And rentals, well, a lot of people in the industry aren't happy with rentals because they feel that they're cutting into developer's profit. Personally, I'm pro-rental. I'm a college student. I'm broke. Sometimes I get a chance to rent games and play rather than buying just one.
Personally, I think the only profits that rentals cut into are those of the developers that make bad games, or games that are so short that everyone that rents them finishes them, and which have so little replay value that those people won't go out and buy the game afterwards.
That being said, I don't have a membership to any of the rental places, so I just try to be careful about what I buy and sell back what I don't want (which is rare, most of the games I've sold back over the years have been games that were upgraded in some form, like taking back GTA3 and GTAVC to get the XBox versions, or taking back some of my DreamCast games after they were re-released and/or updated for the Cube or XBox). That being said, if I didn't have a fairly good amount of expendable income, I'd be renting far more often. As it is, I simply try to make the games I buy last, even if it means circulating a lot of them in and out of the time I spend playing.
But I do think that this could lead to games being longer(in total), and richer(in content), cheaper for them, and finally the same price, if not cheaper, for us. I'd be happy with that, if games were better.
The problem I see here is not that people want longer games, it's that people want games to be shorter, and want the price scaled accordingly. Why have a long game (there are plenty of long games out there, and they're getting better every year) broken down and sold to you in parts when they can sell you the whole thing and you can break it down for yourself? We should be discussing ways to make the experience of playing a long game better for the players that have less time to spend all at once on a game. Breaking it down into smaller parts is one way to do that, but instead of asking the developers and publishers to do it for us, why not discuss ways to make it easier to play the game in small parts?
What I see is simply a way for people to try more games without paying the full price of each game before they decide to spend a lot of time on it. We already have ways to do this, like rentals, that serve the purpose quite well, and with used games and the ability to purchase games for a lower price after you've rented them (ie from most rental places or services like Gamefly), it's not really as big of a problem. The good ideas from all of this talk of episodic games can really be used to improve all games, without having to break them up and sell them over time. I really think the disadvantages of episodic games would cause publishers and developers to become more conservative about what they publish and would result in the players having fewer choices.
So if Stephen King can't manage to make it worth his time to dish out episodic content, what chance does a game publisher have?
While for the most part I agree with you, I think King's a bad example. For instance, if you look back a bit further in his work, there was a title called the Green Mile. Not a massively successful book, but it did well, and was originally released in 5 or 6 parts (I have them somewhere, but I didn't buy in until the 3rd or 4th was released, so I didn't have to wait much to finish it). Eventually it was re-released as a full novel and even later they made a very successful movie out of it, but as an experiment in episodic novels it was successful enough. The later experiment you mention proved a problem with online publishing combined with the episodic approach.
And each season attempt to do a major revamp of the engine so that the problem of looking outdated isn't that bad.
I like that idea, but remember that a revamp still takes significant time and effort, and the increase in visual quality will usually include an increased workload on the artists. I don't think a major revamp is needed for something released either every 6 months or every year, but certainly some work will have to go into it.
Halo is a few years old and doesn't look bad. A game a few months old won't suffer too much.
Look at the pictures of Halo 2, though, and you'll see what a combination of more work on the technology and the art side of things can do. Also, look at the backlash on the PC side where games had 2 years to progress before Halo was released on that platform. PC games caught up with Halo while it sat around, and people that didn't play it on the XBox didn't understand the hype that it received (or were just pissed they had to wait 2 years for it).
And so far as the object being front heavy, yeah, it is, but that would be part of the benefit I would think. Just as companies license their engines for games that will come out up to a year later, it's possible to still have a comparable product.
It would be a benefit if the game's cost could be loaded up front, too. This is why expansion packs work so well on the PC side, the tech is already there and you can take your time putting together an expansion. Even the best expansions, though, never sell as well as the original game.
Maybe so, but I think you're in the minority. I think most people would rather watch the show at the first available time. Usually when it airs, rather than a year later when it comes out on DVD.
I agree, really, but at the same time I'm the kind of person that really has a hard time making the time to watch a show on someone else's (the network's) schedule. I'll be building a computer specifically to make this less of a problem, though (rather than buying a TiVo or whatever off-the-shelf). The success of TiVo and similar products may put me in less of a minority simply because of my reasoning for waiting for the DVD releases, but many people may not be willing to buy the DVD sets (even if they can shell out the money for a TiVo).
Actually, I think that the following examples, Matrix and LotR, are reasons why movie might be doing this more often soon. (And also don't forget that they cut Kill Bill into two parts after it was finished.) Loading as much production as possible into the front of the projects make them cheaper to produce, as I would think it would do in video games. Especially as you can completely re-use any of the art created in subsequent chapters with little/no modification. With this in mind I think it would be possible to not over-charge the customer (your example of gameplay hours against price).
I think this really comes down to movie studios (and writers and directors) wanting to tell more complex and longer stories. Movies have been getting longer in the last decade or so, and filming a series all at once helps with continuity and cost. Obviously in the case of the Matrix they simply were afraid that the movie wouldn't do well, so they setup the first movie to stand on it's own and delayed filming of the 2nd and 3rd until the first was successful. In the case of LotR, they took a big risk, especially given that it's not just 3 movies, but 3 VERY LONG movies. In the case of Kill Bill, I'd normally say that Tarantino can do whatever he wants in the industry, but I think it's been a while since he had that much pull. They probably just decided the movie was too long to stand as a single showing, or they're experimenting to see if the model can work. There's nothing like charging twice the price to motivate the MPAA; why release a 3 hour movie when you can release two 90-minute movies?
Hope I've shed a little light on my insane idea. Not that it matters too much... But hey, it's
Why? Even now, some games offer to let you skip a mission if you fail it (e.g.) three times. It means that the primary, driving element behind playing the next episode is not to see how many enemies they're going to throw at you, but what interesting new things they're going to do with the game (not to mention What Happens Next plot-wise).
The games that are doing well currently either already have this element or can be played with absolutely no concern for this element. Breaking it up into episodes doesn't really change this, and if the plot can't already move people forward through a difficult point, then it won't do so in episodes (except that you can skip it, which brings us to...). Furthermore, if the difficulty stays the same throughout the game, many people will simply become bored with the game. Remember that telling the story isn't the only element of a game. Though some games stretch it at times, this isn't a movie or a TV show.
Operation Flashpoint is a great example of something that could work fantastically in episodes - "I heard you get to drive a tank next month!"
Operation Flashpoint is a good example of a game I've never purchased nor played, so excuse me if I miss your point on that one. On the other hand, why wait until next month to drive a tank if there are 3 other games on the shelves that let you drive a tank right now? There was about a whole year where everyone wanted to know if FPS X would let you drive vehicles because FPS Y and FPS Z promised they would be able to do this. A lot of people were about to wet themselves to drive a tank in an FPS, and when it finally happened, each implementation was either cool for a little while or sucked from the start. It's hit & miss, and if you're releasing a game as a series of episodes, 1 episode can drive people away from the next.
I think I've been doing just that [explaining how episodes will keep interest better than a whole game], actually.
Perhaps some group will be interested in buying the next episode if they couldn't get through the previous episode, but it seems far more likely that they'd simply go play something else. Why not just let people skip portions of existing games (you've already said some games let people do this) and get the plot points if they're having trouble? They continue on, and they don't have to wait for the next episode to do so, they're not stuck with fixed points at which they can rejoin the plot.
