Honestly, it just rankles me to have people point out the lack of inherent value in any activity where the inherent value comes from entertainment. It seems that there is a common attitude that if something is at all enjoyable than it is not intellectually stimulating, and that if something is not intellectually stimulating then it is utterly devoid of value. Anyway, this is neither here nor there, as the use of "intellectual" in this case refers to "intellectual property," which has as much to do with matters of the intellect as lightning bugs have to do with lightning. To wit: not effing much.
Christ, sanctimonious assholes like you need to learn to just shut the fuck up and let other people have their fun. So you don't like video games - so fucking what? Not only are they a legitimate hobby and form of entertainment, they are booming as a business when dozens of other industries around the world are foundering. The fact that you can't wrap your head around people finding entertainment in things that don't entertain you says more about your "intellectual" capacity than it says about anybody else's, Sony executives included. Go read some penny dreadfuls and maybe catch a talkie at the nickelodeon, and leave the rest of us alone to enjoy ourselves as we see fit, grandpa.
The most obvious reason to develop for a home console in this day and age is money. Quite simply, video games on consoles outsell games on PCs by a very wide margin. With the video game market poised to top $10 billion in the US alone this year, it should be fairly obvious why a developer would choose to develop for consoles instead of the PC - sales are higher than on PC, piracy is almost nonexistent compared to PCs, and consoles are both more popular and visible as gaming devices than PCs. You can argue that everybody plays Flash games on PCs and that the PC gaming market is larger than the console market, but I would argue that for people who actually pay money to play video games, consoles are the go-to destination. Some developers are unconcerned with programming as a political statement and just want to develop something that will pay the bills.
But you also rely on other people playing those games as well. What if I find a niche game now that allows players to run dedicated servers, but at the game's peak there are only 150 people playing online at any given time? You can bet that no matter how much I love the multiplayer, I just won't be able to get the same satisfying experience five years down the line when most of the playerbase has moved on. I could either spend a good deal of time and effort trying to keep a multiplayer community alive or I could just accept that all multiplayer games have a lifespan limited by player interest. There is no similar limit to the lifespan of a single-player game.
A huge part of the allure behind home video games in the 70s and 80s was that people could now pay a higher initial cost for the games that they wanted to play and then no longer had to endure microtransactions. It seems that if EA and THQ have their way, we will slowly slide back to the days when we paid for a couple of minutes with a game rather than buying the game itself. After all, it would eliminate the used games market and ensure that developers and publishers get more of our money for less of their product. For a corporate bean-counter, that's a win-win!
Perhaps it is due to the effect of having two tectonic plates in close proximity to each other. For instance, in the immediate vicinity of a subduction zone the satellite would essentially see two stacked tectonic plates, which could account for the differences in observed density.
Anybody with more than a freshman-level understanding of geology want to correct me?
Get a full sleeve of the Mandelbrot set drawn with (literally) painstaking detail and accuracy. That should keep you and your tattoo artist busy for a while.
The Web is a subset of the Internet. Exercising greater control of the Internet implies exercising greater control of things that fall under the heading of the Internet.
These aren't even the first PS3 games to support stereoscopic 3D with 3D-capable TVs. That honor goes to Invincible Tiger: The Legend of Han Tao, an entirely forgettable side-scrolling beat-em-up.
In my real non-caffeine-addicted life, I have the option of making my brain go from 0-100 within a matter of a minute if I so choose. I also have the added advantage of waking up at or near baseline, without the need to return myself from -100 to 0. TFA clearly states that caffeine addicts get no additional perk, so the best that they can hope for is a return to baseline. I, on the other hand, can choose to accelerate my brain well beyond baseline and I don't really need to worry about slipping below the baseline due to withdrawal.
It's nice not being addicted to caffeine.
We look for earth-like worlds for the simple reason that water is the universal solvent. Liquid water makes possible a great deal of chemical and, ultimately, biological processes that aren't possible otherwise. We search for earth-like worlds because they are far and away the most likely to be able to support any type of life, not because of naïveté.
