Delicious LiveJournal Links for 7-25-2008

[andrewducker]

• Net firms in music pirates deal
  BT, Virgin, Orange, Tiscali, BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse have all signed up to a deal, negotiated by the government, will see hundreds of thousands of letters sent to net users suspected of illegally sharing music.
  (tags: broadband copyright filesharing)
• Inside the Lego Factory
  Three short videos take you around the Lego factory. Amazingly efficient, and almost entirely automated.
  (tags: design video lego factory)
• Steven Moffat on the planning his first series of Dr Who
  (tags: DrWho StevenMoffat)
• The Nintendo Wii's New Real Price
  Comparing the cost of a Wii + four controllers with the other current-gen consoles.
  (tags: nintendo wii)
• Running for Office - XKCD style!
  More serious than you might think.
  (tags: politics government usa funny)
• Only in America
  Woman buys "Obama is my slave" t-shirt. Gets assaulted for wearing it. Sues designer of said t-shirt.
  (tags: USA politics clothing)
• Army shoots live pigs in Hawaii in trauma training drill for soldiers heading to Iraq
  God bless america. Oink.
  (tags: usa war iraq)
• Read Giles Coren's letter to Times subs
  In which he gets very, very annoyed over the removal of a single, but very important, letter from an article he submitted. Fantastic stuff.
  (tags: culture english food funny grammar journalism)
• Why film schools teach screenwriters not to pass the Bechdel test
  Which is that: 1) there are at least two named female characters, who 2) talk to each other about 3) something other than a man.
  (tags: film hollywood art women movies feminism)
• WarGames: A Look Back at the Film That Turned Geeks and Phreaks Into Stars
  I loved Wargames as a kid. I actually read the book before I saw the movie!
  (tags: computers culture history wargames)

Comments

[onceupon.livejournal.com]

I have to read more of these but I disagree with the way the comparison was set up on that Wii article. Bah.

[andrewducker]

You can't just say "I disagree" - _how_ do you disagree?

[chuma.livejournal.com]

For starters if you throw in wifi to the mix you can add on another $80 to the basic Xbox360 package. I fyou want any decent HDD space for your multimedia machines you can add another $100 to the PS3 and another $50 to the Xbox360, as not having it kinda defeats the object of the PS3 as it certainly ain't a games machine (Plus the Wii doesn't have a basic unit; it has *1* type of unit). Add into the mix that you get a controller with Wii Play and an attachement with Wii Resort when it comes out and you have 2 games extra with your 4 Player Wii than the others have.

[chuma.livejournal.com]

Oh, also you can't compare like for like with a new controller type. Yes I have 4 nunchucks to go with my 4 remotes, but suggesting you HAVE to have them is a falsehood.

[andrewducker]

I think that suggesting you can play more than a small proportion of Wii games without them is misleading...

I'm not sure I have any games that use the Wiimote and don't require a Nunchuck.

[chuma.livejournal.com]

That would be a False Synergism. There are a actually a fair proportion of games that only require the Remote on its own, just that you don't own them or, like me, prefer to play with the nunchuck.

Dragon Quest Swords, Mario Kart Wii, Smash Bros Brawl, House of the Dead 2+3, Sonic Riders, Poker - All In, Wii Sports, Wii Play, Blazing Angels, Metal Slug Anthology, Ghost Squad, Wario Ware, Wii Chess, Nitro Bike, Super Monkey Ball, Tony Hawks Downhill Jam.

Out of my collection of 26 games, that's 16 of them that don't NEED the nunchuck. Looking at the titles online, it WOULD be true to say that a lot of the more recent titles do require the nunchuck, but to suggest only a small proportion don't is false.

[andrewducker]

I stand corrected - didn't know you could play even Wii Sports without it - how do you do the boxing?

[chuma.livejournal.com]

You don't. You cannot play the boxing without it. But that is just one of the subgames. You can play bowling, tennis, golf and baseball though. Regardless, Boxing is 2 player only so wouldn't really apply to the costing listed in the article. Same is true for Wii Play; the tank game requires a nunchuck but the 8 other games do not, but is only 2 player.

It would be true to say you cannot play all minigames in Monkey Ball and Wario Ware without it, but as I am at pains to point out, you dont NEED to have it to enjoy the game.

[andrewducker]

It seems then that the games are at least partially crippled if you don't have the Nunchucks. Which makes them fairly essential, even if not technically so.

[chuma.livejournal.com]

Fine, have it your way. *12* out of 26. Still a SMALL proportion?

[andrewducker]

Oh, no. You can play half the games. I'm sure most people would be fine with that.

[chuma.livejournal.com]

Actually, on a related note, theres very few XBox360 games that are 4 player. Most of mine are 1 or 2 player or massively multiplayer ONLINE, but not on screen.

