I went to an (otherwise excellent) private school in the UK, in the early/mid 1990s. What was striking at the time was how much worse the quality of the IT teaching was compared to that in other subjects. For most of my time there, IT (which was only mandatory from ages 11-13) was taught by an elderly priest with no computing knowledge, following a script sent out by some course provider.
While I'm sure we were well below the level of many slashdotters, my friends and I were significantly more computer literate than him. We'd been messing around with DOS, clearing up EMS and conventional memory to get our games to run for years (a couple of years later, we'd be enthusiastically pulling together Doom.wads and Duke Nukem 3d mods). Despite being among the "good kids" in the school in behavioural terms 99% of the time, we ended up so bored in those lessons (while he tried to teach basic word processing) that we ended up causing all kinds of havoc on the school PCs (completely undetected) and disrupting lessons no end (all while looking innocent and helpful).
When I went into the sixth form (16-18, for the benefit of non-UK readers), they got somebody in "from industry" to teach IT - and made a once-weekly half-hour IT class mandatory for everybody. Of course, the guy they'd got in "from industry" turned out to have been a factory floor manager in a PC assembly plant. He knew no more about the subject he was supposed to be teaching than the priest. The lessons came down to him reading instructions from a printed script (again provided by some faceless course-provision company) on how to create Word and Powerpoint documents. By this point my friends and I had brushed up our skills no end and were capable of causing even more creative havoc (again, always undetected).
Things may have improved since then, but there was a long way to go from a position where a school that would have been comfortably among the top 10% in the UK didn't even know the skills it needed in an IT teacher, let alone how to design a curriculum.
My experience of the Kinect? It's a very clever piece of hardware and very attractively priced - even in its PC incarnation. There's no end of things that can be done with it. I do suspect that this is what replaces the TV remote control. The only thing we know for sure that it's rubbish at is controlling video games.
Outside of exercise software (where it's good, once you accept its limitations) it makes for a horrible game controller. Despite the craze for alternative control schemes during the current console generation, I don't think anything will be displacing the twinstick controller and the mouse/keyboard combination as the dominant game input methods any time soon.
Oh, believe me, the last thing I want to do is look like I'm celebrating shops going out of business and people losing their jobs.
What I was remarking upon, I think, was how vulnerable so much of the retail sector - as represented in large British shopping centres, had left itself to the recession through the horrible lack of diversity on offer. I'd estimate that in Manchester's Trafford Centre (which I think is the biggest shopping centre in the UK outside of London), more than two thirds of the shops were selling over-priced clothing and accessories. Just as the recession hit, a big, glossy new multi-floor mall opened in the middle of Cambridge (further defacing what was one one of the UK's prettiest town centres), in which every single shop fell into that category, without exception.
I doubt that retail practices like that could have survived for long even had the boom continued.
I'm forced to use UK shopping centres, including participants in this system, more often than I would like (which given how often I would like is "never", probably isn't saying much). And you know what...
Track me. Monitor me. Scrutinise me. Spy on me. Do whatever you want. Provided that what you do with the results tells you that what I actually want from the hell-hole you manage requires more than an identikit, crapulent collection of over-priced clothing and jewellery stores and a single branch of Game.
I've noted the number of shops in these places that have closed down over the last two years and I'm not surprised. This isn't really a good time to be trying to sell people a £200 pair of jeans. In fact, I'm not sure there ever is a good time to try to sell people a £200 pair of jeans. And yet that's what every shop in these places seems to be trying to do.
Whew... that turned into more of a rant than I intended.
They don't exactly give away Railworks, either. It does sometimes get discounted in Steam sales, and if you bought the original, then you got free upgrades to 2 and 3. You do actually have to buy the base game at some point, though.
I suspect this is a special case, driven by the... erm... particular nature of the enthusiast community in question.
More than anything else, it reminds me of the Idolm@ster games (huge in Japan, unreleased in the West), where the home console versions not only require the purchase of a full-priced game, but also have masses and masses of very, very expensive DLC. And yet there is a community out there that keeps lapping it up - even back when the home console versions were 360-exclusive.
As an aside, I did import a copy of the PS3 version of IM@S2, just to see what all the fuss was about. It's cute, well presented and the minigames are fun, but the idea of spending a single penny on DLC for it just seems ludicrous.
And yet... no appeal? No call for a recount? Either the Republican primary rules don't allow for it (and I'm not familiar enough with them to know), or else Santorum has noted the lessons of Florida 2000 and decided that risking a "sore loser" reputation wouldn't do him any good in what's still an ongoing contest.
I tried LOTR:O for a short time after it went free to play, just to see how it was working out (I'd been a subscriber for a short time in its early days). I didn't stick with it for more than a day, though - in this case because it didn't feel distinct enough from WoW in any particular way to compensate for the fact that it was so obviously less polished than WoW.
That's true, but ultimately, TF2 is in a differerent marketplace to the MMOs I play. Despite a degree of character-persistence, it's an fps at heart, not a MMORPG. As such, its competitors are the Battlefield and Modern Warfare games.
I tried about 10 minutes of MW3 on a public server. In the space of that time, I learned 14 new descriptive terms for body parts, 12 new racial slurs, detailed descriptions of 15 new acts that consenting adults might conceivably (though improbably) choose to perform together and more than 300 different ways of spelling and pronouncing existing obscenities.
I crawled back to Dark Souls, both for the blessed silence that permeates so much of the game, and the sense that I was playing a game that just hated me slightly less.
