What's truly weird about this spoof site (yes, it is a joke) is this: Cthulhu Karts (Cthulhu 500) is an actual card game, and a fairly decent one, at that.
I'm leaning towards thinking that this is probably the updated version of FFVII for which fanboys have been slavoring over the past several years. Before Crisis is known to occur before the events of FFVII, and Advent Children is known to occur after, following the storylines of Cloud, Sephiroth, and the rest, after some sort of event which defined them as people (The advent that they are children of). That implies that the big story in Midgar, the crisis, was the events shown in FFVII.
Crisis Core implies that either they are revisiting those events, or something at the center of those events has carried over. Perhaps the Meteor core survived the Lifeforce/Holy attack. Perhaps Aeris' spirit was somehow tied to the Meteor, or its core.
I've been playing around with it for a few hours. You can swim now, which makes for an intersting addition. If you try to leave the SA (Yeah, we all know it's really Los Angeles: Check out the Vinewood sign) area, you encounter road construction. So I decided to try to swim under the closed-off bridges. Bad Idea. When you arrive on the opposite shore, you are instantly a super-wanted criminal, four stars.
Another intersting change is the geography-relevant vehicles. You're not likely to encounter a fancy import car in CJ's home neighborhood, nor will you find any two-tone beaters in the glitzy parts of town. If you drive out into the countryside, you'll encounter 10mph tractors, and on the highways, you might even see some 18-wheelers (although I have yet to see any carrying a trailor: If they are present, it might be another optional mission type, like the vigilante, rescue, and fire missions in other GTAs).
Also, car surfing is alive and well. You can ride on someone's hood clear around town, and this is a good way to quickly explore the city. It is a bit confusing, however, to see the particular pathways some drivers take. Also, it's interesting to note that since the clock goes at 1 game-minute per real second, several traffic lights take 15-20 minutes. Man, that's awful.
So now all that needs to happen to completely round out season 5 is for SciFi to make 5 of these mini-series, with the 5th one lasting 3 nights instead of 2. That would give us a full 990 minutes, or the equivalent of 22 45-minute episodes.
Unless they wimp out and try to completely wrap up the loose ends in tomorrow's show, which would be a mistake: It's probably going to have the highest ratings of anything SciFi will show for a good long time.
Of course, that sort of depends on when the new SG-1 and Atlantis episodes start back up.
Yeah, it's pretty disgusting. I mean, we own the original game, and it's great. I've never tried the expansions, but obviously they add a lot to the game. But Starfarers of Catan, a card game and a novel? That's just milking a cash cow. Now, I'm all for exploiting idiots, but maybe they went a bit too far.
Actually, the card game is extremely good, Starfarers is unique enough to be it's own game (and it is), and Starship Catan is probably my favorite of the bunch. And the novel was written by a fan. They're not quite milking it yet.
Now, if the game gets republished with a Simpsons theme, I'd say they're milking it.
Settlers of Catan is the English edition of Die Siedler von Catan, a German Board game created by Klaus Teuber, and published by Kosmos verlag GmbH in Germany, and Mayfair Games in most of the English-speaking world.
In it, you randomly build a hexagonal island out of smaller, hexagonal tiles. Each tile represends a resource (wool/sheep, lumber/wood, brick/clay, ore/stone, grain/food: These are some of the names that the five resources are known by), each with a number from 2-12. Etc, etc, etc. You know what, just look here, or here.
Part of the appeal of Settlers is its scalability: For beginners starting out for the first time, there's the basic set, which remains fun several plays later. More advanced players, or those craving a bit more variety, can snap in the Seafarers expansion, which adds the option for larger maps, alternate victory conditions, and scenario-specific points and goals, while those wanting a more micromanaged approach can try the Cities & Knights expansion, which allows players to build up their specific cities with improvements, and generally mess with the core game.
The popularity curve tends to favor Seafarers over the basic set and Cities & Knights, but they all have a pretty strong following.
Also of note are the other Catan games, including:
Eh? Your PS2 doesn't always boot into the game? That, my friend, is most likely a physical problem (or you're just being impatient). It is certainly not a programming fault. Any time you power up your PS2 with a PSX or PS2 game in the drive, it should (barring harware failure or scratched up discs) boot straight into the game.
If it stops at the menu, give it a few seconds. It has to validate the disc. If it never moves on, then your system is lacking functionality that other PS2s have, most likely due to a worn out laser assembly.
Unless, of course, you're talking about the specific game's menu. That would just seem like whining, though.
