That's not being "cheap", that's being poor. If Japan does things better than China, it's also because they can afford it, they have a lot more money; just compare their GDP per capita. You could as much laugh at every American who fails to live like the Hilton.
Because it looks like a doomsday machine and science doesn't always know what its machines/experiments/discoveries are capable of, like Marie Curie who was unaware of the dangers of radioactivity which caused her death; experimenting means moving in the dark. Besides, this is meant to study black holes and the big bang if I understood correctly, two very powerful, unexplained natural phenomena. When you fiddle with the innermost secrets of nature, there's always a risk it goes out of hand.
And three posts above you'll find a news item saying that science was actually wrong. How reliable it can be!
This article is not about "puzzle games", it's about puzzles within your average action/adventure game. The case of actual puzzle games is much worse, they're quite well on their way to become an extinct genre like beat'em ups and shoot'em ups; games you can only find in indie and homebrew productions, not in the mainstream. Long gone are the days of Puzzle Boy, Boxxle, Adventures of Lolo, Bombuzal, The Brainies, Lemmings (a best-seller at the time) and so many more...
It's not just that George Lucas had cold feet, he's become a bad director, he's lost his creative touch and filmmaking skill. It's no surprise after spending more than 20 years without directing a film or writing a screenplay, if you don't regularly practise a skill it's going to deteriorate, even more as you grow old. He's been taking care of the business-side of things mostly and has gained an assurance in his capacities that is hurtful to the work of a creative, he thinks he's doing a great job and doesn't question himself anymore. Look what he said about a possible new Indiana Jones:
"We can't do it unless I can come up with a good idea, which I haven't."
Anyone can come up with a concept for an Indiana Jones film, it's certainly not what would prevent it from being made. His "good idea" for the Crystal Skull is an alien plot based around an artifact that has proven to be fake:
"In its earliest incarnation, Lucas proposed an all-out alien flick called "Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men From Mars." Spielberg and Ford didn't like that idea, and it took more than a decade of wrangling to come up with a story all three could live with."
God knows what we would have ended up with if Spielberg hadn't tempered Lucas' goofy visions.
I'm not sure that, when they go to the web from their phone, their aim is to chat or post in forums. It's not very convenient to type on a phone. I think they just don't care about those bells and whistles especially for communication and data search. Promotional sites for new video games for instance are usually much more advanced. It may be that Japanese designers prefer to exert their abilities in tried and tested ways, which is also more rewarding at a corporate level.
For some strange reason, quite many Japanese sites, specifically message boards and chat rooms (tcup for instance), are completely outdated. They've been created in the mid or late 90's and never been upgraded since then. The trend might be gradually reversing but it isn't going fast and there doesn't appear to be a major interest in the Web 2.0 (nicovideo.jp is a good Japanese YouTube though). It's quite paradoxical to think in some aspect Japan is so low-tech on the web. But then again the most interesting sites are not always the ones on the cutting-edge...
This is preposterous. Who cares if he called scientology a cult or something else ? He's entitled to his own opinion, he could call any religion a cult or a mass brainwashing illusion if he wanted to, he's not inciting to violence against people, he's trying to raise awareness, that's how freedom of speech goes. At best, what he is doing is making it more difficult for Scientology to gain new followers; well, they'll just have to be more convincing if their purpose is really that pure and honest !
Laws are guidelines for justice but not justice itself, how can anyone be so stupid as to read laws word by word, regardless of the circumtances, without room for interpretation or exception ? To see them wearing V's mask in the video makes the analogy with some of the events depicted in the film all the more eerie.
Milk the cow, milk the cow... its nectar tastes sweet and will make you wealthy. Of course Konami isn't going to end this series, Capcom isn't giving any break to Resident Evil either and Nintendo has no intention to put The Legend of Zelda to rest; these are not flagships anymore, they've become pillar supporting the whole company. They're all too afraid to even try without them because it might collapse on their head, there's no more room for taking risks, it has to pay off immediately and, sadly, they can only count on well-established franchises for that. But who is to blame, consumers for not wearing out or companies for lacking the power to create new charismatic tales and characters ?
