It doesn't happen until about halfway through the game, but when Walter Bennet -- er, no, whatever the doctor's name is... calls the headcrab "Hedy Lamarr" it was a surprise mainly because the name was familiar. Did a litle looking into the name since all I knew was that Hedy Lamarr was some kind of Hollywod actress.
She was a lot more than that. She deserves to be listed among such names as Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper. This article gives some background on her. In short, she helped come up with a innovative torpedo guidance system that the military ended up using 20 years later.
A codicil to the story that isn't mentioned is that a few years ago, she was formally awarded the royalties from her patent, even though the patent had expired when the military began using the idea.
Granted, we all hate spammers. We hate what they do, we hate the way they zombify unsecured gateways, we hate they way they thumb their nose at everyone, we hate what they try to sell, we hate that they try to scam millions a day. We all would love to see every spammer get harsh penalties.
But, really... nine years?
Isn't that a bit much? He won't be serving all that time, of course, but it's a lot of time for spamming.
Wouldn't a better punishment be somethign vaguely like what they did to Mitnick? Forbid the guy from holding any sort of computer-related occupation for ten years. No computer for more than recreational purposes -- oh, heck, he doesn't need to play HL2, no computer at all. No opportunity to spam, and he'll have to make it or break it in a real job (for values of 'real job' which do not include 'IT jobs.') If he's smart, he can do office clerk work, maybe work his way up to office manager (he just can't work anywhere where the office manager also has to manage the computer system.) If he can't hack that, he goes into fastfood or retail. And if he absolutely can't make a living doing something other than spamming... ladies and gentlemen, we have here a dysfunctional human being.
Compared to Mitnick, he'll still be getting off easy. But it makes a lot more sense than nine years in jail. And the taxpayers aren't paying for his stay in the slam.
And if you want to get really creative, have him subscribed to every junk mail list in existence... with no opt-out.
I don't know, it just seems like nine years is ridiculous when we don't even put away physically violent felons for that long.
Re:Sounds original...
on
Exultant
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
But the trick is to just add a half-twist to it. Then you get a Mobius cliche, a story that has only one side to it. All character-driven conflict gets poured into a Klein bottle from which it is both inside and outside the story, and cops in the story start dunking mugs into coffee doughnuts.
By all means! Let's let Mass. and other state correctional departments do this. That way the people in California and other places that get GPS trackers installed can have at least a few moments of discomfort when we remind them that they're being tracked much as convicted felons are being tracked. It should make for a fine wake-up-and-smell-the-Starbucks moment.
Wether it will actually make people rail against such trackers being put in their cars is debatable. One can always hope.
And for the record... wether your views of crime and punishment are rehabilitative or punitative, either way, someone who commits a crime will be reasonably expected to unwillingly surrender certain rights, so I don't have much problem with convicts being tracked in this manner.
The biggest difference between Jurassic Park and a game with dinosaures is not the polygon count, but that the game is interactive, while the movie is not.
Not true. The big difference is not in the interactivity, but rather in the realtime rendering.
A movie such as Jurrasic Park is made by putting the scene into a 'render farm,' a series of dozens if not hundreds of computers. Each computer not only works on a single frame, but more often than not works on a single element in each frame: color, specularity, shadows, alpha/transparency, Z/depth. In addition, very often, the individual characters and layers of static scenery within a frame are also rendered independantly, each with separate specularity, shadows, color, alpha, Z, etc., layers. This is why the average frame in Final Fantasy is said to be made up of 60 layers.
Typically, rendering time for a single frame, assuming all layers and elements and components being rendered in parallel, could take between an hour and several hours, depending on the polycount and the texture size. This is done mainly because it grants the production team unprecidented control over the final product without having to render out entire frames after a single change to, say, a slug's specularity needs to be done.
You simply cannot do this sort of thing in realtime, which is what gaming requires. It isn't a matter of scripting or interactivity or camera angles. The rendering engine usually doesn't care what camera angle it's at, it will still have to calculate polygons and textures and bumpmaps and all that other good stuff. It comes down to one thing only: pure computing power. If you can get a machine which will render a mad amount of polygons and several hih-resolution texture-, bump-, shadow-, and specular-maps (and maybe even normal maps, as well)
There's also a slightly more subtle reason why a game will never look like a movie: framerate. Cinema framerates are almost universally 24.11 fps. Your typical twitch gamer would turn up his nose at such a framerate. ^^ It's the same reason videotape looks different from film: video is typically 30fps or so.
