These are three racing games, they're all fun, but how do they compare challenge wise?
F-Zero GX: Difficult, but with practice any track can be mastered, in GP mode I have beat al but the Diamond cup in Master Difficulty (I just beat it on Expert, give me some time). The game is difficult in the higher levels because the drivers are better, and it works very well. You can still beat them, but you have to be good.
Jet Moto 2: "Easy" should have been changed to "hard" and the 5 levels above it are even more difficult. I do not know a single person that has come close to completing this game. It's easy to get behind and very hard to make up time.
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2: Beat it in 6 days, went on to dominate the hell out of it on a regular basis, until I got a certain amount of points it was quite fair. Then something happened, the computer cars were getting pulled over 4 times and still racing (they should've been arrested after the third). And one race, I watched a car get pulled over 7 times before getting arrested. Then the game was no fun. The AI resorted to flagrant cheating.
Now, there are numerous other games that simply just make it repetitious. As much as I like the GGX series, I will use a cheat code to unlock the other modes rather than having to do 380 battles in a row. I don't get enough large blocks of free time to even attempt feats like that very often. That's just silly long for an uninterruptable, unsavable path.
I can't believe they left this one out. It's THE BEST game ending ever.
Hero walks upto the bad guy who is now stuck in his burning car
Bad Guy: Help, you gotta get me out of here.
Hero throws dice (long story) at bad guy, takes key to nuke. Looks over and sees a ghost of his sister standing there.
Hero: Don't get out of the car, never get out of the car.
Hero pulls out his.45 and proceeds to empty it at a range of less than 2' into the chest of the bad guy.
Now, how many games do you get to play where the end guy doesn't take the "soft" approach and ends up letting the bad guy live if he has the choice? I can't remember too many, that made this one original.
Nintendo didn't play the spec game that Sony and MS did. Sony said "97M polygons!" MS said "100M polygons!" and Nintendo said "6-12M polygons." Sony and MS were talking max theoretical, Nintendo was talking real. An i875P chipset has a max theoretical memory bandwidth of 12.8GB/sec. Has anyone seen any bandwidth measurements of even half that?
As someone once said to me about the xBox: "The Dreamcast was a 75MHz toy, the xBox is a 700MHz machine, people will treat it better!"
Nintendo knows better, I know better, a P90 used to be hot stuff and now it's being used to level a table. Nintendo is the ONLY one of the three that isn't having frequent problems with thier drive units. PS2 drives go out quite often, XBox drives go out so often I tend to question if they're DESIGNED to go bad.
How often are GBAs dropped? Alot. How often are GBAs given to young kids? Most of the time they are. How often do young kids take care of thier stuff? Consider that I NEVER give my GBA to a young kid, and I cringe as I hand them a PS2 contoller...
Take this device that has a rotating optical media. Take it for a drop. Is the head still going to be aligned? If yes, repeat 200 times. You just simulated a weeks worth of use. Also, what parent is going to buy thier kids this thing? That's like sending your kid to school with a laptop.
PS2 quality graphics are nice, but when they're applied to such a tiny screen, who's going to be able to read anything?
Battery life? Consider that the day they release this thing is the day that Duracell and Energizer's stock split 3 times in one day.
Speed Limits: I call it accelerated darwinism. If you can't drive a car at 100MPH. Atropus lets you know.
Safety on toasters?: Applied darwinism. If you cram a knife in a piece of electronics, you're asking for it.
Glass pack mufflers: See, here's where sound level restiction HELP those guys. If it weren't for the restrictions the muffler industry would be hurt by people running straight pipes.
Telemarketers just don't get the concept of focused marketing. They are likely to fall to corporate darwinsim if they don't "get it".
The real PCI bandwidth is usually something like 75-90MB/sec. Depending on the chipset.
Now, add in IDE RAID cards, and SCSI cards and those along can saturate the bus. Consider that a single SCSI HD can now pump out about 70MB/sec when used in an STR intensive application.
A hard core gamer is very much into thier games. Much like an addict. A hard core gamer plays thier games for hours on end. Much like an addict. However, a hard core gamer KNOWS that thier games are nothing but games, and can easily seperate games from life. An addict tends to confuse the two.
With the phone, there are discounted rates for people that have difficulty affording it, and there are laws mandating that it must be delivered even to areas that aren't profitable.
