They go from the first company to mass produce plastic playing cards in Japan to the first company to produce micro-processor controlled arcade games in Japan.
Anyway, it has some sparse details, but is interesting.
They usually do pull release dates out of their asses, and many people repeatedly asked Valve what the date was when the Sept. 30th date came out, and every store was reporting something different (usually much later). Valve confirmed the Sept. 30th date on quite a few occasions. Take a look back at the E3 press releases, as that's when Valve announced both the game and the release date.
Sounds like a rather unfortunate problem, probably related to chipset drivers for the particular OS (perhaps AGP).
Over time I've become really conservative with what hardware I'll purchase for my PC because of the problems I saw with various games on various hardware, which is why I don't own an AMD CPU or an ATI video card (though both have gotten better over the years), and why I've tried several times to get away from Creative Labs sound cards but have never managed to find something that works well for gaming while still sounding good and working well with NT-based systems (since I've been using 2k and XP for the last 3 years on my gaming systems).
Learn to read, bozo. I said "I'm quite interested in game news..." but Simoniker is not filtering for a general audience.
Then filter out Simoniker and get your game news elsewhere. Game news doesn't filter well for a general audience anyway, and neither does Slashdot news in the first place. Better yet, filter the Games section and then check it once a day to see if you are interested in anything on there, because the truth is that there're rarely more than 8 stories in the games section a day.
The only reason I read the games section of Slashdot is because it DOES filter the game news that I would normally get from reading a half dozen other sites. Slashdot has always been specialized in some way, and there are filters for a reason. Hell, there are even more specialized filters for filtering portions of the games section.
People that have a problem with this are the reason why even the 7 day return policy no longer exists. If you heard this explained as their return policy for new games, it was quite some time ago. Otherwise, you mis-heard them describing the used game policy (though iirc it's much longer than 7 days). Remember, though, that when they did allow returns, they required them to be in new condition to get a full refund, otherwise, they'd just buy them back as used copies.
Now, in addition to a handful of sealed "backstock" copies behind the desk, there are now 8 copies of Madden which are still NEW, but appear to have been "used" (as in, the seal has been broken).
I've found that they usually inform me that the new copy has been opened before they bother scanning it to sell it to me. Perhaps that's just my experience, but there are probably 6 game stores I regularly buy from in this area (each store has different selections of used titles, and I'm often looking for hard-to-find PS1 games) and I've had it happen in at least half of them, and have never been sold a previously opened copy without them letting me know (unless it was used, of course, in which case I was informed it was used) beforehand. The fact is that they're often pushing used titles so hard that they tell me this (and remind me of the differences in the return policies between new and used titles) hoping I'll buy the used one instead.
One thing I will say, though, is that when the return policy on new titles was better, I almost always refused to buy used games, because I wanted to reward the developer for good games. Now, I usually buy used games. Of course, a bigger part of the difference in buying habits probably comes from the fact that I need to save more money now than I used to (trying to pay off some debt to move to a better neighborhood).
Amazon UK's 25% discount price on new games always seems to fall into the realm of $40-50 US (25-30), which is the normal retail price for games in the US.
As for DVDs, most of the cost of producing a film is recovered in the box office, so the DVDs are mostly profit. This is also why DVDs don't cost much more than music CDs (though price-fixing on music CDs doesn't help, either). Most films also don't go into the 100M+ range, either, although they do commonly run several million. Movie studios aren't going to give many people budgets they don't think the box office can recover.
Books require (usually) one author and a handful of editors, and then the publishing. In fact, there are a few models that bypass most of the editing and publishing requirements, as well (you can have a book published in paper format straight from an electronic format submitted by the author), used mostly by new authors just trying to get their work out. On the other hand, books are significantly less likely to sell large numbers of copies, unless the author is a well-known and consistant best-selling author.
If a naked woman walks down a dark alley, should she expect to be safe?
Just as she would probably be fined for public indecency or some crap, anyone that took the oppurtunity to rape her would be imprisoned for rape.
You tell me, which is the worse crime?
As for copy protection, no console using standard formats is going to have strong copy protection forever. The lifespan of a console is just too long for that. While I never have owned a modded console, I've known a handful of people that do, and they get their games primarily from rental.
As for PC games, most of the people I know like to play PC games online, so copying just doesn't happen (because of the fairly universal methods of locking out multiple users of a CD Key). The problem, though, is that many of the copy protection schemes break functionality for legitimate users, while anyone that really wants to copy the disc eventually (usually within days) can (hey, I've used plenty of no-CD cracks for games I only wanted to use offline, but I have the original CDs, too).
