Decoding DivX 3 files isn't really that difficult. The official DivX codec has been able to do so since it went legal with version 4, XviD can manage it, as can numerous other codecs, including libavcodec/ffmpeg.
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest was designed as an entry-level RPG, primarily for the American and European market, back in the days when console RPGs were an extremely small (almost insignificant) portion of the US market. The game reflects this, too, and, aside from a rather spectacular soundtrack, is little more than an RPG-lite.
As for the Game Boy games, there were four titles released in the US under the Final Fantasy banner, but these were all seperate Japanese games/series, retitled to take advantage of the FF name. The Final Fantasy Legend series (there were three of them) were entitled SaGa in Japan, and later had iterations on the Super Famicom/SNES (the three Romancing SaGas, none of which were released outside of Japan), the Playstation (the two SaGa Frontier games), and one on the PS2 (Unlimited SaGa). These were blisteringly hard RPGs (especially for the console market at the time), and stylistically quite a bit different from the FF series proper.
There was also Final Fantasy Adventure, another retitled US Game Boy game. This was originally Seiken Densetsu in Japan ("Legend of the Holy Sword"), and later entries in the series (on the SNES and Playstation) were released as part of the Mana series (Secret of Mana and Legend of Mana, specifically). This was your basic console adventure/action-RPG game in what was basically a Zelda mould, albeit with more RPG elements (experience-based levels, for instance). Actually, a complete overhaul/remake of this original game was just released for the Game Boy Advance, under the US title Sword of Mana.
All things considered, and excusing the opportunism of Square's American branch in the early 1990s, the Final Fantasy series is fairly straightforward, particularly for a series that's been going on for so long. Compare it to, say, the Might and Magic series, with its multiple spin-offs and derivations, or the Mega Man games, which have spun wildly out of the control, with an almost obscene numbers of sub-series and so forth.
No, I think the idea is to have only that one program run with administrator privileges. I.E., the game is executed, it alone runs as administrator, and, when it's done, the system is returned to user-level status.
Windows XP does have the means to do this, although it's not particularly well documented. It's essentially the functional equivalent of running a "su -c progname" on a *nix-based system....
The developer room, IIRC, wasn't removed because of the inclusion of the "Porn Mag." It was removed because the US translation of the game was based on the Japanese rerelease of the game as "Final Fantasy IV Easy Type," which removed the developer room, as well as making numerous tweaks to the game engine, removing a slew of battle commands, and generally accounting for the majority of the (non-graphical) changes between the Japanese and US iterations of the game.
And I think you have FF3 and and FF2 confused: FF2 was the one with your "adaptive stat balancing device" (good description of it, BTW); FF3 had traditional experience-based levels, and the major contribution of that particular game was the introduction of a changable job system into the series.
Personally, I wonder if they'll bother explaining it at all. I wonder because I also can't help but wonder how close of an adaptation this is going to be. If they hedge closely to the books, they'll need to either go to some length to explain the very different place that the second radio series ended up when compared to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe novel, or disregard much of the second radio series entirely. Specifically, they'll need to explain what happens to Ford and Zaphod, reintroduce Trillian, and write-out one or two characters who existed only in the radio play, and never appeared in any of the books.
My understanding is that since Windows NT is basically just Microsoft's OS/2 code from back when they picked up their toys and moved out of IBM's sandbox, that the numbering basically picked up from OS/2. Which still doesn't exactly explain the absence of a 3.0 release, nor is it a particularly honest and forthright way of numbering things, but, hey, this is Microsoft we're talking about, so what do you expect?
Infogrames is Atari. They bought the name a few years ago, and started using it on a select few of their games, like Neverwinter Nights. Just a few months ago, they changed names entirely. This new Atari has just about nothing to do with the original....
Of all the companies out there that have the kind of pull to do this, I think Sega is probably the only one left I can think of. Square too, perhaps, but we all remember Ergheiz and Chocobo Racing were bad ideas. Or a great ideas, I can't decide. Let me just say that if I ever see a game where Solid Snake and Alucard are driving around go-karts is the day I stop purchasing video games.
Whereas I would sell my family into slavery to see Solid Snake and Alucard in go-karts. Go figure.:-)
Although I think the basic problem here is that Konami lacks the "mascot" characters that companies like Nintendo have. Most of Konami's games are more serious and oriented towards an older audience: Solid Snake, Alucard, and the heroes from the Silent Hill series are less given to the sort of caricature that is in some respects essential for games of this ilk.
