I have to wonder how they come up with those numbers. Do 84% of 15-18 year olds even have computers in their homes, or broadband access for downloading games? I seem to remember figures from the 2000 US Census saying only half the households in the US had computers, and something like 25% of the households that did have computers were not connected to the Internet. I would think patterns in the UK would be similar. If so, then those figures don't add up.
The game has a M rating in the US which is supposed to mean that it's to be played by 17 year olds and above. R Rated movies are the same, 17 and above, but are much more revealing than the pixelated scene in GTA. The question comes down to why the outrage over GTA but not a late night movie on Cinemax? I think it is because people still associate games with children, even if it is an adult themed game. Some children will get their hands on the game, just as some will be watching R rated movies. That's up to the parents to monitor.
Where Rockstar can be found at fault is for not including that scene to be rated by the ESRB. They submitted it for ratings and were supposed to reveal everything for review.
I really can't see that happening. If the Xbox 360 is going to launch this Christmas season, I doubt if they will keep quiet and not provide more PS3 details to dissuade people from buying the Xbox and give them a reason to hold out until the PS3 release.
The later alternative to the Atari 2600 joystick was the Epyx 500XJ. Much more ergonomic than the basic joystick but still just a single button. My only complaint was that it was for right handed players only and one friend that I used to play with couldn't use it.
I had to make the 4 yr old a power user to run the educational programs she uses from such manufacturers as Jumpstart, Knowledge Adventure, and others.
On the other hand, my 17 year old is a limited user and everything he plays will work ok with that setup. Sometimes I have had to grant permissions to the program directory or on a couple even the registry key in the hive, but I don't know of a single game we haven't been able to get working that way, and he plays most of the current ones such as World of Warcraft, HL2, Doom 3, and many others. WoW requred granting him access to the program directory and the registry key so he could apply the updates but he still runs it under his basic user account.
I thought it funny that the 4 year old has more rights than the 17 year old, but that is the only way I could get her programs to run.
The Eye Toy for the Playstation 2 has been what I have seen grab the interest of more non-gamers than anything else. I have seen many people that wouldn't touch a game controller waving their hands and moving around having a blast with the Eye Toy mini games.
My wife only plays one on the article list - Bejeweled. Her favorites are the Hoyles series, mostly the Card and Board games.
Maybe he will try to swim across Pennesseewassee Lake in Norway, Maine to keep his promise of swimming from Norway to the US.
While undoubtably a publicity stunt, it's nice to hear that Opera 8 had 1,000,000 downloads. I have been a fan of it for years and use it as my primary browser. Although it is not Open Source they support more Operating Systems than any other browser - I even remember running a BeOS version years ago.
One trend that I have noticed is that if a game has a gun in it, it gets at least a T rating. For example Jak And Daxter did not have any guns and it was rated E. Jak II and III both featured guns and was given a T rating. Many games that have you shooting robots or non humans get a T as well such as Ratchet and Clank, but once it features shooting people it will get an M. I don't know the guidelines for the rating system and what determines the boundaries between E, T, and M but noticed that the inclusion of guns seem to be part of it.
I remember the Amiga version of Blitz Basic. With just a few lines of code you could have a rudimentary game with sprites moving on the screen. It was a Basic language variant with specialized commands for game creation, such as sprite manipulation and collision detection. I prefered it's competitior, AMOS, but Blitz was not bad at all for a hobbyist game programmer.
Last year my Yamaha DX7 music keyboard battery died. I didn't know it at the time but when the battery dies, all programmed sound patches and modes are erased, even the factory presets. No problem, I had made a backup years ago with DX Android on the Atari ST so I could just restore from those backups. I got the battery replaced but when I got the Atari ST out of the closet it would not boot. I guess I could have searched ebay for a replacement but instead I got the Atari ST emulator, STeem from http://www.atari.st/ and was able to restore the patches from the backups using it.
I remember that the switch to CD Rom fixed some of my complaints about the earlier Wing Commanders.
Wing Commander II took nearly an hour to install on my 386, without the speech pack
Speaking of the Speech pack, WC3 had it built in so no need to spend another $15-20 on an addon that only added speech to the subtitled text.
I remember that Wing Commander 1 was the first program I had that required XMS and I had to get QEMM to play it. Shortly after that DOS 5.0 came out with XMS support built in.
