I had this discussion with a friend once, and I think it's a valid point, even if I personally hate the idea of owners hoarding their works away.
There is a viable solution for both sides, though-- escrow for copyrighted works. Set a minimum copyright period (10-20 years) during which works are copyrighted just by creating them, as they are now. To keep your copyright beyond that, you must give the Library of Congress an unencrypted digital, or highest-resolution-possible analog copy of your work, to be held in escrow until the end of your full copyright term. At that point, even if you HAVE hoarded your work away for the entire 150 years or so of your copyright, the work still exists for posterity.
Everybody wins. Cranky or embarassed authors can hide their works away until some time after their death, and normal folks don't lose things to obscurity.
Of course, I still think copyright is waaaaay to long, but this is one of those issues where there is a solution we could implement now, without getting into the deeper issues.
I'm the guy who LOVED the Xen parts of the original Half-Life. I thought the crazy portal-hopping giant-baby-glowing-head-attack hallucination at the end made it just that much cooler. I was pretty tired of the "interactive" hallways and same old soldiers and alien grunts.
I thought it added variety, and it was perfectly built in to the story-- after all, those aliens materializing in front of you had to be popping in from *somewhere*... it seemed a little odd that you hadn't been teleported somewhere before the end of the game just on accident.
And of course it was about ammo management and alien goo. Do you honestly expect aliens to leave much in the way of earth-type ammo and videogame medkits laying around for you?
Lucasarts has a few of their classics still for sale, buried deeply on their site: Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, a 3.5-pack with Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and Sam & Max hit the Road (the full Maniac Mansion game is included in Day of the Tentacle, hence the.5), Escape From Monkey Island, Curse of Monkey Island, and a Mega Monkey Bundle with Monkey Island 1-4 (look for promo link under Escape from Monkey Island).
Broken Sword I and II are still for sale here and there-- I couldn't find a good link. I did, however, find that Revolution (who makes these games) has released Lure of the Temptress along with Beneath a Steel Sky.
yeah, yeah... I covered that in my post. Right there where I said:
"You'd think somebody besides Tapwave would figure out that putting a dpad on the left, buttons on the right, and a couple of shoulder buttons makes just about any PDA into an awesome portable gaming platform."
It's a great PDA. It just sucks that they're the only ones, when ALL of these PDAs and smartphones could be vastly improved with this one small design tweak.
I asked this very question in the last article we had about this cancellation, with nearly the same bitch-and-moan you have. Now that I'm all growed up with a job, I can afford to buy adventure games by the dozen. But they just aren't there. My girlfriend bemoans her selling of her Kings' Quest and Hero's Quest collections-- she said "I never thought those would be the last Adventure games made."
So, for everybody out there, here's a list of what I've found to keep me amused so far:
1. Everything ScummVM plays. You've probably played a good number of these, but I'm sure it's not all of them. Broken Sword I and II are good, and I haven't made my way around to Beneath a Steel Sky or Flight of the Amazon Queen yet, both released as freeware by their original authors to the ScummVM team. Buy the ones still being sold new, like Broken Sword and Simon the Sorcerer 1 & 2 to encourage "good behavior" from game companies.
2. Sequels to ScummVM games that ScummVM can't run yet-- things like Broken Sword III, Monkey Island 4, and Grim Fandango.
3. New things you've never heard of, but are still being sold new-- this is the best bet. Runaways: a Road Adventure (available new), Wyrmkeep's remade Inherit the Earth (may be in a future scummvm version, from peeking in CVS), Gilbert Goodmate for the PocketPC, Syberia 1 and 2, etc... Check out justadventure.com for news.
4. Stuff you haven't heard of but isn't still for sale-- this can be tricky, finding things on ebay or abandonware sites. A friend clued me into one he'd played when younger, now available as abandonware: Amazon: Guardians of Eden. I've heard good things about I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream, but don't have a copy yet. I've also turned up websites about a couple of Discworld adventure games that sound excellent, and the first two also seem to be available as abandonware. There is a third that is still for sale, so if you download the other two BUY THE ONE THAT'S STILL BEING SOLD.
