I think it's more to do with them not wanting home users to set up servers. A server is (especially if it's a big one), more likely to have a higher average bandwidth usage then a regular home user. You'll have all the users connected to the server in addition to all the regular home user bandwidth usage. Even if the server only has a few users connected to whatever services it provides at a time, that's a much bigger chunk of bandwidth then their projected "average user".
They figure that if they make it very unattractive to run servers by giving you a very small upstream cap, then only very few will try. They want those users who run servers to upgrade to (more expensive) "business class" services, that have higher upstream caps and (at least I would hope, though maybe I wouldn't hold my breath) better support.
At least, those are the reasons they gave me one time when they temporarily pulled the plug on my connection...
Captchas are far from human-readable (the good ones at least) While I've run into not a few captchas that are not human-readable, I would argue that they are not, in fact, the good ones. Good Captchas are human readable, but extremely difficult to solve using automation (this, other OCR software, what have you).
Like some people keep saying "why play guitar hero when you can play guitar" it's one of those "why play gran turismo when you can actually drive" things.
Maybe because it's a game?
Games are fun? Well, Guitar Hero is a far cry from a simulation (at the level that games like Flight Sim, Gran Turismo, and the like try to get to) of guitar playing. I'm fine if you want to say "It's a fun game," in the same way that arcade-style racing games are fun. But if someone is playing guitar hero "to get better at guitar" I think they'll likely find very few skills they develop in the game will transfer over.
Also, I'd just like to point out that the difference in cost between "buying a video game + accessory (GH controller)" and "buying a guitar and some sheet music" are quite a bit lower then the differences between "buying a video game + accessory (Steering wheel)" and "Buying a [insert a/multiple $100k+ cars here] and a day at a race track." And don't forget that the potential risks of misusing a high-end car in a race situation have far more repercussions then misusing a guitar.
Those are the two big points of simulations, really. Let you try something you can't or won't normally do because of financial reasons or potential risks. Guitar Hero only has a (relatively, compared to GT/etc) small financial incentive compared to getting a low-end guitar and practicing on that (if a guitar simulation is your goal).
Little Big Planet looks like it has some real potential.
This article, though, is about PlayStation Home, which seems something like XBox Live (especially marketplace and achievements) meets Miis, with shiny graphics and a public chat lobby.
Actually, having played a few of these games with in-game ads, a lot of it really is just adverts. In Battlefield 2142 and Crackdown (and presumably any other free-roaming game in a semi-modern setting), it's usually big billboards scattered around every here and there (not too annoying yet). In sports games, it's even more like reality (things like "Half time, brought to you by X), in addition to the little signs around the edges. The signs may not be so bad, but I can almost feel myself cry a little when I hear the announcer say that half time, the stadium, or some set of statistics (or some equivalent) in a sports game has been brought to me by some company.
But for the purposes of this article, I think they're mostly talking about the billboards.
It looks like a very interesting series, thanks for pointing it out to me. Some of them look like other games I've played (Orbital resembles looks like it resembles flow, and Dialhex reminds me of Hexic), while others are very unique and creative (especially soundvoyager looks like it would be interesting).
I hope I can be forgiven for not knowing about a Japan-only release, though.;)
You're saying that for an author to produce art it has to be a novel or epic-poem, for a painter to produce art it has to be a grand mural, or for a composer to produce art he has to produce an opera. I certainly didn't mean to say this. I just didn't think to put in a few lines (and the post seemed long enough already). I should have said that (a) A game doesn't always need an amazingly epic plot (or any one given thing), but it needs to do a significant chunk of different things well and (b) what is "good" in any one area is fairly subjective.
A haiku can be art, graffiti can be art, and a pop-song can be art... Anything can be art, but some genres and fields tend to have a higher art:not ratio, while others tend to have a lower one.
Whether some people would like to admit it or not, Wii Sports could be seen as art because it was produced by the artists frustration with complicated control mechanics and massive budgets; and the industry will never be the same for having experienced it. Almost the exact same thing could be said of Katamari, except the part where very little actually changed in "the industry."
(And if you're going to measure artistic value by the way it changes a medium, isn't it a bit early to be declaring Wii Sports art?)
I'd say any game has to have the gameplay and interactivity, otherwise it's just a book/painting/movie made in the wrong medium. Most definitely. I feel stupid for leaving that off my "list of important things" now. It seems to have gotten me into a lot of trouble with some of the other people who replied, too.
