The point of ANY high def drive is moot. Seriously. How long is it going to take for enough people to upgrade to a high definition set that could take advantage of (and justify) the drive's capabilities?
You're kidding right? The point of these is not "HDTV", though it will be nice for HDTV. The point is that you can throw 50-100GB on a single disc. This in turn means large, detailed textures, hi-poly models, audio, video, and anything else they want to throw on the disc.
DVDs just don't cut it. They never really did. Right now I'm playing FFXI and, on the PS2, it takes about 16GB. And the texture and model quality isn't even all that great. When we start getting into next-gen platforms which can handle lots more data, 50-100GB will be barely enough.
They made Myst, which is something. A lot of people even really liked it, which is something else. But they're not, say, Nintendo.
influential
What did they influence? It's not like they came up with a genre... adventures have been around since Zork, and point-and-click ones had been around since Sierra and Lucasfilm Games (if not before). The fact they made a point-and-click adventure with prerendered graphics and a storyline was nothing new. Even the fact it was good was nothing new. But it did make it worth playing. It's not like new genres have sprung up because of them.
Unlike, say, Nintendo. (And before you think I'm just a Nintendo fanboy, go look at my posts.)
long-running
Since when? 1995? You realize video games have been around since like the 50s? That today's "senior" gamehouses have been around since the 80s?
not worthy for the front page?
Myst is a nice little series of puzzle games with neat graphics and a story to go along. But Cyan's been dying forever (obvious when they couldn't deliver on Uru). Even the story's "most popular game series evar" hyperbole even sounds silly.
In short, this is a tiny footnote in gaming history, and hopefully the adventure genre can recover now.
Except it Nintendo doesn't really use lame "leaks" they go straight for your balls. Sony and MS use all the hype and obfuscation and viral marketing and leaks. Nintendo just walks softly and carries a big stick when they want to.
I can't think of any Nintendo leaks off the top of my head, but... don't imply they don't use hype, obfuscation, or "viral marketing". What do you think E3 was? The Revolution so far as we know is: A black box. It has some blue light or something. It will play games. It will play old games. It has some new funkotastic controller.
How many rumors, how much hype, how much viral marketing has there been just about the controller? That's all the Revolution is at this point: hype. Vapor. Speculation. It reminds me of this comic about another vaporous console.
Of course, I don't think it will end up vapor: this is Nintendo! But I'm not entirely convinced even Nintendo knows what they're doing, yet.
Do not discard them because they aren't targetted to you. I don't understand it, but my niece and all of her friends want Nintendogs this year. And Advance Wars... My cousin has loved the series since inception.
I am not; but they are not big system sellers; certainly they are not opponent killers. I know a kid who regularly plays my GBA for hours on end, and has done so for a number of years, but has only ever played Advance Wars.
Just because the game isn't oGMo friendly, doesn't mean they're lousy games. People buy them because they want them.
Being a good game and being a AAA system-seller are two very different things. These are very likely good games. I buy "good games" all the time, even if I'm not a particular fan or don't really have the time to play a lot of them (GTA, Gran Turismo 4, etc.). I even collect good games I don't like, because they're good games, and someone might want to play them.
Comparing Twisted Metal and Wipeout to Mario Kart isn't even fair. I love all three, but Twisted Metal is not Mario Kart. They are very different experiences, and each is fulfilling in it's own way.
Twisted Metal provides the battle arena experience; Wipeout Pure provides the racing experience. Both do so with what is, IMO, far superiority to what Mario Kart provides. (Note, I have not played Double Dash, only the GBA, SNES, and N64 variants.) TM2 provides larger and more arenas, more weapons, and simply more fast-paced fun. Mario Kart Advance, for instance, provides 4 fairly small arenas; these get boring quickly. We will have to wait to see what DS provides. Wipeout Pure provides fast-paced "battle"-style racing with tons of arenas, tons of characters and ships to unlock, and new tracks for download. We already know the DS isn't capable of matching the visuals; we will have to wait and see if it's able to deliver comparable gameplay.
I honestly hope it does; I enjoyed Super Mario Kart, but I think the series has only gone downhill from there. There should be far more tracks and lots of diverse battle arenas, especially today when you have all that storage available.
However, the problem with your analysis is this: the PSP is not in direct competition with the Nintendo DS. The PSP is selling the "adult" games... the Twisted Metals, the Wipeouts, and the (coming soon) GTAs. The DS, however is focusing on something entirely different; it is trying to attract a new crowd of gamers... types like the girlfriends, the less "hardcore" gamers, or the extremely casual gamer.
