I heard an intersting bit on the radio the other day interviewing a guy who is making a movie called "Michael Moore Hates America" which is due out later this year. In it he tries, in Michael Moore style, to interview Moore himself while documenting the errors, and more importantly, the ommissions in Moore's films.
Is Michael Moore such an institution now that people are making counter films to his point of view?
I like Moore. A lot. I think he's witty, honest, and most importantly, earnest. (It may be true that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but so is the road back.) But dude, this guy has got to realize that he's just adding credibility to Moore's case.
Make a movie against General Motors, the NRA, President Bush, and it's David-versus-Goliath.
Moore is by no means a Goliath. Looking at him, I'd say he has trouble finding the Slim-Fast asile at the A&P.
Fox calls them homicide bombers, which I think is less accurate because it does not indicate that the bomber was committing suicide on purpose in the process.
Oh, man. They're really doing this?! They actually consider the term "suicide bomber" to be left-biased, and thus feel the need to change it to "homicide bomber," thinking that correcting that percieved bias with a lame, jokey, redundant modifier is more important than clearly presenting the story?
If that's true, then I think two things are obvious:
1. They are tools. 2. Never before has so much Jello been so wrongly not dumped down so many's trousers.
Actually, Moore just bought a penthouse in upper Manhattan.
Ah here we go, just what I was waiting for. Tell me where you saw this and I'll be your friend. I want to know. I don't think it'll change my mind about him (insight is insight, regardless of who possesses it), but I'd like a link for this one -- you'll be doing me a favor, and it may change my mind about him yet.
Anyway, later in my post I mentioned that Moore's movies are doing well financially (after a couple of false starts). But it was impossible for him to expect this, you don't say to your folks "Mom, Pop, I'm going to become the first highly-profitable documentary filmmaker," they'll laugh at you and point out you sold your house to finance Roger & Me.
So no, I don't think he's in it for the money, but if you do make money it's reasonable to enjoy it. I'd wait until he's had that apartment a few years, wearing Rich Uncle Pennybags outfits and swimming around his Money Bin, before slapping the big "Fat Cat" sticker on his forehead.
(The first half of that sticker may still be appropriate, though. Just being honest here.)
Big the discreditings of the discrediting are, on the whole, a lot less compelling than the initial discreditings, which leads me to declare Moore the winner, when the points are added up. (If these pages are still as I remember them -- Moore supposedly adds to his as new charges are brought.)
Most poor rock and roll one hit wonders that make it big and successfull forget were they came from and end up tanking.
Ah, but after Roger & Me, Moore didn't have a lot of success except for the books, until Bowling for Columbine. Canadian Bacon did poorly (I'd say deservedly so), Pets or Meat I've only even seen mentioned in two places (one of which I found today), The Big One just followed Moore's book tour, and T.V. Nation and Awful Truth were not profitable.
And the thing about Bowling for Columbine, arguably Moore's first really big success since Roger & Me: The movie is not anti-gun.
But it shows that Canada has more guns per capita than the United States, and a much lower gun-related murder rate. If anything, it shows that American paranoia is responsible for that more than guns.
Bowling for Columbine is arguably Moore's most centered work to date. People who complain about it lying miss the entire point -- none of the supposed lies that I've heard dispute the essential core of the movie.
It's true that he probably is a little too active in going after Heston, and Dick Clark, but I understand why he did it.
Even if he was an average poor boy in the beguining doesn't mean he isn't a "limousine liberal" now. As a matter of fact, it apears that he is even less then that and mainly a machine schill for the liberals.
There are machine shills all over the place. The right's outnumber Moore at least ten-to-one; talk radio and Fox News prove that handily. And I don't think he is one, even then. I'd say that shills don't fall on their face, creatively, as often, but instead stick to safe projects.
It would apear that apeasing them is what really counts to moore in this day and age.
Success makes alot of people forget who they are/were and often is the failing point that make people who have achived drop back to were they came from.
