Same here, especially after having one of those 3rd party "Mega Super Plus Hyper Edition 2rd" memory cards with "pages." It killed my progress in Suikoden, and I could only recover a save at a point where I was screwed.
But these Console-Save-to-PC devices are not without their problems. The PSX data deck I have is on the fritz, it is having problems reading the memory cards, and I have to use my own typed instructions because if you don't do things correctly your backup can be worthless(one of the save formats doesn't work). My DC one won't allow me to back up copy-protected saves, and why a game like Typing of the Dead needs it is beyond me. And finally, I just found out that my game shark sharkport is a lower version and will not backup my Grand Theft Auto saves.
Then there is the fact that similar devices have different formats, and generally don't work with each other. My data deck could read one other popular card's save format, but due to the glitchy software and probably unofficial support it can't save in it. It is too bad there are so many competing devices and incompatible save formats.
Problems aside, I still recommend owning and using Console-Save-to-PC devices. In addition to backing up your progress, it is also nice to be able to download saves for things you don't have the time to unlock or want to go through the hassle.
When searching, I do not care for the new default view of all posts on one page with no indication of the order, I found the tree view easier and better for reading.
They do provide a tree view option when searching and use it by default when not doing a search, but in both view cases they also removed the boarders/info that used to separate each post, which makes the threads harder to read and follow.
And the only minor annoyance I can see is that so far is when searching clicking the link gives you the full thread, unlike the old version where you could either select the single message or select to view the whole thread without keyword highlights. The good thing about this change is that what ever keywords you searched for are highlighted throughout the whole thread.
There are pirate Nes/Famicom consoles are shaped like popular consoles, like for example the first playstation.
How nice of them to keep the PS box with its advertisements for playstation games. It even has a flyer that advertiess NES/Famicoms in the shapes of a Genesis, SNES, N64, NeoGeo?(I think, I can't quite tell), and the different versions of the same consoles(i.e Genesis version II).
So I can see them making a GameCube shaped pirate Famicom/Nes if they haven't already.
The reason they get away with it is because people think when they deposit a check it seems to have been instantly cleared and cashed.
I can understand why people think this way, I deposit my checks in an ATM and the amount imputed instantly shows up on my balance. That is what I think causes people to think this way. At least some people know better then to assume that the check has been cleared, and believe they really have the cash that they inputted.
Not in the US, since game genie and similar cheat devices have been ruled legal.
Don't have any clue about how this will affect Japan, since these cheat devices do have other purposes then making characters nude. Hopefully the ruling won't go too far as to ban or severely limit such devices.
What, the gold stream package is a lot better then the collectors edition! That bites, I hoped that there was going to be a soundtrack cd in the collector's edition.
So it looks like the retail collector's edition buyers are getting the shaft, the only bonuses for the collector's edition is the DVD(good), HL1 and CS Source (good), a sampler book(blah, they usually turn out to be a few crummy magazine quality pages, and you have to buy the real book anyway), and a t-shirt (blah, I would preferred a soundtrack cd, or the other source versions). I say the collector's edition failed to live up to the "lots of cool bonus stuff for people who like cool bonus stuff" claim.
The stream version lives up to this claim: Day of Defeat: Source, Valve's back catalog currently available on Steam, Complete Strategy Guide from Prima Games, 3 different Half-Life 2 posters, Half-Life 2 hat, Half-Life 2 postcard, Half-Life 2 stickers, Half-Life 2 Soundtrack CD, Chance to win a trip to Valve. Not having the official DVD and having to download the games is the only downside I find with the stream version.
And all the exclusive stuff the collector's edition buyers get in comparison to the Gold is a DVD copy, a sampler of the book, and a t-shirt. The shirts might as well say "I paid for the Half-Life 2 Collector's Edition and all I got was a crummy t-shirt."
So I really hope that they offer the other merchandise in the gold package for separate purchase, I can see lots of people wanting to buy the HL2 merchandise but not wanting to buy the stream Gold edition. I will probably get the collector's edition anyway, I prefer having a physical copy and want to have it as part of my game collection.
I am not surprised at this announcement, people have been spamming these links through various online forums for quite some time now. They do absolute noting to fix this spamming problem, and their so called "anti-spam" policy is a joke.
