"Isn't good enough for you? The prize for abolishing disease, starvation, education and humanity isn't worthy?
come on"
If rich people were truly serious about abolishing that, they wouldn't live on anything more then $100,000 until these goals were accomplished.
"Honestly, it is getting to the point where I ask, when are people going to take responsibility for their actions - that is the cornerstone of being an adult, making your choices and accepting the consequences of those choices."
Personally I think immaturity is a sign of stress and helplessness people feel under modern capitalism, it's becoming harder and harder to make a living. If you want to blame something for the state of society, the economy and how businesses use people is the first place to look.
"Is $20 for 5 hours really that bad?"
Yes $20 is really that bad, most gamers play more then one game, now imagine you have 30 games with 30 short episode "1"'s. This is why consoles are superior, you can RENT and test and play a game right through on $5 and not have to purchase it to get the same experience.
Social networking sites = free dating/hookup sites, places to hookup with people close to you. It's that simple. That and some people just want to make more friends and connections with hot girls, and or other well connected people.
The early nintendo power magazines were good during the NES era, gamepro and EGM took over during the SNES/Genesis/Arcade/Playstation, but I stopped buying mags just before the playstation was released, they all lost most of their value as the internet became the hub for video game info.
"leaving is an ideal, and not so much a viable option."
Exactly, people who say that 'you're free to get another job' have never been poor. Especially if you can't even afford a car.
Yes, one word: Transaction fees. Many banks are starting to nickle and dime you on you debit, credit card, and other "plastic" or "cashless" methods under the guise you are "paying for the convenience". For some people making withdrawal in cash saves them a hell of a lot of money over the long term, believe me. Not only that, when you're poor many banks right now are robbing people blind by setting up intermediaries and double charging for money transfers (i.e. RBC for example. It's digusting, right now many banks are getting away with screwing people.
"Expect a massive migration away from compressed formats"
I really doubt anyone really wants to migrate away from compressed formats. Compression has way too many benefits, they are here to stay. You can make lossless compressed files, if anything more storage will make migration to lossless commpression formats more appealing but it will never get users to migrate away from compressed formats.
"Nintendo may popularise many things, but don't make the mistake of thinking they come up with them all... "
Lets not forget people come up with the same ideas and combinations of ideas and inventions, so it is ok to say that a company did genuinely think it up itself. You can arrive at the same conclusions/ideas independently and have done all the work and been original.
I think video games may never break out of their mold personally. They've gone more mainstream but they aren't totally mainstream yet. Not only that but FF6 requires *hours* of time investment compared to 1-2 hour movies (3 hours being the maximum usually). Games require much more time then I think most adults will have available to dedicate to them and this may mean that many *great games* will never get recognized simply due to being enormous time drains for the adult population that works.
A frequent commentary I keep hearing from many responsible older hardcore gamers, is that they have a stack of games they haven't even touched or played through yet because of other demands on their time. I think this is a problem most people don't think about when they say video games are the 'next great entertainent medium', they are in a way but they also are not. The time games require means that you become exclusive to certain games for a while and can't play as many games as you'd like, as opposed to movies. Think about how many movies you could watch in a year (working a full time job, having a social life, etc) versus how many games you could play all the way through.
Personally I think FF IV (FF2 US) and FF6 (FF3 US) are the pinnacles of the FF series, with FF7 right up there as well. I think FF has been really going downhill since FF9 / FFX, FF9 was cool but felt weird (just a very strange world) and FFX they gutted the RPG and stat attribute systems almost completely and the monsters and battles were painfully lackluster.
"Without levels, or "goals" if you like, gaining skills and whatnot starts to lose its value. then why is sangband so much fun?"
yeah but I didn't just mean levels, I meant interactivity, fun, adding levels adds goals as well. I used to play BBS text games so I know that other games can be fun, but don't take my comments too far out of their context.
"You played Diablo 2 to get items and skills? I played it to kill Diablo and play out the story. Then replayed it to try out some of the other character types. Items and skills were just things that helped me to my goal of beating Diablo. If anything, I give more props to someone who manages to do it with lower levels and fewer items than with more levels/items."
I didn't mean to say story isn't important but I'm talking about a game in terms of replayability, i.e. it remains fun long after you've finished the game or tried different characters.