I'll tell you what's stopping it, at least for college students: Paranoid universities that block darned near every port except 81, rendering Bittorrent totally useless. Anyone have any workaround ideas for that?
You just haven't been paying attention, have you?
on
Sam and Max 2: Reloaded
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
How many of these blood-soaked and mind-numbingly repetitive first-person shooters will be remembered a decade hence?
Doom, 1993. Doom 2, 1994.
And next year, I'll wager a lot of us still remember Star Wars: Dark Forces.
Honestly, nine out of ten slashdotters can probably still hum the Doom theme song.
Sure, the handheld market caters to kids. That's why the GBA-SP sells at a rate of about 2 units every minute.
Parents balking at $50 extra? You underestimate the number of upper-middle- and upper-class households. Remember, if you can convince 1% of everyone to buy your product, that's over 60,000,000 people worldwide.
Not too long ago, Filter (the Top 10 [insert adjective here] Games countdown show) featured Ico in the top 10 games deserving a sequel. I think it came in at 2, and was topped by Vagrant Story. Let's hope some of the other overlooked sequel-worthy games get their share of the spotlight, too.
So, the PS2, which was of a fairly tolerable size, is possibly getting a miniaturized update ala PSOne, whereas the Xbox, hulking brick of technology that it is, is almost certainly not getting such an update.
*AHEM* Microsoft, the only reason I haven't bought your system is because it's massive. Cumbersomely large. I don't have a lot of room to spare for these things, and I live in a fairly rural area with comfortable living space. Imagine what it must be like for people who live in an overcrowded society where the average apartment size may be smaller than your kitchen, and space is at a premium.
Good thing you're not trying to capture any portion of that market.
Original cut, no. Those are dead and gone and will never be released again. But HD-DVDs of the Special Editions? Oh, you betcha.
That's a little misleading. The original cut may not exist in assembled form (although I suspect it actually does, despite Lucas' claims otherwise), but the original stock that comprises it almost certainly does. That, or the SE stock sans CG effects (that is, cleanup only) still exists. I seriously doubt that Lucas took original archival material which would provide for a better source in the event of additional changes and thrown it in a fire or something.
After all, he may eventually want to run with the idea of Jabba being a humanoid.
Anyway, if such material still exists, it will almost certainly be released immediately following GL's death. But please, don't kill him. I wouldn't want the legal backlash of giving you the idea.
Okay, I ordinarily don't openly encourage piracy, but in this case Lucas is clearly profiteering on his own fans, which is Not Good. Besides, most of us already own VHS versions of the OT which are long since suffering from age. So still illegal, but a moral victory.
Anyway, alt.binaries.starwars, people. DVD rips of the non-special edition laserdiscs. There are, of course, other places to acquire these rips, some of which cost money.
If you do go for the bootleg LD rips, the two best versions are the TR47 version, and the Dr. Gonzo version. The TR47 version has slightly superior video quality, but has no menus or bonuses, while the Dr. G version has menus and commentary tracks (which are pieced together from various interviews), but loses a barely noticable amount of quality.
Recently, I noticed Best Buy was giving away Sky Captian promotional DVDs, which contain the two trailers, a making-of documentary, and a PC game (which I haven't bothered to try). In the documentary, they clearly show that the libarary scene (In which Sky Captian is shot across a small library or study by a mysterious woman in a leather suit) was shot on a soundstage set, and the bulk of the room was real. Bluescreen was only visible through the windows. I wouldn't be surprised if there were other such scenes that they weren't counting.
I've really got to give Torgo proper credit: WiP?? has been covering Infinium Labs' escapades quite thoroughly, showing every piece of information he could get his hands on. If you want to be up-to-date on what is pretty obviously a scam that just won't quit, check them out.
Like so many here, I've long since converted to using my PSX-Dual Shock controller with the Radio Shack USB converter, but that's hardly the point.
We've started seeing various self-contained video game systems, such as the Atari 2600-in-a-joystick (and also Intellivision, Sega Genesis, and some arcade games) hit the legal market, but when are we going to see a NES-in-a-NESpad (and not a NES-in-a-three-handed-N64 controller)? Or, even better, SNES-in-a-SNESpad? That's the sort of hack I was hoping this was. Alas.
It's trivial to get into a UPC office to gain access to these things. Most stores don't check ID's, let alone work orders. Default passwords are commonplace ("ma5t3r", "9052/9052" and the like), and it's very easy to get an employee to Log in for you if needed. WalMart keeps printed logs of just about every transaction that is created, as well as in electronic form.
