Hey there.... do you have a cite for the River Raid info? I've always wondered about that... in fact I worked with a guy to try to map the thing out... one time I used an emulator w/ a hacked ROM w/ infinite fuel and no collisions...I let it run over night, and when I came back the game was showing "impossible" configurations, with items where they shouldn't be viz a viz on water or land...
The guy doesn't have much of a web presence, just an old site and the odd reference here and there.
The Exploratorium piece is Music Insects, not Musical...
Also, I forgot about the lost game of Toshio Iwai -- also by Nintendo, "Sound Fantasy"...sometimes described as a precursor to SimTunes, but some descriptions mentions "subgames", as opposed to SimTunes which was a single tool...maybe it was more like Electroplankton, then...
ElectroPlankton was by the same guy who wrote "Musical Insects" at the San Franscisco Exploratorium, which got redone by Maxis, called "SimTunes"... here's a Wired article about the artist and here's a review of the software.
SimTunes was a paintprogram of sorts, except the canvas was transversed by 4 bugs, each could be mapped to a different instrument. Each color then would make the bug play a different note or sound effect, and there were also square modifiers to change the direction or motion of the bug.
It still had a sense of playfulness, you could just focus on making pretty pictures, but could be used as a semi-serious sequencing tool...unlike ElectroPlankton, pretty much any tune could be ported to it, plus there were some interesting tools like limiting the color pallete to a certain scale...
anyway, SimTunes only "kind of" installs these days and runs poorly. I'd love to see a port of it to a game console or better yet as some kind of web app (with a way of SAVING results, unlike Electroplankton...)
I guess I'm less cynical, or more optimistic about the "wisdom of crowds" or something. But the boyband -> 50 cent transition doesn't seem like such a weird thing... it's like saying that the same people who like Charlie Parker now like George Clinton - "It's a completely different genre of music, and it's the same people!"
Sure there's some herd thinking here, but there's also a "fax" affect...i.e. the more people who join in the "network" the more valuable it is to everyone in the network, like Pokemon to Yu-Gi-Oh. Besides the fact I think it's totally plausible to get bored of one game (I've heard Yu-Gi-Oh is a lot more complex, strategy wise) and then look for something else, you might as well switch to what's popular at the moment because you're going to have a lot more people to play against, a bigger crowd of folks you're going to have something in common with.
And God, I don't envy the social strategizing and hierarchy wrangling that teenage girls and to a lesser extent boys have to do. (And don't even try to argue that they shouldn't care what other people think... your social group is a huge part of your life especially in an environment like a school, and being a perpetual outsider is absolutely grueling.)
I mean hell, Slashdot has the exact same thing going on. How many people who fire up Linux do so because they made a measured, objective analysis of the pros and cons of using a minority operating system? (Not that there aren't real benefits, but there's also a set of real drawbracks, UI and interoperabity wise) These folks are just as trend-following as the screaming hoardes of teenybopper girls.
No one's immune from this. The best you can do is to try and steer clear from the most outlandish trends and stick with what seems to be the best bet for a certain timeless quality, so that people won't point and laugh at your bellbottoms and giant muttonchops 10 years later, right before they come right back in style again.
I think there was even more resentment that games weren't credited to the authors, just to the company (hence stuff like the Adventure "signature")
Activision and EA both helped their early success by putting the software authors front and center. EA explicitly went to treat them like rock stars and used them in their ad campaigns.
I think the tactic is less important now that games are made with large teams, but still...those are two companies that have been around over 20 years so they must be doing something right.
"pet rocks, disco, gigapets, Brittney Spears, etcetera" - just be cause they're fads doesn't mean people liked them "just because other people like them". Pet Rocks were a cute little gag, disco was actually fun to dance to, gigapets were kind of compelling for a bit, Brittney has some super-high production value music combined with teeny-bopper sexuality.
Just because something seemed cool for a while doesn't mean it wasn't cool.
I thought I heard that many studios (and some mainstream stars) aren't happy about high-def... skin blemishes and other issues that aren't that visible at regular resolutions become problematic with that level of fine grain.
Me, I don't care so much. I got a midrange video projector that only goes up to like 800 pixels across. But it still looks decent to me, even when projecting across the room. I'm more interested in the general content than the individual pixel perfectness anyway...
I remember with Driver or some similar game...I'm sure their lamposts that stopped by car pretty much dead were much more realistic than those knockovers in GTA, but about 1/5 as much fun. GTA has really found a sweet spot for the balance, I've seen other games get it wrong the other way, and it feels too much like a cartoon...