You just made me feel incredibly old. Damn you, you insensitive clod!
But back on topic....
Considering how complex the car of the Future!® is going to be, with navigation systems and such, keeping the driver's eyes on the road is going to be a priority. The less a driver has to futz around with his eyes off the road, even for a moment, and one hand off the steering wheel, the better.
My question is how one goes about filtering the user's voice through the sound of the music. Would it be possible to make an MP3 that says basicallly, "I'm an voice-activated MP3 player virus. PLAYER TURN OFF!" *click*
This is something that we will eventuall have to deal with, though not anytime soon. For one, it entails a computer powerful enough that it can craft it's own responses, and not work from a rigid script. This is perhaps theone great stumbling block, but it triggers all sorts of philosophical quandries.
It is not untoward to imagine a compute rpprogrammed in such a way, merely difficult, and with the caveat 'not anytime soon.' Acknowledging this, what happens if we can make such a computer. Let's start with the aforementioned help desk comptuer, from the 'test case.' This computer is meant to take input from a verbal source, parse it, process that data, and the generate a response. Presumably this means that the computer is not running strictly upon a script. This would imply that the computer is programmed in some manner to consult a database of known issues, find one that matches the customer's problem, and make recommendations based off of that.
The dicy part is when you start getting into the responses. This computer would have to be able to respond in some way to just about any question. Jokes about the Turing Test and ELIZA aside, when you cannot point to a script and say that the computer is following it, how much different is a computer from a human mind?
Consider: the process of nurturing and raising a child is a sort of conceptual programming. The child will have certain genetic predispositions, but much of how the child interacts to the world will depend upon how he or she has been conditioned to react. This isn't quite programming in the traditional sense, of course, but it is possible to create algorithms that allow a computer to "learn"after a fashion. After that, it's merely a matter of processing power and scale.
Once you consider that iot's possible to create a computer which can generate responses on it's own, and is "conditioned" rather than programmed, then you is when you will have these legal issues come up. Because,r eally, with human nature being what it is, you aren't going to see anyone (even remotely reputable) stand up for 'machine rights' until it's the machines themselves doing the standing.
In an interesting relation to other recent news, and as a thought experiment, what would happen if, say, Suprnova.org had been hosted on a computer that claimed to be it's own person? What if Microspliff had, somehow, integrated the web server with the AI and the OS? Eh, who am I kidding. This is a legal system that's inherently broken and imprisons nonviolent offenders routinely. They'd make some sort of case for 'Saving the Children' and shut down such a system in a heartbeat.
This is probably gonna garner some flames, so Commence Primary Ignition....
Square-Enix is a good game company. They've put out some good things over the years. Heck, I was one of the (few) people who liked the Final Fantasy movie. I thought it was great! But SE's success didn't start with the movie, or even with FF7. It started with FF. That's right, just plain Final Fantasy.
I've played the version of FF that's been released for the GBA, and I tell you, this is RPGs as I remember them. You can clearly see where Richard Garriot got his influences for Ultima from. FF1 is fast-paced, has a great storyline, and makes you pay attention to the things that matter; at some point, levels and gil are secondary because, dude, you're SAVING the WORLD!
Let's hit Rewind for a moment. Back to FF7, which is arguably THE archetype for all console RPGs since. This game made Square the talk of even casual gamers and made people really start turning their heads to look over at Japan and wonder what's brewing over there. Suddenly, Final Fantasy isn't just a (unfortunately-named) series of games. It's verging on a phenomenon. A lot of things contributed to it, including the artwork, the storylines, and -- of course -- the music. (If you do not feel the urge to shed a tear listening to Aeris' death theme, you have no soul. J/k. ^^ )
Moving forward, we have FF8, something unique in console RPGs: a strong love story. And then FF9: strong, powerful cinematics.
Can you see what trend Square/SE is making? Nobody really did, I guess, so nobody's really to blame.
Now we're at FFX. No real FMV cinematic cutscenes here, most everything is done in the engine. And it's gorgeous. Like any FF title it has a massive epic storyline, a cast of a dozen unique characters, strong emotions, gorgeous music, and recurring themes. And not much else. Oops. Somewhere in there they kinda forgot there was supposed to be a game....
