Depends. I've done a good few external hires over the last few years, and while I'd never actively sift on the basis of e-mail addresses, there's no denying that an outlandish one can make an impact (and probably not the sort you wan to make).
I wouldn't particularly care about an AOL address. I don't honestly think that any address which conforms to the firstname.lastname@isp.com format (or any other varation including initials, dots etc) will set any alarm bells ringing for any sensible employer.
However, there is one type of e-mail address that does cause me concern. This is the obvious "naughty" one. I've actually seen job applications listing addresses like partychick33@... or drunkenmick@... These do not give a good impression. Is it unfair? Probably. After all, there's nothing wrong with going out and enjoying yourself. However, using that e-mail address for a job application does imply that you have a problem when dealing with boundaries.
To sum up; a potential employer is far more likely to be put off by what comes before the @ in your e-mail address than by what comes afterwards.
One thing I've noticed over the years is that factors such as dress code can have a significant impact on how people behave around the office. You take people who aren't used to wearing suits and make them do so, and you pull them out of their comfort zone to a degree. You put them on edge and send the message that things are different. This is vital if you're going to start breaking down bad workplace habits. Of course, there's a lot more to it than this, but a competent manager tackling a really broken workplace will know that the first job is to destroy the old culture, so that something more functional can be put on top of it.
You can't keep people on edge like this for too long; it has its own negative impacts upon performance. The trick is to use it as a short(ish), sharp shock. Once the day job is actually getting done properly, you can let things relax a bit again, and let people get back into their comfort zone. If you've done things properly, their comfort zone should now overlap with where the organisation actually needs them to be if they're to be productive. For example, it might now involve a bit of web-browsing first thing in the morning and an hour or so over lunch, whereas before it was taking up the entire day.
Methods like this are almost always unpopular and never result in the manager being liked. In fact, what often happens is that when the manager does start to slack up, the employees read it as a victory. You'll also get a good few employees who will just up and quit (though these are often the ones you'd want to lose anyway). But a competent manager (and yes, not every manager is competent) will know when he can chalk his actions up as a success.
That an organisation is big and hasn't failed yet is absolutely no guarantee that it isn't headed to fail now. I think that is one lesson we can absolutely take from the events we've seen in the wider economy over the last two years.
More broadly, it's by no means uncommon for organisations to lose focus as they grow, and for the original culture that made them successful to be diluted, or for smaller sub-cultures of failure to develop within parts of the organisation. I don't work for Microsoft (or indeed in the tech sector), but I've certainly heard many plausible accounts from people who do of this happening there.
And is it the submitter's problem? Yes. Of course, as a junior member of the team, he's not going to be the one who fixes it, but if the area he works in has a bad reputation within his company, or if his company has a bad reputation within the marketplace, then this can and will impact on his career prospects further down the line (as well as making him more vulnerable to layoffs). He needs exercise some good old-fashioned self-interest and weigh up his options. If he can't give up the income and has absolutely no other job prospects (such as an internal move to a better part of the company, or even a move to another company in the same field), then he may just need to hang in there for the time being and protect his own reputation as well as he's able to. Sometimes, being the only useful, helpful person in a team full of idiots can actually be beneficial, in the short-term. You might stand out more to colleagues elsewhere, who may try to poach you. The most important thing is to avoid falling into the same bad habits. It's generally a good idea in the workplace to try to fit in and get along with your immediate co-workers. However, there will always be some cultures and cliques where thee last thing you want to do is fit in (a lesson most people should have learned by high school). Tolerating some unpleasantness now may turn out to be worth it further down the road.
I'm not necessarily sure you read the full question. From the information contained there, it sounds like the big part of the problem is that the work isn't getting done; at least not to the quality that's needed.
I've been in a similar situation once before, early in my career, when I came as a relatively junior member of staff into a part of my organisation that had a really toxic, time-wasting culture. And despite what you may think, ill-disciplined working habits were a big part of that. I understand that people like to structure their days differently and that properly managed, this can make people more productive, but there needs to be some form of control exercised to prevent people from crossing the line into taking liberties. By all means, show toleration of slightly eccentric working patterns, people listening to ipods at their desk and a moderate amount of personal web-browsing, provided it doesn't start to eat up most of the day. But if the job isn't getting done, remedial action is needed to break the culture. And yes, in the short term, this might involve imposing a draconian regime (with rigidly set hours, dress code etc), which can be relaxed slightly back to a more normal level once it's safe to do so.
The problem is that if you have come in at a junior level, there's almost nothing you can do, particularly if your management chain are complicit in the culture. Personally, when I found myself in that situation, I transferred sidewards to another part of the organisation after a few months; I didn't want my reputation to be tarnished, and was worried that the lack of self-discipline shown by my co-workers would rub off on me. About 18 months later, the head of the division in question was replaced, with his replacement apparently having a specific brief to clean the area up. So yes, working hours were suddenly enforced more rigidly than anywhere else in the organisation, dress codes were were imposed, music at desks was banned, all personal web-browsing was blocked and so on. About half of the staff resigned in protest (we weren't in a recession at the time), while the other half knuckled down and became more productive. 18 months after that, the area looked more or less like the rest of the wider organisation.
The message: sometimes "I work differently to other people" is just code for "I don't want to do any work". Learn to recognise the difference and stamp ruthlessly on the latter. Also, understand that if not monitored, the former can develop into the latter over time.
Oh, and working the odd late night or weekend can, in the right situation, do your career a power of good. Try not to make it a habit, but a willingness to do so when actually required will usually be noticed.
There's nothing wrong with actually playing through a linear story that somebody else has written. If I get a bit of freedom to shape things to my own tastes along the way, then great, but I'm not going to demand even that.
The simple fact is that some people are better storytellers than others. And the people that the likes of Bioware and Square-Enix get to write their stories are generally far better than the average Joe. Everybody likes to think that they could write or narrate a wonderfully engaging story if they ever had the time and/or inspiration, but in reality, it's a gift possessed by only a few.
Dragon Age's story isn't great; if they were going to ditch the whole AD&D/Forgotten Realms setting that was at the heart of the Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights games, then I would have hoped that they would actually do something a bit more... well... different with it. Compared to... say... Mass Effect, it felt very much like they were playing it safe and sticking to a well-trodden path with Dragon Age. If that's what they're doing, then a part of me would actually have preferred to have a more familiar Forgotten Realms setting (not least because of the potential for Miniature Giant Space Hamsters). If, on the other hand, they were trying to produce a genuinely different "dark" fantasy story, then I'm sorry, but The Witcher got there first and did it better.
That said, it's still a very good game with a very engaging story and fun play mechanics. The setting they've created is one I'd be happy to return to in the future.
Everything about the Gamecube felt cheap and nasty (ok, yes, I'll grant it was slightly cheaper than the opposition). The worst bit was the controller, with its ugly, unintuitive, oddly-shaped face buttons, lack of a proper second analogue stick and, if you had the wired version, a cable that was far too short to reach the average sofa. The ridiculous little flippy lid for the optical drive was also horrid (and I saw more than one snapped off by an over-enthusiastic kiddy).
Video gaming in general could have used more prominence in TFA. After all, it's undoubtedly a part of the tech sector. Thinking of 10 examples off the top of my head, in no particular order...
