...is not so much to learn about his games, or even his ideas about what make a great game. It is to learn that *anything* can be used to inspire/guide game design. Too often developers set out to make a game and just look at the competition to figure out what (not) to do. That leads to this kind of thinking: "well, game 'X' let you do backflips, so we'll let you do TWO backflips!!" followed by many pats on the back for being 'revolutionary'.
Even if you don't like Will Wright's games (he has a fascination with sandboxes), his design philosophy is what should impress you when you hear him. I think it's the same kind of approach that led to games like Pikmin, or Katamari Damacy, or Brain Age. The way he can bring two totally unrelated things together is amazing. One example off the top of my head was when he explained how he used a model for the evolution of various animals as the basis for handling the desires for the characters in The Sims.
This is a great resource for buying Lego pieces or even kits. It used to be called BrickBay but eBay felt they had some hold over the word 'bay'.../rolleyes
I was really shocked when I first discovered that site. The idea that you could buy any piece you wanted for just a few pennies was like a geek dream come true!
You can search here to find detailed kit inventories like this one for all but the newest kits. And the Price Guide is a great help too, so you can see what the part has sold for in the past 6 months. Of course the Search Page is the heart of it, allowing you to search for the part you want (once you know its part number) and allows you to restrict searches to sellers in your own country to keep shipping costs down.
All in all, it's a great site. I also love that I don't have to worry about submitting a winning (sniping) bid, or wait days for an auction to end.
Some games *will* be region locked
on
Region-free PS3
·
· Score: 1
It's amazing how so few have caught on to the actual truth. Obviously, PR spin actually works. It would be funny to see their faces when that import game they spent so much on is region locked. "But...but, they said... ^_^
Baby sign language is a great tool for helping you understand your child. Even after my sons started vocalizing, their pronounciation was sometimes just too poor to understand what they were saying. Adding the sign to the vocalization aided tremendously in learning what word he was trying to say. It takes a little bit of effort, but it's really worth it.
For some reason, some people find the lack of immitation or response to their early attempts at teaching signs to their baby to be very frustrating. Yet they don't get any response to the verbal stream they throw at their children, either, and they keep doing that. They'll ask the baby questions, say the baby's answers; hold the whole conversation on their end alone, which teaches the baby speach patterns as well as words. But with signing, they try to do a vocabulary lesson, "water! Water! This is water! Oh, s/he's not responding! It must be too early; I'll just give up."/rolleyes
Another point, is that American Sign Language is great, but babies have very little finger control early on, so you'll have to modify some signs, and don't worry about just making some up. As with verbal pronounciation, your child will likely not reproduce your sign exactly anyway. The important part is establishing a working system for communicating with him or her.
This was not made by their game teams, so comparing this to their games is not relevant.
A more accurate comparison would be to look at something like EQ2 Players which tracks stats for players and guilds (both serverwide and worldwide). It keeps track of ranks, who's done what first, items, etc. It even provides templates and assets for, and hosts, guild websites and forums.
I think the weakness of the PS3 system is the freedom for individual games to host their own servers and set their own rules. One of XBLive's biggest strengths is the standardization, imo. You buy the game, you know what you're getting. With the PS3, that may not always be the case.
I hope Gibson was forward thinking enough to take out a patent on this!
1. Write futuristic novel
2. Patent every concept in the book
3. Wait for people to make it happen
4. Blind-side them with your 1337 patent!
5. Profit!!!!
Admittedly, I live in CA, so YMMV, but it was only $1.5 million last year, and you can eat up a million just by owning a house here. And not an "estate" either, just a regular old suburban place with 50 square feet of lawn and neighbors less than 20' away on both sides.
And the remaining $500k sounds like a lot, but it's the cost of a condo! So with only two heirs, they could both stop renting. If you have 3 or 4 heirs, they get a house to fight over and about a year's salary...Not my idea of fabulously wealthy
I will admit, though, that I have no confidence the govenment will use the money wisely, so that factors into my feelings as well.
The problem with estate taxes is they tax people who don't own anything close to an "estate"!
Sure, tax people like Gates or Buffett; when their heirs split $50 billion instead of $60 billion, who will care? Plus the $10B goes to "help the children".
BTW, I wonder how many suicides there will be in 2010, when the estate tax will be suspended for one year?
Yeah, I love Will Wright...but it's a real shame he works for the Devil. I refuse to support EA in any way, as they embody all that is wrong with this industry. I'll probably just borrow a copy from a friend after they get bored with it.
If it weren't for the fact that it takes so many years for these kinds of suits to make it throught the courts, I'd be inclined to think there was some shadowy force orchestrating all these high-profile patent cases to all make the news at the same time!
Even better, the initial warning was appealed by the player and the appeal was reviewed by a GM higher up the chain and rejected, upholding the warning. Didn't review it enough, my ass.
What he's really saying is, "The lawyers got involved and are forcing me to publish the following statement..."
