Hey, watch that saw! Well anyway, I still thought Link was cool in Wind Waker. Because it drove home that this was a freaking kid with a sword who knew how to use it. That's what's always made the character work for me, that's the source of Link's coolness. Without that he's just a green-suited elf guy with a princess-saving hobby. And I really thought the fight with Gannondorf at the end drove that home, because he just towers over Link.
In short, and not to sound like some lame-ass movie trailer, it's not how you look but what you do that makes a hero, and that's what I like about it.
Remember the original The Legend of Zelda, that game of amazingly well-hidden secrets, challenging gameplay, and second questing? I do.
Did you even give Wind Waker a chance? I've played through it twice so far, working on a third, and I have to say that it feels a lot more like Zelda than Ocarina of Time does.
To me, the thing that screams ZELDA is secrets. The original game had a few screens that didn't have a cave or staircase, either hidden or in the open, in them, but there weren't many. The idea of looking somewher that looks suspecious, expending a bomb or candle usage to see if something's there, and being pleasantly surprised... more than anything else, that's Zelda, and Wind Waker was the first Zelda game since the original to play upon that.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that no one old enough to play the old Zeldas, when they were new, hates the art style. This is why, contrary to popular perception, the Gamecube is not so much the console for kids (that's the PS2, in my book), but the console for Old Fogey gamers who remember things like gameplay.
In fact, no sub-weapon is needed. The game can be completed with the whip alone, and there are times when it's the best choice to use anyway. And there are certainly times when there are better weapons to have than the holy water.
The cool thing about it (and a large part of the coolness of NES Castlevania's design) is that it's almost a boss specific weapon. If you manage to get it to the end of a level, no fewer than four of the six bosses (Medusa, Mummies, Frank and Grim) can be defeated outright using it. But Holy Water is the worst subweapon, from a perspective of making general progress through the game. Most enemies go down after one hit from any weapon, and are much more mobile than Simon, so reach and speed are more important in most non-boss situations, especially since getting knocked into a pit is always fatal.
Since the non-boss game is hard enough as it is, and because a good number of bosses can also be defeated, with some difficulty, using the Boomerang, I tend to prefer it in general situations. However it's also the rarest weapon, and to use it against some opponents requires you to keep it through whole levels, making you vulnerable to the worst aspect of game -- that it doesn't ask you when you accidently pick up a dagger if you want it or not. That's ruined several promising games of mine....
Well there's an interesting factor at work here....
What some consider to be "loony" others consider to be writing with personality, with style. What some people may consider cherry-picking claims, others might interpret as taking the worst ones and not wanting to be verbose in responding to every tiny little thing. I could have said more in my own message, but these days I'm really conscious about how many words I expend on Slashdot posts. I could go line by line if you wanted, however. Places where the guy responded to Moore using certain methods that I myself have been known to use, in a joking manner, but that I'm leaning away from using these days.
It may just be my own take, but Moore strikes me as more reputable, at least than this guy. I dunno, maybe someone could claim that's just the air of authenticity presented by being on the big screen, but on the other hand considering the difficulty in getting up there in the first place, maybe that's justifiable.
P.S. Interesting, unrelated thing. I wrote an E2 writeup a couple of years ago with the same title as your sig....
Reading through the rebuttal-rebuttal, I'm not impressed. The guy seems to think that Moore is responding to him personally, when reading Moore's page makes it clear he's responding to people in general, so naturally he wouldn't have responded to everything this particular person thinks is questionable.
Further, the tone in the page strikes me as, frankly, quibbling and smarmy. It strikes my loony-senses a lot harder than the nebulous "allegations" Moore responded to the first time.
Mind you, I've produced some quibbling, smarmy and loony writing myself, just check my blog linked above for all the evidence you need of that, heh.
Since I get the sense that some people would consider me one of the snobs to which these messages refer, I'll respond.
*YES*, there were plenty of awful games back in the old days, too. The Atari 2600 died as a system, not because of advancing technology, but because of the flood of awful games for it. Nintendo started their infamous licencing plan, not just as a way to control the market for their system and thus make a pile of cash, but also to avoid the situation where hundreds of third-party companies could make horrendous games for their system and damage its reputation. Even so, there was still Color Dreams and the other unlicenced 3rd party developers, and most (but not all - check out Krazy Kreatures) of their games were not worth the silicon they were stamped on.
