The only game in which Ridley "died" and later came back was the original Metroid, simply because Nintendo hadn't planned a sequel at the time. He wasn't in Metroid II, and while he was in the Metroid Prime games, he survived all of those encounters. He died for real in Super Metroid. The Ridley in Metroid Fusion is a copy of him that the X Parasite made.
So... I have no idea what they're going to do to bring him back in this game. (unless it's set before Super Metroid)
the whole adventure of finding new areas or trying to skip areas is pretty much gone in the 3D versions
Not at all. It's more difficult than it used to be, but there's still plenty of sequence breaking to be done. Take a look over at http://www.metroid2002.com/ .
I have my MX Revolution (the Best Mouse Ever Made) set up with shortcuts for manipulating tabs rather than the silly default fwd/back buttons. However, after about half an hour of googling and fiddling with repositories, I was no closer to a working mouse. Now, I'm sure some will be quick yell "but it's the manufacturers fault! They don't provide any drivers!". This'd be fine if: a) there weren't custom drivers for both windows and OS X available b) the custom drivers for Linux didn't require me to DOWNGRADE THE OPERATING SYSTEM in order to install.
Setting up fancy mice is, without a doubt, one of the biggest pains in the ass of Linux. However, it is possible to actually get them working if you're willing to do some work at the command line, and you actually don't need to install any special drivers. Most Linux distros come with a mouse driver called "evdev" that does a great job of recognizing all of the buttons available on any given mouse. Here is some information about setting up X to use the evdev driver, specifically for an MX Revolution.
The hard part is actually getting the buttons to do things. While the driver will recognize all of those buttons, they're useless if they don't have any actions bound to them, and I've yet to find a Linux GUI for mouse configuration that could handle anything fancier than a standard two-button mouse. You'll have to use a program called xbindkeys to do that; here is some information about that.
My project is a good couple thousand lines of code spread out over many files, no libraries.
A good couple thousand? Heck, that's nothing. I've got single files with a few thousand lines. A project that I'm working on right now has about 60,000 lines of Javascript, and that's only because it's really the only viable language for in-browser scripting; we've got about 250,000 lines of code in other languages (C++, Java, sh, and a little Python).
All of it was made by about four people, all of whom have dipped their hands in everything -- and in my experience, the Javascript is horrible to work with. The complete lack of typing and the unusual scoping rules are causing constant confusion. There appear to be no consistent coding conventions across third-party libraries, either, except that most of them are designed to be as terse and confusing as possible. Debugging it across multiple browsers is also pretty horrible, since every browser has its own implementation with its own quirks and there appears to be no such thing as a definitive, rigorous syntax validator.
If you code cleanly then you won't have a problem with JS.
You could say the exact same thing about any language. In my experience, counting the dozen-something languages I've used on different projects over the years, the only language I've had more problems with than Javascript was Visual Basic. (and I am never, ever using VB again)
If you just want to bash out words and leave the layout to somebody else, why aren't you just using something like TextEdit? (since you mentioned NeoOffice, I assume you're on a Mac) Word and NeoOffice are both horrible overkill when it comes to just saving out text without applying any sort of formatting. (can't speak for Scrivener, not familiar with it)
As popular as the game is, and knowing it can run on a *nix variant, Blizzard still won't produce a native Linux client. So why do you suppose that is?
They're a company, so the answer is simple: it's not worth the cost. Linux's install base among desktop users is less than 10% of what OS X has, and they've stated in the past that the only reasons they develop OS X versions of their games are because some of their developers prefer OS X and because maintaining multi-platform compatibility helps them find bugs that they wouldn't find otherwise. The OS X version makes them a small amount of money, but its primary usefulness is as quality control.
(by the way, OS X is not a *nix variant, it is a full-fledged UNIX)
But how much of those libraries exist to achieve Java's religious beliefs on abstraction?
Wow, how did this get modded insightful? For one, calling the design of a programming language a "religious belief", then asking a vague question about it without providing even a basis of an answer is just inflammatory.
