It's probably a cross between your theory, and him simply trying to show that he has a personality. Kinda like how until a few years ago CmdrTaco used to make a point of mentioning his love of The Who in Slashdot stories regularly. I think that stopped around the time Pete Townshead was associated with child porn.
Anyway, Slashdot readers tend to like reviews that are nothing more than tech specs and fancy graphs. But the general population prefers a little more life in what they read, which is what it comes down to in the end.
From the summary: "Plugged into my car speakers, it was able to belt out the new Fountains of Wayne rocker, "Maureen," loudly enough to be heard perfectly, even though I was going 70 mph in a convertible with the top down.'"
Ooooh! He's trendy (new MTV music), he's rich and stylish (convertible), and he's a wanker (blasting noise pollution).
Fountains of Wayne trendy? A band that's been around for 10 years and only had one song get any significant radioplay (and that was 2 years ago already) is your definition of trendy MTV music?
It's ok to not like power-pop, but not liking something doesn't make it trendy MTV music.
What's hard about Wind Waker? The puzzles are standard fare for Zelda, but the enemies simply don't do any significant amount of damage. It's really damn hard to die once you get past the first level.
The triforce hunt is long and boring, but not hard...
Yeah, but IE and Gecko don't support most of them, so they're pretty useless. I found they both will let you force a page break at a certain point, but will ignore any other attempts at controlling where the page breaks go.
One of my favorite sanity effects was the blue screen. You got a blue screen with a register dump that looked similar to a BSOD. Really pissed me off, as the first thing that popped into my mind was All Star Baseball, which would occasionally crash and do a register dump on the screen very similar to a Linux kernel panic.
Another good one was you'd press start to check your inventory, and everything would be missing. Next time you checked your inventory it would be back, but it would certainly freak you out if you need to switch weapons fast...
The current version of Services for Unix already bypasses Win32. I saw MS's presentation at LinuxWorld last year, and they made a big point out of that.
Bundles worked well for the GameCube launch. Then again, even with 3 games, and extra controller, and a memory card, it only brought the price up to $400.
The moral and ethical beliefs of millions of Americans include the mistaken belief that all Catholics keep guns in their basements and that everyone else but their chosen protestant denomination is going to Hell, too.
Catholics with guns? That's just bizarre... maybe some Southern Protestant denomination, but Catholics? Catholics are probably one of the least likely groups to have guns.
I'm not saying there are no ethical issues. If we see people creating fetuses for the purpose of extracting stem cells, many could legitimately consider that morally and ethically reprehensible---myself included. However, as long as you are extracting tissue from a fetus that is going to die anyway, not taking advantage of those cells would be equally morally and ethically indefensible.
Well, the Republicans seem to try to frame the issue as creating embryos for the sole purpose of using them in research. They try to keep the conversation as far away from embryos that are going to be destroyed anyway as they possibly can. I assume they're just trying to tie the issue to abortion and hoping to use it to help on that battle. I think most people are of the mindset that if the embryo is going to be destroyed no matter what, you might as well benefit from it if you can. The Republicans just seem to be afraid of that starting down a slippery slope...
I would argue that an embryo is precisely an equivalent to someone on life support. Left outside of an uterus there is absolutely no hope that this embryo will sprout into a full blown human.
The same argument can be made about an infant or a toddler. If you left an infant or toddler in the woods on their own, the odds of them surving to be an adult on their own are almost zero. Very young children are only slightly less dependant on others than they were when in the womb.
You've just made my point. They didn't do it because that's ideal from a gameplay perspective. They did it because it was the only way they could make the interface playable without having more thumbs.
Well, I do think it's ideal. To me, Metroid Prime feels like Super Metroid with a different camera angle. By the time I made it through the intro level, the controls felt natural and I didn't really have to think about them. The only thing that really felt awkward was the grappling beam, and at that, only when you had to do the trickier maneuvers. Basically, if you had to double jump while looking up in order to reach the grappling point.
