You really should try the games though - you can find the ROMs here. They work perfectly in modern NES emulators, but I assure you these things have certainly given emulator developers some serious headaches, as well as some perfect test material on Badly Working Games. =)
As for the games themselves, they're completely awful - "so bad they're good" kind of way. The cartridge intro with sampled voices and menu system are probably the most impressing bits of the thing. The games just aren't. They were completely awful. I was extremely amused for a while. I wouldn't have been amused at all if I had paid the full price for this thing though, but after getting this for free from the net, I can just say it's hilariously bad...
I'm not a game programmer, but every time I play this stuff, I get the impression that I can make better games than this if only I bother to try! =)
Yes, you can. It's trivial to make "rm" behave like "rm -i", for example.
I haven't myself bothered, because it tends to lead to things like learning to type "unalias ls" or "rm -f whatever" quite fast. Extra security won't work if it is constantly stepping on your toes!
No idea. SSHing in? Some weird "use the keyboard of some other host" X11 hack? Wouldn't surprise me the least...
...or since they need Phantasy Star Online to load Linux in, maybe they have hacked together support for the Phantasy Star Online keyboard (with GameCube stick acting as mouse)... no idea if this is true, this is just extremely hopeful, completely outrageous speculation about the will and capability of the GCLinux people =)
The last time I read about Akalabeth in a magazine, it had a screenshot of the 3D dungeons with caption "The Quake of its era."
And look at this article: "Oh, look how this thing later led to games like Doom 3..."
Hmm, I've been reading about Akalabeth a lot and I haven't even played it. I suppose I should try it some day - everyone seems to be remaking it these days..
Completely pales in comparison to the time when the scammers tried to scam the head in a jar... That was a really beautiful way to merge Lovecraftian horrors and popular Internet sports. As the page says, a masterpiece.
Since when does VNC have anything to do with mythological creatures?
It has everything to do with graphics performance for most mythology-based, fantasy-themed games - for example, when you're playing Linux Neverwinter Nights over VNC.
(No, I haven't done that, but some people apparently did, and were quite successful. My own only surprise was inadvertedly finding out that NWN actually runs pretty well under Mesa software rendering - no hirez textures and was painful to play on anything over 640x480, but still, it was pretty cool...)
Is GnuStep a viable platform? Ten years without a wm based on it?
GNUstep people have probably been more busy with the libraries and such. GNUstep applications work with any X window manager. Window Maker works beautifully and takes the most important GNUstep special features in account. There are dozens of other window managers that work just as well. So developing a window manager probably wasn't important at this point.
From developer point of view, GNUstep base libraries are good enough to be used right now.
From user point of view, GNUstep works pretty well and is included in many free *NIX packaging systems, and isn't too complex to install either. The only bad thing is that there aren't great many GNUstep applications. Yet.
You are an "IT professional" and you dont care how you get the results?
Uh, I was trying to say that as an IT guy I care about the implementation details, but the rest of the world just simply doesn't.
But this has nothing to do with the fact that I didn't understood much of the contents of the article! Two completely separate issues.
There are various fields of expertise, and in the context of this article, I'm far from an expert. I'm not an XBox/PS/GC hardware/software hacker. I'm not that familiar with low-level inner workings of the Network (the only thing I've ever done related to packet capture was that I've used Ethereal a few dozen times...).
For purposes of this article, I'm just a random fool with a GameCube who found the thought of 'net console gaming interesting, especially since the article title suggested cross-platform compatibility (but the article itself didn't - shame). Do I need to know the nitty-gritty details about which packet capture interface the people who built this used? Not really.
And to come back to the first point above: As the IT guy, I'm also capable, and willing, to learn more. If there had been a longish document on the mysterious details of the console networking, and how they managed to reverse-engineer them - that would be an interesting read, in case I could find enough coffee. =)
Well, if you want to learn about Finnish mythology, Kalevala is not the best place to do it since Lönnrot did some hack and slash job when putting together different myths.
