They also, supposedly, stopped making the larger ones, though you can still pick them up. Mine came with the smaller one (I bought it over a year ago), and I bought the bigger one because I prefer it.
How many people really have 3rd party controllers exclusively on their console? Personally, because of an issue I had with a particular manufacturer's controller on the PS1, I have no 3rd party controllers for any of the current generation consoles, except the DreamCast (and that controller has sticky triggers because it's so poorly made). I've been looking at the Logitech wireless controllers for the XBox and PS2, but I'm having trouble justifying the price when I'd need at least 2 of them for each console.
On the other hand, I bought the bigger XBox controller as an addition to my XBox (it came with the S), bought a 2nd Sony controller for the PS2, and 4 wavebirds for the Cube. Of all the controllers I have (including a boatload of different controllers over the years for the PC), the larger XBox controller is the best I've used, followed by the wavebirds, then the PS2 controllers. The Sega controllers for the DC only surpass the very bottom simply because they haven't broken, though that may be simply because they get almost no use.
They are saying that the people writing the viruses are not finding the exploits on their own - they are reverse engineering patches to find the exploits.
They don't even have to reverse engineer the patches, since the bulletins released with the patches usually describe the problem being patched well enough for someone to figure out a way to write an exploit. When you have a description available like the following: Multiple integer overflows in Microsoft ASN.1 library (MSASN1.DLL), as used in LSASS.EXE, CRYPT32.DLL, and other Microsoft executables and libraries on Windows NT 4.0, 2000, and XP, allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via ASN.1 BER encodings with (1) very large length fields that cause arbitrary heap data to be overwritten, or (2) modified bit strings.
All you really need to do is find more information about how the exploitable code is normally used, then find the limits of the buffer (in the case of a buffer overflow like this) and go to town with it.
What it all comes down to is basically that people need to update as soon as possible when patches are released, because the people writing worms and viruses tend to watch the security bulletins looking for new holes to exploit. It's certainly much easier than actively seeking out undocumented holes.
Computer Science != Computer Programming. A good computer science program will have minimal coding requirements (just as much as is required to demonstrate the theory).
You have to understand a language well enough to figure out the examples given in higher level courses. Therefore, for most people, the first year or two of a CS degree is very definitely computer programming.
God, after living in Texas most of my life, I still don't get the whole anti-hispanic thing here in SoCal
My best guess would be that it's caused by the fact that the white and hispanic population of LA county is nearly equal in number, just based on the census (meaning not including anyone that wouldn't fill out a census). San Diego County has a much higher white population and lower hispanic population. I can't say I really noticed an anti-hispanic thing growing up in San Diego East County, but then that doesn't really mean anything to anyone unless I'm hispanic.
Basically I'm saying that UO and U9 were both equally half-arsed efforts. Which one came first and which was delayed... does it even make that much of a difference?
According to most of the interviews I've read, U9 development wasn't allowed to be stopped or slowed down for UO, because no one was sure that UO would work out. This explains the half-assed efforts on both games quite well, since OSI was pretty much dividing their efforts between the two games at a time when U9 really could've used the polish and UO really could've used more backing and attention.
don't shop at gamestop. support independent game stores and i doubt you'll see anything thrown out
If I could find a single independent game store I most likely would shop there. Unfortunately, you have basically 6 choices here: gamestop, EB, Best Buy, KB Toys, Toys R Us, and the department stores (including WalMart).
I buy music from an independent store not only because I prefer to support them, but also because they're more likely to have the music I enjoy and the prices are usually (but not always) better. I don't have a choice when buying games. Frankly, I haven't seen an independent game store in about 15 years, outside of a pawn shop, despite living in two distinctly different parts of the country in that period. Of course, if there is something around here, it could be in a little out-of-the-way place that you would only know about if you lived nearby. A quick search of the yellow pages (well, several searches, going through the 4 major cities near work & home), though, yields close to a dozen listings for Babbages, Funcoland, GameStop EBGames, and Software Etc. (and I believe most of those stores have been rebranded since the listing in the yellow pages, since I haven't seen a Babbages, Funcoland, or Software Etc in quite a while, but have been to most of those locations), but nothing else.
I rarely play CS myself, but in every game I've ever played (TFC, Q1-3, etc) and in the handful of CS games I've played, I've seen little to no difference between male and female players in terms of ability.
I've seen definite differences in terms of class/weapon preferences and choices of strategic positioning and such, but those differences occur often enough in the male population that it could quite easily have nothing to do with the gender of the player and everything to do with the mindset required to play the game as much as most of the people I've played the game with for any significant period of time.
On the other hand, the one thing I have seen as more common among female players than male players is the wish to seperate themselves from the players of the other gender. The reasons for this should be obvious in public game situations, but if the same slurs and abuse occur in tournaments that occur in public games, the players or teams involved should be punished accordingly rather than preventing the female players from competing with the male players. In general, though, if a female player or all-female team does exceptionally well (compared to all players) in a tournament, you usually hear about it.
All said and doen a woman can compete with 90% of the men players with practice, the top 10% will take a while for them to penetrate simply due to skill level but that day can and will come.
And there have been great female players in most FPS games, I've even played alongside (and against) a couple of them. The point, though, is that 10-20% of the online audience for most FPS games is female, and 10% of that (if that many) is willing to play in clans (roughly the same percentage as the rest of the population, maybe smaller for females but that isn't figured into the 10%). Maybe 10% of the clans will compete in LAN tournaments. These numbers work the same way for males, but since 80-90% of the audience for online FPS games is male, the percentages are in their favour.
Women can be very good at FPS games, and sometimes are. There are many tournaments out there that allow them to participate equally with the males, given that 80-90% or more of the attendence is going to be male. If one particular tournament decided to segregate, it was either through stupidity, by request of the males, or by request of the females. In my experience, the males that would request such a thing don't have the communication skills to actually get such a request through any intelligent organizer of such an event, thereby leaving stupidity as the only option other than by request of female participants.
