It's a good point, the web isn't that great as "mass media" for time critical. You can get your message to a lot of people over a long time, or a few people very quickly, and for the end user it has custom content like nothing before in history, but anything from breaking news to that Victoria's Secret model multimedia thing they planned is vulnerable to "slashdot effect"-like things.
Re:That's the hard way of solving the RB
on
When Lego Meet Rubik
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Given the time energy and persistence
most people will put into the cube, this
is no different than the real cube.
Anyone remember the old "RATE YOUR MIND PLA"? One of the first time the "15" sliding puzzle was brought to the public's attention (15 tiles on a 4x4 grid, slide around to make a certain pattern) by Sam Lloyd, it was impossible to solve, and the best you could do was spell out "RATE YOUR MIND PLA" instead of "RATE YOUR MIND PAL" (though according to this page, it might be able to work if you can interchange the two R tiles...)
Buy yeah, disassembling the blocks gave better results than swapping the stickers. Hofstadter
(in Metamagical Themas) points out how damn clever the internal mechanism is, so taking it apart is a bit educational to boot.
Sounds strikingly similar to the argument that stuff like Microsoft SmartTags or other content-warping stuff is ok, since there'll be an opt-out for sites.
Well, they had basically the same thing on the original series, they'd relied on the idea of "the theory of parallel development" to explain how Kirk and Co. could end up on the planet of the Nazis, the Romans (if the empire hadn't ended), the gangsters (no wait... the aliens 'read a book' on mobland), the indians (remember Kirk (Kur-ock? was it?) becoming part of the tribe... the holodeck was just some handwaving to make the same kind of storytelling possible without straining credulity quite so much. (Though obviously it had its own unbelievabilities built in)
My love has been and always will be the "Space" lines; we know that castles and dinosaurs and houses don't really have little round nubs, but the spaceships of the future might; the same geeky love of scifi's possibilities for the future extended to lego.
And that's one of the reasons I've never been a big fan of the generic brick sets; Legos are, essentially, a kids 3D CAD kit in solid form. When all you have is clunky squares, all you can build then is clunky square things, but wings, engines, lasers, cockpits... with those, you could make things with a real sense of design, and more 3D presence than drawing on paper.
Nah, the web's still pretty damn electric. Whaddya think all those routers and servers run on, little hamsters or Flintstone style birds looking into the camera and going 'it's a living'?
Oh... nevermind.
Re:Homebrew devkit with 4 joypads? Try the PC or N
on
MAME on X-Box
·
· Score: 2
Hmmm... Actually, how many just plain USB sticks could I get going on a PC?
I wonder if the X-box might make a decent homebrew platform... I've been looking for a dev kit for a system w/ 4 controllers for a long time.
Open Source, Emulation History, etc.
on
MAME on X-Box
·
· Score: 2
Open Source fans might not get to close to this one. MAME loses a great deal of its appeal without mostly illegal ROMs to use on it. (There might be some legal ones, but the majority aren't.) And although most of the ROMs might seem like 'abandonware', it is taking away modern-day money from some commercial releases. (No one thought circa-1995 machines could do arcade emulation til the Williams Arcade Pack came out.) Some of the coolest things I found for my "new" ps one and my Dreamcast are multiplayer classics like Gauntlet, Super Sprint, and arcade Warlords.
Something like MAME for Xbox is a double threat, bridging the PC/Console divide.
<karmawhore>On the other hand... mame.dk is a helluva resource.</karmawhore> It's almost as good as Killer List of Videogames for screenshots, and better for other reasons...
After six weeks of data collection and statistical analysis, I completed my report. My analysis showed that, in attacks on our B-29s from the rear, it cost the enemy 70 lost fighter planes, on average, to shoot down one of our bombers. But in frontal attacks, the Japanese lost only three fighters for every B-29 they downed. This result differed starkly from the results of a massive combat simulation study, done back home, that had concluded that B-29s would be most vulnerable to attacks from behind! In light of the new findings, bomber formations and tactics were modified to bring greater firepower to bear against frontal attacks. These changes, together with some minor technical modifications, largely solved the problem
Any guesses what they were doing wrong with the "massive combat simulation study"?
