I'm not sure about the US, but in Europe, there's no question that being able to pirate games for the console is a big selling point. Real life example:One of my cousins wanted to buy a console for his 6 year old kid. The best console for the kid's tastes is clearly a GCN. However, since the GCN games cannot be copied, and he doesn't want to buy many games for the kid, he went ahead an bought an XBOX, where they can copy games for the price of a writable DVD.
The real question is, do the few games that the pirates actualy buy offset the 'real' lost sales? I think they do, but I wish there was a good experimental proof for this, one way or another.
Yep, great games, but still, getting just one quality driving simulator could do nothing but help. I know some driving fans that never bought the GCN because they weren't into arcade style racing (a genre in which without a doubt,the GCN rules supreme). A Gran Turismo competitor for the console would do nothing but help sales.
It is available straight from nintendo's online store. For some reason, nobody else is making component cables for the gamecube. As far as game support goes, almost every high profile gamecube game supports 480p.
I, on the other hand, have all kinds of ill feelings towards developers and publishers who are stupid enough to think that piracy will be stopped by adding copy protection.
I've not copied a game since I gor my first full time job a few years ago. However, I've had to visit crack sites time and time again because of the stupid copy protection mechanisms malfunctionin on my perfectly legit copies of the games. I am so tired of ackward copy protection mechanisms that I've almost stopped buying computer games. Now, my console game purchases outnumber my PC game purchases by over 20 to 1. IMO, any company that puts copy protection in front of the user convenience deserves exactly what they are getting: lowers sales, and thus, more pirate copies, probably becasue in many cases the original, uncracked game is inferior to a pirated one you could pick up from kazaa.
Protecting your livelihood by lowering the qaulity of your product and making it less attractive is a recipee for disaster. Just like the RIAA is just shooting themselves in the foot by protecting their business model by copy protecting CDs in an ineffective way that hurts many of their customers, the PC software industry is just asking for decreased sales by releasing the unisable crap they've been releasing lately. Most software developers I know agree that the copy protection mechanism that the publisher adds to their games are just making their games less attractive, and forcing them to make patches that 'fix' broken copy protection mechanisms that make some costumer return their games because they are unplayable on their computer due to an 'incompatible' CDROM drive.
If developers and publishers want to stop piracy, they could start by either releasing their games at a lower price tag, or by going after the groups that are releasing their cracked games to the internet, as opposed to giving money to the makers of copy protection mechanisms.
YuGiOh is really the bottom of the barrel as far as card games go. Most cards are completely useless, while others are played by anyone who owns them. In a way, this is similar to how Magic was in the very beginning, with cards such as Moxes and Black Lotuses, cards that you never had a reason not to play with. Fortunately for Magic players, the game has evolved in the last 10 years, and it is now in a completely different league as far as strategy and play balance goes.
You seem to be a little out of the loop. Wizards of the Coast stopped that trend about 4 years ago, when most games came down to a coin flip due to the excessive power and synergy of the cards they printed. They realized their mistake, and all sets released after that have a pretty similar power level. They sell cards to tournament players mainly because they artificially disallow cards that haven't beem printed in 2 years from the tournaments.
I have to agree with you in your other point though: multiplayer between friends is way more satissfying for me than tournaments.
From your post, it seems that you're probably not working on a large (200K+ lines) application, where more than 3 or 4 programmers are involved in development.
If I could be the sole maintainer of all of the code in my project, I'd not see all that big of an advantage in generics. the main thing would probably be avoiding all of those ugly typecasts all java programmers have to live with, but all in all It'd not be a big deal. However, on a big project, I REALLY, REALLY want to be able to easily know which class the members of a collection are, and I don't want to have to rely on naming conventions or the comments of any of my fellow programmers to do so. Is everyone going to write top notch code every single day for 2 or 3 years? I don't think so. On any major team effort, anything that can save the programmers time counts, and should be investigated. This includes generics, no matter how good or bad the implementation is.
