1. Sounds: You can't compress all audio in the game. It's a tradeoff between disc space vs. CPU time and running MP3 decoders for fifty entities screaming, firing and exploding all over the place is going to kill your performance. Alternatively you can decompress at load but that increases load times a lot.
2. Textures: While it may be possible to create procedural textures for some things, that's not only complicated and impossible for most (since irregular details will require a LOT of variables to be considered), it bloats your load time like mad. Those demos that have a few kilobytes of data take minutes to generate their procedural data and are VERY limited in what they can do. And it's a lot of work, I don't see companies spending two or three extra years on a game just to boast "We're only taking up one DVD!"
3. Videos vs. Cutscenes: Maybe I'm bad at telling them apart but the cutscenes in Xenosaga 2 looked pretty realtime to me and that game takes up two DVDs.
Overall it's a tradeoff between CPU time and memory and most will prefer lower CPU loads so they can dedicate more of it to the actual game instead of the trickery needed to reduce the disc count.
I remember a time when games were kilobytes, then megabytes, then hundreds of megabytes and now gigabytes. Space usage increases as technology becomes more demanding. That's not going to stop. It's silly to assume that a medium that hit its limit this generation will be sufficient for the next one.
NCTV surveyed 176 Nintendo video games. They gave the XUnfit rating to 11 percent of games. Forty-three percent received an XV and 15 percent earned an RV.
Wait... 69% of Nintendo's games are highly violent, to a degree unfit for kids? By what standards? Do those people consider the Road Runner cartoon a bloodbath or what? Mario jumping on goombas is hardly "extreme violence".
A different survey found that 40 of the 47 top-rated Nintendo video games had violence as a theme.
Now it's a theme? Um, hellooooo? What are these guys smoking and can I have some of it? If your definition of "violence as a theme" is "can involve hitting other characters" then yes, that may be true. After all, you're hitting people with turtle shells in Mario Kart or with your sword in Zelda (complete with ultrarealistic flashes and sounds! Hear them bleep and bloop for mercy as you turn them into clouds of smoke!). But if that is your definition of violence, what kind of deranged psycho will your kid grow up into? Some freak who at 47 still tells everyone "my mommy said that is bad!" "my mommy said only bad people do that!"?
Or is someone just too fucking retarded to realize that Nintendo is not the entire games industry and not even the current market leader?
Seriously, what good is a game design degree, anyway? The graduates from one semester would already be more designers than the whole industry needs. What they DO need is grunts. Coders, artists, sound guys, etc. The guys who don't think* but do. Most people who say "I want to make games" think they get to decide what games get made. You only need one or two of those on a team, compared to 50+ grunts on larger teams.
Plus, a degree isn't worth much in the games industry anyway, your skill and especially past experience (often a required number of shipped titles for major companies!) are what's important. Many graduates are worse than the self-taught people. Most jobs with degrees require stuff selftaughts don't even know the name of (how many selftaught coders can do code verification?) so the degree makes sense but the processes involved in games is nothing your average selftaught doesn't know about (or, in case of complex coding, a computer science degree won't teach you).
In the no-degree-required positions it's even recommended to have a degree that's not game related so you can take another high-paying job if you get burned out (or pissed off) by the games industry. If you only have a games degree the rest of your life would involve asking customers whether they'd like fries with that.
*=Yes, I know all of these jobs require thinking. I mean they don't think up the game, just its implementation.
As even the summary says, the new part is that it can be turned into different kinds of paint. Unless your car is made of cheap plastic you can't use paint meant for plastic on it.
People seem to think that because ICANN agreed with the US on the.xxx tld, that the US made the decision. They just happened to agree that its unenforcable and stupid.
So.com,.net,.org, etc are enforceable while.xxx isn't? Lack of enforcement doesn't look like a good reason for not doing it. There'll always be some websites that don't conform but who cares? At least.xxx makes it easier for people to find their porn.
What would you say on the phone? "How are you gentlemen, my super AI has taken control of all your computers and installations. You are on your way to destruction if you don't pay me ONE MILLION DOLLARS!"
You realize that Smash Bros unites pretty much every franchise Nintendo ever made and that's half the point of the game? There's no need to put Mario or DK into new genres but there's no point in removing them from an all-stars game.
Let's put it like that: The average US internet user will type [companyname].com to get to a company website, the rest of the world types their local ccTLD instead (e.g. microsoft.de). That's what I mean with commonly accepted, when you type in.com you expect a website aimed at US residents.
Besides, many companies deal in many countries and in each country they have to obey local laws, few companies that don't deal in the US have a.com domain. And very few companies would be affected by a decision to enforce US pornography laws on.com.
Obviously ICANN would use the US definition on their TLDs. Since ccTLDs can have their own rules for allowed content (e.g. a ccTLD may require all porn sites to use a xxx.tld subdomain, another one may choose not to restrict them at all, etc) that shouldn't be an issue with other countries. Iran would use its definition on its own TLD. Since it's commonly accepted that.com,.org, etc are for US based websites that shouldn't cause much of a problem.
