My girlfriend is 22, and spends some serious time on each Pokemon game (though I will note that she doesn't pay attention to anything else Pokemon-related, and she doesn't bother with each version of the game (ie she has red, gold, and ruby, but not blue/silver/sapphire, etc)). It's one of the few games she plays rather seriously (Animal Crossing is another).
I've considered giving it a run myself just to see why she spends so much time with it, but frankly I have enough games to play without picking up another series that might be hopelessly addicting.
One of the big issues we addressed was a problem with losing progress in the single player game if you adjusted settings in multiplayer. You should now feel free to adjust all the settings in multiplayer without worrying about affecting your single player game.
Other fixes we've provided in the AutoUpdate include:
Made Invert settings persistent for all controllers.
Updated to the latest and greatest Xbox libraries (new and shiny is always good).
Fixed incorrect turret scoring in multiplayer (kills and deaths were not always scored correctly).
Fixed a sporadic hard lock in the stats screen that occurred when the trigger was pressed.
This is a situation that the makers of Deus Ex2 probably submitted footage MORE harsh than the average.
They're supposed to submit the worst possible footage, so it's quite possible in a game like Deus Ex 2 or many other games that most players will never see why an M rating was given. That doesn't mean, however, that the rating wasn't justified. That being said, they still submit the final game so that the ESRB can make sure the footage was representative of the actual game, and the rating and comments are displayed properly on the package.
I don't think that this is 'exclusive'. If other entertainment companies want to donate, I'm sure the military will take it.
That's pretty much what I was getting at. The article clearly states that MS donated the stuff, and there's nothing stopping Sony or Nintendo from making matching donations. I'm sure MS gets a tax writeoff, as well.
The movie companies actually do something like this (not with kids), they will send people to theaters to make sure their movies are actually running and the sales figures reported by the theaters are close to a head count in the actual theater. I'm not saying the ESRB or whoever should do this now. But if push comes to shove it beats government intervention.
This, though, is quite different from making sure they're enforcing ratings, as the movie companies don't check ratings enforcement at all (and the only one that has any real idea of enforcement attached to it is NC-17). The music industry does the same thing: each company has a number of people that go to music stores in various areas to make sure they're displaying the right posters and have enough copies of certain CDs on the shelves, and that CDs that are supposed to be placed in highly visible areas actually are. Personally, I tend to think it's a good thing the games industry isn't doing this, as I feel it's giving the industry a little too much pull in the day-to-day operations of the retailers.
Additionally, the music and movie industries actually hire people to do this and these people usually interact with the retailers (and theater owners) to make sure things stay the way the companies want them to be. What you're proposing is more along the lines of what the police do to catch retailers selling cigarettes, alcohol, and porn to minors. That, combined with the added cost on games, is why I would say 'fuck off'.
More importantly, shouldn't there a bidding war to do this the the USO? There doesn't seem to be competition to win a bid to do this and MS is getting a pass without any competition. It doesn't seem fair to the taxpayers.
How, exactly, would one bid on something like this? MS bids to give each center 17 XBoxes and 3 games per box, Sony bids to give each center 20 PS2s and 4 games per box?
Read the article, MS donated the XBoxes, games, and monitors. If Sony and Nintendo want to donate games, consoles, and TVs/monitors, they should feel free.
I actually had a Wal-Mart register stop 4 times on a checker when I was buying 5 items in the electronics section and she never once checked my ID. Then again, the only thing anyone normally checks my ID for is cigarettes (state law in both California and Virginia requires an ID check until the checker thinks you're 40 or some crap). Hell, she didn't even check my ID when I paid with a credit card.
1. Adopt the same rating system as the MPAA and keep the ratings systems the same, this way parents can't complain they don't know what the ratings mean.
The movie ratings are trademarks of the MPAA, so using their system, under current IP law, is inviting a lawsuit from the MPAA. Even if the government forced them to use the ratings, the MPAA would be suing the government, or lose their trademarks (making them useless as rating tools, as anyone could put the G on their movie without submitting it for rating).
2. Make retailers sign an agreement where they must check for ID on any game that is rated NC-17/R. Failure to do so will results in a fine, $500 for the first offense, $1000 for the second offense, etc.
Why is this any different than the law he's proposing? Except maybe for the fact that your second offense is the maximum penalty (well, there's a year in jail too) under the law.
3. Hire 16-17 year olds as "checkers" to go to the stores and try to buy games. Raise the price on every game sold in North America 25-50 cents to cover the price of these checkers. Eventually, the fines may cover the cost of checkers.
At this point I'm inclined to say 'f*** off', but for the sake of the argument, how many checkers do you think they'll have to hire to do this, and how often should they be checking? Also, how are you going to rotate the checkers so that retailers don't know them on site after their first run?
4. All the game publishing companies need to make a group like the MPAA and the RIAA (yeah, I know they are evil but...) to lobby against government laws against them. It's sad, but in todays world that is what a big industry has to do to survive.
They already have this, they are simply not as big (in terms of politics) as the MPAA or the RIAA. Furthermore, because California is the home state for both of those organizations, but probably not for the games industry (The ESA is based in Washington DC as far as I can tell). Of note, though, is that of the three groups, the games industry is the only one that actually spun off their ratings board as an independent entity (ESRB), yet they're the ones taking the flack.
Maybe they can't use the same letters because MPAA has them copyrighted? (I don't know if they do, just hypothesizing)
From the MPAA's ratings website: The rating system trademarked all the category symbols, except the X. Under the plan, anyone not submitting his or her film for rating could self apply the X or any other symbol or description, except those trademarked by the rating program.
Note: at the time the rating system was G, M, R, and X, with M being Mature, but allowing all ages, the rough equivalent of PG. They later revised M to GP, then to PG, because people were confused by the M rating (thinking it was a step above R). In 1984 they added PG-13. In 1990 they added the NC-17 rating to specify movies that had been rated by the MPAA, but were not approved for anyone under 18 (X was never trademarked so that it could be used by people that did not want to submit to the ratings, but was basically taken over by the adult film industry, not exactly what the MPAA intended, so NC-17 is trademarked as well).
By law, you have to enforce trademarks to keep them, so using the movie industry's ratings would be inviting a lawsuit from the MPAA.