The article raises "freemium" in a wider business sense, but I suspect that a lot of slashdotters will be used to coming across it in discussions of massively multiplayer online games.
I'm a long-term pay-to-play MMO gamer (Final Fantasy XI, World of Warcraft and now giving The Old Republic a whirl - just made a fairly long post about my experiences with it in my journal). I've also given some of the new generation of "freemium", "free to play" or "pay to win" (pick your favorite term) MMOs a go. However, I couldn't stick with any of them for long - from my point of view, this model provides a much inferior player experience.
It's not just about the money - though that is an issue. With a subscription based MMO, I know how much money will be going out the door on the game every month. So I pay my $15, have that as a line in my personal budget, and that's it. On a sheer time/cost ratio, MMOs tend to come out extremely well. With a Freemium MMO, I may end up telling myself that I'm going to spend a certain amount each month, but I also know that if I get stuck or frustrated, there's going to be a strong temptation to go beyond that.
But the really key point in TFA is "non-paying customers are more demanding than paying customers". That may be true from the service-provider's point of view. But it also has implications in the MMO world for the player. A subscription model game requires a degree of buy-in and committment from its player base. The other players you meet all want to be there and are paying for the privilege - and aren't, except in extreme circumstances, going to do anything to jeopardise that. The result, in my experience at least, is that levels of vulgarity, abuse and griefing - as well as outright cheating - are much lower in traditional subs-based MMOs than in the Freemiums.
Ep 4 is a bit clunky, yes. As other posters have noted, that was made before they brought in the expertise they needed - so you get a fight which is basically two untrained old(ish) men taking swings at each other.
But what you get in Eps 5 and 6 is a sense of story to the fight. In 5, when Luke fights Vader, he's clearly lost the fight before it even begins. He's distracted and off-balance. Vader's the older, smarter and more skilled fighter. Luke tries gamely enough to begin with, but every swing he takes is turned against him. Vader's not going all out; he doesn't want to kill, so he bides his time and breaks down his opponent before going for a disabling blow.
In Ep 6, the battle in the throne room begins much the same way. Luke is, once again, at a disadvantage (though he's more aware of it this time). However, once he "snaps" and charges Vader (culminating in him chopping Vader's hand off), his style changes completely. He leaves himself wide open and goes for all-out attack. To use an analogy from fighting games; he's button-mashing. And it catches Vader off guard. Vader's probably still more skilled, but he's also older and slower. He can't keep up with Luke, let alone counter-attack.
In Eps 5 and 6, the fights help to tell the story. The genius of the choreography of the fights is that it takes place at a pace which allows the average viewer to actually pick up on that.
By contrast, the eps 1-3 fights have very little sense of story to them. They're more concerned with "wow factor" and, to put a cynical hat on for a moment, with making sure that everybody gets a chance to look cool to boost the toy sales. I never got a sense that a character's emotional state is being reflected in how they fight.
I loved the lightsaber fights in the original trilogy (particularly RotJ). They were perfectly paced; fast enough to be exciting, but slow enough that you could read a pace and flow to them. They were supported by those wonderful sound effects and music that matched the action perfectly.
By contrast, the lightsaber battles in the prequels left me absolutely cold. It felt like Lucas had watched the Matrix and decided that he wanted that bullet-time wire-fu in his film whether it actually worked or not. The Darth Maul fight in Ep 1 gets a better press than it deserves on the basis of Duel of the Fates (which is a great piece of film music), but other than that, I couldn't see any of the Ep 1-3 battles as anything but soul-less exercises in camera trickery. They're too fast and there's no drama to them. There's just a lot of flailing about and then somebody wins.
Bottom line, talented performers and traditional effects outperformed modern CGI and wire-fu.
Agreed on animation. Way too many games have fantastically detailed character models, which looks and move like a bad special effect from an old movie. When "realistic" games are moving, we're still very much stuck in the uncanny valley.
Dark Souls is a little bit better. Characters move with a sense of weight and momentum that you don't normally see in games. Plus the skeleton monsters look and move just like the ones from Jason and the Argonauts - which is to say, a good special effect from an old movie.
From a gaming perspective (typically one of the big drivers of overclocking), a few factors that might argue "yes, it's over":
1) For quite a few years now, PC games haven't been forcing the kind of upgrade cycle that they did over the previous 20 years. When Crysis appeared in 2007, it was a game that gave many people an "upgrade or don't play it choice". And after that... the industry retreated. Consoles were the primary development platforms at the time and few PC games pushed significantly past the capabilities of the consoles. Not only did we not see any games more demanding than Crysis, but the vast majority of PC games released were substantially less demanding. As a gamer, if you had a PC that could run Crysis well, you did not need an upgrade. This situation lasted 4 years.
2) Performance has become about more than clock-speeds. The main advances in PC gaming technology over the last few years have come from successive versions of directx. You can't overclock a machine with a directx 9 graphics card so that it can "do" directx10. Same goes for dx10/11.
3) As the entry barriers to PC gaming get lower, the average knowledge level of users fall. PC gaming is, in general, easier and more convenient than it has been at any time in the past. Pick up an $800 PC, grab Steam and off you go. If you just want to play games and are using an off-the-shelf PC from a big manufacturer, you don't need to worry about switching around graphics drivers, sorting out hardware conflicts or any of the other little niggles that used to make PC gaming such a "joy". You can even find cases where PC gaming is easier than console gaming; the PS3, with its incessant firmware updates and mandatory installs has taken us a long way from the "insert game and play" roots of console gaming. People who are new to PC gaming just won't be coming from the kind of mindset that even considers overclocking as something you might even remotely want to do.