"Try games from this side of the pond, too. You must play Planescape: Torment. I think it's the best story-focussed RPG ever. Yes, even trouncing Final Fantasy 6.
What can change the nature of a man? You'll find out if you play the game."
I agree it was a good and amazing experience but there were parts that dragged.
I think the problem with torment was that it was too heavily focused on dialog there wasn't much of a game there and they seemed to be churning out baldurs gates clones by the dozen back then, also your main character could never really die. It's too bad it bombed in terms of sales, it was well made.
"What is fundemantally wrong with a lot of MMORPG games is that people seem to be fixated with getting levels. "
Actually that's what's right about most fantasy-esque MMO's. Almost every RPG imaginable has some sort of leveling system. Without levels, or "goals" if you like, gaining skills and whatnot starts to lose its value. That and developers need a way from everyone speeding through their content in a month while keeping the game interesting, if you can finish the entire game in a month you don't have to subscribe any longer.
Take Guild wars for example where they only have 20 levels, it's free but the same problem occured: Once I maxed out my characters level there was no need for me to keep fighting, and since in Guild wars the treasure and item system is very limited, there was no booty incentive either. After the initial first week or two I haven't touched the game since.
In games like Diablo 2, while diablo can get boring, they ensure that you're always working towards some goal, be it level or items by keeping certain things or items "just beyond your reach", the randomly generated items make your goal of attaining 'an uber rare' fun while you're in the game. The fact is a game without goals is dead in the water.
I think it bears repeating though: Any game or action overplayed or played over and over again loses its value, only certain games don't lose their replayability because they were designed with that in mind (See games like Civilization 4 for instance) or Fire Emblem path of radiance.
"Yes this show would never win an emmy, but it was pretty cool how it tied into what was my favorite game at the time. The question I have is why Nintendo does not bring Zelda back."
While I agree a Zelda show would be cool, I don't even think Nintendo knows how to do Zelda right... just look at windwaker... th Now I dont' want to knock Zelda WW too badly but I found the best versions of Zelda were the Zelda #2, Zelda #3, and Ocarina of time, the rest were so-so by my standards.
I think the Zelda the did produce while not bad did capture link better then Nintendo did. He has brown hair as opposed to blonde, and he's not drawn like an anime character like he is in the Zelda manuals.
I still think with a little work the Link in Zelda from The Super Mario Super show is better for a more adult looking link (Since link while funny and cool sounding in Ocarina of time, sounds way more like a pansy then the Voice for Link in the Zelda, from SueprMario Supershow), if someone could develop a character with the right voice and right look then it would be good.
"It seems to me that the game industry doesn't have the diversity that the movie industry does. Movies come in all shapes and sizes and feature a variety of subject matters.
90% of these big budget games are sci-fi or fantasy or something with loads of automatic weapons. Think how boring movies would get if that ratio was the same. Where are the games that could be compared to indie films? The game industry will never develop if they don't try and broaden their scope.
Sorry, did I sound like a Nintendo rep there? I'm not I swear. "
I think the problem is the _cost_ to develop graphics for most games have gone way too high and expectations are unreal.
I think graphics advancement helped kill creativity, in the 8-bit and 16-bit era's before the advent of FPS and final fantasy 7, the focus was more on the games mechanics, how it plays and the rules, then simply on the graphics. Think about the style of gaming "invented" by wolf3d / doom, that kind of originality is missing, finding new ways to play and experience games has totally been brushed under the rug. I think game developers are partially to blame though, they want to reduce the costs of development by reusing art and code, the problem with this is enormous though because ever game is about the same thing at it's fundamentals, I think they should focus more on making interactive fun then on rehashing the same game with a different coat of paint.
Take need for speed most wanted for instance: Same type of arcade racing game we've all been playing for years, but the innovation (cop chases, etc) was really good, but it probably took a huge chunk of development time to get working right, although the end results are stellar, I think innovation game developent costs + large time to develop fun new things = lack of innovation.
The fundamental problem though is that it takes too much money to develop games versus how much the would sell, I think the problem is in the past the industry could "Seed" growth by starding off with original titles that would not gather a lot of sales but who's sales would eventually *grow* through word of mouth. Also I think a lot of more LOYAL niche (lower sales but loyal fans) markets got left behind in the 16-bit era with the move to 32-bit consoles.
