Great graphics make a good game better. That's all they can do, but it's not something to take for granted. Visual appeal can go a long way when you're talking about visual interactive media.
Hah, well sometimes if something is liked enough it will command whatever price to a person, but for the most part CDs are at a price point that is just too high for the market. Quality being subjective, it's hard to say that if something is "good enough" it can cost $X and stuff that's "worse" should cost less. Regardless of quality or feature set, an item should only cost as much as the market can bear. Any more than that and it will lose sales to competition.
If someone wants any item enough, then for that person it isn't a question of other items "competing" for his/her entertainment dollars. But if you are deciding whether to load up on some new CDs, or get a new game, or get a season of whatever anime caught your fancy, you are likely to go with whatever gives you the best value for your money. And CDs simply don't for most people these days.
And in my opinion, CDs in Japan are WAY overpriced. 2700 to 3000 Yen for an album, 1200 or so for a single... that's crazy. I have no idea how CD sales don't go down the toilet altogether over there. On occasion you can get a good deal ($20 for Chrono Cross 3-disc OST wasn't bad), but if you want something like the latest L'Arc En Ciel or whatever, you need to pony up. The amount of money the record labels make per-CD in Japan is shameful.
It also comes down to value for the dollar. A student can get much more entertainment value out of a $60 game than out of 4 music CDs.
The fact of the matter is, music has COMPETITION. The days of the $12 CD making sense are long, long gone. People aren't sitting around hoarding their money. No, they spend it on *other entertainment products* such as DVDs and video games. Look at how CD sales have dropped and how DVD/VG sales have risen over the past few years. To call it hypocrisy is BEYOND STUPID. You would have to stone cold batcrap bonkers to not realize it's a matter of the music industry being unable to compete for the entertainment dollars of its demographic.
And yes, buying music like that would indeed make someone poor, or at least *feel* poor, because it is a POOR FINANCIAL CHOICE in the face of what the competition is offering. A movie costs as much as, or less, than its soundtrack much of the time. A game can offer a dorm's entire floor hours of entertainment and the game industry THRIVES on that, whereas the music industry does what it can to make sure that if a dorm's entire floor is to enjoy hours of music, it will cost not $60 but far more, trying their best to tie it not only to an individual, but to a particular device that individual owns.
I don't even know why I'm taking the time to post this reply; if you had the intellectual capacity of a dixie cup you would have the sense to not post what you did.
That's completely wrong! A lock-in is when the consumer is "stuck" with a particular vendor. This may be due to any number of things, but subscription is not one of them. A subscription-based service only locks you in if it makes unsubscribing difficult (which may translate to costly), which has nothing to do with being a subscription-based service in the first place.
A company that runs on a subscription-based business model would *benefit* from lock-in (to keep subscriptions going), but it doesn't have to do it. Magazines don't lock you in, neither do websites with subscription-based access (e.g. IGN, or newspapers), etc. You're always free to cancel and subcribe to something else if you wish.
To be fair, though, a game doesn't have to be "revolutionary" to shape the game industry. It just has to be well-received enough that it gets other developers and publishers thinking. Halo wasn't revolutionary in terms of game design, but it certainly helped shape the game industry tremendously by giving the Xbox a foothold.
With regard to Itagaki, you're talking about DOA exclusively. BUT!! he pushed the boundaries like few others with Ninja Gaiden for X-Box. It's still the "game to beat" when it comes to the action genre. Killer graphics for its time, very fluid movement, etc. A very solid package as far as the game goes. But Itagaki went the extra mile, which people took for granted -- he release free Hurricane Packs through XBox Live, adding more content and enhancing the gameplay via improved AI, optional camera control, etc. He addressed all the concerns people had with Ninja Gaiden originally, and as a result Ninja Gaiden Black turned out to be, at the time of its release, the "perfect action game." If not for Ninja Gaiden's successful design, I'm not sure we'd have seen games like God of War, Heavenly Sword, the later DMC games, etc. take the direction they did.
There's a reason Ninja Gaiden 2 for the 360 is so highly anticipated; I also expect it to get very high critical acclaim, just as the first.
To put Sakaguchi in there and not Miyamoto is pretty insane, especially given their "being the creator of FF is enough" quote. Miyamoto isn't out of the picture just yet, especially with Mario Galaxy just having been released. He is also one of the driving forces behind the innovation that Nintendo is working to saturate the market with.
