"If you're the sort of person that plays these games for the gameplay and not the story, then FF8 doesn't have a whole lot to offer."
No, I'm afraid you got that backwards. VII, VIII and X all practically required you to take a college course before you could understand the mechanics they used for character development (whether they called it "materia," "guardian forces/draw" or "sphere grid"). Hell, I even had to start VIII over the first time I played it because I screwed up GF development so badly. IX was good because the focus was on the game. Not the graphics, not the music, not some God-awful mechanic that sounds like something out of a certain Hsu and Chan strip, but on the game and the story, where it belonged. Rarely did you have to wander around to "level up" (or "draw spells" or whatever Square wants to call it) and buying new weapons and armor was as easy as walking into the damned store and plunking down some gil.
VIII focused so much on a/v and mechanics that the characters are sickeningly two-dimensional. I could never confuse Squall with a real person. "I have to go kill this sorceress person. Why? Oh, I dunno... just because, I guess... Leave me alone, I'm busy being angsty here!" At least the player actually wanted to kill Sephiroth, but even he isn't anywhere near the character that Kefka was.
I used to love Final Fantasy. VI was my favorite before IX. I got a PlayStation for the sole reason of playing Final Fantasy games. VII was a little bit of a let-down, but that may have been because I played Zelda: OoT first. VIII was even more of a let down. When I played IX, I shed a tear of joy over the true beauty that was the game and basked in the way things used to be. It gave me the sense of awe and woder that I hadn't had with one of these games since VI. And then I realized that IX is the way it is because it is intended to be the last, fianl "hurrah!" for the way things used to be. I look at X and all I see is VIII. And I know better than to think XI is going to be anything like the old games because you can't have an epic story in an MMORPG. I have decided that, save re-releases of older games, Final Fantasy is dead to me (and subsequently I have no reason to purchase a PlayStation 2). I've moved on.
And while I've only recently started playing it, I'm even finding myself let down by Chrono Cross. I remember a game that had a good story but made sure not to take itself too seriously, with a great deal of expression done with the simple (by today's standards) 2D sprites, and a fight system that focused more on the fighting than on either flashy backgrounds or level-up mechanics. A bread-and-butter RPG with a great story and deep characters. Instead, I'm given a game with little expression through the characters (to be expected when half the time they're about 1" tall on the screen and you can almost never make out their faces) (but hell, they could at least have shown facial expressions in the dialog boxes instead of "?" and "!", but I guess they never played Lunar...), fight sequences that are a big step back to Final Fantasy (I'd rather not have to go to a special fight scene sequence than to have "super-nifty 3D grpahics," and whatever happened to the genuinely-nifty area-effect techs?), an "element" system that looks like it was hastily grafted from FF VII, and too many characters for the player to have any sort of real relationship with.
In general, any RPG that requires you to take several hours of your time to learn how to play the game isn't worth my money, because spending so much focus on the game mechanics means that less focus is spent on the actual story.
"It lacked the guts and ambition to break the mold like FF8 did."
VIII didn't break any molds, it was a continuation of the direction they were going from VII. It started with IV in a small and subtle way, but got real big real fast. IX actually broke the mold by being nostalgic and reaching all the way back to V, but they went right back to where they were with X, and I doubt they will ever leave their current line of travel again. Square is done innovating here, move along.
"That just amazes me that there are that many stupid people out there, that actually purchase products from UCE."
Who says they did? His business was spam and his customers were businesses looking to advertise their products. The money his merchant customers pay him really isn't much of an indiciation of how successful the advertising actually was.
"It costs money to be processed. And it's a waste of trees."
Paper can be recycled and trees grow back. The fossil fuel burned to produce the electricity used to transmit that spam does neither, unless you're talking about geologic time frames.
"Convienient: The solution that accompleshes the requirements with the least ammount of effort."
I didn't realize what I was saying was so difficult to understand.
A meter cannot fit into a notebook. It is not a convenient unit of measure.
A centimeter falls through small holes in pockets. It is not a convenient unit of measure.
Measurements in whole grams can be thrown off signifigant figures by slight air currents. It is not a convenient unit of measure.
Global confusion like "kilograms of force" can make communication of concepts of mass or force difficult with other people, therefore it is not as convenient as other alternatives.
The word "kilogram" suggests that its defintion is derived from that of the gram, when the truth is actually the other way around. This misunderstanding is also not always convenient.
"or those that don't understand that mass can be accuratly measured with a spring scale if the gravitational pull is known."
