You make excellent points. You and I are both correct, actually. KOTOR does do a fair bit of hand holding, and it does try to mask 2 "different" paths just by changing a conversation or two. The games' real strength is in their writing. I'm as huge a fan of the original Star Wars trilogy as anyone, and I very firmly believe that both KOTOR games have a far, far stronger story than all 3 movies put together. Where the movies flesh out their characters with subtleties, in KOTOR you spend a lot of time with them and you hear their backstories while helping to transition them into more effective members of your party - whether that means helping them or breaking them. If it weren't for the writing in both games, however, they would definitely be quite shallow. If you can make it to the end of the second game you'll be treated to one of the most satisfying finale to a video game you'll ever see.
Wow, thanks for the tip! They're slowly trying to transition to a bundled DVDROM so I probably wouldn't subscribe as long as you, but I'll definitely give that a shot when my current one runs out.
The editors at PC Gamer (the American one) feel like a second family to me. A second, flabby, balding family. I don't respect any web journalists by name as I respect the writers at PC Gamer. However, I'm not thrilled about the price. Subscription price is very reasonable, but individual issues cost as much as $12CAD! Considering most issues come with a CDROM with 1 demo that's pretty tough to justify. I have some ancient PC Gamer issues that cost $6CAD - including the Quake 1 issue which was over 300 pages long.
I've installed this game about 7 times and I keep on uninstalling it after about 5 hours. It's not easy being an impatient guy who loves RPGs. You're absolutely right that a degree of hand holding is necessary. The Knights of the Old Republic series is the best paced, best balanced series I know that is broken up into definable levels but still feels open-ended since you can do them in any order and must occasionally revisit them. In Morrowind I just feel lost.
Maybe there isn't enough of a population to resemble real towns, but I got very frustrated talking to every guard and serf with a pitchfork looking for Blaz the Breadbaker and Captain Dingus.
Don't get me wrong - I love story based games with a sandbox to play in. The GTA series since the very first has always been the grand champion in that department and I think it's great to see so many games using those games as a template. But a degree of linearity is required to keep the player aware of the track, if not on it. The Ultima Underworld games were perfect for this. The first game was split into levels, on on top of the other, and the second game consisted of alternate dimensions that were introduced 1 or 2 at a time. You could revisit any area you wanted eventually, but the games eased you into the water instead of popping your water wings and shoving you in the shark tank.
RPG designers are like a teenager's parents - give them too much freedom and they'll end up at a cock fight on skid row, but give them too little and they'll lose respect for you.
I can't wait till the re-release, but how about pre-empting football for cartoons for a change? I'm sick of having to watch men tackle one another and grab each other's pigskins for an hour just to find at the last minute that Futurama's been dropped, postponed pretty much until the stupidbowl.
Allpeers certainly does look awesome, but what's it doing in a web browser? It belongs in an IM client like GAIM or as a standalone app. I've been waiting forever for an easy way to share files with my friends, but I'm not crazy about the idea of tying up 100MB of RAM leaving Firefox open all the time.
I hated what The Screen Savers became shortly after the merger. I dispised Attack of the Show on principle until I watched it a few times. Kevin Perreira is actually really sharp and very funny, and Sarah Lane is a good host who presents The Feed (aka Slashdot narrated by a chick) with attitude and an amusing left wing bias. I honestly don't know why AOTS is still on the channel considering the dreck we're left with now. At least Tommy and Vic and Adam and Morgan are still around to keep us company.
G4TV.com was a great show and I'll really miss it. It was a show hosted by 3 hardcore gamers (at least one of which writes game manuals) with strong preferences and opinions, tackling the big issues of the day and conducting interviews with industry greats like Peter Molyneux and Sid Meier. No topic was taboo and they pulled no punches in their interview questions. Although it was presented in a different format it was no less informative than Icons. Why they would axe this and not Arena or Cheat is ridiculous.
For the record, Filter wasn't really so bad either. Diane "Fook Mi" Mizota was little more than a cue card reading Vanna but she did it with flare and was a treat to look at. (Yes, she played Fook Mi in Goldmember. I'm not being a racist ass.) John Walsh was a freaking hilarious little creep too.