Still, every publisher and developer expects a reasonable number of purchases for a good, well-developed game. If their expectations are too high, they'll find that out, and adjust their budget for their next title or perish. The console developers and copy protection software developers will continue to do what they can to protect their investment, but in the long run the best they can hope for is limiting copying and pissing off as few customers as possible.
I don't know about everyone else, but I don't buy from vendors that charge restocking fees for hardware. If I return hardware, it's because it's defective for the function for which I bought it, and should be returned to the manufacturer. I buy from local retailers precisely because returns are easy, and hardware is occasionally defective, and a restocking fee is rediculous when the hardware is defective.
Of course, when the retailer informs me of reasons why a product would not work with my system and I buy it anyway, and find that they were right, I find a restocking fee perfectly within reason, because they can still sell the product to someone that can use it.
A piece of software should be the same way. If the product does not work because of a defect that I was not informed about at the time of purchase, I should be able to get a full refund. If I simply did not like it or ignored the warnings, then a restocking fee would be fine. If the disc is defective then it should be a simple exchange for the same product (which I've never had a problem with from any retailer over anything shipped on a disc, except that people at music retailers look at you in a slightly odd manner when you exchange a scratched disc, and you often have to open the package and show them (the music/movie/game retailer) the physical defect before they stop talking about no return policies).
Unfortunately, most places don't rent computer games, and many places do not sell used computer games.
It comes down to 'try a friends copy', which also means you're unlikely to be buying a lot of new games, or reading the reviews, which, in some cases, is not any better of an option than buying the game and being stuck with it.
Besides that, the problem is most often with games we are not hesitant about buying, rather than ones about which we are hesitant. UT2k3, for example, had a working 'beta', and numerous other games using the previous iterations of the engine. The 'beta' worked fine on my machine, Unreal and UT worked fine on my machine, the retail version of UT2k3 did not work at all. Hell, I had even had problems with UT's copy protection, and later purchased hardware that did not have problems with that protection (after it died around the time Diablo 2's copy protection hit it), yet 2k3 did not work.
The game industry is being protected by the retailers' policies. Instead of selling returned games as new, they should be returning them to the publishers, sticking it where it belongs. The copy protection is supposed to stop people from copying the games, so the problem of people copying and returning shouldn't be there (oh, wait, the copy protection doesn't work for shit, but they keep putting it on there). If the company is using CDkeys and copy protection to protect their discs, then make sure that every copy protected or CDKey-bearing disc is returned to the publisher. If a CD Key is returned and isn't banned from their service, than that's their problem, but at least you (as a retailer) don't have a customer with a useless CD Key because someone copied the game and posted the key on the internet before returning it to you.
I've come to accept that the only way I'm going to get it to work is to cough up $1000 for a new computer.
Umm, despite the fact that it's a rather pointless venture, why not a new CD drive instead of a whole new computer?
Personally, I have a CD-RW and a DVD-ROM drive in my system, and haven't had any copy protection problems on the DVD-ROM. A previous CD-ROM drive that I owned actually was pretty much destroyed by the copy protection on a handful of games, and was the only CD-ROM drive I ever had to replace because it did not work (rather than buying a faster drive). Having multiple drives makes things much easier, and if the copy protection gets out of hand, the no-CD cracks usually take care of it.
To a certain extent, though, stores can track this sort of behavior, so that if it becomes a problem they can choose not to sell to that person any more. Sure, it'll always be more of a problem for the bigger chains (like Wal-Mart and so forth, that sell much more than just games), but most of the game retailers have done it in the past, and would still be doing it if the corporate policies hadn't changed to refuse refunds.
Filter out the Games section if you don't want to see it. Most of them will only show up if you have 'Collapse Sections' selected in your preferences anyway.
Personally, I just go straight to games.slashdot.org anyway, and then visit the main page when things slow down.
WhoTF wants to get home from work to haggle about the rules of an imaginary country? If you spent that time participating in/giving educational compaigns for the real world (no matter what the cause), perhaps the typical apathy of the public would be gone.
Of course, there are no statistics to back up any of your links to apathy and such, so we can just move on to this point: people interested in the politics of a virtual world may be more likely to participate in real world politics. It could also be possible to 'try out' unusual political solutions in a virtual world to give some idea of how people may react (and what effects it may have), in order to fine-tune the ideas before presenting them to real-world political bodies.
Just think what a mess they could've avoided if they could've simulated alcohol prohibition, or if they could've looked forward to see today's drug war budget when they decided to make certain drugs illegal. Sure, there's no perfect world simulation out there, but getting involved in the intricate details of a virtual politic could give rise to new thoughts on real-world government.
in other words: yes, it's just another name for asshats.