Hudson, on the other hand, has a few franchises this would work well with, particularly the Adventure Island series. But they lack a sufficient quantity to really carry this one on their own, I would think. It'll be interesting to see how they pull this one off.
Actually, I tend to think that FFX-2 came about less because of the FF movie and more because of FFXI. Because FFXI is a strictly online game, I get the feeling that FFX-2 is meant to appease offline gamers who would otherwise have to wait for FFXII (which has been announced as offline), while allowing them to reuse the FFX game engine. Financially, Square's problems have been basically resolved following the merger with Enix earlier in the year. Also, AFAIK, Square never publicly said that they would not do a direct sequel, and they certainly never said they would not do a remake (they've remade many of the earlier games in the series already). Fans just basically assumed this.
And FF7 should never have a sequel. Not only because it would be silly, thematically, but also because it would be somewhat pointless, since the FF7 engine is too dated to be reused, anyway (which was a sizable portion of the motivation for FFX-2).
But if you're gonna be picky and stick with the main series, then I'd have to go with Final Fantasy VIII. I thought the junctioning system was a welcome change from your console RPG standards, and I found the characters to be the best developed, personality wise, of the entire series, even if the story itself had some questionable moments.
After that, I'd go with Final Fantasy III, the original Japanese game, not FF6/3. A game that, despite its technical inferiority, out-plays its 16-bit successor in almost every important way. One of the best looking 8-bit games I've ever played, as well as one of the most complex and difficult.
Final Fantasy VIII isn't really the least popular in the series: I've encountered more people who dislike Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy IX, for instance, but it does tend to be one of the most divisive games of the series. People either tend to love or it loathe it, and there's less middle ground than one might expect. I guess it was just too much of a divergence from the traditions of the series for most, but I personally loved it as well....
You've got your progression a little off there....
FF2 was the first mainstream console RPG to eliminate traditional experience-based level building. It's difficult to describe in one sentence, but the basic premise was that stats increased as you made use of them: your HP went up if, after a battle, your HP had been rendered critical. Your weapon proficiency went up when you used a particular weapon type a specific number of times. This system was essentially adopted by Square's other major franchise, the Final Fantasy Legend/SaGa series. This was also the first game in the series with a rotating party: three of your party members were with you for the entire game, but the fourth position changed multiple times throughout. Chocobos and Cid also appeared here for the first time....
FF3 was the first game in the series with a non-static job system: you could swap characters in and out of various different jobs during the game itself. It was also the first game to introduce summoned monsters, the ability to steal items, jump attacks, Moogles, and a rather startling variety of concepts and themes that would recur many times over the rest of the series. Personally, I'd consider FF3 to be the first game that truly resembles what the series was to become, and also probably the greatest RPG available for the NES/Famicom.
FF4's two big contributions were to go back to the static alignment of FF2 with a more or less completely revolving party (only the main character, Cecil, stayed in the party throughout), and to eliminate the traditional turn-based battle approach in favor of the new Active Time Battle system, which would be used through FF9, is being revisited for FFX-2, and in a few random other Square games, including Chrono Trigger.
FF5 brought FF3's job system back, but added a new wrinkle in the form of abilities. Sticking with a job for a length of time earned you specific skills from that job which could be carried over between jobs (and give you, for instance, a Knight who could cast Black magic, or whatever). It was also the last FF game before FFX-2 to have a completely static party lineup.
FF6, as you point out, had the Esper system for magic, but also for statistic adjustments: Espers not only taught you magic, but, on level advancement, would provide bonuses to affiliated statistics. This is, in some respects, a refinement of FF5's ability system, where AP earns you magic as opposed to battle abilities.
In FF8, while technically keeping experience points in place, you gained the bulk of statistical advances and the like through the junctioning system. Magic was treated as an item which could be drawn from monsters or from specific points on the world map. This magic could then be junctioned to specific stats on each of your characters, and would provide a bonus based on a number of factors, including strength of the spell, number of spells in your inventory, and nature of the spell (elemental junctioning a fire spell to your weapon would give your physical attacks a fire attribute, for instance).
