There are 100 items. Scans don't count toward your percent. They're tracked seperately, and there is no display of your scan percentage. You do get informed though when you reach 50% and 100% scans, at which points you will unlock image galleries.
Oh, and there's a bug in the item percent counter. The final suit upgrade doesn't increase your percent, so it's not possible to get 99%. It'll jump from 98% to 100%.
It doesn't even have to be nukes. Very large conventional explosives (think MOAB) would probably do the trick, too. Even if you can't kill all the humans with the blast, at least you can bury them and prevent them from ever leaving the cave.
My guess is something like a nuke would've caused a lot of destruction to all the underground tunnels. The machines probably felt that the loses from sending a huge army would be easier to deal with than massive damage to the underground tunnels. Or maybe they were just afraid of how much damage it would cause to the Earth.
Oh, and those 'Mechs were the stupidest thing I've ever seen. You've got all this metal and armor...but none of it is protecting the freaking pilot. Also, if the Mechs are only going to be on flat ground....why use legged machines? Isn't that just another easy point of failure? How about treads instead.
Remember how easily the squids rip apart the ships? Shielding the pilot of the mech would've only made him last a few more seconds.
Finally, in the first movie, the EMP was "our only weapon against the machines." So, now, sixth months later, they realize, "oh, machine guns can blow them up, too." Huh? And since the EMP is so incredibly effective, lets make sure they're only on our ships, and let's not keep any around the perimeter of our base.
I think the problem was that a ship mounted gun wouldn't have enough mobility to be effective against the squids. As to the EMP, they said flat out in the movie why not. Using the EMP disabled all of their weapons too, and left them as sitting ducks.
I just signed on to Battle.net with Warcraft 3 Classic. The greeting message says there are 10,404 users currently playing Warcraft 3 Classic. Exited and check The Frozen Throne. There are 22,541 users playing that. It Also says there are 151948 total users online on Battle.net right now.
Warcraft 3 is almost a year and a half old. Frozen Throne is losing its appeal too - the numbers were much higher over the summer. Yet those games still have numbers not too far off from the hottest online console games.
Also, those numbers were for the US East Battle.net server. Keep in mind that Battle.net is broken into 4 seperate servers for different parts of the world.
Xbox Live's record players is 1/2 of the number of a random sampling at Battle.net's numbers - or rather, of 1/4 of Battle.net. This isn't really a peak time for Battle.net, as the most recently released Battle.net game is decreasing in popularity.
My take: Nintendo is right and the time isn't right yet for online console gaming from a business sense.
Remember when Phantom Menace came out and everyone was still saying that it was up to par with the Original Trilogy? And then AotC came out and it supposedly saved the franchise from the disaster that was PM?
No, I don't. Bashing Phantom Menace was a trendy thing to do. Everyone did it.
The AotC bashing is more recent. Seems like everyone simultaneously changed their opinions from "much better than PM" to "just as bad as PM", with no explaination.
I still think there isn't much of a difference in quality between the prequels and the original trilogy. Phantom Menace is a little worse due to it not having any back story to base the plot off. Most of the hatred of the new movies comes from many years of built up expectations that are impossible to meet.
And I still feel that The Empire Strikes Back isn't a very good movie. It's a great part of the Star Wars universe, but a terrible movie. The ending is incredibly disappointing - my first reaction was "That's it?" The ending is so abrupt it just kills the movie.
As for the Matrix, I think that no matter what they did with the followup movies, it wouldn't do as well as the original. The original was a success because it had so many different ways to connect to people - those who liked the plot, the effects, the fighting, the philosophical parts, etc. But if you go too far with any of them, you'll alienate people. ~6 hours is too much for people who drawn in by only parts of the package.
Twenty years ago, when the majority of software changed from being Free to being proprietary, there was no revolution, despite the public no longer being able to see what the software was doing, modify/fix it, or share it.
That's because the public doesn't care. Only people who hang out on Slashdot care. And even then, most of them simply want a product that works rather than one that's Free (remember, most Slashdot users use IE).
As for recording TV, that's something that's common for even grandmas to do (yes, I know several grandmas that know how to work their vcr).
Divx failed. DAT failed. DVD Copying Software is available on the shelves at CompUSA. Anywhere but the US, Region Free DVD players are the norm.
It'll take a lot for a heavily restricted digital TV to win.
