that people won't get fed up with the stupid things and turn them off. From the article, about 10% of drivers in Japan use the navigation systems. The other 90% are still clogging up the freeways, even if Americans turn out to be as gadget-happy as the Japanese (which wouldn't surprise me).
So, to answer the question in the article, not unless you can force people to USE the satnav units. I for one have used one a few times (in rental cars mostly) and found it incredibly annoying.
Which is why saying the pledge in general is rather silly. Saying the same sentence from memory doesn't make anyone patriotic at all, just able to regurgitate that sentence.
However, if you've read Brave New World, you'd realize that passive recitation is a quite powerful thing indeed when it comes to morals. Thus <conspiracy theory mode>the government is attempting to teach religion to the students without them noticing</conspiracy theory mode>.
Nintendo products in general are very durable... how many people do you know that actually managed to break their old tank-sized Game Boy? (Well, until I left leaking batteries in mine...)
Occasionally I'll play a FFA game in Warcraft III... it seems to work something like this. Basically, one player tends to get the biggest army, but loses most of it running over a few players. So when those nearly-dead players say "hey, stab this person in the back", it usually happens. That's why the best way to win at FFA is just to get a big army and sit there until the aforementioned powerful player dies.
Likewise, if you get aggressive in Big Brother/Survivor/any other game, people will perceive you as a threat and take you out before you can dominate the rest of the game.
...long political/philosophical discussions on the nature of good and evil (and this is IC and on-topic on the public message boards), working political system, emphasis on roleplay... the only downside is that most of the guilds have you jump through rather elaborate hoops just to be a member. Pkilling is only a problem if you piss people off. Here's the website... or just achaea.com 23.
No, actually, I underestimated the number of exclusive hit games it would have: it has one so far... and it's not going to be exclusive for much longer.
I've always wondered why more MMOs haven't gone toward a "free subscription" model such as Achaea or Project Entropia, where the source of the company's income is buying various game items with real-life money. Maybe not enough profit involved... but you'd think you'd get more people involved that way.
Let me rephrase that. In DKC and its ilk, you have, at certain points of the game (most of the time, actually) two characters, a la Sonic 2/3. Usually one just follows behind the other, but you can at any point swap between them mid-level... Diddy jumped higher, while DK had the ground pounding ability and a better jump attack. In SMB2 you could change between the characters, but only when you died or reached a new level.
Some of their profiles on the games seem like "well, we all thought it was good, but for the sake of flamewars let's whine about popular games".
Example the first: Donkey Kong Country. I'm not going to say it was a stronger game than, say, Yoshi's Island (which they mention in that profile), but it wasn't worthless. It helped to popularize the use of "bonus areas" in every level, and because of that it gained instant replay value. It had two different characters with different abilities that (unlike, say, SMB2) you could swap between. The graphics were godlike for the time. And it came out 11 months before Yoshi's Island, by the way. It was, for its time, an outstanding platformer. The next two, however, were just ripoffs of DKC's formula. THERE'S your hype.
Example the second: FF7. I don't think it wasn't overhyped, but I don't think it was top 10 on this list. It had a huge hype machine backing it up, and after all it was a very good game, so to call it severely overhyped is a bit unfair.
And I wanted to add one game. Banjo-Kazooie... the whole game was like fetch quest city, and it only got worse in the sequel and in DK64.
Apparently the name Street Fighter II has more name recognition than just Street Fighter.
It's kind of like playing an RPG where you get the Giant Shiny Adamantine Razor-Edged Poison-Tipped Whiffle Bat of Godlike Ultimate Strength of Poseidon. No matter how many extra names they add to it, it still looks like a whiffle bat.
are the ones that don't actually show gameplay footage at all. This was an especially big problem in the PS1 generation, where you'd have commercials composed entirely of the game's FMV. It's false advertising at best when you play off the entire game to look like the FMV.
And then, of course, there are the completely unrelated commercials, but those have always been around even before video games.
I agree with you that losing Square was a mistake, but that was a mistake made 5 or 6 years ago and a mistake they're finally trying to correct.
I am going to take issue with you saying they still have the stigma of being the "family system". Why is that a stigma? Are kids, or for that matter adults, too "cool" for platformers, or what amounts to an adventure/RPG, or some of the other original games they've put out recently?
Not everything in life is about shooting up the bad guys or watching the bouncing polygonal boobs. Nintendo realizes that, and I for one applaud them for sticking to their guns.
