I've been using Android x86 for a while on an old spare laptop and, generally speaking, it's worked pretty well! Surprisingly many Android games don't seem to like it (swipe gestures don't seem to map well to a mouse), and apps that rely on portrait orientation are annoying, but for general web browsing it's been fine.
I can't help but think the only long-term way to reduce the effectiveness of these kinds of SEO tricks is to remove all storefronts from Google results. Even that isn't foolproof certainly, and I'm sure that online shopping sites will then just use non-store entry pages. But these SEO tricks work because many people, when they want to buy something, just go to Google and click on the first link presented, which I don't think anyone knowledgeable about web search will think is a good idea. That behavior has to change, and until Google gets serious about informing users about it, or Google somehow loses its place as the #1 search provider and whoever takes its place does so, SEO will probably continue to be big business, and Google/Whoever will continue having to run around putting out little fires.
The free market's whole point is to kill failures, so no doubt there is many.
The free market does not have a point. The idea was to create a financial system out of the general economic trading that has been with man since prehistory. An exchange of goods and services. There is a rough justice to such bartering, given there are no great differences in wealth and power between the participants.
What we have now, however, is not this thing, and I'm glad of it. The primary sellers are huge corporations that pursue every legal avenue available to maximize profits, including patents, licenses and copyrights. When the laws do not favor them, they lobby to get the laws changed. To them it has nothing to do with fairness; it is entirely a cost-effectiveness equation.
Regulation, at its best, is the only really effective shield against this kind of rapaciousness. That's not to say it's always good, but to decry all government intervention is to also bash the only check on corporate power available to us.
Isn't life wonderful when we just let the government do things?
Sometimes it is. There are unquestionably things government is best suited to do. Regulation to take the sharp edges off the free market is one of those things.
As far as corn prices go, it's unlikely that ethanol is a big part of that, and Pepsi and Mountain Dew release their "throwback" line as a small thing, not nearly in large enough quantities to lend credence to your theory. And to describe the market for corn as "free" is ignorant at best, and disingenuous at worst; government farm subsidies play a substantial role in the price of corn in the U.S., which in turn has fueled high fructose corn syrup's ascendancy as universal filler-sweetener in this country.
Psyco is such a nice tool; add just a couple of lines of code, and suddenly 90% of Python programs become multiple times faster on Intel processors... assuming it's single-threaded, of course.
Psyco's been lagging a bit behind lately though, and little progress has been made on shortening that list of features it doesn't support. The main reason for this has been the developer going on to work on PyPy, a subset of Python in which a Python interpreter itself can be written. The ultimate goal appears to be another massive-speedup JIT compiler, although I'm not sure how it gets there from here.
The problem with accessible government is that no-one's interested. Even where there are dedicated TV channels (e.g. in the UK) hardly anyone watches them. Why's that? Because the work of government is almost 100% pure tedium. No-one wants to watch what happens in committee meeting - even if that's where the laws are actually made, nor do are they prepared to sit through hours of televised debate.
This is, strictly speaking, not true. It's not that no one is interested, it's that almost no one is.
And that's not practically the same thing, either. Transparency makes it so the good journalists and bloggers, those who actually somehow like sifting through all that tedious data, can, and then report the upshot to us. Transparency allows the press (when it's working correctly, which one could argue, I admit, it isn't right now) to do its job.
But it is not true that this necessarily renders everything down into sound bites. There's a world of differences between insightful commentary and five seconds of video.
I was just about to suggest Python myself. Not because of the whitespace thing (which is helpful), but because it's a language in which a lot can be done with just a little coding, there are modules for just about everything, and it can take one surprisingly far. Even simple fast-action games can now be written in Python, using the PyCap library interface to the PopCap game framework. PyGame's great for more complex, non-real-time graphics stuff.
