It goes crazy in every house. That's how it works. It's essentially random (yes, it does have some heuristics, but it doesn't measure your place and then calculate a path to vacuum everything), but eventually, it'll have vacuum'd every space simply because it keeps on going and going.
Oh, it's obvious? How is that obvious? Do you have any kind of evidence? Or could it just be that the Wii is freaking fun to play, and people like to talk about it?
I agree, though, this is much more than fanboyism. But it's not astroturfing: People are simply genuinely excited about the Wii.
This is absolutely true. The prime example is a female friend of mine. Whenever the topic comes to video games, she explains that she doesn't play videogames because they're too complicated. "I'm too stupid," she'll exclaim. She's not stupid at all (she's studying law, and she's really very sharp), and she's also not not playing video games: She does play Donkey Konga and Dance Dance Revolution, and she loves Magnetica on the DS. She'd never even pick up a normal controller, but she does like playing Wii.
If you're new to video games, the standard controllers are overwhelming. The Pong had a knob. The VCS 2600 had one digital stick and one button. The original NES controller had a D-Pad, A, B, Start and Select. Since then, every generation has simply added new stuff to the controller: an Analog stick, shoulder buttons, a second set of shoulder buttons, a second analog stick, more buttons, analog shoulder buttons, analog shoulder buttons with a digital "pressed" state, analog face buttons, analog sticks you can also press to create the effect of yet anoter button... People picking up a controller for the first time simply can't learn it in any kind of meaningful time frame.
The Wii remote has gone back to the very beginning: Wii Sports needs two buttons, A and B, and that's it. And you don't even need the buttons during gameplay of most games.
Yes, I own Loco Roco, and it's one of the few example of a genuinely new and "portable" game (it has a few other issues, such as always repeating itself, though). Mercury Meltdown I've only heard good things about. I wanted to try the japanese Demo, but my PSP decided to not let me download demos anymore and I had to completely reset it. When I finally found the time to do so, the demo was gone, so I haven't yet been able to look into it.
Another nice portable PSP game is Ultimate Block Party. It's somewhat similar to Lumines, but doesn't drag on and on into hour-long gaming sessions.
I also own a GBA and a DS, so I might be a bit spoiled. On these two consoles - especially on the DS - there are many, many games like Loco Roco: Funny little time wasters you can a) not play on any other console and b) take out for a quick few minutes of gaming whenever you've got a bit of time to waste.
I just wish I could more easily get tv shows onto it
Agreed. I use PSPWare on the Mac, which is quite nice, but I still have to download the shows from some P2P service and then let PSPWare convert them, which often takes a lot of time and sometimes doesn't work on the first try.
Yes, there are good games for the PSP. No, there are not enough good portable games. Most good PSP games are ports or new versions of PS2 games, generally with similar gameplay (and generally less playable due to the PSP's single analog "nipple"). If I can't play a game during a 15 minutes train ride, I might as well buy it for the PS2.
My PSP has pretty much become my portable Lost player.
This is kind of a Chicken/Egg issue. As long as people don't buy PS3s, exclusive titles will not remain exclusive. As long as there are no exclusive titles, there's no reason to buy a 600-bucks-console if the same games run on a 400-bucks-console.
the mac zealots out there (those who believe it was the perfectly secure OS, but even patched it shows that what some zealots were saying before was an absolute steaming pile of something - there's a Mac user in the office 50 ft from me, i'm going there now to laugh)
Oh, you mean Artie McStrawman? Yeah! Let's laugh at that sucker! HAHA!
Yeah, and I expect that new-fangled d-pad to be passé any day now. Oh wait, the innovation is in the games, and since the Remote allows for more if it than a traditional gamepad, there's no issue whatsoever of it becoming stale. Sure, the holodeck itself ceases being a novelty, but next week, you get dragon hunters, and the week after that hot sexbot action, and the week after that sea diving, and so on. The fishing controller, on the other hand, will always give you fishing games.
Every last person who's been over to play with my Wii (insert joke here) is now lining up every weekend trying to get one. Once they have it, every one of their friends will be doing the same.
And that, I think, is the most amazing part of the Wii: it's absolutely viral. Every part of it is viral: Even the stupid videos where people throw their remotes and the strap snaps, and the parodies of these videos with people with Wii controllers shot into their eyes - people talk about the Wii. At my work place, during the last week, the Wii has been discussed during lunch break almost every day. Normally, we don't even talk about gaming, but the Wii changed that.
