That seems to be more a problem with the industry in general, or its consumer base really. People just buy games with familiar IP. That's why almost every game at recent E3s has been a sequel.
I've been thinking about this lately, about how most companies don't really make games. They make characters and IP. Then they sit on that and develop it for years. As someone who has thought about being in that industry it just sounds depressing that you'd be working on the same material for your whole career. That you'd have to actually relocate to a new company to get anything fresh. It's just another reason to stay developing smaller games.
But if you're developing IP for the higher spec systems, it usually involves gameplay and or assets that take advantage of those higher spec capabilities. And unless you want to contribute to the shovelware pile of ugly ports, it isn't going to be a trivial matter to tailor that IP to a lesser and more uniquely-designed, at least from an input standpoint, system like the Wii.
I think it's a real shame that the entertainment industry in general has gone so franchise-based. But really we have no one to blame but the idiot masses around us. Seek out new forms of entertainment. Take a fucking chance and reward companies for doing likewise!
I've had a similar problem before and found that there were surfaces which were reflecting the signal. CD jewel cases and glass facing for various things like pictures or clocks can do this. Not being an IR technology expert this may in fact be ridiculous but this sure seemed to be the culprit in our case. And not to say there isn't necessarily a problem with your specific wiimote or the game itself, but I can tell you we didn't have those problems playing BB. I've found that not all Wiimote pointing environments are created equal.
Resident Evil 4 is quite good too. Having played a few ports of older games that I enjoyed on other systems, like the Prince of Persia title that was ported, I've found the wii-interpreted control scheme fun, if buggy at times, but not necessarily a huge improvement on the core gameplay. With RE4 however, that game really comes into its own with the wiimote. It's just a better game for it. In fact it kind of bums me out that I can't play the new RE5, which looks fun and quite pretty, with the wiimote. It's going to feel alien back on a regular controller.
No More Heroes is also really good. It's fun and damn quirky and one of the first truly ironic and deconstructionist games out there. For a console that is promoted for its less hardcore, more casual gaming environment, No More Heroes sets up most of its humor for the true veteran gamer. Which is all the more ironic I guess.
Boom Blox was also pretty great. Definitely pick that one up. It really surprised me. I mean it is basically Jenga on the Wii, which sounds simple and uninspiring enough, but man that game is fun with friends and alcohol.
The software catalog on the Wii is still pretty lacking, but there are some real gems out there, first and third party. I have to disagree on the Wiiware mentions though. That stuff has been pretty disappointing so far, especially considering what I've seen on PSN/XBLA. I'd kill for Pixel Junk on the Wii.
I work in an architectural firm. We do a lot of home/commercials remodels. This involves going out to the site and getting measurements of the existing building, and taking lots and lots of pictures. Inside and out. While working on the project our draftsmen page through these pictures one at a time looking for this or that specific detail. As such I try to take the pictures in a specific order, but there's always those minor details you go back to and photograph out of sync. I can tell you that we'd much rather be able to feed the whole lot of images to some magic software that would let us walk through the building and get a sense of the spacial characteristics of the place.
This program would add context and ease of navigation to a collection of otherwise random and disjointed images. If they could determine the correct scale and insert measurements on certain features that would be even better.
If you can't see the wow factor of this then really I don't know what to tell you. Go model me a replica of Notre Dame using only pictures gathered from flickr. See how long it takes you.
I was thinking the same thing. Part of me hopes this gets implemented very widely, as it would only expose the fact that lots and lots of people get high. You'll find it in even the most unlikely people you've worked with or worked for. How awesome would it be if it backfired and companies had to backpeddle into some kind of don't-ask don't-tell policy after finding out just how many of their workforce likes to party.
Re:Hmm...Giganews and other services are still the
on
R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008
·
· Score: 3, Informative
In the interest of the first rule of USENET, my post shall be quick and somewhat vague. As a former user and lover of Xnews I must ask you, have you not heard of GrabIt? Though you'll have to get used to NZBs instead of crawling the group, the ability to shutdown and startup long queues anytime without having to wait for the software to wake up from what seems like a catatonic coma is quite valuable. Of course, I had less than a gig of ram back then.
