Hours and hours of multiplayer, thumb callouses that could etch glass, and that damn clown. Between the Paris & New York Hi-Rise maps...now that's some good stuff.
Vigilante 8 tread a lot of the same ground, and it had its own charm.
I also fondly remember the homemade 25ft link cable made for head-to-head Armored Core.
Been down that path. They are a big PITA to work with, for exactly those reasons.
Also comments like, "Make it hipper...edgier."
(Can you make it vauger, more nebulous?)
But don't discount license games (even on the GBA). Yeah, there is a lot of crap, but so many get made that there is a new school that looks on these arbitrary character sets and rules as a jumping off point for making some interesting, well designed games.
Sadly, it seems GBA reviewers are folk who feel that being a GBA reviewer is a punishment, and spend as little time with the game as possible. It makes the gems harder to find.
Do we see Hollywood rushing unfinished movies to market?
"Sorry, Jackson old bean. You've run a bit long, so we're just going to throw up the credits in the middle of the battle on Mt. Doom. By the time the audience sees it, we'll already have their $9.00, and haha on them."
Unfortunately, this is all too often what happens with games.
How does Hollywood acheive the awesome feat of actually finishing products before they're released?
By making reasonable estimates of the actual time to compleat the project, and by keeping the production pipeline full. Sometimes they will even, (gasp!) keep a finished movie on the shelf for a few months before releasing it. So there is a bit of flexibility, should a project go long.
"A lot of people don't want to get ahead. They want to get by..."
Get ahead of what, or whom, precisely?
I thinks there's plenty of room under the tent for the Trumps and Gates, as well as folk to whom a job is a means to get a nice little place and tend the garden on the weekend.
The reason films can be made by, and in some respects need to be made by large numbers of mobile freelancers is twofold:
Movies shoot in locations around the world, and a production company may find themselves in vastly different physical locations from film to film, requiring local talent to fill out the pool.
Movies are by-and-large made with very standardized technology, the Pananflex, HMIs, 10ks, there is a standard lingo for stardard equipment that make it possible for a freelancer from Boston to interact with a film crew from LA.
This didn't use to be the case, in the early years of film, the technology was very mutable, standards were still forming, very chaotic, and very creative. Things are now more formalized, and frequently formula-ized.
I doubt the game industry will find it self "shooting on location," so the first bit of the analogy falls flat.
As for the second, until graphics performance hit's it's peak (maybe it has), and it's widely regarded industry-wide that there is no percentage in building a new engine from scratch (some movement in that direction, re Doom/Unreal engine liscencing) you're not going to see the kind of standardization that allows a freelance workforce to interoperate seamlessly between companies.
As it currently stands, a worker becomes more valuable the longer he stays with a developer, and new people have a large amount of developer specific information to absorb before they can function.
As to which model, old Hollywood/new Hollywood, is to the advantage of the worker, well, that's a tougher call.
"Is there a reason why right now 3DS seems to be the nearest to a standard we have..."
Oh, I wouldn't say that.
But at 324 different formats, this guy is doing a pretty decent job of untangling the mess. It shareware, and windows only unfortunately.
Having written a LWO>STL/STL>LWO, my hat's off to anyone crazy enough to tackle a universal translator. Though he skipped the hard one; IGES. But at a thousand bucks for a copy of the spec, who can blame him?
is as someone reading you a bedtime story is to reading a book.
It not just that you don't control the flow when you're watching the tube, it's that you're getting someone reading you the news, which is about 10 times slower than reading it yourself.
Aggregate it, sort it, read it, goodbye.
Plus, as many here know, sometimes it is more interesting to read the reactions to a news story than it is to RTFA.
Here are three packages that really help capture the feel of a face-to-face game:
GnuDorrito: A XML snack-food tracking and emulation package.
OpenLate: A software package that keeps out-of-character chatter enable on a random timer to simulate people arriving late for the game.
