You hit the nail in the head. One of Real's problems is to repair their image. Just like netscape/mozilla had to prove to the world that their browser was not as slow as molasses anymore, and the Winamp team had to revocer from the terrible version 4.
I have dared to install the new Realplayer in a windows machine, and I have to say that Real seems to be going in the right direction. The new free player is as unintrusive as anything gets this days. IIRC, you even get a dialog during install letting you decide if you really want to make Real your default mp3 player. Not much different from winamp 3 and 5. My only compaint is that they do try to make you register with them on first run. The player still works fine if you don't register, but you have to click a button labeled cancel as opposed to "Don't Register". Outside of that minor issue, the latest Realplayer is at least as usable as Windows Media Player.
From an outsider POV, Bush is a pro-war, pro-christian, pro-rich people kind of candidate. In most of Europe, those are conservative traits. He's also in favor of big government and ignores deficits, but he's good enough at PR to hide those facts from many people. Of course he's not really economically conservative, but it's all about how he appears to be, not about how his policies really go.
I think of taxes for incomes over 500K as "mandatory donations". For every Bill Gates that donates a few million dollars to charities there are 5 that wouldn't give a dime, regardless of their tax burden. They'll just save their money and retire earlier/buy a bigger boat.Lowering taxes for the rich only leads to overconcentration of wealth into a few hands. History has taught us that this kind of situations lead to violence every single time. If the common man lived well under them, the Russian Tzar and the King of France would be ruling to this day.Without a mechanism to stop greed on one side and envy on the other, we're not going anywhere. Western democracies are still in reasonably good health because an elected government is there to control those primal instincts for the common good. Try to change the government so that it works for the good of all of us, instead of just making sure it has so little power it cannot really do anything.
I'd rather get rid of taxes for those earning under 10K/yr, those guys are the ones that now need charity to both eat, pay their taxes and their medical bills. If you want to go a little further, use any regulating mechanism you want to make health care affortable. Weakening patents could help.
Then you would probably like an old game called Warhammer 40K, chaos gate. it's an X-Com like tactical combat game using warhammer units. A pity that you could only play the space marines fighting the chaos army.
Same thing happens in Spain, but there only 60% or so vote. For the EU elections, less that 50% is the norm. I guess it has more to do with people actually thinking that a change of government would mean a change in their lives or not. In Spain most people don't really care either way, so unless something major happens, there won't be a big turnout. I've been living in the US for more than 6 years, and IMO the same thing happens: most people just don't care.
I guess that in Denmark the government is something more than a source of corruption/scandals:)
Mostly right. Pirates was designed by Sid Meier. Great game that is finally getting a proper sequel by Sid and his Firaxis gang.
On the other hand, you missed a couple of really amazing Molineux games: Theme park and Theme hospital. Both of those games is as good as the ones you mentioned.
bzzz, wrong answer. Hembra is a pretty loaded term in Spain too. The term ss rarely used describing human females. When it is used, it is done typically among males to describe a well-shaped , good looking woman. When used this way, it is similar to the american "babe", Johnny Bravo style.
Thus, for a Spaniard, asking you if you are a "macho" or an "hembra" would be as appropiate as being asked if you're a stud or a babe: The only computer program that could get away with that would be a Larry Laffer game.
The decision PDF explains everything, if you care to read it carefully: Napster was pretty much sued out of existence because the judge decided that they could stop users from trading pirated mp3s, but didn't do enough to stop them. Today's decision says that Grokster does not have the ability of stopping anybody from sharing pirated mp3s, so they cannot be liable for anything
If any christian gets offended by that he/she just doesn't know history. A lot of mosques qere turned into churches in Europe. A prime example is Crodoba's mosque, turned into a catholic church after the Spanish Reconquista. Local muslims still want to share it as a house of worhip with the catholic church. The local bishop claims that the mosque has been a catholic church way longer than it ever was used as a mosque. Both sides refuse to budge, so the conflict remains to this date.