Hopefully the Bioshock guy, Ken Levine is on there. I just read the article but forgot right away. Also they need a guy from Harmonix (Guitar Hero developer) if there isn't one.
Kojima, yeah he's not really big-time on the radar right now. MGS4 is highly anticipated but it's not a reason to slide into the top 25. If you take Kojima then you need to take Itagaki and probably a host of other "fan-fave" developers that push the boundaries in certain genres.
As a scientist would say, prove it! No, not so much.
This study isn't on to diddly. Males are more territorial/aggressive; you don't need a study with 22 subjects playing video games to tell you that.
If a study wanted to generalize about "men vs women" and how they respond to video games, you would need a larger sample of both genders than 11+11, at least several kinds of games (some designed by men, some designed by women), etc. You would also need to apply some sort of statistical analysis to the results (another reason why large sample sizes would be better, to reduce the margin of error).
This "study" reminds me of something I'd find at a high school science fair (freshman/sophomore level). Anywhere else it would seem rather subpar from a methodology perspective (and possibly prior research).
"Hey guys we made up this cool plane it's really fast! Yeah! Imagine going from London to Paris in INSERT_LOW_NUMBER minutes! Imagine it, bitch!
"This plane is longer than the A380. It's really freaking long! That's sweet!
"Did we mention that we play a lot of Mass Effect? Isn't it a cool game? Also our engines are called Scimitar engines! That's like, a shotgun in Mass Effect. Oh yeah, babe!
The gas station attendants will likely get work as "gas station robot maintenance dudes" that fix robots which, you know, go bad. And you know they will. Let's consider some likely scenarios:
1) Robot claws open rear passenger door thinking it's a gas cap cover and shoves nozzle down whoever's strapped in.
2) Robot decides you have a 2007 model instead of 2008 and destroys your gas cap because they way it opens has been changed
3) Robot beats you up and drives off in your car
4) Robot doesn't know the "3 clicks" rule and keeps screwing your gas cap back on for all eternity
5) Robot is racist and doesn't service some people
6) Robot sees a Lamborghini pull up and tries to mate with it, costing the gas station around $400,000
These are all nightmare scenarios that are all too possible if the robots aren't maintained. We'll need people to do this. No way I'd trust other robots!
Ok, what? Indeed with any remote controllers your hands are elevated, while your elbows usually aren't. And this particular new UI tool, is it unusable if you rest your elbows on something? Well, is it? (No, it's perfectly usable.)
And who said this is for sitting in front of a computer all day in the first place? In that case, it's simply inconvenient to have to move your hands in front of your face much simply because it interferes with your vision; you'll be annoyed by that well before your arms tire.
Any input device that requires you to continually keep your hands elevated will never work. Whoa, whoa, in what context? Maybe for coding in Eclipse, but if you're talking about input devices in general, that's just batcrap loco. The Wii, and pretty much all game consoles ever, have been working just fine with input devices where your hands are "elevated."
The reason a mouse and keyboard is so effective is because you can use them both all day long with little to no effort. Uh, no. The reason they're effective is because they're intuitive and they let you work efficiently, not because you can use them all day long. A two-button keyboard where you press the button to scroll through input characters with one and accept them with the other can be used all day long and your hands won't get any more tired but it would NOT be effective.
I can't believe you're this stupid. There is no logical contradiction here. Let me break it down so you can hopefully understand this.
1) accuracy is not 100% with UN-TAMPERED paper ballot counting 2) accuracy is BETTER with UN-TAMPERED electronic voting 3) if you assume tampering then accuracy becomes irrelevant 4) (therefore) if I say acccuracy is relevant, then I don't assume tampering
Got it?
While electronic voting is *easier* to tamper with, that doesn't mean it's *more likely* to happen. Those are two entirely different things. And unless you can prove to me that voting results WILL be tampered with, my concern with accuracy is entirely relevant and not at all in contradiction with my lack of concern with tampering.
Do I HAVE to expect the system to be tampered with? What if I don't? What if I think that if we can get better accuracy, maybe we actually will? Hmm... maybe *I* have even more faith in democracy than *you*, hah:-P
Well the thing is, though, that I'm *NOT* worried. I'm saying if YOU are worried about the system's untrustworthiness, going from e-voting to paper ballots shouldn't really make you think it's trustworthy (has it always been trustworthy in the past or something?).
