Personally, while I can watch embedded YouTube videos, my Wii won't let me watch them from the YouTube site. Claims my version of Flash is out of date, and it's impossible to update.
I would like to actually browse YouTube from my Wii, so this new setup is a good thing.
Nintendo did a genius thing, rereleasing games from older consoles via the Wii Shop Channel. Or even playing old ROMs or LucasArts SCUMM using emulators via the Wii Homebrew Channel.
What I want is a Sierra emulator for the Wii, so I can play all the old classic point-and-click games. If they can port ScummVM, surely they can do something for Sierra.
AGD Interactive just remade Sierra's classic Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire.
It's VGA point-and-click instead of EGA parser, and it's got a number of things missing from the original (like the Saurus repair shop) and quite a few easter eggs.
The graphics are better, but only the level of "better" that Sierra themselves did when updating their own games to VGA in the early '90s. They maintained compatibility, so you can still import your character from QfG1, and still export to one of the later games in the series at the end.
There's always going to be a market for retro games, but the definition of "retro" will change depending on the market.
8-bit games like MegaMan 9 will be big with the set who remember playing them back on the NES. As will parody games, like Strong Bad's Snake Boxer 5 and Alge-bros. (:
I never owned a NES (only console my parents ever sprung for was the Intellivision); I spent my halcyon youth playing Sierra games. So stuff like the VGA remake of Quest for Glory 2 by AGD Interactive are like gold to me.
As time goes on and gamers grow up, each generation of kids will hearken back to their favourite generation of game console.
I can see a lot of problems with this. For example, I run a Wiki detailing the fictional universes of a publishing company.
Now, objectively, the information is false. The last thing we need is people running around shrieking about being vampires, and they know it's true because a trusted site on the Internet said so.
But the information is valid in the context of describing fiction.
So a simple truth rating wouldn't quite cut it, I don't think; there would need to be some sort of contextual reference as well, which starts down the path of making this more trouble than it's worth.
I love Myst. I'll be the first to admit that... even got an armband tatt written in D'ni a couple of months ago.
But Myst sort of killed the adventure game genre. Everyone tried to copy Myst (see Sierra's "Shivers," fr'ex) and everyone failed.
Myst and Riven were fantastic. Myst III was pretty decent, but Myst IV was just a big pile of nonsensical puzzles-for-the-sake-of-puzzles. The puzzles weren't part of the story, but slapped on top because obviously Myst games need lots of puzzles.
Myst V and Myst Online: Uru Live got far better in that regard. I miss Uru, and can't wait for Cyan to start 'er back up again.
I also really miss Sierra's "quest" series. Was never that into King's Quest, but I loved Space Quest and definitely Quest for Glory. Best series ever.
There aren't a lot of adventure fans these days, at least not in terms of percentages of the gamer community. But there are still some of us around. Their VGA remake of QfG 2 is right around the corner.
Funny you should recommend Phaze/Proton.. I grabbed that from the library as a teenager because of the nearly naked chick on the cover of the second book. Then went back to read the first book, which takes place in a fully nude society, begins with the protagonist having sex with a stranger, and includes the same protagonist having loving sex with a unicorn. As I recall, he casts a spell on himself to last through her "heat". I'm not saying it's bad. But in addition to the wonderful puzzles, games, and magic, there is a fair bit of "porn".:)
You know, you're right, and I had forgotten about that entirely. I guess it just wasn't as blatant as it was in Xanth, where women are showing off their bountiful bosoms and mens' eyes become literally stuck in their heads as a result, which I always thought was a bit childish.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that my top choice, Anne McCaffrey, was one of the first posts. here.
I started in on her Dragonriders of Pern series. It waffles back and forth between sci-fi and fantasy, but it's definitely a great read. I stopped with the Masterharper of Pern, which was a good dozen books in, at least, and there've been more since. The Harper Hall miniseries (Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, Dragondrums) is more aimed at the younger crowd, so it might be a good introduction for preteens, with the main body of the series once they get a little older.
There's also the Brainship series (the Ship who Sang, the Ship Who Search, the City who Fought, etc.), the Crystal Singer series, both the Talents series, and so on.
Aside from McCaffrey, can't go wrong with the Chronicles of Narnia.
