Another recent title which comes to mind is Max Payne 2 - that was definitely designed with Xbox/PC in mind, and the PS2 version is not so hot.
The first Max Payne looked like crap on the PS2 as well, and had horrible controls on that platform. IIRC the reason for it looking like crap was because they used lower quality textures to deal with the memory limits of the platform. AFAIK there was no excuse for the controls.
I really can't say I'm surprised that Max Payne 2 would look like crap on the PS2 given that it's the sequel to a game that looked like crap on the PS2. Either the hardware can't handle it, or the developer doesn't know how to make the hardware do it. It doesn't really matter which at this point, since Sony will just push the PS3 down the developers' throats within the next year.
Chart for the week ending January 4th of this year.
They've sold ~3036 XBox systems in Japan in the first week of 2004, which, if it could be held constant, would mean a significant increase in sales for the year. I'm guessing that they'll come out with more sales this year, but not the 150,000 or so that the first week's numbers could indicate.
I'm pretty sure that he was referring to the Japanese game industry when talking about a decline. Since this is actually just 2 interviews translated and chopped up, it's hard to say whether or not that was clarified, but at the same time since the interviews were conducted in Japanese mags, it's more likely that the context of the interview would be enough to justify the lack of clarification.
Anyway, the article does state: Elsewhere in that same interview, Iwata reiterated his confidence in meeting sales targets for GameCube hardware, but was more pessimistic about the general fortunes of the Japanese games business. In the Japanese market, he said, sales of hardware have been declining over the last three years, and though software sales have been able to cover up that decline in the past, that's no longer possible now. While the overseas market still has a passion for playing games, Iwata explained, that's not the case in Japan, although Nintendo plans to play an important role in revitalizing the market in the coming year.
If you look at earlier portions of the article, he states that Cube sales doubled in Japan, but more than doubled in the rest of the world, showing that there's still a market in Japan that will respond to price drops, but unless the price drops were not as significant as elsewhere, it also shows that the market isn't as interested in the industry (of course, other economic factors are at work, as well).
Looking at Japanese sales figures for 2001, 2002, and 2003, you can see some trends such as more games selling over a million units in 2003, but the top-selling game for 2003 sold fewer units than the top-selling game for 2002, and the top-selling game for 2002 was the #2-selling game for 2003.
Overall, games seem to stay in the weekly top-selling lists for either a fairly long period of time or a very short period of time, with little falling in between. In other words, they sell extremely quickly to their core audience and probably receive mild reviews or little attention from those outside that core audience and disappear after the first week or two on the charts. Games with broader appeal and a more well-known name seem to stay in the charts indefinitely, even on fairly moderate weekly sales, as only new highly-awaited titles will shoot up the charts.
To put it another way, how good is the market when Pokemon Ruby & Sapphire was #1 in 2002, beaten out of #1 by FFX-2 in 2003 (by a small margin), and is still in the top 15 on the weekly charts a little over a week ago? Good for Nintendo to be able to maintain a title to almost 5 million sales in the Japanese market and hold the charts for 2 years, but everyone's released plenty of titles since then, and the North American charts reflect a much more friendly environment for new games, and a more moderate timeframe for successful games to stay on the charts through continued sales.
All of that being said, there could be some other more blatantly obvious explanation;)
Firstly, and most simply, age-restriction ratings on video games are having little actual effect. Either they are not being observed by retailers, or they are circumvented very easily in all the traditional ways. How they could be made more effective, or even if they should, is another question.
Well, the real question is should the ratings enforcement be increased through government action or community pressures on local retailers? Government action would put video games on a level that is reserved for porn in the rest of the entertainment industry, as there are no federal government regulations on movies, books, music, etc. outside of pornography.
Secondly, and more contentiously, there are indeed some few video games which are incredibly violent in a spectacularly brutal and callous way. Interaction does make for better learning than passive exposure, and it's intuitively the case that a steady diet of this material at young ages is probably having some malign effect on the more marginally sane in the population. This leads to the question: why do game companies and publishers produce such games?
Having a malign effect on the marginally sane (which is also to say the marginally insane) generally does not bar something from being produced for the completely sane. Every insane or marginally insane person is a little different, and what may or may not set them off is likewise different. Trying to sanitize culture for their benefit is generally the job of those treating their illness. So, more or less, the games are produced for those that can handle them, and it is the job of an individual's caretakers, or the individual themselves, to determine whether or not they can handle the material.
Video games can certainly be regarded as a form of creative art. And they're fun, too (or ought to be.) But they're also really expensive to produce these days, at least for any major title. I don't think any large publisher is going to pick up a title unless they feel it has a good chance of being a good seller. And so in turn, it must be that violence sells, even really nasty stuff.
Your last sentence is only true if there is a way of showing a correlation between violence and sales. In the top 20 best-selling games of all time, this is hardly the case, with Mario Bros. games holding most of the top 10 along with Tetris and the Sims. GTA:VC and Half-Life are the only games in the top 10 that could normally be considered violent, and the latter didn't have a public outcry associated with it (while the former is not nearly as violent as people make it out to be unless you choose to play it in a violent manner). GTA and first-person shooters are the rare cases where 'violent games' have managed, on occasion to get to the top of the charts. On the other hand, yes, they do sell as well as other games for many of the same reasons other games will sell well: if they are well-received by the gaming press and/or well-hyped before-hand. The PS2 and XBox combined sales of True Crime were roughly the same as the sales of Mario Kart in North America, despite the latter being released only on what is presented in the US press as the 3rd place console and nearly a failure for Nintendo. Everything in the top 15 in November had over $5 million in sales, which is nothing to sneeze at if you can get your game in there, so long as you don't spend $5 million making the game. 11 of the top 12 were over $10 million in sales (and both the exception in the top 12 and the lowest-by-dollar of the top 15 were GBA games, which sell for less per unit).
All of that being said, Mario Kart was at the top of the November charts, and only (at that time) sold just under 528,000 units. Compare that to the number of units most other popular media sells. The reason this is such a big business is because each of those units sells for $50 instead of $20 or $30 and in many cases cost less to produce. The game publishers never bet on a 100% success rate with the titles they produce, either. Many of them
Re:Phantom sounds like the right name for this box
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I agree with you except on 2 points: 1) The XBox isn't a substandard piece of hardware, as can be seen in any number of multi-platform games that were actually developed by someone willing to take the time to take advantage of the hardware.
2) The TG-16 was competing with the NES, Genesis, and, later (though at that point the TG-16 was out of the race) the SNES. Hardware-wise, the TG-16 was in many ways superior, but it was quite obvious that NEC didn't have the name recognition in the US and they didn't have the titles for the US market.
In the end, though, there have always been niche markets and consoles that just didn't make sense. Even when it was the NES and the SMS, there was, eventually, a new Atari system available. There was also the Atari Jaguar, and the 3DO, and a few other niche consoles that some people may or may not remember (I remember in particular one that used VHS tapes to deliver what were basically interactive movies, but I don't recall it's name or price).
Handhelds have shown what we all pretty much knew from the Neo-Geo: even superior technology isn't going to justify a higher price, and sometimes older technology is superior simply because it better suits the target audience (ie longer battery life and lower cost to the consumer).
The CD drive in the Playstation sucked ass in terms of it's read time, but in the end it proved that developers would utilize disc-based formats and that it could be used to deliver superior visuals even if the hardware in the system is not superior, and, as you said, that people would wait for a loading screen, even on a console.
