I admit I had the same reaction, namely "Comic book MMO? Been there, done that." But in reality, that's like saying that UO or EQ were the end all be all of fantasy MMOs. You can make another MMO in the same genre and still make a compelling, yet different, experience.
It will be interesting to see how it turns out, and whether it's any good, but I certainly hope it's a lot better than CoH, simply so that I have something else that's fun to play.
Interesting point, especially considering that Sega was started by Americans. That's probably too far back to influence popular opinions, of course.
With regards to Microsoft's uphill battle in Japan, there is an interesting interview with Tom Kalinske (former head of Sega's US division) about how he managed Sega from only a 1% market share in the US to 50% in just 4 years. Perhaps MS can learn some tips.;)
It's so common for the Japanese consoles to be released in stages to the various markets of the world, that I don't understand why MS didn't withhold the system from that region until they had a compelling package.
Being first to market doesn't guarantee success, and often allows your competitors to learn from your mistakes. Even if MS had a killer line up of Japanese games coming, they now have to fight against a negative perception.
I deal with images every day at work, and at home. Inevitably, I lose some images; I can recall the image well enough to describe it, but can't find it in the vast sea of images I have. This system could be a very nice way to find those lost images (although realistically it will probably be a long time before it is cheap enough for home users)
On a related note, does anyone know of a good search tool that compares image contents to find matches?
I also don't understand why the studios aren't selling the cleaned-for-TV versions of their movies. I can only guess that they never thought there was a real market for it, and/or the cost of distribution was too high. Perhaps with digital downloads we will see a bit more flexibility?
In the lawsuit against ClearPlay, the directors are essentially arguing that if I skip a chapter in their movie with my DVD remote, or fall asleep for a bit of it, I'm creating a derivative work!/eyeroll Copyright wasn't made for this, it was made to encourage innovation, and enrich society.
I like all the games in the series, but with the move from GTA2 to GTA3 they lost one of my favorite features. In 2 there were three gangs in each level. They each had a gang they hated and a gang they were indifferent about. So to do missions for one gang, you had to be hated (to a certain degree) by their rival gang. The fun part was that when you finished all the missions for one gang you could go on a rampage in their turf and get jobs from their enemies. It felt like you got 3x the gameplay for each level.
Also the humor was lost in the transition to 3D. For example the wandering line of Elvis impersonators who were especially skittish, but if you managed to run over all of them at once you got a bonus and the words "Elvis has left the building!" Or the announcer's voice when you got an insane stunt bonus.
The score multiplier, which would get zeroed by an arrest, along with charging in-game money to save the game, added real tension to the game. You didn't want to save very often because it was expensive (the way to get out of the level was to get a certain amount of money), and you loved the multiplier which gained +1 each time you completed a mission without getting busted or killed. So, by the time you had a 6x multiplier you were on edge for any sign of the cops since you would lose so much. Naturally, the missions were designed to get the cops all riled up which was very thrilling.
In the 3D ones, you save whenever and don't care (which limits the risk to repeating once single mission), there is little humor, and the levels are pretty linear, as far as the missions go. That said, I like the 3D versions, and absolutely love Vice City (80s music + the PCJ = ftw!)
I realize that you don't have control over this, but at Dave and Busters they only use card swipes to activate the games, not coins. This helps with the pricing because the user fills up a card with points and then the operator can charge any number of points per play on a machine by machine basis (they don't change the cost on a day or time basis that I know of, but they could, I guess). By using points instead of pennies, they break the connection the user would have to spending units of money, plus they can offer discounts for buying points in bulk so the point-to-money conversion is even less intuitive.
an IM icon isn't a threat, it's an icon. "The absence of any factor to indicate the icon was a joke"? Um. How about that it's an icon, as opposed to say a note, or graffiti, or some other type of message?
This doesn't make sense. A note is more capable of being a threat than an icon? The icon included a sentence of text, plus a series of pictures to illustrate the text. It is even more explicit than a simple note would have been. And graffiti? Making the pictures and letters bigger and spraying them on a building somehow lends them more credibility? How many times have we heard "size doesn't matter"?