It'd force the industry to adopt a more content- than technology-oriented approach to making and selling games, which is the direction it's been moving in anyway. Less focus on coding engines (which would ideally be the job of entirely separate companies, but let's not get into that argument here), more on getting some good design down in zeros and ones.
But content takes more time to develop and still costs a lot of money, plus you still have to license the technology. If your content takes longer to develop than your episodes have between releases, then your cost is almost entirely up front, you develop a full game and split it into episodes just because it's the new model people want to try out (same as the old model). This is why there are more artists than coders on most game development teams in the first place. You build an engine and development tools, then bring in an army of artists and work bugs out of the tools and engine as the artists bring together content that you can actually load into the engine to discover bugs. As you said, the industry is already moving towards being more content driven, this is simply a different model of selling the games, and really only effects development in 2 ways: 1) cost of development is returned over a longer period of time (if at all) 2) you have more time to refine content for later portions of the game, so you can release an unfinished game and fewer people will notice.
None of this really addresses, though, the question I asked, which is why would a publisher or develope
After the first game, you've got virtually all of the technology needed, save updates and fixes on the 'finished' engine. You've got a small library of content that can be used in the following games if any situation asks for it. This saves money already after the first game. Then, with each subsequent disc, you have a larger library of content to draw from. Assuming your chapters are only 4 hours of gameplay, you should be able to fit some rather nice-looking art on the disc, I'd think.
You've almost touched on the major problem from the production side. The whole thing is very front-heavy. The code has to be good enough to ship and support the episodic nature of the game, and the majority of the story not only has to be written, but fully developed, including all of the art. Artwork is one of the most time-consuming portions of game development, so if you were going to release episodes monthly, you'd have to be 3-6 months ahead of the curve, and even then you'd fall behind within 8-10 months. You can keep things short, 4-6 episodes, but then you have to have almost everything ready before episode 1 ships, with the remaining 4-6 months spent refining the engine, fixing bugs discovered in the early episodes, and polishing the remainder of your episodes.
With the way all of this is front-loaded, your first episode has to cost more than the rest, because you're not going to have as many people buying the 2nd episode as the 1st, and even fewer people on the 3rd, and so on. It doesn't matter how good your game is, that's the way it goes. The only sequels that do better than the previous ones are those with significant advances and improvements. Episodic games remove almost every chance for improvement in technology, and certainly advancements in gameplay. 6 months down the line your game looks dated, but your new episodes are right next to the games that came out today. The reason shareware was successful with the episodic model was because everyone came into it knowing they weren't going to make money on the first episode, that they'd have to give people a reason to buy the 2nd or 3rd episode without short-changing them on the 1st. Or, it was simply because it was shareware, no one expected to make the kind of money id and 3D Realms made on it.
I already buy DVDs that have 5 or so hours of entertainment(movie, extras, and commentary) for $20. What's 4 hours of gameplay for $5 or $10?
I buy DVD movies for $20-25 and am perfectly happy with maybe 2 hours of content (the extras and commentary are nice, but I don't always watch them). When games are $20-25 my expectations are lower as well. The scale isn't linear, though, and when I shell out $50 for a game I expect a lot. At the same time, 4 hours of gameplay for $10 comes out to 20 hours for $50, essentially, depending on the game type, trying to piss on me by giving me less for my money, hoping I don't notice it because it's a slow trickle instead of a full stream. Paying in small portions for small portions of a whole is just a method of disguising the true cost. In most of those cases, I'd wait for the full series to be released and buy it all up front, just like I do with most TV shows any more. I'd rather pay with dollars out of my pocket than by wasting 15-20 minutes of the hour waiting for the show to come back on, and I'd rather choose when to watch and how long I'll watch (have 2 hours to kill, watch 2 or 3 episodes without waiting a week between episodes).
There's a reason that movies and books rarely do this any more. At the same time, there are 2 recent examples of movies that did do this, yet were not explicitly marketed as such, and those are the Matrix sequels and the Lord of the Rings. The second Star Wars trilogy might also be considered an example of how NOT to make episodic content, because Lucas didn't front-load his content and if any of the movies had actually been good he'd be losing people as time goes on between episodes. Since many people thought the first 2 sucked, he's actually better off tak
You're the exception, not the rule. 80% of players will not finish a given game.
What makes me the exception, then? I probably haven't finished more than half the games I have.
It makes loads of sense, therefore, to break a game up. If the difficulty structure (TM) of a game follows a series of buildups and peaks, it's going to be a hell of a lot more interesting than your standard start-off-easy-end-hard fare.
A lot of games currently follow a series of peaks in difficulty. Most people (myself included) tend to stop playing a game because one particular peak ramps up too quickly, rather than because the game simply gets progressively harder and they eventually can't get any further. A good example from my personal experience would be Metroid Fusion. One particular part of the game has an encounter with SA-X (an enemy nearly equivalent to the player's character at full power), near the middle of the game, that requires you to run away to a particular area, then wait for the SA-X to leave. I stopped playing the game for 2 months because I was having a hard time with that particular sequence. When I came back to it, it still took roughly 6 times to get past it, but then most of the remainder of the game was closer to the original difficulty curve, with 2 or 3 more encounters that were significantly more difficult.
Especially since, if you couldn't finish last month's episode, you can start this month's anyway (after a quick "previously on..." catch-up, if it's narrative led).
That might be a nice way of doing things, but it'd be very hard for developers to handle the difficulty curve if you're assuming that players can skip whole episodes of the game, while still trying to appeal to those that will finish each episode.
There's more. If you buy the first episode and decide you don't like the game, what have you lost? Ten quid? Rather than, say, fourty?
We used to have demos for this. Unfortunately, demos have become less relevant as they release early code or portions that aren't relevant to the overall game. There's always the shareware model, as well, which is closer to what the article actually described (as many others have pointed out, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were released much in this way). Rentals are another consideration for people that aren't sure about a game, and I'd have to say that rentals got me through most of my childhood. If you buy a game and don't like it, take it back, get something else. If it took you 2 months to figure out you don't like it you might end up losing a bit more money on it, but it's not much of a loss if you find out fairly quickly.
Obviously, episodic structure only works for certain game types. Coincidentally, however, these seem to be exactly the games that typically *don't* hold the player's interest up until the end.
Yet what no one's explained so far is how breaking a game up into episodes is going to hold someone's interest any better than getting the whole game at the start would have. Beyond that, you have to wonder how many developers are going to finish releasing episodes if a game doesn't do well in the first couple of episodes. With the front-heavy costs of building a game in the first place, the developers will take even fewer risks in that sort of structure and any game that isn't doing well in the first 2 episodes will probably be written off and left incomplete. Just as with sequels, subsequent episodes will draw a smaller audience, which only helps give publishers incentive to cut their losses after the first episode.
I don't want to spend eight weeks with a game. I would probably play more different games for a shorter time, while coming back to favourites when new episodes are released.
Why do you need games to be episodic to do this? I usually have 3 or 4 games next to each of my systems and cycle through them, putting one back on the shelf every time I get a new game for that system (the new game going next to the system), or get sick of or finish that particular game. If I think I might have a problem coming back to a particular game, I write myself a note. If I have a guide for that particular game, I'll stick the note in the page that's roughly where I'm at in the game. If I don't have a guide, I'll just put the note in the game's case. I have a hand-drawn map of Metroid on my coffee table at the moment because I've been playing through the emulated version of the NES Metroid on my GameCube, and it helps me remember where I've been and where I'm going. What I'm trying to do is something I can usually figure out from there. The first "episode" of.hack has a note sitting in it that probably tells me something like "level up before going to area (whatever the name of it is) to finish this game", because I got sick of spending so much time on the last boss only to die. There's a similar note in my FF Origins case, except that I'm nowhere near the end of FF2 afaik.