In the 15 years that we've been living at where we live we have yet to be able to get cable TV.
DSS came along and we got on it, but that runs a minimum of $20/month, doesn't include local channels, and doesn't include the hardware cost. Reliability isn't too hot, and if you have multiple TVs, you need to have multiple recievers. 3 TVs? You'll need at least two dishes. And each of those TVs has a service charge.
Now take broadcast TV.
Almost every station has local news. It's very portable, some areas can get by on rabbit ears on a portable TV. There is no monthly charge.
This would in effect be telling people who are not willing to pay $40 to watch the local news (which is slathered with ads) that it's either they pay or they get no TV at all. Cable companies would suddenly be able to charge "rural" rates that before people would not have even thought about accepting.
The biggest gainers would be the cable/satallite companies. The biggest losers would be the casual viewers.
Just because you pay a subscription, doesn't mean there will be any less ads.
I had read an article a while back where it came to the conclusion that software has gotten worse due to programmers not checking thier code before they compile it, but instead just bouncing it off the compiler until no errors pop up. Remember, you no longer have to schedule compiler time.
Now consider the difference between hardware and software:
Software can have millions of lines of code. Hardware can have millions of transistors.
Software can usually be patched in the field. Hardware can rarely change once sold.
To run a new batch of software, someone must only compile it, and then test it. To run a new batch of hardware, someone must re-layout the PCB, buy parts, get the board stuffed, and then test it.
If a piece of software breaks, it can often be patched. If a piece of hardware breaks, it has to be replaced.
Basically: It costs big money when hardware screws up, so companies spend time making sure it's good. But software doesn't have immediately visible high costs. And it has more of a "black box" mentality. -
There's a limit to the amount people will take. And for me, the limit was passed at about Mach 8 by that little number. I wouldn't even frequent a site that had that.
I filled out a Umax rebate for a scanner, I paid $150 before a $50 rebate. I had checked up on it with no reply. I had forgotten about it, but noticed the price of the scanner drop to $100 before rebate, then $70 (there was a $20 rebate on top of that), and then $50. So a check rolls in the mail, I'm thinking "wtf are they sending me a check for?". It's my rebate check. From two years earlier....and the scanner sucked, I traded it for a dead motherboard.
For me, the "post PC era" is when people stop treating thier computers as computers, and start viewing them as appliances. SFF PCs are a gateway into it where the PC becomes a set top box much like a DVD player or VCR. The xBox has the potential to be a major gap bridger, as the people that have modded it have found out. A subset of this would be a decline in "PC" sales as people start using the various "appliances" for tasks that they would have otherwise used a PC for.
Another definition would be an end to the trend of continued growth in the PC market and a return to predominantly just using appliances.
Does that mean that I'll never be able to buy a Mac there since none of those were designed to be compatible? What about Linux? Will the price of CAT-5 cables go up as they need to be stamped with "Designed for Windows XP"? What about Full Tilt Pinball which was designed for Windows NT?
Every time you send an email, you pay the recipient $0.01.
End result? The average email user breaks even if they send as much as they recieve. Someone who sends much more than they recieve is only out $1. Legitimate buisnesses will only pay about $0.05 per sale on average. Still peanuts. However, a spammer that sends out 10,000,000 emails ends up having to fork out $100,000. Still alot cheaper than snailmail spam, but you KNOW they'll be checking thier lists alot more carefully and targeting a bit more precisly than the sun. When that 1 in 10,000==success plan starts running $100/success. It cuts into the profit margin. They'll want to reduce that to a 1 in 1000 for the higher return spams (which are probably 1 in 100,000 or more anyways).
If you really wanted to make money by doing nothing each day, with that setup it'd be possible just by recieving the spam:)
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These are three racing games, they're all fun, but how do they compare challenge wise?
F-Zero GX:
Difficult, but with practice any track can be mastered, in GP mode I have beat al but the Diamond cup in Master Difficulty (I just beat it on Expert, give me some time). The game is difficult in the higher levels because the drivers are better, and it works very well. You can still beat them, but you have to be good.
Jet Moto 2:
"Easy" should have been changed to "hard" and the 5 levels above it are even more difficult. I do not know a single person that has come close to completing this game. It's easy to get behind and very hard to make up time.
