Up until now they haven't done anything that I'd particularly object to, but as soon as they start using their gmail account system like a Microsoft Passport system for all their apps, I'll be outta there.
Well I hate to be the cause of you dumping Google, but it seems like they already do.
Log into Gmail, and then go to the Google Search page. You'll probably have a few more links across the top of the page, notice? Go to Google Groups and you'll see (or at least, I do) that you've already been logged in.
I don't see this as bad as Passport, since Google is a lot less likely to try to use it as an embrace-and-extend kind of thing. What do you see as wrong with it?
...playing drink monkey ball proved that its was more important to be able to punch your opponent in the real world...
Wow, a Super Monkey Ball drinking game. Why am I reminded of that drinking game Ford Prefect played with Ol' Janx Spirit at the beginning of Hitchhiker's? One of the effects of alcohol is to supress motor skills, so once one begins to lose at Drink Monkey Ball one is likely to continue losing....
The reality is that everyone lives in a pocket of like minded individuals, which react in a very similar way (this is why in certain communities all you really see is Fords/Lincolins and in other communities you see more Hondas/Acuras.
Yes, this is the danger in relying on anecdotal evidence; we all have a pitifully limited sphere of experience, and things may be very different outside of it.
But also remember that, in this area, reality is in effect the sum total of everyone's experienece. So the parent poster's observation has value as a representative sample.
It would be a better sample, though, were it randomly collected instead of volunteered. Hm.
I guess my point, ultimately, is... er, hey! Look over there!
I had the original first issue once (it was given away to Fun Club subscribers after all). A lot of the artwork in NP in those days was taken from a Japanese Nintendo publication, I believe. The issue is notable for containing some interesting character art for Mario 2, including a two-page spread that was basically just an excuse to show the characters and various enemies competing in track-and-field events. The art isn't bad mind you, but it just goes to show how random Nintendo Power could be in those days.
How many crappy series did it take to kill Star Trek? Is this a relevent question? How many crappy movies did it take to kill Star Wars? (That one's easy: not enough.)
But even so, I'd say that the question is not relevent. The Stars, Trek and Wars, are atypical examples. How many franchises are there of Trek's calibur? The 60s series built up sticky fanboy steam for two decades plus before TNG came out. That's a potent boost to a series' fortunes.
And it needed it. Next Generation, need I remind you, looked damn embarassing in the first episodes. (I still have horrifying memories from then of Troi demonstrating her empathy, read, overacting.) But the show was given time to find its legs, and before long became rightfully seen as a better-defining vision of Trek than the original show and the yardstick by which all Treks are based.
Now, how many series have died in that time? Quantum Leap was popular in its day, but who talks about it anymore? Who remembers Beauty and the Beast, not the Disney cartoon but the once swooned-over, quasi-bestial network series? Moonlighting was once adored, and it had a hip comedic sense that would play well today, so why aren't people still remembering it? How about Lois and Clark? There were once people, it is true, who adored Space 1999. Until certain recent series Battlestar Galactica and Dr. Who would both have qualified as well. Many people thought Galactica was dead, well and truly, until the Sci-Fi Channel's unholy blood was pumped into it.
So anyway, Kevin Browne's statement given should be amended to, "It takes a lot to kill a freakishly popular franchise. And even then, don't turn your back to it."
(What, he's a manager of franchise development? How money does being Rick Berman pay?)
Dude! When I heard about your system I went out and took a look at it.
I think that's a very cool system, even if it was unsuitable for the game you made it for, not the least reason for which is because I came up with something similar to it once, heh. I get the feeling we're on something of the same page on these things.
If you ever want to discuss such things, let me know.
Patents themselves, as a general idea, are a bit less evil than what is usually complained about on Slashdot, which are software patents and (to a lesser extent) business method patents. Things like Amazon's awful one-click shopping patent, which is ludicrous.
But patent law is still fairly weird. It can make you an infringer for not doing something, as opposed to doing it. If you come up with an idea at the same time as someone else, and utilize it commercially at the same time, but they get a patent for it first, then you are in the wrong under the law -- independent discovery is not a defense. The actions of someone you've never heard of thousands of miles away can, in effect, make you a law-breaker.