Besides... look at the back of the box, there's a breakdown of everything objectionable in the game. I am willing to believe that the parents who feign ignorance are really striving for it, or they just can't tell their kids "no" so checking for graphic content would be a futile pursuit
Exactly, and the MPAA did the same thing with the R rated films back in 1990, and has since added the descriptions to PG-13, PG, and NC-17 movies because, in their words, they 'believed it would be useful to parents to know a little more about that film's content before they allowed their children to accompany them [to R rated films]'. Even the R rating has always been about letting parents know what they're in for, and asking parents to attend with their children rather than just sending them off to the movies. The M rating for games should be viewed the same way, asking parents to play the game with their children, or at the very least pay attention to the game to know what their children are exposed to.
It's a good thing some of the earliest 3d texturemapped games (wolfenstein, doom, etc) didn't get patents, or there would probably be a lot fewer 3D games today.
Considering that most of the 3D games available today use technology licensed from the developers of those games, your point is a bit weaker than it should be. We'd be missing ummm Unreal and the crap that Monolith spews out every once in a while, and Deus Ex. Not to mention that there's prior art when it comes to Wolf3D and Doom (for instance, Ultima Underworld, Golgo 13, and I'm sure someone else can come up with a couple dozen other games that used 1st person viewpoints).
Nintendo's marketting is really pissing me off. I own a GBSPA and I don't regret it, but their shameless attempts to make you buy extra crap for it is infuriating, because they cheat and make things that have no technical reason to require a Gamecube, or a Gameboy, have them.
You're right, sometimes there's no technical reason for the requirements, though there may be asthetic reasons. For instance, with FF:CC you probably don't want to stop the game every time one player needs to access a menu when playing in multiplayer. Or, in this case, you don't want every player to see what a single player is doing when he's in another part of the map collecting gems that may give him a lead in the competetive portion of the game.
I might have bought the Mario games, rehashes that they are, but I'm ticked off that to truly use everything on the cart, I have to shell out for a e-Reader. Why? No technical reason, just that Nintendo wants to sell you an e-Reader.
OK, so even though there are 4 Mario GBA games, you're ticked off that one of them has e-Reader compatability that allows them to add extra stuff that isn't part of the game that's on the cart? As far as I've been able to tell, none of the other Mario games have e-Reader functionality, and nothing on the e-Reader cards for SMB3 was in SMB3 to begin with.
It backfired; now I'm considering getting a flash ROM for the GB and putting the Nintendo emulator on it instead. To hell with that crap.
And you'll get, *gasp*, the exact game you could've gotten if you just bought the cart (without the e-Reader), except that you'll be doing it through emulation. Personally, I never owned a copy of SMB3, so I'll stay on the legal side and buy the GBA cart. Then again, I bought an e-Reader the same day I bought my GameCube, to mess around with in Animal Crossing (which really didn't need the e-Reader, as you could just use codes to get most of the stuff on the cards).
So here's another game that sounds like it should be playable with just two Gameboys but requires a Gamecube (probably). I am not impressed here at all.
Four Swords (w/ Link to the Past) for GBA works fine with just 2 GBAs. This is the GameCube version of Four Swords, which has some changes and a couple of extra games thrown in. I don't know how you could own a GBA-SP and never have seen the GBA version of the game before...
Not going to stop buying games for my GB but I find myself avoiding Nintendo's first-party games like the plague. I don't have a GameCube, I'm not going to get a GameCube, I don't want a GameCube. (I have a PS2 and if I get a second console it'll be an XBox... or considering the likely timing of that purchase, an XBox 2 if it's reverse-compatible at all.)
So don't buy a GameCube. They're not doing anything to GBA games that requires a Cube. They're just doing a hell of a lot to Cube games that requires a GBA. Good luck with the XBox, I know I'm really enjoying mine between rounds of Mario Kart. I highly recommend Crimson Skies, but if you have a PC there's not much else I can recommend for the system (except the multi-console titles).
This law would work the same way, except the salesperson making $5/hour would be looking at $1000 and a year in jail for the maximum penalty (with state prison for that year for repeat offenders), because the law is actually just adding to an existing law, with no change to the punishment, which currently covers pornography and cigarettes.
The most obvious question is when did violent games become equivalent to porn and tobacco? The next question is why is it only video games, but then that is obvious: California would shoot down anything involving music or movies this stringent (and vague), but the politicians don't believe that the video game companies have as strong a lobby as the movie and music businesses (and they're probably right, especially in California).
I found a few more objectionable things about Mr. Lee's statements, such as the following:
We can also point to the testimony of criminals as further proof. We know that the Columbine killers compared their intended crimes to the game Doom. Earlier this year, a group of Oakland teenagers went on crime spree, stealing cars and committing several murders. One of the perpetrators was quoted as saying, "We played the game by day and lived it by night." The scientific community has put it very simply -- the debate is over.
1) We don't know much at all about the Columbine killers because they are dead. They may have made comparisons to Doom in order to plan their crimes, but in the end, they killed themselves and no one knows any real reasons for their actions. Besides that, one of them was 18, and Doom existed before the current rating system was widely used (and was an old game by the time of Columbine).
2) 'We played the game by day and lived it by night', well, that's very nice, but if he's referring to GTA, you're looking at a game (GTA:VC) that has sold millions of copies, and yet only had a couple of people claim that they were copying it. We'd be living in hell if there was true causality at work here.
3)The scientific community is not united on this matter, and this is not some media conspiracy to prevent people from finding out that violent games may cause violence. If anything, the reverse is true, because before Columbine it was quite easy to find one study saying the reverse for every study saying what he's quoted, yet it's become harder to find even pre-existing studies every day. Not to mention that a scientific study should prove it's hypothesis, and not many psychologists have been starting with the hypothesis that violence does not beget violence these days.
4) As he is a politician, the final line may disturb me the most: '-- the debate is over'. Sorry Mr. Lee, the debate is never over, and you should know that. You don't try to pass laws and declare the debate over, because the debate will have to continue in order to make sure your laws are not only effective at doing what you intend, but also are not stopping people from getting Constitutionally-protected material.
Furthermore, he says on one hand that the law will not just cover Mature and Adult Only material, but also some Teen material, yet states that it will be easy for retailers to determine what should be seperated from the rest. The wording that he quotes is so vague that you could find some E material to be covered, yet retailers are supposed to be able to do this easily...
Yeah, FFX-2 came out about 2 weeks ago. Silent Hill 3 has been out for quite a while as well.
Personally, I think the website's list has just shortened to a new server, though that could just be my connection burning. The XBox list contained a few notoriously bad games, so I can't see much hope for the remaining lists.
