Boy! I sure am glad I shelled out $50 for this 3 years ago!
what's with the cynicism? Isn't this exactly what gamers want? The whole abandonware scene is based on the premise that companies aren't making money on a product anymore, therefore freely trading it doesn't impact the company. In this case it's officially sanctioned freeware (which is a not-in-anyway-subtle marketing campaign for the next in the series).
apparently, companies can't win, even when they give stuff away for free.
FPS games can work with console controllers. although more a puzzle game than true FPS, metroid prime had a very nice responsive control scheme. (far easier to use than the godfather of console FPS games, Goldeneye.) Given that Doom 3 is being pushed as a horror survival game, I imagine they won't be throwing thousands of zombies simultaneously at you, so the twitchy reflexes needed for most PC games simply won't be an issue in this game. That said, I'm sticking with the PC version (partly because I don't own an Xbox and partly because any mods that come out aren't going to be on the xbox)
ya know, Diablo 2 had pet ownership; at least in the sense that it was described in the article. You could hire a minion (4 different types?), level them up with you, whereupon they gain new abilities according to their occupation, plus you can give them weapons for additional power.
So, really this isn't all that different from D2, except that it's a "pet" rather than a minion.
don't you think they already have this information? Perhaps it's not as high tech, but certainly they have to know which routes are the most heavily traveled, which rides/attractions are the most visited, etc. Simply by how often the trash recepticles are filled, or how much waste is swept up will give you an idea how popular an area is. and that's incredibly low tech. How about line lengths at rides or how much business each food stand does in a day?
There are hundreds of ways they can track how heavily traveled areas are and none of them involve tracking devices. The idea that this child tracker will somehow give them more info seems a little exaggerated.
one potential use of the hydrogen, not previously mentioned by other posters, is as a replacement for natural gas. if i'm not mistaken, natural gas heaters/rangetops/etc. are more efficient than electric. So with a hydrogen powered house, you can use the hydrogen not only for power, but also for cooking, the water heater, etc. and further dissociate yourself from the utility grid.
don't know how the overall efficiency of this compares to just using electric for everything.
true. Everquest addiction is not that shocking. The cool/bizarre part of the story is his co-ownership of the tabletop wargaming company. Here's a guy making millions on baseball and in the off season he's researching and writing WW2 campaigns? would be nice to have a job with enough downtime to give serious fruit to your hobbies...
Rare have made one game since they left Nintendo over 2 years ago.
not quite true. Rare has put out 2 games since being acquired by Microsoft. Bizarrely, the first was a gameboy title.
Rare leaving the Nintendo family was a bit of a bummer for me, because I felt Diddy Kong Racing was a superior title to Mario Kart and was looking forward to the sequel...
the idea, presumably, is to truck supplies overland in antarctica, rather than flying them in with cargo planes. how practical is that? truck needs gas to travel 2000+ miles and then you've got this "stretching road" problem to deal with ("From one summer to the next the crevasse field moved about 1,000 feet north and grew about 100 feet longer."). So, your road needs to be replowed every year to account for the fact that it's now 100 feet away from where you left it?
they address this exact issue in the text of the paper: Third, we cannot draw causal inferences from these associations. It could be that attentional problems lead to television viewing rather than vice versa. However, to mitigate this limitation, we... focused on television viewing at 1 and 3 years of age, well before the age at which most experts believe that ADHD symptoms are manifest.32,39 It is also possible that there are characteristics associated with parents who allow their children to watch excessive amounts of television that accounts for the relationship between television viewing and attentional problems.
Same paragraph goes on to talk about how some shows might be good for children, such as Sesame Street, and promote reading, etc.
So, while the researchers can't claim that TV viewing causes ADHD, there is a very strong correlation between the two, and one that obviously deserves further study. Plopping a 1 year old down in front of a TV and having that entertain him for several hours every day just can't be all that good for him. There's just gotta be more constructively entertaining avenues available.
re han shooting first: steven and i haven't had time to go back and fix the unheroic actions of indiana jones yet
re luke's death star run: one way to improve the scene is to include gungan pilots. and my daughters alerted me to the fact that at college they desconstructed this scene and found it to be very much like the "oedipal abortion of his father's dark creation"
can you actually imagine the same person who wrote and directed the last 2 pieces of star wars crap using the phrase "oedipal abortion"? ok, perhaps thats the wrong question. On second thought, I think that particular line is a clear reference to Lucas aborting his movies in the prequel before they were even metaphorically born.
