The other day I went to Best Buy and picked up a game rated Mature. They asked for ID. I don't buy a whole lot of M games, but I was still taken back a little bit regarding this. I'm willing to wager a lot of retailers either have implemented or are implementing processes to check IDs.
It doesn't solve the problem when adults buy it and turn around and give it to a kid, but do we really need big huge scary laws with fines and jailtime for something the industry is already doing?
"If we refuse to tackle issues and remain purely a thing of fluff and fizz then interactive entertainment will never have the gravitas of its cousins."
Does anything really have gravitas anyway? How many really important films have come out in the last 30 years (arguably as long as video games have been around)? Ok, more than just a few. What percentage of all produced films did they consist of? Wow, that low, huh? I mean, take The Matrix. Lots of philosophy based discussions: but would it have been successful if it wasn't flashy and action oriented or anything like that? Probably not. Which makes oh so obvious:
If you want to find games that ignore censorship and throw caution to the wind and convey messages beyond simple entertainment, you have to find an environment that supports it. The marketplace where a measure of success is dollars and units is most definitely not it. Slamdance wanted to be it, but lost all credability with that Columbine game issue.
Any attempt at true art right now is going to get lost in a sea of "ooh, cool graphics!" and "wow, Will Wheaton did the voice in this cut scene!"
Buck up, chum, video games are a relatively new phenomenon: especially when backed by hardware powerful enough to tell a story. It will eventually find it's niche. Just like powerful music has, like thoughtful poetry and literature have, like important films have. But if you expect the INDUSTRY (ie. EA, Universal, 3DRealms?!) to do it you're going to end up disappointed in the end.
If you no longer want your Wii, now would be the time to sell it. Since they're still pretty tough to be had in stores you could probably get very close to retail for it. Same goes to everyone saying they don't play it anymore. Why keep it?
Unless, of course, the idea is to have it just to have it, which is a bad idea regardless of who's making it.
When the DS came out, the first year had games that were all novelty and pretty much stinkers. Forget Nintendo, remember the PS2 launch? Hopefully the Wii ramps up faster.
The problem with MMORPGs is the reward for the effort. This isn't just a few players in a D&D campaign: you've got huge populations. In order to reward people who do well in the game you HAVE to provide cool and unique places to play with cool and unique opponents that drop cool and unique items.
If you step back you notice all the novel and interesting things in these games happen at the top levels because, frankly, that's where they HAVE to be. If the game peaks midway through the level grind, why would anyone keep enduring it?
In the meantime, the game's value gets diluted where it's only the end game that is important. Instead of treating time investment as something to be rewarded with something to ooh and ahh over, or something reserved for the selected few, it's treated as a requirement to get your fill of the game. You have people paying $X per month. You could be paying $X for dull repetitive content or really exciting unique content... it all depends on how much work you put into it.
This simply doesn't happen with older RPG games. With few players at a time you can make sure everyone's having fun as a group. Together. The world bends to them. How many DM's out there have tweaked random encounters to fix challenge levels for their players? How many DM's roll their own quests specificly to have a good time? With the "MASSIVE" in MMORPGs, there cannot possibly be good attention paid to the up-and-coming players. You focus on the bottom so they get hooked and learn how to play the game, you focus on the top so nobody gets bored and leaves, and the middle? Well, screw them. Hurry up and get beefy.
On the aside, I've liked just about everything that ever came out of Spiderweb Software. Although, perhaps they could take a lesson from Oblivion and scaling opponents with the player's progress. Reward scaling is great in their games with side quests and little things to discover if you have the patience to crawl around, but the games usually stop being fun when I become a living God in the games and can decimate just about every enemy area without a sweat.
IANAL, so, what IS the difference between aquitting MySpace versus just dismissing the case here? Does dismissal mean that there STILL isn't any legal precedence made regarding claims that service provider XYZ made possible victim UVW to get TRS'd in the IJK?
