Why are IGNs reviews of "anticipated" titles so much longer than those non-anticipated ones?
Easy, they do what the readers want and the readers want lots of talk about the hyped up games. Even if that game could be handled with "Same as $previous with $newfeatures added". Same goes for other forms of news, they talk about what the audience wants to know even if there's nothing to be known about it (the news broadcast will happily waste fifteen minutes talking to various experts repeating the same obvious facts and commenting "we just don't know enough yet"). I mean, 12 pages for the sequel to some FPS? You can describe Doom 3, Half-Life 2 or FEAR in three sentences and you'd have accurately covered the games.
Look at the XBox 360 line-up. The games are all getting 7s-9s, but most of them are just nothing special.
Most outlets stopped subtracting points for "game is fucking generic" except when the reviewer is in a bad mood or dislikes a company involved in the making of the game.
I've read magazines where you'd see a doublepage ad and two pages after it a review giving the game a 4% score. Advertisers may be able to exert pressure but the magazine knows that by negotiating with terrorists the rest will take the clue and start exerting the same pressure, the reviews become so inaccurate that readers just stop buying that useless rag and profits really hit zero.
Edge is supposed to be the least biased games magazine on the market and the price shows it, 8$ an issue I think.
I don't see any problem with an increasing fee for patents. After all, that's not theft, it's a service contract "We'll proptect your patent if you keep paying us enough money!". That may end up hurting smaller inventors, though. Not to say the current fees don't. Perhaps assigning fees based on the holder's income or, if it's a corporation, their revenue (and obviously make it illegal to just assign all of them to the CEO and hand them over to the company when they've found someone to sue). Holding thousands of patents would be impossible without paying a few times your total revenue to the gov. What's important is that the "no prior art" rule is enforced strictly and that there are special fines associated with having your patent overturned in court (for all the trouble you've caused the legal system and the alledged infringers). Make it a risky gamble to try suing people with invalid patents just to force them to give up because they can't afford a defense.
The author admits that it pretty much decides in the same way a manager does. At very least we'll be able to replace some highly paid executives with computers.
Except it doesn't analyze the actual content, just stuff like famous actors, special effects (i.e. how many explosions) etc as you would have known from reading even the summary.
There is no precedent (at least none that stood up to the Supreme Court) for the law enforcing ratings on media within the US. All other forms are either self-regulated (movies, music) or not regulated at all (books).
You are viewing it from a distance because games aren't as interactive as real life yet. You get to decide the actions of the main character (to a certain degree) but only as far as "attack this guy" or "run over there". At best you trigger a movie of how the main character kills the guy. D&D allows you to do much more.
Besides, the guys you kill in games often try to kill you. While gangsta culture encourages you to murder someone over a minor dispute, in games it's usually a matter of life and death.
GTASA does include gangsta culture and its twisted ideals but it's not like your kid can't just turn on the radio and hear some random guy talking about how you should shoot someone because he "took your bitch".
Games only give you rewards within the game context, other media often attempt to make you do things with consequences in the real world ("Buy Persil!" "Jews are evil so join us!" "If you want to be cool then beat up random people!").
That requires a cheat device that can make arbitrary changes to the system memory or storage. Once the user starts changing your data and even RAM all bets are off. Sure, the protection to keep it hidden wasn't very effective but as long as the system isn't compromised the code is not triggered. It's like complaining that your car's motor explodes after you ram a few bolts into it and claiming that the manufacturer is at fault for not adding anti-bolt protection to the motor. Rockstar went wrong by claiming none of the HC material was in the game but they DID make the code inaccessible.
Graphics can change the atmosphere/mood and allow for things that wouldn't be possible with text-only descriptions such as synchronicity (you don't read two things at once but two things can be shown at once). There are many differences between books and movies, especially in terms of what you can convey.
Sounds good except for the mandatory levelling. I don't want to micromanage equipment for ten different characters, even abandoned Final Fantasy Tactics over that.
Few 2d games suffer from using an analog stick (though Nintendo's octagonal stick movement limiters seem to help a lot), no need for a special controller.
Yeah, call me a Nazi just because I'm German and hate repetitive and turn-based gameplay.
Now I admit I didn't play many Roguelikes or Ultimas (I have one of them for the C64 but it won't run anymore) but I don't think random encounters are really old-school. They're just an annoyance. Give me enemies I can see and clean the dungeon of, that makes the dungeons look more alive as well.
