I agree - the stylus just doesn't work well as a joystick. I played through the whole thing, and it wasn't until the 50th star or so that I really felt comfortable, and I _still_ got nervous at anything that involved long-distance running.
Perhaps there could be future refinements of the "stylus as joystick" interface, but so far I think Nintendo has to accept that the DS does _not_ have an analog stick - it has a pointing device.
Isn't that battle already lost though? I mean, is Linux licensed with the "V2 Or Later" clause, or was that left out? If the "Or later clause" is present, then the embedded developers are SOL, because their own fork must also include the "Or later" clause, otherwise backtrack to versions of Linux that were licensed without the clause. IANAL, but that's the way it looks to me.
Really, the "or later" clause gives RMS a spectacular amount of power. He could make V3 a copy of the BSD license, and thus effectively obliterating the GPL completely - after all, any V2 project would be allowed to be converted into a V3 project by anyone using it, and the "or later" clause could not be removed without the permission of all relevant copyright holders - and even so, older versions would retain the "or later" clause.
Nice setup. Seriously though, I got mine new on Ebay a year and a half ago for $50CAN, so interested slashdotters can get them for much cheaper than $79 if they shop around.
Well, for non-DRM'd text or HTML files, an old cheap PalmOne device can do all those things. - cheap enough for the tub - searching > bookmarks - lightweight - cheap, therefore loanable - palm games ~= paper airplanes - can throw it at people (my Zire 21 has taken and dealt abuse without any harm)
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the eBook - the problem is with the clumsy, heavyweight approach provided by MS and Adobe. I already get a good eBook experience with my little Zire and free materials. Once the retail experience becomes as good as the free experience, I'll be interested in retail eBooks.
Well, some portable devices are pretty dirt cheap. If you don't mind the low resolution, a Zire 21 has a very high-contrast non-luminous screen, and you can get them at dirt-cheap prices. I don't know if you can get eBooks for them, but I avoid retail eBooks anyways and free things are usually available as text/html.
So far, I've read Thinking In C++ (highly recommended to anyone who wants to learn C++, and it's free), and some creative commons Linux book I only got halfway through (dry, dry stuff, even drier than TiCPP).
Paper > screen for books. If I use a screen, it's because (a) I want to fit a huge book in a tiny pocket and (b) it's free (or at least cheap).
Fsck, I had none of that - even straight up Vonage-box plugged into the cable box, and my Rogers service was crap. I had the full plan, and was running Vonage in "bandwidth saver mode" and even then the sound was laggy.
This was in downtown Hamilton, which should be a large enough city to have decent service.
Really? I'm in Hamilton and my 905-number was Hamilton specific. Of course, every other aspect of Vonage was, personally, a disaster for me so I gave it up - but that wasn't a problem.
Imho, it's because movies are one-or-the-other. You can either watch dramatic films with great script... about some poor little sexual deviant's tragic life and the various dramatic, sad and angry people that surround them...
or you can watch a whizz-bang action or comedy flick written by tools and acted by slabs.
Finally, there's the third category of films - the endless sprawl of "suspense" films that rely on elaborate and pointless supernatural themes, retreads of CSI plots, and A-list actors doing C-list acting. "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" was not that good a film, so why does it deserve to be made over-and-over-again?
So basically, your options are "Scary Movie", "Van Helsing", "Boys Don't Cry", or "What Lies Beneath". While some of those movies would normally be fine to see once or even twice, whatching the genre get abused over and over again eventually grates on you.
I want to see Oscar Bid writing and acting outside of the endless repetition of Oscar Bid themes. Not that I have any problem with cancerous, gay, black, alzheimers sufferers - but we've been hit over the head enough.
Start the level 50 characters off in, say, "Valhalla" - some realm where they can get primo gear and have a little time to play alone and learn before jumping into the blender. Give them a day's work of looting and stuff to get accustomed to their character's high-level doodads, then cut them loose in the real world to sink-or-swim. Basically, compress the whole game into an afternoon's play for "fast track". To avoid fscking the economy, make most "fast track" artifacts useless to non "fast track players" or something - if dropped in the real world they turn into gold or something.
