When I left the movie, I had the impression that Zunkenberg was portrayed as a thieving, condescending, misogynistic, little twerp. He stole everybody else's ideas, idolized a child molesting drug abuser, and betrayed his best (only?) friend.
And while the humanitarian in me says, "It would be nice to help them," the realist in me says "Our civilizations got to the next level first. If the unadvanced civilizations wither away so that the advanced can prosper, that's how it should be."
Based on your post, I'd be hard-pressed to believe you have a humanitarian in you.
Google will send the guy a check with several zeroes in it, relieve their guilty conscience and call it a day. C'mon, you know it will happen that way.
So you're saying the original name for the language was "Goooooo", and they then chopped the five extra o's off and stuck them in the check?
*It seems mostly focused on MMOs, but doesn't name any specific games.
*"Visually impaired" is not a euphemism for "blind" here - he literally means "people who can see, but not well". So much of the backlash is misguided ("Blind people are suing to play video games? LOLWUT? Next they'll want to drive???!!!?")
*His list of things that would make a difference are reasonable - high-contrast display modes, audio navigation cues, audio descriptions of items, and the like.
*HOWEVER... he then proceeds to state that Sony's causing him to LOSE MONEY because he could be selling his in-game items for real-world cash. Ugh.
So this thing isn't entirely over-the-top, but it definitely falls apart when he argues monetary loss.
"Basically, if you're watching it live, you are paying for the show, to some extent everyone else is leeching."
If you're watching it AND BEING MEASURED, you're paying for the show. So if you're watching it live and you're a Nielsen family, you're paying for the show. Or if you're watching it on the broadcasters' site, you're paying for the show. If you're average Jane & Joe with the TV on and nobody's watching you watch, then it doesn't matter.
One thing I would note is the cultural differences, Japanese horror tends to work on tension and supernatural things. Ghosts, bumps in the night, general feeling of unease. Where as Western horror tends to be more gore and shock, the gore and shock has long ago lost it's shock value to us adults, where as the feeling of tension is very hard to break no matter what.
Compare Resident evil (Western horror style) with Silent Hill (Japanese horror style) and you'll see one is scary for a while, where as the other continues to be scary even if you're in a safe room with nothing creepy ever.
Whoah, slow down there. You had me up until you imposed an East vs. West template on it. I don't think that fits.
I've never thought there was anything remotely Western about the Resident Evil games, aside from the characters and setting. Gore and shock, I'd say, have less to do with Western horror than they do with a particular style of horror.
Some Western horror games that I'd say relied as much on atmosphere and tension as they did on gore and shock:
*Undying
*Call of Cthulhu - DCotE
*The Suffering and its sequel
*Eternal Darkness
And if you want to stay loose with your definition of "horror":
*Half-Life
*Half-Life 2
*FEAR
*Condemned
*STALKER
Also, obviously there are lots and lots of Western horror *films* that are more about atmosphere than gore.
Man, this is so harshly on target. Beatles played all old school rock'n'roll songs in Hamburg and for MONEY. My pick no one bothered to collect money from them then.
Right. And history will correctly judge The Beatles not as brilliant songwriters but as the cold-blooded criminals that they were.
My index finger and ring finger are almost the same length, and I'm downright awful at math, almost to the point of discalcula. Numbers jump around the page, switch places, whisper amongst themselves, refuse to participate in calculations, and sometimes simply laugh at me.
Just think of a TV where you can't watch odd numbered channels unless you turn captioning on, noone would accept such stupidity from a tv. Hey, quit raggin' on my TV!;)
I think a more apt (though lengthy) analogy might be this: Say you've got two completely different cable TV standards. All traditional commercial broadcasts go out over System A. All the shows your friends and co-workers watch and talk about are on System A. Most electronics stores only sell System A-compatible TVs.
Then you've got cable TV System B. It's got programming comparable to System B, but less variety, and most System B shows are created by assembled individuals rather than corporations. It's basically high-quality community access television. No cable company will wire your house for System B, so you'd better have a little technical knowledge so you can set things up. There are a few channels that pipe in content from System A, but it's sort of hit-or-miss which System A channels will show up properly and which ones will just be a garbled mess.
