Sakaguchi was personally involved in designing the first 6 Final Fantasy titles, and served as executive producer over a large portion of Square's PSX titles. If Microsoft was going to bet on somebody to save their system, it's hard to imagine a guy better than him.
However, I agree with you that Microsoft counting on only this to save their system is a really stupid idea. Whatsmore, the Final Fantasy games generally lose to the Dragon Quest / Dragon Warrior ones in Japan. Microsoft needs to start listening to what their customers actually want instead of telling them what they should want.
The main point of the article seems to be that a mascot is iconic; it typifies the basic attributes of the company as well. For example, when seeing (Genesis era) Sonic, you supposedly see (Genesis era) Sega and the similar qualities; fast, cool, and somewhat rebelious. During the heyday of Sonic, the primary people playing video games were adolescent males, and they were marketed as such, and thus Sonic was successful. However, nowadays the console market has expanded considerably to the point that trying to identify several select characters with your system is counterproductive; you want to be everything to everyone.
Now everyone plays video games: jocks, nerds, boys, girls, even seniors. As such, you cannot market a console successfully under one image. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft realize this and it's evident in their commercials; they focus on the on the game not the console, until at the very end the company's icon pops up. They want you to identify the type of game you like with the console, not the characters.
When you mention that Japanese interpret it "by context", it seems to me you are referring to homonyms used in conversation, which is in no way unique to the Japanese language; we do the same in English, and I imagine this occurs in almost every language. No offense meant, but since this about the written English language, I think your reply is a bit off topic. Perhaps we could say that the Japanese phonetic system is a little cleaner since it was adapted from primarily one source, Chinese, and was taught in order to pass on Buddhist texts written in Chinese. Japanese also existed for several centuries without a written form of any kind, such that when it was given a written system, it was more uniformly phonetic and lacked the varied sources of spellings that gives English its unique character.
Considering this article is about the push for simplification of the English written language, it seems we should place the focus on the Japanese writing system, which did the almost exact opposite of simplification; they made it more complex. They derived two simple character sets from Chinese writing, each with the same phonetic sounds but a different appearance: hiragana (used for spelling out Japanese words and particles) and katakana (used for spelling out foreign words or sounds). In addition, the Japanese also adapted several thousand Chinese characters, referred to as kanji. So the way they differentiate between homonyms in written system is they will be written with different kanji characters despite sounding the same.
As such, I don't think we can really establish a similarity with Japanese; in order to do what they did, we would have to create a whole new set of characters to match the latin alphabet, as well as make use of several thousand more characters. ^_^ I guess we could take some from the Korean alphabet, which was meant to combine the beauty of Chinese characters with the simplicity of Latin ones, but that's another story. ^_^
I couldn't get it to work; maybe somebody else can. Seems a bit iffy about card detection; it kept thinking my nVidia Geforce 6600GT was an ATI Radeon 9600.
Also, I think somebody needs to have a little talk with them about what "open source" means. Unless Bush and Evanescence are really big fans of their work, I don't think they have permission to be including their songs along with their tech demos...
It certainly has more capital letters 'n dots. I wonder what kind of nonsensical acryonym that will make up? Like First Encounter Assault Recon: you find it, you shoot it, then you look at what you shot.
On second thought, that's a pretty good description of FEAR. ^_^
It should be noted that what Rare did was send the game off to manufacturing AND start the certification process simultaneously.
According to the article, they passed, so it's not a big deal.
All this article is saying is that if it hadn't passed certification, they would have just thrown out all the "bad" copies of the game and missed the launch date.
That is quite true; there's no guarantee they will spend too much effort on producing an emulator, nor ensuring the games they say are compatible are really compatible.
They do have one thing going for them that most emulator authors do not; they have pretty much full access to the hardware they are attempting to emulate. Whereas most emulator authors have to go through at least some reverse engineering to figure out how a particular architecture functions, Microsoft should already know everything there is to know about the XBox.
Although, maybe I'm just blinded by the hope of running emulation enhanced Halo 2 with none of the texture pop-in...^_^
While I do appreciate your point of view and you make a very valid point for how this sort of partial compatibility could be very frustrating to the consumer, please don't take it out on our dear friend emulation.
Emulation doesn't suck; what about MAME and ZSNES? In fact, emulation is a great way to ensure near perfect ports of the games, as long as you have the processing power to do so. Moreover, if you have the spare processing power, you can use it to make the games nicer, such as the various stretching / smoothing routines available in ZSNES; your old games actually look better emulated.