That's got to be the best description of the death star explosion I've ever heard... This joke at least is somewhat funny. How would Lucas make the death star scene better? "perhaps the inclusion of gungan pilot."
most genetically modified foods aren't made for the direct betterment of mankind. rather they are modified for the betterment of the plant. So, rather than make a tomato that is free of salmonella, they are making tomatos that are yucky to tomato worms (for the most part).
The species that are being made for the betterment of mankind typically are done to rectify dietary defficiencies in a given population. For example, vitamin A rice for developing countries which often have large populations of people who don't get enough vitamin A (lack of causes blindness). The rice in this particular story isn't meant to be used to better all people, but (as i read it) to be a supplement for babies who are not breast-feeding (as it was engineered to have proteins naturally occuring in breast milk).
The problem with genetically engineering crops isn't that we are "babying" our immune system (that's a separate issue mostly involving the overuse of antibiotics). Rather, the problem is the overreliance on single species (such as the vitamin A rice) and the lack of natural diversity. Eventually an opportunistic pest is going to come along and decimate your rice field; a condition that would be limited if multiple strains of rice were to be grown.
these aren't antibiotics. these are naturally occuring proteins that are present in breast milk that help fight infection. once a baby is weaned off breast milk, s/he no longer receives these proteins. so the idea is to give the non-breast feeding babies a supplement made from this rice so that the infant has a constant supply of the protein.
given that these are naturally occuring proteins that everyone was exposed to as a child, i think the liklihood of bacteria developing a new resistance to them is low (otherwise, it would have happened sometime within the past several thousand years)
CS is available free if one owns HL. so assuming you originally bought HL (and not the retail CS), then you should be able to play either no problem...
as for the original question of whether we have any interest in CS:CZ, I have none. Day of Defeat is my HL mod du jour. and for those "realistic" moments, I am messing around with America's Army.
This is a quote taken a bit out of context. One actually puts it in context and it argues against your point. Consider the first sentence in the paragraph you selectively quote from: The word which constantly comes to my mind when considering the game is "humane.". Then consider the last sentence, after describing all of the painful problems with RPGS and the liklihood of them being encountered in WoW: I doubt it.
Blizzard has told us that things won't be arbitrary. You collect X consumable to craft Y item and it works everytime, the same. They've pointed out that help is around the corner (from bright exclamation points over people heads who want to talk to you, to minimaps that show the way). So, while it may be a MMORPG (with all that entails), it'll be one of the most polished and user friendly games out there...
I think it's important to note that this is a masters in fine arts, not science. The people being trained in this program are not coders. They'll be the art directors, sound producers, and game designers. They'll be the ones in charge of the outsources units.
the obvious answer to this is Palladium's system. Seeing as how they were the publishers of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle RPG as well as the Palladium Fantasy Role Playing Game. They had a fairly nice system and strove to keep rules compatible across genres, similar to GURPS. I was a huge fan of Palladium's stuff. Particularly their weapon, armor, modern weapon, and castle compendiums which made great source material for any ruleset.
The thing about allowing rival software to be preinstalled on a computer is that both of the software listed are annoying. Quicktime always starts with the stupid "upgrade to pro" windows when it's first run and Real is absolute crap. Windows MP 9 is actually the friendliest piece of software giving you the option to turn off many/most/all of the spyware-type phoning home features. I can't say the same about Quicktime, which always wants to install (and reinstall) something in my startup group.
Given the choice of those 3, I'd chose media player any time.
I've got steam running (and usually leave it running when I'm not home) on my DSL line and the only games installed are HL and Day of Defeat. None of the other mods have installed giving me the "icon is now colored indicating game is ready to play" condition described in the post. And I'm sure most of the gaming population has experienced the same. Sure it sucks that something is going wrong for this guy, but that's just 1 guy.
a damn advertisement logo on it, when I removed it, it left the sticky tape on the DVD player
totally off-topic, but there's a few products out there, sold as "Goo-gone" or similar, that take off tape residue very nicely. too late for this DVD player, but in the future...
Whether you like their games or not, Blizzard struck gold with Battle.net. Easy one-click access to online gaming; built-in with the game, automagic patching when you log on. No messing with server lists, etc. Chat rooms. Battle.net is a PR dream and really helped propel Blizzard to the forefront of online gaming.
