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"Tell me about yourselves"

Just so I can build up a profile of each of you, i want to know how old you all are and what you look like. Anyone who 'comically' says 'I'm green with eight arms, ho ho' will be taunted until my throat (and fingers) are sore.

Yeah, you'd have tought that he might have a wider vocabulary than that, being a librarian.

"Ook" is also the word the librarian at the Unseen University on the Discworld uses to ask for a banana, or anything else for that matter. Just thought I'd share that with you all.

And you smell.

But you type remarkably well for a monkey.


You wouldn't be one of those talking monkeys from Majula's Mask would you?

If you are, could you go to where ever it is you're going in a straight line.

Especially whilst I'm trying to follow you.

Ooooooook
I am a monkey
Ooooooook
I live in the jungle
Ooooooook
I have fleas

It's about 150 miles away, more to the north of Alberta, but the idea is the same. Wake up, roll out of bed, shoot an elk from your window and go down to eat it for breakfast. And the Whiskey is still cheap.

Charlton's Resort? The name doesn't ring a bell, but it was 96/7 when I was there.

I liked Tommys Bar. And the burgers they sold outside.

It's damn cold there this time of year though, isn't it? I remember walking along, thinking that the inside of my nose was freezing.

I walked up Sulphar Mountain whilst I was there. Too tight to take the cable car up. It's free to go down.

After I did it I found out that the place I worked The Rimrock Resort Hotel, gave free cable car passes to all employees....

I was at Charlton's Resort a couple of weeks ago (Banff), small world, ain't it?

bjlangley wrote:
> Aaaaah! someone wants to know about be.
>
> My name is Ben, I live is a small village in Cambridgeshire called
> Witchford. I'm 23 years old, married, and I have a 1 year old
> daughter. (called Malibu)
> I work in Cambridge for BT as an Internet Operations Trainee.
>
> And I'm going home in a minute.


What's that? You want to know more about me? Okay, here goes....

I lived in this village, Witchford from the day I was born, and stayed there until I was 18. I did GCSE's, and A-levels, and played loads of games. I've had an Atari 2600, an Acorn Electron, Sega Master System, Megadrive, NES, SNES, and my brother has an N64, which I'm currently borrowing. After finishing my A-levels I took a gap year, and disappeared to the Canadian Rockies for 7 months. I was working in a hotel in Banff, speading my evenings, and early mornings drinking insane amounts of Canadian Whisky, and beer. There was one time, I had been drinking all night, then went into town, and waited outside the off-licence to open, so I could drink some more. I also gambled quite a lot whilst I was there. My room mate had a SNES and NHL 93. We used to play game after game, but he used to play with no goalie. We played double or nothing games, gambling a maximum of $500 on one game!
Anyway you can only live like this for so long, so I can home, and spent the next week in bed. In the Summer I went to the University of North London, to study International Business. After 1 term I quit because i was bored with it, and I couldn't stand living in London. So again I returned to Witchford. I did a home study course in Applications Programming, achieving a City and Guilds after 6 months or so. During the summer I met a girl, that I fell hopelessly in love with, and married the following year. This Didn't help me find a job though. I spent about 15 months looking for work. I was put on one of the governments New Deal programs. It was a really depressing time. If it wasn't for the support of my wife I might have gone crazy on New Deal. The best they could offer me was a job skills course, and some basic training in Word, Excel, and Access. I already could do most of this stuff, and most of the other people on the courses had severe learning difficulties, or personality disorders. I had applied for loads of jobs, and had many interviews, but wasn't really getting anywhere. Luckily one of the Agencies I had applied to found me a vacancy at ntl, phoning customers and asking them if they were going to pay their bills. Whilst doing this job I got an interview for a job I had applied for 5 months earlier. I got that job. It was at BT as an Internet Operations Trainee, and 6 months later, that's where I am today. A resposible, married father of 1 (but there's another one due in April), with a decent job.

I still love to play games though!

Ali@specialreserve wrote:
> Just so I can build up a profile of each of you, i want to know
> how old you all are and what you look like. Anyone who
> 'comically' says 'I'm green with eight arms, ho ho' will be
> taunted until my throat (and fingers) are sore.

