I would have dismissed this as complete bullshit had it not been on Sony's own PR. What an odd thing to mention. I mean, It's not unknown for PR's to "name drop" in order to more likely appear in search engine listings, Sony doesn't have to resort to that sort of thing because their PR's are widely disssiminated by the media anyway (especially PS3 related stuff).
While Kunitake Ando and Steve Jobs were making complimentary (if somewhat guarded) comments about the two companies early in 2005 (was it at Macworld or something?), steve has been less upbeat about Cell.
If you take the statement at its fact, its really just saying that the cell is general purpose enough to handle any OS. In fact, there's nothing incorrect or even exaggerated about the statement: The cell could certainly support OSX in the same way that PearPC enables a x86 to support OSX (i.e. emulation) but it would be slow as hell. Whether Sony means anything other than that is another question.
Curious, but I'm leaning towards dismissing this as PR hubris. But give it a couple weeks - if the media get's into a froth about it I'm sure Apple will speak up or Sony will clarify one way or the other.
Yeah, I agree.. it is pretty comical at times. Ever wondered why the rockets in quake will knock a player back 10 feet but the recoil doesn't move the shooter one inch?? But at the same time, games that do actually account for such things seem less fun to me. Quake is all about run-and-gun action, and I think that ditching the "burden" cliche would make it less enjoyable. That's just my opinion though, tons of people like Rainbox Six so your mileage may vary.
I tend to give the "laws of physics" cliches a pass. Yeah, you can't really alter the course of your jump in mid-air but how frustrating would the alternative be?
On the other hand, stuff like the usage of crates in level design have got to go. I can't tell you the last time I walked by or even saw a wooden crate in real life, but goddamn if you can't get through a fan-made counterstrike map without walking by at least a dozen of them. Jesus, is this a shipping yard or something? Even professional level design is guilty. Yeah, I know you need to have a hiding space, or a way to allow the player to hop on the roof, but come on.
I have a hard time finding fair, accurate reviews regardless of whether the reviews are written by staff or by consumers. There is a very real conflict of interest for sites that depend on manufactures for advertising dollars and testing samples. On the by-consumer side, you have to filter out shills and zealots (pick your favorite site and check out the consumer reviews of Quicken and Microsoft Money... it's like a holy war).
That said, I've been very happy with consumer reports. They only review items that they purchase themselves (i.e. no 'freebies' or higher-quality items specifically earmarked for product reviews). Furthermore, they accept no advertising and get all their revenue from subscriptions. These two factors take away much of the conflict of interest and/or bias issues that can plague other review sites.
Downsides? Cost (not necessarily expensive imho, but still a tough sell to people who expect everything online to be free). It's also doesnt work with early adopters because they wont review items before they available for purchase. Finally, though they've been getting a bit more 'hip' lately when it comes to technology I doubt your going to find an exhaustive video card shoot-out anytime soon.
What I'd really like to see is a site (or magazine) that can does a decent video game review. They seem to be either clearly biased, drip with ego and/or condescention, but usually they are just TOO LONG. Why is it Ebert can give a fair review of "Mullholland Drive" on a quarter-page of the chicago sun-times, but nobody can seem to encapsulate "Mario Tennis" in under 5 printed pages??
All good points, but the data in Joel's aritcle shows that great programmers aren't necessarily faster than bad programmers (or vice versa). Joel was unable to find a meaningful correlation between completion times and grades.
That said, imho the main point is that good programmers produce better software. Given infinite time and/or money, Derek Smart could still *never* produce software as good as John Romero.
Seriously though, it is very non-obvious to a good deal of IT Managers. When you perceive software development costs as ultimately a burn on revenue, their conclusion is that you need to minimize said costs (much in the same way that you would seek the lowest-priced landscaping or office-cleaning staff).
I had a 2-year stint at a smalltalk consulting shop during the dot-com boom. By that time, the Java drumbeat was getting too hard to ignore and we pretty much had to join the bandwagon to pull down decent gigs.
Java definitely felt much more like c++ than Smalltalk. I'd agree that Ruby is a better comparison. And when you look at everything inside the square brackets, objective-c looks and feels almost exactly like Smalltalk.
I'm not quite sure why Smalltalk didn't catch on like Java did. Was it bad timing, bad marketing, did it feel "too wierd" to more widely used languages? I dunno.
Here's irony: IBM's VisualAge for Java IDE was a Smalltalk image developed with IBM Visualage for Smalltalk (which had 1/10th as many sales).
If there is nudity visible in the console game, its because the USERS PURPOSELY WANTED IT THERE.
