I don't think MM9 proves that there's a real market for 8bit stuff, just for big name brand stuff that was popular in the 8bit era being made in that style. A dev team that's not working with an existing, popular 8bit IP would have trouble selling an 8bit-like game simply because noone wants that when there's no nostalgia associated with it.
Of course from what I see even one man dev teams can handle 32 bit 2d graphics just fine.
Procedural content requires someone to have a grasp of both programming and art, those skills are usually mutually exclusive (different brain wiring) so finding someone who can work with procedural generation and make sure it looks good is going to be hard and expensive.
There's already a bunch of discovery channel or whatever (some documentary channel at least, not sure they even show it here) games and they all suck. Multiplatform to all consoles, high price (60€ for a freaking Wii game, Nintendo has been going below that for quite some time now! If you complain about Nintnedo eating your sales maybe you should at least make sure you don't price higher than them!) and apparently very low quality.
In fact picking "Africa" and "Panda" sounds like attempts to cash in on that PS3 Africa game and the recent Kung-Fu Panda movie.
I see "amoral" as a morality too though I don't think a human can really function without assigning "goodness" values (and if they're just "how much it benefits me") to different courses of action because then it would be hard to impossible to determine which to take.
Usefulness would probably be better called fitness, as in "survival of the fittest". A society with a morality that you should kill anything that moves would destroy itself and thus be unfit. A fitting morality improves a society's chance of survival, an unfit morality lowers it.
Laws have survived as one way of ordering society to minimize damage to itself and maximize the wellbeing of its members. The collective decision of most societies was to codify a set of rules that all members of the society have to follow in order to draw clear limits to what one can and cannot do (without receiving punishment).
That women were treated inferior to men was a convention in some societies, there were other societies where women were treated better than men and yet others where they were equal. I assume the larger number of male-dominated societies might be related to the greater physical strength of the human male in a hunter-gatherer society so it boils down to "don't talk back to me, bitch!". Last I checked it wasn't the bible that created gender equality and with the infamous passage in genesis it did way more to work AGAINST equality of the genders than for it.
An atheist can very well recognize the law as something good. Laws order our society and make us work together. While there are some alternative theories about approaching the problem of making large societies cooperate I'm not aware of many successful implementations (keyword being large, village-sized societies work without laws but country-sized ones are harder to organize). Atheism is not the rejection of all abstract principles, just a specific one that appears to many as no longer fit in the modern situation. An atheist can believe in e.g. the teachings of Jesus on how to interact with your fellow men without accepting the claim about godhood. Rejecting a teaching merely because it was claimed to be brought by a deity is a fallacy but most religious teachings can be rejected for other reasons than "they claim to be written by a god". E.g. not eating pork seems pretty damn silly to me, we've improved food safety to the point where pork can be eaten without getting sick so we don't need to adhere to ancient food safety laws.
At its simplest the question "why should I obey the law?" is answered by "if I don't I get beaten by the police". Religious or not, it's hard to argue against force:P.
In order for an atheist to live out their philosophy to it's logical end, they also need to be an anarchist.
That's nonsense. An atheist just believes that there is no supernatural entity that could be called a deity. That's it. Morality comes from more than just religion and from the POV of an atheist what a religion dictates was just written by a human anyway. Morality can come from a human or from a group of humans. Noone says you need a superhuman source for morality. Ultimately you choose a morality to follow (or, more likely, have one forced upon you). You could follow a completely different morality but once you're conditioned to one it's not easy to change but unnecessary or changed rules will probably be passed on to the next generation. As such morality evolves along with the needs of the environment your culture faces. If you don't believe in some superhuman power dictating things to be right there is no abstract concept that holds any special value over any other beyond its usefulness. Most common moralities are useful because they make a society function properly by making people not damage society too much. Is there a reason to speak the language you do or to use the math you do? Yes, it's practical. The same goes for following a morality, it's practical.
Humans have a certain amount of built-in morality anyway, humans have a resistance to killing that does not need to be taught and probably other such behaviours (I didn't study enough psychology to know a list of those).
That engine there has the number 145, I assume that's the DB classification system. The DB class 145 is apparently called the TRAXX by the manufacturer and used on freight trains too. Numbers starting with 1 denote electric engines.
We already have a gradually accelerating system, it's called a rocket. To accelerate to escape velocity at a survivable force you'd need a hugeass railgun, something on the order of several kilometers height. A tower that tall wouldn't be very easy to stabilize and cost a crapton of money.
