I didn't even notice that you are a cop in true crime. I thought it was a GTA clone from what marketing I have come across. I enjoyed playing GTA and just exploring the world and going on crime sprees. (I never do the missions).
True crime sounds like fun if you can be a renagade cop and go kill the bad guys. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would like to really give the criminals what they deserve, in a role playing, fake environment of course:)
It would be interesting to see what Romero and Hall could come up with working with Ed Boon if he is still with midway. Boon played the "Carmack" roll to John Tobas on Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam among other games. The three could probably come up with an interesting title. Too bad Tobas left midway awhile back IIRC.
It would be pretty cool to have one if you could put in on your property and it would defend it. Of course, I can smell the lawsuit coming when it puts the neigbor's kid in a rear naked choke because the kid comes over the fence to get his ball.
Let me clarify. When I say 'too lazy to participate' I mean 'too lazy to role-play.'
Do you think it's that they are too lazy, or that they don't want to? Do you think they play MMORPG's for the roleplaying, or for the game itself. It sounds strange, but think about it. I think a lot of people play just for the game with little interest in Role Playing.
I must disagree with your contention that 'players will make the content/storylines.' If anything is true across the board of the current crop of MMORPGs, it's that the players *won't* or *can't* make 'story' and 'content' - and the game runners are hard-pressed to come up with enough to make anything interesting happen.
That is because most MMORPG's don't allow unrestricted PvP, if they did the people themselves would make the stories mostly based around combat.
But who says you need a story? (No, seriously) I think people would play online for hours on end just to jack cars, try to rob people, and kill other thugs. I think casual players would pay $10-$15 a month for this.
Letting some players play 'cops' would make things interesting as well...I think there is a lot of potential for a MMO that breaks the mold, because many of them nowadays are clones of each other.
I played SWG at launch and this kind of stuff is why I cancelled. Poor customer support, buggy junk, mod nazi's in their fourms, boring gameplay, etc.
Seriously, I know many people were looking foward to this game (I was) but if you don't like it cancel your account.
I wanted to be bounty hunting, and PvPing like they promised in the interviews a year before the game came out. Instead I ended up in a cantina talking to smokebacca. I won't pay for that kind of experence.
The problem with imagining online versions of games with cool worlds is that the online version will always suffer (and if history is any guide, usually fatally) from the fact that 95% of players are lazy and can't be bothered to participate in them.
Huh? I don't think it's a matter of being lazy, it's a matter of being bored. Just because someone doesn't want to put in the million mouse clicks to level up doesn't make them lazy, it just means they aren't obsessive compulsive.
The fact that Ultima Online, the MMORPG with perhaps the lowest-tech engine, survives and thrives is because it demands more from its players than just appreciative ooh-ing and aah-ing at the eye candy and content that the dev team has slaved to put together.
Do you think UO also survives because it was the first big MMORPG, and it had 10 titles before it to provide a fanbase? Ultima has been around for more than 20 years, it's no suprise their MMO is still alive.
Players are actually required to interact, transact, form social arrangements and the like, and are 'encouraged' to do so 'in-character' if for no other reason than the game mechanics make it easier to do that than to sit around an l33t-ch4t with yer h0m13z. At least, they make that relatively boring.
I didn't see anything in UO that was radically different than SWG or EverQuest.
One of the great things about GTA is the world that has been set up by the developers.
Aren't all single player games like that;)
Player behavior is guided much more subtlely and much more pervasively by the use of single-player storylines and rewards/penalties than it first seems.
Plenty of people I know, don't do any of the missions or follow the storylines, they just mindlessly blow stuff up and use the game as a sandbox.
GTA Online would, in fact, make a decent game initially, but (IMNSHO) there would need to be some carefully thought out mechanisms that would provide for the formation of (and motivation for) player-to-player social structures, both dyadic and multiple-party (partners and gangs).
People would form gangs on their own in GTA online, an in game mechanism would be nice but not needed. People would form them simply for protection and pooling resources.