The problem seems to come from the difficult to emulate GPU, not emulation itself. As such, it sounds like what Microsoft might be doing is some ad hoc driver system, where each game has a specific driver that handles the GPU calls in such a way as to work for a particular game. Either that or they are actually going to try and emulate the GPU instructions on a piecemeal basis, fixing the most common first, and then releasing version patches over XBox live while enabling games that are "friendly" (IE, emulate well, using the article's vernacular) under the successive versions.
This former does sound kind of flakey, but the latter sounds like a true emulator. Most emulators go through this kind of compatibility shakedown phase since certain instructions are used a lot, whereas other instructions are used much more rarely. The upside is that if they do this, it's possible it will eventually emulate all XBox games, possibly with some graphics enhancing options. I guess only time will tell how well their backwards compatibility really works out.
The truth to what, life? Neither religion nor science has satisfactorily answered that question.
Both science and religion claim to be the truth, but they're answering different questions. Science tries to answer the how of things, and religion tries to answer the why. Neither really answers the other's questions effectively.
I think the only reason some people have difficulty reconciling religion and science is that they naively think that either is capable of answering all the questions, of coming up with a "truth", as you put it, for everything.
Well, probably because they don't appear to be a company, just a loose coalition of individuals working really hard. It seems to me that the smart thing to do would be for the leader to establish a company, handle all the paperwork and get a tax license, and then approach Square-Enix as a business.
I'm not sure how much licenses usually cost, but it seems to me that since they weren't expecting to make any money on it in the first place, perhaps they could work out some ridiculous deal with Squeenix to let them continue. Perhaps selling the game at a bargain price of between $5-$20, with 80-90% of it going directly to Squeenix for the permission to use the license. If that wouldn't fly, perhaps they could sell off "beta" accounts in a similar fashion, and try to raise enough to pay the licensing fees. I'd also like to think that it wouldn't create any "artistic concerns" with Squeenix, since they're not really altering the game in any huge way, just making it prettier. This is much like what Konami let Silicon Knights do with Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes.
Perhaps I'm just too much of a wishful thinker, but I'd hate to see all this work go to waste...
I'm not sure where your "understanding" comes from, nor why this is modded "Insightful", but I suggest you read Dogs and Demons to get a more complete understanding of Japan's situation. It was assigned reading for a n English class I took in Japan, assigned by a native Japanese teacher. While you won't benefit from my teacher's ability to fill in holes with other tragic incidents inflicted upon the area of Japan he calls home, I believe it provides a cursory understanding of some of the problems that plague Japan's bureaucratic system.
One of the main points of the book is the absolutely disgusting interaction of Japan's goverment and corporations. Try googling "amakudari" (lit. "descent from heaven"), and see if you still feel the same way.
Yeah, Soul Calibur 1 & 2 both had a form of parrying. It's official name is Guard Impact, and it has the distinction of being able to direct which way you stagger your opponent.
In terms of 2D games, SNK's The Last Blade 1 & 2 ("Deflect"), Samurai Shodown IV (Weapon Flipping Technique), and Garou: Mark of the Wolves (Just Defense)all had some form of parrying. SNK rules!
Unforunately, this ailment isn't simply limited to nVidia or Toshiba; I got a Dell SmartStep 200N with an ATI Radeon Mobility about 2 years ago, and they have yet to produce an update.
I'm becoming of the opinion that a laptop gaming isn't worth it. I've had an experience much like mrluisp stated; it was great when I first got it, and held up for a few months, but lacking driver updates and upgradeability, I was left out in the cold. Now that everything depends on pixel shaders and I can't upgrade the graphics card in it, the only gaming I get out of it is emulation and looking for 2+ year old PC titles.
If you really have your heart set on mobile gaming, you can go ahead and try, but I would seriously consider dishing out the extra money for one with an upgradeable graphics card. Otherwise, your hot new laptop is going to be next to worthless in about 6 months for playing the latest games.
Well, you could just follow the link to the site and find out yourself, but since you're too lazy, and apparently not up on the open source scene, here you go:
Blender was originally a freeware 3D rendering program developed by NaN software, capable of modeling, animation, and even had a built in game engine. NaN fell on hard financial times and had to be shut down. Not wanting to see it go to waste, NaN release it under the GPL license for a payment of 100,000 (generated by an online fundraiser), where it has enjoyed a new life as an open source project.
I'm a little disappointed they only list "Neo Geo 2-slot" in the games section, but it still looks spiffy for all those Californians out there. Lots of classic fun, to be sure. Sinistar, anyone?