Scatalyser: Reinterprets everyday text and adds the appropriate amount of scatalogical humor. There is a bug that keeps the Scatalyser from working in the presence of women.
Why get one Loyalty Card when you can get four? Buy only meat with one, beverages with the other, staples with the third. Use the fourth to buy candy.
Take online surveys early and often. Make up answers. Subscribe to the National Review and Mother Jones. Send in product registration cards. Answer phone surveys in great, if totally made up detail.
If they want your information, bury them under a flood of useless data.
Our information is our own. If you want it, pay us for it, or live with crappy, spurious data.
...the sheer number of levels on which this is wrong.
Not only are there vast number of levels on which this is wrong, but other levels of wrongness are nested within those levels, and some of those are nested recursively.
Wrong.
Oh my god...what will this do to the Furry community? The mind boggles.
The ability to cheaply do reflection mapping means anything glossy now gets a perfectly focused reflection mapped on it, which looks cool for about 5 minutes, then starts to grate.
Reflections are rarely perfect. What a lot of these new games need to take the edge off is a blurred reflection.
Here's a test render I did a while back comparing hard & soft reflections: Chrome_Soft_test.jpg
Much like chrome was a craze back in the early days of pre-rendered CGI, these hard reflections in real-time graphics are about to jump the shark.
I sure many people have heard this story, but it bears repeating.
A reporter came to the home of Neils Bohr, and was shocked to find he had a horseshoe nailed above his entryway. He asked him how such a respected scientist could believe that such a thing would bring good luck.
Bohr replied, "I don't believe the superstition. But I am told it will bring me good luck whether I believe in it or not..."
I tend to think the same thing about people praying for me. Thank them for their consideration, and get on with your life.
What can one do with a well established brand? Use it to sell new products by expanding the product line.
How does it usually go down?
1) The Quick Buck. Slap the brand name on any old piece of dreck, and shove it out the door. Short term profit, but long term damage to the brand.
2) The Smart Move. Create a new and interesting product that shares enough of the characteristics of the original product to legitimately claim the relationship, and leverage the power of the brand name to build a market for the new and interesting product. Short term profit, long term profit, and a boost to the brand image.
Yeah, you get a lot of #1. But #2 is a much better strategy.
"...so I don't want to get interested in the game at all."
I didn't find this to be a real danger with E&B. It's the first MMPOG I'd dabbled with since Asheron's Call. I played for about a month, but found it very difficult to bond with my spacecraft.
As avatars go, rather hard to empathize with. And since the humanoid avatar was only really a shopping and manufacturing interface, well, again, no big surprise it's closing down.
Now, WoW...that's another story. Must...resist...urge to throw life away on pretty game.
Slashdot Mirror
Hours and hours of multiplayer, thumb callouses that could etch glass, and that damn clown. Between the Paris & New York Hi-Rise maps...now that's some good stuff.
Vigilante 8 tread a lot of the same ground, and it had its own charm.
I also fondly remember the homemade 25ft link cable made for head-to-head Armored Core.
Amen, Brother!
Been down that path. They are a big PITA to work with, for exactly those reasons.
Also comments like, "Make it hipper...edgier."
(Can you make it vauger, more nebulous?)
But don't discount license games (even on the GBA). Yeah, there is a lot of crap, but so many get made that there is a new school that looks on these arbitrary character sets and rules as a jumping off point for making some interesting, well designed games.
Sadly, it seems GBA reviewers are folk who feel that being a GBA reviewer is a punishment, and spend as little time with the game as possible. It makes the gems harder to find.
You go to the boardwalk, and have your picture taken in the in one of those murals with a hole cut out for your head.
Shazam!, you're an artist.
Pfft.
Now excuse me, I have to go my gallery open. I'm displaying my latest work, "UT Male grabbing his Crotch or Slain Opponent."
Do we see Hollywood rushing unfinished movies to market?
"Sorry, Jackson old bean. You've run a bit long, so we're just going to throw up the credits in the middle of the battle on Mt. Doom. By the time the audience sees it, we'll already have their $9.00, and haha on them."