The only way to succeed in these "games" is to get the most clicks, and to accomplish this you have to spam your link through various sites. Also these sites tend to offer prizes as an incentive for people to play and spam.
If they really wanted to kill spamming they would use a confirm system that only logs clicks after the link clicker registers to play. Of course that would greatly reduce the numbers of people clicking, viewing the site and its advertisements, would make it harder for the spammers to get anywhere, and pretty much kill the only fun thing about these so called games.
That is why sites like this love the referral based system, and set them up in their favor. They like this because they are able to blame the spammer and claim no responsibility for the spam, while on the side encouraging and helping people to do this abuse. Other fun things they can do with a referral system is can claim that they killed a spammer, only to transfer them to a new account or kill it till the heat dies off. Most sites like this allow the spammer to sing back up without any problems. They can also chose to ignore the abuse reports and allow the spammer to keep at it.
So it is easy to see why they do this, if they had to do confirmations through signups their game wouldn't last very long. The only way to get those clicks to their site and people to continue playing is by allowing spamming.
While it doesn't flat out say it, that site reports this as an UN-confirmed and UN-official rumor. There is hardly any thing in that article that gives the rumor any creditability. All they have to back that up is the rumored above or at $300 price of the PSP that other people have been guessing.
I have seen another site(which I can't find the link) that was claiming the story on the price was on the gamespot site but was removed by gamespot. Just like the link in the write up, that site also appeared to be Nintendo centered site. Most of the comments were the typical fanboy "Sony suxxors!!!," delighting at the though of how much those "pathetic" Sony fanboys will pay, and people complaining about the rumored price as if it was the official. I really can't trust a site that favors Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft/etc not doing something like this to make the competition look bad or use it as fuel for the fanboys.
Even if this was announced on a PSP centered site I wouldn't trust it, I would still treat it as an unconfirmed rumor. Unless it gets picked up and confirmed among the more trustworthy sites, I wouldn't put much stock in it.
It is funny to see people ragging on the PSP's assumed price when the exact same thing was going on with the DS. There was lots of speculation as to what the price for the DS was going to be, and later Nintendo announces a price of $149.99 which was much lower then what was expected. So it is possible that a similar thing could happen with the PSP.
Until Sony officially announces it at the TGS and it goes through the more trustworthy news channels, I am not going to believe it.
Ok, I know that retailers usually give dates that are incorrect, and my main point was addressing the write-up's claim of the release dates being close to reality.
Also I didn't get to see the original post, so I have no clue if it any dates were announced.
and when does someone preannounce it is going to gold?
Yeah, most just announce it when they are sure it is done and has been sent off to the presses. Announcing it when it did makes it so easy for them to go "oops, we found an error, so it won't go gold on Monday!" Wouldn't be surprised if this fake poster's intention was to give Valve even more PR problems, I think they wanted this to become a big delay that would push fans and others over the edge.
How would you feel to hear that after a long period of waiting and delays, it is announced that highly awaited game XYX is going to go gold on Monday, only to have it delayed yet again? I think a lot of people would be very pissed, and that was the reaction that the false poster was going for.
Besides fan speculations, there hasn't been much said about it besides Gabe's vague "The third is the collector's edition SKU with lots of cool bonus stuff for people who like cool bonus stuff."
So it is anyone's guess as to what the CE will contain, along with the rumored HL: Source it might include a music CD, a making of DVD, an official Half-Life 2 crowbar, Source versions of the HL add-ons, or maybe a head-crab figurine. Until they release more info or the game gets released, all we can do is guess.
And proven false, there are things in this story that still don't add up. Just look at the release dates, who here has heard of a game going gold on Monday, getting all the CDs pressed, games boxed, collector's edition stuff gathered together, shipped so that it will be in all the retailers hands so that there will be no unfair early selling advantages on/before the date, and then have the game 3-4 days later be released?
I sure haven't, from my understanding that it takes at least half a month to get to the point were the game has gone gold to shipping and in the stores. Doom 3 went gold on July 14th, and wasn't expected to hit the shelves until August 2nd. A 3-4 day window is a huge potential for disaster, and given the way Valve has been bitched at for missing and changing dates I doubt that they would announce it with that time frame.
Also while the game is undergoing pre-loading, from my understanding it is just the parts that are final (i.e. sounds, some textures, etc) and still leaves Valve open to sending out the final stuff. So while there is evidence of HL2 making some progress, it doesn't mean that the game will be shipping soon.
