Sadly, marketing is hardly ever the problem in the game business. Marketing doesn't start bombing the players until between one week to five months before ship, and they generally don't make promises. There are a few obvious counter examples, Jon Romero about to make you his B*%$h being the most famous one, but for the most part marketing does a reasonable job of handing the spec sheet to the magazines and shouting about how great it will play. I don't think I've seen an example of the marketing department actually making stuff up, though I've seen them make promises based upon specs or feature sheets that got cut.
And that's really the problem. You need to cut things. Either the hyperreal evolutionary landscape was dragging down the processor, or it added layers of unnecessary interaction that killed gameplay (Masters of Orion 3), or you just didn't have time to finish a given feature properly (the extra spirit forges from Soul Reaver), but features will be cut. If you're unprofessional and blog your development cycle to fans who build up notions from your scattered information, you're going to disappoint many of them with decisions that ultimately were correct.
All developers love their fans, and want to have a personal relationship with them. But there are areas where this has to be off limits. All entertainment media know that you have to keep people quiet if you want the experience to be new and unexpected. That we're still struggling with this issue is just another sign of our relative youth as an industry. Enough info will leak out anyway to keep your fans interested. Look at Star Wars, or the LotR productions.
I'm sure you could get Nintendo on-board for an innovative, broadly approachable 2D adventure game for the Nintendo DS. I'm sure at this point they're desperate for games that could be ready by launch next year, and might be willing to take the larger risk to have an expanded launch lineup, especially with a proven team.
Bugs at the beginning of the design / implementation phase are generally the responsibility of the designer / programmer. We're not generally talking about the more sophisticated test casing and automated test script generation of the larger software industry, we're talking about people in their early twenties working for 10 dollars an hour or less. This is not to say that's how it should be: I've been pushing for more automated test solutions from programmers at the company where I work, and it has been yeilding tremendous results. But the fact of the matter is, you don't need playtesters until you have a playable. Up until then extreme coding practices and careful design implementations are what you have to rely upon.
It's also pretty safe to assume that if you hire competent people a remote tester is going to get 30% or less of the bugs of an in-house tester, and will be less able to oversee their correction. In case you didn't know, publishers will have a team of QA on their premisis roughly equal in size to the developer's QA team, devoted to each individual game. Perhaps it's the difficulty communicating with the dev team, or the generally 400% turnover rate, but remote publisher QA is terrible. I'm baffled as to why this practice persists, and why we haven't just moved to a publisher pays for in-house model (with, of course, requisite spot-checks). It's not like the publisher has a team devoted to checking all of the artwork in a project all day long... Take the butcher's word for it, and put those QA developers where they belong.
Testing is starting to get the attention it deserves as a discipline. The company I work at is going to a one designer - one artist - one tester model for level development, which should help communication immensely.
3 testers for the final 4 months of a project this size at 30k is reasonable.
But if that's the case, what do you need all 4 programmers for? you'll really only need the Lead Programmer (who can tweak engine issues) and probably 1 junion dev, and perhaps an intern or some other nearly-free work. Heck, have a junior-junior dev who is also your tester, and save money in BOTH areas.
I noticed this too, but remember that programming includes scripting, which in a game without level designers means that some of those "programmers" are essentially on world layout. You also have object generation, input, and placement, tools development, effects generation, scripting cut scenes, etc. etc. In most other places a designer would do much of the jobs listed above. It might behoove them to add a team member to the schedule for that very purpose.
As a side note, be careful with your interns: They may be making 10 dollars an hour, but once you hit crunch they may be putting in 80 hour weeks... or the equivalent of a 52k per year salary. Better to pay them a reasonable amount up front.
