Zelda II, it's rumored, was transformed into the decent but decidedly non-Zelda RPG-style outing because RPGs were really hot in Japan at the time.
I'm really unsure of that, especially since Zelda II has so many other innovations over the RPG mold, like an action-based game system, a real-time spell interface, and character customization. (You can build up to level 8 Attack first if you want.)
It's worth noting, actually, that the original Disk version of Zelda II had some minor, but interesting, changes over the cart version. There, every three experience levels cost the same number of points, but if you didn't build up your levels evenly (same level in every category), the excess ones they'd be lost when you ran out of lives! I'm glad they changed that, although the experience system made a lot more sense in that version....
The difference is that the Great Sea makes up 99.3% of the world area, the rest being stupid tiny islands (or rocks), whereas there are plenty of large and interesting places in OoT.
But the Great Sea *does* have things going on in that space, like storms, more monsters than peahats and nighttime stalchildren, umpteen dozen platforms, submarines, ghost ship appearances, sunken treasure, boat battles, etc. And you tend to not spend that much extra time in each of Ocarina's other areas, none of which are as large as Hyrule Field by a long shot. (On the other hand, there aren't that many non-dungeon, large, explorable areas in Wind Waker: Dragon Isle, Outset Island, Windfall and the Fortress are pretty much it.)
Both games feature a decidedly low number of monsters, which hopefully the next game will remedy.
Did you ever go through all fifty levels of the Savage Labrynith? After you get the Triforce map, there's a hidden extra thirty levels. Every non-boss, dry land monster in the game is there! The last floor is four top-level Darknuts at once!
Yeah, it was beautiful.
Anyway, I'm actually kind of getting tired of Zelda dungeons. In Wind Waker I saw them mostly as unwelcome interruptions from the important task of finding all the fun stuff there was to do in the world. I hear that Nintendo's thinking the same thing, and the new game will have a different dungeon style. I'm thinking, about time.
The DS's 3D hardware is rumored to be quite capable of cel shading. I'm thinking, portable games tend to be much more acceptable to that kind of look than console titles, and with Four Swords and Minish Cap it's obvious that Nintendo has not abandoned that look. Could it be that we haven't seen the last cel-shaded 3D Zelda?
Interestingly, you're in the minority there. And the gameplay was the most linear of the series so far, excepting perhaps Link's Awakening or one of the Oracle games -- there was hardly anything you could do out of order.
The experience system, too, was anti-Zelda. In Zelda II, your character's power comes as a function of experience points earned, which comes up to, essentially, battles fought. In all the other Zeldas, your character becomes more powerful (gains heart containers & goodies) through exploration and puzzle-solving.
Which isn't to say that I haven't played a metric ton of Zelda II, or that I don't like it. I think it's great, it's just not very Zeldy.
I'm forgoing my opportunity to up-mod in this very deserving discussion in order to say:
BILLY QUAN! MIND YOUR MANNERS! YEAH!
Even now that crotch-cam is one of the funnier things that still fits within the narrow confines of my memory. My god, where can I get tapes of Almost Live???
Re:IMHO DS is far better and the review is compari
on
PSP And DS Duke It Out
·
· Score: 1
Except that in the modern credit happy world 10 dollars a game and 100 dollars a console doesn't mean shit. I've got both machines - the PSP is better, period.
It's twenty dollars a game, that's 40% cheaper, and call me old-fashioned, but you'd better believe it means something to me.
That was mostly gaming, but with a three hour stint of watching Neverwhere off a memory card.
How did you get Neverwhere onto that memory card, if you don't mind my asking? Arrrr....
A slightly better one that the Virtual Boy that sits atop my bookshelf, but a gimic none the less.
MP3s: From your MemoryStick(TM). Might as well get a flash based MP3 player.
Or pay about $50 more and get an iPod with absolutely surreal capacity, instead of continuing to buy overpriced memory sticks to hold your music collection. The iPod fits in your pocket, your unobtrusive music-providing genie. I think Apple did it well enough that it seriously harms the PSP's bid in that area.
And you're right, the movie playback facility in the PSP is absolutely useless for general-release stuff when you'll probably already buy the DVD. (Except for playing Internet-downloaded stuff. Like pirated movies. Yo ho ho.)
The thing I really have to wonder: If the DS didn't come out, I think the GBA would have put up a great fight with the PSP.