Remember-- if you don't buy the ones that are for sale, companies will keep right on assuming the market doesn't exist for these games.
For old DOS games that don't work with ScummVM, NAGI, FreeSCI, or the like, there's always DOSBox, which does an excellent job of making your shiny new PC pretend that it's old and crappy to make the games run.
Anyway, that's what I know. Anybody got anything else?
This has been driving me nuts. Do cell-phone designers not realise that we are all trained by nintendo to expect d-pads on the LEFT side of things? There are a staggering number of "would be great for handheld gaming if only they'd move the d-pad" devices. PocketPC centers it. Treo 600 centers it. Sidekick/Hiptop puts it on the right. Even that shiny new Motorola MPx everybody's drooling over has the damn thing on the right. You'd think somebody besides Tapwave would figure out that putting a dpad on the left, buttons on the right, and a couple of shoulder buttons makes just about any PDA into an awesome portable gaming platform.
You're gonna have to do a little legwork, but this month's Dwell magazine had a short article on an apartment building that was using amorphous thin-film panels as cladding. I'm pretty sure i've seen that magazine at Lowe's if you want to pick up a copy. It has some pretty off-the-wall cool modern designs, too. It also has some (think corrugated steel cube) that would probably get you lynched by your neighbors.
It's not gonna be as easy as getting new vinyl siding installed-- you're probably going to have to find a specialist contractor and figure out where to order the stuff. You'll probably have an easier time if you live somewhere like California, where these things are more popular. I'm in Indiana, so I'm fully expecting to be doing this sort of stuff entirely on my own.
homepower.com might be some help in getting started.
A-men. Not to mention, if you actually HAD such a pet ape, and had the throwing-incident happen once, you might be inclined to back up the hard drive. That's probably the #1 tivo hardware failure-- we all know that hard drives eventually die. Just pull it out and make a backup image. (I believe you can fit an empty (sans video) image on a CD or two) Then, the next time your pet ape goes ape, you can just buy a new drive and reimage, rather than messing with the tivo repair countdown. Save that for non-mechanical component failures.
HDTV Tivo shipping in a few weeks...
on
TiVo Will Die
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· Score: 1
He also seems to be unaware that the first HDTV tivos (DirecTV and OTA) are already preordered and ship out to people at the end of march.
Whether HDTV will be a huge success or not, Tivo is already covering that base.
Very true, but I suspect that "gamers get older" has very little to do with the popularity of "mature" games. ("mature" is a bit misused, here, i think...) In fact, I would go so far as to surmise that these games are most popular with teenage boys. I don't think overwhelming bloodiness is the way into the pocketbooks of actual adults, except by way of their children.
What do adults play in stupendous numbers? Bejeweled, The Sims, Myst, and Mario Kart.
You're not going to catch your parents opining over the lack of realtime 3D evisceration in their games. I will, of course, continue to get a good laugh out of the gibs in quake, though.
As a starter, here's a page with a number of stats, but being from a site called "ecotopia" makes the engineer-cynic in me want to take it with a grain of salt. They are, however, citing other studies. The more facts, the merrier, so if you've got any links, post.
The short version is that amorphous (thin-film) panels yield a 400%-2000% payoff on energy investment. That range is worst-case to best-case lifetime for the panels. Thin-film is the way to go anyway, as it's around $15/sq. foot instead of the $60/sq. foot for the crystalline panels. Sure, crystalline is twice as efficient, but thin-film is cheap enough to use as siding on your house, and you'll make up the difference in area. Now, as to convincing your significant other that shiny purple-blue panels are the way to clad your house is the tough part.
Look at it this way-- based on the energy costs, even if the return was only 110%, it would be worth doing. Is there any other way to turn a barrel of oil into 1.1 barrels of oil?
I've been looking for good confirmation on these statistics, too. I have been reading recently that we're well past break-even on the energy used for production, but I don't have any numbers from a source I'd believe 100%.
Anybody got any good numbers from a reputable, independent (ie, not a solar panel company or an oil company...) source?
Seriously, man-- you're the exception, not the rule. + and - both read in the vast majority of players. The parent poster didn't claim "all," he claimed "virtually any." Which you are unlucky enough to not be part of.
