That's all well and good, but I ask you to look around your office/house. How much of what you see is made locally, even if we call "locally" the country you reside in.
Lets just look at my desk. I can't imagine that any of the electronics on it were manufactured here, so monitor, keyboard, mouse, phone, speakers, , microphone, and computer memory I haven't installed are out. The one coffee mug that has a "made in" statement on it was made in Thailand, and the rest were probably made in Asia. My Page-a-day calendar was manufactured in the USA, that's one. Blank CDs and DVDs weren't made here. Last night's beer bottle sitting here was imported. Even my iced tea was made in Canada. The GBA game was made in Japan. The comb, was made in China, as was the wine glass that has "Boston Wine Expo" on it, oddly enough.
So tell me again why looking at things that were made locally, with local materials is a good measure again? The ONLY time I can be reasonably sure of buying something made in America is buying food at a restaurant (which I will generously label McDonalds for the purposes of this conversation) since it's made within 50 feet of me, hence, in America.
If you want a retrospective of Castlevania in your magazine, you're far better off just publishing a link to the Wikipedia article. This is crap. At least on Wikipedia, people who post opinions as "well known facts" get yelled at, and their articles marked up with "needs to be sourced" or just straight up removed.
They did the same thing (release a timed public beta of iChat (though I don't think Boot Camp is timed at all, wouldn't make sense)) for Jaguar, and offered Jaguar users the software for $30, but that if came free in Panther. No one went ballistic , and people just used something else, or bought/installed a friend's copy of Panther. I can't imagine Apple sold more than a double handful of iChat Jaguar licenses. Not that iChat is particularly GOOD, but from what I hear, Boot Camp isn't especially good either. Most of the people I deal with that run windows on their Macs run it under Parallels, which is a whole lot easier in all kinds of ways, starting with not requiring a reboot to get to whatever else you need. Unless you're gaming with it (and I do know a few people that do that) Parallels performs quite well running Office and other normal apps, even on a low-end Macbook. If for some reason you don't want to buy Leopard (and that's certainly quite reasonable, I generally wait until I don't have any other choice to upgrade my Macs. I'd be running Panther on my Intel iMac if I could) but want a fully supported, non-beta version of Boot Camp, this lets you just pay $30 instead of $130 to get the one feature you care about.
Linux, as far as I recall, doesn't require Boot Camp to run on an Intel Mac (though please correct me if I'm wrong, I could've sworn I'd seen stories about Linux running happily on Intel macs well before Boot Camp was released) so who cares if Apple makes people pay for Boot Camp? If you need Linux to the point where simply recompiling your apps to work under OS X-with-X11 is a burden, why the hell do you have OS X installed? Mail.app isn't that killer. Also, no one I've seen is saying that you can't continue to use the current Boot Camp beta. It just won't be supported, and isn't really supported now, so what's the difference? I can't see how Apple could remotely turn it off.
True, but I would recommend that anyone not doing legitimate business in America do their damndest not to actually enter the country, especially when such a highly publicized law is passed making what you're doing illegal in the US. If I'm a well-known advocate for democracy or human rights in China, taking a connecting flight through Beijing would be pretty damn stupid, don't you think? Especially when the "ambush at connecting flights" tactic has been used with a lot of publicity once before.
Personally, I really do hope that a lot fewer people travel to the US because of laws like this. Eventually, this idiocy will get overturned because the economic impact will push the businessmen that run this country to get it changed. And if not, it'll be easier to get asylum in some saner country once things get too bad to handle in the US. If no one wants to travel here, few must actually want to live here.
Happens to be what I do, so I'm biased, but I've worked the other side.
When I was working salaried. "the customer" was not punished for wasting my time with stupidities. They had every waking hour of my time thanks to the fact that I received a salary, and their attitude didn't help my attitude toward them. That kind of thing will very quickly cause a confrontational attitude to spark up.
Now that I do this freelance, if someone wants me to hold their hand, they pay me 75-90 dollars per hour, plus a minimum of 1 hour travel time for it. Personally, I don't mind doing basic hand-holding at that kind of pay rate, and unless that customer happens to be quite rich (luckily, I have one or two of them) the prospect of handing over a small stack of $10 bills every hour tends to get them to work quite hard at trying to figure out how to do things right themselves. The fact that my time is being compensated pretty handsomely goes a long way to making me much more willing to be helpful, which in general (there are a few bad eggs who I just don't deal with without up-front money, or just not at all) causes my clients to be a lot more grateful. No corporate drone ever gave a damn that I fixed their problem. They were just angry with me for screwing it up in the first place somehow. I can't see myself ever willingly going back to the big corporate environment, where people can order me around just because I'm salaried. Irregularity of pay is more than made up for much higher satisfaction, on my and my customers part.
China's government has every reason to be paranoid.
They have a massive, restless, and incredibly impoverished rural population that could crush the Chinese Communist Party if it ever decided that enough is enough, and revolution is at hand. The geography we currently call China has had a very long, and very bloody history of conflict. Sun-Tzu and all the rest of the famous Chinese military theorists were born out of that period in Chinese history. If you've ever played Romance of the Three Kingdoms, or the Dynasty Warriors games, that period is what those games are set in. The analogies are legion to represent the kind of balancing act the Communists have to undergo to keep China looking like what we think China really is. Even in the video games that you get out of China that are about Chinese history, that period is presented like a civil conflict, not wars between sovereign states. My guess being that while the powers that be can't erase the powerful legendary figures and the hold they have on the dreams of the Chinese people, they certainly can work to make sure that what they think those legends and stories should teach is what gets taught.
