While you have a point in terms of 'accepted terminology' the OP has a point regarding the actual question. Many FPS games are setup under the "if it moves, kill it" philosophy of game design. This doesn't work well when what "moves" is suppose to scare you. If you have the power to kill it, eventually regardless of all the other work put into making it scary, it becomes boring.
How many people got bored of Doom3 once it became apparent how predicable the monster 'hiding' locations were, regardless of whether you could see the monster while you were walking up to the 'ambush' sites.
Even at Sony, the likelyhood that the Blu-Ray movie disks are being mastered at the same equipment as their music CD disks is so small that the "we make things more accurate" snake oil sell would have been a better tack to take.
Do you think they have just one machine doing the mastering?
After reading the article, it seems that this in theory would reduce the amount of 'innate' errors in the master. This would imply that, with fewer errors, your CD could get slightly more scratched before it starts to skip/distort/bug out noticeably.
However, as many others have said, this is solving a problem no one seems to have. You aren't getting better quality audio, you are just reducing the already low error rate of the master.
It's easier to choose one person, network, group, who've convinced us (rightly or not) that they are able to do that for us and present the package in an easily digestible manner.
Did I mention anything about being more reliable?
The point is, as much as people are proclaiming the death of the news media, as long as we find it more convenient to have someone else do the parsing for us, be it Dan Rather, Rush Limbaugh, Stephen Colbert, or SHODAN, there will be a place for the professional news reporter.
The only question is, how much of their effort is going to go into actually reporting the news (as they do today) and how much of it is going to be taking what is already being reported and deciding how and what to present to you.
It does however, become necessary to put Dan Rather in front of the camera somewhere, so he can filter the signal to noise ratio down to something useable and 'believable'.
Bloggers, for all their newfound 'power' are still subject to the "a million voices crying out" problem. Look at the 'blog' coverage of any of those events and you realize that had we "only" had bloggers telling us what happened back then, we'd still be trying to piece it together.
There still needs to be something at the end of the funnel, filtering the "teh aliens what was the ones who did it" and the "I heard from my neighbor's sister-in-law who heard it from a guy standing on the street waiting for a bus.." out of the stream. And while that could be anyone, including yourself, most of us don't want to spend the time or the effort trying to decide who to trust and whose a wingnut. It's easier to choose one person, network, group, who've convinced us (rightly or not) that they are able to do that for us and present the package in an easily digestible manner.
That being said, I do think the news industry is in for some major changes in the near future. They are going to need to move from being the 'authors' to being the 'research librarian': someone who can find what's already out there rather than spending time writing it themselves.
I believe the humor tags are missing from my post, otherwise you'd not be replying to the statement that Unix came from big iron with a post pointing to what was the lone exception to the clause.
The mistake is in attempting to hide the fact that you've 'complied with the law'.
Hidden censorship is the enemy of everyone but the censor. To say "these books are banned" at least provides the ability for someone to someday come along and argue the case that they shouldn't be. To simply and silently make the books disappear removes that.
All use government power should have oversight, the government works on behalf of the people using powers accorded to it by the people. Abuse, deliberate or unintentional, should be watched for and corrected.
That is why Google indicates when it's removed results from a search when it's complying with local laws.
Actually, that pretty much was the defintion of Unix for a long time. Thus why things like Linux, which is not Unix, became popular with the masses.
Unix - You have to buy a million dollar vendor supplied computer, pay a hundred thousand in licensing fees, and were only allowed to run approved utilities with out violating your service contract.
Linux - You could toss it on your garden variety PC, likely one you already own, the cost of acquisition was the cost of the floppies or bandwidth, and you could do whatever you wanted with it.
Unless the games you play are highly unique, most of the skills you obtian in one carry over to the other.
If you manage to become skilled in one FPS, no you won't be a god in every FPS you play, but it's highly unlikely that you'll be ganked as soon as you log in (unless by skills we mean "cheats", which unfortunately is something that becomes a problem as games get older and companies stop updating their anti-cheat routines).
