"If the pixels can respond to any signal within 5 ms"
I took the liberty of adding the emphasis to the keyword there, because that's the whole problem with the current generation of LCDs.
Yes, the day a TFT can completely switch between any two colours in 5ms or less, will be the day we'll stop complaining about ghosting anyway. Heck, even 12ms will do just nicely, _if_ it can actually switch between any two colours in that time.
But the problem with current monitors is that the numbers claimed by the manufacturer are bullshit. They're the best case scenario, not the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario for a "5ms" monitor can be almost 30ms for a single transition. (See some of the measurements on Tom's Hardware, and boggle.) Or you have "16ms" monitors which actually switch slower than "20ms" ones. (Not a joke: again, see any review on Tom's or Anandtech, and boggle at how the 20ms panel is actually the faster one.) Or "25ms" panels showing 140ms worth of actual latency.
The industry has been pretty much left to define for itself wth it wants to measure and how, and what ideal scenario numbers it wants to publish. And unsurprisingly, it did pick the ones that the marketroids liked, not the ones who bear any relevance for the consumer. So you get stuff like numbers measured in perfect darkness, and only until it gets within (an ever increasing) x% of the desired colour, etc.
Most of the improvement between the 140ms displays of the late 90's and the "6ms" displays of today isn't the actual panel, it's in creative measuring and advertising. The real latency did go down, yes, but the claimed latency went down exponentially faster. Every time the actual latency halved, someone invented an even more creative way to claim half of that again in marketting materials.
And then you have outright bullshitters. E.g., manufacturers who shamelessly advertise lower response times than even the panel manufacturer claims. (Sony was for years such a case: they quoted either the time to rise or the time to fall, long after everyone else had been dragged kicking and screaming into quoting the sum. So your uber-expensive new "25ms" Sony would in fact have more latency than a "40ms" from Iiyama.)
_That's_ the problem with those latency numbers: so far they're bogus, and they're likely to stay bogus. When that 5ms monitor hits the shelves, it may be (and probably _will_ be) actually nowhere _near_ being able to display a clean 200 fps. You're lucky if you can get a clean 30fps worth of latency on the worst case scenarios, and for more "normal" 12-16ms monitors you might get 10-20 fps class ghosting.
No. You can learn how Go works in 5 minutes. It takes time to master the strategies, yes, but you can start putting pieces on a board in 5 minutes or less.
The theory that we always wanted that, but had to wait for the technology to get there, has one problem: if you look at the best-sellers of the era where it was already possible to render photo-realistic blood and boobs, the best-sellers _didn't_.
E.g., let's talk The Sims. You know, _the_ game which outsold any Id or Epic or Rockstar title ever, as PC game sales go. It also sold 7 expansion packs, priced like full games.
The most violence you could see in the game was a cartoonish cloud with arms and legs poking out of it in random places, and even for that you had to actively try hard enough to get them to hate each other enough. And, as published, it had no sex whatsoever in it. The most you could get them to do was hug or kiss. That's all.
And yet not only it outsold stuff like SOF which was marketted _only_ as having more realistic bloody textures, or any other FPS for that matter. It also vastly outsold its own clones which tried to play the sex card big time, such as "Singles". (And to a lesser extent, "The Partners." I'm talking orders of magnitude outsold.
E.g., take WoW, which at 3.5 million subscribers is _the_ best selling MMO ever. We're talking almost 9 times as many subscribers as EQ at its peak, and some 14-15 times as many subscribers as UO, which invented the genre. (And just in case someone feels a need to say "bah, only because they banked on the Warcraft name", no, TSO banked on the much bigger The Sims franchise name and peaked at 100,000 subscribers.)
And by virtue of those 3.5 million paying some 14$ a month, it's a bigger license to print money than even The Sims ever was, even including all 7 expansion packs.
WoW's graphics are, you guessed, cartoonish and often cutesy. (See the gnomes for example, especially the females.) Coming from titles like, say, COH or Anarchy online, my first thoughts when trying to create a male human warrior were, "eew, this guy looks like Popeye." No, literally.
Also while technically it does show (cartoonish) splashes of blood at some warrior moves, it doesn't have damage textures, nor gibs, nor blood trails all over the place. And you could play something like a mage or priest and never see even those splashes.
It also doesn't seem to play the nudity card much. Compared to AO's female armours, some of which were barely thin strips of kevlar on the _sides_ of the body, or COH's oversized-boobs-in-spandex (or better yet, without much spandex) approach, WoW is actually a surprisingly decent game. And the players tend to keep it that way too. In two months or so (ok, so I'm a newbie), I've only seen one character in a bikini so far.
(Not that most races would even seem even remotely sexy even if they got naked, except to a handful of people with some weird fetish. E.g., dwarf females look, well, like someone short and overweight. Taurens look, well, literally like cows. Undead look, well, like someone who was burried and rotting for a month, with patches of flesh missing and bones poking out.)
And yet it's the best selling MMO ever.
_The_ most played online FPS ever? Counter-Strike. When was the last time you saw realistic gore or nudity in it? Right.
Or conversely, let's look at a franchise that was driven into the ground by focusing only on bra size: Tomb Raider. Focusing all design just into giving Lara ever increasing melons didn't seem to work that well for Eidos, did it?
Etc.
For some reason people actually buy cartoonish games with not much blood or nudity. Even if the technology allows it. Go figure. Quality (including QA, a good interface, good balance, etc) seems to actually sell more copies than blood and violence do.
"Also, has he seen any of the old Atari and Intellivision ads? There were quite a few adults playing the games in those commercials. They were trying to sell to everyone back then."
Well, see, that's just the thing: they were trying to sell to everyone back then, not just to teenagers wanting to wank over some polygonal female character >:)
It has nothing to do with focus on adults, it has nothing to do with 8 bit vs 64 bit, it has to do with the learning curve. That's all. So all the rant about Sony vs Nintendo is nice, but off-topic at best.
Stuff changes, yes, but it changes in a direction that's harder and harder to grasp for a new gamer. Regardless of age, a new gamer is utterly lost in most current PC games. Kids just happen to be an example of new gamer, but try introducing your old mom or grandma to some games and you may notice the exact same phenomenon. That's the whole problem.
_You_ have likely had the privilege of having that learning curve flattened across a decade or two. We older ones have started on stuff that had just one joystick and often one that only went either let-right or up-down, but you only had to use one of the axis. (E.g., Pong.) Then we had a joystick and one button. Then a joystick and two buttons, but still, you had to mash A and shoot bombs with B when it hit the fan.
Now a console has some 12 buttons to memorize, and some PC games need you to use half the keyboard.
The move to 3D too introduced a bunch of stuff that's an extra pain in the butt, without actually making gameplay any richer. E.g., also wrestling the camera. E.g., FPS "jump puzzles" just for the sake of one extra thing to spend time learning, not because it actually adds anything to the story.
Other stuff was also added just for the sake of complex controls, not because it was needed to enable you to do more stuff. E.g., at the end of the day, between Final Fight and my martial artist in City Of Heroes, the difference isn't that big: both run around and punch hordes of NPCs in the face. But COH makes me also manage some 5 toggles, several buffs, an endurance (mana) bar, and try to string the best combo of 7 different attacks.
Etc.
That's the problem: new players are supposed to just _know_ already stuff that you and I learned in two decades.
Well, here's evidence you can see for yourself
on
Diary of an Aging Gamer
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Ever felt a need to complain about 11 year olds in a MMO? I know I've seen several people complain. And in one Taskforce on COH when someone said he had to go and he'll let his son control the character, the answer from the team leader was swift: "Is he older than 13?"
It's not even about kids as such, it's about new gamers, IMHO. Try introducing a older non-gamer to some modern titles and watch them be just as clueless and disoriented for hours. Try it, really. I know I've experimented on various family members.
In some genres (e.g., some MMOs) they're just utterly hopeless between steering a character in 3D, wrestling the camera, having to mix 15 different attacks and buffs, watching the enemy _and_ your health _and_ your spell timer simultaneously, all at the same time. They got utterly lost between all actions they had to manage at the same time.
It used to be that you only needed 1 joystick or Missile Command, or only the joystick in PacMan or Pong. A new gamer would understand all there is to the controls within _seconds_. And we kids were the ones who ruled supreme and topped the high score tables.
We grew up gently on more and more complexity, learning that we need just one more button, one more thing to watch for, one more nonsensical action to take for granted, one more RL instinct to ignore. It slowly piled up. New players nowadays are supposed to _already_ know all that.
As someone else called it in a post, some time ago, there's a "game grammar" you're pretty much supposed to know. What goes where, what goes well with what. And that's what it is.
And very few games take the time to hold your hand and guide you through it. To abuse the grammar analogy some more, a lot of tutorials basically assume that you already did beginner and intermediate language courses already, and they'll just give you some of the finer points. "Here's a list of words. Now use them in a small essay proving your mastery of the ablative and less-than-perfect tense, or this monster will bite your balls off." But you're supposed to already know what "ablative" is, how/when you use that case, and wth of a tense "less than perfect" is. Or for that matter WTH of a language _is_ it you're supposed write in.
It must be said, not all games. But some can be a nightmare as learning curve goes.
"This sound an awful lot like how parts of WoW work."
I took the liberty of highlighting the keyword there: parts. I do play WoW, and its use of instances is at best minimal.
Try COH sometime. At _least_ 75% of missions are instances, and everything else is straight hunting and/or optional. You start on instances at level 1. Even the tutorial area has an instance. (Think having an instance right in the Northshire Abbey or Teldrasil or Anvilmar newbie areas, for a WoW equivalent.)
WoW has instances, yes, but so few and far in between, they can almost be ignored for the purpose of discussing gameplay. If you did an average over a couple of months, on the average for each hour spent outside you have maybe a couple of minutes spent in instances.
Well, for example, I know Rome: Total War refused to run on someone's computer because he had Alcohol installed. (For precisely the same reason you mention: he had some different games for his little kids on his computer, and didn't trust the kids with the CDs.)