Re:TF a Halflife mod?
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NYT on Game Mods
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· Score: 2, Informative
Valve hired the developers of TF to make TF2, and eventually we ended up with a TF2 dev cycle that is nearing DNF, but they also developed TF Classic for Half-Life, which is somewhat similar to the original Quake mod (Valve also eventually released a DM Classic mod which is similar to Quake DM). TFC was released around the same time as the first SDK for Half-Life, basically as a way of showing off what could be done with the SDK and the HL engine. TFC itself has also been updated several times during it's life, including a re-incarnation of the engineer's teleport pads.
Re:Of course it's not a coincidence
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NYT on Game Mods
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· Score: 1
When 1% of your audience plays mods online, and the best-selling FPS of all time has the biggest mod scene, it's a pretty good indicator that there IS a positive correlation.
The fact that the percentage has increased over time helps, as well, but Quake 3, which is a newer game, sold fewer copies and has fewer online players than Half-Life. People build mods for the game that sells and has the tools.
On the other hand, The Sims, for instance, would probably have a bigger mod scene if it weren't for the 20-million expansions they sold for the game that more or less add the same content that players would normally have added for them. The Sims also happens to be the only PC game to have out-sold Half-Life.
As far as mods selling games goes, that's a really hard position to push, and can only be proven if you can find sales numbers for Counterstrike specifically, or any other mod sold on the shelves. The number of online players for CS still makes up less than 1% of the copies of Half-Life sold, not to mention adding in the number of copies of Counterstrike sold.
Generals, especially with Zero Hour, has the best skirmish mode of any C&C game, and is among the best skirmish modes of any RTS game. I especially like the various medals it hands out for accomplishing certain goals, as it gives me something to shoot for without having to make them up for myself.
For the basic game with the default 3 sides the Zero Hour expansion is fairly limited in scope, adding a handful of derivative units and some play balancing (like AA countermeasures for planes on the US side). However, the 3 specialized generals for each side (9 total) are where the expansion really shines, adding a lot more depth to the gameplay and allowing players to really exercise their personal specialties (although I think the air units got shafted on the Chinese side).
I still haven't quite gotten into WarCraft 3. It just seems too limited to me, and I guess that was the basic idea of the game in the first place.
Exactly, and I think that even this is only really valid for sequels. They should take the feedback on the original game and use any ideas that might improve the sequel, but not bow to every whim of the players.
With original titles, though, while they should pay attention to what other titles did correctly or incorrectly, no one's going to know better than the developers and designers what their game is supposed to be.
Of course, if you get into development and find that your core target audience isn't going to like your game for one reason or another, you should consider the severity of the problem and whether or not fixing the problem will impact whatever vision the designer had for the title (and whether or not that vision was good in the first place). You don't want to be the next DNF, though.
Virtua Fighter isn't the only title to hold the Virtua name. That being said, no series has a larger fan base than Mario, it's not even a close competition (though it's closer now than it was in the past, the Mario name still means something to a lot more people).
That being said, the real question here is whether they're going to market this game to Virtua Fighter fans or Shenmue fans (or neither).
Being *only* the fourth biggest company in the US needs billions spent rectifying it because...
because it's their obligation to their shareholders to do what they can to make money... Just a minor note, though, that it's the 4th biggest brand, not company, though I may not have been clear on that in the first place. Coke? Pepsi? Can't say I give a damn, since given a choice I drink neither, though I do drink products from both companies.
Hardly surprising, considering who'd be doing the market research. I agree that advertising is not going to vanish, but I think complaining that people aren't watching your shiny new TV ad that you spent the GDP of bolivia producing is incredibly boorish and a mockery of what our legislatures should be looking at.
Or even more importantly, who's paying for the research. In the end, I agree that legislature shouldn't be looking at business interests at all, but our country has a long history of doing so anyway. Is TiVo doing any more harm to advertising than the VCR did at it's introduction? I highly doubt it. There are always going to be people out there watching TV as it's broadcast, and when it comes down to it advertisers are always wasting money trying to find new ways to get into our heads, so if they do find a drop in the effectiveness in advertising due to TiVo use, I have little doubt they'll find a new way. If posters on Slashdot can come up with a half dozen methods pulled out of their asses, advertising executives can get their teams to come up with a dozen or more, even if it costs them a lot of money to do so.
Unless you're in that top 1%, I believe I asked just that. Less tax expenditure on stupid, stupid moneypits = lower taxes for all. Although Bush is developing new nuclear weapons, and I'd imagine they still aren't as cheap as a paying your dues to the UN for instance. Last I looked, Ted Turner was still paying these on the US' behalf.
When it comes down to it, though, the further up you go, the more money you can claim you cut with the smallest percentage cuts. If you cut Bill Gates' taxes by 1% (since he definitely is in the top 1%), you can claim you made a much bigger tax cut than if you cut the bottom 50% by 1%. Politicians, by their very nature, want that big dollar figure so they can claim they did something. Meanwhile, I've got a statement that happened to land on my desk recently saying I've put in $11K to a system (Social Security) that will probably never benefit me, personally, in just 5 years of getting a pay check. Gee, maybe if I could have that 2K/year back, I could do something useful, or maybe just spend it on food and gas. Another bonus is that my contribution to Medicare every 2 weeks is higher than my contribution to my own health insurance, and while I'm sure my company puts up a good chunk of change for that insurance, I don't see why the government doesn't get a better deal than they do, especially given that there should be far more people paying into medicare than can take anything out of it. Most of the other taxes I pay are almost impossible to trace, it just comes down to knowing that everything they do comes from that pot of money, including processing the paperwork required for me to make sure I paid the right amount of taxes, in case they decide that I did not and should go to jail (where again my taxes pay for the costs, though since I'd be in jail, my taxes would suddenly be reduced significantly).
Do I believe in spending money on war, nuclear weapons, and everything else that goes into defense spending? I probably wouldn't be so quick to say 'everything' (though I put the word there), but I definitely believe that it's one of the few legitimate expenses the government has.
Great. So, we'll send half of it to the second-class, denigrated, humiliated and generally spit-upon Palestinians then, rather than supporting a 'regime' that indulges in a shocking occupation of UN-proscribed land.
Or build a wall around them, complete with Patriot m
Ah, I see. Since I'd never been to a Hardees before moving to the east coast 18 months ago, I just figured they were always the same place with different names and slightly different menus.
