I was thinking the exact same thing.

dfenstrate is a dolt, yet every post he makes gets rated +5...

Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWERzwbobOk

You're right, you're way smarter than all of us unwashed masses who don't deserve the benefit of your supreme insight.

How do you even take yourself seriously?

"Nothing is easier than self-deception. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true." -Demosthenes

They would freely admit that, but they'd be wrong. Just because people drank the kool-aid and then agree with the guy at the front of the room behind the podium doesn't mean they're all right.

The America you describe might have existed in the previous centuries, but at this point in time, the system is showing extravagant fault.

All those guys who already became millionaires? They spend all their time making sure they stay millionaires. In order for them to stay millionaires, it means they have to keep other people out of/from taking over their game. Corportations engage in monopolistic activity constantly. Not only is it advantageous to have a position of financial liquidity as many of them do, many industries pump millions of dollars (in some cases daily i.e. the medical insurance industry right now) into lobbyists and special interest groups in order to manipulate legistation to support their ambitions and of course, to keep other people from taking their slice of the pie.

I mean, come on! Look at all the anti-competition crap MS has pulled over the years.

I've seen too many people in my life with strong ideas, know-how, and drive fail time and time again to get their companies off the ground, and I guarantee you, it's not because they're not good enough. Every time, it's because of some asshole venture capitalist wanting a bigger slice of the pie.

That's not the America I was promised when I was a child and that's not the America I want to be living in.

How this comment gets 5: Insightful is beyond me. All like the parent replied, it's all ad hominems and strawmen. There's not a single hard argument here that holds water.

http://www.jmooneyham.com/the-huge-mountain-of-cash-separating-the-rich-from-everyone-else.html (and seriously, I'm seeing new infographics like this every few days, this is just the most recent)

Wealth is a zero sum game, a game where the wealthy get the sum and everybody else gets as close to zero as possible without revolting against the wealthy class.

"Poisoned soul" doesn't mean anything. You should make an argument to everyone also to convince also them that people have souls prior to making any assertation towards the condition of that soul.

Your candle lighting analogy makes no sense. Let's say we're both in line at Fortune 500 company for a VP promotion. We can't both have our candles lit, can we?

I'm also a pretty decent guitarist and I appreciate how Guitar Hero forced me to move my left hand in ways I had previously been unpracticed in.

If I number my fingers where 1 = index, 4 = pinky and 5 = thumb, doing patterns of 1, 3, 2, 4, 1, 3, 2, 4 in GH really helped to isolate and build hand muscle I previously hadn't much exercised. Not to mention 1/3, 2/4 "chord" switches and things of the like.

It achieves the same end as say, trying to move each finger individually, in pairs, in threes, without letting the other fingers bend (particularly tricky with middle/ring fingers) which as it turns out is an incredibly useful exercise for a guitar player and is made a lot more fun with GH.

As trained musicians, we often take our musicianship for granted (see DdJ's reply to your post). It's like, the other day my drummer friend was watching a guitar instructional video that was displaying chord tab as the chords were being played. He got really mad me five minutes later when he realized what the tab was and I unenthusiastically said, "Oh, you didn't know that? That's the tab."

You ever notice how you can be explaining the simplest music theory concepts, like how all the modes are really the same scale and are met with glassy, blank stares?

Musicality can be a big hurdle to some people. To say GH has little/no musical value for anyone is a very ignorant a short-sighted thing to say. Just because it holds little value to YOU doesn't mean that it won't enlighten others. I've had countless conversations with my Dad where he's gained new curiousity from playing GH about how to make certain sounds on a guitar that he would have had absolutely no vocabulary for before, even though he's been hearing it in recorded music his whole life. GH gave us the tools to have these conversations.

I dunno about that, man. He did make Half-Life. That wins some smart points in my book.

Hell dude, I used to do that as a Gamestop employee.

We did it all the time. New game comes out, we wait for someone to trade it in. No manager around means, "Hey man, the store will give you X dollars in store credit. I'll (as in me personally) will give you the same value in cash."

So, by my book, you paid twice as much as you needed to for Fallout. If the guy turning it wanted to get cash from the store, he'd have gotten $8.00. Hahahaha.

Man, I remember I got a PS2 for trade in value in cash, I bought a portable LCD screen that clicks onto a Gamecube for I think $35 (and the store was going to turn around and price it for $135!!!).

Neon Genesis Evangelion box set for like $60... I sold a brand new Gamecube that I won from a convention to a customer for face value (but no tax so they saved like $20 or whatever)...

And again, this was common practice. Local management looked the other way. Upper management wouldn't have.

It's unrelated, but I feel like telling it: the best was when GTA: Vice City came out.

