So, people play the RPG for the amazing amazing plot. The randome encounter/combat "game" they throw in there so it isn't just a movie is crap. Throw in something else instead and we can make great games worth playing. Try throwing in a turn based strategy, an fps, a real time strategy, a puzzle game, a simulation. Any real game will do just fine.
While I appreciate some interesting ideas in games, I'd have to say that what you're looking for seems more like the old adventure games rather than console RPGs.
Golden Sun and Mario & Luigi both have to deal with the fact that they're on a portable platform, so most people simply aren't going to deal with spending 30-60 minutes between save points, or much of the gameplay of standard console RPGs.
Even Fire Emblem seems a bit excessive for a handheld at times, with more time spent reading dialogue (most of which doesn't further the plot or even develop the characters) than going through the battles, which are the core of that particular game's sub-genre.
That is why these games come with adjustable difficulty settings.
Most console RPGs don't have adjustable difficulty settings, especially those with random encounters.
Besides: the game should have been scaled properly, with enough static? encounters programmed in to put the character on the propper level.
Yes, which comes down to a matter of playtesting, but, again, if you want to be the maximum possible level you're going to be hunting down every last static encounter rather than simply wandering around until you have a random encounter.
Frankly, I play and enjoy both types of games, and I see no reason to fault a game for using either method. They both have their merits, when done properly, and, as I said, every game that uses random encounters should have a method for getting from one area to another without having to deal with the random encounters, at least for the later parts of the game.
Remember, also, that some of those 3rd party titles may not have been released in Japan, or that the Super Famicom was probably already available in Japan by the time they did.
For example, no Megaman, no Strider; in fact, very few platform games other than Mario. I think this is in part because the system was released there in 1984, the sunset days of arcade ports being console gaming's bread and butter. Afterwards, the prevaling trend was towards more complex action games with some story, and RPGs.
I'd say it's more likely that there just wasn't a 'bread and butter' for console gaming in the mid 80's, and they had to find their own way. Once particular games started selling, different companies started moving in those particular directions. Of course, the great thing about the NES/Famicom area is simply that developers did so many different things and explored the possibilities a great deal.
The RPGs are much better remembered today, of course. So American gamers have a different impression of the NES than the Japanese do of the Famicom, because they got it as many stronger action titles that weren't arcade ports came around. By the later 1980s, competition to the Famicom had already started appearing in Japan, and so a few of the very best titles(the DQ series, FF3, Mario 3, RCR) were remembered.
Frankly, I was amazed that so many of the titles seemed right on, since people keep saying that Japanese and American gamers have different tastes. There are some obvious examples of the differences, like the lack of Castlevania and MegaMan(Rockman) titles, but Metroid was there, the 2 major SMB titles, Excitebike and Goonies II were there (and I never expected that on a Japanese list). I can only really argue against a small number of those titles, and can only think of a small number of titles that would replace them. Putting them in order is fairly meaningless in the end, as everyone can quibble over any number of things to determine order.
And my opinion is that the worst NES game is not Spelunker(which is OK as they go, based on all the emulated NES roms I've played, nearly the whole library), but Super Pitfall. I got it on the basis that "the other Pitfall games sounded cool" at maybe 10 years old. I'm kind of surprised that I still have it around. Basically, you walk around an enormous generic platform map with caves and lousy scrolling, falling into unseen pits and lava and deadly monsters with zero air control, and trying to avoid the monsters that are on ground level with poor control(you can shoot them, but you have limited ammo). There's a plot where you're supposed to rescue your friends or somesuch, but I never got far enough for it to matter.
In other words, it was just like the original Pitfall;p
There were plenty of horrible NES games, it all just depends on which one you got stuck with as a kid.
Based on date of usage, the term should belong to Warner - especially since they originally wanted to do "Enter The Matrix" way back in 1999 (they approached Dave Perry of Shiny Entertainment but he originally turned them down).
You seem to be forgetting that the original Max Payne was in development longer than the original Unreal, or about half as long as DNF. Most of the people following the game saw 'bullet time' demos long before the Matrix was in theaters.
The difference between random encounters and non-random or static encounters is the ability of the player to level up the characters as they please before attacking the next boss/challenge.
With random encounters, if you want to put the time in, you can overpower the boss or at least make things easier on yourself by simply wandering around to find more random monsters. Without it, you're stuck hoping you found every monster in an area to get to the highest level possible before getting there.
Both have their appeal, as different people play RPGs in different ways. What more games probably need is something like the chocobo that lets you go from one place to another while avoiding random encounters (the airship did this as well in the first FF game).
There doesn't have to be exact age correlation between the two rating systems.
But there is, as R = 17+ and M = 17+. There isn't always an exact correlation within a franchise, though.
The Lion and Lamb project seem to be searching for the same correlation. They complain that a game that's rated T was made using a movie that's rated R, but R-rated movies are accessible by teenagers with (13-16) or without (17-19) parents, so how is it wrong? If you use movie, TV, and/or video game ratings as a concrete way of deciding whether some piece of media is appropriate for your child, then you're a miserable excuse for a parent anyway.