Ok...... My name is Pete and i'm 22. I work for a warehouse at the moment but my future probably lies with BT cause my Dad and other members of my family have worked for the company for so long :-)

I'm not married but i have a gf who lives in Daytona Beach Florida (going over there to spend christmas with her). Oh and i live in Wickford......Essex (there goes any hint or shed of respect i might have had with people here).

Would love to come up with games to be made for a living, but i don't think my ideas are good enough.
The warehouse job is basically to get me to the U.S to be with my gf and of course buy the latest games and consoles :-)

The important element was not Sega and Nintendo that is core to the computer games industry, it is infact a name named Nolan Bushnall. This man is the founder of Atari along with another computer programmer, Al Alcorn. These men developed which is considered to be the founding father of computer games, Pong. This game had it all. It had playability, loads of gameplay even though it only consisted of two lines and a square that went from side to side on the screen. They started the computer games industry, and the future after 1972, when they released Pong is all down to them.

However, over the years, making great games has gone by the wayside as most companies have been desperate to develop hardware that will WOW the gaming public. Think of Atari... their most profitable console was the Atari VCS-2600 released in 1979. That made Atari a very big company and Nolan Bushnall a very rich man. However, Atari thought bigger and released two newer systems after that(as well as the Lynx and Jaguar), the 5200 and 7200. These systems both flopped. Why? Because they wanted to release newer hardware that what they thought the gullible(or so they thought) public would think they would buy. Wrong. What happened? Atari was near bankrupt in the mid 80s and was only bailed out by rich entrepreneurs that thought the company was worth saving.

Now we go onto Nintendo and Sega. Both released the first console in 1985, namely being the NES and Master System respectively. Despite them both neglecting to even listen to the British/European markets for years, they also have released system after system.

Look at the NES- now that was a great system that had a great set of games, such as Duck Hunt, the first Mario games, Zelda games, Manic Mansion, the list is perhaps endless. The system sold over 10 million units in America alone, which is a remarkable feat considering a lot of people thought that gaming was unfashionable in the mid 80s. It was also in 1990 in a third of US and Japanese households. Now that was a cheap system, with reasonably cheap games(I know not as cheap as everyone would have liked) and the games that were brought out were all original.

The Master System- That had some of the great games, Sonic, perhaps the most marketed computer games character behind Mario and Pokemon(both Nintendo I might add), Shinobi, Alex Kidd, Michael Jacksons moonwalker and others that I would be here for a very long time if I carried on talking about them. It didnt sell as well as the NES, but when it was turned into the Game Gear in 1990 and was backwards compatible I might add, it made it a great system.

Fortunes changed for the two companies over the next few years- Nintendo released the obcessively hard to program for due to the very slowly developed hardware that only Nintendo could understand. This was a big problem after the SNES had all but flopped, even though it had great games like Zelda:Link to the Past, Mario Kart and many others, it was absolutely caned by the Megadrive. They had already lost a lot of money in development for the SNES and even more from the N64, when I began to see sequel after sequel(alright Zelda is a exception in this case) being developed for the system. This was a bad thing to do... people were already furious with the drip method of releasing games for the system, they were now getting annoyed with Nintendos I want money more than anything else policy which involved buying games and developing games for a system like flogging a dead horse. That was unfair, but Nintendo were so arrogant to think that people would buy it. THEY DIDNT. They were all converted to the Sony bandwagon.

Now Sega. They had alsolutely enormous success over 5 years with the Megadrive, considered to be the greatest games system that has ever been developed. However, the bosses at Sega began to get greedy and arrogant. So they released the 32X add on to take advantage of new CD based hardware. Well well, didnt they not learn... It bombed big time, and with such an enormous amount of time and effort being spent in bringing out a system which was a good idea to be compatible with a system that had a large consumer base, they thought that people would be stupic enough to buy an overly priced add on. No they didnt. People lost trust in Sega, and when they released the Saturn in 1995 infront of the Sony Playstation, it bombed for the simply reason that
a) it was impossible to develop for, and lost a lot of third party support and,
b) No-one trusted them after they had been fobbed off with the 32-X. Result- more debts and low sales, which along with the failure of the N64 played right into the hands of Sony.