FF9's system was actually something of a cross between FF6 and FF7's. In this, you learned abilities from your equipment through the accumulation of AP points. This system has recently been adopted, more or less, for the recently released Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.
FFX did have the sphere system, but it also deserves note for being the first FF game since FF2 to eliminate experience-based levelling entirely in favor of grid points, which would unlock new abilities on the aforementioned sphere grid. The game also dropped the ATB system in place since FF4 in favor of a more streamlined Charge Time Battle system which allowed for such things as swapping characters in and out of your party in the middle of battle.
Also, FFX-2 does not use anything resembling the sphere grid. It reintroduces the job system, but adds a number of new wrinkles, such as the ability to change jobs during battle. Plus, it drops FFX's CTB system in favor of a return to the old ATB standard, and brings back experience points. Gameplay-wise, FFX-2 seems to have little in common with the original FFX.
Yes, but this argument holds up for essentially all software license agreements. When was the last time someone phoned Bill Gates/Steve Ballmer over a particularly disagreeable section in the labyrinth that is your standard MS EULA?
A contract is not a contract without a two-way interchange. This is true under both Australian and American law. But, in an era of mass distribution of goods and services, it simply is not practical for the providers of a service to enter into discussion with everyone who would seek to use said service. The law in question has, more or less, been adapted to substitute the idea of choice in place of actual interchange. In other words, and theoretically speaking, if you have a significant problem with the MS EULA or the GPL, or whatever, to the point where you do not agree with it, then you are forbidden to use the software, but are (theoretically) legally entitled to a refund for whatever it cost you to get to that point in the first place. Doesn't always work out that way (how many retail outlets take back opened merchandise, for instance?), but that's the theory.
A EULA may not be a contract, in the traditional sense, but it gets treated that way because, if it wasn't, the entire model with which software is produced and distributed would break down. You can't claim that OpenTV has the right to break the GPL without claiming, by extension, that I have the right to burn copies of Windows XP and sell them on the nearest street corner.
That said, IANAL, and I think a lot of this remains in something of a legal grey area. But that's my understanding of the situation....
You must mean the Atari 2600 (1977), which predated the NES (1995) by a good 18 years.
Erm... I think you need to check your dates here. The Atari 2600 was indeed released in 1977, but your NES dates are off by ten years. The Famicom (Japanese NES) was released in 1983, and the NES was released in the US in 1985 and in Europe in 1986. That's eight years, not eighteen.
By 1995, the NES was good and dead, and its successor, the Super NES, was on its way out as well. That was the eve of systems like the Nintendo 64, the Playstation, and the short-lived Saturn.
FWIW, saturday morning cartoons and video games coexisted quite nicely in the 1980s. You got the obvious tie-in cartoons for things like Pac-Man and Mario Brothers, and the often forgotten "Saturday Supercade" which featured a bunch of shorter cartoons for games which weren't deemed popular enough to carry their own show (things like "Donkey Kong"...).
Sorry, I should have cited my source originally....
I read the information from Gameforms, who got it from Nikkei Business Daily a few weeks ago.
The long and short of it is that RE4 will remain a GameCube exclusive, but "future Resident Evil titles will likely be released to multiple platforms."
It may well be cool, but it's rather unlikely at the moment. Capcom's financial situation, while not desperate, isn't particularly good right now. They've been forced to cut down on the number of games they're developing by a significant margin, and rethink their marketing strategy. Apparently, the decision to make the Resident Evil series a GameCube exclusive isn't working out as well as they'd hoped, and they're moving that series back to cross-platform status, for instance.
The long and short of it is that Capcom just doesn't have the funds to make them an attractive partner for Sega, unfortunately....
While filming on "Shada" did begin, it was never completed. A production strike put the skids on the whole deal before even half of the principle filming had been completed. Particularly later in the story, the available footage is extremely limited. By the time the strike had cleared up, both Douglas Adams and the then-producer of the show, Graham Williams, had left, and the incoming producer and script editor, John Nathan-Turner and Christopher Bidmead, chose not to revive the story, presumably for financial reasons (getting all the actors back, making sure they had the permission of Adams and Williams, etc.).
What footage does exist of the story was released about ten years ago by BBC Video, with Tom Baker providing some rather hit-and-miss linking narration. The video is out-of-print now, and its kind of difficult to follow the grain of the story, but its definitely worth checking out if you can find it. But given the scattershot nature of the existing footage, it's really more interesting as a artifact than as a story in its own right.