Obviously, there's either a difference between the way the ratings are decided, or there's a difference between the content of the game vs. the movie. I tend to think that the middle ground on game ratings and movie ratings tends to be a bit muddy (ie the PG/PG-13 area where sometimes a PG-13 seems like it should be R or sometimes PG vs. the T/E ratings in games where sometimes an E seems like it should be T and vice versa, and maybe, once in a while, a T seems like it might've been an M), but whenever a film-maker or game developer has discussed changing their piece for a lower rating there have always been very specific items that made the difference to the people deciding the ratings.
Of course, I agree that ratings shouldn't be the only decision maker in this, but in the end I think they're judging this on the ratings more than the product anyway. WTF does the back of a TMNT figure have to do with the game anyway? Hell, it's been well over a decade since I played with a TMNT figure anyway, and they didn't do anything unless you made them do it.
We also take all of the locks with us, and the security system.
This is simply an example of how businesses and individuals work quite differently in an area where people assume things are much the same. Businesses rent the space, not usually the facilities (ie phone, security, etc), so most of the phone equipment, including those lines they're cutting, were put in by the business, and are taken from place to place. For many people it's just not worth the effort to take the lines completely out, so cutting them is far more common, especially since re-using the line would be almost out of the question in the new building (though the new tenant of the old building could re-use the line if you don't cut it too close).
We don't rent space expecting cat-5 cable to be in place, we rent it knowing that it will be easy for our people to put cat-5 in. We don't expect the phone line to be routed to the room we have designated for the phone equipment, or that the security will be up to our requirements.
If it was a home bought and sold by an individual, you have to leave most of those things in place because the buyer expects them to be there. However, if you spell it out in the contract, you can still cut away the phone and cable for whatever reason, though, as an individual, you also expect those things to be in the place you're moving to (which, again, companies don't expect to find when they move into a new business space).
All of our phone/fax patch panels are mounted to large pieces of plywood, which are then mounted to the wall. Every time the office is moved, on the last day of the move, the cables are cut just above these plywood boards and the whole setup is moved to the next place.
You're right, though, this generally does leave no possibility of re-use for the next person. Then again, there was no cable there in the first place when we moved into most of these buildings.
The Oracle games still sell for ~$20 new in various places. I picked both of them up shortly after I picked up my first GBA-SP.
So, they're still available at retail new in the box, and perfectly playable on the GB Player. One of the videos on the Zelda Classic disc specifically mentions the Oracle games as well as Link to the Past, along with the tag line 'now with the GB Player and the GameCube you can play all of the Zelda games on one system', though that conveniently omits the craptastic 3DO games.
and VH-1 ran about 4 hours of Michael Jackson specials over the weekend, most specifically addressing the issue.
Frankly, I'd normally say 'why not just mention that Moonwalker for Genesis was also not pulled from store shelves', except that I wasn't even aware of this compilation in the first place, and may actually buy it now.
Damn it, everybody stop referring to the DC's VGA output as 480p RIGHT NOW.
Just for the sake of correcting people that figure that things like HDTV and 480p actually mean anything, I dug up the definition from the actual standard.
Now tell me, how is the DC not 480p again? There's nothing in the standard that has anything to do with the connection involved. 480p
You will run into problems later when some cluebie wonders how to connect his DC to the component inputs on his TV, at which point I'm sure one of you dumb fucks will "correct" him.
Tax money is the only pool that this funding comes from.
That's a very high-level view of things. In most cases, tax money gets broken into several pools, for instance education, law enforcement, and the DMV. Considering the overhead in most local education departments, it's very likely that the money each district receives is seperated into pools for technology, supplies, teachers, books, and so on. The state of California was 50th in the country for per-student spending on books when I attended school there, for example.
I'm not convinced that this is the best way to spend the money, but it is not my decision to make.
If it comes up in your school district, you have every right for your opinion to be heard on the matter, though different districts have different methods of handling this. In most cases, school districts are very political, and it's hard to get through to them without dealing with a lot of red tape.
Would the money be better spent on teachers? If it is spent on hiring more teachers, improving student-teacher ratios.
It depends on how things are handled. When I was in high school, California required a maximum of 20 students per 10th grade english class. In my senior year the school had to hire 20 new teachers to handle the fact that the class of '98 was over twice the size of the class of '97. Additionally, California law required the school to be built no larger than what was needed for the number of students in it's area the first year it held students from all 4 years of high school. They started with a class of 10 that grew to 100 by the time all 4 years were represented, but the 10th graduating class was a class of 700. By the time I graduated (in the school's 7th year), you couldn't fit the entire student body into the gym's bleachers, and all of the classes except for 10th grade english and all science courses (limited to 24 by the seating arrangements) had in excess of 30 students per teacher.
Anyway, they tried hiring more teachers in the grade schools, but they ran out of class rooms, they had to add temporary classrooms in temporary buildings (trailers) and in assembly areas. The same goes with the high school, most of the 10th grade English classes were being taught in other areas of the school because the English building didn't have enough classrooms for the classes, and many foreign language teachers were teaching English classes as well (frankly, though, I learned more about the English language from my German teacher than I did from my English teachers in high school, since they assumed that you picked up most of the grammar and spelling in grade school).