But the answer that anybody who knows what they're talking about will tell you is, none of them. Java's abstraction mechanisms are built into the language. None of the standard libraries are necessary to support it. They take advantage of it, of course, and you'd be crazy to not take advantage of one of the language's features. Try taking a look at a tree representation of all of the classes in the standard library. The vast majority of classes are not more than one or two levels down from the top-level Object. The things that are deeper are typically things that are complex in any language -- CORBA, GUI toolkits, etc. It certainly looks much cleaner than many graphs I've seen of C++ libraries that abused multiple inheritence.
It usually outperforms its Java sibling in an order of magnitude.
Do you have any actual benchmarks for that? According to the benchmarks page at the official cLucene wiki, cLucene is roughly twice as fast as the Java Lucene at indexing, and it's only about 10% faster at the actual searching. That's not even close to an order of magnitude.
Because you copied it over from another computer, or it got installed by another program? I've got a pristine install of XP that I keep in a virtual machine, and opening up a command prompt and typing "deltree" results in "'deltree' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file."
The would rather punish GameStop for selling a used copy of a game?
Yes, actually. Game publishers make zero money from the used game business; in fact, they perceive the sale of used copies as the loss of a sale of new copies that would have otherwise occurred. If the game publishing industry could make it illegal to sell used games, they would do so in a heartbeat.
If DRM doesnt work, and they drive stores like GameStop out of business, then they will just drive MORE people to download cracked games...
That doesn't really make sense. While GameStop makes the majority of their profit from used game sales, they're far from the only game retailer. If GS dies because they can't sell used games, people who are willing to buy a game will just go to Best Buy, or Wal-mart, or Amazon, and pick up a new game there. The only people whom that will make download cracked games are the ones who aren't willing to buy new games in the first place -- and the publishers don't care about those people because, again, they're not making any profit off of them.
Ok, so what you really meant was, "I hate all things Japanese because I assume they're Dragonball Z clones, and I'm just assuming that all the FF games are not only turn-based, but the gameplay is exactly like an old D&D-knockoff NES game that I didn't like. Therefore, I hate Final Fantasy."
Do you realize how absurd your argument sounds? And then you wonder how we'll they can do without your money -- well, so far they've become one of the largest game developers in the world, so I'm sure they're going to collapse under the pressure of some guys on the internet who don't like it when they protect their copyrights and have never bought one of their products anyway...
Umm, Crystal Defenders came out recently. They published Persona 4 in Europe. Echoes of Time is a few months old, but that was pretty good, too. Same with Lost Winds. I suppose they got mixed reviews, but there's also Star Ocean 4 and The Last Remnant. The FF4 sequel and Dragon Quest 9 will be out in a few months. If you count games that were recently released in Japan, there's also Kuroshitsuji and Dissidia.
Wait, was I supposed to not actually say anything?
If you deliberately wanted to violate the camera ban, there's nothing they can do about it anyway.
Yes, that's the point -- restrictions against bringing cameras into places aren't meant to stop people from intentionally breaking the law. Otherwise they could just say "Don't take any pictures"; they're meant to stop people from accidentally breaking the law. It's meant to stop somebody from hacking into your device and making it silently take pictures and upload them somewhere while you're unaware of it. Putting a sticker on there that probably won't fall off isn't an acceptable compromise.
I'm amazed at how many say "Put some tape over it"
on
Portables Without Cameras?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Or paint, or plastic, or whatever.
Do you really think the guys he works with are so stupid that somebody won't eventually say "hey, is that covering up a camera?" then peel it back and discover the camera there? And then the guy in question will get fired and probably face legal charges for knowingly bringing a functional camera into the place.
You're best off just getting something without a camera, really. If you absolutely have to get a device with a camera, find a technician who will physically remove the device for you. The feds do not appreciate people who think they can half-ass security measures and get away with it.
Any Xbox 360 has been able to play 1080p video for years. I use connect360 on my OS X box for streaming video and it works perfectly, so I don't know what's wrong with the clients you've tried.