I don't really like FPS games that much, as I don't like the precision aiming necessary. I'd much rather focus on an objective than on aiming.
Jumping in a fully 3D world sucks. To make it managable, you need a fully adjustable camera. There were two reasons Zelda didn't do this. The first is it would've taken away at least 3 of the C buttons, cramping the controls. The other is Zelda is based around tight passageways, which don't go well with free cameras.
As for the targeting, what other choice did they have? The only alternative really is to make the game use a Resident Evil like control scheme, which would just make the whole game suck.
Autotargeting in Metroid Prime isn't a cludge around a bad interface. The game is about exploration and strategy. If they put traditional FPS controls on it, it wouldn't feel at all like a Metroid game. It you were expecting a game about blowing things up, you picked the wrong game. It's an adventure game that happens to be in a first person view. Think about how much the game uses the face buttons, and realize how much you'd lose if the controls were designed so that your right thumb was on the analog stick most of the time.
You're not seeing much XML if you work for a small company. At the company I work for, we use CSV based files. Even that is occasionally too difficult for some of our potential partners.
One person I had to deal with had no idea how to open a file with a.txt extension. I told her to try using Notepad, at which point she replied she had never heard of Notepad and it was not installed on her computer. I eventually had to sent her a template file with a csv extension, guide her through working on it in Excel, and then manually correcting the file when I received it (things like adding leading zeros that Excel dropped from numbers). Eventually even this proved too much for them, and they faxed us enrollment forms filled out by hand by their customers. Obviously this partner didn't result in any significant amount of business.
Sorry, thanks for playing. If anything, the things you describe are for the STATES to decide, not the FEDERAL government.
The problem with doing it at the state level is its a hell of a lot less efficient that way. We're all one country, so we should act like it.
Ignoring the blackout a few years ago, public utilties are generally far better off being done at the national level. The benefits of the electrical grid far outweight the disadvantages. You gain more power through it every day, but how often does it go down due to being connected?
Mass transit at a state level sucks. NJ's public transportation would be worthless if it wasn't intertwined with NY's, which I think is also intertwined with some of the other states that neighbor it.
Maybe in the midwest where the states are large and fairly empty doing things at the statelevel makes more sense. But particuarlly on the east coast where states are small, dense, and very dependant on each other, isolating the states doesn't make any sense at all.
You're ok with pork barrel spending and all the government waste? If not, then you must see the only way to stop it is to stop giving the feds our money.
That argument comes down to "some people suck, therefore, all people suck."
Besides, in the end, if you got your wish and the federal government got out of things, you'd just start bitching the state government shouldn't be doing things.
The government should stay out of people's lives socially because their purpose is to keep the trains running and the water flowing
Actually, it's not the FEDERAL government's job to do either, check the Constitution.
The Constitution doesn't say it's the federal government's job simply because trains and indoor plumbing didn't exist at the time the Constitution was written.
The constitution does say the federal government should provide a postal service, which was pretty much the only thing at the time on the same scale as public transportation or utility service. It's just natural for the role to expand. The only people who object are the conservatives who like to bitch about everything, using the justifications "the government shouldn't do things just because" and "a piece of paper that's over 200 years old doesn't go into detail on the necessities of modern society."
It's very, very unlikely to ever stand a chance of being open sourced. There's too much licensed code around the system. The issue isn't so much replacing the code, but rather tracking down people who know enough about it to locate and remove the licensed code.
Even if the code was open sourced, you'd have a half gigabyte of 16 bit assembly code. There's not a lot of people who'd be willing to go through the effort of making that usable.
They came out with an SDK for 2.0, and updated SDKs for the various handheld devices that used the OS.
It was pretty nice to work with. I've never found anything else that comes close to the ease of creating a GUI using the GEOS APIs.
People who were comfortable with MFC before trying the GEOS SDK tended to have a hard time, but if you didn't know either, GEOS programming was far easier to learn and use. The main hardship of GEOS programming was the fact that the OS ran in real mode, which rather limited the amount of memory you could access at one time.
