Super Metroid's soundtrack is really good too. And the gameplay is a lot better too. None of that stupid leveling crap. The leveling doesn't add anything to the game. It just makes you waste time leveling, and prevents you from doing things out of order (if you try to skip things, you won't be a high enough level to hurt things).
It can't really be much worse than installing Linux 2.6 on the iPod. Altho 2.4 kinda worked, 2.6 had a note in the release notes along the lines of "It mostly works, except for the hard disk and the screen." If that can be described as "mostly works", then I'm sure someone can come up with some criteria that defines Linux on a badger (living or dead) as useful.
How can you call Netscape 4.7x faster than Mozilla?
Netscape 4.x can't handle CSS very well, forcing pages to be designed with lots of tables. Once you start nesting tables, it grinds to a halt.
I guess if you threw a really complicated page that used lots of CSS at Netscape 4, it would be faster than Mozilla, as it would just ignore the majority of the markup. Wouldn't look good at all though.
Considering they trademarked the name Firefox shortly before releasing 1.0 (due somewhere around late spring/early summer), I think its safe to assume the name Firefox is going to stay.
Metroid Zero Mission was done extremely well. If you knew the original game, then you'd have a decent idea of what you were doing in the remake, but not enough for there to not be surprises. They kept almost every room memorable room from the original. It just had the perfect blend of making you feel "this is what I remember" and "this is new".
Including an emulated version of the original game really added to the enjoyment, as you could easily compare the two versions.
Another example of how to do it right would be the Mario All-Stars SNES title, with the graphics and audio completely reworked but the underlying game engines left alone.
Mario All-Stars almost did it right, but not quite.
Several levels lost their uniqueness in the remake. Most notable are 6-3 and 8-3 of SMB1. In the 6-3 felt like you were in a cold, icy area (you still walked normally tho). In the remake, the level was bright and sunny just like any other. 8-3 was interesting because of the castle background. It blended in so well with normal bricks that it camaflauged a 10-coin block near the end of the level. In the remake, the background is in the distance and looks completely different, making the previously hidden block really stand out.
If you're using a binary file format, usually your format on disk will be almost identical to how you manipulate the data once it's loaded. The data can be read from disk into your own data structures with very little modification necessary.
Formats like XML require translating the data from the on disk format to the in memory format, and the reverse when saving.
I've seen the GameCube NES emulator extracted from the Zelda Collector's disc. It runs games either perfectly or not at all.
The hard part of NES emulation is the custom chips in the cartridge. The NES could only address 64k of ROM. To get more than that, you had to put an extra chip in the cartridge that would switch memory banks, kinda like expanded memory in the 8086 days.
Just about every company had their own custom chip to do that, if not multiple chips. Odds are Nintendo's emulator only supports the chips they actually used.
I had an opportunity to play Metroid Prime recently, given all its hype. I was very impressed with the game from graphics to story, but I got too frustrated by the controls. I couldn't stop thinking how easy these things I was TRYING to do were on a keyboard/mouse combo, but were complicated on the console by trying to press three buttons at once while moving one or another stick.
You'll truely appreciate the controls of Metroid Prime when you get further into the game. Particuarlly in the boss fights.
With traditional FPS controls, you're focusing on your aim, and everything else is secondary. With Metroid Prime, you're focusing on moving with the aiming being a lower priority.
If you play Metroid Prime with the controls in mind, it works amazingly well. The game will be terrible if you treat it like an FPS. The only part of the controls that's weak is when you have to jump, look up, and use the grapling beam. Fortunately you only have to do that about twice in the game, and it's only for missle expansions.
Of course, if there's a bug that really hurts, and you have a competent IT staff (or even just one good programmer), you can fix it yourself. This advantage of OSS isn't stated often enough.
Theoretically that's true, but, the usual reason for bugs being outstanding for a long time is that they're really hard to fix. I doubt many companies would be willing to dedicate someone to do massive reworking of Open Office to fix a bug caused by architecture limitations - particuarlly not if Word doesn't have the same problem.
Another Zelda title? What ever happened to Nintendo innovation?
Games don't sell nearly as well if they aren't established franchises.
It doesn't mean Nintendo isn't innovating tho - look at Majora's Mask. It used the same engine as Ocarina of Time, but the game had an entirely different feel to it than Ocarina. The time limit greatly changed how the game played.
The premise behind Mario Sunshine was "Platform jumping in 3D is very frustrating - how can we solve that?" That's where the water pack came from.
Video games have been around for decades now. It's much harder to make a huge revolutionary innovation in gaming now. You can't expect a jump like the one from Super Mario World to Super Mario 64 to happen very often.
The big advantage is if your browser or email app crashes, it doesn't take the other one down with it.
