There was that one episode where Wesley points out that 1:1 is the only valid ratio. However, there's at least one episode (it was on either Spike TV or G4 just this week) in which Geordi orders the matter:anti matter ratio set to 3:1 (I can't remember for sure, but I believe this was the same episode when the alien probe used the computer virus that destroyed the Yamato and crippled the Enterprise and a Romulan Warbird).
Based on the fact that Sony is in full disaster-avoidance mode? The only "good" news that's come out of Sony recently has been this sort of, "Trust me, it'll kick ass, just pay us now and wait," stuff. They've had some pretty worrying news the last few months (the rootkit, talk about heavy DRM on the PS3, an inability to address price questions, manufacturing issues), and it's looking like the PS3 and Revolution will come out almost simultaneously. The worst news out of Nintendo, meanwhile, has been their goofy looking controller. Even if you don't like it (I don't, personally), it's still not distressing news by a long shot.
I think that's 12 per 100,000 deaths, though, not per 100,000 people per year. Still - you're point stands: there's a high suicide rate accross the board, and it should come as no suprise that with tens of millions of people buying video games, there's going to be overlap.
On the other hand, with the increasing prevalence of gamer communities and social networks online, it should be taken as a good sign that we don't hear about dozens of gamer suicides every year.
Maybe comparing it to the demolitions industry would be accurate? Demolition workers, who have a dirty, dangerous, and often poor paying job, also have an extremely high satisfaction rate and one of the lowest suicide rates in the US. People (men especially) like to break things. It makes us happy and makes us feel big and strong, when the world tends to make us feel insignificant and helpless. Games can also serve to give you a sense of power and control that's lacking otherwise, and generally makes the rest of life a bit less miserable.
And if you want to deny that, go get yourself good and angry (read a compiled collection of your least favorite politician's speeches), and then find something - just about anything, even a pencil can be satisfying - and break it. Take a hammer and just smash it, throw it against the wall, step on it, kick it, hit it with another thing with the goal of breaking both. You'll feel better than you'll want to admit.
It's also a misdirected rant on the servers. It wasn't the content that caused the crashes. Even with Medivh's new character limit imposed recently, there were still about 800 people sitting around in Silithus during the last steps of the event. The general, LFG, and localdefense channels were spinning faster than anybody could hope to read them, and there were god-knows-how-many other channels set up for overflow.
Add to that the fact that it's a PVP server with an inordinate amount of level 1-10 characters in a zone designed for level 60's (they were litterally aggroing the level 60 elite bugs from outside of the town that would then run in and kill the lowbies trying to follow the events), high level characters everywhere taking their revenge on the lowbies who were comming in uninvited and lagging up their server.
That many characters, all in close proximity, means a lot of data that has to be sent to all those players. More that a lot of player's connections could handle, and those characters would get out of sync and they would appear to jump around randomly to other characters - only adding to the server strain.
No point in trying. The minute he got to the part about rogues needing a buff, you can tell he's full of shit six ways from sunday.
I've played a rogue for six months. They in no way need a buff. Warriors need a minor nerf on overpower and paladins need a bubble nerf now that they can actually do something besides be invincible (clarifications: Overpower is an attack warriors can use after the enemy dodging that does immense damage. Based on the name and description, it should proc off of block and parry, not dodge and miss. "bubble" refers to a Paladin's multiple ways of being temporarily invincible).
Other than that? Rogues rule the roost. Mages are nothing to a dagger rogue, priests have one shot at saving themselves from a rogue, and then it's game over. A warlock without his succubus is fair game, and a warlock with one is just a matter of waiting until the right time to hit him. I hate using he WoW cliche "learn2play," but it really applies to the grandparent. If your a rogue, and you're getting pwned by other classes, you're not picking your fights properly.
It's been commented that Bridge Commander, with all of the addons people have developed for it, could have immense potential for an open-ended game like that. It's already possible with mods like Kobayashi Maru to just fly around and explore, all sorts of freedom to play around with your ship's power distribution, repair stations, dozens and dozens of different ships, distribute crew, and even beam over to a crippled enemy ship and take it over (GTA style). There's already dynamic generation of ships (construction yard mods, and the "distress call" feature that will cause random ships to warp in from neighboring systems to help/hinder you)
There's only so much you can do to mod a game that wasn't really meant to be fully moddable, though. It would be amazing to see an open ended epic game, even just on the scale of Freelancer, using the same systems that Bridge Commander has.