And once you play a few games and get your 'sea legs', it's likely that the only edge people will have over you is an intimate knowledge of the maps and quirks specific to the game. Those can be learned fairly quickly most of the time.
With respect, while I agree somewhat with the perspective that "Hulu" is not to blame, they are not completely blameless. Remember who owns Hulu, NBC and News Corp (aka FOX).
Around this important group was ranged the Army of Oz, and as Dorothy looked at the handsome uniforms of the Twenty-Seven she said:
"Why, they seem to be all officers."
"They are, all except one," answered the Tin Woodman. "I have in my Army eight Generals, six Colonels, seven Majors and five Captains, besides one private for them to command. I'd like to promote the private, for I believe no private should ever be in public life; and I've also noticed that officers usually fight better and are more reliable than common soldiers. Besides, the officers are more important looking, and lend dignity to our army."
Yes. Or there were. Wiiminder was a site that you could go to through your Wii's Opera browser to add 'tabbed browsing'. However, I don't think it's up anymore.
Boxee is a freeware cross-platform media center software with social networking features that is a fork of the open source XBMC media center software with some custom and proprietary additions. Marketed as the first ever "'Social Media Center", Boxee enables its users to view, rate and recommend content to their friends through many social networking features. Boxee is still under development and is currently only available as Alpha releases for Mac OS X (Leopard and Tiger), Apple TV, and Linux for computers with Intel processors, with the first Alpha made available on the 16th of June 2008. A Microsoft Windows Alpha version of Boxee was released in January 2009, but is currently available only by private invitation.
Boxee said in 2009 they are planning on releasing their own dedicated set-top box (hardware) for Boxee, and also plan to license their Boxee media center and social networking service as a third-party software component to other companies for them to use the Boxee software in their hardware, such as set-top boxes from cable-TV companies or embedded computers built-in directly into television-sets. Boxee has also stated that their goal is to have Boxee run on as many third-party hardware platforms and operating systems as possible.
Well the first FPS I played was DOOM and it was a multiplayer game in the computer lab at college. We brought down the network, and got banned from using the lab for a full semester and to top it off, I got walloped fairly hard in the game.
So, I'm guessing the best way to get that feeling again would be to go into work and piss in my bosses mug tomorrow morning.
As far as the "oh wow! new! shiny!" feeling, I tend to get that when I play a good game regardless. I got it when I played each game in the Half-Life series, the System Shock games, the Dues Ex games, Portal, FEAR, and many others.
Maybe, what you really need is a little less jaded cynicism and willingness to pass off everything as "old" the moment you see it.
Mine is that just because they haven't evolved the way he dreamed up back when Duke was 'innovative' doesn't mean they haven't.
You've already provided an example, and I'm sure we both could spend all day coming up with games that have come out since Duke Nukem 3D that have advanced the genre and come up with new, innovative, ideas. Ideas which in many cases have been proven by the number of times that they've been adopted since then.
We could also spend twice as long coming up with games that weren't necessarily innovative but were still good. The ones that took the raw ideas others presented and polished them up.
We aren't in the STNG world of holodecks and AI characters so believable that they come to life and take over the ship. But we don't have to be for the games that are being made now to be GOOD games.
Do you have any IDEA how amazing it was to have a pool table where you could kick the balls around, in 1996? If we'd kept up with that level of innovation, I don't even know where we'd be today. Fully destructable environments, and phonecalls where you could have a realistic conversation with the AI via your headset, I would imagine.
And instead they innovated in different ways, ones that actually improved the game rather than add pointless fluff.
And please stop acting as if the fact that they didn't invent your "fully destructable environments", "Talking AIs", or "fully interactive environments" that they haven't innovated. What you are missing is that for the most part, all of the innovations you've touted so far in all these comments are about as useful as the fabled flying car and haven't been introduced in games for the same reason we don't have flying cars. I.E. They are pointless and inefficient.
Thanks grandpa, you've completely cleared that up for me. I'll get off your lawn now.