I think things like outsourcing and global capitalism are responsible for the "decline", think about it, if you're a kid growing up today you have to think about whether or not going into debt is going to pay off for the field you get into and by the time you graduate and how stable that job market will be for the future, not only that but you have to worry about companies outsourcing your whitecollar job to some high skill+ low wage country and then you're stuck with a crapload of debt if you can't find a job. I don't envy kids living today in first world countries because places like india and china simply outcompete them on $ per worker.
Why would I want to go to university or study hard to be a science/math nerd if the company is going to move or eventually outsouce and higher low wage workers or farm them in on visa's?
"I wouldn't stake millions of pounds on someones common sense without something more to back it up. "
You'd have to be a fuckwit not to know that people take time to become fully alert after waking up, every person on the planet experiences this, they all have to sleep.
Every person that's experienced sleep deprivation also has the same effects, the longer you go without sleep the worse you perform. You don't need study to verify what all observers can witness and experience as fact.
You're missing the point of minimum wage completely, maybe you need a history lesson of why it was implemented in the firstplace. Go backwards in time as capitalism had less regulation and you see infinitely more squalor, you also forget that minimum wage becomes the new "unencumbered price floor" it doesn't matter if the lowest wage is a fraction of a cent or some specificied amount capitalist markets automatically adjust as if it was unencumbered, you are also forgetting that global markets are unencumbered, you can buy many more engineers for the same money in india or china as you can in the US, this is a problem because the standards of living decrease for the population that had worked so many years to acquire them creating massive disincentive as you reduce wages.
Current market systems are hopelessly defective and ruin lives, the historical forces of markets in the times we live in are ruining countless lives all over the world by displacement, no wealth is truly created, it is onl displaced, as other countries grow richer someone else is having their standard of living slashed.
"Why is a global free market for goods considered good, but that for labor bad by so many inhabitants of "developed" nations? "
The cost of living is not the same globally, what one person pays in US or Canada for an education, someone pays even less in another country. The fact is wage and currency disparities create these impossible situations where one person is paying many times more just to live then another person in another country.
"Minimum wage laws impose artificial restrictions on the economy. Like any price floor, they encourage oversupply and drive down demand, which results in unemployment. For a simple thought experiment to demonstrate this point, consider the following:"
You're forgetting the fact that the minimum wage or the "price floor" is necessary, because the price of certain necessary products cannot decrease towards infinity like wage labour can, when people cannot afford to clothing, food, electricity, and things like housing you're going to have an overthrowing of the government or the entire economic system.
There are many products in the world that cannot be made cheaper simply by making peoples labour cheaper. Much of the savings of cheaper labour is NOT passed onto society at large it's passed onto private rich families and wealthy individuals.
Next and modern businesses are not rational, let me repeat that for you, businesses cannot be expected to behave rationally. Their desire is profit, think about CEO pay raises over the last 20 years compared to the wages of the jobs at the bottom of the economic pile.
"Why not take things at face value rather than first assessing whether or not the writer shares your political convictions?"
Cato is a mouthpiece for the defects of capitalism, check out some of their bullshit research on poverty. No one really likes to acknowledge that capitalism couldn't function without one class exploiting another by lowering the value of their wages to levels that they cannot in any security on. Some research may be intriguing but until they focus on the defects of capitalism, most of what they say is a waste, we need to develop better economic systems, you cannot try to fix the status quo, when the status quo is fundamentally flawed in the inherent contradictions of profits versus low wages (and hence reduced standard of living).
"Which begs the question: Do we really want to buy a mouse named after someone who loses games? "
Everyone loses games, especially in FPS games, no one wins consistently 100% of the time. When I used to play quake and other FPS games on the ladders you had to practice all the f'n time to keep up and people traded wins back and forth when you're very competitive you'll win and lose because the competition is so good.
"And the situation is exactly the same with game review magazines."
Not all mags were total mouthpieces, I think the best gaming rags (when they first started out) were GamePro and Electronic gaming monthly, I used to get stuff like Nintendo power for a while mostly for info on new games/codes and stuff. In the earlier EGM and Gamepro days they'd trash games pretty handily and hand out shit scores.