Accelerating in a loop or using a ramp still has the issue that the centipetal force must not get too big.
Japan has tax laws that make it insanely expensive to own a car older than a few years AFAIK, the cars are still in very good condition when the tax gets so high that they're no longer affordable to use so they get sold to other countries instead...
Micro, aka tactics, is what makes an RTS different from a TBS. It adds the action element that lets players infuse battles with their skills rather than watching the system decide them based on the unit numbers or types.
As for your example, why don't you tell them to hold position behind your fortifications? Do you want them to automatically rush out when artillery fires at them? What if that makes them rush headlong into enemy firepower? Maybe it's justified anyway since the arty is too dangerous and must be taken out at all costs? There are a LOT of decisions involved in these tactics and I don't think any unit AI will ever make them satisfactory.
I can't stand how boring FPS games have become, so I'm primarly an RTS gamer
Er, huh? Is there some sort of FPS-RTS dichtomy I'm unaware of? There are tons of other genres you can play if you don't like FPSes.
So releasing what looks like a very promising RTS.. on a console only? They must realize that their entire fanbase are on PC, right? I mean, seriously- None of my XBOX friends care for RTS games...
Considering previous console RTSes were just ports of PC games with worse controls that's no surprise, this game is designed for the console and its controls.
What a big middle finger. I'm sick of people treating PC gamers as second class citizens. The amount of time it took for HALO 2 to be released on PC was disgusting. I went ahead and voted with my wallet. I haven't purchased a halo game since halo 1.
There's already a massive overlap between console and PC releases. Halo is Microsoft's "killer app" franchise, they use it to push their console first and foremost. That's why you don't see much PC support, the series is meant to sell XBoxes. What good would it be as a console seller if you could just get it on the PC?
Because a few kilobytes or even megabytes are too much to fit onto the 7GB disc (especially when the content was shipped on the disc and they just wanted to make you pay to unlock it). Right.
I think your definition of RTS is just too inflexible. If you consider a standard PC RTS, sure, porting that 1:1 is going to be hard but Halo Wars was designed for the console right from the start and they seem to have changed many basic RTS conventions so it's an RTS but not of the type you see on the PC.
2.Games are still built so menus work in standard def
From my limited experience with my Xbox 360 so far I'm pretty sure they aren't, those things are fucking unusable (speaking mostly abouzt a select few demos, the system UI works).
what you thought the platinum was there so you could play cheap ? no its there to kill the used game market.
Really? Old games tend to fall in used value pretty damn fast anyway (especially once they're out of print), the budget lines seem to be used more to have a set of cheap games available for people who want something cheap and to keep some of the popular games available later on so they remain as a selling point for the system even later. If you could only get games from the last 6 months new that would leave a large part of the system's library unavailable and thus remove it as a selling point.
See the car company try which part? Denying used sales (hello Japan!) or getting into used sales themselves to reap those profits (I know VW was advertising something like that around here)?
Meh, they sold the copy, they made their money, now it's in circulation. They have no right to prevent the copy from circulating or demanding money from second hand buyers.
If "no-risk factory produced crap" was really the solution then why is EA bleeding money and forced to fire 6% of their workforce? Their costs are spiralling out of control. Besides, how does cookie-cutter game development make used sales hurt LESS? A game the customer isn't very happy with is more likely to land on the used shelves than one they are playing online for months or break out at every party. What EA is doing is spamming mediocre games that cost a fortune to develop and predictably they are losing money like mad (over 300 million dollar last quarter, shares down over 50% from last year).
Additionally:
And as a poster above said, this is a pretty good deal for the game industries target audience, the gamer who buys lots of games.
Heh, really? The whole industry's target audience? Or just the target audience of the part that's losing money and now needs to whine about every potential threat to their bottomline to make it look like they're doing something rather than admitting that they're throwing more money at games than they can reasonably return?
With child porn investigations this probably counts as sufficient evidence to convict someone seeing how quickly people go rabid when the subject comes up.
I think there's some sort of institute or so that's charged with preserving the purity of the French language. I don't think it was the population that decided to use words like ordinateur, MO/GO, OTAN,...
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I don't think MM9 proves that there's a real market for 8bit stuff, just for big name brand stuff that was popular in the 8bit era being made in that style. A dev team that's not working with an existing, popular 8bit IP would have trouble selling an 8bit-like game simply because noone wants that when there's no nostalgia associated with it.