As Seumas says above, more smart hot chicks! Tina Wood and Laura Foy were both in spades, and at least Diane Mizota read her lines in the right order. Whatsherface on Cheat has the personality of a cheese coupon and smarts to match.
Will I stop paying $2.50 per month for the network because of this? No, but I'm barely getting my money's worth now.
I'm with you on this one. Convergence is not really defined in TFA. It sounds like they're largely talking about the quality of effects - the sole factor in what too many journalists are touting as "next generation games".
These are entirely dissimilar media with one fundamental difference - movies are prerendered while games are realtime. It makes no sense to make a movie in the Quake 4 engine because, by movie standards, it will look like crapola. Short of inviting Sam Jackson to your house and smacking him with a glowing broomstick, I don't see how games and movies can converge more than they already have in terms of special effects.
There are games that have borrowed from tried and true cinematographical conventions. Sure, Alone In The Dark was a Lovecraft-esque horror game with a spooky house and monsters, but what made it truly frightening was the use of strategically-placed camera angles. Roberta Williams' Phantasmagoria succeeded as a thriller game not only because it was composed of digital video with actors and sets, but because of the slow pacing and three dimensional characters who themselves were afraid to open the door you just clicked. Wing Commander 3 and 4 introduced Hollywood actors (Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and more) to cut scenes, allowing the player to interact with the story via branching dialogue menus. Enter The Matrix was "directed" by the Wachowski Bros., but that didn't result in a good game.
Indigo Prophecy (aka Fahrenheit in Europe) is the most movie-like game I've seen to date in terms of presentation, camera work, dialogue, and acting. It's obvious Quantic Dream designed the game to resemble a movie from the ground up, and it's impressive to see a game that looks and feels as polished as its cut scenes. As revolutionary as the interface is, the game is really an evolution of point-and-click adventures of decades past. I do hope to see many more games that tell a story in this way.
There are so many ways to tell a story other than movies. Why equate movies and games at all? Because they're moving pictures on a screen? That's incidental and ancillary. They both tell stories but they abide by different laws of storytelling. I say movies have as much to adopt from games as games do from movies.
Thank you for finally explaining to everyone what this means.
It's nuts to sign up for one of these sites anyway. Users must create uniquely identifiable userIDs for the site to track their stats. If and when the site is busted for whatever reason, the administrator will no doubt surrender the list of userIDs and corresponding IP addresses to the authorities, as has happened in the past.
Up with privacy! Down with elitism! Never ever sign on to a torrent tracker that maintains user ratios!
I'm not thrilled about in-game advertising, but what WOULD thrill me is the increase in 100% sponsored games. Anarchy Online has adopted this model. You Don't Know Jack Online used this model in its heyday. I'd be glad to endure some ads if it meant I could play a good game for free. The better the game, the less annoyed I'd be with ads. In fact, if the ads are done tastefully, I'd seek those brands out just because they were paying for my video games.
I admit my ignorance in how GPS works. I've never used it so my comments are presumption only.
However, I think there must be communication to and from the satellite - if not from the car then from the police. It can't be expected that every car would possess maps of every city with speed limits for every street. The GPS units would have to occasionally download information about the immediate vicinity.
You are probably correct that bad transmissions would be minimal. Regardless, I don't think the idea of policing without the police will catch on. Many Canadian cities implemented and then disassembled unmanned photoradar stations which penalized speeders and people who ran red lights.
I presume such a GPS system would function via satellites. Satellites have huge latency (more than a few seconds) which would reduce the accuracy of such a system. Rain, snow, and clouds can hamper satellite signal and may make a car disappear from GPS, or could cause inaccurate interpretations which prevent a stopped car from moving at all. At certain times of year, the earth's axis relative to the satellite may cause twinkles or distortions in the atmosphere which are also notorious for interrupting signal phase and frequency.
How about more cops patrolling? I'd rather be policed by police than a robot under my hood.
One important aspect of art is that it tells a story, even if it is a static image or sculpture. Games tell a story in a more blunt fashion, of course, but just the same they flesh out minor details that might never be considered in a painting or novel. In Knights of the Old Republic, nearly every item you pick up has a short back story, thereby making every element of the experience alive.