What it comes down to is simple, games need better facilities for tracking your progress so that you can fire a game up after not playing it for a month or so, load your save game, maybe read a little info from the map or an in-game journal (ala Baldur's Gate and derivatives), and you have a pretty good idea of what's going on. The games are getting more complex, your goals get more complex, so the games need to help us handle that complexity. After all, any of us can pick up almost any Super Mario Bros. game today, no matter how long ago we last played it, and have it all figured out in a couple minutes.
Imagine your favorite first-person shooter, role-playing game, or action adventure game. Now imagine that game broken up into one- to two-hour sequences. Now imagine that the first part was free and subsequent parts were delivered to you automatically for five bucks a pop, each month. Would you take the bait?
Well, my favorite FPS games are online, so you can break that story up however you want, all I need is the part that puts me into multiplayer. My favorite role playing games would break up into 20-30 parts like this, and they can stick it up their asses if they expect me to pay $100-150 for what currently costs $50. The real problem is the writer's point of view here, as we can see further on in the article.
People like to complain that both Max Paynes are too short. I suppose they are, but only if you compare them to other games. [...]Meanwhile, I think the main reason Max Payne and its sequel seem so short is that they present captivating storylines and entertaining action, which collectively compel you to play through these games as quickly as you can.
Only if you compare them to other games? Welcome, Captain Obvious, what should we compare them to? Sit-Coms? They seem so short because they're 8 hours long, even if you have to replay several parts a couple of times. Even someone that can only play an average of 1 hour a day can beat an 8 hour game in slightly over a week.
I recently played through Metroid: Zero Mission for the Game Boy Advance, casually in an afternoon. It's a cool game, but the depressing thought then occurred to me that it's going to be months or years until the next one is released. The game is quite short and recycles most of the same assets and gameplay as its predecessors--it uses a tried-and-true formula, that is.
I have two complaints about this comment: 1) He keeps talking as if he's a casual gamer, but in my area Metroid Zero Mission came out yesterday. Sure, that's within the realm of "recently", but how many casual gamers go down to the game store in the middle of the day on a Tuesday to pick up a new game? 2) He talks about the length of the game, and it's use of "the same assets and gameplay as its predecessors", using a "tried and true formula". Did he even know what he was buying (this actually makes me wonder, because MAYBE a casual gamer wouldn't know)? Zero Mission is a remake of the original NES Metroid, so of course it's going to be using the same gameplay and a "tried and true formula". It's also supposed to be longer than the original. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there that will be trying to get some sort of speed record on Zero Mission, but for most people the first time through will take about as long as Max Payne, and most of us are probably aware of that. Interestingly, a short Metroid game is more acceptable to me, probably because I know I'll get some replay out of it, unlike Max Payne.
Gamers are growing older. We don't all have time to spend eight or 10 hours at a time playing Final Fantasy. We also don't all have time to play games every single day. Sometimes we go back to a game we were playing and don't even remember what the heck we were doing.
You know what, I fall into all of these cases, except that I can occasionally, on a weekend, find 8-10 hours to string together playing a video game, maybe twice a month. I've come back and not been able to figure out what I was doing, the most blatant offender being FFVIII, which I had already spent 25 hours on.
Sometimes we spend $50 on a game, never get all the way through it, and then wish we hadn't wasted our money. I think there are a lot of people out there who want to be gamers but don't want to make the commitment of living the "gamer lifestyle" of having their entire existence revolve around their hobby.
These are the parts I don't agree with. If I wish I hadn't wasted my money, it's because I don't like the game, not because I didn't finish it. I never worry about not finishing
I'd also like to know what hardware features are holding back PS2 games so much, compared to the other consoles.
The PS2 has less power than any other home console of the current generation (including the DreamCast). On top of that, many graphics features that were well-supported and documented in the hardware of the other systems (again including the DreamCast) were either unsupported or poorly documented in the PS2. The most obvious of these (especially in the early titles) is FSAA, which Sony eventually documented (or developed middleware for, or someone else developed middleware for it), after the internet was filled with jokes about the jagged edges in PS2 games. The major thing that effects the appearance of PS2 games today, though, is the lack of memory for graphics resources. You can easily double the amount of RAM used for textures and such on the other consoles, which can be used to make the game look significantly better.
And while the GC looks somewhat cool, I've yet to see a cool Xbox. Seriously, have you actually seen one ? Compared to a PS2 they look like shit.
If I was worried about how my consoles look, I wouldn't keep any of them in plain view. None of them look like they belong anywhere near my TV or stereo. They look like they belong in a kid's room. At the very least, though, the only one that isn't the same colour as the rest (at least in my cabinet) is the DreamCast.
$100 dollars for all you say doesn't sound bad... except, the games are still $50 a pop, right?
3 of the 4 games he mentioned can easily be found for $20-30 a pop, and there are plenty more that can be found in the same range.
I was hoping that GameCube would have cheaper games, but their "player's choice" or whatever it is called is still in the $30 dollar range and there aren't that many of them
Most of the "Player's Choice" titles can be found for less than $30 as well, especially if you're willing to buy used. The only games I bought for my Cube at $35+ were F-Zero, Mario Kart, and Animal Crossing (and the last was $35, a month before it became a Player's Choice title), the first two obviously being too new to expect to be less than $40 regardless of what console they were released on.
Five years. Pretty much the standard. NES was released (in North America) in 1985, then the SNES in 1991, the N64 in 1996, and the GameCube in 2001.
And the SNES, N64, and Cube were all considered late to market, even though the N64 was arguably ahead of it's time (though just as Nintendo skipped a "32-bit console" everyone else skipped the "64-bit console"). After 3 successive (but successful, as far as Nintendo's concerned) late releases, of course their cycle is going to be a bit short if they want to release at the same time as everyone else. With the SNES they had the same power Sony does today, they could release late and get people to hold off on the Genesis or TG-16 to see what they were going to do (as people held off on the DreamCast to see what the PS2 would do). With the N64, they were too far behind the PS1, and within the 2 years following N64's launch the PS1 had a string of highly successful games from developers that were best known for their NES and SNES titles.
Frankly, I think it's good to see Nintendo considering putting themselves on the release schedule everyone else is following. At the very least, it'll give people a chance to compare all of the systems from the start.
Question: If the Playstation was what made it "required" for games to have 3D, why is it that the original "standard" for a 3D platformer (Mario 64) was a Nintendo game?
Because although the PS1 was released far ahead of the N64, no one had really released a solid 3D platformer before Mario 64. Anyone that released a 3D platformer at all was trying to figure out how to do it well, and missed in one way or another.
The PS1 really pulled a lot of market share by having an arcade version that meant easy porting between the arcade and the console, and by pulling in publishers and developers that we all knew well from the NES days (ie Square, Konami, Capcom).
My plan's $50 for the first phone and $40 for each additional phone (we have 3, one of which is in a different area code for my gf's father, so if we go to visit him we can use his phone and avoid using up the roaming minutes). We have unlimited calling both local and long distance (though I'm sure international calls cost something, I don't make international calls so I haven't checked), any time, as long as we're within our area (generally within the coverage of your area code, but may be different for area codes that cover larger areas, or smaller areas). Once we start roaming, though, we have 300 shared minutes (shared between the 3 phones), though that can be increased by choosing a more expensive plan.