Also the one I had in mind when I bitched about randomly crashing to desktop was "Die Gilde." ("Europa 1400: The Guild" for you 'merkins. But I don't know if that version has the same copy protection. It's not uncommon to have different ones between Europe and the USA.) The devs came out and said that it's _supposed_ to randomly crash if it detects Daemon Tools. I guess it's as official as it gets when you have the lead dev posting it on the publisher's board.
These are the easy ones, since it's at least obvious you have a problem if the game won't even start. There are however games which are sneakier in their mis-guided attempt at punishing pirates (read: inconveniencing legit buyers.) They'll gradually screw up your gameplay or difficulty level or outright make it impossible to finish some quests or whatever, if they think you're a pirate.
E.g., Operation Flashpoint had it right in the readme that it will screw up your gameplay if it thinks you're a pirate. E.g., Gangsters I've already mentioned: it threw all your gang in jail for as little as having more than one CD drive. (And I mean even physical drives, not actually detecting emulation software.)
Those can be a bitch to diagnose that you even have a copy-protection problem, because they don't just say so. I know I've wasted a very stressful week trying to find out WTF am I doing wrong in Gangsters, until the devs came out and announced that it was a known bug of the copy-protection. I honestly thought I sucked badly at playing the game, if the effects I saw were in-game, not some copy-protection message.
But there probably are a dozen times more where the devs didn't come out and say it, so we'll never know.
"Can someone name 1 CRPG where the final greatest most superior weapon in the game is NOT a sword."
- Fallout and Fallout 2,
- Restricted Area (I finished it with a Flamethrower),
- Shenmue (martial arts all the way),
- Jade Empire (you need martial arts until the end, plus as "ultimate weapons" go, the dual axes do more damage than the sword. Or you can use a naginata for range. Or you can morph into a jade golem. Or whatever.)
- Deus Ex (personally I would count it as a FPS, but then everyone seems to think it's an RPG. So there you go: it had no swords whatsoever.)
- Entomorph: Plague of the Darkfall (if I remember right, it didn't even have any weapons)
- Another War (_all_ weapons in it were WW2 German and Soviet weaponry. And, oh, the _final_ weapon, the one that slays the big final boss is... a potato. I'm not kidding.)
Etc. That's just a 5 minute exercise, off the top of my head.
"Exactly."
Exactly. Try complaining about stuff you know anything about next time;)
"CRPGs all have the same design concept. Different characters, missions, but the same shit."
See, that's just the thing: "Different characters, missions". _That_ is what we play CRPGs for.
The weapons are just a prop to keep that story, those missions, going. I don't really care _what_ that ultimate weapon is shaped as, as long as the things I have to _do_ are different.
"That's why MMORPG will take over all of RPGs in the future. It gives you that variety flavor."
Hell, yes, all the variety ranging beating rats with a stick, to... umm... beating bigger rats with a bigger stick. And then you level up and, it's really amazing, they let you use a bigger stick on bigger rats. And you only need to repetitively do that for another week before you get an even bigger stick and bigger rats. Absolutely amazing, yeah.
It's like watching paint dry, except they let you use a wide variety of colours. This level you get to watch emerald green paint dry, over and over again, the next level they might let you watch teal paint dry. And if you go to a SF themed MMO, instead of a generic medieval one, you might get to watch paint dry on a metal fence instead of a wooden one. Isn't that some mind-blowing variety?
Nasty wisecracks aside, MMOs actually have the _least_ variety. Yeah, they give you plenty of different skins for the rats and for the stick you beat them with, yes. But that's _all_: a bunch of different graphics.
When it comes to the actual things you have to _do_, there all the MMOs combined have zero variety. Essentially everyone has been making a clone of the exact same game since the '90s, and not even a complex or detailed game. A game where _all_ there is to do is run around clicking on NPCs and counting up your XP. Yay.
Here's why it matters: because "FUN" means different things to different people. You can't just say "game X is FUN". Fun by what criteria? For whose tastes?
Most people aren't generic players of anything published. Some like a story, some don't. (E.g., me, I thought the tons of text in Planescape Torment were a great story, whereas my father thinks that _any_ text or conversation is too much blabber instead of getting to the fighting part.) Some like lots of combat, some don't. Etc.
That's why we have those genre names: to tell us roughly what to expect from a given game. I want to know when I buy a game if it's a real CRPG (which I like), or a FPS (which I'm hardly interested in), or a MMO (which I find boring), or a RTS (which I bloody hate), or what.
So does it matter if it's RPG or not? Hell yes, of course it matters, if I'm looking for an RPG. Does it matter if it's really a hack and slash? Well, yes, because that bumps it a few notches down my list: I might still buy it, if I don't find anything more interesting, or I might not if I do. Does it matter if it's really RTS, but they called it an RPG because marketting said RPGs sell? Hell yes, because I bloody hate RTS, and knowing that I wouldn't buy it if it was the last game on Earth.
Which I suppose is why marketroids try to blur the genres, to the point of not meaning anything any more. Everything just gets to get all possible buzzwords, so you can't say "nah, I don't want this genre" any more. We're heading into an age where everything will be just labelled by a string of meaningless buzzwords ("real-time continuous-turn-based first-person isometric-view squad-based-tactics action-adventure RPG") that don't tell you anything about the game any more.
"I just know that I've had way more FUN with Final Fantasy VII and Diablo than some supposedly "open-ended, non-linear" RPGs like Daggerfall or Morrowind, which is just BOOOORING."
Well, bingo, you just made my point. You told me there that you like a certain (sub)genre and dislike another one. So wouldn't it be nice to know which of them a given game fits in, before buying it?
That's the whole point. I'd very much like that when I read "RPG" on a box, I can expect it to have, you know, all the elements that traditionally make an RPG. I.e., an interactive story, a certain way of using statistics to resolve combat, a chance to customize my character, etc.
That's not to say other genres can't be fun on their own. I do play other genres too. All I'm saying is: FFS, everything doesn't have to be called an RPG.
If it doesn't play like an RPG, call it something else. That way, those who like that kind of games, can know it's their thing, and those who expect a real RPG can know they can save their money.
There are plenty of games with combat nowadays. RTS, FPS, action-adventure, you name it. In fact, you're hard pressed to find a game without combat nowadays.
So no offense, but using that to define an RPG is the kind of thing that makes me wish marketting people were lined up and shot.
RPG used to mean something. Now it's just a dilluted buzzword slapped onto the box, just because it's fashionable. It's been eroded and dilluted to the point of being meaningless.
Even Daikatana sported "RPG elements" on the box, and, you know, it was just a FPS. I've even read some site calling Gran Turismo an RPG, because you upgrade your car, or I've had people calling some fighting game an RPG because it has a health bar and combat. That's how dilluted the term has become.
Whole unrelated genres have been renamed once PC CRPGs became a fashionable buzzword. E.g., you no longer have "scrolling beat-em-ups" (e.g., Final Fight) you have "action-RPGs" or they're called outright "RPG" nowadays. Never mind that they have the same mechanics of a completely unrelated genre. Nah, marketting just had to slap "RPG" on the box.
Or take MMORPG, since you mention World Of Warcraft, which basically threw all the elements of an RPG out and nevertheless calls itself an RPG. Yes, I'm not surprised that all you do is fight in WoW, because that's _all_ there is to that whole genre. You have zero control over your character's development, zero plot, zero interactive story, zero influence on the world.
It's just a work simulator, where you spend countless hours doing the same thing over and over again: beating up rats with a stick. You start with a small stick and small rats ("young wolves") and you spend hours working your way towards being allowed a bigger stick and bigger rats. Yay.
But ok, at least it's called a MMORPG, so those of us who want a _real_ RPG can avoid it. Nevertheless, it just serves to further erode the meaning of "RPG". Whole generations of 13 year old retards are raised on thinking that repetitive bashing rats with a stick and "HOW I MINE FOR FISH??? NE1??? R U A GRL?" is what "RPG" means.
So here's the thing: again, RPG used to mean something well defined. And, no offense, but I'm sick and tired of people who _don't_ want an RPG in the first place, coming and arguing how the genre should be changed to something else.
If you just want lots of combat, there are already plenty of games that have that in spades. Get a FPS, RTS or god knows what else, and there you go. You don't need to destroy yet another genre some of us still love, by turning it into yet another generic game that's 100% about combat.
As I've already mentioned, I know of several games already that intentionally crash or refuse to even start if they even think you _might_ have Daemon Tools or Alcohol installed.
Well, I've played computer games since '84 or so. So, well, I guess I _am_ "somewhat" whiny about it by now. It's a lot of time of being inconvenienced by various flavour of a concept that never worked.
What makes it the most exasperating is seeing stuff that, well, can only be explained by sheer stupidity. Such as seeing games released with a copy-protection for which a generic crack already exists. I mean, the thing was already cracked before the game even went gold. Who did they expect to deter there? Even if maybe Joe Average doesn't know how to search for a crack for the protection driver, instead of the crack for "Shooting Guy 2", someone _will_ repackage it as a "Shooting Guy 2 no-CD crack".
Can get pretty depressing, you know?
Anyway, I like your idea of authenticating only once when installing it. Of course, it will get cracked too, as people will just hack the piece of code that checks the activation file. But at least it will inconvenience us legit buyers less, too. I like that.
"Yeah, so that won't deter pirates. So what? Nothing else does either."
Well, bingo. You've summarized there the _whole_ problem with this whole anti-piracy idiocy: it inconveniences everyone _except_ the pirates. It inconveniences _only_ the honest paying customers.
Now I _am_ firmly against piracy, and I'm proud to say that I legally own a copy (well, a license in software lingo) for every single piece of software on my computer. If something could actually deter pirates, I'd be for it.
But that's the whole point: it doesn't. Not only you can always find a no-CD crack or a warezed version, in most cases it's available actually _before_ the game hits the stores. Even the few people who still are too clueless to google for a download, will get the no-CD crack from a friend who knows how to.
And in the meantime it's people like me, people who actually paid for the game, who get to put up with hassles like:
- being locked out of a game I've paid for, because the CD got scratched.
- having my game screwed up without even telling me why, because some broken retarded piece of copy-protection was buggy and thought a legit copy was pirated. (E.g., Gangsters. Before the patch, if you had more than one CD drive, or had the game CD anywhere but in "D:", the retarded copy protection would think you're a pirate and throw all your gang members in jail. Repeatedly. No, I'm not kidding. It's too retarded to make up.)