Sure, gamespy is not what I'd call the most reliable and balanced source of information, but I really can't blame them for naming those three games in their overhyped list. Donkey Kong country was pretty, but as far as gameplay goes, it's not really in the same league as the best games of the SNES generation. I'd rather play Super Mario World or Sonic any day. Quake 2 was, IMO, a step back from the original Quake: The single player game was just as forgettable, the graphics were not a major improvement (IMO, the disco-like colored lights made it look worse), and the multiplayer was way less fun. Quake and Quake 3 are clearly better games. Halo... The amount of hype Halo had is still unmatched. With that amount of hype, almost any game would be in the top 25 overhyped list. Maybe X-Com, Civilization, Syndicate, Ocarina of Time and the like could have deserved that much hype, but Halo? It sold a lot of consoles, but it wasn't even good enough for me to want to finish the single player campaign when I bought it.
Really, Gamespy's overrated list was pretty fair. I think that Morrowind and Super Mario Sunshine were not really all that overhyped, but then again, I see how somebody could disagree with me on those two. I have to agree with you on the "ipod of gaming" comment though: Fargo should have kept his mouth shut on that one.
Consoles with hard drives? While the XBox has one, and the PS2 has ah HD add-on, I don't see the next generation of consoles having a HD, unless it's there solely for DVR functionality. All a next-gen console might need is, at most, a gig or two of space to store saved games and online game patches. I've not seen an unmodded XBox HD even close to full. Most of the space is wasted. Thus, the only gaming-related reason to keep an HD around would be for HD to be more cost effective than other storage mediums. The way things are going, flash-based disks will beat hard drives in price by the time the next consoles come out. Hard drives are becoming bigger, but smaller hard drives do not become significantly cheaper. MS found that out the hard way: Most XBox sold today come with a big HD but only use a small partition. The rest of the disk is wasted. HDs have other minuses: HDs are complicated and failure prone pieces of hardware. There are few less reliable computer parts. Does Sony really want to handle 1 in a 1000 console returns for HD failures?.
it's not hard to find a 0.5 gig USB drive for under $100. By the time the PS3 or Revolution comes out, flash memory will make more sense than a HD for gaming. If you find an HD in your next console, it'll only be there because of some convergence master plan, not because it just happens to be good for gaming.
They made W-Wing alliance, and nobody bought it. I guess that the bigwigs at Lucasarts think that only FPS RTS and RPGs sell. Since space sims are not one on the list, we won't see a new XvT any time soon.
Unfortunately, very few developer groups out there have the a good enough financial position to do something like this. Paradox Entertainment and a few others that hava a loyal fan base are starting to do this kind of thing, but most other studios are either owned by a big media conglomerate or just sold out to a big publisher. id is one of the few developers that has the power to do something like this and is not even trying.
I don't plan to buy the game until id releases the obligatory official patch that removes the copy protection once and for all, just like Bioware did with Neverwinter Nights.They won't get my money if they treat me like a thief
Communism has many meanings. If by communism you mean the soviet political system, Open Source/Free Software don't really have much in common with it. However, it is not hard to see how Marx could 'like' the OSS model. OSS puts the computing 'means of production' in the hands of everyone. To compete in the hardware industry means billions of dollars in investments, so you pretty much have to work for a 'capitalist'. In the software business, using the OSS model, a few hundred workers can compete with the biggest software giants, since the means of production are inexpensive. The only barrier of entry is labor.
So IMO the OSS does share something with communism, but only the pretty, flowery side. Applying Marx's economic ideas in the 'real' industry has so many problems that I can't even begin to describe them. When the product can be copied for pennies w/o any expensive equipment there is no 'natural struggle' to hoard resources, and the OSS model becomes the natural way of doing things. It just happens that true democrats, marxists and libertarians like it just fine. Just don't try to reuse the model in a more traditional industry.
