Sierra made adventure games, not RPGs. There were plenty of 1980s and 1990s RPGs with guns in them. Some of the Wizardry games. Centauri Alliance. Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday. Wasteland.
A good chunk of that is very probably that most of the games in a given bundle are NEW to Linux. A lot of the games in those bundles have been out on Windows and OS X for a while.
Some of those games I've now got five or six legit licenses for, since they keep showing up in indie bundles, Steam sales bundles, etc. I can't even give the extra copies away because all my friends already have them, too.
My HIB purchases aren' t 'Ooh, let me pay $X for all these games!' They're 'Hey, there's one game in there I want. I'll pay $X for it.'
(My personal beef with bundles? Often the developers don't provide patches for the non-Steam versions of the Windows / OS X releases, so we get stuck with whatever bugs were there at the bundle release.)
EA effectively owns the concepts of 'football' and 'hockey', so no one but EA can make those games. But 2K Sports releases PC versions of their titles.
By the time the NES came out, I had a computer. And I was completely smug about the superiority of the Commodore 64. Zelda, pfft. I had The Bard's Tale and Pool of Radiance!
Never underestimate the sheer number of idiots. I work for a company whose product displays NO AC on the simple LCD screen if it loses electrical power.
Damn near everyone who sees the message and calls support tells me, 'But my air conditioning is working fine!'
The product has nothing to do with climate control, for the record.
I haven't bought a PC game that requires a disc in the drive to play for years. They all have a full install and some form of DRM (often Steam) now.
I probably have about sixty games installed on my PC, and I think one of them needs a disc in the drive to work. And that's Dune 2000, which is a) old as hell, and b) plays the video files off the CD, doesn't install them.
I haven't reinstalled Windows 'to regain lost performance' in years, either. I've never had a problem with it slowing down.
Of course, I only install the things I _need_ on it, to do the things I want to do. Games? Yes, to play them. Video transcoding software? Yes, because I need to work with files. Massive 'Community Codec Packs'? No, because they screw things up.
I just install everything to my hard drive and let a caching SSD figure out which files need speeding up at the moment. It's just easier.
Except not, since Intel SmartResponse doesn't work on the Z79 boards, and SmartResponse is limited to 64 gigs - this Asus board specifically says it'll work with the full capacity of any SSD.
That's a nice concept, but the programs I want to use that would be accelerated by being on an SSD are ten to thirty gigs each.
Installing and uninstalling, or at least installing and then moving to another drive as needed, gets old. Fast.
With a cache accelerator SSD setup, I just install all my games, and play them whenever, without worrying which ones are on the SSD and which ones are on the hard drive.
Is it as fast as just using an SSD? No. It it _almost_ as fast? Yes.
And more importantly, it's much less of a pain in the butt than moving files between drives manually.
(Also, I was able to install a caching SSD without having to do a reinstall of Windows and whatnot. Install drive, install driver, reboot. It's easy to add to an existing system.)
And is it me, or is the Xbox 360 the only one of the current consoles that hasn't lost features along the way? The Wii lost the ability to play MP3 files in a software update (though it was optional and you could refuse it), and the newer Wiis drop backwards compatability. The PS3 dropped Linux on all versions, and the originals could play PS2 games and SuperAudioCDs, which the new ones can't. The Xbox 360 added HDMI, but hasn't removed anything as far as I can tell. (Though their new dashboard SUCKS, it doesn't actually remove anything.) They did release a no-hard-drive model but only after they started letting you use USB sticks instead.
As for the 3DS XL, I don't plan on getting one. I do have a DSi XL that I use for ScummVM and watching movies on, but since the 3DS hasn't been hacked worth a darn yet, I can't use it for homebrew.
However, I do like the 3D effect! It's quite neat, and luckily I'm one of the folks that it doesn't give a headache to.
I'm still on Snow Leopard because I still have some old OSX PowerPC code I need to run.
Does anyone know a way to run PPC OSX code in Lion or Mountain Lion? I have the Sheepshaver emulator which runs PPC stuff, but only OS 9 / Classic, not OS X.
Is there a way to emulate, say, 10.4 in 10.7/10.8?
Because butchers like to package things in fractions of a pound, and a traditional hot dog is ten to a pound.
Bakers, on the other hand, like multiples of fours because they package easily. Eight hot dog buns (in two rows of four) or eight hamburger buns (in two slabs of two-by-two) make for a nice, roughly square package that stacks well on the shelf.
Well, you shouldn't NEED to buy a new car more than every ten years or so. Unless you're getting really crappy cars, or not taking care of them.
I certainly plan to keep my current car at least ten years.
