Like most people who became enamored with Sudoku, I've grown weary of its overexposure. I don't know the exact point at which Sudoku became completely played-out, but Spongebob Squarepants Sudoku would probably be well past that point.
Sudoku was fun, but the majority of the fun with any of these puzzles for me was figuring out solution methods for myself. Sudoku is now so heavily documented as to be trivial to solve, even at the highest difficulty levels (Especially if you have the patience to try Bowman's Bingo).
After getting burned out on Sudoku, I found out about Nikoli, and the other myriad puzzles they publish. At first I started with Hashiwokakero, then quickly moved on to Heyawake, Nurikabe, Hitori, Akari, Ripple Effect, Masyu, and even some not listed on the English version of Nikoli's website (Kin Kon Kan is particularly fun, once you figure out the rules).
In that time, I've ordered several books from Nikoli's website, traded for books with occasional Japanese acquaintances, and hunted Japanese auction sites for out of print editions. In short, it's expensive and time consuming to feed my language-independent logic puzzle habit. I'd be very happy if some stateside publisher would put out a magazine akin to Nikoli's "Puzzle Communication", or a compilation of new puzzles. I've seen a few books featuring other Nikoli puzzle types, but they do not feature more than 3 or 4 different puzzle types. Games magazine's puzzle magazines frequently feature Nurikabe and Slither Link, but only 2-5 puzzles per issue. What I want is variety and volume. Lots of different puzzles, lots of instances of each.
By the way, those with the ability/desire to import Japanese video games might want to check out Puzzle Series for the Nintendo DS. Volume 5 is Slither Link, Volume 6 is Illust Logic (Known to many as Picross, Nonograms, Edel, or Paint by Numbers), Volume 10 is Hitori, Volume 11 is Nurikabe, and Volume 12 is Akari (Light Up). You may also want to check out Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection. NetGame is particularly interesting.
And of course, no discussion of grid-based, wordless logic puzzles is complete without a mention of Solitaire Battleships, which currently cruises under the radar with the name Yubotu.
Obviously my sentiments do not really reflect those of the public in general. I'm a cost concious gamer, and my owning a Wii is more down to chance happenstance than any actual pursuit of owning one. I can content myself with Wii Sports and Zelda without any real longing for other new games (Although the shooting stages in Rayman may cause me to make another purchase). My primary excitement with the Wii was the Virtual Console, and even that only held my interest for a few games in particular. Games which have not been released yet.
Several months after launch, the games I want (Super Mario RPG [SNES], Paper Mario [N64], and the two N64 Zelda's) are nowhere to be seen. That's fine. I don't mind waiting. I'm patient.
Catch is, Nintendo doesn't bother to let us know anything about the upcoming VC titles. Insofar as I can tell, the titles aren't announced until the moment that they're available. Every Monday morning, bright and early, I switch on the Wii just before work to check the latest releases. Every Monday morning, I'm disappointed to find games which won't provide me with nearly the amount of gameplay. I see the VC roster with a few A-list games and a -lot- of padding. I can understand Nintendo taking the stance of "Only a few games at a time" in order to increase sales, but it frustrates me to see no news of upcoming VC release dates, and I suspect I'm not alone in this frustration.
I'm still a tad unclear on how exactly the studios are getting names for lawsuits. The way I see it, they pretty much have to be using bittorrent themselves, then netting all the people who connect to their "trap."
"Pretty sneaky, sis."
Only that doesn't work, legally. Imagine that I write a book, taking every legal precaution to prevent it's unauthorized distribution. Now imagine that I put my book out on the street and install a photocopier right next to it with a sign that says "Free copies of ____," where the blank is the name of my book. I camp out with binoculars and take notes over who photocopied my book, then sue them.
Any judge would be able to see that I offered my book at my own discretion. The fact that others may have been doing so without my permission becomes null and void. By using this method, I have essentially released my book into the public domain. The people I caught at my book-copying-trap are not guilty of anything, as I freely offered the book that I wrote myself, with no strings attached. At worst, the other people who did not go to my trap, but made their own copies of my book elsewhere by other means are guilty of copying a product which has no market value. Even under current Evil Copyright Law, this is allowed.
You may argue, "But people on bittorrent don't download a whole movie from one source. They download it from multiple sources." And if PeerGuardian's blacklist is any indicator, there are literally thousands of bad IP addresses, all belonging to **AAs and their croonies. They can't really know if you only downloaded from them, or also downloaded from people outside their ring of informants. There is no way to demonstrate this, and there probably never will be.
