Kingdom hearts was one of the few games I've ever regretted buying. I didn't mind the FF-Disney connection, nor the graphics, which were pretty good. However, the terrible camera (way worse than Sonic Adventure IMO), lack of a cohesive story, low quailty music, all time low AI, crappy level design and pretty repetitive game structures made the game simply not fun for me.
I think Square missed what makes both Action games and RPGs good, and just relied on people liking both franchises to sell the game. Once you ignore that Ariel, Pooh and Sephiroth are in the game, I don't think the game is half as good as the "belivers" say it is.
Come on, everyone that reads slashdot makes at least six figures anyway. With the current economic boom, anybody that can operate a computer can afford a 400hp sports car.
50 on top of broadband ISP costs (no modem allowed) and the time/knowledge to set up a home LAN. With the computer in the office and the console in the living room(A typical setup), many houses would need some rewiring or a not-so-small initial investment in WiFi equipment. When you already have a home LAN with computers everywhere, it's all really easy. For Joe Sixpack it might not be that easy.
Just this w/o paying per game. the Basic Live service, with games that don't need much infrastructure server-side. Go try to play Phantasy Star, or the upcoming Galaxies w/o a monthly fee.
You're describing the reason why I barely ever play my Xbox: Most "worthwile" games are all about voice-enabled multiplayer, which I simply don't enjoy at all.
Different kinds of gamers, different consoles I guess.
In Europe, everybody and their mother have chpped their XBOX or PS2, and just buy games from people with the proper type of DVD burner for les than half price. Maybe it has to do with the insane videogame prices ($60-$65 in many cases).
The main reason the GCN is not selling very well there is that GCN games cannot be copied easily
Wizards has been making blue weaker in the last year or so for one simple reason: In the last 10 years, regardless of which set you're using, it has alwasy been, power wise, one of the two best colors. High quality countermagic and card draw just makes high casting cost cards worthless. If the only way to have a competitive deck is to include blue or have an average casting cost of 2 or less in your deck, the game is not very balanced. Making counterspells more expensive and most blue card draw sorcery speed is just a way of making other colors be able to play!
Sure, for some people that live in somewhat remote areas MTG:O is attractive. However, many, many card sales come from the wannabe professional magic player.
At any time you can find 8 man tournaments where the top two players, and in some cases top 4, gets a few packs of cards for their victory. A really good player can, and does, play almost for free. The catch: to join the tournament, you have to pay for 3 packs of cards and about 2 extra dollars, for a total of $12. Many player belive that they'll get a better bang for their buck if they spend $12 on 3 packs + a chance of winning than just paying $10. This tournaments are considered gambling in some states, where it's not legal to participate in this kind of tournaments in Magic Online.
So this tournaments of the game, one of the most popular, are little more than a casino of sorts. One big casino where the house has a larger profit margin than any regular one. After all, the prizes are digital magic cards, just entries in a database.
I don't know of anyone in the gaming industry that has ever signed a non-competition agreement. Imagine, let's say, a 3D engine programmer, that has been doing that for the last 5 years. His skills would not be that useful for a CAD/Rendering company, since outside of the basic math behind it, he'd have to learn plenty of new skills. Thus, the only major options are another gaming company and NVIDIA/ATI. Who'd be crazy enough to sign an agreement that said that you can only work for less than a handful of companies if you ever quit? Certainly no game programmer I know.
Allowing a license like this to stop reverse engineering/product evaluation is probably one of the worst things you can do to the software industry today. What if MS or Apple had done just that while releasing Windows/MacOS? Would the maker of any window manager that had window title bar, or a start menu, be sued for reverse engineering?
Spending two weeks reviewing the competition's product seems like a perfectly reasonable amount of time to learn its strengths and weaknesses. The only way to compete in an already established market is to build a better product than your competitors (cheaper/better/faster). How are we supposed to do that w/o being able to analyze the competitors' product?
Also, if reverse engineering can be banned, why try to patent anything? Patents eventually expire. A "trade secret" like, lets say, your basic UI design, that is only communicated to your customers after you've accepted the license, seems to me just as good protection as a patent, since anyone copying has broken your license, but offers no expiration date.