Why can't it?
Nintendo said that the DS wasn't intended as a replacement for the GBA, and if you notice they've by no means slowed GBA development -- indeed, a new GBA Zelda was released weeks before the DS' introduction. I think the GBA will eat *both* systems' lunch.
It's true that there aren't a lot of DS games at the moment, but its GBA compatibility (and better screen) helps things a little. It's possible that I'm a little biased against the PSP, because the games out for it are mostly the same games that are always out for the PS2 -- there's not a lot to recommend it so far besides Lumines. And I've already gotten a lot out of play out of the new DS Yoshi game despite it being out for just four days now. It is surprisingly challenging, yet it doesn't feel cheap.
What you describe is quite a niche problem. I have used MiniDisc for years and the *only* time it bit me was when a musician friend gave me a Audio-CD-R with a performance of his.
That's a pretty big niche, that channel by which much independent music is spread. Or rather, it may be a niche compared to consuming Brittany Spears CDs, but....
All of those things are not on the same course, and only rarely is even a handful on-screen at once. Further, it doesn't matter much what direction a banana peel faces, most enemies face the player. (And thwomps are polygonal, too.) Katamari Damacy has an order of magnitude more things on-screen at once, and when they're all on the ball and rotating they're considerably more difficult to render convincingly as sprites. So I say unto you: nyaah!
At the heart of this is an issue of feel over pure design. It matters, in Katamari Damacy, that the stuff you stick to the ball is visible and rotating along with it, to a degree above issues of pure game design. The game would play exactly the same if collected stuff were reflected in just making the core ball bigger (maybe deforming it a bit to reflect big stuff sticking out), but it wouldn't be as much fun. People have mentioned the game's simplistic graphics, but it's just as realistic as it needs to be, and it does need those graphics.
Anyway, I don't know if the DS can handle it all with its 3D hardware, but it just might be able to what with the DS' lower screen resolution. Sprite cheating, however, is likely not a universal solution unless the game were designed around it (with a fixed camera at least).
Billboards worked for the karts in Super Mario Kart, Mario Kart 64, and Mario Kart Super Circuit.
But Katamari Damacy is a greatly different game from any of those. Only eight carts on a track compared to a world full of things, including a big rotating ball containing the last few dozen of those things collected all rotating together.
GBA has 96 KB of VRAM. Nintendo DS has roughly 650 KB of VRAM. Besides, a lot of GBA games routinely swap sprite cels into VRAM in real time; see my white paper on the technique.
I don't need to see a white paper, I'm familiar with how it's done. But the GBA's VRAM is still limited in size, and it's possible to hit the memory limit with just the stuff on the screen during one frame, and VRAM swapping techniques can only do so much. However, the DS' larger VRAM would make this much more feasible.
Play Super Smash Bros. for N64 to see a prime example of combining methods.
Again, Smash is a very different situation. N64 Smash Bros. was designed with purposely low-polygon environments, and relatively low-poly characters, while a lot of the charm of Katamari Damacy comes from picking up lots of real-world objects that have to look similar to their physical counterparts.
That said, I think there's a chance that sprite graphics could work for the basic game, but experiments would have to be run to make sure. And that doesn't solve the problem of having those sprite-based objects displayed on the ball and continuously rolling, which would require a hell of a lot more frames of animation than just resting on the landscape.
That Namco has announced the game (and has a screen shot with polygonal crabs sticking to the ball) indicates that some thought has already been put into this. Here's hoping it turns out well, for a Katamari Damacy game seems like it'd be a perfect fit for the DS.
Billboards could work if the camera isn't freely movable, and if it uses a lot of different sprites for different angles. That'd require a lot of management of sprite memory though, especially if the graphics chips in the DS have the same sprite memory limitations as the GBA does (which it probably doesn't).
They could use a combination of methods. Mario 64 has many ball-shaped enemies that are represented by flat sprites. Objects with cylindrical components, like lampposts, could also be cheated around a bit.
The problem with the billboard option is it becomes difficult to maintain once the stuff is on the ball, which would then require the object to be rotated in all dimensions. The DS' lower resolution could be its saving grace in that case.
1. The DS has a lower resolution. This lets 3D hardware that's slightly better than a N64 provide relatively better visuals than it did. If the game only provided 3D on one of the screens then so much the better.