The real problem with Python, from a learner's perspective, is that it doesn't have a good multi-dimensional array construct. The most obvious solutions are using built-in arrays (which are inflexible compared to lists), Numeric's arrays (which are good but external), lists-of-lists (which get confusing fast), or create an two-dimensional array class to wrap around a list, using math to map the second dimension into it.
Also, when Python 2.6 hits it'll change some syntax about the language, which may confuse the kid if he stays current. But then, the version change could also be a learning experience for him.
It's worth noting why the average voter is so inept: He doesn't research.
He doesn't research. He goes by what is put in front of him, which for most people is what's on TV, but there are also those who casually read the newspaper. That's about it. They don't do stories on things that aren't notable, and those things can't become notable without media attention. If they use the internet it's for email and funny pictures. They don't look for commentary or debate, unless it reinforces what they already know. Usually, something on the internet only gets mentioned on a news broadcast as part of a "lighter side" segment, e.g., "Oh, those wacky nerds! All your rickrolls are belong to us LOL!"
The great lesson this election season is how legitimate the stupidest ideas in the world become when the media gives them attention. "They hate us for our freedom," indeed.
And the great surprise this election is that an unknown, Obama, has broken through the media apathy barrier.
If you hope to do everything OO with classes, you're right. But even with the switch to the Mono virtual machine under the hood coming up July 23, which greatly increases performance and memory capacity, a single VM memory space will only be 64K. (Currently, it's 16K, one-fourth that of a Commodore 64!) That includes both compiled bytecode AND variable storage. Please correct me if I'm wrong (and I'm not snarking here), but I thought that object-oriented languages were not designed for that kind of harsh memory stricture.
In any case, it's perfectly possible to write a program without objects. And I must disagree, also, with your comparison of LSL to BASIC, in syntax it's far closer to C, which is also not object-oriented.
It might have (much) better graphics and sound, but Diablo really doesn't do anything that Angband doesn't. And there's even a multiplayer Angband out these days.
I can't help but wonder, were MAngband better known, if Diablo would be as popular.
On a show like this, no one writes "most" of the jokes and bits. Mike was head writer for most of his tenure on the show, but they always had several writers. The tenor of the jokes does change throughout the show's run, always great, but tending more towards a more left-brained approach, as opposed to right-brained in the early years. The changing of the guard (Joel, Trace and Josh to Mike, Kevin and Bill) probably contributed the most to this.
It's an insightful point you make about the Wii's game drought. The only really big Wii titles have been Wii Sports (which was a surprise; we still play it even now), Zelda and Metroid. There are some other games that are sorta interesting: we've gotten surprising play out of Wii Play's Tanks and Billiards modules. But nothing really meaty. The only thing that really offsets it is Virtual Console.
Once Mario Galaxy and Smash Brawl make it out, though....
All writing contains point of view. It's impossible to escape, and it's arguable that it's pointless to try, and that trying produces bland, content-free writing. That's exactly the reason for this project: not to promote the Wikipedia model of inoffensive facts, but to present the facts as they stand as clearly as possible.
Professional journalism cannot be unbiased, but when it works best, the bias is in favor of facts first, and after that individual human beings before authority figures. But unless the facts are put into context they are meaningless. To put them into context requires knowledge, and that implies a world view which has been formulated to fit that knowledge if the one who possesses that knowledge is anything other than a blithering idiot.
To put it another way, I ask: why do people want to become journalists? The answer, if the journalist is worth anything, is that he wants to make the world a better place. That's an intrinsically biased motive! Yet there is no reason to exclude those journalists for having it, so long as they are truthful and honest in their reporting, who qualities that, for all its faults, the New York Times has in abundance over Fox News.
(*singing to the Time Of The Apes theme song*) "Sandy Frank! Sandy Frank! Here we go again!" "Sandy Frank! Sandy Frank! The source of all our pain!" "Sandy Frank! Sandy Frank! Spielberg won't return his calls!"
