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vgmax

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Posts posted by vgmax

  1. Bias isn't the thing GamerGate made it out to be. The relationship that was the focus of that debate was a one-off conflict of interest deal. I think Game Players made the point about reviews best in the mid-90s, in that if you are charged with actually playing through a game like a reviewer is, a boring game can feel like imprisonment(?), leading to experiences of "feast" vs "famine". EGM in 1994 I think it was had this cartoon of a superhero standing tall in first incarnation, then a little flabby in next, then finally dad-bod representing the failure of sequels to improve on original game's formula. The early 90s had a crush of titles which were basically re-releases with little bits added on (looking at you SFII and especially you, Megaman X). And oh the clones... Doom-clones then Duke clones with different presentation but basically same play. I think a lot of it was due to the high costs of storage in those days, which forced developers to compromise between better graphics (which did steadily improve) and game play which devs only had vague theories of how to modify successfully. Better to make a lot of weaker offerings which cost less than a handful of high priced awesome games (e.g. Final Fantasy III at $80) that might or might not sell and break the bank.

    In the late 2000s there seemed to be a quality crisis in games probably brought on by the recession (the mid-2k games were amazing to put it mildly). Freemium and DRM developed and games started becoming more contrived and less fun. Experiments were less about game play and more about how to cajole players into paying more, incomplete games started shipping etc. People started getting mad and were looking for people to blame for it all. The superstar reviewer of the 90s who had real relationships with readers was put by the wayside as readers started looking to the internet for news (and readers stopped paying attention to who did the writing) and the metrosexual attitude of personal humility, insecurity and appeasement, watching your back etc. took over because people felt anonymized, and then Gamergate naturally followed.

    tldr; Bias isn't a thing in reviews. Reviewers are looking for novelty, always have been, and will give extra points to games that offer it.

    To answer TC's question, I think the mags with superstar reviewers like Game Players (who used humor and answered reader letters with their names) were probably more honest, though honesty really wasn't an issue in those days. Also be sure to distinguish between features (which cover promises by developers and previews using latest tech) and actual reviews which get much less fanfare. The only way you can really successfully allege bias against a review, I think, is to contrast it with scores at Metacritic, Gamefaqs etc. by people who played the game. If a company invites reviewers over for a feature preview, takes out a big ad, and gets a review players ultimately think it doesn't deserve, that's a pretty good sign of bias. This next to never happens. You might be able to make a point that features ultimately masquerade as reviews, but that could also be on the reader eh?

  2. Not likely. Search bar returns all keyword results eventually. They are foolish to think that they are serving shareholders by striking the mags from legit services like IA or this one. If not at IA, here, or oldgamemags the next place that will turn up in the Google/DuckDuckGo/Dogpile results is not a place they want people to know exists. However it's likely the Publishers Association doesn't actually know the details, they've probably just outsourced the job of "protecting content" to a takedown firm (this is what's usually done).

  3. OK so I checked IA out and there are definitely some things there that shouldn't be. What is strange to me is the fact that they went after the old stuff that had been scanned rather than the blatantly pirated ebooks from Future's digital store. In any case the issue TC mentioned seems to be restored to the site.

  4. Interesting. A law went on the books recently in USA to stop content aggregation of copyrighted content, was sneaked inside the Covid recovery bill in December as a rider. We should not expect companies to turn a blind eye to anarchivism much longer... a theory is circulating that freely available content competes with non-free content ("market displacement" is the term), thus all non-strategic use of a company's intellectual property holdings to be inhibited (including old mags). PC Gamer be like, "our old mags compete with our new stuff, even though we don't offer them because we don't got them anymore". Same theory that old games compete with new games. It's all about where people's time is being spent..." if you can corral a person into being your customer, do so" is the logic.

    I did a presentation on the anti-piracy movement/scam last month for class. The place we are headed is frankly quite disturbing. I can post the presentation (PowerPoint format) if you're interested.

    Ethereal I would definitely watch out for the reappearance of that issue somewhere in the care of Future plc in the future. Very likely they will steal your work.

     

    If there are any PC Gamer mags left there, I will archive them tonight. I saw like 30-40 before the 2000s yesterday. Also Internet Archive not a reliable place to post potentially marketable content... the games themselves will likely go offline in the next couple years. The intellectual brutes of society think they are ascendant and are gonna be really uncompromising and vicious going forward.