The control was a little bit like Homeworld, with the ability to send ships above or below the normal plane of play. It kept the top-down traditional RTS view, though, and units stop dead to fight, unlike homeworld. It had its good points and bad points, but overall, it was a solid RTS game and actually FELT like Star Trek.
Personally, the only Star Trek game I still play is Bridge Commander (and even then, it's only because of the sheer number of mods and addons available. The original game had barely a dozen ships, most of which (*cough* Galor class) were pitifully balanced against the Federation ships.
I had the same idea a while ago. I've got level 15 alts planted on a couple of the top servers. I was planning on watching on the first server to finish, but after this, I think I'll wait. The second or third should be a bit less flooded since people will have been there and done that already.
I was hoping that my server would be done early, we were around 10 in the rankings at first. Now, we're down around 30 or 40 in the rankings, but unless the alliance side gets its act together and getting stranglekelp (They haven't broken 2000 of that stuff yet) we're going to hit a brick wall in a week or two.
Not to mention Best Buy will also have twice the fights, twice the shortages, twice the $2000 ebay auctions, twice the clerks afraid to go to work and face angry parents who weren't smart enough to order their PS3/Revolution months ago and now can't get little Billy his Christmas present.
Seriously, look at history - do any of us expect that Sony or Nintendo will NOT have launch shortages? Sony's history suggests their shortage will be even worse than the 360's. Of the three console makers, Nintendo's the only one with a good track record of release volumes, and even they've had long lines and short supplies at nearly every turn. Their record of late releases for the N64 and GC at least mean they haven't had to compete in a double-rush with another big console release. I was hoping that Sony would fall a bit more behind, or Nintendo would make their much earlier optimistic release schedule, just to avoid this sort of mess that will only hurt and/or annoy everybody involved.
It'll be the same story as every new release: There'll be a lot of griping and complaining, and those of us with six braincells to rub together will just wait until March to buy ours.
In my case, still the 360. Provided Sony does follow through with the one specific bit of DRM they've talked about in the past.
Remember the article a while back, when Sony wanted to stop "abuses" like game rentals and used-game resale? Their plan was basically that when a game disk is first run, the console will mark it somehow so that the game will no longer run on any other PS3 hardware.
If they do follow through with this - and I'm still moderately confident they won't - I'll go with the 360.
I, and most people, count the cost of a game as the amount of money spent pursuant to a game from the time they decide they want the game until the time they're playing it (plus any recurrant costs). Unless you've already got Half Life 2 and are just now deciding to play Counterstrike (and that's often not the case - CS has always been the mod that sells Half Life better than Half Life sells itself), your cost is $50.
AA, your cost is zero. There's no "base game" to install onto, no shareware to register. There's a download time, or you can buy it bargain bin at some stores, or you can go to an army recruiter. Many of them have the disks there for free (that's where I got my copy. Just be careful - some of those recruiters are ruthless and will have paperwork ready for you to sign in about 2 minutes).
Metal Gear SOLID was not on the NES or C64. The "Solid" title was tacked on when the series went 3D. Metal Gear Solid games are on the Gamecube, Xbox, PS2, and I'm not sure about PC. Splinter Cell is, and it's a more engaging and less rediculous game anyway.
Give her my number, I'll fix things just fine
on
Getting Off NetHack?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The fact that you've found a girl who doesn't get that weird look in her eye when you tell her your playing Nethack is not something to be overlooked. An above poster is on the right track: Don't try to fight it, build on it. Get her into MUDs, maybe buy her Neverwinter Nights and find a few persistent world servers she can try out, introduce her to MMORPGs if she's doing well on lighter stuff.
See, by trying to break her of video games, you're basically trying to create a typical girlfriend. If you succeed, it'll only be a matter of time before she starts complaining that you spend more time raiding with your guild than you do taking her out, or that you should find a more grown-up hobby than games. Before you know it, you'll be married and your video games will be up in a garage sale like so many gamers before you.
A little bit off from what the grandparent said. If you make ten units, you pay 25 cents each. If you make 1,000 units, it's still 25 cents each for a total of $250. Now, if you make 1,000,000 units, it's 25 cents each for a total of $250,000. The royalty caps here, though. So now, if you make 2,000,000 units, you pay the $250,000 cap, making it only 12.5 cents per unit.
