What cheeses me off is that most normal, mainstream guys will still look at you like you just grew a pair of breasts and your 'nads fell off if you don't know everything there is to know about your car.
Nobody knows anything about their computer or any other electronics they own, but heaven forbid any man emasculate himself by admitting ignorance about a car.
Why is it that a person who doesn't know what it means when a car is 4-cylinder or 6-cylinder is a dickless imbescile, and yet a person who looks at you like you have 3 heads when you say the word "gigahertz" is just not a geek?
Microsoft's not stupid. They'll respond the obvious way - by providing a slightly broken support for the Open File Format. Of course, this will get private businessmen and civil servents using MS-Office to generate and handle Open File Format documents and getting confused about what's going on. The MS-perverted standard rapidly becomes the defacto standard, and the world returns to normal... except that the public once again blames the no-good liberal massholes of taxacheussettes for committing the unChristian crime of trying to interfere with the free market.
I doubt that's enough information for targetting still, unless those sensors are placed at the exact edges of the screen. Consider what happens if your TV has a wider box and you attach the sensors to the side - the 3 inches on either side of the TV that are casing and not screen on your box are different from the 5 inches on your neighbor's LCD TV. Even 1 inch can be the difference between a hit or a miss. I could see pre-game calibration being a possible, but annoying, solution.
Either way, I still doubt that the controller has that level of granularity of angle.
I'm surprised nobody's doubting this. This is IGN for shit's sake - not the IEEE. Do we really trust them to know the abilities of technology?
Think about it this way - even if the Rev has 100% position information about your controller (which I doubt - I'll bet it's very coarse) there's still the problem that it doesn't know exactly where your TV is, or it's dimensions.
People just assume that this thing is the perfect lightgun because it sounds plausible - but that's like saying a ball mouse could be used as a tachometer for a car.
Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke
on
Palm's Mistakes
·
· Score: 1
My question is when we'll be seeing hands-free screenless audio-only PDA's. I mean the processors on these things have got to be able to do some decent speech-to-text (and vice versa), and now with Apple pumping out massive flash disk sizes you can record very long notes to yourself (and can record events as raw audio instead of text data).
You could do some neat stuff with it - audio-calendar, audio-notepad, email-playback, and music/podcast player are the basics. Move on to trivia games, bring back text-based interactive fictions. Hell, make Trade Wars for the thing.
Then market it to commuters. They start handling their email while driving, without having to take their eyes off the road or busy their hands. Yes, it's got similar problems to cellphones while driving - but you can't really outlaw talking while driving - hands free phones are legal for driving prettymuch everywhere.
Re:Really did innovate- not recently
on
Palm's Mistakes
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Many people have been making comments like that - a similar windows mobile phone device is being touted below.
The problem is that those doodads are really, really late to the party. The Blackberry had a dog's age to dominate the market of phone-PDAs, and dominate it did.
Plus, Grafitti2 was Palm's inexcusable blunder. That, and the overly high price point of the Zire 21 - no machine that does that little that late in the game should cost that much (and I know it was still PalmOne's cheapest device ever).
Idunno, I found both Gaiman's "American Gods" and Adams' "Long Dark Teatime" highly overrated. For Adams, the early HHG books or Dirk Gently's Holistic are better, and for Gaiman, his work with Pratchett on "Good Omens: the Nice and Accurate Prophesies of Agnes Nutter, Witch" stands head and shoulders above his own books. Stardust didn't really wow me either.
All the early 4X games had serious play balance issues. Anybody here play the first MOO? Fleets of 32767 ships anyone? The game was still a work of genius for it's time, and still is way more fun to play than anything newer - it just needed a helluvalot of tweaks.
No, the trickster is good. The trickster demonstrates the weaknesses in a harmless way, and usually in a way nobody thought of before. A good trickster has pride in originality.
Why is that good? The trickster is the herald of those who would exploit the weakness that the trickster has discovered. The trickster is just having a little harmless fun. The Jackals will try to make a living (and a killing) out of the same weaknesses the trickster discovers. What happens when wiki spammers figure out that if they're as subtle as our trickster they can get away with it?
MoM is by far the greatest 4X game ever made. I _strongly_ urge any geeks who enjoyed the Civ, MOO, etc. games to seek it out. Takes the whole genre in a completely different direction and does it spectacularly.
They sell it at a loss, sure. So why not just release a dongle that costs enough to turn loss into a tidy profit? A $100 official "hacker" dongle that lets coders do what they want? Then everybody wins - Sony makes the profit they're missing, and hackers get their toy.
But the fact is it's not just about profit. It's about control.
I doubt it would matter. First rule of gaming - it will be fringe until it works with the default hardware. PC gaming had a horrible problem throughout the '90s with expecting users to own joysticks - many top-quality titles fell by the wayside because of that. The successful titles were the ones that aimed at mouse and keyboard.
