We can go on and on about wind power, or nuclear, or solar or whatever. So far, for all the wind power we can generate (and I've been to altamont - I've seen the towers) we have yet to have a windmill make a windmill. Because it can't. Energy is not materials, and technology is not energy. We have yet to see a set of solar panels build another set of solar panels.
I note that you have conveniently left out nuclear energy in your examples.
It's just that facts are facts. You can't live outside the laws of thermodynamics. we found almost 3 trillion barrels of black gold and we've pissed it away on war machines, entertainment, building a gigantic population that is deeply into overshoot and is dependent on a resource about to vanish from the market.
The fact is that human beings are resourceful creatures. Oil may for most intents and purposes run out, but people will find alternatives. Almost all the points you have rely on the proposition that we will never find a source of energy as rich and abundant as oil was in the 1920s. Yet the simple fact is that for most of humanity in the 1920s, oil was not a very useful commodity. By your own argument, as oil became "thermodynamically scareser" , people used and benefited from it more and more. The "thermodynamic scarceness" of a commodity does not appear to correlate well with its utility in society.
I don't buy into the idea that humanity is going to run out of energy. It sounds an awful lot like the old Malthusian idea that we were all going to run out of food. We didn't. Back then, in the 1800s, the most important natural resource was land, because it was used to grow food that people needed to survive. Right now, the most important natural resource is oil, because people "need it to survive". Yet we've moved past that most basic of resources, food, being a bottleneck. I'd argue that we will move past oil.
We may be wasteful in our use of energy, but the fact is that we are getting more efficient every day. And the plain fact is that we already have alternatives to oil, nuclear being the first of many. And moreover, we are continually discovering new sources of energy. As oil becomes scarce, people will improvise and adapt, just as they did when land for food became scarce.
Can you name the one thing that revolutionized our ability to grow food(And no, the answer is not oil). You can't, and the reason is that our ability to grow food did not undergo a revolution. It underwent an evolution, just like our ability to procure energy will.
Humanity could well be wiped out by a lot of things, all of its own making. But and energy shortage is not one of them.
It sucks, but ya, people steal music on the internet, sales drop for the karaoke labels, we get less karaoke.
Having seen some of the karaoke subs produced by anime fansubbers, I'm willing to bet that fan made karaoke videos will produce higher quality content than any professional label. In the face of ubiquitous video editing software, your industry has simply succumbed to its own irrelevance.
The fact of the matter is that open source, at least in the eyes of European policy makers, is about kicking the Americans out of the software business in Europe.
Not really.
Outside of Ireland the the UK, Microsoft is simply not as big in Europe as it is in the states. Time and again I have heard the same story. Linux shops and linux systems are simply more common in mainland Europe than Microsoft systems. Which is not to say that Microsoft systems are not there. They're just not there as much.
A lot of this is down to language and cultural barriers. A lot. It is very difficult for American companies to adapt to business on the continent. Going from an environment of 50 states with the same currency, culture and language, to 25 states with different languages, cultures, currencies (less now), and even legal systems is difficult. In North America, it's common for a franchise to expand across the entire continent at a rapid pace. I doubt there even is a franchise across the entire continent of Europe.
But, it's also true that European governments do balk at the idea of an American operating system controlling all of their computers. The English and Irish do not really see this as a problem, but I'm sure that the French view the situation as an anathema. The same goes for products like Oracle. But this is not a new development. These problems have existed for years.
If you kill a fetus, you have killed the potentiality of a child. Don't mess around and try and justify it, that is what you are doing. What about contraception? What about celibacy? What abou homosexuality? What about staying in the basement and never meeting potential mates?
Are you saying that Slashdotters represent some kind of amoral, baby potentiality eating horde?
The PSP would be a fine console, if it did not have a shoddy control scheme. I mean really shoddy. It is literally physically painful to play certain PSP games for any period of time, which is a terrible pity as many would make fine PS2 titles. Instead they have been relegated to a device that sacrifices ergonomics for a few more millimeters of screen size.
