I would imagine that if a cat (say a tiger, a large cat, but a cat nonetheless) disemboweled someone, they wouldn't be here to talk about it. A velociraptor was a fair amount bigger than a housecat.
I second that notion, Trauma Center is excellent and a truly different kind of game. The sense of desperation you feel when a patient's vitals are dropping and you're balancing multiple injuries at the same time allowed me to react faster than I ordinarily thought I could (or would) for a game. This and Castlevania are all the reason I need to justify the purchase of my DS.
"According to the Entertainment Software Assocation, the average game is age 30, and the average purchaser of games is 37. There are, in fact, more women > 18 who play games than there are young boys 6-17 who do so according to the ESA."
I don't believe those statistics are an accurate representation of reality at all. The average age of a person who PURCHASES a game is not the same as the average age of the person PLAYING it. Besides which, I remember Sony going on and on about how the average age of a PS2 owner being such-and-such and their data being based on the mailed-in info cards. The average kid doesn't care enough to send Sony a card telling them their age and household income.
Now as to the women, my suspicion is that they count things such as web flash games and cell phone games. It has been shown that women DO play free flash games in large numbers. This is not the same as console or PC gamers who spend money and play the games that have the large development teams and resources. (With exceptions such as the Sims, which is the one great example of a game that really does seem to hold wide appeal to women.)
Wouldn't dolphins with toxic darts be natural enemies of sharks with laser beams? Our only hope would seem to be if they fight and mutually destroy one another. If they should band together... may god help us all...
I may be mistaken, but I believe that large retailers generally agree to not make any (or much) money on the sale of the console initially. This makes sense from a retailers POV too because it's better to sell more $50 games and make $25 per game (plus accessories sales) than to make $50 per console sale, but sell less consoles. This in turn causes everyone else to fall into line, because if Walmart is selling for $299, then why would the average consumer go anyplace selling it for even $10 more? (Yes, distance, Walmart is evil etc., if any of those reasons really affected people more than price, Walmart and other big retailers wouldn't be as powerful as they are.)
I haven't seen the movie yet, but this showed up in Batman: Year One by Frank Miller, and it wasn't instantaneous in that case. In fact, it has Batman calculating how long he'll have to stall before the bats might arrive.
"Give me a *story*, dammit... at least of comic-book quality. (And no, "Demons have invaded the earth and you must kill them" is not a story. It's an excuse.) Can't some enterprising company hire someone like, say, Brian Azzarello / Warren Ellis / Alan Moore to put a storyline worth a damn into a game?"
Check out Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising. Warren Ellis was hired to write this. It's a sort of blend of action and realtime strategy, where you can take control of the units yourself. It had a decent storyline (nothing particularly brilliant), good script and above average gameplay. I only ever saw one copy anywhere (the one I fished out of the bargain bin), so good luck finding it.
Does anyone remember this song about Swift? It came up a long time ago on Slashdot in a story on the RIAA bothering people over mp3s that contained the word "usher" in them.
In the commentary, Wimmer says he wasn't very happy with that scene, but that they ran out of time, and he couldn't re-work it. I agree with you in that I really liked that scene too, personally.
There is an absolute limit to how fast the HDD can read data, true, but by compressing the textures and then using one core to decompress them (and trasnfer them) while the other core runs the game, wouldn't this alleviate the problem somewhat? You'd get more overall texture data than the HDD speed permits (because the decompressed textures will be larger than the compressed size, thus you're getting more out than was fed in), without affecting game speed. If I'm wrong on this, then someone please correct me.
This reply will border on pedantic, but by delaying your payment, you actually did deprive them of something. I say this for two reasons:
(a) Because of inflation, today's dollar is worth less than yesterday's dollar.
(b) You robbed them of the opportunity of using those dollars in the past. There is a time value to money, they could have invested it for a profit during the interim of 'yesterday' and today.
This argument doesn't work because he didn't have the money to spend in the first place. Just look at it this way, if he's low on money and buys NO DVDs and watches NO movies and also doesn't download, he will never see the movies that he buys later on DVD. The industry then doesn't get ANY money from him, and maybe he finds something else to spend his cash on when he has it.
As was stated in grandparent post, he didn't have the money to spend on the movies anyway at that point. So, it is still a net gain in revenue from ZERO.
Absolutely Deus Ex Invisible War was a HUGE fuckup. They had what could've been a hugely profitable franchise with more sequels. They showed off some screenshots that were stunningly pretty. Fans (myself included) were rabid for this game.