Sigh, just look through their press releases section and see how many times they mention Star Wars. While they have had some really good Star Wars games, there are lots of low quality ones that counted on the Star Wars name to sell. I have seen some of these that despite their low scores, they managed to end selling enough copies to be re-released at a cheaper price though programs like Sony's "Greatest Hits" series.
And it looks like their innovation and originality dying even more, they recently announced Mercenaries which is a generic 3rd person military unit behind enemy lines preventing North Korea from releasing nukes. Gee, I wonder where they got that *brilliant* plot, who would have ever thought about one involving North Korea and nuclear weapons in this day and age?
Even with their recently released original titles things haven't been going well. I wonder if those who canned Sam & Max 2 were also responsible for giving RTX Red Rock and Wrath Unleashed the ok. Plus games like Gladius and Armed and Dangerous probably could have done better if they were given more time. Now it looks like Lucasarts is going to take the safe and easy route by releasing cliches and Star Wars titles.
I can understand the canceling of Full Throttle 2, it was not living up to the original(I recall some game magazines who got to play some of it were disappointed ) and they didn't want to disappoint the fans. But I can't really deal with their canceling of Sam & Max 2 when things seemed to be top quality. Even Steve Purcell thought it was good, and I trust him more then Lucasarts with how Lucasarts has been doing for the last few years.
I think it was about two years ago the company head was going on about how they were going to restore things back to Lucasarts past history of releasing high quality and original titles, and look at how *well* they have accomplished that. While the games were original, they did not have the old Lucasarts quality and game play wise were quite poor. They have pretty much failed at producing high quality original titles, their releasing anymore adventure games seems unlikely, and are pretty much producing just Star Wars games. Thus for now I have given up with Lucasarts, unless they under go through some drastic changes I don't see anything worth my while being released by them.
"The beauty of this is that the degrading copy becomes a sales promotion tool. People go out and buy an original version."
Now wait a minute, so then how does cranking the difficulty to an absurd levels and making the player screw up make people want to go out and buy it? I highly doubt that those who experience this will go out and buy it, most likely they will either get a good rip, program some hack, or just delete the game.
This technology will end up biting them in the butt. Just think of the reviewers for web sites, magazines, etc will think of your product when the game starts acting like crap on them. Those who use this also have to worry about not only those reviews, but the various sites that people can submit their own reviews and the word of mouth.
I wouldn't be surprised if any games that use this no matter how good they are will eventually end up getting a lot of bad reviews. Since this scheme will be common, similar reviews will look quite legit and not stick out like a fake or unfair review.
The last thing they want to do is to have this scheme affect their legit customers. Most people are not going to be pleased when a few years, months, days, whatever, when their legally purchased game or DVD ceases to function.
I thought the one for GTA III was nicely done. It was just like a movie trailer; it showed some of the action, showed some of the cut scenes, along with clips of audio which gave us a feel for the plot and game.
Like they are ones to talk�
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I, Spammer
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I "love" this quote from this article: Crashing a data center by flooding it with traffic is certainly a form of trespassing and tampering with private property, [lawyer David Kramer] says.
What about spammers? Wouldn't that definition also apply to their flooding email boxes and servers with their crap?
Besides that, I can list several other things they are doing that is equal to that. For example they trespass and tamper with private property when they rape proxies, the same when they hack PCs and servers to relay their crap, their intent to trespass onto our property by trying to get around spam filters, etc.
If this is true, the spammers better realize that this applies to them as well.
I am not surprised at the amount of laughter that DMA president H. Robert Wientzen caused by saying that commercial email should be opt-out. It is no wonder people hate the marketers mentality that consumers should be force to see their advertisements.
Pretending for the moment that all the spam problems don't exist and ignoring their redefinition, can you imagine trying to opt-out of billions of email messages? Even if there was rules and they did honor opt-outs, they are still killing the usefulness of email by flooding you with crap that prevents you from getting you real messages.
Then there is the fact that the DMA they probably will not follow the rules or will have lots of holes when they make the rules. One example I can think of will be that they make it so they can just change the names of the "company" or have several "companies" and switch the "company" sending the email so they can re-send you the same emails.
