As long as the government is not setting the rules for who and at what age people can buy games, then the ESRB (a self-governing industry regulatory body) is continuing to do its job; namely, that of keeping the government out of the business of legislating which games be sold to certain groups.
It's interesting to note that Sega started rating all games produced for the Genesis around the time of Mortal Kombat 1, rather than censor it like Nintendo did. Even so, there was enough outcry that everyone in the industry had to work together and forge a larger ratings board (the ESRB) to stop federal regulations from stepping in.
Maybe if little Cancer-Boy wasn't going to be getting a wonderful gift, which he (or she) might not otherwise be able to enjoy. Nintendo doesn't care if you've lost all your hair or if you only have 6 months to live, it's just there to love you with all the Mario and Zelda it can.
See, it's not just about the kudos for gamers not being granny-killing, child-raping monters, it's also about helping people in need.
Yea, you can't just use hardware which has no drivers (GUS Max in Win95? hah), but everything that comes out (ATI, NVidia, Creative, etc) has DirectX drivers because people won't buy them otherwise.
Granted, the drivers are usually buggy, and end up rebooting your PC randomly anyways, but they are much more consistent nowadays. It did take until DirectX6 for this to be more consistent, though.
Vselka Infiltration (Available 11/13/03) Having located the Vselka, Sam Fisher must now infiltrate its claustrophobic corridors and access its archive system to locate the nuclear warheads.
Vselka Submarine (Available 11/14/03) Having neutralized both Alekseevich and Masse, Third Echelon finds out from Masse's files at Kola Cell that Alekseevich's plan is already in motion and his men have captured a submarine docking station. Third Echelon suspects that the docked submarine, the Vselka, carries nuclear warheads, and Fisher is sent in to stop the theft or, if he's too late, find out where they have been moved to.
This adds on top of the Kola Cell you can download.
What's that, you say, a console that's flexible? Pish posh!
"Whereas there's no alternative to optimizing a console game.. it's required or the game won't run."
That's why EA's Need for Speed series on the PS2 has few frame rate issues, yet the ports for the GCN and Xbox will become slideshows very easily? Or Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance on the tanker's deck (XBox port)?
"With a console they have to get it right, or the game will forever be flawed."
Sadly, the amount of flawed games is getting up there. The Xbox is probably the worst offender here, because it's getting more of the ports from the PC that can have some pretty serious bugs in them. Games like KOTOR are awesome, but how many people were unhappy because of the stealth rescue on the sith ship that ended with them reloading the game?
On the PC side, quality hasn't been a big issue because there hasn't been any. It seems like the policy's slowly transfering to consoles, which sucks rocks.
"The unit is much smaller than a stock Jaguar... [and] the cartridges would be inserted flat into the front of the Panther like a front-load VHS tape recorder."
Don't you mean like a Nintendo Entertainment System? Come on, it's a video game system, this is a video game system.. it should be obvious!:p
Or another country with GSM the standard. Yea, it's still possible to run across SIM locked phones, but it's a whole lot easier to move between phones and providers. Just take out your little SIM card, pop it into the new phone -- done! Or get a new card from your new provider:)
motivation. I don't have the motivation to make the effort -- because I didn't complain about it. If you have time to complain about something, you have time to do something about it.
I'm just pointing out how you could've solved your complaint and helped other (a very intelligent solution), rather than just karma whoring by complaining, which is all most people on Slashdot seem capable of doing. I don't care either way; my copy of mplayer plays WMVs just fine.
Grab mplayer and install it. Run mencode to transcode the WMV file to a different format.
Once that's done, head on over to the BitTorrent website and grab the software. Run a tracker and leave a seed open.
Then post it to Slashdot in a message where you can say, "look at me -- 20 minutes of work and a little CPU time, and I made an open format version of a movie that everyone can enjoy -- plus the video's encoded smaller because of the better codec!"
