A bit trigger happy with the name calling?
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Joel On Software
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Hmm, when I went poking around I found this quote almost immediately..
'First of all, failing to write a spec is the single biggest unnecessary risk you take in a software project. It's as stupid as setting off to cross the Mojave desert with just the clothes on your back, hoping to "wing it."'....
I don't think you are really justified to call the guy an idiot with your single, most likely very out of context, quote. Here is where I got this quote.
... which reason the sales are so stratospherically high for. After the dust settles in a few weeks and we're able to compare HL2 sales to other blockbusters somewhat objectively, how would you determine what percentage of the sales are attributable to the extreme lengths of the anti-piracy and not neccesarily just the fact it's a good game or not?
Will game companies just off the cuff attribute any possible record shattering sales to the ultra DRM ? If so, will HL2 forever alter the course of PC gaming with everybody and their moms scattering to invest in developing their own digital distribution means and rights management? What happens when your system has 4 steam equivalents running on it at once.
Will Valve regret not even trying to leverage their existing infrastructure to licsense to other companies, or is that something up their sleeve they are holding to play at exactly the height of the executive frenzy in the PC gaming industry in response to HL2 sales?
I'm going to have to agree, I don't really mind having to install with 4 cds once.. but I do mind:
Games that are so cheap all the cds come in crappy paper sleeves. Now they're all scattered, or I have to put them in one of those annoying cd organizers.. ugh.
Games that come in poorly manufactured 4 CD case things where all the little holding tabs break off constantly. What the heck? These things -always- break off, then the cds slip out of place in such a way that when you open the container they could slide into the joint and get busted if you aren't careful..
DVD cases are so much nicer then CD cases, I've never had one break, compared to the 40 or so CD cases I've accidently snapped one of the various little plastic bits on. They can fit some -fairly- beefy manuals (by today's standards) in with the game. Most PC games are so backwards that thy contain the DVD case size manual next to a CD case?
So I think if PC games just came in DVD cases even if they were CDs, I think I'd be happy....... erhmmm.
That's not justification to say that it's not enough. The game still looks and runs great at all sorts of settings. The game is just designed to grow into the future some, which is one of the great things in PC gaming.
The problem with stats is that it's easy for them to become more important to players then having fun. Depending on the stat, that has various effects, often counterproductive, on gameplay.
One of the best acknowledgments of this I've ever seen is the half life mod Natural Selection. Kill stats for marines are -not- shown, but they are for the aliens.
Successful marine teams will typically will play in very tight cooridination, and individual contribution to kills is not important to the bigger picture. Not having stats there removes a big part of the temptation to go totally rambo which is going to usually be bad for your team. Who cares if you are killing a bunch of aliens if you are doing it in the wrong place and your team is losing all it's equipment?
The alien style of play on the other hand is much more swarm everywhere. The aliens basically want to inflict as many kills and cost on the marines as much as possible. Raw kills is a valid way to win the match. Having the killboard then makes sense, as it drives competition between the aliens to accomplish this. There is a support alien type that suffers from this scorewise, but you usually only want a level headed person playing that role anyways, so they are probably not affected by pride games.
Basically, I'd say that individual stats are going to often be bad in games that are trying to emphasize on teamwork, and are totally sensical the more individual deathmatch oriented a game is.
Does gamestop have to do anything... nope. I think for the sake of their own business though they would. They really need to include live testing before accepting xboxes to protect themselves and their customers.
As for other things you get besides multiplayer, there are several games I know of that have content updates through the live service. Also using the live service you can basically do internet telephony to other live owners through your friends list without a game I believe. Apparently its quite popular in some circles as it is insanely easy to get working.
I wonder at what level of parity it would take to make a single CD dependable enough to preserve a photo with 99.99% reliability for 100 years. At what length of time with 99.99% reliability does a digital photo on CD become the size of a real photo?
I agree it was correct for the time, but it was still short sighted. As a result of accepting that limitation early we ended up dealing with it in some seriously sloppy ways for years.
It was a massive pain for quite a while trying to use above 640k on a PC, juggling various TSRs in and out of various memory managers. The prospect of an enduser trying to get their PC to run the newest game, modifying config.sys and autoexec.bat was totally insane. Eventually memmaker was integrated into MsDos pretty late in the game. It really damaged Microsoft's reputation at the time to deal with all of that crap because of thier shortsightedness. Even on into Windows 95 it was possible (but admitedly rare) to bump into 640k issues.