The Ninja Gaiden series not story-driven ? I beg to differ. The original one on NES was supported by lengthy cinematics and a rather complex narrative involving an ancestral demon, CIA agents and a quest for revenge. Sure, in the end it came out as a quirky mix of B movie plots but compared to Sega's Shinobi and Taito's Legend of Kage it had a plotline full of twists and turns. Yeah, I know, the 80's are well over.
It's all about the love of money. They're milking the cow as much as possible obviously; one of these days they'll find a way to make a film out of the Silmarillion. They're using the same kind of marketing ploy as the producers of the Harry Potter films, a handy split() function to extend as much as possible what's supposed to be the last usable material of a very profitable series.
Yes, surely, he will. He has already proven he can work with monsters (in all of his films) and small people (*cough* children), that's one step in the right direction !
So basically his life is ruined, even if he honestly tries to redeem myself afterwards, because he'll be forever known as the infamous first criminal to be caught thanks to the almighty Internet.
That's a good point, but I would think emails and chat logs are beyond the jurisdiction of this EU article, it seems to be search engine and search queries specific.
It's true naturally that Google has access to a lot more data than a single random website has, however, no matter how small it is, it could quite easily expand the information gathered on the people who visit. For instance, in some case, by googling an IP, you can see through publically available stats which other sites that one IP has visited. Privacy is always at risk on the Net if an IP is deemed to be an identifier, and that doesn't begin with big corporations.
The referrer field also contains the line from the search engine by which the user came to your site. So if someone types "child porn" and for some reason ends up in your non-malevolent site, you can see his query and his IP.
They're so concerned by the search engines that they seem to forget any website can get search queries and the IPs who performed them just by looking at the referrer field in the server logs. Why would it be less a "threat" for privacy than search engines ?
I don't think House of the Dead, BloodRayne, Dungeon Siege and Postal are many people's favorite games. I haven't seen any of them as films but I wonder if they can compete in terms of lameness with had been done with Street Fighter, Double Dragon and Mortal Kombat in the 90's. No one had gone after the directors as aggressively as some people on the Net are going after Boll though. It's a persona issue here, they just can't stand the guy and there's a rhetorical exchange between him and his Net-based opponents. At least you have to concede he's facing his critics.
Paul Anderson, who's been doing the same game-to-movie stuff as Boll except less actively, doesn't get a tenth of the hatred Boll gets, even though he turned a heavy-weight Japanese franchise such as Resident Evil pretty much into his own happy-crappy little series. And now, as a producer, he's even going to take on Castlevania. It may look like those guys are having fun bathing in mediocrity and making video games look stupid but I think the problem is broader than that, video games are too action-packed and tightly defined to make good films. Proof is, not a single talented director is interested in making films out of games, and when there is finally such a possibility, like Peter Jackson with Halo, whether the director leaves his directorial seat to another person, whether the project is abandoned altogether.
Signing this petition to stop bad video game adaptations to be made is pointless. With or without Boll, they will go on until good directors eventually get interested in the venture, which might never happen. Those who sign the petition, I think, have an old score to settle with Boll.
They should censor foreign athletes too, not just the journalists, to be sure to pocket plenty of gold medails. "You're not allowed to participate, you look like a dissident! Please take example from our hormone-grown and metabolically-challenged athletes who look just so Mao-worthy." I wonder how long before Slashdot is blocked, or is it already?
I didn't even know you could get Safari for Windows ! I just downloaded it, and it looks like I have to thank Mr. Lilly for that useful piece of information. Was he really attacking Apple or promoting the fact their browser is avaialable for Windows too ?
My mom used to say it's the law of seriality; it's often that when you hear someone famous has died then comes another one, and another one, and you end up having a little group of well-known people passing away within a few days or weeks. It happened last year with the death of films directors Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonioni, who both died on July 30, and a famous French actor just before that.
But a lot of people die... immortality is going down the drain and orbituaries are singing in the rain. So far this year.
I just have A Fall of Moondust on my night table (though I admit I'm not to get into it). Along with Asimov and K. Dick, he was THE classic sci-fi author; and he said inspiring things too, he was a bit of a wiseman. But I guess most people will remember him best for what Kubrick did with 2001. Great loss anyway, after Gygax, another icon goes.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not being "cheap", that's being poor. If Japan does things better than China, it's also because they can afford it, they have a lot more money; just compare their GDP per capita. You could as much laugh at every American who fails to live like the Hilton.