All-female clans, simply by numbers of people available to join them, are by far rare, but all-male clans which forbid female entry are almost non-existant (then again, it's perfectly possible that an all-male clan is so obnoxious or pathetic that no female would wish to join them). Why would it make sense for a tournament to follow a model which is not followed by the player base to which it owns it's existance? (in other words, why would the tournament be seperated by sex by the request of the portion of the population that does not otherwise seperate itself that way?)
Re:Okay, so let's put that theory to the test...
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Girls in the Gaming World
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Let them compete on an equal footing initially. If it really turns out that there is such a clear deliniation in ability, then you have a great case for a separate league. If not, then we've just eliminated a lot of unnecessary organizational overhead.
and leagues have been playing Counterstrike for roughly 3 years allowing anyone, male or female, to play on any team in any ladder. The question that isn't asked by this article is "who requested the ladders be seperated?". To say the least, it should've been the question asked before the article was even considered.
That says to me that the girls can be just as good as the guys. Why should they be limited from playing in any particular bracket in a tournament? I can't think of a good reason...unless I didn't think I could beat them.
The problem I see is with the article rather than with the tournaments. This is the first time I've heard of a tournament that had seperate brackets for males and females. In most cases, men and women competed on the same ladders with mixed or unmixed teams, their choice. As far as I'm aware of, the push for female-only ladders came from female-only clans, not from male-only clans (and to my knowledge, few clans are male-only by choice of the members). Each clan I've participated in has welcomed any female member that was up to the normal membership requirements of the clan, which has resulted in a handful of female members over the years between the 3 clans. The only reason there weren't more female members is because there weren't more female players looking to join (one exception in my memory being a point at which membership closed while a female was being actively recruited, because the clan decided to stop playing the game rather than bringing in 6-10 new players).
Such as, discipline and teamwork - two traits that have been far more use in my adult life than algerbra or familiarity with the works of shakespear.
If PE is supposed to teach you that, why are there so many group projects in every other class? I hated nothing more than being graded on a group effort in classes in which I normally could do well on my own, because it meant balancing the effort between people without suffering by a reduced grade. Still, I did it, over and over and over again, and now you tell me that PE was supposed to teach me that? The most important thing I learned in PE was how to change my clothes in less than a minute and get to a class on the other side of campus in the 4 minutes remaining because the teacher didn't keep track of time well enough to let us back into the locker room before the bells rang.
Most people who have a problem with PE because it's "pointless and ego-busting" forget the fact that, to a jock, academic subjects are exactly the same
When making this point, though, remember one thing about school starting from high school onwards (in most areas): algebra and basic mathematics are not taught in the same classroom.
My PE classes in high school consisted of roughly 50-100 students, with no division based on ability. The kid with a bad limp from a car accident was in the same class as the star football player, and the football coaches were usually PE teachers. I'm really not complaining about my own PE classes in that they were graded on effort, attendance, and improvement, so everyone was graded against their own performance over time. The atmosphere, though, tends to be very hostile towards underperforming students, even if they're doing very well in terms of what grade they will receive. You could fulfill the graduation requirements for math without even taking algebra (there were 4 or 5 levels of math taught at lower levels than the first algebra class I took in high school, and you were only required to take 3), so the kids that were good at math were rarely in the same class as the ones that were not. On the other hand, the quarterback was in the same math classes as myself all the way through AP calculus, and though he acted stupid, said stupid things, and didn't always catch on quickly, he could manage it just fine.
Remember, schools are supposed to be in the occupation of education. That includes education of the body as much as it does the mind.
Perhaps if my experience showed that PE teachers actually took the time to educate the minds as to why they should be doing those particular activities I'd agree. It seems to me that by the time high school rolls around most students have a fairly good idea of what activities they enjoy, and the school should be able to handle a little more specialization if they're going to require PE. Then again, PE was only a 2-year requirement when I was in high school, so I can't say it really impacted me in any way except to increase my course-load in my first 2 years of high school (not that it mattered since there wasn't any homework or books for PE, but it did mean I spent an hour longer in school those two years than I did the next two years).
They spend a couple hundred bucks on a playstation, a game and a mat. If they had dug deep and spent another 20 bucks, they could have had twice as many people using the mats at a time.
With an XBox you wouldn't have as many different DDR games (and I've heard that the particular version on XBox is a bit harder than most), but you could've had 4 people at a time.
if they 'fix' it(the non 'standard' screen), then it will become less desirable for people who do their homework(what is standard anyways? 320*240?).
320*240 is more or less standard, but then cell phones follow different rules, and have different standard dimensions from gaming systems or PDAs. Still, to solve problems like homework you would use the same solution most PDAs use: allow display rotation, or set it up so that most applications run with more vertical space, while most games can run either way, according to the developer's needs. As long as it's comfortable to use as a gaming device in widescreen mode, it'll be fine for most ports. If it can be somehow comfortable to use for gaming in either direction, then it'll just be an added bonus for shooters and such (I find that an interesting note, too, since SquareEnix announced some time ago that they were going to start developing cell phone games, and the first game they announced was a shooter).
Now, on the other hand, I'd be more concerned about *buying* these used games knowing this information, since if you wanted things like the box you know this store won't save it.
It's not just one particular store, though. When I traded in my Genesis games they did essentially the same thing, and I doubt I'm in the same area as the previous poster. I'd imagine that if they'll throw out the cases for Genesis games (which are arguably much better than boxes), then they'd throw out any extraneous packaging if they can get away with it and save some space.
If they could, they'd sell used CD/DVD based games the same way, and they certainly will take them.
It's not like you'll have to worry about stores instituting such a policy anyway... simple economics says that if there is a market for those bare games (there is), they will support that market. As much as I hate seeing the games without their original packaging (except perhaps the SNES, with possibly the worst game packaging of any system) there's not much you can do about it. Perhaps the stores could offer an additional credit or two for games with their box and/or manual
The reason they don't keep the packaging around for older titles is because of the combination of: a) not needing the packaging to keep cartridges in working order (unlike optical discs which will scratch), and b) the packaging taking up significantly more space than the cartridges themselves, which means requiring more storage space and shelf space for something they essentially sell for less than $10 most of the time.
