If you are looking to sell expensive boxes, don't forget businesses. Build sharp, top-of-the-line boxes into shiny piano-black cases, then offer to setup their office network if they buy 3 or more of the things. Want 802.11g wireless and a 5 year warranty on that? Insurance against fire, flood, acts of god? I can keep that printer of yours topped off for just $50 a month. Know moore's law? For $100 per month I'll keep your system up-to-date (every 1.5 years).
There are a lot of niches to be filled while working with businesses. They're focused upon doing something other than computing, and could really care less about what WEP encryption is. Outsourcing that to someone else makes a lot of sense, and being the guys who sold them the hardware is a good way to get into their offices... and vice versa.
To expand upon the poster above, bind your cords. If you Zip-tie all your power cords together, all of your RCA cables, etc, until you have little discrete functionality units (I am Jack's VCR Inputs), you can eliminate a lot of clutter. Zip-tie those down to your rack / display unit, and they hardly count as clutter at all. Label all of your cords... It takes longer now, but it will save you lots of probing later, when you are less likely to be worrying about making a mess.
Lots of little special-use attachments? Keep them in a box separate from everything else, so that those NegCons don't clutter up your regular area. Lots of controllers? Wind them up and put them away.
It was actually released by ASCII, as a successor to the somewhat more successful SNES single-hand controller. Both were terrible to use.
The controllers were just overloaded with buttons. You had a D-Pad in the center, 4 buttons surrounding it, 2 on the underside, and a pad for L1R1L2R2SelectStart thrown in below. It was impossible to use the D-pad and any of the buttons at the same time except for the underside two because you were only using one digit, and even then you were busy using those fingers underneath to hold the controller. Anything involving action or timing was impossible to do. Most RPG's were more enjoyable with a traditional controller, but for those without that luxury it must have been nice.
I actually gave mine to a colleague with one arm. He was happy to get it, but he recognized the limitations. If you really want to make a controller for disabled people, use the feet. It would be rather easy to handle forward / back / left / right with your feet, and two analog sticks could be used concurrently. Mount 4 thumb buttons on the end of a cylinder and L1 R1 L2 R2 on the length, with a hand strap to hold it all together, and you're good to go. The feet are vastly underutilized in gaming, relegated to simple acceleration / deceleration, but they are capable of far more than that.
Nintendo had a controller at one point where the joystick was moved with the mouth, sucking counted as an A, and blowing as a B. Because today's controllers were built to the full capacity of both hands, it is somewhat futile to attempt to condense that down without looking to other input sources.
I was attempting to post a comment with a large number of the current speech restrictions in the US, to counteract this silly notion that campaign finance reform is a slippery slope to Fascism. Not that I would put that past the current administration or most any congress, but the slippery slope idea is a little absurd.
Of course it was modded "troll," because nobody followed my advice.
Technically, Neo didn't start the revolution from the outside... He didn't start any revolution. To most people in the film, he was just a guy with nifty powers, who didn't show up for the final act. Seeing as how he died before he could tell anyone what he was doing, they probably thought he was full of hot air. Maybe Morpheous' prophecy of the joining of humans and machines will convince people that Neo is responsible. Maybe not.
Personally, I wanted to watch the machines destroy the giant matrix server in order to get rid of Neo, with Neo flipping through subsystems trying to avoid the path of destruction. Of course, I also wanted the producers to ignore the whole flying at the end of the first movie thing, claiming metaphoric license, and I wanted the second movie to, you know, advance the plot.
I guess like the unofficial Star Wars prequels, a fan's work is never done.
Sound farfetched? It isn't. Once you've made a crack in the first amendment (Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech...), it's easier to use crowbars to widen it than it was to make the crack in the first place...
This message is not spam. I just want to sell you secret Dow Chemical documents showing how to make nuclear weapons from FIRE! Our documents can even raise the dead. But I can't tell you thanks to our F*#k F*#kity F*#kpoo president, who is a gay homosexual. Therefore, we should all revolt, smashing the McDonalds store windows and killing all passers-by. The jurors will be properly informed that they can judge the law as well as the accused, and we can all go home to write our child pornography
If you think this post is a troll, read it with a lawyer.