Slashdot Mirror
"Isn't good enough for you? The prize for abolishing disease, starvation, education and humanity isn't worthy? come on" If rich people were truly serious about abolishing that, they wouldn't live on anything more then $100,000 until these goals were accomplished.
"Honestly, it is getting to the point where I ask, when are people going to take responsibility for their actions - that is the cornerstone of being an adult, making your choices and accepting the consequences of those choices."
Personally I think immaturity is a sign of stress and helplessness people feel under modern capitalism, it's becoming harder and harder to make a living. If you want to blame something for the state of society, the economy and how businesses use people is the first place to look.
"Is $20 for 5 hours really that bad?" Yes $20 is really that bad, most gamers play more then one game, now imagine you have 30 games with 30 short episode "1"'s. This is why consoles are superior, you can RENT and test and play a game right through on $5 and not have to purchase it to get the same experience.
Social networking sites = free dating/hookup sites, places to hookup with people close to you. It's that simple. That and some people just want to make more friends and connections with hot girls, and or other well connected people.
The early nintendo power magazines were good during the NES era, gamepro and EGM took over during the SNES/Genesis/Arcade/Playstation, but I stopped buying mags just before the playstation was released, they all lost most of their value as the internet became the hub for video game info.
"leaving is an ideal, and not so much a viable option." Exactly, people who say that 'you're free to get another job' have never been poor. Especially if you can't even afford a car.
"Do you actually use cash in this day and age?"
Yes, one word: Transaction fees. Many banks are starting to nickle and dime you on you debit, credit card, and other "plastic" or "cashless" methods under the guise you are "paying for the convenience". For some people making withdrawal in cash saves them a hell of a lot of money over the long term, believe me. Not only that, when you're poor many banks right now are robbing people blind by setting up intermediaries and double charging for money transfers (i.e. RBC for example. It's digusting, right now many banks are getting away with screwing people.
"Expect a massive migration away from compressed formats" I really doubt anyone really wants to migrate away from compressed formats. Compression has way too many benefits, they are here to stay. You can make lossless compressed files, if anything more storage will make migration to lossless commpression formats more appealing but it will never get users to migrate away from compressed formats.
"Nintendo may popularise many things, but don't make the mistake of thinking they come up with them all... "
/ideas independently and have done all the work and been original.
Lets not forget people come up with the same ideas and combinations of ideas and inventions, so it is ok to say that a company did genuinely think it up itself. You can arrive at the same conclusions
I think video games may never break out of their mold personally. They've gone more mainstream but they aren't totally mainstream yet. Not only that but FF6 requires *hours* of time investment compared to 1-2 hour movies (3 hours being the maximum usually). Games require much more time then I think most adults will have available to dedicate to them and this may mean that many *great games* will never get recognized simply due to being enormous time drains for the adult population that works.
A frequent commentary I keep hearing from many responsible older hardcore gamers, is that they have a stack of games they haven't even touched or played through yet because of other demands on their time. I think this is a problem most people don't think about when they say video games are the 'next great entertainent medium', they are in a way but they also are not. The time games require means that you become exclusive to certain games for a while and can't play as many games as you'd like, as opposed to movies. Think about how many movies you could watch in a year (working a full time job, having a social life, etc) versus how many games you could play all the way through.
Personally I think FF IV (FF2 US) and FF6 (FF3 US) are the pinnacles of the FF series, with FF7 right up there as well. I think FF has been really going downhill since FF9 / FFX, FF9 was cool but felt weird (just a very strange world) and FFX they gutted the RPG and stat attribute systems almost completely and the monsters and battles were painfully lackluster.
"Without levels, or "goals" if you like, gaining skills and whatnot starts to lose its value. then why is sangband so much fun?"
yeah but I didn't just mean levels, I meant interactivity, fun, adding levels adds goals as well. I used to play BBS text games so I know that other games can be fun, but don't take my comments too far out of their context.
"You played Diablo 2 to get items and skills? I played it to kill Diablo and play out the story. Then replayed it to try out some of the other character types. Items and skills were just things that helped me to my goal of beating Diablo. If anything, I give more props to someone who manages to do it with lower levels and fewer items than with more levels/items."
I didn't mean to say story isn't important but I'm talking about a game in terms of replayability, i.e. it remains fun long after you've finished the game or tried different characters.