That's true. And so, yeah, it's not like Rockstar is guilty of barging into homes and showing porn to 14-year-olds. At the same time, they did put the content there and made it fairly easy to get at. It's not hacking into the pentagon, all you're doing is changing config settings. Further still, you can distribute this "mod" by just giving someone a savegame file/memory card from your "modded" version. By your argument, would they be free of any responsibility if they restricted hot-coffee by way of a cheat code that they didn't give out? What if they put an option on the main menu that read: "Don't select this option!!". Both situations require the intent of the user to get at the content, Rockstar can still claim they tried to obfuscate access to it.
you must also cry for MS Paint, Mario Paint, and any other image-editor/drawing application/game to be given the AO rating as well, because its even easier to draw boobs in those programs.
Nope, here's the difference: Rockstar drew the boobs, not the user. Your argument is that there is no distinction between creating content and unlocking the content.
But let's step back a bit. It seems people are taking a black or white stand on this. You either have to think that rockstar should get the death penalty or that they are an totally innocent victim caught in a religious witch hunt.
The truth is somewhere imbetween. No, they haven't committed any crime. Yes, they broke the rules. The fact is, they mislead the ESRB about the content of the game, nothing more and nothing less. That is a violation of the ESRB submission guidelines, and they are subject to the fines and penalties that Rockstar agreed to when it submitted the game for review.
Good point, but consider the fact that the PC and Xbox versions lagged behind the PS2 for several months. Seeing as how you have to go resample the textures, audio and swap out higher polycount models, I think you'd probably have to revisit the hot coffee content anyway. Why not also take out hot-coffee?
In fact, this could be the smoking gun in "publicity stunt" test: Did Rockstar remaster the hot-coffee content with higher-quality graphics for xbox and PC? If so, then it was *more* work to keep it in, not a last-second omission hamstrung by time constraints.
Even though I think the furor is rediculous the ESRB did the right thing. Rockstar has exploited the "games==evil" climate just as much as Hilary Clinton has, and the industry and community are taking the hits.
Has anyone checked this out? Obviously the CJ model will be improved, but if any of the hot-coffee-specific assets were upgraded then it clinches it, imho.
Has anyone else noticed that more and more sites are cropping up that "penalize" users that use IE? Note that I'm not talking about a site that refuses to support css hacks or throws up a "please upgrade" javascript window -- I'm talking about deliberately serving out degraded pages when it detects you are using IE (or refusing to show anything at all). Here are two examples
Stuff and Nonsense, A an otherwise good design/usability blog, Uses javascript to swap turn all images black and white, displays graphic that reads "Internet Explorer 2 old, Stomp to a Betta Browser" (God I hate bloggers sometimes)
Played to death, pretentious online video game zine, uses javascript to redirect users to a "Sorry IE User" page.
What kills me is that when you turn off javascript, the pages display & behave either identically or pretty damn close to Firefox. So it's not IE completely borks the rendering, or cant handle fancy DOM/Javascript tricks... they just dont want you to look to look at degraded content because they dont like IE.
Obviously these are niche sites, but I've seen this cropping up more and more. I hate IE about as much as any other web developer (though thankfully I stay mostly on the server side), but isn't this the same exact crap that sites did back in the day with the custom Netscape 2 tags, and the crap Microsoft pulled (and occasionally still pulls) circa IE4?
A lot of people, especially business users, don't have much choice other than IE. For me, I use IE for printing because Firefox ends up cropping stuff out half the time regardless of how much I futz with the page setup options.
I've heard the argument that such tactics are necessary to force users (and Microsoft) to take web standards seriously. I find this not only condescending and heavy-handed, but also counter-productive: Isn't the whole idea with web standards is that you want to make the web as inclusive as possible? Sometimes people's ideology gets in the way of their ideology.
I disagree. Whether authorized or not Rockstar is still ultimately responsible for the content they produce. Supposing it is unauthorized, that really doesnt. Also, you say to ignore the negligence rebuttal, but your scenario of a rogue employee doing this on the sly is the very definition of a company being negligent. Supposing a daycare hires a child molester because they don't do background checks, does that relieve the daycare management from responsibility. Thankfully, no.
I do think that the "M" rating is enough to get them out of any sort of criminal matter. It's not they're making Spiro the Dragon - anyone unlocking/installingthe hotcoffee mod should assume that the content is at least as objectionable as what gave the game an M rating in the first place.
Now, as to whether this Easter Egg was "authorized", or the work of one or two rogues. After having scene the video... imho even if one person could do the work you certainly couldn't do it without anyone knowing. To do this on the sly you'd need to: -Pay off the voice actors, and make sure everyone in the recording studio went out to lunch (same voice of cj..., unless they spliced from other scenes I havent heeard) -Get access to the motion-capture lab without anyone knowing. Some of the animations are... umm... lifelike enough to suggest mocap. -Put it into the toolchain and content management system in such a way that those responsible for the release builds wouldn't catch it. Obviously with a few lines of code (hell, even thousands of lines of code) can sneak by... but audio, motion capture, scripting, and 3d models? Doubtful.