I have never really understood portable gaming consoles. Playing a video game is not a passive experience like listening to music. It's something that is quite deeply engrossing and which does not fit into bus journeys, lunch breaks, or just before bedtime sessions. An average video game session probably clocks in at about two to three hours. A bit like reading a book.
And good video games, like good books, simply cannot be read in bits an pieces. You cannot finish War and Peace by five years of reading it over your ham sandwiches during lunch. If you do that you're missing the point. The same holds for Chains of Olympus or the like. Something like "Brain Training", sure, but that is not a title worth buying a console over.
I honestly don't know. Never heard of it before now, my Google Fu finds nothing in English. Indicating it is most likely propriety to Tancent QQ...
Proprietary? Perhaps. But I'd be willing to bet that the codebase is more than likely a fork of Apache or another open source web server, or else a "customised" version of IIS. Copyrights are not a Chinese concept, and I doubt that a site as large as QQ claims to be is running off a web server they rolled themselves.
The controls were horrid. It -acts- like FPS controls, except that you can only turn very slowly, you can't move and shoot, and basically just can't deal with everything that's going on without a lot of grief.
Resident Evil does not and never has played like an FPS. Ever. Resident Evil plays like a survival horror game. That's the whole point.
Resident Evil 5 uses the over the shoulder control scheme as RE 4 (In fact, the exact same control scheme, and indeed gameplay mechanics in every way shape and form(which is not in and of itself a bad thing)), and which can be seen in Dead Space. You have a limited field of vision as enemies slowly advance. The goal is to increase tension by restricting your off-screen view. You must plan the outcome of the encounter with much less than perfect awareness of your surroundings.
Survival horror games are all about management. Enemy management, ammo management, health management. The game is a long series of encounters in which trade offs must be made. Go for the critical hit but likely to miss headshot, or the more sure body shot. Take down nearby villager or more distant las plagos? Use shotgun/rifle/grenade ammo now, or save if for a more difficult encounter? Use green herb now or wait for a red herb booster? Run or shoot? This is the bread and butter gameplay of the genre. The control scheme is a part of that.
They are not about fragging enemies in quick succession, while circle strafing or bunny hopping around the room. I would go so far as to say that survival horror games are about as far away as you can get from FPS games without getting rid of guns altogether. The controls promote split second decisions that have serious consequences. Make the ewrong move, and you're in trouble. It encourages players to make serious tactical decisions.
Resident Evil is not an FPS. It is a survival horror game and plays as such. Long may the genre endure I say.
Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop what you are doing. You and others.
Every time you or anyone else adds pandering disclaimers like this you are undermining your own argument and are undeniably contributing to the problem of censorship in our society.
Why do you think the "Think of the Children" brigade have gotten so far? How do you think that these people have been so successful at slowly introducing censorship to the Internet, and into society in general? It is because they rely on fear and intimidation to produce capitulations such as your disclaimer. Without fear, they are powerless in the face of common sense.
No reasonable person need declare their revulsion. Yet everyone does so, because they are afraid of a pointing finger. Our society has been intimidated into censorship, and no one dares speak against it.
Your statement even went so far as to seek greater consensus "we can all agree", adding to the cycle of intimidation and fear. This is where giving in has gotten us, and there is no end in sight to the injustices that will be heaped on us all "In The Name Of The Children". No end. These people will not stop, ever.
Please do not capitulate in this way. There is no need to, despite how fearful you may be.
True, there are some horrendous images of children being abused out there....
I see this claim being made quite a lot. Can you give one shred of evidence that it is in any way true. Or at least, that these images exist in such dire volumes that we must all accept a near Soviet level of censorship on our internet connections?
One shred of good evidence. That's all I'm looking for. Anyone have some?
It's more than this now. Coming from console games and having seen a recent version of Steam, it immediately struck me what the originally pointless and useless Steam had evolved into.
Steam is the PC's PSN (Playstation Network). To a lesser degree, it's also the PC's Xbox Live, but since you don't have to pay for it and it uses P2P transfers a lot, I think PSN is the closer comparison. Watching it in action, complete with instant messaging, content delivery, DRM and marketplace it was immediately obvious to me as a console gamer that Steam was going to be the future of, and possible the savior of, the PC gaming industry.
