If they would only make a downloadable firmware update that would allow for commercial DVD playback:( I'd gladly pay the $20-$30 licensing fees for DVD playback with the Wiimote! Well, this summer Nintendo's going to release their DVD playback capability. Still up in the air as to whether this will require a firmware update, a hardware upgrade, or only be available on newer systems. I'm putting my money on a firmware update, since, technically, the current Wiis have all the hardware neccessary for playing DVDs. But maybe I'm just being too optimistic.
You're right. But this is also an issue of scale. A painting is probably more comparable to one track, an exhibit is comperable to an album... both take on relatively the same function in their perspective mediums. In fact, it's no coincidence that the term "album" originally means "a collection of pictures in a book".
Photography might be a better example. My father's a photographer, so I know a little about the field. It's not all that expensive to produce large quantities of high-quality copies of a photograph (especially a color photograph... black & white is actually significantly harder and more expensive to produce in large numbers), once an original print has been made. Technology is good enough, today, that the copies are virtually identical to the original. This is similar to how a CD are indecernable similar to a digital master. Even if the bit rate and sample rate are higher on the master, the difference is practically neglable (masters have higher sample rates because higher sample rates can be manipulated more cleanly, NOT because they, in of themselves, sound much different).
1) it takes weeks (if not months) of a musicians time, in the studio, working 10 hour days, to make a decent album.
2) Musicians make far more money on the road than they do from CD sales.
From an income standpoint, a studio recording is simply a way of getting people to come to live shows, because musicians make next to nothing in from CD sales, even over the lifespan of their carrier. From an artistic standpoing, musicians do studio recordings because they can perfect them, and have some finished archival product that could possibly be listened to, even long after they're gone.
From a work to pay standpoint, it would be much easier and less time consuming for musicians to not produce albums at all, but simply go out on the road and play. Some practically do that, and just record live albums, or "live in the studio" albums, which take much less time to baby. Then again, music is a very personal thing to a musician, and being away from crowds, sitting, and composing/recording music is possibly the most artistically rewarding.
I think you have it reversed. There are a few people out there who buy movies and watch them dozens of times, but the majority of people rent movies and watch them once or twice. Even when people DO purchase movies, they watch them maybe 3 or 4 times over the course of a couple years.
If what you said were the case, then there would be music rental places, and movie purchasing places. But we all know that the primary source for aquiring movies is through a rental house, to be watched once. Where-as music (on physically the same kind of media) is always purchased and owned. The medium has expectations of how many times the audience will need to, and want to view the work in order to get the full experience. Generally, an album will be listened to a good magnitude more times than a movie will be watched.
This stems from the fact that music is a bit more of an abstract art form than film. Film works on concrete ideas: dialog, photography, storylines that can be followed, etc. Where-as music is much more abstract, it sometimes takes many listens to really get the full experience of the music, depending upon its complexity. This is not always true, some very surreal or abstract art films reach the level of abstraction of music, but generally, music, as a genre, exists more in the abstract than does film.
Film also demands your attention. Except on rare occations, people sit down, shut up, and watch a film. People are much less comfortable sitting down and listening to an album to the same degree. As a musician, I'd like to think differently, but sadly, people are not as content to sit and listen to music as they are to watch a film. This is evident in the major types of live viewings of the two genres. Currently, if you were to talk in a movie theatre, you'd get weird looks and ultimately kicked out. In live music venues, all except for art music concerts, you're enchoraged to yell, screem, run around, and dance, to the point that many times you can't even hear the music. I guess my favorite venue is that of the jazz club, where you are free to move around, eat, and talk quietly, but for the most part, you are enchoraged to actually sit and take in the music fully.
Film is much more a direct interpretation of reality that we can relate to in simpler terms. This is why we've made movie watching a social event: we understand the film well enough to converse about it, afterwords. Music listening, on the other hand, is hardly ever a social event. When was the last time you invited friends over to listen to an album? I've tried it... it doesn't work. Most people can't think and talk about music intelligently enough to really socialize with it, since it deals in the abstract. You pretty much have to be a musician, yourself, to be able to converse about music in a meaningful way, where-as no one has to be an actor or director to be able to converse about the events of a film.
It's sad, but it's a reality I'll just have to accept.
This reminds me of the painter who was approached, and asked for the price of one of his paintings. The painter responded that the work was $1500. The man glared at him in shock, "But this probably only took 2 to 3 hours to paint!" "No," the painter responded, "this took a lifetime."
A work of art isn't just a piece of plastic, or a dab of paint, years of hard work, training, studying, re-working, etc. go into one work. People who feel like they're being cheated because their paying for plastic that isn't worth 1/10th of its actual value must have never used a dollar bill in their life... which is worth about %0.05 to make. If they still don't get it, they have no value for art, and probably should just not buy it, and let someone who DOES, buy it.
Now, that is irrelivant since most of the money from a CD doesn't even go to the artist (that's another discussion entirely, and yes, I believe artists should get more of the cut).
Oh, I don't disagree with you at all there. But this isn't about musicians demanding money, this is about people not being WILLING to pay money for music. The more people have to pay for something, it's likely that the more they're going to respect it/pay attention to it. For $5 a pop, CDs become like soda to everyone... it's something disposable. People won't expect anything from musicians anymore, and industry professionals won't feel inclined to try and get the very best quality material.
If music is really worth it to our society, we should be WILLING to pay for it. I'm not suggesting that we HAVE to pay for it, but my problem is that many aren't WILLING to pay for it.
Back in the day, people paid $100 a head to see a live concert. They'd sit down, and give the musicians their full attention for an hour and a half. Now, we pay $15 for a CD we can play over and over again, and most don't even give it the time of day. Yeah, I think it's pretty safe to say that price is inversely proportional the interest in the material, at least in this case.
My composition prof used to go on rants about this all day long, and I used to blow him off. Now, I can sorta understand what he's talking about.