I've no plans to buy an Xbox or a PS3 for only reasons of price. $500 as the minimum cost of entry for a system and one game is just nuts. I can't afford it, and I won't bother with it. There's nothing inherent that I will get out of either of those systems over the Xbox and PS2 that I own now, other than the derision of my friends, that I spent a pile of money I could've spent on food or rent on those. I'm sure the games are great, and I wouldn't mind owning one, but they're not worth that, no matter how many fools are willing to overpay for it.
I'd like to get a Wii, and I have a reasonable chance of both affording and getting my hands on one at some point soon. However, right now, I'm actually considering getting a new GBA SP, because I have a lot of games I like for GBA, and an SP is a lot easier to carry around than even the new DS Lite (and a lot easier than my original recipe DS). And a second PS2 to backup my current box, so I can play all the good PS2 games that are now showing up in bargain bins before they become collectors items. Once the price comes down to something resembling reasonable, I'll get a PS3, and maybe even an Xbox 360, but it's got a LONG way to fall before it gets there.
Our society considers it right and proper for everyone to carry a device designed to defend against other people killing us.
No, actually the device is designed to cause grievous harm to people or objects it's aimed at, possibly fatal if aimed appropriately for that purpose. A device designed to "defend against" people killing me would be a device that has no effect other than to neutralize an incoming attack. If someone develops the personal force field (ala Dune), and I carry it to avoid people killing me with firearms, I can't suddenly go after someone with it and kill them. OK, maybe I can, but I can suddenly go after someone with a hairbrush and kill them with it too, but it wasn't designed for that, and you've got to be a bit ingenious to pull it off.
A gun is not a defensive weapon. There are no defensive weapons, because weapons are designed to harm/kill by definition. The only defense anyone gets from owning a weapon, is from the mutually assured destruction principle, just on a smaller scale than the nukes we're used to that principle being applied to. Even land mines, which theoretically do not detonate unless someone moves to attack you, end up being an attack on the people in general when the conflict they were employed in is over, and you get farmers or hikers blowing themselves up just by tilling the land or going for a healthy stroll.
I support the right of gun ownership. I own none, but this country is getting to the point where I'm considering getting one, despite my SO's hatred of them. However, I think the people like you, that claim that owning a firearm is simply for defense and not for killing anyone are either ignorant or lying. If I end up purchasing a gun, it will be because I might be forced to kill someone before they can kill me, not so I can magically block the attacks of other people against me like I'm in some video game.
When asked whether Sony's resurgent strength as a console games publisher was pushing the company to shun exclusives, Tretton denied it. "We're the only company in this industry that's got development resources and talent that have established Number one hits on all three continents," he says, which is true, since the bulk of Microsoft's studios are in North America and Europe, while Nintendo's are concentrated in Japan. "We really feel like we're well positioned to contribute platform-defining games from a first-party standpoint, and we're not dependent on third-party community to the degree that a Microsoft would be.
Wasn't the line for why the GameCube wasn't the #1 console, and the reason the Dreamcast died exactly that kind of talk?
No, most people these days that call themselves atheists are really anti-theists. Specifically, they believe that there is no deity, and believe that those who do believe in it are sick/damaged/misinformed in some way and need to be brought over to the right side. Evangelical anti-theists. Real atheists ought not care an awful lot whether Fred next door believes in the Flying Pasta Monster, or Jesus, or whatever damn fool thing he feels like believing, as long as he doesn't try and force his beliefs on others. These so called atheists do care, and believe they need to stop people from believing in a god. Sounds like a belief system to me.
You have no idea. One of these days I'm going to get off my rear and work out a complete list of the Star Wars parallels and references in FFIX, completely aside from the fact that it feels like they merged Knights of the Old Republic with a FF game to get the game as it is (not that it's bad, there are just tons of obvious similarities).
The opening cutscene might as well have been patched from Episodes 1-3 of the Star Wars movies. The cutscene where Balthier's ship lifts off from Rabanastre is damn near frame for frame the Millenium Falcon's escape from Mos Eisley, even in manner the ship takes off into the sky. The capital city of the Empire is so obviously Coruscant. You have Cloud City, with the apparent cooperation of the leader of it that's actually secretly helping the rebels. And those are just the blatantly obvious parts. So much for just having two characters named Biggs and Wedge somewhere in there. I'm not sure if it's homage or theft, but I'm leaning toward homage.
If Lieberman actually officially switched to a Republican party affiliation, it would be his last term in office.
He talked long and hard about caucusing with the Democrats in order to convince enough Democrats that a vote to keep him in wouldn't be a vote for the Republican party. If he betrayed that, so blatantly, he'd be committing political suicide. Politicians break promises all the time, but most of the time they don't survive as blatant a betrayal as a party switch would be for him.