I'm pretty much willing to accept the validity of the Turing Test, but I'm not sure if such a simple methodology is going to scale well. At some point, to hold your own in a conversation, you need to develop a structure to represent the outside world, and I'm not sure if a straightforward neural net implementation will get you there; admittedly it depends on how complex a neural net system you introduce.
Born out of practical experience implementing compilers?
Seems to be the wrong way 'round...keep up this thinking and we'll all be coding in assembler language! At this stage, languages are meant to make thing easier for the programmer.
Of course, being a programmer I might be somewhat biased...
I'm not a very close observer to any of these things, but it seems like the recently noticed telnetd exploit has really screwed over more sites than Code Red has, which seems more of a bandwidth hog. I mean, a years-old simple string buffer overflow giving root access on so many linux boxes is inexcusable for people trying to "sell" Linux on its general security and reliability...
Also (and this is backed up by Blizzard's Bill Roper in that one Gamespy Top 50 that was posted here) Wing Commander also sold a huge number of the then-current 386 systems.
This article is barely academic, it's more of a mishmash "here are some games that were important or I think are cool." The text he throws to justify including The Sims and Black and White show that. ("It isn't really a multiplayer game..." etc.)
It reminds me of the paper I wrote for an A-life class, http://www.alienbill.com/vgames/alife.html, where I use the flimsiest excuse to argue why 2600 Battlezone is batter than Robot Tank. I then tried to show Classic Video Games as containing simple examples of A-life, which was pushing it. (I think that paper brought me from a solid A to a B+)
This article (cleaned up from link of previous poster) talks about how white LEDs helped make this possible... I was wondering how they planned to illuminate that without fiberoptics. I wonder how much tumble there is to the thing, if they might miss something interesting because the camera faced the wrong way as it passed through the system. --
X-Box is going to be the premier machine for multiplayer.
Several others have pointed out that most 4 player games suck anyway, because there just isn't enough screen space, and they're right.
A big TV, at least 27", takes care of the screen real estate. IMO. 'Course I might be spoiled with my 36" behemoth.
The X-Box is the only console I've seen that allows you to hook several consoles together on a LAN, to either fit more players on, or to give each player more screen space.
The PS had one-on-one console linking, not all that well utilized. And while I think making ad hoc LANs is pretty cool, one TV per person takes a lot of room, generates a lot of heat, and requires a lot of tv hauling.
One last thing: I think it will be quite hard to beat the x-box controller. The psx, ps2, and n64 controllers all sucked, but the xbox controller was actually large enough to fit my hands without feeling cramped, and the buttons and joysticks were all placed perfectly.
I would rather have the xbox controller over the gamecube controller (which looks like a bad version of the playstation controllers).
That's funny, most reviewers have said that the X-box controller is a bad (and oversized) version of the Dreamcast controller. Even the ones with big hands say it's too damn big. The gamecube controller is clearly an extension of the N64 controller, which was way ahead of its time, with very clever grouping of buttons (not like the PSX's 4 identical shoulder buttons, just waiting for you to screw up), a real D-pad, and the reintroduction of the analog stick to modern gaming (way ahead of the dual shock). I like my N64 controllers better than my dreamcast controllers (too bad the VMUs weren't better utilized) so I assume I'll prefer Gamecube's to X-box's.
--
You can take your sentence "So many games that implement >2 players on consoles suck", remove "implement >2 players" and still have a true sentence. Many games suck. On the other hand, Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros, Golden Eye / Perfect Dark / Turok, Bomberman, Mario Party, Mario Tennis, Powerstone 2, Rush 2049, etc etc don't suck. Yeah, you need a big TV to really do it with style. "Pay for the extra ports"... like what about paying for a friggin' DVD player and PSX compatability... both worthwhile features, but not ones everyone wants. I've been "post college" for 5 years now. Yes, it's not easy to invite people over, but it's worth it. With Gamecube and Dreamcast and X-box, I have the option, and will likely have more and better multiplayer game options with them than I will with PS2 multitap.
