Myst was the best selling PC game of all time simply because for a long time it was the only CD-Rom game that actually worked most of the time on most systems, and so it was included with virtualy every new PC, and PC CD-Rom Kit sold in the early 90's
X-box is failing in Japan because the Japanese don't want it, not because they think the system is failing as some would like to beleive. The Japanese have a lot of national pride when it comes to their video games, and MS knew that it was going to be an uphill battle over there.
MS is in a tight spot though, without the japanese market to sell systems, 3rd party developers are harder to court since that is almost half of the market. Companies like Konami and Capcom are already reconsidering their lineups for the x-box (and the game cube)
I would start looking for new opportunities for employment. No job is worth this, no matter what the corporate whores will tell you, your company does not own your soul, and they have no right to demand such an absurd workload.
It's when people roll over and take it up the pooper from employers, that it makes it harder for everybody. Tactics like this work because people cave in and let it happen to them, You have an education, you have a degree, there are plenty of other places that will hire you.
Ok so we have to break a few eggs no matter what sort of egg based breakfast dish we want to enjoy, but which eggs are the ones that we can afford to break?
Surely, a Hydrogen spill isn't anywhere near as bad as a petrol spill. When you consider that hydrogen burns clean it as opposed to the alternative this study simply shows that while there is no "perfect" solution (apart from Doc Brown dropping by with the plans for a "Mr Fusion" device) some solutions are certainly better than others.
We keep burning the fossil fuels like we are now, and another hole in the ozone will be the least of our worries.
could it be... beacause driving games are BORING????
I mean, I've played my share of Gran Tourismo and Moto GP on x-box live and all, but as a whole there is almost no innovation in racing games, they are all for the most part the same game albeit with different controls, physics and maybe some differences in implentation of options like career modes, car building and so on. At least with the other "mee too" style of games like FPS or RTS, there is a degree of novelty in each form of it.
How many Moto GP games do we need for example? 2 and 3 were both just released, and while they are neither sequels nor even made by the same company they are about the same game. Same tracks, same bikes, etc. Maybe this is why these games don't do as well over here?
yeah right, and all of these cases among office workers is just a big coinicidence, whatever. Who funded the research? sounds like there is a self serving motive here.
That's not at all my point. My point is that customers get angry when they find out that they are not really getting something "free"
MS promises "hey look, free maps if you join" Joe Six-Pack gets live and says "cool new maps" Later he finds out that the maps were always there. Joe is Mad.
What MS is doing isn't wrong per se, it's just misleading. "Downloading" a new map is not the same as "unlocking" a new map even if the end results are the same.
I think what gets people mad about this, is the fact that the "downloadable" content schtick that MS assured everybody would be a primary focus for x-box live content is continuing to disappoint.
When you promise people "new levels", if they have x-box live and then those "new levels" turned out to be on the disk in the first place, this angers people. You can liken it to getting a "super-sized" meal at mcdonald's only to find that the extra fries were hidden in a false bottom in the fry box all along.
Last year, when X-box live was released, I was floored not so much by Microsoft's steps towards an online component, but rather by the lack of a plan by Nintendo and Sony. I played a lot of x-box live for that first month, and now, 7 months later I have not purchased a single game that uses it? Why? because most of it is crap. The "Online content" prmoised by MS has mostly boiled down to one level or so every 3 months.
What looked like Nitendo's mistake may not have been such a grave error after all. Console online gaming is still primitive, in the same way that CD-drives were primitive when Sega CD was first released. Developers don't really implement it in any way that improves the software. I think that the next generation (PS3, X-Box2, game-hypercube) will see better use of online play and that will be when Nintendo and Sony make their move.
While I am glad that gaming is getting some attention from academic types with loads of extra grant money lying around just waiting to be put to some good use for the betterment of mankind, it saddens me that this paper is written so poorly. Nobody that is not already familiar with online gaming would be able to make heads or tails of the material. Entire concepts go unexplained. Observations made are shallow, and poorly introduced with little attention to style. I have written (and published) enough APA and ACS style papers to recognize a hack job when I see it.