That test was conducted over a year ago. Several copies of the OS were placed on shelves in major retailers all over the world. Anyone who wanted to could participate in this test. I believe they called it the Vista "launch." The results were quite different from this more recent study.
Maybe all the intelligent members of government are working on the UFO situation. Would explain why things seem to have really gone down hill in the last 60 years.
Somehow I think the psych evaluations for astronauts are somewhat more stringent than those for Hollywood actors. At least that's what movies about astronauts have taught me.
I dunno though, do many teens even like 2D side-scrollers? He probably grew up on Playstation. I was going to say go ahead and get him going on some OpenGL. NeHe's tutorials really make it pretty easy to get into. Of course he's be using C++ so maybe something easier.
Graphics is what got me interested in programming. I remember my high school Pascal classes. Unfortunately they were pretty boring. We did do some simple EGA graphics at one point but that was really the only interesting thing we did in class, though I did end up learning the fundamentals.
Thing was, to do anything cool you had to do all this VGA initialization stuff that was forever out of our reach at that level. Not to mention the computers were pretty obsolete even at that point.
I know there's a lot of (mostly unreasonable) hate around here for Flash, but I'd say get him into Actionscript3. It's really easy to do graphics in without having to setup windows and rendering contexts or getting to know huge APIs. It will introduce him to object oriented programming, but won't involve pointers or memory management or any of the more esoteric aspects of something like C++. Another thing is he can easily share whatever he produces with most anyone else who has a browser. If he is at all into social networking online (all that myspace bullshit) he can make some pretty interesting stuff for his friends' pages. Using Actionscript could also lead him to branching out into other web technologies, something probably more important in today's world than ever. It also has a similar syntax to Java or C++ if he wants to go in that direction. And as far as help and tutorials, there's really one of the richest communities around Flash, being a technology that was practically born in the middle of the blogging phenomenon.
The best thing about Actionscript is how quickly you can put something visual together and how little setup it requires. Graphics is definitely the way to go, and nothing in programming has a more immediate "wow" factor than throwing something pretty up on the screen.
Part of it was just time and having a glut of villains (this alway plagues Batman movies). I was actually starting to worry about his arc late in the movie. I knew there wasn't going to be enough time to do anything with him that didn't feel rushed. I mean the movie felt long as it was, but Two Face didn't get enough of a backstory. Particularly "Harvey loves Rachel" didn't get enough of a backstory. I just didn't buy it. That kind of anger is something you get after your partner of years has been taken from you. I didn't get that vibe from them. Not to mention there wasn't really even enough time between movies for such a relationship to realistically develope (in the interim they hadn't even finished reconstruction of Wayne Manor).
Same problem with the first Matrix movie really. Trinity's kiss in the end pretty much came out of left field. It's not that I don't mind the "love conquers all" idea, but you have to earn it from your audience. Otherwise it feels like a cheap out.
Yea, but I was just waiting for him to say "what you should have done in the first place." Then I just knew he was going to chuck it out the window.
I was actually hoping the Joker was lying the whole time and each boat was actually give their own detonators. Then after Deebo throws the detonator out his window, the yuppies push their own button and blow themselves up. Would have been awesome, but no one quite has the balls for the really big ideas.
I think the raspy voice worked better in the first film, because it was more of him using it to interrogate criminals. It worked well in that sense and I think it was cool to have Batman as more of a street tough vigilante than some proper detective fellow.
The problem with the voice is when he has to use it to speak with characters he isn't interrogating. He's using it as a disguise in those situations, but it just sounds silly when he's using it to deliver lines of exposition. At one point I actually started feeling bad for Bale and wondering how many takes he had to do and how sore his throat must have been. He should have taken a cue from Keaton and just used the angry whisper in those scenes.
I also enjoyed that there wasn't any silly microwave/waterborn silliness.
The thing with the cell phone sonar was pretty bad. Assuming the tech was plausible to begin with (it wasn't), Morgan Freeman's character would never have been able to sift through millions of phones looking for a relevant call just by listening with his ears. What the fuck was that?
