Sunsoft decided to push the NES further by drawing directly to the screen. This meant that any time an enemy fired a barrage of explosive balls, or the player passed near another moving object, the two would overlap and flicker. The effect is most pronounced in the 1st area, where flying bombers are everywhere and sprite overlap is near constant. They'd use the same trick along with some of the same sprites on their next, less successful game, Festers Quest.
Sun took a shortcut that caused a terrible, constant graphical glitch, in exchange for a whole lot more going on the screen at one time. I'm not saying the graphics were terrible, I'm saying that they made a conscious decision that lowered the overall graphics fidelity in order to have a better playing game, and it shows in both departments.
One of the best looking NES games, Crystalis, made the same tradeoff, but because of the nature of the action RPG it wasn't as much of a problem. It also, amusingly enough, stole sprites from Blaster Master.
Wow, that's an expensive iPod. Must be really big to weigh 1000 pounds.
I believe you meant iBook, and it's interesting to note that the 1000 pound iBook in the UK retails in the US for just 1,299 dollars, or about 700 pounds, the cost of your systems upgrade. Likewise, you can pick up the perfectly respectable 12" iBook for the equivalent of 600 pounds. It has pretty much all of the features of it's larger sibling, but in a smaller package.
That 17" PowerBook costs the equivalent of 1,600 pounds in the US, but is sold in the UK for 2,399. Same numbers on the high-end G5's. You're getting them at an almost %50 markup.
No wonder you think Apples are too expensive. Over there, they are.
Most of the strategy guides that you find in Electronics Boutique and the like are from the Publisher of the game in question, which precludes many things from showing up. Anything that might be a bug, like Castlevania:SON's 220+% glitches or infinite money duplicators, are carefully excised from existence. Likewise, as these things are written before the game ships, many of the best, least expected tricks have yet to be discovered. Plus there are many things that the employees will sneak in, such as ridiculous characters, hidden signatures, ludicrous homages and such, that would absolutely positively not be revealed until the product was safely out the door, and the team has been disbanded enough that blame cannot be assigned.
"Professionally" written FAQs are pretty bad. While they do have the attractive full-color laminated pages, they also were written by someone who was given about a week to research and write this thing. Which means they are also incomplete, full of embarrassing typos, and only helpful for very basic things. For any kind of fighting game you are better off with GameFaqs than with a professionally developed magazine. Hobbyist Faq writers love the game enough and know it end-to-end enough to want to write such a thing, and maintain it over the course of months or years. They're the ones likely to discover the most original combos, the most abusive tactics, and the most powerful strategies.
Want to know where all of the developer sanctioned secrets are? Get the official guide. Want to know the most abusive, unbalancing strategies to raise your game? Go to GameFaqs. Want to know where one of the level designers snuck in Merlin the Meteor throwing Squirrel? You need GameFaqs.
By the way, when you are numerating something, please start with one. In much the same way that we don't want to imbue computers with mood swings, we shouldn't want computers to make us zero index everything. Otherwise we run the risk of running counter to the concept of counting.
They actually made a "new" version for the Game Boy Color, a semi-rare cartridge that featured the gameplay we love and truly terrible artwork. While the level designs aren't quite as inspired as the first, they are still a lot of fun. Now if it only would stop corrupting my saves...
There is also the Arcade game which can be Mamed, featuring even better artwork but far worse gameplay.
And yes, it is time for a 3D update. All of the people I've spoken to in the industry love the idea, but don't want to be the ones stuck programming it. Maybe with Capcom's numbers so low, they would consider reviving old franchises...
Perhaps computer hardware is finally ready for a fully 3D unoptomized representation of a system. Instead of adding folders you add rooms. Data and application would be organized by the theme of the rooms, with many themes available. Anyone could add more themed rooms. Applications would have arms and legs like people, and could be shot to start them up and shot to shut them down. You could even shoot to kill, though that should require a separate gun and a confirmation prompt, and even then it just goes into "limbo". You could pick up and move any number of files, just select them from your inventory. Macros could appear as custom guns, or you could load, say, a Photoshop bullet to launch a file in said application. Files saved are automatically placed in your inventory for later depositing. Networks could be represented by open streets.
If someone you don't like wanders into your building, you can shoot them. Your character's movement speed would be directly related to the speed of the network, with an artificial cap and a mouse-wheel controlled walking speed. You could, of course, chat with anyone else within earshot, and anyone on your walkie talkie. Characters could have different abilities depending upon access levels, so that root might have a jump of 4 and the red, blue, and yellow keys, but an unknown a jump of 2 and no keys. Your family might have a jump of 3 and the blue and yellow keys, though not the red, but I expect your kids will find a way in anyway.