To add one more datapoint to this overwhelmingly thorough survey-- I have 3 old DVD players that both read both formats, and one old hitachi DVD-ROM that won't read any of them. And one IBM laptop that didn't used to, but now does after a firmware upgrade.
I was all giddy and excited about HL2. I hadn't been that worked up about a game in 10 years. I was ready and willing to drop whatever it cost to run that game at a fantastic framerate, but it didn't show up, and now I'm even more jaded than I was before.
I had some mild excitement for the previously-upcoming Sam & Max sequel, but that got cancelled. (a new adventure game! MAN I miss that genre. Thank you, ScummVM.)
I think part of the lack of neverending salivation over upcoming games is that I can just go buy them now, unlike when I was 10 and a $50 game was a HUGE deal to save up for. That, or copying 25 pages of machine code out of the back of Compute's Gazette by hand.
Still, there are great games, and I play and buy them. Actually, I probably buy 3 or 4 times what I did when I was younger, even if I spend less time playing them. It's just easier now to justify picking up Viewtiful Joe while I'm grocery shopping than it was when my allowance was $1/week. I don't think the industry has anything to worry about. The dorks who played games as kids in 1982 all have jobs now, and will go right on buying them. Heck, the guys I know with kids play multiplayer gamecube games with them.
Beyond Good and Evil was fantastic. Similar if not entirely the same as the old adventure games-- it had much more key/door/crate-pushing/ledge puzzles over and over than the variety of a real adventure. More like Zelda. In fact, remarkably like zelda. Scratch that... exactly like zelda, except with a spiky-haired asian girl where Link should be.
Nonetheless, it's a GREAT game, well worth $20 for the gamecube. (Or Xbox or PS2 or PC or whatever you have)
I had forgotten about The Longest Journey-- I heard of it a few years back but never got around to picking it up. Thanks for extending my supply of adventures a little longer!
I also wholeheartedly second the "buy them" recommendation. Some of the games I already own I have even re-purchased from LucasArts in their archive collections to get versions with better graphics or CD audio, since many of my originals were C64 or subpar Amiga ports. Unfortunately, some are no longer sold, so I have to buy used-- which never shows up on the company's charts.
Why aren't there any adventure games made anymore? RPG's just aren't the same. I managed to satisfy my need for new games for a while by playing the old ones I'd never managed to get to, but that field is getting a little thin. I've got Beneath a Steel Sky and Simon the Sorcerer to finish, and I discovered a surprisingly well-done port of Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars for the GBA, of all things, that I am now working on. but I've pretty much exhausted Sierra and Lucasarts' backcatalogs.
I guess my old-timer market is getting dried up, and nobody wants to make games for me now that I have the money to buy them.:P Sure, I buy a lot of other games, but these would be instant sales, with no hesitation. Hell, they'd get at least one free sale with crap as long as they stuck "Space Quest" on it.
Why do they think people don't like adventures? Did no one pay attention to Myst?
Anyway, anybody got any obscure adventure game suggestions that I might not have played?
I may be the only one, from reading some of the other posts, but I'm definitely interested. Our company uses laptops as our only machines. The only time I move the laptop is going from home to work in the morning-- and I would really prefer the larger screen real-estate. I have been toying with getting a flat panel and carrying it, too, but something like this integrates things much more cleanly.
I agree-- I was trying to be a little sarcastic. I really can't keep up with my tivo, but I have no real desire to. As long as it has a few shows I like on it for when *I* feel like watching, that's all I ask.
Mostly I was trying to joke with the article author, who is apparently on a Vision Quest to squeeze all the joy out of his life by filling every spare or overlappable moment with timeshifted hoo-ha, and wondering how he can timeshift even more stuff.
Consider it buying the microdrive.
on
iPod Mini Autopsy
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Those 4GB microdrives retail for a LOT more than $250. It would be a good deal based on that alone, but as an mp3 player, you can do better in the space per dollar department.
Multiple-stream recording is fantastic. My directivo already records twice as much as I could watch with its two tuners.
