I sat down and did the math a couple of years ago and concluded that I would never break even.

At the risk of being pedantic (which I doubt is much of a problem on /.) SHOW YOUR WORK.

The problem with a definition like "hardcore" is that it's not clear-cut, is in the eye of the beholder, and is relative.

When I was in college, my girlfriend and I scoured every odd pawn shop in town for the odd overlooked Nintendo game and stayed up all night playing Gauntlet and Xenophobe. After college but before I had kids, I burned many an afternoon with my friends playing Quake, Goldeneye 64, Gran Turismo or some incarnation of Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. Now that I have kids and my last-gen games are looking a bit dated (I have GameCube/PS2/Xbox), we got a Wii. I really enjoy Mario Galaxy, Twilight Princess, Tatsunoko Vs CAPCOM, RE4:Wii Edition, and No More Heroes.

What games can I log a lot of time on? Mario, Zelda, and maybe some Tatsunoko Vs CAPCOM. RE4 and NMH end up being a after-the-kids-have-gone-to-bed game, and guess what. By the time they're asleep, I've probably had enough for one day too. By your definition, my older son who will play LEGO Batman until the Wii overheats is more hardcore than I am. I play TvC with a Gamecube controller, he uses the simple controls. How can I be the less hardcore?

Meanwhile I am presented with lots of odd scenarios.

"You play fighting games and you didn't own a Saturn or a Dreamcast? You're not hardcore."

"Wow, there's lots of stuff out there for the Wii that isn't a sports game collection? Thanks for helping me pick something out. It's nice that a hardcore gamer would be willing to help out a noob like me."

"You don't own a PS3 or a 360? How can you even call yourself a gamer?"

"Seriously, you finished Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden? Those games are brutal. I can't even have any fun playing them."

It took me years to finish Devil May Cry (2 and 3 were much easier), and some crosstraining from Ninja Gaiden may have helped a little, but the best thing about the Devil May Cry games is that you can save at absolutely any time. So, if there's an incident involving bodily functions that I need to tend to, or someone wants their third hot dog, or I can't stand how much sand got tracked on to the living room rug, I can deal with it. I think I have gravitated towards fighting games because single playthroughs are not 6+ hours. The other thing I really like is a game like Pikmin where time is naturally divided into 15 minute segments. And another thing - as a parent, it's a lot more satisfying to play Wii Bowling or Tatsunoko vs CAPCOM with my son if we have time to do that than to play a more difficult game by myself. It's not that I've 'grown out' of gaming, but how it fits into the rest of my life has necessarily changed because the rest of my life has changed.

The reason that most speedcubers use the Fridrich method is that it is affected less by cube conditions than the corners first method used by Minh Thai in the 80's. A corners first method involves a lot of slice moves (turning the middle layer between the two outer layers), effectively doubling the frictional force required to turn it. The Fridrich method has a large move table and emphasis on face turns instead of slices. The Kociemba algorithm, like what you would find in the 'Cube Explorer' program, uses a much larger move table even than the Fridrich algorithm, and is optimized for a low number of face turns - although not always minimal, it's usually pretty close. So even if the thing wasn't lubed that well, it's going to be fast just because of the low number of moves that it will be able to compute. I would also hope that the robot would be able to apply more torque more precisely than a human and isn't doing more than one cube turn with a given motion, so it has a good chance of overcoming the friction of a new cube. Human cubers do things like RU' (right face clockwise, top face counterclockwise) with a single hand motion and an unlubed cube would hang up on the transition between the two motions. The robot would do two separate clean twists without having to worry about a transition.

All of the V-Cubes, which would be any 6x6x6 or 7x7x7 available that I know of, are more speedcubing friendly right out of the box, as its design was done with correcting for small misalignments in mind so as not to put too much torque on the pieces when turning the cube.

It's 5 buttons, no joystick. Rotate Left, Rotate Right, Hyperspace, Thrust, and Fire. Your left hand gets the two rotate buttons, your right gets thrust & fire. The Hyperspace button is in the middle but away from normal hand reach - you have to abandon something else to press it.

Dear sir,

I thought that this comment was hilarious but was incredibly dissappointed by all the urination-in-the-breakfast-cereal comments which followed it.

-SMC

/uses both derivatives and stats IRL

/been known to integrate ocassionally

/never had to use Green's Theorem outside of a classroom because I'm not a M.E.

