Ooh, cool. Sounds like Pang, except being on the 2600 it must pre-date Pang by quite a bit.
Anyways tho, it sounds like you should check Pang out if you like that sort of thing - don't have a URL or anything, but someone must've written a Win or Linux clone by now. The basic idea with Pang is it's like a single-screen platformer with balls bouncing around. You have to avoid them, and you can shoot upwards at them.. hit one, and it splits, asteroids style.
It was originally (AFAIK) an arcade coin-op, but there were ports to a number of console/computer sytems.. I think it was around the 16 bit (ST/Amiga, etc) era. I'm pretty sure it's emulated by MAME, too.
Okay, how about a truly original (not to mention addictive) twist on Tetris
Triptych is kindasorta like Tetris, except you freely rotate the blocks (instead of in 90 degree increments), and it has physics. Yes, _physics_.. the blocks act like spongey rubber blocks, bouncing around and stuff. It's insanely fun to play - personally, I find it extremely easy, but that's kinda nice.. y'can take your brain off the hook and just enjoy the mad bouncy fun. And of course, it gets faster the further you get.
FWIW, it's from the same people who made Pontifex 1 and 2 - the bridge building games. Definately worth checking out.
if you like that, and happen to be a PalmOS PDA owner, check out SFCave which this heli game is basically a clone of. Be warned.. it's more addictive than crack. Oh, and don't bother trying the Java version on the page. it sux. PalmOS version is great tho:)
"It was followed with an incredibly poor sequel: Rainbow Islands, which as legend has it, was rushed to production in 2 weeks after the developers sat around doing nothing while they were being paid to do a Bubble Bobble sequel."
Wash your mouth out, filthy heathen!! Rainbow Islands was ace. I wore a hole in my hand with a Konix Navigator joystick I played it so much on my Atari ST.
Sure, the concept was guff, and it wasn't all that polished at first glance, but once you explored it's hidden depths - it had at LEAST twice as many secret bonuses, etc as Bubble Bobble.. Hell, even now I remember that every third enemy you killed gave you a special.. I think the order was red pot x 3 (extra rainbow), yellow pot (fast fire), trainers/sneakers (move fast), super-special.. and if you crushed an enemy with a rainbow they turned into a gem.. depending on where you crushed them, they'd fly a different way, and where they landed dictated the colour of the gem.. get 'em all, and you open the secret level... and on, and on..
I can't believe it was rushed in 2 weeks. To this day it remains one of the most secret packed arcade games I've ever played!
Anyways, yeah. Big long ramble, sorry. Just had to stick up for this much maligned game tho:)
"And when we connected with a modem, we had to flip a switch on the modem with our bare hands! 300 bits per second, BOTH WAYS, by thunder!"
Luxury! pure luxury! you younguns had it easy!
Back in my day there were no modems! you had to dial up on your phone, and use your voice to do the outgoing data (took me years to learn whalesong that well, it did), and your ears for incoming
Well, I actually got to use a top secret prototype of one of these things - it can replicate anything perfectly.
For testing purposes we scanned Bill Gates, and told it to print a copy. The copy looked identical to the original. On closer examination it turned out the clone was completely and utterly devoid of all traces of soul or humanity.
"yeah, they have argon in them, but they're also of a lower pressure than the air outside of them, a.k.a. being vaccuous inside."
For a moment I thought you said Aragorn rather than Argon.. then I remembered the LOTR plot that features Argon, Legless, and the hobbits trapped inside a lightbulb was only featured in the version of LOTR shown in Soviet Russia.
That was a tragically large setup for a really pathetic joke. That's what makes it so funny.
"Atari Lynx: Crappy color screen. Not much in terms of games. Not very portable and 6 AA's got you a whopping 3 hours of game play. System failed."
IIRC the Lynx was 16 bit, and could display something like 256 colours at a time from a palette of 4096
However, it also had a unique selling point amongst games systems - if you got the original Model 1 lynx like I did (the one shaped like a dog bone), it was big enough and heavy enough that you could use it to bludgeon a would-be assailant to death. Lynx-Fu!