And Lieberman doesn't have a hell of a lot to gain by switching. Democrats don't NEED the Senate nearly as much since they have the House. They have their roadblock, since Bush is likely to become fond of his veto pen. Lieberman will theoretically keep his seniority and place in line for committee chairmanships if he caucuses with the Democrats (and nothing really stops him from just rejoining the Democratic party, just like Jeffords pitched his Republican party affiliation). The Republicans would basically have to offer him a leadership post in order for him to gain anything in the move, and even then it would be a close thing for that to be a gain, since it would piss an awful lot of people off on both sides.
Right now, Lieberman needs the Democrats to like him more than the Democrats need to make nice with him. It's certainly in their interest to keep him caucusing with them, but not at any cost.
Depends on your definition of a social life. Technically, your time playing WoW is part of your social life. It certainly is for me. I would much rather spend time raiding after work than going to a bar, a club, or whatever. Sure, I ought to get more exercise than I do, but so do the college students and others who I see getting trashed nightly around here. Many of them, the only exercise they appear to get is holding their dead drunk partner up on the way to the car, or running by at 1AM screaming because they're too drunk to care. Social indeed. Been there, done that, glad I got the hell over it, thank you. I have friends I hang out with, but I do that on off nights. They themselves don't play WoW, but they don't have a hell of a lot of time to hang out either, since they're married, have kids, work too much to make ends meet, and have their own hobbies. And most of their hobbies are other games in any case, since my personal circle of friends met up at a local arcade/bar/pool hall years ago. My fiancee is a gamer, she just doesn't play WoW.
As far as outside life, it sure sounds like he's got plenty of outside life to me. Getting a Masters isn't exactly a cakewalk, especially with a part time job tacked on (my fiancee is finishing her doctorate, I've seen it). If he did all that while playing WoW in class, etc, I would be shocked. I'm in a raiding guild that raids only 3-4 hours a day. I've got plenty of time to make a real dinner, watch a movie, do whatever before the raid starts. We do all the big stuff save AQ40/Naxx, because we haven't got the regular numbers, but we're getting there.
As far as I can tell, the only thing the original writer is in a state of denial over, is your standing to comment on his state. Your anecdotes are no more proof than his or mine. Mostly because there isn't anything to prove. You can say my "social life" is damaging and unhealthy, and I could just as easily provide arguments that yours is as well.
Jet Grind Radio is great, but there are a few others you might want to check out.
1. Toy Commander. Probably the best single player game on the Dreamcast. I've probably put in more playtime on this game than World of Warcraft over the years. It's just that good. Don't let the "kiddie" theme fool you.
2. Super Magnetic Neo. EXTREMELY cheesy art style, mixed with the hardest 3d platformer ever. If you're a real platformer junkie, you need to pick this game up. If you beat this, you've really accomplished something.
3. Record of Lodoss War. As far as RPGs go, the Dreamcast is pretty light on them, and this is one of the best. Diablo-style. I admit to being biased, since I love the anime that the game is based on, but it's still a good game.
4. Shenmue of course was a one of a kind game. The game that got me to buy the dreamcast. You should be able to find it pretty cheaply, since they made a billion copies. Something you definitely should play at least once, even if you don't slog your way through to the end (I still haven't).
5. Skies of Arcadia. If you don't have a GameCube, and you play RPGs at all, you really owe it to yourself to find a copy of this for the Dreamcast. It's still the best console RPG I've ever played. A plot that was actually translated well. Characters that were actually likable. At the time, the graphics were as good as it got for a CRPG. And a well done, complex battle system that requires a bit of thought to master, but isn't so brain bashingly hard you'll put it down.
Honorable mention to a few nifty games: Armada, Cannon Spike (merely because of how hard to find it is), Carrier, Wacky Races.
No, a competent technical person should damn well be able to know what THEIR computer is doing at all times, at least as far as network access is concerned, and that's the concern when it comes to botnets.
If you lack the ability or knowledge to monitor what your computer is doing on a network it's connected to, you've got no business being called technical. A packet sniffer on the network isn't affected by a rootkit on . Simple access rules on a consumer grade router can cut off access to any particular IP space you don't personally use or find suspicious, and are utterly unaffected by a rootkit on its local network.
No, Joe Average can't do that, but any reasonably computer savvy person can install Linux on a junked PC, run ethereal, see what's going where, and close off access in their router.
Or to put it another way (too long for the slashdot subject header) each individual part of the game was great on its own, but when added together somehow came up with something less than the sum of it's parts.
Now, don't get me wrong. I certainly think it's a great game, and I'm glad I played it, and I would certainly recommend it on story, dialogue, voice work, and cinematic craft alone. It's polished well beyond most games, and while I've heard of bugs on the GameCube version, I didn't experience any going through it myself. However, all that polish couldn't hide the gaping holes that were found, mostly in the "free roaming world" portion. While it seems big enough when you're only using the little hovercraft to shuttle around in, once you upgrade to the flying machine, the limitations become very obvious. It only took some 20 seconds to fly across the entire available "massive world". There was only a single area that was unreachable without the flying machine, and 99% of the locations you could get to were pointless to explore, because they looked crappy to fly near and were ridiculously out of scale. I realize there are limitations on space in the console universe, but when everything is was obviously slashed to fit, it just felt like I was let down. If they had created a bigger Hillys than the one we're given to tool around in, with more extra stuff to do, then I think it would really have lived up to it's potential, but sadly it's just not the case.