And, of course, manufacturers of System A-compatible TVs are comfortable getting sloppy with their design and construction because they know they've got a lock on the market.
If you're like me, you've got both a System A and System B TV at home, because I want it all. However, for most people, System A has pretty much everything they want. Sure, the TVs kind of suck, but to watch System B cable they'd need to go buy a compatible TV down at that weird imports store, and have to learn to wire their home for System B.
Then, finally: "What? System B doesn't carry 'Lost'?!? Well then what's the point?" Seemingly small things seal the deal.
Any attempt to watch a Quicktime file from a local drive results in problems (usually an instant bluescreen, but sometimes general breakage -- taskbar not responding, apps not closing when ordered, menus not responding, that sort of thing).
Viewing a movie that exists elsewhere on the network is fine. Viewing a movie from the Internet still breaks things, presumably because it's still getting cached to the local drive.
They're not brand-name computers, but they were all put together by the same place, presumably with similar specs. Nobody's dug into it too deeply, we've just gotten used to moving all *.mov files to a network drive before viewing.:)
The game IS buggy. And it does have its flaws. And the plot isn't as coherent as I would like. However, it is the FEEL of the game that keeps me playing it. That, and it is also refreshingly challenging. I'm hoping the developer keeps improving. Hopefully they've learned from making S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and we'll get a well-polished, bug free, and more coherent sequel. Agreed on all counts. They successfully capture the atmosphere of a damaged world full of damaged people and animals, both via aesthetics as well as through gameplay.
I didn't care for the actual storyline, but I really liked the implied storyline (basically, what you think is going on for most of the game). And the intended storyline didn't get in the way.
Frankly, I haven't been this engaged by a game in a long, long time.
How can any game be called original, and then labeled as a "first-person-shooter"? If it was original, then it wouldn't be the 4000th first-person-shooter. It's not hard for a label to be an oversimplification, as is the case with STALKER. It does use an FPS mechanic, but it has some significant differences and can't really be played like a normal FPS.
Except, of course, that GTAIII had aircraft. Actually taking off and flying the Dodo was somewhat impractical, but possible.
Yeah, it was possible, but difficult to fly the airplane with no wings. They clipped the wings for the aforementioned reason (9/11 paranoia), and removed the mission(s) that were slated to have used the plane in its full form. Do you have a source on this claim? IIRC, GTA 3 hit stores on October 31, which means Rockstar North would've had a very short period of time to make this change, submit a new version to Rockstar, get it passed, submit to Sony for approval, get it passed, send to the manufacturers for duplication, and distribute copies to stores.
In short, it doesn't seem like they'd have enough response time to have actually made any changes as a reaction to 9/11.
Dinosaurs is what we call the reptiles that went extinct about 65 million years ago.
That should answer your question why all the dinosaurs went extinct. They're defined that way. Okay, riddle me this: Why did no reptile whose legs extended below the body ("dinosaur") rather than to the side ("lizard") survive, regardless of their scale, location, or diet?
That aside, while researching a reply, I found something close to what I was looking for on Wikipedia (though the section is marked as needing citations):
Possible patterns and trends
Despite its overall severity, the K-T extinction was rather patchy. This raises the question of why some groups died out while others did not.
There do seem to be some general trends:
* Organisms which depended on photosynthesis became extinct or suffered heavy losses - from photosynthesing plankton (e.g. coccolithophorids) to land plants. And so did organisms whose food chain depended on photosynthesising organisms, e.g. tyrannosaurs (which ate vegetarian dinosaurs, which ate plants).
* Organisms which built calcium carbonate shells became extinct or suffered heavy losses (coccolithophorids; many groups of molluscs, including ammonites, rudists, freshwater snails and mussels). And so did organisms whose food chain depended on these calcium carbonate shell builders. For example it is thought that ammonites were the principal food of mosasaurs.