The plan is through SunCom (AT&T), and is called the UnPlan. I'd link to it, but the site asks for a zip code and then spits out the available plans, so it may be different for different areas.
As far as emergency uses go, we have car chargers for each of the phones, and when the hurricane blew through here the cell phones were the only ones that worked, though we had to swap them in and out of the car to charge them (and they weren't working as well as normal, the signal levels were about half of normal, but did work, unlike the phone lines and electricity). On normal days whether or not your phone is working depends on the phone you get, and as long as you don't take it too far down you can still talk while it's recharging. Something else I had an issue with is that calling 911 resulted in getting a 911 operator for a different city than the one our plan is set for, though I'm not sure who controls this or how it's determined (probably by which tower picks up your phone, but I'd really be surprised if that resulted in the city I got from the location I called). Luckily, they had no problem transferring me to the correct operator, and it was either laziness or pure luck that resulted in the cops showing up 20 minutes later when they normally patrol the street regularly.
I would agree that it's better to have 2 or more phones, but of course that's also the point at which it really does become a bit expensive unless you're already paying for a cell phone and a home phone (previously I didn't have a cell phone, but my gf pretty much has to have one and it was cheaper for me to get the 2nd phone than to put a line into the apartment).
It's also a product of nationalist (right) philosophy.
And Hitler was part of the national socialist party, so you're both right, or you're both wrong, because fascism has roots in individuals more than parties and nationalist or socialist philosophies.
Hopefully, as cell plans get better and things like the Do Not Call list become more of a problem than a solution (political candidates and charities could just mine the list for numbers), more people will get rid of their landline phones. Personally, I haven't gotten a single political call nor a sales call since I got rid of mine, and the primaries are tomorrow. My cell phone has unlimited long distance calling, so I don't have to worry about my bill spiking because I made a lot of calls to friends and family on the west coast in a given month (the only time my bill would go up would be if I made a lot of calls while roaming, which essentially means I have to drive out-of-state if I'm headed south, or over an hour if I'm headed north or west; if I'm headed east I eventually can't make calls any more because they haven't put up cell towers in the ocean).
i ran it just fine on a 266mhz k6 w/ 32mb of ram and a 4meg ati.
I've never owned a computer that slow personally (used some at work) and while TA:Kingdoms played on my home computer at the time, it did not play well.
One interesting point about Kingdoms, though, is that they included a system through which it would drop animation frames if your system was slowing down to try to keep up the framerate. Unfortunately, this backfired on them as many people saw this as jerky animation rather than a slowdown, and blamed it on the game rather than their computers.
The game was beautiful, and plays very well on current computers, but it isn't properly balanced and seems to be lacking slightly in personality, which seems to really make or break an RTS game (despite the fact that RTS games should be about strategy).
I always thought DR was better, the 2 sides had different technologies, rather than TA which had effectivly the same tech tree but different artwork on each side.
Unfortunately DR is almost completely unplayable on modern computers, while TA remains very playable. DR2 was an interesting attempt at bringing RTS to 3D, but had a nasty camera. DR also had many of the unit behaviors people are still looking for in modern RTS games, such as support units actually supporting a group of units they're travelling with (medics healing soldiers, mechanics repairing vehicles), and was one of the first games in which elevation and terrain made a difference (not only in fog of war but also in range of weapons).
how do you propose to explain a prime number or even just an integer to a culture that has never even conceived of a number? their style of mathematics could be so different from ours that we can't find a common ground upon which to even start trading information...yet we all live in the same universe, so it would be based on the same laws
You start with where the common ground exists. The real problem, of course, is that they may not have any real use for knowing that the piece of string is 1 meter in length and therefore 1/2 meter when halved and 2 meters when doubled and gives them a circle with circumference 2pi meters when used as the radius. At the same time, if they can grasp the knowledge, they may find that they become more productive because they can more easily model things that don't easily model in real space and determine whether or not a structure will withstand given pressures without modelling those pressures in real space. In other words, it would allow them to do what we do today with computers, build a model in artifical space and model the real world pressures applicable to the object being modeled. Without an abstract sense of mathematics, these things simply aren't done without trial and error.
not to mention there have been many cultures that have had no concept of zero...certainly they knew the concept of something not being there, but there was no such thing as 1+0=1
In most intelligent cultures that had no concept of zero, though, they spent a great deal of time discussing it, meaning that the concept was there, they simply could not grasp it. The same can be said for fractions, and in many cases it was the same cultures that did not have the concept of zero.
so one culture...or alien's concept of math may be very different than yours...for example what if they sort of have eyes like a bug? now they see the whole world differently...to them everything is sort of a matrix...and so their counting and mathematics are based almost entirely on matrices. now this doesn't make them any less/more intelligent than us, and their world works much the same as our world, but they see thing vastly differently than we do, and quite possibly have insight in certain areas which we have not yet grasped, such as maybe in their mathmatics they found an easy way to factor very large numbers. or to them prime numbers aren't important at all...heck by using matrices they might not even have a concept of prime numbers like we do.
This all still points to the concepts existing, just not being understood. If we were to encounter an alien race that had no concept of prime numbers (or fractions, or zero), it's likely that they could eventually understand the concept if it's put into mathematical terms based on the mathematics they already have. Additionally, if they have easy ways to factor large numbers or better insight into matrix-based mathematics, they could probably use the existing foundation to teach it to us.
At the same time, it's quite possible that they would have no concept of math as an abstract area of study. Even many humans have problems dealing with math as a pure abstraction (yet at the same time most have problems with word problems, which are the only way most people encounter math in the real world).
Pi does touch on the Golden Ratio, but in any case it's just a good movie that delves into similar subject matter in an enjoyable way, and should be on every geek's DVD shelf (or hard drive).
I also recently finished Angels & Demons (but not the Da Vinci Code yet) and found it quite enjoyable, but it deals mostly with religious symbolism (and a few quick jumps into other areas). I'm currently reading Dan Brown's Digital Fortress, which is looking to be a very good fiction dealing with crypto and methods of foiling brute force attacks.
When (not if) the PSX fails to contain the same PSOne hardware that was rolled into the PS2, I wonder of all you PS fans will continue singing the same tune, or just fall back to the real reason you are rooting against the X-Box, which is that it's put out by an eeeeevil company.
I think you mean the PS3, as the PSX is a DVR containing PS2 hardware.
Besides, I have an XBox, and a PS2, 2 GameCubes, and a DreamCast. I really don't care if all of them keep going, I'd just rather replace my XBox with the next generation XBox rather than have the new one sitting on top of the old one, just like I'd rather have my PS3 replace my PS2 rather than sitting on top of it, and so on. I don't mind spending the money on new hardware once in a while, but I prefer that it be a true upgrade rather than just another piece of hardware.
On the other hand game companies know about the problem. Just print a warning. I am sure any lawyer will insist on it being in the manual.
Check the EULA in the case of computer games. I'm sure you won't find the warning, but you will find that the lawyers covered their asses with a full disclaimer.
The general assumption is that it's fairly hard to tell what will and will not cause a problem, and the lack of a warning does not indicate safety. If my chainsaw did not say "do not stop chain with hand", I'm still not going to stick my hand in it.
