Well if they're *actually* bizarre, the I'd think the next step to go in understanding it is to pose thought experiments and try to figure out what would happen.
Unfortunately, as I'm just a layman, my ability to do that would be somewhat limited. Hmm.
My question about all this is, what qualifies as an observer?
If there is no cat, but instead there's some mechanism in the box that breaks if the atom has decayed, then is it obvious that the mechanism doesn't count as an observer? If it does, then what about a simpler machine? What about a machine the size of a subatomic particle itself?
If it doesn't, then does that impart some special quality to something that is alive? What if it wasn't a cat in the box, but a human being? Would his state match ours, through some kind of goofy telepathy? Intuitively, I don't think that can be so, but of course intuition is not always useful when it comes to quantum mechanics.
The observational barrier attribute of the box, as far as I can see, is acting as a block for the probability waves. The metaphor I use to understand it is, everything inside the box is in a kind of state bubble that is internally consistant, but isn't reflected in the state of things outside the box. Opening the box, or measuring the state of the interior of the box, for whatever the word "measuring" might mean in this context, "pops" the bubble, or more accurately causes the interior space's state to coalesce into that of the exterior space.
I take the word "measuring," from my layman's perspective on all this, to mean less an act carried out by the people outside the box, and more whether there is any way at all the people outside could find out what is inside. If there were any way at all that the interior of the box could be discovered, even one that we do not know, then the state is already collapsed, even if we don't know that to be the case. In that case, then even if we were a robot, outside of the box, we would count as an observer. And instead of there being a binary "is it or isn't it" difference between the possible states, there's more of a fluid range of interior and exterior possibilities, and the act of breaking the seal, by opening the box, merges them.
But then, the seal on the box has caused the probabilities of both its interior and exterior to bifuricate. The interior and exterior might as well be in separate universes.
Okay now, what if the box isn't completely impermiable, but simply impedes the progression of the signs that something inside has changed as it travels from inside to outside? Or more realistically, what if the cat isn't in a box, but is on another planet, light-years away? Or even more realistically, what about a sun that's going to go nova light-years away? IN a sense, it hasn't happened until we see it, right? Then it's happened retroactively, correct?
I don't know. I get the feeling I understand some of it, but it'd take learning a lot of math to really get it all down, I guess.
The pages are shamefully loaded with ads! I could barely find the next-page links at the bottom of the window! At first, I thought a "Google Ad" link labeled "compression" might be the next page, and clicked on it! And the true link is oddly hidden in small print, in a corner beneath a large table of PriceGrabber comparison results.
The article is basically unreadable, I'd say, due to the ads.
Oh, there's a great deal more he could do even within the law to vilify his political opponents.
You don't get credit, or blame, for the things you don't do, for the inverse of the infinite set of unexplored potential. You get them for the things you do, er, do.
I apologize for that remark. I get worked up on this topic at times.
As do we all sometimes. Don't worry about it.
Ooookaaay. Maybe you could get a little more specific here. I really don't see it, especially given the situation.
Really? You don't see anything about his administration's callous approach to citizen eavesdropping? The ludicrous "Do Not Fly" list? Guantanamo? The recent reports about the Department of Transportation looking into putting GPS bugs in new cars? How the EPA's Draft Report on the Environmentwas edited to fit administration viewpoints on global warming? (That link's on a Democrat website, but it's well substantiated.) Hiding shill voices in the media to support him (Armstrong Williams, Jeff Gannon)?
I could go on -- the potential length of this list seems limited only by the amount of energy I put into making it, and to be honest thinking about things like that too much is soul-deadening. Suffice to say, there's enough that it seems less like a bunch of isolated instances, and more like there's a culture of this kind of thinking in Washington at the moment, and the closer you get to the White House, the thicker the air gets.
The real reason we invaded Iraq was a combination of 1) sanctions were crumbling as a result of bribes in Europe and economic pressure in Asia, 2) His behavior in the past, and 3) He would have had nuclear weapons within a couple of years, removing the option. I'm glad we don't have a third of the set to go with North Korea and Iran. I supported the war for that reason.
That was not the story Bush gave at the time. Unless I've missed a major recent press conference, even now, when questioned about Iraq, he talks about terrorists! We probably read different websites, but what I've seen is that Saddam was rather unlikely to have aided Al-Qaeda, due to their differing goals.
War is a serious thing, it requires a tremendous positive action to do something like that, even if wars these days aren't declared unless they're "on terror." Mentally rewind back to the days before the war, and it sounds funny to invade a nation because "sanctions were crumbling." The details of Iraq's nuclear weapons program are unproven to this day. Afganistan did happen, it is true, it didn't catch anyone but it did happen. It's something of a shame, perhaps, that after that, Bush diluted our military resources in attacking Iraq instead of choosing some other action.