While most of Slashdot's readership are against software patents, not patents in general, I think this aspect is universally objectionable. In any case, it is possible to be in favor of patents and against a term of 20 years, which seems a bit long these days.
I agree with owlstead: it would be nice to see Microsoft's market monopoly overthrown, but not by using a legal one. There are certainly worse things in the world than Microsoft.
Gamecube actually *does* have some cool games. So does PS2, from sheer volume. And Dreamcast, to be brutally honest, had a number of clunkers as well.
I will remember the Dreamcast as the system that actually got us to play a fighting game (Soul Calibur). It was the system of the last "traditional" RPG I really got interested in (Grandia II). It gave us an arcade-perfect port of one of the few genuinely novel arcade games to appear in recent years (Crazy Taxi). It also had a multiplayer action game more frantic than even Bomberman (ChuChu Rocket!).
It was the first console to bring Internet multiplayer to the masses. It was the system to show us Sonic the Hedgehog translated into 3D, its success in presenting that is debatable but there were moments when it was great.
Hm... a catalog of the best Dreamcast games would make for a cool blog post now that I think about it.
I'm as much of a Nintendo booster as you can be without cheering them on in a knee-jerk fashion, but I have to admit: the Achievements thing on X-box 360 is really, really great. (A better idea, in fact, than any of their in-store launch games.)
What are new-style classes? How do I make sure I'm not using self instead of cls by mistake, or the other way around? I take it that there's special syntax for "class methods" over "instance methods," but this is the first time I've even heard of a distinction. Maybe you should just point me to a site where I can read more about it myself, could be faster, hmmm.
Interesting, I remember seeing a friend play the demo of that a bit back before I sold my X-box. They seemed to like it, but it didn't twinge any important nerves for me. Then again, it was just a demo. Hm.
Damm.. WTF happend to the dreamcast? it was soo good.
The Playstation 2 happened to it. That was it. It sucked away all the developer attention.
(Yeah, I mourn it as well. It's still a pretty good console for emulation, since you can run CD-R software on it without modding your unit and it can emulate many, many NES games accurately and at full speed. And it's a G-R-E-A-T way to play MULE on an Atari 800 emulator!)
......okay, now I'm confused all over again. What is the difference between an instance and a class method declaration? The examples I've been learning from don't mention cls at all.
Tell me, which is a class's __init__ method? All the examples I've seen pass self to that.
And again, why does syn (the editor I use) mark self as a reserved word? Possibly a misunderstanding of how Python works on the part of its author?
Their rough equality in the U.S. is not something I have hard numbers for, and was just something floating around. Hard numbers for the DS are easy to come by because of Nintendo's recent press release, but Sony usually releases figures for "units shipped," which is a lot less useful.
Where did you get your figures? I'd be very happy to be proven wrong on this point....
If they would make another one. Sadly, the last PowerStone was released way back for the Dreamcast. Smash Bros. seems to be the sole remaining avenue for really good three-plus player fighting action... unless Nintendo finds a way to get past the massive rights problems inherent in releasing a localized Jump Superstars in the U.S.
I started learning it to implement a computer game idea and I find that it really is easy to learn, although it's been difficult to find books on it.
One thing to look out for though that caught me: class methods, when you define them, must have "self" as their first argument. You never use it when actually calling the method, it's just an invisible parameter that must be there first when you define it. There seems to be some technical reason for it, but I don't know what it is.
I bring this up because it caught me for a day or two not long ago. Just trying to pass along the accumulated wisdom.
It's simple, the solution is to encourage the addiction.
Nethack is a wonderfully rich and complex game, but its depths are not infinite, just much greater than the norm. I don't play much Nethack anymore because, well, because I've ascended many of the character classes now, including the most challenging ones. That doesn't make the game less interesting, but ultimately you do start wanting something more, even from Nethack.
Once you finally learn the most relevent tricks, winning at Nethack isn't even hard. (Price IDing, strategies for early wishes, learning not to starve in the upper levels, figuring out how to make holy water and remembering to pray each help a lot.) So, point her to rec.games.roguelike.nethack, and to the many game spoiler sites on the Internet (in Nethack's case those sites are a lot more necessary to play than other games).
Then, once she's finally burnt out on the game, make sure she doesn't learn C and start adding onto the game herself. Then you might never get her back.
Except the DS was first launched in North America, followed by a Japanese launch a little later.