It seems obvious to me that this was yet another attempt for Rockstar to boost sales by exploiting controversy, but the best case scenario is that they decided to omit the content and were incredibly inept and/or lazy about doing so.
And finally, nothing pisses me off more than when a company is caught with their pants down, yet refuses to own up to it and feeds a line of weasily excuses. Just say you f-ed up, take your hits and be done with it.
Agreed. It's unfair that game developers are put on the defensive for making games they they intend to be played by adults. Rockstar didn't create the "games are bad" groupthink, but they certainly are exploiting it just as much as Hilary Clinton is.
ARGH! Okay...seriously...it's already rated M. It's out of the hands of children. If Rockstar actually left the content in that wasn't the smartest thing they've ever done, but it's not like they killed a puppy.
Actually, I find Rockstar's behaviour incredibly irresponsible. Now now, hear me out. It sounds like I'm about to make a moral stand... i'm not.
Here's the deal. Rockstar has been playing a very dangerous game. They that the controversy of GTA3 helped their profits more than it hurt. After making this realization, they've been ratcheting up the controversy -- the GTA series has arguably become more and more violent and lost most of its "comical" violence, and of course there's Manhunt. Manhunt is the most obvious example - were it not for the controversy (and subsequent free publicity to gamers wanting to know what that controversy was about) that piece of crap would have sold all of 3 copies.
So they've playing this game of chicken with the media and the US government, trying to see just how far they could push it. Then they include the "hot coffee" content, knowing it would be easily unlocked while having the out of saying it was the work of hackers who had to tweak the code. Make no mistake: Rockstar wanted the hot coffee content to be unlocked.
Unfortunately, it's not just Rockstar that takes the heat. The media resoundly thinks that Developers are amoral thugs and that all gamers are pathological timebombs. And when congress steps in and decides to regulate, they wont regulate only Rockstar games. Everyone in the industry suffers.
I believe in freedom of expression, and it puts me in the position of defending Rockstar. I think they should have the freedom to do make any type of game they please. However, not for one second do I think that the company is run by anything other than irresponsible media whores.
Oh jeez.. I say "G5", I mean powerpc. Obviously they're not the exact *same* architecture, and "G5" is a marketing term anyway so even the 970 chips that go into IBM servers are not "G5's".
And I wasn't even making the point that one was better than the other, in fact, I pretty much said it looks to be the opposite. My point is that Steve Jobs can't get anytihng more than "meh" from IBM, yet IBM is redesigning chips at the request of Bill, and I imagine that drives him nuts.
I'm wondering if the 360 has something to do with this, or if it at the very least nudged Jobs over the edge.
Hear me out. Most people have heard about Jobs' pathological reaction when he loses face, and everyone knows that he *hates* Bill Gates, right?
So awhile back Jobs' predicts 3Ghz G5's in 2005 (which I guess became the "3GHZ Promise"). IBM fails to deliver. However, Microsoft announces shortly before E3 that the 360 will use a 3.2 GHZ triple-core G5. I can only imagine that Jobs was pissed on some level that Bill Gates trumping him in Apple territory.
Of course, there have been a few reports that the 360's G5 is essentially crippled, and that the chip will effectively be only twice as fast as the original xbox's cpu. Even if it's true, I don't think that changes anything. Jobs may have figured figured (and I'd be inclined to agree) that even if the 360 chip is not really as powerful as it seems, it represents time&effort that IBM was dedicating elsewhere instead of working on improving it's offerings to Apple.
In fact, when you consider that IBM is working w/ Sony and Nintendo on other customized G5's, it seems pretty clear where Apple stands in terms of priority. Not that I blame IBM -- why the hell would you care about the rantings of Steve Jobs when you are going to be selling your product to 3 out of the 3 biggest players in the console market, with each one amounting to way more sales that what you'd ever get with Apple.
Not sure if it's the case, but it sounds plausible enough. At least he kept the promise though, right?;-)
damnit, why do my modpoints expire just before threads like this spring up.
Dvorak keyboards have only won in tests administered by Dvorak himself.. The truth is that he was looking to make money off of his patented configuration.
Still, the Dvorak story is very interesting to me in a sociological sense. The Dvorak keyboard's superiority has existed as a sort of counter-culture convential wisdom but has all the underpinnings of an "urban legend" -- a false or heavily-embellished story that survives because the story evokes a strong emotional response, serves as a cautionary tale and/or plays into feelings or ideas felt by a community. In this case the Dvorak story survives not because of the flimsy, circumstantial "proof" but rather because it evokes people's sense of outrage of the "Little Guy with new ideas" being unable fight the tide of convention.
That said, there *are* keyboards specifically designed to be easier on your fingers. I like the split keyboards because it's easier to keep my wrists straight.
Can any of the pocketPC or Palms be somehow hooked-up to a monitor? If so, what kinda resolution?
