Re:Yet another example of east-west differences
on
Japan's Top 100 Games
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· Score: 1
There is no such thing as "Eastern culture", unless you water down the definition so that it means nothing. Starcraft is neither heavily story driven nor does it severely restrict player freedom -- in fact, one of its key selling points is the variety of strategies is very wide and that Internet play lets you play it every day for a decade and it will never get old. Would you consider a nation where something like 20% of the population has played Starcraft to be an "Eastern" culture or not? Take another example, MMORPGs. They're all about player choice and frequently have the poorest excuse for stories since "Uh oh, the princess was in another castle" (oh yeah, incidentally, that game wasn't Western either). Would a nation in which overuse of MMORPGs is a major social concern be Eastern or not?
Somebody else above has its right -- its not the culture of Japan driving this list, its the culture of Famitsu readers. The magazine devotes large portions of its space to providing the kind of walkthroughs that you really need nowadays to see all the content in $RANDOM_CONSOLE_RPG. (Here is a map of the dungeon, here are the locations of all 42 crystals of power -- #31 is tricky, since you can only see it on the first day of a new moon while standing on one foot)
These brain training games scarcely use the controls at all (and the make pretty good use of the game screen specifically aimed at folks with poor eyesight -- the games have essentially no interface visible and the entire real estate is devoted to say a sentence of text or two numbers or what have you). Everything uses the touch pen.
In one, you get a series of mathematical equations like 4 + 6 = ? And you have to fill in the answer. The trick is that immediately after revealing 4 + 6 one of the two will be covered up, and for the next problem one of the numbers (possibly the covered one) scrolls down while the next number is new (and then covered). Add in time pressure and what should be a simple task really vexes your short term recall. Another example is testing your ability to write some of the more obscure Japanese characters, which I suspect would be good brain excercize if my brain wasn't already pudding in that area.
I live by my DS on airplanes, true (seriously, in terms of comfort on a trans-Pacific flight owning a DS is like getting an upgrade to business class: you can happily fritter away hours of your normally torturous commute), and also like it for train rides in the 2-3 hour range, but its also become my primary console. Since buying WoW, my desire to play my library of involved RPGs on the PS2 has crumbled into dust. If I've got thirty minutes to kill, however, and don't have a good book to curl up with, I'm literally 15 seconds from being in a Canvas curse level, kicking some tail in Advance Wars, etc etc.
No. One is a phenomenally expensive, incredibly dangerous hobby with no reward other than the psycological thrill for a few individuals who actually get to see the awe-inspiring view from the top (if they survive the trip), justified mainly out of machismo and a desire to plant the flag on a more remote location than a flag has ever been planted before. The other involves ropes.
Exactly. All you need to do is get to the asteroid, set up an operation in orbit capable of actually extracting the minerals from all the cruft (oh, sure, $1000 an oz. for platinum sounds like a real moneymaker until you start calculating the cost of shuttle runs to get the 1 tonne of ore that ounce is buried in), and come back with the payload... preferably with your workers still mostly alive.
Ahh, well, at least the existence of this "gold mine in the skies" gives me a good reason to say "Great, so private enterprise can fund space exploration now" and stop pouring billions of tax dollars into NASA, the world's most inefficient R&D slush-fund.
Thats the system thats mostly used here in Japan. We've got some municipal resources for an emergency translator for medical emergencies (the commonly needed ones are Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, and English, in something approaching that order... unfortunately, to my knowledge we don't have anyone qualified to actually speak Chinese or Korean in the municipal government). For routine care we've got these lovely cards which are produced by the prefecture. It looks like a fold out map which has those four languages printed on it with four-color illustrations (literacy among our foreign workers is not quite 100%). One side is for the patient, one side for the doctor. So the doctor gets questions like "What part hurts?" and then there is a handy labeled diagram of the human body with easy-to-recognize pictures and translations in four languages. "What is your complaint? Fever, pregnancy, part of body hurts (pick one from picture #2), feeling ill, broken (pick one from picture #2), etc."
They've also got cards for restauraunts and hotels, in the rare event that someone from abroad decides to visit Oogaki, Gifu without bringing their own translator (Americans: we're the rough equivalent of a mid-sized city in Kansas. Rest of world: we're the rough equivalent of a mid-sized city in Kansas. You don't just decide to hop on a plane and come over in most cases:) )
Recently their paradigm for putting up a new server has been to announce the new server and freeze character creation for 48 hours. During that 48 hour window, you're allowed to transfer a character over from 4 overcrowded servers of the same type (PVE, PVP, RP, RP-PVP). For example, when Hexxar opened up my currently overcrowded Draenor server lost people. Only problem is social networks, which for a lot of folks are more diffuse than just the guild tag, make it a very difficult decision to leave. Its like moving with your office to a new city -- sure, most of the folks you work with came with but you miss the crowd at the bar and that little old lady at the pizza shop who always had a kind word for you. On the other hand, if you're primarily in the game for a solo experience (and anecdotally lots of WoWers are) its a no-brainer -- take any server transfer offered.