4) Among "old school" PC gamers, I think there's been a growing recognition that overclocking has its downsides as well. In an economic downturn, when money is tight, you don't necessarily want to go risking a huge reduction in the lifespan of your expensive toys.
That said, there are a couple of factors that might argue the other way (closely connected to the earlier arguments):
1) System requirements are finally on the move again. After years in stasis, 2011 has seen the release of a number of games with equivalent or higher requirements than Crysis. Bulletstorm started the trend, but Battlefield 3 and - to an even greater extent - Total War: Shogun 2 have really started to push the envelope on PC hardware. A lot of developers openly admit to being bored with console hardware. Even though they still get most of their sales from the consoles, they are using the PC to push beyond what they can achieve there, both to get their studio noticed and to get themselves ready for developing for the next round of console hardware.
2) The downturn also means that people feeling a squeeze on their budgets may be looking to get as much bang for their buck in terms of performance as possible. If you think that your new, overclocked PC will last long enough that you will be able to afford a replacement when it does start to give out, then why not take the risk?
In a long and varied life, Kim Jong Il made one undeniable and catastrophic mistake; he claimed to be an internet expert.
After making this claim, his life was made a misery by a succession of late night calls from friends and family demanding his help in ridding their PCs of various pieces of malware.
It was during one of these conversations, during which he was explaining to his elderly aunt for the thirty-seventh time why she shouldn't click the links in random e-mails claiming to be from DHL and talking her through the process of reinstalling Windows so that it would stop flashing up photos of young ladies taking their clothes off every time she tried to google for humorous cat stories, that his blood pressure finally reached critical point and his heart exploded.
DO: Make a sensible sized hard drive standard for every model. The 360 suffered early cycle because games were tentative about assuming that they could use a hard disk (the "core" model didn't have one). The 4GB drive that ships with the current model is also inadequate. 20GB for the bottom end model should be considered an absolute minimum.
DO: Pack in the RAM. Of all of the factors that are driving developer frustration with the current console generation, RAM seems to be at the top of the pack. It's worse for the PS3 (with its awkward memory-split and larger OS footprint) than for the 360, but still... RAM is pretty cheap and packing plenty of it in will pay dividends in 5 years time.
DO: Continue to develop what you've been doing on voice controls for the console's UI. I have mixed feelings about Kinect, but voice activation is really great - and has an appeal to a wide demographic.
DON'T: Worry too much about making a loss on each unit sold for the first year or two. MS's objectives should be to get a large installed base early on and to make sure that their machine is fairly future-proof. This probably means selling at a loss early on. The real profits from a console come later in the cycle, when component prices have fallen, so you can reduce prices and still sell at a profit, and when you have third party developers giving you free money, by putting out games for your system (and paying you a fee on each copy sold) without you having to invest in development.
DON'T: Allow your dev team to push out firmware updates every 5 minutes. The 360 has had a few too many firmware updates for comfort, but perhaps not to the extent of being a deal-breaker. With the PS3, the sheer frequency of updates (and the length of time they take) is intensely frustrating, when you just want to fire up the console and play a game.
DON'T: Allow region locking. Sony have already ditched this and it did them no harm. MS knows region coding is junk; it doesn't use it for any of its first or second party games. Take the option away from developers; its time for them to grow up. It also reduces the incentive for people to get consoles mod-chipped - which in turn means they may be less likely to look into a bit of piracy. Which brings me onto the final point:
DO: Assume that whatever copy-protection you put into the machine will get broken sooner or later and plan accordingly. Reduce the incentive for people to mod their consoles, rather than going for the punitive route. Don't region lock. Do offer up an "other OS" walled garden. Do make it as easy as possible for indie developers to get their software onto the platform.
Most of the comments above are focussing on the "Humble Bundle" system. As I've actually got most of these already via various Steam sales, I thought I'd try to comment on the actual games.
Super Meat Boy is the best of the bunch and is definitely worth a few dollars if you don't have it already. It's ridiculously difficult in places, but also very more-ish. You really do want a gamepad to play it properly, though - keyboard mode is not nice.
NightSky is clever, but I found its appeal fairly short-lived. Bit.Trip Runner isn't really doing anything we haven't seen done better elsewhere. Shank and Jamestown are the two I haven't played.
You'll get a much more interesting package if you pay above the average. Cave Story+ is really very good indeed - and I suspect that between that and Super Meat Boy, you could justify paying over the average. Gratuitous Space Battles is a really great idea, but I've found that it works far better at a level of principle than it does in practice (where it tends to be deeply frustrating and has a learning curve that annoyed even me - and I've beaten and loved Dark Souls). It's the best game in the package from a graphical perspective, if that matters to you (though still a long way behind mainstream commercial offerings).
My vague memory from articles at the time is that the Fukushima plant was built before knowledge of tsunamis is as advanced as it is today, and that it had a degree of resilience built in against a "more normal" tsunami, rather than the absolute monster that did appear.
Of course, it's worth remembering that while a lot of people had their lives disrupted, the casualties directly caused by Fukushima were limited. If you're looking for examples of disastrous infrastructure planning decisions with fatal consequences, I'd suggest reading up on the Vajont Dam. I've seen this used in public sector training courses as a cautionary example of what the consequences of rushed, sloppy or biased planning decisions can be. It also, largely through coincidence, involves a tsunami (and one with a much, much greater wave height than that which hit Japan this year) - and a freshwater one to boot.