Unfortunately, this is all too often what happens with games.
How does Hollywood acheive the awesome feat of actually finishing products before they're released?
By making reasonable estimates of the actual time to compleat the project, and by keeping the production pipeline full. Sometimes they will even, (gasp!) keep a finished movie on the shelf for a few months before releasing it. So there is a bit of flexibility, should a project go long.
"A lot of people don't want to get ahead. They want to get by..."
Get ahead of what, or whom, precisely?
I thinks there's plenty of room under the tent for the Trumps and Gates, as well as folk to whom a job is a means to get a nice little place and tend the garden on the weekend.
The reason films can be made by, and in some respects need to be made by large numbers of mobile freelancers is twofold:
Movies shoot in locations around the world, and a production company may find themselves in vastly different physical locations from film to film, requiring local talent to fill out the pool.
Movies are by-and-large made with very standardized technology, the Pananflex, HMIs, 10ks, there is a standard lingo for stardard equipment that make it possible for a freelancer from Boston to interact with a film crew from LA.
This didn't use to be the case, in the early years of film, the technology was very mutable, standards were still forming, very chaotic, and very creative. Things are now more formalized, and frequently formula-ized.
I doubt the game industry will find it self "shooting on location," so the first bit of the analogy falls flat.
As for the second, until graphics performance hit's it's peak (maybe it has), and it's widely regarded industry-wide that there is no percentage in building a new engine from scratch (some movement in that direction, re Doom/Unreal engine liscencing) you're not going to see the kind of standardization that allows a freelance workforce to interoperate seamlessly between companies.
As it currently stands, a worker becomes more valuable the longer he stays with a developer, and new people have a large amount of developer specific information to absorb before they can function.
As to which model, old Hollywood/new Hollywood, is to the advantage of the worker, well, that's a tougher call.
So, Diebold gets off with a half-assed apology, sorry about yer democracy, Mate! My bad!
And nobody on the federal level is making a fuss because...hmm, now I wonder why?
And it'll probably just tool along all status quo-y until...what? Massive, undeniable fraud? Some kind of grassroots "Hack the Vote" movement?
I think it was Heinlien that said, "It may be rigged, but it's the only game in town."
So keep the pressure on, and hope it makes a difference before November.
(Where's my EFF renewal form...)
"Is there a reason why right now 3DS seems to be the nearest to a standard we have..." Oh, I wouldn't say that.
But at 324 different formats, this guy is doing a pretty decent job of untangling the mess. It shareware, and windows only unfortunately.
Having written a LWO>STL/STL>LWO, my hat's off to anyone crazy enough to tackle a universal translator. Though he skipped the hard one; IGES. But at a thousand bucks for a copy of the spec, who can blame him?
The renaissance-theme wedding with 60+ guests in full costume, or my wife making a renaissance wedding website shortly there-after. Or making renaissance-theme jewelery + website shortly after that. But of course, I suspected she was a geek before we married.
is as someone reading you a bedtime story is to reading a book.
It not just that you don't control the flow when you're watching the tube, it's that you're getting someone reading you the news, which is about 10 times slower than reading it yourself.
Aggregate it, sort it, read it, goodbye.
Plus, as many here know, sometimes it is more interesting to read the reactions to a news story than it is to RTFA.
Wants to make sure I can get through an online experience with no ads at all.
I luv you, adblock!
Here are three packages that really help capture the feel of a face-to-face game:
GnuDorrito: A XML snack-food tracking and emulation package.
OpenLate: A software package that keeps out-of-character chatter enable on a random timer to simulate people arriving late for the game.
Scatalyser: Reinterprets everyday text and adds the appropriate amount of scatalogical humor. There is a bug that keeps the Scatalyser from working in the presence of women.
Why get one Loyalty Card when you can get four? Buy only meat with one, beverages with the other, staples with the third. Use the fourth to buy candy.