Re:Phantom sounds like the right name for this box
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While you may be one of the sad, sad fans of the Dreamcast, you have forgotten a major reason for Sega exiting the hardware business.
The hardware business is expensive, and Sega ran out of money. That's all there is to it, no 'sony lied about sega' or 'sony slept with segas wife' or any other crap. After the horrible debacle that started with the 32X and SegaCD, they never really got their footing back. The 32X was a financial disaster, probably second only to the ET cartridges made by Atari. The Sega Saturn never really took hold and the 3d hardware was inadequate (not to mention seriously lacking in developer support). I mean, come on, it couldn't even do transparencies. That's sad. Even the 2d games on the Saturn had to use horrible cross-hatching from the 8 bit nintendo days (since the snes could do hardware transparencies and blending).
You're completely ignoring, though, that the hardware business, especially for Sega, was not just consoles. Sega also had a severe problem in the arcade hardware side of things, especially with Sony (and now Microsoft) making arcade cabinets that offered easy porting to the home console(s). Sega tried to do the same thing, but their primary customer was themselves, and their games weren't doing as well against the juggernaut of Sony 3rd parties and Sony's marketing.
Sega was losing on more fronts than just the home consoles, and the Dreamcast didn't do well in Sega's home (Japan) until after they cancelled it, despite strong US sales.
Sony absolutely put on the massive marketing blitz for the PS2 when the Dreamcast launched, despite it being nearly a year before the release of the PS2, and when PS2s were pretty much unavailable at the launch of the system, Sony kept the marketing going through the DC's end-of-life and kept going because Microsoft and Nintendo were launching their consoles. We certainly never saw ads in movie theaters for consoles that weren't due out for over a year (if we saw them at all) before Sony started hedging their bets on the PS2 hardware.
Personally, I own all 4 of this generation's consoles, and the Dreamcast is certainly the saddest case, being somewhere in between the Cube and the XBox graphically, yet having been shelved by their own manufacturer due to no fault of the console itself.
To continue this off-topic tangent just a little further, I agree that the big Xbox controller (the "Duke" - I've never heard that, good one) has a decent shape, but the face-button placement (particularly the black and white buttons) and shapes were awful. The S version, on the other hand, I consider my favorite console controller, despite my big hands.
Oddly enough, I consider the face-button placement on the S controller to be a significant issue preventing me from ever using it, and besides the size is the primary reason I bought the larger controller (I bought my XBox a little over a year ago, so it came with the S controller). On the other hand, the larger controller is almost perfect, though the black and white buttons do feel somewhat out of place (though still better than the S, the main problem I have with the S is the start and select buttons).
Of course, since I've mostly been playing Crimson Skies and PGR2 lately, I haven't had to worry too much about the black and white buttons. I'd also add that the idea of colour-coding the buttons probably wasn't the best, as I can never remember which is which without looking down, though the PS2's shapes are no better.
This all seemed to make sense. Videogames were primarly seen as a kids thing. Adults didn't play them, by and large. Well Sony decided that adults would like to play games, and released lots of adult target titles. Funny thing, turns out adults have more money than kids and hence can spend more on games.
This is what people widely seem to believe, but it's only partially right. If you look at Sony's strategy with the PS1, you'll see that they weren't targeting adults just for the sake of targeting adults, or even by going for mature-rated games. They were going strictly after Nintendo's original fanbase, those that played the NES and maybe the SNES. Those people that played the original NES as kids were generally born between the mid-70s and early-80s, meaning that they were teenagers or in their early 20s when the PS1 came out. In order to appeal to NES gamers, they went after the companies (other than Nintendo) that made the games kids played on the NES. This meant Capcom, Konami, Square, (Enix in Japan) and many others that did 3rd party games for Nintendo. It meant Metal Gear, Final Fantasy, Castlevania, and any title that did really well on the NES that wasn't made by Nintendo themselves. It also meant targeting the arcade developers, because the kids that played NES games were playing in the arcades at the time, thereby targeting Sega's 3rd party developers as well (because Sega was always strong in the arcades and arcade ports on their consoles).
Additionally, they went with a strong push towards 3D games only, and Nintendo, at the time, did not have a 3D console, as the N64 came out a few years after the PS1. Also, although Nintendo had loosened up on their content restrictions after the mess with Mortal Kombat, many of the 3rd parties were still concerned about those restrictions, so they had games on the design boards that weren't slated for a Nintendo console for this reason. Nintendo did have a handful of mature games on the SNES, and another handful on the N64, but Sony had already signed a number of exclusive contracts with many of these 3rd parties for titles that those 3rd parties had thought wouldn't get by Nintendo's censors, or wouldn't have worked on a Nintendo console at the time. Between pulling ahead by releasing a "32-bit" console in the middle of the 16-bit generation (and perhaps Nintendo rode the 16-bit generation a bit long when they skipped to "64-bit"), pushing for 3D graphics the SNES couldn't handle, and signing exclusivity deals with companies that were worried about censors, or moving towards 3D themselves, or worried about cartridge limitations (Square, specifically), Sony sucked up a lot of the 3rd parties that were Nintendo's bread & butter. By making their console a valid method for easy arcade ports, they also sucked up a lot of Sega's 3rd parties, pulling in Namco's Tekken and Soul Blade/Edge lines, for example.
Once they had all of this in place they also pushed the "games for adults" angle, knowing full well that the age group they were going for in Nintendo's original NES market was also the group most concerned with perceptions, as most 13-21 year-olds tend to be. What they knew when they started, though, was that not only was this age group the group that originally played the NES, but they were also the group with the largest expendable income. If the games targeted them well, they could pull in a larger audience than the NES had, and that's exactly what happened. The PS1 opened a larger market to games by aiming at this age group's insecurities as well as offernig games that were familiar to those that had played games as kids. Most of Nintendo's 3rd parties didn't really change their games beyond the shift to 3D and some gameplay enhancements, and neither did Nintendo. It was simply that most of the "adult-oriented" games were given an "edge" by the more realistic graphics capabilities, and a willingness by both developers and the console's developer to push the boundaries. Nintendo's games were always somewhat less violent than their 3rd
People are always going to pirate games. It's just too easy to copy 1s and 0s. I think the solution is the opposite of what the game industry is doing: Sell me more than the disc. I want physical items that are worth more to me, such as a big thick manual, maps, posters, maybe even a player's guide, right in the same box with the shiny disc. I would imagine I'm not alone on this and that if gamers received something more tangible than a disc with their $50, perhaps they would be more inclined to purchase.
I'd also add this: if I'm going to buy a game for $50 and I'm not supposed to copy it, the least they could do is supply a decent jewel case. This is especially a problem with multi-disc releases, such as NWN and UT2k3, both of which had the discs in little paper envelopes. I don't even mind the cardboard-like cases, as long as they have the plastic holders for the discs rather than just having sleeves, because the sleeves themselves scratch the discs.
Considering that I have a box and a half full of game manuals and other stuff that came with games back in the 90s, I don't mind so much that I don't get a lot of extra stuff in the box. However, I do mind that I have to buy stacks of jewel cases when the games should come with them. Sell them to me in DVD cases for all I care, I just want the discs protected to some degree beyond a dust cover.