XIII didn't do well because the game was utter crap, not because of any obscurity. You can put all the famous voices you want in, it doesn't change the fact that the game is a horrible FPS, and was implemented extremely poorly. The save system was awful. Save points in an FPS are a step backward, not forward. There were several sections of the game where gameplay slagged to a near halt thanks to some hidden graphics problem or some other bug, I'm not quite sure, because I didn't care enough to try and work it out. I don't recall UbiSoft ever having a patch up on their site for it when I was playing it (long after its release after buying it for 2 bucks).
The fact that it was cell shaded also did it no favors among the American crowd that generally buys any new FPS they come across. The general attitude toward the practice has mollified somewhat since then, but it was common for gamers I know to say that they would never buy a cell shaded game ever because cell shading is crap.
...though it was well before I became a MST3K fan. Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lily? was my inspiration. The only real problems with the idea were that 1) this was before DVD was a serious concern, so the idea of commentary was pretty new (my idea was to sell audio tapes, and play them in your stereo while watching your VHS movie), 2) No one ever took me seriously, and most inportantly 3) I have no real comic talent of the caliber actually needed to make money off this.
I'm quite glad that Mike Nelson (and hopefully he'll drag in as many MST3K alums as possible, plus anyone good he's met since then) has taken up the torch. (You all do realize that while Joel was the initial public face, Mike was the head for the entire run of the show, right? It's a pointless war which one was better!) It's an idea that needed to be tried, and he'll do a far better job than I ever could have.
I agree, Death & Return of Superman was quite good, but I'm a fan of the beat'em-up genre in general. As far as those kinds of games went on the SNES, it was certainly one of the best. Far better than the TMNT games for sure. I think the whole Superman 64 debacle just poisoned the well so badly that anything it touches appears worse than it might have been without that hideous specter looming over everything.
The best way to get games to run on Ubuntu is to either buy a TV card and plug a console into it, lower your expectations a bit, or do a bit of digging.
You're probably going to hear a lot of people wax on about Cedega here, but I'm not one of them. I've tried Cedega several times (and transgaming still spams me with their "news" every so often) but every time I have it's been money down the drain. The games I'd want to play are either so old or sold so few copies that it is impossible for them to ever garner enough votes to get any critical bugs fixed, and even if there aren't critical bugs, the annoyances are generally legion.
The best solution I've found to gaming is to just use my consoles for 90% of it. I admit, I'm a bit of a gamer, so I have all the current gen consoles, a Dreamcast, and an assorted pile of other stuff including a SNES with no power adapter (if someone has one they're willing to get rid of let me know!) There's a lot more quality just letting the computer alone and turning to the conveniently placed TV. One of these days I'll invest in a decent TV card and just move the whole operation to the computer and clean up a bit, but for right now, I don't need Windows, or Ubuntu, or MacOS for 90% of the gaming I do.
Other than that, if you go looking, there are a fair number of ports for Windows games done by the developers (or people working closely with the developers). Neverwinter Nights is the most popular one, I would imagine, followed by id Software's entire game library (as long as you have the resource files from the original discs). I believe Quake 4 has had its Linux version released by now. icculus.org is a source for some other ports, and also a way to explore a bit more in that area. Also Tux Games is a good place to find games packaged for Linux. I've never bought there, so I don't know if you get a normal installer or a seperate disc with the binaries, etc, but there are some interesting old games in there now that I'm actually interested in getting again. You're going to pay more, but it all goes to support more games being released for Linux.
Lowering your gaming expectations can also be helpful too. I've gotten an awful lot out of Angband, NetHack, etc, over the years, and all those run quite well under Ubuntu, as well as just about anything other OS with a display.
Alien Hominid is a great looking 2D experience. Sure the art style will turn some people off, and the game is hard enough to cause controller breakage, but there are few games out there that do as good a job of making a comic book seem come alive.
Valkyrie Profile is just plain gorgeous, but I don't blame people for not knowing about it, with as hard as it is currently to get your hands on a copy of the PS2 version (and the low number of people that bought a PSP to actually play PSP games on it means that not too many more people are going to be seeing it).
I know I'm probably in the minority here, but the Playstation-era Mega Man X games (4-6) are frankly awesome looking, at least to me. I know Mega Man isn't most people's idea of a great game, but the detail and flash in the games is awesome as far as I'm concerned. Bright colors, lots of movement all over the screen. No, not as good or as consistent as Metal Slug, but close in my book.
These guys are gonna usher in a whole new era of serious, relevant, internet content!
Not that I disagree with your sentiment about those kinds of people, but I don't think that the Internet is all that lacking in serious content, nor in ways to find the relevant content among the dross.
Even then I think there's an overabundance of just about everything online. Any idiot that has some cash and a smidge of knowhow can create their own Super Duper News Site Page Thing. Only an infinitesimal amount of what is laughable buzzworded "content", serious or otherwise, will ever be relevant to me. I don't see how the existence of a ton of mindless babble makes all that much of a difference in the end.
Slashdot Mirror
That's all well and good, but I ask you to look around your office/house. How much of what you see is made locally, even if we call "locally" the country you reside in.