Yep, not to even mention that most of the deities and such are only mentioned passingly. And since it's epic rather than prose, there's considerably less chance that the different people are that detailedly described, anyway.
In original folk poems Loviatar was either one of the names of Louhi (among with Loveatar, Louhetar, and a number of other similar forms) or her daughter.
Okay, now this starts to make even more sense. Thank you =)
European released carts always have a language selector, which delays access to the game. I'm sure this is something to do with a laudable EU superstate free trade regulation from Brussels, but it certainly annoys the hell out of me.
Wouldn't be so sure. I'm pretty sure some EU countries have specific legislation that says that manuals and packaging have to be translated, but I'm pretty sure it's not an EU-wide law.
For comparison, almost all of PC games released in Finland have English packaging and manuals. Some distributors/importers thoughtfully provide installation instructions in Finnish - I have a vague recollection that this was a recommendation from the consumer ombudsman - but full-blown localisation of the game is really rare.
And even so, on Gamecube and GBA, I only see games with translations from Nintendo and pretty rarely from other publishers - the bigger the publisher the more likely there's German and French game translations. I have several games with only English game text, though. It's even more blatant with manuals - here Nintendo seems to be the only game publisher that provides Finnish manuals, though some games only come with a paper sheet with a summary.
Um, in short, it's a publisher's fault, not EU's. =)
But I agree that failure to publish due to language problems is pretty silly. (or maybe that's just an opinion from someone from a country that would be a localizer's nightmare, but luckily the inhabitants have grown used to missing localization =)
starting to??? Not quite. I wouldn't worry about it - Email is a complex system and complex things need complex information to work... it should be okay as long as the user agent knows how to hide the irrelevant information by default.
Could be worse. Could be a message as a.doc attachment. Or a.ppt. With clip-art.
Heh. I am an "IT professional" and I had no idea what the blurb really said. But I did manage to comprehend that it uses method X instead of the more popular method Y, therefore it's network performance is surprisingly good (read: it's pretty darn fast).
I think your comment just exemplifies the thing that we often forget in this side of the table: the people (management and end users), at least hopefully, don't care how you get the results, just that you get good results. Maybe the article would have been more legible if it had said stuff like "It's fast as hell" and they had put the technological discussion to next paragraph, for those who care about such things.
Once you've had wickedly nubile Finnish goddess of pain Loviatar (1st Edition Deities & Demigods p. 55), who can be ever be satisfied by mere mortal women again?
(Avoid entering of the Geek Mode and completely missing the damn point the parent poster was trying to make; Will save with +2 comedy bonus, DC 20. Voluntarily failing the save...)
Huh, Loviatar was supposed to be an ancient Finnish goddess? Damn, I always thought the name sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it. Apart of the structure of the name, it didn't seem Finnish at all.
And a few seconds of grepping (okay, googling) the Kalevala does agree that this isn't just some mysterious TSR mess-up. =)
(Damn, a reference to the 45th poem? I should have read the whole thing...)
Goddesses of pain don't sound too fun though. Mielikki has been my favorite of the Finnish deities that got immortalized in D&D - though, well... unicorns? Bleah.
all the NPCs have full voice and it really makes a diffrence because it feels more like your there, the graphics are simply stunning
...and the immersion shatters the second anyone utters anything about phAt l00t. Thanks, but I think I'll pass. MMORPGs have this nasty habit of being really cool until you let the other players in =)
Too bad the Jurassic Park code maintenance isn't yet very much possible. There's still no compiler that could compile that badly documented bastard child of C, Pascal and line noise that they used there... one of the raptors ate the language specs.
at the end of this game, YOU KILL GOD.
(now i'm way more accustomed to asian thought,
but at 8, i wondered if i was going to hell
for beating this game... ^^)
Well, you kill the god in the first game, but in the sequel, the god will kill you. In the third part, the killed ones will proclaim you a god, though, so it's kind of a win-win situation anyway, considering the greater story arc.