"Why can't everything be more innovative damn it!"
"But grand papa, this one has so many cool features and an engaging story line!"
"Bull shit! Duke Nukem had shitting aliens and strippers! It's been a decade and a half and there haven't been any games out there that have innovated shitting aliens and strippers! You could see your damn reflection! I should be able to jump up on pool tables and kick the balls!"
"But grand papa, many games have reflections, and this is a horror game without aliens or strippers at all!"
"Damn it! I didn't say it would be easy, but if the game doesn't blow me away, it's shit! Pure Shit!"
"That's good father, did you remember to take your Thorazine today?"
Dude, not every war movie is going to be Saving Private Ryan. Not every Sci-Fi show is going to be Firefly or Battle Star Galactica. And that's OK. They don't have to be to be good. Why don't you get off your soap box and actually play the game for once instead of living in the 2d era of FPS.
Nope, I've pretty much pegged you exact. You are so full of piss and vinegar over the fact that the developers don't have the resources to program every single little object out there to act 'realistically' that you've forgotten there are actually points to the games, and it's not "oh look, I can play pool by kicking the balls around". While simultaneously, because you are so focused on coding in features that actually wouldn't mean shit to the game and waste precious CPU and developer time, you've failed to notice that the games have gotten to the point where we don't actually need to be able to tip 2d strippers to enjoy the game.
So, boiled down to it's essentials, your beef is that despite all the actual advances, evolvements, and improvements games have made in the past 13 years, you can't be truly innovative unless you cut and paste from a schlocky game that's almost a decade an a half old?
"I agree, this goes for movies too, I never hear anyone murmmer "Rosebud" as they die anymore, and WTF is with all this CGI crap. Claymotion was good enough for Rudolph, it should have been good enough for Shrek. Now that's innovation mother fuckers!"
Have you ever stopped to consider that just because there are a million flavors out there in the world, that doesn't mean every time you hit Subway for a hoagie it has to include all of them? Sometimes, just making a good ham and cheese is the right choice?
FEAR and FEAR 2 are not Halo. They are not games which derive their sole glory from being the 'first good one for a console'. They may have their flaws, and they may not be the best but they are hardly mediocre.
Slashdot Mirror
While you have a point in terms of 'accepted terminology' the OP has a point regarding the actual question. Many FPS games are setup under the "if it moves, kill it" philosophy of game design. This doesn't work well when what "moves" is suppose to scare you. If you have the power to kill it, eventually regardless of all the other work put into making it scary, it becomes boring.
How many people got bored of Doom3 once it became apparent how predicable the monster 'hiding' locations were, regardless of whether you could see the monster while you were walking up to the 'ambush' sites.
Even at Sony, the likelyhood that the Blu-Ray movie disks are being mastered at the same equipment as their music CD disks is so small that the "we make things more accurate" snake oil sell would have been a better tack to take.
Do you think they have just one machine doing the mastering?
After reading the article, it seems that this in theory would reduce the amount of 'innate' errors in the master. This would imply that, with fewer errors, your CD could get slightly more scratched before it starts to skip/distort/bug out noticeably.
However, as many others have said, this is solving a problem no one seems to have. You aren't getting better quality audio, you are just reducing the already low error rate of the master.
Funny thing about that... Spain doesn't think you can.
Did I mention anything about being more reliable?
The point is, as much as people are proclaiming the death of the news media, as long as we find it more convenient to have someone else do the parsing for us, be it Dan Rather, Rush Limbaugh, Stephen Colbert, or SHODAN, there will be a place for the professional news reporter.
The only question is, how much of their effort is going to go into actually reporting the news (as they do today) and how much of it is going to be taking what is already being reported and deciding how and what to present to you.
It does however, become necessary to put Dan Rather in front of the camera somewhere, so he can filter the signal to noise ratio down to something useable and 'believable'.
Bloggers, for all their newfound 'power' are still subject to the "a million voices crying out" problem. Look at the 'blog' coverage of any of those events and you realize that had we "only" had bloggers telling us what happened back then, we'd still be trying to piece it together.