The issue here is that YOU (not me) are writing off e-voting because it is easier to compromise. Easier, sure, but only *easier* (not possible as opposed to impossible). I, on the other hand, either have enough trust (or don't care enough, whichever works for you) to go with electronic voting since it can potentially give us more accurate counts than paper ballot counting.
That's not what I was arguing at all! I was saying that people DISTRUST CLOSE RACES, not people vs. machines. That's the truth of the matter. There is a margin of error when votes are hand-counted, there's no "rigging" or "buying" necessary! People naturally make mistakes.
Rejecting electronic voting shouldn't make you trust the system if you didn't before, unless you thought that electronic voting was the only possible source of error in the process.
Concerning "fairness," paper voting and electronic voting are either on par or electronic is better since it can potentially allow more people to vote.
By the way, e-voting can potentially be MORE accurate. Why is it that by pointing that out I am "falling into a perfect solution fallacy"? One has to wonder whether the problem is "trust" or whether it is that people are just clueless about the system to begin with.
Well I was right about the "you're nuts" part for sure.
By the way, even if you were anywhere near making any sense, it would mean we should trust whoever ends up winning an election to do a competent job, so why bother voting in the first place?
No the "biggest threat to western democracy" is people being so stupid that they believe rejecting electronic voting will remove the bigget threat to western democracy. What a joke.
Like an earlier poster insightfully mentioned, people are also distrusted when the measurable effect in an election is close to or below the error margin. This is because the error margin when paper ballots are counted by people is not 0%. Making citizens a part of the process only "instills legitimacy" when those citizens are fully competent, and the majority simply aren't. By the way, electronic voting can potentially have a lower margin of error than counting by hand.
Finally, if you are THAT concerned about pressing a button on a touch screen and having a program tally the results rather than marking a paper ballot and having a person tally the results, you're nuts.
I like Mario Kart DS a lot, but I think 64's battle mode tracks are generally better. MKDS is definitely #2 for me, though. Also, what I like about console games over handhelds is that 1 game and 1 console is enough for good split-screen fun. With handhelds, you need multiple systems and multiple game packs (unless you *really* like ShyGuy hehe).
The EC members aren't counting ballots in front of your face and voting, though. None of the current voting methods are totally foolproof, which is my point.
Slashdot Mirror
Great graphics make a good game better. That's all they can do, but it's not something to take for granted. Visual appeal can go a long way when you're talking about visual interactive media.
I was using the "it's all too expensive" argument to justify PEOPLE'S ENTERTAINMENT DOLLARS BEING INSTEAD SPENT ON DVDs AND VIDEO GAMES.
That's not piracy.
Learn to read.
Hah, well sometimes if something is liked enough it will command whatever price to a person, but for the most part CDs are at a price point that is just too high for the market. Quality being subjective, it's hard to say that if something is "good enough" it can cost $X and stuff that's "worse" should cost less. Regardless of quality or feature set, an item should only cost as much as the market can bear. Any more than that and it will lose sales to competition.
If someone wants any item enough, then for that person it isn't a question of other items "competing" for his/her entertainment dollars. But if you are deciding whether to load up on some new CDs, or get a new game, or get a season of whatever anime caught your fancy, you are likely to go with whatever gives you the best value for your money. And CDs simply don't for most people these days.
And in my opinion, CDs in Japan are WAY overpriced. 2700 to 3000 Yen for an album, 1200 or so for a single... that's crazy. I have no idea how CD sales don't go down the toilet altogether over there. On occasion you can get a good deal ($20 for Chrono Cross 3-disc OST wasn't bad), but if you want something like the latest L'Arc En Ciel or whatever, you need to pony up. The amount of money the record labels make per-CD in Japan is shameful.
It also comes down to value for the dollar. A student can get much more entertainment value out of a $60 game than out of 4 music CDs.
The fact of the matter is, music has COMPETITION. The days of the $12 CD making sense are long, long gone. People aren't sitting around hoarding their money. No, they spend it on *other entertainment products* such as DVDs and video games. Look at how CD sales have dropped and how DVD/VG sales have risen over the past few years. To call it hypocrisy is BEYOND STUPID. You would have to stone cold batcrap bonkers to not realize it's a matter of the music industry being unable to compete for the entertainment dollars of its demographic.
