I think that the fact that you don't believe that tactical thinking on the fly is a factor is the very reason why you're not doing well. For all but the very worst FPS games it isn't just a matter of twitch speed, but to the person who's getting consistently out-foxed it will absolutely look like that. I'm no FPS god, but I'm good enough to know that memorizing the maps, knowing which weapons are ideal in which situations, effective use of cover & concealment, and being able to anticipate where your opponents are likely to be, where they're likely to be looking, and in what direction they're likely to dodge are absolutely vital.
I'm rather weak at split-second pixel-perfect aim. As a result I'm fairly useless with sniper weapons, but can otherwise compensate with a little thinking well enough to still put in a respectable showing.
It looks like the Stelladaptor is currently out of stock, but hopefully that's just a temporary issue.
Also, I forgot to mention that you may want to grab one of the game pad utilities from http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/games/utilities/ . I use GamePad Companion, which allows you to map game controller functions to just about anything. I don't think that Power64 needs that however, as long as you set it to enable USB joysticks and then calibrate it.
Ominous Cow is absolutely right. The Stelladaptor is worth every penny, and works flawlessly. I primarily use it with Stella and Power64, but it works in other apps as well.
As a kid I went through countless Atari CX-40 joysticks. They were perfect for my hand, but obviously not designed to last. Eventually I managed to talk my parents into splurging for an Epyx 500XJ (making sure to get the Atari one, not the visually identical serial port PC version). The fire button placement isn't ideal, but the tactile response of the microswitches is wonderful, and 25 years later it *still* works perfectly!
Pardon me while an "old man" of 38 waxes nostalgic...
I'm right there with you. I vaguely remember playing Pong at a diner near our house, and Gun Fight at a proto-arcade that was really more of a pinball/air hockey parlor. The vestibule of our local Ames store had an already-old electro-mechanical game called S.A.M.I. that blew me away (I was probably 6 or 7) until Space Invaders came out a year or so afterward.
Later, when the first honest-to-goodness arcade (an Aladdin's Castle) opened in our area, with games like Space War, Star Fire, M-79 Ambush, Jungle Hunt, Galaxian, Pac-Man, Asteroids, Omega Race, Red Baron, Star Hawk, etc. my life was forever changed. I can still remember where some of those games were positioned! I'd beg my mom for some money (usually I wouldn't get more than a dollar so I had to make it last!) and spend the afternoon there. It was Nirvana. I'd burn through my tiny allowance pretty quickly, and then watch other people play. Just being there surrounded by the machines made me happy, and the ambient noises were like music to me.
As part of a project for a music class, a friend and I once took a tape recorder into the arcade and walked around recording the ambient sounds for a while. I wish I still had that tape somewhere!
Okay, off to go spend some quality time with MAME...
Daemon Tools is an excellent utility for doing just that in Windows. I highly recommend it.
I discovered Daemon Tools when my legal, purchased (pre-ordered, even!) copy of Command & Conquer 3 suddenly stopped recognizing the disc. The disc is pristine and had worked for about a month with no issues, and there had been no changes to the system at all (I only use the PC for C&C and Half-Life) I tried using 2 different drives, applying the official updates, etc., etc., etc., to no avail. I easily wasted three full nights trying to get the game to recognize my disc and had no success whatsoever.
In desperation I looked for no-CD cracks, and stumbled upon Daemon Tools. In less than 10 minutes I was up and running. In a bit of irony, after all the time spent wrestling with the game to get it to run I'd lost my "inertia" with it and mentally moved on to other things. I played a couple of maps that evening and haven't launched the game since.
...but I predicted (and hoped for) this exact idea several years ago, when I was 1/3 of an FFM triad.
Regardless of the inevitable ethical outcry and the fact that it's no longer directly relevant to my current relationship situation, I think that this a very cool technology. It'd be great if it was developed to the point that viable, healthy offspring could be produced, though I doubt that mainstream society is ready for such things yet.
I'm in no way qualified to even speak on this subject, but could it be that the Oxygen Catastrophe, in wiping out the great majority of life on Earth, provided sufficient selective pressure that any previous bias toward cryophilic life was effectively erased? I'm just speculating wildly here.
Can you imagine the panic that internal combustion engines, with their infernal racket and belching smoke, would induce in horses and other beasts of burden! It would be pandemonium in our streets! Bedlam! They're surely just a fad, but this nonsense must nevertheless be nipped in the bud. Ban horseless carriages now, before they become a scourge to our society!
