I'm surprised that, since this is Slashdot, there weren't 300 "Zelda isn't an RPG because..." comments after this.
I am also surprised by two other things. I am surprised that despite the dozens of previews and reviews, you act like that you didn't know that Deadspace:Extraction was a rail shooter until after you bought it. Many of the previews talked about it trying to reach the same demographic as Resident Evil:The Umbrella Chronicles (which is also a rail shooter that is on Wii because Capcom's newest offering at the time, RE5 wasn't being developed for Wii). I am also surprised that you could pretend to believably compare the state of PC gaming to Wii gaming given the differences in demographics and control style. There is no reasonable way anyone can expect a mature title from a Nintendo game that wasn't shoehorned in from somewhere else, because on other systems, PC especially, the actual state of development is genuinely mature. Developers making a game for Wii are trying not to take a bath in red ink at this point. On PC, we've had over twenty years to develop what works and what sells. Nintendo, on the other hand, is constantly changing the playing field for itself. It makes it easier for them to profit, but it leaves third-party developers scrambling to make things work every singe development cycle. Maybe if a mouse and keyboard (not that you couldn't connect a USB keyboard) were standard you could have resource management sims then. I thought those didn't get done on anything you hook to a TV becase you can't read enough information on 480 lines of resolution.
I'd bet you're more likely to find mature titles on Wiiware than on a physical disk due the lower cost of entry for developers. Could you argue that "World of Goo" is a mature game, since we've had physics since before 1687?
Nice handle, oddly appropriate in this case. Do you even have any contact with children?
(Don't answer that - it was rhetorical and I don't really want to know. Ask yourself what kind of kids you interact with and decide for yourself.)
Granted, helicopter parents may totally funnel children into too much structured activity, but there are still lots of kids that have plenty of creativity. I don't see any problem with crayons yet, or Play-Doh, as long as the situation keeps kids from the sort of one-upmanship that would preclude it. If one older kid brings a DS or a PSP with him to a group, it can distract kids from playing with the simple stuff for a while. On the other hand, if that's what the group is doing, (crayons or clay or even blocks!) I've yet to see a real shortage of creativity. My oldest can be a problem for the a similar reason - he's almost always got a Bionicle or two with him, and not a spec, out-of-the-package one. Most of his Bionicles are borrowing heads and weapons from other guys, changed color schemes, extra weapons built with standard LEGO or Technic parts, or hybrids.
If you doubt the creativity of kids, try listening to them. I hope you will be pleasantly surprised, or maybe you have a bunch of dumbbells in your neighborhood.
As far as the parents go - parents that play video games are probably still in the minority. Most of the parents that my wife and I know IRL watch a lot of "Big Brother" and "American Idol" and "Brooke Knows Best" and "Dancing with the Geico Cavemen Spectacular". Most of my serious video game playing adult friends fall into the "Kids? I haven't found a spouse I can tolerate yet!" category. I didn't count people who only played Wii sports for two hours at a party.
Another thing that strikes me is that you can't have a class of 20-30 kids in school and expect all of them to whip out dogs in a spaceship to the moon or a cow with wheels on it with their 8-pack of Crayolas. Some kids aren't going to be at the same place intellectually, some kids aren't going to have the same cultural context, some kids are only going to draw pictures about stuff they learned in Sunday school because their parents won't let them watch TV or play with the heathens next door, some kids don't read and will only generate TV related imagery, and so on. Kids are creative, but they're not all going to be at the same place - and I'm basing a lot of this on my own formative crayon time in the 70's. This is not a new problem. Do you suppose that James Naismith and Johannes Gutenberg had to listen to crap from city leaders about how basketball was keeping kids from being creative when playing outside with a ball and the printing press kept kids from embellishing their folk tales and oral history?
To your two points - probably not, and no. I could see how you might think this is a problem. Input lag of LCD monitors probably don't contribute to the problem with these games not selling. I am certain that Guitar Hero 2 includes a calibration screen where you could completely correct for lag. (Oddly enough, Guitar Hero 3 either does not have that or put it someplace hard for me to find...) I would assume that Rock Band does also, since Harmonix made GH2 (but not GH3 and up) and Rock Band. As for the CRT monitors not suffering from that problem, that is not always the case. I have a Samsung wide format CRT TV, and with my PS2 hooked up via component cable and Rock Band 2 running in Progressive/Widescreen, the correction is usually around 65. I assume that number is ms, but it could be some made-up metric. Hooked up to a standard CRT with composite cables, the correction is 0. As usual, Your Mileage May Vary, This was performed with guitarists on a closed course, I may have a crap TV, etc.
I will second wilby's comment and say that Electricians are not the problem. Any licensed contractor that's worth his salt will know what his capabilities are and act accordingly. The BICSI standards have been in place for a long time, and BICSI has done a great job getting the word out to both electricians and low voltage contractors about how to do things to industry standard. If someone wires CAT5 like it's something else, then you have a dumbass problem, not an electrician problem. All of the jack vendors have done a great job disseminating information about how to do CAT5, and several have certified installer programs aimed at getting people putting together a system, not just wires. If field personnel cannot avail themselves with current information then I wouldn't even trust them to put in a fluorescent dimmer or a thermostat made in the last ten years.