- having a game crash to desktop periodically without any explanation, and after a month or so the devs come and say something like "uh, it's supposed to crash if it detects <insert brand of CD copying software> on your machine." Which I didn't, but apparently the copy protection was retarded enough to think so anyway. (Plus, let's get for a moment into the whole issue of them deciding for me which software I'm allowed to run on _my_ machine. How about they piss off and mind their own business?)
- being locked out of playing a game I've paid for in, say, Wine, because it comes with a retarded copy protection that wants to be loaded as a Windows driver or such.
Etc.
So now you propose, what? That for the few hundreds of games I legally own (yeah, literally. So I don't have a life), I should also dig through a big box of code-wheels and other retarded gizmos to be allowed to play? I hope you'll have some understanding if I'm a lot less than thrilled by that idea.
I wish they just stopped this idiocy completely already. It has one single job to do: deter pirates. If it doesn't do that, why keep such an annoyance around?
DRM isn't as much a conspirac theory as a fact of life, and regardless of whether that's the reason for the Intel migration, it _will_ happen.
The fact is, being a monopoly is every CEO's wet dream. Pure idea capitalism, neo-classical theory style, is where no-name white boxes are now: a place where everyone and their grandma can start building their own and undercutting your prices. _That_ is what an ideal free market is. It's good for the consumer, but it's not where you want your company to be, if you have a choice.
What you want is a locked-in customer base. A hi-tech-style captive market that you can milk and fleece to line your pockets. (Well, that is: what you'd want if you were an MBA instead of a nerd raised on ideals of honesty and of playing nice.)
And historically, the _whole_ history of computing has been about that: whoever thought they owned a market segment, fought tooth-and-nail to keep you locked in, by any means necessary. Back in the stone age of computing, IBM went to court to try to stop the software market from even being born: they wanted to be the only ones you can buy software from for your IBM computer. And from there it went on to be a long sordid tale of FUD (again, it was by IBM, long before MS), connector patents, undisclosed APIs, discriminatory contracts, the Unix fragmentation (noone really wanted portability, if they could have you locked in instead), etc.
And Apple isn't immune either. E.g., the iTunes DRM may be necessary for the RIAA to aggree, but being locked-in so only an iPod plays it, isn't. In fact, the RIAA openly dislikes that. It's all about Apple very much enjoying having a locked-in market.
It's no conspiracy theory, it's no paranoia, it's just human nature. Imagine you're a CEO and there's this techological thingie which promises to give you complete control over what can run on that machine, and how much the user must pay to be allowed to run it. Or if you sell entertainment ormedia, you can control what the user can do with it, how often, etc. Make them pay _again_ as often as you wish, or make their whole collection unusable Napster-style if they dare cancel their subscription. (How's that for a lock-in?)
It's the thing that screams "TEH BIG MONIES!!!!11" in your face.
It's a wet dream. It's _the_ kind of wet dream where you don't just wake up to change your underwear, but rather you wake up sticky and have to change the mattress and blanket. _That_ kind of a wet dream.
Still, maybe I'm just lucky, but mine doesn't reset either. We also have a whole lot of XP workstations at work, and I don't seem to recall anyone complaining about resets on those.
The only situation where I've seen mine reset was with a faulty RAM stick, which is why I mentioned hardware failures.
Though I suppose, to be completely fair, faulty device drivers would also qualify as a way to crash it. Though even there, most major hardware manufacturers seemed to have cleaned up their act. (Via or ATI for example actually are producing quality drivers nowadays, not the kind of stuff they shoved out the door in the late '90s.) And probably even more fortunately, a lot of minor players no longer need to produce their own drivers. (E.g., most USB stuff nowadays just works through the normal Windows drivers.)
Sorry, wasn't any revisionist history, I meant the _Mozilla_ team went and made their very own widgets, skins, bug tracker, frameworks, and generally everything _except_ a browser for years. I know the "Firefox" branding is only recent, but, well, that's the kind of brain-fart one occasionally gets when writing in a hurry and hitting "Submit" without re-reading.
"There are several competiting ideas in economics of what a monopoly is, and none of them apply to Microsoft."
Well, yes, I took the time to actually read the whole article from that link. Indeed it doesn't apply to MS, or for that matter to any RL anti-trust situation.
Now I'm not anti-MS, or by Slashdot standards I'm sure some would call me pro-MS or a MS fanboy. But that article still misses the point by a mile.
It's talking from beginning to end about a situation where prices are strictly a matter of supply and demand, and the ratio between production and demand is the _only_ factor that determines price. (I.e., a 19th century style economy of scarcity.) In fact, an economy where everyone, monopolists included, can _only_ vary production output to affect the prices. Where if one company's product is priced too low, the _only_ thing they can do to affect the price is to destroy some of their stock of products.
Which is a nice dream, but that's not how it works for software. With software there's essentially an _infinite_ supply of any given version of Windows. That's not how MS sets the price. The costs of printing a few more CDs are negligible, so any company ever won't have any trouble ramping up production to sell as many copies as you want to buy.
E.g., it pretends throughout the article that the only entry barriers are product diferentiation and economies of scale. I.e., as if the _only_ way a monopolist could possibly prevent you from entering a market are advertising, releasing new models, and pricing them dirt-cheap.
Which has not been the case in any RL anti-trust case (I don't think anyone hit Coca-Cola with an anti-trust case for marketting a lot), and certainly isn't the case with MS.
The entry barrier to compete with Windows has _nothing_ to do with advertising budgets or with how fast they release new models. (If that was the case, Linux distros releasing a new model every 3 months would have won already.) The real entry barrier is having to compete with the whole interlocking set of pieces, not just with the OS alone.
Ditto for economies of scale. The situation isn't that MS sells Windows very cheaply due to economies of scale. Though with duplication costs being negligible, they certainly could. The point made during the anti-trust trial was that the price per copy actually went _up_ steadily, i.e., in the exact opposite direction than the economies of scale said.
Also it's a straw man anyway, since all modern anti-trust cases have to prove that the price increased for the consumers. I'm not aware of any company being accused of monopolistic practices simply because they could manufacture stuff cheaper.
And generally, the thrust of the whole article seems to be "but in a free market that works flawlessly and _strictly_ by ideal free market principles, it's not even possible to have a monopoly!" Well, duh! Yes, indeed, that's the whole point.
And that's why RL anti-trust cases are all about preventing stuff that's deliberately disrupting the whole free market idea. E.g., stuff like price fixing. E.g., maintaining artifficially high entry barriers, via controlling more than one market segment.
That's what it's all about, not advertising and economies of scale. If you just stick to advertising and ramping up production, I do believe no government in the world will ever bring an anti-trust lawsuit against you.
"That is quite a generalization; install Debian from CD and then repeat your claim that Linux lacks a raw quantity of apps."
While Debian is one thing I haven't actually used, I've installed from SuSE, RedHat, and Mandrake CDs, and write this on Gentoo. I'll still make that claim any day.
"Raw quantity of apps" means exactly nothing if it lacks the one I need. As I've said, the computer (OS included) is just a tool to an end. If it can't achieve the goal I need, it's not the tool I need.
If my goal is to, say, unscrew the screws off a GBA, I'm not interested in a great toolkit with a hundred thousand kinds of hammers. It either has the screw-driver I need, or it doesn't. Raw quantity of everything _else_ doesn't even start to be a consolation.
"If I were to claim that MacOS lacked apps because I was, say, a gamer, a textile designer and a studio engineer would promptly collapse on the floor laughing at me."
The point being? If you're a gamer, MacOS certainly has a lack of the applications _you_ need. Even said textile engineer might not use a Mac at home, if their hobbies included gaming.
"As someone who runs a full compliment of business-class network services in my house, I view your claim with amused skepticism."
As someone who has zero need for business-class network services in my house, I'm not even starting to be impressed.
And even if I had a need for that, it still wouldn't cover everything else. That's usually the problem with such niche views of the world. RL uses of a computer at home aren't just restricted to "but it runs Mozilla and I can install Squid and BIND on it."
RL uses of a computer might also include stuff like, yes, games. Even people who don't define themselves as hardcore gamers, might waste some hours playing some ActiveX Windows-only Backgammon on MSN or some shareware Windows-only PacMan variant or whatever. (E.g., Mom falls squarely in that category.)
Or it might include stuff like editing digital photos in Paintshop. The Gimp is fine for cheapskates like me who only occasionaly recolor some texture, but it's not something I'd recomend to my elderly relatives.
Or it might involve, surprise, actually specifically needing a MS program. I've received more Word forms when last looking for a job than I care to remember, half of which were rendered totally screwed up in OOo. And both at this company and the previous one I have to deal with Excel sheets which (A) contain scripting, and (B) again, render like crap in OOo.
Or it might involve actually needing IE, because some site doesn't even work in Mozilla or Opera. E.g., I can tell you first hand that WebSphere's admin page is broken in Opera, although it does work well with Mozilla or Konqueror. E.g., the company I work for, let's just say their whole intranet is completely broken in anything but IE. With Mozilla, Opera or Konqueror you can't even log in properly.
Etc.
The point is that it's quite the opposite of "aim for more precision". RL isn't made of narrow neatly confined niches. It's made most often of having to deal with a rather broad spectrum of wildly unrelated stuff. And having maybe 50% of them covered by Linux, no matter how well, won't even start to be a reason to switch.
"Microsoft have a relatively featureless, uninnovative browser compared to the competetion."
Well, good, because that's how I like my browsers. It's a browser, FFS, not a whole operating system. _All_ it has to do is render HTML pages. If it does that well, I'm perfectly content with that.
(And before you scream "Windows fanboy", go tell that to the makers of Firefox then too, because that one too had the goal of being "just a browser" all along.)
"Why is it so popular?"
Because back when it still mattered, and the browser market was up for grabs, Netscape was a festering pile of shit. It's easy to blame it on MS's OS monopoly and unfair practices, but the fact remains that Nescape was a buggy crashing mess on any OS, including Linux (yes, I ran it on Linux too) and on MacOS (yes, we had to test our web apps on Netscape on macs, too.)