Better understanding and forecasting would be a fantastic thing. It would certainly save lives. However, after watching the footage of the tsunami in question, there's a little part of my brain that wonders whether it would do much more than tweak the odds for people in a few marginal cases.
I suppose where there's a much clearer use for this is in making infrastructure and resilience planning decisions. It will never be practical to say "people shouldn't live in areas that might be hit by tsunamis". As the "Boxing Day" tsunami demonstrated, the areas in question are absolutely vast - and as the Japanese tsunami demonstrated, they can stretch miles inland. I just don't see how countries could afford to give up such huge tracts of habitable land to mitigate against the risk of "once every couple of centuries" events. What might be practical, however, is to think about how to site critical pieces of infrastructure (such as... say... nuclear power plants, as well as hospitals, emergency response centres, transportation hubs) so as to minimise their exposure to these events - and understanding the paths that future tsunamis are likely to follow is going to be key to that.
And protecting your key infrastructure is vital to saving lives in the days and weeks after a catastrophe - particularly in nations less wealthy and less resilient than Japan (which understandably struggled even despite those advantages).
I find your description (I've not seen the movie myself yet) amusing and ironic given that Dead Space's Necromorphs were so obviously and blatantly based on The Thing.
We Brits do have a legal process and it is being followed to the letter in this case. That the case now looks likely to go to the Supreme Court is pretty good evidence of that (implying, indeed, rather more scrutiny than you might get around a "normal" extradition case). The thing with a legal process is that it will sometimes produce decisions you like, and sometimes produce decisions you don't. That's normal - not evidence of a conspiracy at work.
There are elements of the case that are worrying (though more in general than wikileaks-specific terms), but both the Swedish and UK legal systems do seem to be "working as intended".
It depends. If I'm hiring and I see a candidate with good grades in a sensible/relevant subject from a university I respect, then yes, the degree counts.
If I see a candidate with mediocre grades in Media Studies from an institution I don't respect, then I'll be fighting the temptation to assume that they went to university because they got to 18 and just followed what has, for many people, become the default path and then done the minimum to coast through. What that degree is demonstrating is that the candidate follows the path of least resistance. In those circumstances, I might be looking favourably upon a bright and enthusiastic 18 year old with some interesting extra-curricular projects who at least knows what he wants to do with his life.
In the days before the huge expansion of higher education, when going for a degree wasn't yet the default expectation for every middle-class kid, then yes, getting a degree almost always showed a degree of committment and dedication (or in a few cases, the luck and/or brilliance required to bypass those). Today, you have to be a bit more discerning.
I don't work in the IT or compsci sectors, but I think there are a few general principles about how recruitment works that you might want to note.
You don't have formal educational qualifications. Obviously, that's a handicap. However, you're not in a field here where qualifications are a legal requirement (unlike, say, medicine or law), so it's not insurmountable.
Some employers still have a policy of requiring a degree from all applicants, but - personal view here -in many cases they're foolish to do so. In the current climate, a lot of bright people are choosing not to take on the expense and debt associated with a degree. I see a lot of employers insisting "graduates only" who are achieving little except needlessly inflating the starting salary they need to offer (though by less than in the past - the graduate premium isn't what it was).
I've done a fair old bit of recruitment over the last decade or so and what a sensible employer will be looking for - when recruiting people for their "first proper job" - can be distilled down to: a degree of committment (as in, ability to stick at something which is difficult and takes time), reasonable interpersonal skills and, where appropriate, technical competence.
Interpersonal skills you'll need to demonstrate at interview (and by writing a half-way competent CV and application form). The ability to stick with something and technical competence might traditionally be demonstrated - to a basic level - by the fact that the applicant has both had the perserverence and the ability necessary to earn a degree (though with degrees as debased as they are these days, it's increasingly difficult to use this as a firm indicator).
So without a degree, you will need to have independent evidence of committment and technical ability. You've done some freelance projects - that's good. The companies you did them for may have gone under, but you kept your own work, right? Right? And maybe if those companies aren't around any more, there's less of an issue in sharing the work you did for them as part of your application?
In addition, if you've done any non-technical work - even just office admin and stuff - that's also good and worth including in your job applications - particularly if you can get a reference. It shows you can get along with people in an office environment on a day to day basis, turn up for work on time, follow basic codes of conduct and so on (which is something that a surprising number of people - even graduates - in some fields especially graduates - fail at). Don't under-estimate this one. As a recruiter, in 95% of cases, I'd rather see a few summers spent temping in a "serious" workplace on a CV than some glamorous, expensive (and usually irrelevant) piece of gap-year do-goodery.
Remember, being at a technical disadvantage, you'll need to use hard facts to sell yourself so far as possible. Part of TFS reads like a "personal statement" from a CV. Saying stuff like "I'm personable and self-motivated" is all well and good, but it won't get you a job. You'll need concrete evidence to demonstrate your skills and your ability to stick with a task. So yeah, I hope you kept all that evidence of your previous work.
The Yen isn't helping - very true. But the fact remains that Nintendo chose a "quick win" strategy for this console generation, while MS and (probably accidentally) Sony went for slower-burn strategies.
If Nintendo had the Wii-U ready to go for Christmas 2009 they would have been laughing. As it is, they are bowing out of another console gen sort-of looking like the losers, and if the Wii-U doesn't succeed in 2012 (which it probably won't, given the current economic climate) then they're fucked. Probably out of the home-console-hardware game for good.