* Omnivores, insectivores and carrion-eaters appear to have survived quite well. It is worth noting that at the end of the Cretaceous there seem to have been no purely vegetarian or carnivorous mammals. Many mammals, and the birds which survived the extinction, fed on insects, larvae, worms, snails etc., which in turn fed on dead plant matter. So they survived the collapse of plant-based food chains because they lived in "detritus-based" food chains.
* In stream communities few groups of animals became extinct. Stream communities tend to be less reliant on food from living plants and are more dependent on detritus that washes in from land. The stream communities may also have been buffered from extinction by their reliance on detritus-based food chains. (See Sheehan and Fastovsky, Geology, v. 20, p. 556-560.)
* Similar, but more complex patterns have been found in the oceans. For example, animals living in the water column are almost entirely dependent on primary production from living phytoplankton. Many animals living on or in the ocean floor feed on detritus, or at least can switch to detritus feeding. Extinction was more severe among those animals living in the water column than among animals living on or in the sea floor.
* No land animal larger than a cat survived.
* The largest air-breathing survivors, crocodilians and champsosaurs, were semi-aquatic. Modern crocodilians can live as scavengers and can survive for as long as a year without a meal. And modern crocodilians' young are small, grow slowly and feed largely on invertebrates for their first few years - so they rely on a detritus-based food chain.
Actually, many scientists believe that dinosaurs evolved into what is now known as birds.
You wouldn't find any of the mammals that lived back then in today's world, either.
Yet there are plenty of fish and reptiles that have remained virtually unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs, right? And I think it's a small subset of dinos that are said to have evolved into birds; that certainly doesn't resolve the big questions...
*Why* were dinosaurs the ones to be wiped out completely?
Mammals survived because they're small? There were small dinosaurs.
Fish survived because they're water-dwelling? There were water-dwelling dinosaurs.
Reptiles survived because...?!?
I'm sure it's more complicated than this, and that's why I'm asking -- can someone help me understand? Why every dinosaur on the planet, regardless of habitat/diet/size died, while so many non-dinosaurs survived?
I'm not picking on Warren - I'm still not sure who he is or what he does. (I suppose I could read TFA, or even the stuff beneath the headline, but that's too much work.)
I don't even know how to respond to this.:D
Your mistake here is company!=designer. Sure, a company can work on multiple projects, but I doubt a single designer can work part-time on two completely separate new games and ensure both are top shelf. (If he is, he's likely just lending a brand name to the project or otherwise off-shoring the actual design work.)
Except that he runs the studio; he's qualified to speak for the studio. He's run studios before while providing creative direction on multiple titles, with the aforementioned clean record of shipping them.
Designer Warren Spector Has Two Games in the Works
Pardon me, but when I hear vaporware phrase like this, I generally think , "...but neither is expected to ship."
Warren Spector's record for shipping games he's announced is pretty clean. And that aside, your statement just doesn't make any sense -- it's impossible for a company to successfully work on two projects at a time?
Of the resources dedicate to art, 95% of it was dedicating to finding angles/excuses to show Fran's bare ass or make the princess give out a gasp (which sounded more like a sexual moan) every cutscene.
So yea, only women get cervical cancer, but HPV sucks for both genders. It isn't just an amusement for men. Shouldn't we want to stop the disease wherever possible?
Precisely. It seems to me that a major angle of this story has been overlooked for the sake of controversy -- they've developed a vaccine for an otherwise incurable venereal disease. It seems to me that's a pretty big deal.
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When I left the movie, I had the impression that Zunkenberg was portrayed as a thieving, condescending, misogynistic, little twerp. He stole everybody else's ideas, idolized a child molesting drug abuser, and betrayed his best (only?) friend.
I agree, they went pretty easy on him.
Based on your post, I'd be hard-pressed to believe you have a humanitarian in you.
That's the tricky part - publicly-traded companies aren't directly accountable to customers. They're directly accountable to shareholders.
Google will send the guy a check with several zeroes in it, relieve their guilty conscience and call it a day. C'mon, you know it will happen that way.
So you're saying the original name for the language was "Goooooo", and they then chopped the five extra o's off and stuck them in the check?