In the case of Linux, the problem is the kernel is an unstable target. A driver written for the 2.2 kernel won't work with the 2.4 kernel. Sometimes even a point release will break compatibility.
Now factor in that most users aren't going to compile their own kernel and drivers. So you need packaged versions. What distros do you package for? What versions of that distro? It very quickly becomes a lot to maintain for little benefit.
As to other OS's, they've got such small userbases it isn't worth the effort.
What should happen is companies should just release documentation on the hardware when appropriate. I can somewhat understand NVidia and ATI's reluctance, but someone like a network card vendor shouldn't care.
My biggest gripe is companies that change the chipset on a product without changing the model number. Sometimes it makes it really difficult to ensure you're getting hardware that works outside of windows - or that it meets your needs.
I doubt he was talking about what the animals say in Animal Crossing. The puns in that game when you do something like catch a bug or a fish were well done. The non-villager animals also were well written.
It's only the animals that have houses in your town that are dull.
Play a Sega game that has voice acting. Say a Sonic Adventure game. You're going to cringe every time someone talks.
Sega's hires two types of voice actors: those who do not know what inflection is, and those who use it in all the wrong places.
I will say though, the House of the Dead games wouldn't be as fun without the really bad voice acting.
As to voice acting and Nintendo games, I think a large part of the problem is if Nintendo did give Link a voice, if it came out any less than perfect, the bitching they'd hear would make the cell-shading complaints look like nothing.
The reviews that said Samus needed a voice are just plain stupid. There isn't anyone she could possibly talk to.
I think whenever Nintendo finally gets around to making some new characters, that's when they should go with voices - if it fits the game.
Microsoft bad - probably almost everyone on Slashdot will agree to that.
Software patents bad - that's a mixed bag, but yes, the people who think they're bad speak up much more. Pretty much everyone agrees that the US Patent Office issues way too many software patents that it shouldn't - either because they're obvious, or because there's prior art. A lot of people here seem to think that automatically makes all patents bad. There's also the crowd that thinks that because something is obvious now, of course it had to be 10 years ago when the patent was originally filed. That's often not the case.
Considering how many companies MS has driven out of business over the years due to either illegal or dirty tactics, I'm all for any means of hurting them.
Newsgroups wouldn't deal with the problem of making sure everyone had the latest version. You'd have to dig around hoping you saw the most recent post. Also keep in mind news servers tend to take a while to distribute messages.
It would work, but it wouldn't be that nice to work with for a large number of documents.
FYI, although XFree86 defaults to closed network access, not all X implementations do. IRIX in particular doesn't. My highschool had a bunch of Indy workstations, and by default it was set to "xhost +".
SGI had a nice command called endsession, which would connect to an X display and log the user out. Combine that with the lack of security, and you could imagine the fun that would go on in a high school lab.
When the sysadmin realized the problem, the workstations defaulted to xhost -.
LINK.EXE from Visual Studio 6.0 is really fun on Windows 2000. It very frequently won't terminate. And if I try to use End Task in the Task Manager on it, I get a "Permission Denied" error, even if the Administrator tries.
I can't log out, and I can't shut down. It'll just freeze waiting for LINK.EXE to terminate. Oh, after LINK.EXE locks up like that, I can't exit the IDE either. It wants to wait for LINK.EXE to terminate. End tasking the IDE results in it getting stuck in the same state as LINK.EXE.
Only solution is the power button.
I ended up installing OpenWatcom, as it worked fine for the project I was working on.
The Donkey Kong Country was really good. DKC 2 was good. DKC 3 was blah. DK 64 just had too much in it.
Killer Instinct was a pretty decent fighter.
Obviously Goldeneye and Perfect Dark were huge hits.
Conker was a great game, but it was last major N64 game released, so not many people payed attention to it.
But they've had a lot of bombs. Banjo Kazooie was kinda painful (one death and you have to collect all 100 notes in the level again). Banjo Tooie fixed the problems in the first game, but then ended up having way too much to collect. Jet Force Gemini was another painful collectathon. Star Fox Adventures, well, at least it looked really pretty.
I think it comes down to Rare really shined when Nintendo first bought a chunk of them, but since then it's been downhill, with an occasional flash of brilliance.
Putting GNU/Linux on your resume would probably just confuse the HR person doing the initial scan of resumes.
