Thanks a lot for this rational post! This post isn't going to get any karma, but I want to encourage slashdotters who, for once, don't go in the same direction as everybody else and actually think rationally before they post.
The way they put it, the rovers are on the ground and suddenly somebody at NASA went "Oh crap, winter's coming!" and the solution they came up with is to put them on sleep mode, cross their fingers for a long amount of time, and see if the screensaver's still on when spring comes. Couldn't they prepare better for this or did I miss something?
"When I first played it, I did not know what I was doing. I was overwhelmed by enemies and I got killed right away. (...) When I played A Link to the Past on the Super Famicom, I really enjoyed that game. I thought it was great."
I had the exact opposite reaction. I remember, the freedom of the NES game was incredible (and a first, mind you). I learned later that Miyamoto tried to recreate the feeling he had as a kid wandering through the forest, which he imagined full of fantasy creatures, without directions or points of reference, and he was dead on. This was exactly what I felt like as a kid playing that game!
So when I bought Link to the Past I was expecting more (better) of the same. If you've ever played that game you still remember how it opens. The story of the Triforce, and princess Zelda talking to you in your dreams via telepathy. I was positively in awe. Then when I could play, I left the house under the rain and started going every which way. And you remember, at the start of the game every road except the road to the castle is blocked by indestructible soldiers in armor (after you save the princess they vanish, never to return). What the fuck? was my only thought (yes, I was a naughty boy). I almost cried (insert nerd joke here).
Don't get me wrong, after I got over my surprise and indignation I thoroughly enjoyed this fantastic game, but this Action/RPG type game wasn't the Zelda I knew and loved. It gave up the freedom which made the original unique for guided gameplay and a good story (part of the charm of the original is you only discovered who you were and what you were doing at the end).
I don't care about realistic vs. cel shaded Zelda (actually I do but that's an other point for an other time), what I want is a Zelda game with the same idea as the original, and with all of the improvements a modern console can give. In the original you woke up in the middle of the map, amnesiac, and you had to figure out who you were, where you were, and what you had to do all by yourself. I don't care about that The One-reincarnation crap we were fed during Wind Waker (which was a fantastic game, but you could've just called it The Wind Waker, 'The Legend of Zelda:' was superfluous).
Imagine how cool it would be if a game opened just like that, with your character in the middle of this huge, beautiful, enthralling 3D world, with all of the explanations left for you to figure out! But nobody, and especially not Aonuma-san, has got the balls to try that.
Synchronization of our Internet bookmarks across all our computers
Now wouldn't THAT be nice?
I remember back in the days of Netscape, the bookmarks were all stored in a bookmark.htm folders, organized pre-XML style: an hr tag made a line in the bookmark menu, etc. That was great, but then the newer versions of Windows included the Favorites folder, which is a good idea in theory but doesn't work as well as I wish, and God knows where the bookmarks are stored with Mozilla: what was wrong with simple markeup?
First of all, they may not be the leaders (yet), but the X-Box did a lot better than anyone would have given them credit for a few years ago. Yes there are lots of PC games but there are also good original titles, and Live works really well. I think the main reason why they haven't cornered the market is because they don't understand it (sometimes just throwing money at a problem doesn't solve it), and because Sony are pretty much unbeatable -- no matter how much money you throw, Sony are big enough to fire back with the big guns, and the installed base of the PS/PS2 is just too big. In terms of installed base (which is what they were going for from the start, since they stated they would lose billions and didn't mind), the X-Box is a success.
"
your comments would suggest that their games should be excellent. As this article suggests though, this isnt the case( why else would they be making promises?)"
They didn't say "We'll make good games, promise!", they said that they would focus on quality, try to push their good game to game published ratio to 1. They have always been making good games for as long as I remember.
"
Just imagine, what that statement means for the future if Microsoft manage to get a hold of the console market? I personally think I'll lose interest in the whole idea of console gaming if this happens. Console gaming should be a hotbed of innovation. The last thing we want is anyone slacking off."
