Funny, my coworker got chewed out by her boss for having sent him an email, 2 hours later he comes in yelling at her for not calling him about the email!
He's one of those guys you love to hate. He's also one of those "never-work" bosses.
Got a letter from microsoft about 2 weeks ago. It was sent to management level employees of various companies. The text warned against using open-source solutions because these may not have IP indemnification protecting your company from lawsuits.
Naturally they follow this up promoting how well protected MS products are by their legal department.
The letter was good for a few laughs before I threw it out.
EA rushed the developers to an early release.
The "Boost" key in the land controls applies to NOTHING. There's no vehicle in the game that can use "Boost". They apparently forgot to remove this key when they decided to release this beta for retail.
People opened up the files and found the UI that the developers intended to release, it has everything expected of a multiplayer game, plus a section of menus for clan-specific functions! Like an in-game message board...
Remember how they advertised that you could rise to the rank of general, but there are no ranks past the various iterations of sargeant? Those are being saved for the expansion's unlocks.
Note how quick they were to announce an expansion. They're going to sell the features they had cut out from the release with probably a few extras.
----
This is a side note, but various guides are being led to believe that the Distinguished Service Medal requirements are as follows:
-3000 commander hours.
-2000 squad leader hours.
-2000 squad member hours.
7000 hours total. Two hours a day, 365 days a year, will require 9.58 years to achieve.
Marketing and brandname are tough categories to compete in when dealing with such a tiny market. Nintendo and Sony are pretty much the only big players here.
Nokia's N-Gage came out as a joke, a well-repeated and oft-referenced comedy. Side-talkin! They'll need to sink a lot of money into producing innovative and affordable products. But on top of that, they'll need to dish out a massive marketing campaign to remedy a terrible first impression.
If the writer envisions a multi-purpose handheld gaming system taking over the market due to integrating with other gadgets...Nokia won't be the one dishing it out.
My bet is a later generation of a Sony handheld due to the way they've been trying pack extra features into the PS3 past it's gaming features(Still remains to be seen what features survive into release...). Nintendo will probably try to stick to games and pleasing its hardcore fans.
In my opinion, integration is nice, but people are buying these handhelds for playing games first and foremost. The rest is window dressing.
Indeed, it would be a waiting game between the workforce and the "Guys in Charge". The workforce can refuse to sign till they drop the demand.
The "Guys in Charge" would still be paid though, while the unemployed are stuck unemployed or trying to tread water in low-paying entry level jobs(or have to start a new career) till this boycott is over.
Simply boycotting work in general isn't really plausible. People will swallow a great deal to get their money(Yes, there's an obvious joke there). Gov't regulation is a good thing here.
People who've poked through the battlefield 2 found the original interface menus. These had all the core features expected of a multiplayer game interface, as well as a whole tree for clan-specific functions!
Everyone who owns BF2 can vouch for the "Boost" button in the Land controls. Did you guys ever realize that there is no vehicle that uses this button? Ayup that's right, it's a key for vehicles that were never put in the game. They didn't have time to remove the key from the key configuration menu apparently.
Wondered why the ranking system only goes up to sargeant ranks when they advertised that you could go up to general ranks? They're saving them for the expansion which has the rest of the unlocks.
EA was incredibly quick to announce their upcoming expansion to BF2, before even releasing the patch necessary to fix major playability issues! The 1.01 crash caused memory leaks that lagged and crashed servers to the point where it had to be repealed! (We have 1.02 now, which is just the working version of 1.01)
They're selling us the rest of the game and just tacking on a few extras.
EA rushed the developers to an early release date, leaving the consumer with a buggy game and the programmers scrambling for a playable patch.
They pulled this same crap with Splinter cell games. I just love how you need a workaround just to use the apostrophe key in chat. Whether or not you're talking through text, hitting apostrophe will open the console! "Im sorry but Im just not a fan of saying youre, theyre, and its/its".(I'm serious, this was in Pandora tommorow, and was still around for the sequel Chaos Theory) This was a simple problem to fix.
I know that there are a large number of people who pirate only so they don't blow money on crap games. Basically a ridiculously large demo.
Demos kinda died because people hated the 600mb+ demo. But we've got more bandwidth these days and I'd much prefer a 600mb demo to a 4gig pirated dvd game. Especially when I find out I hate the game.
More demos won't stop piracy, but it'll grease the transition for pirates who have money(i.e the only pirates who matter) to just buy the game if they decide they want it instead of having them download the full versions of a ton of really/bad/ games. Once these guys get to preview the good games they've pirated, it's a bit harder for them to convince themselves to pay money for what they've already got on their harddrive.