So how is it illegal to take something offered by the person who owns it?
Eh? eBay isn't an auction site? What the heck are they, a corn fritter? Why does it say "Live Auctions" right there on their front page? And how do they explain this? It explicitly says "auctions" and "bidding." If they're not an auction site, we seriously need to think about the definition of the term "auction site."
Sure, from our limited POV, it looks like a shallow pantomime of the same thing over and over.
But imagine a Mario game down the road where it is revealed that Bowser has a limited amount of time travel technology at his disposal. He can't do much, but he can make minor tweaks to history.
Thus, we are not witnessing Peach get kidnapped on multiple different occasions: We are witnessing Peach get kidnapped the same time, on different timelines.
1) UMDs are only playable on the PSP, which is, by and large, still a $200 minimum investment. Contrastingly, DVD players and VCRs are available for a tenth of that.
2) The PSP does not, natively, support output to a TV screen (I realize that there are 3rd party devices which allow this). Thus, if you are going to watch a UMD, you'll be doing it on a portable screen, and almost certainly watching it alone. Even the loneliest of nerds likes to watch movies with other lonely nerds.
3) Playing a UMD movie on the PSP means continuously spinning and reading from the disc, which is the most power-hungry thing the PSP does. Moving parts consume great whopping chunks of battery life, and watching a movie on the device means you'll probably need to charge the system again tonight.
4) DVDs exist. Honestly, this is most likely the biggest reason UMDs fail as a format. There is absolutely no compelling reason to purchase a more expensive UMD with lower resolution output and fewer features, when you could save money and get more and higher quality content by buying the same movie on DVD. "But UMDs are portable!" So are DVDs, and portable DVD players can be had for less than a PSP, with a much bigger screen.
UMD Movies: Dumb at launch, dumb now, and dumb when the system dies. If, instead, Sony had released video content on memory sticks, or via an iTunes-like download service, they might be making money on video content for the PSP, rather than having spent a fortune manufacturing a product no one wants or needs.
Instead, they fell into the mentality of thinking, "We need a big library of titles for the PSP. Games take a lot of time, energy, and money to develop, so in the meantime, let's convert movies. They're already made, we already own a lot of them anyway, and even those we don't own cost a fraction of game development costs." This leads to a situation where the video selection for the PSP outweighs the game selection. Not a good situation for a completely redundant product.
Someone check my math...
on
DNA Origami
·
· Score: 1
The article mentions that, basically, you can use this technique to create arbitrary 2D shapes out of 6nm pixels.
10,000,000nm per cm. Divide by 6, gives you 1,666,666 pixels (rounding down) per cm. Squared gives you 2,777,777,777,776 pixels per cm^2. Divide by 8 bits per byte gives you 347,222,222,222 bytes per cm^2.
Now, this isn't quite accurate, because you can't have disjoint groups. However, there are ways around that: You could create two contiguous groups which XOR to create the data array, giving you 173,611,111,111 bytes per cm^2.
161GB in a square centimeter.
Standard optical discs (CDs/DVDs) are 12cm in diameter. The unusuable outer edge is not greater than.5cm. The unusuable inner ring has a diameter of less than 3cm. So the usable surface area of a standard optical disc is at least: (pi*5.25^2)-(pi*1.5^2) which gives us about 80cm^2 of usable data space on a standard optical disc.
Yep, got so worked up that I went and posted a message to Slashdot. Absolutely brimming over with rage here, I am.
I would have thought that correcting factual issues was at least marginally more on-topic than say, correcting someone's grammar or spelling, and that happens here every day.
"Had" a contest? You mean "planned" a contest. No one outside of a few game reviewers ever actually had access to the game. It was never released. Of course no one made it. No one was given the opportunity.
I guarantee you, if all it took was 800 hours of mindnumbing tedium to get a big prize, someone would have done it. Assuming their SegaCD didn't die from running for 800 hours straight, and you didn't have any power issues. That's more than a month to go without a single issue.
In all fairness, one reason Mirrormask did poorly at the box office was that it never had a general release. Contrarywise, there are Gaiman fans everywhere (myself included) who were more than happy to have a movie written by him in the spirit of Labyrinth.
