But in terms of influence the second I played C&C I felt that their whole concept of the Tiberium resource was taken directly from the Spice in Dune II. It almost even looked similar...
Yeah, that happens quite a bit when the same people are involved in making the games, especially when they turn around from Dune II and make C&C right after it.
Personally, besides the points you mentioned, I think Generals really stands out for the skirmish mode. On most other C&C titles the skirmish mode was pretty bad, with a particularly nasty AI even at the easiest levels. With Generals you could tone it down until you got used to it and then start cranking it up to get a real challenge. Having a real difference between the way you had to play with each faction also helped quite a bit (and the expansion made good use of this with the inclusion of the choice of Generals for specialization).
I never really got into Warcraft 3, despite loving the previous games in the series. I never really got the hang of the changes they made to the system, though I may give it another try since I don't have a system that can really handle more recent PC games. I watched some videos of matches from BlizzCon (initially I went to the website to watch the Starcraft 2 matches, but ended up watching a few other videos as well) and liked the way the game flowed, though obviously those are much better players than most.
The sad part is that most of the chocolate sold in the US is probably Hershey's milk chocolate, and yes, it always tastes like that.
I once met a group of Europeans (I can't recall at the moment which country they were from, but I think it was a Scandinavian country) that traveled to a different part of the U.S. every year to see one thing or another (at least that's what they said, they seemed to be spending most of their time drinking around the hotel pool).
Despite that many Americans never leave their home state, and most never leave the country, there's still a lot to be seen within the country, and quite a difference between Americans in one region vs. another. I moved from California to Virginia, and it was a significant culture shock, despite having traveled through much of the country during my life.
I've probably been to more states than most of the citizens of this country, but I feel like I could see a lot more without having to travel even to Canada or Mexico, never mind Europe, Asia, Africa, or Australia. Of course, I wouldn't mind traveling to parts of those continents, but I'm a lot more comfortable spending my travel time in a car than a plane and maybe seeing a few things on the way.
This is very dependent on the school. When I was in grade school, we used Apple computers. When I was in high school, the computer lab had a mix of Windows and Macs. When I was in my first year of college, we had Linux terminals and Sun servers. They actually switched to Windows the next year because of some political garbage, but that was also a time when people had more trouble understanding the GPL.
Many of the colleges I've been to since use Windows heavily, but it's pretty rare that the IT people aren't at least aware of alternatives. The older IT people have seen their environment change significantly over the years, as most of the schools had Unix systems at one point, and there are bound to be Macs somewhere on campus that they have to deal with.
Then again, larger colleges will have compartmentalized IT people that deal primarily with one group of computers in the school.
Most high school and grade school teachers probably have little interaction with computers in their school anyway.
Anything that gets enough hype in the gaming community sells very well for a day or two, no matter how bad it is.
If it's very short or very bad, there will be used copies available in very short order.
If it's very good, but short, there will still be used copies available in short order.
If it's long, but still good, the people that will play a 40-hour game in 2 days will start turning in their games by the end of the first week.
There are always going to be people that won't play a game multiple times, and there will always be people (like myself, admittedly) that will hold on to games for an extremely long time. Still, if a game has no replay value, a larger portion of the purchasers are going to be turning it in as soon as they can to get the highest possible return on their $50-60 investment in that game.
Fortunately there are always more gamers out there that want to become game developers.
On the other hand, there are plenty of avenues for independent developers now to publish their games, and many small development houses (or individual developers) are taking advantage of this, as well, to take home more of the profits on their games (though, granted, they get a smaller amount of profit to divide up, they also have fewer people to divide it with).
That depends on the state, though. In Virginia, I'm subjected to an annual safety inspection, mostly for things that I could get a fix-it ticket for anyway. In California, I had to have my car inspected for emissions (every other year for cars less than 4 years old, annually after that until they exempt cars from that year or older), but never needed a safety inspection (you would simply get the fix-it ticket if a cop noticed a violation).
$60 and $70 NES games were based on a $10-20 increase in the cost of that particular cartridge because of additional RAM and even processors in the cartridges (beyond the standard cartridge). The average NES game was still $50.
The XBox 360 price hike to $60 is especially irritating because they're still using DVD discs. I could almost understand it on the PS3, if I believed that it cost an extra $10 to copy a Blu-Ray disc vs. a DVD. I'll spend $60 on a game if I really think it's worth the price, but there's really not much I think is worth that much, and some developers actually do release their games at $50.