The easier you make it for people to play your products, the more product you are going to sell. In Valve's case, one can easily envision a whole number of retail mods being released. Since multiplayer is the rage, money is to be made in the online arena. Given that from the total HL population, a minority of them actually played online (no idea how small, but it's certainly much less than the millions that were sold), any opportunity to get a fraction of them online and potentially buying your online mods is money.
In the case of HL, I'm somewhat relieved that they're going the online autopatching method. There were a ridiculous amount of patches released for HL and if you didn't keep up with them you could easily get lost in what you needed (they released full standalone retail-to-current patches somewhat infrequently and lots of incremental patches inbetween). So an easy "click to update" system (or better yet, leave it running and have it updated and ready whenever you want to play) is a nice convenience.
granted, it sucked mighty hardcore when it was first released and it'll absolutely suck for a couple weeks after HL2 is released, but overall, I'm not too worried about it.
there's a couple of interviews with the principles behind this (producer, director, etc.) here and here. this definitely sounds like one very interesting film from a technical and artistic perspective.
walking around with a headset and holding a joystick connected to your plastic backpack is not really the best way to "enhance [one's] integration with the 'sighted' world." (more like the best way to integrate yourself with a "kick me" note taped on your plastic backpack.) that said, it is fairly cool technology.
sorta offtopic, regarding 3-D audio technology (EAX, A3D), does anyone else find them to be highly lacking? For example, in America's Army, I've noticed in the training missions when you are required to listen to someone talking to you, the best sound comes when you've turned your head 90 degrees to the speaker, so one "ear" is directly facing him. The only time one needs to do this in real life is if one is hard of hearing, or in an environment full of background noise. Its like the designers have the right idea, they're just not implementing some facet of how we process sound properly. I can't see how the algorithms currently in use could be implemented in the game the article refers to. Hopefully software developed for people who use their hearing as the primary sense of input does a better job of capturing the real world phenomena (and that it eventually makes it's way into gaming audio technology)...
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Boy! I sure am glad I shelled out $50 for this 3 years ago!
what's with the cynicism? Isn't this exactly what gamers want? The whole abandonware scene is based on the premise that companies aren't making money on a product anymore, therefore freely trading it doesn't impact the company. In this case it's officially sanctioned freeware (which is a not-in-anyway-subtle marketing campaign for the next in the series).
apparently, companies can't win, even when they give stuff away for free.
FPS games can work with console controllers. although more a puzzle game than true FPS, metroid prime had a very nice responsive control scheme. (far easier to use than the godfather of console FPS games, Goldeneye.) Given that Doom 3 is being pushed as a horror survival game, I imagine they won't be throwing thousands of zombies simultaneously at you, so the twitchy reflexes needed for most PC games simply won't be an issue in this game. That said, I'm sticking with the PC version (partly because I don't own an Xbox and partly because any mods that come out aren't going to be on the xbox)
ya know, Diablo 2 had pet ownership; at least in the sense that it was described in the article. You could hire a minion (4 different types?), level them up with you, whereupon they gain new abilities according to their occupation, plus you can give them weapons for additional power.
So, really this isn't all that different from D2, except that it's a "pet" rather than a minion.
don't you think they already have this information? Perhaps it's not as high tech, but certainly they have to know which routes are the most heavily traveled, which rides/attractions are the most visited, etc. Simply by how often the trash recepticles are filled, or how much waste is swept up will give you an idea how popular an area is. and that's incredibly low tech. How about line lengths at rides or how much business each food stand does in a day?
There are hundreds of ways they can track how heavily traveled areas are and none of them involve tracking devices. The idea that this child tracker will somehow give them more info seems a little exaggerated.
one potential use of the hydrogen, not previously mentioned by other posters, is as a replacement for natural gas. if i'm not mistaken, natural gas heaters/rangetops/etc. are more efficient than electric. So with a hydrogen powered house, you can use the hydrogen not only for power, but also for cooking, the water heater, etc. and further dissociate yourself from the utility grid.
don't know how the overall efficiency of this compares to just using electric for everything.
true. Everquest addiction is not that shocking. The cool/bizarre part of the story is his co-ownership of the tabletop wargaming company. Here's a guy making millions on baseball and in the off season he's researching and writing WW2 campaigns? would be nice to have a job with enough downtime to give serious fruit to your hobbies...