Of course they deserve respect. The two journalists that we have left are very hard working. The rest of them should also be praised for noting that what the pamphlet says is true... Compared to the millions of people that will vote incorrectly or whose vote will be miscounted due to poll workers "accidentally" typing
[ {long KerryTotal = 0; long BushTotal == 0; if ( voteKerry() ){//Increase Kerry's Total KerryTotal++; }else//Increase Bush's Total; BushTotal++; }]
a single case of having the votes intercepted while being transmitted in plaintext and rewritten is just a statistical abberation. Let's not forget, user error here is also CYA for malicious users, which includes Hackers (Windows? A voting machine running on Windows?) Riggers (Let's give poll workers full access to the security logs, including the ability to erase them) and the occasional superuser (All you need is a properly formatted Compact Flash card). Did I mention that they're running Windows? Can you say: Properly formatted JPEG file?
I'd just like to point out that the money Lionhead gets from VC funding is likely to go into the prototyping phase, and not the development phase of any given game, which is tradtionally funded by the publisher. In other words, Lionhead now has the funds to create quite a few 20% tech demos, which are a good way of selling a game to a publisher. Coming to the table with funding in their pocket gives them the luxury of saying "no," and getting a better deal elsewhere.
While a few million from a publisher means one game made, a few million in VC gives a studio a lot freedom.
Ninjas may be the natural enemy of pirates but they are too evenly matched. Everyone knows that in a battle of Pirates and Ninjas, the outcome is a draw.
If you remember back in the day Lucas released an updated version on VHS with these shots optically "corrected," shortly before announcing the Special Editions. Probably the hell of trying to remove little green boxes without discoloring the ships was too much for him, and he decided to redo the whole bloody lot.
But yes, the green boxes used to be significantly worse.
Actually it has been leaked that the XBox 2 devkits are running on Apple G5's running a Win2K core. While I can't vouch for that personally (we don't have any Xbox 2 dev kits), it is quite believeable considering the Xbox 2 itself, which is basically running windows, is doing so on a PPC core.
Of course, as you pointed out, the software would need to be compiled for the proper chipset, but there is already a virtual PC for the G5 that runs at decent speeds... I'm sure there would be an enthusiastic existentialist somewhere who could whip up a virtual PC for Windows.
I don't think we'll see action on this area until people start sending annonymous copyright takedown notices to the ISP's of members of congress, as well as the heads of major corporations, showing them the folly of giving others full control over your life and business without due process. Of course such a thing would be illegal and dangerous, and a person would have to be crazytodo such a thing. After all, laws are a social contract, which we must obey in order for society to function. In a society ravaged by terrorism like ours, sending mixed messages is the last thing we can afford.
Agreed. When switching back from Linux to Windows, the only app which I was really sorry to lose (besides sKill) was Kmail. It does everything an e-mail client should do, with one of the least cluttered interfaces I have ever had the pleasure of using. Configuring filters was a breeze, and I never got the feeling of being dumped into someone's pet project. It really felt like it came from the UI and application designers from Apple, working from a very non-Apple "Power is Good" mantra.
I wish someone would do a Kmail Windows port. In the meantime I just have to subsist on The Bat! Yes, the punctuation is part of the name. Just look it up on Yahoo!
Probably because Windows XP's inherent burning system isn't as well hooked into the OS as HDD-based removable media. They just got the whole CD-as-floppy paradigm with XP, and it doesn't exactly work right yet. Go ahead, try to save this page to your CDR drive.
Didn't work, did it? Explorer is doing all kinds of fancy footwork to make it appear as if you're copying files onto the drive, then burning them, when under the hood you're just copying to a local cache on drive C.
Essentially, their CDR implementation is incomplete, and therefore it would be a pain to implement full backup to it. Add to that file splitting and management, and why not just hold off on that feature until Longhorn.