This will probably net you some great karma, in addition to making your initial format question moot. It's all a matter of effort and motivation:)
My time isn't free. I've had to spend a lot of money to get my education, as well as a lot of personal time I could've been using towards something else. As any economics student could tell you, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
This provides a nice feedback mechanism that allows non-programmers to reward programmers for "filling in" and doing what the non-programmers wanted to be done. It's a natural balance, and I consider it progress in how opensource is developed. One of the few sustainable ways we could keep Linus Torvalds working on the kernel 40 hours a week is by having IBM, Red Hat, et all contributing to his work, just like Red Hat employs Alan Cox, or any number of other examples.
I'm sure most end-users think Mac Address refers to the nearest McDonald's restraunt, not a string of hexidecimal that ethernet cards use.
And this is why they (WAP manufacturers) need to ship the WAPs in a locked up config with a shiny wizard that allows easy adding and removal of cards to the security whitelist.
Javascript unit converters. Javascript spreadsheet applications. Basically, any thing that you can think of as a small, useful thing to have done, can be made into a webpage. The potential of web automation is pretty big. It's just that most people abused it for other things.
Once webbrowsing started to get bigger, clients started to demand features of browsers that would allow them to be used as a replacement for end-user applications. Networks were much more heterogenous back then -- OS/2, Macintoshes, Unix machines, and Windows 3.1 all had their spot in the business world. Rather than supporting multiple applications, it was a lot easier to write one website and have it work in all the browsers.
Except that HTML at the time wasn't robust enough for most of what they needed to do to replace these applications. This improved with newer spec support, and also partially from the implementation of tags which were not strictly spec.. but still, it didn't totally address the automation that could be done in real computer client programs. That's where Javascript came in.
It wasn't about advertising. Heck, the first time I started seeing popup windows for that was like 1998/1999 -- years after Javascript was created. Although Portals were still really popular then (just as "push" was going through its death throes).
I suppose that not everyone had the Andreeson reality-distortion field affecting them:) Too bad no one else listened to you then. At least something's happening now.
" (your server MUST check input, forget about doing that in javascript)."
"(such as making web forms "smarter" about doing a first check before submitting it [since it costs more CPU/transfer time for the server to do it, this saves modem users the pain of a typo returning an error page],"
I did not say "Don't ever check on the server side." I said, "additional checking which allows users on slow links to not be punshed for typos that can be corrected by a little client-side scripting."
"Sega Genesis Activator Ring. The ring was made of eight different sections that corresponded to buttons on a regular Genesis controller. Specially configured Activator games were Eternal Champions, Streets of Rage 3, Mortal Kombat CD, and Greatest Heavyweights. Eternal Champions, Mortal Kombat, and Street Fighter II: SCE were pack-ins. Many of the Genesis's library of games worked with the Activator. MK-1659"
They also have a picture, although not the one from the box showing a kid kicking, while on screen an Eternal Champions game has the user kicking a guy.
"why netscape thought it a good idea to allow any site an almost arbitrary level of control over my browser is beyond me."
It's 1994. The top of the line computers are 66Mhz. You want to market a server product that allows people to serve thousands of computers, without requiring super big iron support. You have a client program (Netscape Navigator) to go with your server product (Netscape webserver). Suddenly, it becomes clear to you -- distributed computing. Have the client side do some of the heavy lifting; it also allows other automation features on the client side not possible with HTML (at the time). You make this "Javascript" which is to other scripting languages as Java was to C and C++, and market it aggresively as a product solution.
Most people end up using it to have a trail of images after your mouse cursor, or the equivalent of xsnow;)
Only now are people even bothering to say, "maybe I don't want web pages being able to do absolutetly anything via a scriptable interface" However, there are still beneficial uses for Javascript (such as making web forms "smarter" about doing a first check before submitting it [since it costs more CPU/transfer time for the server to do it, this saves modem users the pain of a typo returning an error page], or seeding things with values), I don't think it should totally be stripped out. Just redesigned with security in mind, ala Java applets.
