At least they are starting the second season now...that gives them time to catch up and possibly show the third while its actually current. (I hope!) SciFi sure did drag its heels about getting it on the lineup though.
The second season is BTW fantastic. You will miss Eccleston for all of about an episode or two. I have watched Dr Who since the Tom Baker days and have actually grown to like David Tennants version best of all. He has the sense of humor that Baker had, the wit of Sylvester McCoy and more athleticisim than any Doctor since Peter Davison. Christmas Ivasion is a great introduction while New Earth is a bit silly. By far the best of the second season episodes is The Girl in the Fireplace, though Cybermen and Satans Pit two parters are also fantastic. The only real stinker in the second season is Love & Monsters which as a farting monster designed by a child (chosen from a contest) that looks remarkably like Fat Bastard from Austin Powers. Overall the second season ends up even better than the first, its peppered with old favorites as well as a few rather shocking surprises.
They have to get Little Computer People, The Sims has nothing on that classic:) Above all I would love to see Miner 2049'er and Attack of the Mutant Camels. I love old school gaming but can only take Nostalgia in small doses, howerver the price is ok and the kids will get a laugh out of seeing what daddy played when he was their age.
After the recent studies lessening the effects of piracy who is really surprised with one that states that the vastly overblown figures were actually "conservative" now they can go to whichever politician they have in their pockets and whine that the original numbers have to be true.
I would love to see a week or better yet a month where "piracy" by their definition ceased to be. Friends didnt pass on mix tapes, no one downloaded a game or song, no one loaned out a book, no one tried to move their windows license to a new computer, etc, I would then really love to see the real results of the ginormous sales they really think would happen. My prediction they fall drastically across the board. Yep alot of people pirate, but alot of people also buy things based on having heard it, played it or seen it and liked it.
I guess im just a low rent gamer, if I had to define HighBrow gaming I would describe it as gaming were fun takes a backseat to realisim. I can remember back in the early days of gaming I had a friend who was the "Highbrow" sort, he would spend hours and hours playing "Reach For the Stars" getting angry at his computer and spouting on and on about how such and such political this and money that. I on the other hand became totally obsessed with a game called "Star Control" his was all about managing resources and mine was about pretending your Han Solo smuggling, making contact and usually battling it out Omega Race style (ships movement was based on inertia, a bit confusing for newbies but great fun once you learned how to bank and drift). He nearly had ulcers over his game which he declared as vastly superior, mine just brings back warm smiles. In his later divorce, part of the Irreconcilable differences defined in the proceeding was his unhealthy obsession with his games. I think in way turn based strategy for him was a way to feel that he was in control of something, in real life he was low rank grunt who was usually in trouble more than not.
I have a friend now that is obsessed with Flight Sims, he has a special chair, dual thrustmaster controllers and pedals, a triple monitor display and half the time he is nutty enough to wear a flight jacket while playing. I think he is half insane but he enjoys it. I think the bottom line is how you approach gaming it you obsess to the point were its a tedious job then you need to get out and get a life. If you look at it as a hobby and remember its supposed to be fun I dont see any problems.
String theory is no more unproven than Intelligent Design, actually both are quite similar in that they make a convenient explanation for things that are otherwise unexplainable. I guess Athiests and Non-Athiests all needs something to believe in.
Back in the 50's did parents sue Clayton Moore for encouraging kids to play with guns? There has always been and always will be a certain group that attempt to shift the blame from parenting and personal responsibility to an "external influence". Since the Baroque era and most likely before pop culture has always been tagged as the cause of the decline of civilization. Where is the uproar over television, GTA is far less gory than the average episode of CSI. I've read many books with far more graphic violence. Those are accepted now since the old guard have lived with them most if not all of their lives. When we are all in our 60's and 70's video games will be ok and we will surely be bitching about something else new that we dont understand and see as a corruption of morality.
