Let's say you make a program which will generate a random level for, oh just for argument's sake, Doom. Let's say you don't really put that many restrictions on what it can and cannot do, just that it must make a level which is contiguous (or connected by teleporters) and doesn't have any passages smaller than the player character.
Most of these are going to be duller than a chisel made out of Play-doh. Some of them will be exceedingly bad or overly complicated. Some of them will be enjoyable, and a very few will be excellent.
The thing is, when you're dealing with randomly generated levels/other content, you're always dealing with a finite data set (regardless of claims of "Unlimited gameplay!"), and most of that data set is going to be garbage. A lot of it will be virtually indistinguishable from other bits (Here we have the jungle. Here we have a different jungle, but this one has a blue stump in the middle of the third area.) The trick is inserting a quality filter, and then you get down to the dirty business of quantifying quality, so that a computer can understand it.
Randomly generated content is only as bad as the quality filter used on it. Unfortunately, such a thing is a nightmare to program.
I hope that Zelda series collection disc becomes a trend over at Nintendo. A Mario series disc would be another logical choice, and so perhaps F-Zero and Star Fox discs.
One question: Shouldn't the Zelda disc also include A Link to the Past, Link's Awakening, and Oracle of Seasons/Ages?
Nintendo has the distinction of being the only company from which I have bought games without owning the systems. I later get the systems, but if I see something like Metroid Prime or Pikmin for under $20, I'm not about to pass that up.
This is something I've noticed from several of the articles here on/.: We seem to be carrying around two definitions of the word "Adult". On one hand, you have the "mature, sophisticated, intellectual" definition, and on the other, you have the "porn, alcohol, and other age-restricted materials" definition.
Tragic though it may be, it seems that the latter definition is the more common one, even here on/., and we're supposed to be the intellectual crowd.
On the German side of the coin, you've got a bit of a quandry. Most German game manufacturers are GmbH, which is an abbreviation for something or another, but basically boils down to the fact that the company isn't allowed to export their products themselves. So, in order for German games to reach other shores, they must go through other companies. Among them, Mayfair Games, importers of the Catan series (pronounced cuh-tahn'), Rio Grande Games (Bohnanza is a good gateway game, while Peurto Rico and TransAmerica have been getting good attention from less casual gamers.), and on some occasions, Fantasy Flight Games, current makers of most Lord of the Rings board games.
You know, what with the previous article about the judge okaying competitive pop-ups and saying that pop-ups and spam are a "burden of using the internet," it could easily be argued that the same holds true in favor of file-sharers. It's just a "burden of using the internet," and the companies need to get over it.
... and I'll probably keep saying until I die (at which point, others will likely say it in my place): Every disease has a patient.
How many people in the world are homicidal psychopaths? Seriously, think about the percentages. There's six billion people out there. If even.01% of them are the type of person who goes for eating someone's intestines while that person is still living, that's still 600000 seriously warped individuals, enough to make a moderately sized city full.
So of course there are incredibly violent people willing and eager to do unspeakable acts. For such people, triggers exist all around them, in every aspect of everyday life. No one plays Doom and as a result thinks "Hey, if I shoot someone with a gun, they die! And that's fun!" They already know that a bullet to the brain will kill, and just looking for a new pair of pants could trigger a psychotic episode. It could be the hangers, the mirrors, the checkout counter, anything. It certainly wouldn't be the store's fault.
At any rate, people are responsible for their own actions, period. If anyone else is to blame (in addition, not instead of) it would be their parents or legal guardians, who failed to instill in them a proper sense of right/wrong, fantasy/reality, and social responsibility.
I find this news particularly annoying. This merely strengthens the public perception that the state is a haven for stupidity and a complete wasteland of intelligence.
I think it should be restated that Schmutzer is not making a baseless accusation: He is merely repeating what the boys already told police.
However, it should also be pointed out that young boys have been shooting at trucks in Tennessee for about as long as there have been trucks. I doubt this is the first instance of death, or the defendants blaming video games.
When are we going to realize that stupidity is a disease, and get around to treating it medically?
For me (and most everyone I know who played it to any extent) GTA and it's offspring stopped being fun long ago. The only true joy I can squeeze out of it now is dropping a Rhino tank out of the sky, and that gets repetitive quick.
Now, if there was a Sim City-line GTA-style game in which you create your city and then wreak havoc on a personal level, that might get my attention.