I don't know about the place where you live, but here in Minnesota we get about two hours of glistening, beautiful, white snow followed by a matter of months of dirty, disgusting, brown or black slush and enormous grey snowbanks. Personally, I think that it would be a much less dreary place in winter if we didn't have all of this accumulated snow. Having said that, I'm also an avid skier, so it should go without saying that I don't want to see snow-free winters. Ideally I would just like snow to stay where it belongs.
You mean this?
47. Hey, they’re only AOL users.
AOL releases twenty million search keywords entered by 650,000 search-engine users, supposedly for the benefit of researchers. The searches have been anonymized, but The New York Times and others discover it’s possible to identify who performed some of them. AOL declares the release a “screw-up” and multiple heads roll, including that of its CTO.
It's one thing not to read the article, but you clearly didn't even read the summary. I have my doubts as to whether you will even read this reply to your post.
If Sony had wanted to release a game console, they could have done it. Nintendo clearly did. Instead, Sony wanted to release an entertainment unit for the living room. They didn't focus on games, and blu-ray doesn't have enough of a market yet to justify the R&D and advertising behind the PS3. If Sony had just concentrated on getting good games out early in the lifespan of the console they would never be in this mess. Now they need to scramble to get games out before the console completely sinks.
It's great that you like your blu-ray player and that you like Resistance, but a generic first-person shooter and a high-def media player aren't enough to compensate for the lack of FUN.
As a Minnesotan student who grew up in the 80s, I got to play a lot of MECC games on our school's computers. I remember playing the Oregon Trail, Odell Lake, Number and Word Munchers, and Storybook Weaver.
One thing that I haven't heard mentioned yet, though, is Freedom. I remember this game very well. In it, you played a slave in the south, and the game began with your escape. The game randomly generated a character with different starting statistics each time. Sometimes you would be able to read, sometimes not - in which case all signs appeared as gibberish. Sometimes your character would have a compass or tools, other times you would have to rely on the sun or the growth of moss on trees. The game was presented from a first-person perspective in static screens. The goal, of course, was to make it to the Free North. Over the course of the game, the player met sympathetic people who sheltered them, members of the Underground Railroad, and of course, many people trying to catch and return the escaped slave. It was a very deep and engaging game. The Oregon Trail and Odell Lake were educational, but even on an Apple IIGS Freedom was scary and immersive - I really was afraid when I heard that distorted bark and knew I had dogs on my trail (and no cayenne pepper to throw them off!)
Of course now I would probably laugh at the simple graphics and sound, but at the time the game was incredible.
I just see this as Square-Enix pandering to their two largest markets in a crass attempt to maximize sales. Creating main characters to appeal to a specific market is nothing more than folding to the focus-group mentality that the most widely acceptable option is the best one. This is not an artistic choice, it is a financial one. Ultimately I think that it will leave the game feeling like an empty attempt to seem "cool" or "badass" but without the underlying je-ne-sais-quoi that can make games truly great.
They can delay the game as long as they want. I have always had good experiences with Wil Wright games, and I trust that when Spore finally does release it will be as polished and tested as possible. They're delaying it in order to release the best game possible. If they didn't, we'd be complaining about an incomplete, buggy game, and we would finally see a patch to instate full functionality... oh, around Q2 2008.
Either that, or they're all just playing Spore so much that they can't get any work done.
I can find plenty of info on "Next," but what in the hell is "The Last Mizmey"?
Googling mizmey turns up a distressing dearth of information. Are you sure that you didn't just make that title up when you couldn't think of a second sci-fi film in production?
Slashdot Mirror
Whoops, meant to reply to the parent.
Ah yes, I, too, remember the day in Econ 101 when they covered Mercantilism. Fortunately, Capitalism is a whole different ballgame.