With this, and the RIAA stuff, what I'd really like to see is the punishment be some combination of actual replacement cost, reimbursement of documented legal fees, and community service helping out IP enforcement in some capacity. I'm tired of hearing about these insane unjustifiable damages with the sole intent of burdening the defendant far beyond their financial capability. If the defendant had $30K laying around, he could theoretically start a legitimate business instead of getting caught with the shady one. Is it too much to ask that people actually know in advance what the punishment is instead of finding out how many zeroes go on the end of the damage figure by the jury or judge's roulette wheel spin?
What's worse with this particular case is that since Call of Duty 3 XBox has been out for a while we're only talking about a $30 replacement cost, and the actual impact on Activision's initial investment is lower than had the guy been pirating CoD4. (If he was pirating CoD3:Wii, then we're talking $50 RC and I presume that was just a port and not a rebuilt game.) That makes $150,000 seem pretty crazy. The other $100,000 fines make me even more nervous, since TFA talks about some of them not having representation. As much as lawyers may give us the willies, not having them in some cases is a lot worse.
Did the game that ran faster on WINE use OpenGL? Any other clues as to why it might happen occasionally that way as opposed to the other?
Anyway, I'll admit I'm a Linux newbie, since I've only run knoppix and Ubuntu a little - and I mostly had a knoppix boot CD around to fix busted Windows machines. I'm pleased with how my Ubuntu 8 machine runs now, and I've been thinking about getting some flavor of Quake running on it, just to make sure I know how to get it to go. Surely waiting for Google to do in-browser games can't be the only way for Linux to make inroads with the gamer community. Purely based on my limited personal experience with only two Linux flavors, I would have to think that games should run a lot faster on a Linux box just because of the lower system overhead (which is what I think you're getting at). Knowing that, why haven't more gamers rallied for Linux versions? Is it purely the difficulty of the install that would keep developers away? I know it's not assets, so that narrows it down to executables and libraries. After a while, publishers would amass a lot of the libraries they would need, so then it's just compiling more than one executable at that point. Right?
Seriously, this perplexes me. If Linux makes for a faster machine with the same hardware, what's the holdup? I don't know if 'Google to the Rescue' is the answer.
1) You're right, the RIAA does not correctly understand that piracy does not equal lost sales, but they try to impact any and all users as if that were the truth.
2) I don't have anything against Wii homebrew, but I wouldn't be willing to chance running legitimately purchased Virtual Console games off the SD card via homebrew if a Nintendo update nuked them because it thought I was being bad.
I really do hope that people are successful making their own homebrew games and that works out long-term. I still don't like Nintendo's overly slow implementation of the SD cards and obligatorily running everything from system memory , and that's why I'd prefer Nintendo have a consumer-ready solution. Don't forget, what we learn about hardware here isn't just for us to use personally. Presuming that we are all technology professionals here (another gross oversimplification, I'm sure) we don't have to just use technology for ourselves. We have to be able to support it for others. If something works well, we suggest it to others because we won't get called over there to fix it. If it's going to take a bit of work, both during setup and continually during operation, it's not usually worth recommending except to the most savvy of our clients.
3) I have made gross generalizations about Bittorrent that seem disparaging, but not about digital distribution in general. Didn't I point out that the XBLA and PSN models work fine, since they have adequate storage of a sufficient speed to make those work? I still find Bittorrent a waste of time for reasons I've already stated. Yes, I do know that there are other legal ways to get un-DRM'd content - I don't hear anyone at work asking me about the Amazon music store, for example. I would guess that's because they don't know how to get Amazon stuff on their iPod (even if it's trivial.) Most of them bought iPods and use iTunes and don't have to ask anyone anything until they drop them in the sink.
4) P.S. That's High Horse, and yes, I'm getting off now.
Fine. You win. Is that what you wanted to hear?
You can call me a luddite since I can't find any legitimate use for BitTorrent. You can call me a luddite for still using CD's because I hate the way pop music is mixed these days for iTunes and earbuds. You can beat me up as much as you feel is necessary for respecting the rights of copyright holders. You can trash me publicly for trying to hold on to some fragment of my progeny's childhood. Go ahead.
Umm... No, I don't work for the RIAA. You may not like the law, but I would beseech you to respect the law.
I understand digital distribution is the future, but we're not quite there yet on the Wii.
iTunes works just fine, but you'll tell me that Steve Jobs is a money-grubbing ogre feeding off of the table scraps of the record companies. iTunes passes the Grandma test of technology, though. I haven't used iTunes for anything except a podcast manager, but I can see that it's easy to use. (I don't even own an iPod!) XBox Live and PSN are decent models for digital distribution, too - but those machines have hard drives! So, to re-iterate my point:
I thought that the Wii had a way to make digital distribution better, play things from the SD card. If that's really not possible/practical, then I am going to wait until Nintendo delivers something that's easier to deal with instead of doing the pirate thing so I don't inspire bad ethical practices amongst my children.
FYI, there's no Hannah Montana here, but likely because I only have male children. Yes, corporate rock still sucks. However, it would be difficult for me to say no to Hot Wheels or Lego, which you may feel is more corporate oppression, but I don't. We can make music in our house, we do that. I can't manufacture Legos myself, I would be hard pressed to make building blocks from scratch, and it would be a little much to ask me to make an open-source Zelda game from scratch in my spare time that was even one millionth as good as The Ocarina of Time or Twilight Princess.