I'm just wondering what kind of Neo Geo games they will have. The right selection of Neo Geo games, and I'd fly to California (from Hawaii) solely for that. Mmm, Blazing Star, Metal Slug, and Samurai Shodown....
True; my Dell SmartStep 200 runs out in just over 2 hours. Manages to get through most DVD movies that way, but I tend to use it more for gaming on the go than movie watching.
Doesn't last too long in hibernate, either. When I went to Thailand last winter, I accidentally put it into my case in hibernate. About 12 hours later, I'm sitting in the Taipei airport on a cold winter's day, hoping to use it to warm my lap. Imagine my chagrin when the battery is already dead, and my next flight 4 hours away...
How dare you sully the sacred art of cosplay? Now all those overweight, middle-aged men dressed up as Sailor Moon and the Tron guy will feel all embarrassed and stuff.
I appreciate that they are trying to take into account the "Wal-Mart" class of games by including various hunting titles, but for real PC gamers, who would care whether these run or not? In fact, I almost consider it a bonus that these games don't run...
To be honest, I wish they would've done a little more testing of older and newer titles, across all platforms. It doesn't mean a whole lot if you're testing different stuff on different hardware/OS configurations. Actually, I wish they'd just tested more games, old or new. Pardon me, but I don't think ~4 demos is a comprehensive nor accurate test of how well Cedega performs.
Thanks for your post; that is quite an interesting idea that would've never come to my mind. Such implications could really change the way cars are built, and possibly lead to some of the benefits the article mentions.
Although, as most posters have pointed out, the possible abuse availible by these is quite large, I'm also kind of intrigued as to how they would function. It seems like they're just a new tool/fastener combo that no longer requires quite so much strength to operate; just a press a button and the come off. It could also make servicing much more interesting, as you could unbolt multiple parts at a time with a few button presses and just lift them off. Sounds pretty cool to me!
Slashdot Mirror
Sakaguchi was personally involved in designing the first 6 Final Fantasy titles, and served as executive producer over a large portion of Square's PSX titles. If Microsoft was going to bet on somebody to save their system, it's hard to imagine a guy better than him.
However, I agree with you that Microsoft counting on only this to save their system is a really stupid idea. Whatsmore, the Final Fantasy games generally lose to the Dragon Quest / Dragon Warrior ones in Japan. Microsoft needs to start listening to what their customers actually want instead of telling them what they should want.
The main point of the article seems to be that a mascot is iconic; it typifies the basic attributes of the company as well. For example, when seeing (Genesis era) Sonic, you supposedly see (Genesis era) Sega and the similar qualities; fast, cool, and somewhat rebelious. During the heyday of Sonic, the primary people playing video games were adolescent males, and they were marketed as such, and thus Sonic was successful. However, nowadays the console market has expanded considerably to the point that trying to identify several select characters with your system is counterproductive; you want to be everything to everyone.
Now everyone plays video games: jocks, nerds, boys, girls, even seniors. As such, you cannot market a console successfully under one image. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft realize this and it's evident in their commercials; they focus on the on the game not the console, until at the very end the company's icon pops up. They want you to identify the type of game you like with the console, not the characters.
When you mention that Japanese interpret it "by context", it seems to me you are referring to homonyms used in conversation, which is in no way unique to the Japanese language; we do the same in English, and I imagine this occurs in almost every language. No offense meant, but since this about the written English language, I think your reply is a bit off topic. Perhaps we could say that the Japanese phonetic system is a little cleaner since it was adapted from primarily one source, Chinese, and was taught in order to pass on Buddhist texts written in Chinese. Japanese also existed for several centuries without a written form of any kind, such that when it was given a written system, it was more uniformly phonetic and lacked the varied sources of spellings that gives English its unique character.
Considering this article is about the push for simplification of the English written language, it seems we should place the focus on the Japanese writing system, which did the almost exact opposite of simplification; they made it more complex. They derived two simple character sets from Chinese writing, each with the same phonetic sounds but a different appearance: hiragana (used for spelling out Japanese words and particles) and katakana (used for spelling out foreign words or sounds). In addition, the Japanese also adapted several thousand Chinese characters, referred to as kanji. So the way they differentiate between homonyms in written system is they will be written with different kanji characters despite sounding the same.