Now, if only audio and video *players* could play back multiple streams!! I could listen to two things at once WHILE timestretching and trimming commercials and intro/credit crap, thus bringing my watching capability to something like 300 or 400% of normal human "realtime" limitations.
Of course, it would suck... but at least I'd be able to keep up with my Tivo, right?
If you want to cram EVEN MORE CRAP into your life (as I do) you are probably already timeshifting everything you can. So, what to do now to squeeze more episodes of "My Life as a Teenage Robot" into your busy life of sci-fi novels, gameboy programming and gamecube games?
Timestretching!! By cranking up the speed at which you watch something while keeping the audio pitch sane, you can drop a good 25% (or more, if you feel *X-TREME*) from your viewing time. And if you think I'm joking, check out this winDVD page where they outline their timestretching tech. Pop in a DVD, and use your choice of "finish by a specific time" or "finish within a certain amount of time." And voila, suddenly everything takes 25% less time. Which leaves you able to catch up on all those anime reruns your tivo has been accumulating while you were busy watching the Daily Show.
It's a true story. I never got around to stealing anything-- half because I'm a lazy bastard and procrastinated, and half because my conscience just wouldn't let me get in on the looting. Not that the people running the company didn't deserve it for the incredibly lousy decisions that turned our previously profitable and stable small software company into a huge, lumbering dot-com mess.
I made off with a nice shirt from a racing team from a project I worked on 5 or 6 cat5 patch cables. Nothing huge. We did lose a few aerons, and I know some older laptops disappeared, as did the occasional palm pilot, but the looting wasn't much to speak of. The only really good hauls were the people who "planned ahead" for the auction, like the video camera guy, or another guy who stuffed a ridiculous amount of RAM inside the case of an old pentium aptiva, which he bought at auction for $50.
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I had this discussion with a friend once, and I think it's a valid point, even if I personally hate the idea of owners hoarding their works away.
There is a viable solution for both sides, though-- escrow for copyrighted works. Set a minimum copyright period (10-20 years) during which works are copyrighted just by creating them, as they are now. To keep your copyright beyond that, you must give the Library of Congress an unencrypted digital, or highest-resolution-possible analog copy of your work, to be held in escrow until the end of your full copyright term. At that point, even if you HAVE hoarded your work away for the entire 150 years or so of your copyright, the work still exists for posterity.
Everybody wins. Cranky or embarassed authors can hide their works away until some time after their death, and normal folks don't lose things to obscurity.
Of course, I still think copyright is waaaaay to long, but this is one of those issues where there is a solution we could implement now, without getting into the deeper issues.
I'm the guy who LOVED the Xen parts of the original Half-Life. I thought the crazy portal-hopping giant-baby-glowing-head-attack hallucination at the end made it just that much cooler. I was pretty tired of the "interactive" hallways and same old soldiers and alien grunts.
I thought it added variety, and it was perfectly built in to the story-- after all, those aliens materializing in front of you had to be popping in from *somewhere*... it seemed a little odd that you hadn't been teleported somewhere before the end of the game just on accident.
And of course it was about ammo management and alien goo. Do you honestly expect aliens to leave much in the way of earth-type ammo and videogame medkits laying around for you?
Oh well, I'm done whining.
In Cold Blood for $15.
Broken Sword I and II for sale from sold-out.co.uk. Says they ship worldwide.
There's also an amazingly good port of Broken Sword I for the GBA. If you have a GBA, I highly recommend it-- it's really well done.
An addendum to my previous post:
.5), Escape From Monkey Island, Curse of Monkey Island, and a Mega Monkey Bundle with Monkey Island 1-4 (look for promo link under Escape from Monkey Island).
Buy Simon the Sorcerer 1, 2, and 3D
Found out that Harlan Ellison's site has I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream the computer game for $32.
Lucasarts has a few of their classics still for sale, buried deeply on their site: Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, a 3.5-pack with Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and Sam & Max hit the Road (the full Maniac Mansion game is included in Day of the Tentacle, hence the
Broken Sword III
Broken Sword I and II are still for sale here and there-- I couldn't find a good link. I did, however, find that Revolution (who makes these games) has released Lure of the Temptress along with Beneath a Steel Sky.