Even though teachers are grossly underpaid in relation to the importance of their job, major increases in their salaries might bring in more of the "I'm in it for the money" teachers rather than "I want to teach" teachers.
This is exactly the problem. You can raise teachers' salaries, but then you can only afford a lower number of teachers. As an added bonus, I'd like to know how many of my high school teachers could actually afford to live in the area the students lived in without a second job. The teachers I knew well enough to know such things about all had at least one other job, some seasonal (summer jobs), others part time (leave school and go to another job, usually teaching at the community college, a few nites a week). I had the same teacher for German in my first 3 years of high school and the first semester I studied the language in college. You can only pay teachers so much before you get people in it for the money or start effecting the number of teachers you can hire, which is truly unfortunate because we need as many teachers as we can get. Unfortunately, you can only have as many teachers as you have classrooms, and building more classrooms is at least as expensive as most other ideas for improving education.
Actually, it is not true that consoles usually only draw at 640x240. The default mode on the Xbox is to render a complete 640x480 screen, and the display hardware uses the extra scan lines to implement a flicker filter. Developers are encouraged to use this mode partially for the visual difference, but also because the game can support 480p without modification. Since the fill-rate is the same, the user gets progressive scan for free.
This is also the case on the DreamCast, which is why most of it's games look great on 480p HDTVs or with a VGA adapter. 480p can also be used for some FSAA methods when going to interlaced mode.
You are mostly right about the higher resolutions, though. The big issue is that few enough customers can take advantage of them, so it's not worth implementing them. The problem is not necessarily fill-rate (although that can be a factor), but that it affects gameplay. A 16:9 aspect ratio requires either displaying more stuff on the sides, or cutting off the top and bottom. In either case, it affects camera tuning, cutscene creation, and sometimes even level design (to accomodate the different visual presentation.)
16:9 can change things, depending on the type of game, but resolution is just a matter of whether or not the developers want to develop the game for the higher resolution. Once it's working fine in 1080i or 720p, it's not any extra work to rescale for 480p/i. True support of 16:9 ends up with more polygons on the screen and possibly more textures, and you have to pay attention to whether or not something is given away, but unless there are a lot of peripheral cues in a game, it could be developed in 16:9 and then work just fine in 4:3. Considering how many people think that 4:3 formatting is perfectly ok for their movies, I don't think many that bought a 4:3 HDTV would miss the loss in a 16:9-developed game simply cut off for 4:3.
I was buying a HDTV, Initially I wanted the 16:9 format television but after much soul searching and back account checking, I realized that the majority of my TV use is for video games and regular television. Not too much 16:9 support there.
It all depends on what kind of TV you're watching. HD programming is as often in 16:9 as not if you have a good selection of HD programming in your area.
Considering that most people buying HDTVs now will still have them for quite a few years to come, it may be in their best interest to get a 16x9 screen and put up with the bars on 4x3 content (or use one of the many stretched modes available on most HDTVs). The same thing goes for gamers, as the next generation of consoles is far more likely to have better support for HDTV (hey, even the DreamCast supports 480p, and in most DC games it's the native resolution so you don't lose anything).
Generally speaking, with good hardware support, games can easily be coded for the highest resolution a developer wants to support and then scaled for smaller resolutions. Developers have been doing resolution/refresh-independant development on PCs for years, and the consoles are going to have to start (hell, they should've done it long ago at the very least for the sake of PAL translation).
All of that being said, I don't think anyone would be disappointed with the appearance of even non-480p games on a good HDTV. The 480p games, on the other hand, will just look that much better.
I usually read more quickly on a computer, but I am very touchy about the clarity of text on the computer as well as refresh rates and such. In any case, it should still be possible to print the text, though I'm sure parents wouldn't want their kids printing out the entire book for each of their classes.
You said it yourself, the books cost quite a bit of money, and you're right, many of the same publishers that publish college books also publish high school books. It costs a lot more money to print the books than it does to press CDs, and many publishers (though I'm not absolutely sure on textbook publishers) already offer books on CDs for less than the dead tree editions.
Even without the sharing she I soubt she baught all that many of the CDs.
Clearly some punishment is fair in this case.
3500 dollors may be steep (or not), but the legel alternative would have the price at 1100 dollors,
No one knows whether or not she bought the CDs. 100 CDs is not a huge amount (assuming 11 songs per CD, which is low), though it may be for a 15-year-old. On the other hand, there is no legal alternative. iTunes Music Service is not the same as Kazaa, you're not sharing music there, you can't listen to an album to decide whether or not you want to buy the CD.
I think it's bullshit that if I want to avoid having the RIAA offer me a 'settlement' of several thousand dollars I have to shut off P2P software and have to monitor all outside access to my computer very closely, just because they're afraid that someone else will download some of the several thousand songs on my hard drive. I bet the RIAA wouldn't even bother trying to figure out how many of the songs they actually own, but would just send a bill for the 8000+ songs that are there. Come to think of it, even RIAA artists don't often attribute their copyright to the RIAA or give the RIAA the right to enforce their copyrights.