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I went to an (otherwise excellent) private school in the UK, in the early/mid 1990s. What was striking at the time was how much worse the quality of the IT teaching was compared to that in other subjects. For most of my time there, IT (which was only mandatory from ages 11-13) was taught by an elderly priest with no computing knowledge, following a script sent out by some course provider.
While I'm sure we were well below the level of many slashdotters, my friends and I were significantly more computer literate than him. We'd been messing around with DOS, clearing up EMS and conventional memory to get our games to run for years (a couple of years later, we'd be enthusiastically pulling together Doom .wads and Duke Nukem 3d mods). Despite being among the "good kids" in the school in behavioural terms 99% of the time, we ended up so bored in those lessons (while he tried to teach basic word processing) that we ended up causing all kinds of havoc on the school PCs (completely undetected) and disrupting lessons no end (all while looking innocent and helpful).
When I went into the sixth form (16-18, for the benefit of non-UK readers), they got somebody in "from industry" to teach IT - and made a once-weekly half-hour IT class mandatory for everybody. Of course, the guy they'd got in "from industry" turned out to have been a factory floor manager in a PC assembly plant. He knew no more about the subject he was supposed to be teaching than the priest. The lessons came down to him reading instructions from a printed script (again provided by some faceless course-provision company) on how to create Word and Powerpoint documents. By this point my friends and I had brushed up our skills no end and were capable of causing even more creative havoc (again, always undetected).
Things may have improved since then, but there was a long way to go from a position where a school that would have been comfortably among the top 10% in the UK didn't even know the skills it needed in an IT teacher, let alone how to design a curriculum.
My experience of the Kinect? It's a very clever piece of hardware and very attractively priced - even in its PC incarnation. There's no end of things that can be done with it. I do suspect that this is what replaces the TV remote control. The only thing we know for sure that it's rubbish at is controlling video games.
Outside of exercise software (where it's good, once you accept its limitations) it makes for a horrible game controller. Despite the craze for alternative control schemes during the current console generation, I don't think anything will be displacing the twinstick controller and the mouse/keyboard combination as the dominant game input methods any time soon.
Oh, believe me, the last thing I want to do is look like I'm celebrating shops going out of business and people losing their jobs.
What I was remarking upon, I think, was how vulnerable so much of the retail sector - as represented in large British shopping centres, had left itself to the recession through the horrible lack of diversity on offer. I'd estimate that in Manchester's Trafford Centre (which I think is the biggest shopping centre in the UK outside of London), more than two thirds of the shops were selling over-priced clothing and accessories. Just as the recession hit, a big, glossy new multi-floor mall opened in the middle of Cambridge (further defacing what was one one of the UK's prettiest town centres), in which every single shop fell into that category, without exception.
I doubt that retail practices like that could have survived for long even had the boom continued.
I'm forced to use UK shopping centres, including participants in this system, more often than I would like (which given how often I would like is "never", probably isn't saying much). And you know what...
Track me. Monitor me. Scrutinise me. Spy on me. Do whatever you want. Provided that what you do with the results tells you that what I actually want from the hell-hole you manage requires more than an identikit, crapulent collection of over-priced clothing and jewellery stores and a single branch of Game.
I've noted the number of shops in these places that have closed down over the last two years and I'm not surprised. This isn't really a good time to be trying to sell people a £200 pair of jeans. In fact, I'm not sure there ever is a good time to try to sell people a £200 pair of jeans. And yet that's what every shop in these places seems to be trying to do.
Whew... that turned into more of a rant than I intended.
They don't exactly give away Railworks, either. It does sometimes get discounted in Steam sales, and if you bought the original, then you got free upgrades to 2 and 3. You do actually have to buy the base game at some point, though.
I suspect this is a special case, driven by the... erm... particular nature of the enthusiast community in question.
More than anything else, it reminds me of the Idolm@ster games (huge in Japan, unreleased in the West), where the home console versions not only require the purchase of a full-priced game, but also have masses and masses of very, very expensive DLC. And yet there is a community out there that keeps lapping it up - even back when the home console versions were 360-exclusive.
As an aside, I did import a copy of the PS3 version of IM@S2, just to see what all the fuss was about. It's cute, well presented and the minigames are fun, but the idea of spending a single penny on DLC for it just seems ludicrous.
And yet... no appeal? No call for a recount? Either the Republican primary rules don't allow for it (and I'm not familiar enough with them to know), or else Santorum has noted the lessons of Florida 2000 and decided that risking a "sore loser" reputation wouldn't do him any good in what's still an ongoing contest.
I tried LOTR:O for a short time after it went free to play, just to see how it was working out (I'd been a subscriber for a short time in its early days). I didn't stick with it for more than a day, though - in this case because it didn't feel distinct enough from WoW in any particular way to compensate for the fact that it was so obviously less polished than WoW.
That's true, but ultimately, TF2 is in a differerent marketplace to the MMOs I play. Despite a degree of character-persistence, it's an fps at heart, not a MMORPG. As such, its competitors are the Battlefield and Modern Warfare games.
I tried about 10 minutes of MW3 on a public server. In the space of that time, I learned 14 new descriptive terms for body parts, 12 new racial slurs, detailed descriptions of 15 new acts that consenting adults might conceivably (though improbably) choose to perform together and more than 300 different ways of spelling and pronouncing existing obscenities.
I crawled back to Dark Souls, both for the blessed silence that permeates so much of the game, and the sense that I was playing a game that just hated me slightly less.
The article raises "freemium" in a wider business sense, but I suspect that a lot of slashdotters will be used to coming across it in discussions of massively multiplayer online games.