Again, feel a need to scream "Windows fanboy"? Well, go tell that to the Debian developpers too, then. One of the standard Gentoo fortune cookies is of them joking about using Netscape's crashes to close several windows with a single click, and how that's progress.
And then came Firefox, which was for ages just vapourware. No, lemme rephrase that: it took years before even being worthy of being called "vapourware."
Instead of making a browser when it mattered, and when the market was up for grabs, they went into fantasy land and spent years coding their own widgets (yeah, I sooo need yet another widget set that doesn't act like any other app on that system), and their own bug tracking system (good one, no doubt, but not a browser), and god knows what else. That's _years_ spent reinventing wheels that already had been done better, instead of actually making a damned browser.
There were _years_ of IE being the _only_ usable choice. I don't know about you, but in my book that's reason enough for it to own the market.
"If you were the boss of a browser company, I am sure you be complaining too."
If I was the boss of a company who lost the market because they had a total crap product in the first place, and then spent years re-inventing the wheel instead of having a replacement product to sell... well, yes, guess I too would blame it on Microsoft. Beats accepting the cruel reality.
"After a few months, of going back and forth between both systems; I think a lot of people would chose Linux."
After some years of going back and forth between the two, I'm back again to deleting the Linux partition off my home machine. Yes, the system itself is nice, but with the lack of apps for it, I have very little use for it.
"With Linux you don't get the software rot,"
That's funny, I haven't noticed any on my Windows XP partition or my Windows 2000 box.
"or the adware/spyware/viruses."
I haven't got any on Windows either.
"Also, once you learn a little bit about how to use linux, it's more powerful and flexible."
Once you learn a lot less than that about Windows, you stop clicking "yes" on "Do you want your machine to be 0wn3d by the Russian spam mafia?" popups, which makes the previous point moot too.
Also once you learn that computers are no more than a tool to an end, you stop thinking that a powerful and flexible _OS_ is the alpha and the omega. The applications is where it's at. The OS only exists to load those.
If it was possible to load the same apps without an OS at all, trust me, most of us would happily do that too. See how some 100 million game consoles were sold only from the current generation, and noone said "nah, I'm not buying a PS2 until it starts showing a Microsoft Windows splash screen while booting."
The battle never was and never will be the over-simplified "Windows vs Linux" imaginary battle that is waged on Slashdot. The real choice, in the real world, is never about the OS itself. It's more like "what apps can you run on Windows vs what apps can you run on Linux?" That's really where Linux fails.
"And with Linux, you don't have msft on your back."
I'm not even sure what to make of that. I'm pretty sure I haven't had Microsoft on my back so far, whatever that means.
I know this will get modded down into oblivion, this being Slashdot where joining in the "windows sucks" choir is _popular_ and _fashionable_. But Windows XP is no longer Windows 98, and it's getting tiresome to hear the same rehashed bullshit that was only true in the 90's.
"People quit M$ because they are sick and tired of dishing out bucketloads of money everytime they want to do anything, because they are sick of rebooting 400 times a day, because they are sick of BSODs.. And on and on and on..."
No, again, XP is no longer Windows '98. Have you even used a Windows XP system lately? No, I don't think so. I haven't seen one BSOD-ing even once, unless there's actually a hardware fault. (E.g., if you think you're so l33t for running CL3 memory at CL2 and your CPU running 20% higher than the speed it was sold for. You can crash any system, Linux included, that way.)
"An entire OS on a single CDROM that does NOTHING out of the box except get you on the internet and get infected before you can patch it.."
Again, I'll call that fanboy bullshit. The last XP SP2 I've installed never got virused.
Oh, wait, you presumably mean "but if you install an old unpatched Windows 2000 with an unpatched IE 5 you'll get virused." Which is the usual fanboy loaded comparison: let's compare an old unpatched Windows installation to a new fully patched Linux box. Well, gee.
Well, you try running an equally old and unpatched Linux distro, and then we'll talk. You know, since Windows 2000 or '98 are the ones used to hand-wave through the "windows sucks" bullshit, it's only fair to compare them to a distro from the same years. I seem to recall that the statistic for 2000, was that you'd get rooted within half an hour if you went online without a firewall.
"I didn't want to spend hundreds and hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a word processor, a paint program, virus protection, firewall, etc..."
Bullshit again. The Gimp, OOo and a bunch of others are available on Windows just as well as on Linux. Those of us who do pay for something else, pay for the extra functionality that Gimp, OOo and the others don't have.
"Oh yeah, and I have ZERO pirated stuff.. ZERO... No warez, no serialz, no gamez, nothing.."
Well, neither do I. So your point is? The usual fanboy bullshit along the lines of "everyone is using Windows just because they pirate everything"? Or what?
It may come as a surprise to you, but even by BSA's bullshit inflated statistics, most people are _not_ pirates. And BSA exists only to cry "wolf!", so they do that lots. Yet study their inflated statistics for the USA or western Europe sometimes, and you might be surprised. There just isn't that much piracy to support the fanboy idiocy that everyone running Windows is only doing it because they pirate everything.
It may come as a surprise to you, but some of us actually _paid_ for Windows, and for everything else on it, and found it worth every single cent. And why not? If the choice is between (A) a system which costs money, and (B) one which is utterly useless to me, trust me, I'll fork over the dough for A every single time.
The illusion of urgency does serve the point of making it all seem more heroic. There's a reason why in movies they stop the bomb when the countdown is blinking at 2 seconds and not when it still has a good 18 hours left.
IMHO it says "you're _the_ one". Not "one of them". If you stop something in the last 2 seconds, it's fairly clear that if you fail there isn't much time for someone else to come do it. If there are 18 hours left on the countdown, hey, you could have called the bomb squad instead.
And then there is one game which did exactly what you say: told you it's not urgent and you have all the time in the world. In fact, there are at least a few more centuries, if not millenia, before it's really a threat. Don't worry if you fail, don't take yourself too seriously, another hero will eventually come and finish it. It goes above and beyond the call of duty to tell you that.
That game was Morrowind.
And, frankly, I just found that story to be a major turn-off. And yes I am aware that many people did like Morrowind for the sheer size and open-endedness of running around jumping into random caves for a quick hack-and-slash, or doing some fetch-quest for a minor village noone else even existed. But I haven't read anywhere anyone saying that MW's main quest was particularly great or felt epic/heroic/whatever.
The problem, however, exists in other games that you're supposed to just know that you're supposed to ignore that urgency in the story. You're supposed to play in a schizophrenic state of mind where you simultaneously suspend disbelief in the story and the urgency of your quest, _and_ know that you can run around saving pets from trees and taking years to breed the perfect Chocobo.
(Along with even more explicit inconsistencies between the actual game and the story/cutscenes. I still want to use a Phoenix Dawn on Aeris, dammit;)
There are a ton of RPGs where, yes, you're just not ready if you just did what you're told. I can think of a few (e.g., Lunar 2) where at one point, forget bosses, I couldn't even survive normal enemies in the next area without running around in the previous area, slaying random enemies for another 1-2 levels of xp and for money to buy new equipment. And that seems to me just wrong.
Maybe that's the real problem: artificially stretching the game beyond the real content, and assuming you'll _know_ you're supposed to do all that. There must be a more happy medium between (A) linear and (B) ignoring the main quest while running around saving little boys' puppies for extra xp.
For example, the Mandalorian camp in KOTOR2 comes to mind as an elegant solution to tell you basically, "ok, we have a bunch of optional quests here, but you must do at least half of them to proceed. Your choice which ones." It gives you a good reason to do them: you're not ignoring the main quest, that's the only way to get further in the main quest.
Maybe more games should use that kind of a plot device. Or in whatever other way, make those side-quests seem more relevant to the main quest, as opposed to feeling like you're ignoring the main quest.
"It isn't because christians, in general, feel like they need their own specialized forms of entertainment. It's because common elements of popular movies, rock, and fiction are antithetical to christian beliefs, if not downright disrespectful."
In other words, "It's not that X wants a different Y, it's that existing Y is unsuited for X". Uh, right. There must be a subtle difference there that completely escapes me.
"You could however have fictional characters living in that time frame who interact with the main characters in cutscenes and then go off and do their own thing. Like Bob, who hears about Jesus and must make his way to Jeruselem and encouters mini-quests on the way."
Reminds me of a joke.
So on TV Moskow during Communism they have this show on the aniversary of Lenin's birthday. Including an interview with comrade Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, a simple man who's talked to Lenin no less than three times.
Reporter: "So tell us, how did you meet comrade Lenin the first time."
Ivan: "Ah, yes, it was right before the revolution, and I was a simple farmer near Moskow. And one night this traveler knocks at my door and asks if he can sleep at my house for the night. I didn't know it was Lenin, noone had heard of him yet. So I'm thinking... hmm... if I say 'no', it's night, it's cold, there are wolves and bandits out there, that's not a nice thing to do. If I say 'yes', how do I know he's not some thief or worse? So I say, 'oh, fuck off!'"
Reporter: "Ahem, yeah, ok, let's skip to the second time you've met comrade Lenin then"
Ivan: "Ah, right, I was in Moskow selling vegetables at the market when all hell breaks loose. There's shooting and screams, and everyone's talking about some revolution, and this group comes running and bumps into me. And this guy, he was comrade Lenin, says, 'Please my good man! The Czar's soldiers are after us! Help us hide and regroup before they catch us!' So I'm thinking... hmm, if I say 'no', I might well have this guy's life on my conscience. If I say 'yes', well, the Czar's soldiers might well take mine. So I say, 'oh, fuck off!'"
Reporter: "Ahem, well, we're running out of time, so why don't you tell us how the third time went?"
Ivan: "Oh, right, right. So it was after the revolution, I had moved into town, and I'm selling newspapers. So this black car stops and comrade Lenin steps out and says, 'Ah, I know you. You don't happen to remember meeting me before, do you?' So I'm thinking... if I say 'no', he'll know I'm lying. If I say 'yes', I might well regret it. So I say, 'oh, fuck off!'"
Yup, I can see how that would work for a "Bob meets Jesus" game too;)
Slashdot Mirror
"If the pixels can respond to any signal within 5 ms"
I took the liberty of adding the emphasis to the keyword there, because that's the whole problem with the current generation of LCDs.
