Shenmue 2 is the only game I've ever played that *obviously* needed a sequel; the villian hasn't been dispatched, the big discovery has been made, but only at the very end and then you don't know what it means....this game clearly was meant to continue. Yes, the game is a bit slow going on the plot, but it's meant to tell a big story. I think Yu Suzuki thought he had a brand new franchise a la Final Fantasy on his hands; but the difference was that it would be one story played out over 10+ games. Clearly that hasn't/won't happen, and now all I want is one more game to tie everything up, bring closure to the series, and presumably see what the big deal was with those freaking mirrors.
Though rumors abound that yes indeedy, there is a Shenmue 3 waiting in the wings, it's nothing but rumors; Sega doesn't even acknowledge that Shenmue 3 was even developed.
That said, I'll buy whatever console it comes out on just to play it; anything after that is a bonus.
Metrowerks (sorry, Freescale) already announced that there will be no more OS X version of Codewarrior (nor Windows...they're going for the embedded market now).
Dunno about their Linux IDE, but I wouldn't be surprised if that gets shut down too.
I was part of the original AC beta when it was on the Zone, and when the beta was announced as being over, and was going to go live in a week, Turbine announced there would be all kinds of crazy things, like a comet appearing in the sky (I saw it) and that it was supposed to crash and destroy the world (which I'm not sure if it did...wasn't on when the end came).
Because I think only one person got to keep his/her beta character through some contest, everyone else knew theirs would be removed, so I saw people dropping stuff all over the place...I logged in and found one high level fighter laying out all his treasure on the ground in a straight line, for any and all to take.
I guess it comes down to economics....the reason why they're ending the game was the lack of participants, so to spend the time to "end the world" in some dramatic way which might be seen by 10 people isn't worth it.
I was pretty stunned by it; Hyrule isn't coming back (at least in WW). As soon as I got to the game where you go back to Hyrule, I was wondering what would happen in the game that would bring it all back, and then was stunned to realize it wouldn't. I can't remember a game that really gave a "plot twist" that was both profound and well done.
...if Nintendo has some grand story already laid out and each game is another episode a la Star Wars. If so, it seems that WW was Nintendo's Return of the Jedi, complete with a 'cartoonish' quality that infuriated some (but not all...I actually liked it).
That said, RotJ really was the *end* (yes, the books carried it on a bit further, but I mean that the principal elements of the story had ended) and WW also seems to signal an end; once you take the land away, can you really put it back again? And frankly, I'm actually pretty okay with the idea of the series "ending" in a rather dramatic and final way; I'd hate to see the series milked for all its worth and have nothing but mediocre Zelda games cluttering up my opinion of the series.
So if in TW Link bites it, then Nintendo will have done something truly amazing; brought a game franchise to a repectable end. That, theoretically, frees them up to come up with a whole *new* series, and a new set of adventures. Sure they can keep the Mario warhorse around for each console; there's no "story" there.
Frankly, I kinda wished they'd actually done one really big story, a la Shenmue, but that's just quibbling at this point.
Crystal Quest still ranks higher than Tetris in my book. It *felt* right, was easy to learn, and like Tetris, utterly addicting. Many a copy of Word 5.0 was shut down so that the grad student who had unlimited access to the Mac lab at college could instead play CQ.
No, no love here either. But I'll go further and say I'm not feeling it from *any* of the consoles. The interest I have for the Revolution, based on its controller, is tempered by the fact that it seems the only other selling point is that it can play all the older games. Note to Nintendo: Retro gaming is cool, but not for very long. Yes it's fun to fire up Super Mario Brothers once in awhile, but I'm not going to slog through those games *again*.
But as far as the 360...PGR3 looks okay, I guess, but so does PGR2 and I'm not 1/3 of the way through that. To be fair, the same goes for GTA:SA...it's fun, but so was Vice City, and frankly I've moved on.
I'm beginning to think this new generation is the harbringer of some kind of gaming apocalypse...everybody, including nintendo, is pushing "more of the same" but with minor twists (better graphics, innovative controller). It's depressing when you look forward to the next systems for more of the same, but better!