They sort of made up for it with FFX-2, but the damage had already been done. It was no longer about playing a game. It was about EXPERIENCING FINAL FANTASY. FF wasn't a franchise anymore, it was something unique to itself, something powerful that was greater than any single person or group of people. At least to SE's mind. And this came to it's greatest expression in *puts on the high-temp entry suit* Final Fantasy Online, AKA FFXI.
In most Skinner Box MMORPGs, the goal is to level up, make gil, fight notorious monsters, earn prestige, and get gear. This is true with FFXI, but the level grind, the farming grind, and the NM grind are so onerous, that it's the bloody Iron Man Triathalon of MMO's. It's like SE purposely went out of their way to make it the most onerous MMO out there. It's gorgeous visually, yes, and the music is top-notch and the writing is really good in a lot of places. But in all that grandeur, there's not much room for the player. Essentially, what SE has said is that the reward for playing Final Fantasy is that you are playing Final Fantasy.
Let's hit 'Play' again and go back to FF: Dawn of Souls. I managed to get to the bonus dungeons of FF1, and was loking forward to seeing what they would bring. If these were anything like the expansions for Ultima 7 then there would be new puzzles, new challenges, new gear, and new bosses to fight. Heh, I was mostly right.
Suddenly, all the fast paced, smooth, seamless progress I'd made in the game thus far ground to a sudden screeching jarring halt. Five minutes into the Earthgift Shrine, I was wondering why it was so annoying. Fifteen minutes in, I was wondering what had happened to the game I had been playing. It was an utter mental chore to get through the Shrine. And then to find out that there were FOUR bosses in the Shrine... and to defeat each one you had to go through the Shrine again for EACH ONE.... Ooh. That hurt. That really hurt.
So what had happened? It had been going so smoothly, so cool! The game was fun and fast
Realnetworks is also the inheritor to a long line of sneaky, underhanded tricks. They were among the first companies to include spyware and trojans with their product. They're a company with a history of scummy business practicesand lack of respect for the end-user. That's the main reason they're not getting any sympathy here.
Not to mention that they were QUITE adamant themselves about the licensing of their 'Real' streaming media 'technology.' This is just what they did coming back right to them.
...with 3D interfaces is that they're not really 3D. They're effectively 2D because they're still -- for just about everyone, anyway -- displayed on a monitor. No matter how 'three-dimensional' the interface is, it's useless because you're still limited to x,y coordinates for the mouse cursor.
Now, you could include controls for moving around your 'presence' in a 3D 'filespace,' but there comes a point when there is a failure of returns: it's just easier to look at a tree in a "two dimensional" hierarchal file structure.
When the interface can actually be three-dimensional -- such as, for example, the interface we saw in Johnny Mnemonic, or the terminals in Final Fantasy -- then I think we can start payingmore serious attention to 3D interface design. (Of course, starting to think about it now doesn't hurt. It's just there's precious little practical application for it right now.)
Part of that is because IE for the Mac is still a good browser. It really isn't as bad as IE for Windows.
One thing that IE on the Mac can do that IE for Windows can't -- aside form not opening up your computer to a hundred vulnerabilities -- is handle PNGs properly. I don't know why. IE on Windows can't handle PNG alpha channels, while IE on the Mac handles them just fine.
I don't use IE on my Mac anymore, but I still have to occasionally check web pages. It's not a bad browser, but Firefox and Safari do have richer feature sets.
and lets face it the games shipping at lunch will not be the ones remembered on the system.
The games shippping at supper, on the other hand....
However, I would say that there are a handful of games which might be remembered. Halo pretty much made the XBox launch -- I daresay people will remember Halo long after they forget the XBox.
Sounds like what we really need is a War of the Worlds Musical!
Actually, there IS a musical version of War of the Worlds, by Jeff Wayne. The comptuer game from a few years ago was based on, not George Orwell's WotW, but JEff Wayne's WotW. The music is pretty good if rather ABBA-like. The main titles are dramatic, and there's nothing quite like Thunderchild.
Look for it, find it, listen to it. The music is over the top in some places but all things considered it's a definite listen.
His bed cast in light Fall leaves are LEDs No risk of VD
Re:Don't forget to check out the extensions:
on
Firefox 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
And don't forget that many of your extensions will not be able to work with this version of Firefox. -.-
This is perhaps the one most annoying thing about Fireofox. I love it, the extension concept is fantastic, it really makes my browser the way I want it to be... but it's almost Microsoft-in-a-Can when it comes to upgrades and dealing with old extensions.