- The Red Ring of Death: as you say, should absolutely have been in there. Cost-cutting decisions lead to major customer frustrations. The issue is then compounded by lies, obfuscation and, once the problem is acknowledged, a massively slow response.
- The Gamecube: everything about it. A nasty, tacky piece of junk with no games worth looking at that was put out with the intention of being a serious contender and rightly consigned to third place.
- Hot Coffee: the video game industry unintentionally playing right into the hands of the "think of the children" brigade. While there's an absolutely legitimate battle to be fought against censorship of video-games, this was a huge tactical mis-step.
- The Sixaxis controller: rather than going for the obvious solution of competing with the Wii by having more and better games (which would hardly be difficult), Sony decided to rush some desperately inadequate motion sensing tech into the PS3's controller. When it was announced, everybody assumed it would be a nasty hack. When the PS3 was launched, everybody could see it really was a nasty hack. Fortunately, most PS3 developers now ignore it.
- The original Xbox360 controller: just... what? I'd love to know who decided this was a good idea. Microsoft actually issued a better, second-generation controller pretty quickly. But not before they'd become a laughing stock.
- Spore: the hype, the underwhelming game, the hideously broken DRM, the Amazon review campaign. Never has a game promised so much and delivered so little.
- Nintendo's online strategy: yeah, still waiting on this one... maybe they have one... somewhere...
- The PSP Go: Sony put out a revision of their middlingly-successful handheld whose only claim to fame is that it has less functionality than the original version. And then they wonder why it doesn't take off...
- The DSi: Nintendo demonstrate that they have the ethics of a rabid pitbull by putting out the first handheld for many years to incorporate region locking.
- The Phantom: ok, I know that some of the events surrounding Infinium Labs are touched upon briefly in TFA, but I think the Phantom should have taken pride of place in the line-up of tech-fiascos over the last decade.
The Yogg-Saron fight (yes, it's heavily Cthulhu-mythos inspired), at the end of Ulduar, requires the raid members to monitor their own sanity level. If it hits 0, the player goes insane and attacks their allies (a condition that lasts until the end of the fight, even if the player is killed and resurrected).
Sanity is reduced by a number of factors, including semi-random attacks that Yogg-Saron can do on the raid, remaining in proximity to his brain for too long, or facing him while he howls during the final phase of the fight.
If players have the assistance of the Keeper Freya during the fight, she will provide sanctuary pools in the corners of the encounter room that players can run to if they need to regenerate sanity. In the fight's harder modes, Freya's assistance may not be there and players have to be very careful not to take unnecessary sanity damage.
It's not a brilliant implementation, I grant you. It would have been awesome if they could have made it so that as your sanity level gets lower, you start seeing odd visual effects, or your controls become less responsive. But it has, at least, been tried.
The second AvP movie is actually pretty good if you fast-forward past all the scenes with bad, hammy acting and stilted, unconvincing dialogue. In other words, any of the scenes where the humans are the focus.
While I'm not a massive fan of how they chose to play the Predalien, the sequences with the Aliens over-running the town, the National Guard response being wiped out and so on are enjoyable. Not only that, but they're also surprisingly "hardcore", given that the first AvP movie tried to lock itself so firmly into a teen-friendly content level.
The biggest gripe I had with AvP2 was that the audience is clearly supposed to feel that the military are all nasty and naughty for nuking the town at the end. Frankly, from their point of view, with a city having been over-run so quickly and other containment methods having failed, dropping a nuke to limit the problem before it could spread further was absolutely the right and ethical decision.
The original AvP (in terms of PC fpses, I mean) was a pretty poor effort, yes. It suffered from having no real storyline to its (shockingly short) campaigns, and from the Alien and Predator campaigns being frustrating exercises in jump puzzles and "find the one piece of wall that's textured slightly differently, meaning you can break it".
I thought that despite running on what was a crummy engine even by the standards of the time, AvP2 was a good bit better. They pulled together a very solid and atmospheric Marine campaign for it, even if the Alien and Predator campaigns were still total rubbish. It did a lot of stuff right, though; creeping through a darkened colony as a Marine, while watching for the telltale pings on your motion tracker was really quite scary.
The upcoming game does have some potential, therefore, even if the previews haven't exactly been ecstatic. But what I really want is the (much delayed, possibly vaporware) "Aliens: Colonial Marines" squad-based shooter that's allegedly in the pipeline. Take the B-movie fodder Predator out of the picture, confine the game to the marine perspective and really focus on making the experience terrifying and, with a decent technology base, you could have a very effective game indeed.
Seconded, with a vengeance. I'm very glad that MMOs weren't around for most of my childhood and that when they appeared during my college days, I was sensible enough to know I needed to avoid them until I was in full-time paid employment.
I was always nerdy as a kid, but even then I spent around as much time on my bike as on my PC (all the better for out-running the swarm of wannabe-jocks chasing me throwing stones).
The computer games I played as a kid were addictive in their own way, but none of them had the utter timesink potential of a modern MMO.
I mostly enjoyed Mirror's Edge, though I acknowledge the issue you highlight. There were certain sequences where I could see what I had to do and it felt like I was doing it properly, but try as I might, Faith just WOULD NOT grab onto that ledge or pipe.
I had fun with the game in the end, despite a few niggles. My biggest frustration was that despite the apparently open cityscape you have to play with, a lot of the levels are actually very, very linear, with only 1 path you can follow. I think the game was good enough and novel to deserve a sequel, so hopefully these are issues they can work on for that.
This is often the way with games that try to be different; they have a good central idea, but the execution is flawed enough that they don't always get the feel right on the first go.
Yes, I've played it. It was basically the original game with a stupid plot. It's certainly not bad; the engine feels slick, the weapons are nicely modelled and the graphics and sound are pretty good (though the former still fall short of the standard set by Crysis more than 2 years ago).
But it's absolutely nothing special. The set-pieces are less impressive than the original's (there's certainly no counterpart to the infamous nuke sequence), the plot goes off the deep end into the kind of lunacy that even Metal Gear Solid probably wouldn't stoop to (which is a real atmosphere killer) and the singleplayer campain is devastatingly short.
It's a 7.5/10 sort of game. Maybe an 8/10 if you want to be kind. That's solid, but it's not spectacular.
Actually, the article is far less irritating than the summary had led me to believe. Yes, it points out 10 games that are not recommended for children and teens. But it isn't trying to get the games banned (the original commonsensemedia article actually points out that these are good games), just trying to help parents make informed decisions. This, I believe, is a good thing.
Moreover, the "suggested replacement" games aren't all of the "Barbie Horse Adventures" ilk. While a few made me raise an eyebrow, most of them are reasonable enough replacements.
Let's take a look at the list:
Assassin's Creed 2 replaced by Mirror's Edge: I haven't played AC2, but I would probably agree that the original AC is "not for kids". Mirror's Edge doesn't seem outlandish as a replacement; it's not some twee kiddy game and it does contain violence. It's just a bit less "in your face" with it. So no problems with this one.
