Standard for consoles, yes. For PC? No. The second analog pad will never, ever be used.
IMHO, they're taking the wrong approach. Ditch the control stick, make it just a screen with ports on the side. Just make the damn thing run USB and make some custom control devices that you can attach the screen to. Then, if you want to use their analog control pad, you can - or they kan make a keyboard that you can use as a screenmount instead. Or I can wire up four USB gamepads and my friends can crowd around to play bomberman.
Well, the fact is that yes, sometimes one does surf through thin pipe (eg. cell phone or 56k). Remember that just because you and I have DSL, most of the world runs 56k. And whether or not it is their "fault" (blame the user, greeeaaat) they could get Google faster sans images.
Yes, it is good for them, but I still don't like it. One of the larges reasons I switched over to Google in the first place, besides its effectiveness, was its lightweight page. Google is my homepage partially because it loads really damn fast. It searches really damn fast. Images are slow. This is, to me, one of Google's main selling points. Ergo, this sucks.
Rather than fighting over the OSS issues, can anyone say what this actually does? Is this like GTK? Perhaps they noticed "hey, its a bitch to code gui for both win32 and Linux because of different graphical toolkits, 'cause GTK blows and KDE's is not free, so lets let them port the win32 one?" Or am I completely not understanding what this is for.
I remember one odd discussion on the possibility of using some form of conventional (non-rechargeable) battery to power an electric car. Apparently there is some form of large scale battery that is very high in mass/energy efficiency and very cheap and clean to refurbish. The principle was that instead of gas stations you would be warehouses of batteries ready to load in new batteries and unload old ones. Unfortunately I don't remember what the technology was called.
My understanding from the article was just that the card-slot is the new game medium. I assume they've just moved the games to a much smaller form factor, possibly to make it look more "mature" by having them look less like the current clunky plastic. I don't think the new cartridge slot is a flash card slot or anything. Mind you, SD card support would be neat.
Not the original battlezone, I realize there's the oldschool vector game. But correct me if I'm wrong, I think '98 was the first game to do a Dune2-style RTS from an FPS perspective.
Heheh, I'm thinking BattleZone '98, the original FPS/RTS hybrid, with the main gamepad used to control your player and the touchscreen used to issue RTS commands.
Hell, even from a simpler perspective, the touchscreen could be used for inventory management in a conventional FPS.
The only risk is that Nintendo's developers will stick to their mentality of simple (childish?) games, which doesn't look like that was what this platform was designed for. The Mario titles are awesome games by their own right, but I don't think those games could properly exploit the interface that they've built for themselves here.
HAH! I called it. I knew it. First screen is top, second screen is touch screen, otherwise same basic layout as GBASP! Knew it.
You can see what happened. Nintendo's been playing with the dual-screen games based on the GBA+GC combination, and likes it. Now they want that in a handheld.
Think about it: it runs bluetooth, will have a high price point, so it will be expensive... now thing about the games: a touch screen, which is useless for action - I'm thinking more turn-based and RT strategy game as well as some complex puzzle games.
The conclusion is obvsiou: Nintendo is trying to grow up and sell a handheld for adults. And it will be sweet. Think of multiplayer strategy games, over bluetooth, with a touchscreen to work with.
Heheh, you think that the people pulling the strings are using the logic of "what makes economic sense for the whole US, not just certain specific companies". That's so cute.
Now, some flamebait:
"How do you know an American is lying?"
"His mouth is open!"
Not so funny now that the shoe is on the other foot, eh?
Funny, the one I've got has none of those problems. The slots were all there. Poorly stocked (onboard sound, 128 megs ram, etc) but all there. My upgrade path was new ram (up to 384), new video card (radeon 9600) and putting in my old CDR drive. Then my dad got me a new HDD for xmas. Still plenty of PCI slots, still plenty of drive bays, and still plenty of ram slots, and the ram is normal DDR.
Yeah, it was no hot box, but it works well and was very cheap to build, while I know people who've paid twice that, had to pirate their OS, and got only marginally better performance. Plus, the Dell cases are very nice to work in.
Actually, from an interview I saw once, that was a real concern. After all, the ostensible purpose of the suit was to examine bears in their natural habitat, particularly in the environments they make as "homes" for themselves, ie the places they sleep. The expected reaction to the suit was to beat it up a bit and then, once convinced it was not a threat, ignore it. So the above scenario was considered plausible.
