This is on an Intel iMac that gets maybe 12+ hours a day usage in a house with two cats that like to sleep on my desk: none of my previous Logitech or Microsoft mice have had trouble with the wheel sticking. Their buttons broke and they were ugly, but the wheel worked.
Due to the small size of the Mighty Mouse's scrollball and the relatively large size of the gap around it that opens when you scroll, my Might Mouse occasionally sticks so that one direction doesn't work. A couple of minutes of shaking it upside down generally clears it.
Indeed - a lot of JRPGs seem to suffer from far too much story. Tales of Symphonia would have been far better if they'd stripped out a third or a half of the plot. There's only so many times I can care about "OMG you betrayed your friends" and "OMG you're losing your humanity".
I think the Metroid method is the right way to do story in games: the story is there to add context to the game, but it doesn't lead the game. You could ignore it completely if you wanted, or you could scan all the logs and follow it in detail.
The main campaign has a nice learning curve and isn't all that hard until the last few missions, IIRC. There are some really hard Battle mode missions, but you can pick and choose which ones you play.
It is deceptively deep, though, and fiendishly addictive.
I think it's mainly confusion on the part of Labour - they just don't seem to know what to do about crime. One set of reforms boosts the importance of probation and attempts to replace long prison terms with better handling of offenders once they leave prison on licence, then the next reforms reverse that. None of it seems to be based on evidence or research, they're just guessing and reacting to whatever the tabloids say.
My favourite quote that sums up Labour is "Labour see a problem and a headline, and they address the headline".
Hey, I'm not blaming anyone - I'm probably going to move to the States in a year or two. I agree, I think it's a combination of distance to the supermarket, available storage space (the average American fridge wouldn't even fit in my kitchen), shopping habits (I shop two or three times a week) and a desire for 'value'.
I've also noticed that food in the US lasts longer - maybe they use more preservatives or something?
While I'm sure you can find places that do similar sizes to the American style supermarkets, a normal supermarket over here has nothing like the sizes I saw in the States. It's probably because average serving size and average family size are lower over here. An average meal in an American restaurant was about twice what I would normally eat, for example.
I would guess that they are referring to the 'spare' co-processor on each Cell: each Cell has 7 SPEs (co-processors) working, but there are actually 8 in the silicon. That way, if one of the SPEs doesn't work during testing, you can just disable it and still keep the chip.
American supermarkets are disturbing places that make us Europeans feel like they've wandered into a world of giants. Tubs of ice cream the size of bathtubs, slabs of cheese bigger than my fridge.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that got fed up on the Path to Hades. It just seemed to take the least fun part of the game and stretch it out for ages, just when my interest in the game was already waning. Especially annoying combined with God of War's crappy camera.
I don't think most people want innovation: they just want what they already have and know, but better. Look at how many gamers spend hour after hour, year after year playing Counterstrike, BF2 or WoW. They're doing exactly the same actions again and again and they love it.
For every gamer who bemoans the lack of innovation, I'm sure there are five that look forward to things like BF:2142 or CS:Source. It's the consumers that make the market, after all.
That was seen as so disturbing, it was actually cut out of the European version: the human in the cage was replaced with one of those blue undead soldiers. It confused me at the time, as I had read a review that described that scene from the American version.
Don't tell me there are still people around who believe the Playstation 2 is a powerful console? It's significantly slower than the Gamecube and XBox. It came out a year earlier, after all. (look at Anandtech, or just go and play RE4 on PS2 and GCN - there's a reason why the PS2 has to resort to FMV for the cutscenes, while the GCN renders them in-engine)
Trauma center and kirby make good use of the touchcreen, Mario Kart makes no use of it at all, Metroid's controls are excellent, Brain training is not a simple IQ test.
Region free means the price is even better in the US for UK people like me: £30/game here, or $30 in the US. I'm waiting until my next trip to the US to stock up on games...
The DS even seems to be winning in the UK (source), where Nintendo has never done as well as on mainland Europe. It's been interesting watching the size of the DS section in shops grow, mostly at the expense of UMDs.
I'm not sure about the save issue. I doubt very much it's a technical issue. Being able to save all the time removes all death penalty, so there's no fear of failure. That can remove the sense of achievement in a game. How boring would Resident Evil 4 be if you could save after killing every bad guy? It also makes the "Die, memorise level, win" method easier.
I remember thinking about this playing Half Life. Initially I would only save between major encounters, but as I progressed I gradually started quick saving more and more often until I was doing it before every room.
Office 97 runs fine on low end machines. Openoffice crawled on my 192Mb XFCE/Ubuntu machine. Abiword and Gnumeric are acceptably fast on older machines, but their support for MS formats is worse.
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This is on an Intel iMac that gets maybe 12+ hours a day usage in a house with two cats that like to sleep on my desk: none of my previous Logitech or Microsoft mice have had trouble with the wheel sticking. Their buttons broke and they were ugly, but the wheel worked.
