Quote:Gabe: Robert said we could talk about that deal with GameStop.
We had a meeting with GameStop to talk about selling a boxed version of the game. Once we had a bunch of episodes together, we would collect them and put them in a box, you know? And GameStop said, oh, that's fantastic. We'd love to do it, we'd love to carry the game... but it's not going to be available anywhere else, is it?
And Robert said, well, we're going to digitally distribute it first.
They got really upset. And they said, no, you can't do that. We can't have it in our store if it's coming out digitally first. And he said, well, I'm sorry, that's the way it works. We're publishing our game and we can say where it goes. And so the deal that they tried to strike with Robert was okay, well, listen: If you cut us in on the profits from online distribution, and XBLA, and everything it comes out on, then we'll think about carrying it in the store. Just, what assholes.
So we're not going to be seeing this game in GameStop, is what you're saying.
Gabe: Probably not.
If this is "how the business works" then "the business" is an idiot, a rich idiot. No, being rich does not justify the choices you made in life retroactively somehow, and this is really just arse behavior.
Basically they are saying "Hey, for you to have the privilage of us making a profit off of selling your games, we should also make an additional profit from game sales we in no way have anything to do with at all". By the way, <a href="http://www.illwillpress.com/newused22.html">this</a> is the best commentary I've yet seen, if lacking in any real reason for it to be animated.
So, I played TP again yesterday... for 5 1/2 hours. Along with last Thursday, I made progress again in the game for the first time since, my save file said, January 2007. :)
... so yeah, I actually managed to finish the second dungeon (Goron Mines), which is where I'd quit... I'm now about to enter the third one, the underwater temple.
So what do I think?
Really, it's the same question as with Phantom Hourglass and Oracles: How much should you count a really stupid story and bad characterizations against a game with amazing gameplay, design, graphics, music and art? While I'm playing, I quickly forget about those bad parts... just like with those other games. And the good parts are so, so good...
But still, the question of why even the best games games don't have stories and characterizations to match their great gameplay is a valid one, I think. Even if the gameplay certainly matters more.
MELROSE PARK, Ill. — Being inside a pinball machine factory sounds exactly as you think it would. Across a 40,000-square-foot warehouse here, a cheery cacophony of flippers flip, bells ding, bumpers bump and balls click in an endless, echoing loop. The quarter never runs out.
Eddie Hivo, left, and Fernando Herrera checking a pinball machine at Stern Pinball Inc. in Melrose Park, Ill., the last company to mass produce the devices.
Gary Stern says half of his company’s machines now go into homes and not a corner arcade.
But this place, Stern Pinball Inc., is the last of its kind in the world. A range of companies once mass produced pinball machines, especially in the Chicago area, the one-time capital of the business. Now there is only Stern. And even the dinging and flipping here has slowed: Stern, which used to crank out 27,000 pinball machines each year, is down to around 10,000.
To most, the story seems familiar — of a craze that had its moment, of computers that grew sophisticated, of a culture that started staying home for fun, of being replaced by video games. But to pinball people, this is a painful fading, and one that, some insist, might yet be turned around.
“There are a lot of things I look at and scratch my head,” said Tim Arnold, who ran an arcade during a heyday of pinball in the 1970s and recently opened The Pinball Hall of Fame, a nonprofit museum in a Las Vegas strip mall. “Why are people playing games on their cellphones while they write e-mail? I don’t get it.”
“The thing that’s killing pinball,” Mr. Arnold added, “is not that people don’t like it. It’s that there’s nowhere to play it.”
Along the factory line in this suburb west of Chicago, scores of workers pull and twist at colored wires, drill holes in wooden frames, screw in flippers and tiny light bulbs and assorted game characters who will eventually move and spin and taunt you.
Though pinball has roots in the 1800s game of bagatelle, these are by no means simple machines. Each one contains a half-mile of wire and 3,500 tiny components, and takes 32 hours to build — as the company’s president, Gary Stern, likes to say, longer than a Ford Taurus.
