The silly part is that "Apple" isn't even that unique a name. Are they going to sue the apple growers in Washington State after this for infringement as well? >_>
Steam is not a bad idea so much as it's one that has no reason to exist. I don't see why Valve is making such a hoopla about this or emphasizing and demanding its usage. What's so wrong about Half-Life's current multiplayer implementation that demands this elaborate and questionable revision?
I've been a gamer since the days of the NES. From my own experience, I would be willing to say that the majority of games I enjoyed were consequently easy games. Why is that? I think it's because I find that video games, as a source of entertainment, are not fun when you're trying to get through the same damned level or boss ten times. RPGs, in particular, are getting so obscure these days that you'd swear they were written around the gamer buying the complementary strategy guide.
Make no mistake, I like games I can sit down and play for twenty minutes and leave without caring much about progress. The idea of fighting a boss that takes 45 minutes to defeat, then dying, just isn't too appealing. I'm not a stathead or a completist in this regard - the kind of person that has to find and battle every last secret character.
There is, as mentioned elsewhere, a fine line between difficulty and frustration. To me, a good challenge is described as one where when the player dies, (s)he can see how it happened and see some route to prevent it from happening the next time. This is as opposed to one challenge after another, to the point where when you die, you blame the game designers for their lousy creation instead of your own skills.
That's right family members. Blame Grand Theft Auto. Blame a video game for your 14 and 16 year old kids getting a.22 caliber rifle. Blame a video game for them sniping at trucks from behind trees.
These juveniles have some very serious mental issues, and it's pretty clear the parents - in bringing this lawsuit - have a defect or two as well.
It's called TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR OWN ACTIONS folks. Or is that concept so long gone in today's nuclear family?
It's a crying shame that the courts could only lock these kids up until they are 19. They should lock the whole lot of them up for a good, long time.
From the article:
"And on Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing to look into the connection between file-swapping services and pornography, called by its chairman, Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican of Utah."
Not that creep again! Wasn't he humiliated enough after this own web site was caught pirating a Java program?:P
I urge everyone to write your member of Congress or the Senate expressing your thoughts and views about HR 2885 and inform them of this RIAA power play. We must both inform the ignorant politicians on the virtues of peer-to-peer, and convince all of them to go past the antipornography label and see what this bill truly stands for.
Never assume that a bill, no matter how stupid, is destined to fail. When you have million-dollar lobbys, smarmy politicians on our payroll, and lawyers pouring over the books, one can creatively get anything passed on our government.
I don't argue that Auto sucked. My point is that Capcom used the cel shading in an innovative way to produce a racing game that didn't look like anything else on the market. Ubi is trying to do the same for the FPS genre with XIII.
Maybe I just needed to play it more, but I wasn't terribly impressed with the XIII demo. I think it's an awesome idea, and an intriguing usage of cel shading, but it just doesn't come together for me. The reason is mainly because I'm not sure I fully understood what the game wanted to be. They have some nice comic book inspirations when enemies die and stuff, but the game seems to play too "realistic" amidst the comic book nature of it all. Is it just me, or do you literally die in a couple hits? I don't know, I was expecting the gameplay to be a bit more like Shogo or Doom than the two-shots-you-dead scheme.
I thought that the visuals were done rather well, however, and the unusually placed swing music gave the action a campy, retro feel. Contrary to others, I don't feel cel shading is an overused trick. It's all in how you apply it. Capcom's Auto Modellista put a cel shading spin on a racing game to visually pleasing results (like something out of the anime Initial D, I suppose). We haven't seen a full-blown FPS title using the trick though and I think XIII does it rather well, despite my having nothing to compare it to.
But UT2K3 goes a bit overkill with the announcer. For example, when you're doing the character select, must it shout out the name of every character in the game as you scroll through the list? >_>
There's nothing worse in multiplayer than an opponent that knows the game through and through and studies it like a Buddhist monk in training. The kind that lives and breathes a game and can't accept defeat at the hands of anyone. The kind of person, in short, for whom a game is much more than a mere game. Those are the people who take all of the fun out of it.
Okay, cheaters are pretty bad too... but what is cheating a reaction against?
Computer games are recreation. People play them to have fun, to kill time, and to make friends. People shouldn't take them so seriously. The minute a game becomes more than a game, to the point where you become so sincerely delusioned that you believe you can win millions playing it, is the point you need to step away and re-evaluate your so-called life.