If we factor in paying for XBox Live against the free (and frankly limited and occasionally very shoddy) online service for the Wii, that's a significant whack of money on top per year.

[andrewducker]

Now those arguments are ones I can agree with. While Live is apparently excellent, it is definitely an extra cost.

I was also very annoyed to discover how many games aren't multiplayer around a single TV. I played Burnout Paradise at a friend's and was disgusted to discover that we couldn't race each other.

[andrewducker]

Also, your vendetta is getting kinda repetitive. You may not want a PS3, but claiming it's not a games machine makes you look silly.

[chuma.livejournal.com]

Sony have said so themselves and even critisized the Nintendo Wii for being just a games machine. You just aren't involved in the day to day politics of gaming, so maybe you should stop claiming who is "silly" until you have all the facts, mm?

[andrewducker]

It may not solely be a games machine - but a games machine it most definitely is. You can play games on it - ipso facto, games machine.

[chuma.livejournal.com]

Does that make the iPhone a games machine too then?

[andrewducker]

If people are buying it largely for that purpose, then yes.

I know several people who bought the PS3 as a games machine. They use it largely for playing games on, bought it from computer games shops, etc.

Sony may want to claim that it's not a games machine, but that's like saying that the Wii isn't because it has a web browser, or the 360 isn't because you can watch DVDs on it. All three are clearly aimed at the games console market, marketing nonsense aside.

[chuma.livejournal.com]

The PS3 is being largely bought as a cheap Blueray player, not as a game machine. If you weren't being so rude earlier I would have linked you the articles from E3 where Sony have been focused on this area of the device. They are really pushing the selling of online content and films and their Second Life clone called Home. I think that about 50% of the E3 presentation was dedicated to this purpose, showing off the interface for buying movies and so forth.

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/07/15/sony-announces-80gb-ps3-will-be-399-in-sept/

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/07/15/psns-video-content-is-open-for-business-to-all-studios/

the first article is the new 80Gb basic version they are pushing and dropping the 40Gb one (60Gb has already fallen by the wayside) as people are going to need bigger HDDs for the purposes they are using the PS3 for.

Now, if Sony want to pitch their tent out with the PS3 being a Multimedia machine rather than a games console, that it their business, but it is not a "vendetta" to point out just how lacking they are in their original core market this generation. In fairness to them, it hasn't stopped sales of the PSP in that regard either, though UMD format seems to have died a death.

To be honest this is much like arguing over whether a Tomato is a vegetable because you know people use it in salads or if it is a berry because that is how it is defined.

[andrewducker]

Oh, Sony have definitely been pushing it that way. But then Microsoft have been doing exactly the same thing with the 360, pushing it as a home hub and media centre since before the launch.

MS don't, to me, seem to be any different to Sony in this, also selling masses of downloadable content, downloadable video, etc. And Sony seem to be pretty much there on the game front. Checking Wikipedia, MS have 104 exclusives, Sony have 90, hardly a knockout blow for the 360.

I'm not a Sony fan - I'd go for a 360 myself - but you seem downright obsessional on the subject.

[chuma.livejournal.com]

I was a Sony fan, or at least I was a fan of the first 2 consoles having well over 150 games between them both.

As for the exclusive, only 26 have actually been released in the EU at this time. With the region locking, this means no hope of imports working either. Substantially less than the 90 you claim. More importantly than sheer volume is quality. There just hasn't been any killer titles for it yet. Everyone (including myself) though Metal Gear Solid 4 was gonna be the console seller, but it didn't live up to the hype. My attempts to play it as yet have been thwarted by cut scenes, though I know someone who has it and will attempt to do so at some point.

Finally, yes you can argue MS have been doing the same, but most of the tools added by MS have been with the gamer in mind. With the lack of a viable format for movies now on the XBox360, the have take a shift back towards gaming as a whole rather than multimedia.

Look, we can argue in circles over this all day if you want and I can offer articles, facts and opinions on every rebuttal you have. As far as I am concerned, the PS3 is Sony's plan to push Blueray as they haven't had a propriotry format that has sold for a long while and if they make games along the way, then all well and good. As a gamer, I HATE this focus and would prefer it to be the other way around. for this reason I am utterly opposed to the business model.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Sadly, there's nowhere to comment on Coren's article. I wanted to mention that his subs were right, and it was an ugly sentence.

Also, that he's clearly a cock for publishing that letter.

[andrewducker]

Did he publish it? Or was it leaked?

It seems very unlikely that he'd publish that.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Ah, didn't read the URL. It would appear it was leaked.

In which case, fair enough, he's not a total ass. Still wrong about the sentence, though. And the joke doesn't play.

[andrewducker]

Doesn't play for me either. But it's not my piece - he's free to write things the way he wants to, and complain about it when people change his writing for no good reason.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

True dat. I'd have been similarly irritated in his position, although possibly not over an "a". Still, sounds like a long-running feud.