Being a developer myself, I am intrigued about building applications and solutions that will open my doors, unlock my car, log me on to my computer and control home automation.
I don't see how this offers any practical security benefits. Let's explore a possible holdup situation involving a standard punk and an "early adopter":
Punk: Gimme your keys or I'll cut you!
You: Sorry, no keys, I start my car with a microchip in my hand.
Punk: What the hell? Don't fuck with me! Gimme your keys!
You: I told you, I-... Urrghhrgh *Sounds of dying*
Nope, doesn't look too promising. Nope, not too promising at all... But maybe if you're reeeallly lucky he'll know about RFID tags and just saw off your hand instead!
Microsoft has always said that the console race is a marathon, not a sprint. However, this initial costly sprint remains important during a period when the company boasts the only next generation system on the market.
A marathon where you're bleeding money for most of the race. Sure hope another company doesn't zip past you on a bicycle or something.
Just like the marketing guy who coined the "Touching is good..." slogan for the NDS, the guy who came up with this and thought it was clever needs to be a bit more in-touch (pun intended) with American culture.
I saw the commercials in Japan. In just about all of them Utada Hikaru asks, "Can I touch it?" and then there's a clever cleavage shot when she bends over (there were similar posters featuring her all over the cities). No, I think the innuendo there was an intentional global strategy, not a misunderstanding. Why the hell they thought that was a good idea, I do not know. Maybe they were trying to tap that mainstream market, and they were like "Hey, mainstream people like sex!"... Or something...
"Revolution" was the code name. You just can't go with that (except in extreme cases), it's just principle. Besides, Nitendo would be [i]dead[/i] if this was their policy, 'cause, you know as well as I do, "Dolphin" was a pretty pussy name...
I know several very smart people who were rejected from UIUC's CS program in the last few years. It's amazing though, that seems completely inconsistent with this steep drop in numbers. Are schools simply accepting less people, or what?
Thus raising the whole to 'art'? That is, if I played paintball in a beautiful stadium, it would elevate the combination (bunch of yahoos running around in a pretty setting, splattering each other and the architecturally pleasing stadium with fluorescent lime-green paint) to the status of 'art'?
That actually sounds a whole lot more creative and expressive than flipping the pages of the greatest novel ever written. Or staring at the greatest sculpture ever made.
... Ebert has a point. If FPSs are 'art', then so is paintball, or playing army when you're 10, or playing army when you're 40 (ever see a "Civil War re-enactment"?).
Kendo is often called an "art". And that's just a bunch of grown men screaming and hitting each other in the head with sticks. But let's not confuse medium with art here. There's nothing artistic about looking at a painting. Likewise, there need not be anything artistic about playing a game. What's in question here is whether or not the game itself is art, not whether or not it's an art form, though that's also an interesting topic for debate.
let's hope this doesn't mean radical changes in the games we see at the championships.
From TFA: The deal also asserts that Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 will be the exclusive gaming platforms for the PC and console for the events, meaning that other console titles for Sony or Nintendo platforms will not figure in the competitions.
Games offered last time: -Counter-Strike: Source
-FIFA Football 2005
-Need for Speed: Underground 2
-StarCraft: Brood War
-Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne
-Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War
-Dead or Alive Ultimate
-Halo 2
I would guess the biggest reason you won't be playing GoldenEye on an Xbox360 anytime soon is because Microsoft would have to create an emulation layer of some sort to run it. The chances of Nintendo ignoring that kind of action are slim to none considering their stance on emulation.
No they wouldn't. Like you said, "Microsoft owns Rare". You know, the company with the source code? The main problem here is how little of its property Rare actually owns 100% of. Depending on the terms of the GoldenEye license (you know, from that movie), Microsoft might have to pay a lot of money to republish that game. That goes double for Donkey Kong, etc., since Nintendo is an actually competitor.
Something in me hopes the system will also be bad and eventually Ubi will announce that copy protection is impossible, finally acknowledging what we all knew for ages.