Agreed. I think the best thing is to recognize that cheap consumer-grade equipment is garbage, and that generally the more expensive consumer-grade equipment is less error-prone. Of course this is on a component-by-component basis. A 50 dollar NIC from 3com is solidly built, but any hard drive you buy has to be expected to fail... flagrantly... at exactly the wrong time. It's best to invest in an expensive motherboard and an expensive NIC. PSU's vary quite wildly with no respect for cost, so do some research on Tom's Hardware or one of the other hardware research sites out there before you buy anything. Some of the best PSU's out there are only 30 bucks... Of course, if a motherboard supports two PSU's, go for it. I've never had RAM fail in any capacity, so I can't say spending there will net great rewards, but certainly take care with your cooling system, from buying the best processor cooler, to cooling it with a good hydrodynamic fan with failure alarm, and always always adding more air circulation than necessary.
There really are consumer parts aimed at the PC server environment, but nothing should be considered drop-in. Do some research on individual components, and good luck!
Viewing user interaction in gaming as a portion of a story is succombing to linear design. Not only do you have "interaction," you have player choice, a world rich enough that every corner the player peeks around contains something, you have the systems of the world interacting with themselves and the player in interesting and frequently unpredictable ways.
I'm not convinced that emphasizing all areas is the way to go, with current budgets. As you point out most games which are successful are so ignoring certain aspects of the craft. Quake III has engendered a long following, yet has never had the slightest notion of a story. But what it did, it did very well... ID never lost sight of the fact that they were making an action multiplayer fragfest, and all of their efforts were expended on that goal. Part of the "big picture" was the focus on specific elements. Mario has always created a moment-to-moment sense of awe and wonder, yet has been sadly lax on character development. Final Fantasy has always had great stories wrapped around some of the most boring moment-to-moment gameplay imaginable. The Godfather was one of the greatest pictures of all time, yet it hadn't the slightest trace of comedy. The Lamborghini Diablo was one of the greatest cars of the 80's, yet had impossibly small trunk space. These are not weaknesses of things that could be greater, these are the tradeoffs that you must make in order to be great.
Don't be all things to all people: Down that road lies Daikatana. Know what your core strengths of your game will be, and emphasize those.
This motion picture has been altered from the performance intended by the director and producers of the motion picture. The studio caved to focus tests and removed the sad, emotionally gripping ending. The ending now includes bunnies. Furthermore thanks to pressure from financial investors the prison warden no longer arbitrarily kills prisoners and blames it on the main character, but removes them to a humanely managed rehabilitation facility owned and operated by Haliburton(TM). The main character has been altered from a potentially offensive trash talking chicano gangster to a more palatable richeously indignant black man with a heart of gold who now eats M&M's instead of Reeses Pieces. Because she lent her name to the project, Drew Barrymore now has a cameo.
Furthermore, you fast forwarded through the violent parts and destroyed the purity of our art. You evil bastard.
Ironic that you would say that, as last night I had a user install SP2... Now the user's computer locks on startup, safe-mode or not, which wouldn't require more than a data copy and re-install except that A: opening the PC to get at the HDD voids their prescious warranty and B: installing a new OS voids their prescious warranty.
They're returning the thing, btw, and getting an iBook.
I use a Dual-screen setup at work. While few games use both, it is very convienient to have data open in one window and a game going in another. There are lots of times when I wish both were available for games. And don't forget, two smaller screens are cheaper than one larger one... Nintendo was probably partly being cheap.
The problems with the hyper-advanced Gameboy with Minidisk (or some optical format, minidisks don't actually hold much anymore), dual-analog sticks, etc, etc is that they don't fit the portable model well. Which is to say instant on, instant off, with a high durability, a long battery life, and just generally cheap. The PSP is skewing the other direction, with high power, high cost, and low battery. We'll have to see how it does, but so far it's following in the footsteps of the Game Gear, Nomad, and Turbo Express Portable.
Nintendo knows better than to market a dual-use system. The second use never goes anywhere. Remember the hype around the Saturn as an internet browser? Remember game.com? CDI?
On the other hand, the ghost of the Virtual Boy is hovering over the DS, but the Virtual Boy died on it's own merits, or lack thereof. The Virtual Boy had the power of a Gameboy in a non-portable system that was rediculously expensive and made player nauseous (the owners manual points this out on every single page, along with twice mentioning that it may permanently destroy young kid's ability to see depth.). There is grounds to hope that this won't be as spectacular a failure as the Virtual Boy... Though on the flip side this means you won't be able to pick one up with a full library of games for 50 bucks like the Virtual Boy.