Granted. But until someone shows me otherwise, I will continue thinking well of Moore.
(Yes, that's a challenge. Someone out there, show me something damning. I want to know where these rumors come from, if there's anything to them.)
The problem is that this time around they don't like any of it. They dispise the roots that help image them into a person admired and successfull that even you become a fanboy.
Oh my friend, I know I'm a fanboy. Do a Slashdot search connecting "MilenCent" to "Nintendo" and you'll have all the proof you want of that. I don't dress up as Link for Halloween, mind you....*
I am not a Michael Moore fanboy however; a fanboy wouldn't complain about Canadian Bacon, The Big One, or the one-note tone of his books. I do admire Bowling for Columbine, however, and I'm looking forward to Farenheit 9/11. I think the man does good work, and whatever flaws they have are a result of his earnestness more than any calculated shill-factor.
* This comment is part of a blatant bid to get "Michael Moore" connected to "The Legend of Zelda" in Google searches. Rupees! Flint, Michigan! Heart Containers! General Motors! Ganondorf! John Ashcroft!
It looks like Fatboy's movie has grossed $21M this weekend.
And yet, I doubt you could say he predicted that.
Furthermore, in Hollywood pay scales 21M is pocketchange, and that's the gross, not the net profit, and less of that money will be converted into money for Moore's production company because of the distribution deal mess.
Mind you, I hope he *does* get rich from making documentaries. I'd love to get rich doing that -- might prove to my battered soul that the world's a good place after all.
Want to live in a fantasy, and keep your kids in a fantasy?
Um.... (quickly shuffling my boxed collectors edition of the Lord of the Rings DVDs in the special box with collectable Gandalf pewter figuring and designer tableware behind by back, and standing in front of the box containing plastic Glamrung for the kids)
I agree that this Disney fiasco is probably at least somewhat invented - or overdramatized - by Moore himself. And this is coming from someone who actually likes his movies, and agrees with (most of) his viewpoints. Let's face it: he knows how to generate publicity.
But Moore has also claimed that no filmmaker wants this kind of publicity. The quote, about Citizens United is probably tongue-in-cheek, though I'm sure that helped. No one wants to hear something more than the thing they're not supposed to -- an artifact of the fundamental depravity of man, some people might say. Me, I'm not convinced.
Michael Moore ungraciously steals from other artists
What?!
Look bunky, the title is homage (since in Moore's view the political atmosphere in the United States is approaching that depicted in the book). No matter what Mr. Bradbury says, you can't copyright titles. (I can't believe that man is upset, by the way -- someone must have got to him.) If you could, the available namespace for new creative works would be impossibly cluttered by now. To call naming your movie similarly to another work in order to make a point about similarity ungraciously stealing from another artist is unconscionable.
But I wouldn't be angry at you, except you made that damnable "limousine liberal" crack. If you think it's possible to get rich off of producing documentaries than you are a schmuck, pardon my Yiddish.
Moore's comes from a working class background, a fact that's obvious to anyone whose seen Roger & Me and don't give me that crap about it being full of lies. His father and grandfather worked for General Motors. He had to sell his home to get Roger & Me made. Take a look for yourself. It's impossible he got into this business expecting to make boatloads of cash; that he's succeeded at it means he should be lauded, not condemned for the crime of success. If you're a documentary filmmaker who somehow makes money you must have a spark of genius in you, just like Rush Limbaugh must have for proving talk radio to be profitable. (Whether I agree with him is something else -- but Rush did made it work.)
Conservatives should be lauding his success, but instead they try to prevent people from seeing his movie, all because Moore doesn't agree with them.
A lot of people have been harping about Moore's self-promotion skills, especially on Plastic.
Moore does seem to have some of that, but I think it's been greatly blown out of proportion. I buy what Moore's saying about what happened with Farenheir 9/11, his story there doesn't see fishy, and I'm glad that the movie is seeing wide release instead of dumped into the garbage bin.