"Ya i'm going to ride my segway to the health club where i will ride on a stationary bike."
Good grief, have you no sense?! All that time previously wasted on exercise machines can be a thing of the past now. Don't you see? Why expend sweat and effort running on a treadmill when you can Segway on a treadmill?
Furthermore, I propose immediate research into electric powered exercise bicycles. It's simply unacceptable that so many man-hours are wasted every day across the world by people pedalling hard to get nowhere. If the process was automatic, they could do something useful, like watch wrestling on TV from the comfort of their armchair, while the machine cycled itself in another room.
Moderators: I may be making a subtle and cynical point about this whole thing.. or I might just be stupid. The decision is yours.
Okay, right now the segway is an overpriced lard transporter, but once it gets past the stage of being an early adopter thing, think of the possibilities!.. these things could bring about a whole renaissance of chariot racing!
C'mon, you know you love the idea of tearing down the street on one of these things - or at least, trundling down the street - razor-sharp wheelblades glinting in the sunlight, whip in hand, dressed in your finest mock-roman armour (yes, there's a U an armour, dammit. I'm british), ramming the other gladiators - sorry - Segway riders - out of the way while the crowds cheer your name...
Well, you have to admit, it would be interesting:)
And for the sake of not totally wasting this comment on rambling nonsense, two other things come to mind about this:
Firstly, the stuff on the guy's website about the Segway replacing his second car was pretty interesting - he jogs every morning.. but the Segway lets him jog when he chooses and ride the rest of the time, instead of being forced to jog to work, or whatever - sounds pretty sensible to me..
But then it falls down with all the near cultlike worship of the Segway team. I mean, this isn't anything new - there are plenty of those around here who worship Linus, or even Bill (you know who you are).. but rarely with such a degree of fervor.. to quote just one bit of the diary:
"everyone at segway ht is part of the vision, the trainers, marketers, product development teams, to dean kamen himself; you get the immediate feeling that what you're part of isn't just another form of transportation but an evolution of our species and maybe society."
"I agree that it is unfortunate that he didn't make the source available"
Uhm.. Did you look at the guy's page? Right below the compiled version download is the source download.. hell, he even recommends that you download the source rather than the precomp version.
I have to agree with this. We've already seen it in films...
I'm not a big movie-watcher, so my timeline might be a bit skewed here, but it's the general idea I want to get across...
Roughly 10 or so years ago, special effects really took off in films. They'd always been around, of course, but this was the first time we started seeing REALLY big explosions, and stuff. Namely, cool CG effects.
Suddenly, the film industry goes ga-ga over this stuff. Plots degenerate into vehicles to carry the viewer from one extravagant CG set piece to the next.
This is about where we are with games right now. With a few rare exceptions, games are largely built on their "WOW factor" at the moment. Plots, characterisation, 'artisticness' don't figure into it that much right now. Sorta like ID4, or Die Hard With More Big Car Chases And Stuff.
Then people started getting sick of these films. They're still around, of course, but less frequently. Now, we're less likely to see CG in moves - not because it isn't there, but because it's used as a tool, to benefit the rest of the movie. Used invisibly, to create that army of 10,000 your scene needs, or.. well, you know what I mean. Basically, films are no longer about CG effects. The CG effects are just another useful tool in the filmmakers tool box.
And hopefully, in a few years, we'll reach a similar point with games - super special effects (graphics engines, physics, etc, etc) will become so commonplace that it'll no longer be enough to get sales. So game developers will start turning to other selling points - plots, characterisation, and so on.
I think something that hasn't been properly defined here is exactly what we mean by "adult" or "mature" gaming. Let's look at the parallels in the film world, shall we?
Given that the term "adult" tends to bring to mind movies like "Shaving Ryan's Privates" or "Jurassic Pork 7", I'll deal with "mature" in this post.
So, what constitutes a "mature" film? Generally, I would consider it to mean anything that is not suitable for children.. so, to name a couple of examples: Hellraiser (horror/gore), Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas (drugs/language), and.... 2001: A Space Oddysea.