In all honesty, it's amazing that Mirrormask has done as well as it has, considering that it's had almost no advertising whatsoever. The DVDs are selling based almost entirely off of word of mouth.
Terry Gilliam's film adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Good Omens for a start. It's dead.
Long ago, there were rumors of a version of Dune to be directed by Salvador Dali, and scored by Pink Floyd (sometime in the late 60s/early 70s). While it probably wouldn't have made much sense, it undoubtedly would have been beautiful.
There's been talk for a long time about a film adaptation of Patrick McGoohan's TV series, The Prisoner. That one went the way of the dodo.
Rumors got batted around about a sequel to Blade Runner, but not based directly on a PKD novel.
A lot has been said on the subject of adapting Piers Anthony's works to the screen, but little has been done, although A Spell for Chameleon is supposedly in the works right now.
Every dollar spent on used games is money that wont be available to the gaming industry. Used games resellers are parasites depriving the video games creators from a much needed income.
Let's take that logic for a moment and consider: Every dollar spent on groceries is also money that won't be available to the gaming industry. Heck, every dollar spent on one industry is money which won't be available to another industry.
Which is completely absurd. When you buy something from someone, that money doesn't magically disappear into another universe never to be seen again. That's not how any economy works. You buy something, the person you bought it from buys something, and so on. You might buy something with a marked dollar one week, then recieve that dollar back in change a few weeks later at a completely different store! Sure, people are getting richer and richer, but we're constantly pumping the system with fresh currency.
Companies sometimes seem to fall into the mindset of "Gotta catch 'em all," in that they want to have all the money in the world. And that just plain wouldn't make sense.
I will easily admit that I don't know all games, but while Popcap's games are derivitave, it is usually less so than Zuma.
Bejeweled owes its lineage only to Nintendo's Puzzle League, and it's a tenuous connnection.
Heavy Weapon has some similarities to an 80s PC game which has gone by many names (Parachute and Sabotage being the two I knew of) and which recently appeared on the iPod as a hidden game. However, Heavy Weapon sports significant improvements, and works more as a redevelopment than a ripoff.
Rocket Mania seems to draw some inspiration from both Pipe Dream and Gunpey, but again, is enough different to survive on its own.
Insaniquarium and Feeding Freenzy seem to be completely original games.
Using Occam's Razor, which states that the simplest solution is probably right, it seems simpler to say that Santa just uses distributed labor.
Now, if only our government could tap into Santa's intelligence gathering network.
The one thing G4 Execs seem to have forgotten:
on
G4TV Cancels More Shows
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I can't help but think that the G4 executives were either never informed of, or have completely forgotten that G4 is meant to be a network for Gamers. Right now, a massive bulk of their programming seems to have been put there just for the sake of Tommy Tallerico. Man Show? Whip Set? FASTLANE?
When you branch out and try to serve the percieved "other interests" of gamers, make sure you're not distancing yourself from your stated goals. Tech TV had shows which appealed to gamers and informed them of technology, and which appealed to tech heads and informed them of gaming news. That was good synergy. Now however, G4 is becoming worse than SpikeTV in terms of having a direct focus as a network.
1) Are you a gamer? If not, hire some intelligent diehard gamers to help you get what gamers want. You'll probably know a few from your repeat customers.
2) Junk Games: There comes a saturation point where you simply cannot accept any more of a particular title. If you've got 10 copies on hand, don't accept any more, or reduce the trade credit value to something trivial. A sliding scale on trade credit value is more fair, but also more confusing to customers ("But just 5 minutes ago, you gave that guy $2.00 for this game!") and more trouble to keep updated.
3) Big system releases are always rough on the secondhand stores. If you can't get 360 systems, focus on what you can get. Offer specials and deals for the holidays. Offer packages of similar games (All Sonic the Hedgehog games for the Sega Genesis in one pack). Toss in a free game or two from a small selection with the purchase of other systems. Try to keep the discount in the 10-15% range.
4) Keep some items on hand for novelty sake. Understand that you won't necessarily sell them, but that they will function more as museum pieces to attract customers. NES Power Pads are cheap, and make interesting wall decorations. Power Gloves and ROBs can also be had reasonbly, and are similarly eye-catching.
5) If you don't already have any, set up some systems for customers to try games in store. Allow customers to request games ("Can I try this game?"). Only enforce any kind of time limit if there are other customers waiting to try games, or if the customer has been playing for an hour or more. Remember that sales counter duties take precedence over demo system duties (as in, finish ringing up customers before taking care of the kid wanting to switch games... again.)
