There's a large and fairly obsessive subculture associated with videogame prototypes. The ultimate goal for most people involved is to find prototypes 'in the wild' like this, but a lot of ultra rare video game stuff is found through dodgy deals and allegedly, bribery and outright theft. http://www.atariprotos.com/ is a repository of Atari stuff and http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/ is a message board discussing the subject. The big area for debate around prototyes is wheather or not they should be realeased. Regardless of the fact that this game never saw commercial release, it's still likely to be someone's intellectual property, and they may not be keen on seeing it spread around freely. A lot of prototypes are worth serious money, this one as an Atari game will be too. A lot of collectors refuse to relase prototypes they've discovered incase it lowers the value of them.
... just lots of little ones.
There's not a lot in WOW that hasn't been done before in other games, either MMOs or other genres, but what Blizz has done is make the innovations of previous games work.
Previous MMORPGs have been innaccessible, imbalanced, prone to exploits, buggy and often just downright boring.
WOW has so often overcome these issues to become one of the biggest games of this decade with a lot of well thought out and well designed gameplay.
Take the whole bind on pickup/bind on equip mechanic for items, meaning that some in game items can be bought and sold freely, but others (usually top tier weapons and armour) can only be gained by achieving in game goals. This means that there is still a viable cash economy, but players cannot simply 'buy' their way to the top, they need to go out and complete quests etc.
Wow was not the first game to feature an ingame economy, but what it did was make the economy fun and useful to players whilst at the same time limiting it's potential to be expolited.
Did anyone else read the headline as $208? Maybe it's just my font but for a moment I was planning on bidding myself. I'm not sure what I'd do with a wireless spectrum at the moment, but for that kind of money it'd be worth buying one just to keep around in case of emergency.
I used to work for TV licensing in the UK...
Strangley enough, you don't legally require a TV licence in the UK to view conent on the BBC's iPlayer
As the law stands in the UK at the moment you need a TV licence to watch live broadcast TV whether thats terrestrial, cable, online etc. If you're watching a proramme as it's being broadcast over the air, you need a licence. On the other hand time shifted content, whether streamed or downloaded, does not require a licence at all as it's not broadcast 'live'. Watching TV on youtube, itunes, whatever, doesn't require a TV licence and neither does the iPlayer.
This is a very good point. I orignally bought wow not beacuse it was an MMOG, but beacause it was the next big Blizzard title. If anyone is going to give them serious competition it's got to be someone who can promise both quality software and have a big consumer impact.
Online games have a sort of catch 22 attached to them, people are only going to want to play them if they are already popular and have a large userbase. It doesn't matter how good the game itself is, it's no fun to play an online multiplayer game in an empty server. One of WoWs biggest pluses is that it has such an active player base, you may queue to get on the server, but you'll never be waiting long to find other players.
WoW had an instant commuunity of dedicated players right from the start, if anyone's going to compete they're going to need to accomplish something similar they'll risk losing the MMO genre's biggest selling point, the massivley multiplayer bit.
Heres a link to the PDF of the paper this article arises from. It's very vaugue as to how the law will be applied and surprisingly actually shows that the majority of respondents were against the proposal. This is not law yet, no by a long way, the govenment is leaving itself plenty of wiggle room to drop this if it becomes unpopular or difficult.
TFA and it's linked stories don't really go into much detail about what the actual benefits for the chinese industry are.
Can anyone supply some more information?
It's easy to invoke the old arguments about a colapsing business model and the failure of big companies to react to the market etc. etc. but how and why are chinese artists better without a working copyright system? This isn't a rhetorical question, I'd like to know.
Has anyone considered the that this may be due to the fact that the PS2 is still selling well? According to recent reports (mentioned here on slashdot) the PS2 is currently outselling the Xbox 369 in the USA and presumably in other places too. Perhaps sony don't want to kill their cash cow just yet, if it's still doing well.
Perhaps they think that it's worth waiting 'till they've got the PS3 right before they release it, they still hold the market, the 360 isn't quite the threat it could have been.
The Revolution is the unknown factor in this, but maybe Sony sees a benefit in being the last to market.
The boy in the trailer does actually appear to be skateboarding himself. There's probably a limited number of child actors that can skate, he could have been the only kid they could get.
I don't know if this is related, but Morrissey has been in the firing line before for his opinions.
In the 90's he was accused of racism and showing at least tacit support for far right politcal groups.
Personally I think the allegations were very overblown, but but some of his lyrics, interviews and the imagery that he has used seems to flirt with racism and nationalism.