I don't see computer games becoming an ESPN-caliber spectactor sport anytime soon. For me and many others, it's rather boring to watch other people play games. I could see if it were your map, your mod, or whatnot - but for a bunch of random people, it's not very interesting. Hollywood faces this same problem in the design of video game-based movies (though that ain't the only problem). The truth of the matter is, video games are active entertainment. The player is engaged, mouse in hand, and trying to outwit his opponents, paying attention to his surroundings and sound effects. That experience is what sets video games apart from other forms of entertainment. Compare against sporting events or movies, which are passive experiences, you watch the action unfold before you with no control over what happens.
Some people enjoy that. Personally, I'd be hard-pressed to watch a three-hour-long baseball game from beginning to end without falling asleep, and likewise to a Quake/Unreal/Warcraft/Starcraft/whatever match.
Now watch as Bill Gates and his cronies push for Trusted Computing, the Palladium project. After all, it's never Microsoft's fault that the bugs exist, right? It's always those darned users and by George we need to foolproof the system. Please. Trusting computing is a joke. It is a power play by top industry corporations to seize power and act as a yet another cohesive monopoly in a so-called free market. Just like the RIAA. Just like the MPAA.
Here's a thought. Hold the software companies responsible for their own goofups and bugs. Let the people sue. Let the people file their class action lawsuits against Microsoft for their errors. But don't let the government take control.
I don't want the ignorant US government, or any government for that matter, looking over the Internet and infringing on it any more than they already are. Half of those farts probably don't even know what the Internet is. I can't say I'd want these clueless individuals, easily motivated by legal bribery (lobbies) and big business (Palladium), to be involved. They will only serve to screw things up, pass ridiculous laws, and tax Internet commerce to death. Let the Internet be that one place government is unable to corrupt.
The problem is that the people who aren't on the Internet; the people who take passive interest in computers, are ignorant to these facts. That's why I feel, unfortunately, that things like Palladium are destined to pass. Microsoft and others are going to get these bills through the door while the politicians are still ignorant to computers.
I'd like to say we can stop them, but we don't have a $47 billion lobbyist group behind us.
To me, Driver was always a great premise for a game. Throw the player into a gigantic city with realistic traffic intersections and conditions, and outrun the cops.
But that's typically where my enjoyment of the game ended. Why? So many special tricks and manuevers exist in Driver that are mandatory to your success.
I think that the ultimate car chase game would take the very basic controls of The Need for Speed III (steer, accelerate, brake, and handbrake), the modes of NFS3 (outrun, be the cops, etc), and stick it in a massive, non-linear city environment as opposed to a linear track. Give the player very basic controls and let them mix and match them to concoct their own tricks, rather than putting them through a long tutorial on different turning degrees, premade "macros," and other nonsense. I heard that the Game Boy Advance version had simplistic A + B controls and it got by just fine.
In short, Driver was often too complex for its own good (tying in to what Carmack said about modern games a few days ago). This is a driving game and, as such, the controls need to be as simplistic as possible. Let the physics engine handle the results.
I too would have to agree with John Carmack. It's nice to know that a real bigwig in the games industry is coming out and saying this. Really, the games I like best are the ones that are very simple to pick up and that you can play for 15-30 minutes and quit without thinking about "did I get that item?" or "where the (insert expletive here) is the next save point?"
Hence, it's easy to characterize me as a gamer that enjoys simple games with plenty of replayability as opposed to long, epic games with no replayability whatsoever. I wouldn't be surprised if many gamers from the NES generation felt the same way. There weren't many lengthy NES games that took 40 hours to beat. Most were relatively short and could be beaten in a couple hours, but were fun enough to revisit over and over again. That brand of game feels lost today amidst new gamers that seem to feel the number of hours is everything, no matter how many contrieved or lame "filler" subquests are needed to bloat the game.
Actually, despite the fact that this was started by a really nonsensical news story, it has actually been useful. I've complained that with DivX increasingly adware supported and the cruddy quality of RealMedia and Windows Video that a genuine open-source standard needed to be created for the purpose of compressing video, much like OGG does for audio.
I now know about Theora and XviD which I have never heard of before. The latter I will now endeavor to use when possible.