What's more is that today's album is yesterday's symphony. How would you feel, if I showed up to a concert to just listen to one movement of a symphony, and then left? That's what people are doing with CDs... they buy it for one track, and only listen to that, claiming that the rest of the CD is crap. Sorry dude, if you don't like my WORK as a whole, then FUCK OFF! I put together and released an ALBUM because I wanted to make an ALBUM, not a fucking string of songs.
If people can't pay $15, because they don't think its worth it, they need to LOOK HARDER, because, yes, 95% of everything out there is total crap, but that's about a good 20 thousand albums, by now, that aren't.
Well, for one thing, studio recordings are just as hard, if not harder, than live albums. I guess it depends upon the kind of music you listen to, but many times, live bands are doing everything in their power to sound as good as they did in the studio. Live albums aren't as difficult in many ways, because people are willing to accept (and expect) some amount of mistakes and not as good quality of sound. Also live spaces tend to muddy sound a bit anyway, so more mistakes and production inconsistancies are masked.
I dunno, I love live shows, but I love studio albums too, I wouldn't trade one for the other, or say that one is inherently superior to the other.
The fact is, the entertainment form changes to match the distrobution method. TV shows have always been light entertainment because:
A) you have to expect that many people will walk in in the middle of your show. B) many people won't have time to finish the show C) people will watch it once and never really need to watch it agian.
So currently, our TV watching habits match that of subscriber distrobution, and the entertainment style matches that of our viewing habits.
Popular music, which has been driven by radio since the 1920s, has revolved mostly around 3 minute songs with simple progressions and less defined musical arcs, because:
A) You have no idea what kind of environment the person is in, or what they are doing, therefor, there's a good posibility they don't really want to have to pay much attention to the music. B) you have to be prepared for the fact that they're in the car, and will be getting out in just a few minutes, therefor, they're not going to want to have to dive into a 20 minute epic (I do, but I'm weird).
I'd like to see the death of radio, because it hasn't worked, in terms of bettering the genre of music as a whole, in fact, it's dumbed down the art form. I'd like to see people "take back" music into their own hands, and be forced to decide what THEY want to listen to. Sure, at first, they're going to choose to listen to the same old radio crap, but after a while, they'll be forced to seek out music that they like, if they don't want to have to listen to the same old thing over and over again. I know, for instance, that when I go to work, it's a 10 minute drive, so I have the option of putting on a 8-9 minute piece and being able to listen to it all the way through, I'm not limited to short songs. My iPod allows me to do that.
Traditionally, music was a lot longer than 3 minute songs... even folk music of the old days consisted of many many verses that might run 8 minutes or more. The concept that 8 minutes is too long for a song is entirely created by the contemporary distrobution method. This, among other things, might gradually change if we move away from the traditional "one size fits all" distrobution that radio provides.
What IS sad, however, is that people don't consider $15 a good deal for an hours worth of music. As a musician, that just makes me sad. Maybe the quality of the goods need to go up, but $10-$15 seems like a steal if you've just gotten a great album you're going to be listening to for the rest of your life. Unfortunately, most people don't think of music that way... it's like fast food: you eat it, shit it, and forget about it.
I don't know about you guys, but I get fast food because my body need neurishment and I'm in a hurry. I wouldn't buy it if I didn't get hungry. We don't NEED music, though. We've lived for eons without walkman or iPods. Why, now, do we need music that badly that we're willing to pay shit to listen to shit? I don't know about you, but I don't see this as victory for the music world in the slightest.
I'm not defending the RIAA in the slightest... on the contrary, I think they're the biggest culprit in spreading this diseased culture.
Well, if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense (the tax hike being good for the community). The only clients Virgin Galactic will have are big-time, multi-millionare business people. These people, in turn, are going to want to stay in 5-star hotels the night before their flight, eat at 5-star restaurants for the day they spend there, maybe buy a few hundred dollars worth in suvineers while they're at it. This doesn't even begin to figure in the workers and management of these lavish facilities, all of whome have a lot more money to blow on goods than the locals do. Income tax wouldn't work because all the clients don't live there, and a lot of the workers are probably going to be passing through. Sales tax, then, makes a lot of sense.
It is depressing that this happens this way in an age when we're rejecting local tax increases for schools, but in this particular instance, the sales tax seems like exactly what this town needs.
They stand to suffer a lot. Currently, their reputation is built on the image of making "fun, innocent game machines", "toys" if you will (although not just for kids). The moment "work" starts to crop up when thinking about one of their gadgets, the overall image isn't as joyful and innocent as it once was. It's one of the major reasons they're doing so much better than Sony right now, on both fronts... Sony's lost their way in trying to market their devices as "more than just toys". As it turns out, "toys" is exactly what the majority of people who buy the systems want. They don't want the hastle of dealing with various media, they don't want the added complexities that a sophisticated OS brings (Nintendo has caved on this, but with a very intuitive and simple OS). Adding business related material to a device can be a slippery slope, and before you know it, the image of the device changes from "gaming machine", to "multi-functional device".
Just look, the two most popular handheld devices on the market today are the iPod and the Nintendo DS. I don't think it's just a coincidence that the companies both have made it their mission to only do one entertainment related thing, and do it well.
The funny thing is that, with it's touch screen, and two screen interface, the DS seems to have a lot more potential as a PDA... although Nintendo has no interest in taking it in that direction. Basically the only thing the PSP has over the DS is power, and seriously, when was the last time you needed to render complex 3D lighting effects on a PDA?
I just wish Nintendo would come out with a suite of PDA apps. I guess they're releasing Opera in the US this June, but it's supposed to be slow and crippled. But I can understand why they don't: adding PDA functionality would muddy their image of being a system focused on games. I guess I'm fine with that.