Another aspect of art is to put the viewer in the shoes of the artist, which games exceed at, for those who care to see. Pong or Spacewar, the first video games, may not themselves be as striking as the setting behind them. Their simplicity is a testement to the innovation of playing a game on a multi-thousand dollar calculator. Black and White hints at some of the idiological and theological beliefs of Peter Molyneux, the lead designer. Tetris is a prime example of Alexei Pajitnov's respect and adoration of mathematics. A programmer in the 80's had a nightmare about a nuclear war and subsequently created Missile Command. There is always a motivation behind the work.
The last aspect of art I can pretend to profess is the aspect of conflict. Mona Lisa's smile, for instance, hints at more than just happiness. RPGs like Fallout allow the player to decide their alignment, and therefore solve any problem through many different means. Even Super Mario Bros and Pacman are prime examples - why do they combat their opponents to get to the next level? Because they MUST.
Have I addressed your arguments? Maybe not. Maybe something is art only to someone worth seeing it as such. Or maybe something is art if the creator says it is. Maybe a video game is just a set of rules with pieces of art glued in to make it pretty, or maybe the cohesive sum of the parts is precisely what makes it art. Maybe I'm just struggling to rationalize my unproductive hobby.
Then again, maybe video games are more wholly "art" than any other artform. Not only do they (debatably) include the other aspects of art, but they also are interactive. Not only are players an audience of this art, but also artists themselves, bending the experience to match their personal preferences.
Sorry to blather so. I'd love to hear your rebuttal. Your challenges are absolutely valid.
Have we, as critics, given people like Ebert enough reason to believe that games are art?
I definitely think so. Games reviewers, like Ebert, give a description of the set and setting, plot, experience, describe the taste left in their mouth when the game is done, and finally give a qualitative score based on all elements put together. However, because games are "put together" in real time and not in advance like movies, game reviews are swayed by the technical prowess of the product. In a way this is akin to Ebert not only reviewing the movie, but also the quality of the service at the theatre.
Anyone who says games are not art is closed minded, plain and simple. Whether a game is beautiful is irrelevant. Super Mario Brothers on the NES is art. Pong is art. They are a singing, dancing example of zeitgeist, providing a window into eras of recent history. We will look back on video games in future decades and the sway of the times on the games' design will be more apparant in hindsight.
It's happening everywhere! A study was done in Canada which stated that low income Canadian households spent twice as much on video games as those with a higher annual income.
Video games are "addictive" because people are not "addicted" to the real world. They are displeased with their surroundings so they escape into a more palatable place. The cure to video game addiction is to make the real world a better place. Why haven't video game addicts sued their respective governments for driving them to games?
I agree with you 100% that the law is on the side of the ESA and the software publishers, and that, despite their intentions, HoTU is taking a chance on the law. I only called the ESA clueless because they sent HoTU a boilerplate DMCA violation letter that did not apply to the crime.
I guess my broader point, which I should have stated initially, is that the DMCA is not fleshed out well enough to enforce or defend accurately. It's a new breed of law that will take time to perfect by trial and error, and will have to be changed regularly to reflect the times.
I personally would love to see old games freely available on the internet if they are no longer available otherwise, but I definitely sympathize with the designers and programmers whose livelihoods depend on sales. I wonder if anyone's bothered to *ask* publishers whether they mind their expired properties being shared.
It sounds like Microsoft isn't prepared to just send out new systems though. They will try to repair them first. Regardless of Microsoft's definition of "immediately", it will still take at least 48 hours to ship consoles to and from consumers.
O'Donnell urged anyone with Xbox problems to call 1-800-4myXbox or go to http://www.xbox.com./ If the problems can't be immediately resolved, Microsoft will pay to ship the console overnight to a repair center, overnight it back once it's fixed, or ship a replacement.
If you were one of the Xbox's biggest fans and waited in line for 24 hours to be one of the first people in the world with a 360, how would you feel if MS told you to wait several days to play it? MS should be cross-shipping new systems to each and every person with a defective console and making sure it gets there by the next day. Not only this, but they should be instructing their customer service reps to reassure these avid Xbox afficionados that they appreciate their loyalty and will be compensating them with a free game or a month of Xbox Live or ANYTHING to apologize profusely! These are the people who will spread word-of-mouth advertising to all their friends. If the first thing they tell their peers is the story of Microsoft's crappy product quality and customer service, people will think twice before buying.