If companies really wanted to be ethical about this and have customers, they would not resort to ticking their potential customers off and they would use confirmed opt-in and not sell their customers personal info (email, phone, street address, etc). It may be harder to get customers, but it is a lot better in the long run if you are get and retain those customers that way then what you might get if you resort to spamming the hell out of them.
I decided to test this out and found that Mozilla sort of defeats the right click protection. When I right clicked it brought up the so called "menu disabled" message, but after clicking ok the menu for right click appeared. If I had the mouse pointer over the image after clicking "ok" it would give me the option to save the image.
The both keyboard keys didn't quite work, even though the mouse was over the image it didn't have the save image option.
You're allowed to have one hyphen or apostrophe in your name. Numbers and other punctuation are not allowed, and we will also follow strict capitalization rules.
The companies can still get around this, don't assume that they are that inept and encryption will protect you. One thing they can do is install and hide key logging software, software that takes screen shots of what you are writing, etc.
I read in this news story on cnet a while back that one Japanese label was going to just copy protect cretin tracks on their disks with midbar's "copy protection" scheme.
I wondered the same thing then as I do now with what creative is doing, why bother? Ignoring how easy it is to defeat, I want to know why are they just copy protecting select tracks. The only reason I can think is that the want to protect the parts that they feel are valuable, or at least create that impression by locking those tracks off.
Another thought more related to the creative incident is that this is a trap set up in order to get the user to enable and "support" DRM by having the user agree to the EULA's and what ever DRM software creative installs. I doubt the users who will try to access the tracks would agree to and install DRM if they knew what they where getting into.
I am not looking forward to more hardware component companies start announcing support for palladium. I would not be surprised to see creative announcing support, and having other sound card manufactures fallow their lead just like Intel and AMD.
I think that the reason that Nintendo is releasing their stuff this way is that it would be a lot more profitable then making a Nes collection GBA series. The price range is nice, you get $1.95 to $4.95 each, and is below the $25-40 range that some GBA games run for. I also bet they will be going the collector's card rout, make only X amount of cards for a popular game like the origional Zelda for example(if it is possable, I kind of have doubts about it).
I would love just buy a GBA game with a collection of NES games already built in, and not have to bother with the hassle of cards and the amount of memory the reader has. I know I could get one of the pirate carts that allow this and use emulators, but I would like to what is legal, as well as support Nintendo so that they will start doing this more. Companies like Namco have been doing this with their classic games for quite some time. I really enjoyed the Museum series even though the selection of games they give is kind of low.
I also remember hearing a while back that they where planing to release a GameCube Kirby tilt and tumble game with a cart that would allow you to download games to it. I haven't heard anything after that, and I haven't been paying much attention to it either. I would guess the main reason Nintendo hasn't done this is due to their concerns of piracy and how easy it would be hack and download stuff to it.. I guess they figured that no one would buy anymore classic NES collections or games when one can just hack the cart they provide and download these games for free.
What the EULA's for those machines would be like. As if anyone would follow them, and I doubt most college students would.
I don't think there will be much of a demand when they find out that they can't install a non-Mirosoft supported programs and codecs, as well as access the popular non-Mirosoft file formats. I can see people being upset at not being able to see or access the Divx;-) file that is getting passed around the dorm's network.
and didn't make it clear where Open Source stands.
And that is where the real problem with this announcement. There is no clear indication any where on their page as if they will let open source slide or not. If only there was more information about this, other then the red hat blurb at the end with no announcement to back it up.
This also brings up a question, if there is a loop hole for non profit(or low profit), would they consider open sorce to be so? I can see them evaluating it as for profit, there are companys like Red Hat making a profit off of open source, and are paying for its devlopment.
I tried to connect and got this error "No web site is configured at this address." Putting any conspiracy theories behind, It could be that the site suffered the dreaded./ effect and had to do something to save bandwidth. I also think that their hosting of full albums made it a lot easier.
I am beginning to wonder if this is a new trend for the **AA's. They try the legal routs first, then put up news coverage of a site that they can't touch. Then have the sights bandwidth get eaten due to the publicity, forcing the site to shut down or move. I wouldn't also be surprised if their Overpeer service or who ever the employ to harass p2p also DOSed the site while this was happening.