Interesting note on that song... it's possible that it was hearing that that caused Sandy Frank (who brought over a lot of Japanese TV shows and movies, including Battle of the Planets/Gachaman) to refuse to renew the rights to the movies, causing Comedy Central to have to take them out of circulation early. To this day, none of those episodes can be purchased on DVD.
Crow: "Hey kids! Musliage tastes just like sweet honey!" Joel: "Kids, kids, musliage does not taste like honey, okay? From one who knows."
(After a Commando Cody short -- first season, too) Servo: "If Cody really had a rocket strapped to his back he'd be doing cartwheels all over Kansas!" Crow: "Yeah, and if the invisible man were really invisible, he'd be blind 'cause his retinas would be transparent!" Servo: "And if the incredible shrinking man were really shrinking, no one would be able to hear him because his vocal cords would have shrunk too, making his voice ultrasonic! Even dogs would have to say, 'huh, what?'" Joel: "Well guys, I know one that's for real. Did you know that science has yet to come up with a explanation for how bumblebees can fly? It's aerodynamically impossible, yet they do. Go figure Tom Servo." Servo: "Hm, that's strange, maybe I can figure..." (head explodes) Joel: "Hm, how about you Crow?" Crow: "Yeah yeah, bumblebees can't fly... uh..." (head explodes) Joel: "Oh, I really gotta build you guys with more memory capacity. Can you figure it out Cambot?" (screen goes staticy, jump to commercial)
Re:One of the biggest flame wars in internet histo
on
MST3K is Back, Sort Of
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· Score: 1
Then Michael J. Nelson became head writer. Kevin Murphy and Frank Conniff took over for Josh, which was a big loss. The jokes started to became a little stale, but the show was still good. Frank simply was not funny, but Trace did what he could to keep the sketches interesting.
Mike Nelson was head writer from season 2 on... MAYBE from season 1, I don't remember. Joel may have stepped down as host midway through season 5, and he may have been the show's creator, but he was far from the only creative voice behind it, and Mike has been the major editorial voice behind the show's jokes since nearly the beginning of the cable era.
Next, extremely oddly considering the show's history and how people left it, no cast member has ever had a bad thing to say about any other cast member. The closest was when Joel once said about Josh "J. Elvis" Weinstein, of his leaving the show after the first season, "He was eighteen." Even if the Usenet MSTie community engaged in epic flame wars when Joel left and Mike stepped in as host, there has never been an indication that anyone was angry behind the scenes. The word about Joel leaving, from a very recent interview with Kevin Murphy (the one at Quick Stop Entertainment) is that he had always planned to leave because he was just that kind of restless guy.
Finally: no one can argue that there was anything that brilliant about the first season, or the KTMA episodes, other than the premise and some of the sketches. The jokes were only occasionally good back then. The show was definitely riding on the strength of the premise from that point, to the degree that the Brains were always reluctant to show episodes from the first season after they had built up a good body of repeat shows. I saw many of the episodes, and even one the one they released on DVD; take my word for it.
Reading over the article a bit more, okay, let me amend my statement....
The fact that Second Life has a kind of monopoly in virtual land sale seems to enter into it. So this might not be a strike against click-wrap licenses in general. Hmm.
You are correct, really, but it's important to note why.
The idea of a contract is that two parties enter into a mutually beneficial arrangement. A contract that gives one side of the deal nothing (or, apparently, almost nothing) is not a valid contract.
Most "click-wrap" licenses, as we understand the term, would fail this test for the same reason Second Life's license failed it, as practically all of them are CYA deals that exist primarily to restrict users from doing unforeseen things that could work out bad for the company in the future. And it is true that this precedent is not binding outside this jurisdiction, BUT, other judges who are asked to determine the legality of a click-wrap license in the future could well become aware of it, and that should not be discounted.
I think we are on the same page then, for I do agree with you on these points overall. I have a vivid memory of the days I was stuck in Norfair, having explored all the passages multiple times, until I was reduced to bombing every block of floor in the shafts and only THEN found the way forward.