Not to mention that there are griefers even in games with player killing, such as people purposely exploiting bugs that hinder other players (quick examples from my far-too-much-time playing TFC: blocking pathways with items that can't be destroyed or using 'ghost' exploits that allow you to spam grenades while not being seen or being able to move through walls (or ghosting into the wall or sky in such a way that you can launch grenades into a high-traffic area), or hiding flags to prevent your team from scoring).
Personally, I played mostly in the skirmish mode, which I think was the best of any of the C&C games to date. I also liked the little 'medals' they gave out for different accomplishments, which added to the replay value of the game somewhat, giving you measurable goals outside of the normal victory conditions in-game, rather than just letting the player make stuff up for themselves (though you can still do that, of course;).
Personally, although it was a horrible thing to have happen, I really wish there had been something recent along those lines that people could have looked at when I was in government class in high school. Too much of it was too abstract, and although our teacher was also young (25), and offered a fairly different view from what we were used to seeing in school, he couldn't find much that would polarize the class except in general viewpoints. The best he could do, most of the time, was show that even the views most people take a black & white stance on tend to fall into more grey areas (ie having a mock trial on gun control in which each side takes the absolute stance: anyone can have any type of gun vs no one can ever have a gun, although the latter point makes more sense to people that grew up in areas where it is mostly true, it's very hard to drive the point home in the US).
That being said, I'd never wish an experience like that one anyone. I'm just trying to make the point that it brought out a lot of weird ideas that some people always had about what is and is not ok, without really looking at things logically. When people are freaking out about kids wearing trench coats and listening to KMFDM (something I knew a handful of people did when I was in high school from 92 to 96), someone needs to give them a sound reality check.
Frankly, after updating the game itself (I didn't even buy the game until a patch or two was available, and never ran it before patching it), Generals ran quite nicely on my system, which although probably better than average, isn't anywhere near the top of the curve.
That being said, the additions they've made and the apparently improved graphics don't bode well for the people that aren't planning on upgrading at all between now and whenever this game will finally be released. I'm just hoping nVidia gets back to the lead before I have to buy an ATI card to play a new game.
the graphics engine (or logic for hiding detail while zoomed out) they're using must be a stud to be able to handle 1000+ units, each fighting and reacting uniquely.
You might want to re-read that part. Although the graphics in the shots look impressive, it never mentioned that all 1000+ units were visible on the screen at once, just that they were seen as red and green dots in the mini-map. OTOH, this leads to needing some fairly efficient AI, as there's certainly going to be a lot going on off-screen as well as on-screen all the time with that many units in a given area. This is especially noted when they talk about the things the AI can do (interacting with the environments, using buildings, terrain, and other units as projectiles, forming 'intelligent' battle lines, and so on).
The gameplay sounds a lot like Myth with a larger overall scale (in other words, heavily tactical but you can't see all of your units at once).
Something else I'd like to note in regards to the ratings is that often the blood is the only difference between an M rated game and a T rated game. For some parents this means their kids should be fine with both types of games, while for others this may mean they should watch the T rated titles a little more closely. Total Annihilation, for example, features mostly robots and vehicles, so there is no blood, yet there is still massive destruction. The T rating is firmly in place because of the lack of blood, yet still fairly violent content. On the other hand, many other RTS games often receive M ratings because they depict human units, and bloodshed when they are killed. For some parents the blood makes all the difference in the world, for others it makes no difference at all, and for the latter type there's a difference between whether you're willing to let your children have access to that violent content or not, regardless of the blood levels.
I'd just like to add, though, that very few of the people that grew up playing video games are into their 30s, yet, which means (hopefully) their kids are still fairly young.
While there are many things younger kids can get into trouble doing, it's far more often that kids in their teens (even late teens, such as Columbine) are the ones in the news with parents (and everyone else) blaming video games. While I realize that parents become less involved in their teens' lives as they get older (and teens like it that way), they still need to take the responsibility of parenting and make sure they know what their kids are up to. By no means do I think that most teenagers can't handle GTA (because I know if I was 13 when GTA3 came out my parents would've been ok with me playing it), but some of these people are doing truly stupid things and just blaming the title of the month for it. Today's teenagers may have parents with some exposure to video games, but it's really going to be a few more years before this becomes common, and it will be even moreso in another decade or two (and many of those PS2s are in parents' homes for the use of the parents, so they have to realize that games they bought for themselves aren't going to be kept out of their childrens' hands indefinitely).
I'm keeping a fairly careful eye on my nieces and nephews for the next 15-20 years to see how they fare, considering that my step-brothers spend a fair amount of time on their PS2s, and my brother-in-law spends a fair amount of time playing PC games. I don't plan on having kids myself, as my girlfriend and I have very different (often opposing) views on how children should be raised.