I still think it is them, at least in part. Most console releases are met with shortages, waiting in line in the cold only to find out they're sold out already, and so forth. It's the way the companies play the game. It's how a lot of companies play the game. It worked with Tickle-me-Elmo, it's works with cars, toys, designer clothes, sports drinks - virtually everything. When people CAN'T get something, for some reason, many of them will want it MORE. You start off with a moderate demand and insufficient supply. A lot of people will see that it's sold out. Maybe they didn't want it specifically - Maybe little Billy would have been just as happy with a GI-Joe, but then Billy's parents see that Tickle-me-Elmo is flying off the shelves like hotcakes. This tells them, "Hey, a lot of people are buying that. That must be the toy every kid wants! I bet Billy wants one, too." It's subtle, but every holiday season since the invention of the advertisement bears the same sort of patten.
Heck, back in high school, I even saw this in food service. I worked concessions at a race track for a few summers. We served a lot of food, but very few people ever ordered our mushroom swiss burgers. We kept two in the steam table at a time, and prepared more from regular hamburgers as we sold them. It was a good day if we sold four of them, and on off weeks without a big race, we'd close at 9 and probably not sell any.
However, once in a while, we'd get one person order two, and the next person order one. We have to tell that person we're sorry but we don't have any ready right now, but if you'll just hang on a couple minutes, we'll fix one and would you like a coke while you wait.
After that, almost invariably, several of the people already in line will also want one. As soon as one of us said we were short on something (this would also happen with chicken strips, which usually didn't sell very well but would occasionally sell faster than we could fry them), we'd get a short run on it. Often, "just to try," or even more revealing, customers have said to me, "Hey, you sell out of those, they must be popular. Give me one, too." I can only imagine that a good number of those people get out to their seats and realize they just paid an extra $2 on top of the cost of a regular burger for a spoon full of mushroom sauce and a slice of cheese they could have had for a quarter and that they really did just want a pepsi after all.
All true, but the "So?" comes in when you remember that a bad translation, a bad sequel, or a bad remake hurt themselves far more than just a regular bad movie does. How many times have you heard, "It was a good movie, but it was a bad sequel."?
Every furthur Boll movie that comes out leaves me more and more convinced that the article a while back on Slashdot was true: He's not even trying to succeed, he's using some obscure tax hole to bilch investors.
A few of these movies, I've actually believed COULD work. In the hands of almost any other director, with a more carefully selected cast - actors who can actually work the character, not just bring a big name, pretty face, or nice boobs to the show - I believe they could have been good movies, and at least decent translations of the games behind them.
as for MMORPGs, people know why the industry is stuck in another cycle. It's extremely expensive to make an MMORPG. There was a story here on Slashdot in early November, and according to that, Blizzard took a $32 million loss last year from the launch, and has only made $7 million profit on the game this year. Not to mention that WoW's been in development for years. It's hard to make one work (WoW had a strongly established name to pull in users right away. Everquest and Ultima Online had to start from scratch and took longer to grow), and it's hard to keep players. Plus, once you launch, development is a nearly constant process for the life of the game. Everquest had expansions comming every few months at one point, and added content to the core game and all of the expansions after going live. WoW has an expansion comming, and has had probably eight big content patches released. A non MMO game, development is mostly over after launch. A few patches, a couple new maps, sometimes an expansion pack a year later.
Sure, MMOs are big money, but they're prohibitively expensive to launch one that'll compete against the current big names, and it's possible (probably likely) to lose a lot of money.
I'm pretty sure Everquest is past the billion mark. It's varied from hundreds of thousands to millions of customers for a number of years now. WoW's got a good shot at the shortest time to reach that billion, though.
Although, despite what the complainers on the WoW forums say, they're nowhere near that in profits. They took $37 million loss last year, and a $7 million profit this year, both largely due to WoW.
At least now, the major server madness is past. It's unlikely they'll be doing anymore multi-million dollar mass server replacements like they did several times between launch and the beginning of this year.
They haven't halted game development. They still put out news for Starcraft: Ghost occasionally, and over the summer, Infoceptor (Blizzard-only game news site) had a short interview about their next unannounced project.
Give them a break: They spent $150 million last year taking WoW gold, not to mention that it was THE unannounced project that'd been in the works since Brood War was released. Even without WoW, it was years between games.