I admit I don't have an excellent understanding of the situation concerning Moore, Disney, Miramax, and the ownership of the film, but as far as I can tell, Disney *owned* the film. They paid for it, and as Moore said, from one source Disney was saying "we're not going to distribute it," while another kept handing them money to get it completed.
What would I do in that circumstance? Shut up, finish the movie, and worry about it afterwards. Funding opportunities don't grow on trees, and complaining too loudly about the discontinuity would probably alert the Disney upper brass that the funding's still going on, and halt it. When you're already into production, you'd like to not have wasted the time you've already put into it.
Just my perspective.
As for hating everyone involved with this... I find that's a more and more common reaction these days, to view everyone with a political motiviation with distrust. I think that shows a certain weariness with the process, and also a recognition that neither "side" has entirely clean hands.
I don't know if I agree with that view, but I can certainly understand it.
I honestly don't see the PSP's multimedia capabilities being all that widely used. Their coice to go to a proprietary media, the UMD, means that people with extensive DVD or CD collections will have to purchase their music and movies all over again if they want to use them in the PSP.
When I heard this, I got a feeling of deja-vu. Let's see, what device have I used recently that felt similarly crippled by this kind of thing....
Then I realized, it was the network Walkman my friend let me borrow, and it's also made by Sony! Why buy a cheap portable MP3 player when you can buy an expensive one that only plays its own format, only works with a very small number of programs, and uses an eeeevil DRM scheme to restrict what you can do with your music?
I realize it's not quite the same thing, but I think it's a little illustrative of the pressure Sony's entertainment divisions are putting on their electronics.
Me too. I greatly disliked the game, its hideous pre-battle load times, and the fact that random enemies were scaled up to match the player's level, which meant if you didn't have someone capable of handling whatever similarly-leveled monsters were generated at that moment you were screwed.
Hard is one thing, but FF Tactics was just annoying. The GBA game is more interesting, in my book.
Re:Teaching? Yes. Applications? Er.. why?
on
High Level Assembly
·
· Score: 1
I haven't read the whole site yet (I got a Spanish paper due in an hour, yikes!), but from what I can tell the idea is to give the user all the advantages of assembly with some of the advantages of compiled languages.
But I think a real argument can be made that one of the reasons pseudoscience has become so popular these days (to the level of informing at least two presidents) is that so much of real science is published in journals that you have to pay big bucks to read.
If you're in college then you probably have free access through your institution, and you can probably afford it if you're working in the field, but there are a number of inquiring laymen, myself among them, who are interested in science and don't want the dumbed-down popular science magazine and newspaper versions.
If a good number of your available T.V. programs, radio programs and print publications feature Creationist speakers (I hesitate to call them thinkers), and you don't see much of the opposition, then it becomes much easier to convince yourself that there's a vast Creationist science movement out there that's about to take the scientific establishment by storm. Some people I know actually believe this.
I don't think this is the only cause of the problem mind you, or even the main cause. And I don't think, if you allow the public access to research, that a majority, or even a large minority, of people will actually read them. But I think the right people will read them, and I hope you won't think me immodest when I say I suspect I may be one of the right people.
I realize it seems like that. And it's possible to go too far in giving them hints as to what's possible.
But there are an infinite number of things that are not possible in a given game, even Deux Ex. If you see a phone, is it logical to assume you can call someone else in the game? If you see a TV, is it logical to assume you could catch the news and maybe get game hints that way? Do the light switches work? Can you shoot out the lights?
Can you break a window, pick up a shard of glass from it, wield that as a weapon, then go into the next room and use it to threaten a guard into telling you where the secret plans are stored?
Can you steal a uniform to seem less suspecious, then pick up a shovel, go outside, start digging a hole, go down about thirty feet, then start tunnelling horizontally in order to escape a prison camp?
