Maybe you weren't paying much attention when Sony made the 'Rendering Toy Story in real time' claims. That sounded pretty revolutionary and cutting edge back in 2000. Unfortunately, it was all a big lie.
A new console will cost up to $300 or so. Even if the console manufacturers take a, let's say, $100 loss on each console sold in the first year, it's still only $400 worth of hardware, built by the same companies that make computer processors and GPUs. The best we can hope for at a console launch is the same amount of raw power of a high end PC.
If you were an ATI or nVidia executive, and you could manufacture a video card for a console manufacturer for, let's say, $200. Wouldn't you try to sell the same base components in the PC market for 2x the price? I know I would.
No amount of imagination will make your game's AI better. What you need is enough processing power to be able to traverse and modify pretty complicated data structures that represent your agents. This kind of AI code is choke full of branching and random access to memory. It's the huge cost of systems like this that makes most modern's games AI weak. Physics are so 'in' that we spend all the time makign a car feel 'real', while the AI still goes on wheels.
If we make in order operations easier, all we're doing is make it even easier to go down the physics and graphics road. If every 1000 cycles you spend on AI can be transformed into 10,000, it's going to be tough to convince the publisher that AI is worth it.
For example, in the next Gran Turismo for 2006/7, do you think that Poliphony will spend the extra resources of the PS3 on realistic AI drivers that can overtake properly, or on damage modelling and an extra couple of layers of effects in the car's surfaces? My guess is that the AI will blow, as it does today, and all of the extra HP will be spent on graphics and physics.
I've just inherited a pretty ridiculous amount of money, over 10x my yearly salary. That makes my interest income similar to what I make by working. Does that mean that now I work much harder than before?
Most upper class income doesn't come from CEO-like salaries, it is profits from investing hundreds of thousands of dollars, that in many cases were just inherited in the first place. Those dollars grow by just talking to a good investment team that does the dirty work for you. I really can't call that money 'earned', or think that it's the result of hard work. I don't think anyone should be able to not just live without working, but increase their fortune 3 times faster than inflation because of a relative 4 generations ago. And that's one of the many bad things that a flat tax brings.
By making a flat tax, you just help create a modern nobility. Money making is exponential, not linear.The more you have, the easier it is to make more. If there is no dampening effect to hinder those huge fortunes, you'll get an even more stratified social model. It'll be possible to move between steps, but it will be much, much harder.
The problem is, Shogun costs a small fortune on e-bay, so if you don't have it already, you'll pay about as much for it as you would for 5 newer games.
Re:Betrayal at House on the Hill
on
Fun Tabletop Games?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Without the game's 36 page FAQ, IMO the game is forribly unplayable. It seems that NOBODY playtested most of the scenarios, and it shows.
I've played that game a dozen times, but I can't really recommend it. It's 20-40 minutes of almost random movement, followed by 5 minutes of reading incomplete special scenario rules, and then 1 or 2 turns of completely imbalanced gaming. There are two 'sides' and by the time everyone read the part of the rules that they are allowed to read, It's pretty clear who is winning that one. I was pretty much 'forced' into playing after the 3rd time. The game can be balanced and fun, but that only happens 1 out of 8 games, because of horribly balanced rules. To me, that's not worth playing, but YMMV.
For a horror boardgame, I'd just wait and see if the new release of Arkham Horror is any good.
Funagain has probably the larges selection in the US, but it's also the most expensive of the 'popular' online stores. If you're not looking for a simulation of the political situation of germany, or something of that caliber, you'll do better of at Time Well Spent, Fair Play Games or Cardhaus,just to name a few that will save you some bucks.
Diplomacy is still on print, but man players, me included, think that the only reasonable way to play it is with 7 players. If you go down to 6 or less, the game loses balance. Modern Art, on the other hand, plays well with 4 or 5, and it costs a whole $16 in an online store.
If you want the social engineering skills of settlers without any of the luck or the 'I know who's winning in the first five minutes' syndrome, try El Grande, Traders of Genoa or Modern Art. All three of those have a MAJOR social element, each in its own different way, while all of them are, IMO, substantially better than Settlers.
As far as availability goes, El Grande will be reprinted this year, while the other two can be found in most online boardgame stores.