2. The PS2 can't handle Katamari Damacy, in a manner of speaking. I read in the post-mortem of the game in Game Developer Magazine that the game "cheats" when the ball gets loaded with stuff, removing difficult-to-see and relatively small stuff on the interior of the ball as it increases in size. Just increase this cheating factor on the DS and there you go. It'd be less noticable on the DS because, again, of the reduced resolution.
3. Katamari Damacy isn't all that bad. The PS2 is still relatively underpowered when it comes to Gamecube and Xbox. It's still more powerful than the DS (or PSP for that matter), but see #1 above.
It's also possible that Namco could cheat, by using sprites for some objects. If the camera is not very moveable then this may work for objects not yet collected, as the game could use the DS' sprite scaling to simulate 3D to some extent.
They could also cheat by not actually allowing objects to stick to the ball and using a generic katamari model for it that just gets bigger, but a lot of the game's charm would be lost in that event. That would be a worst-case scenario for DS Katamari Damacy, I'd guess.
Ah, I'm afraid that I myself am unaware of the Aqua-soft case, sorry about that. What I remember reading was about Apple cracking down on user interface elements that purposely look like the interface of OS X, but I don't think were necessarily direct copies.
It's possible that we're talking about the same case, and mental static and failed pairity checks in my memory have confused the details of the case in my mind -- it's been at least a couple of years since I saw my example, and am not sure if I could find it again if I searched for it. If that's the case, I apologize.
(On Yoshi Touch & Go) And it is the most wonderful game I have played in years.
Now this is really weird. I bought that game today, and similarly thought it was absolutely great, and I saw this story and was going to post about it, then figured, naaaah. Then I read your post. It's reassuring to see someone else thinks the same way about it.
I can't explain why it's so addictive. It doesn't have a large number of levels (or any!). There doesn't seem to be any bosses. It's got a stiff difficulty level to it, and the game's always ready to hand out a beat-down to a momentarily-careless player. It's just a really pure arcade-style game, with a novel control scheme.
I don't know if the game is a fluke or if Nintendo plans on making the DS a haven for these kinds of deceptively complex, weirdly addictive little things, but it's a good start at least.
No, I was referring to Apple's cease-and-desists to prevent Linux window managers from including an Aqua-like theme, which dates back to a couple of years ago I think.
Re:Before anyone jumps to conclusions...
on
Google's X Files Vanish
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
To those who may be so inclined to immediately blame Apple, I would say: wait until any facts in this particular instance actually support that position.
I'd say that, while it is prudent to not jump to the conclusion regarding the facts behind the take down, that given Apple's past behavior in "protecting" their Aqua user interface, that some amount of suspecion aimed in their direction is perhaps justified. Even if Apple did nothing, if Google took them down out of fear out of what Apple might do to them then it's clear that some kind of chilling effect has taken place, which after all is part of the strategy behind this kind of litigation -- to discourage infringement, or things that might possibly infringe, before it occurs.
(Yeah, it's just based on some graphics and not new technology, but it still feels a bit chilly to me.)
I'd say that Link to the Past also wasn't that difficult. The original Zelda's second quest was probably the hardest thing the series has seen. (Since then, I've always found myself hoping for a second quest when I finish a Zelda game....)
Oddly, I also find Nethack to be rather easy these days. Some players remedy that by setting "conducts" for themselves, purposely not using many of the game's features to give themselves a challenge. People have been doing this for Zelda as well (finishing the original game without a ring, or a lesser sword), but the need to make the game accessable to any player (which is of great importance to Nintendo, which is the only major console manufacturer that still seems to value the non-dedicated-gamer market) makes Zelda games seem somewhat easy to ace players.
Of course the puzzles are as tough as ever, and may even be harder than in the original, which really didn't have a lot of them.
And Majora's Mask was Ocarina-Adult+Masks+3 Day System. Wind Waker's innovation had to do with game structure more than anything else, once the whole ocean was available to you, the WHOLE ocean was available, and suddenly the game became less about finding the next dungeon (of which there weren't that many anyway) and more about wandering randomly, finding cool things. Which was the cool thing about the very first Zelda.
It was so easy I finished the game without dying.