I would think that technology funding and teachers come from different pools of money, but I could be wrong.
Additionally, they might be able to save some money if they can buy the books on CD-ROM. Hell, they might even save some of their students from serious back problems if all they have to carry around is a little paper, and iBook, and a pencil.
Furthermore, as it says, they have sold 200k boxes in the U.S., which have spawned 100k subscriptions. You're just pulling numbers out of your ass when you're talking about 30% of North American users subscribing.
OK, so, at worst they have 50% of NA users signed up to PlayOnline (not exactly the same thing as subscribing for the game, either). Considering that there are still boxes on the shelves, it's probably much higher than that, like 70% since we already used that number;) In order to reach 500k they need 70k more users assuming that no one drops before they reach that number. If it takes them over a month to ship another 140k boxes (if 200k shipped = 100k subscribed, 140k = 70k subscribed), there's a possibility that they'll lose some percentage of subscribers, and need to increase the shipments even more (though, of course, they need to actually sell the boxes too).
In any case, the wording is unclear on one point: PlayOnline subscribers != FFXI subscribers. I'm a PlayOnline subscriber and I don't even own FFXI, I simply subscribed to get all of the content for the FFIX book I bought over a year ago.
RTFA!! Better yet, actually try to understand the article. Don't just grab a few numbers out of it and start plugging them into your calculators without regard to their actual meaning.
Yes, I did RTFA and UTFA, unfortunately it was about 15 minutes before I posted the above comment, and I didn't re-read before replying. Congratulations for having a better memory than I do, but then, that's why I use computers to store most important information and my cell phone to store phone numbers and physical & email addresses.
so saying they currently have 400k subscribers from japan and 100k boxes sold equalling 430k subscribes sounds like a decent estimate. what they basically are saying is that 70% of the people buying the boxed game will most likely not continue for longer then 1 month worth of play. MMORPG is not for everyone.
This sounds about right, but it's probably more likely that 30+% of the North American users have decided to subscribe for some period of time.
This has to be the case, simply because only 1/4th of their subscribers are in the US, where the game has been out only a fairly short time, and is only available on the PC. The Japanese release, which has been available ~18 months, accounts for 75% of the users, which means that either people have been living with their heads in the ground and are just now picking it up (unlikely, especially since Japanese sales usually dive after a couple weeks at best), or they really like the game.
The best part, though, is that the NC-17 versions of films are usually restored for DVD 'unrated' releases.
Frankly, if a scene can cause a rating drop from NC-17 to R just because they change it from colour to black & white, it just shows that the rating was unjustified to begin with.
Theaters are usually good enough about enforcing their own rules regarding ratings (and the age restrictions for those ratings), so I don't really see the point of people protesting, and I've never really seen it happen first-hand, either (though come to think of it, NC-17 movies are rare enough in theaters that I'd be hard pressed to say whether or not I've actually been to a theater where an NC-17 movie was playing).
Anyway this is all horribly off-topic, the game is AO, and you kids shouldn`t be playing all these fun games, back to your bibles, and read up on stoning immoral women.
The game isn't AO, which is why this is on-topic and was brought up in the first place.
In the US, violence may raise a hair once in a while, but sex is just out, simple as that. AO gets reserved almost entirely to sexual situations in games rather than being applied to extreme violence. In a movie it doesn't take an extreme amount of nudity and/or sex to get an NC-17 rating, but the amount of violence it takes to get an NC-17 rating is almost unbelievable (at the same time, what it takes to cut a violent NC-17 movie to an R rating is almost laughable). To relate it to music, back when I listened to rap music, in the late 80's/early 90's, 2 Live Crew had an album banned in Florida because of sexually suggestive content (and the album's cover), while NWA and others with violent content didn't even make a stir in the media.
Of course, this isn't to say that I feel violent content should be banned or even limited to adults, it's simply to point out that the puritan beliefs are still at hand, and are seriously warped.
The reality is that no matter how hyped up people get about Marilyn Manson and Eminem CDs, a great deal of the hype is created to sell albums, and encouraged by the record labels. If they were seriously in danger of being banned, the responses would be very different, much like we saw with 2 Live Crew, or when Ice T was under fire for 'Cop Killer' (anyone else remember Clinton condemning that song when he had previously stated Eric Clapton, who helped make the song 'I Shot The Sheriff' popular, was his favorite musician?). I actually think that Manhunt is a similar response, on the part of Rockstar, to the media's reaction to Grand Theft Auto, as the responses that Marilyn Manson, Eminem, and other 'controversial' musicians have had in recent years to press reaction to their music.
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So, people play the RPG for the amazing amazing plot. The randome encounter/combat "game" they throw in there so it isn't just a movie is crap. Throw in something else instead and we can make great games worth playing. Try throwing in a turn based strategy, an fps, a real time strategy, a puzzle game, a simulation. Any real game will do just fine.
While I appreciate some interesting ideas in games, I'd have to say that what you're looking for seems more like the old adventure games rather than console RPGs.
Golden Sun and Mario & Luigi both have to deal with the fact that they're on a portable platform, so most people simply aren't going to deal with spending 30-60 minutes between save points, or much of the gameplay of standard console RPGs.
