I think most of our disagreements come down to these last two parts. Even where I disagree with the rest of your statements, a lot of it is restated here, so I'm skipping in favour of making this short (and getting to lunch).;)
I'll say it again, if you want to see the best FPS, watch the Q3A 1v1 finals at Quakecon. In my experience and in my opinion, this is the pinnicle of the genre.
Be there or be square.;~)
QuakeCon's in Texas, I've never been able to attend due to this little geographical issue;) I've lived on both coasts (west coast when I was most active online, east coast currently), which means that in either case either costs or time have prevented me from being there.
PS. It seems to me you're talking about clan benefits and mistaking them for team oriented play.
Clan benefits and team-oriented play have a lot in common. No individual that plays a great deal of team-based games does as well in a team that he is not accustomed to as in one in which he plays a great deal. I was not nearly as good a player when I first became a member of CE as I was after 2 weeks of playing as a member of CE, in part because of the skill level of the individuals in the clan, and in part because I grew accustomed to the individuals and learned their strengths and weaknesses and how they could compliment my own. If you have 4 O players that play together all the time and split them into 4 different teams, they will not do nearly as well, even if each of those teams is comprised of better players than the other 3 players they were normally playing with. CE was only a good clan because we practiced every day several hours a day and knew each other very well. Our individual skill, though high, was not high enough to make us a good team without that level of practice.
I'd just assert here that the fear among many musicians is that when (not if, because it will happen) the recording industry flops, there won't be any money for touring, which the musicians I know love best. Sure, they can still put on local shows, but it's expensive travelling all over the world, and the labels currently foot that bill.
The musicians will have to learn to save money to put on a larger tour, or find new avenues to get the money up front (much of which the label will do for them now, but the label won't give them a large cut of things like advertising). As it stands now, very few labels pay the bill for touring anyway, except in an extremely small number of cases where acts got very good contracts. The labels simply put up the money up front and then charge the artist interest on that money until the tour brings in enough to cover the costs + interest. Some artists lose money on touring, but the majority of them make more money on touring than on album sales (also helped by selling merchandise at shows, although the labels usually charge more money per CD for any CDs sold at shows). Start small, save the money made on local shows/tours to pay for bigger tours. Save some of that money made on album sales for touring. I know touring is used as a promotional outlet for album sales, but you've got to start somewhere. Anyone that's already made it big and can't afford to tour on their own dime was obviously living in their label's pocket already, right where the label wants them.
The labels also provide "mainstream exposure" because there are so few major labels and they are each fairly selective (though lately it would appear they're selecting the worst they can find).
Yes, the labels do provide this, but the labels are also rushing to find what's going to be the next big thing. They don't know what's going to be big, and they can't make something big by their own power alone, they have to guess, and they usually scramble to sign anyone that looks/sounds like what's already big. Once they have those artists, it's simply a matter of throwing enough money at it. Without the big labels, many of the barriers would disappear, even though it would be harder to get the mass exposure. The labels currently pay for every song played on the radio and every ad you see and make sure they get placed in stores. You often can't get placed in major record stores at all without a major label today, whereas without the major record labels buying all of the space many record stores would be able to cater to local tastes better, meaning that local bands could get better exposure (and similarly, local bands could get airplay on local stations as the conglomerates that own the stations all over the country would be forced to cater to local tastes rather than making money from the labels).
In a case where there are tons of independent labels, there becomes a flood of different things available - all well and good for those of us who listen, but the musicians are far less likely to be distinguished and will have a hard time finding money to tour nationally or internationally.
What's the difference? This is already the case, you simply have that small chance of becoming part of one of the RIAA's labels today that MIGHT give you that BIG BREAK, if you happen to appeal to what people already want and catch the RIAA's eyes. Guess how most people get the RIAA's attention in the first place? By being on independant labels and touring. When something hits big, the RIAA labels hit up the independant labels for anything that sounds the same. The RIAA labels even maintain a lot of independant labels themselves for just this reason (because they can't possibly keep track of every little niche market that might explode tomorrow).
I don't like the RIAA or the record labels, either. Neither do most of my musician friends. But they are all worried about what happens when the labels fail, and I can understand their concerns.
For instance, Disney probably employs a hell of a lot of people that could legally vote. Therefore, if Disney cuts a $2000 check for each of those people, it's really not hard to imagine that they could still have a fair amount of say in politics. Of course, hiding that's a little harder, but not much.
It appears that it's just a wi-fi adapter, really. You already have to have a wireless network to connect the device, this just hooks up to the ethernet port on the console (assuming you have one if your console is a PS2 or GC) to get the console onto your wireless network. Or, as Linksys' site says, you can get a second one to connect to your wired hub/bridge (to act as the base station, basically). I think I'll just stick with my previous intension of getting a 4-port wireless bridge to sit behind my consoles so that all of them are wired to one device.
This isn't about cheating, it's about hacking. I think there would be very few people who would think to sue someone who killed and robbed them in-game, or someone who used a clever scam to cheat them out of some money or items. Yes, that is part of the game and part of the reason why people play.
Hacking is another matter. Suppose someome hacked into a few systems and wiped all the prepaid call time off your cellphone account, and all your frequent flyer miles with the airline, and so on. You'd want them back, wouldn't you? Perhaps you and your wife/friend were going to take a vacation to Hawaii with those miles.
The way I see it is this: -Action: A player does something in game that's within the realms of the game to harm my character in some way. -Reaction: Punish that character in the game through the means available to me in the game. If the game has setup some sort of court system to bring this guy into, then do that, otherwise, just go PvP and retaliate, and/or get others to help in this cause.
-Action: A player and/or random person does something outside of the game to affect characters/events inside the game (ie hacking / cracking / whateveryouwanttocallit), depriving people of their characters and items. -Reaction: the developers should restore order and fix whatever it was that let the person do this, and then decide for themselves whether or not they wish to take real-world action against the person to recover their real-world losses. It is the developers' responsibility to fix the hole that was exploited, and to do as much as possible to restore the damage done in the game (or find a way to fit it into the game), but at the same time, the developers were responsible for the hole being there in the first place, too.
Another note, though: if someone tricks another person into giving them their password (which would presumably allow the person to take the other person's character and/or items), the developers have no responsibility towards that person except to secure their account once they have proven they are the original owner of the account. I realize that some people are a bit sneaky in how they do these things. Similarly, I realize that people are really stupid and fall for these things. However, it is because of both sides existing (stupidity and sneakiness) that I have to stare at this damned warning saying that Blizzard will never ask for your password when I log onto Battle.net, and then 2 seconds later I see someone trawling for passwords.