Hopefully the next time someone is set to court for something like this the result will be different. Reverse engineering is key to allow competition, the key principle to our economy. Undermine competition, and you are undermining one of the key foundations of our society. I just hope the next judge undestands that
Telus is being pretty tight in their spending lately. AFAIK, they've not even asked for bids un overhauling their Number Management System to allow transferring phone numbers. If the Canadian government doesn't force them to do it, it's not going to happen
Nintendo is just trying to keep the GCN profitable, not trying to fight at all for the number 1 spot in home consoles. The company is not in trouble though: Since the release of the GBA:SP, GBA sales are outpacing the PS2 by a significant margin
In this case, "crippling" the competititon is just much easier.Using a vanilla compiler or changing some bios settings is way easier and cheaper than making a developement team spend a few weeks tinkering with the Fortran compiler.
It is more open in the sense that it does not matter which contry the developer is from, but moving away from established genres is clearly a no-no in the US market (unless, of course, the game is choke full of guns). Remember ICO, or Eternal Darkness? Great games, low american sales.
Every market has its quirks. Japan's is just less "politically correct" than most.
Sure, the EU does not have a constitution because it's still mainly an economical, not a political, organization. All sovereign countries that are members of the EU do not share most of the political entities that a typical constitution defines. It'd be pretty silly for the EU to have a constitution, but it requires all members to follow, IIRC, the charter of human rights.
I've not read the constitution of every EU member, and I'm pretty sure that neither have you, or mr McCullagh. Thus, claming that the first amendment is "stronger" than anything mentioned in all european's constitution does not seem very beliveable. I have' at least, read the US constitution and Spain's. Both are on the web, although Spain's is just in spanish I'm afraid. However, I invite you to read both and compare them, as I've done. There are other laws outside of each country's constitution that also cover specific cases of free speech that should be noted. In any case, instead of spending hours writing an analysis, I'll just give you a few examples of how freedom of speech in different forms is not any better in the US:
Right to reply to newspapers is precisely what the EU proposal McCullagh hated so much is about: A webpage is considered mass media, like a newspaper, and every newspaper has to allow equal space to answer to criticism. To me, that's enhancing free speech, not allowing a big media conglomerate to "outshout" the little guy.
Indecent speech in public broadcasts: There is no such thing as indecent in spanish law.
One word McCarthyism.
I hope this is enough to show you that not everything you've learned about other countries in the US school system is accurate. I wish Americans could wake up and work for enhancing their civil rights instead of letting them disappear.
For better or for worse, Europe lacks a First Amendment and the respect for limited government, private property and free enterprise that America still enjoys.
I've not read a more blatant troll in months. Freedom of speech is in every EU country's constitution. No member of the EU country lacks private property rights. Loving your country is one thing, but posting blatant lies in a supposedly respectable news source is just disrespecting the intelligence of the readers.
Yes... and that's making their international flights way less appealing for geeks. I've stopped traveling with Spain's biggest airline, Iberia, after I was told not to use my Nomad, GBA or PDA during an 8+ hour-long flight. Many of my friends that used to travel the same route at least 4 times every year have done so too.
No wonder they are giving some of their international flights to American Airlines. Why pay more traveling with them, when you are really getting less?
File sharing of copyrighted material happening today is akin to someone creating an exact replica of a house thats up for rent and living in it rent free. Doesn't harm the landlord? Yes it does, cos now he/she/it will never get any rent.
Please, let's be serious here. The landlord would also get no money if the tenant finds a cheaper apartment, or just can't pay rent at all. Would you think that the landlord that offers a cheaper apartment is stealing? After all, he's depriving someone else of his well earned revenue!
The key to "stealing" is to take something from another. No, you don't steal costumers, or girlfriends... Only taking property from others is a crime. The issue here is that many users here, like me, for instance, don't really belive in intelectual property in the same sense as phisical property. In my opinion, we'd be better off without it. Information can be copied for free, and trying to control its distribution is not just close to impossible: just trying to do it seems unethical to me.
And yes, I am a professional software developer. I sell code for a living. However I write custom programs, and sell the source to my client. They can do whatever they please with it: just use it, change it, or even sell it. I just could not sleep at night if my way of living relied on some twisted laws that restrict what other people can communicate to each other. I wonder how all those people that belive in restricting other people's freedom can. Maybe morals are a thing of the past after all.
