One of the best boardgames ever produced, was the Games Workshop Masterpece "Talisman". It was pricy, even when it was plentiful, $50 for the base set and like another $30 for each of the 3 expansions, but I am yet to meet a person that has played it and not loved it. It's a simple fantasy boardgame that even non-gamers can understand and enjoy, but there is enough depth to it that there are a lot of subtle strategies that keep the game from being completely random.
Complete sets of this game used to go for as much as $1400 on e-bay for 2nd edition, and about $1000 for the 3rd edition (I have the 3rd edition myself) It's sort of back in print right now, and worth grabbing if you can find it. i haven't checked lately but i would guess that the reprint has lowered the cost of the 3rd edition significantly. Word of warning though, the game without the expansions (you really need at least 2 of them) isn't half as interesting.
Some other great board/card games: Zombies!!!, Frag, Munchkin, and Chez Geek the last 3 are all published by steve jackson games.
I would pay to get that game considering how much better OOT looked in progressive scan on the cube. The other two zeldas (1 and 2) is a nice bonus too. Why on earth nintendo doesn't sell them seperately i will never know.
My cube GBASP and X-box have delivered nothing but perfect service, it's just my sony products that are crap.
And WHile I own all 4 major consoles (and a dreamcast) I also own a gaming PC, the last game i bought for which was the Neverwinter nights expansion. Maybe if I liked Warcraft and FPSs I would be content but I find that there are a lot of console games that are a lot more fun to play (Disgaea, Wind Waker, Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced, Silent Hill 3, and so on) then most of the PC offerings for right now. I am sure there will be a retort of the nature "console games are for idiots, you have no taste" but be that what it may I am the one that has to enjoy my game library, not you.
Sometimes I can't understand why people buy consoles at all when there are emulators, but then I remember that most people are ignorant, lazy, impatient, or all of the above
Thank you for taking time out of your day to troll, slashdot thanks you for your contribution. Nothing makes my day like hubris from a random stranger.
As for emulation: there are no satisfactory emulators for the current gen systems, and I tend to beleive that people that make games deserve to get some money from me if I want to play them.
Well this is well within their rights, though i think that moderating the boards and removing offensive posts may have served their purposes more than just telling non-customers to bugger off. Squelching dissent like this just makes the potential customers more likely to not buy the game since they will interpert this as Lucasarts deliberately trying to keep them in the dark as to potential game issues.
I agree wholeheartedly with you on that. VS is one of my all time favorite games. Great Story, unique game play, tough as nails and some great surprises.
But as you said, the menu system could be a pain. Typically I kept a weapon for each type of monster race, and when there were 3 or 4 different types in the room with me, it meant that I might have to change weapons a dozen times before the fight was over. A quick swap button would have made a world of difference.
Still, VS was squares best PSX offering in my opinion, despite its flaws.
HOw many of these 60 million are resales? I treat my PS2 with the utmost care and I am on my 3rd due to breakage. Come to think of it, of all the Sony products i have purchased over the years, only a couple of them still work. Maybe I am just unlucky...
Seriously though, I guess it testifies as to how important the stupid thing is to me since I have replaced it twice.
most guys don't want to be caught playing something like Mario Golf or Mario Party, when there are other games geared more toward what males are looking for, which is action, fighting, and girls. Games like Grand Theft Auto and DOA Extreme Beach Volleyball
Well I am a guy, and I don't have a problem with other guys seeing me play those games. Most all of my guy friends like these games as well. Most of our significant others enjoy playing these games with us as too. What better kind of game is there than one you can curl up on the couch with your girl friend and play? Sure we like GTA and what some mouth-breathers like to think are "adult games" like Resident Evil and DOA, but a game is a game, if its enjoyable and entertaining then its worth playing no matter how kiddie or "fruity" the game seems to the casual observer. Playing a "Mature" game doesn't make you mature just as playing a kiddie game doesn't suddenly make you revert into a child.
People who make character judgements based on the games people like are not worth the time of day anyway. If you have friends that feel the need to call you names for playing Mario Golf, you need some better friends. When I see somebody playing the newest Tomb Raider game i try not to hold it against them, and they shouldn't hold the fact that I played a 4 player game of drunken Mario Party the night before against me.
let me amend this a bit, the findings were that each individual performed better when observed, good workers, bad workers, happy workers, angry workers, sad workers, all of them.