Borderlands for Infamous: Ok, this one made me go "hmm". Borderlands has highly cartoonish violence, while Infamous is actually quite dark in its theme and has highly morally ambiguous characters. Weirdly, I think the game they've recommended is actually less suitable than the game they're replacing.
Brutal Legend for Ghostbusters: I'd have no problem with this, particularly as Ghostbusters is actually the better game provided you avoid the dismal PC version.
Call of Duty MW2 for Battlefield Bad Company 2: Fair enough. I believe a lot of PC gamers already made this switch due to the dedicated servers issue anyway. Both are respectable but unspectacular games, once you get past the hype.
Dead Space: Extraction for Deadly Creatures: I've not played Deadly Creatures, but I have played Extraction (which puts me in a small minority, judging by its dismal sales figures). While it's a "light gun" game, Extraction is absolutely and emphatically not for kids. It is dark, scary and gory.
Dragon Age: Origins for Braid: This one's deeply weird. Dragon Age isn't exactly your average hack-em-up arcade game. I suspect that any under-18s asking for Dragon Age and patient enough to stick with it past the first 10 minutes are probably mature enough to deal with it. And Braid as a replacement? A platform/puzzler as a replacement for an RPG? No, I don't think so. If I were to suggest a replacement, it would probably be Last Remnant, Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon, which are at least RPGs. Or get them into the whole retro thing with a copy of Baldur's Gate 2 - the themes are still as mature, but it's harmless if it's just little sprites, right?:)
GTA IV for Batman: Arkham Asylum: Again, the games aren't quite the same genre, so this is a tricky one. However, GTA is not for kids, end of story. The Batman game is awesome, and probably dark enough in its theme and style to satisfy most teenagers. So yes, you could do worse than this.
Demon's Souls for Uncharted 2: Yeah, no real problems with this. To be honest, I prefer Uncharted 2 as a game anyway (though this may put me in a minority).
Left 4 Dead 2 for Overlord 2: Another strange one. Overlord 2 is not an fps. Nor is it a particularly co-operative game. Nor is it fantastically good. Nor is it morally squeaky-clean (though the violence is cartoonish). I guess you could always try to track down the Australian version of L4D2.
GTA: Chinatown for C.O.P.: well, at least it's one sandbox game for another. The problem is that the reviews all seem to show that C.O.P. is basically rubbish. It's probably your best option while staying within the same genre on the same platform, but you can still expect a lot of disappointment on Christmas morning with this switch.
So yeah, at least some of the switches recommended are sensible, and this isn't a dreadful guide to parents who might not be massively savvy in these matters. On this basis, did the article summary really need to take the tone that it did?
I'm just waiting for the "school" maps to appear. This game has already had to be mutilated to make it onto the shelves in Australia. I think once the first screenshots of a zombie-killing spree in some kid's high-school appear, that should probably do for it in the rest of the world as well.
I know when I was a teenager, I developed a Doom map based on my school. Didn't think much of it at the time (this was pre-Columbine) - it was just a fun setting while I taught myself level design - but I know that if I'd done that (and been found out) today, I'd at best have found myself in compulsory counselling and at worst in jail.
You have a point, but I think there's a little more to it than this. I suspect that they're speeding up the levelling process because they're going to add another five levels onto the top come the next expansion. My impression has always been that Blizzard have a definitive idea how long it should take a player to go from level 1 to the maximum level, and that they try to keep this constant through expansions. So, not long after the release of Burning Crusade, we had a nerf to the 1-60 levelling process (with 60-70 still being a substantial gap). Then 60-70 was nerfed shortly before Lich King hit. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the 70-80 xp grind had a nerf shortly before or after 4.0.
I've played Dirt 2 on the PS3, back when it was released a few months ago. I can see why the graphical improvements in the PC version might attract attention, but I have another question...
Does DX11 have any kind of feature that lets you take that complete and utter XTREME moron who does the voice-overs for the game and kill him slowly in imaginative ways? Any enjoyment in the game was killed for me by XTREME SURFER DUDE RAD TO THE MAX guy screaming his head off every time I tried to do anything. Seriously... who actually likes that kind of thing? Who can even actually tolerate it, in a game that doesn't give you any option to turn it off.
I'll stick with Forza 3 for my racing game goodness for the time being. Yes, it has the strange old-bloke with the curious mid-Atlantic accent doing voice work on the menus, but at least he's not being all XTREME and you can shut him up if you want to.
And yet I've played plenty of games which I would recognise as over-hyped, but which I have also enjoyed. I mention Modern Warfare 2 in my post. Is it overhyped? Yes, wildly so. It's not even as good as its own prequel, due to a ludicrous plot which really shatters any suspension of disbelief. However, it's a lot of fun to play; the combat feels slick and precise, the weapons are well implemented and the scenarios provide a good degree of variety. So it's a very good game - but not one that's going to redefine the genre in the way the original Modern Warfare did. Judged in a vacuum, as I say, I think it's an 8/10 kind of game.
And that's what a review should tell me. I want an honest assessment of the game, not histrionics about whether or not it lives up to the hype. The issue for me is, when I load the game up, am I going to enjoy it. It is perfectly possible to feel disappointed about a failure to live up to hype and still be a perfectly good experience.
It's fine for the text of a review to acknowledge hype and expectations, but I don't think they have any place in an objective scoring system, or even in a broader assessment of quality. After all, it's perfectly possible that I've actually missed a good chunk of the hype anyway.
The problem is that you need a scale that encompasses everything from "hideously bad" to "sublimely good", and very, very few commercially released games these days actually fall into the former category. Sure, the usual anti-modern-gaming crowd here on slashdot likes to decry the latest overhyped blockbuster as "worst game ever", but in reality, pretty much every such game is "mediocre" at worst, and actually reasonably good fun if considered in isolation, on its own merits. It's not really fair to score a game down for being overhyped - only to review the game in front of you.
Genuinely bad games with genuinely low review scores do exist. Even if you look at IGN, who are generally felt to "score high", you can use the review filters to find plenty of games with scores of 3.0/10 or less. These are mostly clustered on the PC, Wii, PS2 and handhelds - platforms with relatively low development costs prone to low-quality shovelware (which is by no means to decry all titles for those systems as low quality). However, the development costs for high-end games these days are such that you really can't afford to let an absolute stinker go out the door. This does make the odd rare exception that slips through, such as Lair, all the more deliciously awful.
So yes, it's not a big conspiracy that you tend to get a clustering of review scores around the 7-9/10 mark. It's just a fair reflection of the overall quality of most modern big-budget games. Reader reviews, on the other hand, often tend to be callibrated to a less objective scale, and to take more account of factors such as the degree to which the game had been hyped (and to the kind of emotive factors that the console wars stir up), leading to a wider variation.
You do, of course, get the occasional game where the "professional" review scores seem a bit out of whack. Modern Warfare 2 felt like a bit of an example of this to me; I could have seen it as an 8/10 kind of game, but I suspect that review scores above that are being hype driven.
Ultimately, I find that the best way to use reviews isn't to go off meta-critic rankings or composite scores. It's to find a review site whose tastes generally accord with my own and use this as a rough guide. I already know in advance broadly which games I'm interested in. If I read the review, I use it as a guide-post and look for issues mentioned that are of particular importance to me. If a review flags that a game has an overly restrictive save-system, then I won't buy it even if the score is good, because I hate repeating content I've already passed unnecessarily. If a review criticises and marks down a game for not including online play, however, I won't let that deter me; it's not usually a huge issue for me, as aside from WoW, I'm primarily a singleplayer gamer.