Ever notice that the open-source is always the clone rather than the commercial game being the clone of the open source? That might have something to do with the competition, too. I know 98% of commercial games are derivative crud, but open source games are pretty much 100% derivative crud, with worse production values. And I say this as a part-time developer on one (which, I do not hesitate to admit, would not exist but for the core rules being a popular commercially-produced board game).
Very true. When Illinois banned sales of GTA to minors, the law was swiftly quashed on constitutional grounds. When Kanagawa Prefecture and Saitama Prefecture did so, it wasn't.
Or if there is a better way. I know NASA is all about research and pushing forward the boundaries of science. But I think they are spreading themselves out too thin. Especially if you consider how little money they get.
A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon we're talking about actual money. We should just redirect the money to direct research grants in fields which are useful (spend a billion dollars to develop a solar sail, get another method for getting an expensive vehicle from one point where it is useless to humantiy to another point where it is useless to humanity).
I think Vanguard could theoretically be successful at a niche level -- a hardcore game, by hardcore gamers, for hardcore gamers. Look at any of the PR or the FAQ questions for this game: in response to any concerns about difficulty, Brad McQuaid says "Cry more n00b". Casuals need not apply. This means if I so much as navigate to their website my head might well explode, and I know the process of entering in my credit card information on signup would be much too hardcore for me to handle. But maybe there are some people nostalgiac for the old, painful days of EQ (spend a summer of 4 hour days, get to level... 12! Unless you died too much!). Then again, Shadowbane was basically "Remember old school UO? We want to do that, except without all that pesky bit about having ineffectual restrictions against killing people. Play2Crush!", and we see how that niche appeal worked out...
The problem is that somebody with delusions of grandeur sees his niche game as beating out WoW. Thats where the madness sets in. You can make a *lot of money* in niche IP. You don't have to write the Da Vinci Code to be a successful author -- my little sister hopes to eventually earn a nice paycheck writing books about cynical modern adolescent girls and their coming-of-age stories. They Might Be Giants certainly don't go hungry for not being $RECENT_BOY_BAND. But if my little sister said she expected to do Da Vinci numbers with those books, I would say she was crazy, and if somebody said "TMBG's next record is going multi-platinum!", I'd say they were crazy. "Our game will be a painful experience to make your successes bigger, AND we're going to be the market leader" is crazy-talk.
Only problem is that banks *really do* put links into mass-mailings announcing, e.g., new features which take you to websites. There was a good example posted earlier this week. Yes, the marketing team which decided "Hmm, lets reserve www.specialpromotionforBankOfStupid.com and direct all of our customers to go to it and enter their login information" deserved to be flown to Nigeria and shot by the undersecretary to Boutrain Gimulkembo for stealing his ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS ($100,000,000.00). But they wrote the campaign anyhow. I came within about three seconds of being phished once myself because I a "Confirmation: your banking details have changed recently" email from my bank which was word-for-word identical to the confirmation I got from them the last time I actually moved addresses.
Banks & etc probably need to develop a code of conduct: We only do business with you online through our one solitary web portal. That web portal has exactly one accessible address. If we need to get in touch with you, we will send you an email saying "You've got mail at our web portal" without giving a clickable link anywhere, forcing you to take three seconds out of your day and type in www.BankOfBestSecurityPractices.com into your address bar. Granted, the marginal three seconds costing the bank customers considered over 10 million users might make them loathe to do this, but I've got to think *constant* bad publicity over phishing hurts them worse.
Yes, its a long-running tradition that the awards lag by at least part of a year (2003 in March 2004, 2002 in October 2003, etc). You can verify this with this database -- the tradition of awards being physically handed out in the year after the citation has been standard practice since at least JFK.
I searched for "beef" the other day, and eBay offered to sell me beef. The thought of buying beef from eBay frankly scares me (only 1 week left on the auction for this hamburger patty! Ooh, sign me up!).
Great, so you'll cleverly disguise the fact that you are seeking jobs behind a code that can be deciphered by anyone with an IQ above that of paint. This will result in many qualified engineers sending their resumes your way, because they appreciate the value of a recruiter who can think outside the box and ask Zen koans like "How would you move Mt. Fuji?" which, while not actually being relevant to the skills you need in your employees, make really good management book titles.
