"Tsunami" is indeed a Japanese term. It basically translates as "harbor wave", due to the fact that fishermen out at sea would fail to notice its passing (as the wave height is tiny in deep water) then return to their harbor to find it devastated.
"Tidal wave" is a Western term, but one that is generally discouraged these days, due to its imprecision. The term can, however, be used quite properly to refer to a tidal bore or tidal surge. Text-books etc increasingly use "tsunami" for waves like the one we've seen today, as the Japanese term is universally recognised.
Of course, the wave you really never want to see is an iminami. The term (which doesn't have the kind of widespread recognition as "tsunami") translates as "purification wave" and refers to exceptionally large waves of the kind generated by asteroid strikes or large underwater landslides. Megatsunami is more commonly used as an alternative term, but I personally feel the Japanese word has a particularly beautiful sound.
These do sometimes happen on enclosed bodies of water, but large-scale ones tend to form part of mass-extinction events.
This is, of course, where the term "tidal wave" originated from. The problem is that the old name implied that the waves had tidal causes to the layman, hence the drive to get people to use "tsunami" instead. It doesn't help that there are actual tidal waves (as in, waves which have strictly tidal causes, such as the tidal bore observed in the Thames) which are very different beasts to a tsunami.
On balance, I think that using "tsunami" is the right way to go.
Agree with what you say, but would add that this is now the second time that I've bought an EA game (a steam purchase in this case) which I've later regretted because I probably would have witheld my purchase had I known about some of the stuff the publisher was doing.
The first case was worse, really, because it directly affected my enjoyment of the game. That was Command & Conquer 4, which had "needs an always-on net-connect" DRM (and an unreliable version at that), despite the fact that I hadn't found this anywhere in the pre-release publicity.
C&C4 was a fairly marginal purchase for me anyway - I'd liked C&C3, but not loved it. Had I known in advance about the DRM, that would have been a definite no-purchase. Dragon Age 2 would have been a much tougher decision.
If this were a massively multiplayer game, I would agree entirely. In fact, if this was a ban from the multiplayer portion of an online and offline game, I would also agree. However, the Dragon Age games are resolutely single-player only. You can't actually ruin somebody else's experience of the game, in the way that shouting and screaming in a movie theatre would ruin the movie for others.
I don't like to push an analogy too far, but I think there's a better one here. This is like buying a DVD from a store and then standing around in the store shouting abuse. The staff would be absolutely within their rights to remove you from the store, but not to confiscate the DVD you'd bought off you as well.
Submitter here - thought I ought to make a quick reply:
On your first point - the effect of the ban was to prevent the user from installing (and hence playing) the game. It wasn't that they prevented the user from buying the game (which would have been stupid, but arguably less evil) but rather that money had changed hands and the user wasn't able to access the game due to the ban. Given the space limitations on story titles and summaries, this felt like a fair summing up to me.
On the second point, I had first hoped, when I read TFA, that this was due to a backend bug. However, the response from Bioware makes it fairly clear that from their point of view, this is "working as intended".
A tsunami like this is technically a wave, but because of its extremely long wavelength, it neither looks nor acts like a normal oceanic wave. A "normal" wave, even a 15 meter monster (higher than this tsunami, but pretty routine in some parts of the world) will basically splash against the shore but not make it more than a few tens of meters inland at most.
A tsunami might not be as high as one of these waves, but it contains a far larger mass of water, with far greater momentum. The effects of a significant tsunami making landfall, pretty well demonstrated in the footage of today's, tend to resemble a very fast, very high and very powerful tide.
"Reply to all" is great for career-imperilling fun, but you can replicate the effect perfectly well with good old dead tree and snail-mail. Indeed, the closest thing I've had to a genuinely career-ending moment so far happened during my first year in work and was entirely down to a dead tree circulation mistake. Even now I still look back on it and cringe, even though I've since changed employers.
I needed to send two documents to different recipients in the (large) organisation I worked in, both of whom were based in different buildings in different parts of London. One was a routine, dull minute of a meeting. The other was a sensitive personnel-related document (relating to a staff disciplinary matter - I was in HR at the time). I decided to deal with the former first. I printed it out, put it in an envelope and put it in the out-tray for our internal delivery service (which had multiple collections daily and moved dead tree around our sites within about 30-60 minutes, depending on traffic). I then went back to find a secure mail pouch for the the personnel letter - only to find that the piece of paper I still had on my desk was the meeting minute. I look around and see the delivery guy vanishing into the lift with all of the internal mail.
Cue a 30 minute dash (and I do mean dash - literally running) across central London to beat the delivery van to our other site and intercept the envelope before the addressee could open it. I made it - by the skin of my teeth. Had I failed to, my career could have... well... turned out very differently - and not in a good sense. In a way, it was a good learning experience - I've been incredibly careful about what I put into envelopes ever since.
But it just goes to show that you don't need fancy new-fangled modern technology in order to ruin your career with a mis-addressed mail.
There's been quite an explicit aspiration, on the part of all 3 console developers, that the current console generation would run for 10 years, rather than the usual 5-6. With development costs going ever upwards and a big economic downturn right in the middle of the cycle, you can see why this is a desirable prospect.