Hype for GTA:VC was so ridiculously overblown (I remember having to make over 400 reservation phone calls before Gamestop started using automation) that we actually took reservations for the first three shipments of the game. Of course, it's worth noting here that this was kind of ridiculous to begin with because only about 70% of that first shipment's reservation holders will actually pick up, so at some point it was always inevitable that we'd get the go ahead to sell to walk-ins before we began satisfying second shipment reservations...

Anyway, on release day, I got a phone call:

"Hello, will you guys be selling second shipment reservations today?"

"No, first shipment only. Sorry."

"What if I gave you $50?"

So I gave the guy my name and told him to ask for me when he came in, sold him the copy and came up $50 richer. I used this to justify my purchase of the game's soundtrack that night when I also picked up my copy of the game.

The next day, when I came into work, there was a lot of hushed talk about the POS screwing up transactions yesterday. It turned out that whenever someone paid for a transaction on a debit card, the register would actually charge them for whatever value the most recent credit card transaction was charged. For some people it worked out to their disadvantage and if they came and complained we reimbursed them. Some people came out ahead and they got a walk. I was one of those people and I came up about $50.

And it still makes me smile.

But... they... do...

What do you think drives the used price?

I worked at Gamestop for a few years. Used game prices are CONSISTENTLY $3-$5 less than the same game new.

I say $3 now because if you were to say, trade in Gears of War or GTA on the first week of release, they'd probably give you $30 and then price it $2-$3 less than the new copy. Because they know somebody's gonna pay it. Hell, they might be sold out of the new ones (I say might because no prices are considered on a store by store basis and a store's inventory is never taken into account when determining prices).

I don't know where the price is now, because I stopped caring, but a year and a half after Twilight Princess's release, the new price was still $49.99 and the used price was still $44.99.

New game price drops determine used game price drops. This is how it already works. How the parent gets +5 insightful is beyond me.

I've even called the VG industry immature at job interviews and have gotten away with it.

http://www.worklessparty.org/timework/ford.htm

It was NINETY FIVE YEARS ago the automobile industry got hip to the idea that workers are most productive and produce the best work when working a 40 hr/week schedule.

Having worked in games, I feel the industry is very immature. While I was in college, the guy who ended up hiring me to my first out of school job (dev side at a AAA development studio) came and spoke at a Q&A event. The most salient thing I remember him saying: "It gets a lot easier when you accept that it really is all about the shareholder."

Add to that 80+ hour weeks during three to five months of crunch.

Your argument has done very little to convince me that the VG industry is anything but immature. Not that the previous post made any better of an argument, but from what I've seen an experienced, we still have a loooooooong way to go.

The profit motive stifles artistry in video games. Not censorship.

Censorship wishes it had the same negative impact the profit motive does.

And I didn't even need to write a 1500 word essay.

Have you played Okami yet? I think it's better than Zelda.

(accidentally posted previous as anonymous)

Are you poor? Odds are likely that you dropped out of school, are a drug/substance abuser, or made some other shitty life choice that you're paying for now."

And to add to my troll, an extra big FUCK YOU to that, man.

SERIOUSLY, WHAT AN INSENSITIVE ASSHOLE.

IT'S THE POOR PEOPLES' FAULT THAT THEY'RE POOR. THEY JUST WEREN'T SMART LIKE ME. SO FUCK 'EM.

Yeah, fuck you, man.

Matt Groening has said before that Futurama is so budget-intensive that the smaller cable networks would not be able to financially support the show in its current state. I remember he went on to say that the kind of sacrifices that would have to be made to make the transtion from a broadcast to a cable network cut too deep and he was unwilling to make them.

I can't remember exactly where I read this, but it makes sense. It's very espensive to make an animated show of this nature while maintaining Futurama's standard of quality. Look at how Comedy Cental and Adult Swim save money on their animations. South Park is super cheap because there's no hand animation. Drawn Together has hand animation, but it's crude and ugly when you stand it next to Futurama. For years Adult Swim used stock character animations and used computers to manipulate them (e.g. Space Ghost, Sealab).

Futurama needs Fox's money. Kind of like how Mr. Bungle's California could have never been made without Warner Bros.'s money backing it up.

Speaking as someone who worked briefly as a sound designer for a major video game studio:

From a sound designer's standpoint there's little difference. It's easy to think that a lot of the sound will come from shooting the scene, like when I take my handicam outside and shoot, I have a soundtrack automatically from the microphone, right? Turns out that soundtrack is mostly unusable, as a lot of background sounds (movement, wind, etc) will come out a ton louder than you want them to. What ends up happening is you'll rebuild all of the elements either from foley sessions or archived material and then rebuild the scene from scratch just as you would in animation.

I guess the differences would be more like in an animation, there's a lot more freedom to use strange sounds or big sounds that might seem out of place in reality. Also, not to discredit a scratch audio track when shooting a scene: sometimes it can be very useful for a sound designer to listen to the source audio to get a feel for timing or whatever that obviously isn't available when working in animation.

But really, I don't see it as very different, overall. There are no shortcuts in sound design.