Oh, the old "AIDS is just [God's|Nature's] way of compensating" routine. Reminds me of the early comments about AIDS, when it was only affecting certain parts of the population.
Except, of course, that I take a large percentage of that 'certain parts of the population' to also be an adaptation for the stress of overpopulation. Then again, since I'm still in a food coma from 2 Thanksgiving dinners over the weekend, I wasn't exactly sure what diseases 5.5 billion might be curing in Africa.
Of course, your comment is totally inane as no matter what you'd prefer it was spent on, it is being spent on adverts that I can guarantee 99.9% of the populace could live without.
But, again, people spend their own money on those products so that those companies can continue to advertise. Do Coke, Marlboro, and Budweiser really need more ads in America? Probably not, though I've heard on occasion that Pepsi might overtake Coke in the top 3 brands in the country. The problem with the way marketing works is that it is considered successful if the company makes money on what they advertise. If you buy something that's advertised on TV, you're pretty much guaranteeing that you'll see more ads. Sure, almost everyone can live without advertising, and in fact would still buy most of the same products, but the simple reality is that unless advertising were banned (something I also disagree with), there would be no market research to support a stop in funding of advertising.
My point was not that tax money should go overseas - it was that corporations have no sense of moral decency. If you want arguments about where your taxes go, start here:
Corporations are entities, they have rarely shown a sense of moral decency. They need legislation to keep from killing people. Why should the fact that Microsoft makes more money than the majority of African nations combined change any of that?
Tax rebate for the richest 1%
Show me a way to get the dollar figure on a tax rebate increased without reducing the top 10%. Stop again and consider that the richest 10% run the companies that employ 50% or more of Americans, pay nearly 50% of the taxes the country collects every year, and includes most of the politicians voting for any tax rebates. You could give people money that never paid taxes (like, say, my girlfriend), or you can cut taxes 1% on people that are paying a 70% tax on their income between state and federal taxes. Oh, wait, I paid nearly 50% of my income in taxes last year, where are the people asking to give me a tax break? Nowhere. Everyone wants to give it to people who make less than half as much (and barely, if at all, have to pay any tax, based not only on raw dollars but on percentage of income), even though the government could never pass multi-million dollar tax cuts by giving them back their money. In any case, I believe that the entire tax system needs an overhaul, and that rebates aren't even close to a fix.
* Israel
Let's see, let Israel and Pakistan kill each other and focus on containment, or try to play peacekeeper. Yeah, I think I'd rather just wall that part of the world off from civilization and let them either kill each other off or figure it out on their own. Unfortunately, I don't think that'll work, either.
* Afghanistan
* Iraq
These are actually places I'd rather spend the money, though probably more because troops have been committed and war has started rather than because I would've liked it spent in the first place. Once you start something, you'd damn well better finish it.
* Numerous tinpot 'democracies' installed by the US
I guess that all depends on what you're looking at as tinpot, as well as the reasons for the installation of those governments in the first place.
* Did I mention the 6bn annually to Israel?
No, you just mentioned Israel in general. 6billion is a nice round figure, though.
So basically you're talking about audio books, though apparently they've evolved slightly since the last time I bothered with one;) I tend to think they serve their purpose well in situations such as driving long distances, but then I don't use them at all (the last one I tried to listen to was Stephen King's The Gunslinger, which just put me to sleep, in part because of Stephen King's voice).
I like the smell of new paper (or even old paper at times) and the weight of a good book, as well as having it on my shelf to pull down at any time (with the only requirement being good light). At the same time, it's much more convenient for me to read text on the screen most of the time.
As for social/antisocial, I find the skills I lack most in social situations are the ones that irritate me the most, such as interrupting people to get a word in or raising my voice to be heard over other people. I doubt I'll ever understand why people that do these things are considered social, when in reality they're simply trying to focus attention on themselves. Luckily, as long as I intend to stay with my girlfriend, she drags me out enough to keep me from being a complete hermit. On the whole, though, I tend to find most social engagements to be unproductive and boring, so I avoid them as much as I can.
Cost of advertising tampax to men and Mercedes to low-income families - $72 billion. Actually, let me write that out: 72,000,000,000 US Dollars.
Cost of providing enough generic retro-viral drugs to Africa to stave off 8,000 deaths PER DAY - $5.5 billion. This is the deal that has just been announced.
The difference between the two, obviously, is that Americans willingly spend enough money for the companies to afford to spend $72 billion on advertising, in hopes that they'll sell more this year, whereas the $5.5 billion is coming out of our pockets regardless of whether or not we prefer to help people in Africa rather than help people in our own countries. Sure, $5.5 billion doesn't have as large an effect on the starving and diseased of a 1st world country as it does in a 3rd world country (where simple vaccines everyone gets at birth in a first world country are mostly unavailable), but some of us have different priorities depending on our own views of the consequences of spending tax money and preventing natural deaths in a time of rampant overpopulation.
The main problem with TV is that it's passive, and since it doesn't require action from the viewer, over time it becomes easier for the viewer to just let things happen.
This is actually what limits my TV viewing more than anything else. I just find myself generally restless if I watch too much TV and it's not entertaining. This is also why I keep books and my GBA at hand, as I easily have something more involving, yet still entertaining, close by.
Contrast it with books, you have to actively participate in the book in order to be entertained. You can sit and look at the book all you want, but until you open it up and start reading it, you are not likely to become entertained. This is why I object to those so-called digital books. They take all the effort out of reading and stick it on the screen, and now kids don't learn that reading really does take effort.
The only effort a digital book takes out of it is the effort of turning the pages, or, in some cases, holding the book at a readable angle (especially a problem when lighting is an issue). Personally, I find I read much more quickly in digital formats, and part of that is the lack of pages breaking the flow of the words, and the other part is the ability to display it in a manner that's much better for my eyes. Of course, that depends on the digital book being available in a format that permits me to display it in a single page with my own colour preferences.
Of course, too much reading leads to antisocial behavior as well, I've noticed.:) It's not like there's any perfect medium, it's just a matter of realizing what the limitations of the medium are and keeping diversity in your forms of entertainment. (Sex is definitely an active form of entertainment, and very social. But with obvious limitations...)
There's nothing wrong with antisocial behavior in and of itself, though. In fact, I've found a notable lack of problem-solving ability in highly social individuals. Then again, that probably depends on the type of problem being solved, as I'm sure they could solve problems related to socializing fairly easily, especially in groups, and especially those problems that are based around opinion rather than fact or logic.