6) Gather up all the merchandise you'd rather never see again, and are potentially willing to lose completely. Put it in a "$5.00 or less!" bin. Toss in a few higher quality "acceptable losses."
7) Watch flea markets, garage sales, even eBay for an affordable, functioning arcade cabinet. Alternatively, rent one from your local "amusement machines" dealer. Make sure it's something older, from the late 80s or early 90s. Put it on free play on the weekends.
What exactly rises to the level of "You worked in state X and must pay taxes?" Is it the location of the business? If so, why aren't we all paying taxes to the location of the home office of whatever company we work for? Is it the location of the services rendered? If so, then why aren't we paying taxes for each state of customer calls? Or should we be paying taxes for everywhere in the world when the services are on a globally accessable web site?
Okay, a UK Study shows that SciFi viewers are roughly 51% female and 49% male. Forgetting for a moment that that's pretty much the same ratio of men to women globally (which basically implies that women are neither more nor less interested in SciFi than men), why are they attributing the success to American shows like Buffy and Xena? And how did Lara Croft's name get in the mix?
Surely there would be some discussion of the popular British shows on the air, like Doctor Who. No mention of them, though. Weird.
I'm fairly certain that the topless, leather-kilt-clad muscleman I saw leading his friend around on a leash in Brighton during some sort of "Pride" festival probably was gay. Just a guess.
Second, think for a few moments: Great Britain, while a major world power, is hardly going to have been the only nation to think of this sort of thing. Moreover, I'd be a bit surprised if they built the biggest or even the nicest of the underground Cold-War cities. I'm not saying that the US did: Most likely some OPEC Sheik created something to make the brain stagger in the middle of some unknown desert.
Point is, how many of these things exist? How fancy do they get?
Slashdot Mirror
Sudoku was fun, but the majority of the fun with any of these puzzles for me was figuring out solution methods for myself. Sudoku is now so heavily documented as to be trivial to solve, even at the highest difficulty levels (Especially if you have the patience to try Bowman's Bingo).
After getting burned out on Sudoku, I found out about Nikoli, and the other myriad puzzles they publish. At first I started with Hashiwokakero, then quickly moved on to Heyawake, Nurikabe, Hitori, Akari, Ripple Effect, Masyu, and even some not listed on the English version of Nikoli's website (Kin Kon Kan is particularly fun, once you figure out the rules).
In that time, I've ordered several books from Nikoli's website, traded for books with occasional Japanese acquaintances, and hunted Japanese auction sites for out of print editions. In short, it's expensive and time consuming to feed my language-independent logic puzzle habit. I'd be very happy if some stateside publisher would put out a magazine akin to Nikoli's "Puzzle Communication", or a compilation of new puzzles. I've seen a few books featuring other Nikoli puzzle types, but they do not feature more than 3 or 4 different puzzle types. Games magazine's puzzle magazines frequently feature Nurikabe and Slither Link, but only 2-5 puzzles per issue. What I want is variety and volume. Lots of different puzzles, lots of instances of each.
By the way, those with the ability/desire to import Japanese video games might want to check out Puzzle Series for the Nintendo DS. Volume 5 is Slither Link, Volume 6 is Illust Logic (Known to many as Picross, Nonograms, Edel, or Paint by Numbers), Volume 10 is Hitori, Volume 11 is Nurikabe, and Volume 12 is Akari (Light Up). You may also want to check out Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection. NetGame is particularly interesting.
And of course, no discussion of grid-based, wordless logic puzzles is complete without a mention of Solitaire Battleships, which currently cruises under the radar with the name Yubotu.
Obviously my sentiments do not really reflect those of the public in general. I'm a cost concious gamer, and my owning a Wii is more down to chance happenstance than any actual pursuit of owning one. I can content myself with Wii Sports and Zelda without any real longing for other new games (Although the shooting stages in Rayman may cause me to make another purchase). My primary excitement with the Wii was the Virtual Console, and even that only held my interest for a few games in particular. Games which have not been released yet.
Several months after launch, the games I want (Super Mario RPG [SNES], Paper Mario [N64], and the two N64 Zelda's) are nowhere to be seen. That's fine. I don't mind waiting. I'm patient.