Frankly, I see the only hope coming from giving away or making dev kits unbelievably cheap so that anyone and their dog can create a game and distribute it online (a la xbox live). Will a lot suck? Oh boy will they ever! But it's the only way any kind of innovation will happen, I think. But I guess as long as the big three get their royalties per disc, no one is going to care.
The beautiful thing about mysql is that I've run it on windows, os x, linux (ppc, x86 and mips (ps2 running linux)) Solaris x86, and freebsd. Because you can actually get the source and compile it, you have a transactional database that runs on practically anything. This version of oracle is currently available for Windows and Linux. For some of the groups I work with, this basically makes it a non-starter (there really are some mac-only shops out there who will not think to buy a pc just to run the db).
The current version is a beta and the date refers to when the "shipping" product should become available, negating the use of the beta.
Three months isn't exactly enough time for apps to have gotten "fat". Besides, you don't have to use every aspect of the database (pl/sql comes to mind), but treat it as a straightforward mysql installation...stick with the dynamic sql and you really wouldn't know the difference.
Filing frivilous lawsuits actually costs money, and I don't see where his income comes from. It's all nice to crusade and all, but eventually you have to pay for the fax machine and ISP.
And what kind of law does he actually practice? All this grandstanding could be done by anyone with the wherewithall to build a soapbox, but I wonder if all this is actually just an excuse to avoid going to the office and doing the inevitable paperwork: "Make sure Form 5A is included with Form 7B (revision 2) that has been notarized along with the Schedule C form...."
Zzzzz...
(Maybe that's why he's so aggressive...he's just trying to stay awake)
I have a machine that was infected by a worm and it has no internet access *at* *all*. It was infected by another machine interally. It doesn't even do anything net-related..it's for number crunching using internally-written software; no user is supposed to sit down and use it.
Has anyone installed VMWare Workstation on Ubuntu? I use Fedora only 'cause VMWare works with it (albiet with patches). I much more prefer Ubuntu's method of getting apps and patches than RedHat's.
Also, has anyone tried Oracle on it? I know you need to tell the installer to ignore the fact it's not a suse or redhat-based distro, but was there any other issues?
Can't wait to get my hands on the new iPod. New iMac looks sweet. Downloading iTunes 6 now.
That said...
Where are the powermacs and powerbooks I'd heard were going to be announced? If I'm going to be making content for the new iPod, what better than on a quad-processor G5? Or a dual procesor powerbook?
I have read a lot about the 360. I was there with the IBM jokes, I even watched the MTV show pretty much in its entirety (exception: I don't really care for the killers). After all is said and done, I'm probably not getting one.
Why? Microsoft hasn't triggered my herd instinct. There's no buzz or *reason* to want to line up at 12 am or whatever to be one of the first to buy the thing. Project Gotham Racing 3? Yawn...I haven't finished PGR2. I didn't like Perfect Dark on the N64, why should I like it on the 360 (full disclosure: I'm one of the few people, I guess, who didn't like Halo *at* *all* and have decided that for the rest of my life, I will play FPS on a mouse/keyboard rig, not a gamepad).
In short, I'm not going to spend that kind of money for "more of the same".
But wait, there's more!
Here I may be crossing into treasonous territory, but I feel pretty much the same about the PS3 as well. Lots of cool pics, awesome specs, but no game that I really care about has me marking Xs on my calendar till launch date.
The only *interesting* console was the, you guessed it, the Revolution, and the only thing that has piqued my interest is, like everyone else, the controller. Other than that, I think my feelings about the games run about the same...there'll be a Mario game (though hopefully a decent one...the GameCube seemed to have missed that). There'll be a Zelda game probably, and throw in a MarioKart and you have yourself a Nintendo console.
Come to think of it, *none* of the systems have inspired me to want to get the latest-n-greatest. I don't have a HD tv, I don't play sports games. So this puts me in an interesting situation...I can sit back and wait for the inevitible price drops. I can wait to see if certain vaporware ever materializes. I can kick back with my I Love Katamari and Zelda Twilight Princess and PGR2 (yes, have all three consoles) and determine my next move entirely on the *games* available.