Frankly, I don't think parents need to take much of a leap to go from teaching their children that TV and Film are make-believe to video games. My parents were aware of video games (they bought the Atari 2600 for themselves as much as for us, since they both played Pac-Man and Centipede quite a bit in arcades), but they certainly weren't prepared for them to go from Pac-Man to Doom to Quake 3 (though my dad probably was much more prepared, as he was well aware of the progress of technology). Still, they made it quite clear that most of what's going on on the TV (and later monitor) screen is not real, including the video games. Sure, I grew up watching the video games go through the revolutions that brought us from Pong to Super Mario Bros. to Doom to Quake, but the difference between what's on the screen and the real world was always there, regardless of the fact that it took the games a long time to get anywhere near the visuals of film and TV shows.
Other than that, regardless of what's going on with the TV screen, don't aim guns at or near people should be very basic, especially if you have guns in the house. Additionally, people that do keep guns in the house should teach their children to use and respect them, and keep them locked up. The idea that a kid will not get into danger with a gun in the house if you hide the gun is rediculous, as the child is bound to find everything in your house, especially if you hide it from them. Most people's kids probably have better hiding places for things than their parents do anyway. Shooting at passing cars should be no more allowable than throwing rocks at passing cars.
As for children being smart enough to transfer blame, that's not only the case, but children are also more likely to transfer the blame at certain ages, depending on how much trouble they believe they will be in if they fess up to it.
Though I'm not the person in question, and I still believe strongly in each parent really making informed decisions on these things, I felt a need to address something here.
My only question for you is whether you'll let your children play more scary and/or violent games when they get older. For instance, right now, your oldest child is 10... in 5 years, you'd think they could handle Baldur's Gate (I doubt a 10-year-old could understand it anyway), so will you let them play it then?
Given that in some ways I may have been a bit ahead of many other children my own age, at 10 years old I was playing pen & paper AD&D. Baldur's Gate would've appealed to me more at that age than it does now (though I still enjoyed it). Additionally, because I could only get so many games for each system, I spent far more time playing each game (and therefore would've played BG a great deal more if it had been available when I was 10 rather than 20-something).
Each child is a special case, certainly. I grew up in a situation where my dad absolutely did not allow toy guns in the house (nor did he own any real guns), until I was about 10 years old and he started dating a woman who regularly bought her 4-year-old son toy guns. My parents were fairly open about what I could view on TV, play (on consoles and PC), and read, but the toy guns were out of the question until he let this particular woman into the house. Frankly, it wasn't an issue for me because I always had plenty of entertainment without toy guns (the issue never came up with me until that point, when I realized how big of an issue it was for my dad).
I saw Poltergeist when I was fairly young (around 5), and to this day it's still in the high numbers for scariest movies I've ever seen, but my parents made sure that I knew there was a difference between movies and reality, and were there throughout the movie. At that age it was a special case, but as I got older they were not reluctant to allow me to view violent or scary movies, because they knew I was not a violent child, nor scared easily (or at least in the long term, a scary movie wouldn't keep me up at night).
They let me play AD&D (and GURPS, Chill, and a handful of other RPGs) at a time when many parents were still blaming it for the deaths of their children, and they let me read anything a library or a book store would carry. When it came time, they let me listen to whatever music I wished, as long as they didn't have to hear it and I didn't repeat the 'offensive' language in much of it (I went through a period of listening to gangster rap and some other hardcore rap back in the late 80s, in my pre-teen years, before industrial and metal opened my eyes (or would that be ears) in the early 90s). When Wolfenstein 3D and Doom came out, it wasn't a problem. It all came back to the simple fact that my parents enforced early on that what happens on the screen is not what happens in real life, and that if I were to imitate what I saw/read/heard, I would be punished.
I've seen numerous people shelter their children, and in some ways, with some kids, it works perfectly fine. The key, though, is to make sure they know that difference. It's not so much a matter of sheltering as making sure they are mature enough for what they're dealing with. In many ways, the 'Mature' titles we're seeing today appeal more to those that aren't typically allowed to view that content than they do to truly mature individuals, and while I may enjoy a game of Grand Theft Auto 3/VC, even gunning down civilians and killing cops in the game, it's not the best game I own, nor is it one I spend a particularly large amount of time playing on a daily basis (recently that's been Animal Crossing, but that's another story).
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.dojomediaserver.com/specials/Famicom/ti meline.html
They go from the first company to mass produce plastic playing cards in Japan to the first company to produce micro-processor controlled arcade games in Japan.
Anyway, it has some sparse details, but is interesting.