Whether Microsoft loses $150 per console is irrelevant. When you drop $500 on a product you expect it to blow your mind the minute you turn it on.
Microsoft had best take this issue VERY seriously if they want to convince people to get a 360 instead of a PS3. The Xbox's biggest fans, if mistreated, will complain long and loud.
"Abandonware" is a grey term. The purpose of Home of The Underdogs is to preserve out of print and unavailable software. Some of the titles mentioned in the ESA's letter were 20 years old. How often do you see DOS games for sale anywhere? These are pieces of history whose best interests are served best by gamers, not by publishers who would rather sit on the IP forever.
And exactly how much of the profits of an Ebay sale do you think publishers and designers see?
The ESA (Entertainment Software Association), a body representing many software companies, sent a threatening letter to Home of the Underdogs a few years ago, demanding that they cease the sale of all copyright materials from their website. They state to be standing behind the DMCA.
IDSA is providing this letter of notification pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and 17 USC =A7 512 (c) to make you aware of material on your network or system that infringes the exclusive copyright rights of one or more IDSA members. ...
IDSA has a good faith belief that the Internet site found at theunderdogs.org infringes the rights of one or more IDSA members by offering for illegal sale one or more unauthorized copies of one or more game products protected by copyright...
Anyone who has seen this website knows that they do not sell games at all and never have. They provide abandonware downloads - games that have been out of print and not for sale for many years - in the interest of the preservation of culture.
Just another example of clueless bullies hiding behind the DMCA, seemingly for financial gain, but for properties not even for sale! Read the full letter and the webmaster's commentary for full details.
http://www.the-underdogs.org/partdeux.php
Slashdot Mirror
You make excellent points. You and I are both correct, actually. KOTOR does do a fair bit of hand holding, and it does try to mask 2 "different" paths just by changing a conversation or two. The games' real strength is in their writing. I'm as huge a fan of the original Star Wars trilogy as anyone, and I very firmly believe that both KOTOR games have a far, far stronger story than all 3 movies put together. Where the movies flesh out their characters with subtleties, in KOTOR you spend a lot of time with them and you hear their backstories while helping to transition them into more effective members of your party - whether that means helping them or breaking them. If it weren't for the writing in both games, however, they would definitely be quite shallow. If you can make it to the end of the second game you'll be treated to one of the most satisfying finale to a video game you'll ever see.
Wow, thanks for the tip! They're slowly trying to transition to a bundled DVDROM so I probably wouldn't subscribe as long as you, but I'll definitely give that a shot when my current one runs out.
The editors at PC Gamer (the American one) feel like a second family to me. A second, flabby, balding family. I don't respect any web journalists by name as I respect the writers at PC Gamer. However, I'm not thrilled about the price. Subscription price is very reasonable, but individual issues cost as much as $12CAD! Considering most issues come with a CDROM with 1 demo that's pretty tough to justify. I have some ancient PC Gamer issues that cost $6CAD - including the Quake 1 issue which was over 300 pages long.
I've installed this game about 7 times and I keep on uninstalling it after about 5 hours. It's not easy being an impatient guy who loves RPGs. You're absolutely right that a degree of hand holding is necessary. The Knights of the Old Republic series is the best paced, best balanced series I know that is broken up into definable levels but still feels open-ended since you can do them in any order and must occasionally revisit them. In Morrowind I just feel lost.
Maybe there isn't enough of a population to resemble real towns, but I got very frustrated talking to every guard and serf with a pitchfork looking for Blaz the Breadbaker and Captain Dingus.
Don't get me wrong - I love story based games with a sandbox to play in. The GTA series since the very first has always been the grand champion in that department and I think it's great to see so many games using those games as a template. But a degree of linearity is required to keep the player aware of the track, if not on it. The Ultima Underworld games were perfect for this. The first game was split into levels, on on top of the other, and the second game consisted of alternate dimensions that were introduced 1 or 2 at a time. You could revisit any area you wanted eventually, but the games eased you into the water instead of popping your water wings and shoving you in the shark tank.