There really should be a non-steamed version for all the games, so you can run it without steam.
For all of Introversion's games there are. I own Darwinia, Uplink, and Defcon- all for Mac OS X- and don't have to mess with Steam at all to play any of them (obviously, since Steam is Windows-only). There are non-Steam Windows versions of all of Introversion's games. Maybe you can contact them to see if it's possible to transfer your Steam licenses to the direct download versions?
BTW, I'm personally neutral about Steam. I keep a Windows box just to play the Half-Life games (and also the Command & Conquer games from time to time), so more than half of my Windows gaming is done through it. I like the convenience of auto-patching and being able to pull down a game on a new machine without needing the install discs, but the other day I was unable to launch Episode 2 because I couldn't connect to Steam, and that pissed me off royally.
Without actually watching you play I can't tell from your post where the problem was, but personally I loved the game. The visuals got me interested, but the completely unique gameplay (typical of Introversion) really impressed me.
There are (or at least were) some pretty active discussion forums related to the game. Perhaps you can get some tips there?
Yes, OS/2 v4.0 was code-named Merlin. I remember that without hesitation because back when it first came out I named my cat after it. Yes, I'm absolutely serious. My non-geek friends assumed that he was named after the wizard and I generally let them- it was easier than trying to explain what an operating system is.
Not long after we got a second cat. The two cats took an immediate dislike to each other so, IBM freak that I was (am?), we decided to name the new cat APAR. APAR stands for "Authorized Program Analysis Report", and is basically IBM's internal term for a software bug. So we had a cat named after a piece of IBM software, and another named after bugs in IBM software.
Sadly, our pet situation followed the product line and Merlin is no longer with us. (APAR is doing just fine, thanks.) Even though we've since switched to Macs as our primary computers, I've promised my wife that our next cat will *not* be named Cheetah, Puma, Panther, Jaguar, Tiger, or Leopard.:-)
You're absolutely right. My 12" G4 PB is (still) my primary computer. I'm a form factor fanatic, so much so that the relatively small size increase between the 12" PB and the MacBook is enough to keep me using a G4. Sure there are trade-offs (I've upgraded the hard drive to 160 GB, but I'm still stuck with 1.25 GB of memory and an aging 1.5 GHz PPC processor), but I make them happily for my itty bitty form factor.
I've been waiting for Apple to come out with an equivalent sized Intel machine, but frankly this isn't it. Yes, it's thinner and 1.6 lbs lighter, with a faster processor and more memory, but even I have limits to what I'm willing to sacrifice for a smaller machine. I use wired ethernet every day both at home (where I could use wireless) and at work (where I can't), FireWire at least once a week, a plethora of USB devices (I have a powered USB hub at work but not at home), and rip and burn discs regularly. I'd *have* to carry around the external SuperDrive, a powered USB hub, an external hard drive (I couldn't come close to shoehorning my data into the Air's tiny hard drive) and the USB-to-Ethernet adapter just to maintain my current functionality, at which point any benefit from the smaller form factor is totally lost. Besides, I'd be cutting less than an inch from the thickness but gaining 2 inches in width. No thanks.
Size freak that I am, it seems that if anyone would want one of these it would be me. Unfortunately I really don't. Maybe I'm really not the target market after all, but are there really that many executives out there who use Macs, and of that set are there that many who fetishize small machines?
Most of my cow-orkers are idiots, regardless of age, so I guess that the only conclusion I can draw from this is that as I've gotten older (I just turned 38 a couple of weeks ago) I've grown more cynical and less tolerant of others' mental shortcomings.;-)
As for reflexes, they've slowed a bit but not as much as I'd feared they would back when I was a teenager. I can still pull off the occasional double-jump-then-headshot-in-midair-while-maneuvering-around-the-incoming-rocket maneuver, but it's less common than it used to be and I get more enjoyment out of mental gymnastics (Portal is my current obsession).
All in all I think I'm sharper and smarter than I was 10 or 20 years ago with one glaring exception. My short-term memory and attention span have turned to complete crap. It's so bad that I've considered possibly seeing a doctor. I forget what I'm saying in mid sentence (unrecoverably) at least a couple of times per day, and am able to function at work only because I always carry around a note pad as a rolling "To Do" list. At my wife's suggestion I've started keeping a pad of post-it notes at the computer at home so that if I sit down to (for example) check e-mail and update a web site I'll actually do both tasks, rather that start one, get distracted half way through, and then end up completing neither one. Yes, two items requires a list. A single distraction can lead to a chain that sets be back hours without even realizing it. Ever put in a DVD and then forget to press play? To say that it's frustrating would be an understatement.