Catch is, Nintendo doesn't bother to let us know anything about the upcoming VC titles. Insofar as I can tell, the titles aren't announced until the moment that they're available. Every Monday morning, bright and early, I switch on the Wii just before work to check the latest releases. Every Monday morning, I'm disappointed to find games which won't provide me with nearly the amount of gameplay. I see the VC roster with a few A-list games and a -lot- of padding. I can understand Nintendo taking the stance of "Only a few games at a time" in order to increase sales, but it frustrates me to see no news of upcoming VC release dates, and I suspect I'm not alone in this frustration.
I'm still a tad unclear on how exactly the studios are getting names for lawsuits. The way I see it, they pretty much have to be using bittorrent themselves, then netting all the people who connect to their "trap."
"Pretty sneaky, sis."
Only that doesn't work, legally. Imagine that I write a book, taking every legal precaution to prevent it's unauthorized distribution. Now imagine that I put my book out on the street and install a photocopier right next to it with a sign that says "Free copies of ____," where the blank is the name of my book. I camp out with binoculars and take notes over who photocopied my book, then sue them.
Any judge would be able to see that I offered my book at my own discretion. The fact that others may have been doing so without my permission becomes null and void. By using this method, I have essentially released my book into the public domain. The people I caught at my book-copying-trap are not guilty of anything, as I freely offered the book that I wrote myself, with no strings attached. At worst, the other people who did not go to my trap, but made their own copies of my book elsewhere by other means are guilty of copying a product which has no market value. Even under current Evil Copyright Law, this is allowed.
You may argue, "But people on bittorrent don't download a whole movie from one source. They download it from multiple sources." And if PeerGuardian's blacklist is any indicator, there are literally thousands of bad IP addresses, all belonging to **AAs and their croonies. They can't really know if you only downloaded from them, or also downloaded from people outside their ring of informants. There is no way to demonstrate this, and there probably never will be.
So how is it illegal to take something offered by the person who owns it?
Eh? eBay isn't an auction site? What the heck are they, a corn fritter? Why does it say "Live Auctions" right there on their front page? And how do they explain this? It explicitly says "auctions" and "bidding." If they're not an auction site, we seriously need to think about the definition of the term "auction site."
Sure, from our limited POV, it looks like a shallow pantomime of the same thing over and over.
But imagine a Mario game down the road where it is revealed that Bowser has a limited amount of time travel technology at his disposal. He can't do much, but he can make minor tweaks to history.
Thus, we are not witnessing Peach get kidnapped on multiple different occasions: We are witnessing Peach get kidnapped the same time, on different timelines.
Or not. I tend to overthink some things.
1) UMDs are only playable on the PSP, which is, by and large, still a $200 minimum investment. Contrastingly, DVD players and VCRs are available for a tenth of that.
2) The PSP does not, natively, support output to a TV screen (I realize that there are 3rd party devices which allow this). Thus, if you are going to watch a UMD, you'll be doing it on a portable screen, and almost certainly watching it alone. Even the loneliest of nerds likes to watch movies with other lonely nerds.
3) Playing a UMD movie on the PSP means continuously spinning and reading from the disc, which is the most power-hungry thing the PSP does. Moving parts consume great whopping chunks of battery life, and watching a movie on the device means you'll probably need to charge the system again tonight.
4) DVDs exist. Honestly, this is most likely the biggest reason UMDs fail as a format. There is absolutely no compelling reason to purchase a more expensive UMD with lower resolution output and fewer features, when you could save money and get more and higher quality content by buying the same movie on DVD. "But UMDs are portable!" So are DVDs, and portable DVD players can be had for less than a PSP, with a much bigger screen.
UMD Movies: Dumb at launch, dumb now, and dumb when the system dies. If, instead, Sony had released video content on memory sticks, or via an iTunes-like download service, they might be making money on video content for the PSP, rather than having spent a fortune manufacturing a product no one wants or needs.
Instead, they fell into the mentality of thinking, "We need a big library of titles for the PSP. Games take a lot of time, energy, and money to develop, so in the meantime, let's convert movies. They're already made, we already own a lot of them anyway, and even those we don't own cost a fraction of game development costs." This leads to a situation where the video selection for the PSP outweighs the game selection. Not a good situation for a completely redundant product.
The article mentions that, basically, you can use this technique to create arbitrary 2D shapes out of 6nm pixels.
.5cm. The unusuable inner ring has a diameter of less than 3cm. So the usable surface area of a standard optical disc is at least:
10,000,000nm per cm.