Slashdot Mirror
My girlfriend is 22, and spends some serious time on each Pokemon game (though I will note that she doesn't pay attention to anything else Pokemon-related, and she doesn't bother with each version of the game (ie she has red, gold, and ruby, but not blue/silver/sapphire, etc)). It's one of the few games she plays rather seriously (Animal Crossing is another).
I've considered giving it a run myself just to see why she spends so much time with it, but frankly I have enough games to play without picking up another series that might be hopelessly addicting.
http://fasastudio.com/games/crimsonskies/Update+Ne ws.htm
One of the big issues we addressed was a problem with losing progress in the single player game if you adjusted settings in multiplayer. You should now feel free to adjust all the settings in multiplayer without worrying about affecting your single player game.
Other fixes we've provided in the AutoUpdate include:
Made Invert settings persistent for all controllers.
Updated to the latest and greatest Xbox libraries (new and shiny is always good).
Fixed incorrect turret scoring in multiplayer (kills and deaths were not always scored correctly).
Fixed a sporadic hard lock in the stats screen that occurred when the trigger was pressed.
This is a situation that the makers of Deus Ex2 probably submitted footage MORE harsh than the average.
They're supposed to submit the worst possible footage, so it's quite possible in a game like Deus Ex 2 or many other games that most players will never see why an M rating was given. That doesn't mean, however, that the rating wasn't justified. That being said, they still submit the final game so that the ESRB can make sure the footage was representative of the actual game, and the rating and comments are displayed properly on the package.
I don't think that this is 'exclusive'. If other entertainment companies want to donate, I'm sure the military will take it.
That's pretty much what I was getting at. The article clearly states that MS donated the stuff, and there's nothing stopping Sony or Nintendo from making matching donations. I'm sure MS gets a tax writeoff, as well.
The movie companies actually do something like this (not with kids), they will send people to theaters to make sure their movies are actually running and the sales figures reported by the theaters are close to a head count in the actual theater. I'm not saying the ESRB or whoever should do this now. But if push comes to shove it beats government intervention.
This, though, is quite different from making sure they're enforcing ratings, as the movie companies don't check ratings enforcement at all (and the only one that has any real idea of enforcement attached to it is NC-17). The music industry does the same thing: each company has a number of people that go to music stores in various areas to make sure they're displaying the right posters and have enough copies of certain CDs on the shelves, and that CDs that are supposed to be placed in highly visible areas actually are. Personally, I tend to think it's a good thing the games industry isn't doing this, as I feel it's giving the industry a little too much pull in the day-to-day operations of the retailers.
Additionally, the music and movie industries actually hire people to do this and these people usually interact with the retailers (and theater owners) to make sure things stay the way the companies want them to be. What you're proposing is more along the lines of what the police do to catch retailers selling cigarettes, alcohol, and porn to minors. That, combined with the added cost on games, is why I would say 'fuck off'.
More importantly, shouldn't there a bidding war to do this the the USO? There doesn't seem to be competition to win a bid to do this and MS is getting a pass without any competition. It doesn't seem fair to the taxpayers.
How, exactly, would one bid on something like this? MS bids to give each center 17 XBoxes and 3 games per box, Sony bids to give each center 20 PS2s and 4 games per box?
Read the article, MS donated the XBoxes, games, and monitors. If Sony and Nintendo want to donate games, consoles, and TVs/monitors, they should feel free.
I actually had a Wal-Mart register stop 4 times on a checker when I was buying 5 items in the electronics section and she never once checked my ID. Then again, the only thing anyone normally checks my ID for is cigarettes (state law in both California and Virginia requires an ID check until the checker thinks you're 40 or some crap). Hell, she didn't even check my ID when I paid with a credit card.
1. Adopt the same rating system as the MPAA and keep the ratings systems the same, this way parents can't complain they don't know what the ratings mean.
The movie ratings are trademarks of the MPAA, so using their system, under current IP law, is inviting a lawsuit from the MPAA. Even if the government forced them to use the ratings, the MPAA would be suing the government, or lose their trademarks (making them useless as rating tools, as anyone could put the G on their movie without submitting it for rating).
2. Make retailers sign an agreement where they must check for ID on any game that is rated NC-17/R. Failure to do so will results in a fine, $500 for the first offense, $1000 for the second offense, etc.
Why is this any different than the law he's proposing? Except maybe for the fact that your second offense is the maximum penalty (well, there's a year in jail too) under the law.
3. Hire 16-17 year olds as "checkers" to go to the stores and try to buy games. Raise the price on every game sold in North America 25-50 cents to cover the price of these checkers. Eventually, the fines may cover the cost of checkers.
At this point I'm inclined to say 'f*** off', but for the sake of the argument, how many checkers do you think they'll have to hire to do this, and how often should they be checking? Also, how are you going to rotate the checkers so that retailers don't know them on site after their first run?
4. All the game publishing companies need to make a group like the MPAA and the RIAA (yeah, I know they are evil but...) to lobby against government laws against them. It's sad, but in todays world that is what a big industry has to do to survive.
They already have this, they are simply not as big (in terms of politics) as the MPAA or the RIAA. Furthermore, because California is the home state for both of those organizations, but probably not for the games industry (The ESA is based in Washington DC as far as I can tell). Of note, though, is that of the three groups, the games industry is the only one that actually spun off their ratings board as an independent entity (ESRB), yet they're the ones taking the flack.
M = NC-17
;)
AO = R
You've got those swapped
Maybe they can't use the same letters because MPAA has them copyrighted? (I don't know if they do, just hypothesizing)
From the MPAA's ratings website:
The rating system trademarked all the category symbols, except the X. Under the plan, anyone not submitting his or her film for rating could self apply the X or any other symbol or description, except those trademarked by the rating program.
Note: at the time the rating system was G, M, R, and X, with M being Mature, but allowing all ages, the rough equivalent of PG. They later revised M to GP, then to PG, because people were confused by the M rating (thinking it was a step above R). In 1984 they added PG-13. In 1990 they added the NC-17 rating to specify movies that had been rated by the MPAA, but were not approved for anyone under 18 (X was never trademarked so that it could be used by people that did not want to submit to the ratings, but was basically taken over by the adult film industry, not exactly what the MPAA intended, so NC-17 is trademarked as well).
By law, you have to enforce trademarks to keep them, so using the movie industry's ratings would be inviting a lawsuit from the MPAA.