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  5. I don't think this is a sensible concern for a couple reasons:

    * broader reach will result in more people getting invested in the site/project

    * more people getting invested will mean more effort which will make maintenance easier

    Also media costs are really low right now. You can store 2,000 mags on a terabyte hdd, and those run just $25 used.

  6. This project probably does more harm than good.

    Several things:

    1) Friend asked at their forums about project specifics. A researcher using the project responded directly, saying they had ample resources for getting the work done (surplus, in fact). That was last year... since then the RTX series and Navi/VII series have come out, which has likely resulted in an increase in total resources of around 30% (and climbing).

    2) Researcher disclosed that additional power would not result in higher rates of progress because Stanford is unwilling to hire more staff (or even to train staff -- this is an Ivy League rich person school that lost its way) and computation outcomes must be verified thru costly and time-consuming experiments (the project is merely a predictive aid to help researchers figure which experiments are worthwhile).

    3) these cards/systems are using mondo energy which is often produced by fossil fuels

    Also the coin is pratically worthless and becoming moreso (no one is buying, only selling).

    I participated with my own rx560 before realizing that the resources of that card were a disposable drop in the bucket.

  7. Bought this guide before I owned the game. Couldn't afford Playstation so it was the next best thing. Beautiful pictures. Was one of several released for the game. Afterward Square and other companies formally began monetizing guides and making their games so obtuse at points as to require them for certain tasks (infamous password in Tales of Destiny comes to mind). They forbade any companies except officially recognized publishers from creating them in print. A step towards the decline of the industry, sad to say.

  8. On 11/17/2019 at 4:41 AM, kitsunebi77 said:

    I got bored and uploaded something. It's another issue of Famitsu, full of this and that as they are wont to be. Please pour out a 40 for the Chinese message board I found this on a year ago which has since gone the way of pogs and pudding pops.

    https://archive.org/details/famitsu0288june241994

    large.1391015391_Famitsu0288(June241994).jpg

     

    I was gonna try an OCR but the PDF is too washed out, likely from JPEG compression.

  9. In theory, machine learning provide better algorithms.

    In theory.

    I've used machine translation for 20 years, and the only improvement I've seen is they stopped biasing the interpretation towards celebrity names.

    And it still can't make a lick of sense out of a SNES game script (or any interpersonal dialogue, for that matter).

  10. @kitsunebi77:

    there have been prototype releases for the past 25 years. They are invariably the result of someone giving a ROM to somebody who then dumped it with a copier. Romhacking.net has a bunch of sourcecodes for old Atari games, all made available by the original programmers. All this stuff started on sites like Zophar.net... there are communities like TCRF and Betaarchive who are determined to obtain every prototype ever made. Software is the legacy of those who programmed it... programmers want to be remembered for what they made, hence they release the prototypes they kept as keepsakes of their endevors. Stuff trickles out with or without a makeshift authority mediating handovers. If anything VGHF sterilizes the passion and frenzy as a function of its formality.

  11. It's behind an "academic wall". Here's the thing: university libraries across the United States keep their old mags, of all topics, in an archive. But they have a habit of, after a certain time, restricting access to their older materials or of denying photocopies of those mags to anyone who isn't sponsored by a college. It's like that huge stack of games Byuu (the author of Higan) had mailed to him for "preservation": the data from those ROMS will be scanned, but it'll likely the copies will never find their way onto the internet in a publicly available form (at least, not for another 60-70 years). Only greyer projects like this one make abandoned media available to the public.

  12. I'd like to make a point about this "Video Game Foundation" stuff...

    Gaming is a hobby. Nothing but a hobby. When you make it something else, you're distracting from what's important. Causes like social justice, medical research, research on the effects of consumer chemicals, etc. Gaming history is something for hobbyists, not a focus of tax dollars. That foundation, from what they describe, is creating nothing more than a wall behind which stuff will never be seen again by anybody but neo-aristocrats. Who gets to become a "gaming historian"? Those blessed with the cash from their inheritance? Beware what you endorse... because when you do so, you implicitly endorse that which is necessary for what you endorse to exist, which you may not be in favor of...

  13. Wonder if anyone's familiar of any trade journals that were published for Japanese game developers in the 80s/90s. Reason being I and a bunch of RHDN peeps strongly suspect that there were development libraries sold to companies thru trade mags, the kind of thing that wouldn't be on newsstands but would show up in the mailbox of developers/companies. Might be something to look for.

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