It is the message that is important, not the medium it is delivered in, and in this case the message was pretty clear.
I realize that I'm Johnny-come-lately, but IIRC putting more quarters in a meter that is not expired, and whos time limit you haven't exceeded is OK. But if it has expired, or you have stayed longer than the limit you are guilty and are supposed to turn yourself in or somesuch.
Science is all about proving negatives. Indeed, the only thing ever proven in science is that a model is wrong.
You have this backwards. Proving a theory wrong is not proving a negative. It is disproving a positive. For example, the theory "There is no intelligent life in the universe" cannot be proven because you could not "prove" that you had looked everywhere that intelligent life might be found. Whereas "There is intelligent life in the universe" would be proven the very first time intelligent life was discovered.
It should be noted that most theories are almost impossible to prove. Even after hundreds of tests seem to support a theory, it is still not "proven", it has simply become more likely to be correct.
According to this guy (who was in the beta testing of the NXT) Lego will sell compatibility cables for the old system. That link also shows you how to make your own in the interim. I don't know how a port would handle having an old motor w/o rotation info, but I think you could program around that.
The NXT is a mindstorms kit. The entire line in fact. And blue RCXs? RCXs are yellow and black.
As for the article, the guy obviously doesn't know anything about lego. Studless lego has been phased into the Technic line for years, and had nothing to do with the NXT. I think they are trying to compete better by moving away from overly blocky designs, and doing away with the studs is a big help in that area. IMHO, that is a mistake, because kids can't apply their years of experience in building regular LEGO kits to the Technic kits, which results in less free form play and less play over all. I personally had a hard time learning how to build using beams and pins instead of studs, and the frustration made playing with technic sets a pain instead of a joy.
Then Blizzard should not have distributed 6 million copies of the game. They've brought this upon themselves.
I realize it's difficult to talk about these games without fanboyism creaping in, but it doesn't make any sense to claim that Blizzard was blindsided. They ordered, and paid for, millions of copies of the game. When those ran low, they printed more. They knew exactly what they were doing.
If they didn't know how big a mistake they had made with their DB and server cluster setup, they definately found out during "open" beta (which they quickly renamed "stress test 2" to explain the abismal performance).
What's so frustrating about these watered-down "popular science" type articles is it's impossible to know if I'm reading something that is truly new to me, or (as I always suspect and too often find) it turns out I already know more than the writer ever will.
Seriously. Not infrequently, the summary contains all of the information in TFA! Is there some other source (preferably a single source) that reports on these kinds of developments in more depth?
You're being exploited because you let yourselves be. That's the harsh truth.
Well, I understand what you're saying, but I wonder...
Why was there ever a need to ever form a union anywhere? I'm no fan of unions, but it seems like the games industry is a pretty perfect example of why they can be necessary. I mean you can't expect that every single person in games who's over 30 can just start their own company and expect to compete with EA. Even if they grouped up in teams, they couldn't attract the money to do more than R&D ; they'll never "look like they'll make money". Plenty of big names have plenty of products that lose money every year.
As for your last comment: "Otherwise? Well.. I'm sure there's a fresh crop of programmers to burn out next year." There is no "otherwise". The next crop is out there, no matter what. Even if everyone over 30 left to form a few thousand startups, there would be no shortage of those who want to be next in line for abuse. Maybe because of that even a union strike wouldn't have any real effect...just bring in the starry-eyed scabs.
The real mystery to me is, where did the management come from? They are the ones who propogate these problems. In regular software development there are more realistic schedules, more standardized tools and methods. In games it's pie-in-the-sky and full speed ahead!
Well, this is the problem. RPG rounds fired at tanks is not a big issue. If this could react against IEDs, then it'd be big news. Until then it's cool, but not something that's going to make much of a difference (at least in Iraq).
The crucial part of any good lie is believability. I mean, come on! An "exciting show" about [a word processor] was "drawing huge crowds"?! Believabilty just flew out the window!