And yes, buying music like that would indeed make someone poor, or at least *feel* poor, because it is a POOR FINANCIAL CHOICE in the face of what the competition is offering. A movie costs as much as, or less, than its soundtrack much of the time. A game can offer a dorm's entire floor hours of entertainment and the game industry THRIVES on that, whereas the music industry does what it can to make sure that if a dorm's entire floor is to enjoy hours of music, it will cost not $60 but far more, trying their best to tie it not only to an individual, but to a particular device that individual owns.
I don't even know why I'm taking the time to post this reply; if you had the intellectual capacity of a dixie cup you would have the sense to not post what you did.
Harvard is a private Uni, so it should be unaffected.
That's completely wrong! A lock-in is when the consumer is "stuck" with a particular vendor. This may be due to any number of things, but subscription is not one of them. A subscription-based service only locks you in if it makes unsubscribing difficult (which may translate to costly), which has nothing to do with being a subscription-based service in the first place.
A company that runs on a subscription-based business model would *benefit* from lock-in (to keep subscriptions going), but it doesn't have to do it. Magazines don't lock you in, neither do websites with subscription-based access (e.g. IGN, or newspapers), etc. You're always free to cancel and subcribe to something else if you wish.
To be fair, though, a game doesn't have to be "revolutionary" to shape the game industry. It just has to be well-received enough that it gets other developers and publishers thinking. Halo wasn't revolutionary in terms of game design, but it certainly helped shape the game industry tremendously by giving the Xbox a foothold.
With regard to Itagaki, you're talking about DOA exclusively. BUT!! he pushed the boundaries like few others with Ninja Gaiden for X-Box. It's still the "game to beat" when it comes to the action genre. Killer graphics for its time, very fluid movement, etc. A very solid package as far as the game goes. But Itagaki went the extra mile, which people took for granted -- he release free Hurricane Packs through XBox Live, adding more content and enhancing the gameplay via improved AI, optional camera control, etc. He addressed all the concerns people had with Ninja Gaiden originally, and as a result Ninja Gaiden Black turned out to be, at the time of its release, the "perfect action game." If not for Ninja Gaiden's successful design, I'm not sure we'd have seen games like God of War, Heavenly Sword, the later DMC games, etc. take the direction they did.
There's a reason Ninja Gaiden 2 for the 360 is so highly anticipated; I also expect it to get very high critical acclaim, just as the first.
To put Sakaguchi in there and not Miyamoto is pretty insane, especially given their "being the creator of FF is enough" quote. Miyamoto isn't out of the picture just yet, especially with Mario Galaxy just having been released. He is also one of the driving forces behind the innovation that Nintendo is working to saturate the market with.
Hopefully the Bioshock guy, Ken Levine is on there. I just read the article but forgot right away. Also they need a guy from Harmonix (Guitar Hero developer) if there isn't one.
Kojima, yeah he's not really big-time on the radar right now. MGS4 is highly anticipated but it's not a reason to slide into the top 25. If you take Kojima then you need to take Itagaki and probably a host of other "fan-fave" developers that push the boundaries in certain genres.
This study isn't on to diddly. Males are more territorial/aggressive; you don't need a study with 22 subjects playing video games to tell you that.
If a study wanted to generalize about "men vs women" and how they respond to video games, you would need a larger sample of both genders than 11+11, at least several kinds of games (some designed by men, some designed by women), etc. You would also need to apply some sort of statistical analysis to the results (another reason why large sample sizes would be better, to reduce the margin of error).
This "study" reminds me of something I'd find at a high school science fair (freshman/sophomore level). Anywhere else it would seem rather subpar from a methodology perspective (and possibly prior research).
how did u no my password??
Let me summarize TFA for you:
"Hey guys we made up this cool plane it's really fast! Yeah! Imagine going from London to Paris in INSERT_LOW_NUMBER minutes! Imagine it, bitch!
"This plane is longer than the A380. It's really freaking long! That's sweet!
"Did we mention that we play a lot of Mass Effect? Isn't it a cool game? Also our engines are called Scimitar engines! That's like, a shotgun in Mass Effect. Oh yeah, babe!
"This plane is FROM THE FUTURE motherf---er!"
The gas station attendants will likely get work as "gas station robot maintenance dudes" that fix robots which, you know, go bad. And you know they will. Let's consider some likely scenarios:
1) Robot claws open rear passenger door thinking it's a gas cap cover and shoves nozzle down whoever's strapped in.