Bah, the PS2 is about two steps up from the N64. DreamCast is about a half-generation between the two, includes two processors that are each slightly more powerful than the N64s, the PS2 is a small step above that. PS2 has aweful lighting effects, and texture management. The GameCube is probably the best of the three when it comes to lighting, and a close second to the XBox when it comes to textures and polygons. Those consoles are in a whole different league.
But... the PS2 has a lot of great titles, and that's the most important thing. We'd probably have been better off had each of those titles been made for the GameCube, but oh well.
Oh, I agree. I picked up FF4 and FF6 as well (I'll pick up FF5 sometime, but I've played it so much in the past, that I'm not exactly itching for it). So far, however, there haven't been any really major, new top tier RPGs for the DS (save, maybe FFIII, if you consider that "new"). I can't wait until FFXII: Revenant Wings comes out, and DQ9, those will be interesting to see whether the DS can keep my interest locked the same way that a GameCube or PS2 can. Currently, I have nothing to really compare it to.
Well, for one, licensing fees... of which there are none for AAC. Microsoft is now everyone's competition, why would a DAP vendor want to have to be connected at the hip to their competition's format? AAC isn't owned by Apple, they just happen to use it, and for good reason.
Secondly, AAC is MP4 audio, an update to the MP3 standard. That means it's a lot closer, in codec format, to MP3 than it is to WMV. And whatever happens, MP3 isn't going ANYWHERE anytime soon, it'll be on every digital media player for probably two decades from now, if not more.
I think you have reason to be optimistic all around. RE is a very popular series in America, hell, it even spawned two hollywood movies. Seeing Japanese apparent disinterest in overly gorey games, I'm guessing that REs primary fan base is the US. Kingdom Hearts, being a jRPG/adventure, has a noticably bigger audience in Japan. RE much more suits the American aesthetic of gaming, these days. So I have very little doubt that if they put the effort into making a Japanese release, they'll release it in the US... hell, the translation is already done, it would take them less than a few days to copy/paste the English back in. For people like me, who love jRPGs, this is kind of disheartening, but I'm just being realistic.
Secondly, it's been a while since I thought about the possibility of doing a Metroid Prime1/2 Wii release, but it makes a lot of sense. They basically already did a MP2 Wii version, and demoed it at E3 last year. If they've already done the control scheme, it's not as if they need to re-write the game. It would practically take a couple of days to add the new control system to the full game (as apposed to the demo). And I'm sure after that's done, it would not be difficult to bring over to MP1 (which they would need to do, since it's the more popular of the two). Seeing as though Nintendo has done things like this in the past, with Wind Waker and such, I don't think think it's out of the question at all.
I wouldn't be too worried about WiiReleases, though... these kinds of things are promotional dealees. But they take so little time and money to put out, I doubt they'll have any effect on the amount of output the game developers do for original games.
Well, for one, TP wasn't an old game, in fact, the GameCube version was released a month later... so there's really no comparison, it's just a multi-platform release (the systems just happening to be made by the same company). Animal Crossing, yes, you are correct... however, AC was still pretty new, so I'd still think of it more of a multi-platform release. Also, from people who play AC (I have it, but I really never got into it, and the mole guy keeps yelling at me because of it) I hear that the Wi-Fi makes it almost a completey new game. If you want retooling... look at the slu of SNES ports on the GBA, THAT'S retooling.
Actually, that's unlikely. RE4 was originally designed as a Nintendo exclusive, but because of the huge popularity of the PS2, they couldn't afford not to port it. Now, the tables are reversed, and they've just put out an old game with a Wii control system (biproduct of the control system development of RE5, anyone?). If this doesn't reak of RE5 being made for the Wii, I don't know what does.
Sorry to dissapoint you, but hey... at least you can hope for a PS3 port of the game. It happened last time. But don't get your hopes up, the PS3 doesn't have the same kind of numbers as the PS2 or Wii.
Stupid shill... he's probably even one of those nutjobs that thinks that the PS2 produced better graphics than the gamecube......yeah, and the holocaust never happened!
Case in point: PS1 on a PS2 = no change. Had the PS2 had anything in the way of hardware smoothing algorythms (besides simple interlace reduction ie: "virtical gaussion blur"), that might have been different, but the fact remains that there was virtually no improvement of anything about the PS2s handling of PS1 games. Even load times were identical... the PS2 went as far as to emulate extended load times, since games were programmed with music and animated load screens to match the horrible load times of optical drives.
The fact is, Sonys systems always seem to produce graphics that look far from polished, where-as even Nintendo's less powerful systems seem to produce graphics that look amazing for their time. Maybe the PS3 will change that, but I don't think this is just a question of graphical power, I think it's also a question of demanding a certain level of attention to detail from developers. Nintendo added in a bunch of neat little procedures in order to cut down on loadtimes, jaggies, and whatnot, and then scrutinized the output, requiring that any software running on their system met a certain level of quality. That's not something that can be accomplished with shear horsepower, that's quality that can only be achieved with advanced corporate infrastructure. Nintendo, as a prominant game developer, knows that the popularity of their systems is greatly based on the quality of the games, Sony doesn't seem to take that same level of innitiative.
I'm half expecting Wii games to look cleaner, in the long run, than PS3 games... even if they use much less sophsticated graphical procedures.
While I agree that the GC was a MUCH more graphically superior system (read my lengthy post above), there is one thing that could be taken as a win for the PS2. In sheer polygon count, the PS2 could do about 3x as many. But polygon count doesn't really ammount to much these days. With various graphical smoothing techniques, rounded polygons, advanced lighting effects, suprior texture rendering, anti-aliasing... you can make a game look far better with far fewer polygons. Sony has always been a freak for polygon count, possibly because its a simple quantifiable number that they can tout around (sorta like bit-rate used to be in the old days), but most games don't even need to take advantage of all the polygons a system can produce. Now, I have no idea whether RE4, specifically, had less polygons on the PS2 version, but I bet that the lower-quality graphics were due to less sophisticated lighting effects and graphical smoothing, not the actual number of polygons.