Beyond that, there isn't a disc that can't be copied out there somehow, otherwise it wouldn't have been distributable on any significant scale. Almost anything you can do on a CD that can be read in a CD-ROM drive can be mimicked by a CD-R drive with the right software. Just protect the discs you ship and go after the people that are really pirating your games. I'm sick of downloading CD-cracks to make games playable and I'm even more sick of copying disc 3 of 5 for my friend who found out this one disc in the game wouldn't play because you shipped it in cheap packaging. Nothing better than a game with so much obvious expense at least in the artwork (to take up 5 discs) being sold in such cheap packaging that there's a 10-20% failure rate of the discs.
Finally, your "per-game basis" line is incorrect. EA's entire line of sports games supports a single buddy list and you can see what people you know are online even if you are playing Madden and they are playing NBA Live.
To correct his statement, then, you're looking at, at best, a "per-developer" or "per-publisher" basis. Personally, EA's already lost any money I might have spent on their console games by making their online play PS2-only. At the very least they could've used the same online services for GameCube play, as the only substantial difference between Nintendo and Sony in terms of the online package is that Sony is advertising and pushing online capability.
The XBox's biggest advantage in online play outside of the services provided by Live is the variety of games available for online play. EA cuts into that a little by making their online play PS2-only, but overall most of the games they offer have at least 1 equivalent on the XBox with Live capability (exceptions would probably be the Sims and Tony Hawk series). It's actually a really stark contrast to the single-player gaming experiences on the two platforms, where the PS2 clearly offers more diversity.
All of that being said, I'll buy the next generation consoles as the titles I want become available, just as I did in this generation. Right now, the only PS2 games I buy are PS2 exclusives, and most of the XBox games I buy are multi-console releases (though I've mostly been playing Crimson Skies and Project Gotham Racing 2 lately). Obviously that puts the GameCube in the same boat as the PS2, buying mostly exclusives for that platform, and I've been trading in my DreamCast titles as I've been able to replace them on other consoles (or with sequels that are similar or superior enough to keep me from playing the DC versions).
Dependable quality of service? Have you checked your service agreement? Does MS make any guarantees regarding service?
I don't know, I'm just asking because I am curious.
Of course not, because they can't control the line between you and them. You can't even get a guarantee on your QoS from your ISP, unless you pay business rates which guarantee a maximum downtime except in event of inclimate weather or act of god.
To draw a logical conclusion from your statement, in order for your choice of candidate to be voted in, something like, oh, a literacy test would have to be instituted?
I thought the votes in Florida showed that the ballot is a literacy test.
Attention Rockstar Games, GTA 6 should be in Vegas, a casino enforcer type on the strip.
Great, so what does that leave for 4 and 5?
Rockstar was pretty adamant about Vice City not being GTA 4, and I wouldn't be surprised, if they do go through with San Andreas, that it would not be GTA 4, either.
Touche, kind of. Pioneer's actually has a street price $41 dollors cheaper than the PSX.
heh, the price on Pioneer's website (linked from that review) is $200 more than listed in the review. Then again, they have a model with a smaller hard drive that's listed at $999.
My arguement agaisn't the PSX applies to products like the Pioneer as well (to a lesser degree), the Pioneer at basically just adding 1 function to an existing device though whereas this monster from Sony is attempting something much more delicate. Price wise though, I do have to admit you got me.
I really don't know enough about the PSX to know whether they're simply adding a PSX to the package or actually using the PS2's processor to do some of the work for the TiVo functionality. Other than that, it's basically the same as the Pioneer device with a PS2 for free. Adding DVD-burning to a TiVo is a logical step forward rather than a major combination device, and most of the other functions come for free when you put a DVD writer on the system.
That being said, I'll most likely be building my own DVR rather than buying an off-the-shelf item. Not necessarily because it'll save me any money, but rather because I can get what I want, have some flexibility, and have a bit of fun putting it together.
Sony's intimate knowledge of the parts and the manufacturing has allowed them to combine silicon, cutting down on overall size and costs. Likewise, the only profittaking is from Sony, and with fewer hands in the pot the margins can be shrunk. Unfortunately for Microsoft, using off-the-shelf parts from different manufacturers ensured that they needed the cooperation (and credits) from different companies. Nvidia, for example, gets a cut on the sales of the hardware, not from the software like ATI gets from Nintendo. Microsoft similarly needs to use faster hardware in their machines as they aren't exactly console-optimized. The 'Cube, again, can get away with running on much slower (read, cheaper) hardware, because it would be a terrible webserver. Say what you will about the XBox OS, it's hardware and interfaces were not originally developed with gaming in mind.
You're forgetting (or didn't know) a few things about the XBox hardware, though. The CPU, motherboard, video, and sound were modified and/or designed for the XBox. In fact, nVidia gets as big a cut of the XBox as it does because it designed the motherboard (a derivative of which became the nForce, which, oddly enough, was originally for AMD chips). The CPU was modified heavily in it's design not only to fit the specs for the chipset, but also to fit the needs of a console. All of this is why Microsoft has been able to reduce manufacturing costs on the console, but at the same time their payments to nVidia and Intel have not changed, thereby sticking them with a rather large percentage of the manufacturing cost going to those two companies. This is, as you hinted with statements about Sony, why MS announced that they are licensing technology from IBM, which should lead more people to believe they will be manufacturing the processors themselves (or outsourcing it) rather than having IBM produce processors for them as Intel does for the current XBox.
On the other hand, the success of the PS2 can probably be traced to GT3, GTA, Square, Metal Gear Solid 2, Onimusha, and a host of must-have games that were released before the Xbox hit its stride. People buy games and hardware to play those games, not hardware and games to play on that hardware.
Certainly for me it was a mix of Square, GT3, GTA3, and Tekken, not to mention backwards compatibility. That being said, I was not an early adopter of the PS2, and was disappointed with it's performance relative to the DreamCast which I had purchased shortly after release in 1999.
It goes a little further than that, though. You don't just have development companies that will sign exclusives with certain manufacturers. You also have each development house keeping all of it's own developers, artists, and designers in-house. If you want Carmack to work on your engine, you either have to be id Software or you have to license the engine from him. If you want Square's composer, you either have to be at Square, or setup a deal with Square to license music from him. The only other way you can go about it is to try to convince the person to leave the development house, and with non-compete clauses that can be pretty hard to do (ie look at EA and Ubisoft). Additionally, you have a handful of very large publishing houses that do most of the business in the industry, or, with consoles, everything goes through the console manufacturers as publishers. Some of the major publishers (EA, Sierra in the mid-/late-90s on the PC side, Microsoft, Sony, and even Nintendo on the console side) buy up development houses that they believe have done good work in the past rather than trying to hire on individual developers or license material from them.
There's a lot more room for independents in the games industry because of the lower barrier to entry than in the movie industry, but this has always been the case (and really the movie industry and even the music industry is seeing the barriers to industry fall rapidly as PCs and technology for digital music and movie recording and editing advance). At the same time, the barriers to entry are rising in the games industry for the first time in quite a while, and most people that make their way into more popular development houses get there through the community of the games those companies produce (by making mods) rather than by developing games from scratch on their own.
The above AC poster is mostly correct. The MPAA has trademarked every rating, and when they invented the rating system they had trademarked them as well. They never trademarked X because they figured that it would be used by film-makers that didn't want to go through the rating process, or wanted to create mature films. They didn't quite anticipate X becoming associated with the porn industry the way it did, and then created NC-17.