It's also easier for me to do most of my communication by e-mail or chat rather than in person, since I can't very well take notes on things I want to mention while the person I'm talking with is speaking. It's like my mind is just as quick to think of things as it's always been, but the stack that holds things between when they're thought of and acted upon has vanished.
Oh, and my hearing now sucks ass as well, but that's directly attributable to my best friend in high school getting car stereo components at cost.:-)
Suppose you want to play an RTS on a console, with mouse support. It wouldn't be a Nintendo console, it would be a Sony.
**COUGH COUGHDREAMCASTCOUGH COUGH***
No, I don't really mean this as a serious reply, though I have played Unreal Tournament on a DC using mouse and keyboard. Just please don't think that Sony was first to offer usable kbd/mouse support for a console.
Interface for the visually impaired?
on
ZOMG New Zunes
·
· Score: 1
I wonder if they've decided to shift their target market to the visually impaired. Heck, my iPod has a smaller screen but displays 9 lines of very readable text with no problem.
Actually, now that I think about it, since the Zune has the same resolution as the video iPod those same 9 lines would probably look pixelated on the physically larger screen. I never would've thought that the larger screen would actually be a detriment, but there you go.
Excellent point. Having some of the critical technology come from the 1920's is not the same as having all of the critical technologies be of that vintage.
That's an interesting idea, but I'll put my money on vitrification, which is the current state-of-the-art process. Vitrification involves replacing a significant percentage of the inter- and intra-cellular water with a cryoprotectant which causes the cells to attain a glass state rather than forming ice crystals. It's not perfect, but it does go a long way toward eliminating freezing damage.
Dust? Friction? Component wear? You *do* realize that they're talking about atomic scale manufacturing, right? I think it would be more accurate to say that your mental image of how these systems function is what's not scaling down correctly.
Slashdot Mirror
That's fantastic. I regularly debate with creationists online. May I steal your quote?
I think that the fact that you don't believe that tactical thinking on the fly is a factor is the very reason why you're not doing well. For all but the very worst FPS games it isn't just a matter of twitch speed, but to the person who's getting consistently out-foxed it will absolutely look like that. I'm no FPS god, but I'm good enough to know that memorizing the maps, knowing which weapons are ideal in which situations, effective use of cover & concealment, and being able to anticipate where your opponents are likely to be, where they're likely to be looking, and in what direction they're likely to dodge are absolutely vital.
I'm rather weak at split-second pixel-perfect aim. As a result I'm fairly useless with sniper weapons, but can otherwise compensate with a little thinking well enough to still put in a respectable showing.
Absolutely. I've had my Epyx 500XJ for 25 years and it still performs flawlessly!
It looks like the Stelladaptor is currently out of stock, but hopefully that's just a temporary issue.
Also, I forgot to mention that you may want to grab one of the game pad utilities from http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/games/utilities/ . I use GamePad Companion, which allows you to map game controller functions to just about anything. I don't think that Power64 needs that however, as long as you set it to enable USB joysticks and then calibrate it.
Ominous Cow is absolutely right. The Stelladaptor is worth every penny, and works flawlessly. I primarily use it with Stella and Power64, but it works in other apps as well.
As a kid I went through countless Atari CX-40 joysticks. They were perfect for my hand, but obviously not designed to last. Eventually I managed to talk my parents into splurging for an Epyx 500XJ (making sure to get the Atari one, not the visually identical serial port PC version). The fire button placement isn't ideal, but the tactile response of the microswitches is wonderful, and 25 years later it *still* works perfectly!
I just became 12 again. If we ever meet in real life I owe you a Guinness or ten. Many thanks!
Pardon me while an "old man" of 38 waxes nostalgic...
I'm right there with you. I vaguely remember playing Pong at a diner near our house, and Gun Fight at a proto-arcade that was really more of a pinball/air hockey parlor. The vestibule of our local Ames store had an already-old electro-mechanical game called S.A.M.I. that blew me away (I was probably 6 or 7) until Space Invaders came out a year or so afterward.
Later, when the first honest-to-goodness arcade (an Aladdin's Castle) opened in our area, with games like Space War, Star Fire, M-79 Ambush, Jungle Hunt, Galaxian, Pac-Man, Asteroids, Omega Race, Red Baron, Star Hawk, etc. my life was forever changed. I can still remember where some of those games were positioned! I'd beg my mom for some money (usually I wouldn't get more than a dollar so I had to make it last!) and spend the afternoon there. It was Nirvana. I'd burn through my tiny allowance pretty quickly, and then watch other people play. Just being there surrounded by the machines made me happy, and the ambient noises were like music to me.