In the beginning, Steam was nothing more than a DRM pain in the ass. But it's clear where Valve are going with this. They want to use Steam to turn your PC, or a segment of it, into a console. I imagine that sooner or later, PC games are going to have "Steam vX.X Compatible" stickers which guarantee that the game will work flawlessly on any system that rates at that level or above according to some Valve compatibility report built into the Steam system.
This will be a quantum leap for PC gaming.
Of course, DRM is still there. As I said, Valve's objective is to make your PC act like a console. Consoles are convenient, but they also have draconian DRM, so that publishers and developers can have piracy fears assuaged and stand to make more profit. This too will save PC gaming. But convenience for players, and security for developers is ultimately a win-win scenario for everybody.
People are leaving PC games behind because they don't want to spend 5 hours just trying to get the game to turn on. They don't want it to run like crap when it does. They don't want to upgrade their rigs, or update BIOS for every new major release. If Steam makes that go away, PC gaming will finally become a proper leisure activity.
Couple it all with digital distribution, greater use of gamepads and accessories, friends lists, messaging and free online play, and Steam will effectively become another player in the console market. This has the potential of saving PC gaming.
Watch for those Steam compatible stickers. If they appear, I may just consider installing Steam on my windows box. And that's saying an awful lot.
They probably will. And that's probably the whole point. But not for the reason you think.
Microsoft is a company in trouble. It's main product, its flagship OS, is not selling a well as it might hope. For the first time in years it is faced with real and credible competition from both Apple and Canonical. It needs to stay competitive and its current liaisons with media companies are not helping it do that.
Culture has changed. File sharing is a fact of life for the majority of PC users. People share their files, not only documents and music, but also video files. Apple and Canonical have responded by giving users better tools and greater freedom with their files. Microsoft has responded by locking its systems down, putting barriers in the way of people trying to us their PCs.
But culture has changed. People want to transfer files between the now multiple machines and accounts in their homes. They want to show other people the files on their drives. Microsoft is waking up to this fact, not because they want to, but because in this day and age and culture, they have to.
Microsoft, desperate to get itself into the living room, has been caving into the media industry for years now. But it's still not in the living room, aside from the Xbox console, which does not need the media industry to get there. How has Microsoft, as a company, made profit by pandering to these outside interests? In ten years of compromises, what benefit has Microsoft seen to the restrictions it has placed in its operating system? As open alternatives replace Microsoft products in this domain (Bitorrent/VLC/Boxee), it's clear that people are voting with their feet, and are choosing players and distribution methods that just do what they want them to do, without telling them that they can't.
The media companies will kick and buck and scream and roar over this. It's an anathema to their world view, where users have only limited, and in some cases temporary, control and access over their files. But Microsoft has probably stopped listening, despite their now large ties to the entertainment industry. Times are getting tough, and with alternatives out there, they cannot afford Windows to be laden down with artificial barriers introduced at the behest of third parties.
Killzone 2 is a good game, certainly above average. In the looks department it blows most games out of the water but the game play is generic FPS game play.
This line has been repeated, ad nauseum, by almost everyone who has encounted or reviewed the game. I'd like to take this to task.
Firstly, on the matter on graphics. Personally, while I understand that they are good, I do not agree that the graphics in Killzone 2 are as much above other games as they have been made out to be. While they are technically impressive, they do not completely eclipse the graphics that can be seen on many recent titles(Gears of War 2, Resident Evil 5, Uncharted). Having said that, this is just a personal opinion, from someone with poor vision.
Secondly, the criticism that the game is "generic" or "unoriginal" is in my opinion, totally unjustified. For those who have not played the demo, let me explain.
Killzone 2 features a cover system. Holding L2 while against cover will cause the player to "hug" the wall. At the point, the left stick can be used to shimmy along the cover, and to peek out over or to the side in order to shoot. The gameplay encourages this by making it clear that running out of cover and shooting is very likely to get you killed very quickly.