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Same here, especially after having one of those 3rd party "Mega Super Plus Hyper Edition 2rd" memory cards with "pages." It killed my progress in Suikoden, and I could only recover a save at a point where I was screwed.
But these Console-Save-to-PC devices are not without their problems. The PSX data deck I have is on the fritz, it is having problems reading the memory cards, and I have to use my own typed instructions because if you don't do things correctly your backup can be worthless(one of the save formats doesn't work). My DC one won't allow me to back up copy-protected saves, and why a game like Typing of the Dead needs it is beyond me. And finally, I just found out that my game shark sharkport is a lower version and will not backup my Grand Theft Auto saves.
Then there is the fact that similar devices have different formats, and generally don't work with each other. My data deck could read one other popular card's save format, but due to the glitchy software and probably unofficial support it can't save in it. It is too bad there are so many competing devices and incompatible save formats.
Problems aside, I still recommend owning and using Console-Save-to-PC devices. In addition to backing up your progress, it is also nice to be able to download saves for things you don't have the time to unlock or want to go through the hassle.
When searching, I do not care for the new default view of all posts on one page with no indication of the order, I found the tree view easier and better for reading.
They do provide a tree view option when searching and use it by default when not doing a search, but in both view cases they also removed the boarders/info that used to separate each post, which makes the threads harder to read and follow.
And the only minor annoyance I can see is that so far is when searching clicking the link gives you the full thread, unlike the old version where you could either select the single message or select to view the whole thread without keyword highlights. The good thing about this change is that what ever keywords you searched for are highlighted throughout the whole thread.
There are pirate Nes/Famicom consoles are shaped like popular consoles, like for example the first playstation.
How nice of them to keep the PS box with its advertisements for playstation games. It even has a flyer that advertiess NES/Famicoms in the shapes of a Genesis, SNES, N64, NeoGeo?(I think, I can't quite tell), and the different versions of the same consoles(i.e Genesis version II).
So I can see them making a GameCube shaped pirate Famicom/Nes if they haven't already.
The reason they get away with it is because people think when they deposit a check it seems to have been instantly cleared and cashed.
I can understand why people think this way, I deposit my checks in an ATM and the amount imputed instantly shows up on my balance. That is what I think causes people to think this way. At least some people know better then to assume that the check has been cleared, and believe they really have the cash that they inputted.
Not in the US, since game genie and similar cheat devices have been ruled legal.
Don't have any clue about how this will affect Japan, since these cheat devices do have other purposes then making characters nude. Hopefully the ruling won't go too far as to ban or severely limit such devices.
What, the gold stream package is a lot better then the collectors edition! That bites, I hoped that there was going to be a soundtrack cd in the collector's edition.
So it looks like the retail collector's edition buyers are getting the shaft, the only bonuses for the collector's edition is the DVD(good), HL1 and CS Source (good), a sampler book(blah, they usually turn out to be a few crummy magazine quality pages, and you have to buy the real book anyway), and a t-shirt (blah, I would preferred a soundtrack cd, or the other source versions). I say the collector's edition failed to live up to the "lots of cool bonus stuff for people who like cool bonus stuff" claim.
The stream version lives up to this claim: Day of Defeat: Source, Valve's back catalog currently available on Steam, Complete Strategy Guide from Prima Games, 3 different Half-Life 2 posters, Half-Life 2 hat, Half-Life 2 postcard, Half-Life 2 stickers, Half-Life 2 Soundtrack CD, Chance to win a trip to Valve. Not having the official DVD and having to download the games is the only downside I find with the stream version.
And all the exclusive stuff the collector's edition buyers get in comparison to the Gold is a DVD copy, a sampler of the book, and a t-shirt. The shirts might as well say "I paid for the Half-Life 2 Collector's Edition and all I got was a crummy t-shirt."
So I really hope that they offer the other merchandise in the gold package for separate purchase, I can see lots of people wanting to buy the HL2 merchandise but not wanting to buy the stream Gold edition. I will probably get the collector's edition anyway, I prefer having a physical copy and want to have it as part of my game collection.
I am not surprised at this announcement, people have been spamming these links through various online forums for quite some time now. They do absolute noting to fix this spamming problem, and their so called "anti-spam" policy is a joke.
The only way to succeed in these "games" is to get the most clicks, and to accomplish this you have to spam your link through various sites. Also these sites tend to offer prizes as an incentive for people to play and spam.