I take it to mean the project was a failure, given that they're selling off the fruits of their labour. Just as well - all the gear in the world wouldn't protect the suit from just being sat on and then the bear going to sleep for a few weeks in winter, leaving the suit dude to starve to death while trapped under a fat assed bear.
I find the best buy is usually a compromise. Buy yourself a decent office machine and then add in more ram and a real video card, and maybe an old SB Live Value for surround sound. Except for these sleek riced-out gaming boxes like the Compaqs in question, building from parts is usually much more expensive than finding a whole machine with most of the gear you want. A decent DELL is like $400 and you get the l33t Dell case. Just put in some real RAM, a burner, and a new AGP card.
Nope. Indrema was a completely different piece of vapourware. Indrema's businessplan was "lets make a console for opensource coders to play with and pray like hell they make oodles of free apps for us, cause we got nothing".
It was a very heroic and pathetic venture by some nice Linux people.
"Those "poor" guys in the Baghdad prison you are so concerned about exploded bombs just 2 weeks ago in a school bus full of Iraqi school childen, slaughtering at lease 60 school kids."
Right, so every person being tortured in those prisons has been proven guilty. Yeah. Umm, if you haven't been reading - most of the torture was being used to get _confessions_ - which means they weren't even sure these people they have imprisoned, violated, and tortured are even guilty. There are stories of whole families being thrown into those prisons based on a neighbor's fabricated testimony.
Actually, using the "bit" rather than "byte" makes particular sense when you consider the way architectures keep doubling in word size. Use of the byte made sence when everything was based around an 8-bit architecture, but now that we are moving to wider and wider word sizes it is becoming increasingly inappropriate as a baseline unit.
IMHO, use individual bits and the Mib/Mb system for binary/metric. It's the inevitable conclusion of the "big numbers are better" logic, and it makes sense from an SI perspective as well as a CS one, so it would just make everyone's life simpler if we just got there sooner and moved everything over to such measurement systems - otherwise we will go through the headaches of dozens of changes and differing conventions to get where we're going anyways.
Besides that, for real measurements it would make more sense to go by words (not bytes) and stick to real even binary numbers like 2^2=4, 2^2^2 = 2^4 = 16, 2^2^2^2 = 2^16 = 256, 2^2^2^2^2 = 2^256 = 65536, and so on, rather than the bastard scales of 2^3 (byte) 2^3*2^10 (kilobyte), 2^3*2^20 (megabyte) etc.
This is a myth. Here in Canada everyone, government included, was against the war, and we are not involved in Oil for Food. Besides that, regardless of what pseudo-elected politicrats think, the _people_ of the world were against the war. Do you think all those protestors gave two shits about oil for food? No, they cared about the eleven thousand people who are now dead who woulnd't be dead right now but for the war.
Played it when they had it on PA - IMHO, the crossbow is the best weapon. Read the help (F1) and they explain why the powerups are what they are (Health, Food, and Home). You lose health from the read things, food from firing, and home from "setbacks" - the big lightning barriers.
For ppl complaining about the camera, just zoom way out. Oh, and I love the controls - any oldschool StarCon or SpaceWar players will find them pleasant. However, if you don't love them - down is brake. Use it often. Makes the game much easier to handle.
I think its a LucasArts engine, as there are all these references to LucasArts code and help involved, although only mention of one developer besides Ben (the boy).
Well, the girl in question started from UT, not Doom or Wolf - in fact, she finds those games offendingly difficult to navigate in because of the lack of visual landmarks and the tendency towards winding hallways. The real challenge is learning to mouse-aim anyways. Start with UT, and don't tell her about alt-fires until later (except on the sniper rifle). Oh, and turn off the "dodge" function.
Start her on UT'99 for FPS games. Its a very easy, forgiving FPS for newbs - my fiancee (a non-gamer) loves it to death. You'll get a kick out of her joyful squeal when she bags her first "HEAD SHOT!!!". It also has nice in-game tutorials, including introduction to FPS deathmatch and explanations of all the gametypes. Plus, I find that the biggest problem newbs have is that they get totally and completely lost in complex maps. Old UT has many "theme" maps that are mostly one or two huge rooms and thus very difficult to get lost in. Hardcore FPSers don't like these maps because they're simple, but there's nothing quite like pitting a group of 10 newbs on 2 teams against each other on CTF-Face (aka sniper-whore heaven).