I'm a long-term pay-to-play MMO gamer (Final Fantasy XI, World of Warcraft and now giving The Old Republic a whirl - just made a fairly long post about my experiences with it in my journal). I've also given some of the new generation of "freemium", "free to play" or "pay to win" (pick your favorite term) MMOs a go. However, I couldn't stick with any of them for long - from my point of view, this model provides a much inferior player experience.
It's not just about the money - though that is an issue. With a subscription based MMO, I know how much money will be going out the door on the game every month. So I pay my $15, have that as a line in my personal budget, and that's it. On a sheer time/cost ratio, MMOs tend to come out extremely well. With a Freemium MMO, I may end up telling myself that I'm going to spend a certain amount each month, but I also know that if I get stuck or frustrated, there's going to be a strong temptation to go beyond that.
But the really key point in TFA is "non-paying customers are more demanding than paying customers". That may be true from the service-provider's point of view. But it also has implications in the MMO world for the player. A subscription model game requires a degree of buy-in and committment from its player base. The other players you meet all want to be there and are paying for the privilege - and aren't, except in extreme circumstances, going to do anything to jeopardise that. The result, in my experience at least, is that levels of vulgarity, abuse and griefing - as well as outright cheating - are much lower in traditional subs-based MMOs than in the Freemiums.
Ep 4 is a bit clunky, yes. As other posters have noted, that was made before they brought in the expertise they needed - so you get a fight which is basically two untrained old(ish) men taking swings at each other.
But what you get in Eps 5 and 6 is a sense of story to the fight. In 5, when Luke fights Vader, he's clearly lost the fight before it even begins. He's distracted and off-balance. Vader's the older, smarter and more skilled fighter. Luke tries gamely enough to begin with, but every swing he takes is turned against him. Vader's not going all out; he doesn't want to kill, so he bides his time and breaks down his opponent before going for a disabling blow.
In Ep 6, the battle in the throne room begins much the same way. Luke is, once again, at a disadvantage (though he's more aware of it this time). However, once he "snaps" and charges Vader (culminating in him chopping Vader's hand off), his style changes completely. He leaves himself wide open and goes for all-out attack. To use an analogy from fighting games; he's button-mashing. And it catches Vader off guard. Vader's probably still more skilled, but he's also older and slower. He can't keep up with Luke, let alone counter-attack.
In Eps 5 and 6, the fights help to tell the story. The genius of the choreography of the fights is that it takes place at a pace which allows the average viewer to actually pick up on that.
By contrast, the eps 1-3 fights have very little sense of story to them. They're more concerned with "wow factor" and, to put a cynical hat on for a moment, with making sure that everybody gets a chance to look cool to boost the toy sales. I never got a sense that a character's emotional state is being reflected in how they fight.
I loved the lightsaber fights in the original trilogy (particularly RotJ). They were perfectly paced; fast enough to be exciting, but slow enough that you could read a pace and flow to them. They were supported by those wonderful sound effects and music that matched the action perfectly.
By contrast, the lightsaber battles in the prequels left me absolutely cold. It felt like Lucas had watched the Matrix and decided that he wanted that bullet-time wire-fu in his film whether it actually worked or not. The Darth Maul fight in Ep 1 gets a better press than it deserves on the basis of Duel of the Fates (which is a great piece of film music), but other than that, I couldn't see any of the Ep 1-3 battles as anything but soul-less exercises in camera trickery. They're too fast and there's no drama to them. There's just a lot of flailing about and then somebody wins.
Bottom line, talented performers and traditional effects outperformed modern CGI and wire-fu.
Agreed on animation. Way too many games have fantastically detailed character models, which looks and move like a bad special effect from an old movie. When "realistic" games are moving, we're still very much stuck in the uncanny valley.
Dark Souls is a little bit better. Characters move with a sense of weight and momentum that you don't normally see in games. Plus the skeleton monsters look and move just like the ones from Jason and the Argonauts - which is to say, a good special effect from an old movie.
From a gaming perspective (typically one of the big drivers of overclocking), a few factors that might argue "yes, it's over":
1) For quite a few years now, PC games haven't been forcing the kind of upgrade cycle that they did over the previous 20 years. When Crysis appeared in 2007, it was a game that gave many people an "upgrade or don't play it choice". And after that... the industry retreated. Consoles were the primary development platforms at the time and few PC games pushed significantly past the capabilities of the consoles. Not only did we not see any games more demanding than Crysis, but the vast majority of PC games released were substantially less demanding. As a gamer, if you had a PC that could run Crysis well, you did not need an upgrade. This situation lasted 4 years.
2) Performance has become about more than clock-speeds. The main advances in PC gaming technology over the last few years have come from successive versions of directx. You can't overclock a machine with a directx 9 graphics card so that it can "do" directx10. Same goes for dx10/11.
3) As the entry barriers to PC gaming get lower, the average knowledge level of users fall. PC gaming is, in general, easier and more convenient than it has been at any time in the past. Pick up an $800 PC, grab Steam and off you go. If you just want to play games and are using an off-the-shelf PC from a big manufacturer, you don't need to worry about switching around graphics drivers, sorting out hardware conflicts or any of the other little niggles that used to make PC gaming such a "joy". You can even find cases where PC gaming is easier than console gaming; the PS3, with its incessant firmware updates and mandatory installs has taken us a long way from the "insert game and play" roots of console gaming. People who are new to PC gaming just won't be coming from the kind of mindset that even considers overclocking as something you might even remotely want to do.