I'm not going to complain about shortages, I had enough opportunity to buy a core version today and didn't (and now I feel like an idiot because I could have made a big profit on eBay but whatever). What annoys me, though:
1. The demo kiosks have no games on them. Not a single one. All you can do is watch trailers (using faked footage, the kind they showed at E3, kinda ironic that they call the games section "the best games ever with movie-quality graphics") for a variety of racing and sports games. They could have put a 50 Euro DVD player in there and done the same.
2. The (non-MS) games cost 68 Euros a piece. As if 60 Euros for a console game wasn't enough of a ripoff, now they're increasing prices again! I was so tempted to put a few copies of the PC versions of those games on the same shelf so everyone who just bought the system can see they're paying 50% more than a PC user for identical or inferior (no mod support) versions. I mean, PC games are more complex and harder to test, yet they're selling for 40-45 Euros while console games cost 60 across the board so it can't be dev costs. Manufacturer royalties were less than 10$ a copy from what I heard so it would explain 55 Euros at best.
I've seen buildings that were created to be art and art only (can't imagine what you'd use some of Hundertwasser's constructions for) but others that were both functional and art (the Bauhaus in Dessau, for example). True, I've never been to America but we're talking about buildings in general, not only those located in the USA. What I'm saying is that something shouldn't be discounted from art just because it has a use. Your argument looks like you're saying that games exist to entertain therefore they aren't art. Operas exist to entertain, are they not art? Sure, being entertaining does not imply it's art but it doesn't imply the opposite, either.
The MPAA is taking nearly (and in the first few weeks really) 100% of the ticket price, the cinema has to run ads and sell overpriced junk just to break even.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Sounds:
You can't compress all audio in the game. It's a tradeoff between disc space vs. CPU time and running MP3 decoders for fifty entities screaming, firing and exploding all over the place is going to kill your performance. Alternatively you can decompress at load but that increases load times a lot.
2. Textures:
While it may be possible to create procedural textures for some things, that's not only complicated and impossible for most (since irregular details will require a LOT of variables to be considered), it bloats your load time like mad. Those demos that have a few kilobytes of data take minutes to generate their procedural data and are VERY limited in what they can do. And it's a lot of work, I don't see companies spending two or three extra years on a game just to boast "We're only taking up one DVD!"
3. Videos vs. Cutscenes:
Maybe I'm bad at telling them apart but the cutscenes in Xenosaga 2 looked pretty realtime to me and that game takes up two DVDs.
Overall it's a tradeoff between CPU time and memory and most will prefer lower CPU loads so they can dedicate more of it to the actual game instead of the trickery needed to reduce the disc count.
I remember a time when games were kilobytes, then megabytes, then hundreds of megabytes and now gigabytes. Space usage increases as technology becomes more demanding. That's not going to stop. It's silly to assume that a medium that hit its limit this generation will be sufficient for the next one.
OH PLEASE!!!! "lucky enough" You make out to be some amazing thing... It's JUST a GAME BOX!!! Hello!!!
Correction: It's a game box that sells for a few hundred bucks over retail price on eBay. It's an investment.
NCTV surveyed 176 Nintendo video games. They gave the XUnfit rating to 11 percent of games. Forty-three percent received an XV and 15 percent earned an RV.
Wait... 69% of Nintendo's games are highly violent, to a degree unfit for kids? By what standards? Do those people consider the Road Runner cartoon a bloodbath or what? Mario jumping on goombas is hardly "extreme violence".
A different survey found that 40 of the 47 top-rated Nintendo video games had violence as a theme.
Now it's a theme? Um, hellooooo? What are these guys smoking and can I have some of it? If your definition of "violence as a theme" is "can involve hitting other characters" then yes, that may be true. After all, you're hitting people with turtle shells in Mario Kart or with your sword in Zelda (complete with ultrarealistic flashes and sounds! Hear them bleep and bloop for mercy as you turn them into clouds of smoke!). But if that is your definition of violence, what kind of deranged psycho will your kid grow up into? Some freak who at 47 still tells everyone "my mommy said that is bad!" "my mommy said only bad people do that!"?
Or is someone just too fucking retarded to realize that Nintendo is not the entire games industry and not even the current market leader?
Seriously, what good is a game design degree, anyway? The graduates from one semester would already be more designers than the whole industry needs. What they DO need is grunts. Coders, artists, sound guys, etc. The guys who don't think* but do. Most people who say "I want to make games" think they get to decide what games get made. You only need one or two of those on a team, compared to 50+ grunts on larger teams.