And Starcraft, like a few other games, realizes this and allows you to change the speed of the game from agonizingly slow to a nice fast clip, not to mention the variety in maps you mentioned. And, unlike some of the complaints mentioned in the article, you can skip almost all of the cinematics in Starcraft if you so desire.
I think you can, in fact, fix pacing; it just takes a bit more effort to make varying game speeds. (For example, FF6 allowed you to vary the pace of the battles.) That, and the ability to cancel out of the increasingly-long cinematics, would do a world of good.
Apple comes out looking like they (a) understand copyright restrictions and took that into account already, and (b) still don't want to be the RIAA and crack down on this sort of thing. This is called "design". They made it difficult enough to sell iTunes songs that they don't need to worry about reselling, even if it is legal.
That said, someone's going to find a way around it eventually, if current trends hold.
Like the article says, quicksaves/unlimited saves are a double-edged sword. On one hand, it allows players to leave at any time and come back to the game without losing too much progress (or having to go back to the last save point), but on the other hand players get complacent: save, try something, die, restart from save, try something else, until you've brute-forced your way through the whole game. Autosaving makes matters even worse by taking control from the player while still offering the same measure of safety.
Many people have posted many examples of the suspend save as a compromise: the player can save their game at any point, but as soon as that suspend save is loaded, it disappears. When you die, you return to your last "real" save point. The fact that you can save anywhere allows, say, the 8 year old to save as soon as his mom calls, but it doesn't allow people to game the system and keep trying something until it works, with no lost time.
And this is a problem... why? Nintendo has "adult" games for Gamecube... Resident Evil and Eternal Darkness come to mind. It's just that not everything in gaming has to be "shoot people and/or watch jiggling polygonal boobs". If you can't enjoy a game that's based on such BRAND NEW concepts as gameplay and adventure and... God forbid... FUN for all ages, then how did you ever get into gaming in the first place?
The reason Nintendo is in such a hole right now is not as much because of their "kiddy" games as it is several bad business decisions. *coughSQUAREcough*
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'd be shouting...
"Join the army, they said."
"See the world, they said."
"I'd rather be sailing."
"Who wants to sing?"
Bonus points to the first person to tell me the source of those two sets of quotes...
that people won't get fed up with the stupid things and turn them off. From the article, about 10% of drivers in Japan use the navigation systems. The other 90% are still clogging up the freeways, even if Americans turn out to be as gadget-happy as the Japanese (which wouldn't surprise me).
So, to answer the question in the article, not unless you can force people to USE the satnav units. I for one have used one a few times (in rental cars mostly) and found it incredibly annoying.
Which is why saying the pledge in general is rather silly. Saying the same sentence from memory doesn't make anyone patriotic at all, just able to regurgitate that sentence.
However, if you've read Brave New World, you'd realize that passive recitation is a quite powerful thing indeed when it comes to morals. Thus <conspiracy theory mode>the government is attempting to teach religion to the students without them noticing</conspiracy theory mode>.
Nintendo products in general are very durable... how many people do you know that actually managed to break their old tank-sized Game Boy? (Well, until I left leaking batteries in mine...)
Occasionally I'll play a FFA game in Warcraft III... it seems to work something like this. Basically, one player tends to get the biggest army, but loses most of it running over a few players. So when those nearly-dead players say "hey, stab this person in the back", it usually happens. That's why the best way to win at FFA is just to get a big army and sit there until the aforementioned powerful player dies.
Likewise, if you get aggressive in Big Brother/Survivor/any other game, people will perceive you as a threat and take you out before you can dominate the rest of the game.
Or maybe I just need more sleep.
...long political/philosophical discussions on the nature of good and evil (and this is IC and on-topic on the public message boards), working political system, emphasis on roleplay... the only downside is that most of the guilds have you jump through rather elaborate hoops just to be a member. Pkilling is only a problem if you piss people off. Here's the website... or just achaea.com 23.
Less trouble that way.
*holds random item over head* Duh-duh-duh-DUH! Or is that not what you're thinking of?
I nominated Kefka... after all, what other boss cracks random one-liners throughout the game AND can drop your entire party to 1 HP each?
No, actually, I underestimated the number of exclusive hit games it would have: it has one so far... and it's not going to be exclusive for much longer.
I've always wondered why more MMOs haven't gone toward a "free subscription" model such as Achaea or Project Entropia, where the source of the company's income is buying various game items with real-life money. Maybe not enough profit involved... but you'd think you'd get more people involved that way.
