As long as spammers can take in more money than it costs them, they will continue to spam. This is "rational" behavior in the economic sense.
I don't follow. Responding to "market forces" (and God knows I'm an ESR-esque capitalist) doesn't give you the right to invade my privacy. Arguably, the mafia responds to market forces. Extortion is "rational behavior in the economic sense." Your point being?
His point being "The problem is that our approach to the solution has also been short-term thinking. We have to think long-term. We have to make the spammers pay more than we do." I know, I know, reading the WHOLE article is very hard.
But, there's lots of interesting statistics to go through. such as "Nearly Twice as Many Adults Have Played Internet Games for More than Eight Consecutive Hours than Teenagers"
That would be because you only get to be a teen for 10 years whereas you get to be an adult from 20-Death. There are WAY more adults than teens in the world. Way more than double. I hate it when they give stats with no context.
Ok, so any game like Tetris, Quake III, Unreal Tournament is out of this equation. They don't really have stories so breaking them into parts makes no sense.
Any game with a multiplayer component is out too - If you release new content, presumably there will be some new models etc. If I don't have those models because I didn't buy Episode 3 or whatever, then the versions of our game will be out of sync and we won't be able to play together. Episodic games fragment the multiplayer community which is the opposite of what you want.
That leaves us with single-player story-driven games. Again, there are two sides. On the one hand we have games where the plot is open and your choices have real consequences to how the story unfolds (Western style RPGs (Fallout, Neverwinter Night: Shadows of Undrentide, Planescape Torment)). Let's include in this catagory games where the plot will unfold in more or less the same way but you have a lot of freedom as far as how you explore the world (Metroid series, Myst and Uru, Grand Theft Auto). None of these are suited to Episodic gaming because if you limit your content to, say, 5 hours of gameplay per episode then there will be very little that I can explore and unless you are willing to write a series of different episodes for different decisions in previous episodes, my actions won't be able to significantly affect the way your plot unfolds.
This leaves us with story-driven, single-player, linear, non-exploratory games. They would be very good episodic games. Unfortunately, there aren't very many games like that and most of them are made for consoles (ie, parts of the Final Fantasy series, Viewtiful Joe, Metal Gear series) which generally don't have large Hard Drives to store new episodes on them.
You must have not bought a Ubisoft game recently. They've gone from crap company to company that routinely produces amazing games. Hopefully in a year or so their reputation will catch up with their new level of quality and people will start looking for the brand instead of avoiding it.
The fact is that most people technically sophisticated enough to want Xbox Live probably replace their PC every 2 or 3 years -- and in that window, their last PC probably already came with an onboard ethernet port.
Or we have a Mac, or we don't replace our PCs very often because we do most our gaming on comsoles, or we have a strange home networking environment or we are 10 year olds who have to borrow Mom's PC and she won't let us install software after the "incident" or all kinds of things.
The whole POINT of consoles. The whole REASON that we buy them and that developers develop for them is that they are easy to use and that you can rely on each of them having the same specifications. They are totally plug and play. Setting up a system that requires a second piece of hardware to be up and running (bear in mind that this second piece of hardware is running on a notoriously crash-prone O/S) in order to participate in Live Play is INSANE.
I spent two years providing tech support to the people "sophisticated enough" to buy DSL. Let me tell you, some of them are FUNCTIONALLY ILLITERATE.
Maybe you Mensa kids should take a good look at your (snail) mailboxes and the 'in' bin next to your fax machine. See all of those unsolicited commercial messages?
Sender pays does not discourage commercial users in the real world. Why would it suddenly start working on the Internet? So long as it is in some way profitable to send us advertisements, companies will continue to do so.
What sender pays does accomplish is that it discourages legitimate use of mail. I get a lot more commercial letters than ones from friends and family. Apparently, it's profitable to send me ads. On the other hand, I get substantially more legitimate emails than unsolicited commercial ones. If you start charging me for sending email to friends and family, that will stop.
Exclusivity = I dont buy them unless it's for the one I own.
I take it from this comment that you somehow think that there are people do do buy games for systems the don't own? Of course you don't buy it if you can't play it.