Unfortunately, memorisation is a staple of racing games. One of my all-time fave series' is WipeOut, which are very good racing games, but because of the game's obscene speed and powersliding, the game requires a large amount of memorisation. I found myself frustrated at this, and got to wondering: when do we get a racing game with a random track generator? Yes, it would be a lot of work, but would be incredibly rewarding for multiplayer gamin.
Anyhow, I recommend Looney Toons Space Race for the Dreamcast if you're looking for a good and forgiving racing game. The weapons are heavily biased towards reclaiming the lead and the game has an extremely powerful catch-up effect, to the point that I will frequently run from the front to the back of the pack and vice-versa several times in a single race, and still win.
Actually, one of the best games for being forgiving was a very old Playstation title called High Octane. It was a slow hovervehicle racer. The game was very forgiving in that it had very short tracks with very large numbers of laps, so you'd learn all the turns before the 3rd lab, and you still had 5 more to go. The walls were just bouncy surfaces and steep slopes, not the sudden-death fall-offs or sticky walls of other games, so it was rarely even a problem to take a turn wide.
My fave racing game is still always Half-Life Turbo (a Snark racing mod) that is the most obscenely violent race I've ever played. Its buggy, kludgy, and minimalist, but its still my fave.
Diddy Kong Racing was ungodly hard. I find that many kids games have this problem - they make the game hard for the playtesters, and forget that their target audience is 8-year olds.
The second problem is this - my Dad tried to play a modern action game once (and only once). This man is an optical physicist, so he's at least of reasonable intelligece, drives a stick, so he can handle complex controls, and races in go-kart tourneys, so he's got at least minimal reflexes. Modern games assume you've played every predecessor in the genre, so they've got such incredibly complex stacks of rules and are so baroque that it took me 5 minutes to explain the intricacies of the rules (let go of the throttle before you hit the dash zones and you go faster), and another 5 for him to get his hass kicked anyways. This piling of rules upon rules upon rules makes for a nasty barrier to entry.
When will they learn: the good games have simple basis/interface and intricate play, not vice-versa.
Oh, that actually sounds critical. I was hoping it was something like the "Commodore Vic20/9-Qbit Quantum Processor RS232 bridging protocol daemon" or something else equally obscure and useless, like the freaking desktop briefcase or MS-wallet.
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Heheh, actually, we seemed to have finally solved the whole "sunni vs. shiite" problem. Now they're just both killing Americans.
Standard for consoles, yes. For PC? No. The second analog pad will never, ever be used.
IMHO, they're taking the wrong approach. Ditch the control stick, make it just a screen with ports on the side. Just make the damn thing run USB and make some custom control devices that you can attach the screen to. Then, if you want to use their analog control pad, you can - or they kan make a keyboard that you can use as a screenmount instead. Or I can wire up four USB gamepads and my friends can crowd around to play bomberman.
Well, the fact is that yes, sometimes one does surf through thin pipe (eg. cell phone or 56k). Remember that just because you and I have DSL, most of the world runs 56k. And whether or not it is their "fault" (blame the user, greeeaaat) they could get Google faster sans images.
Yes, it is good for them, but I still don't like it. One of the larges reasons I switched over to Google in the first place, besides its effectiveness, was its lightweight page. Google is my homepage partially because it loads really damn fast. It searches really damn fast. Images are slow. This is, to me, one of Google's main selling points. Ergo, this sucks.
Rather than fighting over the OSS issues, can anyone say what this actually does? Is this like GTK? Perhaps they noticed "hey, its a bitch to code gui for both win32 and Linux because of different graphical toolkits, 'cause GTK blows and KDE's is not free, so lets let them port the win32 one?" Or am I completely not understanding what this is for.
I remember one odd discussion on the possibility of using some form of conventional (non-rechargeable) battery to power an electric car. Apparently there is some form of large scale battery that is very high in mass/energy efficiency and very cheap and clean to refurbish. The principle was that instead of gas stations you would be warehouses of batteries ready to load in new batteries and unload old ones. Unfortunately I don't remember what the technology was called.
My understanding from the article was just that the card-slot is the new game medium. I assume they've just moved the games to a much smaller form factor, possibly to make it look more "mature" by having them look less like the current clunky plastic. I don't think the new cartridge slot is a flash card slot or anything. Mind you, SD card support would be neat.
Not the original battlezone, I realize there's the oldschool vector game. But correct me if I'm wrong, I think '98 was the first game to do a Dune2-style RTS from an FPS perspective.
Heheh, I'm thinking BattleZone '98, the original FPS/RTS hybrid, with the main gamepad used to control your player and the touchscreen used to issue RTS commands.