Because of the way trademark law works in the US, the MPAA would be forced to sue the ESRB if they used the film ratings. On further note, the M rating actually was part of the original MPAA ratings, but they changed it to clarify it with the R rating (meaning Restricted) because parents didn't understand it. Apparently, they still don't, but since the MPAA let the trademark go when they stopped using the M rating, it's a good choice for the ESRB (as, apparently, it was also the first to come to mind for the MPAA and actually makes sense).
So, in other words, the AC is right, except that it has nothing to do with copyright, but instead trademarks, and the ratings other than X were always trademarked by the MPAA. You can get the info at the MPAA's website if you want more details, including the year at which each rating was devised and trademarked, as well as the reasoning behind the symbols used.
hell, even when I was an infant toys were labelled with age suggestions. Did parents suddenly stop reading that stuff, or was it just my parents? My parents even helped me with my Legos the first few times to make sure I wasn't going to stick them in my mouth and choke on them before letting me play with them alone in my room (granted I was 4 and the labels said something like 6 or 7+). My GTA double pack box says "Mature 17+" with a big M under it right on the front cover, and those warning labels on the Legos were on the back in small print back then. Let's not forget the two half-naked slightly cartoonish women on the front cover, either. If the mature rating doesn't scare them off, nothing scares a parent off better than half-naked women. The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is almost taboo in many households.
This is exactly right. Why not impose the same penalties upon merchants for selling mature content to kids, as are imposed upon those who sell cigarettes and alcohol to minors? If the retailers had to pay these fines out of their own pockets, they probably would check the person's age the next time.
The question is this: would you apply those penalties across the board, or simply to games? Right now those penalties only apply to alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and pornography. There are no fines on merchants selling kids R-rated movies (or theaters letting them into those movies), music with explicit content labels, books with mature content, even magazines outside of porn. Where do you draw the line for the media that doesn't have explicit rating levels (ie M and AO for games and R and NC-17 for movies; it should be noted that most stores that don't have policies for R rated movies also don't have policies for NC-17 and unrated movies)?
Even the fines for selling cigarettes to minors were almost non-existent across most of the country 15 years ago. After enough Wal-Marts sell stickered albums to minors, are the states going to prevent Wal-Mart from selling stickered albums any more (ie like Wal-Mart is no longer allowed to sell firearms in California because they screwed up too many times, and the liquor licenses of stores and bars that sell alcohol to minors repeatedly are revoked)?
Seriously, though, you need to broaden your perspective a little bit if you find the current politicians (Democrats most emphatically included) in the US (and I can only assume from the rest of your comment that you are a USAan) left wing.
I just find it more interesting that he thinks the idea of controlling cryptography (or any technology for that matter) is not left wing.
When the Republicans give us medicare prescription drug plans we have to wonder if there even is still a right wing outside of the ultra-religious groups (many of which probably would still give us a medicare prescription drug plan).
The same is true in movies, but the point can be proven there much more easily. Watch Psycho (the original) or The Godfather and pay attention to what the music is doing for the scene.
A good developer, just like a good director, is going to use the music to set the scene, to introduce a character (and even to change a character), and to adjust the viewer/player's emotions.
Doom and Quake used music and sound to put people on edge, which is something that is missing from almost every FPS since the first Quake. Halo used music to give the player a sense of awe, especially when combined with the imagery (given, of course, that you played it when it first came out on the XBox rather than at it's PC release, after people became jaded by hype and not having it because of it's XBox-only status, and the entire genre had already taken from Halo and moved forward).
Many of the console franchises (especially Final Fantasy) rely heavily on re-use of previous musical themes, in part because it brings nostalgia on the part of long-time players, and because they already have an idea of which themes were successful from the earlier releases.
With music (and indeed much of what you hear), your brain fills in what it doesn't necessarily hear. This is especially true when you remember it later (or get it stuck in your head).
With graphics, your brain may fill in some detail, especially on primitive forms, but for the most part you become accustomed to a certain level of visual quality and your brain expects it. A good example would be to go back and look at movies with a lot of special effects, going back even 10 years would show major improvement in computer-generated effects, to the point where scenes that once looked amazing now look horribly dated.
Still, when you think of Mario, what image comes first? In my head it's the 8-bit NES SMB1 Mario, generally with the mushroom. It's certainly not the Mario I see in the various games I have on my GameCube, which I have to actually think about for a while to retrieve properly. When I think of Final Fantasy it's the NES version that comes to mind first, with FF7 coming to mind next. Many of the franchises that started on the PS1 tend to stick out in my mind in their most recent forms simply because the changes to the characters were mostly clarifying the details that could not be fleshed out on the PS1 hardware. The characters and franchises that pre-date 3d graphics, though, tend to stick in my head in the form with which I spent the most time.
And, while there was a mountain of hype and buzz surronding the first Halo, I recall very little hype for Half-Life.
Believe me, Valve learned from Half-Life (and TF2) when they decided not to say a word about Half-Life 2. HL was on the front page of every gaming magazine over a year before it's release because Valve started showing it off 6-12 months before deciding to scrap the engine and rewrite it (which delayed the game for a year), meaning that people were waiting for it to come out 2 or more years before it hit the shelves. Add in the hype about TF2 being either a mod or expansion pack for Half-Life, and you had an entire fan-base waiting for the game that didn't really care about Half-Life itself (and much of which still doesn't, or has cared even less since TF2 was announced as a seperate product about 3-6 months after HL's release).
He's currently working on Dungeon Siege 2, from what I've heard, which essentially means that only the dates, and perhaps some of the comments, are out of date. They still plan on making an RTS, but after DS2 rather than after DS1.
Another clue should have been all the stuff about hardware acceleration. An RTS with a free camera? How forward looking!
Yeah, more like a bunch of crap with the only exceptions being games like Homeworld in which it really is necessary to do the gameplay any justice. Even some of the free-roaming cameras cited as examples in the interviews sucked, like the Star Wars title mentioned. A fixed camera means you only have to solve the problem of units being behind obstacles (something that was a problem before engines were really 3D). With a user-controlled camera, developers often forget to solve this problem (because the user can just move the camera, right?), and don't even consider all of the problems associated with free-roaming cameras (gee, did I want the camera to raise up when going over the mountain, or did I want to look at the unit on top of the mountain from 2 inches above it because that was the level I set the camera at before I scrolled to the mountain?). The more time the user spends adjusting the camera, the less time they spend playing the game.
Personally I very much hope to see a 'Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic' sequel sometime next year. That game was excellent and a definite 'Game of the Year' in my book.
Personally, I hope not to see a sequel to KOTOR next year, because the original spent a great deal of time in development to become what it is. The last thing I want is some crap sequel spun off in 12 months to cash in on the success of the first one. Give me a sequel in 2-3 years, probably on the next generation XBox, that's truly deserving of the name KOTOR has made for itself.
I'm also hoping that Thief III doesn't get the Deus Ex: Invisible War treatment. Ion Storm already butchered one franchise with their oversimplified garbage.
I haven't played Invisible War yet, but Thief 3, in general, wasn't as complicated as Deus Ex, anyway. Sure, they could butcher it, but it wouldn't be in all of the same ways (unless they simply decided to do a retexturing job on Invisible War and push it out as Thief 3).