Old arcade games, likewise, had their share of awful titles. And some older games have game play that doesn't hold up to today's standards. (I actually consider Donkey Kong to be one of these.)
But it's still a fact that many recent games don't offer much more over the games upon which they were based than upgraded graphics. I, and I suspect most of the people who are being slammed here, argue that improved graphics and sound are nice, but not enough in themselves.
Furthermore, think about the number of old games that are still remembered today. There are actually a *lot* of them, most released in a surprisingly short period of time. Space Invaders, the first extremely popular game, was released in 1978. Pac-Man was released in 1981. The Crash was late 83/early 84. That's just six years, and arcades got Robotron, Defender & Stargate, Joust, Asteroids & Asteroids Deluxe, Tempest, Donkey Kong & Jr, Frogger, Sinistar, Battlezone, Pac-Man & Ms. & Super, Centipede & Millipede, Pole Position, Tron, Q*Bert, Star Wars, and a good number of games I've neglected. Look at arcades today, hell I'll even let you include consoles and PCs, and try to argue there's a similar amount of innovation.
Further, all of these games are substantively different from each other. Even most obvious sequels here, the Pac-Man trilogy, had enough differences that a player good at one might not be at one of the others: Ms. Pac-Man was resistant to patterns, and Super Pac-Man had the keys/doors play mechanic that allowed the player's actions to change the maze.
Now there *were* blatant-rip-offs in those days. There were many Pac-Man clones produced, most inferior to the original game and some that were basically the original game with hacked graphics. Many of these were bootlegs. And there were games that were released with minor graphics and gameplay changes, like Super Zaxxon.
But in general, it was a lot easier then to make a game with a unique play mechanic, try to sell it and succeed than it is now. That's why old arcade and console games get released in 24-packs for $20 these days and sell pretty well. Nostalgia is certainly a factor, but it helps that the games stand up.
Our apartment often has other noises going on (like conversations in the room) that make it difficult to concentrate on his growls. I've heard that the Dragon Kick will hit him out of his whirlwind attack, that may also be useful. And after getting him dizzy after the tornado and hitting him, he runs off and makes one punch before jumping back into the lava. The story goes that, if you manage to hit him with a dragon kick before he jumps back in, he resumes the whirlwind and thus gives you a chance at inflicting more damage. I haven't tested any of these things yet.
The ninja robots, aka Cromartys, are very annoying because they attack four times in a row, and in Ultra-V only the first attack is telegraphed. I try to be in Slow for the second -- if you're paying attention, you can just tell when it's low or high from the attack animation, and after than one the other two are the reverse of the one before it.
But more often, I'll try to get behind him while he's punching and Slow+Z+Punch. Or start Rock-On against a lesser for and use that to get rid of any lurking Cromartys. Always abuse this.
It's also worth noting that the worse Cromarty area, the train section of Level 5, can also be the easiest, because cagey handling of the red bottles can turn almost that entire section into one gigantic Rock-On combo. I've gotten almost 100,000 points on one play through that area alone, though 20,000-30,000 is usually a more realistic target.
Where were you a month ago, when my system restore disks CDs suddenly developed an unrecoverable error on the *second* disk to work (and thus I didn't find out about it until it was too late to abort the restore!) and thus couldn't put Windows XP back on my machine?
While I've found another solution since then, I actually got on good terms with Linux during that time. It'll be useful in the future, when there's finally enough software make the big switch....
I remember playing that game on the Genesis under the rather goofy title "Fatal Rewind." I enjoyed it until the level with the arbitrary, invisible skeletons in the background that appeared and instantly killed you if you went the wrong way. A good example of the WRONG way to increase difficulty!
I've recently beaten it on V-Rated, and I'm approaching the fight with Fire Leo on Ultra-V (where you get no skull markers warning you where to dodge!), perhaps the hardest task in the game.
I REALLY hate to say this, but my favorite parts of Mario Sunshine are the Void Levels.