ICO was a rasonably original game, with innovative aesthetics. However, it sold pretty badly. That's where the problem lies: if the game moves away from the norm, it will not sell well.
I can think of very few original games that have sold well lately. Ico, Eternal Darkness, even Metroid, have not sold half as well as they deserved based on quality alone.Gaming is somewhat mainstream now, and in an industry with ever increasing costs like the software industry, you cannot have originality, great technology or blockbuster sales. Most big publishers sacrifice originality. The ones that sacrifice sales wil not be big for long.
Substance was a pretty weak remake IMO. VR missions and some small missions do not make a game. Every single complaint I've heard about Sons of Liberty was about the game's pacing and the story. Metal Gear Solid is a much better game, so it's a better target for a remake
I expect Twin Snakes to be as much of a Remake as the Resident Evil remake was: The main story and main areas stay the same, some areas are added in, and the graphics and cutscenes are improved. I really liked how RE and RE0 games on the GC turned out. I think that Silicon Knights can make something just as good.
He's not referring to all programming as "hacking". In fact, the article mentions how most of the programmers in the corporate world do jobs that have absolutely nothing to do with his concept of hacking. Hacking has a heavy dose of design on it. In fact, Graham argues that design happens to be more important than the actual implementation, it just happens that the implementation gets done as you design.
On most cases, coding to a design, instead of coding to user specs, restricts the task so much that there is little chance of creativity. That's not Hacking at all. On the other hand, desigining a +100,000 LOC complex, flexible system, designing it's data structures and object relationships, is so much more complex than "grunt coding" that I think it is way closer to architecture than it is to building a brick wall.
If you belive that all design/code is more like building a house than paiting it's just because you've not seen a truly brilliant, innovative design yet. I hope you're lucky enough to see one, or better yet, create one.
Don't try to be Amazon.com with a full e-commerce presence all at once. Step in gradually, he said, by starting with a Web site and company e-mail. "You have to try it out -- see what works for you and what doesn't work for you," he said.
What does a store gain from having a small web site? I think that a web site for a small shop will not do any good unless the costumers can find it in google when they are searching for the products directly, and the site has, at least, descriptions, photos and prices of the items to be sold.
Is a small web site that does not list inventories, and just offers a street address and an e-mail any good?
Slashdot Mirror
Kingdom hearts was one of the few games I've ever regretted buying. I didn't mind the FF-Disney connection, nor the graphics, which were pretty good. However, the terrible camera (way worse than Sonic Adventure IMO), lack of a cohesive story, low quailty music, all time low AI, crappy level design and pretty repetitive game structures made the game simply not fun for me.
I think Square missed what makes both Action games and RPGs good, and just relied on people liking both franchises to sell the game. Once you ignore that Ariel, Pooh and Sephiroth are in the game, I don't think the game is half as good as the "belivers" say it is.
Come on, everyone that reads slashdot makes at least six figures anyway. With the current economic boom, anybody that can operate a computer can afford a 400hp sports car.
Oops, wrong decade.
50 on top of broadband ISP costs (no modem allowed) and the time/knowledge to set up a home LAN. With the computer in the office and the console in the living room(A typical setup), many houses would need some rewiring or a not-so-small initial investment in WiFi equipment. When you already have a home LAN with computers everywhere, it's all really easy. For Joe Sixpack it might not be that easy.
Just this w/o paying per game. the Basic Live service, with games that don't need much infrastructure server-side. Go try to play Phantasy Star, or the upcoming Galaxies w/o a monthly fee.
You're describing the reason why I barely ever play my Xbox: Most "worthwile" games are all about voice-enabled multiplayer, which I simply don't enjoy at all.
Different kinds of gamers, different consoles I guess.
In Europe, everybody and their mother have chpped their XBOX or PS2, and just buy games from people with the proper type of DVD burner for les than half price. Maybe it has to do with the insane videogame prices ($60-$65 in many cases).
The main reason the GCN is not selling very well there is that GCN games cannot be copied easily
Wizards has been making blue weaker in the last year or so for one simple reason: In the last 10 years, regardless of which set you're using, it has alwasy been, power wise, one of the two best colors. High quality countermagic and card draw just makes high casting cost cards worthless. If the only way to have a competitive deck is to include blue or have an average casting cost of 2 or less in your deck, the game is not very balanced. Making counterspells more expensive and most blue card draw sorcery speed is just a way of making other colors be able to play!