This is only true for the start of a console cycle. By this point, Sony and MS should at worst be breaking even on console sales and probably having a bit of profit. Component prices fall dramatically over the course of the typical 5-year console cycle.
You've missed the point about Dead Space: Extraction.
It's not a port of Dead Space, nor is it a Wii-ed down version of it. It's an entirely separate title, which serves as a prequel to the original game, running parallel to the Downfall animated movie. It had reviews ranging from the good to the excellent. I bought it despite owning Dead Space for the 360 because I enjoyed Dead Space and wanted to play another game in the same universe. I was initially skeptical of the rail-shooter concept, but half an hour's play was enough to convince me.
We know that sequels and spin-offs work, as evidenced by the industry's love affair with them. If people really do own multiple platforms, then it would be an obvious decision for Wii-owners who had played the original elsewhere to pick up Extraction. However, they didn't? Why? Hard to say, but it's likely at least in part because of the expectation Nintendo have allowed to develop that Wii games are low-quality shovelware titles.
Plenty of games which are genuinely mature, as opposed to "hyper-violent" don't make it to the Wii at all. There's a great example out there this week; Dragon Age: Origins. Spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, fantasy-themed RPG, contains "adult" content, but not "hyper violence". It's on the PS3. It's on the Xbox360. It's on the PC. But not on the Wii. Why? Chances are because the Wii's hardware just can't handle a genuinely ambitious game like this. There are plenty of other examples around; Batman: Arkham Asylum, Call of Duty - Modern Warfare 2, Operation Flashpoint - Dragon Rising.
All are big releases, which contain adult themes without being gore-fests, and which are on any other serious platform. None of them are on the Wii. And I'll say it again; the problem is the Wii's hardware.
This is exactly what I predicted at the start of this console cycle. The Wii has amazing initial sales, due to the novelty factor of the controller and a media which is generally feeling disillusioned with Sony and MS and therefore happy to unquestioningly do most of Nintendo's hype for them. Then the same old Nintendo factor of "no decent games outside of a few first-party titles (which are themselves only popular with a certain niche)" kicks in, the limitations of the controller become more widely known, the system's hardware starts to seem more and more pathetic compared to its competitors and sales (particularly of non-bundled games) fall off a cliff.
The sad thing is that the few mature games for the Wii that are actually any good are being hit by the fallout from this. Dead Space: Extraction is an excellent game - a thinking man's rail shooter (which I would previously have believed to be a contradiction in terms) and it deserved to do well. Instead, if wikipedia is to be believed, it sold less than 9,300 copies at launch, despite a positive critical reception. I'm sure EA looked at that, compared it with the sales of the original Dead Space on PC, PS3 and Xbox360, and thought "remind me why we even bother with this Wii rubbish?". Had they published the game on the other platforms, with standard controller or mouse controls, it's entirely plausible that they might have managed sales figures 20 times higher (using the original Dead Space as a comparison).
Things will only get worse now that development for the 360 and PS3 is in a fairly mature state, with newer games taking full advantage of the system's capabilities. By contrast, I think the Wii is being harmed by the unexpected longevity of the PS2. With big cross-platform titles (eg. Force Unleashed, but there are plenty of other examples), developers already have to develop entirely separate versions of the game (with the differences often going far beyond just graphics). Often, there will be one broad version for the "proper" gaming platforms; the PC, PS3 and Xbox360. Meanwhile, a cutdown version is developed, for the "lesser" consoles. It makes sense to release for the PS2 and the Wii, due to their huge installed bases, but it doesn't make sense to develop a separate version of the game for each. So the Wii ends up getting a lot of titles which are just direct PS2 ports with a bit of lazy motion sensing tacked on, even though its (admittedly poor) hardware is capable of significantly better. So while PS3 and 360 titles released today generally look better than those from the system's launch, a lot of Wii titles actually look worse. This really won't be helping.
As an MMO player, I've seen a dramatic rise in the frequency and sophistication of tricks designed to get access to players' accounts over the last few years.
As a bit of background for those who don't play these games; even though most games technically forbid it, the trade of in-game currency for real-life money is big business. A quick look around a few of the well-known sites that are used for this purpose show that, for example, 1,000 World of Warcraft gold will sell for around $10.
Now, those selling the in-game currency need to obtain it from somewhere to sell it. Traditionally, they've obtained their money via "legitimate" means, usually a sweat shop full of part-time students working shifts to keep characters earning money through fairly mechanical processes 24/7/365. I say this is legitimate, but this is only true in so far as it does not violate any game mechanics; it can have a fairly crippling effect on a game's economy and can make life much worse for genuine players. In some cases, this was augmented by 3rd-party automation software (usually called bots) which took away the requirement to have somebody at each keyboard and allowed one person to supervise a dozen or so clients.
However, in recent times, many of those involved in the in-game currency trade have decided to cut out this part of their operations. Rather than earning the cash on their own characters, they rather steal it from the accounts of other players, by gaining access to their account and stripping it bare. This has the twin benefits of not requiring anything like the human effort that earning the money directly via in-game means has and of not driving inflation (reducing the real-world value of the game's currency - unless the game's operator has a policy of refunding stolen currency).
Now, back when this first started to appear, I was still playing Final Fantasy XI, a game whose highly sophisticated and relatively unrestrained in-game economy rendered it highly vulnerable to the advances of real-currency traders (WoW, by comparison, has a pretty basic economy where players never really need much gold to get by, rendering it less fertile ground). Back then, there were three basic ways to lose your account. The first was greed; you sign up for a scam power-levelling service, or a currency trade website that requires you to register your account details. Surprise, surprise, the nice people offering this wonderful service really just empty out your account. Obviously, only the truly atupid are going to fall for something like this (though I can name one or two who did).
The second method relied on fear; you'd get an official looking e-mail, purporting to be from Square-Enix (or Blizzard - this still happens in WoW), claiming that your account was believed to be inactive/in violation or something and you needed to reply to them, stating all of your account details, to prevent it from being locked. Again, fairly basic stuff, though with a convincing enoug e-mail, you will probably always get a few suckers.
The third was pure bad-luck and not really relevant to the currency trade. I remember two FFXI players who broke up with their real-life partners and forgot that said partner had their login details - which they promptly used to trash their account.
However, just as I was making the transition from FFXI to WoW (about 2.5 years ago), more sophisticated attacks started showing up. These generally revolve around the use of keyloggers, to caputre the player's login details. The really big one that I remember, which hit a lot of FFXI players I knew at the time, involved allakhazam - a previously legitimate community site - which accidentally carried a number of malware-laden banner ads. By all accounts, the creeps behind it harvested logins for a few weeks, then struck quickly at as many accounts as they could before people wised up.
Over in World of Warcraft, the situation is even worse, largely due to the requirement that anybody who wants to play in any kind of vaguely serious raid requires 3r
Slashdot Mirror
Depends. I've done a good few external hires over the last few years, and while I'd never actively sift on the basis of e-mail addresses, there's no denying that an outlandish one can make an impact (and probably not the sort you wan to make).