It's a pity though that the way the java 1.5 generics are going to be implemented is not all that satisfactory to me. I find miself agreeing with the article's author, even though I'd rather be shot in the head than having to develop on a MS-centric environment. Is there really no way to keep compatibility with 1.4 classfiles while implementing generics in the C# style?
Just read a little further into the article. It seems that to avoid having to make changes in the VM, the Java generics have to become just like the current containers at the bytecode level. The main difference would be taht instead of having to type all the ugly type casts yourself, the compiler would do it for you. Obviously, this doesn't lead to any performance increases over Java 1.4 containters.
Compare this to, let's say, C++ templates, where the compiler makes a new copy of the template class specifically for each and every type you use on it. That makes the executable size increase a bunch, but it allows the compiler to pay the performance price, making the code perform almost like a program where a human programmer would have written a copy of the template class for each and every type you ever used it with.
Since the design of the java 1.5 generics is public knowledge, it's pretty easy for anyone with a reasonable programming knowledge to analyze it. It just seems that run-time efficiency wasn't the first thing in the designers minds.
You picked one of the few games that got it right. I was a regular at some TF servers and had lots of fun playing a scout on both flag runner/area capturing and sniper supression roles. Some regular snipers on the servers just left the server or changed classes when I joined in:). In TF, a scout that is dedicated to hunting down the snipers would counter all the frags the sniper was making, and could make sniping pretty frustrating.
Also, the strange way the sniper aim worked on TF made it way harder to aim then than it is now on most modern FPS. I wish some modern games went back to the ways of old, where snipers were easy to stop(TF), or just didn't exist at all(Plain old Quake).
Assemblers are really, really low level, 1 asm instruction is typically equivalent to 1 machine code instruction, as opposed to the 3-25 of machine code the typical line of C code is like. Adding the extra complexity of specifying which registry each piece of data goes to and the lack of high level constructs makes assembly code inherently harder to maintain.
Also, there's the issue of the VUs being vector-based processors, which the typical asm-monkey or game programmer probably has little experience with. Add that to having 2 vector units available at the same time (parallel programming?), and ou get a machine that most 'mortal' game programmers don't get even close to being able to code for properly.
On the other hand, I've heard from people that had to work both on PCs and PS2s that they'd rather handle the PS2s assembler than having to suffer through writing video code that works properly on the myriad of video cards avaliable today, most of which have enough little quirks.Most changes in the 3d engine code have to be tested on at least 8 computers with 8 video cards just to make sure that the latest change hasn't just made any of the test setups crash due to some bing in the directx drivers for that card.
Don't forget Bungie's innovations on level design: no other game to date has reused corridors and rooms to the same degree as HALO. Even Penny Arcade made a strip out of it.
All in all it's not a bad game, but the huge amount of praise the game has gotten from most media seems completely unjustified IMO.
If I was on Apple's shoes, and knew I'd not be able to manufacture enough units on time for christmas, I'd release it in the summer, and make sure the product is not announced until AFTER christmas, to avoid competing against the normal Ipod.
Nintendo has used a similar tactic in the past when releasing new Gameboy "flavors", It makes the best business sense IMHO. It's just that we've heard about the new product a week too soon.
Note that the article mentions "the trial judge", not the judges at the appeals court. Of course the triel judge does not like Verizon's interpretation of the law, he ruled against them!
It would be interesting to read the entire appeals' court ruling.
I see what you'd want to compare chip s chip directly, but in that case, what's the point on using games anyway? If the game performance IRL is going to be bound by my budget video card, none of the processors has a real advantage over the other from a typical users' POV, and that's what the tests are supposed to be about, not the capabilities of the system under conditions that are never going to happen in RL. At least I'd have addedanother chart that shows if there is a real bottleneck or not using a normal video card under $100.
After all, an unrealistic test wouldn't be much different than a car magazine testing the performance of family sedans after installing a supercharger: it might tell us something about the cars, but it is not something that the typical car buyer should care about.