Yes happy people will output more, no arguments there, and i said right up front that these findings have been misrepresented as justification for tight supervision as a means to improve efficency. So we don't really disagree in that respect. The "true" spirit of the findings, are that the act of observation alone will affect the system being observed. Subjects will try and give their observers what they want. What was read out of it is "if everyone thinks/knows they are being observed they will work harder". I was more focused on the abuse of this research.
So saying that observation will only cause people who are not working to work is not the whole story; Hard workers will work even harder when observed. The Hawthorne effect will have an impact irregardless of individual worker attitude, some will be affected more than others, but in an overwhelming majority of the cases it will be a net gain.
Around the 50s and 60s, there were some questions asked as to what low cost steps could be taken to improve worker output in an office environment. They tried a lot of things, plants were added to one office, light music was played in another, windows were opened for fresh air all sorts of little things, and then some of the offices were controls in which nothing was changed. What they found was, everything, including the control group had a large jump in productivity, the reason they concluded after some additional research is that observation led to the workers working harder. This phenomenon came to be known as the Hawthorne effect
So the answer to your question is yes it does, sort of...
The thing is, that like any discovery in business, people and managers only really hear part of what you tell them, and then sort of add what they want to hear around it. The Hawthorne effect was seen as a justification of scrutiny, and given the political climate of today, it makes Rigorous scrutiny even more lucrative since it protects your business, and it increases efficiency as a bonus. The longer term effects of constant scrutiny have not been studied to the same extent since among other reasons, the level of observation that many employees are subjected to would be considered unethical by American Psychological Association guidelines. (unethical equals you can't do it, despite what the movies would have you beleive)
If I was to speculate as to the effect based on other similar studies I have read, I would guess that such constant monitoring would increase anxiety levels in most people, some more than others, and would indeed lead to higher attrition rates, greater than normal incidences of workplace violence harassment and overall a lessening of the office quality of life. Most companies trying to pursue the apparently evasive "bottom-line" would see a way to insure that workers do not reach an age where they qualify for pensions, and increased productivity with those workers that stay on.
On average an American will spend 75 hours this year playing videogames, more than double the amount of time spent gaming in 1997
Dear God! When Wind Waker came out I spent like 50 hours in a weeks time with it, I picked up Disgaea last Thursday and I was at 30 hours by Sunday.
Either 75 is a really low estimate (thats what, an hour and 15 min a week?) Or I can expect some friends and family to be ambushing me with an intervention pretty soon....
Gaming has already been marching towards Mcdonaldization, and now that eyes with bigger wallets are setting their gaze on the industry its only going to get worse.
Its going to turn into Hollywood part 2, most of the main releases will be utter crap, and the good games are going to be fighting like hell for exposure while the bigger companies fight to keep them out of the picture. Its even worse for games since stores like EB and Gamestop don't even stock titles that tehy don't get pre-orders for. Word of mouth just won't cut it any more. Go try and find a copy of Disgaea or Otogi to see what I mean.
Oh, and just as a closure: I don't think you can call yourself a "leading game expert" just because you "play games a lot".
I disagree with you there, I don't have to be a master painter to be able to fully appretiate a painting, nor do I need to be a master chef to know if a meal tasted good or not. ROger Ebert is considered an expert on film by many, and even if you don't agree with everything the man says, despite not having ever made a film of his own he knows a lot about film. If i wanted an opinion on the movie industry I would certainly consider him a potential source before i would consider some hack like Bruckheimer. I am not saying that people with actual programing skills are not good experts, I am just saying that they are not the only experts.
But this so-called expert that jabbered her way through this talk is neither a player, nor an expert. As with any field the only requirement you need to satisfy to be considered "an expert" is for somebody to call you an expert. MS has been making console games for what, 2 years? and now they suddenly know what is wrong with the industry? Aren't these concerns she voiced almost verbatim of what Miyamoto of nintendo( MS' biggest 2nd place rival no less) has been saying for years? "Two many buttons" is coming out of the mouth of a spokesperson from a company that designed one of the crappiest console controlers of all time?
Gather round children, and let me tell you a little story about the Phillips CD-I, or the 3D0, or the Sega 32-X. You see, all of these were systems that consumers cried "foul" on long before they even hit the store shelves. Some unfortunate souls bought these, and for their dilligence they were rewarded with very expensive door stops.