RPG designers are like a teenager's parents - give them too much freedom and they'll end up at a cock fight on skid row, but give them too little and they'll lose respect for you.
There really isn't much more info here than the last time /. covered the issue.
1 1&tid=129&tid=133
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/20/17542
I can't wait till the re-release, but how about pre-empting football for cartoons for a change? I'm sick of having to watch men tackle one another and grab each other's pigskins for an hour just to find at the last minute that Futurama's been dropped, postponed pretty much until the stupidbowl.
Allpeers certainly does look awesome, but what's it doing in a web browser? It belongs in an IM client like GAIM or as a standalone app. I've been waiting forever for an easy way to share files with my friends, but I'm not crazy about the idea of tying up 100MB of RAM leaving Firefox open all the time.
I hated what The Screen Savers became shortly after the merger. I dispised Attack of the Show on principle until I watched it a few times. Kevin Perreira is actually really sharp and very funny, and Sarah Lane is a good host who presents The Feed (aka Slashdot narrated by a chick) with attitude and an amusing left wing bias. I honestly don't know why AOTS is still on the channel considering the dreck we're left with now. At least Tommy and Vic and Adam and Morgan are still around to keep us company.
G4TV.com was a great show and I'll really miss it. It was a show hosted by 3 hardcore gamers (at least one of which writes game manuals) with strong preferences and opinions, tackling the big issues of the day and conducting interviews with industry greats like Peter Molyneux and Sid Meier. No topic was taboo and they pulled no punches in their interview questions. Although it was presented in a different format it was no less informative than Icons. Why they would axe this and not Arena or Cheat is ridiculous.
For the record, Filter wasn't really so bad either. Diane "Fook Mi" Mizota was little more than a cue card reading Vanna but she did it with flare and was a treat to look at. (Yes, she played Fook Mi in Goldmember. I'm not being a racist ass.) John Walsh was a freaking hilarious little creep too.
As Seumas says above, more smart hot chicks! Tina Wood and Laura Foy were both in spades, and at least Diane Mizota read her lines in the right order. Whatsherface on Cheat has the personality of a cheese coupon and smarts to match.
Will I stop paying $2.50 per month for the network because of this? No, but I'm barely getting my money's worth now.
I'm with you on this one. Convergence is not really defined in TFA. It sounds like they're largely talking about the quality of effects - the sole factor in what too many journalists are touting as "next generation games".
These are entirely dissimilar media with one fundamental difference - movies are prerendered while games are realtime. It makes no sense to make a movie in the Quake 4 engine because, by movie standards, it will look like crapola. Short of inviting Sam Jackson to your house and smacking him with a glowing broomstick, I don't see how games and movies can converge more than they already have in terms of special effects.
There are games that have borrowed from tried and true cinematographical conventions. Sure, Alone In The Dark was a Lovecraft-esque horror game with a spooky house and monsters, but what made it truly frightening was the use of strategically-placed camera angles. Roberta Williams' Phantasmagoria succeeded as a thriller game not only because it was composed of digital video with actors and sets, but because of the slow pacing and three dimensional characters who themselves were afraid to open the door you just clicked. Wing Commander 3 and 4 introduced Hollywood actors (Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and more) to cut scenes, allowing the player to interact with the story via branching dialogue menus. Enter The Matrix was "directed" by the Wachowski Bros., but that didn't result in a good game.
Indigo Prophecy (aka Fahrenheit in Europe) is the most movie-like game I've seen to date in terms of presentation, camera work, dialogue, and acting. It's obvious Quantic Dream designed the game to resemble a movie from the ground up, and it's impressive to see a game that looks and feels as polished as its cut scenes. As revolutionary as the interface is, the game is really an evolution of point-and-click adventures of decades past. I do hope to see many more games that tell a story in this way.
There are so many ways to tell a story other than movies. Why equate movies and games at all? Because they're moving pictures on a screen? That's incidental and ancillary. They both tell stories but they abide by different laws of storytelling. I say movies have as much to adopt from games as games do from movies.
Thank you for finally explaining to everyone what this means.