I really hope that they include SOME backwards compatability with extensions in future versions of Firefox. I had a nice set of extensions that I had give Firefox EXACTLY the behavior I wanted it to have. (Doubleclick to close tabs, smooth mouse scrolling, BugMeNot, Googlebar -- frickin' GOOGLEBAR! doesn't work yet under 1.0 -- Image Toolbar, and a bunch of others.) But as soon as I upgraded, half my extensions suddenly don't work.
Ironically, FoxyTunes, the extension that took almost forever to get ported over to MacOSX, isn't one of the ones that needs to be updated.
A message to the Firfox developers: I hope this isn't the way things are going to be for EVERY version release, otherwise people might not bother to update, and then we get the same thing that happened with Windows with people not updating their boxen.
Trouble is, you can't deal with anyone personally. Your Evil Avatar can only kill minions. You can't even off Joe Random in the cell, you have to get one of your minions to kill him.
And heaven forbid that you take a superagent to be interrogated and think you can leave it for a little while. When the 'interrogation' is complete, the agent is simply let loose, and the interrogating minion goes off on his merry way, leaving you standing there with the rapidly-recovering superagent. One minute later, Jet Chan is beating on your ass and your bodyguard has just bit the big one.
Re:So what are we going to do tonight Brain?
on
Review: Evil Genius
·
· Score: 1
Then get to your local game store of choice, for the game is already out. =)
However, I like many other players who looked forward eagerly to this game found it riddled with bugs and performance issues. If you rmachine isn't above the current average spec, you're going to run into stuttering, lag, long pauses, and the occasional memory leak that crashes the game. This is a very resource-intensive game.
So, whatever happened to that OTHER great presidential superstition, specifically the Zero Factor? Where any president whose term starts in a year ending in zero is assassinated or has an attempted assassination on them?
Product Number 3 I guess doesn't have much to qualify it for more than a T rating... except that the gyrating and dancing that the main character does is a bit... excentric. And while well-done, still kind of disturbing. She GRINDS.
Still, all the enemies are bots, so there's no 'animated human gore,' so I guess it's all cool. If a young kid is going to get hold of 'a gmae they shouldn't,' I'd rather have them exposed to something like this than, for example, Killer Instinct. A young kid would probably not be interested in P.No.3 anyway. "Why's she moving like that? It doesn't make sense! This game is boring!"
Slashdot Mirror
TRY the veal!
Who run Santa Clara Town?
Tina Turner in chainmail for the win.
It doesn't happen until about halfway through the game, but when Walter Bennet -- er, no, whatever the doctor's name is... calls the headcrab "Hedy Lamarr" it was a surprise mainly because the name was familiar. Did a litle looking into the name since all I knew was that Hedy Lamarr was some kind of Hollywod actress.
She was a lot more than that. She deserves to be listed among such names as Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper. This article gives some background on her. In short, she helped come up with a innovative torpedo guidance system that the military ended up using 20 years later.
A codicil to the story that isn't mentioned is that a few years ago, she was formally awarded the royalties from her patent, even though the patent had expired when the military began using the idea.
Granted, we all hate spammers. We hate what they do, we hate the way they zombify unsecured gateways, we hate they way they thumb their nose at everyone, we hate what they try to sell, we hate that they try to scam millions a day. We all would love to see every spammer get harsh penalties.
But, really... nine years?
Isn't that a bit much? He won't be serving all that time, of course, but it's a lot of time for spamming.
Wouldn't a better punishment be somethign vaguely like what they did to Mitnick? Forbid the guy from holding any sort of computer-related occupation for ten years. No computer for more than recreational purposes -- oh, heck, he doesn't need to play HL2, no computer at all. No opportunity to spam, and he'll have to make it or break it in a real job (for values of 'real job' which do not include 'IT jobs.') If he's smart, he can do office clerk work, maybe work his way up to office manager (he just can't work anywhere where the office manager also has to manage the computer system.) If he can't hack that, he goes into fastfood or retail. And if he absolutely can't make a living doing something other than spamming... ladies and gentlemen, we have here a dysfunctional human being.
Compared to Mitnick, he'll still be getting off easy. But it makes a lot more sense than nine years in jail. And the taxpayers aren't paying for his stay in the slam.
And if you want to get really creative, have him subscribed to every junk mail list in existence... with no opt-out.
