Well, the thing is moving to France isn't an option.
Not simply in the sense that uprooting yourself and moving to a different country is a difficult, and in some senses risky, proposition. Rather, French as spoken in Canada, and French as spoken in France are such different 'dialects' that they border on speaking different languages...
At least, that's what my obsessed with linguistics, raised on the Canadian border, lived a few years in France fiance says on the matter... And given that she speaks both Quebecois French, and actual French, I'd say she's probably right.
Now of course, this is entirely anecdotal evidence, but Ring is an unusual case.
Everyone I know who has seen both versions prefers whichever version they saw first.
If they prefer "The Ring" they site the complaint you made... Too much left unexplained in "Ringu".
If they prefer "Ringu" they site the complete opposite as the complaint. "The Ring" overexplains things that they felt better left as enigmas...
Hmmm... While tallying efficiency as the entire mass moved a distance per quantity of fuel might be a more 'textbook' definition of efficiency, would it not make sense to ignore the weight of the vehicle itself and simply calculate efficiency based on weight of 'cargo', distance travelled and fuel consumed?
Curious if anyone has any recent figures on what percentage of various console populations are used for online gaming... (aka, how what % of xboxs are used online regularlu, and similar). Last time I heard anything was a decent while ago, but the numbers weren't impressive. Somewhere in the 10% range. Things may be much different these days, but those numbers wouldn't really support the 'online=domination' line of logic...
Online play will definitely be attractive to a few niche groups(PC converts who were heavy into PC multiplayer, a few strains of 'die hard gamer'), but saying that online play will attract and draw in the masses(which are who truly make or break a system) might not turn out to be true...
Shoot, I'd think the Dreamcast would be a pretty good example of the fact that an online console will not inherently dominate over non-online consoles.
What it boils down to is what the masses want determines what will be the winner, and the tastes of the masses are not the same as the tastes of the sort of geeks who'd be nitpicking and debating what aspect of a console will make it superior within its generation on a web based discussion board...
Unfortunately, prices in different regions aren't as simple as taking a price and converting the price via the exchange rate.
For a variety of reasons, including things like tariffs, local taxes, and marketing decisions of the company involved(price things according to what the market can bear, certain markets you can get away with a higher mark up than others), prices vary from region to region. Things like region locking/encoding are used to try and keep products local to specific areas.
The end result is that the prices in the US and Japan for instance, may very well be different even with an accurate exchange rate employed to compare the two... And it is also true that in general prices in Japan tend to be high, like the grandparent of this post implied).
The examples they use in the article make the argument that N.American/European game markets are more original a real joke.
Prince of Persia: Okay. A reimagining of a really old game, that is yet another platformer.
Sly Cooper: A platformer, with a little stealth mixed in. Not much new.
Deus Ex: Invisible War: FPS with plot and some RPG elements. System Shock 1, 2, Deus Ex 1, Thief 1, 2.
Tony Hawk 3: I hope I don't need to explain why a third in a series isn't original.
Now I am not criticizing the games, and I will agree that N.American/European developers have come a long way and are putting together good games. But the lack of originality claim came off as unfounded, and nothing in the article backed it up in the least. In fact, the article almost read as an example of how the non-Japanese developers were pounding out the same old same old games(particularly of the sports category).
Yeah, maybe I'm being nitpicky over a one line claim that wasn't the brunt of the article, but it really struck me as flagrantly inaccurate(probably in part due to the use of that quote in the slashdot article blurb)
26 isn't that bad. And Rogue Leader isn't that surprising given the entire 'Star Wars is a very cultural thing.' Eternal Darkness doesn't surprise me much, but dissapoints me. On both counts. It's an instant classic in my book. Best use of mood and developing a style for the story that I've seen.
(WARNING Eternal Darkness spoiler...)
Of course, it helps that I was on a big Lovecraft kick at the time... The real ending(after playing all three variants) is so perfectly Lovecraftian... All along it was Mantoroks scheme, we do wind up pawns in the end...
Sounds like a good description of the PS2 and SquareSoft(er, Square Enix these days) to me. Which is hardly an accurate description of the Japanese game market... Frankly, I think the US market is almost as guilty of the T&A aspect(Tomb Raider anyone?).