Concerning Lincoln: well I will admit that I am not particularly well-read in that area. However, a lot of people seem to really like Lincoln, that proves nothing but is perhaps indicative concerning a relatively uncontroversial figure, and war is a funny thing in that you don't always get your way even if you do things perfectly (which is a good reason to avoid it if possible). I will say that Wikipedia's entry on the American Civil War states that the Confederacy left the union even before Lincoln's inaugration, so avoiding the war would have left the country split.
Now that's just gratuitous.
Yeah, but ya know, when the urge of the joke overcomes you.... My responsibility is to laughs, first and foremost. Nyuk nyuk nyuk.
I agree he's hardly in Tony Blair's league when it comes to public speaking, but I think at least some of that is a deliberate attempt to separate himself p
Do you mean Hitler would have tolerated Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, Martin Sheen, and our paranoid friend Shanen(the GP)?
I submit that the phrasing of the question shows something awry -- that Bush "tolerates" these people is not a point in his favor, but a point NOT AGAINST him. There is plenty else to dislike him for.
Also, Michael Moore, despite some minor flaws, is not the demon some people would like to make him out to be. He is the loudest pro-liberal voice, so of course LOTS of people hate him, and there's a lot of anti-Moore static out there. As for the other people you mention... I care not a whit for any of them. They're not even on my radar. Martin Sheen's involved in politics you say? He's kooky you say? Funny, the last I had heard about that was years ago.
Crack your history book, my friend. I always wonder what the left will call an actual fascist after pining that label on everyone they don't like.
Again, like I just said, the "left" is far less a monolithic, easy-to-pin-down-with-a-sentence entity than the "right" is right now, and a much lesser target.
It seems to me the communication problem here is that I'm at least trying to live in the world of realistic observation, while you're more interested in identifying who's the "left" or "right." I know plenty of liberals who have solid beefs with the president. You seem to be attacking only the most strident ones. That is not a battle I'm going to fight. The plain fact is, Bush has taken real steps TOWARDS facism, even if he isn't there yet. Okay?
As for your "crack open a history book" suggestion, I will not even dignify that by responding to it. I'm trying not to insult you, you could at least do the same. Suffice to say, not everyone who has a solid grasp of history is magically transformed into a right-winger. The story of human kind is not the tale of Dialectical Republicanism.
I'm talking about idiots like Jack Murtha who think they're doing the right thing, but are actually causing the deaths of our troops in Iraq by giving the enemy strength to carry on. Lincoln had a former congressman arrested for doing exactly the same thing.
"NEWS BREAK: Representative Jack Murtha of Pennsylvania was convicted today on seven separate counts of smuggling first aid kits, potions of Gain Ability, and Pieces of Heart to the insurgents in Iraq. More on this breaking story at 11."
So, it's support the war in lockstep with the right or aid the enemy, that's the binary decision offered here. Nothing about caring for the safety of our troops, about the U.S.'s role in the world, about our credibility among other nations, about the precedent this sets, about the false justifications they gave for the attack, nothing.
Oy.
I would say GWB is probably a better wartime president than Lincoln.
(Imagining Bush reading the Gettysburg address.)
(Shuddering.)
1. What war? Are you buying into their "war on terror" terminology? 'Cause I doubt that, when the founding fathas' thought of war, they considered it an ambiguouly defined, declared struggle against an unknown body of men carried out by attacking a nation who had nothing to do with them. If you look at a wartime president's success as being judged by how far he progresses towards the goal of beating the enemy, then Bush is a spectacularly bad president -- he leveled the barrel of the U.S. Armed Forces, and he missed. He attacked the wrong guys.
2. Even if you granted, somehow, that Bush attacked the right people, at least Lincoln won. A civil war is a serious affair, one of the most serious the U.S. has ever been involved in. Having half your country slip right out from under you is not an easy thing to deal with. Oy!
You say Bush is a wartime president and thus should get special consideration or something despite the fact that he started it on pretty spurious grounds, but you ALSO say the war lasted only a couple of day
If Bush were really a fascist along the lines of Hitler you would have already been arrested for posting that comment. Idiot.
-1 Disingenuous! Wait, this isn't Plastic....
Lincoln wasn't president during a fakey war "on Terror" in practice fought thousands of miles away. It was the U.S. Civil War. Open combat on our own damn soil. Where "dissenters" were likely to be the actual people on the other side. (And no, the "fight" against domestic terrorists ain't the same thing. We don't have entire states, not adjacent to the Union, but actually IN the Union rebelling.)
Which is NOT to excuse his action, necessarily. But you should look at the other aspects of Lincoln's record, not just one bit taken capriciously out of context. Would you say that G. W. Bush is even a tenth the president Lincoln was? Even half the president Reagan was?
So dandy, in fact, various Latin American politicians are running on just that and are hailed as heros by the same people, who bash Bush.