Look how badly the extended hardware has always done - did you see a lot of superscope games? The only ones that get away with it are megahits like DDR, and those generally come with the relevant controller.
There will be no such animal - except maybe a fringe one.
I'm a white Canuck who crossed the border on a trip by Greyhound (never again) to Chicago recently, and I don't know if they claim to do "random" checks or review "suspicious" people only or whatever.
Let me be blunt: they go by race. Completely. Girl in line in front of me at customs seemed to be of indian or pakistani descent, but spoke English clearly enough that I assumed she was raised in Canada and was likely a Canadian citizen.
Of course, they went completely through her bags and took quite a while with her. My wife and I went through quickly, as did several other non-middle-eastern folks. There was a family of 5 that simply took forever because they were quite obviously recent immigrants.
Right or wrong, there is no doubt that "random selection" has become a euphemism for racial profiling.
You can get a for dummies book on your computer. Countless free guides exist online that will help you solve any computer problem you may ever run into. There is tons of quick, easily available computer information.
Likewise, your car comes with a manual, and an endless supply of car-oriented-websites will provide you with insite on the parts of your car.
There are numerous free help information systems available for medical advice. Here in Canada, all the medical treatment you could ever want is free (but slow).
Law, on the other hand, which was made by and for the people of your country, is not meant for your eyes. No, you cannot figure out your tenant problems without a lawyer. There is no "law for dummies". You'd better have a darned impressive heroic cause before you try and get pro bono help.
The problem I see is that if you get stuck without a vehicle you've gotta walk. Thats painfully dull. SO you see players hopping around with X-Locs. Personally, I always thought the X-loc was an annoying feature anyway - the only more annoying feature was the UT sniper rifle. Of course, the constant popularity of CTF-Face (a map for Xloc and sniper and nothing else) meant that I was in the minority.
Still, I know a lot of UT fans that were disappointed with the newer, complicateder, faster, Quakier UT. I'll be happy to see the new one.
Ick. I'm sorry - why do developers even bother with that kind of crap? Here's a hint - if the gameplay is slow enough that I ever notice the sexy glint off of your quadremegamapped player-model's nipple shields, then your gameplay is too damn slow and I only noticed 'cause you bored me to tears.
This actually really bugs me. The massive size of game content means that mods are pretty much undownloadable - In old UT with a well-configged server you could hop on and fetch the files quickly. As files get heavier you take longer to fetch files. Pretty much means that nobody plays on servers with 3rd party content because of the endless waiting.
The worst part is that most of the downloading is for textures. Textures are, to me, the least important part of the game. Use a friggin low-res JPG for all I care. But now, every game needs 9 layers of lossless-compressed 1024x1024 images. This would be akin to serving up webpages that are just a giant imagemapped gif.
what I've heard is that while galactic collisions look like all holy hell breaking loose, the stars so rarely pass actually close to each other that they never meat - it's like two clouds of sand passing through each other. The only worry is that something massive brushing within a few lightyears of our solar system might screw with the oribits.
Sounds similar to Saturn's rings. A ton of matter spread into teeny blocks in space by tidal forces, but still with enough mass to pull together into a bazillion little blobs. Perhaps the radiant matter/antimatter/energy from the black hole (I'm fuzzy on Hawking's theory on the subject) is heating the surrounding star-spray enough to light some of them?
Good point. To me, this was the big thing that set Halo aside. I was relieved that the FPS had extracted every painful wart of the FPS experience - no ammo management, no backtracking-for-health, etc.
Halo redefined the genre simply by looking at the stupid, stupid features we all take for granted. I've been playing Serious Sam 2nd Enc. for a while, and it's got awesome monsters, weapons, etc. but still has the fundamental problem of inventory management - whenever I fire a gun I'm wondering if I'll need the ammo later. In Halo, you don't worry. You can only carry 2 guns, and ammo is plentiful. In SS, you have tons of guns, but you never know which gun you'll be receiving ammo for later. SS is better than most, routinely dumping tons of ammo upon you, but in every fight I'm wondering "am I supposed to open up with the cannon now? Or save it for later?"
Still, at least FPS designers have moved away from the "where the hell is that door... damn, I gotta automap" gameplay pioneered in Doom.
Slashdot Mirror
What cheeses me off is that most normal, mainstream guys will still look at you like you just grew a pair of breasts and your 'nads fell off if you don't know everything there is to know about your car.
Nobody knows anything about their computer or any other electronics they own, but heaven forbid any man emasculate himself by admitting ignorance about a car.