If anyone is looking for a copy of RoboRally, you should know that Hasbro will be reprinting it this summer. We still don't know if there are any real changes from the original, but I don't think they can screw it up too badly.
As far as review quality goes, a monkey with a spatula could give better reviews than imdb. There are several groups of people that try mess with the imdb scores. Some movies get 'hyped up' for no apparent reason, while others get killed just to get them in the top 100 worst movies. Just look at the detailed rankings on any modern movie: 13% of all voters giving a 10 to "the punisher"? Did 24 of the worst 100 movies of all time get made in the last 4 years?
I'd rather find a few critics that I trust than using IMDB as anything more than a database itself.
Square has always worked on high expense, high reward games like Final Fantasy. Their average project's cost has always been among the highest in the industry. Just a couple of games that don't sell very well sends a company like that to their knees. Nintendo, on the other hand, makes as many "surefire" low budget games as EA. How much does it really cost to make warioware?. How much for porting a random Mario game to the latest console?. Even their big budget games are not even in teh same league as a Final Fantasy games as far as project costs go.
A Nintendo bankrupcy would only happen if all of their hardware divisions fail XBOX-in-Japan style. Nintendo has some serious brand problems, but it'd take unbelieveable incompetence to make them fail in 5 years.
Gamers might not get money for review scores, but you guys seem to have an uncanny ability to give scores thatseem to match the text of the reviews. For example:
Building on the success of Metroid Prime, developer Retro Studios has unleashed another masterpiece with Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. While investigating a distress signal on the mysterious planet Aether, bounty hunter Samus Aran finds herself caught in a war between two warring factions, the peaceful dwellers of the light world, the Luminoth, and the evil creatures of the dark world, the Ing. The sequel features improved graphics, a hauntingly beautiful soundtrack, new weapons, suits, and visors for Samus to use, as well as a host of menacing creatures to blast and puzzles to solve. There's also a tacked on multiplayer mode that, while not exactly as thrilling as other deathmatch games on the market, will still manage to suck away a few hours of your life. Beautiful, intense, and full of high production values, Metroid Prime 2 Echoes is one of 2004's greatest games.
And, right after claiming it's one of the best games of the year, the score is 3/5. The same score that "Hamtaro ham-ham games" and "The punisher", where the text of the review says "but to spend $49.99 on this game only proves that you're either a huge Punisher fan (which is fine) or that you enjoy "punishing" yourself". To me, that makes as much sense as Chewbacca living in Endor.
Bigger sites coomit the same sin (just read the Halo 2 review in gamespot, and then look at the score), but if you guys want to gain the audience that gamers once had, you have to do better than this.
Sure, there are millions of Republicans in those sates, but as far as elections go, they matter as much as the Democrats in Utah: pretty much nothing.
It's ironic though that those non-religious republicans that don't matter in the polls happen to be the ones that get the most economic benefit from our republican administration.
Google operates a french domain (google.fr), and the 'illegal behavior' they are talking about is accessible from France. If google stopped showing this specific ad to IPs originating in France i'd expect that there would be no case. When you provide a service in a country, you that country expects you to obey the country's laws.
IMO, this is not very different from what we saw when the GBA came out. At the US launch no third party released anything worth noting, while Nintendo was only offering ports (Some old mario game and Game & Watch gallery IIRC). If Nintendo expected huge sales while their flagship title is a N64 port, they must be dellusional. If Metroid Hunters or the new 2D Mario DS were launch titles, then we'd have seen good sales.
I don't think the PSP has a chance against the portable DVD players. portable DVD players can play any of the 1000s of DVDs that anyone can buy at their local store. You can buy many used for under $5, and every DVD movie you bought in the last 5 years will work just fine. On the other hand, the PSP does not play DVDs at all, so the consumer has to buy a movie that is not compatible with their home DVD player, or go through a long and probably illegal process to copy a shrinked version of the movie into a stupidly expensive memory stick.
I don't have a portable DVD player, but having 300+ dvds, any random portable player beats the PSP hands down.
Re:I spent New Year's eve playing this...
on
DOOM: The Boardgame
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· Score: 1
The game's publisher, Fantasy Flight Games have just released additional rules that add difficulty levels. From "I'm to young to die" to "Nightmare", you can tailor the game to your players' skill.