If the wars were really about that smoking hole in Manhattan, then we probably should have gone after the guys who caused it.
Honestly, it just rankles me to have people point out the lack of inherent value in any activity where the inherent value comes from entertainment. It seems that there is a common attitude that if something is at all enjoyable than it is not intellectually stimulating, and that if something is not intellectually stimulating then it is utterly devoid of value.
Anyway, this is neither here nor there, as the use of "intellectual" in this case refers to "intellectual property," which has as much to do with matters of the intellect as lightning bugs have to do with lightning. To wit: not effing much.
Christ, sanctimonious assholes like you need to learn to just shut the fuck up and let other people have their fun. So you don't like video games - so fucking what? Not only are they a legitimate hobby and form of entertainment, they are booming as a business when dozens of other industries around the world are foundering. The fact that you can't wrap your head around people finding entertainment in things that don't entertain you says more about your "intellectual" capacity than it says about anybody else's, Sony executives included. Go read some penny dreadfuls and maybe catch a talkie at the nickelodeon, and leave the rest of us alone to enjoy ourselves as we see fit, grandpa.
The most obvious reason to develop for a home console in this day and age is money. Quite simply, video games on consoles outsell games on PCs by a very wide margin. With the video game market poised to top $10 billion in the US alone this year, it should be fairly obvious why a developer would choose to develop for consoles instead of the PC - sales are higher than on PC, piracy is almost nonexistent compared to PCs, and consoles are both more popular and visible as gaming devices than PCs. You can argue that everybody plays Flash games on PCs and that the PC gaming market is larger than the console market, but I would argue that for people who actually pay money to play video games, consoles are the go-to destination. Some developers are unconcerned with programming as a political statement and just want to develop something that will pay the bills.
But you also rely on other people playing those games as well. What if I find a niche game now that allows players to run dedicated servers, but at the game's peak there are only 150 people playing online at any given time? You can bet that no matter how much I love the multiplayer, I just won't be able to get the same satisfying experience five years down the line when most of the playerbase has moved on. I could either spend a good deal of time and effort trying to keep a multiplayer community alive or I could just accept that all multiplayer games have a lifespan limited by player interest. There is no similar limit to the lifespan of a single-player game.
A huge part of the allure behind home video games in the 70s and 80s was that people could now pay a higher initial cost for the games that they wanted to play and then no longer had to endure microtransactions. It seems that if EA and THQ have their way, we will slowly slide back to the days when we paid for a couple of minutes with a game rather than buying the game itself. After all, it would eliminate the used games market and ensure that developers and publishers get more of our money for less of their product. For a corporate bean-counter, that's a win-win!
Perhaps it is due to the effect of having two tectonic plates in close proximity to each other. For instance, in the immediate vicinity of a subduction zone the satellite would essentially see two stacked tectonic plates, which could account for the differences in observed density.
Anybody with more than a freshman-level understanding of geology want to correct me?
Get a full sleeve of the Mandelbrot set drawn with (literally) painstaking detail and accuracy. That should keep you and your tattoo artist busy for a while.
The Web is a subset of the Internet. Exercising greater control of the Internet implies exercising greater control of things that fall under the heading of the Internet.
These aren't even the first PS3 games to support stereoscopic 3D with 3D-capable TVs. That honor goes to Invincible Tiger: The Legend of Han Tao, an entirely forgettable side-scrolling beat-em-up.
It's simple: the US is run by a shadow government of Malthusians.
In my real non-caffeine-addicted life, I have the option of making my brain go from 0-100 within a matter of a minute if I so choose. I also have the added advantage of waking up at or near baseline, without the need to return myself from -100 to 0. TFA clearly states that caffeine addicts get no additional perk, so the best that they can hope for is a return to baseline. I, on the other hand, can choose to accelerate my brain well beyond baseline and I don't really need to worry about slipping below the baseline due to withdrawal.
It's nice not being addicted to caffeine.
