I for one have forked over money plenty of times to projects
It's pretty much only the superstars who can get away with this. (Which kind of holds true in the commercial market as well.)
Of course a legitimate micropayment system early on might've helped the whole scene.
Or maybe not, often people will spend time looking for a free version even when a cheap version is available. Apparently, their time is cheap or they're so poor or have such a poor sense of time and money being linked that gratis is always better.
To sum up: I suggest reviewers spend more time playing the game and less time worrying about how much time they played the game.
I think this is a red herring...I don't see reviewers harping that much on the amount of time spent. It's usually a # generated by marketroids, and it probably does an ok job of giving a rough idea of the amount of of content...
Tetris, despite it being a wonderful game, doesn't have much content. And that's fine.
No one would have EVER thought of doing updates over a network if these guys hadn't shown the way.
Just like I'm very grateful to the nice gentleman who explained I could mow the lawn with a kind of back and forth motion...I was on the verge of turning off my lawnmower, bringing it on my back to the other side, and then starting it up again.
"Despite 'only' being XML, RSS is the driving force fulfilling the Web's original promise: making the Web useful in an exciting, real-time way."
Err, did I miss the meeting where that was declared as the Web's original promise?
Anyway, the trouble is pretty obvious: RSS is just a polling mechanism to do fakey Push. (Wired had an interesting retrospective on their infamous "PUSH IS THE FUTURE" hand cover about PointCast.) And that's expensive, the cyber equivalent of a hoarde of screaming children asking "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? How about now? Are we there yet now? Are we there yet?" It would be good if we had an equally widely used "true Push" standard, where remote clients would register as listeners, and then the server can actually publish new content to the remote sites. However, in today's heavily firewall'd internet, I dunno if that would work so well, especially for home users.
I dunno. I kind of admit to not really grokking RSS, for me, the presentation is too much of the total package. (Or maybe I'm bitter because the weird intraday format that emerged for my own site doesn't really lend itself to RSS-ification...)
I'm not sure where it falls on the originality spectrum...it melds elements of Joust and Pong, and technically it's a port since I also wrote it for Windows and in Java, but it's not a port or clone of any well-known game.
The Atari 2600 is a different scene from the DC, and any port to it is a SERIOUS challenge, but the DC is a lot more flexible, and I can see your point that a port of a game that is much better on a 1990-era PC isn't much of a breakthrough.
I think ideally a port or even an original game on a console or other non-PC system is mostly worthwhile if it takes advantage of that system; like DC would be better than a PC for multiplayer "couch" games, some ports to Palm are cool just 'cause it's portable (text adventures are a good example, because they don't demand constant attention and/or reflexes)
Anyway, there are some orginal games, but ports require less imagination, and sometimes have more of a built in audience--or at least people know what to expect.
If I were microsoft, I'd be doing *everything* I could to get Rockstar to release the next GTA on their system first...(and I'd like to see a GTA not geared to the PS2's limitations...)
That Odeon site is pretty Odious...even beyond the retardation of requiring www. being prepended to the domain in the URL, it opens up to what looks like a giant banner ad...and NO OTHER CONTENT. Then when you read the instructions "Simply click this page to enter." (buried in some boilerplate looking text) you try clicking on the page. No dice, the text lied. So you click on the "ODEON" logo. Nope, that's not clickable either. You HAVE to click on the "FREE* Activision PC Game Sampler" to get anywhere.
And that takes you to what looks like a circa-1997 splash page w/ a fuzzed out logo. (No further info on the spiderman offer) But that's the site...all the content is hidden in a series of 5 dropdown menus.
And as if that's not bad enough, some of the menu items that "do something" besides open up a submenu have confusing *right* facing triangles, very similar at a glance to the left facing submenu indicators. But on mouse-over, they all get a lit up arrow pointing one way or the other.
What a suck, suck, suck site, from every angle imaginable: usability, information flow, accessibility, content, graphics design...UGH! At the risk of hammering on my lame pun, they really DO put the Odeon back into Odious.