Many of those people here are those "who bash Bush." You are not speaking to a community of fellow-thinkers here, you aren't gonna get a chorus of "hell yeahs" just for parroting insular knowledge* here. I could be considered one of those "people who bash Bush," but I do NOT support strongmen, you damnable oversimplifier.
Please don't lump everyone you don't agree with in the same damn boat! There is a lot more political solidarity among Repubs than Demmy-Cs these days, it's one of the reasons we lost the election, but even so I wouldn't accuse you of, say, supporting the U.S.' torture policy unless I actually saw you say something in support of it.
DO you support it?
* Unless it's hating Microsoft, I guess. Wait, no, X-box is cool here.
So, "Beyond Good and Evil" rocked but "Katamari Damacy" didn't? BGaE WAS pretty good, but it certainly wasn't Katamari-level cool. REJECT!
Of course, it's become common practice in some circles to try to buffer rejection of a controversial statement, or even try to shame people into accepting it, by preemptively calling those who will obviously disagree with it fanboys, which at best is figuring out to what decimal place one's geekness resolves, and at worst is an act arguably more nerdly than the actual liking of the supposedly mediocre game.
And why did people want a sequel to KD so badly? MAYBE IT WAS BECAUSE THE ORIGINAL GAME WAS ABOUT THREE HOURS LONG! Fool! It's okay to make a sequel to a game that was, by all reports, much much too short to begin with!
Just because he doesn't like the game (which, to me, means he's either trying to play too-kool-4-U overhipster or is simply deficient in basic humanity) and by random whim of publishing industry happens to have a megaphone handy with which to shout his merest idea*, doesn't mean that he shouldn't attempt to see why other people like it. Empathy is a surprisingly useful trait for a reviewer, of any type, to have.
Further, later on he says "Microsoft introduces the Tard Pack." Oh yeah, that does wonders for his creditibility, oy.
*Yep, that's a blatant TMBG reference. Also geeky, I know.
Ah well, at least Advance Wars DS did get mentioned. The time we've put in on that is just surreal. Once upon a time it took me 55 hours to finish FFIII/VI with all subquests completed. The game clock on the history screen on my copy of AWDS currently reads 180 hours. That's split between two people, true, but we easily put in five times as long on AW2. That's some good gameplay!
I'm as interested in and supportive of Nintendo, generally, as anyone here, but I have to say that, based on what we know so far, I agree with Matthews on his Revolution synopsis.
Specifically, I agree on two points:
First, the word about Revolution's processor power. It is understood that, these days, graphics hardware tends to be a truer example of what a console's graphics look like than raw CPU speed -- look at the DS, it's got souped-up GBA chips in it, an ARM7 and an ARM9, but its graphics are arguably better than the N64. (Mario Kart DS uses actual models for the drivers instead of the N64 version's scaled sprites.) It's also understood that, since the Revolution isn't targeting HD sets, it needs much less power to produce the same quality of visuals.
On the other hand, it's certainly possible for developers to make use of extra processing power. To a sufficently ingenious team and designer, that's golden. To someone thinking about creating the next SimCity-like simulation-game, every spare cycle is useful, and in the future that style of game will become more and more important as advances in graphic quality progresses further into diminishing returns compared to the time, energy and money put into improving them.
Second, his gameplay comments. I know I'm not the only one who thinks that Gamecube was a *little* disappointing. It is true that we had a number of really cool games that didn't appear on other systems: Pikmin, Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, Animal Crossing, etc. But on the other hand, Luigi's Mansion was quite disappointing, Mario Sunshine, while great for what it was, was too similar to Mario 64, and Zelda Wind Waker, while it certainly possesses obvious strengths, is the seventh traditional Zelda game since the modern take on the formula was created in Link to the Past (1 SNES, 1 GB, 2 GBC, 1 GBA, 1 N64). Majora's Mask is the most interesting recent Zelda, in my mind, because it played around so much with the formula, and Four Swords Adventures, while not as interesting as the basic Zelda formula, at least did something clever and unexpected with it. Miyamoto himself said that Twilight Princess may be the last "traditional" Zelda game, and their developers have been heard in the past grumbling about how the Zelda dungeon system is showing its age.
Mind you, Nintendo still has the best designers in the industry. Sony may have Shadow of the Colossus and Katamari Damacy, but both their designers have acknowledged their debt to Miyamoto. Design well and truly *is* king in gaming, but like everyone's an armchair movie critic these days, everyone has an opinion on video games, even those they've given a rightful chance. It's so easy for a game to get torn down by the, frankly, incredibly stupid gaming culture because its different (one word guys: Celda).