I've played games before where all I want is the story, and all these fights or puzzles or what have you getting in the way are just a big nuisance. And when I'm playing them, I usually wish that games like that would choose a different medium to tell their story in.
The games I mentioned all use gameplay very well, and it's a big part of the reason I enjoyed them so much.
While all that is true, at the same time, no one thing makes any of these good.
Literature needs to have a good plot, the author needs to effectively use words to describe the scene, they need to have good pacing of their story, and appropriate character development (which can cover a wide range depending on the story they are telling).
Music has always been a bit more abstract for me, but I hope we can agree that there isn't any one thing that makes music good.
Movies many of the same things as literature, and in addition they need good actors, a well done score, camera work and lighting, and many other things.
By the same token, saying "A game is art because of it's gameplay" is far too narrow. Notice that I didn't say good visuals make a great game (Otherwise I probably would have put something like Gears of War on my little list). They are, however, a part of making a great game. The visuals in a game like Shadow of the Colossus are one of the many things that come together to make it so great. And yes, gameplay is another.
Games, like movies, build on what has come before. They need many of the things a movie does, and well done gameplay in addition. Saying gameplay on its own can hold up a game seems a lot like saying special effects can hold up a movie to me.
Side note: I should have said in my first post that a lot of these things are somewhat subjective. "Good visuals" isn't the same as "EVERYTHING has specular highlights and bloom! And 1024x1024 textures only please!"
I would actually disagree with you there. Nintendo makes some fun games to be sure, but I wouldn't call them art by any stretch. As much as I enjoy a round of Mario Party with my friends, or a few rounds of Smash Bros with my brother, or beating Twilight Princess a month or so ago (hint: quite a lot, for all of them), it doesn't make them "artistic."
Like it or not, artistic and fun are too different (but not mutually exclusive) things. And they aren't, generally speaking, the things that Nintendo is trying to do with first party titles or the Wii. An artistic game is the kind of game that I'd want to play just to play the game. Do something like see the interesting/beautiful scenery, follow a well-written plot, or something like that (same reasons you might want to read a book or look at a painting). Nintendo games are more of a "good clean fun" type of feeling, where I want to play them to get to accomplish some arbitrary objective (get the star, beat the boss, collect the power-ups).
I'd say if any console can claim to be the home of artistic games in the previous generation, it'd be the PS2. Games like Okami, Shadow of the Colossus, Ico, and Katamari are the first to come to mind when I think of games that I enjoyed for their interesting takes on the environment and story-telling.
Of course, that's probably because the PS2 had by far the largest install base in the last cycle. I'd be willing to bet that if you look at any given console generation, the most "artistic" system would also be the one that had the largest install base. Just because it's safest to make a game like that (one where you know it won't reach as high a percentage of the install base). If the Wii can grab that spot, it very well might be the next "artistic platform" (although I'd like to see what a game like Shadow of the Colossus could do with the PS3 or 360's hardware, personally).
(side note: I haven't seen Pi, but it doesn't take much to be more artistic then American Pie)
Prominent critics of the RIAA are hardly silent on the subject, now are they.
The OP says (as you so helpfully quoted) "lawyers and judges.. condone by their silence..".
The GP says that their are many lawyers who criticize this tactic. The implication here is that they are not silent, therefore the assertion that they condone the RIAA's tactics with their (non-existent) silence is not true.
The point the OP was asserting was that other lawyers are not criticizing the RIAA's tactics. The GP is making his assertion about who the critics are (specifically that they are mostly lawyers), not what they are doing.
They're completely different concepts, for Pete's sake!
And I agree, their/there/they're has been one of the few "confusing homonyms" in English that has never really given me trouble. (Actually, it's not the homonyms, it's the words that are spelled similar but sound different that always throw me off).
> I'm SURE that there is prior art to that on different systems.
I'm sure there is. In fact I remember doing this back when I played Counter Strike (right after they introduced mic use). But prior art is really a quite irrelevant concept for this story... no one said they were trying to patent it (though it is Microsoft, so maybe "yet" is appropriate).
The point of this story is that the next Halo is getting a fix for something that bugs a lot of people about the current version.