While I can't prove it of course, I personally feel that it was a real speed bump for PC gaming that sent quite a few people packing in frustration to consoles because they were spending more time rearranging their himem and creating multiple boot profiles for every game then they were actually playing. When I first used linux, the fact that 'free' simply showed all my memory in as one giant usable chunk, all 4 glorious megs of it, was seriously awesome.
Apparently, Bill Gates claims he never said it though..
Are they just trying to cover up for the fact that it's a market they are too afraid to enter? They insinuate that this could weaken Sony's console dominance, but that just fundamentally doesn't make any sense. Sony can put something like PSP on indefinite life support, like they did with minidisc, if they need to.
I think most telling is the statement that nobody has or will make a meaningful connection between console and handheld devices. I know it's a gamble to say it, but I think that's going to go down like one of those "640k is enough for everybody" type of statements that are seriously shortsighted. The integration angle is still relatively experimental.
Right now, you've got the most marginalized console trying to perform handheld integration. The content, not technically, but philosophically, for this sort of thing flows more from the console market into the handheld then the other way around. Pokemon is a big exception to that, but it being only a single property with fairly uncompelling console counterparts to it's handheld juggernaut is a good example of why console->handheld integration is likely to be more popular.
When the biggest console, Sony, starts integrating content to a handheld, it's going to be a different story on how profound the effect of console/handheld integration is. The first must have game with meaningful handheld integration could do incredible things for the PSP sales.
The fact that digital data rarely goes from "Perfect" to "Ok" to "umm not so good" to "What is that?".. it tends to go from "Perfect" to "Gone/Maybe not gone but very expensive to retrieve," makes it's worth discussing the finer points of digital archival versus analog.
Re:Too much testing, not enough Interviewing
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IT Literacy Test
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· Score: 1
It's a double edged blade of seperation. The interview process from the perspective of a qualified individual should be that they are interviewing the company just as much as they are being interviewed. If a company wants to alienate me by demonstrating their hiring priorities are lacking in basic human insight then that's a very helpful red flag that I should seek other avenues of employment.
Even from the company's perspective they should desire people who are scrutinizing the company, because those people will have their own intuitions that they are not a good match for the company the company may not have. It's best for both parties to avoid that situation.
All hiring that I've seen in the last few years usually goes like this:
1) Person is recommended, hooked up, done, hired.
Or
1) Person's resume comes up in resume search, etc.. 2) Person's resume contains neccesary skills and applicable experience and is called for interview 3) About 90% of the interview is gauging their personal skills, not technical.
It's easy to get rid of a person in the early probationary stages if it turns out they simply don't have the technical skills they claimed they did, that's a low cost risk, and if you aren't totally clueless (aka: doomed no matter what) it's relatively easy to spot.
It's extremely difficult to get rid of a person that has the skills but it turns out they are a pain in the %!* to deal with. You might not find out the full depths of how bad that is until much later when they've settled into their full on %@#hole mode. Now they are in charge of projects, dealing with groups of people, the resentment becomes a -huge- distraction, and they become a total HR liability. If they harass somebody that sues, the company is responsible. If you fire them, they might claim harassment or descrimination. It's a nitemare.
Since when did grammar(!) and spelling have anything to do with insightfulness? A 4 year old with no ability or read or write whatsoever can potentially be insightful beyond an ivy league PhD.
While I won't argue that his grammar and spelling aren't quite bad, the mentality that presentation mistakes destory the value of something is what allows superior marketing to defeat a superior product at virtually all times. If people spent the time to see substance through bad presentation everything would be fundamentally better, not just look better.
Medicine however has been quite successful at keeping everybody alive much longer. As you get older you need more medicine to stay alive, or sometimes to just -want- to stay alive. In this way medicine seems to do a good job of perpetuating it's own existence.
Will medicine eventually destroy quality of life as the number of retirees encroaches on the number of workers? Pushing the retirement age higher, taxes higher, benefits lower.. Will viagra save the world by allowing pensioners to continue producing offspring until their deaths allowing the long lifetimes to be leveraged in some meaningful way against this tide? Will a new standard of raising children have to be adopted for that to make any sense whatsoever? What the heck? Help!
What's especially retarded is that when you elevate something to the status of "oooh scary evil!" you actually imbue it with the properties you are so worried about through the message "We are authority, we don't want you to see that, because it will make you do X."
