There's already an MMOFPS: Sony's Planetside. But unfortunately it's not that good of a game as the tedium/fun is directly connected to how many people are on (as in the game is not fun unless others are on: there's no NPCs in the world whatsoever).
Maybe Nintendo has some sort of intelligent website creator that checks for the plugin and if it doesn't find it automatically loads a non-flash site meaning the end-user doesn't need to bother with plugins and such.
Of course they have, where else do you think they got the idea from?
But, the sci-fi hibernation often times is cryogenic. That means all of your body's cells slow down and muscle atrophy isn't a problem. If you don't have that and attempt a sort of chemically induced hibernation where your body's metabolism slows waaaaay down, then you run the risk of atrophy as well as any other type of inaction-caused disease.
All Nintendo does is gaming. Their entire life is based off of how well their gaming consoles do. You point out that Microsoft and Sony both have other departments that handle their guaranteed company profit, so both can do whatever they want and if it ends up bombing they can patch that wound up with wads of cash from their other divisions. Nintendo can't do that, so they need to make sure the DS is consumer friendly. Nintendo can't afford to pull a Virtual Boy now when they're in a tug of awar with Microsoft while trying to catch up to Sony. Nintendo could afford to pull a Virtual Boy when they actually did it because it was at the console turn before the N64 when they were still the kings of gaming. When their only competition was Sega, a gaming only company as you imply, they could ignore the end user and not care about how crappy their commercials were. Word of mouth and the idea that all of gaming could be termed as "playing Nintendo" took care of that for them.
Now, when more and more people term gaming as "playing Playstation," the Big N's in a tight spot. And you wonder why, even after pointing out how much of a tight spot they're in in your very own post, Nintendo doesn't act like the stuck up, my-way-or-the-highway jackasses they did in the pre-N64 era? They've evolved into a new company and they know now they need to market better, and if by collaborating with people who essentially are saying "Nintendo, your Gamecube internet connectability is abysmal, and we've done something about it" means they're "teaming up with shady tool developers" then Valve buying up the Counterstrike guys could be termed as "hiring some shady mod programmers" even though the decision is the number one reason why Valve is so filthy rich today.
You do realize America did business with both the Nazis and the soon-to-be Allies before we joined the war, right? We made a bundle on selling weapons and ammo to both sides: it's part of the reason why the Great Depression ended.
A lot of posts around here are running around acting as if each individual Microsoft program has a problem specific to that program which is entirely false. Just like with the libPNG exploit, this exploits a graphics library: GDI+. It's the library's fault why this affects so many programs: they used the library in all of them.
The movie, while interesting, suffers from "education monotone." Remember all of those videos in high school with guys explaining physics/chemistry/sex with the most monotone of voices? Same with this. I did get a kick out of the pictures they used for Nolan Bushnell and Konrad Zuse, though.
But do all bug you daily with a pop-up box that disrupts any full-screen program currently running (and crashes a few), pointing out your subscription is up, or not allowing you to turn the box off or extend the amount of time it appears by? No, really, do they? I've only used Norton, so tell me if McAfee or Panda does that.
No one should be using Norton anyway. I jumped Norton's ship (after using it for free for a month) after discovering you need to pay for updates past that point and it annoys you daily about it (and even offers a "remind me after..." prompt where the only choice is 1 day). The only way to stop the annoyance is to uninstall the program or buy a year subscription. I did what they didn't want me to do. Take that Symantec. Hello Grisoft.
The money isn't "real" because a company controls the world it's in. The company going under and/or cancelling the game would make the virtual money you've collected worth nothing: but if it's considered real money then you could theoretically sue the company for the real world equivalent of virtual money you had when the game stopped. Then also, you'd have to put virtual currency on your taxes and likewise the company running the game would have to send out a tax form (An MMOW-2?) to each and every player. PKing and stealing in games would be literally illegal and therefore to be safe companies would have to strip out any PvP or thieving-style content. And finally, since the company is quite literally creating money from nowhere, the economy could theoretically be ruined by MMOs money creation systems and so MMOs would be put under harsh scrutiny by the government to ensure they don't tilt the economic balance too far either way.
Virtual money is not real money for those reasons. It's a virtual object--property--that you can sell for any price you can get for it. Heck, using your "converting from one to the other" theory for currency, someone could probably sell air to another person and argue that since it's worth money air's a form of currency. Don't argue that virtual money's a form of currency, argue that it's PROPERTY. Property can be created from scratch: currency cannot.