Actually, he did get permission for "Amish Paradise." Or, rather, he thought he did. There was a miscommunication somewhere along the lines. Al talked to someone in Coolio's employ, who gave the all clear, but apparently did so without making sure Coolio himself was OK with it. When the song was actually released, Coolio found out, and disapproved.
Generally, "Weird Al" has been very courteous regarding the wishes of the original artist. A number of songs he did in the 1980s were perfomed on tour, but never recorded for this reason. The most notable example being "Chicken Pot Pie," a parody of Paul McCartney's "Live and Let Die" which McCartney asked not to be released because of his vegetarianism.
But I gather this has more to do with Al being courteous and not wanting to burn his bridges as much as it has to do with legal neccessity.
The problem with identifying hypernovae "candidates" is that we're still not entirely certain what causes a hypernova. They could just be really, really large supernovae, or they could be two stars in a binary system merging, or something else entirely.
Whether or not anything can survive, that really depends on how close that thing is. A hypernova probably wouldn't completely eliminate all life within its galaxy, but it would have smaller, though not insignificant, effects over a much greater radius.
For what's its worth, some have put forward the star Eta Carinae as a possible candidate for a hypernova explosion. It one of the most massive, and unpredictable, stars in our galaxy. It's said (by people who have a far greater understanding of this sort of thing than me) that this would have a pretty severe effect on anything in our stellar vicinity outside of our atmosphere, but I don't think its being said that it would eliminate life within.
Amrs races don't cause war my friend, psychopaths with power do.
Indeed. But arms races do breed paranoia, and, by association, the sort of powerful psychopaths who would wage war. And that's completely leaving aside the issue of whether or not, without the arms race, these psychopaths would have the means to wage war.
And, for what its worth, Germany in the 1930s was engaged in an arms race, primarily with France, and it did eventually lead to the Second World War. Keep in mind that one of Hitler's most popular platforms was regaining military parity with the rest of Europe following the post-WWI disarmament. Hitler's reasons may have ultimately been psychopathic, but its not like he didn't have a sizable portion of the German people backing him, largely because of French military (who were most assuredly not on horseback...) buildup along the Maginot Line at the border of the two countries. As far as arms races go, it wasn't the most dramatic, but it was an arms race of a sort.
An arms race never solves anything. It's, at best, an extremely dangerous gamble: it might prevent an intelligent, cautious leader from waging war against you, but, since we've already established we're dealing with psychopaths, you can't neccessarily rely on dealing with intelligent and cautious leaders. And the further you get along in the race, the more deadly the stakes are.
That the US "won" the Cold War arms race was a lucky fluke, but it was never a sure thing, and it could have ended hideously badly. Basing future foreign policy on a similar model does not fill me with a great deal of confidence.
Only on the most basic level. The problem was no one actually wanted to invest the sort of effort neccessary to "win" the Vietnam War (regardless of whether or not it could have been done, which isn't self-evident, actually).
The "micromanaging" of the war happened because, in general, there was no public will to go in with full force. The general populace wouldn't have supported that: public opinion, born of over a decade of Red scaremongering and political trumpeting, wanted a nice, simple war that didn't actually affect anyone much at all.
'Course, it didn't work out that way. Some of the most significant political protests in recent history attest to that. But letting loose the military without the sort of "micromanagement" that its become fashionable to abhor these days would have had its own slew of problems, and its extremely unlikely anyone would have been much happier with the result, even if we did "win."
Nope. Uranus has it beat (being the Greek name for the Roman god Cronos). And, of course, all of the satelites and asteroids which have since moved onto to less slashed and burned mythological systems....
Problem is, what with all the asteroids, satelites, and other assorted odds 'n ends in the great big junk drawer of space, most of Roman deities have been taken, even going down from the Olympian pantheon and into the lesser known demigod figures. They've already moved into other mythical figures for satelites (not only other deities, but also things like Shakespearean characters). The really obvious ones, like Minerva, have long since been claimed....
The problem with mplayer, ultimately, is not a problem with the program itself, but a problem with the (former?) release policy. I've been through numerous build processes a lot more annoying than mplayer's. The difference is that, for most really annoying compiling jobs, its easy enough for joe average-user to go download a prebuilt RPM (or DEB) of the program. For the longest time, mplayer restricted distribution in this way (not that said packages didn't exist anyway, of course...).