While I don't think WC3 was the killer app that made people upgrade to cd rom (for that I would say Windows 95/Office 95 with a stack of floppies a foot tall), it sure made installation a lot faster and easier. I played it through a few times and after winning the initial time, the next time I deliberately failed a couple missions so I could play the losing path missions.
aimed at employees who cannot install AOL software at their workstations
Many pieces of software do not need installation - they can just be copied to a directory and ran from there without having to touch the registry or any system files. I would suspect that this is what the client will do. It could be run from CD or the user's home directory and call the existing IE dlls instead of installing anything itself.
Many of the new products released in the Japanese market would run risks of legal action if released in the US. Any new product or innovation stands the chance of having to run through a legal gauntlet in the American court system. Look at things like Creative's Rio and the court battles they had to go through to release the first consumer MP3 player stateside. As long as the *AA and other copyright owners hold a legal cudgel over the US technology companies if they create a device that *might* infinge on a copyright, then the innovators will have to reside offshore.
The design of the unit at Institute, WV was supposed to be identical to the Indian unit. We were always told that Bhopal tragedy was caused by deliberate sabatoge. MIC is water reactive. The system was designed so that water could not be introduced into it. The water and steam hoses had fittings that could not be attached to the connectors on the MIC storage to prevent water from being introduced to the system. Someone at the Indian unit had cut the end off of a water hose and attached a connector that would fit the MIC system and introduced water into the system. A chemical reaction occured causing the vapor cloud to be released into the atmosphere.
MIC is used in the making of insecticides. It is one of the main ingredients of Seven, along with Phosgene and Chlorine, two other poisonous gases. Phosgene is the name of the mustard gas used in World War I. Basically insecticides are nerve agents designed to work on insects. Many of the ingredients are lethal to humans as well.
I have seen several examples over the years where it was obvious that the developers used unlicensed tools. The one that I remember the most was a game called Settlers 2. One of the directories had a crack for Scitech Display Doctor that was left on the distribution cds.
I am glad that Jez San was able to save the company and prevent another good developer from going under as so many others have in the past. I remember spending hours playing Starglider years ago and would rate it as one of the must have titles for the Atari ST or Amiga. My children really enjoy I Ninja on the PS2, one of their more recent efforts.
If nothing else, participating in the open beta will give me a chance to try it out before buying WoW. One of my strongest complaints about MMORPGs is the lack of a playable demo or trial. While you usually get the first month free, you still have to shell out $50 for the game itself without knowing if you are going to enjoy the experience. You have to make your buying decision based on reviews and in-game movies instead of a playable demo. This alone has kept me from trying several games since I didn't want to buy it to find out I didn't like the gameplay.
I am looking forward to this one since I have found most Blizzard games to have great gameplay. I didn't care as much for their older games, Blackthorne and the Lost Vikings, but the Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft series rank among my favorites.
If lowering the hardware costs will prevent piracy, why do people still pirate PS2 or Xbox software when the hardware is only $149? Just today there was an article on GTA San Andreas being on the net a week before the official release.
I think a major reason behind the lack of hard drive on the new unit is due to the release of HD Loader over the summer. The HD Loader software allowed you to install a hard drive in the PS2 and run games from it without a mod chip. No soldering was required and the case did not have to be opened so the warranty was not violated. The hard drive attached to the network adapter and fit in the expansion port. Sony moved quickly to have the distributors shut down, but not before a lot of people had obtained the software. They were afraid of people copying friend's games or rentals to their hard drive.
I bought HD Loader and found many legitimate uses for it. I have young children and using HD Loader I copied all of my original games to the hard drive so they do not have to handle the game disks and take the chance of scratching them. I just leave the HD Loader disk in the tray so that everytime they boot they are presented with a menu of games to run. Load times have noticeably decreased. One of my kid's favorites had nearly a minute load time between levels. Running from the hard drive that was reduced to less than 10 seconds.
Sony Computer Entertainment boss Ken Kutaragi has confirmed that the PlayStation 3 will feature backwards compatibility with the PS2 and PSone, ensuring continued support for older software formats in the new hardware.