I'm not even sure why. There is certainly a good amount of creativity in them. The best has got to be the one that's just a long chain of big, rotating wooden blocks, hanging in space. Makes spectators freak out, but once you get used to it it's not really that bad.
Of course, Sunshine's not a shooter. But Metroid Prime is full of jumping puzzles, yet they aren't nearly as annoying, for a simple reason: no fall is instantly fatal in that game.
Hmmm. If that's a recommendation I might try it out, I've been looking for another Roguelike to play lately that isn't ADOM or Angband (which both bug me, for different reaspons).
Not long ago there seemed to be like two dozen promising, up-and-coming Roguelikes. (Including, it must be added, my own Roguelike-like module for Neverwinter Nights.) What happened to them all?
Well, if you're playing a Valk and are engraving Elbereth....
Another great thing about Nethack is that the different characters, since about 3.2 when the weapona and magic skill systems made it into the game, playing different characters can be quite different experiences -- a Wizard has a much different method of early survival than a Valkyrie or Barbarian, and a Tourist has to play in a way counter to every other class. Also, the equipment you find tends to lend each play its own unique flavor.
On the other hand, later on when you've got your ascension kit mostly complete, and are slogging through the mazes, the different character experiences become a lot more similar, and Nethack gets really annoying. The game's fallen a bit in my estimation because of that.
I beat Rygar, without help, from the first time I played it through to the end, in three hours. A big aid was quickly discovering which enemies to kill gave disproportionately large amounts of experience (the robots in the sky world). Overall, I wasn't impressed -- I had cut my teeth on that kind of game on Metroid.
Anyway, you could continue in Rygar -- you just had to press the Start button from the title screen after Game Over.
But the original Castlevania... that's a keeper. I've beaten it on one credit, but that doesn't happen too often. Your comments on the bosses are all accurate, all I'd add is:
I haven't tested this out, but once or twice I've found Frank incredibly easy when he shouldn't have been. It *might* be when you manage to hit both Igor (bouncing around the room) and Frank with the same whip strike. Research is required here. Anyway, if you have the holy water Frank's a cinch.
And the thing about Dracula is, the Boomerang (available before the fight) makes both his first and second forms a challenge. The Holy Water (available in the boss room itself) makes his first form much harder, but his second a snap.
I found myself frustrated at this, and got to wondering: when do we get a racing game with a random track generator?
F-Zero X, the version of the venerable high-speed racing series for N64, had such a generator in it's secret "X Cup", which unfortunately was difficult to unlock because F-Zero X is one of those games that epitomizes extreme difficulty.
F-Zero GX is even harder -- it has a "story mode" that is just about the hardest thing I've ever seen. It was programmed by the Super Monkey Ball people, and it shows.
And Super Monkey Ball! Getting to the secret ultra-tough Master levels (which requires getting through 50 super-tough Expert levels without continuing, then getting through 10 hyper-tough Expert Extra levels also without continuing) may be the hardest of all video game challenges. My record is 37 levels without continuing.
Yes, Robotron is classic difficulty. Extremely hard, but ultimately masterable. My high score on default settings is over 500k, but most of the time I average around 150-200k. It's taken a lot of practice to get to even that level.
Williams used to be the king of this. Have you ever played Defender or Stargate (also known as "Defender II")? I very recently had my first 100k game on Stargate, it's *brutal* in difficulty and there certainly are times when there is just no way to survive. And yet, people have rolled the score counters of both games, multiple times. I just don't see how they do it, and I'm not a bad gamer if I say so myself.
I think the reason these games aren't "too hard" has less to do with difficulty, but that with tons of practice the difficulty is surmountable, and more importantly, the games themselves are interesting enough to keep you playing despite it.
Seconded, on Diddy Kong Racing, one of those games I've been sufficently obsessed by to beat (both difficulty levels), but will never play again. It was just too hard.
But these days I think many games err on the side of being too easy. Ocarina of Time I've beaten, fairly easily until the last boss, without collecting a single heart piece or container, Majora's Mask doesn't even kill you if you run out of hearts, and Wind Waker wasn't much harder that OoT. All of those games could have used, in my opinion, a bit more challenge, but on the other hand I've seen newbie players have trouble with Wind Waker, mostly because they're more afraid of the boss fights than they need to be.