Saying GNU/Linux simply means you say what RMS tells you to say. Sure, at places like Slashdot you'll find people who say GNU/Linux, but they're still greatly the minority. Outside of Slashdot, they're so rare they're negligible.
The GBA Castlevania games are largely getting good reviews because there isn't much like them being produced.
If you notice, each time a new one comes, the review starts by complaining about a lot of really bad negatives about the previous game. Things that should've really hurt the review score (i.e. Harmony of Dissonance's complete lack of difficulty, bad music, and the amount of time you spend wandering aimlessly because whenever you get an item that allows you to progress further, the game gives you no indication of what it does, so you spend a long time figuring out where to go next), but never got mentioned in the reviews of the last game.
GBA Castlevania game reviews seem like "We gave the last one a 9.5 but it should've been more like a 5.9. Oh well, this one really is a 9.5!"
First fatal flaw is the difficulty. Most people die once while fighting the first boss, since you only have 3 hearts, and what looks like the obvious way to kill him doesn't work. But the later enemies don't do any more damage than the early ones, so once you get a few hearts you pretty much can't die.
Second fatal flaw is the linearity. You're forced to do the levels in order, even though there is no reason for it. It looks like the game was designed to allow things to be done out of order, but then the PHB came and insisted otherwise at the last minute. Nothing in the later levels prevents them from being done out of order; the game just refuses to let you enter them out of order. This kills the replayability of the game.
The second flaw is derived from this flaw. There's way too much story. For the first half of the game, you spend large portions of the game listening to people talk. But it's all pointless, because it's just the same story A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time used, but with the details changed. They also take a lot longer to tell it to you. This could be excused if the detailed story didn't force the game to be linear.
The overworld is tedious, but compared to the other problems, it's nothing. If that was the only flaw of the game, I'd say Wind Waker would beat Ocarina easily.
I want a game to go back to the roots of the series. In Zelda 1, there were multiple paths through the dungeons. And there were dead ends. Level 9 was huge, but you only had to go through about 30% of it to get the items and beat the game. Figuring out how to navigate the dungeon was a large part of the challenge. I would love to see this aspect brought into the 3D games.
What didn't you like about Circle of the Moon? I personally thought it was one of the best Castlevanias.
Did you actually like Harmony of Dissonance? I thought that was a terrible game. The enemies were terribly easy; especially the bosses. The only challenge in that game was figuring out where to go. Whenever you got a new key or a new ability, the game gave you no indication of what it does. How was I supposed to know that a Lizard Tail lets me slide? Explored randomly for 10 minutes after that before I accidentally slid and realized what I had to do. Or that the Skull Key opens the rainbow colored doors, and Maxim's bracelet opened some other colored door.
The outcry was mainly from people who thought Ocarina of Time was the first Zelda game. If you look at the whole Zelda series, Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask look out of place; Wind Waker fits right in. Zelda 3 in particular has a nice bright cartoonish look. Zelda 1 was clearly intended to look like a cartoon, but the NES couldn't stress that very well. Look at the Zelda 1 manual - it has an in game picture of every enemy, and also a hand drawn Wind Waker style artwork drawing of the enemy.
The other reason for complaints was the graphic quality when they first revealed the cell shading was significantly lower than the final game.
The original Spaceworld demo never really impressed me. When I watched it, it just didn't look like a game to me. I also like the 2D Zeldas much better than the 3D ones. Combine the two factors and I was actually rather glad when they showed the cell shaded game - it actually looked like a Zelda game to me. Too bad the game had a few fatal flaws in it; it really had the potential to be an excellent game. A Wind Waker: Master Quest would be excellent...
Ya know, I think you might be right. Nintendo should have been smarter than to show the Link demo if they new a cel-based Zelda game was coming out...
They didn't decide on the cell shading until after showing the demo. They started making a game based on that art, but decided if they continued it would be exactly the same as Ocarina, but prettier. So they tried cell shading instead, which ended up being at least a little different, although not a huge change in gameplay.
Zip isn't dead. Government offices are full of Zip drives. I know someone who had 3 different co-op jobs at government offices, and all 3 places used Zip drives heavily.
Slashdot Mirror
There are 100 items. Scans don't count toward your percent. They're tracked seperately, and there is no display of your scan percentage. You do get informed though when you reach 50% and 100% scans, at which points you will unlock image galleries.
Oh, and there's a bug in the item percent counter. The final suit upgrade doesn't increase your percent, so it's not possible to get 99%. It'll jump from 98% to 100%.