Whaaat?
This is my point. While I can't see anyone having any reasonable objections to letting a kid watch 2001, it is not a film targetted at kids. It won't harm them, and they won't see anything offensive, upsetting, or disturbing. Chances are they just won't fully understand the film either.
My point in all this is basically that "mature" doesn't have to mean gore-fest or pornographic. It can also mean that it's aimed at a level of understanding that would go over the heads of many kids.
OTOH that's likely to also mean it'll go right over a large number of adults heads, too, but there you go.
"Oooookaaaay. So those of use who used consoles in the 70's don't count? You truly want a pioneer, try Ralph Baer, Nolan Bushnell or Wally Higginbotham. Miyamoto is a great designer, but he stands on the shoulders of others."
Yeah, really. As limitless as my admiration for Miyamoto is, he didn't singlehandedly invent videogames. The Wired article would have you believe he came up with the first ever 3D game in Mario 64 - okay, it doesn't say that expressly, but it kinda implies it. Indeed, that line about the first Mario Bros game being the first game so complex it had to be mapped is.. questionable...
If it refers to mapping as in the actual tile map that made up the levels in the game.. well, yeah, okay then. It possibly was the first like that,, but it wasn't the first game with a complex environment for the player to explore - hey, don't forget those ol' text adventures. ADVENT(ure) on the TRS-80, anyone? (and I don't mean none of yer new fangled CoCo rubbish here.. Model I only;P)
Uh. I think my train of thought was just derailed rather messily.. so in summary...
I think the line is drawn at the twelve button mark. If you have more than 12 buttons on your mouse and joystick combined, it's a gaming console.
In that case the Atari Jaguar was a supercomputer! it's joypad had at least 7148 buttons. And it was roughly the size of yer average office building. And you could trick your friends into trying to make phone calls on it!
A disproportionately high percentage of Death Row inmates are black.
It's extremely common for Death Row inmates to live on D.R. for several years before execution.
In any trial in which the death sentence is a possible or likely outcome, any potential jurors who are opposed to the death penalty are removed from the jury, thereby creating a jury far more likely to push for the death penalty.
Despite the US telling the rest of the world it is illegal to do so, the US have on multiple occasions sentenced under-18's to death.
These facts are all given as best as possible from memory. I do not have the sources to hand, nor can I promise that they're 100% accurate. I'm also not an American. However, even if I'm a bit off with some of these, there are definately issues with the death sentence, and if you're interested in them, these are a good place to start.
"...second, that playing on a TV is way better than emulation"
You wot? Since when were emulation and playing on a TV mutually exclusive?.. I relive the joys of NES, Snes, Mastersystem, Megadrive (Genesis to all you American folks), and countless other systems - MAME, too, of course, on my telly, via emulators, and my graphics card's TV-out.
The hardest thing, IMO, is getting hold of a decent joypad for the PC. Maybe I'm just picky, but there doesn't seem to be a really good one out there. However, there are many ways to convert original console joypads to work with the PC.. and of course, if you've got the cash for it, there's the X-Arcade, too.
There will be two versions. The regular DVD, and the Collectors Edition Boxed Set, which contains an additional disc with "The making of", directors commentary, the missing JFK footage, and the definitive answer to whether there's a god.
It never does fail, The rule is 'I' before 'E', Except after 'C'. Except when sounded like "A" as in neighbor and reign.
Actually, it does fail when you throw "weird" at it. E before I, and no C, or A. So.. uh.. nerr-nerr-ner-nerr-nerr
Unless of course I missed another part of it which covers that case. In which event, this post is a forgery. By aliens. Big green ones, with bug-eyes, 'n everything.
or what if your house was buried in HTML tags.. Worse still, buried under a mountain of  's!
Re:could this be the xbox "killer app"?
on
Xbox Live Goes Online
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is the 1.0 product, though. Microsoft doesn't even come close to getting it right until 4.0 or 5.0...