Looks like I won't have to think about it for quite awhile.
I get no comments except "what's that on your hand?" and I realize I've been dragging it through the ink as I write. I had to give up on fountain pens completely (just a phase) and I discover that pencils smear too. Bic pens are about the only thing I use these days.
...is the fact that they mark everything before the flavor-of-the-month as 'legacy' as in 'you should port all that to the '. It took me years to figure out how all the various bits of MFC worked (so non-standard as C++ goes), and then COM was the thing, with all its templates. I got enough COM working to feel pretty good and now.net is where everything's at and I should do everything in C#, can't be trusted to allocate memory myself, etc.
And the thing that galls me is that it's all trying to do pretty much the same thing. No new "revolutionary" stuff took place...MFC was just a wrapper around the SDK. COM was a (theoretically anwyway) nicer way of doing DLLs and RPC..net is just a me-too way of re-organizing the deck chairs and throwing in yet another language and garbage collection. Woo freaking hoo.
To those who say that if I wanted to, I could just stick with the API, I say, sure...which one? Because of the underpinings of Win9X and NT were so completely different, there were just enough differences in a lot of the apps that I wrote that I either had to have a separate Win9X version, or just don't use that particular API, in which case, I either had to reinvent the wheel, or just not do it.
The nice thing about Unix has been its consistency. The C programs I wrote in college 10+years ago would still work now with minimal changes (I acknowledge that even some Unix APIs change a little).
Something I never understood about Romero is: What does he actually do? WIth Carmack it's pretty easy, he's the coder's coder. But Romero always had that nebulous title of "designer" which means what, exactly? Does he actually work on the levels, making art, programming rooms, or is he just the idea guy, writing emails and documents?
"She's a designer *AND* a developer" =Stunned look=
Overdub: Forget it Jake, it's Microsoft. ==Fade to black==
Yes, that's all well and good but...
on
Bill Gates Speaks Out
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
...how can we capitalize on what *could* be a nice bit of PR disaster for M$, showing that Gates is off his rocker, not to be trusted around children, etc. It's simply wrong that he should think M$ came up with everything and let it stand at that; think of the readers who *don't* know better and are that bit more lulled into thinking computers were invented by M$.
It's sort of a bizzare reversal of the phrase: every time Bill lies, a cash register goes "ring!"
(With apologies to Poochy) "Yo! I'm Excel! Yo I'm soooo down with you! I take calculations...TO THE EXTREME!!!!"
I don't think I've ever seen a more in-your-face interface *ever*. Interfaces are supposed to get out of the way and let you get the job done with minimal fuss...this takes it to the complete opposite.
It seems clear to me that Microsoft is really honestly losing it...their two cash cows, which drive the *entire* freaking company, are being pimped. They're being given cheezy makeovers and being pushed in your face in some desperate attempt to stay in the forefront of your mind, because what you're *doing* is not important, it's that you're using WINDOWS and OFFICE that's important.
I'm in complete agreement with you...I went *from* Java to ObjC and Cocoa. To me, cross-platform compatibility isn't essential, and besides, I've just never ever gottan a Java app to run with that...crispness...that a C/C++/ObjC program has.
Of course, it helps that my target audience are Mac folks already, but XCode + ObjC/Cocoa has proven so good that I'd happily develop for any platform that could run that combo.
It's sad to think that I had access to a NeXT machine back-in-the-day and apart from firing up Project Builder once or twice, never really considered trying to learn to program on it.
According to Wikipedia, the "first" worm was in fact targed to Unix machines running on the VAX and Sparc. IIRC, there were two versions, one for each platform, and they would bring over the source code and compile it on the infected machine, then run.
What separates that from today is that it wasn't designed to do any actual damage (bugs in the code caused it to replicate wildly, causing the actual damage), and depended on there being a C compiler available.
Sigh, regardless of the damage done back then, it all seems so quaint in comparison to the stuff running around today.