Even Fire Emblem seems a bit excessive for a handheld at times, with more time spent reading dialogue (most of which doesn't further the plot or even develop the characters) than going through the battles, which are the core of that particular game's sub-genre.
That is why these games come with adjustable difficulty settings.
Most console RPGs don't have adjustable difficulty settings, especially those with random encounters.
Besides: the game should have been scaled properly, with enough static? encounters programmed in to put the character on the propper level.
Yes, which comes down to a matter of playtesting, but, again, if you want to be the maximum possible level you're going to be hunting down every last static encounter rather than simply wandering around until you have a random encounter.
Frankly, I play and enjoy both types of games, and I see no reason to fault a game for using either method. They both have their merits, when done properly, and, as I said, every game that uses random encounters should have a method for getting from one area to another without having to deal with the random encounters, at least for the later parts of the game.
Rather than later third-party greats.
;p
Remember, also, that some of those 3rd party titles may not have been released in Japan, or that the Super Famicom was probably already available in Japan by the time they did.
For example, no Megaman, no Strider; in fact, very few platform games other than Mario. I think this is in part because the system was released there in 1984, the sunset days of arcade ports being console gaming's bread and butter. Afterwards, the prevaling trend was towards more complex action games with some story, and RPGs.
I'd say it's more likely that there just wasn't a 'bread and butter' for console gaming in the mid 80's, and they had to find their own way. Once particular games started selling, different companies started moving in those particular directions. Of course, the great thing about the NES/Famicom area is simply that developers did so many different things and explored the possibilities a great deal.
The RPGs are much better remembered today, of course. So American gamers have a different impression of the NES than the Japanese do of the Famicom, because they got it as many stronger action titles that weren't arcade ports came around. By the later 1980s, competition to the Famicom had already started appearing in Japan, and so a few of the very best titles(the DQ series, FF3, Mario 3, RCR) were remembered.
Frankly, I was amazed that so many of the titles seemed right on, since people keep saying that Japanese and American gamers have different tastes. There are some obvious examples of the differences, like the lack of Castlevania and MegaMan(Rockman) titles, but Metroid was there, the 2 major SMB titles, Excitebike and Goonies II were there (and I never expected that on a Japanese list). I can only really argue against a small number of those titles, and can only think of a small number of titles that would replace them. Putting them in order is fairly meaningless in the end, as everyone can quibble over any number of things to determine order.
And my opinion is that the worst NES game is not Spelunker(which is OK as they go, based on all the emulated NES roms I've played, nearly the whole library), but Super Pitfall. I got it on the basis that "the other Pitfall games sounded cool" at maybe 10 years old. I'm kind of surprised that I still have it around. Basically, you walk around an enormous generic platform map with caves and lousy scrolling, falling into unseen pits and lava and deadly monsters with zero air control, and trying to avoid the monsters that are on ground level with poor control(you can shoot them, but you have limited ammo). There's a plot where you're supposed to rescue your friends or somesuch, but I never got far enough for it to matter.
In other words, it was just like the original Pitfall
There were plenty of horrible NES games, it all just depends on which one you got stuck with as a kid.
Based on date of usage, the term should belong to Warner - especially since they originally wanted to do "Enter The Matrix" way back in 1999 (they approached Dave Perry of Shiny Entertainment but he originally turned them down).
You seem to be forgetting that the original Max Payne was in development longer than the original Unreal, or about half as long as DNF. Most of the people following the game saw 'bullet time' demos long before the Matrix was in theaters.
The difference between random encounters and non-random or static encounters is the ability of the player to level up the characters as they please before attacking the next boss/challenge.
With random encounters, if you want to put the time in, you can overpower the boss or at least make things easier on yourself by simply wandering around to find more random monsters. Without it, you're stuck hoping you found every monster in an area to get to the highest level possible before getting there.
Both have their appeal, as different people play RPGs in different ways. What more games probably need is something like the chocobo that lets you go from one place to another while avoiding random encounters (the airship did this as well in the first FF game).
There doesn't have to be exact age correlation between the two rating systems.
But there is, as R = 17+ and M = 17+. There isn't always an exact correlation within a franchise, though.
The Lion and Lamb project seem to be searching for the same correlation. They complain that a game that's rated T was made using a movie that's rated R, but R-rated movies are accessible by teenagers with (13-16) or without (17-19) parents, so how is it wrong? If you use movie, TV, and/or video game ratings as a concrete way of deciding whether some piece of media is appropriate for your child, then you're a miserable excuse for a parent anyway.
Obviously, there's either a difference between the way the ratings are decided, or there's a difference between the content of the game vs. the movie. I tend to think that the middle ground on game ratings and movie ratings tends to be a bit muddy (ie the PG/PG-13 area where sometimes a PG-13 seems like it should be R or sometimes PG vs. the T/E ratings in games where sometimes an E seems like it should be T and vice versa, and maybe, once in a while, a T seems like it might've been an M), but whenever a film-maker or game developer has discussed changing their piece for a lower rating there have always been very specific items that made the difference to the people deciding the ratings.