Rare have made one game since they left Nintendo over 2 years ago.
not quite true. Rare has put out 2 games since being acquired by Microsoft. Bizarrely, the first was a gameboy title.
Rare leaving the Nintendo family was a bit of a bummer for me, because I felt Diddy Kong Racing was a superior title to Mario Kart and was looking forward to the sequel...
the idea, presumably, is to truck supplies overland in antarctica, rather than flying them in with cargo planes. how practical is that? truck needs gas to travel 2000+ miles and then you've got this "stretching road" problem to deal with ("From one summer to the next the crevasse field moved about 1,000 feet north and grew about 100 feet longer."). So, your road needs to be replowed every year to account for the fact that it's now 100 feet away from where you left it?
Unfortunately, I think your list needs some revision:
1. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation
2. Tomb Raider 2
and the soon to be released
3. next Resident Evil movie
i'll never understand video game movies nor their sequels...
they address this exact issue in the text of the paper: ... focused on television viewing at 1 and 3 years of age, well before the age at which most experts believe that ADHD symptoms are manifest.32,39 It is also possible that there are characteristics associated with parents who allow their children to watch excessive amounts of television that accounts for the relationship between television viewing and attentional problems.
Third, we cannot draw causal inferences from these associations. It could be that attentional problems lead to television viewing rather than vice versa. However, to mitigate this limitation, we
Same paragraph goes on to talk about how some shows might be good for children, such as Sesame Street, and promote reading, etc.
So, while the researchers can't claim that TV viewing causes ADHD, there is a very strong correlation between the two, and one that obviously deserves further study. Plopping a 1 year old down in front of a TV and having that entertain him for several hours every day just can't be all that good for him. There's just gotta be more constructively entertaining avenues available.
here are some paraphrased comments "lucas" makes:
re han shooting first: steven and i haven't had time to go back and fix the unheroic actions of indiana jones yet
re luke's death star run: one way to improve the scene is to include gungan pilots. and my daughters alerted me to the fact that at college they desconstructed this scene and found it to be very much like the "oedipal abortion of his father's dark creation"
can you actually imagine the same person who wrote and directed the last 2 pieces of star wars crap using the phrase "oedipal abortion"? ok, perhaps thats the wrong question. On second thought, I think that particular line is a clear reference to Lucas aborting his movies in the prequel before they were even metaphorically born.
That's got to be the best description of the death star explosion I've ever heard... This joke at least is somewhat funny. How would Lucas make the death star scene better? "perhaps the inclusion of gungan pilot."
today's press release concerning the 0.999~ = 1 debate was also a bit humorous. (although that only really applies to those who frequent the war room)
most genetically modified foods aren't made for the direct betterment of mankind. rather they are modified for the betterment of the plant. So, rather than make a tomato that is free of salmonella, they are making tomatos that are yucky to tomato worms (for the most part).
The species that are being made for the betterment of mankind typically are done to rectify dietary defficiencies in a given population. For example, vitamin A rice for developing countries which often have large populations of people who don't get enough vitamin A (lack of causes blindness). The rice in this particular story isn't meant to be used to better all people, but (as i read it) to be a supplement for babies who are not breast-feeding (as it was engineered to have proteins naturally occuring in breast milk).
The problem with genetically engineering crops isn't that we are "babying" our immune system (that's a separate issue mostly involving the overuse of antibiotics). Rather, the problem is the overreliance on single species (such as the vitamin A rice) and the lack of natural diversity. Eventually an opportunistic pest is going to come along and decimate your rice field; a condition that would be limited if multiple strains of rice were to be grown.
these aren't antibiotics. these are naturally occuring proteins that are present in breast milk that help fight infection. once a baby is weaned off breast milk, s/he no longer receives these proteins. so the idea is to give the non-breast feeding babies a supplement made from this rice so that the infant has a constant supply of the protein.
given that these are naturally occuring proteins that everyone was exposed to as a child, i think the liklihood of bacteria developing a new resistance to them is low (otherwise, it would have happened sometime within the past several thousand years)
CS is available free if one owns HL. so assuming you originally bought HL (and not the retail CS), then you should be able to play either no problem...
as for the original question of whether we have any interest in CS:CZ, I have none. Day of Defeat is my HL mod du jour. and for those "realistic" moments, I am messing around with America's Army.