B is the big one, but A is obviously required to even get to B.
PS2 have Grand turismo, metal gear and the final fantasy series. Xbox have project gotham 2
OK, I give you GT3 (and soon GT4) and PGR2, but the Cube is getting the Metal Gear Solid remake and has Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles.
Not to mention the rest of the Cube's exclusive titles. While we're talking about racing games, where's an equal to Mario Kart on ANY platform? Or, for that matter, F-Zero GX?
None of the consoles of this generation has managed to have everything everyone could possibly want.
The only titles that've received any success on the system so far (outside of Nintendo 1st and 2nd party) are the Capcom titles; specifically Resident Evil. Beyond that, the odd other title has received success (Pac Man World 2), but nothing worth writting home about. Nintendo's own titles tend to eclipse the third-party titles when third-party interest is mainly on other systems.
Namco's been doing fairly well on the Cube; besides Pac-Man, Soul Calibur 2 did very well on the Cube, and they had 2 or 3 titles that haven't been released in the US yet that did very well in Japan last year.
It may be too early to tell how well FF:CC is doing, but it'd be nice to see it do well, if only to see more SquareEnix titles on Nintendo's home consoles again. Super Monkey Ball also did well. Overall, though, Nintendo's 1st and 2nd party titles definitely overshadow the rest of the offerings on the console. That being said, most of the titles and developers that are run off because of this aren't developing high-quality titles in the first place, which leads to a higher percentage of strong titles, even if the total number of titles is lower.
If Nintendo went 3rd party ala Sega, I'm sure they'd be opening themselves up to a wider audience and raking in a lot of money. The trouble then is who would make such wonderful hardware design
They'd also have to release more software than they do now to make up for the loss of profits on hardware. As it stands, their titles are selling very well, and the primary gain from selling their games on say the PS2 would be better long-term sales. Plus, they'd make less money on each copy they sold if it were on someone else's console, because they'd have to pay the fees associated with releasing console games which they don't pay on their own hardware.
I'd agree with this point in theory. yet the truth is that if Sony had ignored the vocal set of players who wanted more static 'spawns' in SWG, and more static 'quests' instead of putting a priority on interactivity tools like player cities, mounts, vehicles, etc - they'd have many fewer players.
The point, though, is that they never even put these things into the game before considering the requests of players wanting more EQ-like gameplay. The requests came before the game was even on the shelves, and even at the point that it reached the shelves it had not yet acheived what the developers had promised from the start.
They could have easily maintained the correctness of being able to ignore those players - but the business side of the equation quickly gave priority to making SWG more like EQ to sate those players. If they had 300k players who could care less about the level grind, about spawns, about uber loot - I'm sure they probably would ahve largely ignored those concerns. EA largely ignored those complaints with UO... and well... the history speaks for itself.
I pretty much agree, the business side drives the content and gameplay because people will only fund development of games that they believe will sell. On the other hand, MMO developers are particularly guilty of delivering unfinished games (though I hate to say it, moreso than standard single- and multi-player games, which still have problems doing so as well). When you deliver a game to the public (whether by selling it or by releasing a public beta) without the features that are supposed to differentiate the game from the others of the genre, of course you're going to get a lot of cries that many "important" features are missing, even if they're features the game was never meant to have.
[You don't have to hold to the standard MMO gameplay to have an MMO game] Somewhat true, and somewhat not. Yes, the game design doesn't have to change much but the costs make the point moot. The 'massive' part of massmog is costly. A 400 player traditional FPS server would be too pricey to maintain for free. Similarly, a 400 player diablo server would have almost all the problems of Everquest - but without any revenue stream to support it. That's just not a business model that's going to fly, imo.
Which is why I stressed the technical hurdles of distributing games over a wider area than the server farms used for today's MMO games. Still, with the current model you can do MMO FPS, Diablo, and RTS games with a fee structure; it is simply a matter of finding a way to interest players in that gameplay with the fees in place. Again, it comes down to someone finding a way to extend the technology to the point where individual players host a portion of the game and where redundancy holds a high position for both cheat-prevention and stability of the game world. I have 400+ players in my game, why can't THEY host the game? Add in a free dedicated server backend (how many Half-Life servers are running today? Valve runs very few servers themselves, and usually only for testing purposes) to help distribute the load, and run a smaller number of servers yourself to make sure the game's state is persistant and run all authentication (something Blizzard and Valve currently do themselves for standard multiplayer games).
The genre is a big wooly mess to be sure - but I simply don't think it's due solely to designer ineptitude. Most of it simply has to do with what games the audience shows up to play, and what designers can do within the business realities.
I agree, but at the same time I don't see the future (in the long-term) of the genre continuing in the same manner. The progression will be slow, definitely, but eventually other genres will take up residence among the MMO world, and instead of MMO being a genre, it will simply become another method of play, just as single- and multi- player is today.
I think the telling point in Planetside's relative lack of succe
In fact, those commercial games/designers who do try to innovate typically get hammered by the majority of the playerbase and the gaming press for doing so (SWG/UO/etc).
This is usually because the player base making the noise had certain expectations going into the game(s) that were not met. People expect every MMO game coming from Sony to be another EQ, even though there's no history there to show that's the case (especially with SWG and PlanetSide). People expect every Star Wars game to allow you to be a jedi, even though there is history there to show otherwise (though they're rare, there are SW games that don't feature the player as a jedi and/or using force powers and light sabres). If someone makes it clear what the players should expect, and deliver on that, then it's the players' own fault for expecting something different. In the case of SWG specifically, it's a mixed bag, depending on what the individual expected from the game. There are a lot of ways in which SWG did not deliver on the promises of it's developers, at least initially.
There is innovation in the massmog genre - and as with most others, it's coming from the 'indy' scene (no need for dropping the fees or sharing load across companies).