Let me rephrase that. In DKC and its ilk, you have, at certain points of the game (most of the time, actually) two characters, a la Sonic 2/3. Usually one just follows behind the other, but you can at any point swap between them mid-level... Diddy jumped higher, while DK had the ground pounding ability and a better jump attack. In SMB2 you could change between the characters, but only when you died or reached a new level.
Example the first: Donkey Kong Country. I'm not going to say it was a stronger game than, say, Yoshi's Island (which they mention in that profile), but it wasn't worthless. It helped to popularize the use of "bonus areas" in every level, and because of that it gained instant replay value. It had two different characters with different abilities that (unlike, say, SMB2) you could swap between. The graphics were godlike for the time. And it came out 11 months before Yoshi's Island, by the way. It was, for its time, an outstanding platformer. The next two, however, were just ripoffs of DKC's formula. THERE'S your hype.
Example the second: FF7. I don't think it wasn't overhyped, but I don't think it was top 10 on this list. It had a huge hype machine backing it up, and after all it was a very good game, so to call it severely overhyped is a bit unfair.
And I wanted to add one game. Banjo-Kazooie... the whole game was like fetch quest city, and it only got worse in the sequel and in DK64.
Duh. You just tried to charge for Linux.
It's kind of like playing an RPG where you get the Giant Shiny Adamantine Razor-Edged Poison-Tipped Whiffle Bat of Godlike Ultimate Strength of Poseidon. No matter how many extra names they add to it, it still looks like a whiffle bat.
And then, of course, there are the completely unrelated commercials, but those have always been around even before video games.
If you have mud pints, just dump the pints of mud on the ogre. That'll mud him up pretty good.
And what do you call the scores of people America detained after Sept. 11 on little or no evidence?
You forgot
September 10, 1945 at 13:25: Al Gore claims to have invented the moth.
I am going to take issue with you saying they still have the stigma of being the "family system". Why is that a stigma? Are kids, or for that matter adults, too "cool" for platformers, or what amounts to an adventure/RPG, or some of the other original games they've put out recently?
Not everything in life is about shooting up the bad guys or watching the bouncing polygonal boobs. Nintendo realizes that, and I for one applaud them for sticking to their guns.
And Starcraft, like a few other games, realizes this and allows you to change the speed of the game from agonizingly slow to a nice fast clip, not to mention the variety in maps you mentioned. And, unlike some of the complaints mentioned in the article, you can skip almost all of the cinematics in Starcraft if you so desire.
I think you can, in fact, fix pacing; it just takes a bit more effort to make varying game speeds. (For example, FF6 allowed you to vary the pace of the battles.) That, and the ability to cancel out of the increasingly-long cinematics, would do a world of good.
Apple comes out looking like they (a) understand copyright restrictions and took that into account already, and (b) still don't want to be the RIAA and crack down on this sort of thing. This is called "design". They made it difficult enough to sell iTunes songs that they don't need to worry about reselling, even if it is legal. That said, someone's going to find a way around it eventually, if current trends hold.
Like the article says, quicksaves/unlimited saves are a double-edged sword. On one hand, it allows players to leave at any time and come back to the game without losing too much progress (or having to go back to the last save point), but on the other hand players get complacent: save, try something, die, restart from save, try something else, until you've brute-forced your way through the whole game. Autosaving makes matters even worse by taking control from the player while still offering the same measure of safety.
Many people have posted many examples of the suspend save as a compromise: the player can save their game at any point, but as soon as that suspend save is loaded, it disappears. When you die, you return to your last "real" save point. The fact that you can save anywhere allows, say, the 8 year old to save as soon as his mom calls, but it doesn't allow people to game the system and keep trying something until it works, with no lost time.
Why don't they do something worthwhile, like a standard Mario-style platformer (something Nintendo pretty much has yet to accomplish on GC)?
And this is a problem... why? Nintendo has "adult" games for Gamecube... Resident Evil and Eternal Darkness come to mind. It's just that not everything in gaming has to be "shoot people and/or watch jiggling polygonal boobs". If you can't enjoy a game that's based on such BRAND NEW concepts as gameplay and adventure and... God forbid... FUN for all ages, then how did you ever get into gaming in the first place?
The reason Nintendo is in such a hole right now is not as much because of their "kiddy" games as it is several bad business decisions. *coughSQUAREcough*