I think a GTA-MMO could draw in the mainstream crowd that MMO developers are always looking for. They shouldn't think in generic RPG terms though. They should make it more of a sandbox type world where the players will make the content/storylines. Forget leveling, let people just go play. Focus on creating new places, cars, and weapons and let the players (gangs?) make the stories themselves
The problem with imagining online versions of games with cool worlds is that the online version will always suffer (and if history is any guide, usually fatally) from the fact that 95% of players are lazy and can't be bothered to participate in them.
Huh? I don't think it's a matter of being lazy, it's a matter of being bored. Just because someone doesn't want to put in the million mouse clicks to level up doesn't make them lazy, it just means they aren't obsessive compulsive.
The fact that Ultima Online, the MMORPG with perhaps the lowest-tech engine, survives and thrives is because it demands more from its players than just appreciative ooh-ing and aah-ing at the eye candy and content that the dev team has slaved to put together.
Do you think UO also survives because it was the first big MMORPG, and it had 10 titles before it to provide a fanbase? Ultima has been around for more than 20 years, it's no suprise their MMO is still alive.
Players are actually required to interact, transact, form social arrangements and the like, and are 'encouraged' to do so 'in-character' if for no other reason than the game mechanics make it easier to do that than to sit around an l33t-ch4t with yer h0m13z. At least, they make that relatively boring.
I didn't see anything in UO that was radically different than SWG or EverQuest.
One of the great things about GTA is the world that has been set up by the developers.
Aren't all single player games like that;)
Player behavior is guided much more subtlely and much more pervasively by the use of single-player storylines and rewards/penalties than it first seems.
Plenty of people I know, don't do any of the missions or follow the storylines, they just mindlessly blow stuff up and use the game as a sandbox.
GTA Online would, in fact, make a decent game initially, but (IMNSHO) there would need to be some carefully thought out mechanisms that would provide for the formation of (and motivation for) player-to-player social structures, both dyadic and multiple-party (partners and gangs).
People would form gangs on their own in GTA online, an in game mechanism would be nice but not needed. People would form them simply for protection and pooling resources.
I think a GTA-MMO could draw in the mainstream crowd that MMO developers are always looking for. They shouldn't think in generic RPG terms though. They should make it more of a sandbox type world where the players will make the content/storylines. Forget leveling, let people just go play. Focus on creating new places, cars, and weapons and let the players (gangs?) make the stories themselves.
Ah Postal 2, The game where you sneak up on women and then beat the piss out of them. Literally. You can also urinate in their open mouths which usually makes them vomit...
Have you actuallyp played the game? There is no way to "beat the piss out of the women...Literally". Also, you don't really urinate in their mouths, urinating anywhere on them will make them throw up every so often. It's kind of silly for people to make comments about the game who haven't played it/don't know what they are talking about. I know, I know welcome to slashdot, I must be new here.
It just that these two unrelated events don't presage that.
Bummer, huh? You'll have to pay those credit card bills after all.
Or, it could be a black hole on its way to the earth throwing kupiter belt objects and other assorted space goodies at us. Soon the black hole will be here and kill us all! The government paid you to be a disinformation agent! You can't fool the good citizens of slashdot. (Do I still have to pay my visa bill?)
Would the extreme gamer rather sign up, hand out their credit card number, and buy 60 Atari 2600 games for a sum price of about $320, or illegally download a small zip file containing 500 of them in about 30 seconds after 2 minutes of searching on Google?
They aren't Atari 2600 games, they are arcade games made by Atari from what I saw at the site.
You have a point about the bulk discount, but you over estimate the ease of piracy for the average person. Sure, I could bop over to mame.dk and download roms, or fire up bit torrent. But I'm going to have to sit there and download them one by one on mame.dk. On bit torrent, It's not too bad since they are in sets.
The average person, doesn't use bit torrent though, and with the "atari generation" in there 20s and 30s I'm sure there is some money to be made here. They are missing the main point of why people will pay vs pirate: saving time, and supporting a product they enjoy.
For example, if Joe user comes home from work, and it's going to take him 2 hours to find and download 100 roms, another hour to set up MAME, he isn't going to bother if he has a cheap and more reliable way to get the games with some type of tech support.