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And rentals, well, a lot of people in the industry aren't happy with rentals because they feel that they're cutting into developer's profit. Personally, I'm pro-rental. I'm a college student. I'm broke. Sometimes I get a chance to rent games and play rather than buying just one.
Personally, I think the only profits that rentals cut into are those of the developers that make bad games, or games that are so short that everyone that rents them finishes them, and which have so little replay value that those people won't go out and buy the game afterwards.
That being said, I don't have a membership to any of the rental places, so I just try to be careful about what I buy and sell back what I don't want (which is rare, most of the games I've sold back over the years have been games that were upgraded in some form, like taking back GTA3 and GTAVC to get the XBox versions, or taking back some of my DreamCast games after they were re-released and/or updated for the Cube or XBox). That being said, if I didn't have a fairly good amount of expendable income, I'd be renting far more often. As it is, I simply try to make the games I buy last, even if it means circulating a lot of them in and out of the time I spend playing.
But I do think that this could lead to games being longer(in total), and richer(in content), cheaper for them, and finally the same price, if not cheaper, for us. I'd be happy with that, if games were better.
The problem I see here is not that people want longer games, it's that people want games to be shorter, and want the price scaled accordingly. Why have a long game (there are plenty of long games out there, and they're getting better every year) broken down and sold to you in parts when they can sell you the whole thing and you can break it down for yourself? We should be discussing ways to make the experience of playing a long game better for the players that have less time to spend all at once on a game. Breaking it down into smaller parts is one way to do that, but instead of asking the developers and publishers to do it for us, why not discuss ways to make it easier to play the game in small parts?
What I see is simply a way for people to try more games without paying the full price of each game before they decide to spend a lot of time on it. We already have ways to do this, like rentals, that serve the purpose quite well, and with used games and the ability to purchase games for a lower price after you've rented them (ie from most rental places or services like Gamefly), it's not really as big of a problem. The good ideas from all of this talk of episodic games can really be used to improve all games, without having to break them up and sell them over time. I really think the disadvantages of episodic games would cause publishers and developers to become more conservative about what they publish and would result in the players having fewer choices.
I think your reply got attached to the wrong post there ;)
So if Stephen King can't manage to make it worth his time to dish out episodic content, what chance does a game publisher have?
While for the most part I agree with you, I think King's a bad example. For instance, if you look back a bit further in his work, there was a title called the Green Mile. Not a massively successful book, but it did well, and was originally released in 5 or 6 parts (I have them somewhere, but I didn't buy in until the 3rd or 4th was released, so I didn't have to wait much to finish it). Eventually it was re-released as a full novel and even later they made a very successful movie out of it, but as an experiment in episodic novels it was successful enough. The later experiment you mention proved a problem with online publishing combined with the episodic approach.
And each season attempt to do a major revamp of the engine so that the problem of looking outdated isn't that bad.
I like that idea, but remember that a revamp still takes significant time and effort, and the increase in visual quality will usually include an increased workload on the artists. I don't think a major revamp is needed for something released either every 6 months or every year, but certainly some work will have to go into it.
Halo is a few years old and doesn't look bad. A game a few months old won't suffer too much.
Look at the pictures of Halo 2, though, and you'll see what a combination of more work on the technology and the art side of things can do. Also, look at the backlash on the PC side where games had 2 years to progress before Halo was released on that platform. PC games caught up with Halo while it sat around, and people that didn't play it on the XBox didn't understand the hype that it received (or were just pissed they had to wait 2 years for it).
And so far as the object being front heavy, yeah, it is, but that would be part of the benefit I would think. Just as companies license their engines for games that will come out up to a year later, it's possible to still have a comparable product.
It would be a benefit if the game's cost could be loaded up front, too. This is why expansion packs work so well on the PC side, the tech is already there and you can take your time putting together an expansion. Even the best expansions, though, never sell as well as the original game.
Maybe so, but I think you're in the minority. I think most people would rather watch the show at the first available time. Usually when it airs, rather than a year later when it comes out on DVD.
I agree, really, but at the same time I'm the kind of person that really has a hard time making the time to watch a show on someone else's (the network's) schedule. I'll be building a computer specifically to make this less of a problem, though (rather than buying a TiVo or whatever off-the-shelf). The success of TiVo and similar products may put me in less of a minority simply because of my reasoning for waiting for the DVD releases, but many people may not be willing to buy the DVD sets (even if they can shell out the money for a TiVo).
Actually, I think that the following examples, Matrix and LotR, are reasons why movie might be doing this more often soon. (And also don't forget that they cut Kill Bill into two parts after it was finished.) Loading as much production as possible into the front of the projects make them cheaper to produce, as I would think it would do in video games. Especially as you can completely re-use any of the art created in subsequent chapters with little/no modification. With this in mind I think it would be possible to not over-charge the customer (your example of gameplay hours against price).
I think this really comes down to movie studios (and writers and directors) wanting to tell more complex and longer stories. Movies have been getting longer in the last decade or so, and filming a series all at once helps with continuity and cost. Obviously in the case of the Matrix they simply were afraid that the movie wouldn't do well, so they setup the first movie to stand on it's own and delayed filming of the 2nd and 3rd until the first was successful. In the case of LotR, they took a big risk, especially given that it's not just 3 movies, but 3 VERY LONG movies. In the case of Kill Bill, I'd normally say that Tarantino can do whatever he wants in the industry, but I think it's been a while since he had that much pull. They probably just decided the movie was too long to stand as a single showing, or they're experimenting to see if the model can work. There's nothing like charging twice the price to motivate the MPAA; why release a 3 hour movie when you can release two 90-minute movies?
Hope I've shed a little light on my insane idea. Not that it matters too much... But hey, it's
Why? Even now, some games offer to let you skip a mission if you fail it (e.g.) three times. It means that the primary, driving element behind playing the next episode is not to see how many enemies they're going to throw at you, but what interesting new things they're going to do with the game (not to mention What Happens Next plot-wise).
The games that are doing well currently either already have this element or can be played with absolutely no concern for this element. Breaking it up into episodes doesn't really change this, and if the plot can't already move people forward through a difficult point, then it won't do so in episodes (except that you can skip it, which brings us to...). Furthermore, if the difficulty stays the same throughout the game, many people will simply become bored with the game. Remember that telling the story isn't the only element of a game. Though some games stretch it at times, this isn't a movie or a TV show.
Operation Flashpoint is a great example of something that could work fantastically in episodes - "I heard you get to drive a tank next month!"
Operation Flashpoint is a good example of a game I've never purchased nor played, so excuse me if I miss your point on that one. On the other hand, why wait until next month to drive a tank if there are 3 other games on the shelves that let you drive a tank right now? There was about a whole year where everyone wanted to know if FPS X would let you drive vehicles because FPS Y and FPS Z promised they would be able to do this. A lot of people were about to wet themselves to drive a tank in an FPS, and when it finally happened, each implementation was either cool for a little while or sucked from the start. It's hit & miss, and if you're releasing a game as a series of episodes, 1 episode can drive people away from the next.
I think I've been doing just that [explaining how episodes will keep interest better than a whole game], actually.
Perhaps some group will be interested in buying the next episode if they couldn't get through the previous episode, but it seems far more likely that they'd simply go play something else. Why not just let people skip portions of existing games (you've already said some games let people do this) and get the plot points if they're having trouble? They continue on, and they don't have to wait for the next episode to do so, they're not stuck with fixed points at which they can rejoin the plot.