Does your grocer know how to measure localized gravitational potential? Can the scales even be corrected? Even for known discrepancies like latitude?
"When measuring astrophysical distances, scientists nearly always use parsecs."
First off, I wasn't talking about "what is commonly used" here or there, I was talking about SI. I said "SI" in the original post. Several times in fact.
Secondly, parsecs aren't SI. Parsecs aren't even metric.
"And if you had any knowledge of physics, you would know about the CGS system of unit,"
The only SI part of the CGS system, however, is the S.
"which is used by many people because it treats electric charge in a better way than SI does."
But the EMU Coulomb is the one your government has made law. Whatever your thoughts on the matter, the Coulomb and all the other SI units are "the standard" that everybody seems to enjoy talking about in glowing terms.
Re:No, End NASA-controlled Manned Space Flight.
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
"Ever heard of the X-Prize?"
Yes, I've heard quite a lot of talk about the X-Prize. That was kind of my point.
"Currently, you have Armadillo(...), Scaled Composites(...), XCor(...),
"Test vehicles" this, "first stage" that... Were they full-scale vehicles? Could somebody have ridden in the vehicle right now? Has there been anything more than a thesis paper, flashy computer graphics and a few thousand dollars spent at the local model rocketry store?
China has sent up empty Shenzhou capsules that, for all intents and purposes, could have carried a taikonaut into space. Ignoring the differences between "low earth orbit" and "sub-orbital parabola," has anybody in the private sector anywhere done anything remotely similar?
"NASA has not developed a successful new man-rated launch system in the last 35 years,"
And who has? Are you referring to the Soyu^H^H^Hhenzhou, perhaps?
"Only a Biologist would be so anal as to declare such a assinine statemate."
That's a peculiar prejudice. I have nothing to do with biology.
"Most scientists , and biologists that have a head above their sholders, use what ever is most convienint."
Isn't that exactly what people complained about when the Mars probe was lost? That LockMart was using units that were "convenient" instead of switching to all-SI and forcing their private-sector customers to follow suit?
"Absolutely, no si unit is "anoying"."
Oh, I can think of quite a few. For example, I find the meter too long and the centimeter too short to be convenient in measuring day-to-day lengths. Decimeters might be better, but people look at you funny when you say that word.
However, in that paritcular instance, I was referring to the annoyance of using a "kilo-" anything as the base unit declared for a system. And it does bring to light the way other people have found the units inconvenient as well: A kg*m/s^2 is a "Newton" and a g*cm/s^2 is a "dyne," but nobody even bothered to name a g*m/s^2 because of the mismatch of scales involved.
"Only those who do not understand physics want to use kilograms as a measurement of force."
ie. The vast majority of the population of the planet. Think of all the products sold by the "kilogram" in grocery stores even though they use spring scales.
"(except maybe for nutritionists."
Aside from using "calories" instead of the proper "Joules," they also have the nasty habit of calling a kilocalorie a "Calorie."
"SI does not apply to computer science."
You seem to be confused. The SI isn't about "science" (especially since true scientists understand that the decision of measurement systems is completey arbitrary) it is about an agreed-upon measurement standards needed for trade. Lengths of fabric, areas of land, weights of food, and anything else that you don't purchase per-unit. And computer storage media gets bought and sold just like anything else.
Ehhh... I'm not sure I would go that far. Aside from the silly recurring names and objects in the games (Cid, Bahamut, etc.) there are some general underlying themes to the stories that all games have in common.
"FF adventure was really the prequel to the Secret of Mana."
Only in the US. "Final Fantasy Adventure" and "Secret of Mana" were both released in Japan as "Seiken Densetsu" ("Legendary Sword," I believe) and "Seiken Densetsu 2," respectively. "Legend of Mana" for the PlayStation is "Seiken Densetsu 4."
The thing is, to my knowledge this is the first time Square is so blatently milking the name in both Japan as well as North America.
"I think FF mystic quest was actually a FF game."
It got released in Japan later as "Final Fantasy USA," confirming the belief in Japan that US gamers are idiots. I'd say it was more of a fluke than a decided marketing strategy, though (poor Japan couldn't live with itself knowing that there was a "Final Fantasy" in North America that wasn't in Japan).
Except there are no conversions in SI. All SI units are metric, but not all metric units are SI. The unit of length in SI is the meter, period. Not centimeters, not kilometers, but meters. It doesn't matter if you're talking about the Bohr radius or the distance to the nearest supercluster, you must use meters. The standards will grudgingly accept the use of such prefixes, but they'd much rather you say "1E(-2) m" than "1 cm."
