It is intresting that this "girl" seems to have made one tiny little flaw in her argument that male game designers don't know what women want. She says at the end of her article that women are in fact the largest group of gamers, just not in the headline grabbing FPS etc but with simple games like cards, you know the free java/flash type games.
Well who designs these games then? Males by any chance? There just is not going to much of a market for a full priced card game is there now? As for her suggestion of playing a 8gb install resource hog MMO like EQ2 with an initial cost of 50 dollars + monthly fee just so you can play trivia wich you can do for free at hundreds of websites, well lets just say it is the perfect example why women are treated as second class citizens.
Luckily all this talk about computer games and demographics is just a lot of bullshit anyway.
I got a tiny little bit of information for you that might astound you. (Kids look away) THE MAJORITY OF PEOPLE BOTH MALE AND FEMALE DO NOT PLAY VIDEO GAMES.
Shocking eh? Nonetheless it is true, sure an MMO like WoW seems big with 9 million subscribers but any tv network would laugh at such viewing figures. Especially if you consider the fact that WoW unlike any tv station in the world is targetted at the entire world. (No not even CNN has world wide reach as it splits itself up into regions, CNN europe is a very different product then CNN asia for instance).
If as she says women prefer card games and trivia games then she won't find many new games aimed at their audience. Same reason you don't see that many chess games being launched anymore. Why? Well what could possibly be added? The chess engine beats me even more soundly? Super duper animation of a chessboard? No, trivia games, card games, chess games have all been perfected. They can now be done by anyone in flash and are being done.
Anyway I think it is a load of crap anyway. In the first place I never trust any statistic and certainly not one gathered over the internet. How does she know what percentage of online monopoly players are of the female sex? Even if everyone who fills out a form does so honestly (yeah right) this still leaves open the possibilty that women are more likely to fill in questionares.
You don't know, nobody does, how many Doom3 players are female. Neither can you guess, for every obvious 12yr old in an online session there are a dozen completly silent players.
Oh and her claim that saying women want social games is old fashioned. Go and explain "The Sims" then. Huge hit with women (if you believe Maxis clams) and in my eyes a game that deals primarly with 'real world' goals like getting rich and hitched.
But lets be honest, this girl is still a sexist herself, clearly dividing the world in male female roles. Maybe as she grows older she will learn that real freedom for both sexes comes when we stop expecting certain behaviours from a person just because they belong to a certain sex. Liberation is not when a male can play female games or vice versa but when we stop labeling both people and games as belonging to either sex. When a man can be dainty and a women butch without being looked down upon then will we be free to be our own person. (And of course still allowing males to be butch and women to be dainty as well)
I am sort of the guy in the middle between those non-slashdot readers who made The Sims such an absolute hit at least in sales (and what else counts?) and the slashdot reading "hardcore" gaming who doesn't like any game that does not involve killing.
The Sims sold, more importantly its expansions packs sold proving there is a large loyal crowd of players. After all just selling the main game does not prove populatity it could be that everyone dis-installs the game after ten minutes of play. But surely only people actually playing the game and having fun doing so bother to buy expansion packs?
There are two ways of playing the sims. First is the pure game mode and to get yourselve rich and famous and in college and god knowns what other goals the expansions set. This is either your cup of tea or it isn't but I hazard to guess that those who love it would find wandering around an endless maze shooting incredible stupid AI just as boring.
The second mode of play is to customize the game to your hearts content. While the original game and indeed the expansions have a very limited "fashion" sense and almost force you to go for the "high class" tacky items because of stats instead of choosing the items you really like you can find any number of creations on the net to fill your make believe house in.
In this yes it is a barbie doll house and just ask the people behind barbie what a stroke of genius that is.
Personally I can't play the game very long even with the huge amount of user created content because of the lame AI. To much time is spend getting your characters to go to the bathroom with almost every morning ending with at least 1 toon peeing her pants (yes all my toons were females, I am male what did you expect). While this has a certain appeal (they look so cute) it means doing anything else becomes a chore.
If The Sims2 had a better AI so that the toons would properly use the toilet, let the best cook prepair breakfast while the rest cleaned and took out the garbage, paid the bill etc etc it would have been a lot more fun since you could then concentrate on playing the game without the need to micro manage.
I am not alone in this, a suprising amount of the user created content consists of furniture with extreme stats that make eating/peeing/sleeping work faster.
The Sims managed to attract a whole gaming crowd that usually does not play PC games or games at all. So what if 9 out of 10 slashdotters find the game boring. I got a little question for you, who is more likely to actually pay for the games they buy, the average doom playing slashdotter OR the "female" The Sims player? So who do you think it makes more sense to make games for?
Perhaps part of the reason The Sims sold so well is not that it was more popular then more male oriented games but that it was popular with an audience that does not pirate its games.
Just for once I would like to see game companies not so much innovate as just take the best bits out of games that game before and not constantly de-evolve.
So from now on every single player FPS game will have the following:
Quicksave, at any point unrestricted. If you feel they ruin the challenge, don't use them.
Grenades are not a selecteable weapon instead can be thrown with main weapon equipped like Halo/Fear.
NO close combat fast moving enemy takes more then 1 clip of ammo to kill. Especially melee. (Am I the only one who hates having to reload/switch with some ankle biter gnawing you?
No ankle biters. I want my enemies human sized. Head crabs are out.
No random spawns behind me when I walk into the pool of light to get an ammo resupply EVERY GODDAMN FUCKING TIME (Doom3 I am talking to you.)
No Ammo grab. You know it you hate it, the moment you cleared a difficult room of baddies you have to visit their twisting corpses to grab half a clip of ammo from each so you can kill the next batch. Is every video game secret army short on funds or something? Brothers in Arms and Vietcong showed how it can be done differently.
Give me some backup. Yeah yeah, I am the lone soldier hero who saves the day but just at 1 or 2 points in the game make it less bloody obvious that today's game all focus on graphics and not on AI. Brothers in Arms, Vietcong and Call of Duty showed the way.
No more trash talking bosses, co-workers without the option to beat them up. I am for one sick and tired of being the rooky who has to prove himself. Can a real writer please come up with a more original setting then your are the newbie but somehow have to do all the critical missions without any help?
FEAR was short and the story not exactly original BUT it was beautifully executed. It simply incoorperated a lot of good design decission. The only baddie I found was that you still were alone and badly equipped. I would at least to have liked to see a couple of mission starts and ends with some real backup and not just story plot cannon-fodder. I could also have done with a better supply of ammo so I would not have to loot every damn corpse. Oh and the "hidden" health/slow-mo boosts were lame as well. Can you make it any more obvious I am playing a game then having power-ups lying around in sewers?
I find it amazing to see wolfenstein and the word innovation linked however. Sure they were the first but the last wolfenstein to me was an extreme case of mediocore FPS design. Oh well, the punters loved it so who am I to critize.
Ssssh you are upsetting the console monkey's
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The High Cost of Gaming
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You see consoles are cheaper that is why you get games like "Fable", "Morrowind", "Knight of the old republic" wich sell for 10 euros extra for the console version yet come with less content. Fable PC had extra chapters, Morrowind the whole user created content and Kotor an extra space station and some goodies.
More content, lower price. Welcome to the wonderfull world of game economics.
The reason could be that game companies look at their respective userbases and decide wich userbase is most likely to be stupid enough to pay more for less.
Or perhaps the reason is that the console version has to recover the licensing cost. MS doesn't get a penny for a pc game but they certainly get paid for an X-box game.
As for the cost increasing because of either inflation or higher production costs. If the industry was working properly this would be offset by increased market share meaning they would have more copies of the games being sold to spread the cost over.
Games are not normal product. They are a luxury item partly bought by parents for kids and adding yet another 10 (your currency here) is likely to at least make parents think twice. Especially in a down economy. The 5th of december in holland is sinterklaas, the day to give gift to each other like christmas in is in the rest of the world, and the PSP has NOT BEEN SOLD OUT for two weeks now. The original rush was the game fanatics buying it but this was too early for the holiday season buying. Only the most together parents would have started shopping that early.
I am no analyst but this leads me to believe that many a kid is not going to find the PSP in his shoe (Sinterklaas uses shoes, Santa stockings). Part reason? The high price for the games. Come on, most of the games are rehashes, the are smaller without such niceties as voice acting and yet cost more then full pc games?
Oh and a further tell-tale sign that the cost of production has little to do with the cost of games. How can every game cost exactly the same amount to produce? What do I mean? Well if cost of production detemines price and every game is priced the same then the cost of production must be equal.
No games are priced for what the market can bare. Then some daring company raises it by 10 and if it works slowly other companies will follow. Price hikes like the euro introduction work wonders too.