Obviously it would be a really bad thing if Microsoft became a monopoly in the console market, but then again consoles are a platform. Just like Windows being a bad OS doesn't stop people making great games for it, it would be the same with the Monopobox or whatever Microsoft will call their überconsole.
Microsoft make some awesome products until they are in a monopoly position. DOS was a fine OS, and so was Windows 3.*, same with Word up to 6.0, IE up to 5... They have lots of $$$ and they know how to use it. When they go after a market they make the best products, that is until they've got it locked, at which point it doesn't matter and they slack off : just look at how they stopped development on the bug-ridden, outdated (popup blocking, tabbed browsing anyone?) IE. But on the other hand, since QuickTime and Winamp have the media market, WMP 9 is a really cool piece of software.
It's the same with games (and the console, by the way). Since it's a highly competitive market, they'll know to get the skilled people to work for them, make some really good titles. AoE was pretty cool for a while, there were the Mechwarrior series and the Close Combats... Microsoft are great when it comes to games.
Half-Life 2 is a terrible example of that. If it had been a game no-one had heard of but had the same graphics engine and gameplay mechanics there would be almost as much hype and hoopla around it, I can guarantee that.
I wholeheartedly agree that there nearly isn't enough creativity in the video-game industry. Because it is a mass entertainment medium, the incentive to give the creative people real creative freedom is severely lacking. But also, because video-games are such a mass entertainment media, the laws of market apply to it, i.e. more often than not, a bad game will flop, and a good game will sell, sequel or no sequel. Like with movies. This is what recently happened with, say, Deus Ex 2, which had a lot of hype going for it and a huge fanbase but (even though I loved it) most people didn't like it and it flopped, even though it was a sequel to one of the most critically acclaimed games of the past decade.
That said, there are several other things to take into account.
First of all, what matters in a game isn't the title as much as the gameplay mechanics. In a movie or a book, a sequel implies a lot of things : same characters, same genre, same universe... Of course there are lots of unconventional sequels out there, but in a videogame what is appealing is the gameplay (in the broader sense, i.e. gaming experience, graphics, etc.) more than the characters or the story. Look at a game like The Legend of Zelda : The wind Waker. It's, what, the tenth sequel to one of the most successful franchises in videogame history? And yet wasn't that a very ballsy game? The Wind Waker was a very innovative game in more than one way. A very creative game, no matter how much of a sequel it was. Sams with an other hit console game like Prince of Persia : The Sands of Time. An other adaptation of an old school 2D game into a 3D masterpiece. Boooring you say? No, because even though it's a sequel, there are tons of creativity jammed into it. The gameplay mechanics, the famed rewind, the animation, the level design... The point here is that because videogames rely so much on gameplay mechanics, a sequel is far from meaning an uninnovative or non-creative game.
Very far from it.
The main problem with the videogame industry isn't that there isn't creativity, it's that there is no incentive to give the creative people the creative freedom they require -- much like Hollywood. As long as boring, unimaginative sequels will sell, why should execs look further than boring, unimaginative sequels? I only wish that there was a 'creativity crisis' in the video-game industry. Those things force the people with the big $$$ to take chances, to crop the useless fat out. Look at what happened with television : HBO proved with The Sopranos that a quality TV series could actually make money. Now we see all kinds of great shows pop up all around the place like Six Feet Under, K Street, but not just on cable, with The Shield, CSI, and many more like The Wire, Dead Like Me, and more I'm forgetting. Only a few years back the only reason I kept a TV was out of habit, for DVDs and the occasional documentary or Star Trek. Now I find myself cancelling dates (yes, I can get dates) to watch a great TV show. The problem with the videogame industry is that a good videogame takes a lot of money, and a lot of skills. The time when you could program a game on your Amiga in your bedroom while your brother drew the sprites and made a bad MIDI soundtrack for it is long gone. Once again, why is HL so good? Because they've been working at it since the first one came out! And because Valve hired some of the best programmers they could find! That's what, six/seven years of development and with very talented people. I can only imagine how much money has been invested in this project. And it paid off! The game is fantastic, even before it came out. It's got the best graphical engine anyone has ever seen (John C
Media aren't for addressing serious social issues, or giving insight into human nature. It's only for entertainment! We don't want our media to be artistic, that would just be unacceptable.
