The author of TFA seems to have never played a game online in co-op. It's a whole different experience. Cooperative play - especially the way that some games are implementing it now with drop-in/drop-out - is incredibly fun, often more fun than playing alone. You're not playing with random strangers usually either.
Famitsu's 'data' correlates directly to how much money they're paid by the publisher to promote it. You should always take anything in Famitsu with a significant grain of salt, they're not exactly a bastion of journalistic integrity.
Sony are really a mixed bag. They're usually reasonably good, except for a few rather high-profile proprietary technologies that they've attempted to force onto consumers. I assume you never had the misfortune of owning a Minidisc or MicroMV recorder. On the flipside, our family has a Sony TV from 15 years ago which still works absolutely perfectly. In the same period we've had it, we've gone through around four other (non-Sony) sets.
That said, it's interesting to note that for every dodgy new piece of proprietary tech they've introduced, there have been joint ventures or reasonably open standards that they've introduced which have gone on and done well. Walkman, S/PDIF audio interfaces, the 3.5 inch floppy disk (though arguably you can probably thank Apple for that becoming a standard, rather than Sony)...
Time will tell which side of the line Blu-ray falls.
Yesterday 1up quoted Kojima in an interview saying he was looking at 360 and PC development.
Metal Gear Solid was PC and PS1. MGS2 was Xbox, PC and PS2. The only reason that MGS3 ended up an exclusive was that by that stage the writing was on the wall, and there was really no reason to go multi-platform given the massive install base the PS2 had.
MGS4 will end up being a 6-month PS3 exclusive. Why release for a single system with (by then) a 5-6 million install base when you could release for both of the high-tech platforms and hit a 20+ million install base? Unless Sony has ponied up cash to keep it exclusive or they've somehow purchased Konami, the developer owes their loyalty to whichever platform or platforms which has the most potential profit for the money they spend developing it.
I bet that [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Rutherfor d]Rutherford[/url] would have been even more annoyed about winning the Chemistry price if he saw this 'research'
Because they have a population of 1.3 billion people. Even if only a fraction bother to buy games, that's still a huge market and Microsoft would be insane not to give it a go, especially given the way that China has been undergoing a major technological revolution recently. It's a huge emerging market. Launching Xbox 360 in mainland China is clearly an investment into the future, not something they expect to immediately begin to pay off.
'Drip-fed' implies that the games were actually released. Generally speaking, the only viable options for getting any games at all in Australia was to import expensive UK releases or resort to piracy. A real shame, too, because the system had some excellent games.
I still remember my despair at finding my copy of Skies of Arcadia was defective and wouldn't run. I think it was one of the five or so copies we got here. Not that I'm bitter about it or anything.:(
- How does Vader know Luke is his son? The force? If so, why doesn't he guess about Leia, who he meets before?
A kid of the required age who is strong in the force, hangs out with Obi-wan, and has the name "Skywalker". It's not that much of a jump, is it? Also, I can't remember for sure (only saw Episode III once) but did Anakin actually know he had sired twins? And he does guess in the end, once he realises that there's two of them.
- Why no mention of Vader knowing Luke's family?
What family? Owen and Beru, relatives he only ever met once, in passing, that live on a backwater ball of dirt in the ass end of nowhere? Why would he need to talk about them?
- Why does Ben leave Luke in Tatooine and Leia with the royal family of Alderaan?
Assuming he didn't know there were twins, Obi-wan hid the more important of the pair (probably the one with the most potential) in an obscure spot where he could also lie low and keep an eye on things. As for Leia... sometimes the best hiding place is right infront of your nose.
- Why does Ben say that Vader hunted down all the Jedi, when it's clear the Emperor himself was behind it?
He led the slaughter of all the Jedi in the temple. Additionally it's reasonable to assume that not all the Jedi were picked off in the initial clone attack and formed a resistance, so once he got the trademark suit, he may well have hunted them down one by one. And it was always implied that the Emperor was behind it, since Vader follows the Emperor's orders.