Mass can even be more annoying. There, the standard is kilograms, not grams. And everybody wants to use these units as force instead.
Oh, by the way, you're also not allowed to use metric prefixes for powers of 2. A kilobyte must be 1000 bytes, not 1024.
"The spacecraft is in good health and is undergoing routine checkouts of the systems and is downlinking pictues of Saturn."
You mean it didn't break up over earth, spewing radioactive death all across the surface of the planet, killing off all human life in the process? Shouldn't the cockroaches be in power or something?
Did the "environmental" lobby ever suggest a different power source for space probes going to Saturn?
I'm willing to bet that India will acheive manned spaceflight before Europe.
Re:Why are we always nitpicking?
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
"But how is it that we have had troops (US gov. employees) all over the world doing the most dangerous things for decades but 7 astronauts are unreasonable losses?"
Life is cheap. Space shuttles are expensive.
Re:No, End NASA-controlled Manned Space Flight.
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"Given the huge amount of private-sector activity in the suborbital market currently,"
Absolutely none. There's a few dozen companies talking about this and that, but that's all it is: Talk. The Chinese have done a heck of a lot more with manned spaceflight than the US private sector has.
"and NASA's pitiful track record in developing new launch vehicles,"
Compard to...? Who else uses a launch vehicle capable of making repairs in space?
The story sounds a lot like FF IX. Heck, one of the characters looks a lot like Zidane, even
"Action oriented" this, "action oriented" that... It sounds like they may as well just call it "Seiken Densetsu" and be done with it. Or are they just going to milk the phrase "Final Fantasy" like the cash cow it is?
Slashdot Mirror
"Simply create ten million or so "honeypot" email addresses, and have an automated system have them all request information on the mortgage deal."
The words "denial of service" come to mind.
"If you're the sort of person that plays these games for the gameplay and not the story, then FF8 doesn't have a whole lot to offer."
No, I'm afraid you got that backwards. VII, VIII and X all practically required you to take a college course before you could understand the mechanics they used for character development (whether they called it "materia," "guardian forces/draw" or "sphere grid"). Hell, I even had to start VIII over the first time I played it because I screwed up GF development so badly. IX was good because the focus was on the game. Not the graphics, not the music, not some God-awful mechanic that sounds like something out of a certain Hsu and Chan strip, but on the game and the story, where it belonged. Rarely did you have to wander around to "level up" (or "draw spells" or whatever Square wants to call it) and buying new weapons and armor was as easy as walking into the damned store and plunking down some gil.
VIII focused so much on a/v and mechanics that the characters are sickeningly two-dimensional. I could never confuse Squall with a real person. "I have to go kill this sorceress person. Why? Oh, I dunno... just because, I guess... Leave me alone, I'm busy being angsty here!" At least the player actually wanted to kill Sephiroth, but even he isn't anywhere near the character that Kefka was.
I used to love Final Fantasy. VI was my favorite before IX. I got a PlayStation for the sole reason of playing Final Fantasy games. VII was a little bit of a let-down, but that may have been because I played Zelda: OoT first. VIII was even more of a let down. When I played IX, I shed a tear of joy over the true beauty that was the game and basked in the way things used to be. It gave me the sense of awe and woder that I hadn't had with one of these games since VI. And then I realized that IX is the way it is because it is intended to be the last, fianl "hurrah!" for the way things used to be. I look at X and all I see is VIII. And I know better than to think XI is going to be anything like the old games because you can't have an epic story in an MMORPG. I have decided that, save re-releases of older games, Final Fantasy is dead to me (and subsequently I have no reason to purchase a PlayStation 2). I've moved on.
And while I've only recently started playing it, I'm even finding myself let down by Chrono Cross. I remember a game that had a good story but made sure not to take itself too seriously, with a great deal of expression done with the simple (by today's standards) 2D sprites, and a fight system that focused more on the fighting than on either flashy backgrounds or level-up mechanics. A bread-and-butter RPG with a great story and deep characters. Instead, I'm given a game with little expression through the characters (to be expected when half the time they're about 1" tall on the screen and you can almost never make out their faces) (but hell, they could at least have shown facial expressions in the dialog boxes instead of "?" and "!", but I guess they never played Lunar...), fight sequences that are a big step back to Final Fantasy (I'd rather not have to go to a special fight scene sequence than to have "super-nifty 3D grpahics," and whatever happened to the genuinely-nifty area-effect techs?), an "element" system that looks like it was hastily grafted from FF VII, and too many characters for the player to have any sort of real relationship with.