I also enjoyed Piers Anthony. Stay away from Xanth unless you want to stunt their minds with endless puns and what is practically porn. Instead, look for the Incarnations of Immortality (On A Pale Horse, etc.) and the Phaze/Proton books (Out of Phaze, etc).
Since I mostly covered fantasy, Asimov's full-length novel "Nightfall" was fun.
All we need is for there to be a Chinese-Scientology link and we'll have the most commented-on story ever.... thousands of Chinese eMeters have been recalled due to high lead content! Film at eleven!
Before things like TLC or Discovery, there were almost no infotainment outlets.
I'd like to amend that to remove TLC. Sadly, we're well beyond the days of James Burke's Connections and the like. There's not much science involved in 2-day home renovation shows, fashion makeover shows, or pimp-my-vehicle.
The closest they get is the occasional ghost investigation, which can hardly be called science.
Minor correction - D&D 3e came out in 2000, not 1999. Thus it's been eight years since the last major revision, not nine.
I have thus far only ever been to one GenCon, and it was in 2000, and there was a big rush for the new edition. I remember it well. Scarred Lands was released to capitalize on this, and Exalted was postponed for another year because White Wolf didn't want to release their new fantasy game in direct competition with D&D.
A friend of mine was in charge of the latest release of Gamma World, for d20 Modern. One of the suppositions they made was that, before the Crash, technology had advanced to the point where even AI was so cheap that it was added to absolutely everything, for no other reason than that they could. Hammer? AI. Light switch? AI. No one even thought about it; it was just done. It was funny, but also kinda scary, because ours is a civilization where I can definitely see that happening.
This reminds me of that, and may be the first step.
FTA: "The mice, reared in cages kept in a shed downwind of two steel mills and a busy highway in a Canadian city, showed a host of genetic changes compared to similarly housed mice breathing filtered air." "No such research has been done on people in Hamilton Harbour, Canada, where the mouse studies were carried out." "Canadian researchers found that filtering out particles from polluted air lessened the risk of heritable mutations in mice caged near Hamilton." "After three weeks of breathing the Hamilton air, the mice were already showing more signs of DNA breakage than control mice breathing filtered air."
Guess who else lives in this neighbourhood?
Damnit. Now I'm going to have to start putting filters around all the doors and windows.
CBS got all rights to Star Trek on TV, while Paramount got rights to Star Trek in the theatres.
StarTrek.com was going to be run by CBS Interactive, but it's a shared ownership. But you're right; with no new Trek on TV, they may be passing it along the chain to Paramount. No clue what they'll do with it.
DNA. When DNA was discovered, well after Darwin's time, it could have easily rendered large swathes of evolution irrelevant. It didn't. It verified and strengthened the theory.
Chromosomes. Humans have 23 chromosome pairs; the other great apes have 24. By evolutionary theory, we should find that somewhere along the line, human genes mutated and two of our chromosomes fused. A chromosome has two markers called telomeres, one on each end, and a single centromere in the middle. (T__C___T) What we would expect to find is a chromosome with telomeres on each end, telomeres in the middle (where the fusion happened) and two centromeres. If we don't, our current understanding of evolution is wrong.
But we did find a fused chromosome, exactly as predicted; our chromosome #2. (T__c___TT___C__T)
I've been trying to plug Uru for ages, pun not intended. Sadly, most people I talk to just don't get it. "There's nothing to kill? You just talk and solve puzzles? I don't get it; what do you do?"
But I've managed to bring my brother down, and he's mostly a Team Fortress-esque player, with occasional forays into more tradition FPS territory. He found he liked it (particularly Kadish Tolesa - can't wait to show him Ahnonay, now that it's out).
I don't care if the Feds can read my email. I don't use Email anymore. I upgraded to Gmail. That's, like, two versions better, right? I hope so; I think I missed the release of Fmail.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, while I can watch embedded YouTube videos, my Wii won't let me watch them from the YouTube site. Claims my version of Flash is out of date, and it's impossible to update.
I would like to actually browse YouTube from my Wii, so this new setup is a good thing.
Nintendo did a genius thing, rereleasing games from older consoles via the Wii Shop Channel. Or even playing old ROMs or LucasArts SCUMM using emulators via the Wii Homebrew Channel.