I'd buy the GBA version, but I'm not paying $20 for a game I already own two copies of and is old enough to vote.
That was what I was thinking, too, but I thought that since it's relatively cheap, I'll just get it. I don't own any copies of it, and that's another factor =)
But even if I would have had, I might have still bought it. First, Zelda is always Zelda, and then, I'm just a game collector. I have two or three copies of some games (the second or third copies usually budget releases or free copies).
You can get GBA Zelda already! The NES Classics Series for Gameboy Advance has The Legend of Zelda. It's the real NES ROM being run in an emulator (some small changes, like a less typoed intro - the rest of the legendary lines in the game seem untouched =) works really well too. And it's cheaper than most GBA games too (I got mine for 25 euros).
I wasn't too hot to get the other games in this series, but this one I had to get. Damn I've played this one a lot =)
In FF7 Aeris' case is slightly different because she was just simply slaughtered for no reason whatsoever in the middle of the game, and I heard the designer's intention was to make a counterpoint, because most of the preceding games had some sort of heroic, meaningful sacrifice of a character. So, the designer was perfectly aware that major characters die all the time in games, and probably even that that was actually turning into one of the defining cliches of JRPGs...
The FTC is trying to enforce a law that hasn't even passed
...just when he was done saying stuff like:
This ad has been sent in compliance of the new email bill:
Section 301. Per Section 301, paragraph (a)(2)(c) of S 1618,
http://www.senate.gov/~murkowski/commercialemail/S 71index.html
Further transmission of this email letter may be stopped at no cost
to you by sending a reply to remove@imtoosexy.com with the word
"remove" in the subject line
Warcrafts? Up to the level of LotR? Not quite... but you could still make hell of good movies out of them.
What I'd like to see would be movie versions of the Ultima series. Particularly Ultima VII and Ultima VII part 2. Though there's so much material in the games that it might better work as a DVD-only release or as a TV series.
...and now that there's talk about Doom movie again - someone please defrost the Deus Ex movie project too...
Nintendo's the Apple Computer of console gaming. Or least it's become that in the last few years.
Yeah, Nintendo's consoles and games are quite a well-working brand, they're generally praised for their rather good quality, they have a large group of extremely rabid fans... and just like Apple, Nintendo has been "dying" for quite a while now. =)
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, that's interesting.
You really should try the games though - you can find the ROMs here. They work perfectly in modern NES emulators, but I assure you these things have certainly given emulator developers some serious headaches, as well as some perfect test material on Badly Working Games. =)
As for the games themselves, they're completely awful - "so bad they're good" kind of way. The cartridge intro with sampled voices and menu system are probably the most impressing bits of the thing. The games just aren't. They were completely awful. I was extremely amused for a while. I wouldn't have been amused at all if I had paid the full price for this thing though, but after getting this for free from the net, I can just say it's hilariously bad...
I'm not a game programmer, but every time I play this stuff, I get the impression that I can make better games than this if only I bother to try! =)
Yes, you can. It's trivial to make "rm" behave like "rm -i", for example.
I haven't myself bothered, because it tends to lead to things like learning to type "unalias ls" or "rm -f whatever" quite fast. Extra security won't work if it is constantly stepping on your toes!
No idea. SSHing in? Some weird "use the keyboard of some other host" X11 hack? Wouldn't surprise me the least...
...or since they need Phantasy Star Online to load Linux in, maybe they have hacked together support for the Phantasy Star Online keyboard (with GameCube stick acting as mouse)... no idea if this is true, this is just extremely hopeful, completely outrageous speculation about the will and capability of the GCLinux people =)
Still, I'd really want to know for sure, too.
::snap::
The last time I read about Akalabeth in a magazine, it had a screenshot of the 3D dungeons with caption "The Quake of its era."
And look at this article: "Oh, look how this thing later led to games like Doom 3..."
