The thing I don't like about the Wiimote for aiming in shooting games is that you are never actually aiming with the gun. You are just looking at the cursor on screen and aiming with that. In the duck-hunt-esque game on Wii Play this gets to be very confusing with 2 players because it is difficult to tell your cursors apart in the heat of battle. Plus it feels a bit 'disconnected' from your actions, where as simply pointing and shooting feels more real.
With the old Zapper on NES it had the advantage of knowing exactly where you were pointing on the screen, because the frame of reference _was_ the screen itself. However with the Wiimote the sensor bar is the frame of reference and the screen doesn't matter.
In my perfect Wii world the Wii Zapper would have gun sights on it similar to the old NES Zapper. Then any game using this would have a quick calibration session in the game where it shows targets for you to aim at on screen and when you shoot at them it can figure out where on the screen you are pointing with the sensor bar (sort of like calibrating a touch screen on a Windows Mobile device). This way you could remove the on screen cursor and simply aim with the gun sights on the Wii zapper.
But unfortuantely based on screenshots I have seen the Wii zapper does not have any gun sights so it doesn't look like the on screen cursor will be disappearing any time soon. Guess I'll just have to get used to shooting from the hip.
Would the owner of an apartment building be liable if someone posted a similar message on a bulletin board along side all of the for sale ads from other tenants?
Milder winders are actually causing problems with trade routes to the arctic. A lot of the stuff that gets delivered gets done so in the winter on ice roads, and with milder winters the window in which the lakes are frozen enough to drive large semi trucks on is getting narrower and narrower.
Find me a laser that can do direct CD/DVD printing. That is what I use my Pixma ip4300 for, it does amazing prints and it is very easy to refill the carts yourself.
I use hobbicolors ink on ebay for this printer, which is excellent (and cheap!) and you can get a free 3rd party ink monitoring tool at http://www.freewebs.com/inkmon/.
I just configured this on my Exchange 2003 server with my WM5 PPC 6700. Basically you configure the Exchange server to send your phone a text message when you receive an email. This text message tells the phone to check for new messages on the server. So basically you get your emails on your mobile phone nearly instantaneously.
It was annoying so I turned it off.
Plus, with the built in speaker, you can have lightsaber sounds coming out of the Wiimote. I am not even a big Starwars fan but I am excited about the possibilities of this.
I highly doubt that. If LED bulbs never need to be replaced, they will just be really expensive. They will not however cease to exist due to some conspiracy theory.
>>Why would someone spend good hard cash to get virtual stuff...?
That is not a valid question, as you can replace 'virtual stuff' in your question with anything depending on the person. I could replace it with 'a manicure' or 'clothes for my pet' or just about anything I am not interested in. My wife would replace it with my arc aaa flashlight for example.
As I have said before I used to run a business of sorts selling virtual items to lots of different people. Most of these people had more money than time, and that's all it really comes down to. They enjoyed playing the game, but didn't have the time to play it, so to get the most out of their time they would pay me to do their dirty work for them.
For example, if they could work in real life for 1 hour and earn enough money to pay for an item that would take them 10 hours of in game time to get, why wouldn't they pay for it? To them the amount of money is insignificant, 50 bucks here or there. But to me, who was efficient at getting what they wanted, it was profitible. My character was geared to do these tasks and my entertainment came out of the profits I was earning.
So the buyer gets what they want, and the seller gets what they want. It really doesn't have anything to do with intellectual property. Just time.
I am no longer in the business anymore, but if I were, many of my 'clients' were repeat customers and towards the end I really wasn't using eBay anyway. In any case, there will be other sites that will fill the void (there already are), so this really doesn't change anything as far as buying and selling virtual items is concerned. The only thing that really changes is eBay won't be profiting from it anymore. And I sure did pay them a lot of fees!
I wanted to comment on the 'crispness' on WarioWare that is mentioned in this article. I have a LG 42 inch HD LCD (1080i) and you can see some compression artifacts in the short movies that introduce each character in WarioWare. So it is not perfect, but I will admit it is nitpicking to notice something like that.
I'm not sure why people are calling this a closed system. I personally played Second Life for a total of an hour before I decided I didn't like it, but I have played and made money in Asheron's Call (Microsoft/Turbine) and Anarchy Online was my job for 6 months and I made about 10,000US playing it exclusively for profit.
The reason why I do not see this as a closed system is because the people putting money into it are taking something out...entertainment. And while that is not a tangible item it is still just as valuable in a videogame as it is in real life. You don't leave with anything after a movie or a trip to a casino, how is that different?