Ah what a beautiful operating system it would be. And with just 1 GB of RAM and a 10 million dollar initial investment, it would be a steal.*
Since my usual harps have been mentiond (Bionic Commando, Strider, and Gunstar Heroes), I'll throw in two here for Blaster Master and Rocket Knight Adventures. Blaster Master is notable because A: it took the Metroid formula and created something that didn't play or feel anything like Metroid and B: it sacrificed graphics (and story) for gameplay. Modern designers would be well-heeled in these two lessons: Learn what works in a successful game and implement the high-level of what made it fun, rather than the low-level of how the fun was implemented, and anything can be made to fit gameplay, but not the other way around.
Rocket Knight Adventures was a greatly underrated Konami game for the Genesis. It had an excellent gameplay hook, the jetpack, but it also implemented many things that a modern designer would be well-heeled to abide by. For example, while taking damage enemies cannot damage you. This leads to many circumstances where you jump in with a hope and a prayer, and slice the enemy to shreds. Another example is the raw strength of the player. Everybody enjoys playing a character that mows through enemies, though not one whose power is so unlimited as to present no challenge. RKA handled this exchange very well, and to this day one of my favorite images of gaming are the hordes of pigs in underwear running from our intrepid hero.
Treasure understood that if you want to create dramatic tension in your players, you have to force them to come as close as possible to danger.The player in Gunstar Heroes had the ability to run up to any enemy, bomb, friend, or object, and throw them as a projectile weapon. It forced a dramatic tension between fleeing and running in, resulting in lots of running in. Narry an object was too large to be thrown, including all of the bosses. Additionally, there was a close-range repeated attack that did tremendous amounts of damage on a jump-in, and a weapon whose sole purpose was to do high damage at close range.
The two player aspect was also well-played. Like all of the best multiplayer cooperative games, you could really tick off your friends. Despite the fact that it doesn't really hurt them, very few people like to be spiked into enemies. Likewise, the spacecraft level had one player controlling the ship and one controlling a rotating turret, but the turret had the ability to jerk around the main craft for short, annoying distances. Furthermore, any dead player was entitled to 1/2 of the surviving player's life. It was this ability to irritate though not destroy that made Gunstar Heroes one of the best side-scrollers of all time.
Still, it is rare that Strider and Bionic Commando get their dues, so to see this Hardcore favorite left off of the list isn't too heartbreaking.
Have you not played Ghosts and Goblins? I mean, it's actually possible to beat Ghouls 'n Ghosts. You only have to be human, and have a lot of time. I managed to beat Ghouls 'n Ghosts on the Genesis many years back. Ghosts and Goblins stayed unbeaten until emulation added a "save state" feature. The swooping-red-demons-of-death-on-ladders were finally tamed by moment-to-moment saves and a truly ludicrously low fps. Even the Ghouls 'n Ghosts "Statue Tongues" level was nothing compared to that beast.
In all fairness, Ghouls 'n Ghosts was a better game. But that doesn't make it the harder of the two.
"These buffoons" made decisions that seem perfectly rational at the time but in retrospect are a bad idea. Cutting their unique feature is always a bad idea, but when you're coming up significantly short on the funding end, that unique feature probably represented 1/4th of the budget. They chose to focus on developing the character that needed the most work, rather than working on the character that was OK. The publisher made the switch to the PS2, which supports with the cutting of co-op play. Using a licensed engine is a very reasonable thing to do usually, especially if you have no experience on that platform. Not continuing with the prototype is completely understandable if you are making your "first and greatest" game. You don't want the baggage of your prototype and hey, you licensed an engine for a reason, right? Nobody likes firing people, even if they are bringing the team down. And many people underestimate the publisher's role in development.
In other words, they did not make any uncomprehensible mistakes, and they didn't make any mistakes that haven't been made many times before in.
BTW, 600k will get you two coders and a office. How will you pay the artists? Designers? Testers? Mo-cap? Voice actors? Texturers? Administrators? Musicians? It makes me cry how much people with no connection to the industry underestimate the development process. "Just make it great." "What, really, makes a game great?" "You know, not bad stuff." And then they go on to quote some price and team size that might get them Prince of Persia 1, not the 275 people who worked on Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, or the 230 people who worked on Halo.
600k is so low as to be downright insulting. What do you think we do all day? Play tetris? Why do you think we accept salaries of half of what we could earn elsewhere, doing twice the work?
Does anyone else get that feeling that the US and Europe are about to play catch-up again? Right now we're at the technological level of atonomous vacuums, and japan is training their ambidextrous robotic armies on soccer. How long before Japan makes one that's 3 feet tall, terribly cute, and can wash the dishes (with a stepstool)? While our educational institutions are doing research with an eye for immediate military applications, Japan has been doing pure research for the past twenty years, and it is starting to pay off.
That's not to say that we haven't made great strides in robots that can blow up other robots, but a consumer robot will probably be humanoid, as that is both what people are most comfortable with and what households are designed to support. All of the good humanoid robots come from japan. The most dexterous robots come from japan. Japanese robots have a sense of balance and manipulation that American robots just can't touch. And we're many years behind the ability to release a commercial robot like the Aibo.