The thing is that exclusives sell consoles. When I picked my console for this generation, I picked a Game Cube first because I wanted the exclusives on the Game Cube more than the exclusives on the other two systems. Every great exclusive that Nintendo puts out or that it gets company C to put out means Y more people buy a Game Cube. Then, once they have a Game Cube, they buy Z number of games, each of which gives Nintendo cash.
It depebnds on the game. Rainboz Six 3 is supposed to be a high-tension shooter where you have to move caustiously and carefully to avoid dying. In that kind of situation, limited saves makes perfect sense. Max Payne 2 is supposed to be about experiencing the story and creating jaw-droppingly cool gunfights.
Theres not faster way to ruin the sense of fun in that game than by making you play big sections over and over again. So it's a good thing you can autosave.
Let me just make sure that I understand you correctly. When you were forking over $80.00 the primary reason you were spending the cash was for the MANUAL?
Why not spend $50.00 for a game and then $30.00 for a history book?.
Can I just say that I'm sick and tired of people equating sequels with a lack of creativity in games? No? I'll go ahead and do it anyway.
I'm sick and tired of people equating a sequels with a lack of creativity in games.
We need to get over the mistaken notion that sequel == uncreative or even easy. It may be true (but not 100% true) that sequels are indicative of recycled creative ideas in the world of film and books (though note that we have no problem with good dramatic television shows that run for many episodes). But games are different from these things. One of the important ways that games are different from movies is that games are software. I don't think that any of us would complain that Adobe keeps releasing sequel after sequel to Photoshop. Photoshop 7.0 is a dramatically better product than Photoshop 1.0. Linux kernel current.number is a more robust OS kernel than Linux kernel 1.0. Likewise, it is reasonable to expect that (game title) 2.0 could be a better title than (game title) 1.0.
To pick a recent example - by all accounts, Project Gotham Racing 2 is a dramatically better product than Project Gotham Racing 1. They tweaked the interface, they made it prettier, they added new gameplay functionality and they generally made it a BETTER GAME. It is uncreative? I would argue that the cool new things that they added were very creative indeed.
Anybody else noting a trend in almost everyone's responses?
THEY'RE ALL SEQUELS! They all end in a freakin' number. Looks like '04 is shaping up to be the year of rehashing and revamping.
Can I just say that I'm sick and tired of people equating sequels with a lack of creativity in games? I'll go ahead and do it anyway.
I'm sick and tired of people equating a sequels with a lack of cretivity in games.
We need to get over the mistaken notion that sequel == uncreative. It may be true (but not 100% true) that sequels are indicative of recycled creative ideas in the world of film and books (though note that we have no problem with good dramatic television shows that run for many episodes). But games are different from these things. One of the important ways that games are different from movies is that games are software. I don't think that any of us would complain that Adobe keeps releasing sequel after sequel to Photoshop. Photoshop 7.0 is a dramatically better product than Photoshop 1.0. Linux kernel current.number is a more robust OS kernel than Linux kernel 1.0. Likewise, it is reasonable to expect that (game title) 2.0 could be a better title than (game title) 1.0.
To pick a recent example - by all accounts, Project Gotham Racing 2 is a dramatically better product than Project Gotham Racing 1. They tweaked the interface, they made it prettier, they added new gameplay functionality and they generally made it a BETTER GAME. It is uncreative? I would argue that the cool new things that they added were very creative indeed.
Maybe I'm dense or maybe it's because I haven't ever come accross any MMOG that held my attention for any length of time but I'm really having a hard time understanding what the big deal is.
There's this company, its set up this virtual space and you can choose to participate or not participate in it. If you choose to participate, caveat emptor. The gods of this space are capricious and malicious and there is no reason for them to act fairly aside from good customer relations. Yeah, maybe it's unfair that Urizenus had his account terminated but speaking from experience working in the billing department of a phone company, the policy to refund or not refund, to cancel or continue an account etc, has never been a fair process. It's not even a rational process. And working phone connections are MUCH more important than MMOG accounts.
The relationship between the owners of Sim accounts and the people who provide those accounts has always been a commercial relationship and in commercial relationships your options as a customer are pretty much limited to "continue to pay" or "stop paying". If you don't like how things are going or the way you're being treated by company X then vote with your dollars and continue your research with a service that has a user model that will better allow you to do the work that you want to do. The company doesn't owe you anything else.