It was about as stupid as the microwave device (which never vaporized the nearby heavily hydrated human beings) from the first film. It was just bad science (again) and an unnecessary contrivance of the plot in the first place. Both devices are only so annoying because the rest of the film, while extraordinary, is pretty well grounded. Good flicks otherwise though.
the solution was to have the area covered with black marble and have lots of sharp points triangles sticking up out of the ground.
Terrible idea. Such an environment would just attract the goth kids from 12008. They would loiter around reciting bad poetry and drinking absynthe until the radioactivity conferred unto them superhuman powers, which they would then use to conquer the world and enslave us all.
Fuck people, try to think about the long term consequences of your actions!
I had no idea Ron Paul was a gynecologist. In a sick way I really respect that, though in another way it makes for a really great cheap shot as you just demonstrated.
Obama has consistently opposed making English the official language. As an Illinois senator, Obama voted against a measure to make English the official language of the United States in June 2007.
So basically he'll fight against a bill to make english the official language of the United States (isn't kind of that already?), but he'll roll over on something like telco immunity.
I mean, why would you do this? In a country full of people who have demonized something as innocuous as the metric system just for being foreign, why even appear to hate on the English language? And if you're going to be that progressive on an issue like that it makes this whole FISA thing even more of an outrage. Could it be that he doesn't really stand for anything?
I agree with what he said about wanting children to be bilingual. It's a progressive ideal and something that should be more popular in an educated and free society. I haven't been following Obama much as I'm disillusioned with a system and a populace that voted GW into office twice, but something like that makes me respect Obama. Too bad the news today implies he's just as full of shit as the rest of them.
Slashdot Mirror
That seems to be more a problem with the industry in general, or its consumer base really. People just buy games with familiar IP. That's why almost every game at recent E3s has been a sequel.
I've been thinking about this lately, about how most companies don't really make games. They make characters and IP. Then they sit on that and develop it for years. As someone who has thought about being in that industry it just sounds depressing that you'd be working on the same material for your whole career. That you'd have to actually relocate to a new company to get anything fresh. It's just another reason to stay developing smaller games.
But if you're developing IP for the higher spec systems, it usually involves gameplay and or assets that take advantage of those higher spec capabilities. And unless you want to contribute to the shovelware pile of ugly ports, it isn't going to be a trivial matter to tailor that IP to a lesser and more uniquely-designed, at least from an input standpoint, system like the Wii.
I think it's a real shame that the entertainment industry in general has gone so franchise-based. But really we have no one to blame but the idiot masses around us. Seek out new forms of entertainment. Take a fucking chance and reward companies for doing likewise!
I've had a similar problem before and found that there were surfaces which were reflecting the signal. CD jewel cases and glass facing for various things like pictures or clocks can do this. Not being an IR technology expert this may in fact be ridiculous but this sure seemed to be the culprit in our case. And not to say there isn't necessarily a problem with your specific wiimote or the game itself, but I can tell you we didn't have those problems playing BB. I've found that not all Wiimote pointing environments are created equal.
Resident Evil 4 is quite good too. Having played a few ports of older games that I enjoyed on other systems, like the Prince of Persia title that was ported, I've found the wii-interpreted control scheme fun, if buggy at times, but not necessarily a huge improvement on the core gameplay. With RE4 however, that game really comes into its own with the wiimote. It's just a better game for it. In fact it kind of bums me out that I can't play the new RE5, which looks fun and quite pretty, with the wiimote. It's going to feel alien back on a regular controller.
No More Heroes is also really good. It's fun and damn quirky and one of the first truly ironic and deconstructionist games out there. For a console that is promoted for its less hardcore, more casual gaming environment, No More Heroes sets up most of its humor for the true veteran gamer. Which is all the more ironic I guess.
Boom Blox was also pretty great. Definitely pick that one up. It really surprised me. I mean it is basically Jenga on the Wii, which sounds simple and uninspiring enough, but man that game is fun with friends and alcohol.