Just a note, but the comment on dropping fees and sharing loads has to do with making an MMO a widely-used feature in many types of games. You don't have to hold to the standard MMO gameplay to have an MMO game. You could extend existing multiplayer ideas to massive numbers of people, as long as the engine could handle it, and the load could be distributed among not only various companies, but also the players themselves. For the most part, it's a technical problem that's solved in part within every MMO game's code, but has to be tuned for resources, distribution across a wider area, latency, and dropouts (meaning when one player drops out, the state on their machine should not be lost to the game, therefore requiring redundancy). On the other hand, that's no small feat, even with so much work done already in the centralized servers of most MMO games.
Games like Puzzle Pirates, Second Life, etc. truly stand out from the herd but comparatively, players aren't knocking down their doors. Personally, I believe that Blizzard's inevitable success with World of Warcraft is going to be seen as vindication for the status quo*, and the commercial situation will become entrenched.
As we've seen in the past, though, just because something becomes entrenched does not mean that it can't be removed or replaced. Nor does it mean that I really care if it is replaced. I'd simply rather see other types of games utilize MMO as a part of the game, rather than simply being the whole point of the game.
*One could argue that Blizzard is leveraging the status quo of progression systems, while truly striving to entertain first and foremost. Even if true, the forcus on entertainment will not be recognized as the important requirement for success.
I agree, and this is a problem in all game genres. It is only when developers and designers truly understand their genre that they can make strides in improving their genre, and most are looking at too big a picture to understand that most games are made by the details.
Few FPS publishers seem to actually recognize what made half-life, halo, and goldeneye stand above games quake, unreal, or soldier of fortune. So there's little reason to believe they'll be able to recognize the importance placed on quality story, immersion and polish in the massmog arena.
But, again, I have to state that story, immersion, and polish have little to do with what you need to successfully utilize MMO. Additionally, the heavy bias towards story is more a part of the genre of most MMO games rather than a need of MMO in particular (and I'd also add that most successful MMO games have had little story that the average player is intimately familiar with in the first place, a general complaint about the current
I find that I tend to flip-flop between reading and playing games quite frequently, and that in the last few years I've generally moved more towards console gaming (away from PC gaming), and even more recently I've probably spent more time with handheld (GBA) games than games on the TV.
One thing I tend to do if a game or book seems to be going a bit more slowly for me is to watch TV and play or read during the commercials (especially with the GBA games). Eventually if the game or book picks back up I'll stop paying attention to the TV.
On the other hand, when writing a particular program takes my interest, I simply do that. There's only so much of my time it can take up before it, too, loses my interest, but eventually it'll pick up again. If it's something I really want to do, I'll make time for it regardless of waning interest.
Finally, I'd say to do something more active like go out and get some exercise, but there's snow on the ground, so I'm not very motivated at the moment to do such a thing myself, and wouldn't recommend it to anyone else in that case.
I think there's definitely room for the MMO genre to grow, but we'll see that growth become more rapid when developers more familiar with the original genres come into the MMO realm. Planetside could've been so much more if it had only been developed by someone else, like Valve, with a real idea of how to build a team-based FPS and scale that idea to MMO size. FFXI may be the first sign of that, although it could be argued that Ultima Online was built by the designer of Ultima, and therefore was the first (I'd just point out that that was done before people really realized how big an MMO game really could be).
Cavedog made the first movements towards MMO RTS, but at the same time didn't go the full distance to actually making it possible for thousands of players to battle each other at once (instead relegating the battles to smaller groups with the overall war being handled outside of the game), yet no one seems to have really picked up on the idea and made it reality (now someone will point out an MMORTS that I haven't seen before).
I believe that MMO could be the future of many genres, but I also believe that it will truly come into it's own from the more common sources, rather than from the companies like Sony just trying to cash in on the trend. I think the real breakthrough will come when someone comes up with a method for distributing the load between company servers and independant servers, reducing or eliminating the subscription fees, and giving players more reason than simple level treadmills to continue playing. Most current MMO games are made simply to keep people playing (and paying) rather than to provide interesting and entertaining gameplay, and I think that trend needs to be squashed before it really becomes as revolutionary as online multiplayer gaming itself.
It seems that the real advancements in gaming come only every few years... which coincides with the release dates for the established and experienced game companies like Id and Epic and Blizzard. [...] Unfortunately, many of the innovative game companies of old (Bullfrog, Sierra, Psygnosis...) are all but dead.
Look at the companies you mention as the current innovators, and then look at their titles over the past few years. Id: Doom, Doom 2, Quake, Q2, Q3, now Doom 3. Epic: UT, UT2k3, now UT2k4. Blizzard: Diablo 2, WarCraft 3.
These companies have succumbed to the lure of money as well. Instead of innovating, they let others do it, and then simply evolve. The UT line is trying to follow the sports-game model of yearly releases with modest improvements. Id has turned into a factory for new game engines, with other companies like Valve putting those engines to use to create the games people seem to enjoy (though Valve is creating their own engine now), and with Half-Life's success id has decided to build a more story-based game, reverting to the Doom label (and taking quite a bit of lead from the survival horror genre popular on consoles). Blizzard's Diablo 2 was an evolution of Diablo, which manages to be the only title of it's kind that really holds up well in the market. WarCraft 3 was a move in a direction that many others had taken, in a slightly different way, not only moving to 3D but to smaller numbers of units with hero units at the center (an idea used by many other RTS games earlier, but the smaller numbers of units can also be attributed to the limitations of Blizzard's 3D engines).
None of the original talent on which the company was built remains. It's sad, really, but new talent will eventually arise.
This is the real truth of the matter. Eventually some relatively unknown company will come forth to take the place of id, Epic, and Blizzard. After all, id and Epic came out of the shareware scene and Blizzard was a console developer in their early years. Eventually someone will come seemingly out of nowhere to take the top of the pile in the PC game development world, and more than likely when that happens it'll be after releasing numerous moderately successful games just as it was with these three companies.
