Careful, make the copyright too short and independents will have trouble selling their ideas to the cartels since the cartels can just wait until the independent's work expires.
Lots of people. Hell, one of the listed games was Nintendogs which got a 40/40 from Famitsu and is the best selling game this generation (VGchartz lists 20 million sales). Well, unless you count Wii Sports but that's bundled with the console in 2/3 regions, while Nintendogs bundles exist they cost more than the base system.
You know, back in my day, we called ourselves "hardcore" and laughed at the graphics whores and gore kiddies who care more about superficialities than the actual gameplay but I guess nowadays people who care about "bling bling" like HD, gore, gamerscores, etc are "hardcore"...
Besides, "brand loyality" doesn't work anyway, otherwise the PS3 would have taken the same lead as the PS2, while it did have quite a few inertia sales it isn't even second place now. The number of brand loyal people is MUCH smaller than the number of people who look how a system performs before buying it.
The Wii is more than just controls, it's an integration of software and hardware. Stick a Wiimote on a 360 and Wii owners will still go "WTF" at the system menu. The software of the Wii was critical to its success. Without games like Wii Sports to drive the sales the system wouldn't have gone anywhere, it was the prospect of games anyone could understand without being treated like a retard or having to spend weeks doing the same things to progress through the story. Neither Sony nor MS seems to have any real desire to appeal to those people nor any real understanding of what it takes to get them, throwing a few B-list token games at them and calling it a day.
Also the games that go PS3/360/PC aren't going to take those "casuals" away since they aren't designed with the right requirements for these people. I know MS loves to claim things like "when they graduate from Nintendo we'll take them away" but they don't "graduate", they just have expectations that a regular game fails to fulfill. Losing those expectations is not "graduating", it's developing an insensitivity towards certain design problems in modern games.
Yeah, NEXT time. They won't bother with HD before then.
The do-everything HD box is irrelevant because it cannot replace the Wii. To most people the Wii is the only console they would ever consider, the PS3 and 360 just aren't options to them and a box that runs their games could just as well lack that feature since these people don't care.
Metroid Prime is as much a standard FPS as Metroid is a standard platformer. Maybe less since Prime actually plays like 3D Zelda in first person (obviously with more Metroidy designs) rather than, say, Doom.
"128 Marios" was a tech demo that later became Pikmin, people have been demanding a Mario 128 because they didn't like Sunshine but I don't think anything like that was ever announced.
Er, you just discard all of their innovations as not for you, then you complain they aren't innovating? If they're not for you, sure, that's something you can complain about but claiming they aren't innovating simply because none of their inventions matter to YOU?
Obviously better graphics would be nice but "don't matter" means they're no longer a major selling point, people look more for other values than the graphics yet graphics tend to be the biggest cost in console hardware. More graphics mean more unit cost but not more sales.
The problem is that third parties put their crappy port teams on game development for the Wii (or, in the case of something like Zack & Wiki, just designed something that was bound to fail), then they wonder why they don't get as many sales as Nintendo (who's putting their best teams on their games and has some of the best teams in the industry anyway). Additionally many seem to think a "casual" game is just a game with dumbed down difficulty but otherwise the same as a core game (see e.g. Henry Hatsworth, there's NOTHING about that game that's "casual" but EA thinks of it as a "casual" game anyway) when the real "casual" games are things like Tetris. "Casual" just means not much time in one sitting and not a regular schedule for gaming, it doesn't mean no difficulty. In fact these people often play the games so much they become masters at it.
See: Earth Defense Force 2 (PS2). Tons of enemies swarming towards you at the same time in a city where you can destroy any building with a few explosives (and bigger weapons will level a whole block, especially when the UFOs go all Independence Day on the city). It's all about the implementation.
It's less about research and more about the unit costs. Both the 360 and PS3 had to overstretch to get a notable graphics jump on the last generation, the result was a high unit cost leading to high retail prices and losses. Nintendo had to avoid console losses (since they still had the risk of falling flat if they miscalculated) and still had to have a normal price, the new controllers already add to the unit cost and to push the graphics they'd have to throw a lot of money at each system. That additional money wouldn't have done anything if their analysis was correct (and it was) since they figured that the graphics are more than people really need and cost way more than they bring in sales.
Now that I think about it using licensed songs might not be possible. Remember, the game is about making cover versions of the included songs and sharing those, using something licensed might be a copyright violation for the users since they'd have to pay royalties for their cover. AFAIK the Rockband (or GH sumthing, didn't bother to remember) song creation and uploading mode explicitely prohibits covering copyrighted songs for legal reasons.