In general, platform providers have a unique opportunity at the GDC to share knowledge with and inspire the people who will make or break their consoles, namely the game developers themselves.
If these developers are interested in either of these consoles, then they already have dev kits and official support from the "platform provider". These consoles are coming out this year; it's not as though someone is going to be in one of those presentations and suddenly decide to make a launch title.
The only significant thing about these keynotes is that the information in them won't be under an NDA. The rest is PR BS.
Recently I played the game Candyland. The game requires zero skill. There are random chances to get ahead or be knocked back, but they require no user input or any kind of decision at all. If I left the room for some reason and had someone "play" for me, it wouldn't affect the outcome of the game at all. It is not inherently "fairer" to personally pick the card from the stack, than to have someone else do it for me.
Wow is exactly like Candyland in many respects. If I take a few days off and run around nonstop harvesting in a zone or zones, no one would think that was anything but fine. But if I went to work and had a friend play my character and he just ran around harvesting (the exact same thing I could do myself), some would think that morally wrong (leaving the ToS out of it). The common complaint is it isn't "fair", as though autorunning between nodes is somehow character building.
Oddly enough, buying already harvested items off the auction house is considered perfectly acceptable, even if I do it with gold my guild gave me. It's not uncommon for guildies to farm for gold to buy epic mounts for someone, perhaps even an IRL friend. But if that IRL friend pays them money, or takes them out to dinner, as thanks, how is that different? And if the people out farming for me aren't people I even know, why should you care? As long as the gold enters the market from authorized, in-game methods, it's no different at all.
I fear that the reality will be far different. Rather than making the big devs come up with something original, the controller is going to 'force' them to ignore the Revolution completely.
As you noted, these companies are all about a cheap, quick buck. That means making one version of a game and porting to the other competing platforms. If the Revolution doesn't ship with a standard (normal) controller, and instead requires significant customization of the game to allow it to be playable, the big companies will just skip the Revolution version altogether. Even more so if the adoption rate for the Revolution is similar to the Gamecube's.
Visually, this game has nothing to distinguish itself from a multidude of similar titles. Where is the style? All the characters are the same body with a unique head sewn on top, with no chance for visual distinction. I don't care for WoW's really low-poly approach, but when you see a screenshot from their game, at least you know what game it came from.
As far as gameplay...ugh. Sounds like it's back to the grindstone. No thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
is knowing which side your bread is buttered on!
...is not so much to learn about his games, or even his ideas about what make a great game. It is to learn that *anything* can be used to inspire/guide game design. Too often developers set out to make a game and just look at the competition to figure out what (not) to do. That leads to this kind of thinking: "well, game 'X' let you do backflips, so we'll let you do TWO backflips!!" followed by many pats on the back for being 'revolutionary'.
Even if you don't like Will Wright's games (he has a fascination with sandboxes), his design philosophy is what should impress you when you hear him. I think it's the same kind of approach that led to games like Pikmin, or Katamari Damacy, or Brain Age. The way he can bring two totally unrelated things together is amazing. One example off the top of my head was when he explained how he used a model for the evolution of various animals as the basis for handling the desires for the characters in The Sims.
This is a great resource for buying Lego pieces or even kits. It used to be called BrickBay but eBay felt they had some hold over the word 'bay'... /rolleyes
I was really shocked when I first discovered that site. The idea that you could buy any piece you wanted for just a few pennies was like a geek dream come true!
You can search here to find detailed kit inventories like this one for all but the newest kits. And the Price Guide is a great help too, so you can see what the part has sold for in the past 6 months. Of course the Search Page is the heart of it, allowing you to search for the part you want (once you know its part number) and allows you to restrict searches to sellers in your own country to keep shipping costs down.
All in all, it's a great site. I also love that I don't have to worry about submitting a winning (sniping) bid, or wait days for an auction to end.
It's amazing how so few have caught on to the actual truth. Obviously, PR spin actually works. It would be funny to see their faces when that import game they spent so much on is region locked. "But...but, they said...
^_^
Baby sign language is a great tool for helping you understand your child. Even after my sons started vocalizing, their pronounciation was sometimes just too poor to understand what they were saying. Adding the sign to the vocalization aided tremendously in learning what word he was trying to say. It takes a little bit of effort, but it's really worth it.
/rolleyes
For some reason, some people find the lack of immitation or response to their early attempts at teaching signs to their baby to be very frustrating. Yet they don't get any response to the verbal stream they throw at their children, either, and they keep doing that. They'll ask the baby questions, say the baby's answers; hold the whole conversation on their end alone, which teaches the baby speach patterns as well as words. But with signing, they try to do a vocabulary lesson, "water! Water! This is water! Oh, s/he's not responding! It must be too early; I'll just give up."
Another point, is that American Sign Language is great, but babies have very little finger control early on, so you'll have to modify some signs, and don't worry about just making some up. As with verbal pronounciation, your child will likely not reproduce your sign exactly anyway. The important part is establishing a working system for communicating with him or her.