That 'crazy map crap' is what many game programmers deal with every day. If you want to create a modern graphical or physics engine, the typical math curriculum from an engineering school is barely enough to get by.
A friend of mine who wrote a 3D engine for a pretty respected PC games company. The math he has to deal with is not much different from what you'd see at an Aerospace Engineering PhD curriculum. Is the math needed to simulate a car's movement in a racing sim all that much different than what a Mechanical engineer does when he designs it? Is a F15 flight simulator a completely different beast from the ones written by AE to train real pilots?
Math wise, I've found modern game programming to be one of the most demanding career paths you can take with a CS degree. I guess you made a good choice by changing majors: Unless you were just planning on writing 2D UIs, you probably would have hated it.
Hasbro is using the Avalon Hill brand on all of their latest strategy board games. This includes Risk variants like 2210 and Risk Godstorm.I wish they released a good strategy game, as opposed to the dicefests they release nowadays.
Re:Open mouth, insert paranoid foot
on
Bobby Fischer Found
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· Score: 3, Interesting
You might be a mathematician, but I'm pretty sure you are not a chess player. Most legal opening moves are so bad that a chess player does not have to memorize anything: If somebody opens with something like a3 or g4, any reasonable move will give you an advantage. This is caused by how inmediately obvious most bad moves are. In chess, a really bad move can be "punished" 2 or thee moves later. A more subtle error might be noticeable in 8 moves or so. Compared to a game like Go, where mistakes could not be obvious to an amateur 30 moves later, chess's true complexity is relatively low.
In pro chess you'll never see a truly awful opening move: any move that could be considered a theoretical innovation is tested and retested by a grandmaster before he ever makes it on the board.
As far as known opening lines go, some of the biggest opening families like the Ruy Lopez have known variants well past move 10. More like move 23. Any Grandmaster out there knows all of that theory. Even I, a complete amateur, know more than a couple dozen opening lines past the 8th move.
I am impressed by your high game quality standards. Viewtiful Joe has to be a pretty bad game to get a weak 92% in Gamerankings.This clearly indicates that the game is no good.Sony's US refusal to distribute VJ had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the game is a 2D side scroller, as TFA says.
I guess somebody will have to tell the guys at Capcom that if they want to be able to sell their PS2 games in NA they better start learning from the companies that made Big Motha Truckers and Army Men:Green Rogue
I don't think that a budget based on money makes much sense. Let me give you a highly simplified example:
All games made by major development studios have to pay the developers salaries and get them health insurance. In the midwest, this is at least 70K per developer/year. Let's say that I hire two multi-talented developer that manages to make a crappy game for me in a year. Even w/o IT costs, I've gone over the 100K limit.
On the other hand, what if 8 college guys decide to sink 60 hours a week for 2 years making a game, each taking an equal cut on the game's sales. IMO, they've spent way more effort than the two hired guns in the previous example. They were never paid though, so they decide to claim that their 'budget' is the money the spent buying basic tools... way under 100K.
IMO, an indie game is just a game done without spending a 'proffesional-like' amount of time on it. Any industry game nowadays uses at least 6 people for a year. Not so high profile games have teams of 12-15 people that spend 2 years on the game. IMO, anything that uses under 6 man/years can be unquestionable called indie.
Well, the xbox line up is particularly strong in sports and FPS, while the GCN is stronger in adventure-like games, Zelda and Metroid style. Jost go to Gamerankings, click on Rankings and select the console you want to check from the list.
Plenty of games out there are make by huge companies. However, you managed to pick a game made by a pretty small software studio. PopTop is a small studio based on Fenton, MO, 30 minutes away from downtown St.Louis. Last time I checked (A friend of mine wrote the graphics engine for RRT3) their staff included 4 programmers, 1 game designer/programmer, and 5/6 artists. I don't think that the original Sonic Team was much smaller than that.