What I want is a Sierra emulator for the Wii, so I can play all the old classic point-and-click games. If they can port ScummVM, surely they can do something for Sierra.
AGD Interactive just remade Sierra's classic Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire.
It's VGA point-and-click instead of EGA parser, and it's got a number of things missing from the original (like the Saurus repair shop) and quite a few easter eggs.
The graphics are better, but only the level of "better" that Sierra themselves did when updating their own games to VGA in the early '90s. They maintained compatibility, so you can still import your character from QfG1, and still export to one of the later games in the series at the end.
There's always going to be a market for retro games, but the definition of "retro" will change depending on the market.
8-bit games like MegaMan 9 will be big with the set who remember playing them back on the NES. As will parody games, like Strong Bad's Snake Boxer 5 and Alge-bros. (:
I never owned a NES (only console my parents ever sprung for was the Intellivision); I spent my halcyon youth playing Sierra games. So stuff like the VGA remake of Quest for Glory 2 by AGD Interactive are like gold to me.
As time goes on and gamers grow up, each generation of kids will hearken back to their favourite generation of game console.
I second this. I've been using avast for years with no problems.
Looks good so far, but their library is still a little limited. I still have copies of most of the games I'd want to buy.
Now if they get access to Sierra and LucasArts' back catalogue, then we're in business.
I can see a lot of problems with this. For example, I run a Wiki detailing the fictional universes of a publishing company.
Now, objectively, the information is false. The last thing we need is people running around shrieking about being vampires, and they know it's true because a trusted site on the Internet said so.
But the information is valid in the context of describing fiction.
So a simple truth rating wouldn't quite cut it, I don't think; there would need to be some sort of contextual reference as well, which starts down the path of making this more trouble than it's worth.
from the send-data-through-the-wiither dept.
Damnit, editors, stop spying on me! "Wiither" is the name I gave my Wii.
I love Myst. I'll be the first to admit that... even got an armband tatt written in D'ni a couple of months ago.
But Myst sort of killed the adventure game genre. Everyone tried to copy Myst (see Sierra's "Shivers," fr'ex) and everyone failed.
Myst and Riven were fantastic. Myst III was pretty decent, but Myst IV was just a big pile of nonsensical puzzles-for-the-sake-of-puzzles. The puzzles weren't part of the story, but slapped on top because obviously Myst games need lots of puzzles.
Myst V and Myst Online: Uru Live got far better in that regard. I miss Uru, and can't wait for Cyan to start 'er back up again.
I also really miss Sierra's "quest" series. Was never that into King's Quest, but I loved Space Quest and definitely Quest for Glory. Best series ever.
There aren't a lot of adventure fans these days, at least not in terms of percentages of the gamer community. But there are still some of us around. Their VGA remake of QfG 2 is right around the corner.
Funny you should recommend Phaze/Proton.. I grabbed that from the library as a teenager because of the nearly naked chick on the cover of the second book. Then went back to read the first book, which takes place in a fully nude society, begins with the protagonist having sex with a stranger, and includes the same protagonist having loving sex with a unicorn. As I recall, he casts a spell on himself to last through her "heat". I'm not saying it's bad. But in addition to the wonderful puzzles, games, and magic, there is a fair bit of "porn". :)
You know, you're right, and I had forgotten about that entirely. I guess it just wasn't as blatant as it was in Xanth, where women are showing off their bountiful bosoms and mens' eyes become literally stuck in their heads as a result, which I always thought was a bit childish.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that my top choice, Anne McCaffrey, was one of the first posts. here.
I started in on her Dragonriders of Pern series. It waffles back and forth between sci-fi and fantasy, but it's definitely a great read. I stopped with the Masterharper of Pern, which was a good dozen books in, at least, and there've been more since. The Harper Hall miniseries (Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, Dragondrums) is more aimed at the younger crowd, so it might be a good introduction for preteens, with the main body of the series once they get a little older.
There's also the Brainship series (the Ship who Sang, the Ship Who Search, the City who Fought, etc.), the Crystal Singer series, both the Talents series, and so on.
Aside from McCaffrey, can't go wrong with the Chronicles of Narnia.