The wife had a good laugh w/ that one. She suggested:

"Is there a sign out there that says 'Dead Robot Storage'? Is there?"

Yeah, that's my point, and taken from the parent about the profit motive. While I don't think Kevin Smith is a great director for "Foundation" specifically, he's still capable of turning a profit with dialogue-driven material.

OK, so we don't think that Emmerich can do a dialogue-driven film. The internet puts up a big stink, and nothing happens. Emmerich is just one of the many ways to profitable film making. Of course, he's in the same camp as Cameron. Spend Big, win Big.

There are plenty of directors who are good at doing dialogue-driven films - Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Sam Mendes, Kerry Conran's one movie, and M. Night Shyamalan come to mind. All have worked with both small and big budgets. I'm sure most of the /. crowd could rattle off a few favorites that I didn't mention. As a matter of fact, with the dialogue being so important, perhaps the CG thing isn't too crazy. Let the actors rehearse the crap out of the lines and get it good and shoot it on green screen in a warehouse. No location shooting, no set building, just worry about blocking, acting, costumes and props. If you can keep the budget reasonable, and it doesn't suck, then it could make a profit. The down side is that other than M. Night, none of the directors in this bracket have ever cracked the top twenty in profits. We'll call this the "Craftsmanship on a Budget, win moderate" group. It's not they're losing money, it's just that it's not making enough money for the WSJ to take notice.

Of course, there's always the Roger Corman way. Granted, he wouldn't direct it these days, but he's still a proven producer.

What - you were hoping for Sam Raimi?

Yeah, and scientists that say that they "only want to do research" don't realize how much salesmanship goes into getting grants. Musicians that just want to play don't realize how much salesmanship goes into getting gigs or a record deal. If you prefer to leave it up to sales to make it profitable, then you're paying someone else (hence, lowering the overall profit) to explain your beautiful piece of code. A straight-up salesman may be able to grease your customers better so that the purchase goes smoothly, but I would guess that he can't explain the product was well as the guy who coded it.

There's a lot to be said for dragging one's butt from the basement and interacting with customers, assuming that there's any capability to do so. Maybe you can't put your lead programmer in front of the customer but maybe one of his direct reports with a high understanding of the program and an ability to speak intelligently to the customer would create a better sales experience. (Of course, that direct report will get promoted sooner that way.) If you make a product that is intended to be sold to other humans in meatspace, some amount of responsibility should be yours to help explain and sell it. The best part about some interaction between design and customer relations is that it shortens the feedback loop.

Of course, you have to send someone that isn't going to tell the prospective customer to man up and use the command line every time there's a difficulty implementing a feature. :P

Although I can't vouch for the sound quality, there have been laser turntables since the late 1980's - although it was a while before they showed up for sale. A friend of mine (serious vinyl collector) found an article about them when we were in high school (demo at CES?), and we never saw the actual finished model advertised for sale until we were both back from college. The pro is that you don't have a needle dragging across the surface of your vinyl and wearing it down, and even some really old records that would otherwise be unplayable can be played on it. The con is that it was harder (at the time) to ignore dust particles and such, and a lot of the funny-colored records didn't play on it. I hope that the math has improved in 20 years, but there's no telling since I'm not a museum or a rich audiophile. Maybe the IRENE system that the Library of Congress uses (similar tech, but with conventional photography) could be ported to iPhone.

Doesn't the laissez faire capitalism model dictate that they do exactly this? With the threat of new bands forming at any time, demand for their product could inexplicably dry up at any moment.

Fine, yell "Poe's Law" and "shenanigans".

Honestly, I think bands would do well to provide quality service to fans, insuring that they still have fans. If musicians felt like they worked for their fans instead of the record company, there might not be such a disconnect between their actions and the economics of it all. If a band has a sufficient following on their website, why shouldn't they sell it there? Andy Partridge and Thomas Dolby are niche markets at best, but they're able to provide things now to their fans direct from their website that no record company executive would ever consider. Sure, it's not as convenient as iTunes or Amazon, but the crazy dedicated fans that every artist really wants are probably going to the band's website anyway.

I'm surprised that, since this is Slashdot, there weren't 300 "Zelda isn't an RPG because..." comments after this.