Songs like 'National Front Disco' (the NF being a british far right group) and 'Bengali in Platforms' can be interpreted as racist even if that wasn't their original intent, as can many of the mans public comments e.g.
"Reggae is vile."
"Obviously to get on Top Of The Pops these days one had to be, by law, black. I think something political has happened and there has been a hefty pushing of all these black artists and all this discofied nonsense into the Top 40... In essence, this music doesn't say anything whatsoever "
Saying stuff like this whilst wandering round draped in a Union Jack along with his apparent fascination with skinheads, is bound to raise a few eybrows.
Perhpas Morrissey's history has to do with his recent 'interview', that coupled with his recent comments may have been enough to cause a blip on government radars. As I say, I don't think the man really is a facist as some would have it (actually Im a big fan, seen him live many times) but there may be more to this than just his anti bush comments. Everyone here has assumed that it's some sort of liberal, left wing viewpoint that has landed him in trouble, just because he's anti bush doesn't mean that he's also a liberal. They may have thought he was involved with the far right.
"I don't want to be European. I want England to remain an island. I think part of the greatness of the past has been the fact that England has been an island." (Morrissey, August 1992)
sounds similar to the BNPs view.
There's a good page about his nineties nationalist controversy here
I do belive that the current regime here in the UK and in the USA has gone way top far in eroding our liberties, and that pulling Moz in was unjustified, but at the same time groups and their supporters that seek to damage society and disrupt the democratic process do need watching. I'd hate to think that no one was paying attention.
Im not sure if it was ever used this way but the Dreamcast VMS had the potential to be used as a stats display, and certainly the bottom screen on the DS is used like this, to great effect I think.
I dont think any of the current or next gen of consoles are offering anything like this, but a separate lcd display on either the console or the controller could be used as compromise between the info rich but obtrusive HUD and a cool looking but confusing displayless gaming environment.
If you think about the real life user interface of a car or just about any powered vehicle, information is displayed on separate gauges away from the main feild of view of the user. I know aircraft and I think some cars use HUDs, but these are as a suplement to the rest of the dials and gauges. Im sure a HUD showing all the instruments of a plane would be very intrusive.
This kind of display is something most people are going to be used to and will presumably find intuitive, Mario Kart DS has a minimap on the lower screen and it's very handy. As well as the normal fairly uncluttered display on the top screen, you've also got a very easy way to check the positions and see whats coming next with hardly and disruption to the flow of the game.
After the next installment of the GTA series on the PS3(?) sells a 100 zillion copies Im sure their value will bounce right back.
Seriously, whilst this comapny might have taken a few knocks of late, they have excellent form and if there was one developer you could bank on having more hits in the future then it's these people. They could release GTA: Antarctica and it'd sell.
Who has the patents on the rest of the technology? Who controlls cellular bandwidth?
Corporations like Sony, Motorolla, Nokia, Apple, etc etc.
What are they gonna do? make devices that allow people to trade freely without their intervention or are they gonna try and make some money out of this?
Anyone who has the capacity to make something like this on a large scale is not going to let unfettered P2P happen. Mobile players, moblie phones etc are very closed proprietary devices, DRM has got to be eaiser to implement on these and harder to get around than just about anything else.
I hear this a lot. I think you're kidding yourself if you think that analogue equipmnet some how has more accurate sound reproduction than digital.
Analogue media adds a lot of his hum and distortion, Im fairly sure this is objectively verifyable, and cannot re create a sound source as accurately as even the relatively low bitrate of a cd. Im really not an audio expert, so I can't give an authoritive debunking on the analogue myth, but I think it's pretty plain.
Now a lot of people, me included, prefer their music to be a bit noisy and distorted, and prefer the fuzzy warm sound of vinyl, but to say that digital is a con is silly,
To anyone that thinks that analogue is better than digital, try this:
Record digitaly onto a computer your favourite vinyl, make sure it's done well, but don't go processing it or anything, then burn it onto a CD.
Then with the help of a friend do a blind listening test, listening to both the original vinyl and the CD copy of the vinyl side by side and see if you can tell the difference. Try it with a few different tracks. All things being equal ie same amp and speakers etc, I'd be very surprised if there are many people out there that can consistently tell the difference between an original analogue recording and a digital copy of that same recording.
The sound of a CD isn't a limitiation of the medium it's it's strength, it is capable of reproducing the vinyl sound almost entirely and what you're hearing when you listen to vinyl isn't more lifelike, it's more fuzzed and noisy.
I don't think I'd be able to stop telling people what I'd done if I'd played such a major part in the development of the web as good old TBL.
You have a website? lovely, I invented those you know!