New does not mean better, and when someone is trying to tell you their product can do everything from play every game ever made, all the way to cure cancer you are completely right in smelling a rat.
Innovation makes the world go round, but clearly these two products, the phantom and the N-Gage are not the light at the end of the tunnel. They are merely C.H.U.D.s with a flashlight trying to eat your wallet.
In LOZ:Majora's Mask the concept was this: the world was about to end in 3 days time, and you had to save it. THis was accomplished through a "groundhog's day"esque system by which at anytime, you could travel back in time and restart from the beggining of day one, but any events you had completed were undone. A lot of people loathed this game for this since if you were half way through a dungeon and time ran out, tough! you had to start over. Anyway, if you wanted to take a break from the game, you could create a "suspend save" which would save your current status and then exit the game. When you restored the save, it deleted itself and that was that. You could pick up where you left off but you couldnt use the save to restore and retry over and over again.
It is a great system, it provided the "save anywhere flexibility without the potential abuses.
I wonder if the security for the current crop of MMORPGs is that much more lax than the older generation or is it that more people are gunning for them? I suspect that its a little of both. I remember back when I was playing AC there were a few cases of people messing up the servers (someone actually worked out how to crash an entire server) but I seem to recall that these troubles were from exploits in the game itself and not the actual work of any hackers.
With these types of games becoming more and more popular, and the fact that we are getting closer and closer to the day that items in game will carry real legally recognized value (lawsuits over lost items, are already starting to appear and even if you find it absurd, it is what things are moving towards) It may become really expensive for companies to put out games that are not perfectly secure (and what is perfectly secure anyway?) How many years will i get for hacking in my own LongSword of Holocaust?
I think the technology behind this is hella cool, no doubt about that, but i have to agree that it sort of does seem like cheating, and honestly, imperfection is important to performance.
When i go to a concert i don't want it to sound exactly like the album, I like the fact that the lead's voice is a bit crackly because this is his 10th night in a row and he slept on a car seat the night before. I like the fact that some roadie is going to inevitable cause a feed back loop half way through one of the songs. All of these things are part of the experience, and to have a computer fixing the mistakes as they go along takes something away. When the robot overlords enslave us they will have perfect music, we as humans are not built for perfection.
Still, if they could only build a device that can filter out suck, that would be a valuable benfit to society.
I ver played all 3 versions at least a little bit, and honestly they are all pretty solid, the cube and x-box versions were neck and neck graphicly, and the PS2 version trailed a little bit in that respect but I don't think anyone is going to be disappointed.
For me, the choice came down to the bonus character I wanted, and I choose Link. Spawn I could care less about only if it were possible to medically remove my ability to care, and Heihachi or whatever his name is seemed cool, but not as cool as our Pajamma wearing Elf friend.
Hope you all have the next week off work, your going to need it....
While i don't have a hard time imagining that something like this is coming in the near future, let us consider the source, the Sun is not exactly the most reputable news source, more likely it hangs out somewhere near the bottom end of the reputability scale. Why not post some stuff from the weekly world news while we are at it? They had some great articles on UFO technology last week.
It could indeed be the origin of the number, but the point of the whole thing was this:
The answer is useless without knowing how to ask the question. The meaning of life, the universe and everything is the pursuit of the answer, not the answer itself.
Part of the blame falls squarely on the retailers. Most of the giant chain stores like E.B. and Gamestop only want to carry games that they know are going to sell in droves. I know for a fact, that these chains give very little option to their individual stores; the stock at your local EB/Gamestop is decided by a corporate office based on what they classify the paticular store as ("PC store", "Used/pre-owned store" etc). How do they decide what to send?
For A-list tiles like Wind Waker ort Soul Calibur, its a no brainer, they send tons of copies because they know its going to sell. But for games like Rez, or Ikaruga, or anyother non-mainstream game, they only bother to send copies if there are pre-sales and reserves. Which games get reserves? the titles that the company tells their staff to push, and what determines those games? The game companies that spend the most on store displays and advertising inside and outside the store. SO games like Rez already had 2 strikes against them from the get-go. Sega was hyping up thier A-list titles, and spent very little advertising Rez.
