The annual Gamestop expo has a lot of the air of old-E3... Yuck, I don't know why they even kept that around. Why would you want hot, smelly, sweat-drenched air anyway?
So they've added an extra blade to the UI, but they didn't think to at least re-use one of the background pictures from the other blades for the new one. So instead of a sexy Bullet Witch in the Marketplace background, now I have some ugly orange mess that looks like an ad for M&M's. That's disjointed and annoying and should have been a simple, obvious fix. Though I imagine having two backgrounds with Wolverine instead of one might have resulted in some kind of character license infringement or something. Lovely.
The power use doesn't bother me so much, but I noticed that when I left WiiConnect24 on the console got really hot. I didn't like the idea of my Wii baking 24 hours a day. I wouldn't want it to update automatically when I turn it on if that would interfere with me jumping right into a game. But it could do the update in the background while I'm shopping or whatever, similar to how the 360 and PS3 background downloading and resume if you do something that it can't background with. And it's a no-brainer to just put in an update-on-demand feature without having to turn on the continuous connection.
Meanwhile, after seeing what appeared to be a laggy demo at the press conference, I was pleasantly surprised by how well Warhawk worked. I'm sorry, but anyone who says it's laggy was probably wearing their Nintendo-colored glasses.
I'm sorry but I might have a case of the retardeds. The demo was laggy but anyone who says so wears Nintendo glasses? Didn't you just say it was? Can you make that make sense? How much do Nintendo glasses cost?
I'll admit my statement was not as clear as it could have been. The demo at the press conference appeared laggy, but my actual hands-on experience did not reflect any such lag. I have heard speculation that there might have been a delay between what was happening on the demo system and what was displayed on the big screens at the press conference, but I don't know what the real story is there. All I know is that, when I actually played the game for myself, I did not experience any lag. I was contrasting the lag that I anticipated with the lack of lack I actually experienced.
And if I drop the sarcasm, my speculation for why people might call Warhawk laggy is that perhaps they expected the Warhawk's on-screen orientation to stay exactly in sync with the orientation of the controller, rather than thinking of the controller as a steering device.
Well, I tried both Wii and PS3/Warhawk at E3, and while I was predisposed to like the Wii and skeptical of Sony's 'last minute' addition, I was disappointed with the Wii and impressed with the PS3 controller.
First off, I really like the PS2/Dual-Analog style controller, so that wasn't going to be a problem for me. I don't like the non-symmetrical layout of the Gamecube and I hated the first-party XBox controllers. The 360 controller is perhaps the best, with the 'bumpers' instead of the white/black buttons that are in different places on different controllers, and the triggers that actually allow for varying degrees of input (which is hard to get with Sony's buttons).
My friends and I were all excited to swordfight with the Wii controller. Problem was, it didn't actually let you control the sword in 3D space, it only let you determine when to swing. Not to say that the controller couldn't do it right, but it hasn't yet. Also, I really didn't like using the Wii controller for the FPS sections of the game, although I was told that Metroid worked much better.
The Wii controller was very sensitive and responsive, but the games just weren't using it to its potential yet. I'm hoping that if they're just afraid 'real' 3D control is too complicated, they'll have some 'advanced'/'arcade' options in there like you often see on console flight simulators. The best game I played in Nintendo's booth was the driving game, which could have been done just as well on PS3, and would have looked better. (Note that they said that 'something came up' and kicked everyone out of the booth before I got to try Zelda, Mario, or Metroid -- probably Paris Hilton showed up or something...)
Meanwhile, after seeing what appeared to be a laggy demo at the press conference, I was pleasantly surprised by how well Warhawk worked. I'm sorry, but anyone who says it's laggy was probably wearing their Nintendo-colored glasses. I found it very easy and natural to pilot my Warhawk, which is very promising given that they had apparently only added this control mode a few weeks before E3! Meanwhile, Nintendo's betting the whole farm on this gimmick, and they still don't have it down.
As a side note, we put in the original Warhawk when we got back, and we were amazed at how craptacular it looked. It must have been displaying like 100 polygons on screen! And at the time we thought it was awesome -- though even then we weren't fooled by the fmv...