Giving them the demo allows them to know they want it, before the full version is on their computer. This window of opportunity could be the deciding point for purchase or piracy.
I'd also like to make mention of a program that many here hate. Steam. I hate it as a game-matching system, it's gone through a horde of problems. However, as a content distribution method, it worked flawlessly for me. I bought HL2, downloaded it, and was merrily blasting the baddies with no hitches. However, Valve's main purpose in developing Steam wasn't simply to distribute HL2. That was just a step. What they really want is for other game developers to come to them. They've just pulled in their first taker, Ritual Entertainment will distribute the first episode of the sequel to SiN via Steam.
Note I said episode. Steam allows for games to arrive on your harddrive bit by bit. This works great for demos. This is especially useful to bring in the try-before-buy piraters. Again, nobody cares about the piraters who absolutely refuse to pay. Another bonus that comes in the Steam distribution system is that it the game developer doesn't forfeit massive amounts of money to the producing company. The developers will be seeing more of the profits so voting with your wallet swings a little heavier.
Re:Doom 3 and HL2 were so not worth the money...
on
How id Lost Its Crown
·
· Score: 0
I'm all-aboard for good story-based games.
However, asking for a good story and non-linearity is a bit much.
Content doesn't come cheap, the man-hours being put into it need to get paid off and these man-hours'll have to come from the best minds in the business. The overhead for content is high and the benefit to the player is questionable. Replayability is great, but not everyone wants to replay the game to see it unfold differently. For these consumers, all the expenses those non-linear elements racked up meant nothing.
Also, creating multiple results as well as a good story for each is incredibly difficult. Revenge of the Sith, I could've stopped the extermination of the Jedi by myself with technology of today. A FUCKING CONDOM! Anakin's wifey wouldn'tve died in childbirth and he wouldn't use that reason to turn to the dark side. See? Let's take the condom and the no-condom paths, one leads to a galaxy-wide war/extermination, the other leads to a romp in the sack and saucy pillow-talk in the morning.
The extra alternatives don't always add up to a nice story. The further these alternatives branch away from each other plot the more work needs to be done. If you bring the extra alternatives back into a single story again, the player feels cheated of having real control of outcomes. So I snuck around the guard instead of shooting him...I still got through the door, it doesn't amount to much change in the end. If I want to play the game the way I want, I can just buy a shooting game, or a sneaking game respectively. Giving both at the same time risks retarding both aspects to give a poor result.
The core of multiple-ending games is centered around a good story, and small decisions that affect the ending movie and not much else. You'll still fight the war, you'll still kill lots of people. Many will die the same death in every plot-line.
Multi-ending games are great in their own right, but it's not such a big advantage over linear games. Just take one good plotline and do it well, and that's fine. I don't watch movies and complain about not having alternate endings, I'd only complain if it had a bad ending.
If the public has a big increase in bandwidth, that'll afford the content producers to create bigger and bigger forms of content. That's great.
However, if these increased pipelines don't result in cheaper costs as well, it's going to be a bummer to have all this massive content, but with me still paying the same cost per gb as before.
Video files used to satisfy at 30-50mb per episode. Now I'm seeing 100-300mb episodes, great quality. Lots of growth in DVD-quality files getting passed around, 4gigs-ish. Dual-layer DVDs'll or one of the new HD-DVD formats'll become commonplace in the future(or something bigger).
If each gb doesn't get cheaper along with the simultaneous growth in bandwidth and filesize, my wallet is going to be doing all the shrinking in return.
Already living in fear of Optimum's Online secret bandwidth caps which they are deathly afraid of disclosing.
Creative's strategy was to compete with the Ipod on a feature by feature basis. It wanted to match and overcome it in every area.
Plays more formats, longer battery life, more space, replaced all buttons with touchpads, tried to match style by making everything softly lit with LED lighting, better signal-to-noise ratio, Removable battery, fm tuner and microphone, and it's cheaper than the iPod to boot! In terms of form factor it loses in that it's a bit heavier, and though it's shorter than an ipod, it's a little wider.
This is on paper.
The one critical feature point that is killing the product is quality. There's been a mass of broken Zen Micros. The headphone jack is of exceedingly poor quality, people have returned them only to get new ones that are also defective(A poster reports returning 3 and is praying the 4th will last), hence the laughable 90-day warranty. The first two firmware versions would drain the batterylife immensely due to the mini-drive inside never shutting down, leading to a nearly halved battery life. A new version was released to fix this, and indeed does fix the problem, giving about 9 hours of playback time for me. It also introduced a new bug where the battery empties itself if the headphones are plugged in for four hours after shutdown(which is where the player goes from standby to shutdown on its harddrive). You can however simply disconnect the headphones when not in use to avoid this. This version was subsequently retracted by creative, taking users back to the older firmware where the standby mode merely halved the battery life.