I'll start off by saying I agree with most of what you're saying. Better graphics and better game play are not mutually exclusive, or even all that strongly correlated. Having more resources is important for more then just higher levels of anti-aliasing and more detailed textures. I think (and hope) that we will see many of the things you talked about in your post (especially with respect to the scope of the environments) in the new generation of game consoles (or on computers, or somewhere else who knows).
But at the same time, the new abilities of the consoles have imposed some new limitations on developers. They have to have those higher res textures to compete with other games (and I know at least that Microsoft requires support for 720p in their games). The dev team has to spend time implementing the $shiny_new_thing in the game engine instead of adding cool game-play elements. And also, while there may not be a strong correlation, the bigger, more detailed, or more complicated you want the game world to get, the longer the artists, level editors, testers, developers, and whoever else are going to have to work on the games.
These things all cost quite a bit more money for the developers then they did in the last generation. There is a limit to how long a game can stay in design, how long the developers can keep adding new features, and so on, before the money just dries up and you have to release a game. Adding on extra costs like this, while at the same time the gamers are already complaining about slightly higher costs for games means that the developers have a limit to just how many new things they can add to a game.
My personal hope is that two things will start to show up that make it easier on the developers so they can work on new things. First off, I'd like to see more automation in how the game world is built. Obviously, creating and then hand placing a million million different objects over 1000 square miles for the player to interact with is near impossible. But bring in some procedural creation of objects and levels (either in the design/creation phase or to some degree during the game) and this becomes much more possible. That's not to say that everything in the game has to (or should ever) be created this way. The only game that could work this way is a sandbox game, and fun as they are I hope the game industry never starts making only sandboxes.
The other big thing is more comprehensive APIs to take care of the basics for the developers. It seems to me that this is the part that Microsoft really gets. They definitely seem the furthest ahead in this area, with a fairly good chunk of the online multi-player code for any given game probably sitting in the XBox's API as well as most of integration with the underlying OS (things like game downloads, profile management, etc). Having the horse power is one important part of the equation (and here, the PS3 is the winner in most areas), but giving people the ability to use it is another part that counts for at least as much.
If you like to mess around with hardware, but not enough to actually solder on a chip (or don't want to open the XBox for another reason), you can make an adapter for the XBox controller by taking one of the tear-away ends of the cord and splicing in a USB male adapter (something like this, but in reverse.. and you don't have to cut the cord if you don't have extras).
It's pretty easy since the XBox controllers are basically just USB cables with a non-standard adapter. There are drivers for the controller and memory card (you can find them on xbox-scene), so all you need to get is a memory card (you should be able to find a used one at a local game store) and you're set. Plus you can use the controller as a game pad for your PC if you want.
At EBStop just ask for the controller. They can't leave it just lying out since it's, you know, wireless. It would be stolen within hours.
So are the xbox and ps3 controllers, but they manage to attach a cable to them so they don't walk away. It's not the same, but you should still be able to get a feel for it, but whatever, I'll ask next time I'm there.:) Actually, the 360 demos pretty much universally use the wired version of the controller.
And the fact that PS3 demos all have an annoying plastic case around the controller that makes it a bit harder to hit some of the buttons near the middle, and impossible to hit start, select, or whatever they're calling the middle jewel makes me think that any kind of similar treatment for Wii controllers would make them completely unplayable...
I'll use this to reply to both the people who said "22 miles isn't that far." I realize a lot of people drive further every day (some people even do those kinds of commute around here). My commute is actually a good 30 miles (for there and back - 15 one way) daily, and it was a few more over the summer (internship - I'm still finishing up college).
But to drive that far in the kind of traffic we have around here (Not just Southern California as the you noted, but Orange County) during any time when most people aren't at work (and the store would be open) is a nightmare. In the morning or the afternoon, you're lucky to get anything but stop-and-go traffic on the freeways. Mid day and evenings aren't as bad, but it's still pretty crowded and the people aren't any saner. And of course, streets are poorly laid out and usually over crowded wherever you.
There's a reason there are a good twenty stores between my zip and the store with the 60GB model. And it's not JUST that we're lazy.
I'll give the grandparent one thing, there are places where they aren't everywhere yet. For example, try my zip code (92656) on the ebgames store list and you have to go 22 miles before you get a store that has any in stock for the 60GB model , or 10 miles for the 20GB. The drive for the 20GB isn't that bad, but it'd be a pretty dedicated person who'd drive from here to the stores with the 60GB to buy one.
