From Jack Thompson’s new temper tantrum at Take Two:
I want to bring to your attention the fact that at www.rockstargames.com anyone of any age can order Manhunt 2 and receive it, with no age verification whatsoever. Asking a 14-year-old if he’s 17 is not age verification, now is it?
How the hell is this guy a lawyer? Not only is that legal age verification in the United States (and, in fact, has been by precedent since the 1960s, when the issue was first tested by adult telephone services,) but also the Take 2 site only takes credit cards - which are themselves acceptable forms of age verification in the US since the early 1970s. Either the Florida Bar is obscenely easy, or Jacky Boy has been taking some anti-memory pills. That he should send that phrase on to the FTC and activist groups is so deeply ignorant of the law that it’s almost embarrassing to know who Jack is.
Jack, I write family-friendly game titles for a living, including family licenses from children’s cartoons. I want you out of my industry. You do far more damage than you prevent. Get it through your head: you’re a poor lawyer, a poor activist and a poor excuse for an adult living in a representative democracy. Stop flogging the bear: you may be a media whore, but the bear’s gonna turn around and bite you, soon enough.
And by bear, I mean “barratry.” Since you don’t seem to understand the law, Jack, please look it up (the various news blogs covering this are unfortunately referring to the COPPA decision; the COPA decision I just linked is far more germane.)
I greatly hope that the Take 2 lawyers will take barratry into consideration. This is the clearest case of abuse of the legal system I’ve seen in years, and that’d put a hell of a lot of weight behind the disbarment we all so desperately want to see.
Our good friends at DevKitPro want help exposing their project to a wider audience through the SourceForge Community Choice awards. DevKitPro is a deployment of GCC meant to facilitate development for console video game systems, including the Nintendo DS, the GameBoy Advance, Playstation Portable, Sega Saturn, GP2X, GP32, Nintendo GameCube and hopefully soon the Wii.
Some of you may know that I write Nintendo games commercially. DevKitPro and its antecedents were how I got my foot in the door. I’d like other people to know these tools are available, in case they have the passion too.
If you’d like to see other people able to make homebrew gaming happen for their consoles, cast your vote here.
So, I’m writing a web-based game, and I would like to know how people feel about timing out people who have disconnected. The game is a turn-based strategy game with moderately fast play, on the order of every 30 seconds to 1 minute, comparable to Reversi/Othello (Havannah, to be specific.) In particular, I’m not sure where to set the threshholds for a given person timing out.
My plan is to have three threshholds. If you’re playing a game, and someone disconnects, it’s generally for one of two reasons: their connection failed, or they’re quitting to avoid losing. On the one hand, I have spotty wifi at home, and I frequently lose connection for several minutes at a time, and I wouldn’t want to be counted a loser and a poor sport while I waited on my DSL modem to stop sucking. On the other hand, sitting around waiting for someone you don’t know is frequently the suck, and many people do quit to get out of a loss.
So, I’m setting the upper threshhold at 20 minutes. No matter what, if they log off and stay gone for 20 minutes, the game is discarded, and called in favor of the person still online. However, obviously I don’t want people to have to wait around for 20 minutes, so I need to set a lower threshhold. That threshhold will be the point at which someone gets to choose what to do. If I’m gone a little over the lower threshhold, the system will say to the other player “do you want to call it a tie, save it for later, or claim a disconnect win?” If it’s someone who doesn’t know me, they shouldn’t be forced to wait, and should have the option of calling it a tie if the game isn’t very far in, or if I’ve obviously been having connection trouble. However, they should also be able to claim a disconnect win if they smell a jerk.
It would be nice if they could call a tie or a save very early, much earlier than would be appropriate for calling a quitter loss, so the other two threshholds are those two issues seperately. The lowest threshhold is the “save or tie” threshhold, and it should be fairly fast. Someone can choose to ignore it if they want. The next threshhold is the “you quit to cheat” threshhold, and it should be at least somewhat patient. At the 20 minute line, the system will call it, no matter what.
So, the question is, how long should those two lower timeouts be? Twenty minutes is obviously far too long for either. On the balance, ten seconds obviously isn’t long enough; most people can’t reconnect that fast, and we need to be accomodating of people’s computers rebooting, of modem reconnect cycles, of DSL reconnect cycles, and so on.
I’m going to set a range of options. If you don’t see the time you want, feel free to add it; I’ll be using the distribution of answers, not just the most popular, so it’ll still count.
How long should the game wait before allowing a tie or save?
So, I handed over some webspace to a guy on IRC who was converting books from Project Gutenberg for use with the bookreader in MoonShell for the Nintendo DS. He was trying to share a few books I recognized and they’re all legal, and his webspace was fail, so I figured I’d be goodbear and share.
Lo and behold, I take a look at the space I gave him - http://moonbooks.stonecypher.net/ - a few weeks later. He’s already got 150+ books up. Very rarely am I as happy with someone to whom I give resources as I am this time. This is a great example of shared resources being put to very good use. In particular, Brandon asked me what authors I liked, and when I name-dropped Ambrose Bierce, he went and converted what appears to be everything Bierce ever wrote, including a personal favorite called “Write it Right.”
Bravo. Makes me wonder who else I should be helping out, and I gave out another account today. We’ll see if it’s also put to good use.
It’s been a good year for holy-crap technologies. This one - an MIT tool called ASSIST - boggles my mind, and it’s given me some seriously woot ideas. I’m filing it under Nintendo DS because, even though it’s not a game, that’s just the ideal platform for a better-developed such tool.
The YouTube video is short, but there’s a longer one at the main page.
That’s right. Netflix will give you a million bucks if you can write an algorithm which one-ups their existing algorithm by 10% or better on grounds of predicting what their customers will like, based on their prior history.