Lots of great games (and there are some on PS2 as well) never get the respect they deserve. Nintendo's in a bit of a privilaged position, in that if they make something truly different and special, that many people will actually give it a chance because of Nintendo's history and reputation. Don't forget that even the godly Katamari Damacy is not a huge seller for Namco and has sold better in the United States than in Japan, and that much of its success can be traced, directly, to those early reviews and web articles, Insert Credit's among them, that praised it so highly and caused Namco to take the chance on releasing it in the U.S. It is possible that more people would have played it if it had been on Gamecube, despite its substantially smaller user base, because Gamecube owners are more likely to expect that kind of game!
That's Revolution's biggest promise, that the people who really know and care about gaming will get a system to call their own. That, mixed with the interesting new play styles made possible by the controller, has a chance of sparking a new resurgance of gaming with players, first drawn in by the controller and the hype potential of actually being able to play pretend swordfight in a video game, then kept around by Nintendo's historically strong design ability.
Doesn't this guy, like, have better uses for his mod points? I know when I get 'em, I usually run out too soon. In contrast, probably all this guy does with 'em is mod people down, anonymously, using the metamod-immune method.
Ah well, I suppose we all need a hobby. Mine? It's whining.
Dammit, you beat me to it. I'm just starting to play around with Nethack Biodiversity, it's got lots of new monsters without being quite as shameless with its additions as Slashem....
Advance Wars DS is godly. According to the game's History screen, we've clocked over 180 hours on it already. (Over the years we were playing AW2, we probably put in at least five times as much!)
Trust me, you don't want the government to protect you. In the end it will be perverted and used against you.
Yeah, because we'd all be so much better off without all those stupid traffic laws, drug regulations and public roads.
Okay, I understand your point, and I agree to a point. But try not to be so blinded by ideology: there are some things that government does well. It's also arguable that there's plenty more it could do, and it is not obvious that it would be a bad thing. Whether it is or not may not be certain, but then, that's why people argue about these things.
GAH. I just noticed a mistake I made in the wording of my post, here's hoping I can catch it before someone wiseass does: Kameo is NOT a sequel to an N64 game. It had an N64 prototype. It certainly has been reworked since then (possibly more than once, given the time since its conception). But it is not, itself, a sequel to anything, which was in fact a point in the post my message replied to.
It is the best adventure game ever to be released with a console spare Mario 64. It doesn't get the press it deserves because it isn't a sequel.
Even if we grant Kameo (which we most certainly do not, we have far better things to grant with our granting stick), you overlook the fact that Mario 64 itself was a launch game!
Indeed, it and Goldeneye, which, while I don't think it was a launch game was pretty close to being one, were responsible for the N64's tremendous early momentum that got largely spent in the initial gap between the launch days and the next games.
Meanwhile, what does X-box 360 have? Project Gotham Racing, and two games that had N64 incarnations before it. (Kameo was shown at an E3 in an N64 incarnation.) An N64 ancestry, of course, is by no means a sign of failure, but it sure took Rare a long time to produce those two sequels. By all believable reports, the biggest 360 game is Geometry Wars, which goes for $5 over X-box Live! And don't laugh: that game, and internet multiplayer arcade Gauntlet, are the two things I'd consider getting an X-box 360 for.
The best launch list I can think of belonged to the SNES: it had Super Mario World and Pilotwings, and not long after came F-Zero and Final Fantasy II (aka IV). For its time, the impact of those three games cannot be underestimated: Super Mario World was one of the greatest 2D platformers, Pilotwings gave many gamers their first glimpse of a truly easy-to-play flight simulator, and FF II was a landmark progression in the world of RPGs, being the Final Fantasy that introduced Active Time Battle. And F-Zero had a sense of speed often lacking even in "speedster" racing games today.
It seems there's a basic disconnect between your and my impressions as to what makes a good launch game. You seem to be focused more on the press a game will generate (although really, I don't think it's been generated, nothing there is on the level of Halo or Mario 64) than its quality as a game.
You seem like a nice guy, but you need better hype vaccinations. Fortunately, over time people tend to develop their own defense against hype, most commonly in the form of brutal cynicism. I'll be waiting for you in the Brutal Cynics' Receiving Lounge when you get your ID card.
Out of curosity, why is it a particularly good game for female gamers? Because the protagonist is a girl?
The reason that most women don't like video games less to do with theme, setting, graphics or anything like that, and more to do with the fact that most women have lives, and anyone with any kind of objective perspective upon life will be forced to recognize that most games suck.
Slashdot Mirror
I do use Flashblock. I'm considering it.
You need to get out more. And open your eyes. You are living in poverty while surrounded by riches.
Comments like this cry out for a mod that goes: "+1 Awesome."
Well if they're *actually* bizarre, the I'd think the next step to go in understanding it is to pose thought experiments and try to figure out what would happen.
Unfortunately, as I'm just a layman, my ability to do that would be somewhat limited. Hmm.
My question about all this is, what qualifies as an observer?