A developer like Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, for instance, is constantly being put in the chair of developing his Zelda series. There's only so much he can be innovative with and still push the title as a Zelda game. As a result, the end product will tend to not have the same drastic impact upon the gaming world. It'll be a reworked, more-of-the-same type of game, if you will.
Miyamoto wasn't the lead designer on either Majora's Mask or Wind Waker. AFAIK, he isn't even 50% of the time on the new 'realistic' Zelda. His current position involves spending some time on most Nintendo internal projects, but he doesn't have the same level of involvement in one single game as he had with Mario Bros 3 or Mario 64. It seems that he's spending most of his time collaborating with younger designers. Nintendo would rather have 6 games every year where you can see some of the Miyamoto magic than 1 masterpiece every 2 years. We call can notice where the 'Miyamoto Touch' is, but that doesn't mean that the entire game is his responsability. No matter hard Nintendo is trying, they are having problems findinng enough top level talent to keep their standards of old.
The Zelda series is now lead by Eiji Aonuma, who IIRC started working in the zelda series as a co-director in Ocarina of Time. IMO, he is doing a pretty good job.
It's true though that it's much harder to innovate when your game has to keep so many traditional elements as the zelda series carries. Every new zelda game carries a few extra elements that the next has to add into the mix. Most people focus on the traditional elements, like the weapons, the enemies and the dungeons. The game's new changes like face expressions and upgraded physics don't shine as much as they would in a game outside of the Zelda series. If they wanted critical acclaim, they'd be better off working on new franchises, but it seems that it is not in their best interest. Just look at how badly a good game like Pikmin 2 is selling: slightly over 50K this December, compared to almost half a million copies of Mario Party 6.
5 years, in gaming terms, is a lifetime. In 5 years, whoever wants to make a football game will have to start from scratch: Game engine, facial features DB, body type DB... all kinds of stuff that will make competing with EA way, way harder than it is now, with a Sega game that's at least on par with Madden. The way development costs are increasing, I'd not expect any competition for an NFL license in 5 years: You'd probably end up losing money for the first 2 years of the agreement, just on development costs alone. The fact that EA will have a working game from the previous year makes them be able to be profitable while paying way more than any competing studio would.
There is a small chance that somebody will get a new exclusive deal with the NFL, leaving EA with ESPN anchors and fake teams, but I really don't see anybody paying for the NFL rights without having a competitive game already.
CMM is not so serious in the US either. My old job was trying to get a CMM3 certification. The actual certification was supposed to happen in spring 2005, and they were getting everyone in the building ready to pass the formal review. Then, in mid September, we learn that over 80% of the people are going to lose their job Dec 31st, and the new work was going to be sent to company-owned foreign sites. What did management do? speed up the certification process, changing the final review date to December. Once the company got the CMM3, most of the people that made the succesful review possible got cut, and the marketers will tout how the company is CMM3 certified.
Nowadays, CMM is just a bozzword you throw at your customers, and only by accident it has something to do with your actual dev. methodology
I'm sorry to break it to you, but Oblivion will be way, way samller than Morrowind. The developers made it pretty clear in a couple of interviews: The new, shiny graphics makes adding new game content very, very expensive. Since there's no way they'll risk increasing their budget 4x, the game world will be smaller, and will have way fewer available quests.
I for one would rather sacrifice graphics than pretty much anything else. Add to all of this the fact that they are going to be Microsoft's big launch game for their new console, with all the time constraints this will put on the developers, and it is hard to expect much fro Oblivion.
He's talking about 'the next 100 years', so let's do the math on that. There are more than 6200 million on Earth. We'll just made the flawed but simple assumption that the world's population will stay constant. if there was 1 in 4550 chance of dying in an airplane crash in this period, it'd mean that 1.36 million people would die in airplane crashes in this period.
This means that, on average, 13600 people would have to die in airplane crashes every year. In 2000 a pretty average year for airline accidents, 83 people died in airplane crashes. Even in 2001, couting all sept 11 deaths, we didn't not reach 5000 deaths.
I guess that the only way to explain this stats would be to claim that the reader files over a hundred times more often than the average person. I'll let someone else figure that one out.
I was seriously considering one last year, right after christmas. The problem? the crappiest, under 1 ghz tablet was about $2000. Are the tablet features worth 3z the cost of a quality desktop, or 2x of a decent laptop? Not for me.