I finished Ocarina without dying. Then I finished it without dying, with three hearts. Later Zeldas have been light on difficulty, it is true, but have been cool for other reasons. Meanwhile, I know few modern gamers who can stand up to the original game or its second quest. Overall games have been getting easier, and when they *are* hard (like Mario Sunshine's void levels) players tend to complain bitterly.
They have been using the same puzzles since A Link to the Past.
And so has everyone else. The action-adventure genre as a whole has been fairly lacking in this department, possibly due to its very nature. The fact is there are fewer kinds of puzzles that you can put into these games than you might think. Press a button, flip a switch, find a key, special blocks, dual environments. That about sums up 90% of action-adventure puzzles.
There are exceptions to this, and if you're going to find them then more recent Zeldas are just about the best place to look. But I think Nintendo themselves know that the dungeon game is showing its age, and that may explain why there were so few of them in Wind Waker.
Yes I expect to get modded down, but this is not a flame, its accurate information.
Well, more accurately it's opinion, but that's okay. My comments here are opinions too. (Meanwhile, if you had said that on Plastic you would have been modded down. They even have a special moderation for people who say they'll get modded down, "-1 Modappeal.")
Of course, you could certainly BELIEVE that it happened, even if it didn't.
I take the view that, in cases where a rule or law is passed that purposely seeks to supress information on how it is used, it is prudent to at least keep the worst in mind as a real possibility. Else, why would they have insisted on the secrecy? (And don't gimmie that business about national security, you rascal!)
True, true. Of course, overall I tend to take the opinion, already eloquently expressed by others in this conversation, that whether the USA PATRIOT is being abused or not, it should be stricken down, just because it's a bad law. These things have a tendency to be abused eventually, if not by this administration (and considering their track record, I'd be surprised if they weren't abusing it somehow) then by the next one, perhaps even by (gasp) liberals!
It's the kind of law that's hard to strike down, because whoever's in power will make use of it in their own way. It'll probably require a situation where Congress is once again at odds with the Presidency, and are looking at a way to stick it to the executive branch.
Slashdot Mirror
Zelda II, it's rumored, was transformed into the decent but decidedly non-Zelda RPG-style outing because RPGs were really hot in Japan at the time.
I'm really unsure of that, especially since Zelda II has so many other innovations over the RPG mold, like an action-based game system, a real-time spell interface, and character customization. (You can build up to level 8 Attack first if you want.)
It's worth noting, actually, that the original Disk version of Zelda II had some minor, but interesting, changes over the cart version. There, every three experience levels cost the same number of points, but if you didn't build up your levels evenly (same level in every category), the excess ones they'd be lost when you ran out of lives! I'm glad they changed that, although the experience system made a lot more sense in that version....
The difference is that the Great Sea makes up 99.3% of the world area, the rest being stupid tiny islands (or rocks), whereas there are plenty of large and interesting places in OoT.
But the Great Sea *does* have things going on in that space, like storms, more monsters than peahats and nighttime stalchildren, umpteen dozen platforms, submarines, ghost ship appearances, sunken treasure, boat battles, etc. And you tend to not spend that much extra time in each of Ocarina's other areas, none of which are as large as Hyrule Field by a long shot. (On the other hand, there aren't that many non-dungeon, large, explorable areas in Wind Waker: Dragon Isle, Outset Island, Windfall and the Fortress are pretty much it.)
Both games feature a decidedly low number of monsters, which hopefully the next game will remedy.
Did you ever go through all fifty levels of the Savage Labrynith? After you get the Triforce map, there's a hidden extra thirty levels. Every non-boss, dry land monster in the game is there! The last floor is four top-level Darknuts at once!
Yeah, it was beautiful.
Anyway, I'm actually kind of getting tired of Zelda dungeons. In Wind Waker I saw them mostly as unwelcome interruptions from the important task of finding all the fun stuff there was to do in the world. I hear that Nintendo's thinking the same thing, and the new game will have a different dungeon style. I'm thinking, about time.
Oh yeah, then riddle me this: Which of these two was more boring?
A. Wind Waker's Great Sea
B. Ocarina of Time's damnably large, mostly empty Hyrule Field?
Just a thought...
The DS's 3D hardware is rumored to be quite capable of cel shading. I'm thinking, portable games tend to be much more acceptable to that kind of look than console titles, and with Four Swords and Minish Cap it's obvious that Nintendo has not abandoned that look. Could it be that we haven't seen the last cel-shaded 3D Zelda?
