David Jaffe of all people is criticizing story-driven video games. Keep in mind that this is the guy who thinks that tits and ultraviolence are basically all you need to make a game compelling. Keep putting your closeted fratboy fantasies on display all you want, but don't bitch when the rest of us decide to keep playing in the big-boy pool, OK, David?
I don't know what they call it in business, but the political term you're looking for is "shifting the Overton window." The window itself is the range of policies that policymakers are willing to accept. Politicians and lobbyists shift the window by espousing radical ideas that few sane people would accept so that when they later present a "compromise position," it appears to be much more acceptable by comparison than it would have if they'd just started with the compromise position to begin with.
Blizzard is pretty PC-centric, so if anything it will be the console versions that will be shitty ports of the PC version, not the other way around.
That said, there's no reason why both versions can't be good. Torchlight was a Diablo clone made by an indie developer that was praised for the amount of work put into making the console port just as playable as the PC version. There's no reason why a big company like Blizzard couldn't do the same... other than greed and laziness, I guess.
It's now known as the E-PARASITE Act. Normally I wouldn't bother posting over something so trivial, but the new name is so poetically apt that I have to mention it.
Funny, I thought the pirate mantra was that "theft" involved physically depriving someone of something.
No, it just involves depriving someone of something that is theirs; it doesn't have to be physical. Unlike pirates, who simply increase the number of copies of an intellectual product, corporations have rigged the patent and copyright systems of the United States in their favor, which takes intellectual products out of the public domain.
That said, I don't think piracy of video games has anything to do with the ridiculous copyright laws in place, except in the case of abandonware. Rather, aside from the obviously large number of people who don't think that the games they pirate are worth the price charged for them, it has more to do with DRM, which is a software-specific way of taking rights away from the consumer.
Did you not even read the summary? Nowhere up there does it mention that the XBox 360 is having the same problem with LA Noire, not even in the linked articles. While it's apparently true, you'd have to go outside of the Slashdot article to find out about it.
You sure you want to make that argument to defend a console that plays the thirteenth through fifteenth mainline Mario games and the twelfth and fifteenth mainline Zelda games?
He was able to get a 42" widescreen LCD monitor with built-in speakers in 2004? And that cellphone of his must be humongous for him to be seriously comparing it to a TV...
This is either a brilliant troll or you didn't bother putting any time into researching what you just claimed. Either way, it's right at home at Slashdot.
Evans admitted that valuing virtual currency can be difficult and that the company was not actually deprived of tangible goods, but he said that the theft could still affect the developer by indirectly causing legitimate online gamers to stop playing Zynga Poker or its other games.
...So, what you're saying is that we should give the "thief" a medal?
If a game is a graphical adventure because it has graphics and adventure in it, then Super Mario Bros. is an RPG because in it you play the role of a plumber who jumps on turtles. Genres are used to refer to games with specific attributes (in the case of graphical adventures, attributes like a relative lack of reflex-intensive gameplay, an indirect control of the player character if applicable, and a reliance on solving complex puzzles which usually involve inventory manipulation or some sort of thought beyond "put the square peg in the square hole") because if genres just referred to any old game that we could possibly shoehorn into them with minimal justification, they would become meaningless descriptors.
So no, GTA, Uncharted, and Infamous are not graphical adventures, and Myst and its ilk most certainly would not have looked like any of them today. GTA and Infamous are sandbox games while Uncharted is a third-person shooter with action-adventure elements. And as for the games that some others mentioned, Thief II is an action-adventure with heavy emphasis on stealth and the others are Western-style RPGs (with third-person shooter elements in the case of Mass Effect). You all might have been better served by mentioning a game like Resident Evil, but even that is more of a shooter than a straight adventure game, especially in more recent installments.
This is a great article that I've always recommended to people who wondered what happened to Western-style adventure games in the late 90's. I always disagreed with their flippant dismissal of the "Myst destroyed adventure games" argument, though; I don't see why both can't be true at the same time. While it's obviously true that traditional adventure games got ridiculous with their "lateral thinking," it's also obviously true to me that Myst was a lifeless and uninteresting series of puzzles with almost no characters and little more than an excuse plot, and the vast majority of adventure games that came out for the next ten years shamelessly copied it.
That said, for those people who don't know, the writer of this article is also the co-writer of Valve's Portal, so he has some clue of what he speaks.
payments for the alpha version of Minecraft have continued accumulating while Notch has been unable to withdraw them, and the account now contains over €600,000.
1. If you actually have a copy of HL2, you shouldn't need any bandwidth at all to install it. 2. Decryption requires very little bandwidth. 3. Updating a game has nothing to do with DRM. If you think that the DRM forces you to update HL2, then you're wrong. You can tell Steam not to update HL2, then play it offline.
It's funny how many people are worried about what will happen when there's no more Steam but fail to realize that most games that have been around for a decade or more require workarounds to play today anyway because of advances in technology. So those games you bought back then are just as worthless now as games on Steam will be on that day in the distant future when it shuts down. Why aren't you guys up in arms about that?