The software catalog on the Wii is still pretty lacking, but there are some real gems out there, first and third party. I have to disagree on the Wiiware mentions though. That stuff has been pretty disappointing so far, especially considering what I've seen on PSN/XBLA. I'd kill for Pixel Junk on the Wii.
I work in an architectural firm. We do a lot of home/commercials remodels. This involves going out to the site and getting measurements of the existing building, and taking lots and lots of pictures. Inside and out. While working on the project our draftsmen page through these pictures one at a time looking for this or that specific detail. As such I try to take the pictures in a specific order, but there's always those minor details you go back to and photograph out of sync. I can tell you that we'd much rather be able to feed the whole lot of images to some magic software that would let us walk through the building and get a sense of the spacial characteristics of the place.
This program would add context and ease of navigation to a collection of otherwise random and disjointed images. If they could determine the correct scale and insert measurements on certain features that would be even better.
If you can't see the wow factor of this then really I don't know what to tell you. Go model me a replica of Notre Dame using only pictures gathered from flickr. See how long it takes you.
I was thinking the same thing. Part of me hopes this gets implemented very widely, as it would only expose the fact that lots and lots of people get high. You'll find it in even the most unlikely people you've worked with or worked for. How awesome would it be if it backfired and companies had to backpeddle into some kind of don't-ask don't-tell policy after finding out just how many of their workforce likes to party.
...by removing the head and destroying the brain.
Let me repeat that.
Removing the head and destroying the brain.
In the interest of the first rule of USENET, my post shall be quick and somewhat vague. As a former user and lover of Xnews I must ask you, have you not heard of GrabIt? Though you'll have to get used to NZBs instead of crawling the group, the ability to shutdown and startup long queues anytime without having to wait for the software to wake up from what seems like a catatonic coma is quite valuable. Of course, I had less than a gig of ram back then.
If the enemy does start rotating the armor, we can just hire Starfox to defeat them.
That test was conducted over a year ago. Several copies of the OS were placed on shelves in major retailers all over the world. Anyone who wanted to could participate in this test. I believe they called it the Vista "launch." The results were quite different from this more recent study.
Maybe all the intelligent members of government are working on the UFO situation. Would explain why things seem to have really gone down hill in the last 60 years.
That's only because the Mormons ride bicycles.
Somehow I think the psych evaluations for astronauts are somewhat more stringent than those for Hollywood actors. At least that's what movies about astronauts have taught me.
Clearwater, Fl here. Tom Cruise is an anomoly. The scariest part about regular scientologists is that they look just like us!
I dunno though, do many teens even like 2D side-scrollers? He probably grew up on Playstation. I was going to say go ahead and get him going on some OpenGL. NeHe's tutorials really make it pretty easy to get into. Of course he's be using C++ so maybe something easier.
Graphics is what got me interested in programming. I remember my high school Pascal classes. Unfortunately they were pretty boring. We did do some simple EGA graphics at one point but that was really the only interesting thing we did in class, though I did end up learning the fundamentals.
Thing was, to do anything cool you had to do all this VGA initialization stuff that was forever out of our reach at that level. Not to mention the computers were pretty obsolete even at that point.
I know there's a lot of (mostly unreasonable) hate around here for Flash, but I'd say get him into Actionscript3. It's really easy to do graphics in without having to setup windows and rendering contexts or getting to know huge APIs. It will introduce him to object oriented programming, but won't involve pointers or memory management or any of the more esoteric aspects of something like C++. Another thing is he can easily share whatever he produces with most anyone else who has a browser. If he is at all into social networking online (all that myspace bullshit) he can make some pretty interesting stuff for his friends' pages. Using Actionscript could also lead him to branching out into other web technologies, something probably more important in today's world than ever. It also has a similar syntax to Java or C++ if he wants to go in that direction. And as far as help and tutorials, there's really one of the richest communities around Flash, being a technology that was practically born in the middle of the blogging phenomenon.
The best thing about Actionscript is how quickly you can put something visual together and how little setup it requires. Graphics is definitely the way to go, and nothing in programming has a more immediate "wow" factor than throwing something pretty up on the screen.