Of course a kid is going to become more likely to go "oooh I have to see that, and X sounds interesting too," when exposed to a situation like that.
The unfortunate reality though of course is that if any kid in the entire school had done some whacko with a gun, media would be all over the computer lab with the violent video games.
The ironic twist is that the computer lab running the arcade brought quite a few people together where normally their cliques or their loner status kept them totally apart. If there were any pyscho loner types in the school wanting to go on a shooting rampage, they probably ended up hanging out and being accepted in the computer lab, thus making a murderous rampage less likely.
The only thing I'll say about one game being more 'real' then another is that despite the fact that there are differences, each subtle change doesn't diminish the 'realness' of any individual version. They are all games you can become equally skilled at relative to themselves. The main reason you feel that it sucks is because it offsets your established skill. I'd love to see Callus emulation side-by-side with the real thing. The difference must be incredibly small because the games play so balanced and tight on my PC.
I agree the 4 button face layout is suboptimal.
And I agree the large circle face d-pad is annoying for accidently doing too many diagonals. This is something the PS2 D-Pad has a definite advantage on. The isolated control surface gives you very precise control. If the Capcom controllers had used either a raised cross or the PS2 style sunken cross I would have gotten it in an instant, I'm guessing the main reason they didn't is because of licsensing/patent issues. Since I don't have any problem hitting diagonals on a PS2 pad now, I don't see any advantage to a pad that makes it easier to point of being sloppy.
This is a pretty asinine argument, but nonetheless, I just don't see how the SNES D-pad is all that superior.
I have -zero- problem hitting diagonals on the PS2 gamepads. Instead of pushing the surface of the tip of your thumb down onto the pad, you cradle the joint into the gap. From this position, the middle segment of the left index finger of an adult will rest easily on the L1 button. An adult right thumb can cover a mirror position across the 4 face buttons and hit any of them with a slight movement, the analog sticks don't even come close to getting in the way of this position.
Your concept of 'real' SF2 players prefering arcade style joystick doesn't really make sense when you consider the fact that _Capcom_ released the D-pad controller now does it? It's mostly arcade lip service to say you like the original stick better. It takes more skill to use the stick, the D-pad is much easier. I bow down to those that can do everything on a stick that I can do with a D-pad, it's hard. The last time I played an arcade version of Street Fighter with enough intensity to beat it in one credit ( a good 20 minutes of play? ), I actually burned a cut into the inside of my left middle finger from using the upside down cradle grip. Yea, thats pretty lame, I'm not used to the arcade controller.
So by Capcom making the official controller a D-pad, I guess they are contradicting the 'real' players, or something. I saw that controller at the store and I wasn't impressed because the D-pad was the large circle kind like the X-Box. Honestly, I never gave it a chance, so I can't really say. The button layout would be nice though. The genesis had a similar special Street Fighter controller that was pretty good, so I might give the capcom one a chance yet.
Do you even play Street Fighter games? Just be honest, do you?
I played SF2 original through Super Turbo on the SNES, probably something like 3 years of gaming. Then I played Alpha 3 on the PS1. Then Capcom Vs SNK 2 on the PS2. Then I played every single arcade version ever on emulation on PC using the Dual Shock. I can tell you from hundreds of hours of experience that the Dual Shock is an excellent controller for Street Fighter games and that it's D-pad is totally on par with the SNES. The only mark against it is the 4 button layout, not the D-pad.
Just play the games on both controllers, ok?, and get back to me. Both the SNES and PS2 controller are great for them, I actually like the PS2 controller slightly more because the volume of the handles makes thumb stability more comfortable. When my hands were smaller that wasn't an issue, but as an adult, my hands have to clench up to hold an SNES controller.
I'm extremely opinionated when it comes to digital controls because I've been playing these games on and off religiously for over 10 years, I can tell within seconds of using a certain controller if it's worthy for moves that have to be pulled off in 100ms windows of opportunity. You don't play these games consciously, it's one of those intuitive things like riding a bicycle where after so much time you feel your way through it without thought and any slight deviation that hinders you is immediately noticable, like a tire that is slightly low on air. The very first turn you make on such a bike you feel a pull that is unnatural. It's exactly the same way on a subpar controller, and the PS2 controller is not such a controller.