I mainly do server side development, and rarely do anything more taxing than email/browsing when I'm not doing that, so I get by with pretty meager hardware. Supposing I could get a decent resolution out of a PDA hooked up to a monitor, it might be cool to have it as my daytimer/addressbook while traveling and then "dock" it when I'm at home/work. Is it possible?
The projects that the poster wants to work on sound like more of a showcase of gameplay rather than graphics. So, it might not be necessary to dive into linear algebra and x86 assembly just yet;-)
Here's the tough part: I can't stand the majority of design book. I've read a few (and skimmed/browsed dozens), and they mainly seem to be essays written by game designers on what games they do/dont like. Interesting, but imho they didn't equip me with any tips/trick/knowledge that could I could actually use. I've heard that Rules of Play is good at defining what makes good gameplay (there's virtually no mention programming languages or hardware). In fact, many of the design studies are simple board-games. However, some people have called it it too academic.
I'd stick w/ Java for now, and find a book on java game development. It'll make it easier to get your design to reality, and port it to c++/directx later on. Java is slower, but it "feels like" c++ so porting wont be as bad as porting a VB or flash game.
On one hand, it's refreshing to see that Nintendo's public statements and overall marketing strategy take the opposite form of Microsoft and Sony. Microsoft and Sony are bombarding us with press releases, telling us about how insanely powerful the hardware and games will be. there is no way that the systems can live up to the hype. Nintendo's marketing is muted, honest, and realistic.
That said, I think it's almost swinging too far in the opposite direction. It's gotten to the point to where Iwata's statements stop sounding like "refreshing honesty" and go into downright "negative". Let's review the the more notable PR coming from nintendo
Revolution wont be as powerful as 360 or PS3, but it will be *different*
Revolution will fail if the games dont exploit how *different* it is.
Aaaah!! The gaming industry is on the verge of collapse!!
Third parties may not "get it", and may shy away from the platform because, well, it's just so *different*.
We're not ready to show the Revolution at E3...
The controller's not quite finished yet.. but trust us, but we've shown some sketches to some third parties and they liked it.
No HD support. You don't need it.
Will probably launch after 360 and and PS3.
Of course, I'm being tonue-in-cheek, and I'm ignoring the "teaser" press releases that do sound interesting (online play, full nintendo library, yadda yadda), but it largely seems as though anything you read about Revolution isn't something you'd necessarily want to tell the hole world about. I mean, sure, be honest and everything, that's great. But it's one thing to let it slip in an interview that the Revolution will not have HD, but quite another to go to the media screaming "HEY GUYS!!! THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT HAVE HD!!! TELL YOUR FRIENDS!!"
It's like Nintendo has adopted a sort of devil-may-care, go-buy-a-revolution-but-if-you-dont-oh-well strategy that I don't quite understand.
Beyond Nintendo... I'm getting damn tired of all the press releases from the Big Three in general. I've never seen so many press releases preceding an actual picture of an actual game running on actual hardware (not some tech demo on a dual-cpu uberPC/Mac tricked out with an to-be-released video card). This is even worse than the last wave of consoles. Put up or shut up for cryin out loud!
Not only was it one of Slashdot's best posts, but thisis probably the most thoughtful, intelligent statement on the subject, period. You usually either hear the biased opinions from the developers/gamers, or from journalists/politicians who are only looking for attention.
On one hand, I'm not surprised by this. Console makers always hype their consoles to near-obnoxious levels (with the exception of perhaps Nintendo, but even they hyped the N64 as an "SGI workstation in your living room" at one e3). Sony and Microsoft have not changed their tenor since their last iteration (Sony: "Oh no, PS2 is *so powerful* the US might consider it a weapon!" Microsoft: "Check out all of these dynamically lit/shaded ping-pong balls... and this is only at at 1/5th power!!").
However, take the Anandtech article with a smaller grain of salt, too. I'm not sure which quotes from the article were attributed to final hardware and which were talking about the development kits (we already know that the Powermac xbox devstation is slower... or at least that's what one of the EA guys told me at E3). There was this quote:
Developers have just recently received more final Xbox 360 hardware, and gauging performance of the actual Xenos GPU compared to the R420 based solutions in the G5 development kits will take some time.
My guess is same can be said for CPU as well as GPU but that's a hunch.
Besides that, realize that the developers get much, much better at maximizing the hardware over time. When the SNES came out, developers complained that the extra colors and memory were pointles because the cpu was too damn slow (3.5 mhz, right?). 1st wave games had smallish sprites, tons of slowdown when things got busy, and many arcade ports only had a single-player option because 2-player bogged the hardware). Towards the end you had near-perfect ports of streetfighter 2, and full-color, parallax scrolling games with several large sprites like Donkey Kong Country. My hunch is that the 2nd wave games for 360 and ps3 will have similar gains.
It's still a really good article and worth checking out, but I'm not surprised in either direction.
I completely agree with you on both points. It is abnoxious, and it probably was some overzealous firefox zealot who probably works on this website in exchange for college credit.