Of course from what I see even one man dev teams can handle 32 bit 2d graphics just fine.
Procedural content requires someone to have a grasp of both programming and art, those skills are usually mutually exclusive (different brain wiring) so finding someone who can work with procedural generation and make sure it looks good is going to be hard and expensive.
They could simply classify it as a war weapon and limit it to govt agencies...
There's already a bunch of discovery channel or whatever (some documentary channel at least, not sure they even show it here) games and they all suck. Multiplatform to all consoles, high price (60€ for a freaking Wii game, Nintendo has been going below that for quite some time now! If you complain about Nintnedo eating your sales maybe you should at least make sure you don't price higher than them!) and apparently very low quality.
In fact picking "Africa" and "Panda" sounds like attempts to cash in on that PS3 Africa game and the recent Kung-Fu Panda movie.
I see "amoral" as a morality too though I don't think a human can really function without assigning "goodness" values (and if they're just "how much it benefits me") to different courses of action because then it would be hard to impossible to determine which to take.
Usefulness would probably be better called fitness, as in "survival of the fittest". A society with a morality that you should kill anything that moves would destroy itself and thus be unfit. A fitting morality improves a society's chance of survival, an unfit morality lowers it.
Laws have survived as one way of ordering society to minimize damage to itself and maximize the wellbeing of its members. The collective decision of most societies was to codify a set of rules that all members of the society have to follow in order to draw clear limits to what one can and cannot do (without receiving punishment).
That women were treated inferior to men was a convention in some societies, there were other societies where women were treated better than men and yet others where they were equal. I assume the larger number of male-dominated societies might be related to the greater physical strength of the human male in a hunter-gatherer society so it boils down to "don't talk back to me, bitch!". Last I checked it wasn't the bible that created gender equality and with the infamous passage in genesis it did way more to work AGAINST equality of the genders than for it.
An atheist can very well recognize the law as something good. Laws order our society and make us work together. While there are some alternative theories about approaching the problem of making large societies cooperate I'm not aware of many successful implementations (keyword being large, village-sized societies work without laws but country-sized ones are harder to organize). Atheism is not the rejection of all abstract principles, just a specific one that appears to many as no longer fit in the modern situation. An atheist can believe in e.g. the teachings of Jesus on how to interact with your fellow men without accepting the claim about godhood. Rejecting a teaching merely because it was claimed to be brought by a deity is a fallacy but most religious teachings can be rejected for other reasons than "they claim to be written by a god". E.g. not eating pork seems pretty damn silly to me, we've improved food safety to the point where pork can be eaten without getting sick so we don't need to adhere to ancient food safety laws.
At its simplest the question "why should I obey the law?" is answered by "if I don't I get beaten by the police". Religious or not, it's hard to argue against force :P.
In order for an atheist to live out their philosophy to it's logical end, they also need to be an anarchist.
That's nonsense. An atheist just believes that there is no supernatural entity that could be called a deity. That's it. Morality comes from more than just religion and from the POV of an atheist what a religion dictates was just written by a human anyway. Morality can come from a human or from a group of humans. Noone says you need a superhuman source for morality. Ultimately you choose a morality to follow (or, more likely, have one forced upon you). You could follow a completely different morality but once you're conditioned to one it's not easy to change but unnecessary or changed rules will probably be passed on to the next generation. As such morality evolves along with the needs of the environment your culture faces. If you don't believe in some superhuman power dictating things to be right there is no abstract concept that holds any special value over any other beyond its usefulness. Most common moralities are useful because they make a society function properly by making people not damage society too much. Is there a reason to speak the language you do or to use the math you do? Yes, it's practical. The same goes for following a morality, it's practical.
Humans have a certain amount of built-in morality anyway, humans have a resistance to killing that does not need to be taught and probably other such behaviours (I didn't study enough psychology to know a list of those).
I guess you don't come from a country were the last major outbreak of nationalism resulted in a genocide and war that killed millions?
That engine there has the number 145, I assume that's the DB classification system. The DB class 145 is apparently called the TRAXX by the manufacturer and used on freight trains too. Numbers starting with 1 denote electric engines.
We already have a gradually accelerating system, it's called a rocket. To accelerate to escape velocity at a survivable force you'd need a hugeass railgun, something on the order of several kilometers height. A tower that tall wouldn't be very easy to stabilize and cost a crapton of money.
Accelerating in a loop or using a ramp still has the issue that the centipetal force must not get too big.