As part of a project for a music class, a friend and I once took a tape recorder into the arcade and walked around recording the ambient sounds for a while. I wish I still had that tape somewhere!
Okay, off to go spend some quality time with MAME...
Space Lords?
http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?game_id=9674
Daemon Tools is an excellent utility for doing just that in Windows. I highly recommend it.
I discovered Daemon Tools when my legal, purchased (pre-ordered, even!) copy of Command & Conquer 3 suddenly stopped recognizing the disc. The disc is pristine and had worked for about a month with no issues, and there had been no changes to the system at all (I only use the PC for C&C and Half-Life) I tried using 2 different drives, applying the official updates, etc., etc., etc., to no avail. I easily wasted three full nights trying to get the game to recognize my disc and had no success whatsoever.
In desperation I looked for no-CD cracks, and stumbled upon Daemon Tools. In less than 10 minutes I was up and running. In a bit of irony, after all the time spent wrestling with the game to get it to run I'd lost my "inertia" with it and mentally moved on to other things. I played a couple of maps that evening and haven't launched the game since.
...but I predicted (and hoped for) this exact idea several years ago, when I was 1/3 of an FFM triad.
Regardless of the inevitable ethical outcry and the fact that it's no longer directly relevant to my current relationship situation, I think that this a very cool technology. It'd be great if it was developed to the point that viable, healthy offspring could be produced, though I doubt that mainstream society is ready for such things yet.
Oh damn. Now I wish I hadn't commented so I could mod you up. Well done!
I'm in no way qualified to even speak on this subject, but could it be that the Oxygen Catastrophe, in wiping out the great majority of life on Earth, provided sufficient selective pressure that any previous bias toward cryophilic life was effectively erased? I'm just speculating wildly here.
Can you imagine the panic that internal combustion engines, with their infernal racket and belching smoke, would induce in horses and other beasts of burden! It would be pandemonium in our streets! Bedlam! They're surely just a fad, but this nonsense must nevertheless be nipped in the bud. Ban horseless carriages now, before they become a scourge to our society!
There really should be a non-steamed version for all the games, so you can run it without steam.
For all of Introversion's games there are. I own Darwinia, Uplink, and Defcon- all for Mac OS X- and don't have to mess with Steam at all to play any of them (obviously, since Steam is Windows-only). There are non-Steam Windows versions of all of Introversion's games. Maybe you can contact them to see if it's possible to transfer your Steam licenses to the direct download versions?
BTW, I'm personally neutral about Steam. I keep a Windows box just to play the Half-Life games (and also the Command & Conquer games from time to time), so more than half of my Windows gaming is done through it. I like the convenience of auto-patching and being able to pull down a game on a new machine without needing the install discs, but the other day I was unable to launch Episode 2 because I couldn't connect to Steam, and that pissed me off royally.
Without actually watching you play I can't tell from your post where the problem was, but personally I loved the game. The visuals got me interested, but the completely unique gameplay (typical of Introversion) really impressed me.
There are (or at least were) some pretty active discussion forums related to the game. Perhaps you can get some tips there?
Yes, OS/2 v4.0 was code-named Merlin. I remember that without hesitation because back when it first came out I named my cat after it. Yes, I'm absolutely serious. My non-geek friends assumed that he was named after the wizard and I generally let them- it was easier than trying to explain what an operating system is.
:-)
Not long after we got a second cat. The two cats took an immediate dislike to each other so, IBM freak that I was (am?), we decided to name the new cat APAR. APAR stands for "Authorized Program Analysis Report", and is basically IBM's internal term for a software bug. So we had a cat named after a piece of IBM software, and another named after bugs in IBM software.
Sadly, our pet situation followed the product line and Merlin is no longer with us. (APAR is doing just fine, thanks.) Even though we've since switched to Macs as our primary computers, I've promised my wife that our next cat will *not* be named Cheetah, Puma, Panther, Jaguar, Tiger, or Leopard.
You're absolutely right. My 12" G4 PB is (still) my primary computer. I'm a form factor fanatic, so much so that the relatively small size increase between the 12" PB and the MacBook is enough to keep me using a G4. Sure there are trade-offs (I've upgraded the hard drive to 160 GB, but I'm still stuck with 1.25 GB of memory and an aging 1.5 GHz PPC processor), but I make them happily for my itty bitty form factor.