Just as arcades in times of yore provided a superior experience, and faded out as home consoles grew stronger and stronger, movie theaters will die out as home setups become bigger, better, and cheaper.
I'm sure he'd never watched any films which featured shooting guns or killing cops...No, of course not! And even if he had, we all know that movies don't influence kids, it's those video games that are really Evil (as in Frooits of the Devil)!
Come on, I'm not that old, but I'm old enough to remember when the target of this kind of hysteria was Dungeons & Dragons. Good mothers wouldn't let their kids be exposed to that source of Evil. How can everyone else have forgotten so quickly?
Yeah, this has kept me from buying a handheld (well, the cost of games, plus the fact that I would rarely use it). I can get most of these on an emulator, anyway. I don't understand why people are so willing to pay so much for so little.
I had hoped the Revolution would offer the back catalog for reasonable prices (I mean how much revenue are those games generating at the moment? Nada. So anything they charge is a plus for Nintendo), but you're right, they will probably charge too much.
Plus if you have a favorite game you haven't played in years, and you remember it fondly, once you pay $5-$10 bucks for it, you'll realize after 5 minutes that it isn't nearly as fun as you remember. So you will have just paid a buck a minute to have your memories ruined.:/
A subscription would be great to allow you to try out lots of games cheaply, but once you settled on a few you wanted to play "regularly" it'd be better to be able to buy them individually. It'll be interesting to see how it turns out.
"If i wanted to play a game for 30 minutes and acomplish something i would play WoW."
People say this all the time like its some kind mantra, but the fact is, on most servers you will spend those 30 minutes (if not more)just trying to log in! See here and here for just two quick examples.
Slashdot Mirror
I admit I had the same reaction, namely "Comic book MMO? Been there, done that." But in reality, that's like saying that UO or EQ were the end all be all of fantasy MMOs. You can make another MMO in the same genre and still make a compelling, yet different, experience.
It will be interesting to see how it turns out, and whether it's any good, but I certainly hope it's a lot better than CoH, simply so that I have something else that's fun to play.
Interesting point, especially considering that Sega was started by Americans. That's probably too far back to influence popular opinions, of course.
;)
With regards to Microsoft's uphill battle in Japan, there is an interesting interview with Tom Kalinske (former head of Sega's US division) about how he managed Sega from only a 1% market share in the US to 50% in just 4 years. Perhaps MS can learn some tips.
It's so common for the Japanese consoles to be released in stages to the various markets of the world, that I don't understand why MS didn't withhold the system from that region until they had a compelling package.
Being first to market doesn't guarantee success, and often allows your competitors to learn from your mistakes. Even if MS had a killer line up of Japanese games coming, they now have to fight against a negative perception.
I deal with images every day at work, and at home. Inevitably, I lose some images; I can recall the image well enough to describe it, but can't find it in the vast sea of images I have. This system could be a very nice way to find those lost images (although realistically it will probably be a long time before it is cheap enough for home users)
On a related note, does anyone know of a good search tool that compares image contents to find matches?
I also don't understand why the studios aren't selling the cleaned-for-TV versions of their movies. I can only guess that they never thought there was a real market for it, and/or the cost of distribution was too high. Perhaps with digital downloads we will see a bit more flexibility?
/eyeroll Copyright wasn't made for this, it was made to encourage innovation, and enrich society.
In the lawsuit against ClearPlay, the directors are essentially arguing that if I skip a chapter in their movie with my DVD remote, or fall asleep for a bit of it, I'm creating a derivative work!
Your term "friend" is clearly derived from our company name "Friendster." See you in court!! >:) Sincerely, K. Lindstrom
I like all the games in the series, but with the move from GTA2 to GTA3 they lost one of my favorite features. In 2 there were three gangs in each level. They each had a gang they hated and a gang they were indifferent about. So to do missions for one gang, you had to be hated (to a certain degree) by their rival gang. The fun part was that when you finished all the missions for one gang you could go on a rampage in their turf and get jobs from their enemies. It felt like you got 3x the gameplay for each level.