(My car's a 2007 model, and doesn't have Bluetooth anything. I stuck with the base stereo; for some bizarre reason, the nav system upgraded one couldn't play mp3s, but the base one could.)
The burned penis incident you're referring to was in 2002.
It wasn't a third degree burn. According to medical records, the gent had reddened skin and one blister.
'laptops' were transitioning to being called 'notebooks' a full ten years before that.
The Dell 325NC, for instance. NC for Notebook (Color). 1991.
Dell's first portable, as a comparison, had a model number of 316LT. For LapTop.
So yes, I call shenanigans on 'you can't use them on your lap' being the reason laptops started being called notebooks. Notebooks were MUCH smaller and lighter than laptops. Like, well, a notebook. Or a three ring binder, at least.
I call shenanigans. I'm old enough to remember when they stopped calling portables 'laptops' in ads and started calling them 'notebooks'.
The computers advertised as 'notebooks' were much smaller than the older models advertised as 'laptops'.
The older ones WERE big and heavy enough that setting them in your lap was a realistic way to use them. 'Notebooks' are small enough that they don't balance well in the average lap, and calling them a 'thightop' - balanced on one leg - just sounds stupid.
I think the furthest I ever pushed a bicycle was about three miles.
While there did used to be more pay phones, pay phones were only in the business district. They certainly weren't anywhere between my house and my friends' houses.
Sierra made adventure games, not RPGs. There were plenty of 1980s and 1990s RPGs with guns in them. Some of the Wizardry games. Centauri Alliance. Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday. Wasteland.
They made netbooks without fans? All of the ones I've seen have fans. Small ones, and generally pretty quiet. Until the bearings start to wear out.
My Eee 701 had a fan, my Eee 901 has a fan (that's wearing out and moaning like the souls of the damned.)
The only time I got anywhere close to 10 hours of battery life out of my Eees was when I used a huge aftermarket battery that stuck way out.
Three or four hours out of the 701 when it was new, maybe five out of the 901.
Well, you could always hunt down a Thinkpad W700DS. That was a 17" laptop with a second 10" screen that popped out of the side, as a second display.
I bet it was awfully heavy, though.
A good chunk of that is very probably that most of the games in a given bundle are NEW to Linux. A lot of the games in those bundles have been out on Windows and OS X for a while.
Some of those games I've now got five or six legit licenses for, since they keep showing up in indie bundles, Steam sales bundles, etc. I can't even give the extra copies away because all my friends already have them, too.
My HIB purchases aren' t 'Ooh, let me pay $X for all these games!' They're 'Hey, there's one game in there I want. I'll pay $X for it.'
(My personal beef with bundles? Often the developers don't provide patches for the non-Steam versions of the Windows / OS X releases, so we get stuck with whatever bugs were there at the bundle release.)
Baseball: http://2ksports.com/games/mlb2k12/
Basketball: http://2ksports.com/games/nba2k11/
EA effectively owns the concepts of 'football' and 'hockey', so no one but EA can make those games. But 2K Sports releases PC versions of their titles.
By the time the NES came out, I had a computer. And I was completely smug about the superiority of the Commodore 64. Zelda, pfft. I had The Bard's Tale and Pool of Radiance!
The 8 Bit Wars left many scars.
Most people I hang out with keep their phone in their back pocket.
'Year of the Linux Asstop' doesn't have quite the same ring to it, though.
Never underestimate the sheer number of idiots. I work for a company whose product displays NO AC on the simple LCD screen if it loses electrical power.
Damn near everyone who sees the message and calls support tells me, 'But my air conditioning is working fine!'
The product has nothing to do with climate control, for the record.
You can run the programs offline if Steam feels like letting you.
Steam's 'offline mode' is not reliable. I often have it just say 'Unable to connect to server' and quit without offering offline mode.
So no, you can't necessarily 'run the programs off line'.
Which was sort of my point.
I haven't bought a PC game that requires a disc in the drive to play for years. They all have a full install and some form of DRM (often Steam) now.
I probably have about sixty games installed on my PC, and I think one of them needs a disc in the drive to work. And that's Dune 2000, which is a) old as hell, and b) plays the video files off the CD, doesn't install them.
I haven't reinstalled Windows 'to regain lost performance' in years, either. I've never had a problem with it slowing down.
Of course, I only install the things I _need_ on it, to do the things I want to do. Games? Yes, to play them. Video transcoding software? Yes, because I need to work with files. Massive 'Community Codec Packs'? No, because they screw things up.
I just install everything to my hard drive and let a caching SSD figure out which files need speeding up at the moment. It's just easier.
Nah, I couldn't print my paper because stupid Steam failed to connect to my account, so my office program locked me out.