That would be a fantastic tool for interrogations:
"Where were you two weeks ago at 8pm?"
Very quick thought : They can't know I was really doing X. "I was with friends. You can check my alibi."
That's how we all think when we lie. Even the best-poker faced liar has those quick thoughts, which could be picked up by this device.
There are fantastic applications in this for crimesolving, but also questions about privacy : is it right for cops to pry in people's thoughts like that, even in teh context of a police interrogation?
Steam engines have blown up and killed people. The first power machines have killed people. People have died in coal mines. In cars, in airplanes. I'm pretty confident when we first came up with fire there were a few mishaps.
It's called progress, people. The more power we gain, the better we can kill ourselves, as the 20th century showed. Which goes to prove -- with great power comes great responsibility. (HHOS)
I also have to point out the problems with luser errors. A lawyer friend of mine represents a corporation that is sued because somebody lost an arm in one of their industrial machines. The machine is set so you have to keep pushing the button to make it run. That way, if you want to go fiddle with it, it can't be running while you do it and therefore take off your arm. But what are you supposed to do when the guy tells an other guy to help him out and press the button while he puts his fork in the toaster. Did the power machine tear off that guy's arm? No, his stupidity did.
I used to laugh at SCO but now they stopped being funny.
Before they sued that company, they were just a dying corp making a big PR splash with a lot of FUD and horseshit to drive their stock price up and make a lot of money. Unethical, dishonest, but no big deal. Now that they're actually suing Fortune 500 Linux-using companie(s), they could actually hurt the OS. Suits will be much more wary about switching if legal tells them they could get sued for it, no matter how much bullshit the lawsuit actually is. At first I laughed at the verbose arguments, the OSS community's cinglant responses and the Slashdot jokes (okay, maybe I didn't laugh at the/. jokes, but I smiled. A little. At the beginning.;-)), but now they're just not funny anymore.
They've gone from evil, but ridiculous and harmless, to evil and actually dangerous. The OSS community is a great, grand thing, and now that they're actually starting to get dangerous we should be able to mobilize the power to squash them out of relevance/existence. Couldn't an org like the FSF or a big player like IBM countersue?
The how doesn't matter. What matters is that I've stopped laughing at SCO and I now consider them as a danger.
"
Maybe its easy once you know what you're doing."
Well isn't that the case with all computers and software? I've installed all the Big Three BSDs, several iterations of the much feared Slack, Debian and countless other distros, and they've never posed any serious problems -- sure, driver/package issues and the like, but zero showstoppers. Why? I'm fairly computer literate, but nothing exceptional, I have no l33t *nix 1nst4ll sk1llz (maybe some experience).
All I did was read, download and print down the necessary information for each distro/flavour before installing it. And everything went smooth from there.
I hate those so-called gurus who just tell you to read the man pages when you come to them with a problem, but if you want to install and configure Linux/BSD, reading up is really all you have to do.
Why am I even wasting my karma on this? You're a troll.
Microsoft's objective is control? NEWSFLASH : Microsoft are NOT the Borg. Microsoft is a corporation, and just like every other corporation in the Goddamn world, like Red Hat, like the bar around the corner, its objective is to make money. That's not exactly honorable, but it makes a huge difference. But it's certainly not dishonorable : the definition of a corporation is of a group of people trying to make money for themselves. Since Microsoft has a lot of money already and therefore a lot of power, it wants to keep what it has and get more of the same, and that's why sometimes it does bad things. But it does not mean it's evil!