Someone please assure me that this was not the work of graduate students. If it was, University standards are at an all time low. Poorly written items like this one only do disservice to the field in general because it destroys creditability.
ahem, sorry for the late hour of this, my internet isn't in my new place yet.
By that same logic we should not stop people from killing other people since they are going to do it anyway. Lets set aside a few towns and cities where killing is legal so then we can learn to better fight crime by observing it
Screw Hackers. Games should not need to make special servers for people that want to cheat.
Hey, Im all for exploring and learning or whatever else we like to pretend most hackers are looking for, but this sort of thing is not cool.
This company has lost money, and while it could have been their own fault (sloppy code, client side exploits etc) regardless of the source of the problem, the mouth breathers that did this are in the wrong. It's akin to kicking the ladder out from someone that is painting a house. Sure, maybe they should no better than to climb a ladder that just anybody can pull out from under them but the person doing the yanking is still to blame.
3DO as a company sucked. It Sucks so bad in fact, that it actually causes me to use the word "Suck" to describe it and I hate that word.
I know some of you are big fans of the "Heros of might and magic" series, but that is the single only product that 3DO carries that isnt a piece of crap.
3do's strategy has been to flood the market with sequel after sequel of whatever game they manage to sell more than 12 of. There are over 30 Army Men games and they are all garbage. You have the "world destruction league" sequels and these are junk too. Need I even mention "legends" and "crusaders" of might and magic? Goodbye, so long and good riddance to you hopefully some other company that has more than just monkeys pounding on keyboards can use the shelf space your products will no longer need.
As the article says, cheating is deadly on two fronts: It ruins the game when some punk hops in and wins only because he has a cheat running, and people will get accused of cheating by sore losers.
While the subject of modding X-boxes is a touchy one, I for one am glad that Microsoft bans anyone that mods their x-box or knowingly cheats on line. Bang, kiss your $50 x-box live membership goodbye. I think that if they keep an aggressive stance on these sorts of things, they wil be able to keep a lot of the cheating to a minimum. While most people would say that they are not Modding their x-boxes for any shady reasons, the truth is that a lot of people like to cheat and when I am paying to play a game online, I am not willing to put up with people cheating.
I loved the first game, though most people were put off by the higher than average difficulty level. I'm glad that Capcom is still going with a sequel despite the fact that the first one did less than great in the slaes department. Much of this though I blame on the early rental availability through blockbuster video. i think a lot of people had already had their fill with the game before it came out.
A great game and a worthy one to check out if you loved the old school action platformers.
Face it, we are stamped, coded and catalogued. All they need to do now is make us get GPS chips implanted and the picture is complete.
We have crossed so any bridges on the way down this road, that short of a complete breakdown of society we are never going to get away from this. We are defined by what we consume, and what we buy. If we cannot purchase we are dead weight. All of society is built around giving us enough money so that we can spend it back to the system. Credit and lending creates money, and someday more money will be owed than there is in circulation (if it isn't already)
Im not surprised, any company that does it's own assesment of performance is going to fudge data. Self-serving research is not going to get you accurate data.
Personally, I have nothing but good things to say of Radeon. While it can be argued that their cards don't quite measure up and driver issues are common with some software, the fact Radeon Cards are on average $100 cheaper than their Nvidia equivalents makes it easier for me to look the other way on those sorts of things.
I still have a hard time trusting Nvidia after that garbage with the GeForce-4s that were really Geforce2s with more RAM.
You can play all those games on a PC with a good mega-drive, SNes, etc, emulator.
I mean if you are intrigued by the challenge of modding the system yourself then by all means, but most of you are just free-loaders and most of the rest of us really don't care about your pain.
EQ:OA is a piece of crap, anyone that is playing it has either: a) never played any other Online RPG and thus they have no frame of reference to understand just how bad that game is. b) Living in denial
sorry if this offends anyone here, but you need to get out more.
Slashdot Mirror
Myst was the best selling PC game of all time simply because for a long time it was the only CD-Rom game that actually worked most of the time on most systems, and so it was included with virtualy every new PC, and PC CD-Rom Kit sold in the early 90's
Still you are correct, don't mind me.
X-box is failing in Japan because the Japanese don't want it, not because they think the system is failing as some would like to beleive. The Japanese have a lot of national pride when it comes to their video games, and MS knew that it was going to be an uphill battle over there.