As for the laws beyond the ingame laws and EULA my understanding is that every EULA has something along the lines of "In the event of a legal dispute all blah blah considered to have occurred in the jurisdiction X". So that (flippantly) solves the problem of "where is it located?" that Jane mentions above.
Maybe the conceptual roadblock that I'm hitting is that I don't think that rights and freedoms are natural things. I think that they are constructs that had to be carved out of an agreement between people and the State. I mean, they're a pretty recent innovation as far as Statecraft is concerned. It comes as no suprise to me that new virtual communities don't automatically come with a free set of rights.
If freedom of speech is what people want from their virtual comunities, then they need to start voting with their subscriptions and start finding communities that have a set of moral standards that they can agree with. By all accounts the Sims Online is not such a community. Stop paying them.
The best thing about this story is that it strips away all pretense and just says "Let's have a console vs PC flamewar on Slashdot".
As far as I know, console games have always outsold PC games. But PC games have continued to thrive anyway. If you're a developer, it doesn't matter which has the higher percentage market share, it just matters whether or not you can make money off of it.
My understanding is that it goes in cycles too. We're nearing the midpoint of this generation of consoles so we should be seeing an increase in PC games marketshare over the next three years until the next generation of consoles comes out and starts eating up marketshare again.
There are things that consoles do well, there are things that PCs do well and there are places were they overlap. None of this matters. What matters are the games. There are great games available for all of these systems. Carry on.
Black Isle didn't make BG 1 and 2. Bioware did. Bioware also made Neverwinter Nights. You may remember that Bioware cut ties with Interplay/Black Isle over contract problems.
Nostalgia is cute and all but Black Isle hasn't made a great game in a long time. I won't miss it at all. I will, on the other hand, continue to watch Bioware and Troika. Don't get caught up in the brand names, follow the actual creators.
There is no way that DoA could deserve an Ao rating. Ao is the equivalent to a NC-17, and NC-17 requires it to be either a) porn or b) have extremely explicit violence above and beyond what you see in M-rated games.
Let's be frank here, DoA Beach Volleyball doesn't even deserve a Mature rating. Sadly, the ESRB has so far ignored my tireless efforts to instate an "Immature" rating.
If you read the article you'll see that the authors provide a very balanced and reasonable view. In fact they specifically *don't* blame the videogames industry.
Here, in case your sedentray lifestyle has rendered you incapable of clicking links:
It is not the responsibility of the gaming industry to solve the obesity epidemic but it is clear that in order to successfully address this public health emergency, kids need to spend less time in front of screens and more time exercising. There is a great amount of parent education needed about the link between screen time and health. In addition, there is both an opportunity and challenge for the industry to develop games that involve physical activity so that young players exercise more than their thumbs.
First X box live allows it, and now gameboy games are getting patched. I think it's great that Nintendo is going the extra mile for it's customers, but as soon as console game makers get the idea they can rely on patching, shipping games broken will be as prevelent as on the PC. Hooray. At that point, consoles get added to the list of vices i'll be able to cut out of my budget.
Every time someone talks about this bug or that bug on a console game it seems like people start complaining in the way that you are now complaining. "Oh no, patching will mean that formerly bug free console games will now have bugs. Why oh why are PC game makers so lazy? Blah blah blah."
Bugs have been with us in consoles for a very long time. Remember Enter the Matrix? It's not alone. SSX Tricky has bluescreened my GameCube, people have already mentioned KOTOR and Crimson Skies, the list goes on.
And it's not limited to modern games. Bugs have been around for ages, just we called them 'glitchs' and wrote them up in FAQs as cool things that people could explore. Here are a few, to refresh your memory:
NES Metroid On most levels with the doors you shoot to cause them to open you can use a door to climb up many many walls/levels above. Simply shoot the door and stand with the front 1/2 of Samus wedged where the door will reform. After you are partially ''sealed'' by the door just quickly tap up and down on the control pad. You will slowly climb up the wall. It is possible to get stuck while using this trick.
Super Mario World Go to World 1-2. At the pipe that leads to the flag, break two blocks so there's one at the end touching the pipe. Now duck and jump backward toward the brick (don't break it!). You should go through the wall and pipe into a warp zone. Jump down the first pipe you see and you will be in the Negative World (-1)!