Lets just look at my desk. I can't imagine that any of the electronics on it were manufactured here, so monitor, keyboard, mouse, phone, speakers, , microphone, and computer memory I haven't installed are out. The one coffee mug that has a "made in" statement on it was made in Thailand, and the rest were probably made in Asia. My Page-a-day calendar was manufactured in the USA, that's one. Blank CDs and DVDs weren't made here. Last night's beer bottle sitting here was imported. Even my iced tea was made in Canada. The GBA game was made in Japan. The comb, was made in China, as was the wine glass that has "Boston Wine Expo" on it, oddly enough.
So tell me again why looking at things that were made locally, with local materials is a good measure again? The ONLY time I can be reasonably sure of buying something made in America is buying food at a restaurant (which I will generously label McDonalds for the purposes of this conversation) since it's made within 50 feet of me, hence, in America.
If you want a retrospective of Castlevania in your magazine, you're far better off just publishing a link to the Wikipedia article. This is crap. At least on Wikipedia, people who post opinions as "well known facts" get yelled at, and their articles marked up with "needs to be sourced" or just straight up removed.
Really slow news day I reckon.
Ever hear of iChat?
They did the same thing (release a timed public beta of iChat (though I don't think Boot Camp is timed at all, wouldn't make sense)) for Jaguar, and offered Jaguar users the software for $30, but that if came free in Panther. No one went ballistic , and people just used something else, or bought/installed a friend's copy of Panther. I can't imagine Apple sold more than a double handful of iChat Jaguar licenses. Not that iChat is particularly GOOD, but from what I hear, Boot Camp isn't especially good either. Most of the people I deal with that run windows on their Macs run it under Parallels, which is a whole lot easier in all kinds of ways, starting with not requiring a reboot to get to whatever else you need. Unless you're gaming with it (and I do know a few people that do that) Parallels performs quite well running Office and other normal apps, even on a low-end Macbook. If for some reason you don't want to buy Leopard (and that's certainly quite reasonable, I generally wait until I don't have any other choice to upgrade my Macs. I'd be running Panther on my Intel iMac if I could) but want a fully supported, non-beta version of Boot Camp, this lets you just pay $30 instead of $130 to get the one feature you care about.
Linux, as far as I recall, doesn't require Boot Camp to run on an Intel Mac (though please correct me if I'm wrong, I could've sworn I'd seen stories about Linux running happily on Intel macs well before Boot Camp was released) so who cares if Apple makes people pay for Boot Camp? If you need Linux to the point where simply recompiling your apps to work under OS X-with-X11 is a burden, why the hell do you have OS X installed? Mail.app isn't that killer. Also, no one I've seen is saying that you can't continue to use the current Boot Camp beta. It just won't be supported, and isn't really supported now, so what's the difference? I can't see how Apple could remotely turn it off.
True, but I would recommend that anyone not doing legitimate business in America do their damndest not to actually enter the country, especially when such a highly publicized law is passed making what you're doing illegal in the US. If I'm a well-known advocate for democracy or human rights in China, taking a connecting flight through Beijing would be pretty damn stupid, don't you think? Especially when the "ambush at connecting flights" tactic has been used with a lot of publicity once before.
Personally, I really do hope that a lot fewer people travel to the US because of laws like this. Eventually, this idiocy will get overturned because the economic impact will push the businessmen that run this country to get it changed. And if not, it'll be easier to get asylum in some saner country once things get too bad to handle in the US. If no one wants to travel here, few must actually want to live here.
Happens to be what I do, so I'm biased, but I've worked the other side.
When I was working salaried. "the customer" was not punished for wasting my time with stupidities. They had every waking hour of my time thanks to the fact that I received a salary, and their attitude didn't help my attitude toward them. That kind of thing will very quickly cause a confrontational attitude to spark up.
Now that I do this freelance, if someone wants me to hold their hand, they pay me 75-90 dollars per hour, plus a minimum of 1 hour travel time for it. Personally, I don't mind doing basic hand-holding at that kind of pay rate, and unless that customer happens to be quite rich (luckily, I have one or two of them) the prospect of handing over a small stack of $10 bills every hour tends to get them to work quite hard at trying to figure out how to do things right themselves. The fact that my time is being compensated pretty handsomely goes a long way to making me much more willing to be helpful, which in general (there are a few bad eggs who I just don't deal with without up-front money, or just not at all) causes my clients to be a lot more grateful. No corporate drone ever gave a damn that I fixed their problem. They were just angry with me for screwing it up in the first place somehow. I can't see myself ever willingly going back to the big corporate environment, where people can order me around just because I'm salaried. Irregularity of pay is more than made up for much higher satisfaction, on my and my customers part.
China's government has every reason to be paranoid.
They have a massive, restless, and incredibly impoverished rural population that could crush the Chinese Communist Party if it ever decided that enough is enough, and revolution is at hand. The geography we currently call China has had a very long, and very bloody history of conflict. Sun-Tzu and all the rest of the famous Chinese military theorists were born out of that period in Chinese history. If you've ever played Romance of the Three Kingdoms, or the Dynasty Warriors games, that period is what those games are set in. The analogies are legion to represent the kind of balancing act the Communists have to undergo to keep China looking like what we think China really is. Even in the video games that you get out of China that are about Chinese history, that period is presented like a civil conflict, not wars between sovereign states. My guess being that while the powers that be can't erase the powerful legendary figures and the hold they have on the dreams of the Chinese people, they certainly can work to make sure that what they think those legends and stories should teach is what gets taught.