I don't know, it just seems like nine years is ridiculous when we don't even put away physically violent felons for that long.
But the trick is to just add a half-twist to it. Then you get a Mobius cliche, a story that has only one side to it. All character-driven conflict gets poured into a Klein bottle from which it is both inside and outside the story, and cops in the story start dunking mugs into coffee doughnuts.
By all means! Let's let Mass. and other state correctional departments do this. That way the people in California and other places that get GPS trackers installed can have at least a few moments of discomfort when we remind them that they're being tracked much as convicted felons are being tracked. It should make for a fine wake-up-and-smell-the-Starbucks moment.
Wether it will actually make people rail against such trackers being put in their cars is debatable. One can always hope.
And for the record... wether your views of crime and punishment are rehabilitative or punitative, either way, someone who commits a crime will be reasonably expected to unwillingly surrender certain rights, so I don't have much problem with convicts being tracked in this manner.
A movie such as Jurrasic Park is made by putting the scene into a 'render farm,' a series of dozens if not hundreds of computers. Each computer not only works on a single frame, but more often than not works on a single element in each frame: color, specularity, shadows, alpha/transparency, Z/depth. In addition, very often, the individual characters and layers of static scenery within a frame are also rendered independantly, each with separate specularity, shadows, color, alpha, Z, etc., layers. This is why the average frame in Final Fantasy is said to be made up of 60 layers.
Typically, rendering time for a single frame, assuming all layers and elements and components being rendered in parallel, could take between an hour and several hours, depending on the polycount and the texture size. This is done mainly because it grants the production team unprecidented control over the final product without having to render out entire frames after a single change to, say, a slug's specularity needs to be done.
You simply cannot do this sort of thing in realtime, which is what gaming requires. It isn't a matter of scripting or interactivity or camera angles. The rendering engine usually doesn't care what camera angle it's at, it will still have to calculate polygons and textures and bumpmaps and all that other good stuff. It comes down to one thing only: pure computing power. If you can get a machine which will render a mad amount of polygons and several hih-resolution texture-, bump-, shadow-, and specular-maps (and maybe even normal maps, as well)
There's also a slightly more subtle reason why a game will never look like a movie: framerate. Cinema framerates are almost universally 24.11 fps. Your typical twitch gamer would turn up his nose at such a framerate. ^^ It's the same reason videotape looks different from film: video is typically 30fps or so.
...it was Knight Rider.
You just made me feel incredibly old. Damn you, you insensitive clod!
But back on topic....
Considering how complex the car of the Future!® is going to be, with navigation systems and such, keeping the driver's eyes on the road is going to be a priority. The less a driver has to futz around with his eyes off the road, even for a moment, and one hand off the steering wheel, the better.
My question is how one goes about filtering the user's voice through the sound of the music. Would it be possible to make an MP3 that says basicallly, "I'm an voice-activated MP3 player virus. PLAYER TURN OFF!" *click*
This is something that we will eventuall have to deal with, though not anytime soon. For one, it entails a computer powerful enough that it can craft it's own responses, and not work from a rigid script. This is perhaps theone great stumbling block, but it triggers all sorts of philosophical quandries.
It is not untoward to imagine a compute rpprogrammed in such a way, merely difficult, and with the caveat 'not anytime soon.' Acknowledging this, what happens if we can make such a computer. Let's start with the aforementioned help desk comptuer, from the 'test case.' This computer is meant to take input from a verbal source, parse it, process that data, and the generate a response. Presumably this means that the computer is not running strictly upon a script. This would imply that the computer is programmed in some manner to consult a database of known issues, find one that matches the customer's problem, and make recommendations based off of that.
The dicy part is when you start getting into the responses. This computer would have to be able to respond in some way to just about any question. Jokes about the Turing Test and ELIZA aside, when you cannot point to a script and say that the computer is following it, how much different is a computer from a human mind?
Consider: the process of nurturing and raising a child is a sort of conceptual programming. The child will have certain genetic predispositions, but much of how the child interacts to the world will depend upon how he or she has been conditioned to react. This isn't quite programming in the traditional sense, of course, but it is possible to create algorithms that allow a computer to "learn"after a fashion. After that, it's merely a matter of processing power and scale.