Atari (infrogames?) should make their own emulator and sell their games for $2 each, if you buy less than 50. If you buy more than 50 you should get them for $1 each. It's the perfect marketing plan ("You can now buy the games you loved in the arcade to play at home, for the price they used to cost to play twice!"). They should also market the damn thing, anytime I tell a non-gamer about stella(atari 2600 emulator) or mame, they think it's the greatest thing ever. Most people don't know mame exists.
The website they have now is a good start, but the price is a bit high for the casual consumer. Also, the ease of use is crappy, with the different amounts of "credits". They should just put the prices up. Having an ease of use issue is a real problem, because the people who are likely to use their service are the ones who don't want to be bothered with the hassle of rom hunting.
Yeah, I know, these aren't full games, but just the ROM images - but then, you're not paying the $25 to $2000 or whatever you might pay for the actual physical machine, either.
FYI: Most old games (ie ms-pacman, etc) go for about $500 in good condition (or at least they did when I was working in arcades...1993-1998). I think boards alone sell for about $100-250.
A top-down driving game with a "free" world like GTA3 has would just not be as interesting as a 3D world, IMO.
It was at the time though, since no one else made a "free" game like that where you could go around on a crime spree. I think comparing GTA 1 to text adventures is a bit of a stretch.
It's a sad state of gaming... few people I know would give GTA1 a serious chance when it game out. A few close friends I would play it all hours of the night. But no, you have to put it into 3D before many people will give it a chance. I guess that's a slightly off-topic rant, but it's true.
It has more to do with the platform. When GTA1 came out on the PC, not a lot of people knew about it and there wasn't any type of ad campaign (that I remember). I don't think people got into GTA3 strictly because of the 3D. I think it had more to do with the platform it came out on, the advertising, and the pop culture aspect of it. I'm sure plenty of people would have given GTA1 a shot on the PC if they had known it existed back then. I for one played the demo of GTA1 for hours, the same way I play GTA3. Roaming around aimlessly, killing things. I even blew up the train in GTA1:)
UT2K3 servers don't have very many people playing. There are almost as many as UT still has. Maybe they should think about where they failed between UT and UT2k3.
I had a chance to speak to our head of HR at a company I previously worked at (in the US) that hired a lot of people overseas. Our company helped drug companies go through clinical trials in the US and sometimes overseas. I asked him about degrees from europe and he said they usually step them down compared to US degrees. So basically 4 years of college in Europe there was equal to 2 years in the US. I don't know if he was doing it out of ignorance or if it is standard practice so take it for what it's worth...
My first point is this, did they look into the fact that if a kid has ADHD or whatever that his parents might be sypathetic and let him play more games? IE: Typical Soccer mom: "Jonny was playing games for 2 hours again today, poor little guy he doesn't need me nagging him to do homework on top of it...He will just hate me...better take a prozac". vs and old school mom "Better get Johnny off the games and doing his homework since he has ADHD he will need extra time studying with my help
Secondly, Why is it abnormal for a kid to play Video games 11 hours a week on average? That is less than an hour and a half a day. If a child with ADHD played chess for an hour and a half a day, would people write negative articles about that? How about if they were more likely to play football than their peers?
Video games can have a positive impact on childrens lives, teaching them problem solving, map reading skills, sparking an intrest in technology, allowing competition for children who might not be as physically gifted as others, etc. I'd really like to see a study done twards why there are such negative stereotypes about games and gamers.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't even notice that you are a cop in true crime. I thought it was a GTA clone from what marketing I have come across. I enjoyed playing GTA and just exploring the world and going on crime sprees. (I never do the missions). True crime sounds like fun if you can be a renagade cop and go kill the bad guys. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would like to really give the criminals what they deserve, in a role playing, fake environment of course :)
2 CPU's in one package. In this case on one chip.
What is the difference then from just having a duel processor system?
I hear Carmack is a big Diakatana fan.
It would be interesting to see what Romero and Hall could come up with working with Ed Boon if he is still with midway. Boon played the "Carmack" roll to John Tobas on Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam among other games. The three could probably come up with an interesting title. Too bad Tobas left midway awhile back IIRC.
It would be pretty cool to have one if you could put in on your property and it would defend it. Of course, I can smell the lawsuit coming when it puts the neigbor's kid in a rear naked choke because the kid comes over the fence to get his ball.