I seem to recall a similar concept being presented in a comic book in the early to mid eighties. I suspect it was a Marvel comic featuring a team of heroes. In fact, I quite clearly recall that another part of the storyline was that the machines were powered by kidnapped children (in addition to erasing player's brains).
However, posted to Usenet by yours truly:
Every mention I've seen (coinop.org, gooddealgames.com, etc) is extremely skimpy on details such as names, dates, and specific arcades. The general story at the moment is that in less than a dozen arcades in a suburb of Portland, OR in the early 1980s, Polybius was introduced. It was an abstract action/puzzle game which did't really attract much attention to itself. However, some people who played it reported incidents of amnesia, forgetting important details about their lives, such as their name, or where their home was. Further, some reported terrible nightmares.
The story further states that most of the kids who played Polybius swore off video games entirely, and that one became a big anti-videogame advocate (some instances of the story mentioning him as a lobbyist). However, no names are given.
Lastly, at least one former Portland, OR arcade owner claims that men in black suits would periodically come in to gather data from the machine, but not quarters. Again no names given.
Examining the logic of the story, however, makes it extremely suspect. If such a thing had truly happened, then the conspiracy in question didn't really do anything to avoid attention. In fact, they did almost everything they could to -attract- attention.
Picture this:
ARCADE OWNER: Oh, hey, you must be here to look at the Polybius machine.
MAN IN BLACK: Why do you say that?
ARCADE OWNER: Because you're wearing a black business suit, stupid. This is an arcade, not a juice bar. By the way, aren't you going to take the quarters or something?
MAN IN BLACK: No. I'm getting data.
Etc.
Now, if such a thing -had- happened, it should have set off warning lights all over the place.
On the other hand, my paranoid brain just spat out a possible explaination other than the "we're being obvious because no one will believe it" explaination that conspiracy theories so often use. How about "we're being obvious because some people will believe it, and we want to control what you believe?"
Fact: In 1983, video games were becoming a serious contender for consumer money.
Fact: In 1983, the public at large did not percieve video games as something to be regulated or monitored.
Fact: They do now.
Some other things to consider: Video games cannot induce amnesia or hallucinations. In fact, no form of video/audio stimulation can without exceptional chemical circumstances.
However, drugs can. Astonishingly, there are drugs which could have produced the exact reactions the children who played Polybius experienced. Many of these could be delivered via touch, or through the air to be inhaled. It wouldn't be too hard to hide a delivery system in a thing as massive as an arcade cabinet, but even that runs a risk: What if someone got hold of the cabinet?
Does everyone remember those bean-bag ashtrays that used to be all over the place? Acades were cluttered with them. Ever know of an arcade that actually cleaned them out?
It wouldn't be too hard to hide a delivery system in one of those, and no one would notice if a vapor seemed to be coming from an ashtray.
In other words, if the whole Polybius thing did happen, the whole thing is a smokescreen for political manipulation to demonize video games so that the government could control them. The game itself was a red herring.
I see a lot of mentions of classical "Edutainment" titles, like Stickybear, Reader Rabbit, Mathblaster, etc. The problem is, no one, then or now, actively chooses to play those games when there are more enjoyable, non-educational alternatives (and face it, most of the alternatives, now and then, are more enjoyable).
The problem is that the designers ask themselves the question "How can we make learning this concept fun?" They should be asking "How can we teach something from this fun activity?"
I have a friend who is a middle-school level teacher. He makes the above question his philosophy in the classroom, and it works. He's taught fractions with Harry Potter, conjugation of verbs with Transformers, and any number of even odder examples. The trick is that the children don't realize that what they're doing is a lesson. This stuff has won him awards.
Another, more relevant example: A friend's nephew was having trouble with decimals, percents and fractions. Same nephew plays Warhammer 40k obsessively. "Jason, what's 25% of 44?" "I dunno." "Jason, if you have 44 troops in battle, when do you have to make a morale check?"
Take what the child already knows and enjoys and figure out how it is useful. Whether you approve of your child's habits and tastes or not, they are learning all the time from their hobbies, and it falls to parents and educators to direct that learning.
Bleem LLC -never- sold emulated PSOne titles for Dreamcast. Bleem sold an emulator, and you still had to get the game elsewhere. Since Sony's complaint with Bleem was that it used copyrighted code to check for original discs, Bleem simply made their emulator capable of running CD-rs as well.