It'd force the industry to adopt a more content- than technology-oriented approach to making and selling games, which is the direction it's been moving in anyway. Less focus on coding engines (which would ideally be the job of entirely separate companies, but let's not get into that argument here), more on getting some good design down in zeros and ones.
But content takes more time to develop and still costs a lot of money, plus you still have to license the technology. If your content takes longer to develop than your episodes have between releases, then your cost is almost entirely up front, you develop a full game and split it into episodes just because it's the new model people want to try out (same as the old model). This is why there are more artists than coders on most game development teams in the first place. You build an engine and development tools, then bring in an army of artists and work bugs out of the tools and engine as the artists bring together content that you can actually load into the engine to discover bugs. As you said, the industry is already moving towards being more content driven, this is simply a different model of selling the games, and really only effects development in 2 ways:
1) cost of development is returned over a longer period of time (if at all)
2) you have more time to refine content for later portions of the game, so you can release an unfinished game and fewer people will notice.
None of this really addresses, though, the question I asked, which is why would a publisher or develope
After the first game, you've got virtually all of the technology needed, save updates and fixes on the 'finished' engine. You've got a small library of content that can be used in the following games if any situation asks for it. This saves money already after the first game. Then, with each subsequent disc, you have a larger library of content to draw from. Assuming your chapters are only 4 hours of gameplay, you should be able to fit some rather nice-looking art on the disc, I'd think.
You've almost touched on the major problem from the production side. The whole thing is very front-heavy. The code has to be good enough to ship and support the episodic nature of the game, and the majority of the story not only has to be written, but fully developed, including all of the art. Artwork is one of the most time-consuming portions of game development, so if you were going to release episodes monthly, you'd have to be 3-6 months ahead of the curve, and even then you'd fall behind within 8-10 months. You can keep things short, 4-6 episodes, but then you have to have almost everything ready before episode 1 ships, with the remaining 4-6 months spent refining the engine, fixing bugs discovered in the early episodes, and polishing the remainder of your episodes.
With the way all of this is front-loaded, your first episode has to cost more than the rest, because you're not going to have as many people buying the 2nd episode as the 1st, and even fewer people on the 3rd, and so on. It doesn't matter how good your game is, that's the way it goes. The only sequels that do better than the previous ones are those with significant advances and improvements. Episodic games remove almost every chance for improvement in technology, and certainly advancements in gameplay. 6 months down the line your game looks dated, but your new episodes are right next to the games that came out today. The reason shareware was successful with the episodic model was because everyone came into it knowing they weren't going to make money on the first episode, that they'd have to give people a reason to buy the 2nd or 3rd episode without short-changing them on the 1st. Or, it was simply because it was shareware, no one expected to make the kind of money id and 3D Realms made on it.
I already buy DVDs that have 5 or so hours of entertainment(movie, extras, and commentary) for $20. What's 4 hours of gameplay for $5 or $10?
I buy DVD movies for $20-25 and am perfectly happy with maybe 2 hours of content (the extras and commentary are nice, but I don't always watch them). When games are $20-25 my expectations are lower as well. The scale isn't linear, though, and when I shell out $50 for a game I expect a lot. At the same time, 4 hours of gameplay for $10 comes out to 20 hours for $50, essentially, depending on the game type, trying to piss on me by giving me less for my money, hoping I don't notice it because it's a slow trickle instead of a full stream. Paying in small portions for small portions of a whole is just a method of disguising the true cost. In most of those cases, I'd wait for the full series to be released and buy it all up front, just like I do with most TV shows any more. I'd rather pay with dollars out of my pocket than by wasting 15-20 minutes of the hour waiting for the show to come back on, and I'd rather choose when to watch and how long I'll watch (have 2 hours to kill, watch 2 or 3 episodes without waiting a week between episodes).
There's a reason that movies and books rarely do this any more. At the same time, there are 2 recent examples of movies that did do this, yet were not explicitly marketed as such, and those are the Matrix sequels and the Lord of the Rings. The second Star Wars trilogy might also be considered an example of how NOT to make episodic content, because Lucas didn't front-load his content and if any of the movies had actually been good he'd be losing people as time goes on between episodes. Since many people thought the first 2 sucked, he's actually better off tak
You're the exception, not the rule. 80% of players will not finish a given game.
What makes me the exception, then? I probably haven't finished more than half the games I have.
It makes loads of sense, therefore, to break a game up. If the difficulty structure (TM) of a game follows a series of buildups and peaks, it's going to be a hell of a lot more interesting than your standard start-off-easy-end-hard fare.
A lot of games currently follow a series of peaks in difficulty. Most people (myself included) tend to stop playing a game because one particular peak ramps up too quickly, rather than because the game simply gets progressively harder and they eventually can't get any further. A good example from my personal experience would be Metroid Fusion. One particular part of the game has an encounter with SA-X (an enemy nearly equivalent to the player's character at full power), near the middle of the game, that requires you to run away to a particular area, then wait for the SA-X to leave. I stopped playing the game for 2 months because I was having a hard time with that particular sequence. When I came back to it, it still took roughly 6 times to get past it, but then most of the remainder of the game was closer to the original difficulty curve, with 2 or 3 more encounters that were significantly more difficult.
Especially since, if you couldn't finish last month's episode, you can start this month's anyway (after a quick "previously on..." catch-up, if it's narrative led).
That might be a nice way of doing things, but it'd be very hard for developers to handle the difficulty curve if you're assuming that players can skip whole episodes of the game, while still trying to appeal to those that will finish each episode.
There's more. If you buy the first episode and decide you don't like the game, what have you lost? Ten quid? Rather than, say, fourty?
We used to have demos for this. Unfortunately, demos have become less relevant as they release early code or portions that aren't relevant to the overall game. There's always the shareware model, as well, which is closer to what the article actually described (as many others have pointed out, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were released much in this way). Rentals are another consideration for people that aren't sure about a game, and I'd have to say that rentals got me through most of my childhood. If you buy a game and don't like it, take it back, get something else. If it took you 2 months to figure out you don't like it you might end up losing a bit more money on it, but it's not much of a loss if you find out fairly quickly.
Obviously, episodic structure only works for certain game types. Coincidentally, however, these seem to be exactly the games that typically *don't* hold the player's interest up until the end.
Yet what no one's explained so far is how breaking a game up into episodes is going to hold someone's interest any better than getting the whole game at the start would have. Beyond that, you have to wonder how many developers are going to finish releasing episodes if a game doesn't do well in the first couple of episodes. With the front-heavy costs of building a game in the first place, the developers will take even fewer risks in that sort of structure and any game that isn't doing well in the first 2 episodes will probably be written off and left incomplete. Just as with sequels, subsequent episodes will draw a smaller audience, which only helps give publishers incentive to cut their losses after the first episode.
I don't want to spend eight weeks with a game. I would probably play more different games for a shorter time, while coming back to favourites when new episodes are released.
.hack has a note sitting in it that probably tells me something like "level up before going to area (whatever the name of it is) to finish this game", because I got sick of spending so much time on the last boss only to die. There's a similar note in my FF Origins case, except that I'm nowhere near the end of FF2 afaik.