Most companies out there do spend a lot more money on creating a game than this small teams. Square-Enix, Konami and EA spend lots of money on their big games. Relatively poor studios in the Midwest are the exception, not the rule.
Games wise, the PS2 had the weakest launch I can remember. Way weaker than N64, Dreamcast, GCN.. even worse than the XBox!. The only console that comes close is the original Playstation. However, the PS2 launch can be considered a success overall due to the incredible amout of hype that Sony generated. The press just loved the PS2, and with so much publicity going on, almost every single third party publisher knew that they had to jump into the PS2 bandwagon.
Compare that to, let's say, the GCN launch. The GCN specs seemed lackluster, the press hated the handle, and the console was originally shown in purple! Nintendo failed to get the attention of most gamers and third party developers. It was just a question of image, that made Nintendo fail being the best selling console of this generation.
The N-Gage managed to get bad press from both the mainstream and the videogame media. It's pretty simple: If nobody wants the product, the product flops. The PS2 was bought by people that wanted a cheap DVD player and some crazy early adopters, the GCN has the loyal Nintendo fan base, but Nokia had nothing. I have no idea of why anybody thought that the N-Gage would sell.
Re:Cha ching, reloaded.
on
Gates on Spam
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· Score: 1
The problem is to find a problem that is not easily attacked using a dictionary-like attack. If we set up a "simple" factorization problem, that a desktop computer could solve in ~=5 seconds, the amount of space necessary to have all possible answers wouldn't be outside of the reach of a big spammer.
This approach has another weakness: the problems have to be adapted appropriately to the computers that connect to the server, or we risk making email unusable or making spam easy. Computers get faster every year, and a problem that takes 5-10 seconds on a desktop PC will take less than a second in the typical desktop machine that will be sold in 3 years. How long should it take to send an e-mail? What about using a 6-8 year old machine? All of this questions need to be answered before using this kind of scheme.
It is also an action/stealth game, but it is very, very linear and the variety between levels is mostly graphical.
I for one liked Thief because I had multiple options to solve most puzzles and the maps were pretty open ended. I never felt I was 'solving' any problem, just finding the only solution the game designers had left for me.
If you liked the freedom Thief gave you on most missions, Splinter Cell is probably not for you.
Slashdot Mirror
You hit the nail in the head. One of Real's problems is to repair their image. Just like netscape/mozilla had to prove to the world that their browser was not as slow as molasses anymore, and the Winamp team had to revocer from the terrible version 4.
I have dared to install the new Realplayer in a windows machine, and I have to say that Real seems to be going in the right direction. The new free player is as unintrusive as anything gets this days. IIRC, you even get a dialog during install letting you decide if you really want to make Real your default mp3 player. Not much different from winamp 3 and 5. My only compaint is that they do try to make you register with them on first run. The player still works fine if you don't register, but you have to click a button labeled cancel as opposed to "Don't Register". Outside of that minor issue, the latest Realplayer is at least as usable as Windows Media Player.
From an outsider POV, Bush is a pro-war, pro-christian, pro-rich people kind of candidate. In most of Europe, those are conservative traits. He's also in favor of big government and ignores deficits, but he's good enough at PR to hide those facts from many people. Of course he's not really economically conservative, but it's all about how he appears to be, not about how his policies really go.
I think of taxes for incomes over 500K as "mandatory donations". For every Bill Gates that donates a few million dollars to charities there are 5 that wouldn't give a dime, regardless of their tax burden. They'll just save their money and retire earlier/buy a bigger boat.Lowering taxes for the rich only leads to overconcentration of wealth into a few hands. History has taught us that this kind of situations lead to violence every single time. If the common man lived well under them, the Russian Tzar and the King of France would be ruling to this day.Without a mechanism to stop greed on one side and envy on the other, we're not going anywhere. Western democracies are still in reasonably good health because an elected government is there to control those primal instincts for the common good. Try to change the government so that it works for the good of all of us, instead of just making sure it has so little power it cannot really do anything.