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They also, supposedly, stopped making the larger ones, though you can still pick them up. Mine came with the smaller one (I bought it over a year ago), and I bought the bigger one because I prefer it.
How many people really have 3rd party controllers exclusively on their console? Personally, because of an issue I had with a particular manufacturer's controller on the PS1, I have no 3rd party controllers for any of the current generation consoles, except the DreamCast (and that controller has sticky triggers because it's so poorly made). I've been looking at the Logitech wireless controllers for the XBox and PS2, but I'm having trouble justifying the price when I'd need at least 2 of them for each console.
On the other hand, I bought the bigger XBox controller as an addition to my XBox (it came with the S), bought a 2nd Sony controller for the PS2, and 4 wavebirds for the Cube. Of all the controllers I have (including a boatload of different controllers over the years for the PC), the larger XBox controller is the best I've used, followed by the wavebirds, then the PS2 controllers. The Sega controllers for the DC only surpass the very bottom simply because they haven't broken, though that may be simply because they get almost no use.
They are saying that the people writing the viruses are not finding the exploits on their own - they are reverse engineering patches to find the exploits.
They don't even have to reverse engineer the patches, since the bulletins released with the patches usually describe the problem being patched well enough for someone to figure out a way to write an exploit. When you have a description available like the following:
Multiple integer overflows in Microsoft ASN.1 library (MSASN1.DLL), as used in LSASS.EXE, CRYPT32.DLL, and other Microsoft executables and libraries on Windows NT 4.0, 2000, and XP, allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via ASN.1 BER encodings with (1) very large length fields that cause arbitrary heap data to be overwritten, or (2) modified bit strings.
All you really need to do is find more information about how the exploitable code is normally used, then find the limits of the buffer (in the case of a buffer overflow like this) and go to town with it.
What it all comes down to is basically that people need to update as soon as possible when patches are released, because the people writing worms and viruses tend to watch the security bulletins looking for new holes to exploit. It's certainly much easier than actively seeking out undocumented holes.
Computer Science != Computer Programming. A good computer science program will have minimal coding requirements (just as much as is required to demonstrate the theory).
You have to understand a language well enough to figure out the examples given in higher level courses. Therefore, for most people, the first year or two of a CS degree is very definitely computer programming.
God, after living in Texas most of my life, I still don't get the whole anti-hispanic thing here in SoCal
My best guess would be that it's caused by the fact that the white and hispanic population of LA county is nearly equal in number, just based on the census (meaning not including anyone that wouldn't fill out a census). San Diego County has a much higher white population and lower hispanic population. I can't say I really noticed an anti-hispanic thing growing up in San Diego East County, but then that doesn't really mean anything to anyone unless I'm hispanic.
Basically I'm saying that UO and U9 were both equally half-arsed efforts. Which one came first and which was delayed... does it even make that much of a difference?
According to most of the interviews I've read, U9 development wasn't allowed to be stopped or slowed down for UO, because no one was sure that UO would work out. This explains the half-assed efforts on both games quite well, since OSI was pretty much dividing their efforts between the two games at a time when U9 really could've used the polish and UO really could've used more backing and attention.
don't shop at gamestop. support independent game stores and i doubt you'll see anything thrown out
If I could find a single independent game store I most likely would shop there. Unfortunately, you have basically 6 choices here: gamestop, EB, Best Buy, KB Toys, Toys R Us, and the department stores (including WalMart).
I buy music from an independent store not only because I prefer to support them, but also because they're more likely to have the music I enjoy and the prices are usually (but not always) better. I don't have a choice when buying games. Frankly, I haven't seen an independent game store in about 15 years, outside of a pawn shop, despite living in two distinctly different parts of the country in that period. Of course, if there is something around here, it could be in a little out-of-the-way place that you would only know about if you lived nearby. A quick search of the yellow pages (well, several searches, going through the 4 major cities near work & home), though, yields close to a dozen listings for Babbages, Funcoland, GameStop EBGames, and Software Etc. (and I believe most of those stores have been rebranded since the listing in the yellow pages, since I haven't seen a Babbages, Funcoland, or Software Etc in quite a while, but have been to most of those locations), but nothing else.
I rarely play CS myself, but in every game I've ever played (TFC, Q1-3, etc) and in the handful of CS games I've played, I've seen little to no difference between male and female players in terms of ability.
I've seen definite differences in terms of class/weapon preferences and choices of strategic positioning and such, but those differences occur often enough in the male population that it could quite easily have nothing to do with the gender of the player and everything to do with the mindset required to play the game as much as most of the people I've played the game with for any significant period of time.
On the other hand, the one thing I have seen as more common among female players than male players is the wish to seperate themselves from the players of the other gender. The reasons for this should be obvious in public game situations, but if the same slurs and abuse occur in tournaments that occur in public games, the players or teams involved should be punished accordingly rather than preventing the female players from competing with the male players. In general, though, if a female player or all-female team does exceptionally well (compared to all players) in a tournament, you usually hear about it.
All said and doen a woman can compete with 90% of the men players with practice, the top 10% will take a while for them to penetrate simply due to skill level but that day can and will come.
And there have been great female players in most FPS games, I've even played alongside (and against) a couple of them. The point, though, is that 10-20% of the online audience for most FPS games is female, and 10% of that (if that many) is willing to play in clans (roughly the same percentage as the rest of the population, maybe smaller for females but that isn't figured into the 10%). Maybe 10% of the clans will compete in LAN tournaments. These numbers work the same way for males, but since 80-90% of the audience for online FPS games is male, the percentages are in their favour.
Women can be very good at FPS games, and sometimes are. There are many tournaments out there that allow them to participate equally with the males, given that 80-90% or more of the attendence is going to be male. If one particular tournament decided to segregate, it was either through stupidity, by request of the males, or by request of the females. In my experience, the males that would request such a thing don't have the communication skills to actually get such a request through any intelligent organizer of such an event, thereby leaving stupidity as the only option other than by request of female participants.