I used to rented movies from the local place. Yeah, I could return them late in the dropoff box. Yeah, they didn't turn around and charge my credit card for late fees. But, brother, next time I went to rent something and they scanned my card in the clerk would say "Oh, you have $X.XX in late fees.
While those customers with Amazon could cancel and start again to avoid a recap on those, Amazon's got their credit cards and addresses on file. A new account sending packages to an address with one of those "marked" accounts would spit up a warning. And if the customer doesn't want to pay, well, they can take themselves elsewhere.
If you ran a business, would you want a customer you KNEW would take advantage of any of your weaknesses frequenting your establishment? Would you let a shoplifting customer back into your store because you need the business?
Morality and law aside from people getting free stuff accidentally or intentionally, this plan seems a lot more fairly handed than just turning around and backcharging on the sly.
I wonder if YouTube handed over historic IP logs of that user's activity. While IP doesn't necessarily equal a person, it's probably just a bridge for the next request of information from an ISP.
I have visions of Tron-esque gladiators fighting for the right to make the mainframe belong to the penis enlargment spam zombie network or the penny stock spam zombie network.
Also, it might be neat pitting malware against each other in a Code War type of visible environment.
For what it's worth, I think having a whole bunch of the same games for different consoles causes trouble, and one has to look at DDR and Beatmania for evidence.
Japanese releases of DDR get different songs versus US and European releases. The games go through localization which basically winds up with songs in one country's version of a game and not another's. Imagine if that was pulled with other games: a platformer that the developer made 20 different levels to play in but only 8 of them are common to all the regions and the rest are "region exclusives."
Now with alternate platforms, essentially the SAME game but tuned to different hardware doesn't carry with it the data that drives it. DDR Ultramix on the Xbox includes songs that aren't found on the PS2 analog, so if you're a real fan of a series and gotta have it all you have to get both consoles. Contrast to some other franchise games: if you like Mario games, get a Nintendo branded system and you'll get them: you don't have to worry about 2 months later a new new version of your new game to be announced for a different platform with extra goodies that you should have gotten to begin with.
It's already started with the 360 version of Guitar Hero II. It's going to feature songs not in the PS2 version. Sure, other games do things like that too (like Metal Gear Solid), but with rhythm games the controllers aren't interchangeable between platforms and you end up with a closet full of junk and a game you might pay $50 for only to get maybe $10 worth of new content.
It's often been suggested that Microsoft give up a lot of legacy and backwards support in the Windows line and start anew. The official line to that is that Microsoft wants to assure customers of their commitment to existing technology blah blah blah.
Seems like if your Windows 2000/XP applications aren't working on Vista then the backwards compatibility they treasure so much really isn't that important anyway.
As I recall, Microsoft publically made available an RC version of Vista, and Apple makes iTunes and Quicktime (non-Pro, at least) available to everyone to download. Both parties should have known, but it would probably be in the best interests of Microsoft to make sure it would work since they are the ones putting themselves on a limb with Vista.
I can't be the only one who thinks this is a cool idea. If you look at the FAQ, you can even erase it from the Tivo and download it again when you want to watch it. Sounds like an offsite movie storage arrangement simply for the cost of Unbox movies.
And that they aren't going to lock it in to the tivo and let me transfer it to my PC? Golden. I love the idea of hearing about a cool flick at work, logging in and buying it, and then coming home to it sitting there and just waiting for me to watch it.
So what is an appropriate level of "completion" for the games Animal Crossing Population Growing (Nintendo GameCube) and Animal Crossing Wild World (Nintendo DS)?
You have all the items possible to get in the game.
What about Tetris (almost every platform you've heard of)
There has to be an upper limit, real or artificial, where things just don't get any faster. Easy Tetris versions like the one on DS and The Grandmaster have points at which they declare you a winner and show you an ending.
or SimCity (PC DOS, Mac, Super NES, Windows)?
Back in the day I remember it as trying to get a city with populations and income per month closest to the theoretical maximum, doing so in as few years as possible, and with the least amount to initial money.