Supporting HDTV on the Xbox is "free" in that the entire buffer renders at 480p, except for games that explicitly don't support it (Kung Fu Chaos) due to the way they use the buffer. It's just like the Dreamcast a few years ago -- not every game says it supports 480p, but in a collection of 50 games, you'll only find 1 or 2 games which actually won't work on a 480p setup.
While not as many games support 720p or 16:9, they are out there. Panzer Dragoon, Quantum Redshift, and other games I have at 16:9 are beautiful. There's no slowdown, but I have so much more to see. It's well worth getting it, since 16:9 TVs aren't that much more, and it also allows you to watch DVDs in a native aspect ratio.
The Model 50001 PS2 supports progressive scan output on DVD movies only and DVD+/-R media.
It's still less flexible than those 60$ CDN DVD players you can buy at Future Shop that do progressive scan and MP3/Kodak picture CD/JPG/WMV cd playback.
Yea, it's getting better. My point was that no one was buying them. I have all the microphone games out for the older systems, but I collect such things:)
N64's Microphone game was "Hey you, Pikachu!" The N64 voice module was required for them, it did all the language to input conversion. Seaman, as you pointed out, did all the processing on the Dreamcast itself. Alien Front Online, the other DC microphone game, only used it for online voice chat.
Some other microphone stuff includes: on the Xbox, Rainbow 6 will do voice processing and allow you to control squad members by spoken command. Manhunt on the PS2 will alert enemies to your presence if you have the microphone on and talk. Karaoke Revolution on the PS2 will guage your tone of voice (although it doesn't check that you're actually singing the lyrics -- you can cheat this way). EyeToy will record audio with the video when leaving messages on the PS2 (although, since it has no HD, it's the shittiest idea I can think of for that console). Socom and Socom 2 (PS2) also allow you to control squad members via microphone. Every Xbox Live! online multiplayer game supports the headset:)
The only current platform I can see microphone games getting widespread adoption on is the Xbox, simply because the voice encoder + headset is inexpensive, standard, and supported by all Live! enabled games. The PS2 voice support is much, much less full, as is the online. Sony's trying to get more out there by playing catch up to Microsoft's Live! commitment, but I don't think it'll work. It's too late in the console's life span; there are too many games that don't need these attachements on the PS2.
"I wish more companies would try stuff like this now."
Hmm, let's think.
Nintendo Rob
Nintendo Power glove
Sega Activator
Nintendo U-Force
Gameboy Printer
Why would you want these things to come back? Do you know how many Christmases have been ruined because children wanted these horrible things?
There is a "modern" version of the Activator that Future shops in the city have, setup on Soul Calibur 2. It's just as horrible and gimmicky as the original Activator that was supposed to make Eternal Champions so good.
Cheap crapness aside, there's also the matter of peripheral support. How many games support the N64 microphone? Dreamcast microphone? Xbox USB keyboard adapter? And these are things that can really add a lot to games! Unless it's a memory card or a controller with rumble support or something cool, chances are it'll only have a 5-10% attachement rate tops. That's no way to make ROI on development of something cool, and no real incentive to support those cool addons with software. Look how long it's taken EyeToy to get something that wasn't a minigame for it, or the PS2's lackluster headset and online support (compared to the Xbox, where Microsoft made everything standard by force of will and money).
In summary: these things always sucked, there's no economic gain to developing them, and no incentive to support them. 3 strikes pretty big strikes against innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as the government is not setting the rules for who and at what age people can buy games, then the ESRB (a self-governing industry regulatory body) is continuing to do its job; namely, that of keeping the government out of the business of legislating which games be sold to certain groups.
You might not believe me, but the ESRB is the best compromise between total censorship (ala SNES Mortal Kombat), and total outrage by the public enough to try and get things legislated (ala the outcry on Mortal Kombat 2 not being censored):
"The gaming industry set about creating a rating system for games in the early 1990's due to threatened federal intervention."