They usually do pull release dates out of their asses, and many people repeatedly asked Valve what the date was when the Sept. 30th date came out, and every store was reporting something different (usually much later). Valve confirmed the Sept. 30th date on quite a few occasions. Take a look back at the E3 press releases, as that's when Valve announced both the game and the release date.
and most people in the US call them Tactical RPGs, or at least they did back when FF:Tactics came out...
Or maybe I got lost somewhere in a parallel universe.
Sounds like a rather unfortunate problem, probably related to chipset drivers for the particular OS (perhaps AGP).
Over time I've become really conservative with what hardware I'll purchase for my PC because of the problems I saw with various games on various hardware, which is why I don't own an AMD CPU or an ATI video card (though both have gotten better over the years), and why I've tried several times to get away from Creative Labs sound cards but have never managed to find something that works well for gaming while still sounding good and working well with NT-based systems (since I've been using 2k and XP for the last 3 years on my gaming systems).
Learn to read, bozo. I said "I'm quite interested in game news..." but Simoniker is not filtering for a general audience.
Then filter out Simoniker and get your game news elsewhere. Game news doesn't filter well for a general audience anyway, and neither does Slashdot news in the first place. Better yet, filter the Games section and then check it once a day to see if you are interested in anything on there, because the truth is that there're rarely more than 8 stories in the games section a day.
The only reason I read the games section of Slashdot is because it DOES filter the game news that I would normally get from reading a half dozen other sites. Slashdot has always been specialized in some way, and there are filters for a reason. Hell, there are even more specialized filters for filtering portions of the games section.
People that have a problem with this are the reason why even the 7 day return policy no longer exists. If you heard this explained as their return policy for new games, it was quite some time ago. Otherwise, you mis-heard them describing the used game policy (though iirc it's much longer than 7 days). Remember, though, that when they did allow returns, they required them to be in new condition to get a full refund, otherwise, they'd just buy them back as used copies.
Now, in addition to a handful of sealed "backstock" copies behind the desk, there are now 8 copies of Madden which are still NEW, but appear to have been "used" (as in, the seal has been broken).
I've found that they usually inform me that the new copy has been opened before they bother scanning it to sell it to me. Perhaps that's just my experience, but there are probably 6 game stores I regularly buy from in this area (each store has different selections of used titles, and I'm often looking for hard-to-find PS1 games) and I've had it happen in at least half of them, and have never been sold a previously opened copy without them letting me know (unless it was used, of course, in which case I was informed it was used) beforehand. The fact is that they're often pushing used titles so hard that they tell me this (and remind me of the differences in the return policies between new and used titles) hoping I'll buy the used one instead.
One thing I will say, though, is that when the return policy on new titles was better, I almost always refused to buy used games, because I wanted to reward the developer for good games. Now, I usually buy used games. Of course, a bigger part of the difference in buying habits probably comes from the fact that I need to save more money now than I used to (trying to pay off some debt to move to a better neighborhood).
Amazon UK's 25% discount price on new games always seems to fall into the realm of $40-50 US (25-30), which is the normal retail price for games in the US.
As for DVDs, most of the cost of producing a film is recovered in the box office, so the DVDs are mostly profit. This is also why DVDs don't cost much more than music CDs (though price-fixing on music CDs doesn't help, either). Most films also don't go into the 100M+ range, either, although they do commonly run several million. Movie studios aren't going to give many people budgets they don't think the box office can recover.
Books require (usually) one author and a handful of editors, and then the publishing. In fact, there are a few models that bypass most of the editing and publishing requirements, as well (you can have a book published in paper format straight from an electronic format submitted by the author), used mostly by new authors just trying to get their work out. On the other hand, books are significantly less likely to sell large numbers of copies, unless the author is a well-known and consistant best-selling author.
If a naked woman walks down a dark alley, should she expect to be safe?
Just as she would probably be fined for public indecency or some crap, anyone that took the oppurtunity to rape her would be imprisoned for rape.
You tell me, which is the worse crime?
As for copy protection, no console using standard formats is going to have strong copy protection forever. The lifespan of a console is just too long for that. While I never have owned a modded console, I've known a handful of people that do, and they get their games primarily from rental.
As for PC games, most of the people I know like to play PC games online, so copying just doesn't happen (because of the fairly universal methods of locking out multiple users of a CD Key). The problem, though, is that many of the copy protection schemes break functionality for legitimate users, while anyone that really wants to copy the disc eventually (usually within days) can (hey, I've used plenty of no-CD cracks for games I only wanted to use offline, but I have the original CDs, too).