The early part of a console cycle is a rough time for console developers. Even if you make a profit off each unit sold, the low volume of games available limits your income from the new generation, at a time when you've just finished pumping a load of cash into R&D to get the thing onto the market. Ideally, you want to prolong the latter part of the cycle, where you are creaming off the profits from your premium on each game sold (most of which you have to put almost no effort into beyond certification). This is where Sony made megabucks from their games division in the last cycle - sitting back and allowing the PS2's total dominance to work for them as almost the entire industry worked to deliver them profits. Nobody this cycle has achieved a similar position - only Nintendo have the installed base required, and they don't have the games. Sony and Microsoft have the games on their platforms, but neither has achieved a substantial advantage.
However, it's starting to look like the 10 year aspiration isn't going to pan out. TFA makes a reasonably convincing case for suspecting that MS will move earlier than expected. Nintendo have also been the subject of rumours for a month or two - and they have the strongest need to act, because the Wii is completely obsolete and is losing relevance with every day that passes. Only Sony have yet to give any signs of developing a new system - but they have a huge motivation now, in the form of a complete loss of the PS3's vaunted anti-piracy protections.
I'm not quite sure what's driving this, except in the case of Nintendo who would need to move just to keep up with the competition (as HDTVs become more widespread and people's expectations rise).
However, there is a part of me that - despite owning all 3 consoles and liking my 360 and PS3 - would like to believe that its due to the relative resurgence of PC gaming. Valve have done a lot of work to make the platform a sounder commercial proposition for development than it has been for quite some time - Steam's copy protection isn't perfect, but it's good enough that the inconvenience factor puts off some of the casual piracy associated with the platform (and minimises the inconvenience for users). Then there's the fact that PC technology is a long way beyond what the current consoles can offer - and while this shouldn't be a huge advantage from a commercial perspective, there are a lot of talented people in the industry who want to develop for the latest and greatest hardware. The PC version of Bulletstorm is, in technical terms, far superior to the console versions. Crysis 2 is apparently similar. Oh, and don't forget that it's never been cheaper (or, to be fair, easier) to get an off-the-shelf PC which will run the latest games just fine - at a time when consoles remain relatively expensive.
The last time the PC really had a dominant position in gaming (as opposed to a merely strong one) was in the dying days of the SNES/Genesis console generation, when the PC had far surpassed the old consoles and none of the successors looked even vaguely credible until the arrival of the original Playstation some time later. I'm just speculating here, but I do wonder whether the console developers are starting to worry about a repeat.
I've never been anywhere near either of the games mentioned in the summary and can't check their websites from the office. But if those prices quoted for in-game items are correct (and not a case of dollars being switched for cents) then I start to smell a scam.
Surely no parent would ever "ok" a purchase like that from their kids (and these do sound like child-oriented games). I sounds at least plausible therefore (though I can't say more than that without evidence) that some of these games are making it as easy as possible to circumvent payment protections and giving active encouragement to do so.
Normally, my response to such cases is "parents, watch what your kids are doing". Certainly, that mother the other week complaining about MS allowing her kid to spend money on Xbox Live got no sympathy from me. I use Xbox Live myself and know that it has robust protections built in if you take the 10 seconds needed to switch them on. However, if things do start to veer more in the direction of outright scam (and I'm not saying that this does, just that those prices, if correct, might suggest it) then things get a little murkier. It starts to feel more directly like asking kids to steal from their parents, which brings me onto the obligatory Penny Arcade.
Very, very true. If I hadn't posted already in this thread, I'd be modding insightful.
I sat down with the significant other a couple of Sundays ago to watch a few movies. We finished off the evening with Alien. I noticed two things while watching it:
1) Dear god that movie is scary. The effects may be dated in places (and Ripley's hair-do definitely is), but the film has lost none of its ability to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up for pretty much its entire duration.
2) There is only one scene in it which involves any noticable quantity of gore (well... human gore); the chest-burster scene. The rest of the time, the movie relies upon suggestion to do its work for it. And because the gore is limited to a single scene, said scene is legendarily effective.
I've not watched it for quite a while and can't claim to have been looking for gore levels last time I did, but my recollection is that Aliens is pretty much the same. Sadly, too many movies since then have thrown all subtlety to the wind and, as I've said elsewhere in the comments, seem to aim for disgust rather than fear.
I like horror - games and film. Or at least, I think I do. I do find myself increasingly wondering, which I think is exacerbated by some of the current trends in horror.
Now, I fully accept that, as implied by TFA, different factors may affect different people. But for me, one of the big factors that affects how I go away from a horror movie or game feeling about it is the ending. I like a horror movie/game that scares the life out of me, but then presents a resolution. What really irks me is the current trend to make the endings of horror movies/games as bleak as possible. For some reason, this seems to be seen as more "artistically credible" these days. I can tolerate an ambiguous ending, but an outright downer "everybody dies" ending just leaves me feeling "well, that was grim and depressing and now I'm not sure why I watched it at all". It was clever and novel when Night of the Living Dead did it, but it seems to be pretty much de rigeur for any horror product these days. I think it reduces the cathartic value of the genre pretty massively.
Actually, there was a recent well-known horror-themed game that provided a welcome exception (not going to name it for spoilage reasons). Although even that made sure to leave the door open for a sequel.
Oh, and again, just my personal tastes, but while "scary" is great, watching people doing nothing more than pretending to be in pain or to inflict pain on others actively disgusts me. There do seem to be whole new subgenres of "horror" which aim for disgust rather than fear and - while perfectly happy to defend the right of others to watch it - I want nothing to do with it myself. Alien - fantastic movie. Saw - you can keep it.
Actually, I'd argue that neither Half-Life nor Starcraft has been particularly influential. Successful - yes. They've both obviously been successful to a degree that must surely be far beyond what their creators could have envisaged? But influential - as in having a real impact upon the direction of the industry? Not so much.