In general, any RPG that requires you to take several hours of your time to learn how to play the game isn't worth my money, because spending so much focus on the game mechanics means that less focus is spent on the actual story.
"It lacked the guts and ambition to break the mold like FF8 did."
VIII didn't break any molds, it was a continuation of the direction they were going from VII. It started with IV in a small and subtle way, but got real big real fast. IX actually broke the mold by being nostalgic and reaching all the way back to V, but they went right back to where they were with X, and I doubt they will ever leave their current line of travel again. Square is done innovating here, move along.
It would involve a GPS receiver and a baseball bat.
"That just amazes me that there are that many stupid people out there, that actually purchase products from UCE."
Who says they did? His business was spam and his customers were businesses looking to advertise their products. The money his merchant customers pay him really isn't much of an indiciation of how successful the advertising actually was.
"It costs money to be processed. And it's a waste of trees."
Paper can be recycled and trees grow back. The fossil fuel burned to produce the electricity used to transmit that spam does neither, unless you're talking about geologic time frames.
You're confusing "monkeys" with "apes." For example, most humans don't have tails, prehensile or otherwise.
You do realize that in 2001 the federal government spent about twice as much on social programs than it did on defense, right?
"But can you justify using that much power (albeit in a very short burst) that could warm those without a roof over their head?"
I'm sure the laser could heat them up very much indeed.
"Can you justify burning all that coal or making that much radioactive waste?"
Because where's the fun in housing the homeless if you don't also require them to freeze in the dark?
"Give me room-temperature supraconductors any day of the week,"
And where would you get the electricity to put over those superconductors, hm?
"but Why The Hell would I want to know how it feels to be like on the surface of the sun"
Because the surface of the sun keeps us warm and has been putting out energy for millions of years.
"that's an awfully small data set"
Yeah, it wasn't even enough to determine whether they preferred vi or emacs. Or perhaps ed...
"Convienient: The solution that accompleshes the requirements with the least ammount of effort."
I didn't realize what I was saying was so difficult to understand.
A meter cannot fit into a notebook. It is not a convenient unit of measure.
A centimeter falls through small holes in pockets. It is not a convenient unit of measure.
Measurements in whole grams can be thrown off signifigant figures by slight air currents. It is not a convenient unit of measure.
Global confusion like "kilograms of force" can make communication of concepts of mass or force difficult with other people, therefore it is not as convenient as other alternatives.
The word "kilogram" suggests that its defintion is derived from that of the gram, when the truth is actually the other way around. This misunderstanding is also not always convenient.
"or those that don't understand that mass can be accuratly measured with a spring scale if the gravitational pull is known."
Does your grocer know how to measure localized gravitational potential? Can the scales even be corrected? Even for known discrepancies like latitude?
"When measuring astrophysical distances, scientists nearly always use parsecs."
First off, I wasn't talking about "what is commonly used" here or there, I was talking about SI. I said "SI" in the original post. Several times in fact.
Secondly, parsecs aren't SI. Parsecs aren't even metric.
"And if you had any knowledge of physics, you would know about the CGS system of unit,"
The only SI part of the CGS system, however, is the S.
"which is used by many people because it treats electric charge in a better way than SI does."
But the EMU Coulomb is the one your government has made law. Whatever your thoughts on the matter, the Coulomb and all the other SI units are "the standard" that everybody seems to enjoy talking about in glowing terms.
"Ever heard of the X-Prize?"
Yes, I've heard quite a lot of talk about the X-Prize. That was kind of my point.
"Currently, you have Armadillo(...), Scaled Composites(...), XCor(...),
"Test vehicles" this, "first stage" that... Were they full-scale vehicles? Could somebody have ridden in the vehicle right now? Has there been anything more than a thesis paper, flashy computer graphics and a few thousand dollars spent at the local model rocketry store?
China has sent up empty Shenzhou capsules that, for all intents and purposes, could have carried a taikonaut into space. Ignoring the differences between "low earth orbit" and "sub-orbital parabola," has anybody in the private sector anywhere done anything remotely similar?
"NASA has not developed a successful new man-rated launch system in the last 35 years,"
And who has? Are you referring to the Soyu^H^H^Hhenzhou, perhaps?
"Only a Biologist would be so anal as to declare such a assinine statemate."
That's a peculiar prejudice. I have nothing to do with biology.
"Most scientists , and biologists that have a head above their sholders, use what ever is most convienint."
