However, *I* am not on broadband, and have no opportunity to be on broadband in the near future, so I hate your argument, very much. As will the other 82% of dial-up users.
(Heh, not trying to dis ya, it's just human nature to dislike be denied experiences like this.)
again, by Will Harvey (well, The Immortal was by Sandbox Productions, I think it was.)
I was of comparable age (very young) at that time he did the C64 game, so I've always kind of looked upon Will Harvey as a kind of patron saint of kid programmers.
I'd love to ask him how the hell you're suppose to beat the secret level in Electronic Arts' versions of Marble Madness.
Oh, tell me about it! Donkey Kong, for its strengths, is NOT the best classic arcade game! Most of the people voting on this have never even heard of Tempest or Robotron, and only know of Donkey Kong because it's by Miyamoto. Not that he doesn't make great games, but let's face it, he was just learning his craft back then. Practically every poll on the list has some tragic wrongness to it. It saddens me greatly to see almighty Rampart's fortunes so abysmally low.
This is one of the reasons I never picked up a PS2, and sold my X-Box. Though to be fair, there aren't a lot of Gamecube games I'm playing right now.
I was thinking about this the other day, about the essential sameness of gaming today. In the old days people seemed to start with a concept (maze game with chasing antagonists - Pac-Man, obstacle course with limited means of avoiding obstacles - Donkey Kong, shooting game involving learning the unique movement styles of each type of opponent - Centipede and especially Millipede). Now, they just simulate reality as best they can, plop you down into a GenericPerson (tm) with a gun, and give you targets.
That worked for me back when I played Doom, and Goldeneye gave it a fresh coat of paint for me, but now... eh. I like the idea behind Deus Ex, the idea of having many ways to accomplish tasks, there's something about that which strikes me as very *right*, but I don't have the time to invest into learning yet another FPS game.
What I have been playing, for my Gamecube, has been Viewtiful Joe (absolutely cool) and Midway Arcade Treasures (24 easy-to-learn yet challenging games, including Rampart, on which I've raved far, far too much here) On GBA I've spent some time with the new Metroid (much like the old Metroid) and Fire Emblem. But I'm on something of a gaming binge right now, and before Viewtiful Joe I hardly played anything for weeks.
I guess the difference between then and now is, simply, the games that are available. I go to stores looking for something to buy and walk away disappointed.
I haven't played a computer game since Neverwinter Nights, and there for me the "game" was really just module creation, but I do have to admit that funky SimCity add-on for The Sims has my interest piqued.
Well, look at it this way. Who is the more imaginative, the various prop department stiffs who create models, armor, costumes, etc., or the author who created the work upon which they elaborate?
I still take issue with the word professional, as it has been applied to "dreaming." It smacks, to me, of Disney-speak. (I've also never been able to trust the word "imagineering." It rummaged through my wallet, ran off with my girlfriend, poured sugar in my gas tank.)
And I would say being creative is intrinsically not just like any other skill. Although you can get better at it, unlike, say, producing a craft, cooking a meal, etc., you can never be reasonably certain of success in it, no matter how good you get. It is intrinsically chaotic, there is an inescapable random component in creativity. This is why many authors, even exceedingly talented ones, continually feel insecure about their work, because you're only ever as good as your next book, and just because your last twelve were great doesn't mean number thirteen will likewise be so.
Indeed, I'd say it's rather easy for a prolific creator to run out of ideas unless you put effort into maintaining your creative ecology. In other words, you can get worse at creating with practice.
Heh, you may not believe this, but I thought for a few seconds before using the word "zany," which is particularly devalued in our culture, having been used to describe plenty of things which are purported to be funny but aren't. I decided to use it anyway because I rather like it, even if it tends to bring to mind thousands of half-wit prop comics.
They did not best my own personal imagination. Some (but by no means all) of the reasons:
1. A movie has to be everything to all people, and this necessitates many trade-offs. My hypothetical best story is different from yours, and there are more people out there who would be happy with some lasers and rocket engines than would be happy Adams' superlative wit, just like there were more people who thought the Scouring of the Shire was an unnecessary add-on to the story than thought, like the author did, that it was an essential closing. With Lord of the Rings, this means that a whole bunch of people now consider these actors to be the definitive visual representations of these actors, and despite the fact that I generally liked the movies, I think that's a great shame.
2. The modifier "professional" implies that someone can dream authoritatively. They cannot. In fact, I have a pretty low opinion of these people, for missing forests due to trees, looking at fine details while missing points. The people in the industry who most often connect words like "dream" with words like "profit" are Disney themselves, and despite a number of animated features, these days they tend to get it wrong more often than right.
3. A movie is the work of hundreds of people, but some people are more important than others. Peter Jackson was much more important to the production than all the costume designers put together. If Jackson messes up, no one can make up for that deficiency.
And a special case for this production:
We're talking about DOUGLAS NOEL FREAKING ADAMS, for heaven's sake, a man I have always imagined as wit personified. These are not ordinary stories. I have never read anything else that zany and inventive, and I have no idea how the people making it can believe they can do it justice. Is Disney going to leave in Oolon Colluphid's philosophy books? Eccentricia Gallumbits? "Oh no, not again?"
On a lesser, but related, note, I've always been more taken with the awesome, chest-bursting humor of Hitchhiker's than the story itself, which meanders from place to place, not always with a good reason. I think this fits the story nicely, very nicely indeed in fact, but I can't help but think that Disney will try to "improve" it. Doing so may well damage the humor.
Anyway, sorry to disagree, sometimes the movie *is* better than the novel but I think this time it's impossible.
I really like the idea that a given game situation may be different between plays, either randomly, due to conscious player actions, due to his playing skill, or from selectable options. That's the entire idea behind Roguelikes. There are lots and lots of ways to do this that are ignored by most developers. (Perhaps because it'd hurt the market for hint books, bleah.)