And so on and so on.
Which brings me to my second point. The reason that there are more bugs on PC games is because there are a lot more ways that things can go wrong. On a console you have one set of hardware and maybe a few different controllers. You have a very small OS and no other programs running.
PCs have untold billions of possible configurations, countless types of inputs, a very large and complicated (and buggy!) OS competing for RAM and mediating between your program and the hardware and who knows what other programs running in the background. There is no way that you can adequately test for this wide a variety of conditions and it is inevitable that you will run into unexpected problems when you ship the game.
What have we learned today? 1) Console games have lots anf lots of bugs. Anyone who says they don't is lying to you or stupid. 2) PCs have more bugs than consoles because they do not have a unified configuration and there is lots that can go wrong.
Oh, they weren't looking for working consoles. They'd just heard that videogame consoles were bullet-proof and wanted to use them to armour their hideout.
The classic story of the railroad tycoons who didn't realize that they were actually transportation tycoons is all well and good but Nintendo does not have the same problem.
According to the COmpany History, Nintendo is over 100 years old. They started out making playing cards. Read the history on that link. It shows them going through a few different changes. The important common factor? Nintendo has always made games.
That's right. Nintendo is not a console company and it's not a video game company and it's not an entertainment company. It's a game company. They make games. They have been making games for over 100 years. I think that we can all agree that "making games" is a pretty broad understanding of what the company does.
. The violent/unsafe neighborhood they grow up in.
You know I thought that a fair number of shooters were middle class kids in pretty good neighbourhoods. Weren't the Columbine kids from reasonably well-to-do families?
Slashdot Mirror
As long as spammers can take in more money than it costs them, they will continue to spam. This is "rational" behavior in the economic sense.
I don't follow. Responding to "market forces" (and God knows I'm an ESR-esque capitalist) doesn't give you the right to invade my privacy. Arguably, the mafia responds to market forces. Extortion is "rational behavior in the economic sense." Your point being?
His point being "The problem is that our approach to the solution has also been short-term thinking. We have to think long-term. We have to make the spammers pay more than we do." I know, I know, reading the WHOLE article is very hard.
As a longtime N fan, I have to say, this guy's an idiot. I haven't read the article yet, I'm just saying.
Awesome! This is the first time I've seen someone get +4 Interesting for blatantly admitting that they didn't RTFA.
But, there's lots of interesting statistics to go through. such as "Nearly Twice as Many Adults Have Played Internet Games for More than Eight Consecutive Hours than Teenagers"
That would be because you only get to be a teen for 10 years whereas you get to be an adult from 20-Death. There are WAY more adults than teens in the world. Way more than double. I hate it when they give stats with no context.
Ok, so any game like Tetris, Quake III, Unreal Tournament is out of this equation. They don't really have stories so breaking them into parts makes no sense.
Any game with a multiplayer component is out too - If you release new content, presumably there will be some new models etc. If I don't have those models because I didn't buy Episode 3 or whatever, then the versions of our game will be out of sync and we won't be able to play together. Episodic games fragment the multiplayer community which is the opposite of what you want.
That leaves us with single-player story-driven games. Again, there are two sides. On the one hand we have games where the plot is open and your choices have real consequences to how the story unfolds (Western style RPGs (Fallout, Neverwinter Night: Shadows of Undrentide, Planescape Torment)). Let's include in this catagory games where the plot will unfold in more or less the same way but you have a lot of freedom as far as how you explore the world (Metroid series, Myst and Uru, Grand Theft Auto). None of these are suited to Episodic gaming because if you limit your content to, say, 5 hours of gameplay per episode then there will be very little that I can explore and unless you are willing to write a series of different episodes for different decisions in previous episodes, my actions won't be able to significantly affect the way your plot unfolds.
This leaves us with story-driven, single-player, linear, non-exploratory games. They would be very good episodic games. Unfortunately, there aren't very many games like that and most of them are made for consoles (ie, parts of the Final Fantasy series, Viewtiful Joe, Metal Gear series) which generally don't have large Hard Drives to store new episodes on them.
You must have not bought a Ubisoft game recently. They've gone from crap company to company that routinely produces amazing games. Hopefully in a year or so their reputation will catch up with their new level of quality and people will start looking for the brand instead of avoiding it.