Besides... look at the back of the box, there's a breakdown of everything objectionable in the game. I am willing to believe that the parents who feign ignorance are really striving for it, or they just can't tell their kids "no" so checking for graphic content would be a futile pursuit
Exactly, and the MPAA did the same thing with the R rated films back in 1990, and has since added the descriptions to PG-13, PG, and NC-17 movies because, in their words, they 'believed it would be useful to parents to know a little more about that film's content before they allowed their children to accompany them [to R rated films]'. Even the R rating has always been about letting parents know what they're in for, and asking parents to attend with their children rather than just sending them off to the movies. The M rating for games should be viewed the same way, asking parents to play the game with their children, or at the very least pay attention to the game to know what their children are exposed to.
It's a good thing some of the earliest 3d texturemapped games (wolfenstein, doom, etc) didn't get patents, or there would probably be a lot fewer 3D games today.
Considering that most of the 3D games available today use technology licensed from the developers of those games, your point is a bit weaker than it should be. We'd be missing ummm Unreal and the crap that Monolith spews out every once in a while, and Deus Ex. Not to mention that there's prior art when it comes to Wolf3D and Doom (for instance, Ultima Underworld, Golgo 13, and I'm sure someone else can come up with a couple dozen other games that used 1st person viewpoints).
Nintendo's marketting is really pissing me off. I own a GBSPA and I don't regret it, but their shameless attempts to make you buy extra crap for it is infuriating, because they cheat and make things that have no technical reason to require a Gamecube, or a Gameboy, have them.
You're right, sometimes there's no technical reason for the requirements, though there may be asthetic reasons. For instance, with FF:CC you probably don't want to stop the game every time one player needs to access a menu when playing in multiplayer. Or, in this case, you don't want every player to see what a single player is doing when he's in another part of the map collecting gems that may give him a lead in the competetive portion of the game.
I might have bought the Mario games, rehashes that they are, but I'm ticked off that to truly use everything on the cart, I have to shell out for a e-Reader. Why? No technical reason, just that Nintendo wants to sell you an e-Reader.
OK, so even though there are 4 Mario GBA games, you're ticked off that one of them has e-Reader compatability that allows them to add extra stuff that isn't part of the game that's on the cart? As far as I've been able to tell, none of the other Mario games have e-Reader functionality, and nothing on the e-Reader cards for SMB3 was in SMB3 to begin with.
It backfired; now I'm considering getting a flash ROM for the GB and putting the Nintendo emulator on it instead. To hell with that crap.
And you'll get, *gasp*, the exact game you could've gotten if you just bought the cart (without the e-Reader), except that you'll be doing it through emulation. Personally, I never owned a copy of SMB3, so I'll stay on the legal side and buy the GBA cart. Then again, I bought an e-Reader the same day I bought my GameCube, to mess around with in Animal Crossing (which really didn't need the e-Reader, as you could just use codes to get most of the stuff on the cards).
So here's another game that sounds like it should be playable with just two Gameboys but requires a Gamecube (probably). I am not impressed here at all.
Four Swords (w/ Link to the Past) for GBA works fine with just 2 GBAs. This is the GameCube version of Four Swords, which has some changes and a couple of extra games thrown in. I don't know how you could own a GBA-SP and never have seen the GBA version of the game before...
Not going to stop buying games for my GB but I find myself avoiding Nintendo's first-party games like the plague. I don't have a GameCube, I'm not going to get a GameCube, I don't want a GameCube. (I have a PS2 and if I get a second console it'll be an XBox... or considering the likely timing of that purchase, an XBox 2 if it's reverse-compatible at all.)
So don't buy a GameCube. They're not doing anything to GBA games that requires a Cube. They're just doing a hell of a lot to Cube games that requires a GBA. Good luck with the XBox, I know I'm really enjoying mine between rounds of Mario Kart. I highly recommend Crimson Skies, but if you have a PC there's not much else I can recommend for the system (except the multi-console titles).
This law would work the same way, except the salesperson making $5/hour would be looking at $1000 and a year in jail for the maximum penalty (with state prison for that year for repeat offenders), because the law is actually just adding to an existing law, with no change to the punishment, which currently covers pornography and cigarettes.
The most obvious question is when did violent games become equivalent to porn and tobacco? The next question is why is it only video games, but then that is obvious: California would shoot down anything involving music or movies this stringent (and vague), but the politicians don't believe that the video game companies have as strong a lobby as the movie and music businesses (and they're probably right, especially in California).
I found a few more objectionable things about Mr. Lee's statements, such as the following:
We can also point to the testimony of criminals as further proof. We know that the Columbine killers compared their intended crimes to the game Doom. Earlier this year, a group of Oakland teenagers went on crime spree, stealing cars and committing several murders. One of the perpetrators was quoted as saying, "We played the game by day and lived it by night." The scientific community has put it very simply -- the debate is over.
1) We don't know much at all about the Columbine killers because they are dead. They may have made comparisons to Doom in order to plan their crimes, but in the end, they killed themselves and no one knows any real reasons for their actions. Besides that, one of them was 18, and Doom existed before the current rating system was widely used (and was an old game by the time of Columbine).
2) 'We played the game by day and lived it by night', well, that's very nice, but if he's referring to GTA, you're looking at a game (GTA:VC) that has sold millions of copies, and yet only had a couple of people claim that they were copying it. We'd be living in hell if there was true causality at work here.
3)The scientific community is not united on this matter, and this is not some media conspiracy to prevent people from finding out that violent games may cause violence. If anything, the reverse is true, because before Columbine it was quite easy to find one study saying the reverse for every study saying what he's quoted, yet it's become harder to find even pre-existing studies every day. Not to mention that a scientific study should prove it's hypothesis, and not many psychologists have been starting with the hypothesis that violence does not beget violence these days.
4) As he is a politician, the final line may disturb me the most: '-- the debate is over'. Sorry Mr. Lee, the debate is never over, and you should know that. You don't try to pass laws and declare the debate over, because the debate will have to continue in order to make sure your laws are not only effective at doing what you intend, but also are not stopping people from getting Constitutionally-protected material.
Furthermore, he says on one hand that the law will not just cover Mature and Adult Only material, but also some Teen material, yet states that it will be easy for retailers to determine what should be seperated from the rest. The wording that he quotes is so vague that you could find some E material to be covered, yet retailers are supposed to be able to do this easily...
Yeah, FFX-2 came out about 2 weeks ago. Silent Hill 3 has been out for quite a while as well.
