No, they starting being written in force in about 1994-5, when the industry started becoming much more corporate. (EA was well into their acquisition scheme by then, and that was a huge part of it).
And just because these articles are commonly written doesn't mean that they aren't on to something. Do you really think that there aren't problems in the way the business of making games is done?
And? Electrical contacts get dirty, what's your point?
More telling, in my opinion, is the number of original (>20 year old) NES machines that can still be made to work perfectly with just this trick. Your PS1 still work? How about your friends'? Hell, how many people do you know that have had to replace a faulty PS2?
Granted the NES design could have been better (by "better" I mean a top loading cartridge, like the SNES and the famicom in Japan). However, the NES was designed that way in order to get it into stores in the USA. They couldn't build it correctly, or stores wouldn't have carried it. In reality the solution that they came up with didn't compromise the system too badly (see point about original NES's still working), and the system survived that flaw to become an enormous commercial success.
While you may think me deranged, I have a fair amount of faith in Nintendo as a company. So far this hasn't failed me. Nintendo has an excellent reliability track record, even taking into account DS lite problems. They almost always get it right the first time, and when they don't, they fix it. Also, I want to play Twilight Princess + a half dozen other release titles, and if my monkey instincts make me want to play them sooner, rather than later, well, what can I say?
For reasons that utterly escape me, there seem to be no companies interested in making a really good solid state recorder for the modern technoliterati. The ones that do exist all have serious problems and/or are outrageously priced. The M-Audio 2496 has an internal, non servicable rechargable battery. The Marantz 660 and 671 are probably ok function wise but are only at the low end of grossly overpriced. Ironically the Sony RH1 mindisc recorder (which isn't solid state) is about as close as it gets, but it: records to minidiscs which are proprietary, and records in a file format that completely locked down and has horrible cross platform support.
Why can't somebody manufacture a stereo recorder, with software for mp3, vorbis, and flac, at varying bitrates, using AA batteries, with a Compact Flash slot? I mean, good grief, we're talking like $50-$75 in parts here. This would be the ultimate podcast/ethnography field recorder, and its like nobody will manufacture them.
Re:This article doesn't even list RPGs
on
Quantum Leaps in RPGs
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I think part of the difficulty arises from the differences between what we call RPGs in Pen&Paper, and RPGs in Computer/Video games.
Role playing in Pen&Paper evolved from wargaming, as people developed an interest in playing specific heros (inspired directly by the works of J. R R. Tolkien) rather than armies. What are called "RPGs" on computers are an outgrowth of Adventure games, they attempted to model the experience of Pen&Paper roleplaying by adding stats and combat to interactive stories told through computers. This, especially in the pre-Compuserve/BBS days missed the social aspect that was seen as critical to Pen&Papers RPGs by purists, and there is a continuing resistance amongst die-hard P&P RPG players to the association of the genres. JRPGs are an even more strange beast, as they evolved being designed by people who had never played D&D in the first place (which is almost unheard of for american cRPG designers), Japanese developers having only played japanese copies of D&D (which is what Anime like Lodoss War is loosely based on, it seems like an odd parody of D&D stereotypes because it is, reflected by another culture through language barriers both ways) at most. The focus on Consoles, rather than PCs had other significant impacts on their development, which can be seen by comparing, say the Original Final Fantasy on NES, with Ultima V on the Apple II.
The difficulty for purists is that all of these different branches (P&P RPG, Adventure Games, cRPGs, jRPGs) evolved over time with varying degrees of intermingling. And now the last ten years have brought MMO type cRPGs into the mainstream, further complicating things (they have social interaction, but relatively little roleplaying where do they fit in?) The question of what a "true" role-playing game is quite difficult to answer now. P&P is the oldest, by 6-8 years, followed by cRPGs , jRPGs, and finally MMORPGs. In reality I think these are all pretty distinct genres, and are probably played (even if by the same person) for different reasons. Each provides a substantially different experience. I think that lumping them all together under the same label is a mistake, in much the same way as an inexperienced bookseller might lump Sci-fi/fantasy/horror/other together dispite definate, if not immediately obvious, differences. One of our problems in this subculture is its evolution with an astonishing lack of criticism (by which I mean criticism in the literary sense) which I think it both desperatly needs, and deserves.