Due to the small size of the Mighty Mouse's scrollball and the relatively large size of the gap around it that opens when you scroll, my Might Mouse occasionally sticks so that one direction doesn't work. A couple of minutes of shaking it upside down generally clears it.
Fire Emblem had a story?
Indeed - a lot of JRPGs seem to suffer from far too much story. Tales of Symphonia would have been far better if they'd stripped out a third or a half of the plot. There's only so many times I can care about "OMG you betrayed your friends" and "OMG you're losing your humanity".
I think the Metroid method is the right way to do story in games: the story is there to add context to the game, but it doesn't lead the game. You could ignore it completely if you wanted, or you could scan all the logs and follow it in detail.
While I like the 2D scrolling of the Mighty mouse wheel, I've found that it's very prone to getting dirty and sticking.
The main campaign has a nice learning curve and isn't all that hard until the last few missions, IIRC. There are some really hard Battle mode missions, but you can pick and choose which ones you play.
It is deceptively deep, though, and fiendishly addictive.
The half price DS Lites GAME is selling seem to be going pretty quick too: the last fifty took less than 30 seconds...
I think it's mainly confusion on the part of Labour - they just don't seem to know what to do about crime. One set of reforms boosts the importance of probation and attempts to replace long prison terms with better handling of offenders once they leave prison on licence, then the next reforms reverse that. None of it seems to be based on evidence or research, they're just guessing and reacting to whatever the tabloids say.
My favourite quote that sums up Labour is "Labour see a problem and a headline, and they address the headline".
Your comment sounds dangerously logical and as such has no place in a discussion of British criminal system policy.
Hey, I'm not blaming anyone - I'm probably going to move to the States in a year or two. I agree, I think it's a combination of distance to the supermarket, available storage space (the average American fridge wouldn't even fit in my kitchen), shopping habits (I shop two or three times a week) and a desire for 'value'.
I've also noticed that food in the US lasts longer - maybe they use more preservatives or something?
While I'm sure you can find places that do similar sizes to the American style supermarkets, a normal supermarket over here has nothing like the sizes I saw in the States. It's probably because average serving size and average family size are lower over here. An average meal in an American restaurant was about twice what I would normally eat, for example.
I would guess that they are referring to the 'spare' co-processor on each Cell: each Cell has 7 SPEs (co-processors) working, but there are actually 8 in the silicon. That way, if one of the SPEs doesn't work during testing, you can just disable it and still keep the chip.
American supermarkets are disturbing places that make us Europeans feel like they've wandered into a world of giants. Tubs of ice cream the size of bathtubs, slabs of cheese bigger than my fridge.
Appears to be a giant dating site for people who think quoting 'meaningful' song lyrics on their web page makes them deep.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that got fed up on the Path to Hades. It just seemed to take the least fun part of the game and stretch it out for ages, just when my interest in the game was already waning. Especially annoying combined with God of War's crappy camera.
Edge is £4 and has far better reviews than Gamespot.
I don't think most people want innovation: they just want what they already have and know, but better. Look at how many gamers spend hour after hour, year after year playing Counterstrike, BF2 or WoW. They're doing exactly the same actions again and again and they love it.
For every gamer who bemoans the lack of innovation, I'm sure there are five that look forward to things like BF:2142 or CS:Source. It's the consumers that make the market, after all.
Surely everyone knows that by now: I've never even played a Final Fantasy game and I know Aeris dies...
That was seen as so disturbing, it was actually cut out of the European version: the human in the cage was replaced with one of those blue undead soldiers. It confused me at the time, as I had read a review that described that scene from the American version.
Don't tell me there are still people around who believe the Playstation 2 is a powerful console? It's significantly slower than the Gamecube and XBox. It came out a year earlier, after all. (look at Anandtech, or just go and play RE4 on PS2 and GCN - there's a reason why the PS2 has to resort to FMV for the cutscenes, while the GCN renders them in-engine)
Trauma center and kirby make good use of the touchcreen, Mario Kart makes no use of it at all, Metroid's controls are excellent, Brain training is not a simple IQ test.
Region free means the price is even better in the US for UK people like me: £30/game here, or $30 in the US. I'm waiting until my next trip to the US to stock up on games...
The DS even seems to be winning in the UK (source), where Nintendo has never done as well as on mainland Europe. It's been interesting watching the size of the DS section in shops grow, mostly at the expense of UMDs.
I'm not sure about the save issue. I doubt very much it's a technical issue. Being able to save all the time removes all death penalty, so there's no fear of failure. That can remove the sense of achievement in a game. How boring would Resident Evil 4 be if you could save after killing every bad guy? It also makes the "Die, memorise level, win" method easier.
I remember thinking about this playing Half Life. Initially I would only save between major encounters, but as I progressed I gradually started quick saving more and more often until I was doing it before every room.
Office 97 runs fine on low end machines. Openoffice crawled on my 192Mb XFCE/Ubuntu machine. Abiword and Gnumeric are acceptably fast on older machines, but their support for MS formats is worse.