This very thing is coming back to bite intel on the ass lately. The idiots who cant let go of the clockspeed thing. I had a notebook I was recently trying to sell, a guy that was interested was completely irate because I had the nerve to sell a 1.6ghz notebook for only a few dollars less than some other guy was selling a 2.0ghz system. He refused to comprehend that the one I was selling was a centrino while the other one he was looking at was an early p4 mobile and that mine was actually faster and cheaper. I finally grew so frustrated that I lied and told him I sold it already and reposted the ad with a new picture.
For me not getting annoying popups actually increases the chances that I purchase a product. I will generally go out of my way to find a non annoying competitor when im shopping.
No by my logic, I generally play a guitar the same way I hold chords with the same fingering and strum or pick the same way pretty much regardless of the guitar. The controller looks like a guitar and you hold it like a guitar, but you "play" it much differently from what I read. Habits in playing do tend to effect me, I learned to play a G for instance with what is concidered an incorrect fingering by most instructors but if I cant get used to doing it the correct way.
I guess im just not adventurous enough to take a power drill to my strings or pick them with my teeth, though I did smash one once by accident ala Pete Townsend.
Re:Fitting that it's been 10 years.
on
The Decade of the N64
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I dont think it was so much that Nintendo's quality went down as much as what gamers wanted went from gameplay to pretty graphics. Paper Mario was a great game but compare it to the pretty cinematics of Final Fantasy 7 and which one would you pick? I would even be willing to say that the majority were willing to lower their standards a bit for prettier games. Sony was able to build enough hype of the playstation and a general belief that if a game is bigger in size its better in quality and continued to build on that with the PS2.
This generation is IMHO the first one in a long time where they are all starting out even, 3rd party support is bigger than its been in a long time for Nintendo but they still have the half true-half false tarnished legacy of the past, Sony has brough itself back to the pack with its pricing scheme, delays and lackluster launch titles and the 360 is still plodding along with all the baggage that the Microsoft name lends to the console. I really think this is going to be the first true "console war" since the SNES vs Genesis vs Turbografx days.
The local Microcenter here sells 1gig flash drives and 1 gig sd for $15.00 now they are impulse items at the registers, if they can sell them for that you know the cost of the memory itself is pretty minimal. Most games are still under a gig but I would be more than willing to pay the extra $20-30 in media costs for the durability of a cartridge.
I play guitar...though im no Hendrix or Van Halen, I worry that playing it would completely jack up my real guitar playing. I know it sounds silly, but do any actual guitar players play this? it looks like a lot of fun, I just dont want to end up developing bad playing habits due to letting the controller retrain me.
There seemed to be alot of bad blood between Square and Nintendo for quite a while, wasnt there a span of a few years between handheld game releases from square that many attributed to the break up? Still had the n64 won the console war you can bet that square would have looked for a way to squeeze their stuff on a cartridge. My point was that Square has always been opportunistic for good or bad.
Sorry I thought I had read that both FF11 and Front Mission online had both been announced for the 360. I do remember several positive statements about the 360 as well as hints that final fantasy (proper, i know about crystal chronicles and the remakes on the handhelds) would no longer be exclusively Sony.
Its a nice idea and one that is probably a long time coming, but phasing something like that into place will take an incredibly long time. Look at the struggles of PCI express, its still not in 50% of the newer motherboards and systems though its benefits are more than apparent. Its just been in the past couple years that we have seen a shift to full usb and most machines still come with ps2, serial and parallel ports anyway. Dramatic changes to the PC standards are very difficult, there are millions of existing machines that still need support. Perhaps if it was tied to a new socket standard in the future it could slowly be phased in through upgrades, but I see the chances as very very slim.
Square for all the great games they have made in the past has always been a fickle company, when the hype was behind the PS1 they dropped Nintendo like a hot potato and joined the Sony bandwagon, when the Xbox started gaining ground they suddenly gushed over Microsoft, now that the Wii has the buzz they are trying hard to kiss up to everyone so they can pick sides after the war has officially started.
The comments though sound like Sony's success depends on Square which if I was Sony would really piss me off...after all Square hasnt really been Square in years. The momentum of Final Fantasy is relying on past reputation and the ignorance of those that dont know that the main reasons for Final Fantasy's success have moved on to other development companies.