If there is no cat, but instead there's some mechanism in the box that breaks if the atom has decayed, then is it obvious that the mechanism doesn't count as an observer? If it does, then what about a simpler machine? What about a machine the size of a subatomic particle itself?
If it doesn't, then does that impart some special quality to something that is alive? What if it wasn't a cat in the box, but a human being? Would his state match ours, through some kind of goofy telepathy? Intuitively, I don't think that can be so, but of course intuition is not always useful when it comes to quantum mechanics.
The observational barrier attribute of the box, as far as I can see, is acting as a block for the probability waves. The metaphor I use to understand it is, everything inside the box is in a kind of state bubble that is internally consistant, but isn't reflected in the state of things outside the box. Opening the box, or measuring the state of the interior of the box, for whatever the word "measuring" might mean in this context, "pops" the bubble, or more accurately causes the interior space's state to coalesce into that of the exterior space.
I take the word "measuring," from my layman's perspective on all this, to mean less an act carried out by the people outside the box, and more whether there is any way at all the people outside could find out what is inside. If there were any way at all that the interior of the box could be discovered, even one that we do not know, then the state is already collapsed, even if we don't know that to be the case. In that case, then even if we were a robot, outside of the box, we would count as an observer. And instead of there being a binary "is it or isn't it" difference between the possible states, there's more of a fluid range of interior and exterior possibilities, and the act of breaking the seal, by opening the box, merges them.
But then, the seal on the box has caused the probabilities of both its interior and exterior to bifuricate. The interior and exterior might as well be in separate universes.
Okay now, what if the box isn't completely impermiable, but simply impedes the progression of the signs that something inside has changed as it travels from inside to outside? Or more realistically, what if the cat isn't in a box, but is on another planet, light-years away? Or even more realistically, what about a sun that's going to go nova light-years away? IN a sense, it hasn't happened until we see it, right? Then it's happened retroactively, correct?
I don't know. I get the feeling I understand some of it, but it'd take learning a lot of math to really get it all down, I guess.
Don't you mean ads?
The pages are shamefully loaded with ads! I could barely find the next-page links at the bottom of the window! At first, I thought a "Google Ad" link labeled "compression" might be the next page, and clicked on it! And the true link is oddly hidden in small print, in a corner beneath a large table of PriceGrabber comparison results.
The article is basically unreadable, I'd say, due to the ads.
Oh, there's a great deal more he could do even within the law to vilify his political opponents.
You don't get credit, or blame, for the things you don't do, for the inverse of the infinite set of unexplored potential. You get them for the things you do, er, do.
I apologize for that remark. I get worked up on this topic at times.
As do we all sometimes. Don't worry about it.
Ooookaaay. Maybe you could get a little more specific here. I really don't see it, especially given the situation.
Really? You don't see anything about his administration's callous approach to citizen eavesdropping? The ludicrous "Do Not Fly" list? Guantanamo? The recent reports about the Department of Transportation looking into putting GPS bugs in new cars? How the EPA's Draft Report on the Environment was edited to fit administration viewpoints on global warming? (That link's on a Democrat website, but it's well substantiated.) Hiding shill voices in the media to support him (Armstrong Williams, Jeff Gannon)?
I could go on -- the potential length of this list seems limited only by the amount of energy I put into making it, and to be honest thinking about things like that too much is soul-deadening. Suffice to say, there's enough that it seems less like a bunch of isolated instances, and more like there's a culture of this kind of thinking in Washington at the moment, and the closer you get to the White House, the thicker the air gets.
The real reason we invaded Iraq was a combination of 1) sanctions were crumbling as a result of bribes in Europe and economic pressure in Asia, 2) His behavior in the past, and 3) He would have had nuclear weapons within a couple of years, removing the option. I'm glad we don't have a third of the set to go with North Korea and Iran. I supported the war for that reason.
That was not the story Bush gave at the time. Unless I've missed a major recent press conference, even now, when questioned about Iraq, he talks about terrorists! We probably read different websites, but what I've seen is that Saddam was rather unlikely to have aided Al-Qaeda, due to their differing goals.
War is a serious thing, it requires a tremendous positive action to do something like that, even if wars these days aren't declared unless they're "on terror." Mentally rewind back to the days before the war, and it sounds funny to invade a nation because "sanctions were crumbling." The details of Iraq's nuclear weapons program are unproven to this day. Afganistan did happen, it is true, it didn't catch anyone but it did happen. It's something of a shame, perhaps, that after that, Bush diluted our military resources in attacking Iraq instead of choosing some other action.
Concerning Lincoln: well I will admit that I am not particularly well-read in that area. However, a lot of people seem to really like Lincoln, that proves nothing but is perhaps indicative concerning a relatively uncontroversial figure, and war is a funny thing in that you don't always get your way even if you do things perfectly (which is a good reason to avoid it if possible). I will say that Wikipedia's entry on the American Civil War states that the Confederacy left the union even before Lincoln's inaugration, so avoiding the war would have left the country split.