A sufficently-creative person, in a rich-enough world, can come up with more possible solutions to a problem than you can count. But people find out early in their game playing careers that the great majority of these solutions just aren't possible.
That's what the developers of Deus Ex are up against. Getting gamers to the point where they are open-minded enough to start trying "weird" solutions again. Once the user knows that windows on walls are recognized as windows, then they may start generalizing that in similar places, like breaking car and plane windows (with decompression as a side effect), sliding glass doors, glass cabinets, and so on.
The idea isn't to give the user a catalog of possible actions, but a feel for how closely the game simulates reality that is consistant enough that they can rely on it.
Yes, you are right on my friend. You saved me the trouble of having to post about this.
For many years windows have been plain scenery. Then they became transparent. Now they're openable and useable, but the gamer typically hasn't read the memo about that.
My opinion: the design is broken. There needs to be something in the game to clue the player in to the fact that windows are now useable. Either force him to go through one earlier in the game, or (to be a bit more subtle about it) show another character with abilities roughly analogous to the player using the window.
To be really subtle, the developers could have something "stuck" in a window that the player wants, that would encourage him to play around with it and discover its openability.
You may have a point there. Does anyone know if the emulation of the secret Zelda game in Animal Crossing is GBA portable? I'm imagine not, since one of the other games in that (Wario's Woods) isn't, and Zelda uses a battery save.
Another reason one might want to pick up one of the later emulated versions of Zelda (on whatever system) even if one already owns the cartridge: by this time, the batteries on the old games are probably all dead.
Slashdot Mirror
Cool, let me know what you think afterwards.
I heard an intersting bit on the radio the other day interviewing a guy who is making a movie called "Michael Moore Hates America" which is due out later this year. In it he tries, in Michael Moore style, to interview Moore himself while documenting the errors, and more importantly, the ommissions in Moore's films.
Is Michael Moore such an institution now that people are making counter films to his point of view?
I like Moore. A lot. I think he's witty, honest, and most importantly, earnest. (It may be true that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but so is the road back.) But dude, this guy has got to realize that he's just adding credibility to Moore's case.
Make a movie against General Motors, the NRA, President Bush, and it's David-versus-Goliath.
Moore is by no means a Goliath. Looking at him, I'd say he has trouble finding the Slim-Fast asile at the A&P.
Please, tell me, what kind of film doesn't address an agenda?
The Chronicles of Riddick. (Which sucks, by the way.)
Yours is my favorite.
Fox calls them homicide bombers, which I think is less accurate because it does not indicate that the bomber was committing suicide on purpose in the process.
Oh, man. They're really doing this?! They actually consider the term "suicide bomber" to be left-biased, and thus feel the need to change it to "homicide bomber," thinking that correcting that percieved bias with a lame, jokey, redundant modifier is more important than clearly presenting the story?
If that's true, then I think two things are obvious:
1. They are tools.
2. Never before has so much Jello been so wrongly not dumped down so many's trousers.
Absolutely true. There is still some debate, however, as to exactly which half.
You are hearby sentenced to the Milwaukee Correctional Institute for Impossible Brilliance. Wow.
Actually, Moore just bought a penthouse in upper Manhattan.
Ah here we go, just what I was waiting for. Tell me where you saw this and I'll be your friend. I want to know. I don't think it'll change my mind about him (insight is insight, regardless of who possesses it), but I'd like a link for this one -- you'll be doing me a favor, and it may change my mind about him yet.
Anyway, later in my post I mentioned that Moore's movies are doing well financially (after a couple of false starts). But it was impossible for him to expect this, you don't say to your folks "Mom, Pop, I'm going to become the first highly-profitable documentary filmmaker," they'll laugh at you and point out you sold your house to finance Roger & Me.
So no, I don't think he's in it for the money, but if you do make money it's reasonable to enjoy it. I'd wait until he's had that apartment a few years, wearing Rich Uncle Pennybags outfits and swimming around his Money Bin, before slapping the big "Fat Cat" sticker on his forehead.