Had Sony bought out Bleem, it probably would have been cheaper for both parties, and more than likely would have been more than a little profitable.
This makes me wonder: Why don't we see any GBA Casemods (and by casemod, I do not mean "paint job." I mean taking the GBA guts and putting them in another casing, preferrably one of your own construction) out there?
I mean, the SP guts are obviously tiny. Most likely square-shaped. What about putting an SP in an old-style GameBoy brick? How about something that looks like a SNES cartridge, but unfolds SP-style? How about one that looks like an Atari Joystick? A mini-gamecube? The possibilities are there.
In all actuality, Fair Use does cover this. In order for someone to be in violation, the pirated work in question must be commercially damaging.
The exact wording of the Fair Use section of copyright law is a little fluffy on the matter, but basically, I'm looking at (1) The purpose and character of use (profit/nonprofit) and (4) The effect on the potential market value of the product.
Bitin Off Hedz: There is, as far as I know, one way to play this game and enjoy it, and that is to use gummi dinos for pawns so that you really can bite off their hedz.
Girl Genius appeals to the same mentality as Bejeweled (AKA Diamond Mine), only competitive and a little more difficult. Strangely enough, even though it looks wonky and plays weird, a lot of people pick up on it on a subconcious level. You definitely feel smarter for playing it, though.
Never ran into the absentia player syndrome in KDL. Probably depends a lot on somebody just not bothering to finish their own turn (Like in Monopoly: There's no reason your turn should last longer than 1 minute. It's roll & move, buy or not, trade or not.)
I enjoyed Parts Unknown, but found it's thematic sequel Renfield to be unfun in every way.
However, I can't say enough good things about James's new Hip Pocket line of games, Light Speed and Agora especially.
The only trouble with Metagaming's Microgames line was the use of about a hundred tiny little square cardboard tokens, about 1cm^2 each.
That and the maps were printed on flimsy paper, heavily creased (so that they had trouble lying flat unless you covered them with a sheet of clear acrylic or glass), and just plain ugly.
This is probably going to net me a whole slew of blank stares for responses, but honestly:
Why not just obey the freaking speed limit? Honestly, it's not that hard. It's a speed limit, not some novel form of theoretical mathematics. Heck, if it was theoretical mathematics,/. would love it. Everybody would agree that it was a good thing.
For a crowd that so easily shrugged off the influences of peer pressure in the past (persuing the path of the geek in school instead of the path of the prep), you lot seem to fold like an origami sculpture when somebody tailgates or honks a horn at you.
Or, you could spring for a PSX controller (pretty cheap: around $5 used) and get a PSX-to-USB connector from Radio Shack for $10. There you go. The best 10-button controller money can buy, perfect for SNES emulation.
Strangely, system crashes don't generally happen on video game consoles. There are a (very) few exceptions to this rule.
Of course, there are some reasons for this: video game consoles always have the same hardware setup (that is to say, every PS2 is functionally identical to every other PS2, software wise), and the user can only really input through a simple controller. However, as the systems become more complex, they start to resemble a full-fledged computer system more and more. So the question arises again: Why?
Standarization. You never have to download new drivers for an Xbox or Gamecube controller (even if it is 3rd party) because all such controllers conform to an interface standard. Multi-player adapters are always plug-n-play. To a computer developer, this sounds like a mythical la-la-land. To a console developer, this is a given.
> wouldn't it be nice to have a shirt with tetris on it? i mean the whole thing, in a 2D barcode. hmm...
I've been thinking about this, coupled with an article I saw earlier today about using paper instead of modern data storage (Seemed like illogical luddite rambling to me), and did some quick calculations:
We have laser printers which can print upwards of 800dpi. Let's say you've got a semi-sturdy blank playing card. It's going to be about 2.5"x3.5" or thereabouts. Allow.25 for margins: 6sq inches per side, two sides.
800dpi allows for 640000 bits per square inch. 12 square inches, and you've got 7680000 bits, or 960000 bytes. And that's if you're printing in black and white. Go 16 color greyscale, and you've got 3840000 bytes. Converting it back could be difficult, though.
At any rate, this is more than enough space in which to fit Tetris. I just wish someone would -do- this. Granted, it's not the most efficient means of data storage, or even the sturdiest, but in terms of disposable data storage, I'd feel better about printing a small file on a paper card than wasting a CD for a single file.