I'm tired of the same things myself, but that's why I am sticking with Japanese games mainly. But I'm going the GameCube route. It's all a matter of tastes I suppose. Pikmin alone is practically a system seller for me... One of the most original games I've played in the last few years, and while it is a genre 'mix'(Bit RTS, bit adventure/puzzle, bit platformer) it is a mix unlike anything else I can think of. And I really like the cute, yet simultaneously dark in that morbid nmother nature 'survival of the fittest' sort of way...
Then again, some people absolutely hate Pikmin and want to play an FPS. It's all about preferences...
Though I still must say your complaint isn't that accurate a description of Japanese games(a portion of them, but there are a lot that aren't like that...)
Okay, US and Japanese markets have different tastes, and the game producers from each market cater to their local markets and do better there. Frankly, that's not particularly surprising and in fact I'd think it would be almost expected.
However, blaming it on a lack of variation in Japanese games seems a little unfounded... New and groundbreaking concepts are pretty damn rare in both markets. In fact, I'd wager that US developers focusing on the genres that 'do big' in the US, and pumping out clones and 'nothing new here titles' that are targeted at what has been succesful previously in the US is the number one contributor to the shift that they're noticing...
Well, I have to both agree and disagree on this issue... Got a few relatives in a few branches of service, and do government contract work myself. And from what I've seen, while there are a lot of cases of civilians getting bitchy about actually justified costs, there are just as many(if not more) cases of exorbitant costs that really are waste.
A good example of a real life justified expense is hammers. Huge complaints over how 'a hammer you could go and pick up at the hardware store' was being bought for way too much money. Turns out, the hammers were used near jet fuel, thus they had to be made out of a pricier material because your standard hammer from a hardware store would cause sparks. Sparks and jet fuel aren't a nice combination.
On the other hand, there are cases where there is a lot of waste. Designing coffee makers that will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, with the requirements that they be capable of surviving a plane crash that would kill all the occupants(Makes you wonder who will drink the coffee). Or fuses being bought for about a hundred bucks. No special requirements, not held to any 'stricter' testing than standard civilian fuses.
Sometimes the high dollar items are justified, sometimes they aren't... From the few that I've been able to look into, I've seen more that weren't justified, but still close to even... It's not right to just make a blanket statement about military spending always being over the top, but it's not exactly a good idea to ignore the cases when they are being wasteful.
And it should be acknowledged that military wastefulness(when they are honestly being wasteful) isn't always the militaries fault. Sometime's it is, sometimes it boils down to congress...
When it comes to being technically capable of the feats that the Sony PR machine claimed the PS2 would be capable of, the PS2 failed miserably. Arguably the biggest case of console marketing hyperbole ever.
When it comes to installed user base, third party support, and sheer size of game library however, the PS2 certainly did live up to the hype.
Just a quick FYI to tag in here, but the Cube supports 480p as well... No higher resolutions, but it does manage progressive scan, and I at least find it a rather noticeable improvement.
And, I'm not certain about the Xbox, but I know on the Cube side of things the 480p support varies by game(whether its present or not), I believe the XBox has a similar situation, though I'm not certain.
"You seem to have an excess of mistresses. There's a word for keepers like you."
"Your dungeon floor isn't level, angry creatures cannot play marbles."
Re:Not even true in the way YOU mean it
on
Tech Rich Get Richer
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I have an important question about this statistic. Tally the incomes of all the taxpayers in the country. What percent of this total income do the '1% top of taxpayers' make.
Without that knowledge spouting off "the top X% pay Y% of the taxes" is meaningless. If the top X% make 80 % of the money, but pay 39 % of the taxes then they're hideously undertaxed... if the top X% make 10 % of the money, but pay 39 % then they're getting shafted.
The fact that these studies always seem to ignore the issue of what percentage of money this top 1-5% make certainly makes me suspicious of the findings... but there's no hard evidence either way that I know of, and without those other figures the statistics you're quoting are meaningless.
Actually, wasn't there a whole slew of 'standard horror movie monster A' versus 'standard horror movie monster B' a long time ago, back in the black and white film days?
Hmm... I recall seeing something along those lines, involving trench diggers and crowd control. I thought it went something along the lines of 'Engage emergency break before performing crowd control.' Something that implied the ditch witch should be used for crowd control... But my memory may be fuzzy.
Just a simple seconding of the opinion... But it really is a good point. Play mechanics have a certain style/flavor to them, and it is really important that the setting and the play mechanics compliment each other.
Another good example of a set of play mechanics that really complimented the setting/theme of the game is 7th Sea. I've not taken a look at the new d20 version of it, but unless they rewrite a lot of the basic d20 system, you would have to lose a lot of what made the original 7th Sea work...