I *think* the policy may have been withdrawn now, though (a legal issue of some sort has been ironed out), so hopefully mplayer can get the more widespread attention it deserves.
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Decoding DivX 3 files isn't really that difficult. The official DivX codec has been able to do so since it went legal with version 4, XviD can manage it, as can numerous other codecs, including libavcodec/ffmpeg.
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest was designed as an entry-level RPG, primarily for the American and European market, back in the days when console RPGs were an extremely small (almost insignificant) portion of the US market. The game reflects this, too, and, aside from a rather spectacular soundtrack, is little more than an RPG-lite.
As for the Game Boy games, there were four titles released in the US under the Final Fantasy banner, but these were all seperate Japanese games/series, retitled to take advantage of the FF name. The Final Fantasy Legend series (there were three of them) were entitled SaGa in Japan, and later had iterations on the Super Famicom/SNES (the three Romancing SaGas, none of which were released outside of Japan), the Playstation (the two SaGa Frontier games), and one on the PS2 (Unlimited SaGa). These were blisteringly hard RPGs (especially for the console market at the time), and stylistically quite a bit different from the FF series proper.
There was also Final Fantasy Adventure, another retitled US Game Boy game. This was originally Seiken Densetsu in Japan ("Legend of the Holy Sword"), and later entries in the series (on the SNES and Playstation) were released as part of the Mana series (Secret of Mana and Legend of Mana, specifically). This was your basic console adventure/action-RPG game in what was basically a Zelda mould, albeit with more RPG elements (experience-based levels, for instance). Actually, a complete overhaul/remake of this original game was just released for the Game Boy Advance, under the US title Sword of Mana.
All things considered, and excusing the opportunism of Square's American branch in the early 1990s, the Final Fantasy series is fairly straightforward, particularly for a series that's been going on for so long. Compare it to, say, the Might and Magic series, with its multiple spin-offs and derivations, or the Mega Man games, which have spun wildly out of the control, with an almost obscene numbers of sub-series and so forth.
No, I think the idea is to have only that one program run with administrator privileges. I.E., the game is executed, it alone runs as administrator, and, when it's done, the system is returned to user-level status.
Windows XP does have the means to do this, although it's not particularly well documented. It's essentially the functional equivalent of running a "su -c progname" on a *nix-based system....
The developer room, IIRC, wasn't removed because of the inclusion of the "Porn Mag." It was removed because the US translation of the game was based on the Japanese rerelease of the game as "Final Fantasy IV Easy Type," which removed the developer room, as well as making numerous tweaks to the game engine, removing a slew of battle commands, and generally accounting for the majority of the (non-graphical) changes between the Japanese and US iterations of the game.
And I think you have FF3 and and FF2 confused: FF2 was the one with your "adaptive stat balancing device" (good description of it, BTW); FF3 had traditional experience-based levels, and the major contribution of that particular game was the introduction of a changable job system into the series.
Personally, I wonder if they'll bother explaining it at all. I wonder because I also can't help but wonder how close of an adaptation this is going to be. If they hedge closely to the books, they'll need to either go to some length to explain the very different place that the second radio series ended up when compared to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe novel, or disregard much of the second radio series entirely. Specifically, they'll need to explain what happens to Ford and Zaphod, reintroduce Trillian, and write-out one or two characters who existed only in the radio play, and never appeared in any of the books.
My understanding is that since Windows NT is basically just Microsoft's OS/2 code from back when they picked up their toys and moved out of IBM's sandbox, that the numbering basically picked up from OS/2. Which still doesn't exactly explain the absence of a 3.0 release, nor is it a particularly honest and forthright way of numbering things, but, hey, this is Microsoft we're talking about, so what do you expect?
Infogrames is Atari. They bought the name a few years ago, and started using it on a select few of their games, like Neverwinter Nights. Just a few months ago, they changed names entirely. This new Atari has just about nothing to do with the original....
Although I think the basic problem here is that Konami lacks the "mascot" characters that companies like Nintendo have. Most of Konami's games are more serious and oriented towards an older audience: Solid Snake, Alucard, and the heroes from the Silent Hill series are less given to the sort of caricature that is in some respects essential for games of this ilk.