So why doesn't Blizzard just sell the gold for those players who want to skip to the front? Why don't they just let you roll up a level 50 player with a greater from scratch if you fork over $100? After all, let's say you want to join your friends who play on Battlegrounds, but don't want the agonizing process of leveling up to battlegrounds level... why doesn't Blizzard offer to let you build a character at that level? It would make them money, block off the farmers, let players who have no interest in the treadmill aspect of MMOs get involved, and still allow you to design the player yourself and know what it has (whereas buying a character from someone else gives you a bunch of stuff that you don't know how to use and might not work well).
Sounds like a gaming tablet. Basically, MS's answer to the DS. Some place they can get hand-held FPS and RTS games onto the market without sucking up to Nintendo.
Sounds hazardous to me - little airborne filaments? Sounds like asbestos. Then again, I've done no digging at all to check, so I may be full of carp.
At any rate, it seems like overkill to a problem that should've been fixed by the GSM standard itself - built into the GSM standard there should've been a mechanism to receive "silcence flags" sent by local transmitters. Church/movie theathre simply needs to have a transmitter in the room. First-responders could have special cellphoness that ignore the "silence flag".
Simple. China has no interest in making their citizens into good free little consumers. China just wants to sell stuff to other countries. So, businesses that sell internationally will register their international websites with an international provider, and meanwhile will have their domestic system on the new Chinese domain names, which is all the locals will be able to access.
If chinese people interact with outsiders on the internet, the Chinese government loses control. Blocking them from doing so interferese in no way with American businesses using Chinese labour to manufacture their branded products.
Well, except that generally, these "little man" electronics companies are basically just "lets make a logo and get Chinese manufacturing companies X, Y, and Z slap it on their products when we import them".
Still, most of the big names do the same, they just spend more on marketing.
I posted that earlier in another thread how WoW is really hurting the games industry and people freaked out. But think about it - think about all the gamers you know who play WoW - these are people who used to buy a new game every month, and now they're playing only one game all the time. Great for Blizzard, kinda sucks for everyone else. Of course, you can't blame Blizzard for making a freakin' awsome game.
Either way, WoW has conquered half of hardcore PC gaming, and is probably singlehandedly responsible for a lot of PC gaming woes.
Personally, I'm patient. I'm waiting for UT2007 and the Revolution. Gaming has gotten too baroque, and the Rev will save it.
Well, at least the car is actually a car available for sale - I don't care who's driving it or where, any more than I care if a McDonalds commercial includes a supermodel eating it. The sketchy part is that the price listed is for a car is the price for a different product than what is being shown - but at least they do sell that product.
The case of games and McDonalds is that they simply don't even sell what is being shown - you can't buy a hamburger that looks as good, large, and tasty as what they show you in the commercial.
The problem with in-engine cutscenes is that I fidn that they are very often unskippable. Of course, recording video is so much easier. The funniest example is serious Sam 2, where the cutscenes are just video-recorded in-game footage - I guess a scripted replay system would've been too much trouble for a budget title.
Not only that, but the COD2 movies are in first-person perspective. Since the game is an FPS, it seems even more feasible that the movies being shown are in-game footage.
I wonder how one would expand Tycho Brahe's term "bullshot" to refer to a movie?
Yep. Growth has it's limits. Eventually you hit all the people who just aren't gamers and haven't played a 3d game ever - I don't think anybody will be reaching them until the Revolution comes out.
Plus, WoW is really hurting the PC gaming industry. I know a lot of gamers who've just stopped playing any game that isn't WoW.
Finally, Half-Life was a great game. The first time. The second time someone made an "immersive FPS adventure - like playing a movie!" it was pretty cool. But now they've all but pushed out half the industry, and the gameplay in those titles is pretty tired. Conversely, the online multiplayer FPS and RTS games are getting increasingly ferrocious learning curves that block anybody but hardcore teens from playing.
Plus, there is a real, massive demand for educational titles for young kids (not toddlers) that just isn't being exploited. I know tons of parents who're wondering where the next "The Incredible Machine", "Carmen Sandiego" or "Sim Earth" is.