4) Among "old school" PC gamers, I think there's been a growing recognition that overclocking has its downsides as well. In an economic downturn, when money is tight, you don't necessarily want to go risking a huge reduction in the lifespan of your expensive toys.
That said, there are a couple of factors that might argue the other way (closely connected to the earlier arguments):
1) System requirements are finally on the move again. After years in stasis, 2011 has seen the release of a number of games with equivalent or higher requirements than Crysis. Bulletstorm started the trend, but Battlefield 3 and - to an even greater extent - Total War: Shogun 2 have really started to push the envelope on PC hardware. A lot of developers openly admit to being bored with console hardware. Even though they still get most of their sales from the consoles, they are using the PC to push beyond what they can achieve there, both to get their studio noticed and to get themselves ready for developing for the next round of console hardware.
2) The downturn also means that people feeling a squeeze on their budgets may be looking to get as much bang for their buck in terms of performance as possible. If you think that your new, overclocked PC will last long enough that you will be able to afford a replacement when it does start to give out, then why not take the risk?
In a long and varied life, Kim Jong Il made one undeniable and catastrophic mistake; he claimed to be an internet expert.
After making this claim, his life was made a misery by a succession of late night calls from friends and family demanding his help in ridding their PCs of various pieces of malware.
It was during one of these conversations, during which he was explaining to his elderly aunt for the thirty-seventh time why she shouldn't click the links in random e-mails claiming to be from DHL and talking her through the process of reinstalling Windows so that it would stop flashing up photos of young ladies taking their clothes off every time she tried to google for humorous cat stories, that his blood pressure finally reached critical point and his heart exploded.
Case solved.
I think you're getting (tenuous) theory and practice pretty horrendously mixed up there.
I think you've confused "atheism" with "puritanism". Easy mistake to make, I'm sure.
DO: Make a sensible sized hard drive standard for every model. The 360 suffered early cycle because games were tentative about assuming that they could use a hard disk (the "core" model didn't have one). The 4GB drive that ships with the current model is also inadequate. 20GB for the bottom end model should be considered an absolute minimum.
DO: Pack in the RAM. Of all of the factors that are driving developer frustration with the current console generation, RAM seems to be at the top of the pack. It's worse for the PS3 (with its awkward memory-split and larger OS footprint) than for the 360, but still... RAM is pretty cheap and packing plenty of it in will pay dividends in 5 years time.
DO: Continue to develop what you've been doing on voice controls for the console's UI. I have mixed feelings about Kinect, but voice activation is really great - and has an appeal to a wide demographic.
DON'T: Worry too much about making a loss on each unit sold for the first year or two. MS's objectives should be to get a large installed base early on and to make sure that their machine is fairly future-proof. This probably means selling at a loss early on. The real profits from a console come later in the cycle, when component prices have fallen, so you can reduce prices and still sell at a profit, and when you have third party developers giving you free money, by putting out games for your system (and paying you a fee on each copy sold) without you having to invest in development.
DON'T: Allow your dev team to push out firmware updates every 5 minutes. The 360 has had a few too many firmware updates for comfort, but perhaps not to the extent of being a deal-breaker. With the PS3, the sheer frequency of updates (and the length of time they take) is intensely frustrating, when you just want to fire up the console and play a game.
DON'T: Allow region locking. Sony have already ditched this and it did them no harm. MS knows region coding is junk; it doesn't use it for any of its first or second party games. Take the option away from developers; its time for them to grow up. It also reduces the incentive for people to get consoles mod-chipped - which in turn means they may be less likely to look into a bit of piracy. Which brings me onto the final point:
DO: Assume that whatever copy-protection you put into the machine will get broken sooner or later and plan accordingly. Reduce the incentive for people to mod their consoles, rather than going for the punitive route. Don't region lock. Do offer up an "other OS" walled garden. Do make it as easy as possible for indie developers to get their software onto the platform.
Most of the comments above are focussing on the "Humble Bundle" system. As I've actually got most of these already via various Steam sales, I thought I'd try to comment on the actual games.
Super Meat Boy is the best of the bunch and is definitely worth a few dollars if you don't have it already. It's ridiculously difficult in places, but also very more-ish. You really do want a gamepad to play it properly, though - keyboard mode is not nice.
NightSky is clever, but I found its appeal fairly short-lived. Bit.Trip Runner isn't really doing anything we haven't seen done better elsewhere. Shank and Jamestown are the two I haven't played.
You'll get a much more interesting package if you pay above the average. Cave Story+ is really very good indeed - and I suspect that between that and Super Meat Boy, you could justify paying over the average. Gratuitous Space Battles is a really great idea, but I've found that it works far better at a level of principle than it does in practice (where it tends to be deeply frustrating and has a learning curve that annoyed even me - and I've beaten and loved Dark Souls). It's the best game in the package from a graphical perspective, if that matters to you (though still a long way behind mainstream commercial offerings).
My vague memory from articles at the time is that the Fukushima plant was built before knowledge of tsunamis is as advanced as it is today, and that it had a degree of resilience built in against a "more normal" tsunami, rather than the absolute monster that did appear.
Of course, it's worth remembering that while a lot of people had their lives disrupted, the casualties directly caused by Fukushima were limited. If you're looking for examples of disastrous infrastructure planning decisions with fatal consequences, I'd suggest reading up on the Vajont Dam. I've seen this used in public sector training courses as a cautionary example of what the consequences of rushed, sloppy or biased planning decisions can be. It also, largely through coincidence, involves a tsunami (and one with a much, much greater wave height than that which hit Japan this year) - and a freshwater one to boot.