Am I alone in noticing this as a nightmarishly insecure system? Consider this scenario: Hacker enters the UPC office, then alters the prices on a select number of high cost items to be something negligable, like $0.20 or some such. Hacker's partner buys the items on the list, winds up paying less than $5.00 for over $1,000 worth of merchandise, with everything looking fine from the POV of your non-tech-savvy register worker (or U-Scan system). Hacker gives his partner 4 minutes or so (since the prices only have to be right when they're getting scanned), then switches all the prices back and makes his escape.
These Internet speed record experiments are interesting, but the issue of scale is rarely addressed. Okay, so a team of researchers were able to go faster than the speed of bad news, but what happens when the server load is a bit higher than just one transfer?
Or does Internet2 use some exotic de-centralized transfer method that renders the paradigm of servers laughably obsolete?
Actually, I think in one version you could put your bathrobe in "the thing your aunt gave you and you don't know what it is," and then put TTYAGYAYDKWII in the pocket of your bathrobe. It even listed in your inventory that both were inside each other.
I thought it should have just ended the game right there, saying something along the lines of, "Okay, fine. You win. You've done something sillier than anything else we had planned. Happy?"
Isn't this about like asking someone "Have you stopped beating your wife?"
Okay, in the interests of good logic, yes, I admit that the person you ask could have actually been beating his wife at some point. I would point out that it is similarly likely that such a person trusted sponsored research.
The patent centers around "home video game systems" which are already legally distinct entities from limited functionality computing devices.
The truly interesting aspect of the patent is that it mentions home video game systems "with hard disk drive and internet access capability," something that no Nintendo product has ever had. Nintendo hasn't released a lot of information regarding the GameCube's successor, but I think this is probably a good indication that it has both a HDD and broadband modem out of the box.
Slashdot Mirror
The Universe itself is (supposedly) infinite. Now if we could just understand how it's processing the data...
What's truly weird about this spoof site (yes, it is a joke) is this: Cthulhu Karts (Cthulhu 500) is an actual card game, and a fairly decent one, at that.
I'm leaning towards thinking that this is probably the updated version of FFVII for which fanboys have been slavoring over the past several years. Before Crisis is known to occur before the events of FFVII, and Advent Children is known to occur after, following the storylines of Cloud, Sephiroth, and the rest, after some sort of event which defined them as people (The advent that they are children of). That implies that the big story in Midgar, the crisis, was the events shown in FFVII.
Crisis Core implies that either they are revisiting those events, or something at the center of those events has carried over. Perhaps the Meteor core survived the Lifeforce/Holy attack. Perhaps Aeris' spirit was somehow tied to the Meteor, or its core.
I've been playing around with it for a few hours. You can swim now, which makes for an intersting addition. If you try to leave the SA (Yeah, we all know it's really Los Angeles: Check out the Vinewood sign) area, you encounter road construction. So I decided to try to swim under the closed-off bridges. Bad Idea. When you arrive on the opposite shore, you are instantly a super-wanted criminal, four stars.
Another intersting change is the geography-relevant vehicles. You're not likely to encounter a fancy import car in CJ's home neighborhood, nor will you find any two-tone beaters in the glitzy parts of town. If you drive out into the countryside, you'll encounter 10mph tractors, and on the highways, you might even see some 18-wheelers (although I have yet to see any carrying a trailor: If they are present, it might be another optional mission type, like the vigilante, rescue, and fire missions in other GTAs).
Also, car surfing is alive and well. You can ride on someone's hood clear around town, and this is a good way to quickly explore the city. It is a bit confusing, however, to see the particular pathways some drivers take. Also, it's interesting to note that since the clock goes at 1 game-minute per real second, several traffic lights take 15-20 minutes. Man, that's awful.
So now all that needs to happen to completely round out season 5 is for SciFi to make 5 of these mini-series, with the 5th one lasting 3 nights instead of 2. That would give us a full 990 minutes, or the equivalent of 22 45-minute episodes.
Unless they wimp out and try to completely wrap up the loose ends in tomorrow's show, which would be a mistake: It's probably going to have the highest ratings of anything SciFi will show for a good long time.
Of course, that sort of depends on when the new SG-1 and Atlantis episodes start back up.
Yeah, it's pretty disgusting. I mean, we own the original game, and it's great. I've never tried the expansions, but obviously they add a lot to the game. But Starfarers of Catan, a card game and a novel? That's just milking a cash cow. Now, I'm all for exploiting idiots, but maybe they went a bit too far.