I think that the game industry is just shooting itself in the foot again. With copy protection just a fantasy does the industry really want to raise the barrier against simply buying the game? Anyone want to take bets on how long it will take before the 360 is hacked?
Like the one in my sig this one is never going to be settled. I spotted at least the following holy wars regarding MMO's.
PvP vs PvE. Any PvE game will be instantly joined by PvP fans hounding the forms for PvP to be introduced. Same the otherway around. PvP fans at the moment are in a bit of a bind because the premier PvP games are not doing too well. PvE sells more monthly subscriptions and while games like EQ2 are introducing things like duelling Sony also took a lot of PvP out of its SWG title.
Instanced vs non-instanced areas. The parent article and again you get hotheads on both sides claiming the other sides just don't understand true gaming. It is no fun in EQ2 to find the person you need to talk to has been killed and is on a 8 hour respawn trigger but then again neither is it much fun to be totally alone. If I want to play alone I just visit the lower sewer levels. That place is totally deserted at all times.
Crafting vs non-crafting economy. Should everything be looted/bought from NPC's or should everything be made by other players? The mixed approach that EQ2 uses seems to satisfy neither camp.
1 char per server vs multiple. The problem here is subtle but if you allow multiple characters per server you remove accountabilty. An anti-social player can simply maintain two characters.
There are of course other issues but you can reguarly see these topics being discussed on every MMO forum. Personally I think MMO's at the moment are incredibly primitive games relying more on their addictiveness then on simply being good games. I myself and other players just keep playing because the game we are in is the only show in town and maybe the next levelup will make it more fun then work and we invested to much time in our current character to give it all up.
Stop playing your MMO and you will have to admit that you have wasted countless hours.
I don't know myself why I keep playing EQ2 when if it had been a single player game I wouldn't have touched it with a bargepole. Its combat is boring, the guests stories lame, its character development simplistic. Yet it lives up to its nickname Evercrack.
Oh well, the server should be backup. Just check the email wether I got an invite for DDO and then back to grinding my stove toon.
Granted with a slightly older age group but according to some dutch newspaper stories (not the most reliable newssource) there are problems with senior citizens sitting around shopping areas, blocking passage with their rollaters and stuff, oggling shoppers and loudly gossiping (making hatefull remarks), etc etc etc. Almost to a point the problems caused by teenagers.
It seems these two age groups just represent people with too much time to spend and nothing anyone wants them to do.
Before I start sounding like a leftie I think that both groups a largely made up of pathetic whiners would should be taken out back by security and fed to the guard dogs.
Then again I am a nerd and have never found myself in a position where I had nothing to do. Shopping areas are to me, and every red blooded male, a place of horrors that you visit for as short a time as possible to get the bare essentials needed for survival before you go back to your hobbies.
First, how SWG played a couple of months ago when I left.
You would select a race/sex and choose your appearance. This cannot be compared to say Everquest 2 a game I play nowadays. You could customize far more and for instance make flat chested female or a fat wookie. Compare this to EQ2 were you can only change the face a little bit. Even more important perhaps is that you can change your appearance in SWG in game so you could change your hairstyle and makeup to fit you latest outfit.
You would then be walked through the basics of the game before being dropped in the starters area. This was changed to Mos Eisly for everyone at one point and you would now also get a droid who would give you starter missions. You could start killing stuff right away and if you fought with your hands you would get melee xp, for ranged ranged xp. You could visit any trainer and use the XP to improve your capabilites in that field. Visit a medic trainer for instance and any healing you did would allow you to become a better medic.
Each proffesions existed of a base box (medic, melee, ranged, scout, etc) 4x4 grid of specialistation wich each specilisation consisting of four boxes wich you had to get in sequence and a final master box. Each box cost a certain amount of job points of wich you had a finite amount.
Advanced jobs could be learned once you had the required numbed of base specialistions. So for instance combat medic required some in marksman and some in medic, beast handler needed some of scout and some other I forgot. This in theory allowed you to truly create your own character. In theory, in practice the job skill cost was very expensive on say proffesions like crafters. It cost so many job skill points to become a master chef for instance that you could barely afford any combat skills. Since the swg universe needed a lot of specialised crafters, entertainers and doctors and it allowed only 1 character per server SWG always depended heavily on those people that were prepared to play with a non-combat optomized character.
This is important because MMO's are closer to diablo then say D&D PnP.
So while a combat specced who just been running some insane mission on dathomir needs an entertainer to heal his mind, that entertainer could not put a dent in a naff and spends his entire time online just standing around in a cantina on coronet spamming special moves and begging for tips.
Luckily SWG had one thing that forced XP grinding would be combat specialist to also be entertainers. The hologrind.
The only way to become a jedi was to unlock your holo and the way to do that was master a preset number of jobs. So there was a constant stream of players mastering entertainers, medics, doctors and crafters. While it did hurt those few players that wanted to be entertainers, medics, doctors or crafters it also meant there was a steady supply of fresh blood. Rather then what you see in most MMO's where everyone is at the highest level with newby areas totally deserted.
SWG gameplay was always open-ended sandbox model rather then a story led game. Compared even with EQ2 it had far more Elite style missions, go kill X of Y and come back. Loot weapons were rare and crafting therefore important. EQ2 you can exist, in fact new player have to because of prices, on your loot. SWG your equipment was made by other players.
The problem SWG has had that plagues every MMO game that want sto be more then a hack and slash is that players will happily shoot themselves in the foot. MMO players are FPS players who switch on godmode and then complain that the game offers no challenge.
Why oh why did we spend all our time running naff missions (money and XP grind wich every swg player will regonize) when we could have had far more fun running away from nasties on endor? I remember one evening when with a couple of friendly players we just went exploring on endor. Just visiting nice locations, grahpics turned up and taking snapshots. We were having a lot of fun and doing a lot of
Most obvious is that japanese sony != american sony. Secondly is that hardware sony != content sony.
Content sony only cares about pushing its wares but so does hardware sony. Hardware sony does not want people to not buy their hardware because it is to crippled while content sony does not want people to use their hardware to duplicate their content.
Then you got japan sony coming from a slightly different culture then the american "lets sue" sony.
But what I think is at the heart of this is the Sony that does not want to be owned by Microsoft. While the internet tv might not have happened I am sure there are people at sony that would dearly love the idea of them producing the "next pc". It is the only possibly explanation for Linux on the playstation sold by sony itself. They can't make a single cent profit on it. So why do it if not for learning wether it can be done?
Might it someday be possible to buy in the store a non-ms computer? Worse perhaps a computer that is not like today's pc's at all but far closer to say, oh a mobile phone?
MS has really screwed over every single company it has dealt with and the IBM Sony's of this world would dearly like to see a future were MS can't dictate so many terms.
It is basic economy. When your supplier controls you you are not in control. At the moment it is MS that control the PC and PC makers like sony don't like that.
So it is not out of character at all. Sony is just trying to get maximum profit. MS being toned down a bit means that sony can better dictate the terms, the terms probably being "we want more cash".
It is strange but many so called leftie cannot realize the fact that racism is not exclusive to whites.
When you say bad things about muslim immigrants from north africa (we must be specific, for instance oriental or non-muslim india immigrants do far far better. African non-muslim blacks are practically white the moment they hit european soil.
You will get the claim that your a nazi. Yet who were the nazi's. They hated jews obviously, not much for gay rights either. Women were there to produce the master race. Mmmm, now lets see muslims, hate jews, hates gays and hate women rights.
I think we got a new extreme right in our midst and many bleeding heart liberals can't see it. They will defend people who represent everything they are against just because a non-white person could not possibly be a racist.
Whenever a muslim makes a claim about Iraq/Afghanistan/Israel being an attack on all muslims ask him about Dafur or Sudan or repressed groups in every single muslim country.
You had huge riots when some american soldiers destroyed some modern copies of the islam. When afghanistan destroyed ancient budhist statues not a single muslim cried out.
I am no longer willing to defend those who never fight for someone else.
Replace the word "Apple" with "Microsoft" and the name "Steve Jobs" with "Bill Gates. Then ask the same question. If then your answer is that MS is the most evil company in history and Bill Gates gives lessons to satan himself then you must conclude the same thing about Apple and Steve Jobs.
MS has a monopoly. T0o many computers == wintel and to be fair other companies like say Dell and of course Intel are very happy to help MS keep that monopoly.
Because of this monopoly however any decision MS makes will be very closely watched to see if it doesn't have an "evil" angle.
Apple is tiny and controls the desktop in about the same way that say Greenland controls world politics. Not at all.