Hudson, on the other hand, has a few franchises this would work well with, particularly the Adventure Island series. But they lack a sufficient quantity to really carry this one on their own, I would think. It'll be interesting to see how they pull this one off.
Actually, I tend to think that FFX-2 came about less because of the FF movie and more because of FFXI. Because FFXI is a strictly online game, I get the feeling that FFX-2 is meant to appease offline gamers who would otherwise have to wait for FFXII (which has been announced as offline), while allowing them to reuse the FFX game engine. Financially, Square's problems have been basically resolved following the merger with Enix earlier in the year. Also, AFAIK, Square never publicly said that they would not do a direct sequel, and they certainly never said they would not do a remake (they've remade many of the earlier games in the series already). Fans just basically assumed this.
And FF7 should never have a sequel. Not only because it would be silly, thematically, but also because it would be somewhat pointless, since the FF7 engine is too dated to be reused, anyway (which was a sizable portion of the motivation for FFX-2).
My favorite is Final Fantasy Tactics. :-P
But if you're gonna be picky and stick with the main series, then I'd have to go with Final Fantasy VIII. I thought the junctioning system was a welcome change from your console RPG standards, and I found the characters to be the best developed, personality wise, of the entire series, even if the story itself had some questionable moments.
After that, I'd go with Final Fantasy III, the original Japanese game, not FF6/3. A game that, despite its technical inferiority, out-plays its 16-bit successor in almost every important way. One of the best looking 8-bit games I've ever played, as well as one of the most complex and difficult.
Final Fantasy VIII isn't really the least popular in the series: I've encountered more people who dislike Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy IX, for instance, but it does tend to be one of the most divisive games of the series. People either tend to love or it loathe it, and there's less middle ground than one might expect. I guess it was just too much of a divergence from the traditions of the series for most, but I personally loved it as well....
You've got your progression a little off there....
FF2 was the first mainstream console RPG to eliminate traditional experience-based level building. It's difficult to describe in one sentence, but the basic premise was that stats increased as you made use of them: your HP went up if, after a battle, your HP had been rendered critical. Your weapon proficiency went up when you used a particular weapon type a specific number of times. This system was essentially adopted by Square's other major franchise, the Final Fantasy Legend/SaGa series. This was also the first game in the series with a rotating party: three of your party members were with you for the entire game, but the fourth position changed multiple times throughout. Chocobos and Cid also appeared here for the first time....
FF3 was the first game in the series with a non-static job system: you could swap characters in and out of various different jobs during the game itself. It was also the first game to introduce summoned monsters, the ability to steal items, jump attacks, Moogles, and a rather startling variety of concepts and themes that would recur many times over the rest of the series. Personally, I'd consider FF3 to be the first game that truly resembles what the series was to become, and also probably the greatest RPG available for the NES/Famicom.
FF4's two big contributions were to go back to the static alignment of FF2 with a more or less completely revolving party (only the main character, Cecil, stayed in the party throughout), and to eliminate the traditional turn-based battle approach in favor of the new Active Time Battle system, which would be used through FF9, is being revisited for FFX-2, and in a few random other Square games, including Chrono Trigger.
FF5 brought FF3's job system back, but added a new wrinkle in the form of abilities. Sticking with a job for a length of time earned you specific skills from that job which could be carried over between jobs (and give you, for instance, a Knight who could cast Black magic, or whatever). It was also the last FF game before FFX-2 to have a completely static party lineup.
FF6, as you point out, had the Esper system for magic, but also for statistic adjustments: Espers not only taught you magic, but, on level advancement, would provide bonuses to affiliated statistics. This is, in some respects, a refinement of FF5's ability system, where AP earns you magic as opposed to battle abilities.
In FF8, while technically keeping experience points in place, you gained the bulk of statistical advances and the like through the junctioning system. Magic was treated as an item which could be drawn from monsters or from specific points on the world map. This magic could then be junctioned to specific stats on each of your characters, and would provide a bonus based on a number of factors, including strength of the spell, number of spells in your inventory, and nature of the spell (elemental junctioning a fire spell to your weapon would give your physical attacks a fire attribute, for instance).
FF9's system was actually something of a cross between FF6 and FF7's. In this, you learned abilities from your equipment through the accumulation of AP points. This system has recently been adopted, more or less, for the recently released Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.