Why do you need games to be episodic to do this? I usually have 3 or 4 games next to each of my systems and cycle through them, putting one back on the shelf every time I get a new game for that system (the new game going next to the system), or get sick of or finish that particular game. If I think I might have a problem coming back to a particular game, I write myself a note. If I have a guide for that particular game, I'll stick the note in the page that's roughly where I'm at in the game. If I don't have a guide, I'll just put the note in the game's case. I have a hand-drawn map of Metroid on my coffee table at the moment because I've been playing through the emulated version of the NES Metroid on my GameCube, and it helps me remember where I've been and where I'm going. What I'm trying to do is something I can usually figure out from there. The first "episode" of
What it comes down to is simple, games need better facilities for tracking your progress so that you can fire a game up after not playing it for a month or so, load your save game, maybe read a little info from the map or an in-game journal (ala Baldur's Gate and derivatives), and you have a pretty good idea of what's going on. The games are getting more complex, your goals get more complex, so the games need to help us handle that complexity. After all, any of us can pick up almost any Super Mario Bros. game today, no matter how long ago we last played it, and have it all figured out in a couple minutes.
Imagine your favorite first-person shooter, role-playing game, or action adventure game. Now imagine that game broken up into one- to two-hour sequences. Now imagine that the first part was free and subsequent parts were delivered to you automatically for five bucks a pop, each month. Would you take the bait?
Well, my favorite FPS games are online, so you can break that story up however you want, all I need is the part that puts me into multiplayer. My favorite role playing games would break up into 20-30 parts like this, and they can stick it up their asses if they expect me to pay $100-150 for what currently costs $50. The real problem is the writer's point of view here, as we can see further on in the article.
People like to complain that both Max Paynes are too short. I suppose they are, but only if you compare them to other games. [...]Meanwhile, I think the main reason Max Payne and its sequel seem so short is that they present captivating storylines and entertaining action, which collectively compel you to play through these games as quickly as you can.
Only if you compare them to other games? Welcome, Captain Obvious, what should we compare them to? Sit-Coms? They seem so short because they're 8 hours long, even if you have to replay several parts a couple of times. Even someone that can only play an average of 1 hour a day can beat an 8 hour game in slightly over a week.
I recently played through Metroid: Zero Mission for the Game Boy Advance, casually in an afternoon. It's a cool game, but the depressing thought then occurred to me that it's going to be months or years until the next one is released. The game is quite short and recycles most of the same assets and gameplay as its predecessors--it uses a tried-and-true formula, that is.
I have two complaints about this comment:
1) He keeps talking as if he's a casual gamer, but in my area Metroid Zero Mission came out yesterday. Sure, that's within the realm of "recently", but how many casual gamers go down to the game store in the middle of the day on a Tuesday to pick up a new game?
2) He talks about the length of the game, and it's use of "the same assets and gameplay as its predecessors", using a "tried and true formula". Did he even know what he was buying (this actually makes me wonder, because MAYBE a casual gamer wouldn't know)? Zero Mission is a remake of the original NES Metroid, so of course it's going to be using the same gameplay and a "tried and true formula". It's also supposed to be longer than the original. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there that will be trying to get some sort of speed record on Zero Mission, but for most people the first time through will take about as long as Max Payne, and most of us are probably aware of that. Interestingly, a short Metroid game is more acceptable to me, probably because I know I'll get some replay out of it, unlike Max Payne.
Gamers are growing older. We don't all have time to spend eight or 10 hours at a time playing Final Fantasy. We also don't all have time to play games every single day. Sometimes we go back to a game we were playing and don't even remember what the heck we were doing.
You know what, I fall into all of these cases, except that I can occasionally, on a weekend, find 8-10 hours to string together playing a video game, maybe twice a month. I've come back and not been able to figure out what I was doing, the most blatant offender being FFVIII, which I had already spent 25 hours on.
Sometimes we spend $50 on a game, never get all the way through it, and then wish we hadn't wasted our money. I think there are a lot of people out there who want to be gamers but don't want to make the commitment of living the "gamer lifestyle" of having their entire existence revolve around their hobby.
These are the parts I don't agree with. If I wish I hadn't wasted my money, it's because I don't like the game, not because I didn't finish it. I never worry about not finishing
I'd also like to know what hardware features are holding back PS2 games so much, compared to the other consoles.
The PS2 has less power than any other home console of the current generation (including the DreamCast). On top of that, many graphics features that were well-supported and documented in the hardware of the other systems (again including the DreamCast) were either unsupported or poorly documented in the PS2. The most obvious of these (especially in the early titles) is FSAA, which Sony eventually documented (or developed middleware for, or someone else developed middleware for it), after the internet was filled with jokes about the jagged edges in PS2 games. The major thing that effects the appearance of PS2 games today, though, is the lack of memory for graphics resources. You can easily double the amount of RAM used for textures and such on the other consoles, which can be used to make the game look significantly better.
And while the GC looks somewhat cool, I've yet to see a cool Xbox. Seriously, have you actually seen one ? Compared to a PS2 they look like shit.
If I was worried about how my consoles look, I wouldn't keep any of them in plain view. None of them look like they belong anywhere near my TV or stereo. They look like they belong in a kid's room. At the very least, though, the only one that isn't the same colour as the rest (at least in my cabinet) is the DreamCast.
$100 dollars for all you say doesn't sound bad ... except, the games are still $50 a pop, right?
3 of the 4 games he mentioned can easily be found for $20-30 a pop, and there are plenty more that can be found in the same range.
I was hoping that GameCube would have cheaper games, but their "player's choice" or whatever it is called is still in the $30 dollar range and there aren't that many of them
Most of the "Player's Choice" titles can be found for less than $30 as well, especially if you're willing to buy used. The only games I bought for my Cube at $35+ were F-Zero, Mario Kart, and Animal Crossing (and the last was $35, a month before it became a Player's Choice title), the first two obviously being too new to expect to be less than $40 regardless of what console they were released on.
Five years. Pretty much the standard. NES was released (in North America) in 1985, then the SNES in 1991, the N64 in 1996, and the GameCube in 2001.
And the SNES, N64, and Cube were all considered late to market, even though the N64 was arguably ahead of it's time (though just as Nintendo skipped a "32-bit console" everyone else skipped the "64-bit console"). After 3 successive (but successful, as far as Nintendo's concerned) late releases, of course their cycle is going to be a bit short if they want to release at the same time as everyone else. With the SNES they had the same power Sony does today, they could release late and get people to hold off on the Genesis or TG-16 to see what they were going to do (as people held off on the DreamCast to see what the PS2 would do). With the N64, they were too far behind the PS1, and within the 2 years following N64's launch the PS1 had a string of highly successful games from developers that were best known for their NES and SNES titles.
Frankly, I think it's good to see Nintendo considering putting themselves on the release schedule everyone else is following. At the very least, it'll give people a chance to compare all of the systems from the start.
Question: If the Playstation was what made it "required" for games to have 3D, why is it that the original "standard" for a 3D platformer (Mario 64) was a Nintendo game?
Because although the PS1 was released far ahead of the N64, no one had really released a solid 3D platformer before Mario 64. Anyone that released a 3D platformer at all was trying to figure out how to do it well, and missed in one way or another.
The PS1 really pulled a lot of market share by having an arcade version that meant easy porting between the arcade and the console, and by pulling in publishers and developers that we all knew well from the NES days (ie Square, Konami, Capcom).
On the contrary, it was 6 years. 1985 for the NES, 1991 for the SNES.
And the SNES was late to market, as the Genesis and the TG-16 were both available long before it.