This is a new game mechanic that fairly radically changes the gameplay of the FPS. Like the shoulder view in Resident Evil 4, Z-targeting in the Ocarina of Time, and the cover system in Killswitch, this is potentially a genre changing innovation. Killzone 2 is essentially bringing the Killswitch cover system from third person shooters, into the first person shooter domain. If this is not innovation, then I'm not sure what qualifies.
Personally, having of late seen reviewers, time and again, criticize first person shooters for being "unoriginal" or "bland", I can only conclude that the review community has become jaded towards the genre. I think they are finally coming down off their shameless hype high preceding Halo 3 and have become cynical about the entire concept of FPS games. While the FPS market is admittedly saturated, there is still innovation in this area, even if reviewers are unable to see it.
The only downer I felt was that the original cast members from the first game, Templer, Lugar, etc., are not the lead characters in this sequel.
The first game was not a major title. It can safely be said that most people who buy Killzone 2 will probably have never played the first game. From a writers perspective, this is man from heaven. They don't have to worry about the dreaded continuity.
Sometimes I think video game writers and designers need to consider that games like Killzone should care more about what happens to these characters as they fight this war.
There is a place for story in a game. But what must be remembered is that it is not a very big place.
Story in a game is like filling between layers in a cake. Sure it's tasty, and you can get pretty creative there(jam!!), but filling and icing is not what a cake is all about. Cake is about cake. And a game is about the game. Sure, put some delicious jam and chocolate icing between those layers, but the cake needs to be there, delicious and moist, as the base on which everything rests. Gameplay has to me the main ingredient in any game.
It is not that shooter games do not need story. It is that they are better served with a bite sized story. Shooter players are not looking for a Stienbeck-esque affair, broad, intricate and layered with meaning. They just want to shoot something. Think about Half-life, and how essentially, over the course of the game, nothing happens. The player, as Freeman, embarks on a journey with no specific goal, overcomes a series of loosely, if at all, related obstacles, and at the end has not reached any real conclusion. This breaks every accepted storytelling rule since Homer drafted the Odyssey. But despite all that, players loved it!
The reality is, that most of the story of games, comes from the playing. Scripted events, while they are appreciated, are not as essential to the immersion of a players as the gameplay, or the level design, or the art design, or the obstacles that they will face. Most people will remember a boss that challenged them before they remember a dramatic cutscene, complete with orchestral score. This goes double for first person games, where the player is literally seeing through the eyes of the protagonist.
Shooters get a lot of flack over their perceived poor storylines and shallow characters. While some of these criticisms are valid, it is invalid to say that shooters, or any game, MUST have Oscar worthy drama at every second turn. The player has enough drama facing down the hordes that are set against them. If you add any more, then that jam is just going to be cloyingly sweet.
Your analogy fails. What if you had invested a huge amount of money and time hiring people to program and build the machine?
As I recall, I invested quite a bit of money in that calculator, and quite a bit of time learning its functionality. True, I didn't incorporate a company and hire people to do all this, but I don't see how that breaks the analogy above on how copyright infringement is not the same thing as theft.
For a user, there is no loss with a digital copy. For a creator, who depends on the creation for income, there is a loss of potential income.
Exactly. Nobody has lost anything of material value. Copyright infringement is not theft. Copyright infringement is just copyright infringement.
I had a calculator once. It was a nice little Sharp model. It had a button for pi, and could even do numerical integration. I was pretty happy with it. One day, it was stolen. This theft left me calculatorless for some time. It was somewhat of a blow.
However, if instead, someone had looked at my calculator, taken out a 3D tricorder-mapper-duplicator-thingamabob and had made an exact copy of my calculator, complete with all functionality, and left me with mine, I don't think I would have been quite as upset. In fact, I think you will agree that if I ran around waving my calculator in the air claiming that it had been robbed from me and that I was a victim of "theft", I would not get a lot of sympathy. Indeed, some might even say my terminology was not entirely correct. If all this happenned, I would still have my calculator, which after following the actual theft I most certainly do not.