Actually, this comment, depending on how it was intended may not be the flamebait it's been modded down as (-1, flamebait at time of writing)
There is an old saying that Microsoft don't get things right until version 3, and to my knowledge it's one that many in Microsoft themselves hold true. This, of course, poses an interesting problem for the XBox, and, to a lesser degree, XBox live (which is more tweakable as time goes on), in that it's largely a one-shot deal.
Of course, even if the X does totally flop, MS can go to v2 anyway, with XBox 2, but I think they'd really rather avoid that situation.
Right now, the X is looking fairly ill, and like it could well head the way of the Jaguar/Dreamcast, if it weren't for the fact that MS can afford to keep it afloat through it's bad times, and the fact that there's some really promising looking stuff on the horizon (including Xbox Live) - possibly not enough to save it, but just maybe.
Just so's to keep bias accusations out of this, I don't own any of the current gen of consoles (XBox, GC, PS2), however, I've been watching the "console war" with some interest
That PS2 will be victorious, there is little doubt.. However, until recently I'd been fairly certain that GC would come out as #2, and the XBox would either disappear all together, or find some kind of niche following...
Lately, I'm starting to think that's turning around - not yet, but quality GC software releases seem to be slowing a little, and as I already said, there's some interesting sounding stuff on the horizon for the XBox.
No, I don't really care about this whole story either, but this guy has gone to the trouble of translating it for everyone, and it makes a hell of a lot more sense than the google translation someone else posted, so c'mon, spread the love (mod points) around, people.
You buy stuff from the high tech planets, and sell it to the low tech ones, thus making a nice profit along the way. Just watch out for those damn cat-people-things.
Slashdot Mirror
Ooh, cool. Sounds like Pang, except being on the 2600 it must pre-date Pang by quite a bit.
Anyways tho, it sounds like you should check Pang out if you like that sort of thing - don't have a URL or anything, but someone must've written a Win or Linux clone by now. The basic idea with Pang is it's like a single-screen platformer with balls bouncing around. You have to avoid them, and you can shoot upwards at them.. hit one, and it splits, asteroids style.
It was originally (AFAIK) an arcade coin-op, but there were ports to a number of console/computer sytems.. I think it was around the 16 bit (ST/Amiga, etc) era. I'm pretty sure it's emulated by MAME, too.
Okay, how about a truly original (not to mention addictive) twist on Tetris
Triptych is kindasorta like Tetris, except you freely rotate the blocks (instead of in 90 degree increments), and it has physics. Yes, _physics_.. the blocks act like spongey rubber blocks, bouncing around and stuff. It's insanely fun to play - personally, I find it extremely easy, but that's kinda nice.. y'can take your brain off the hook and just enjoy the mad bouncy fun. And of course, it gets faster the further you get.
FWIW, it's from the same people who made Pontifex 1 and 2 - the bridge building games. Definately worth checking out.
if you like that, and happen to be a PalmOS PDA owner, check out SFCave which this heli game is basically a clone of. Be warned.. it's more addictive than crack. Oh, and don't bother trying the Java version on the page. it sux. PalmOS version is great tho :)
"It was followed with an incredibly poor sequel: Rainbow Islands, which as legend has it, was rushed to production in 2 weeks after the developers sat around doing nothing while they were being paid to do a Bubble Bobble sequel."
:)
Wash your mouth out, filthy heathen!!
Rainbow Islands was ace. I wore a hole in my hand with a Konix Navigator joystick I played it so much on my Atari ST.
Sure, the concept was guff, and it wasn't all that polished at first glance, but once you explored it's hidden depths - it had at LEAST twice as many secret bonuses, etc as Bubble Bobble.. Hell, even now I remember that every third enemy you killed gave you a special.. I think the order was red pot x 3 (extra rainbow), yellow pot (fast fire), trainers/sneakers (move fast), super-special.. and if you crushed an enemy with a rainbow they turned into a gem.. depending on where you crushed them, they'd fly a different way, and where they landed dictated the colour of the gem.. get 'em all, and you open the secret level... and on, and on..