But as long as everybody's trying to make the next Half-Life AAA blockbuster, they're stuck.
Console games are pretty much still mainly aimed at university/teenaged/preadolescent guys. The heavy focus on T/M titles (adults don't need blood, tits, and heavy metal to buy games) demonstrates this. Eventually, you hit the point where you've got every teenaged boy in your market - and then what? I think they hit that point and are still trying to grow, not realising that they've fully exploited the target market.
Every game that breaks out of that market and gets a little momentum going becomes an unparalleled success. The trick is (a) getting out of the market that all your developers fit into, and (b) getting that momementum outside of that market when all your marketting people think like teenaged boys.
I agree that Dia is apallingly bad. I find that I end up usually making do with OpenOffice Draw if I need a drawing program and I don't have AutoCAD or Visio handy - but it's not a perfect substitute.
Re:Maybe there's something to this...
on
Uwe Boll Smash!
·
· Score: 1
This is a very good point - the measure of financial success is not gross income, but return-on-investment, time, risk, and buy-in-cost. Boll's movies have quick returns, low buy-in-cost, and high return-on-investment. His proven track record in those lines make them low-risk too. I can see why he gets investors.
Of course, that kind of approach is strip-mining. He not only damages his own reputation with these crap films, but the movie industry in general. If viewers start thinking "let's not go to the movies, the last 5 flicks we saw all sucked" then not only will Boll be in trouble, but the whole industry. I wouldn't be surprised if studios started paying distributors to block his stuff.
I would think movies would be more useful - most FPS games I've played don't exactly let you see the stance of the firer. Plus, games don't teach you how to use a sight - most FPS titles have the gun off to an angle, rather than having the sights lined up.
I would think that most of the "training" from tactical FPS games would be (a) teaching how to move slowly, hide, etc. and (b) psychological. A mouse is not a handgun in any way, shape or form.
Duck Hunt would do more for your marksmanship than Quake.
Slashdot Mirror
Screw Sonic. I'm just looking forward to sitting down with some buddies and brawling through the Gauntlet games and Golden Axe.
I agree - the stylus just doesn't work well as a joystick. I played through the whole thing, and it wasn't until the 50th star or so that I really felt comfortable, and I _still_ got nervous at anything that involved long-distance running.
Perhaps there could be future refinements of the "stylus as joystick" interface, but so far I think Nintendo has to accept that the DS does _not_ have an analog stick - it has a pointing device.
Isn't that battle already lost though? I mean, is Linux licensed with the "V2 Or Later" clause, or was that left out? If the "Or later clause" is present, then the embedded developers are SOL, because their own fork must also include the "Or later" clause, otherwise backtrack to versions of Linux that were licensed without the clause. IANAL, but that's the way it looks to me.
Really, the "or later" clause gives RMS a spectacular amount of power. He could make V3 a copy of the BSD license, and thus effectively obliterating the GPL completely - after all, any V2 project would be allowed to be converted into a V3 project by anyone using it, and the "or later" clause could not be removed without the permission of all relevant copyright holders - and even so, older versions would retain the "or later" clause.
Nice setup. Seriously though, I got mine new on Ebay a year and a half ago for $50CAN, so interested slashdotters can get them for much cheaper than $79 if they shop around.
Well, for non-DRM'd text or HTML files, an old cheap PalmOne device can do all those things.
- cheap enough for the tub
- searching > bookmarks
- lightweight
- cheap, therefore loanable
- palm games ~= paper airplanes
- can throw it at people (my Zire 21 has taken and dealt abuse without any harm)
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the eBook - the problem is with the clumsy, heavyweight approach provided by MS and Adobe. I already get a good eBook experience with my little Zire and free materials. Once the retail experience becomes as good as the free experience, I'll be interested in retail eBooks.
Well, some portable devices are pretty dirt cheap. If you don't mind the low resolution, a Zire 21 has a very high-contrast non-luminous screen, and you can get them at dirt-cheap prices. I don't know if you can get eBooks for them, but I avoid retail eBooks anyways and free things are usually available as text/html.