I'll have it tomorrow when the internet's fixed, I swear!
For what it's worth, that actually WAS Unix.
Except not, since Intel SmartResponse doesn't work on the Z79 boards, and SmartResponse is limited to 64 gigs - this Asus board specifically says it'll work with the full capacity of any SSD.
That's a nice concept, but the programs I want to use that would be accelerated by being on an SSD are ten to thirty gigs each.
Installing and uninstalling, or at least installing and then moving to another drive as needed, gets old. Fast.
With a cache accelerator SSD setup, I just install all my games, and play them whenever, without worrying which ones are on the SSD and which ones are on the hard drive.
Is it as fast as just using an SSD? No. It it _almost_ as fast? Yes.
And more importantly, it's much less of a pain in the butt than moving files between drives manually.
(Also, I was able to install a caching SSD without having to do a reinstall of Windows and whatnot. Install drive, install driver, reboot. It's easy to add to an existing system.)
And is it me, or is the Xbox 360 the only one of the current consoles that hasn't lost features along the way? The Wii lost the ability to play MP3 files in a software update (though it was optional and you could refuse it), and the newer Wiis drop backwards compatability. The PS3 dropped Linux on all versions, and the originals could play PS2 games and SuperAudioCDs, which the new ones can't. The Xbox 360 added HDMI, but hasn't removed anything as far as I can tell. (Though their new dashboard SUCKS, it doesn't actually remove anything.) They did release a no-hard-drive model but only after they started letting you use USB sticks instead.
As for the 3DS XL, I don't plan on getting one. I do have a DSi XL that I use for ScummVM and watching movies on, but since the 3DS hasn't been hacked worth a darn yet, I can't use it for homebrew.
However, I do like the 3D effect! It's quite neat, and luckily I'm one of the folks that it doesn't give a headache to.
Doesn't that only work with the Server version of Snow Leopard?
I'm still on Snow Leopard because I still have some old OSX PowerPC code I need to run.
Does anyone know a way to run PPC OSX code in Lion or Mountain Lion? I have the Sheepshaver emulator which runs PPC stuff, but only OS 9 / Classic, not OS X.
Is there a way to emulate, say, 10.4 in 10.7/10.8?
Because butchers like to package things in fractions of a pound, and a traditional hot dog is ten to a pound.
Bakers, on the other hand, like multiples of fours because they package easily. Eight hot dog buns (in two rows of four) or eight hamburger buns (in two slabs of two-by-two) make for a nice, roughly square package that stacks well on the shelf.
Well, you shouldn't NEED to buy a new car more than every ten years or so. Unless you're getting really crappy cars, or not taking care of them.
I certainly plan to keep my current car at least ten years.
(My car's a 2007 model, and doesn't have Bluetooth anything. I stuck with the base stereo; for some bizarre reason, the nav system upgraded one couldn't play mp3s, but the base one could.)
The burned penis incident you're referring to was in 2002.
It wasn't a third degree burn. According to medical records, the gent had reddened skin and one blister.
'laptops' were transitioning to being called 'notebooks' a full ten years before that.
The Dell 325NC, for instance. NC for Notebook (Color). 1991.
Dell's first portable, as a comparison, had a model number of 316LT. For LapTop.
So yes, I call shenanigans on 'you can't use them on your lap' being the reason laptops started being called notebooks. Notebooks were MUCH smaller and lighter than laptops. Like, well, a notebook. Or a three ring binder, at least.
I call shenanigans. I'm old enough to remember when they stopped calling portables 'laptops' in ads and started calling them 'notebooks'.
The computers advertised as 'notebooks' were much smaller than the older models advertised as 'laptops'.
The older ones WERE big and heavy enough that setting them in your lap was a realistic way to use them. 'Notebooks' are small enough that they don't balance well in the average lap, and calling them a 'thightop' - balanced on one leg - just sounds stupid.
If you're a fan of platformers, you should've bought a Nintendo DS instead of a tablet.
There are roughly 'four metric buttloads' of platform games for the DS. And it has a D-pad and buttons to play them with.
I can't find a way to get a Model B.
I can find a way to sign up for a list saying I'm interested in getting one eventually, but that's it.
They don't even provide an estimated time. And they're not taking orders.
So it's not like 'We're backordered, will ship as they come in'. It's more like 'We hope to get more someday!'
It's the same thing at both Farnell and RS.
DataTypes survive in a limited context; audio and video codecs do much the same thing.
I think the furthest I ever pushed a bicycle was about three miles.
While there did used to be more pay phones, pay phones were only in the business district. They certainly weren't anywhere between my house and my friends' houses.