I think this is a rationalization. Nintendo hasn't been delivering in general, and they didn't deliver a viable competitor to the PSP. I don't really think Nintendo knows what it's doing. "Not just one screen... TWO! And one's a touchscreen!" This is nice. There have been some nifty things you can do with it. But it's a bit driftless.
While the N64 was, overall, dismal, Nintendo managed to define 3D platforming and adventuring with Mario64 and Zelda64. They managed to define 16-bit gaming on the SNES, and 8-bit on the NES. They even defined what portable gaming has been for the past decade and a half. But they've also had some stinkers; they haven't managed to do anything new with the Cube or trend-setting with the DS, despite promising to do so with funky controllers and touch screens.
The biggest problem is, they haven't delivered a lot of games. Where are the loads of Nintendo games I enjoyed when SNES was king? Nintendo! What are you doing?
As for the DS trying to attract the "casual" gamer, don't count on it. It's not exactly the sort of thing people besides the hardcore gamer geek are going to be interested in. This doesn't mean it's bad. But it's not trying to pander to any casual market. The PSP is sleek and sexy, and something the casual
The scientific process needs, at its fundamental level, the following three things:
Which is what I stated.
What you are talking about is empirical science. Without Mathematics and fundamental understanding, the science you talk about is all that would ever be understood. Fortunately, empirical science is no longer the only scientific understanding of the universe.
Mathematics is empirical. Do you think someone just decided to make it up because it seemed like a good idea? From simple arithmetic to the most advanced proofs, it's all based on someone seeing how things work and labelling them ("I have two. I get two more. I have four.") and then proving things based off those fundamentals.
With math I can calculate a lot of things; it will never tell me why. The empirical constants and observed principles of the universe are just as fundamental to math as to anything else. Why is "two"? Why does addition work? You and I can conceive of systems where the rules for these are different; therefore they are not necessarily so, they simply happen to be for us. We don't even know that math, physics, and other things we "know" work beyond our tiny corner of the universe!
What is this "fundamental understanding" you refer to? What funamental scientific information do you have that's not, at some level, based on empirical knowledge?
SONY comes out and markets the PSP as to compete with the DS.
Not really. It's more like Sony announced a next-gen handheld, and Nintendo tried to counter with the DS. Sony specifically doesn't consider the DS a competitor: nor should they. The GBA, perhaps, but more as a "reigning handheld champion vs the next generation" rather than on features.
The DS basically won with Nintendogs and Advance Wars.
This is laughable, and insulting to Nintendo. They will forever dominate this generation based on an advanced tamagotchi and a strategy game that just came out? I should hope they have something better in their lineup. People buy these games for one reason: it's the only thing they can get.
With Mario Kart on the horizon hope is lost.
I find this amusing. The PSP has had similar stuff since launch, like Wipeout Pure and Twisted Metal (both excellent games).
But wait, what's this? By selling UMDs they switched markets! PSP vs. video iPod, stay tuned.
Actually, selling it as a device that also plays movies and music was a goal from the beginning.
The NDS has some redeeming qualities and (hopefully) will have some system-sellers for it. Being a starry-eyed fanboy, however, just makes you, the DS, and Nintendo look silly. The PSP hasn't even seen its first Christmas yet; saying it has "lost" is laughable, especially with the numbers of people I saw playing it at PAX.
If I were you, I'd be rooting for both consoles. Competition in the market has always done the market good: more games, better games, cheaper games.
Science is not about finding the truth. It has nothing to do with the truth; people who look to it for truth misunderstand it. Science, and the scientific method, are based on one thing: reproducible effect. I do X, Y, and Z, and T results. If this can be confirmed, reproduced independently, you might have something scientifically useful.
Notice what this does not say: X, Y, and Z are "true"; Z is "true"; X, Y, and Z cause T. Nor does it state the meaning of X, Y, Z, or T. Nor does it say why, in the presence of X, Y, and Z, T occurs. These are irrelevant. The only thing science does, the only thing it is capable of, is one thing: testing if, in the presence of X, Y, and Z, we repeatedly get T. For most things, that's all that matters. This is the scientific method.