But there are many things wrong with auto-adjusting difficulty as described in the article. It's open to player abuse, for one thing.
It also makes the game fall victim to what I call Mario Kart syndrome. Mario Kart 64 (not as much Double Dash) had an amazingly cheap AI for the other drivers, on the harder difficulties, that made it impossible to stay in first place for longer than a short period of time. If you wanted to get first place consistantly, you couldn't do it by trying to get and stay in first place the whole race. You were better off staying back a little, picking up attack items and taking him down just before the finish line. That was what I hated most about it, and why we never played the race mode past about a week with the game. I hate the idea that the player is penalized for doing well. He needs to gain some advantage, or at least bonus, recognizing his achievement.
One more thing: auto-adjusting difficulty negates one of the traditional purposes of a video game, namely, to test your skill. Did you get 10 million points by the end merely because you had problems in the first level?
StarFox's difficult doesn't automatically adjust, instead you complete missions to "earn" harder levels. However, you can still go back and play the easier ones even if you've unlocked the hard ones, you just aren't forced to. In fact, to get a really good score I'd say you have to do this, as taking the warps gets you the chance to earn buckets of points, yet the easier levels are better scoring (especially the Independence Day level) than the harder ones.
Please do not shamelessly extrapolate to cover my opinions. Have at least a little shame. And try to extrapolate less, there may be children present.
Heh, anyway, I consider FMV to be a source of much evil in gaming today so of course I disagree with you. Useless items, likewise, are annoying. More interesting are useful things, other advantages, score (or experience) bonuses, new characters, hidden story brances, new areas to explore, alternate endings, and T-Shirt offers (like many old Atari arcade games - I wish I had sent off for the KLAX T-shirt while they offered it).
Seconded. For some reason my Christian friends back home groove on it, me, I dunno. I've never been able to watch much of Evangelion without devolving into Mystery Science Theater mode. I tend to prefer Big O, even though it has its share of religious references (though more ambiguously) and Final Ultimate Truth (though more Matrixy), because of its class warfare themes, the fact they gave the giant robot pilot a job *other* than piloting the giant robot, and the humanity of its characters.
I say I'm "middle of the road" because I do some programming, but I'm also an English major. And I do have to say that I have read articles that seem like someone took the Star Wars roofer conversation from Clerks and made it five times (accurate figure) less interesting and more obtuse. My pitiful job at the campus library involves sending articles over ARIEL, a protocol for sending book images over the net to other libraries, and along the way I'm pretty sure I've seen a good cross-section of articles, or requested articles at least.
Some of them are cool, some are impenetrable, some pointless. But I've had the benefit of having some relatively down-to-earth professors. Maybe it's telling that I'm almost done with my undergrad degree yet I'm still not quite sure what the hell post-modernism is supposed to be, if it's not just an excuse to goof around and write funny things, whether intentionally or not. I'm down with writing the funny, but it's vitally important to me that when people laugh at my work, that they're laughing at the same things I laugh at.
Anyway, the guy who wrote the article, I recognize his name. Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer created Habitat, the first true graphical virtual world, distant Commodore 64 predecessor of things like Everquest. Think if Maniac Mansion were several thousand rooms in size, thousands of players, and everyone had their own character. The man has good ideas.
Worse, they fell for incorrectly spelled big numbers. The word for the one-followed-by-100-zeros number is googol.
I'm not trying to cut ya down though, I would have made the same mistake myself a few short months ago. I agree with you more than your derisive sparring partner, go is an AI problem of a far greater magnitude than chess. There are many reasons for this, but the number of possible moves is definitely one of them.
Actually, I find that while Nethack's reputation is of a brutal, ultra-tough player-killer, once you know enough about the game you can win much more often, and indeed there are players in the yearly month-long Nethack contest that won more than half of their games (including one player who did so, and ascended every class, who was himself mentioned on Slashdot).
However ADOM, while a very good game, strikes me as a pale imitator of Nethack. I think it's a more interesting game than Angband (whose appeal eludes me, being almost entirely about combat), but when I played it extensively I noticed a number of things that I disagreed with, gameplay-wise. Most notably, items generation frequencies are modified depending on the player class, there doesn't seem to be Nethack's rich web of item interrelations (a major part of the game), and a lot of stuff seems put in "just because." And most of ADOM's injokes aren't as funny, though I wouldn't be biased against it because of that. And every time I read in the newsgroup of the vaunted "become a chaos god" ending I get the impression that the game is unfocused. There are certainly many great things about ADOM however, don't get me wrong, and while I say it "imitates" Nethack it does it honestly, trying to come up with its own way of doing things in many places, and in that respect the game has many cool ideas.
Slash'em is the current "alternative" gameplay fork of Nethack (possible because, unlike ADOM, it's open source), taking up the mantle from Slash, Nethack--, Nethack+ and the almost-forgotten Nethack-TNG. It hasn't be updated in a while, however. There are other, smaller patches (the Lethe patch is generally recommended by me), but Slash'em includes so many extra things that it's almost ludicrous. The Slash'em philosophy is to add things first and make them fit later, while the Dev Team's thinks long and hard, in some ways *too* long and hard, about what to add. However, the cream-of-the-crop features of the gameplay variants often find their way into vanilla Nethack, which is where the current weapon skill system (Nethack+), some monsters and, I think, the untying of player role and race (Slash'em) came from.
Does it sound weird that the Dev Team thinks hard about what to add to Nethack? Isn't this the legendary game that, when the developers were informed that it contained everything but the kitchen sink, put them in the game? The fact is that the Dev Team *doesn't* just put things in the game willy-nilly, despite the reputation. Otherwise we wouldn't have long-standing gameplay variants in which there are lightsabers, bullwhips that inflict extra damage against undead and a doppelganger character race. Our Nethack community has played lots of all three games, and some of the older variants as well, but we always come back to vanilla.