Re:I've never understood the obsession with Halo
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Halo 2 Reviews
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I couldn't agree more with the basic concept of this sentiment. Doom 1 is a nearly unplayable game by today's standards, but at the time it was the most unbelievable thing ever to me.
A decent portion of my marketable skills were once all attributable to the desire to play networked Doom. I spent 6 months convincing a couple key faculty at my high school in early 94 that we should build a computer lab, and after a year of acquiring and repairing free 286s and networking them, we finally maanaged to scrounge four grungy 386s just barely powerful enough to play doom with no sound and network them, it was the most incredible thing ever.
Based on our successes we eventually ended up getting a real budget to build a 486 lab and we went so far as to operate a Doom and Descent arcade for money during lunch and after school to buy more computers. That's some seriously pre-columbine stuff right there.
A couple sensitive faculty caught wind of the full picture of what was going on, but because our school was so underfunded our faculty supporters were able to convince them it was harmless enough to be worth it. In fact, their suspcisions were instigated by the fact we had a computer lab at all, it seemed impossible to them after 20 or so years of only being able afford new books every 7 years or so.
Even though I don't particularly employ the specific technical skills I acquired then anymore, the first experience of working with others in an adult mentality and actually creating something matured me from a nihilistic wannabe punk to something resembling a half way useful person. Earning the right to be treated like an adult in an environment where traditionally I'd been treated like a criminal was priceless. Thanks Doom, it took my selfish desire to play you networked to grow up.... ?
When Halo came out, I was basically, eh, that's pretty good, nice use of physics there, a bit slow paced and repetitive level design though. The fact that so many people saw it as the best game ever was pretty alien to me without the perspective of how totally floored I was by the original Doom. I still have these emotions burned into my brain by just how blown away I was by the leaked alpha and beta. It was that extreme sentiment that actually changed my life.
It's not really 4 seperate buttons, they are joined under the plastic housing, touch it and you'll see the other pieces move exactly like the SNES D-pad.
In my opinion, it works extremely well because you can put the bottom side of your thumb joint in the gap and perform any movements incredibly fast.
Again, the definitive test of that are street fighter games, I don't know any serious street fighter players that are nostalgic for the SNES D-pad in relation to the PS2 dual shock.
It excels at being versatile as a decent analog and a decent digital... I really don't have any issue with the digital on the dual shock, I play street fighter games extensively which, as far as I'm concerned, is the definitive test of a D pad.
I agree the analog is subpar compared to the N64, especially for very precise control near the center. . The one thing the PS2 analog is a tad better at is directional control at full tilt, and dual analog is being used more and more.
And on the flipside.. emulation is sometimes better, at least in my opinion.
My PS2 dualshock controller with USB adaptor is more comfortable in my hands then any older controllers. With video filters like SuperEagle, many games look much better without losing their charm. The ability to save anytime is a massive improvement to many games (sure you can abuse it to beat any game easily, but thats a choice), good bye long winded code inputs. Built in gameshark support with downloadable codes.. Some emulators even have half way decent online functionality..
It's somewhat difficult to say if it's a real or artificial shortage this time. Considering it's capabilities and price, and the fact it has 2 LCDs when LCD demand is so high..
But.. knowing Nintendo.. They don't particularly deserve the benefit of the doubt on this issue:)
I have occasional allergies and those commericials for allergy drugs seem designed to give you allergy symptoms.. am I the only person to have ever experienced this? When it looks like it's going to be an ad with pollen molucules flying into the tear duct of somebody's eye, I switch channels just to be safe.
It's probably going to have some extremely simple watchdog piece of hardware that will reboot the machine if it ever stops receiving it's ticks from the OS, or perhaps even the game itself (since the game itself is a kind of crashable operating system)
If you wanna see something cool, in Counterstrike: Source, which uses the HL2 engine, open up the console and execute: "+showbudget"
It brings up this dynamically updating chart showing each of the game's subsystems and how much time, in milliseconds, is being spent in each one, with a kind of color coded historical running graph at the top showing each component's share and the total time spent per frame. Kinda pointless for an end user, but in a way it's rather englightening to see what the most expensive operations are. There is an even crazier realtime full on function level profiler available through the console as well, but I havn't really messed with it.
I couldn't agree more with your basic idea that the fight from both perspectives makes no sense. Prove the unprovable? Disprove the undisprovable? How is the futility not obvious to these people? It's just fighting for the sake of fighting really.
