Finally, and sadly, prolific Neo Geo (and other) FAQ writer Chris MacDonald, aka Kao Megura, has recently passed away, according to forum messages posted by his brother.
This is truely a shame. I did communicate with Chris via e-mail a few years back about a FAQ I was writing and if I could "borrow" one of his layouts. He came across as a genuinly nice guy, and not stuck up at all which was refreshing.
Gamepro and other gaming magazines should print a tribute to him for all of his stuff they stole and sold from his FAQ sheets. Rest in Peace Chris.
Now that games have matured into a $11 billion business, topping movie box-office sales and siphoning television viewers, the lucrative and increasingly influential genre has attracted more star power than ever.'"
How about getting some of those "stars" to lobby the MPAA to allow the Video Game industry to use movie ratings for video games. That might actually help the few parents who try to watch what their children buy and get various senators to take up a crusade other than censoring video games. That would be a boon (not ed) to the whole video game industry.
"If that turns out to be the case, no non-EA Sports game could license NFL player likenesses--an almost certainly fatal blow to the Madden series' rivals."
This is an interesting move by EA. It makes sense for them to put their rivals out of the NFL simulation game business. With Madden 2004, in my opinion EA took a step back by making the game more realistic yet less fun. The story as I heard it goes, John Madden was watching his son play Madden Football on the Playstation and his Son converted a 4th and 28. When he told his son "hey that was nice" he Son replied back, "Uhh no I do it all the time". To which John Madden replied, "Well that isn't right". He complained about it, and in Madden 2004 they hard coded in the percentages that a play should fail based on the NFL percentages from the year before (ie, 4th down tries only succeed about 21% of the time). While this makes for a fun football simulation, it's not really dependant on the players skill so to me it's not fun knowing I'm winning or losing based on a virtual coin toss rather than my own skill.
The point of this story was this, while EA may lock up the players rights to fight off it's competitors, there is still money to be made with sports games. There were plenty of games that were very good that weren't licenced by the NBA or NFL players associations. They can often licence one players name for the game such as Joe Montana's football for Sega way back when. Joe Montana's football was great for it's time, and had no basis in reality (games would end with Arena football scores like 71-68) yet many gamers I know look back at it fondly. Another example of a game without a licence succeeding is hoops for the original NES. Blades of Steel didn't have a licence but more people remember that game than the old NHL hockey games.
Overall this could be a big winner for EA, but it could also lead to more innovative games for the sports genre as rival companies try to find a different solution.
You can look on ebay to gauge the market rate for a Jedi account. There is one listing over $1000 with bids, many at $1000 with no bids, a couple in the $700 range, and a few "almost a Jedi" with bids ranging $180-375ish. So clearly they're not quite going like hotcakes in the $1000 range. I could see the value going up a bit if it was an official product, but I doubt the market would be very large.
track one of the bids in your "my ebay" tracker and watch how much it shoots up in the last hour. Most of the time they go for $1500 - 2000
Sale of MMORPG Items on Ebay is commonplace. The question is, will a company ever embrace the real world value of the items and sell them themselves? Sony could probably make a killing selling Jedi accouts for $1000 a piece to casual gamers who don't have 200 hours to waste on becoming a Jedi. The question is, would it put off gamers who don't have the money for a uber account, or would it attract more casual gamers to the game?
People give online gaming far FAR too much credit. The vast majority of people who play videogames do not do so online; Either through PC or consoles. They play at home, or if they want to play multiplayer, with friends. Not online.
Yes, but people who played consoles outnumbered arcade gamers in 1994-1995 as well. What I'm saying is the people who played in the arcades for competition migrated to online gaming. I know quite a few competitive gamers from playing in various tournments on the east coast, as well as working at a few arcades and all of them play some type of online game now when I talk to them.
Maybe the guy who went to the arcade once a month to get a beer and play Mortal Kombat doesn't play games online, but odds are the guy who went there every day and dropped 5-10 dollars does and that is part of what killed the arcades.
Game design is a different sort of thing though. I think both are interesting. There are a number of properties that a good game should have (and I haven't seen much attempt to analytically break it down). For example, repetition is generally a bad thing.
I think they are different also. I find that most schools that offer "Video game" courses tend to lean twards design. Being a programmer, this doesn't please me that much.:) As for the repetition, it depends if the person considers the repetition fun. One mans fun is anothers boredom. MMORPG's are a good example of this. Some people I run into are hopelessly addicted to them, other are utterly bored by the repetition and lack of conent. I agree that repetition for the sake of content is a bad idea, but some personality types are attracted to this and I think feel confort in a stable environment. I know this sounds strange, but how many times have you seen someone replay the same game over, and over and over.
Syncing visual stimmuli to audio stimuli tends to be exciting (if you can put together an intelligent music engine and sync beats to something, you might have something interesting going -- Rez depended heavily on this, for example, but it'd be okay to be less blatently music-oriented.