Not to bright to turn away 93% of the internet because you can't lower yourself to writing an if/then statement. Fortunately, this stupidity extends to their coding. Turn off javascript ("active scripting" on security tab of internet options) and it displays the page.
I love Firefox, but jeez. What a bunch of jackasses.
Why the hell did it bother with the varying laser patterns (that the trespassers nimbly avoided), only to switch to the checkerboard deathlaser? Why not just do the checkerboard first and get it over with?
yeah, I know... it takes away the suspense, but I always thought that bit was kinda funny.
You get what you pay for. Yeah, I know. My point was that ECS mobos suck. Cost might make it worth your while, but they don't suck less.
Since when is this new?. Fair.
Finally, did you RTFA? It actually says why the testers are females.Yeah, the reason? "the female of the species has smaller, defter fingers." Kinda generalizing, aren't they? No man on earth has small enough hands to work at ECS?
Slashdot Mirror
I would have dismissed this as complete bullshit had it not been on Sony's own PR. What an odd thing to mention. I mean, It's not unknown for PR's to "name drop" in order to more likely appear in search engine listings, Sony doesn't have to resort to that sort of thing because their PR's are widely disssiminated by the media anyway (especially PS3 related stuff).
While Kunitake Ando and Steve Jobs were making complimentary (if somewhat guarded) comments about the two companies early in 2005 (was it at Macworld or something?), steve has been less upbeat about Cell.
If you take the statement at its fact, its really just saying that the cell is general purpose enough to handle any OS. In fact, there's nothing incorrect or even exaggerated about the statement: The cell could certainly support OSX in the same way that PearPC enables a x86 to support OSX (i.e. emulation) but it would be slow as hell. Whether Sony means anything other than that is another question.
Curious, but I'm leaning towards dismissing this as PR hubris. But give it a couple weeks - if the media get's into a froth about it I'm sure Apple will speak up or Sony will clarify one way or the other.
Yeah, I agree.. it is pretty comical at times. Ever wondered why the rockets in quake will knock a player back 10 feet but the recoil doesn't move the shooter one inch?? But at the same time, games that do actually account for such things seem less fun to me. Quake is all about run-and-gun action, and I think that ditching the "burden" cliche would make it less enjoyable. That's just my opinion though, tons of people like Rainbox Six so your mileage may vary.
I tend to give the "laws of physics" cliches a pass. Yeah, you can't really alter the course of your jump in mid-air but how frustrating would the alternative be?
On the other hand, stuff like the usage of crates in level design have got to go. I can't tell you the last time I walked by or even saw a wooden crate in real life, but goddamn if you can't get through a fan-made counterstrike map without walking by at least a dozen of them. Jesus, is this a shipping yard or something? Even professional level design is guilty. Yeah, I know you need to have a hiding space, or a way to allow the player to hop on the roof, but come on.
I have a hard time finding fair, accurate reviews regardless of whether the reviews are written by staff or by consumers. There is a very real conflict of interest for sites that depend on manufactures for advertising dollars and testing samples. On the by-consumer side, you have to filter out shills and zealots (pick your favorite site and check out the consumer reviews of Quicken and Microsoft Money... it's like a holy war).
That said, I've been very happy with consumer reports. They only review items that they purchase themselves (i.e. no 'freebies' or higher-quality items specifically earmarked for product reviews). Furthermore, they accept no advertising and get all their revenue from subscriptions. These two factors take away much of the conflict of interest and/or bias issues that can plague other review sites.
Downsides? Cost (not necessarily expensive imho, but still a tough sell to people who expect everything online to be free). It's also doesnt work with early adopters because they wont review items before they available for purchase. Finally, though they've been getting a bit more 'hip' lately when it comes to technology I doubt your going to find an exhaustive video card shoot-out anytime soon.
What I'd really like to see is a site (or magazine) that can does a decent video game review. They seem to be either clearly biased, drip with ego and/or condescention, but usually they are just TOO LONG. Why is it Ebert can give a fair review of "Mullholland Drive" on a quarter-page of the chicago sun-times, but nobody can seem to encapsulate "Mario Tennis" in under 5 printed pages??
Damnit, I meant John Carmack. (why do I always get those two reversed?) I think this error sends me to geek hell.
must drill into memory...
Carmack==talent
Romero==hotty ex-girlfriend
All good points, but the data in Joel's aritcle shows that great programmers aren't necessarily faster than bad programmers (or vice versa). Joel was unable to find a meaningful correlation between completion times and grades.
That said, imho the main point is that good programmers produce better software. Given infinite time and/or money, Derek Smart could still *never* produce software as good as John Romero.
Seriously though, it is very non-obvious to a good deal of IT Managers. When you perceive software development costs as ultimately a burn on revenue, their conclusion is that you need to minimize said costs (much in the same way that you would seek the lowest-priced landscaping or office-cleaning staff).