Half-Life was a great game, but it is hard to see it as much more than "Quake 2 done well, with a gimmick where you can run around jumping like a loon during cutscenes if you want". That gimmick hasn't really been all that widely adopted, either. It's still very much a Half-Life thing and by the time of HL2 it was starting to look a little silly in places. Quake was influential because it marked the jump to proper 3d gaming (as opposed to the 2.5d of Doom and DN3D) and because of its impacts upon the online gaming scene. Deus Ex was influential because it was so successful in marrying the fps and RPG genres together (in a much more accessible way than the earlier System Shock games). You could even argue that a Half-Life mod - Counter-Strike was fairly influential, in solidifying a shift in online gaming away from deathmatch and towards team-play and in pushing online gaming in a more realism-themed (though not realistic) direction. But Half-Life? It was just a very good game within established genre parameters. Nothng more, nothing less.
And Starcraft? Not influential in the slightest, really. For the most part, Blizzard are polishers, rather than innovators. They take concepts that other people have come up with and then polish them to the nth degree. Command & Conquer was influential - it invented the drag-click interface that made RTSes actually feel playable on the PC and which has been copied by every other RTS since. Starcraft didn't really do anything that the other Command & Conquer immitators of the day weren't also doing (eg. Krush Kill 'n Destroy, Dark Reign etc), but it did it well enough that the game went on to be very successful. It didn't inspire a legion of imitators, though; C&C did that (you can point to the odd Starcraft-inspired game, like Universe at War, but they're the exceptions rather than the norm). In fact, one thing that became clear when Starcraft 2 (again a very good game) was released was that if anything, Starcraft was a bit of an evolutionary cul-de-sac for the RTS, and that inspirations for the genre since Starcraft's release had often gone off in very different directions.
If Blizzard have had a genuinely influential game, it's World of Warcraft. With WoW, while Blizzard did largely lift concepts others had created wholesale, they did bring one key innovation to the table; they cut out 90% of the grind that had previously been associated with the genre. This innovation has been adoped by almost every MMO since then, so I guess that WoW passes the "influential" test.
It's not often I agree with a piece in the Guardian, but on this occasion, I think they're onto something. I remember the build-up to the first dotcom bust and a lot of the signs are showing up again. The over-valued floatations of profitless companies are certainly the most obvious of these, but there's a lot more than that out there if you want to look for it. Most worrying for many slashdot readers (though not for me with my nicely non-IT-based job), I'm starting to see the same kind of rush towards IT and computer-science based courses that we saw in the 90s, as the area became seen as a good route to "get rich quick". More competition for jobs and downward pressure on wages on the way.
Actually, I think the Guardian article is, in some ways, a little under-stated. It assumes that we're about to see the start of the bubble, which will begin in earnest with a facebook floatation. I suspect that we're actually a bit further along the cycle than that - already well up on that bubble and waiting for it to burst.
Of course, things won't be absolutely the same this time as they were in the original boom. I think the first boom and bust was characterised by a lack of understanding over what the public actually wanted out of the net. Pretty much everybody who was a significant online presence in those days was a new startup of one form or another and what the bust really did was sort out the wheat from the chaff. The businesses who had hit upon a successful model - like Amazon - came through it just fine. Meanwhile, the likes of Boo.com were exposed as fundamentally unviable - the public weren't remotely interested. It's worth remembering that outside of a small number of finance types and journalists, nobody was actually even looking at the sites of most of the victims last time. I was a heavy net user at the time and I remember seeing these huge IPOs for companies that I hadn't even heard of.
This time around, I think there's a better understanding of what people are interested in. The problem this time isn't the "everything dotcom is exciting" myth that we had last time. Rather, it's the "this is popular, therefore I must be able to make it insanely profitable" myth. The huge valuations are being attached to companies that have already undergone some fairly extensive testing in the court of popular opinion. The problem, however, is that that popular isn't the same as profitable and, I think, the lessons of the last 15 years or so indicate that making them profitable (at least to a degree that justifies the IPO) will likely not prove possible.
Advertising isn't going to do it alone in most of these cases. Sure, advertising is always going to be part of the online economy, but it's been proven time and time again that it isn't a silver bullet - not least because so many people these days just block it. At some point, a lot of these businesses are going to be pushed in the direction of starting to charge for content or services that they have been offering for free. And in a world where people have been used to having these things for free - and where free alternatives will still exist - I don't think that's going to work. Particularly not for social networking enterprises like these, where a lot of their value hinges upon the fact that everybody you know uses them. Some companies may fare better (just as some did in the first bust) - those selling casual games, for example - because they're already extracting revenue from customers.
I just ask a simple question: "Is this company selling a product that people will buy?" If the answer's no, then the company's story probably isn't going to have a happy ending.
Actually, I'm not really sure it did. Unreal did the whole "story" thing first. In fact, you could argue that Quake 2 had already done it. Sure, Half Life did it better - but then Deus Ex went on to do it better still. Half-Life was an excellent game which, primarily through its mods, was influential in PC gaming for the better part of a decade, but I'm not really sure it was either genre-defining or a monumental leap forwards on what had come before.
I bought a PS3. I have absolutely no desire to use it to run homebrew and I grew out of games piracy more than a decade ago. I use it to play legitimately-purchased games and Blu-Ray movies. And nobody puts a gun at my head and forces me to buy those. How does today's announcement affect me in the slightest?