If your use case is generally finding photos, what you really want is Picasa (also from Google). The thing rides herd over your JPG collection like iTunes comprehensively manages your MP3s, from downloading/ripping to organizing to iPod/CD. Since it keeps an up-to-date index of folders with images in them searches are all but instantaneous after the initial scan (which took about 5-10 minutes on my computer with 40g of hard drive space used and a couple hundred images to be indexed -- if I had gone through the trouble to specify the folders to start from instead of just telling them to index the entire drive I would have cut that down by 99%).
If I can give them another plug, its got a nice "I'm Feeling Lucky" auto correction feature. The effects are generally pretty modest but its saved 3 of my digital camera photos that I thought were duds despite being things I really wanted recorded.
If they start defacing websites for just a cartoon, imagine what they will do if it was a offending movie/act: take whole servers and backbones down? Oh the horror.
Well, when Submission (a film which is harshly critical of certain strands of Islam and borders on pornography, or so I've heard) was produced, the filmmaker was stabbed to death and a major supporter (who is also an elected legislator in the country) was forced into hiding fearing for her life. The Satanic Verses, a book which some said was blasphemous, earned Salaman Rushdie a death sentence via fatwa plus a $2 million bounty on his head from the Iranian government (no one has collected yet), and got two of his translators stabbed (the Japanese one, a mild mannered college professor, died of his wounds).
... because this is the best answer I have ever seen to the question "So what do you do that cannot more profitably automated or outsourced to $COUNTRY_WITH_LOWER_STANDARD_OF_LIVING?" and it was posted by a janitor.
Is burn in honestly a concern with modern monitors? You'd think that the "hud" filling the bottom 5% of *every desktop in corporate America for as many hours as the machine is on* would have caused some complaints if static images were still scorching modern equipment. And yet I still don't have a screen with that little four-color Windows logo burnt into it yet -- maybe my LCD is afraid of being sued for copyright infringement...
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Somebody else above has its right -- its not the culture of Japan driving this list, its the culture of Famitsu readers. The magazine devotes large portions of its space to providing the kind of walkthroughs that you really need nowadays to see all the content in $RANDOM_CONSOLE_RPG. (Here is a map of the dungeon, here are the locations of all 42 crystals of power -- #31 is tricky, since you can only see it on the first day of a new moon while standing on one foot)
In one, you get a series of mathematical equations like 4 + 6 = ? And you have to fill in the answer. The trick is that immediately after revealing 4 + 6 one of the two will be covered up, and for the next problem one of the numbers (possibly the covered one) scrolls down while the next number is new (and then covered). Add in time pressure and what should be a simple task really vexes your short term recall. Another example is testing your ability to write some of the more obscure Japanese characters, which I suspect would be good brain excercize if my brain wasn't already pudding in that area.
I live by my DS on airplanes, true (seriously, in terms of comfort on a trans-Pacific flight owning a DS is like getting an upgrade to business class: you can happily fritter away hours of your normally torturous commute), and also like it for train rides in the 2-3 hour range, but its also become my primary console. Since buying WoW, my desire to play my library of involved RPGs on the PS2 has crumbled into dust. If I've got thirty minutes to kill, however, and don't have a good book to curl up with, I'm literally 15 seconds from being in a Canvas curse level, kicking some tail in Advance Wars, etc etc.
No. One is a phenomenally expensive, incredibly dangerous hobby with no reward other than the psycological thrill for a few individuals who actually get to see the awe-inspiring view from the top (if they survive the trip), justified mainly out of machismo and a desire to plant the flag on a more remote location than a flag has ever been planted before. The other involves ropes.
Ahh, well, at least the existence of this "gold mine in the skies" gives me a good reason to say "Great, so private enterprise can fund space exploration now" and stop pouring billions of tax dollars into NASA, the world's most inefficient R&D slush-fund.
They've also got cards for restauraunts and hotels, in the rare event that someone from abroad decides to visit Oogaki, Gifu without bringing their own translator (Americans: we're the rough equivalent of a mid-sized city in Kansas. Rest of world: we're the rough equivalent of a mid-sized city in Kansas. You don't just decide to hop on a plane and come over in most cases :) )
Recently their paradigm for putting up a new server has been to announce the new server and freeze character creation for 48 hours. During that 48 hour window, you're allowed to transfer a character over from 4 overcrowded servers of the same type (PVE, PVP, RP, RP-PVP). For example, when Hexxar opened up my currently overcrowded Draenor server lost people. Only problem is social networks, which for a lot of folks are more diffuse than just the guild tag, make it a very difficult decision to leave. Its like moving with your office to a new city -- sure, most of the folks you work with came with but you miss the crowd at the bar and that little old lady at the pizza shop who always had a kind word for you. On the other hand, if you're primarily in the game for a solo experience (and anecdotally lots of WoWers are) its a no-brainer -- take any server transfer offered.