(The first half of that sticker may still be appropriate, though. Just being honest here.)
Big the discreditings of the discrediting are, on the whole, a lot less compelling than the initial discreditings, which leads me to declare Moore the winner, when the points are added up. (If these pages are still as I remember them -- Moore supposedly adds to his as new charges are brought.)
Most poor rock and roll one hit wonders that make it big and successfull forget were they came from and end up tanking.
Ah, but after Roger & Me, Moore didn't have a lot of success except for the books, until Bowling for Columbine. Canadian Bacon did poorly (I'd say deservedly so), Pets or Meat I've only even seen mentioned in two places (one of which I found today), The Big One just followed Moore's book tour, and T.V. Nation and Awful Truth were not profitable.
And the thing about Bowling for Columbine, arguably Moore's first really big success since Roger & Me: The movie is not anti-gun.
It's anti-NRA, it's anti-Charleton Heston, it's (weirdly) anti-Dick Clark, it's anti-nightly news, it's anti-James Nichols, it's anti-atmosphere of fear.
But it shows that Canada has more guns per capita than the United States, and a much lower gun-related murder rate. If anything, it shows that American paranoia is responsible for that more than guns.
Bowling for Columbine is arguably Moore's most centered work to date. People who complain about it lying miss the entire point -- none of the supposed lies that I've heard dispute the essential core of the movie.
It's true that he probably is a little too active in going after Heston, and Dick Clark, but I understand why he did it.
Even if he was an average poor boy in the beguining doesn't mean he isn't a "limousine liberal" now. As a matter of fact, it apears that he is even less then that and mainly a machine schill for the liberals.
There are machine shills all over the place. The right's outnumber Moore at least ten-to-one; talk radio and Fox News prove that handily. And I don't think he is one, even then. I'd say that shills don't fall on their face, creatively, as often, but instead stick to safe projects.
It would apear that apeasing them is what really counts to moore in this day and age.
Success makes alot of people forget who they are/were and often is the failing point that make people who have achived drop back to were they came from.
Granted. But until someone shows me otherwise, I will continue thinking well of Moore.
(Yes, that's a challenge. Someone out there, show me something damning. I want to know where these rumors come from, if there's anything to them.)
The problem is that this time around they don't like any of it. They dispise the roots that help image them into a person admired and successfull that even you become a fanboy.
Oh my friend, I know I'm a fanboy. Do a Slashdot search connecting "MilenCent" to "Nintendo" and you'll have all the proof you want of that. I don't dress up as Link for Halloween, mind you....*
I am not a Michael Moore fanboy however; a fanboy wouldn't complain about Canadian Bacon, The Big One, or the one-note tone of his books. I do admire Bowling for Columbine, however, and I'm looking forward to Farenheit 9/11. I think the man does good work, and whatever flaws they have are a result of his earnestness more than any calculated shill-factor.
* This comment is part of a blatant bid to get "Michael Moore" connected to "The Legend of Zelda" in Google searches. Rupees! Flint, Michigan! Heart Containers! General Motors! Ganondorf! John Ashcroft!
It looks like Fatboy's movie has grossed $21M this weekend.
And yet, I doubt you could say he predicted that.
Furthermore, in Hollywood pay scales 21M is pocketchange, and that's the gross, not the net profit, and less of that money will be converted into money for Moore's production company because of the distribution deal mess.
Mind you, I hope he *does* get rich from making documentaries. I'd love to get rich doing that -- might prove to my battered soul that the world's a good place after all.
Want to live in a fantasy, and keep your kids in a fantasy?
Um.... (quickly shuffling my boxed collectors edition of the Lord of the Rings DVDs in the special box with collectable Gandalf pewter figuring and designer tableware behind by back, and standing in front of the box containing plastic Glamrung for the kids)
No.