Slashdot Mirror
Shenmue 2 is the only game I've ever played that *obviously* needed a sequel; the villian hasn't been dispatched, the big discovery has been made, but only at the very end and then you don't know what it means....this game clearly was meant to continue. Yes, the game is a bit slow going on the plot, but it's meant to tell a big story. I think Yu Suzuki thought he had a brand new franchise a la Final Fantasy on his hands; but the difference was that it would be one story played out over 10+ games. Clearly that hasn't/won't happen, and now all I want is one more game to tie everything up, bring closure to the series, and presumably see what the big deal was with those freaking mirrors.
Though rumors abound that yes indeedy, there is a Shenmue 3 waiting in the wings, it's nothing but rumors; Sega doesn't even acknowledge that Shenmue 3 was even developed.
That said, I'll buy whatever console it comes out on just to play it; anything after that is a bonus.
Metrowerks (sorry, Freescale) already announced that there will be no more OS X version of Codewarrior (nor Windows...they're going for the embedded market now).
Dunno about their Linux IDE, but I wouldn't be surprised if that gets shut down too.
I was part of the original AC beta when it was on the Zone, and when the beta was announced as being over, and was going to go live in a week, Turbine announced there would be all kinds of crazy things, like a comet appearing in the sky (I saw it) and that it was supposed to crash and destroy the world (which I'm not sure if it did...wasn't on when the end came).
Because I think only one person got to keep his/her beta character through some contest, everyone else knew theirs would be removed, so I saw people dropping stuff all over the place...I logged in and found one high level fighter laying out all his treasure on the ground in a straight line, for any and all to take.
I guess it comes down to economics....the reason why they're ending the game was the lack of participants, so to spend the time to "end the world" in some dramatic way which might be seen by 10 people isn't worth it.
I was pretty stunned by it; Hyrule isn't coming back (at least in WW). As soon as I got to the game where you go back to Hyrule, I was wondering what would happen in the game that would bring it all back, and then was stunned to realize it wouldn't. I can't remember a game that really gave a "plot twist" that was both profound and well done.
...if Nintendo has some grand story already laid out and each game is another episode a la Star Wars. If so, it seems that WW was Nintendo's Return of the Jedi, complete with a 'cartoonish' quality that infuriated some (but not all...I actually liked it).
That said, RotJ really was the *end* (yes, the books carried it on a bit further, but I mean that the principal elements of the story had ended) and WW also seems to signal an end; once you take the land away, can you really put it back again? And frankly, I'm actually pretty okay with the idea of the series "ending" in a rather dramatic and final way; I'd hate to see the series milked for all its worth and have nothing but mediocre Zelda games cluttering up my opinion of the series.
So if in TW Link bites it, then Nintendo will have done something truly amazing; brought a game franchise to a repectable end. That, theoretically, frees them up to come up with a whole *new* series, and a new set of adventures. Sure they can keep the Mario warhorse around for each console; there's no "story" there.
Frankly, I kinda wished they'd actually done one really big story, a la Shenmue, but that's just quibbling at this point.
Crystal Quest still ranks higher than Tetris in my book. It *felt* right, was easy to learn, and like Tetris, utterly addicting. Many a copy of Word 5.0 was shut down so that the grad student who had unlimited access to the Mac lab at college could instead play CQ.
No, no love here either. But I'll go further and say I'm not feeling it from *any* of the consoles. The interest I have for the Revolution, based on its controller, is tempered by the fact that it seems the only other selling point is that it can play all the older games. Note to Nintendo: Retro gaming is cool, but not for very long. Yes it's fun to fire up Super Mario Brothers once in awhile, but I'm not going to slog through those games *again*.
But as far as the 360...PGR3 looks okay, I guess, but so does PGR2 and I'm not 1/3 of the way through that. To be fair, the same goes for GTA:SA...it's fun, but so was Vice City, and frankly I've moved on.
I'm beginning to think this new generation is the harbringer of some kind of gaming apocalypse...everybody, including nintendo, is pushing "more of the same" but with minor twists (better graphics, innovative controller). It's depressing when you look forward to the next systems for more of the same, but better!
Frankly, I see the only hope coming from giving away or making dev kits unbelievably cheap so that anyone and their dog can create a game and distribute it online (a la xbox live). Will a lot suck? Oh boy will they ever! But it's the only way any kind of innovation will happen, I think. But I guess as long as the big three get their royalties per disc, no one is going to care.