Has anybody noticed that Anandtech is testing this budget, $60 to $90 processors using a radeon 9800Pro w/256mb of video ram? That's a $400+ video card!
Is people really buying this kind of video card on a budget PC? I'd rather test the processors using a budget video card instead. It might become the bottleneck in some games, but I think that's what the consumer wants after all... an idea on how much faster their game will run on a realistic machine, not in this monstrosity.
Deflation is not the option either: If money becomes "better" with time, there is little incentive to use it. That'd stop consumer spending, which means less growth. The last thing a country wants is to stop growth
All in all, a small amount of inflation is healthier for an economy than deflation.
A Nintendo press release sheds a little more light on the matters , at least if we can trust Nintendo's figures. They claim that they actually sold more Gamecubes than Sony sold PS2s on thanksgiving week. It seems that they sold "only" 600K Gameboy, so either the GBA is selling way less than most of us think, or the Gamecube sales were truly terrific.
So, if we use the numbers we've got and use some imagination, we can get some better results. Since know that Nintendo sold about 250K GCN in October, we could extrapolate that to about 65K a week. If they kept similar sales numbers for the first three weeks of November, that's about 750K in the entire month: not that far behind from PS2 sales, and far better than what MS is doing.( About 75K more units a month than the GCN before the price cut, I think)
IIRC Halo was the 10th game in the list of XBox videogame sales in October in the US, so either it is still selling pretty well, or everything else for the console is selling terribly.
I agree that the programmer should have claimed the draw, and that not claiming it is not very different that resigning the game. However, your claim that only a weak player would do something like this could not be further from the truth.
While I have a pretty weak rating (1843 3 years ago, I've nto played tournaments since), I've played casual chess with expert chess players, rated over 2000 ELO points. While those people would not allow such a thing in a proper tournament, they'd have no problems with not moving the first piece you grabbed in a coffee shop, In fact, I've even seen one of them ask his opponent to change his move if the he blundered and the game was interesting.
On the other hand, I can't count how many unskilled amateurs, the kind that can't name 3 opening families, complain whenever a piece is touched by accident on a friendly, unsanctioned game.
In a tournament, of course, all rules should be followed. It's not common to see that specific rule needing to be enforced very often though. I can't recall reading about or witnessing a game where an IM or GM grabbed a piece and then changed his mind.
It doesn't make any difference for me, or most slashdot readers, but it does to the average American. It is relatively easy to convince Joe Sixpack that an 23 year-old "evil hacker" has been "pirating" songs on the internet, and costing them millions. The plan just falls appart when the RIAA is instead suing a 75 year-old grandmother, or a 12 year-old kid. Only then it's clear to most people that normal, otherwise law abiding citizens are the ones that are getting sued for sharings songs on the internet. It's just way more shocking if children and grandmothers are the ones being sued.
If the average American sees normal people being sued, he might start thinking that the law is not beneficial to the US, and must be repealed
I have a 32 inches 16:9 Panasonic Tau. I bought it primarly for movie watching, but I do most of my console gaming on it too. Most Gamecube and XBOX games support progressive scan in some degree, and it does make a pretty significant difference in image quality over playing with progressive mode off. I don't think that the cost of a really good TV is really worth it if all you're going to do with the TV is gaming though.
On the other hand, my gaming experience got much better when I bought a high quality 7.1 receiver and a serious set of speakers. A good amount of games come also with either Dolby Pro logic II or Dolby Digital support these days. There is a hell of a difference between the weak sound a typical TV or $200 stereo output and what a quality sound system can do. IMO Noticing exacly where an enemy is pouncing at you from makes a game feel way more immersive than a simple resolution change.
It's worse that being mild: They typically censor many of their anime series for violence, sex and random gore. For example, in 'Knights of the Zodiac', their censored version of Saint Seiya, They go as far as butchering dialogue to make the series more acceptable for the 'American Public'. 'He's dying' becomes 'He's losing his powers', blood is changed from red to brown/green, etc. Even Futurama is censored somwhat: it seems that 'sweet zombie Jesus' is too offensive for them.