Damn it, I was going to say something similar to this but you beat me to it. Well here goes anyway:
Free didn't work for dotcom pet food stores, yet much of the rhetoric around technologies like Linux and voiceover-IP still involves this crazy notion that companies can make money by giving things away. They can't.
I have to contradict this. It is certainly possible. As an example, although this will certainly mark me as unsuitable in the eyes of any potential up-modders, let me present the Legend of Zelda Collector's Disc I just got in the mail from Nintendo. They're giving these things away as a promotion. Buy a new Gamecube, two other games or subscribe to Nintendo Power and you get a disk with four Zelda games on it: the two N64 games and the two NES games.
I was a little confused that Nintendo was doing so much to give away Zeldas that had retailed for $50 not too long ago (Majora's Mask was released in the second half of 2000), but then I had a look at the manual.
No game gets more than five pages of gameplay treatment. The original Zelda, which due to its complete lack of in-game tutorial is probably the game most needing a good manual, has only one page. I doubt any new players will be getting too far in that. But sure enough, on the back page there's that offer, subscribe to Nintendo Power and get a free Zelda Collector's Edition player's guide, which will almost certainly contain everything the manual would have had. And with many new Gamecubes being bundled with the Zelda Collector's disk, you can bet that this guide is going to be for sale on retail shelves.
Similarly, of course, there's the now-standard Linux distributor's system of giving away most of the software and charging for service. You could argue that no one need ever pay for that if they just figured out how to use the system properly, but that, too, is a form of payment, in time and energy.
The old razor blade philosophy that's ruining the market for printers right now is also relevant: sell the basic razor at a loss, but greatly mark-up razor blades.
You can make money giving things away. By selling a thing that makes the gift useful, or allows it to continue to be used. But you have to be careful in doing it or, just like with Lexmark's printers, you risk customer indignation. I liken Lexmark's strategy as a way of converting customer respect into money. There is not a limitless amount of that resource, and while there are always new suckers graduating from the ranks of flea markets to Wal-Mart, they are probably not enough in the long run.
I downloaded SmoothTeddy when I first saw it on boingboing and have been playing with it a little. It's nice being able to create 3D images so flexibly, but there are bugs in the system. The interface has many elements of gestures (delete a shape by drawing a line from it to a trashcan, cut it apart by drawing a line across it, mirror it by drawing a line from a shape off into the air). However it's written in Java and it shows. It's more of a technology demo than something that can be used for real work at the moment. The program's only export format is to Alice, a combination 3D modelling/programming system (well... that's technically true at least, heh). The guy's page said that there's a commercial product in Japan that uses the Teddy technology, but that it's Japanese-only.
Ignoring the bugs (many of which cause the program to freeze if an incorrect stroke is drawn), there are some cool elements to this. Most things you can draw end up looking almost exactly like a big pillow. You can draw objects on the pillow that intersect it and then adjust their location on the pillow's surface. When it gets where you want it you can "merge" it with the pillow. The program tries to create smooth meshes wherever it can, and making sharp corners is almost impossible without creative use of the cutting tool.
Verdict: fun to play with if you have a good tolerance for bugs and don't mind that you won't be able to easily get your work into another program.
Ah, but Nintendo has a lot more experience than Sega did making systems that require little in the way of power. Remember the GBA SP's included rechargable pack? They could use a similar system for this.
classicgaming.com's article on the new Space Invaders/QIX machine mentioned the possibility that the game contained at least one secret inclusion, along the lines of Pac-Man in the Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga 20 Year Reunion machines. Intreguingly, one of the possible names dropped was Zoo Keeper.
Zoo Keeper!!
Not the recent interesting, yet simplistic, web-based Flash Zoo Keeper, which is better known these days and is a completely different game. Zoo Keeper was released in 1983 and thus didn't get much of a chance in the marketplace before the big crash hit. It's been the game I've gotten the most out of in MAME lately.
There are three kinds of levels in the game. The "main" levels involve moving around the outside of a big brick cage in order to try to keep animals in. Movement is restricted to the outside, and in fact it's like running along the outside of a very small, rectangular brick planet. Wherever Zeke (your protagonist) walks, bricks are laid on the inside layer of the cage. Jumping Zeke is a little faster, and he can control his direction in mid-air, but he leaves no bricks while he walks.
Inside the wall emerges a number of animals, a few when the level starts and more and more as it continues. They bounce around the inside and eat bricks they hit. If one of them gets trapped inside a wall (almost impossible to avoid many times) they start bouncing wildly and eat a trail through the bricks. If one gets out, it's orientation switches to the same "surface of a small brick planet" perspective as Zeke's, and it starts running around the cage in the direction taking it away from Zeke. This is surprisingly important to coming up with a good strategy, which involves getting as many animals running in the same direction as possible.
Zeke's jumps cover a lot of distance, and every animal he jumps over in one bound increases the points earned. Jumping over more animals earns more points. When whole menageries start traipsing around the outside of the cage it becomes possible, though very difficult, to leap over ten or more animals as once. The scoring goes like, 100 - 500 - 2,000 - 6,000, then roughly doubling for each additional animal travelled over during that jump. It's possible to earn up to a million points on one jump!
Each cage level is basically a test of survival. There's a "fuse" at the top of the screen with bonus items scattered along it. When the fuse reaches an item, it appears somewhere on the surface of the cage. Some of these items are nets, one per level at first but with more once the game starts reaching epic difficulties, that make Zeke invulnerable and allow him to send animals back into the cage. When the fuse reaches the "END" box at the right edge of the screen the level is complete, and any animals still in the interior of the cage earn bonus points. Lions, which are usually very fast, are by far worth the most points, between 30,000 and 60,000 each.