One thing I haven't seen anything about is what kind of storage the Revolution will have. I don't want to download a bunch of ROMs if there's nowhere to KEEP them. And I better not have to transfer them onto a memory card and then transfer them to my computer and then transfer them back when I want to play them again...
> If every game reviewer held games to the Xplay standards, we'd all have much better games.
Well, that's only if you take seriously the premise that their reviews are based on 'standards'. As far as I can tell, the show is more of an attempt at a comedy routine than a review show. And I just don't usually find it all that funny. Again I offer for comparison 'Judgment Day'. Tommy and Victor are also willing to call bad games bad, and they even wildly disagree with each other on some games. When I watch JD, I get the sense that these guys have been playing games for a long time, actually played the games they're reviewing, and are giving us their honest opinions. On X-Play, I get the sense that someone else played the games and wrote some stuff they thought would be funny for the hosts to read off of the teleprompter. One thing I do like on X-Play, however, is the bear that answers technical questions and then attacks the camera.
I really don't get what so many people like about X-Play. I just got DirecTV recently, and the first couple of episodes of this that I saw, they didn't like a single game they reviewed. So my initial reaction was "Why the heck would you get people who don't like games to do a game review show?" I watched a few more anyway, and it turned out they do claim to like some games. But for the most part, the show seems to be more about how 'cleverly cynical' they can be, rather than about games. And their rating system truly sucks. I haven't actually kept a count, but it seems like ninety percent of what they review gets a '3 out of 5'. They will go on and on about how much they hated a game and then give it a '3 out of 5'. Next, they'll talk about how much they enjoyed a game and how good its graphics were, and give it a '3 out of 5'. Why do they even bother with the number? The only thing on G4 that I watch regularly is 'Judgment Day'. Now those guys know their games! And their reviews come across as their honest opinions, not something that was written for them to say to sound clever or funny. And they actually are funny, whereas on X-Play they're only trying to be funny.
They said it starts out by only downloading the parts of the game that are immediately accessible, and then streams the rest while you play that. So you start playing as soon as the first level is ready, and as long as you don't finish it too fast, the rest will be there for you when you get there.
I'm running SuSE 9.0 on my integrated SiL 3112 right now. The installation was as smooth as any other SuSE installation I've done. My only complaint about the SATA drive under Linux is that my drive-activity light doesn't work. Much better than WinXP, which had some problem -- possibly not related to SATA -- such that it gave me a blue screen on boot and forced a chkdsk every time I rebooted until I found a registry setting to tell it not to check whether it had been shut down 'properly'.
You can go to technet.oracle.com and download all the Oracle software you want and use it all you like, as long as you don't go commercial/production with it. The full versions of all their software are freely available for developers/students to experiment with or learn on.
This doesn't answer your question about PostgreSQL or mySQL, but if your main interest is learning to use OLAP and not specifically with those databases, then the Oracle stuff might be a good resource.
"A lot of people like flexibility in choices, so what are the choices here in terms of what.NET means?" he said. "Well, we want the choices all to be exactly the same: software to connect information, people, systems and devices."
A lot of people like flexibility in choices...we want the choices all to be the same...
I seem to remember a lot of people reacting the way I did - namely "Damn! A db filesystem is so cool - I wish it wasn't MS that was finally going to make this mainstream and take all the credit!"
The sad think is that they just don't notice that the Amiga could edit video better than a P200 because they were using a 20.000 video card.
Um, 20,000 what? Not dollars, certainly. The Toaster never cost that much.
And the original poster was talking about more than just editing video. The Amiga had better graphics and sound capabilities than anything close to its price range, and it took quite a while for Mac and Windows to catch up
The English rules for pronunciation indicates that the 'i' in 'Linux' should be long because the 'u' comes after only one consonant. In the case of 'Lindows', the 'i' is separated from the next vowel, 'o', by two consonants, making it short rather than long.
My favorite part was the assertion that Space Wars was the "first first person shooter"! What? These guys obviousbly don't even read about games, let alone play them or know anything about them!