There still needs to be something at the end of the funnel, filtering the "teh aliens what was the ones who did it" and the "I heard from my neighbor's sister-in-law who heard it from a guy standing on the street waiting for a bus.." out of the stream. And while that could be anyone, including yourself, most of us don't want to spend the time or the effort trying to decide who to trust and whose a wingnut. It's easier to choose one person, network, group, who've convinced us (rightly or not) that they are able to do that for us and present the package in an easily digestible manner.
That being said, I do think the news industry is in for some major changes in the near future. They are going to need to move from being the 'authors' to being the 'research librarian': someone who can find what's already out there rather than spending time writing it themselves.
More importantly there is the "check your URL against our list and now we know who to check next" factor.
Since you sound knowledgeable, I imagine this link. Is not what you are looking for. However, just in the off chance...
Well, there is this and this. But yeah, OP kinda forgets what Unix is.
I believe the humor tags are missing from my post, otherwise you'd not be replying to the statement that Unix came from big iron with a post pointing to what was the lone exception to the clause.
Given Microsoft Bob's relation to Melinda Gates, I'd say... yes.
The mistake is in attempting to hide the fact that you've 'complied with the law'.
Hidden censorship is the enemy of everyone but the censor. To say "these books are banned" at least provides the ability for someone to someday come along and argue the case that they shouldn't be. To simply and silently make the books disappear removes that.
All use government power should have oversight, the government works on behalf of the people using powers accorded to it by the people. Abuse, deliberate or unintentional, should be watched for and corrected.
That is why Google indicates when it's removed results from a search when it's complying with local laws.
Actually, that pretty much was the defintion of Unix for a long time. Thus why things like Linux, which is not Unix, became popular with the masses.
Unix - You have to buy a million dollar vendor supplied computer, pay a hundred thousand in licensing fees, and were only allowed to run approved utilities with out violating your service contract.
Linux - You could toss it on your garden variety PC, likely one you already own, the cost of acquisition was the cost of the floppies or bandwidth, and you could do whatever you wanted with it.
Unless the games you play are highly unique, most of the skills you obtian in one carry over to the other.
If you manage to become skilled in one FPS, no you won't be a god in every FPS you play, but it's highly unlikely that you'll be ganked as soon as you log in (unless by skills we mean "cheats", which unfortunately is something that becomes a problem as games get older and companies stop updating their anti-cheat routines).
And once you play a few games and get your 'sea legs', it's likely that the only edge people will have over you is an intimate knowledge of the maps and quirks specific to the game. Those can be learned fairly quickly most of the time.
A tank rush is a zerg rush, is a...
With respect, while I agree somewhat with the perspective that "Hulu" is not to blame, they are not completely blameless. Remember who owns Hulu, NBC and News Corp (aka FOX).
Ozma of Oz
Yes. Or there were. Wiiminder was a site that you could go to through your Wii's Opera browser to add 'tabbed browsing'. However, I don't think it's up anymore.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxee
Boxee is a freeware cross-platform media center software with social networking features that is a fork of the open source XBMC media center software with some custom and proprietary additions. Marketed as the first ever "'Social Media Center", Boxee enables its users to view, rate and recommend content to their friends through many social networking features. Boxee is still under development and is currently only available as Alpha releases for Mac OS X (Leopard and Tiger), Apple TV, and Linux for computers with Intel processors, with the first Alpha made available on the 16th of June 2008. A Microsoft Windows Alpha version of Boxee was released in January 2009, but is currently available only by private invitation.
Boxee said in 2009 they are planning on releasing their own dedicated set-top box (hardware) for Boxee, and also plan to license their Boxee media center and social networking service as a third-party software component to other companies for them to use the Boxee software in their hardware, such as set-top boxes from cable-TV companies or embedded computers built-in directly into television-sets. Boxee has also stated that their goal is to have Boxee run on as many third-party hardware platforms and operating systems as possible.