Thus it is that science is, quite literally, magic. Look over most fictional magic systems. We have things like "if we say this spell, this thing happens." "If we write these symbols, this thing happens." "If I visualize this thing in my mind, this thing happens." "If a mix a pinch of this and a hair of that, this thing happens." Because it's reproducible, it's useful. The mechanic does not matter: only reproducible effect matters. If waving ones hands and saying a phrase were to be followed consistently by a minor explosion, it would be just as scientific as mixing two chemicals to produce the same effect.
It doesn't matter why. Theories get revised consistently to fit the facts, to document reproducible effects. If phlostigen and ether were accurate and useful models, the fact they have been discarded for more useful models does not matter: science isn't about truth. It is about reproducible effects.
This is why not clinging to pet theories (yes, this includes everyone's favorite: natural evolution) is important: the theories do not matter. One should never fit facts to a theory. One should create a theory to fit the facts.
Holy crap, it's Langley! Man, I haven't seen you in ages. Hop on freenode and msg me sometime.
Re:Omegathon?
on
PAX05 Writeup
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Eh. The Omegathon was OK. I didn't really pay attention to it this year; after all, I didn't have a chance of winning, and I'd rather be spending my time playing games myself.
Last year the final round of Pong was very cool, suprising, and funny, because no one knew what to expect; this year it wasn't really a suprise that it'd be an old-school game, merely a question of what. To answer your question: Combat (Atari).
After watching the omeganauts suck at Karaoke Revolution (Tycho and Kara played a round first, and they were very good... almost all the omeganauts were very bad), I found it hard to care about any of the contenders.
Easy: Penny Arcade isn't just a webcomic. It's not just a fictional construct with an interesting plot. It's commentary on gaming and comnmunity by people who really know what they're talking about: and it's good.
Sluggy has sucked for awhile. I used to be a big sluggite: it just doesn't interest any longer, it has lost its flavor, its appeal. I read a lot of other comics too, both gaming and not gaming, and I find new ones all the time. Except for 8-bit theater, which has remained funny over a suprisingly long period of time, everything has had its ups and downs: especially sluggy. People lose interest in what they're doing, they don't know where to go next, they get sick of characters, they feel like changing the plot, or the style, and thus the comic changes.
Penny Arcade is like none of these things. Tycho and Gabe aren't going to lose interest in the industry, it's what they love. The comic isn't long-running and plot-based; they try new things all the time, but that doesn't change what it is: a look into the mind of two very talented gamers.
where's the Maya/3DS/LW/Softimage alternative? It doesn't exist (dont be a bone head and suggest Blender here, its like comaring a 79' VW to a Ferrai).
Maya is ported. So is a little thing called Houdini. But you probably never heard of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Final Fantasy X, or X-Men...
Also, to call Blender a '79 VW compared to any of the above is ignorant. No, it's not Houdini, but it will easily take on any of the modellers you mentioned, and there are some pretty nifty renderers available, too.
What Linux really lacks is the equivalent of Digital Performer. And no, rosegarden or any of the others don't even come close.:-(
I have a hard time understanding how Sony ever thought this was going to take off in the first place.
Why does Sony think I want to buy my movies twice?
Well, it's more a matter of what idiocy possessed them to think that we'd pay more to buy a second copy with limited viewability. Typical MBA stupidity.
OTOH, if I could pay $5 and get a UMD of a movie, I'd be there. Throw in the UMDs as a bonus extra when you buy the DVD Deluxe Edition. Think if I could pay $10 and get my favorite TV shows from this week on a UMD to watch on the bus. I'd do that.
If Sony businesspeople were smart, they'd be giving these things to customers left and right to get some saturation in the market. People start getting nifty little discs, they start wanting PSPs to play them, and before long they're used to getting UMDs...
Frustrations are mounting regarding the lackluster monetary outlook and poor game selection. From the article:
"The PS2 has traveled the spectrum of being hailed as the greatest piece of hardware since the introduction of the original PlayStation to being treated like a Goodwill store where developers drop off bare-bones ports and shoddy, old games. Since the release of the PS2 on October 26, 2001, to the time of this writing, there have been approximately 29 games released, most of which were released during the launch window. Around 20 or so of the games available are sports games or rushed sequels, which is about two-thirds of the entire PS2 library; the rest suffer from long load times and poor, aliased graphics. And if you work out the math with the number of games released in the first 8 months, it comes out to less than one PS2 game release per week--.90 games to be exact."
Clearly 1up.com, a Nintendo site, presents an unbiased and comparative view of the PSP. A console with 30 launch titles, most of which were very solid, is a great failure! And if we've only gotten 0.76 games per week since then, that's not enough to keep any real gamer satisfied. Any console that doesn't have a constant stream of titles since launch is doomed!
