2 out of 5, I'd say. Adding lots of configuration menus and control options is extra work....
The thing is that they had to have tried different control schemes when they were playtesting the game themselves. So it shouldn't be that difficult to put some simple gui on top of what they already were doing. Not doing that is just plain lazy.
Another example that got me to hate a probably good game was Bioshock. You could remap the controls, but the key I usually use for reload was permanently reserved for bringing the menu up. So half the time while I was going through the first stage I would get done with shooting things and bring the menu up to break up the game. Very irritating and really silly for them to have done something like that.
Games that use the unreal engine have had some major control problems. In Batman: Arkham Asylum it had the forward back controls reversed for a standard usb dual axis controller (logitech in this case). The only way to get a controller to work correctly, and this is true of quite a lot of console ports, is to get a xbox 360 controller or an emulator to fool the game that you are using one.
Also, one would think the developers changed controls during playtesting, so why is it so hard to change the controls in some pc ports of games. This is the first thing that should be in a game, the ability to change the controls. I don't care if you think I should play a game using controls X, I want to use controls Y.
when you introduce a new and improved model every freaking year with little effort to back it up with software people start to loose interest, add on to the fact this thing is more or less what you already own but with a monstrous price tag and a half broken gimmick no one should really be surprised.
This isn't a new model, it is a new system. That is like comparing the playstation to the playstation 2. The guts of this one are much better, along with both an analog joystick and bigger main screen (along with 3d ability) make the new games capable of a lot more. It should also be noted that the app store for this one is much better, and there are already some good things like netflix available.
I agree though that the previous xl/mini/different design releases of the normal ds and even the dsi are definitely not worth getting.
I have a feeling that the 3ds will gain a lot more support this fall/winter when all of the first party 3ds games start coming out. Half the reason I got one was because of the new kid icarus along with the new paper mario. The fact that it also can do netflix and browse the web now (couldn't until a recent update happened) should also help sales. I guess I'm glad I'll be getting a bunch of free games from their store which is nice, I just hope that it gets more popularity later this year.
Come over to Europe. We need good coders and we treat them well. Our programmers arrive somewhere between 8 and 10am and go between 3 and 5pm. Mo-Fr. Occasionally (read: about twice a year) they might be asked whether it would be possible that someone could come in a Saturday for a launch so we can make sure everything's running smoothly. You get 1.5 hours of time off for every hour invested in such Saturday.
The work permit should be trivial if you're good.
This is actually something I'm working on. I'm a dual citizen (US/UK) and getting my UK passport soon just so I can more easily do this. I just need to work out if I want it to be more of a permanent move. Things like this along with the better health care systems over there are very enticing.
3. And the public profile has what information ? your name and gender - as if it's not already publicly available?
GP might have difficulty determining the latter.
In G+ the gender is going to become available to be private if you wish, like everything in your g+ profile other than ones name. It very plainly says this when you are editing your profile. I find this much easier to configure than the multi-page fun of privacy settings that is facebook.
I believe there is already a plugin for chrome (maybe firefox also) that can get twitter and facebook showing up in your stream in google+. I would post links but I just remember seeing posts in google+ from friends that were using said plugins.
I got an invite into Google+, was on for a very short time (around 10 minutes I would guess), in which I already had several people "pre-add" me to their lists - for a brand new account (so how exactly have these relationships been formed, or is this some Buzz "feature" where certain people are automatically just linked to my Google+ account?)
Those people added your email address to one of their circles. The moment you signed on that was converted to your Google+ account.
Think of it something of a mixup between twitter and facebook. You can add whomever you want to your own circles, but you can choose to share with any partial part of that list. Also people can choose to only listen to you if they want. There is also a nice flow chart of how the communication works in google+ and would link it but can't really do that from my current connection to the web.
Yes, my friend got one of those invites from someone already "in", but Google told her that it was full when she tried to claim the invite and set up an account.
Keep trying to get in. They are letting people in still, just a little at a time. I can also understand why they are doing it since the want to make sure things are good this time, before everyone is jumping in.
I second that. Also the clever marketing ploy where google plus tells me they've got no further capacity right now... Check back later....