Although, on the other hand, the one thing that Metroid has that later games in the series do not is that the game looks undesigned. The point-a-to-point-b design of the later games implies the mind of a designer has laid out the tunnels, and subtly removes the sense that the player is exploring tunnels that were never meant to be explored. The original Metroid's technical limitations (which necessitate an absence of hints and many reused playfield sections) enhances that feeling of alien wonder by accident that few games attempt to inspire on purpose.
I think you're completely correct about having to refill the tanks manually in Metroid, that does suck quite a bit.
Overall I agree with you, and Nintendo obviously does, but I do think a case could be made for Zelda being RPGish. Its level advancement is handled entirely through items and puzzle-solving instead of combat though. You find items and heart containers in Zeldas by poking your nose everywhere, that is the game's analogue for combat-gained experience.
All those things you mention are part of what I like about both Metroid and Zelda 2: "Repetitive level design" = making canny use of premade screen segments to make a world much larger than cart memory of the time would ordinarily allow. "Unclear goals" = open-ended gameplay, where you have to figure out what to do instead of have the game lead you by the hand every damn where. "Returning to start when you die" = Having an actual penalty for death that's still not really that bad, since by the time you get a sizable distance from the start location, you're powerful enough to make short work of most of the enemies in that area. Plus it lends more cohesion to the world, having to navigate it in ways other than plot point to plot point.
Not only that. Increasingly, the new products made for consumption aren't for us to do the consuming, but instead big corporations, the government, or the military.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using Android x86 for a while on an old spare laptop and, generally speaking, it's worked pretty well! Surprisingly many Android games don't seem to like it (swipe gestures don't seem to map well to a mouse), and apps that rely on portrait orientation are annoying, but for general web browsing it's been fine.
I can't help but think the only long-term way to reduce the effectiveness of these kinds of SEO tricks is to remove all storefronts from Google results. Even that isn't foolproof certainly, and I'm sure that online shopping sites will then just use non-store entry pages. But these SEO tricks work because many people, when they want to buy something, just go to Google and click on the first link presented, which I don't think anyone knowledgeable about web search will think is a good idea. That behavior has to change, and until Google gets serious about informing users about it, or Google somehow loses its place as the #1 search provider and whoever takes its place does so, SEO will probably continue to be big business, and Google/Whoever will continue having to run around putting out little fires.
The free market's whole point is to kill failures, so no doubt there is many.
The free market does not have a point. The idea was to create a financial system out of the general economic trading that has been with man since prehistory. An exchange of goods and services. There is a rough justice to such bartering, given there are no great differences in wealth and power between the participants.
What we have now, however, is not this thing, and I'm glad of it. The primary sellers are huge corporations that pursue every legal avenue available to maximize profits, including patents, licenses and copyrights. When the laws do not favor them, they lobby to get the laws changed. To them it has nothing to do with fairness; it is entirely a cost-effectiveness equation.
Regulation, at its best, is the only really effective shield against this kind of rapaciousness. That's not to say it's always good, but to decry all government intervention is to also bash the only check on corporate power available to us.
Isn't life wonderful when we just let the government do things?
Sometimes it is. There are unquestionably things government is best suited to do. Regulation to take the sharp edges off the free market is one of those things.
As far as corn prices go, it's unlikely that ethanol is a big part of that, and Pepsi and Mountain Dew release their "throwback" line as a small thing, not nearly in large enough quantities to lend credence to your theory. And to describe the market for corn as "free" is ignorant at best, and disingenuous at worst; government farm subsidies play a substantial role in the price of corn in the U.S., which in turn has fueled high fructose corn syrup's ascendancy as universal filler-sweetener in this country.
Demonstratively false. I haven't heard anyone defend Obama for the wiretap issue.
Come to think of it, while there was a lot of love directed at Obama for a while there, I noticed no one shouting down people who disagreed with him.
Psyco is such a nice tool; add just a couple of lines of code, and suddenly 90% of Python programs become multiple times faster on Intel processors... assuming it's single-threaded, of course.