Funny thing, one of the first games I played on the cube was Skies of Arcadia, originally a DreamCast game that made its way over. Even though the actual models were the same ones used on the DreamCast... the lighting effects were phenominal. I don't think I've even seen the PS2 do that good of lighting, and this was a DreamCast port!
Bottom line is, the PS2 reached its limit long ago, I don't think the Cube ever reached its full potential.
Well, for one... when was the last time you saw a GameCube game that made full use of its graphics? Maybe Twilight Princess, and that's about it. I saw many games on the Cube, where I couldn't imagine the creators doing any better graphics than they achieved (Tales of Symphonia comes to mind), and still feeling like the system wasn't running at its full potential. Okami was like that over on the PS2... it feels like the graphics accomplished everything they set out to be, I can't really think of any way to improve them, yet it was running on a PS2!!!
I've come to almost put the GameCube and PS2 in separate generations, graphically. The graphics on the cube are just so superior, it's kinda hard for me to go back and look at the PS2. Tales of the Abyss, for instance, while an amazing game, is kind of painful after having played Tales of Symphonia, it just feels so glitchy and graphically inferior to its predicessor... they should have just stuck with with the cube. I see the difference between non-antialiased graphics (like the PS2) to anti-aliased graphics (like the GameCube/XBox), as an even bigger difference than the jump from EDTV to HDTV. Anti-aliasing effectly more than quadruples the apparent resolution of graphics, not to mention, the graphics just look cleaner and less pixilated.
Sometimes I even think that the N64 had better graphics than the PS2... sure it couldn't put out a 10th of the polygons, but the games still look and feel more polished, for their graphical capabilities, than PS2 games. Even Shadow of the Collosus and FF12 were painfully jaggy. It just feels like for the second half of its lifetime, PS2 games have been trying to do too much with too little power, whereas I never felt that way about the Cube. If anything, PS2 games have started to look worse and worse, as developers try to squeeze more polygons in, causing more jaggies and huge slowdowns (again, Abyss).
This is an instance where polygon count doesn't amount to shit. The PS2 had a pretty high polygon count, quite a bit higher than the GameCube. But the GameCube's anti-aliasing, combined with its far more sophisticated lighting effects, just made the games look more vivid, regardless of the actual polygonal detail.
If Nintendo's good at one thing, it's building systems that do more with less. For instance, the Cube's built-in functions for pre-loading optical data (not to mention, Nintendo's stringent requirements for developers to design pre-loading into games), makes the system feel like its loading optical data almost as fast as loading off a cartridge. It's these little subtleties that make a huge difference in the overall feeling of polish you get from a game. I can't remember a time where a Cube game had a "please wait... loading" screen, where as practically every other game for the PS2 has some kind of load screen, or graphical freeze with a loading meter.
So my response is: Wii... at ED resolution, vs 360 and PS3? For what it needs to do, it wouldn't surprise me if the games eventually wound up looking just as good, with 1/10th of the polygons and graphical fireworks. Sure, photorealism isn't going to be there, but I actually don't give a shit about photorealism anymore... I'll just watch a movie instead.
You missed my point. Twisting your wrist starts the turn, and the more you turn your wrist, the faster you turn to that direction. Just think about a steering wheel, I don't need to turn it 360 degrees to make a 360 turn, I just turn it slightly to one side, hold it there, and make the turn... the farther I turn it, the faster I turn. The way you're thinking about it, the exact angle of the accelerometer translates to the exact direction the character is facing (ie: upright is always north, upside down is always south). This is not what I'm talking about. Just picture the motion of a steering wheel, and you'll get what I'm saying.
The reason a twisting motion is required (as apposed to pointing the nuncuck to one side or the other) is that the angle of of a lateral tilt can be measured by an accelerometer, so can a fore/aft rotation, due to the pull of gravity. It doesn't matter what angle the accelerometer is at when the device is first activated, because the pull of gravity is always the same, so the accelerometer measures its lateral tilt against the direction of gravity. If you hold it 30 degrees to the right, the device will always (while it's functioning) be able to detect that it's at 30 degrees to the right. The same goes for a fore/aft tilt. On the other hand, if the nuncuck is turned from side to side (instead of a lateral rotation), an accelerometer has no way of detecting where its innitial position is. It can measure the amount of change from side to side, after the device is turned on, but the user would then have to be asked to point the nuncuck absolutely perfectly forward during startup or calibration.
Also, twisting ones wrist causes much less muscle strain over long periods of use, where as side/side turning (which requires one to bend their hand backward, to some degree), can be very tiring. Since the wrist mimics the motion of a stearing wheel or flight yoke, we're already used to controlling things by clockwise/counter-clockwise rotations, so this method is simply better anyway.
I'll agree about the button thing. I can see where they're going with it, but couldn't they have given me a smaller "B" button, like on the gamecube, maybe above the A? I dunno... I think its a huge issue, though. Then again, I'm one of the people who actually understands where Apple is coming from with the one-button mouse thing, at least for laptops.
The only problem with Wii FPSs is that developers have gotten off on the wrong track with the turn/look conrol system. Bounding box turn/look systems are terrible, and have the potential of making the WiiMote even more clunky than a dual-analog setup. But I came up with a method that would totally illiminate the need for the bounding box system, by having the motion sensor in the nunchuck be your turn/look controls. Twisting your wrist clockwise/counterclockwise turns your vision right/left, while tilting your wrist up/down tilts you head. It's sorta like turning a steering wheel, so it would be fairly quick to pick up, and leaves the right hand to do only aiming and shooting.
The even bigger advantage is that it isolates movement to the left hand. Since the analog stick is also on the nunchuck, the left hand is then in complete control of movement and turning, while the right hand deals with everything related to shooting. This would be the first control system in which all motion could be controlled by one hand, leaving the other hand free to deal with everything else.