The reason they are doing this is because of previous problems with letting everyone in at the beginning. They messed things up with Buzz when they did that. I think it is a good idea so that a lot of the kinks and small annoyances get worked out.
Are there really only four circles? Can you not make new ones? That seems quite limiting.
The preview videos showed multiple circles. One of the videos even showed creating a circle. I am guessing that the four listed are the ones you start with.
They are expensive. The vast majority of IT shops do not have test environments because of the cost.
I would argue this is a case of high short term cost as compared to high long term cost. Not having a test environment will usually end up with a higher long term cost because of hacks/fixes/upgrades that wouldn't be needed and easier to do if found in test.
It uses your Google Voice number. You can even receive calls. In the Voice settings page, Google Chat is listed as a linked phone so you can configure it like any other. It even works with third party chat clients that support XMPP voice calls like Pidgin.
Oh neat, I had no idea. Thanks for the information.
Google Voice is VoIP when initiated on your computer via Gmail, and is still free up through the end of this year at least. On a (typical) mobile phone you're right, it's merely a call negotiator, not a VoIP service.
You are thinking of the Google talk with ability to make calls. This is different from google voice, or at least I thought so. I guess they could be the same back end but I always put them in two different categories since they were on two different sites. From google voice you can call anyone for free (within the US at least), you just have it connect to one of the phones you have it linked to and then the target phone. I think that a lot of people currently confuse google voice (previously grand central) with google talk now that talk has the phone landline ability.
Then you're missing out. IMHO, the real special thing about SC2 has been the online multiplayer (both coop and vs random internet folks). The single player game was fun and all, but only barely worth the price of admission, but when you look internet play alone I'm down to under a buck an hour of fantastically fun game play. Getting together with friends online, joining with them to play some good 3v3's, 4v4's, etc is where it's at. Simply waiting until the game is on sale means you're waiting for everyone to get bored and move on to another game before you get all excited about it yourself. Totally not worth it for a online multiplayer game.
A games social value is very time specific and by waiting you're missing out.
d
Very true, but I'm sure there will be quite a bit of people, myself included, that will get on to play these games for the first time when the bundle happens. I am a fan of Protoss and want to play when the stand alone for it comes out. I also know that the majority of people I game with do the same for these pricey games. So everyone I know will be playing when the bundle happens. So the multiplayer, at the moment, has no appeal to me. It will have appeal to me when people I know jump in.
It's a really good idea to spread out the Engineering curriculum over 5-6 years. I only got an AA my first time through college before realizing I had no idea what I wanted to do in life, and joined the Air Force. Four years of grunt work later taught me the value of getting a worthwhile degree, and since all my general education requirements were out of the way (did all that English and Social Science crap the first time) - I was able to focus entirely on working my way up through the math and science classes.
There were a LOT of smart kids I met along the way who could have made it through a 5-6 year program and been great Engineers, they just burnt out on the heavy courseload and decided it wasn't worth the headache when people majoring in business were binge drinking every night and acing their classes just by showing up.
I don't know about you but where I went (GaTech) most all of the engineering degrees, which I include Comp. Sci in, took 5-6 years to get through. Especially if you did co-op (work one semester, school one semester). Actually I think in general that co-op programs are especially good for undergrads wanting to work in their field after getting a bachelor's degree.
Eh, my CS program actually included a lot of discrete math, graph theory, algorithm complexity, and even a little number theory. There was a lot of crap in there too, but it was no job training degree.. In fact, the complaint I heard most often is that all this theory wasn't going to do us any good in the "real" world.
This was what I felt too from my CS degree. Any college that has CS programs that focus classes on particular languages rather than on the core concepts is just a computer programming degree rather than Computer Science. I think part of the problem is that there are quite a lot of IT jobs and not many Computer Science jobs. An IT job can be done by someone without a degree or someone with one. The Computer Science jobs let you actually use the more complex parts of the field. Finding one of the latter jobs, though, can be impossible in some areas of the country and difficult otherwise.
He must have lived in a parallel universe. In the 90s it was IRC.