See, this here's the thing: You'd think Games.slashdot would cover all kinds of games, from board games to RPGs to video games.
Anyhow, Fluxx did sort of bend my brain in a peculiar way, not because of it being a particularly thought provoking game (in fact, it's what some people would call "thought optional"), but because it is a proto-typical card game. That is to say, all card games are a form of Fluxx, or more accurately, Fluxx can become any other game, given the right homemade cards.
As for video games, I suppose I'd have to give credit to Silent Hill for being the most thoroughly creepy series of games ever. Electronic or not.
For myself and several of my friends, the death of the point-n-click adventure genre came just after King's Quest 4: The Perils of Rosella. Honestly, the puzzles weren't puzzles in any sense. They were just examples of "do some random thing and hope it's the same random thing the programmers thought of."
An example: You need a plank of wood to cross a (very shallow) area. A frog is blocking your way. Get the shiny ball hidden underneath the bridge two screens back, then throw it at the frog.
Honestly, does that make any sense? The writers for some of these things just couldn't come up with plausable situations, puzzles, or solutions.
I'd really love to see sales figures of the games as compared to sales figures of the solution books.
Just how tedious is it to archive (locally) huge quantities of strips like this? I mean, using MyComicsPage, let's say I sign up for a year and wish to archive Calvin & Hobbes on my computer (so's I can view 'em offline). Is this so impractical as to be impossible?
Also, which comics do they have full archives of? Is it all of them, or just a select few?
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say you make a program which will generate a random level for, oh just for argument's sake, Doom. Let's say you don't really put that many restrictions on what it can and cannot do, just that it must make a level which is contiguous (or connected by teleporters) and doesn't have any passages smaller than the player character.
Most of these are going to be duller than a chisel made out of Play-doh. Some of them will be exceedingly bad or overly complicated. Some of them will be enjoyable, and a very few will be excellent.
The thing is, when you're dealing with randomly generated levels/other content, you're always dealing with a finite data set (regardless of claims of "Unlimited gameplay!"), and most of that data set is going to be garbage. A lot of it will be virtually indistinguishable from other bits (Here we have the jungle. Here we have a different jungle, but this one has a blue stump in the middle of the third area.) The trick is inserting a quality filter, and then you get down to the dirty business of quantifying quality, so that a computer can understand it.
Randomly generated content is only as bad as the quality filter used on it. Unfortunately, such a thing is a nightmare to program.
I hope that Zelda series collection disc becomes a trend over at Nintendo. A Mario series disc would be another logical choice, and so perhaps F-Zero and Star Fox discs.
One question: Shouldn't the Zelda disc also include A Link to the Past, Link's Awakening, and Oracle of Seasons/Ages?
Nintendo has the distinction of being the only company from which I have bought games without owning the systems. I later get the systems, but if I see something like Metroid Prime or Pikmin for under $20, I'm not about to pass that up.
This is something I've noticed from several of the articles here on /.: We seem to be carrying around two definitions of the word "Adult". On one hand, you have the "mature, sophisticated, intellectual" definition, and on the other, you have the "porn, alcohol, and other age-restricted materials" definition.
/., and we're supposed to be the intellectual crowd.
Tragic though it may be, it seems that the latter definition is the more common one, even here on
Enough maudlin, back to games.
On the American side of things, there's Cheapass games, Looney Labs, Out of the Box publishing, and for you linux/opensource/get-it-for-free-fans, Piecepack.
On the German side of the coin, you've got a bit of a quandry. Most German game manufacturers are GmbH, which is an abbreviation for something or another, but basically boils down to the fact that the company isn't allowed to export their products themselves. So, in order for German games to reach other shores, they must go through other companies. Among them, Mayfair Games, importers of the Catan series (pronounced cuh-tahn'), Rio Grande Games (Bohnanza is a good gateway game, while Peurto Rico and TransAmerica have been getting good attention from less casual gamers.), and on some occasions, Fantasy Flight Games, current makers of most Lord of the Rings board games.
For actually buying the games, I would suggest Funagain or Boulder Games.
Enjoy.
You know, what with the previous article about the judge okaying competitive pop-ups and saying that pop-ups and spam are a "burden of using the internet," it could easily be argued that the same holds true in favor of file-sharers. It's just a "burden of using the internet," and the companies need to get over it.