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If they would only make a downloadable firmware update that would allow for commercial DVD playback :( I'd gladly pay the $20-$30 licensing fees for DVD playback with the Wiimote! Well, this summer Nintendo's going to release their DVD playback capability. Still up in the air as to whether this will require a firmware update, a hardware upgrade, or only be available on newer systems. I'm putting my money on a firmware update, since, technically, the current Wiis have all the hardware neccessary for playing DVDs. But maybe I'm just being too optimistic.
You're right. But this is also an issue of scale. A painting is probably more comparable to one track, an exhibit is comperable to an album... both take on relatively the same function in their perspective mediums. In fact, it's no coincidence that the term "album" originally means "a collection of pictures in a book".
Photography might be a better example. My father's a photographer, so I know a little about the field. It's not all that expensive to produce large quantities of high-quality copies of a photograph (especially a color photograph... black & white is actually significantly harder and more expensive to produce in large numbers), once an original print has been made. Technology is good enough, today, that the copies are virtually identical to the original. This is similar to how a CD are indecernable similar to a digital master. Even if the bit rate and sample rate are higher on the master, the difference is practically neglable (masters have higher sample rates because higher sample rates can be manipulated more cleanly, NOT because they, in of themselves, sound much different).
1) it takes weeks (if not months) of a musicians time, in the studio, working 10 hour days, to make a decent album.
2) Musicians make far more money on the road than they do from CD sales.
From an income standpoint, a studio recording is simply a way of getting people to come to live shows, because musicians make next to nothing in from CD sales, even over the lifespan of their carrier. From an artistic standpoing, musicians do studio recordings because they can perfect them, and have some finished archival product that could possibly be listened to, even long after they're gone.
From a work to pay standpoint, it would be much easier and less time consuming for musicians to not produce albums at all, but simply go out on the road and play. Some practically do that, and just record live albums, or "live in the studio" albums, which take much less time to baby. Then again, music is a very personal thing to a musician, and being away from crowds, sitting, and composing/recording music is possibly the most artistically rewarding.
I think you have it reversed. There are a few people out there who buy movies and watch them dozens of times, but the majority of people rent movies and watch them once or twice. Even when people DO purchase movies, they watch them maybe 3 or 4 times over the course of a couple years.
If what you said were the case, then there would be music rental places, and movie purchasing places. But we all know that the primary source for aquiring movies is through a rental house, to be watched once. Where-as music (on physically the same kind of media) is always purchased and owned. The medium has expectations of how many times the audience will need to, and want to view the work in order to get the full experience. Generally, an album will be listened to a good magnitude more times than a movie will be watched.
This stems from the fact that music is a bit more of an abstract art form than film. Film works on concrete ideas: dialog, photography, storylines that can be followed, etc. Where-as music is much more abstract, it sometimes takes many listens to really get the full experience of the music, depending upon its complexity. This is not always true, some very surreal or abstract art films reach the level of abstraction of music, but generally, music, as a genre, exists more in the abstract than does film.
Film also demands your attention. Except on rare occations, people sit down, shut up, and watch a film. People are much less comfortable sitting down and listening to an album to the same degree. As a musician, I'd like to think differently, but sadly, people are not as content to sit and listen to music as they are to watch a film. This is evident in the major types of live viewings of the two genres. Currently, if you were to talk in a movie theatre, you'd get weird looks and ultimately kicked out. In live music venues, all except for art music concerts, you're enchoraged to yell, screem, run around, and dance, to the point that many times you can't even hear the music. I guess my favorite venue is that of the jazz club, where you are free to move around, eat, and talk quietly, but for the most part, you are enchoraged to actually sit and take in the music fully.
Film is much more a direct interpretation of reality that we can relate to in simpler terms. This is why we've made movie watching a social event: we understand the film well enough to converse about it, afterwords. Music listening, on the other hand, is hardly ever a social event. When was the last time you invited friends over to listen to an album? I've tried it... it doesn't work. Most people can't think and talk about music intelligently enough to really socialize with it, since it deals in the abstract. You pretty much have to be a musician, yourself, to be able to converse about music in a meaningful way, where-as no one has to be an actor or director to be able to converse about the events of a film.
It's sad, but it's a reality I'll just have to accept.
This reminds me of the painter who was approached, and asked for the price of one of his paintings. The painter responded that the work was $1500. The man glared at him in shock, "But this probably only took 2 to 3 hours to paint!" "No," the painter responded, "this took a lifetime."
A work of art isn't just a piece of plastic, or a dab of paint, years of hard work, training, studying, re-working, etc. go into one work. People who feel like they're being cheated because their paying for plastic that isn't worth 1/10th of its actual value must have never used a dollar bill in their life... which is worth about %0.05 to make. If they still don't get it, they have no value for art, and probably should just not buy it, and let someone who DOES, buy it.
Now, that is irrelivant since most of the money from a CD doesn't even go to the artist (that's another discussion entirely, and yes, I believe artists should get more of the cut).
Oh, I don't disagree with you at all there. But this isn't about musicians demanding money, this is about people not being WILLING to pay money for music. The more people have to pay for something, it's likely that the more they're going to respect it/pay attention to it. For $5 a pop, CDs become like soda to everyone... it's something disposable. People won't expect anything from musicians anymore, and industry professionals won't feel inclined to try and get the very best quality material.
If music is really worth it to our society, we should be WILLING to pay for it. I'm not suggesting that we HAVE to pay for it, but my problem is that many aren't WILLING to pay for it.
Back in the day, people paid $100 a head to see a live concert. They'd sit down, and give the musicians their full attention for an hour and a half. Now, we pay $15 for a CD we can play over and over again, and most don't even give it the time of day. Yeah, I think it's pretty safe to say that price is inversely proportional the interest in the material, at least in this case.
My composition prof used to go on rants about this all day long, and I used to blow him off. Now, I can sorta understand what he's talking about.