Personally, I think the website's list has just shortened to a new server, though that could just be my connection burning. The XBox list contained a few notoriously bad games, so I can't see much hope for the remaining lists.
Valve hired the developers of TF to make TF2, and eventually we ended up with a TF2 dev cycle that is nearing DNF, but they also developed TF Classic for Half-Life, which is somewhat similar to the original Quake mod (Valve also eventually released a DM Classic mod which is similar to Quake DM). TFC was released around the same time as the first SDK for Half-Life, basically as a way of showing off what could be done with the SDK and the HL engine. TFC itself has also been updated several times during it's life, including a re-incarnation of the engineer's teleport pads.
When 1% of your audience plays mods online, and the best-selling FPS of all time has the biggest mod scene, it's a pretty good indicator that there IS a positive correlation.
The fact that the percentage has increased over time helps, as well, but Quake 3, which is a newer game, sold fewer copies and has fewer online players than Half-Life. People build mods for the game that sells and has the tools.
On the other hand, The Sims, for instance, would probably have a bigger mod scene if it weren't for the 20-million expansions they sold for the game that more or less add the same content that players would normally have added for them. The Sims also happens to be the only PC game to have out-sold Half-Life.
As far as mods selling games goes, that's a really hard position to push, and can only be proven if you can find sales numbers for Counterstrike specifically, or any other mod sold on the shelves. The number of online players for CS still makes up less than 1% of the copies of Half-Life sold, not to mention adding in the number of copies of Counterstrike sold.
Generals, especially with Zero Hour, has the best skirmish mode of any C&C game, and is among the best skirmish modes of any RTS game. I especially like the various medals it hands out for accomplishing certain goals, as it gives me something to shoot for without having to make them up for myself.
For the basic game with the default 3 sides the Zero Hour expansion is fairly limited in scope, adding a handful of derivative units and some play balancing (like AA countermeasures for planes on the US side). However, the 3 specialized generals for each side (9 total) are where the expansion really shines, adding a lot more depth to the gameplay and allowing players to really exercise their personal specialties (although I think the air units got shafted on the Chinese side).
I still haven't quite gotten into WarCraft 3. It just seems too limited to me, and I guess that was the basic idea of the game in the first place.
Exactly, and I think that even this is only really valid for sequels. They should take the feedback on the original game and use any ideas that might improve the sequel, but not bow to every whim of the players.
With original titles, though, while they should pay attention to what other titles did correctly or incorrectly, no one's going to know better than the developers and designers what their game is supposed to be.
Of course, if you get into development and find that your core target audience isn't going to like your game for one reason or another, you should consider the severity of the problem and whether or not fixing the problem will impact whatever vision the designer had for the title (and whether or not that vision was good in the first place). You don't want to be the next DNF, though.
Virtua Tennis, Virtua Racing...
Virtua Fighter isn't the only title to hold the Virtua name. That being said, no series has a larger fan base than Mario, it's not even a close competition (though it's closer now than it was in the past, the Mario name still means something to a lot more people).
That being said, the real question here is whether they're going to market this game to Virtua Fighter fans or Shenmue fans (or neither).
Being *only* the fourth biggest company in the US needs billions spent rectifying it because...
because it's their obligation to their shareholders to do what they can to make money... Just a minor note, though, that it's the 4th biggest brand, not company, though I may not have been clear on that in the first place. Coke? Pepsi? Can't say I give a damn, since given a choice I drink neither, though I do drink products from both companies.
Hardly surprising, considering who'd be doing the market research. I agree that advertising is not going to vanish, but I think complaining that people aren't watching your shiny new TV ad that you spent the GDP of bolivia producing is incredibly boorish and a mockery of what our legislatures should be looking at.
Or even more importantly, who's paying for the research. In the end, I agree that legislature shouldn't be looking at business interests at all, but our country has a long history of doing so anyway. Is TiVo doing any more harm to advertising than the VCR did at it's introduction? I highly doubt it. There are always going to be people out there watching TV as it's broadcast, and when it comes down to it advertisers are always wasting money trying to find new ways to get into our heads, so if they do find a drop in the effectiveness in advertising due to TiVo use, I have little doubt they'll find a new way. If posters on Slashdot can come up with a half dozen methods pulled out of their asses, advertising executives can get their teams to come up with a dozen or more, even if it costs them a lot of money to do so.
Unless you're in that top 1%, I believe I asked just that. Less tax expenditure on stupid, stupid moneypits = lower taxes for all. Although Bush is developing new nuclear weapons, and I'd imagine they still aren't as cheap as a paying your dues to the UN for instance. Last I looked, Ted Turner was still paying these on the US' behalf.
When it comes down to it, though, the further up you go, the more money you can claim you cut with the smallest percentage cuts. If you cut Bill Gates' taxes by 1% (since he definitely is in the top 1%), you can claim you made a much bigger tax cut than if you cut the bottom 50% by 1%. Politicians, by their very nature, want that big dollar figure so they can claim they did something. Meanwhile, I've got a statement that happened to land on my desk recently saying I've put in $11K to a system (Social Security) that will probably never benefit me, personally, in just 5 years of getting a pay check. Gee, maybe if I could have that 2K/year back, I could do something useful, or maybe just spend it on food and gas. Another bonus is that my contribution to Medicare every 2 weeks is higher than my contribution to my own health insurance, and while I'm sure my company puts up a good chunk of change for that insurance, I don't see why the government doesn't get a better deal than they do, especially given that there should be far more people paying into medicare than can take anything out of it. Most of the other taxes I pay are almost impossible to trace, it just comes down to knowing that everything they do comes from that pot of money, including processing the paperwork required for me to make sure I paid the right amount of taxes, in case they decide that I did not and should go to jail (where again my taxes pay for the costs, though since I'd be in jail, my taxes would suddenly be reduced significantly).
Do I believe in spending money on war, nuclear weapons, and everything else that goes into defense spending? I probably wouldn't be so quick to say 'everything' (though I put the word there), but I definitely believe that it's one of the few legitimate expenses the government has.
Great. So, we'll send half of it to the second-class, denigrated, humiliated and generally spit-upon Palestinians then, rather than supporting a 'regime' that indulges in a shocking occupation of UN-proscribed land.
Or build a wall around them, complete with Patriot m
Ah, I see. Since I'd never been to a Hardees before moving to the east coast 18 months ago, I just figured they were always the same place with different names and slightly different menus.