I can't believe it was rushed in 2 weeks. To this day it remains one of the most secret packed arcade games I've ever played!
Anyways, yeah. Big long ramble, sorry. Just had to stick up for this much maligned game tho
"... The results were simple: Apple hardware does not perform as quickly as MS hardware with similar software tasks."
Good grief, I wasn't particularly surprised by the Alienware laptop outrunning a Mac, but it was even outperformed by an XBox? That's pretty harsh!
"educational purposes". Think about it.
I think it means
"Static exhibition and [static] educational purposes only"
rather than
"Static exhibition [purposes], and educational purposes only"
"And when we connected with a modem, we had to flip a switch on the modem with our bare hands! 300 bits per second, BOTH WAYS, by thunder!"
Luxury! pure luxury! you younguns had it easy!
Back in my day there were no modems! you had to dial up on your phone, and use your voice to do the outgoing data (took me years to learn whalesong that well, it did), and your ears for incoming
Well, I actually got to use a top secret prototype of one of these things - it can replicate anything perfectly.
For testing purposes we scanned Bill Gates, and told it to print a copy. The copy looked identical to the original. On closer examination it turned out the clone was completely and utterly devoid of all traces of soul or humanity.
In other words, a 100% perfect copy.
"yeah, they have argon in them, but they're also of a lower pressure than the air outside of them, a.k.a. being vaccuous inside."
For a moment I thought you said Aragorn rather than Argon.. then I remembered the LOTR plot that features Argon, Legless, and the hobbits trapped inside a lightbulb was only featured in the version of LOTR shown in Soviet Russia.
That was a tragically large setup for a really pathetic joke. That's what makes it so funny.
"Atari Lynx: Crappy color screen. Not much in terms of games. Not very portable and 6 AA's got you a whopping 3 hours of game play. System failed."
IIRC the Lynx was 16 bit, and could display something like 256 colours at a time from a palette of 4096
However, it also had a unique selling point amongst games systems - if you got the original Model 1 lynx like I did (the one shaped like a dog bone), it was big enough and heavy enough that you could use it to bludgeon a would-be assailant to death. Lynx-Fu!
"Ya i'm going to ride my segway to the health club where i will ride on a stationary bike."
Good grief, have you no sense?!
All that time previously wasted on exercise machines can be a thing of the past now. Don't you see? Why expend sweat and effort running on a treadmill when you can Segway on a treadmill?
Furthermore, I propose immediate research into electric powered exercise bicycles. It's simply unacceptable that so many man-hours are wasted every day across the world by people pedalling hard to get nowhere. If the process was automatic, they could do something useful, like watch wrestling on TV from the comfort of their armchair, while the machine cycled itself in another room.
Moderators: I may be making a subtle and cynical point about this whole thing.. or I might just be stupid. The decision is yours.
Okay, right now the segway is an overpriced lard transporter, but once it gets past the stage of being an early adopter thing, think of the possibilities!.. these things could bring about a whole renaissance of chariot racing!
:)
C'mon, you know you love the idea of tearing down the street on one of these things - or at least, trundling down the street - razor-sharp wheelblades glinting in the sunlight, whip in hand, dressed in your finest mock-roman armour (yes, there's a U an armour, dammit. I'm british), ramming the other gladiators - sorry - Segway riders - out of the way while the crowds cheer your name...
Well, you have to admit, it would be interesting
And for the sake of not totally wasting this comment on rambling nonsense, two other things come to mind about this:
Firstly, the stuff on the guy's website about the Segway replacing his second car was pretty interesting - he jogs every morning.. but the Segway lets him jog when he chooses and ride the rest of the time, instead of being forced to jog to work, or whatever - sounds pretty sensible to me..
But then it falls down with all the near cultlike worship of the Segway team. I mean, this isn't anything new - there are plenty of those around here who worship Linus, or even Bill (you know who you are).. but rarely with such a degree of fervor.. to quote just one bit of the diary:
"everyone at segway ht is part of the vision, the trainers, marketers, product development teams, to dean kamen himself; you get the immediate feeling that what you're part of isn't just another form of transportation but an evolution of our species and maybe society."