Sony, in 1995, realised that there was an expanding market taht they could exploit because there was a lot of angry gamers that were disillusioned with Sega and Nintendo, both ripping them off over several years. So they decided to release the Playstation. they made a good move in not deciding to use DVD based hardware because it would have made the 399 price tag in Britain look like small change to what it would have been. Also it would have been anti-pirateable, because even now, DVD copying hardware is still way too expensive at nearly 2500. It would have been a good idea to release the system as a DVD player, but to be honest it would have been noweher near as successful. It was Sony who started the exposion in the costs of making computer games, because with the overall majority of the market share for 5 years and a huge third party support line up, they could do pretty much what they wanted to do. So they decided to release a lot of games, over 1000, which meant a hell of a lot mroe games would fail and because of the low cost of games that Sony pushed for, it pushed production costs up as well(along with improved technology which costed a lot of money also.). This meant that a lot of games had to be sold in order for companies to break even. Thus the age of the sequel was born. Companies thought that to release a sequel was more cost effective than release a totally new and original game. So we now have Resident Evil, Tomb Raider and Spyro the Dragon, the list is perhaps endless. Companies have for the last few years on the Playstation been releasing sequel after sequel in order to make more money. This is going to be the case when all the super consoles will all be released by perhaps the end of next year.

Right. First of all Dreamcast. Sega wasnt trusted by anyone because of the 32X and the Saturn. They spent more money, similar to Tony Blair, to develop another new system the Dreamcast. The Playstation, when the Dc was released, was still outselling the DC nearly 3 to one(perhaps more) in 1999! The DC was selling game after game that were first arcade games on the DC, Virtua Tennis, Crazy Taxi, which had no depth or originality whatsoever(maybe CT is an exception) because as they were successful in the arcades they thought people would buy them for the home. This has all but killed off the arcade industry also. They only reason the DC because popular is because people managed to find out how to chip the damn thing in order to produce coped games, thats all. People buy second hand DC's so they wont need a boot disk and copy games using a CD writer. Thats the reason why the DC has sold well, particularly in the UK. Shenmue is definately not worth the 70 million dollars development costs, and will definately not break even on it. People will be very disappointed.

Then theres the PS2. Too expensive, Sony believe that they are making a loss on every Playstation 2 they sell. That is rubbish. They are making big profits, the only reason that there is also hardware shortages is that they want to flog off as many PS2's as possible before the Xbox and Gamecube comes out. People are already chipping PS2's, even Sony is!!! Apparantly, Sony chip playstation 2's for companies so they can test their games on the, calling them "Development units". They cannot move these units unless a car licnesed from Sony does it for them. I wonder how much the black market would want those chips. They need to seriously improve their catalogue of games or if the PS2 bombs, it would but Sony is serious financial trouble. Also, yet more unoriginal sequels- just look at TTT and RR5!!!

Then Gamecube and Xbox. Nintendo say that their system will be anti-piratable because of the micro-DVDs they use. No. All pirates need are blank discs and an adapted DVD writer and it will be as easy as pie. Have you seen the development videos also? 128 Bit sequels. Xbox will only do well if they sell it as a PC, with MS Office 2000 and A nice monitor, it is practically a PC in a box anyway, with a harddrive and a modem(not to mention a keyboard and mouse to be available at launch!!!)

Put it this way, many games companies and hardware developers have gone blind in the name of securing a quick buck. We have gone away from putting the effort into making quality original games that everyone want, all they want is to make a product. Isnt it right that a product to be successful you need to look at the consumer and take their views? That is definately not what is happening at the moment. I believe that these companies need to stand up and take note that are views count for something and they should look at the Nolan Bushnalls and the Al Alcorns, the basic software developers of the past to look to the future. Where would we be without them? Put it this way- The Collyer brothers started off making Championship Manager in their bedrooms, Sigueru Miyamoto was a cleaner in the Ninetndo reception area, they wouldnt have gotten a break if it were for small parties allowing them to do so and now they are legends- at the moment we have sequels not originality and thats what we need to separate the best of the bunch of superconsoles, or else the computer games industry will grind to dust when armageddon takes place next year between the big 4, Sony, Sega, Nintendo and Microsoft.