Yes it would be cliche, but god, Nintendo needs to run a huge TV ad campaign on this, because cliche or not, it would be awesome. "Wii will rock you!" accompanied by Queen is just distilled, crystalized awesome.
The issue here is this: Are games commodity items, like spoons, bags of rice, or screwdrivers? Or are they works of art? The Problem is that "the free market" is really, really shitty at encouraging art, while being passably decent at managing commodity items.
If games are art, that means that just suggesting we let the market decide is crummy advice.
I think that ultimately the memory limitations of the SPU's (both in terms of capacity and of bandwidth) are going to be severly limiting for the PS3. This combined with the limitations of the single main POWER unit (which can easily be swamped just trying to manage the SPU's, let alone doing actual game logic) means that cell is going to have a lot of trouble doing just about anything but scoring high LINPACK numbers.
I harbor a suspiscion that the PS3 is going to end up looking like the dog again this generation. Not that it isn't more powerful than the Wii, because it certainly is, but having to render at 1080p is going to make its shortcoming much more painfully obvious compared to the Xbox360, and the Wii gets a huge advantage by being merely 480p, which can cover up a whole multitude of sins.
Sony needs to do so for a variety of reasons. They need to justify their high pricetag. They need to justify their hype. Perhaps most importantly they need to justify their architecture. I think, and I'm not alone, that Cell is going to turn out to be a dog just like the Emotion Engine, Holding back a performance starved architecture. They may be able to cover up for it a bit by having ditched the Cell in favor of an Nvidia graphics chip, so what they have will probably look alright, but I'm not convinced they'll be able to deliver immersive environments capable of competeing with later gen 360 titles due to performance starved physics processing.
Oh right, because the 5 paragraph essay is the highest literary form in the English Language. I've written so goddamn many of them I could shoot whoever thought up the idea of using them as the basis for English education in the United States.
Issue t is best illustrated by the three points X, Y, and Z.
Regarding X...
It is important to remember Y...
Z is important because...
In summary, t is a topic blah blah, by points X, Y, and Z.
Nobody fucking writes that way in the real world. I have never, in all the millions of pages I've read over the years, read a published work following that form outside of English textbooks. I don't know who they think they're fooling either. People by and large still write in the same manner they did in the Ninteenth century, only with more profanities. Oratory is the issue they need to be working on. And not by adding a public speaking requirement in college either, it needs to start much earlier. Damn you Abraham Lincoln!
I'm really not sure why people are so worried about 911 service. In my hometown the 911 emergency service is worthless anyway for a huge number of people. By which I mean response is a good 15-30 minutes away, at which point you are already dead/house burned down beyond any recovery/robbed/ etc. And these are houses within range of high speed internet service! Is this quality of emergency services just that rare? I always assumed that was how it was in most rural areas, small towns, and small non-metropolitan cities.
Currently under way? It's already HERE! The law passed. Habeus Corpus is now permanently suspended, and torture is "legal" under United States law. You can be indefinately held, with no attorney, and no trial, all they have to do is say you "support terrorism"
As I originally posted, that's exactly what it is suppoosed to do. My point was it is a lousy method of accomplishing that goal. I'd argue that proportional representation is a much better method. Two party systems suck almost as bad as one party state, but the fact that our system could be worse doesn't make it good, or even acceptable.
It's meant to be a balance issue, so that a minority party can theoretically attach things they want to bills the majority "must pass." In reality, its gets used for this kind of moralistic bullshit, and for sneaky atrocity like attaching "Dump Nuclear Waste in Lake Michigan" to bills entitled "People Shouldn't Molest Babies."
Ultimately, I'd argue that its an ineffective band-aid on the cancerous sore that is our winner-take-all legislative system. We desperately need to have proportional represention. Like, you know, every free nation on Earth. But the powers that be are too entrenched in the two party system.