Oh yeah. So many games do this poorly. While I'm not that musically inclined, some games just "have it" where the music fits the mood(Uplink, Rez, The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Brothers, Unreal Tournament, etc) others feel like the music was haphazardly slapped onto the game by the marketing department (Madden 2004 springs to mind). A few actually manage to use sound to significantly enhance gameplay (Counterstrike).
Minimizing time that a player is "out of the game", be it chapter screens or a "death screen" reduces addictiveness, since it provides opportunity for a player to stop playing.
Or it just frustrates the hell out of them. I started playing Ninja Gaiden on the X-Box this weekend. I had to sit through a silly intro about some dark dragon sword. I kept hitting start, but alas the authors felt I needed to know about this sword to play an action game. After 2 minutes of frustration, the game started and I managed to die before I made it to a save point. This managed to frustrate the shit out of me since I had to sit through the damn intro again to start over. While this is a minor complaint about a game that everyone loves, it still is a good example of frustrating a player.
Quake did a good job here -- click and you're back in the game.
It's so true, that is what makes FPS games like digital crack. Ok, you died you lose all your weapons and respawn. Time to start again. There was an old playstation fighting game like this, called Bushido Blade. The fights were quick, you could kill each other in 1 hit with a clean strike. However, you could just press 1 button to play the same match over and over again. A friend and I played 400 matches one night. It was like we were rats hitting a button provided by a scientist to get more drugs.
Players become more involved in a game if they feel that they are "gaining" something constantly -- RPGs lived for a while on almost this characteristic alone. So on and so forth...
I touched on MMORPGS earlier, but they are living on this. People do the same things over and over again (Star wars galaxies is a good example) for the perception that they are gaining something (progress twards Jedihood, their next skillbox). It's amazing how addictive these games can become for some people in spite of the repetititive game play.
see that teaching a course where the output is a complete game is valuable but why do it for a NES emulater and why in a dialect of basic??
Computer Science students often start off with Pascal. It's not as important what platform they are programming for, It's more important that they learn the basic concepts for making a game. While teaching J2ME coding on a Cell phone emulator might be more practical for a 1 man development project, it doesn't mean teaching for the NES is worthless.
Students will learn a lot more being able to produce sightly more unfinished demo's using more relevant technology. For example which is more useful to a potential game designer, being able to write and understand algorithms to manipulate the pallete to get more apparent colours or learning how to use Direct Input (or some other modern API, like OpenGL)??
I don't think the course is about trying to get a job in the gaming industry afterwords, it's more about concepts that are needed for game devolpment (ie Double Buffering, different types of collision detection). While you might understand these things if you have made a small game already, you probably don't if you just have a CS degree.
I wonder if I should develop my first serious homebrew game under NES or Gameboy? It will be instantly cross-platform under all those emulators, less likely to encounter those nasty hardware configuration problems and I won't have to worry about conforming to the latest 3D graphics.
I would go for the gameboy if I were you. You could buy a compact flash card then and play your game on a gameboy advance which is a bit cooler to show off than just playing it on an emulator on your PC.
Oh, and I couldn't resist: first post!
Nah, that was me. YOU FAIL IT!:D
A class where students actually make a game, rather than just design it. Game design is one thing, and everyone "has an idea for a game" nowadays but not everyone can make one. I'm glad to see students working on a console, even if it is an old one.
I can understand parents showing up at this film with their children expecting something different, but after a few minutes of the tremendous violence shown onscreen, I would have thought more parents would have spared their children further horror. Shouldn't ticket sellers offer some kind of warning to parents showing up with good intentions and young children?
Just as with Video games, parents need to be informed. How could any parent have missed the media frenzy bitching about how violent "passion of the christ" was? Having managed a movie theater back in my college days, I can tell you that parents just don't care nowadays. I constantly saw parents taking their young children in to see movies like "leathal weapon 4". I don't think it was out of ignorance, I think it's more indifference. I find that most parents just don't know how to be parents anymore and try to treat their children as friends. It's sad.
If you are a parent and you bring your child to a R rated movie, which is clearly stated to be for people 18 and above, then it's your fault when the child sees the violence, or sex in that movie. It's not the fault of the MPAA or anyone else.
Nudity and sex is all about context, and being an American it seems that too many people get bent out of shape about someone being naked, and it's seriously going to warp the minds of our youth.
It does mold the image of the other sex in the minds of young people though. You think a young girl who is bombarded with the objectification of women doesn't get it into her head that she should be the same way? When kids are exposed to near pornography at young ages by their 'idols' you don't think that makes them all the more eager to act it out?
Leisure Suit Larry is an ADULT-ORIENTED and sexually themed game, thus I hope we get to see some guys nuts and maybe a rediculously-sized breast getting thrown across our screens here and there. That's the appeal of games like that, right? (I don't play them; someone help me out here...)
I haven't played the LSL games since the first 2 or 3 (on my apple like 15 years ago) but the point back then was adult humor. The sex stuff wasn't that graphic. Of course, graphics have come a long way since then.
Personally, I think sex is overused in all aspects of American pop culture. But at the same time, the media portrays it as controversial and extreme, and that's why it sells.