"Try games from this side of the pond, too. You must play Planescape: Torment. I think it's the best story-focussed RPG ever. Yes, even trouncing Final Fantasy 6.
What can change the nature of a man? You'll find out if you play the game."
I agree it was a good and amazing experience but there were parts that dragged.
I think the problem with torment was that it was too heavily focused on dialog there wasn't much of a game there and they seemed to be churning out baldurs gates clones by the dozen back then, also your main character could never really die. It's too bad it bombed in terms of sales, it was well made.
"What is fundemantally wrong with a lot of MMORPG games is that people seem to be fixated with getting levels. "
Actually that's what's right about most fantasy-esque MMO's. Almost every RPG imaginable has some sort of leveling system. Without levels, or "goals" if you like, gaining skills and whatnot starts to lose its value. That and developers need a way from everyone speeding through their content in a month while keeping the game interesting, if you can finish the entire game in a month you don't have to subscribe any longer.
Take Guild wars for example where they only have 20 levels, it's free but the same problem occured: Once I maxed out my characters level there was no need for me to keep fighting, and since in Guild wars the treasure and item system is very limited, there was no booty incentive either. After the initial first week or two I haven't touched the game since.
In games like Diablo 2, while diablo can get boring, they ensure that you're always working towards some goal, be it level or items by keeping certain things or items "just beyond your reach", the randomly generated items make your goal of attaining 'an uber rare' fun while you're in the game. The fact is a game without goals is dead in the water.
I think it bears repeating though: Any game or action overplayed or played over and over again loses its value, only certain games don't lose their replayability because they were designed with that in mind (See games like Civilization 4 for instance) or Fire Emblem path of radiance.
"Yes this show would never win an emmy, but it was pretty cool how it tied into what was my favorite game at the time. The question I have is why Nintendo does not bring Zelda back." While I agree a Zelda show would be cool, I don't even think Nintendo knows how to do Zelda right... just look at windwaker... th Now I dont' want to knock Zelda WW too badly but I found the best versions of Zelda were the Zelda #2, Zelda #3, and Ocarina of time, the rest were so-so by my standards. I think the Zelda the did produce while not bad did capture link better then Nintendo did. He has brown hair as opposed to blonde, and he's not drawn like an anime character like he is in the Zelda manuals. I still think with a little work the Link in Zelda from The Super Mario Super show is better for a more adult looking link (Since link while funny and cool sounding in Ocarina of time, sounds way more like a pansy then the Voice for Link in the Zelda, from SueprMario Supershow), if someone could develop a character with the right voice and right look then it would be good.
"It seems to me that the game industry doesn't have the diversity that the movie industry does. Movies come in all shapes and sizes and feature a variety of subject matters.
90% of these big budget games are sci-fi or fantasy or something with loads of automatic weapons. Think how boring movies would get if that ratio was the same. Where are the games that could be compared to indie films? The game industry will never develop if they don't try and broaden their scope.
Sorry, did I sound like a Nintendo rep there? I'm not I swear. "
I think the problem is the _cost_ to develop graphics for most games have gone way too high and expectations are unreal.
I think graphics advancement helped kill creativity, in the 8-bit and 16-bit era's before the advent of FPS and final fantasy 7, the focus was more on the games mechanics, how it plays and the rules, then simply on the graphics. Think about the style of gaming "invented" by wolf3d / doom, that kind of originality is missing, finding new ways to play and experience games has totally been brushed under the rug. I think game developers are partially to blame though, they want to reduce the costs of development by reusing art and code, the problem with this is enormous though because
ever game is about the same thing at it's fundamentals, I think they should focus more on making interactive fun then on rehashing the same game with a different coat of paint.
Take need for speed most wanted for instance: Same type of arcade racing game we've all been playing for years, but the innovation (cop chases, etc) was really good, but it probably took a huge chunk of development time to get working right, although the end results are stellar, I think innovation game developent costs + large time to develop fun new things = lack of innovation.
The fundamental problem though is that it takes too much money to develop games versus how much the would sell, I think the problem is in the past the industry could "Seed" growth by starding off with original titles that would not gather a lot of sales but who's sales would eventually *grow* through word of mouth. Also I think a lot of more LOYAL niche (lower sales but loyal fans) markets got left behind in the 16-bit era with the move to 32-bit consoles.