Oh, it's possible. If every game came with a 330-pound bouncer who just beat the crap out of you every time you tried to copy the game, I think piracy would be stifled. They could justify it in the license agreement, just like with invasive software! Yay! They'd have to classify him as digital though, or the DMCA wouldn't prevent you from circumventing him with a gun...
Rather than helping to reduce spam Gingras claimed that the point is to allow users to verify who important messages are really from, like a message from your bank or credit card company
...leading to more efficent prevention of phishing, and ultimately... reducing.. spam... D'oh!
Non-violent ones too. I mean, Mario eats a mushroom and gets HUGE. He finds a frog ("suit") and suddenly he's bouncing around. I don't even want to know what that star is made out of...
The customers will see you as The Source(TM) for the latest and greatest, and mostly ignore the copycats.
Sega Saturn came out first. Sony Playstation won an Emmy for "pioneering 3D polygon-based gaming". Public perspective is something written by your PR department.
I don't think you can blame the consumer. The problem was really on a much higher level. Not only did the Xbox not have very many good games available in Japan (developer issues), they had even less being sold in stores (retailer issues). In 2004 (maybe I got there too late), even if you wanted to buy an Xbox, you could only buy like 5 (all secondhand) games for it in stores. As opposed to hundreds for Sega Saturn... Nationalism might be an issue on that level, I don't know, but I do know that even the free-minded consumer didn't have too much of a choice...
How exactly is this different than their old plan? These games have been in development for a while, and they've been "planning to succeed in Japan" since Xbox 1...
Well, I'm no language teacher, but I am a pretty good non-native speaker of Japanese... I recommend learning hiragana and katakana on the web first. Shouldn't be too hard, that's how I learned and I think it took at most a few weeks. Also, the basic grammatical structure of Japanese isn't too complicated, in fact it's extremely simple, so it shouldn't be too hard to learn basic stuff from books/the web. It's kanji that makes Japanese "hard" (learn how to do radical lookup in a dictionary program like JWPce as soon as possible, and get good at it). Even if you don't want to pay a teacher, maybe you could find a Japanese person to practice with (or other otaku learning Japanese). I'm not sure how far you can actually get without formal instruction, but either way, pumping that anime addiction of yours is what you want to do. Anime itself is pretty hard to follow at a beginner level, but you'll have a fair amount of luck with shows like Pokemon, aimed at younger viewers. An even better way to practice is video games. Many games for PS2 etc. have subtitles and speech at the same time, which makes things much easier to understand, as your abilities in reading and listening will supplement each other (trust me, this is amazingly helpful)... Older games (PSX, etc. once you learn how to look up kanji) will help your reading, and you can go through text at your own pace rather than being force-fed at fluent-level. Well, at the level you're at, there are plenty of good GB games with all the text in hiragana with spaces, which might help. And when doing any of these, especially now, don't expect 100% comprehension, just do your best to learn what you didn't understand. Use the dictionary all the time, quiz yourself, and double-check your ideas about grammar using Google (as in, use it to see if things you want to say in Japanese have ever been said before, a clear sign of at least semi-validity). Without taking a class, it all hinges on how much effort you put into this, but learning Japanese can turn into a fun hobby. Expose yourself to the language as much as possible, though, or you won't have much fodder for your self-learning. Not sure what other advice I can give. Good luck!
Ummm... The PS3 and 360 have comparable backwards-compatibility options to the Revolution. Revolution's classic games will be restricted mainly to first-party stuff if I recall correctly. You'll probably get a much better retro library per buck off a PS3.
Nintendo has stated repeatedly that they are approaching the market in a completely different fashion, so why concern themselves with how the others are marketing their stuff?
Because, well... ever see the Southpark episode where everyone dresses up like Chewbacca for halloween?