Suhweet! Is there any chance at all we'll see multiplayer (internet or otherwise)? RE4 rocked in Singleplayer, but I thought it desperately needed a multiplayer mode, as that would have been shit tons of entertainment.
wow wow wow, I was with you until until you equated Hezbollah with the RIAA, because you've got it backwards there mate. Hezbollah is the group of revolutionary freedom fighters seeking indepence from Zionist imperialism (in a addition to being a political party with the same goal). Additionally, Hezbollah actually employ the methods you are advocating (as opposed to being the established government waging illegal wars and invasions.)
If anything Hezbollah is exactly the group people violently opposed to Corporate Facism gone wild want to emulate, rather than deride. Also note, that unlike the RIAA, Hezbollah is widely regarded (especially now) as heros in much of the South Lebanon and amongst the Palestinian people, whereas the RIAA is regarded as a heroic body by exactly no one, as far as I"m aware.
I'm with you on the violent revolution being a viable response to fascism, however, that's dead on.
Here's the thing, looking this deeply into the economics of a form of entertainment is going to be disheartening. It's pretty much always going to turn out that you're spending a lot of money to do the things you enjoy. If four controllers are too expensive for you, don't buy them (I mean, most of have to make decisions and trade-offs about the things we buy, right?). I won't until there's a fairly significant amount of compelling gameplay out there to justify it, and even then it might be pretty iffy, as historically I haven't played that many 4-player games. No matter how you slice it, the Wii is going to be much less expensive than any other comparable console setup. And you know what? That extra $200 for the family with 3 kids is going to be least of the expenses they incur because of having too many damn kids (and if they're having that much trouble, maybe they shouldn't have had them in the first place, kids are expensive, its not like this should be a suprise to anybody). They may be turned off by it, and they're welcome to go the competition, who will be happy to take twice as much money, or more.
Let's face it, there's a lot of stuff in the controllers in the first place. Such that I can easily see where my money is going when I buy one. There may be a good $10 in profit for Nintendo there, but I don't begrudge them that. Does that make me irrational? Mario Party and the other Nintendo party games are, once you work in their specific costs, some of the more expensive titles out there. Probably a good $75-$80 once you account for the necessary accessories divided between them.
Re:The problem with guis is they don't work
on
GUIs Get a Makeover
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· Score: 1
I think that perhaps training gramps to use bash is a little more complex than teaching him how to use explorer.
You're damn right it is. Teaching my grandfather Bash, when he has no ability to touch type, and is too old to learn, would be an excercise in futility. He can use a GUI, however, and is able to use a computer with one to accomplish the tasks he requires, but attempting to train him to use a highly specialized CLI would be foolish in the extreme. He'd have to write down specific instructions in order to do ANYTHING on a CLI. To the extent that the instuctions themselves would become a user interface issue all their own.
Yeah, I mean, if you have to buy 3 more controllers to play 4-player multiplayer, the Wii is $490! That's more expensive than a 360 and almost enough for the PS3!
Oh, wait, except you're getting a console, a game, and four wireless controllers for that price. For my Xbox, that would run a grand total of $600 + a game. $700+ for a PS3 and controllers.
$60 is $60, but seriously people, at launch a Gamecube + 3 controllers would have run, what $320 for system + four corded controllers? It's not that bad. Get over it.
Are you seriously saying you couldn't get by on $300 for a Wii + Twilight Princess? Because I know that's going to tide me over for a while.
I'm reminded of two Penny-Arcade comics:
Riiiight. So when 500 or more assignments (per semester!) get made for: write a 2-3 page paper, using these sources, on x topic thats been written about to death; none of them are going to be similar? My ass they aren't. This is a point that I think is legimate, especially given the similarities in English education throughout regions, let alone states and counties. I can't even conceive of how the sheer volume of papers written on the same topic can FAIL to produce remarkably similar papers (assuming standard rules of grammar are even remotely followed, and let's face it, even mistakes are fairly standard by regional dialect, as well as those imposed by normal composition techniques, i.e. typing errors.) Given the lack of curricula changes at most institutions I can see how thousands upon thousands of papers of the same length, on the same topic, written by people with fairly similar educational backgrounds are going to be written within a span of just a few years. Even worse you're talking about people who have read the same resources in preparation for writing these papers. If that's not a system designed to produce identical papers, I don't know what is!