Interestingly, you're in the minority there. And the gameplay was the most linear of the series so far, excepting perhaps Link's Awakening or one of the Oracle games -- there was hardly anything you could do out of order.
The experience system, too, was anti-Zelda. In Zelda II, your character's power comes as a function of experience points earned, which comes up to, essentially, battles fought. In all the other Zeldas, your character becomes more powerful (gains heart containers & goodies) through exploration and puzzle-solving.
Which isn't to say that I haven't played a metric ton of Zelda II, or that I don't like it. I think it's great, it's just not very Zeldy.
Majora's Mask, foo'!
I'm forgoing my opportunity to up-mod in this very deserving discussion in order to say:
BILLY QUAN! MIND YOUR MANNERS! YEAH!
Even now that crotch-cam is one of the funnier things that still fits within the narrow confines of my memory. My god, where can I get tapes of Almost Live???
Except that in the modern credit happy world 10 dollars a game and 100 dollars a console doesn't mean shit. I've got both machines - the PSP is better, period.
It's twenty dollars a game, that's 40% cheaper, and call me old-fashioned, but you'd better believe it means something to me.
That was mostly gaming, but with a three hour stint of watching Neverwhere off a memory card.
How did you get Neverwhere onto that memory card, if you don't mind my asking? Arrrr....
A slightly better one that the Virtual Boy that sits atop my bookshelf, but a gimic none the less.
My god, how much money do you have?
(P.S.: It's "gimmick.")
MP3s: From your MemoryStick(TM). Might as well get a flash based MP3 player.
Or pay about $50 more and get an iPod with absolutely surreal capacity, instead of continuing to buy overpriced memory sticks to hold your music collection. The iPod fits in your pocket, your unobtrusive music-providing genie. I think Apple did it well enough that it seriously harms the PSP's bid in that area.
And you're right, the movie playback facility in the PSP is absolutely useless for general-release stuff when you'll probably already buy the DVD. (Except for playing Internet-downloaded stuff. Like pirated movies. Yo ho ho.)
The thing I really have to wonder: If the DS didn't come out, I think the GBA would have put up a great fight with the PSP.
Why can't it?
Nintendo said that the DS wasn't intended as a replacement for the GBA, and if you notice they've by no means slowed GBA development -- indeed, a new GBA Zelda was released weeks before the DS' introduction. I think the GBA will eat *both* systems' lunch.
It's true that there aren't a lot of DS games at the moment, but its GBA compatibility (and better screen) helps things a little. It's possible that I'm a little biased against the PSP, because the games out for it are mostly the same games that are always out for the PS2 -- there's not a lot to recommend it so far besides Lumines. And I've already gotten a lot out of play out of the new DS Yoshi game despite it being out for just four days now. It is surprisingly challenging, yet it doesn't feel cheap.
What you describe is quite a niche problem. I have used MiniDisc for years and the *only* time it bit me was when a musician friend gave me a Audio-CD-R with a performance of his.
That's a pretty big niche, that channel by which much independent music is spread. Or rather, it may be a niche compared to consuming Brittany Spears CDs, but....
All of those things are not on the same course, and only rarely is even a handful on-screen at once. Further, it doesn't matter much what direction a banana peel faces, most enemies face the player. (And thwomps are polygonal, too.) Katamari Damacy has an order of magnitude more things on-screen at once, and when they're all on the ball and rotating they're considerably more difficult to render convincingly as sprites. So I say unto you: nyaah!
At the heart of this is an issue of feel over pure design. It matters, in Katamari Damacy, that the stuff you stick to the ball is visible and rotating along with it, to a degree above issues of pure game design. The game would play exactly the same if collected stuff were reflected in just making the core ball bigger (maybe deforming it a bit to reflect big stuff sticking out), but it wouldn't be as much fun. People have mentioned the game's simplistic graphics, but it's just as realistic as it needs to be, and it does need those graphics.
Anyway, I don't know if the DS can handle it all with its 3D hardware, but it just might be able to what with the DS' lower screen resolution. Sprite cheating, however, is likely not a universal solution unless the game were designed around it (with a fixed camera at least).
Billboards worked for the karts in Super Mario Kart, Mario Kart 64, and Mario Kart Super Circuit.
But Katamari Damacy is a greatly different game from any of those. Only eight carts on a track compared to a world full of things, including a big rotating ball containing the last few dozen of those things collected all rotating together.