Let me clarify. When I say 'too lazy to participate' I mean 'too lazy to role-play.'
Do you think it's that they are too lazy, or that they don't want to? Do you think they play MMORPG's for the roleplaying, or for the game itself. It sounds strange, but think about it. I think a lot of people play just for the game with little interest in Role Playing.
I must disagree with your contention that 'players will make the content/storylines.' If anything is true across the board of the current crop of MMORPGs, it's that the players *won't* or *can't* make 'story' and 'content' - and the game runners are hard-pressed to come up with enough to make anything interesting happen.
That is because most MMORPG's don't allow unrestricted PvP, if they did the people themselves would make the stories mostly based around combat.
But who says you need a story? (No, seriously) I think people would play online for hours on end just to jack cars, try to rob people, and kill other thugs. I think casual players would pay $10-$15 a month for this.
Letting some players play 'cops' would make things interesting as well...I think there is a lot of potential for a MMO that breaks the mold, because many of them nowadays are clones of each other.
I played SWG at launch and this kind of stuff is why I cancelled. Poor customer support, buggy junk, mod nazi's in their fourms, boring gameplay, etc.
Seriously, I know many people were looking foward to this game (I was) but if you don't like it cancel your account.
I wanted to be bounty hunting, and PvPing like they promised in the interviews a year before the game came out. Instead I ended up in a cantina talking to smokebacca. I won't pay for that kind of experence.
Geez. Why is it that you are so predudice on OSes? Did Apple beat you with a stick and crash on your "What I did last summer?" 3rd grade paper?
Actually, no. I was a big fan of the Apple II when I was younger. I have to work with Macs now, and I'd much rather be on any other platform
The problem with imagining online versions of games with cool worlds is that the online version will always suffer (and if history is any guide, usually fatally) from the fact that 95% of players are lazy and can't be bothered to participate in them.
;)
Huh? I don't think it's a matter of being lazy, it's a matter of being bored. Just because someone doesn't want to put in the million mouse clicks to level up doesn't make them lazy, it just means they aren't obsessive compulsive.
The fact that Ultima Online, the MMORPG with perhaps the lowest-tech engine, survives and thrives is because it demands more from its players than just appreciative ooh-ing and aah-ing at the eye candy and content that the dev team has slaved to put together.
Do you think UO also survives because it was the first big MMORPG, and it had 10 titles before it to provide a fanbase? Ultima has been around for more than 20 years, it's no suprise their MMO is still alive.
Players are actually required to interact, transact, form social arrangements and the like, and are 'encouraged' to do so 'in-character' if for no other reason than the game mechanics make it easier to do that than to sit around an l33t-ch4t with yer h0m13z. At least, they make that relatively boring.
I didn't see anything in UO that was radically different than SWG or EverQuest.
One of the great things about GTA is the world that has been set up by the developers.
Aren't all single player games like that
Player behavior is guided much more subtlely and much more pervasively by the use of single-player storylines and rewards/penalties than it first seems.
Plenty of people I know, don't do any of the missions or follow the storylines, they just mindlessly blow stuff up and use the game as a sandbox.
GTA Online would, in fact, make a decent game initially, but (IMNSHO) there would need to be some carefully thought out mechanisms that would provide for the formation of (and motivation for) player-to-player social structures, both dyadic and multiple-party (partners and gangs).
People would form gangs on their own in GTA online, an in game mechanism would be nice but not needed. People would form them simply for protection and pooling resources.