Of course, I agree that ratings shouldn't be the only decision maker in this, but in the end I think they're judging this on the ratings more than the product anyway. WTF does the back of a TMNT figure have to do with the game anyway? Hell, it's been well over a decade since I played with a TMNT figure anyway, and they didn't do anything unless you made them do it.
We also take all of the locks with us, and the security system.
This is simply an example of how businesses and individuals work quite differently in an area where people assume things are much the same. Businesses rent the space, not usually the facilities (ie phone, security, etc), so most of the phone equipment, including those lines they're cutting, were put in by the business, and are taken from place to place. For many people it's just not worth the effort to take the lines completely out, so cutting them is far more common, especially since re-using the line would be almost out of the question in the new building (though the new tenant of the old building could re-use the line if you don't cut it too close).
We don't rent space expecting cat-5 cable to be in place, we rent it knowing that it will be easy for our people to put cat-5 in. We don't expect the phone line to be routed to the room we have designated for the phone equipment, or that the security will be up to our requirements.
If it was a home bought and sold by an individual, you have to leave most of those things in place because the buyer expects them to be there. However, if you spell it out in the contract, you can still cut away the phone and cable for whatever reason, though, as an individual, you also expect those things to be in the place you're moving to (which, again, companies don't expect to find when they move into a new business space).
All of our phone/fax patch panels are mounted to large pieces of plywood, which are then mounted to the wall. Every time the office is moved, on the last day of the move, the cables are cut just above these plywood boards and the whole setup is moved to the next place.
You're right, though, this generally does leave no possibility of re-use for the next person. Then again, there was no cable there in the first place when we moved into most of these buildings.
The Oracle games still sell for ~$20 new in various places. I picked both of them up shortly after I picked up my first GBA-SP.
So, they're still available at retail new in the box, and perfectly playable on the GB Player. One of the videos on the Zelda Classic disc specifically mentions the Oracle games as well as Link to the Past, along with the tag line 'now with the GB Player and the GameCube you can play all of the Zelda games on one system', though that conveniently omits the craptastic 3DO games.
and VH-1 ran about 4 hours of Michael Jackson specials over the weekend, most specifically addressing the issue.
Frankly, I'd normally say 'why not just mention that Moonwalker for Genesis was also not pulled from store shelves', except that I wasn't even aware of this compilation in the first place, and may actually buy it now.
secret weapons of luftwaffe didn't do that bad and iirc a rehash of sorts is coming out pretty soon.
Just a note, I only recently (last friday) found out that Secret Weapons Over Normandy was coming out, only to find that it was already in stores.
Damn it, everybody stop referring to the DC's VGA output as 480p RIGHT NOW.
i xels/AspectRa tio/ScanMode/FrameRates ive/240 /704/16:9/Progressive/60s sive/240 /704/4:3/Progressive/60s ive/24/ 640/4:3/Progressive/60
Just for the sake of correcting people that figure that things like HDTV and 480p actually mean anything, I dug up the definition from the actual standard.
EDTV (Enhanced Definition Television)
Format/VerticalScanLines/HorizontalP
480p/480/704/16:9/Progres
480p/480/704/16:9/Progressive/30
480p/48
480p/480/704/4:3/Progre
480p/480/704/4:3/Progressive/30
480p/48
480p/480/640/4:3/Progres
480p/480/640/4:3/Progressive/30
480p/480
Now tell me, how is the DC not 480p again?
There's nothing in the standard that has anything to do with the connection involved.
480p
You will run into problems later when some cluebie wonders how to connect his DC to the component inputs on his TV, at which point I'm sure one of you dumb fucks will "correct" him.
Tax money is the only pool that this funding comes from.
That's a very high-level view of things. In most cases, tax money gets broken into several pools, for instance education, law enforcement, and the DMV. Considering the overhead in most local education departments, it's very likely that the money each district receives is seperated into pools for technology, supplies, teachers, books, and so on. The state of California was 50th in the country for per-student spending on books when I attended school there, for example.
I'm not convinced that this is the best way to spend the money, but it is not my decision to make.
If it comes up in your school district, you have every right for your opinion to be heard on the matter, though different districts have different methods of handling this. In most cases, school districts are very political, and it's hard to get through to them without dealing with a lot of red tape.
Would the money be better spent on teachers? If it is spent on hiring more teachers, improving student-teacher ratios.
It depends on how things are handled. When I was in high school, California required a maximum of 20 students per 10th grade english class. In my senior year the school had to hire 20 new teachers to handle the fact that the class of '98 was over twice the size of the class of '97. Additionally, California law required the school to be built no larger than what was needed for the number of students in it's area the first year it held students from all 4 years of high school. They started with a class of 10 that grew to 100 by the time all 4 years were represented, but the 10th graduating class was a class of 700. By the time I graduated (in the school's 7th year), you couldn't fit the entire student body into the gym's bleachers, and all of the classes except for 10th grade english and all science courses (limited to 24 by the seating arrangements) had in excess of 30 students per teacher.