A bit much, don'tcha think?
"I agree that it is unfortunate that he didn't make the source available"
Uhm.. Did you look at the guy's page?
Right below the compiled version download is the source download.. hell, he even recommends that you download the source rather than the precomp version.
page is at:
http://members.lycos.co.uk/hostintheshell/
in case you didn't see it elsewhere
I have to agree with this. We've already seen it in films...
I'm not a big movie-watcher, so my timeline might be a bit skewed here, but it's the general idea I want to get across...
Roughly 10 or so years ago, special effects really took off in films. They'd always been around, of course, but this was the first time we started seeing REALLY big explosions, and stuff. Namely, cool CG effects.
Suddenly, the film industry goes ga-ga over this stuff. Plots degenerate into vehicles to carry the viewer from one extravagant CG set piece to the next.
This is about where we are with games right now. With a few rare exceptions, games are largely built on their "WOW factor" at the moment. Plots, characterisation, 'artisticness' don't figure into it that much right now. Sorta like ID4, or Die Hard With More Big Car Chases And Stuff.
Then people started getting sick of these films. They're still around, of course, but less frequently. Now, we're less likely to see CG in moves - not because it isn't there, but because it's used as a tool, to benefit the rest of the movie. Used invisibly, to create that army of 10,000 your scene needs, or.. well, you know what I mean. Basically, films are no longer about CG effects. The CG effects are just another useful tool in the filmmakers tool box.
And hopefully, in a few years, we'll reach a similar point with games - super special effects (graphics engines, physics, etc, etc) will become so commonplace that it'll no longer be enough to get sales. So game developers will start turning to other selling points - plots, characterisation, and so on.
I think something that hasn't been properly defined here is exactly what we mean by "adult" or "mature" gaming. Let's look at the parallels in the film world, shall we?
Given that the term "adult" tends to bring to mind movies like "Shaving Ryan's Privates" or "Jurassic Pork 7", I'll deal with "mature" in this post.
So, what constitutes a "mature" film? Generally, I would consider it to mean anything that is not suitable for children.. so, to name a couple of examples: Hellraiser (horror/gore), Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas (drugs/language), and.... 2001: A Space Oddysea.
Whaaat?
This is my point. While I can't see anyone having any reasonable objections to letting a kid watch 2001, it is not a film targetted at kids. It won't harm them, and they won't see anything offensive, upsetting, or disturbing. Chances are they just won't fully understand the film either.
My point in all this is basically that "mature" doesn't have to mean gore-fest or pornographic. It can also mean that it's aimed at a level of understanding that would go over the heads of many kids.
OTOH that's likely to also mean it'll go right over a large number of adults heads, too, but there you go.
"Oooookaaaay. So those of use who used consoles in the 70's don't count? You truly want a pioneer, try Ralph Baer, Nolan Bushnell or Wally Higginbotham. Miyamoto is a great designer, but he stands on the shoulders of others."
;P)
Yeah, really.
As limitless as my admiration for Miyamoto is, he didn't singlehandedly invent videogames. The Wired article would have you believe he came up with the first ever 3D game in Mario 64 - okay, it doesn't say that expressly, but it kinda implies it. Indeed, that line about the first Mario Bros game being the first game so complex it had to be mapped is.. questionable...
If it refers to mapping as in the actual tile map that made up the levels in the game.. well, yeah, okay then. It possibly was the first like that,, but it wasn't the first game with a complex environment for the player to explore - hey, don't forget those ol' text adventures. ADVENT(ure) on the TRS-80, anyone? (and I don't mean none of yer new fangled CoCo rubbish here.. Model I only
Uh. I think my train of thought was just derailed rather messily.. so in summary...
Miyamoto. Great guy. But not *THAT* great.
I think the line is drawn at the twelve button mark. If you have more than 12 buttons on your mouse and joystick combined, it's a gaming console.