I guess the question I have about your view here is: so?
If doing something makes you feel better about yourself, then that's a wholly internal process. Why do you feel better about yourself when you do good for someone else? Why, it's because you've helped them out. That's the only personal benefit, and it's fairly nebulous. (And if feeling good about himself is all that this guy cared for, well, he could get it a lot more reliably from your friendly neighborhood dope peddler.)
It doesn't make sense to say we shouldn't admire someone because they'll feel better about themselves for doing it. It's still an admirable act. Looked at from your perspective, the only way you could do something good for anyone selflessly is by unknowing accident.
Sheesh, it's amazing that no one has remarked upon the important thing about this guy, which is that he's freaking cool! This is exactly the kind of thing I'd like to do if I had the money and time! Good ol' selflessness and wonder and doing good for your fellow man! Just because!
What a nifty idea, wow. And I liked his analogy too, which I saw as more of a humor thing than a real analogy anyway.
But sending zip archives that don't contain executables is okay. That'll probably include your web page updates.
Indeed, people have to be careful with limiting archives, since the StarOffice/OpenOffice file format is little more than a bunch of XML files (and maybe some others, depending on what's embedded in the document) collected in a zip archive.
I think Gmail has the potential to become a really strong tool against spam, because Gmail can pool the opinions of millions of users as to whether messages are spam or not. If the same message gets sent to thousands of users that's a good first strike against it (though it could just be a popular mailing list), but if most of them consider it spam I'd take advantage of that information.
So I wouldn't be surprised if everyone's filters influenced others' to some degree.
Heh, cool. Looking at the time, I'm wondering, How do you find the time and energy to do all this, with school/friends/parents/pimples/etc.?
Anyway, I think I've proven that the prodigy/15/webhost combo is not enough for me -- or more accurately it's too much, as I dismissed their requests out of hand.
Furthermore, Google's invitation program is specifically for friends, people I know pretty well. There exist companies that I would have no compunction in trying to game their systems in order to get, say, a second e-mail account, but Google isn't one of them. If they play fair by me then by Jove I'll play fair by them.
And let's not forget!: I've already used both of my invitations.
Yes, I think I've already said this somewhere in these comments (I can't find it right now), but I admit it's impossible for Google to completely eradicate the sending of file attachments. But they can make it sufficently hard that "normal" users won't be able to take advantage of it for purposes like hosting a warez repository.
Scrambling with a PGP-like program, passwordifying an archive, even simple XORing can force Google's megacomputer to spend so much time looking on each attachment as to make performance suffer for everyone else.
But what if Google decides to go a different route? Instead of letting all attachments go through except these, what if they decided to only allow recognizable attachments? They would look at the information at the beginning of the file to determine what type it is instead of relying on the extension, of course.
I think that'd be a shame, and it wouldn't stamp-out EXE hosting (since you can get around it by uuencoding and pasting into a Word document, or even split it up across multiple Word documents), but it could work "good enough."
Yeah, but if someone really wanted to they could recognize EXEs from the beginning of their data, they all contain a fairly similar header. I don't know if Gmail looks inside attachments as part of its search and ad service functionality, but if they do it seems likely they could tie into that to catch executables.
The AC respondent is right however, in that a simple XOR could make it quite a bit harder for Google to detect EXEs. Certainly not insurmountable, mind you, but harder. More expensive computationally.
Yeah, or use some other archival format than zip, or even create something new. In fact, I'm pretty sure I was able to mail myself a zipped executable despite what the Google staff person said, though I didn't think much of it when I did it, so maybe it didn't actually work and I just failed to notice.
In any case, I'm sure it's impossible to completely stamp out people using GMail as a file repository, and I'm sure they realize that. But they can put it out of the reach of "typical" users, thwart people seeking to automate it, make people split files up into multiple parts to get around the attachment limit, force them to use special tools to decode data, etc.