Well the first FPS I played was DOOM and it was a multiplayer game in the computer lab at college. We brought down the network, and got banned from using the lab for a full semester and to top it off, I got walloped fairly hard in the game.
So, I'm guessing the best way to get that feeling again would be to go into work and piss in my bosses mug tomorrow morning.
As far as the "oh wow! new! shiny!" feeling, I tend to get that when I play a good game regardless. I got it when I played each game in the Half-Life series, the System Shock games, the Dues Ex games, Portal, FEAR, and many others.
Maybe, what you really need is a little less jaded cynicism and willingness to pass off everything as "old" the moment you see it.
Actually, you are missing a number of points.
Mine is that just because they haven't evolved the way he dreamed up back when Duke was 'innovative' doesn't mean they haven't.
You've already provided an example, and I'm sure we both could spend all day coming up with games that have come out since Duke Nukem 3D that have advanced the genre and come up with new, innovative, ideas. Ideas which in many cases have been proven by the number of times that they've been adopted since then.
We could also spend twice as long coming up with games that weren't necessarily innovative but were still good. The ones that took the raw ideas others presented and polished them up.
We aren't in the STNG world of holodecks and AI characters so believable that they come to life and take over the ship. But we don't have to be for the games that are being made now to be GOOD games.
As well as hope that you aren't sandblasting your panels with it when the barrel gets clogged.
And instead they innovated in different ways, ones that actually improved the game rather than add pointless fluff.
And please stop acting as if the fact that they didn't invent your "fully destructable environments", "Talking AIs", or "fully interactive environments" that they haven't innovated. What you are missing is that for the most part, all of the innovations you've touted so far in all these comments are about as useful as the fabled flying car and haven't been introduced in games for the same reason we don't have flying cars. I.E. They are pointless and inefficient.
Thanks grandpa, you've completely cleared that up for me. I'll get off your lawn now.
"Why can't everything be more innovative damn it!"
"But grand papa, this one has so many cool features and an engaging story line!"
"Bull shit! Duke Nukem had shitting aliens and strippers! It's been a decade and a half and there haven't been any games out there that have innovated shitting aliens and strippers! You could see your damn reflection! I should be able to jump up on pool tables and kick the balls!"
"But grand papa, many games have reflections, and this is a horror game without aliens or strippers at all!"
"Damn it! I didn't say it would be easy, but if the game doesn't blow me away, it's shit! Pure Shit!"
"That's good father, did you remember to take your Thorazine today?"
Dude, not every war movie is going to be Saving Private Ryan. Not every Sci-Fi show is going to be Firefly or Battle Star Galactica. And that's OK. They don't have to be to be good. Why don't you get off your soap box and actually play the game for once instead of living in the 2d era of FPS.
Nope, I've pretty much pegged you exact. You are so full of piss and vinegar over the fact that the developers don't have the resources to program every single little object out there to act 'realistically' that you've forgotten there are actually points to the games, and it's not "oh look, I can play pool by kicking the balls around". While simultaneously, because you are so focused on coding in features that actually wouldn't mean shit to the game and waste precious CPU and developer time, you've failed to notice that the games have gotten to the point where we don't actually need to be able to tip 2d strippers to enjoy the game.
So, boiled down to it's essentials, your beef is that despite all the actual advances, evolvements, and improvements games have made in the past 13 years, you can't be truly innovative unless you cut and paste from a schlocky game that's almost a decade an a half old?
"I agree, this goes for movies too, I never hear anyone murmmer "Rosebud" as they die anymore, and WTF is with all this CGI crap. Claymotion was good enough for Rudolph, it should have been good enough for Shrek. Now that's innovation mother fuckers!"
Have you ever stopped to consider that just because there are a million flavors out there in the world, that doesn't mean every time you hit Subway for a hoagie it has to include all of them? Sometimes, just making a good ham and cheese is the right choice?
FEAR and FEAR 2 are not Halo. They are not games which derive their sole glory from being the 'first good one for a console'. They may have their flaws, and they may not be the best but they are hardly mediocre.