The beautiful thing about mysql is that I've run it on windows, os x, linux (ppc, x86 and mips (ps2 running linux)) Solaris x86, and freebsd. Because you can actually get the source and compile it, you have a transactional database that runs on practically anything. This version of oracle is currently available for Windows and Linux. For some of the groups I work with, this basically makes it a non-starter (there really are some mac-only shops out there who will not think to buy a pc just to run the db).
Yes, but how do you use junctions? What tools are available? I had to download a freeware program just to set them up.
/s whatever" command will never return.
The other downside is that you can't protect yourself from recursion; depending on how you set it up, your "dir
The current version is a beta and the date refers to when the "shipping" product should become available, negating the use of the beta.
Three months isn't exactly enough time for apps to have gotten "fat". Besides, you don't have to use every aspect of the database (pl/sql comes to mind), but treat it as a straightforward mysql installation...stick with the dynamic sql and you really wouldn't know the difference.
Filing frivilous lawsuits actually costs money, and I don't see where his income comes from. It's all nice to crusade and all, but eventually you have to pay for the fax machine and ISP.
And what kind of law does he actually practice? All this grandstanding could be done by anyone with the wherewithall to build a soapbox, but I wonder if all this is actually just an excuse to avoid going to the office and doing the inevitable paperwork: "Make sure Form 5A is included with Form 7B (revision 2) that has been notarized along with the Schedule C form...."
Zzzzz...
(Maybe that's why he's so aggressive...he's just trying to stay awake)
I have a machine that was infected by a worm and it has no internet access *at* *all*. It was infected by another machine interally. It doesn't even do anything net-related..it's for number crunching using internally-written software; no user is supposed to sit down and use it.
And I spent five hours rebuilding it.
Has anyone installed VMWare Workstation on Ubuntu? I use Fedora only 'cause VMWare works with it (albiet with patches). I much more prefer Ubuntu's method of getting apps and patches than RedHat's.
Also, has anyone tried Oracle on it? I know you need to tell the installer to ignore the fact it's not a suse or redhat-based distro, but was there any other issues?
Can't wait to get my hands on the new iPod. New iMac looks sweet. Downloading iTunes 6 now.
That said...
Where are the powermacs and powerbooks I'd heard were going to be announced? If I'm going to be making content for the new iPod, what better than on a quad-processor G5? Or a dual procesor powerbook?
I have read a lot about the 360. I was there with the IBM jokes, I even watched the MTV show pretty much in its entirety (exception: I don't really care for the killers). After all is said and done, I'm probably not getting one.
Why? Microsoft hasn't triggered my herd instinct. There's no buzz or *reason* to want to line up at 12 am or whatever to be one of the first to buy the thing. Project Gotham Racing 3? Yawn...I haven't finished PGR2. I didn't like Perfect Dark on the N64, why should I like it on the 360 (full disclosure: I'm one of the few people, I guess, who didn't like Halo *at* *all* and have decided that for the rest of my life, I will play FPS on a mouse/keyboard rig, not a gamepad).
In short, I'm not going to spend that kind of money for "more of the same".
But wait, there's more!
Here I may be crossing into treasonous territory, but I feel pretty much the same about the PS3 as well. Lots of cool pics, awesome specs, but no game that I really care about has me marking Xs on my calendar till launch date.
The only *interesting* console was the, you guessed it, the Revolution, and the only thing that has piqued my interest is, like everyone else, the controller. Other than that, I think my feelings about the games run about the same...there'll be a Mario game (though hopefully a decent one...the GameCube seemed to have missed that). There'll be a Zelda game probably, and throw in a MarioKart and you have yourself a Nintendo console.
Come to think of it, *none* of the systems have inspired me to want to get the latest-n-greatest. I don't have a HD tv, I don't play sports games. So this puts me in an interesting situation...I can sit back and wait for the inevitible price drops. I can wait to see if certain vaporware ever materializes. I can kick back with my I Love Katamari and Zelda Twilight Princess and PGR2 (yes, have all three consoles) and determine my next move entirely on the *games* available.