Voter apathy in many states, at least in the presidential election, can be directly attributed to the electorial college. In California during the last election, for example, I saw not a SINGLE campaign ad by a presidential candidate. Nader pressed a lot more flesh in the state, but without posters, radio ads, etc, what is the point? That the state was going to Gore was a foregone conclusion... one more vote doesn't actually count for anything.
Get rid of the electorial college, re-engage the population on the most important voting day of the year, and then replace the hanging chads. What's the point of a great front-end if the system is still broken?
Interestingly enough, with the ever-expanding star wars featurelist, it could someday achieve that beautiful glory of the original design doc.
With staying power and adequate funding, who knows how far it could go. If Episode 3 doesn't incinerate the heart of the series that Episode 1 ripped out and Episode 2 stomped on, this MMPORPG could be in development for many, many years.
He's also being too hard on Namco and Nintendo. Racing Evolution was no terrible game, it was just "different." In a series known for being identical to the way it flagshipped the PS1, it was time for a risk. They took the risk, they alienated some fans, and now they are in a much better position in the market. Would he have preferred another Ridge Racer 5? It was a failure, true, but a noble one.
Likewise, saying Nintendo's head is buried in the sand ignores the fact that nintendo has testmarketed an online adapter, the Bulky Drive. Japan doesn't have very high broadband penetration. If the decision were based on Japan alone, there just isn't enough households for all of the extra work required in porting games to online multiplayer. The X-Box online is a no-brainier, and the PS2 has to keep up, but the 'Cube? Would Mario Party be better if 10% of the 10% of households with broadband decided to play online? Except to the extremely hardcore, not releasing an online adapter shouldn't count as a blunder. The whole N64 cartridge thing... That was a blunder. No Mario Kart Online yet? Don't be foolish.
Honestly, that was better than "A Boy and His Blob." At least you could see the hole in E.T. "A Boy and His Blob" consisted of walking around, throwing unmarked colored jellybeans at your blob. Eventually you would map out what every one did. From then on, you had to walk up to every wall, floor, ceiling and other surface in the game, feed the blob the appropriate jellybean, walk through blindly, and see if you fell to your death. This task wasn't made any easier by the limited number of jellybeans... As if someone was going to cheat and use 3 ladders from "ketchup" instead of two.
In this case, "fall in hole, die, reset" wasn't just a mistake, it was the gameplay. The only merciful thing about the game was that it was one level long, and the second half of that level was a series of copout, easy training screens that should have come first. Why Nintendo Power hailed it as the second coming of your deity of choice is anyone's guess, but I'm guessing money.
You can get a lot more photos here, not all of them are renders. Notice also that the game in the windows is not being played, merely viewed. It could be a demo video being played, or a static screenshot, or (far more likely) the screen is a mockup and the consoles haven't reached the beta testers yet (they haven't). In case you haven't noticed, all screenshots get touched by photoshop before going out to the general public, just some more than others. Mocking up an interface that doesn't exist, and that hasn't gone out for refinement, is perfectly acceptable. The choice of Metroid Prime for the screenshot was a stupid one, but at least they have good taste in games.
We shouldn't put the Phantom on that list until 2004. I'm curious to see the size of the flameout.
I think the author is being a little hard on Duchovny. When have we ever seen him as animated as Michael Ironside? Lacking the subtle clues of minute physical gesture, generated characters in videogames need to put a lot of variation in tone and pacing. Duchnovy traditionally relies upon eye and minor head movements. That's not to say he isn't a great actor, but he's far too subtle and visual to be a great voice actor. He has less intonation than Ben Stein. Thinking that would translate well to an audio-only role is Ubi Soft's fault.
1. What genre of game *would* be more suitable for adapting Fight Club?
MMPORPG? Just because there is no suitable genre for a movie to game transition doesn't mean you randomly pick one. "Hey Jim, all the kids love this new 'Bowling for Columbine' movie." "That's great Bob, let's make an FPS!"
2. Why is it assumed that an action game can't have a narrative component?
Because they used the magical word "fighting game." Shenmue was not a fighting game. Deus Ex was not a fighting game. Tekken was a fighting game. This game resembles Tekken.
I don't recall the trailers for the movie focussing on the anti-capitalism message.
No, and that's a valid point. However, there is a long history of very bad licensed games, games that totally missed the point, and games that did both. Without evidence that the creators have any clue about how to translate the material they are working with into, say, an FPRTS, it is pretty safe to assume they will fudge it up.