Part of it was just time and having a glut of villains (this alway plagues Batman movies). I was actually starting to worry about his arc late in the movie. I knew there wasn't going to be enough time to do anything with him that didn't feel rushed. I mean the movie felt long as it was, but Two Face didn't get enough of a backstory. Particularly "Harvey loves Rachel" didn't get enough of a backstory. I just didn't buy it. That kind of anger is something you get after your partner of years has been taken from you. I didn't get that vibe from them. Not to mention there wasn't really even enough time between movies for such a relationship to realistically develope (in the interim they hadn't even finished reconstruction of Wayne Manor).
Same problem with the first Matrix movie really. Trinity's kiss in the end pretty much came out of left field. It's not that I don't mind the "love conquers all" idea, but you have to earn it from your audience. Otherwise it feels like a cheap out.
Yea, but I was just waiting for him to say "what you should have done in the first place." Then I just knew he was going to chuck it out the window.
I was actually hoping the Joker was lying the whole time and each boat was actually give their own detonators. Then after Deebo throws the detonator out his window, the yuppies push their own button and blow themselves up. Would have been awesome, but no one quite has the balls for the really big ideas.
I think the raspy voice worked better in the first film, because it was more of him using it to interrogate criminals. It worked well in that sense and I think it was cool to have Batman as more of a street tough vigilante than some proper detective fellow.
The problem with the voice is when he has to use it to speak with characters he isn't interrogating. He's using it as a disguise in those situations, but it just sounds silly when he's using it to deliver lines of exposition. At one point I actually started feeling bad for Bale and wondering how many takes he had to do and how sore his throat must have been. He should have taken a cue from Keaton and just used the angry whisper in those scenes.
I also enjoyed that there wasn't any silly microwave/waterborn silliness.
The thing with the cell phone sonar was pretty bad. Assuming the tech was plausible to begin with (it wasn't), Morgan Freeman's character would never have been able to sift through millions of phones looking for a relevant call just by listening with his ears. What the fuck was that?
It was about as stupid as the microwave device (which never vaporized the nearby heavily hydrated human beings) from the first film. It was just bad science (again) and an unnecessary contrivance of the plot in the first place. Both devices are only so annoying because the rest of the film, while extraordinary, is pretty well grounded. Good flicks otherwise though.
the solution was to have the area covered with black marble and have lots of sharp points triangles sticking up out of the ground.
Terrible idea. Such an environment would just attract the goth kids from 12008. They would loiter around reciting bad poetry and drinking absynthe until the radioactivity conferred unto them superhuman powers, which they would then use to conquer the world and enslave us all.
Fuck people, try to think about the long term consequences of your actions!
Uhm. 13 isn't really Barely Legal is it? Do you even read that magazine?
when Will Wright teams up with John Carmack
Just imagine the sort of penis monsters one could create in id Tech 5. Scary.
IANAD, but I'm pretty sure they're still analog.
Yea well, fuck did you expect? It's Monday.
New slogan:
"I'll Only Put the Head of It In"
Obama '08
There's already a great David Alan Coe theme song. That'll win you the south.
I had no idea Ron Paul was a gynecologist. In a sick way I really respect that, though in another way it makes for a really great cheap shot as you just demonstrated.
Obama has consistently opposed making English the official language. As an Illinois senator, Obama voted against a measure to make English the official language of the United States in June 2007.
So basically he'll fight against a bill to make english the official language of the United States (isn't kind of that already?), but he'll roll over on something like telco immunity.
I mean, why would you do this? In a country full of people who have demonized something as innocuous as the metric system just for being foreign, why even appear to hate on the English language? And if you're going to be that progressive on an issue like that it makes this whole FISA thing even more of an outrage. Could it be that he doesn't really stand for anything?
I agree with what he said about wanting children to be bilingual. It's a progressive ideal and something that should be more popular in an educated and free society. I haven't been following Obama much as I'm disillusioned with a system and a populace that voted GW into office twice, but something like that makes me respect Obama. Too bad the news today implies he's just as full of shit as the rest of them.