I think people just want the MIDI system to use better samples so the play actually sounds like a live performance (which is something you'd expect about a game were you, well, perform live). Not a problem with MIDI itself, just the data that's being fed into it.
The intention that's attributed to the player is important, if the player shoots them because of some attribute that isn't tied to the race it's not racism (and if it were any other race people wouldn't even call it that), if he shoots them because they are members of that race (or because their race alledgedly possesses an attribute that means you must shoot them) that's racism.
What I think hurts the image of black people more is everything related to "gangsta culture". Zombies are zombies but this crap makes blacks appear as violent thugs who treat women like dirt and commit crimes all the time, basically a savage in modern clothes.
Species is just an arbitrary dividing line drawn by a bunch of people. It won't be thrown out because it's useful, at least until something more useful comes along.
We can't define life for organisms like humans very well because it's an archaic term that was never designed to be accurate with the medicine we have these days (we can define life on a single cell basis, the problem is just defining which cells in a human have to die to call the human dead for legal purposes, more of a legal problem than a scientific one since we could very well say "these cells live, these others are dead"). Saying life may be more than a chemical process is blind speculation and that IS unscientific, it's an appeal to ignorance (we don't know anything about it so there might as well be dragons here). Things like the Higgs boson were added in theories that explained things found in experiments, there is evidence that suggests a Higgs boson might exist, similarily for other particles. There is zero evidence for an afterlife, postulating it is just unnecessarily introducing latent factors. You can just as well argue that God might be hidden in the things we haven't explored yet (God of the gaps argument) or that the FSM is out there. It's pointless since anyone can make up any random claim he wants and propose that it "might" be proven by further research.
But you'd act the same whether you are watched or not, the physical part of you cannot know whether such a watcher exists and if it feels that there is someone watching it must be an illusion (as we both agree that the watcher cannot change things). As such the "watcher" is pure speculation like talk about an undetectable deity. Even if it makes you you it doesn't make you feel that you are you, that part must arise from your body and would feel that you are you no matter if there is a watcher or not.
Nonsense. During a dream your ability to think rational is impaired and your memory doesn't work with clear images anyway, you'll "see" a spot that basically says "insert numbers that make sense here" and you will think you actually saw the numbers with absolute certainity, only when the dream is over you're able to figure out that there never were any numbers in first place (or you think you forgot what they were). I've seen a lot of supposed clues that one is dreaming (including feelings of touch and smell) in my dreams.
If you see weird numbers on the watch that's probably because your mind expects them there/the dream involves having weird numbers on the watch.
Would still have to be something mental then as your eyes don't work much different compared to a camera. Or do you think there are some "spirit photons" that react with the chemicals in your retina but not the photosensor in your camera?
I think some theories actually say time ends with the universe and asking about "after the end" is pointless just like asking what's located at address 0x100000000 in a computer with 32bit address size (if we ignore that the computer would just truncate that address and go with 0).
Also you say "if there is a vital life force" which is about as useful as just saying "if there is an afterlife" or "if God exists", it's a condition that cannot be verified and has zero evidence to suggest even the possibility.
If life is just a complex chemical process it's not strange for it to end. Do you think there is an "afterfire" that fires go to when they stop burning?
And how the hell does an afterlife explain branes, quantum physics, etc?
No, not really. What I think shows this the most is altered states of consciousness, e.g. when you are under influence of hormones, drugs, medication, non-lucid dreams, etc. Your entire mind is altered, not just the "meat part", if there was a part of your mind that was supernatural wouldn't that be unaffected by substances like that and make you realize when you're about to do something stupid? At very least, no part that can affect your physical behaviour is unaffected. You could claim there is an observer that can only read but not write but that observer could then not be involved in your thought process that led to the conclusion and whether you actually have one or not you would behave in the same way and arrive at the same conclusion.
Self-awareness is part of the mind and can be determined through psychological tests, it's not something abstract like the concept of a deity that has no way to be proven or disproven.
With regular events it's easy, you have an inner clock and know that every day at x:xx something specific happens. That's not even something that requires a self-aware organism, most animals have inner clocks too and know when it is feeding time.
Slashdot Mirror
Never seen the intro to Red Alert 2?
That's fantasy, not SciFi. Fantasy doesn't need to explain itself, a wizard did it anyway.