Actually, there are 100 items. There's a bug in the game. When you get the final suit upgrade, your percent doesn't go up.
It doesn't even have to be nukes. Very large conventional explosives (think MOAB) would probably do the trick, too. Even if you can't kill all the humans with the blast, at least you can bury them and prevent them from ever leaving the cave.
My guess is something like a nuke would've caused a lot of destruction to all the underground tunnels. The machines probably felt that the loses from sending a huge army would be easier to deal with than massive damage to the underground tunnels. Or maybe they were just afraid of how much damage it would cause to the Earth.
Oh, and those 'Mechs were the stupidest thing I've ever seen. You've got all this metal and armor...but none of it is protecting the freaking pilot. Also, if the Mechs are only going to be on flat ground....why use legged machines? Isn't that just another easy point of failure? How about treads instead.
Remember how easily the squids rip apart the ships? Shielding the pilot of the mech would've only made him last a few more seconds.
Finally, in the first movie, the EMP was "our only weapon against the machines." So, now, sixth months later, they realize, "oh, machine guns can blow them up, too." Huh? And since the EMP is so incredibly effective, lets make sure they're only on our ships, and let's not keep any around the perimeter of our base.
I think the problem was that a ship mounted gun wouldn't have enough mobility to be effective against the squids. As to the EMP, they said flat out in the movie why not. Using the EMP disabled all of their weapons too, and left them as sitting ducks.
I just signed on to Battle.net with Warcraft 3 Classic. The greeting message says there are 10,404 users currently playing Warcraft 3 Classic. Exited and check The Frozen Throne. There are 22,541 users playing that. It Also says there are 151948 total users online on Battle.net right now.
Warcraft 3 is almost a year and a half old. Frozen Throne is losing its appeal too - the numbers were much higher over the summer. Yet those games still have numbers not too far off from the hottest online console games.
Also, those numbers were for the US East Battle.net server. Keep in mind that Battle.net is broken into 4 seperate servers for different parts of the world.
Xbox Live's record players is 1/2 of the number of a random sampling at Battle.net's numbers - or rather, of 1/4 of Battle.net. This isn't really a peak time for Battle.net, as the most recently released Battle.net game is decreasing in popularity.
My take: Nintendo is right and the time isn't right yet for online console gaming from a business sense.
The problem is getting a publisher to agree to publish your game.
GBA development is pretty easy - the homebrew community has figured out pretty much every detail of the hardware.
It really comes down to the fact that the crap that's on the GBA sells well, so few publishers want to take a risk with something original.
Remember when Phantom Menace came out and everyone was still saying that it was up to par with the Original Trilogy? And then AotC came out and it supposedly saved the franchise from the disaster that was PM?
No, I don't. Bashing Phantom Menace was a trendy thing to do. Everyone did it.
The AotC bashing is more recent. Seems like everyone simultaneously changed their opinions from "much better than PM" to "just as bad as PM", with no explaination.
I still think there isn't much of a difference in quality between the prequels and the original trilogy. Phantom Menace is a little worse due to it not having any back story to base the plot off. Most of the hatred of the new movies comes from many years of built up expectations that are impossible to meet.
And I still feel that The Empire Strikes Back isn't a very good movie. It's a great part of the Star Wars universe, but a terrible movie. The ending is incredibly disappointing - my first reaction was "That's it?" The ending is so abrupt it just kills the movie.
As for the Matrix, I think that no matter what they did with the followup movies, it wouldn't do as well as the original. The original was a success because it had so many different ways to connect to people - those who liked the plot, the effects, the fighting, the philosophical parts, etc. But if you go too far with any of them, you'll alienate people. ~6 hours is too much for people who drawn in by only parts of the package.
Read my post and the one above it again. It was about people not caring about having the code. You're supporting my point.
Twenty years ago, when the majority of software changed from being Free to being proprietary, there was no revolution, despite the public no longer being able to see what the software was doing, modify/fix it, or share it.
That's because the public doesn't care. Only people who hang out on Slashdot care. And even then, most of them simply want a product that works rather than one that's Free (remember, most Slashdot users use IE).
As for recording TV, that's something that's common for even grandmas to do (yes, I know several grandmas that know how to work their vcr).
Divx failed. DAT failed. DVD Copying Software is available on the shelves at CompUSA. Anywhere but the US, Region Free DVD players are the norm.