Look at IBM. Only a few years back they were the Evil Empire and now they're advertising Linux all over the place and supporting the community. Does it mean that Darth Vader has suddenly realised the good of the Light Side and IBM has turned from blood-sucking Borg into a philantropic organisation? No. It means nothing if not that IBM's new strategy for moneymaking involves supporting Linux. It doesn't mean it's less Evil, it doesn't mean it's less good. It means it has a different strategy now than when it was 'Big Iron'.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks a lot for this rational post! This post isn't going to get any karma, but I want to encourage slashdotters who, for once, don't go in the same direction as everybody else and actually think rationally before they post.
You're 38 and you start sentences with "Dude, "?
Your teenage years are over buddy, move on. ;-)
Incredible, isn't it?
You'd think that a propaganda outlet run by the worst regime on this planet would be honest and fair... Who else is left to trust!
AHHHHHHH! YOU FUCKING GEEKS!
And this is from a guy who woke up in the middle of the night to stand in line for each LotR and Star Wars movie!
The way they put it, the rovers are on the ground and suddenly somebody at NASA went "Oh crap, winter's coming!" and the solution they came up with is to put them on sleep mode, cross their fingers for a long amount of time, and see if the screensaver's still on when spring comes. Couldn't they prepare better for this or did I miss something?
Exactly!
I had the exact opposite reaction. I remember, the freedom of the NES game was incredible (and a first, mind you). I learned later that Miyamoto tried to recreate the feeling he had as a kid wandering through the forest, which he imagined full of fantasy creatures, without directions or points of reference, and he was dead on. This was exactly what I felt like as a kid playing that game!
So when I bought Link to the Past I was expecting more (better) of the same. If you've ever played that game you still remember how it opens. The story of the Triforce, and princess Zelda talking to you in your dreams via telepathy. I was positively in awe. Then when I could play, I left the house under the rain and started going every which way. And you remember, at the start of the game every road except the road to the castle is blocked by indestructible soldiers in armor (after you save the princess they vanish, never to return). What the fuck? was my only thought (yes, I was a naughty boy). I almost cried (insert nerd joke here).
Don't get me wrong, after I got over my surprise and indignation I thoroughly enjoyed this fantastic game, but this Action/RPG type game wasn't the Zelda I knew and loved. It gave up the freedom which made the original unique for guided gameplay and a good story (part of the charm of the original is you only discovered who you were and what you were doing at the end).
I don't care about realistic vs. cel shaded Zelda (actually I do but that's an other point for an other time), what I want is a Zelda game with the same idea as the original, and with all of the improvements a modern console can give. In the original you woke up in the middle of the map, amnesiac, and you had to figure out who you were, where you were, and what you had to do all by yourself. I don't care about that The One-reincarnation crap we were fed during Wind Waker (which was a fantastic game, but you could've just called it The Wind Waker, 'The Legend of Zelda :' was superfluous).
Imagine how cool it would be if a game opened just like that, with your character in the middle of this huge, beautiful, enthralling 3D world, with all of the explanations left for you to figure out! But nobody, and especially not Aonuma-san, has got the balls to try that.
...And sucking at it for as long? ;-)
Here's the link.
Good points.
First of all, they may not be the leaders (yet), but the X-Box did a lot better than anyone would have given them credit for a few years ago. Yes there are lots of PC games but there are also good original titles, and Live works really well. I think the main reason why they haven't cornered the market is because they don't understand it (sometimes just throwing money at a problem doesn't solve it), and because Sony are pretty much unbeatable -- no matter how much money you throw, Sony are big enough to fire back with the big guns, and the installed base of the PS/PS2 is just too big. In terms of installed base (which is what they were going for from the start, since they stated they would lose billions and didn't mind), the X-Box is a success.
They didn't say "We'll make good games, promise!", they said that they would focus on quality, try to push their good game to game published ratio to 1. They have always been making good games for as long as I remember.
Obviously it would be a really bad thing if Microsoft became a monopoly in the console market, but then again consoles are a platform. Just like Windows being a bad OS doesn't stop people making great games for it, it would be the same with the Monopobox or whatever Microsoft will call their überconsole.