Sure, for some people that live in somewhat remote areas MTG:O is attractive. However, many, many card sales come from the wannabe professional magic player.
At any time you can find 8 man tournaments where the top two players, and in some cases top 4, gets a few packs of cards for their victory. A really good player can, and does, play almost for free. The catch: to join the tournament, you have to pay for 3 packs of cards and about 2 extra dollars, for a total of $12. Many player belive that they'll get a better bang for their buck if they spend $12 on 3 packs + a chance of winning than just paying $10. This tournaments are considered gambling in some states, where it's not legal to participate in this kind of tournaments in Magic Online.
So this tournaments of the game, one of the most popular, are little more than a casino of sorts. One big casino where the house has a larger profit margin than any regular one. After all, the prizes are digital magic cards, just entries in a database.
I don't know of anyone in the gaming industry that has ever signed a non-competition agreement. Imagine, let's say, a 3D engine programmer, that has been doing that for the last 5 years. His skills would not be that useful for a CAD/Rendering company, since outside of the basic math behind it, he'd have to learn plenty of new skills. Thus, the only major options are another gaming company and NVIDIA/ATI. Who'd be crazy enough to sign an agreement that said that you can only work for less than a handful of companies if you ever quit? Certainly no game programmer I know.
Since the console would be cheaper for pirates too, I don't think that the price reduction will change things at all.
Allowing a license like this to stop reverse engineering/product evaluation is probably one of the worst things you can do to the software industry today. What if MS or Apple had done just that while releasing Windows/MacOS? Would the maker of any window manager that had window title bar, or a start menu, be sued for reverse engineering?
Spending two weeks reviewing the competition's product seems like a perfectly reasonable amount of time to learn its strengths and weaknesses. The only way to compete in an already established market is to build a better product than your competitors (cheaper/better/faster). How are we supposed to do that w/o being able to analyze the competitors' product?
Also, if reverse engineering can be banned, why try to patent anything? Patents eventually expire. A "trade secret" like, lets say, your basic UI design, that is only communicated to your customers after you've accepted the license, seems to me just as good protection as a patent, since anyone copying has broken your license, but offers no expiration date.
Hopefully the next time someone is set to court for something like this the result will be different. Reverse engineering is key to allow competition, the key principle to our economy. Undermine competition, and you are undermining one of the key foundations of our society. I just hope the next judge undestands that
Telus is being pretty tight in their spending lately. AFAIK, they've not even asked for bids un overhauling their Number Management System to allow transferring phone numbers. If the Canadian government doesn't force them to do it, it's not going to happen
Nintendo is just trying to keep the GCN profitable, not trying to fight at all for the number 1 spot in home consoles. The company is not in trouble though: Since the release of the GBA:SP, GBA sales are outpacing the PS2 by a significant margin
In this case, "crippling" the competititon is just much easier .Using a vanilla compiler or changing some bios settings is way easier and cheaper than making a developement team spend a few weeks tinkering with the Fortran compiler.
We won't get a sequel to "Mary Kate and Ashley: Sweet 16" for the Gamecube! What are we going to do now?
It is more open in the sense that it does not matter which contry the developer is from, but moving away from established genres is clearly a no-no in the US market (unless, of course, the game is choke full of guns). Remember ICO, or Eternal Darkness? Great games, low american sales.
Every market has its quirks. Japan's is just less "politically correct" than most.
Sure, the EU does not have a constitution because it's still mainly an economical, not a political, organization. All sovereign countries that are members of the EU do not share most of the political entities that a typical constitution defines. It'd be pretty silly for the EU to have a constitution, but it requires all members to follow, IIRC, the charter of human rights.
I've not read the constitution of every EU member, and I'm pretty sure that neither have you, or mr McCullagh. Thus, claming that the first amendment is "stronger" than anything mentioned in all european's constitution does not seem very beliveable. I have' at least, read the US constitution and Spain's. Both are on the web, although Spain's is just in spanish I'm afraid. However, I invite you to read both and compare them, as I've done. There are other laws outside of each country's constitution that also cover specific cases of free speech that should be noted. In any case, instead of spending hours writing an analysis, I'll just give you a few examples of how freedom of speech in different forms is not any better in the US:
Right to reply to newspapers is precisely what the EU proposal McCullagh hated so much is about: A webpage is considered mass media, like a newspaper, and every newspaper has to allow equal space to answer to criticism. To me, that's enhancing free speech, not allowing a big media conglomerate to "outshout" the little guy.