Yes, the day a TFT can completely switch between any two colours in 5ms or less, will be the day we'll stop complaining about ghosting anyway. Heck, even 12ms will do just nicely, _if_ it can actually switch between any two colours in that time.
But the problem with current monitors is that the numbers claimed by the manufacturer are bullshit. They're the best case scenario, not the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario for a "5ms" monitor can be almost 30ms for a single transition. (See some of the measurements on Tom's Hardware, and boggle.) Or you have "16ms" monitors which actually switch slower than "20ms" ones. (Not a joke: again, see any review on Tom's or Anandtech, and boggle at how the 20ms panel is actually the faster one.) Or "25ms" panels showing 140ms worth of actual latency.
The industry has been pretty much left to define for itself wth it wants to measure and how, and what ideal scenario numbers it wants to publish. And unsurprisingly, it did pick the ones that the marketroids liked, not the ones who bear any relevance for the consumer. So you get stuff like numbers measured in perfect darkness, and only until it gets within (an ever increasing) x% of the desired colour, etc.
Most of the improvement between the 140ms displays of the late 90's and the "6ms" displays of today isn't the actual panel, it's in creative measuring and advertising. The real latency did go down, yes, but the claimed latency went down exponentially faster. Every time the actual latency halved, someone invented an even more creative way to claim half of that again in marketting materials.
And then you have outright bullshitters. E.g., manufacturers who shamelessly advertise lower response times than even the panel manufacturer claims. (Sony was for years such a case: they quoted either the time to rise or the time to fall, long after everyone else had been dragged kicking and screaming into quoting the sum. So your uber-expensive new "25ms" Sony would in fact have more latency than a "40ms" from Iiyama.)
_That's_ the problem with those latency numbers: so far they're bogus, and they're likely to stay bogus. When that 5ms monitor hits the shelves, it may be (and probably _will_ be) actually nowhere _near_ being able to display a clean 200 fps. You're lucky if you can get a clean 30fps worth of latency on the worst case scenarios, and for more "normal" 12-16ms monitors you might get 10-20 fps class ghosting.
No. You can learn how Go works in 5 minutes. It takes time to master the strategies, yes, but you can start putting pieces on a board in 5 minutes or less.
The theory that we always wanted that, but had to wait for the technology to get there, has one problem: if you look at the best-sellers of the era where it was already possible to render photo-realistic blood and boobs, the best-sellers _didn't_.
E.g., let's talk The Sims. You know, _the_ game which outsold any Id or Epic or Rockstar title ever, as PC game sales go. It also sold 7 expansion packs, priced like full games.
The most violence you could see in the game was a cartoonish cloud with arms and legs poking out of it in random places, and even for that you had to actively try hard enough to get them to hate each other enough. And, as published, it had no sex whatsoever in it. The most you could get them to do was hug or kiss. That's all.
And yet not only it outsold stuff like SOF which was marketted _only_ as having more realistic bloody textures, or any other FPS for that matter. It also vastly outsold its own clones which tried to play the sex card big time, such as "Singles". (And to a lesser extent, "The Partners." I'm talking orders of magnitude outsold.
E.g., take WoW, which at 3.5 million subscribers is _the_ best selling MMO ever. We're talking almost 9 times as many subscribers as EQ at its peak, and some 14-15 times as many subscribers as UO, which invented the genre. (And just in case someone feels a need to say "bah, only because they banked on the Warcraft name", no, TSO banked on the much bigger The Sims franchise name and peaked at 100,000 subscribers.)
And by virtue of those 3.5 million paying some 14$ a month, it's a bigger license to print money than even The Sims ever was, even including all 7 expansion packs.
WoW's graphics are, you guessed, cartoonish and often cutesy. (See the gnomes for example, especially the females.) Coming from titles like, say, COH or Anarchy online, my first thoughts when trying to create a male human warrior were, "eew, this guy looks like Popeye." No, literally.
Also while technically it does show (cartoonish) splashes of blood at some warrior moves, it doesn't have damage textures, nor gibs, nor blood trails all over the place. And you could play something like a mage or priest and never see even those splashes.
It also doesn't seem to play the nudity card much. Compared to AO's female armours, some of which were barely thin strips of kevlar on the _sides_ of the body, or COH's oversized-boobs-in-spandex (or better yet, without much spandex) approach, WoW is actually a surprisingly decent game. And the players tend to keep it that way too. In two months or so (ok, so I'm a newbie), I've only seen one character in a bikini so far.
(Not that most races would even seem even remotely sexy even if they got naked, except to a handful of people with some weird fetish. E.g., dwarf females look, well, like someone short and overweight. Taurens look, well, literally like cows. Undead look, well, like someone who was burried and rotting for a month, with patches of flesh missing and bones poking out.)
And yet it's the best selling MMO ever.
_The_ most played online FPS ever? Counter-Strike. When was the last time you saw realistic gore or nudity in it? Right.
Or conversely, let's look at a franchise that was driven into the ground by focusing only on bra size: Tomb Raider. Focusing all design just into giving Lara ever increasing melons didn't seem to work that well for Eidos, did it?
Etc.
For some reason people actually buy cartoonish games with not much blood or nudity. Even if the technology allows it. Go figure. Quality (including QA, a good interface, good balance, etc) seems to actually sell more copies than blood and violence do.
"Also, has he seen any of the old Atari and Intellivision ads? There were quite a few adults playing the games in those commercials. They were trying to sell to everyone back then."
Well, see, that's just the thing: they were trying to sell to everyone back then, not just to teenagers wanting to wank over some polygonal female character >:)
It has nothing to do with focus on adults, it has nothing to do with 8 bit vs 64 bit, it has to do with the learning curve. That's all. So all the rant about Sony vs Nintendo is nice, but off-topic at best.
Stuff changes, yes, but it changes in a direction that's harder and harder to grasp for a new gamer. Regardless of age, a new gamer is utterly lost in most current PC games. Kids just happen to be an example of new gamer, but try introducing your old mom or grandma to some games and you may notice the exact same phenomenon. That's the whole problem.
_You_ have likely had the privilege of having that learning curve flattened across a decade or two. We older ones have started on stuff that had just one joystick and often one that only went either let-right or up-down, but you only had to use one of the axis. (E.g., Pong.) Then we had a joystick and one button. Then a joystick and two buttons, but still, you had to mash A and shoot bombs with B when it hit the fan.
Now a console has some 12 buttons to memorize, and some PC games need you to use half the keyboard.
The move to 3D too introduced a bunch of stuff that's an extra pain in the butt, without actually making gameplay any richer. E.g., also wrestling the camera. E.g., FPS "jump puzzles" just for the sake of one extra thing to spend time learning, not because it actually adds anything to the story.
Other stuff was also added just for the sake of complex controls, not because it was needed to enable you to do more stuff. E.g., at the end of the day, between Final Fight and my martial artist in City Of Heroes, the difference isn't that big: both run around and punch hordes of NPCs in the face. But COH makes me also manage some 5 toggles, several buffs, an endurance (mana) bar, and try to string the best combo of 7 different attacks.
Etc.
That's the problem: new players are supposed to just _know_ already stuff that you and I learned in two decades.
Ever felt a need to complain about 11 year olds in a MMO? I know I've seen several people complain. And in one Taskforce on COH when someone said he had to go and he'll let his son control the character, the answer from the team leader was swift: "Is he older than 13?"
It's not even about kids as such, it's about new gamers, IMHO. Try introducing a older non-gamer to some modern titles and watch them be just as clueless and disoriented for hours. Try it, really. I know I've experimented on various family members.
In some genres (e.g., some MMOs) they're just utterly hopeless between steering a character in 3D, wrestling the camera, having to mix 15 different attacks and buffs, watching the enemy _and_ your health _and_ your spell timer simultaneously, all at the same time. They got utterly lost between all actions they had to manage at the same time.
It used to be that you only needed 1 joystick or Missile Command, or only the joystick in PacMan or Pong. A new gamer would understand all there is to the controls within _seconds_. And we kids were the ones who ruled supreme and topped the high score tables.
We grew up gently on more and more complexity, learning that we need just one more button, one more thing to watch for, one more nonsensical action to take for granted, one more RL instinct to ignore. It slowly piled up. New players nowadays are supposed to _already_ know all that.
As someone else called it in a post, some time ago, there's a "game grammar" you're pretty much supposed to know. What goes where, what goes well with what. And that's what it is.
And very few games take the time to hold your hand and guide you through it. To abuse the grammar analogy some more, a lot of tutorials basically assume that you already did beginner and intermediate language courses already, and they'll just give you some of the finer points. "Here's a list of words. Now use them in a small essay proving your mastery of the ablative and less-than-perfect tense, or this monster will bite your balls off." But you're supposed to already know what "ablative" is, how/when you use that case, and wth of a tense "less than perfect" is. Or for that matter WTH of a language _is_ it you're supposed write in.
It must be said, not all games. But some can be a nightmare as learning curve goes.
"This sound an awful lot like how parts of WoW work."
I took the liberty of highlighting the keyword there: parts. I do play WoW, and its use of instances is at best minimal.
Try COH sometime. At _least_ 75% of missions are instances, and everything else is straight hunting and/or optional. You start on instances at level 1. Even the tutorial area has an instance. (Think having an instance right in the Northshire Abbey or Teldrasil or Anvilmar newbie areas, for a WoW equivalent.)
WoW has instances, yes, but so few and far in between, they can almost be ignored for the purpose of discussing gameplay. If you did an average over a couple of months, on the average for each hour spent outside you have maybe a couple of minutes spent in instances.
Well, for example, I know Rome: Total War refused to run on someone's computer because he had Alcohol installed. (For precisely the same reason you mention: he had some different games for his little kids on his computer, and didn't trust the kids with the CDs.)
Also the one I had in mind when I bitched about randomly crashing to desktop was "Die Gilde." ("Europa 1400: The Guild" for you 'merkins. But I don't know if that version has the same copy protection. It's not uncommon to have different ones between Europe and the USA.) The devs came out and said that it's _supposed_ to randomly crash if it detects Daemon Tools. I guess it's as official as it gets when you have the lead dev posting it on the publisher's board.