My plan's $50 for the first phone and $40 for each additional phone (we have 3, one of which is in a different area code for my gf's father, so if we go to visit him we can use his phone and avoid using up the roaming minutes). We have unlimited calling both local and long distance (though I'm sure international calls cost something, I don't make international calls so I haven't checked), any time, as long as we're within our area (generally within the coverage of your area code, but may be different for area codes that cover larger areas, or smaller areas). Once we start roaming, though, we have 300 shared minutes (shared between the 3 phones), though that can be increased by choosing a more expensive plan.
The plan is through SunCom (AT&T), and is called the UnPlan. I'd link to it, but the site asks for a zip code and then spits out the available plans, so it may be different for different areas.
As far as emergency uses go, we have car chargers for each of the phones, and when the hurricane blew through here the cell phones were the only ones that worked, though we had to swap them in and out of the car to charge them (and they weren't working as well as normal, the signal levels were about half of normal, but did work, unlike the phone lines and electricity). On normal days whether or not your phone is working depends on the phone you get, and as long as you don't take it too far down you can still talk while it's recharging. Something else I had an issue with is that calling 911 resulted in getting a 911 operator for a different city than the one our plan is set for, though I'm not sure who controls this or how it's determined (probably by which tower picks up your phone, but I'd really be surprised if that resulted in the city I got from the location I called). Luckily, they had no problem transferring me to the correct operator, and it was either laziness or pure luck that resulted in the cops showing up 20 minutes later when they normally patrol the street regularly.
I would agree that it's better to have 2 or more phones, but of course that's also the point at which it really does become a bit expensive unless you're already paying for a cell phone and a home phone (previously I didn't have a cell phone, but my gf pretty much has to have one and it was cheaper for me to get the 2nd phone than to put a line into the apartment).
It's also a product of nationalist (right) philosophy.
And Hitler was part of the national socialist party, so you're both right, or you're both wrong, because fascism has roots in individuals more than parties and nationalist or socialist philosophies.
Hopefully, as cell plans get better and things like the Do Not Call list become more of a problem than a solution (political candidates and charities could just mine the list for numbers), more people will get rid of their landline phones. Personally, I haven't gotten a single political call nor a sales call since I got rid of mine, and the primaries are tomorrow. My cell phone has unlimited long distance calling, so I don't have to worry about my bill spiking because I made a lot of calls to friends and family on the west coast in a given month (the only time my bill would go up would be if I made a lot of calls while roaming, which essentially means I have to drive out-of-state if I'm headed south, or over an hour if I'm headed north or west; if I'm headed east I eventually can't make calls any more because they haven't put up cell towers in the ocean).
i ran it just fine on a 266mhz k6 w/ 32mb of ram and a 4meg ati.
I've never owned a computer that slow personally (used some at work) and while TA:Kingdoms played on my home computer at the time, it did not play well.
One interesting point about Kingdoms, though, is that they included a system through which it would drop animation frames if your system was slowing down to try to keep up the framerate. Unfortunately, this backfired on them as many people saw this as jerky animation rather than a slowdown, and blamed it on the game rather than their computers.
The game was beautiful, and plays very well on current computers, but it isn't properly balanced and seems to be lacking slightly in personality, which seems to really make or break an RTS game (despite the fact that RTS games should be about strategy).
I always thought DR was better, the 2 sides had different technologies, rather than TA which had effectivly the same tech tree but different artwork on each side.
Unfortunately DR is almost completely unplayable on modern computers, while TA remains very playable. DR2 was an interesting attempt at bringing RTS to 3D, but had a nasty camera. DR also had many of the unit behaviors people are still looking for in modern RTS games, such as support units actually supporting a group of units they're travelling with (medics healing soldiers, mechanics repairing vehicles), and was one of the first games in which elevation and terrain made a difference (not only in fog of war but also in range of weapons).
how do you propose to explain a prime number or even just an integer to a culture that has never even conceived of a number? their style of mathematics could be so different from ours that we can't find a common ground upon which to even start trading information...yet we all live in the same universe, so it would be based on the same laws
You start with where the common ground exists. The real problem, of course, is that they may not have any real use for knowing that the piece of string is 1 meter in length and therefore 1/2 meter when halved and 2 meters when doubled and gives them a circle with circumference 2pi meters when used as the radius. At the same time, if they can grasp the knowledge, they may find that they become more productive because they can more easily model things that don't easily model in real space and determine whether or not a structure will withstand given pressures without modelling those pressures in real space. In other words, it would allow them to do what we do today with computers, build a model in artifical space and model the real world pressures applicable to the object being modeled. Without an abstract sense of mathematics, these things simply aren't done without trial and error.
not to mention there have been many cultures that have had no concept of zero...certainly they knew the concept of something not being there, but there was no such thing as 1+0=1
In most intelligent cultures that had no concept of zero, though, they spent a great deal of time discussing it, meaning that the concept was there, they simply could not grasp it. The same can be said for fractions, and in many cases it was the same cultures that did not have the concept of zero.
so one culture...or alien's concept of math may be very different than yours...for example what if they sort of have eyes like a bug? now they see the whole world differently...to them everything is sort of a matrix...and so their counting and mathematics are based almost entirely on matrices. now this doesn't make them any less/more intelligent than us, and their world works much the same as our world, but they see thing vastly differently than we do, and quite possibly have insight in certain areas which we have not yet grasped, such as maybe in their mathmatics they found an easy way to factor very large numbers. or to them prime numbers aren't important at all...heck by using matrices they might not even have a concept of prime numbers like we do.
This all still points to the concepts existing, just not being understood. If we were to encounter an alien race that had no concept of prime numbers (or fractions, or zero), it's likely that they could eventually understand the concept if it's put into mathematical terms based on the mathematics they already have. Additionally, if they have easy ways to factor large numbers or better insight into matrix-based mathematics, they could probably use the existing foundation to teach it to us.
At the same time, it's quite possible that they would have no concept of math as an abstract area of study. Even many humans have problems dealing with math as a pure abstraction (yet at the same time most have problems with word problems, which are the only way most people encounter math in the real world).
Pi does touch on the Golden Ratio, but in any case it's just a good movie that delves into similar subject matter in an enjoyable way, and should be on every geek's DVD shelf (or hard drive).
I also recently finished Angels & Demons (but not the Da Vinci Code yet) and found it quite enjoyable, but it deals mostly with religious symbolism (and a few quick jumps into other areas). I'm currently reading Dan Brown's Digital Fortress, which is looking to be a very good fiction dealing with crypto and methods of foiling brute force attacks.
When (not if) the PSX fails to contain the same PSOne hardware that was rolled into the PS2, I wonder of all you PS fans will continue singing the same tune, or just fall back to the real reason you are rooting against the X-Box, which is that it's put out by an eeeeevil company.
I think you mean the PS3, as the PSX is a DVR containing PS2 hardware.
Besides, I have an XBox, and a PS2, 2 GameCubes, and a DreamCast. I really don't care if all of them keep going, I'd just rather replace my XBox with the next generation XBox rather than have the new one sitting on top of the old one, just like I'd rather have my PS3 replace my PS2 rather than sitting on top of it, and so on. I don't mind spending the money on new hardware once in a while, but I prefer that it be a true upgrade rather than just another piece of hardware.
On the other hand game companies know about the problem. Just print a warning. I am sure any lawyer will insist on it being in the manual.
Check the EULA in the case of computer games. I'm sure you won't find the warning, but you will find that the lawyers covered their asses with a full disclaimer.
The general assumption is that it's fairly hard to tell what will and will not cause a problem, and the lack of a warning does not indicate safety. If my chainsaw did not say "do not stop chain with hand", I'm still not going to stick my hand in it.