If they really wanted to kill spamming they would use a confirm system that only logs clicks after the link clicker registers to play. Of course that would greatly reduce the numbers of people clicking, viewing the site and its advertisements, would make it harder for the spammers to get anywhere, and pretty much kill the only fun thing about these so called games.
That is why sites like this love the referral based system, and set them up in their favor. They like this because they are able to blame the spammer and claim no responsibility for the spam, while on the side encouraging and helping people to do this abuse. Other fun things they can do with a referral system is can claim that they killed a spammer, only to transfer them to a new account or kill it till the heat dies off. Most sites like this allow the spammer to sing back up without any problems. They can also chose to ignore the abuse reports and allow the spammer to keep at it.
So it is easy to see why they do this, if they had to do confirmations through signups their game wouldn't last very long. The only way to get those clicks to their site and people to continue playing is by allowing spamming.
While it doesn't flat out say it, that site reports this as an UN-confirmed and UN-official rumor. There is hardly any thing in that article that gives the rumor any creditability. All they have to back that up is the rumored above or at $300 price of the PSP that other people have been guessing.
I have seen another site(which I can't find the link) that was claiming the story on the price was on the gamespot site but was removed by gamespot. Just like the link in the write up, that site also appeared to be Nintendo centered site. Most of the comments were the typical fanboy "Sony suxxors!!!," delighting at the though of how much those "pathetic" Sony fanboys will pay, and people complaining about the rumored price as if it was the official. I really can't trust a site that favors Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft/etc not doing something like this to make the competition look bad or use it as fuel for the fanboys.
Even if this was announced on a PSP centered site I wouldn't trust it, I would still treat it as an unconfirmed rumor. Unless it gets picked up and confirmed among the more trustworthy sites, I wouldn't put much stock in it.
It is funny to see people ragging on the PSP's assumed price when the exact same thing was going on with the DS. There was lots of speculation as to what the price for the DS was going to be, and later Nintendo announces a price of $149.99 which was much lower then what was expected. So it is possible that a similar thing could happen with the PSP.
Until Sony officially announces it at the TGS and it goes through the more trustworthy news channels, I am not going to believe it.
Ok, I know that retailers usually give dates that are incorrect, and my main point was addressing the write-up's claim of the release dates being close to reality.
Also I didn't get to see the original post, so I have no clue if it any dates were announced.
and when does someone preannounce it is going to gold?
Yeah, most just announce it when they are sure it is done and has been sent off to the presses. Announcing it when it did makes it so easy for them to go "oops, we found an error, so it won't go gold on Monday!" Wouldn't be surprised if this fake poster's intention was to give Valve even more PR problems, I think they wanted this to become a big delay that would push fans and others over the edge.
How would you feel to hear that after a long period of waiting and delays, it is announced that highly awaited game XYX is going to go gold on Monday, only to have it delayed yet again? I think a lot of people would be very pissed, and that was the reaction that the false poster was going for.
Besides fan speculations, there hasn't been much said about it besides Gabe's vague "The third is the collector's edition SKU with lots of cool bonus stuff for people who like cool bonus stuff."
So it is anyone's guess as to what the CE will contain, along with the rumored HL: Source it might include a music CD, a making of DVD, an official Half-Life 2 crowbar, Source versions of the HL add-ons, or maybe a head-crab figurine. Until they release more info or the game gets released, all we can do is guess.
And proven false, there are things in this story that still don't add up. Just look at the release dates, who here has heard of a game going gold on Monday, getting all the CDs pressed, games boxed, collector's edition stuff gathered together, shipped so that it will be in all the retailers hands so that there will be no unfair early selling advantages on/before the date, and then have the game 3-4 days later be released?
I sure haven't, from my understanding that it takes at least half a month to get to the point were the game has gone gold to shipping and in the stores. Doom 3 went gold on July 14th, and wasn't expected to hit the shelves until August 2nd. A 3-4 day window is a huge potential for disaster, and given the way Valve has been bitched at for missing and changing dates I doubt that they would announce it with that time frame.
Also while the game is undergoing pre-loading, from my understanding it is just the parts that are final (i.e. sounds, some textures, etc) and still leaves Valve open to sending out the final stuff. So while there is evidence of HL2 making some progress, it doesn't mean that the game will be shipping soon.