The media is engaging in the same behavior. Stories on sex get viewers, sell newspapers, etc. Even if it's something trivial, if sex is involved people are interested.
People always talk about the sexual revolution, blah blah blah, but all the "progress" made in America that ever seems to happen is just allowing women to be able to show more and more of their bodies, and the twisted fools that read magazines like Maxim to oggle over them and continue objectifying, and I think this article only illustrates what kind of a double standard these "journalists" help to create.
I think the real bottom line is, sex should be allowed in video games/media etc. It's a large part of life (at least for me!). The only problem I have with it, is when the media, business and whoever else sells sex to kids.
I think at some point, as the "Atari/NES generation" ages, and demands better entertainment from their video games, there are going to have to be better guidlines as to what kind of game gets what kind of rating and how they are distributed. I really wonder why retailers won't sell AO games, 7-11 sells porno mags, video stores carry porn, why do we constantly classify video games as a different form of media and as childrens games when such a large chunk of 20-30 males play games still?
Thanks to IGN Pocket for its first details on Game Boy Advance game Pirate Battle, an original "turn-based strategy game" from the RIAA and Nintendo.
In the game you play an ex-RIAA agent hired by nintendo to track down and kill the evil webmaster of gameboy-advance.net with your threating e-mail powerup, which can be combo'ed with a lawsuit gun special move you can fight the evil pirates, but when you track them down eventually you will have to face their ultimate weapon, the flash card!
You underestimate market pressures. If the EU and "some third world countries" (such as China, which is catching up fast enough that they are now the worlds largest market for cell phones?) move to Linux, US software companies will face one of two choices: Become irellevant, or support Linux before the competition (whether US or foreign).
US software companies will still write software mostly for US companies. The burdon of moving that software to linux will fall on the third world countries. China may consume many goods (such as cell phones) but how much software do you think they buy legitimatly compared to US business? While we are on the subject of cell phones, a lot of them run Java now, so US developers won't have to do anything different for those.
If your clients decide TCO is compelling, then it doesn't matter what you think - someone will be there to support them, and someone will be there to send them documents in formats that work well for them, or take their data in formats you can't handle, or whatever is relevant to your business.
TCO is debatable for linux vs windows despite what many zealots here on slashdot think. It's Really debatable overseas where software piracy is more common. If a company moves to linux, it's more likely they will be focused on translating their own documents to windows compatable formats than vice-versa.
That's how Windows and Office came to dominate in the first place: Some people saw a benefit, and they got a domino effect from partners, customers etc. that may not have seen a direct benefit, but saw a benefit in interoperating with people who had taken the leap.
Windows and office got to where they are through a lot of different factors. It wasn't just the ability to transfer documents in the correct format easly. You have to consider the fact that most people are trained on windows software, and that is all they use. Most Admins are Windows Admins, most tech support guys know Windows. Etc.
The other fact I think you are overlooking is that it's more likely for a Chinese software development firm to develop apps for use in American than vice versa.
I do think Linux will grab a hold of the market in the US in the next 5-10 years, but not because of the EU, China and/or Russia. There are a lot of scenarios that could lead to linux gaining ground (which seem to be covered on slashdot daily), but this isn't one of the more likely ones.
The piece references an economic analysis by Raph Koster regarding Star Wars Galaxies, in which he mentions the game "...uses what is called a faucet-drain economy.
And the faucet drains right into e-bay . I played SWG for the first month, and quit after I realized it was an annoying timesink and that Jedi were a sick marketing ploy. I had some money to play around with last month, so I bought myself a Jedi on ebay for $600. The Jedi was mislisted, so I got it pretty cheap. I played for a week, realized it was still boring (You have killed a generic monster, you gain 100 Jedi XP! Only 190000 more till you can get your next box/level!) so I relisted it on ebay. And I got $2000 for it. $1400 isn't a bad profit for a weeks work/play. Thanks for improving my real life economy Ralph. Maybe I'll see you again after pub 10 when being a Jedi is fun, or when the vehicle expansion comes out this fall.
No they don't. They are extra characters that people don't play. I play Star Wars Galaxies and have about 6 characters. Two of my characters have money, the other ones only have the 250 credits you start with. This does distort the statistics quite a bit and I imagine there are a bunch of other people who do the same thing.
There are, most SWG power players have a few characters of different classes which they can use to "buff" (enhance) their main character. It's nice to have a second character on the same server who is a doctor that you can log in to treat your main character (if you have 2 computers). Also, you can have a merchant that makes the money for your brawler, who just tips him whatever he needs. The merchant could appear dirt poor, because he's constantly tipping the brawler (main character).
They could measure the economy more accurately if they had 1 character per account.
Miguel believes that poor countries will be the first that will adopt widely Linux, and as long the EU won't adopt a similar system to US for patents, Europe will follow soon after, leaving no option to USA but to eventually adopt Linux as well in the long run (despite potential patent problems).