- Why doesn't Ben warn Luke that one of the Sith will probobly try to get Luke to join him and betray the other, when it's pretty clear that's what they tend to do?
Ben may not have known that. Or he might have witheld that information because it wouldn't really have mattered. Plus, Luke was probably smart enough to figure it out on his own - I doubt that he didn't know what he was getting into.
- Why no mention at all of a trade federation (ok, it was in the Solo & Lando books...)
I thought they were disbanded once they threw their lot in with the seperatists and started the clone wars? Since they also lost said wars, wouldn't that mean that there's no Trade Federation left? Why talk about them if they're nearly two decades irrelevant?
Yoda being a senior council member,
There was no council, and the council itself never came up because there were more pressing matters for Yoda and Obi-wan to attend to than talking about how they were organised years beforehand.
Luke & Leia's mom being a princess of Naboo
If you want to talk about inconsistencies, how come Leia talks about memories of her mother when she died in childbirth? Presumably, Leia's memories are of her adoptive mother. That's the only time she ever came up in conversation, and neither of them knew any details at all, so they couldn't talk about them. She just wasn't really relevant.
celibacy requirements of Jedi, and it being a major reason for Anakin's downfall
Again, the day-to-day mundane rules of the Jedi Order were hardly relevant to the situation at hand in OT.
A better idea might be not to charge tax on intellectual property until it's actually being exploited for money.
The problem I see with this is simply that it's got the potential to end up being unfair to a lot of artists. They'd have to seriously devalue their property in order to actually afford to pay the tax. In an ideal world, they would then ramp up its value proportional to the income they make off it. The problem is that it's not an ideal world. A big media company discovers this struggling artist that only values their IP at, say, $500. Being the morally bankrupt individuals that we know they are, they could quite possibly look at that as simply the cost of doing business. Rip it off, and the artist can only sue them for damages on $500 worth of property. You can guarantee that if you tried to somehow address this issue, the same big media companies would twist the laws back into their favour, and in the end nothing would change.
Surely the DMCA will only serve to drive people towards the Commons?
This might be the case if Joe Average wasn't an utter moron. The issue here goes further than just government and legislation. The problem is that Joe Sixpack will still continue to buy the stuff. He'll probably bitch and complain a little bit about the inconvenience at some point, but he'll continue to pay for it, validating the media companies' business models and continuing to allow them to make obscene profits and use that money to pass more laws in a vicious cycle.
Never underestimate the stupidity of people in large groups.
I think gone are the days when you could get a few programmers together and churn out a simple innovative game that would sell well.
Maybe in certain genres or game styles. As some markets become inaccessible, other markets emerge.
One of the best counter-examples I can think of is Neopets. Started by a few guys in late 1999. Sold in 2005 to Viacom for $160 million. It's fair to assume that with the 30 million userbase they gathered before selling it they were probably making a pretty fair income on it too (Wikipedia indicates at least $30 million USD revenue per year, though as with anything wikipedia you may want to take that with a grain of salt).
Hopefully Sega aren't as bad to work with as Lucasarts are. I don't want to see another good Obsidian RPG forced out three or four months before it's ready. Knights of the Old Republic 2 would have been a fantastic game had they been allowed to finish it. With all the bugs and missing bits it ended up at the low end of average. Neverwinter Nights 2 is undercooked too.
I think it has to be some kind of graphics trickery that Smilebit were doing. None of the games they produced for Xbox are backwards compatible, and all three did some pretty impressive stuff in the graphics department, especially Panzer Dragoon Orta.
... but it still doesn't play Panzer Dragoon Orta or Jet Set Radio Future, the two games that I still bother to keep my old Xbox around so that I can replay.
JSRF is a first-generation game, it shouldn't have been pushing the Xbox's limits too hard. What on earth were Sega doing to the console that is so hard for MS's 'emulation ninjas' to reproduce?