Microsoft make some awesome products until they are in a monopoly position. DOS was a fine OS, and so was Windows 3.*, same with Word up to 6.0, IE up to 5... They have lots of $$$ and they know how to use it. When they go after a market they make the best products, that is until they've got it locked, at which point it doesn't matter and they slack off : just look at how they stopped development on the bug-ridden, outdated (popup blocking, tabbed browsing anyone?) IE. But on the other hand, since QuickTime and Winamp have the media market, WMP 9 is a really cool piece of software.
It's the same with games (and the console, by the way). Since it's a highly competitive market, they'll know to get the skilled people to work for them, make some really good titles. AoE was pretty cool for a while, there were the Mechwarrior series and the Close Combats... Microsoft are great when it comes to games.
Written, directed and starring Bruce Fucking Campbell(TM)? Holy fucking shit that will be amazing!
And what a great idea for a movie : apparently ridiculous but in the hands of Ash, a guaranteed masterpiece!
Agreed, but these people were just KW'ing by posting links to popular webcomics and talking about them as if they were a radical idea.
...and every sprite comic on and off-line.
Half-Life 2 is a terrible example of that. If it had been a game no-one had heard of but had the same graphics engine and gameplay mechanics there would be almost as much hype and hoopla around it, I can guarantee that.
I wholeheartedly agree that there nearly isn't enough creativity in the video-game industry. Because it is a mass entertainment medium, the incentive to give the creative people real creative freedom is severely lacking. But also, because video-games are such a mass entertainment media, the laws of market apply to it, i.e. more often than not, a bad game will flop, and a good game will sell, sequel or no sequel. Like with movies. This is what recently happened with, say, Deus Ex 2, which had a lot of hype going for it and a huge fanbase but (even though I loved it) most people didn't like it and it flopped, even though it was a sequel to one of the most critically acclaimed games of the past decade.
That said, there are several other things to take into account.
First of all, what matters in a game isn't the title as much as the gameplay mechanics. In a movie or a book, a sequel implies a lot of things : same characters, same genre, same universe... Of course there are lots of unconventional sequels out there, but in a videogame what is appealing is the gameplay (in the broader sense, i.e. gaming experience, graphics, etc.) more than the characters or the story. Look at a game like The Legend of Zelda : The wind Waker. It's, what, the tenth sequel to one of the most successful franchises in videogame history? And yet wasn't that a very ballsy game? The Wind Waker was a very innovative game in more than one way. A very creative game, no matter how much of a sequel it was. Sams with an other hit console game like Prince of Persia : The Sands of Time. An other adaptation of an old school 2D game into a 3D masterpiece. Boooring you say? No, because even though it's a sequel, there are tons of creativity jammed into it. The gameplay mechanics, the famed rewind, the animation, the level design... The point here is that because videogames rely so much on gameplay mechanics, a sequel is far from meaning an uninnovative or non-creative game.
Very far from it.
The main problem with the videogame industry isn't that there isn't creativity, it's that there is no incentive to give the creative people the creative freedom they require -- much like Hollywood. As long as boring, unimaginative sequels will sell, why should execs look further than boring, unimaginative sequels? I only wish that there was a 'creativity crisis' in the video-game industry. Those things force the people with the big $$$ to take chances, to crop the useless fat out. Look at what happened with television : HBO proved with The Sopranos that a quality TV series could actually make money. Now we see all kinds of great shows pop up all around the place like Six Feet Under, K Street, but not just on cable, with The Shield, CSI, and many more like The Wire, Dead Like Me, and more I'm forgetting. Only a few years back the only reason I kept a TV was out of habit, for DVDs and the occasional documentary or Star Trek. Now I find myself cancelling dates (yes, I can get dates) to watch a great TV show. The problem with the videogame industry is that a good videogame takes a lot of money, and a lot of skills. The time when you could program a game on your Amiga in your bedroom while your brother drew the sprites and made a bad MIDI soundtrack for it is long gone. Once again, why is HL so good? Because they've been working at it since the first one came out! And because Valve hired some of the best programmers they could find! That's what, six/seven years of development and with very talented people. I can only imagine how much money has been invested in this project. And it paid off! The game is fantastic, even before it came out. It's got the best graphical engine anyone has ever seen (John C
Media aren't for addressing serious social issues, or giving insight into human nature. It's only for entertainment! We don't want our media to be artistic, that would just be unacceptable.