In that case the Atari Jaguar was a supercomputer! it's joypad had at least 7148 buttons. And it was roughly the size of yer average office building. And you could trick your friends into trying to make phone calls on it!
Ahh, they don't make 'em like they used to.
Some other interesting facts about Death Row.
A disproportionately high percentage of Death Row inmates are black.
It's extremely common for Death Row inmates to live on D.R. for several years before execution.
In any trial in which the death sentence is a possible or likely outcome, any potential jurors who are opposed to the death penalty are removed from the jury, thereby creating a jury far more likely to push for the death penalty.
Despite the US telling the rest of the world it is illegal to do so, the US have on multiple occasions sentenced under-18's to death.
These facts are all given as best as possible from memory. I do not have the sources to hand, nor can I promise that they're 100% accurate. I'm also not an American. However, even if I'm a bit off with some of these, there are definately issues with the death sentence, and if you're interested in them, these are a good place to start.
"...second, that playing on a TV is way better than emulation"
You wot? Since when were emulation and playing on a TV mutually exclusive?.. I relive the joys of NES, Snes, Mastersystem, Megadrive (Genesis to all you American folks), and countless other systems - MAME, too, of course, on my telly, via emulators, and my graphics card's TV-out.
The hardest thing, IMO, is getting hold of a decent joypad for the PC. Maybe I'm just picky, but there doesn't seem to be a really good one out there. However, there are many ways to convert original console joypads to work with the PC.. and of course, if you've got the cash for it, there's the X-Arcade, too.
There will be two versions. The regular DVD, and the Collectors Edition Boxed Set, which contains an additional disc with "The making of", directors commentary, the missing JFK footage, and the definitive answer to whether there's a god.
It never does fail,
The rule is 'I' before 'E',
Except after 'C'.
Except when sounded like "A" as in neighbor and reign.
Actually, it does fail when you throw "weird" at it. E before I, and no C, or A. So.. uh.. nerr-nerr-ner-nerr-nerr
Unless of course I missed another part of it which covers that case. In which event, this post is a forgery. By aliens. Big green ones, with bug-eyes, 'n everything.
or what if your house was buried in HTML tags.. Worse still, buried under a mountain of  's!
This is the 1.0 product, though. Microsoft doesn't even come close to getting it right until 4.0 or 5.0...
Actually, this comment, depending on how it was intended may not be the flamebait it's been modded down as (-1, flamebait at time of writing)
There is an old saying that Microsoft don't get things right until version 3, and to my knowledge it's one that many in Microsoft themselves hold true. This, of course, poses an interesting problem for the XBox, and, to a lesser degree, XBox live (which is more tweakable as time goes on), in that it's largely a one-shot deal.
Of course, even if the X does totally flop, MS can go to v2 anyway, with XBox 2, but I think they'd really rather avoid that situation.
Right now, the X is looking fairly ill, and like it could well head the way of the Jaguar/Dreamcast, if it weren't for the fact that MS can afford to keep it afloat through it's bad times, and the fact that there's some really promising looking stuff on the horizon (including Xbox Live) - possibly not enough to save it, but just maybe.
Just so's to keep bias accusations out of this, I don't own any of the current gen of consoles (XBox, GC, PS2), however, I've been watching the "console war" with some interest
That PS2 will be victorious, there is little doubt.. However, until recently I'd been fairly certain that GC would come out as #2, and the XBox would either disappear all together, or find some kind of niche following...
Lately, I'm starting to think that's turning around - not yet, but quality GC software releases seem to be slowing a little, and as I already said, there's some interesting sounding stuff on the horizon for the XBox.
Mod parent up as informative, please.
No, I don't really care about this whole story either, but this guy has gone to the trouble of translating it for everyone, and it makes a hell of a lot more sense than the google translation someone else posted, so c'mon, spread the love (mod points) around, people.
You never played Elite, did you?
You buy stuff from the high tech planets, and sell it to the low tech ones, thus making a nice profit along the way. Just watch out for those damn cat-people-things.