Psyco's been lagging a bit behind lately though, and little progress has been made on shortening that list of features it doesn't support. The main reason for this has been the developer going on to work on PyPy, a subset of Python in which a Python interpreter itself can be written. The ultimate goal appears to be another massive-speedup JIT compiler, although I'm not sure how it gets there from here.
The problem with accessible government is that no-one's interested. Even where there are dedicated TV channels (e.g. in the UK) hardly anyone watches them. Why's that? Because the work of government is almost 100% pure tedium. No-one wants to watch what happens in committee meeting - even if that's where the laws are actually made, nor do are they prepared to sit through hours of televised debate.
This is, strictly speaking, not true. It's not that no one is interested, it's that almost no one is.
And that's not practically the same thing, either. Transparency makes it so the good journalists and bloggers, those who actually somehow like sifting through all that tedious data, can, and then report the upshot to us. Transparency allows the press (when it's working correctly, which one could argue, I admit, it isn't right now) to do its job.
But it is not true that this necessarily renders everything down into sound bites. There's a world of differences between insightful commentary and five seconds of video.
All this IMHO of course....
I was just about to suggest Python myself. Not because of the whitespace thing (which is helpful), but because it's a language in which a lot can be done with just a little coding, there are modules for just about everything, and it can take one surprisingly far. Even simple fast-action games can now be written in Python, using the PyCap library interface to the PopCap game framework. PyGame's great for more complex, non-real-time graphics stuff.
The real problem with Python, from a learner's perspective, is that it doesn't have a good multi-dimensional array construct. The most obvious solutions are using built-in arrays (which are inflexible compared to lists), Numeric's arrays (which are good but external), lists-of-lists (which get confusing fast), or create an two-dimensional array class to wrap around a list, using math to map the second dimension into it.
Also, when Python 2.6 hits it'll change some syntax about the language, which may confuse the kid if he stays current. But then, the version change could also be a learning experience for him.
It's worth noting why the average voter is so inept: He doesn't research.
He doesn't research. He goes by what is put in front of him, which for most people is what's on TV, but there are also those who casually read the newspaper. That's about it. They don't do stories on things that aren't notable, and those things can't become notable without media attention. If they use the internet it's for email and funny pictures. They don't look for commentary or debate, unless it reinforces what they already know. Usually, something on the internet only gets mentioned on a news broadcast as part of a "lighter side" segment, e.g., "Oh, those wacky nerds! All your rickrolls are belong to us LOL!"
The great lesson this election season is how legitimate the stupidest ideas in the world become when the media gives them attention. "They hate us for our freedom," indeed.
And the great surprise this election is that an unknown, Obama, has broken through the media apathy barrier.
A contrasting view....
If you hope to do everything OO with classes, you're right. But even with the switch to the Mono virtual machine under the hood coming up July 23, which greatly increases performance and memory capacity, a single VM memory space will only be 64K. (Currently, it's 16K, one-fourth that of a Commodore 64!) That includes both compiled bytecode AND variable storage. Please correct me if I'm wrong (and I'm not snarking here), but I thought that object-oriented languages were not designed for that kind of harsh memory stricture.
In any case, it's perfectly possible to write a program without objects. And I must disagree, also, with your comparison of LSL to BASIC, in syntax it's far closer to C, which is also not object-oriented.
It might have (much) better graphics and sound, but Diablo really doesn't do anything that Angband doesn't. And there's even a multiplayer Angband out these days.
I can't help but wonder, were MAngband better known, if Diablo would be as popular.
Good comment, just a minor correction...
On a show like this, no one writes "most" of the jokes and bits. Mike was head writer for most of his tenure on the show, but they always had several writers. The tenor of the jokes does change throughout the show's run, always great, but tending more towards a more left-brained approach, as opposed to right-brained in the early years. The changing of the guard (Joel, Trace and Josh to Mike, Kevin and Bill) probably contributed the most to this.