I brought my Wii to work once, and of the four people who played it, two already ordered one. I've actually had girls who visited ask to power up the Wii and play a bit of Tennis - normally, they wouldn't touch a gamepad with a ten foot pole. I've had "Wii parties" where people came over specifically to play Wii, and some of these people have already ordered a Wii of their own - more would have bought one if they were available anywhere.
The Wii is totally viral. It infects everyone who plays with it.
Because something like iozone says the comparative IO performance of OS X and XP is a wash.
If it doesn't translate into any real-world advantage, it makes no difference to me.
The OS X Dock is substantially different to the NeXT Dock
The differences between the Mac Dock and the NeXT Dock are slim (in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the two shared actual code in addition to the name) compared to the differences between the Mac Dock and the Start Bar - which, if anything, copied concepts from the Mac's menu bar (Apple-Menu -> Start Menu).
Clearly, you have never used NeXTSTEP, if you think the Taskbar is a copy of its Dock.
Again, you show your hypocrisy. Claiming that the Windows Start Bar is not a copy of the NeXT Dock, but that the Mac OS Dock have more in common than Exposé and Flip3D, that's just laughable.
The "look and feel" of Windows is substantially different to OS X.
Well, yeah, that's your - somewhat absurd - main point. It has become clear that you will not let facts influence your convictions, hence further discussion is pointless.
Your example aren't proving anything other than that there are very few cases where "hard work" works, and in those cases, it was more luck than hard work.
When you type in a password field, you see every characters, not stars or dots
That's not good, but in reality, you wouldn't want to enter your password with people around even if it was displayed as dots, since if they can see the password field, they can see you using your keyboard on screen, too:-)
You can't set your own start page
There is no actual "start page." For those who haven't used it, the "start page" isn't some web site, but a starting point which offers access to some of WiiOpera's features. I think you can't enter addresses without going to this "start page."
Interestingly, those videos possibly are helping the Wii. I've seen lots of "Wii conversations" being started by those, or by the "recall" of Wii straps (which, I know, wasn't technically a recall). Eventually, these conversations turn into a discussion of how cool the Wii's new controller is. So yeah, in a way, these videos might help Nintendo.
First of all, yes. Zelda is amazing. I think it's one of the top four Zelda games ever (the other three being Occarina, Past and Awakening, imho). Possibly the best.
Second, I don't understand why people prefer Rayman to Super Monkey Ball. Rayman's multiplayer mode for most minigames is to let players play the game one after the other. That sucks! Rayman is a pretty crappy party game. In addition to that, you have to unlock minigames. That sucks even more!
Contrast this with Super Monkey Ball: All game are unlocked from the go, when going into a game you always see how many players and whether to attach the nunchuck, and in most games, there's a splitscreen mode!. Oh, and bottom-placedp player gets to choose the next minigame, which makes for some interesting competition.
I haven't played the single player mode in Super Monkey Ball, so I can't comment on that, but for multiplayer gaming, I prefer Super Monkey Ball to Rayman.
In my experience, that is not true. I was blogging some stuff about the Wii before it was released, including midnight sales dates. Something interesting happened: In my country (in Europe), that blog post now appears as a top position in Google on several Wii-related search terms. People often post to my blog where they've been able to buy Wiis, and every time, somebody posts a little later that they're all gone.
Two things of note: Nintendo does ship new Wiis regularly, and they do sell out regularly, even in my generally not too Nintendo friendly country.
I see no reason why Sony or a third party couldn't come out with a similar controller, similar to the add-on gamepads, Air-Guitars and Microphones we've all come to know and love on our PS2s
Except... there ar three or four games at most for each of these add-on "gamepads." Even the EyeToy didn't get more than a few mediocre games. On the Wii, every game can and will use the remote to some degree, because developers know they can rely on it being there.
And as we've seen, ideas usually don't suddenly appear. They need to be refined over time. Look at FPSs on the Wii: CoD got the aiming pretty good, Red Steel implemented some additional remote features (such as "calls" you get during multiplayer games or throwing of hand grenades using the nunchuck), and so on. The second or third versions of these games will perfect the control scheme. You can't just create two or three games for such an innovative controller and expect them to be perfect in every way - that's why most EyeToy games are either pretty bad, or pretty bland.
How many different versions of the GameBoy, GameBoy Advanced, and DS have come out so far
It should be noted that no new revision ever fundamentally changed the hardware. They made new versions of the GB, GBA and DS smaller, prettier and included a brighter screen, but they never increased the screen's resolution, or made them faster.