Me, I'm a bit annoyed I can't send executables, but it's no biggie. I can always use my web spaces' mail server for that kind of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, watch that saw! Well anyway, I still thought Link was cool in Wind Waker. Because it drove home that this was a freaking kid with a sword who knew how to use it. That's what's always made the character work for me, that's the source of Link's coolness. Without that he's just a green-suited elf guy with a princess-saving hobby. And I really thought the fight with Gannondorf at the end drove that home, because he just towers over Link.
In short, and not to sound like some lame-ass movie trailer, it's not how you look but what you do that makes a hero, and that's what I like about it.
Oh for the love of....
Remember the original The Legend of Zelda, that game of amazingly well-hidden secrets, challenging gameplay, and second questing? I do.
Did you even give Wind Waker a chance? I've played through it twice so far, working on a third, and I have to say that it feels a lot more like Zelda than Ocarina of Time does.
To me, the thing that screams ZELDA is secrets. The original game had a few screens that didn't have a cave or staircase, either hidden or in the open, in them, but there weren't many. The idea of looking somewher that looks suspecious, expending a bomb or candle usage to see if something's there, and being pleasantly surprised... more than anything else, that's
Zelda, and Wind Waker was the first Zelda game since the original to play upon that.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that no one old enough to play the old Zeldas, when they were new, hates the art style. This is why, contrary to popular perception, the Gamecube is not so much the console for kids (that's the PS2, in my book), but the console for Old Fogey gamers who remember things like gameplay.
And dammit I L-I-K-E the art style!
In fact, no sub-weapon is needed. The game can be completed with the whip alone, and there are times when it's the best choice to use anyway. And there are certainly times when there are better weapons to have than the holy water.
The cool thing about it (and a large part of the coolness of NES Castlevania's design) is that it's almost a boss specific weapon. If you manage to get it to the end of a level, no fewer than four of the six bosses (Medusa, Mummies, Frank and Grim) can be defeated outright using it. But Holy Water is the worst subweapon, from a perspective of making general progress through the game. Most enemies go down after one hit from any weapon, and are much more mobile than Simon, so reach and speed are more important in most non-boss situations, especially since getting knocked into a pit is always fatal.
Since the non-boss game is hard enough as it is, and because a good number of bosses can also be defeated, with some difficulty, using the Boomerang, I tend to prefer it in general situations. However it's also the rarest weapon, and to use it against some opponents requires you to keep it through whole levels, making you vulnerable to the worst aspect of game -- that it doesn't ask you when you accidently pick up a dagger if you want it or not. That's ruined several promising games of mine....
Well there's an interesting factor at work here....
What some consider to be "loony" others consider to be writing with personality, with style. What some people may consider cherry-picking claims, others might interpret as taking the worst ones and not wanting to be verbose in responding to every tiny little thing. I could have said more in my own message, but these days I'm really conscious about how many words I expend on Slashdot posts. I could go line by line if you wanted, however. Places where the guy responded to Moore using certain methods that I myself have been known to use, in a joking manner, but that I'm leaning away from using these days.
It may just be my own take, but Moore strikes me as more reputable, at least than this guy. I dunno, maybe someone could claim that's just the air of authenticity presented by being on the big screen, but on the other hand considering the difficulty in getting up there in the first place, maybe that's justifiable.
P.S. Interesting, unrelated thing. I wrote an E2 writeup a couple of years ago with the same title as your sig....
Reading through the rebuttal-rebuttal, I'm not impressed. The guy seems to think that Moore is responding to him personally, when reading Moore's page makes it clear he's responding to people in general, so naturally he wouldn't have responded to everything this particular person thinks is questionable.
Further, the tone in the page strikes me as, frankly, quibbling and smarmy. It strikes my loony-senses a lot harder than the nebulous "allegations" Moore responded to the first time.
Mind you, I've produced some quibbling, smarmy and loony writing myself, just check my blog linked above for all the evidence you need of that, heh.
Since I get the sense that some people would consider me one of the snobs to which these messages refer, I'll respond.
*YES*, there were plenty of awful games back in the old days, too. The Atari 2600 died as a system, not because of advancing technology, but because of the flood of awful games for it. Nintendo started their infamous licencing plan, not just as a way to control the market for their system and thus make a pile of cash, but also to avoid the situation where hundreds of third-party companies could make horrendous games for their system and damage its reputation. Even so, there was still Color Dreams and the other unlicenced 3rd party developers, and most (but not all - check out Krazy Kreatures) of their games were not worth the silicon they were stamped on.
