For fuck's sake, it's a damn game. So what if the races of the Horde - fiction - are based upon racial stereotypes in real life? So what if the world in World of Warcraft really is biased toward 'western' cultures? It's not the end of the fucking world if the trolls have Jamaican accents or if the Tauren culture resembles that of the indigenous tribes of North America. The writer of the article needs to remove whatever quantity of sand that has found its way into their vagina and get on with their hopefully substantially less politically correct lives.
Sorry folks, but it's not 1995 anymore. I hate to say it, but tacking '3D' onto the end of your game's title is no longer a selling point. We all played Star Fox, we got the fucking point. Z-Axis, third dimension, whatever. Throw something cool in it, like fun gameplay and a halfway decent story, when applicable, and you might have me sold.
A generic, boring game in pretty clothes is still a generic, boring game. It just looks good, so it keeps your attention for an additional, say, two minutes or so, until you realize it's just another generic, boring game, and that you liked it a lot better when it was called 'Quake' and actually had some substance. Any game developer that doesn't get this doesn't belong in the games business. They belong in Hollywood, or Bollywood, depending on where most of their labor has been outsourced to. (I'm looking at you, Square Enix.)
"Failing that, they should just use the blue force shields that feature prominently in their Digital Security Video - as long as your attacker is using little yellow balls to stage their attack."
Yes, because I'm fairly certain that somebody somewhere has come up with an insidious plot to rig the elections with a Nerf gun.
Okay, so we all know a million liters of fuel isn't much in the grand scheme of things. Worldwide, many billions of gallons and tons of assorted fossil fuels are consumed, which means that a million gallons a year from one facility is pretty small potatoes when stacked up against the fuel demands of the world.
I think we're forgetting that the fuel need not leave town, though. Locally produced bio-fuels could supply limited geographic areas with at least some quantity of cheap fuel, which at least helps whoever lives there. It doesn't have to travel, meaning it retains much more of its value since less energy and effort has to be spent to move it from point 'A' to point 'B', and since a township produces it, a township reaps the benefits, immediately benefitting the local economy. It's like the farmer's market for gas, yaknow?
I have to wonder if anyone here has ever heard the phrase, "Think global, act local." I also have to wonder if anyone here considers that it's pretty stupid to rely on just one source of fuel. Let me lay it out for you, here - we already have an absolutely massive bio-fuel 'portfolio', detailing dozens of ways that businesses and communities can produce useful quantities of bio-deisel and ehtanol, but using just one or two of them probably isn't going to be enough to take oil out of the picture, especially if only a few people give it a shot. Right now, we need to take what we can get, and the ability to produce fuel in the process of purifying wastewater is something nobody should overlook. If nothing else, the cost of water purification could be offset by fuel sales, potentially reducing utility costs.
The real question here isn't whether or not the Dual-Shake was 'stolen' from Nintendo or whether or not it's just a hastily added feature designed to make up for the potential loss of the Dual-Shock feature in future controllers. The real question is whether or not game developers are actually going to actually take full advantage of this feature when they're not under pressure to help Sony one-up Nintendo. The difference here is that Sony once mocked the 'Wii-mote' and its motion sensing features, only to embrace them once they realized that it actually worked - a purely reactionary move, for better or for worse. Nintendo has been making the Wii's controller the thesis of the entire console, and as we've seen, there are quite a few games already in production that incorporate the motion-sensing features of the controller into the gameplay quite well. (While it might work out for Sony in the end, Nintendo has a massive head-start on them.)
Another interesting thing to note is that if games come out for the Playstation 3 that revolve around the motion-sensing control feature, it's likely that they will also be ported to the Wii - or from it, which ever way it works out. This means increased availability of games, which works out for us gamers, though it's hard to tell which company would come out on top of that one. (Something tells me Nintendo would get the long end of the stick on that one, considering the console is already predicted to be much cheaper, and therefore more available to consumers in terms of cost.) This also means that developers wishing to take advantage of motion-sensing controllers won't be isolated to just one console, should they choose to develop for the Wii and the Playstation 3 at the same time. (And eventually the 360, since there's no way in hell Microsoft would ignore a feature like this considering all of the attention it's getting.) After seeing what the 'Wii-mote' can do, it's easy to see that Nintendo's driving a motion-sensing bandwagon right through the industry. Their console may yet be a revolution - in control schemes, if nothing else.