These are the easy ones, since it's at least obvious you have a problem if the game won't even start. There are however games which are sneakier in their mis-guided attempt at punishing pirates (read: inconveniencing legit buyers.) They'll gradually screw up your gameplay or difficulty level or outright make it impossible to finish some quests or whatever, if they think you're a pirate.
E.g., Operation Flashpoint had it right in the readme that it will screw up your gameplay if it thinks you're a pirate. E.g., Gangsters I've already mentioned: it threw all your gang in jail for as little as having more than one CD drive. (And I mean even physical drives, not actually detecting emulation software.)
Those can be a bitch to diagnose that you even have a copy-protection problem, because they don't just say so. I know I've wasted a very stressful week trying to find out WTF am I doing wrong in Gangsters, until the devs came out and announced that it was a known bug of the copy-protection. I honestly thought I sucked badly at playing the game, if the effects I saw were in-game, not some copy-protection message.
But there probably are a dozen times more where the devs didn't come out and say it, so we'll never know.
"Can someone name 1 CRPG where the final greatest most superior weapon in the game is NOT a sword."
;)
- Fallout and Fallout 2,
- Restricted Area (I finished it with a Flamethrower),
- Shenmue (martial arts all the way),
- Jade Empire (you need martial arts until the end, plus as "ultimate weapons" go, the dual axes do more damage than the sword. Or you can use a naginata for range. Or you can morph into a jade golem. Or whatever.)
- Deus Ex (personally I would count it as a FPS, but then everyone seems to think it's an RPG. So there you go: it had no swords whatsoever.)
- Entomorph: Plague of the Darkfall (if I remember right, it didn't even have any weapons)
- Another War (_all_ weapons in it were WW2 German and Soviet weaponry. And, oh, the _final_ weapon, the one that slays the big final boss is... a potato. I'm not kidding.)
Etc. That's just a 5 minute exercise, off the top of my head.
"Exactly."
Exactly. Try complaining about stuff you know anything about next time
"CRPGs all have the same design concept. Different characters, missions, but the same shit."
See, that's just the thing: "Different characters, missions". _That_ is what we play CRPGs for.
The weapons are just a prop to keep that story, those missions, going. I don't really care _what_ that ultimate weapon is shaped as, as long as the things I have to _do_ are different.
"That's why MMORPG will take over all of RPGs in the future. It gives you that variety flavor."
Hell, yes, all the variety ranging beating rats with a stick, to... umm... beating bigger rats with a bigger stick. And then you level up and, it's really amazing, they let you use a bigger stick on bigger rats. And you only need to repetitively do that for another week before you get an even bigger stick and bigger rats. Absolutely amazing, yeah.
It's like watching paint dry, except they let you use a wide variety of colours. This level you get to watch emerald green paint dry, over and over again, the next level they might let you watch teal paint dry. And if you go to a SF themed MMO, instead of a generic medieval one, you might get to watch paint dry on a metal fence instead of a wooden one. Isn't that some mind-blowing variety?
Nasty wisecracks aside, MMOs actually have the _least_ variety. Yeah, they give you plenty of different skins for the rats and for the stick you beat them with, yes. But that's _all_: a bunch of different graphics.
When it comes to the actual things you have to _do_, there all the MMOs combined have zero variety. Essentially everyone has been making a clone of the exact same game since the '90s, and not even a complex or detailed game. A game where _all_ there is to do is run around clicking on NPCs and counting up your XP. Yay.
No, thanks.
Here's why it matters: because "FUN" means different things to different people. You can't just say "game X is FUN". Fun by what criteria? For whose tastes?
Most people aren't generic players of anything published. Some like a story, some don't. (E.g., me, I thought the tons of text in Planescape Torment were a great story, whereas my father thinks that _any_ text or conversation is too much blabber instead of getting to the fighting part.) Some like lots of combat, some don't. Etc.
That's why we have those genre names: to tell us roughly what to expect from a given game. I want to know when I buy a game if it's a real CRPG (which I like), or a FPS (which I'm hardly interested in), or a MMO (which I find boring), or a RTS (which I bloody hate), or what.
So does it matter if it's RPG or not? Hell yes, of course it matters, if I'm looking for an RPG. Does it matter if it's really a hack and slash? Well, yes, because that bumps it a few notches down my list: I might still buy it, if I don't find anything more interesting, or I might not if I do. Does it matter if it's really RTS, but they called it an RPG because marketting said RPGs sell? Hell yes, because I bloody hate RTS, and knowing that I wouldn't buy it if it was the last game on Earth.
Which I suppose is why marketroids try to blur the genres, to the point of not meaning anything any more. Everything just gets to get all possible buzzwords, so you can't say "nah, I don't want this genre" any more. We're heading into an age where everything will be just labelled by a string of meaningless buzzwords ("real-time continuous-turn-based first-person isometric-view squad-based-tactics action-adventure RPG") that don't tell you anything about the game any more.
"I just know that I've had way more FUN with Final Fantasy VII and Diablo than some supposedly "open-ended, non-linear" RPGs like Daggerfall or Morrowind, which is just BOOOORING."
Well, bingo, you just made my point. You told me there that you like a certain (sub)genre and dislike another one. So wouldn't it be nice to know which of them a given game fits in, before buying it?
That's the whole point. I'd very much like that when I read "RPG" on a box, I can expect it to have, you know, all the elements that traditionally make an RPG. I.e., an interactive story, a certain way of using statistics to resolve combat, a chance to customize my character, etc.
That's not to say other genres can't be fun on their own. I do play other genres too. All I'm saying is: FFS, everything doesn't have to be called an RPG.
If it doesn't play like an RPG, call it something else. That way, those who like that kind of games, can know it's their thing, and those who expect a real RPG can know they can save their money.
There are plenty of games with combat nowadays. RTS, FPS, action-adventure, you name it. In fact, you're hard pressed to find a game without combat nowadays.
So no offense, but using that to define an RPG is the kind of thing that makes me wish marketting people were lined up and shot.
RPG used to mean something. Now it's just a dilluted buzzword slapped onto the box, just because it's fashionable. It's been eroded and dilluted to the point of being meaningless.
Even Daikatana sported "RPG elements" on the box, and, you know, it was just a FPS. I've even read some site calling Gran Turismo an RPG, because you upgrade your car, or I've had people calling some fighting game an RPG because it has a health bar and combat. That's how dilluted the term has become.
Whole unrelated genres have been renamed once PC CRPGs became a fashionable buzzword. E.g., you no longer have "scrolling beat-em-ups" (e.g., Final Fight) you have "action-RPGs" or they're called outright "RPG" nowadays. Never mind that they have the same mechanics of a completely unrelated genre. Nah, marketting just had to slap "RPG" on the box.
Or take MMORPG, since you mention World Of Warcraft, which basically threw all the elements of an RPG out and nevertheless calls itself an RPG. Yes, I'm not surprised that all you do is fight in WoW, because that's _all_ there is to that whole genre. You have zero control over your character's development, zero plot, zero interactive story, zero influence on the world.
It's just a work simulator, where you spend countless hours doing the same thing over and over again: beating up rats with a stick. You start with a small stick and small rats ("young wolves") and you spend hours working your way towards being allowed a bigger stick and bigger rats. Yay.
But ok, at least it's called a MMORPG, so those of us who want a _real_ RPG can avoid it. Nevertheless, it just serves to further erode the meaning of "RPG". Whole generations of 13 year old retards are raised on thinking that repetitive bashing rats with a stick and "HOW I MINE FOR FISH??? NE1??? R U A GRL?" is what "RPG" means.
So here's the thing: again, RPG used to mean something well defined. And, no offense, but I'm sick and tired of people who _don't_ want an RPG in the first place, coming and arguing how the genre should be changed to something else.
If you just want lots of combat, there are already plenty of games that have that in spades. Get a FPS, RTS or god knows what else, and there you go. You don't need to destroy yet another genre some of us still love, by turning it into yet another generic game that's 100% about combat.
As I've already mentioned, I know of several games already that intentionally crash or refuse to even start if they even think you _might_ have Daemon Tools or Alcohol installed.
Well, I've played computer games since '84 or so. So, well, I guess I _am_ "somewhat" whiny about it by now. It's a lot of time of being inconvenienced by various flavour of a concept that never worked.
What makes it the most exasperating is seeing stuff that, well, can only be explained by sheer stupidity. Such as seeing games released with a copy-protection for which a generic crack already exists. I mean, the thing was already cracked before the game even went gold. Who did they expect to deter there? Even if maybe Joe Average doesn't know how to search for a crack for the protection driver, instead of the crack for "Shooting Guy 2", someone _will_ repackage it as a "Shooting Guy 2 no-CD crack".
Can get pretty depressing, you know?
Anyway, I like your idea of authenticating only once when installing it. Of course, it will get cracked too, as people will just hack the piece of code that checks the activation file. But at least it will inconvenience us legit buyers less, too. I like that.
"Yeah, so that won't deter pirates. So what? Nothing else does either."
Well, bingo. You've summarized there the _whole_ problem with this whole anti-piracy idiocy: it inconveniences everyone _except_ the pirates. It inconveniences _only_ the honest paying customers.
Now I _am_ firmly against piracy, and I'm proud to say that I legally own a copy (well, a license in software lingo) for every single piece of software on my computer. If something could actually deter pirates, I'd be for it.
But that's the whole point: it doesn't. Not only you can always find a no-CD crack or a warezed version, in most cases it's available actually _before_ the game hits the stores. Even the few people who still are too clueless to google for a download, will get the no-CD crack from a friend who knows how to.
And in the meantime it's people like me, people who actually paid for the game, who get to put up with hassles like:
- being locked out of a game I've paid for, because the CD got scratched.
- having my game screwed up without even telling me why, because some broken retarded piece of copy-protection was buggy and thought a legit copy was pirated. (E.g., Gangsters. Before the patch, if you had more than one CD drive, or had the game CD anywhere but in "D:", the retarded copy protection would think you're a pirate and throw all your gang members in jail. Repeatedly. No, I'm not kidding. It's too retarded to make up.)