Check Wikipedia. FFXI came out about a year before the Enix merger. And FFXII isn't the first single-player FF since then: FFX-2 was released half a month before the merger, nearly a year after XI. Although DQVIII and FFXII were both published by Square-Enix, the actual staff involved in creating each game was completely different (DQVIII was developed by Level-5 vs. the in-house FF team). Simple things like DQ's lack of voice acting (completely absent in the original Japanese version, which is heresy by modern FF/Kingdom Hearts standards) help show how seperate the projects are. I'm not saying that interaction couldn't happen or isn't happening, just that if it is it's not quite located where you said it was...
Is this actually real? All articles reference the Xinhua one, which seems like kind of a dead end for something supposedly on the internet. Can anyone actually back this up, with like the Chinese site or something? (Just wondering, our irresponsible western media has been known to get pwned)
The Revolution is where my money will go, no question, for the simple reason that it's going to be far less expensive to buy for my kids, it has a tiny sense of innocence to it which I think you kind of fricking want in a game, and it's going to be actually interesting to see new titles because of the funky controller.
While the console itself is important, and I think your image of it is dead on, it's not just the console you need to buy: there are games too. There will undoubtedly be a healthy amount of more adult-oriented titles (not the focus, but they'll be there, especially 3rd-party-wise), and although the system will probably cost less, will the games? The upper bound retail price (at least on Amazon) for both DS and PSP games is about $40, with both having some games cheaper than that. PS2 and GC games both sell for around $50 (or less, like before). This is their business model, they make much more off the games than consoles. If the games start costing less, they've either (a) become a company that doesn't want profit (you can believe this one if you really want to), or (b) started spending less on development, etc. to keep their profit margin. It's possible it might cost less to develop revolution games, but I'm just trying to show that "costs less" and "innocence" aren't assumptions one can really make at this point (though Nintendo probably wants people to). I agree that the games themselves will probably be pretty awesome with the addition of the controller, though.
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Being a developer myself, I am intrigued about building applications and solutions that will open my doors, unlock my car, log me on to my computer and control home automation.
I don't see how this offers any practical security benefits. Let's explore a possible holdup situation involving a standard punk and an "early adopter":
Punk: Gimme your keys or I'll cut you!
You: Sorry, no keys, I start my car with a microchip in my hand.
Punk: What the hell? Don't fuck with me! Gimme your keys!
You: I told you, I-... Urrghhrgh *Sounds of dying*
Nope, doesn't look too promising. Nope, not too promising at all... But maybe if you're reeeallly lucky he'll know about RFID tags and just saw off your hand instead!
Microsoft has always said that the console race is a marathon, not a sprint. However, this initial costly sprint remains important during a period when the company boasts the only next generation system on the market.
A marathon where you're bleeding money for most of the race. Sure hope another company doesn't zip past you on a bicycle or something.
Google says it means "up" in the Okinawan dialect... But their press release says it's from English.
Just like the marketing guy who coined the "Touching is good..." slogan for the NDS, the guy who came up with this and thought it was clever needs to be a bit more in-touch (pun intended) with American culture.
I saw the commercials in Japan. In just about all of them Utada Hikaru asks, "Can I touch it?" and then there's a clever cleavage shot when she bends over (there were similar posters featuring her all over the cities). No, I think the innuendo there was an intentional global strategy, not a misunderstanding. Why the hell they thought that was a good idea, I do not know. Maybe they were trying to tap that mainstream market, and they were like "Hey, mainstream people like sex!"... Or something...
"Revolution" was the code name. You just can't go with that (except in extreme cases), it's just principle. Besides, Nitendo would be [i]dead[/i] if this was their policy, 'cause, you know as well as I do, "Dolphin" was a pretty pussy name...
I know several very smart people who were rejected from UIUC's CS program in the last few years. It's amazing though, that seems completely inconsistent with this steep drop in numbers. Are schools simply accepting less people, or what?
Thus raising the whole to 'art'? That is, if I played paintball in a beautiful stadium, it would elevate the combination (bunch of yahoos running around in a pretty setting, splattering each other and the architecturally pleasing stadium with fluorescent lime-green paint) to the status of 'art'?