Although, I'd think the area I live in would be on the lower end of the "PS3 availability" spectrum, seeing as the ratio of people with too much money to the rest of the population is higher then most of the US.
And of course, I've seen PS3s around now and then when I go to an electronics or games store. Most people who are actually looking for one probably could have found one in my area by now.
Well, for one thing I would say that eating 600 pies in one sitting is rather unlikely compared to drinking enough water to get water poisoning in one sitting (the later being possible).
In any case, I would say the people hosting the competition have a certain responsibility to keep it generally safe.
With the case in the article, where there was probably at least a fairly high chance of someone being hurt, that responsibility would have been anywhere from making sure people susceptible to water intoxication did not participate to canceling or changing the way their contest worked. Perhaps continuously giving people water wasn't a good idea, you don't need to drink a couple gallons of water to have a strong urge to go to the bathroom. Or giving them something that would keep their electrolytes up (Wikipedia says this low electrolyte ballance is the cause of water intoxication) instead of water. Heck, there's even a chance for some sponsorship from Gatorade in that case.
With your example, if the people in charge of a pie eating contest went and asked a doctor (something the people holding this contest not only didn't do, but they apparently ignored free advice when it was offered), and the doctor told them that, then I would say it would be their responsibility to say something like "It is possible, if you eat several hundred pies, that it will cause severe health problems up to and including death... so know your limits." Since the probability of someone eating so many is very low, they don't need to be as careful.
If you knew you were going to be in a snail eating contest, wouldn't you do a bit of research beforehand to make sure there were no dangers before doing it?
Similarly, if you were going to hold a snail-eating contest, wouldn't you want to do some research to make sure it wasn't going to put all your participants lives at risk?
I think it could reasonably be argued that most of the contestants expected the people running a contest, or another public event, would have done this kind of research and so would have ignored doing it for themselves (if it even crossed their minds to do some research). The mere fact that someone is publicly holding a contest where snails are eaten implies that (though in this case obviously not correctly) it is safe to eat large quantities of snails or else the company or people sponsoring this contest would not be holding it.
With respect to the submitter's complaint about "precise control," I was under the impression that the PS3 controllers had replaced the bottom two shoulder buttons with some sort of analog "trigger" instead of just a button. The triggers on the XBox controller work great for gas and break because they have a long enough range from "fully pressed" to "not pressed" that you have fairly precise control over how much gas/break to give the car. I'd assume (if I heard correctly about the controller) that something similar would work very well on a PS3 controller, as far as control schemes go.
In fact, one of my bigger issues with GT has always been that I pretty much have to go all or nothing on the gas and breaks because the analog range from off to full on the face buttons (and all the buttons on the PS2 except the sticks, really) is something on the order of less than a pound of force, and my motor skills aren't good enough to use them for partial gas/breaking (though some of my friends have gotten pretty good at it).
They do sound obvious and they should be in just about every multiplayer game.
Unfortunately, all the XBox Live developers never got that memo. Some manage to get the Players/Total working fine, but in almost every XBL game, when you try to enter a match and are rejected you will be pushed back several screens. It's annoying, but it's true of just about every game I've tried to play on live.
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I think it's more to do with them not wanting home users to set up servers. A server is (especially if it's a big one), more likely to have a higher average bandwidth usage then a regular home user. You'll have all the users connected to the server in addition to all the regular home user bandwidth usage. Even if the server only has a few users connected to whatever services it provides at a time, that's a much bigger chunk of bandwidth then their projected "average user".
They figure that if they make it very unattractive to run servers by giving you a very small upstream cap, then only very few will try. They want those users who run servers to upgrade to (more expensive) "business class" services, that have higher upstream caps and (at least I would hope, though maybe I wouldn't hold my breath) better support.
At least, those are the reasons they gave me one time when they temporarily pulled the plug on my connection...
Maybe because it's a game?
Games are fun? Well, Guitar Hero is a far cry from a simulation (at the level that games like Flight Sim, Gran Turismo, and the like try to get to) of guitar playing. I'm fine if you want to say "It's a fun game," in the same way that arcade-style racing games are fun. But if someone is playing guitar hero "to get better at guitar" I think they'll likely find very few skills they develop in the game will transfer over.
Also, I'd just like to point out that the difference in cost between "buying a video game + accessory (GH controller)" and "buying a guitar and some sheet music" are quite a bit lower then the differences between "buying a video game + accessory (Steering wheel)" and "Buying a [insert a/multiple $100k+ cars here] and a day at a race track." And don't forget that the potential risks of misusing a high-end car in a race situation have far more repercussions then misusing a guitar.