From my own past experience with declining MMOGs, it won't really get the point accross. Developers very often dig into a vision of their game and not even the enjoyment of their users will dislodge them. I watched one game go from tens of thousands of players - not enough to make the developers rich, but enough to pay for itself and give the dev team some "night job" income - down to barely a hundred now because of the increasing amount of tedium and clicking being added to the game, and for stupid reasons or no reasons at all.
Me, and thousands of others quitting didn't put a dent in their resolve to make a game that can be used to test the effective lifespan of any mouse on the market, but it did do good: I am no longer annoyed by the game, I know longer have to deal with the developers ass-backwards approach to problem solving, and I have an extra $12 a month to spend on other things. I'm happy.
A demo can also make a game look better than the final product. Certain aspect of gameplay just doesn't seem worthwhile? Leave it out of the demo. Buggy level of the game? Dron't include it, or even skip over it and put in the really cool levels.
Something that I think Blizzard did an amazing job with the Starcraft demo was actually making it a different storyline than the game. Instead of including the first few missions from Starcraft itself, the demo had a different campaign titled Precursor which ended on a cliffhanger and set the stage for the beginning of the full version of the game.
When they discovered Pluto's two small outer moons a while back, I'd seen some people temporarily refering to them as Donald and Mickey. Not sure if either has final names, but I still liked the suggested Styx and Cerberus.
No, don't you know your logic? Validity and truth are independent. For a rediculous example, it's very easy to construct a VALID argument showing that the sky is purple and has pink polka dots. It's based on faulty assumptions and yeilds falty conclusions, but it is still entirely valid.
They aren't just separate, but in some cases they're specifically different characters in the same world. Link and Zelda from Link the the Past were distant ancestors of the Link and Zelda from the NES games. Before Windwaker came out, I'd seen at least one post on GameFAQs linking to a fan page that tried to establish continuity through the series, and even then, there were at least three and possibly as many as five Links and Zeldas. Since then, Minish Cap would suggest at least one new pair, since (if it's accepted as the first origin of Link's hat), it would be chronologically first, before LttP, and Link in LttP had never previously weilded a sword.
Anyway, I digress... It's much easier to take the games individually as independent stories or as shorter series and not try to chain them all together into one epic story. It's just as bad as fanboys trying to invent continuity between Final Fantasy 6 and Final Fantasy 7, just doesn't work without assuming things that seem to contradict the games.
Slashdot Mirror
There was that one episode where Wesley points out that 1:1 is the only valid ratio. However, there's at least one episode (it was on either Spike TV or G4 just this week) in which Geordi orders the matter:anti matter ratio set to 3:1 (I can't remember for sure, but I believe this was the same episode when the alien probe used the computer virus that destroyed the Yamato and crippled the Enterprise and a Romulan Warbird).
Based on the fact that Sony is in full disaster-avoidance mode? The only "good" news that's come out of Sony recently has been this sort of, "Trust me, it'll kick ass, just pay us now and wait," stuff. They've had some pretty worrying news the last few months (the rootkit, talk about heavy DRM on the PS3, an inability to address price questions, manufacturing issues), and it's looking like the PS3 and Revolution will come out almost simultaneously. The worst news out of Nintendo, meanwhile, has been their goofy looking controller. Even if you don't like it (I don't, personally), it's still not distressing news by a long shot.
I think that's 12 per 100,000 deaths, though, not per 100,000 people per year. Still - you're point stands: there's a high suicide rate accross the board, and it should come as no suprise that with tens of millions of people buying video games, there's going to be overlap.
On the other hand, with the increasing prevalence of gamer communities and social networks online, it should be taken as a good sign that we don't hear about dozens of gamer suicides every year.
Maybe comparing it to the demolitions industry would be accurate? Demolition workers, who have a dirty, dangerous, and often poor paying job, also have an extremely high satisfaction rate and one of the lowest suicide rates in the US. People (men especially) like to break things. It makes us happy and makes us feel big and strong, when the world tends to make us feel insignificant and helpless. Games can also serve to give you a sense of power and control that's lacking otherwise, and generally makes the rest of life a bit less miserable.
And if you want to deny that, go get yourself good and angry (read a compiled collection of your least favorite politician's speeches), and then find something - just about anything, even a pencil can be satisfying - and break it. Take a hammer and just smash it, throw it against the wall, step on it, kick it, hit it with another thing with the goal of breaking both. You'll feel better than you'll want to admit.
It's also a misdirected rant on the servers. It wasn't the content that caused the crashes. Even with Medivh's new character limit imposed recently, there were still about 800 people sitting around in Silithus during the last steps of the event. The general, LFG, and localdefense channels were spinning faster than anybody could hope to read them, and there were god-knows-how-many other channels set up for overflow.