It's just like music composition. People with similar music education backgrounds end up producing similar music. That's just how it is. Are you seriously going to argue that the standard educational texts HAVEN'T been mined for every bloody original idea they contain a thousand times over?
Ok, I look at that list, and vast majority of titles are mid-nineties and earlier. I count 9 releases after 2000. Sounds like 1 or 2 releases a year to me.
Ok, PC games may be cheaper, so what? The price difference isn't huge at any rate. Boxed Wii games are going to range from $10-$50, on-line titles between $2-$20. That still doesn't address my needs. I don't want a random second PC laying around that I have to tweak and maintain just for games. Other people may want to, that's fine, I do not. If I'm paying more for console games for that level of convenience, that's fine with me.
As far as resolution goes, The new Sam&Max games are 3D, they don't have high resolution pre-rendered backgrounds, and they have voice acting. So resolution isn't that important in MY opinion. You may care, I don't.
As far as text adventures go, while they have a fairly active indy development scene, I wouldn't call it a booming commercial genre either.
Anyway, there clearly fair number of people who agree with that Sam&Max on the Wii is a good idea, including people at the development studio, so piss off AC.
Sigh, I get this every time I post and it gets VERY tired. One, MAYBE two releases a year does not a live genre make (not in an industry with hundreds of releases per year). Yes, in the past 8 years or so there has been a stuttering trickle of Adventure titles, and most of those are crap that try to hard to reach out to the wrong audience and ultimately fail miserably. Pre-1996 there were a good dozen top tier adventure titles coming out per year, with many more lesser ones. Sure, many of them sucked, but enough of them were good to excellent that there was usually something to play. That is not true anymore.
Secondly I would most like to get a Mac Mini, to replace my current G5 Tower (I want a small, lightweight system, not the immense 20kg behemoth I have now) I wish the Mini had decent graphics, but it doesn't, and I'm not even sure Intel GMA950 can run the new 3D Sam & Max. Also what makes you think that Sam & Max needs more than 640x480 (which the Wii CAN output)? It's got a pointing device as well, I don't see why you'd think it wouldn't work on the Wii. Given that most classic adventure games could be played solely on a two button mouse (I know, I've played them that way) Why couldn't a multi-button pointer controller suffice?
Slashdot Mirror
No, they starting being written in force in about 1994-5, when the industry started becoming much more corporate. (EA was well into their acquisition scheme by then, and that was a huge part of it). And just because these articles are commonly written doesn't mean that they aren't on to something. Do you really think that there aren't problems in the way the business of making games is done?
Mod parent up: There definately needs to be a 3rd dimension on the BMI chart, and waist measurement would be a pretty good first guess at one.
I disagree, humans are inherently ephemeral. A great work of software can last forever.
More telling, in my opinion, is the number of original (>20 year old) NES machines that can still be made to work perfectly with just this trick. Your PS1 still work? How about your friends'? Hell, how many people do you know that have had to replace a faulty PS2?
Granted the NES design could have been better (by "better" I mean a top loading cartridge, like the SNES and the famicom in Japan). However, the NES was designed that way in order to get it into stores in the USA. They couldn't build it correctly, or stores wouldn't have carried it. In reality the solution that they came up with didn't compromise the system too badly (see point about original NES's still working), and the system survived that flaw to become an enormous commercial success.
While you may think me deranged, I have a fair amount of faith in Nintendo as a company. So far this hasn't failed me. Nintendo has an excellent reliability track record, even taking into account DS lite problems. They almost always get it right the first time, and when they don't, they fix it. Also, I want to play Twilight Princess + a half dozen other release titles, and if my monkey instincts make me want to play them sooner, rather than later, well, what can I say?
Why can't somebody manufacture a stereo recorder, with software for mp3, vorbis, and flac, at varying bitrates, using AA batteries, with a Compact Flash slot? I mean, good grief, we're talking like $50-$75 in parts here. This would be the ultimate podcast/ethnography field recorder, and its like nobody will manufacture them.