It's... just a country... with some neat cartoons. Granted, there's a lot to appreciate about Japanese culture, but there's a lot to appreciate about most cultures.
Just MacGyver yourself up an energy drink. Take a thermos of orange juice or something, grind up a caffiene pill or two into it, and let it sit. Bam, energy drink.
Now, I never said that this was a good, safe idea. It -might- work. Don't blame me if you go into convulsions.
Wow, this is rich, and that my good friends is not a pun. $500 - $600 for a 'gimmicky' console created in the image of its cheaper, more functional competitor, loaded with features that people simply probably aren't going to use, all to play what is essentially the same old crap with prettier graphics...
Say, does anyone remember one of the biggest reasons the 3DO didn't sell? Remember the then strong system specifications that ran hand-in-hand with its gigantic price tag? Remember all the stupid crap that people just didn't care about in a game console that came with it? Yeah, I'm getting a distinct feeling of deja vu here, too. I know the situation isn't the same exactly - Sony's a lot bigger than 3DO was, and has a mature console line, and a whole lot of games - but to me this announcement sounds more like a death-rattle for the Playstation unless this thing is launched with a lot of major, must-have titles to justify investing that much money into it. I'm not even sure the Final Fantasy 7 remake is going to be able to keep this thing from crumpling under its own price-tag, and it's going to be interesting to see where they go with this.
I had some hope for this thing, but now all my attention's focused on Nintendo. One, there's no way I'll be able to afford this thing any time soon, and two, the gimmicks they're throwing out with it tell me that they're getting desperate for some good ideas and hunting for reasons their console is going to be any better than the other two besides its system specifications. Unless there is a truly killer title released with this thing that I absolutely must have, there's no reason I'd pay even $400 for it. Just too much money.
I know it's about the towers and such, I was just making a joke about seemingly useless features that've found their way into phones.
If you think about it, though, it shouldn't be especially difficult to cram a tiny barometer, thermometer, and humidity gauge into a handset. Creating a dongle for a phone that has all that and more would be a similarly painless process, and it could allow meteorologists and plain ol' hobbyists alike to carry around a tiny weather station wherever they go. This would be really useful for things like micro-climate research and all that fun stuff, but I can't say the average cell-phone owner would find a lot of use for it. (Unless, of course, you lived in a place like Indiana or Washington where the weather changes every five minutes. Then, Mr. Sunshine can't pull one over on you, like he likes to do whenever I try to mow my lawn. For the record, mowing in a rain-storm sucks.)
What would be really neat, though, is to pack a tiny doppler radar into a phone, like a little gizmo that fits over the antenna and spins around and uses the actual antenna to scan or something. Sure, it'd suck, but think of all the fun you could have with that kind of stuff besides watching the weather. You could run up to your friends and be like, "Hey, I've got you on my radar!" And then, you hit the built-in stop-watch feature of your crazy ass new phone and count the seconds before one of them punches you in the balls for being a dork.
A-fuckin'-men, bro'. I'm of the mind that the means to communicate should be a utility, not a luxury. Our taxes did after all subsidize the telecommunications industry to allow them to lay the copper lines to make this happen in the first place, and everyone and their mother knows that this has shit to do with fiber. It's all about money and who gets to play with it.
I'm glad you brought this up. The HL2 SDK is about as clear as mud - hard as a rock, dumb as a brick. Aside from the fact that HL2 is stupidly unoptimized and just really poorly coded for what few new features it truly delivered - Havoc's physics foremost among them - making ANYTHING worthwhile for it is like pulling teeth, from maps to complete mods. You practically have to be a professional and know the program like the back of your hand to even begin to navigate through this garbage, and really to me it just seems like that's Valve's way of saying, "You're not allowed to make your own fun with this one. Only we are."