A very large percentage of your consumers base their choices on their level of exposure to a given game. Example: Rez gets no advertising in the US prior to its release. The only people that even knew about the game are those that either imported it, or keep their eyes on the Japanese game market. It gets released, no stores stock more than 1 or 2 copies if any at all because nobody pre-purchased it, and those few copies that are out there get bought up by the small group that actuall wanted it. When people finally start hearing about the game, its nowhere to be found. Now EB/Gamestop looks at their sales figures and sees "Rez: 1000 units sold nationwide" which seems dismal unless you consider the fact that 1000 is the total number in the field, but this is still chump change to the 100000 copies of Wind Waker that got sold (warning: above numbers made up to illustrate point)
Games should posses complex gameplay, through simple controls. If I have to look at the instructions more than once before I know how to play the game, its more complicated than it needs to be. This isn't to say that the gameplay should be simple, no of course not, but when the controls are intuitive, when i don't have to think about what my hands need to be doing, then I am once step closer to being in the game.
I think the first asheron's call had the right idea: create an epic storyline, with quests and events, and the base the outcomes on what the community does.
For example, in AC1, there was a period during which these shadowy beings began to invade. over a couple of months, these creepy floating fortresses started appearing outside towns, strange new monsters appeared, and new dungeons opened up. Over the coming months, quests and events precedeing the resurection of a demon-god began to appear. Some players swore to help revive the god, and others tried to defend the shirnes and prevent it. One server actually held back the march of darkness most of the month but finally fell and the entire world was assaulted by this devil.
I am simplfying it a lot but you get the idea. I had a lot of friends that started playing the game more than ever when this event was going on, and I think something like thisis the key to keeping your customers.
The "sandbox model" in which players are just let loose in a static world to kill respawning mobs over and over isn't appealing to about 90% of the potential MMORPG players (that is anyone that plays RPGs) If they want to grab that market, they need to make the game as interesting as a brandnew epic RPG every month. "new content every month? that will cost a fortune!" you say. But I say "whoever figures out a way to do it without breaking the bank or hiking subscription costs will be the one that comes out on top"
If you are suffering mental anguish from losing something in a game that is supposed to be for fun you need to find a new hobby.
I hope this twit gets laughed out of court, I really can't sympathize with him. Its his own fault for holding his imaginary items in such high esteem.
What next? People suing Nintendo because they can't beat super mario brothers? Suing Microsoft because of mental angusih suffered while playing online and getting owned at Mech Assualt? Should I sue Lucasarts because my KOTOR save game got ruined after 30 hours and I had to start over? Where does it end?
A popular theory of law, says somehting to the degree that laws are followed, when the risk and magnitude of punishment exceed what the law breaker is willing to tollerate (if some one can tell me what school of thought this is, I would be grateful, I slept through sociology class a lot)
In order to stop a person from pirating your software, you have to do one of the following: 1) Make it impossible to crack
Unlikely, we all know this, end of argument 2) Catch and prosecute all pirates
About as viable as the first option, going to court is expensive. 3) Make most of your users beleive that they will get caught and prosecuted if they pirate your software
And this is what we have with the spy-ware. The average user, (slashdot readers on the whole being a little more informed than the masses) that just sat down to photo-shop a squirrel with large nuts into a FARK photoshop contest entry, and has a big window pop-up and tell them that they are in violation of the law and will burn in hell for pirating software is less likely to continue using it. Is it going to work all the time? No, but it will deter some potential pirates. but why spy on them? I can think of a lot of reasons, the first one that comes to mind is to track the distribution of the pirated copy. Do this enough, and you can begin to put a finger on the specific people that are distributing your software.
Why not freeze it out?
Simple, if the software froze all the time, it would be obvious very quickly to the "pirates" and they would get to work at cracking it again. The spy option makes it far less likely to be noticed, and instead may round up a few customers.
Is this right? Personally I don't think any sort of spy-ware is justified at any time, so I would say not. But on the otherhand, stealing crap isn't right either so I have a hard time feeling too sorry for the people that have their privacy breached in this manner.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the best boardgames ever produced, was the Games Workshop Masterpece "Talisman". It was pricy, even when it was plentiful, $50 for the base set and like another $30 for each of the 3 expansions, but I am yet to meet a person that has played it and not loved it. It's a simple fantasy boardgame that even non-gamers can understand and enjoy, but there is enough depth to it that there are a lot of subtle strategies that keep the game from being completely random.