Don't know about you, but the only one of the above completion states one could arrive at without a strategy guide that contains secrets of the inner workings of the games that one might never derive on their own.
There was a time when games were 100% complete with all items and trinkets and levels and enemies and any other quantifiable thing without the use of strategy guides. The guides basically upset the game player / game maker difficulty balance like an arms race and so the game makers had to put more junk hidden in more obscure and arbitrary ways.
One of the issues I think NGage had was that it had a cell phone screen on a gaming device. Portrait is great for information displays but not so great for gaming. My brother had one and I couldn't stand playing most of the games because it was too hard to see anything.
I remember thinking, "Oh, cool, Tomb Raider." Except it was a pain to play since I couldn't get a good look at my surroundings without facing the direction. He also had a Sonic game. You could either have bars on the top and bottom (like a letterbox movie) or play the game with the screen rotated. Sounds real comfortable, you know, navigating with a controller with a hand above the screen and jumping with controls under the screen.
The big disappointment for him was the lack of shooter games. It would have been the perfect platform for it. These are action oriented low-involvement games (if you've got a save feature) that would have separated themselves from the rest of the cell phone game world... which is a GOOD thing.
All those giants behind a new NGage... I'll bet we still won't even get 1943. T-T
How much WOULD it be worth to multinational corporations to get their logo on those things? I mean, there's lots of exposure of shuttles during take off and landing.
Maybe future eras might find trashed remains of deep space probes and wonder who this McDonald's guy is anyway.
The military, at least, is a function of the government.
...
I do not, however, believe space exploration is within the constitutionally defined limits of what the federal government should be doing.
I'd argue that space presence is vital to military function, given how important satellites are for surveilance and recon. Perhaps a good question is whether NASA should be folded into the Pentagon and all it's science dumped.
One of the things that makes Scientology dangerous is not that they believe in odd things, it's that they are very well organized and equipped to muzzle detractors. South Park attacked the fundamentals of belief in a way that's obvious. Nobody except Keith and that church branch really know what happened during his protest. The original trial where he wasn't able to even counter Scientology's accusations is a travesty of justice.
Beleving in Xenu, thetans, and paying gobs of money for the privilage of memorizing word lists aren't in themselves dangerous, illegal, or even wrong. What IS dangerous is how much legal protection they are granted by being recognized as a religion and their willingness to exploit the law in their favor.
Other religious organizations (Roman Catholic for the best example) dumped influencing governments centuries ago. Like a badly behaved child, this new religion is trying to do exactly what a lot of the old world religions did at one time and no longer consider fashionable.
"What you are seeing coming from Microsoft is their marketing and PR machine are trying to hype the tech sector to give it, and themselves, a boost. The level or AI (whatever that really is) and robotics is not close to the C3PO bot that most people think of as robotics. Dumb vacuums that can zip around a floor and avoid obstacles doesn't seem like much of an advance in robotics or AI from what was possible a decade or more ago."
No, but that an average person can afford it (Roomba's basic model is only a Franklin and a half) is a big advance.
As far as major advances in AI and motion rivaling that of even the most basic of mammals perhaps there haven't been all that many advances. Which means it's still anyone's game, really. Will the open source movement ever really have the organization and the distribution power to handle more than software? Nuts and bolts versus zeros and ones?
Where's the beef? Microsoft has the billions it can pour into robotics at a whim if they think it's going to be a third leg to stand on. And even if they DON'T come up with the next big thing, they sure as hell could buy it.
Isn't telling a company how to write it's programs, particularly it's flagship, like telling another parent how to raise their kids? If they want to PAY over twenty people for designing that, hey, it's their money. Whether it's mismanaged or not is an internal affair over at Microsoft. Maybe the articles will have some people answer for that.
Slashdot Mirror
The other day I went to Best Buy and picked up a game rated Mature. They asked for ID. I don't buy a whole lot of M games, but I was still taken back a little bit regarding this. I'm willing to wager a lot of retailers either have implemented or are implementing processes to check IDs.