In the end, the Zen Micro beats the crap out of the iPod on paper...but those price shortcuts led to a cut in quality. You can actually see the crooked headphone jack in photos of the Zen Micro's top. These photos can be gleaned from more than one reviewer's site. There's a very visible gap where the jack is able to wiggle and eventually break loose.
The FM tuner is laughable, it'll only detect local stations. The thing picks up only 2 of the 20+ stations around me here in the tri-state area.
Luckily for me, I've received the most recent edition where the jack is soddered more heavily(though the gap is still there, I've shimmied in a piece of paper to wedge it), and I'm used to disconnecting my headphones after use anyway. Thus, I'm happy with my player.
The bottom line is that iPod is not just popular due to marketing, but also because the competition hasn't rallied up a clearly superior product. I'm sure that one will come in the future, but till then, iPods really are among the best mp3 players out there.
Nobody finds it interesting that City of Heroes is actually leading World of Warcraft in "What MMOG do you play the most?"?
City of heroes has far less suscribers than World of Warcraft, peaked at 180,000 down to about 120,000 last I heard. Not to rip on CoH since I actually enjoyed it more than WoW, but it's just odd that the distribution of results seems so far from the sales quotes from the companies.
Any ideas on why?
This would require a non-dice baced game. Because if luck screws you to the point where your skill is irrelevant(chain-misses, enemies chain-critting) then that adds frustration to the death which you can't recognize as being your lack of skill. It's far too upsetting to lose everything when it's out of your hands.
This is impossible to avoid in an MMORPG. MMORPG's have new content being created, new skills/feats/enemies/items/whatever. All these things can be bugged or unbalanced. And during that time of bugginess or unbalance, people will die and lose everything. You have so much more at stake to lose to factors you cannot control.
This is scary because:
1.) The poor kid's childhood has been ruined.
2.) These people are actually breeding!O.O
But seriously...naming the child like that seems extremely shortsighted. At least give the kid a fighting chance at a normal life.
Slashdot Mirror
It'd be nice to know what would happen if it pops before it happens, rather than afterwards.
Funny, my coworker got chewed out by her boss for having sent him an email, 2 hours later he comes in yelling at her for not calling him about the email!
He's one of those guys you love to hate. He's also one of those "never-work" bosses.
Got a letter from microsoft about 2 weeks ago. It was sent to management level employees of various companies. The text warned against using open-source solutions because these may not have IP indemnification protecting your company from lawsuits.
Naturally they follow this up promoting how well protected MS products are by their legal department.
The letter was good for a few laughs before I threw it out.
EA rushed the developers to an early release. The "Boost" key in the land controls applies to NOTHING. There's no vehicle in the game that can use "Boost". They apparently forgot to remove this key when they decided to release this beta for retail. People opened up the files and found the UI that the developers intended to release, it has everything expected of a multiplayer game, plus a section of menus for clan-specific functions! Like an in-game message board... Remember how they advertised that you could rise to the rank of general, but there are no ranks past the various iterations of sargeant? Those are being saved for the expansion's unlocks. Note how quick they were to announce an expansion. They're going to sell the features they had cut out from the release with probably a few extras. ---- This is a side note, but various guides are being led to believe that the Distinguished Service Medal requirements are as follows: -3000 commander hours. -2000 squad leader hours. -2000 squad member hours. 7000 hours total. Two hours a day, 365 days a year, will require 9.58 years to achieve.
Marketing and brandname are tough categories to compete in when dealing with such a tiny market. Nintendo and Sony are pretty much the only big players here.
Nokia's N-Gage came out as a joke, a well-repeated and oft-referenced comedy. Side-talkin!
They'll need to sink a lot of money into producing innovative and affordable products. But on top of that, they'll need to dish out a massive marketing campaign to remedy a terrible first impression.
If the writer envisions a multi-purpose handheld gaming system taking over the market due to integrating with other gadgets...Nokia won't be the one dishing it out.
My bet is a later generation of a Sony handheld due to the way they've been trying pack extra features into the PS3 past it's gaming features(Still remains to be seen what features survive into release...). Nintendo will probably try to stick to games and pleasing its hardcore fans.
In my opinion, integration is nice, but people are buying these handhelds for playing games first and foremost. The rest is window dressing.