Once you consider that iot's possible to create a computer which can generate responses on it's own, and is "conditioned" rather than programmed, then you is when you will have these legal issues come up. Because,r eally, with human nature being what it is, you aren't going to see anyone (even remotely reputable) stand up for 'machine rights' until it's the machines themselves doing the standing.
In an interesting relation to other recent news, and as a thought experiment, what would happen if, say, Suprnova.org had been hosted on a computer that claimed to be it's own person? What if Microspliff had, somehow, integrated the web server with the AI and the OS? Eh, who am I kidding. This is a legal system that's inherently broken and imprisons nonviolent offenders routinely. They'd make some sort of case for 'Saving the Children' and shut down such a system in a heartbeat.
This is probably gonna garner some flames, so Commence Primary Ignition....
Square-Enix is a good game company. They've put out some good things over the years. Heck, I was one of the (few) people who liked the Final Fantasy movie. I thought it was great! But SE's success didn't start with the movie, or even with FF7. It started with FF. That's right, just plain Final Fantasy.
I've played the version of FF that's been released for the GBA, and I tell you, this is RPGs as I remember them. You can clearly see where Richard Garriot got his influences for Ultima from. FF1 is fast-paced, has a great storyline, and makes you pay attention to the things that matter; at some point, levels and gil are secondary because, dude, you're SAVING the WORLD!
Let's hit Rewind for a moment. Back to FF7, which is arguably THE archetype for all console RPGs since. This game made Square the talk of even casual gamers and made people really start turning their heads to look over at Japan and wonder what's brewing over there. Suddenly, Final Fantasy isn't just a (unfortunately-named) series of games. It's verging on a phenomenon. A lot of things contributed to it, including the artwork, the storylines, and -- of course -- the music. (If you do not feel the urge to shed a tear listening to Aeris' death theme, you have no soul. J/k. ^^ )
Moving forward, we have FF8, something unique in console RPGs: a strong love story. And then FF9: strong, powerful cinematics.
Can you see what trend Square/SE is making? Nobody really did, I guess, so nobody's really to blame.
Now we're at FFX. No real FMV cinematic cutscenes here, most everything is done in the engine. And it's gorgeous. Like any FF title it has a massive epic storyline, a cast of a dozen unique characters, strong emotions, gorgeous music, and recurring themes. And not much else. Oops. Somewhere in there they kinda forgot there was supposed to be a game....
They sort of made up for it with FFX-2, but the damage had already been done. It was no longer about playing a game. It was about EXPERIENCING FINAL FANTASY. FF wasn't a franchise anymore, it was something unique to itself, something powerful that was greater than any single person or group of people. At least to SE's mind. And this came to it's greatest expression in *puts on the high-temp entry suit* Final Fantasy Online, AKA FFXI.
In most Skinner Box MMORPGs, the goal is to level up, make gil, fight notorious monsters, earn prestige, and get gear. This is true with FFXI, but the level grind, the farming grind, and the NM grind are so onerous, that it's the bloody Iron Man Triathalon of MMO's. It's like SE purposely went out of their way to make it the most onerous MMO out there. It's gorgeous visually, yes, and the music is top-notch and the writing is really good in a lot of places. But in all that grandeur, there's not much room for the player. Essentially, what SE has said is that the reward for playing Final Fantasy is that you are playing Final Fantasy.
Let's hit 'Play' again and go back to FF: Dawn of Souls. I managed to get to the bonus dungeons of FF1, and was loking forward to seeing what they would bring. If these were anything like the expansions for Ultima 7 then there would be new puzzles, new challenges, new gear, and new bosses to fight. Heh, I was mostly right.
Suddenly, all the fast paced, smooth, seamless progress I'd made in the game thus far ground to a sudden screeching jarring halt. Five minutes into the Earthgift Shrine, I was wondering why it was so annoying. Fifteen minutes in, I was wondering what had happened to the game I had been playing. It was an utter mental chore to get through the Shrine. And then to find out that there were FOUR bosses in the Shrine... and to defeat each one you had to go through the Shrine again for EACH ONE.... Ooh. That hurt. That really hurt.
So what had happened? It had been going so smoothly, so cool! The game was fun and fast
Realnetworks is also the inheritor to a long line of sneaky, underhanded tricks. They were among the first companies to include spyware and trojans with their product. They're a company with a history of scummy business practicesand lack of respect for the end-user. That's the main reason they're not getting any sympathy here.
Not to mention that they were QUITE adamant themselves about the licensing of their 'Real' streaming media 'technology.' This is just what they did coming back right to them.