Really, when releasing a licensed game, it is the responsibility of the development team to prove that the game isn't total junk. So far, with the design that has been shown they appear to be either totally clueless, or have been cornered into making a game that's the anthesis of the source material. Either way, anyone who likes the movie is going to be sorely disappointed.
As a previous poster mentioned, ignorance isn't an excuse for one's actions in the eyes of the law. If you are stupid enough to allow encrypted traffic to pass through a node under your control, with no idea of what exactly you are allowing to pass, expect to face the consequences.
I've seen the game, and it really does have some new and unique mechanics.
For example, you start the game with a full Nihilism bar. Your bar drains by observing the pointlessness of the game and the honor of futile struggle. Once the Nihilism bar is fully empty, you become the dreaded Uberman. Your character no longer cares if he takes damage or not, and becomes highly motivated by his sheer superiority.
You win the game because your opponent secretly wants you to win the game. However, this victory can be countered by the Dread Scourge of Christianity (which you can learn from the local moneylender), which will cause your opponent to simply want everyone to lose.
There are other great moves in the game. There's the dreaded cafe attack, which will cause all of the other characters to beat up on the one with the most popularity. There's the dreaded Nirvana attack, which burns an infinite loop into the eprom of the PS2. There's the dreaded condemned to death move, which can be inflicted upon your own character and which will cause him to actually care about living. Come to think of it, there are quite a few moves that can be done against yourself, and a lot of dread. There's also lots of shouting in German. I'm not sure why it is in German, as Fight Club was made in Los Angeles, but there it is.
The manual is mostly written in redundant, repetitive phrases that repeat but enjoin more truth in seeking without soaring into the void of generality which deprives all thinking of death... A radical thinking frozen in time that turns to what is actual while first insisting bluntly on establishing the actual truth which today gives us a measure and a stand against the confusion of opinions and reckonings. There is also a move list, and a cute comic written by Penny Arcade.
Overall the game is a vacuous, empty hole of truth, an infinite pit of depth. Should you buy this game? Eh.
Look at those muscles on... "Jack". The form is excellent on "Jack's" slide side-kick. Well, rack up one more to clueless licensing.
Personally, I find the most ironic thing being that the point of the fight scenes in the movie were about overcoming the vacuous isolationism felt by modern man in a society without real connections. However, the game takes those incidents and creates a vacuous, isolationist single-player experience. They don't even have a simulated crowd. Personally I feel Pit Fighter did a better job of capturing the gritty comeradery of the movie, and had the benefit of being a 3 player game in a public location generally no less primal than the basement of a bar.
Really, if they were to do Fight Club as a videogame, they need to play to the strengths of the medium. The game should be a Massively Multiplayer Social experiment, with players fighting together online over a cheaply licensed engine. Then they start getting assignments. They might be directed to meet up with other people in their area to form a chapter, or upload files to an errant FTP server that "someone" left unlocked. They might start e-mailing someone at a company trying to get working passwords from them. Eventually, of course, a clever website defacement handled by the smoke and mirrors of an IP redirect on the effected system would "prove" that they aren't just playing a game, and that they "are" going to get into trouble. Anyone who stays past this point thereby agrees to the Project Mayhem that they will be participating in. That's not to say that this "game" should be done, any more than any other Fight Club game should be made. Discretion is the better part of design. Oh well, perhaps the designers aren't talking because they're hiding something far more... Interesting.
Everyone is entitled to half of their films being well-intentioned failures... that shouldn't tarnish a reputation too much. Ang Lee is floating on the upper half of that equation, and is successful overall. The Wachowskis are two and two. Personally I feel Revolutions received a lot of the venom that should have been directed towards Reloaded. Forcing Keanu to act without his eyes was a stroke of brilliance, and really helped his performance.
I once suggested during an intership that they quote errors, or at least reduce the number of significant figures from 9 to 1 or 2...
Wonderful! Another person in the fight to re-acquaint professionals with the concept of significant figures! If I have to sit through another presentation showing how such and such a program will save the company thirteen million, one hundred seventy-four thousand, eight hundred twenty-five dollars and eighteen point two cents over the span of twenty years, I'm going to kill fifteen point eight co-workers, plus or minus two.