So far, I've read Thinking In C++ (highly recommended to anyone who wants to learn C++, and it's free), and some creative commons Linux book I only got halfway through (dry, dry stuff, even drier than TiCPP).
Paper > screen for books. If I use a screen, it's because (a) I want to fit a huge book in a tiny pocket and (b) it's free (or at least cheap).
Whoop - bah, got confused. Rogers was who I had in Guelph. In Hamilton it was Cogeco.
Fsck, I had none of that - even straight up Vonage-box plugged into the cable box, and my Rogers service was crap. I had the full plan, and was running Vonage in "bandwidth saver mode" and even then the sound was laggy.
This was in downtown Hamilton, which should be a large enough city to have decent service.
Really? I'm in Hamilton and my 905-number was Hamilton specific. Of course, every other aspect of Vonage was, personally, a disaster for me so I gave it up - but that wasn't a problem.
Imho, it's because movies are one-or-the-other. You can either watch dramatic films with great script... about some poor little sexual deviant's tragic life and the various dramatic, sad and angry people that surround them...
or you can watch a whizz-bang action or comedy flick written by tools and acted by slabs.
Finally, there's the third category of films - the endless sprawl of "suspense" films that rely on elaborate and pointless supernatural themes, retreads of CSI plots, and A-list actors doing C-list acting. "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" was not that good a film, so why does it deserve to be made over-and-over-again?
So basically, your options are "Scary Movie", "Van Helsing", "Boys Don't Cry", or "What Lies Beneath". While some of those movies would normally be fine to see once or even twice, whatching the genre get abused over and over again eventually grates on you.
I want to see Oscar Bid writing and acting outside of the endless repetition of Oscar Bid themes. Not that I have any problem with cancerous, gay, black, alzheimers sufferers - but we've been hit over the head enough.
Good call. Abuse rocked, and I was itching to see more from them.
Start the level 50 characters off in, say, "Valhalla" - some realm where they can get primo gear and have a little time to play alone and learn before jumping into the blender. Give them a day's work of looting and stuff to get accustomed to their character's high-level doodads, then cut them loose in the real world to sink-or-swim. Basically, compress the whole game into an afternoon's play for "fast track". To avoid fscking the economy, make most "fast track" artifacts useless to non "fast track players" or something - if dropped in the real world they turn into gold or something.
So why doesn't Blizzard just sell the gold for those players who want to skip to the front? Why don't they just let you roll up a level 50 player with a greater from scratch if you fork over $100? After all, let's say you want to join your friends who play on Battlegrounds, but don't want the agonizing process of leveling up to battlegrounds level... why doesn't Blizzard offer to let you build a character at that level? It would make them money, block off the farmers, let players who have no interest in the treadmill aspect of MMOs get involved, and still allow you to design the player yourself and know what it has (whereas buying a character from someone else gives you a bunch of stuff that you don't know how to use and might not work well).
Sounds like a gaming tablet. Basically, MS's answer to the DS. Some place they can get hand-held FPS and RTS games onto the market without sucking up to Nintendo.
Sounds hazardous to me - little airborne filaments? Sounds like asbestos. Then again, I've done no digging at all to check, so I may be full of carp.
At any rate, it seems like overkill to a problem that should've been fixed by the GSM standard itself - built into the GSM standard there should've been a mechanism to receive "silcence flags" sent by local transmitters. Church/movie theathre simply needs to have a transmitter in the room. First-responders could have special cellphoness that ignore the "silence flag".
Simple. China has no interest in making their citizens into good free little consumers. China just wants to sell stuff to other countries. So, businesses that sell internationally will register their international websites with an international provider, and meanwhile will have their domestic system on the new Chinese domain names, which is all the locals will be able to access.
If chinese people interact with outsiders on the internet, the Chinese government loses control. Blocking them from doing so interferese in no way with American businesses using Chinese labour to manufacture their branded products.
Well, except that generally, these "little man" electronics companies are basically just "lets make a logo and get Chinese manufacturing companies X, Y, and Z slap it on their products when we import them".
Still, most of the big names do the same, they just spend more on marketing.