Those are the two big points of simulations, really. Let you try something you can't or won't normally do because of financial reasons or potential risks. Guitar Hero only has a (relatively, compared to GT/etc) small financial incentive compared to getting a low-end guitar and practicing on that (if a guitar simulation is your goal).
Little Big Planet looks like it has some real potential.
This article, though, is about PlayStation Home, which seems something like XBox Live (especially marketplace and achievements) meets Miis, with shiny graphics and a public chat lobby.
Actually, having played a few of these games with in-game ads, a lot of it really is just adverts. In Battlefield 2142 and Crackdown (and presumably any other free-roaming game in a semi-modern setting), it's usually big billboards scattered around every here and there (not too annoying yet). In sports games, it's even more like reality (things like "Half time, brought to you by X), in addition to the little signs around the edges. The signs may not be so bad, but I can almost feel myself cry a little when I hear the announcer say that half time, the stadium, or some set of statistics (or some equivalent) in a sports game has been brought to me by some company.
But for the purposes of this article, I think they're mostly talking about the billboards.
It looks like a very interesting series, thanks for pointing it out to me. Some of them look like other games I've played (Orbital resembles looks like it resembles flow, and Dialhex reminds me of Hexic), while others are very unique and creative (especially soundvoyager looks like it would be interesting).
;)
I hope I can be forgiven for not knowing about a Japan-only release, though.
(And if you're going to measure artistic value by the way it changes a medium, isn't it a bit early to be declaring Wii Sports art?)
I've played games before where all I want is the story, and all these fights or puzzles or what have you getting in the way are just a big nuisance. And when I'm playing them, I usually wish that games like that would choose a different medium to tell their story in.
The games I mentioned all use gameplay very well, and it's a big part of the reason I enjoyed them so much.
While all that is true, at the same time, no one thing makes any of these good.
Literature needs to have a good plot, the author needs to effectively use words to describe the scene, they need to have good pacing of their story, and appropriate character development (which can cover a wide range depending on the story they are telling).
Music has always been a bit more abstract for me, but I hope we can agree that there isn't any one thing that makes music good.
Movies many of the same things as literature, and in addition they need good actors, a well done score, camera work and lighting, and many other things.
By the same token, saying "A game is art because of it's gameplay" is far too narrow. Notice that I didn't say good visuals make a great game (Otherwise I probably would have put something like Gears of War on my little list). They are, however, a part of making a great game. The visuals in a game like Shadow of the Colossus are one of the many things that come together to make it so great. And yes, gameplay is another.
Games, like movies, build on what has come before. They need many of the things a movie does, and well done gameplay in addition. Saying gameplay on its own can hold up a game seems a lot like saying special effects can hold up a movie to me.
Side note: I should have said in my first post that a lot of these things are somewhat subjective. "Good visuals" isn't the same as "EVERYTHING has specular highlights and bloom! And 1024x1024 textures only please!"
I would actually disagree with you there. Nintendo makes some fun games to be sure, but I wouldn't call them art by any stretch. As much as I enjoy a round of Mario Party with my friends, or a few rounds of Smash Bros with my brother, or beating Twilight Princess a month or so ago (hint: quite a lot, for all of them), it doesn't make them "artistic."
Like it or not, artistic and fun are too different (but not mutually exclusive) things. And they aren't, generally speaking, the things that Nintendo is trying to do with first party titles or the Wii. An artistic game is the kind of game that I'd want to play just to play the game. Do something like see the interesting/beautiful scenery, follow a well-written plot, or something like that (same reasons you might want to read a book or look at a painting). Nintendo games are more of a "good clean fun" type of feeling, where I want to play them to get to accomplish some arbitrary objective (get the star, beat the boss, collect the power-ups).
I'd say if any console can claim to be the home of artistic games in the previous generation, it'd be the PS2. Games like Okami, Shadow of the Colossus, Ico, and Katamari are the first to come to mind when I think of games that I enjoyed for their interesting takes on the environment and story-telling.
Of course, that's probably because the PS2 had by far the largest install base in the last cycle. I'd be willing to bet that if you look at any given console generation, the most "artistic" system would also be the one that had the largest install base. Just because it's safest to make a game like that (one where you know it won't reach as high a percentage of the install base). If the Wii can grab that spot, it very well might be the next "artistic platform" (although I'd like to see what a game like Shadow of the Colossus could do with the PS3 or 360's hardware, personally).