A few weeks ago CN aired a Family guy episode that supposedly was not allowed on TV by Fox, but I still wouldn't keep my hopes up for uncensored, original content.
Slashdot Mirror
The real question is, do the few games that the pirates actualy buy offset the 'real' lost sales? I think they do, but I wish there was a good experimental proof for this, one way or another.
Yep, great games, but still, getting just one quality driving simulator could do nothing but help. I know some driving fans that never bought the GCN because they weren't into arcade style racing (a genre in which without a doubt,the GCN rules supreme). A Gran Turismo competitor for the console would do nothing but help sales.
It is available straight from nintendo's online store. For some reason, nobody else is making component cables for the gamecube. As far as game support goes, almost every high profile gamecube game supports 480p.
I, on the other hand, have all kinds of ill feelings towards developers and publishers who are stupid enough to think that piracy will be stopped by adding copy protection.
I've not copied a game since I gor my first full time job a few years ago. However, I've had to visit crack sites time and time again because of the stupid copy protection mechanisms malfunctionin on my perfectly legit copies of the games. I am so tired of ackward copy protection mechanisms that I've almost stopped buying computer games. Now, my console game purchases outnumber my PC game purchases by over 20 to 1. IMO, any company that puts copy protection in front of the user convenience deserves exactly what they are getting: lowers sales, and thus, more pirate copies, probably becasue in many cases the original, uncracked game is inferior to a pirated one you could pick up from kazaa.
Protecting your livelihood by lowering the qaulity of your product and making it less attractive is a recipee for disaster. Just like the RIAA is just shooting themselves in the foot by protecting their business model by copy protecting CDs in an ineffective way that hurts many of their customers, the PC software industry is just asking for decreased sales by releasing the unisable crap they've been releasing lately. Most software developers I know agree that the copy protection mechanism that the publisher adds to their games are just making their games less attractive, and forcing them to make patches that 'fix' broken copy protection mechanisms that make some costumer return their games because they are unplayable on their computer due to an 'incompatible' CDROM drive.
If developers and publishers want to stop piracy, they could start by either releasing their games at a lower price tag, or by going after the groups that are releasing their cracked games to the internet, as opposed to giving money to the makers of copy protection mechanisms.
YuGiOh is really the bottom of the barrel as far as card games go. Most cards are completely useless, while others are played by anyone who owns them. In a way, this is similar to how Magic was in the very beginning, with cards such as Moxes and Black Lotuses, cards that you never had a reason not to play with. Fortunately for Magic players, the game has evolved in the last 10 years, and it is now in a completely different league as far as strategy and play balance goes.
You seem to be a little out of the loop. Wizards of the Coast stopped that trend about 4 years ago, when most games came down to a coin flip due to the excessive power and synergy of the cards they printed. They realized their mistake, and all sets released after that have a pretty similar power level. They sell cards to tournament players mainly because they artificially disallow cards that haven't beem printed in 2 years from the tournaments.
I have to agree with you in your other point though: multiplayer between friends is way more satissfying for me than tournaments.
From your post, it seems that you're probably not working on a large (200K+ lines) application, where more than 3 or 4 programmers are involved in development.
If I could be the sole maintainer of all of the code in my project, I'd not see all that big of an advantage in generics. the main thing would probably be avoiding all of those ugly typecasts all java programmers have to live with, but all in all It'd not be a big deal. However, on a big project, I REALLY, REALLY want to be able to easily know which class the members of a collection are, and I don't want to have to rely on naming conventions or the comments of any of my fellow programmers to do so. Is everyone going to write top notch code every single day for 2 or 3 years? I don't think so. On any major team effort, anything that can save the programmers time counts, and should be investigated. This includes generics, no matter how good or bad the implementation is.