I spent some real money the other day on a pretend world. It was a world created by Arthur C. Clarke. I was entertained for a few hours, and now that pretend world full of pretend things sits on my shelf.
and any time you want to revisit that pretend world, you can pick it back up off the shelf without spending any more money. Alternatively, you could've gone and picked it up from the library for free, as long as you returned it on time.
Yesterday I went to the local video store, where I spent some more real money on yet another pretend world. Today, I returned the video--if I want to visit that pretend world again, I'll have to cough up more real money.
Or, if it was a pretend world you really liked, you could've spent more money the first time to put it on your shelf. This is why I don't like renting videos, the only way it saves me money is when I rent something I don't like, in which case I still spent money to watch something I didn't like.
What's the difference between people who spend X dollars per month on Everquest et al. and the people who sink X dollars per month into satellite television?
The similarity only comes in if you spend $15/month on satellite television to watch the 'All Kevin Smith channel' and payed a $100 setup fee to put in the satellite equipment (and have all the other channels locked out) when the whole Kevin Smith library would've been about $100 on DVD in the first place.
I pay $50 for Final Fantasy X, I get to play it forever (though not FFXI). I pay $50 for SWG, I get to play it for 30 days after I go through the mandatory registration process, regardless of whether or not I actually play it during that time or whether or not there's a playable server near me during that time. After 30 days, FFX still works, SWG costs another $15 to keep playing.
Then again, if I were the type of person to get addicted to MMO games, maybe it would actually save me money in the long term, because I wouldn't need to buy any other games (and $15/month is a lot cheaper than a new game every month).
It's all entertainment. People don't usually buy either product with 'useful' ends in mind--they pay the money to be amused and pass the time. It's their money; it's their time. Sure, they could be giving both to more 'worthy' causes, but so could we all.
Yeah, I could give $15/month to the crack-whore that walks past my apartment every day. Agreed, though, that everyone with disposable income spends some amount of it on entertainment, and that it's rarely useful to do so. I think it's more a measure of how useful the money that's being spent could be. People seem to spend a lot of money on EQ, and yet many of these people seem to be paying just to make their lives miserable.
He's right about the PS2 pulling dust into the laser assembly, though. A friend of mine plays his for very long stretches at a time, and when he pulls a disc out that went in clean and stayed in there for a couple days of heavy playing, it comes out coated (on the bottom) with dust. Eventually he rigged up a filter system to cover the intake vents on the PS2 and hasn't had a problem since.
Half-Life doesn't use DX9; it uses DX6. Furthermore, the game has a very complete OpenGL renderer. Porting it would still take some work, I'm sure, but it's not like they would have to re-write it.
The OpenGL renderer takes care of graphics (and their OpenGL renderer has always been better than their Direct3D renderer in HL anyway), assuming that the game can be brought up under Linux to the point of using the renderer in the first place, but then you have the i/o and sound systems (the sound definitely uses DX, don't know about the i/o). If Valve is to be believed, the client-side of the network code was giving them (actually the team that was porting it, I forget which company was working on that) problems on Mac OS that would make it incompatible online, which makes me wonder if they're using DX for the netcode as well.
Being in Australia should give you more legitimate use for mod chips than in the US, because fewer games are released for the Australian region in the first place (and mod chips bypass region lockouts). As I said towards the end of my post, if the console manufacturers really wanted to, they could make the consoles either region free, or they could make seperate region encoding from the anti-piracy measures so that someone putting in a mod chip for region encoding reasons isn't also permitting piracy on their systems.
Other than that, backups of games is a legitimate use, although I don't have any problems with my games getting scratched anyway (and I don't have any consoles with mod chips, either).
All of that being said, the person involved in the particular case was exactly the kind of person that should be stopped: someone selling illegal copies of games. Selling mod chips allowed him to be in the business of selling the illegal copies, but if he had simply been in the import business (importing US/Japanese games) then the use for which the mod chips would be marketed should be perfectly legal.
I guess I'm just lucky that, in the end, I could always just buy a Japanese console if I wanted to play Japanese games, and go through the power conversion hassle (although from what I've seen Japanese consoles are available in 110, wonder if it's the same plug), without also having to hassle much with the conversion of the TV signal.
Unfortunately, Eidos is blaming the fact that it's a buggy pile on the developers, when Eidos is the one that forced it to ship to beat the end of the fiscal year.
Oh, and the game didn't sell poorly at all, it's #2 on the sales charts for the year so far. The sales may, however, have dropped significantly after everyone figured out the horrible condition it was in.
Maybe Core is having a party right now because they already tried to kill the bitch some time ago (wasn't Lara supposed to be dead at the end of "The Last Revelation"? Or at least >?) and maybe they programmed the new videogame with their own asses just to say screw you to Eidos and screw you to Paramount... I wouldn't be surprised by that
Actually, I think Eidos just did them a huge favour, because Eidos forced the game to release to meet a fiscal quarter anyway, and the game did sell pretty well at first (it is #2 in the US in terms of sales($) so far this year, how bad is it that the top 2 games this year are generally considered buggy crap? Oh, and the first XBox game on the list comes in at #5 only because #6 and 7 are GBA titles (therefore have lower sales in terms of dollars, even though they sold far more units, surprisingly, though, that #5 title is not the XBox port of the #1 title, which comes in at #10). Of course, whether or not Core will be able to ever get funding to do anything else remains to be seen, since Eidos seems to have gone to great lengths to push the blame over to them.
Anyway in 80s and 90s was the success of a movie that made or ruined the career of videogames.
It still does make or ruin the success of the game. That #1 title is severely tied to the success of the Matrix series, obviously. Of course, the video game industry has always been hit & miss with movie licenses, and the same can be said of movies made from video game licenses, but neither stops people from looking, like people driving past a bad wreck.
Paramount bitching about the poor sales of the videogame that reflected on the movie is someone spewing LIES to save their asses. A Movie Sells Itself.
This is very true. I'd also add that the timing is just really bad for a Tomb Raider sequel, considering the other overhyped sequels this summer (and possibly the disappointment of those sequels, leading people to wait on Tomb Raider, whether they liked the first one or not). Not to mention they've just got to find a reason to shift the blame when a movie marketed towards kids took the #1 spot, although they should just admit that the summer market was itching for a kids movie now that we're 2 months into the summer break for all of those kids.
Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within, it was a great movie but wayyy off-topic from Final Fantasy. Its sales were low. But Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX, and the subsequent X were great sellers. Why do we have to believe to Paramount and Eidos corporate shit?
Final Fantasy doesn't require much to be on-topic, I just don't think the US market is completely ready for mature animation (and by mature I don't mean hentai), even computer animation, nor do I think that Square is necessarily the best group to try to break that market open. Their stories may work for games, but the movie, though stunning visually, just doesn't hold as well.
And now mod me down as troll and flamebait, but American Videogame Industry is good for RPGs, FPs, Strategy Games, and might be good for sports games as well, but for action games American Videogame Industry sucks my balls.
I think the American video game industry just has trouble figuring out what people want in those markets, and the Japanese industry has done a much better job producing (which probably has a lot to do with the fact that the Japanese industry takes a lot more risks and doesn't release in the US until they think they can sell it here). The US industry knows that if they make them good enough, FPS, RTS, and PC-RPGs (and sports) are all they really need, until the market turns away from them.
On the flip-side of the coin, a lot of people are still trying to figure out how to do action games that people will enjoy now that everything's gone to 3D. Nintendo seems to have gotten this right, but their market for these types of games still isn't nearly as big as it used to be. Of course, now that Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire has sold ~
My problem is that Valve thinks it's cool for me to run a server for their game even though I can't play it. That bugs me. I can respect that the financial decision to make a client might not be a great idea today, but there was certainly a time when it would have made sense. I, along with many others, would happily pay for a Linux client.
From a purely financial standpoint: - Any game that relies on someone other than the developer to setup servers NEEDS linux server software. There's simply no way around that, as a very large percentage of all servers running for any of these games right now is a Linux (or other *nix) box. It has nothing to do with the capabilities of the OS when it comes to whether or not they will do the port, it has everything to do with the fact that the people running the servers are running Linux (and just a note, while the people running the servers may choose Linux for it's capabilities, Valve, id, and others did not choose to make the Linux server because of Linux' capabilities) - Past performance of boxed Linux client sales have given sufficient reason for them not to make the porting effort. Additionally, they dropped work to port the game to the MacOS (they said it was because the Mac port wouldn't play online with the Win port, but that doesn't make a lot of sense to me). Arguably, MacOS has a larger user base on the client, and a better retail history for game ports, yet most companies can't financially justify the ports.
I never once said they should do it for free. I don't expect things like that from game companies.
But would they be able to recover the cost of porting, especially when they make claims of having a very large percentage of original code, and most of that code was written in C++ using MS VC++ (with probably very little regard to portability)? If their estimates say they won't make the money back, then they're essentially doing it for free. In fact, they'd probably be better off giving away the Linux binaries and telling you to buy Windows copies to get the art and CD Key, then getting an idea of the number of Linux clients through surveys and online stats.
As far as fixing wine, that might take a precious hour or two away from their team.
Except that their teams aren't made up of API hackers, they're people that were generally hired for game programming experience.
Or they could have told people roughly how VAC would work client-side so the wine team and contributors could work around it.
Which makes me wonder, if wine could work around VAC, would that give more people a way to get around VAC (in the malicious sense) when running Windows clients? Perhaps wine doesn't work with VAC simply because it isn't Windows, because the environment is not that in which the game was meant to be run?
Last I heard, the HL2 and HL patch teams were made up of different people. They released a boatload of HL patches in the time they've spent making HL2, not to mention the level of work that went into some of those HL patches.
Not that I plan on bashing Valve for releasing a patch for a 4-year-old game with only 3 months, considering the level of testing they normally subject their patches to (though I will gladly bash the number of client bugs they haven't fixed that have been in there the full 4 years and the number of things their testing hasn't caught over the years).
Actually, I was off a bit, it was the 1200, or even the 800 and 600, all of which were actually computers (more or less) rather than dedicated video game consoles. I remember my dad spent a great deal of time in the garage soldering parts onto boards to build his first computer (I don't remember what the computer was, unfortunately, but it was one of the many kits available in the late 70's/early 80's). Still, since the 1200 came out ~82, I'm thinking that most of that is in my mind simply because of my age, since the first 2600 was released about 3.5 months before I was born, and my parents most likely bought one between 80 and 81 (based on my vague memories of where we lived at the time, since my parents moved to the west coast in late 79 and lived in 2 places before moving to San Diego in 82, and have lived in the same home since 83; also, the plant that manufactured the US 2600 consoles (at least the first consoles) was in the same city that we lived in at the time, until they started doing all the manufacturing in Taiwan).
Still, most of the people I knew had the wood-panelled systems, except for one friend of mine that had a Collecovision, until the 2600 Jr. came out (for about $50), which played the same carts but was smaller (and 'futuristic'-looking, too!). In fact, from looking around on the atariage faq, I think the model we had may have been the 2600A, because I don't remember the difficulty switch on the top of the unit (meaning it was in the back), but it definitely had that wood panel look.
My parents bought an Atari VCS (yes, it wasn't called the 2600 then) back just about when they came out, and I remember them playing Space Invaders on it a lot.
It was an Atari VCS CX2600, with the wood grain panels and hokey switches. Since my dad and most of his friends were into the whole thing at the time, they called it the 2600 to distinguish it from the earlier Atari systems (ie the 1300), and because no one really cared that you had a Video Computer System, but rather what KIND of system you had;)
The 2600 name was pushed forward a bit more with the re-releases, and with the release of the 5200, but it was generally just what people tended to call the system (if they didn't just call it an Atari, much like we all called our NES a Nintendo).
Of course, then all of the women that did meet IT guys realized that the 'work long hours' thing doesn't stop just because they have a girlfriend/wife/s.o.
Many of the guys I worked with when I was doing site installations were divorced or single for good reason: 3 weeks on the road, 1 week home, in the best case scenarios, and the time on the road was spent doing easily 90-hour weeks on the clock.
I believe it's "umlaut" (with one over the first "u", but of course Slashdot won't let me type that).
That seems right, I've rarely seen the word written out, it was simply spoken quite often in my German classes through high school.
I tried both pasting the character into the text box, as you apparently did, and using the escape sequence. The former gave me just a plain "e", and the latter gave nothing at all.