One of the other levels is an interesting Frogger/Donkey Kong cross level in which Zeke must work his way upwards through a sea of moving, floating platforms to rescue his girlfriend Zelda (no relation to you-know-who, though she looks a little similar to Big-Z's original NES incarnation), while avoiding a bunch of highly annoying coconuts thrown bouncing around the platforms by a smal monkey. The last kind of level requires the player to jump over lines of animals and small cages (which must be completely cleared, and not run into the side of) in order to reach Zelda at the top of a series of floors. These levels are very challenging to a new player, but once mastered are not much trouble. The player gets an extra life when he finishes one of these.
Scoring in this game is very interesting. It's very difficult to earn much more than 3,000 points in the first level, yet my highest score on default difficulty is almost 500,000. There is little reason here to milk early levels for points, because their scoring opportunities are so limited when compared to lat
I didn't know that the entire system was the controller! Snap an LCD screen onto that video-out and you'd have a portible N64/SNES! Of course if they sold that the might cannibalize any market for the GBA in China.
I'd love to own one of these, but alas, not in Chinese. And the controller is a bit clunky as well. But the possibility that it can run SNES games is really cool, and it makes real sense. I'd imagine that it wouldn't cost Nintendo very much to just throw in the entire SNES hardware, though space considerations in the controller would counteract that I suppose.
I wonder if it's possible to buy "dumb" controllers to hook up to it in order to play multiplayer games? Dr. Mario 64 had multiplayer as a primary draw. With just two out ports (one of thise for video), I'd imagine for more than two players you'd need some sort of hub. But that could get expensive if you needed a separate iQue for each player.
On the other hand, it'd make possible interesting games of Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, in which not only did each player have his own screen, but his own graphics hardware.
I wasn't too thrilled with the "official campaign," (but I'm something of a game snob), but the module creation ability *really* mades this game. I even made a Roguelike module for the thing (though it required a lot of working around of Roguelike-unfriendly design assumptions, and I haven't had time to work on it much lately).
Also, I hear that the Hordes of the Underdark finally lets your characters advance to epic (over 20) levels. *That* is cool.
If you consider a book to be a straight narrative from plot point to plot point then you're frankly missing the point. The Scouring of the Shire is my own very-favorite part of the series, because the fate of the world does NOT hinge upon it. These days I tend to look carefully at any work that has as its aim the Saving of the World. When looking at what I can take away from a story, the belief that the act of saving the world is harder than figuring out truthfully what must be done for it to be saved is looking progressively more stupid as I age. I don't blame Jackson for excising it (*something* had to go, I suppose), but it is not an extraneous portion of the story.
Looking at the larger picture, what bothers me isn't that *some* movies are better than the books upon which they were based. If you want a prime example look at The Wizard of Oz, the originals weren't bad but the movie is great. However, the longer the book has been around, the less likely that a movie version, if it happens, will be better, because the older a book is, the better it has to be for studio execs to scent gold it. Also, the older and more beloved the work, the greater a wall of public regard that must be torn down in order to work their grimy magic upon it.
But to step back a bit, what bothers me is the general public perception that the movie is *automatically* better than the book, because it's a *movie*, which is not even true half the time. Yet, Harry Freaking Potter excepted, everyone watches the movie, and far fewer read the book. Film and literature may be different arts, and they mey exchange letters and invite each other over for tea every Tuesday, but the neigoborhood still gossips about them. And the fact is, people always compare them to each other. The fact that movies are extremely huge money these days while most authors work second or even third jobs contributes to this effect.
What got me all hot under the collar in this department was seeing countless works of literature sold with their covers matching the movie adaptation, looking exactly as if they were mere novelizations, copies of truer celluoid. Now it's happening to Lord of the Rings -- just a couple of days ago I saw at the bookstore a compilation of the three novels in the trilogy, with a movie still cover and with movie Gandalf and movie Frodo collectable bookends in a big movie-themed cardboard box. What I hate is the sense that the movie appearances of these characters will become the "official" versions in the minds of everyone who isn't at least an undergrad (which is to say, most people). You may not believe this, but the picture on my own mind of what a Balrog looked like was a hell of a lot nastier than that CGI version, and my own image of hobbits did not take into account the Elijah Wood factor.
Hurting my own argument: What about the Ralph Bakshi versions? No one complained about them?
Ah, but they didn't have hundreds of millions of dollars pushing them into the public consciousness, did they?
Hacking together a multiplayer interface for a game is one thing, but hacking it together in order to play a game in an emulator is something different. You'd probably have to put special code in the emulator for that. (Isn't Frodo open-source?)
If you're going to go through all that, the question has to be asked, why not just re-implement the game? Use wireless to enable games with more than four players? I can just imagine everyone frantically pressing the scroll buttons/wheel to get their bids in on time. That'd be cool, heh.
Even if this works, how are they going to get four players going at the same time? M.U.L.E. can be played with three computer opponents, but the game's really at its best when played with at least three human participants.
YES. YES IT DOES HAVE TO BE REITERATED WHEN I DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT IT.
You see, I don't go to RotK fansites, movie gossip sites, entertainment news sites, or however many variations of Ain't It Cool News as there almost certainly are.
I *do* go to Slashdot, granted, there's a certain simularity there, but I don't typically read every comment about LotR movies.
I vigorously stand up for my right to be ignorant, for those oh-so-blissful few moments during the calm before the marketing storm, about the contents of multi-zillion dollar fantasy epics, sci-fi trilogies, action movies, etc. I will never equate "writing for those who know intimate details of upcoming film inclusions" with "writing for a general audience," and I hate to say it, but I kind of resent the implication that I have to have some kind of advanced degree in ReturnKingology in order to write about the damn --yes, damn-- movie. I thought the time I put into my undergrad, during which I tackled the Silmarillion to the great expense of my social life, took care of that.
In any case, I thought the whole post was a thinly-veiled attempt to allude to some elf queen/dwarf nookie. I feel no love from this room.
Slashdot Mirror
These things may be true.