It doesn't solve the problem when adults buy it and turn around and give it to a kid, but do we really need big huge scary laws with fines and jailtime for something the industry is already doing?
"If we refuse to tackle issues and remain purely a thing of fluff and fizz then interactive entertainment will never have the gravitas of its cousins."
Does anything really have gravitas anyway? How many really important films have come out in the last 30 years (arguably as long as video games have been around)? Ok, more than just a few. What percentage of all produced films did they consist of? Wow, that low, huh? I mean, take The Matrix. Lots of philosophy based discussions: but would it have been successful if it wasn't flashy and action oriented or anything like that? Probably not. Which makes oh so obvious:
If you want to find games that ignore censorship and throw caution to the wind and convey messages beyond simple entertainment, you have to find an environment that supports it. The marketplace where a measure of success is dollars and units is most definitely not it. Slamdance wanted to be it, but lost all credability with that Columbine game issue.
Any attempt at true art right now is going to get lost in a sea of "ooh, cool graphics!" and "wow, Will Wheaton did the voice in this cut scene!"
Buck up, chum, video games are a relatively new phenomenon: especially when backed by hardware powerful enough to tell a story. It will eventually find it's niche. Just like powerful music has, like thoughtful poetry and literature have, like important films have. But if you expect the INDUSTRY (ie. EA, Universal, 3DRealms?!) to do it you're going to end up disappointed in the end.
Well, http://www.php.net/ is running PHP on it. I've gotta wonder if THEIR version is as much a watershed as the versions they make public.
If you no longer want your Wii, now would be the time to sell it. Since they're still pretty tough to be had in stores you could probably get very close to retail for it. Same goes to everyone saying they don't play it anymore. Why keep it?
Unless, of course, the idea is to have it just to have it, which is a bad idea regardless of who's making it.
When the DS came out, the first year had games that were all novelty and pretty much stinkers. Forget Nintendo, remember the PS2 launch? Hopefully the Wii ramps up faster.
The problem with MMORPGs is the reward for the effort. This isn't just a few players in a D&D campaign: you've got huge populations. In order to reward people who do well in the game you HAVE to provide cool and unique places to play with cool and unique opponents that drop cool and unique items.
If you step back you notice all the novel and interesting things in these games happen at the top levels because, frankly, that's where they HAVE to be. If the game peaks midway through the level grind, why would anyone keep enduring it?
In the meantime, the game's value gets diluted where it's only the end game that is important. Instead of treating time investment as something to be rewarded with something to ooh and ahh over, or something reserved for the selected few, it's treated as a requirement to get your fill of the game. You have people paying $X per month. You could be paying $X for dull repetitive content or really exciting unique content... it all depends on how much work you put into it.
This simply doesn't happen with older RPG games. With few players at a time you can make sure everyone's having fun as a group. Together. The world bends to them. How many DM's out there have tweaked random encounters to fix challenge levels for their players? How many DM's roll their own quests specificly to have a good time? With the "MASSIVE" in MMORPGs, there cannot possibly be good attention paid to the up-and-coming players. You focus on the bottom so they get hooked and learn how to play the game, you focus on the top so nobody gets bored and leaves, and the middle? Well, screw them. Hurry up and get beefy.
On the aside, I've liked just about everything that ever came out of Spiderweb Software. Although, perhaps they could take a lesson from Oblivion and scaling opponents with the player's progress. Reward scaling is great in their games with side quests and little things to discover if you have the patience to crawl around, but the games usually stop being fun when I become a living God in the games and can decimate just about every enemy area without a sweat.
IANAL, so, what IS the difference between aquitting MySpace versus just dismissing the case here? Does dismissal mean that there STILL isn't any legal precedence made regarding claims that service provider XYZ made possible victim UVW to get TRS'd in the IJK?
Why not just mark the accounts?
I used to rented movies from the local place. Yeah, I could return them late in the dropoff box. Yeah, they didn't turn around and charge my credit card for late fees. But, brother, next time I went to rent something and they scanned my card in the clerk would say "Oh, you have $X.XX in late fees.