After reading TFA:
*It seems mostly focused on MMOs, but doesn't name any specific games.
*"Visually impaired" is not a euphemism for "blind" here - he literally means "people who can see, but not well". So much of the backlash is misguided ("Blind people are suing to play video games? LOLWUT? Next they'll want to drive???!!!?")
*His list of things that would make a difference are reasonable - high-contrast display modes, audio navigation cues, audio descriptions of items, and the like.
*HOWEVER... he then proceeds to state that Sony's causing him to LOSE MONEY because he could be selling his in-game items for real-world cash. Ugh.
So this thing isn't entirely over-the-top, but it definitely falls apart when he argues monetary loss.
"Basically, if you're watching it live, you are paying for the show, to some extent everyone else is leeching."
If you're watching it AND BEING MEASURED, you're paying for the show. So if you're watching it live and you're a Nielsen family, you're paying for the show. Or if you're watching it on the broadcasters' site, you're paying for the show. If you're average Jane & Joe with the TV on and nobody's watching you watch, then it doesn't matter.
Definitely the Ultima series. They were classics, and did things that still aren't the norm for RPGs today.
Indeed. See Haldane's classic essay On Being the Right Size .
One thing I would note is the cultural differences, Japanese horror tends to work on tension and supernatural things. Ghosts, bumps in the night, general feeling of unease. Where as Western horror tends to be more gore and shock, the gore and shock has long ago lost it's shock value to us adults, where as the feeling of tension is very hard to break no matter what.
Compare Resident evil (Western horror style) with Silent Hill (Japanese horror style) and you'll see one is scary for a while, where as the other continues to be scary even if you're in a safe room with nothing creepy ever.
Whoah, slow down there. You had me up until you imposed an East vs. West template on it. I don't think that fits.
I've never thought there was anything remotely Western about the Resident Evil games, aside from the characters and setting. Gore and shock, I'd say, have less to do with Western horror than they do with a particular style of horror.
Some Western horror games that I'd say relied as much on atmosphere and tension as they did on gore and shock:
*Undying
*Call of Cthulhu - DCotE
*The Suffering and its sequel
*Eternal Darkness
And if you want to stay loose with your definition of "horror":
*Half-Life
*Half-Life 2
*FEAR
*Condemned
*STALKER
Also, obviously there are lots and lots of Western horror *films* that are more about atmosphere than gore.
Man, this is so harshly on target. Beatles played all old school rock'n'roll songs in Hamburg and for MONEY. My pick no one bothered to collect money from them then.
Right. And history will correctly judge The Beatles not as brilliant songwriters but as the cold-blooded criminals that they were.
My index finger and ring finger are almost the same length, and I'm downright awful at math, almost to the point of discalcula. Numbers jump around the page, switch places, whisper amongst themselves, refuse to participate in calculations, and sometimes simply laugh at me.
I think a more apt (though lengthy) analogy might be this: Say you've got two completely different cable TV standards. All traditional commercial broadcasts go out over System A. All the shows your friends and co-workers watch and talk about are on System A. Most electronics stores only sell System A-compatible TVs.
Then you've got cable TV System B. It's got programming comparable to System B, but less variety, and most System B shows are created by assembled individuals rather than corporations. It's basically high-quality community access television. No cable company will wire your house for System B, so you'd better have a little technical knowledge so you can set things up. There are a few channels that pipe in content from System A, but it's sort of hit-or-miss which System A channels will show up properly and which ones will just be a garbled mess.
And, of course, manufacturers of System A-compatible TVs are comfortable getting sloppy with their design and construction because they know they've got a lock on the market.
If you're like me, you've got both a System A and System B TV at home, because I want it all. However, for most people, System A has pretty much everything they want. Sure, the TVs kind of suck, but to watch System B cable they'd need to go buy a compatible TV down at that weird imports store, and have to learn to wire their home for System B.
Then, finally: "What? System B doesn't carry 'Lost'?!? Well then what's the point?" Seemingly small things seal the deal.
...and we run Windows XP, not Vista.