I'll keep playing demos and the games I have until the games I want are down to a price I'll pay. I may even start buying some of the games on Xbox Arcade since I've burnt a lot of time playing the demos of some of those.
This is a good point. My last employer put me on unpaid leave for a week (undetermined period of time when it started), and it instantly became my new job to find a new job. I spent a minimum of 8 hours a day when I wasn't getting paid looking for a new job. Even though I went back to work a week later, I turned in my 2 weeks notice a week after that. If they hadn't brought me back in to work, it was likely that I would've had 2-3 weeks without a paycheck, plus another 2-4 weeks before my first paycheck from the new employer came in.
There's no reason to waste time when you're not getting paid for your time. If you're going the route of independent contractor, even if it is only temporary, your only job is to find yourself work, and there's no reason not to spend at least 40 hours a week doing that if you have no other work to do.
That's the way it was when I was a kid, but the last few times I went to a Toys R Us they simply had the games in a locked glass cabinet behind the counter in the electronics/games section and had empty display boxes on the shelves in the same section.
Many retailers get promotional boxes before the game is available to promote pre-orders. They could just use the same boxes. Plus the keys are usually printed on the material that's normally kept locked away anyway, whether it's the manual, the jewel case/sleeve, or on the CD itself.
Retailers that put the games out on the shelf usually have either a locking case that requires you to get someone to open it for you, and/or an RFID or similar tag that sets off an alarm when you try to exit the store before they disable it (and usually the check-out clerk doesn't disable the damned thing anyway, which is why a recent ring of shoplifters was able to steal a number of games and movies stashed inside the larger box of a cheap item for which they had a receipt).
Most new titles (especially for XBox 360 and PS3) are $60. Previous to those two systems coming along, new titles were usually $50. Even then, a lot of people complained about spending $50 on a game only to find out that it sucked, or had game-crippling bugs that might be fixed in a few months, when the game might be available at a lower price. This is even more of a problem now that developers have the ability to patch console games.
As for stopping people from shoplifting, how many places have games available on the shelf to be shoplifted in the first place? Wal-Mart locks up console titles, I'm not sure why they don't do the same with PC titles. Best Buy and Circuit City are the only places I can think of that have all of their games out on the shelves, and they already have measures in place that reduce ALL shoplifting, without having to take specific measures for games. Even giant warehouse stores like Sam's Club and Costco lock up most of their expensive software and games, and places people might not think of shopping for games as often, like Toys R Us, do the same.
Something else to note: I doubt there were as many problems shoplifting PC games before they had to reduce the size of the boxes for the retailers. In fact, the CD long-boxes of my youth were supposed to have the same effect, and weren't much larger than the current video game boxes.
CD keys being authenticated for online play has only been around a few years longer than activation, though. In many ways, it's exactly the sort of thing people have encouraged because a good online component does lead people to buy the game, if they want to play online. It extends the life of the product (really, who would still be playing Starcraft if it had been a single-player only title?). That system was basically the first step towards activation.
With activation, though, you have to have an internet connection to play a single-player game, which is ridiculous to people that want to be able to play a game in situations where they have no connectivity, or to just about anyone that doesn't have an always-on connection. If you had to log in to battle.net to play the single player campaign in Diablo or Starcraft and they decided to shut down the servers that authenticate those two games after Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 are released, it would probably be fairly irritating to the small number of people that would like to play the earlier titles (for instance, maybe someone that is planning on buying Diablo 3 would want to take a quick run through the first two games before buying the new one to refresh the (admittedly sparse) story-line).
Steam actually bothers me a little more than the other common methods (though I dislike anything other than the game being installed on my system). In that case I have to remember a user name and password that I signed up for several years ago in order to play games I bought before Steam existed (ie Half-Life and its mods and expansion). Sure, I could probably play the original game and expansion without current patches on my own machine, but if I run into some nasty bug or graphics glitches that might have been taken care of in a later patch, I'm SOL unless I install Steam and remember the information under which I previously registered those CD keys.
Re:Halfway through the book, and ...
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Snow Crash seemed self indulgent to me, he also seemed to be pandering to his audience too much, his characters were how geeks saw themselves and how they should be in the world, not how their were.
Considering that his previous works were The Big U and Zodiac, the only way Snow Crash could have pandered to its audience would be that he simply expected geeks to enjoy it more than other people. After all, he had little reason to expect geeks to pick up a book just because he wrote it until after Snow Crash and The Diamond Age.
My main issue with his later books is the pace. Snow Crash was a very fast read for me, and in general I am a very slow reader. The fact that he used a very sci-fi (and geek-pandering in many ways) setting to take on a very low-tech topic (religion as meme) was also very gratifying.