Again, I don't understand, you say to play the game, yet you advocate grinding?
Have you actually played WoW? His point was that you don't have to grind. You can easily get from 1 to 80 and get all of the equipment you need just by doing quests. The only thing in the game that requires any amount of grinding to get is the Artisan Flying skill, which isn't available until 70 and isn't something that even most hardcore players bother with until they're 77 or so (all it does is make you fly faster).
How in the name of Jesus Allah Christ (tm) is WoW complex? There's 2 builds for each class, PvE and PvP, and all you do is left click / hit hotkeys over and over as everything is autohit. Complex is a game like Asheron's Call or Darkfall/a) or Ultima Online.
Sounds to me like you played some pure DPS class to 30 and then quit. Am I right?
In general, the only classes that only have two viable builds are pure DPS classes, and the developers are working pretty hard to change that so that every class has at least three viable builds for PvP or PvE (although the degree of success so far varies by class). Hybrid classes usually have at least three builds. Druids have four, and Death Knights have seven (yes, seven).
Besides that, the complexity isn't in character design. That's something you do once over the course of a few minutes and then go play the game. The real complexity is in the raid encounters. Read up on the tactics required to beat Kael'thas Sunstrider or C'thun or Sartharion. If you run into those (or any other high-level boss fight) and just mash your hotkeys, you're going to die, and you're going to get the rest of your raid killed with you.
Slashdot Mirror
"Debian" is an ancient African word for "can't compile Slackware."
Pass me that hammer, there's a fly on my mother-in-law's forehead
Now that's what I call killing two birds with one stone!
Good thing nobody uses it then - I'd hate to have to make pages work in a browser with less debugging aids than even IE6 offers.
I guess it's also a good thing that Opera has a very nice built-in Javascript debugger called Dragonfly, huh?
The only game in which Ridley "died" and later came back was the original Metroid, simply because Nintendo hadn't planned a sequel at the time. He wasn't in Metroid II, and while he was in the Metroid Prime games, he survived all of those encounters. He died for real in Super Metroid. The Ridley in Metroid Fusion is a copy of him that the X Parasite made.
So... I have no idea what they're going to do to bring him back in this game. (unless it's set before Super Metroid)
the whole adventure of finding new areas or trying to skip areas is pretty much gone in the 3D versions
Not at all. It's more difficult than it used to be, but there's still plenty of sequence breaking to be done. Take a look over at http://www.metroid2002.com/ .
Blah blah blah, everybody hates MS, we know the drill.
But what exactly does this have to do with the article, other than having the word "Microsoft" in it?
No, but you won't be able to aim very well.
(I think you clicked on the wrong article)
I have my MX Revolution (the Best Mouse Ever Made) set up with shortcuts for manipulating tabs rather than the silly default fwd/back buttons. However, after about half an hour of googling and fiddling with repositories, I was no closer to a working mouse. Now, I'm sure some will be quick yell "but it's the manufacturers fault! They don't provide any drivers!". This'd be fine if:
a) there weren't custom drivers for both windows and OS X available
b) the custom drivers for Linux didn't require me to DOWNGRADE THE OPERATING SYSTEM in order to install.
Setting up fancy mice is, without a doubt, one of the biggest pains in the ass of Linux. However, it is possible to actually get them working if you're willing to do some work at the command line, and you actually don't need to install any special drivers. Most Linux distros come with a mouse driver called "evdev" that does a great job of recognizing all of the buttons available on any given mouse. Here is some information about setting up X to use the evdev driver, specifically for an MX Revolution.
The hard part is actually getting the buttons to do things. While the driver will recognize all of those buttons, they're useless if they don't have any actions bound to them, and I've yet to find a Linux GUI for mouse configuration that could handle anything fancier than a standard two-button mouse. You'll have to use a program called xbindkeys to do that; here is some information about that.
My project is a good couple thousand lines of code spread out over many files, no libraries.