While those customers with Amazon could cancel and start again to avoid a recap on those, Amazon's got their credit cards and addresses on file. A new account sending packages to an address with one of those "marked" accounts would spit up a warning. And if the customer doesn't want to pay, well, they can take themselves elsewhere.
If you ran a business, would you want a customer you KNEW would take advantage of any of your weaknesses frequenting your establishment? Would you let a shoplifting customer back into your store because you need the business?
Morality and law aside from people getting free stuff accidentally or intentionally, this plan seems a lot more fairly handed than just turning around and backcharging on the sly.
I wonder if YouTube handed over historic IP logs of that user's activity. While IP doesn't necessarily equal a person, it's probably just a bridge for the next request of information from an ISP.
I have visions of Tron-esque gladiators fighting for the right to make the mainframe belong to the penis enlargment spam zombie network or the penny stock spam zombie network.
Also, it might be neat pitting malware against each other in a Code War type of visible environment.
For what it's worth, I think having a whole bunch of the same games for different consoles causes trouble, and one has to look at DDR and Beatmania for evidence.
Japanese releases of DDR get different songs versus US and European releases. The games go through localization which basically winds up with songs in one country's version of a game and not another's. Imagine if that was pulled with other games: a platformer that the developer made 20 different levels to play in but only 8 of them are common to all the regions and the rest are "region exclusives."
Now with alternate platforms, essentially the SAME game but tuned to different hardware doesn't carry with it the data that drives it. DDR Ultramix on the Xbox includes songs that aren't found on the PS2 analog, so if you're a real fan of a series and gotta have it all you have to get both consoles. Contrast to some other franchise games: if you like Mario games, get a Nintendo branded system and you'll get them: you don't have to worry about 2 months later a new new version of your new game to be announced for a different platform with extra goodies that you should have gotten to begin with.
It's already started with the 360 version of Guitar Hero II. It's going to feature songs not in the PS2 version. Sure, other games do things like that too (like Metal Gear Solid), but with rhythm games the controllers aren't interchangeable between platforms and you end up with a closet full of junk and a game you might pay $50 for only to get maybe $10 worth of new content.
It's often been suggested that Microsoft give up a lot of legacy and backwards support in the Windows line and start anew. The official line to that is that Microsoft wants to assure customers of their commitment to existing technology blah blah blah.
Seems like if your Windows 2000/XP applications aren't working on Vista then the backwards compatibility they treasure so much really isn't that important anyway.
As I recall, Microsoft publically made available an RC version of Vista, and Apple makes iTunes and Quicktime (non-Pro, at least) available to everyone to download. Both parties should have known, but it would probably be in the best interests of Microsoft to make sure it would work since they are the ones putting themselves on a limb with Vista.
So they're going to have pages and pages and pages of my logs showing I connect through a proxy located somewhere other than the US.
Excellent work, feds.
I can't be the only one who thinks this is a cool idea. If you look at the FAQ, you can even erase it from the Tivo and download it again when you want to watch it. Sounds like an offsite movie storage arrangement simply for the cost of Unbox movies.
And that they aren't going to lock it in to the tivo and let me transfer it to my PC? Golden. I love the idea of hearing about a cool flick at work, logging in and buying it, and then coming home to it sitting there and just waiting for me to watch it.
After a few rounds of tetris, I can see blocks even when I close my eyes.
That's got to mean I've got even better vision to see things that aren't even normally visible.
(I'm not convinced they're not there, you see)
So what is an appropriate level of "completion" for the games Animal Crossing Population Growing (Nintendo GameCube) and Animal Crossing Wild World (Nintendo DS)?
You have all the items possible to get in the game.
What about Tetris (almost every platform you've heard of)
There has to be an upper limit, real or artificial, where things just don't get any faster. Easy Tetris versions like the one on DS and The Grandmaster have points at which they declare you a winner and show you an ending.
or SimCity (PC DOS, Mac, Super NES, Windows)?