Australia is intending to replace its aging F-111 fleet with JSF. However there's been a significant amount of resistance to the idea, since the JSF is not able to fill in the same roles that the F-111 currently performs in the Australian Air Force. 'Upgrading' to JSF theoretically will reduce the crippling maintenance costs associated with the F-111, but at the expense of a lot of our strategic strike capabilities.
I wonder whether the US not wanting to play nicely with JSF source code might have further implications on the debate.
Firefly's universe would make an excellent MMO, but there is one line here which worries me:
By standardizing, they can provide a less expensive alternative to the tens of millions of dollars and several years it takes to currently develop an MMO.
I dunno, but when I think 'standardizing' I think 'making everything the same'. Generic. It's a good thing for some things (like data formats), but MMOs are already widely criticized already for often being the exact same mechanics with a different wrapper over the top. Surely 'standardizing' that would make this even worse?
I imagine it's 100% CG. This isn't a Halo 3 trailer, it's a trailer for the Halo franchise in general. There are no less than three Halo games in production - Halo 3, Halo Wars, and whatever it is that Peter Jackson is cooking - and this was designed to advertise them all simultaneously. As it's not a Halo 3 trailer, they don't need to feel constrained into using only Halo 3 in-game graphics.
Does anyone have some information on what they've actually amended? If this is the same legislation that I recall, it was going to be illegal for me to have a modchip in my games consoles so that I could play legitimately purchased import software (they like to gouge us for massive margins on games, if we get them at all). If this is the same legislation, then I want to know if that specific part has been fixed yet or not.
My university started everyone out on C. Having seen some of the horrible code that some students produced even in the final year, I'd say that the problem lies deeper than the language they started out on.
Though I'd hate to have started with Visual Basic all the same.
Slashdot Mirror
The author of TFA seems to have never played a game online in co-op. It's a whole different experience. Cooperative play - especially the way that some games are implementing it now with drop-in/drop-out - is incredibly fun, often more fun than playing alone. You're not playing with random strangers usually either.
Don't forget Michael Jackson in Moonwalker!
Famitsu's 'data' correlates directly to how much money they're paid by the publisher to promote it. You should always take anything in Famitsu with a significant grain of salt, they're not exactly a bastion of journalistic integrity.
You might be waiting a while, since Epic have renamed it to Unreal Tournament 3.
Sony are really a mixed bag. They're usually reasonably good, except for a few rather high-profile proprietary technologies that they've attempted to force onto consumers. I assume you never had the misfortune of owning a Minidisc or MicroMV recorder. On the flipside, our family has a Sony TV from 15 years ago which still works absolutely perfectly. In the same period we've had it, we've gone through around four other (non-Sony) sets.
That said, it's interesting to note that for every dodgy new piece of proprietary tech they've introduced, there have been joint ventures or reasonably open standards that they've introduced which have gone on and done well. Walkman, S/PDIF audio interfaces, the 3.5 inch floppy disk (though arguably you can probably thank Apple for that becoming a standard, rather than Sony)...
Time will tell which side of the line Blu-ray falls.
Yesterday 1up quoted Kojima in an interview saying he was looking at 360 and PC development.
Metal Gear Solid was PC and PS1. MGS2 was Xbox, PC and PS2. The only reason that MGS3 ended up an exclusive was that by that stage the writing was on the wall, and there was really no reason to go multi-platform given the massive install base the PS2 had.
MGS4 will end up being a 6-month PS3 exclusive. Why release for a single system with (by then) a 5-6 million install base when you could release for both of the high-tech platforms and hit a 20+ million install base? Unless Sony has ponied up cash to keep it exclusive or they've somehow purchased Konami, the developer owes their loyalty to whichever platform or platforms which has the most potential profit for the money they spend developing it.
And I wish I could remember that Slashdot does not support bbcode. :(
I bet that [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Rutherfor d]Rutherford[/url] would have been even more annoyed about winning the Chemistry price if he saw this 'research'
Rockstar don't pay him to promote other people's games.