Divide by 6, gives you 1,666,666 pixels (rounding down) per cm.
Squared gives you 2,777,777,777,776 pixels per cm^2.
Divide by 8 bits per byte gives you 347,222,222,222 bytes per cm^2.
Now, this isn't quite accurate, because you can't have disjoint groups. However, there are ways around that: You could create two contiguous groups which XOR to create the data array, giving you 173,611,111,111 bytes per cm^2.
161GB in a square centimeter.
Standard optical discs (CDs/DVDs) are 12cm in diameter. The unusuable outer edge is not greater than
(pi*5.25^2)-(pi*1.5^2) which gives us about 80cm^2 of usable data space on a standard optical disc.
80cm^2 * 161GB/cm^2 gives us 12.5TB per DNA disc.
Yep, got so worked up that I went and posted a message to Slashdot. Absolutely brimming over with rage here, I am.
I would have thought that correcting factual issues was at least marginally more on-topic than say, correcting someone's grammar or spelling, and that happens here every day.
"Had" a contest? You mean "planned" a contest. No one outside of a few game reviewers ever actually had access to the game. It was never released. Of course no one made it. No one was given the opportunity.
I guarantee you, if all it took was 800 hours of mindnumbing tedium to get a big prize, someone would have done it. Assuming their SegaCD didn't die from running for 800 hours straight, and you didn't have any power issues. That's more than a month to go without a single issue.
In all fairness, one reason Mirrormask did poorly at the box office was that it never had a general release. Contrarywise, there are Gaiman fans everywhere (myself included) who were more than happy to have a movie written by him in the spirit of Labyrinth.
In all honesty, it's amazing that Mirrormask has done as well as it has, considering that it's had almost no advertising whatsoever. The DVDs are selling based almost entirely off of word of mouth.
Terry Gilliam's film adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Good Omens for a start. It's dead.
Long ago, there were rumors of a version of Dune to be directed by Salvador Dali, and scored by Pink Floyd (sometime in the late 60s/early 70s). While it probably wouldn't have made much sense, it undoubtedly would have been beautiful.
There's been talk for a long time about a film adaptation of Patrick McGoohan's TV series, The Prisoner. That one went the way of the dodo.
Rumors got batted around about a sequel to Blade Runner, but not based directly on a PKD novel.
A lot has been said on the subject of adapting Piers Anthony's works to the screen, but little has been done, although A Spell for Chameleon is supposedly in the works right now.
Every dollar spent on used games is money that wont be available to the gaming industry. Used games resellers are parasites depriving the video games creators from a much needed income.
Let's take that logic for a moment and consider: Every dollar spent on groceries is also money that won't be available to the gaming industry. Heck, every dollar spent on one industry is money which won't be available to another industry.
Which is completely absurd. When you buy something from someone, that money doesn't magically disappear into another universe never to be seen again. That's not how any economy works. You buy something, the person you bought it from buys something, and so on. You might buy something with a marked dollar one week, then recieve that dollar back in change a few weeks later at a completely different store! Sure, people are getting richer and richer, but we're constantly pumping the system with fresh currency.
Companies sometimes seem to fall into the mindset of "Gotta catch 'em all," in that they want to have all the money in the world. And that just plain wouldn't make sense.
I will easily admit that I don't know all games, but while Popcap's games are derivitave, it is usually less so than Zuma.
Bejeweled owes its lineage only to Nintendo's Puzzle League, and it's a tenuous connnection.
Heavy Weapon has some similarities to an 80s PC game which has gone by many names (Parachute and Sabotage being the two I knew of) and which recently appeared on the iPod as a hidden game. However, Heavy Weapon sports significant improvements, and works more as a redevelopment than a ripoff.
Rocket Mania seems to draw some inspiration from both Pipe Dream and Gunpey, but again, is enough different to survive on its own.
Insaniquarium and Feeding Freenzy seem to be completely original games.
Tommy Tallerico? Is that you?
Using Occam's Razor, which states that the simplest solution is probably right, it seems simpler to say that Santa just uses distributed labor.
Now, if only our government could tap into Santa's intelligence gathering network.
I can't help but think that the G4 executives were either never informed of, or have completely forgotten that G4 is meant to be a network for Gamers. Right now, a massive bulk of their programming seems to have been put there just for the sake of Tommy Tallerico. Man Show? Whip Set? FASTLANE?