If I ever met Daryl McBride in person, I'd tell him to "get bent." Then again, maybe I wouldn't, because I'd no doubt get sued for defamation of character. Oh how I detest those who live, breathe, and reproduce by litigation.
SCO is going to hell and they know it. I'll be the one on the sidelines, dancing as they are marched through the fire. I think it's great that other studies have shown that big companies just don't care about pathetic SCO. Their grandstanding is nothing more than an excuse to jack up their stock prices, and it's hurting Linux.
SCO needs to face reality. It is an unsubstantial insect in the world of technology. I hope IBM smashes them. And while they are twitching, smashes them again. And again. That's what should happen to bugs who abuse the legal system and the stock market for selfish, personal gain.
Amen, grendel. Lobbying from all sides, whether we agree with them or not, shoudl be banned. Politicians should be voted on based on their belief and take those beliefs into account when they make it into the office. They should not have the ability to become corrupted at the hands of corporations through legalized bribery.
Look at the Enron situation. So many politicians had their hands in that cookie jar. When it collapsed, no one was interested in prosecuting the guilty - everyone was more interested in saving their own derriere.
The time to push for such a thing is now, before the corporations become even more fused with our government. We are quickly reaching a point of no return, and if the people lose their power in the government to the corporation, we will never get it back.
I think what you say is very true. Today, it's no longer about innovation, having a great idea, or doing something better than your competition. No, today it's whoever has the high-powered legal team. The way our court system is manupulated by big corporations is a slap in the face to justice.
The funny thing is, the politicians wouldn't have it any other way.
Not at all.
See, the beauty of the whole SCO litigation and Microsoft's position in it is that the major media outlets have not reported a thing on it. This does not appear on CNN or Fox News. This sort of news slips under the radar. Ask any non-tech person about SCO and they won't know what you'd be talking about. The problem is that I don't have faith that many CEOs are up-to-date on the latest tech news - only what Gates or their MSCE tells them. If Gates intimates that a threat is on its way, people listen.
It's no skin off Microsoft's back if SCO fails. They'll just continue to move forward like nothing ever happened.
They sat on their hands and did nothing until Linux became pervasive in the desktop and server environment and now they launch this frivilous lawsuit to save their pathetic corporation out of the financial dumpster.
However, I see this Linux licensing plan as evidence that SCO is weak. By raising the lawsuit to $3 billion and now barking about a licensing program, SCO seems like it is trying to raise as loud a ruckus as possible to scare off customers of Linux in lieu of IBM outright ignoring them and Fortune 500 companies shrugging at their claims. SCO is concerned that IBM is essentially silent on the issue and this grandstanding is just evidence of a desperate plea for attention.
SCO needs to understand its place in the world. It is an insignificant yet annoying gnat. And big guys like IBM smash gnats.
I think that a push should be made to get democrat Howard Berman out of office. It's true that the article mentioned two democrats, but we know from the past that Berman is the mastermind. The man has sponsored far too many of these gestapo bills to protect his payroll from the entertainment industry. We don't need politicians like him in office.
Yeah, I'll have to second that. The author kept drawing comparisons between IE and Netscape 4.x, which was absurd since there's no reason why people should still be using Netscape 4.x. Mozilla implemented the new features you described and, unlike Opera which no doubt inspired some of them, did it for free. For him to argue that Mozilla was too little too late and "meaningless" was ignorance, not divine inspiration.
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The silly part is that "Apple" isn't even that unique a name. Are they going to sue the apple growers in Washington State after this for infringement as well? >_>
Steam is not a bad idea so much as it's one that has no reason to exist. I don't see why Valve is making such a hoopla about this or emphasizing and demanding its usage. What's so wrong about Half-Life's current multiplayer implementation that demands this elaborate and questionable revision?
Make no mistake, I like games I can sit down and play for twenty minutes and leave without caring much about progress. The idea of fighting a boss that takes 45 minutes to defeat, then dying, just isn't too appealing. I'm not a stathead or a completist in this regard - the kind of person that has to find and battle every last secret character.
There is, as mentioned elsewhere, a fine line between difficulty and frustration. To me, a good challenge is described as one where when the player dies, (s)he can see how it happened and see some route to prevent it from happening the next time. This is as opposed to one challenge after another, to the point where when you die, you blame the game designers for their lousy creation instead of your own skills.
These juveniles have some very serious mental issues, and it's pretty clear the parents - in bringing this lawsuit - have a defect or two as well.