I liked The Diamond Age, and even Zodiac, because they had similar pacing, but I've had to slog through the first 100 or so pages of every book he's written since (Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle). It seems that a lot of writers get to this point, and people point to how much their writing has matured, but if the reader gets bogged down in their writing, I see it as a sign of not being able to get ideas across concisely.
On the other hand, despite his ideas being a little more cluttered in his writing, I do see signs of a better story in his later works. If he could take a step back and combine his previous works' pace with his later works' stronger stories, I think his work would turn out much better.
I'd also like to add that people seem to complain about him making up words almost any time he does it in one of his books. I've rarely found it to be an issue, as they usually make sense in context and are generally used to give the reader a better feel for the world being presented. As some have pointed out, in the case of this book it helps to present a world that might be fairly familiar to us from the perspective of a character quite unfamiliar with it.
Yes, Starcraft and the Blizzard-backed expansion work fine on Vista. You shouldn't even need to do anything special to get it running, just install it and connect to battle.net to patch it.
I installed it recently because I thought I'd like to play it again, and did for a while. I do have some issues with textures not showing up properly, but I think it's just the crappy Intel video card in my laptop rather than a specific Vista issue.
For some people it's just a hassle to resell it themselves. For others they simply don't know the value of their used stuff.
For example, I'll sell used games on eBay if they're valuable enough for me to spend the (admittedly minimal) time to list it, but I won't sell much of anything on Craigslist because I don't want to put up with all of the people hassling me trying to arrange pickups and giving me offers at 25% of the posted price. If the game isn't valuable enough to sell on eBay, and I can't bundle it with some other items to get something out of it, I'll take it to GameStop and take the hit, but then they're not likely to make a profit off it anyway, if they can sell it at all.
On the other hand, go to a flea market (swap meet, whatever they call them) and look at all the people trying to sell used sports games for $10-20. The value of the majority of sports games is almost nothing when the new version comes out the next year, but either someone's buying them at inflated costs or people just can't part with them for the $1 or so that GameStop would give them.
If developers and publishers want to restrict the used game market, there's a simple way to do it: put some replay value in your titles. It still wouldn't kill the market, because there will always be people that won't replay a game no matter what may change in the game, but a game that players can replay multiple times will have a smaller used market than a game that is basically the same every time you play it. This is also why popular multiplayer titles (even on consoles where DRM isn't likely to keep you from playing a used game online) have a smaller used market than single-player titles. In fact, single-player-only titles will have their new and used prices drop much faster than titles with good multiplayer components. I know many people won't bother buying a single-player-only title within the first few weeks of release precisely because the price will drop, even if they won't buy used games.
Of course, the last part is a big part of why publishers don't like the used market, but the reality is that demand is going to drop off after the first few weeks anyway, unless a game turns out to be a sleeper hit that doesn't sell well early on but picks up on word of mouth.
The study's not telling people to let their children sit in front of the computer or the TV for several hours a day, it's simply stating that some kids derive a benefit from online interactions, such as social networking sites and online games. This is one of those things that only requires a study because the media is so focused on the downside, when people spend most of their life online and lose perspective.
Kids that become interested in the customization open to them on MySpace or WoW will learn some important skills, if they learn to apply them outside those environments. Certainly CSS and lua, along with general markup and scripting, are valuable outside of simple time-wasters.
Hell, this time of year I never see the light of day because I go to work at dawn and go home at dusk, and I don't even work long shifts.
It makes sense to invest part (or even most in this case) of the money in case there are no investments forthcoming in the future. While their deal with Google has been extended through 2011, that wasn't always the case, and they still are better off considering the deal lost after 2011, rather than depending on Google to continue dumping cash on them.
But Google has to be wary because they have such a large chunk of the market both in search and online advertising. Microsoft is bound by terms because of their settlements with the DoJ and various other agencies (the EU, various states, etc.). Google would find it in their best interest to act as if they were a convicted monopolist in order to avoid becoming one. Unfortunately that's just the way anti-trust law works, you don't get advanced notice that you have to change the way you do business because you've gained too large a share of the market, and since the DoJ has been looking into some of their business deals recently, they should consider it their warning.
Actually, I doubt most people consider potential pay in deciding who stays home, but rather current pay. In most cases today neither person will stay home, but one will find a position working off-hours, or the kid will go to day-care.