That's exactly what I did, because I don't even know the character sequences for them (since they're unused in English unless you're using foreign words that are commonly accepted). I'm simply glad I never had to type any of my German homework;)
One of the big prolems with Lynx was the battery life. That thing would go through 6 AA batteries in under two hours.
I think it had more to do with the size of the thing, really. I loved my Lynx, because I spent most of my time playing it with the cigarette lighter adapter hooked up (my parents' minivan had a mid-seat cigarette lighter) or the AC adapter when I was at my grandparents' house. I still don't understand it when my younger cousins show up to family parties with a PlayStation (hello, get a portable, no one's going to let you play on the big screen).
The only time the battery life of my GBA-SP matters to me is when I'm at the laundrymat, but then again maybe the only time it matters is because it's so good (and at the same time only one of my Wavebirds has the Pelican rechargable pack on it, though I will eventually buy more of them for the rest of my Wavebirds, I will not buy batteries for these things now that I know the battery pack is just as good in terms of powering the thing, and lasts long enough for my use).
I play games on my cell phone when there's no one else around to talk to while I'm on my smoke breaks. I play games on my GBA-SP when I'm at the laundrymat or waiting in line at the movie theater (or in the movie theater waiting for the previews to start) or basically anywhere else I go to specifically knowing I'll have some time on my hands. I don't bring my GBA to work because they frown on even the cell phone games (and would definitely frown on one of these things).
Just wondering if it works, since you mentioned it;)
and in case it doesn't, that's 3 different accents and an oomlaut (gah, did I spell that right?). As long as the text window accepts the entry and the page displays it right, Slashdot shouldn't have to give you a special way to enter the characters.
I've been gaming for about 4 years now. I didn't get into gaming until I was in college. Honestly, my parents didn't encourage gaming that much. I don't think they discussed the possiblity of buying me a game console when I was a kid.
I'm a male gamer, so it doesn't really apply much to me, but I thought I'd add some things for comparison. I've been a gamer almost as long as I can remember (because I remember my parents getting the Atari 2600, which is the first thing I remember playing games on). My mom played Centipede, Pac-Man, and a handful of other games, and occasionally took us with her to arcades (once she found arcades that weren't essentially bars with games). My parents also took full advantage of the console crash by buying a lot of carts for that 2600 when everyone was selling them for next to nothing. That being said, I know my dad played the games as well, but I don't really remember him spending a lot of time doing it (unlike my mom). My parents never really discussed me getting a console as a kid, they just bought the 2600 and told me to stop playing to go outside, or eat, or whatever. Similarly, they eventually bought an NES (though by this time my parents were divorced, it was my dad and the woman that would eventually become my step-mom). Both systems were kept in the family room for a while, though eventually we had more televisions in the house and the NES moved to a spare room (especially since I played the thing a lot). The first console that was really bought for me was a Turbo Grafx-16, which I had asked for as a Christmas present (actually, I asked for either the TG-16 or a Genesis, and my dad bought the TG-16 after looking up information on which was technically the better system). It wasn't a discussion thing, and my sister and step-sister played games as well, just not as much as I did (in fact, no one in the house played as much as I did).
Am I into different games than male gamers? Maybe, maybe not. I'd like to think my gender has very little to do with the type of games I prefer.
I have to admit that I do use male sounding names on gaming servers. I really hate joining a game and being distracted by some 13 year old's sexist comments. But on the same token if I'm kicking some 13 year old's ass and he's making stupid comments, I will inform him that a woman is kicking his sorry ass.
That's completely understandable. Many of the female gamers I've played TFC with chose non-gender-specific names, or names that many of the 13-year-olds wouldn't always pick up on as being female. Then again, I have played with a handful that are very up-front about it. There seems to be little difference between the character of the women that do either, and in fact many that normally play under feminine names will choose non-specific names when they don't want to suffer even the chance of the crap some people choose to spew forth at female gamers.
I am a little disappointed that one of the articles talked about gaming as a way to help women date. I also happen to be an IT professional, and the thought of dating or marrying an IT professional did not factor into my decision to pursue a career in computing. I'd like to think that the fact I love math, puzzles and logic had some influence in my decision. So I'd like to think I game because gaming is a great form of entertainment.
I really don't know where that angle came from in the article, and felt it was possibly the weakest angle such an article could choose. I feel that it makes female gamers seem manipulative rather than just seeing them as any other gamer. When playing a game, there shouldn't be any difference in the way you treat the other players. The fact that my girlfriend plays games only matters because I keep trying to find ways to get her interested in more games that I play, so that we can spend time together instead of letting the games become a sore point when she wants to spend time doing something together.
Just because there is the odd person who would make a legal use of it, does not justify allowing the horde to do so. Think about gun restrictions, and various similar limitations.
Yes, think about gun restrictions. For most lethal firearms, the majority of people in America are welcome to get a minimal background check and then buy said firearm. Of course, if the weapon they wish to buy can take out a city block in half a second, it's significantly less likely that they can get it. On the other hand, in most states in the US, if said person attempting to buy a single-shot rifle happens to be a convicted felon, than he usually can not buy the weapon.
On the other hand, you have a mod chip, which won't kill anyone or anything, which enables piracy, independant development, the playing of independantly developed titles, and removal of region encoding (artificial trade restrictions).
If I buy a piece of non-lethal hardware, I should be able to do whatever I want to it (short of making it into a piece of lethal hardware, at least lethal to anyone other than myself).
If someone commits a crime, feel free to stop them. Hell, make a database of people convicted of piracy and prevent them from being able to buy the mod chips for all I care. Don't spend tax money trying to enforce corporate schemes that setup artificial trade barriers (which are illegal in many countries, though many haven't bothered to try to stop region encoding).
If companies really want to make mod chips illegal and aren't making artificial barriers to trade but are actually trying to help the consumers, they can seperate the region encoding from the rest of their security, make it possible to remove region encoding (or never put it on in the first place) without allowing copied games to work. It's really simple if you go into the project from the start with the idea that the two should be seperate.
I clearly remember reading that in more then one magazine, quoted from someone previously trustworthy at Square.
And shortly after reading about FFXI for the first time, I read that FFXII would be an XBox exclusive, so maybe it was the same person that made both statements...