It's interesting to note that Sega started rating all games produced for the Genesis around the time of Mortal Kombat 1, rather than censor it like Nintendo did. Even so, there was enough outcry that everyone in the industry had to work together and forge a larger ratings board (the ESRB) to stop federal regulations from stepping in.
the moderators involved are unfamiliar with Monty Python.
Since I stopped gaming on my PC, the only upgrades are done about 1 to 1.5 years after the things come out, so they're very budget priced.
;)
Console gaming is a lot cheaper and has more variety. I was just clarifying that DirectX wasn't as bad as it used to be
"but now it's pointless."
Maybe if little Cancer-Boy wasn't going to be getting a wonderful gift, which he (or she) might not otherwise be able to enjoy. Nintendo doesn't care if you've lost all your hair or if you only have 6 months to live, it's just there to love you with all the Mario and Zelda it can.
See, it's not just about the kudos for gamers not being granny-killing, child-raping monters, it's also about helping people in need.
I'm not!
Yea, you can't just use hardware which has no drivers (GUS Max in Win95? hah), but everything that comes out (ATI, NVidia, Creative, etc) has DirectX drivers because people won't buy them otherwise.
Granted, the drivers are usually buggy, and end up rebooting your PC randomly anyways, but they are much more consistent nowadays. It did take until DirectX6 for this to be more consistent, though.
Vselka Infiltration (Available 11/13/03)
Having located the Vselka, Sam Fisher must now infiltrate its claustrophobic corridors and access its archive system to locate the nuclear warheads.
Vselka Submarine (Available 11/14/03)
Having neutralized both Alekseevich and Masse, Third Echelon finds out from Masse's files at Kola Cell that Alekseevich's plan is already in motion and his men have captured a submarine docking station. Third Echelon suspects that the docked submarine, the Vselka, carries nuclear warheads, and Fisher is sent in to stop the theft or, if he's too late, find out where they have been moved to.
This adds on top of the Kola Cell you can download.
What's that, you say, a console that's flexible? Pish posh!
"Whereas there's no alternative to optimizing a console game.. it's required or the game won't run."
That's why EA's Need for Speed series on the PS2 has few frame rate issues, yet the ports for the GCN and Xbox will become slideshows very easily? Or Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance on the tanker's deck (XBox port)?
"With a console they have to get it right, or the game will forever be flawed."
Sadly, the amount of flawed games is getting up there. The Xbox is probably the worst offender here, because it's getting more of the ports from the PC that can have some pretty serious bugs in them. Games like KOTOR are awesome, but how many people were unhappy because of the stealth rescue on the sith ship that ended with them reloading the game?
On the PC side, quality hasn't been a big issue because there hasn't been any. It seems like the policy's slowly transfering to consoles, which sucks rocks.
"The unit is much smaller than a stock Jaguar... [and] the cartridges would be inserted flat into the front of the Panther like a front-load VHS tape recorder."
:p
Don't you mean like a Nintendo Entertainment System? Come on, it's a video game system, this is a video game system.. it should be obvious!
Or another country with GSM the standard. Yea, it's still possible to run across SIM locked phones, but it's a whole lot easier to move between phones and providers. Just take out your little SIM card, pop it into the new phone -- done! Or get a new card from your new provider :)
Both on the internet and on corporate LANs where they had to develop things like helpdesk software, etc.
It is useful, you just have to have a secured version for internet browsing, same as anything else.
motivation. I don't have the motivation to make the effort -- because I didn't complain about it. If you have time to complain about something, you have time to do something about it.
I'm just pointing out how you could've solved your complaint and helped other (a very intelligent solution), rather than just karma whoring by complaining, which is all most people on Slashdot seem capable of doing. I don't care either way; my copy of mplayer plays WMVs just fine.
Grab mplayer and install it. Run mencode to transcode the WMV file to a different format.