It's unlikely that the US will move to linux just because the EU and some third world countries do. It's more likely at this point that some mega-worm that causes some type of damage will cause US companies off of windows. Migration for small companies can costs thousands of dollars, they aren't going to migrate unless there is some type of huge risk in not migrating. Not to mention, if a company has a bunch of MCSE's they aren't going to be chomping at the bit to migrate. Right now, the only 'killer app/feature' linux can offer companies is security. Total cost of ownership is debatable.
Hah, Garriott made my favorite RPG of all time, Ultima 4. Now it seems he is the only one who "gets it" and wants to cut the boring parts out of MMO's. He's going to get my money just to see what he does. Ah, and for those who are concerned with the sci-fi format, Origin put out a pretty good Sci-FI RPG game back around the Ultima 4-5 days called 2400AD. Check it out.
Use Mozilla until you run into a page that doesn't work. Then copy the address, open IE and use it while on that page. That's what I do with Opera. And really, there aren't that many pages that simply refuse to work with anything but IE.
that is exactly what I do. I do run into a lot of webpages that don't display correctly in mozilla (about 15% if I had to guess) and certain ones flat out break (probably about 3%). But how broken is your OS/platform if you have to switch between two different browsers to surf the internet safely? Lets face it, aside from office, the internet is the "killer app" for the everyday user.
how about NOT installing shit on your systems duh?
The new trend I've noticed is if you end up on a website with one of those stupid pop ups that gives you "Do you want to install junkWebBar" you click no, and it still tries to install (my firewall catches this). It still manages to install itself though, my firewall ends up catching it when it tries to get out for the first time.
You can try running mozilla but then you run into websites that just break in it because they aren't coded for web standards.
Now this stuff happens to me, I have a degree in computer science, work as a programmer, and run 2 firewalls at home. How are everyday users going to protect themselves? Just not "installing shit" doesnt' save someone from getting browser jacked which used to be limited to porn sites, but I see it everywhere nowadays.
This is going to be an issue, that if it gets worse might drive people to linux or some other OS/internet browser.
I agree with your general point. However, I think you're a little off on this particular part. Comcast hadn't been running TechTV. Comcast bought TechTV and then announced layoffs shortly after. Whether TechTV was doing well or not may not be the issue (although they did take quite a hit during the dot-bomb).
See but the funny thing is about 2 years ago comcast dropped tech tv from it's lineup in many areas (I was in one of them). I have a friend who works as QA for the complaint lines from comcast and she said they used to get complaints constantly about comcast dropping tech tv. So, fast foward 2 years, and comcast buys techTV (Probably at a lower price since it had less viewers) then fires everyone.
I have to say, Tech TV when it first came on the air was great. Big Thinkers (Interviews with tech guru's) was a fun show, and silicon spin (talk show) was fun because you got to see CEO's and CTO's squirm. Screensavers and Call for help were ok. It seemed the longer TechTV was on the air, the further they got away from truely technical stuff and moved to being a "helpdesk/geek" network.
G4 and Tech TV could be a nice merging because together they might have enough orginal programming to actually have a network without re-runs.
On a more personal note, it's rare that I get so pissed off with a company that I don't want to use their products anymore, but comcast is so piss poor when it comes to service (yes, I bitch to my friend all the time about this) that I'm thinking of switching to directTV and DSL. If comcast owns G4, does that mean you don't get it on DirectTV? Or is that a law that the monopoly comcast actually has to follow?
Cyberathlete Professional League ? Jesus christ, people please move out of your parent's basement, get a job, go on dates, get a gym membership, and live your life. I love gaming but this is just ridiculous.
Hah, you guys are talking about how usenet will make their heads explode? Image if they found freenet? I don't know if a high percentage cryptomanics/cypher punks are sexual deviants or if the deviants are just attracted to freenet somehow, but that place is will make your stomach turn if you get offended by anything questionable.
When will the linux desktops going to "lead" in innovation instead of lagging, continually trying to replicated some outdated version of windows?
Although you've been modded as a troll, you are right in large part it seems linux tries to emulate windows. It's not a bad thing, because it allows people to switch when they get too disgruntled with windows. However, the bigger payoff would be if someone developed a desktop enviornment that was BETTER than windows. Not just in preformance, but in look in feel
You can go and play the other games which are only there because DDR has kept the arcade from being converted into a Starbucks or hell, you can even just chill and watch people play.
Actually I left out another part of what has killed arcades, online gaming over the internet. While you can go to the arcades and play other games, how many new games actually come out in the arcades anymore? It seems like so many game companies closed their arcade divisions. I see more gimmick games designed for the malls and boardwalks than actual stand up arcade games.
You are right though, arcades were dying pre-DDR. DDR helped attract a certain crowd to the arcades, but I think it drove other players out too.
Overall, the arcade experence doesn't have much to offer vs the home experence anymore. They used to offer cutting edge games, and competition. Now the internet provides the competition and PC games look just as good as most arcade games nowadays.
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Finally, and sadly, prolific Neo Geo (and other) FAQ writer Chris MacDonald, aka Kao Megura, has recently passed away, according to forum messages posted by his brother.