As far as Bittorrent goes, I had it installed for a while, and didn't find anything that I couldn't get some other quicker legitimate way.
Back to the SD card - yes, the slot is slow and I discovered that backing up save games which are quite small compared to some of the Virtual Console games. All the more reason not to do any more writes to the card than you have to. I presumed (perhaps incorrectly) that it takes less time to read the data straight from the SD card than it would to make room in system memory by moving stuff out to an SD card, and then write the new stuff to system memory.
Seriously, even if Nintendo made you put some sort of Nintendo brand SD card in it that had some hidden unreadable-by-PC sector in it or some hash that uniquely identified the user some other way I would be happy to do this. I'm not even interested in doing this the pirate way. Right now, I'm not going to get any downloadable games. If they could just make the legitimate way simple enough, I could be happy with it.
I'm sure I'll get branded a fanboy for this, no worse than getting modded up for being a snitch for Nintendo, anyway.
Oh, I remember the other reason why I'm not going to do this the pirate way besides my unbridled fanboyism. I have an impressionable child in my house that still thinks music and movies come on disks, and not from Bittorrent, and I'd like to keep it that way for as long as possible.
Eh? This is Quake 3 Arena, right? Pentium 90 and 16 megs of RAM were Quake 1, not Q3A. Also, I don't think it's quite as bad as you think, having the thing as a plugin. Have you tried playing Off-Road Velociraptor Safari? Perhaps not, since there's no Linux version of the Unity Web player... Anyway I still expect that Carmack's built some similar (hopefully better) framework as a game environment.
that there is no such thing as a bad commercial. Back when I was newer here... funny, I don't see it in my history...Anyway, I got told that if I didn't understand a commercial or the mechanism whereby the commercial was supposed to work was so transparent to me as to be laughable, it's not because it's a bad commercial - it's because I'm not who the commercial is targeted to.
Mind you, I was told that by that "A.C." guy, and most of the rest of his response was inflammatory, but I have grown up a little after having received that beatdown.
The only conclusion I can draw from having watched the Jerry & Bill show, is either they're not marketing to me, so I'm free to go get another copy of Hardy Heron, or there must be another part to the commercial that we haven't seen yet and this first commercial is just warming us up to the dynamic between our two characters.
(Oops. It's after 11. I must go mindlessly buy everything they advertise on Adult Swim.)
As a resident of Florida, and one of the people who called Nintendo about this when the Power Players started showing up in mall kiosks, I think I can reasonably say something about this.
First, I called Nintendo about this at least five years ago - probably longer. Perhaps the older games were fresher in my mind at the time.
Two, it's not just the content of the cartridge. The plastic joysticks are recasts of the Nintendo 64 controller and the Sega Genesis controller. Even if an eight year old kid couldn't name all of the pirated games on the ROM inside that machine, he would probably recognize the N64 controller. At the time that those were initially out, the Wii was not out yet, and lots of people were still playing their N64's (including myself). Oddly enough, I didn't call Sega.
Three, if the seller didn't know that they contained illegally loaded games, how could he have any reasonable expectation of selling them? Generic games don't move big numbers unless they're preloaded on a cell phone.
Maybe it was just obvious to me because I'm a fanboy, but the Power Player machine is one of the more clear-cut copyright violations that I've ever seen openly sold in stores. Sure, I'd expect this sort of thing sold at the Flea Market Mall in the low-rent part of town, but not in the big Simon malls right before Christmas. Sure, I bristle a little bit about GI Joe and Power Ranger knockoffs at the dollar store, but it never made me actually dial the phone and rat someone out. I'm now mad that Amazon is selling them - but this goes back to the fact that Nintendo (or whoever) shouldn't be going after some dude in Florida as a long term solution. If the problem was actually to be solved, the appropriate authority would work on preventing their import in the first place. We can't stop China from making them, since I get the feeling that copyright laws work differently there. My gut feeling is dude in Florida committed some worse crime, and this article is media spin/plea bargain.
In addition to the aforementioned Bruce Campbell and the savory plot points, it is also directed by Don Coscarelli. He was the director that brought us the Phantasm movies, and the not-quite-like-Andre-Norton-did-it-but-still-an-amusing-movie The Beastmaster.
In general, at this point, I would be willing to say that I enjoy a sincere low-budget production over a self-inflated, egotistical one. If Lucas was going to make a Mutt movie, perhaps we should make him use a 16mm Bell & Howell with black & white film and a smaller crew. Then he could see what he was really made of. Let him shoot little serialized 6 minute shorts and they can show them before Spielberg's features.
For every puzzle that one used to have to hand-draw a map for, there would now be a strategy guide brimming with maps at your local Gamestop that you would be derided for not purchasing when you picked up your pre-order.
For every secret code that one used to have to calculate the checksum for, the internet now leaks out all of the codes for the game within hours of it being on store shelves except for the developer code for checking the build version number that they can claim is the 'one more secret' to find.
For every fetch-quest and sequence break, some obsessive fan will write a FAQ.