Anyway, they tried hiring more teachers in the grade schools, but they ran out of class rooms, they had to add temporary classrooms in temporary buildings (trailers) and in assembly areas. The same goes with the high school, most of the 10th grade English classes were being taught in other areas of the school because the English building didn't have enough classrooms for the classes, and many foreign language teachers were teaching English classes as well (frankly, though, I learned more about the English language from my German teacher than I did from my English teachers in high school, since they assumed that you picked up most of the grammar and spelling in grade school).
Even though teachers are grossly underpaid in relation to the importance of their job, major increases in their salaries might bring in more of the "I'm in it for the money" teachers rather than "I want to teach" teachers.
This is exactly the problem. You can raise teachers' salaries, but then you can only afford a lower number of teachers. As an added bonus, I'd like to know how many of my high school teachers could actually afford to live in the area the students lived in without a second job. The teachers I knew well enough to know such things about all had at least one other job, some seasonal (summer jobs), others part time (leave school and go to another job, usually teaching at the community college, a few nites a week). I had the same teacher for German in my first 3 years of high school and the first semester I studied the language in college. You can only pay teachers so much before you get people in it for the money or start effecting the number of teachers you can hire, which is truly unfortunate because we need as many teachers as we can get. Unfortunately, you can only have as many teachers as you have classrooms, and building more classrooms is at least as expensive as most other ideas for improving education.
Actually, it is not true that consoles usually only draw at 640x240. The default mode on the Xbox is to render a complete 640x480 screen, and the display hardware uses the extra scan lines to implement a flicker filter. Developers are encouraged to use this mode partially for the visual difference, but also because the game can support 480p without modification. Since the fill-rate is the same, the user gets progressive scan for free.
This is also the case on the DreamCast, which is why most of it's games look great on 480p HDTVs or with a VGA adapter. 480p can also be used for some FSAA methods when going to interlaced mode.
You are mostly right about the higher resolutions, though. The big issue is that few enough customers can take advantage of them, so it's not worth implementing them. The problem is not necessarily fill-rate (although that can be a factor), but that it affects gameplay. A 16:9 aspect ratio requires either displaying more stuff on the sides, or cutting off the top and bottom. In either case, it affects camera tuning, cutscene creation, and sometimes even level design (to accomodate the different visual presentation.)
16:9 can change things, depending on the type of game, but resolution is just a matter of whether or not the developers want to develop the game for the higher resolution. Once it's working fine in 1080i or 720p, it's not any extra work to rescale for 480p/i. True support of 16:9 ends up with more polygons on the screen and possibly more textures, and you have to pay attention to whether or not something is given away, but unless there are a lot of peripheral cues in a game, it could be developed in 16:9 and then work just fine in 4:3. Considering how many people think that 4:3 formatting is perfectly ok for their movies, I don't think many that bought a 4:3 HDTV would miss the loss in a 16:9-developed game simply cut off for 4:3.
I was buying a HDTV, Initially I wanted the 16:9 format television but after much soul searching and back account checking, I realized that the majority of my TV use is for video games and regular television. Not too much 16:9 support there.
It all depends on what kind of TV you're watching. HD programming is as often in 16:9 as not if you have a good selection of HD programming in your area.
Considering that most people buying HDTVs now will still have them for quite a few years to come, it may be in their best interest to get a 16x9 screen and put up with the bars on 4x3 content (or use one of the many stretched modes available on most HDTVs). The same thing goes for gamers, as the next generation of consoles is far more likely to have better support for HDTV (hey, even the DreamCast supports 480p, and in most DC games it's the native resolution so you don't lose anything).
Generally speaking, with good hardware support, games can easily be coded for the highest resolution a developer wants to support and then scaled for smaller resolutions. Developers have been doing resolution/refresh-independant development on PCs for years, and the consoles are going to have to start (hell, they should've done it long ago at the very least for the sake of PAL translation).
All of that being said, I don't think anyone would be disappointed with the appearance of even non-480p games on a good HDTV. The 480p games, on the other hand, will just look that much better.
I usually read more quickly on a computer, but I am very touchy about the clarity of text on the computer as well as refresh rates and such. In any case, it should still be possible to print the text, though I'm sure parents wouldn't want their kids printing out the entire book for each of their classes.
You said it yourself, the books cost quite a bit of money, and you're right, many of the same publishers that publish college books also publish high school books. It costs a lot more money to print the books than it does to press CDs, and many publishers (though I'm not absolutely sure on textbook publishers) already offer books on CDs for less than the dead tree editions.
Even without the sharing she I soubt she baught all that many of the CDs.
Clearly some punishment is fair in this case.
3500 dollors may be steep (or not), but the legel alternative would have the price at 1100 dollors,
No one knows whether or not she bought the CDs. 100 CDs is not a huge amount (assuming 11 songs per CD, which is low), though it may be for a 15-year-old. On the other hand, there is no legal alternative. iTunes Music Service is not the same as Kazaa, you're not sharing music there, you can't listen to an album to decide whether or not you want to buy the CD.