The only reason my wife doesn't work is because she was making less money than the cost of day-care/pre-school. So she is going to night classes and taking online courses to get her degree in a field where she will make decent money (nursing, actually, and that primarily because she can take classes that specifically apply to what she will be doing and get it done in a fairly short time period (a couple years)).
Most of the couples we know with children are both working. My wife and I are the exception because I went into a corporate position at 19 and proved myself as a developer with the same company for 10 years, and more than doubled my pay in that time period. The best job she's ever had is as a bank teller, which is better than the jobs most of her friends have had, but obviously is even more limited in the hours she can work than my job is in the hours I can work. That leaves her with the same jobs most of her friends have: waitress, "sales associate", etc. where she can work from 6pm to closing on weekdays, and whatever hours they'll give her on weekends. It's usually not worth it.
The part she likes to point out as unfair, though, is that she has a degree. I just have to remind her that an Associates in General Studies just tells people that she hasn't decided what she's going to do when she grows up.
The odd thing to me is that my freshman CS course had 1 female in it 12 years ago, out of ~120 students. We could only wish for numbers as high as 20%.
I think it's really a matter of time and finding ways to drive interest without being stupid about it. We don't need computers to be cute or anything like that, we just need more women to become interested in them. After all, the lead developer on my current project is female, and she has a heavy Unix background, it obviously wasn't pretty pictures on the screen that got her interested.
The time part comes with the broader interest in computers among the population in general. My wife has gone from using a computer only occasionally to do her homework to using one to manage our household, finances, and her homework, plus some of her entertainment. My daughter (almost 4 years old) is learning to use the computer by playing games on the PBS Kids website. My daughter might never be interested in programming, but at least she'll have the familiarity with computers that most people need before they even consider programming as an option.
Another important note is that people tend to see computers as complicated and hard to use. Usually this comes from inexperience, or an inability to see the common functions between applications that make learning new things fairly easy (for the rest of us). If people find it hard to use a computer, they'll never think they have a chance of actually programming a computer, or even the IT-oriented skills like managing and configuring systems, applications, and networks.
Or, depending on the Blackberry, you can just set it to play an MP3 at max volume that might actually wake you up. I use my Curve as an alarm clock and have it set to an MP3 that starts with the singer screaming (it sounds like she's going to rip her throat out).
Of course, the human mind is a wonderful thing, and if you hear anything enough times your brain will filter it out and you won't wake up anyway. Or maybe that's just me.
The only way I could get away from Animal Crossing was to put it down for a couple of weeks. Once I came back and had to start cleaning up the cobwebs and shooing out the roaches, I figured out that I was really wasting my time with that game.
Actually, I think I did that multiple times before I figured it out.
Hmm... I wonder what types of insects are in town right now? err no.
Yeah, good luck playing any of those while running an installer on your PC. I'd be happy just to be able to play HL2 without stripping Windows down to the bone before running it, never mind while an installer is running.
Most PS3 games don't need to install anything, and probably about half of the games that have the capability to install something on the system are optional (to reduce loading times).
With either the XBox 360 or the PS3 it's much more common to run into an install screen when a patch is released for a game than just to play the game, but even then it's usually a very quick process (or you can just skip it).
Not if it's one or two luddites but it looks like we're talking about several milions of people, enough to propel the former last place in the console market into the first place just by tapping those groups.
The basic things that happened here are: 1) Cost 2) Backlash against the "adult"-focus of the PS1/2 3) Novel gameplay
1 & 2 largely had to do with increasing the market among children/families, something that hadn't been a focus in the console market since the PlayStation came on the scene. The PS1 largely focused on bringing back names that the 20-somethings had grown up with (Final Fantasy, Metal Gear, etc.), and appealing to teenagers and 20-somethings content-wise (in the Beavis & Butthead sense).
Nintendo had always been focused on the family-oriented games, but they couldn't get enough attention from parents, and the kids wanted to play GTA to be cool. Numbers 1 & 3 got parents attention with the Wii, and it helped that the system doesn't look like a weird purple lunch-box this time around. Both also help appeal with older gamers, even people that never played games before (or haven't in a long time), but it's primarily the novel gameplay that appeals, and the price that sells.
There's a lot to be said about Sony's effort to push games out of the Nintendo mold and bring back the gamers that either left gaming behind as teenagers, or moved to the PC, where the games were already being made for adults. At this point in time, though, Sony was late to the table and missed the price points with the PS3. They might turn it around with another generation or two of games, but in a lot of ways they're competing as much with the success of the PS2 as with anything that Nintendo or MS are doing in the market.
