The courts are on the side of whichever party has more money. In this case, the Video Games industry is worth $7 billion US, though sales in Louisiana are I imagine only a small fraction of that.
From memory, the two KotOR games used a heavily modified Neverwinter Nights engine. If they do a new one, I really, really hope they can use a new engine. Not because the graphics began to look a bit dated, but because of the ludicrously high loading times. Compare them against most PS2 RPGs and the loading times are an order of magnitude slower in KotOR, and that's without taking into account the auto-save time. It was really frustrating when you'd need to walk through two or three areas to get somewhere, and you would spend more time watching the loading screen than you were playing the game itself. The areas never even seemed to be big enough to warrant the long loading times, either. A more optimised engine could probably have handled much larger areas, or even gotten some kind of streaming / load-on-demand setup working.
I don't know about where you live, but Honda has never been synonymous with quality here.
Additionally, Matsushita have this incredibly annoying trend recently of releasing Laptop DVD drives which do extra CSS and Region Checking in hardware, and even libdvdcss-based software like VLC can't play DVDs region-free with them. The firmware is difficult to get hold of and very difficult to hack, but the drives are being used everywhere in laptops because they're so cheap.
Actually, I guess your 'just like Sony' comment is right on the mark.
Given the trends recently in copyright term extensions and law changes (read: tightening the thumbscrews) it won't really matter, because those Archaeologists a century or more from now will probably be hunted down and shot for even thinking about trying to access digital media without the copyright holder's permission.
Even assuming that the future is not some 1984-esque dystopia, there are a number of large, annoying and extremely rich and vocal organisations which would be very much against the concept of storing a lot of our data for extended periods in an accessible, searchable and unencrypted format. Google already ran into this problem with their plan to archive books. The only data that could be archived like this at the moment without someone complaining about copyright violation is pure facts and figures and anything that's been put in the public domain. And unfortunately, a lot of this sort of information is not really what Archaeologists look for. The tangible aspects of our society's culture are things like art, writing and music, all of which are coincidentally copyright protected (ostensibly to encourage the development of those cultural aspects by allowing those who expend effort to create them to be able to be compensated for their work).
So in short, either the publishers of art, music, movies and books need to all band together behind this initiative or copyright law in itself needs to change. And since neither of those look likely to happen, I think this whole archival concept can be written off as unfeasible. After all, why allow a hypothetical future generation to have insight into our culture if you can make piles of money instead?
A while back it was pointed out that they were on the verge of passing legislation that made modchips for games consoles illegal (as they break copy protection) even when they were used only for imports. I believe simply possessing one had a $6,000 AUD fine associated with it. Which would mean that I owe the Australian government about $18,000 at the moment. Is this another ugly face of the same legislation, or are they simply trying to take as many civil liberties as they can before Christmas?
The windows 95 version of TIE Fighter also has an updated engine (the X-Wing vs TIE Fighter one).
Unfortunately, it also lacks iMUSE (or I can't get it to work at any rate) which provided the awesome context-sensitive music. It's just not the same when playing without that.:(
Computer Associates rebranded to simply 'CA' about a year ago. Since everyone was referring to them as C.A. anyway, they decided not to fight it. Also to subtly distance themselves from the subject of TFA.
According to Joystiq your number is off by a factor of ten. The 10,000 limited editions were apparently all preordered very quickly, too. And that's just preorders for the limited edition bundle. I think it's going to do better than you're making out. Nowhere near enough to crack the Japanese market, but they probably don't need to - the US and European markets are bigger, and if they can maintain a large hold on those markets, then having a smaller presence in Japan won't really hurt them that much.
I really wish someone would tell Peter Molyneux to shut up for a bit. It seems like every couple of weeks I see an article about him tooting his own whistle in the media somehow, and it's starting to get irritating. Maybe I'd care if he'd actually made a game that came close to meeting expectations in the last decade or so.
It is big enough. The three extra discs are special features stuff. One of them is apparently slated to be a 'making of' special video DVD, much like what was included with the Halo 2 collector's edition. The other two, from what I can make out, are a Red vs Blue video DVD, and a DVD with a pile of material from the other two games in the trilogy. You might argue that those last two could be combined (the first is to be included with the 'collector's edition' release), but these things cost a few cents to press, and it looks better to consumers as well. Three whole DVDs filled with special features.
Personally I don't think that the capacity problem is going to be an issue for at least another few years. Most games will be dual platform, and that implies you have to work to the lowest common denominator (X360). By the time developers really begin to chafe under the restrictions of a DVD9, it will be around about late 2008 / early 2009, and MS will be 9-12 months away from releasing their third console, which I imagine will have HD-DVD.
It provides stimulation to an extra sense. Without it, games can only stimulate the player's visual and auditory senses. They can see and hear the game. Rumble may be pretty rudimentary, but it adds tactile stimulation that is not usually there. In broad terms, by increasing the number of senses you can stimulate in a player, you increase the immersion into the game experience, which theoretically makes it more enjoyable.