In the future, I think the Evolution vs Creationism debate is going to be referred to as: "The 200 year Troll."
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, when I went poking around I found this quote almost immediately..
....
'First of all, failing to write a spec is the single biggest unnecessary risk you take in a software project. It's as stupid as setting off to cross the Mojave desert with just the clothes on your back, hoping to "wing it."'
I don't think you are really justified to call the guy an idiot with your single, most likely very out of context, quote. Here is where I got this quote.
That's serious? Would you believe that even more then half a percent of Pocket PC users have done that?
... which reason the sales are so stratospherically high for. After the dust settles in a few weeks and we're able to compare HL2 sales to other blockbusters somewhat objectively, how would you determine what percentage of the sales are attributable to the extreme lengths of the anti-piracy and not neccesarily just the fact it's a good game or not?
Will game companies just off the cuff attribute any possible record shattering sales to the ultra DRM ? If so, will HL2 forever alter the course of PC gaming with everybody and their moms scattering to invest in developing their own digital distribution means and rights management? What happens when your system has 4 steam equivalents running on it at once.
Will Valve regret not even trying to leverage their existing infrastructure to licsense to other companies, or is that something up their sleeve they are holding to play at exactly the height of the executive frenzy in the PC gaming industry in response to HL2 sales?
I'm going to have to agree, I don't really mind having to install with 4 cds once.. but I do mind:
Games that are so cheap all the cds come in crappy paper sleeves. Now they're all scattered, or I have to put them in one of those annoying cd organizers.. ugh.
Games that come in poorly manufactured 4 CD case things where all the little holding tabs break off constantly. What the heck? These things -always- break off, then the cds slip out of place in such a way that when you open the container they could slide into the joint and get busted if you aren't careful..
DVD cases are so much nicer then CD cases, I've never had one break, compared to the 40 or so CD cases I've accidently snapped one of the various little plastic bits on. They can fit some -fairly- beefy manuals (by today's standards) in with the game. Most PC games are so backwards that thy contain the DVD case size manual next to a CD case?
So I think if PC games just came in DVD cases even if they were CDs, I think I'd be happy....... erhmmm.
That's not justification to say that it's not enough. The game still looks and runs great at all sorts of settings. The game is just designed to grow into the future some, which is one of the great things in PC gaming.
The problem with stats is that it's easy for them to become more important to players then having fun. Depending on the stat, that has various effects, often counterproductive, on gameplay.
One of the best acknowledgments of this I've ever seen is the half life mod Natural Selection. Kill stats for marines are -not- shown, but they are for the aliens.
Successful marine teams will typically will play in very tight cooridination, and individual contribution to kills is not important to the bigger picture. Not having stats there removes a big part of the temptation to go totally rambo which is going to usually be bad for your team. Who cares if you are killing a bunch of aliens if you are doing it in the wrong place and your team is losing all it's equipment?
The alien style of play on the other hand is much more swarm everywhere. The aliens basically want to inflict as many kills and cost on the marines as much as possible. Raw kills is a valid way to win the match. Having the killboard then makes sense, as it drives competition between the aliens to accomplish this. There is a support alien type that suffers from this scorewise, but you usually only want a level headed person playing that role anyways, so they are probably not affected by pride games.
Basically, I'd say that individual stats are going to often be bad in games that are trying to emphasize on teamwork, and are totally sensical the more individual deathmatch oriented a game is.
Does gamestop have to do anything... nope. I think for the sake of their own business though they would. They really need to include live testing before accepting xboxes to protect themselves and their customers.
As for other things you get besides multiplayer, there are several games I know of that have content updates through the live service. Also using the live service you can basically do internet telephony to other live owners through your friends list without a game I believe. Apparently its quite popular in some circles as it is insanely easy to get working.
I wonder at what level of parity it would take to make a single CD dependable enough to preserve a photo with 99.99% reliability for 100 years. At what length of time with 99.99% reliability does a digital photo on CD become the size of a real photo?
I agree it was correct for the time, but it was still short sighted. As a result of accepting that limitation early we ended up dealing with it in some seriously sloppy ways for years.
It was a massive pain for quite a while trying to use above 640k on a PC, juggling various TSRs in and out of various memory managers. The prospect of an enduser trying to get their PC to run the newest game, modifying config.sys and autoexec.bat was totally insane. Eventually memmaker was integrated into MsDos pretty late in the game. It really damaged Microsoft's reputation at the time to deal with all of that crap because of thier shortsightedness. Even on into Windows 95 it was possible (but admitedly rare) to bump into 640k issues.
