After the tickets to the local Tool concert sold out in 6 seconds, I've given up any hope of going to Ticketmaster concerts anyway. I had at least 20 people in my company all trying to log into their site the moment the tickets went on sale. Only 1 got in, and even though he had a chance to select how many tickets he wanted, it immediately came back saying there were none available. Of course, there were tons on Ebay for $600 immediately.
So...screw it. I'm not going to spend an insane amount of money for tickets to shows where I won't get a good seat anyway. There's a great music scene in my town that I already enjoy and that's less than $10 at the door. Even standing in the back of the club is closer than the front row of a big act and I can usually share a beer with the band after their show. They're also more than happy to let me share their music with a friend. Pretty much an improvement all around.
There's good reason for any developer to be familiar with a good IDE and with tools like vi and Emacs, but do you really want to spend valuable classroom time teaching them about editing tools instead of the language?
You probably should spend some time during one class to discuss the choices available and what your own preferences and biases are, but they'll probably have to use whatever their employer uses when they get into the workplace. Better to spend your time teaching them to be carefull and thoughtfull coders and they'll use that skill to decide what environment to code in themselves.
If you read what he says, he's just saying he doesn't think it would be a significant part of their revenue. He doesn't say that Nintendo won't do ads or episodic content, just that the majority of their income will come from new games.
The fact that he didn't rule it out completely seems kind of significant.
I'm not sure if anyone else has mentioned this yet, but I feel obliged to mention how horrible the installation process for this game was. I already had this game on the PC, but was curious to see how an MMORPG would be handled on the 360.
First off, one of the nice things about consoles is that you generally don't have to install anything. Just put the disc in and go. FFXI requires you to install it to the hard drive. The process of just copying the data to the hard drive took an hour. Thankfully it was only one disc, so I didn't have to get up and switch discs, but an install time of an hour would be insane on the PC, on a console it's unforgivable. After it was done it popped up a dialog saying "Installation finished". I clicked through that and it brought up another window that said "Finishing installation. This will take about a minute". Why they had the system wait at the first dialog, I'll never know.
Aside from the install, the game also require a ridiculous number of log in names: your registration name (assigned automatically), your PlayOnline name, your email addy on PlayOnline (as well as how it appears in the email), your account name in the game, and at least one or two more for some unknown purpose.
Next you have to purchase time to play the game. This is done as a seperate step from entering in your billing information for some reason. At this time you have to enter the automatically assigned registration name and password (which is silly because you're already logged in). Then you have to register your game and add-ons. This required entering 5 seperate 20 character alphanumeric codes--like the CD keys you have to enter for the PC.
At this point my install time had already taken over an hour and a half. Finally thinking I could play the game, I navigated through the menus to start FFXI (up untill this point I was just in the Play Online application). At that point it said I had to update my files. It took 15 minutes for the game to analyze 1780 files on the hard drive (to prepare for an update). Then it took an hour to redownload all 1780 files. The game JUST came out. It's a CONSOLE game. And I had to wait over an hour to patch the game...
So, after 2 and a half hours of work to install the game I was able to create a character and start running around in the game. The graphics were the same as those on the PC released 2-3 years ago. Not exactly surprising, but you do kind of hope for more on a next gen console. Graphically, it's probably the weakest game released on the 360 to date. Kind of a let down after all the work you have to do to install the game.
Anyway, my point here is not whether the game is good or bad, just that my feeling is that Square doesn't seem to have much respect for their customer if they put them through that kind of install process. They're also completely missing the potential of using XBoxLive. Considering that you have to already be subscribed to XBoxLive it seems that setting up your account should be completely automated. Why can't they just get the billing info straight from MS?
Hopefully someone will come along and do an MMORPG right on the console. I really would love to play a game like WoW on a joystick in my living room, using the headset to talk with people in my group.
This is...creepy. A manifesto? C'mon. This feels a bit too Heaven's Gate-ish to me.
You know you're a cult when you start dressing up your beliefs with cute characters and animal mascots to lure young children into your belief structure. Why don't you just hook up a bottle of juice that they can drink from whenever they type "I love linux" and "Down with Micro$oft. They are teh suck".
I'm sorry, but how are the publishers not enforcing their ratings system? Except in the recent GTA "Hot Coffee" fiasco (which is still slightly silly since the game was already rated M for Mature), the game publishers have abided by the ESRB's rating system and placed the rating on the box and then give the box to the retailer. The retailers are the ones who sell it to the public, and so are the ones capable of enforcing the ratings.
If you talk with game developers, you find that a lot of changes are made simply to get the game into major retailers, like Walmart, who make a point of saying how family friendly they are and don't want to sell games that may offend families--that is, unless it's a runaway hit, like GTA, in which case all their family friendly arguments conveniently cease. Let's also not forget that they place violent games on the same shelf that they place kids games, unlike movies which are generally seperated.
But let's get this straight. While retailers could definitely do more to limit how easily kids get these games, the real issue is parents not being aware either of the games the kids are buying, or what they themselves are buying for the kids. Parents certainly have a challenge when it comes to being able to police what their kids do at their friends houses (which is actually the more common complaint I've heard from parents who are worried about what games their kids play), but frankly, that's not going to change once there's a law preventing minors from buying games since that's clearly a case where the other parents would probably buy inappropriate games for the kids anyway. In general, it's best for the parents to learn who their kids are playing with and don't let them play with the ones who aren't parented well.
And as far as this legistlation goes, it's clearly just a way for politicians to appear to be concerned for families. Notice how it doesn't make any effort to control what movies kids can buy? Arnold knows better than to mess with the movie industry.