On the other hand, you're totally right in that it is about the games, and neither Nintendo nor Sony has shown anything that could be considered killer. While the old system makers, Square, have thrown their weight behind the PSP, that doesn't carry as much mindshare as it used to. Who will get Halo, or GTA, or HL2?
A friend's mother recently bought a computer (which it was up to me to get working), and the thing came infested with AOL. Not only was there AOL links everywhere, and AIM running at startup, but the system manufacturer had set every instance of I.E. to an AOL branded Netscape browser. Going to program files -> Internet Explorer revealed, you guessed it, a app to sign up for AOL. The regular address bar in windows had been replaced by an AOL bar, which also fed everything through the AOLified Netscape (the normal address bar had been turned off by default and, once on, was shoved almost entirely off the side of the window).
It was a mess, quite frankly. Welcome to the future.
I fail to see how having a better speaker make lines for you to speak during a presidential debate is cheating. I mean, they have swarms of people doing their research for them, their speeches are obviously entirely canned, what part do the presidential candidates actually play except for talking heads?
As for the earpiece in general... If I had to write speeches for that man I'd do that too. His intelligence doesn't exactly burn like a nuke-u-ler fire.
The only way this could be actual major news is if the format of the debate forbade audio prompts. Which, if true, would be the kind of trivial infraction that the American people would be able to understand and hate him for. Anyone know the rules?
I hadn't made a comment on this law. I was just pointing out that the beliefs this man sticks to are quite traditional, based upon a skimming of the archives of his weekly posts. He also does stick to them and abide by them despite the winds in the capital, leading to the charge of integrity... wrongheaded integrity but integrity nonetheless. All judgements are based upon incomplete information, but I didn't realize that either of the ones I had made were in the slightest bit controversial. As for this law, i didn't even comment on what the damn law really says. Hell for all I know it could be a law banning spyware.
Why have you made 11 posts zealously defending him from attacks that aren't really coming?
Do you mean this one? The one where he rails against gay marriage, judges who are attempting to marry gays, and gay people who are attempting to get married in front of judges? I fail to see any listing there of why he voted how he voted.
Now yes, he does seem to have, how shall you say perspective, but I would hardly call that enough. Not changing one's mind on an issue despite overwhelming evidence is not a good thing: it's a sign of inflexible thinking. But what he does appear to have is integrity, and that is what we need more of in Washington. I wouldn't vote for him, as I don't agree with his views, but this is what the opposition in Washington is supposed to look like. This is what Jimmy Stewart would have become if Mr. Smith had stayed in Washington, gotten old, and hated most of the functions of government.
I should have used the term multitasking as well. It would be nice to flip back and forth between a chat app and the datebook, for example, or be downloading a PDF of the train schedule in the background while writing notes on what to do that day. Or grabbing an MP3 file from a server at home while showing off pictures from a trip. Network awareness in the Palm OS really needs to go up, and multitasking would go a long way towards that.
Of course, if I really needed all of that I would buy a PDA and install linux on it. But while linux on the desktop is usable but with lots of the support beams and wires showing, desktop linux on a PDA is downright silly. The PalmOS is far more elegant and focused on doing what it needs to be doing. It would just be nice if it could do it better, and do more of it at once.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, marketing is hardly ever the problem in the game business. Marketing doesn't start bombing the players until between one week to five months before ship, and they generally don't make promises. There are a few obvious counter examples, Jon Romero about to make you his B*%$h being the most famous one, but for the most part marketing does a reasonable job of handing the spec sheet to the magazines and shouting about how great it will play. I don't think I've seen an example of the marketing department actually making stuff up, though I've seen them make promises based upon specs or feature sheets that got cut.