While I can't prove it of course, I personally feel that it was a real speed bump for PC gaming that sent quite a few people packing in frustration to consoles because they were spending more time rearranging their himem and creating multiple boot profiles for every game then they were actually playing. When I first used linux, the fact that 'free' simply showed all my memory in as one giant usable chunk, all 4 glorious megs of it, was seriously awesome.
Apparently, Bill Gates claims he never said it though..
Are they just trying to cover up for the fact that it's a market they are too afraid to enter? They insinuate that this could weaken Sony's console dominance, but that just fundamentally doesn't make any sense. Sony can put something like PSP on indefinite life support, like they did with minidisc, if they need to.
I think most telling is the statement that nobody has or will make a meaningful connection between console and handheld devices. I know it's a gamble to say it, but I think that's going to go down like one of those "640k is enough for everybody" type of statements that are seriously shortsighted. The integration angle is still relatively experimental.
Right now, you've got the most marginalized console trying to perform handheld integration. The content, not technically, but philosophically, for this sort of thing flows more from the console market into the handheld then the other way around. Pokemon is a big exception to that, but it being only a single property with fairly uncompelling console counterparts to it's handheld juggernaut is a good example of why console->handheld integration is likely to be more popular.
When the biggest console, Sony, starts integrating content to a handheld, it's going to be a different story on how profound the effect of console/handheld integration is. The first must have game with meaningful handheld integration could do incredible things for the PSP sales.
The fact that digital data rarely goes from "Perfect" to "Ok" to "umm not so good" to "What is that?".. it tends to go from "Perfect" to "Gone/Maybe not gone but very expensive to retrieve," makes it's worth discussing the finer points of digital archival versus analog.
It's a double edged blade of seperation. The interview process from the perspective of a qualified individual should be that they are interviewing the company just as much as they are being interviewed. If a company wants to alienate me by demonstrating their hiring priorities are lacking in basic human insight then that's a very helpful red flag that I should seek other avenues of employment.
Even from the company's perspective they should desire people who are scrutinizing the company, because those people will have their own intuitions that they are not a good match for the company the company may not have. It's best for both parties to avoid that situation.
All hiring that I've seen in the last few years usually goes like this:
1) Person is recommended, hooked up, done, hired.
Or
1) Person's resume comes up in resume search, etc..
2) Person's resume contains neccesary skills and applicable experience and is called for interview
3) About 90% of the interview is gauging their personal skills, not technical.
It's easy to get rid of a person in the early probationary stages if it turns out they simply don't have the technical skills they claimed they did, that's a low cost risk, and if you aren't totally clueless (aka: doomed no matter what) it's relatively easy to spot.
It's extremely difficult to get rid of a person that has the skills but it turns out they are a pain in the %!* to deal with. You might not find out the full depths of how bad that is until much later when they've settled into their full on %@#hole mode. Now they are in charge of projects, dealing with groups of people, the resentment becomes a -huge- distraction, and they become a total HR liability. If they harass somebody that sues, the company is responsible. If you fire them, they might claim harassment or descrimination. It's a nitemare.
Since when did grammar(!) and spelling have anything to do with insightfulness? A 4 year old with no ability or read or write whatsoever can potentially be insightful beyond an ivy league PhD.
While I won't argue that his grammar and spelling aren't quite bad, the mentality that presentation mistakes destory the value of something is what allows superior marketing to defeat a superior product at virtually all times. If people spent the time to see substance through bad presentation everything would be fundamentally better, not just look better.
Medicine however has been quite successful at keeping everybody alive much longer. As you get older you need more medicine to stay alive, or sometimes to just -want- to stay alive. In this way medicine seems to do a good job of perpetuating it's own existence.
Will medicine eventually destroy quality of life as the number of retirees encroaches on the number of workers? Pushing the retirement age higher, taxes higher, benefits lower.. Will viagra save the world by allowing pensioners to continue producing offspring until their deaths allowing the long lifetimes to be leveraged in some meaningful way against this tide? Will a new standard of raising children have to be adopted for that to make any sense whatsoever? What the heck? Help!
What's especially retarded is that when you elevate something to the status of "oooh scary evil!" you actually imbue it with the properties you are so worried about through the message "We are authority, we don't want you to see that, because it will make you do X."