It probably depends what country and what age you were. In the 90s for teenagers in Britain, it was ICQ, then MSN Messenger (released 1999), with the latter being much more popular. "What's your email?" meant "What's your MSN messenger ID?". I visited some distant teenage relatives in the USA several times around this time, and remember being as surprised that they didn't know what MSN Messenger was as they were that I didn't have AIM.
ICQ was definitely what I used for ages until too many people had AIM only. At that point I finally switched over to AIM. MSN messenger was always the one I never had. I think there were a few features that it didn't have. For that matter, ICQ had a lot of features that didn't make it into AIM until at least 10 years later, which was always annoying. I do agree that I used IRC a lot before/while I used ICQ. It seems the non-technical/geeks went to AIM first and completely skipped ICQ.
The real Netflix fix, instead of streaming the movie within the tight constraints and impaired quality necessary to prevent buffering, would be for me to order up the movie I wanted that morning like I order up DVD's from them, have them remove a previous movie to make room for the new one, and then d/l it over the day. By the time I'm home in the evening, even a slow DSL line could have a true DVD-level copy available for watching without interruption. The next morning I order another movie or two and the old ones are deleted as part of the new ones arriving. Seriously, this would be such an improvement over the existing system and the expense of mailing much better quality DVDs could go away entirely.
Maybe for DVDs, but they also do blu-ray discs. For slower connections those would still be easier to just get the discs. There are also probably a decent number of people that only have internet on very slow connections or through the phone and so still will want discs. Also, a big reason that not everything is streaming is because of the content owner's not wanting it to be. So there will always be certain things that are only available via disc form. I have my doubts the discs will ever go away because of these among other reasons.
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2 out of 5, I'd say. Adding lots of configuration menus and control options is extra work....
The thing is that they had to have tried different control schemes when they were playtesting the game themselves. So it shouldn't be that difficult to put some simple gui on top of what they already were doing. Not doing that is just plain lazy.
Feel free to provide more examples.
Another example that got me to hate a probably good game was Bioshock. You could remap the controls, but the key I usually use for reload was permanently reserved for bringing the menu up. So half the time while I was going through the first stage I would get done with shooting things and bring the menu up to break up the game. Very irritating and really silly for them to have done something like that.
Feel free to provide more examples.
Games that use the unreal engine have had some major control problems. In Batman: Arkham Asylum it had the forward back controls reversed for a standard usb dual axis controller (logitech in this case). The only way to get a controller to work correctly, and this is true of quite a lot of console ports, is to get a xbox 360 controller or an emulator to fool the game that you are using one.
Also, one would think the developers changed controls during playtesting, so why is it so hard to change the controls in some pc ports of games. This is the first thing that should be in a game, the ability to change the controls. I don't care if you think I should play a game using controls X, I want to use controls Y.
Can't you do that with Steam anyway, without the always-on bullshit?
Indeed, though all of Blizzard is absent from steam so it is not possible to play this game on steam in offline mode....
when you introduce a new and improved model every freaking year with little effort to back it up with software people start to loose interest, add on to the fact this thing is more or less what you already own but with a monstrous price tag and a half broken gimmick no one should really be surprised.
This isn't a new model, it is a new system. That is like comparing the playstation to the playstation 2. The guts of this one are much better, along with both an analog joystick and bigger main screen (along with 3d ability) make the new games capable of a lot more. It should also be noted that the app store for this one is much better, and there are already some good things like netflix available. I agree though that the previous xl/mini/different design releases of the normal ds and even the dsi are definitely not worth getting.
Oh, sorry about that, yes I agree that the full list of the 20 games that will be given would be nice.
Even the ars tecnica article doesn't have the fulls list of games, it just lists a few from each list. Anyone know what they are?
Here is a decent list from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3DS_games
Opera on the Wii and the Nintendo DSi is actually pretty decent, I don't know why Nintendo switched to NetFront for the 3DS.
Is NetFront any good, compared to Opera?
Seems to be decent, though I can't say that I've tried Opera on the other Nintendo devices.