And then... the demo released. It ran so incredibly poorly and with settings geared towards the Xbox version (which seems to have been the project lead) that entire forums were filled with tips on getting just the DEMO to run properly. Instead of gamers clamouring for more (ala Battlefield 1942), they had die-hard fans of the original swearing to never go near the game and new players wondering what the fuss was about in the first place. Xbox owners never cared in the first place and it showed in the sales figures. Harvey Smith (lead designer) eventually quit Ion Storm Austin, and so did Warren Spector. Ion Storm Austin is now just a hollow shell. Most of this can be attributed to the decision to design the game around the limitations of the Xbox. One decision may have cost millions of dollars from future games and gutted an entire dev studio, as well as tarnishing the names of 2 respected game designers (Smith and Spector). That definitely deserves to be on the list.
I'm still lamenting the fall of Next Generation magazine. They changed their name to Next Gen late into their major changes in style, and a pretty much complete overhaul of the original editorial staff. The changed some of the staff, the sales fell, so they kept changing the staff, and the sales kept falling...
Sigh... I still have the entire original run of the magazine(s). I wish I could at least find a place where I could buy Edge magazine.
Sega and other football game makers have a unique opportunity at this time to make really amazing College Football Games.
...There is a large playerbase that is actively followed.
Umm... I don't really follow US college sports, but can they actually use the names of college athletes? I thought that that wasn't allowed (although I could be thinking of college basketball or something).
(If you don't know what DS means, how do you know it's not an acronym? Use your mind, son.)
If you don't know what it is, why ASSUME it is an acronym? And I believe the point still stands, if you want to KNOW what it is, follow the link. If not, then let it pass.
Except that it's not an acronym. The DS is the official name. Nintendo DS. That's it. DS doesn't stand for anything in particular anymore. (Previously, it stood for Dual Screen or Developer's System.)
If you wanted to know what it was, why not just click the link and RTFA or google for it? It wouldn't take that much longer than putting up a post bitching about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I would imagine that if a cat (say a tiger, a large cat, but a cat nonetheless) disemboweled someone, they wouldn't be here to talk about it. A velociraptor was a fair amount bigger than a housecat.
I second that notion, Trauma Center is excellent and a truly different kind of game. The sense of desperation you feel when a patient's vitals are dropping and you're balancing multiple injuries at the same time allowed me to react faster than I ordinarily thought I could (or would) for a game. This and Castlevania are all the reason I need to justify the purchase of my DS.
"According to the Entertainment Software Assocation, the average game is age 30, and the average purchaser of games is 37. There are, in fact, more women > 18 who play games than there are young boys 6-17 who do so according to the ESA."
I don't believe those statistics are an accurate representation of reality at all. The average age of a person who PURCHASES a game is not the same as the average age of the person PLAYING it. Besides which, I remember Sony going on and on about how the average age of a PS2 owner being such-and-such and their data being based on the mailed-in info cards. The average kid doesn't care enough to send Sony a card telling them their age and household income.
Now as to the women, my suspicion is that they count things such as web flash games and cell phone games. It has been shown that women DO play free flash games in large numbers. This is not the same as console or PC gamers who spend money and play the games that have the large development teams and resources. (With exceptions such as the Sims, which is the one great example of a game that really does seem to hold wide appeal to women.)
Wouldn't dolphins with toxic darts be natural enemies of sharks with laser beams? Our only hope would seem to be if they fight and mutually destroy one another. If they should band together... may god help us all...
Here's SWIFT explained through a song by some astronomers who also sing a capella. Much more entertaining than RTFA.
"All posts marked "Funny" will be mod'ed or metamod'ed down."
Oh, poetic justice is going to be such a wonderful bitch...
That would probably be the most beautiful and expensive black screen in all of existence...
I may be mistaken, but I believe that large retailers generally agree to not make any (or much) money on the sale of the console initially. This makes sense from a retailers POV too because it's better to sell more $50 games and make $25 per game (plus accessories sales) than to make $50 per console sale, but sell less consoles. This in turn causes everyone else to fall into line, because if Walmart is selling for $299, then why would the average consumer go anyplace selling it for even $10 more? (Yes, distance, Walmart is evil etc., if any of those reasons really affected people more than price, Walmart and other big retailers wouldn't be as powerful as they are.)
I haven't seen the movie yet, but this showed up in Batman: Year One by Frank Miller, and it wasn't instantaneous in that case. In fact, it has Batman calculating how long he'll have to stall before the bats might arrive.
Actually, that search could also just mean that UPS just isn't any good at finding anything...
"Give me a *story*, dammit... at least of comic-book quality. (And no, "Demons have invaded the earth and you must kill them" is not a story. It's an excuse.) Can't some enterprising company hire someone like, say, Brian Azzarello / Warren Ellis / Alan Moore to put a storyline worth a damn into a game?"