GBA has 96 KB of VRAM. Nintendo DS has roughly 650 KB of VRAM. Besides, a lot of GBA games routinely swap sprite cels into VRAM in real time; see my white paper on the technique.
I don't need to see a white paper, I'm familiar with how it's done. But the GBA's VRAM is still limited in size, and it's possible to hit the memory limit with just the stuff on the screen during one frame, and VRAM swapping techniques can only do so much. However, the DS' larger VRAM would make this much more feasible.
Play Super Smash Bros. for N64 to see a prime example of combining methods.
Again, Smash is a very different situation. N64 Smash Bros. was designed with purposely low-polygon environments, and relatively low-poly characters, while a lot of the charm of Katamari Damacy comes from picking up lots of real-world objects that have to look similar to their physical counterparts.
That said, I think there's a chance that sprite graphics could work for the basic game, but experiments would have to be run to make sure. And that doesn't solve the problem of having those sprite-based objects displayed on the ball and continuously rolling, which would require a hell of a lot more frames of animation than just resting on the landscape.
That Namco has announced the game (and has a screen shot with polygonal crabs sticking to the ball) indicates that some thought has already been put into this. Here's hoping it turns out well, for a Katamari Damacy game seems like it'd be a perfect fit for the DS.
Billboards could work if the camera isn't freely movable, and if it uses a lot of different sprites for different angles. That'd require a lot of management of sprite memory though, especially if the graphics chips in the DS have the same sprite memory limitations as the GBA does (which it probably doesn't).
They could use a combination of methods. Mario 64 has many ball-shaped enemies that are represented by flat sprites. Objects with cylindrical components, like lampposts, could also be cheated around a bit.
The problem with the billboard option is it becomes difficult to maintain once the stuff is on the ball, which would then require the object to be rotated in all dimensions. The DS' lower resolution could be its saving grace in that case.
I'm pretty sure it can handle it.
1. The DS has a lower resolution. This lets 3D hardware that's slightly better than a N64 provide relatively better visuals than it did. If the game only provided 3D on one of the screens then so much the better.
2. The PS2 can't handle Katamari Damacy, in a manner of speaking. I read in the post-mortem of the game in Game Developer Magazine that the game "cheats" when the ball gets loaded with stuff, removing difficult-to-see and relatively small stuff on the interior of the ball as it increases in size. Just increase this cheating factor on the DS and there you go. It'd be less noticable on the DS because, again, of the reduced resolution.
3. Katamari Damacy isn't all that bad. The PS2 is still relatively underpowered when it comes to Gamecube and Xbox. It's still more powerful than the DS (or PSP for that matter), but see #1 above.
It's also possible that Namco could cheat, by using sprites for some objects. If the camera is not very moveable then this may work for objects not yet collected, as the game could use the DS' sprite scaling to simulate 3D to some extent.
They could also cheat by not actually allowing objects to stick to the ball and using a generic katamari model for it that just gets bigger, but a lot of the game's charm would be lost in that event. That would be a worst-case scenario for DS Katamari Damacy, I'd guess.
Ah, I'm afraid that I myself am unaware of the Aqua-soft case, sorry about that. What I remember reading was about Apple cracking down on user interface elements that purposely look like the interface of OS X, but I don't think were necessarily direct copies.
It's possible that we're talking about the same case, and mental static and failed pairity checks in my memory have confused the details of the case in my mind -- it's been at least a couple of years since I saw my example, and am not sure if I could find it again if I searched for it. If that's the case, I apologize.
(On Yoshi Touch & Go)
And it is the most wonderful game I have played in years.
Now this is really weird. I bought that game today, and similarly thought it was absolutely great, and I saw this story and was going to post about it, then figured, naaaah. Then I read your post. It's reassuring to see someone else thinks the same way about it.
I can't explain why it's so addictive. It doesn't have a large number of levels (or any!). There doesn't seem to be any bosses. It's got a stiff difficulty level to it, and the game's always ready to hand out a beat-down to a momentarily-careless player. It's just a really pure arcade-style game, with a novel control scheme.
I don't know if the game is a fluke or if Nintendo plans on making the DS a haven for these kinds of deceptively complex, weirdly addictive little things, but it's a good start at least.