When I was younger I would buy a cd every couple weeks, in the past year I have purchased two. I have a huge cd collection but it stopped growing, there just isnt enough compelling music out there. In the past year I picked up a Santana cd and The Wreckers debut album. I havent gone on strike against the record labels, though I do not buy on impulse anymore, and wont just buy a disk for one or two songs. My tastes havent really changed, I just have lost interest. I have a few independant disks that I picked up at shows and have purchased a couple dozen tunes on itunes. My wife has picked up a few disks, but to me most of the bands she is into sound the same. Maybe im just old and cranky but it just seems like the stuff being pushed these days is just so formula that owning one of the bands songs is like owning them all.
So far Vista looks to be more beneficial to the Linux and MAC communities than MS. I have already been asked by one of my larger clients to look into "alternate" solutions after their company president read an article about hardware requirements and panicked. So far I have seen nothing that really benefits the end user other than yet more "wizards" to make things more complicated for those that already know what they are doing and a pretty interface that puts enough of a resource drain on the system to require otherwise unneccesary upgrades. I guess in the long run MS can depend on "retiring" support on 2003 and XP to force users towards Vista but I dont see nearly the amount of voluntary upgrading as MS seems to expect.
This is just the latest in an attempt to survive for the traditional newspapaper. Back when the web first started remember how many newpapers refused to be online at all or required registration hurdles to prevent "linking", after enough bad PR and dropping subscription levels, most reluctantly accepted the web and started to regain credability. I have a newspaper salesperson that comes to my door at least once a month, the last time he was here we argued about the value of the newspaper, he mentioned classified, i mentioned craigs list, he mentioned local news I mentioned kanascity.com, for every "exclusive" I could easily counter with 2-3 web alternatives that were not only more up to date but also allowed a certain level of interactivity. Print newspapers just cant compete.
There has been a huge content shift with many newspapers mainly due to the readiness of up to the minute news online. Many papers now rely on their columnists and unique local features to survive, some have managed to flourish but most will never be as important to their respective cities as they once were, for a publisher that hurts. They all still want to maintain their mini-empires which frankly is impossible in the modern information age. Limiting their content will do nothing but limit the views to their content, further exasperating the very problem they feel they are facing.
What is the benefit of this device? For nearly the same amount you can get a pda capable of running linux that includes a faster processor, an input method and a screen. Am I missing something?
The biggest problem with platform idependance is that the content providers all pick sides and the hardware vendors all work to "own" the segment rather than share and participate in it. Overall an independant standard would increase sales and adopters all around but its never going to happen.
That was my problem with it as well. It would have made a great short, but it evidently has quite a following..i was modded down simply for stating that I didnt care for it:)
That actually proves the point even more...my kids love Napoleon Dynamite but I think 1 1/2 stars was being generous. I remember leaving the theatre thinking that they sure dont make teen movies like they used to. Different strokes I guess...
Umm some problems...and why this is stupid
on
USB Batteries
·
· Score: 1
Most computer have the usbports stacked so they would only be able to charge one at a time.
If you have access to the power brick you have access to an outlet so why not charge them from one.
Charging from the laptop while on battery power would surely drain things probably quicker than the battery could fully charge up.
You can buy around a dozen or more regular rechargables for the price of one of these so whats the point. This is definately one of those "because we can" products like usb mitten warmers and coffee warmers.
Im old enough to remember both Siskel and Ebert totally throttling Star Wars, reviewers cannot review without bias nor should they be expected to. Everyone has different tastes and will always use what they like, are familiar with and are comfortable with as their benchmark. A madden fan for instance isnt going to review a non madden football game as highly simply because the controls and feel of the game are different. Games that are concidered complete crap to many will still find a market that loves them. My son for instance cant get enough of the Fantastic Four game that came out this past year...its complete junk but he gets to play "thing" and bash stuff so he thinks its great. The bottom line is there is no such thing as a barometer for everyones tastes, we all like different things and will judge them accordingly.