By jumping puzzle levels, I'm assuming you mean the ones with the remix of the original SMB theme playing in the background. Those levels were the best part of the game. They felt like the old 2D Mario games.
The problems with Mario Sunshine came down to two things:
1) The various coin hunts made up something like 1/3 of the shines in the game.
2) By placing the game on a vacation island, they really limited what options they had for level design. The levels weren't nearly as varied as in Mario 64.
Metroid skipping a generation had nothing to do with slow schedules. Metroid's sales are far better in the US than in Japan. Being as Japan-centric as Nintendo is, they simply looked at the Japanese market and decided there wasn't much demand for a new Metroid game. They only decided to release it after being pestered repeatedly for it by people in the US for several years.
It's there, just disabled. And relatively easy to enable. Easy enough that they had to expect it to happen.
For two, modding the game to enable this feature is unlawful.
Did you have to sign a contract saying you couldn't tweak the game when you bought it? It's just as legal as modifying your new car.
For three, they didn't lie, these self appointed "experts" just don't understand the press release or are deliberately misinterpreting it to accuse Rockstar of lying.
Rockstar's press release was entirely intended to confuse people by using complicated words most people wouldn't understand, while simultaneously not really admitting or denying having put the code in the game.
Not to mention the fact that the game was rated MA, not M and there have indeed been AO rated games since ESRB was formed.
The ESRB changed the ratings to single letter ratings something like 6 years ago. It's definately rated M. Regardless, MA is the old code for M, which isn't any different.
Slashdot Mirror
Sonic games sold much better on the GameCube than on PS2 or Xbox, so it is rather surprising that they're releasing it for Nintendo's system.
The more likely reason is that Nintendo's NDA's prevent anyone from announcing games until after the system is fully revealed.
It's probably a cross between your theory, and him simply trying to show that he has a personality. Kinda like how until a few years ago CmdrTaco used to make a point of mentioning his love of The Who in Slashdot stories regularly. I think that stopped around the time Pete Townshead was associated with child porn.
Anyway, Slashdot readers tend to like reviews that are nothing more than tech specs and fancy graphs. But the general population prefers a little more life in what they read, which is what it comes down to in the end.
From the summary: "Plugged into my car speakers, it was able to belt out the new Fountains of Wayne rocker, "Maureen," loudly enough to be heard perfectly, even though I was going 70 mph in a convertible with the top down.'"
Ooooh! He's trendy (new MTV music), he's rich and stylish (convertible), and he's a wanker (blasting noise pollution).
Fountains of Wayne trendy? A band that's been around for 10 years and only had one song get any significant radioplay (and that was 2 years ago already) is your definition of trendy MTV music?
It's ok to not like power-pop, but not liking something doesn't make it trendy MTV music.
What's hard about Wind Waker? The puzzles are standard fare for Zelda, but the enemies simply don't do any significant amount of damage. It's really damn hard to die once you get past the first level.
The triforce hunt is long and boring, but not hard...
Yeah, but IE and Gecko don't support most of them, so they're pretty useless. I found they both will let you force a page break at a certain point, but will ignore any other attempts at controlling where the page breaks go.
We could have patents on "sleepless in seattle" plots
Anything resulting in less chick flicks sounds good to me.
One of my favorite sanity effects was the blue screen. You got a blue screen with a register dump that looked similar to a BSOD. Really pissed me off, as the first thing that popped into my mind was All Star Baseball, which would occasionally crash and do a register dump on the screen very similar to a Linux kernel panic.
Another good one was you'd press start to check your inventory, and everything would be missing. Next time you checked your inventory it would be back, but it would certainly freak you out if you need to switch weapons fast...
The patent was filed December 14, 2000. Eternal Darkness was released in 2002. Patents just take a long time to be processed.
The current version of Services for Unix already bypasses Win32. I saw MS's presentation at LinuxWorld last year, and they made a big point out of that.