Sure, you think that, right now when you have zero responsibility. But wait till it is your own company and you got to choose between hiring the person with an alcohol problem and the one that goes to bed early enough to be awake at work.
Does owning your own company also make you more proficient at making strawman arguments and false dichotomies?
Rob
Re:Don't f* with the IT guy like at restaurant you
on
Child Porn As a Weapon
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
There are actually a whole load of reasons for the distinction.
1. When an underaged person consents to non-televised sex with someone, that person usually does it because he or she enjoys the act. When an underaged person does porn, there are usually one of two reasons for it: either to make money or because that person wants to make his or her partner happy, but with the expressed condition that the porn be kept private. Either way, creating and distributing such porn is considered more degrading to the person than simply having sex with that person.
2. In a number of jurisdictions, it's not legal for everyone to have sex with an underaged person. In some places, for example, you're only allowed to have sex with a 16-year-old if you're under 19. But pornography can be viewed by anyone once it's out in the open, which makes your "if it's legal to do one then it should be legal to do the other" argument moot.
3. Pornography is an international concern due to the ease of distribution, so most countries have the same laws about child pornography, much like how most countries have accepted the Berne Convention. Age of consent is always considered an internal concern, on the other hand. Therefore, there are many different sets of laws concerning sexual consent but only one concerning consent to taking part in pornography. It should come as no surprise that these don't always agree, and in fact they do agree in some cases.
That said, some prosecutors go too far and completely ignore the spirit of the laws. There have been cases where a young man has been charged for having porn of his underaged girlfriend even though he's never shown it to anyone. Then they charge the girl for making and distributing child porn. Of herself. That sort of thing is completely absurd, but has nothing to do with the general validity of the laws.
No, backing up involves copying, and hence violates copyright.
(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy. — Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful. -- 17 U.S.C. 117
For whatever reason, however, this only applies to computer programs. Presumably because other media weren't so easy to copy back when this part of the code was last modified in 1980.
It's not the speed of your monitor that's important, it's the polling rate of your controls, which (if you have a good enough mouse) is capped by the speed at which your CPU and GPU process the game (the theoretical "frames per second"). A higher polling rate makes mouse movements smoother and more precise, and that's the most important determinant of success at FPSes.
Slashdot Mirror
David Jaffe of all people is criticizing story-driven video games. Keep in mind that this is the guy who thinks that tits and ultraviolence are basically all you need to make a game compelling. Keep putting your closeted fratboy fantasies on display all you want, but don't bitch when the rest of us decide to keep playing in the big-boy pool, OK, David?
Rob
Now we just need to discover Smithore and we'll be all set to go to planet Irata.
Rob
I don't know what they call it in business, but the political term you're looking for is "shifting the Overton window." The window itself is the range of policies that policymakers are willing to accept. Politicians and lobbyists shift the window by espousing radical ideas that few sane people would accept so that when they later present a "compromise position," it appears to be much more acceptable by comparison than it would have if they'd just started with the compromise position to begin with.
Rob
Blizzard is pretty PC-centric, so if anything it will be the console versions that will be shitty ports of the PC version, not the other way around.
That said, there's no reason why both versions can't be good. Torchlight was a Diablo clone made by an indie developer that was praised for the amount of work put into making the console port just as playable as the PC version. There's no reason why a big company like Blizzard couldn't do the same... other than greed and laziness, I guess.
Rob
It's now known as the E-PARASITE Act. Normally I wouldn't bother posting over something so trivial, but the new name is so poetically apt that I have to mention it.
Rob
No, it just involves depriving someone of something that is theirs; it doesn't have to be physical. Unlike pirates, who simply increase the number of copies of an intellectual product, corporations have rigged the patent and copyright systems of the United States in their favor, which takes intellectual products out of the public domain.
That said, I don't think piracy of video games has anything to do with the ridiculous copyright laws in place, except in the case of abandonware. Rather, aside from the obviously large number of people who don't think that the games they pirate are worth the price charged for them, it has more to do with DRM, which is a software-specific way of taking rights away from the consumer.
Rob
Yes, stealing is taking something that is not yours, by which "take" is universally regarded to mean "remove from someone else's possession."
So, no, software piracy doesn't count.
Rob
I dunno how this one hasn't been posted yet.
Rob
Did you not even read the summary? Nowhere up there does it mention that the XBox 360 is having the same problem with LA Noire, not even in the linked articles. While it's apparently true, you'd have to go outside of the Slashdot article to find out about it.
Rob
You sure you want to make that argument to defend a console that plays the thirteenth through fifteenth mainline Mario games and the twelfth and fifteenth mainline Zelda games?
Rob
He was able to get a 42" widescreen LCD monitor with built-in speakers in 2004? And that cellphone of his must be humongous for him to be seriously comparing it to a TV...
Rob
The only thing I can think about is what will happen when /v/ hears about this.
Rob
This is either a brilliant troll or you didn't bother putting any time into researching what you just claimed. Either way, it's right at home at Slashdot.