It's called TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR OWN ACTIONS folks. Or is that concept so long gone in today's nuclear family?
It's a crying shame that the courts could only lock these kids up until they are 19. They should lock the whole lot of them up for a good, long time.
Not that creep again! Wasn't he humiliated enough after this own web site was caught pirating a Java program? :P
I urge everyone to write your member of Congress or the Senate expressing your thoughts and views about HR 2885 and inform them of this RIAA power play. We must both inform the ignorant politicians on the virtues of peer-to-peer, and convince all of them to go past the antipornography label and see what this bill truly stands for.
Never assume that a bill, no matter how stupid, is destined to fail. When you have million-dollar lobbys, smarmy politicians on our payroll, and lawyers pouring over the books, one can creatively get anything passed on our government.
I don't argue that Auto sucked. My point is that Capcom used the cel shading in an innovative way to produce a racing game that didn't look like anything else on the market. Ubi is trying to do the same for the FPS genre with XIII.
I thought that the visuals were done rather well, however, and the unusually placed swing music gave the action a campy, retro feel. Contrary to others, I don't feel cel shading is an overused trick. It's all in how you apply it. Capcom's Auto Modellista put a cel shading spin on a racing game to visually pleasing results (like something out of the anime Initial D, I suppose). We haven't seen a full-blown FPS title using the trick though and I think XIII does it rather well, despite my having nothing to compare it to.
But UT2K3 goes a bit overkill with the announcer. For example, when you're doing the character select, must it shout out the name of every character in the game as you scroll through the list? >_>
The end all was PlanetDeerHunter.com. Hands down.
There's nothing worse in multiplayer than an opponent that knows the game through and through and studies it like a Buddhist monk in training. The kind that lives and breathes a game and can't accept defeat at the hands of anyone. The kind of person, in short, for whom a game is much more than a mere game. Those are the people who take all of the fun out of it.
Okay, cheaters are pretty bad too... but what is cheating a reaction against?
Computer games are recreation. People play them to have fun, to kill time, and to make friends. People shouldn't take them so seriously. The minute a game becomes more than a game, to the point where you become so sincerely delusioned that you believe you can win millions playing it, is the point you need to step away and re-evaluate your so-called life.
I don't see computer games becoming an ESPN-caliber spectactor sport anytime soon. For me and many others, it's rather boring to watch other people play games. I could see if it were your map, your mod, or whatnot - but for a bunch of random people, it's not very interesting. Hollywood faces this same problem in the design of video game-based movies (though that ain't the only problem). The truth of the matter is, video games are active entertainment. The player is engaged, mouse in hand, and trying to outwit his opponents, paying attention to his surroundings and sound effects. That experience is what sets video games apart from other forms of entertainment. Compare against sporting events or movies, which are passive experiences, you watch the action unfold before you with no control over what happens.
Some people enjoy that. Personally, I'd be hard-pressed to watch a three-hour-long baseball game from beginning to end without falling asleep, and likewise to a Quake/Unreal/Warcraft/Starcraft/whatever match.
Now watch as Bill Gates and his cronies push for Trusted Computing, the Palladium project. After all, it's never Microsoft's fault that the bugs exist, right? It's always those darned users and by George we need to foolproof the system. Please. Trusting computing is a joke. It is a power play by top industry corporations to seize power and act as a yet another cohesive monopoly in a so-called free market. Just like the RIAA. Just like the MPAA.
Here's a thought. Hold the software companies responsible for their own goofups and bugs. Let the people sue. Let the people file their class action lawsuits against Microsoft for their errors. But don't let the government take control.
I don't want the ignorant US government, or any government for that matter, looking over the Internet and infringing on it any more than they already are. Half of those farts probably don't even know what the Internet is. I can't say I'd want these clueless individuals, easily motivated by legal bribery (lobbies) and big business (Palladium), to be involved. They will only serve to screw things up, pass ridiculous laws, and tax Internet commerce to death. Let the Internet be that one place government is unable to corrupt.
The problem is that the people who aren't on the Internet; the people who take passive interest in computers, are ignorant to these facts. That's why I feel, unfortunately, that things like Palladium are destined to pass. Microsoft and others are going to get these bills through the door while the politicians are still ignorant to computers.
I'd like to say we can stop them, but we don't have a $47 billion lobbyist group behind us.