I didn't mean first in a chronological sense, but in the sense that it is considered most important by many system manufacturers, and a lot of emphasis is put on it. Yes, the North American market is important too, more important in some ways, but it is less in others, and anyway most systems are designed in Japan, and a disproportionate number of the people who make software are Japanese.
The userbase of the DS and PSP in the U.S. are roughly even at this time, although Nintendo's had a good holiday season with multiple great games while the PSP only really had GTA.
But why is this important to us U.S. players? For these reasons:
1. It proves the DS is no Virtual Boy. It's here to stay. 2. It is vindication for the DS' unorthodox design elements. The DS' success in Japan is so tremendous by this point that it can only be called an unqualified success, even if the rest of the world had never bought a single DS. 3. Most importantly, Japan is the first market for many video game systems. There is a feedback loop here: if a system is popular, it attracts many developers, which make the system even more popular, etcetera. But the market here is the one in which many of those developers live and work, and that's gotta have a strong influence. That's one of the reasons why relatively few Japanese publishers developed for the original X-box.
The camera became quite a problem for Takumi Kawagoe who was working on the Lakitu cam, Goddard recalls: "suddenly, halfway through the project, one of the people from downstairs came up and said 'Do you realise Sega has patent on being able to switch camera views?'" The team were devastated. "Half the patents that come out are for techniques people have used for years" says Goddard. "The software patents just don't work."
I don't really have anything more to add to that, just wanted to point it out....
(Yeah, and probably someone will reply and say, "But the other half of the time software patents ARE good!" Why you gotta be ignorant your whole life?)
Slashdot Mirror
Up until now they haven't done anything that I'd particularly object to, but as soon as they start using their gmail account system like a Microsoft Passport system for all their apps, I'll be outta there.
Well I hate to be the cause of you dumping Google, but it seems like they already do.
Log into Gmail, and then go to the Google Search page. You'll probably have a few more links across the top of the page, notice? Go to Google Groups and you'll see (or at least, I do) that you've already been logged in.
I don't see this as bad as Passport, since Google is a lot less likely to try to use it as an embrace-and-extend kind of thing. What do you see as wrong with it?
...playing drink monkey ball proved that its was more important to be able to punch your opponent in the real world...
Wow, a Super Monkey Ball drinking game. Why am I reminded of that drinking game Ford Prefect played with Ol' Janx Spirit at the beginning of Hitchhiker's? One of the effects of alcohol is to supress motor skills, so once one begins to lose at Drink Monkey Ball one is likely to continue losing....
The reality is that everyone lives in a pocket of like minded individuals, which react in a very similar way (this is why in certain communities all you really see is Fords/Lincolins and in other communities you see more Hondas/Acuras.
Yes, this is the danger in relying on anecdotal evidence; we all have a pitifully limited sphere of experience, and things may be very different outside of it.
But also remember that, in this area, reality is in effect the sum total of everyone's experienece. So the parent poster's observation has value as a representative sample.
It would be a better sample, though, were it randomly collected instead of volunteered. Hm.
I guess my point, ultimately, is... er, hey! Look over there!
(runs)
Hm... you have good points there, true. But ah-ha, they show that it is very easy to kill a franchise, take that!
(I'm gonna be smug for a good fifteen minutes after that one, heh)
I had the original first issue once (it was given away to Fun Club subscribers after all). A lot of the artwork in NP in those days was taken from a Japanese Nintendo publication, I believe. The issue is notable for containing some interesting character art for Mario 2, including a two-page spread that was basically just an excuse to show the characters and various enemies competing in track-and-field events. The art isn't bad mind you, but it just goes to show how random Nintendo Power could be in those days.
How many crappy series did it take to kill Star Trek? Is this a relevent question? How many crappy movies did it take to kill Star Wars? (That one's easy: not enough.)
But even so, I'd say that the question is not relevent. The Stars, Trek and Wars, are atypical examples. How many franchises are there of Trek's calibur? The 60s series built up sticky fanboy steam for two decades plus before TNG came out. That's a potent boost to a series' fortunes.
And it needed it. Next Generation, need I remind you, looked damn embarassing in the first episodes. (I still have horrifying memories from then of Troi demonstrating her empathy, read, overacting.) But the show was given time to find its legs, and before long became rightfully seen as a better-defining vision of Trek than the original show and the yardstick by which all Treks are based.