All-female clans, simply by numbers of people available to join them, are by far rare, but all-male clans which forbid female entry are almost non-existant (then again, it's perfectly possible that an all-male clan is so obnoxious or pathetic that no female would wish to join them). Why would it make sense for a tournament to follow a model which is not followed by the player base to which it owns it's existance? (in other words, why would the tournament be seperated by sex by the request of the portion of the population that does not otherwise seperate itself that way?)
Let them compete on an equal footing initially. If it really turns out that there is such a clear deliniation in ability, then you have a great case for a separate league. If not, then we've just eliminated a lot of unnecessary organizational overhead.
and leagues have been playing Counterstrike for roughly 3 years allowing anyone, male or female, to play on any team in any ladder. The question that isn't asked by this article is "who requested the ladders be seperated?". To say the least, it should've been the question asked before the article was even considered.
That says to me that the girls can be just as good as the guys. Why should they be limited from playing in any particular bracket in a tournament? I can't think of a good reason...unless I didn't think I could beat them.
The problem I see is with the article rather than with the tournaments. This is the first time I've heard of a tournament that had seperate brackets for males and females. In most cases, men and women competed on the same ladders with mixed or unmixed teams, their choice. As far as I'm aware of, the push for female-only ladders came from female-only clans, not from male-only clans (and to my knowledge, few clans are male-only by choice of the members). Each clan I've participated in has welcomed any female member that was up to the normal membership requirements of the clan, which has resulted in a handful of female members over the years between the 3 clans. The only reason there weren't more female members is because there weren't more female players looking to join (one exception in my memory being a point at which membership closed while a female was being actively recruited, because the clan decided to stop playing the game rather than bringing in 6-10 new players).
Such as, discipline and teamwork - two traits that have been far more use in my adult life than algerbra or familiarity with the works of shakespear.
If PE is supposed to teach you that, why are there so many group projects in every other class? I hated nothing more than being graded on a group effort in classes in which I normally could do well on my own, because it meant balancing the effort between people without suffering by a reduced grade. Still, I did it, over and over and over again, and now you tell me that PE was supposed to teach me that? The most important thing I learned in PE was how to change my clothes in less than a minute and get to a class on the other side of campus in the 4 minutes remaining because the teacher didn't keep track of time well enough to let us back into the locker room before the bells rang.
Most people who have a problem with PE because it's "pointless and ego-busting" forget the fact that, to a jock, academic subjects are exactly the same
When making this point, though, remember one thing about school starting from high school onwards (in most areas): algebra and basic mathematics are not taught in the same classroom.
My PE classes in high school consisted of roughly 50-100 students, with no division based on ability. The kid with a bad limp from a car accident was in the same class as the star football player, and the football coaches were usually PE teachers. I'm really not complaining about my own PE classes in that they were graded on effort, attendance, and improvement, so everyone was graded against their own performance over time. The atmosphere, though, tends to be very hostile towards underperforming students, even if they're doing very well in terms of what grade they will receive. You could fulfill the graduation requirements for math without even taking algebra (there were 4 or 5 levels of math taught at lower levels than the first algebra class I took in high school, and you were only required to take 3), so the kids that were good at math were rarely in the same class as the ones that were not. On the other hand, the quarterback was in the same math classes as myself all the way through AP calculus, and though he acted stupid, said stupid things, and didn't always catch on quickly, he could manage it just fine.
Remember, schools are supposed to be in the occupation of education. That includes education of the body as much as it does the mind.
Perhaps if my experience showed that PE teachers actually took the time to educate the minds as to why they should be doing those particular activities I'd agree. It seems to me that by the time high school rolls around most students have a fairly good idea of what activities they enjoy, and the school should be able to handle a little more specialization if they're going to require PE. Then again, PE was only a 2-year requirement when I was in high school, so I can't say it really impacted me in any way except to increase my course-load in my first 2 years of high school (not that it mattered since there wasn't any homework or books for PE, but it did mean I spent an hour longer in school those two years than I did the next two years).
They spend a couple hundred bucks on a playstation, a game and a mat. If they had dug deep and spent another 20 bucks, they could have had twice as many people using the mats at a time.
With an XBox you wouldn't have as many different DDR games (and I've heard that the particular version on XBox is a bit harder than most), but you could've had 4 people at a time.
if they 'fix' it(the non 'standard' screen), then it will become less desirable for people who do their homework(what is standard anyways? 320*240?).
320*240 is more or less standard, but then cell phones follow different rules, and have different standard dimensions from gaming systems or PDAs. Still, to solve problems like homework you would use the same solution most PDAs use: allow display rotation, or set it up so that most applications run with more vertical space, while most games can run either way, according to the developer's needs. As long as it's comfortable to use as a gaming device in widescreen mode, it'll be fine for most ports. If it can be somehow comfortable to use for gaming in either direction, then it'll just be an added bonus for shooters and such (I find that an interesting note, too, since SquareEnix announced some time ago that they were going to start developing cell phone games, and the first game they announced was a shooter).
Now, on the other hand, I'd be more concerned about *buying* these used games knowing this information, since if you wanted things like the box you know this store won't save it.
It's not just one particular store, though. When I traded in my Genesis games they did essentially the same thing, and I doubt I'm in the same area as the previous poster. I'd imagine that if they'll throw out the cases for Genesis games (which are arguably much better than boxes), then they'd throw out any extraneous packaging if they can get away with it and save some space.
If they could, they'd sell used CD/DVD based games the same way, and they certainly will take them.
It's not like you'll have to worry about stores instituting such a policy anyway... simple economics says that if there is a market for those bare games (there is), they will support that market. As much as I hate seeing the games without their original packaging (except perhaps the SNES, with possibly the worst game packaging of any system) there's not much you can do about it. Perhaps the stores could offer an additional credit or two for games with their box and/or manual
The reason they don't keep the packaging around for older titles is because of the combination of:
a) not needing the packaging to keep cartridges in working order (unlike optical discs which will scratch), and
b) the packaging taking up significantly more space than the cartridges themselves, which means requiring more storage space and shelf space for something they essentially sell for less than $10 most of the time.