I'm surprised no one seems to have pointed this out. If MS have their own Antivirus product, then it will require there to be problems with Windows' security to guard against. There's a huge internal conflict of interest here - if they improve windows' security, then they'll end up screwing themselves out of money by making their own product irrelevant.
Given Sony's track record this past year or so, Kaz should probably concentrate on getting the 500,000 or so he's promised into stores before he starts promising more than that.
And Atari is in a bad financial situation at the moment, having failed to produce a big hit game in quite a while, and generally have been churning out crap.
Maybe TFA was actually on to something, after all?
I was able to place my preorder back just after E3, though apparently they were offering preorders before then - apparently Australia is different.
However, I pretty much went against the crowd this weekend: I went and canceled my order. I refuse to play silly-buggers with Nintendo's retarded regioning policy for yet another console generation, and I certainly don't want my Virtual Console game selection to be limited to what was available in PAL back in the 8/16-bit era (which is what they're apparently doing). Not to mention the whole waiting-for-months-for-an-inferior-product (at a greater price) shenanigans. PAL Hell indeed. I'll be importing one once US stock availability stabilizes next year.
It's actually kind of ironic that Nintendo have the least progressive stance on this issue, and that Sony appear to be the only ones actually looking out for international customers.
So, how much are Take Two paying Jack Thompson at the moment in order to get him to stir up shit to drum up their sales figures? The whole thing seems kind of suspicious to me. It certainly wouldn't be the first time someone's been paid off to act as an 'enemy' of another person in order to help drum up support and interest...
If this article proves to actually be true - and I'm taking it with a rather large grain of salt - is it possible that we might be able to turn off region coding? At the moment I'm refusing to buy a Wii because of the regioning, especially on the virtual console games. PAL games from the 8/16-bit era were usually absolutely horrible.
... we will be needing to ban crowbars. After all, they can be used to break locks so that people can steal things! We must enact new legislation straight away to make sure that crowbars and any other tool that might be used for crime is banned. After all, it's the creators of the tool that are criminals, not the people who used it to break the law.
Slashdot Mirror
The courts are on the side of whichever party has more money. In this case, the Video Games industry is worth $7 billion US, though sales in Louisiana are I imagine only a small fraction of that.
From memory, the two KotOR games used a heavily modified Neverwinter Nights engine. If they do a new one, I really, really hope they can use a new engine. Not because the graphics began to look a bit dated, but because of the ludicrously high loading times. Compare them against most PS2 RPGs and the loading times are an order of magnitude slower in KotOR, and that's without taking into account the auto-save time. It was really frustrating when you'd need to walk through two or three areas to get somewhere, and you would spend more time watching the loading screen than you were playing the game itself. The areas never even seemed to be big enough to warrant the long loading times, either. A more optimised engine could probably have handled much larger areas, or even gotten some kind of streaming / load-on-demand setup working.
I don't know about where you live, but Honda has never been synonymous with quality here.
Additionally, Matsushita have this incredibly annoying trend recently of releasing Laptop DVD drives which do extra CSS and Region Checking in hardware, and even libdvdcss-based software like VLC can't play DVDs region-free with them. The firmware is difficult to get hold of and very difficult to hack, but the drives are being used everywhere in laptops because they're so cheap.
Actually, I guess your 'just like Sony' comment is right on the mark.
Given the trends recently in copyright term extensions and law changes (read: tightening the thumbscrews) it won't really matter, because those Archaeologists a century or more from now will probably be hunted down and shot for even thinking about trying to access digital media without the copyright holder's permission.
Even assuming that the future is not some 1984-esque dystopia, there are a number of large, annoying and extremely rich and vocal organisations which would be very much against the concept of storing a lot of our data for extended periods in an accessible, searchable and unencrypted format. Google already ran into this problem with their plan to archive books. The only data that could be archived like this at the moment without someone complaining about copyright violation is pure facts and figures and anything that's been put in the public domain. And unfortunately, a lot of this sort of information is not really what Archaeologists look for. The tangible aspects of our society's culture are things like art, writing and music, all of which are coincidentally copyright protected (ostensibly to encourage the development of those cultural aspects by allowing those who expend effort to create them to be able to be compensated for their work).
So in short, either the publishers of art, music, movies and books need to all band together behind this initiative or copyright law in itself needs to change. And since neither of those look likely to happen, I think this whole archival concept can be written off as unfeasible. After all, why allow a hypothetical future generation to have insight into our culture if you can make piles of money instead?
A while back it was pointed out that they were on the verge of passing legislation that made modchips for games consoles illegal (as they break copy protection) even when they were used only for imports. I believe simply possessing one had a $6,000 AUD fine associated with it. Which would mean that I owe the Australian government about $18,000 at the moment. Is this another ugly face of the same legislation, or are they simply trying to take as many civil liberties as they can before Christmas?
The windows 95 version of TIE Fighter also has an updated engine (the X-Wing vs TIE Fighter one).