Honestly, I thought that the reason they put tough puzzles in adventure games was so they could sell strategy guides. If you make it too easy, it's just a thing to do in the game, and no one needs to buy the guide. If you make it too hard and don't leak the answers, people lose interest in the game or don't finish in time to buy the new one.
To be fair, I only found the black dot in Adventure (2600) because I was told that it existed and the bridge was required. I only finished Indiana Jones (2600) because one of the older guys in band had figured out the shovel and parachute parts. I never did see the guy's initials in Indy. These happened before strategy guides. Playing around with Nintendo passwords happened before strategy guides. The business has changed again, and I don't think anyone will be drawing maps by hand.
Corners first, when initially stumbled upon by accidentally solving the corners, does seem rather obvious. Many of the people that were fast in the early days of cubing were using corners first solutions. Any of us that were trying to make funny patterns on the cube were familiar with moving groups of edges around that didn't disturb the corners. Also, the easiest move to flip edges left everything else undisturbed, and flipped one edge on the top layer and three in the middle layer. (That would be RERERERE.) These things combined to make corners first commonplace.
As someone who still carries a cube around, I would have to say that you can still be well under a minute with a corners first solution, and not have to memorize as many routines (15-20 tops) as someone using the more efficient Fridrich F2L solution (76 much longer routines minimum) not to mention the additional difficulty of having to locate two cubes at a time for corner-edge pairs. This is, as a task, rather like human computing. Do you stick with a short program that's less error prone, or do you write a more complicated one that hogs more memory in the hope of getting it done a few cycles sooner? I'm surprised at how many so-called 'nerds' on this thread disregard the cube as some sort of frustrating toy that can't be done except by paint or sticker removal (especially when disassembly is more reliable:P) instead of wanting to understand the behavior of groups and physically grasping algorithm efficiency. Cudos to KokorHekks for solving it himself!
They (Pick a they. I guess it depends on which tinfoil helmet you're wearing.) don't want physical distribution, because it's expensive, takes fuel, printing costs, and other indirect costs. Also, there's no hassle about commentary tracks or alternate endings or deleted scenes yet. Microsoft wins out because they could become a big player in the marketplace like Apple at the distribution end. The movie studios win out because you have nothing left after you've paid to watch a movie - it's harder to pirate a film when you're not in possession of the physical media and only have a narrow time frame in which to watch it. Comcast wins because they won't have to throttle so much BitTorrent traffic, and people will upgrade their internet to make it their video store.
For now, I still want physical media. Most families can get interrupted watching a movie at home, or have kids that rewatch the heck out of a couple of favorites. So there.:P
Not only is it not the same since they are analog sources, but it was a given at the time that the cassette copy that you made was inferior to the original. Since there are generational losses inherent in the copying procedure, they weren't worried about you loaning your cassette to someone and them making a copy for someone else, since the resulting copy would be bad enough that if the recipient liked the music, they would probably just buy the original for themselves if they were financially capable to do so. It would be hard to argue a lost sale if they were disinclined to the purchase in the first place.
Of course, I feel the same way about low bit rate MP3's, but apparently only criminals use MP3. After seeing this attitude from the record company, I am thinking that I had better not use any audio compression on any music I've created. If I send a copy of a preliminary track in MP3 format to my drummer so he can work out a drum part, I'm sure I'll be assumed a criminal just for using audio compression and sending it over the Intertubes and whatnot.:(
The ESRB has routinely relied on the developers to make (presumably) intelligent decisions about what to rate games, since it's not as realistic for ESRB employees to complete the entirety of gameplay available in a game as opposed to the corresponding MPAA employee sitting through two hours of a movie. The gameplay footage that the developers provide is historically what the ESRB bases its decision on, although theres a chance the whole "Hot Coffee" incident has caused the ESRB to make a more thorough review of game assets. (But I doubt it.)
The ESRB does not have a clear set of guidelines on what will get content rated a certain way, and every game is treated as an individual case. (Read about the ESRB's handling of Manhunt 2 for a recent example.)
The A/O rating, at this time, is a rating that will keep a game out of stores for sure, and likely to prevent publishing altogether due to the console manufacturer's guidelines.
The only lobby group that I am aware of, the ECA, is positioned such that they feel the restriction of the sale of a game based on its content is unconstitutional.
So, if you have an AO game, you can't make it or get it into big box stores or get the console holders to sign off, but if you somehow got it into the wild, any 5 year old with $60 can get it unless you want a pack of lawyers chasing you around.
Typical conflict between "Oh Noez! Think of the Chitluns!" vs. "This is a free country, so pay up!"
To be fair, no one has made a quality, compelling AO game to test the legal waters - and most companies would rather take the more profitable M rating anyway.
Did you play Resident Evil 4:Wii Edition? Lots of replay value there. I'm still playing Mercs from the GC version!
I'm sure someone else mentioned Metroid 3. How about the upcoming Soul Calibur Legends? Umbrella Chronicles? If you're upset that none of the things I mentioned are fighting games, how about Bleach, the next Guilty Gear game, or Samurai Showdown Anthology?
Personally, I think that if Capcom had kept going with Power Stone, they could have made it a success on the Gamecube - but I understand that few games have the raw Licensed Character quality that SSB has. Maybe you need something more off the wall?