Not to be too serious, but it looks like we will have a lot of ground to recover when this type of thing catches on...
It would be more intuitive, but it is currently implemented badly. For example, in Windows when a piece of software doesn't show up in the Start->Programs menu, it becomes necessary to delve into C:\program files\company name\application name. Can you tell me offhand who created clone CD? Or Ad-Aware? Why is there a quick launch menu to the left of the open windows, and a running application tray which includes launchers to the right? Why are both of these to the right of the start menu, which includes no less than two different places for application icons? And why oh why are we not supposed to have icons on the desktop? What about launching in explorer? Without including the run menu, command-key launchers, or other non-graphical ways of launching applications, you already have 6 different places to look for an icon, and the icon might be in any or none of those. Add in that Windows is now a multi-user environment masquerading as a single-user, meaning that the icon might not be there at all in your user, and you see why so many people complain about icons being lost.
The engine communicating with the deflector shield I feel is an apt analogy, because the command line provides a simple way for applications to communicate. While graphical user interfaces have interprocess communication, the process is far less elegant, expedient, and easy to code, and fits a far less general case.
Using a CLI does require more knowledge than using a GUI. But if you use an application professionally, every day, it shouldn't be a problem. And the additional power that you get from the CLI is to many people worth the tradeoff.
Why is it when attacking the CLI people resort to showing a confused new user? It can be confusing to new people, but once acquainted with it (like the bridge of the enterprise should be) it is more powerful than a GUI for many tasks. And anyone who thinks that the current GUI isn't confusing to new users hasn't consulted in a while.
Agreed. Mir was just an easy target. It takes a lot of skill to keep a space station afloat with the equivalent of duct tape and tin foil. I didn't mean to imply that they weren't skilled, I meant to imply that unlike the US, the Mir team was probably used to a little rattling, and maybe the occasional backfiring cylinder:).
Besides, you can't poke fun at the SkyLab management team. They hardly had the plastic off of their chairs by the time they were done.
whereas x86 PC hardware was produced by loads of companies and hence the competition drove the price down.
Except that, as the above poster pointed out, many Apples are cheaper. iBooks most famously, but their integrated line is also cheaper if you count the cost of the monitor. The high end of their line is very affordable... Compare the cost of a dual 1.8 G5 to a dual 2.8 Xenon, and recognize that the dual G5 is faster. Plus multiprocessing on the Mac has far fewer of the hitches of multiprocessing on the PC.
Not to undercut my own argument, but in the (long) past Apple did make a few supplier decisions that didn't pan out. Specifically, apple's use of SCSI drives became a liability. While it was expected that with competition SCSI prices would eventually fall to be on parity with ATA drives, it never happened, despite being significantly faster for about the same cost to produce. Still, hot swapping external SCSI drives was one of the best reasons to own a Mac (and one of the easiest ways to transfer large amounts of data), you would just pay for the privilege. Now there is USB / Firewire to do that job affordably, and Apple has transitioned to ATA. Except for the Power PC processor and resultant motherboard, which I've always respected above the hot-running Pentium line, Apples these days pretty much use standard parts from the x86 universe.
You'll notice that your x86 which you've had since before Win95 has come out has had the graphics card, sound card, power supply, hard drives, motherboard, cpu, network card, and probably the case replaced multiple times. I'm sorry, at that point it is not the same PC, you have just bought a new one in parts. You could probably rummage through your parts bin and reassemble your original 486, if you were so inclined. You can do the same thing (or, at least, similar things) in the Mac with judicious use of online retailers. In other words, the implication that an x86 is a better investment because it has stayed around for the past 10 years is a false one, as nothing of the original machine remains.
Most people buy computers as a whole, and not as individual upgrades. Personally, if I get another motherboard incompatibility I'm going to track down and strangle the engineer who decided it should only work with Kingston(tm) ram. While I do buy pretty cheap for my non-main system, my new motherboard DOA rate is hovering around %50. I personally recommend to my family that if they want a machine either A: I should build it for them, and the flight out to California that would entail, or B: they should buy new. Building a system, while not requiring as many steps as it used to, is still a lot more effort than an average non technophile would want to put into it in the same way that non gearheads wouldn't want to build their car.
And if you want to only have one computer, run windows under a virtualization layer on the Mac. Unlike the monolithic, hot-running Pentium line, the Power PC is adept at simulating other computing environments. While you're at it, add Linux for network administration duties. Apple for every day, Linux for networking, and Windows for legacy dependencies. Sounds just about right.
They first heard this potentially dangerous noise in November, as a possible precursor to total systems meltdown and other heinous stuff, and they didn't go to check it out until February?
I know they were looking for experience, but they shouldn't have hired management team from the Mir.