I think things like outsourcing and global capitalism are responsible for the "decline", think about it, if you're a kid growing up today you have to think about whether or not going into debt is going to pay off for the field you get into and by the time you graduate and how stable that job market will be for the future, not only that but you have to worry about companies outsourcing your whitecollar job to some high skill+ low wage country and then you're stuck with a crapload of debt if you can't find a job. I don't envy kids living today in first world countries because places like india and china simply outcompete them on $ per worker.
Why would I want to go to university or study hard to be a science/math nerd if the company is going to move or eventually outsouce and higher low wage workers or farm them in on visa's?
"And now people are having trouble with their own native language when they graduate from college..."
This is a side effect of specialization and overloading kids, everyone has a natural limit to how much the can learn or cope with.
"I wouldn't stake millions of pounds on someones common sense without something more to back it up. "
You'd have to be a fuckwit not to know that people take time to become fully alert after waking up, every person on the planet experiences this, they all have to sleep.
Every person that's experienced sleep deprivation also has the same effects, the longer you go without sleep the worse you perform. You don't need study to verify what all observers can witness and experience as fact.
You're missing the point of minimum wage completely, maybe you need a history lesson of why it was implemented in the firstplace. Go backwards in time as capitalism had less regulation and you see infinitely more squalor, you also forget that minimum wage becomes the new "unencumbered price floor" it doesn't matter if the lowest wage is a fraction of a cent or some specificied amount capitalist markets automatically adjust as if it was unencumbered, you are also forgetting that global markets are unencumbered, you can buy many more engineers for the same money in india or china as you can in the US, this is a problem because the standards of living decrease for the population that had worked so many years to acquire them creating massive disincentive as you reduce wages.
Current market systems are hopelessly defective and ruin lives, the historical forces of markets in the times we live in are ruining countless lives all over the world by displacement, no wealth is truly created, it is onl displaced, as other countries grow richer someone else is having their standard of living slashed.
"Why is a global free market for goods considered good, but that for labor bad by so many inhabitants of "developed" nations? "
The cost of living is not the same globally, what one person pays in US or Canada for an education, someone pays even less in another country. The fact is wage and currency disparities create these impossible situations where one person is paying many times more just to live then another person in another country.
"Minimum wage laws impose artificial restrictions on the economy. Like any price floor, they encourage oversupply and drive down demand, which results in unemployment. For a simple thought experiment to demonstrate this point, consider the following:"
You're forgetting the fact that the minimum wage or the "price floor" is necessary, because the price of certain necessary products cannot decrease towards infinity like wage labour can, when people cannot afford to clothing, food, electricity, and things like housing you're going to have an overthrowing of the government or the entire economic system.
There are many products in the world that cannot be made cheaper simply by making peoples labour cheaper. Much of the savings of cheaper labour is NOT passed onto society at large it's passed onto private rich families and wealthy individuals.
Next and modern businesses are not rational, let me repeat that for you, businesses cannot be expected to behave rationally. Their desire is profit, think about CEO pay raises over the last 20 years compared to the wages of the jobs at the bottom of the economic pile.
"Why not take things at face value rather than first assessing whether or not the writer shares your political convictions?"
Cato is a mouthpiece for the defects of capitalism, check out some of their bullshit research on poverty. No one really likes to acknowledge that capitalism couldn't function without one class exploiting another by lowering the value of their wages to levels that they cannot in any security on. Some research may be intriguing but until they focus on the defects of capitalism, most of what they say is a waste, we need to develop better economic systems, you cannot try to fix the status quo, when the status quo is fundamentally flawed in the inherent contradictions of profits versus low wages (and hence reduced standard of living).
"Which begs the question: Do we really want to buy a mouse named after someone who loses games? "
Everyone loses games, especially in FPS games, no one wins consistently 100% of the time. When I used to play quake and other FPS games on the ladders you had to practice all the f'n time to keep up and people traded wins back and forth when you're very competitive you'll win and lose because the competition is so good.
"And the situation is exactly the same with game review magazines."
Not all mags were total mouthpieces, I think the best gaming rags (when they first started out) were GamePro and Electronic gaming monthly, I used to get stuff like Nintendo power for a while mostly for info on new games/codes and stuff. In the earlier EGM and Gamepro days they'd trash games pretty handily and hand out shit scores.