Honestly, the biggest reason in my opinion that HL2 isn't aging nearly as gracefully as HL1 is because it's much easier to renew HL1's value even if it does lack a fancy physics engine and good graphics right out of the box. A steady influx of mods, maps, and good development tools for HL2 would've certainly kept my attention on the game, but that didn't happen. The same goes for HL2DM and CSS - the biggest reasons I still play CS 1.5 on WON2 is because of the lack of Steam, the better power balance, and above all else, the sheer abundance of good maps and fun/funny mods and the ease with which you can mess with it. HL2DM and CSS lack all of those - Or in the case of Steam, they have it, and it sucks ass.
That aside, if HL2 were published five years earlier, it would've seemed dramatically more impressive to gamers regardless. Pretty graphics and good physics have already been done before, and Valve really missed the boat on that one. The graphics and physics of HL2 were its biggest selling points, and the only reason that the Source engine exists - to say that pretty graphics and physics are all that HL2 really has wouldn't be too terribly far off. However, similarly attractive games - especially generic but good looking first person shooters - are in abundance today, and HL2 just didn't have what it takes to remain in the limelight for too terribly long. HL2 was built around an entertaining visual experience, not a challenging and enjoyable gameplay experience. If you do that to a game and make visuals its focus while taking a shit on the level design and gameplay, you make a game that's briefly entertaining, but not enjoyable or satisfying by any stretch of the imagination.
Not to worry, though. WON2 is reasonably functional, and when CS 1.5 does get old, there are plenty of good freeware games out there to fiddle with...
WAPTOC - "Won't Anyone Please Think Of the Children?"
Laws intended to protect children in any way are rarely intended to do so, and often fail to do so once passed for obvious reasons. If you see a law designed - supposedly - to protect children in any way, take it with an additional grain of salt - it's usually a cover for something that would otherwise become controversial or be shot down immediately. This also applies to laws concerning terrorism and the so-called war on drugs.
Wasn't Jeff Vogel bitching about this like, last month?
We know, we know, little studios can't produce the same content as big studios - not usually, anyway - and are therefore doomed to never meet the status quo. We've been hearing this same tired old rhetoric year after year, and any idiot knows that it takes time, money, and manpower that most people just don't have in order to make a title with the same level of audio-visual quality as the titles released by the 500-pound gorillas of the gaming world.
Let's look at games differently, though. After ample exposure to the GCS community, I can safely say that there are indeed people out there who make games who aren't in it for money or exposure - and they're damn good at it. The article tells us that these 'little people' will be forced into niche markets and will never make it big. (A classic defeatist argument, of course. "Your enemy is great, and you are small! Surely you will be struck down!") I have to wonder if any of these people have ever considered that some people just... make games for fun. It's not a matter of paying my bills or whether or not I get to eat if I sit down with a copy of Megazeux and make retarded comedy titles. It also wasn't a big deal for a couple guys in the community who worked for a year straight on a game called 'Adlo', which contrary to popular to belief is not a Mario clone, but something much more impressive. (That's saying a lot, considering that it's still a silly platformer. I mean, holy shit, it took me a week to beat that game, and it was awesome.)
I don't know about the people that make little 'niche games' like Puzzle Pirates and all that jazz, but some people - very talented and creative people who turn out very high quality work in spite of their limitations - just aren't in it for the money. These are the folks I pay attention to, because they've come up with the strangest habit of turning out games that are actually fun, regardless of whether or not they're just tweaks on old ideas.
Will independent studios ever dominate the market? No, because in order for independent studios to dominate the market, either they have to become huge, or the big studios have to shrink, and neither of those things will happen. (Well, maybe one of them. The big studios seem to be crumpling under their own weight these days.) The point of being an independent developer isn't to make it big in the first place. The point of being independent is to do your own goddamn work without someone breathing down your neck. (A few guys living in an apartment can turn out a good game regardless and keep their day jobs to boot.) If you want to make a lot of money, either you snag some investors and start yourself a mid-sized studio to try to get your foot in the door, or you get a job with one of the big-and-few. Independence was never about being big, and that's what a lot of these cynics - and hopeless optimists - forget.