Once Microsoft or another company has dominated the market through strong arm tactics, the strong arm tactics are no longer necessary. The US can wag its finger at Microsoft and say that they cannot forbid PC makers from installing other browsers, but now that most people consider Internet Explorer as "the internet" and the competition is basically dead, what's the point? Microsoft may agree to not prevent OEM's from installing OS2 Warp and BeOs, but what's the point now? In the time between when the problem came to light, the investigation happened, the trial happened, and appeals were exhausted, Microsoft's dominance of a market has become so assured that their previous tactics have become unnecessary. If at that point they are "forced" to remove their strong arm tactics, there is no credible competition left to pose a threat and Microsoft has a complete hold over the standard.
I don't think Judges will act any quicker, but I do think the stick they carry should be appropriately sized for punitive effect. If you've made 50 billion dollars through illegal activities, that's 50 billion less you should have the day after the judge's gavel hits the table. If you have gained your monopoly position through control of a standard, the group that controls that standard is now a separate company. If your top executives made most of their money knowingly through this company's illegal activities, then tomorrow those tope executives are going to have a hard time putting food on the table.
Worf: "Yes sir!...It doesn't appear to be in the start menu Sir!" Picard: "Damn! It must be in the program files. Does anyone know who wrote 'Shields up'?" Jordi: "I believe it was 'Gibson.'"
*Bam*
Worf: "Hull at 70%. Looking in the Program Files folder under 'Gibson'... Not there either, sir." Picard: "Are you logged in as Captain?" Worf: "This computer has a login?"
*Bam*
Picard: "Reroute power from the engines to frontal deflector shields, now!" Worf: "Would that be in the engine program or the deflector shield program?" Data: "Hull integrity at 20%, if I may captain?" Picard: "Do it!"
There are some things which the command line does much better than graphical user interfaces. Interprocess communication and opening parameters spring to mind. Your e-mail program can, for example, use essentially any writing program you chose to compose the text, can spell-check it in another, and can send it out itself. You could also do all of this yourself on the command line, or you could script several actions to happen when giving a simpler command. In the instance that you indicated, the shields application would probably be run under sudo, and could be mapped with appropriate parameters to simply "shieldsup".
Anyone can "do" the command line. But the command line is not simply a dumbed-down version of more modern graphical user interfaces. It is, in a way, a programming language. And much like how purely graphical programming languages are much simpler than their text-based counterparts, so too are purely graphical interfaces simpler in their inputs and outputs. If you want to search through a table of users and ban a user whose IP address keeps spamming your network, that can be done very quickly involving only one command line, but in a GUI it would take many steps.
While drag-n-drop was a good first step, we have yet to find a way to make the graphical user interface as powerful as the command line.
In Federal Court today, Andy and Larry Wachowski, creators of The Matrix, were sued on behalf of God. When asked to comment, God said the Wachowskis had violated his copyright and defamed his family's good name. Said God, "My son would never be that stupid."
My appologies if I had offended. While we haven't settled on satisfactory definitions of male / female / intersex / etc, the concept of sex is an inherintly quantifiable one. We haven't decided on what those quantities are, but the concept is measurable, you just have to choose a yardstick. Physical manifestation? Genetic structure? Reproductive abilities?
For most people, sex and gender are assumed to be identical simply because it would be rude to contradict the gender they chose to manifest. On the other hand, if a doctor was attempting to treat a sex-linked genetic disease, that doctor has a specific quantifiable working definition of sex that may contradict the chosen gender... sometimes completely unbeknown to the party at hand. There are a famous group of women in Italy (whose name escapes me right now), renown for their beauty and sterility... who are genetically XY but with a total testosterone insensitivity, and as such became ultra feminine with all female parts.
In this case "sex" refers to the working definition of whoever has the need to know. male / female is a simplification of the result of that data. In a certain percentage of cases, it is an oversimplification.
Ah, gender identity politics at 3 in the morning. Where would we be without Slashdot?
Gender is the personal expression of sexual identity. Definition 2 hits this directly, though I could see why an etymologyst would list the grammatical definition of gender first. The 3rd definition is more common usage, but it is split in half with 3b supporting the classification schema definition. Note, none of these definitions refer specifically to biology, just identity perception. And as the baby is too young to have a well formed sexual identity perception, it can be said to be biologically male or female, but it cannot be said to be psychologically masculine or feminine.
That's per license. While I can't seem to find the offer now, Lindows was offering a flat-rate price... I believe it was 1,000 dollars for an unlimited number of computers. This is the time that Walmart / Microtel jumped on board, and I would assume that license is still valid.
Slashdot Mirror
Sunsoft decided to push the NES further by drawing directly to the screen. This meant that any time an enemy fired a barrage of explosive balls, or the player passed near another moving object, the two would overlap and flicker. The effect is most pronounced in the 1st area, where flying bombers are everywhere and sprite overlap is near constant. They'd use the same trick along with some of the same sprites on their next, less successful game, Festers Quest.