One problem is that people who don't keep up-to-date about the system will not notice the price drop and still have the 700$ price stuck in their heads. Parents will decide that their kids don't need one for christmas (as opposed to now where they're deperately looking around trying to find a store with some in stock), regular gamers may decide that waiting is indeed the better option here, etc. Sure, the campers would still come or at least some of them, the initial shipment will surely sell out but after that you'd need to drop price quickly and then people will feel ripped off. It's best to act casual and not create any such major reason to hate you.
What are proper implementations of gathering materials/crafting? I've played Saga of Ryzom (during the public beta) and that allowed for gaining ressources by foraging, i.e. either running to randomly appearing ressource spots and mining stuff (with various details such as if you're too aggressive you may release poisonous gas or the source will explode, you can use other skills to counteract that, etc) or using a skill to unearth ressource spots anywhere. Since some materials can only be obtained by fighting (or buying generic material that fits anywhere but has low quality) and most crafting plans need a variety of things to complete (but nothing specific, each slot will accept a variety of materials, e.g. hooves, shells, woods) she'll probably give you a list of items to bring home from the hunt. One annoyance is that you need to craft roughly fifty swords to gain one level in the crafting skill... Perhaps they changed that by now.
I guess that's pretty standard for most MMOs, haven't got much experience with most of them.
Since few mobs are actually aggressive and the aggressive ones will often attack herds of herbivores instead of you you can move around without fighting as long as you know what to stay away from.
MS severely overpriced the original XBox here, too few people bought it and when they dropped the price very early the people who paid much for them were understandably quite angry. MS sent out apology packages to those people (additional controllers, games and a DVD remote, I think).
Nintendo titles may be many things but they're not educational (at least the popular ones). What would Mario Smash Football teach children? What about Smash Bros, Zelda, Metroid, you know, their flagship titles for the GC? Do any of these teach anything?
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Why are IGNs reviews of "anticipated" titles so much longer than those non-anticipated ones?
Easy, they do what the readers want and the readers want lots of talk about the hyped up games. Even if that game could be handled with "Same as $previous with $newfeatures added". Same goes for other forms of news, they talk about what the audience wants to know even if there's nothing to be known about it (the news broadcast will happily waste fifteen minutes talking to various experts repeating the same obvious facts and commenting "we just don't know enough yet"). I mean, 12 pages for the sequel to some FPS? You can describe Doom 3, Half-Life 2 or FEAR in three sentences and you'd have accurately covered the games.
Look at the XBox 360 line-up. The games are all getting 7s-9s, but most of them are just nothing special.
Most outlets stopped subtracting points for "game is fucking generic" except when the reviewer is in a bad mood or dislikes a company involved in the making of the game.
I've read magazines where you'd see a doublepage ad and two pages after it a review giving the game a 4% score. Advertisers may be able to exert pressure but the magazine knows that by negotiating with terrorists the rest will take the clue and start exerting the same pressure, the reviews become so inaccurate that readers just stop buying that useless rag and profits really hit zero.
Edge is supposed to be the least biased games magazine on the market and the price shows it, 8$ an issue I think.
I don't see any problem with an increasing fee for patents. After all, that's not theft, it's a service contract "We'll proptect your patent if you keep paying us enough money!". That may end up hurting smaller inventors, though. Not to say the current fees don't. Perhaps assigning fees based on the holder's income or, if it's a corporation, their revenue (and obviously make it illegal to just assign all of them to the CEO and hand them over to the company when they've found someone to sue). Holding thousands of patents would be impossible without paying a few times your total revenue to the gov. What's important is that the "no prior art" rule is enforced strictly and that there are special fines associated with having your patent overturned in court (for all the trouble you've caused the legal system and the alledged infringers). Make it a risky gamble to try suing people with invalid patents just to force them to give up because they can't afford a defense.
If the patent is valid it has to be more specific than just "checking email via RF". Patents cover the implementation, not the idea itself.
We're talking about a program that takes a number of datapoints, puts them into an equation and returns the result. Not AI.
The author admits that it pretty much decides in the same way a manager does. At very least we'll be able to replace some highly paid executives with computers.
Except it doesn't analyze the actual content, just stuff like famous actors, special effects (i.e. how many explosions) etc as you would have known from reading even the summary.
There was a game like that and it sucked.
There is no precedent (at least none that stood up to the Supreme Court) for the law enforcing ratings on media within the US. All other forms are either self-regulated (movies, music) or not regulated at all (books).