People have short memories. The DS had what at launch? The PS2 had what at launch? The Cube had what at launch? Remember the months after the PS2? Remember the year after the Cube? What about the stream of nothing but ports for the GBA?
Cripe, people, get a clue. The PSP has a lot going for it, and it has a lot of games in the pipe. Be patient and stop whining.
Hint: this isn't about you. No one cares about you. This is about Google, and why they chose Linux. They've grown from a few servers to a hugely successful do-no-evil public company. They made a big decision along the way to use Linux. This is what we're interested in.
Yes, except the goal of D3D in Linux under wine is to be as fast and compatible as possible, so your favorite games work.
Microsoft doesn't have such motivation. The only goal that makes business sense is to have enough OpenGL to write it down as a feature, but broken enough that it's not actually viable, to promote D3D.
I have an even better idea! Let's step back and look at this problem from a broader view. What are we trying to prevent here? Illegal activities! What is the primary thing that makes a person a criminal?
That's right: LAWS!
Yes, folks, we should outlaw laws that make activities illegal, because without them, there would be no crime!
I say we start by making politicians criminally liable for proposing any new law that might result in criminal activity...
There are similar ways to do it for XEmacs and other editors, all less practical and efficient than the VS implementation.
Less efficient? How? Either you've never seen the code and don't know what you're talking about, or you work for Microsoft (and you're already biased). In either case, you're asserting that Visual Studio has some magical property that it is impossible to match in another codebase. I suggest you rethink this assertion: even elisp code can be efficient, and you can write vim plugins in C.
Not being context sensitive is simply unacceptable for example. When you start using namespaces, many classes,... it's simply essential.
And the only one of the named methods (dynamic abbrevs) is context-insensitive. All the others are language-intelligent.
Hint #2: You can write plugins for VStudio too.
I'm happy to know that Visual Studio can finally do what emacs has done for 35 years.
Is "intellisense" the thing that gives you a dropdown of method names and similar? If so, there are multiple existing ways to do similar things in both (x)emacs and vim (although I'm not familiar with the procedure for doing it in the latter, so a vim master will have to chime in). There's dynamic abbrevs which work with almost everything and, while not context sensitive, are generally good enough unless you don't know and haven't typed the method. But it works in any mode, so if you're typing a letter to Grandma you can autocomplete from any other buffer.
Additionally there are things like lisp-symbol-complete, and cedet which is basically written to be "intellisense for emacs" among other things.
This is the power of a programmable editor. If there's a feature you want, you can add it. If there's a feature you want to change, you can modify it. If there's a misfeature, you can get rid of it.
I don't think a GUI platform can call itself complete until it's got an IDE that's worthy for programming.
I disagree... I'm not a fan of your monolithic IDEs at all. My GUI is an IDE:
ROX-Filer, which is highly customizable and integrated with the shell
XEmacs or vim as your preference goes, which are two highly advanced programmable editors
bash, zsh, csh, or your other favorite shell
autotools for building
These tools combine into an "IDE" that is my desktop. I have the best-in-class for every component. Beats a jack-of-all-trades IDE that lacks in any number of regards and takes huge resources.
Oh pfft. So someone comes out with a USB addon for the PS3 that let you plug in your PS2/PS1 memory cards. $10-15 tops. Then you don't need a PC or Mac at all.
Sony's not "forcing" customers to "jump through hoops"; as someone else said if you've got old save games, your old console doesn't stop working when you get a PS3.
Sony gives you 2 consoles of backward compatibility, a ton of new features, upgrades to a more standard form of memory storage with far greater capacity and a lower price, and all everyone does is whine whine whine because they can't plug in their 12-year-old memory card. Typical.
The thing is, this is part of the cycle. The console isn't suddenly dead when the next generation gets released. Past its prime, yes, but it's still got a ways to go. Most people were still playing NES games when the SNES was out, same with the N64, etc.
What I'm saying is that regardless of manufacturer, these things already have close to an 8-10-year lifecycle. Basically, Sony is playing up something that is fairly typical. Hype, yes, true, probably, big deal? Not quite as big as they'd like to make it---but a signficant advantage over the XBOX, which seems to have been in its death throes for awhile already.
(Nintendo has been doing worse for entirely Nintendo-related reasons, IMO. They need to start producing the same level of games they did in the SNES days. I think they realize this, too, and that's what they're aiming for with the Revolution. I'm not entirely sure they know how to do it yet, though.)