Hell, even from a simpler perspective, the touchscreen could be used for inventory management in a conventional FPS.
The only risk is that Nintendo's developers will stick to their mentality of simple (childish?) games, which doesn't look like that was what this platform was designed for. The Mario titles are awesome games by their own right, but I don't think those games could properly exploit the interface that they've built for themselves here.
HAH! I called it. I knew it. First screen is top, second screen is touch screen, otherwise same basic layout as GBASP! Knew it.
You can see what happened. Nintendo's been playing with the dual-screen games based on the GBA+GC combination, and likes it. Now they want that in a handheld.
Think about it: it runs bluetooth, will have a high price point, so it will be expensive... now thing about the games: a touch screen, which is useless for action - I'm thinking more turn-based and RT strategy game as well as some complex puzzle games.
The conclusion is obvsiou: Nintendo is trying to grow up and sell a handheld for adults. And it will be sweet. Think of multiplayer strategy games, over bluetooth, with a touchscreen to work with.
Heheh, you think that the people pulling the strings are using the logic of "what makes economic sense for the whole US, not just certain specific companies". That's so cute.
Now, some flamebait:
"How do you know an American is lying?"
"His mouth is open!"
Not so funny now that the shoe is on the other foot, eh?
Funny, the one I've got has none of those problems. The slots were all there. Poorly stocked (onboard sound, 128 megs ram, etc) but all there. My upgrade path was new ram (up to 384), new video card (radeon 9600) and putting in my old CDR drive. Then my dad got me a new HDD for xmas. Still plenty of PCI slots, still plenty of drive bays, and still plenty of ram slots, and the ram is normal DDR.
Yeah, it was no hot box, but it works well and was very cheap to build, while I know people who've paid twice that, had to pirate their OS, and got only marginally better performance. Plus, the Dell cases are very nice to work in.
Actually, from an interview I saw once, that was a real concern. After all, the ostensible purpose of the suit was to examine bears in their natural habitat, particularly in the environments they make as "homes" for themselves, ie the places they sleep. The expected reaction to the suit was to beat it up a bit and then, once convinced it was not a threat, ignore it. So the above scenario was considered plausible.
I take it to mean the project was a failure, given that they're selling off the fruits of their labour. Just as well - all the gear in the world wouldn't protect the suit from just being sat on and then the bear going to sleep for a few weeks in winter, leaving the suit dude to starve to death while trapped under a fat assed bear.
I find the best buy is usually a compromise. Buy yourself a decent office machine and then add in more ram and a real video card, and maybe an old SB Live Value for surround sound. Except for these sleek riced-out gaming boxes like the Compaqs in question, building from parts is usually much more expensive than finding a whole machine with most of the gear you want. A decent DELL is like $400 and you get the l33t Dell case. Just put in some real RAM, a burner, and a new AGP card.
Nope. Indrema was a completely different piece of vapourware. Indrema's businessplan was "lets make a console for opensource coders to play with and pray like hell they make oodles of free apps for us, cause we got nothing".
It was a very heroic and pathetic venture by some nice Linux people.
"Those "poor" guys in the Baghdad prison you are so concerned about exploded bombs just 2 weeks ago in a school bus full of Iraqi school childen, slaughtering at lease 60 school kids."
Right, so every person being tortured in those prisons has been proven guilty. Yeah. Umm, if you haven't been reading - most of the torture was being used to get _confessions_ - which means they weren't even sure these people they have imprisoned, violated, and tortured are even guilty. There are stories of whole families being thrown into those prisons based on a neighbor's fabricated testimony.
Actually, using the "bit" rather than "byte" makes particular sense when you consider the way architectures keep doubling in word size. Use of the byte made sence when everything was based around an 8-bit architecture, but now that we are moving to wider and wider word sizes it is becoming increasingly inappropriate as a baseline unit.
IMHO, use individual bits and the Mib/Mb system for binary/metric. It's the inevitable conclusion of the "big numbers are better" logic, and it makes sense from an SI perspective as well as a CS one, so it would just make everyone's life simpler if we just got there sooner and moved everything over to such measurement systems - otherwise we will go through the headaches of dozens of changes and differing conventions to get where we're going anyways.