Slashdot Mirror
Another recent title which comes to mind is Max Payne 2 - that was definitely designed with Xbox/PC in mind, and the PS2 version is not so hot.
The first Max Payne looked like crap on the PS2 as well, and had horrible controls on that platform. IIRC the reason for it looking like crap was because they used lower quality textures to deal with the memory limits of the platform. AFAIK there was no excuse for the controls.
I really can't say I'm surprised that Max Payne 2 would look like crap on the PS2 given that it's the sequel to a game that looked like crap on the PS2. Either the hardware can't handle it, or the developer doesn't know how to make the hardware do it. It doesn't really matter which at this point, since Sony will just push the PS3 down the developers' throats within the next year.
Chart for the end of last year.
They sold ~98,400 XBox systems in Japan in 2003.
Chart for the week ending January 4th of this year.
They've sold ~3036 XBox systems in Japan in the first week of 2004, which, if it could be held constant, would mean a significant increase in sales for the year. I'm guessing that they'll come out with more sales this year, but not the 150,000 or so that the first week's numbers could indicate.
I'm pretty sure that he was referring to the Japanese game industry when talking about a decline. Since this is actually just 2 interviews translated and chopped up, it's hard to say whether or not that was clarified, but at the same time since the interviews were conducted in Japanese mags, it's more likely that the context of the interview would be enough to justify the lack of clarification.
;)
Anyway, the article does state:
Elsewhere in that same interview, Iwata reiterated his confidence in meeting sales targets for GameCube hardware, but was more pessimistic about the general fortunes of the Japanese games business. In the Japanese market, he said, sales of hardware have been declining over the last three years, and though software sales have been able to cover up that decline in the past, that's no longer possible now. While the overseas market still has a passion for playing games, Iwata explained, that's not the case in Japan, although Nintendo plans to play an important role in revitalizing the market in the coming year.
If you look at earlier portions of the article, he states that Cube sales doubled in Japan, but more than doubled in the rest of the world, showing that there's still a market in Japan that will respond to price drops, but unless the price drops were not as significant as elsewhere, it also shows that the market isn't as interested in the industry (of course, other economic factors are at work, as well).
Looking at Japanese sales figures for 2001, 2002, and 2003, you can see some trends such as more games selling over a million units in 2003, but the top-selling game for 2003 sold fewer units than the top-selling game for 2002, and the top-selling game for 2002 was the #2-selling game for 2003.
Overall, games seem to stay in the weekly top-selling lists for either a fairly long period of time or a very short period of time, with little falling in between. In other words, they sell extremely quickly to their core audience and probably receive mild reviews or little attention from those outside that core audience and disappear after the first week or two on the charts. Games with broader appeal and a more well-known name seem to stay in the charts indefinitely, even on fairly moderate weekly sales, as only new highly-awaited titles will shoot up the charts.
To put it another way, how good is the market when Pokemon Ruby & Sapphire was #1 in 2002, beaten out of #1 by FFX-2 in 2003 (by a small margin), and is still in the top 15 on the weekly charts a little over a week ago? Good for Nintendo to be able to maintain a title to almost 5 million sales in the Japanese market and hold the charts for 2 years, but everyone's released plenty of titles since then, and the North American charts reflect a much more friendly environment for new games, and a more moderate timeframe for successful games to stay on the charts through continued sales.
All of that being said, there could be some other more blatantly obvious explanation
Firstly, and most simply, age-restriction ratings on video games are having little actual effect. Either they are not being observed by retailers, or they are circumvented very easily in all the traditional ways. How they could be made more effective, or even if they should, is another question.
Well, the real question is should the ratings enforcement be increased through government action or community pressures on local retailers? Government action would put video games on a level that is reserved for porn in the rest of the entertainment industry, as there are no federal government regulations on movies, books, music, etc. outside of pornography.
Secondly, and more contentiously, there are indeed some few video games which are incredibly violent in a spectacularly brutal and callous way. Interaction does make for better learning than passive exposure, and it's intuitively the case that a steady diet of this material at young ages is probably having some malign effect on the more marginally sane in the population. This leads to the question: why do game companies and publishers produce such games?
Having a malign effect on the marginally sane (which is also to say the marginally insane) generally does not bar something from being produced for the completely sane. Every insane or marginally insane person is a little different, and what may or may not set them off is likewise different. Trying to sanitize culture for their benefit is generally the job of those treating their illness. So, more or less, the games are produced for those that can handle them, and it is the job of an individual's caretakers, or the individual themselves, to determine whether or not they can handle the material.
Video games can certainly be regarded as a form of creative art. And they're fun, too (or ought to be.) But they're also really expensive to produce these days, at least for any major title. I don't think any large publisher is going to pick up a title unless they feel it has a good chance of being a good seller. And so in turn, it must be that violence sells, even really nasty stuff.
Your last sentence is only true if there is a way of showing a correlation between violence and sales. In the top 20 best-selling games of all time, this is hardly the case, with Mario Bros. games holding most of the top 10 along with Tetris and the Sims. GTA:VC and Half-Life are the only games in the top 10 that could normally be considered violent, and the latter didn't have a public outcry associated with it (while the former is not nearly as violent as people make it out to be unless you choose to play it in a violent manner). GTA and first-person shooters are the rare cases where 'violent games' have managed, on occasion to get to the top of the charts. On the other hand, yes, they do sell as well as other games for many of the same reasons other games will sell well: if they are well-received by the gaming press and/or well-hyped before-hand. The PS2 and XBox combined sales of True Crime were roughly the same as the sales of Mario Kart in North America, despite the latter being released only on what is presented in the US press as the 3rd place console and nearly a failure for Nintendo. Everything in the top 15 in November had over $5 million in sales, which is nothing to sneeze at if you can get your game in there, so long as you don't spend $5 million making the game. 11 of the top 12 were over $10 million in sales (and both the exception in the top 12 and the lowest-by-dollar of the top 15 were GBA games, which sell for less per unit).
All of that being said, Mario Kart was at the top of the November charts, and only (at that time) sold just under 528,000 units. Compare that to the number of units most other popular media sells. The reason this is such a big business is because each of those units sells for $50 instead of $20 or $30 and in many cases cost less to produce. The game publishers never bet on a 100% success rate with the titles they produce, either. Many of them
I agree with you except on 2 points:
1) The XBox isn't a substandard piece of hardware, as can be seen in any number of multi-platform games that were actually developed by someone willing to take the time to take advantage of the hardware.
2) The TG-16 was competing with the NES, Genesis, and, later (though at that point the TG-16 was out of the race) the SNES. Hardware-wise, the TG-16 was in many ways superior, but it was quite obvious that NEC didn't have the name recognition in the US and they didn't have the titles for the US market.
In the end, though, there have always been niche markets and consoles that just didn't make sense. Even when it was the NES and the SMS, there was, eventually, a new Atari system available. There was also the Atari Jaguar, and the 3DO, and a few other niche consoles that some people may or may not remember (I remember in particular one that used VHS tapes to deliver what were basically interactive movies, but I don't recall it's name or price).
Handhelds have shown what we all pretty much knew from the Neo-Geo: even superior technology isn't going to justify a higher price, and sometimes older technology is superior simply because it better suits the target audience (ie longer battery life and lower cost to the consumer).
The CD drive in the Playstation sucked ass in terms of it's read time, but in the end it proved that developers would utilize disc-based formats and that it could be used to deliver superior visuals even if the hardware in the system is not superior, and, as you said, that people would wait for a loading screen, even on a console.