(side note: I haven't seen Pi, but it doesn't take much to be more artistic then American Pie)
Prominent critics of the RIAA are hardly silent on the subject, now are they.
.. condone by their silence ..".
The OP says (as you so helpfully quoted) "lawyers and judges
The GP says that their are many lawyers who criticize this tactic. The implication here is that they are not silent, therefore the assertion that they condone the RIAA's tactics with their (non-existent) silence is not true.
The point the OP was asserting was that other lawyers are not criticizing the RIAA's tactics. The GP is making his assertion about who the critics are (specifically that they are mostly lawyers), not what they are doing.
> I'm SURE that there is prior art to that on different systems.
... no one said they were trying to patent it (though it is Microsoft, so maybe "yet" is appropriate).
I'm sure there is. In fact I remember doing this back when I played Counter Strike (right after they introduced mic use). But prior art is really a quite irrelevant concept for this story
The point of this story is that the next Halo is getting a fix for something that bugs a lot of people about the current version.
I'll start off by saying I agree with most of what you're saying. Better graphics and better game play are not mutually exclusive, or even all that strongly correlated. Having more resources is important for more then just higher levels of anti-aliasing and more detailed textures. I think (and hope) that we will see many of the things you talked about in your post (especially with respect to the scope of the environments) in the new generation of game consoles (or on computers, or somewhere else who knows).
But at the same time, the new abilities of the consoles have imposed some new limitations on developers. They have to have those higher res textures to compete with other games (and I know at least that Microsoft requires support for 720p in their games). The dev team has to spend time implementing the $shiny_new_thing in the game engine instead of adding cool game-play elements. And also, while there may not be a strong correlation, the bigger, more detailed, or more complicated you want the game world to get, the longer the artists, level editors, testers, developers, and whoever else are going to have to work on the games.
These things all cost quite a bit more money for the developers then they did in the last generation. There is a limit to how long a game can stay in design, how long the developers can keep adding new features, and so on, before the money just dries up and you have to release a game. Adding on extra costs like this, while at the same time the gamers are already complaining about slightly higher costs for games means that the developers have a limit to just how many new things they can add to a game.
My personal hope is that two things will start to show up that make it easier on the developers so they can work on new things. First off, I'd like to see more automation in how the game world is built. Obviously, creating and then hand placing a million million different objects over 1000 square miles for the player to interact with is near impossible. But bring in some procedural creation of objects and levels (either in the design/creation phase or to some degree during the game) and this becomes much more possible. That's not to say that everything in the game has to (or should ever) be created this way. The only game that could work this way is a sandbox game, and fun as they are I hope the game industry never starts making only sandboxes.
The other big thing is more comprehensive APIs to take care of the basics for the developers. It seems to me that this is the part that Microsoft really gets. They definitely seem the furthest ahead in this area, with a fairly good chunk of the online multi-player code for any given game probably sitting in the XBox's API as well as most of integration with the underlying OS (things like game downloads, profile management, etc). Having the horse power is one important part of the equation (and here, the PS3 is the winner in most areas), but giving people the ability to use it is another part that counts for at least as much.
If you like to mess around with hardware, but not enough to actually solder on a chip (or don't want to open the XBox for another reason), you can make an adapter for the XBox controller by taking one of the tear-away ends of the cord and splicing in a USB male adapter (something like this, but in reverse .. and you don't have to cut the cord if you don't have extras).
It's pretty easy since the XBox controllers are basically just USB cables with a non-standard adapter. There are drivers for the controller and memory card (you can find them on xbox-scene), so all you need to get is a memory card (you should be able to find a used one at a local game store) and you're set. Plus you can use the controller as a game pad for your PC if you want.
So are the xbox and ps3 controllers, but they manage to attach a cable to them so they don't walk away. It's not the same, but you should still be able to get a feel for it, but whatever, I'll ask next time I'm there.
And the fact that PS3 demos all have an annoying plastic case around the controller that makes it a bit harder to hit some of the buttons near the middle, and impossible to hit start, select, or whatever they're calling the middle jewel makes me think that any kind of similar treatment for Wii controllers would make them completely unplayable...