Mr. Stern, the last pinball machine magnate, is a wise-cracking, fast-talking 62-year-old with a shock of white hair, matching white frame glasses and a deep tan who eats jelly beans at his desk and recently hurt a rib snowboarding in Colorado.
The manufacturing plant is a game geek’s fantasy job, a Willy Wonka factory of pinball.
Some designers sit in private glass offices seated across from their pinball machines.
Some workers are required to spend 15 minutes a day in the “game room” playing the latest models or risk the wrath of Mr. Stern. “You work at a pinball company,” he explained, grumpily, “you’re going to play a lot of pinball.” (On a clipboard here, the professionals must jot their critiques, which, on a recent day, included “flipper feels soft” and “stupid display.”)
And in a testing laboratory devoted to the physics of all of this, silver balls bounce around alone in cases for hours to record how well certain kickers and flippers and bumpers hold up.
Mr. Stern’s father, Samuel Stern, spent his life in the pinball business, starting out as a game operator in the 1930s — when a simple version of the modern mass-produced pinball machine first appeared. Dozens of companies were soon producing the machines, said Roger Sharpe, widely considered a foremost historian of the sport after the 1977 publication of his book, “Pinball!”
The creation of the flipper — popularized by the Humpty Dumpty game in 1947 — transformed the activity, which went on to surges in the 1950s, ’70s and early ’90s.
“Everybody thinks of it as retro, as nostalgia,” Mr. Sharpe said. “But it’s not. These are sophisticated games. Pinball is timeless.”
Perhaps, but even Mr. Stern acknowledges that demand is down. The hard-core players are faithful; the International Flipper Pinball Association keeps careful watch of the top-ranked players in the world. But the casual player has drifted.
“The whole coin-op industry is not what it once was,” Mr. Stern said.
Corner shops, pubs, arcades and bowling alleys stopped stocking pinball machines. A younger audience turned to video games. Men of a certain age, said Mr. Arnold, who is 52, became the reliable audience. (“Chicks,” he announced, “don’t get it.”)
And so for Mr. Stern, the pinball buyer is shifting.
In the United States, Mr. Stern said, half of his new machines, which cost about $5,000 and are bought through distributors, now go directly into people’s homes and not a corner arcade. He said nearly 40 percent of the machines — some designed to appeal to French, German, Italian and Spanish players — were exported, and he added that he had been working to make inroads in China, India, the Middle East and Russia.
Mr. Stern said the notion underlying this game was universal, lasting.
Ask him about the future and Mr. Stern offers a rare pause. In 10 years, he said, pinball will be fine. His company will be here, cranking out pinball machines. Fifty years hence? It is too far away to think about, he said. But pressed to ponder it, he said he was certain of one thing: Pinball will be around.
“Look, pinball is like tennis,” said Mr. Stern, noting that a tennis court could never, for instance, be made round and that certain elements of a pinball play field are equally unchangeable and lasting. “This is a ball game. It’s a bat and ball game, O.K.?”
Wii games can look as good as Xbox360 or PlayStation3 games, US developer High Voltage Software (´The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy´, ´Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude´) claims.
In an exclusive IGN interview, Eric Nofsinger, the studio´s Chief Creative Officer, found some strong words.
Most of the games on the Wii look like crap. We want to change that, so we've invested heavily in our Wii tech over the past year. We have real-time normal mapping, reflection and refraction, post process full screen effects, real-time shadows, projected lights and textures, specularity and fresnel effects, emissive and iridescent materials, interactive water, morphing, and much more all running with a rock solid frame rate on the Wii.
Our goal is to be the most technically innovative Wii developer on the planet. (...) With Conduit, we are trying to make a Wii game that looks like a 360 title.
The studio announced the development of a First Person Shooter called ´The Conduit´ and showed off their dedicated Wii engine called Quantum3 in a technology demo.