Nobody would give one shit what Apple does with its desktop because nobody needs them or feels they don't have a choice but to use them. Same way the whole world watches the US and nobody watches greenland. So Apple can get away with charging for service packs. Imagine if MS did that. Apple gets away with some pretty bad customer support, just browse slashdot, all because it is just to small for people to be really affected.
With MP3 players however Apple has achieved if not a monopoly then at least a dominance. Nobody could possibly feel forced to buy Apple for their player because the alternatives are to hard to use or impossible to buy. (the whole linux vs windows argument).
We do however get to see Apple behaving very MS like. Stupid idiotic restrictions seemingly designed for nothing else then just because they can.
If you ignore the fanboys, always a smart move, then most Apple users will agree that Steve Jobs only saving grace is that he has never had the success of Bill Gates. He can get away with decissions that Bill Gates would be roasted alive for. Steve Jobs decides to cripple a product in order to boost sales of another? 99% of posts will point out that this is a sound business decision. Bill Gates gives a couple of million to disease research? 99% of posts will question what his real motives are.
IBM is a current favorite for their support of Linux and general coolness. Can you imagine that not too long ago it was MS that was the new upstart fighting the monopolist IBM?
While I am not saying that all companies are equally evil I am saying that Apple/Steve Jobs is easily just as evil as MS/Bill Gates. He just has more charm.
We just had another story about how MS might generate artificial shortages for some strange marketing reason. Now a discussion on how only a few months from now they might half the price? Right.
What has so far been make or break for a console? Is it hardware? Well no, sorry console fans but if you want the best graphics you buy a pc. Is it who launches first? No, the crown of console king has been won to many times by "newbies" from the ones who been there.
What makes or breaks a console im my opinion is simply having the games that people want to play. It is certainly how I choose my console. You don't think I hand pc makers a small fortune because I like them? No, the games I want are only available on top end PC's.
X-box had halo, nintendo had ehh... final fantasy? or was the sony? GBA had tony hawk 2. Only console I ever owned. Brilliant game.
Yeah sure not a brilliant reason but just ask the average consumer how many games they actually own. You would be suprised how few out of the total collection are bought by the general public.
These are the MUST have titles and they are the titles wich sell the console. Why do you think MS wants so many exclusives?
X-box 360 line up is not good so far. I am not anti-console, just never been attracted. However I did just see a x-box 360 stand at a gameshop story in Osdorp Amsterdam Holland and it look nice. Not 100% sure if the graphics weren't fake nice (we all know MS's record on this) and wether the pretty graphics weren't just typical racer sweet pictures zero debt stuff.
Sony can still pull a winner IF at its launch it has the MUST have titles and MS still hasn't come up with the goods. Personally I think the worlds economie at the moment is not that healthy, especially when parents can buy the cheaper PSP or Nintendo DS and still have a happy kid, plus a happy kid you can kick outside instead of being in your living room.
All this and everything else anyone says has been done said before, but the half price thing is the most insane, just compare the price of the gamecube (less then a gba) with the price of the PS2. Yet who won?
I just played Vietcong 2. While it is not a perfect game it was enjoyable. For the maybe 10 hours I took me to complete it. The original seemed longer. Yet this for a MMORPG is nothing. EQ2 free trial offers more playtime. Vietcong 2 can barely be played longer although I suppose there are a few levels that have unlimited spawns (bits were you have to overcome defences and as long you have not crossed them new enemies keep coming in) were you could spend hours if you were so inclined.
Even games like Baldur Gate pale in the number of play hours next to a MMORPG. Lets face it, not many people play the same game for years and years. Everquest and SWG and Ultima Online are still being played by people who were there at launch.
Yes I am aware of games like counterstrike but if you are a diehard counterstrike player you will probably not still be playing on the same maps that were there at launch. CS, the sims, and Flightsim 2004 and other long lasting games are constantly updated by their users and it might even be argued that it is the users that create the game.
An MMORPG does not give the same freedom. Good luck doing even something as simple as creating your own "skin".
So rather then having longivity by constantly having new stuff added by unpaid monkeys, eh I mean dedicated users MMORPG's invariable try to last a long time by making progress slow. You will have to defeat an amazing amount of enemies once you get past the earlier levels, reading some quests in EQ2 reminds me more of a doom level then an RPG. I have to kill HOW many demon spawn? Where as the best RPG ever, Planescape Torment went out of its way to give you a way around the fights, there were only a tiny handfull needed, MMORPG's go for more hack&slash then Diablo.
Or to put it another way, MMORPG's are a grind. For regular RPG's there usually is somekind of experience/money cheat where by revisiting an area you can kill the same thing over and over if you need/want the reward. This is MMORPG's entire gameplay.
Because you are not alone and therefore you cannot be the hero of THE story they have totally removed the story based reward. SWG was worst in this respect. It basically HAD no story, just Elite type missions wich re-used the same stupid random message. Something like my little girls lost a flower please go kill a nest of rancors. The element of WTF was very high, the element of wanting to find out the ending zero.
EQ2 at first seems better but is still hopelessly basic. Almost all have the problem off you wondering, "Exactly how many blue gems has this girl found while sweeping anyway?". The simple problem off the fact that you and everyone get exactly the same quest even when that doesn't fit the story.
Only a tiny percentage of quests involve any roleplaying, you simply aren't allowed to make a choice. The choice between good and evil is basically just the architecture.
As an computerRPG MMORPG's typically fail. If you compare them to PnP RPG's then they are a joke. There is no roleplaying.
SWG in someways was an attempt to break some of the MMORPG's common pitfalls. It had a lot of customization, your character could easily look an individual with real control over body build, style and color of clothes and weapon choice.
Neither were you restricted to a handfull of jobs, you could choose and mix any of them.
So why did it so poorly? Well it is hard to explain. Perhaps people just didn't realize how good it was at its heart.
One of the things I still regret is the move away from the so called hologrind. For those who don't know: You could be a lot of different combo's of jobs but NOT a jedi with your normal character. To get one you need to unlock it by becoming a master in a random selection of jobs. Wich jobs they were could be revealed by using looted holocrons. Once you had mastered the required jobs you could become a jedi char.
The complaint was that this led to a lot of people trying jobs they didn't want to do ruining the economy bec
If today you wrote your ordinary webpage to the official standard you would have a page that would not display as you desire in any browser. NONE of the ones I know handle everything in css2 correctly.
That is not even to count such differences as how to interpret a file, by its extension, its mimetype or its data content.
It would have been nice if there had been an enforced standard, THIS is what HTML is and nothing else. It would have meant you could truly have been free to choose your own browser. It would also have meant that no browser would feel the need to pretend it is one of the better ones, yes IE I am talking to you.
Mobile phones are not like PC's. First off the domination of MS is totally absent in the phone world. Opera actually has a browser share that can be measured in whole digits in the mobile phone market.
It is also a lot harder to install another browser. Dual booting is not even to be thought of.
On the the other hand what about freedom? What of the freedom of a webbrowser maker to add new and intresting features.
All I can say is look at the wonderfull world of the PC internet. Can you imagine that a company involved with a "new" internet will want to avoid that? That perhaps they burnt with the failure of WAP want to avoid that whole chuncks of their new net are unavailble to users of platform X?
Some cry, let the market decide but the market does not decide. Or is/. just a poor loser when it claims MS uses its IE dominance unfairly to dictate how the net should be?
As a webbuilder I think that it would be kinda nice to be able to build a site just for once and not have to include any workarounds and bugfixes to support every single version of browser no matter how bugridden and insecure. Just once you know. WAP sites were bliss even with their horrible limitations. Just one way to do them and any syntax error caused the page to fail. Seperates the men from the boys.
Although perhaps it depends on how you define "idiot".
It is not just that these people do not have a complete understanding of computers and how to operate them. These people would also fall for trojans/spyware in real life. Like happily giving all their personal details to anyone who asks and then wondering why they get so much junkmail. What to think of pyramid schemes or false lotteries?
A non-idiot will always ask himself, why is person X offering to do something for me? Why does the supermarket offer me lower prices if I signup for a free card with my personal details attached? Exactly what is the math behind these pyramid schemes and can anyone not involved at the very beginning ever make money of it? Roulette, so what is the size of my house vs the house of the casino owner?
Same with virusses/rootkits/goatse links, why would someone send me a random link?
I think an idiot is a person who does not receive warning signals. HOT LESBIAN TEENAGE CO-ED ANIMAL HENTAI SEX FULL DVD.exe to them promisses some weird sex. They do not find it odd that the file is less then 1 mb. They simply do not think.
It has nothing to do with computer literacy. It is just common sense. Normal people have it, idiots don't.
I use parts of SElinux and am right now running a linux tool called foremost wich seems to be written by some part of the US airforce.
American tax dollars hard at work to keep my socialist PC running nicely. Got to love the modern world.