The disadvantage of splitting the apps is greatly increased memory usage. There is some performance increase and memory usage reduction due to the simplification of the user interfaces, but that's greatly outweighed by each app using it's own copy of the Gecko libraries. (To those who want to complain about Mozilla having an IRC client and the like, that stuff has always been an optional part of the install) The development of Firefox and Thunderbird aren't syncronized at all, so there isn't any chance of that getting changed anytime soon.
The problem with that is you can only resume the download as long as you don't close Mozilla. It also can't resume after an error.
I don't use the download manager because I would always end up closing my last open Mozilla window, causing the download to abort. The download manager currently can't resume a download if that happens.
The Rogue Squadron games delt with this nicely. The Rebel ships all look beat up. If you walk around the hanger while selecting your ship, you'll see paint chips and other signs of wear with the ships. The Naboo Starfighter looks like it got pulled out of a junkyard.
Well, in just about every Zelda from Link to the Past onwards, there were chickens in the game. If you attacked the chickens a little they'd run away. Do it enough and the whole flock would come and attack you. It would be hard to get away from them.
Wind Waker didn't have chickens, so they had pigs and the like play the same role. The whole thing was just a running joke through the series, not any type of social commentary.
That was implied in addition to the button being grayed out, but the contents of the File menu are rarely visible. The disabled toolbar button can be seen with just a quick glance.
Why in the world would you want to take up real estate on your screen with a cutesy little picture that you can click on to save your file?
Because in a well designed GUI, the Save button will be grayed out if the file is unmodified. This gives you a very quick way to tell if the file has been modified or not.
Slashdot Mirror
It's "Henshin a go go, baby". He says it when he transforms into superhero form. Henshin is Japanese for transform.
The game is fairly hard on the adult difficulty (and there are 2 harder difficulties), but there's also a kids mode which is pretty easy.
Super Metroid's soundtrack is really good too. And the gameplay is a lot better too. None of that stupid leveling crap. The leveling doesn't add anything to the game. It just makes you waste time leveling, and prevents you from doing things out of order (if you try to skip things, you won't be a high enough level to hurt things).
Commander Keen was ported to the GameBoy Color very shortly before the GameBoy Advance was released. Just get that to use in your GBA.
It can't really be much worse than installing Linux 2.6 on the iPod. Altho 2.4 kinda worked, 2.6 had a note in the release notes along the lines of "It mostly works, except for the hard disk and the screen." If that can be described as "mostly works", then I'm sure someone can come up with some criteria that defines Linux on a badger (living or dead) as useful.
The decision was made to improve quality. Several projects, including the 1.0 release of Firefox, were schedule to come off the 1.7 branch.
That caused the Mozilla people to delay 1.7 in order to work on stabilizing it so that the products using it would have a higher level of quality.
Making 1.8 be the stable branch wouldn't have been of any use to any of the major projects using the code.
How can you call Netscape 4.7x faster than Mozilla?
Netscape 4.x can't handle CSS very well, forcing pages to be designed with lots of tables. Once you start nesting tables, it grinds to a halt.
I guess if you threw a really complicated page that used lots of CSS at Netscape 4, it would be faster than Mozilla, as it would just ignore the majority of the markup. Wouldn't look good at all though.
Considering they trademarked the name Firefox shortly before releasing 1.0 (due somewhere around late spring/early summer), I think its safe to assume the name Firefox is going to stay.
Who uses MOD/XM files anymore anyways?
For starters, most GameBoy Advance music is composed in those formats.
Metroid Zero Mission was done extremely well. If you knew the original game, then you'd have a decent idea of what you were doing in the remake, but not enough for there to not be surprises. They kept almost every room memorable room from the original. It just had the perfect blend of making you feel "this is what I remember" and "this is new".
Including an emulated version of the original game really added to the enjoyment, as you could easily compare the two versions.
Another example of how to do it right would be the Mario All-Stars SNES title, with the graphics and audio completely reworked but the underlying game engines left alone.
Mario All-Stars almost did it right, but not quite.
Several levels lost their uniqueness in the remake. Most notable are 6-3 and 8-3 of SMB1. In the 6-3 felt like you were in a cold, icy area (you still walked normally tho). In the remake, the level was bright and sunny just like any other. 8-3 was interesting because of the castle background. It blended in so well with normal bricks that it camaflauged a 10-coin block near the end of the level. In the remake, the background is in the distance and looks completely different, making the previously hidden block really stand out.
"Microsoft is only releasing 200,000 of the boxed sets."
Looks like they decided to release one green Xbox for every Xbox they've managed to sell in Japan.
If you're using a binary file format, usually your format on disk will be almost identical to how you manipulate the data once it's loaded. The data can be read from disk into your own data structures with very little modification necessary.