FFX did have the sphere system, but it also deserves note for being the first FF game since FF2 to eliminate experience-based levelling entirely in favor of grid points, which would unlock new abilities on the aforementioned sphere grid. The game also dropped the ATB system in place since FF4 in favor of a more streamlined Charge Time Battle system which allowed for such things as swapping characters in and out of your party in the middle of battle.
Also, FFX-2 does not use anything resembling the sphere grid. It reintroduces the job system, but adds a number of new wrinkles, such as the ability to change jobs during battle. Plus, it drops FFX's CTB system in favor of a return to the old ATB standard, and brings back experience points. Gameplay-wise, FFX-2 seems to have little in common with the original FFX.
Yes, but this argument holds up for essentially all software license agreements. When was the last time someone phoned Bill Gates/Steve Ballmer over a particularly disagreeable section in the labyrinth that is your standard MS EULA?
A contract is not a contract without a two-way interchange. This is true under both Australian and American law. But, in an era of mass distribution of goods and services, it simply is not practical for the providers of a service to enter into discussion with everyone who would seek to use said service. The law in question has, more or less, been adapted to substitute the idea of choice in place of actual interchange. In other words, and theoretically speaking, if you have a significant problem with the MS EULA or the GPL, or whatever, to the point where you do not agree with it, then you are forbidden to use the software, but are (theoretically) legally entitled to a refund for whatever it cost you to get to that point in the first place. Doesn't always work out that way (how many retail outlets take back opened merchandise, for instance?), but that's the theory.
A EULA may not be a contract, in the traditional sense, but it gets treated that way because, if it wasn't, the entire model with which software is produced and distributed would break down. You can't claim that OpenTV has the right to break the GPL without claiming, by extension, that I have the right to burn copies of Windows XP and sell them on the nearest street corner.
That said, IANAL, and I think a lot of this remains in something of a legal grey area. But that's my understanding of the situation....
Erm... I think you need to check your dates here. The Atari 2600 was indeed released in 1977, but your NES dates are off by ten years. The Famicom (Japanese NES) was released in 1983, and the NES was released in the US in 1985 and in Europe in 1986. That's eight years, not eighteen.
By 1995, the NES was good and dead, and its successor, the Super NES, was on its way out as well. That was the eve of systems like the Nintendo 64, the Playstation, and the short-lived Saturn.
FWIW, saturday morning cartoons and video games coexisted quite nicely in the 1980s. You got the obvious tie-in cartoons for things like Pac-Man and Mario Brothers, and the often forgotten "Saturday Supercade" which featured a bunch of shorter cartoons for games which weren't deemed popular enough to carry their own show (things like "Donkey Kong"...).
Sorry, I should have cited my source originally....
I read the information from Gameforms, who got it from Nikkei Business Daily a few weeks ago.
The long and short of it is that RE4 will remain a GameCube exclusive, but "future Resident Evil titles will likely be released to multiple platforms."
http://www.gameforms.com/news/?768
It may well be cool, but it's rather unlikely at the moment. Capcom's financial situation, while not desperate, isn't particularly good right now. They've been forced to cut down on the number of games they're developing by a significant margin, and rethink their marketing strategy. Apparently, the decision to make the Resident Evil series a GameCube exclusive isn't working out as well as they'd hoped, and they're moving that series back to cross-platform status, for instance.
The long and short of it is that Capcom just doesn't have the funds to make them an attractive partner for Sega, unfortunately....
While filming on "Shada" did begin, it was never completed. A production strike put the skids on the whole deal before even half of the principle filming had been completed. Particularly later in the story, the available footage is extremely limited. By the time the strike had cleared up, both Douglas Adams and the then-producer of the show, Graham Williams, had left, and the incoming producer and script editor, John Nathan-Turner and Christopher Bidmead, chose not to revive the story, presumably for financial reasons (getting all the actors back, making sure they had the permission of Adams and Williams, etc.).
What footage does exist of the story was released about ten years ago by BBC Video, with Tom Baker providing some rather hit-and-miss linking narration. The video is out-of-print now, and its kind of difficult to follow the grain of the story, but its definitely worth checking out if you can find it. But given the scattershot nature of the existing footage, it's really more interesting as a artifact than as a story in its own right.