Maybe you don't remember their slogan:
We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company.
We look for earth-like worlds for the simple reason that water is the universal solvent. Liquid water makes possible a great deal of chemical and, ultimately, biological processes that aren't possible otherwise. We search for earth-like worlds because they are far and away the most likely to be able to support any type of life, not because of naïveté.
I don't know about the place where you live, but here in Minnesota we get about two hours of glistening, beautiful, white snow followed by a matter of months of dirty, disgusting, brown or black slush and enormous grey snowbanks. Personally, I think that it would be a much less dreary place in winter if we didn't have all of this accumulated snow.
Having said that, I'm also an avid skier, so it should go without saying that I don't want to see snow-free winters. Ideally I would just like snow to stay where it belongs.
You mean this?
47. Hey, they’re only AOL users. AOL releases twenty million search keywords entered by 650,000 search-engine users, supposedly for the benefit of researchers. The searches have been anonymized, but The New York Times and others discover it’s possible to identify who performed some of them. AOL declares the release a “screw-up” and multiple heads roll, including that of its CTO.
Why should connecting to Microsoft's closed gaming network be a legally protected right?
It's one thing not to read the article, but you clearly didn't even read the summary. I have my doubts as to whether you will even read this reply to your post.
If Sony had wanted to release a game console, they could have done it. Nintendo clearly did. Instead, Sony wanted to release an entertainment unit for the living room. They didn't focus on games, and blu-ray doesn't have enough of a market yet to justify the R&D and advertising behind the PS3. If Sony had just concentrated on getting good games out early in the lifespan of the console they would never be in this mess. Now they need to scramble to get games out before the console completely sinks. It's great that you like your blu-ray player and that you like Resistance, but a generic first-person shooter and a high-def media player aren't enough to compensate for the lack of FUN.
As a Minnesotan student who grew up in the 80s, I got to play a lot of MECC games on our school's computers. I remember playing the Oregon Trail, Odell Lake, Number and Word Munchers, and Storybook Weaver.
One thing that I haven't heard mentioned yet, though, is Freedom. I remember this game very well. In it, you played a slave in the south, and the game began with your escape. The game randomly generated a character with different starting statistics each time. Sometimes you would be able to read, sometimes not - in which case all signs appeared as gibberish. Sometimes your character would have a compass or tools, other times you would have to rely on the sun or the growth of moss on trees. The game was presented from a first-person perspective in static screens. The goal, of course, was to make it to the Free North. Over the course of the game, the player met sympathetic people who sheltered them, members of the Underground Railroad, and of course, many people trying to catch and return the escaped slave. It was a very deep and engaging game. The Oregon Trail and Odell Lake were educational, but even on an Apple IIGS Freedom was scary and immersive - I really was afraid when I heard that distorted bark and knew I had dogs on my trail (and no cayenne pepper to throw them off!) Of course now I would probably laugh at the simple graphics and sound, but at the time the game was incredible.
I just see this as Square-Enix pandering to their two largest markets in a crass attempt to maximize sales. Creating main characters to appeal to a specific market is nothing more than folding to the focus-group mentality that the most widely acceptable option is the best one. This is not an artistic choice, it is a financial one. Ultimately I think that it will leave the game feeling like an empty attempt to seem "cool" or "badass" but without the underlying je-ne-sais-quoi that can make games truly great.
They can delay the game as long as they want. I have always had good experiences with Wil Wright games, and I trust that when Spore finally does release it will be as polished and tested as possible. They're delaying it in order to release the best game possible. If they didn't, we'd be complaining about an incomplete, buggy game, and we would finally see a patch to instate full functionality... oh, around Q2 2008. Either that, or they're all just playing Spore so much that they can't get any work done.
I can find plenty of info on "Next," but what in the hell is "The Last Mizmey"? Googling mizmey turns up a distressing dearth of information. Are you sure that you didn't just make that title up when you couldn't think of a second sci-fi film in production?