Because they have a population of 1.3 billion people. Even if only a fraction bother to buy games, that's still a huge market and Microsoft would be insane not to give it a go, especially given the way that China has been undergoing a major technological revolution recently. It's a huge emerging market. Launching Xbox 360 in mainland China is clearly an investment into the future, not something they expect to immediately begin to pay off.
'Drip-fed' implies that the games were actually released. Generally speaking, the only viable options for getting any games at all in Australia was to import expensive UK releases or resort to piracy. A real shame, too, because the system had some excellent games.
:(
I still remember my despair at finding my copy of Skies of Arcadia was defective and wouldn't run. I think it was one of the five or so copies we got here. Not that I'm bitter about it or anything.
- How does Vader know Luke is his son? The force? If so, why doesn't he guess about Leia, who he meets before?
:(
A kid of the required age who is strong in the force, hangs out with Obi-wan, and has the name "Skywalker". It's not that much of a jump, is it? Also, I can't remember for sure (only saw Episode III once) but did Anakin actually know he had sired twins? And he does guess in the end, once he realises that there's two of them.
- Why no mention of Vader knowing Luke's family?
What family? Owen and Beru, relatives he only ever met once, in passing, that live on a backwater ball of dirt in the ass end of nowhere? Why would he need to talk about them?
- Why does Ben leave Luke in Tatooine and Leia with the royal family of Alderaan?
Assuming he didn't know there were twins, Obi-wan hid the more important of the pair (probably the one with the most potential) in an obscure spot where he could also lie low and keep an eye on things. As for Leia... sometimes the best hiding place is right infront of your nose.
- Why does Ben say that Vader hunted down all the Jedi, when it's clear the Emperor himself was behind it?
He led the slaughter of all the Jedi in the temple. Additionally it's reasonable to assume that not all the Jedi were picked off in the initial clone attack and formed a resistance, so once he got the trademark suit, he may well have hunted them down one by one. And it was always implied that the Emperor was behind it, since Vader follows the Emperor's orders.
- Why doesn't Ben warn Luke that one of the Sith will probobly try to get Luke to join him and betray the other, when it's pretty clear that's what they tend to do?
Ben may not have known that. Or he might have witheld that information because it wouldn't really have mattered. Plus, Luke was probably smart enough to figure it out on his own - I doubt that he didn't know what he was getting into.
- Why no mention at all of a trade federation (ok, it was in the Solo & Lando books...)
I thought they were disbanded once they threw their lot in with the seperatists and started the clone wars? Since they also lost said wars, wouldn't that mean that there's no Trade Federation left? Why talk about them if they're nearly two decades irrelevant?
Yoda being a senior council member,
There was no council, and the council itself never came up because there were more pressing matters for Yoda and Obi-wan to attend to than talking about how they were organised years beforehand.
Luke & Leia's mom being a princess of Naboo
If you want to talk about inconsistencies, how come Leia talks about memories of her mother when she died in childbirth? Presumably, Leia's memories are of her adoptive mother. That's the only time she ever came up in conversation, and neither of them knew any details at all, so they couldn't talk about them. She just wasn't really relevant.
celibacy requirements of Jedi, and it being a major reason for Anakin's downfall
Again, the day-to-day mundane rules of the Jedi Order were hardly relevant to the situation at hand in OT.
God, I feel like a nerd writing this.
I assumed that the whole SIXAXIS business came from the fact they have those three axes plus the d-pad and two analog sticks.
A better idea might be not to charge tax on intellectual property until it's actually being exploited for money.
The problem I see with this is simply that it's got the potential to end up being unfair to a lot of artists. They'd have to seriously devalue their property in order to actually afford to pay the tax. In an ideal world, they would then ramp up its value proportional to the income they make off it. The problem is that it's not an ideal world. A big media company discovers this struggling artist that only values their IP at, say, $500. Being the morally bankrupt individuals that we know they are, they could quite possibly look at that as simply the cost of doing business. Rip it off, and the artist can only sue them for damages on $500 worth of property. You can guarantee that if you tried to somehow address this issue, the same big media companies would twist the laws back into their favour, and in the end nothing would change.