Indeed, it would be a waiting game between the workforce and the "Guys in Charge". The workforce can refuse to sign till they drop the demand.
The "Guys in Charge" would still be paid though, while the unemployed are stuck unemployed or trying to tread water in low-paying entry level jobs(or have to start a new career) till this boycott is over.
Simply boycotting work in general isn't really plausible. People will swallow a great deal to get their money(Yes, there's an obvious joke there). Gov't regulation is a good thing here.
People who've poked through the battlefield 2 found the original interface menus. These had all the core features expected of a multiplayer game interface, as well as a whole tree for clan-specific functions! Everyone who owns BF2 can vouch for the "Boost" button in the Land controls. Did you guys ever realize that there is no vehicle that uses this button? Ayup that's right, it's a key for vehicles that were never put in the game. They didn't have time to remove the key from the key configuration menu apparently. Wondered why the ranking system only goes up to sargeant ranks when they advertised that you could go up to general ranks? They're saving them for the expansion which has the rest of the unlocks. EA was incredibly quick to announce their upcoming expansion to BF2, before even releasing the patch necessary to fix major playability issues! The 1.01 crash caused memory leaks that lagged and crashed servers to the point where it had to be repealed! (We have 1.02 now, which is just the working version of 1.01) They're selling us the rest of the game and just tacking on a few extras. EA rushed the developers to an early release date, leaving the consumer with a buggy game and the programmers scrambling for a playable patch. They pulled this same crap with Splinter cell games. I just love how you need a workaround just to use the apostrophe key in chat. Whether or not you're talking through text, hitting apostrophe will open the console! "Im sorry but Im just not a fan of saying youre, theyre, and its/its".(I'm serious, this was in Pandora tommorow, and was still around for the sequel Chaos Theory) This was a simple problem to fix.
I know that there are a large number of people who pirate only so they don't blow money on crap games. Basically a ridiculously large demo.
/bad/ games. Once these guys get to preview the good games they've pirated, it's a bit harder for them to convince themselves to pay money for what they've already got on their harddrive.
Demos kinda died because people hated the 600mb+ demo. But we've got more bandwidth these days and I'd much prefer a 600mb demo to a 4gig pirated dvd game. Especially when I find out I hate the game.
More demos won't stop piracy, but it'll grease the transition for pirates who have money(i.e the only pirates who matter) to just buy the game if they decide they want it instead of having them download the full versions of a ton of really
Giving them the demo allows them to know they want it, before the full version is on their computer. This window of opportunity could be the deciding point for purchase or piracy.
I'd also like to make mention of a program that many here hate. Steam. I hate it as a game-matching system, it's gone through a horde of problems. However, as a content distribution method, it worked flawlessly for me. I bought HL2, downloaded it, and was merrily blasting the baddies with no hitches. However, Valve's main purpose in developing Steam wasn't simply to distribute HL2. That was just a step. What they really want is for other game developers to come to them. They've just pulled in their first taker, Ritual Entertainment will distribute the first episode of the sequel to SiN via Steam.
Note I said episode. Steam allows for games to arrive on your harddrive bit by bit. This works great for demos. This is especially useful to bring in the try-before-buy piraters. Again, nobody cares about the piraters who absolutely refuse to pay. Another bonus that comes in the Steam distribution system is that it the game developer doesn't forfeit massive amounts of money to the producing company. The developers will be seeing more of the profits so voting with your wallet swings a little heavier.
I'm all-aboard for good story-based games. However, asking for a good story and non-linearity is a bit much. Content doesn't come cheap, the man-hours being put into it need to get paid off and these man-hours'll have to come from the best minds in the business. The overhead for content is high and the benefit to the player is questionable. Replayability is great, but not everyone wants to replay the game to see it unfold differently. For these consumers, all the expenses those non-linear elements racked up meant nothing. Also, creating multiple results as well as a good story for each is incredibly difficult. Revenge of the Sith, I could've stopped the extermination of the Jedi by myself with technology of today. A FUCKING CONDOM! Anakin's wifey wouldn'tve died in childbirth and he wouldn't use that reason to turn to the dark side. See? Let's take the condom and the no-condom paths, one leads to a galaxy-wide war/extermination, the other leads to a romp in the sack and saucy pillow-talk in the morning. The extra alternatives don't always add up to a nice story. The further these alternatives branch away from each other plot the more work needs to be done. If you bring the extra alternatives back into a single story again, the player feels cheated of having real control of outcomes. So I snuck around the guard instead of shooting him...I still got through the door, it doesn't amount to much change in the end. If I want to play the game the way I want, I can just buy a shooting game, or a sneaking game respectively. Giving both at the same time risks retarding both aspects to give a poor result. The core of multiple-ending games is centered around a good story, and small decisions that affect the ending movie and not much else. You'll still fight the war, you'll still kill lots of people. Many will die the same death in every plot-line. Multi-ending games are great in their own right, but it's not such a big advantage over linear games. Just take one good plotline and do it well, and that's fine. I don't watch movies and complain about not having alternate endings, I'd only complain if it had a bad ending.