Careful, make the copyright too short and independents will have trouble selling their ideas to the cartels since the cartels can just wait until the independent's work expires.
Lots of people. Hell, one of the listed games was Nintendogs which got a 40/40 from Famitsu and is the best selling game this generation (VGchartz lists 20 million sales). Well, unless you count Wii Sports but that's bundled with the console in 2/3 regions, while Nintendogs bundles exist they cost more than the base system.
You know, back in my day, we called ourselves "hardcore" and laughed at the graphics whores and gore kiddies who care more about superficialities than the actual gameplay but I guess nowadays people who care about "bling bling" like HD, gore, gamerscores, etc are "hardcore"...
Besides, "brand loyality" doesn't work anyway, otherwise the PS3 would have taken the same lead as the PS2, while it did have quite a few inertia sales it isn't even second place now. The number of brand loyal people is MUCH smaller than the number of people who look how a system performs before buying it.
The Wii is more than just controls, it's an integration of software and hardware. Stick a Wiimote on a 360 and Wii owners will still go "WTF" at the system menu. The software of the Wii was critical to its success. Without games like Wii Sports to drive the sales the system wouldn't have gone anywhere, it was the prospect of games anyone could understand without being treated like a retard or having to spend weeks doing the same things to progress through the story. Neither Sony nor MS seems to have any real desire to appeal to those people nor any real understanding of what it takes to get them, throwing a few B-list token games at them and calling it a day.
Also the games that go PS3/360/PC aren't going to take those "casuals" away since they aren't designed with the right requirements for these people. I know MS loves to claim things like "when they graduate from Nintendo we'll take them away" but they don't "graduate", they just have expectations that a regular game fails to fulfill. Losing those expectations is not "graduating", it's developing an insensitivity towards certain design problems in modern games.
Yeah, NEXT time. They won't bother with HD before then.
The do-everything HD box is irrelevant because it cannot replace the Wii. To most people the Wii is the only console they would ever consider, the PS3 and 360 just aren't options to them and a box that runs their games could just as well lack that feature since these people don't care.
Metroid Prime is as much a standard FPS as Metroid is a standard platformer. Maybe less since Prime actually plays like 3D Zelda in first person (obviously with more Metroidy designs) rather than, say, Doom.
"128 Marios" was a tech demo that later became Pikmin, people have been demanding a Mario 128 because they didn't like Sunshine but I don't think anything like that was ever announced.
Er, you just discard all of their innovations as not for you, then you complain they aren't innovating? If they're not for you, sure, that's something you can complain about but claiming they aren't innovating simply because none of their inventions matter to YOU?
Obviously better graphics would be nice but "don't matter" means they're no longer a major selling point, people look more for other values than the graphics yet graphics tend to be the biggest cost in console hardware. More graphics mean more unit cost but not more sales.
The problem is that third parties put their crappy port teams on game development for the Wii (or, in the case of something like Zack & Wiki, just designed something that was bound to fail), then they wonder why they don't get as many sales as Nintendo (who's putting their best teams on their games and has some of the best teams in the industry anyway). Additionally many seem to think a "casual" game is just a game with dumbed down difficulty but otherwise the same as a core game (see e.g. Henry Hatsworth, there's NOTHING about that game that's "casual" but EA thinks of it as a "casual" game anyway) when the real "casual" games are things like Tetris. "Casual" just means not much time in one sitting and not a regular schedule for gaming, it doesn't mean no difficulty. In fact these people often play the games so much they become masters at it.
Yeah, it's been a few years since the release already. I guess he was talking abouzt back when they were new.
See: Earth Defense Force 2 (PS2). Tons of enemies swarming towards you at the same time in a city where you can destroy any building with a few explosives (and bigger weapons will level a whole block, especially when the UFOs go all Independence Day on the city). It's all about the implementation.
It's less about research and more about the unit costs. Both the 360 and PS3 had to overstretch to get a notable graphics jump on the last generation, the result was a high unit cost leading to high retail prices and losses. Nintendo had to avoid console losses (since they still had the risk of falling flat if they miscalculated) and still had to have a normal price, the new controllers already add to the unit cost and to push the graphics they'd have to throw a lot of money at each system. That additional money wouldn't have done anything if their analysis was correct (and it was) since they figured that the graphics are more than people really need and cost way more than they bring in sales.