If you believe them when they say it will have a 10 year life cycle, you should probably get your head examined.
I believe if you weren't a Nintendo fanboy and looked at the lifespan on the PS1, you'd see it survived a decade. The PS2 has an easy 3 years left in it, which puts it close, and I wouldn't be suprised to see more.
Nintendo: 7/83 - 11/90
Super Nintendo: 11/90 - 6/96
Nintendo 64: 6/96 - 9/01
GameCube: 9/01 - 8/06 (guess based on current information)
As you can see, the lifespan of consoles is decreasing as they become more advanced.
Because clearly, there are no consoles besides Nintendo consoles. Don't get me wrong: I grew up on Nintendo and love them like anyone else. But this decline could also easily be attributed to Nintendo's production of fewer and fewer games, their focus on the Gameboy, or any number of factors. Look beyond Nintendo and we don't see a decline at all.
Now Sony has billed the Playstation3 as a 10-year device
The thing to realize about this is that it's nothing unusual for Sony. The PS1 was already 10 years (first shipped in 1994, still shipping millions in 2004). The PS2 was first shipped in 2000, and as they're pumping out games for it today with no end in sight, it'll probably be 2008-2010 before we see the last PSTwo out the door. Backward compatibility of the PS3 helps to encourage this, since even if someone doesn't have a PS1 or PS2, if they get a PS3, then they can still play those new PS2 games.
If the PS3 ships in 2006, I wouldn't be suprised still seeing it in 2016, but the PS4 will probably ship around 2011.
Unfortunately, it doesn't take old PS and PS2 memory cards (I found it annoying that you could save PS data onto a PS2 card, but this just really sucks).
Yes, because it's so hard to transfer files to a Memory Stick Duo. I might even be able to do that with a $10 USB interface. (And you've been able to transfer PS1/PS2 savegames for ages.)
Dance pads and other old PS2 periphels won't work on it (I guess I can laugh at my brother for buying a $300 DDR dance mat that won't work with a PS3).
Sure, because even though they already build a PS2->USB box for $13, building either a bluetooth-based box or just connecting your dance pad to the PS3 USB port will be impossible.
After all, it's clearly in the best interests of Sony and Konami/Bemani to alienate all those users. That's why they're ensuring backward compatibility in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
You're kidding right? The point of these is not "HDTV", though it will be nice for HDTV. The point is that you can throw 50-100GB on a single disc. This in turn means large, detailed textures, hi-poly models, audio, video, and anything else they want to throw on the disc.
DVDs just don't cut it. They never really did. Right now I'm playing FFXI and, on the PS2, it takes about 16GB. And the texture and model quality isn't even all that great. When we start getting into next-gen platforms which can handle lots more data, 50-100GB will be barely enough.
They made Myst, which is something. A lot of people even really liked it, which is something else. But they're not, say, Nintendo.
influentialWhat did they influence? It's not like they came up with a genre... adventures have been around since Zork, and point-and-click ones had been around since Sierra and Lucasfilm Games (if not before). The fact they made a point-and-click adventure with prerendered graphics and a storyline was nothing new. Even the fact it was good was nothing new. But it did make it worth playing. It's not like new genres have sprung up because of them.
Unlike, say, Nintendo. (And before you think I'm just a Nintendo fanboy, go look at my posts.)
long-runningSince when? 1995? You realize video games have been around since like the 50s? That today's "senior" gamehouses have been around since the 80s?
not worthy for the front page?Myst is a nice little series of puzzle games with neat graphics and a story to go along. But Cyan's been dying forever (obvious when they couldn't deliver on Uru). Even the story's "most popular game series evar" hyperbole even sounds silly.
In short, this is a tiny footnote in gaming history, and hopefully the adventure genre can recover now.
I can't think of any Nintendo leaks off the top of my head, but ... don't imply they don't use hype, obfuscation, or "viral marketing". What do you think E3 was? The Revolution so far as we know is: A black box. It has some blue light or something. It will play games. It will play old games. It has some new funkotastic controller.
How many rumors, how much hype, how much viral marketing has there been just about the controller? That's all the Revolution is at this point: hype. Vapor. Speculation. It reminds me of this comic about another vaporous console.
Of course, I don't think it will end up vapor: this is Nintendo! But I'm not entirely convinced even Nintendo knows what they're doing, yet.