MS is in a tight spot though, without the japanese market to sell systems, 3rd party developers are harder to court since that is almost half of the market. Companies like Konami and Capcom are already reconsidering their lineups for the x-box (and the game cube)
I would start looking for new opportunities for employment. No job is worth this, no matter what the corporate whores will tell you, your company does not own your soul, and they have no right to demand such an absurd workload.
It's when people roll over and take it up the pooper from employers, that it makes it harder for everybody. Tactics like this work because people cave in and let it happen to them, You have an education, you have a degree, there are plenty of other places that will hire you.
Ok so we have to break a few eggs no matter what sort of egg based breakfast dish we want to enjoy, but which eggs are the ones that we can afford to break?
Surely, a Hydrogen spill isn't anywhere near as bad as a petrol spill. When you consider that hydrogen burns clean it as opposed to the alternative this study simply shows that while there is no "perfect" solution (apart from Doc Brown dropping by with the plans for a "Mr Fusion" device) some solutions are certainly better than others.
We keep burning the fossil fuels like we are now, and another hole in the ozone will be the least of our worries.
could it be... beacause driving games are BORING????
I mean, I've played my share of Gran Tourismo and Moto GP on x-box live and all, but as a whole there is almost no innovation in racing games, they are all for the most part the same game albeit with different controls, physics and maybe some differences in implentation of options like career modes, car building and so on. At least with the other "mee too" style of games like FPS or RTS, there is a degree of novelty in each form of it.
How many Moto GP games do we need for example? 2 and 3 were both just released, and while they are neither sequels nor even made by the same company they are about the same game. Same tracks, same bikes, etc. Maybe this is why these games don't do as well over here?
yeah right, and all of these cases among office workers is just a big coinicidence, whatever. Who funded the research? sounds like there is a self serving motive here.
That's not at all my point. My point is that customers get angry when they find out that they are not really getting something "free"
MS promises "hey look, free maps if you join" Joe Six-Pack gets live and says "cool new maps" Later he finds out that the maps were always there. Joe is Mad.
What MS is doing isn't wrong per se, it's just misleading. "Downloading" a new map is not the same as "unlocking" a new map even if the end results are the same.
What!? Are we talking about the same thing here?
That is why at times I hate using metaphors, some people don't understand them and then try to stretch them too far...
I think what gets people mad about this, is the fact that the "downloadable" content schtick that MS assured everybody would be a primary focus for x-box live content is continuing to disappoint.
When you promise people "new levels", if they have x-box live and then those "new levels" turned out to be on the disk in the first place, this angers people. You can liken it to getting a "super-sized" meal at mcdonald's only to find that the extra fries were hidden in a false bottom in the fry box all along.
Wow, good to see a FARK sized flamewar going on with lots of ill informed banter and name calling.
Last year, when X-box live was released, I was floored not so much by Microsoft's steps towards an online component, but rather by the lack of a plan by Nintendo and Sony. I played a lot of x-box live for that first month, and now, 7 months later I have not purchased a single game that uses it? Why? because most of it is crap. The "Online content" prmoised by MS has mostly boiled down to one level or so every 3 months.
What looked like Nitendo's mistake may not have been such a grave error after all. Console online gaming is still primitive, in the same way that CD-drives were primitive when Sega CD was first released. Developers don't really implement it in any way that improves the software. I think that the next generation (PS3, X-Box2, game-hypercube) will see better use of online play and that will be when Nintendo and Sony make their move.
bad bad bad things are going to come of this.
While I am glad that gaming is getting some attention from academic types with loads of extra grant money lying around just waiting to be put to some good use for the betterment of mankind, it saddens me that this paper is written so poorly. Nobody that is not already familiar with online gaming would be able to make heads or tails of the material. Entire concepts go unexplained. Observations made are shallow, and poorly introduced with little attention to style. I have written (and published) enough APA and ACS style papers to recognize a hack job when I see it.
Someone please assure me that this was not the work of graduate students. If it was, University standards are at an all time low. Poorly written items like this one only do disservice to the field in general because it destroys creditability.
ahem, sorry for the late hour of this, my internet isn't in my new place yet.