While you may be one of the sad, sad fans of the Dreamcast, you have forgotten a major reason for Sega exiting the hardware business.
The hardware business is expensive, and Sega ran out of money. That's all there is to it, no 'sony lied about sega' or 'sony slept with segas wife' or any other crap. After the horrible debacle that started with the 32X and SegaCD, they never really got their footing back. The 32X was a financial disaster, probably second only to the ET cartridges made by Atari. The Sega Saturn never really took hold and the 3d hardware was inadequate (not to mention seriously lacking in developer support). I mean, come on, it couldn't even do transparencies. That's sad. Even the 2d games on the Saturn had to use horrible cross-hatching from the 8 bit nintendo days (since the snes could do hardware transparencies and blending).
You're completely ignoring, though, that the hardware business, especially for Sega, was not just consoles. Sega also had a severe problem in the arcade hardware side of things, especially with Sony (and now Microsoft) making arcade cabinets that offered easy porting to the home console(s). Sega tried to do the same thing, but their primary customer was themselves, and their games weren't doing as well against the juggernaut of Sony 3rd parties and Sony's marketing.
Sega was losing on more fronts than just the home consoles, and the Dreamcast didn't do well in Sega's home (Japan) until after they cancelled it, despite strong US sales.
Sony absolutely put on the massive marketing blitz for the PS2 when the Dreamcast launched, despite it being nearly a year before the release of the PS2, and when PS2s were pretty much unavailable at the launch of the system, Sony kept the marketing going through the DC's end-of-life and kept going because Microsoft and Nintendo were launching their consoles. We certainly never saw ads in movie theaters for consoles that weren't due out for over a year (if we saw them at all) before Sony started hedging their bets on the PS2 hardware.
Personally, I own all 4 of this generation's consoles, and the Dreamcast is certainly the saddest case, being somewhere in between the Cube and the XBox graphically, yet having been shelved by their own manufacturer due to no fault of the console itself.
To continue this off-topic tangent just a little further, I agree that the big Xbox controller (the "Duke" - I've never heard that, good one) has a decent shape, but the face-button placement (particularly the black and white buttons) and shapes were awful. The S version, on the other hand, I consider my favorite console controller, despite my big hands.
Oddly enough, I consider the face-button placement on the S controller to be a significant issue preventing me from ever using it, and besides the size is the primary reason I bought the larger controller (I bought my XBox a little over a year ago, so it came with the S controller). On the other hand, the larger controller is almost perfect, though the black and white buttons do feel somewhat out of place (though still better than the S, the main problem I have with the S is the start and select buttons).
Of course, since I've mostly been playing Crimson Skies and PGR2 lately, I haven't had to worry too much about the black and white buttons. I'd also add that the idea of colour-coding the buttons probably wasn't the best, as I can never remember which is which without looking down, though the PS2's shapes are no better.
This all seemed to make sense. Videogames were primarly seen as a kids thing. Adults didn't play them, by and large. Well Sony decided that adults would like to play games, and released lots of adult target titles. Funny thing, turns out adults have more money than kids and hence can spend more on games.
This is what people widely seem to believe, but it's only partially right. If you look at Sony's strategy with the PS1, you'll see that they weren't targeting adults just for the sake of targeting adults, or even by going for mature-rated games. They were going strictly after Nintendo's original fanbase, those that played the NES and maybe the SNES. Those people that played the original NES as kids were generally born between the mid-70s and early-80s, meaning that they were teenagers or in their early 20s when the PS1 came out. In order to appeal to NES gamers, they went after the companies (other than Nintendo) that made the games kids played on the NES. This meant Capcom, Konami, Square, (Enix in Japan) and many others that did 3rd party games for Nintendo. It meant Metal Gear, Final Fantasy, Castlevania, and any title that did really well on the NES that wasn't made by Nintendo themselves. It also meant targeting the arcade developers, because the kids that played NES games were playing in the arcades at the time, thereby targeting Sega's 3rd party developers as well (because Sega was always strong in the arcades and arcade ports on their consoles).
Additionally, they went with a strong push towards 3D games only, and Nintendo, at the time, did not have a 3D console, as the N64 came out a few years after the PS1. Also, although Nintendo had loosened up on their content restrictions after the mess with Mortal Kombat, many of the 3rd parties were still concerned about those restrictions, so they had games on the design boards that weren't slated for a Nintendo console for this reason. Nintendo did have a handful of mature games on the SNES, and another handful on the N64, but Sony had already signed a number of exclusive contracts with many of these 3rd parties for titles that those 3rd parties had thought wouldn't get by Nintendo's censors, or wouldn't have worked on a Nintendo console at the time. Between pulling ahead by releasing a "32-bit" console in the middle of the 16-bit generation (and perhaps Nintendo rode the 16-bit generation a bit long when they skipped to "64-bit"), pushing for 3D graphics the SNES couldn't handle, and signing exclusivity deals with companies that were worried about censors, or moving towards 3D themselves, or worried about cartridge limitations (Square, specifically), Sony sucked up a lot of the 3rd parties that were Nintendo's bread & butter. By making their console a valid method for easy arcade ports, they also sucked up a lot of Sega's 3rd parties, pulling in Namco's Tekken and Soul Blade/Edge lines, for example.
Once they had all of this in place they also pushed the "games for adults" angle, knowing full well that the age group they were going for in Nintendo's original NES market was also the group most concerned with perceptions, as most 13-21 year-olds tend to be. What they knew when they started, though, was that not only was this age group the group that originally played the NES, but they were also the group with the largest expendable income. If the games targeted them well, they could pull in a larger audience than the NES had, and that's exactly what happened. The PS1 opened a larger market to games by aiming at this age group's insecurities as well as offernig games that were familiar to those that had played games as kids. Most of Nintendo's 3rd parties didn't really change their games beyond the shift to 3D and some gameplay enhancements, and neither did Nintendo. It was simply that most of the "adult-oriented" games were given an "edge" by the more realistic graphics capabilities, and a willingness by both developers and the console's developer to push the boundaries. Nintendo's games were always somewhat less violent than their 3rd
People are always going to pirate games. It's just too easy to copy 1s and 0s. I think the solution is the opposite of what the game industry is doing: Sell me more than the disc. I want physical items that are worth more to me, such as a big thick manual, maps, posters, maybe even a player's guide, right in the same box with the shiny disc. I would imagine I'm not alone on this and that if gamers received something more tangible than a disc with their $50, perhaps they would be more inclined to purchase.
I'd also add this: if I'm going to buy a game for $50 and I'm not supposed to copy it, the least they could do is supply a decent jewel case. This is especially a problem with multi-disc releases, such as NWN and UT2k3, both of which had the discs in little paper envelopes. I don't even mind the cardboard-like cases, as long as they have the plastic holders for the discs rather than just having sleeves, because the sleeves themselves scratch the discs.
Considering that I have a box and a half full of game manuals and other stuff that came with games back in the 90s, I don't mind so much that I don't get a lot of extra stuff in the box. However, I do mind that I have to buy stacks of jewel cases when the games should come with them. Sell them to me in DVD cases for all I care, I just want the discs protected to some degree beyond a dust cover.