This is truely a shame. I did communicate with Chris via e-mail a few years back about a FAQ I was writing and if I could "borrow" one of his layouts. He came across as a genuinly nice guy, and not stuck up at all which was refreshing.
Gamepro and other gaming magazines should print a tribute to him for all of his stuff they stole and sold from his FAQ sheets. Rest in Peace Chris.
Now that games have matured into a $11 billion business, topping movie box-office sales and siphoning television viewers, the lucrative and increasingly influential genre has attracted more star power than ever.'"
How about getting some of those "stars" to lobby the MPAA to allow the Video Game industry to use movie ratings for video games. That might actually help the few parents who try to watch what their children buy and get various senators to take up a crusade other than censoring video games. That would be a boon (not ed) to the whole video game industry.
"If that turns out to be the case, no non-EA Sports game could license NFL player likenesses--an almost certainly fatal blow to the Madden series' rivals."
This is an interesting move by EA. It makes sense for them to put their rivals out of the NFL simulation game business. With Madden 2004, in my opinion EA took a step back by making the game more realistic yet less fun. The story as I heard it goes, John Madden was watching his son play Madden Football on the Playstation and his Son converted a 4th and 28. When he told his son "hey that was nice" he Son replied back, "Uhh no I do it all the time". To which John Madden replied, "Well that isn't right". He complained about it, and in Madden 2004 they hard coded in the percentages that a play should fail based on the NFL percentages from the year before (ie, 4th down tries only succeed about 21% of the time). While this makes for a fun football simulation, it's not really dependant on the players skill so to me it's not fun knowing I'm winning or losing based on a virtual coin toss rather than my own skill.
The point of this story was this, while EA may lock up the players rights to fight off it's competitors, there is still money to be made with sports games. There were plenty of games that were very good that weren't licenced by the NBA or NFL players associations. They can often licence one players name for the game such as Joe Montana's football for Sega way back when. Joe Montana's football was great for it's time, and had no basis in reality (games would end with Arena football scores like 71-68) yet many gamers I know look back at it fondly. Another example of a game without a licence succeeding is hoops for the original NES. Blades of Steel didn't have a licence but more people remember that game than the old NHL hockey games.
Overall this could be a big winner for EA, but it could also lead to more innovative games for the sports genre as rival companies try to find a different solution.
You can look on ebay to gauge the market rate for a Jedi account. There is one listing over $1000 with bids, many at $1000 with no bids, a couple in the $700 range, and a few "almost a Jedi" with bids ranging $180-375ish. So clearly they're not quite going like hotcakes in the $1000 range. I could see the value going up a bit if it was an official product, but I doubt the market would be very large.
track one of the bids in your "my ebay" tracker and watch how much it shoots up in the last hour. Most of the time they go for $1500 - 2000
Sale of MMORPG Items on Ebay is commonplace. The question is, will a company ever embrace the real world value of the items and sell them themselves? Sony could probably make a killing selling Jedi accouts for $1000 a piece to casual gamers who don't have 200 hours to waste on becoming a Jedi. The question is, would it put off gamers who don't have the money for a uber account, or would it attract more casual gamers to the game?
Wrong.
People give online gaming far FAR too much credit. The vast majority of people who play videogames do not do so online; Either through PC or consoles. They play at home, or if they want to play multiplayer, with friends. Not online.
Yes, but people who played consoles outnumbered arcade gamers in 1994-1995 as well. What I'm saying is the people who played in the arcades for competition migrated to online gaming. I know quite a few competitive gamers from playing in various tournments on the east coast, as well as working at a few arcades and all of them play some type of online game now when I talk to them.
Maybe the guy who went to the arcade once a month to get a beer and play Mortal Kombat doesn't play games online, but odds are the guy who went there every day and dropped 5-10 dollars does and that is part of what killed the arcades.
Game design is a different sort of thing though. I think both are interesting. There are a number of properties that a good game should have (and I haven't seen much attempt to analytically break it down). For example, repetition is generally a bad thing.
:) As for the repetition, it depends if the person considers the repetition fun. One mans fun is anothers boredom. MMORPG's are a good example of this. Some people I run into are hopelessly addicted to them, other are utterly bored by the repetition and lack of conent. I agree that repetition for the sake of content is a bad idea, but some personality types are attracted to this and I think feel confort in a stable environment. I know this sounds strange, but how many times have you seen someone replay the same game over, and over and over.
I think they are different also. I find that most schools that offer "Video game" courses tend to lean twards design. Being a programmer, this doesn't please me that much.
Syncing visual stimmuli to audio stimuli tends to be exciting (if you can put together an intelligent music engine and sync beats to something, you might have something interesting going -- Rez depended heavily on this, for example, but it'd be okay to be less blatently music-oriented.
Oh yeah. So many games do this poorly. While I'm not that musically inclined, some games just "have it" where the music fits the mood(Uplink, Rez, The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Brothers, Unreal Tournament, etc) others feel like the music was haphazardly slapped onto the game by the marketing department (Madden 2004 springs to mind). A few actually manage to use sound to significantly enhance gameplay (Counterstrike).