Or, conversely, that Sony intelligently priced the PS3 near the market-clearing price, rather than below it creating an opportunity for arbitrage. Since Sony is in business to make money for Sony, not a horde of e-Bay resellers, the lack of an e-Bay premium isn't, in and of itself, a bad sign.
Come on. It's not like Sony could go even lower with the price - they're losing tons of money as is, and people don't buy the consoles.
It doesn't change his point, but it does make him wrong.
Geez. Are you kidding me? The actual confirmed result was worse than Gruber's worst printed numbers in his article. His updated numbers were exactly right until Ryu gave the developers more money, possibly as a result of his article. I have no idea what precisely he would have to do to be "right" in your mind, but I doubt it's humanly possible.
And his "point" is just an opinion. Many creators take deals that are much worse than 15% from their agent or manager. And Macheist is neither an agent or manager, so I'm not sure what the relevance of his point is, anyway.
I'm not sure if you still haven't read the article, or if you simply don't want to understand. Yes, MacHeist is not an agent or manager. In fact, an agent or manager does a whole lot more than what MacHeist did, so I don't see why MacHeist should get more money than an agent or manager. Anyway, that's not the main point. Here's the relevant part:
If you didn't know any better, judging only from MacHeist's promotional copy and statements such as Ryu's, you might think that most of the profits from the bundle were going to the developers of the bundled applications. Not so. Most of the proceeds are going to MacHeist, and the more bundles they sell, the more disproportionate MacHeist's share of the profit will get.
Gruber's point was that people buying the shareware bundle probably thought that the sale helped independent Mac developers when in fact, it hurt them because it gave them no money, but higher support cost.
Of course, you don't want to understand, so you don't.
It's all relative to the Wiimote bar you place near your TV
Well, duh. The Remote can't know where you place your TV, or how big your TV is. That's why there is a sensor bar. Games are free to calibrate your remote, though, so that the "TV offset" is corrected. So far, none do this. You could fix this by creating your own wider or smaller sensor bar - I thought about creating a small white sensor bar I can place inside my projector's picture.
The responsiveness issues seem to depend on the games. Some have a pretty big lag, some don't. It never bothers me during gaming, though, I only notice it when I'm moving the hand.
Lastly, I think you're confusing the accelerometer and the "pointing mechanism." The fact that the Wii sometimes doesn't register your motions has got nothing to do with bright lights or interference. It's simply you not making the correct motions. Motion sensing does not depend on the sensor bar.
I'm totally happy with my Wii. I'm playing it at least one or two hours every day, since I got it on Europe launch day. I have friends over every second day, and five of them have already bought or ordered their own Wiis (and the number would be higher if more Wiis were available). I pronounce the Wii "best console ever."
Slashdot Mirror
It goes crazy in every house. That's how it works. It's essentially random (yes, it does have some heuristics, but it doesn't measure your place and then calculate a path to vacuum everything), but eventually, it'll have vacuum'd every space simply because it keeps on going and going.
I think I speak for most of us when I say "Huh? The who is doing the what now?"
ryanw loves himself some scientific explanations of the PS3's superiority:
Wow, three times more powerful! Who would have thought! And the modders declare:
Precious little Slashdot... :-)
Oh, it's obvious? How is that obvious? Do you have any kind of evidence? Or could it just be that the Wii is freaking fun to play, and people like to talk about it?
I agree, though, this is much more than fanboyism. But it's not astroturfing: People are simply genuinely excited about the Wii.
This is absolutely true. The prime example is a female friend of mine. Whenever the topic comes to video games, she explains that she doesn't play videogames because they're too complicated. "I'm too stupid," she'll exclaim. She's not stupid at all (she's studying law, and she's really very sharp), and she's also not not playing video games: She does play Donkey Konga and Dance Dance Revolution, and she loves Magnetica on the DS. She'd never even pick up a normal controller, but she does like playing Wii.
If you're new to video games, the standard controllers are overwhelming. The Pong had a knob. The VCS 2600 had one digital stick and one button. The original NES controller had a D-Pad, A, B, Start and Select. Since then, every generation has simply added new stuff to the controller: an Analog stick, shoulder buttons, a second set of shoulder buttons, a second analog stick, more buttons, analog shoulder buttons, analog shoulder buttons with a digital "pressed" state, analog face buttons, analog sticks you can also press to create the effect of yet anoter button... People picking up a controller for the first time simply can't learn it in any kind of meaningful time frame.