I also enjoyed Piers Anthony. Stay away from Xanth unless you want to stunt their minds with endless puns and what is practically porn. Instead, look for the Incarnations of Immortality (On A Pale Horse, etc.) and the Phaze/Proton books (Out of Phaze, etc).
Since I mostly covered fantasy, Asimov's full-length novel "Nightfall" was fun.
For years, mankind has yearned to destroy the sun!
Maybe, but I lol'ed anyway.
All we need is for there to be a Chinese-Scientology link and we'll have the most commented-on story ever. ... thousands of Chinese eMeters have been recalled due to high lead content! Film at eleven!
Before things like TLC or Discovery, there were almost no infotainment outlets.
I'd like to amend that to remove TLC. Sadly, we're well beyond the days of James Burke's Connections and the like. There's not much science involved in 2-day home renovation shows, fashion makeover shows, or pimp-my-vehicle.
The closest they get is the occasional ghost investigation, which can hardly be called science.
Minor correction - D&D 3e came out in 2000, not 1999. Thus it's been eight years since the last major revision, not nine.
I have thus far only ever been to one GenCon, and it was in 2000, and there was a big rush for the new edition. I remember it well. Scarred Lands was released to capitalize on this, and Exalted was postponed for another year because White Wolf didn't want to release their new fantasy game in direct competition with D&D.
A friend of mine was in charge of the latest release of Gamma World, for d20 Modern. One of the suppositions they made was that, before the Crash, technology had advanced to the point where even AI was so cheap that it was added to absolutely everything, for no other reason than that they could. Hammer? AI. Light switch? AI. No one even thought about it; it was just done. It was funny, but also kinda scary, because ours is a civilization where I can definitely see that happening.
This reminds me of that, and may be the first step.
FTA:
"The mice, reared in cages kept in a shed downwind of two steel mills and a busy highway in a Canadian city, showed a host of genetic changes compared to similarly housed mice breathing filtered air."
"No such research has been done on people in Hamilton Harbour, Canada, where the mouse studies were carried out."
"Canadian researchers found that filtering out particles from polluted air lessened the risk of heritable mutations in mice caged near Hamilton."
"After three weeks of breathing the Hamilton air, the mice were already showing more signs of DNA breakage than control mice breathing filtered air."
Guess who else lives in this neighbourhood?
Damnit. Now I'm going to have to start putting filters around all the doors and windows.
CBS/Paramount were merged, but then split up.
CBS got all rights to Star Trek on TV, while Paramount got rights to Star Trek in the theatres.
StarTrek.com was going to be run by CBS Interactive, but it's a shared ownership. But you're right; with no new Trek on TV, they may be passing it along the chain to Paramount. No clue what they'll do with it.
Well, let's look at what would have disproved it.
DNA. When DNA was discovered, well after Darwin's time, it could have easily rendered large swathes of evolution irrelevant. It didn't. It verified and strengthened the theory.
Chromosomes. Humans have 23 chromosome pairs; the other great apes have 24. By evolutionary theory, we should find that somewhere along the line, human genes mutated and two of our chromosomes fused. A chromosome has two markers called telomeres, one on each end, and a single centromere in the middle. (T__C___T) What we would expect to find is a chromosome with telomeres on each end, telomeres in the middle (where the fusion happened) and two centromeres. If we don't, our current understanding of evolution is wrong.
But we did find a fused chromosome, exactly as predicted; our chromosome #2. (T__c___TT___C__T)
I've been trying to plug Uru for ages, pun not intended. Sadly, most people I talk to just don't get it. "There's nothing to kill? You just talk and solve puzzles? I don't get it; what do you do?"
But I've managed to bring my brother down, and he's mostly a Team Fortress-esque player, with occasional forays into more tradition FPS territory. He found he liked it (particularly Kadish Tolesa - can't wait to show him Ahnonay, now that it's out).
See you in-cavern. (:
You're just saying that because you're a sore looser.
I don't care if the Feds can read my email. I don't use Email anymore. I upgraded to Gmail. That's, like, two versions better, right? I hope so; I think I missed the release of Fmail.
When are we going to be able to invent our own moderation tags? (:
Trust me, I was waiting for it too. But the new configuration utility doesn't seem to be working at all for many ATI boards.
So until I can figure out how to fix it (along with a few dozen other Ubuntu users), my secondary display is stuck as a clone of my primary.