Hmm, I've been reading about Akalabeth a lot and I haven't even played it. I suppose I should try it some day - everyone seems to be remaking it these days..
Completely pales in comparison to the time when the scammers tried to scam the head in a jar... That was a really beautiful way to merge Lovecraftian horrors and popular Internet sports. As the page says, a masterpiece.
It has everything to do with graphics performance for most mythology-based, fantasy-themed games - for example, when you're playing Linux Neverwinter Nights over VNC.
(No, I haven't done that, but some people apparently did, and were quite successful. My own only surprise was inadvertedly finding out that NWN actually runs pretty well under Mesa software rendering - no hirez textures and was painful to play on anything over 640x480, but still, it was pretty cool...)
Wow! This from the company that truly stompeth on the Ultima remakes and other fan projects.
There's no consistency like inconsistency. Will I ever learn to understand EA?
GNUstep people have probably been more busy with the libraries and such. GNUstep applications work with any X window manager. Window Maker works beautifully and takes the most important GNUstep special features in account. There are dozens of other window managers that work just as well. So developing a window manager probably wasn't important at this point.
From developer point of view, GNUstep base libraries are good enough to be used right now.
From user point of view, GNUstep works pretty well and is included in many free *NIX packaging systems, and isn't too complex to install either. The only bad thing is that there aren't great many GNUstep applications. Yet.
Uh, I was trying to say that as an IT guy I care about the implementation details, but the rest of the world just simply doesn't.
But this has nothing to do with the fact that I didn't understood much of the contents of the article! Two completely separate issues.
There are various fields of expertise, and in the context of this article, I'm far from an expert. I'm not an XBox/PS/GC hardware/software hacker. I'm not that familiar with low-level inner workings of the Network (the only thing I've ever done related to packet capture was that I've used Ethereal a few dozen times...).
For purposes of this article, I'm just a random fool with a GameCube who found the thought of 'net console gaming interesting, especially since the article title suggested cross-platform compatibility (but the article itself didn't - shame). Do I need to know the nitty-gritty details about which packet capture interface the people who built this used? Not really.
And to come back to the first point above: As the IT guy, I'm also capable, and willing, to learn more. If there had been a longish document on the mysterious details of the console networking, and how they managed to reverse-engineer them - that would be an interesting read, in case I could find enough coffee. =)
Yep, not to even mention that most of the deities and such are only mentioned passingly. And since it's epic rather than prose, there's considerably less chance that the different people are that detailedly described, anyway.
Okay, now this starts to make even more sense. Thank you =)
Wouldn't be so sure. I'm pretty sure some EU countries have specific legislation that says that manuals and packaging have to be translated, but I'm pretty sure it's not an EU-wide law.
For comparison, almost all of PC games released in Finland have English packaging and manuals. Some distributors/importers thoughtfully provide installation instructions in Finnish - I have a vague recollection that this was a recommendation from the consumer ombudsman - but full-blown localisation of the game is really rare.
And even so, on Gamecube and GBA, I only see games with translations from Nintendo and pretty rarely from other publishers - the bigger the publisher the more likely there's German and French game translations. I have several games with only English game text, though. It's even more blatant with manuals - here Nintendo seems to be the only game publisher that provides Finnish manuals, though some games only come with a paper sheet with a summary.
Um, in short, it's a publisher's fault, not EU's. =)
But I agree that failure to publish due to language problems is pretty silly. (or maybe that's just an opinion from someone from a country that would be a localizer's nightmare, but luckily the inhabitants have grown used to missing localization =)
starting to??? Not quite. I wouldn't worry about it - Email is a complex system and complex things need complex information to work... it should be okay as long as the user agent knows how to hide the irrelevant information by default.
Could be worse. Could be a message as a .doc attachment. Or a .ppt. With clip-art.
Heh. I am an "IT professional" and I had no idea what the blurb really said. But I did manage to comprehend that it uses method X instead of the more popular method Y, therefore it's network performance is surprisingly good (read: it's pretty darn fast).