Fortunately it seems that the average price for a tablet is going down, so the technology might end up reaching enough people to make the platform viable. I really wish it does, if just for the superior interface for many forms of gaming. SCUMM based games and MOO clones are begging for real point and click interfaces, I'd rather use a pen than a mouse for this any day.
shell out the $150 (less than the cost of a textbook) and get Matlab, it's the best math software possible
You are either geting gouged or talking about grad level books. The list price for a Kreyszig is under $131.95, and it'll probably last you a couple of semesters, and it was the most expensive book I had to buy as an undergraduate. $150 is more than what MS will charge for a MSDev Studio. IMO, it's outright robbery considering the budget of the average undergrad, especially when there are open source alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you weren't paying much attention when Sony made the 'Rendering Toy Story in real time' claims. That sounded pretty revolutionary and cutting edge back in 2000. Unfortunately, it was all a big lie.
A new console will cost up to $300 or so. Even if the console manufacturers take a, let's say, $100 loss on each console sold in the first year, it's still only $400 worth of hardware, built by the same companies that make computer processors and GPUs. The best we can hope for at a console launch is the same amount of raw power of a high end PC.
If you were an ATI or nVidia executive, and you could manufacture a video card for a console manufacturer for, let's say, $200. Wouldn't you try to sell the same base components in the PC market for 2x the price? I know I would.
No amount of imagination will make your game's AI better. What you need is enough processing power to be able to traverse and modify pretty complicated data structures that represent your agents. This kind of AI code is choke full of branching and random access to memory. It's the huge cost of systems like this that makes most modern's games AI weak. Physics are so 'in' that we spend all the time makign a car feel 'real', while the AI still goes on wheels.
If we make in order operations easier, all we're doing is make it even easier to go down the physics and graphics road. If every 1000 cycles you spend on AI can be transformed into 10,000, it's going to be tough to convince the publisher that AI is worth it.
For example, in the next Gran Turismo for 2006/7, do you think that Poliphony will spend the extra resources of the PS3 on realistic AI drivers that can overtake properly, or on damage modelling and an extra couple of layers of effects in the car's surfaces? My guess is that the AI will blow, as it does today, and all of the extra HP will be spent on graphics and physics.
Yes, maybe if Nintendo ever planned to release a Fire Emblem GCN game outside of Japan there would be no reason to complain. :)
I've just inherited a pretty ridiculous amount of money, over 10x my yearly salary. That makes my interest income similar to what I make by working. Does that mean that now I work much harder than before?
Most upper class income doesn't come from CEO-like salaries, it is profits from investing hundreds of thousands of dollars, that in many cases were just inherited in the first place. Those dollars grow by just talking to a good investment team that does the dirty work for you. I really can't call that money 'earned', or think that it's the result of hard work. I don't think anyone should be able to not just live without working, but increase their fortune 3 times faster than inflation because of a relative 4 generations ago. And that's one of the many bad things that a flat tax brings.
By making a flat tax, you just help create a modern nobility. Money making is exponential, not linear.The more you have, the easier it is to make more. If there is no dampening effect to hinder those huge fortunes, you'll get an even more stratified social model. It'll be possible to move between steps, but it will be much, much harder.
The problem is, Shogun costs a small fortune on e-bay, so if you don't have it already, you'll pay about as much for it as you would for 5 newer games.
Without the game's 36 page FAQ, IMO the game is forribly unplayable. It seems that NOBODY playtested most of the scenarios, and it shows.
I've played that game a dozen times, but I can't really recommend it. It's 20-40 minutes of almost random movement, followed by 5 minutes of reading incomplete special scenario rules, and then 1 or 2 turns of completely imbalanced gaming. There are two 'sides' and by the time everyone read the part of the rules that they are allowed to read, It's pretty clear who is winning that one. I was pretty much 'forced' into playing after the 3rd time. The game can be balanced and fun, but that only happens 1 out of 8 games, because of horribly balanced rules. To me, that's not worth playing, but YMMV.
For a horror boardgame, I'd just wait and see if the new release of Arkham Horror is any good.
Funagain has probably the larges selection in the US, but it's also the most expensive of the 'popular' online stores. If you're not looking for a simulation of the political situation of germany, or something of that caliber, you'll do better of at Time Well Spent, Fair Play Games or Cardhaus,just to name a few that will save you some bucks.