:(
Unfortunately, it also lacks iMUSE (or I can't get it to work at any rate) which provided the awesome context-sensitive music. It's just not the same when playing without that.
Computer Associates rebranded to simply 'CA' about a year ago. Since everyone was referring to them as C.A. anyway, they decided not to fight it. Also to subtly distance themselves from the subject of TFA.
According to Joystiq your number is off by a factor of ten. The 10,000 limited editions were apparently all preordered very quickly, too. And that's just preorders for the limited edition bundle. I think it's going to do better than you're making out. Nowhere near enough to crack the Japanese market, but they probably don't need to - the US and European markets are bigger, and if they can maintain a large hold on those markets, then having a smaller presence in Japan won't really hurt them that much.
I really wish someone would tell Peter Molyneux to shut up for a bit. It seems like every couple of weeks I see an article about him tooting his own whistle in the media somehow, and it's starting to get irritating. Maybe I'd care if he'd actually made a game that came close to meeting expectations in the last decade or so.
It is big enough. The three extra discs are special features stuff. One of them is apparently slated to be a 'making of' special video DVD, much like what was included with the Halo 2 collector's edition. The other two, from what I can make out, are a Red vs Blue video DVD, and a DVD with a pile of material from the other two games in the trilogy. You might argue that those last two could be combined (the first is to be included with the 'collector's edition' release), but these things cost a few cents to press, and it looks better to consumers as well. Three whole DVDs filled with special features.
Personally I don't think that the capacity problem is going to be an issue for at least another few years. Most games will be dual platform, and that implies you have to work to the lowest common denominator (X360). By the time developers really begin to chafe under the restrictions of a DVD9, it will be around about late 2008 / early 2009, and MS will be 9-12 months away from releasing their third console, which I imagine will have HD-DVD.
It provides stimulation to an extra sense. Without it, games can only stimulate the player's visual and auditory senses. They can see and hear the game. Rumble may be pretty rudimentary, but it adds tactile stimulation that is not usually there. In broad terms, by increasing the number of senses you can stimulate in a player, you increase the immersion into the game experience, which theoretically makes it more enjoyable.
TFA has some tiny images that barely pass as thumbnails. You can get the actual 'detailed panoramas' from NASA directly.
I'm surprised no one seems to have pointed this out. If MS have their own Antivirus product, then it will require there to be problems with Windows' security to guard against. There's a huge internal conflict of interest here - if they improve windows' security, then they'll end up screwing themselves out of money by making their own product irrelevant.
Just as well that Adobe have released a beta of Flash 9 for Linux today then.
Given Sony's track record this past year or so, Kaz should probably concentrate on getting the 500,000 or so he's promised into stores before he starts promising more than that.
NIN is also mentioned in TFA, but this is slashdot so you're excused for not actually reading it.
... do I "win $20"?
TFA is actually about the UK government trying to prevent this directive from being passed, so the whole world hasn't quite gone insane yet.
On another note, it seems very interesting, timing-wise, that this would come up so soon after Google acquires Youtube.
And Atari is in a bad financial situation at the moment, having failed to produce a big hit game in quite a while, and generally have been churning out crap.
Maybe TFA was actually on to something, after all?
I was able to place my preorder back just after E3, though apparently they were offering preorders before then - apparently Australia is different.
However, I pretty much went against the crowd this weekend: I went and canceled my order. I refuse to play silly-buggers with Nintendo's retarded regioning policy for yet another console generation, and I certainly don't want my Virtual Console game selection to be limited to what was available in PAL back in the 8/16-bit era (which is what they're apparently doing). Not to mention the whole waiting-for-months-for-an-inferior-product (at a greater price) shenanigans. PAL Hell indeed. I'll be importing one once US stock availability stabilizes next year.
It's actually kind of ironic that Nintendo have the least progressive stance on this issue, and that Sony appear to be the only ones actually looking out for international customers.
So, how much are Take Two paying Jack Thompson at the moment in order to get him to stir up shit to drum up their sales figures? The whole thing seems kind of suspicious to me. It certainly wouldn't be the first time someone's been paid off to act as an 'enemy' of another person in order to help drum up support and interest...
If this article proves to actually be true - and I'm taking it with a rather large grain of salt - is it possible that we might be able to turn off region coding? At the moment I'm refusing to buy a Wii because of the regioning, especially on the virtual console games. PAL games from the 8/16-bit era were usually absolutely horrible.
... we will be needing to ban crowbars. After all, they can be used to break locks so that people can steal things! We must enact new legislation straight away to make sure that crowbars and any other tool that might be used for crime is banned. After all, it's the creators of the tool that are criminals, not the people who used it to break the law.
Nintendo has it right. The GBA and DS are region-free.
Nintendo has it wrong. The Wii is region-locked, X360 leaves it up to the publishers, and PS3 is region free.
The winner of the medicine prize got it for ground breaking research into curing intractible hiccups by sticking his finger up a patient's anus.
He also suggests that sex is the most potent cure for hiccups, but that won't really affect anyone on slashdot.