I think a GTA-MMO could draw in the mainstream crowd that MMO developers are always looking for. They shouldn't think in generic RPG terms though. They should make it more of a sandbox type world where the players will make the content/storylines. Forget leveling, let people just go play. Focus on creating new places, cars, and weapons and let the players (gangs?) make the stories themselves
The problem with imagining online versions of games with cool worlds is that the online version will always suffer (and if history is any guide, usually fatally) from the fact that 95% of players are lazy and can't be bothered to participate in them. Huh? I don't think it's a matter of being lazy, it's a matter of being bored. Just because someone doesn't want to put in the million mouse clicks to level up doesn't make them lazy, it just means they aren't obsessive compulsive. The fact that Ultima Online, the MMORPG with perhaps the lowest-tech engine, survives and thrives is because it demands more from its players than just appreciative ooh-ing and aah-ing at the eye candy and content that the dev team has slaved to put together. Do you think UO also survives because it was the first big MMORPG, and it had 10 titles before it to provide a fanbase? Ultima has been around for more than 20 years, it's no suprise their MMO is still alive. Players are actually required to interact, transact, form social arrangements and the like, and are 'encouraged' to do so 'in-character' if for no other reason than the game mechanics make it easier to do that than to sit around an l33t-ch4t with yer h0m13z. At least, they make that relatively boring. I didn't see anything in UO that was radically different than SWG or EverQuest. One of the great things about GTA is the world that has been set up by the developers. Aren't all single player games like that ;)
Player behavior is guided much more subtlely and much more pervasively by the use of single-player storylines and rewards/penalties than it first seems.
Plenty of people I know, don't do any of the missions or follow the storylines, they just mindlessly blow stuff up and use the game as a sandbox.
GTA Online would, in fact, make a decent game initially, but (IMNSHO) there would need to be some carefully thought out mechanisms that would provide for the formation of (and motivation for) player-to-player social structures, both dyadic and multiple-party (partners and gangs).
People would form gangs on their own in GTA online, an in game mechanism would be nice but not needed. People would form them simply for protection and pooling resources.
I think a GTA-MMO could draw in the mainstream crowd that MMO developers are always looking for. They shouldn't think in generic RPG terms though. They should make it more of a sandbox type world where the players will make the content/storylines. Forget leveling, let people just go play. Focus on creating new places, cars, and weapons and let the players (gangs?) make the stories themselves.
The X Prize does not involve going into orbit.
Why do you slashdot people always have to get so technical? It's not like this stuff is rocket science...
oh wait a second........
either a windows emulator, or a disk formatting utility.
Here are the programs you need to have a k-133t windows system.
1. AOL- DUH, they are the greatest ISP ever.
2. Webshots - Impress your friends with your changing wallpaper!
3. Hotbar - Skin Internet Explorer and Impress your friends!
4. AOHell This program will make you l33t!
5. Incredimail This makes your e-mail look k00lah then everyone elses.
6. Microsoft Outlook because all the anti-virus tools work with it. You don't want to use another e-mail client, you might get a virus!
7. Comet Cursor. Makes your cursor R0x0r.
8. Intruder Alert 99 You need a firewall, the internet isn't a safe place!
9. Gator Gator is an awesome program that helps u remember ur passwords. This way u don't have to fill out stupid forms!
10. BO Server The guys in my gaming clan sent me this, they said it would improve my FPS, and make windows run faster. I think it did!
Hah, so China is on the same level as John Carmack and a few of his friends. Yep, there is a Super Power in the making.
Ah Postal 2, The game where you sneak up on women and then beat the piss out of them. Literally. You can also urinate in their open mouths which usually makes them vomit...
Have you actuallyp played the game? There is no way to "beat the piss out of the women...Literally". Also, you don't really urinate in their mouths, urinating anywhere on them will make them throw up every so often. It's kind of silly for people to make comments about the game who haven't played it/don't know what they are talking about. I know, I know welcome to slashdot, I must be new here.
It just that these two unrelated events don't presage that. Bummer, huh? You'll have to pay those credit card bills after all.
Or, it could be a black hole on its way to the earth throwing kupiter belt objects and other assorted space goodies at us. Soon the black hole will be here and kill us all! The government paid you to be a disinformation agent! You can't fool the good citizens of slashdot. (Do I still have to pay my visa bill?)
Would the extreme gamer rather sign up, hand out their credit card number, and buy 60 Atari 2600 games for a sum price of about $320, or illegally download a small zip file containing 500 of them in about 30 seconds after 2 minutes of searching on Google?
They aren't Atari 2600 games, they are arcade games made by Atari from what I saw at the site.
You have a point about the bulk discount, but you over estimate the ease of piracy for the average person. Sure, I could bop over to mame.dk and download roms, or fire up bit torrent. But I'm going to have to sit there and download them one by one on mame.dk. On bit torrent, It's not too bad since they are in sets.