Slashdot Mirror
I think most of our disagreements come down to these last two parts. Even where I disagree with the rest of your statements, a lot of it is restated here, so I'm skipping in favour of making this short (and getting to lunch). ;)
;~)
;) I've lived on both coasts (west coast when I was most active online, east coast currently), which means that in either case either costs or time have prevented me from being there.
I'll say it again, if you want to see the best FPS, watch the Q3A 1v1 finals at Quakecon. In my experience and in my opinion, this is the pinnicle of the genre.
Be there or be square.
QuakeCon's in Texas, I've never been able to attend due to this little geographical issue
PS. It seems to me you're talking about clan benefits and mistaking them for team oriented play.
Clan benefits and team-oriented play have a lot in common. No individual that plays a great deal of team-based games does as well in a team that he is not accustomed to as in one in which he plays a great deal. I was not nearly as good a player when I first became a member of CE as I was after 2 weeks of playing as a member of CE, in part because of the skill level of the individuals in the clan, and in part because I grew accustomed to the individuals and learned their strengths and weaknesses and how they could compliment my own. If you have 4 O players that play together all the time and split them into 4 different teams, they will not do nearly as well, even if each of those teams is comprised of better players than the other 3 players they were normally playing with. CE was only a good clan because we practiced every day several hours a day and knew each other very well. Our individual skill, though high, was not high enough to make us a good team without that level of practice.
I'd just assert here that the fear among many musicians is that when (not if, because it will happen) the recording industry flops, there won't be any money for touring, which the musicians I know love best. Sure, they can still put on local shows, but it's expensive travelling all over the world, and the labels currently foot that bill.
The musicians will have to learn to save money to put on a larger tour, or find new avenues to get the money up front (much of which the label will do for them now, but the label won't give them a large cut of things like advertising). As it stands now, very few labels pay the bill for touring anyway, except in an extremely small number of cases where acts got very good contracts. The labels simply put up the money up front and then charge the artist interest on that money until the tour brings in enough to cover the costs + interest. Some artists lose money on touring, but the majority of them make more money on touring than on album sales (also helped by selling merchandise at shows, although the labels usually charge more money per CD for any CDs sold at shows). Start small, save the money made on local shows/tours to pay for bigger tours. Save some of that money made on album sales for touring. I know touring is used as a promotional outlet for album sales, but you've got to start somewhere. Anyone that's already made it big and can't afford to tour on their own dime was obviously living in their label's pocket already, right where the label wants them.
The labels also provide "mainstream exposure" because there are so few major labels and they are each fairly selective (though lately it would appear they're selecting the worst they can find).
Yes, the labels do provide this, but the labels are also rushing to find what's going to be the next big thing. They don't know what's going to be big, and they can't make something big by their own power alone, they have to guess, and they usually scramble to sign anyone that looks/sounds like what's already big. Once they have those artists, it's simply a matter of throwing enough money at it. Without the big labels, many of the barriers would disappear, even though it would be harder to get the mass exposure. The labels currently pay for every song played on the radio and every ad you see and make sure they get placed in stores. You often can't get placed in major record stores at all without a major label today, whereas without the major record labels buying all of the space many record stores would be able to cater to local tastes better, meaning that local bands could get better exposure (and similarly, local bands could get airplay on local stations as the conglomerates that own the stations all over the country would be forced to cater to local tastes rather than making money from the labels).
In a case where there are tons of independent labels, there becomes a flood of different things available - all well and good for those of us who listen, but the musicians are far less likely to be distinguished and will have a hard time finding money to tour nationally or internationally.
What's the difference? This is already the case, you simply have that small chance of becoming part of one of the RIAA's labels today that MIGHT give you that BIG BREAK, if you happen to appeal to what people already want and catch the RIAA's eyes. Guess how most people get the RIAA's attention in the first place? By being on independant labels and touring. When something hits big, the RIAA labels hit up the independant labels for anything that sounds the same. The RIAA labels even maintain a lot of independant labels themselves for just this reason (because they can't possibly keep track of every little niche market that might explode tomorrow).
I don't like the RIAA or the record labels, either. Neither do most of my musician friends. But they are all worried about what happens when the labels fail, and I can understand their concerns.
The RIAA and the major labels are
For instance, Disney probably employs a hell of a lot of people that could legally vote. Therefore, if Disney cuts a $2000 check for each of those people, it's really not hard to imagine that they could still have a fair amount of say in politics. Of course, hiding that's a little harder, but not much.
It appears that it's just a wi-fi adapter, really. You already have to have a wireless network to connect the device, this just hooks up to the ethernet port on the console (assuming you have one if your console is a PS2 or GC) to get the console onto your wireless network. Or, as Linksys' site says, you can get a second one to connect to your wired hub/bridge (to act as the base station, basically). I think I'll just stick with my previous intension of getting a 4-port wireless bridge to sit behind my consoles so that all of them are wired to one device.
This isn't about cheating, it's about hacking. I think there would be very few people who would think to sue someone who killed and robbed them in-game, or someone who used a clever scam to cheat them out of some money or items. Yes, that is part of the game and part of the reason why people play.
Hacking is another matter. Suppose someome hacked into a few systems and wiped all the prepaid call time off your cellphone account, and all your frequent flyer miles with the airline, and so on. You'd want them back, wouldn't you? Perhaps you and your wife/friend were going to take a vacation to Hawaii with those miles.
The way I see it is this:
-Action: A player does something in game that's within the realms of the game to harm my character in some way.
-Reaction: Punish that character in the game through the means available to me in the game. If the game has setup some sort of court system to bring this guy into, then do that, otherwise, just go PvP and retaliate, and/or get others to help in this cause.
-Action: A player and/or random person does something outside of the game to affect characters/events inside the game (ie hacking / cracking / whateveryouwanttocallit), depriving people of their characters and items.
-Reaction: the developers should restore order and fix whatever it was that let the person do this, and then decide for themselves whether or not they wish to take real-world action against the person to recover their real-world losses. It is the developers' responsibility to fix the hole that was exploited, and to do as much as possible to restore the damage done in the game (or find a way to fit it into the game), but at the same time, the developers were responsible for the hole being there in the first place, too.
Another note, though: if someone tricks another person into giving them their password (which would presumably allow the person to take the other person's character and/or items), the developers have no responsibility towards that person except to secure their account once they have proven they are the original owner of the account. I realize that some people are a bit sneaky in how they do these things. Similarly, I realize that people are really stupid and fall for these things. However, it is because of both sides existing (stupidity and sneakiness) that I have to stare at this damned warning saying that Blizzard will never ask for your password when I log onto Battle.net, and then 2 seconds later I see someone trawling for passwords.