Afraid that the US goverment (the one that makes speeches) might be firmly up MS backside but the parts of the US goverment that actually do stuff seem to like linux.
I went to buy a pornPod the moment I learned they now support pictures. I winked at the girl behind the counter and asked her to sell me a model fit for my person. She sold me a nano.:(
Jumping the shark: Cow zombies.
on
How Zombies Work
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· Score: 1
What does a zombie cow eat anyway, "Graaaaaaaas". Sorry not scary.
It is claimed by some that girls are smarter that boys. Well at least right up until the moment that the girl becomes intrested in boys. Then their IQ plunges. Because, at least in the western culture I know, smart girls don't get the cute boys (cute being the assholes that get girls who just dropped 30-40 IQ points pregnant).
Sure a girl can resist but she will both have to face ridicule from the cool boys, from the nerdy boys who usually can't stand a girl to be smarter then them, from the other girls who resent a girl who dares to be different, from her parent for not dating.
/. is mostly composed of true geeks. Sure some of us may claim that we broke the stereo-type but lets be honest, if you were a cool guy with a knack for tech you still wouldn't be posting on slashdot on a friday evening, you would be having crazy hot sex.
For most of us that however is not an option but what if your a normal person faced with the choice of thinking for yourselve setting yourselve apart from the group or getting laid. Newsflash but 99% of humans would choose the sex. I would but as a geek I do not have that choice.
Dumb people who go with the flow do and they have sex and they get the kids. You see as nerds we better hope the ID people are right because if evolution is true then we are going to go back to swinging from trees. Dumb people have more kids in shorter generations. An intelligent women may have 1-2 kids after 30. A dumb girl will already be granny a dozen times at that age.
On a more serious note I think there is no real news story here. The whole debate vs Creationism vs Darwinism is nothing new. People have been discussing the subject even before darwin came up with his theorie. the whole bit about the earth being the center of the earth until some guy said, no it isn't, is at its heart the same discussion. Is the world a magical creation by a superbeing vs, is the world just a whole lot of natural laws with us just a side product?
Most people do not truly think about this deeply, why should you? It gets in the way of having sex and any survey done to ask peoples opinion could probably easily be swayed by how the questions are asked. See, Yes prime minister episode 1 for how this is done.
Might it be true that in the 1990's tv stations wanted to report the rise of the amount of people that believed in evolution while now they think they can score better headlines with the rise of ID believers?
How many of the evolution defenders here can on their own come up with the argument to break the human eye argument of the ID supporters? That their all the stages of evolution of the eye plus numerous alternative versions are available all around us? Eyes that are just primitive light sentive cells to eyes that see a sharper faster vision or in a different spectrum. No lense, multie lense, single lense? Black and white or color. Good for motion or good for still images?
My pc can do it easily. Very easily in fact. Just load up glxgears or something.
Little bit of a newsflash, fps is a totally meaningless figure unless you attach to it WICH frame your redrawing X times per second. Sure most graphics cards are not capable at the moment of outputting 120 refreshes per second just as most monitors are not capable of displaying them but generating them is pretty easy. But then my same PC that can easily draw a hundred glxgears per second will probably choke to death on a single frame from the latest cgi movie.
Welcome to the new world of computing where useless marketting buzzwords rule the day. Now if they told me that the PS3 can play everquest 2 with all options maxed out at 120 fps then I would be impressed. Or SWG coronet on a busy day.
Wonder why? Of course MS is just warning this might happen, it is not really a threath. And what if it was anyway? South Korea is a country. If it just said Fuck you MS and just handed out the MS software to all its citizens for free or even sold it and kept the money what could MS do?
American goverment is crazy but crazy enough to start a war for a companies sake? Or should that be another war?
Sure they could start a trade war but the US needs the rest of the world more then the rest of the world needs the US.
These things are always a bit of a showdown, who has the bigger balls. For a long time MS has had the biggest but in the last few years a lot has changed. US goverment itself is more and more looking at other OSes to supply its needs. Pentagon using Linux for its future soldier project, NSA with their own linux code available as opensource, some local goverments going to openformats etc etc.
I would be much suprises if any hostile move by MS would result in anything else then more countries and companies reconsidering their reliance on MS. Isn't korea part of the asian countries attempts to improve linux already? Then again MS shooting itself in the foot would hardly be a first.
Never mess with the guys that can answer
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Patents vs. Secrecy
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· Score: 2, Funny
Never mess with the guys that can answer the question: "You and what army?".
US Military: "We don't want you to release that information."
You: "Oh yeah who is going to make me? You and what army?"
Sony's own games EQ2 and SWG both support multiple CPU's so whats the problem?
Then again isn't this always a problem with the release of new hardware both for PC and consoles? When you get that brand new graphics card or soundcard it takes some hard searching to find a game that actually supports its new features. At the time of the Matrox G400 it was only a handfull of games that supported bumpmapping.
The x-box is now of course obsolete. After all it is already a few years old and we know that is succesor is to be launched soon. So exactly why are top games still being developed for it? Wouldn't it have been smarter to say, okay six months before the launch of a new generation console we stop releasing games for the old and concentrate on making games for the new one. Especially with the x-box 360 wich can't run existing x-box games this would really help during launch.
I can only imagine that for developers working 3 years on a top game the vague launch date of a new generation console is not enough to bet their own launch date on. Would you really want your Jade empire to be delayed a year because the 360 is delayed a year?
Every console ever launched needed time to come to full bloom. I am personally only interested in handhelds and at launch none of them had, for me, must have titles. The DS or PSP choice is not yet made for me as neither has a game I must have.
On the PC it is the same, when windows 95 hit many a game still had to run in dos mode. XP was not immidiatly supported as I am sure neither will Vista be.
As for the whole multi-threading bit, any big game has had to have been in production well before test units were around so they would have to have been developed on "normal" pc's. Multi-threading I am told by real programmers is a very different beast on different pieces of hardware so wouldn't it be sensible for a game developed mostly on non-existent hardware to be conservative in its reliance on hardware features? You wouldn't want to make a top game and then only find out that "shock and horror" a new consoles hardware doesn't live up to claims made by its creator?
As for the PS3 being harder to develop for then the X-box 360. Wasn't the same said about the PS2 vs the x-box?/me looks at PS2 vs X-box sales figures. Riiiight.
First off yes consoles are "cheaper" then pc's. Fucking duh. Of course they are, they are invariably inferior to pc's. Yeah even the new 360 and PS3. Remember everyone being excited about the multiple cpu's when PC's were still only equipped with one? But that was a long time ago and now top end gaming PC's have got multiple cpu's and PC's games that support them. At the same time reports are hitting that the new consoles aren't really all that powerfull and still horribly crippled by low memory and the lack of a HD.
Price is still lower but you get less but lets not forget to check the price of the games. I don't know if this is true around the world but in holland games like Kotor and morrowind (released both for console AND pc) typically cost a full 10 euro's more for the console version. Wich is kinda sad since for both games the PC version was clearly better. Kotor because it came with extra content and Morrowind because of the whole user made content bit that is exclusive to the PC. Not to forget that the expansion packs for Morrowind were PC only.
Show me Counterstrike for console please. No not counterstrike itself but usermade modifications for your console. Sure 99% of usermade content probably sucks but the remaining 1% consist of some pure gems wich either are brilliant games in their own right or take an existing game to new levels. That is not including games like MS own flightsimulator wich ofcourse are all about user made content. Or Neverwinter Nights.
Their are of course prices to pay but you paint an extremely one sided picture and fail to completly analyze the costs.
A 1000 dollar gaming machine does not compare to a 300 dollar console. You should compare it to a 300 dollar console + accesories + tv + cheapo internet pc. Wanna bet that all that together comes pretty close to the cost of a full gaming pc? Anyway not everyone is a kid living on his mothers allowance. 500 dollars is all relative. If you think that is a lot never ever look at bills for your gf/wifes clothing.
The games are also different. Good luck finding an EQ2 or WoW on the console. Good luck with usermade games like Flightsim or NWN too. Then again good luck finding pure arcade titles on the PC.
Console games are easier to get running. Then again if you got troubles getting games to run on your pc what are you doing on slashdot?
Copy protection is a bitch at times but there is always away around it. Perhaps I have just been lucky.
I wonder what exactly the reason for this "test" is by MS. It is MS so there must be a motive. Could it be that they are trying to figure out exactly what kinda hardware is the norm for gamers? So that future games by them can be better tailored to the hardware available?