Now that's just gratuitous.
Yeah, but ya know, when the urge of the joke overcomes you.... My responsibility is to laughs, first and foremost. Nyuk nyuk nyuk.
I agree he's hardly in Tony Blair's league when it comes to public speaking, but I think at least some of that is a deliberate attempt to separate himself p
Do you mean Hitler would have tolerated Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, Martin Sheen, and our paranoid friend Shanen(the GP)?
I submit that the phrasing of the question shows something awry -- that Bush "tolerates" these people is not a point in his favor, but a point NOT AGAINST him. There is plenty else to dislike him for.
Also, Michael Moore, despite some minor flaws, is not the demon some people would like to make him out to be. He is the loudest pro-liberal voice, so of course LOTS of people hate him, and there's a lot of anti-Moore static out there. As for the other people you mention... I care not a whit for any of them. They're not even on my radar. Martin Sheen's involved in politics you say? He's kooky you say? Funny, the last I had heard about that was years ago.
Crack your history book, my friend. I always wonder what the left will call an actual fascist after pining that label on everyone they don't like.
Again, like I just said, the "left" is far less a monolithic, easy-to-pin-down-with-a-sentence entity than the "right" is right now, and a much lesser target.
It seems to me the communication problem here is that I'm at least trying to live in the world of realistic observation, while you're more interested in identifying who's the "left" or "right." I know plenty of liberals who have solid beefs with the president. You seem to be attacking only the most strident ones. That is not a battle I'm going to fight. The plain fact is, Bush has taken real steps TOWARDS facism, even if he isn't there yet. Okay?
As for your "crack open a history book" suggestion, I will not even dignify that by responding to it. I'm trying not to insult you, you could at least do the same. Suffice to say, not everyone who has a solid grasp of history is magically transformed into a right-winger. The story of human kind is not the tale of Dialectical Republicanism.
I'm talking about idiots like Jack Murtha who think they're doing the right thing, but are actually causing the deaths of our troops in Iraq by giving the enemy strength to carry on. Lincoln had a former congressman arrested for doing exactly the same thing.
"NEWS BREAK: Representative Jack Murtha of Pennsylvania was convicted today on seven separate counts of smuggling first aid kits, potions of Gain Ability, and Pieces of Heart to the insurgents in Iraq. More on this breaking story at 11."
So, it's support the war in lockstep with the right or aid the enemy, that's the binary decision offered here. Nothing about caring for the safety of our troops, about the U.S.'s role in the world, about our credibility among other nations, about the precedent this sets, about the false justifications they gave for the attack, nothing.
Oy.
I would say GWB is probably a better wartime president than Lincoln.
(Imagining Bush reading the Gettysburg address.)
(Shuddering.)
1. What war? Are you buying into their "war on terror" terminology? 'Cause I doubt that, when the founding fathas' thought of war, they considered it an ambiguouly defined, declared struggle against an unknown body of men carried out by attacking a nation who had nothing to do with them. If you look at a wartime president's success as being judged by how far he progresses towards the goal of beating the enemy, then Bush is a spectacularly bad president -- he leveled the barrel of the U.S. Armed Forces, and he missed. He attacked the wrong guys.
2. Even if you granted, somehow, that Bush attacked the right people, at least Lincoln won. A civil war is a serious affair, one of the most serious the U.S. has ever been involved in. Having half your country slip right out from under you is not an easy thing to deal with. Oy!
You say Bush is a wartime president and thus should get special consideration or something despite the fact that he started it on pretty spurious grounds, but you ALSO say the war lasted only a couple of day
EXCELLENT!
I was a little iffy, wondering if it might be too much of a stretch, until he got to the introduction of the word "homeland." Nice, nice post.
If Bush were really a fascist along the lines of Hitler you would have already been arrested for posting that comment. Idiot.
-1 Disingenuous! Wait, this isn't Plastic....
Lincoln wasn't president during a fakey war "on Terror" in practice fought thousands of miles away. It was the U.S. Civil War. Open combat on our own damn soil. Where "dissenters" were likely to be the actual people on the other side. (And no, the "fight" against domestic terrorists ain't the same thing. We don't have entire states, not adjacent to the Union, but actually IN the Union rebelling.)
Which is NOT to excuse his action, necessarily. But you should look at the other aspects of Lincoln's record, not just one bit taken capriciously out of context. Would you say that G. W. Bush is even a tenth the president Lincoln was? Even half the president Reagan was?
So dandy, in fact, various Latin American politicians are running on just that and are hailed as heros by the same people, who bash Bush.