I've been waiting for Apple to come out with an equivalent sized Intel machine, but frankly this isn't it. Yes, it's thinner and 1.6 lbs lighter, with a faster processor and more memory, but even I have limits to what I'm willing to sacrifice for a smaller machine. I use wired ethernet every day both at home (where I could use wireless) and at work (where I can't), FireWire at least once a week, a plethora of USB devices (I have a powered USB hub at work but not at home), and rip and burn discs regularly. I'd *have* to carry around the external SuperDrive, a powered USB hub, an external hard drive (I couldn't come close to shoehorning my data into the Air's tiny hard drive) and the USB-to-Ethernet adapter just to maintain my current functionality, at which point any benefit from the smaller form factor is totally lost. Besides, I'd be cutting less than an inch from the thickness but gaining 2 inches in width. No thanks.
Size freak that I am, it seems that if anyone would want one of these it would be me. Unfortunately I really don't. Maybe I'm really not the target market after all, but are there really that many executives out there who use Macs, and of that set are there that many who fetishize small machines?
Most of my cow-orkers are idiots, regardless of age, so I guess that the only conclusion I can draw from this is that as I've gotten older (I just turned 38 a couple of weeks ago) I've grown more cynical and less tolerant of others' mental shortcomings. ;-)
:-)
As for reflexes, they've slowed a bit but not as much as I'd feared they would back when I was a teenager. I can still pull off the occasional double-jump-then-headshot-in-midair-while-maneuvering-around-the-incoming-rocket maneuver, but it's less common than it used to be and I get more enjoyment out of mental gymnastics (Portal is my current obsession).
All in all I think I'm sharper and smarter than I was 10 or 20 years ago with one glaring exception. My short-term memory and attention span have turned to complete crap. It's so bad that I've considered possibly seeing a doctor. I forget what I'm saying in mid sentence (unrecoverably) at least a couple of times per day, and am able to function at work only because I always carry around a note pad as a rolling "To Do" list. At my wife's suggestion I've started keeping a pad of post-it notes at the computer at home so that if I sit down to (for example) check e-mail and update a web site I'll actually do both tasks, rather that start one, get distracted half way through, and then end up completing neither one. Yes, two items requires a list. A single distraction can lead to a chain that sets be back hours without even realizing it. Ever put in a DVD and then forget to press play? To say that it's frustrating would be an understatement.
It's also easier for me to do most of my communication by e-mail or chat rather than in person, since I can't very well take notes on things I want to mention while the person I'm talking with is speaking. It's like my mind is just as quick to think of things as it's always been, but the stack that holds things between when they're thought of and acted upon has vanished.
Oh, and my hearing now sucks ass as well, but that's directly attributable to my best friend in high school getting car stereo components at cost.
It's "by most publications' standards".
:-)
I'm sorry. I just couldn't resist. I actually agree with your point, but the opportunity to tease you a bit was too tempting to pass up.
No hard feelings?
Suppose you want to play an RTS on a console, with mouse support. It wouldn't be a Nintendo console, it would be a Sony.
**COUGH COUGHDREAMCASTCOUGH COUGH***
No, I don't really mean this as a serious reply, though I have played Unreal Tournament on a DC using mouse and keyboard. Just please don't think that Sony was first to offer usable kbd/mouse support for a console.
I wonder if they've decided to shift their target market to the visually impaired. Heck, my iPod has a smaller screen but displays 9 lines of very readable text with no problem.
Actually, now that I think about it, since the Zune has the same resolution as the video iPod those same 9 lines would probably look pixelated on the physically larger screen. I never would've thought that the larger screen would actually be a detriment, but there you go.
Excellent point. Having some of the critical technology come from the 1920's is not the same as having all of the critical technologies be of that vintage.
;-)
BTW, your name is spelled wrong.
-Cybrex
That's an interesting idea, but I'll put my money on vitrification, which is the current state-of-the-art process. Vitrification involves replacing a significant percentage of the inter- and intra-cellular water with a cryoprotectant which causes the cells to attain a glass state rather than forming ice crystals. It's not perfect, but it does go a long way toward eliminating freezing damage.
Vi pravas! :-)
Dust? Friction? Component wear? You *do* realize that they're talking about atomic scale manufacturing, right? I think it would be more accurate to say that your mental image of how these systems function is what's not scaling down correctly.