Better understanding and forecasting would be a fantastic thing. It would certainly save lives. However, after watching the footage of the tsunami in question, there's a little part of my brain that wonders whether it would do much more than tweak the odds for people in a few marginal cases.
I suppose where there's a much clearer use for this is in making infrastructure and resilience planning decisions. It will never be practical to say "people shouldn't live in areas that might be hit by tsunamis". As the "Boxing Day" tsunami demonstrated, the areas in question are absolutely vast - and as the Japanese tsunami demonstrated, they can stretch miles inland. I just don't see how countries could afford to give up such huge tracts of habitable land to mitigate against the risk of "once every couple of centuries" events. What might be practical, however, is to think about how to site critical pieces of infrastructure (such as... say... nuclear power plants, as well as hospitals, emergency response centres, transportation hubs) so as to minimise their exposure to these events - and understanding the paths that future tsunamis are likely to follow is going to be key to that.
And protecting your key infrastructure is vital to saving lives in the days and weeks after a catastrophe - particularly in nations less wealthy and less resilient than Japan (which understandably struggled even despite those advantages).
I find your description (I've not seen the movie myself yet) amusing and ironic given that Dead Space's Necromorphs were so obviously and blatantly based on The Thing.
We Brits do have a legal process and it is being followed to the letter in this case. That the case now looks likely to go to the Supreme Court is pretty good evidence of that (implying, indeed, rather more scrutiny than you might get around a "normal" extradition case). The thing with a legal process is that it will sometimes produce decisions you like, and sometimes produce decisions you don't. That's normal - not evidence of a conspiracy at work.
There are elements of the case that are worrying (though more in general than wikileaks-specific terms), but both the Swedish and UK legal systems do seem to be "working as intended".
It depends. If I'm hiring and I see a candidate with good grades in a sensible/relevant subject from a university I respect, then yes, the degree counts.
If I see a candidate with mediocre grades in Media Studies from an institution I don't respect, then I'll be fighting the temptation to assume that they went to university because they got to 18 and just followed what has, for many people, become the default path and then done the minimum to coast through. What that degree is demonstrating is that the candidate follows the path of least resistance. In those circumstances, I might be looking favourably upon a bright and enthusiastic 18 year old with some interesting extra-curricular projects who at least knows what he wants to do with his life.
In the days before the huge expansion of higher education, when going for a degree wasn't yet the default expectation for every middle-class kid, then yes, getting a degree almost always showed a degree of committment and dedication (or in a few cases, the luck and/or brilliance required to bypass those). Today, you have to be a bit more discerning.
Evidence, evidence, evidence.
I don't work in the IT or compsci sectors, but I think there are a few general principles about how recruitment works that you might want to note.
You don't have formal educational qualifications. Obviously, that's a handicap. However, you're not in a field here where qualifications are a legal requirement (unlike, say, medicine or law), so it's not insurmountable.
Some employers still have a policy of requiring a degree from all applicants, but - personal view here -in many cases they're foolish to do so. In the current climate, a lot of bright people are choosing not to take on the expense and debt associated with a degree. I see a lot of employers insisting "graduates only" who are achieving little except needlessly inflating the starting salary they need to offer (though by less than in the past - the graduate premium isn't what it was).
I've done a fair old bit of recruitment over the last decade or so and what a sensible employer will be looking for - when recruiting people for their "first proper job" - can be distilled down to: a degree of committment (as in, ability to stick at something which is difficult and takes time), reasonable interpersonal skills and, where appropriate, technical competence.
Interpersonal skills you'll need to demonstrate at interview (and by writing a half-way competent CV and application form). The ability to stick with something and technical competence might traditionally be demonstrated - to a basic level - by the fact that the applicant has both had the perserverence and the ability necessary to earn a degree (though with degrees as debased as they are these days, it's increasingly difficult to use this as a firm indicator).
So without a degree, you will need to have independent evidence of committment and technical ability. You've done some freelance projects - that's good. The companies you did them for may have gone under, but you kept your own work, right? Right? And maybe if those companies aren't around any more, there's less of an issue in sharing the work you did for them as part of your application?
In addition, if you've done any non-technical work - even just office admin and stuff - that's also good and worth including in your job applications - particularly if you can get a reference. It shows you can get along with people in an office environment on a day to day basis, turn up for work on time, follow basic codes of conduct and so on (which is something that a surprising number of people - even graduates - in some fields especially graduates - fail at). Don't under-estimate this one. As a recruiter, in 95% of cases, I'd rather see a few summers spent temping in a "serious" workplace on a CV than some glamorous, expensive (and usually irrelevant) piece of gap-year do-goodery.
Remember, being at a technical disadvantage, you'll need to use hard facts to sell yourself so far as possible. Part of TFS reads like a "personal statement" from a CV. Saying stuff like "I'm personable and self-motivated" is all well and good, but it won't get you a job. You'll need concrete evidence to demonstrate your skills and your ability to stick with a task. So yeah, I hope you kept all that evidence of your previous work.
The Yen isn't helping - very true. But the fact remains that Nintendo chose a "quick win" strategy for this console generation, while MS and (probably accidentally) Sony went for slower-burn strategies.
If Nintendo had the Wii-U ready to go for Christmas 2009 they would have been laughing. As it is, they are bowing out of another console gen sort-of looking like the losers, and if the Wii-U doesn't succeed in 2012 (which it probably won't, given the current economic climate) then they're fucked. Probably out of the home-console-hardware game for good.