Slashdot Mirror
At least they are starting the second season now...that gives them time to catch up and possibly show the third while its actually current. (I hope!) SciFi sure did drag its heels about getting it on the lineup though.
The second season is BTW fantastic. You will miss Eccleston for all of about an episode or two. I have watched Dr Who since the Tom Baker days and have actually grown to like David Tennants version best of all. He has the sense of humor that Baker had, the wit of Sylvester McCoy and more athleticisim than any Doctor since Peter Davison. Christmas Ivasion is a great introduction while New Earth is a bit silly. By far the best of the second season episodes is The Girl in the Fireplace, though Cybermen and Satans Pit two parters are also fantastic. The only real stinker in the second season is Love & Monsters which as a farting monster designed by a child (chosen from a contest) that looks remarkably like Fat Bastard from Austin Powers. Overall the second season ends up even better than the first, its peppered with old favorites as well as a few rather shocking surprises.
They have to get Little Computer People, The Sims has nothing on that classic :) Above all I would love to see Miner 2049'er and Attack of the Mutant Camels. I love old school gaming but can only take Nostalgia in small doses, howerver the price is ok and the kids will get a laugh out of seeing what daddy played when he was their age.
After the recent studies lessening the effects of piracy who is really surprised with one that states that the vastly overblown figures were actually "conservative" now they can go to whichever politician they have in their pockets and whine that the original numbers have to be true.
I would love to see a week or better yet a month where "piracy" by their definition ceased to be. Friends didnt pass on mix tapes, no one downloaded a game or song, no one loaned out a book, no one tried to move their windows license to a new computer, etc, I would then really love to see the real results of the ginormous sales they really think would happen. My prediction they fall drastically across the board. Yep alot of people pirate, but alot of people also buy things based on having heard it, played it or seen it and liked it.
I guess im just a low rent gamer, if I had to define HighBrow gaming I would describe it as gaming were fun takes a backseat to realisim. I can remember back in the early days of gaming I had a friend who was the "Highbrow" sort, he would spend hours and hours playing "Reach For the Stars" getting angry at his computer and spouting on and on about how such and such political this and money that. I on the other hand became totally obsessed with a game called "Star Control" his was all about managing resources and mine was about pretending your Han Solo smuggling, making contact and usually battling it out Omega Race style (ships movement was based on inertia, a bit confusing for newbies but great fun once you learned how to bank and drift). He nearly had ulcers over his game which he declared as vastly superior, mine just brings back warm smiles. In his later divorce, part of the Irreconcilable differences defined in the proceeding was his unhealthy obsession with his games. I think in way turn based strategy for him was a way to feel that he was in control of something, in real life he was low rank grunt who was usually in trouble more than not.
I have a friend now that is obsessed with Flight Sims, he has a special chair, dual thrustmaster controllers and pedals, a triple monitor display and half the time he is nutty enough to wear a flight jacket while playing. I think he is half insane but he enjoys it. I think the bottom line is how you approach gaming it you obsess to the point were its a tedious job then you need to get out and get a life. If you look at it as a hobby and remember its supposed to be fun I dont see any problems.
String theory is no more unproven than Intelligent Design, actually both are quite similar in that they make a convenient explanation for things that are otherwise unexplainable. I guess Athiests and Non-Athiests all needs something to believe in.
Back in the 50's did parents sue Clayton Moore for encouraging kids to play with guns? There has always been and always will be a certain group that attempt to shift the blame from parenting and personal responsibility to an "external influence". Since the Baroque era and most likely before pop culture has always been tagged as the cause of the decline of civilization. Where is the uproar over television, GTA is far less gory than the average episode of CSI. I've read many books with far more graphic violence. Those are accepted now since the old guard have lived with them most if not all of their lives. When we are all in our 60's and 70's video games will be ok and we will surely be bitching about something else new that we dont understand and see as a corruption of morality.