Sigh, just look through their press releases section and see how many times they mention Star Wars. While they have had some really good Star Wars games, there are lots of low quality ones that counted on the Star Wars name to sell. I have seen some of these that despite their low scores, they managed to end selling enough copies to be re-released at a cheaper price though programs like Sony's "Greatest Hits" series.
And it looks like their innovation and originality dying even more, they recently announced Mercenaries which is a generic 3rd person military unit behind enemy lines preventing North Korea from releasing nukes. Gee, I wonder where they got that *brilliant* plot, who would have ever thought about one involving North Korea and nuclear weapons in this day and age?
Even with their recently released original titles things haven't been going well. I wonder if those who canned Sam & Max 2 were also responsible for giving RTX Red Rock and Wrath Unleashed the ok. Plus games like Gladius and Armed and Dangerous probably could have done better if they were given more time. Now it looks like Lucasarts is going to take the safe and easy route by releasing cliches and Star Wars titles.
I can understand the canceling of Full Throttle 2, it was not living up to the original(I recall some game magazines who got to play some of it were disappointed ) and they didn't want to disappoint the fans. But I can't really deal with their canceling of Sam & Max 2 when things seemed to be top quality. Even Steve Purcell thought it was good, and I trust him more then Lucasarts with how Lucasarts has been doing for the last few years.
I think it was about two years ago the company head was going on about how they were going to restore things back to Lucasarts past history of releasing high quality and original titles, and look at how *well* they have accomplished that. While the games were original, they did not have the old Lucasarts quality and game play wise were quite poor. They have pretty much failed at producing high quality original titles, their releasing anymore adventure games seems unlikely, and are pretty much producing just Star Wars games. Thus for now I have given up with Lucasarts, unless they under go through some drastic changes I don't see anything worth my while being released by them.
"The beauty of this is that the degrading copy becomes a sales promotion tool. People go out and buy an original version."
Now wait a minute, so then how does cranking the difficulty to an absurd levels and making the player screw up make people want to go out and buy it? I highly doubt that those who experience this will go out and buy it, most likely they will either get a good rip, program some hack, or just delete the game.
This technology will end up biting them in the butt. Just think of the reviewers for web sites, magazines, etc will think of your product when the game starts acting like crap on them. Those who use this also have to worry about not only those reviews, but the various sites that people can submit their own reviews and the word of mouth.
I wouldn't be surprised if any games that use this no matter how good they are will eventually end up getting a lot of bad reviews. Since this scheme will be common, similar reviews will look quite legit and not stick out like a fake or unfair review.
The last thing they want to do is to have this scheme affect their legit customers. Most people are not going to be pleased when a few years, months, days, whatever, when their legally purchased game or DVD ceases to function.
Try gametrailers.com's tv spot section.
I thought the one for GTA III was nicely done. It was just like a movie trailer; it showed some of the action, showed some of the cut scenes, along with clips of audio which gave us a feel for the plot and game.
I "love" this quote from this article:
Crashing a data center by flooding it with traffic is certainly a form of trespassing and tampering with private property, [lawyer David Kramer] says.
What about spammers? Wouldn't that definition also apply to their flooding email boxes and servers with their crap?
Besides that, I can list several other things they are doing that is equal to that. For example they trespass and tamper with private property when they rape proxies, the same when they hack PCs and servers to relay their crap, their intent to trespass onto our property by trying to get around spam filters, etc.
If this is true, the spammers better realize that this applies to them as well.
I am not surprised at the amount of laughter that DMA president H. Robert Wientzen caused by saying that commercial email should be opt-out. It is no wonder people hate the marketers mentality that consumers should be force to see their advertisements.
Pretending for the moment that all the spam problems don't exist and ignoring their redefinition, can you imagine trying to opt-out of billions of email messages? Even if there was rules and they did honor opt-outs, they are still killing the usefulness of email by flooding you with crap that prevents you from getting you real messages.
Then there is the fact that the DMA they probably will not follow the rules or will have lots of holes when they make the rules. One example I can think of will be that they make it so they can just change the names of the "company" or have several "companies" and switch the "company" sending the email so they can re-send you the same emails.