... and I'll probably keep saying until I die (at which point, others will likely say it in my place): Every disease has a patient.
.01% of them are the type of person who goes for eating someone's intestines while that person is still living, that's still 600000 seriously warped individuals, enough to make a moderately sized city full.
How many people in the world are homicidal psychopaths? Seriously, think about the percentages. There's six billion people out there. If even
So of course there are incredibly violent people willing and eager to do unspeakable acts. For such people, triggers exist all around them, in every aspect of everyday life. No one plays Doom and as a result thinks "Hey, if I shoot someone with a gun, they die! And that's fun!" They already know that a bullet to the brain will kill, and just looking for a new pair of pants could trigger a psychotic episode. It could be the hangers, the mirrors, the checkout counter, anything. It certainly wouldn't be the store's fault.
At any rate, people are responsible for their own actions, period. If anyone else is to blame (in addition, not instead of) it would be their parents or legal guardians, who failed to instill in them a proper sense of right/wrong, fantasy/reality, and social responsibility.
The end.
Strangely, I almost wonder if you're joking. Californians and New Yorkers almost seem to forget that there -are- 48 other states.
I find this news particularly annoying. This merely strengthens the public perception that the state is a haven for stupidity and a complete wasteland of intelligence.
I think it should be restated that Schmutzer is not making a baseless accusation: He is merely repeating what the boys already told police.
However, it should also be pointed out that young boys have been shooting at trucks in Tennessee for about as long as there have been trucks. I doubt this is the first instance of death, or the defendants blaming video games.
When are we going to realize that stupidity is a disease, and get around to treating it medically?
For me (and most everyone I know who played it to any extent) GTA and it's offspring stopped being fun long ago. The only true joy I can squeeze out of it now is dropping a Rhino tank out of the sky, and that gets repetitive quick.
Now, if there was a Sim City-line GTA-style game in which you create your city and then wreak havoc on a personal level, that might get my attention.
I seem to recall a similar concept being presented in a comic book in the early to mid eighties. I suspect it was a Marvel comic featuring a team of heroes. In fact, I quite clearly recall that another part of the storyline was that the machines were powered by kidnapped children (in addition to erasing player's brains).
However, posted to Usenet by yours truly:
Every mention I've seen (coinop.org, gooddealgames.com, etc) is extremely skimpy on details such as names, dates, and specific arcades. The general story at the moment is that in less than a dozen arcades in a suburb of Portland, OR in the early 1980s, Polybius was
introduced. It was an abstract action/puzzle game which did't really attract much attention to itself. However, some people who played it reported incidents of amnesia, forgetting important details about their lives, such as their name, or where their home was. Further, some reported terrible nightmares.
The story further states that most of the kids who played Polybius swore off video games entirely, and that one became a big anti-videogame advocate (some instances of the story mentioning him as a lobbyist). However, no names are given.
Lastly, at least one former Portland, OR arcade owner claims that men in black suits would periodically come in to gather data from the machine, but not quarters. Again no names given.
Examining the logic of the story, however, makes it extremely suspect. If such a thing had truly happened, then the conspiracy in question didn't really do anything to avoid attention. In fact, they did almost everything they could to -attract- attention.
Picture this:
ARCADE OWNER: Oh, hey, you must be here to look at the Polybius machine.
MAN IN BLACK: Why do you say that?
ARCADE OWNER: Because you're wearing a black business suit, stupid. This is an arcade, not a juice bar. By the way, aren't you going to take the quarters or something?
MAN IN BLACK: No. I'm getting data.
Etc.
Now, if such a thing -had- happened, it should have set off warning lights all over the place.
On the other hand, my paranoid brain just spat out a possible explaination other than the "we're being obvious because no one will believe it" explaination that conspiracy theories so often use. How about "we're being obvious because some people will believe it, and we want to control what you believe?"
Fact: In 1983, video games were becoming a serious contender for consumer money.
Fact: In 1983, the public at large did not percieve video games as something to be regulated or monitored.
Fact: They do now.
Some other things to consider: Video games cannot induce amnesia or hallucinations. In fact, no form of video/audio stimulation can without exceptional chemical circumstances.
However, drugs can. Astonishingly, there are drugs which could have produced the exact reactions the children who played Polybius experienced. Many of these could be delivered via touch, or through the air to be inhaled. It wouldn't be too hard to hide a delivery system in a thing as massive as an arcade cabinet, but even that runs a risk: What if someone got hold of the cabinet?