However, *I* am not on broadband, and have no opportunity to be on broadband in the near future, so I hate your argument, very much. As will the other 82% of dial-up users.
(Heh, not trying to dis ya, it's just human nature to dislike be denied experiences like this.)
again, by Will Harvey (well, The Immortal was by Sandbox Productions, I think it was.)
I was of comparable age (very young) at that time he did the C64 game, so I've always kind of looked upon Will Harvey as a kind of patron saint of kid programmers.
I'd love to ask him how the hell you're suppose to beat the secret level in Electronic Arts' versions of Marble Madness.
Oh, tell me about it! Donkey Kong, for its strengths, is NOT the best classic arcade game! Most of the people voting on this have never even heard of Tempest or Robotron, and only know of Donkey Kong because it's by Miyamoto. Not that he doesn't make great games, but let's face it, he was just learning his craft back then. Practically every poll on the list has some tragic wrongness to it. It saddens me greatly to see almighty Rampart's fortunes so abysmally low.
This is one of the reasons I never picked up a PS2, and sold my X-Box. Though to be fair, there aren't a lot of Gamecube games I'm playing right now.
I was thinking about this the other day, about the essential sameness of gaming today. In the old days people seemed to start with a concept (maze game with chasing antagonists - Pac-Man, obstacle course with limited means of avoiding obstacles - Donkey Kong, shooting game involving learning the unique movement styles of each type of opponent - Centipede and especially Millipede). Now, they just simulate reality as best they can, plop you down into a GenericPerson (tm) with a gun, and give you targets.
That worked for me back when I played Doom, and Goldeneye gave it a fresh coat of paint for me, but now... eh. I like the idea behind Deus Ex, the idea of having many ways to accomplish tasks, there's something about that which strikes me as very *right*, but I don't have the time to invest into learning yet another FPS game.
What I have been playing, for my Gamecube, has been Viewtiful Joe (absolutely cool) and Midway Arcade Treasures (24 easy-to-learn yet challenging games, including Rampart, on which I've raved far, far too much here) On GBA I've spent some time with the new Metroid (much like the old Metroid) and Fire Emblem. But I'm on something of a gaming binge right now, and before Viewtiful Joe I hardly played anything for weeks.
I guess the difference between then and now is, simply, the games that are available. I go to stores looking for something to buy and walk away disappointed.
I haven't played a computer game since Neverwinter Nights, and there for me the "game" was really just module creation, but I do have to admit that funky SimCity add-on for The Sims has my interest piqued.
Well, look at it this way. Who is the more imaginative, the various prop department stiffs who create models, armor, costumes, etc., or the author who created the work upon which they elaborate?
I still take issue with the word professional, as it has been applied to "dreaming." It smacks, to me, of Disney-speak. (I've also never been able to trust the word "imagineering." It rummaged through my wallet, ran off with my girlfriend, poured sugar in my gas tank.)
And I would say being creative is intrinsically not just like any other skill. Although you can get better at it, unlike, say, producing a craft, cooking a meal, etc., you can never be reasonably certain of success in it, no matter how good you get. It is intrinsically chaotic, there is an inescapable random component in creativity. This is why many authors, even exceedingly talented ones, continually feel insecure about their work, because you're only ever as good as your next book, and just because your last twelve were great doesn't mean number thirteen will likewise be so.
Indeed, I'd say it's rather easy for a prolific creator to run out of ideas unless you put effort into maintaining your creative ecology. In other words, you can get worse at creating with practice.
Heh, you may not believe this, but I thought for a few seconds before using the word "zany," which is particularly devalued in our culture, having been used to describe plenty of things which are purported to be funny but aren't. I decided to use it anyway because I rather like it, even if it tends to bring to mind thousands of half-wit prop comics.
They did not best my own personal imagination. Some (but by no means all) of the reasons:
1. A movie has to be everything to all people, and this necessitates many trade-offs. My hypothetical best story is different from yours, and there are more people out there who would be happy with some lasers and rocket engines than would be happy Adams' superlative wit, just like there were more people who thought the Scouring of the Shire was an unnecessary add-on to the story than thought, like the author did, that it was an essential closing. With Lord of the Rings, this means that a whole bunch of people now consider these actors to be the definitive visual representations of these actors, and despite the fact that I generally liked the movies, I think that's a great shame.
2. The modifier "professional" implies that someone can dream authoritatively. They cannot. In fact, I have a pretty low opinion of these people, for missing forests due to trees, looking at fine details while missing points. The people in the industry who most often connect words like "dream" with words like "profit" are Disney themselves, and despite a number of animated features, these days they tend to get it wrong more often than right.
3. A movie is the work of hundreds of people, but some people are more important than others. Peter Jackson was much more important to the production than all the costume designers put together. If Jackson messes up, no one can make up for that deficiency.
And a special case for this production:
We're talking about DOUGLAS NOEL FREAKING ADAMS, for heaven's sake, a man I have always imagined as wit personified. These are not ordinary stories. I have never read anything else that zany and inventive, and I have no idea how the people making it can believe they can do it justice. Is Disney going to leave in Oolon Colluphid's philosophy books? Eccentricia Gallumbits? "Oh no, not again?"
On a lesser, but related, note, I've always been more taken with the awesome, chest-bursting humor of Hitchhiker's than the story itself, which meanders from place to place, not always with a good reason. I think this fits the story nicely, very nicely indeed in fact, but I can't help but think that Disney will try to "improve" it. Doing so may well damage the humor.
Anyway, sorry to disagree, sometimes the movie *is* better than the novel but I think this time it's impossible.
I really like the idea that a given game situation may be different between plays, either randomly, due to conscious player actions, due to his playing skill, or from selectable options. That's the entire idea behind Roguelikes. There are lots and lots of ways to do this that are ignored by most developers. (Perhaps because it'd hurt the market for hint books, bleah.)
But there are many things wrong with auto-adjusting difficulty as described in the article. It's open to player abuse, for one thing.