*sigh*
How can people even ask this question?
That would be a fantastic tool for interrogations :
"Where were you two weeks ago at 8pm?"
Very quick thought : They can't know I was really doing X.
"I was with friends. You can check my alibi."
That's how we all think when we lie. Even the best-poker faced liar has those quick thoughts, which could be picked up by this device.
There are fantastic applications in this for crimesolving, but also questions about privacy : is it right for cops to pry in people's thoughts like that, even in teh context of a police interrogation?
Steam engines have blown up and killed people. The first power machines have killed people. People have died in coal mines. In cars, in airplanes. I'm pretty confident when we first came up with fire there were a few mishaps.
It's called progress, people. The more power we gain, the better we can kill ourselves, as the 20th century showed. Which goes to prove -- with great power comes great responsibility. (HHOS)
I also have to point out the problems with luser errors. A lawyer friend of mine represents a corporation that is sued because somebody lost an arm in one of their industrial machines. The machine is set so you have to keep pushing the button to make it run. That way, if you want to go fiddle with it, it can't be running while you do it and therefore take off your arm. But what are you supposed to do when the guy tells an other guy to help him out and press the button while he puts his fork in the toaster. Did the power machine tear off that guy's arm? No, his stupidity did.
I actually laughed. :-)
I used to laugh at SCO but now they stopped being funny.
/. jokes, but I smiled. A little. At the beginning. ;-)), but now they're just not funny anymore.
Before they sued that company, they were just a dying corp making a big PR splash with a lot of FUD and horseshit to drive their stock price up and make a lot of money. Unethical, dishonest, but no big deal. Now that they're actually suing Fortune 500 Linux-using companie(s), they could actually hurt the OS. Suits will be much more wary about switching if legal tells them they could get sued for it, no matter how much bullshit the lawsuit actually is. At first I laughed at the verbose arguments, the OSS community's cinglant responses and the Slashdot jokes (okay, maybe I didn't laugh at the
They've gone from evil, but ridiculous and harmless, to evil and actually dangerous. The OSS community is a great, grand thing, and now that they're actually starting to get dangerous we should be able to mobilize the power to squash them out of relevance/existence. Couldn't an org like the FSF or a big player like IBM countersue?
The how doesn't matter. What matters is that I've stopped laughing at SCO and I now consider them as a danger.
All I did was read, download and print down the necessary information for each distro/flavour before installing it. And everything went smooth from there.
I hate those so-called gurus who just tell you to read the man pages when you come to them with a problem, but if you want to install and configure Linux/BSD, reading up is really all you have to do.
Why am I even wasting my karma on this? You're a troll.
Microsoft's objective is control? NEWSFLASH : Microsoft are NOT the Borg. Microsoft is a corporation, and just like every other corporation in the Goddamn world, like Red Hat, like the bar around the corner, its objective is to make money. That's not exactly honorable, but it makes a huge difference. But it's certainly not dishonorable : the definition of a corporation is of a group of people trying to make money for themselves. Since Microsoft has a lot of money already and therefore a lot of power, it wants to keep what it has and get more of the same, and that's why sometimes it does bad things. But it does not mean it's evil!
Look at IBM. Only a few years back they were the Evil Empire and now they're advertising Linux all over the place and supporting the community. Does it mean that Darth Vader has suddenly realised the good of the Light Side and IBM has turned from blood-sucking Borg into a philantropic organisation? No. It means nothing if not that IBM's new strategy for moneymaking involves supporting Linux. It doesn't mean it's less Evil, it doesn't mean it's less good. It means it has a different strategy now than when it was 'Big Iron'.
He's right, it's no joke. Katakana (phonetic Japanese) are traditionally trabscribed in capitals.
I am very aware of the distinction. However that last quote in my post applies to the both of 'em.