Indecent speech in public broadcasts: There is no such thing as indecent in spanish law.
One word McCarthyism.
I hope this is enough to show you that not everything you've learned about other countries in the US school system is accurate. I wish Americans could wake up and work for enhancing their civil rights instead of letting them disappear.
From the article:
I've not read a more blatant troll in months. Freedom of speech is in every EU country's constitution. No member of the EU country lacks private property rights. Loving your country is one thing, but posting blatant lies in a supposedly respectable news source is just disrespecting the intelligence of the readers.
Yes... and that's making their international flights way less appealing for geeks. I've stopped traveling with Spain's biggest airline, Iberia, after I was told not to use my Nomad, GBA or PDA during an 8+ hour-long flight. Many of my friends that used to travel the same route at least 4 times every year have done so too.
No wonder they are giving some of their international flights to American Airlines. Why pay more traveling with them, when you are really getting less?
I thought we already had.
Please, let's be serious here. The landlord would also get no money if the tenant finds a cheaper apartment, or just can't pay rent at all. Would you think that the landlord that offers a cheaper apartment is stealing? After all, he's depriving someone else of his well earned revenue!
The key to "stealing" is to take something from another. No, you don't steal costumers, or girlfriends... Only taking property from others is a crime. The issue here is that many users here, like me, for instance, don't really belive in intelectual property in the same sense as phisical property. In my opinion, we'd be better off without it. Information can be copied for free, and trying to control its distribution is not just close to impossible: just trying to do it seems unethical to me.
And yes, I am a professional software developer. I sell code for a living. However I write custom programs, and sell the source to my client. They can do whatever they please with it: just use it, change it, or even sell it. I just could not sleep at night if my way of living relied on some twisted laws that restrict what other people can communicate to each other. I wonder how all those people that belive in restricting other people's freedom can. Maybe morals are a thing of the past after all.
ICO was a rasonably original game, with innovative aesthetics. However, it sold pretty badly. That's where the problem lies: if the game moves away from the norm, it will not sell well.
I can think of very few original games that have sold well lately. Ico, Eternal Darkness, even Metroid, have not sold half as well as they deserved based on quality alone.Gaming is somewhat mainstream now, and in an industry with ever increasing costs like the software industry, you cannot have originality, great technology or blockbuster sales. Most big publishers sacrifice originality. The ones that sacrifice sales wil not be big for long.
Substance was a pretty weak remake IMO. VR missions and some small missions do not make a game. Every single complaint I've heard about Sons of Liberty was about the game's pacing and the story. Metal Gear Solid is a much better game, so it's a better target for a remake
I expect Twin Snakes to be as much of a Remake as the Resident Evil remake was: The main story and main areas stay the same, some areas are added in, and the graphics and cutscenes are improved. I really liked how RE and RE0 games on the GC turned out. I think that Silicon Knights can make something just as good.
He's not referring to all programming as "hacking". In fact, the article mentions how most of the programmers in the corporate world do jobs that have absolutely nothing to do with his concept of hacking. Hacking has a heavy dose of design on it. In fact, Graham argues that design happens to be more important than the actual implementation, it just happens that the implementation gets done as you design.
On most cases, coding to a design, instead of coding to user specs, restricts the task so much that there is little chance of creativity. That's not Hacking at all. On the other hand, desigining a +100,000 LOC complex, flexible system, designing it's data structures and object relationships, is so much more complex than "grunt coding" that I think it is way closer to architecture than it is to building a brick wall.
If you belive that all design/code is more like building a house than paiting it's just because you've not seen a truly brilliant, innovative design yet. I hope you're lucky enough to see one, or better yet, create one.
From The article
What does a store gain from having a small web site? I think that a web site for a small shop will not do any good unless the costumers can find it in google when they are searching for the products directly, and the site has, at least, descriptions, photos and prices of the items to be sold.
Is a small web site that does not list inventories, and just offers a street address and an e-mail any good?
Or even worse... the constantly annoying Julian Bashir!