It's nuts to sign up for one of these sites anyway. Users must create uniquely identifiable userIDs for the site to track their stats. If and when the site is busted for whatever reason, the administrator will no doubt surrender the list of userIDs and corresponding IP addresses to the authorities, as has happened in the past.
Up with privacy! Down with elitism! Never ever sign on to a torrent tracker that maintains user ratios!
I'm not thrilled about in-game advertising, but what WOULD thrill me is the increase in 100% sponsored games. Anarchy Online has adopted this model. You Don't Know Jack Online used this model in its heyday. I'd be glad to endure some ads if it meant I could play a good game for free. The better the game, the less annoyed I'd be with ads. In fact, if the ads are done tastefully, I'd seek those brands out just because they were paying for my video games.
Thank you for the clarification. I relinquish my karma point to you.
I admit my ignorance in how GPS works. I've never used it so my comments are presumption only.
However, I think there must be communication to and from the satellite - if not from the car then from the police. It can't be expected that every car would possess maps of every city with speed limits for every street. The GPS units would have to occasionally download information about the immediate vicinity.
You are probably correct that bad transmissions would be minimal. Regardless, I don't think the idea of policing without the police will catch on. Many Canadian cities implemented and then disassembled unmanned photoradar stations which penalized speeders and people who ran red lights.
This is exactly what I was thinking.
I presume such a GPS system would function via satellites. Satellites have huge latency (more than a few seconds) which would reduce the accuracy of such a system. Rain, snow, and clouds can hamper satellite signal and may make a car disappear from GPS, or could cause inaccurate interpretations which prevent a stopped car from moving at all. At certain times of year, the earth's axis relative to the satellite may cause twinkles or distortions in the atmosphere which are also notorious for interrupting signal phase and frequency.
How about more cops patrolling? I'd rather be policed by police than a robot under my hood.
Please keep advertisements in the banner on the side of the page so that my Adblock extension catches them.
One important aspect of art is that it tells a story, even if it is a static image or sculpture. Games tell a story in a more blunt fashion, of course, but just the same they flesh out minor details that might never be considered in a painting or novel. In Knights of the Old Republic, nearly every item you pick up has a short back story, thereby making every element of the experience alive.
Another aspect of art is to put the viewer in the shoes of the artist, which games exceed at, for those who care to see. Pong or Spacewar, the first video games, may not themselves be as striking as the setting behind them. Their simplicity is a testement to the innovation of playing a game on a multi-thousand dollar calculator. Black and White hints at some of the idiological and theological beliefs of Peter Molyneux, the lead designer. Tetris is a prime example of Alexei Pajitnov's respect and adoration of mathematics. A programmer in the 80's had a nightmare about a nuclear war and subsequently created Missile Command. There is always a motivation behind the work.
The last aspect of art I can pretend to profess is the aspect of conflict. Mona Lisa's smile, for instance, hints at more than just happiness. RPGs like Fallout allow the player to decide their alignment, and therefore solve any problem through many different means. Even Super Mario Bros and Pacman are prime examples - why do they combat their opponents to get to the next level? Because they MUST.
Have I addressed your arguments? Maybe not. Maybe something is art only to someone worth seeing it as such. Or maybe something is art if the creator says it is. Maybe a video game is just a set of rules with pieces of art glued in to make it pretty, or maybe the cohesive sum of the parts is precisely what makes it art. Maybe I'm just struggling to rationalize my unproductive hobby.
Then again, maybe video games are more wholly "art" than any other artform. Not only do they (debatably) include the other aspects of art, but they also are interactive. Not only are players an audience of this art, but also artists themselves, bending the experience to match their personal preferences.
Sorry to blather so. I'd love to hear your rebuttal. Your challenges are absolutely valid.
Have we, as critics, given people like Ebert enough reason to believe that games are art?
I definitely think so. Games reviewers, like Ebert, give a description of the set and setting, plot, experience, describe the taste left in their mouth when the game is done, and finally give a qualitative score based on all elements put together. However, because games are "put together" in real time and not in advance like movies, game reviews are swayed by the technical prowess of the product. In a way this is akin to Ebert not only reviewing the movie, but also the quality of the service at the theatre.