Many of those people here are those "who bash Bush." You are not speaking to a community of fellow-thinkers here, you aren't gonna get a chorus of "hell yeahs" just for parroting insular knowledge* here. I could be considered one of those "people who bash Bush," but I do NOT support strongmen, you damnable oversimplifier.
Please don't lump everyone you don't agree with in the same damn boat! There is a lot more political solidarity among Repubs than Demmy-Cs these days, it's one of the reasons we lost the election, but even so I wouldn't accuse you of, say, supporting the U.S.' torture policy unless I actually saw you say something in support of it.
DO you support it?
* Unless it's hating Microsoft, I guess. Wait, no, X-box is cool here.
So, "Beyond Good and Evil" rocked but "Katamari Damacy" didn't? BGaE WAS pretty good, but it certainly wasn't Katamari-level cool. REJECT!
Of course, it's become common practice in some circles to try to buffer rejection of a controversial statement, or even try to shame people into accepting it, by preemptively calling those who will obviously disagree with it fanboys, which at best is figuring out to what decimal place one's geekness resolves, and at worst is an act arguably more nerdly than the actual liking of the supposedly mediocre game.
And why did people want a sequel to KD so badly? MAYBE IT WAS BECAUSE THE ORIGINAL GAME WAS ABOUT THREE HOURS LONG! Fool! It's okay to make a sequel to a game that was, by all reports, much much too short to begin with!
Just because he doesn't like the game (which, to me, means he's either trying to play too-kool-4-U overhipster or is simply deficient in basic humanity) and by random whim of publishing industry happens to have a megaphone handy with which to shout his merest idea*, doesn't mean that he shouldn't attempt to see why other people like it. Empathy is a surprisingly useful trait for a reviewer, of any type, to have.
Further, later on he says "Microsoft introduces the Tard Pack." Oh yeah, that does wonders for his creditibility, oy.
*Yep, that's a blatant TMBG reference. Also geeky, I know.
Where's Meteos, aka The DS Lumines? Harsh.
Ah well, at least Advance Wars DS did get mentioned. The time we've put in on that is just surreal. Once upon a time it took me 55 hours to finish FFIII/VI with all subquests completed. The game clock on the history screen on my copy of AWDS currently reads 180 hours. That's split between two people, true, but we easily put in five times as long on AW2. That's some good gameplay!
I'm as interested in and supportive of Nintendo, generally, as anyone here, but I have to say that, based on what we know so far, I agree with Matthews on his Revolution synopsis.
Specifically, I agree on two points:
First, the word about Revolution's processor power. It is understood that, these days, graphics hardware tends to be a truer example of what a console's graphics look like than raw CPU speed -- look at the DS, it's got souped-up GBA chips in it, an ARM7 and an ARM9, but its graphics are arguably better than the N64. (Mario Kart DS uses actual models for the drivers instead of the N64 version's scaled sprites.) It's also understood that, since the Revolution isn't targeting HD sets, it needs much less power to produce the same quality of visuals.
On the other hand, it's certainly possible for developers to make use of extra processing power. To a sufficently ingenious team and designer, that's golden. To someone thinking about creating the next SimCity-like simulation-game, every spare cycle is useful, and in the future that style of game will become more and more important as advances in graphic quality progresses further into diminishing returns compared to the time, energy and money put into improving them.
Second, his gameplay comments. I know I'm not the only one who thinks that Gamecube was a *little* disappointing. It is true that we had a number of really cool games that didn't appear on other systems: Pikmin, Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, Animal Crossing, etc. But on the other hand, Luigi's Mansion was quite disappointing, Mario Sunshine, while great for what it was, was too similar to Mario 64, and Zelda Wind Waker, while it certainly possesses obvious strengths, is the seventh traditional Zelda game since the modern take on the formula was created in Link to the Past (1 SNES, 1 GB, 2 GBC, 1 GBA, 1 N64). Majora's Mask is the most interesting recent Zelda, in my mind, because it played around so much with the formula, and Four Swords Adventures, while not as interesting as the basic Zelda formula, at least did something clever and unexpected with it. Miyamoto himself said that Twilight Princess may be the last "traditional" Zelda game, and their developers have been heard in the past grumbling about how the Zelda dungeon system is showing its age.
Mind you, Nintendo still has the best designers in the industry. Sony may have Shadow of the Colossus and Katamari Damacy, but both their designers have acknowledged their debt to Miyamoto. Design well and truly *is* king in gaming, but like everyone's an armchair movie critic these days, everyone has an opinion on video games, even those they've given a rightful chance. It's so easy for a game to get torn down by the, frankly, incredibly stupid gaming culture because its different (one word guys: Celda).