Rob
Evans admitted that valuing virtual currency can be difficult and that the company was not actually deprived of tangible goods, but he said that the theft could still affect the developer by indirectly causing legitimate online gamers to stop playing Zynga Poker or its other games.
Rob
If a game is a graphical adventure because it has graphics and adventure in it, then Super Mario Bros. is an RPG because in it you play the role of a plumber who jumps on turtles. Genres are used to refer to games with specific attributes (in the case of graphical adventures, attributes like a relative lack of reflex-intensive gameplay, an indirect control of the player character if applicable, and a reliance on solving complex puzzles which usually involve inventory manipulation or some sort of thought beyond "put the square peg in the square hole") because if genres just referred to any old game that we could possibly shoehorn into them with minimal justification, they would become meaningless descriptors.
So no, GTA, Uncharted, and Infamous are not graphical adventures, and Myst and its ilk most certainly would not have looked like any of them today. GTA and Infamous are sandbox games while Uncharted is a third-person shooter with action-adventure elements. And as for the games that some others mentioned, Thief II is an action-adventure with heavy emphasis on stealth and the others are Western-style RPGs (with third-person shooter elements in the case of Mass Effect). You all might have been better served by mentioning a game like Resident Evil, but even that is more of a shooter than a straight adventure game, especially in more recent installments.
Rob
This is a great article that I've always recommended to people who wondered what happened to Western-style adventure games in the late 90's. I always disagreed with their flippant dismissal of the "Myst destroyed adventure games" argument, though; I don't see why both can't be true at the same time. While it's obviously true that traditional adventure games got ridiculous with their "lateral thinking," it's also obviously true to me that Myst was a lifeless and uninteresting series of puzzles with almost no characters and little more than an excuse plot, and the vast majority of adventure games that came out for the next ten years shamelessly copied it.
That said, for those people who don't know, the writer of this article is also the co-writer of Valve's Portal, so he has some clue of what he speaks.
Rob
Too bad the oil companies will make sure you never see it on the road.
Rob
Sigh... Slashdot: News for Nerds Who Can't Read.
payments for the alpha version of Minecraft have continued accumulating while Notch has been unable to withdraw them, and the account now contains over €600,000.
Rob
Where in the hell could you possibly get the idea that this 600k balance was from a single transaction?
Rob
1. If you actually have a copy of HL2, you shouldn't need any bandwidth at all to install it.
2. Decryption requires very little bandwidth.
3. Updating a game has nothing to do with DRM. If you think that the DRM forces you to update HL2, then you're wrong. You can tell Steam not to update HL2, then play it offline.
Rob
It's funny how many people are worried about what will happen when there's no more Steam but fail to realize that most games that have been around for a decade or more require workarounds to play today anyway because of advances in technology. So those games you bought back then are just as worthless now as games on Steam will be on that day in the distant future when it shuts down. Why aren't you guys up in arms about that?
Rob
Sure, you think that, right now when you have zero responsibility. But wait till it is your own company and you got to choose between hiring the person with an alcohol problem and the one that goes to bed early enough to be awake at work.
Does owning your own company also make you more proficient at making strawman arguments and false dichotomies?
Rob
There are actually a whole load of reasons for the distinction.
1. When an underaged person consents to non-televised sex with someone, that person usually does it because he or she enjoys the act. When an underaged person does porn, there are usually one of two reasons for it: either to make money or because that person wants to make his or her partner happy, but with the expressed condition that the porn be kept private. Either way, creating and distributing such porn is considered more degrading to the person than simply having sex with that person.
2. In a number of jurisdictions, it's not legal for everyone to have sex with an underaged person. In some places, for example, you're only allowed to have sex with a 16-year-old if you're under 19. But pornography can be viewed by anyone once it's out in the open, which makes your "if it's legal to do one then it should be legal to do the other" argument moot.
3. Pornography is an international concern due to the ease of distribution, so most countries have the same laws about child pornography, much like how most countries have accepted the Berne Convention. Age of consent is always considered an internal concern, on the other hand. Therefore, there are many different sets of laws concerning sexual consent but only one concerning consent to taking part in pornography. It should come as no surprise that these don't always agree, and in fact they do agree in some cases.
That said, some prosecutors go too far and completely ignore the spirit of the laws. There have been cases where a young man has been charged for having porn of his underaged girlfriend even though he's never shown it to anyone. Then they charge the girl for making and distributing child porn. Of herself. That sort of thing is completely absurd, but has nothing to do with the general validity of the laws.
Rob
No, backing up involves copying, and hence violates copyright.
(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy. — Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.
-- 17 U.S.C. 117
For whatever reason, however, this only applies to computer programs. Presumably because other media weren't so easy to copy back when this part of the code was last modified in 1980.
Rob
It's not the speed of your monitor that's important, it's the polling rate of your controls, which (if you have a good enough mouse) is capped by the speed at which your CPU and GPU process the game (the theoretical "frames per second"). A higher polling rate makes mouse movements smoother and more precise, and that's the most important determinant of success at FPSes.
Rob