Sun took a shortcut that caused a terrible, constant graphical glitch, in exchange for a whole lot more going on the screen at one time. I'm not saying the graphics were terrible, I'm saying that they made a conscious decision that lowered the overall graphics fidelity in order to have a better playing game, and it shows in both departments.
One of the best looking NES games, Crystalis, made the same tradeoff, but because of the nature of the action RPG it wasn't as much of a problem. It also, amusingly enough, stole sprites from Blaster Master.
Wow, that's an expensive iPod. Must be really big to weigh 1000 pounds.
I believe you meant iBook, and it's interesting to note that the 1000 pound iBook in the UK retails in the US for just 1,299 dollars, or about 700 pounds, the cost of your systems upgrade. Likewise, you can pick up the perfectly respectable 12" iBook for the equivalent of 600 pounds. It has pretty much all of the features of it's larger sibling, but in a smaller package.
That 17" PowerBook costs the equivalent of 1,600 pounds in the US, but is sold in the UK for 2,399. Same numbers on the high-end G5's. You're getting them at an almost %50 markup.
No wonder you think Apples are too expensive. Over there, they are.
Most of the strategy guides that you find in Electronics Boutique and the like are from the Publisher of the game in question, which precludes many things from showing up. Anything that might be a bug, like Castlevania:SON's 220+% glitches or infinite money duplicators, are carefully excised from existence. Likewise, as these things are written before the game ships, many of the best, least expected tricks have yet to be discovered. Plus there are many things that the employees will sneak in, such as ridiculous characters, hidden signatures, ludicrous homages and such, that would absolutely positively not be revealed until the product was safely out the door, and the team has been disbanded enough that blame cannot be assigned.
"Professionally" written FAQs are pretty bad. While they do have the attractive full-color laminated pages, they also were written by someone who was given about a week to research and write this thing. Which means they are also incomplete, full of embarrassing typos, and only helpful for very basic things. For any kind of fighting game you are better off with GameFaqs than with a professionally developed magazine. Hobbyist Faq writers love the game enough and know it end-to-end enough to want to write such a thing, and maintain it over the course of months or years. They're the ones likely to discover the most original combos, the most abusive tactics, and the most powerful strategies.
Want to know where all of the developer sanctioned secrets are? Get the official guide. Want to know the most abusive, unbalancing strategies to raise your game? Go to GameFaqs. Want to know where one of the level designers snuck in Merlin the Meteor throwing Squirrel? You need GameFaqs.
By the way, when you are numerating something, please start with one. In much the same way that we don't want to imbue computers with mood swings, we shouldn't want computers to make us zero index everything. Otherwise we run the risk of running counter to the concept of counting.
Meanwhile, you've reduced your [payroll costs|voter results] by 10% with probably just 0.0001% chance of getting caught.
.9 in the checkbox.
I knew there was a reason my ballot had a little
Right. Hence the claim "Windows XP is faster than Windows 98 by an order of magnitude." What they don't tell you is that is in base 1.05
I really which Capcom made a new version.
They actually made a "new" version for the Game Boy Color, a semi-rare cartridge that featured the gameplay we love and truly terrible artwork. While the level designs aren't quite as inspired as the first, they are still a lot of fun. Now if it only would stop corrupting my saves...
There is also the Arcade game which can be Mamed, featuring even better artwork but far worse gameplay.
And yes, it is time for a 3D update. All of the people I've spoken to in the industry love the idea, but don't want to be the ones stuck programming it. Maybe with Capcom's numbers so low, they would consider reviving old franchises...
Perhaps computer hardware is finally ready for a fully 3D unoptomized representation of a system. Instead of adding folders you add rooms. Data and application would be organized by the theme of the rooms, with many themes available. Anyone could add more themed rooms. Applications would have arms and legs like people, and could be shot to start them up and shot to shut them down. You could even shoot to kill, though that should require a separate gun and a confirmation prompt, and even then it just goes into "limbo". You could pick up and move any number of files, just select them from your inventory. Macros could appear as custom guns, or you could load, say, a Photoshop bullet to launch a file in said application. Files saved are automatically placed in your inventory for later depositing. Networks could be represented by open streets.
If someone you don't like wanders into your building, you can shoot them. Your character's movement speed would be directly related to the speed of the network, with an artificial cap and a mouse-wheel controlled walking speed. You could, of course, chat with anyone else within earshot, and anyone on your walkie talkie. Characters could have different abilities depending upon access levels, so that root might have a jump of 4 and the red, blue, and yellow keys, but an unknown a jump of 2 and no keys. Your family might have a jump of 3 and the blue and yellow keys, though not the red, but I expect your kids will find a way in anyway.
Ah what a beautiful operating system it would be. And with just 1 GB of RAM and a 10 million dollar initial investment, it would be a steal.*
*from whoever is funding it.