And to clearify terms, (for elsewhere in the thread) usually by "multiplayer" I mean "shared console" multiplayer, not "online network" multiplayer.. yes for the former to shine you need A. a big tv and B. friends, but it's a hell of a lot more social. --
Right now, Nintendo seems to be the only company that really gets how important multiplayer is.
Dreamcast started to get the right idea, with 4 ports, but I think they had more of a PSX vibe going on, with as many or more 2 player than 4 player games around. I think X-box might end up in a similar fashion even with 4 ports, since its PC heritage doesn't have a good multiplayer tradition either. And PS2, where you need a multitap for that? Feh. Few gamemakers are anxious to support anything but out of the box hardware.
Yes, online console gaming has a big future, but blasting 2 or 3 buddies to smithereens while talking trash, all on the couch will beat out getting your ass handed to you by faceless, lamely-nicknamed punks who spend way too many hours at this stuff. --
It's been a long time coming and it's still not that great. It still has that little bendy creaky quality at the end of syllables.
The main problem is sampling became so cheap, that some of the incentive for pushing it beyond a 1983 Commodore 64 running the all-software S.A.M. was lost. Now maybe that paying for voice talent is the limiting factor, this will improve.
Jar Jar the first all-computer major character in a full length flick my ass, his annoying voice was voiced just like the flintstones. --
Well, the site's being slashdotted to hell... I caught this yesterday (on memepool, which was already slowing the site down) and mirrored one of the more interesting things, a trading card peek at the 'yoda religion' that Lucas put the smack down on (and rightfully so)-- you can see the card here, along with direct links to some of the coolest things on the site. (like Atha Prime (slashdotted), possibly the first idea for a post-ROTJ storyline badguy, and this unreleased minirig (also slashdotted) clipon for the Falcon. And some other non-slashdotted, extended Star-Wars-iverse links as well. ) --
Spacewar! is one of the grand-daddies of modern videogames, and a much deeper deathmatch than Pong. (I was amazed at how developed its deathmatch became when I read this old Rolling Stones article.)
Written by MIT Hackers who were inspired by the space opera Fiction of E.E. "Doc" Smith. Someone has an the original game running on a PDP-1 emulator. There's a decent funny
introduction at classicgaming.com and a more comprehensive set of Spacewar! links as well.
(Possibly the most obvious sequal to Spacewar! was the brilliantStar Control series. The first game added 12 new types of ships, each with 2 unique weapons systems, and the second created a whole universe to support it. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.)
--
How worried are people about long term exposure to CRT radiation? Is it chicken little, or do the hours and hours and hours we spend in front of these things mean something? --
The tone was a bit snarky, but whatever, it is an interesting accomplishment.
Of course, if Microsoft figured out how to make a friendly UI for their organizer in the first place, it would be closer to a moot point. (Honestly, most of the Palm 3rd party stuff isn't that great anyway, IMO as a 4-year-palm-fan) Microsoft never seemed to understand that the desktop UI doesn't scale down very well, you need to start simply and build up. That's the real power of palm. --
WAP isn't the real problem. If anything, it's that stripped down language WML. The only crimp WAP adds is that ridiculous per transfer byte limit, a bit under 1.5k, the compressed version that is. But the real problem is-- unsurprisingly-- the crusty hardware the stuff runs on. Unless this new standard insists on certain minimal UI... mostly, real keyboards or an acceptable substitute like graffiti... it's not going to be much better. And while we're dreaming, lets get a decent price structure where the cost of contacting me by cellphone is your expense, not mine, and text messages are cheaper than the bandwidth needed for talking. --
Compare:
"There's this thing about him not being very smart, which is the part I think I hate the most. The first president ever who has an MBA, and he's not very smart? That's interesting," Kvamme said, shaking his head.
"I just want to be a monkey of moderate intelligence in a suite. I'm going to business school!"