This very thing is coming back to bite intel on the ass lately. The idiots who cant let go of the clockspeed thing. I had a notebook I was recently trying to sell, a guy that was interested was completely irate because I had the nerve to sell a 1.6ghz notebook for only a few dollars less than some other guy was selling a 2.0ghz system. He refused to comprehend that the one I was selling was a centrino while the other one he was looking at was an early p4 mobile and that mine was actually faster and cheaper. I finally grew so frustrated that I lied and told him I sold it already and reposted the ad with a new picture.
For me not getting annoying popups actually increases the chances that I purchase a product. I will generally go out of my way to find a non annoying competitor when im shopping.
No by my logic, I generally play a guitar the same way I hold chords with the same fingering and strum or pick the same way pretty much regardless of the guitar. The controller looks like a guitar and you hold it like a guitar, but you "play" it much differently from what I read. Habits in playing do tend to effect me, I learned to play a G for instance with what is concidered an incorrect fingering by most instructors but if I cant get used to doing it the correct way.
I guess im just not adventurous enough to take a power drill to my strings or pick them with my teeth, though I did smash one once by accident ala Pete Townsend.
I dont think it was so much that Nintendo's quality went down as much as what gamers wanted went from gameplay to pretty graphics. Paper Mario was a great game but compare it to the pretty cinematics of Final Fantasy 7 and which one would you pick? I would even be willing to say that the majority were willing to lower their standards a bit for prettier games. Sony was able to build enough hype of the playstation and a general belief that if a game is bigger in size its better in quality and continued to build on that with the PS2.
This generation is IMHO the first one in a long time where they are all starting out even, 3rd party support is bigger than its been in a long time for Nintendo but they still have the half true-half false tarnished legacy of the past, Sony has brough itself back to the pack with its pricing scheme, delays and lackluster launch titles and the 360 is still plodding along with all the baggage that the Microsoft name lends to the console. I really think this is going to be the first true "console war" since the SNES vs Genesis vs Turbografx days.
The local Microcenter here sells 1gig flash drives and 1 gig sd for $15.00 now they are impulse items at the registers, if they can sell them for that you know the cost of the memory itself is pretty minimal. Most games are still under a gig but I would be more than willing to pay the extra $20-30 in media costs for the durability of a cartridge.
I play guitar...though im no Hendrix or Van Halen, I worry that playing it would completely jack up my real guitar playing. I know it sounds silly, but do any actual guitar players play this? it looks like a lot of fun, I just dont want to end up developing bad playing habits due to letting the controller retrain me.
There seemed to be alot of bad blood between Square and Nintendo for quite a while, wasnt there a span of a few years between handheld game releases from square that many attributed to the break up? Still had the n64 won the console war you can bet that square would have looked for a way to squeeze their stuff on a cartridge. My point was that Square has always been opportunistic for good or bad.
Sorry I thought I had read that both FF11 and Front Mission online had both been announced for the 360. I do remember several positive statements about the 360 as well as hints that final fantasy (proper, i know about crystal chronicles and the remakes on the handhelds) would no longer be exclusively Sony.
Its a nice idea and one that is probably a long time coming, but phasing something like that into place will take an incredibly long time. Look at the struggles of PCI express, its still not in 50% of the newer motherboards and systems though its benefits are more than apparent. Its just been in the past couple years that we have seen a shift to full usb and most machines still come with ps2, serial and parallel ports anyway. Dramatic changes to the PC standards are very difficult, there are millions of existing machines that still need support. Perhaps if it was tied to a new socket standard in the future it could slowly be phased in through upgrades, but I see the chances as very very slim.
Square for all the great games they have made in the past has always been a fickle company, when the hype was behind the PS1 they dropped Nintendo like a hot potato and joined the Sony bandwagon, when the Xbox started gaining ground they suddenly gushed over Microsoft, now that the Wii has the buzz they are trying hard to kiss up to everyone so they can pick sides after the war has officially started.
The comments though sound like Sony's success depends on Square which if I was Sony would really piss me off...after all Square hasnt really been Square in years. The momentum of Final Fantasy is relying on past reputation and the ignorance of those that dont know that the main reasons for Final Fantasy's success have moved on to other development companies.