I'd rather get rid of taxes for those earning under 10K/yr, those guys are the ones that now need charity to both eat, pay their taxes and their medical bills. If you want to go a little further, use any regulating mechanism you want to make health care affortable. Weakening patents could help.
Then you would probably like an old game called Warhammer 40K, chaos gate. it's an X-Com like tactical combat game using warhammer units. A pity that you could only play the space marines fighting the chaos army.
Same thing happens in Spain, but there only 60% or so vote. For the EU elections, less that 50% is the norm. I guess it has more to do with people actually thinking that a change of government would mean a change in their lives or not. In Spain most people don't really care either way, so unless something major happens, there won't be a big turnout. I've been living in the US for more than 6 years, and IMO the same thing happens: most people just don't care.
I guess that in Denmark the government is something more than a source of corruption/scandals :)
Mostly right. Pirates was designed by Sid Meier. Great game that is finally getting a proper sequel by Sid and his Firaxis gang.
On the other hand, you missed a couple of really amazing Molineux games: Theme park and Theme hospital. Both of those games is as good as the ones you mentioned.
bzzz, wrong answer. Hembra is a pretty loaded term in Spain too. The term ss rarely used describing human females. When it is used, it is done typically among males to describe a well-shaped , good looking woman. When used this way, it is similar to the american "babe", Johnny Bravo style.
Thus, for a Spaniard, asking you if you are a "macho" or an "hembra" would be as appropiate as being asked if you're a stud or a babe: The only computer program that could get away with that would be a Larry Laffer game.
The decision PDF explains everything, if you care to read it carefully: Napster was pretty much sued out of existence because the judge decided that they could stop users from trading pirated mp3s, but didn't do enough to stop them. Today's decision says that Grokster does not have the ability of stopping anybody from sharing pirated mp3s, so they cannot be liable for anything
If any christian gets offended by that he/she just doesn't know history. A lot of mosques qere turned into churches in Europe. A prime example is Crodoba's mosque, turned into a catholic church after the Spanish Reconquista. Local muslims still want to share it as a house of worhip with the catholic church. The local bishop claims that the mosque has been a catholic church way longer than it ever was used as a mosque. Both sides refuse to budge, so the conflict remains to this date.
Sure, gamespy is not what I'd call the most reliable and balanced source of information, but I really can't blame them for naming those three games in their overhyped list. Donkey Kong country was pretty, but as far as gameplay goes, it's not really in the same league as the best games of the SNES generation. I'd rather play Super Mario World or Sonic any day. Quake 2 was, IMO, a step back from the original Quake: The single player game was just as forgettable, the graphics were not a major improvement (IMO, the disco-like colored lights made it look worse), and the multiplayer was way less fun. Quake and Quake 3 are clearly better games. Halo... The amount of hype Halo had is still unmatched. With that amount of hype, almost any game would be in the top 25 overhyped list. Maybe X-Com, Civilization, Syndicate, Ocarina of Time and the like could have deserved that much hype, but Halo? It sold a lot of consoles, but it wasn't even good enough for me to want to finish the single player campaign when I bought it.
Really, Gamespy's overrated list was pretty fair. I think that Morrowind and Super Mario Sunshine were not really all that overhyped, but then again, I see how somebody could disagree with me on those two. I have to agree with you on the "ipod of gaming" comment though: Fargo should have kept his mouth shut on that one.
Hard drives are becoming bigger, but smaller hard drives do not become significantly cheaper. MS found that out the hard way: Most XBox sold today come with a big HD but only use a small partition. The rest of the disk is wasted. HDs have other minuses: HDs are complicated and failure prone pieces of hardware. There are few less reliable computer parts. Does Sony really want to handle 1 in a 1000 console returns for HD failures?.
it's not hard to find a 0.5 gig USB drive for under $100. By the time the PS3 or Revolution comes out, flash memory will make more sense than a HD for gaming. If you find an HD in your next console, it'll only be there because of some convergence master plan, not because it just happens to be good for gaming.