Both MS and Sony have a clear interest in making people game on their own propietary systems rather then the far more open PC. MS and Sony get paid when a game gets developed for their respective consoles. They get 0 for a game developed for pc. Yet both got really big titles that are exclusive to the PC, think MMO games wich MS is trying once again. Is Everquest just sony's way of testing the water until a future console is ready to run a MMO like and they will then drop the PC? EQ2 and SWG both like 1gig of memory so unless the new PS3 can perform some kind of miracle it will not be able to run the games as is. It used to be true that consoles needed less ram because they ran at far lower resolutions but with HD-tv this is becoming less true.
At the moment PC vs Console is not a matter of price. Yes a console alone is cheaper but you would still need the costs of a pc to be able to rant on/. on how much cheaper your console is. While I don't need a console to rant on how much bull that is.
It is a matter of different types of gaming. Sure I am tempted to the darkside by reviews of Jade empire and some other titles but am not willing to give up high resultions and user mods. My games also tend to need more buttons then a console has available. Then
Sorry, yeah we were almost finished but we decided to use a new engine so now we got to start all over again.
First cancelling because you want to do a bigger tour because of claimed high interest in your show and then cancceling again because there is not enough interest?
Smarter people then me should probably be able to figure out if this is a vaporware product wich exists just to get gullible people to give them money. Phantom game console like.
X-box is games right, so this movie is based on a game right therefor the game is on a x-box right?
Doom of course was a PC game, for the newbies, and is also extremely old. Talk of a movie version has been going on for far to long so since that time consoles have caught up a bit and the third version actually seems to have made it into console land. Then again the 3rd version was all ready close to a movie. It certainly seemed to take a lesson from the alien series, make it so dark that you can't see the scary's. What is it with the future and nobody having the money for some decent lighting eh?
We all knew the movie was going to be bad. It is too simple for hollywood to understand. A marine on mars fighting the legions from hell. 1.5 hours of zero story and non-stop violence. Even george lucas could direct this one. Just stand behind him with a cattle prod and stimulate him not to include any comedy.
But no, they change all the basic settings and want to add a story. It is like the american version of Red Dwarf or wanting to add a love interest to Half-Life. Perhaps we should simply stop demanding more movies. I had better cinamtic experience with the cutscenes in x-wing then watching Revenge of the jedi. With the Doom3 game we already have our doom movie. All some good soul has to do is cut out all the 100th corner with a baddy around it bits and give us a 1 hour game with all the good bits and some better lighting. Then tape it and voila, Doom movie the right way.
Slashdot Mirror
It is intresting that this "girl" seems to have made one tiny little flaw in her argument that male game designers don't know what women want. She says at the end of her article that women are in fact the largest group of gamers, just not in the headline grabbing FPS etc but with simple games like cards, you know the free java/flash type games.
Well who designs these games then? Males by any chance? There just is not going to much of a market for a full priced card game is there now? As for her suggestion of playing a 8gb install resource hog MMO like EQ2 with an initial cost of 50 dollars + monthly fee just so you can play trivia wich you can do for free at hundreds of websites, well lets just say it is the perfect example why women are treated as second class citizens.
Luckily all this talk about computer games and demographics is just a lot of bullshit anyway.
I got a tiny little bit of information for you that might astound you. (Kids look away) THE MAJORITY OF PEOPLE BOTH MALE AND FEMALE DO NOT PLAY VIDEO GAMES.
Shocking eh? Nonetheless it is true, sure an MMO like WoW seems big with 9 million subscribers but any tv network would laugh at such viewing figures. Especially if you consider the fact that WoW unlike any tv station in the world is targetted at the entire world. (No not even CNN has world wide reach as it splits itself up into regions, CNN europe is a very different product then CNN asia for instance).
If as she says women prefer card games and trivia games then she won't find many new games aimed at their audience. Same reason you don't see that many chess games being launched anymore. Why? Well what could possibly be added? The chess engine beats me even more soundly? Super duper animation of a chessboard? No, trivia games, card games, chess games have all been perfected. They can now be done by anyone in flash and are being done.
Anyway I think it is a load of crap anyway. In the first place I never trust any statistic and certainly not one gathered over the internet. How does she know what percentage of online monopoly players are of the female sex? Even if everyone who fills out a form does so honestly (yeah right) this still leaves open the possibilty that women are more likely to fill in questionares.
You don't know, nobody does, how many Doom3 players are female. Neither can you guess, for every obvious 12yr old in an online session there are a dozen completly silent players.
Oh and her claim that saying women want social games is old fashioned. Go and explain "The Sims" then. Huge hit with women (if you believe Maxis clams) and in my eyes a game that deals primarly with 'real world' goals like getting rich and hitched.
But lets be honest, this girl is still a sexist herself, clearly dividing the world in male female roles. Maybe as she grows older she will learn that real freedom for both sexes comes when we stop expecting certain behaviours from a person just because they belong to a certain sex. Liberation is not when a male can play female games or vice versa but when we stop labeling both people and games as belonging to either sex. When a man can be dainty and a women butch without being looked down upon then will we be free to be our own person. (And of course still allowing males to be butch and women to be dainty as well)
The Sims sold, more importantly its expansions packs sold proving there is a large loyal crowd of players. After all just selling the main game does not prove populatity it could be that everyone dis-installs the game after ten minutes of play. But surely only people actually playing the game and having fun doing so bother to buy expansion packs?
There are two ways of playing the sims. First is the pure game mode and to get yourselve rich and famous and in college and god knowns what other goals the expansions set. This is either your cup of tea or it isn't but I hazard to guess that those who love it would find wandering around an endless maze shooting incredible stupid AI just as boring.
The second mode of play is to customize the game to your hearts content. While the original game and indeed the expansions have a very limited "fashion" sense and almost force you to go for the "high class" tacky items because of stats instead of choosing the items you really like you can find any number of creations on the net to fill your make believe house in.
In this yes it is a barbie doll house and just ask the people behind barbie what a stroke of genius that is.
Personally I can't play the game very long even with the huge amount of user created content because of the lame AI. To much time is spend getting your characters to go to the bathroom with almost every morning ending with at least 1 toon peeing her pants (yes all my toons were females, I am male what did you expect). While this has a certain appeal (they look so cute) it means doing anything else becomes a chore.
If The Sims2 had a better AI so that the toons would properly use the toilet, let the best cook prepair breakfast while the rest cleaned and took out the garbage, paid the bill etc etc it would have been a lot more fun since you could then concentrate on playing the game without the need to micro manage.
I am not alone in this, a suprising amount of the user created content consists of furniture with extreme stats that make eating/peeing/sleeping work faster.
The Sims managed to attract a whole gaming crowd that usually does not play PC games or games at all. So what if 9 out of 10 slashdotters find the game boring. I got a little question for you, who is more likely to actually pay for the games they buy, the average doom playing slashdotter OR the "female" The Sims player? So who do you think it makes more sense to make games for?
Perhaps part of the reason The Sims sold so well is not that it was more popular then more male oriented games but that it was popular with an audience that does not pirate its games.
So from now on every single player FPS game will have the following:
FEAR was short and the story not exactly original BUT it was beautifully executed. It simply incoorperated a lot of good design decission. The only baddie I found was that you still were alone and badly equipped. I would at least to have liked to see a couple of mission starts and ends with some real backup and not just story plot cannon-fodder. I could also have done with a better supply of ammo so I would not have to loot every damn corpse. Oh and the "hidden" health/slow-mo boosts were lame as well. Can you make it any more obvious I am playing a game then having power-ups lying around in sewers?
I find it amazing to see wolfenstein and the word innovation linked however. Sure they were the first but the last wolfenstein to me was an extreme case of mediocore FPS design. Oh well, the punters loved it so who am I to critize.
More content, lower price. Welcome to the wonderfull world of game economics.
The reason could be that game companies look at their respective userbases and decide wich userbase is most likely to be stupid enough to pay more for less.
Or perhaps the reason is that the console version has to recover the licensing cost. MS doesn't get a penny for a pc game but they certainly get paid for an X-box game.
As for the cost increasing because of either inflation or higher production costs. If the industry was working properly this would be offset by increased market share meaning they would have more copies of the games being sold to spread the cost over.
Games are not normal product. They are a luxury item partly bought by parents for kids and adding yet another 10 (your currency here) is likely to at least make parents think twice. Especially in a down economy. The 5th of december in holland is sinterklaas, the day to give gift to each other like christmas in is in the rest of the world, and the PSP has NOT BEEN SOLD OUT for two weeks now. The original rush was the game fanatics buying it but this was too early for the holiday season buying. Only the most together parents would have started shopping that early.
I am no analyst but this leads me to believe that many a kid is not going to find the PSP in his shoe (Sinterklaas uses shoes, Santa stockings). Part reason? The high price for the games. Come on, most of the games are rehashes, the are smaller without such niceties as voice acting and yet cost more then full pc games?