As such, I don't think we can really establish a similarity with Japanese; in order to do what they did, we would have to create a whole new set of characters to match the latin alphabet, as well as make use of several thousand more characters. ^_^ I guess we could take some from the Korean alphabet, which was meant to combine the beauty of Chinese characters with the simplicity of Latin ones, but that's another story. ^_^
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=82471
I couldn't get it to work; maybe somebody else can. Seems a bit iffy about card detection; it kept thinking my nVidia Geforce 6600GT was an ATI Radeon 9600.
Also, I think somebody needs to have a little talk with them about what "open source" means. Unless Bush and Evanescence are really big fans of their work, I don't think they have permission to be including their songs along with their tech demos...
It certainly has more capital letters 'n dots. I wonder what kind of nonsensical acryonym that will make up? Like First Encounter Assault Recon: you find it, you shoot it, then you look at what you shot.
On second thought, that's a pretty good description of FEAR. ^_^
It should be noted that what Rare did was send the game off to manufacturing AND start the certification process simultaneously.
According to the article, they passed, so it's not a big deal.
All this article is saying is that if it hadn't passed certification, they would have just thrown out all the "bad" copies of the game and missed the launch date.
That is quite true; there's no guarantee they will spend too much effort on producing an emulator, nor ensuring the games they say are compatible are really compatible.
They do have one thing going for them that most emulator authors do not; they have pretty much full access to the hardware they are attempting to emulate. Whereas most emulator authors have to go through at least some reverse engineering to figure out how a particular architecture functions, Microsoft should already know everything there is to know about the XBox.
Although, maybe I'm just blinded by the hope of running emulation enhanced Halo 2 with none of the texture pop-in...^_^
While I do appreciate your point of view and you make a very valid point for how this sort of partial compatibility could be very frustrating to the consumer, please don't take it out on our dear friend emulation.
Emulation doesn't suck; what about MAME and ZSNES? In fact, emulation is a great way to ensure near perfect ports of the games, as long as you have the processing power to do so. Moreover, if you have the spare processing power, you can use it to make the games nicer, such as the various stretching / smoothing routines available in ZSNES; your old games actually look better emulated.
The problem seems to come from the difficult to emulate GPU, not emulation itself. As such, it sounds like what Microsoft might be doing is some ad hoc driver system, where each game has a specific driver that handles the GPU calls in such a way as to work for a particular game. Either that or they are actually going to try and emulate the GPU instructions on a piecemeal basis, fixing the most common first, and then releasing version patches over XBox live while enabling games that are "friendly" (IE, emulate well, using the article's vernacular) under the successive versions.
This former does sound kind of flakey, but the latter sounds like a true emulator. Most emulators go through this kind of compatibility shakedown phase since certain instructions are used a lot, whereas other instructions are used much more rarely. The upside is that if they do this, it's possible it will eventually emulate all XBox games, possibly with some graphics enhancing options. I guess only time will tell how well their backwards compatibility really works out.
pwn'd!
/corpsehump
w00t, w00t~!
The truth to what, life? Neither religion nor science has satisfactorily answered that question.
Both science and religion claim to be the truth, but they're answering different questions. Science tries to answer the how of things, and religion tries to answer the why. Neither really answers the other's questions effectively.
I think the only reason some people have difficulty reconciling religion and science is that they naively think that either is capable of answering all the questions, of coming up with a "truth", as you put it, for everything.
Well, probably because they don't appear to be a company, just a loose coalition of individuals working really hard. It seems to me that the smart thing to do would be for the leader to establish a company, handle all the paperwork and get a tax license, and then approach Square-Enix as a business.
I'm not sure how much licenses usually cost, but it seems to me that since they weren't expecting to make any money on it in the first place, perhaps they could work out some ridiculous deal with Squeenix to let them continue. Perhaps selling the game at a bargain price of between $5-$20, with 80-90% of it going directly to Squeenix for the permission to use the license. If that wouldn't fly, perhaps they could sell off "beta" accounts in a similar fashion, and try to raise enough to pay the licensing fees. I'd also like to think that it wouldn't create any "artistic concerns" with Squeenix, since they're not really altering the game in any huge way, just making it prettier. This is much like what Konami let Silicon Knights do with Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes.
Perhaps I'm just too much of a wishful thinker, but I'd hate to see all this work go to waste...
Don't forget the infamous program included with Windows NT4; "Wang Imaging".
That always cracks me up.