Re:Maybe the problem is Minsky himself?
on
AI Going Nowhere?
·
· Score: 1
Image recognition, voice recognition, fuzzy logic control systems...
There are a ton of areas where things that were once 'maybe theoretically possible' and worked on as AI have become commonplace and used simply 'as technology.' Once that occurs, the technology in question stops being considered AI, and the AI field is blamed for never getting anywhere...
Digital animation in a real time system, with no reliance on 'prescripting', with high detail physics(of the sort that would blow anything in any game away by many orders of magnitude).
Oh yeah, we're still forgetting dealing with things like senses other than sight...
Those dates are US releases if I recall... The original PS was sometime in 87... early I believe. Most accounts I've heard always placed the order Dragon Quest, Phantasy Star, Final Fantasy... Though, I think the second Dragon Quest beat out at least FF, if not PS as well...
The problem will be faking that input and output(on the degree and scale of what we are talking about) is a problem that may very well be as complex and difficult as creating an actual real world robotic body... If creating a virtual world with the sort of sensory input humans receive was a trivial task, then the entire 'virtual reality' thing would be a lot farther along than it is...
Re:Maybe the problem is Minsky himself?
on
AI Going Nowhere?
·
· Score: 1
You forgot the other alternative...
Either a branch of AI research goes nowhere and is abandoned.
Or it works, solves a limited set of problems, is deemed practical and thus somehow becomes 'not AI' due to the fact that it is no longer 'mystically intelligent' but simply a functioning piece of machinery...
In other words, AI research is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't...
Hmmm... Well, if you're implying that Microsoft is trying to use the word Fantasy to ties themselves to the Final Fantasy brand name(sorry, series isn't an accurate description...), then I think you missed a big old number four on that list.
Phantasy Star predates Final Fantasy. Shoot, except for Dragon Warrior/Quest, PS predates the rest of the genre(as far as consoles go)...
I've seen college IT departments who encouraged sharing via local means. Why did they do it? Simple, the sharing would have gone on either locally or via P2P and they have plenty of internal local bandwidth, but bandwidth to the rest of the world is far more limited. Thus, by keeping to local sharing systems, the colleges external connection doesn't get bogged down by the endless P2P requests...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the thing is moving to France isn't an option.
Not simply in the sense that uprooting yourself and moving to a different country is a difficult, and in some senses risky, proposition. Rather, French as spoken in Canada, and French as spoken in France are such different 'dialects' that they border on speaking different languages...
At least, that's what my obsessed with linguistics, raised on the Canadian border, lived a few years in France fiance says on the matter... And given that she speaks both Quebecois French, and actual French, I'd say she's probably right.
Now of course, this is entirely anecdotal evidence, but Ring is an unusual case. Everyone I know who has seen both versions prefers whichever version they saw first. If they prefer "The Ring" they site the complaint you made... Too much left unexplained in "Ringu". If they prefer "Ringu" they site the complete opposite as the complaint. "The Ring" overexplains things that they felt better left as enigmas...
Hmmm... While tallying efficiency as the entire mass moved a distance per quantity of fuel might be a more 'textbook' definition of efficiency, would it not make sense to ignore the weight of the vehicle itself and simply calculate efficiency based on weight of 'cargo', distance travelled and fuel consumed?
Curious if anyone has any recent figures on what percentage of various console populations are used for online gaming... (aka, how what % of xboxs are used online regularlu, and similar). Last time I heard anything was a decent while ago, but the numbers weren't impressive. Somewhere in the 10% range. Things may be much different these days, but those numbers wouldn't really support the 'online=domination' line of logic...
Online play will definitely be attractive to a few niche groups(PC converts who were heavy into PC multiplayer, a few strains of 'die hard gamer'), but saying that online play will attract and draw in the masses(which are who truly make or break a system) might not turn out to be true...
Shoot, I'd think the Dreamcast would be a pretty good example of the fact that an online console will not inherently dominate over non-online consoles.
What it boils down to is what the masses want determines what will be the winner, and the tastes of the masses are not the same as the tastes of the sort of geeks who'd be nitpicking and debating what aspect of a console will make it superior within its generation on a web based discussion board...
Unfortunately, prices in different regions aren't as simple as taking a price and converting the price via the exchange rate.