It also makes the game fall victim to what I call Mario Kart syndrome. Mario Kart 64 (not as much Double Dash) had an amazingly cheap AI for the other drivers, on the harder difficulties, that made it impossible to stay in first place for longer than a short period of time. If you wanted to get first place consistantly, you couldn't do it by trying to get and stay in first place the whole race. You were better off staying back a little, picking up attack items and taking him down just before the finish line. That was what I hated most about it, and why we never played the race mode past about a week with the game. I hate the idea that the player is penalized for doing well. He needs to gain some advantage, or at least bonus, recognizing his achievement.
One more thing: auto-adjusting difficulty negates one of the traditional purposes of a video game, namely, to test your skill. Did you get 10 million points by the end merely because you had problems in the first level?
StarFox's difficult doesn't automatically adjust, instead you complete missions to "earn" harder levels. However, you can still go back and play the easier ones even if you've unlocked the hard ones, you just aren't forced to. In fact, to get a really good score I'd say you have to do this, as taking the warps gets you the chance to earn buckets of points, yet the easier levels are better scoring (especially the Independence Day level) than the harder ones.
Please do not shamelessly extrapolate to cover my opinions. Have at least a little shame. And try to extrapolate less, there may be children present.
Heh, anyway, I consider FMV to be a source of much evil in gaming today so of course I disagree with you. Useless items, likewise, are annoying. More interesting are useful things, other advantages, score (or experience) bonuses, new characters, hidden story brances, new areas to explore, alternate endings, and T-Shirt offers (like many old Atari arcade games - I wish I had sent off for the KLAX T-shirt while they offered it).
Seconded. For some reason my Christian friends back home groove on it, me, I dunno. I've never been able to watch much of Evangelion without devolving into Mystery Science Theater mode. I tend to prefer Big O, even though it has its share of religious references (though more ambiguously) and Final Ultimate Truth (though more Matrixy), because of its class warfare themes, the fact they gave the giant robot pilot a job *other* than piloting the giant robot, and the humanity of its characters.
And R. Dorothy. But that's a given.
I say I'm "middle of the road" because I do some programming, but I'm also an English major. And I do have to say that I have read articles that seem like someone took the Star Wars roofer conversation from Clerks and made it five times (accurate figure) less interesting and more obtuse. My pitiful job at the campus library involves sending articles over ARIEL, a protocol for sending book images over the net to other libraries, and along the way I'm pretty sure I've seen a good cross-section of articles, or requested articles at least.
Some of them are cool, some are impenetrable, some pointless. But I've had the benefit of having some relatively down-to-earth professors. Maybe it's telling that I'm almost done with my undergrad degree yet I'm still not quite sure what the hell post-modernism is supposed to be, if it's not just an excuse to goof around and write funny things, whether intentionally or not. I'm down with writing the funny, but it's vitally important to me that when people laugh at my work, that they're laughing at the same things I laugh at.
Anyway, the guy who wrote the article, I recognize his name. Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer created Habitat, the first true graphical virtual world, distant Commodore 64 predecessor of things like Everquest. Think if Maniac Mansion were several thousand rooms in size, thousands of players, and everyone had their own character. The man has good ideas.
Worse, they fell for incorrectly spelled big numbers. The word for the one-followed-by-100-zeros number is googol.
I'm not trying to cut ya down though, I would have made the same mistake myself a few short months ago. I agree with you more than your derisive sparring partner, go is an AI problem of a far greater magnitude than chess. There are many reasons for this, but the number of possible moves is definitely one of them.
Actually, I find that while Nethack's reputation is of a brutal, ultra-tough player-killer, once you know enough about the game you can win much more often, and indeed there are players in the yearly month-long Nethack contest that won more than half of their games (including one player who did so, and ascended every class, who was himself mentioned on Slashdot).
However ADOM, while a very good game, strikes me as a pale imitator of Nethack. I think it's a more interesting game than Angband (whose appeal eludes me, being almost entirely about combat), but when I played it extensively I noticed a number of things that I disagreed with, gameplay-wise. Most notably, items generation frequencies are modified depending on the player class, there doesn't seem to be Nethack's rich web of item interrelations (a major part of the game), and a lot of stuff seems put in "just because." And most of ADOM's injokes aren't as funny, though I wouldn't be biased against it because of that. And every time I read in the newsgroup of the vaunted "become a chaos god" ending I get the impression that the game is unfocused. There are certainly many great things about ADOM however, don't get me wrong, and while I say it "imitates" Nethack it does it honestly, trying to come up with its own way of doing things in many places, and in that respect the game has many cool ideas.
Slash'em is the current "alternative" gameplay fork of Nethack (possible because, unlike ADOM, it's open source), taking up the mantle from Slash, Nethack--, Nethack+ and the almost-forgotten Nethack-TNG. It hasn't be updated in a while, however. There are other, smaller patches (the Lethe patch is generally recommended by me), but Slash'em includes so many extra things that it's almost ludicrous. The Slash'em philosophy is to add things first and make them fit later, while the Dev Team's thinks long and hard, in some ways *too* long and hard, about what to add. However, the cream-of-the-crop features of the gameplay variants often find their way into vanilla Nethack, which is where the current weapon skill system (Nethack+), some monsters and, I think, the untying of player role and race (Slash'em) came from.
Does it sound weird that the Dev Team thinks hard about what to add to Nethack? Isn't this the legendary game that, when the developers were informed that it contained everything but the kitchen sink, put them in the game? The fact is that the Dev Team *doesn't* just put things in the game willy-nilly, despite the reputation. Otherwise we wouldn't have long-standing gameplay variants in which there are lightsabers, bullwhips that inflict extra damage against undead and a doppelganger character race. Our Nethack community has played lots of all three games, and some of the older variants as well, but we always come back to vanilla.