So let's not be stupid. Let's not assume that indies are going to take over the world, but let's also not assume that they'll ever vanish from the face of the earth. Both assumptions are pretty freakin' dumb. Let's also not forget that the market is changing, and if rumors about the Nintendo Revolution are true, and if GCS development continues to proceed as it has, making a good independent title might become a much more casual affair than it was before. So, gamers and game makers, keep doing what you love.
I made a bet with my friends that the voice actor of Spike - Steven Blum - was going to be in this one. Yaknow, since he's already in fucking everything. (I about shit my pants when I heard him in Call of Duty's expansion as the voice of Captain Foley.) The stakes were even higher over the probability that the voice of Inuyasha would be incorporated into the movie at least once, but we finally called that one off after we concluded that if that same voice actor were heard anywhere in the entire movie, we wouldn't be watching it anyway.
This really makes me want to download IE7, being fully aware that it contains all of the same garbage and insecurity of its predecessor and all of the standards compliance of Opera 4.0. At least the folks at Mozilla fix their massive security holes in a timely fashion.
Okay, if this thing is seven times more powerful than a three-gigahertz Pentium processor, why the hell aren't these guys making CPUs alongside their GPUs? Seriously, GPUs have gotten to the point at which they are just as if not more powerful than standard CPUs, and with quantities of RAM to match a whole PC. The news of this new and extremely powerful GPU - should it stand up to the hype - alongside news that NVidia has developed a physics coprocessing technique using SLI leads me to believe that GPUs may soon no longer be just GPUs, but complete co-computing units to which graphics, physics, and other demanding tasks could be offloaded. That might be interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
For fuck's sake, it's a damn game. So what if the races of the Horde - fiction - are based upon racial stereotypes in real life? So what if the world in World of Warcraft really is biased toward 'western' cultures? It's not the end of the fucking world if the trolls have Jamaican accents or if the Tauren culture resembles that of the indigenous tribes of North America. The writer of the article needs to remove whatever quantity of sand that has found its way into their vagina and get on with their hopefully substantially less politically correct lives.
Sorry folks, but it's not 1995 anymore. I hate to say it, but tacking '3D' onto the end of your game's title is no longer a selling point. We all played Star Fox, we got the fucking point. Z-Axis, third dimension, whatever. Throw something cool in it, like fun gameplay and a halfway decent story, when applicable, and you might have me sold.
A generic, boring game in pretty clothes is still a generic, boring game. It just looks good, so it keeps your attention for an additional, say, two minutes or so, until you realize it's just another generic, boring game, and that you liked it a lot better when it was called 'Quake' and actually had some substance. Any game developer that doesn't get this doesn't belong in the games business. They belong in Hollywood, or Bollywood, depending on where most of their labor has been outsourced to. (I'm looking at you, Square Enix.)
I certainly don't hope I'm the only person who finds this incredibly creepy.
Somehow, I don't think 502 randomly selected adults polled by phone accurately represents the entire fucking country.
Or...
"Who is this 'Cockmongler', and why should I vote for him?"
"Failing that, they should just use the blue force shields that feature prominently in their Digital Security Video - as long as your attacker is using little yellow balls to stage their attack."
Yes, because I'm fairly certain that somebody somewhere has come up with an insidious plot to rig the elections with a Nerf gun.
It looks like somebody with something intelligent to say beat you to it. That's like, double-burn.
Better luck next time.
Okay, so we all know a million liters of fuel isn't much in the grand scheme of things. Worldwide, many billions of gallons and tons of assorted fossil fuels are consumed, which means that a million gallons a year from one facility is pretty small potatoes when stacked up against the fuel demands of the world.
I think we're forgetting that the fuel need not leave town, though. Locally produced bio-fuels could supply limited geographic areas with at least some quantity of cheap fuel, which at least helps whoever lives there. It doesn't have to travel, meaning it retains much more of its value since less energy and effort has to be spent to move it from point 'A' to point 'B', and since a township produces it, a township reaps the benefits, immediately benefitting the local economy. It's like the farmer's market for gas, yaknow?