Which isn't to say that it isn't a stupid statement Sony have put out, of course.
Well, that's fixed that one then, hasn't it? With a statement like that, it's clear that piracy on the PS3 is good and dead.
Or maybe not.
Seriously, I don't see what Sony were trying to achieve here. I think anybody who mods their console (hardware or software) to run homebrew or pirated games will do so with the expectation that they will not continue to be able to use PSN features for long. All Sony have probably achieved is a minor Streisand-effect, making sure that even more people know that it's now possible to pirate PS3 games.
That said, I do applaud the policy of banning modded consoles from the PSN (and hence from the online components of PS3 games). The big attraction of console online multiplayer for me (and I suspect for quite a few others) is that playing on a locked-down system does reduce (albeit perhaps not eliminate) the scope for cheats outside of the exploitation of game-specific glitches.
Interesting. That's probably not quite as bad as it first seemed, then.
Worst case was probably "content's in there, but it has loads of crashes and other glitches".
I think partly it's about companies still liking to feel "in control". The other, more significant part of it is that there are still a number of entertainment companies out there who still entertain the hilarious notion that they might actually be able to sell their products legally in places like China and India (as opposed to just having them pirated there). Pricing products at way below the international value in those markets is the way they think they'll succeed - so they like region locks to prevent reverse-importations.
What's gradually happening is that a lot of companies are now realising that, no, these places really are never going to actually pay them money for their products. So region locking is gradually falling out of favour (albeit not as quickly as I would like). In gaming terms, the PS3 contains the hardware and firmware hooks to implement region locking on its games, but Sony won't certify any games that actually use it. The 360 is technically region locked, but MS leaves the decision on whether to actually use region locking up to publishers (and doesn't region lock games it publishes itself). Most publishers don't bother. Only Nintendo, as the most control-freaky and "paternalist" of the big 3 actually push region locking - which they're rolling out on handhelds as well now.
Except this isn't about regional release date timings. The game isn't out anywhere yet. And the leak isn't of a finished version. And the last phase in getting a game ready for release is QA - getting rid of the bugs.
So it's a bit like going to a torrent for your new MJ album, finding that the only version available is based on a dodgy tape recording of the tracks as they're broadcast over a dodgy radio, while some guy reads out the weather forecast in German in the background. Sure, the hardcore fans might put up with that and buy the final product anyway, but a lot of people who took a look out of curiousity are going to take away a pretty negative impression.
"Incomplete" almost certainly doesn't mean "the last two levels aren't in there". Not when the game is this close to release. Games development doesn't work that way any more. What it probably means is that "the final 20% of the serious bugs that we needed to eliminate before launch are still in there". In other words, if this differs from the version that gets submitted as gold master, any differences will be a pronounced negative and will be the kind of annoyance that will just put people off from buying anyway (and create the worst sort of pre-release publicity).
The HL2 leak was of a build that was nowhere near ready. If I remember, Valve was somewhat guilty of having pretty heavily exaggerated how close HL2 was to being finished at the time. This doesn't in any way justify the leak, but it does explain why the game changed substantially and for the better - it wasn't really much to do with the leak at all. Crysis 2, on the other hand, has a release date that's not much more than a month and a half away. There's not much that can be done.
There isn't really an upside to this one. The only way there could be would be if whoever in the supply chain is responsible for this leak were to say, trip up and fall out of a third floor window into a skip full of broken glass and dogshit.
Look, I know that there are all kinds of flaws in the copyright legal system. And yes, I know that there's plenty wrong with the approach that most of the industry takes towards DRM. But seriously, who the hell thought that leaking this was a good idea? All this is going to achieve - beyond letting a bunch of scabby teenagers play the game a bit earlier than they would have otherwise - is to seriously piss off one of the few remaining developers who really cares about the PC as a platform. Yes, Crysis 2 may be getting console ports, but everything I've seen so far suggests that it is still a PC game first and foremost and, most critically, one of the few around to really be pushing the limits of the platform.
PC gaming isn't dying. In fact, it should be positioned for a real comeback over the next few years. The current generation of console hardware is aging, there are no successors on the horizon and there are a lot of people out there who got into the development business because they want to make games for the latest and greatest technology. Whatever the corporate priorities, it's almost inevitable that we'll see games over the next five or so years on the PC that far outperform their console cousins - in terms of both graphics and gameplay (because like it or not, better technology does sometimes unlock new gameplay options). However, I say "almost" inevitable. Because, justified or not, if there's one thing that could prevent a PC renaissance, it's arseholery like this, which goes beyond even the usual day-one piracy. It's not just about the impact on sales - which slashdot can and does argue over all day on occasion - I can just imagine how galling it must be for developers to have people playing their work for free, before honest customers even have the chance to buy it. Particularly if the build is unfinished and the game is now going to get criticised for flaws not in the final version.
I'd like to think that people would just ignore the leak en masse. Sadly, we all know that isn't going to happen.
There are minor variations from game to game. Bayonetta looked better on the 360 than the PS3. Final Fantasy XIII looked better on the PS3 than the 360. There are some differences around the online services and the gaming experience. The Black Ops problems are almost certainly the result of coding differences between the two versions of that particular game than by anything specific to the hardware.
The essential similarities of the experience presented by the two consoles (I own both) tend to get lost in online discussions, because of the degree of emotional heat that the "console wars" tend to generate.
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"Tsunami" is indeed a Japanese term. It basically translates as "harbor wave", due to the fact that fishermen out at sea would fail to notice its passing (as the wave height is tiny in deep water) then return to their harbor to find it devastated.