Damn it, I was going to say something similar to this but you beat me to it. Well here goes anyway:
Free didn't work for dotcom pet food stores, yet much of the rhetoric around technologies like Linux and voiceover-IP still involves this crazy notion that companies can make money by giving things away. They can't.
I have to contradict this. It is certainly possible. As an example, although this will certainly mark me as unsuitable in the eyes of any potential up-modders, let me present the Legend of Zelda Collector's Disc I just got in the mail from Nintendo. They're giving these things away as a promotion. Buy a new Gamecube, two other games or subscribe to Nintendo Power and you get a disk with four Zelda games on it: the two N64 games and the two NES games.
I was a little confused that Nintendo was doing so much to give away Zeldas that had retailed for $50 not too long ago (Majora's Mask was released in the second half of 2000), but then I had a look at the manual.
No game gets more than five pages of gameplay treatment. The original Zelda, which due to its complete lack of in-game tutorial is probably the game most needing a good manual, has only one page. I doubt any new players will be getting too far in that. But sure enough, on the back page there's that offer, subscribe to Nintendo Power and get a free Zelda Collector's Edition player's guide, which will almost certainly contain everything the manual would have had. And with many new Gamecubes being bundled with the Zelda Collector's disk, you can bet that this guide is going to be for sale on retail shelves.
Similarly, of course, there's the now-standard Linux distributor's system of giving away most of the software and charging for service. You could argue that no one need ever pay for that if they just figured out how to use the system properly, but that, too, is a form of payment, in time and energy.
The old razor blade philosophy that's ruining the market for printers right now is also relevant: sell the basic razor at a loss, but greatly mark-up razor blades.
You can make money giving things away. By selling a thing that makes the gift useful, or allows it to continue to be used. But you have to be careful in doing it or, just like with Lexmark's printers, you risk customer indignation. I liken Lexmark's strategy as a way of converting customer respect into money. There is not a limitless amount of that resource, and while there are always new suckers graduating from the ranks of flea markets to Wal-Mart, they are probably not enough in the long run.
I downloaded SmoothTeddy when I first saw it on boingboing and have been playing with it a little. It's nice being able to create 3D images so flexibly, but there are bugs in the system. The interface has many elements of gestures (delete a shape by drawing a line from it to a trashcan, cut it apart by drawing a line across it, mirror it by drawing a line from a shape off into the air). However it's written in Java and it shows. It's more of a technology demo than something that can be used for real work at the moment. The program's only export format is to Alice, a combination 3D modelling/programming system (well... that's technically true at least, heh). The guy's page said that there's a commercial product in Japan that uses the Teddy technology, but that it's Japanese-only.
Ignoring the bugs (many of which cause the program to freeze if an incorrect stroke is drawn), there are some cool elements to this. Most things you can draw end up looking almost exactly like a big pillow. You can draw objects on the pillow that intersect it and then adjust their location on the pillow's surface. When it gets where you want it you can "merge" it with the pillow. The program tries to create smooth meshes wherever it can, and making sharp corners is almost impossible without creative use of the cutting tool.
Verdict: fun to play with if you have a good tolerance for bugs and don't mind that you won't be able to easily get your work into another program.
Ah, but Nintendo has a lot more experience than Sega did making systems that require little in the way of power. Remember the GBA SP's included rechargable pack? They could use a similar system for this.
classicgaming.com's article on the new Space Invaders/QIX machine mentioned the possibility that the game contained at least one secret inclusion, along the lines of Pac-Man in the Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga 20 Year Reunion machines. Intreguingly, one of the possible names dropped was Zoo Keeper.
Zoo Keeper!!
Not the recent interesting, yet simplistic, web-based Flash Zoo Keeper, which is better known these days and is a completely different game. Zoo Keeper was released in 1983 and thus didn't get much of a chance in the marketplace before the big crash hit. It's been the game I've gotten the most out of in MAME lately.
There are three kinds of levels in the game. The "main" levels involve moving around the outside of a big brick cage in order to try to keep animals in. Movement is restricted to the outside, and in fact it's like running along the outside of a very small, rectangular brick planet. Wherever Zeke (your protagonist) walks, bricks are laid on the inside layer of the cage. Jumping Zeke is a little faster, and he can control his direction in mid-air, but he leaves no bricks while he walks.
Inside the wall emerges a number of animals, a few when the level starts and more and more as it continues. They bounce around the inside and eat bricks they hit. If one of them gets trapped inside a wall (almost impossible to avoid many times) they start bouncing wildly and eat a trail through the bricks. If one gets out, it's orientation switches to the same "surface of a small brick planet" perspective as Zeke's, and it starts running around the cage in the direction taking it away from Zeke. This is surprisingly important to coming up with a good strategy, which involves getting as many animals running in the same direction as possible.
Zeke's jumps cover a lot of distance, and every animal he jumps over in one bound increases the points earned. Jumping over more animals earns more points. When whole menageries start traipsing around the outside of the cage it becomes possible, though very difficult, to leap over ten or more animals as once. The scoring goes like, 100 - 500 - 2,000 - 6,000, then roughly doubling for each additional animal travelled over during that jump. It's possible to earn up to a million points on one jump!
Each cage level is basically a test of survival. There's a "fuse" at the top of the screen with bonus items scattered along it. When the fuse reaches an item, it appears somewhere on the surface of the cage. Some of these items are nets, one per level at first but with more once the game starts reaching epic difficulties, that make Zeke invulnerable and allow him to send animals back into the cage. When the fuse reaches the "END" box at the right edge of the screen the level is complete, and any animals still in the interior of the cage earn bonus points. Lions, which are usually very fast, are by far worth the most points, between 30,000 and 60,000 each.