I have a feeling that the 3ds will gain a lot more support this fall/winter when all of the first party 3ds games start coming out. Half the reason I got one was because of the new kid icarus along with the new paper mario. The fact that it also can do netflix and browse the web now (couldn't until a recent update happened) should also help sales. I guess I'm glad I'll be getting a bunch of free games from their store which is nice, I just hope that it gets more popularity later this year.
Come over to Europe. We need good coders and we treat them well. Our programmers arrive somewhere between 8 and 10am and go between 3 and 5pm. Mo-Fr. Occasionally (read: about twice a year) they might be asked whether it would be possible that someone could come in a Saturday for a launch so we can make sure everything's running smoothly. You get 1.5 hours of time off for every hour invested in such Saturday.
The work permit should be trivial if you're good.
This is actually something I'm working on. I'm a dual citizen (US/UK) and getting my UK passport soon just so I can more easily do this. I just need to work out if I want it to be more of a permanent move. Things like this along with the better health care systems over there are very enticing.
3. And the public profile has what information ? your name and gender - as if it's not already publicly available?
GP might have difficulty determining the latter.
In G+ the gender is going to become available to be private if you wish, like everything in your g+ profile other than ones name. It very plainly says this when you are editing your profile. I find this much easier to configure than the multi-page fun of privacy settings that is facebook.
I believe there is already a plugin for chrome (maybe firefox also) that can get twitter and facebook showing up in your stream in google+. I would post links but I just remember seeing posts in google+ from friends that were using said plugins.
I got an invite into Google+, was on for a very short time (around 10 minutes I would guess), in which I already had several people "pre-add" me to their lists - for a brand new account (so how exactly have these relationships been formed, or is this some Buzz "feature" where certain people are automatically just linked to my Google+ account?)
Those people added your email address to one of their circles. The moment you signed on that was converted to your Google+ account.
Think of it something of a mixup between twitter and facebook. You can add whomever you want to your own circles, but you can choose to share with any partial part of that list. Also people can choose to only listen to you if they want. There is also a nice flow chart of how the communication works in google+ and would link it but can't really do that from my current connection to the web.
Yes, my friend got one of those invites from someone already "in", but Google told her that it was full when she tried to claim the invite and set up an account.
Keep trying to get in. They are letting people in still, just a little at a time. I can also understand why they are doing it since the want to make sure things are good this time, before everyone is jumping in.
I second that. Also the clever marketing ploy where google plus tells me they've got no further capacity right now... Check back later....
The reason they are doing this is because of previous problems with letting everyone in at the beginning. They messed things up with Buzz when they did that. I think it is a good idea so that a lot of the kinks and small annoyances get worked out.
Seems strange that they only have an icon for China showing up for this article when it clearly has to do with Japan too.
Are there really only four circles? Can you not make new ones? That seems quite limiting.
The preview videos showed multiple circles. One of the videos even showed creating a circle. I am guessing that the four listed are the ones you start with.
They are expensive. The vast majority of IT shops do not have test environments because of the cost.
I would argue this is a case of high short term cost as compared to high long term cost. Not having a test environment will usually end up with a higher long term cost because of hacks/fixes/upgrades that wouldn't be needed and easier to do if found in test.
It uses your Google Voice number. You can even receive calls. In the Voice settings page, Google Chat is listed as a linked phone so you can configure it like any other. It even works with third party chat clients that support XMPP voice calls like Pidgin.
Oh neat, I had no idea. Thanks for the information.
Google Voice is VoIP when initiated on your computer via Gmail, and is still free up through the end of this year at least. On a (typical) mobile phone you're right, it's merely a call negotiator, not a VoIP service.
You are thinking of the Google talk with ability to make calls. This is different from google voice, or at least I thought so. I guess they could be the same back end but I always put them in two different categories since they were on two different sites. From google voice you can call anyone for free (within the US at least), you just have it connect to one of the phones you have it linked to and then the target phone. I think that a lot of people currently confuse google voice (previously grand central) with google talk now that talk has the phone landline ability.