- having a game crash to desktop periodically without any explanation, and after a month or so the devs come and say something like "uh, it's supposed to crash if it detects <insert brand of CD copying software> on your machine." Which I didn't, but apparently the copy protection was retarded enough to think so anyway. (Plus, let's get for a moment into the whole issue of them deciding for me which software I'm allowed to run on _my_ machine. How about they piss off and mind their own business?)
- being locked out of playing a game I've paid for in, say, Wine, because it comes with a retarded copy protection that wants to be loaded as a Windows driver or such.
Etc.
So now you propose, what? That for the few hundreds of games I legally own (yeah, literally. So I don't have a life), I should also dig through a big box of code-wheels and other retarded gizmos to be allowed to play? I hope you'll have some understanding if I'm a lot less than thrilled by that idea.
I wish they just stopped this idiocy completely already. It has one single job to do: deter pirates. If it doesn't do that, why keep such an annoyance around?
DRM isn't as much a conspirac theory as a fact of life, and regardless of whether that's the reason for the Intel migration, it _will_ happen.
The fact is, being a monopoly is every CEO's wet dream. Pure idea capitalism, neo-classical theory style, is where no-name white boxes are now: a place where everyone and their grandma can start building their own and undercutting your prices. _That_ is what an ideal free market is. It's good for the consumer, but it's not where you want your company to be, if you have a choice.
What you want is a locked-in customer base. A hi-tech-style captive market that you can milk and fleece to line your pockets. (Well, that is: what you'd want if you were an MBA instead of a nerd raised on ideals of honesty and of playing nice.)
And historically, the _whole_ history of computing has been about that: whoever thought they owned a market segment, fought tooth-and-nail to keep you locked in, by any means necessary. Back in the stone age of computing, IBM went to court to try to stop the software market from even being born: they wanted to be the only ones you can buy software from for your IBM computer. And from there it went on to be a long sordid tale of FUD (again, it was by IBM, long before MS), connector patents, undisclosed APIs, discriminatory contracts, the Unix fragmentation (noone really wanted portability, if they could have you locked in instead), etc.
And Apple isn't immune either. E.g., the iTunes DRM may be necessary for the RIAA to aggree, but being locked-in so only an iPod plays it, isn't. In fact, the RIAA openly dislikes that. It's all about Apple very much enjoying having a locked-in market.
It's no conspiracy theory, it's no paranoia, it's just human nature. Imagine you're a CEO and there's this techological thingie which promises to give you complete control over what can run on that machine, and how much the user must pay to be allowed to run it. Or if you sell entertainment ormedia, you can control what the user can do with it, how often, etc. Make them pay _again_ as often as you wish, or make their whole collection unusable Napster-style if they dare cancel their subscription. (How's that for a lock-in?)
It's the thing that screams "TEH BIG MONIES!!!!11" in your face.
It's a wet dream. It's _the_ kind of wet dream where you don't just wake up to change your underwear, but rather you wake up sticky and have to change the mattress and blanket. _That_ kind of a wet dream.
So make no mistake, it _will_ happen.
Point well taken.
Still, maybe I'm just lucky, but mine doesn't reset either. We also have a whole lot of XP workstations at work, and I don't seem to recall anyone complaining about resets on those.
The only situation where I've seen mine reset was with a faulty RAM stick, which is why I mentioned hardware failures.
Though I suppose, to be completely fair, faulty device drivers would also qualify as a way to crash it. Though even there, most major hardware manufacturers seemed to have cleaned up their act. (Via or ATI for example actually are producing quality drivers nowadays, not the kind of stuff they shoved out the door in the late '90s.) And probably even more fortunately, a lot of minor players no longer need to produce their own drivers. (E.g., most USB stuff nowadays just works through the normal Windows drivers.)
Sorry, wasn't any revisionist history, I meant the _Mozilla_ team went and made their very own widgets, skins, bug tracker, frameworks, and generally everything _except_ a browser for years. I know the "Firefox" branding is only recent, but, well, that's the kind of brain-fart one occasionally gets when writing in a hurry and hitting "Submit" without re-reading.
"There are several competiting ideas in economics of what a monopoly is, and none of them apply to Microsoft."
Well, yes, I took the time to actually read the whole article from that link. Indeed it doesn't apply to MS, or for that matter to any RL anti-trust situation.
Now I'm not anti-MS, or by Slashdot standards I'm sure some would call me pro-MS or a MS fanboy. But that article still misses the point by a mile.
It's talking from beginning to end about a situation where prices are strictly a matter of supply and demand, and the ratio between production and demand is the _only_ factor that determines price. (I.e., a 19th century style economy of scarcity.) In fact, an economy where everyone, monopolists included, can _only_ vary production output to affect the prices. Where if one company's product is priced too low, the _only_ thing they can do to affect the price is to destroy some of their stock of products.
Which is a nice dream, but that's not how it works for software. With software there's essentially an _infinite_ supply of any given version of Windows. That's not how MS sets the price. The costs of printing a few more CDs are negligible, so any company ever won't have any trouble ramping up production to sell as many copies as you want to buy.
E.g., it pretends throughout the article that the only entry barriers are product diferentiation and economies of scale. I.e., as if the _only_ way a monopolist could possibly prevent you from entering a market are advertising, releasing new models, and pricing them dirt-cheap.
Which has not been the case in any RL anti-trust case (I don't think anyone hit Coca-Cola with an anti-trust case for marketting a lot), and certainly isn't the case with MS.
The entry barrier to compete with Windows has _nothing_ to do with advertising budgets or with how fast they release new models. (If that was the case, Linux distros releasing a new model every 3 months would have won already.) The real entry barrier is having to compete with the whole interlocking set of pieces, not just with the OS alone.
Ditto for economies of scale. The situation isn't that MS sells Windows very cheaply due to economies of scale. Though with duplication costs being negligible, they certainly could. The point made during the anti-trust trial was that the price per copy actually went _up_ steadily, i.e., in the exact opposite direction than the economies of scale said.
Also it's a straw man anyway, since all modern anti-trust cases have to prove that the price increased for the consumers. I'm not aware of any company being accused of monopolistic practices simply because they could manufacture stuff cheaper.
And generally, the thrust of the whole article seems to be "but in a free market that works flawlessly and _strictly_ by ideal free market principles, it's not even possible to have a monopoly!" Well, duh! Yes, indeed, that's the whole point.
And that's why RL anti-trust cases are all about preventing stuff that's deliberately disrupting the whole free market idea. E.g., stuff like price fixing. E.g., maintaining artifficially high entry barriers, via controlling more than one market segment.
That's what it's all about, not advertising and economies of scale. If you just stick to advertising and ramping up production, I do believe no government in the world will ever bring an anti-trust lawsuit against you.
"That is quite a generalization; install Debian from CD and then repeat your claim that Linux lacks a raw quantity of apps."
While Debian is one thing I haven't actually used, I've installed from SuSE, RedHat, and Mandrake CDs, and write this on Gentoo. I'll still make that claim any day.
"Raw quantity of apps" means exactly nothing if it lacks the one I need. As I've said, the computer (OS included) is just a tool to an end. If it can't achieve the goal I need, it's not the tool I need.
If my goal is to, say, unscrew the screws off a GBA, I'm not interested in a great toolkit with a hundred thousand kinds of hammers. It either has the screw-driver I need, or it doesn't. Raw quantity of everything _else_ doesn't even start to be a consolation.
"If I were to claim that MacOS lacked apps because I was, say, a gamer, a textile designer and a studio engineer would promptly collapse on the floor laughing at me."
The point being? If you're a gamer, MacOS certainly has a lack of the applications _you_ need. Even said textile engineer might not use a Mac at home, if their hobbies included gaming.
"As someone who runs a full compliment of business-class network services in my house, I view your claim with amused skepticism."
As someone who has zero need for business-class network services in my house, I'm not even starting to be impressed.
And even if I had a need for that, it still wouldn't cover everything else. That's usually the problem with such niche views of the world. RL uses of a computer at home aren't just restricted to "but it runs Mozilla and I can install Squid and BIND on it."
RL uses of a computer might also include stuff like, yes, games. Even people who don't define themselves as hardcore gamers, might waste some hours playing some ActiveX Windows-only Backgammon on MSN or some shareware Windows-only PacMan variant or whatever. (E.g., Mom falls squarely in that category.)
Or it might include stuff like editing digital photos in Paintshop. The Gimp is fine for cheapskates like me who only occasionaly recolor some texture, but it's not something I'd recomend to my elderly relatives.
Or it might involve, surprise, actually specifically needing a MS program. I've received more Word forms when last looking for a job than I care to remember, half of which were rendered totally screwed up in OOo. And both at this company and the previous one I have to deal with Excel sheets which (A) contain scripting, and (B) again, render like crap in OOo.
Or it might involve actually needing IE, because some site doesn't even work in Mozilla or Opera. E.g., I can tell you first hand that WebSphere's admin page is broken in Opera, although it does work well with Mozilla or Konqueror. E.g., the company I work for, let's just say their whole intranet is completely broken in anything but IE. With Mozilla, Opera or Konqueror you can't even log in properly.
Etc.
The point is that it's quite the opposite of "aim for more precision". RL isn't made of narrow neatly confined niches. It's made most often of having to deal with a rather broad spectrum of wildly unrelated stuff. And having maybe 50% of them covered by Linux, no matter how well, won't even start to be a reason to switch.
"And because IE and Netscape were the only existing browsers, right?"
;)
And because in 1997 anyone had even heard of Opera, right?
"Microsoft have a relatively featureless, uninnovative browser compared to the competetion."
Well, good, because that's how I like my browsers. It's a browser, FFS, not a whole operating system. _All_ it has to do is render HTML pages. If it does that well, I'm perfectly content with that.
(And before you scream "Windows fanboy", go tell that to the makers of Firefox then too, because that one too had the goal of being "just a browser" all along.)
"Why is it so popular?"
Because back when it still mattered, and the browser market was up for grabs, Netscape was a festering pile of shit. It's easy to blame it on MS's OS monopoly and unfair practices, but the fact remains that Nescape was a buggy crashing mess on any OS, including Linux (yes, I ran it on Linux too) and on MacOS (yes, we had to test our web apps on Netscape on macs, too.)