Copyright Infringement is not theft. Nor is it stealing. It is Copyright Infringement. Thank you for your attention, and for your sympathy in the case of my missing digital companion.
For people who make a living out of creativity or in a creative business, there is scarcely anything more important than to have your rights protected by the law.
Absolutely! I mean it's either that or, horror of horrors, finding salaried employment.
I'm a mathematician. Many Slashdotters are programmers, engineers, etc. Isn't our work creative? How come we don;t get a lifetime +90 years gravy train? Is what we do simply not worth as much to society as movies about comic book superheroes and books about high school for witches and wizards? We don't seem to need protection, so why should artists?
Slashdot Mirror
I note that you have conveniently left out nuclear energy in your examples.
Sounds familiar.
The fact is that human beings are resourceful creatures. Oil may for most intents and purposes run out, but people will find alternatives. Almost all the points you have rely on the proposition that we will never find a source of energy as rich and abundant as oil was in the 1920s. Yet the simple fact is that for most of humanity in the 1920s, oil was not a very useful commodity. By your own argument, as oil became "thermodynamically scareser" , people used and benefited from it more and more. The "thermodynamic scarceness" of a commodity does not appear to correlate well with its utility in society.
I don't buy into the idea that humanity is going to run out of energy. It sounds an awful lot like the old Malthusian idea that we were all going to run out of food. We didn't. Back then, in the 1800s, the most important natural resource was land, because it was used to grow food that people needed to survive. Right now, the most important natural resource is oil, because people "need it to survive". Yet we've moved past that most basic of resources, food, being a bottleneck. I'd argue that we will move past oil.
We may be wasteful in our use of energy, but the fact is that we are getting more efficient every day. And the plain fact is that we already have alternatives to oil, nuclear being the first of many. And moreover, we are continually discovering new sources of energy. As oil becomes scarce, people will improvise and adapt, just as they did when land for food became scarce.
Can you name the one thing that revolutionized our ability to grow food(And no, the answer is not oil). You can't, and the reason is that our ability to grow food did not undergo a revolution. It underwent an evolution, just like our ability to procure energy will.
Humanity could well be wiped out by a lot of things, all of its own making. But and energy shortage is not one of them.
Correllation does not imply Causation.
Having seen some of the karaoke subs produced by anime fansubbers, I'm willing to bet that fan made karaoke videos will produce higher quality content than any professional label. In the face of ubiquitous video editing software, your industry has simply succumbed to its own irrelevance.
Not really.
Outside of Ireland the the UK, Microsoft is simply not as big in Europe as it is in the states. Time and again I have heard the same story. Linux shops and linux systems are simply more common in mainland Europe than Microsoft systems. Which is not to say that Microsoft systems are not there. They're just not there as much.
A lot of this is down to language and cultural barriers. A lot. It is very difficult for American companies to adapt to business on the continent. Going from an environment of 50 states with the same currency, culture and language, to 25 states with different languages, cultures, currencies (less now), and even legal systems is difficult. In North America, it's common for a franchise to expand across the entire continent at a rapid pace. I doubt there even is a franchise across the entire continent of Europe.
But, it's also true that European governments do balk at the idea of an American operating system controlling all of their computers. The English and Irish do not really see this as a problem, but I'm sure that the French view the situation as an anathema. The same goes for products like Oracle. But this is not a new development. These problems have existed for years.
Pro-choice is about women being able to choose when to have a child. It's not about them picking and choosing what kind of children they have.
Yet almost 50% of their elected representatives, and probably media outlets, supported it. How do we account for this?
Don't.
The PSP would be a fine console, if it did not have a shoddy control scheme. I mean really shoddy. It is literally physically painful to play certain PSP games for any period of time, which is a terrible pity as many would make fine PS2 titles. Instead they have been relegated to a device that sacrifices ergonomics for a few more millimeters of screen size.
I have never really understood portable gaming consoles. Playing a video game is not a passive experience like listening to music. It's something that is quite deeply engrossing and which does not fit into bus journeys, lunch breaks, or just before bedtime sessions. An average video game session probably clocks in at about two to three hours. A bit like reading a book.