Because it looks like a doomsday machine and science doesn't always know what its machines/experiments/discoveries are capable of, like Marie Curie who was unaware of the dangers of radioactivity which caused her death; experimenting means moving in the dark. Besides, this is meant to study black holes and the big bang if I understood correctly, two very powerful, unexplained natural phenomena. When you fiddle with the innermost secrets of nature, there's always a risk it goes out of hand.
And three posts above you'll find a news item saying that science was actually wrong. How reliable it can be!
This article is not about "puzzle games", it's about puzzles within your average action/adventure game. The case of actual puzzle games is much worse, they're quite well on their way to become an extinct genre like beat'em ups and shoot'em ups; games you can only find in indie and homebrew productions, not in the mainstream. Long gone are the days of Puzzle Boy, Boxxle, Adventures of Lolo, Bombuzal, The Brainies, Lemmings (a best-seller at the time) and so many more...
It's not just that George Lucas had cold feet, he's become a bad director, he's lost his creative touch and filmmaking skill. It's no surprise after spending more than 20 years without directing a film or writing a screenplay, if you don't regularly practise a skill it's going to deteriorate, even more as you grow old. He's been taking care of the business-side of things mostly and has gained an assurance in his capacities that is hurtful to the work of a creative, he thinks he's doing a great job and doesn't question himself anymore. Look what he said about a possible new Indiana Jones:
Anyone can come up with a concept for an Indiana Jones film, it's certainly not what would prevent it from being made. His "good idea" for the Crystal Skull is an alien plot based around an artifact that has proven to be fake:
God knows what we would have ended up with if Spielberg hadn't tempered Lucas' goofy visions.
I'm not sure that, when they go to the web from their phone, their aim is to chat or post in forums. It's not very convenient to type on a phone. I think they just don't care about those bells and whistles especially for communication and data search. Promotional sites for new video games for instance are usually much more advanced. It may be that Japanese designers prefer to exert their abilities in tried and tested ways, which is also more rewarding at a corporate level.
For some strange reason, quite many Japanese sites, specifically message boards and chat rooms (tcup for instance), are completely outdated. They've been created in the mid or late 90's and never been upgraded since then. The trend might be gradually reversing but it isn't going fast and there doesn't appear to be a major interest in the Web 2.0 (nicovideo.jp is a good Japanese YouTube though). It's quite paradoxical to think in some aspect Japan is so low-tech on the web. But then again the most interesting sites are not always the ones on the cutting-edge...
This is preposterous. Who cares if he called scientology a cult or something else ? He's entitled to his own opinion, he could call any religion a cult or a mass brainwashing illusion if he wanted to, he's not inciting to violence against people, he's trying to raise awareness, that's how freedom of speech goes. At best, what he is doing is making it more difficult for Scientology to gain new followers; well, they'll just have to be more convincing if their purpose is really that pure and honest !
Laws are guidelines for justice but not justice itself, how can anyone be so stupid as to read laws word by word, regardless of the circumtances, without room for interpretation or exception ? To see them wearing V's mask in the video makes the analogy with some of the events depicted in the film all the more eerie.
Milk the cow, milk the cow... its nectar tastes sweet and will make you wealthy. Of course Konami isn't going to end this series, Capcom isn't giving any break to Resident Evil either and Nintendo has no intention to put The Legend of Zelda to rest; these are not flagships anymore, they've become pillar supporting the whole company. They're all too afraid to even try without them because it might collapse on their head, there's no more room for taking risks, it has to pay off immediately and, sadly, they can only count on well-established franchises for that. But who is to blame, consumers for not wearing out or companies for lacking the power to create new charismatic tales and characters ?
The Ninja Gaiden series not story-driven ? I beg to differ. The original one on NES was supported by lengthy cinematics and a rather complex narrative involving an ancestral demon, CIA agents and a quest for revenge. Sure, in the end it came out as a quirky mix of B movie plots but compared to Sega's Shinobi and Taito's Legend of Kage it had a plotline full of twists and turns. Yeah, I know, the 80's are well over.