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After the tickets to the local Tool concert sold out in 6 seconds, I've given up any hope of going to Ticketmaster concerts anyway. I had at least 20 people in my company all trying to log into their site the moment the tickets went on sale. Only 1 got in, and even though he had a chance to select how many tickets he wanted, it immediately came back saying there were none available. Of course, there were tons on Ebay for $600 immediately.
So...screw it. I'm not going to spend an insane amount of money for tickets to shows where I won't get a good seat anyway. There's a great music scene in my town that I already enjoy and that's less than $10 at the door. Even standing in the back of the club is closer than the front row of a big act and I can usually share a beer with the band after their show. They're also more than happy to let me share their music with a friend. Pretty much an improvement all around.
There's good reason for any developer to be familiar with a good IDE and with tools like vi and Emacs, but do you really want to spend valuable classroom time teaching them about editing tools instead of the language?
You probably should spend some time during one class to discuss the choices available and what your own preferences and biases are, but they'll probably have to use whatever their employer uses when they get into the workplace. Better to spend your time teaching them to be carefull and thoughtfull coders and they'll use that skill to decide what environment to code in themselves.
You're right. Knee jerk reactions like this have no place on Slashdot. Besides, it was clearly Microsoft that spread the rumor!
If you read what he says, he's just saying he doesn't think it would be a significant part of their revenue. He doesn't say that Nintendo won't do ads or episodic content, just that the majority of their income will come from new games.
The fact that he didn't rule it out completely seems kind of significant.
I'm not sure if anyone else has mentioned this yet, but I feel obliged to mention how horrible the installation process for this game was. I already had this game on the PC, but was curious to see how an MMORPG would be handled on the 360.
First off, one of the nice things about consoles is that you generally don't have to install anything. Just put the disc in and go. FFXI requires you to install it to the hard drive. The process of just copying the data to the hard drive took an hour. Thankfully it was only one disc, so I didn't have to get up and switch discs, but an install time of an hour would be insane on the PC, on a console it's unforgivable. After it was done it popped up a dialog saying "Installation finished". I clicked through that and it brought up another window that said "Finishing installation. This will take about a minute". Why they had the system wait at the first dialog, I'll never know.
Aside from the install, the game also require a ridiculous number of log in names: your registration name (assigned automatically), your PlayOnline name, your email addy on PlayOnline (as well as how it appears in the email), your account name in the game, and at least one or two more for some unknown purpose.
Next you have to purchase time to play the game. This is done as a seperate step from entering in your billing information for some reason. At this time you have to enter the automatically assigned registration name and password (which is silly because you're already logged in). Then you have to register your game and add-ons. This required entering 5 seperate 20 character alphanumeric codes--like the CD keys you have to enter for the PC.
At this point my install time had already taken over an hour and a half. Finally thinking I could play the game, I navigated through the menus to start FFXI (up untill this point I was just in the Play Online application). At that point it said I had to update my files. It took 15 minutes for the game to analyze 1780 files on the hard drive (to prepare for an update). Then it took an hour to redownload all 1780 files. The game JUST came out. It's a CONSOLE game. And I had to wait over an hour to patch the game...
So, after 2 and a half hours of work to install the game I was able to create a character and start running around in the game. The graphics were the same as those on the PC released 2-3 years ago. Not exactly surprising, but you do kind of hope for more on a next gen console. Graphically, it's probably the weakest game released on the 360 to date. Kind of a let down after all the work you have to do to install the game.
Anyway, my point here is not whether the game is good or bad, just that my feeling is that Square doesn't seem to have much respect for their customer if they put them through that kind of install process. They're also completely missing the potential of using XBoxLive. Considering that you have to already be subscribed to XBoxLive it seems that setting up your account should be completely automated. Why can't they just get the billing info straight from MS?
Hopefully someone will come along and do an MMORPG right on the console. I really would love to play a game like WoW on a joystick in my living room, using the headset to talk with people in my group.
For a guy whose website says "the sublime and the poetic are not merely goals, but foundations", I think you'd feel right at home with Professor Nutt.
This is...creepy. A manifesto? C'mon. This feels a bit too Heaven's Gate-ish to me.
You know you're a cult when you start dressing up your beliefs with cute characters and animal mascots to lure young children into your belief structure. Why don't you just hook up a bottle of juice that they can drink from whenever they type "I love linux" and "Down with Micro$oft. They are teh suck".
I'm sorry, but how are the publishers not enforcing their ratings system? Except in the recent GTA "Hot Coffee" fiasco (which is still slightly silly since the game was already rated M for Mature), the game publishers have abided by the ESRB's rating system and placed the rating on the box and then give the box to the retailer. The retailers are the ones who sell it to the public, and so are the ones capable of enforcing the ratings.
If you talk with game developers, you find that a lot of changes are made simply to get the game into major retailers, like Walmart, who make a point of saying how family friendly they are and don't want to sell games that may offend families--that is, unless it's a runaway hit, like GTA, in which case all their family friendly arguments conveniently cease. Let's also not forget that they place violent games on the same shelf that they place kids games, unlike movies which are generally seperated.
But let's get this straight. While retailers could definitely do more to limit how easily kids get these games, the real issue is parents not being aware either of the games the kids are buying, or what they themselves are buying for the kids. Parents certainly have a challenge when it comes to being able to police what their kids do at their friends houses (which is actually the more common complaint I've heard from parents who are worried about what games their kids play), but frankly, that's not going to change once there's a law preventing minors from buying games since that's clearly a case where the other parents would probably buy inappropriate games for the kids anyway. In general, it's best for the parents to learn who their kids are playing with and don't let them play with the ones who aren't parented well.
And as far as this legistlation goes, it's clearly just a way for politicians to appear to be concerned for families. Notice how it doesn't make any effort to control what movies kids can buy? Arnold knows better than to mess with the movie industry.
Sounds like Disaster Area.
So anyway, can I get these with 7.1 sound?