Besides that, for real measurements it would make more sense to go by words (not bytes) and stick to real even binary numbers like 2^2=4, 2^2^2 = 2^4 = 16, 2^2^2^2 = 2^16 = 256, 2^2^2^2^2 = 2^256 = 65536, and so on, rather than the bastard scales of 2^3 (byte) 2^3*2^10 (kilobyte), 2^3*2^20 (megabyte) etc.
This is a myth. Here in Canada everyone, government included, was against the war, and we are not involved in Oil for Food. Besides that, regardless of what pseudo-elected politicrats think, the _people_ of the world were against the war. Do you think all those protestors gave two shits about oil for food? No, they cared about the eleven thousand people who are now dead who woulnd't be dead right now but for the war.
Played it when they had it on PA - IMHO, the crossbow is the best weapon. Read the help (F1) and they explain why the powerups are what they are (Health, Food, and Home). You lose health from the read things, food from firing, and home from "setbacks" - the big lightning barriers.
For ppl complaining about the camera, just zoom way out. Oh, and I love the controls - any oldschool StarCon or SpaceWar players will find them pleasant. However, if you don't love them - down is brake. Use it often. Makes the game much easier to handle.
I think its a LucasArts engine, as there are all these references to LucasArts code and help involved, although only mention of one developer besides Ben (the boy).
Well, the girl in question started from UT, not Doom or Wolf - in fact, she finds those games offendingly difficult to navigate in because of the lack of visual landmarks and the tendency towards winding hallways. The real challenge is learning to mouse-aim anyways. Start with UT, and don't tell her about alt-fires until later (except on the sniper rifle). Oh, and turn off the "dodge" function.
Start her on UT'99 for FPS games. Its a very easy, forgiving FPS for newbs - my fiancee (a non-gamer) loves it to death. You'll get a kick out of her joyful squeal when she bags her first "HEAD SHOT!!!". It also has nice in-game tutorials, including introduction to FPS deathmatch and explanations of all the gametypes. Plus, I find that the biggest problem newbs have is that they get totally and completely lost in complex maps. Old UT has many "theme" maps that are mostly one or two huge rooms and thus very difficult to get lost in. Hardcore FPSers don't like these maps because they're simple, but there's nothing quite like pitting a group of 10 newbs on 2 teams against each other on CTF-Face (aka sniper-whore heaven).
Unfortunately, memorisation is a staple of racing games. One of my all-time fave series' is WipeOut, which are very good racing games, but because of the game's obscene speed and powersliding, the game requires a large amount of memorisation. I found myself frustrated at this, and got to wondering: when do we get a racing game with a random track generator? Yes, it would be a lot of work, but would be incredibly rewarding for multiplayer gamin.
Anyhow, I recommend Looney Toons Space Race for the Dreamcast if you're looking for a good and forgiving racing game. The weapons are heavily biased towards reclaiming the lead and the game has an extremely powerful catch-up effect, to the point that I will frequently run from the front to the back of the pack and vice-versa several times in a single race, and still win.
Actually, one of the best games for being forgiving was a very old Playstation title called High Octane. It was a slow hovervehicle racer. The game was very forgiving in that it had very short tracks with very large numbers of laps, so you'd learn all the turns before the 3rd lab, and you still had 5 more to go. The walls were just bouncy surfaces and steep slopes, not the sudden-death fall-offs or sticky walls of other games, so it was rarely even a problem to take a turn wide.
My fave racing game is still always Half-Life Turbo (a Snark racing mod) that is the most obscenely violent race I've ever played. Its buggy, kludgy, and minimalist, but its still my fave.
Diddy Kong Racing was ungodly hard. I find that many kids games have this problem - they make the game hard for the playtesters, and forget that their target audience is 8-year olds.
The second problem is this - my Dad tried to play a modern action game once (and only once). This man is an optical physicist, so he's at least of reasonable intelligece, drives a stick, so he can handle complex controls, and races in go-kart tourneys, so he's got at least minimal reflexes. Modern games assume you've played every predecessor in the genre, so they've got such incredibly complex stacks of rules and are so baroque that it took me 5 minutes to explain the intricacies of the rules (let go of the throttle before you hit the dash zones and you go faster), and another 5 for him to get his hass kicked anyways. This piling of rules upon rules upon rules makes for a nasty barrier to entry.
When will they learn: the good games have simple basis/interface and intricate play, not vice-versa.
Oh, that actually sounds critical. I was hoping it was something like the "Commodore Vic20/9-Qbit Quantum Processor RS232 bridging protocol daemon" or something else equally obscure and useless, like the freaking desktop briefcase or MS-wallet.