Personally, I feel that the state of the economy is due to the combination of the policies of the sitting president and the president that came before them. For example, Clinton fed the bubble despite a long cautionary history about preventing an economy from expanding too quickly. However, a sitting president is most definitely responsible for the federal deficit that is racked up during their administration, as they have direct control over such policies.
"The pop-up is opened by ActiveX controls that are instantiated from a Web site."
But ActiveX requires the user by default to approve the running of code. Many users will refuse out of fear, and many more will simply be turned off. Weatherunderground.com may love their pop-ups, but they don't want to lose their users who may think they are being attacked.
Likewise, saying that ActiveX can't initiate a pop-up is the same as saying that ActiveX can't open a new window. If I'm not mistaken, Windows Update relies upon this functionality.
Personally, my feeling is that the mandate that Microsoft employees must use Microsoft software has gotten more than a few to realize just how annoying it can be. Now contractors that go home and use Mozilla or Opera at night have to deal with this somewhat dated browser during the day. It's either fix it or live with it. They're fixing it. Good for them: it's about bloody time.
Right, but nobody at the company remembers him or has any record of him, so that can't be taken as evidence. Google searches yield nothing, and Moby has never heard of him. For a computer consultant, he keeps a very low profile.
While game concepts can't be patented, games can be copyrighted. Think "K.C. Munchkin." Overly derivitave games can and will be shot down in court. But does Gallager have a case? Grand Theft Auto, a sprite-based top-down shooter, looked like most of the other games out there at the time. The artistic style was nice, but it was a straight rip of any number of 16 bit racing games. The "plot" was a laughable joke, mostly "answer phone, assassinate somebody, answer phone, steal a car." Games about crime had been done before, though none made the same cultural splash. Really, the thing that would make or break this case is if the unique mechanic of car jacking was in Gallager's game... but as nobody seems to have seen it, we simply won't know until it goes before a judge.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are looking to sell expensive boxes, don't forget businesses. Build sharp, top-of-the-line boxes into shiny piano-black cases, then offer to setup their office network if they buy 3 or more of the things. Want 802.11g wireless and a 5 year warranty on that? Insurance against fire, flood, acts of god? I can keep that printer of yours topped off for just $50 a month. Know moore's law? For $100 per month I'll keep your system up-to-date (every 1.5 years).
There are a lot of niches to be filled while working with businesses. They're focused upon doing something other than computing, and could really care less about what WEP encryption is. Outsourcing that to someone else makes a lot of sense, and being the guys who sold them the hardware is a good way to get into their offices... and vice versa.
To expand upon the poster above, bind your cords. If you Zip-tie all your power cords together, all of your RCA cables, etc, until you have little discrete functionality units (I am Jack's VCR Inputs), you can eliminate a lot of clutter. Zip-tie those down to your rack / display unit, and they hardly count as clutter at all. Label all of your cords... It takes longer now, but it will save you lots of probing later, when you are less likely to be worrying about making a mess.
Lots of little special-use attachments? Keep them in a box separate from everything else, so that those NegCons don't clutter up your regular area. Lots of controllers? Wind them up and put them away.
Here it is, the ASCII Grip(e).
j pg
A new one to me, all in Japanese.
a NES one http://blake.prohosting.com/coleco/nes/einhander.
DDR is *all* about acceleration.
:)
P.S. 10 feet.
It was actually released by ASCII, as a successor to the somewhat more successful SNES single-hand controller. Both were terrible to use.
The controllers were just overloaded with buttons. You had a D-Pad in the center, 4 buttons surrounding it, 2 on the underside, and a pad for L1R1L2R2SelectStart thrown in below. It was impossible to use the D-pad and any of the buttons at the same time except for the underside two because you were only using one digit, and even then you were busy using those fingers underneath to hold the controller. Anything involving action or timing was impossible to do. Most RPG's were more enjoyable with a traditional controller, but for those without that luxury it must have been nice.
I actually gave mine to a colleague with one arm. He was happy to get it, but he recognized the limitations. If you really want to make a controller for disabled people, use the feet. It would be rather easy to handle forward / back / left / right with your feet, and two analog sticks could be used concurrently. Mount 4 thumb buttons on the end of a cylinder and L1 R1 L2 R2 on the length, with a hand strap to hold it all together, and you're good to go. The feet are vastly underutilized in gaming, relegated to simple acceleration / deceleration, but they are capable of far more than that.