Still, every publisher and developer expects a reasonable number of purchases for a good, well-developed game. If their expectations are too high, they'll find that out, and adjust their budget for their next title or perish. The console developers and copy protection software developers will continue to do what they can to protect their investment, but in the long run the best they can hope for is limiting copying and pissing off as few customers as possible.
I don't know about everyone else, but I don't buy from vendors that charge restocking fees for hardware. If I return hardware, it's because it's defective for the function for which I bought it, and should be returned to the manufacturer. I buy from local retailers precisely because returns are easy, and hardware is occasionally defective, and a restocking fee is rediculous when the hardware is defective.
Of course, when the retailer informs me of reasons why a product would not work with my system and I buy it anyway, and find that they were right, I find a restocking fee perfectly within reason, because they can still sell the product to someone that can use it.
A piece of software should be the same way. If the product does not work because of a defect that I was not informed about at the time of purchase, I should be able to get a full refund. If I simply did not like it or ignored the warnings, then a restocking fee would be fine. If the disc is defective then it should be a simple exchange for the same product (which I've never had a problem with from any retailer over anything shipped on a disc, except that people at music retailers look at you in a slightly odd manner when you exchange a scratched disc, and you often have to open the package and show them (the music/movie/game retailer) the physical defect before they stop talking about no return policies).
Unfortunately, most places don't rent computer games, and many places do not sell used computer games.
It comes down to 'try a friends copy', which also means you're unlikely to be buying a lot of new games, or reading the reviews, which, in some cases, is not any better of an option than buying the game and being stuck with it.
Besides that, the problem is most often with games we are not hesitant about buying, rather than ones about which we are hesitant. UT2k3, for example, had a working 'beta', and numerous other games using the previous iterations of the engine. The 'beta' worked fine on my machine, Unreal and UT worked fine on my machine, the retail version of UT2k3 did not work at all. Hell, I had even had problems with UT's copy protection, and later purchased hardware that did not have problems with that protection (after it died around the time Diablo 2's copy protection hit it), yet 2k3 did not work.
The game industry is being protected by the retailers' policies. Instead of selling returned games as new, they should be returning them to the publishers, sticking it where it belongs. The copy protection is supposed to stop people from copying the games, so the problem of people copying and returning shouldn't be there (oh, wait, the copy protection doesn't work for shit, but they keep putting it on there). If the company is using CDkeys and copy protection to protect their discs, then make sure that every copy protected or CDKey-bearing disc is returned to the publisher. If a CD Key is returned and isn't banned from their service, than that's their problem, but at least you (as a retailer) don't have a customer with a useless CD Key because someone copied the game and posted the key on the internet before returning it to you.
I've come to accept that the only way I'm going to get it to work is to cough up $1000 for a new computer.
Umm, despite the fact that it's a rather pointless venture, why not a new CD drive instead of a whole new computer?
Personally, I have a CD-RW and a DVD-ROM drive in my system, and haven't had any copy protection problems on the DVD-ROM. A previous CD-ROM drive that I owned actually was pretty much destroyed by the copy protection on a handful of games, and was the only CD-ROM drive I ever had to replace because it did not work (rather than buying a faster drive). Having multiple drives makes things much easier, and if the copy protection gets out of hand, the no-CD cracks usually take care of it.
UT2k3 was definitely one that hit me. The beta played wonderfully on my system, so I bought the game soon after it was released.
With the store-bought game, it crashed to desktop every time I tried to play it, before even getting to the game itself (crashed from the menu).
The patches might have fixed it, but I haven't gotten around to reinstalling it on my system.
To a certain extent, though, stores can track this sort of behavior, so that if it becomes a problem they can choose not to sell to that person any more. Sure, it'll always be more of a problem for the bigger chains (like Wal-Mart and so forth, that sell much more than just games), but most of the game retailers have done it in the past, and would still be doing it if the corporate policies hadn't changed to refuse refunds.
Filter out the Games section if you don't want to see it. Most of them will only show up if you have 'Collapse Sections' selected in your preferences anyway.
Personally, I just go straight to games.slashdot.org anyway, and then visit the main page when things slow down.
WhoTF wants to get home from work to haggle about the rules of an imaginary country? If you spent that time participating in/giving educational compaigns for the real world (no matter what the cause), perhaps the typical apathy of the public would be gone.
Of course, there are no statistics to back up any of your links to apathy and such, so we can just move on to this point: people interested in the politics of a virtual world may be more likely to participate in real world politics. It could also be possible to 'try out' unusual political solutions in a virtual world to give some idea of how people may react (and what effects it may have), in order to fine-tune the ideas before presenting them to real-world political bodies.