I wouldn't count them out yet. When has Microsoft ever did anything right the first time, or even the second? Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were terrible and barely usable, Word for Windows 1.0 and 1.1 were not very good, IE was up to version 3.0 before it really started overtaking Netscape, and it even took MS DOS until version 5.0 to really be any good.
I don't own an Xbox, I have a PS2 and Game Cube, but I have seen how Microsoft operates in the past. They take the best ideas of their competitors and incorporate them into their own designs. I would guess that the Xbox 3 will be the real contender.
Another reason to advertise long game play times is because of the games that are the exact opposite - you can complete them too fast. How many times have you felt ripped off laying down $50 for a game and completing it within hours? I can think of a couple recent examples on the PS2: Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance and Silent Hill 3 could both be completed in 10 hours. Years ago I remember playing The Leather Goddess of Phobos II and finishing it in 5 hours, the same night I had bought it. By advertising 150 hours you know that at least you won't be completing the game in a single sitting even if you don't see it through to completion.
As the father of two young children, I took what I thought was adequate precautions to protect my game collection. I placed the PS2 games up on a shelf out of their reach and changed the disk for them when they wanted to play. One day a friend was over and while I was out of the room he gets a game down off the shelf to look at the cover art or manual and places it on the coffee table. In a matter of minutes the toddler is attracted to the bright, shiny packaging and the even brighter, shinier game DVD inside. Almost instantly a $50 disk is scratched and unplayable in spite of all the precautions I had taken. I contacted the company to see if I could get a replacment disk for a discounted price and was told that I would have to buy the whole package again for full price. After that I made DVDR backups of the games I had bought and modified the PS2 to play the backups. While I am sure many use modchips to copy games they do not own, don't condemn the technology when it has legitimate uses as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to wonder how they come up with those numbers. Do 84% of 15-18 year olds even have computers in their homes, or broadband access for downloading games? I seem to remember figures from the 2000 US Census saying only half the households in the US had computers, and something like 25% of the households that did have computers were not connected to the Internet. I would think patterns in the UK would be similar. If so, then those figures don't add up.
The game has a M rating in the US which is supposed to mean that it's to be played by 17 year olds and above. R Rated movies are the same, 17 and above, but are much more revealing than the pixelated scene in GTA. The question comes down to why the outrage over GTA but not a late night movie on Cinemax? I think it is because people still associate games with children, even if it is an adult themed game. Some children will get their hands on the game, just as some will be watching R rated movies. That's up to the parents to monitor.
Where Rockstar can be found at fault is for not including that scene to be rated by the ESRB. They submitted it for ratings and were supposed to reveal everything for review.
I really can't see that happening. If the Xbox 360 is going to launch this Christmas season, I doubt if they will keep quiet and not provide more PS3 details to dissuade people from buying the Xbox and give them a reason to hold out until the PS3 release.
The later alternative to the Atari 2600 joystick was the Epyx 500XJ. Much more ergonomic than the basic joystick but still just a single button. My only complaint was that it was for right handed players only and one friend that I used to play with couldn't use it.
I had to make the 4 yr old a power user to run the educational programs she uses from such manufacturers as Jumpstart, Knowledge Adventure, and others.
On the other hand, my 17 year old is a limited user and everything he plays will work ok with that setup. Sometimes I have had to grant permissions to the program directory or on a couple even the registry key in the hive, but I don't know of a single game we haven't been able to get working that way, and he plays most of the current ones such as World of Warcraft, HL2, Doom 3, and many others. WoW requred granting him access to the program directory and the registry key so he could apply the updates but he still runs it under his basic user account.
I thought it funny that the 4 year old has more rights than the 17 year old, but that is the only way I could get her programs to run.
The Eye Toy for the Playstation 2 has been what I have seen grab the interest of more non-gamers than anything else. I have seen many people that wouldn't touch a game controller waving their hands and moving around having a blast with the Eye Toy mini games.
My wife only plays one on the article list - Bejeweled. Her favorites are the Hoyles series, mostly the Card and Board games.
Maybe he will try to swim across Pennesseewassee Lake in Norway, Maine to keep his promise of swimming from Norway to the US.
While undoubtably a publicity stunt, it's nice to hear that Opera 8 had 1,000,000 downloads. I have been a fan of it for years and use it as my primary browser. Although it is not Open Source they support more Operating Systems than any other browser - I even remember running a BeOS version years ago.