For a variety of reasons, including things like tariffs, local taxes, and marketing decisions of the company involved(price things according to what the market can bear, certain markets you can get away with a higher mark up than others), prices vary from region to region. Things like region locking/encoding are used to try and keep products local to specific areas.
The end result is that the prices in the US and Japan for instance, may very well be different even with an accurate exchange rate employed to compare the two... And it is also true that in general prices in Japan tend to be high, like the grandparent of this post implied).
The examples they use in the article make the argument that N.American/European game markets are more original a real joke.
Prince of Persia: Okay. A reimagining of a really old game, that is yet another platformer.
Sly Cooper: A platformer, with a little stealth mixed in. Not much new.
Deus Ex: Invisible War: FPS with plot and some RPG elements. System Shock 1, 2, Deus Ex 1, Thief 1, 2.
Tony Hawk 3: I hope I don't need to explain why a third in a series isn't original.
Now I am not criticizing the games, and I will agree that N.American/European developers have come a long way and are putting together good games. But the lack of originality claim came off as unfounded, and nothing in the article backed it up in the least. In fact, the article almost read as an example of how the non-Japanese developers were pounding out the same old same old games(particularly of the sports category).
Yeah, maybe I'm being nitpicky over a one line claim that wasn't the brunt of the article, but it really struck me as flagrantly inaccurate(probably in part due to the use of that quote in the slashdot article blurb)
26 isn't that bad. And Rogue Leader isn't that surprising given the entire 'Star Wars is a very cultural thing.' Eternal Darkness doesn't surprise me much, but dissapoints me. On both counts. It's an instant classic in my book. Best use of mood and developing a style for the story that I've seen.
(WARNING Eternal Darkness spoiler...)
Of course, it helps that I was on a big Lovecraft kick at the time... The real ending(after playing all three variants) is so perfectly Lovecraftian... All along it was Mantoroks scheme, we do wind up pawns in the end...
Sounds like a good description of the PS2 and SquareSoft(er, Square Enix these days) to me. Which is hardly an accurate description of the Japanese game market... Frankly, I think the US market is almost as guilty of the T&A aspect(Tomb Raider anyone?).
I'm tired of the same things myself, but that's why I am sticking with Japanese games mainly. But I'm going the GameCube route. It's all a matter of tastes I suppose. Pikmin alone is practically a system seller for me... One of the most original games I've played in the last few years, and while it is a genre 'mix'(Bit RTS, bit adventure/puzzle, bit platformer) it is a mix unlike anything else I can think of. And I really like the cute, yet simultaneously dark in that morbid nmother nature 'survival of the fittest' sort of way...
Then again, some people absolutely hate Pikmin and want to play an FPS. It's all about preferences...
Though I still must say your complaint isn't that accurate a description of Japanese games(a portion of them, but there are a lot that aren't like that...)
Okay, US and Japanese markets have different tastes, and the game producers from each market cater to their local markets and do better there. Frankly, that's not particularly surprising and in fact I'd think it would be almost expected.
However, blaming it on a lack of variation in Japanese games seems a little unfounded... New and groundbreaking concepts are pretty damn rare in both markets. In fact, I'd wager that US developers focusing on the genres that 'do big' in the US, and pumping out clones and 'nothing new here titles' that are targeted at what has been succesful previously in the US is the number one contributor to the shift that they're noticing...
But, maybe it's just me.
Well, I have to both agree and disagree on this issue... Got a few relatives in a few branches of service, and do government contract work myself. And from what I've seen, while there are a lot of cases of civilians getting bitchy about actually justified costs, there are just as many(if not more) cases of exorbitant costs that really are waste.
A good example of a real life justified expense is hammers. Huge complaints over how 'a hammer you could go and pick up at the hardware store' was being bought for way too much money. Turns out, the hammers were used near jet fuel, thus they had to be made out of a pricier material because your standard hammer from a hardware store would cause sparks. Sparks and jet fuel aren't a nice combination.
On the other hand, there are cases where there is a lot of waste. Designing coffee makers that will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, with the requirements that they be capable of surviving a plane crash that would kill all the occupants(Makes you wonder who will drink the coffee). Or fuses being bought for about a hundred bucks. No special requirements, not held to any 'stricter' testing than standard civilian fuses.
Sometimes the high dollar items are justified, sometimes they aren't... From the few that I've been able to look into, I've seen more that weren't justified, but still close to even... It's not right to just make a blanket statement about military spending always being over the top, but it's not exactly a good idea to ignore the cases when they are being wasteful.