You are a crazy person.
The fact is that most people technically sophisticated enough to want Xbox Live probably replace their PC every 2 or 3 years -- and in that window, their last PC probably already came with an onboard ethernet port.
Or we have a Mac, or we don't replace our PCs very often because we do most our gaming on comsoles, or we have a strange home networking environment or we are 10 year olds who have to borrow Mom's PC and she won't let us install software after the "incident" or all kinds of things.
The whole POINT of consoles. The whole REASON that we buy them and that developers develop for them is that they are easy to use and that you can rely on each of them having the same specifications. They are totally plug and play. Setting up a system that requires a second piece of hardware to be up and running (bear in mind that this second piece of hardware is running on a notoriously crash-prone O/S) in order to participate in Live Play is INSANE.
I spent two years providing tech support to the people "sophisticated enough" to buy DSL. Let me tell you, some of them are FUNCTIONALLY ILLITERATE.
I'm sure glad they put "more modern" in quotes, as Times New Roman was introduced in 1932!
Generally, we agree that the Postmodern period began sometime after the 2nd World War. So this makes Times New Roman a very Modern font.
Maybe you Mensa kids should take a good look at your (snail) mailboxes and the 'in' bin next to your fax machine. See all of those unsolicited commercial messages?
Sender pays does not discourage commercial users in the real world. Why would it suddenly start working on the Internet? So long as it is in some way profitable to send us advertisements, companies will continue to do so.
What sender pays does accomplish is that it discourages legitimate use of mail. I get a lot more commercial letters than ones from friends and family. Apparently, it's profitable to send me ads. On the other hand, I get substantially more legitimate emails than unsolicited commercial ones. If you start charging me for sending email to friends and family, that will stop.
Exclusivity = I dont buy them unless it's for the one I own.
I take it from this comment that you somehow think that there are people do do buy games for systems the don't own? Of course you don't buy it if you can't play it.
The thing is that exclusives sell consoles. When I picked my console for this generation, I picked a Game Cube first because I wanted the exclusives on the Game Cube more than the exclusives on the other two systems. Every great exclusive that Nintendo puts out or that it gets company C to put out means Y more people buy a Game Cube. Then, once they have a Game Cube, they buy Z number of games, each of which gives Nintendo cash.
It depebnds on the game. Rainboz Six 3 is supposed to be a high-tension shooter where you have to move caustiously and carefully to avoid dying. In that kind of situation, limited saves makes perfect sense. Max Payne 2 is supposed to be about experiencing the story and creating jaw-droppingly cool gunfights.
Theres not faster way to ruin the sense of fun in that game than by making you play big sections over and over again. So it's a good thing you can autosave.
Let me just make sure that I understand you correctly. When you were forking over $80.00 the primary reason you were spending the cash was for the MANUAL?
Why not spend $50.00 for a game and then $30.00 for a history book?.
Can I just say that I'm sick and tired of people equating sequels with a lack of creativity in games? No? I'll go ahead and do it anyway.
I'm sick and tired of people equating a sequels with a lack of creativity in games.
We need to get over the mistaken notion that sequel == uncreative or even easy. It may be true (but not 100% true) that sequels are indicative of recycled creative ideas in the world of film and books (though note that we have no problem with good dramatic television shows that run for many episodes). But games are different from these things. One of the important ways that games are different from movies is that games are software. I don't think that any of us would complain that Adobe keeps releasing sequel after sequel to Photoshop. Photoshop 7.0 is a dramatically better product than Photoshop 1.0. Linux kernel current.number is a more robust OS kernel than Linux kernel 1.0. Likewise, it is reasonable to expect that (game title) 2.0 could be a better title than (game title) 1.0.
To pick a recent example - by all accounts, Project Gotham Racing 2 is a dramatically better product than Project Gotham Racing 1. They tweaked the interface, they made it prettier, they added new gameplay functionality and they generally made it a BETTER GAME. It is uncreative? I would argue that the cool new things that they added were very creative indeed.
Anybody else noting a trend in almost everyone's responses?
THEY'RE ALL SEQUELS! They all end in a freakin' number. Looks like '04 is shaping up to be the year of rehashing and revamping.
Can I just say that I'm sick and tired of people equating sequels with a lack of creativity in games? I'll go ahead and do it anyway.