Also the humor was lost in the transition to 3D. For example the wandering line of Elvis impersonators who were especially skittish, but if you managed to run over all of them at once you got a bonus and the words "Elvis has left the building!" Or the announcer's voice when you got an insane stunt bonus.
The score multiplier, which would get zeroed by an arrest, along with charging in-game money to save the game, added real tension to the game. You didn't want to save very often because it was expensive (the way to get out of the level was to get a certain amount of money), and you loved the multiplier which gained +1 each time you completed a mission without getting busted or killed. So, by the time you had a 6x multiplier you were on edge for any sign of the cops since you would lose so much. Naturally, the missions were designed to get the cops all riled up which was very thrilling.
In the 3D ones, you save whenever and don't care (which limits the risk to repeating once single mission), there is little humor, and the levels are pretty linear, as far as the missions go. That said, I like the 3D versions, and absolutely love Vice City (80s music + the PCJ = ftw!)
I realize that you don't have control over this, but at Dave and Busters they only use card swipes to activate the games, not coins. This helps with the pricing because the user fills up a card with points and then the operator can charge any number of points per play on a machine by machine basis (they don't change the cost on a day or time basis that I know of, but they could, I guess). By using points instead of pennies, they break the connection the user would have to spending units of money, plus they can offer discounts for buying points in bulk so the point-to-money conversion is even less intuitive.
an IM icon isn't a threat, it's an icon. "The absence of any factor to indicate the icon was a joke"? Um. How about that it's an icon, as opposed to say a note, or graffiti, or some other type of message?
This doesn't make sense. A note is more capable of being a threat than an icon? The icon included a sentence of text, plus a series of pictures to illustrate the text. It is even more explicit than a simple note would have been. And graffiti? Making the pictures and letters bigger and spraying them on a building somehow lends them more credibility? How many times have we heard "size doesn't matter"?
It is the message that is important, not the medium it is delivered in, and in this case the message was pretty clear.
I realize that I'm Johnny-come-lately, but IIRC putting more quarters in a meter that is not expired, and whos time limit you haven't exceeded is OK. But if it has expired, or you have stayed longer than the limit you are guilty and are supposed to turn yourself in or somesuch.
t ml, where puting coins into expired meters is judged to be obstructing police enforcement. /rolleyes
That's why you get cases like http://www.cincypost.com/news/1998/meters020998.h
Science is all about proving negatives. Indeed, the only thing ever proven in science is that a model is wrong.
You have this backwards. Proving a theory wrong is not proving a negative. It is disproving a positive. For example, the theory "There is no intelligent life in the universe" cannot be proven because you could not "prove" that you had looked everywhere that intelligent life might be found. Whereas "There is intelligent life in the universe" would be proven the very first time intelligent life was discovered.
It should be noted that most theories are almost impossible to prove. Even after hundreds of tests seem to support a theory, it is still not "proven", it has simply become more likely to be correct.
According to this guy (who was in the beta testing of the NXT) Lego will sell compatibility cables for the old system. That link also shows you how to make your own in the interim. I don't know how a port would handle having an old motor w/o rotation info, but I think you could program around that.
I can't picture anyone buying any more mindstorms
The NXT is a mindstorms kit. The entire line in fact. And blue RCXs? RCXs are yellow and black.
As for the article, the guy obviously doesn't know anything about lego. Studless lego has been phased into the Technic line for years, and had nothing to do with the NXT. I think they are trying to compete better by moving away from overly blocky designs, and doing away with the studs is a big help in that area. IMHO, that is a mistake, because kids can't apply their years of experience in building regular LEGO kits to the Technic kits, which results in less free form play and less play over all. I personally had a hard time learning how to build using beams and pins instead of studs, and the frustration made playing with technic sets a pain instead of a joy.
Then Blizzard should not have distributed 6 million copies of the game. They've brought this upon themselves.
I realize it's difficult to talk about these games without fanboyism creaping in, but it doesn't make any sense to claim that Blizzard was blindsided. They ordered, and paid for, millions of copies of the game. When those ran low, they printed more. They knew exactly what they were doing.