I wouldn't particularly care about an AOL address. I don't honestly think that any address which conforms to the firstname.lastname@isp.com format (or any other varation including initials, dots etc) will set any alarm bells ringing for any sensible employer.
However, there is one type of e-mail address that does cause me concern. This is the obvious "naughty" one. I've actually seen job applications listing addresses like partychick33@... or drunkenmick@... These do not give a good impression. Is it unfair? Probably. After all, there's nothing wrong with going out and enjoying yourself. However, using that e-mail address for a job application does imply that you have a problem when dealing with boundaries.
To sum up; a potential employer is far more likely to be put off by what comes before the @ in your e-mail address than by what comes afterwards.
One thing I've noticed over the years is that factors such as dress code can have a significant impact on how people behave around the office. You take people who aren't used to wearing suits and make them do so, and you pull them out of their comfort zone to a degree. You put them on edge and send the message that things are different. This is vital if you're going to start breaking down bad workplace habits. Of course, there's a lot more to it than this, but a competent manager tackling a really broken workplace will know that the first job is to destroy the old culture, so that something more functional can be put on top of it.
You can't keep people on edge like this for too long; it has its own negative impacts upon performance. The trick is to use it as a short(ish), sharp shock. Once the day job is actually getting done properly, you can let things relax a bit again, and let people get back into their comfort zone. If you've done things properly, their comfort zone should now overlap with where the organisation actually needs them to be if they're to be productive. For example, it might now involve a bit of web-browsing first thing in the morning and an hour or so over lunch, whereas before it was taking up the entire day.
Methods like this are almost always unpopular and never result in the manager being liked. In fact, what often happens is that when the manager does start to slack up, the employees read it as a victory. You'll also get a good few employees who will just up and quit (though these are often the ones you'd want to lose anyway). But a competent manager (and yes, not every manager is competent) will know when he can chalk his actions up as a success.
That an organisation is big and hasn't failed yet is absolutely no guarantee that it isn't headed to fail now. I think that is one lesson we can absolutely take from the events we've seen in the wider economy over the last two years.
More broadly, it's by no means uncommon for organisations to lose focus as they grow, and for the original culture that made them successful to be diluted, or for smaller sub-cultures of failure to develop within parts of the organisation. I don't work for Microsoft (or indeed in the tech sector), but I've certainly heard many plausible accounts from people who do of this happening there.
And is it the submitter's problem? Yes. Of course, as a junior member of the team, he's not going to be the one who fixes it, but if the area he works in has a bad reputation within his company, or if his company has a bad reputation within the marketplace, then this can and will impact on his career prospects further down the line (as well as making him more vulnerable to layoffs). He needs exercise some good old-fashioned self-interest and weigh up his options. If he can't give up the income and has absolutely no other job prospects (such as an internal move to a better part of the company, or even a move to another company in the same field), then he may just need to hang in there for the time being and protect his own reputation as well as he's able to. Sometimes, being the only useful, helpful person in a team full of idiots can actually be beneficial, in the short-term. You might stand out more to colleagues elsewhere, who may try to poach you. The most important thing is to avoid falling into the same bad habits. It's generally a good idea in the workplace to try to fit in and get along with your immediate co-workers. However, there will always be some cultures and cliques where thee last thing you want to do is fit in (a lesson most people should have learned by high school). Tolerating some unpleasantness now may turn out to be worth it further down the road.
I'm not necessarily sure you read the full question. From the information contained there, it sounds like the big part of the problem is that the work isn't getting done; at least not to the quality that's needed.
I've been in a similar situation once before, early in my career, when I came as a relatively junior member of staff into a part of my organisation that had a really toxic, time-wasting culture. And despite what you may think, ill-disciplined working habits were a big part of that. I understand that people like to structure their days differently and that properly managed, this can make people more productive, but there needs to be some form of control exercised to prevent people from crossing the line into taking liberties. By all means, show toleration of slightly eccentric working patterns, people listening to ipods at their desk and a moderate amount of personal web-browsing, provided it doesn't start to eat up most of the day. But if the job isn't getting done, remedial action is needed to break the culture. And yes, in the short term, this might involve imposing a draconian regime (with rigidly set hours, dress code etc), which can be relaxed slightly back to a more normal level once it's safe to do so.
The problem is that if you have come in at a junior level, there's almost nothing you can do, particularly if your management chain are complicit in the culture. Personally, when I found myself in that situation, I transferred sidewards to another part of the organisation after a few months; I didn't want my reputation to be tarnished, and was worried that the lack of self-discipline shown by my co-workers would rub off on me. About 18 months later, the head of the division in question was replaced, with his replacement apparently having a specific brief to clean the area up. So yes, working hours were suddenly enforced more rigidly than anywhere else in the organisation, dress codes were were imposed, music at desks was banned, all personal web-browsing was blocked and so on. About half of the staff resigned in protest (we weren't in a recession at the time), while the other half knuckled down and became more productive. 18 months after that, the area looked more or less like the rest of the wider organisation.
The message: sometimes "I work differently to other people" is just code for "I don't want to do any work". Learn to recognise the difference and stamp ruthlessly on the latter. Also, understand that if not monitored, the former can develop into the latter over time.
Oh, and working the odd late night or weekend can, in the right situation, do your career a power of good. Try not to make it a habit, but a willingness to do so when actually required will usually be noticed.
Because they're fun and engaging.
There's nothing wrong with actually playing through a linear story that somebody else has written. If I get a bit of freedom to shape things to my own tastes along the way, then great, but I'm not going to demand even that.
The simple fact is that some people are better storytellers than others. And the people that the likes of Bioware and Square-Enix get to write their stories are generally far better than the average Joe. Everybody likes to think that they could write or narrate a wonderfully engaging story if they ever had the time and/or inspiration, but in reality, it's a gift possessed by only a few.
Dragon Age's story isn't great; if they were going to ditch the whole AD&D/Forgotten Realms setting that was at the heart of the Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights games, then I would have hoped that they would actually do something a bit more... well... different with it. Compared to... say... Mass Effect, it felt very much like they were playing it safe and sticking to a well-trodden path with Dragon Age. If that's what they're doing, then a part of me would actually have preferred to have a more familiar Forgotten Realms setting (not least because of the potential for Miniature Giant Space Hamsters). If, on the other hand, they were trying to produce a genuinely different "dark" fantasy story, then I'm sorry, but The Witcher got there first and did it better.
That said, it's still a very good game with a very engaging story and fun play mechanics. The setting they've created is one I'd be happy to return to in the future.
Everything about the Gamecube felt cheap and nasty (ok, yes, I'll grant it was slightly cheaper than the opposition). The worst bit was the controller, with its ugly, unintuitive, oddly-shaped face buttons, lack of a proper second analogue stick and, if you had the wired version, a cable that was far too short to reach the average sofa. The ridiculous little flippy lid for the optical drive was also horrid (and I saw more than one snapped off by an over-enthusiastic kiddy).
Video gaming in general could have used more prominence in TFA. After all, it's undoubtedly a part of the tech sector. Thinking of 10 examples off the top of my head, in no particular order...