Since my usual harps have been mentiond (Bionic Commando, Strider, and Gunstar Heroes), I'll throw in two here for Blaster Master and Rocket Knight Adventures. Blaster Master is notable because A: it took the Metroid formula and created something that didn't play or feel anything like Metroid and B: it sacrificed graphics (and story) for gameplay. Modern designers would be well-heeled in these two lessons: Learn what works in a successful game and implement the high-level of what made it fun, rather than the low-level of how the fun was implemented, and anything can be made to fit gameplay, but not the other way around.
Rocket Knight Adventures was a greatly underrated Konami game for the Genesis. It had an excellent gameplay hook, the jetpack, but it also implemented many things that a modern designer would be well-heeled to abide by. For example, while taking damage enemies cannot damage you. This leads to many circumstances where you jump in with a hope and a prayer, and slice the enemy to shreds. Another example is the raw strength of the player. Everybody enjoys playing a character that mows through enemies, though not one whose power is so unlimited as to present no challenge. RKA handled this exchange very well, and to this day one of my favorite images of gaming are the hordes of pigs in underwear running from our intrepid hero.
Treasure understood that if you want to create dramatic tension in your players, you have to force them to come as close as possible to danger.The player in Gunstar Heroes had the ability to run up to any enemy, bomb, friend, or object, and throw them as a projectile weapon. It forced a dramatic tension between fleeing and running in, resulting in lots of running in. Narry an object was too large to be thrown, including all of the bosses. Additionally, there was a close-range repeated attack that did tremendous amounts of damage on a jump-in, and a weapon whose sole purpose was to do high damage at close range.
The two player aspect was also well-played. Like all of the best multiplayer cooperative games, you could really tick off your friends. Despite the fact that it doesn't really hurt them, very few people like to be spiked into enemies. Likewise, the spacecraft level had one player controlling the ship and one controlling a rotating turret, but the turret had the ability to jerk around the main craft for short, annoying distances. Furthermore, any dead player was entitled to 1/2 of the surviving player's life. It was this ability to irritate though not destroy that made Gunstar Heroes one of the best side-scrollers of all time.
Still, it is rare that Strider and Bionic Commando get their dues, so to see this Hardcore favorite left off of the list isn't too heartbreaking.
Have you not played Ghosts and Goblins? I mean, it's actually possible to beat Ghouls 'n Ghosts. You only have to be human, and have a lot of time. I managed to beat Ghouls 'n Ghosts on the Genesis many years back. Ghosts and Goblins stayed unbeaten until emulation added a "save state" feature. The swooping-red-demons-of-death-on-ladders were finally tamed by moment-to-moment saves and a truly ludicrously low fps. Even the Ghouls 'n Ghosts "Statue Tongues" level was nothing compared to that beast.
In all fairness, Ghouls 'n Ghosts was a better game. But that doesn't make it the harder of the two.
"These buffoons" made decisions that seem perfectly rational at the time but in retrospect are a bad idea. Cutting their unique feature is always a bad idea, but when you're coming up significantly short on the funding end, that unique feature probably represented 1/4th of the budget. They chose to focus on developing the character that needed the most work, rather than working on the character that was OK. The publisher made the switch to the PS2, which supports with the cutting of co-op play. Using a licensed engine is a very reasonable thing to do usually, especially if you have no experience on that platform. Not continuing with the prototype is completely understandable if you are making your "first and greatest" game. You don't want the baggage of your prototype and hey, you licensed an engine for a reason, right? Nobody likes firing people, even if they are bringing the team down. And many people underestimate the publisher's role in development.
In other words, they did not make any uncomprehensible mistakes, and they didn't make any mistakes that haven't been made many times before in.
BTW, 600k will get you two coders and a office. How will you pay the artists? Designers? Testers? Mo-cap? Voice actors? Texturers? Administrators? Musicians? It makes me cry how much people with no connection to the industry underestimate the development process. "Just make it great." "What, really, makes a game great?" "You know, not bad stuff." And then they go on to quote some price and team size that might get them Prince of Persia 1, not the 275 people who worked on Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, or the 230 people who worked on Halo.
600k is so low as to be downright insulting. What do you think we do all day? Play tetris? Why do you think we accept salaries of half of what we could earn elsewhere, doing twice the work?
Does anyone else get that feeling that the US and Europe are about to play catch-up again? Right now we're at the technological level of atonomous vacuums, and japan is training their ambidextrous robotic armies on soccer. How long before Japan makes one that's 3 feet tall, terribly cute, and can wash the dishes (with a stepstool)? While our educational institutions are doing research with an eye for immediate military applications, Japan has been doing pure research for the past twenty years, and it is starting to pay off.
That's not to say that we haven't made great strides in robots that can blow up other robots, but a consumer robot will probably be humanoid, as that is both what people are most comfortable with and what households are designed to support. All of the good humanoid robots come from japan. The most dexterous robots come from japan. Japanese robots have a sense of balance and manipulation that American robots just can't touch. And we're many years behind the ability to release a commercial robot like the Aibo.