The IGN article describes the technical details of the engine:
It allows the developer to create graphic effects normally seen on other consoles with vertex and pixel shaders – specifically, dynamic bump-mapping (via tangent space normals or embossing), reflection and refraction (via real-time cube or spherical environmental maps), light / shadow maps, projected texture lights, specular and Fresnel effects, emissive and iridescent materials, advanced alpha blends, light beams / shafts, gloss and detail mapping, seamless resource streaming, projected shadows, heat distortion and motion blur, interactive water with dual-wave channels and complex surface effects, animated textures, and more.
This company is determined and looking to push the hardware but lack experience. They're making a game for Wii called Pure Shit. That was a lie, it's called Conduit and it, well, it looks like pure shit. Irony. But to be fair, it's an incredibly early build of the game so we'll see. But lets base our opinions on what we know now: So a company that's full of piss and vinegar and young upstarts ("whippersnappers") can pull a real-time demo like that there above... what could a AAA company push?
Julian Eggebrecht, president of Factor 5 (´Turrican´, ´Rogue Squadron´) has commented on the graphics engine they are developing for Wii. Speaking to IGN, he said that "it does everything that the PS3 did and then some."
Eggebrecht appears to be saying that their current Wii project, which had only just been revealed, will look at least as good as the studio´s recent PlayStation3 game ´Lair´ or better. Here is the context:
We want to push the hardware. (...) I mean, on the graphical side, we're going to try and do everything to outdo everything else on the platform, the same as we did for the Star Wars games back on the GameCube. (...)
We're pretty much at a state where we're almost done with the engine. At the same time, we've also been working on content quite a bit because we had enough running very quickly on the platform that we were able to. But the biggest milestone or mark right now is that we're almost done with the engine and it does everything that the PS3 did and then some, quite frankly. So we're pretty happy with that.
It's not just what a lot of people were expecting. 'Oh, we're going to cash in on what we had from Rebel Strike.' Which we actually also did. That was a fun experience just to bring that game over and play it on Wii. Nevertheless, we said, well, weighing the pros and cons, why don't we do something completely new based on all the experience we had back then? So, that's almost done.
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The real time demo is undeniable. But how well it works in an actual game, that's the question.
If that's what it takes to shut down horrible groups like the FLDS, more people should do things like that... it's insane that they have been allowed to exist in so many states for so long.
Posted by: Jasonstawnos - 19th April 2008, 7:08 PM - Forum: Tendo City
- Replies (5)
I got banned for being a bot. :(
Whut u need EM i got a duffel bag here fulla pillz xanax viagra lexaprom valium lithium oxycotin effexor
(I can't think of any more prescription drug names :( so we'll just roll right onto)
lol size matters checkit 78% of women say that they aren't satisfied by their partner and they all lie when they say size isn't important, you need at least 10 inches under your belt to even qualify, but most women today have upgraded to the footlong or even 14 inch models. All they care about is having a phallus or phallic-shaped object as large as possible inserted as far as possible as fast and as hard as possible that's all they like is power between their legs and nothing else would we lie to you or be misinformed? we are the vag commandos, fighting along side the likes of the ranks of say Green Berets but our department is more information and getting you laid which is kind of like foreign policy warfare in itself no? , you aren't a man if you only have 6 inches lol what are you gonna do lick her pussy?
also be sure to understand how theg ame works, you have to project an image of self-confidence and non-reliance and lackof co-depedance at all times and even an air of aloofness and maybe offensiveness (if you can work it in there in a funny sort ofway, women love humor) but at the same time show a small level of interest that only she picks up on so she tihnks that you're an asshole to eveyrone but she's special, then you have to just reel her in slowly mate make her think she wants you beacuse women are all easily maniplated and the same pick up artist tactics can be used on all of them beacuse they aren't thinking human beings like us dumbass men, they only think what yo implant into their minds with your games, the rules of which we will teach you, which you cannot get laid without (trust us)
I don't know where I was gong with this EM but you need to give me money as soon as possible kthxbrb
![[Image: 25pinball01_650.jpg]](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/25/us/25pinball01_650.jpg)
![[Image: 25pinball02_650.jpg]](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/25/us/25pinball02_650.jpg)