One of the other levels is an interesting Frogger/Donkey Kong cross level in which Zeke must work his way upwards through a sea of moving, floating platforms to rescue his girlfriend Zelda (no relation to you-know-who, though she looks a little similar to Big-Z's original NES incarnation), while avoiding a bunch of highly annoying coconuts thrown bouncing around the platforms by a smal monkey. The last kind of level requires the player to jump over lines of animals and small cages (which must be completely cleared, and not run into the side of) in order to reach Zelda at the top of a series of floors. These levels are very challenging to a new player, but once mastered are not much trouble. The player gets an extra life when he finishes one of these.
Scoring in this game is very interesting. It's very difficult to earn much more than 3,000 points in the first level, yet my highest score on default difficulty is almost 500,000. There is little reason here to milk early levels for points, because their scoring opportunities are so limited when compared to lat
I didn't know that the entire system was the controller! Snap an LCD screen onto that video-out and you'd have a portible N64/SNES! Of course if they sold that the might cannibalize any market for the GBA in China.
I'd love to own one of these, but alas, not in Chinese. And the controller is a bit clunky as well. But the possibility that it can run SNES games is really cool, and it makes real sense. I'd imagine that it wouldn't cost Nintendo very much to just throw in the entire SNES hardware, though space considerations in the controller would counteract that I suppose.
I wonder if it's possible to buy "dumb" controllers to hook up to it in order to play multiplayer games? Dr. Mario 64 had multiplayer as a primary draw. With just two out ports (one of thise for video), I'd imagine for more than two players you'd need some sort of hub. But that could get expensive if you needed a separate iQue for each player.
On the other hand, it'd make possible interesting games of Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, in which not only did each player have his own screen, but his own graphics hardware.
I wasn't too thrilled with the "official campaign," (but I'm something of a game snob), but the module creation ability *really* mades this game. I even made a Roguelike module for the thing (though it required a lot of working around of Roguelike-unfriendly design assumptions, and I haven't had time to work on it much lately).
Also, I hear that the Hordes of the Underdark finally lets your characters advance to epic (over 20) levels. *That* is cool.
I think there are online versions, of a sort, out there. Some versions are shareware, though.
It's *possible*, sure. It's just *unlikely*.
If you consider a book to be a straight narrative from plot point to plot point then you're frankly missing the point. The Scouring of the Shire is my own very-favorite part of the series, because the fate of the world does NOT hinge upon it. These days I tend to look carefully at any work that has as its aim the Saving of the World. When looking at what I can take away from a story, the belief that the act of saving the world is harder than figuring out truthfully what must be done for it to be saved is looking progressively more stupid as I age. I don't blame Jackson for excising it (*something* had to go, I suppose), but it is not an extraneous portion of the story.
Looking at the larger picture, what bothers me isn't that *some* movies are better than the books upon which they were based. If you want a prime example look at The Wizard of Oz, the originals weren't bad but the movie is great. However, the longer the book has been around, the less likely that a movie version, if it happens, will be better, because the older a book is, the better it has to be for studio execs to scent gold it. Also, the older and more beloved the work, the greater a wall of public regard that must be torn down in order to work their grimy magic upon it.
But to step back a bit, what bothers me is the general public perception that the movie is *automatically* better than the book, because it's a *movie*, which is not even true half the time. Yet, Harry Freaking Potter excepted, everyone watches the movie, and far fewer read the book. Film and literature may be different arts, and they mey exchange letters and invite each other over for tea every Tuesday, but the neigoborhood still gossips about them. And the fact is, people always compare them to each other. The fact that movies are extremely huge money these days while most authors work second or even third jobs contributes to this effect.
What got me all hot under the collar in this department was seeing countless works of literature sold with their covers matching the movie adaptation, looking exactly as if they were mere novelizations, copies of truer celluoid. Now it's happening to Lord of the Rings -- just a couple of days ago I saw at the bookstore a compilation of the three novels in the trilogy, with a movie still cover and with movie Gandalf and movie Frodo collectable bookends in a big movie-themed cardboard box. What I hate is the sense that the movie appearances of these characters will become the "official" versions in the minds of everyone who isn't at least an undergrad (which is to say, most people). You may not believe this, but the picture on my own mind of what a Balrog looked like was a hell of a lot nastier than that CGI version, and my own image of hobbits did not take into account the Elijah Wood factor.
Hurting my own argument: What about the Ralph Bakshi versions? No one complained about them?
Ah, but they didn't have hundreds of millions of dollars pushing them into the public consciousness, did they?
Hacking together a multiplayer interface for a game is one thing, but hacking it together in order to play a game in an emulator is something different. You'd probably have to put special code in the emulator for that. (Isn't Frodo open-source?)
If you're going to go through all that, the question has to be asked, why not just re-implement the game? Use wireless to enable games with more than four players? I can just imagine everyone frantically pressing the scroll buttons/wheel to get their bids in on time. That'd be cool, heh.
Even if this works, how are they going to get four players going at the same time? M.U.L.E. can be played with three computer opponents, but the game's really at its best when played with at least three human participants.
To reply in kind:
YES. YES IT DOES HAVE TO BE REITERATED WHEN I DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT IT.
You see, I don't go to RotK fansites, movie gossip sites, entertainment news sites, or however many variations of Ain't It Cool News as there almost certainly are.
I *do* go to Slashdot, granted, there's a certain simularity there, but I don't typically read every comment about LotR movies.
I vigorously stand up for my right to be ignorant, for those oh-so-blissful few moments during the calm before the marketing storm, about the contents of multi-zillion dollar fantasy epics, sci-fi trilogies, action movies, etc. I will never equate "writing for those who know intimate details of upcoming film inclusions" with "writing for a general audience," and I hate to say it, but I kind of resent the implication that I have to have some kind of advanced degree in ReturnKingology in order to write about the damn --yes, damn-- movie. I thought the time I put into my undergrad, during which I tackled the Silmarillion to the great expense of my social life, took care of that.
In any case, I thought the whole post was a thinly-veiled attempt to allude to some elf queen/dwarf nookie. I feel no love from this room.