Take online surveys early and often. Make up answers. Subscribe to the National Review and Mother Jones. Send in product registration cards. Answer phone surveys in great, if totally made up detail.
If they want your information, bury them under a flood of useless data.
Our information is our own. If you want it, pay us for it, or live with crappy, spurious data.
...the sheer number of levels on which this is wrong.
Not only are there vast number of levels on which this is wrong, but other levels of wrongness are nested within those levels, and some of those are nested recursively.
Wrong.
Oh my god...what will this do to the Furry community? The mind boggles.
This travesty would never have happened, if only Bruce Willis had been born Canadian...
I do make games. Unfortunately, it's tricky to do raytraced soft-reflections on the Gameboy advance.
But I'll file "Bloody Gore-Ball" away for another day.
The ability to cheaply do reflection mapping means anything glossy now gets a perfectly focused reflection mapped on it, which looks cool for about 5 minutes, then starts to grate.
Reflections are rarely perfect. What a lot of these new games need to take the edge off is a blurred reflection.
Here's a test render I did a while back comparing hard & soft reflections: Chrome_Soft_test.jpg
Much like chrome was a craze back in the early days of pre-rendered CGI, these hard reflections in real-time graphics are about to jump the shark.
I sure many people have heard this story, but it bears repeating.
A reporter came to the home of Neils Bohr, and was shocked to find he had a horseshoe nailed above his entryway. He asked him how such a respected scientist could believe that such a thing would bring good luck.
Bohr replied, "I don't believe the superstition. But I am told it will bring me good luck whether I believe in it or not..."
I tend to think the same thing about people praying for me. Thank them for their consideration, and get on with your life.
"What if they're more tolerant, imaginative, dynamic, and funny than we are? What if their culture makes ours look sour and limited?"
Not the most awesome book ever written, but "Darwin's Radio" had a very interesting take on this. A good read.
(For calibration, I think the DaVinchi Code guy is a hack, much like Michael Crichton.)
Doom is a well established brand.
What can one do with a well established brand? Use it to sell new products by expanding the product line.
How does it usually go down?
1) The Quick Buck. Slap the brand name on any old piece of dreck, and shove it out the door. Short term profit, but long term damage to the brand.
2) The Smart Move. Create a new and interesting product that shares enough of the characteristics of the original product to legitimately claim the relationship, and leverage the power of the brand name to build a market for the new and interesting product. Short term profit, long term profit, and a boost to the brand image.
Yeah, you get a lot of #1. But #2 is a much better strategy.
...fails to cross my face.
"...so I don't want to get interested in the game at all."
I didn't find this to be a real danger with E&B. It's the first MMPOG I'd dabbled with since Asheron's Call. I played for about a month, but found it very difficult to bond with my spacecraft.
As avatars go, rather hard to empathize with. And since the humanoid avatar was only really a shopping and manufacturing interface, well, again, no big surprise it's closing down.
Now, WoW...that's another story. Must...resist...urge to throw life away on pretty game.
So, there's some technology that's going to make it more difficult and less rewarding to watch TV?
Yeah, I'll take some of that.
I was having a conversation with someone about this today.
Does anybody watch TV anymore? Aren't there more interesting things going on? Do people talk about TV shows at work, or is it games these days?
Is a Tivo full of "Dharma and Greg" really the key to eternal bliss?
Anyway, if someone wants a mutiny on a sinking ship, I say let him wear the captain's hat.
Maybe once you're in Canada, the thought of killing yourself for a cause seems less attractive,
I suspect it's the universal healthcare, and very tasty bread.
Micromoog;
Asuuming you're a taxpaying American consumer, you already have.
As for mine, I'm suggled safely between it and a hard place.
Technically, I think that would make you God's Advocate, which could be an important distinction, for billing purposes.
But yeah, race of hyper-intellegent rodents, not really getting my vote for the Bright Idea 2004 Sweepstakes.
I imagine walking out of the house one day into a giant springloaded trapped baited with porn and the latest ATI card.