- The Red Ring of Death: as you say, should absolutely have been in there. Cost-cutting decisions lead to major customer frustrations. The issue is then compounded by lies, obfuscation and, once the problem is acknowledged, a massively slow response.
- The Gamecube: everything about it. A nasty, tacky piece of junk with no games worth looking at that was put out with the intention of being a serious contender and rightly consigned to third place.
- Hot Coffee: the video game industry unintentionally playing right into the hands of the "think of the children" brigade. While there's an absolutely legitimate battle to be fought against censorship of video-games, this was a huge tactical mis-step.
- The Sixaxis controller: rather than going for the obvious solution of competing with the Wii by having more and better games (which would hardly be difficult), Sony decided to rush some desperately inadequate motion sensing tech into the PS3's controller. When it was announced, everybody assumed it would be a nasty hack. When the PS3 was launched, everybody could see it really was a nasty hack. Fortunately, most PS3 developers now ignore it.
- The original Xbox360 controller: just... what? I'd love to know who decided this was a good idea. Microsoft actually issued a better, second-generation controller pretty quickly. But not before they'd become a laughing stock.
- Spore: the hype, the underwhelming game, the hideously broken DRM, the Amazon review campaign. Never has a game promised so much and delivered so little.
- Nintendo's online strategy: yeah, still waiting on this one... maybe they have one... somewhere...
- The PSP Go: Sony put out a revision of their middlingly-successful handheld whose only claim to fame is that it has less functionality than the original version. And then they wonder why it doesn't take off...
- The DSi: Nintendo demonstrate that they have the ethics of a rabid pitbull by putting out the first handheld for many years to incorporate region locking.
- The Phantom: ok, I know that some of the events surrounding Infinium Labs are touched upon briefly in TFA, but I think the Phantom should have taken pride of place in the line-up of tech-fiascos over the last decade.
WoW did this.
The Yogg-Saron fight (yes, it's heavily Cthulhu-mythos inspired), at the end of Ulduar, requires the raid members to monitor their own sanity level. If it hits 0, the player goes insane and attacks their allies (a condition that lasts until the end of the fight, even if the player is killed and resurrected).
Sanity is reduced by a number of factors, including semi-random attacks that Yogg-Saron can do on the raid, remaining in proximity to his brain for too long, or facing him while he howls during the final phase of the fight.
If players have the assistance of the Keeper Freya during the fight, she will provide sanctuary pools in the corners of the encounter room that players can run to if they need to regenerate sanity. In the fight's harder modes, Freya's assistance may not be there and players have to be very careful not to take unnecessary sanity damage.
It's not a brilliant implementation, I grant you. It would have been awesome if they could have made it so that as your sanity level gets lower, you start seeing odd visual effects, or your controls become less responsive. But it has, at least, been tried.
The second AvP movie is actually pretty good if you fast-forward past all the scenes with bad, hammy acting and stilted, unconvincing dialogue. In other words, any of the scenes where the humans are the focus.
While I'm not a massive fan of how they chose to play the Predalien, the sequences with the Aliens over-running the town, the National Guard response being wiped out and so on are enjoyable. Not only that, but they're also surprisingly "hardcore", given that the first AvP movie tried to lock itself so firmly into a teen-friendly content level.
The biggest gripe I had with AvP2 was that the audience is clearly supposed to feel that the military are all nasty and naughty for nuking the town at the end. Frankly, from their point of view, with a city having been over-run so quickly and other containment methods having failed, dropping a nuke to limit the problem before it could spread further was absolutely the right and ethical decision.
The original AvP (in terms of PC fpses, I mean) was a pretty poor effort, yes. It suffered from having no real storyline to its (shockingly short) campaigns, and from the Alien and Predator campaigns being frustrating exercises in jump puzzles and "find the one piece of wall that's textured slightly differently, meaning you can break it".
I thought that despite running on what was a crummy engine even by the standards of the time, AvP2 was a good bit better. They pulled together a very solid and atmospheric Marine campaign for it, even if the Alien and Predator campaigns were still total rubbish. It did a lot of stuff right, though; creeping through a darkened colony as a Marine, while watching for the telltale pings on your motion tracker was really quite scary.
The upcoming game does have some potential, therefore, even if the previews haven't exactly been ecstatic. But what I really want is the (much delayed, possibly vaporware) "Aliens: Colonial Marines" squad-based shooter that's allegedly in the pipeline. Take the B-movie fodder Predator out of the picture, confine the game to the marine perspective and really focus on making the experience terrifying and, with a decent technology base, you could have a very effective game indeed.
At least we'd have an fps where the designers can feel free to stick crates all over the levels and not be criticised for lazy design choices.
Seconded, with a vengeance. I'm very glad that MMOs weren't around for most of my childhood and that when they appeared during my college days, I was sensible enough to know I needed to avoid them until I was in full-time paid employment.
I was always nerdy as a kid, but even then I spent around as much time on my bike as on my PC (all the better for out-running the swarm of wannabe-jocks chasing me throwing stones).
The computer games I played as a kid were addictive in their own way, but none of them had the utter timesink potential of a modern MMO.
I mostly enjoyed Mirror's Edge, though I acknowledge the issue you highlight. There were certain sequences where I could see what I had to do and it felt like I was doing it properly, but try as I might, Faith just WOULD NOT grab onto that ledge or pipe.
I had fun with the game in the end, despite a few niggles. My biggest frustration was that despite the apparently open cityscape you have to play with, a lot of the levels are actually very, very linear, with only 1 path you can follow. I think the game was good enough and novel to deserve a sequel, so hopefully these are issues they can work on for that.
This is often the way with games that try to be different; they have a good central idea, but the execution is flawed enough that they don't always get the feel right on the first go.
Yes, I've played it. It was basically the original game with a stupid plot. It's certainly not bad; the engine feels slick, the weapons are nicely modelled and the graphics and sound are pretty good (though the former still fall short of the standard set by Crysis more than 2 years ago).
But it's absolutely nothing special. The set-pieces are less impressive than the original's (there's certainly no counterpart to the infamous nuke sequence), the plot goes off the deep end into the kind of lunacy that even Metal Gear Solid probably wouldn't stoop to (which is a real atmosphere killer) and the singleplayer campain is devastatingly short.
It's a 7.5/10 sort of game. Maybe an 8/10 if you want to be kind. That's solid, but it's not spectacular.
Actually, the article is far less irritating than the summary had led me to believe. Yes, it points out 10 games that are not recommended for children and teens. But it isn't trying to get the games banned (the original commonsensemedia article actually points out that these are good games), just trying to help parents make informed decisions. This, I believe, is a good thing.
Moreover, the "suggested replacement" games aren't all of the "Barbie Horse Adventures" ilk. While a few made me raise an eyebrow, most of them are reasonable enough replacements.
Let's take a look at the list:
Assassin's Creed 2 replaced by Mirror's Edge: I haven't played AC2, but I would probably agree that the original AC is "not for kids". Mirror's Edge doesn't seem outlandish as a replacement; it's not some twee kiddy game and it does contain violence. It's just a bit less "in your face" with it. So no problems with this one.