I spent some real money the other day on a pretend world. It was a world created by Arthur C. Clarke. I was entertained for a few hours, and now that pretend world full of pretend things sits on my shelf.
and any time you want to revisit that pretend world, you can pick it back up off the shelf without spending any more money. Alternatively, you could've gone and picked it up from the library for free, as long as you returned it on time.
Yesterday I went to the local video store, where I spent some more real money on yet another pretend world. Today, I returned the video--if I want to visit that pretend world again, I'll have to cough up more real money.
Or, if it was a pretend world you really liked, you could've spent more money the first time to put it on your shelf. This is why I don't like renting videos, the only way it saves me money is when I rent something I don't like, in which case I still spent money to watch something I didn't like.
What's the difference between people who spend X dollars per month on Everquest et al. and the people who sink X dollars per month into satellite television?
The similarity only comes in if you spend $15/month on satellite television to watch the 'All Kevin Smith channel' and payed a $100 setup fee to put in the satellite equipment (and have all the other channels locked out) when the whole Kevin Smith library would've been about $100 on DVD in the first place.
I pay $50 for Final Fantasy X, I get to play it forever (though not FFXI). I pay $50 for SWG, I get to play it for 30 days after I go through the mandatory registration process, regardless of whether or not I actually play it during that time or whether or not there's a playable server near me during that time. After 30 days, FFX still works, SWG costs another $15 to keep playing.
Then again, if I were the type of person to get addicted to MMO games, maybe it would actually save me money in the long term, because I wouldn't need to buy any other games (and $15/month is a lot cheaper than a new game every month).
It's all entertainment. People don't usually buy either product with 'useful' ends in mind--they pay the money to be amused and pass the time. It's their money; it's their time. Sure, they could be giving both to more 'worthy' causes, but so could we all.
Yeah, I could give $15/month to the crack-whore that walks past my apartment every day. Agreed, though, that everyone with disposable income spends some amount of it on entertainment, and that it's rarely useful to do so. I think it's more a measure of how useful the money that's being spent could be. People seem to spend a lot of money on EQ, and yet many of these people seem to be paying just to make their lives miserable.
He's right about the PS2 pulling dust into the laser assembly, though. A friend of mine plays his for very long stretches at a time, and when he pulls a disc out that went in clean and stayed in there for a couple days of heavy playing, it comes out coated (on the bottom) with dust. Eventually he rigged up a filter system to cover the intake vents on the PS2 and hasn't had a problem since.
hey Ab, not much, just playing far too many console games these days, and spending a lot of time over here on Slashdot ;)
Half-Life doesn't use DX9; it uses DX6. Furthermore, the game has a very complete OpenGL renderer. Porting it would still take some work, I'm sure, but it's not like they would have to re-write it.
The OpenGL renderer takes care of graphics (and their OpenGL renderer has always been better than their Direct3D renderer in HL anyway), assuming that the game can be brought up under Linux to the point of using the renderer in the first place, but then you have the i/o and sound systems (the sound definitely uses DX, don't know about the i/o). If Valve is to be believed, the client-side of the network code was giving them (actually the team that was porting it, I forget which company was working on that) problems on Mac OS that would make it incompatible online, which makes me wonder if they're using DX for the netcode as well.
Being in Australia should give you more legitimate use for mod chips than in the US, because fewer games are released for the Australian region in the first place (and mod chips bypass region lockouts). As I said towards the end of my post, if the console manufacturers really wanted to, they could make the consoles either region free, or they could make seperate region encoding from the anti-piracy measures so that someone putting in a mod chip for region encoding reasons isn't also permitting piracy on their systems.
Other than that, backups of games is a legitimate use, although I don't have any problems with my games getting scratched anyway (and I don't have any consoles with mod chips, either).
All of that being said, the person involved in the particular case was exactly the kind of person that should be stopped: someone selling illegal copies of games. Selling mod chips allowed him to be in the business of selling the illegal copies, but if he had simply been in the import business (importing US/Japanese games) then the use for which the mod chips would be marketed should be perfectly legal.
I guess I'm just lucky that, in the end, I could always just buy a Japanese console if I wanted to play Japanese games, and go through the power conversion hassle (although from what I've seen Japanese consoles are available in 110, wonder if it's the same plug), without also having to hassle much with the conversion of the TV signal.
Unfortunately, Eidos is blaming the fact that it's a buggy pile on the developers, when Eidos is the one that forced it to ship to beat the end of the fiscal year.
Oh, and the game didn't sell poorly at all, it's #2 on the sales charts for the year so far. The sales may, however, have dropped significantly after everyone figured out the horrible condition it was in.
Maybe Core is having a party right now because they already tried to kill the bitch some time ago (wasn't Lara supposed to be dead at the end of "The Last Revelation"? Or at least >?) and maybe they programmed the new videogame with their own asses just to say screw you to Eidos and screw you to Paramount... I wouldn't be surprised by that
Actually, I think Eidos just did them a huge favour, because Eidos forced the game to release to meet a fiscal quarter anyway, and the game did sell pretty well at first (it is #2 in the US in terms of sales($) so far this year, how bad is it that the top 2 games this year are generally considered buggy crap? Oh, and the first XBox game on the list comes in at #5 only because #6 and 7 are GBA titles (therefore have lower sales in terms of dollars, even though they sold far more units, surprisingly, though, that #5 title is not the XBox port of the #1 title, which comes in at #10). Of course, whether or not Core will be able to ever get funding to do anything else remains to be seen, since Eidos seems to have gone to great lengths to push the blame over to them.
Anyway in 80s and 90s was the success of a movie that made or ruined the career of videogames.
It still does make or ruin the success of the game. That #1 title is severely tied to the success of the Matrix series, obviously. Of course, the video game industry has always been hit & miss with movie licenses, and the same can be said of movies made from video game licenses, but neither stops people from looking, like people driving past a bad wreck.
Paramount bitching about the poor sales of the videogame that reflected on the movie is someone spewing LIES to save their asses. A Movie Sells Itself.
This is very true. I'd also add that the timing is just really bad for a Tomb Raider sequel, considering the other overhyped sequels this summer (and possibly the disappointment of those sequels, leading people to wait on Tomb Raider, whether they liked the first one or not). Not to mention they've just got to find a reason to shift the blame when a movie marketed towards kids took the #1 spot, although they should just admit that the summer market was itching for a kids movie now that we're 2 months into the summer break for all of those kids.
Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within, it was a great movie but wayyy off-topic from Final Fantasy. Its sales were low. But Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX, and the subsequent X were great sellers. Why do we have to believe to Paramount and Eidos corporate shit?
Final Fantasy doesn't require much to be on-topic, I just don't think the US market is completely ready for mature animation (and by mature I don't mean hentai), even computer animation, nor do I think that Square is necessarily the best group to try to break that market open. Their stories may work for games, but the movie, though stunning visually, just doesn't hold as well.
And now mod me down as troll and flamebait, but American Videogame Industry is good for RPGs, FPs, Strategy Games, and might be good for sports games as well, but for action games American Videogame Industry sucks my balls.
I think the American video game industry just has trouble figuring out what people want in those markets, and the Japanese industry has done a much better job producing (which probably has a lot to do with the fact that the Japanese industry takes a lot more risks and doesn't release in the US until they think they can sell it here). The US industry knows that if they make them good enough, FPS, RTS, and PC-RPGs (and sports) are all they really need, until the market turns away from them.
On the flip-side of the coin, a lot of people are still trying to figure out how to do action games that people will enjoy now that everything's gone to 3D. Nintendo seems to have gotten this right, but their market for these types of games still isn't nearly as big as it used to be. Of course, now that Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire has sold ~
My problem is that Valve thinks it's cool for me to run a server for their game even though I can't play it. That bugs me. I can respect that the financial decision to make a client might not be a great idea today, but there was certainly a time when it would have made sense. I, along with many others, would happily pay for a Linux client.
From a purely financial standpoint:
- Any game that relies on someone other than the developer to setup servers NEEDS linux server software. There's simply no way around that, as a very large percentage of all servers running for any of these games right now is a Linux (or other *nix) box. It has nothing to do with the capabilities of the OS when it comes to whether or not they will do the port, it has everything to do with the fact that the people running the servers are running Linux (and just a note, while the people running the servers may choose Linux for it's capabilities, Valve, id, and others did not choose to make the Linux server because of Linux' capabilities)
- Past performance of boxed Linux client sales have given sufficient reason for them not to make the porting effort. Additionally, they dropped work to port the game to the MacOS (they said it was because the Mac port wouldn't play online with the Win port, but that doesn't make a lot of sense to me). Arguably, MacOS has a larger user base on the client, and a better retail history for game ports, yet most companies can't financially justify the ports.
I never once said they should do it for free. I don't expect things like that from game companies.
But would they be able to recover the cost of porting, especially when they make claims of having a very large percentage of original code, and most of that code was written in C++ using MS VC++ (with probably very little regard to portability)? If their estimates say they won't make the money back, then they're essentially doing it for free. In fact, they'd probably be better off giving away the Linux binaries and telling you to buy Windows copies to get the art and CD Key, then getting an idea of the number of Linux clients through surveys and online stats.
As far as fixing wine, that might take a precious hour or two away from their team.
Except that their teams aren't made up of API hackers, they're people that were generally hired for game programming experience.
Or they could have told people roughly how VAC would work client-side so the wine team and contributors could work around it.
Which makes me wonder, if wine could work around VAC, would that give more people a way to get around VAC (in the malicious sense) when running Windows clients? Perhaps wine doesn't work with VAC simply because it isn't Windows, because the environment is not that in which the game was meant to be run?
Last I heard, the HL2 and HL patch teams were made up of different people. They released a boatload of HL patches in the time they've spent making HL2, not to mention the level of work that went into some of those HL patches.
Not that I plan on bashing Valve for releasing a patch for a 4-year-old game with only 3 months, considering the level of testing they normally subject their patches to (though I will gladly bash the number of client bugs they haven't fixed that have been in there the full 4 years and the number of things their testing hasn't caught over the years).
Actually, I was off a bit, it was the 1200, or even the 800 and 600, all of which were actually computers (more or less) rather than dedicated video game consoles. I remember my dad spent a great deal of time in the garage soldering parts onto boards to build his first computer (I don't remember what the computer was, unfortunately, but it was one of the many kits available in the late 70's/early 80's). Still, since the 1200 came out ~82, I'm thinking that most of that is in my mind simply because of my age, since the first 2600 was released about 3.5 months before I was born, and my parents most likely bought one between 80 and 81 (based on my vague memories of where we lived at the time, since my parents moved to the west coast in late 79 and lived in 2 places before moving to San Diego in 82, and have lived in the same home since 83; also, the plant that manufactured the US 2600 consoles (at least the first consoles) was in the same city that we lived in at the time, until they started doing all the manufacturing in Taiwan).
Still, most of the people I knew had the wood-panelled systems, except for one friend of mine that had a Collecovision, until the 2600 Jr. came out (for about $50), which played the same carts but was smaller (and 'futuristic'-looking, too!). In fact, from looking around on the atariage faq, I think the model we had may have been the 2600A, because I don't remember the difficulty switch on the top of the unit (meaning it was in the back), but it definitely had that wood panel look.
Just a minor thing ;)
;)
My parents bought an Atari VCS (yes, it wasn't called the 2600 then) back just about when they came out, and I remember them playing Space Invaders on it a lot.
It was an Atari VCS CX2600, with the wood grain panels and hokey switches. Since my dad and most of his friends were into the whole thing at the time, they called it the 2600 to distinguish it from the earlier Atari systems (ie the 1300), and because no one really cared that you had a Video Computer System, but rather what KIND of system you had
The 2600 name was pushed forward a bit more with the re-releases, and with the release of the 5200, but it was generally just what people tended to call the system (if they didn't just call it an Atari, much like we all called our NES a Nintendo).
Of course, then all of the women that did meet IT guys realized that the 'work long hours' thing doesn't stop just because they have a girlfriend/wife/s.o.
Many of the guys I worked with when I was doing site installations were divorced or single for good reason: 3 weeks on the road, 1 week home, in the best case scenarios, and the time on the road was spent doing easily 90-hour weeks on the clock.
I believe it's "umlaut" (with one over the first "u", but of course Slashdot won't let me type that).
;)
That seems right, I've rarely seen the word written out, it was simply spoken quite often in my German classes through high school.
I tried both pasting the character into the text box, as you apparently did, and using the escape sequence. The former gave me just a plain "e", and the latter gave nothing at all.