There’s a point at which one begins to wonder how they can take themselves seriously when they claim their channel is all about keeping it calm. It’s gotten quite sad. Mellow’s just a hangout for warezers, pirates and troublemakers, anymore. They cause trouble in the real channel, then they go to #mellow and behave, so they can convince themselves they’re really okay guys, and that it’s just the other channel’s fault that they’re trolling.
Sadly, I begin to worry that they’ve gotten so caught up in their drama and lies that they won’t ever admit to themselves the damage they’ve done, and that the way the split will end is when the DS is over. We’d lose half a dozen good developers that way.
It’d be nice if they’d grow up, get over the drama and come back. Joat, I’m looking straight at you.
Lots of blogs aggregate my blog, and most of them - surprisingly, even the homebrew scene aggregators - haven’t set this yet. So, let me just spread the love: the Wii will be released November 19, 2006 at a price of $250. Many details were given. Some games will use the DS as a controller, just as the GameCube used the GBA as a controller (examples from the past include Donkey Kong Country 3, and Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, which actually required a GBA for a controller.) Nostalgic NES games will be $5, SNES for $10, and N64 for $15.
There’ve been a lot of good media clips lately. This one, well, it’s pretty good. Some of the lead-in visual gags are a bit tired, but they’ve also got several really good, really inobvious visual gags, so give them the benefit of the doubt.
Very reminiscent of the Averaging Gradius project, but done with a certain eye for style in a much more modern and better looking game. Averaging Gradius still holds my heart (and the title of progenitor,) but this really should be seen.
Some movies. There are three, so I’m hiding them behind the more button. Don’t mind the name, or the black-and-whiteness; you want to see these. Read the rest of this entry »
For those who haven’t noticed, the dev channels from efnet for Nintendo hardware have moved to irc.blitzed.net . Affected are #dsdev, #gbadev, and #wiidev.
That PC sudoku client I keep talking about is starting to come together. Probably in the next week or two, I’m going to start looking for beta testers. Beta testers get 500 free puzzles, and don’t have to pay any money to be involved. If you’re interested, read on.
Next-Gen has claimed that “senior industry sources” have told them that the world’s largest gaming convention, whose profits have just been going up every year, is suddenly over.
I’m calling bullshit. I think this is a tactic to raise traffic, that it’s a boldfaced lie (or a prank on a reporter who refuses to report rumor as something other than fact,) and that it’s a sign that Next-Gen has finally gone down the tubes.
I’m going to paste the link, rather than link it, because I don’t want most people visiting the page, but I want there to be posterity. http://next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3538&Itemid=2 Do not visit this page; it’s bullshit.
If Next-Gen doesn’t run a front-page screen-top apology for a month, their credibility has been shot to hell. ‘Course, it’s not like they’re worth reading anyway, given that they rate games starting at 8 of 10, have appalling grammar, and never admit to passing rumor off as news. (Sure, they’ve been caught doing it before, but saying E3 is over is a bit fucking much.)
E3 just started a network site, and accepted quite a bit of money to get people involved. If they shut down after that, they’re in for tremendous trouble. They provide massive marketing opportunities at comparatively low prices, make four to seven hundred dollars a head for a crowd of sixty thousand and have a massive impact on the direction of gaming.
I just don’t believe it. Cite your sources or go the fuck home. Next-Gen is nothing better than the Daily Sun.
I’ve got a potential buyer for my PC and Nintendo DS Sudoku clients, so I’ve been working on them fairly exclusively. I’m kind of hoping to have news about them soon, because in particular the PC client has a bunch of fairly odd new features which I am quite proud of. But, first I have to get them sold.
That’s right, it’s called the Wii now. Apparently Nintendo didn’t learn from Intel’s Viiv bungle; that’s pronounced “we,” not “why.” It’s supposed to be inviting, comfortable, and unifying, and to emphasize that everyone plays. Also it avoids acronymitudinalityhood.
How do you feel about the Revolution’s name change?
Kevin Siembieda has generated some of the best RPG stuff on the market. Rifts was the second RPG I ever played, and I remember it to this day as the only modern dark horror setting I’ve ever seen that actually worked in gameplay.
Kevin has been screwed to the tune of a million dollars, at a time when he’s stretched thin on a bunch of exciting projects which suddenly he can’t float. There’s a decent chance Palladium is going under. However, there is hope.
Kevin’s handmaking a poster - a small, black and white pencilled 11×14″ affair, hand-numbered, featuring all the major characters of the Multiverse. Copies are a limited run, and each one is $50. This money will go to shouldering the company through a few rough months while it gets over the collossal screwing which someone on the inside dealt out (including the theft of a lot of irreplacable originals.) Assuming he survives (and he will, if you guys crack out the wallets - he only needs to sell 5-6k posters to make it through this) he will be printing a list of all the people who helped in the back of one of the major books. And, for you gluttons out there, those prints are going to spike on value something fierce. That’s a collectible like you only see once every 20 years.
So, I got mine. It’s time for you to get yours. Kevin has been remarkably good to the RPG crowd, keeping margins very small. If he’d been a little greedier he could probably weather this attack on his own.
He’s given us heroes for fifteen years. It’s time for us to give him a few back. Fifty bucks isn’t that much.
There’s a point at which one begins to wonder how they can take themselves seriously when they claim their channel is all about keeping it calm. It’s gotten quite sad. Mellow’s just a hangout for warezers, pirates and troublemakers, anymore. They cause trouble in the real channel, then they go to #mellow and behave, so they can convince themselves they’re really okay guys, and that it’s just the other channel’s fault that they’re trolling.