If they didn't know how big a mistake they had made with their DB and server cluster setup, they definately found out during "open" beta (which they quickly renamed "stress test 2" to explain the abismal performance).
What's so frustrating about these watered-down "popular science" type articles is it's impossible to know if I'm reading something that is truly new to me, or (as I always suspect and too often find) it turns out I already know more than the writer ever will.
Seriously. Not infrequently, the summary contains all of the information in TFA! Is there some other source (preferably a single source) that reports on these kinds of developments in more depth?
You're being exploited because you let yourselves be. That's the harsh truth.
Well, I understand what you're saying, but I wonder...
Why was there ever a need to ever form a union anywhere? I'm no fan of unions, but it seems like the games industry is a pretty perfect example of why they can be necessary. I mean you can't expect that every single person in games who's over 30 can just start their own company and expect to compete with EA. Even if they grouped up in teams, they couldn't attract the money to do more than R&D ; they'll never "look like they'll make money". Plenty of big names have plenty of products that lose money every year.
As for your last comment: "Otherwise? Well.. I'm sure there's a fresh crop of programmers to burn out next year." There is no "otherwise". The next crop is out there, no matter what. Even if everyone over 30 left to form a few thousand startups, there would be no shortage of those who want to be next in line for abuse. Maybe because of that even a union strike wouldn't have any real effect...just bring in the starry-eyed scabs.
The real mystery to me is, where did the management come from? They are the ones who propogate these problems. In regular software development there are more realistic schedules, more standardized tools and methods. In games it's pie-in-the-sky and full speed ahead!
Casualties in tanks are few in Iraq.
Well, this is the problem. RPG rounds fired at tanks is not a big issue. If this could react against IEDs, then it'd be big news. Until then it's cool, but not something that's going to make much of a difference (at least in Iraq).
So, any word on how much the patch will cost? =P
The crucial part of any good lie is believability. I mean, come on! An "exciting show" about [a word processor] was "drawing huge crowds"?! Believabilty just flew out the window!
^_^
"What we saw really makes us think that Molyneux is the true God of Simulation"
This calls for a Celebrity Death Match featuring Peter Molyneux vs. Will Wright!
Just as arcades in times of yore provided a superior experience, and faded out as home consoles grew stronger and stronger, movie theaters will die out as home setups become bigger, better, and cheaper.
I'm sure he'd never watched any films which featured shooting guns or killing cops...No, of course not! And even if he had, we all know that movies don't influence kids, it's those video games that are really Evil (as in Frooits of the Devil)!
Come on, I'm not that old, but I'm old enough to remember when the target of this kind of hysteria was Dungeons & Dragons. Good mothers wouldn't let their kids be exposed to that source of Evil. How can everyone else have forgotten so quickly?
The funny part is, how many Walmart frequenters have ever even heard of this brand? (Admittedly, I grew up in a Craftsman household)
Yeah, this has kept me from buying a handheld (well, the cost of games, plus the fact that I would rarely use it). I can get most of these on an emulator, anyway. I don't understand why people are so willing to pay so much for so little.
:/
I had hoped the Revolution would offer the back catalog for reasonable prices (I mean how much revenue are those games generating at the moment? Nada. So anything they charge is a plus for Nintendo), but you're right, they will probably charge too much.
Plus if you have a favorite game you haven't played in years, and you remember it fondly, once you pay $5-$10 bucks for it, you'll realize after 5 minutes that it isn't nearly as fun as you remember. So you will have just paid a buck a minute to have your memories ruined.
A subscription would be great to allow you to try out lots of games cheaply, but once you settled on a few you wanted to play "regularly" it'd be better to be able to buy them individually. It'll be interesting to see how it turns out.
"If i wanted to play a game for 30 minutes and acomplish something i would play WoW."
People say this all the time like its some kind mantra, but the fact is, on most servers you will spend those 30 minutes (if not more)just trying to log in! See here and here for just two quick examples.