Re:Still waiting on these...
on
Ultima Revived
·
· Score: 1
I haven't played it yet, but I picked up Bethesda's recent "Sea Dogs" precisely because it looks like an updated "Pirates!" The two blurbs on the front also compare it favorably to "Pirates!" You should be able to find "Sea Dogs" in the bargain ($20) bin at a store near you.
Check out "The Unholy War" for PS1. I think it may be exactly what you're looking for in an Archon remake. The development team even had some of the original Archon developers on it.
One of the posts linked in the original story also has Mr. Miller saying "Jeff Minter is still working [for] us on a variety of new game titles. He intends to release a new title roughly every 6-9 months." Not to mention that he (Minter, not Miller) also worked on the development tools for the NUON. Anyone know if that's what they're releasing?
I could hardly take the rest of this seriously after it started off so poorly:
RSI never existed? Wrong! Check any Workers Compensation Board annual report. Oh, but you have to look under the proper name: Musculoskeletal Disorders.
I don't believe it said that RSI never existed, just that what was often diagnosed as RSI/CTS was really psychological, not physical. Workers Comp. records do nothing to negate this assertion.
Here are a few of your inaccuracies. You quote Dr Dean Louis as saying that "A keyboard never injured anyone." Wrong! I invite you to flip over the keyboard on the next personal computer you see. You will find a warning label there, that says something like, "Continuous use of a keyboard may cause injury."
"There's a warning label, therefore it must be true." -- That's a non-sequiter if I ever saw one. The label is probably there to deflect liability for all those workers comp claims just mentioned. Again, this does nothing to address whether there was an actual physical injury from the keyboard, or whether many people, including doctor's and workers comp boards, point to the keyboard as the cause of the symptoms.
John Emmer -- VidEo GAme eNthusiast, Philosopher, Software Engineer
jjustice@sensus-communis.com -- www.sensus-communis.com
jjustice@veganpub.com -- www.veganpub.com
While it is true that, in general, games for a given platform tend to improve (in terms of technical accomplishments, not necessarily in terms of quality), Panzer Dragoon was actually an 'early' game for the Saturn and IMHO was one of the best, both technically and as a game.
As for the SNES 'killing' the Genesis, well, you might as well stand in the middle of a room full of classic gamers and yell "The Atari 800 beat the pants off of the C64!"
I remember reading an article about the symbols for nuclear waste dumps - I think it was in "The Futurist" in the late 70's or early 80's (I remember it from school.) Unfortunately, I don't see any old article index on The Futurist web site ( http://www.wfs.org/futurist.htm ) Perhaps this is worth a trip to an actual physical library...
Slashdot Mirror
So they've added an extra blade to the UI, but they didn't think to at least re-use one of the background pictures from the other blades for the new one. So instead of a sexy Bullet Witch in the Marketplace background, now I have some ugly orange mess that looks like an ad for M&M's. That's disjointed and annoying and should have been a simple, obvious fix. Though I imagine having two backgrounds with Wolverine instead of one might have resulted in some kind of character license infringement or something. Lovely.
The power use doesn't bother me so much, but I noticed that when I left WiiConnect24 on the console got really hot. I didn't like the idea of my Wii baking 24 hours a day. I wouldn't want it to update automatically when I turn it on if that would interfere with me jumping right into a game. But it could do the update in the background while I'm shopping or whatever, similar to how the 360 and PS3 background downloading and resume if you do something that it can't background with. And it's a no-brainer to just put in an update-on-demand feature without having to turn on the continuous connection.
I'll admit my statement was not as clear as it could have been. The demo at the press conference appeared laggy, but my actual hands-on experience did not reflect any such lag. I have heard speculation that there might have been a delay between what was happening on the demo system and what was displayed on the big screens at the press conference, but I don't know what the real story is there. All I know is that, when I actually played the game for myself, I did not experience any lag. I was contrasting the lag that I anticipated with the lack of lack I actually experienced.
And if I drop the sarcasm, my speculation for why people might call Warhawk laggy is that perhaps they expected the Warhawk's on-screen orientation to stay exactly in sync with the orientation of the controller, rather than thinking of the controller as a steering device.