The people I would love to hurt are the ones at Square-Enix. If I understand right, Final Fantasy is now 360-exclusive. So much for Final Fantasy. :\
Making a major RPG Xbox exclusive would be a major mistake. The majority of RPG sales come from Japan, where the Xbox doesn't sell very well.
Considering Square-Enix is the biggest name in RPGs, I would think they would know better than anyone what a mistake that would be.
Bundles worked well for the GameCube launch. Then again, even with 3 games, and extra controller, and a memory card, it only brought the price up to $400.
The moral and ethical beliefs of millions of Americans include the mistaken belief that all Catholics keep guns in their basements and that everyone else but their chosen protestant denomination is going to Hell, too.
Catholics with guns? That's just bizarre... maybe some Southern Protestant denomination, but Catholics? Catholics are probably one of the least likely groups to have guns.
I'm not saying there are no ethical issues. If we see people creating fetuses for the purpose of extracting stem cells, many could legitimately consider that morally and ethically reprehensible---myself included. However, as long as you are extracting tissue from a fetus that is going to die anyway, not taking advantage of those cells would be equally morally and ethically indefensible.
Well, the Republicans seem to try to frame the issue as creating embryos for the sole purpose of using them in research. They try to keep the conversation as far away from embryos that are going to be destroyed anyway as they possibly can. I assume they're just trying to tie the issue to abortion and hoping to use it to help on that battle. I think most people are of the mindset that if the embryo is going to be destroyed no matter what, you might as well benefit from it if you can. The Republicans just seem to be afraid of that starting down a slippery slope...
I would argue that an embryo is precisely an equivalent to someone on life support. Left outside of an uterus there is absolutely no hope that this embryo will sprout into a full blown human.
The same argument can be made about an infant or a toddler. If you left an infant or toddler in the woods on their own, the odds of them surving to be an adult on their own are almost zero. Very young children are only slightly less dependant on others than they were when in the womb.
I'd like to know why this line:
x = *(float*)
isn't just:
x = (float)i;
You've just made my point. They didn't do it because that's ideal from a gameplay perspective. They did it because it was the only way they could make the interface playable without having more thumbs.
Well, I do think it's ideal. To me, Metroid Prime feels like Super Metroid with a different camera angle. By the time I made it through the intro level, the controls felt natural and I didn't really have to think about them. The only thing that really felt awkward was the grappling beam, and at that, only when you had to do the trickier maneuvers. Basically, if you had to double jump while looking up in order to reach the grappling point.
I don't really like FPS games that much, as I don't like the precision aiming necessary. I'd much rather focus on an objective than on aiming.
Jumping in a fully 3D world sucks. To make it managable, you need a fully adjustable camera. There were two reasons Zelda didn't do this. The first is it would've taken away at least 3 of the C buttons, cramping the controls. The other is Zelda is based around tight passageways, which don't go well with free cameras.
As for the targeting, what other choice did they have? The only alternative really is to make the game use a Resident Evil like control scheme, which would just make the whole game suck.
Autotargeting in Metroid Prime isn't a cludge around a bad interface. The game is about exploration and strategy. If they put traditional FPS controls on it, it wouldn't feel at all like a Metroid game. It you were expecting a game about blowing things up, you picked the wrong game. It's an adventure game that happens to be in a first person view. Think about how much the game uses the face buttons, and realize how much you'd lose if the controls were designed so that your right thumb was on the analog stick most of the time.
You're not seeing much XML if you work for a small company. At the company I work for, we use CSV based files. Even that is occasionally too difficult for some of our potential partners.
.txt extension. I told her to try using Notepad, at which point she replied she had never heard of Notepad and it was not installed on her computer. I eventually had to sent her a template file with a csv extension, guide her through working on it in Excel, and then manually correcting the file when I received it (things like adding leading zeros that Excel dropped from numbers). Eventually even this proved too much for them, and they faxed us enrollment forms filled out by hand by their customers. Obviously this partner didn't result in any significant amount of business.
One person I had to deal with had no idea how to open a file with a
Sorry, thanks for playing. If anything, the things you describe are for the STATES to decide, not the FEDERAL government.