Not to be too serious, but it looks like we will have a lot of ground to recover when this type of thing catches on...
It would be more intuitive, but it is currently implemented badly. For example, in Windows when a piece of software doesn't show up in the Start->Programs menu, it becomes necessary to delve into C:\program files\company name\application name. Can you tell me offhand who created clone CD? Or Ad-Aware? Why is there a quick launch menu to the left of the open windows, and a running application tray which includes launchers to the right? Why are both of these to the right of the start menu, which includes no less than two different places for application icons? And why oh why are we not supposed to have icons on the desktop? What about launching in explorer? Without including the run menu, command-key launchers, or other non-graphical ways of launching applications, you already have 6 different places to look for an icon, and the icon might be in any or none of those. Add in that Windows is now a multi-user environment masquerading as a single-user, meaning that the icon might not be there at all in your user, and you see why so many people complain about icons being lost.
The engine communicating with the deflector shield I feel is an apt analogy, because the command line provides a simple way for applications to communicate. While graphical user interfaces have interprocess communication, the process is far less elegant, expedient, and easy to code, and fits a far less general case.
Using a CLI does require more knowledge than using a GUI. But if you use an application professionally, every day, it shouldn't be a problem. And the additional power that you get from the CLI is to many people worth the tradeoff.
Why is it when attacking the CLI people resort to showing a confused new user? It can be confusing to new people, but once acquainted with it (like the bridge of the enterprise should be) it is more powerful than a GUI for many tasks. And anyone who thinks that the current GUI isn't confusing to new users hasn't consulted in a while.
Agreed. Mir was just an easy target. It takes a lot of skill to keep a space station afloat with the equivalent of duct tape and tin foil. I didn't mean to imply that they weren't skilled, I meant to imply that unlike the US, the Mir team was probably used to a little rattling, and maybe the occasional backfiring cylinder :).
Besides, you can't poke fun at the SkyLab management team. They hardly had the plastic off of their chairs by the time they were done.
whereas x86 PC hardware was produced by loads of companies and hence the competition drove the price down.
Except that, as the above poster pointed out, many Apples are cheaper. iBooks most famously, but their integrated line is also cheaper if you count the cost of the monitor. The high end of their line is very affordable... Compare the cost of a dual 1.8 G5 to a dual 2.8 Xenon, and recognize that the dual G5 is faster. Plus multiprocessing on the Mac has far fewer of the hitches of multiprocessing on the PC.
Not to undercut my own argument, but in the (long) past Apple did make a few supplier decisions that didn't pan out. Specifically, apple's use of SCSI drives became a liability. While it was expected that with competition SCSI prices would eventually fall to be on parity with ATA drives, it never happened, despite being significantly faster for about the same cost to produce. Still, hot swapping external SCSI drives was one of the best reasons to own a Mac (and one of the easiest ways to transfer large amounts of data), you would just pay for the privilege. Now there is USB / Firewire to do that job affordably, and Apple has transitioned to ATA. Except for the Power PC processor and resultant motherboard, which I've always respected above the hot-running Pentium line, Apples these days pretty much use standard parts from the x86 universe.
You'll notice that your x86 which you've had since before Win95 has come out has had the graphics card, sound card, power supply, hard drives, motherboard, cpu, network card, and probably the case replaced multiple times. I'm sorry, at that point it is not the same PC, you have just bought a new one in parts. You could probably rummage through your parts bin and reassemble your original 486, if you were so inclined. You can do the same thing (or, at least, similar things) in the Mac with judicious use of online retailers. In other words, the implication that an x86 is a better investment because it has stayed around for the past 10 years is a false one, as nothing of the original machine remains.
Most people buy computers as a whole, and not as individual upgrades. Personally, if I get another motherboard incompatibility I'm going to track down and strangle the engineer who decided it should only work with Kingston(tm) ram. While I do buy pretty cheap for my non-main system, my new motherboard DOA rate is hovering around %50. I personally recommend to my family that if they want a machine either A: I should build it for them, and the flight out to California that would entail, or B: they should buy new. Building a system, while not requiring as many steps as it used to, is still a lot more effort than an average non technophile would want to put into it in the same way that non gearheads wouldn't want to build their car.
And if you want to only have one computer, run windows under a virtualization layer on the Mac. Unlike the monolithic, hot-running Pentium line, the Power PC is adept at simulating other computing environments. While you're at it, add Linux for network administration duties. Apple for every day, Linux for networking, and Windows for legacy dependencies. Sounds just about right.
Great, now we'll have to find some other way to tell the test boxes from the final boxes.
Thanks, Microsoft, for finding a new and unique way to make my job more difficult.
They first heard this potentially dangerous noise in November, as a possible precursor to total systems meltdown and other heinous stuff, and they didn't go to check it out until February?
I know they were looking for experience, but they shouldn't have hired management team from the Mir.