Oh, the old "AIDS is just [God's|Nature's] way of compensating" routine. Reminds me of the early comments about AIDS, when it was only affecting certain parts of the population.
Except, of course, that I take a large percentage of that 'certain parts of the population' to also be an adaptation for the stress of overpopulation. Then again, since I'm still in a food coma from 2 Thanksgiving dinners over the weekend, I wasn't exactly sure what diseases 5.5 billion might be curing in Africa.
Of course, your comment is totally inane as no matter what you'd prefer it was spent on, it is being spent on adverts that I can guarantee 99.9% of the populace could live without.
But, again, people spend their own money on those products so that those companies can continue to advertise. Do Coke, Marlboro, and Budweiser really need more ads in America? Probably not, though I've heard on occasion that Pepsi might overtake Coke in the top 3 brands in the country. The problem with the way marketing works is that it is considered successful if the company makes money on what they advertise. If you buy something that's advertised on TV, you're pretty much guaranteeing that you'll see more ads. Sure, almost everyone can live without advertising, and in fact would still buy most of the same products, but the simple reality is that unless advertising were banned (something I also disagree with), there would be no market research to support a stop in funding of advertising.
My point was not that tax money should go overseas - it was that corporations have no sense of moral decency. If you want arguments about where your taxes go, start here:
Corporations are entities, they have rarely shown a sense of moral decency. They need legislation to keep from killing people. Why should the fact that Microsoft makes more money than the majority of African nations combined change any of that?
Tax rebate for the richest 1%
Show me a way to get the dollar figure on a tax rebate increased without reducing the top 10%. Stop again and consider that the richest 10% run the companies that employ 50% or more of Americans, pay nearly 50% of the taxes the country collects every year, and includes most of the politicians voting for any tax rebates. You could give people money that never paid taxes (like, say, my girlfriend), or you can cut taxes 1% on people that are paying a 70% tax on their income between state and federal taxes. Oh, wait, I paid nearly 50% of my income in taxes last year, where are the people asking to give me a tax break? Nowhere. Everyone wants to give it to people who make less than half as much (and barely, if at all, have to pay any tax, based not only on raw dollars but on percentage of income), even though the government could never pass multi-million dollar tax cuts by giving them back their money. In any case, I believe that the entire tax system needs an overhaul, and that rebates aren't even close to a fix.
* Israel
Let's see, let Israel and Pakistan kill each other and focus on containment, or try to play peacekeeper. Yeah, I think I'd rather just wall that part of the world off from civilization and let them either kill each other off or figure it out on their own. Unfortunately, I don't think that'll work, either.
* Afghanistan
* Iraq
These are actually places I'd rather spend the money, though probably more because troops have been committed and war has started rather than because I would've liked it spent in the first place. Once you start something, you'd damn well better finish it.
* Numerous tinpot 'democracies' installed by the US
I guess that all depends on what you're looking at as tinpot, as well as the reasons for the installation of those governments in the first place.
* Did I mention the 6bn annually to Israel?
No, you just mentioned Israel in general. 6billion is a nice round figure, though.
* Hallib
So basically you're talking about audio books, though apparently they've evolved slightly since the last time I bothered with one ;) I tend to think they serve their purpose well in situations such as driving long distances, but then I don't use them at all (the last one I tried to listen to was Stephen King's The Gunslinger, which just put me to sleep, in part because of Stephen King's voice).
I like the smell of new paper (or even old paper at times) and the weight of a good book, as well as having it on my shelf to pull down at any time (with the only requirement being good light). At the same time, it's much more convenient for me to read text on the screen most of the time.
As for social/antisocial, I find the skills I lack most in social situations are the ones that irritate me the most, such as interrupting people to get a word in or raising my voice to be heard over other people. I doubt I'll ever understand why people that do these things are considered social, when in reality they're simply trying to focus attention on themselves. Luckily, as long as I intend to stay with my girlfriend, she drags me out enough to keep me from being a complete hermit. On the whole, though, I tend to find most social engagements to be unproductive and boring, so I avoid them as much as I can.
Cost of advertising tampax to men and Mercedes to low-income families - $72 billion. Actually, let me write that out: 72,000,000,000 US Dollars.
Cost of providing enough generic retro-viral drugs to Africa to stave off 8,000 deaths PER DAY - $5.5 billion. This is the deal that has just been announced.
The difference between the two, obviously, is that Americans willingly spend enough money for the companies to afford to spend $72 billion on advertising, in hopes that they'll sell more this year, whereas the $5.5 billion is coming out of our pockets regardless of whether or not we prefer to help people in Africa rather than help people in our own countries. Sure, $5.5 billion doesn't have as large an effect on the starving and diseased of a 1st world country as it does in a 3rd world country (where simple vaccines everyone gets at birth in a first world country are mostly unavailable), but some of us have different priorities depending on our own views of the consequences of spending tax money and preventing natural deaths in a time of rampant overpopulation.
The main problem with TV is that it's passive, and since it doesn't require action from the viewer, over time it becomes easier for the viewer to just let things happen.
:) It's not like there's any perfect medium, it's just a matter of realizing what the limitations of the medium are and keeping diversity in your forms of entertainment. (Sex is definitely an active form of entertainment, and very social. But with obvious limitations...)
This is actually what limits my TV viewing more than anything else. I just find myself generally restless if I watch too much TV and it's not entertaining. This is also why I keep books and my GBA at hand, as I easily have something more involving, yet still entertaining, close by.
Contrast it with books, you have to actively participate in the book in order to be entertained. You can sit and look at the book all you want, but until you open it up and start reading it, you are not likely to become entertained. This is why I object to those so-called digital books. They take all the effort out of reading and stick it on the screen, and now kids don't learn that reading really does take effort.
The only effort a digital book takes out of it is the effort of turning the pages, or, in some cases, holding the book at a readable angle (especially a problem when lighting is an issue). Personally, I find I read much more quickly in digital formats, and part of that is the lack of pages breaking the flow of the words, and the other part is the ability to display it in a manner that's much better for my eyes. Of course, that depends on the digital book being available in a format that permits me to display it in a single page with my own colour preferences.
Of course, too much reading leads to antisocial behavior as well, I've noticed.
There's nothing wrong with antisocial behavior in and of itself, though. In fact, I've found a notable lack of problem-solving ability in highly social individuals. Then again, that probably depends on the type of problem being solved, as I'm sure they could solve problems related to socializing fairly easily, especially in groups, and especially those problems that are based around opinion rather than fact or logic.