I am also surprised by two other things. I am surprised that despite the dozens of previews and reviews, you act like that you didn't know that Deadspace:Extraction was a rail shooter until after you bought it. Many of the previews talked about it trying to reach the same demographic as Resident Evil:The Umbrella Chronicles (which is also a rail shooter that is on Wii because Capcom's newest offering at the time, RE5 wasn't being developed for Wii). I am also surprised that you could pretend to believably compare the state of PC gaming to Wii gaming given the differences in demographics and control style. There is no reasonable way anyone can expect a mature title from a Nintendo game that wasn't shoehorned in from somewhere else, because on other systems, PC especially, the actual state of development is genuinely mature. Developers making a game for Wii are trying not to take a bath in red ink at this point. On PC, we've had over twenty years to develop what works and what sells. Nintendo, on the other hand, is constantly changing the playing field for itself. It makes it easier for them to profit, but it leaves third-party developers scrambling to make things work every singe development cycle. Maybe if a mouse and keyboard (not that you couldn't connect a USB keyboard) were standard you could have resource management sims then. I thought those didn't get done on anything you hook to a TV becase you can't read enough information on 480 lines of resolution.

I'd bet you're more likely to find mature titles on Wiiware than on a physical disk due the lower cost of entry for developers. Could you argue that "World of Goo" is a mature game, since we've had physics since before 1687?

Nice handle, oddly appropriate in this case. Do you even have any contact with children?

(Don't answer that - it was rhetorical and I don't really want to know. Ask yourself what kind of kids you interact with and decide for yourself.)

Granted, helicopter parents may totally funnel children into too much structured activity, but there are still lots of kids that have plenty of creativity. I don't see any problem with crayons yet, or Play-Doh, as long as the situation keeps kids from the sort of one-upmanship that would preclude it. If one older kid brings a DS or a PSP with him to a group, it can distract kids from playing with the simple stuff for a while. On the other hand, if that's what the group is doing, (crayons or clay or even blocks!) I've yet to see a real shortage of creativity. My oldest can be a problem for the a similar reason - he's almost always got a Bionicle or two with him, and not a spec, out-of-the-package one. Most of his Bionicles are borrowing heads and weapons from other guys, changed color schemes, extra weapons built with standard LEGO or Technic parts, or hybrids.

If you doubt the creativity of kids, try listening to them. I hope you will be pleasantly surprised, or maybe you have a bunch of dumbbells in your neighborhood. As far as the parents go - parents that play video games are probably still in the minority. Most of the parents that my wife and I know IRL watch a lot of "Big Brother" and "American Idol" and "Brooke Knows Best" and "Dancing with the Geico Cavemen Spectacular". Most of my serious video game playing adult friends fall into the "Kids? I haven't found a spouse I can tolerate yet!" category. I didn't count people who only played Wii sports for two hours at a party.

Another thing that strikes me is that you can't have a class of 20-30 kids in school and expect all of them to whip out dogs in a spaceship to the moon or a cow with wheels on it with their 8-pack of Crayolas. Some kids aren't going to be at the same place intellectually, some kids aren't going to have the same cultural context, some kids are only going to draw pictures about stuff they learned in Sunday school because their parents won't let them watch TV or play with the heathens next door, some kids don't read and will only generate TV related imagery, and so on. Kids are creative, but they're not all going to be at the same place - and I'm basing a lot of this on my own formative crayon time in the 70's. This is not a new problem. Do you suppose that James Naismith and Johannes Gutenberg had to listen to crap from city leaders about how basketball was keeping kids from being creative when playing outside with a ball and the printing press kept kids from embellishing their folk tales and oral history?

To your two points - probably not, and no. I could see how you might think this is a problem. Input lag of LCD monitors probably don't contribute to the problem with these games not selling. I am certain that Guitar Hero 2 includes a calibration screen where you could completely correct for lag. (Oddly enough, Guitar Hero 3 either does not have that or put it someplace hard for me to find...) I would assume that Rock Band does also, since Harmonix made GH2 (but not GH3 and up) and Rock Band. As for the CRT monitors not suffering from that problem, that is not always the case. I have a Samsung wide format CRT TV, and with my PS2 hooked up via component cable and Rock Band 2 running in Progressive/Widescreen, the correction is usually around 65. I assume that number is ms, but it could be some made-up metric. Hooked up to a standard CRT with composite cables, the correction is 0. As usual, Your Mileage May Vary, This was performed with guitarists on a closed course, I may have a crap TV, etc.

Since when do you let electricians _design_ your system? You should have actual engineers for that.