Just think what a mess they could've avoided if they could've simulated alcohol prohibition, or if they could've looked forward to see today's drug war budget when they decided to make certain drugs illegal. Sure, there's no perfect world simulation out there, but getting involved in the intricate details of a virtual politic could give rise to new thoughts on real-world government.
in other words: yes, it's just another name for asshats.
Not to mention that there are griefers even in games with player killing, such as people purposely exploiting bugs that hinder other players (quick examples from my far-too-much-time playing TFC: blocking pathways with items that can't be destroyed or using 'ghost' exploits that allow you to spam grenades while not being seen or being able to move through walls (or ghosting into the wall or sky in such a way that you can launch grenades into a high-traffic area), or hiding flags to prevent your team from scoring).
Personally, I played mostly in the skirmish mode, which I think was the best of any of the C&C games to date. I also liked the little 'medals' they gave out for different accomplishments, which added to the replay value of the game somewhat, giving you measurable goals outside of the normal victory conditions in-game, rather than just letting the player make stuff up for themselves (though you can still do that, of course ;).
Personally, although it was a horrible thing to have happen, I really wish there had been something recent along those lines that people could have looked at when I was in government class in high school. Too much of it was too abstract, and although our teacher was also young (25), and offered a fairly different view from what we were used to seeing in school, he couldn't find much that would polarize the class except in general viewpoints. The best he could do, most of the time, was show that even the views most people take a black & white stance on tend to fall into more grey areas (ie having a mock trial on gun control in which each side takes the absolute stance: anyone can have any type of gun vs no one can ever have a gun, although the latter point makes more sense to people that grew up in areas where it is mostly true, it's very hard to drive the point home in the US).
That being said, I'd never wish an experience like that one anyone. I'm just trying to make the point that it brought out a lot of weird ideas that some people always had about what is and is not ok, without really looking at things logically. When people are freaking out about kids wearing trench coats and listening to KMFDM (something I knew a handful of people did when I was in high school from 92 to 96), someone needs to give them a sound reality check.
Frankly, after updating the game itself (I didn't even buy the game until a patch or two was available, and never ran it before patching it), Generals ran quite nicely on my system, which although probably better than average, isn't anywhere near the top of the curve.
That being said, the additions they've made and the apparently improved graphics don't bode well for the people that aren't planning on upgrading at all between now and whenever this game will finally be released. I'm just hoping nVidia gets back to the lead before I have to buy an ATI card to play a new game.
the graphics engine (or logic for hiding detail while zoomed out) they're using must be a stud to be able to handle 1000+ units, each fighting and reacting uniquely.
You might want to re-read that part. Although the graphics in the shots look impressive, it never mentioned that all 1000+ units were visible on the screen at once, just that they were seen as red and green dots in the mini-map. OTOH, this leads to needing some fairly efficient AI, as there's certainly going to be a lot going on off-screen as well as on-screen all the time with that many units in a given area. This is especially noted when they talk about the things the AI can do (interacting with the environments, using buildings, terrain, and other units as projectiles, forming 'intelligent' battle lines, and so on).
The gameplay sounds a lot like Myth with a larger overall scale (in other words, heavily tactical but you can't see all of your units at once).
Something else I'd like to note in regards to the ratings is that often the blood is the only difference between an M rated game and a T rated game. For some parents this means their kids should be fine with both types of games, while for others this may mean they should watch the T rated titles a little more closely. Total Annihilation, for example, features mostly robots and vehicles, so there is no blood, yet there is still massive destruction. The T rating is firmly in place because of the lack of blood, yet still fairly violent content. On the other hand, many other RTS games often receive M ratings because they depict human units, and bloodshed when they are killed. For some parents the blood makes all the difference in the world, for others it makes no difference at all, and for the latter type there's a difference between whether you're willing to let your children have access to that violent content or not, regardless of the blood levels.
I'd just like to add, though, that very few of the people that grew up playing video games are into their 30s, yet, which means (hopefully) their kids are still fairly young.
While there are many things younger kids can get into trouble doing, it's far more often that kids in their teens (even late teens, such as Columbine) are the ones in the news with parents (and everyone else) blaming video games. While I realize that parents become less involved in their teens' lives as they get older (and teens like it that way), they still need to take the responsibility of parenting and make sure they know what their kids are up to. By no means do I think that most teenagers can't handle GTA (because I know if I was 13 when GTA3 came out my parents would've been ok with me playing it), but some of these people are doing truly stupid things and just blaming the title of the month for it. Today's teenagers may have parents with some exposure to video games, but it's really going to be a few more years before this becomes common, and it will be even moreso in another decade or two (and many of those PS2s are in parents' homes for the use of the parents, so they have to realize that games they bought for themselves aren't going to be kept out of their childrens' hands indefinitely).