When I was younger I would buy a cd every couple weeks, in the past year I have purchased two. I have a huge cd collection but it stopped growing, there just isnt enough compelling music out there. In the past year I picked up a Santana cd and The Wreckers debut album. I havent gone on strike against the record labels, though I do not buy on impulse anymore, and wont just buy a disk for one or two songs. My tastes havent really changed, I just have lost interest. I have a few independant disks that I picked up at shows and have purchased a couple dozen tunes on itunes. My wife has picked up a few disks, but to me most of the bands she is into sound the same. Maybe im just old and cranky but it just seems like the stuff being pushed these days is just so formula that owning one of the bands songs is like owning them all.
So far Vista looks to be more beneficial to the Linux and MAC communities than MS. I have already been asked by one of my larger clients to look into "alternate" solutions after their company president read an article about hardware requirements and panicked. So far I have seen nothing that really benefits the end user other than yet more "wizards" to make things more complicated for those that already know what they are doing and a pretty interface that puts enough of a resource drain on the system to require otherwise unneccesary upgrades. I guess in the long run MS can depend on "retiring" support on 2003 and XP to force users towards Vista but I dont see nearly the amount of voluntary upgrading as MS seems to expect.
This is just the latest in an attempt to survive for the traditional newspapaper. Back when the web first started remember how many newpapers refused to be online at all or required registration hurdles to prevent "linking", after enough bad PR and dropping subscription levels, most reluctantly accepted the web and started to regain credability. I have a newspaper salesperson that comes to my door at least once a month, the last time he was here we argued about the value of the newspaper, he mentioned classified, i mentioned craigs list, he mentioned local news I mentioned kanascity.com, for every "exclusive" I could easily counter with 2-3 web alternatives that were not only more up to date but also allowed a certain level of interactivity. Print newspapers just cant compete.
There has been a huge content shift with many newspapers mainly due to the readiness of up to the minute news online. Many papers now rely on their columnists and unique local features to survive, some have managed to flourish but most will never be as important to their respective cities as they once were, for a publisher that hurts. They all still want to maintain their mini-empires which frankly is impossible in the modern information age. Limiting their content will do nothing but limit the views to their content, further exasperating the very problem they feel they are facing.
What is the benefit of this device? For nearly the same amount you can get a pda capable of running linux that includes a faster processor, an input method and a screen. Am I missing something?
The biggest problem with platform idependance is that the content providers all pick sides and the hardware vendors all work to "own" the segment rather than share and participate in it. Overall an independant standard would increase sales and adopters all around but its never going to happen.
That was my problem with it as well. It would have made a great short, but it evidently has quite a following..i was modded down simply for stating that I didnt care for it :)
That actually proves the point even more...my kids love Napoleon Dynamite but I think 1 1/2 stars was being generous. I remember leaving the theatre thinking that they sure dont make teen movies like they used to. Different strokes I guess...
Most computer have the usbports stacked so they would only be able to charge one at a time.
If you have access to the power brick you have access to an outlet so why not charge them from one.
Charging from the laptop while on battery power would surely drain things probably quicker than the battery could fully charge up.
You can buy around a dozen or more regular rechargables for the price of one of these so whats the point. This is definately one of those "because we can" products like usb mitten warmers and coffee warmers.
Im old enough to remember both Siskel and Ebert totally throttling Star Wars, reviewers cannot review without bias nor should they be expected to. Everyone has different tastes and will always use what they like, are familiar with and are comfortable with as their benchmark. A madden fan for instance isnt going to review a non madden football game as highly simply because the controls and feel of the game are different. Games that are concidered complete crap to many will still find a market that loves them. My son for instance cant get enough of the Fantastic Four game that came out this past year...its complete junk but he gets to play "thing" and bash stuff so he thinks its great. The bottom line is there is no such thing as a barometer for everyones tastes, we all like different things and will judge them accordingly.
from my experience in that industry...trust me you really dont want 1080p porn.