You're an internet millionaire? Fantastic! You'd be a nobody if it wasn't for me!
Dear amazon.com, send me free stuff. I invented the web.
I don't think I'd ever get tired of that.
Erm, The idea of buying single recordings of single songs isn't a new one, they're called singles and have been available in one form or another since the late 19th century, predating the album by a considerable length of time.
In fact it's not unusual for bands to relese 5 or 6 singles from an album, some artists I believe have even released singles of every track. Up untill the 90's really, the singles market was the dominant market in the music business, it's only in recent times that record lables have started to throw singles out the door as loss leading promotions for albums and tours.
I can't help but think there maybe a good reason why most unreleased games weren't released. Having played a lot of the more readily available protos floating around the 'net, it seems there are a few genuine bonafide classics that got shelved due to bankruptcy/internal politics or whatever and I can see why these may get premium prices.
Sadly there's no mystery why a lot of protos reamined locked away, it's because they were crap.
Whilst I personally don't approve of the RIAA and others tactics I can kind of see why they they might be getting upset by this.
It would be a very stupid and shortsighted move for the RIAA to shut down amateur fansites that that offer lyrics, but many of the big lyric sites are run for profit.
Have a look, a lot fof them are pop-up ridden spyware infested nightmares, the kind of websites Slashdotters usually condemn. They are profiting directly from the IP of others, often offering crappy interpretations of songs ripped from usenet posts, and making cash from the whole internet ad racket thing, a lot different in my book from P2P sharing. Many of these places have more in common with the well known pirate DVD outfits than your usual internet traders.
If this turns out to be a witch hunt, where genuine dedicated non profit fansites get cease and desist orders then It's a bad thing, another case of the music industry shooting itself in the foot. On the other hand I can't get too upset when the RIAA decides they've had enough of sites using their artists lyrics as a lure into the 'free ipod' and 'you've got spyware' pay per click ads.
Daddy can I got outside and play?
No! You'll stay in the house and play videogames! Why can't you spend all day cooped up in your room like normal kids?
There's a lot of comment here on slashdot about the culture of fear the government/media are breeding.
Many people are afriad of terrorism, crime, immagrants, but seem blase about one type of social menace that's not just a possible but very probable.
If you're not very careful about security your box will be compromised, and whilst, okay, it's not quite in the same league as being killed, it can create huge problems.
A little public paranioa in this area might not be too much of a bad thing.
Numeeja - New Media, as pronounced by someone from North London.
Epater le bourgeois - to shock or make an impression on wealthy/posh people.
Pisstake - unexpresable in American English, heh, but basicly means 'send up', making fun of.
Pap - very mild term for manure.
Slashdot Mirror
If you put in enough 'love'?
Whatever that's a euphemism for I don't want it in my coffee.
If I had a million mod points I'd give them all to you.
There's a large and fairly obsessive subculture associated with videogame prototypes. The ultimate goal for most people involved is to find prototypes 'in the wild' like this, but a lot of ultra rare video game stuff is found through dodgy deals and allegedly, bribery and outright theft.
http://www.atariprotos.com/ is a repository of Atari stuff and http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/ is a message board discussing the subject.
The big area for debate around prototyes is wheather or not they should be realeased. Regardless of the fact that this game never saw commercial release, it's still likely to be someone's intellectual property, and they may not be keen on seeing it spread around freely.
A lot of prototypes are worth serious money, this one as an Atari game will be too. A lot of collectors refuse to relase prototypes they've discovered incase it lowers the value of them.
... just lots of little ones. There's not a lot in WOW that hasn't been done before in other games, either MMOs or other genres, but what Blizz has done is make the innovations of previous games work. Previous MMORPGs have been innaccessible, imbalanced, prone to exploits, buggy and often just downright boring.
WOW has so often overcome these issues to become one of the biggest games of this decade with a lot of well thought out and well designed gameplay.
Take the whole bind on pickup/bind on equip mechanic for items, meaning that some in game items can be bought and sold freely, but others (usually top tier weapons and armour) can only be gained by achieving in game goals. This means that there is still a viable cash economy, but players cannot simply 'buy' their way to the top, they need to go out and complete quests etc.
Wow was not the first game to feature an ingame economy, but what it did was make the economy fun and useful to players whilst at the same time limiting it's potential to be expolited.
Did anyone else read the headline as $208? Maybe it's just my font but for a moment I was planning on bidding myself. I'm not sure what I'd do with a wireless spectrum at the moment, but for that kind of money it'd be worth buying one just to keep around in case of emergency.
We already did. It's called Snooker
I used to work for TV licensing in the UK...