This was in a press release from Macrovision last November.s detail.jsp?id=Thu%20Nov%2011%2016:50:07%20PST%2020 04
http://www.macrovision.com/company/news/press/new
One trend that I have noticed is that if a game has a gun in it, it gets at least a T rating. For example Jak And Daxter did not have any guns and it was rated E. Jak II and III both featured guns and was given a T rating. Many games that have you shooting robots or non humans get a T as well such as Ratchet and Clank, but once it features shooting people it will get an M. I don't know the guidelines for the rating system and what determines the boundaries between E, T, and M but noticed that the inclusion of guns seem to be part of it.
Look at what happened after Y1K - a few hundred years of Dark Ages.
I remember the Amiga version of Blitz Basic. With just a few lines of code you could have a rudimentary game with sprites moving on the screen. It was a Basic language variant with specialized commands for game creation, such as sprite manipulation and collision detection. I prefered it's competitior, AMOS, but Blitz was not bad at all for a hobbyist game programmer.
Last year my Yamaha DX7 music keyboard battery died. I didn't know it at the time but when the battery dies, all programmed sound patches and modes are erased, even the factory presets. No problem, I had made a backup years ago with DX Android on the Atari ST so I could just restore from those backups. I got the battery replaced but when I got the Atari ST out of the closet it would not boot. I guess I could have searched ebay for a replacement but instead I got the Atari ST emulator, STeem from http://www.atari.st/ and was able to restore the patches from the backups using it.
I have emulators for most of the computers I had previously owned. I still have the software, just would not have a way to play them anymore if it wasn't for emulators. Some of the ones I use besides the Atari ST that I had previously mentioned are:
Amiga http://www.winuae.net/
Atari 800 http://www.concentric.net/~Twist/atari800win/
DOS Games http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/
Another Atari ST Emulator http://sourceforge.net/projects/winston/
I remember that the switch to CD Rom fixed some of my complaints about the earlier Wing Commanders.
Wing Commander II took nearly an hour to install on my 386, without the speech pack
Speaking of the Speech pack, WC3 had it built in so no need to spend another $15-20 on an addon that only added speech to the subtitled text.
I remember that Wing Commander 1 was the first program I had that required XMS and I had to get QEMM to play it. Shortly after that DOS 5.0 came out with XMS support built in.
While I don't think WC3 was the killer app that made people upgrade to cd rom (for that I would say Windows 95/Office 95 with a stack of floppies a foot tall), it sure made installation a lot faster and easier. I played it through a few times and after winning the initial time, the next time I deliberately failed a couple missions so I could play the losing path missions.
aimed at employees who cannot install AOL software at their workstations
Many pieces of software do not need installation - they can just be copied to a directory and ran from there without having to touch the registry or any system files. I would suspect that this is what the client will do. It could be run from CD or the user's home directory and call the existing IE dlls instead of installing anything itself.
Many of the new products released in the Japanese market would run risks of legal action if released in the US. Any new product or innovation stands the chance of having to run through a legal gauntlet in the American court system. Look at things like Creative's Rio and the court battles they had to go through to release the first consumer MP3 player stateside. As long as the *AA and other copyright owners hold a legal cudgel over the US technology companies if they create a device that *might* infinge on a copyright, then the innovators will have to reside offshore.
The design of the unit at Institute, WV was supposed to be identical to the Indian unit. We were always told that Bhopal tragedy was caused by deliberate sabatoge. MIC is water reactive. The system was designed so that water could not be introduced into it. The water and steam hoses had fittings that could not be attached to the connectors on the MIC storage to prevent water from being introduced to the system. Someone at the Indian unit had cut the end off of a water hose and attached a connector that would fit the MIC system and introduced water into the system. A chemical reaction occured causing the vapor cloud to be released into the atmosphere.
MIC is used in the making of insecticides. It is one of the main ingredients of Seven, along with Phosgene and Chlorine, two other poisonous gases. Phosgene is the name of the mustard gas used in World War I. Basically insecticides are nerve agents designed to work on insects. Many of the ingredients are lethal to humans as well.