I agree that this Disney fiasco is probably at least somewhat invented - or overdramatized - by Moore himself. And this is coming from someone who actually likes his movies, and agrees with (most of) his viewpoints. Let's face it: he knows how to generate publicity.
But Moore has also claimed that no filmmaker wants this kind of publicity. The quote, about Citizens United is probably tongue-in-cheek, though I'm sure that helped. No one wants to hear something more than the thing they're not supposed to -- an artifact of the fundamental depravity of man, some people might say. Me, I'm not convinced.
But also, everyone should be aware of the page in which Moore responds to the people who claim he twisted facts:
Moore's considerably-less-famous response page.
Do you (does anyone, for that matter) *really* think Bush and Hitler are comparable in any way that's remotely important?
Yes.
Michael Moore ungraciously steals from other artists
What?!
Look bunky, the title is homage (since in Moore's view the political atmosphere in the United States is approaching that depicted in the book). No matter what Mr. Bradbury says, you can't copyright titles. (I can't believe that man is upset, by the way -- someone must have got to him.) If you could, the available namespace for new creative works would be impossibly cluttered by now. To call naming your movie similarly to another work in order to make a point about similarity ungraciously stealing from another artist is unconscionable.
But I wouldn't be angry at you, except you made that damnable "limousine liberal" crack. If you think it's possible to get rich off of producing documentaries than you are a schmuck, pardon my Yiddish.
Moore's comes from a working class background, a fact that's obvious to anyone whose seen Roger & Me and don't give me that crap about it being full of lies. His father and grandfather worked for General Motors. He had to sell his home to get Roger & Me made. Take a look for yourself. It's impossible he got into this business expecting to make boatloads of cash; that he's succeeded at it means he should be lauded, not condemned for the crime of success. If you're a documentary filmmaker who somehow makes money you must have a spark of genius in you, just like Rush Limbaugh must have for proving talk radio to be profitable. (Whether I agree with him is something else -- but Rush did made it work.)
Conservatives should be lauding his success, but instead they try to prevent people from seeing his movie, all because Moore doesn't agree with them.
A lot of people have been harping about Moore's self-promotion skills, especially on Plastic.
Moore does seem to have some of that, but I think it's been greatly blown out of proportion. I buy what Moore's saying about what happened with Farenheir 9/11, his story there doesn't see fishy, and I'm glad that the movie is seeing wide release instead of dumped into the garbage bin.
I admit I don't have an excellent understanding of the situation concerning Moore, Disney, Miramax, and the ownership of the film, but as far as I can tell, Disney *owned* the film. They paid for it, and as Moore said, from one source Disney was saying "we're not going to distribute it," while another kept handing them money to get it completed.
What would I do in that circumstance? Shut up, finish the movie, and worry about it afterwards. Funding opportunities don't grow on trees, and complaining too loudly about the discontinuity would probably alert the Disney upper brass that the funding's still going on, and halt it. When you're already into production, you'd like to not have wasted the time you've already put into it.
Just my perspective.
As for hating everyone involved with this... I find that's a more and more common reaction these days, to view everyone with a political motiviation with distrust. I think that shows a certain weariness with the process, and also a recognition that neither "side" has entirely clean hands.
I don't know if I agree with that view, but I can certainly understand it.
Worse. Anyone remember Darkened Skye, or something named similar to that? A fantasy game with a massive Skittles tie-in?
I honestly don't see the PSP's multimedia capabilities being all that widely used. Their coice to go to a proprietary media, the UMD, means that people with extensive DVD or CD collections will have to purchase their music and movies all over again if they want to use them in the PSP.
When I heard this, I got a feeling of deja-vu. Let's see, what device have I used recently that felt similarly crippled by this kind of thing....
Then I realized, it was the network Walkman my friend let me borrow, and it's also made by Sony! Why buy a cheap portable MP3 player when you can buy an expensive one that only plays its own format, only works with a very small number of programs, and uses an eeeevil DRM scheme to restrict what you can do with your music?