Check out Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising. Warren Ellis was hired to write this. It's a sort of blend of action and realtime strategy, where you can take control of the units yourself. It had a decent storyline (nothing particularly brilliant), good script and above average gameplay. I only ever saw one copy anywhere (the one I fished out of the bargain bin), so good luck finding it.
Does anyone remember this song about Swift? It came up a long time ago on Slashdot in a story on the RIAA bothering people over mp3s that contained the word "usher" in them.
In the commentary, Wimmer says he wasn't very happy with that scene, but that they ran out of time, and he couldn't re-work it. I agree with you in that I really liked that scene too, personally.
Heh... that was good, thanks a lot for the laugh (and the visual)... I find your lack of faith disturbing, indeed.
"Je ne sais quoi."
I don't ever actually use any French, but had to learn it anyways. Damned 2 official languages... (I'm Canadian if you haven't guessed.)
Pr0n once again leading the way... from techonology to sane legal precedents, pr0n is probably the biggest motivator for change in human history.
Pr0n... is there anything it can't do?
There is an absolute limit to how fast the HDD can read data, true, but by compressing the textures and then using one core to decompress them (and trasnfer them) while the other core runs the game, wouldn't this alleviate the problem somewhat? You'd get more overall texture data than the HDD speed permits (because the decompressed textures will be larger than the compressed size, thus you're getting more out than was fed in), without affecting game speed. If I'm wrong on this, then someone please correct me.
This reply will border on pedantic, but by delaying your payment, you actually did deprive them of something. I say this for two reasons:
(a) Because of inflation, today's dollar is worth less than yesterday's dollar.
(b) You robbed them of the opportunity of using those dollars in the past. There is a time value to money, they could have invested it for a profit during the interim of 'yesterday' and today.
This argument doesn't work because he didn't have the money to spend in the first place. Just look at it this way, if he's low on money and buys NO DVDs and watches NO movies and also doesn't download, he will never see the movies that he buys later on DVD. The industry then doesn't get ANY money from him, and maybe he finds something else to spend his cash on when he has it.
As was stated in grandparent post, he didn't have the money to spend on the movies anyway at that point. So, it is still a net gain in revenue from ZERO.
Absolutely Deus Ex Invisible War was a HUGE fuckup. They had what could've been a hugely profitable franchise with more sequels. They showed off some screenshots that were stunningly pretty. Fans (myself included) were rabid for this game.
And then... the demo released. It ran so incredibly poorly and with settings geared towards the Xbox version (which seems to have been the project lead) that entire forums were filled with tips on getting just the DEMO to run properly. Instead of gamers clamouring for more (ala Battlefield 1942), they had die-hard fans of the original swearing to never go near the game and new players wondering what the fuss was about in the first place. Xbox owners never cared in the first place and it showed in the sales figures. Harvey Smith (lead designer) eventually quit Ion Storm Austin, and so did Warren Spector. Ion Storm Austin is now just a hollow shell. Most of this can be attributed to the decision to design the game around the limitations of the Xbox. One decision may have cost millions of dollars from future games and gutted an entire dev studio, as well as tarnishing the names of 2 respected game designers (Smith and Spector). That definitely deserves to be on the list.
I'm still lamenting the fall of Next Generation magazine. They changed their name to Next Gen late into their major changes in style, and a pretty much complete overhaul of the original editorial staff. The changed some of the staff, the sales fell, so they kept changing the staff, and the sales kept falling...
Sigh... I still have the entire original run of the magazine(s). I wish I could at least find a place where I could buy Edge magazine.
Sega and other football game makers have a unique opportunity at this time to make really amazing College Football Games.
...There is a large playerbase that is actively followed.
Umm... I don't really follow US college sports, but can they actually use the names of college athletes? I thought that that wasn't allowed (although I could be thinking of college basketball or something).
No, "Revolution" is the codename for the next Nintendo home console, which should appear in some form at the 2005 E3.
(If you don't know what DS means, how do you know it's not an acronym? Use your mind, son.)
If you don't know what it is, why ASSUME it is an acronym? And I believe the point still stands, if you want to KNOW what it is, follow the link. If not, then let it pass.
Except that it's not an acronym. The DS is the official name. Nintendo DS. That's it. DS doesn't stand for anything in particular anymore. (Previously, it stood for Dual Screen or Developer's System.)
If you wanted to know what it was, why not just click the link and RTFA or google for it? It wouldn't take that much longer than putting up a post bitching about it.
"and then I can sell the odd collection of football helmets, the 40,000 some odd copies of video cames"
If those 40,000 some odd copies of games could be sold, then maybe Acclaim might not have been in the trouble it was in.