Back in the day I remember it as trying to get a city with populations and income per month closest to the theoretical maximum, doing so in as few years as possible, and with the least amount to initial money.
Don't know about you, but the only one of the above completion states one could arrive at without a strategy guide that contains secrets of the inner workings of the games that one might never derive on their own. There was a time when games were 100% complete with all items and trinkets and levels and enemies and any other quantifiable thing without the use of strategy guides. The guides basically upset the game player / game maker difficulty balance like an arms race and so the game makers had to put more junk hidden in more obscure and arbitrary ways.
One of the issues I think NGage had was that it had a cell phone screen on a gaming device. Portrait is great for information displays but not so great for gaming. My brother had one and I couldn't stand playing most of the games because it was too hard to see anything.
I remember thinking, "Oh, cool, Tomb Raider." Except it was a pain to play since I couldn't get a good look at my surroundings without facing the direction. He also had a Sonic game. You could either have bars on the top and bottom (like a letterbox movie) or play the game with the screen rotated. Sounds real comfortable, you know, navigating with a controller with a hand above the screen and jumping with controls under the screen.
The big disappointment for him was the lack of shooter games. It would have been the perfect platform for it. These are action oriented low-involvement games (if you've got a save feature) that would have separated themselves from the rest of the cell phone game world... which is a GOOD thing.
All those giants behind a new NGage... I'll bet we still won't even get 1943. T-T
Compared to the overwhelming force and seemingly unlimited resources of a government compared to an individual, yeah, I'd call the individual weak.
To defend the weak against the strong one must BE strong.
How much WOULD it be worth to multinational corporations to get their logo on those things? I mean, there's lots of exposure of shuttles during take off and landing.
Maybe future eras might find trashed remains of deep space probes and wonder who this McDonald's guy is anyway.
The military, at least, is a function of the government.
...
I do not, however, believe space exploration is within the constitutionally defined limits of what the federal government should be doing.
I'd argue that space presence is vital to military function, given how important satellites are for surveilance and recon. Perhaps a good question is whether NASA should be folded into the Pentagon and all it's science dumped.
One of the things that makes Scientology dangerous is not that they believe in odd things, it's that they are very well organized and equipped to muzzle detractors. South Park attacked the fundamentals of belief in a way that's obvious. Nobody except Keith and that church branch really know what happened during his protest. The original trial where he wasn't able to even counter Scientology's accusations is a travesty of justice. Beleving in Xenu, thetans, and paying gobs of money for the privilage of memorizing word lists aren't in themselves dangerous, illegal, or even wrong. What IS dangerous is how much legal protection they are granted by being recognized as a religion and their willingness to exploit the law in their favor. Other religious organizations (Roman Catholic for the best example) dumped influencing governments centuries ago. Like a badly behaved child, this new religion is trying to do exactly what a lot of the old world religions did at one time and no longer consider fashionable.
"What you are seeing coming from Microsoft is their marketing and PR machine are trying to hype the tech sector to give it, and themselves, a boost. The level or AI (whatever that really is) and robotics is not close to the C3PO bot that most people think of as robotics. Dumb vacuums that can zip around a floor and avoid obstacles doesn't seem like much of an advance in robotics or AI from what was possible a decade or more ago."
No, but that an average person can afford it (Roomba's basic model is only a Franklin and a half) is a big advance.
As far as major advances in AI and motion rivaling that of even the most basic of mammals perhaps there haven't been all that many advances. Which means it's still anyone's game, really. Will the open source movement ever really have the organization and the distribution power to handle more than software? Nuts and bolts versus zeros and ones?
Where's the beef? Microsoft has the billions it can pour into robotics at a whim if they think it's going to be a third leg to stand on. And even if they DON'T come up with the next big thing, they sure as hell could buy it.
Isn't telling a company how to write it's programs, particularly it's flagship, like telling another parent how to raise their kids? If they want to PAY over twenty people for designing that, hey, it's their money. Whether it's mismanaged or not is an internal affair over at Microsoft. Maybe the articles will have some people answer for that.