Nintendo had a controller at one point where the joystick was moved with the mouth, sucking counted as an A, and blowing as a B. Because today's controllers were built to the full capacity of both hands, it is somewhat futile to attempt to condense that down without looking to other input sources.
You've got the appendages. Use them.
I was attempting to post a comment with a large number of the current speech restrictions in the US, to counteract this silly notion that campaign finance reform is a slippery slope to Fascism. Not that I would put that past the current administration or most any congress, but the slippery slope idea is a little absurd.
Of course it was modded "troll," because nobody followed my advice.
Technically, Neo didn't start the revolution from the outside... He didn't start any revolution. To most people in the film, he was just a guy with nifty powers, who didn't show up for the final act. Seeing as how he died before he could tell anyone what he was doing, they probably thought he was full of hot air. Maybe Morpheous' prophecy of the joining of humans and machines will convince people that Neo is responsible. Maybe not.
Personally, I wanted to watch the machines destroy the giant matrix server in order to get rid of Neo, with Neo flipping through subsystems trying to avoid the path of destruction. Of course, I also wanted the producers to ignore the whole flying at the end of the first movie thing, claiming metaphoric license, and I wanted the second movie to, you know, advance the plot.
I guess like the unofficial Star Wars prequels, a fan's work is never done.
Sound farfetched? It isn't. Once you've made a crack in the first amendment (Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech...), it's easier to use crowbars to widen it than it was to make the crack in the first place...
This message is not spam. I just want to sell you secret Dow Chemical documents showing how to make nuclear weapons from FIRE! Our documents can even raise the dead. But I can't tell you thanks to our F*#k F*#kity F*#kpoo president, who is a gay homosexual. Therefore, we should all revolt, smashing the McDonalds store windows and killing all passers-by. The jurors will be properly informed that they can judge the law as well as the accused, and we can all go home to write our child pornography
If you think this post is a troll, read it with a lawyer.
Voter apathy in many states, at least in the presidential election, can be directly attributed to the electorial college. In California during the last election, for example, I saw not a SINGLE campaign ad by a presidential candidate. Nader pressed a lot more flesh in the state, but without posters, radio ads, etc, what is the point? That the state was going to Gore was a foregone conclusion... one more vote doesn't actually count for anything.
Get rid of the electorial college, re-engage the population on the most important voting day of the year, and then replace the hanging chads. What's the point of a great front-end if the system is still broken?
Interestingly enough, with the ever-expanding star wars featurelist, it could someday achieve that beautiful glory of the original design doc.
With staying power and adequate funding, who knows how far it could go. If Episode 3 doesn't incinerate the heart of the series that Episode 1 ripped out and Episode 2 stomped on, this MMPORPG could be in development for many, many years.
linky
He's also being too hard on Namco and Nintendo. Racing Evolution was no terrible game, it was just "different." In a series known for being identical to the way it flagshipped the PS1, it was time for a risk. They took the risk, they alienated some fans, and now they are in a much better position in the market. Would he have preferred another Ridge Racer 5? It was a failure, true, but a noble one.
Likewise, saying Nintendo's head is buried in the sand ignores the fact that nintendo has testmarketed an online adapter, the Bulky Drive. Japan doesn't have very high broadband penetration. If the decision were based on Japan alone, there just isn't enough households for all of the extra work required in porting games to online multiplayer. The X-Box online is a no-brainier, and the PS2 has to keep up, but the 'Cube? Would Mario Party be better if 10% of the 10% of households with broadband decided to play online? Except to the extremely hardcore, not releasing an online adapter shouldn't count as a blunder. The whole N64 cartridge thing... That was a blunder. No Mario Kart Online yet? Don't be foolish.
Honestly, that was better than "A Boy and His Blob." At least you could see the hole in E.T. "A Boy and His Blob" consisted of walking around, throwing unmarked colored jellybeans at your blob. Eventually you would map out what every one did. From then on, you had to walk up to every wall, floor, ceiling and other surface in the game, feed the blob the appropriate jellybean, walk through blindly, and see if you fell to your death. This task wasn't made any easier by the limited number of jellybeans... As if someone was going to cheat and use 3 ladders from "ketchup" instead of two.