Complete sets of this game used to go for as much as $1400 on e-bay for 2nd edition, and about $1000 for the 3rd edition (I have the 3rd edition myself) It's sort of back in print right now, and worth grabbing if you can find it. i haven't checked lately but i would guess that the reprint has lowered the cost of the 3rd edition significantly. Word of warning though, the game without the expansions (you really need at least 2 of them) isn't half as interesting.
Some other great board/card games: Zombies!!!, Frag, Munchkin, and Chez Geek the last 3 are all published by steve jackson games.
A Majora's mask port for the cube? Sign me up!
I would pay to get that game considering how much better OOT looked in progressive scan on the cube. The other two zeldas (1 and 2) is a nice bonus too. Why on earth nintendo doesn't sell them seperately i will never know.
or not....
My cube GBASP and X-box have delivered nothing but perfect service, it's just my sony products that are crap.
And WHile I own all 4 major consoles (and a dreamcast) I also own a gaming PC, the last game i bought for which was the Neverwinter nights expansion. Maybe if I liked Warcraft and FPSs I would be content but I find that there are a lot of console games that are a lot more fun to play (Disgaea, Wind Waker, Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced, Silent Hill 3, and so on) then most of the PC offerings for right now. I am sure there will be a retort of the nature "console games are for idiots, you have no taste" but be that what it may I am the one that has to enjoy my game library, not you.
Sometimes I can't understand why people buy consoles at all when there are emulators, but then I remember that most people are ignorant, lazy, impatient, or all of the above
Thank you for taking time out of your day to troll, slashdot thanks you for your contribution. Nothing makes my day like hubris from a random stranger. As for emulation: there are no satisfactory emulators for the current gen systems, and I tend to beleive that people that make games deserve to get some money from me if I want to play them.
Well this is well within their rights, though i think that moderating the boards and removing offensive posts may have served their purposes more than just telling non-customers to bugger off. Squelching dissent like this just makes the potential customers more likely to not buy the game since they will interpert this as Lucasarts deliberately trying to keep them in the dark as to potential game issues.
I agree wholeheartedly with you on that. VS is one of my all time favorite games. Great Story, unique game play, tough as nails and some great surprises.
But as you said, the menu system could be a pain. Typically I kept a weapon for each type of monster race, and when there were 3 or 4 different types in the room with me, it meant that I might have to change weapons a dozen times before the fight was over. A quick swap button would have made a world of difference.
Still, VS was squares best PSX offering in my opinion, despite its flaws.
HOw many of these 60 million are resales? I treat my PS2 with the utmost care and I am on my 3rd due to breakage. Come to think of it, of all the Sony products i have purchased over the years, only a couple of them still work. Maybe I am just unlucky...
Seriously though, I guess it testifies as to how important the stupid thing is to me since I have replaced it twice.
most guys don't want to be caught playing something like Mario Golf or Mario Party, when there are other games geared more toward what males are looking for, which is action, fighting, and girls. Games like Grand Theft Auto and DOA Extreme Beach Volleyball
Well I am a guy, and I don't have a problem with other guys seeing me play those games. Most all of my guy friends like these games as well. Most of our significant others enjoy playing these games with us as too. What better kind of game is there than one you can curl up on the couch with your girl friend and play? Sure we like GTA and what some mouth-breathers like to think are "adult games" like Resident Evil and DOA, but a game is a game, if its enjoyable and entertaining then its worth playing no matter how kiddie or "fruity" the game seems to the casual observer. Playing a "Mature" game doesn't make you mature just as playing a kiddie game doesn't suddenly make you revert into a child.
People who make character judgements based on the games people like are not worth the time of day anyway. If you have friends that feel the need to call you names for playing Mario Golf, you need some better friends. When I see somebody playing the newest Tomb Raider game i try not to hold it against them, and they shouldn't hold the fact that I played a 4 player game of drunken Mario Party the night before against me.
let me amend this a bit, the findings were that each individual performed better when observed, good workers, bad workers, happy workers, angry workers, sad workers, all of them.