Diplomacy is still on print, but man players, me included, think that the only reasonable way to play it is with 7 players. If you go down to 6 or less, the game loses balance. Modern Art, on the other hand, plays well with 4 or 5, and it costs a whole $16 in an online store.
As far as availability goes, El Grande will be reprinted this year, while the other two can be found in most online boardgame stores.
If anyone is looking for a copy of RoboRally, you should know that Hasbro will be reprinting it this summer. We still don't know if there are any real changes from the original, but I don't think they can screw it up too badly.
As far as review quality goes, a monkey with a spatula could give better reviews than imdb. There are several groups of people that try mess with the imdb scores. Some movies get 'hyped up' for no apparent reason, while others get killed just to get them in the top 100 worst movies. Just look at the detailed rankings on any modern movie: 13% of all voters giving a 10 to "the punisher"? Did 24 of the worst 100 movies of all time get made in the last 4 years?
I'd rather find a few critics that I trust than using IMDB as anything more than a database itself.
Square has always worked on high expense, high reward games like Final Fantasy. Their average project's cost has always been among the highest in the industry. Just a couple of games that don't sell very well sends a company like that to their knees. Nintendo, on the other hand, makes as many "surefire" low budget games as EA. How much does it really cost to make warioware?. How much for porting a random Mario game to the latest console?. Even their big budget games are not even in teh same league as a Final Fantasy games as far as project costs go.
A Nintendo bankrupcy would only happen if all of their hardware divisions fail XBOX-in-Japan style. Nintendo has some serious brand problems, but it'd take unbelieveable incompetence to make them fail in 5 years.
Gamers might not get money for review scores, but you guys seem to have an uncanny ability to give scores thatseem to match the text of the reviews. For example:
And, right after claiming it's one of the best games of the year, the score is 3/5. The same score that "Hamtaro ham-ham games" and "The punisher", where the text of the review says "but to spend $49.99 on this game only proves that you're either a huge Punisher fan (which is fine) or that you enjoy "punishing" yourself". To me, that makes as much sense as Chewbacca living in Endor.
Bigger sites coomit the same sin (just read the Halo 2 review in gamespot, and then look at the score), but if you guys want to gain the audience that gamers once had, you have to do better than this.
Sure, there are millions of Republicans in those sates, but as far as elections go, they matter as much as the Democrats in Utah: pretty much nothing.
It's ironic though that those non-religious republicans that don't matter in the polls happen to be the ones that get the most economic benefit from our republican administration.
Google operates a french domain (google.fr), and the 'illegal behavior' they are talking about is accessible from France. If google stopped showing this specific ad to IPs originating in France i'd expect that there would be no case. When you provide a service in a country, you that country expects you to obey the country's laws.
IMO, this is not very different from what we saw when the GBA came out. At the US launch no third party released anything worth noting, while Nintendo was only offering ports (Some old mario game and Game & Watch gallery IIRC). If Nintendo expected huge sales while their flagship title is a N64 port, they must be dellusional. If Metroid Hunters or the new 2D Mario DS were launch titles, then we'd have seen good sales.
I don't think the PSP has a chance against the portable DVD players. portable DVD players can play any of the 1000s of DVDs that anyone can buy at their local store. You can buy many used for under $5, and every DVD movie you bought in the last 5 years will work just fine. On the other hand, the PSP does not play DVDs at all, so the consumer has to buy a movie that is not compatible with their home DVD player, or go through a long and probably illegal process to copy a shrinked version of the movie into a stupidly expensive memory stick.
I don't have a portable DVD player, but having 300+ dvds, any random portable player beats the PSP hands down.
The game's publisher, Fantasy Flight Games have just released additional rules that add difficulty levels. From "I'm to young to die" to "Nightmare", you can tailor the game to your players' skill.
Miyamoto wasn't the lead designer on either Majora's Mask or Wind Waker. AFAIK, he isn't even 50% of the time on the new 'realistic' Zelda. His current position involves spending some time on most Nintendo internal projects, but he doesn't have the same level of involvement in one single game as he had with Mario Bros 3 or Mario 64. It seems that he's spending most of his time collaborating with younger designers. Nintendo would rather have 6 games every year where you can see some of the Miyamoto magic than 1 masterpiece every 2 years. We call can notice where the 'Miyamoto Touch' is, but that doesn't mean that the entire game is his responsability. No matter hard Nintendo is trying, they are having problems findinng enough top level talent to keep their standards of old.