In this case, "fall in hole, die, reset" wasn't just a mistake, it was the gameplay. The only merciful thing about the game was that it was one level long, and the second half of that level was a series of copout, easy training screens that should have come first. Why Nintendo Power hailed it as the second coming of your deity of choice is anyone's guess, but I'm guessing money.
You can get a lot more photos here, not all of them are renders. Notice also that the game in the windows is not being played, merely viewed. It could be a demo video being played, or a static screenshot, or (far more likely) the screen is a mockup and the consoles haven't reached the beta testers yet (they haven't). In case you haven't noticed, all screenshots get touched by photoshop before going out to the general public, just some more than others. Mocking up an interface that doesn't exist, and that hasn't gone out for refinement, is perfectly acceptable. The choice of Metroid Prime for the screenshot was a stupid one, but at least they have good taste in games.
We shouldn't put the Phantom on that list until 2004. I'm curious to see the size of the flameout.
I think the author is being a little hard on Duchovny. When have we ever seen him as animated as Michael Ironside? Lacking the subtle clues of minute physical gesture, generated characters in videogames need to put a lot of variation in tone and pacing. Duchnovy traditionally relies upon eye and minor head movements. That's not to say he isn't a great actor, but he's far too subtle and visual to be a great voice actor. He has less intonation than Ben Stein. Thinking that would translate well to an audio-only role is Ubi Soft's fault.
1. What genre of game *would* be more suitable for adapting Fight Club?
MMPORPG? Just because there is no suitable genre for a movie to game transition doesn't mean you randomly pick one. "Hey Jim, all the kids love this new 'Bowling for Columbine' movie." "That's great Bob, let's make an FPS!"
2. Why is it assumed that an action game can't have a narrative component?
Because they used the magical word "fighting game." Shenmue was not a fighting game. Deus Ex was not a fighting game. Tekken was a fighting game. This game resembles Tekken.
I don't recall the trailers for the movie focussing on the anti-capitalism message.
No, and that's a valid point. However, there is a long history of very bad licensed games, games that totally missed the point, and games that did both. Without evidence that the creators have any clue about how to translate the material they are working with into, say, an FPRTS, it is pretty safe to assume they will fudge it up.
Really, when releasing a licensed game, it is the responsibility of the development team to prove that the game isn't total junk. So far, with the design that has been shown they appear to be either totally clueless, or have been cornered into making a game that's the anthesis of the source material. Either way, anyone who likes the movie is going to be sorely disappointed.
As a previous poster mentioned, ignorance isn't an excuse for one's actions in the eyes of the law. If you are stupid enough to allow encrypted traffic to pass through a node under your control, with no idea of what exactly you are allowing to pass, expect to face the consequences.
My ISP might have something to say about that...
I've seen the game, and it really does have some new and unique mechanics.
For example, you start the game with a full Nihilism bar. Your bar drains by observing the pointlessness of the game and the honor of futile struggle. Once the Nihilism bar is fully empty, you become the dreaded Uberman. Your character no longer cares if he takes damage or not, and becomes highly motivated by his sheer superiority.
You win the game because your opponent secretly wants you to win the game. However, this victory can be countered by the Dread Scourge of Christianity (which you can learn from the local moneylender), which will cause your opponent to simply want everyone to lose.
There are other great moves in the game. There's the dreaded cafe attack, which will cause all of the other characters to beat up on the one with the most popularity. There's the dreaded Nirvana attack, which burns an infinite loop into the eprom of the PS2. There's the dreaded condemned to death move, which can be inflicted upon your own character and which will cause him to actually care about living. Come to think of it, there are quite a few moves that can be done against yourself, and a lot of dread. There's also lots of shouting in German. I'm not sure why it is in German, as Fight Club was made in Los Angeles, but there it is.
The manual is mostly written in redundant, repetitive phrases that repeat but enjoin more truth in seeking without soaring into the void of generality which deprives all thinking of death... A radical thinking frozen in time that turns to what is actual while first insisting bluntly on establishing the actual truth which today gives us a measure and a stand against the confusion of opinions and reckonings. There is also a move list, and a cute comic written by Penny Arcade.
Overall the game is a vacuous, empty hole of truth, an infinite pit of depth. Should you buy this game? Eh.
That was the comparison I was looking for. Majestic.