Surely the DMCA will only serve to drive people towards the Commons?
This might be the case if Joe Average wasn't an utter moron. The issue here goes further than just government and legislation. The problem is that Joe Sixpack will still continue to buy the stuff. He'll probably bitch and complain a little bit about the inconvenience at some point, but he'll continue to pay for it, validating the media companies' business models and continuing to allow them to make obscene profits and use that money to pass more laws in a vicious cycle.
Never underestimate the stupidity of people in large groups.
Maybe now they'll have a bit more success searching for that missing moon landing footage.
I think gone are the days when you could get a few programmers together and churn out a simple innovative game that would sell well.
Maybe in certain genres or game styles. As some markets become inaccessible, other markets emerge.
One of the best counter-examples I can think of is Neopets. Started by a few guys in late 1999. Sold in 2005 to Viacom for $160 million. It's fair to assume that with the 30 million userbase they gathered before selling it they were probably making a pretty fair income on it too (Wikipedia indicates at least $30 million USD revenue per year, though as with anything wikipedia you may want to take that with a grain of salt).
Looks like the first of the games developed with this license will be an Alien RPG deveoped by Obsidian.
Hopefully Sega aren't as bad to work with as Lucasarts are. I don't want to see another good Obsidian RPG forced out three or four months before it's ready. Knights of the Old Republic 2 would have been a fantastic game had they been allowed to finish it. With all the bugs and missing bits it ended up at the low end of average. Neverwinter Nights 2 is undercooked too.
I think it has to be some kind of graphics trickery that Smilebit were doing. None of the games they produced for Xbox are backwards compatible, and all three did some pretty impressive stuff in the graphics department, especially Panzer Dragoon Orta.
... but it still doesn't play Panzer Dragoon Orta or Jet Set Radio Future, the two games that I still bother to keep my old Xbox around so that I can replay.
JSRF is a first-generation game, it shouldn't have been pushing the Xbox's limits too hard. What on earth were Sega doing to the console that is so hard for MS's 'emulation ninjas' to reproduce?
Australia is intending to replace its aging F-111 fleet with JSF. However there's been a significant amount of resistance to the idea, since the JSF is not able to fill in the same roles that the F-111 currently performs in the Australian Air Force. 'Upgrading' to JSF theoretically will reduce the crippling maintenance costs associated with the F-111, but at the expense of a lot of our strategic strike capabilities.
I wonder whether the US not wanting to play nicely with JSF source code might have further implications on the debate.
Firefly's universe would make an excellent MMO, but there is one line here which worries me:
By standardizing, they can provide a less expensive alternative to the tens of millions of dollars and several years it takes to currently develop an MMO.
I dunno, but when I think 'standardizing' I think 'making everything the same'. Generic. It's a good thing for some things (like data formats), but MMOs are already widely criticized already for often being the exact same mechanics with a different wrapper over the top. Surely 'standardizing' that would make this even worse?
I imagine it's 100% CG. This isn't a Halo 3 trailer, it's a trailer for the Halo franchise in general. There are no less than three Halo games in production - Halo 3, Halo Wars, and whatever it is that Peter Jackson is cooking - and this was designed to advertise them all simultaneously. As it's not a Halo 3 trailer, they don't need to feel constrained into using only Halo 3 in-game graphics.
Does anyone have some information on what they've actually amended? If this is the same legislation that I recall, it was going to be illegal for me to have a modchip in my games consoles so that I could play legitimately purchased import software (they like to gouge us for massive margins on games, if we get them at all). If this is the same legislation, then I want to know if that specific part has been fixed yet or not.
My university started everyone out on C. Having seen some of the horrible code that some students produced even in the final year, I'd say that the problem lies deeper than the language they started out on.
Though I'd hate to have started with Visual Basic all the same.