Borderlands for Infamous: Ok, this one made me go "hmm". Borderlands has highly cartoonish violence, while Infamous is actually quite dark in its theme and has highly morally ambiguous characters. Weirdly, I think the game they've recommended is actually less suitable than the game they're replacing.
Brutal Legend for Ghostbusters: I'd have no problem with this, particularly as Ghostbusters is actually the better game provided you avoid the dismal PC version.
Call of Duty MW2 for Battlefield Bad Company 2: Fair enough. I believe a lot of PC gamers already made this switch due to the dedicated servers issue anyway. Both are respectable but unspectacular games, once you get past the hype.
Dead Space: Extraction for Deadly Creatures: I've not played Deadly Creatures, but I have played Extraction (which puts me in a small minority, judging by its dismal sales figures). While it's a "light gun" game, Extraction is absolutely and emphatically not for kids. It is dark, scary and gory.
Dragon Age: Origins for Braid: This one's deeply weird. Dragon Age isn't exactly your average hack-em-up arcade game. I suspect that any under-18s asking for Dragon Age and patient enough to stick with it past the first 10 minutes are probably mature enough to deal with it. And Braid as a replacement? A platform/puzzler as a replacement for an RPG? No, I don't think so. If I were to suggest a replacement, it would probably be Last Remnant, Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon, which are at least RPGs. Or get them into the whole retro thing with a copy of Baldur's Gate 2 - the themes are still as mature, but it's harmless if it's just little sprites, right? :)
GTA IV for Batman: Arkham Asylum: Again, the games aren't quite the same genre, so this is a tricky one. However, GTA is not for kids, end of story. The Batman game is awesome, and probably dark enough in its theme and style to satisfy most teenagers. So yes, you could do worse than this.
Demon's Souls for Uncharted 2: Yeah, no real problems with this. To be honest, I prefer Uncharted 2 as a game anyway (though this may put me in a minority).
Left 4 Dead 2 for Overlord 2: Another strange one. Overlord 2 is not an fps. Nor is it a particularly co-operative game. Nor is it fantastically good. Nor is it morally squeaky-clean (though the violence is cartoonish). I guess you could always try to track down the Australian version of L4D2.
GTA: Chinatown for C.O.P.: well, at least it's one sandbox game for another. The problem is that the reviews all seem to show that C.O.P. is basically rubbish. It's probably your best option while staying within the same genre on the same platform, but you can still expect a lot of disappointment on Christmas morning with this switch.
So yeah, at least some of the switches recommended are sensible, and this isn't a dreadful guide to parents who might not be massively savvy in these matters. On this basis, did the article summary really need to take the tone that it did?
I'm just waiting for the "school" maps to appear. This game has already had to be mutilated to make it onto the shelves in Australia. I think once the first screenshots of a zombie-killing spree in some kid's high-school appear, that should probably do for it in the rest of the world as well.
I know when I was a teenager, I developed a Doom map based on my school. Didn't think much of it at the time (this was pre-Columbine) - it was just a fun setting while I taught myself level design - but I know that if I'd done that (and been found out) today, I'd at best have found myself in compulsory counselling and at worst in jail.
You have a point, but I think there's a little more to it than this. I suspect that they're speeding up the levelling process because they're going to add another five levels onto the top come the next expansion. My impression has always been that Blizzard have a definitive idea how long it should take a player to go from level 1 to the maximum level, and that they try to keep this constant through expansions. So, not long after the release of Burning Crusade, we had a nerf to the 1-60 levelling process (with 60-70 still being a substantial gap). Then 60-70 was nerfed shortly before Lich King hit. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the 70-80 xp grind had a nerf shortly before or after 4.0.
I've played Dirt 2 on the PS3, back when it was released a few months ago. I can see why the graphical improvements in the PC version might attract attention, but I have another question...
Does DX11 have any kind of feature that lets you take that complete and utter XTREME moron who does the voice-overs for the game and kill him slowly in imaginative ways? Any enjoyment in the game was killed for me by XTREME SURFER DUDE RAD TO THE MAX guy screaming his head off every time I tried to do anything. Seriously... who actually likes that kind of thing? Who can even actually tolerate it, in a game that doesn't give you any option to turn it off.
I'll stick with Forza 3 for my racing game goodness for the time being. Yes, it has the strange old-bloke with the curious mid-Atlantic accent doing voice work on the menus, but at least he's not being all XTREME and you can shut him up if you want to.
And yet I've played plenty of games which I would recognise as over-hyped, but which I have also enjoyed. I mention Modern Warfare 2 in my post. Is it overhyped? Yes, wildly so. It's not even as good as its own prequel, due to a ludicrous plot which really shatters any suspension of disbelief. However, it's a lot of fun to play; the combat feels slick and precise, the weapons are well implemented and the scenarios provide a good degree of variety. So it's a very good game - but not one that's going to redefine the genre in the way the original Modern Warfare did. Judged in a vacuum, as I say, I think it's an 8/10 kind of game.
And that's what a review should tell me. I want an honest assessment of the game, not histrionics about whether or not it lives up to the hype. The issue for me is, when I load the game up, am I going to enjoy it. It is perfectly possible to feel disappointed about a failure to live up to hype and still be a perfectly good experience.
It's fine for the text of a review to acknowledge hype and expectations, but I don't think they have any place in an objective scoring system, or even in a broader assessment of quality. After all, it's perfectly possible that I've actually missed a good chunk of the hype anyway.
The problem is that you need a scale that encompasses everything from "hideously bad" to "sublimely good", and very, very few commercially released games these days actually fall into the former category. Sure, the usual anti-modern-gaming crowd here on slashdot likes to decry the latest overhyped blockbuster as "worst game ever", but in reality, pretty much every such game is "mediocre" at worst, and actually reasonably good fun if considered in isolation, on its own merits. It's not really fair to score a game down for being overhyped - only to review the game in front of you.
Genuinely bad games with genuinely low review scores do exist. Even if you look at IGN, who are generally felt to "score high", you can use the review filters to find plenty of games with scores of 3.0/10 or less. These are mostly clustered on the PC, Wii, PS2 and handhelds - platforms with relatively low development costs prone to low-quality shovelware (which is by no means to decry all titles for those systems as low quality). However, the development costs for high-end games these days are such that you really can't afford to let an absolute stinker go out the door. This does make the odd rare exception that slips through, such as Lair, all the more deliciously awful.
So yes, it's not a big conspiracy that you tend to get a clustering of review scores around the 7-9/10 mark. It's just a fair reflection of the overall quality of most modern big-budget games. Reader reviews, on the other hand, often tend to be callibrated to a less objective scale, and to take more account of factors such as the degree to which the game had been hyped (and to the kind of emotive factors that the console wars stir up), leading to a wider variation.
You do, of course, get the occasional game where the "professional" review scores seem a bit out of whack. Modern Warfare 2 felt like a bit of an example of this to me; I could have seen it as an 8/10 kind of game, but I suspect that review scores above that are being hype driven.