Again, feel a need to scream "Windows fanboy"? Well, go tell that to the Debian developpers too, then. One of the standard Gentoo fortune cookies is of them joking about using Netscape's crashes to close several windows with a single click, and how that's progress.
And then came Firefox, which was for ages just vapourware. No, lemme rephrase that: it took years before even being worthy of being called "vapourware."
Instead of making a browser when it mattered, and when the market was up for grabs, they went into fantasy land and spent years coding their own widgets (yeah, I sooo need yet another widget set that doesn't act like any other app on that system), and their own bug tracking system (good one, no doubt, but not a browser), and god knows what else. That's _years_ spent reinventing wheels that already had been done better, instead of actually making a damned browser.
There were _years_ of IE being the _only_ usable choice. I don't know about you, but in my book that's reason enough for it to own the market.
"If you were the boss of a browser company, I am sure you be complaining too."
If I was the boss of a company who lost the market because they had a total crap product in the first place, and then spent years re-inventing the wheel instead of having a replacement product to sell... well, yes, guess I too would blame it on Microsoft. Beats accepting the cruel reality.
"After a few months, of going back and forth between both systems; I think a lot of people would chose Linux."
After some years of going back and forth between the two, I'm back again to deleting the Linux partition off my home machine. Yes, the system itself is nice, but with the lack of apps for it, I have very little use for it.
"With Linux you don't get the software rot,"
That's funny, I haven't noticed any on my Windows XP partition or my Windows 2000 box.
"or the adware/spyware/viruses."
I haven't got any on Windows either.
"Also, once you learn a little bit about how to use linux, it's more powerful and flexible."
Once you learn a lot less than that about Windows, you stop clicking "yes" on "Do you want your machine to be 0wn3d by the Russian spam mafia?" popups, which makes the previous point moot too.
Also once you learn that computers are no more than a tool to an end, you stop thinking that a powerful and flexible _OS_ is the alpha and the omega. The applications is where it's at. The OS only exists to load those.
If it was possible to load the same apps without an OS at all, trust me, most of us would happily do that too. See how some 100 million game consoles were sold only from the current generation, and noone said "nah, I'm not buying a PS2 until it starts showing a Microsoft Windows splash screen while booting."
The battle never was and never will be the over-simplified "Windows vs Linux" imaginary battle that is waged on Slashdot. The real choice, in the real world, is never about the OS itself. It's more like "what apps can you run on Windows vs what apps can you run on Linux?" That's really where Linux fails.
"And with Linux, you don't have msft on your back."
I'm not even sure what to make of that. I'm pretty sure I haven't had Microsoft on my back so far, whatever that means.
I know this will get modded down into oblivion, this being Slashdot where joining in the "windows sucks" choir is _popular_ and _fashionable_. But Windows XP is no longer Windows 98, and it's getting tiresome to hear the same rehashed bullshit that was only true in the 90's.
"People quit M$ because they are sick and tired of dishing out bucketloads of money everytime they want to do anything, because they are sick of rebooting 400 times a day, because they are sick of BSODs.. And on and on and on..."
No, again, XP is no longer Windows '98. Have you even used a Windows XP system lately? No, I don't think so. I haven't seen one BSOD-ing even once, unless there's actually a hardware fault. (E.g., if you think you're so l33t for running CL3 memory at CL2 and your CPU running 20% higher than the speed it was sold for. You can crash any system, Linux included, that way.)
"An entire OS on a single CDROM that does NOTHING out of the box except get you on the internet and get infected before you can patch it.."
Again, I'll call that fanboy bullshit. The last XP SP2 I've installed never got virused.
Oh, wait, you presumably mean "but if you install an old unpatched Windows 2000 with an unpatched IE 5 you'll get virused." Which is the usual fanboy loaded comparison: let's compare an old unpatched Windows installation to a new fully patched Linux box. Well, gee.
Well, you try running an equally old and unpatched Linux distro, and then we'll talk. You know, since Windows 2000 or '98 are the ones used to hand-wave through the "windows sucks" bullshit, it's only fair to compare them to a distro from the same years. I seem to recall that the statistic for 2000, was that you'd get rooted within half an hour if you went online without a firewall.
"I didn't want to spend hundreds and hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a word processor, a paint program, virus protection, firewall, etc..."
Bullshit again. The Gimp, OOo and a bunch of others are available on Windows just as well as on Linux. Those of us who do pay for something else, pay for the extra functionality that Gimp, OOo and the others don't have.
"Oh yeah, and I have ZERO pirated stuff.. ZERO...
No warez, no serialz, no gamez, nothing.."
Well, neither do I. So your point is? The usual fanboy bullshit along the lines of "everyone is using Windows just because they pirate everything"? Or what?
It may come as a surprise to you, but even by BSA's bullshit inflated statistics, most people are _not_ pirates. And BSA exists only to cry "wolf!", so they do that lots. Yet study their inflated statistics for the USA or western Europe sometimes, and you might be surprised. There just isn't that much piracy to support the fanboy idiocy that everyone running Windows is only doing it because they pirate everything.
It may come as a surprise to you, but some of us actually _paid_ for Windows, and for everything else on it, and found it worth every single cent. And why not? If the choice is between (A) a system which costs money, and (B) one which is utterly useless to me, trust me, I'll fork over the dough for A every single time.
The illusion of urgency does serve the point of making it all seem more heroic. There's a reason why in movies they stop the bomb when the countdown is blinking at 2 seconds and not when it still has a good 18 hours left.
IMHO it says "you're _the_ one". Not "one of them". If you stop something in the last 2 seconds, it's fairly clear that if you fail there isn't much time for someone else to come do it. If there are 18 hours left on the countdown, hey, you could have called the bomb squad instead.
And then there is one game which did exactly what you say: told you it's not urgent and you have all the time in the world. In fact, there are at least a few more centuries, if not millenia, before it's really a threat. Don't worry if you fail, don't take yourself too seriously, another hero will eventually come and finish it. It goes above and beyond the call of duty to tell you that.
That game was Morrowind.
And, frankly, I just found that story to be a major turn-off. And yes I am aware that many people did like Morrowind for the sheer size and open-endedness of running around jumping into random caves for a quick hack-and-slash, or doing some fetch-quest for a minor village noone else even existed. But I haven't read anywhere anyone saying that MW's main quest was particularly great or felt epic/heroic/whatever.
The problem, however, exists in other games that you're supposed to just know that you're supposed to ignore that urgency in the story. You're supposed to play in a schizophrenic state of mind where you simultaneously suspend disbelief in the story and the urgency of your quest, _and_ know that you can run around saving pets from trees and taking years to breed the perfect Chocobo.
(Along with even more explicit inconsistencies between the actual game and the story/cutscenes. I still want to use a Phoenix Dawn on Aeris, dammit;)
There are a ton of RPGs where, yes, you're just not ready if you just did what you're told. I can think of a few (e.g., Lunar 2) where at one point, forget bosses, I couldn't even survive normal enemies in the next area without running around in the previous area, slaying random enemies for another 1-2 levels of xp and for money to buy new equipment. And that seems to me just wrong.
Maybe that's the real problem: artificially stretching the game beyond the real content, and assuming you'll _know_ you're supposed to do all that. There must be a more happy medium between (A) linear and (B) ignoring the main quest while running around saving little boys' puppies for extra xp.
For example, the Mandalorian camp in KOTOR2 comes to mind as an elegant solution to tell you basically, "ok, we have a bunch of optional quests here, but you must do at least half of them to proceed. Your choice which ones." It gives you a good reason to do them: you're not ignoring the main quest, that's the only way to get further in the main quest.
Maybe more games should use that kind of a plot device. Or in whatever other way, make those side-quests seem more relevant to the main quest, as opposed to feeling like you're ignoring the main quest.
"It isn't because christians, in general, feel like they need their own specialized forms of entertainment. It's because common elements of popular movies, rock, and fiction are antithetical to christian beliefs, if not downright disrespectful."
In other words, "It's not that X wants a different Y, it's that existing Y is unsuited for X". Uh, right. There must be a subtle difference there that completely escapes me.
"You could however have fictional characters living in that time frame who interact with the main characters in cutscenes and then go off and do their own thing. Like Bob, who hears about Jesus and must make his way to Jeruselem and encouters mini-quests on the way."
;)
Reminds me of a joke.
So on TV Moskow during Communism they have this show on the aniversary of Lenin's birthday. Including an interview with comrade Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, a simple man who's talked to Lenin no less than three times.
Reporter: "So tell us, how did you meet comrade Lenin the first time."
Ivan: "Ah, yes, it was right before the revolution, and I was a simple farmer near Moskow. And one night this traveler knocks at my door and asks if he can sleep at my house for the night. I didn't know it was Lenin, noone had heard of him yet. So I'm thinking... hmm... if I say 'no', it's night, it's cold, there are wolves and bandits out there, that's not a nice thing to do. If I say 'yes', how do I know he's not some thief or worse? So I say, 'oh, fuck off!'"
Reporter: "Ahem, yeah, ok, let's skip to the second time you've met comrade Lenin then"
Ivan: "Ah, right, I was in Moskow selling vegetables at the market when all hell breaks loose. There's shooting and screams, and everyone's talking about some revolution, and this group comes running and bumps into me. And this guy, he was comrade Lenin, says, 'Please my good man! The Czar's soldiers are after us! Help us hide and regroup before they catch us!' So I'm thinking... hmm, if I say 'no', I might well have this guy's life on my conscience. If I say 'yes', well, the Czar's soldiers might well take mine. So I say, 'oh, fuck off!'"
Reporter: "Ahem, well, we're running out of time, so why don't you tell us how the third time went?"
Ivan: "Oh, right, right. So it was after the revolution, I had moved into town, and I'm selling newspapers. So this black car stops and comrade Lenin steps out and says, 'Ah, I know you. You don't happen to remember meeting me before, do you?' So I'm thinking... if I say 'no', he'll know I'm lying. If I say 'yes', I might well regret it. So I say, 'oh, fuck off!'"
Yup, I can see how that would work for a "Bob meets Jesus" game too