And it should be acknowledged that military wastefulness(when they are honestly being wasteful) isn't always the militaries fault. Sometime's it is, sometimes it boils down to congress...
Define 'live up to its hype.'
When it comes to being technically capable of the feats that the Sony PR machine claimed the PS2 would be capable of, the PS2 failed miserably. Arguably the biggest case of console marketing hyperbole ever.
When it comes to installed user base, third party support, and sheer size of game library however, the PS2 certainly did live up to the hype.
Just a quick FYI to tag in here, but the Cube supports 480p as well... No higher resolutions, but it does manage progressive scan, and I at least find it a rather noticeable improvement.
And, I'm not certain about the Xbox, but I know on the Cube side of things the 480p support varies by game(whether its present or not), I believe the XBox has a similar situation, though I'm not certain.
Dungeon Keeper 2 had some classics...
"You seem to have an excess of mistresses. There's a word for keepers like you."
"Your dungeon floor isn't level, angry creatures cannot play marbles."
I have an important question about this statistic. Tally the incomes of all the taxpayers in the country. What percent of this total income do the '1% top of taxpayers' make.
Without that knowledge spouting off "the top X% pay Y% of the taxes" is meaningless. If the top X% make 80 % of the money, but pay 39 % of the taxes then they're hideously undertaxed... if the top X% make 10 % of the money, but pay 39 % then they're getting shafted.
The fact that these studies always seem to ignore the issue of what percentage of money this top 1-5% make certainly makes me suspicious of the findings... but there's no hard evidence either way that I know of, and without those other figures the statistics you're quoting are meaningless.
Actually, wasn't there a whole slew of 'standard horror movie monster A' versus 'standard horror movie monster B' a long time ago, back in the black and white film days?
Hmm... I recall seeing something along those lines, involving trench diggers and crowd control. I thought it went something along the lines of 'Engage emergency break before performing crowd control.' Something that implied the ditch witch should be used for crowd control... But my memory may be fuzzy.
Just a simple seconding of the opinion... But it really is a good point. Play mechanics have a certain style/flavor to them, and it is really important that the setting and the play mechanics compliment each other. Another good example of a set of play mechanics that really complimented the setting/theme of the game is 7th Sea. I've not taken a look at the new d20 version of it, but unless they rewrite a lot of the basic d20 system, you would have to lose a lot of what made the original 7th Sea work...
Image recognition, voice recognition, fuzzy logic control systems... There are a ton of areas where things that were once 'maybe theoretically possible' and worked on as AI have become commonplace and used simply 'as technology.' Once that occurs, the technology in question stops being considered AI, and the AI field is blamed for never getting anywhere...
Digital animation in a real time system, with no reliance on 'prescripting', with high detail physics(of the sort that would blow anything in any game away by many orders of magnitude). Oh yeah, we're still forgetting dealing with things like senses other than sight...
Those dates are US releases if I recall... The original PS was sometime in 87... early I believe. Most accounts I've heard always placed the order Dragon Quest, Phantasy Star, Final Fantasy... Though, I think the second Dragon Quest beat out at least FF, if not PS as well...
The problem will be faking that input and output(on the degree and scale of what we are talking about) is a problem that may very well be as complex and difficult as creating an actual real world robotic body... If creating a virtual world with the sort of sensory input humans receive was a trivial task, then the entire 'virtual reality' thing would be a lot farther along than it is...
You forgot the other alternative... Either a branch of AI research goes nowhere and is abandoned. Or it works, solves a limited set of problems, is deemed practical and thus somehow becomes 'not AI' due to the fact that it is no longer 'mystically intelligent' but simply a functioning piece of machinery... In other words, AI research is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't...
Hmmm... Well, if you're implying that Microsoft is trying to use the word Fantasy to ties themselves to the Final Fantasy brand name(sorry, series isn't an accurate description...), then I think you missed a big old number four on that list. Phantasy Star predates Final Fantasy. Shoot, except for Dragon Warrior/Quest, PS predates the rest of the genre(as far as consoles go)...
I've seen college IT departments who encouraged sharing via local means. Why did they do it? Simple, the sharing would have gone on either locally or via P2P and they have plenty of internal local bandwidth, but bandwidth to the rest of the world is far more limited. Thus, by keeping to local sharing systems, the colleges external connection doesn't get bogged down by the endless P2P requests...
No, the Harvard students held out for fifty bucks a month.