That actually sounds a whole lot more creative and expressive than flipping the pages of the greatest novel ever written. Or staring at the greatest sculpture ever made.
... Ebert has a point. If FPSs are 'art', then so is paintball, or playing army when you're 10, or playing army when you're 40 (ever see a "Civil War re-enactment"?) .
Kendo is often called an "art". And that's just a bunch of grown men screaming and hitting each other in the head with sticks. But let's not confuse medium with art here. There's nothing artistic about looking at a painting. Likewise, there need not be anything artistic about playing a game. What's in question here is whether or not the game itself is art, not whether or not it's an art form, though that's also an interesting topic for debate.
Under French law, fashion designs are considered to be protected intellectual property, but not under American law.
Our country is seriously fucked up if we can patent genes but not jeans.
Did you know Hu Jintao got his degree in hydraulic engineering? Why can't we have an engineer presient?
Because we elect ours. Sad but true.
let's hope this doesn't mean radical changes in the games we see at the championships.
From TFA:
The deal also asserts that Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 will be the exclusive gaming platforms for the PC and console for the events, meaning that other console titles for Sony or Nintendo platforms will not figure in the competitions.
Games offered last time:
-Counter-Strike: Source
-FIFA Football 2005
-Need for Speed: Underground 2
-StarCraft: Brood War
-Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne
-Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War
-Dead or Alive Ultimate
-Halo 2
I'd wager a "No."
I would guess the biggest reason you won't be playing GoldenEye on an Xbox360 anytime soon is because Microsoft would have to create an emulation layer of some sort to run it. The chances of Nintendo ignoring that kind of action are slim to none considering their stance on emulation.
No they wouldn't. Like you said, "Microsoft owns Rare". You know, the company with the source code? The main problem here is how little of its property Rare actually owns 100% of. Depending on the terms of the GoldenEye license (you know, from that movie), Microsoft might have to pay a lot of money to republish that game. That goes double for Donkey Kong, etc., since Nintendo is an actually competitor.
Something in me hopes the system will also be bad and eventually Ubi will announce that copy protection is impossible, finally acknowledging what we all knew for ages.
Oh, it's possible. If every game came with a 330-pound bouncer who just beat the crap out of you every time you tried to copy the game, I think piracy would be stifled. They could justify it in the license agreement, just like with invasive software! Yay! They'd have to classify him as digital though, or the DMCA wouldn't prevent you from circumventing him with a gun...
Rather than helping to reduce spam Gingras claimed that the point is to allow users to verify who important messages are really from, like a message from your bank or credit card company
...leading to more efficent prevention of phishing, and ultimately... reducing.. spam... D'oh!
Non-violent ones too. I mean, Mario eats a mushroom and gets HUGE. He finds a frog ("suit") and suddenly he's bouncing around. I don't even want to know what that star is made out of...
Why Oklahoma?
(No offense, just curious, because this undoubtedly costing Microsoft's legal team big monies, yet I can't really see the strategy...)
The customers will see you as The Source(TM) for the latest and greatest, and mostly ignore the copycats.
Sega Saturn came out first. Sony Playstation won an Emmy for "pioneering 3D polygon-based gaming". Public perspective is something written by your PR department.
I don't think you can blame the consumer. The problem was really on a much higher level. Not only did the Xbox not have very many good games available in Japan (developer issues), they had even less being sold in stores (retailer issues). In 2004 (maybe I got there too late), even if you wanted to buy an Xbox, you could only buy like 5 (all secondhand) games for it in stores. As opposed to hundreds for Sega Saturn... Nationalism might be an issue on that level, I don't know, but I do know that even the free-minded consumer didn't have too much of a choice...
How exactly is this different than their old plan? These games have been in development for a while, and they've been "planning to succeed in Japan" since Xbox 1...