And that's really the problem. You need to cut things. Either the hyperreal evolutionary landscape was dragging down the processor, or it added layers of unnecessary interaction that killed gameplay (Masters of Orion 3), or you just didn't have time to finish a given feature properly (the extra spirit forges from Soul Reaver), but features will be cut. If you're unprofessional and blog your development cycle to fans who build up notions from your scattered information, you're going to disappoint many of them with decisions that ultimately were correct.
All developers love their fans, and want to have a personal relationship with them. But there are areas where this has to be off limits. All entertainment media know that you have to keep people quiet if you want the experience to be new and unexpected. That we're still struggling with this issue is just another sign of our relative youth as an industry. Enough info will leak out anyway to keep your fans interested. Look at Star Wars, or the LotR productions.
Don't worry. We're getting there.
Due to a technical error, News will be at 12.
I'm sure you could get Nintendo on-board for an innovative, broadly approachable 2D adventure game for the Nintendo DS. I'm sure at this point they're desperate for games that could be ready by launch next year, and might be willing to take the larger risk to have an expanded launch lineup, especially with a proven team.
Bugs at the beginning of the design / implementation phase are generally the responsibility of the designer / programmer. We're not generally talking about the more sophisticated test casing and automated test script generation of the larger software industry, we're talking about people in their early twenties working for 10 dollars an hour or less. This is not to say that's how it should be: I've been pushing for more automated test solutions from programmers at the company where I work, and it has been yeilding tremendous results. But the fact of the matter is, you don't need playtesters until you have a playable. Up until then extreme coding practices and careful design implementations are what you have to rely upon.
It's also pretty safe to assume that if you hire competent people a remote tester is going to get 30% or less of the bugs of an in-house tester, and will be less able to oversee their correction. In case you didn't know, publishers will have a team of QA on their premisis roughly equal in size to the developer's QA team, devoted to each individual game. Perhaps it's the difficulty communicating with the dev team, or the generally 400% turnover rate, but remote publisher QA is terrible. I'm baffled as to why this practice persists, and why we haven't just moved to a publisher pays for in-house model (with, of course, requisite spot-checks). It's not like the publisher has a team devoted to checking all of the artwork in a project all day long... Take the butcher's word for it, and put those QA developers where they belong.
Testing is starting to get the attention it deserves as a discipline. The company I work at is going to a one designer - one artist - one tester model for level development, which should help communication immensely.
3 testers for the final 4 months of a project this size at 30k is reasonable.
But if that's the case, what do you need all 4 programmers for? you'll really only need the Lead Programmer (who can tweak engine issues) and probably 1 junion dev, and perhaps an intern or some other nearly-free work. Heck, have a junior-junior dev who is also your tester, and save money in BOTH areas.
I noticed this too, but remember that programming includes scripting, which in a game without level designers means that some of those "programmers" are essentially on world layout. You also have object generation, input, and placement, tools development, effects generation, scripting cut scenes, etc. etc. In most other places a designer would do much of the jobs listed above. It might behoove them to add a team member to the schedule for that very purpose.
As a side note, be careful with your interns: They may be making 10 dollars an hour, but once you hit crunch they may be putting in 80 hour weeks... or the equivalent of a 52k per year salary. Better to pay them a reasonable amount up front.
...do Journalists deserve respect?
//Increase Kerry's Total KerryTotal++; }else //Increase Bush's Total; BushTotal++; }]
Of course they deserve respect. The two journalists that we have left are very hard working. The rest of them should also be praised for noting that what the pamphlet says is true... Compared to the millions of people that will vote incorrectly or whose vote will be miscounted due to poll workers "accidentally" typing
[ {long KerryTotal = 0; long BushTotal == 0; if ( voteKerry() ){
a single case of having the votes intercepted while being transmitted in plaintext and rewritten is just a statistical abberation. Let's not forget, user error here is also CYA for malicious users, which includes Hackers (Windows? A voting machine running on Windows?) Riggers (Let's give poll workers full access to the security logs, including the ability to erase them) and the occasional superuser (All you need is a properly formatted Compact Flash card). Did I mention that they're running Windows? Can you say: Properly formatted JPEG file?