I have seen several examples over the years where it was obvious that the developers used unlicensed tools. The one that I remember the most was a game called Settlers 2. One of the directories had a crack for Scitech Display Doctor that was left on the distribution cds.
I am glad that Jez San was able to save the company and prevent another good developer from going under as so many others have in the past. I remember spending hours playing Starglider years ago and would rate it as one of the must have titles for the Atari ST or Amiga. My children really enjoy I Ninja on the PS2, one of their more recent efforts.
If nothing else, participating in the open beta will give me a chance to try it out before buying WoW. One of my strongest complaints about MMORPGs is the lack of a playable demo or trial. While you usually get the first month free, you still have to shell out $50 for the game itself without knowing if you are going to enjoy the experience. You have to make your buying decision based on reviews and in-game movies instead of a playable demo. This alone has kept me from trying several games since I didn't want to buy it to find out I didn't like the gameplay.
I am looking forward to this one since I have found most Blizzard games to have great gameplay. I didn't care as much for their older games, Blackthorne and the Lost Vikings, but the Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft series rank among my favorites.
If lowering the hardware costs will prevent piracy, why do people still pirate PS2 or Xbox software when the hardware is only $149? Just today there was an article on GTA San Andreas being on the net a week before the official release.
I think a major reason behind the lack of hard drive on the new unit is due to the release of HD Loader over the summer. The HD Loader software allowed you to install a hard drive in the PS2 and run games from it without a mod chip. No soldering was required and the case did not have to be opened so the warranty was not violated. The hard drive attached to the network adapter and fit in the expansion port. Sony moved quickly to have the distributors shut down, but not before a lot of people had obtained the software. They were afraid of people copying friend's games or rentals to their hard drive.
I bought HD Loader and found many legitimate uses for it. I have young children and using HD Loader I copied all of my original games to the hard drive so they do not have to handle the game disks and take the chance of scratching them. I just leave the HD Loader disk in the tray so that everytime they boot they are presented with a menu of games to run. Load times have noticeably decreased. One of my kid's favorites had nearly a minute load time between levels. Running from the hard drive that was reduced to less than 10 seconds.
What Sony hasn't said for sure is whether the PS3 will be backwards compatible with DVD movies and PS2 games.
a y_ps2_psone/
I remember them saying almost a year ago that PS2 games would be backwards compatible
http://www.theregister.com/2003/09/02/ps3_will_pl
Sony Computer Entertainment boss Ken Kutaragi has confirmed that the PlayStation 3 will feature backwards compatibility with the PS2 and PSone, ensuring continued support for older software formats in the new hardware.
I wouldn't count them out yet. When has Microsoft ever did anything right the first time, or even the second? Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were terrible and barely usable, Word for Windows 1.0 and 1.1 were not very good, IE was up to version 3.0 before it really started overtaking Netscape, and it even took MS DOS until version 5.0 to really be any good.
I don't own an Xbox, I have a PS2 and Game Cube, but I have seen how Microsoft operates in the past. They take the best ideas of their competitors and incorporate them into their own designs. I would guess that the Xbox 3 will be the real contender.
Another reason to advertise long game play times is because of the games that are the exact opposite - you can complete them too fast. How many times have you felt ripped off laying down $50 for a game and completing it within hours? I can think of a couple recent examples on the PS2: Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance and Silent Hill 3 could both be completed in 10 hours. Years ago I remember playing The Leather Goddess of Phobos II and finishing it in 5 hours, the same night I had bought it. By advertising 150 hours you know that at least you won't be completing the game in a single sitting even if you don't see it through to completion.
As the father of two young children, I took what I thought was adequate precautions to protect my game collection. I placed the PS2 games up on a shelf out of their reach and changed the disk for them when they wanted to play. One day a friend was over and while I was out of the room he gets a game down off the shelf to look at the cover art or manual and places it on the coffee table. In a matter of minutes the toddler is attracted to the bright, shiny packaging and the even brighter, shinier game DVD inside. Almost instantly a $50 disk is scratched and unplayable in spite of all the precautions I had taken. I contacted the company to see if I could get a replacment disk for a discounted price and was told that I would have to buy the whole package again for full price. After that I made DVDR backups of the games I had bought and modified the PS2 to play the backups. While I am sure many use modchips to copy games they do not own, don't condemn the technology when it has legitimate uses as well.