That's exactly what today's Windows Update did was force that regedit onto everyone. I never did that regedit before and I just checked and it was already done, so Microsoft had to have done it for me.
They did do that with the MegaMan Collection: They set it up so MegaMan 8 graphics could be turned on for any game in the series pre-MM8. So you have a choice of the original graphics with original music or MM8 graphics with remixed music.
Like IGN, Gamespot, and Gamespy don't already get under the table offers to give games better ratings. Read those sites once in a while and you'll realize bias that strong is most likely a paid bias.
Xenosaga is a game that's done this very thing. Square owns Xenogears, so Monolith named their game Xenosaga. No copyright infringement suits or or anything even though everyone knows its relation to Xenogears.
Everything the patent claims is Nintendo's except for maybe the GB/GBC emulators. The date Nintendo announced (announced, not released) the GBA was August 24th, 2000. The patent was filed on November 28, 2000 (assuming that the filing date is when it went into effect). Now, I've never made an emulator before, but I'd think it's hard to make one for a system that wasn't even out yet. I'm guessing (assuming, even) Nintendo probably made some form of GBA emulator to allow development for the GBA. Also, the GBA uses an emulator to allow GB/GBC games to play (in addition to having the chipset inside, I believe) and so it was the first handheld system to play GBA, GBC, and GB games all in one. Now, if there was a handheld system that could emulate the GB/GBC before that time, Nintendo still holds rights to the GBA because when the patent was filed they were the only ones who had their hands on them (excluding developers). Remember, this is a patent for emulation on handheld systems, so PC emulators don't count. Only emulators that could run on mobile devices. Can anyone dredge one up?
Yes, all console makers (Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft all do, at least) require a royalty to be paid to make a game on their console. This is part of the reason why multiplatform games don't happen as often as one might think they would. This is also why PC games can sell less copies and be okay because their profit margins are higher because they don't have to pay royalties to anyone.
Listen. It's not fair use if you download a ROM off of the internet because it's not a backup YOU made. If you make the backup for private use and don't share it with anyone, then it's fine, but if you make a backup and post it on the internet, then that's obviously not for private use and thusly is why Nintendo's going after them.
Personally my ethics with emulation is that if the system is still available to be bought at most places then emulating it is very bad. Anything else I don't mind. Here's my reasoning. You probably would have to go through fifty hoops and pay out of the ass to get an old game that will probably be used so the company that made it isn't making any money off of you anyway. But with current games and consoles the companies haven't fully milked the games for their worth yet so emulation eats into their market, even if a large number of emulator players are downloading and playing ROMs because they can't afford the real game there's still some that are doing it to avoid paying any money. Since these are video games that take anywhere from 6 months to 3 years to make (when was the last time it took a musician 6 months to make an entire album?) for a a week , I'm more inclined to side with the "big bad" company rather than the emulators on this one.
Also, from what I can read (and I'm not a lawyer, of course) the patent is for "software implementation of a handheld video game hardware platform," which means to me that the emulation is for handheld hardware meant for gaming first and foremost. Don't go all "Nintendo's gone too far! They could possibly stop emulation of [blah] on [blah]!" because unless the first one reads "Game Boy" something, Nintendo probably couldn't give a shit. Nintendo's not SCO. Period.
I just wish Nintendo added in an extra pamphlet with every game they sold telling you that games can cause seizures.
Oh, what's that you say? They do!? Why, that's absurd, a parent not reading the warnings before putting the game in front of their kid! Tsk.
The mass market doesn't appreciate Nintendo trying to keep the gaming market from digging itself into a rut. It's going to be the crash of the 80's all over again if someone powerful doesn't step up and try to stop it. Nintendo was there back then, Sony and Microsoft weren't, so I trust Nintendo's word on a stagnating gaming economy over the other two. GameCube-GBA connectivity is something only they can do right now (and you know Sony's going to be all over PSP-PS3 connectivity) and if it's used right it can produce innovative games (and unfortunately, it's not used well at all).
Also Nintendo, by making the GameCube use a proprietary DVD format, made it so DVD movie playback was impossible on the system. This decision also made pirating software on the system hard, and so any sales they've lost in hardware have probably been more than made up in with the sales of software because there aren't many (if any) pirated games. Plus, the GameCube was making a general profit with each console sold when it was $200, a smaller one with $150, slipped into the negatives when Nintendo started including a game with the system at $150, and is still in the negatives with $99 without a game. So, for most of the system's lifetime it's been making a profit with every console sold.