Yes happy people will output more, no arguments there, and i said right up front that these findings have been misrepresented as justification for tight supervision as a means to improve efficency. So we don't really disagree in that respect. The "true" spirit of the findings, are that the act of observation alone will affect the system being observed. Subjects will try and give their observers what they want. What was read out of it is "if everyone thinks/knows they are being observed they will work harder". I was more focused on the abuse of this research.
So saying that observation will only cause people who are not working to work is not the whole story; Hard workers will work even harder when observed. The Hawthorne effect will have an impact irregardless of individual worker attitude, some will be affected more than others, but in an overwhelming majority of the cases it will be a net gain.
Some of this is a bit rusty, so bear with me...
Around the 50s and 60s, there were some questions asked as to what low cost steps could be taken to improve worker output in an office environment. They tried a lot of things, plants were added to one office, light music was played in another, windows were opened for fresh air all sorts of little things, and then some of the offices were controls in which nothing was changed. What they found was, everything, including the control group had a large jump in productivity, the reason they concluded after some additional research is that observation led to the workers working harder. This phenomenon came to be known as the Hawthorne effect
So the answer to your question is yes it does, sort of...
The thing is, that like any discovery in business, people and managers only really hear part of what you tell them, and then sort of add what they want to hear around it. The Hawthorne effect was seen as a justification of scrutiny, and given the political climate of today, it makes Rigorous scrutiny even more lucrative since it protects your business, and it increases efficiency as a bonus. The longer term effects of constant scrutiny have not been studied to the same extent since among other reasons, the level of observation that many employees are subjected to would be considered unethical by American Psychological Association guidelines. (unethical equals you can't do it, despite what the movies would have you beleive)
If I was to speculate as to the effect based on other similar studies I have read, I would guess that such constant monitoring would increase anxiety levels in most people, some more than others, and would indeed lead to higher attrition rates, greater than normal incidences of workplace violence harassment and overall a lessening of the office quality of life. Most companies trying to pursue the apparently evasive "bottom-line" would see a way to insure that workers do not reach an age where they qualify for pensions, and increased productivity with those workers that stay on.
On average an American will spend 75 hours this year playing videogames, more than double the amount of time spent gaming in 1997
Dear God! When Wind Waker came out I spent like 50 hours in a weeks time with it, I picked up Disgaea last Thursday and I was at 30 hours by Sunday.
Either 75 is a really low estimate (thats what, an hour and 15 min a week?) Or I can expect some friends and family to be ambushing me with an intervention pretty soon....
Could not agree with you more on all counts.
Gaming has already been marching towards Mcdonaldization, and now that eyes with bigger wallets are setting their gaze on the industry its only going to get worse.
Its going to turn into Hollywood part 2, most of the main releases will be utter crap, and the good games are going to be fighting like hell for exposure while the bigger companies fight to keep them out of the picture. Its even worse for games since stores like EB and Gamestop don't even stock titles that tehy don't get pre-orders for. Word of mouth just won't cut it any more. Go try and find a copy of Disgaea or Otogi to see what I mean.
Oh, and just as a closure: I don't think you can call yourself a "leading game expert" just because you "play games a lot".
I disagree with you there, I don't have to be a master painter to be able to fully appretiate a painting, nor do I need to be a master chef to know if a meal tasted good or not. ROger Ebert is considered an expert on film by many, and even if you don't agree with everything the man says, despite not having ever made a film of his own he knows a lot about film. If i wanted an opinion on the movie industry I would certainly consider him a potential source before i would consider some hack like Bruckheimer. I am not saying that people with actual programing skills are not good experts, I am just saying that they are not the only experts.
But this so-called expert that jabbered her way through this talk is neither a player, nor an expert. As with any field the only requirement you need to satisfy to be considered "an expert" is for somebody to call you an expert. MS has been making console games for what, 2 years? and now they suddenly know what is wrong with the industry? Aren't these concerns she voiced almost verbatim of what Miyamoto of nintendo( MS' biggest 2nd place rival no less) has been saying for years? "Two many buttons" is coming out of the mouth of a spokesperson from a company that designed one of the crappiest console controlers of all time?
Gather round children, and let me tell you a little story about the Phillips CD-I, or the 3D0, or the Sega 32-X. You see, all of these were systems that consumers cried "foul" on long before they even hit the store shelves. Some unfortunate souls bought these, and for their dilligence they were rewarded with very expensive door stops.