I am not; but they are not big system sellers; certainly they are not opponent killers. I know a kid who regularly plays my GBA for hours on end, and has done so for a number of years, but has only ever played Advance Wars.
Being a good game and being a AAA system-seller are two very different things. These are very likely good games. I buy "good games" all the time, even if I'm not a particular fan or don't really have the time to play a lot of them (GTA, Gran Turismo 4, etc.). I even collect good games I don't like, because they're good games, and someone might want to play them.
Twisted Metal provides the battle arena experience; Wipeout Pure provides the racing experience. Both do so with what is, IMO, far superiority to what Mario Kart provides. (Note, I have not played Double Dash, only the GBA, SNES, and N64 variants.) TM2 provides larger and more arenas, more weapons, and simply more fast-paced fun. Mario Kart Advance, for instance, provides 4 fairly small arenas; these get boring quickly. We will have to wait to see what DS provides. Wipeout Pure provides fast-paced "battle"-style racing with tons of arenas, tons of characters and ships to unlock, and new tracks for download. We already know the DS isn't capable of matching the visuals; we will have to wait and see if it's able to deliver comparable gameplay.
I honestly hope it does; I enjoyed Super Mario Kart, but I think the series has only gone downhill from there. There should be far more tracks and lots of diverse battle arenas, especially today when you have all that storage available.
I think this is a rationalization. Nintendo hasn't been delivering in general, and they didn't deliver a viable competitor to the PSP. I don't really think Nintendo knows what it's doing. "Not just one screen... TWO! And one's a touchscreen!" This is nice. There have been some nifty things you can do with it. But it's a bit driftless.
While the N64 was, overall, dismal, Nintendo managed to define 3D platforming and adventuring with Mario64 and Zelda64. They managed to define 16-bit gaming on the SNES, and 8-bit on the NES. They even defined what portable gaming has been for the past decade and a half. But they've also had some stinkers; they haven't managed to do anything new with the Cube or trend-setting with the DS, despite promising to do so with funky controllers and touch screens.
The biggest problem is, they haven't delivered a lot of games. Where are the loads of Nintendo games I enjoyed when SNES was king? Nintendo! What are you doing?
As for the DS trying to attract the "casual" gamer, don't count on it. It's not exactly the sort of thing people besides the hardcore gamer geek are going to be interested in. This doesn't mean it's bad. But it's not trying to pander to any casual market. The PSP is sleek and sexy, and something the casual
Which is what I stated.
Mathematics is empirical. Do you think someone just decided to make it up because it seemed like a good idea? From simple arithmetic to the most advanced proofs, it's all based on someone seeing how things work and labelling them ("I have two. I get two more. I have four.") and then proving things based off those fundamentals.
With math I can calculate a lot of things; it will never tell me why. The empirical constants and observed principles of the universe are just as fundamental to math as to anything else. Why is "two"? Why does addition work? You and I can conceive of systems where the rules for these are different; therefore they are not necessarily so, they simply happen to be for us. We don't even know that math, physics, and other things we "know" work beyond our tiny corner of the universe!
What is this "fundamental understanding" you refer to? What funamental scientific information do you have that's not, at some level, based on empirical knowledge?
Not really. It's more like Sony announced a next-gen handheld, and Nintendo tried to counter with the DS. Sony specifically doesn't consider the DS a competitor: nor should they. The GBA, perhaps, but more as a "reigning handheld champion vs the next generation" rather than on features.
This is laughable, and insulting to Nintendo. They will forever dominate this generation based on an advanced tamagotchi and a strategy game that just came out? I should hope they have something better in their lineup. People buy these games for one reason: it's the only thing they can get.
I find this amusing. The PSP has had similar stuff since launch, like Wipeout Pure and Twisted Metal (both excellent games).
Actually, selling it as a device that also plays movies and music was a goal from the beginning.
The NDS has some redeeming qualities and (hopefully) will have some system-sellers for it. Being a starry-eyed fanboy, however, just makes you, the DS, and Nintendo look silly. The PSP hasn't even seen its first Christmas yet; saying it has "lost" is laughable, especially with the numbers of people I saw playing it at PAX.
If I were you, I'd be rooting for both consoles. Competition in the market has always done the market good: more games, better games, cheaper games.
Science is not about finding the truth. It has nothing to do with the truth; people who look to it for truth misunderstand it. Science, and the scientific method, are based on one thing: reproducible effect. I do X, Y, and Z, and T results. If this can be confirmed, reproduced independently, you might have something scientifically useful.