Another point is that by ignoring the internet scene, Nintendo lets Microsoft and Sony run out and get riddled by bullets while they sit back, watch, and take notes. Hopefully Nintendo will glue together the best pieces of Microsoft and Sony's online strategies into a kickass network for their next console.
One thing Nintendo needs to do is stop letting Yamauchi come back from the grave and babble about their business. It's just making fodder for the [crappy] news sites to toss out as "Nintendo's dying! Ahh!" news. He retired, stop letting him talk.
Another thing, although not truly a bad thing, is that they're Japanese centric. While this has its good sides, it alienates them from the rest of the world. But, since it is a 100+ year old company, Japanese pride is definitely going to be a major part of any decision. Hopefully (yet another hopefully...) they will strike a balance between their focus on Japan and their focus on the rest of the world and maybe rope in some more American 3rd parties. Most 3rd parties don't want to compete against Nintendo's games, so they just focus on the other consoles.
So, Nintendo has a lot of work to do in the next generation to get the people who left them to return, both 3rd parties and customers. They definitely won't pull a Sega in the next generation, though.
I personally think that if Nintendo added some cheap flash memory to their next system to act as a place to save games (but not to replace memory cards, as people will want to carry saves to other places and carry GC saves over for the backwards compatibility) they could possibly get a jump on Sony and/or Microsoft. I don't remember off the top of my head exactly what the size of the GameCube's memory cards are (4 megabits for 59 and 16 megabits for 251? Is that right?), but since my 8MB PS2 card is very empty still after many games and my GC 251 memory card is 3/4 full with about 10 different games worth of data or so, a 16MB flash drive should be plenty for everyone in the next wave and relatively cheap to include.
You are right, I shouldn't post on Slashdot right after getting home from a New Years Party. All of your corrections to my post are indeed right and I'm sorry for the misinformation of my original post. (I guess for some reason, in my New Year's Eve state I thought 2^32/2 was 2^16. Damn.)
Slashdot Mirror
There's already an MMOFPS: Sony's Planetside. But unfortunately it's not that good of a game as the tedium/fun is directly connected to how many people are on (as in the game is not fun unless others are on: there's no NPCs in the world whatsoever).
Maybe Nintendo has some sort of intelligent website creator that checks for the plugin and if it doesn't find it automatically loads a non-flash site meaning the end-user doesn't need to bother with plugins and such.
Of course they have, where else do you think they got the idea from? But, the sci-fi hibernation often times is cryogenic. That means all of your body's cells slow down and muscle atrophy isn't a problem. If you don't have that and attempt a sort of chemically induced hibernation where your body's metabolism slows waaaaay down, then you run the risk of atrophy as well as any other type of inaction-caused disease.
All Nintendo does is gaming. Their entire life is based off of how well their gaming consoles do. You point out that Microsoft and Sony both have other departments that handle their guaranteed company profit, so both can do whatever they want and if it ends up bombing they can patch that wound up with wads of cash from their other divisions. Nintendo can't do that, so they need to make sure the DS is consumer friendly. Nintendo can't afford to pull a Virtual Boy now when they're in a tug of awar with Microsoft while trying to catch up to Sony. Nintendo could afford to pull a Virtual Boy when they actually did it because it was at the console turn before the N64 when they were still the kings of gaming. When their only competition was Sega, a gaming only company as you imply, they could ignore the end user and not care about how crappy their commercials were. Word of mouth and the idea that all of gaming could be termed as "playing Nintendo" took care of that for them.
Now, when more and more people term gaming as "playing Playstation," the Big N's in a tight spot. And you wonder why, even after pointing out how much of a tight spot they're in in your very own post, Nintendo doesn't act like the stuck up, my-way-or-the-highway jackasses they did in the pre-N64 era? They've evolved into a new company and they know now they need to market better, and if by collaborating with people who essentially are saying "Nintendo, your Gamecube internet connectability is abysmal, and we've done something about it" means they're "teaming up with shady tool developers" then Valve buying up the Counterstrike guys could be termed as "hiring some shady mod programmers" even though the decision is the number one reason why Valve is so filthy rich today.
You do realize America did business with both the Nazis and the soon-to-be Allies before we joined the war, right? We made a bundle on selling weapons and ammo to both sides: it's part of the reason why the Great Depression ended.