It's an insightful point you make about the Wii's game drought. The only really big Wii titles have been Wii Sports (which was a surprise; we still play it even now), Zelda and Metroid. There are some other games that are sorta interesting: we've gotten surprising play out of Wii Play's Tanks and Billiards modules. But nothing really meaty. The only thing that really offsets it is Virtual Console.
Once Mario Galaxy and Smash Brawl make it out, though....
All writing contains point of view. It's impossible to escape, and it's arguable that it's pointless to try, and that trying produces bland, content-free writing. That's exactly the reason for this project: not to promote the Wikipedia model of inoffensive facts, but to present the facts as they stand as clearly as possible.
Professional journalism cannot be unbiased, but when it works best, the bias is in favor of facts first, and after that individual human beings before authority figures. But unless the facts are put into context they are meaningless. To put them into context requires knowledge, and that implies a world view which has been formulated to fit that knowledge if the one who possesses that knowledge is anything other than a blithering idiot.
To put it another way, I ask: why do people want to become journalists? The answer, if the journalist is worth anything, is that he wants to make the world a better place. That's an intrinsically biased motive! Yet there is no reason to exclude those journalists for having it, so long as they are truthful and honest in their reporting, who qualities that, for all its faults, the New York Times has in abundance over Fox News.
Oh, almost forgot:
(*singing to the Time Of The Apes theme song*)
"Sandy Frank! Sandy Frank! Here we go again!"
"Sandy Frank! Sandy Frank! The source of all our pain!"
"Sandy Frank! Sandy Frank! Spielberg won't return his calls!"
Interesting note on that song... it's possible that it was hearing that that caused Sandy Frank (who brought over a lot of Japanese TV shows and movies, including Battle of the Planets/Gachaman) to refuse to renew the rights to the movies, causing Comedy Central to have to take them out of circulation early. To this day, none of those episodes can be purchased on DVD.
Ah, from the Joke By Ingmar Bergman... so, so awesome.
These are awesome! Anyone out there for creating a new internet fad based on this?
There are so many of them, here's just the briefest selection....
"Rex Dart, Eskimo Spy!"
"Oh, I love going to Bar! I like to order Sandwich and have Drink!"
"Godzilla's got a tree! He's got a tree! That's not the Godzilla we know, he's fighting dirty!"
(Jean Shepherd "Christmas Story" voice) "Never before in the annals of kid-dom had a toy been sucked into the whirlpool of death!"
"Oh no! They're executing Harlan Ellison!" Joel: "Good."
Crow: "Hey kids! Musliage tastes just like sweet honey!" Joel: "Kids, kids, musliage does not taste like honey, okay? From one who knows."
(After a Commando Cody short -- first season, too)
Servo: "If Cody really had a rocket strapped to his back he'd be doing cartwheels all over Kansas!"
Crow: "Yeah, and if the invisible man were really invisible, he'd be blind 'cause his retinas would be transparent!"
Servo: "And if the incredible shrinking man were really shrinking, no one would be able to hear him because his vocal cords would have shrunk too, making his voice ultrasonic! Even dogs would have to say, 'huh, what?'"
Joel: "Well guys, I know one that's for real. Did you know that science has yet to come up with a explanation for how bumblebees can fly? It's aerodynamically impossible, yet they do. Go figure Tom Servo."
Servo: "Hm, that's strange, maybe I can figure..." (head explodes)
Joel: "Hm, how about you Crow?"
Crow: "Yeah yeah, bumblebees can't fly... uh..." (head explodes)
Joel: "Oh, I really gotta build you guys with more memory capacity. Can you figure it out Cambot?"
(screen goes staticy, jump to commercial)
Then Michael J. Nelson became head writer. Kevin Murphy and Frank Conniff took over for Josh, which was a big loss. The jokes started to became a little stale, but the show was still good. Frank simply was not funny, but Trace did what he could to keep the sketches interesting.