It's all about the love of money. They're milking the cow as much as possible obviously; one of these days they'll find a way to make a film out of the Silmarillion. They're using the same kind of marketing ploy as the producers of the Harry Potter films, a handy split() function to extend as much as possible what's supposed to be the last usable material of a very profitable series.
Yes, surely, he will. He has already proven he can work with monsters (in all of his films) and small people (*cough* children), that's one step in the right direction !
They have to name the first spacecraft using this sail Perkele 1. Or maybe Vittu 1. (local joke)
Can't type. Must have early dementia. No wonder I got caught so easily.
So basically his life is ruined, even if he honestly tries to redeem myself afterwards, because he'll be forever known as the infamous first criminal to be caught thanks to the almighty Internet.
That's a good point, but I would think emails and chat logs are beyond the jurisdiction of this EU article, it seems to be search engine and search queries specific.
It's true naturally that Google has access to a lot more data than a single random website has, however, no matter how small it is, it could quite easily expand the information gathered on the people who visit. For instance, in some case, by googling an IP, you can see through publically available stats which other sites that one IP has visited. Privacy is always at risk on the Net if an IP is deemed to be an identifier, and that doesn't begin with big corporations.
The referrer field also contains the line from the search engine by which the user came to your site. So if someone types "child porn" and for some reason ends up in your non-malevolent site, you can see his query and his IP.
Maybe in his old age Lucas would be a better lawyer than he is a director.
They're so concerned by the search engines that they seem to forget any website can get search queries and the IPs who performed them just by looking at the referrer field in the server logs. Why would it be less a "threat" for privacy than search engines ?
I don't think House of the Dead, BloodRayne, Dungeon Siege and Postal are many people's favorite games. I haven't seen any of them as films but I wonder if they can compete in terms of lameness with had been done with Street Fighter, Double Dragon and Mortal Kombat in the 90's. No one had gone after the directors as aggressively as some people on the Net are going after Boll though. It's a persona issue here, they just can't stand the guy and there's a rhetorical exchange between him and his Net-based opponents. At least you have to concede he's facing his critics.
Paul Anderson, who's been doing the same game-to-movie stuff as Boll except less actively, doesn't get a tenth of the hatred Boll gets, even though he turned a heavy-weight Japanese franchise such as Resident Evil pretty much into his own happy-crappy little series. And now, as a producer, he's even going to take on Castlevania. It may look like those guys are having fun bathing in mediocrity and making video games look stupid but I think the problem is broader than that, video games are too action-packed and tightly defined to make good films. Proof is, not a single talented director is interested in making films out of games, and when there is finally such a possibility, like Peter Jackson with Halo, whether the director leaves his directorial seat to another person, whether the project is abandoned altogether.
Signing this petition to stop bad video game adaptations to be made is pointless. With or without Boll, they will go on until good directors eventually get interested in the venture, which might never happen. Those who sign the petition, I think, have an old score to settle with Boll.
They should censor foreign athletes too, not just the journalists, to be sure to pocket plenty of gold medails. "You're not allowed to participate, you look like a dissident! Please take example from our hormone-grown and metabolically-challenged athletes who look just so Mao-worthy." I wonder how long before Slashdot is blocked, or is it already?
I didn't even know you could get Safari for Windows ! I just downloaded it, and it looks like I have to thank Mr. Lilly for that useful piece of information. Was he really attacking Apple or promoting the fact their browser is avaialable for Windows too ?
The idiot right above your topic did too.
My mom used to say it's the law of seriality; it's often that when you hear someone famous has died then comes another one, and another one, and you end up having a little group of well-known people passing away within a few days or weeks. It happened last year with the death of films directors Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonioni, who both died on July 30, and a famous French actor just before that.
But a lot of people die... immortality is going down the drain and orbituaries are singing in the rain. So far this year.
I just have A Fall of Moondust on my night table (though I admit I'm not to get into it). Along with Asimov and K. Dick, he was THE classic sci-fi author; and he said inspiring things too, he was a bit of a wiseman. But I guess most people will remember him best for what Kubrick did with 2001. Great loss anyway, after Gygax, another icon goes.
If you want to see some fast-spreading fungus that destroys food and threatens to wipe out humanity, go look into my fridge.