Minimizing time that a player is "out of the game", be it chapter screens or a "death screen" reduces addictiveness, since it provides opportunity for a player to stop playing.
Or it just frustrates the hell out of them. I started playing Ninja Gaiden on the X-Box this weekend. I had to sit through a silly intro about some dark dragon sword. I kept hitting start, but alas the authors felt I needed to know about this sword to play an action game. After 2 minutes of frustration, the game started and I managed to die before I made it to a save point. This managed to frustrate the shit out of me since I had to sit through the damn intro again to start over. While this is a minor complaint about a game that everyone loves, it still is a good example of frustrating a player.
Quake did a good job here -- click and you're back in the game.
It's so true, that is what makes FPS games like digital crack. Ok, you died you lose all your weapons and respawn. Time to start again. There was an old playstation fighting game like this, called Bushido Blade. The fights were quick, you could kill each other in 1 hit with a clean strike. However, you could just press 1 button to play the same match over and over again. A friend and I played 400 matches one night. It was like we were rats hitting a button provided by a scientist to get more drugs.
Players become more involved in a game if they feel that they are "gaining" something constantly -- RPGs lived for a while on almost this characteristic alone. So on and so forth...
I touched on MMORPGS earlier, but they are living on this. People do the same things over and over again (Star wars galaxies is a good example) for the perception that they are gaining something (progress twards Jedihood, their next skillbox). It's amazing how addictive these games can become for some people in spite of the repetititive game play.
see that teaching a course where the output is a complete game is valuable but why do it for a NES emulater and why in a dialect of basic??
Computer Science students often start off with Pascal. It's not as important what platform they are programming for, It's more important that they learn the basic concepts for making a game. While teaching J2ME coding on a Cell phone emulator might be more practical for a 1 man development project, it doesn't mean teaching for the NES is worthless.
Students will learn a lot more being able to produce sightly more unfinished demo's using more relevant technology. For example which is more useful to a potential game designer, being able to write and understand algorithms to manipulate the pallete to get more apparent colours or learning how to use Direct Input (or some other modern API, like OpenGL)??
I don't think the course is about trying to get a job in the gaming industry afterwords, it's more about concepts that are needed for game devolpment (ie Double Buffering, different types of collision detection). While you might understand these things if you have made a small game already, you probably don't if you just have a CS degree.
I wonder if I should develop my first serious homebrew game under NES or Gameboy? It will be instantly cross-platform under all those emulators, less likely to encounter those nasty hardware configuration problems and I won't have to worry about conforming to the latest 3D graphics.
:D
I would go for the gameboy if I were you. You could buy a compact flash card then and play your game on a gameboy advance which is a bit cooler to show off than just playing it on an emulator on your PC.
Oh, and I couldn't resist: first post! Nah, that was me. YOU FAIL IT!
A class where students actually make a game, rather than just design it. Game design is one thing, and everyone "has an idea for a game" nowadays but not everyone can make one. I'm glad to see students working on a console, even if it is an old one.
I can understand parents showing up at this film with their children expecting something different, but after a few minutes of the tremendous violence shown onscreen, I would have thought more parents would have spared their children further horror. Shouldn't ticket sellers offer some kind of warning to parents showing up with good intentions and young children?
Just as with Video games, parents need to be informed. How could any parent have missed the media frenzy bitching about how violent "passion of the christ" was? Having managed a movie theater back in my college days, I can tell you that parents just don't care nowadays. I constantly saw parents taking their young children in to see movies like "leathal weapon 4". I don't think it was out of ignorance, I think it's more indifference. I find that most parents just don't know how to be parents anymore and try to treat their children as friends. It's sad.
If you are a parent and you bring your child to a R rated movie, which is clearly stated to be for people 18 and above, then it's your fault when the child sees the violence, or sex in that movie. It's not the fault of the MPAA or anyone else.
Nudity and sex is all about context, and being an American it seems that too many people get bent out of shape about someone being naked, and it's seriously going to warp the minds of our youth.
It does mold the image of the other sex in the minds of young people though. You think a young girl who is bombarded with the objectification of women doesn't get it into her head that she should be the same way? When kids are exposed to near pornography at young ages by their 'idols' you don't think that makes them all the more eager to act it out?
Leisure Suit Larry is an ADULT-ORIENTED and sexually themed game, thus I hope we get to see some guys nuts and maybe a rediculously-sized breast getting thrown across our screens here and there. That's the appeal of games like that, right? (I don't play them; someone help me out here...)
I haven't played the LSL games since the first 2 or 3 (on my apple like 15 years ago) but the point back then was adult humor. The sex stuff wasn't that graphic. Of course, graphics have come a long way since then.
Personally, I think sex is overused in all aspects of American pop culture. But at the same time, the media portrays it as controversial and extreme, and that's why it sells.