Oh and a further tell-tale sign that the cost of production has little to do with the cost of games. How can every game cost exactly the same amount to produce? What do I mean? Well if cost of production detemines price and every game is priced the same then the cost of production must be equal.
No games are priced for what the market can bare. Then some daring company raises it by 10 and if it works slowly other companies will follow. Price hikes like the euro introduction work wonders too.
I think that the game industry is just shooting itself in the foot again. With copy protection just a fantasy does the industry really want to raise the barrier against simply buying the game? Anyone want to take bets on how long it will take before the 360 is hacked?
PvP vs PvE. Any PvE game will be instantly joined by PvP fans hounding the forms for PvP to be introduced. Same the otherway around. PvP fans at the moment are in a bit of a bind because the premier PvP games are not doing too well. PvE sells more monthly subscriptions and while games like EQ2 are introducing things like duelling Sony also took a lot of PvP out of its SWG title.
Instanced vs non-instanced areas. The parent article and again you get hotheads on both sides claiming the other sides just don't understand true gaming. It is no fun in EQ2 to find the person you need to talk to has been killed and is on a 8 hour respawn trigger but then again neither is it much fun to be totally alone. If I want to play alone I just visit the lower sewer levels. That place is totally deserted at all times.
Crafting vs non-crafting economy. Should everything be looted/bought from NPC's or should everything be made by other players? The mixed approach that EQ2 uses seems to satisfy neither camp.
1 char per server vs multiple. The problem here is subtle but if you allow multiple characters per server you remove accountabilty. An anti-social player can simply maintain two characters.
There are of course other issues but you can reguarly see these topics being discussed on every MMO forum. Personally I think MMO's at the moment are incredibly primitive games relying more on their addictiveness then on simply being good games. I myself and other players just keep playing because the game we are in is the only show in town and maybe the next levelup will make it more fun then work and we invested to much time in our current character to give it all up.
Stop playing your MMO and you will have to admit that you have wasted countless hours.
I don't know myself why I keep playing EQ2 when if it had been a single player game I wouldn't have touched it with a bargepole. Its combat is boring, the guests stories lame, its character development simplistic. Yet it lives up to its nickname Evercrack.
Oh well, the server should be backup. Just check the email wether I got an invite for DDO and then back to grinding my stove toon.
It seems these two age groups just represent people with too much time to spend and nothing anyone wants them to do.
Before I start sounding like a leftie I think that both groups a largely made up of pathetic whiners would should be taken out back by security and fed to the guard dogs.
Then again I am a nerd and have never found myself in a position where I had nothing to do. Shopping areas are to me, and every red blooded male, a place of horrors that you visit for as short a time as possible to get the bare essentials needed for survival before you go back to your hobbies.
First, how SWG played a couple of months ago when I left.
You would select a race/sex and choose your appearance. This cannot be compared to say Everquest 2 a game I play nowadays. You could customize far more and for instance make flat chested female or a fat wookie. Compare this to EQ2 were you can only change the face a little bit. Even more important perhaps is that you can change your appearance in SWG in game so you could change your hairstyle and makeup to fit you latest outfit.
You would then be walked through the basics of the game before being dropped in the starters area. This was changed to Mos Eisly for everyone at one point and you would now also get a droid who would give you starter missions. You could start killing stuff right away and if you fought with your hands you would get melee xp, for ranged ranged xp. You could visit any trainer and use the XP to improve your capabilites in that field. Visit a medic trainer for instance and any healing you did would allow you to become a better medic.
Each proffesions existed of a base box (medic, melee, ranged, scout, etc) 4x4 grid of specialistation wich each specilisation consisting of four boxes wich you had to get in sequence and a final master box. Each box cost a certain amount of job points of wich you had a finite amount.
Advanced jobs could be learned once you had the required numbed of base specialistions. So for instance combat medic required some in marksman and some in medic, beast handler needed some of scout and some other I forgot. This in theory allowed you to truly create your own character. In theory, in practice the job skill cost was very expensive on say proffesions like crafters. It cost so many job skill points to become a master chef for instance that you could barely afford any combat skills. Since the swg universe needed a lot of specialised crafters, entertainers and doctors and it allowed only 1 character per server SWG always depended heavily on those people that were prepared to play with a non-combat optomized character.
This is important because MMO's are closer to diablo then say D&D PnP.
So while a combat specced who just been running some insane mission on dathomir needs an entertainer to heal his mind, that entertainer could not put a dent in a naff and spends his entire time online just standing around in a cantina on coronet spamming special moves and begging for tips.
Luckily SWG had one thing that forced XP grinding would be combat specialist to also be entertainers. The hologrind.
The only way to become a jedi was to unlock your holo and the way to do that was master a preset number of jobs. So there was a constant stream of players mastering entertainers, medics, doctors and crafters. While it did hurt those few players that wanted to be entertainers, medics, doctors or crafters it also meant there was a steady supply of fresh blood. Rather then what you see in most MMO's where everyone is at the highest level with newby areas totally deserted.
SWG gameplay was always open-ended sandbox model rather then a story led game. Compared even with EQ2 it had far more Elite style missions, go kill X of Y and come back. Loot weapons were rare and crafting therefore important. EQ2 you can exist, in fact new player have to because of prices, on your loot. SWG your equipment was made by other players.
The problem SWG has had that plagues every MMO game that want sto be more then a hack and slash is that players will happily shoot themselves in the foot. MMO players are FPS players who switch on godmode and then complain that the game offers no challenge.
Why oh why did we spend all our time running naff missions (money and XP grind wich every swg player will regonize) when we could have had far more fun running away from nasties on endor? I remember one evening when with a couple of friendly players we just went exploring on endor. Just visiting nice locations, grahpics turned up and taking snapshots. We were having a lot of fun and doing a lot of
Content sony only cares about pushing its wares but so does hardware sony. Hardware sony does not want people to not buy their hardware because it is to crippled while content sony does not want people to use their hardware to duplicate their content.
Then you got japan sony coming from a slightly different culture then the american "lets sue" sony.
But what I think is at the heart of this is the Sony that does not want to be owned by Microsoft. While the internet tv might not have happened I am sure there are people at sony that would dearly love the idea of them producing the "next pc". It is the only possibly explanation for Linux on the playstation sold by sony itself. They can't make a single cent profit on it. So why do it if not for learning wether it can be done?
Might it someday be possible to buy in the store a non-ms computer? Worse perhaps a computer that is not like today's pc's at all but far closer to say, oh a mobile phone?
MS has really screwed over every single company it has dealt with and the IBM Sony's of this world would dearly like to see a future were MS can't dictate so many terms.
It is basic economy. When your supplier controls you you are not in control. At the moment it is MS that control the PC and PC makers like sony don't like that.
So it is not out of character at all. Sony is just trying to get maximum profit. MS being toned down a bit means that sony can better dictate the terms, the terms probably being "we want more cash".
Simple really.
When you say bad things about muslim immigrants from north africa (we must be specific, for instance oriental or non-muslim india immigrants do far far better. African non-muslim blacks are practically white the moment they hit european soil.
You will get the claim that your a nazi. Yet who were the nazi's. They hated jews obviously, not much for gay rights either. Women were there to produce the master race. Mmmm, now lets see muslims, hate jews, hates gays and hate women rights.
I think we got a new extreme right in our midst and many bleeding heart liberals can't see it. They will defend people who represent everything they are against just because a non-white person could not possibly be a racist.
Whenever a muslim makes a claim about Iraq/Afghanistan/Israel being an attack on all muslims ask him about Dafur or Sudan or repressed groups in every single muslim country.
You had huge riots when some american soldiers destroyed some modern copies of the islam. When afghanistan destroyed ancient budhist statues not a single muslim cried out.
I am no longer willing to defend those who never fight for someone else.
MS has a monopoly. T0o many computers == wintel and to be fair other companies like say Dell and of course Intel are very happy to help MS keep that monopoly.
Because of this monopoly however any decision MS makes will be very closely watched to see if it doesn't have an "evil" angle.
Apple is tiny and controls the desktop in about the same way that say Greenland controls world politics. Not at all.
Nobody would give one shit what Apple does with its desktop because nobody needs them or feels they don't have a choice but to use them. Same way the whole world watches the US and nobody watches greenland. So Apple can get away with charging for service packs. Imagine if MS did that. Apple gets away with some pretty bad customer support, just browse slashdot, all because it is just to small for people to be really affected.
With MP3 players however Apple has achieved if not a monopoly then at least a dominance. Nobody could possibly feel forced to buy Apple for their player because the alternatives are to hard to use or impossible to buy. (the whole linux vs windows argument).