Plus, a degree isn't worth much in the games industry anyway, your skill and especially past experience (often a required number of shipped titles for major companies!) are what's important. Many graduates are worse than the self-taught people. Most jobs with degrees require stuff selftaughts don't even know the name of (how many selftaught coders can do code verification?) so the degree makes sense but the processes involved in games is nothing your average selftaught doesn't know about (or, in case of complex coding, a computer science degree won't teach you).
In the no-degree-required positions it's even recommended to have a degree that's not game related so you can take another high-paying job if you get burned out (or pissed off) by the games industry. If you only have a games degree the rest of your life would involve asking customers whether they'd like fries with that.
*=Yes, I know all of these jobs require thinking. I mean they don't think up the game, just its implementation.
Number-changing license plates?
As even the summary says, the new part is that it can be turned into different kinds of paint. Unless your car is made of cheap plastic you can't use paint meant for plastic on it.
... obligatory demanding of ONE MILLION DOLLARS.
Seriously, what evil overlord would miss such an opportunity?
Yeah, you know, like how burning coal never returns more energy than you used to ignite it...
People seem to think that because ICANN agreed with the US on the .xxx tld, that the US made the decision. They just happened to agree that its unenforcable and stupid.
.com, .net, .org, etc are enforceable while .xxx isn't? Lack of enforcement doesn't look like a good reason for not doing it. There'll always be some websites that don't conform but who cares? At least .xxx makes it easier for people to find their porn.
So
Some people hire graffiti artists to paint pictures on their walls. Not all graffiti is the illegal kind.
What would you say on the phone? "How are you gentlemen, my super AI has taken control of all your computers and installations. You are on your way to destruction if you don't pay me ONE MILLION DOLLARS!"
I'd prefer the android to fight INSTEAD of me.
You realize that Smash Bros unites pretty much every franchise Nintendo ever made and that's half the point of the game? There's no need to put Mario or DK into new genres but there's no point in removing them from an all-stars game.
Let's put it like that: The average US internet user will type [companyname].com to get to a company website, the rest of the world types their local ccTLD instead (e.g. microsoft.de). That's what I mean with commonly accepted, when you type in .com you expect a website aimed at US residents.
.com domain. And very few companies would be affected by a decision to enforce US pornography laws on .com.
Besides, many companies deal in many countries and in each country they have to obey local laws, few companies that don't deal in the US have a
In this case I think it's EA doing the faking (you remember their Madden E3 video?).
Obviously ICANN would use the US definition on their TLDs. Since ccTLDs can have their own rules for allowed content (e.g. a ccTLD may require all porn sites to use a xxx.tld subdomain, another one may choose not to restrict them at all, etc) that shouldn't be an issue with other countries. Iran would use its definition on its own TLD. Since it's commonly accepted that .com, .org, etc are for US based websites that shouldn't cause much of a problem.
There is a legal definition of "pornography" out there, that should be applied.
The GeForce 2 can do fun litle things like the lighting in Doom 3.
Looks like Sin City to me (definitely film-noir monologue style). My mind is always a bit fuzzy but it could even have been a direct quote.
I've read claims that Volition has the same problem, at least I saw job listings stay up for months without applicants.
I'm not going to complain about shortages, I had enough opportunity to buy a core version today and didn't (and now I feel like an idiot because I could have made a big profit on eBay but whatever). What annoys me, though:
1. The demo kiosks have no games on them. Not a single one. All you can do is watch trailers (using faked footage, the kind they showed at E3, kinda ironic that they call the games section "the best games ever with movie-quality graphics") for a variety of racing and sports games. They could have put a 50 Euro DVD player in there and done the same.
2. The (non-MS) games cost 68 Euros a piece. As if 60 Euros for a console game wasn't enough of a ripoff, now they're increasing prices again! I was so tempted to put a few copies of the PC versions of those games on the same shelf so everyone who just bought the system can see they're paying 50% more than a PC user for identical or inferior (no mod support) versions. I mean, PC games are more complex and harder to test, yet they're selling for 40-45 Euros while console games cost 60 across the board so it can't be dev costs. Manufacturer royalties were less than 10$ a copy from what I heard so it would explain 55 Euros at best.
Love Hina? I thought the "do something wrong (like landing on a girl's boobies) and get beaten up" joke was a Clever & Smart trademark?
Revived is the wrong word, it doesn't work on dead people or at least dead people named Aerith.
I've seen buildings that were created to be art and art only (can't imagine what you'd use some of Hundertwasser's constructions for) but others that were both functional and art (the Bauhaus in Dessau, for example). True, I've never been to America but we're talking about buildings in general, not only those located in the USA. What I'm saying is that something shouldn't be discounted from art just because it has a use. Your argument looks like you're saying that games exist to entertain therefore they aren't art. Operas exist to entertain, are they not art? Sure, being entertaining does not imply it's art but it doesn't imply the opposite, either.
The MPAA is taking nearly (and in the first few weeks really) 100% of the ticket price, the cinema has to run ads and sell overpriced junk just to break even.