It'll take a lot for a heavily restricted digital TV to win.
In the case of Linux, the problem is the kernel is an unstable target. A driver written for the 2.2 kernel won't work with the 2.4 kernel. Sometimes even a point release will break compatibility.
Now factor in that most users aren't going to compile their own kernel and drivers. So you need packaged versions. What distros do you package for? What versions of that distro? It very quickly becomes a lot to maintain for little benefit.
As to other OS's, they've got such small userbases it isn't worth the effort.
What should happen is companies should just release documentation on the hardware when appropriate. I can somewhat understand NVidia and ATI's reluctance, but someone like a network card vendor shouldn't care.
My biggest gripe is companies that change the chipset on a product without changing the model number. Sometimes it makes it really difficult to ensure you're getting hardware that works outside of windows - or that it meets your needs.
I doubt he was talking about what the animals say in Animal Crossing. The puns in that game when you do something like catch a bug or a fish were well done. The non-villager animals also were well written.
It's only the animals that have houses in your town that are dull.
Play a Sega game that has voice acting. Say a Sonic Adventure game. You're going to cringe every time someone talks.
Sega's hires two types of voice actors: those who do not know what inflection is, and those who use it in all the wrong places.
I will say though, the House of the Dead games wouldn't be as fun without the really bad voice acting.
As to voice acting and Nintendo games, I think a large part of the problem is if Nintendo did give Link a voice, if it came out any less than perfect, the bitching they'd hear would make the cell-shading complaints look like nothing.
The reviews that said Samus needed a voice are just plain stupid. There isn't anyone she could possibly talk to.
I think whenever Nintendo finally gets around to making some new characters, that's when they should go with voices - if it fits the game.
If they're not making money then they're breaking even.
The only time Nintendo has ever lost money on hardware was the first shipment of GameCubes, and it was a single digit loss.
Microsoft bad - probably almost everyone on Slashdot will agree to that.
Software patents bad - that's a mixed bag, but yes, the people who think they're bad speak up much more. Pretty much everyone agrees that the US Patent Office issues way too many software patents that it shouldn't - either because they're obvious, or because there's prior art. A lot of people here seem to think that automatically makes all patents bad. There's also the crowd that thinks that because something is obvious now, of course it had to be 10 years ago when the patent was originally filed. That's often not the case.
Considering how many companies MS has driven out of business over the years due to either illegal or dirty tactics, I'm all for any means of hurting them.
Newsgroups wouldn't deal with the problem of making sure everyone had the latest version. You'd have to dig around hoping you saw the most recent post. Also keep in mind news servers tend to take a while to distribute messages.
It would work, but it wouldn't be that nice to work with for a large number of documents.
FYI, although XFree86 defaults to closed network access, not all X implementations do. IRIX in particular doesn't. My highschool had a bunch of Indy workstations, and by default it was set to "xhost +".
SGI had a nice command called endsession, which would connect to an X display and log the user out. Combine that with the lack of security, and you could imagine the fun that would go on in a high school lab.
When the sysadmin realized the problem, the workstations defaulted to xhost -.
LINK.EXE from Visual Studio 6.0 is really fun on Windows 2000. It very frequently won't terminate. And if I try to use End Task in the Task Manager on it, I get a "Permission Denied" error, even if the Administrator tries.
I can't log out, and I can't shut down. It'll just freeze waiting for LINK.EXE to terminate. Oh, after LINK.EXE locks up like that, I can't exit the IDE either. It wants to wait for LINK.EXE to terminate. End tasking the IDE results in it getting stuck in the same state as LINK.EXE.
Only solution is the power button.
I ended up installing OpenWatcom, as it worked fine for the project I was working on.
The Donkey Kong Country was really good. DKC 2 was good. DKC 3 was blah. DK 64 just had too much in it.
Killer Instinct was a pretty decent fighter.
Obviously Goldeneye and Perfect Dark were huge hits.
Conker was a great game, but it was last major N64 game released, so not many people payed attention to it.
But they've had a lot of bombs. Banjo Kazooie was kinda painful (one death and you have to collect all 100 notes in the level again). Banjo Tooie fixed the problems in the first game, but then ended up having way too much to collect. Jet Force Gemini was another painful collectathon. Star Fox Adventures, well, at least it looked really pretty.
I think it comes down to Rare really shined when Nintendo first bought a chunk of them, but since then it's been downhill, with an occasional flash of brilliance.