The media is engaging in the same behavior. Stories on sex get viewers, sell newspapers, etc. Even if it's something trivial, if sex is involved people are interested.
People always talk about the sexual revolution, blah blah blah, but all the "progress" made in America that ever seems to happen is just allowing women to be able to show more and more of their bodies, and the twisted fools that read magazines like Maxim to oggle over them and continue objectifying, and I think this article only illustrates what kind of a double standard these "journalists" help to create.
I think the real bottom line is, sex should be allowed in video games/media etc. It's a large part of life (at least for me!). The only problem I have with it, is when the media, business and whoever else sells sex to kids.
I think at some point, as the "Atari/NES generation" ages, and demands better entertainment from their video games, there are going to have to be better guidlines as to what kind of game gets what kind of rating and how they are distributed. I really wonder why retailers won't sell AO games, 7-11 sells porno mags, video stores carry porn, why do we constantly classify video games as a different form of media and as childrens games when such a large chunk of 20-30 males play games still?
Thanks to IGN Pocket for its first details on Game Boy Advance game Pirate Battle, an original "turn-based strategy game" from the RIAA and Nintendo.
In the game you play an ex-RIAA agent hired by nintendo to track down and kill the evil webmaster of gameboy-advance.net with your threating e-mail powerup, which can be combo'ed with a lawsuit gun special move you can fight the evil pirates, but when you track them down eventually you will have to face their ultimate weapon, the flash card!
You underestimate market pressures. If the EU and "some third world countries" (such as China, which is catching up fast enough that they are now the worlds largest market for cell phones?) move to Linux, US software companies will face one of two choices: Become irellevant, or support Linux before the competition (whether US or foreign).
US software companies will still write software mostly for US companies. The burdon of moving that software to linux will fall on the third world countries. China may consume many goods (such as cell phones) but how much software do you think they buy legitimatly compared to US business? While we are on the subject of cell phones, a lot of them run Java now, so US developers won't have to do anything different for those.
If your clients decide TCO is compelling, then it doesn't matter what you think - someone will be there to support them, and someone will be there to send them documents in formats that work well for them, or take their data in formats you can't handle, or whatever is relevant to your business.
TCO is debatable for linux vs windows despite what many zealots here on slashdot think. It's Really debatable overseas where software piracy is more common. If a company moves to linux, it's more likely they will be focused on translating their own documents to windows compatable formats than vice-versa.
That's how Windows and Office came to dominate in the first place: Some people saw a benefit, and they got a domino effect from partners, customers etc. that may not have seen a direct benefit, but saw a benefit in interoperating with people who had taken the leap.
Windows and office got to where they are through a lot of different factors. It wasn't just the ability to transfer documents in the correct format easly. You have to consider the fact that most people are trained on windows software, and that is all they use. Most Admins are Windows Admins, most tech support guys know Windows. Etc.
The other fact I think you are overlooking is that it's more likely for a Chinese software development firm to develop apps for use in American than vice versa.
I do think Linux will grab a hold of the market in the US in the next 5-10 years, but not because of the EU, China and/or Russia. There are a lot of scenarios that could lead to linux gaining ground (which seem to be covered on slashdot daily), but this isn't one of the more likely ones.
The piece references an economic analysis by Raph Koster regarding Star Wars Galaxies, in which he mentions the game "...uses what is called a faucet-drain economy.
And the faucet drains right into e-bay . I played SWG for the first month, and quit after I realized it was an annoying timesink and that Jedi were a sick marketing ploy. I had some money to play around with last month, so I bought myself a Jedi on ebay for $600. The Jedi was mislisted, so I got it pretty cheap. I played for a week, realized it was still boring (You have killed a generic monster, you gain 100 Jedi XP! Only 190000 more till you can get your next box/level!) so I relisted it on ebay. And I got $2000 for it. $1400 isn't a bad profit for a weeks work/play. Thanks for improving my real life economy Ralph. Maybe I'll see you again after pub 10 when being a Jedi is fun, or when the vehicle expansion comes out this fall.
No they don't. They are extra characters that people don't play. I play Star Wars Galaxies and have about 6 characters. Two of my characters have money, the other ones only have the 250 credits you start with. This does distort the statistics quite a bit and I imagine there are a bunch of other people who do the same thing.
There are, most SWG power players have a few characters of different classes which they can use to "buff" (enhance) their main character. It's nice to have a second character on the same server who is a doctor that you can log in to treat your main character (if you have 2 computers). Also, you can have a merchant that makes the money for your brawler, who just tips him whatever he needs. The merchant could appear dirt poor, because he's constantly tipping the brawler (main character).
They could measure the economy more accurately if they had 1 character per account.
Miguel believes that poor countries will be the first that will adopt widely Linux, and as long the EU won't adopt a similar system to US for patents, Europe will follow soon after, leaving no option to USA but to eventually adopt Linux as well in the long run (despite potential patent problems).