The problem with doing it at the state level is its a hell of a lot less efficient that way. We're all one country, so we should act like it.
Ignoring the blackout a few years ago, public utilties are generally far better off being done at the national level. The benefits of the electrical grid far outweight the disadvantages. You gain more power through it every day, but how often does it go down due to being connected?
Mass transit at a state level sucks. NJ's public transportation would be worthless if it wasn't intertwined with NY's, which I think is also intertwined with some of the other states that neighbor it.
Maybe in the midwest where the states are large and fairly empty doing things at the statelevel makes more sense. But particuarlly on the east coast where states are small, dense, and very dependant on each other, isolating the states doesn't make any sense at all.
You're ok with pork barrel spending and all the government waste? If not, then you must see the only way to stop it is to stop giving the feds our money.
That argument comes down to "some people suck, therefore, all people suck."
Besides, in the end, if you got your wish and the federal government got out of things, you'd just start bitching the state government shouldn't be doing things.
The government should stay out of people's lives socially because their purpose is to keep the trains running and the water flowing
Actually, it's not the FEDERAL government's job to do either, check the Constitution.
The Constitution doesn't say it's the federal government's job simply because trains and indoor plumbing didn't exist at the time the Constitution was written.
The constitution does say the federal government should provide a postal service, which was pretty much the only thing at the time on the same scale as public transportation or utility service. It's just natural for the role to expand. The only people who object are the conservatives who like to bitch about everything, using the justifications "the government shouldn't do things just because" and "a piece of paper that's over 200 years old doesn't go into detail on the necessities of modern society."
It's very, very unlikely to ever stand a chance of being open sourced. There's too much licensed code around the system. The issue isn't so much replacing the code, but rather tracking down people who know enough about it to locate and remove the licensed code.
Even if the code was open sourced, you'd have a half gigabyte of 16 bit assembly code. There's not a lot of people who'd be willing to go through the effort of making that usable.
They came out with an SDK for 2.0, and updated SDKs for the various handheld devices that used the OS.
It was pretty nice to work with. I've never found anything else that comes close to the ease of creating a GUI using the GEOS APIs.
People who were comfortable with MFC before trying the GEOS SDK tended to have a hard time, but if you didn't know either, GEOS programming was far easier to learn and use. The main hardship of GEOS programming was the fact that the OS ran in real mode, which rather limited the amount of memory you could access at one time.
By jumping puzzle levels, I'm assuming you mean the ones with the remix of the original SMB theme playing in the background. Those levels were the best part of the game. They felt like the old 2D Mario games.
The problems with Mario Sunshine came down to two things:
1) The various coin hunts made up something like 1/3 of the shines in the game.
2) By placing the game on a vacation island, they really limited what options they had for level design. The levels weren't nearly as varied as in Mario 64.
Metroid skipping a generation had nothing to do with slow schedules. Metroid's sales are far better in the US than in Japan. Being as Japan-centric as Nintendo is, they simply looked at the Japanese market and decided there wasn't much demand for a new Metroid game. They only decided to release it after being pestered repeatedly for it by people in the US for several years.
PS2 games don't have EULA's.
For one, it's not in the game.
It's there, just disabled. And relatively easy to enable. Easy enough that they had to expect it to happen.
For two, modding the game to enable this feature is unlawful.
Did you have to sign a contract saying you couldn't tweak the game when you bought it? It's just as legal as modifying your new car.
For three, they didn't lie, these self appointed "experts" just don't understand the press release or are deliberately misinterpreting it to accuse Rockstar of lying.
Rockstar's press release was entirely intended to confuse people by using complicated words most people wouldn't understand, while simultaneously not really admitting or denying having put the code in the game.
Not to mention the fact that the game was rated MA, not M and there have indeed been AO rated games since ESRB was formed.
The ESRB changed the ratings to single letter ratings something like 6 years ago. It's definately rated M. Regardless, MA is the old code for M, which isn't any different.