One out of a million? No problem.
I'd just like to point out that the money Lionhead gets from VC funding is likely to go into the prototyping phase, and not the development phase of any given game, which is tradtionally funded by the publisher. In other words, Lionhead now has the funds to create quite a few 20% tech demos, which are a good way of selling a game to a publisher. Coming to the table with funding in their pocket gives them the luxury of saying "no," and getting a better deal elsewhere.
While a few million from a publisher means one game made, a few million in VC gives a studio a lot freedom.
Ninjas may be the natural enemy of pirates but they are too evenly matched. Everyone knows that in a battle of Pirates and Ninjas, the outcome is a draw.
If you remember back in the day Lucas released an updated version on VHS with these shots optically "corrected," shortly before announcing the Special Editions. Probably the hell of trying to remove little green boxes without discoloring the ships was too much for him, and he decided to redo the whole bloody lot.
But yes, the green boxes used to be significantly worse.
It was fine as it was, but the new song and dance routine with the cgi-creatures and backup singers makes me want to retch.
I hate it too. I always expect that CGI fuzzball to start shouting "Honeycomb! Honeycomb! Me Want Honeycomb!"
Actually it has been leaked that the XBox 2 devkits are running on Apple G5's running a Win2K core. While I can't vouch for that personally (we don't have any Xbox 2 dev kits), it is quite believeable considering the Xbox 2 itself, which is basically running windows, is doing so on a PPC core.
Of course, as you pointed out, the software would need to be compiled for the proper chipset, but there is already a virtual PC for the G5 that runs at decent speeds... I'm sure there would be an enthusiastic existentialist somewhere who could whip up a virtual PC for Windows.
I don't think we'll see action on this area until people start sending annonymous copyright takedown notices to the ISP's of members of congress, as well as the heads of major corporations, showing them the folly of giving others full control over your life and business without due process. Of course such a thing would be illegal and dangerous, and a person would have to be crazy to do such a thing. After all, laws are a social contract, which we must obey in order for society to function. In a society ravaged by terrorism like ours, sending mixed messages is the last thing we can afford.
100 bucks for life or 5 bucks per month? You're not planning on living very long, are you?
Agreed. When switching back from Linux to Windows, the only app which I was really sorry to lose (besides sKill) was Kmail. It does everything an e-mail client should do, with one of the least cluttered interfaces I have ever had the pleasure of using. Configuring filters was a breeze, and I never got the feeling of being dumped into someone's pet project. It really felt like it came from the UI and application designers from Apple, working from a very non-Apple "Power is Good" mantra.
I wish someone would do a Kmail Windows port. In the meantime I just have to subsist on The Bat! Yes, the punctuation is part of the name. Just look it up on Yahoo!
Probably because Windows XP's inherent burning system isn't as well hooked into the OS as HDD-based removable media. They just got the whole CD-as-floppy paradigm with XP, and it doesn't exactly work right yet. Go ahead, try to save this page to your CDR drive.
Didn't work, did it? Explorer is doing all kinds of fancy footwork to make it appear as if you're copying files onto the drive, then burning them, when under the hood you're just copying to a local cache on drive C.
Essentially, their CDR implementation is incomplete, and therefore it would be a pain to implement full backup to it. Add to that file splitting and management, and why not just hold off on that feature until Longhorn.