I'm keeping a fairly careful eye on my nieces and nephews for the next 15-20 years to see how they fare, considering that my step-brothers spend a fair amount of time on their PS2s, and my brother-in-law spends a fair amount of time playing PC games. I don't plan on having kids myself, as my girlfriend and I have very different (often opposing) views on how children should be raised.
Frankly, I don't think parents need to take much of a leap to go from teaching their children that TV and Film are make-believe to video games. My parents were aware of video games (they bought the Atari 2600 for themselves as much as for us, since they both played Pac-Man and Centipede quite a bit in arcades), but they certainly weren't prepared for them to go from Pac-Man to Doom to Quake 3 (though my dad probably was much more prepared, as he was well aware of the progress of technology). Still, they made it quite clear that most of what's going on on the TV (and later monitor) screen is not real, including the video games. Sure, I grew up watching the video games go through the revolutions that brought us from Pong to Super Mario Bros. to Doom to Quake, but the difference between what's on the screen and the real world was always there, regardless of the fact that it took the games a long time to get anywhere near the visuals of film and TV shows.
Other than that, regardless of what's going on with the TV screen, don't aim guns at or near people should be very basic, especially if you have guns in the house. Additionally, people that do keep guns in the house should teach their children to use and respect them, and keep them locked up. The idea that a kid will not get into danger with a gun in the house if you hide the gun is rediculous, as the child is bound to find everything in your house, especially if you hide it from them. Most people's kids probably have better hiding places for things than their parents do anyway. Shooting at passing cars should be no more allowable than throwing rocks at passing cars.
As for children being smart enough to transfer blame, that's not only the case, but children are also more likely to transfer the blame at certain ages, depending on how much trouble they believe they will be in if they fess up to it.
Though I'm not the person in question, and I still believe strongly in each parent really making informed decisions on these things, I felt a need to address something here.
My only question for you is whether you'll let your children play more scary and/or violent games when they get older. For instance, right now, your oldest child is 10... in 5 years, you'd think they could handle Baldur's Gate (I doubt a 10-year-old could understand it anyway), so will you let them play it then?
Given that in some ways I may have been a bit ahead of many other children my own age, at 10 years old I was playing pen & paper AD&D. Baldur's Gate would've appealed to me more at that age than it does now (though I still enjoyed it). Additionally, because I could only get so many games for each system, I spent far more time playing each game (and therefore would've played BG a great deal more if it had been available when I was 10 rather than 20-something).
Each child is a special case, certainly. I grew up in a situation where my dad absolutely did not allow toy guns in the house (nor did he own any real guns), until I was about 10 years old and he started dating a woman who regularly bought her 4-year-old son toy guns. My parents were fairly open about what I could view on TV, play (on consoles and PC), and read, but the toy guns were out of the question until he let this particular woman into the house. Frankly, it wasn't an issue for me because I always had plenty of entertainment without toy guns (the issue never came up with me until that point, when I realized how big of an issue it was for my dad).
I saw Poltergeist when I was fairly young (around 5), and to this day it's still in the high numbers for scariest movies I've ever seen, but my parents made sure that I knew there was a difference between movies and reality, and were there throughout the movie. At that age it was a special case, but as I got older they were not reluctant to allow me to view violent or scary movies, because they knew I was not a violent child, nor scared easily (or at least in the long term, a scary movie wouldn't keep me up at night).
They let me play AD&D (and GURPS, Chill, and a handful of other RPGs) at a time when many parents were still blaming it for the deaths of their children, and they let me read anything a library or a book store would carry. When it came time, they let me listen to whatever music I wished, as long as they didn't have to hear it and I didn't repeat the 'offensive' language in much of it (I went through a period of listening to gangster rap and some other hardcore rap back in the late 80s, in my pre-teen years, before industrial and metal opened my eyes (or would that be ears) in the early 90s). When Wolfenstein 3D and Doom came out, it wasn't a problem. It all came back to the simple fact that my parents enforced early on that what happens on the screen is not what happens in real life, and that if I were to imitate what I saw/read/heard, I would be punished.
I've seen numerous people shelter their children, and in some ways, with some kids, it works perfectly fine. The key, though, is to make sure they know that difference. It's not so much a matter of sheltering as making sure they are mature enough for what they're dealing with. In many ways, the 'Mature' titles we're seeing today appeal more to those that aren't typically allowed to view that content than they do to truly mature individuals, and while I may enjoy a game of Grand Theft Auto 3/VC, even gunning down civilians and killing cops in the game, it's not the best game I own, nor is it one I spend a particularly large amount of time playing on a daily basis (recently that's been Animal Crossing, but that's another story).