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But in terms of influence the second I played C&C I felt that their whole concept of the Tiberium resource was taken directly from the Spice in Dune II. It almost even looked similar...
Yeah, that happens quite a bit when the same people are involved in making the games, especially when they turn around from Dune II and make C&C right after it.
Personally, besides the points you mentioned, I think Generals really stands out for the skirmish mode. On most other C&C titles the skirmish mode was pretty bad, with a particularly nasty AI even at the easiest levels. With Generals you could tone it down until you got used to it and then start cranking it up to get a real challenge. Having a real difference between the way you had to play with each faction also helped quite a bit (and the expansion made good use of this with the inclusion of the choice of Generals for specialization).
I never really got into Warcraft 3, despite loving the previous games in the series. I never really got the hang of the changes they made to the system, though I may give it another try since I don't have a system that can really handle more recent PC games. I watched some videos of matches from BlizzCon (initially I went to the website to watch the Starcraft 2 matches, but ended up watching a few other videos as well) and liked the way the game flowed, though obviously those are much better players than most.
The sad part is that most of the chocolate sold in the US is probably Hershey's milk chocolate, and yes, it always tastes like that.
I once met a group of Europeans (I can't recall at the moment which country they were from, but I think it was a Scandinavian country) that traveled to a different part of the U.S. every year to see one thing or another (at least that's what they said, they seemed to be spending most of their time drinking around the hotel pool).
Despite that many Americans never leave their home state, and most never leave the country, there's still a lot to be seen within the country, and quite a difference between Americans in one region vs. another. I moved from California to Virginia, and it was a significant culture shock, despite having traveled through much of the country during my life.
I've probably been to more states than most of the citizens of this country, but I feel like I could see a lot more without having to travel even to Canada or Mexico, never mind Europe, Asia, Africa, or Australia. Of course, I wouldn't mind traveling to parts of those continents, but I'm a lot more comfortable spending my travel time in a car than a plane and maybe seeing a few things on the way.
This is very dependent on the school. When I was in grade school, we used Apple computers. When I was in high school, the computer lab had a mix of Windows and Macs. When I was in my first year of college, we had Linux terminals and Sun servers. They actually switched to Windows the next year because of some political garbage, but that was also a time when people had more trouble understanding the GPL.
Many of the colleges I've been to since use Windows heavily, but it's pretty rare that the IT people aren't at least aware of alternatives. The older IT people have seen their environment change significantly over the years, as most of the schools had Unix systems at one point, and there are bound to be Macs somewhere on campus that they have to deal with.
Then again, larger colleges will have compartmentalized IT people that deal primarily with one group of computers in the school.
Most high school and grade school teachers probably have little interaction with computers in their school anyway.
Anything that gets enough hype in the gaming community sells very well for a day or two, no matter how bad it is.
If it's very short or very bad, there will be used copies available in very short order.
If it's very good, but short, there will still be used copies available in short order.
If it's long, but still good, the people that will play a 40-hour game in 2 days will start turning in their games by the end of the first week.
There are always going to be people that won't play a game multiple times, and there will always be people (like myself, admittedly) that will hold on to games for an extremely long time. Still, if a game has no replay value, a larger portion of the purchasers are going to be turning it in as soon as they can to get the highest possible return on their $50-60 investment in that game.
Fortunately there are always more gamers out there that want to become game developers.
On the other hand, there are plenty of avenues for independent developers now to publish their games, and many small development houses (or individual developers) are taking advantage of this, as well, to take home more of the profits on their games (though, granted, they get a smaller amount of profit to divide up, they also have fewer people to divide it with).
That depends on the state, though. In Virginia, I'm subjected to an annual safety inspection, mostly for things that I could get a fix-it ticket for anyway. In California, I had to have my car inspected for emissions (every other year for cars less than 4 years old, annually after that until they exempt cars from that year or older), but never needed a safety inspection (you would simply get the fix-it ticket if a cop noticed a violation).
$60 and $70 NES games were based on a $10-20 increase in the cost of that particular cartridge because of additional RAM and even processors in the cartridges (beyond the standard cartridge). The average NES game was still $50.
The XBox 360 price hike to $60 is especially irritating because they're still using DVD discs. I could almost understand it on the PS3, if I believed that it cost an extra $10 to copy a Blu-Ray disc vs. a DVD. I'll spend $60 on a game if I really think it's worth the price, but there's really not much I think is worth that much, and some developers actually do release their games at $50.