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2:
Beat it in 6 days, went on to dominate the hell out of it on a regular basis, until I got a certain amount of points it was quite fair. Then something happened, the computer cars were getting pulled over 4 times and still racing (they should've been arrested after the third). And one race, I watched a car get pulled over 7 times before getting arrested. Then the game was no fun. The AI resorted to flagrant cheating.
Now, there are numerous other games that simply just make it repetitious. As much as I like the GGX series, I will use a cheat code to unlock the other modes rather than having to do 380 battles in a row. I don't get enough large blocks of free time to even attempt feats like that very often. That's just silly long for an uninterruptable, unsavable path.
I can't believe they left this one out. It's THE BEST game ending ever.
.45 and proceeds to empty it at a range of less than 2' into the chest of the bad guy.
Hero walks upto the bad guy who is now stuck in his burning car
Bad Guy: Help, you gotta get me out of here.
Hero throws dice (long story) at bad guy, takes key to nuke. Looks over and sees a ghost of his sister standing there.
Hero: Don't get out of the car, never get out of the car.
Hero pulls out his
Now, how many games do you get to play where the end guy doesn't take the "soft" approach and ends up letting the bad guy live if he has the choice? I can't remember too many, that made this one original.
I've been asking for a trackball in a mouse for a long time. It'd make working with large OrCAD and AutoCAD files alot easier.
Nintendo didn't play the spec game that Sony and MS did. Sony said "97M polygons!" MS said "100M polygons!" and Nintendo said "6-12M polygons." Sony and MS were talking max theoretical, Nintendo was talking real. An i875P chipset has a max theoretical memory bandwidth of 12.8GB/sec. Has anyone seen any bandwidth measurements of even half that?
As someone once said to me about the xBox:
"The Dreamcast was a 75MHz toy, the xBox is a 700MHz machine, people will treat it better!"
Nintendo knows better, I know better, a P90 used to be hot stuff and now it's being used to level a table. Nintendo is the ONLY one of the three that isn't having frequent problems with thier drive units. PS2 drives go out quite often, XBox drives go out so often I tend to question if they're DESIGNED to go bad.
How often are GBAs dropped? Alot.
How often are GBAs given to young kids? Most of the time they are.
How often do young kids take care of thier stuff? Consider that I NEVER give my GBA to a young kid, and I cringe as I hand them a PS2 contoller...
Take this device that has a rotating optical media. Take it for a drop. Is the head still going to be aligned? If yes, repeat 200 times. You just simulated a weeks worth of use. Also, what parent is going to buy thier kids this thing? That's like sending your kid to school with a laptop.
PS2 quality graphics are nice, but when they're applied to such a tiny screen, who's going to be able to read anything?
Battery life? Consider that the day they release this thing is the day that Duracell and Energizer's stock split 3 times in one day.
I think they're missing the market.
Speed Limits: I call it accelerated darwinism. If you can't drive a car at 100MPH. Atropus lets you know.
Safety on toasters?: Applied darwinism. If you cram a knife in a piece of electronics, you're asking for it.
Glass pack mufflers: See, here's where sound level restiction HELP those guys. If it weren't for the restrictions the muffler industry would be hurt by people running straight pipes.
Telemarketers just don't get the concept of focused marketing. They are likely to fall to corporate darwinsim if they don't "get it".
Factor in the growth rate, and you end up with an equasion without a solution.
Also, it's likely that in that time, they'd have to sue people multiple times.
Next you're going to tell me they outlawed him too!
The real PCI bandwidth is usually something like 75-90MB/sec. Depending on the chipset.
Now, add in IDE RAID cards, and SCSI cards and those along can saturate the bus. Consider that a single SCSI HD can now pump out about 70MB/sec when used in an STR intensive application.
...now quit bothering me, this 24 year old is in the process of dominating Golden Sun:The Lost Age.
---
A hard core gamer is very much into thier games. Much like an addict. A hard core gamer plays thier games for hours on end. Much like an addict. However, a hard core gamer KNOWS that thier games are nothing but games, and can easily seperate games from life. An addict tends to confuse the two.
---
If you start that up, I'll start up a DVD cleaning and sterilization service and place it next door to yours. You'll need it.
Have a policy that if a cell phone rings, or if someone is caught talking on one during the flight, they will be immediately ejected.
Suddenly, people will double check thier phones.