I'll use this to reply to both the people who said "22 miles isn't that far." I realize a lot of people drive further every day (some people even do those kinds of commute around here). My commute is actually a good 30 miles (for there and back - 15 one way) daily, and it was a few more over the summer (internship - I'm still finishing up college).
But to drive that far in the kind of traffic we have around here (Not just Southern California as the you noted, but Orange County) during any time when most people aren't at work (and the store would be open) is a nightmare. In the morning or the afternoon, you're lucky to get anything but stop-and-go traffic on the freeways. Mid day and evenings aren't as bad, but it's still pretty crowded and the people aren't any saner. And of course, streets are poorly laid out and usually over crowded wherever you.
There's a reason there are a good twenty stores between my zip and the store with the 60GB model. And it's not JUST that we're lazy.
I'll give the grandparent one thing, there are places where they aren't everywhere yet. For example, try my zip code (92656) on the ebgames store list and you have to go 22 miles before you get a store that has any in stock for the 60GB model , or 10 miles for the 20GB. The drive for the 20GB isn't that bad, but it'd be a pretty dedicated person who'd drive from here to the stores with the 60GB to buy one.
Although, I'd think the area I live in would be on the lower end of the "PS3 availability" spectrum, seeing as the ratio of people with too much money to the rest of the population is higher then most of the US.
And of course, I've seen PS3s around now and then when I go to an electronics or games store. Most people who are actually looking for one probably could have found one in my area by now.
It's actually a super market with a tendency towards stocking cheaper stuff. Think a really big "everything's a dollar" store (except not literally).
Well, for one thing I would say that eating 600 pies in one sitting is rather unlikely compared to drinking enough water to get water poisoning in one sitting (the later being possible).
... so know your limits." Since the probability of someone eating so many is very low, they don't need to be as careful.
In any case, I would say the people hosting the competition have a certain responsibility to keep it generally safe.
With the case in the article, where there was probably at least a fairly high chance of someone being hurt, that responsibility would have been anywhere from making sure people susceptible to water intoxication did not participate to canceling or changing the way their contest worked. Perhaps continuously giving people water wasn't a good idea, you don't need to drink a couple gallons of water to have a strong urge to go to the bathroom. Or giving them something that would keep their electrolytes up (Wikipedia says this low electrolyte ballance is the cause of water intoxication) instead of water. Heck, there's even a chance for some sponsorship from Gatorade in that case.
With your example, if the people in charge of a pie eating contest went and asked a doctor (something the people holding this contest not only didn't do, but they apparently ignored free advice when it was offered), and the doctor told them that, then I would say it would be their responsibility to say something like "It is possible, if you eat several hundred pies, that it will cause severe health problems up to and including death
Similarly, if you were going to hold a snail-eating contest, wouldn't you want to do some research to make sure it wasn't going to put all your participants lives at risk?
I think it could reasonably be argued that most of the contestants expected the people running a contest, or another public event, would have done this kind of research and so would have ignored doing it for themselves (if it even crossed their minds to do some research). The mere fact that someone is publicly holding a contest where snails are eaten implies that (though in this case obviously not correctly) it is safe to eat large quantities of snails or else the company or people sponsoring this contest would not be holding it.
With respect to the submitter's complaint about "precise control," I was under the impression that the PS3 controllers had replaced the bottom two shoulder buttons with some sort of analog "trigger" instead of just a button. The triggers on the XBox controller work great for gas and break because they have a long enough range from "fully pressed" to "not pressed" that you have fairly precise control over how much gas/break to give the car. I'd assume (if I heard correctly about the controller) that something similar would work very well on a PS3 controller, as far as control schemes go.
In fact, one of my bigger issues with GT has always been that I pretty much have to go all or nothing on the gas and breaks because the analog range from off to full on the face buttons (and all the buttons on the PS2 except the sticks, really) is something on the order of less than a pound of force, and my motor skills aren't good enough to use them for partial gas/breaking (though some of my friends have gotten pretty good at it).
I think his point was that, "If including services, don't forget Google owns some sources, too."
Well don't blame me, I always choose the CowboyNeal option...
They do sound obvious and they should be in just about every multiplayer game.
Unfortunately, all the XBox Live developers never got that memo. Some manage to get the Players/Total working fine, but in almost every XBL game, when you try to enter a match and are rejected you will be pushed back several screens. It's annoying, but it's true of just about every game I've tried to play on live.