The Zelda series is now lead by Eiji Aonuma, who IIRC started working in the zelda series as a co-director in Ocarina of Time. IMO, he is doing a pretty good job.
It's true though that it's much harder to innovate when your game has to keep so many traditional elements as the zelda series carries. Every new zelda game carries a few extra elements that the next has to add into the mix. Most people focus on the traditional elements, like the weapons, the enemies and the dungeons. The game's new changes like face expressions and upgraded physics don't shine as much as they would in a game outside of the Zelda series. If they wanted critical acclaim, they'd be better off working on new franchises, but it seems that it is not in their best interest. Just look at how badly a good game like Pikmin 2 is selling: slightly over 50K this December, compared to almost half a million copies of Mario Party 6.
5 years, in gaming terms, is a lifetime. In 5 years, whoever wants to make a football game will have to start from scratch: Game engine, facial features DB, body type DB... all kinds of stuff that will make competing with EA way, way harder than it is now, with a Sega game that's at least on par with Madden. The way development costs are increasing, I'd not expect any competition for an NFL license in 5 years: You'd probably end up losing money for the first 2 years of the agreement, just on development costs alone. The fact that EA will have a working game from the previous year makes them be able to be profitable while paying way more than any competing studio would.
There is a small chance that somebody will get a new exclusive deal with the NFL, leaving EA with ESPN anchors and fake teams, but I really don't see anybody paying for the NFL rights without having a competitive game already.
CMM is not so serious in the US either. My old job was trying to get a CMM3 certification. The actual certification was supposed to happen in spring 2005, and they were getting everyone in the building ready to pass the formal review. Then, in mid September, we learn that over 80% of the people are going to lose their job Dec 31st, and the new work was going to be sent to company-owned foreign sites. What did management do? speed up the certification process, changing the final review date to December. Once the company got the CMM3, most of the people that made the succesful review possible got cut, and the marketers will tout how the company is CMM3 certified.
Nowadays, CMM is just a bozzword you throw at your customers, and only by accident it has something to do with your actual dev. methodology
I'm sorry to break it to you, but Oblivion will be way, way samller than Morrowind. The developers made it pretty clear in a couple of interviews: The new, shiny graphics makes adding new game content very, very expensive. Since there's no way they'll risk increasing their budget 4x, the game world will be smaller, and will have way fewer available quests.
I for one would rather sacrifice graphics than pretty much anything else. Add to all of this the fact that they are going to be Microsoft's big launch game for their new console, with all the time constraints this will put on the developers, and it is hard to expect much fro Oblivion.
He's talking about 'the next 100 years', so let's do the math on that. There are more than 6200 million on Earth. We'll just made the flawed but simple assumption that the world's population will stay constant. if there was 1 in 4550 chance of dying in an airplane crash in this period, it'd mean that 1.36 million people would die in airplane crashes in this period.
This means that, on average, 13600 people would have to die in airplane crashes every year. In 2000 a pretty average year for airline accidents, 83 people died in airplane crashes. Even in 2001, couting all sept 11 deaths, we didn't not reach 5000 deaths.
I guess that the only way to explain this stats would be to claim that the reader files over a hundred times more often than the average person. I'll let someone else figure that one out.
I was seriously considering one last year, right after christmas. The problem? the crappiest, under 1 ghz tablet was about $2000. Are the tablet features worth 3z the cost of a quality desktop, or 2x of a decent laptop? Not for me.
Fortunately it seems that the average price for a tablet is going down, so the technology might end up reaching enough people to make the platform viable. I really wish it does, if just for the superior interface for many forms of gaming. SCUMM based games and MOO clones are begging for real point and click interfaces, I'd rather use a pen than a mouse for this any day.
You are either geting gouged or talking about grad level books. The list price for a Kreyszig is under $131.95, and it'll probably last you a couple of semesters, and it was the most expensive book I had to buy as an undergraduate. $150 is more than what MS will charge for a MSDev Studio. IMO, it's outright robbery considering the budget of the average undergrad, especially when there are open source alternatives.