A good couple thousand? Heck, that's nothing. I've got single files with a few thousand lines. A project that I'm working on right now has about 60,000 lines of Javascript, and that's only because it's really the only viable language for in-browser scripting; we've got about 250,000 lines of code in other languages (C++, Java, sh, and a little Python).
All of it was made by about four people, all of whom have dipped their hands in everything -- and in my experience, the Javascript is horrible to work with. The complete lack of typing and the unusual scoping rules are causing constant confusion. There appear to be no consistent coding conventions across third-party libraries, either, except that most of them are designed to be as terse and confusing as possible. Debugging it across multiple browsers is also pretty horrible, since every browser has its own implementation with its own quirks and there appears to be no such thing as a definitive, rigorous syntax validator.
If you code cleanly then you won't have a problem with JS.
You could say the exact same thing about any language. In my experience, counting the dozen-something languages I've used on different projects over the years, the only language I've had more problems with than Javascript was Visual Basic. (and I am never, ever using VB again)
If you just want to bash out words and leave the layout to somebody else, why aren't you just using something like TextEdit? (since you mentioned NeoOffice, I assume you're on a Mac) Word and NeoOffice are both horrible overkill when it comes to just saving out text without applying any sort of formatting. (can't speak for Scrivener, not familiar with it)
As popular as the game is, and knowing it can run on a *nix variant, Blizzard still won't produce a native Linux client. So why do you suppose that is?
They're a company, so the answer is simple: it's not worth the cost. Linux's install base among desktop users is less than 10% of what OS X has, and they've stated in the past that the only reasons they develop OS X versions of their games are because some of their developers prefer OS X and because maintaining multi-platform compatibility helps them find bugs that they wouldn't find otherwise. The OS X version makes them a small amount of money, but its primary usefulness is as quality control.
(by the way, OS X is not a *nix variant, it is a full-fledged UNIX)
But how much of those libraries exist to achieve Java's religious beliefs on abstraction?
Wow, how did this get modded insightful? For one, calling the design of a programming language a "religious belief", then asking a vague question about it without providing even a basis of an answer is just inflammatory.
But the answer that anybody who knows what they're talking about will tell you is, none of them. Java's abstraction mechanisms are built into the language. None of the standard libraries are necessary to support it. They take advantage of it, of course, and you'd be crazy to not take advantage of one of the language's features. Try taking a look at a tree representation of all of the classes in the standard library. The vast majority of classes are not more than one or two levels down from the top-level Object. The things that are deeper are typically things that are complex in any language -- CORBA, GUI toolkits, etc. It certainly looks much cleaner than many graphs I've seen of C++ libraries that abused multiple inheritence.
It usually outperforms its Java sibling in an order of magnitude.
Do you have any actual benchmarks for that? According to the benchmarks page at the official cLucene wiki, cLucene is roughly twice as fast as the Java Lucene at indexing, and it's only about 10% faster at the actual searching. That's not even close to an order of magnitude.
Because you copied it over from another computer, or it got installed by another program? I've got a pristine install of XP that I keep in a virtual machine, and opening up a command prompt and typing "deltree" results in "'deltree' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file."
You think that's bad? Guin Saga is up to 123 volumes and counting.
The would rather punish GameStop for selling a used copy of a game?
Yes, actually. Game publishers make zero money from the used game business; in fact, they perceive the sale of used copies as the loss of a sale of new copies that would have otherwise occurred. If the game publishing industry could make it illegal to sell used games, they would do so in a heartbeat.
If DRM doesnt work, and they drive stores like GameStop out of business, then they will just drive MORE people to download cracked games...
That doesn't really make sense. While GameStop makes the majority of their profit from used game sales, they're far from the only game retailer. If GS dies because they can't sell used games, people who are willing to buy a game will just go to Best Buy, or Wal-mart, or Amazon, and pick up a new game there. The only people whom that will make download cracked games are the ones who aren't willing to buy new games in the first place -- and the publishers don't care about those people because, again, they're not making any profit off of them.