It's unlikely that the US will move to linux just because the EU and some third world countries do. It's more likely at this point that some mega-worm that causes some type of damage will cause US companies off of windows. Migration for small companies can costs thousands of dollars, they aren't going to migrate unless there is some type of huge risk in not migrating. Not to mention, if a company has a bunch of MCSE's they aren't going to be chomping at the bit to migrate. Right now, the only 'killer app/feature' linux can offer companies is security. Total cost of ownership is debatable.
Hah, Garriott made my favorite RPG of all time, Ultima 4. Now it seems he is the only one who "gets it" and wants to cut the boring parts out of MMO's. He's going to get my money just to see what he does. Ah, and for those who are concerned with the sci-fi format, Origin put out a pretty good Sci-FI RPG game back around the Ultima 4-5 days called 2400AD. Check it out.
Use Mozilla until you run into a page that doesn't work. Then copy the address, open IE and use it while on that page. That's what I do with Opera. And really, there aren't that many pages that simply refuse to work with anything but IE.
that is exactly what I do. I do run into a lot of webpages that don't display correctly in mozilla (about 15% if I had to guess) and certain ones flat out break (probably about 3%). But how broken is your OS/platform if you have to switch between two different browsers to surf the internet safely? Lets face it, aside from office, the internet is the "killer app" for the everyday user.
how about NOT installing shit on your systems duh?
The new trend I've noticed is if you end up on a website with one of those stupid pop ups that gives you "Do you want to install junkWebBar" you click no, and it still tries to install (my firewall catches this). It still manages to install itself though, my firewall ends up catching it when it tries to get out for the first time.
You can try running mozilla but then you run into websites that just break in it because they aren't coded for web standards.
Now this stuff happens to me, I have a degree in computer science, work as a programmer, and run 2 firewalls at home. How are everyday users going to protect themselves? Just not "installing shit" doesnt' save someone from getting browser jacked which used to be limited to porn sites, but I see it everywhere nowadays.
This is going to be an issue, that if it gets worse might drive people to linux or some other OS/internet browser.
I agree with your general point. However, I think you're a little off on this particular part. Comcast hadn't been running TechTV. Comcast bought TechTV and then announced layoffs shortly after. Whether TechTV was doing well or not may not be the issue (although they did take quite a hit during the dot-bomb).
See but the funny thing is about 2 years ago comcast dropped tech tv from it's lineup in many areas (I was in one of them). I have a friend who works as QA for the complaint lines from comcast and she said they used to get complaints constantly about comcast dropping tech tv. So, fast foward 2 years, and comcast buys techTV (Probably at a lower price since it had less viewers) then fires everyone.
I have to say, Tech TV when it first came on the air was great. Big Thinkers (Interviews with tech guru's) was a fun show, and silicon spin (talk show) was fun because you got to see CEO's and CTO's squirm. Screensavers and Call for help were ok. It seemed the longer TechTV was on the air, the further they got away from truely technical stuff and moved to being a "helpdesk/geek" network.
G4 and Tech TV could be a nice merging because together they might have enough orginal programming to actually have a network without re-runs.
On a more personal note, it's rare that I get so pissed off with a company that I don't want to use their products anymore, but comcast is so piss poor when it comes to service (yes, I bitch to my friend all the time about this) that I'm thinking of switching to directTV and DSL. If comcast owns G4, does that mean you don't get it on DirectTV? Or is that a law that the monopoly comcast actually has to follow?
Cyberathlete Professional League ? Jesus christ, people please move out of your parent's basement, get a job, go on dates, get a gym membership, and live your life. I love gaming but this is just ridiculous.
Would you say that to Garry Kasparov about chess?
Hah, you guys are talking about how usenet will make their heads explode? Image if they found freenet? I don't know if a high percentage cryptomanics/cypher punks are sexual deviants or if the deviants are just attracted to freenet somehow, but that place is will make your stomach turn if you get offended by anything questionable.
When will the linux desktops going to "lead" in innovation instead of lagging, continually trying to replicated some outdated version of windows?
Although you've been modded as a troll, you are right in large part it seems linux tries to emulate windows. It's not a bad thing, because it allows people to switch when they get too disgruntled with windows. However, the bigger payoff would be if someone developed a desktop enviornment that was BETTER than windows. Not just in preformance, but in look in feel
and that is exactly what sun is trying to do with project looking glass.
Check out some of the movies and screenshots of it if you haven't seen them yet (it's been posted on slashdot) they are pretty badass imo.
You can go and play the other games which are only there because DDR has kept the arcade from being converted into a Starbucks or hell, you can even just chill and watch people play.
Actually I left out another part of what has killed arcades, online gaming over the internet. While you can go to the arcades and play other games, how many new games actually come out in the arcades anymore? It seems like so many game companies closed their arcade divisions. I see more gimmick games designed for the malls and boardwalks than actual stand up arcade games.
You are right though, arcades were dying pre-DDR. DDR helped attract a certain crowd to the arcades, but I think it drove other players out too.
Overall, the arcade experence doesn't have much to offer vs the home experence anymore. They used to offer cutting edge games, and competition. Now the internet provides the competition and PC games look just as good as most arcade games nowadays.