:)
Any attempt to watch a Quicktime file from a local drive results in problems (usually an instant bluescreen, but sometimes general breakage -- taskbar not responding, apps not closing when ordered, menus not responding, that sort of thing).
Viewing a movie that exists elsewhere on the network is fine. Viewing a movie from the Internet still breaks things, presumably because it's still getting cached to the local drive.
They're not brand-name computers, but they were all put together by the same place, presumably with similar specs. Nobody's dug into it too deeply, we've just gotten used to moving all *.mov files to a network drive before viewing.
I didn't care for the actual storyline, but I really liked the implied storyline (basically, what you think is going on for most of the game). And the intended storyline didn't get in the way.
Frankly, I haven't been this engaged by a game in a long, long time.
Yeah, it was possible, but difficult to fly the airplane with no wings. They clipped the wings for the aforementioned reason (9/11 paranoia), and removed the mission(s) that were slated to have used the plane in its full form. Do you have a source on this claim? IIRC, GTA 3 hit stores on October 31, which means Rockstar North would've had a very short period of time to make this change, submit a new version to Rockstar, get it passed, submit to Sony for approval, get it passed, send to the manufacturers for duplication, and distribute copies to stores.
In short, it doesn't seem like they'd have enough response time to have actually made any changes as a reaction to 9/11.
Pros: Finally get to field-test that cool Tau Cannon.
Cons: Headcrabs everywhere.
That should answer your question why all the dinosaurs went extinct. They're defined that way. Okay, riddle me this: Why did no reptile whose legs extended below the body ("dinosaur") rather than to the side ("lizard") survive, regardless of their scale, location, or diet?
That aside, while researching a reply, I found something close to what I was looking for on Wikipedia (though the section is marked as needing citations):
Actually, many scientists believe that dinosaurs evolved into what is now known as birds.
You wouldn't find any of the mammals that lived back then in today's world, either.
Yet there are plenty of fish and reptiles that have remained virtually unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs, right? And I think it's a small subset of dinos that are said to have evolved into birds; that certainly doesn't resolve the big questions...*Why* were dinosaurs the ones to be wiped out completely?
Mammals survived because they're small? There were small dinosaurs.
Fish survived because they're water-dwelling? There were water-dwelling dinosaurs.
Reptiles survived because...?!?
I'm sure it's more complicated than this, and that's why I'm asking -- can someone help me understand? Why every dinosaur on the planet, regardless of habitat/diet/size died, while so many non-dinosaurs survived?
I'm not picking on Warren - I'm still not sure who he is or what he does. (I suppose I could read TFA, or even the stuff beneath the headline, but that's too much work.)
:D
I don't even know how to respond to this.
Your mistake here is company!=designer. Sure, a company can work on multiple projects, but I doubt a single designer can work part-time on two completely separate new games and ensure both are top shelf. (If he is, he's likely just lending a brand name to the project or otherwise off-shoring the actual design work.)
Except that he runs the studio; he's qualified to speak for the studio. He's run studios before while providing creative direction on multiple titles, with the aforementioned clean record of shipping them.
Bah! *throws hands above head* I give up, heh.
Pardon me, but when I hear vaporware phrase like this, I generally think , "...but neither is expected to ship."
Warren Spector's record for shipping games he's announced is pretty clean. And that aside, your statement just doesn't make any sense -- it's impossible for a company to successfully work on two projects at a time?
That's because dark matter is God!
That makes me wonder... can God create dark matter so dark that even he can't resist the inexplicable accelerating expansion of observable matter?
Of the resources dedicate to art, 95% of it was dedicating to finding angles/excuses to show Fran's bare ass or make the princess give out a gasp (which sounded more like a sexual moan) every cutscene.
So... money well-spent, you're saying.
So yea, only women get cervical cancer, but HPV sucks for both genders. It isn't just an amusement for men. Shouldn't we want to stop the disease wherever possible?
Precisely. It seems to me that a major angle of this story has been overlooked for the sake of controversy -- they've developed a vaccine for an otherwise incurable venereal disease. It seems to me that's a pretty big deal.