Ever notice that the open-source is always the clone rather than the commercial game being the clone of the open source? That might have something to do with the competition, too. I know 98% of commercial games are derivative crud, but open source games are pretty much 100% derivative crud, with worse production values. And I say this as a part-time developer on one (which, I do not hesitate to admit, would not exist but for the core rules being a popular commercially-produced board game).
Very true. When Illinois banned sales of GTA to minors, the law was swiftly quashed on constitutional grounds. When Kanagawa Prefecture and Saitama Prefecture did so, it wasn't.
How does giving the employees more break time make up for lost revenue?
There will always be Samus.
A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon we're talking about actual money. We should just redirect the money to direct research grants in fields which are useful (spend a billion dollars to develop a solar sail, get another method for getting an expensive vehicle from one point where it is useless to humantiy to another point where it is useless to humanity).
The problem is that somebody with delusions of grandeur sees his niche game as beating out WoW. Thats where the madness sets in. You can make a *lot of money* in niche IP. You don't have to write the Da Vinci Code to be a successful author -- my little sister hopes to eventually earn a nice paycheck writing books about cynical modern adolescent girls and their coming-of-age stories. They Might Be Giants certainly don't go hungry for not being $RECENT_BOY_BAND. But if my little sister said she expected to do Da Vinci numbers with those books, I would say she was crazy, and if somebody said "TMBG's next record is going multi-platinum!", I'd say they were crazy. "Our game will be a painful experience to make your successes bigger, AND we're going to be the market leader" is crazy-talk.
Banks & etc probably need to develop a code of conduct: We only do business with you online through our one solitary web portal. That web portal has exactly one accessible address. If we need to get in touch with you, we will send you an email saying "You've got mail at our web portal" without giving a clickable link anywhere, forcing you to take three seconds out of your day and type in www.BankOfBestSecurityPractices.com into your address bar. Granted, the marginal three seconds costing the bank customers considered over 10 million users might make them loathe to do this, but I've got to think *constant* bad publicity over phishing hurts them worse.
Mine was "Writer Wong: definately worth a read". Darn dyslexia.
Seriously. Good god, who administrates UNIX any more?
Yes, its a long-running tradition that the awards lag by at least part of a year (2003 in March 2004, 2002 in October 2003, etc). You can verify this with this database -- the tradition of awards being physically handed out in the year after the citation has been standard practice since at least JFK.
I searched for "beef" the other day, and eBay offered to sell me beef. The thought of buying beef from eBay frankly scares me (only 1 week left on the auction for this hamburger patty! Ooh, sign me up!).
Great, so you'll cleverly disguise the fact that you are seeking jobs behind a code that can be deciphered by anyone with an IQ above that of paint. This will result in many qualified engineers sending their resumes your way, because they appreciate the value of a recruiter who can think outside the box and ask Zen koans like "How would you move Mt. Fuji?" which, while not actually being relevant to the skills you need in your employees, make really good management book titles.
... every time I hear their music I get the urge to commit self-destructive behavior.
... Old Grandma Hardcore.
If I can give them another plug, its got a nice "I'm Feeling Lucky" auto correction feature. The effects are generally pretty modest but its saved 3 of my digital camera photos that I thought were duds despite being things I really wanted recorded.
Well, when Submission (a film which is harshly critical of certain strands of Islam and borders on pornography, or so I've heard) was produced, the filmmaker was stabbed to death and a major supporter (who is also an elected legislator in the country) was forced into hiding fearing for her life. The Satanic Verses, a book which some said was blasphemous, earned Salaman Rushdie a death sentence via fatwa plus a $2 million bounty on his head from the Iranian government (no one has collected yet), and got two of his translators stabbed (the Japanese one, a mild mannered college professor, died of his wounds).
... because this is the best answer I have ever seen to the question "So what do you do that cannot more profitably automated or outsourced to $COUNTRY_WITH_LOWER_STANDARD_OF_LIVING?" and it was posted by a janitor.
Is burn in honestly a concern with modern monitors? You'd think that the "hud" filling the bottom 5% of *every desktop in corporate America for as many hours as the machine is on* would have caused some complaints if static images were still scorching modern equipment. And yet I still don't have a screen with that little four-color Windows logo burnt into it yet -- maybe my LCD is afraid of being sued for copyright infringement...