And good video games, like good books, simply cannot be read in bits an pieces. You cannot finish War and Peace by five years of reading it over your ham sandwiches during lunch. If you do that you're missing the point. The same holds for Chains of Olympus or the like. Something like "Brain Training", sure, but that is not a title worth buying a console over.
Yes, but they were rendered useless as all the money for the ammunition across the fleet had been spent on one marbled tulip bulb.
Potentially harmful? And you're a lawyer. Gods help our legal system.
Proprietary? Perhaps. But I'd be willing to bet that the codebase is more than likely a fork of Apache or another open source web server, or else a "customised" version of IIS. Copyrights are not a Chinese concept, and I doubt that a site as large as QQ claims to be is running off a web server they rolled themselves.
Resident Evil does not and never has played like an FPS. Ever. Resident Evil plays like a survival horror game. That's the whole point.
Resident Evil 5 uses the over the shoulder control scheme as RE 4 (In fact, the exact same control scheme, and indeed gameplay mechanics in every way shape and form(which is not in and of itself a bad thing)), and which can be seen in Dead Space. You have a limited field of vision as enemies slowly advance. The goal is to increase tension by restricting your off-screen view. You must plan the outcome of the encounter with much less than perfect awareness of your surroundings.
Survival horror games are all about management. Enemy management, ammo management, health management. The game is a long series of encounters in which trade offs must be made. Go for the critical hit but likely to miss headshot, or the more sure body shot. Take down nearby villager or more distant las plagos? Use shotgun/rifle/grenade ammo now, or save if for a more difficult encounter? Use green herb now or wait for a red herb booster? Run or shoot? This is the bread and butter gameplay of the genre. The control scheme is a part of that.
They are not about fragging enemies in quick succession, while circle strafing or bunny hopping around the room. I would go so far as to say that survival horror games are about as far away as you can get from FPS games without getting rid of guns altogether. The controls promote split second decisions that have serious consequences. Make the ewrong move, and you're in trouble. It encourages players to make serious tactical decisions.
Resident Evil is not an FPS. It is a survival horror game and plays as such. Long may the genre endure I say.
Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop what you are doing. You and others.
Every time you or anyone else adds pandering disclaimers like this you are undermining your own argument and are undeniably contributing to the problem of censorship in our society.
Why do you think the "Think of the Children" brigade have gotten so far? How do you think that these people have been so successful at slowly introducing censorship to the Internet, and into society in general? It is because they rely on fear and intimidation to produce capitulations such as your disclaimer. Without fear, they are powerless in the face of common sense.
No reasonable person need declare their revulsion. Yet everyone does so, because they are afraid of a pointing finger. Our society has been intimidated into censorship, and no one dares speak against it.
Your statement even went so far as to seek greater consensus "we can all agree", adding to the cycle of intimidation and fear. This is where giving in has gotten us, and there is no end in sight to the injustices that will be heaped on us all "In The Name Of The Children". No end. These people will not stop, ever.
Please do not capitulate in this way. There is no need to, despite how fearful you may be.
And I have absolutely no idea who they even are! I guess this means I'm just too old.... or too young....
I see this claim being made quite a lot. Can you give one shred of evidence that it is in any way true. Or at least, that these images exist in such dire volumes that we must all accept a near Soviet level of censorship on our internet connections?
One shred of good evidence. That's all I'm looking for. Anyone have some?
I was going to press you on this, but then I found a counterexample to your world view.
It's more than this now. Coming from console games and having seen a recent version of Steam, it immediately struck me what the originally pointless and useless Steam had evolved into.
Steam is the PC's PSN (Playstation Network). To a lesser degree, it's also the PC's Xbox Live, but since you don't have to pay for it and it uses P2P transfers a lot, I think PSN is the closer comparison. Watching it in action, complete with instant messaging, content delivery, DRM and marketplace it was immediately obvious to me as a console gamer that Steam was going to be the future of, and possible the savior of, the PC gaming industry.