Huh... Actually, I'm almost surprised processors still have the "debug flag"...maybe I've spent too much time in VM land (Java), but given all we've heard about speculative processing and the like, it's amazing we can debug at all...
When I think of bad voice acting, Rare's stuff, especially on N64, especially Conker's BFD, comes to mind. It was obvious that the one guy they hired to do like every voice except Conker and his galpal was running out of ideas...and Conker's delivery was like me in my middle school play, especially when they broke the fourth wall a bit and got meta.
By the end, you've probably also built up his stamina by running a lot.
Heh...I think you're making a funny (at least I didn't notice any improvement...though it's funny how in VC he can be like the cop robot in Terminator 2 and run down a car...) but I think that kind of exercise-related buildup is how the new GTA is slated to work. At least, if you don't exercise and/or eat crap from the restaurants you get fat. (Heh, food selections from restaurants, wonder if it'll endup being like River City Ransom...)
I'm a little wary of the level of detail they're promising...I don't want too much micromanagement to get in the way of the usual mayhem.
Alas, the nearest Office Depot retail location to Boston is in Kingston NY.
Awww, CRAP! I was getting it mixed up with OfficeMax, which in turn seems like it's interchangable with Staples, which meant I assumed "there's gotta be one around here somewhere..."
Thanks, that was pretty clear. I think I started to see the light as I typed up my first comment but seeing a more concrete example was nice. When I think about the assembly I've written for the Atari 2600, sure there's a lot of cross-instruction dependencies going on (esp/ w testing the register flags) but I could see where a lot of code is doing one thing, then doing another, with a chanse for optimization there.
Yeah, the first time through i was pretty quick on the reload sequence...after a while though, once I figured out how to quickly get an arsenal, I would just try to play it straight. GTAs are nice in that your character doesn't powerup (except for the health/armor bonus possibility) and is basically the same at the end as at the begining...you're just a smarter player, and have more knowledge of getting guns, or more money.
I remember when my mother brought home a 486 DX-2 66MHZ Packard Bell with something like 8 or 12 megs of ram.
we thought we were descended from kings, that day.
Yeah, that was the machine I got halfway through college, and felt the same...ahhh, Wing Commander 3...
Then we got the dorms wired for the 'Net. And I got my ass HANDED to me in Duke Nuke'Em 3D by those punk-ass frosh and their new shiny pentiums...I'd almost hold my own 'til the underwater levels, then my framerate dropped to about, I dunno,.25 or something FPS.
Is there any way of "easily" understanding how a chip handles out of order dependcies? I've done some 6502 programming (Atari 2600) but the idea seems pretty amazing to me...I guess each instruction can only affect a certain # of registers and memory locations, and if another instruction doesn't rely on those, it's ok to run it prematurely, before the the first instruction...
Well, maybe I've answered my own question, but it seems pretty amazing that you can get improved performance with that, and not having to rollback all the time.
Slate is a GREAT website. I hate to admit it but its regularly much more fascinating than, say, Salon, or any other similarly positioned site I can think of. Wired.com is pretty good as well, but Slate seems to have a knack for really intriguing topics.
That's a little funny, but I haven't seen the mail since the 90s and even then it was pretty small potatoes...people were getting to be a little net-saavy by then, or rather there weren't as many idiots, or if there were they had smarter friends pointing out the error of their ways.
Like with perl, I'm not always wanting to use strict and warn; I like not having to predeclare all my variables, for one thing...(and sometimes I'd have to lookup how to predeclare some kinds of hashes and arrays...)
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I for one have forked over money plenty of times to projects
It's pretty much only the superstars who can get away with this. (Which kind of holds true in the commercial market as well.)
Of course a legitimate micropayment system early on might've helped the whole scene.
Or maybe not, often people will spend time looking for a free version even when a cheap version is available. Apparently, their time is cheap or they're so poor or have such a poor sense of time and money being linked that gratis is always better.
Regardless of the moral intention of the GPL (and I largely approve of it and use it for my own work),
I mostly make my independent projects open source as well (even if usually I don't get around to figuring out the right licensing bit)
But that's mostly because it's crapware that, in a world without micropayments, no one would pay for.