Beneath a Steel Sky and Flight of the Amazon Queen for download from ScummVM. Also, re-coded cutscenes for Broken Sword I and II to get the video working in ScumMVM.
yeah, yeah... I covered that in my post. Right there where I said:
"You'd think somebody besides Tapwave would figure out that putting a dpad on the left, buttons on the right, and a couple of shoulder buttons makes just about any PDA into an awesome portable gaming platform."
It's a great PDA. It just sucks that they're the only ones, when ALL of these PDAs and smartphones could be vastly improved with this one small design tweak.
I asked this very question in the last article we had about this cancellation, with nearly the same bitch-and-moan you have. Now that I'm all growed up with a job, I can afford to buy adventure games by the dozen. But they just aren't there. My girlfriend bemoans her selling of her Kings' Quest and Hero's Quest collections-- she said "I never thought those would be the last Adventure games made."
So, for everybody out there, here's a list of what I've found to keep me amused so far:
1. Everything ScummVM plays. You've probably played a good number of these, but I'm sure it's not all of them. Broken Sword I and II are good, and I haven't made my way around to Beneath a Steel Sky or Flight of the Amazon Queen yet, both released as freeware by their original authors to the ScummVM team. Buy the ones still being sold new, like Broken Sword and Simon the Sorcerer 1 & 2 to encourage "good behavior" from game companies.
2. Sequels to ScummVM games that ScummVM can't run yet-- things like Broken Sword III, Monkey Island 4, and Grim Fandango.
3. New things you've never heard of, but are still being sold new-- this is the best bet. Runaways: a Road Adventure (available new), Wyrmkeep's remade Inherit the Earth (may be in a future scummvm version, from peeking in CVS), Gilbert Goodmate for the PocketPC, Syberia 1 and 2, etc... Check out justadventure.com for news.
4. Stuff you haven't heard of but isn't still for sale-- this can be tricky, finding things on ebay or abandonware sites. A friend clued me into one he'd played when younger, now available as abandonware: Amazon: Guardians of Eden. I've heard good things about I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream, but don't have a copy yet. I've also turned up websites about a couple of Discworld adventure games that sound excellent, and the first two also seem to be available as abandonware. There is a third that is still for sale, so if you download the other two BUY THE ONE THAT'S STILL BEING SOLD.
Remember-- if you don't buy the ones that are for sale, companies will keep right on assuming the market doesn't exist for these games.
For old DOS games that don't work with ScummVM, NAGI, FreeSCI, or the like, there's always DOSBox, which does an excellent job of making your shiny new PC pretend that it's old and crappy to make the games run.
Anyway, that's what I know. Anybody got anything else?
This has been driving me nuts. Do cell-phone designers not realise that we are all trained by nintendo to expect d-pads on the LEFT side of things? There are a staggering number of "would be great for handheld gaming if only they'd move the d-pad" devices. PocketPC centers it. Treo 600 centers it. Sidekick/Hiptop puts it on the right. Even that shiny new Motorola MPx everybody's drooling over has the damn thing on the right. You'd think somebody besides Tapwave would figure out that putting a dpad on the left, buttons on the right, and a couple of shoulder buttons makes just about any PDA into an awesome portable gaming platform.
Oh well... I can dream.
You're gonna have to do a little legwork, but this month's Dwell magazine had a short article on an apartment building that was using amorphous thin-film panels as cladding. I'm pretty sure i've seen that magazine at Lowe's if you want to pick up a copy. It has some pretty off-the-wall cool modern designs, too. It also has some (think corrugated steel cube) that would probably get you lynched by your neighbors.
It's not gonna be as easy as getting new vinyl siding installed-- you're probably going to have to find a specialist contractor and figure out where to order the stuff. You'll probably have an easier time if you live somewhere like California, where these things are more popular. I'm in Indiana, so I'm fully expecting to be doing this sort of stuff entirely on my own.
homepower.com might be some help in getting started.