Actually, the card game is extremely good, Starfarers is unique enough to be it's own game (and it is), and Starship Catan is probably my favorite of the bunch. And the novel was written by a fan. They're not quite milking it yet.
Now, if the game gets republished with a Simpsons theme, I'd say they're milking it.
Not to nitpick, but "-1, Inaccurate."
Settlers of Catan is the English edition of Die Siedler von Catan, a German Board game created by Klaus Teuber, and published by Kosmos verlag GmbH in Germany, and Mayfair Games in most of the English-speaking world.
In it, you randomly build a hexagonal island out of smaller, hexagonal tiles. Each tile represends a resource (wool/sheep, lumber/wood, brick/clay, ore/stone, grain/food: These are some of the names that the five resources are known by), each with a number from 2-12. Etc, etc, etc. You know what, just look here, or here.
Part of the appeal of Settlers is its scalability: For beginners starting out for the first time, there's the basic set, which remains fun several plays later. More advanced players, or those craving a bit more variety, can snap in the Seafarers expansion, which adds the option for larger maps, alternate victory conditions, and scenario-specific points and goals, while those wanting a more micromanaged approach can try the Cities & Knights expansion, which allows players to build up their specific cities with improvements, and generally mess with the core game.
The popularity curve tends to favor Seafarers over the basic set and Cities & Knights, but they all have a pretty strong following.
Also of note are the other Catan games, including:
Starfarers of Catan
Starship Catan
Settlers of Catan Card Game
Candamir: The First Settlers (which is not yet released or even translated).
Then there's the novel, the computer games, and the whiskey bottle edition. No, seriously.
Eh? Your PS2 doesn't always boot into the game? That, my friend, is most likely a physical problem (or you're just being impatient). It is certainly not a programming fault. Any time you power up your PS2 with a PSX or PS2 game in the drive, it should (barring harware failure or scratched up discs) boot straight into the game.
If it stops at the menu, give it a few seconds. It has to validate the disc. If it never moves on, then your system is lacking functionality that other PS2s have, most likely due to a worn out laser assembly.
Unless, of course, you're talking about the specific game's menu. That would just seem like whining, though.
So what is stopping anyone from doing this now?
I'll tell you what's stopping it, at least for college students: Paranoid universities that block darned near every port except 81, rendering Bittorrent totally useless. Anyone have any workaround ideas for that?
How many of these blood-soaked and mind-numbingly repetitive first-person shooters will be remembered a decade hence?
Doom, 1993.
Doom 2, 1994.
And next year, I'll wager a lot of us still remember Star Wars: Dark Forces.
Honestly, nine out of ten slashdotters can probably still hum the Doom theme song.
Is it now required that at every mention of Infinium Labs, someone has to make the DNF Joke? Who thinks it's still funny?
Sure, the handheld market caters to kids. That's why the GBA-SP sells at a rate of about 2 units every minute.
Parents balking at $50 extra? You underestimate the number of upper-middle- and upper-class households. Remember, if you can convince 1% of everyone to buy your product, that's over 60,000,000 people worldwide.
Not too long ago, Filter (the Top 10 [insert adjective here] Games countdown show) featured Ico in the top 10 games deserving a sequel. I think it came in at 2, and was topped by Vagrant Story. Let's hope some of the other overlooked sequel-worthy games get their share of the spotlight, too.
So, the PS2, which was of a fairly tolerable size, is possibly getting a miniaturized update ala PSOne, whereas the Xbox, hulking brick of technology that it is, is almost certainly not getting such an update.
*AHEM* Microsoft, the only reason I haven't bought your system is because it's massive. Cumbersomely large. I don't have a lot of room to spare for these things, and I live in a fairly rural area with comfortable living space. Imagine what it must be like for people who live in an overcrowded society where the average apartment size may be smaller than your kitchen, and space is at a premium.
Good thing you're not trying to capture any portion of that market.
Overheard in Heaven -
Angel 1: Have you heard all these rumors that Paul McCartney is alive? Seems there's some strong evidence to indicate it may be true.
Angel 2: Then who's writing all these killer harp riffs?
Original cut, no. Those are dead and gone and will never be released again. But HD-DVDs of the Special Editions? Oh, you betcha.