Hell, even making stuff "email-me-ware" (if you use it, email me) doesn't work...you only get email for people wanting support...
Yes, Mod Parent Up.
To sum up: I suggest reviewers spend more time playing the game and less time worrying about how much time they played the game.
I think this is a red herring...I don't see reviewers harping that much on the amount of time spent. It's usually a # generated by marketroids, and it probably does an ok job of giving a rough idea of the amount of of content...
Tetris, despite it being a wonderful game, doesn't have much content. And that's fine.
150-hours does sound like a lot though.
You're crazy.
No one would have EVER thought of doing updates over a network if these guys hadn't shown the way.
Just like I'm very grateful to the nice gentleman who explained I could mow the lawn with a kind of back and forth motion...I was on the verge of turning off my lawnmower, bringing it on my back to the other side, and then starting it up again.
"Despite 'only' being XML, RSS is the driving force fulfilling the Web's original promise: making the Web useful in an exciting, real-time way."
Err, did I miss the meeting where that was declared as the Web's original promise?
Anyway, the trouble is pretty obvious: RSS is just a polling mechanism to do fakey Push. (Wired had an interesting retrospective on their infamous "PUSH IS THE FUTURE" hand cover about PointCast.) And that's expensive, the cyber equivalent of a hoarde of screaming children asking "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? How about now? Are we there yet now? Are we there yet?" It would be good if we had an equally widely used "true Push" standard, where remote clients would register as listeners, and then the server can actually publish new content to the remote sites. However, in today's heavily firewall'd internet, I dunno if that would work so well, especially for home users.
I dunno. I kind of admit to not really grokking RSS, for me, the presentation is too much of the total package. (Or maybe I'm bitter because the weird intraday format that emerged for my own site doesn't really lend itself to RSS-ification...)
Uh, you're kidding, right?
About 2001. Where we had a moon base, commercial space station, regular commercial space travel, and a big ol' manned trip to Jupiter by this point?
If this is a troll color me hooked...
This is an interesting problem in general.
I made the homebrew JoustPong for the Atari 2600.
I'm not sure where it falls on the originality spectrum...it melds elements of Joust and Pong, and technically it's a port since I also wrote it for Windows and in Java, but it's not a port or clone of any well-known game.
The Atari 2600 is a different scene from the DC, and any port to it is a SERIOUS challenge, but the DC is a lot more flexible, and I can see your point that a port of a game that is much better on a 1990-era PC isn't much of a breakthrough.
I think ideally a port or even an original game on a console or other non-PC system is mostly worthwhile if it takes advantage of that system; like DC would be better than a PC for multiplayer "couch" games, some ports to Palm are cool just 'cause it's portable (text adventures are a good example, because they don't demand constant attention and/or reflexes)
Anyway, there are some orginal games, but ports require less imagination, and sometimes have more of a built in audience--or at least people know what to expect.
Interestingly, I think Europeans think of Ford as a European company, because of the long historical association with and factories in Germany...
If I were microsoft, I'd be doing *everything* I could to get Rockstar to release the next GTA on their system first...(and I'd like to see a GTA not geared to the PS2's limitations...)
That Odeon site is pretty Odious...even beyond the retardation of requiring www. being prepended to the domain in the URL, it opens up to what looks like a giant banner ad...and NO OTHER CONTENT. Then when you read the instructions "Simply click this page to enter." (buried in some boilerplate looking text) you try clicking on the page. No dice, the text lied. So you click on the "ODEON" logo. Nope, that's not clickable either. You HAVE to click on the "FREE* Activision PC Game Sampler" to get anywhere.
And that takes you to what looks like a circa-1997 splash page w/ a fuzzed out logo. (No further info on the spiderman offer) But that's the site...all the content is hidden in a series of 5 dropdown menus.
And as if that's not bad enough, some of the menu items that "do something" besides open up a submenu have confusing *right* facing triangles, very similar at a glance to the left facing submenu indicators. But on mouse-over, they all get a lit up arrow pointing one way or the other.