It's a pity though that the way the java 1.5 generics are going to be implemented is not all that satisfactory to me. I find miself agreeing with the article's author, even though I'd rather be shot in the head than having to develop on a MS-centric environment. Is there really no way to keep compatibility with 1.4 classfiles while implementing generics in the C# style?
Just read a little further into the article. It seems that to avoid having to make changes in the VM, the Java generics have to become just like the current containers at the bytecode level. The main difference would be taht instead of having to type all the ugly type casts yourself, the compiler would do it for you. Obviously, this doesn't lead to any performance increases over Java 1.4 containters.
Compare this to, let's say, C++ templates, where the compiler makes a new copy of the template class specifically for each and every type you use on it. That makes the executable size increase a bunch, but it allows the compiler to pay the performance price, making the code perform almost like a program where a human programmer would have written a copy of the template class for each and every type you ever used it with.
Since the design of the java 1.5 generics is public knowledge, it's pretty easy for anyone with a reasonable programming knowledge to analyze it. It just seems that run-time efficiency wasn't the first thing in the designers minds.
a 256 colors version of Zak is supported by scummVM. As long as you can find the exact version of the game, you can play it on any modern OS.
You picked one of the few games that got it right. I was a regular at some TF servers and had lots of fun playing a scout on both flag runner/area capturing and sniper supression roles. Some regular snipers on the servers just left the server or changed classes when I joined in :). In TF, a scout that is dedicated to hunting down the snipers would counter all the frags the sniper was making, and could make sniping pretty frustrating.
Also, the strange way the sniper aim worked on TF made it way harder to aim then than it is now on most modern FPS. I wish some modern games went back to the ways of old, where snipers were easy to stop(TF), or just didn't exist at all(Plain old Quake).
I think he means Hamill, Mark Hamill, who played Luke in the originals.
Assemblers are really, really low level, 1 asm instruction is typically equivalent to 1 machine code instruction, as opposed to the 3-25 of machine code the typical line of C code is like. Adding the extra complexity of specifying which registry each piece of data goes to and the lack of high level constructs makes assembly code inherently harder to maintain.
Also, there's the issue of the VUs being vector-based processors, which the typical asm-monkey or game programmer probably has little experience with. Add that to having 2 vector units available at the same time (parallel programming?), and ou get a machine that most 'mortal' game programmers don't get even close to being able to code for properly.
On the other hand, I've heard from people that had to work both on PCs and PS2s that they'd rather handle the PS2s assembler than having to suffer through writing video code that works properly on the myriad of video cards avaliable today, most of which have enough little quirks.Most changes in the 3d engine code have to be tested on at least 8 computers with 8 video cards just to make sure that the latest change hasn't just made any of the test setups crash due to some bing in the directx drivers for that card.
Don't forget Bungie's innovations on level design: no other game to date has reused corridors and rooms to the same degree as HALO. Even Penny Arcade made a strip out of it.
All in all it's not a bad game, but the huge amount of praise the game has gotten from most media seems completely unjustified IMO.
Haven't you seen Demolition Man? Congress will pass the "Schwarzenegger Amendment", and will become president just before the franchise wars
If I was on Apple's shoes, and knew I'd not be able to manufacture enough units on time for christmas, I'd release it in the summer, and make sure the product is not announced until AFTER christmas, to avoid competing against the normal Ipod.
Nintendo has used a similar tactic in the past when releasing new Gameboy "flavors", It makes the best business sense IMHO. It's just that we've heard about the new product a week too soon.
It would be interesting to read the entire appeals' court ruling.
I see what you'd want to compare chip s chip directly, but in that case, what's the point on using games anyway? If the game performance IRL is going to be bound by my budget video card, none of the processors has a real advantage over the other from a typical users' POV, and that's what the tests are supposed to be about, not the capabilities of the system under conditions that are never going to happen in RL. At least I'd have addedanother chart that shows if there is a real bottleneck or not using a normal video card under $100.