--that Monkey on Futurama
Seriously, look at his record of failure in Texas. Every generation of Bush has built up the family business, except him. He had some minor success using his connections to get some funding for the baseball thing. Some of the bushisms are "surface" goofs, some really are representative of some fundamental lacks. --
Slashdot Mirror
It's a good point, the web isn't that great as "mass media" for time critical. You can get your message to a lot of people over a long time, or a few people very quickly, and for the end user it has custom content like nothing before in history, but anything from breaking news to that Victoria's Secret model multimedia thing they planned is vulnerable to "slashdot effect"-like things.
Given the time energy and persistence most people will put into the cube, this is no different than the real cube.
Anyone remember the old "RATE YOUR MIND PLA"? One of the first time the "15" sliding puzzle was brought to the public's attention (15 tiles on a 4x4 grid, slide around to make a certain pattern) by Sam Lloyd, it was impossible to solve, and the best you could do was spell out "RATE YOUR MIND PLA" instead of "RATE YOUR MIND PAL" (though according to this page, it might be able to work if you can interchange the two R tiles...)
Buy yeah, disassembling the blocks gave better results than swapping the stickers. Hofstadter (in Metamagical Themas) points out how damn clever the internal mechanism is, so taking it apart is a bit educational to boot.
Sounds strikingly similar to the argument that stuff like Microsoft SmartTags or other content-warping stuff is ok, since there'll be an opt-out for sites.
Well, they had basically the same thing on the original series, they'd relied on the idea of "the theory of parallel development" to explain how Kirk and Co. could end up on the planet of the Nazis, the Romans (if the empire hadn't ended), the gangsters (no wait... the aliens 'read a book' on mobland), the indians (remember Kirk (Kur-ock? was it?) becoming part of the tribe... the holodeck was just some handwaving to make the same kind of storytelling possible without straining credulity quite so much. (Though obviously it had its own unbelievabilities built in)
My love has been and always will be the "Space" lines; we know that castles and dinosaurs and houses don't really have little round nubs, but the spaceships of the future might; the same geeky love of scifi's possibilities for the future extended to lego.
And that's one of the reasons I've never been a big fan of the generic brick sets; Legos are, essentially, a kids 3D CAD kit in solid form. When all you have is clunky squares, all you can build then is clunky square things, but wings, engines, lasers, cockpits... with those, you could make things with a real sense of design, and more 3D presence than drawing on paper.
Nah, the web's still pretty damn electric. Whaddya think all those routers and servers run on, little hamsters or Flintstone style birds looking into the camera and going 'it's a living'?
Oh... nevermind.
Hmmm... Actually, how many just plain USB sticks could I get going on a PC?
I wonder if the X-box might make a decent homebrew platform... I've been looking for a dev kit for a system w/ 4 controllers for a long time.
Open Source fans might not get to close to this one. MAME loses a great deal of its appeal without mostly illegal ROMs to use on it. (There might be some legal ones, but the majority aren't.) And although most of the ROMs might seem like 'abandonware', it is taking away modern-day money from some commercial releases. (No one thought circa-1995 machines could do arcade emulation til the Williams Arcade Pack came out.) Some of the coolest things I found for my "new" ps one and my Dreamcast are multiplayer classics like Gauntlet, Super Sprint, and arcade Warlords.
Something like MAME for Xbox is a double threat, bridging the PC/Console divide.
<karmawhore>On the other hand... mame.dk is a helluva resource.</karmawhore> It's almost as good as Killer List of Videogames for screenshots, and better for other reasons...
After six weeks of data collection and statistical analysis, I completed my report. My analysis showed that, in attacks on our B-29s from the rear, it cost the enemy 70 lost fighter planes, on average, to shoot down one of our bombers. But in frontal attacks, the Japanese lost only three fighters for every B-29 they downed. This result differed starkly from the results of a massive combat simulation study, done back home, that had concluded that B-29s would be most vulnerable to attacks from behind! In light of the new findings, bomber formations and tactics were modified to bring greater firepower to bear against frontal attacks. These changes, together with some minor technical modifications, largely solved the problem
Any guesses what they were doing wrong with the "massive combat simulation study"?