Of course a kid is going to become more likely to go "oooh I have to see that, and X sounds interesting too," when exposed to a situation like that.
The unfortunate reality though of course is that if any kid in the entire school had done some whacko with a gun, media would be all over the computer lab with the violent video games.
The ironic twist is that the computer lab running the arcade brought quite a few people together where normally their cliques or their loner status kept them totally apart. If there were any pyscho loner types in the school wanting to go on a shooting rampage, they probably ended up hanging out and being accepted in the computer lab, thus making a murderous rampage less likely.
The only thing I'll say about one game being more 'real' then another is that despite the fact that there are differences, each subtle change doesn't diminish the 'realness' of any individual version. They are all games you can become equally skilled at relative to themselves. The main reason you feel that it sucks is because it offsets your established skill. I'd love to see Callus emulation side-by-side with the real thing. The difference must be incredibly small because the games play so balanced and tight on my PC.
I agree the 4 button face layout is suboptimal.
And I agree the large circle face d-pad is annoying for accidently doing too many diagonals. This is something the PS2 D-Pad has a definite advantage on. The isolated control surface gives you very precise control. If the Capcom controllers had used either a raised cross or the PS2 style sunken cross I would have gotten it in an instant, I'm guessing the main reason they didn't is because of licsensing/patent issues. Since I don't have any problem hitting diagonals on a PS2 pad now, I don't see any advantage to a pad that makes it easier to point of being sloppy.
This is a pretty asinine argument, but nonetheless, I just don't see how the SNES D-pad is all that superior.
I have -zero- problem hitting diagonals on the PS2 gamepads. Instead of pushing the surface of the tip of your thumb down onto the pad, you cradle the joint into the gap. From this position, the middle segment of the left index finger of an adult will rest easily on the L1 button. An adult right thumb can cover a mirror position across the 4 face buttons and hit any of them with a slight movement, the analog sticks don't even come close to getting in the way of this position.
Your concept of 'real' SF2 players prefering arcade style joystick doesn't really make sense when you consider the fact that _Capcom_ released the D-pad controller now does it? It's mostly arcade lip service to say you like the original stick better. It takes more skill to use the stick, the D-pad is much easier. I bow down to those that can do everything on a stick that I can do with a D-pad, it's hard. The last time I played an arcade version of Street Fighter with enough intensity to beat it in one credit ( a good 20 minutes of play? ), I actually burned a cut into the inside of my left middle finger from using the upside down cradle grip. Yea, thats pretty lame, I'm not used to the arcade controller.
So by Capcom making the official controller a D-pad, I guess they are contradicting the 'real' players, or something. I saw that controller at the store and I wasn't impressed because the D-pad was the large circle kind like the X-Box. Honestly, I never gave it a chance, so I can't really say. The button layout would be nice though. The genesis had a similar special Street Fighter controller that was pretty good, so I might give the capcom one a chance yet.
Do you even play Street Fighter games? Just be honest, do you?
I played SF2 original through Super Turbo on the SNES, probably something like 3 years of gaming. Then I played Alpha 3 on the PS1. Then Capcom Vs SNK 2 on the PS2. Then I played every single arcade version ever on emulation on PC using the Dual Shock. I can tell you from hundreds of hours of experience that the Dual Shock is an excellent controller for Street Fighter games and that it's D-pad is totally on par with the SNES. The only mark against it is the 4 button layout, not the D-pad.
Just play the games on both controllers, ok?, and get back to me. Both the SNES and PS2 controller are great for them, I actually like the PS2 controller slightly more because the volume of the handles makes thumb stability more comfortable. When my hands were smaller that wasn't an issue, but as an adult, my hands have to clench up to hold an SNES controller.
I'm extremely opinionated when it comes to digital controls because I've been playing these games on and off religiously for over 10 years, I can tell within seconds of using a certain controller if it's worthy for moves that have to be pulled off in 100ms windows of opportunity. You don't play these games consciously, it's one of those intuitive things like riding a bicycle where after so much time you feel your way through it without thought and any slight deviation that hinders you is immediately noticable, like a tire that is slightly low on air. The very first turn you make on such a bike you feel a pull that is unnatural. It's exactly the same way on a subpar controller, and the PS2 controller is not such a controller.
I couldn't agree more with the basic concept of this sentiment. Doom 1 is a nearly unplayable game by today's standards, but at the time it was the most unbelievable thing ever to me.