2) Robot decides you have a 2007 model instead of 2008 and destroys your gas cap because they way it opens has been changed
3) Robot beats you up and drives off in your car
4) Robot doesn't know the "3 clicks" rule and keeps screwing your gas cap back on for all eternity
5) Robot is racist and doesn't service some people
6) Robot sees a Lamborghini pull up and tries to mate with it, costing the gas station around $400,000
These are all nightmare scenarios that are all too possible if the robots aren't maintained. We'll need people to do this. No way I'd trust other robots!
Ok, what? Indeed with any remote controllers your hands are elevated, while your elbows usually aren't. And this particular new UI tool, is it unusable if you rest your elbows on something? Well, is it? (No, it's perfectly usable.)
And who said this is for sitting in front of a computer all day in the first place? In that case, it's simply inconvenient to have to move your hands in front of your face much simply because it interferes with your vision; you'll be annoyed by that well before your arms tire.
Fair enough. I should have probably thought of a more nonsensical example than I did, but hopefully I still got my points across.
What color?
I can't believe you're this stupid. There is no logical contradiction here. Let me break it down so you can hopefully understand this.
1) accuracy is not 100% with UN-TAMPERED paper ballot counting
2) accuracy is BETTER with UN-TAMPERED electronic voting
3) if you assume tampering then accuracy becomes irrelevant
4) (therefore) if I say acccuracy is relevant, then I don't assume tampering
Got it?
While electronic voting is *easier* to tamper with, that doesn't mean it's *more likely* to happen. Those are two entirely different things. And unless you can prove to me that voting results WILL be tampered with, my concern with accuracy is entirely relevant and not at all in contradiction with my lack of concern with tampering.
Do I HAVE to expect the system to be tampered with? What if I don't? What if I think that if we can get better accuracy, maybe we actually will? Hmm... maybe *I* have even more faith in democracy than *you*, hah :-P
Well the thing is, though, that I'm *NOT* worried. I'm saying if YOU are worried about the system's untrustworthiness, going from e-voting to paper ballots shouldn't really make you think it's trustworthy (has it always been trustworthy in the past or something?).
The issue here is that YOU (not me) are writing off e-voting because it is easier to compromise. Easier, sure, but only *easier* (not possible as opposed to impossible). I, on the other hand, either have enough trust (or don't care enough, whichever works for you) to go with electronic voting since it can potentially give us more accurate counts than paper ballot counting.
That's not what I was arguing at all! I was saying that people DISTRUST CLOSE RACES, not people vs. machines. That's the truth of the matter. There is a margin of error when votes are hand-counted, there's no "rigging" or "buying" necessary! People naturally make mistakes.
Rejecting electronic voting shouldn't make you trust the system if you didn't before, unless you thought that electronic voting was the only possible source of error in the process.
Concerning "fairness," paper voting and electronic voting are either on par or electronic is better since it can potentially allow more people to vote.
By the way, e-voting can potentially be MORE accurate. Why is it that by pointing that out I am "falling into a perfect solution fallacy"? One has to wonder whether the problem is "trust" or whether it is that people are just clueless about the system to begin with.
Well I was right about the "you're nuts" part for sure.
By the way, even if you were anywhere near making any sense, it would mean we should trust whoever ends up winning an election to do a competent job, so why bother voting in the first place?
No the "biggest threat to western democracy" is people being so stupid that they believe rejecting electronic voting will remove the bigget threat to western democracy. What a joke.
Like an earlier poster insightfully mentioned, people are also distrusted when the measurable effect in an election is close to or below the error margin. This is because the error margin when paper ballots are counted by people is not 0%. Making citizens a part of the process only "instills legitimacy" when those citizens are fully competent, and the majority simply aren't. By the way, electronic voting can potentially have a lower margin of error than counting by hand.
Finally, if you are THAT concerned about pressing a button on a touch screen and having a program tally the results rather than marking a paper ballot and having a person tally the results, you're nuts.
I like Mario Kart DS a lot, but I think 64's battle mode tracks are generally better. MKDS is definitely #2 for me, though. Also, what I like about console games over handhelds is that 1 game and 1 console is enough for good split-screen fun. With handhelds, you need multiple systems and multiple game packs (unless you *really* like ShyGuy hehe).
The EC members aren't counting ballots in front of your face and voting, though. None of the current voting methods are totally foolproof, which is my point.