Look at those muscles on... "Jack". The form is excellent on "Jack's" slide side-kick. Well, rack up one more to clueless licensing.
Personally, I find the most ironic thing being that the point of the fight scenes in the movie were about overcoming the vacuous isolationism felt by modern man in a society without real connections. However, the game takes those incidents and creates a vacuous, isolationist single-player experience. They don't even have a simulated crowd. Personally I feel Pit Fighter did a better job of capturing the gritty comeradery of the movie, and had the benefit of being a 3 player game in a public location generally no less primal than the basement of a bar.
Really, if they were to do Fight Club as a videogame, they need to play to the strengths of the medium. The game should be a Massively Multiplayer Social experiment, with players fighting together online over a cheaply licensed engine. Then they start getting assignments. They might be directed to meet up with other people in their area to form a chapter, or upload files to an errant FTP server that "someone" left unlocked. They might start e-mailing someone at a company trying to get working passwords from them. Eventually, of course, a clever website defacement handled by the smoke and mirrors of an IP redirect on the effected system would "prove" that they aren't just playing a game, and that they "are" going to get into trouble. Anyone who stays past this point thereby agrees to the Project Mayhem that they will be participating in.
That's not to say that this "game" should be done, any more than any other Fight Club game should be made. Discretion is the better part of design. Oh well, perhaps the designers aren't talking because they're hiding something far more... Interesting.
It wasn't the first time that a legendary asian filmmaker has made a dud. In fact, it's not ang lee's first dud either.
Everyone is entitled to half of their films being well-intentioned failures... that shouldn't tarnish a reputation too much. Ang Lee is floating on the upper half of that equation, and is successful overall. The Wachowskis are two and two. Personally I feel Revolutions received a lot of the venom that should have been directed towards Reloaded. Forcing Keanu to act without his eyes was a stroke of brilliance, and really helped his performance.
I once suggested during an intership that they quote errors, or at least reduce the number of significant figures from 9 to 1 or 2...
Wonderful! Another person in the fight to re-acquaint professionals with the concept of significant figures! If I have to sit through another presentation showing how such and such a program will save the company thirteen million, one hundred seventy-four thousand, eight hundred twenty-five dollars and eighteen point two cents over the span of twenty years, I'm going to kill fifteen point eight co-workers, plus or minus two.
If I remember correctly, presidents in the U.S. are elected by the people.
Interesting theory. I guess that depends on your definition of "people."
Personally, I feel that the state of the economy is due to the combination of the policies of the sitting president and the president that came before them. For example, Clinton fed the bubble despite a long cautionary history about preventing an economy from expanding too quickly. However, a sitting president is most definitely responsible for the federal deficit that is racked up during their administration, as they have direct control over such policies.
"The pop-up is opened by ActiveX controls that are instantiated from a Web site."
But ActiveX requires the user by default to approve the running of code. Many users will refuse out of fear, and many more will simply be turned off. Weatherunderground.com may love their pop-ups, but they don't want to lose their users who may think they are being attacked.
Likewise, saying that ActiveX can't initiate a pop-up is the same as saying that ActiveX can't open a new window. If I'm not mistaken, Windows Update relies upon this functionality.
Personally, my feeling is that the mandate that Microsoft employees must use Microsoft software has gotten more than a few to realize just how annoying it can be. Now contractors that go home and use Mozilla or Opera at night have to deal with this somewhat dated browser during the day. It's either fix it or live with it. They're fixing it. Good for them: it's about bloody time.
Right, but nobody at the company remembers him or has any record of him, so that can't be taken as evidence. Google searches yield nothing, and Moby has never heard of him. For a computer consultant, he keeps a very low profile.
While game concepts can't be patented, games can be copyrighted. Think "K.C. Munchkin." Overly derivitave games can and will be shot down in court. But does Gallager have a case? Grand Theft Auto, a sprite-based top-down shooter, looked like most of the other games out there at the time. The artistic style was nice, but it was a straight rip of any number of 16 bit racing games. The "plot" was a laughable joke, mostly "answer phone, assassinate somebody, answer phone, steal a car." Games about crime had been done before, though none made the same cultural splash. Really, the thing that would make or break this case is if the unique mechanic of car jacking was in Gallager's game... but as nobody seems to have seen it, we simply won't know until it goes before a judge.