This was not made by their game teams, so comparing this to their games is not relevant.
A more accurate comparison would be to look at something like EQ2 Players which tracks stats for players and guilds (both serverwide and worldwide). It keeps track of ranks, who's done what first, items, etc. It even provides templates and assets for, and hosts, guild websites and forums.
I think the weakness of the PS3 system is the freedom for individual games to host their own servers and set their own rules. One of XBLive's biggest strengths is the standardization, imo. You buy the game, you know what you're getting. With the PS3, that may not always be the case.
I hope Gibson was forward thinking enough to take out a patent on this!
1. Write futuristic novel
2. Patent every concept in the book
3. Wait for people to make it happen
4. Blind-side them with your 1337 patent!
5. Profit!!!!
Admittedly, I live in CA, so YMMV, but it was only $1.5 million last year, and you can eat up a million just by owning a house here. And not an "estate" either, just a regular old suburban place with 50 square feet of lawn and neighbors less than 20' away on both sides.
And the remaining $500k sounds like a lot, but it's the cost of a condo! So with only two heirs, they could both stop renting. If you have 3 or 4 heirs, they get a house to fight over and about a year's salary...Not my idea of fabulously wealthy
I will admit, though, that I have no confidence the govenment will use the money wisely, so that factors into my feelings as well.
The problem with estate taxes is they tax people who don't own anything close to an "estate"!
Sure, tax people like Gates or Buffett; when their heirs split $50 billion instead of $60 billion, who will care? Plus the $10B goes to "help the children".
BTW, I wonder how many suicides there will be in 2010, when the estate tax will be suspended for one year?
Yeah, I love Will Wright...but it's a real shame he works for the Devil. I refuse to support EA in any way, as they embody all that is wrong with this industry. I'll probably just borrow a copy from a friend after they get bored with it.
If it weren't for the fact that it takes so many years for these kinds of suits to make it throught the courts, I'd be inclined to think there was some shadowy force orchestrating all these high-profile patent cases to all make the news at the same time!
Time to dust off the old tin foil hat, I guess.
Even better, the initial warning was appealed by the player and the appeal was reviewed by a GM higher up the chain and rejected, upholding the warning. Didn't review it enough, my ass.
What he's really saying is, "The lawyers got involved and are forcing me to publish the following statement..."
In general, platform providers have a unique opportunity at the GDC to share knowledge with and inspire the people who will make or break their consoles, namely the game developers themselves.
If these developers are interested in either of these consoles, then they already have dev kits and official support from the "platform provider". These consoles are coming out this year; it's not as though someone is going to be in one of those presentations and suddenly decide to make a launch title.
The only significant thing about these keynotes is that the information in them won't be under an NDA. The rest is PR BS.
I haven't noticed any of it. I [only] use it for basic functions [though]...
Hmm...I think I know why. ^_^
Recently I played the game Candyland. The game requires zero skill. There are random chances to get ahead or be knocked back, but they require no user input or any kind of decision at all. If I left the room for some reason and had someone "play" for me, it wouldn't affect the outcome of the game at all. It is not inherently "fairer" to personally pick the card from the stack, than to have someone else do it for me.
Wow is exactly like Candyland in many respects. If I take a few days off and run around nonstop harvesting in a zone or zones, no one would think that was anything but fine. But if I went to work and had a friend play my character and he just ran around harvesting (the exact same thing I could do myself), some would think that morally wrong (leaving the ToS out of it). The common complaint is it isn't "fair", as though autorunning between nodes is somehow character building.
Oddly enough, buying already harvested items off the auction house is considered perfectly acceptable, even if I do it with gold my guild gave me. It's not uncommon for guildies to farm for gold to buy epic mounts for someone, perhaps even an IRL friend. But if that IRL friend pays them money, or takes them out to dinner, as thanks, how is that different? And if the people out farming for me aren't people I even know, why should you care? As long as the gold enters the market from authorized, in-game methods, it's no different at all.
*Note: I have never bought in-game currency.
I fear that the reality will be far different. Rather than making the big devs come up with something original, the controller is going to 'force' them to ignore the Revolution completely.
As you noted, these companies are all about a cheap, quick buck. That means making one version of a game and porting to the other competing platforms. If the Revolution doesn't ship with a standard (normal) controller, and instead requires significant customization of the game to allow it to be playable, the big companies will just skip the Revolution version altogether. Even more so if the adoption rate for the Revolution is similar to the Gamecube's.
Visually, this game has nothing to distinguish itself from a multidude of similar titles. Where is the style? All the characters are the same body with a unique head sewn on top, with no chance for visual distinction. I don't care for WoW's really low-poly approach, but when you see a screenshot from their game, at least you know what game it came from.
As far as gameplay...ugh. Sounds like it's back to the grindstone. No thanks.