Beyond that, there isn't a disc that can't be copied out there somehow, otherwise it wouldn't have been distributable on any significant scale. Almost anything you can do on a CD that can be read in a CD-ROM drive can be mimicked by a CD-R drive with the right software. Just protect the discs you ship and go after the people that are really pirating your games. I'm sick of downloading CD-cracks to make games playable and I'm even more sick of copying disc 3 of 5 for my friend who found out this one disc in the game wouldn't play because you shipped it in cheap packaging. Nothing better than a game with so much obvious expense at least in the artwork (to take up 5 discs) being sold in such cheap packaging that there's a 10-20% failure rate of the discs.
Finally, your "per-game basis" line is incorrect. EA's entire line of sports games supports a single buddy list and you can see what people you know are online even if you are playing Madden and they are playing NBA Live.
To correct his statement, then, you're looking at, at best, a "per-developer" or "per-publisher" basis. Personally, EA's already lost any money I might have spent on their console games by making their online play PS2-only. At the very least they could've used the same online services for GameCube play, as the only substantial difference between Nintendo and Sony in terms of the online package is that Sony is advertising and pushing online capability.
The XBox's biggest advantage in online play outside of the services provided by Live is the variety of games available for online play. EA cuts into that a little by making their online play PS2-only, but overall most of the games they offer have at least 1 equivalent on the XBox with Live capability (exceptions would probably be the Sims and Tony Hawk series). It's actually a really stark contrast to the single-player gaming experiences on the two platforms, where the PS2 clearly offers more diversity.
All of that being said, I'll buy the next generation consoles as the titles I want become available, just as I did in this generation. Right now, the only PS2 games I buy are PS2 exclusives, and most of the XBox games I buy are multi-console releases (though I've mostly been playing Crimson Skies and Project Gotham Racing 2 lately). Obviously that puts the GameCube in the same boat as the PS2, buying mostly exclusives for that platform, and I've been trading in my DreamCast titles as I've been able to replace them on other consoles (or with sequels that are similar or superior enough to keep me from playing the DC versions).
Dependable quality of service? Have you checked your service agreement? Does MS make any guarantees regarding service?
I don't know, I'm just asking because I am curious.
Of course not, because they can't control the line between you and them. You can't even get a guarantee on your QoS from your ISP, unless you pay business rates which guarantee a maximum downtime except in event of inclimate weather or act of god.
To draw a logical conclusion from your statement, in order for your choice of candidate to be voted in, something like, oh, a literacy test would have to be instituted?
I thought the votes in Florida showed that the ballot is a literacy test.
Attention Rockstar Games, GTA 6 should be in Vegas, a casino enforcer type on the strip.
Great, so what does that leave for 4 and 5?
Rockstar was pretty adamant about Vice City not being GTA 4, and I wouldn't be surprised, if they do go through with San Andreas, that it would not be GTA 4, either.
Touche, kind of. Pioneer's actually has a street price $41 dollors cheaper than the PSX.
heh, the price on Pioneer's website (linked from that review) is $200 more than listed in the review. Then again, they have a model with a smaller hard drive that's listed at $999.
My arguement agaisn't the PSX applies to products like the Pioneer as well (to a lesser degree), the Pioneer at basically just adding 1 function to an existing device though whereas this monster from Sony is attempting something much more delicate. Price wise though, I do have to admit you got me.
I really don't know enough about the PSX to know whether they're simply adding a PSX to the package or actually using the PS2's processor to do some of the work for the TiVo functionality. Other than that, it's basically the same as the Pioneer device with a PS2 for free. Adding DVD-burning to a TiVo is a logical step forward rather than a major combination device, and most of the other functions come for free when you put a DVD writer on the system.
That being said, I'll most likely be building my own DVR rather than buying an off-the-shelf item. Not necessarily because it'll save me any money, but rather because I can get what I want, have some flexibility, and have a bit of fun putting it together.
Check the price of TiVos with DVD-R functionality. The PSX is actually slightly cheaper than Pioneer's TiVo DVD-R product.
Sony's intimate knowledge of the parts and the manufacturing has allowed them to combine silicon, cutting down on overall size and costs. Likewise, the only profittaking is from Sony, and with fewer hands in the pot the margins can be shrunk. Unfortunately for Microsoft, using off-the-shelf parts from different manufacturers ensured that they needed the cooperation (and credits) from different companies. Nvidia, for example, gets a cut on the sales of the hardware, not from the software like ATI gets from Nintendo. Microsoft similarly needs to use faster hardware in their machines as they aren't exactly console-optimized. The 'Cube, again, can get away with running on much slower (read, cheaper) hardware, because it would be a terrible webserver. Say what you will about the XBox OS, it's hardware and interfaces were not originally developed with gaming in mind.
You're forgetting (or didn't know) a few things about the XBox hardware, though. The CPU, motherboard, video, and sound were modified and/or designed for the XBox. In fact, nVidia gets as big a cut of the XBox as it does because it designed the motherboard (a derivative of which became the nForce, which, oddly enough, was originally for AMD chips). The CPU was modified heavily in it's design not only to fit the specs for the chipset, but also to fit the needs of a console. All of this is why Microsoft has been able to reduce manufacturing costs on the console, but at the same time their payments to nVidia and Intel have not changed, thereby sticking them with a rather large percentage of the manufacturing cost going to those two companies. This is, as you hinted with statements about Sony, why MS announced that they are licensing technology from IBM, which should lead more people to believe they will be manufacturing the processors themselves (or outsourcing it) rather than having IBM produce processors for them as Intel does for the current XBox.
On the other hand, the success of the PS2 can probably be traced to GT3, GTA, Square, Metal Gear Solid 2, Onimusha, and a host of must-have games that were released before the Xbox hit its stride. People buy games and hardware to play those games, not hardware and games to play on that hardware.
Certainly for me it was a mix of Square, GT3, GTA3, and Tekken, not to mention backwards compatibility. That being said, I was not an early adopter of the PS2, and was disappointed with it's performance relative to the DreamCast which I had purchased shortly after release in 1999.
It goes a little further than that, though. You don't just have development companies that will sign exclusives with certain manufacturers. You also have each development house keeping all of it's own developers, artists, and designers in-house. If you want Carmack to work on your engine, you either have to be id Software or you have to license the engine from him. If you want Square's composer, you either have to be at Square, or setup a deal with Square to license music from him. The only other way you can go about it is to try to convince the person to leave the development house, and with non-compete clauses that can be pretty hard to do (ie look at EA and Ubisoft). Additionally, you have a handful of very large publishing houses that do most of the business in the industry, or, with consoles, everything goes through the console manufacturers as publishers. Some of the major publishers (EA, Sierra in the mid-/late-90s on the PC side, Microsoft, Sony, and even Nintendo on the console side) buy up development houses that they believe have done good work in the past rather than trying to hire on individual developers or license material from them.
There's a lot more room for independents in the games industry because of the lower barrier to entry than in the movie industry, but this has always been the case (and really the movie industry and even the music industry is seeing the barriers to industry fall rapidly as PCs and technology for digital music and movie recording and editing advance). At the same time, the barriers to entry are rising in the games industry for the first time in quite a while, and most people that make their way into more popular development houses get there through the community of the games those companies produce (by making mods) rather than by developing games from scratch on their own.
The above AC poster is mostly correct. The MPAA has trademarked every rating, and when they invented the rating system they had trademarked them as well. They never trademarked X because they figured that it would be used by film-makers that didn't want to go through the rating process, or wanted to create mature films. They didn't quite anticipate X becoming associated with the porn industry the way it did, and then created NC-17.