Slashdot Mirror
http://serve.me.nus.edu.sg/cyclocopter/
The thing I don't like about the Wiimote for aiming in shooting games is that you are never actually aiming with the gun. You are just looking at the cursor on screen and aiming with that. In the duck-hunt-esque game on Wii Play this gets to be very confusing with 2 players because it is difficult to tell your cursors apart in the heat of battle. Plus it feels a bit 'disconnected' from your actions, where as simply pointing and shooting feels more real. With the old Zapper on NES it had the advantage of knowing exactly where you were pointing on the screen, because the frame of reference _was_ the screen itself. However with the Wiimote the sensor bar is the frame of reference and the screen doesn't matter. In my perfect Wii world the Wii Zapper would have gun sights on it similar to the old NES Zapper. Then any game using this would have a quick calibration session in the game where it shows targets for you to aim at on screen and when you shoot at them it can figure out where on the screen you are pointing with the sensor bar (sort of like calibrating a touch screen on a Windows Mobile device). This way you could remove the on screen cursor and simply aim with the gun sights on the Wii zapper. But unfortuantely based on screenshots I have seen the Wii zapper does not have any gun sights so it doesn't look like the on screen cursor will be disappearing any time soon. Guess I'll just have to get used to shooting from the hip.
Forgot to mention they have them on display in a glass case alongside cell phone accessories and the like.
Where I live in Edmonton Canada you can get mod chips at a local asian supermarket. Just thought I'd throw that out there.
And that's why it is stupid. Does it matter if the bulletin board is electronic or cork and push pins? No.
Would the owner of an apartment building be liable if someone posted a similar message on a bulletin board along side all of the for sale ads from other tenants?
Also see http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/09/windows_in_ your_pocket/
I'm pretty sure this is already possible. http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/
When I was living at home my sister must've found every last one of them. She was terrible for breaking the computer.
Milder winders are actually causing problems with trade routes to the arctic. A lot of the stuff that gets delivered gets done so in the winter on ice roads, and with milder winters the window in which the lakes are frozen enough to drive large semi trucks on is getting narrower and narrower.
Uh-Oh! Now I know why it always made that noise when a new message came in. ICQ can see the future!
Find me a laser that can do direct CD/DVD printing. That is what I use my Pixma ip4300 for, it does amazing prints and it is very easy to refill the carts yourself. I use hobbicolors ink on ebay for this printer, which is excellent (and cheap!) and you can get a free 3rd party ink monitoring tool at http://www.freewebs.com/inkmon/.
I just configured this on my Exchange 2003 server with my WM5 PPC 6700. Basically you configure the Exchange server to send your phone a text message when you receive an email. This text message tells the phone to check for new messages on the server. So basically you get your emails on your mobile phone nearly instantaneously. It was annoying so I turned it off.
Plus, with the built in speaker, you can have lightsaber sounds coming out of the Wiimote. I am not even a big Starwars fan but I am excited about the possibilities of this.
Excite truck is awesome, by no means a driving sim though.
Who's your daddies??
The first rule of quantum computing is don't ask questions.
I highly doubt that. If LED bulbs never need to be replaced, they will just be really expensive. They will not however cease to exist due to some conspiracy theory.
Where did you buy them. Any online sources?
Just find a free proxy that is based in the US and then you can view the content.
Popups and annoying banners on that site, I closed it immediately.
Of course!
>>Why would someone spend good hard cash to get virtual stuff...?
That is not a valid question, as you can replace 'virtual stuff' in your question with anything depending on the person. I could replace it with 'a manicure' or 'clothes for my pet' or just about anything I am not interested in. My wife would replace it with my arc aaa flashlight for example.
As I have said before I used to run a business of sorts selling virtual items to lots of different people. Most of these people had more money than time, and that's all it really comes down to. They enjoyed playing the game, but didn't have the time to play it, so to get the most out of their time they would pay me to do their dirty work for them.
For example, if they could work in real life for 1 hour and earn enough money to pay for an item that would take them 10 hours of in game time to get, why wouldn't they pay for it? To them the amount of money is insignificant, 50 bucks here or there. But to me, who was efficient at getting what they wanted, it was profitible. My character was geared to do these tasks and my entertainment came out of the profits I was earning.
So the buyer gets what they want, and the seller gets what they want. It really doesn't have anything to do with intellectual property. Just time.
I am no longer in the business anymore, but if I were, many of my 'clients' were repeat customers and towards the end I really wasn't using eBay anyway. In any case, there will be other sites that will fill the void (there already are), so this really doesn't change anything as far as buying and selling virtual items is concerned. The only thing that really changes is eBay won't be profiting from it anymore. And I sure did pay them a lot of fees!
I wanted to comment on the 'crispness' on WarioWare that is mentioned in this article. I have a LG 42 inch HD LCD (1080i) and you can see some compression artifacts in the short movies that introduce each character in WarioWare. So it is not perfect, but I will admit it is nitpicking to notice something like that.
I'm not sure why people are calling this a closed system. I personally played Second Life for a total of an hour before I decided I didn't like it, but I have played and made money in Asheron's Call (Microsoft/Turbine) and Anarchy Online was my job for 6 months and I made about 10,000US playing it exclusively for profit. The reason why I do not see this as a closed system is because the people putting money into it are taking something out...entertainment. And while that is not a tangible item it is still just as valuable in a videogame as it is in real life. You don't leave with anything after a movie or a trip to a casino, how is that different?