That's a little misleading. The original cut may not exist in assembled form (although I suspect it actually does, despite Lucas' claims otherwise), but the original stock that comprises it almost certainly does. That, or the SE stock sans CG effects (that is, cleanup only) still exists. I seriously doubt that Lucas took original archival material which would provide for a better source in the event of additional changes and thrown it in a fire or something.
After all, he may eventually want to run with the idea of Jabba being a humanoid.
Anyway, if such material still exists, it will almost certainly be released immediately following GL's death. But please, don't kill him. I wouldn't want the legal backlash of giving you the idea.
Okay, I ordinarily don't openly encourage piracy, but in this case Lucas is clearly profiteering on his own fans, which is Not Good. Besides, most of us already own VHS versions of the OT which are long since suffering from age. So still illegal, but a moral victory.
Anyway, alt.binaries.starwars, people. DVD rips of the non-special edition laserdiscs. There are, of course, other places to acquire these rips, some of which cost money.
If you do go for the bootleg LD rips, the two best versions are the TR47 version, and the Dr. Gonzo version. The TR47 version has slightly superior video quality, but has no menus or bonuses, while the Dr. G version has menus and commentary tracks (which are pieced together from various interviews), but loses a barely noticable amount of quality.
"Entirely" is a misleading term here.
Recently, I noticed Best Buy was giving away Sky Captian promotional DVDs, which contain the two trailers, a making-of documentary, and a PC game (which I haven't bothered to try). In the documentary, they clearly show that the libarary scene (In which Sky Captian is shot across a small library or study by a mysterious woman in a leather suit) was shot on a soundstage set, and the bulk of the room was real. Bluescreen was only visible through the windows. I wouldn't be surprised if there were other such scenes that they weren't counting.
I've really got to give Torgo proper credit: WiP?? has been covering Infinium Labs' escapades quite thoroughly, showing every piece of information he could get his hands on. If you want to be up-to-date on what is pretty obviously a scam that just won't quit, check them out.
Like so many here, I've long since converted to using my PSX-Dual Shock controller with the Radio Shack USB converter, but that's hardly the point.
We've started seeing various self-contained video game systems, such as the Atari 2600-in-a-joystick (and also Intellivision, Sega Genesis, and some arcade games) hit the legal market, but when are we going to see a NES-in-a-NESpad (and not a NES-in-a-three-handed-N64 controller)? Or, even better, SNES-in-a-SNESpad? That's the sort of hack I was hoping this was. Alas.
It's trivial to get into a UPC office to gain access to these things. Most stores don't check ID's, let alone work orders. Default passwords are commonplace ("ma5t3r", "9052/9052" and the like), and it's very easy to get an employee to Log in for you if needed. WalMart keeps printed logs of just about every transaction that is created, as well as in electronic form.
Am I alone in noticing this as a nightmarishly insecure system? Consider this scenario: Hacker enters the UPC office, then alters the prices on a select number of high cost items to be something negligable, like $0.20 or some such. Hacker's partner buys the items on the list, winds up paying less than $5.00 for over $1,000 worth of merchandise, with everything looking fine from the POV of your non-tech-savvy register worker (or U-Scan system). Hacker gives his partner 4 minutes or so (since the prices only have to be right when they're getting scanned), then switches all the prices back and makes his escape.
That's just scary.
These Internet speed record experiments are interesting, but the issue of scale is rarely addressed. Okay, so a team of researchers were able to go faster than the speed of bad news, but what happens when the server load is a bit higher than just one transfer?
Or does Internet2 use some exotic de-centralized transfer method that renders the paradigm of servers laughably obsolete?
Actually, I think in one version you could put your bathrobe in "the thing your aunt gave you and you don't know what it is," and then put TTYAGYAYDKWII in the pocket of your bathrobe. It even listed in your inventory that both were inside each other.
I thought it should have just ended the game right there, saying something along the lines of, "Okay, fine. You win. You've done something sillier than anything else we had planned. Happy?"
When did you stop trusting sponsored 'research'?
Isn't this about like asking someone "Have you stopped beating your wife?"
Okay, in the interests of good logic, yes, I admit that the person you ask could have actually been beating his wife at some point. I would point out that it is similarly likely that such a person trusted sponsored research.
The patent centers around "home video game systems" which are already legally distinct entities from limited functionality computing devices.
The truly interesting aspect of the patent is that it mentions home video game systems "with hard disk drive and internet access capability," something that no Nintendo product has ever had. Nintendo hasn't released a lot of information regarding the GameCube's successor, but I think this is probably a good indication that it has both a HDD and broadband modem out of the box.