"Tidal wave" is a Western term, but one that is generally discouraged these days, due to its imprecision. The term can, however, be used quite properly to refer to a tidal bore or tidal surge. Text-books etc increasingly use "tsunami" for waves like the one we've seen today, as the Japanese term is universally recognised.
Of course, the wave you really never want to see is an iminami. The term (which doesn't have the kind of widespread recognition as "tsunami") translates as "purification wave" and refers to exceptionally large waves of the kind generated by asteroid strikes or large underwater landslides. Megatsunami is more commonly used as an alternative term, but I personally feel the Japanese word has a particularly beautiful sound. These do sometimes happen on enclosed bodies of water, but large-scale ones tend to form part of mass-extinction events.
This is, of course, where the term "tidal wave" originated from. The problem is that the old name implied that the waves had tidal causes to the layman, hence the drive to get people to use "tsunami" instead. It doesn't help that there are actual tidal waves (as in, waves which have strictly tidal causes, such as the tidal bore observed in the Thames) which are very different beasts to a tsunami.
On balance, I think that using "tsunami" is the right way to go.
Agree with what you say, but would add that this is now the second time that I've bought an EA game (a steam purchase in this case) which I've later regretted because I probably would have witheld my purchase had I known about some of the stuff the publisher was doing.
The first case was worse, really, because it directly affected my enjoyment of the game. That was Command & Conquer 4, which had "needs an always-on net-connect" DRM (and an unreliable version at that), despite the fact that I hadn't found this anywhere in the pre-release publicity.
C&C4 was a fairly marginal purchase for me anyway - I'd liked C&C3, but not loved it. Had I known in advance about the DRM, that would have been a definite no-purchase. Dragon Age 2 would have been a much tougher decision.
If this were a massively multiplayer game, I would agree entirely. In fact, if this was a ban from the multiplayer portion of an online and offline game, I would also agree. However, the Dragon Age games are resolutely single-player only. You can't actually ruin somebody else's experience of the game, in the way that shouting and screaming in a movie theatre would ruin the movie for others.
I don't like to push an analogy too far, but I think there's a better one here. This is like buying a DVD from a store and then standing around in the store shouting abuse. The staff would be absolutely within their rights to remove you from the store, but not to confiscate the DVD you'd bought off you as well.
Submitter here - thought I ought to make a quick reply:
On your first point - the effect of the ban was to prevent the user from installing (and hence playing) the game. It wasn't that they prevented the user from buying the game (which would have been stupid, but arguably less evil) but rather that money had changed hands and the user wasn't able to access the game due to the ban. Given the space limitations on story titles and summaries, this felt like a fair summing up to me.
On the second point, I had first hoped, when I read TFA, that this was due to a backend bug. However, the response from Bioware makes it fairly clear that from their point of view, this is "working as intended".
A tsunami like this is technically a wave, but because of its extremely long wavelength, it neither looks nor acts like a normal oceanic wave. A "normal" wave, even a 15 meter monster (higher than this tsunami, but pretty routine in some parts of the world) will basically splash against the shore but not make it more than a few tens of meters inland at most.
A tsunami might not be as high as one of these waves, but it contains a far larger mass of water, with far greater momentum. The effects of a significant tsunami making landfall, pretty well demonstrated in the footage of today's, tend to resemble a very fast, very high and very powerful tide.
"Reply to all" is great for career-imperilling fun, but you can replicate the effect perfectly well with good old dead tree and snail-mail. Indeed, the closest thing I've had to a genuinely career-ending moment so far happened during my first year in work and was entirely down to a dead tree circulation mistake. Even now I still look back on it and cringe, even though I've since changed employers.
I needed to send two documents to different recipients in the (large) organisation I worked in, both of whom were based in different buildings in different parts of London. One was a routine, dull minute of a meeting. The other was a sensitive personnel-related document (relating to a staff disciplinary matter - I was in HR at the time). I decided to deal with the former first. I printed it out, put it in an envelope and put it in the out-tray for our internal delivery service (which had multiple collections daily and moved dead tree around our sites within about 30-60 minutes, depending on traffic). I then went back to find a secure mail pouch for the the personnel letter - only to find that the piece of paper I still had on my desk was the meeting minute. I look around and see the delivery guy vanishing into the lift with all of the internal mail.
Cue a 30 minute dash (and I do mean dash - literally running) across central London to beat the delivery van to our other site and intercept the envelope before the addressee could open it. I made it - by the skin of my teeth. Had I failed to, my career could have... well... turned out very differently - and not in a good sense. In a way, it was a good learning experience - I've been incredibly careful about what I put into envelopes ever since.
But it just goes to show that you don't need fancy new-fangled modern technology in order to ruin your career with a mis-addressed mail.
Indeed, if you want to look at the history of actual full-fledged democracies, you can find the kind of brutalities that would make even the average despot blush.
There's been quite an explicit aspiration, on the part of all 3 console developers, that the current console generation would run for 10 years, rather than the usual 5-6. With development costs going ever upwards and a big economic downturn right in the middle of the cycle, you can see why this is a desirable prospect.
The early part of a console cycle is a rough time for console developers. Even if you make a profit off each unit sold, the low volume of games available limits your income from the new generation, at a time when you've just finished pumping a load of cash into R&D to get the thing onto the market. Ideally, you want to prolong the latter part of the cycle, where you are creaming off the profits from your premium on each game sold (most of which you have to put almost no effort into beyond certification). This is where Sony made megabucks from their games division in the last cycle - sitting back and allowing the PS2's total dominance to work for them as almost the entire industry worked to deliver them profits. Nobody this cycle has achieved a similar position - only Nintendo have the installed base required, and they don't have the games. Sony and Microsoft have the games on their platforms, but neither has achieved a substantial advantage.