Does everyone remember those bean-bag ashtrays that used to be all over the place? Acades were cluttered with them. Ever know of an arcade that actually cleaned them out?
It wouldn't be too hard to hide a delivery system in one of those, and no one would notice if a vapor seemed to be coming from an ashtray.
In other words, if the whole Polybius thing did happen, the whole thing is a smokescreen for political manipulation to demonize video games so that the government could control them. The game itself was a red herring.
Beware the ashtray.
I see a lot of mentions of classical "Edutainment" titles, like Stickybear, Reader Rabbit, Mathblaster, etc. The problem is, no one, then or now, actively chooses to play those games when there are more enjoyable, non-educational alternatives (and face it, most of the alternatives, now and then, are more enjoyable).
The problem is that the designers ask themselves the question "How can we make learning this concept fun?" They should be asking "How can we teach something from this fun activity?"
I have a friend who is a middle-school level teacher. He makes the above question his philosophy in the classroom, and it works. He's taught fractions with Harry Potter, conjugation of verbs with Transformers, and any number of even odder examples. The trick is that the children don't realize that what they're doing is a lesson. This stuff has won him awards.
Another, more relevant example: A friend's nephew was having trouble with decimals, percents and fractions. Same nephew plays Warhammer 40k obsessively. "Jason, what's 25% of 44?" "I dunno." "Jason, if you have 44 troops in battle, when do you have to make a morale check?"
Take what the child already knows and enjoys and figure out how it is useful. Whether you approve of your child's habits and tastes or not, they are learning all the time from their hobbies, and it falls to parents and educators to direct that learning.
Bleem LLC -never- sold emulated PSOne titles for Dreamcast. Bleem sold an emulator, and you still had to get the game elsewhere. Since Sony's complaint with Bleem was that it used copyrighted code to check for original discs, Bleem simply made their emulator capable of running CD-rs as well.
Had Sony bought out Bleem, it probably would have been cheaper for both parties, and more than likely would have been more than a little profitable.
This makes me wonder: Why don't we see any GBA Casemods (and by casemod, I do not mean "paint job." I mean taking the GBA guts and putting them in another casing, preferrably one of your own construction) out there?
I mean, the SP guts are obviously tiny. Most likely square-shaped. What about putting an SP in an old-style GameBoy brick? How about something that looks like a SNES cartridge, but unfolds SP-style? How about one that looks like an Atari Joystick? A mini-gamecube? The possibilities are there.
In all actuality, Fair Use does cover this. In order for someone to be in violation, the pirated work in question must be commercially damaging.
The exact wording of the Fair Use section of copyright law is a little fluffy on the matter, but basically, I'm looking at (1) The purpose and character of use (profit/nonprofit) and (4) The effect on the potential market value of the product.
Ironically, for those who want slightly more structured chaos, try Andy Looney's Fluxx. Great fun, and there's loads of proposed cards.
Bitin Off Hedz: There is, as far as I know, one way to play this game and enjoy it, and that is to use gummi dinos for pawns so that you really can bite off their hedz.
Girl Genius appeals to the same mentality as Bejeweled (AKA Diamond Mine), only competitive and a little more difficult. Strangely enough, even though it looks wonky and plays weird, a lot of people pick up on it on a subconcious level. You definitely feel smarter for playing it, though.
Never ran into the absentia player syndrome in KDL. Probably depends a lot on somebody just not bothering to finish their own turn (Like in Monopoly: There's no reason your turn should last longer than 1 minute. It's roll & move, buy or not, trade or not.)
I enjoyed Parts Unknown, but found it's thematic sequel Renfield to be unfun in every way.
However, I can't say enough good things about James's new Hip Pocket line of games, Light Speed and Agora especially.
The only trouble with Metagaming's Microgames line was the use of about a hundred tiny little square cardboard tokens, about 1cm^2 each.
That and the maps were printed on flimsy paper, heavily creased (so that they had trouble lying flat unless you covered them with a sheet of clear acrylic or glass), and just plain ugly.
This is probably going to net me a whole slew of blank stares for responses, but honestly:
/. would love it. Everybody would agree that it was a good thing.