If companies really wanted to be ethical about this and have customers, they would not resort to ticking their potential customers off and they would use confirmed opt-in and not sell their customers personal info (email, phone, street address, etc). It may be harder to get customers, but it is a lot better in the long run if you are get and retain those customers that way then what you might get if you resort to spamming the hell out of them.
"Frea speach" a common term used to refer to a spammer's claim of free speech giving them the right to spam.
It is intentionally misspelled to distinguish their version from actual free speech rights.
I decided to test this out and found that Mozilla sort of defeats the right click protection. When I right clicked it brought up the so called "menu disabled" message, but after clicking ok the menu for right click appeared. If I had the mouse pointer over the image after clicking "ok" it would give me the option to save the image.
The both keyboard keys didn't quite work, even though the mouse was over the image it didn't have the save image option.
According to the faq you can't.
You're allowed to have one hyphen or apostrophe in your name. Numbers and other punctuation are not allowed, and we will also follow strict capitalization rules.
The companies can still get around this, don't assume that they are that inept and encryption will protect you. One thing they can do is install and hide key logging software, software that takes screen shots of what you are writing, etc.
I read in this news story on cnet a while back that one Japanese label was going to just copy protect cretin tracks on their disks with midbar's "copy protection" scheme.
I wondered the same thing then as I do now with what creative is doing, why bother? Ignoring how easy it is to defeat, I want to know why are they just copy protecting select tracks. The only reason I can think is that the want to protect the parts that they feel are valuable, or at least create that impression by locking those tracks off.
Another thought more related to the creative incident is that this is a trap set up in order to get the user to enable and "support" DRM by having the user agree to the EULA's and what ever DRM software creative installs. I doubt the users who will try to access the tracks would agree to and install DRM if they knew what they where getting into.
I am not looking forward to more hardware component companies start announcing support for palladium. I would not be surprised to see creative announcing support, and having other sound card manufactures fallow their lead just like Intel and AMD.
I think that the reason that Nintendo is releasing their stuff this way is that it would be a lot more profitable then making a Nes collection GBA series. The price range is nice, you get $1.95 to $4.95 each, and is below the $25-40 range that some GBA games run for. I also bet they will be going the collector's card rout, make only X amount of cards for a popular game like the origional Zelda for example(if it is possable, I kind of have doubts about it).
I would love just buy a GBA game with a collection of NES games already built in, and not have to bother with the hassle of cards and the amount of memory the reader has. I know I could get one of the pirate carts that allow this and use emulators, but I would like to what is legal, as well as support Nintendo so that they will start doing this more. Companies like Namco have been doing this with their classic games for quite some time. I really enjoyed the Museum series even though the selection of games they give is kind of low.
I also remember hearing a while back that they where planing to release a GameCube Kirby tilt and tumble game with a cart that would allow you to download games to it. I haven't heard anything after that, and I haven't been paying much attention to it either. I would guess the main reason Nintendo hasn't done this is due to their concerns of piracy and how easy it would be hack and download stuff to it.. I guess they figured that no one would buy anymore classic NES collections or games when one can just hack the cart they provide and download these games for free.
What the EULA's for those machines would be like. As if anyone would follow them, and I doubt most college students would.
;-) file that is getting passed around the dorm's network.
I don't think there will be much of a demand when they find out that they can't install a non-Mirosoft supported programs and codecs, as well as access the popular non-Mirosoft file formats. I can see people being upset at not being able to see or access the Divx
and didn't make it clear where Open Source stands.
And that is where the real problem with this announcement. There is no clear indication any where on their page as if they will let open source slide or not. If only there was more information about this, other then the red hat blurb at the end with no announcement to back it up.
This also brings up a question, if there is a loop hole for non profit(or low profit), would they consider open sorce to be so? I can see them evaluating it as for profit, there are companys like Red Hat making a profit off of open source, and are paying for its devlopment.
I tried to connect and got this error "No web site is configured at this address." Putting any conspiracy theories behind, It could be that the site suffered the dreaded ./ effect and had to do something to save bandwidth. I also think that their hosting of full albums made it a lot easier.
I am beginning to wonder if this is a new trend for the **AA's. They try the legal routs first, then put up news coverage of a site that they can't touch. Then have the sights bandwidth get eaten due to the publicity, forcing the site to shut down or move. I wouldn't also be surprised if their Overpeer service or who ever the employ to harass p2p also DOSed the site while this was happening.