B is the big one, but A is obviously required to even get to B.
PS2 have Grand turismo, metal gear and the final fantasy series. Xbox have project gotham 2
OK, I give you GT3 (and soon GT4) and PGR2, but the Cube is getting the Metal Gear Solid remake and has Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles.
Not to mention the rest of the Cube's exclusive titles. While we're talking about racing games, where's an equal to Mario Kart on ANY platform? Or, for that matter, F-Zero GX?
None of the consoles of this generation has managed to have everything everyone could possibly want.
The only titles that've received any success on the system so far (outside of Nintendo 1st and 2nd party) are the Capcom titles; specifically Resident Evil. Beyond that, the odd other title has received success (Pac Man World 2), but nothing worth writting home about. Nintendo's own titles tend to eclipse the third-party titles when third-party interest is mainly on other systems.
Namco's been doing fairly well on the Cube; besides Pac-Man, Soul Calibur 2 did very well on the Cube, and they had 2 or 3 titles that haven't been released in the US yet that did very well in Japan last year.
It may be too early to tell how well FF:CC is doing, but it'd be nice to see it do well, if only to see more SquareEnix titles on Nintendo's home consoles again. Super Monkey Ball also did well. Overall, though, Nintendo's 1st and 2nd party titles definitely overshadow the rest of the offerings on the console. That being said, most of the titles and developers that are run off because of this aren't developing high-quality titles in the first place, which leads to a higher percentage of strong titles, even if the total number of titles is lower.
If Nintendo went 3rd party ala Sega, I'm sure they'd be opening themselves up to a wider audience and raking in a lot of money. The trouble then is who would make such wonderful hardware design
They'd also have to release more software than they do now to make up for the loss of profits on hardware. As it stands, their titles are selling very well, and the primary gain from selling their games on say the PS2 would be better long-term sales. Plus, they'd make less money on each copy they sold if it were on someone else's console, because they'd have to pay the fees associated with releasing console games which they don't pay on their own hardware.
The Resident Evil series arent exclusive to the Gamecube, quite the opposite in fact.
Resident Evil 0 and the remake of Resident Evil are Cube exclusives. I believe they're going to release one more Cube-exclusive RE title, as well.
I'd agree with this point in theory. yet the truth is that if Sony had ignored the vocal set of players who wanted more static 'spawns' in SWG, and more static 'quests' instead of putting a priority on interactivity tools like player cities, mounts, vehicles, etc - they'd have many fewer players.
... and well... the history speaks for itself.
The point, though, is that they never even put these things into the game before considering the requests of players wanting more EQ-like gameplay. The requests came before the game was even on the shelves, and even at the point that it reached the shelves it had not yet acheived what the developers had promised from the start.
They could have easily maintained the correctness of being able to ignore those players - but the business side of the equation quickly gave priority to making SWG more like EQ to sate those players. If they had 300k players who could care less about the level grind, about spawns, about uber loot - I'm sure they probably would ahve largely ignored those concerns. EA largely ignored those complaints with UO
I pretty much agree, the business side drives the content and gameplay because people will only fund development of games that they believe will sell. On the other hand, MMO developers are particularly guilty of delivering unfinished games (though I hate to say it, moreso than standard single- and multi-player games, which still have problems doing so as well). When you deliver a game to the public (whether by selling it or by releasing a public beta) without the features that are supposed to differentiate the game from the others of the genre, of course you're going to get a lot of cries that many "important" features are missing, even if they're features the game was never meant to have.
[You don't have to hold to the standard MMO gameplay to have an MMO game]
Somewhat true, and somewhat not. Yes, the game design doesn't have to change much but the costs make the point moot. The 'massive' part of massmog is costly. A 400 player traditional FPS server would be too pricey to maintain for free. Similarly, a 400 player diablo server would have almost all the problems of Everquest - but without any revenue stream to support it. That's just not a business model that's going to fly, imo.
Which is why I stressed the technical hurdles of distributing games over a wider area than the server farms used for today's MMO games. Still, with the current model you can do MMO FPS, Diablo, and RTS games with a fee structure; it is simply a matter of finding a way to interest players in that gameplay with the fees in place. Again, it comes down to someone finding a way to extend the technology to the point where individual players host a portion of the game and where redundancy holds a high position for both cheat-prevention and stability of the game world. I have 400+ players in my game, why can't THEY host the game? Add in a free dedicated server backend (how many Half-Life servers are running today? Valve runs very few servers themselves, and usually only for testing purposes) to help distribute the load, and run a smaller number of servers yourself to make sure the game's state is persistant and run all authentication (something Blizzard and Valve currently do themselves for standard multiplayer games).
The genre is a big wooly mess to be sure - but I simply don't think it's due solely to designer ineptitude. Most of it simply has to do with what games the audience shows up to play, and what designers can do within the business realities.
I agree, but at the same time I don't see the future (in the long-term) of the genre continuing in the same manner. The progression will be slow, definitely, but eventually other genres will take up residence among the MMO world, and instead of MMO being a genre, it will simply become another method of play, just as single- and multi- player is today.
I think the telling point in Planetside's relative lack of succe
In fact, those commercial games/designers who do try to innovate typically get hammered by the majority of the playerbase and the gaming press for doing so (SWG/UO/etc).
This is usually because the player base making the noise had certain expectations going into the game(s) that were not met. People expect every MMO game coming from Sony to be another EQ, even though there's no history there to show that's the case (especially with SWG and PlanetSide). People expect every Star Wars game to allow you to be a jedi, even though there is history there to show otherwise (though they're rare, there are SW games that don't feature the player as a jedi and/or using force powers and light sabres). If someone makes it clear what the players should expect, and deliver on that, then it's the players' own fault for expecting something different. In the case of SWG specifically, it's a mixed bag, depending on what the individual expected from the game. There are a lot of ways in which SWG did not deliver on the promises of it's developers, at least initially.
There is innovation in the massmog genre - and as with most others, it's coming from the 'indy' scene (no need for dropping the fees or sharing load across companies).