Notice what this does not say: X, Y, and Z are "true"; Z is "true"; X, Y, and Z cause T. Nor does it state the meaning of X, Y, Z, or T. Nor does it say why, in the presence of X, Y, and Z, T occurs. These are irrelevant. The only thing science does, the only thing it is capable of, is one thing: testing if, in the presence of X, Y, and Z, we repeatedly get T. For most things, that's all that matters. This is the scientific method.
Thus it is that science is, quite literally, magic. Look over most fictional magic systems. We have things like "if we say this spell, this thing happens." "If we write these symbols, this thing happens." "If I visualize this thing in my mind, this thing happens." "If a mix a pinch of this and a hair of that, this thing happens." Because it's reproducible, it's useful. The mechanic does not matter: only reproducible effect matters. If waving ones hands and saying a phrase were to be followed consistently by a minor explosion, it would be just as scientific as mixing two chemicals to produce the same effect.
It doesn't matter why. Theories get revised consistently to fit the facts, to document reproducible effects. If phlostigen and ether were accurate and useful models, the fact they have been discarded for more useful models does not matter: science isn't about truth. It is about reproducible effects.
This is why not clinging to pet theories (yes, this includes everyone's favorite: natural evolution) is important: the theories do not matter. One should never fit facts to a theory. One should create a theory to fit the facts.
This is what makes science useful.
Holy crap, it's Langley! Man, I haven't seen you in ages. Hop on freenode and msg me sometime.
Eh. The Omegathon was OK. I didn't really pay attention to it this year; after all, I didn't have a chance of winning, and I'd rather be spending my time playing games myself.
Last year the final round of Pong was very cool, suprising, and funny, because no one knew what to expect; this year it wasn't really a suprise that it'd be an old-school game, merely a question of what. To answer your question: Combat (Atari).
After watching the omeganauts suck at Karaoke Revolution (Tycho and Kara played a round first, and they were very good... almost all the omeganauts were very bad), I found it hard to care about any of the contenders.
Sluggy has sucked for awhile. I used to be a big sluggite: it just doesn't interest any longer, it has lost its flavor, its appeal. I read a lot of other comics too, both gaming and not gaming, and I find new ones all the time. Except for 8-bit theater, which has remained funny over a suprisingly long period of time, everything has had its ups and downs: especially sluggy. People lose interest in what they're doing, they don't know where to go next, they get sick of characters, they feel like changing the plot, or the style, and thus the comic changes.
Penny Arcade is like none of these things. Tycho and Gabe aren't going to lose interest in the industry, it's what they love. The comic isn't long-running and plot-based; they try new things all the time, but that doesn't change what it is: a look into the mind of two very talented gamers.
Maya is ported. So is a little thing called Houdini. But you probably never heard of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Final Fantasy X, or X-Men...
Also, to call Blender a '79 VW compared to any of the above is ignorant. No, it's not Houdini, but it will easily take on any of the modellers you mentioned, and there are some pretty nifty renderers available, too.
What Linux really lacks is the equivalent of Digital Performer. And no, rosegarden or any of the others don't even come close. :-(
OTOH, if I could pay $5 and get a UMD of a movie, I'd be there. Throw in the UMDs as a bonus extra when you buy the DVD Deluxe Edition. Think if I could pay $10 and get my favorite TV shows from this week on a UMD to watch on the bus. I'd do that.
If Sony businesspeople were smart, they'd be giving these things to customers left and right to get some saturation in the market. People start getting nifty little discs, they start wanting PSPs to play them, and before long they're used to getting UMDs...
Sounds like they just like to hype or hate whatever's trendy. The basic point still stands (though no one contests it anyway).
Clearly 1up.com, a Nintendo site, presents an unbiased and comparative view of the PSP. A console with 30 launch titles, most of which were very solid, is a great failure! And if we've only gotten 0.76 games per week since then, that's not enough to keep any real gamer satisfied. Any console that doesn't have a constant stream of titles since launch is doomed!
People have short memories. The DS had what at launch? The PS2 had what at launch? The Cube had what at launch? Remember the months after the PS2? Remember the year after the Cube? What about the stream of nothing but ports for the GBA?
Cripe, people, get a clue. The PSP has a lot going for it, and it has a lot of games in the pipe. Be patient and stop whining.
Who the hell are you?
Yes, except the goal of D3D in Linux under wine is to be as fast and compatible as possible, so your favorite games work.