I'm sick and tired of people equating a sequels with a lack of cretivity in games.
We need to get over the mistaken notion that sequel == uncreative. It may be true (but not 100% true) that sequels are indicative of recycled creative ideas in the world of film and books (though note that we have no problem with good dramatic television shows that run for many episodes). But games are different from these things. One of the important ways that games are different from movies is that games are software. I don't think that any of us would complain that Adobe keeps releasing sequel after sequel to Photoshop. Photoshop 7.0 is a dramatically better product than Photoshop 1.0. Linux kernel current.number is a more robust OS kernel than Linux kernel 1.0. Likewise, it is reasonable to expect that (game title) 2.0 could be a better title than (game title) 1.0.
To pick a recent example - by all accounts, Project Gotham Racing 2 is a dramatically better product than Project Gotham Racing 1. They tweaked the interface, they made it prettier, they added new gameplay functionality and they generally made it a BETTER GAME. It is uncreative? I would argue that the cool new things that they added were very creative indeed.
Massively-multiplayer Rayman. It can't fail!
Maybe I'm dense or maybe it's because I haven't ever come accross any MMOG that held my attention for any length of time but I'm really having a hard time understanding what the big deal is.
There's this company, its set up this virtual space and you can choose to participate or not participate in it. If you choose to participate, caveat emptor. The gods of this space are capricious and malicious and there is no reason for them to act fairly aside from good customer relations. Yeah, maybe it's unfair that Urizenus had his account terminated but speaking from experience working in the billing department of a phone company, the policy to refund or not refund, to cancel or continue an account etc, has never been a fair process. It's not even a rational process. And working phone connections are MUCH more important than MMOG accounts.
The relationship between the owners of Sim accounts and the people who provide those accounts has always been a commercial relationship and in commercial relationships your options as a customer are pretty much limited to "continue to pay" or "stop paying". If you don't like how things are going or the way you're being treated by company X then vote with your dollars and continue your research with a service that has a user model that will better allow you to do the work that you want to do. The company doesn't owe you anything else.
As for the laws beyond the ingame laws and EULA my understanding is that every EULA has something along the lines of "In the event of a legal dispute all blah blah considered to have occurred in the jurisdiction X". So that (flippantly) solves the problem of "where is it located?" that Jane mentions above.
Maybe the conceptual roadblock that I'm hitting is that I don't think that rights and freedoms are natural things. I think that they are constructs that had to be carved out of an agreement between people and the State. I mean, they're a pretty recent innovation as far as Statecraft is concerned. It comes as no suprise to me that new virtual communities don't automatically come with a free set of rights.
If freedom of speech is what people want from their virtual comunities, then they need to start voting with their subscriptions and start finding communities that have a set of moral standards that they can agree with. By all accounts the Sims Online is not such a community. Stop paying them.
The best thing about this story is that it strips away all pretense and just says "Let's have a console vs PC flamewar on Slashdot".
As far as I know, console games have always outsold PC games. But PC games have continued to thrive anyway. If you're a developer, it doesn't matter which has the higher percentage market share, it just matters whether or not you can make money off of it.
My understanding is that it goes in cycles too. We're nearing the midpoint of this generation of consoles so we should be seeing an increase in PC games marketshare over the next three years until the next generation of consoles comes out and starts eating up marketshare again.
There are things that consoles do well, there are things that PCs do well and there are places were they overlap. None of this matters. What matters are the games. There are great games available for all of these systems. Carry on.
Black Isle didn't make BG 1 and 2. Bioware did. Bioware also made Neverwinter Nights. You may remember that Bioware cut ties with Interplay/Black Isle over contract problems.
Nostalgia is cute and all but Black Isle hasn't made a great game in a long time. I won't miss it at all. I will, on the other hand, continue to watch Bioware and Troika. Don't get caught up in the brand names, follow the actual creators.
There is no way that DoA could deserve an Ao rating. Ao is the equivalent to a NC-17, and NC-17 requires it to be either a) porn or b) have extremely explicit violence above and beyond what you see in M-rated games.
Let's be frank here, DoA Beach Volleyball doesn't even deserve a Mature rating. Sadly, the ESRB has so far ignored my tireless efforts to instate an "Immature" rating.