Oh, that...that's kind of a quirk of the physics engine maybe. But the cool thing is they made cities with enough nooks and crannies that there are interesting things to try for with that quirk.
Re the video...damn, I'm on a business trip, don't have access to the filename. I can try pinging my friend who would always point me to the stuff though...
Hmm. I guess that's a pretty ok "in game" reason, though obviously it's more about later GTAs making you take missions that are assigned on you to advance the storyline...but still, the dork was so abusive, and they so played up how terrible he was, and the missions were so tough, relatively speaking...eh, whatevah. Still a great game.
I hate managing my character like a damn dressup doll. Just give me something fun to do, don't make me worry about how I look doing it, or if I've spent enough time in the gym...
Plus, to really pull that off, they'd likely need to go back to a silent main character...or else have a very limited set of voices.
I love Zelda for what it is, but all the nooks and crannies feel very planted....you get the feeling Hyrule wouldn't exist withou a guy link to run around in it, but GTAs' worlds seem much closer to "living breathing" cities...
Now there's a question...what the hell was CJ's motivation for helping out that dork who needed the rhymes? Everyone knew he was a posing idiot, but CJ does his bidding like the other guy had dirty pictures of him.
Well, obviously the designers had stunting in mind a bit, which is why they stuck a number of ramps about, as well as "insane stunt" bonuses.
I agree stunters have pushed the envelope.
I love the one video that has an intermission that gets the cops to do lots of stupid stuff, usually ending up with them in the water, either in their car or not...
Not to mention their cost...Palm was like one half to one third the Newton I think. Newton fans would say that corresponds to their functionality, but again, Palm was powerful enough to do custom apps, thus putting itself above the other "electronic organizers" of the day.
I respect the Newton, but it's not just bad marketing or politics or being the first out there w/ some unproven handwriting recongition that made it fail to thrive. (Actually, I was surprised Palm's graffiti wasn't a showstopper for more people, at the time I thought it was perverse that people would have to change to meet the computers needs, rather than the other way around, but I personally got used to it, and other people either got used to it or used the virtual keyboard.)
And it is particularly dissapointing that it kind of succumbed to the MS hegemony; I mean both are probably fighting for pieces of a shrinking pie (the dedicated PDA market) but there was a time when I was happy to say "See? Microsoft doesn't always win, the attempts to scale Windows down to a handheld were laughably bad, and so WinCE is just this little minority player."
I still prefer Palm's approach of building up from simple UI than trying to scale down the desktop.
I said it was a decent run, and I stand by that, 6 to 8 or 9 years, straddling the whole dotcom thing. They jumped the shark mightily when the Handspring crew split off. I think thatt division of their forces is what really killed 'em.
I don't think any of the Newtons hit the "shirt pocket" formfactor that Palm nailed, even the MessagePad 2100. And that was a very important size to get down to.
The Palm was in an interesting space, complexity wise; somewhere between the Newton and, say, those Rolodex or Radio Shack brand organizers with little rubber screens and 40x3 or 4 character LCD screens. The touch sensitive screens allowed GUIs to work, rather than the DOS-like interaction of those cheaper models, and it was powerful enough to run 3rd party software (and had a reasonable path to that kind of software install), but everything else was a compromise for formfactor and battery life.
So given this scenario, where does the Palm value come in? The name? Nope. Apple would want consistent branding. The OS? No way. Palm is so full of cruft I swear that the developers are ready to shoot it. The device designs? Never. They're way too far behind the curve.
Some aspects of the UI? I still find it very friendly. Maybe not Mac-y enough however.
Around 2001 I was still amazed at how much more usable it was than the winCE alternatives.
It's still my favorite PIM UI, much more elegant than Outlook. I use a Sony Clie regularly. I guess Palm just slipped up in the behind the scenes technology, as well as some of the integration w/ the Outlook Hegemony.
Newton was cooler in many ways, but didn't understand the criticial formfactor issue, and then became a political target.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey there....
do you have a cite for the River Raid info?
I've always wondered about that... in fact I worked with a guy to try to map the thing out... one time I used an emulator w/ a hacked ROM w/ infinite fuel and no collisions...I let it run over night, and when I came back the game was showing "impossible" configurations, with items where they shouldn't be viz a viz on water or land...
A few updates to my original post:
The guy doesn't have much of a web presence, just an old site and the odd reference here and there.
The Exploratorium piece is Music Insects, not Musical...
Also, I forgot about the lost game of Toshio Iwai -- also by Nintendo, "Sound Fantasy"...sometimes described as a precursor to SimTunes, but some descriptions mentions "subgames", as opposed to SimTunes which was a single tool...maybe it was more like Electroplankton, then...
well, yeah, but is the library something someone's ported to any console, or is this just Windows/Linux/OSX?