They made W-Wing alliance, and nobody bought it. I guess that the bigwigs at Lucasarts think that only FPS RTS and RPGs sell. Since space sims are not one on the list, we won't see a new XvT any time soon.
Unfortunately, very few developer groups out there have the a good enough financial position to do something like this. Paradox Entertainment and a few others that hava a loyal fan base are starting to do this kind of thing, but most other studios are either owned by a big media conglomerate or just sold out to a big publisher. id is one of the few developers that has the power to do something like this and is not even trying.
I don't plan to buy the game until id releases the obligatory official patch that removes the copy protection once and for all, just like Bioware did with Neverwinter Nights.They won't get my money if they treat me like a thief
Communism has many meanings. If by communism you mean the soviet political system, Open Source/Free Software don't really have much in common with it. However, it is not hard to see how Marx could 'like' the OSS model. OSS puts the computing 'means of production' in the hands of everyone. To compete in the hardware industry means billions of dollars in investments, so you pretty much have to work for a 'capitalist'. In the software business, using the OSS model, a few hundred workers can compete with the biggest software giants, since the means of production are inexpensive. The only barrier of entry is labor.
So IMO the OSS does share something with communism, but only the pretty, flowery side. Applying Marx's economic ideas in the 'real' industry has so many problems that I can't even begin to describe them. When the product can be copied for pennies w/o any expensive equipment there is no 'natural struggle' to hoard resources, and the OSS model becomes the natural way of doing things. It just happens that true democrats, marxists and libertarians like it just fine. Just don't try to reuse the model in a more traditional industry.
That 'crazy map crap' is what many game programmers deal with every day. If you want to create a modern graphical or physics engine, the typical math curriculum from an engineering school is barely enough to get by.
A friend of mine who wrote a 3D engine for a pretty respected PC games company. The math he has to deal with is not much different from what you'd see at an Aerospace Engineering PhD curriculum. Is the math needed to simulate a car's movement in a racing sim all that much different than what a Mechanical engineer does when he designs it? Is a F15 flight simulator a completely different beast from the ones written by AE to train real pilots?
Math wise, I've found modern game programming to be one of the most demanding career paths you can take with a CS degree. I guess you made a good choice by changing majors: Unless you were just planning on writing 2D UIs, you probably would have hated it.
Quite the opposite. We'll all have to spend the day working to be able to afford both the $55 game and the $600 Video Card Upgrade
Hasbro is using the Avalon Hill brand on all of their latest strategy board games. This includes Risk variants like 2210 and Risk Godstorm.I wish they released a good strategy game, as opposed to the dicefests they release nowadays.
You might be a mathematician, but I'm pretty sure you are not a chess player. Most legal opening moves are so bad that a chess player does not have to memorize anything: If somebody opens with something like a3 or g4, any reasonable move will give you an advantage. This is caused by how inmediately obvious most bad moves are. In chess, a really bad move can be "punished" 2 or thee moves later. A more subtle error might be noticeable in 8 moves or so. Compared to a game like Go, where mistakes could not be obvious to an amateur 30 moves later, chess's true complexity is relatively low.
In pro chess you'll never see a truly awful opening move: any move that could be considered a theoretical innovation is tested and retested by a grandmaster before he ever makes it on the board.
As far as known opening lines go, some of the biggest opening families like the Ruy Lopez have known variants well past move 10. More like move 23. Any Grandmaster out there knows all of that theory. Even I, a complete amateur, know more than a couple dozen opening lines past the 8th move.
I am impressed by your high game quality standards. Viewtiful Joe has to be a pretty bad game to get a weak 92% in Gamerankings.This clearly indicates that the game is no good.Sony's US refusal to distribute VJ had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the game is a 2D side scroller, as TFA says.