...with 3D interfaces is that they're not really 3D. They're effectively 2D because they're still -- for just about everyone, anyway -- displayed on a monitor. No matter how 'three-dimensional' the interface is, it's useless because you're still limited to x,y coordinates for the mouse cursor.
Now, you could include controls for moving around your 'presence' in a 3D 'filespace,' but there comes a point when there is a failure of returns: it's just easier to look at a tree in a "two dimensional" hierarchal file structure.
When the interface can actually be three-dimensional -- such as, for example, the interface we saw in Johnny Mnemonic, or the terminals in Final Fantasy -- then I think we can start payingmore serious attention to 3D interface design. (Of course, starting to think about it now doesn't hurt. It's just there's precious little practical application for it right now.)
Part of that is because IE for the Mac is still a good browser. It really isn't as bad as IE for Windows.
One thing that IE on the Mac can do that IE for Windows can't -- aside form not opening up your computer to a hundred vulnerabilities -- is handle PNGs properly. I don't know why. IE on Windows can't handle PNG alpha channels, while IE on the Mac handles them just fine.
I don't use IE on my Mac anymore, but I still have to occasionally check web pages. It's not a bad browser, but Firefox and Safari do have richer feature sets.
To which I wittilly reply: oops. ^^;;
Bwah! Got me there. ^^ HG Wells is what I meant. What the hell was I thinking with 'George Orwell?'
However, I would say that there are a handful of games which might be remembered. Halo pretty much made the XBox launch -- I daresay people will remember Halo long after they forget the XBox.
Look for it, find it, listen to it. The music is over the top in some places but all things considered it's a definite listen.
Try this, then....
His bed cast in light
Fall leaves are LEDs
No risk of VD
And don't forget that many of your extensions will not be able to work with this version of Firefox. -.-
This is perhaps the one most annoying thing about Fireofox. I love it, the extension concept is fantastic, it really makes my browser the way I want it to be... but it's almost Microsoft-in-a-Can when it comes to upgrades and dealing with old extensions.
I really hope that they include SOME backwards compatability with extensions in future versions of Firefox. I had a nice set of extensions that I had give Firefox EXACTLY the behavior I wanted it to have. (Doubleclick to close tabs, smooth mouse scrolling, BugMeNot, Googlebar -- frickin' GOOGLEBAR! doesn't work yet under 1.0 -- Image Toolbar, and a bunch of others.) But as soon as I upgraded, half my extensions suddenly don't work.
Ironically, FoxyTunes, the extension that took almost forever to get ported over to MacOSX, isn't one of the ones that needs to be updated.
A message to the Firfox developers: I hope this isn't the way things are going to be for EVERY version release, otherwise people might not bother to update, and then we get the same thing that happened with Windows with people not updating their boxen.
Trouble is, you can't deal with anyone personally. Your Evil Avatar can only kill minions. You can't even off Joe Random in the cell, you have to get one of your minions to kill him.
And heaven forbid that you take a superagent to be interrogated and think you can leave it for a little while. When the 'interrogation' is complete, the agent is simply let loose, and the interrogating minion goes off on his merry way, leaving you standing there with the rapidly-recovering superagent. One minute later, Jet Chan is beating on your ass and your bodyguard has just bit the big one.
Then get to your local game store of choice, for the game is already out. =)
However, I like many other players who looked forward eagerly to this game found it riddled with bugs and performance issues. If you rmachine isn't above the current average spec, you're going to run into stuttering, lag, long pauses, and the occasional memory leak that crashes the game. This is a very resource-intensive game.
So, whatever happened to that OTHER great presidential superstition, specifically the Zero Factor? Where any president whose term starts in a year ending in zero is assassinated or has an attempted assassination on them?
Even P.No.3?
Product Number 3 I guess doesn't have much to qualify it for more than a T rating... except that the gyrating and dancing that the main character does is a bit... excentric. And while well-done, still kind of disturbing. She GRINDS.
Still, all the enemies are bots, so there's no 'animated human gore,' so I guess it's all cool. If a young kid is going to get hold of 'a gmae they shouldn't,' I'd rather have them exposed to something like this than, for example, Killer Instinct. A young kid would probably not be interested in P.No.3 anyway. "Why's she moving like that? It doesn't make sense! This game is boring!"
"This must be what going mad feels like."