I think it's bullshit that if I want to avoid having the RIAA offer me a 'settlement' of several thousand dollars I have to shut off P2P software and have to monitor all outside access to my computer very closely, just because they're afraid that someone else will download some of the several thousand songs on my hard drive. I bet the RIAA wouldn't even bother trying to figure out how many of the songs they actually own, but would just send a bill for the 8000+ songs that are there. Come to think of it, even RIAA artists don't often attribute their copyright to the RIAA or give the RIAA the right to enforce their copyrights.
I would think that technology funding and teachers come from different pools of money, but I could be wrong.
Additionally, they might be able to save some money if they can buy the books on CD-ROM. Hell, they might even save some of their students from serious back problems if all they have to carry around is a little paper, and iBook, and a pencil.
Since DirectPlay and GameSpy perform 2 completely different functions, I don't quite understand your link.
GameSpy would, at best, replace Zone.com, not DirectPlay, since the latter is a network API and the former is simply a matchmaking service.
Furthermore, as it says, they have sold 200k boxes in the U.S., which have spawned 100k subscriptions. You're just pulling numbers out of your ass when you're talking about 30% of North American users subscribing.
;) In order to reach 500k they need 70k more users assuming that no one drops before they reach that number. If it takes them over a month to ship another 140k boxes (if 200k shipped = 100k subscribed, 140k = 70k subscribed), there's a possibility that they'll lose some percentage of subscribers, and need to increase the shipments even more (though, of course, they need to actually sell the boxes too).
OK, so, at worst they have 50% of NA users signed up to PlayOnline (not exactly the same thing as subscribing for the game, either). Considering that there are still boxes on the shelves, it's probably much higher than that, like 70% since we already used that number
In any case, the wording is unclear on one point: PlayOnline subscribers != FFXI subscribers. I'm a PlayOnline subscriber and I don't even own FFXI, I simply subscribed to get all of the content for the FFIX book I bought over a year ago.
RTFA!! Better yet, actually try to understand the article. Don't just grab a few numbers out of it and start plugging them into your calculators without regard to their actual meaning.
Yes, I did RTFA and UTFA, unfortunately it was about 15 minutes before I posted the above comment, and I didn't re-read before replying. Congratulations for having a better memory than I do, but then, that's why I use computers to store most important information and my cell phone to store phone numbers and physical & email addresses.
so saying they currently have 400k subscribers from japan and 100k boxes sold equalling 430k subscribes sounds like a decent estimate. what they basically are saying is that 70% of the people buying the boxed game will most likely not continue for longer then 1 month worth of play. MMORPG is not for everyone.
This sounds about right, but it's probably more likely that 30+% of the North American users have decided to subscribe for some period of time.
This has to be the case, simply because only 1/4th of their subscribers are in the US, where the game has been out only a fairly short time, and is only available on the PC. The Japanese release, which has been available ~18 months, accounts for 75% of the users, which means that either people have been living with their heads in the ground and are just now picking it up (unlikely, especially since Japanese sales usually dive after a couple weeks at best), or they really like the game.
The best part, though, is that the NC-17 versions of films are usually restored for DVD 'unrated' releases.
Frankly, if a scene can cause a rating drop from NC-17 to R just because they change it from colour to black & white, it just shows that the rating was unjustified to begin with.
Theaters are usually good enough about enforcing their own rules regarding ratings (and the age restrictions for those ratings), so I don't really see the point of people protesting, and I've never really seen it happen first-hand, either (though come to think of it, NC-17 movies are rare enough in theaters that I'd be hard pressed to say whether or not I've actually been to a theater where an NC-17 movie was playing).
Anyway this is all horribly off-topic, the game is AO, and you kids shouldn`t be playing all these fun games, back to your bibles, and read up on stoning immoral women.
The game isn't AO, which is why this is on-topic and was brought up in the first place.
In the US, violence may raise a hair once in a while, but sex is just out, simple as that. AO gets reserved almost entirely to sexual situations in games rather than being applied to extreme violence. In a movie it doesn't take an extreme amount of nudity and/or sex to get an NC-17 rating, but the amount of violence it takes to get an NC-17 rating is almost unbelievable (at the same time, what it takes to cut a violent NC-17 movie to an R rating is almost laughable). To relate it to music, back when I listened to rap music, in the late 80's/early 90's, 2 Live Crew had an album banned in Florida because of sexually suggestive content (and the album's cover), while NWA and others with violent content didn't even make a stir in the media.
Of course, this isn't to say that I feel violent content should be banned or even limited to adults, it's simply to point out that the puritan beliefs are still at hand, and are seriously warped.
The reality is that no matter how hyped up people get about Marilyn Manson and Eminem CDs, a great deal of the hype is created to sell albums, and encouraged by the record labels. If they were seriously in danger of being banned, the responses would be very different, much like we saw with 2 Live Crew, or when Ice T was under fire for 'Cop Killer' (anyone else remember Clinton condemning that song when he had previously stated Eric Clapton, who helped make the song 'I Shot The Sheriff' popular, was his favorite musician?). I actually think that Manhunt is a similar response, on the part of Rockstar, to the media's reaction to Grand Theft Auto, as the responses that Marilyn Manson, Eminem, and other 'controversial' musicians have had in recent years to press reaction to their music.