I'll keep playing demos and the games I have until the games I want are down to a price I'll pay. I may even start buying some of the games on Xbox Arcade since I've burnt a lot of time playing the demos of some of those.
This is a good point. My last employer put me on unpaid leave for a week (undetermined period of time when it started), and it instantly became my new job to find a new job. I spent a minimum of 8 hours a day when I wasn't getting paid looking for a new job. Even though I went back to work a week later, I turned in my 2 weeks notice a week after that. If they hadn't brought me back in to work, it was likely that I would've had 2-3 weeks without a paycheck, plus another 2-4 weeks before my first paycheck from the new employer came in.
There's no reason to waste time when you're not getting paid for your time. If you're going the route of independent contractor, even if it is only temporary, your only job is to find yourself work, and there's no reason not to spend at least 40 hours a week doing that if you have no other work to do.
That's the way it was when I was a kid, but the last few times I went to a Toys R Us they simply had the games in a locked glass cabinet behind the counter in the electronics/games section and had empty display boxes on the shelves in the same section.
Many retailers get promotional boxes before the game is available to promote pre-orders. They could just use the same boxes. Plus the keys are usually printed on the material that's normally kept locked away anyway, whether it's the manual, the jewel case/sleeve, or on the CD itself.
Retailers that put the games out on the shelf usually have either a locking case that requires you to get someone to open it for you, and/or an RFID or similar tag that sets off an alarm when you try to exit the store before they disable it (and usually the check-out clerk doesn't disable the damned thing anyway, which is why a recent ring of shoplifters was able to steal a number of games and movies stashed inside the larger box of a cheap item for which they had a receipt).
Most new titles (especially for XBox 360 and PS3) are $60. Previous to those two systems coming along, new titles were usually $50. Even then, a lot of people complained about spending $50 on a game only to find out that it sucked, or had game-crippling bugs that might be fixed in a few months, when the game might be available at a lower price. This is even more of a problem now that developers have the ability to patch console games.
As for stopping people from shoplifting, how many places have games available on the shelf to be shoplifted in the first place? Wal-Mart locks up console titles, I'm not sure why they don't do the same with PC titles. Best Buy and Circuit City are the only places I can think of that have all of their games out on the shelves, and they already have measures in place that reduce ALL shoplifting, without having to take specific measures for games. Even giant warehouse stores like Sam's Club and Costco lock up most of their expensive software and games, and places people might not think of shopping for games as often, like Toys R Us, do the same.
Something else to note: I doubt there were as many problems shoplifting PC games before they had to reduce the size of the boxes for the retailers. In fact, the CD long-boxes of my youth were supposed to have the same effect, and weren't much larger than the current video game boxes.
CD keys being authenticated for online play has only been around a few years longer than activation, though. In many ways, it's exactly the sort of thing people have encouraged because a good online component does lead people to buy the game, if they want to play online. It extends the life of the product (really, who would still be playing Starcraft if it had been a single-player only title?). That system was basically the first step towards activation.
With activation, though, you have to have an internet connection to play a single-player game, which is ridiculous to people that want to be able to play a game in situations where they have no connectivity, or to just about anyone that doesn't have an always-on connection. If you had to log in to battle.net to play the single player campaign in Diablo or Starcraft and they decided to shut down the servers that authenticate those two games after Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 are released, it would probably be fairly irritating to the small number of people that would like to play the earlier titles (for instance, maybe someone that is planning on buying Diablo 3 would want to take a quick run through the first two games before buying the new one to refresh the (admittedly sparse) story-line).
Steam actually bothers me a little more than the other common methods (though I dislike anything other than the game being installed on my system). In that case I have to remember a user name and password that I signed up for several years ago in order to play games I bought before Steam existed (ie Half-Life and its mods and expansion). Sure, I could probably play the original game and expansion without current patches on my own machine, but if I run into some nasty bug or graphics glitches that might have been taken care of in a later patch, I'm SOL unless I install Steam and remember the information under which I previously registered those CD keys.
Snow Crash seemed self indulgent to me, he also seemed to be pandering to his audience too much, his characters were how geeks saw themselves and how they should be in the world, not how their were.
Considering that his previous works were The Big U and Zodiac, the only way Snow Crash could have pandered to its audience would be that he simply expected geeks to enjoy it more than other people. After all, he had little reason to expect geeks to pick up a book just because he wrote it until after Snow Crash and The Diamond Age.
My main issue with his later books is the pace. Snow Crash was a very fast read for me, and in general I am a very slow reader. The fact that he used a very sci-fi (and geek-pandering in many ways) setting to take on a very low-tech topic (religion as meme) was also very gratifying.