The Wii remote has gone back to the very beginning: Wii Sports needs two buttons, A and B, and that's it. And you don't even need the buttons during gameplay of most games.
Yes, I own Loco Roco, and it's one of the few example of a genuinely new and "portable" game (it has a few other issues, such as always repeating itself, though). Mercury Meltdown I've only heard good things about. I wanted to try the japanese Demo, but my PSP decided to not let me download demos anymore and I had to completely reset it. When I finally found the time to do so, the demo was gone, so I haven't yet been able to look into it.
Another nice portable PSP game is Ultimate Block Party. It's somewhat similar to Lumines, but doesn't drag on and on into hour-long gaming sessions.
I also own a GBA and a DS, so I might be a bit spoiled. On these two consoles - especially on the DS - there are many, many games like Loco Roco: Funny little time wasters you can a) not play on any other console and b) take out for a quick few minutes of gaming whenever you've got a bit of time to waste.
Agreed. I use PSPWare on the Mac, which is quite nice, but I still have to download the shows from some P2P service and then let PSPWare convert them, which often takes a lot of time and sometimes doesn't work on the first try.
(Disclaimer: I own a PSP.)
Yes, there are good games for the PSP. No, there are not enough good portable games. Most good PSP games are ports or new versions of PS2 games, generally with similar gameplay (and generally less playable due to the PSP's single analog "nipple"). If I can't play a game during a 15 minutes train ride, I might as well buy it for the PS2.
My PSP has pretty much become my portable Lost player.
This is kind of a Chicken/Egg issue. As long as people don't buy PS3s, exclusive titles will not remain exclusive. As long as there are no exclusive titles, there's no reason to buy a 600-bucks-console if the same games run on a 400-bucks-console.
I think a few more good, portable games would have helped, too.
Oh, you mean Artie McStrawman? Yeah! Let's laugh at that sucker! HAHA!
Yeah, and I expect that new-fangled d-pad to be passé any day now. Oh wait, the innovation is in the games, and since the Remote allows for more if it than a traditional gamepad, there's no issue whatsoever of it becoming stale. Sure, the holodeck itself ceases being a novelty, but next week, you get dragon hunters, and the week after that hot sexbot action, and the week after that sea diving, and so on. The fishing controller, on the other hand, will always give you fishing games.
No, they see it as a totally fun way to spend an evening.
The Virtual Boy was (and still is) a novelty, yet you don't see (and never saw) anyone doing any Virtual Boy Parties.
And that, I think, is the most amazing part of the Wii: it's absolutely viral. Every part of it is viral: Even the stupid videos where people throw their remotes and the strap snaps, and the parodies of these videos with people with Wii controllers shot into their eyes - people talk about the Wii. At my work place, during the last week, the Wii has been discussed during lunch break almost every day. Normally, we don't even talk about gaming, but the Wii changed that.
I brought my Wii to work once, and of the four people who played it, two already ordered one. I've actually had girls who visited ask to power up the Wii and play a bit of Tennis - normally, they wouldn't touch a gamepad with a ten foot pole. I've had "Wii parties" where people came over specifically to play Wii, and some of these people have already ordered a Wii of their own - more would have bought one if they were available anywhere.
The Wii is totally viral. It infects everyone who plays with it.
Except that, funnily, it looks like this time around it's gonna be the PS3 that gets only three games a year.
If it doesn't translate into any real-world advantage, it makes no difference to me.
The differences between the Mac Dock and the NeXT Dock are slim (in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the two shared actual code in addition to the name) compared to the differences between the Mac Dock and the Start Bar - which, if anything, copied concepts from the Mac's menu bar (Apple-Menu -> Start Menu).
Again, you show your hypocrisy. Claiming that the Windows Start Bar is not a copy of the NeXT Dock, but that the Mac OS Dock have more in common than Exposé and Flip3D, that's just laughable.
Well, yeah, that's your - somewhat absurd - main point. It has become clear that you will not let facts influence your convictions, hence further discussion is pointless.
Your example aren't proving anything other than that there are very few cases where "hard work" works, and in those cases, it was more luck than hard work.
That's not good, but in reality, you wouldn't want to enter your password with people around even if it was displayed as dots, since if they can see the password field, they can see you using your keyboard on screen, too :-)
There is no actual "start page." For those who haven't used it, the "start page" isn't some web site, but a starting point which offers access to some of WiiOpera's features. I think you can't enter addresses without going to this "start page."