Once Microsoft or another company has dominated the market through strong arm tactics, the strong arm tactics are no longer necessary. The US can wag its finger at Microsoft and say that they cannot forbid PC makers from installing other browsers, but now that most people consider Internet Explorer as "the internet" and the competition is basically dead, what's the point? Microsoft may agree to not prevent OEM's from installing OS2 Warp and BeOs, but what's the point now? In the time between when the problem came to light, the investigation happened, the trial happened, and appeals were exhausted, Microsoft's dominance of a market has become so assured that their previous tactics have become unnecessary. If at that point they are "forced" to remove their strong arm tactics, there is no credible competition left to pose a threat and Microsoft has a complete hold over the standard.
I don't think Judges will act any quicker, but I do think the stick they carry should be appropriately sized for punitive effect. If you've made 50 billion dollars through illegal activities, that's 50 billion less you should have the day after the judge's gavel hits the table. If you have gained your monopoly position through control of a standard, the group that controls that standard is now a separate company. If your top executives made most of their money knowingly through this company's illegal activities, then tomorrow those tope executives are going to have a hard time putting food on the table.
Picard: "Worf! Red Alert! Shields Up!"
...It doesn't appear to be in the start menu Sir!"
Worf: "Yes sir!
Picard: "Damn! It must be in the program files. Does anyone know who wrote 'Shields up'?"
Jordi: "I believe it was 'Gibson.'"
*Bam*
Worf: "Hull at 70%. Looking in the Program Files folder under 'Gibson'... Not there either, sir."
Picard: "Are you logged in as Captain?"
Worf: "This computer has a login?"
*Bam*
Picard: "Reroute power from the engines to frontal deflector shields, now!"
Worf: "Would that be in the engine program or the deflector shield program?"
Data: "Hull integrity at 20%, if I may captain?"
Picard: "Do it!"
~$ GEngine -rrte | GShields -fwd
~$ skill Klingon -v -9
There are some things which the command line does much better than graphical user interfaces. Interprocess communication and opening parameters spring to mind. Your e-mail program can, for example, use essentially any writing program you chose to compose the text, can spell-check it in another, and can send it out itself. You could also do all of this yourself on the command line, or you could script several actions to happen when giving a simpler command. In the instance that you indicated, the shields application would probably be run under sudo, and could be mapped with appropriate parameters to simply "shieldsup".
Anyone can "do" the command line. But the command line is not simply a dumbed-down version of more modern graphical user interfaces. It is, in a way, a programming language. And much like how purely graphical programming languages are much simpler than their text-based counterparts, so too are purely graphical interfaces simpler in their inputs and outputs. If you want to search through a table of users and ban a user whose IP address keeps spamming your network, that can be done very quickly involving only one command line, but in a GUI it would take many steps.
While drag-n-drop was a good first step, we have yet to find a way to make the graphical user interface as powerful as the command line.
In Federal Court today, Andy and Larry Wachowski, creators of The Matrix, were sued on behalf of God. When asked to comment, God said the Wachowskis had violated his copyright and defamed his family's good name. Said God, "My son would never be that stupid."
My appologies if I had offended. While we haven't settled on satisfactory definitions of male / female / intersex / etc, the concept of sex is an inherintly quantifiable one. We haven't decided on what those quantities are, but the concept is measurable, you just have to choose a yardstick. Physical manifestation? Genetic structure? Reproductive abilities?
For most people, sex and gender are assumed to be identical simply because it would be rude to contradict the gender they chose to manifest. On the other hand, if a doctor was attempting to treat a sex-linked genetic disease, that doctor has a specific quantifiable working definition of sex that may contradict the chosen gender... sometimes completely unbeknown to the party at hand. There are a famous group of women in Italy (whose name escapes me right now), renown for their beauty and sterility... who are genetically XY but with a total testosterone insensitivity, and as such became ultra feminine with all female parts.
In this case "sex" refers to the working definition of whoever has the need to know. male / female is a simplification of the result of that data. In a certain percentage of cases, it is an oversimplification.
Ah, gender identity politics at 3 in the morning. Where would we be without Slashdot?
Gender is the personal expression of sexual identity. Definition 2 hits this directly, though I could see why an etymologyst would list the grammatical definition of gender first. The 3rd definition is more common usage, but it is split in half with 3b supporting the classification schema definition. Note, none of these definitions refer specifically to biology, just identity perception. And as the baby is too young to have a well formed sexual identity perception, it can be said to be biologically male or female, but it cannot be said to be psychologically masculine or feminine.
Sex is verifiable. Gender is a perception.
suprnova.org - Has decided to focus on the Japanese market
That's per license. While I can't seem to find the offer now, Lindows was offering a flat-rate price... I believe it was 1,000 dollars for an unlimited number of computers. This is the time that Walmart / Microtel jumped on board, and I would assume that license is still valid.
I'm personally waiting for the Old Man Murray version. His strong opinions and insights could lead to the greatest GPROMMMMMMORPG of all time.