Microsoft doesn't have such motivation. The only goal that makes business sense is to have enough OpenGL to write it down as a feature, but broken enough that it's not actually viable, to promote D3D.
I have an even better idea! Let's step back and look at this problem from a broader view. What are we trying to prevent here? Illegal activities! What is the primary thing that makes a person a criminal?
That's right: LAWS!
Yes, folks, we should outlaw laws that make activities illegal, because without them, there would be no crime!
I say we start by making politicians criminally liable for proposing any new law that might result in criminal activity...
Less efficient? How? Either you've never seen the code and don't know what you're talking about, or you work for Microsoft (and you're already biased). In either case, you're asserting that Visual Studio has some magical property that it is impossible to match in another codebase. I suggest you rethink this assertion: even elisp code can be efficient, and you can write vim plugins in C.
And the only one of the named methods (dynamic abbrevs) is context-insensitive. All the others are language-intelligent.
I'm happy to know that Visual Studio can finally do what emacs has done for 35 years.
Is "intellisense" the thing that gives you a dropdown of method names and similar? If so, there are multiple existing ways to do similar things in both (x)emacs and vim (although I'm not familiar with the procedure for doing it in the latter, so a vim master will have to chime in). There's dynamic abbrevs which work with almost everything and, while not context sensitive, are generally good enough unless you don't know and haven't typed the method. But it works in any mode, so if you're typing a letter to Grandma you can autocomplete from any other buffer.
Additionally there are things like lisp-symbol-complete, and cedet which is basically written to be "intellisense for emacs" among other things.
This is the power of a programmable editor. If there's a feature you want, you can add it. If there's a feature you want to change, you can modify it. If there's a misfeature, you can get rid of it.
I disagree... I'm not a fan of your monolithic IDEs at all. My GUI is an IDE:
These tools combine into an "IDE" that is my desktop. I have the best-in-class for every component. Beats a jack-of-all-trades IDE that lacks in any number of regards and takes huge resources.
Sony's not "forcing" customers to "jump through hoops"; as someone else said if you've got old save games, your old console doesn't stop working when you get a PS3.
Sony gives you 2 consoles of backward compatibility, a ton of new features, upgrades to a more standard form of memory storage with far greater capacity and a lower price, and all everyone does is whine whine whine because they can't plug in their 12-year-old memory card. Typical.
What I'm saying is that regardless of manufacturer, these things already have close to an 8-10-year lifecycle. Basically, Sony is playing up something that is fairly typical. Hype, yes, true, probably, big deal? Not quite as big as they'd like to make it---but a signficant advantage over the XBOX, which seems to have been in its death throes for awhile already.
(Nintendo has been doing worse for entirely Nintendo-related reasons, IMO. They need to start producing the same level of games they did in the SNES days. I think they realize this, too, and that's what they're aiming for with the Revolution. I'm not entirely sure they know how to do it yet, though.)
I believe if you weren't a Nintendo fanboy and looked at the lifespan on the PS1, you'd see it survived a decade. The PS2 has an easy 3 years left in it, which puts it close, and I wouldn't be suprised to see more.
Because clearly, there are no consoles besides Nintendo consoles. Don't get me wrong: I grew up on Nintendo and love them like anyone else. But this decline could also easily be attributed to Nintendo's production of fewer and fewer games, their focus on the Gameboy, or any number of factors. Look beyond Nintendo and we don't see a decline at all.
The thing to realize about this is that it's nothing unusual for Sony. The PS1 was already 10 years (first shipped in 1994, still shipping millions in 2004). The PS2 was first shipped in 2000, and as they're pumping out games for it today with no end in sight, it'll probably be 2008-2010 before we see the last PSTwo out the door. Backward compatibility of the PS3 helps to encourage this, since even if someone doesn't have a PS1 or PS2, if they get a PS3, then they can still play those new PS2 games.
If the PS3 ships in 2006, I wouldn't be suprised still seeing it in 2016, but the PS4 will probably ship around 2011.
Yes, because it's so hard to transfer files to a Memory Stick Duo. I might even be able to do that with a $10 USB interface. (And you've been able to transfer PS1/PS2 savegames for ages.)
Sure, because even though they already build a PS2->USB box for $13, building either a bluetooth-based box or just connecting your dance pad to the PS3 USB port will be impossible. After all, it's clearly in the best interests of Sony and Konami/Bemani to alienate all those users. That's why they're ensuring backward compatibility in the first place.
Sure, dumbass.