I think your comment just exemplifies the thing that we often forget in this side of the table: the people (management and end users), at least hopefully, don't care how you get the results, just that you get good results. Maybe the article would have been more legible if it had said stuff like "It's fast as hell" and they had put the technological discussion to next paragraph, for those who care about such things.
(Avoid entering of the Geek Mode and completely missing the damn point the parent poster was trying to make; Will save with +2 comedy bonus, DC 20. Voluntarily failing the save...)
Huh, Loviatar was supposed to be an ancient Finnish goddess? Damn, I always thought the name sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it. Apart of the structure of the name, it didn't seem Finnish at all.
And a few seconds of grepping (okay, googling) the Kalevala does agree that this isn't just some mysterious TSR mess-up. =)
(Damn, a reference to the 45th poem? I should have read the whole thing...)
Goddesses of pain don't sound too fun though. Mielikki has been my favorite of the Finnish deities that got immortalized in D&D - though, well... unicorns? Bleah.
There's also an open-source version: OpenTeddy.
I just wish OpenTeddy and this inkulator thing would somehow work right out of Blender...
...and the immersion shatters the second anyone utters anything about phAt l00t. Thanks, but I think I'll pass. MMORPGs have this nasty habit of being really cool until you let the other players in =)
Well, you can already control Jurassic Park from the Linux desktop. In open source.
Too bad the Jurassic Park code maintenance isn't yet very much possible. There's still no compiler that could compile that badly documented bastard child of C, Pascal and line noise that they used there... one of the raptors ate the language specs.
Well, you kill the god in the first game, but in the sequel, the god will kill you. In the third part, the killed ones will proclaim you a god, though, so it's kind of a win-win situation anyway, considering the greater story arc.
Or something along those lines. =)
That was what I was thinking, too, but I thought that since it's relatively cheap, I'll just get it. I don't own any copies of it, and that's another factor =)
But even if I would have had, I might have still bought it. First, Zelda is always Zelda, and then, I'm just a game collector. I have two or three copies of some games (the second or third copies usually budget releases or free copies).
You can get GBA Zelda already! The NES Classics Series for Gameboy Advance has The Legend of Zelda. It's the real NES ROM being run in an emulator (some small changes, like a less typoed intro - the rest of the legendary lines in the game seem untouched =) works really well too. And it's cheaper than most GBA games too (I got mine for 25 euros).
I wasn't too hot to get the other games in this series, but this one I had to get. Damn I've played this one a lot =)
...or Dupré in Ultima VII pt2: Serpent Isle...
In FF7 Aeris' case is slightly different because she was just simply slaughtered for no reason whatsoever in the middle of the game, and I heard the designer's intention was to make a counterpoint, because most of the preceding games had some sort of heroic, meaningful sacrifice of a character. So, the designer was perfectly aware that major characters die all the time in games, and probably even that that was actually turning into one of the defining cliches of JRPGs...
So says Spamford:
...just when he was done saying stuff like:
Pot. Kettle. Black.
Warcrafts? Up to the level of LotR? Not quite... but you could still make hell of good movies out of them.
What I'd like to see would be movie versions of the Ultima series. Particularly Ultima VII and Ultima VII part 2. Though there's so much material in the games that it might better work as a DVD-only release or as a TV series.
...and now that there's talk about Doom movie again - someone please defrost the Deus Ex movie project too...
Okay, I was first confused as hell, but then I noted it was just Linux, emulator, and a bit of tinkering. It was clever, but not really that clever.
So, I suppose a GameCube would run OSX faster than XBox, or maybe we'll just need to wait for XBox2... PPC processor is pretty much needed anyway =)
Yeah, Nintendo's consoles and games are quite a well-working brand, they're generally praised for their rather good quality, they have a large group of extremely rabid fans... and just like Apple, Nintendo has been "dying" for quite a while now. =)