I liked The Diamond Age, and even Zodiac, because they had similar pacing, but I've had to slog through the first 100 or so pages of every book he's written since (Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle). It seems that a lot of writers get to this point, and people point to how much their writing has matured, but if the reader gets bogged down in their writing, I see it as a sign of not being able to get ideas across concisely.
On the other hand, despite his ideas being a little more cluttered in his writing, I do see signs of a better story in his later works. If he could take a step back and combine his previous works' pace with his later works' stronger stories, I think his work would turn out much better.
I'd also like to add that people seem to complain about him making up words almost any time he does it in one of his books. I've rarely found it to be an issue, as they usually make sense in context and are generally used to give the reader a better feel for the world being presented. As some have pointed out, in the case of this book it helps to present a world that might be fairly familiar to us from the perspective of a character quite unfamiliar with it.
Yes, Starcraft and the Blizzard-backed expansion work fine on Vista. You shouldn't even need to do anything special to get it running, just install it and connect to battle.net to patch it.
I installed it recently because I thought I'd like to play it again, and did for a while. I do have some issues with textures not showing up properly, but I think it's just the crappy Intel video card in my laptop rather than a specific Vista issue.
For some people it's just a hassle to resell it themselves. For others they simply don't know the value of their used stuff.
For example, I'll sell used games on eBay if they're valuable enough for me to spend the (admittedly minimal) time to list it, but I won't sell much of anything on Craigslist because I don't want to put up with all of the people hassling me trying to arrange pickups and giving me offers at 25% of the posted price. If the game isn't valuable enough to sell on eBay, and I can't bundle it with some other items to get something out of it, I'll take it to GameStop and take the hit, but then they're not likely to make a profit off it anyway, if they can sell it at all.
On the other hand, go to a flea market (swap meet, whatever they call them) and look at all the people trying to sell used sports games for $10-20. The value of the majority of sports games is almost nothing when the new version comes out the next year, but either someone's buying them at inflated costs or people just can't part with them for the $1 or so that GameStop would give them.
If developers and publishers want to restrict the used game market, there's a simple way to do it: put some replay value in your titles. It still wouldn't kill the market, because there will always be people that won't replay a game no matter what may change in the game, but a game that players can replay multiple times will have a smaller used market than a game that is basically the same every time you play it. This is also why popular multiplayer titles (even on consoles where DRM isn't likely to keep you from playing a used game online) have a smaller used market than single-player titles. In fact, single-player-only titles will have their new and used prices drop much faster than titles with good multiplayer components. I know many people won't bother buying a single-player-only title within the first few weeks of release precisely because the price will drop, even if they won't buy used games.
Of course, the last part is a big part of why publishers don't like the used market, but the reality is that demand is going to drop off after the first few weeks anyway, unless a game turns out to be a sleeper hit that doesn't sell well early on but picks up on word of mouth.
The study's not telling people to let their children sit in front of the computer or the TV for several hours a day, it's simply stating that some kids derive a benefit from online interactions, such as social networking sites and online games. This is one of those things that only requires a study because the media is so focused on the downside, when people spend most of their life online and lose perspective.
Kids that become interested in the customization open to them on MySpace or WoW will learn some important skills, if they learn to apply them outside those environments. Certainly CSS and lua, along with general markup and scripting, are valuable outside of simple time-wasters.
Hell, this time of year I never see the light of day because I go to work at dawn and go home at dusk, and I don't even work long shifts.
It makes sense to invest part (or even most in this case) of the money in case there are no investments forthcoming in the future. While their deal with Google has been extended through 2011, that wasn't always the case, and they still are better off considering the deal lost after 2011, rather than depending on Google to continue dumping cash on them.
But Google has to be wary because they have such a large chunk of the market both in search and online advertising. Microsoft is bound by terms because of their settlements with the DoJ and various other agencies (the EU, various states, etc.). Google would find it in their best interest to act as if they were a convicted monopolist in order to avoid becoming one. Unfortunately that's just the way anti-trust law works, you don't get advanced notice that you have to change the way you do business because you've gained too large a share of the market, and since the DoJ has been looking into some of their business deals recently, they should consider it their warning.
Actually, I doubt most people consider potential pay in deciding who stays home, but rather current pay. In most cases today neither person will stay home, but one will find a position working off-hours, or the kid will go to day-care.