However, it's starting to look like the 10 year aspiration isn't going to pan out. TFA makes a reasonably convincing case for suspecting that MS will move earlier than expected. Nintendo have also been the subject of rumours for a month or two - and they have the strongest need to act, because the Wii is completely obsolete and is losing relevance with every day that passes. Only Sony have yet to give any signs of developing a new system - but they have a huge motivation now, in the form of a complete loss of the PS3's vaunted anti-piracy protections.
I'm not quite sure what's driving this, except in the case of Nintendo who would need to move just to keep up with the competition (as HDTVs become more widespread and people's expectations rise).
However, there is a part of me that - despite owning all 3 consoles and liking my 360 and PS3 - would like to believe that its due to the relative resurgence of PC gaming. Valve have done a lot of work to make the platform a sounder commercial proposition for development than it has been for quite some time - Steam's copy protection isn't perfect, but it's good enough that the inconvenience factor puts off some of the casual piracy associated with the platform (and minimises the inconvenience for users). Then there's the fact that PC technology is a long way beyond what the current consoles can offer - and while this shouldn't be a huge advantage from a commercial perspective, there are a lot of talented people in the industry who want to develop for the latest and greatest hardware. The PC version of Bulletstorm is, in technical terms, far superior to the console versions. Crysis 2 is apparently similar. Oh, and don't forget that it's never been cheaper (or, to be fair, easier) to get an off-the-shelf PC which will run the latest games just fine - at a time when consoles remain relatively expensive.
The last time the PC really had a dominant position in gaming (as opposed to a merely strong one) was in the dying days of the SNES/Genesis console generation, when the PC had far surpassed the old consoles and none of the successors looked even vaguely credible until the arrival of the original Playstation some time later. I'm just speculating here, but I do wonder whether the console developers are starting to worry about a repeat.
I've never been anywhere near either of the games mentioned in the summary and can't check their websites from the office. But if those prices quoted for in-game items are correct (and not a case of dollars being switched for cents) then I start to smell a scam.
Surely no parent would ever "ok" a purchase like that from their kids (and these do sound like child-oriented games). I sounds at least plausible therefore (though I can't say more than that without evidence) that some of these games are making it as easy as possible to circumvent payment protections and giving active encouragement to do so.
Normally, my response to such cases is "parents, watch what your kids are doing". Certainly, that mother the other week complaining about MS allowing her kid to spend money on Xbox Live got no sympathy from me. I use Xbox Live myself and know that it has robust protections built in if you take the 10 seconds needed to switch them on. However, if things do start to veer more in the direction of outright scam (and I'm not saying that this does, just that those prices, if correct, might suggest it) then things get a little murkier. It starts to feel more directly like asking kids to steal from their parents, which brings me onto the obligatory Penny Arcade.
Fair point, yes, I think I was guilty of allowing the sequels to tarnish the original by implication.
Very, very true. If I hadn't posted already in this thread, I'd be modding insightful.
I sat down with the significant other a couple of Sundays ago to watch a few movies. We finished off the evening with Alien. I noticed two things while watching it:
1) Dear god that movie is scary. The effects may be dated in places (and Ripley's hair-do definitely is), but the film has lost none of its ability to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up for pretty much its entire duration.
2) There is only one scene in it which involves any noticable quantity of gore (well... human gore); the chest-burster scene. The rest of the time, the movie relies upon suggestion to do its work for it. And because the gore is limited to a single scene, said scene is legendarily effective.
I've not watched it for quite a while and can't claim to have been looking for gore levels last time I did, but my recollection is that Aliens is pretty much the same. Sadly, too many movies since then have thrown all subtlety to the wind and, as I've said elsewhere in the comments, seem to aim for disgust rather than fear.
I like horror - games and film. Or at least, I think I do. I do find myself increasingly wondering, which I think is exacerbated by some of the current trends in horror.
Now, I fully accept that, as implied by TFA, different factors may affect different people. But for me, one of the big factors that affects how I go away from a horror movie or game feeling about it is the ending. I like a horror movie/game that scares the life out of me, but then presents a resolution. What really irks me is the current trend to make the endings of horror movies/games as bleak as possible. For some reason, this seems to be seen as more "artistically credible" these days. I can tolerate an ambiguous ending, but an outright downer "everybody dies" ending just leaves me feeling "well, that was grim and depressing and now I'm not sure why I watched it at all". It was clever and novel when Night of the Living Dead did it, but it seems to be pretty much de rigeur for any horror product these days. I think it reduces the cathartic value of the genre pretty massively.
Actually, there was a recent well-known horror-themed game that provided a welcome exception (not going to name it for spoilage reasons). Although even that made sure to leave the door open for a sequel.
Oh, and again, just my personal tastes, but while "scary" is great, watching people doing nothing more than pretending to be in pain or to inflict pain on others actively disgusts me. There do seem to be whole new subgenres of "horror" which aim for disgust rather than fear and - while perfectly happy to defend the right of others to watch it - I want nothing to do with it myself. Alien - fantastic movie. Saw - you can keep it.