A-men. Not to mention, if you actually HAD such a pet ape, and had the throwing-incident happen once, you might be inclined to back up the hard drive. That's probably the #1 tivo hardware failure-- we all know that hard drives eventually die. Just pull it out and make a backup image. (I believe you can fit an empty (sans video) image on a CD or two) Then, the next time your pet ape goes ape, you can just buy a new drive and reimage, rather than messing with the tivo repair countdown. Save that for non-mechanical component failures.
He also seems to be unaware that the first HDTV tivos (DirecTV and OTA) are already preordered and ship out to people at the end of march.
Whether HDTV will be a huge success or not, Tivo is already covering that base.
Very true, but I suspect that "gamers get older" has very little to do with the popularity of "mature" games. ("mature" is a bit misused, here, i think...) In fact, I would go so far as to surmise that these games are most popular with teenage boys. I don't think overwhelming bloodiness is the way into the pocketbooks of actual adults, except by way of their children.
What do adults play in stupendous numbers? Bejeweled, The Sims, Myst, and Mario Kart.
You're not going to catch your parents opining over the lack of realtime 3D evisceration in their games. I will, of course, continue to get a good laugh out of the gibs in quake, though.
As a starter, here's a page with a number of stats, but being from a site called "ecotopia" makes the engineer-cynic in me want to take it with a grain of salt. They are, however, citing other studies. The more facts, the merrier, so if you've got any links, post.
The short version is that amorphous (thin-film) panels yield a 400%-2000% payoff on energy investment. That range is worst-case to best-case lifetime for the panels. Thin-film is the way to go anyway, as it's around $15/sq. foot instead of the $60/sq. foot for the crystalline panels. Sure, crystalline is twice as efficient, but thin-film is cheap enough to use as siding on your house, and you'll make up the difference in area. Now, as to convincing your significant other that shiny purple-blue panels are the way to clad your house is the tough part.
Look at it this way-- based on the energy costs, even if the return was only 110%, it would be worth doing. Is there any other way to turn a barrel of oil into 1.1 barrels of oil?
I've been looking for good confirmation on these statistics, too. I have been reading recently that we're well past break-even on the energy used for production, but I don't have any numbers from a source I'd believe 100%.
Anybody got any good numbers from a reputable, independent (ie, not a solar panel company or an oil company...) source?
Seriously, man-- you're the exception, not the rule. + and - both read in the vast majority of players. The parent poster didn't claim "all," he claimed "virtually any." Which you are unlucky enough to not be part of.
To add one more datapoint to this overwhelmingly thorough survey-- I have 3 old DVD players that both read both formats, and one old hitachi DVD-ROM that won't read any of them. And one IBM laptop that didn't used to, but now does after a firmware upgrade.
I was all giddy and excited about HL2. I hadn't been that worked up about a game in 10 years. I was ready and willing to drop whatever it cost to run that game at a fantastic framerate, but it didn't show up, and now I'm even more jaded than I was before.
I had some mild excitement for the previously-upcoming Sam & Max sequel, but that got cancelled. (a new adventure game! MAN I miss that genre. Thank you, ScummVM.)
I think part of the lack of neverending salivation over upcoming games is that I can just go buy them now, unlike when I was 10 and a $50 game was a HUGE deal to save up for. That, or copying 25 pages of machine code out of the back of Compute's Gazette by hand.
Still, there are great games, and I play and buy them. Actually, I probably buy 3 or 4 times what I did when I was younger, even if I spend less time playing them. It's just easier now to justify picking up Viewtiful Joe while I'm grocery shopping than it was when my allowance was $1/week. I don't think the industry has anything to worry about. The dorks who played games as kids in 1982 all have jobs now, and will go right on buying them. Heck, the guys I know with kids play multiplayer gamecube games with them.
Beyond Good and Evil was fantastic. Similar if not entirely the same as the old adventure games-- it had much more key/door/crate-pushing/ledge puzzles over and over than the variety of a real adventure. More like Zelda. In fact, remarkably like zelda. Scratch that... exactly like zelda, except with a spiky-haired asian girl where Link should be.