The compelling reason to use 'SKU'(skew) for video game consoles instead of 'product' is there has been a pervasive need to bundle to maintain price points early in a machine's cycle. When we say "Microsoft's new console" it may be clear enough we're talking about the XBox360. If I ask the cashier at Gamestop for and XBox360, we're clear on what the product is, but since they package it several different ways I'm sure I would be asked which 'bundle' or 'package' I wanted. It used to be that sometimes the stores would do some of their own bundles, but the console manufacturers have taken to doing it themselves more and more. Since the mainstream video game press is making an effort to pay attention to the NPD Group's (www.npd.com) sales tracking data, and the way to make sense of who sold what is to look at the data by individual UPC codes, then the result is saying what's selling by 'SKU', since Uniform Papa Charlie isn't shorter. Since 1up and Kotaku and the like have taken to saying it, it follows that the usage filters down to other people blogging/reporting on the video game industry.
Wait, I'm sorry. Were you asking a rhetorical question? I do this all the time. I really need to lighten up.
Speaking as a gamer - as my handle might imply, "A lack of games? Appalling! - and the price is much too high! We just got rumble back last Thursday after much outcry. We do much love our Sony - Hope this Blu-Ray thing will fly."
"The games? Well, I'd say they're not that much alike, You won't find much FPS on Nintendo's little tyke - Unless some Wiimote Metroid or RE4 is what you like. And, of course, M$ has got Halo's new Third reich."
OK, enough verse. My personal philosophy for purchasing a game machine since the SuperNintendo/Genisis days was - and still is - 'It's about the games, stupid.' Sony does have some catchup to do here. They're going to have a hard time in a couple of days. They're not going to carry the day on price, so they better have some games lined up to even things out.
Hear, hear! I don't need everything to rumble, but it was nice to know when you were getting a wheel on the curb on Gran Turismo, and when something big was coming up behind you in other games. Here's how I see it.
1) Rumble became standard.
2) Everybody got put on notice by Immersion.
3) Sony ignored #1 above because the rest of their system was so expensive, they were a little cash strapped and they weren't ready to settle.
4) Fans complained about #1 with respect to Sony's new controller.
5) Sony found themselves selling systems, but not as fast as the others who understood item #1.
6) Sony found themselves having to listen to the market.
It's nice that they're listening, and I like Playstation as much as the next fanboy, but I think their hand was somewhat forced. I find it fantastic that it happened sooner rather than later.
Slashdot Mirror
I am also surprised by two other things. I am surprised that despite the dozens of previews and reviews, you act like that you didn't know that Deadspace:Extraction was a rail shooter until after you bought it. Many of the previews talked about it trying to reach the same demographic as Resident Evil:The Umbrella Chronicles (which is also a rail shooter that is on Wii because Capcom's newest offering at the time, RE5 wasn't being developed for Wii). I am also surprised that you could pretend to believably compare the state of PC gaming to Wii gaming given the differences in demographics and control style. There is no reasonable way anyone can expect a mature title from a Nintendo game that wasn't shoehorned in from somewhere else, because on other systems, PC especially, the actual state of development is genuinely mature. Developers making a game for Wii are trying not to take a bath in red ink at this point. On PC, we've had over twenty years to develop what works and what sells. Nintendo, on the other hand, is constantly changing the playing field for itself. It makes it easier for them to profit, but it leaves third-party developers scrambling to make things work every singe development cycle. Maybe if a mouse and keyboard (not that you couldn't connect a USB keyboard) were standard you could have resource management sims then. I thought those didn't get done on anything you hook to a TV becase you can't read enough information on 480 lines of resolution.
I'd bet you're more likely to find mature titles on Wiiware than on a physical disk due the lower cost of entry for developers. Could you argue that "World of Goo" is a mature game, since we've had physics since before 1687?
(Don't answer that - it was rhetorical and I don't really want to know. Ask yourself what kind of kids you interact with and decide for yourself.)
Granted, helicopter parents may totally funnel children into too much structured activity, but there are still lots of kids that have plenty of creativity. I don't see any problem with crayons yet, or Play-Doh, as long as the situation keeps kids from the sort of one-upmanship that would preclude it. If one older kid brings a DS or a PSP with him to a group, it can distract kids from playing with the simple stuff for a while. On the other hand, if that's what the group is doing, (crayons or clay or even blocks!) I've yet to see a real shortage of creativity. My oldest can be a problem for the a similar reason - he's almost always got a Bionicle or two with him, and not a spec, out-of-the-package one. Most of his Bionicles are borrowing heads and weapons from other guys, changed color schemes, extra weapons built with standard LEGO or Technic parts, or hybrids.
If you doubt the creativity of kids, try listening to them. I hope you will be pleasantly surprised, or maybe you have a bunch of dumbbells in your neighborhood. As far as the parents go - parents that play video games are probably still in the minority. Most of the parents that my wife and I know IRL watch a lot of "Big Brother" and "American Idol" and "Brooke Knows Best" and "Dancing with the Geico Cavemen Spectacular". Most of my serious video game playing adult friends fall into the "Kids? I haven't found a spouse I can tolerate yet!" category. I didn't count people who only played Wii sports for two hours at a party.