Why is it that a person who doesn't know what it means when a car is 4-cylinder or 6-cylinder is a dickless imbescile, and yet a person who looks at you like you have 3 heads when you say the word "gigahertz" is just not a geek?
Microsoft's not stupid. They'll respond the obvious way - by providing a slightly broken support for the Open File Format. Of course, this will get private businessmen and civil servents using MS-Office to generate and handle Open File Format documents and getting confused about what's going on. The MS-perverted standard rapidly becomes the defacto standard, and the world returns to normal... except that the public once again blames the no-good liberal massholes of taxacheussettes for committing the unChristian crime of trying to interfere with the free market.
I doubt that's enough information for targetting still, unless those sensors are placed at the exact edges of the screen. Consider what happens if your TV has a wider box and you attach the sensors to the side - the 3 inches on either side of the TV that are casing and not screen on your box are different from the 5 inches on your neighbor's LCD TV. Even 1 inch can be the difference between a hit or a miss. I could see pre-game calibration being a possible, but annoying, solution.
Either way, I still doubt that the controller has that level of granularity of angle.
I'm surprised nobody's doubting this. This is IGN for shit's sake - not the IEEE. Do we really trust them to know the abilities of technology?
Think about it this way - even if the Rev has 100% position information about your controller (which I doubt - I'll bet it's very coarse) there's still the problem that it doesn't know exactly where your TV is, or it's dimensions.
People just assume that this thing is the perfect lightgun because it sounds plausible - but that's like saying a ball mouse could be used as a tachometer for a car.
My question is when we'll be seeing hands-free screenless audio-only PDA's. I mean the processors on these things have got to be able to do some decent speech-to-text (and vice versa), and now with Apple pumping out massive flash disk sizes you can record very long notes to yourself (and can record events as raw audio instead of text data).
You could do some neat stuff with it - audio-calendar, audio-notepad, email-playback, and music/podcast player are the basics. Move on to trivia games, bring back text-based interactive fictions. Hell, make Trade Wars for the thing.
Then market it to commuters. They start handling their email while driving, without having to take their eyes off the road or busy their hands. Yes, it's got similar problems to cellphones while driving - but you can't really outlaw talking while driving - hands free phones are legal for driving prettymuch everywhere.
Many people have been making comments like that - a similar windows mobile phone device is being touted below.
The problem is that those doodads are really, really late to the party. The Blackberry had a dog's age to dominate the market of phone-PDAs, and dominate it did.
Plus, Grafitti2 was Palm's inexcusable blunder. That, and the overly high price point of the Zire 21 - no machine that does that little that late in the game should cost that much (and I know it was still PalmOne's cheapest device ever).
Idunno, I found both Gaiman's "American Gods" and Adams' "Long Dark Teatime" highly overrated. For Adams, the early HHG books or Dirk Gently's Holistic are better, and for Gaiman, his work with Pratchett on "Good Omens: the Nice and Accurate Prophesies of Agnes Nutter, Witch" stands head and shoulders above his own books. Stardust didn't really wow me either.
All the early 4X games had serious play balance issues. Anybody here play the first MOO? Fleets of 32767 ships anyone? The game was still a work of genius for it's time, and still is way more fun to play than anything newer - it just needed a helluvalot of tweaks.
Yep. They can go complain about it to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.
Anyhow - a giant authoritarian government that works in close concert with big business - isn't that prettymuch the dictionary definition of fascism?
No, the trickster is good. The trickster demonstrates the weaknesses in a harmless way, and usually in a way nobody thought of before. A good trickster has pride in originality.
Why is that good? The trickster is the herald of those who would exploit the weakness that the trickster has discovered. The trickster is just having a little harmless fun. The Jackals will try to make a living (and a killing) out of the same weaknesses the trickster discovers. What happens when wiki spammers figure out that if they're as subtle as our trickster they can get away with it?
MoM is by far the greatest 4X game ever made. I _strongly_ urge any geeks who enjoyed the Civ, MOO, etc. games to seek it out. Takes the whole genre in a completely different direction and does it spectacularly.
They sell it at a loss, sure. So why not just release a dongle that costs enough to turn loss into a tidy profit? A $100 official "hacker" dongle that lets coders do what they want? Then everybody wins - Sony makes the profit they're missing, and hackers get their toy.
But the fact is it's not just about profit. It's about control.
Never happened in the sense of Highlander II, Star Control III, Master Of Orion 3, etc. That kind of "never happened".
It wasn't just the 3d-ness - that was the most sluggish game I ever played.
I doubt it would matter. First rule of gaming - it will be fringe until it works with the default hardware. PC gaming had a horrible problem throughout the '90s with expecting users to own joysticks - many top-quality titles fell by the wayside because of that. The successful titles were the ones that aimed at mouse and keyboard.