I have to wonder if anyone here has ever heard the phrase, "Think global, act local." I also have to wonder if anyone here considers that it's pretty stupid to rely on just one source of fuel. Let me lay it out for you, here - we already have an absolutely massive bio-fuel 'portfolio', detailing dozens of ways that businesses and communities can produce useful quantities of bio-deisel and ehtanol, but using just one or two of them probably isn't going to be enough to take oil out of the picture, especially if only a few people give it a shot. Right now, we need to take what we can get, and the ability to produce fuel in the process of purifying wastewater is something nobody should overlook. If nothing else, the cost of water purification could be offset by fuel sales, potentially reducing utility costs.
The real question here isn't whether or not the Dual-Shake was 'stolen' from Nintendo or whether or not it's just a hastily added feature designed to make up for the potential loss of the Dual-Shock feature in future controllers. The real question is whether or not game developers are actually going to actually take full advantage of this feature when they're not under pressure to help Sony one-up Nintendo. The difference here is that Sony once mocked the 'Wii-mote' and its motion sensing features, only to embrace them once they realized that it actually worked - a purely reactionary move, for better or for worse. Nintendo has been making the Wii's controller the thesis of the entire console, and as we've seen, there are quite a few games already in production that incorporate the motion-sensing features of the controller into the gameplay quite well. (While it might work out for Sony in the end, Nintendo has a massive head-start on them.)
Another interesting thing to note is that if games come out for the Playstation 3 that revolve around the motion-sensing control feature, it's likely that they will also be ported to the Wii - or from it, which ever way it works out. This means increased availability of games, which works out for us gamers, though it's hard to tell which company would come out on top of that one. (Something tells me Nintendo would get the long end of the stick on that one, considering the console is already predicted to be much cheaper, and therefore more available to consumers in terms of cost.) This also means that developers wishing to take advantage of motion-sensing controllers won't be isolated to just one console, should they choose to develop for the Wii and the Playstation 3 at the same time. (And eventually the 360, since there's no way in hell Microsoft would ignore a feature like this considering all of the attention it's getting.) After seeing what the 'Wii-mote' can do, it's easy to see that Nintendo's driving a motion-sensing bandwagon right through the industry. Their console may yet be a revolution - in control schemes, if nothing else.
Glad someone agrees with me on that one, too.
... Japan is overrated.
It's... just a country... with some neat cartoons. Granted, there's a lot to appreciate about Japanese culture, but there's a lot to appreciate about most cultures.
Just MacGyver yourself up an energy drink. Take a thermos of orange juice or something, grind up a caffiene pill or two into it, and let it sit. Bam, energy drink.
Now, I never said that this was a good, safe idea. It -might- work. Don't blame me if you go into convulsions.
Wow, this is rich, and that my good friends is not a pun. $500 - $600 for a 'gimmicky' console created in the image of its cheaper, more functional competitor, loaded with features that people simply probably aren't going to use, all to play what is essentially the same old crap with prettier graphics...
Say, does anyone remember one of the biggest reasons the 3DO didn't sell? Remember the then strong system specifications that ran hand-in-hand with its gigantic price tag? Remember all the stupid crap that people just didn't care about in a game console that came with it? Yeah, I'm getting a distinct feeling of deja vu here, too. I know the situation isn't the same exactly - Sony's a lot bigger than 3DO was, and has a mature console line, and a whole lot of games - but to me this announcement sounds more like a death-rattle for the Playstation unless this thing is launched with a lot of major, must-have titles to justify investing that much money into it. I'm not even sure the Final Fantasy 7 remake is going to be able to keep this thing from crumpling under its own price-tag, and it's going to be interesting to see where they go with this.
I had some hope for this thing, but now all my attention's focused on Nintendo. One, there's no way I'll be able to afford this thing any time soon, and two, the gimmicks they're throwing out with it tell me that they're getting desperate for some good ideas and hunting for reasons their console is going to be any better than the other two besides its system specifications. Unless there is a truly killer title released with this thing that I absolutely must have, there's no reason I'd pay even $400 for it. Just too much money.
Sorry Sony, but you lost me.
I know it's about the towers and such, I was just making a joke about seemingly useless features that've found their way into phones.