That's exactly what I did, because I don't even know the character sequences for them (since they're unused in English unless you're using foreign words that are commonly accepted). I'm simply glad I never had to type any of my German homework
One of the big prolems with Lynx was the battery life. That thing would go through 6 AA batteries in under two hours.
I think it had more to do with the size of the thing, really. I loved my Lynx, because I spent most of my time playing it with the cigarette lighter adapter hooked up (my parents' minivan had a mid-seat cigarette lighter) or the AC adapter when I was at my grandparents' house. I still don't understand it when my younger cousins show up to family parties with a PlayStation (hello, get a portable, no one's going to let you play on the big screen).
The only time the battery life of my GBA-SP matters to me is when I'm at the laundrymat, but then again maybe the only time it matters is because it's so good (and at the same time only one of my Wavebirds has the Pelican rechargable pack on it, though I will eventually buy more of them for the rest of my Wavebirds, I will not buy batteries for these things now that I know the battery pack is just as good in terms of powering the thing, and lasts long enough for my use).
I play games on my cell phone when there's no one else around to talk to while I'm on my smoke breaks. I play games on my GBA-SP when I'm at the laundrymat or waiting in line at the movie theater (or in the movie theater waiting for the previews to start) or basically anywhere else I go to specifically knowing I'll have some time on my hands. I don't bring my GBA to work because they frown on even the cell phone games (and would definitely frown on one of these things).
eeee
;)
Just wondering if it works, since you mentioned it
and in case it doesn't, that's 3 different accents and an oomlaut (gah, did I spell that right?). As long as the text window accepts the entry and the page displays it right, Slashdot shouldn't have to give you a special way to enter the characters.
I've been gaming for about 4 years now. I didn't get into gaming until I was in college. Honestly, my parents didn't encourage gaming that much. I don't think they discussed the possiblity of buying me a game console when I was a kid.
I'm a male gamer, so it doesn't really apply much to me, but I thought I'd add some things for comparison. I've been a gamer almost as long as I can remember (because I remember my parents getting the Atari 2600, which is the first thing I remember playing games on). My mom played Centipede, Pac-Man, and a handful of other games, and occasionally took us with her to arcades (once she found arcades that weren't essentially bars with games). My parents also took full advantage of the console crash by buying a lot of carts for that 2600 when everyone was selling them for next to nothing. That being said, I know my dad played the games as well, but I don't really remember him spending a lot of time doing it (unlike my mom). My parents never really discussed me getting a console as a kid, they just bought the 2600 and told me to stop playing to go outside, or eat, or whatever. Similarly, they eventually bought an NES (though by this time my parents were divorced, it was my dad and the woman that would eventually become my step-mom). Both systems were kept in the family room for a while, though eventually we had more televisions in the house and the NES moved to a spare room (especially since I played the thing a lot). The first console that was really bought for me was a Turbo Grafx-16, which I had asked for as a Christmas present (actually, I asked for either the TG-16 or a Genesis, and my dad bought the TG-16 after looking up information on which was technically the better system). It wasn't a discussion thing, and my sister and step-sister played games as well, just not as much as I did (in fact, no one in the house played as much as I did).
Am I into different games than male gamers? Maybe, maybe not. I'd like to think my gender has very little to do with the type of games I prefer.
I have to admit that I do use male sounding names on gaming servers. I really hate joining a game and being distracted by some 13 year old's sexist comments. But on the same token if I'm kicking some 13 year old's ass and he's making stupid comments, I will inform him that a woman is kicking his sorry ass.
That's completely understandable. Many of the female gamers I've played TFC with chose non-gender-specific names, or names that many of the 13-year-olds wouldn't always pick up on as being female. Then again, I have played with a handful that are very up-front about it. There seems to be little difference between the character of the women that do either, and in fact many that normally play under feminine names will choose non-specific names when they don't want to suffer even the chance of the crap some people choose to spew forth at female gamers.
I am a little disappointed that one of the articles talked about gaming as a way to help women date. I also happen to be an IT professional, and the thought of dating or marrying an IT professional did not factor into my decision to pursue a career in computing. I'd like to think that the fact I love math, puzzles and logic had some influence in my decision. So I'd like to think I game because gaming is a great form of entertainment.
I really don't know where that angle came from in the article, and felt it was possibly the weakest angle such an article could choose. I feel that it makes female gamers seem manipulative rather than just seeing them as any other gamer. When playing a game, there shouldn't be any difference in the way you treat the other players. The fact that my girlfriend plays games only matters because I keep trying to find ways to get her interested in more games that I play, so that we can spend time together instead of letting the games become a sore point when she wants to spend time doing something together.
Just because there is the odd person who would make a legal use of it, does not justify allowing the horde to do so. Think about gun restrictions, and various similar limitations.
Yes, think about gun restrictions. For most lethal firearms, the majority of people in America are welcome to get a minimal background check and then buy said firearm. Of course, if the weapon they wish to buy can take out a city block in half a second, it's significantly less likely that they can get it. On the other hand, in most states in the US, if said person attempting to buy a single-shot rifle happens to be a convicted felon, than he usually can not buy the weapon.
On the other hand, you have a mod chip, which won't kill anyone or anything, which enables piracy, independant development, the playing of independantly developed titles, and removal of region encoding (artificial trade restrictions).
If I buy a piece of non-lethal hardware, I should be able to do whatever I want to it (short of making it into a piece of lethal hardware, at least lethal to anyone other than myself).
If someone commits a crime, feel free to stop them. Hell, make a database of people convicted of piracy and prevent them from being able to buy the mod chips for all I care. Don't spend tax money trying to enforce corporate schemes that setup artificial trade barriers (which are illegal in many countries, though many haven't bothered to try to stop region encoding).
If companies really want to make mod chips illegal and aren't making artificial barriers to trade but are actually trying to help the consumers, they can seperate the region encoding from the rest of their security, make it possible to remove region encoding (or never put it on in the first place) without allowing copied games to work. It's really simple if you go into the project from the start with the idea that the two should be seperate.
DC has
16 MB SDRAM
8 MB SDRAM (video)
2 MB RAM (audio)
I clearly remember reading that in more then one magazine, quoted from someone previously trustworthy at Square.
And shortly after reading about FFXI for the first time, I read that FFXII would be an XBox exclusive, so maybe it was the same person that made both statements...