I'm pretty much willing to accept the validity of the Turing Test, but I'm not sure if such a simple methodology is going to scale well. At some point, to hold your own in a conversation, you need to develop a structure to represent the outside world, and I'm not sure if a straightforward neural net implementation will get you there; admittedly it depends on how complex a neural net system you introduce.
Born out of practical experience implementing compilers?
Seems to be the wrong way 'round...keep up this thinking and we'll all be coding in assembler language! At this stage, languages are meant to make thing easier for the programmer.
Of course, being a programmer I might be somewhat biased...
I'm not a very close observer to any of these things, but it seems like the recently noticed telnetd exploit has really screwed over more sites than Code Red has, which seems more of a bandwidth hog. I mean, a years-old simple string buffer overflow giving root access on so many linux boxes is inexcusable for people trying to "sell" Linux on its general security and reliability...
Also (and this is backed up by Blizzard's Bill Roper in that one Gamespy Top 50 that was posted here) Wing Commander also sold a huge number of the then-current 386 systems.
This article is barely academic, it's more of a mishmash "here are some games that were important or I think are cool." The text he throws to justify including The Sims and Black and White show that. ("It isn't really a multiplayer game..." etc.)
It reminds me of the paper I wrote for an A-life class, http://www.alienbill.com/vgames/alife.html, where I use the flimsiest excuse to argue why 2600 Battlezone is batter than Robot Tank. I then tried to show Classic Video Games as containing simple examples of A-life, which was pushing it. (I think that paper brought me from a solid A to a B+)
This article (cleaned up from link of previous poster) talks about how white LEDs helped make this possible... I was wondering how they planned to illuminate that without fiberoptics. I wonder how much tumble there is to the thing, if they might miss something interesting because the camera faced the wrong way as it passed through the system.
--
X-Box is going to be the premier machine for multiplayer.
Several others have pointed out that most 4 player games suck anyway, because there just isn't enough screen space, and they're right.
A big TV, at least 27", takes care of the screen real estate. IMO. 'Course I might be spoiled with my 36" behemoth.
The X-Box is the only console I've seen that allows you to hook several consoles together on a LAN, to either fit more players on, or to give each player more screen space.
The PS had one-on-one console linking, not all that well utilized. And while I think making ad hoc LANs is pretty cool, one TV per person takes a lot of room, generates a lot of heat, and requires a lot of tv hauling.
One last thing: I think it will be quite hard to beat the x-box controller. The psx, ps2, and n64 controllers all sucked, but the xbox controller was actually large enough to fit my hands without feeling cramped, and the buttons and joysticks were all placed perfectly.
I would rather have the xbox controller over the gamecube controller (which looks like a bad version of the playstation controllers).
That's funny, most reviewers have said that the X-box controller is a bad (and oversized) version of the Dreamcast controller. Even the ones with big hands say it's too damn big. The gamecube controller is clearly an extension of the N64 controller, which was way ahead of its time, with very clever grouping of buttons (not like the PSX's 4 identical shoulder buttons, just waiting for you to screw up), a real D-pad, and the reintroduction of the analog stick to modern gaming (way ahead of the dual shock). I like my N64 controllers better than my dreamcast controllers (too bad the VMUs weren't better utilized) so I assume I'll prefer Gamecube's to X-box's.
--
You can take your sentence "So many games that implement >2 players on consoles suck", remove "implement >2 players" and still have a true sentence. Many games suck. On the other hand, Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros, Golden Eye / Perfect Dark / Turok, Bomberman, Mario Party, Mario Tennis, Powerstone 2, Rush 2049, etc etc don't suck. Yeah, you need a big TV to really do it with style. "Pay for the extra ports"... like what about paying for a friggin' DVD player and PSX compatability... both worthwhile features, but not ones everyone wants. I've been "post college" for 5 years now. Yes, it's not easy to invite people over, but it's worth it. With Gamecube and Dreamcast and X-box, I have the option, and will likely have more and better multiplayer game options with them than I will with PS2 multitap.
And to clearify terms, (for elsewhere in the thread) usually by "multiplayer" I mean "shared console" multiplayer, not "online network" multiplayer.. yes for the former to shine you need A. a big tv and B. friends, but it's a hell of a lot more social.