Now that I think about it using licensed songs might not be possible. Remember, the game is about making cover versions of the included songs and sharing those, using something licensed might be a copyright violation for the users since they'd have to pay royalties for their cover. AFAIK the Rockband (or GH sumthing, didn't bother to remember) song creation and uploading mode explicitely prohibits covering copyrighted songs for legal reasons.
I think people just want the MIDI system to use better samples so the play actually sounds like a live performance (which is something you'd expect about a game were you, well, perform live). Not a problem with MIDI itself, just the data that's being fed into it.
The intention that's attributed to the player is important, if the player shoots them because of some attribute that isn't tied to the race it's not racism (and if it were any other race people wouldn't even call it that), if he shoots them because they are members of that race (or because their race alledgedly possesses an attribute that means you must shoot them) that's racism.
What I think hurts the image of black people more is everything related to "gangsta culture". Zombies are zombies but this crap makes blacks appear as violent thugs who treat women like dirt and commit crimes all the time, basically a savage in modern clothes.
Species is just an arbitrary dividing line drawn by a bunch of people. It won't be thrown out because it's useful, at least until something more useful comes along.
We can't define life for organisms like humans very well because it's an archaic term that was never designed to be accurate with the medicine we have these days (we can define life on a single cell basis, the problem is just defining which cells in a human have to die to call the human dead for legal purposes, more of a legal problem than a scientific one since we could very well say "these cells live, these others are dead"). Saying life may be more than a chemical process is blind speculation and that IS unscientific, it's an appeal to ignorance (we don't know anything about it so there might as well be dragons here). Things like the Higgs boson were added in theories that explained things found in experiments, there is evidence that suggests a Higgs boson might exist, similarily for other particles. There is zero evidence for an afterlife, postulating it is just unnecessarily introducing latent factors. You can just as well argue that God might be hidden in the things we haven't explored yet (God of the gaps argument) or that the FSM is out there. It's pointless since anyone can make up any random claim he wants and propose that it "might" be proven by further research.
But you'd act the same whether you are watched or not, the physical part of you cannot know whether such a watcher exists and if it feels that there is someone watching it must be an illusion (as we both agree that the watcher cannot change things). As such the "watcher" is pure speculation like talk about an undetectable deity. Even if it makes you you it doesn't make you feel that you are you, that part must arise from your body and would feel that you are you no matter if there is a watcher or not.
Nonsense. During a dream your ability to think rational is impaired and your memory doesn't work with clear images anyway, you'll "see" a spot that basically says "insert numbers that make sense here" and you will think you actually saw the numbers with absolute certainity, only when the dream is over you're able to figure out that there never were any numbers in first place (or you think you forgot what they were). I've seen a lot of supposed clues that one is dreaming (including feelings of touch and smell) in my dreams.
If you see weird numbers on the watch that's probably because your mind expects them there/the dream involves having weird numbers on the watch.
Would still have to be something mental then as your eyes don't work much different compared to a camera. Or do you think there are some "spirit photons" that react with the chemicals in your retina but not the photosensor in your camera?
I think some theories actually say time ends with the universe and asking about "after the end" is pointless just like asking what's located at address 0x100000000 in a computer with 32bit address size (if we ignore that the computer would just truncate that address and go with 0).
Also you say "if there is a vital life force" which is about as useful as just saying "if there is an afterlife" or "if God exists", it's a condition that cannot be verified and has zero evidence to suggest even the possibility.
If life is just a complex chemical process it's not strange for it to end. Do you think there is an "afterfire" that fires go to when they stop burning?
And how the hell does an afterlife explain branes, quantum physics, etc?
No, not really. What I think shows this the most is altered states of consciousness, e.g. when you are under influence of hormones, drugs, medication, non-lucid dreams, etc. Your entire mind is altered, not just the "meat part", if there was a part of your mind that was supernatural wouldn't that be unaffected by substances like that and make you realize when you're about to do something stupid? At very least, no part that can affect your physical behaviour is unaffected. You could claim there is an observer that can only read but not write but that observer could then not be involved in your thought process that led to the conclusion and whether you actually have one or not you would behave in the same way and arrive at the same conclusion.
Self-awareness is part of the mind and can be determined through psychological tests, it's not something abstract like the concept of a deity that has no way to be proven or disproven.
With regular events it's easy, you have an inner clock and know that every day at x:xx something specific happens. That's not even something that requires a self-aware organism, most animals have inner clocks too and know when it is feeding time.