Seriously, the first two (Myst and Riven) were absolutely brilliant, and are still two of my favorite games of all time. The third was passable, but the fourth and fifth pretty much fell flat.
Mostly, I think it's because the characters got detailed well beyond the level they were developed for, resulting in stories and motivations that were flimsy or didn't make sense half of the time. Combined with a general decline in the quality of the puzzles, poor level design in the later ones, and the atrocious move to realtime graphics in the final one, this killed the games.
I'd like to see them rebooted with a return to the formula that made them a success in the first place: a return drop-dead gorgeous prerendered graphics, hard puzzles, intriguing levels, and a good sense of mystery. Ditch the overdone storyline and the attempts to add more interactivity to world, most of which just came off as hokey anyways.
Quite honestly, by the time they're about 14 there's nothing you can do to protect them any more. If you stop them from seeing porn on the internet, they'll manage to see it in magazines. If you don't want them to hear about the Bad Things out there, they'll just hear about them from other sources.
By the time they enter highschool, your children have already had their foundation laid. Hopefully you did a good job. From there on out it's a matter of exploring the world around them and developing high level understandings, and they cannot do that if you keep them from experiencing it. If you gave them the right foundation, they will experience it and make the right decisions.
My first clear memory is having a discussion about pickles in preschool when I was 3. I have vague recollections of a family reunion I went to when I was 2 and 6 months.
I think that memory is trigger based. Memories come back to us when something specific reminds us of them. Example: I got a new piece of code a while ago from a colleague, and was having a tough time working out what it did. I spontaneously remembered when I was 3, playing with my parents' Apple ][. I used to pound on the keyboard and pretend that I was typing, even though I couldn't read a word of what was showing up on the screen. My inability to read the code triggered the memory of my inability to read the screen.
I was born in 1986, and had a DIY radio kit. But my Apple ][ swiftly displaced it based sheerly on what it could do. And, while I have tinkered with EE some over the years, I still remain much more interested computers. I believe that amateur computing and computer science have displace EE and amateur science.
In Apple's Mac OS X, they include a GUI IDE called Project Builder, which is used for most OS X development out there. However, on close examination, one finds that Project Builder is merely an interface stuck on a slightly modified copy of GCC. It creates its own makefiles which include directives to link against the directives to link against the MacOS libraries, and the executes a gnumake command. So Project Builder is really little more than a spiffed-up text editor (it even 'features' being able to use the same keyboard shortcuts as Emacs) with the ability to execute a few commandline statements. But with it one is able to write anything from OpenGL games to SCSI drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, the first two (Myst and Riven) were absolutely brilliant, and are still two of my favorite games of all time. The third was passable, but the fourth and fifth pretty much fell flat.
Mostly, I think it's because the characters got detailed well beyond the level they were developed for, resulting in stories and motivations that were flimsy or didn't make sense half of the time. Combined with a general decline in the quality of the puzzles, poor level design in the later ones, and the atrocious move to realtime graphics in the final one, this killed the games.
I'd like to see them rebooted with a return to the formula that made them a success in the first place: a return drop-dead gorgeous prerendered graphics, hard puzzles, intriguing levels, and a good sense of mystery. Ditch the overdone storyline and the attempts to add more interactivity to world, most of which just came off as hokey anyways.
Quite honestly, by the time they're about 14 there's nothing you can do to protect them any more. If you stop them from seeing porn on the internet, they'll manage to see it in magazines. If you don't want them to hear about the Bad Things out there, they'll just hear about them from other sources.
By the time they enter highschool, your children have already had their foundation laid. Hopefully you did a good job. From there on out it's a matter of exploring the world around them and developing high level understandings, and they cannot do that if you keep them from experiencing it. If you gave them the right foundation, they will experience it and make the right decisions.
My first clear memory is having a discussion about pickles in preschool when I was 3. I have vague recollections of a family reunion I went to when I was 2 and 6 months.
I think that memory is trigger based. Memories come back to us when something specific reminds us of them. Example: I got a new piece of code a while ago from a colleague, and was having a tough time working out what it did. I spontaneously remembered when I was 3, playing with my parents' Apple ][. I used to pound on the keyboard and pretend that I was typing, even though I couldn't read a word of what was showing up on the screen. My inability to read the code triggered the memory of my inability to read the screen.
I was born in 1986, and had a DIY radio kit. But my Apple ][ swiftly displaced it based sheerly on what it could do. And, while I have tinkered with EE some over the years, I still remain much more interested computers. I believe that amateur computing and computer science have displace EE and amateur science.
offer rewards for running PGPnet
first
Math is the square root of all evil.
In Apple's Mac OS X, they include a GUI IDE called Project Builder, which is used for most OS X development out there. However, on close examination, one finds that Project Builder is merely an interface stuck on a slightly modified copy of GCC. It creates its own makefiles which include directives to link against the directives to link against the MacOS libraries, and the executes a gnumake command. So Project Builder is really little more than a spiffed-up text editor (it even 'features' being able to use the same keyboard shortcuts as Emacs) with the ability to execute a few commandline statements. But with it one is able to write anything from OpenGL games to SCSI drivers.