Add to that the fact that it's a PVP server with an inordinate amount of level 1-10 characters in a zone designed for level 60's (they were litterally aggroing the level 60 elite bugs from outside of the town that would then run in and kill the lowbies trying to follow the events), high level characters everywhere taking their revenge on the lowbies who were comming in uninvited and lagging up their server.
That many characters, all in close proximity, means a lot of data that has to be sent to all those players. More that a lot of player's connections could handle, and those characters would get out of sync and they would appear to jump around randomly to other characters - only adding to the server strain.
No point in trying. The minute he got to the part about rogues needing a buff, you can tell he's full of shit six ways from sunday.
I've played a rogue for six months. They in no way need a buff. Warriors need a minor nerf on overpower and paladins need a bubble nerf now that they can actually do something besides be invincible (clarifications: Overpower is an attack warriors can use after the enemy dodging that does immense damage. Based on the name and description, it should proc off of block and parry, not dodge and miss. "bubble" refers to a Paladin's multiple ways of being temporarily invincible).
Other than that? Rogues rule the roost. Mages are nothing to a dagger rogue, priests have one shot at saving themselves from a rogue, and then it's game over. A warlock without his succubus is fair game, and a warlock with one is just a matter of waiting until the right time to hit him. I hate using he WoW cliche "learn2play," but it really applies to the grandparent. If your a rogue, and you're getting pwned by other classes, you're not picking your fights properly.
Stockades usually gets "stocks"
It's been commented that Bridge Commander, with all of the addons people have developed for it, could have immense potential for an open-ended game like that. It's already possible with mods like Kobayashi Maru to just fly around and explore, all sorts of freedom to play around with your ship's power distribution, repair stations, dozens and dozens of different ships, distribute crew, and even beam over to a crippled enemy ship and take it over (GTA style). There's already dynamic generation of ships (construction yard mods, and the "distress call" feature that will cause random ships to warp in from neighboring systems to help/hinder you)
There's only so much you can do to mod a game that wasn't really meant to be fully moddable, though. It would be amazing to see an open ended epic game, even just on the scale of Freelancer, using the same systems that Bridge Commander has.
The control was a little bit like Homeworld, with the ability to send ships above or below the normal plane of play. It kept the top-down traditional RTS view, though, and units stop dead to fight, unlike homeworld. It had its good points and bad points, but overall, it was a solid RTS game and actually FELT like Star Trek.
Personally, the only Star Trek game I still play is Bridge Commander (and even then, it's only because of the sheer number of mods and addons available. The original game had barely a dozen ships, most of which (*cough* Galor class) were pitifully balanced against the Federation ships.
I had the same idea a while ago. I've got level 15 alts planted on a couple of the top servers. I was planning on watching on the first server to finish, but after this, I think I'll wait. The second or third should be a bit less flooded since people will have been there and done that already.
I was hoping that my server would be done early, we were around 10 in the rankings at first. Now, we're down around 30 or 40 in the rankings, but unless the alliance side gets its act together and getting stranglekelp (They haven't broken 2000 of that stuff yet) we're going to hit a brick wall in a week or two.
Not to mention Best Buy will also have twice the fights, twice the shortages, twice the $2000 ebay auctions, twice the clerks afraid to go to work and face angry parents who weren't smart enough to order their PS3/Revolution months ago and now can't get little Billy his Christmas present.
Seriously, look at history - do any of us expect that Sony or Nintendo will NOT have launch shortages? Sony's history suggests their shortage will be even worse than the 360's. Of the three console makers, Nintendo's the only one with a good track record of release volumes, and even they've had long lines and short supplies at nearly every turn. Their record of late releases for the N64 and GC at least mean they haven't had to compete in a double-rush with another big console release. I was hoping that Sony would fall a bit more behind, or Nintendo would make their much earlier optimistic release schedule, just to avoid this sort of mess that will only hurt and/or annoy everybody involved.
It'll be the same story as every new release: There'll be a lot of griping and complaining, and those of us with six braincells to rub together will just wait until March to buy ours.
In my case, still the 360. Provided Sony does follow through with the one specific bit of DRM they've talked about in the past. Remember the article a while back, when Sony wanted to stop "abuses" like game rentals and used-game resale? Their plan was basically that when a game disk is first run, the console will mark it somehow so that the game will no longer run on any other PS3 hardware. If they do follow through with this - and I'm still moderately confident they won't - I'll go with the 360.