What's more is that today's album is yesterday's symphony. How would you feel, if I showed up to a concert to just listen to one movement of a symphony, and then left? That's what people are doing with CDs... they buy it for one track, and only listen to that, claiming that the rest of the CD is crap. Sorry dude, if you don't like my WORK as a whole, then FUCK OFF! I put together and released an ALBUM because I wanted to make an ALBUM, not a fucking string of songs.
If people can't pay $15, because they don't think its worth it, they need to LOOK HARDER, because, yes, 95% of everything out there is total crap, but that's about a good 20 thousand albums, by now, that aren't.
Well, for one thing, studio recordings are just as hard, if not harder, than live albums. I guess it depends upon the kind of music you listen to, but many times, live bands are doing everything in their power to sound as good as they did in the studio. Live albums aren't as difficult in many ways, because people are willing to accept (and expect) some amount of mistakes and not as good quality of sound. Also live spaces tend to muddy sound a bit anyway, so more mistakes and production inconsistancies are masked.
I dunno, I love live shows, but I love studio albums too, I wouldn't trade one for the other, or say that one is inherently superior to the other.
The fact is, the entertainment form changes to match the distrobution method. TV shows have always been light entertainment because:
A) you have to expect that many people will walk in in the middle of your show.
B) many people won't have time to finish the show
C) people will watch it once and never really need to watch it agian.
So currently, our TV watching habits match that of subscriber distrobution, and the entertainment style matches that of our viewing habits.
Popular music, which has been driven by radio since the 1920s, has revolved mostly around 3 minute songs with simple progressions and less defined musical arcs, because:
A) You have no idea what kind of environment the person is in, or what they are doing, therefor, there's a good posibility they don't really want to have to pay much attention to the music.
B) you have to be prepared for the fact that they're in the car, and will be getting out in just a few minutes, therefor, they're not going to want to have to dive into a 20 minute epic (I do, but I'm weird).
I'd like to see the death of radio, because it hasn't worked, in terms of bettering the genre of music as a whole, in fact, it's dumbed down the art form. I'd like to see people "take back" music into their own hands, and be forced to decide what THEY want to listen to. Sure, at first, they're going to choose to listen to the same old radio crap, but after a while, they'll be forced to seek out music that they like, if they don't want to have to listen to the same old thing over and over again. I know, for instance, that when I go to work, it's a 10 minute drive, so I have the option of putting on a 8-9 minute piece and being able to listen to it all the way through, I'm not limited to short songs. My iPod allows me to do that.
Traditionally, music was a lot longer than 3 minute songs... even folk music of the old days consisted of many many verses that might run 8 minutes or more. The concept that 8 minutes is too long for a song is entirely created by the contemporary distrobution method. This, among other things, might gradually change if we move away from the traditional "one size fits all" distrobution that radio provides.
What IS sad, however, is that people don't consider $15 a good deal for an hours worth of music. As a musician, that just makes me sad. Maybe the quality of the goods need to go up, but $10-$15 seems like a steal if you've just gotten a great album you're going to be listening to for the rest of your life. Unfortunately, most people don't think of music that way... it's like fast food: you eat it, shit it, and forget about it.
I don't know about you guys, but I get fast food because my body need neurishment and I'm in a hurry. I wouldn't buy it if I didn't get hungry. We don't NEED music, though. We've lived for eons without walkman or iPods. Why, now, do we need music that badly that we're willing to pay shit to listen to shit? I don't know about you, but I don't see this as victory for the music world in the slightest.
I'm not defending the RIAA in the slightest... on the contrary, I think they're the biggest culprit in spreading this diseased culture.
Well, if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense (the tax hike being good for the community). The only clients Virgin Galactic will have are big-time, multi-millionare business people. These people, in turn, are going to want to stay in 5-star hotels the night before their flight, eat at 5-star restaurants for the day they spend there, maybe buy a few hundred dollars worth in suvineers while they're at it. This doesn't even begin to figure in the workers and management of these lavish facilities, all of whome have a lot more money to blow on goods than the locals do. Income tax wouldn't work because all the clients don't live there, and a lot of the workers are probably going to be passing through. Sales tax, then, makes a lot of sense.
It is depressing that this happens this way in an age when we're rejecting local tax increases for schools, but in this particular instance, the sales tax seems like exactly what this town needs.
They stand to suffer a lot. Currently, their reputation is built on the image of making "fun, innocent game machines", "toys" if you will (although not just for kids). The moment "work" starts to crop up when thinking about one of their gadgets, the overall image isn't as joyful and innocent as it once was. It's one of the major reasons they're doing so much better than Sony right now, on both fronts... Sony's lost their way in trying to market their devices as "more than just toys". As it turns out, "toys" is exactly what the majority of people who buy the systems want. They don't want the hastle of dealing with various media, they don't want the added complexities that a sophisticated OS brings (Nintendo has caved on this, but with a very intuitive and simple OS). Adding business related material to a device can be a slippery slope, and before you know it, the image of the device changes from "gaming machine", to "multi-functional device".
Just look, the two most popular handheld devices on the market today are the iPod and the Nintendo DS. I don't think it's just a coincidence that the companies both have made it their mission to only do one entertainment related thing, and do it well.
The funny thing is that, with it's touch screen, and two screen interface, the DS seems to have a lot more potential as a PDA... although Nintendo has no interest in taking it in that direction. Basically the only thing the PSP has over the DS is power, and seriously, when was the last time you needed to render complex 3D lighting effects on a PDA?
I just wish Nintendo would come out with a suite of PDA apps. I guess they're releasing Opera in the US this June, but it's supposed to be slow and crippled. But I can understand why they don't: adding PDA functionality would muddy their image of being a system focused on games. I guess I'm fine with that.