Strangley enough, you don't legally require a TV licence in the UK to view conent on the BBC's iPlayer
As the law stands in the UK at the moment you need a TV licence to watch live broadcast TV whether thats terrestrial, cable, online etc. If you're watching a proramme as it's being broadcast over the air, you need a licence. On the other hand time shifted content, whether streamed or downloaded, does not require a licence at all as it's not broadcast 'live'.
Watching TV on youtube, itunes, whatever, doesn't require a TV licence and neither does the iPlayer.
Tall Key? It's spelt Torquay, but don't worry, it's one of thousands of British placenames designed to trap the unwary.
This is a very good point. I orignally bought wow not beacuse it was an MMOG, but beacause it was the next big Blizzard title. If anyone is going to give them serious competition it's got to be someone who can promise both quality software and have a big consumer impact.
Online games have a sort of catch 22 attached to them, people are only going to want to play them if they are already popular and have a large userbase. It doesn't matter how good the game itself is, it's no fun to play an online multiplayer game in an empty server. One of WoWs biggest pluses is that it has such an active player base, you may queue to get on the server, but you'll never be waiting long to find other players.
WoW had an instant commuunity of dedicated players right from the start, if anyone's going to compete they're going to need to accomplish something similar they'll risk losing the MMO genre's biggest selling point, the massivley multiplayer bit.
Heres a link to the PDF of the paper this article arises from. It's very vaugue as to how the law will be applied and surprisingly actually shows that the majority of respondents were against the proposal. This is not law yet, no by a long way, the govenment is leaving itself plenty of wiggle room to drop this if it becomes unpopular or difficult.
TFA and it's linked stories don't really go into much detail about what the actual benefits for the chinese industry are.
Can anyone supply some more information?
It's easy to invoke the old arguments about a colapsing business model and the failure of big companies to react to the market etc. etc. but how and why are chinese artists better without a working copyright system?
This isn't a rhetorical question, I'd like to know.
Has anyone considered the that this may be due to the fact that the PS2 is still selling well?
According to recent reports (mentioned here on slashdot) the PS2 is currently outselling the Xbox 369 in the USA and presumably in other places too. Perhaps sony don't want to kill their cash cow just yet, if it's still doing well.
Perhaps they think that it's worth waiting 'till they've got the PS3 right before they release it, they still hold the market, the 360 isn't quite the threat it could have been. The Revolution is the unknown factor in this, but maybe Sony sees a benefit in being the last to market.
The boy in the trailer does actually appear to be skateboarding himself. There's probably a limited number of child actors that can skate, he could have been the only kid they could get.
In the 90's he was accused of racism and showing at least tacit support for far right politcal groups.
Personally I think the allegations were very overblown, but but some of his lyrics, interviews and the imagery that he has used seems to flirt with racism and nationalism. Songs like 'National Front Disco' (the NF being a british far right group) and 'Bengali in Platforms' can be interpreted as racist even if that wasn't their original intent, as can many of the mans public comments e.g.
"Reggae is vile."
"Obviously to get on Top Of The Pops these days one had to be, by law, black. I think something political has happened and there has been a hefty pushing of all these black artists and all this discofied nonsense into the Top 40... In essence, this music doesn't say anything whatsoever "
Saying stuff like this whilst wandering round draped in a Union Jack along with his apparent fascination with skinheads, is bound to raise a few eybrows.
Perhpas Morrissey's history has to do with his recent 'interview', that coupled with his recent comments may have been enough to cause a blip on government radars. As I say, I don't think the man really is a facist as some would have it (actually Im a big fan, seen him live many times) but there may be more to this than just his anti bush comments. Everyone here has assumed that it's some sort of liberal, left wing viewpoint that has landed him in trouble, just because he's anti bush doesn't mean that he's also a liberal. They may have thought he was involved with the far right.
"I don't want to be European. I want England to remain an island. I think part of the greatness of the past has been the fact that England has been an island." (Morrissey, August 1992)
sounds similar to the BNPs view. There's a good page about his nineties nationalist controversy here
I do belive that the current regime here in the UK and in the USA has gone way top far in eroding our liberties, and that pulling Moz in was unjustified, but at the same time groups and their supporters that seek to damage society and disrupt the democratic process do need watching. I'd hate to think that no one was paying attention.
Im not sure if it was ever used this way but the Dreamcast VMS had the potential to be used as a stats display, and certainly the bottom screen on the DS is used like this, to great effect I think.
I dont think any of the current or next gen of consoles are offering anything like this, but a separate lcd display on either the console or the controller could be used as compromise between the info rich but obtrusive HUD and a cool looking but confusing displayless gaming environment.