Ultimately, I find that the best way to use reviews isn't to go off meta-critic rankings or composite scores. It's to find a review site whose tastes generally accord with my own and use this as a rough guide. I already know in advance broadly which games I'm interested in. If I read the review, I use it as a guide-post and look for issues mentioned that are of particular importance to me. If a review flags that a game has an overly restrictive save-system, then I won't buy it even if the score is good, because I hate repeating content I've already passed unnecessarily. If a review criticises and marks down a game for not including online play, however, I won't let that deter me; it's not usually a huge issue for me, as aside from WoW, I'm primarily a singleplayer gamer.
This is only true for the start of a console cycle. By this point, Sony and MS should at worst be breaking even on console sales and probably having a bit of profit. Component prices fall dramatically over the course of the typical 5-year console cycle.
You've missed the point about Dead Space: Extraction.
It's not a port of Dead Space, nor is it a Wii-ed down version of it. It's an entirely separate title, which serves as a prequel to the original game, running parallel to the Downfall animated movie. It had reviews ranging from the good to the excellent. I bought it despite owning Dead Space for the 360 because I enjoyed Dead Space and wanted to play another game in the same universe. I was initially skeptical of the rail-shooter concept, but half an hour's play was enough to convince me.
We know that sequels and spin-offs work, as evidenced by the industry's love affair with them. If people really do own multiple platforms, then it would be an obvious decision for Wii-owners who had played the original elsewhere to pick up Extraction. However, they didn't? Why? Hard to say, but it's likely at least in part because of the expectation Nintendo have allowed to develop that Wii games are low-quality shovelware titles.
Plenty of games which are genuinely mature, as opposed to "hyper-violent" don't make it to the Wii at all. There's a great example out there this week; Dragon Age: Origins. Spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, fantasy-themed RPG, contains "adult" content, but not "hyper violence". It's on the PS3. It's on the Xbox360. It's on the PC. But not on the Wii. Why? Chances are because the Wii's hardware just can't handle a genuinely ambitious game like this. There are plenty of other examples around; Batman: Arkham Asylum, Call of Duty - Modern Warfare 2, Operation Flashpoint - Dragon Rising.
All are big releases, which contain adult themes without being gore-fests, and which are on any other serious platform. None of them are on the Wii. And I'll say it again; the problem is the Wii's hardware.
This is exactly what I predicted at the start of this console cycle. The Wii has amazing initial sales, due to the novelty factor of the controller and a media which is generally feeling disillusioned with Sony and MS and therefore happy to unquestioningly do most of Nintendo's hype for them. Then the same old Nintendo factor of "no decent games outside of a few first-party titles (which are themselves only popular with a certain niche)" kicks in, the limitations of the controller become more widely known, the system's hardware starts to seem more and more pathetic compared to its competitors and sales (particularly of non-bundled games) fall off a cliff.
The sad thing is that the few mature games for the Wii that are actually any good are being hit by the fallout from this. Dead Space: Extraction is an excellent game - a thinking man's rail shooter (which I would previously have believed to be a contradiction in terms) and it deserved to do well. Instead, if wikipedia is to be believed, it sold less than 9,300 copies at launch, despite a positive critical reception. I'm sure EA looked at that, compared it with the sales of the original Dead Space on PC, PS3 and Xbox360, and thought "remind me why we even bother with this Wii rubbish?". Had they published the game on the other platforms, with standard controller or mouse controls, it's entirely plausible that they might have managed sales figures 20 times higher (using the original Dead Space as a comparison).
Things will only get worse now that development for the 360 and PS3 is in a fairly mature state, with newer games taking full advantage of the system's capabilities. By contrast, I think the Wii is being harmed by the unexpected longevity of the PS2. With big cross-platform titles (eg. Force Unleashed, but there are plenty of other examples), developers already have to develop entirely separate versions of the game (with the differences often going far beyond just graphics). Often, there will be one broad version for the "proper" gaming platforms; the PC, PS3 and Xbox360. Meanwhile, a cutdown version is developed, for the "lesser" consoles. It makes sense to release for the PS2 and the Wii, due to their huge installed bases, but it doesn't make sense to develop a separate version of the game for each. So the Wii ends up getting a lot of titles which are just direct PS2 ports with a bit of lazy motion sensing tacked on, even though its (admittedly poor) hardware is capable of significantly better. So while PS3 and 360 titles released today generally look better than those from the system's launch, a lot of Wii titles actually look worse. This really won't be helping.
As an MMO player, I've seen a dramatic rise in the frequency and sophistication of tricks designed to get access to players' accounts over the last few years.
As a bit of background for those who don't play these games; even though most games technically forbid it, the trade of in-game currency for real-life money is big business. A quick look around a few of the well-known sites that are used for this purpose show that, for example, 1,000 World of Warcraft gold will sell for around $10.
Now, those selling the in-game currency need to obtain it from somewhere to sell it. Traditionally, they've obtained their money via "legitimate" means, usually a sweat shop full of part-time students working shifts to keep characters earning money through fairly mechanical processes 24/7/365. I say this is legitimate, but this is only true in so far as it does not violate any game mechanics; it can have a fairly crippling effect on a game's economy and can make life much worse for genuine players. In some cases, this was augmented by 3rd-party automation software (usually called bots) which took away the requirement to have somebody at each keyboard and allowed one person to supervise a dozen or so clients.
However, in recent times, many of those involved in the in-game currency trade have decided to cut out this part of their operations. Rather than earning the cash on their own characters, they rather steal it from the accounts of other players, by gaining access to their account and stripping it bare. This has the twin benefits of not requiring anything like the human effort that earning the money directly via in-game means has and of not driving inflation (reducing the real-world value of the game's currency - unless the game's operator has a policy of refunding stolen currency).
Now, back when this first started to appear, I was still playing Final Fantasy XI, a game whose highly sophisticated and relatively unrestrained in-game economy rendered it highly vulnerable to the advances of real-currency traders (WoW, by comparison, has a pretty basic economy where players never really need much gold to get by, rendering it less fertile ground). Back then, there were three basic ways to lose your account. The first was greed; you sign up for a scam power-levelling service, or a currency trade website that requires you to register your account details. Surprise, surprise, the nice people offering this wonderful service really just empty out your account. Obviously, only the truly atupid are going to fall for something like this (though I can name one or two who did).
The second method relied on fear; you'd get an official looking e-mail, purporting to be from Square-Enix (or Blizzard - this still happens in WoW), claiming that your account was believed to be inactive/in violation or something and you needed to reply to them, stating all of your account details, to prevent it from being locked. Again, fairly basic stuff, though with a convincing enoug e-mail, you will probably always get a few suckers.
The third was pure bad-luck and not really relevant to the currency trade. I remember two FFXI players who broke up with their real-life partners and forgot that said partner had their login details - which they promptly used to trash their account.
However, just as I was making the transition from FFXI to WoW (about 2.5 years ago), more sophisticated attacks started showing up. These generally revolve around the use of keyloggers, to caputre the player's login details. The really big one that I remember, which hit a lot of FFXI players I knew at the time, involved allakhazam - a previously legitimate community site - which accidentally carried a number of malware-laden banner ads. By all accounts, the creeps behind it harvested logins for a few weeks, then struck quickly at as many accounts as they could before people wised up.
Over in World of Warcraft, the situation is even worse, largely due to the requirement that anybody who wants to play in any kind of vaguely serious raid requires 3r