Another thing that strikes me is that you can't have a class of 20-30 kids in school and expect all of them to whip out dogs in a spaceship to the moon or a cow with wheels on it with their 8-pack of Crayolas. Some kids aren't going to be at the same place intellectually, some kids aren't going to have the same cultural context, some kids are only going to draw pictures about stuff they learned in Sunday school because their parents won't let them watch TV or play with the heathens next door, some kids don't read and will only generate TV related imagery, and so on. Kids are creative, but they're not all going to be at the same place - and I'm basing a lot of this on my own formative crayon time in the 70's. This is not a new problem. Do you suppose that James Naismith and Johannes Gutenberg had to listen to crap from city leaders about how basketball was keeping kids from being creative when playing outside with a ball and the printing press kept kids from embellishing their folk tales and oral history?
To your two points - probably not, and no. I could see how you might think this is a problem. Input lag of LCD monitors probably don't contribute to the problem with these games not selling. I am certain that Guitar Hero 2 includes a calibration screen where you could completely correct for lag. (Oddly enough, Guitar Hero 3 either does not have that or put it someplace hard for me to find...) I would assume that Rock Band does also, since Harmonix made GH2 (but not GH3 and up) and Rock Band. As for the CRT monitors not suffering from that problem, that is not always the case. I have a Samsung wide format CRT TV, and with my PS2 hooked up via component cable and Rock Band 2 running in Progressive/Widescreen, the correction is usually around 65. I assume that number is ms, but it could be some made-up metric. Hooked up to a standard CRT with composite cables, the correction is 0. As usual, Your Mileage May Vary, This was performed with guitarists on a closed course, I may have a crap TV, etc.
Since when do you let electricians _design_ your system? You should have actual engineers for that.
I will second wilby's comment and say that Electricians are not the problem. Any licensed contractor that's worth his salt will know what his capabilities are and act accordingly. The BICSI standards have been in place for a long time, and BICSI has done a great job getting the word out to both electricians and low voltage contractors about how to do things to industry standard. If someone wires CAT5 like it's something else, then you have a dumbass problem, not an electrician problem. All of the jack vendors have done a great job disseminating information about how to do CAT5, and several have certified installer programs aimed at getting people putting together a system, not just wires. If field personnel cannot avail themselves with current information then I wouldn't even trust them to put in a fluorescent dimmer or a thermostat made in the last ten years.
What's worse with this particular case is that since Call of Duty 3 XBox has been out for a while we're only talking about a $30 replacement cost, and the actual impact on Activision's initial investment is lower than had the guy been pirating CoD4. (If he was pirating CoD3:Wii, then we're talking $50 RC and I presume that was just a port and not a rebuilt game.) That makes $150,000 seem pretty crazy. The other $100,000 fines make me even more nervous, since TFA talks about some of them not having representation. As much as lawyers may give us the willies, not having them in some cases is a lot worse.
Anyway, I'll admit I'm a Linux newbie, since I've only run knoppix and Ubuntu a little - and I mostly had a knoppix boot CD around to fix busted Windows machines. I'm pleased with how my Ubuntu 8 machine runs now, and I've been thinking about getting some flavor of Quake running on it, just to make sure I know how to get it to go. Surely waiting for Google to do in-browser games can't be the only way for Linux to make inroads with the gamer community. Purely based on my limited personal experience with only two Linux flavors, I would have to think that games should run a lot faster on a Linux box just because of the lower system overhead (which is what I think you're getting at). Knowing that, why haven't more gamers rallied for Linux versions? Is it purely the difficulty of the install that would keep developers away? I know it's not assets, so that narrows it down to executables and libraries. After a while, publishers would amass a lot of the libraries they would need, so then it's just compiling more than one executable at that point. Right?
Seriously, this perplexes me. If Linux makes for a faster machine with the same hardware, what's the holdup? I don't know if 'Google to the Rescue' is the answer.
2) I don't have anything against Wii homebrew, but I wouldn't be willing to chance running legitimately purchased Virtual Console games off the SD card via homebrew if a Nintendo update nuked them because it thought I was being bad. I really do hope that people are successful making their own homebrew games and that works out long-term. I still don't like Nintendo's overly slow implementation of the SD cards and obligatorily running everything from system memory , and that's why I'd prefer Nintendo have a consumer-ready solution. Don't forget, what we learn about hardware here isn't just for us to use personally. Presuming that we are all technology professionals here (another gross oversimplification, I'm sure) we don't have to just use technology for ourselves. We have to be able to support it for others. If something works well, we suggest it to others because we won't get called over there to fix it. If it's going to take a bit of work, both during setup and continually during operation, it's not usually worth recommending except to the most savvy of our clients.
3) I have made gross generalizations about Bittorrent that seem disparaging, but not about digital distribution in general. Didn't I point out that the XBLA and PSN models work fine, since they have adequate storage of a sufficient speed to make those work? I still find Bittorrent a waste of time for reasons I've already stated. Yes, I do know that there are other legal ways to get un-DRM'd content - I don't hear anyone at work asking me about the Amazon music store, for example. I would guess that's because they don't know how to get Amazon stuff on their iPod (even if it's trivial.) Most of them bought iPods and use iTunes and don't have to ask anyone anything until they drop them in the sink.