The only reason my wife doesn't work is because she was making less money than the cost of day-care/pre-school. So she is going to night classes and taking online courses to get her degree in a field where she will make decent money (nursing, actually, and that primarily because she can take classes that specifically apply to what she will be doing and get it done in a fairly short time period (a couple years)).
Most of the couples we know with children are both working. My wife and I are the exception because I went into a corporate position at 19 and proved myself as a developer with the same company for 10 years, and more than doubled my pay in that time period. The best job she's ever had is as a bank teller, which is better than the jobs most of her friends have had, but obviously is even more limited in the hours she can work than my job is in the hours I can work. That leaves her with the same jobs most of her friends have: waitress, "sales associate", etc. where she can work from 6pm to closing on weekdays, and whatever hours they'll give her on weekends. It's usually not worth it.
The part she likes to point out as unfair, though, is that she has a degree. I just have to remind her that an Associates in General Studies just tells people that she hasn't decided what she's going to do when she grows up.
The odd thing to me is that my freshman CS course had 1 female in it 12 years ago, out of ~120 students. We could only wish for numbers as high as 20%.
I think it's really a matter of time and finding ways to drive interest without being stupid about it. We don't need computers to be cute or anything like that, we just need more women to become interested in them. After all, the lead developer on my current project is female, and she has a heavy Unix background, it obviously wasn't pretty pictures on the screen that got her interested.
The time part comes with the broader interest in computers among the population in general. My wife has gone from using a computer only occasionally to do her homework to using one to manage our household, finances, and her homework, plus some of her entertainment. My daughter (almost 4 years old) is learning to use the computer by playing games on the PBS Kids website. My daughter might never be interested in programming, but at least she'll have the familiarity with computers that most people need before they even consider programming as an option.
Another important note is that people tend to see computers as complicated and hard to use. Usually this comes from inexperience, or an inability to see the common functions between applications that make learning new things fairly easy (for the rest of us). If people find it hard to use a computer, they'll never think they have a chance of actually programming a computer, or even the IT-oriented skills like managing and configuring systems, applications, and networks.
Or, depending on the Blackberry, you can just set it to play an MP3 at max volume that might actually wake you up. I use my Curve as an alarm clock and have it set to an MP3 that starts with the singer screaming (it sounds like she's going to rip her throat out).
Of course, the human mind is a wonderful thing, and if you hear anything enough times your brain will filter it out and you won't wake up anyway. Or maybe that's just me.
The only way I could get away from Animal Crossing was to put it down for a couple of weeks. Once I came back and had to start cleaning up the cobwebs and shooing out the roaches, I figured out that I was really wasting my time with that game.
Actually, I think I did that multiple times before I figured it out.
Hmm... I wonder what types of insects are in town right now? err no.
Bioshock, HL2, Crysis
Yeah, good luck playing any of those while running an installer on your PC. I'd be happy just to be able to play HL2 without stripping Windows down to the bone before running it, never mind while an installer is running.
Most PS3 games don't need to install anything, and probably about half of the games that have the capability to install something on the system are optional (to reduce loading times).
With either the XBox 360 or the PS3 it's much more common to run into an install screen when a patch is released for a game than just to play the game, but even then it's usually a very quick process (or you can just skip it).
Not if it's one or two luddites but it looks like we're talking about several milions of people, enough to propel the former last place in the console market into the first place just by tapping those groups.
The basic things that happened here are:
1) Cost
2) Backlash against the "adult"-focus of the PS1/2
3) Novel gameplay
1 & 2 largely had to do with increasing the market among children/families, something that hadn't been a focus in the console market since the PlayStation came on the scene. The PS1 largely focused on bringing back names that the 20-somethings had grown up with (Final Fantasy, Metal Gear, etc.), and appealing to teenagers and 20-somethings content-wise (in the Beavis & Butthead sense).
Nintendo had always been focused on the family-oriented games, but they couldn't get enough attention from parents, and the kids wanted to play GTA to be cool. Numbers 1 & 3 got parents attention with the Wii, and it helped that the system doesn't look like a weird purple lunch-box this time around. Both also help appeal with older gamers, even people that never played games before (or haven't in a long time), but it's primarily the novel gameplay that appeals, and the price that sells.
There's a lot to be said about Sony's effort to push games out of the Nintendo mold and bring back the gamers that either left gaming behind as teenagers, or moved to the PC, where the games were already being made for adults. At this point in time, though, Sony was late to the table and missed the price points with the PS3. They might turn it around with another generation or two of games, but in a lot of ways they're competing as much with the success of the PS2 as with anything that Nintendo or MS are doing in the market.