Well, I'm no language teacher, but I am a pretty good non-native speaker of Japanese... I recommend learning hiragana and katakana on the web first. Shouldn't be too hard, that's how I learned and I think it took at most a few weeks. Also, the basic grammatical structure of Japanese isn't too complicated, in fact it's extremely simple, so it shouldn't be too hard to learn basic stuff from books/the web. It's kanji that makes Japanese "hard" (learn how to do radical lookup in a dictionary program like JWPce as soon as possible, and get good at it). Even if you don't want to pay a teacher, maybe you could find a Japanese person to practice with (or other otaku learning Japanese). I'm not sure how far you can actually get without formal instruction, but either way, pumping that anime addiction of yours is what you want to do. Anime itself is pretty hard to follow at a beginner level, but you'll have a fair amount of luck with shows like Pokemon, aimed at younger viewers. An even better way to practice is video games. Many games for PS2 etc. have subtitles and speech at the same time, which makes things much easier to understand, as your abilities in reading and listening will supplement each other (trust me, this is amazingly helpful)... Older games (PSX, etc. once you learn how to look up kanji) will help your reading, and you can go through text at your own pace rather than being force-fed at fluent-level. Well, at the level you're at, there are plenty of good GB games with all the text in hiragana with spaces, which might help. And when doing any of these, especially now, don't expect 100% comprehension, just do your best to learn what you didn't understand. Use the dictionary all the time, quiz yourself, and double-check your ideas about grammar using Google (as in, use it to see if things you want to say in Japanese have ever been said before, a clear sign of at least semi-validity). Without taking a class, it all hinges on how much effort you put into this, but learning Japanese can turn into a fun hobby. Expose yourself to the language as much as possible, though, or you won't have much fodder for your self-learning. Not sure what other advice I can give. Good luck!
Ummm... The PS3 and 360 have comparable backwards-compatibility options to the Revolution. Revolution's classic games will be restricted mainly to first-party stuff if I recall correctly. You'll probably get a much better retro library per buck off a PS3.
Nintendo has stated repeatedly that they are approaching the market in a completely different fashion, so why concern themselves with how the others are marketing their stuff?
Because, well... ever see the Southpark episode where everyone dresses up like Chewbacca for halloween?
Check Wikipedia. FFXI came out about a year before the Enix merger. And FFXII isn't the first single-player FF since then: FFX-2 was released half a month before the merger, nearly a year after XI. Although DQVIII and FFXII were both published by Square-Enix, the actual staff involved in creating each game was completely different (DQVIII was developed by Level-5 vs. the in-house FF team). Simple things like DQ's lack of voice acting (completely absent in the original Japanese version, which is heresy by modern FF/Kingdom Hearts standards) help show how seperate the projects are. I'm not saying that interaction couldn't happen or isn't happening, just that if it is it's not quite located where you said it was...
Is this actually real? All articles reference the Xinhua one, which seems like kind of a dead end for something supposedly on the internet. Can anyone actually back this up, with like the Chinese site or something? (Just wondering, our irresponsible western media has been known to get pwned)
The Revolution is where my money will go, no question, for the simple reason that it's going to be far less expensive to buy for my kids, it has a tiny sense of innocence to it which I think you kind of fricking want in a game, and it's going to be actually interesting to see new titles because of the funky controller.
While the console itself is important, and I think your image of it is dead on, it's not just the console you need to buy: there are games too. There will undoubtedly be a healthy amount of more adult-oriented titles (not the focus, but they'll be there, especially 3rd-party-wise), and although the system will probably cost less, will the games? The upper bound retail price (at least on Amazon) for both DS and PSP games is about $40, with both having some games cheaper than that. PS2 and GC games both sell for around $50 (or less, like before). This is their business model, they make much more off the games than consoles. If the games start costing less, they've either (a) become a company that doesn't want profit (you can believe this one if you really want to), or (b) started spending less on development, etc. to keep their profit margin. It's possible it might cost less to develop revolution games, but I'm just trying to show that "costs less" and "innocence" aren't assumptions one can really make at this point (though Nintendo probably wants people to). I agree that the games themselves will probably be pretty awesome with the addition of the controller, though.