Looks like I won't have to think about it for quite awhile.
I get no comments except "what's that on your hand?" and I realize I've been dragging it through the ink as I write. I had to give up on fountain pens completely (just a phase) and I discover that pencils smear too. Bic pens are about the only thing I use these days.
...is the fact that they mark everything before the flavor-of-the-month as 'legacy' as in 'you should port all that to the '. It took me years to figure out how all the various bits of MFC worked (so non-standard as C++ goes), and then COM was the thing, with all its templates. I got enough COM working to feel pretty good and now .net is where everything's at and I should do everything in C#, can't be trusted to allocate memory myself, etc.
.net is just a me-too way of re-organizing the deck chairs and throwing in yet another language and garbage collection. Woo freaking hoo.
And the thing that galls me is that it's all trying to do pretty much the same thing. No new "revolutionary" stuff took place...MFC was just a wrapper around the SDK. COM was a (theoretically anwyway) nicer way of doing DLLs and RPC.
To those who say that if I wanted to, I could just stick with the API, I say, sure...which one? Because of the underpinings of Win9X and NT were so completely different, there were just enough differences in a lot of the apps that I wrote that I either had to have a separate Win9X version, or just don't use that particular API, in which case, I either had to reinvent the wheel, or just not do it.
The nice thing about Unix has been its consistency. The C programs I wrote in college 10+years ago would still work now with minimal changes (I acknowledge that even some Unix APIs change a little).
Something I never understood about Romero is: What does he actually do? WIth Carmack it's pretty easy, he's the coder's coder. But Romero always had that nebulous title of "designer" which means what, exactly? Does he actually work on the levels, making art, programming rooms, or is he just the idea guy, writing emails and documents?
Sorry, didn't have anything particular to say..just wanted to try out the new comment window that you mentioned.
"She's a designer"
"She's a developer"
"She's a designer *AND* a developer"
=Stunned look=
Overdub: Forget it Jake, it's Microsoft.
==Fade to black==
...how can we capitalize on what *could* be a nice bit of PR disaster for M$, showing that Gates is off his rocker, not to be trusted around children, etc. It's simply wrong that he should think M$ came up with everything and let it stand at that; think of the readers who *don't* know better and are that bit more lulled into thinking computers were invented by M$.
It's sort of a bizzare reversal of the phrase: every time Bill lies, a cash register goes "ring!"
(With apologies to Poochy)
"Yo! I'm Excel! Yo I'm soooo down with you! I take calculations...TO THE EXTREME!!!!"
I don't think I've ever seen a more in-your-face interface *ever*. Interfaces are supposed to get out of the way and let you get the job done with minimal fuss...this takes it to the complete opposite.
It seems clear to me that Microsoft is really honestly losing it...their two cash cows, which drive the *entire* freaking company, are being pimped. They're being given cheezy makeovers and being pushed in your face in some desperate attempt to stay in the forefront of your mind, because what you're *doing* is not important, it's that you're using WINDOWS and OFFICE that's important.
TO THE XTREEEEEMMMME!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I'm in complete agreement with you...I went *from* Java to ObjC and Cocoa. To me, cross-platform compatibility isn't essential, and besides, I've just never ever gottan a Java app to run with that...crispness...that a C/C++/ObjC program has.
Of course, it helps that my target audience are Mac folks already, but XCode + ObjC/Cocoa has proven so good that I'd happily develop for any platform that could run that combo.
It's sad to think that I had access to a NeXT machine back-in-the-day and apart from firing up Project Builder once or twice, never really considered trying to learn to program on it.
It also occurs to me that this was the only Unix worm I've ever heard of, and it happened in *1988*.
According to Wikipedia, the "first" worm was in fact targed to Unix machines running on the VAX and Sparc. IIRC, there were two versions, one for each platform, and they would bring over the source code and compile it on the infected machine, then run.
What separates that from today is that it wasn't designed to do any actual damage (bugs in the code caused it to replicate wildly, causing the actual damage), and depended on there being a C compiler available.
Sigh, regardless of the damage done back then, it all seems so quaint in comparison to the stuff running around today.