Why not just obey the freaking speed limit? Honestly, it's not that hard. It's a speed limit, not some novel form of theoretical mathematics. Heck, if it was theoretical mathematics,
For a crowd that so easily shrugged off the influences of peer pressure in the past (persuing the path of the geek in school instead of the path of the prep), you lot seem to fold like an origami sculpture when somebody tailgates or honks a horn at you.
Or, you could spring for a PSX controller (pretty cheap: around $5 used) and get a PSX-to-USB connector from Radio Shack for $10. There you go. The best 10-button controller money can buy, perfect for SNES emulation.
Strangely, system crashes don't generally happen on video game consoles. There are a (very) few exceptions to this rule.
Of course, there are some reasons for this: video game consoles always have the same hardware setup (that is to say, every PS2 is functionally identical to every other PS2, software wise), and the user can only really input through a simple controller. However, as the systems become more complex, they start to resemble a full-fledged computer system more and more. So the question arises again: Why?
Standarization. You never have to download new drivers for an Xbox or Gamecube controller (even if it is 3rd party) because all such controllers conform to an interface standard. Multi-player adapters are always plug-n-play. To a computer developer, this sounds like a mythical la-la-land. To a console developer, this is a given.
> wouldn't it be nice to have a shirt with tetris on it? i mean the whole thing, in a 2D barcode. hmm...
.25 for margins: 6sq inches per side, two sides.
I've been thinking about this, coupled with an article I saw earlier today about using paper instead of modern data storage (Seemed like illogical luddite rambling to me), and did some quick calculations:
We have laser printers which can print upwards of 800dpi. Let's say you've got a semi-sturdy blank playing card. It's going to be about 2.5"x3.5" or thereabouts. Allow
800dpi allows for 640000 bits per square inch. 12 square inches, and you've got 7680000 bits, or 960000 bytes. And that's if you're printing in black and white. Go 16 color greyscale, and you've got 3840000 bytes. Converting it back could be difficult, though.
At any rate, this is more than enough space in which to fit Tetris. I just wish someone would -do- this. Granted, it's not the most efficient means of data storage, or even the sturdiest, but in terms of disposable data storage, I'd feel better about printing a small file on a paper card than wasting a CD for a single file.
Funny, I thought the US version was Pushover (Starring G.I. Ant)
Oh, wait, you mean video games?
See, this here's the thing: You'd think Games.slashdot would cover all kinds of games, from board games to RPGs to video games.
Anyhow, Fluxx did sort of bend my brain in a peculiar way, not because of it being a particularly thought provoking game (in fact, it's what some people would call "thought optional"), but because it is a proto-typical card game. That is to say, all card games are a form of Fluxx, or more accurately, Fluxx can become any other game, given the right homemade cards.
As for video games, I suppose I'd have to give credit to Silent Hill for being the most thoroughly creepy series of games ever. Electronic or not.
For myself and several of my friends, the death of the point-n-click adventure genre came just after King's Quest 4: The Perils of Rosella. Honestly, the puzzles weren't puzzles in any sense. They were just examples of "do some random thing and hope it's the same random thing the programmers thought of."
An example: You need a plank of wood to cross a (very shallow) area. A frog is blocking your way. Get the shiny ball hidden underneath the bridge two screens back, then throw it at the frog.
Honestly, does that make any sense? The writers for some of these things just couldn't come up with plausable situations, puzzles, or solutions.
I'd really love to see sales figures of the games as compared to sales figures of the solution books.
The RIAA isn't really stupid per se. They're just faced with the following scenario:
...And... uh... There's Internet Piracy! Yes, that's it.
Mr. Big Bucks: My record sales are slipping. Make them better again.
RIAA: Well, there's a few things affecting your sales. There's your own high prices and lackluster quality...
Mr. Big Bucks: Are you planning on getting paid?
RIAA:
Mr. Big Bucks: Guess which one we can do something about.
RIAA: High prices?
Mr. Big Bucks: You are clearly delerious from the lack of money in your pockets. Here's a few million. Feel better now?
RIAA: Oh, we go after piracy?
Mr. Big Bucks: Excelsior.
Just how tedious is it to archive (locally) huge quantities of strips like this? I mean, using MyComicsPage, let's say I sign up for a year and wish to archive Calvin & Hobbes on my computer (so's I can view 'em offline). Is this so impractical as to be impossible?
Also, which comics do they have full archives of? Is it all of them, or just a select few?