A lot of posts around here are running around acting as if each individual Microsoft program has a problem specific to that program which is entirely false. Just like with the libPNG exploit, this exploits a graphics library: GDI+. It's the library's fault why this affects so many programs: they used the library in all of them.
The movie, while interesting, suffers from "education monotone." Remember all of those videos in high school with guys explaining physics/chemistry/sex with the most monotone of voices? Same with this. I did get a kick out of the pictures they used for Nolan Bushnell and Konrad Zuse, though.
The first thing I thought of saying when I saw this was the parent. Good thing I read the thread first before posting.
But do all bug you daily with a pop-up box that disrupts any full-screen program currently running (and crashes a few), pointing out your subscription is up, or not allowing you to turn the box off or extend the amount of time it appears by? No, really, do they? I've only used Norton, so tell me if McAfee or Panda does that.
No one should be using Norton anyway. I jumped Norton's ship (after using it for free for a month) after discovering you need to pay for updates past that point and it annoys you daily about it (and even offers a "remind me after..." prompt where the only choice is 1 day). The only way to stop the annoyance is to uninstall the program or buy a year subscription. I did what they didn't want me to do. Take that Symantec. Hello Grisoft.
The money isn't "real" because a company controls the world it's in. The company going under and/or cancelling the game would make the virtual money you've collected worth nothing: but if it's considered real money then you could theoretically sue the company for the real world equivalent of virtual money you had when the game stopped. Then also, you'd have to put virtual currency on your taxes and likewise the company running the game would have to send out a tax form (An MMOW-2?) to each and every player. PKing and stealing in games would be literally illegal and therefore to be safe companies would have to strip out any PvP or thieving-style content. And finally, since the company is quite literally creating money from nowhere, the economy could theoretically be ruined by MMOs money creation systems and so MMOs would be put under harsh scrutiny by the government to ensure they don't tilt the economic balance too far either way.
Virtual money is not real money for those reasons. It's a virtual object--property--that you can sell for any price you can get for it. Heck, using your "converting from one to the other" theory for currency, someone could probably sell air to another person and argue that since it's worth money air's a form of currency. Don't argue that virtual money's a form of currency, argue that it's PROPERTY. Property can be created from scratch: currency cannot.
That's exactly what today's Windows Update did was force that regedit onto everyone. I never did that regedit before and I just checked and it was already done, so Microsoft had to have done it for me.
They did do that with the MegaMan Collection: They set it up so MegaMan 8 graphics could be turned on for any game in the series pre-MM8. So you have a choice of the original graphics with original music or MM8 graphics with remixed music.
And you thought cam whores were all over before, now imagine Xbox-Cam Whores!
Like IGN, Gamespot, and Gamespy don't already get under the table offers to give games better ratings. Read those sites once in a while and you'll realize bias that strong is most likely a paid bias.
Last time I checked most open source projects don't pay well. ;)
Xenosaga is a game that's done this very thing. Square owns Xenogears, so Monolith named their game Xenosaga. No copyright infringement suits or or anything even though everyone knows its relation to Xenogears.
That wasn't a pre-release, that was the final version of Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness. (That's not a joke, it's the truth.)
Everything the patent claims is Nintendo's except for maybe the GB/GBC emulators. The date Nintendo announced (announced, not released) the GBA was August 24th, 2000. The patent was filed on November 28, 2000 (assuming that the filing date is when it went into effect). Now, I've never made an emulator before, but I'd think it's hard to make one for a system that wasn't even out yet. I'm guessing (assuming, even) Nintendo probably made some form of GBA emulator to allow development for the GBA. Also, the GBA uses an emulator to allow GB/GBC games to play (in addition to having the chipset inside, I believe) and so it was the first handheld system to play GBA, GBC, and GB games all in one. Now, if there was a handheld system that could emulate the GB/GBC before that time, Nintendo still holds rights to the GBA because when the patent was filed they were the only ones who had their hands on them (excluding developers). Remember, this is a patent for emulation on handheld systems, so PC emulators don't count. Only emulators that could run on mobile devices. Can anyone dredge one up?
Yes, all console makers (Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft all do, at least) require a royalty to be paid to make a game on their console. This is part of the reason why multiplatform games don't happen as often as one might think they would. This is also why PC games can sell less copies and be okay because their profit margins are higher because they don't have to pay royalties to anyone.