4) P.S. That's High Horse, and yes, I'm getting off now.
Fine. You win. Is that what you wanted to hear? You can call me a luddite since I can't find any legitimate use for BitTorrent. You can call me a luddite for still using CD's because I hate the way pop music is mixed these days for iTunes and earbuds. You can beat me up as much as you feel is necessary for respecting the rights of copyright holders. You can trash me publicly for trying to hold on to some fragment of my progeny's childhood. Go ahead.
I understand digital distribution is the future, but we're not quite there yet on the Wii.
iTunes works just fine, but you'll tell me that Steve Jobs is a money-grubbing ogre feeding off of the table scraps of the record companies. iTunes passes the Grandma test of technology, though. I haven't used iTunes for anything except a podcast manager, but I can see that it's easy to use. (I don't even own an iPod!) XBox Live and PSN are decent models for digital distribution, too - but those machines have hard drives! So, to re-iterate my point:
I thought that the Wii had a way to make digital distribution better, play things from the SD card. If that's really not possible/practical, then I am going to wait until Nintendo delivers something that's easier to deal with instead of doing the pirate thing so I don't inspire bad ethical practices amongst my children.
As far as Bittorrent goes, I had it installed for a while, and didn't find anything that I couldn't get some other quicker legitimate way.
Back to the SD card - yes, the slot is slow and I discovered that backing up save games which are quite small compared to some of the Virtual Console games. All the more reason not to do any more writes to the card than you have to. I presumed (perhaps incorrectly) that it takes less time to read the data straight from the SD card than it would to make room in system memory by moving stuff out to an SD card, and then write the new stuff to system memory.
A Thousand Times, this.
Seriously, even if Nintendo made you put some sort of Nintendo brand SD card in it that had some hidden unreadable-by-PC sector in it or some hash that uniquely identified the user some other way I would be happy to do this. I'm not even interested in doing this the pirate way. Right now, I'm not going to get any downloadable games. If they could just make the legitimate way simple enough, I could be happy with it.
I'm sure I'll get branded a fanboy for this, no worse than getting modded up for being a snitch for Nintendo, anyway.
Oh, I remember the other reason why I'm not going to do this the pirate way besides my unbridled fanboyism. I have an impressionable child in my house that still thinks music and movies come on disks, and not from Bittorrent, and I'd like to keep it that way for as long as possible.
Eh? This is Quake 3 Arena, right? Pentium 90 and 16 megs of RAM were Quake 1, not Q3A. Also, I don't think it's quite as bad as you think, having the thing as a plugin. Have you tried playing Off-Road Velociraptor Safari? Perhaps not, since there's no Linux version of the Unity Web player... Anyway I still expect that Carmack's built some similar (hopefully better) framework as a game environment.
Mind you, I was told that by that "A.C." guy, and most of the rest of his response was inflammatory, but I have grown up a little after having received that beatdown.
The only conclusion I can draw from having watched the Jerry & Bill show, is either they're not marketing to me, so I'm free to go get another copy of Hardy Heron, or there must be another part to the commercial that we haven't seen yet and this first commercial is just warming us up to the dynamic between our two characters.
(Oops. It's after 11. I must go mindlessly buy everything they advertise on Adult Swim.)
First, I called Nintendo about this at least five years ago - probably longer. Perhaps the older games were fresher in my mind at the time.
Two, it's not just the content of the cartridge. The plastic joysticks are recasts of the Nintendo 64 controller and the Sega Genesis controller. Even if an eight year old kid couldn't name all of the pirated games on the ROM inside that machine, he would probably recognize the N64 controller. At the time that those were initially out, the Wii was not out yet, and lots of people were still playing their N64's (including myself). Oddly enough, I didn't call Sega.
Three, if the seller didn't know that they contained illegally loaded games, how could he have any reasonable expectation of selling them? Generic games don't move big numbers unless they're preloaded on a cell phone.
Maybe it was just obvious to me because I'm a fanboy, but the Power Player machine is one of the more clear-cut copyright violations that I've ever seen openly sold in stores. Sure, I'd expect this sort of thing sold at the Flea Market Mall in the low-rent part of town, but not in the big Simon malls right before Christmas. Sure, I bristle a little bit about GI Joe and Power Ranger knockoffs at the dollar store, but it never made me actually dial the phone and rat someone out. I'm now mad that Amazon is selling them - but this goes back to the fact that Nintendo (or whoever) shouldn't be going after some dude in Florida as a long term solution. If the problem was actually to be solved, the appropriate authority would work on preventing their import in the first place. We can't stop China from making them, since I get the feeling that copyright laws work differently there. My gut feeling is dude in Florida committed some worse crime, and this article is media spin/plea bargain.
In general, at this point, I would be willing to say that I enjoy a sincere low-budget production over a self-inflated, egotistical one. If Lucas was going to make a Mutt movie, perhaps we should make him use a 16mm Bell & Howell with black & white film and a smaller crew. Then he could see what he was really made of. Let him shoot little serialized 6 minute shorts and they can show them before Spielberg's features.
For every secret code that one used to have to calculate the checksum for, the internet now leaks out all of the codes for the game within hours of it being on store shelves except for the developer code for checking the build version number that they can claim is the 'one more secret' to find.