If you think about it, though, it shouldn't be especially difficult to cram a tiny barometer, thermometer, and humidity gauge into a handset. Creating a dongle for a phone that has all that and more would be a similarly painless process, and it could allow meteorologists and plain ol' hobbyists alike to carry around a tiny weather station wherever they go. This would be really useful for things like micro-climate research and all that fun stuff, but I can't say the average cell-phone owner would find a lot of use for it. (Unless, of course, you lived in a place like Indiana or Washington where the weather changes every five minutes. Then, Mr. Sunshine can't pull one over on you, like he likes to do whenever I try to mow my lawn. For the record, mowing in a rain-storm sucks.)
What would be really neat, though, is to pack a tiny doppler radar into a phone, like a little gizmo that fits over the antenna and spins around and uses the actual antenna to scan or something. Sure, it'd suck, but think of all the fun you could have with that kind of stuff besides watching the weather. You could run up to your friends and be like, "Hey, I've got you on my radar!" And then, you hit the built-in stop-watch feature of your crazy ass new phone and count the seconds before one of them punches you in the balls for being a dork.
Wave of the future, man.
First, cellular phones were just that - cellular phones.
Then came the ringtones and other customization features, and those were fun to toy with.
Then there was web-browsing, which was even cooler, and actually served to make the phone more useful.
Then came the cameras for still-image and video capture - why for nobody knows, but people love it anyway.
Given all of that neat stuff, and the increasingly computer-like nature of cellular phones, what's the next feature on the horizon, you ask?
Portable weather stations. It just makes sense.
Atomic zombie pirate sniper ninjas.
This is freaking gold.
... is a ninja -with- a long range rifle. Or worse yet, a whole pirate ship full of them.
Pirate sniper ninjas. Think about it.
A-fuckin'-men, bro'. I'm of the mind that the means to communicate should be a utility, not a luxury. Our taxes did after all subsidize the telecommunications industry to allow them to lay the copper lines to make this happen in the first place, and everyone and their mother knows that this has shit to do with fiber. It's all about money and who gets to play with it.
Well, at least all the plants and animals in Iran will be okay once we're done with it. Cue references to 'Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind'...
I'm glad you brought this up. The HL2 SDK is about as clear as mud - hard as a rock, dumb as a brick. Aside from the fact that HL2 is stupidly unoptimized and just really poorly coded for what few new features it truly delivered - Havoc's physics foremost among them - making ANYTHING worthwhile for it is like pulling teeth, from maps to complete mods. You practically have to be a professional and know the program like the back of your hand to even begin to navigate through this garbage, and really to me it just seems like that's Valve's way of saying, "You're not allowed to make your own fun with this one. Only we are."
Honestly, the biggest reason in my opinion that HL2 isn't aging nearly as gracefully as HL1 is because it's much easier to renew HL1's value even if it does lack a fancy physics engine and good graphics right out of the box. A steady influx of mods, maps, and good development tools for HL2 would've certainly kept my attention on the game, but that didn't happen. The same goes for HL2DM and CSS - the biggest reasons I still play CS 1.5 on WON2 is because of the lack of Steam, the better power balance, and above all else, the sheer abundance of good maps and fun/funny mods and the ease with which you can mess with it. HL2DM and CSS lack all of those - Or in the case of Steam, they have it, and it sucks ass.
That aside, if HL2 were published five years earlier, it would've seemed dramatically more impressive to gamers regardless. Pretty graphics and good physics have already been done before, and Valve really missed the boat on that one. The graphics and physics of HL2 were its biggest selling points, and the only reason that the Source engine exists - to say that pretty graphics and physics are all that HL2 really has wouldn't be too terribly far off. However, similarly attractive games - especially generic but good looking first person shooters - are in abundance today, and HL2 just didn't have what it takes to remain in the limelight for too terribly long. HL2 was built around an entertaining visual experience, not a challenging and enjoyable gameplay experience. If you do that to a game and make visuals its focus while taking a shit on the level design and gameplay, you make a game that's briefly entertaining, but not enjoyable or satisfying by any stretch of the imagination.
Not to worry, though. WON2 is reasonably functional, and when CS 1.5 does get old, there are plenty of good freeware games out there to fiddle with...
WAPTOC - "Won't Anyone Please Think Of the Children?"