Look how badly the extended hardware has always done - did you see a lot of superscope games? The only ones that get away with it are megahits like DDR, and those generally come with the relevant controller.
There will be no such animal - except maybe a fringe one.
I'm a white Canuck who crossed the border on a trip by Greyhound (never again) to Chicago recently, and I don't know if they claim to do "random" checks or review "suspicious" people only or whatever.
Let me be blunt: they go by race. Completely. Girl in line in front of me at customs seemed to be of indian or pakistani descent, but spoke English clearly enough that I assumed she was raised in Canada and was likely a Canadian citizen.
Of course, they went completely through her bags and took quite a while with her. My wife and I went through quickly, as did several other non-middle-eastern folks. There was a family of 5 that simply took forever because they were quite obviously recent immigrants.
Right or wrong, there is no doubt that "random selection" has become a euphemism for racial profiling.
The difference:
You can get a for dummies book on your computer. Countless free guides exist online that will help you solve any computer problem you may ever run into. There is tons of quick, easily available computer information.
Likewise, your car comes with a manual, and an endless supply of car-oriented-websites will provide you with insite on the parts of your car.
There are numerous free help information systems available for medical advice. Here in Canada, all the medical treatment you could ever want is free (but slow).
Law, on the other hand, which was made by and for the people of your country, is not meant for your eyes. No, you cannot figure out your tenant problems without a lawyer. There is no "law for dummies". You'd better have a darned impressive heroic cause before you try and get pro bono help.
Which industry has the barriers? hmm.
The problem I see is that if you get stuck without a vehicle you've gotta walk. Thats painfully dull. SO you see players hopping around with X-Locs. Personally, I always thought the X-loc was an annoying feature anyway - the only more annoying feature was the UT sniper rifle. Of course, the constant popularity of CTF-Face (a map for Xloc and sniper and nothing else) meant that I was in the minority.
Still, I know a lot of UT fans that were disappointed with the newer, complicateder, faster, Quakier UT. I'll be happy to see the new one.
Parent was ontopic - Jill was an Epic game.
Anyhow, I'd like a new version of OMF (battlegrounds never ever happened). Or a new version of Jazz the Jackrabbit. Or Epic Pinball. Epic pwned.
Ick. I'm sorry - why do developers even bother with that kind of crap? Here's a hint - if the gameplay is slow enough that I ever notice the sexy glint off of your quadremegamapped player-model's nipple shields, then your gameplay is too damn slow and I only noticed 'cause you bored me to tears.
This actually really bugs me. The massive size of game content means that mods are pretty much undownloadable - In old UT with a well-configged server you could hop on and fetch the files quickly. As files get heavier you take longer to fetch files. Pretty much means that nobody plays on servers with 3rd party content because of the endless waiting.
The worst part is that most of the downloading is for textures. Textures are, to me, the least important part of the game. Use a friggin low-res JPG for all I care. But now, every game needs 9 layers of lossless-compressed 1024x1024 images. This would be akin to serving up webpages that are just a giant imagemapped gif.
Still, can't wait to see it.
Personaly, I think this is a great thing.
We can use this software to easily find out which judgest to bust for corruption.
Yes. Perhaps these rich businesses can even provide them with spellcheckers for their yachts.
So, has MS been taken to task yet for what they did to BeOS?
what I've heard is that while galactic collisions look like all holy hell breaking loose, the stars so rarely pass actually close to each other that they never meat - it's like two clouds of sand passing through each other. The only worry is that something massive brushing within a few lightyears of our solar system might screw with the oribits.
Sounds similar to Saturn's rings. A ton of matter spread into teeny blocks in space by tidal forces, but still with enough mass to pull together into a bazillion little blobs. Perhaps the radiant matter/antimatter/energy from the black hole (I'm fuzzy on Hawking's theory on the subject) is heating the surrounding star-spray enough to light some of them?
Good point. To me, this was the big thing that set Halo aside. I was relieved that the FPS had extracted every painful wart of the FPS experience - no ammo management, no backtracking-for-health, etc.
Halo redefined the genre simply by looking at the stupid, stupid features we all take for granted. I've been playing Serious Sam 2nd Enc. for a while, and it's got awesome monsters, weapons, etc. but still has the fundamental problem of inventory management - whenever I fire a gun I'm wondering if I'll need the ammo later. In Halo, you don't worry. You can only carry 2 guns, and ammo is plentiful. In SS, you have tons of guns, but you never know which gun you'll be receiving ammo for later. SS is better than most, routinely dumping tons of ammo upon you, but in every fight I'm wondering "am I supposed to open up with the cannon now? Or save it for later?"
Still, at least FPS designers have moved away from the "where the hell is that door... damn, I gotta automap" gameplay pioneered in Doom.