:)
Once that's done, head on over to the BitTorrent website and grab the software. Run a tracker and leave a seed open.
Then post it to Slashdot in a message where you can say, "look at me -- 20 minutes of work and a little CPU time, and I made an open format version of a movie that everyone can enjoy -- plus the video's encoded smaller because of the better codec!"
This will probably net you some great karma, in addition to making your initial format question moot. It's all a matter of effort and motivation
My time isn't free. I've had to spend a lot of money to get my education, as well as a lot of personal time I could've been using towards something else. As any economics student could tell you, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
This provides a nice feedback mechanism that allows non-programmers to reward programmers for "filling in" and doing what the non-programmers wanted to be done. It's a natural balance, and I consider it progress in how opensource is developed. One of the few sustainable ways we could keep Linus Torvalds working on the kernel 40 hours a week is by having IBM, Red Hat, et all contributing to his work, just like Red Hat employs Alan Cox, or any number of other examples.
I'm sure most end-users think Mac Address refers to the nearest McDonald's restraunt, not a string of hexidecimal that ethernet cards use.
And this is why they (WAP manufacturers) need to ship the WAPs in a locked up config with a shiny wizard that allows easy adding and removal of cards to the security whitelist.
Javascript unit converters. Javascript spreadsheet applications. Basically, any thing that you can think of as a small, useful thing to have done, can be made into a webpage. The potential of web automation is pretty big. It's just that most people abused it for other things.
Once webbrowsing started to get bigger, clients started to demand features of browsers that would allow them to be used as a replacement for end-user applications. Networks were much more heterogenous back then -- OS/2, Macintoshes, Unix machines, and Windows 3.1 all had their spot in the business world. Rather than supporting multiple applications, it was a lot easier to write one website and have it work in all the browsers.
Except that HTML at the time wasn't robust enough for most of what they needed to do to replace these applications. This improved with newer spec support, and also partially from the implementation of tags which were not strictly spec.. but still, it didn't totally address the automation that could be done in real computer client programs. That's where Javascript came in.
It wasn't about advertising. Heck, the first time I started seeing popup windows for that was like 1998/1999 -- years after Javascript was created. Although Portals were still really popular then (just as "push" was going through its death throes).
I suppose that not everyone had the Andreeson reality-distortion field affecting them :) Too bad no one else listened to you then. At least something's happening now.
" (your server MUST check input, forget about doing that in javascript)."
"(such as making web forms "smarter" about doing a first check before submitting it [since it costs more CPU/transfer time for the server to do it, this saves modem users the pain of a typo returning an error page],"
I did not say "Don't ever check on the server side." I said, "additional checking which allows users on slow links to not be punshed for typos that can be corrected by a little client-side scripting."
More checks are better than fewer.
Read about it here.
"Sega Genesis Activator Ring. The ring was made of eight different sections that corresponded to buttons on a regular Genesis controller. Specially configured Activator games were Eternal Champions, Streets of Rage 3, Mortal Kombat CD, and Greatest Heavyweights. Eternal Champions, Mortal Kombat, and Street Fighter II: SCE were pack-ins. Many of the Genesis's library of games worked with the Activator. MK-1659"
They also have a picture, although not the one from the box showing a kid kicking, while on screen an Eternal Champions game has the user kicking a guy.
"why netscape thought it a good idea to allow any site an almost arbitrary level of control over my browser is beyond me."
;)
It's 1994. The top of the line computers are 66Mhz. You want to market a server product that allows people to serve thousands of computers, without requiring super big iron support. You have a client program (Netscape Navigator) to go with your server product (Netscape webserver). Suddenly, it becomes clear to you -- distributed computing. Have the client side do some of the heavy lifting; it also allows other automation features on the client side not possible with HTML (at the time). You make this "Javascript" which is to other scripting languages as Java was to C and C++, and market it aggresively as a product solution.