I had a 2-year stint at a smalltalk consulting shop during the dot-com boom. By that time, the Java drumbeat was getting too hard to ignore and we pretty much had to join the bandwagon to pull down decent gigs.
Java definitely felt much more like c++ than Smalltalk. I'd agree that Ruby is a better comparison. And when you look at everything inside the square brackets, objective-c looks and feels almost exactly like Smalltalk.
I'm not quite sure why Smalltalk didn't catch on like Java did. Was it bad timing, bad marketing, did it feel "too wierd" to more widely used languages? I dunno.
Here's irony: IBM's VisualAge for Java IDE was a Smalltalk image developed with IBM Visualage for Smalltalk (which had 1/10th as many sales).
Nope, here's the difference: Rockstar drew the boobs, not the user. Your argument is that there is no distinction between creating content and unlocking the content.
But let's step back a bit. It seems people are taking a black or white stand on this. You either have to think that rockstar should get the death penalty or that they are an totally innocent victim caught in a religious witch hunt.
The truth is somewhere imbetween. No, they haven't committed any crime. Yes, they broke the rules. The fact is, they mislead the ESRB about the content of the game, nothing more and nothing less. That is a violation of the ESRB submission guidelines, and they are subject to the fines and penalties that Rockstar agreed to when it submitted the game for review.
Good point, but consider the fact that the PC and Xbox versions lagged behind the PS2 for several months. Seeing as how you have to go resample the textures, audio and swap out higher polycount models, I think you'd probably have to revisit the hot coffee content anyway. Why not also take out hot-coffee?
In fact, this could be the smoking gun in "publicity stunt" test: Did Rockstar remaster the hot-coffee content with higher-quality graphics for xbox and PC? If so, then it was *more* work to keep it in, not a last-second omission hamstrung by time constraints.
Even though I think the furor is rediculous the ESRB did the right thing. Rockstar has exploited the "games==evil" climate just as much as Hilary Clinton has, and the industry and community are taking the hits.
Has anyone checked this out? Obviously the CJ model will be improved, but if any of the hot-coffee-specific assets were upgraded then it clinches it, imho.
Has anyone else noticed that more and more sites are cropping up that "penalize" users that use IE? Note that I'm not talking about a site that refuses to support css hacks or throws up a "please upgrade" javascript window -- I'm talking about deliberately serving out degraded pages when it detects you are using IE (or refusing to show anything at all). Here are two examples
Stuff and Nonsense, A an otherwise good design/usability blog, Uses javascript to swap turn all images black and white, displays graphic that reads "Internet Explorer 2 old, Stomp to a Betta Browser" (God I hate bloggers sometimes)
Played to death, pretentious online video game zine, uses javascript to redirect users to a "Sorry IE User" page.
What kills me is that when you turn off javascript, the pages display & behave either identically or pretty damn close to Firefox. So it's not IE completely borks the rendering, or cant handle fancy DOM/Javascript tricks... they just dont want you to look to look at degraded content because they dont like IE.
Obviously these are niche sites, but I've seen this cropping up more and more. I hate IE about as much as any other web developer (though thankfully I stay mostly on the server side), but isn't this the same exact crap that sites did back in the day with the custom Netscape 2 tags, and the crap Microsoft pulled (and occasionally still pulls) circa IE4?
A lot of people, especially business users, don't have much choice other than IE. For me, I use IE for printing because Firefox ends up cropping stuff out half the time regardless of how much I futz with the page setup options.
I've heard the argument that such tactics are necessary to force users (and Microsoft) to take web standards seriously. I find this not only condescending and heavy-handed, but also counter-productive: Isn't the whole idea with web standards is that you want to make the web as inclusive as possible? Sometimes people's ideology gets in the way of their ideology.
I disagree. Whether authorized or not Rockstar is still ultimately responsible for the content they produce. Supposing it is unauthorized, that really doesnt. Also, you say to ignore the negligence rebuttal, but your scenario of a rogue employee doing this on the sly is the very definition of a company being negligent. Supposing a daycare hires a child molester because they don't do background checks, does that relieve the daycare management from responsibility. Thankfully, no.
I do think that the "M" rating is enough to get them out of any sort of criminal matter. It's not they're making Spiro the Dragon - anyone unlocking/installingthe hotcoffee mod should assume that the content is at least as objectionable as what gave the game an M rating in the first place.
Now, as to whether this Easter Egg was "authorized", or the work of one or two rogues. After having scene the video... imho even if one person could do the work you certainly couldn't do it without anyone knowing. To do this on the sly you'd need to:
-Pay off the voice actors, and make sure everyone in the recording studio went out to lunch (same voice of cj..., unless they spliced from other scenes I havent heeard)
-Get access to the motion-capture lab without anyone knowing. Some of the animations are... umm... lifelike enough to suggest mocap.