For every fetch-quest and sequence break, some obsessive fan will write a FAQ.
Honestly, I thought that the reason they put tough puzzles in adventure games was so they could sell strategy guides. If you make it too easy, it's just a thing to do in the game, and no one needs to buy the guide. If you make it too hard and don't leak the answers, people lose interest in the game or don't finish in time to buy the new one. To be fair, I only found the black dot in Adventure (2600) because I was told that it existed and the bridge was required. I only finished Indiana Jones (2600) because one of the older guys in band had figured out the shovel and parachute parts. I never did see the guy's initials in Indy. These happened before strategy guides. Playing around with Nintendo passwords happened before strategy guides. The business has changed again, and I don't think anyone will be drawing maps by hand.
As someone who still carries a cube around, I would have to say that you can still be well under a minute with a corners first solution, and not have to memorize as many routines (15-20 tops) as someone using the more efficient Fridrich F2L solution (76 much longer routines minimum) not to mention the additional difficulty of having to locate two cubes at a time for corner-edge pairs. This is, as a task, rather like human computing. Do you stick with a short program that's less error prone, or do you write a more complicated one that hogs more memory in the hope of getting it done a few cycles sooner? I'm surprised at how many so-called 'nerds' on this thread disregard the cube as some sort of frustrating toy that can't be done except by paint or sticker removal (especially when disassembly is more reliable :P) instead of wanting to understand the behavior of groups and physically grasping algorithm efficiency. Cudos to KokorHekks for solving it himself!
For now, I still want physical media. Most families can get interrupted watching a movie at home, or have kids that rewatch the heck out of a couple of favorites. So there. :P
Of course, I feel the same way about low bit rate MP3's, but apparently only criminals use MP3. After seeing this attitude from the record company, I am thinking that I had better not use any audio compression on any music I've created. If I send a copy of a preliminary track in MP3 format to my drummer so he can work out a drum part, I'm sure I'll be assumed a criminal just for using audio compression and sending it over the Intertubes and whatnot. :(
There are several problems with that.
The ESRB has routinely relied on the developers to make (presumably) intelligent decisions about what to rate games, since it's not as realistic for ESRB employees to complete the entirety of gameplay available in a game as opposed to the corresponding MPAA employee sitting through two hours of a movie. The gameplay footage that the developers provide is historically what the ESRB bases its decision on, although theres a chance the whole "Hot Coffee" incident has caused the ESRB to make a more thorough review of game assets. (But I doubt it.)
The ESRB does not have a clear set of guidelines on what will get content rated a certain way, and every game is treated as an individual case. (Read about the ESRB's handling of Manhunt 2 for a recent example.)
The A/O rating, at this time, is a rating that will keep a game out of stores for sure, and likely to prevent publishing altogether due to the console manufacturer's guidelines.
The only lobby group that I am aware of, the ECA, is positioned such that they feel the restriction of the sale of a game based on its content is unconstitutional.
So, if you have an AO game, you can't make it or get it into big box stores or get the console holders to sign off, but if you somehow got it into the wild, any 5 year old with $60 can get it unless you want a pack of lawyers chasing you around.
Typical conflict between "Oh Noez! Think of the Chitluns!" vs. "This is a free country, so pay up!"
To be fair, no one has made a quality, compelling AO game to test the legal waters - and most companies would rather take the more profitable M rating anyway.
I'm sure someone else mentioned Metroid 3. How about the upcoming Soul Calibur Legends? Umbrella Chronicles? If you're upset that none of the things I mentioned are fighting games, how about Bleach, the next Guilty Gear game, or Samurai Showdown Anthology?
Personally, I think that if Capcom had kept going with Power Stone, they could have made it a success on the Gamecube - but I understand that few games have the raw Licensed Character quality that SSB has. Maybe you need something more off the wall?
Onechanbara's what you really want, isn't it?
Hey, I tried.
Wait, I'm sorry. Were you asking a rhetorical question? I do this all the time. I really need to lighten up.
Speaking as a gamer - as my handle might imply,
"A lack of games? Appalling! - and the price is much too high!
We just got rumble back last Thursday after much outcry.
We do much love our Sony - Hope this Blu-Ray thing will fly."
"The games? Well, I'd say they're not that much alike,
You won't find much FPS on Nintendo's little tyke -
Unless some Wiimote Metroid or RE4 is what you like.
And, of course, M$ has got Halo's new Third reich."
OK, enough verse. My personal philosophy for purchasing a game machine since the SuperNintendo/Genisis days was - and still is - 'It's about the games, stupid.' Sony does have some catchup to do here. They're going to have a hard time in a couple of days. They're not going to carry the day on price, so they better have some games lined up to even things out.
Here's how I see it.
1) Rumble became standard.
2) Everybody got put on notice by Immersion.
3) Sony ignored #1 above because the rest of their system was so expensive, they were a little cash strapped and they weren't ready to settle.
4) Fans complained about #1 with respect to Sony's new controller.
5) Sony found themselves selling systems, but not as fast as the others who understood item #1.
6) Sony found themselves having to listen to the market.
It's nice that they're listening, and I like Playstation as much as the next fanboy, but I think their hand was somewhat forced. I find it fantastic that it happened sooner rather than later.