Well, I tried both Wii and PS3/Warhawk at E3, and while I was predisposed to like the Wii and skeptical of Sony's 'last minute' addition, I was disappointed with the Wii and impressed with the PS3 controller.
First off, I really like the PS2/Dual-Analog style controller, so that wasn't going to be a problem for me. I don't like the non-symmetrical layout of the Gamecube and I hated the first-party XBox controllers. The 360 controller is perhaps the best, with the 'bumpers' instead of the white/black buttons that are in different places on different controllers, and the triggers that actually allow for varying degrees of input (which is hard to get with Sony's buttons).
My friends and I were all excited to swordfight with the Wii controller. Problem was, it didn't actually let you control the sword in 3D space, it only let you determine when to swing. Not to say that the controller couldn't do it right, but it hasn't yet. Also, I really didn't like using the Wii controller for the FPS sections of the game, although I was told that Metroid worked much better.
The Wii controller was very sensitive and responsive, but the games just weren't using it to its potential yet. I'm hoping that if they're just afraid 'real' 3D control is too complicated, they'll have some 'advanced'/'arcade' options in there like you often see on console flight simulators. The best game I played in Nintendo's booth was the driving game, which could have been done just as well on PS3, and would have looked better. (Note that they said that 'something came up' and kicked everyone out of the booth before I got to try Zelda, Mario, or Metroid -- probably Paris Hilton showed up or something...)
Meanwhile, after seeing what appeared to be a laggy demo at the press conference, I was pleasantly surprised by how well Warhawk worked. I'm sorry, but anyone who says it's laggy was probably wearing their Nintendo-colored glasses. I found it very easy and natural to pilot my Warhawk, which is very promising given that they had apparently only added this control mode a few weeks before E3! Meanwhile, Nintendo's betting the whole farm on this gimmick, and they still don't have it down.
As a side note, we put in the original Warhawk when we got back, and we were amazed at how craptacular it looked. It must have been displaying like 100 polygons on screen! And at the time we thought it was awesome -- though even then we weren't fooled by the fmv...
One thing I haven't seen anything about is what kind of storage the Revolution will have. I don't want to download a bunch of ROMs if there's nowhere to KEEP them. And I better not have to transfer them onto a memory card and then transfer them to my computer and then transfer them back when I want to play them again...
> If every game reviewer held games to the Xplay standards, we'd all have much better games.
Well, that's only if you take seriously the premise that their reviews are based on 'standards'. As far as I can tell, the show is more of an attempt at a comedy routine than a review show. And I just don't usually find it all that funny. Again I offer for comparison 'Judgment Day'. Tommy and Victor are also willing to call bad games bad, and they even wildly disagree with each other on some games. When I watch JD, I get the sense that these guys have been playing games for a long time, actually played the games they're reviewing, and are giving us their honest opinions. On X-Play, I get the sense that someone else played the games and wrote some stuff they thought would be funny for the hosts to read off of the teleprompter. One thing I do like on X-Play, however, is the bear that answers technical questions and then attacks the camera.
I really don't get what so many people like about X-Play. I just got DirecTV recently, and the first couple of episodes of this that I saw, they didn't like a single game they reviewed. So my initial reaction was "Why the heck would you get people who don't like games to do a game review show?" I watched a few more anyway, and it turned out they do claim to like some games. But for the most part, the show seems to be more about how 'cleverly cynical' they can be, rather than about games. And their rating system truly sucks. I haven't actually kept a count, but it seems like ninety percent of what they review gets a '3 out of 5'. They will go on and on about how much they hated a game and then give it a '3 out of 5'. Next, they'll talk about how much they enjoyed a game and how good its graphics were, and give it a '3 out of 5'. Why do they even bother with the number? The only thing on G4 that I watch regularly is 'Judgment Day'. Now those guys know their games! And their reviews come across as their honest opinions, not something that was written for them to say to sound clever or funny. And they actually are funny, whereas on X-Play they're only trying to be funny.