I'm not sure where your "understanding" comes from, nor why this is modded "Insightful", but I suggest you read Dogs and Demons to get a more complete understanding of Japan's situation. It was assigned reading for a n English class I took in Japan, assigned by a native Japanese teacher. While you won't benefit from my teacher's ability to fill in holes with other tragic incidents inflicted upon the area of Japan he calls home, I believe it provides a cursory understanding of some of the problems that plague Japan's bureaucratic system.
One of the main points of the book is the absolutely disgusting interaction of Japan's goverment and corporations. Try googling "amakudari" (lit. "descent from heaven"), and see if you still feel the same way.
Let us hop up and down in joy!
Yeah, Soul Calibur 1 & 2 both had a form of parrying. It's official name is Guard Impact, and it has the distinction of being able to direct which way you stagger your opponent.
In terms of 2D games, SNK's The Last Blade 1 & 2 ("Deflect"), Samurai Shodown IV (Weapon Flipping Technique), and Garou: Mark of the Wolves (Just Defense)all had some form of parrying. SNK rules!
Unforunately, this ailment isn't simply limited to nVidia or Toshiba; I got a Dell SmartStep 200N with an ATI Radeon Mobility about 2 years ago, and they have yet to produce an update.
I'm becoming of the opinion that a laptop gaming isn't worth it. I've had an experience much like mrluisp stated; it was great when I first got it, and held up for a few months, but lacking driver updates and upgradeability, I was left out in the cold. Now that everything depends on pixel shaders and I can't upgrade the graphics card in it, the only gaming I get out of it is emulation and looking for 2+ year old PC titles.
If you really have your heart set on mobile gaming, you can go ahead and try, but I would seriously consider dishing out the extra money for one with an upgradeable graphics card. Otherwise, your hot new laptop is going to be next to worthless in about 6 months for playing the latest games.
Well, you could just follow the link to the site and find out yourself, but since you're too lazy, and apparently not up on the open source scene, here you go:
Blender was originally a freeware 3D rendering program developed by NaN software, capable of modeling, animation, and even had a built in game engine. NaN fell on hard financial times and had to be shut down. Not wanting to see it go to waste, NaN release it under the GPL license for a payment of 100,000 (generated by an online fundraiser), where it has enjoyed a new life as an open source project.
I'm a little disappointed they only list "Neo Geo 2-slot" in the games section, but it still looks spiffy for all those Californians out there. Lots of classic fun, to be sure. Sinistar, anyone?
I'm just wondering what kind of Neo Geo games they will have. The right selection of Neo Geo games, and I'd fly to California (from Hawaii) solely for that. Mmm, Blazing Star, Metal Slug, and Samurai Shodown....
If you run Slackware 0.01, then you need to do this.
I'm sorry, but if you're running Slackware 0.01, what you need to do is upgrade. ^_^
Yeah, it was only on the PSX, since the "arcade" and "Saturn" don't count as real video game platforms anymore.
Poor, poor Saturn; such a good, yet often maligned, system.
Fortunately for myself, I don't live in Austin. ^_^
True; my Dell SmartStep 200 runs out in just over 2 hours. Manages to get through most DVD movies that way, but I tend to use it more for gaming on the go than movie watching.
Doesn't last too long in hibernate, either. When I went to Thailand last winter, I accidentally put it into my case in hibernate. About 12 hours later, I'm sitting in the Taipei airport on a cold winter's day, hoping to use it to warm my lap. Imagine my chagrin when the battery is already dead, and my next flight 4 hours away...
How dare you sully the sacred art of cosplay? Now all those overweight, middle-aged men dressed up as Sailor Moon and the Tron guy will feel all embarrassed and stuff.
I appreciate that they are trying to take into account the "Wal-Mart" class of games by including various hunting titles, but for real PC gamers, who would care whether these run or not? In fact, I almost consider it a bonus that these games don't run...
To be honest, I wish they would've done a little more testing of older and newer titles, across all platforms. It doesn't mean a whole lot if you're testing different stuff on different hardware/OS configurations. Actually, I wish they'd just tested more games, old or new. Pardon me, but I don't think ~4 demos is a comprehensive nor accurate test of how well Cedega performs.
Thanks for your post; that is quite an interesting idea that would've never come to my mind. Such implications could really change the way cars are built, and possibly lead to some of the benefits the article mentions.
Although, as most posters have pointed out, the possible abuse availible by these is quite large, I'm also kind of intrigued as to how they would function. It seems like they're just a new tool/fastener combo that no longer requires quite so much strength to operate; just a press a button and the come off. It could also make servicing much more interesting, as you could unbolt multiple parts at a time with a few button presses and just lift them off. Sounds pretty cool to me!