Laws intended to protect children in any way are rarely intended to do so, and often fail to do so once passed for obvious reasons. If you see a law designed - supposedly - to protect children in any way, take it with an additional grain of salt - it's usually a cover for something that would otherwise become controversial or be shot down immediately. This also applies to laws concerning terrorism and the so-called war on drugs.
WAPTOC hard at work, here.
Wasn't Jeff Vogel bitching about this like, last month?
We know, we know, little studios can't produce the same content as big studios - not usually, anyway - and are therefore doomed to never meet the status quo. We've been hearing this same tired old rhetoric year after year, and any idiot knows that it takes time, money, and manpower that most people just don't have in order to make a title with the same level of audio-visual quality as the titles released by the 500-pound gorillas of the gaming world.
Let's look at games differently, though. After ample exposure to the GCS community, I can safely say that there are indeed people out there who make games who aren't in it for money or exposure - and they're damn good at it. The article tells us that these 'little people' will be forced into niche markets and will never make it big. (A classic defeatist argument, of course. "Your enemy is great, and you are small! Surely you will be struck down!") I have to wonder if any of these people have ever considered that some people just... make games for fun. It's not a matter of paying my bills or whether or not I get to eat if I sit down with a copy of Megazeux and make retarded comedy titles. It also wasn't a big deal for a couple guys in the community who worked for a year straight on a game called 'Adlo', which contrary to popular to belief is not a Mario clone, but something much more impressive. (That's saying a lot, considering that it's still a silly platformer. I mean, holy shit, it took me a week to beat that game, and it was awesome.)
I don't know about the people that make little 'niche games' like Puzzle Pirates and all that jazz, but some people - very talented and creative people who turn out very high quality work in spite of their limitations - just aren't in it for the money. These are the folks I pay attention to, because they've come up with the strangest habit of turning out games that are actually fun, regardless of whether or not they're just tweaks on old ideas.
Will independent studios ever dominate the market? No, because in order for independent studios to dominate the market, either they have to become huge, or the big studios have to shrink, and neither of those things will happen. (Well, maybe one of them. The big studios seem to be crumpling under their own weight these days.) The point of being an independent developer isn't to make it big in the first place. The point of being independent is to do your own goddamn work without someone breathing down your neck. (A few guys living in an apartment can turn out a good game regardless and keep their day jobs to boot.) If you want to make a lot of money, either you snag some investors and start yourself a mid-sized studio to try to get your foot in the door, or you get a job with one of the big-and-few. Independence was never about being big, and that's what a lot of these cynics - and hopeless optimists - forget.
So let's not be stupid. Let's not assume that indies are going to take over the world, but let's also not assume that they'll ever vanish from the face of the earth. Both assumptions are pretty freakin' dumb. Let's also not forget that the market is changing, and if rumors about the Nintendo Revolution are true, and if GCS development continues to proceed as it has, making a good independent title might become a much more casual affair than it was before. So, gamers and game makers, keep doing what you love.
I made a bet with my friends that the voice actor of Spike - Steven Blum - was going to be in this one. Yaknow, since he's already in fucking everything. (I about shit my pants when I heard him in Call of Duty's expansion as the voice of Captain Foley.) The stakes were even higher over the probability that the voice of Inuyasha would be incorporated into the movie at least once, but we finally called that one off after we concluded that if that same voice actor were heard anywhere in the entire movie, we wouldn't be watching it anyway.
I just made like, five dollars.
This really makes me want to download IE7, being fully aware that it contains all of the same garbage and insecurity of its predecessor and all of the standards compliance of Opera 4.0. At least the folks at Mozilla fix their massive security holes in a timely fashion.
Okay, if this thing is seven times more powerful than a three-gigahertz Pentium processor, why the hell aren't these guys making CPUs alongside their GPUs? Seriously, GPUs have gotten to the point at which they are just as if not more powerful than standard CPUs, and with quantities of RAM to match a whole PC. The news of this new and extremely powerful GPU - should it stand up to the hype - alongside news that NVidia has developed a physics coprocessing technique using SLI leads me to believe that GPUs may soon no longer be just GPUs, but complete co-computing units to which graphics, physics, and other demanding tasks could be offloaded. That might be interesting.