In the beginning, Steam was nothing more than a DRM pain in the ass. But it's clear where Valve are going with this. They want to use Steam to turn your PC, or a segment of it, into a console. I imagine that sooner or later, PC games are going to have "Steam vX.X Compatible" stickers which guarantee that the game will work flawlessly on any system that rates at that level or above according to some Valve compatibility report built into the Steam system.
This will be a quantum leap for PC gaming.
Of course, DRM is still there. As I said, Valve's objective is to make your PC act like a console. Consoles are convenient, but they also have draconian DRM, so that publishers and developers can have piracy fears assuaged and stand to make more profit. This too will save PC gaming. But convenience for players, and security for developers is ultimately a win-win scenario for everybody.
People are leaving PC games behind because they don't want to spend 5 hours just trying to get the game to turn on. They don't want it to run like crap when it does. They don't want to upgrade their rigs, or update BIOS for every new major release. If Steam makes that go away, PC gaming will finally become a proper leisure activity.
Couple it all with digital distribution, greater use of gamepads and accessories, friends lists, messaging and free online play, and Steam will effectively become another player in the console market. This has the potential of saving PC gaming.
Watch for those Steam compatible stickers. If they appear, I may just consider installing Steam on my windows box. And that's saying an awful lot.
They probably will. And that's probably the whole point. But not for the reason you think.
Microsoft is a company in trouble. It's main product, its flagship OS, is not selling a well as it might hope. For the first time in years it is faced with real and credible competition from both Apple and Canonical. It needs to stay competitive and its current liaisons with media companies are not helping it do that.
Culture has changed. File sharing is a fact of life for the majority of PC users. People share their files, not only documents and music, but also video files. Apple and Canonical have responded by giving users better tools and greater freedom with their files. Microsoft has responded by locking its systems down, putting barriers in the way of people trying to us their PCs.
But culture has changed. People want to transfer files between the now multiple machines and accounts in their homes. They want to show other people the files on their drives. Microsoft is waking up to this fact, not because they want to, but because in this day and age and culture, they have to.
Microsoft, desperate to get itself into the living room, has been caving into the media industry for years now. But it's still not in the living room, aside from the Xbox console, which does not need the media industry to get there. How has Microsoft, as a company, made profit by pandering to these outside interests? In ten years of compromises, what benefit has Microsoft seen to the restrictions it has placed in its operating system? As open alternatives replace Microsoft products in this domain (Bitorrent/VLC/Boxee), it's clear that people are voting with their feet, and are choosing players and distribution methods that just do what they want them to do, without telling them that they can't.
The media companies will kick and buck and scream and roar over this. It's an anathema to their world view, where users have only limited, and in some cases temporary, control and access over their files. But Microsoft has probably stopped listening, despite their now large ties to the entertainment industry. Times are getting tough, and with alternatives out there, they cannot afford Windows to be laden down with artificial barriers introduced at the behest of third parties.
Community effort. Private gain.
This line has been repeated, ad nauseum, by almost everyone who has encounted or reviewed the game. I'd like to take this to task.
Firstly, on the matter on graphics. Personally, while I understand that they are good, I do not agree that the graphics in Killzone 2 are as much above other games as they have been made out to be. While they are technically impressive, they do not completely eclipse the graphics that can be seen on many recent titles(Gears of War 2, Resident Evil 5, Uncharted). Having said that, this is just a personal opinion, from someone with poor vision.
Secondly, the criticism that the game is "generic" or "unoriginal" is in my opinion, totally unjustified. For those who have not played the demo, let me explain.
Killzone 2 features a cover system. Holding L2 while against cover will cause the player to "hug" the wall. At the point, the left stick can be used to shimmy along the cover, and to peek out over or to the side in order to shoot. The gameplay encourages this by making it clear that running out of cover and shooting is very likely to get you killed very quickly.
This is a new game mechanic that fairly radically changes the gameplay of the FPS. Like the shoulder view in Resident Evil 4, Z-targeting in the Ocarina of Time, and the cover system in Killswitch, this is potentially a genre changing innovation. Killzone 2 is essentially bringing the Killswitch cover system from third person shooters, into the first person shooter domain. If this is not innovation, then I'm not sure what qualifies.