.. ?
A decent portion of my marketable skills were once all attributable to the desire to play networked Doom. I spent 6 months convincing a couple key faculty at my high school in early 94 that we should build a computer lab, and after a year of acquiring and repairing free 286s and networking them, we finally maanaged to scrounge four grungy 386s just barely powerful enough to play doom with no sound and network them, it was the most incredible thing ever.
Based on our successes we eventually ended up getting a real budget to build a 486 lab and we went so far as to operate a Doom and Descent arcade for money during lunch and after school to buy more computers. That's some seriously pre-columbine stuff right there.
A couple sensitive faculty caught wind of the full picture of what was going on, but because our school was so underfunded our faculty supporters were able to convince them it was harmless enough to be worth it. In fact, their suspcisions were instigated by the fact we had a computer lab at all, it seemed impossible to them after 20 or so years of only being able afford new books every 7 years or so.
Even though I don't particularly employ the specific technical skills I acquired then anymore, the first experience of working with others in an adult mentality and actually creating something matured me from a nihilistic wannabe punk to something resembling a half way useful person. Earning the right to be treated like an adult in an environment where traditionally I'd been treated like a criminal was priceless. Thanks Doom, it took my selfish desire to play you networked to grow up..
When Halo came out, I was basically, eh, that's pretty good, nice use of physics there, a bit slow paced and repetitive level design though. The fact that so many people saw it as the best game ever was pretty alien to me without the perspective of how totally floored I was by the original Doom. I still have these emotions burned into my brain by just how blown away I was by the leaked alpha and beta. It was that extreme sentiment that actually changed my life.
It's not really 4 seperate buttons, they are joined under the plastic housing, touch it and you'll see the other pieces move exactly like the SNES D-pad.
In my opinion, it works extremely well because you can put the bottom side of your thumb joint in the gap and perform any movements incredibly fast.
Again, the definitive test of that are street fighter games, I don't know any serious street fighter players that are nostalgic for the SNES D-pad in relation to the PS2 dual shock.
It excels at being versatile as a decent analog and a decent digital... I really don't have any issue with the digital on the dual shock, I play street fighter games extensively which, as far as I'm concerned, is the definitive test of a D pad.
I agree the analog is subpar compared to the N64, especially for very precise control near the center. . The one thing the PS2 analog is a tad better at is directional control at full tilt, and dual analog is being used more and more.
And on the flipside.. emulation is sometimes better, at least in my opinion.
My PS2 dualshock controller with USB adaptor is more comfortable in my hands then any older controllers. With video filters like SuperEagle, many games look much better without losing their charm. The ability to save anytime is a massive improvement to many games (sure you can abuse it to beat any game easily, but thats a choice), good bye long winded code inputs. Built in gameshark support with downloadable codes.. Some emulators even have half way decent online functionality..
It's somewhat difficult to say if it's a real or artificial shortage this time. Considering it's capabilities and price, and the fact it has 2 LCDs when LCD demand is so high..
:)
But.. knowing Nintendo.. They don't particularly deserve the benefit of the doubt on this issue
I have occasional allergies and those commericials for allergy drugs seem designed to give you allergy symptoms.. am I the only person to have ever experienced this? When it looks like it's going to be an ad with pollen molucules flying into the tear duct of somebody's eye, I switch channels just to be safe.
It's probably going to have some extremely simple watchdog piece of hardware that will reboot the machine if it ever stops receiving it's ticks from the OS, or perhaps even the game itself (since the game itself is a kind of crashable operating system)
If you wanna see something cool, in Counterstrike: Source, which uses the HL2 engine, open up the console and execute:
"+showbudget"
It brings up this dynamically updating chart showing each of the game's subsystems and how much time, in milliseconds, is being spent in each one, with a kind of color coded historical running graph at the top showing each component's share and the total time spent per frame. Kinda pointless for an end user, but in a way it's rather englightening to see what the most expensive operations are. There is an even crazier realtime full on function level profiler available through the console as well, but I havn't really messed with it.
I couldn't agree more with your basic idea that the fight from both perspectives makes no sense. Prove the unprovable? Disprove the undisprovable? How is the futility not obvious to these people? It's just fighting for the sake of fighting really.
In the future, I think the Evolution vs Creationism debate is going to be referred to as: "The 200 year Troll."