Role playing in Pen&Paper evolved from wargaming, as people developed an interest in playing specific heros (inspired directly by the works of J. R R. Tolkien) rather than armies. What are called "RPGs" on computers are an outgrowth of Adventure games, they attempted to model the experience of Pen&Paper roleplaying by adding stats and combat to interactive stories told through computers. This, especially in the pre-Compuserve/BBS days missed the social aspect that was seen as critical to Pen&Papers RPGs by purists, and there is a continuing resistance amongst die-hard P&P RPG players to the association of the genres. JRPGs are an even more strange beast, as they evolved being designed by people who had never played D&D in the first place (which is almost unheard of for american cRPG designers), Japanese developers having only played japanese copies of D&D (which is what Anime like Lodoss War is loosely based on, it seems like an odd parody of D&D stereotypes because it is, reflected by another culture through language barriers both ways) at most. The focus on Consoles, rather than PCs had other significant impacts on their development, which can be seen by comparing, say the Original Final Fantasy on NES, with Ultima V on the Apple II.
The difficulty for purists is that all of these different branches (P&P RPG, Adventure Games, cRPGs, jRPGs) evolved over time with varying degrees of intermingling. And now the last ten years have brought MMO type cRPGs into the mainstream, further complicating things (they have social interaction, but relatively little roleplaying where do they fit in?) The question of what a "true" role-playing game is quite difficult to answer now. P&P is the oldest, by 6-8 years, followed by cRPGs , jRPGs, and finally MMORPGs. In reality I think these are all pretty distinct genres, and are probably played (even if by the same person) for different reasons. Each provides a substantially different experience. I think that lumping them all together under the same label is a mistake, in much the same way as an inexperienced bookseller might lump Sci-fi/fantasy/horror/other together dispite definate, if not immediately obvious, differences. One of our problems in this subculture is its evolution with an astonishing lack of criticism (by which I mean criticism in the literary sense) which I think it both desperatly needs, and deserves.
Yes it would be cliche, but god, Nintendo needs to run a huge TV ad campaign on this, because cliche or not, it would be awesome. "Wii will rock you!" accompanied by Queen is just distilled, crystalized awesome.
If games are art, that means that just suggesting we let the market decide is crummy advice.
I harbor a suspiscion that the PS3 is going to end up looking like the dog again this generation. Not that it isn't more powerful than the Wii, because it certainly is, but having to render at 1080p is going to make its shortcoming much more painfully obvious compared to the Xbox360, and the Wii gets a huge advantage by being merely 480p, which can cover up a whole multitude of sins.
Sony needs to do so for a variety of reasons. They need to justify their high pricetag. They need to justify their hype. Perhaps most importantly they need to justify their architecture. I think, and I'm not alone, that Cell is going to turn out to be a dog just like the Emotion Engine, Holding back a performance starved architecture. They may be able to cover up for it a bit by having ditched the Cell in favor of an Nvidia graphics chip, so what they have will probably look alright, but I'm not convinced they'll be able to deliver immersive environments capable of competeing with later gen 360 titles due to performance starved physics processing.
Issue t is best illustrated by the three points X, Y, and Z.
Regarding X...
It is important to remember Y...
Z is important because...
In summary, t is a topic blah blah, by points X, Y, and Z.
Nobody fucking writes that way in the real world. I have never, in all the millions of pages I've read over the years, read a published work following that form outside of English textbooks. I don't know who they think they're fooling either. People by and large still write in the same manner they did in the Ninteenth century, only with more profanities. Oratory is the issue they need to be working on. And not by adding a public speaking requirement in college either, it needs to start much earlier. Damn you Abraham Lincoln!
I'm really not sure why people are so worried about 911 service. In my hometown the 911 emergency service is worthless anyway for a huge number of people. By which I mean response is a good 15-30 minutes away, at which point you are already dead/house burned down beyond any recovery/robbed/ etc. And these are houses within range of high speed internet service! Is this quality of emergency services just that rare? I always assumed that was how it was in most rural areas, small towns, and small non-metropolitan cities.
Currently under way? It's already HERE! The law passed. Habeus Corpus is now permanently suspended, and torture is "legal" under United States law. You can be indefinately held, with no attorney, and no trial, all they have to do is say you "support terrorism"
As I originally posted, that's exactly what it is suppoosed to do. My point was it is a lousy method of accomplishing that goal. I'd argue that proportional representation is a much better method. Two party systems suck almost as bad as one party state, but the fact that our system could be worse doesn't make it good, or even acceptable.