Actually, he did get permission for "Amish Paradise." Or, rather, he thought he did. There was a miscommunication somewhere along the lines. Al talked to someone in Coolio's employ, who gave the all clear, but apparently did so without making sure Coolio himself was OK with it. When the song was actually released, Coolio found out, and disapproved.
Generally, "Weird Al" has been very courteous regarding the wishes of the original artist. A number of songs he did in the 1980s were perfomed on tour, but never recorded for this reason. The most notable example being "Chicken Pot Pie," a parody of Paul McCartney's "Live and Let Die" which McCartney asked not to be released because of his vegetarianism.
But I gather this has more to do with Al being courteous and not wanting to burn his bridges as much as it has to do with legal neccessity.
The problem with identifying hypernovae "candidates" is that we're still not entirely certain what causes a hypernova. They could just be really, really large supernovae, or they could be two stars in a binary system merging, or something else entirely.
Whether or not anything can survive, that really depends on how close that thing is. A hypernova probably wouldn't completely eliminate all life within its galaxy, but it would have smaller, though not insignificant, effects over a much greater radius.
For what's its worth, some have put forward the star Eta Carinae as a possible candidate for a hypernova explosion. It one of the most massive, and unpredictable, stars in our galaxy. It's said (by people who have a far greater understanding of this sort of thing than me) that this would have a pretty severe effect on anything in our stellar vicinity outside of our atmosphere, but I don't think its being said that it would eliminate life within.
And, for what its worth, Germany in the 1930s was engaged in an arms race, primarily with France, and it did eventually lead to the Second World War. Keep in mind that one of Hitler's most popular platforms was regaining military parity with the rest of Europe following the post-WWI disarmament. Hitler's reasons may have ultimately been psychopathic, but its not like he didn't have a sizable portion of the German people backing him, largely because of French military (who were most assuredly not on horseback...) buildup along the Maginot Line at the border of the two countries. As far as arms races go, it wasn't the most dramatic, but it was an arms race of a sort.
An arms race never solves anything. It's, at best, an extremely dangerous gamble: it might prevent an intelligent, cautious leader from waging war against you, but, since we've already established we're dealing with psychopaths, you can't neccessarily rely on dealing with intelligent and cautious leaders. And the further you get along in the race, the more deadly the stakes are.
That the US "won" the Cold War arms race was a lucky fluke, but it was never a sure thing, and it could have ended hideously badly. Basing future foreign policy on a similar model does not fill me with a great deal of confidence.
Only on the most basic level. The problem was no one actually wanted to invest the sort of effort neccessary to "win" the Vietnam War (regardless of whether or not it could have been done, which isn't self-evident, actually).
The "micromanaging" of the war happened because, in general, there was no public will to go in with full force. The general populace wouldn't have supported that: public opinion, born of over a decade of Red scaremongering and political trumpeting, wanted a nice, simple war that didn't actually affect anyone much at all.
'Course, it didn't work out that way. Some of the most significant political protests in recent history attest to that. But letting loose the military without the sort of "micromanagement" that its become fashionable to abhor these days would have had its own slew of problems, and its extremely unlikely anyone would have been much happier with the result, even if we did "win."
Nope. Uranus has it beat (being the Greek name for the Roman god Cronos). And, of course, all of the satelites and asteroids which have since moved onto to less slashed and burned mythological systems....
Problem is, what with all the asteroids, satelites, and other assorted odds 'n ends in the great big junk drawer of space, most of Roman deities have been taken, even going down from the Olympian pantheon and into the lesser known demigod figures. They've already moved into other mythical figures for satelites (not only other deities, but also things like Shakespearean characters). The really obvious ones, like Minerva, have long since been claimed....
This is why Apple Computer is not allowed to name planets... :-)
The problem with mplayer, ultimately, is not a problem with the program itself, but a problem with the (former?) release policy. I've been through numerous build processes a lot more annoying than mplayer's. The difference is that, for most really annoying compiling jobs, its easy enough for joe average-user to go download a prebuilt RPM (or DEB) of the program. For the longest time, mplayer restricted distribution in this way (not that said packages didn't exist anyway, of course...).
I *think* the policy may have been withdrawn now, though (a legal issue of some sort has been ironed out), so hopefully mplayer can get the more widespread attention it deserves.