Actually, I'd argue that neither Half-Life nor Starcraft has been particularly influential. Successful - yes. They've both obviously been successful to a degree that must surely be far beyond what their creators could have envisaged? But influential - as in having a real impact upon the direction of the industry? Not so much.
Half-Life was a great game, but it is hard to see it as much more than "Quake 2 done well, with a gimmick where you can run around jumping like a loon during cutscenes if you want". That gimmick hasn't really been all that widely adopted, either. It's still very much a Half-Life thing and by the time of HL2 it was starting to look a little silly in places. Quake was influential because it marked the jump to proper 3d gaming (as opposed to the 2.5d of Doom and DN3D) and because of its impacts upon the online gaming scene. Deus Ex was influential because it was so successful in marrying the fps and RPG genres together (in a much more accessible way than the earlier System Shock games). You could even argue that a Half-Life mod - Counter-Strike was fairly influential, in solidifying a shift in online gaming away from deathmatch and towards team-play and in pushing online gaming in a more realism-themed (though not realistic) direction. But Half-Life? It was just a very good game within established genre parameters. Nothng more, nothing less.
And Starcraft? Not influential in the slightest, really. For the most part, Blizzard are polishers, rather than innovators. They take concepts that other people have come up with and then polish them to the nth degree. Command & Conquer was influential - it invented the drag-click interface that made RTSes actually feel playable on the PC and which has been copied by every other RTS since. Starcraft didn't really do anything that the other Command & Conquer immitators of the day weren't also doing (eg. Krush Kill 'n Destroy, Dark Reign etc), but it did it well enough that the game went on to be very successful. It didn't inspire a legion of imitators, though; C&C did that (you can point to the odd Starcraft-inspired game, like Universe at War, but they're the exceptions rather than the norm). In fact, one thing that became clear when Starcraft 2 (again a very good game) was released was that if anything, Starcraft was a bit of an evolutionary cul-de-sac for the RTS, and that inspirations for the genre since Starcraft's release had often gone off in very different directions.
If Blizzard have had a genuinely influential game, it's World of Warcraft. With WoW, while Blizzard did largely lift concepts others had created wholesale, they did bring one key innovation to the table; they cut out 90% of the grind that had previously been associated with the genre. This innovation has been adoped by almost every MMO since then, so I guess that WoW passes the "influential" test.
It's not often I agree with a piece in the Guardian, but on this occasion, I think they're onto something. I remember the build-up to the first dotcom bust and a lot of the signs are showing up again. The over-valued floatations of profitless companies are certainly the most obvious of these, but there's a lot more than that out there if you want to look for it. Most worrying for many slashdot readers (though not for me with my nicely non-IT-based job), I'm starting to see the same kind of rush towards IT and computer-science based courses that we saw in the 90s, as the area became seen as a good route to "get rich quick". More competition for jobs and downward pressure on wages on the way.
Actually, I think the Guardian article is, in some ways, a little under-stated. It assumes that we're about to see the start of the bubble, which will begin in earnest with a facebook floatation. I suspect that we're actually a bit further along the cycle than that - already well up on that bubble and waiting for it to burst.
Of course, things won't be absolutely the same this time as they were in the original boom. I think the first boom and bust was characterised by a lack of understanding over what the public actually wanted out of the net. Pretty much everybody who was a significant online presence in those days was a new startup of one form or another and what the bust really did was sort out the wheat from the chaff. The businesses who had hit upon a successful model - like Amazon - came through it just fine. Meanwhile, the likes of Boo.com were exposed as fundamentally unviable - the public weren't remotely interested. It's worth remembering that outside of a small number of finance types and journalists, nobody was actually even looking at the sites of most of the victims last time. I was a heavy net user at the time and I remember seeing these huge IPOs for companies that I hadn't even heard of.
This time around, I think there's a better understanding of what people are interested in. The problem this time isn't the "everything dotcom is exciting" myth that we had last time. Rather, it's the "this is popular, therefore I must be able to make it insanely profitable" myth. The huge valuations are being attached to companies that have already undergone some fairly extensive testing in the court of popular opinion. The problem, however, is that that popular isn't the same as profitable and, I think, the lessons of the last 15 years or so indicate that making them profitable (at least to a degree that justifies the IPO) will likely not prove possible.
Advertising isn't going to do it alone in most of these cases. Sure, advertising is always going to be part of the online economy, but it's been proven time and time again that it isn't a silver bullet - not least because so many people these days just block it. At some point, a lot of these businesses are going to be pushed in the direction of starting to charge for content or services that they have been offering for free. And in a world where people have been used to having these things for free - and where free alternatives will still exist - I don't think that's going to work. Particularly not for social networking enterprises like these, where a lot of their value hinges upon the fact that everybody you know uses them. Some companies may fare better (just as some did in the first bust) - those selling casual games, for example - because they're already extracting revenue from customers.
I just ask a simple question: "Is this company selling a product that people will buy?" If the answer's no, then the company's story probably isn't going to have a happy ending.
Actually, I'm not really sure it did. Unreal did the whole "story" thing first. In fact, you could argue that Quake 2 had already done it. Sure, Half Life did it better - but then Deus Ex went on to do it better still. Half-Life was an excellent game which, primarily through its mods, was influential in PC gaming for the better part of a decade, but I'm not really sure it was either genre-defining or a monumental leap forwards on what had come before.
Why? What's the problem?
I bought a PS3. I have absolutely no desire to use it to run homebrew and I grew out of games piracy more than a decade ago. I use it to play legitimately-purchased games and Blu-Ray movies. And nobody puts a gun at my head and forces me to buy those. How does today's announcement affect me in the slightest?