Personally, having of late seen reviewers, time and again, criticize first person shooters for being "unoriginal" or "bland", I can only conclude that the review community has become jaded towards the genre. I think they are finally coming down off their shameless hype high preceding Halo 3 and have become cynical about the entire concept of FPS games. While the FPS market is admittedly saturated, there is still innovation in this area, even if reviewers are unable to see it.
The first game was not a major title. It can safely be said that most people who buy Killzone 2 will probably have never played the first game. From a writers perspective, this is man from heaven. They don't have to worry about the dreaded continuity.
There is a place for story in a game. But what must be remembered is that it is not a very big place.
Story in a game is like filling between layers in a cake. Sure it's tasty, and you can get pretty creative there(jam!!), but filling and icing is not what a cake is all about. Cake is about cake. And a game is about the game. Sure, put some delicious jam and chocolate icing between those layers, but the cake needs to be there, delicious and moist, as the base on which everything rests. Gameplay has to me the main ingredient in any game.
It is not that shooter games do not need story. It is that they are better served with a bite sized story. Shooter players are not looking for a Stienbeck-esque affair, broad, intricate and layered with meaning. They just want to shoot something. Think about Half-life, and how essentially, over the course of the game, nothing happens. The player, as Freeman, embarks on a journey with no specific goal, overcomes a series of loosely, if at all, related obstacles, and at the end has not reached any real conclusion. This breaks every accepted storytelling rule since Homer drafted the Odyssey. But despite all that, players loved it!
The reality is, that most of the story of games, comes from the playing. Scripted events, while they are appreciated, are not as essential to the immersion of a players as the gameplay, or the level design, or the art design, or the obstacles that they will face. Most people will remember a boss that challenged them before they remember a dramatic cutscene, complete with orchestral score. This goes double for first person games, where the player is literally seeing through the eyes of the protagonist.
Shooters get a lot of flack over their perceived poor storylines and shallow characters. While some of these criticisms are valid, it is invalid to say that shooters, or any game, MUST have Oscar worthy drama at every second turn. The player has enough drama facing down the hordes that are set against them. If you add any more, then that jam is just going to be cloyingly sweet.
As I recall, I invested quite a bit of money in that calculator, and quite a bit of time learning its functionality. True, I didn't incorporate a company and hire people to do all this, but I don't see how that breaks the analogy above on how copyright infringement is not the same thing as theft.
Exactly. Nobody has lost anything of material value. Copyright infringement is not theft. Copyright infringement is just copyright infringement.
Actually, it's really not a bother. Mathematics is generally its own reward.
I had a calculator once. It was a nice little Sharp model. It had a button for pi, and could even do numerical integration. I was pretty happy with it. One day, it was stolen. This theft left me calculatorless for some time. It was somewhat of a blow.
However, if instead, someone had looked at my calculator, taken out a 3D tricorder-mapper-duplicator-thingamabob and had made an exact copy of my calculator, complete with all functionality, and left me with mine, I don't think I would have been quite as upset. In fact, I think you will agree that if I ran around waving my calculator in the air claiming that it had been robbed from me and that I was a victim of "theft", I would not get a lot of sympathy. Indeed, some might even say my terminology was not entirely correct. If all this happenned, I would still have my calculator, which after following the actual theft I most certainly do not.
Copyright Infringement is not theft. Nor is it stealing. It is Copyright Infringement. Thank you for your attention, and for your sympathy in the case of my missing digital companion.
Give me one good moral reason why one shouldn't respond in that way to a cease and desist letter.
Absolutely! I mean it's either that or, horror of horrors, finding salaried employment.
I'm a mathematician. Many Slashdotters are programmers, engineers, etc. Isn't our work creative? How come we don;t get a lifetime +90 years gravy train? Is what we do simply not worth as much to society as movies about comic book superheroes and books about high school for witches and wizards? We don't seem to need protection, so why should artists?