What a suck, suck, suck site, from every angle imaginable: usability, information flow, accessibility, content, graphics design...UGH! At the risk of hammering on my lame pun, they really DO put the Odeon back into Odious.
Huh...
Actually, I'm almost surprised processors still have the "debug flag"...maybe I've spent too much time in VM land (Java), but given all we've heard about speculative processing and the like, it's amazing we can debug at all...
Mod parent up; that's a very good question, and fun for speculation.
When I think of bad voice acting, Rare's stuff, especially on N64, especially Conker's BFD, comes to mind. It was obvious that the one guy they hired to do like every voice except Conker and his galpal was running out of ideas...and Conker's delivery was like me in my middle school play, especially when they broke the fourth wall a bit and got meta.
By the end, you've probably also built up his stamina by running a lot.
Heh...I think you're making a funny (at least I didn't notice any improvement...though it's funny how in VC he can be like the cop robot in Terminator 2 and run down a car...) but I think that kind of exercise-related buildup is how the new GTA is slated to work. At least, if you don't exercise and/or eat crap from the restaurants you get fat. (Heh, food selections from restaurants, wonder if it'll endup being like River City Ransom...)
I'm a little wary of the level of detail they're promising...I don't want too much micromanagement to get in the way of the usual mayhem.
Alas, the nearest Office Depot retail location to Boston is in Kingston NY.
Awww, CRAP! I was getting it mixed up with OfficeMax, which in turn seems like it's interchangable with Staples, which meant I assumed "there's gotta be one around here somewhere..."
Thanks, that was pretty clear. I think I started to see the light as I typed up my first comment but seeing a more concrete example was nice. When I think about the assembly I've written for the Atari 2600, sure there's a lot of cross-instruction dependencies going on (esp/ w testing the register flags) but I could see where a lot of code is doing one thing, then doing another, with a chanse for optimization there.
Yeah, the first time through i was pretty quick on the reload sequence...after a while though, once I figured out how to quickly get an arsenal, I would just try to play it straight. GTAs are nice in that your character doesn't powerup (except for the health/armor bonus possibility) and is basically the same at the end as at the begining...you're just a smarter player, and have more knowledge of getting guns, or more money.
Actually I think the quoted passage is just enough for the accent to still be funny...that was actually a very good clipping.
All hail Weird Al Yankovic
I remember when my mother brought home a 486 DX-2 66MHZ Packard Bell with something like 8 or 12 megs of ram.
.25 or something FPS.
we thought we were descended from kings, that day.
Yeah, that was the machine I got halfway through college, and felt the same...ahhh, Wing Commander 3...
Then we got the dorms wired for the 'Net. And I got my ass HANDED to me in Duke Nuke'Em 3D by those punk-ass frosh and their new shiny pentiums...I'd almost hold my own 'til the underwater levels, then my framerate dropped to about, I dunno,
Is there any way of "easily" understanding how a chip handles out of order dependcies? I've done some 6502 programming (Atari 2600) but the idea seems pretty amazing to me...I guess each instruction can only affect a certain # of registers and memory locations, and if another instruction doesn't rely on those, it's ok to run it prematurely, before the the first instruction...
Well, maybe I've answered my own question, but it seems pretty amazing that you can get improved performance with that, and not having to rollback all the time.
Slate is a GREAT website. I hate to admit it but its regularly much more fascinating than, say, Salon, or any other similarly positioned site I can think of. Wired.com is pretty good as well, but Slate seems to have a knack for really intriguing topics.
That's a little funny, but I haven't seen the mail since the 90s and even then it was pretty small potatoes...people were getting to be a little net-saavy by then, or rather there weren't as many idiots, or if there were they had smarter friends pointing out the error of their ways.
I thought the real time aspect is what made it so cool?
Like with perl, I'm not always wanting to use strict and warn; I like not having to predeclare all my variables, for one thing...(and sometimes I'd have to lookup how to predeclare some kinds of hashes and arrays...)