The average person, doesn't use bit torrent though, and with the "atari generation" in there 20s and 30s I'm sure there is some money to be made here. They are missing the main point of why people will pay vs pirate: saving time, and supporting a product they enjoy.
For example, if Joe user comes home from work, and it's going to take him 2 hours to find and download 100 roms, another hour to set up MAME, he isn't going to bother if he has a cheap and more reliable way to get the games with some type of tech support.
Atari (infrogames?) should make their own emulator and sell their games for $2 each, if you buy less than 50. If you buy more than 50 you should get them for $1 each. It's the perfect marketing plan ("You can now buy the games you loved in the arcade to play at home, for the price they used to cost to play twice!"). They should also market the damn thing, anytime I tell a non-gamer about stella(atari 2600 emulator) or mame, they think it's the greatest thing ever. Most people don't know mame exists.
The website they have now is a good start, but the price is a bit high for the casual consumer. Also, the ease of use is crappy, with the different amounts of "credits". They should just put the prices up. Having an ease of use issue is a real problem, because the people who are likely to use their service are the ones who don't want to be bothered with the hassle of rom hunting.
Yeah, I know, these aren't full games, but just the ROM images - but then, you're not paying the $25 to $2000 or whatever you might pay for the actual physical machine, either.
FYI: Most old games (ie ms-pacman, etc) go for about $500 in good condition (or at least they did when I was working in arcades...1993-1998). I think boards alone sell for about $100-250.
and is using a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz machine
or at least he thinks he is!
I'm quite interested in game news..." but Simoniker is not filtering for a general audience.
In general, I would say the slashdot crowd is interested when MMO's get hacked IMO.
A top-down driving game with a "free" world like GTA3 has would just not be as interesting as a 3D world, IMO.
It was at the time though, since no one else made a "free" game like that where you could go around on a crime spree. I think comparing GTA 1 to text adventures is a bit of a stretch.
It's a sad state of gaming... few people I know would give GTA1 a serious chance when it game out. A few close friends I would play it all hours of the night. But no, you have to put it into 3D before many people will give it a chance. I guess that's a slightly off-topic rant, but it's true.
:)
It has more to do with the platform. When GTA1 came out on the PC, not a lot of people knew about it and there wasn't any type of ad campaign (that I remember). I don't think people got into GTA3 strictly because of the 3D. I think it had more to do with the platform it came out on, the advertising, and the pop culture aspect of it. I'm sure plenty of people would have given GTA1 a shot on the PC if they had known it existed back then. I for one played the demo of GTA1 for hours, the same way I play GTA3. Roaming around aimlessly, killing things. I even blew up the train in GTA1
UT2K3 servers don't have very many people playing. There are almost as many as UT still has. Maybe they should think about where they failed between UT and UT2k3.
I had a chance to speak to our head of HR at a company I previously worked at (in the US) that hired a lot of people overseas. Our company helped drug companies go through clinical trials in the US and sometimes overseas. I asked him about degrees from europe and he said they usually step them down compared to US degrees. So basically 4 years of college in Europe there was equal to 2 years in the US. I don't know if he was doing it out of ignorance or if it is standard practice so take it for what it's worth...
My first point is this, did they look into the fact that if a kid has ADHD or whatever that his parents might be sypathetic and let him play more games? IE: Typical Soccer mom: "Jonny was playing games for 2 hours again today, poor little guy he doesn't need me nagging him to do homework on top of it...He will just hate me...better take a prozac". vs and old school mom "Better get Johnny off the games and doing his homework since he has ADHD he will need extra time studying with my help
Secondly, Why is it abnormal for a kid to play Video games 11 hours a week on average? That is less than an hour and a half a day. If a child with ADHD played chess for an hour and a half a day, would people write negative articles about that? How about if they were more likely to play football than their peers?
Video games can have a positive impact on childrens lives, teaching them problem solving, map reading skills, sparking an intrest in technology, allowing competition for children who might not be as physically gifted as others, etc. I'd really like to see a study done twards why there are such negative stereotypes about games and gamers.