Just a note, but the comment on dropping fees and sharing loads has to do with making an MMO a widely-used feature in many types of games. You don't have to hold to the standard MMO gameplay to have an MMO game. You could extend existing multiplayer ideas to massive numbers of people, as long as the engine could handle it, and the load could be distributed among not only various companies, but also the players themselves. For the most part, it's a technical problem that's solved in part within every MMO game's code, but has to be tuned for resources, distribution across a wider area, latency, and dropouts (meaning when one player drops out, the state on their machine should not be lost to the game, therefore requiring redundancy). On the other hand, that's no small feat, even with so much work done already in the centralized servers of most MMO games.
Games like Puzzle Pirates, Second Life, etc. truly stand out from the herd but comparatively, players aren't knocking down their doors. Personally, I believe that Blizzard's inevitable success with World of Warcraft is going to be seen as vindication for the status quo*, and the commercial situation will become entrenched.
As we've seen in the past, though, just because something becomes entrenched does not mean that it can't be removed or replaced. Nor does it mean that I really care if it is replaced. I'd simply rather see other types of games utilize MMO as a part of the game, rather than simply being the whole point of the game.
*One could argue that Blizzard is leveraging the status quo of progression systems, while truly striving to entertain first and foremost. Even if true, the forcus on entertainment will not be recognized as the important requirement for success.
I agree, and this is a problem in all game genres. It is only when developers and designers truly understand their genre that they can make strides in improving their genre, and most are looking at too big a picture to understand that most games are made by the details.
Few FPS publishers seem to actually recognize what made half-life, halo, and goldeneye stand above games quake, unreal, or soldier of fortune. So there's little reason to believe they'll be able to recognize the importance placed on quality story, immersion and polish in the massmog arena.
But, again, I have to state that story, immersion, and polish have little to do with what you need to successfully utilize MMO. Additionally, the heavy bias towards story is more a part of the genre of most MMO games rather than a need of MMO in particular (and I'd also add that most successful MMO games have had little story that the average player is intimately familiar with in the first place, a general complaint about the current
I find that I tend to flip-flop between reading and playing games quite frequently, and that in the last few years I've generally moved more towards console gaming (away from PC gaming), and even more recently I've probably spent more time with handheld (GBA) games than games on the TV.
One thing I tend to do if a game or book seems to be going a bit more slowly for me is to watch TV and play or read during the commercials (especially with the GBA games). Eventually if the game or book picks back up I'll stop paying attention to the TV.
On the other hand, when writing a particular program takes my interest, I simply do that. There's only so much of my time it can take up before it, too, loses my interest, but eventually it'll pick up again. If it's something I really want to do, I'll make time for it regardless of waning interest.
Finally, I'd say to do something more active like go out and get some exercise, but there's snow on the ground, so I'm not very motivated at the moment to do such a thing myself, and wouldn't recommend it to anyone else in that case.
I think there's definitely room for the MMO genre to grow, but we'll see that growth become more rapid when developers more familiar with the original genres come into the MMO realm. Planetside could've been so much more if it had only been developed by someone else, like Valve, with a real idea of how to build a team-based FPS and scale that idea to MMO size. FFXI may be the first sign of that, although it could be argued that Ultima Online was built by the designer of Ultima, and therefore was the first (I'd just point out that that was done before people really realized how big an MMO game really could be).
Cavedog made the first movements towards MMO RTS, but at the same time didn't go the full distance to actually making it possible for thousands of players to battle each other at once (instead relegating the battles to smaller groups with the overall war being handled outside of the game), yet no one seems to have really picked up on the idea and made it reality (now someone will point out an MMORTS that I haven't seen before).
I believe that MMO could be the future of many genres, but I also believe that it will truly come into it's own from the more common sources, rather than from the companies like Sony just trying to cash in on the trend. I think the real breakthrough will come when someone comes up with a method for distributing the load between company servers and independant servers, reducing or eliminating the subscription fees, and giving players more reason than simple level treadmills to continue playing. Most current MMO games are made simply to keep people playing (and paying) rather than to provide interesting and entertaining gameplay, and I think that trend needs to be squashed before it really becomes as revolutionary as online multiplayer gaming itself.
It seems that the real advancements in gaming come only every few years... which coincides with the release dates for the established and experienced game companies like Id and Epic and Blizzard. [...] Unfortunately, many of the innovative game companies of old (Bullfrog, Sierra, Psygnosis...) are all but dead.
Look at the companies you mention as the current innovators, and then look at their titles over the past few years. Id: Doom, Doom 2, Quake, Q2, Q3, now Doom 3. Epic: UT, UT2k3, now UT2k4. Blizzard: Diablo 2, WarCraft 3.
These companies have succumbed to the lure of money as well. Instead of innovating, they let others do it, and then simply evolve. The UT line is trying to follow the sports-game model of yearly releases with modest improvements. Id has turned into a factory for new game engines, with other companies like Valve putting those engines to use to create the games people seem to enjoy (though Valve is creating their own engine now), and with Half-Life's success id has decided to build a more story-based game, reverting to the Doom label (and taking quite a bit of lead from the survival horror genre popular on consoles). Blizzard's Diablo 2 was an evolution of Diablo, which manages to be the only title of it's kind that really holds up well in the market. WarCraft 3 was a move in a direction that many others had taken, in a slightly different way, not only moving to 3D but to smaller numbers of units with hero units at the center (an idea used by many other RTS games earlier, but the smaller numbers of units can also be attributed to the limitations of Blizzard's 3D engines).
None of the original talent on which the company was built remains. It's sad, really, but new talent will eventually arise.
This is the real truth of the matter. Eventually some relatively unknown company will come forth to take the place of id, Epic, and Blizzard. After all, id and Epic came out of the shareware scene and Blizzard was a console developer in their early years. Eventually someone will come seemingly out of nowhere to take the top of the pile in the PC game development world, and more than likely when that happens it'll be after releasing numerous moderately successful games just as it was with these three companies.