We do however get to see Apple behaving very MS like. Stupid idiotic restrictions seemingly designed for nothing else then just because they can.
If you ignore the fanboys, always a smart move, then most Apple users will agree that Steve Jobs only saving grace is that he has never had the success of Bill Gates. He can get away with decissions that Bill Gates would be roasted alive for. Steve Jobs decides to cripple a product in order to boost sales of another? 99% of posts will point out that this is a sound business decision. Bill Gates gives a couple of million to disease research? 99% of posts will question what his real motives are.
IBM is a current favorite for their support of Linux and general coolness. Can you imagine that not too long ago it was MS that was the new upstart fighting the monopolist IBM?
While I am not saying that all companies are equally evil I am saying that Apple/Steve Jobs is easily just as evil as MS/Bill Gates. He just has more charm.
What has so far been make or break for a console? Is it hardware? Well no, sorry console fans but if you want the best graphics you buy a pc. Is it who launches first? No, the crown of console king has been won to many times by "newbies" from the ones who been there.
What makes or breaks a console im my opinion is simply having the games that people want to play. It is certainly how I choose my console. You don't think I hand pc makers a small fortune because I like them? No, the games I want are only available on top end PC's.
X-box had halo, nintendo had ehh... final fantasy? or was the sony? GBA had tony hawk 2. Only console I ever owned. Brilliant game.
Yeah sure not a brilliant reason but just ask the average consumer how many games they actually own. You would be suprised how few out of the total collection are bought by the general public.
These are the MUST have titles and they are the titles wich sell the console. Why do you think MS wants so many exclusives?
X-box 360 line up is not good so far. I am not anti-console, just never been attracted. However I did just see a x-box 360 stand at a gameshop story in Osdorp Amsterdam Holland and it look nice. Not 100% sure if the graphics weren't fake nice (we all know MS's record on this) and wether the pretty graphics weren't just typical racer sweet pictures zero debt stuff.
Sony can still pull a winner IF at its launch it has the MUST have titles and MS still hasn't come up with the goods. Personally I think the worlds economie at the moment is not that healthy, especially when parents can buy the cheaper PSP or Nintendo DS and still have a happy kid, plus a happy kid you can kick outside instead of being in your living room.
All this and everything else anyone says has been done said before, but the half price thing is the most insane, just compare the price of the gamecube (less then a gba) with the price of the PS2. Yet who won?
I just played Vietcong 2. While it is not a perfect game it was enjoyable. For the maybe 10 hours I took me to complete it. The original seemed longer. Yet this for a MMORPG is nothing. EQ2 free trial offers more playtime. Vietcong 2 can barely be played longer although I suppose there are a few levels that have unlimited spawns (bits were you have to overcome defences and as long you have not crossed them new enemies keep coming in) were you could spend hours if you were so inclined.
Even games like Baldur Gate pale in the number of play hours next to a MMORPG. Lets face it, not many people play the same game for years and years. Everquest and SWG and Ultima Online are still being played by people who were there at launch.
Yes I am aware of games like counterstrike but if you are a diehard counterstrike player you will probably not still be playing on the same maps that were there at launch. CS, the sims, and Flightsim 2004 and other long lasting games are constantly updated by their users and it might even be argued that it is the users that create the game.
An MMORPG does not give the same freedom. Good luck doing even something as simple as creating your own "skin".
So rather then having longivity by constantly having new stuff added by unpaid monkeys, eh I mean dedicated users MMORPG's invariable try to last a long time by making progress slow. You will have to defeat an amazing amount of enemies once you get past the earlier levels, reading some quests in EQ2 reminds me more of a doom level then an RPG. I have to kill HOW many demon spawn? Where as the best RPG ever, Planescape Torment went out of its way to give you a way around the fights, there were only a tiny handfull needed, MMORPG's go for more hack&slash then Diablo.
Or to put it another way, MMORPG's are a grind. For regular RPG's there usually is somekind of experience/money cheat where by revisiting an area you can kill the same thing over and over if you need/want the reward. This is MMORPG's entire gameplay.
Because you are not alone and therefore you cannot be the hero of THE story they have totally removed the story based reward. SWG was worst in this respect. It basically HAD no story, just Elite type missions wich re-used the same stupid random message. Something like my little girls lost a flower please go kill a nest of rancors. The element of WTF was very high, the element of wanting to find out the ending zero.
EQ2 at first seems better but is still hopelessly basic. Almost all have the problem off you wondering, "Exactly how many blue gems has this girl found while sweeping anyway?". The simple problem off the fact that you and everyone get exactly the same quest even when that doesn't fit the story.
Only a tiny percentage of quests involve any roleplaying, you simply aren't allowed to make a choice. The choice between good and evil is basically just the architecture.
As an computerRPG MMORPG's typically fail. If you compare them to PnP RPG's then they are a joke. There is no roleplaying.
SWG in someways was an attempt to break some of the MMORPG's common pitfalls. It had a lot of customization, your character could easily look an individual with real control over body build, style and color of clothes and weapon choice.
Neither were you restricted to a handfull of jobs, you could choose and mix any of them.
So why did it so poorly? Well it is hard to explain. Perhaps people just didn't realize how good it was at its heart.
One of the things I still regret is the move away from the so called hologrind. For those who don't know: You could be a lot of different combo's of jobs but NOT a jedi with your normal character. To get one you need to unlock it by becoming a master in a random selection of jobs. Wich jobs they were could be revealed by using looted holocrons. Once you had mastered the required jobs you could become a jedi char.
The complaint was that this led to a lot of people trying jobs they didn't want to do ruining the economy bec
That is not even to count such differences as how to interpret a file, by its extension, its mimetype or its data content.
It would have been nice if there had been an enforced standard, THIS is what HTML is and nothing else. It would have meant you could truly have been free to choose your own browser. It would also have meant that no browser would feel the need to pretend it is one of the better ones, yes IE I am talking to you.
Mobile phones are not like PC's. First off the domination of MS is totally absent in the phone world. Opera actually has a browser share that can be measured in whole digits in the mobile phone market.
It is also a lot harder to install another browser. Dual booting is not even to be thought of.
On the the other hand what about freedom? What of the freedom of a webbrowser maker to add new and intresting features.
All I can say is look at the wonderfull world of the PC internet. Can you imagine that a company involved with a "new" internet will want to avoid that? That perhaps they burnt with the failure of WAP want to avoid that whole chuncks of their new net are unavailble to users of platform X?
Some cry, let the market decide but the market does not decide. Or is /. just a poor loser when it claims MS uses its IE dominance unfairly to dictate how the net should be?
As a webbuilder I think that it would be kinda nice to be able to build a site just for once and not have to include any workarounds and bugfixes to support every single version of browser no matter how bugridden and insecure. Just once you know. WAP sites were bliss even with their horrible limitations. Just one way to do them and any syntax error caused the page to fail. Seperates the men from the boys.
It is not just that these people do not have a complete understanding of computers and how to operate them. These people would also fall for trojans/spyware in real life. Like happily giving all their personal details to anyone who asks and then wondering why they get so much junkmail. What to think of pyramid schemes or false lotteries?
A non-idiot will always ask himself, why is person X offering to do something for me? Why does the supermarket offer me lower prices if I signup for a free card with my personal details attached? Exactly what is the math behind these pyramid schemes and can anyone not involved at the very beginning ever make money of it? Roulette, so what is the size of my house vs the house of the casino owner?
Same with virusses/rootkits/goatse links, why would someone send me a random link?
I think an idiot is a person who does not receive warning signals. HOT LESBIAN TEENAGE CO-ED ANIMAL HENTAI SEX FULL DVD.exe to them promisses some weird sex. They do not find it odd that the file is less then 1 mb. They simply do not think.
It has nothing to do with computer literacy. It is just common sense. Normal people have it, idiots don't.
American tax dollars hard at work to keep my socialist PC running nicely. Got to love the modern world.
Afraid that the US goverment (the one that makes speeches) might be firmly up MS backside but the parts of the US goverment that actually do stuff seem to like linux.
I went to buy a pornPod the moment I learned they now support pictures. I winked at the girl behind the counter and asked her to sell me a model fit for my person. She sold me a nano. :(
What does a zombie cow eat anyway, "Graaaaaaaas". Sorry not scary.
Sure a girl can resist but she will both have to face ridicule from the cool boys, from the nerdy boys who usually can't stand a girl to be smarter then them, from the other girls who resent a girl who dares to be different, from her parent for not dating.
/. is mostly composed of true geeks. Sure some of us may claim that we broke the stereo-type but lets be honest, if you were a cool guy with a knack for tech you still wouldn't be posting on slashdot on a friday evening, you would be having crazy hot sex.