But that's typically where my enjoyment of the game ended. Why? So many special tricks and manuevers exist in Driver that are mandatory to your success.
I think that the ultimate car chase game would take the very basic controls of The Need for Speed III (steer, accelerate, brake, and handbrake), the modes of NFS3 (outrun, be the cops, etc), and stick it in a massive, non-linear city environment as opposed to a linear track. Give the player very basic controls and let them mix and match them to concoct their own tricks, rather than putting them through a long tutorial on different turning degrees, premade "macros," and other nonsense. I heard that the Game Boy Advance version had simplistic A + B controls and it got by just fine.
In short, Driver was often too complex for its own good (tying in to what Carmack said about modern games a few days ago). This is a driving game and, as such, the controls need to be as simplistic as possible. Let the physics engine handle the results.
Hence, it's easy to characterize me as a gamer that enjoys simple games with plenty of replayability as opposed to long, epic games with no replayability whatsoever. I wouldn't be surprised if many gamers from the NES generation felt the same way. There weren't many lengthy NES games that took 40 hours to beat. Most were relatively short and could be beaten in a couple hours, but were fun enough to revisit over and over again. That brand of game feels lost today amidst new gamers that seem to feel the number of hours is everything, no matter how many contrieved or lame "filler" subquests are needed to bloat the game.
I now know about Theora and XviD which I have never heard of before. The latter I will now endeavor to use when possible.
You are so right, my friend. Perhaps the Feds will haul McBride's butt to jail and seize his assets. Yeah... I'd like to see that.
If I ever met Daryl McBride in person, I'd tell him to "get bent." Then again, maybe I wouldn't, because I'd no doubt get sued for defamation of character. Oh how I detest those who live, breathe, and reproduce by litigation. SCO is going to hell and they know it. I'll be the one on the sidelines, dancing as they are marched through the fire. I think it's great that other studies have shown that big companies just don't care about pathetic SCO. Their grandstanding is nothing more than an excuse to jack up their stock prices, and it's hurting Linux. SCO needs to face reality. It is an unsubstantial insect in the world of technology. I hope IBM smashes them. And while they are twitching, smashes them again. And again. That's what should happen to bugs who abuse the legal system and the stock market for selfish, personal gain.
Yes, but how many people really know about that? o_O
Look at the Enron situation. So many politicians had their hands in that cookie jar. When it collapsed, no one was interested in prosecuting the guilty - everyone was more interested in saving their own derriere.
The time to push for such a thing is now, before the corporations become even more fused with our government. We are quickly reaching a point of no return, and if the people lose their power in the government to the corporation, we will never get it back.
The funny thing is, the politicians wouldn't have it any other way.
Not at all. See, the beauty of the whole SCO litigation and Microsoft's position in it is that the major media outlets have not reported a thing on it. This does not appear on CNN or Fox News. This sort of news slips under the radar. Ask any non-tech person about SCO and they won't know what you'd be talking about. The problem is that I don't have faith that many CEOs are up-to-date on the latest tech news - only what Gates or their MSCE tells them. If Gates intimates that a threat is on its way, people listen. It's no skin off Microsoft's back if SCO fails. They'll just continue to move forward like nothing ever happened.
They sat on their hands and did nothing until Linux became pervasive in the desktop and server environment and now they launch this frivilous lawsuit to save their pathetic corporation out of the financial dumpster.
However, I see this Linux licensing plan as evidence that SCO is weak. By raising the lawsuit to $3 billion and now barking about a licensing program, SCO seems like it is trying to raise as loud a ruckus as possible to scare off customers of Linux in lieu of IBM outright ignoring them and Fortune 500 companies shrugging at their claims. SCO is concerned that IBM is essentially silent on the issue and this grandstanding is just evidence of a desperate plea for attention.
SCO needs to understand its place in the world. It is an insignificant yet annoying gnat. And big guys like IBM smash gnats.
The same reason millions of school and college computers continue to run Netscape Communicator 4.7. For no good reason. ;)
Yeah, I'll have to second that. The author kept drawing comparisons between IE and Netscape 4.x, which was absurd since there's no reason why people should still be using Netscape 4.x. Mozilla implemented the new features you described and, unlike Opera which no doubt inspired some of them, did it for free. For him to argue that Mozilla was too little too late and "meaningless" was ignorance, not divine inspiration.