New does not mean better, and when someone is trying to tell you their product can do everything from play every game ever made, all the way to cure cancer you are completely right in smelling a rat.
Innovation makes the world go round, but clearly these two products, the phantom and the N-Gage are not the light at the end of the tunnel. They are merely C.H.U.D.s with a flashlight trying to eat your wallet.
In LOZ:Majora's Mask the concept was this: the world was about to end in 3 days time, and you had to save it. THis was accomplished through a "groundhog's day"esque system by which at anytime, you could travel back in time and restart from the beggining of day one, but any events you had completed were undone. A lot of people loathed this game for this since if you were half way through a dungeon and time ran out, tough! you had to start over. Anyway, if you wanted to take a break from the game, you could create a "suspend save" which would save your current status and then exit the game. When you restored the save, it deleted itself and that was that. You could pick up where you left off but you couldnt use the save to restore and retry over and over again.
It is a great system, it provided the "save anywhere flexibility without the potential abuses.
I wonder if the security for the current crop of MMORPGs is that much more lax than the older generation or is it that more people are gunning for them? I suspect that its a little of both. I remember back when I was playing AC there were a few cases of people messing up the servers (someone actually worked out how to crash an entire server) but I seem to recall that these troubles were from exploits in the game itself and not the actual work of any hackers.
With these types of games becoming more and more popular, and the fact that we are getting closer and closer to the day that items in game will carry real legally recognized value (lawsuits over lost items, are already starting to appear and even if you find it absurd, it is what things are moving towards) It may become really expensive for companies to put out games that are not perfectly secure (and what is perfectly secure anyway?) How many years will i get for hacking in my own LongSword of Holocaust?
Behold!!!!
The birth of a brand new genre, isn't it cute?
the early 90's gave us FPSers...
The late 90s gave us RTS
Now the low 00's give us the GTAesques.
Rejoice! the angel of imitation and the archangel of rehash are upon us! The Angel of originality however just went and hung herself.
I think the technology behind this is hella cool, no doubt about that, but i have to agree that it sort of does seem like cheating, and honestly, imperfection is important to performance.
When i go to a concert i don't want it to sound exactly like the album, I like the fact that the lead's voice is a bit crackly because this is his 10th night in a row and he slept on a car seat the night before. I like the fact that some roadie is going to inevitable cause a feed back loop half way through one of the songs. All of these things are part of the experience, and to have a computer fixing the mistakes as they go along takes something away. When the robot overlords enslave us they will have perfect music, we as humans are not built for perfection.
Still, if they could only build a device that can filter out suck, that would be a valuable benfit to society.
I ver played all 3 versions at least a little bit, and honestly they are all pretty solid, the cube and x-box versions were neck and neck graphicly, and the PS2 version trailed a little bit in that respect but I don't think anyone is going to be disappointed.
For me, the choice came down to the bonus character I wanted, and I choose Link. Spawn I could care less about only if it were possible to medically remove my ability to care, and Heihachi or whatever his name is seemed cool, but not as cool as our Pajamma wearing Elf friend.
Hope you all have the next week off work, your going to need it....
While i don't have a hard time imagining that something like this is coming in the near future, let us consider the source, the Sun is not exactly the most reputable news source, more likely it hangs out somewhere near the bottom end of the reputability scale. Why not post some stuff from the weekly world news while we are at it? They had some great articles on UFO technology last week.
It could indeed be the origin of the number, but the point of the whole thing was this:
The answer is useless without knowing how to ask the question. The meaning of life, the universe and everything is the pursuit of the answer, not the answer itself.
Part of the blame falls squarely on the retailers. Most of the giant chain stores like E.B. and Gamestop only want to carry games that they know are going to sell in droves. I know for a fact, that these chains give very little option to their individual stores; the stock at your local EB/Gamestop is decided by a corporate office based on what they classify the paticular store as ("PC store", "Used/pre-owned store" etc). How do they decide what to send?
For A-list tiles like Wind Waker ort Soul Calibur, its a no brainer, they send tons of copies because they know its going to sell. But for games like Rez, or Ikaruga, or anyother non-mainstream game, they only bother to send copies if there are pre-sales and reserves. Which games get reserves? the titles that the company tells their staff to push, and what determines those games? The game companies that spend the most on store displays and advertising inside and outside the store. SO games like Rez already had 2 strikes against them from the get-go. Sega was hyping up thier A-list titles, and spent very little advertising Rez.