If you think about the real life user interface of a car or just about any powered vehicle, information is displayed on separate gauges away from the main feild of view of the user. I know aircraft and I think some cars use HUDs, but these are as a suplement to the rest of the dials and gauges. Im sure a HUD showing all the instruments of a plane would be very intrusive.
This kind of display is something most people are going to be used to and will presumably find intuitive, Mario Kart DS has a minimap on the lower screen and it's very handy. As well as the normal fairly uncluttered display on the top screen, you've also got a very easy way to check the positions and see whats coming next with hardly and disruption to the flow of the game.
Seriously, whilst this comapny might have taken a few knocks of late, they have excellent form and if there was one developer you could bank on having more hits in the future then it's these people. They could release GTA: Antarctica and it'd sell.
Who has the patents on the rest of the technology? Who controlls cellular bandwidth?
Corporations like Sony, Motorolla, Nokia, Apple, etc etc.
What are they gonna do? make devices that allow people to trade freely without their intervention or are they gonna try and make some money out of this?
Anyone who has the capacity to make something like this on a large scale is not going to let unfettered P2P happen. Mobile players, moblie phones etc are very closed proprietary devices, DRM has got to be eaiser to implement on these and harder to get around than just about anything else.
Now a lot of people, me included, prefer their music to be a bit noisy and distorted, and prefer the fuzzy warm sound of vinyl, but to say that digital is a con is silly, To anyone that thinks that analogue is better than digital, try this:
Record digitaly onto a computer your favourite vinyl, make sure it's done well, but don't go processing it or anything, then burn it onto a CD.
Then with the help of a friend do a blind listening test, listening to both the original vinyl and the CD copy of the vinyl side by side and see if you can tell the difference.
Try it with a few different tracks. All things being equal ie same amp and speakers etc, I'd be very surprised if there are many people out there that can consistently tell the difference between an original analogue recording and a digital copy of that same recording.
The sound of a CD isn't a limitiation of the medium it's it's strength, it is capable of reproducing the vinyl sound almost entirely and what you're hearing when you listen to vinyl isn't more lifelike, it's more fuzzed and noisy.
I don't think I'd be able to stop telling people what I'd done if I'd played such a major part in the development of the web as good old TBL.
You have a website? lovely, I invented those you know!
You're an internet millionaire? Fantastic! You'd be a nobody if it wasn't for me!
Dear amazon.com, send me free stuff. I invented the web.
I don't think I'd ever get tired of that.
In fact it's not unusual for bands to relese 5 or 6 singles from an album, some artists I believe have even released singles of every track. Up untill the 90's really, the singles market was the dominant market in the music business, it's only in recent times that record lables have started to throw singles out the door as loss leading promotions for albums and tours.
I can't help but think there maybe a good reason why most unreleased games weren't released. Having played a lot of the more readily available protos floating around the 'net, it seems there are a few genuine bonafide classics that got shelved due to bankruptcy/internal politics or whatever and I can see why these may get premium prices.
Sadly there's no mystery why a lot of protos reamined locked away, it's because they were crap.
It would be a very stupid and shortsighted move for the RIAA to shut down amateur fansites that that offer lyrics, but many of the big lyric sites are run for profit. Have a look, a lot fof them are pop-up ridden spyware infested nightmares, the kind of websites Slashdotters usually condemn. They are profiting directly from the IP of others, often offering crappy interpretations of songs ripped from usenet posts, and making cash from the whole internet ad racket thing, a lot different in my book from P2P sharing. Many of these places have more in common with the well known pirate DVD outfits than your usual internet traders.
If this turns out to be a witch hunt, where genuine dedicated non profit fansites get cease and desist orders then It's a bad thing, another case of the music industry shooting itself in the foot. On the other hand I can't get too upset when the RIAA decides they've had enough of sites using their artists lyrics as a lure into the 'free ipod' and 'you've got spyware' pay per click ads.
Daddy can I got outside and play? No! You'll stay in the house and play videogames! Why can't you spend all day cooped up in your room like normal kids?
Many people are afriad of terrorism, crime, immagrants, but seem blase about one type of social menace that's not just a possible but very probable.
If you're not very careful about security your box will be compromised, and whilst, okay, it's not quite in the same league as being killed, it can create huge problems.
A little public paranioa in this area might not be too much of a bad thing.
Numeeja - New Media, as pronounced by someone from North London. Epater le bourgeois - to shock or make an impression on wealthy/posh people. Pisstake - unexpresable in American English, heh, but basicly means 'send up', making fun of. Pap - very mild term for manure.