Then you're missing out. IMHO, the real special thing about SC2 has been the online multiplayer (both coop and vs random internet folks). The single player game was fun and all, but only barely worth the price of admission, but when you look internet play alone I'm down to under a buck an hour of fantastically fun game play. Getting together with friends online, joining with them to play some good 3v3's, 4v4's, etc is where it's at. Simply waiting until the game is on sale means you're waiting for everyone to get bored and move on to another game before you get all excited about it yourself. Totally not worth it for a online multiplayer game.
A games social value is very time specific and by waiting you're missing out.
d
Very true, but I'm sure there will be quite a bit of people, myself included, that will get on to play these games for the first time when the bundle happens. I am a fan of Protoss and want to play when the stand alone for it comes out. I also know that the majority of people I game with do the same for these pricey games. So everyone I know will be playing when the bundle happens. So the multiplayer, at the moment, has no appeal to me. It will have appeal to me when people I know jump in.
It's a really good idea to spread out the Engineering curriculum over 5-6 years. I only got an AA my first time through college before realizing I had no idea what I wanted to do in life, and joined the Air Force. Four years of grunt work later taught me the value of getting a worthwhile degree, and since all my general education requirements were out of the way (did all that English and Social Science crap the first time) - I was able to focus entirely on working my way up through the math and science classes.
There were a LOT of smart kids I met along the way who could have made it through a 5-6 year program and been great Engineers, they just burnt out on the heavy courseload and decided it wasn't worth the headache when people majoring in business were binge drinking every night and acing their classes just by showing up.
I don't know about you but where I went (GaTech) most all of the engineering degrees, which I include Comp. Sci in, took 5-6 years to get through. Especially if you did co-op (work one semester, school one semester). Actually I think in general that co-op programs are especially good for undergrads wanting to work in their field after getting a bachelor's degree.
Eh, my CS program actually included a lot of discrete math, graph theory, algorithm complexity, and even a little number theory. There was a lot of crap in there too, but it was no job training degree.. In fact, the complaint I heard most often is that all this theory wasn't going to do us any good in the "real" world.
This was what I felt too from my CS degree. Any college that has CS programs that focus classes on particular languages rather than on the core concepts is just a computer programming degree rather than Computer Science. I think part of the problem is that there are quite a lot of IT jobs and not many Computer Science jobs. An IT job can be done by someone without a degree or someone with one. The Computer Science jobs let you actually use the more complex parts of the field. Finding one of the latter jobs, though, can be impossible in some areas of the country and difficult otherwise.
He must have lived in a parallel universe. In the 90s it was IRC.
It probably depends what country and what age you were. In the 90s for teenagers in Britain, it was ICQ, then MSN Messenger (released 1999), with the latter being much more popular. "What's your email?" meant "What's your MSN messenger ID?". I visited some distant teenage relatives in the USA several times around this time, and remember being as surprised that they didn't know what MSN Messenger was as they were that I didn't have AIM.
ICQ was definitely what I used for ages until too many people had AIM only. At that point I finally switched over to AIM. MSN messenger was always the one I never had. I think there were a few features that it didn't have. For that matter, ICQ had a lot of features that didn't make it into AIM until at least 10 years later, which was always annoying. I do agree that I used IRC a lot before/while I used ICQ. It seems the non-technical/geeks went to AIM first and completely skipped ICQ.
The real Netflix fix, instead of streaming the movie within the tight constraints and impaired quality necessary to prevent buffering, would be for me to order up the movie I wanted that morning like I order up DVD's from them, have them remove a previous movie to make room for the new one, and then d/l it over the day. By the time I'm home in the evening, even a slow DSL line could have a true DVD-level copy available for watching without interruption. The next morning I order another movie or two and the old ones are deleted as part of the new ones arriving. Seriously, this would be such an improvement over the existing system and the expense of mailing much better quality DVDs could go away entirely.
Maybe for DVDs, but they also do blu-ray discs. For slower connections those would still be easier to just get the discs. There are also probably a decent number of people that only have internet on very slow connections or through the phone and so still will want discs. Also, a big reason that not everything is streaming is because of the content owner's not wanting it to be. So there will always be certain things that are only available via disc form. I have my doubts the discs will ever go away because of these among other reasons.