I guess somebody will have to tell the guys at Capcom that if they want to be able to sell their PS2 games in NA they better start learning from the companies that made Big Motha Truckers and Army Men:Green Rogue
I don't think that a budget based on money makes much sense. Let me give you a highly simplified example:
All games made by major development studios have to pay the developers salaries and get them health insurance. In the midwest, this is at least 70K per developer/year. Let's say that I hire two multi-talented developer that manages to make a crappy game for me in a year. Even w/o IT costs, I've gone over the 100K limit.
On the other hand, what if 8 college guys decide to sink 60 hours a week for 2 years making a game, each taking an equal cut on the game's sales. IMO, they've spent way more effort than the two hired guns in the previous example. They were never paid though, so they decide to claim that their 'budget' is the money the spent buying basic tools... way under 100K.
IMO, an indie game is just a game done without spending a 'proffesional-like' amount of time on it. Any industry game nowadays uses at least 6 people for a year. Not so high profile games have teams of 12-15 people that spend 2 years on the game. IMO, anything that uses under 6 man/years can be unquestionable called indie.
Well, the xbox line up is particularly strong in sports and FPS, while the GCN is stronger in adventure-like games, Zelda and Metroid style. Jost go to Gamerankings, click on Rankings and select the console you want to check from the list.
Plenty of games out there are make by huge companies. However, you managed to pick a game made by a pretty small software studio. PopTop is a small studio based on Fenton, MO, 30 minutes away from downtown St.Louis. Last time I checked (A friend of mine wrote the graphics engine for RRT3) their staff included 4 programmers, 1 game designer/programmer, and 5/6 artists. I don't think that the original Sonic Team was much smaller than that.
Most companies out there do spend a lot more money on creating a game than this small teams. Square-Enix, Konami and EA spend lots of money on their big games. Relatively poor studios in the Midwest are the exception, not the rule.
Games wise, the PS2 had the weakest launch I can remember. Way weaker than N64, Dreamcast, GCN.. even worse than the XBox!. The only console that comes close is the original Playstation. However, the PS2 launch can be considered a success overall due to the incredible amout of hype that Sony generated. The press just loved the PS2, and with so much publicity going on, almost every single third party publisher knew that they had to jump into the PS2 bandwagon.
Compare that to, let's say, the GCN launch. The GCN specs seemed lackluster, the press hated the handle, and the console was originally shown in purple! Nintendo failed to get the attention of most gamers and third party developers. It was just a question of image, that made Nintendo fail being the best selling console of this generation.
The N-Gage managed to get bad press from both the mainstream and the videogame media. It's pretty simple: If nobody wants the product, the product flops. The PS2 was bought by people that wanted a cheap DVD player and some crazy early adopters, the GCN has the loyal Nintendo fan base, but Nokia had nothing. I have no idea of why anybody thought that the N-Gage would sell.
The problem is to find a problem that is not easily attacked using a dictionary-like attack. If we set up a "simple" factorization problem, that a desktop computer could solve in ~=5 seconds, the amount of space necessary to have all possible answers wouldn't be outside of the reach of a big spammer.
This approach has another weakness: the problems have to be adapted appropriately to the computers that connect to the server, or we risk making email unusable or making spam easy. Computers get faster every year, and a problem that takes 5-10 seconds on a desktop PC will take less than a second in the typical desktop machine that will be sold in 3 years. How long should it take to send an e-mail? What about using a 6-8 year old machine? All of this questions need to be answered before using this kind of scheme.
It is also an action/stealth game, but it is very, very linear and the variety between levels is mostly graphical.
I for one liked Thief because I had multiple options to solve most puzzles and the maps were pretty open ended. I never felt I was 'solving' any problem, just finding the only solution the game designers had left for me.
If you liked the freedom Thief gave you on most missions, Splinter Cell is probably not for you.