Most people end up using it to have a trail of images after your mouse cursor, or the equivalent of xsnow
Only now are people even bothering to say, "maybe I don't want web pages being able to do absolutetly anything via a scriptable interface" However, there are still beneficial uses for Javascript (such as making web forms "smarter" about doing a first check before submitting it [since it costs more CPU/transfer time for the server to do it, this saves modem users the pain of a typo returning an error page], or seeding things with values), I don't think it should totally be stripped out. Just redesigned with security in mind, ala Java applets.
Supporting HDTV on the Xbox is "free" in that the entire buffer renders at 480p, except for games that explicitly don't support it (Kung Fu Chaos) due to the way they use the buffer. It's just like the Dreamcast a few years ago -- not every game says it supports 480p, but in a collection of 50 games, you'll only find 1 or 2 games which actually won't work on a 480p setup.
While not as many games support 720p or 16:9, they are out there. Panzer Dragoon, Quantum Redshift, and other games I have at 16:9 are beautiful. There's no slowdown, but I have so much more to see. It's well worth getting it, since 16:9 TVs aren't that much more, and it also allows you to watch DVDs in a native aspect ratio.
The Model 50001 PS2 supports progressive scan output on DVD movies only and DVD+/-R media.
It's still less flexible than those 60$ CDN DVD players you can buy at Future Shop that do progressive scan and MP3/Kodak picture CD/JPG/WMV cd playback.
Yea, it's getting better. My point was that no one was buying them. I have all the microphone games out for the older systems, but I collect such things :)
:)
N64's Microphone game was "Hey you, Pikachu!" The N64 voice module was required for them, it did all the language to input conversion. Seaman, as you pointed out, did all the processing on the Dreamcast itself. Alien Front Online, the other DC microphone game, only used it for online voice chat.
Some other microphone stuff includes: on the Xbox, Rainbow 6 will do voice processing and allow you to control squad members by spoken command. Manhunt on the PS2 will alert enemies to your presence if you have the microphone on and talk. Karaoke Revolution on the PS2 will guage your tone of voice (although it doesn't check that you're actually singing the lyrics -- you can cheat this way). EyeToy will record audio with the video when leaving messages on the PS2 (although, since it has no HD, it's the shittiest idea I can think of for that console). Socom and Socom 2 (PS2) also allow you to control squad members via microphone. Every Xbox Live! online multiplayer game supports the headset
The only current platform I can see microphone games getting widespread adoption on is the Xbox, simply because the voice encoder + headset is inexpensive, standard, and supported by all Live! enabled games. The PS2 voice support is much, much less full, as is the online. Sony's trying to get more out there by playing catch up to Microsoft's Live! commitment, but I don't think it'll work. It's too late in the console's life span; there are too many games that don't need these attachements on the PS2.
Hmm, let's think.
- Nintendo Rob
- Nintendo Power glove
- Sega Activator
- Nintendo U-Force
- Gameboy Printer
Why would you want these things to come back? Do you know how many Christmases have been ruined because children wanted these horrible things?There is a "modern" version of the Activator that Future shops in the city have, setup on Soul Calibur 2. It's just as horrible and gimmicky as the original Activator that was supposed to make Eternal Champions so good.
Cheap crapness aside, there's also the matter of peripheral support. How many games support the N64 microphone? Dreamcast microphone? Xbox USB keyboard adapter? And these are things that can really add a lot to games! Unless it's a memory card or a controller with rumble support or something cool, chances are it'll only have a 5-10% attachement rate tops. That's no way to make ROI on development of something cool, and no real incentive to support those cool addons with software. Look how long it's taken EyeToy to get something that wasn't a minigame for it, or the PS2's lackluster headset and online support (compared to the Xbox, where Microsoft made everything standard by force of will and money).
In summary: these things always sucked, there's no economic gain to developing them, and no incentive to support them. 3 strikes pretty big strikes against innovation.