Anyone who says games are not art is closed minded, plain and simple. Whether a game is beautiful is irrelevant. Super Mario Brothers on the NES is art. Pong is art. They are a singing, dancing example of zeitgeist, providing a window into eras of recent history. We will look back on video games in future decades and the sway of the times on the games' design will be more apparant in hindsight.
Unless you're listening to, or are, Corey Hart.
It's happening everywhere! A study was done in Canada which stated that low income Canadian households spent twice as much on video games as those with a higher annual income.
Sure it is! It's their job to solve problems at the root, not put bandaids on the symptoms.
Video games are "addictive" because people are not "addicted" to the real world. They are displeased with their surroundings so they escape into a more palatable place. The cure to video game addiction is to make the real world a better place. Why haven't video game addicts sued their respective governments for driving them to games?
I agree with you 100% that the law is on the side of the ESA and the software publishers, and that, despite their intentions, HoTU is taking a chance on the law. I only called the ESA clueless because they sent HoTU a boilerplate DMCA violation letter that did not apply to the crime.
I guess my broader point, which I should have stated initially, is that the DMCA is not fleshed out well enough to enforce or defend accurately. It's a new breed of law that will take time to perfect by trial and error, and will have to be changed regularly to reflect the times.
I personally would love to see old games freely available on the internet if they are no longer available otherwise, but I definitely sympathize with the designers and programmers whose livelihoods depend on sales. I wonder if anyone's bothered to *ask* publishers whether they mind their expired properties being shared.
It sounds like Microsoft isn't prepared to just send out new systems though. They will try to repair them first. Regardless of Microsoft's definition of "immediately", it will still take at least 48 hours to ship consoles to and from consumers.
O'Donnell urged anyone with Xbox problems to call 1-800-4myXbox or go to http://www.xbox.com./ If the problems can't be immediately resolved, Microsoft will pay to ship the console overnight to a repair center, overnight it back once it's fixed, or ship a replacement.
If you were one of the Xbox's biggest fans and waited in line for 24 hours to be one of the first people in the world with a 360, how would you feel if MS told you to wait several days to play it? MS should be cross-shipping new systems to each and every person with a defective console and making sure it gets there by the next day. Not only this, but they should be instructing their customer service reps to reassure these avid Xbox afficionados that they appreciate their loyalty and will be compensating them with a free game or a month of Xbox Live or ANYTHING to apologize profusely! These are the people who will spread word-of-mouth advertising to all their friends. If the first thing they tell their peers is the story of Microsoft's crappy product quality and customer service, people will think twice before buying.
Whether Microsoft loses $150 per console is irrelevant. When you drop $500 on a product you expect it to blow your mind the minute you turn it on.
Microsoft had best take this issue VERY seriously if they want to convince people to get a 360 instead of a PS3. The Xbox's biggest fans, if mistreated, will complain long and loud.
"Abandonware" is a grey term. The purpose of Home of The Underdogs is to preserve out of print and unavailable software. Some of the titles mentioned in the ESA's letter were 20 years old. How often do you see DOS games for sale anywhere? These are pieces of history whose best interests are served best by gamers, not by publishers who would rather sit on the IP forever.
And exactly how much of the profits of an Ebay sale do you think publishers and designers see?
The ESA (Entertainment Software Association), a body representing many software companies, sent a threatening letter to Home of the Underdogs a few years ago, demanding that they cease the sale of all copyright materials from their website. They state to be standing behind the DMCA.
...
IDSA is providing this letter of notification pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and 17 USC =A7 512 (c) to make you aware of material on your network or system that infringes the exclusive copyright rights of one or more IDSA members.
IDSA has a good faith belief that the Internet site found at theunderdogs.org infringes the rights of one or more IDSA members by offering for illegal sale one or more unauthorized copies of one or more game products protected by copyright...
Anyone who has seen this website knows that they do not sell games at all and never have. They provide abandonware downloads - games that have been out of print and not for sale for many years - in the interest of the preservation of culture.
Just another example of clueless bullies hiding behind the DMCA, seemingly for financial gain, but for properties not even for sale! Read the full letter and the webmaster's commentary for full details. http://www.the-underdogs.org/partdeux.php