--
Right now, Nintendo seems to be the only company that really gets how important multiplayer is.
Dreamcast started to get the right idea, with 4 ports, but I think they had more of a PSX vibe going on, with as many or more 2 player than 4 player games around. I think X-box might end up in a similar fashion even with 4 ports, since its PC heritage doesn't have a good multiplayer tradition either. And PS2, where you need a multitap for that? Feh. Few gamemakers are anxious to support anything but out of the box hardware.
Yes, online console gaming has a big future, but blasting 2 or 3 buddies to smithereens while talking trash, all on the couch will beat out getting your ass handed to you by faceless, lamely-nicknamed punks who spend way too many hours at this stuff.
--
It's been a long time coming and it's still not that great. It still has that little bendy creaky quality at the end of syllables.
The main problem is sampling became so cheap, that some of the incentive for pushing it beyond a 1983 Commodore 64 running the all-software S.A.M. was lost. Now maybe that paying for voice talent is the limiting factor, this will improve.
Jar Jar the first all-computer major character in a full length flick my ass, his annoying voice was voiced just like the flintstones.
--
Well, the site's being slashdotted to hell... I caught this yesterday (on memepool, which was already slowing the site down) and mirrored one of the more interesting things, a trading card peek at the 'yoda religion' that Lucas put the smack down on (and rightfully so)-- you can see the card here, along with direct links to some of the coolest things on the site. (like Atha Prime (slashdotted), possibly the first idea for a post-ROTJ storyline badguy, and this unreleased minirig (also slashdotted) clipon for the Falcon. And some other non-slashdotted, extended Star-Wars-iverse links as well. )
--
At the end of may I wrote up spacewar for my kisrael.com quote/link blog:
Spacewar! is one of the grand-daddies of modern videogames, and a much deeper deathmatch than Pong. (I was amazed at how developed its deathmatch became when I read this old Rolling Stones article.) Written by MIT Hackers who were inspired by the space opera Fiction of E.E. "Doc" Smith. Someone has an the original game running on a PDP-1 emulator. There's a decent funny introduction at classicgaming.com and a more comprehensive set of Spacewar! links as well. (Possibly the most obvious sequal to Spacewar! was the brilliant Star Control series. The first game added 12 new types of ships, each with 2 unique weapons systems, and the second created a whole universe to support it. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.)
--
How worried are people about long term exposure to CRT radiation? Is it chicken little, or do the hours and hours and hours we spend in front of these things mean something?
--
The tone was a bit snarky, but whatever, it is an interesting accomplishment.
Of course, if Microsoft figured out how to make a friendly UI for their organizer in the first place, it would be closer to a moot point. (Honestly, most of the Palm 3rd party stuff isn't that great anyway, IMO as a 4-year-palm-fan) Microsoft never seemed to understand that the desktop UI doesn't scale down very well, you need to start simply and build up. That's the real power of palm.
--
WAP isn't the real problem. If anything, it's that stripped down language WML. The only crimp WAP adds is that ridiculous per transfer byte limit, a bit under 1.5k, the compressed version that is. But the real problem is-- unsurprisingly-- the crusty hardware the stuff runs on. Unless this new standard insists on certain minimal UI... mostly, real keyboards or an acceptable substitute like graffiti... it's not going to be much better. And while we're dreaming, lets get a decent price structure where the cost of contacting me by cellphone is your expense, not mine, and text messages are cheaper than the bandwidth needed for talking.
--
Compare:
"There's this thing about him not being very smart, which is the part I think I hate the most. The first president ever who has an MBA, and he's not very smart? That's interesting," Kvamme said, shaking his head.
"I just want to be a monkey of moderate intelligence in a suite. I'm going to business school!" --that Monkey on Futurama
Seriously, look at his record of failure in Texas. Every generation of Bush has built up the family business, except him. He had some minor success using his connections to get some funding for the baseball thing. Some of the bushisms are "surface" goofs, some really are representative of some fundamental lacks.
--