Now, how many series have died in that time? Quantum Leap was popular in its day, but who talks about it anymore? Who remembers Beauty and the Beast, not the Disney cartoon but the once swooned-over, quasi-bestial network series? Moonlighting was once adored, and it had a hip comedic sense that would play well today, so why aren't people still remembering it? How about Lois and Clark? There were once people, it is true, who adored Space 1999. Until certain recent series Battlestar Galactica and Dr. Who would both have qualified as well. Many people thought Galactica was dead, well and truly, until the Sci-Fi Channel's unholy blood was pumped into it.
So anyway, Kevin Browne's statement given should be amended to, "It takes a lot to kill a freakishly popular franchise. And even then, don't turn your back to it."
(What, he's a manager of franchise development? How money does being Rick Berman pay?)
Dude! When I heard about your system I went out and took a look at it.
I think that's a very cool system, even if it was unsuitable for the game you made it for, not the least reason for which is because I came up with something similar to it once, heh. I get the feeling we're on something of the same page on these things.
If you ever want to discuss such things, let me know.
I don't think taking advantage of pathfinding bugs should be considered cheating. Sounds like creative play to me.
Patents themselves, as a general idea, are a bit less evil than what is usually complained about on Slashdot, which are software patents and (to a lesser extent) business method patents. Things like Amazon's awful one-click shopping patent, which is ludicrous.
But patent law is still fairly weird. It can make you an infringer for not doing something, as opposed to doing it. If you come up with an idea at the same time as someone else, and utilize it commercially at the same time, but they get a patent for it first, then you are in the wrong under the law -- independent discovery is not a defense. The actions of someone you've never heard of thousands of miles away can, in effect, make you a law-breaker.
While most of Slashdot's readership are against software patents, not patents in general, I think this aspect is universally objectionable. In any case, it is possible to be in favor of patents and against a term of 20 years, which seems a bit long these days.
I agree with owlstead: it would be nice to see Microsoft's market monopoly overthrown, but not by using a legal one. There are certainly worse things in the world than Microsoft.
Well....
Gamecube actually *does* have some cool games. So does PS2, from sheer volume. And Dreamcast, to be brutally honest, had a number of clunkers as well.
I will remember the Dreamcast as the system that actually got us to play a fighting game (Soul Calibur). It was the system of the last "traditional" RPG I really got interested in (Grandia II). It gave us an arcade-perfect port of one of the few genuinely novel arcade games to appear in recent years (Crazy Taxi). It also had a multiplayer action game more frantic than even Bomberman (ChuChu Rocket!).
It was the first console to bring Internet multiplayer to the masses. It was the system to show us Sonic the Hedgehog translated into 3D, its success in presenting that is debatable but there were moments when it was great.
Hm... a catalog of the best Dreamcast games would make for a cool blog post now that I think about it.
I'm as much of a Nintendo booster as you can be without cheering them on in a knee-jerk fashion, but I have to admit: the Achievements thing on X-box 360 is really, really great. (A better idea, in fact, than any of their in-store launch games.)
Ah, thanks much
Wow. I almost understood that, but....
What are new-style classes? How do I make sure I'm not using self instead of cls by mistake, or the other way around? I take it that there's special syntax for "class methods" over "instance methods," but this is the first time I've even heard of a distinction. Maybe you should just point me to a site where I can read more about it myself, could be faster, hmmm.
Interesting, I remember seeing a friend play the demo of that a bit back before I sold my X-box. They seemed to like it, but it didn't twinge any important nerves for me. Then again, it was just a demo. Hm.
Damm.. WTF happend to the dreamcast? it was soo good.
The Playstation 2 happened to it. That was it. It sucked away all the developer attention.
(Yeah, I mourn it as well. It's still a pretty good console for emulation, since you can run CD-R software on it without modding your unit and it can emulate many, many NES games accurately and at full speed. And it's a G-R-E-A-T way to play MULE on an Atari 800 emulator!)
......okay, now I'm confused all over again. What is the difference between an instance and a class method declaration? The examples I've been learning from don't mention cls at all.
Tell me, which is a class's __init__ method? All the examples I've seen pass self to that.