Because of the way trademark law works in the US, the MPAA would be forced to sue the ESRB if they used the film ratings. On further note, the M rating actually was part of the original MPAA ratings, but they changed it to clarify it with the R rating (meaning Restricted) because parents didn't understand it. Apparently, they still don't, but since the MPAA let the trademark go when they stopped using the M rating, it's a good choice for the ESRB (as, apparently, it was also the first to come to mind for the MPAA and actually makes sense).
So, in other words, the AC is right, except that it has nothing to do with copyright, but instead trademarks, and the ratings other than X were always trademarked by the MPAA. You can get the info at the MPAA's website if you want more details, including the year at which each rating was devised and trademarked, as well as the reasoning behind the symbols used.
hell, even when I was an infant toys were labelled with age suggestions. Did parents suddenly stop reading that stuff, or was it just my parents? My parents even helped me with my Legos the first few times to make sure I wasn't going to stick them in my mouth and choke on them before letting me play with them alone in my room (granted I was 4 and the labels said something like 6 or 7+). My GTA double pack box says "Mature 17+" with a big M under it right on the front cover, and those warning labels on the Legos were on the back in small print back then. Let's not forget the two half-naked slightly cartoonish women on the front cover, either. If the mature rating doesn't scare them off, nothing scares a parent off better than half-naked women. The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is almost taboo in many households.
This is exactly right. Why not impose the same penalties upon merchants for selling mature content to kids, as are imposed upon those who sell cigarettes and alcohol to minors? If the retailers had to pay these fines out of their own pockets, they probably would check the person's age the next time.
The question is this: would you apply those penalties across the board, or simply to games? Right now those penalties only apply to alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and pornography. There are no fines on merchants selling kids R-rated movies (or theaters letting them into those movies), music with explicit content labels, books with mature content, even magazines outside of porn. Where do you draw the line for the media that doesn't have explicit rating levels (ie M and AO for games and R and NC-17 for movies; it should be noted that most stores that don't have policies for R rated movies also don't have policies for NC-17 and unrated movies)?
Even the fines for selling cigarettes to minors were almost non-existent across most of the country 15 years ago. After enough Wal-Marts sell stickered albums to minors, are the states going to prevent Wal-Mart from selling stickered albums any more (ie like Wal-Mart is no longer allowed to sell firearms in California because they screwed up too many times, and the liquor licenses of stores and bars that sell alcohol to minors repeatedly are revoked)?
Seriously, though, you need to broaden your perspective a little bit if you find the current politicians (Democrats most emphatically included) in the US (and I can only assume from the rest of your comment that you are a USAan) left wing.
I just find it more interesting that he thinks the idea of controlling cryptography (or any technology for that matter) is not left wing.
When the Republicans give us medicare prescription drug plans we have to wonder if there even is still a right wing outside of the ultra-religious groups (many of which probably would still give us a medicare prescription drug plan).
The same is true in movies, but the point can be proven there much more easily. Watch Psycho (the original) or The Godfather and pay attention to what the music is doing for the scene.
A good developer, just like a good director, is going to use the music to set the scene, to introduce a character (and even to change a character), and to adjust the viewer/player's emotions.
Doom and Quake used music and sound to put people on edge, which is something that is missing from almost every FPS since the first Quake. Halo used music to give the player a sense of awe, especially when combined with the imagery (given, of course, that you played it when it first came out on the XBox rather than at it's PC release, after people became jaded by hype and not having it because of it's XBox-only status, and the entire genre had already taken from Halo and moved forward).
Many of the console franchises (especially Final Fantasy) rely heavily on re-use of previous musical themes, in part because it brings nostalgia on the part of long-time players, and because they already have an idea of which themes were successful from the earlier releases.
With music (and indeed much of what you hear), your brain fills in what it doesn't necessarily hear. This is especially true when you remember it later (or get it stuck in your head).
With graphics, your brain may fill in some detail, especially on primitive forms, but for the most part you become accustomed to a certain level of visual quality and your brain expects it. A good example would be to go back and look at movies with a lot of special effects, going back even 10 years would show major improvement in computer-generated effects, to the point where scenes that once looked amazing now look horribly dated.
Still, when you think of Mario, what image comes first? In my head it's the 8-bit NES SMB1 Mario, generally with the mushroom. It's certainly not the Mario I see in the various games I have on my GameCube, which I have to actually think about for a while to retrieve properly. When I think of Final Fantasy it's the NES version that comes to mind first, with FF7 coming to mind next. Many of the franchises that started on the PS1 tend to stick out in my mind in their most recent forms simply because the changes to the characters were mostly clarifying the details that could not be fleshed out on the PS1 hardware. The characters and franchises that pre-date 3d graphics, though, tend to stick in my head in the form with which I spent the most time.
And, while there was a mountain of hype and buzz surronding the first Halo, I recall very little hype for Half-Life.
Believe me, Valve learned from Half-Life (and TF2) when they decided not to say a word about Half-Life 2. HL was on the front page of every gaming magazine over a year before it's release because Valve started showing it off 6-12 months before deciding to scrap the engine and rewrite it (which delayed the game for a year), meaning that people were waiting for it to come out 2 or more years before it hit the shelves. Add in the hype about TF2 being either a mod or expansion pack for Half-Life, and you had an entire fan-base waiting for the game that didn't really care about Half-Life itself (and much of which still doesn't, or has cared even less since TF2 was announced as a seperate product about 3-6 months after HL's release).
He's currently working on Dungeon Siege 2, from what I've heard, which essentially means that only the dates, and perhaps some of the comments, are out of date. They still plan on making an RTS, but after DS2 rather than after DS1.
Another clue should have been all the stuff about hardware acceleration. An RTS with a free camera? How forward looking!
Yeah, more like a bunch of crap with the only exceptions being games like Homeworld in which it really is necessary to do the gameplay any justice. Even some of the free-roaming cameras cited as examples in the interviews sucked, like the Star Wars title mentioned. A fixed camera means you only have to solve the problem of units being behind obstacles (something that was a problem before engines were really 3D). With a user-controlled camera, developers often forget to solve this problem (because the user can just move the camera, right?), and don't even consider all of the problems associated with free-roaming cameras (gee, did I want the camera to raise up when going over the mountain, or did I want to look at the unit on top of the mountain from 2 inches above it because that was the level I set the camera at before I scrolled to the mountain?). The more time the user spends adjusting the camera, the less time they spend playing the game.
Personally I very much hope to see a 'Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic' sequel sometime next year. That game was excellent and a definite 'Game of the Year' in my book.
Personally, I hope not to see a sequel to KOTOR next year, because the original spent a great deal of time in development to become what it is. The last thing I want is some crap sequel spun off in 12 months to cash in on the success of the first one. Give me a sequel in 2-3 years, probably on the next generation XBox, that's truly deserving of the name KOTOR has made for itself.
I'm also hoping that Thief III doesn't get the Deus Ex: Invisible War treatment. Ion Storm already butchered one franchise with their oversimplified garbage.
I haven't played Invisible War yet, but Thief 3, in general, wasn't as complicated as Deus Ex, anyway. Sure, they could butcher it, but it wouldn't be in all of the same ways (unless they simply decided to do a retexturing job on Invisible War and push it out as Thief 3).