My pet peeve: You can't scroll with the d-pad.
Interestingly, those videos possibly are helping the Wii. I've seen lots of "Wii conversations" being started by those, or by the "recall" of Wii straps (which, I know, wasn't technically a recall). Eventually, these conversations turn into a discussion of how cool the Wii's new controller is. So yeah, in a way, these videos might help Nintendo.
First of all, yes. Zelda is amazing. I think it's one of the top four Zelda games ever (the other three being Occarina, Past and Awakening, imho). Possibly the best.
Second, I don't understand why people prefer Rayman to Super Monkey Ball. Rayman's multiplayer mode for most minigames is to let players play the game one after the other. That sucks! Rayman is a pretty crappy party game. In addition to that, you have to unlock minigames. That sucks even more!
Contrast this with Super Monkey Ball: All game are unlocked from the go, when going into a game you always see how many players and whether to attach the nunchuck, and in most games, there's a splitscreen mode!. Oh, and bottom-placedp player gets to choose the next minigame, which makes for some interesting competition.
I haven't played the single player mode in Super Monkey Ball, so I can't comment on that, but for multiplayer gaming, I prefer Super Monkey Ball to Rayman.
In my experience, that is not true. I was blogging some stuff about the Wii before it was released, including midnight sales dates. Something interesting happened: In my country (in Europe), that blog post now appears as a top position in Google on several Wii-related search terms. People often post to my blog where they've been able to buy Wiis, and every time, somebody posts a little later that they're all gone.
Two things of note: Nintendo does ship new Wiis regularly, and they do sell out regularly, even in my generally not too Nintendo friendly country.
Except... there ar three or four games at most for each of these add-on "gamepads." Even the EyeToy didn't get more than a few mediocre games. On the Wii, every game can and will use the remote to some degree, because developers know they can rely on it being there.
And as we've seen, ideas usually don't suddenly appear. They need to be refined over time. Look at FPSs on the Wii: CoD got the aiming pretty good, Red Steel implemented some additional remote features (such as "calls" you get during multiplayer games or throwing of hand grenades using the nunchuck), and so on. The second or third versions of these games will perfect the control scheme. You can't just create two or three games for such an innovative controller and expect them to be perfect in every way - that's why most EyeToy games are either pretty bad, or pretty bland.
It should be noted that no new revision ever fundamentally changed the hardware. They made new versions of the GB, GBA and DS smaller, prettier and included a brighter screen, but they never increased the screen's resolution, or made them faster.
Come on. It's not like Sony could go even lower with the price - they're losing tons of money as is, and people don't buy the consoles.
Geez. Are you kidding me? The actual confirmed result was worse than Gruber's worst printed numbers in his article. His updated numbers were exactly right until Ryu gave the developers more money, possibly as a result of his article. I have no idea what precisely he would have to do to be "right" in your mind, but I doubt it's humanly possible.
I'm not sure if you still haven't read the article, or if you simply don't want to understand. Yes, MacHeist is not an agent or manager. In fact, an agent or manager does a whole lot more than what MacHeist did, so I don't see why MacHeist should get more money than an agent or manager. Anyway, that's not the main point. Here's the relevant part:
Gruber's point was that people buying the shareware bundle probably thought that the sale helped independent Mac developers when in fact, it hurt them because it gave them no money, but higher support cost.
Of course, you don't want to understand, so you don't.
Well, duh. The Remote can't know where you place your TV, or how big your TV is. That's why there is a sensor bar. Games are free to calibrate your remote, though, so that the "TV offset" is corrected. So far, none do this. You could fix this by creating your own wider or smaller sensor bar - I thought about creating a small white sensor bar I can place inside my projector's picture.
The responsiveness issues seem to depend on the games. Some have a pretty big lag, some don't. It never bothers me during gaming, though, I only notice it when I'm moving the hand.
Lastly, I think you're confusing the accelerometer and the "pointing mechanism." The fact that the Wii sometimes doesn't register your motions has got nothing to do with bright lights or interference. It's simply you not making the correct motions. Motion sensing does not depend on the sensor bar.
I'm totally happy with my Wii. I'm playing it at least one or two hours every day, since I got it on Europe launch day. I have friends over every second day, and five of them have already bought or ordered their own Wiis (and the number would be higher if more Wiis were available). I pronounce the Wii "best console ever."
You listed the same three axes twice. Is that so hard to understand?