I posted that earlier in another thread how WoW is really hurting the games industry and people freaked out. But think about it - think about all the gamers you know who play WoW - these are people who used to buy a new game every month, and now they're playing only one game all the time. Great for Blizzard, kinda sucks for everyone else. Of course, you can't blame Blizzard for making a freakin' awsome game.
Either way, WoW has conquered half of hardcore PC gaming, and is probably singlehandedly responsible for a lot of PC gaming woes.
Personally, I'm patient. I'm waiting for UT2007 and the Revolution. Gaming has gotten too baroque, and the Rev will save it.
Well, at least the car is actually a car available for sale - I don't care who's driving it or where, any more than I care if a McDonalds commercial includes a supermodel eating it. The sketchy part is that the price listed is for a car is the price for a different product than what is being shown - but at least they do sell that product.
The case of games and McDonalds is that they simply don't even sell what is being shown - you can't buy a hamburger that looks as good, large, and tasty as what they show you in the commercial.
The problem with in-engine cutscenes is that I fidn that they are very often unskippable. Of course, recording video is so much easier. The funniest example is serious Sam 2, where the cutscenes are just video-recorded in-game footage - I guess a scripted replay system would've been too much trouble for a budget title.
Not only that, but the COD2 movies are in first-person perspective. Since the game is an FPS, it seems even more feasible that the movies being shown are in-game footage.
I wonder how one would expand Tycho Brahe's term "bullshot" to refer to a movie?
Yep. Growth has it's limits. Eventually you hit all the people who just aren't gamers and haven't played a 3d game ever - I don't think anybody will be reaching them until the Revolution comes out.
Plus, WoW is really hurting the PC gaming industry. I know a lot of gamers who've just stopped playing any game that isn't WoW.
Finally, Half-Life was a great game. The first time. The second time someone made an "immersive FPS adventure - like playing a movie!" it was pretty cool. But now they've all but pushed out half the industry, and the gameplay in those titles is pretty tired. Conversely, the online multiplayer FPS and RTS games are getting increasingly ferrocious learning curves that block anybody but hardcore teens from playing.
Plus, there is a real, massive demand for educational titles for young kids (not toddlers) that just isn't being exploited. I know tons of parents who're wondering where the next "The Incredible Machine", "Carmen Sandiego" or "Sim Earth" is.
But as long as everybody's trying to make the next Half-Life AAA blockbuster, they're stuck.
Console games are pretty much still mainly aimed at university/teenaged/preadolescent guys. The heavy focus on T/M titles (adults don't need blood, tits, and heavy metal to buy games) demonstrates this. Eventually, you hit the point where you've got every teenaged boy in your market - and then what? I think they hit that point and are still trying to grow, not realising that they've fully exploited the target market.
Every game that breaks out of that market and gets a little momentum going becomes an unparalleled success. The trick is (a) getting out of the market that all your developers fit into, and (b) getting that momementum outside of that market when all your marketting people think like teenaged boys.
I agree that Dia is apallingly bad. I find that I end up usually making do with OpenOffice Draw if I need a drawing program and I don't have AutoCAD or Visio handy - but it's not a perfect substitute.
This is a very good point - the measure of financial success is not gross income, but return-on-investment, time, risk, and buy-in-cost. Boll's movies have quick returns, low buy-in-cost, and high return-on-investment. His proven track record in those lines make them low-risk too. I can see why he gets investors.
Of course, that kind of approach is strip-mining. He not only damages his own reputation with these crap films, but the movie industry in general. If viewers start thinking "let's not go to the movies, the last 5 flicks we saw all sucked" then not only will Boll be in trouble, but the whole industry. I wouldn't be surprised if studios started paying distributors to block his stuff.
I would think movies would be more useful - most FPS games I've played don't exactly let you see the stance of the firer. Plus, games don't teach you how to use a sight - most FPS titles have the gun off to an angle, rather than having the sights lined up.
I would think that most of the "training" from tactical FPS games would be (a) teaching how to move slowly, hide, etc. and (b) psychological. A mouse is not a handgun in any way, shape or form.
Duck Hunt would do more for your marksmanship than Quake.