A very large percentage of your consumers base their choices on their level of exposure to a given game. Example: Rez gets no advertising in the US prior to its release. The only people that even knew about the game are those that either imported it, or keep their eyes on the Japanese game market. It gets released, no stores stock more than 1 or 2 copies if any at all because nobody pre-purchased it, and those few copies that are out there get bought up by the small group that actuall wanted it. When people finally start hearing about the game, its nowhere to be found. Now EB/Gamestop looks at their sales figures and sees "Rez: 1000 units sold nationwide" which seems dismal unless you consider the fact that 1000 is the total number in the field, but this is still chump change to the 100000 copies of Wind Waker that got sold (warning: above numbers made up to illustrate point)
Games should posses complex gameplay, through simple controls. If I have to look at the instructions more than once before I know how to play the game, its more complicated than it needs to be. This isn't to say that the gameplay should be simple, no of course not, but when the controls are intuitive, when i don't have to think about what my hands need to be doing, then I am once step closer to being in the game.
I think the first asheron's call had the right idea: create an epic storyline, with quests and events, and the base the outcomes on what the community does.
For example, in AC1, there was a period during which these shadowy beings began to invade. over a couple of months, these creepy floating fortresses started appearing outside towns, strange new monsters appeared, and new dungeons opened up. Over the coming months, quests and events precedeing the resurection of a demon-god began to appear. Some players swore to help revive the god, and others tried to defend the shirnes and prevent it. One server actually held back the march of darkness most of the month but finally fell and the entire world was assaulted by this devil.
I am simplfying it a lot but you get the idea. I had a lot of friends that started playing the game more than ever when this event was going on, and I think something like thisis the key to keeping your customers.
The "sandbox model" in which players are just let loose in a static world to kill respawning mobs over and over isn't appealing to about 90% of the potential MMORPG players (that is anyone that plays RPGs) If they want to grab that market, they need to make the game as interesting as a brandnew epic RPG every month. "new content every month? that will cost a fortune!" you say. But I say "whoever figures out a way to do it without breaking the bank or hiking subscription costs will be the one that comes out on top"
If you are suffering mental anguish from losing something in a game that is supposed to be for fun you need to find a new hobby.
I hope this twit gets laughed out of court, I really can't sympathize with him. Its his own fault for holding his imaginary items in such high esteem.
What next? People suing Nintendo because they can't beat super mario brothers? Suing Microsoft because of mental angusih suffered while playing online and getting owned at Mech Assualt? Should I sue Lucasarts because my KOTOR save game got ruined after 30 hours and I had to start over? Where does it end?
A popular theory of law, says somehting to the degree that laws are followed, when the risk and magnitude of punishment exceed what the law breaker is willing to tollerate (if some one can tell me what school of thought this is, I would be grateful, I slept through sociology class a lot)
In order to stop a person from pirating your software, you have to do one of the following:
1) Make it impossible to crack
Unlikely, we all know this, end of argument
2) Catch and prosecute all pirates
About as viable as the first option, going to court is expensive.
3) Make most of your users beleive that they will get caught and prosecuted if they pirate your software
And this is what we have with the spy-ware. The average user, (slashdot readers on the whole being a little more informed than the masses) that just sat down to photo-shop a squirrel with large nuts into a FARK photoshop contest entry, and has a big window pop-up and tell them that they are in violation of the law and will burn in hell for pirating software is less likely to continue using it. Is it going to work all the time? No, but it will deter some potential pirates. but why spy on them? I can think of a lot of reasons, the first one that comes to mind is to track the distribution of the pirated copy. Do this enough, and you can begin to put a finger on the specific people that are distributing your software.
Why not freeze it out?
Simple, if the software froze all the time, it would be obvious very quickly to the "pirates" and they would get to work at cracking it again. The spy option makes it far less likely to be noticed, and instead may round up a few customers.
Is this right? Personally I don't think any sort of spy-ware is justified at any time, so I would say not. But on the otherhand, stealing crap isn't right either so I have a hard time feeling too sorry for the people that have their privacy breached in this manner.