Putting GNU/Linux on your resume would probably just confuse the HR person doing the initial scan of resumes.
Saying GNU/Linux simply means you say what RMS tells you to say. Sure, at places like Slashdot you'll find people who say GNU/Linux, but they're still greatly the minority. Outside of Slashdot, they're so rare they're negligible.
The GBA Castlevania games are largely getting good reviews because there isn't much like them being produced.
If you notice, each time a new one comes, the review starts by complaining about a lot of really bad negatives about the previous game. Things that should've really hurt the review score (i.e. Harmony of Dissonance's complete lack of difficulty, bad music, and the amount of time you spend wandering aimlessly because whenever you get an item that allows you to progress further, the game gives you no indication of what it does, so you spend a long time figuring out where to go next), but never got mentioned in the reviews of the last game.
GBA Castlevania game reviews seem like "We gave the last one a 9.5 but it should've been more like a 5.9. Oh well, this one really is a 9.5!"
First fatal flaw is the difficulty. Most people die once while fighting the first boss, since you only have 3 hearts, and what looks like the obvious way to kill him doesn't work. But the later enemies don't do any more damage than the early ones, so once you get a few hearts you pretty much can't die.
Second fatal flaw is the linearity. You're forced to do the levels in order, even though there is no reason for it. It looks like the game was designed to allow things to be done out of order, but then the PHB came and insisted otherwise at the last minute. Nothing in the later levels prevents them from being done out of order; the game just refuses to let you enter them out of order. This kills the replayability of the game.
The second flaw is derived from this flaw. There's way too much story. For the first half of the game, you spend large portions of the game listening to people talk. But it's all pointless, because it's just the same story A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time used, but with the details changed. They also take a lot longer to tell it to you. This could be excused if the detailed story didn't force the game to be linear.
The overworld is tedious, but compared to the other problems, it's nothing. If that was the only flaw of the game, I'd say Wind Waker would beat Ocarina easily.
I want a game to go back to the roots of the series. In Zelda 1, there were multiple paths through the dungeons. And there were dead ends. Level 9 was huge, but you only had to go through about 30% of it to get the items and beat the game. Figuring out how to navigate the dungeon was a large part of the challenge. I would love to see this aspect brought into the 3D games.
What didn't you like about Circle of the Moon? I personally thought it was one of the best Castlevanias.
Did you actually like Harmony of Dissonance? I thought that was a terrible game. The enemies were terribly easy; especially the bosses. The only challenge in that game was figuring out where to go. Whenever you got a new key or a new ability, the game gave you no indication of what it does. How was I supposed to know that a Lizard Tail lets me slide? Explored randomly for 10 minutes after that before I accidentally slid and realized what I had to do. Or that the Skull Key opens the rainbow colored doors, and Maxim's bracelet opened some other colored door.
The outcry was mainly from people who thought Ocarina of Time was the first Zelda game. If you look at the whole Zelda series, Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask look out of place; Wind Waker fits right in. Zelda 3 in particular has a nice bright cartoonish look. Zelda 1 was clearly intended to look like a cartoon, but the NES couldn't stress that very well. Look at the Zelda 1 manual - it has an in game picture of every enemy, and also a hand drawn Wind Waker style artwork drawing of the enemy.
The other reason for complaints was the graphic quality when they first revealed the cell shading was significantly lower than the final game.
The original Spaceworld demo never really impressed me. When I watched it, it just didn't look like a game to me. I also like the 2D Zeldas much better than the 3D ones. Combine the two factors and I was actually rather glad when they showed the cell shaded game - it actually looked like a Zelda game to me. Too bad the game had a few fatal flaws in it; it really had the potential to be an excellent game. A Wind Waker: Master Quest would be excellent...
Ya know, I think you might be right. Nintendo should have been smarter than to show the Link demo if they new a cel-based Zelda game was coming out...
They didn't decide on the cell shading until after showing the demo. They started making a game based on that art, but decided if they continued it would be exactly the same as Ocarina, but prettier. So they tried cell shading instead, which ended up being at least a little different, although not a huge change in gameplay.
Nope, sorry, WAP isn't dying.
For something to die, it has to have been alive at some point.
Zip isn't dead. Government offices are full of Zip drives. I know someone who had 3 different co-op jobs at government offices, and all 3 places used Zip drives heavily.