Nonetheless, it's a GREAT game, well worth $20 for the gamecube. (Or Xbox or PS2 or PC or whatever you have)
I had forgotten about The Longest Journey-- I heard of it a few years back but never got around to picking it up. Thanks for extending my supply of adventures a little longer!
I also wholeheartedly second the "buy them" recommendation. Some of the games I already own I have even re-purchased from LucasArts in their archive collections to get versions with better graphics or CD audio, since many of my originals were C64 or subpar Amiga ports. Unfortunately, some are no longer sold, so I have to buy used-- which never shows up on the company's charts.
Why aren't there any adventure games made anymore? RPG's just aren't the same. I managed to satisfy my need for new games for a while by playing the old ones I'd never managed to get to, but that field is getting a little thin. I've got Beneath a Steel Sky and Simon the Sorcerer to finish, and I discovered a surprisingly well-done port of Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars for the GBA, of all things, that I am now working on. but I've pretty much exhausted Sierra and Lucasarts' backcatalogs.
:P Sure, I buy a lot of other games, but these would be instant sales, with no hesitation. Hell, they'd get at least one free sale with crap as long as they stuck "Space Quest" on it.
I guess my old-timer market is getting dried up, and nobody wants to make games for me now that I have the money to buy them.
Why do they think people don't like adventures? Did no one pay attention to Myst?
Anyway, anybody got any obscure adventure game suggestions that I might not have played?
I may be the only one, from reading some of the other posts, but I'm definitely interested. Our company uses laptops as our only machines. The only time I move the laptop is going from home to work in the morning-- and I would really prefer the larger screen real-estate. I have been toying with getting a flat panel and carrying it, too, but something like this integrates things much more cleanly.
Yeah, that's kinda the same thing as discriminating against racists. What was the question again?
I agree-- I was trying to be a little sarcastic. I really can't keep up with my tivo, but I have no real desire to. As long as it has a few shows I like on it for when *I* feel like watching, that's all I ask.
Mostly I was trying to joke with the article author, who is apparently on a Vision Quest to squeeze all the joy out of his life by filling every spare or overlappable moment with timeshifted hoo-ha, and wondering how he can timeshift even more stuff.
Those 4GB microdrives retail for a LOT more than $250. It would be a good deal based on that alone, but as an mp3 player, you can do better in the space per dollar department.
Multiple-stream recording is fantastic. My directivo already records twice as much as I could watch with its two tuners.
Now, if only audio and video *players* could play back multiple streams!! I could listen to two things at once WHILE timestretching and trimming commercials and intro/credit crap, thus bringing my watching capability to something like 300 or 400% of normal human "realtime" limitations.
Of course, it would suck... but at least I'd be able to keep up with my Tivo, right?
If you want to cram EVEN MORE CRAP into your life (as I do) you are probably already timeshifting everything you can. So, what to do now to squeeze more episodes of "My Life as a Teenage Robot" into your busy life of sci-fi novels, gameboy programming and gamecube games?
Timestretching!! By cranking up the speed at which you watch something while keeping the audio pitch sane, you can drop a good 25% (or more, if you feel *X-TREME*) from your viewing time. And if you think I'm joking, check out this winDVD page where they outline their timestretching tech. Pop in a DVD, and use your choice of "finish by a specific time" or "finish within a certain amount of time." And voila, suddenly everything takes 25% less time. Which leaves you able to catch up on all those anime reruns your tivo has been accumulating while you were busy watching the Daily Show.
It's important, or something. Who knows.
It's a true story. I never got around to stealing anything-- half because I'm a lazy bastard and procrastinated, and half because my conscience just wouldn't let me get in on the looting. Not that the people running the company didn't deserve it for the incredibly lousy decisions that turned our previously profitable and stable small software company into a huge, lumbering dot-com mess.
I made off with a nice shirt from a racing team from a project I worked on 5 or 6 cat5 patch cables. Nothing huge. We did lose a few aerons, and I know some older laptops disappeared, as did the occasional palm pilot, but the looting wasn't much to speak of. The only really good hauls were the people who "planned ahead" for the auction, like the video camera guy, or another guy who stuffed a ridiculous amount of RAM inside the case of an old pentium aptiva, which he bought at auction for $50.