Bah, the PS2 is about two steps up from the N64. DreamCast is about a half-generation between the two, includes two processors that are each slightly more powerful than the N64s, the PS2 is a small step above that. PS2 has aweful lighting effects, and texture management. The GameCube is probably the best of the three when it comes to lighting, and a close second to the XBox when it comes to textures and polygons. Those consoles are in a whole different league.
But... the PS2 has a lot of great titles, and that's the most important thing. We'd probably have been better off had each of those titles been made for the GameCube, but oh well.
Oh, I agree. I picked up FF4 and FF6 as well (I'll pick up FF5 sometime, but I've played it so much in the past, that I'm not exactly itching for it). So far, however, there haven't been any really major, new top tier RPGs for the DS (save, maybe FFIII, if you consider that "new"). I can't wait until FFXII: Revenant Wings comes out, and DQ9, those will be interesting to see whether the DS can keep my interest locked the same way that a GameCube or PS2 can. Currently, I have nothing to really compare it to.
Well, for one, licensing fees... of which there are none for AAC. Microsoft is now everyone's competition, why would a DAP vendor want to have to be connected at the hip to their competition's format? AAC isn't owned by Apple, they just happen to use it, and for good reason.
Secondly, AAC is MP4 audio, an update to the MP3 standard. That means it's a lot closer, in codec format, to MP3 than it is to WMV. And whatever happens, MP3 isn't going ANYWHERE anytime soon, it'll be on every digital media player for probably two decades from now, if not more.
I think you have reason to be optimistic all around. RE is a very popular series in America, hell, it even spawned two hollywood movies. Seeing Japanese apparent disinterest in overly gorey games, I'm guessing that REs primary fan base is the US. Kingdom Hearts, being a jRPG/adventure, has a noticably bigger audience in Japan. RE much more suits the American aesthetic of gaming, these days. So I have very little doubt that if they put the effort into making a Japanese release, they'll release it in the US... hell, the translation is already done, it would take them less than a few days to copy/paste the English back in. For people like me, who love jRPGs, this is kind of disheartening, but I'm just being realistic.
Secondly, it's been a while since I thought about the possibility of doing a Metroid Prime1/2 Wii release, but it makes a lot of sense. They basically already did a MP2 Wii version, and demoed it at E3 last year. If they've already done the control scheme, it's not as if they need to re-write the game. It would practically take a couple of days to add the new control system to the full game (as apposed to the demo). And I'm sure after that's done, it would not be difficult to bring over to MP1 (which they would need to do, since it's the more popular of the two). Seeing as though Nintendo has done things like this in the past, with Wind Waker and such, I don't think think it's out of the question at all.
I wouldn't be too worried about WiiReleases, though... these kinds of things are promotional dealees. But they take so little time and money to put out, I doubt they'll have any effect on the amount of output the game developers do for original games.
Well, for one, TP wasn't an old game, in fact, the GameCube version was released a month later... so there's really no comparison, it's just a multi-platform release (the systems just happening to be made by the same company). Animal Crossing, yes, you are correct... however, AC was still pretty new, so I'd still think of it more of a multi-platform release. Also, from people who play AC (I have it, but I really never got into it, and the mole guy keeps yelling at me because of it) I hear that the Wi-Fi makes it almost a completey new game. If you want retooling... look at the slu of SNES ports on the GBA, THAT'S retooling.
Actually, that's unlikely. RE4 was originally designed as a Nintendo exclusive, but because of the huge popularity of the PS2, they couldn't afford not to port it. Now, the tables are reversed, and they've just put out an old game with a Wii control system (biproduct of the control system development of RE5, anyone?). If this doesn't reak of RE5 being made for the Wii, I don't know what does.
Sorry to dissapoint you, but hey... at least you can hope for a PS3 port of the game. It happened last time. But don't get your hopes up, the PS3 doesn't have the same kind of numbers as the PS2 or Wii.
Stupid shill... he's probably even one of those nutjobs that thinks that the PS2 produced better graphics than the gamecube... ...yeah, and the holocaust never happened!
Case in point: PS1 on a PS2 = no change. Had the PS2 had anything in the way of hardware smoothing algorythms (besides simple interlace reduction ie: "virtical gaussion blur"), that might have been different, but the fact remains that there was virtually no improvement of anything about the PS2s handling of PS1 games. Even load times were identical... the PS2 went as far as to emulate extended load times, since games were programmed with music and animated load screens to match the horrible load times of optical drives.
The fact is, Sonys systems always seem to produce graphics that look far from polished, where-as even Nintendo's less powerful systems seem to produce graphics that look amazing for their time. Maybe the PS3 will change that, but I don't think this is just a question of graphical power, I think it's also a question of demanding a certain level of attention to detail from developers. Nintendo added in a bunch of neat little procedures in order to cut down on loadtimes, jaggies, and whatnot, and then scrutinized the output, requiring that any software running on their system met a certain level of quality. That's not something that can be accomplished with shear horsepower, that's quality that can only be achieved with advanced corporate infrastructure. Nintendo, as a prominant game developer, knows that the popularity of their systems is greatly based on the quality of the games, Sony doesn't seem to take that same level of innitiative.
I'm half expecting Wii games to look cleaner, in the long run, than PS3 games... even if they use much less sophsticated graphical procedures.
While I agree that the GC was a MUCH more graphically superior system (read my lengthy post above), there is one thing that could be taken as a win for the PS2. In sheer polygon count, the PS2 could do about 3x as many. But polygon count doesn't really ammount to much these days. With various graphical smoothing techniques, rounded polygons, advanced lighting effects, suprior texture rendering, anti-aliasing... you can make a game look far better with far fewer polygons. Sony has always been a freak for polygon count, possibly because its a simple quantifiable number that they can tout around (sorta like bit-rate used to be in the old days), but most games don't even need to take advantage of all the polygons a system can produce. Now, I have no idea whether RE4, specifically, had less polygons on the PS2 version, but I bet that the lower-quality graphics were due to less sophisticated lighting effects and graphical smoothing, not the actual number of polygons.