Old arcade games, likewise, had their share of awful titles. And some older games have game play that doesn't hold up to today's standards. (I actually consider Donkey Kong to be one of these.)
But it's still a fact that many recent games don't offer much more over the games upon which they were based than upgraded graphics. I, and I suspect most of the people who are being slammed here, argue that improved graphics and sound are nice, but not enough in themselves.
Furthermore, think about the number of old games that are still remembered today. There are actually a *lot* of them, most released in a surprisingly short period of time. Space Invaders, the first extremely popular game, was released in 1978. Pac-Man was released in 1981. The Crash was late 83/early 84. That's just six years, and arcades got Robotron, Defender & Stargate, Joust, Asteroids & Asteroids Deluxe, Tempest, Donkey Kong & Jr, Frogger, Sinistar, Battlezone, Pac-Man & Ms. & Super, Centipede & Millipede, Pole Position, Tron, Q*Bert, Star Wars, and a good number of games I've neglected. Look at arcades today, hell I'll even let you include consoles and PCs, and try to argue there's a similar amount of innovation.
Further, all of these games are substantively different from each other. Even most obvious sequels here, the Pac-Man trilogy, had enough differences that a player good at one might not be at one of the others: Ms. Pac-Man was resistant to patterns, and Super Pac-Man had the keys/doors play mechanic that allowed the player's actions to change the maze.
Now there *were* blatant-rip-offs in those days. There were many Pac-Man clones produced, most inferior to the original game and some that were basically the original game with hacked graphics. Many of these were bootlegs. And there were games that were released with minor graphics and gameplay changes, like Super Zaxxon.
But in general, it was a lot easier then to make a game with a unique play mechanic, try to sell it and succeed than it is now. That's why old arcade and console games get released in 24-packs for $20 these days and sell pretty well. Nostalgia is certainly a factor, but it helps that the games stand up.
Our apartment often has other noises going on (like conversations in the room) that make it difficult to concentrate on his growls. I've heard that the Dragon Kick will hit him out of his whirlwind attack, that may also be useful. And after getting him dizzy after the tornado and hitting him, he runs off and makes one punch before jumping back into the lava. The story goes that, if you manage to hit him with a dragon kick before he jumps back in, he resumes the whirlwind and thus gives you a chance at inflicting more damage. I haven't tested any of these things yet.
The ninja robots, aka Cromartys, are very annoying because they attack four times in a row, and in Ultra-V only the first attack is telegraphed. I try to be in Slow for the second -- if you're paying attention, you can just tell when it's low or high from the attack animation, and after than one the other two are the reverse of the one before it.
But more often, I'll try to get behind him while he's punching and Slow+Z+Punch. Or start Rock-On against a lesser for and use that to get rid of any lurking Cromartys. Always abuse this.
It's also worth noting that the worse Cromarty area, the train section of Level 5, can also be the easiest, because cagey handling of the red bottles can turn almost that entire section into one gigantic Rock-On combo. I've gotten almost 100,000 points on one play through that area alone, though 20,000-30,000 is usually a more realistic target.
Where were you a month ago, when my system restore disks CDs suddenly developed an unrecoverable error on the *second* disk to work (and thus I didn't find out about it until it was too late to abort the restore!) and thus couldn't put Windows XP back on my machine?
While I've found another solution since then, I actually got on good terms with Linux during that time. It'll be useful in the future, when there's finally enough software make the big switch....
I remember playing that game on the Genesis under the rather goofy title "Fatal Rewind." I enjoyed it until the level with the arbitrary, invisible skeletons in the background that appeared and instantly killed you if you went the wrong way. A good example of the WRONG way to increase difficulty!
I've recently beaten it on V-Rated, and I'm approaching the fight with Fire Leo on Ultra-V (where you get no skull markers warning you where to dodge!), perhaps the hardest task in the game.
I'm not looking forward to it.
Wellll....
I REALLY hate to say this, but my favorite parts of Mario Sunshine are the Void Levels.