For most of us that however is not an option but what if your a normal person faced with the choice of thinking for yourselve setting yourselve apart from the group or getting laid. Newsflash but 99% of humans would choose the sex. I would but as a geek I do not have that choice.
Dumb people who go with the flow do and they have sex and they get the kids. You see as nerds we better hope the ID people are right because if evolution is true then we are going to go back to swinging from trees. Dumb people have more kids in shorter generations. An intelligent women may have 1-2 kids after 30. A dumb girl will already be granny a dozen times at that age.
On a more serious note I think there is no real news story here. The whole debate vs Creationism vs Darwinism is nothing new. People have been discussing the subject even before darwin came up with his theorie. the whole bit about the earth being the center of the earth until some guy said, no it isn't, is at its heart the same discussion. Is the world a magical creation by a superbeing vs, is the world just a whole lot of natural laws with us just a side product?
Most people do not truly think about this deeply, why should you? It gets in the way of having sex and any survey done to ask peoples opinion could probably easily be swayed by how the questions are asked. See, Yes prime minister episode 1 for how this is done.
Might it be true that in the 1990's tv stations wanted to report the rise of the amount of people that believed in evolution while now they think they can score better headlines with the rise of ID believers?
How many of the evolution defenders here can on their own come up with the argument to break the human eye argument of the ID supporters? That their all the stages of evolution of the eye plus numerous alternative versions are available all around us? Eyes that are just primitive light sentive cells to eyes that see a sharper faster vision or in a different spectrum. No lense, multie lense, single lense? Black and white or color. Good for motion or good for still images?
Little bit of a newsflash, fps is a totally meaningless figure unless you attach to it WICH frame your redrawing X times per second. Sure most graphics cards are not capable at the moment of outputting 120 refreshes per second just as most monitors are not capable of displaying them but generating them is pretty easy. But then my same PC that can easily draw a hundred glxgears per second will probably choke to death on a single frame from the latest cgi movie.
Welcome to the new world of computing where useless marketting buzzwords rule the day. Now if they told me that the PS3 can play everquest 2 with all options maxed out at 120 fps then I would be impressed. Or SWG coronet on a busy day.
American goverment is crazy but crazy enough to start a war for a companies sake? Or should that be another war?
Sure they could start a trade war but the US needs the rest of the world more then the rest of the world needs the US.
These things are always a bit of a showdown, who has the bigger balls. For a long time MS has had the biggest but in the last few years a lot has changed. US goverment itself is more and more looking at other OSes to supply its needs. Pentagon using Linux for its future soldier project, NSA with their own linux code available as opensource, some local goverments going to openformats etc etc.
I would be much suprises if any hostile move by MS would result in anything else then more countries and companies reconsidering their reliance on MS. Isn't korea part of the asian countries attempts to improve linux already? Then again MS shooting itself in the foot would hardly be a first.
US Military: "We don't want you to release that information."
You: "Oh yeah who is going to make me? You and what army?"
US Military: "Well......."
Then again isn't this always a problem with the release of new hardware both for PC and consoles? When you get that brand new graphics card or soundcard it takes some hard searching to find a game that actually supports its new features. At the time of the Matrox G400 it was only a handfull of games that supported bumpmapping.
The x-box is now of course obsolete. After all it is already a few years old and we know that is succesor is to be launched soon. So exactly why are top games still being developed for it? Wouldn't it have been smarter to say, okay six months before the launch of a new generation console we stop releasing games for the old and concentrate on making games for the new one. Especially with the x-box 360 wich can't run existing x-box games this would really help during launch.
I can only imagine that for developers working 3 years on a top game the vague launch date of a new generation console is not enough to bet their own launch date on. Would you really want your Jade empire to be delayed a year because the 360 is delayed a year?
Every console ever launched needed time to come to full bloom. I am personally only interested in handhelds and at launch none of them had, for me, must have titles. The DS or PSP choice is not yet made for me as neither has a game I must have.
On the PC it is the same, when windows 95 hit many a game still had to run in dos mode. XP was not immidiatly supported as I am sure neither will Vista be.
As for the whole multi-threading bit, any big game has had to have been in production well before test units were around so they would have to have been developed on "normal" pc's. Multi-threading I am told by real programmers is a very different beast on different pieces of hardware so wouldn't it be sensible for a game developed mostly on non-existent hardware to be conservative in its reliance on hardware features? You wouldn't want to make a top game and then only find out that "shock and horror" a new consoles hardware doesn't live up to claims made by its creator?
As for the PS3 being harder to develop for then the X-box 360. Wasn't the same said about the PS2 vs the x-box? /me looks at PS2 vs X-box sales figures. Riiiight.
Price is still lower but you get less but lets not forget to check the price of the games. I don't know if this is true around the world but in holland games like Kotor and morrowind (released both for console AND pc) typically cost a full 10 euro's more for the console version. Wich is kinda sad since for both games the PC version was clearly better. Kotor because it came with extra content and Morrowind because of the whole user made content bit that is exclusive to the PC. Not to forget that the expansion packs for Morrowind were PC only.
Show me Counterstrike for console please. No not counterstrike itself but usermade modifications for your console. Sure 99% of usermade content probably sucks but the remaining 1% consist of some pure gems wich either are brilliant games in their own right or take an existing game to new levels. That is not including games like MS own flightsimulator wich ofcourse are all about user made content. Or Neverwinter Nights.
Their are of course prices to pay but you paint an extremely one sided picture and fail to completly analyze the costs.
A 1000 dollar gaming machine does not compare to a 300 dollar console. You should compare it to a 300 dollar console + accesories + tv + cheapo internet pc. Wanna bet that all that together comes pretty close to the cost of a full gaming pc? Anyway not everyone is a kid living on his mothers allowance. 500 dollars is all relative. If you think that is a lot never ever look at bills for your gf/wifes clothing.
The games are also different. Good luck finding an EQ2 or WoW on the console. Good luck with usermade games like Flightsim or NWN too. Then again good luck finding pure arcade titles on the PC.
Console games are easier to get running. Then again if you got troubles getting games to run on your pc what are you doing on slashdot?
Copy protection is a bitch at times but there is always away around it. Perhaps I have just been lucky.
I wonder what exactly the reason for this "test" is by MS. It is MS so there must be a motive. Could it be that they are trying to figure out exactly what kinda hardware is the norm for gamers? So that future games by them can be better tailored to the hardware available?
Both MS and Sony have a clear interest in making people game on their own propietary systems rather then the far more open PC. MS and Sony get paid when a game gets developed for their respective consoles. They get 0 for a game developed for pc. Yet both got really big titles that are exclusive to the PC, think MMO games wich MS is trying once again. Is Everquest just sony's way of testing the water until a future console is ready to run a MMO like and they will then drop the PC? EQ2 and SWG both like 1gig of memory so unless the new PS3 can perform some kind of miracle it will not be able to run the games as is. It used to be true that consoles needed less ram because they ran at far lower resolutions but with HD-tv this is becoming less true.
At the moment PC vs Console is not a matter of price. Yes a console alone is cheaper but you would still need the costs of a pc to be able to rant on /. on how much cheaper your console is. While I don't need a console to rant on how much bull that is.
It is a matter of different types of gaming. Sure I am tempted to the darkside by reviews of Jade empire and some other titles but am not willing to give up high resultions and user mods. My games also tend to need more buttons then a console has available. Then
First cancelling because you want to do a bigger tour because of claimed high interest in your show and then cancceling again because there is not enough interest?
Smarter people then me should probably be able to figure out if this is a vaporware product wich exists just to get gullible people to give them money. Phantom game console like.
Doom of course was a PC game, for the newbies, and is also extremely old. Talk of a movie version has been going on for far to long so since that time consoles have caught up a bit and the third version actually seems to have made it into console land. Then again the 3rd version was all ready close to a movie. It certainly seemed to take a lesson from the alien series, make it so dark that you can't see the scary's. What is it with the future and nobody having the money for some decent lighting eh?
We all knew the movie was going to be bad. It is too simple for hollywood to understand. A marine on mars fighting the legions from hell. 1.5 hours of zero story and non-stop violence. Even george lucas could direct this one. Just stand behind him with a cattle prod and stimulate him not to include any comedy.
But no, they change all the basic settings and want to add a story. It is like the american version of Red Dwarf or wanting to add a love interest to Half-Life. Perhaps we should simply stop demanding more movies. I had better cinamtic experience with the cutscenes in x-wing then watching Revenge of the jedi. With the Doom3 game we already have our doom movie. All some good soul has to do is cut out all the 100th corner with a baddy around it bits and give us a 1 hour game with all the good bits and some better lighting. Then tape it and voila, Doom movie the right way.