Funny thing, one of the first games I played on the cube was Skies of Arcadia, originally a DreamCast game that made its way over. Even though the actual models were the same ones used on the DreamCast... the lighting effects were phenominal. I don't think I've even seen the PS2 do that good of lighting, and this was a DreamCast port!
Bottom line is, the PS2 reached its limit long ago, I don't think the Cube ever reached its full potential.
Well, for one... when was the last time you saw a GameCube game that made full use of its graphics? Maybe Twilight Princess, and that's about it. I saw many games on the Cube, where I couldn't imagine the creators doing any better graphics than they achieved (Tales of Symphonia comes to mind), and still feeling like the system wasn't running at its full potential. Okami was like that over on the PS2... it feels like the graphics accomplished everything they set out to be, I can't really think of any way to improve them, yet it was running on a PS2!!!
I've come to almost put the GameCube and PS2 in separate generations, graphically. The graphics on the cube are just so superior, it's kinda hard for me to go back and look at the PS2. Tales of the Abyss, for instance, while an amazing game, is kind of painful after having played Tales of Symphonia, it just feels so glitchy and graphically inferior to its predicessor... they should have just stuck with with the cube. I see the difference between non-antialiased graphics (like the PS2) to anti-aliased graphics (like the GameCube/XBox), as an even bigger difference than the jump from EDTV to HDTV. Anti-aliasing effectly more than quadruples the apparent resolution of graphics, not to mention, the graphics just look cleaner and less pixilated.
Sometimes I even think that the N64 had better graphics than the PS2... sure it couldn't put out a 10th of the polygons, but the games still look and feel more polished, for their graphical capabilities, than PS2 games. Even Shadow of the Collosus and FF12 were painfully jaggy. It just feels like for the second half of its lifetime, PS2 games have been trying to do too much with too little power, whereas I never felt that way about the Cube. If anything, PS2 games have started to look worse and worse, as developers try to squeeze more polygons in, causing more jaggies and huge slowdowns (again, Abyss).
This is an instance where polygon count doesn't amount to shit. The PS2 had a pretty high polygon count, quite a bit higher than the GameCube. But the GameCube's anti-aliasing, combined with its far more sophisticated lighting effects, just made the games look more vivid, regardless of the actual polygonal detail.
If Nintendo's good at one thing, it's building systems that do more with less. For instance, the Cube's built-in functions for pre-loading optical data (not to mention, Nintendo's stringent requirements for developers to design pre-loading into games), makes the system feel like its loading optical data almost as fast as loading off a cartridge. It's these little subtleties that make a huge difference in the overall feeling of polish you get from a game. I can't remember a time where a Cube game had a "please wait... loading" screen, where as practically every other game for the PS2 has some kind of load screen, or graphical freeze with a loading meter.
So my response is: Wii... at ED resolution, vs 360 and PS3? For what it needs to do, it wouldn't surprise me if the games eventually wound up looking just as good, with 1/10th of the polygons and graphical fireworks. Sure, photorealism isn't going to be there, but I actually don't give a shit about photorealism anymore... I'll just watch a movie instead.
You missed my point. Twisting your wrist starts the turn, and the more you turn your wrist, the faster you turn to that direction. Just think about a steering wheel, I don't need to turn it 360 degrees to make a 360 turn, I just turn it slightly to one side, hold it there, and make the turn... the farther I turn it, the faster I turn. The way you're thinking about it, the exact angle of the accelerometer translates to the exact direction the character is facing (ie: upright is always north, upside down is always south). This is not what I'm talking about. Just picture the motion of a steering wheel, and you'll get what I'm saying.
The reason a twisting motion is required (as apposed to pointing the nuncuck to one side or the other) is that the angle of of a lateral tilt can be measured by an accelerometer, so can a fore/aft rotation, due to the pull of gravity. It doesn't matter what angle the accelerometer is at when the device is first activated, because the pull of gravity is always the same, so the accelerometer measures its lateral tilt against the direction of gravity. If you hold it 30 degrees to the right, the device will always (while it's functioning) be able to detect that it's at 30 degrees to the right. The same goes for a fore/aft tilt. On the other hand, if the nuncuck is turned from side to side (instead of a lateral rotation), an accelerometer has no way of detecting where its innitial position is. It can measure the amount of change from side to side, after the device is turned on, but the user would then have to be asked to point the nuncuck absolutely perfectly forward during startup or calibration.
Also, twisting ones wrist causes much less muscle strain over long periods of use, where as side/side turning (which requires one to bend their hand backward, to some degree), can be very tiring. Since the wrist mimics the motion of a stearing wheel or flight yoke, we're already used to controlling things by clockwise/counter-clockwise rotations, so this method is simply better anyway.
baka
I'll agree about the button thing. I can see where they're going with it, but couldn't they have given me a smaller "B" button, like on the gamecube, maybe above the A? I dunno... I think its a huge issue, though. Then again, I'm one of the people who actually understands where Apple is coming from with the one-button mouse thing, at least for laptops.
The only problem with Wii FPSs is that developers have gotten off on the wrong track with the turn/look conrol system. Bounding box turn/look systems are terrible, and have the potential of making the WiiMote even more clunky than a dual-analog setup. But I came up with a method that would totally illiminate the need for the bounding box system, by having the motion sensor in the nunchuck be your turn/look controls. Twisting your wrist clockwise/counterclockwise turns your vision right/left, while tilting your wrist up/down tilts you head. It's sorta like turning a steering wheel, so it would be fairly quick to pick up, and leaves the right hand to do only aiming and shooting.
The even bigger advantage is that it isolates movement to the left hand. Since the analog stick is also on the nunchuck, the left hand is then in complete control of movement and turning, while the right hand deals with everything related to shooting. This would be the first control system in which all motion could be controlled by one hand, leaving the other hand free to deal with everything else.