I'm not even sure why. There is certainly a good amount of creativity in them. The best has got to be the one that's just a long chain of big, rotating wooden blocks, hanging in space. Makes spectators freak out, but once you get used to it it's not really that bad.
Of course, Sunshine's not a shooter. But Metroid Prime is full of jumping puzzles, yet they aren't nearly as annoying, for a simple reason: no fall is instantly fatal in that game.
Hmmm. If that's a recommendation I might try it out, I've been looking for another Roguelike to play lately that isn't ADOM or Angband (which both bug me, for different reaspons).
Not long ago there seemed to be like two dozen promising, up-and-coming Roguelikes. (Including, it must be added, my own Roguelike-like module for Neverwinter Nights.) What happened to them all?
Well, if you're playing a Valk and are engraving Elbereth....
Another great thing about Nethack is that the different characters, since about 3.2 when the weapona and magic skill systems made it into the game, playing different characters can be quite different experiences -- a Wizard has a much different method of early survival than a Valkyrie or Barbarian, and a Tourist has to play in a way counter to every other class. Also, the equipment you find tends to lend each play its own unique flavor.
On the other hand, later on when you've got your ascension kit mostly complete, and are slogging through the mazes, the different character experiences become a lot more similar, and Nethack gets really annoying. The game's fallen a bit in my estimation because of that.
I beat Rygar, without help, from the first time I played it through to the end, in three hours. A big aid was quickly discovering which enemies to kill gave disproportionately large amounts of experience (the robots in the sky world). Overall, I wasn't impressed -- I had cut my teeth on that kind of game on Metroid.
Anyway, you could continue in Rygar -- you just had to press the Start button from the title screen after Game Over.
But the original Castlevania... that's a keeper. I've beaten it on one credit, but that doesn't happen too often. Your comments on the bosses are all accurate, all I'd add is:
I haven't tested this out, but once or twice I've found Frank incredibly easy when he shouldn't have been. It *might* be when you manage to hit both Igor (bouncing around the room) and Frank with the same whip strike. Research is required here. Anyway, if you have the holy water Frank's a cinch.
And the thing about Dracula is, the Boomerang (available before the fight) makes both his first and second forms a challenge. The Holy Water (available in the boss room itself) makes his first form much harder, but his second a snap.
I found myself frustrated at this, and got to wondering: when do we get a racing game with a random track generator?
F-Zero X, the version of the venerable high-speed racing series for N64, had such a generator in it's secret "X Cup", which unfortunately was difficult to unlock because F-Zero X is one of those games that epitomizes extreme difficulty.
F-Zero GX is even harder -- it has a "story mode" that is just about the hardest thing I've ever seen. It was programmed by the Super Monkey Ball people, and it shows.
And Super Monkey Ball! Getting to the secret ultra-tough Master levels (which requires getting through 50 super-tough Expert levels without continuing, then getting through 10 hyper-tough Expert Extra levels also without continuing) may be the hardest of all video game challenges. My record is 37 levels without continuing.
But I'll get it someday!!
Yes, Robotron is classic difficulty. Extremely hard, but ultimately masterable. My high score on default settings is over 500k, but most of the time I average around 150-200k. It's taken a lot of practice to get to even that level.
Williams used to be the king of this. Have you ever played Defender or Stargate (also known as "Defender II")? I very recently had my first 100k game on Stargate, it's *brutal* in difficulty and there certainly are times when there is just no way to survive. And yet, people have rolled the score counters of both games, multiple times. I just don't see how they do it, and I'm not a bad gamer if I say so myself.
I think the reason these games aren't "too hard" has less to do with difficulty, but that with tons of practice the difficulty is surmountable, and more importantly, the games themselves are interesting enough to keep you playing despite it.
Seconded, on Diddy Kong Racing, one of those games I've been sufficently obsessed by to beat (both difficulty levels), but will never play again. It was just too hard.
But these days I think many games err on the side of being too easy. Ocarina of Time I've beaten, fairly easily until the last boss, without collecting a single heart piece or container, Majora's Mask doesn't even kill you if you run out of hearts, and Wind Waker wasn't much harder that OoT. All of those games could have used, in my opinion, a bit more challenge, but on the other hand I've seen newbie players have trouble with Wind Waker, mostly because they're more afraid of the boss fights than they need to be.