Listen. It's not fair use if you download a ROM off of the internet because it's not a backup YOU made. If you make the backup for private use and don't share it with anyone, then it's fine, but if you make a backup and post it on the internet, then that's obviously not for private use and thusly is why Nintendo's going after them.
Personally my ethics with emulation is that if the system is still available to be bought at most places then emulating it is very bad. Anything else I don't mind. Here's my reasoning. You probably would have to go through fifty hoops and pay out of the ass to get an old game that will probably be used so the company that made it isn't making any money off of you anyway. But with current games and consoles the companies haven't fully milked the games for their worth yet so emulation eats into their market, even if a large number of emulator players are downloading and playing ROMs because they can't afford the real game there's still some that are doing it to avoid paying any money. Since these are video games that take anywhere from 6 months to 3 years to make (when was the last time it took a musician 6 months to make an entire album?) for a a week , I'm more inclined to side with the "big bad" company rather than the emulators on this one.
Also, from what I can read (and I'm not a lawyer, of course) the patent is for "software implementation of a handheld video game hardware platform," which means to me that the emulation is for handheld hardware meant for gaming first and foremost. Don't go all "Nintendo's gone too far! They could possibly stop emulation of [blah] on [blah]!" because unless the first one reads "Game Boy" something, Nintendo probably couldn't give a shit. Nintendo's not SCO. Period.
Flame me away, whoo!
I just wish Nintendo added in an extra pamphlet with every game they sold telling you that games can cause seizures. Oh, what's that you say? They do!? Why, that's absurd, a parent not reading the warnings before putting the game in front of their kid! Tsk.
The mass market doesn't appreciate Nintendo trying to keep the gaming market from digging itself into a rut. It's going to be the crash of the 80's all over again if someone powerful doesn't step up and try to stop it. Nintendo was there back then, Sony and Microsoft weren't, so I trust Nintendo's word on a stagnating gaming economy over the other two. GameCube-GBA connectivity is something only they can do right now (and you know Sony's going to be all over PSP-PS3 connectivity) and if it's used right it can produce innovative games (and unfortunately, it's not used well at all).
Also Nintendo, by making the GameCube use a proprietary DVD format, made it so DVD movie playback was impossible on the system. This decision also made pirating software on the system hard, and so any sales they've lost in hardware have probably been more than made up in with the sales of software because there aren't many (if any) pirated games. Plus, the GameCube was making a general profit with each console sold when it was $200, a smaller one with $150, slipped into the negatives when Nintendo started including a game with the system at $150, and is still in the negatives with $99 without a game. So, for most of the system's lifetime it's been making a profit with every console sold.
Another point is that by ignoring the internet scene, Nintendo lets Microsoft and Sony run out and get riddled by bullets while they sit back, watch, and take notes. Hopefully Nintendo will glue together the best pieces of Microsoft and Sony's online strategies into a kickass network for their next console.
One thing Nintendo needs to do is stop letting Yamauchi come back from the grave and babble about their business. It's just making fodder for the [crappy] news sites to toss out as "Nintendo's dying! Ahh!" news. He retired, stop letting him talk.
Another thing, although not truly a bad thing, is that they're Japanese centric. While this has its good sides, it alienates them from the rest of the world. But, since it is a 100+ year old company, Japanese pride is definitely going to be a major part of any decision. Hopefully (yet another hopefully...) they will strike a balance between their focus on Japan and their focus on the rest of the world and maybe rope in some more American 3rd parties. Most 3rd parties don't want to compete against Nintendo's games, so they just focus on the other consoles.
So, Nintendo has a lot of work to do in the next generation to get the people who left them to return, both 3rd parties and customers. They definitely won't pull a Sega in the next generation, though.
I personally think that if Nintendo added some cheap flash memory to their next system to act as a place to save games (but not to replace memory cards, as people will want to carry saves to other places and carry GC saves over for the backwards compatibility) they could possibly get a jump on Sony and/or Microsoft. I don't remember off the top of my head exactly what the size of the GameCube's memory cards are (4 megabits for 59 and 16 megabits for 251? Is that right?), but since my 8MB PS2 card is very empty still after many games and my GC 251 memory card is 3/4 full with about 10 different games worth of data or so, a 16MB flash drive should be plenty for everyone in the next wave and relatively cheap to include.
You are right, I shouldn't post on Slashdot right after getting home from a New Years Party. All of your corrections to my post are indeed right and I'm sorry for the misinformation of my original post. (I guess for some reason, in my New Year's Eve state I thought 2^32/2 was 2^16. Damn.)