After all, an unrealistic test wouldn't be much different than a car magazine testing the performance of family sedans after installing a supercharger: it might tell us something about the cars, but it is not something that the typical car buyer should care about.
Has anybody noticed that Anandtech is testing this budget, $60 to $90 processors using a radeon 9800Pro w/256mb of video ram? That's a $400+ video card!
Is people really buying this kind of video card on a budget PC? I'd rather test the processors using a budget video card instead. It might become the bottleneck in some games, but I think that's what the consumer wants after all... an idea on how much faster their game will run on a realistic machine, not in this monstrosity.
Deflation is not the option either: If money becomes "better" with time, there is little incentive to use it. That'd stop consumer spending, which means less growth. The last thing a country wants is to stop growth
All in all, a small amount of inflation is healthier for an economy than deflation.
A Nintendo press release sheds a little more light on the matters , at least if we can trust Nintendo's figures. They claim that they actually sold more Gamecubes than Sony sold PS2s on thanksgiving week. It seems that they sold "only" 600K Gameboy, so either the GBA is selling way less than most of us think, or the Gamecube sales were truly terrific.
So, if we use the numbers we've got and use some imagination, we can get some better results. Since know that Nintendo sold about 250K GCN in October, we could extrapolate that to about 65K a week. If they kept similar sales numbers for the first three weeks of November, that's about 750K in the entire month: not that far behind from PS2 sales, and far better than what MS is doing.( About 75K more units a month than the GCN before the price cut, I think)
IIRC Halo was the 10th game in the list of XBox videogame sales in October in the US, so either it is still selling pretty well, or everything else for the console is selling terribly.
I agree that the programmer should have claimed the draw, and that not claiming it is not very different that resigning the game. However, your claim that only a weak player would do something like this could not be further from the truth.
While I have a pretty weak rating (1843 3 years ago, I've nto played tournaments since), I've played casual chess with expert chess players, rated over 2000 ELO points. While those people would not allow such a thing in a proper tournament, they'd have no problems with not moving the first piece you grabbed in a coffee shop, In fact, I've even seen one of them ask his opponent to change his move if the he blundered and the game was interesting.
On the other hand, I can't count how many unskilled amateurs, the kind that can't name 3 opening families, complain whenever a piece is touched by accident on a friendly, unsanctioned game.
In a tournament, of course, all rules should be followed. It's not common to see that specific rule needing to be enforced very often though. I can't recall reading about or witnessing a game where an IM or GM grabbed a piece and then changed his mind.
It doesn't make any difference for me, or most slashdot readers, but it does to the average American. It is relatively easy to convince Joe Sixpack that an 23 year-old "evil hacker" has been "pirating" songs on the internet, and costing them millions. The plan just falls appart when the RIAA is instead suing a 75 year-old grandmother, or a 12 year-old kid. Only then it's clear to most people that normal, otherwise law abiding citizens are the ones that are getting sued for sharings songs on the internet. It's just way more shocking if children and grandmothers are the ones being sued.
If the average American sees normal people being sued, he might start thinking that the law is not beneficial to the US, and must be repealed
I have a 32 inches 16:9 Panasonic Tau. I bought it primarly for movie watching, but I do most of my console gaming on it too. Most Gamecube and XBOX games support progressive scan in some degree, and it does make a pretty significant difference in image quality over playing with progressive mode off. I don't think that the cost of a really good TV is really worth it if all you're going to do with the TV is gaming though.
On the other hand, my gaming experience got much better when I bought a high quality 7.1 receiver and a serious set of speakers. A good amount of games come also with either Dolby Pro logic II or Dolby Digital support these days. There is a hell of a difference between the weak sound a typical TV or $200 stereo output and what a quality sound system can do. IMO Noticing exacly where an enemy is pouncing at you from makes a game feel way more immersive than a simple resolution change.
A few weeks ago CN aired a Family guy episode that supposedly was not allowed on TV by Fox, but I still wouldn't keep my hopes up for uncensored, original content.