I've no plans to buy an Xbox or a PS3 for only reasons of price. $500 as the minimum cost of entry for a system and one game is just nuts. I can't afford it, and I won't bother with it. There's nothing inherent that I will get out of either of those systems over the Xbox and PS2 that I own now, other than the derision of my friends, that I spent a pile of money I could've spent on food or rent on those. I'm sure the games are great, and I wouldn't mind owning one, but they're not worth that, no matter how many fools are willing to overpay for it.
I'd like to get a Wii, and I have a reasonable chance of both affording and getting my hands on one at some point soon. However, right now, I'm actually considering getting a new GBA SP, because I have a lot of games I like for GBA, and an SP is a lot easier to carry around than even the new DS Lite (and a lot easier than my original recipe DS). And a second PS2 to backup my current box, so I can play all the good PS2 games that are now showing up in bargain bins before they become collectors items. Once the price comes down to something resembling reasonable, I'll get a PS3, and maybe even an Xbox 360, but it's got a LONG way to fall before it gets there.
Our society considers it right and proper for everyone to carry a device designed to defend against other people killing us.
No, actually the device is designed to cause grievous harm to people or objects it's aimed at, possibly fatal if aimed appropriately for that purpose. A device designed to "defend against" people killing me would be a device that has no effect other than to neutralize an incoming attack. If someone develops the personal force field (ala Dune), and I carry it to avoid people killing me with firearms, I can't suddenly go after someone with it and kill them. OK, maybe I can, but I can suddenly go after someone with a hairbrush and kill them with it too, but it wasn't designed for that, and you've got to be a bit ingenious to pull it off.
A gun is not a defensive weapon. There are no defensive weapons, because weapons are designed to harm/kill by definition. The only defense anyone gets from owning a weapon, is from the mutually assured destruction principle, just on a smaller scale than the nukes we're used to that principle being applied to. Even land mines, which theoretically do not detonate unless someone moves to attack you, end up being an attack on the people in general when the conflict they were employed in is over, and you get farmers or hikers blowing themselves up just by tilling the land or going for a healthy stroll.
I support the right of gun ownership. I own none, but this country is getting to the point where I'm considering getting one, despite my SO's hatred of them. However, I think the people like you, that claim that owning a firearm is simply for defense and not for killing anyone are either ignorant or lying. If I end up purchasing a gun, it will be because I might be forced to kill someone before they can kill me, not so I can magically block the attacks of other people against me like I'm in some video game.
From the Newsweek blog entry/article.
When asked whether Sony's resurgent strength as a console games publisher was pushing the company to shun exclusives, Tretton denied it. "We're the only company in this industry that's got development resources and talent that have established Number one hits on all three continents," he says, which is true, since the bulk of Microsoft's studios are in North America and Europe, while Nintendo's are concentrated in Japan. "We really feel like we're well positioned to contribute platform-defining games from a first-party standpoint, and we're not dependent on third-party community to the degree that a Microsoft would be.
Wasn't the line for why the GameCube wasn't the #1 console, and the reason the Dreamcast died exactly that kind of talk?
No, most people these days that call themselves atheists are really anti-theists. Specifically, they believe that there is no deity, and believe that those who do believe in it are sick/damaged/misinformed in some way and need to be brought over to the right side. Evangelical anti-theists. Real atheists ought not care an awful lot whether Fred next door believes in the Flying Pasta Monster, or Jesus, or whatever damn fool thing he feels like believing, as long as he doesn't try and force his beliefs on others. These so called atheists do care, and believe they need to stop people from believing in a god. Sounds like a belief system to me.
You have no idea. One of these days I'm going to get off my rear and work out a complete list of the Star Wars parallels and references in FFIX, completely aside from the fact that it feels like they merged Knights of the Old Republic with a FF game to get the game as it is (not that it's bad, there are just tons of obvious similarities).
The opening cutscene might as well have been patched from Episodes 1-3 of the Star Wars movies. The cutscene where Balthier's ship lifts off from Rabanastre is damn near frame for frame the Millenium Falcon's escape from Mos Eisley, even in manner the ship takes off into the sky. The capital city of the Empire is so obviously Coruscant. You have Cloud City, with the apparent cooperation of the leader of it that's actually secretly helping the rebels. And those are just the blatantly obvious parts. So much for just having two characters named Biggs and Wedge somewhere in there. I'm not sure if it's homage or theft, but I'm leaning toward homage.
If Lieberman actually officially switched to a Republican party affiliation, it would be his last term in office.
He talked long and hard about caucusing with the Democrats in order to convince enough Democrats that a vote to keep him in wouldn't be a vote for the Republican party. If he betrayed that, so blatantly, he'd be committing political suicide. Politicians break promises all the time, but most of the time they don't survive as blatant a betrayal as a party switch would be for him.