Agreed. I think the best thing is to recognize that cheap consumer-grade equipment is garbage, and that generally the more expensive consumer-grade equipment is less error-prone. Of course this is on a component-by-component basis. A 50 dollar NIC from 3com is solidly built, but any hard drive you buy has to be expected to fail... flagrantly... at exactly the wrong time. It's best to invest in an expensive motherboard and an expensive NIC. PSU's vary quite wildly with no respect for cost, so do some research on Tom's Hardware or one of the other hardware research sites out there before you buy anything. Some of the best PSU's out there are only 30 bucks... Of course, if a motherboard supports two PSU's, go for it. I've never had RAM fail in any capacity, so I can't say spending there will net great rewards, but certainly take care with your cooling system, from buying the best processor cooler, to cooling it with a good hydrodynamic fan with failure alarm, and always always adding more air circulation than necessary.
There really are consumer parts aimed at the PC server environment, but nothing should be considered drop-in. Do some research on individual components, and good luck!
(P.S. all of our servers are basically desktops)
Viewing user interaction in gaming as a portion of a story is succombing to linear design. Not only do you have "interaction," you have player choice, a world rich enough that every corner the player peeks around contains something, you have the systems of the world interacting with themselves and the player in interesting and frequently unpredictable ways.
I'm not convinced that emphasizing all areas is the way to go, with current budgets. As you point out most games which are successful are so ignoring certain aspects of the craft. Quake III has engendered a long following, yet has never had the slightest notion of a story. But what it did, it did very well... ID never lost sight of the fact that they were making an action multiplayer fragfest, and all of their efforts were expended on that goal. Part of the "big picture" was the focus on specific elements. Mario has always created a moment-to-moment sense of awe and wonder, yet has been sadly lax on character development. Final Fantasy has always had great stories wrapped around some of the most boring moment-to-moment gameplay imaginable. The Godfather was one of the greatest pictures of all time, yet it hadn't the slightest trace of comedy. The Lamborghini Diablo was one of the greatest cars of the 80's, yet had impossibly small trunk space. These are not weaknesses of things that could be greater, these are the tradeoffs that you must make in order to be great.
Don't be all things to all people: Down that road lies Daikatana. Know what your core strengths of your game will be, and emphasize those.
This motion picture has been altered from the performance intended by the director and producers of the motion picture. The studio caved to focus tests and removed the sad, emotionally gripping ending. The ending now includes bunnies. Furthermore thanks to pressure from financial investors the prison warden no longer arbitrarily kills prisoners and blames it on the main character, but removes them to a humanely managed rehabilitation facility owned and operated by Haliburton(TM). The main character has been altered from a potentially offensive trash talking chicano gangster to a more palatable richeously indignant black man with a heart of gold who now eats M&M's instead of Reeses Pieces. Because she lent her name to the project, Drew Barrymore now has a cameo.
Furthermore, you fast forwarded through the violent parts and destroyed the purity of our art. You evil bastard.
Ironic that you would say that, as last night I had a user install SP2... Now the user's computer locks on startup, safe-mode or not, which wouldn't require more than a data copy and re-install except that A: opening the PC to get at the HDD voids their prescious warranty and B: installing a new OS voids their prescious warranty.
They're returning the thing, btw, and getting an iBook.
I use a Dual-screen setup at work. While few games use both, it is very convienient to have data open in one window and a game going in another. There are lots of times when I wish both were available for games. And don't forget, two smaller screens are cheaper than one larger one... Nintendo was probably partly being cheap.
The problems with the hyper-advanced Gameboy with Minidisk (or some optical format, minidisks don't actually hold much anymore), dual-analog sticks, etc, etc is that they don't fit the portable model well. Which is to say instant on, instant off, with a high durability, a long battery life, and just generally cheap. The PSP is skewing the other direction, with high power, high cost, and low battery. We'll have to see how it does, but so far it's following in the footsteps of the Game Gear, Nomad, and Turbo Express Portable.
Nintendo knows better than to market a dual-use system. The second use never goes anywhere. Remember the hype around the Saturn as an internet browser? Remember game.com? CDI?