By that same logic we should not stop people from killing other people since they are going to do it anyway. Lets set aside a few towns and cities where killing is legal so then we can learn to better fight crime by observing it
Screw Hackers. Games should not need to make special servers for people that want to cheat.
Hey, Im all for exploring and learning or whatever else we like to pretend most hackers are looking for, but this sort of thing is not cool.
This company has lost money, and while it could have been their own fault (sloppy code, client side exploits etc) regardless of the source of the problem, the mouth breathers that did this are in the wrong. It's akin to kicking the ladder out from someone that is painting a house. Sure, maybe they should no better than to climb a ladder that just anybody can pull out from under them but the person doing the yanking is still to blame.
3DO as a company sucked. It Sucks so bad in fact, that it actually causes me to use the word "Suck" to describe it and I hate that word.
I know some of you are big fans of the "Heros of might and magic" series, but that is the single only product that 3DO carries that isnt a piece of crap.
3do's strategy has been to flood the market with sequel after sequel of whatever game they manage to sell more than 12 of. There are over 30 Army Men games and they are all garbage. You have the "world destruction league" sequels and these are junk too. Need I even mention "legends" and "crusaders" of might and magic? Goodbye, so long and good riddance to you hopefully some other company that has more than just monkeys pounding on keyboards can use the shelf space your products will no longer need.
As the article says, cheating is deadly on two fronts: It ruins the game when some punk hops in and wins only because he has a cheat running, and people will get accused of cheating by sore losers.
While the subject of modding X-boxes is a touchy one, I for one am glad that Microsoft bans anyone that mods their x-box or knowingly cheats on line. Bang, kiss your $50 x-box live membership goodbye. I think that if they keep an aggressive stance on these sorts of things, they wil be able to keep a lot of the cheating to a minimum. While most people would say that they are not Modding their x-boxes for any shady reasons, the truth is that a lot of people like to cheat and when I am paying to play a game online, I am not willing to put up with people cheating.
wooo hooooo! Maximo sequel!
I loved the first game, though most people were put off by the higher than average difficulty level. I'm glad that Capcom is still going with a sequel despite the fact that the first one did less than great in the slaes department. Much of this though I blame on the early rental availability through blockbuster video. i think a lot of people had already had their fill with the game before it came out.
A great game and a worthy one to check out if you loved the old school action platformers.
Face it, we are stamped, coded and catalogued. All they need to do now is make us get GPS chips implanted and the picture is complete.
/paranoid rambling
We have crossed so any bridges on the way down this road, that short of a complete breakdown of society we are never going to get away from this. We are defined by what we consume, and what we buy. If we cannot purchase we are dead weight. All of society is built around giving us enough money so that we can spend it back to the system. Credit and lending creates money, and someday more money will be owed than there is in circulation (if it isn't already)
Total gain: 0
Our entire society adds up to 0.
I say that to people all the time, that and one of his other well known sayings: "beer is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy"
Pirates! is one of my all time favorite games, and If this remake is handled right it could be a great game.
Pirates are like ninjas in that anything you put them in, becomes that much cooler.
Im not surprised, any company that does it's own assesment of performance is going to fudge data. Self-serving research is not going to get you accurate data.
Personally, I have nothing but good things to say of Radeon. While it can be argued that their cards don't quite measure up and driver issues are common with some software, the fact Radeon Cards are on average $100 cheaper than their Nvidia equivalents makes it easier for me to look the other way on those sorts of things.
I still have a hard time trusting Nvidia after that garbage with the GeForce-4s that were really Geforce2s with more RAM.
umm i gotta agree with the "who cares" comment.
You can play all those games on a PC with a good mega-drive, SNes, etc, emulator.
I mean if you are intrigued by the challenge of modding the system yourself then by all means, but most of you are just free-loaders and most of the rest of us really don't care about your pain.
EQ:OA is a piece of crap, anyone that is playing it has either:
a) never played any other Online RPG and thus they have no frame of reference to understand just how bad that game is.
b) Living in denial
sorry if this offends anyone here, but you need to get out more.
Im not even going to comment on how stupid this conversation has become, oh wait I just did.