Then it's not really free, is it?
I, and most people, count the cost of a game as the amount of money spent pursuant to a game from the time they decide they want the game until the time they're playing it (plus any recurrant costs). Unless you've already got Half Life 2 and are just now deciding to play Counterstrike (and that's often not the case - CS has always been the mod that sells Half Life better than Half Life sells itself), your cost is $50.
AA, your cost is zero. There's no "base game" to install onto, no shareware to register. There's a download time, or you can buy it bargain bin at some stores, or you can go to an army recruiter. Many of them have the disks there for free (that's where I got my copy. Just be careful - some of those recruiters are ruthless and will have paperwork ready for you to sign in about 2 minutes).
Metal Gear SOLID was not on the NES or C64. The "Solid" title was tacked on when the series went 3D. Metal Gear Solid games are on the Gamecube, Xbox, PS2, and I'm not sure about PC. Splinter Cell is, and it's a more engaging and less rediculous game anyway.
The fact that you've found a girl who doesn't get that weird look in her eye when you tell her your playing Nethack is not something to be overlooked. An above poster is on the right track: Don't try to fight it, build on it. Get her into MUDs, maybe buy her Neverwinter Nights and find a few persistent world servers she can try out, introduce her to MMORPGs if she's doing well on lighter stuff.
See, by trying to break her of video games, you're basically trying to create a typical girlfriend. If you succeed, it'll only be a matter of time before she starts complaining that you spend more time raiding with your guild than you do taking her out, or that you should find a more grown-up hobby than games. Before you know it, you'll be married and your video games will be up in a garage sale like so many gamers before you.
A little bit off from what the grandparent said. If you make ten units, you pay 25 cents each. If you make 1,000 units, it's still 25 cents each for a total of $250. Now, if you make 1,000,000 units, it's 25 cents each for a total of $250,000. The royalty caps here, though. So now, if you make 2,000,000 units, you pay the $250,000 cap, making it only 12.5 cents per unit.
I still think it is them, at least in part. Most console releases are met with shortages, waiting in line in the cold only to find out they're sold out already, and so forth. It's the way the companies play the game. It's how a lot of companies play the game. It worked with Tickle-me-Elmo, it's works with cars, toys, designer clothes, sports drinks - virtually everything. When people CAN'T get something, for some reason, many of them will want it MORE. You start off with a moderate demand and insufficient supply. A lot of people will see that it's sold out. Maybe they didn't want it specifically - Maybe little Billy would have been just as happy with a GI-Joe, but then Billy's parents see that Tickle-me-Elmo is flying off the shelves like hotcakes. This tells them, "Hey, a lot of people are buying that. That must be the toy every kid wants! I bet Billy wants one, too." It's subtle, but every holiday season since the invention of the advertisement bears the same sort of patten.
Heck, back in high school, I even saw this in food service. I worked concessions at a race track for a few summers. We served a lot of food, but very few people ever ordered our mushroom swiss burgers. We kept two in the steam table at a time, and prepared more from regular hamburgers as we sold them. It was a good day if we sold four of them, and on off weeks without a big race, we'd close at 9 and probably not sell any.
However, once in a while, we'd get one person order two, and the next person order one. We have to tell that person we're sorry but we don't have any ready right now, but if you'll just hang on a couple minutes, we'll fix one and would you like a coke while you wait.
After that, almost invariably, several of the people already in line will also want one. As soon as one of us said we were short on something (this would also happen with chicken strips, which usually didn't sell very well but would occasionally sell faster than we could fry them), we'd get a short run on it. Often, "just to try," or even more revealing, customers have said to me, "Hey, you sell out of those, they must be popular. Give me one, too." I can only imagine that a good number of those people get out to their seats and realize they just paid an extra $2 on top of the cost of a regular burger for a spoon full of mushroom sauce and a slice of cheese they could have had for a quarter and that they really did just want a pepsi after all.
All true, but the "So?" comes in when you remember that a bad translation, a bad sequel, or a bad remake hurt themselves far more than just a regular bad movie does. How many times have you heard, "It was a good movie, but it was a bad sequel."?
Every furthur Boll movie that comes out leaves me more and more convinced that the article a while back on Slashdot was true: He's not even trying to succeed, he's using some obscure tax hole to bilch investors.