Be sweet to see on, say, Dreamcast....
ElectroPlankton was by the same guy who wrote "Musical Insects" at the San Franscisco Exploratorium, which got redone by Maxis, called "SimTunes"...
here's a Wired article about the artist and here's a review of the software.
SimTunes was a paintprogram of sorts, except the canvas was transversed by 4 bugs, each could be mapped to a different instrument. Each color then would make the bug play a different note or sound effect, and there were also square modifiers to change the direction or motion of the bug.
It still had a sense of playfulness, you could just focus on making pretty pictures, but could be used as a semi-serious sequencing tool...unlike ElectroPlankton, pretty much any tune could be ported to it, plus there were some interesting tools like limiting the color pallete to a certain scale...
anyway, SimTunes only "kind of" installs these days and runs poorly. I'd love to see a port of it to a game console or better yet as some kind of web app (with a way of SAVING results, unlike Electroplankton...)
What platforms can the resulting games be run on?
I guess I'm less cynical, or more optimistic about the "wisdom of crowds" or something. But the boyband -> 50 cent transition doesn't seem like such a weird thing... it's like saying that the same people who like Charlie Parker now like George Clinton - "It's a completely different genre of music, and it's the same people!"
Sure there's some herd thinking here, but there's also a "fax" affect...i.e. the more people who join in the "network" the more valuable it is to everyone in the network, like Pokemon to Yu-Gi-Oh. Besides the fact I think it's totally plausible to get bored of one game (I've heard Yu-Gi-Oh is a lot more complex, strategy wise) and then look for something else, you might as well switch to what's popular at the moment because you're going to have a lot more people to play against, a bigger crowd of folks you're going to have something in common with.
And God, I don't envy the social strategizing and hierarchy wrangling that teenage girls and to a lesser extent boys have to do. (And don't even try to argue that they shouldn't care what other people think... your social group is a huge part of your life especially in an environment like a school, and being a perpetual outsider is absolutely grueling.)
I mean hell, Slashdot has the exact same thing going on. How many people who fire up Linux do so because they made a measured, objective analysis of the pros and cons of using a minority operating system? (Not that there aren't real benefits, but there's also a set of real drawbracks, UI and interoperabity wise) These folks are just as trend-following as the screaming hoardes of teenybopper girls.
No one's immune from this. The best you can do is to try and steer clear from the most outlandish trends and stick with what seems to be the best bet for a certain timeless quality, so that people won't point and laugh at your bellbottoms and giant muttonchops 10 years later, right before they come right back in style again.
I think there was even more resentment that games weren't credited to the authors, just to the company (hence stuff like the Adventure "signature")
Activision and EA both helped their early success by putting the software authors front and center. EA explicitly went to treat them like rock stars and used them in their ad campaigns.
I think the tactic is less important now that games are made with large teams, but still...those are two companies that have been around over 20 years so they must be doing something right.
You sound like such an ass dude.
"pet rocks, disco, gigapets, Brittney Spears, etcetera" - just be cause they're fads doesn't mean people liked them "just because other people like them". Pet Rocks were a cute little gag, disco was actually fun to dance to, gigapets were kind of compelling for a bit, Brittney has some super-high production value music combined with teeny-bopper sexuality.
Just because something seemed cool for a while doesn't mean it wasn't cool.
Thrill Bill is the name and download. Fileplanet is a bit annoying but I couldn't find a link anywhere else.
I actually don't think I kept a copy, but my friend was able to dig up the name.
The intermission is pretty short, but it's one of the most clever bits of a stunting video I've seen.
I thought I heard that many studios (and some mainstream stars) aren't happy about high-def... skin blemishes and other issues that aren't that visible at regular resolutions become problematic with that level of fine grain.
Me, I don't care so much. I got a midrange video projector that only goes up to like 800 pixels across. But it still looks decent to me, even when projecting across the room. I'm more interested in the general content than the individual pixel perfectness anyway...
Agreed.
I remember with Driver or some similar game...I'm sure their lamposts that stopped by car pretty much dead were much more realistic than those knockovers in GTA, but about 1/5 as much fun. GTA has really found a sweet spot for the balance, I've seen other games get it wrong the other way, and it feels too much like a cartoon...
Actually, it's a question if "right" is "consistent with itself" or "consistent with the real world"...