Lots of great games (and there are some on PS2 as well) never get the respect they deserve. Nintendo's in a bit of a privilaged position, in that if they make something truly different and special, that many people will actually give it a chance because of Nintendo's history and reputation. Don't forget that even the godly Katamari Damacy is not a huge seller for Namco and has sold better in the United States than in Japan, and that much of its success can be traced, directly, to those early reviews and web articles, Insert Credit's among them, that praised it so highly and caused Namco to take the chance on releasing it in the U.S. It is possible that more people would have played it if it had been on Gamecube, despite its substantially smaller user base, because Gamecube owners are more likely to expect that kind of game!
That's Revolution's biggest promise, that the people who really know and care about gaming will get a system to call their own. That, mixed with the interesting new play styles made possible by the controller, has a chance of sparking a new resurgance of gaming with players, first drawn in by the controller and the hype potential of actually being able to play pretend swordfight in a video game, then kept around by Nintendo's historically strong design ability.
Ah, another "-1 Overrated" mod.
Doesn't this guy, like, have better uses for his mod points? I know when I get 'em, I usually run out too soon. In contrast, probably all this guy does with 'em is mod people down, anonymously, using the metamod-immune method.
Ah well, I suppose we all need a hobby. Mine? It's whining.
Ah, I had that a long time ago, on a bunch of floppies. Ah, for the old, classic Might & Magic gameplay....
Dammit, you beat me to it. I'm just starting to play around with Nethack Biodiversity, it's got lots of new monsters without being quite as shameless with its additions as Slashem....
Advance Wars DS is godly. According to the game's History screen, we've clocked over 180 hours on it already. (Over the years we were playing AW2, we probably put in at least five times as much!)
Wow, thanks for the links! They both sound really cool!
Trust me, you don't want the government to protect you. In the end it will be perverted and used against you.
Yeah, because we'd all be so much better off without all those stupid traffic laws, drug regulations and public roads.
Okay, I understand your point, and I agree to a point. But try not to be so blinded by ideology: there are some things that government does well. It's also arguable that there's plenty more it could do, and it is not obvious that it would be a bad thing. Whether it is or not may not be certain, but then, that's why people argue about these things.
GAH. I just noticed a mistake I made in the wording of my post, here's hoping I can catch it before someone wiseass does: Kameo is NOT a sequel to an N64 game. It had an N64 prototype. It certainly has been reworked since then (possibly more than once, given the time since its conception). But it is not, itself, a sequel to anything, which was in fact a point in the post my message replied to.
Sorry for the inaccuracy.
WHAT? Why you gotta be ignorant your whole life?
It is the best adventure game ever to be released with a console spare Mario 64. It doesn't get the press it deserves because it isn't a sequel.
Even if we grant Kameo (which we most certainly do not, we have far better things to grant with our granting stick), you overlook the fact that Mario 64 itself was a launch game!
Indeed, it and Goldeneye, which, while I don't think it was a launch game was pretty close to being one, were responsible for the N64's tremendous early momentum that got largely spent in the initial gap between the launch days and the next games.
Meanwhile, what does X-box 360 have? Project Gotham Racing, and two games that had N64 incarnations before it. (Kameo was shown at an E3 in an N64 incarnation.) An N64 ancestry, of course, is by no means a sign of failure, but it sure took Rare a long time to produce those two sequels. By all believable reports, the biggest 360 game is Geometry Wars, which goes for $5 over X-box Live! And don't laugh: that game, and internet multiplayer arcade Gauntlet, are the two things I'd consider getting an X-box 360 for.
The best launch list I can think of belonged to the SNES: it had Super Mario World and Pilotwings, and not long after came F-Zero and Final Fantasy II (aka IV). For its time, the impact of those three games cannot be underestimated: Super Mario World was one of the greatest 2D platformers, Pilotwings gave many gamers their first glimpse of a truly easy-to-play flight simulator, and FF II was a landmark progression in the world of RPGs, being the Final Fantasy that introduced Active Time Battle. And F-Zero had a sense of speed often lacking even in "speedster" racing games today.
It seems there's a basic disconnect between your and my impressions as to what makes a good launch game. You seem to be focused more on the press a game will generate (although really, I don't think it's been generated, nothing there is on the level of Halo or Mario 64) than its quality as a game.
You seem like a nice guy, but you need better hype vaccinations. Fortunately, over time people tend to develop their own defense against hype, most commonly in the form of brutal cynicism. I'll be waiting for you in the Brutal Cynics' Receiving Lounge when you get your ID card.
Out of curosity, why is it a particularly good game for female gamers? Because the protagonist is a girl?
The reason that most women don't like video games less to do with theme, setting, graphics or anything like that, and more to do with the fact that most women have lives, and anyone with any kind of objective perspective upon life will be forced to recognize that most games suck.
+5 Insightful is not enough for your post. Good call.
You are making a statement of fact, while the story concerns how things should be. Do you claim this is right and proper?
The "17 Mistakes..." article is one of the coolest things I've ever seen linked to from Slashdot. I am in a blissed-out state of ultimate geekness!