You are viewing it from a distance because games aren't as interactive as real life yet. You get to decide the actions of the main character (to a certain degree) but only as far as "attack this guy" or "run over there". At best you trigger a movie of how the main character kills the guy. D&D allows you to do much more.
Besides, the guys you kill in games often try to kill you. While gangsta culture encourages you to murder someone over a minor dispute, in games it's usually a matter of life and death.
GTASA does include gangsta culture and its twisted ideals but it's not like your kid can't just turn on the radio and hear some random guy talking about how you should shoot someone because he "took your bitch".
Games only give you rewards within the game context, other media often attempt to make you do things with consequences in the real world ("Buy Persil!" "Jews are evil so join us!" "If you want to be cool then beat up random people!").
That requires a cheat device that can make arbitrary changes to the system memory or storage. Once the user starts changing your data and even RAM all bets are off. Sure, the protection to keep it hidden wasn't very effective but as long as the system isn't compromised the code is not triggered. It's like complaining that your car's motor explodes after you ram a few bolts into it and claiming that the manufacturer is at fault for not adding anti-bolt protection to the motor. Rockstar went wrong by claiming none of the HC material was in the game but they DID make the code inaccessible.
No. There are people who can afford it at 300 but not at 700 and many more who would buy it at 300 but not at 700. Look at the 3DO.
Graphics can change the atmosphere/mood and allow for things that wouldn't be possible with text-only descriptions such as synchronicity (you don't read two things at once but two things can be shown at once). There are many differences between books and movies, especially in terms of what you can convey.
Sounds good except for the mandatory levelling. I don't want to micromanage equipment for ten different characters, even abandoned Final Fantasy Tactics over that.
Few 2d games suffer from using an analog stick (though Nintendo's octagonal stick movement limiters seem to help a lot), no need for a special controller.
Yeah, call me a Nazi just because I'm German and hate repetitive and turn-based gameplay.
Now I admit I didn't play many Roguelikes or Ultimas (I have one of them for the C64 but it won't run anymore) but I don't think random encounters are really old-school. They're just an annoyance. Give me enemies I can see and clean the dungeon of, that makes the dungeons look more alive as well.
One problem is that people who don't keep up-to-date about the system will not notice the price drop and still have the 700$ price stuck in their heads. Parents will decide that their kids don't need one for christmas (as opposed to now where they're deperately looking around trying to find a store with some in stock), regular gamers may decide that waiting is indeed the better option here, etc. Sure, the campers would still come or at least some of them, the initial shipment will surely sell out but after that you'd need to drop price quickly and then people will feel ripped off. It's best to act casual and not create any such major reason to hate you.
What are proper implementations of gathering materials/crafting? I've played Saga of Ryzom (during the public beta) and that allowed for gaining ressources by foraging, i.e. either running to randomly appearing ressource spots and mining stuff (with various details such as if you're too aggressive you may release poisonous gas or the source will explode, you can use other skills to counteract that, etc) or using a skill to unearth ressource spots anywhere. Since some materials can only be obtained by fighting (or buying generic material that fits anywhere but has low quality) and most crafting plans need a variety of things to complete (but nothing specific, each slot will accept a variety of materials, e.g. hooves, shells, woods) she'll probably give you a list of items to bring home from the hunt. One annoyance is that you need to craft roughly fifty swords to gain one level in the crafting skill... Perhaps they changed that by now.
I guess that's pretty standard for most MMOs, haven't got much experience with most of them.
Since few mobs are actually aggressive and the aggressive ones will often attack herds of herbivores instead of you you can move around without fighting as long as you know what to stay away from.
MS severely overpriced the original XBox here, too few people bought it and when they dropped the price very early the people who paid much for them were understandably quite angry. MS sent out apology packages to those people (additional controllers, games and a DVD remote, I think).
"Revolution" is probably the most pretentious name you can give an appliance.
Unless you mean the touchscreen in general you're wrong, the seals can easily be drawn with a finger.
You must have very... interesting anatomy.
Well, what company would put out a release saying "We won't support feature X despite our competition doing so", except for Nintendo, I mean?
Some Nintendo execs said they believe you shouldn't pay for online if you already pay for the game.
Nintendo titles may be many things but they're not educational (at least the popular ones). What would Mario Smash Football teach children? What about Smash Bros, Zelda, Metroid, you know, their flagship titles for the GC? Do any of these teach anything?