Formats like XML require translating the data from the on disk format to the in memory format, and the reverse when saving.
Cartridge Colors:
GameBoy - light gray
GameBoy/GameBoy Color - black
GameBoy Color - semi-transparent green
GameBoy Advance - dark gray
There's the odd exception that was a different color, but those are the standard colors.
I've seen the GameCube NES emulator extracted from the Zelda Collector's disc. It runs games either perfectly or not at all.
The hard part of NES emulation is the custom chips in the cartridge. The NES could only address 64k of ROM. To get more than that, you had to put an extra chip in the cartridge that would switch memory banks, kinda like expanded memory in the 8086 days.
Just about every company had their own custom chip to do that, if not multiple chips. Odds are Nintendo's emulator only supports the chips they actually used.
I had an opportunity to play Metroid Prime recently, given all its hype. I was very impressed with the game from graphics to story, but I got too frustrated by the controls. I couldn't stop thinking how easy these things I was TRYING to do were on a keyboard/mouse combo, but were complicated on the console by trying to press three buttons at once while moving one or another stick.
You'll truely appreciate the controls of Metroid Prime when you get further into the game. Particuarlly in the boss fights.
With traditional FPS controls, you're focusing on your aim, and everything else is secondary. With Metroid Prime, you're focusing on moving with the aiming being a lower priority.
If you play Metroid Prime with the controls in mind, it works amazingly well. The game will be terrible if you treat it like an FPS. The only part of the controls that's weak is when you have to jump, look up, and use the grapling beam. Fortunately you only have to do that about twice in the game, and it's only for missle expansions.
Of course, if there's a bug that really hurts, and you have a competent IT staff (or even just one good programmer), you can fix it yourself. This advantage of OSS isn't stated often enough.
Theoretically that's true, but, the usual reason for bugs being outstanding for a long time is that they're really hard to fix. I doubt many companies would be willing to dedicate someone to do massive reworking of Open Office to fix a bug caused by architecture limitations - particuarlly not if Word doesn't have the same problem.
Another Zelda title? What ever happened to Nintendo innovation?
Games don't sell nearly as well if they aren't established franchises.
It doesn't mean Nintendo isn't innovating tho - look at Majora's Mask. It used the same engine as Ocarina of Time, but the game had an entirely different feel to it than Ocarina. The time limit greatly changed how the game played.
The premise behind Mario Sunshine was "Platform jumping in 3D is very frustrating - how can we solve that?" That's where the water pack came from.
Video games have been around for decades now. It's much harder to make a huge revolutionary innovation in gaming now. You can't expect a jump like the one from Super Mario World to Super Mario 64 to happen very often.
The big advantage is if your browser or email app crashes, it doesn't take the other one down with it.
The disadvantage of splitting the apps is greatly increased memory usage. There is some performance increase and memory usage reduction due to the simplification of the user interfaces, but that's greatly outweighed by each app using it's own copy of the Gecko libraries. (To those who want to complain about Mozilla having an IRC client and the like, that stuff has always been an optional part of the install) The development of Firefox and Thunderbird aren't syncronized at all, so there isn't any chance of that getting changed anytime soon.
The problem with that is you can only resume the download as long as you don't close Mozilla. It also can't resume after an error.
I don't use the download manager because I would always end up closing my last open Mozilla window, causing the download to abort. The download manager currently can't resume a download if that happens.
The Rogue Squadron games delt with this nicely. The Rebel ships all look beat up. If you walk around the hanger while selecting your ship, you'll see paint chips and other signs of wear with the ships. The Naboo Starfighter looks like it got pulled out of a junkyard.
It's not really too surprising. I've seen ~40x CD-R's that were labelled as being for use at a minimum burning speed of 16x.
It seems reasonable that chemicals that work well at low burning speeds wouldn't work well at high speeds, and vice versa.
1x DVD speed is a lot higher than 1x CD speed, so I would expect these issues to start popping up sooner in DVDs than they did in CDs.
A hard set IP wouldn't work well for roaming.
What you want is an IM-like system. Give each communicator a unique id, and let the central server map id's to IP's as necessary.
Well, in just about every Zelda from Link to the Past onwards, there were chickens in the game. If you attacked the chickens a little they'd run away. Do it enough and the whole flock would come and attack you. It would be hard to get away from them.
Wind Waker didn't have chickens, so they had pigs and the like play the same role. The whole thing was just a running joke through the series, not any type of social commentary.
That was implied in addition to the button being grayed out, but the contents of the File menu are rarely visible. The disabled toolbar button can be seen with just a quick glance.
Why in the world would you want to take up real estate on your screen with a cutesy little picture that you can click on to save your file?
Because in a well designed GUI, the Save button will be grayed out if the file is unmodified. This gives you a very quick way to tell if the file has been modified or not.