And again, why does syn (the editor I use) mark self as a reserved word? Possibly a misunderstanding of how Python works on the part of its author?
Their rough equality in the U.S. is not something I have hard numbers for, and was just something floating around. Hard numbers for the DS are easy to come by because of Nintendo's recent press release, but Sony usually releases figures for "units shipped," which is a lot less useful.
Where did you get your figures? I'd be very happy to be proven wrong on this point....
If they would make another one. Sadly, the last PowerStone was released way back for the Dreamcast. Smash Bros. seems to be the sole remaining avenue for really good three-plus player fighting action... unless Nintendo finds a way to get past the massive rights problems inherent in releasing a localized Jump Superstars in the U.S.
It was a triumph of the human *something*, at least....
I started learning it to implement a computer game idea and I find that it really is easy to learn, although it's been difficult to find books on it.
One thing to look out for though that caught me: class methods, when you define them, must have "self" as their first argument. You never use it when actually calling the method, it's just an invisible parameter that must be there first when you define it. There seems to be some technical reason for it, but I don't know what it is.
I bring this up because it caught me for a day or two not long ago. Just trying to pass along the accumulated wisdom.
It's simple, the solution is to encourage the addiction.
Nethack is a wonderfully rich and complex game, but its depths are not infinite, just much greater than the norm. I don't play much Nethack anymore because, well, because I've ascended many of the character classes now, including the most challenging ones. That doesn't make the game less interesting, but ultimately you do start wanting something more, even from Nethack.
Once you finally learn the most relevent tricks, winning at Nethack isn't even hard. (Price IDing, strategies for early wishes, learning not to starve in the upper levels, figuring out how to make holy water and remembering to pray each help a lot.) So, point her to rec.games.roguelike.nethack, and to the many game spoiler sites on the Internet (in Nethack's case those sites are a lot more necessary to play than other games).
Then, once she's finally burnt out on the game, make sure she doesn't learn C and start adding onto the game herself. Then you might never get her back.
Except the DS was first launched in North America, followed by a Japanese launch a little later.
I didn't mean first in a chronological sense, but in the sense that it is considered most important by many system manufacturers, and a lot of emphasis is put on it. Yes, the North American market is important too, more important in some ways, but it is less in others, and anyway most systems are designed in Japan, and a disproportionate number of the people who make software are Japanese.
The userbase of the DS and PSP in the U.S. are roughly even at this time, although Nintendo's had a good holiday season with multiple great games while the PSP only really had GTA.
But in Japan, the DS is smoking the PSP. In sales each month it comes in ahead of the PS2. And during several reporting periods, the DS has outsold all other consoles combined. And in the last reporting period (link only accurate to my statements temporarily, and may change soon in fact, the period I'm talking about is the week from Dec 26-Jan 1) eight of the ten top software titles on the list are DS games. The top-rated PS2 game, at #4, is Kingdom Hearts II, a very eagerly-awaited game in a nation that loves RPGs. #3 and #2, respectively, are Mario Kart DS and Animal Crossing! #1 and #5 are in the Brain Training series that has yet to make it to the U.S., but are supposed to be coming soon.
But why is this important to us U.S. players? For these reasons:
1. It proves the DS is no Virtual Boy. It's here to stay.
2. It is vindication for the DS' unorthodox design elements. The DS' success in Japan is so tremendous by this point that it can only be called an unqualified success, even if the rest of the world had never bought a single DS.
3. Most importantly, Japan is the first market for many video game systems. There is a feedback loop here: if a system is popular, it attracts many developers, which make the system even more popular, etcetera. But the market here is the one in which many of those developers live and work, and that's gotta have a strong influence. That's one of the reasons why relatively few Japanese publishers developed for the original X-box.
From the article:
The camera became quite a problem for Takumi Kawagoe who was working on the Lakitu cam, Goddard recalls: "suddenly, halfway through the project, one of the people from downstairs came up and said 'Do you realise Sega has patent on being able to switch camera views?'" The team were devastated. "Half the patents that come out are for techniques people have used for years" says Goddard. "The software patents just don't work."
I don't really have anything more to add to that, just wanted to point it out....
(Yeah, and probably someone will reply and say, "But the other half of the time software patents ARE good!" Why you gotta be ignorant your whole life?)