If you read the article you'll see that the authors provide a very balanced and reasonable view. In fact they specifically *don't* blame the videogames industry.
Here, in case your sedentray lifestyle has rendered you incapable of clicking links:
It is not the responsibility of the gaming industry to solve the obesity epidemic but it is clear that in order to successfully address this public health emergency, kids need to spend less time in front of screens and more time exercising. There is a great amount of parent education needed about the link between screen time and health. In addition, there is both an opportunity and challenge for the industry to develop games that involve physical activity so that young players exercise more than their thumbs.
First X box live allows it, and now gameboy games are getting patched. I think it's great that Nintendo is going the extra mile for it's customers, but as soon as console game makers get the idea they can rely on patching, shipping games broken will be as prevelent as on the PC.
Hooray. At that point, consoles get added to the list of vices i'll be able to cut out of my budget.
Every time someone talks about this bug or that bug on a console game it seems like people start complaining in the way that you are now complaining. "Oh no, patching will mean that formerly bug free console games will now have bugs. Why oh why are PC game makers so lazy? Blah blah blah."
Bugs have been with us in consoles for a very long time. Remember Enter the Matrix? It's not alone. SSX Tricky has bluescreened my GameCube, people have already mentioned KOTOR and Crimson Skies, the list goes on.
And it's not limited to modern games. Bugs have been around for ages, just we called them 'glitchs' and wrote them up in FAQs as cool things that people could explore. Here are a few, to refresh your memory:
NES Metroid
On most levels with the doors you shoot to cause them to open you can use a door to climb up many many walls/levels above. Simply shoot the door and stand with the front 1/2 of Samus wedged where the door will reform. After you are partially ''sealed'' by the door just quickly tap up and down on the control pad. You will slowly climb up the wall. It is possible to get stuck while using this trick.
Super Mario World
Go to World 1-2. At the pipe that leads to the flag, break two blocks so there's one at the end touching the pipe. Now duck and jump backward toward the brick (don't break it!). You should go through the wall and pipe into a warp zone. Jump down the first pipe you see and you will be in the Negative World (-1)!
And so on and so on.
Which brings me to my second point. The reason that there are more bugs on PC games is because there are a lot more ways that things can go wrong. On a console you have one set of hardware and maybe a few different controllers. You have a very small OS and no other programs running.
PCs have untold billions of possible configurations, countless types of inputs, a very large and complicated (and buggy!) OS competing for RAM and mediating between your program and the hardware and who knows what other programs running in the background. There is no way that you can adequately test for this wide a variety of conditions and it is inevitable that you will run into unexpected problems when you ship the game.
What have we learned today?
1) Console games have lots anf lots of bugs. Anyone who says they don't is lying to you or stupid.
2) PCs have more bugs than consoles because they do not have a unified configuration and there is lots that can go wrong.
Thanks for coming out.
Oh, they weren't looking for working consoles. They'd just heard that videogame consoles were bullet-proof and wanted to use them to armour their hideout.
"Hi, uh, I'd like to return some consoles."
"Some consoles?"
"Yeah, I bought some consoles for my family and none of the damn things work! I want a refund."
"OK sir, how many consoles are we talking, here?"
"Uh, about four hundred PS2s and about two hundred Xboxes."
"!!!"
"I have a big family is all!"
The classic story of the railroad tycoons who didn't realize that they were actually transportation tycoons is all well and good but Nintendo does not have the same problem.
According to the COmpany History, Nintendo is over 100 years old. They started out making playing cards. Read the history on that link. It shows them going through a few different changes. The important common factor? Nintendo has always made games.
That's right. Nintendo is not a console company and it's not a video game company and it's not an entertainment company. It's a game company. They make games. They have been making games for over 100 years. I think that we can all agree that "making games" is a pretty broad understanding of what the company does.
Myopia, indeed.
. The violent/unsafe neighborhood they grow up in.
You know I thought that a fair number of shooters were middle class kids in pretty good neighbourhoods. Weren't the Columbine kids from reasonably well-to-do families?
From your description and the fileplanet link you sent, I think you're playing the demo for the original game, not the subject of this article..
Then again, the rest of your comments seem arbitrary and trollish. Good day to you.
Yes. That's the joke.