-Put it into the toolchain and content management system in such a way that those responsible for the release builds wouldn't catch it. Obviously with a few lines of code (hell, even thousands of lines of code) can sneak by... but audio, motion capture, scripting, and 3d models? Doubtful.
It seems obvious to me that this was yet another attempt for Rockstar to boost sales by exploiting controversy, but the best case scenario is that they decided to omit the content and were incredibly inept and/or lazy about doing so.
And finally, nothing pisses me off more than when a company is caught with their pants down, yet refuses to own up to it and feeds a line of weasily excuses. Just say you f-ed up, take your hits and be done with it.
Agreed. It's unfair that game developers are put on the defensive for making games they they intend to be played by adults. Rockstar didn't create the "games are bad" groupthink, but they certainly are exploiting it just as much as Hilary Clinton is.
Actually, I find Rockstar's behaviour incredibly irresponsible. Now now, hear me out . It sounds like I'm about to make a moral stand... i'm not.
Here's the deal. Rockstar has been playing a very dangerous game. They that the controversy of GTA3 helped their profits more than it hurt. After making this realization, they've been ratcheting up the controversy -- the GTA series has arguably become more and more violent and lost most of its "comical" violence, and of course there's Manhunt. Manhunt is the most obvious example - were it not for the controversy (and subsequent free publicity to gamers wanting to know what that controversy was about) that piece of crap would have sold all of 3 copies.
So they've playing this game of chicken with the media and the US government, trying to see just how far they could push it. Then they include the "hot coffee" content, knowing it would be easily unlocked while having the out of saying it was the work of hackers who had to tweak the code. Make no mistake: Rockstar wanted the hot coffee content to be unlocked.
Unfortunately, it's not just Rockstar that takes the heat. The media resoundly thinks that Developers are amoral thugs and that all gamers are pathological timebombs. And when congress steps in and decides to regulate, they wont regulate only Rockstar games. Everyone in the industry suffers.
I believe in freedom of expression, and it puts me in the position of defending Rockstar. I think they should have the freedom to do make any type of game they please. However, not for one second do I think that the company is run by anything other than irresponsible media whores.
Oh jeez.. I say "G5", I mean powerpc. Obviously they're not the exact *same* architecture, and "G5" is a marketing term anyway so even the 970 chips that go into IBM servers are not "G5's".
And I wasn't even making the point that one was better than the other, in fact, I pretty much said it looks to be the opposite. My point is that Steve Jobs can't get anytihng more than "meh" from IBM, yet IBM is redesigning chips at the request of Bill, and I imagine that drives him nuts.
I'm wondering if the 360 has something to do with this, or if it at the very least nudged Jobs over the edge.
;-)
Hear me out. Most people have heard about Jobs' pathological reaction when he loses face, and everyone knows that he *hates* Bill Gates, right?
So awhile back Jobs' predicts 3Ghz G5's in 2005 (which I guess became the "3GHZ Promise"). IBM fails to deliver. However, Microsoft announces shortly before E3 that the 360 will use a 3.2 GHZ triple-core G5. I can only imagine that Jobs was pissed on some level that Bill Gates trumping him in Apple territory.
Of course, there have been a few reports that the 360's G5 is essentially crippled, and that the chip will effectively be only twice as fast as the original xbox's cpu. Even if it's true, I don't think that changes anything. Jobs may have figured figured (and I'd be inclined to agree) that even if the 360 chip is not really as powerful as it seems, it represents time&effort that IBM was dedicating elsewhere instead of working on improving it's offerings to Apple.
In fact, when you consider that IBM is working w/ Sony and Nintendo on other customized G5's, it seems pretty clear where Apple stands in terms of priority. Not that I blame IBM -- why the hell would you care about the rantings of Steve Jobs when you are going to be selling your product to 3 out of the 3 biggest players in the console market, with each one amounting to way more sales that what you'd ever get with Apple.
Not sure if it's the case, but it sounds plausible enough. At least he kept the promise though, right?
damnit, why do my modpoints expire just before threads like this spring up.
Dvorak keyboards have only won in tests administered by Dvorak himself.. The truth is that he was looking to make money off of his patented configuration.
Still, the Dvorak story is very interesting to me in a sociological sense. The Dvorak keyboard's superiority has existed as a sort of counter-culture convential wisdom but has all the underpinnings of an "urban legend" -- a false or heavily-embellished story that survives because the story evokes a strong emotional response, serves as a cautionary tale and/or plays into feelings or ideas felt by a community. In this case the Dvorak story survives not because of the flimsy, circumstantial "proof" but rather because it evokes people's sense of outrage of the "Little Guy with new ideas" being unable fight the tide of convention.
That said, there *are* keyboards specifically designed to be easier on your fingers. I like the split keyboards because it's easier to keep my wrists straight.
Can any of the pocketPC or Palms be somehow hooked-up to a monitor? If so, what kinda resolution?