They said it starts out by only downloading the parts of the game that are immediately accessible, and then streams the rest while you play that. So you start playing as soon as the first level is ready, and as long as you don't finish it too fast, the rest will be there for you when you get there.
I'm running SuSE 9.0 on my integrated SiL 3112 right now. The installation was as smooth as any other SuSE installation I've done. My only complaint about the SATA drive under Linux is that my drive-activity light doesn't work. Much better than WinXP, which had some problem -- possibly not related to SATA -- such that it gave me a blue screen on boot and forced a chkdsk every time I rebooted until I found a registry setting to tell it not to check whether it had been shut down 'properly'.
You can go to technet.oracle.com and download all the Oracle software you want and use it all you like, as long as you don't go commercial/production with it. The full versions of all their software are freely available for developers/students to experiment with or learn on.
This doesn't answer your question about PostgreSQL or mySQL, but if your main interest is learning to use OLAP and not specifically with those databases, then the Oracle stuff might be a good resource.
>And whoever imagined that cutesey RPN languages like Postscript, Forth and Smalltalk could ever be mainstream needs their head read!
What does 'RPN' stand for here? And why is Smalltalk 'cutesey'?
From this story on Yahoo:
.NET means?" he said. "Well, we want the choices all to be exactly the same: software to connect information, people, systems and devices."
"A lot of people like flexibility in choices, so what are the choices here in terms of what
A lot of people like flexibility in choices...we want the choices all to be the same...
Actually, you don't need WineX etc for that -- I just saw UU for PDA's at E3 yesterday...
I seem to remember a lot of people reacting the way I did - namely "Damn! A db filesystem is so cool - I wish it wasn't MS that was finally going to make this mainstream and take all the credit!"
The sad think is that they just don't notice that the Amiga could edit video better than a P200 because they were using a 20.000 video card.
Um, 20,000 what? Not dollars, certainly. The Toaster never cost that much.
And the original poster was talking about more than just editing video. The Amiga had better graphics and sound capabilities than anything close to its price range, and it took quite a while for Mac and Windows to catch up
The English rules for pronunciation indicates that the 'i' in 'Linux' should be long because the 'u' comes after only one consonant. In the case of 'Lindows', the 'i' is separated from the next vowel, 'o', by two consonants, making it short rather than long.
Wouldn't that make the 'i' in 'Microsoft' short?
My favorite part was the assertion that Space Wars was the "first first person shooter"! What? These guys obviousbly don't even read about games, let alone play them or know anything about them!
I haven't played it yet, but I picked up Bethesda's recent "Sea Dogs" precisely because it looks like an updated "Pirates!" The two blurbs on the front also compare it favorably to "Pirates!" You should be able to find "Sea Dogs" in the bargain ($20) bin at a store near you.
Check out "The Unholy War" for PS1. I think it may be exactly what you're looking for in an Archon remake. The development team even had some of the original Archon developers on it.
One of the posts linked in the original story also has Mr. Miller saying "Jeff Minter is still working [for] us on a variety of new game titles. He intends to release a new title roughly every 6-9 months." Not to mention that he (Minter, not Miller) also worked on the development tools for the NUON. Anyone know if that's what they're releasing?
John Emmer -- VidEo GAme eNthusiast, Philosopher, Software Engineer
jjustice@sensus-communis.com -- www.sensus-communis.com
jjustice@veganpub.com -- www.veganpub.com
While it is true that, in general, games for a given platform tend to improve (in terms of technical accomplishments, not necessarily in terms of quality), Panzer Dragoon was actually an 'early' game for the Saturn and IMHO was one of the best, both technically and as a game.
As for the SNES 'killing' the Genesis, well, you might as well stand in the middle of a room full of classic gamers and yell "The Atari 800 beat the pants off of the C64!"
I remember reading an article about the symbols for nuclear waste dumps - I think it was in "The Futurist" in the late 70's or early 80's (I remember it from school.) Unfortunately, I don't see any old article index on The Futurist web site ( http://www.wfs.org/futurist.htm ) Perhaps this is worth a trip to an actual physical library...