This is a quote taken a bit out of context. One actually puts it in context and it argues against your point. Consider the first sentence in the paragraph you selectively quote from: The word which constantly comes to my mind when considering the game is "humane.". Then consider the last sentence, after describing all of the painful problems with RPGS and the liklihood of them being encountered in WoW: I doubt it.
Blizzard has told us that things won't be arbitrary. You collect X consumable to craft Y item and it works everytime, the same. They've pointed out that help is around the corner (from bright exclamation points over people heads who want to talk to you, to minimaps that show the way). So, while it may be a MMORPG (with all that entails), it'll be one of the most polished and user friendly games out there...
I think it's important to note that this is a masters in fine arts, not science. The people being trained in this program are not coders. They'll be the art directors, sound producers, and game designers. They'll be the ones in charge of the outsources units.
the obvious answer to this is Palladium's system. Seeing as how they were the publishers of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle RPG as well as the Palladium Fantasy Role Playing Game. They had a fairly nice system and strove to keep rules compatible across genres, similar to GURPS. I was a huge fan of Palladium's stuff. Particularly their weapon, armor, modern weapon, and castle compendiums which made great source material for any ruleset.
The thing about allowing rival software to be preinstalled on a computer is that both of the software listed are annoying. Quicktime always starts with the stupid "upgrade to pro" windows when it's first run and Real is absolute crap. Windows MP 9 is actually the friendliest piece of software giving you the option to turn off many/most/all of the spyware-type phoning home features. I can't say the same about Quicktime, which always wants to install (and reinstall) something in my startup group.
Given the choice of those 3, I'd chose media player any time.
this must have been a bug.
I've got steam running (and usually leave it running when I'm not home) on my DSL line and the only games installed are HL and Day of Defeat. None of the other mods have installed giving me the "icon is now colored indicating game is ready to play" condition described in the post. And I'm sure most of the gaming population has experienced the same. Sure it sucks that something is going wrong for this guy, but that's just 1 guy.
a damn advertisement logo on it, when I removed it, it left the sticky tape on the DVD player
totally off-topic, but there's a few products out there, sold as "Goo-gone" or similar, that take off tape residue very nicely. too late for this DVD player, but in the future...
Blame Blizzard.
Whether you like their games or not, Blizzard struck gold with Battle.net. Easy one-click access to online gaming; built-in with the game, automagic patching when you log on. No messing with server lists, etc. Chat rooms. Battle.net is a PR dream and really helped propel Blizzard to the forefront of online gaming.
The easier you make it for people to play your products, the more product you are going to sell. In Valve's case, one can easily envision a whole number of retail mods being released. Since multiplayer is the rage, money is to be made in the online arena. Given that from the total HL population, a minority of them actually played online (no idea how small, but it's certainly much less than the millions that were sold), any opportunity to get a fraction of them online and potentially buying your online mods is money.
In the case of HL, I'm somewhat relieved that they're going the online autopatching method. There were a ridiculous amount of patches released for HL and if you didn't keep up with them you could easily get lost in what you needed (they released full standalone retail-to-current patches somewhat infrequently and lots of incremental patches inbetween). So an easy "click to update" system (or better yet, leave it running and have it updated and ready whenever you want to play) is a nice convenience.
granted, it sucked mighty hardcore when it was first released and it'll absolutely suck for a couple weeks after HL2 is released, but overall, I'm not too worried about it.
there's a couple of interviews with the principles behind this (producer, director, etc.) here and here. this definitely sounds like one very interesting film from a technical and artistic perspective.
walking around with a headset and holding a joystick connected to your plastic backpack is not really the best way to "enhance [one's] integration with the 'sighted' world." (more like the best way to integrate yourself with a "kick me" note taped on your plastic backpack.) that said, it is fairly cool technology.
sorta offtopic, regarding 3-D audio technology (EAX, A3D), does anyone else find them to be highly lacking? For example, in America's Army, I've noticed in the training missions when you are required to listen to someone talking to you, the best sound comes when you've turned your head 90 degrees to the speaker, so one "ear" is directly facing him. The only time one needs to do this in real life is if one is hard of hearing, or in an environment full of background noise. Its like the designers have the right idea, they're just not implementing some facet of how we process sound properly. I can't see how the algorithms currently in use could be implemented in the game the article refers to. Hopefully software developed for people who use their hearing as the primary sense of input does a better job of capturing the real world phenomena (and that it eventually makes it's way into gaming audio technology)...