But IS there money to be made? It costs a lot of money to get stuff into space and exploration doesn't tend to make much money.
Japan has tax laws that make it insanely expensive to own a car older than a few years AFAIK, the cars are still in very good condition when the tax gets so high that they're no longer affordable to use so they get sold to other countries instead...
Micro, aka tactics, is what makes an RTS different from a TBS. It adds the action element that lets players infuse battles with their skills rather than watching the system decide them based on the unit numbers or types.
As for your example, why don't you tell them to hold position behind your fortifications? Do you want them to automatically rush out when artillery fires at them? What if that makes them rush headlong into enemy firepower? Maybe it's justified anyway since the arty is too dangerous and must be taken out at all costs? There are a LOT of decisions involved in these tactics and I don't think any unit AI will ever make them satisfactory.
I can't stand how boring FPS games have become, so I'm primarly an RTS gamer
Er, huh? Is there some sort of FPS-RTS dichtomy I'm unaware of? There are tons of other genres you can play if you don't like FPSes.
So releasing what looks like a very promising RTS .. on a console only? They must realize that their entire fanbase are on PC, right? I mean, seriously- None of my XBOX friends care for RTS games...
Considering previous console RTSes were just ports of PC games with worse controls that's no surprise, this game is designed for the console and its controls.
What a big middle finger. I'm sick of people treating PC gamers as second class citizens. The amount of time it took for HALO 2 to be released on PC was disgusting. I went ahead and voted with my wallet. I haven't purchased a halo game since halo 1.
There's already a massive overlap between console and PC releases. Halo is Microsoft's "killer app" franchise, they use it to push their console first and foremost. That's why you don't see much PC support, the series is meant to sell XBoxes. What good would it be as a console seller if you could just get it on the PC?
Because a few kilobytes or even megabytes are too much to fit onto the 7GB disc (especially when the content was shipped on the disc and they just wanted to make you pay to unlock it). Right.
I think your definition of RTS is just too inflexible. If you consider a standard PC RTS, sure, porting that 1:1 is going to be hard but Halo Wars was designed for the console right from the start and they seem to have changed many basic RTS conventions so it's an RTS but not of the type you see on the PC.
2.Games are still built so menus work in standard def
From my limited experience with my Xbox 360 so far I'm pretty sure they aren't, those things are fucking unusable (speaking mostly abouzt a select few demos, the system UI works).
what you thought the platinum was there so you could play cheap ? no its there to kill the used game market.
Really? Old games tend to fall in used value pretty damn fast anyway (especially once they're out of print), the budget lines seem to be used more to have a set of cheap games available for people who want something cheap and to keep some of the popular games available later on so they remain as a selling point for the system even later. If you could only get games from the last 6 months new that would leave a large part of the system's library unavailable and thus remove it as a selling point.
See the car company try which part? Denying used sales (hello Japan!) or getting into used sales themselves to reap those profits (I know VW was advertising something like that around here)?
Meh, they sold the copy, they made their money, now it's in circulation. They have no right to prevent the copy from circulating or demanding money from second hand buyers.
If "no-risk factory produced crap" was really the solution then why is EA bleeding money and forced to fire 6% of their workforce? Their costs are spiralling out of control. Besides, how does cookie-cutter game development make used sales hurt LESS? A game the customer isn't very happy with is more likely to land on the used shelves than one they are playing online for months or break out at every party. What EA is doing is spamming mediocre games that cost a fortune to develop and predictably they are losing money like mad (over 300 million dollar last quarter, shares down over 50% from last year).
Additionally:
And as a poster above said, this is a pretty good deal for the game industries target audience, the gamer who buys lots of games.
Heh, really? The whole industry's target audience? Or just the target audience of the part that's losing money and now needs to whine about every potential threat to their bottomline to make it look like they're doing something rather than admitting that they're throwing more money at games than they can reasonably return?
In 2150 the moon can advertise its population of lesbian moon babes.
There's even a BBC three-part series of Dune that came out after Waterworld so he has no option to complain.
That's only once they have found the gun. They can't take the bullet and instantly say "oh this is registration number XYZ-12345".
With child porn investigations this probably counts as sufficient evidence to convict someone seeing how quickly people go rabid when the subject comes up.
I think there's some sort of institute or so that's charged with preserving the purity of the French language. I don't think it was the population that decided to use words like ordinateur, MO/GO, OTAN, ...
Which is just French for comic since the French don't like foreign words.