And Lieberman doesn't have a hell of a lot to gain by switching. Democrats don't NEED the Senate nearly as much since they have the House. They have their roadblock, since Bush is likely to become fond of his veto pen. Lieberman will theoretically keep his seniority and place in line for committee chairmanships if he caucuses with the Democrats (and nothing really stops him from just rejoining the Democratic party, just like Jeffords pitched his Republican party affiliation). The Republicans would basically have to offer him a leadership post in order for him to gain anything in the move, and even then it would be a close thing for that to be a gain, since it would piss an awful lot of people off on both sides.
Right now, Lieberman needs the Democrats to like him more than the Democrats need to make nice with him. It's certainly in their interest to keep him caucusing with them, but not at any cost.
were in ur house, beetin ur repz!
Depends on your definition of a social life. Technically, your time playing WoW is part of your social life. It certainly is for me. I would much rather spend time raiding after work than going to a bar, a club, or whatever. Sure, I ought to get more exercise than I do, but so do the college students and others who I see getting trashed nightly around here. Many of them, the only exercise they appear to get is holding their dead drunk partner up on the way to the car, or running by at 1AM screaming because they're too drunk to care. Social indeed. Been there, done that, glad I got the hell over it, thank you. I have friends I hang out with, but I do that on off nights. They themselves don't play WoW, but they don't have a hell of a lot of time to hang out either, since they're married, have kids, work too much to make ends meet, and have their own hobbies. And most of their hobbies are other games in any case, since my personal circle of friends met up at a local arcade/bar/pool hall years ago. My fiancee is a gamer, she just doesn't play WoW.
As far as outside life, it sure sounds like he's got plenty of outside life to me. Getting a Masters isn't exactly a cakewalk, especially with a part time job tacked on (my fiancee is finishing her doctorate, I've seen it). If he did all that while playing WoW in class, etc, I would be shocked. I'm in a raiding guild that raids only 3-4 hours a day. I've got plenty of time to make a real dinner, watch a movie, do whatever before the raid starts. We do all the big stuff save AQ40/Naxx, because we haven't got the regular numbers, but we're getting there.
As far as I can tell, the only thing the original writer is in a state of denial over, is your standing to comment on his state. Your anecdotes are no more proof than his or mine. Mostly because there isn't anything to prove. You can say my "social life" is damaging and unhealthy, and I could just as easily provide arguments that yours is as well.
Jet Grind Radio is great, but there are a few others you might want to check out.
1. Toy Commander. Probably the best single player game on the Dreamcast. I've probably put in more playtime on this game than World of Warcraft over the years. It's just that good. Don't let the "kiddie" theme fool you.
2. Super Magnetic Neo. EXTREMELY cheesy art style, mixed with the hardest 3d platformer ever. If you're a real platformer junkie, you need to pick this game up. If you beat this, you've really accomplished something.
3. Record of Lodoss War. As far as RPGs go, the Dreamcast is pretty light on them, and this is one of the best. Diablo-style. I admit to being biased, since I love the anime that the game is based on, but it's still a good game.
4. Shenmue of course was a one of a kind game. The game that got me to buy the dreamcast. You should be able to find it pretty cheaply, since they made a billion copies. Something you definitely should play at least once, even if you don't slog your way through to the end (I still haven't).
5. Skies of Arcadia. If you don't have a GameCube, and you play RPGs at all, you really owe it to yourself to find a copy of this for the Dreamcast. It's still the best console RPG I've ever played. A plot that was actually translated well. Characters that were actually likable. At the time, the graphics were as good as it got for a CRPG. And a well done, complex battle system that requires a bit of thought to master, but isn't so brain bashingly hard you'll put it down.
Honorable mention to a few nifty games: Armada, Cannon Spike (merely because of how hard to find it is), Carrier, Wacky Races.
No, a competent technical person should damn well be able to know what THEIR computer is doing at all times, at least as far as network access is concerned, and that's the concern when it comes to botnets.
If you lack the ability or knowledge to monitor what your computer is doing on a network it's connected to, you've got no business being called technical. A packet sniffer on the network isn't affected by a rootkit on . Simple access rules on a consumer grade router can cut off access to any particular IP space you don't personally use or find suspicious, and are utterly unaffected by a rootkit on its local network.
No, Joe Average can't do that, but any reasonably computer savvy person can install Linux on a junked PC, run ethereal, see what's going where, and close off access in their router.
Well, Microsoft has an answer for you there!
Buy an Xbox360.
Or to put it another way (too long for the slashdot subject header) each individual part of the game was great on its own, but when added together somehow came up with something less than the sum of it's parts.
Now, don't get me wrong. I certainly think it's a great game, and I'm glad I played it, and I would certainly recommend it on story, dialogue, voice work, and cinematic craft alone. It's polished well beyond most games, and while I've heard of bugs on the GameCube version, I didn't experience any going through it myself. However, all that polish couldn't hide the gaping holes that were found, mostly in the "free roaming world" portion. While it seems big enough when you're only using the little hovercraft to shuttle around in, once you upgrade to the flying machine, the limitations become very obvious. It only took some 20 seconds to fly across the entire available "massive world". There was only a single area that was unreachable without the flying machine, and 99% of the locations you could get to were pointless to explore, because they looked crappy to fly near and were ridiculously out of scale. I realize there are limitations on space in the console universe, but when everything is was obviously slashed to fit, it just felt like I was let down. If they had created a bigger Hillys than the one we're given to tool around in, with more extra stuff to do, then I think it would really have lived up to it's potential, but sadly it's just not the case.