I'm pretty sure the physics ain't "realistic" in the latter sense, but tweaked to maximize fun.
quirk: well, glitch. I don't know if it's "realistic" physics or a rounding error that would make a cycle spin quite so much. Maybe/
Nooks and Crannies are just places to go, little details to check out, especially ones that aren't neccesarily in the main games missions.
GTA is cool how its missions are all made up of components that are more or less available throughout the games: vehicles, guns, people.
Even the cutscenes are using the exact same models.
Oh, that...that's kind of a quirk of the physics engine maybe. But the cool thing is they made cities with enough nooks and crannies that there are interesting things to try for with that quirk.
Re the video...damn, I'm on a business trip, don't have access to the filename. I can try pinging my friend who would always point me to the stuff though...
Hmm. I guess that's a pretty ok "in game" reason, though obviously it's more about later GTAs making you take missions that are assigned on you to advance the storyline...but still, the dork was so abusive, and they so played up how terrible he was, and the missions were so tough, relatively speaking...eh, whatevah. Still a great game.
I for one don't WANT to be a unique character.
I hate managing my character like a damn dressup doll. Just give me something fun to do, don't make me worry about how I look doing it, or if I've spent enough time in the gym...
Plus, to really pull that off, they'd likely need to go back to a silent main character...or else have a very limited set of voices.
I love Zelda for what it is, but all the nooks and crannies feel very planted....you get the feeling Hyrule wouldn't exist withou a guy link to run around in it, but GTAs' worlds seem much closer to "living breathing" cities...
Now there's a question...what the hell was CJ's motivation for helping out that dork who needed the rhymes? Everyone knew he was a posing idiot, but CJ does his bidding like the other guy had dirty pictures of him.
Well, obviously the designers had stunting in mind a bit, which is why they stuck a number of ramps about, as well as "insane stunt" bonuses.
I agree stunters have pushed the envelope.
I love the one video that has an intermission that gets the cops to do lots of stupid stuff, usually ending up with them in the water, either in their car or not...
I'm pretty sure about that:d /newton160.jpg
http://tommcmahon.typepad.com/photos/uncategorize
There is a qualitative difference in their size, and "shirt pocket" just abou describes it.
Not to mention their cost...Palm was like one half to one third the Newton I think. Newton fans would say that corresponds to their functionality, but again, Palm was powerful enough to do custom apps, thus putting itself above the other "electronic organizers" of the day.
I respect the Newton, but it's not just bad marketing or politics or being the first out there w/ some unproven handwriting recongition that made it fail to thrive. (Actually, I was surprised Palm's graffiti wasn't a showstopper for more people, at the time I thought it was perverse that people would have to change to meet the computers needs, rather than the other way around, but I personally got used to it, and other people either got used to it or used the virtual keyboard.)
You're right, it is semantics.
And it is particularly dissapointing that it kind of succumbed to the MS hegemony; I mean both are probably fighting for pieces of a shrinking pie (the dedicated PDA market) but there was a time when I was happy to say "See? Microsoft doesn't always win, the attempts to scale Windows down to a handheld were laughably bad, and so WinCE is just this little minority player."
I still prefer Palm's approach of building up from simple UI than trying to scale down the desktop.
I said it was a decent run, and I stand by that, 6 to 8 or 9 years, straddling the whole dotcom thing. They jumped the shark mightily when the Handspring crew split off. I think thatt division of their forces is what really killed 'em.
I don't think any of the Newtons hit the "shirt pocket" formfactor that Palm nailed, even the MessagePad 2100. And that was a very important size to get down to.
The Palm was in an interesting space, complexity wise; somewhere between the Newton and, say, those Rolodex or Radio Shack brand organizers with little rubber screens and 40x3 or 4 character LCD screens. The touch sensitive screens allowed GUIs to work, rather than the DOS-like interaction of those cheaper models, and it was powerful enough to run 3rd party software (and had a reasonable path to that kind of software install), but everything else was a compromise for formfactor and battery life.
So given this scenario, where does the Palm value come in? The name? Nope. Apple would want consistent branding. The OS? No way. Palm is so full of cruft I swear that the developers are ready to shoot it. The device designs? Never. They're way too far behind the curve.
Some aspects of the UI? I still find it very friendly. Maybe not Mac-y enough however.
Palm had a decent run. 1996-200...3? 4?
Around 2001 I was still amazed at how much more usable it was than the winCE alternatives.
It's still my favorite PIM UI, much more elegant than Outlook. I use a Sony Clie regularly. I guess Palm just slipped up in the behind the scenes technology, as well as some of the integration w/ the Outlook Hegemony.
Newton was cooler in many ways, but didn't understand the criticial formfactor issue, and then became a political target.