A few of these movies, I've actually believed COULD work. In the hands of almost any other director, with a more carefully selected cast - actors who can actually work the character, not just bring a big name, pretty face, or nice boobs to the show - I believe they could have been good movies, and at least decent translations of the games behind them.
as for MMORPGs, people know why the industry is stuck in another cycle. It's extremely expensive to make an MMORPG. There was a story here on Slashdot in early November, and according to that, Blizzard took a $32 million loss last year from the launch, and has only made $7 million profit on the game this year. Not to mention that WoW's been in development for years. It's hard to make one work (WoW had a strongly established name to pull in users right away. Everquest and Ultima Online had to start from scratch and took longer to grow), and it's hard to keep players. Plus, once you launch, development is a nearly constant process for the life of the game. Everquest had expansions comming every few months at one point, and added content to the core game and all of the expansions after going live. WoW has an expansion comming, and has had probably eight big content patches released. A non MMO game, development is mostly over after launch. A few patches, a couple new maps, sometimes an expansion pack a year later.
Sure, MMOs are big money, but they're prohibitively expensive to launch one that'll compete against the current big names, and it's possible (probably likely) to lose a lot of money.
I'm pretty sure Everquest is past the billion mark. It's varied from hundreds of thousands to millions of customers for a number of years now. WoW's got a good shot at the shortest time to reach that billion, though.
Although, despite what the complainers on the WoW forums say, they're nowhere near that in profits. They took $37 million loss last year, and a $7 million profit this year, both largely due to WoW.
At least now, the major server madness is past. It's unlikely they'll be doing anymore multi-million dollar mass server replacements like they did several times between launch and the beginning of this year.
They haven't halted game development. They still put out news for Starcraft: Ghost occasionally, and over the summer, Infoceptor (Blizzard-only game news site) had a short interview about their next unannounced project.
Give them a break: They spent $150 million last year taking WoW gold, not to mention that it was THE unannounced project that'd been in the works since Brood War was released. Even without WoW, it was years between games.
From my own past experience with declining MMOGs, it won't really get the point accross. Developers very often dig into a vision of their game and not even the enjoyment of their users will dislodge them. I watched one game go from tens of thousands of players - not enough to make the developers rich, but enough to pay for itself and give the dev team some "night job" income - down to barely a hundred now because of the increasing amount of tedium and clicking being added to the game, and for stupid reasons or no reasons at all.
Me, and thousands of others quitting didn't put a dent in their resolve to make a game that can be used to test the effective lifespan of any mouse on the market, but it did do good: I am no longer annoyed by the game, I know longer have to deal with the developers ass-backwards approach to problem solving, and I have an extra $12 a month to spend on other things. I'm happy.
A demo can also make a game look better than the final product. Certain aspect of gameplay just doesn't seem worthwhile? Leave it out of the demo. Buggy level of the game? Dron't include it, or even skip over it and put in the really cool levels.
Something that I think Blizzard did an amazing job with the Starcraft demo was actually making it a different storyline than the game. Instead of including the first few missions from Starcraft itself, the demo had a different campaign titled Precursor which ended on a cliffhanger and set the stage for the beginning of the full version of the game.
When they discovered Pluto's two small outer moons a while back, I'd seen some people temporarily refering to them as Donald and Mickey. Not sure if either has final names, but I still liked the suggested Styx and Cerberus.
No, don't you know your logic? Validity and truth are independent. For a rediculous example, it's very easy to construct a VALID argument showing that the sky is purple and has pink polka dots. It's based on faulty assumptions and yeilds falty conclusions, but it is still entirely valid.
They aren't just separate, but in some cases they're specifically different characters in the same world. Link and Zelda from Link the the Past were distant ancestors of the Link and Zelda from the NES games. Before Windwaker came out, I'd seen at least one post on GameFAQs linking to a fan page that tried to establish continuity through the series, and even then, there were at least three and possibly as many as five Links and Zeldas. Since then, Minish Cap would suggest at least one new pair, since (if it's accepted as the first origin of Link's hat), it would be chronologically first, before LttP, and Link in LttP had never previously weilded a sword.
Anyway, I digress... It's much easier to take the games individually as independent stories or as shorter series and not try to chain them all together into one epic story. It's just as bad as fanboys trying to invent continuity between Final Fantasy 6 and Final Fantasy 7, just doesn't work without assuming things that seem to contradict the games.