With the phone, there are discounted rates for people that have difficulty affording it, and there are laws mandating that it must be delivered even to areas that aren't profitable.
In the 15 years that we've been living at where we live we have yet to be able to get cable TV.
DSS came along and we got on it, but that runs a minimum of $20/month, doesn't include local channels, and doesn't include the hardware cost. Reliability isn't too hot, and if you have multiple TVs, you need to have multiple recievers. 3 TVs? You'll need at least two dishes. And each of those TVs has a service charge.
Now take broadcast TV.
Almost every station has local news. It's very portable, some areas can get by on rabbit ears on a portable TV. There is no monthly charge.
This would in effect be telling people who are not willing to pay $40 to watch the local news (which is slathered with ads) that it's either they pay or they get no TV at all. Cable companies would suddenly be able to charge "rural" rates that before people would not have even thought about accepting.
The biggest gainers would be the cable/satallite companies. The biggest losers would be the casual viewers.
Just because you pay a subscription, doesn't mean there will be any less ads.
--
I'd gladly mount the thing inside of a cast-iron safe with an extra layer of Mu-metal to make sure it's safe from any "damage" or "tampering".
WTF kind of logic is that? Is he going to come by in a white van and sell me some speakers tomarrow?
I had read an article a while back where it came to the conclusion that software has gotten worse due to programmers not checking thier code before they compile it, but instead just bouncing it off the compiler until no errors pop up. Remember, you no longer have to schedule compiler time.
Now consider the difference between hardware and software:
Software can have millions of lines of code.
Hardware can have millions of transistors.
Software can usually be patched in the field.
Hardware can rarely change once sold.
To run a new batch of software, someone must only compile it, and then test it.
To run a new batch of hardware, someone must re-layout the PCB, buy parts, get the board stuffed, and then test it.
If a piece of software breaks, it can often be patched.
If a piece of hardware breaks, it has to be replaced.
Basically:
It costs big money when hardware screws up, so companies spend time making sure it's good. But software doesn't have immediately visible high costs. And it has more of a "black box" mentality.
-
There's a limit to the amount people will take. And for me, the limit was passed at about Mach 8 by that little number. I wouldn't even frequent a site that had that.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes traveling down the interstate.
I filled out a Umax rebate for a scanner, I paid $150 before a $50 rebate. I had checked up on it with no reply. I had forgotten about it, but noticed the price of the scanner drop to $100 before rebate, then $70 (there was a $20 rebate on top of that), and then $50. So a check rolls in the mail, I'm thinking "wtf are they sending me a check for?". It's my rebate check. From two years earlier. ...and the scanner sucked, I traded it for a dead motherboard.
Because I could make it the next Darwin Awards and Computer Stupidities site. And bash.org, LOOK OUT!
For me, the "post PC era" is when people stop treating thier computers as computers, and start viewing them as appliances. SFF PCs are a gateway into it where the PC becomes a set top box much like a DVD player or VCR. The xBox has the potential to be a major gap bridger, as the people that have modded it have found out. A subset of this would be a decline in "PC" sales as people start using the various "appliances" for tasks that they would have otherwise used a PC for.
Another definition would be an end to the trend of continued growth in the PC market and a return to predominantly just using appliances.
Does that mean that I'll never be able to buy a Mac there since none of those were designed to be compatible? What about Linux? Will the price of CAT-5 cables go up as they need to be stamped with "Designed for Windows XP"? What about Full Tilt Pinball which was designed for Windows NT?
Every time you send an email, you pay the recipient $0.01.
:)
End result?
The average email user breaks even if they send as much as they recieve. Someone who sends much more than they recieve is only out $1. Legitimate buisnesses will only pay about $0.05 per sale on average. Still peanuts. However, a spammer that sends out 10,000,000 emails ends up having to fork out $100,000. Still alot cheaper than snailmail spam, but you KNOW they'll be checking thier lists alot more carefully and targeting a bit more precisly than the sun. When that 1 in 10,000==success plan starts running $100/success. It cuts into the profit margin. They'll want to reduce that to a 1 in 1000 for the higher return spams (which are probably 1 in 100,000 or more anyways).
If you really wanted to make money by doing nothing each day, with that setup it'd be possible just by recieving the spam
STEAL THIER AIR!
It's easier than you'd think, they use the same combination as what I use on my luggage.