Which isn't to say that it isn't a stupid statement Sony have put out, of course.
Well, that's fixed that one then, hasn't it? With a statement like that, it's clear that piracy on the PS3 is good and dead.
Or maybe not.
Seriously, I don't see what Sony were trying to achieve here. I think anybody who mods their console (hardware or software) to run homebrew or pirated games will do so with the expectation that they will not continue to be able to use PSN features for long. All Sony have probably achieved is a minor Streisand-effect, making sure that even more people know that it's now possible to pirate PS3 games.
That said, I do applaud the policy of banning modded consoles from the PSN (and hence from the online components of PS3 games). The big attraction of console online multiplayer for me (and I suspect for quite a few others) is that playing on a locked-down system does reduce (albeit perhaps not eliminate) the scope for cheats outside of the exploitation of game-specific glitches.
Interesting. That's probably not quite as bad as it first seemed, then. Worst case was probably "content's in there, but it has loads of crashes and other glitches".
Oh, agree entirely.
I think partly it's about companies still liking to feel "in control". The other, more significant part of it is that there are still a number of entertainment companies out there who still entertain the hilarious notion that they might actually be able to sell their products legally in places like China and India (as opposed to just having them pirated there). Pricing products at way below the international value in those markets is the way they think they'll succeed - so they like region locks to prevent reverse-importations.
What's gradually happening is that a lot of companies are now realising that, no, these places really are never going to actually pay them money for their products. So region locking is gradually falling out of favour (albeit not as quickly as I would like). In gaming terms, the PS3 contains the hardware and firmware hooks to implement region locking on its games, but Sony won't certify any games that actually use it. The 360 is technically region locked, but MS leaves the decision on whether to actually use region locking up to publishers (and doesn't region lock games it publishes itself). Most publishers don't bother. Only Nintendo, as the most control-freaky and "paternalist" of the big 3 actually push region locking - which they're rolling out on handhelds as well now.
Except this isn't about regional release date timings. The game isn't out anywhere yet. And the leak isn't of a finished version. And the last phase in getting a game ready for release is QA - getting rid of the bugs.
So it's a bit like going to a torrent for your new MJ album, finding that the only version available is based on a dodgy tape recording of the tracks as they're broadcast over a dodgy radio, while some guy reads out the weather forecast in German in the background. Sure, the hardcore fans might put up with that and buy the final product anyway, but a lot of people who took a look out of curiousity are going to take away a pretty negative impression.
"Incomplete" almost certainly doesn't mean "the last two levels aren't in there". Not when the game is this close to release. Games development doesn't work that way any more. What it probably means is that "the final 20% of the serious bugs that we needed to eliminate before launch are still in there". In other words, if this differs from the version that gets submitted as gold master, any differences will be a pronounced negative and will be the kind of annoyance that will just put people off from buying anyway (and create the worst sort of pre-release publicity).
The HL2 leak was of a build that was nowhere near ready. If I remember, Valve was somewhat guilty of having pretty heavily exaggerated how close HL2 was to being finished at the time. This doesn't in any way justify the leak, but it does explain why the game changed substantially and for the better - it wasn't really much to do with the leak at all. Crysis 2, on the other hand, has a release date that's not much more than a month and a half away. There's not much that can be done.
There isn't really an upside to this one. The only way there could be would be if whoever in the supply chain is responsible for this leak were to say, trip up and fall out of a third floor window into a skip full of broken glass and dogshit.
Oh well that's just fantastic, isn't it?
Look, I know that there are all kinds of flaws in the copyright legal system. And yes, I know that there's plenty wrong with the approach that most of the industry takes towards DRM. But seriously, who the hell thought that leaking this was a good idea? All this is going to achieve - beyond letting a bunch of scabby teenagers play the game a bit earlier than they would have otherwise - is to seriously piss off one of the few remaining developers who really cares about the PC as a platform. Yes, Crysis 2 may be getting console ports, but everything I've seen so far suggests that it is still a PC game first and foremost and, most critically, one of the few around to really be pushing the limits of the platform.
PC gaming isn't dying. In fact, it should be positioned for a real comeback over the next few years. The current generation of console hardware is aging, there are no successors on the horizon and there are a lot of people out there who got into the development business because they want to make games for the latest and greatest technology. Whatever the corporate priorities, it's almost inevitable that we'll see games over the next five or so years on the PC that far outperform their console cousins - in terms of both graphics and gameplay (because like it or not, better technology does sometimes unlock new gameplay options). However, I say "almost" inevitable. Because, justified or not, if there's one thing that could prevent a PC renaissance, it's arseholery like this, which goes beyond even the usual day-one piracy. It's not just about the impact on sales - which slashdot can and does argue over all day on occasion - I can just imagine how galling it must be for developers to have people playing their work for free, before honest customers even have the chance to buy it. Particularly if the build is unfinished and the game is now going to get criticised for flaws not in the final version.
I'd like to think that people would just ignore the leak en masse. Sadly, we all know that isn't going to happen.
There are minor variations from game to game. Bayonetta looked better on the 360 than the PS3. Final Fantasy XIII looked better on the PS3 than the 360. There are some differences around the online services and the gaming experience. The Black Ops problems are almost certainly the result of coding differences between the two versions of that particular game than by anything specific to the hardware.
The essential similarities of the experience presented by the two consoles (I own both) tend to get lost in online discussions, because of the degree of emotional heat that the "console wars" tend to generate.