I guess the question I have about your view here is: so?
If doing something makes you feel better about yourself, then that's a wholly internal process. Why do you feel better about yourself when you do good for someone else? Why, it's because you've helped them out. That's the only personal benefit, and it's fairly nebulous. (And if feeling good about himself is all that this guy cared for, well, he could get it a lot more reliably from your friendly neighborhood dope peddler.)
It doesn't make sense to say we shouldn't admire someone because they'll feel better about themselves for doing it. It's still an admirable act. Looked at from your perspective, the only way you could do something good for anyone selflessly is by unknowing accident.
Sheesh, it's amazing that no one has remarked upon the important thing about this guy, which is that he's freaking cool! This is exactly the kind of thing I'd like to do if I had the money and time! Good ol' selflessness and wonder and doing good for your fellow man! Just because!
What a nifty idea, wow. And I liked his analogy too, which I saw as more of a humor thing than a real analogy anyway.
But sending zip archives that don't contain executables is okay. That'll probably include your web page updates.
Indeed, people have to be careful with limiting archives, since the StarOffice/OpenOffice file format is little more than a bunch of XML files (and maybe some others, depending on what's embedded in the document) collected in a zip archive.
- John Harris
I think Gmail has the potential to become a really strong tool against spam, because Gmail can pool the opinions of millions of users as to whether messages are spam or not. If the same message gets sent to thousands of users that's a good first strike against it (though it could just be a popular mailing list), but if most of them consider it spam I'd take advantage of that information.
So I wouldn't be surprised if everyone's filters influenced others' to some degree.
Heh, cool. Looking at the time, I'm wondering, How do you find the time and energy to do all this, with school/friends/parents/pimples/etc.?
Anyway, I think I've proven that the prodigy/15/webhost combo is not enough for me -- or more accurately it's too much, as I dismissed their requests out of hand.
Furthermore, Google's invitation program is specifically for friends, people I know pretty well. There exist companies that I would have no compunction in trying to game their systems in order to get, say, a second e-mail account, but Google isn't one of them. If they play fair by me then by Jove I'll play fair by them.
And let's not forget!: I've already used both of my invitations.
Yes, I think I've already said this somewhere in these comments (I can't find it right now), but I admit it's impossible for Google to completely eradicate the sending of file attachments. But they can make it sufficently hard that "normal" users won't be able to take advantage of it for purposes like hosting a warez repository.
Scrambling with a PGP-like program, passwordifying an archive, even simple XORing can force Google's megacomputer to spend so much time looking on each attachment as to make performance suffer for everyone else.
But what if Google decides to go a different route? Instead of letting all attachments go through except these, what if they decided to only allow recognizable attachments? They would look at the information at the beginning of the file to determine what type it is instead of relying on the extension, of course.
I think that'd be a shame, and it wouldn't stamp-out EXE hosting (since you can get around it by uuencoding and pasting into a Word document, or even split it up across multiple Word documents), but it could work "good enough."
Yeah, but if someone really wanted to they could recognize EXEs from the beginning of their data, they all contain a fairly similar header. I don't know if Gmail looks inside attachments as part of its search and ad service functionality, but if they do it seems likely they could tie into that to catch executables.
The AC respondent is right however, in that a simple XOR could make it quite a bit harder for Google to detect EXEs. Certainly not insurmountable, mind you, but harder. More expensive computationally.
Yeah, or use some other archival format than zip, or even create something new. In fact, I'm pretty sure I was able to mail myself a zipped executable despite what the Google staff person said, though I didn't think much of it when I did it, so maybe it didn't actually work and I just failed to notice.
In any case, I'm sure it's impossible to completely stamp out people using GMail as a file repository, and I'm sure they realize that. But they can put it out of the reach of "typical" users, thwart people seeking to automate it, make people split files up into multiple parts to get around the attachment limit, force them to use special tools to decode data, etc.
Me, I'm a bit annoyed I can't send executables, but it's no biggie. I can always use my web spaces' mail server for that kind of thing.