Mike Nelson was head writer from season 2 on... MAYBE from season 1, I don't remember. Joel may have stepped down as host midway through season 5, and he may have been the show's creator, but he was far from the only creative voice behind it, and Mike has been the major editorial voice behind the show's jokes since nearly the beginning of the cable era.
Next, extremely oddly considering the show's history and how people left it, no cast member has ever had a bad thing to say about any other cast member. The closest was when Joel once said about Josh "J. Elvis" Weinstein, of his leaving the show after the first season, "He was eighteen." Even if the Usenet MSTie community engaged in epic flame wars when Joel left and Mike stepped in as host, there has never been an indication that anyone was angry behind the scenes. The word about Joel leaving, from a very recent interview with Kevin Murphy (the one at Quick Stop Entertainment) is that he had always planned to leave because he was just that kind of restless guy.
Finally: no one can argue that there was anything that brilliant about the first season, or the KTMA episodes, other than the premise and some of the sketches. The jokes were only occasionally good back then. The show was definitely riding on the strength of the premise from that point, to the degree that the Brains were always reluctant to show episodes from the first season after they had built up a good body of repeat shows. I saw many of the episodes, and even one the one they released on DVD; take my word for it.
That all cleared up? Thanks for playing, buh-bye.
Hm...
Reading over the article a bit more, okay, let me amend my statement....
The fact that Second Life has a kind of monopoly in virtual land sale seems to enter into it. So this might not be a strike against click-wrap licenses in general. Hmm.
IAalsoNAL....
You are correct, really, but it's important to note why.
The idea of a contract is that two parties enter into a mutually beneficial arrangement. A contract that gives one side of the deal nothing (or, apparently, almost nothing) is not a valid contract.
Most "click-wrap" licenses, as we understand the term, would fail this test for the same reason Second Life's license failed it, as practically all of them are CYA deals that exist primarily to restrict users from doing unforeseen things that could work out bad for the company in the future. And it is true that this precedent is not binding outside this jurisdiction, BUT, other judges who are asked to determine the legality of a click-wrap license in the future could well become aware of it, and that should not be discounted.
Hm...
I think we are on the same page then, for I do agree with you on these points overall. I have a vivid memory of the days I was stuck in Norfair, having explored all the passages multiple times, until I was reduced to bombing every block of floor in the shafts and only THEN found the way forward.
Although, on the other hand, the one thing that Metroid has that later games in the series do not is that the game looks undesigned. The point-a-to-point-b design of the later games implies the mind of a designer has laid out the tunnels, and subtly removes the sense that the player is exploring tunnels that were never meant to be explored. The original Metroid's technical limitations (which necessitate an absence of hints and many reused playfield sections) enhances that feeling of alien wonder by accident that few games attempt to inspire on purpose.
I think you're completely correct about having to refill the tanks manually in Metroid, that does suck quite a bit.
Overall I agree with you, and Nintendo obviously does, but I do think a case could be made for Zelda being RPGish. Its level advancement is handled entirely through items and puzzle-solving instead of combat though. You find items and heart containers in Zeldas by poking your nose everywhere, that is the game's analogue for combat-gained experience.
All those things you mention are part of what I like about both Metroid and Zelda 2:
"Repetitive level design" = making canny use of premade screen segments to make a world much larger than cart memory of the time would ordinarily allow.
"Unclear goals" = open-ended gameplay, where you have to figure out what to do instead of have the game lead you by the hand every damn where.
"Returning to start when you die" = Having an actual penalty for death that's still not really that bad, since by the time you get a sizable distance from the start location, you're powerful enough to make short work of most of the enemies in that area. Plus it lends more cohesion to the world, having to navigate it in ways other than plot point to plot point.
Awesome retort.
Not only that. Increasingly, the new products made for consumption aren't for us to do the consuming, but instead big corporations, the government, or the military.
(Because dangit, I wanna invisibility cloak too.)