On the other hand, the ghost of the Virtual Boy is hovering over the DS, but the Virtual Boy died on it's own merits, or lack thereof. The Virtual Boy had the power of a Gameboy in a non-portable system that was rediculously expensive and made player nauseous (the owners manual points this out on every single page, along with twice mentioning that it may permanently destroy young kid's ability to see depth.). There is grounds to hope that this won't be as spectacular a failure as the Virtual Boy... Though on the flip side this means you won't be able to pick one up with a full library of games for 50 bucks like the Virtual Boy.
On the other hand, you're totally right in that it is about the games, and neither Nintendo nor Sony has shown anything that could be considered killer. While the old system makers, Square, have thrown their weight behind the PSP, that doesn't carry as much mindshare as it used to. Who will get Halo, or GTA, or HL2?
Time will tell.
I'm compelled to think this may be further proof that Bush is a paranoid sociopath after having lived the life of a bubble boy for the last 4 years.
It's just further proof that if you're going to shoot him, aim for the head.
Wait, I was just sayGAHfhH3FJfKDd34ff
---#434 Carrier signal lost---
I certainly did when I read the title. I was very suprised to see that it was about a fictional work.
It's close. Most of the work Diebold has done has been fictional.
A friend's mother recently bought a computer (which it was up to me to get working), and the thing came infested with AOL. Not only was there AOL links everywhere, and AIM running at startup, but the system manufacturer had set every instance of I.E. to an AOL branded Netscape browser. Going to program files -> Internet Explorer revealed, you guessed it, a app to sign up for AOL. The regular address bar in windows had been replaced by an AOL bar, which also fed everything through the AOLified Netscape (the normal address bar had been turned off by default and, once on, was shoved almost entirely off the side of the window).
It was a mess, quite frankly. Welcome to the future.
I fail to see how having a better speaker make lines for you to speak during a presidential debate is cheating. I mean, they have swarms of people doing their research for them, their speeches are obviously entirely canned, what part do the presidential candidates actually play except for talking heads?
As for the earpiece in general... If I had to write speeches for that man I'd do that too. His intelligence doesn't exactly burn like a nuke-u-ler fire.
The only way this could be actual major news is if the format of the debate forbade audio prompts. Which, if true, would be the kind of trivial infraction that the American people would be able to understand and hate him for. Anyone know the rules?
I hadn't made a comment on this law. I was just pointing out that the beliefs this man sticks to are quite traditional, based upon a skimming of the archives of his weekly posts. He also does stick to them and abide by them despite the winds in the capital, leading to the charge of integrity... wrongheaded integrity but integrity nonetheless. All judgements are based upon incomplete information, but I didn't realize that either of the ones I had made were in the slightest bit controversial. As for this law, i didn't even comment on what the damn law really says. Hell for all I know it could be a law banning spyware.
Why have you made 11 posts zealously defending him from attacks that aren't really coming?
Do you mean this one? The one where he rails against gay marriage, judges who are attempting to marry gays, and gay people who are attempting to get married in front of judges? I fail to see any listing there of why he voted how he voted.
Now yes, he does seem to have, how shall you say perspective, but I would hardly call that enough. Not changing one's mind on an issue despite overwhelming evidence is not a good thing: it's a sign of inflexible thinking. But what he does appear to have is integrity, and that is what we need more of in Washington.
I wouldn't vote for him, as I don't agree with his views, but this is what the opposition in Washington is supposed to look like. This is what Jimmy Stewart would have become if Mr. Smith had stayed in Washington, gotten old, and hated most of the functions of government.
I should have used the term multitasking as well. It would be nice to flip back and forth between a chat app and the datebook, for example, or be downloading a PDF of the train schedule in the background while writing notes on what to do that day. Or grabbing an MP3 file from a server at home while showing off pictures from a trip. Network awareness in the Palm OS really needs to go up, and multitasking would go a long way towards that.
Of course, if I really needed all of that I would buy a PDA and install linux on it. But while linux on the desktop is usable but with lots of the support beams and wires showing, desktop linux on a PDA is downright silly. The PalmOS is far more elegant and focused on doing what it needs to be doing. It would just be nice if it could do it better, and do more of it at once.