Ultimately, I'd argue that its an ineffective band-aid on the cancerous sore that is our winner-take-all legislative system. We desperately need to have proportional represention. Like, you know, every free nation on Earth. But the powers that be are too entrenched in the two party system.
Suhweet! Is there any chance at all we'll see multiplayer (internet or otherwise)? RE4 rocked in Singleplayer, but I thought it desperately needed a multiplayer mode, as that would have been shit tons of entertainment.
And they can make damn sure you enjoy it, by making the movies unskippable!
Progress is beautiful isn't it?
If anything Hezbollah is exactly the group people violently opposed to Corporate Facism gone wild want to emulate, rather than deride. Also note, that unlike the RIAA, Hezbollah is widely regarded (especially now) as heros in much of the South Lebanon and amongst the Palestinian people, whereas the RIAA is regarded as a heroic body by exactly no one, as far as I"m aware.
I'm with you on the violent revolution being a viable response to fascism, however, that's dead on.
Let's face it, there's a lot of stuff in the controllers in the first place. Such that I can easily see where my money is going when I buy one. There may be a good $10 in profit for Nintendo there, but I don't begrudge them that. Does that make me irrational? Mario Party and the other Nintendo party games are, once you work in their specific costs, some of the more expensive titles out there. Probably a good $75-$80 once you account for the necessary accessories divided between them.
You're damn right it is. Teaching my grandfather Bash, when he has no ability to touch type, and is too old to learn, would be an excercise in futility. He can use a GUI, however, and is able to use a computer with one to accomplish the tasks he requires, but attempting to train him to use a highly specialized CLI would be foolish in the extreme. He'd have to write down specific instructions in order to do ANYTHING on a CLI. To the extent that the instuctions themselves would become a user interface issue all their own.
Oh, wait, except you're getting a console, a game, and four wireless controllers for that price. For my Xbox, that would run a grand total of $600 + a game. $700+ for a PS3 and controllers.
$60 is $60, but seriously people, at launch a Gamecube + 3 controllers would have run, what $320 for system + four corded controllers? It's not that bad. Get over it.
Are you seriously saying you couldn't get by on $300 for a Wii + Twilight Princess? Because I know that's going to tide me over for a while. I'm reminded of two Penny-Arcade comics:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/09/15
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/08/25
Unlike the low-end 360 and PS3, a Wii is actually functional right out of the box. You can even *gasp* save your games without buying anything else.
It's just like music composition. People with similar music education backgrounds end up producing similar music. That's just how it is. Are you seriously going to argue that the standard educational texts HAVEN'T been mined for every bloody original idea they contain a thousand times over?
Ok, PC games may be cheaper, so what? The price difference isn't huge at any rate. Boxed Wii games are going to range from $10-$50, on-line titles between $2-$20. That still doesn't address my needs. I don't want a random second PC laying around that I have to tweak and maintain just for games. Other people may want to, that's fine, I do not. If I'm paying more for console games for that level of convenience, that's fine with me.
As far as resolution goes, The new Sam&Max games are 3D, they don't have high resolution pre-rendered backgrounds, and they have voice acting. So resolution isn't that important in MY opinion. You may care, I don't.
As far as text adventures go, while they have a fairly active indy development scene, I wouldn't call it a booming commercial genre either.
Anyway, there clearly fair number of people who agree with that Sam&Max on the Wii is a good idea, including people at the development studio, so piss off AC.
Secondly I would most like to get a Mac Mini, to replace my current G5 Tower (I want a small, lightweight system, not the immense 20kg behemoth I have now) I wish the Mini had decent graphics, but it doesn't, and I'm not even sure Intel GMA950 can run the new 3D Sam & Max. Also what makes you think that Sam & Max needs more than 640x480 (which the Wii CAN output)? It's got a pointing device as well, I don't see why you'd think it wouldn't work on the Wii. Given that most classic adventure games could be played solely on a two button mouse (I know, I've played them that way) Why couldn't a multi-button pointer controller suffice?