I mainly do server side development, and rarely do anything more taxing than email/browsing when I'm not doing that, so I get by with pretty meager hardware. Supposing I could get a decent resolution out of a PDA hooked up to a monitor, it might be cool to have it as my daytimer/addressbook while traveling and then "dock" it when I'm at home/work. Is it possible?
The projects that the poster wants to work on sound like more of a showcase of gameplay rather than graphics. So, it might not be necessary to dive into linear algebra and x86 assembly just yet ;-)
Here's the tough part: I can't stand the majority of design book. I've read a few (and skimmed/browsed dozens), and they mainly seem to be essays written by game designers on what games they do/dont like. Interesting, but imho they didn't equip me with any tips/trick/knowledge that could I could actually use. I've heard that Rules of Play is good at defining what makes good gameplay (there's virtually no mention programming languages or hardware). In fact, many of the design studies are simple board-games. However, some people have called it it too academic.
I'd stick w/ Java for now, and find a book on java game development. It'll make it easier to get your design to reality, and port it to c++/directx later on. Java is slower, but it "feels like" c++ so porting wont be as bad as porting a VB or flash game.
That said, I think it's almost swinging too far in the opposite direction. It's gotten to the point to where Iwata's statements stop sounding like "refreshing honesty" and go into downright "negative". Let's review the the more notable PR coming from nintendo
- Revolution wont be as powerful as 360 or PS3, but it will be *different*
- Revolution will fail if the games dont exploit how *different* it is.
- Aaaah!! The gaming industry is on the verge of collapse!!
- Third parties may not "get it", and may shy away from the platform because, well, it's just so *different*.
- We're not ready to show the Revolution at E3...
- The controller's not quite finished yet.. but trust us, but we've shown some sketches to some third parties and they liked it.
- No HD support. You don't need it.
- Will probably launch after 360 and and PS3.
Of course, I'm being tonue-in-cheek, and I'm ignoring the "teaser" press releases that do sound interesting (online play, full nintendo library, yadda yadda), but it largely seems as though anything you read about Revolution isn't something you'd necessarily want to tell the hole world about. I mean, sure, be honest and everything, that's great. But it's one thing to let it slip in an interview that the Revolution will not have HD, but quite another to go to the media screaming "HEY GUYS!!! THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT HAVE HD!!! TELL YOUR FRIENDS!!"It's like Nintendo has adopted a sort of devil-may-care, go-buy-a-revolution-but-if-you-dont-oh-well strategy that I don't quite understand.
Beyond Nintendo... I'm getting damn tired of all the press releases from the Big Three in general. I've never seen so many press releases preceding an actual picture of an actual game running on actual hardware (not some tech demo on a dual-cpu uberPC/Mac tricked out with an to-be-released video card). This is even worse than the last wave of consoles. Put up or shut up for cryin out loud!
Hmm... that's a good point but I'd argue that it wasn't the majority. I can only think of like 7 with external chips.
Also, the examples I mentioned did not (I don't think) use a coprocessor.
Not only was it one of Slashdot's best posts, but thisis probably the most thoughtful, intelligent statement on the subject, period. You usually either hear the biased opinions from the developers/gamers, or from journalists/politicians who are only looking for attention.
However, take the Anandtech article with a smaller grain of salt, too. I'm not sure which quotes from the article were attributed to final hardware and which were talking about the development kits (we already know that the Powermac xbox devstation is slower... or at least that's what one of the EA guys told me at E3). There was this quote: My guess is same can be said for CPU as well as GPU but that's a hunch.
Besides that, realize that the developers get much, much better at maximizing the hardware over time. When the SNES came out, developers complained that the extra colors and memory were pointles because the cpu was too damn slow (3.5 mhz, right?). 1st wave games had smallish sprites, tons of slowdown when things got busy, and many arcade ports only had a single-player option because 2-player bogged the hardware). Towards the end you had near-perfect ports of streetfighter 2, and full-color, parallax scrolling games with several large sprites like Donkey Kong Country. My hunch is that the 2nd wave games for 360 and ps3 will have similar gains.
It's still a really good article and worth checking out, but I'm not surprised in either direction.
Damnit, never any modpoints when I need them.
I completely agree with you on both points. It is abnoxious, and it probably was some overzealous firefox zealot who probably works on this website in exchange for college credit.
Not to bright to turn away 93% of the internet because you can't lower yourself to writing an if/then statement. Fortunately, this stupidity extends to their coding. Turn off javascript ("active scripting" on security tab of internet options) and it displays the page.
I love Firefox, but jeez. What a bunch of jackasses.
Why the hell did it bother with the varying laser patterns (that the trespassers nimbly avoided), only to switch to the checkerboard deathlaser? Why not just do the checkerboard first and get it over with? yeah, I know... it takes away the suspense, but I always thought that bit was kinda funny.