If the public has a big increase in bandwidth, that'll afford the content producers to create bigger and bigger forms of content. That's great. However, if these increased pipelines don't result in cheaper costs as well, it's going to be a bummer to have all this massive content, but with me still paying the same cost per gb as before. Video files used to satisfy at 30-50mb per episode. Now I'm seeing 100-300mb episodes, great quality. Lots of growth in DVD-quality files getting passed around, 4gigs-ish. Dual-layer DVDs'll or one of the new HD-DVD formats'll become commonplace in the future(or something bigger). If each gb doesn't get cheaper along with the simultaneous growth in bandwidth and filesize, my wallet is going to be doing all the shrinking in return. Already living in fear of Optimum's Online secret bandwidth caps which they are deathly afraid of disclosing.
I am an owner of a Creative Zen Micro.
Creative's strategy was to compete with the Ipod on a feature by feature basis. It wanted to match and overcome it in every area.
Plays more formats, longer battery life, more space, replaced all buttons with touchpads, tried to match style by making everything softly lit with LED lighting, better signal-to-noise ratio, Removable battery, fm tuner and microphone, and it's cheaper than the iPod to boot! In terms of form factor it loses in that it's a bit heavier, and though it's shorter than an ipod, it's a little wider.
This is on paper.
The one critical feature point that is killing the product is quality. There's been a mass of broken Zen Micros. The headphone jack is of exceedingly poor quality, people have returned them only to get new ones that are also defective(A poster reports returning 3 and is praying the 4th will last), hence the laughable 90-day warranty. The first two firmware versions would drain the batterylife immensely due to the mini-drive inside never shutting down, leading to a nearly halved battery life. A new version was released to fix this, and indeed does fix the problem, giving about 9 hours of playback time for me. It also introduced a new bug where the battery empties itself if the headphones are plugged in for four hours after shutdown(which is where the player goes from standby to shutdown on its harddrive). You can however simply disconnect the headphones when not in use to avoid this. This version was subsequently retracted by creative, taking users back to the older firmware where the standby mode merely halved the battery life.
In the end, the Zen Micro beats the crap out of the iPod on paper...but those price shortcuts led to a cut in quality. You can actually see the crooked headphone jack in photos of the Zen Micro's top. These photos can be gleaned from more than one reviewer's site. There's a very visible gap where the jack is able to wiggle and eventually break loose.
The FM tuner is laughable, it'll only detect local stations. The thing picks up only 2 of the 20+ stations around me here in the tri-state area.
Luckily for me, I've received the most recent edition where the jack is soddered more heavily(though the gap is still there, I've shimmied in a piece of paper to wedge it), and I'm used to disconnecting my headphones after use anyway. Thus, I'm happy with my player.
The bottom line is that iPod is not just popular due to marketing, but also because the competition hasn't rallied up a clearly superior product. I'm sure that one will come in the future, but till then, iPods really are among the best mp3 players out there.
Shall I be the first to hail our new "Far-Eastern" overlords?
Nobody finds it interesting that City of Heroes is actually leading World of Warcraft in "What MMOG do you play the most?"? City of heroes has far less suscribers than World of Warcraft, peaked at 180,000 down to about 120,000 last I heard. Not to rip on CoH since I actually enjoyed it more than WoW, but it's just odd that the distribution of results seems so far from the sales quotes from the companies. Any ideas on why?
This would require a non-dice baced game. Because if luck screws you to the point where your skill is irrelevant(chain-misses, enemies chain-critting) then that adds frustration to the death which you can't recognize as being your lack of skill. It's far too upsetting to lose everything when it's out of your hands. This is impossible to avoid in an MMORPG. MMORPG's have new content being created, new skills/feats/enemies/items/whatever. All these things can be bugged or unbalanced. And during that time of bugginess or unbalance, people will die and lose everything. You have so much more at stake to lose to factors you cannot control.
This is scary because: 1.) The poor kid's childhood has been ruined. 2.) These people are actually breeding!O.O But seriously...naming the child like that seems extremely shortsighted. At least give the kid a fighting chance at a normal life.