When you branch out and try to serve the percieved "other interests" of gamers, make sure you're not distancing yourself from your stated goals. Tech TV had shows which appealed to gamers and informed them of technology, and which appealed to tech heads and informed them of gaming news. That was good synergy. Now however, G4 is becoming worse than SpikeTV in terms of having a direct focus as a network.
Never let Tommy pick shows. That's the moral.
1) Are you a gamer? If not, hire some intelligent diehard gamers to help you get what gamers want. You'll probably know a few from your repeat customers.
2) Junk Games: There comes a saturation point where you simply cannot accept any more of a particular title. If you've got 10 copies on hand, don't accept any more, or reduce the trade credit value to something trivial. A sliding scale on trade credit value is more fair, but also more confusing to customers ("But just 5 minutes ago, you gave that guy $2.00 for this game!") and more trouble to keep updated.
3) Big system releases are always rough on the secondhand stores. If you can't get 360 systems, focus on what you can get. Offer specials and deals for the holidays. Offer packages of similar games (All Sonic the Hedgehog games for the Sega Genesis in one pack). Toss in a free game or two from a small selection with the purchase of other systems. Try to keep the discount in the 10-15% range.
4) Keep some items on hand for novelty sake. Understand that you won't necessarily sell them, but that they will function more as museum pieces to attract customers. NES Power Pads are cheap, and make interesting wall decorations. Power Gloves and ROBs can also be had reasonbly, and are similarly eye-catching.
5) If you don't already have any, set up some systems for customers to try games in store. Allow customers to request games ("Can I try this game?"). Only enforce any kind of time limit if there are other customers waiting to try games, or if the customer has been playing for an hour or more. Remember that sales counter duties take precedence over demo system duties (as in, finish ringing up customers before taking care of the kid wanting to switch games... again.)
6) Gather up all the merchandise you'd rather never see again, and are potentially willing to lose completely. Put it in a "$5.00 or less!" bin. Toss in a few higher quality "acceptable losses."
7) Watch flea markets, garage sales, even eBay for an affordable, functioning arcade cabinet. Alternatively, rent one from your local "amusement machines" dealer. Make sure it's something older, from the late 80s or early 90s. Put it on free play on the weekends.
It means my ascii art sucks when I forget to use a fixed width font.
Y---Y-EEEEE--SSS--!
-Y-Y--E-----S---S-!
--Y---EEE----SS---!
--Y---E-------SS--!
--Y---E-----S---S--
--Y---EEEEE--SSS--!
Doctor Who on BBC, Prisoner on Sky One. It's hard for me to think of a better situation that doesn't violate the laws of physics.
... And right is crazy. Or so you would think reading /.
Seriously, this got modded +4 insightful.
What exactly rises to the level of "You worked in state X and must pay taxes?" Is it the location of the business? If so, why aren't we all paying taxes to the location of the home office of whatever company we work for? Is it the location of the services rendered? If so, then why aren't we paying taxes for each state of customer calls? Or should we be paying taxes for everywhere in the world when the services are on a globally accessable web site?
This opens a great big mess-o-worms.
Okay, a UK Study shows that SciFi viewers are roughly 51% female and 49% male. Forgetting for a moment that that's pretty much the same ratio of men to women globally (which basically implies that women are neither more nor less interested in SciFi than men), why are they attributing the success to American shows like Buffy and Xena? And how did Lara Croft's name get in the mix?
Surely there would be some discussion of the popular British shows on the air, like Doctor Who. No mention of them, though. Weird.
I'm fairly certain that the topless, leather-kilt-clad muscleman I saw leading his friend around on a leash in Brighton during some sort of "Pride" festival probably was gay. Just a guess.
First, pictures? Please? Someone?
Second, think for a few moments: Great Britain, while a major world power, is hardly going to have been the only nation to think of this sort of thing. Moreover, I'd be a bit surprised if they built the biggest or even the nicest of the underground Cold-War cities. I'm not saying that the US did: Most likely some OPEC Sheik created something to make the brain stagger in the middle of some unknown desert.
Point is, how many of these things exist? How fancy do they get?
Meh. Played it. Extensively (former GF loved it).
The idea there wasn't so much bullying as 12-year-old schoolgirls in an all-out brawl.
But seriously, the anti-gaming press seems to have completely lost interest in non-electronic gaming. Some of the games on BGG are outright obscene.