No, I was referring to Apple's cease-and-desists to prevent Linux window managers from including an Aqua-like theme, which dates back to a couple of years ago I think.
To those who may be so inclined to immediately blame Apple, I would say: wait until any facts in this particular instance actually support that position.
I'd say that, while it is prudent to not jump to the conclusion regarding the facts behind the take down, that given Apple's past behavior in "protecting" their Aqua user interface, that some amount of suspecion aimed in their direction is perhaps justified. Even if Apple did nothing, if Google took them down out of fear out of what Apple might do to them then it's clear that some kind of chilling effect has taken place, which after all is part of the strategy behind this kind of litigation -- to discourage infringement, or things that might possibly infringe, before it occurs.
(Yeah, it's just based on some graphics and not new technology, but it still feels a bit chilly to me.)
I'd say that Link to the Past also wasn't that difficult. The original Zelda's second quest was probably the hardest thing the series has seen. (Since then, I've always found myself hoping for a second quest when I finish a Zelda game....)
Oddly, I also find Nethack to be rather easy these days. Some players remedy that by setting "conducts" for themselves, purposely not using many of the game's features to give themselves a challenge. People have been doing this for Zelda as well (finishing the original game without a ring, or a lesser sword), but the need to make the game accessable to any player (which is of great importance to Nintendo, which is the only major console manufacturer that still seems to value the non-dedicated-gamer market) makes Zelda games seem somewhat easy to ace players.
Of course the puzzles are as tough as ever, and may even be harder than in the original, which really didn't have a lot of them.
It was a POS. It was Ocarina+boat+flute-horse.
And Majora's Mask was Ocarina-Adult+Masks+3 Day System. Wind Waker's innovation had to do with game structure more than anything else, once the whole ocean was available to you, the WHOLE ocean was available, and suddenly the game became less about finding the next dungeon (of which there weren't that many anyway) and more about wandering randomly, finding cool things. Which was the cool thing about the very first Zelda.
It was so easy I finished the game without dying.
I finished Ocarina without dying. Then I finished it without dying, with three hearts. Later Zeldas have been light on difficulty, it is true, but have been cool for other reasons. Meanwhile, I know few modern gamers who can stand up to the original game or its second quest. Overall games have been getting easier, and when they *are* hard (like Mario Sunshine's void levels) players tend to complain bitterly.
They have been using the same puzzles since A Link to the Past.
And so has everyone else. The action-adventure genre as a whole has been fairly lacking in this department, possibly due to its very nature. The fact is there are fewer kinds of puzzles that you can put into these games than you might think. Press a button, flip a switch, find a key, special blocks, dual environments. That about sums up 90% of action-adventure puzzles.
There are exceptions to this, and if you're going to find them then more recent Zeldas are just about the best place to look. But I think Nintendo themselves know that the dungeon game is showing its age, and that may explain why there were so few of them in Wind Waker.
Yes I expect to get modded down, but this is not a flame, its accurate information.
Well, more accurately it's opinion, but that's okay. My comments here are opinions too. (Meanwhile, if you had said that on Plastic you would have been modded down. They even have a special moderation for people who say they'll get modded down, "-1 Modappeal.")
Of course, you could certainly BELIEVE that it happened, even if it didn't.
I take the view that, in cases where a rule or law is passed that purposely seeks to supress information on how it is used, it is prudent to at least keep the worst in mind as a real possibility. Else, why would they have insisted on the secrecy? (And don't gimmie that business about national security, you rascal!)
True, true. Of course, overall I tend to take the opinion, already eloquently expressed by others in this conversation, that whether the USA PATRIOT is being abused or not, it should be stricken down, just because it's a bad law. These things have a tendency to be abused eventually, if not by this administration (and considering their track record, I'd be surprised if they weren't abusing it somehow) then by the next one, perhaps even by (gasp) liberals!
It's the kind of law that's hard to strike down, because whoever's in power will make use of it in their own way. It'll probably require a situation where Congress is once again at odds with the Presidency, and are looking at a way to stick it to the executive branch.
They must not have done a very good job of it, if YOU know about it.
This is logically fallacious:
If if didn't happen, I couldn't know about it.
If it did happen, and I don't know about it, of course I can't complain about it.
If it did happen, and I do know about it and complain about it, the coverup can't be as bad as I say because I found out.
Result: No one can ever usefully complain about coverups, ever.