I realize it's not quite the same thing, but I think it's a little illustrative of the pressure Sony's entertainment divisions are putting on their electronics.
I liked So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, though I didn't like it as much as the one before it, and that one less than the two before that.
The one I didn't like was Mostly Harmless.
Me too. I greatly disliked the game, its hideous pre-battle load times, and the fact that random enemies were scaled up to match the player's level, which meant if you didn't have someone capable of handling whatever similarly-leveled monsters were generated at that moment you were screwed.
Hard is one thing, but FF Tactics was just annoying. The GBA game is more interesting, in my book.
I haven't read the whole site yet (I got a Spanish paper due in an hour, yikes!), but from what I can tell the idea is to give the user all the advantages of assembly with some of the advantages of compiled languages.
I have to say, I could really groove on this.
But I think a real argument can be made that one of the reasons pseudoscience has become so popular these days (to the level of informing at least two presidents) is that so much of real science is published in journals that you have to pay big bucks to read.
If you're in college then you probably have free access through your institution, and you can probably afford it if you're working in the field, but there are a number of inquiring laymen, myself among them, who are interested in science and don't want the dumbed-down popular science magazine and newspaper versions.
If a good number of your available T.V. programs, radio programs and print publications feature Creationist speakers (I hesitate to call them thinkers), and you don't see much of the opposition, then it becomes much easier to convince yourself that there's a vast Creationist science movement out there that's about to take the scientific establishment by storm. Some people I know actually believe this.
I don't think this is the only cause of the problem mind you, or even the main cause. And I don't think, if you allow the public access to research, that a majority, or even a large minority, of people will actually read them. But I think the right people will read them, and I hope you won't think me immodest when I say I suspect I may be one of the right people.
I realize it seems like that. And it's possible to go too far in giving them hints as to what's possible.
But there are an infinite number of things that are not possible in a given game, even Deux Ex. If you see a phone, is it logical to assume you can call someone else in the game? If you see a TV, is it logical to assume you could catch the news and maybe get game hints that way? Do the light switches work? Can you shoot out the lights?
Can you break a window, pick up a shard of glass from it, wield that as a weapon, then go into the next room and use it to threaten a guard into telling you where the secret plans are stored?
Can you steal a uniform to seem less suspecious, then pick up a shovel, go outside, start digging a hole, go down about thirty feet, then start tunnelling horizontally in order to escape a prison camp?
A sufficently-creative person, in a rich-enough world, can come up with more possible solutions to a problem than you can count. But people find out early in their game playing careers that the great majority of these solutions just aren't possible.
That's what the developers of Deus Ex are up against. Getting gamers to the point where they are open-minded enough to start trying "weird" solutions again. Once the user knows that windows on walls are recognized as windows, then they may start generalizing that in similar places, like breaking car and plane windows (with decompression as a side effect), sliding glass doors, glass cabinets, and so on.
The idea isn't to give the user a catalog of possible actions, but a feel for how closely the game simulates reality that is consistant enough that they can rely on it.
Yes, you are right on my friend. You saved me the trouble of having to post about this.
For many years windows have been plain scenery. Then they became transparent. Now they're openable and useable, but the gamer typically hasn't read the memo about that.
My opinion: the design is broken. There needs to be something in the game to clue the player in to the fact that windows are now useable. Either force him to go through one earlier in the game, or (to be a bit more subtle about it) show another character with abilities roughly analogous to the player using the window.
To be really subtle, the developers could have something "stuck" in a window that the player wants, that would encourage him to play around with it and discover its openability.
You may have a point there. Does anyone know if the emulation of the secret Zelda game in Animal Crossing is GBA portable? I'm imagine not, since one of the other games in that (Wario's Woods) isn't, and Zelda uses a battery save.
Another reason one might want to pick up one of the later emulated versions of Zelda (on whatever system) even if one already owns the cartridge: by this time, the batteries on the old games are probably all dead.