Ok, so what you really meant was, "I hate all things Japanese because I assume they're Dragonball Z clones, and I'm just assuming that all the FF games are not only turn-based, but the gameplay is exactly like an old D&D-knockoff NES game that I didn't like. Therefore, I hate Final Fantasy."
Do you realize how absurd your argument sounds? And then you wonder how we'll they can do without your money -- well, so far they've become one of the largest game developers in the world, so I'm sure they're going to collapse under the pressure of some guys on the internet who don't like it when they protect their copyrights and have never bought one of their products anyway...
Umm, Crystal Defenders came out recently. They published Persona 4 in Europe. Echoes of Time is a few months old, but that was pretty good, too. Same with Lost Winds. I suppose they got mixed reviews, but there's also Star Ocean 4 and The Last Remnant. The FF4 sequel and Dragon Quest 9 will be out in a few months. If you count games that were recently released in Japan, there's also Kuroshitsuji and Dissidia.
Wait, was I supposed to not actually say anything?
If you deliberately wanted to violate the camera ban, there's nothing they can do about it anyway.
Yes, that's the point -- restrictions against bringing cameras into places aren't meant to stop people from intentionally breaking the law. Otherwise they could just say "Don't take any pictures"; they're meant to stop people from accidentally breaking the law. It's meant to stop somebody from hacking into your device and making it silently take pictures and upload them somewhere while you're unaware of it. Putting a sticker on there that probably won't fall off isn't an acceptable compromise.
Or paint, or plastic, or whatever.
Do you really think the guys he works with are so stupid that somebody won't eventually say "hey, is that covering up a camera?" then peel it back and discover the camera there? And then the guy in question will get fired and probably face legal charges for knowingly bringing a functional camera into the place.
You're best off just getting something without a camera, really. If you absolutely have to get a device with a camera, find a technician who will physically remove the device for you. The feds do not appreciate people who think they can half-ass security measures and get away with it.
Any Xbox 360 has been able to play 1080p video for years. I use connect360 on my OS X box for streaming video and it works perfectly, so I don't know what's wrong with the clients you've tried.
Build yourself nice small PC with some horse power and HDMI out. Network it to a storage server and play every dam media format available easily.
Please, show me the part list for a small form-factor PC that can play 1080p video and costs less than an Xbox 360.
Again, I don't understand, you say to play the game, yet you advocate grinding?
Have you actually played WoW? His point was that you don't have to grind. You can easily get from 1 to 80 and get all of the equipment you need just by doing quests. The only thing in the game that requires any amount of grinding to get is the Artisan Flying skill, which isn't available until 70 and isn't something that even most hardcore players bother with until they're 77 or so (all it does is make you fly faster).
Hey, don't knock it. Photoshop Hero is the best game ever.
Ok, so your complaint isn't "WoW isn't complex," it's "The first tier of WotLK dungeons are too easy." Well, the devs know, it was intentional, and the next content patch will be tougher.
How in the name of Jesus Allah Christ (tm) is WoW complex? There's 2 builds for each class, PvE and PvP, and all you do is left click / hit hotkeys over and over as everything is autohit. Complex is a game like Asheron's Call or Darkfall/a) or Ultima Online.
Sounds to me like you played some pure DPS class to 30 and then quit. Am I right?
In general, the only classes that only have two viable builds are pure DPS classes, and the developers are working pretty hard to change that so that every class has at least three viable builds for PvP or PvE (although the degree of success so far varies by class). Hybrid classes usually have at least three builds. Druids have four, and Death Knights have seven (yes, seven).
Besides that, the complexity isn't in character design. That's something you do once over the course of a few minutes and then go play the game. The real complexity is in the raid encounters. Read up on the tactics required to beat Kael'thas Sunstrider or C'thun or Sartharion. If you run into those (or any other high-level boss fight) and just mash your hotkeys, you're going to die, and you're going to get the rest of your raid killed with you.