XIII didn't do well because the game was utter crap, not because of any obscurity. You can put all the famous voices you want in, it doesn't change the fact that the game is a horrible FPS, and was implemented extremely poorly. The save system was awful. Save points in an FPS are a step backward, not forward. There were several sections of the game where gameplay slagged to a near halt thanks to some hidden graphics problem or some other bug, I'm not quite sure, because I didn't care enough to try and work it out. I don't recall UbiSoft ever having a patch up on their site for it when I was playing it (long after its release after buying it for 2 bucks).
The fact that it was cell shaded also did it no favors among the American crowd that generally buys any new FPS they come across. The general attitude toward the practice has mollified somewhat since then, but it was common for gamers I know to say that they would never buy a cell shaded game ever because cell shading is crap.
...though it was well before I became a MST3K fan. Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lily? was my inspiration. The only real problems with the idea were that 1) this was before DVD was a serious concern, so the idea of commentary was pretty new (my idea was to sell audio tapes, and play them in your stereo while watching your VHS movie), 2) No one ever took me seriously, and most inportantly 3) I have no real comic talent of the caliber actually needed to make money off this.
I'm quite glad that Mike Nelson (and hopefully he'll drag in as many MST3K alums as possible, plus anyone good he's met since then) has taken up the torch. (You all do realize that while Joel was the initial public face, Mike was the head for the entire run of the show, right? It's a pointless war which one was better!) It's an idea that needed to be tried, and he'll do a far better job than I ever could have.
I agree, Death & Return of Superman was quite good, but I'm a fan of the beat'em-up genre in general. As far as those kinds of games went on the SNES, it was certainly one of the best. Far better than the TMNT games for sure. I think the whole Superman 64 debacle just poisoned the well so badly that anything it touches appears worse than it might have been without that hideous specter looming over everything.
The best way to get games to run on Ubuntu is to either buy a TV card and plug a console into it, lower your expectations a bit, or do a bit of digging.
You're probably going to hear a lot of people wax on about Cedega here, but I'm not one of them. I've tried Cedega several times (and transgaming still spams me with their "news" every so often) but every time I have it's been money down the drain. The games I'd want to play are either so old or sold so few copies that it is impossible for them to ever garner enough votes to get any critical bugs fixed, and even if there aren't critical bugs, the annoyances are generally legion.
The best solution I've found to gaming is to just use my consoles for 90% of it. I admit, I'm a bit of a gamer, so I have all the current gen consoles, a Dreamcast, and an assorted pile of other stuff including a SNES with no power adapter (if someone has one they're willing to get rid of let me know!) There's a lot more quality just letting the computer alone and turning to the conveniently placed TV. One of these days I'll invest in a decent TV card and just move the whole operation to the computer and clean up a bit, but for right now, I don't need Windows, or Ubuntu, or MacOS for 90% of the gaming I do.
Other than that, if you go looking, there are a fair number of ports for Windows games done by the developers (or people working closely with the developers). Neverwinter Nights is the most popular one, I would imagine, followed by id Software's entire game library (as long as you have the resource files from the original discs). I believe Quake 4 has had its Linux version released by now. icculus.org is a source for some other ports, and also a way to explore a bit more in that area. Also Tux Games is a good place to find games packaged for Linux. I've never bought there, so I don't know if you get a normal installer or a seperate disc with the binaries, etc, but there are some interesting old games in there now that I'm actually interested in getting again. You're going to pay more, but it all goes to support more games being released for Linux.
Lowering your gaming expectations can also be helpful too. I've gotten an awful lot out of Angband, NetHack, etc, over the years, and all those run quite well under Ubuntu, as well as just about anything other OS with a display.
Game Company Which Makes It's Money Selling Physical Discs Says Downloads Are Stupid.
Welcome to obvious land. Oh wait, it's slashdot. Or Digg. I can't really tell anymore.
Alien Hominid is a great looking 2D experience. Sure the art style will turn some people off, and the game is hard enough to cause controller breakage, but there are few games out there that do as good a job of making a comic book seem come alive.
Valkyrie Profile is just plain gorgeous, but I don't blame people for not knowing about it, with as hard as it is currently to get your hands on a copy of the PS2 version (and the low number of people that bought a PSP to actually play PSP games on it means that not too many more people are going to be seeing it).
I know I'm probably in the minority here, but the Playstation-era Mega Man X games (4-6) are frankly awesome looking, at least to me. I know Mega Man isn't most people's idea of a great game, but the detail and flash in the games is awesome as far as I'm concerned. Bright colors, lots of movement all over the screen. No, not as good or as consistent as Metal Slug, but close in my book.
These guys are gonna usher in a whole new era of serious, relevant, internet content!
Not that I disagree with your sentiment about those kinds of people, but I don't think that the Internet is all that lacking in serious content, nor in ways to find the relevant content among the dross.
Even then I think there's an overabundance of just about everything online. Any idiot that has some cash and a smidge of knowhow can create their own Super Duper News Site Page Thing. Only an infinitesimal amount of what is laughable buzzworded "content", serious or otherwise, will ever be relevant to me. I don't see how the existence of a ton of mindless babble makes all that much of a difference in the end.