Isn't that exactly what people complained about when the Mars probe was lost? That LockMart was using units that were "convenient" instead of switching to all-SI and forcing their private-sector customers to follow suit?
"Absolutely, no si unit is "anoying"."
Oh, I can think of quite a few. For example, I find the meter too long and the centimeter too short to be convenient in measuring day-to-day lengths. Decimeters might be better, but people look at you funny when you say that word.
However, in that paritcular instance, I was referring to the annoyance of using a "kilo-" anything as the base unit declared for a system. And it does bring to light the way other people have found the units inconvenient as well: A kg*m/s^2 is a "Newton" and a g*cm/s^2 is a "dyne," but nobody even bothered to name a g*m/s^2 because of the mismatch of scales involved.
"Only those who do not understand physics want to use kilograms as a measurement of force."
ie. The vast majority of the population of the planet. Think of all the products sold by the "kilogram" in grocery stores even though they use spring scales.
"(except maybe for nutritionists."
Aside from using "calories" instead of the proper "Joules," they also have the nasty habit of calling a kilocalorie a "Calorie."
"SI does not apply to computer science."
You seem to be confused. The SI isn't about "science" (especially since true scientists understand that the decision of measurement systems is completey arbitrary) it is about an agreed-upon measurement standards needed for trade. Lengths of fabric, areas of land, weights of food, and anything else that you don't purchase per-unit. And computer storage media gets bought and sold just like anything else.
"Yes, they are. FF is a brand, not a series."
Ehhh... I'm not sure I would go that far. Aside from the silly recurring names and objects in the games (Cid, Bahamut, etc.) there are some general underlying themes to the stories that all games have in common.
"FF adventure was really the prequel to the Secret of Mana."
Only in the US. "Final Fantasy Adventure" and "Secret of Mana" were both released in Japan as "Seiken Densetsu" ("Legendary Sword," I believe) and "Seiken Densetsu 2," respectively. "Legend of Mana" for the PlayStation is "Seiken Densetsu 4."
The thing is, to my knowledge this is the first time Square is so blatently milking the name in both Japan as well as North America.
"I think FF mystic quest was actually a FF game."
It got released in Japan later as "Final Fantasy USA," confirming the belief in Japan that US gamers are idiots. I'd say it was more of a fluke than a decided marketing strategy, though (poor Japan couldn't live with itself knowing that there was a "Final Fantasy" in North America that wasn't in Japan).
I'd think just the opposite. More surface area for the wind to grab.
Except there are no conversions in SI. All SI units are metric, but not all metric units are SI. The unit of length in SI is the meter, period. Not centimeters, not kilometers, but meters. It doesn't matter if you're talking about the Bohr radius or the distance to the nearest supercluster, you must use meters. The standards will grudgingly accept the use of such prefixes, but they'd much rather you say "1E(-2) m" than "1 cm."
Mass can even be more annoying. There, the standard is kilograms, not grams. And everybody wants to use these units as force instead.
Oh, by the way, you're also not allowed to use metric prefixes for powers of 2. A kilobyte must be 1000 bytes, not 1024.
"The spacecraft is in good health and is undergoing routine checkouts of the systems and is downlinking pictues of Saturn."
You mean it didn't break up over earth, spewing radioactive death all across the surface of the planet, killing off all human life in the process? Shouldn't the cockroaches be in power or something?
Did the "environmental" lobby ever suggest a different power source for space probes going to Saturn?
"Sell 1x2 m plywood, 5 mm bolts, and 5 mm drill bits."
That's all well and good for new products, but what about repairing older products? Do you have any idea how many 5/8" bolts are out there?
I'm willing to bet that India will acheive manned spaceflight before Europe.
"But how is it that we have had troops (US gov. employees) all over the world doing the most dangerous things for decades but 7 astronauts are unreasonable losses?"
Life is cheap. Space shuttles are expensive.
"Given the huge amount of private-sector activity in the suborbital market currently,"
Absolutely none. There's a few dozen companies talking about this and that, but that's all it is: Talk. The Chinese have done a heck of a lot more with manned spaceflight than the US private sector has.
"and NASA's pitiful track record in developing new launch vehicles,"
Compard to...? Who else uses a launch vehicle capable of making repairs in space?
Now now, there's no need for racial slurs here... :)
I wouldn't call that a life, though...
Sega and Nintendo? Merge? That's heresy! I suppose next you'll be telling me that Square and Enix will merge.
Seriously, Sonic on the cover of Nintendo Power? Come now!