Well, Metroid never sold well in Japan. That's why their was no N64 Metroid. There's only a GameCube Metroid because every time Miyamoto came to the US, people repeatedly asked him about a new Metroid. This is really obvious when you realize that Metroid Fusion was developed in Japan, but released in the US several months before the Japanese release.
As to Star Wars, I'd venture to say the movies are probably much more popular in the US than in Japan. So you'd expect game sales to match.
The cheaters banned in Warcraft have been people using maphacks which remove the fog of war. The usual way to check it is to watch a replay, and see if the person clicked on something they shouldn't be able to see.
Warcraft 3 does a pretty good job with skill matching (my record is somewhere around 60% wins, and unless you're at the very top or very bottom of the rankings should level out around 50% for each ideally), but the trash talking and insults are still FAR too prevalent for it to be enjoyable.
You'd be surprised how few people on battle.net actually understand how the winning percentage should work out. If you don't have a ~75% winning percent (and it has to be at solo), then you get harassed and called a newb all the time. Try reading the forums at www.battle.net, they're all terrible about that.
The last level of Zelda II was pretty tough, but not too bad. You had to be cheap though. If you tried fighting the more difficult enemies head on, you'd get destroyed.
Blue birds with shields? When you break through the breakable blocks right before them, stay very high. get in a position so that if you kneel and swing your sword, it will hit the bird's head at the peak of his jump. They can't defend against that, and they can't hurt you.
The next to last boss is just a bitch. The last one had a trick, but I don't remember it offhand.
You want a hard game though? Try Might Bomb Jack. The game is long, has branching paths, and no backtracking once you go through a door. If you pick the wrong path, it'll be about half an hour or more before you find out. You'll just get stuck in a room with no exit.
Also Zelda TWW (kaze no takuto) is also quite a bit harder when trying to find the triforce shards.
That was changed in the American version because EVERYONE bitched about how tedious it was in the Japanese game. Take a look at any import review; they all say the game gets really tedious towards the end.
The most glaring example is Super Mario Bros 2. It wasn't released here because it was considered too hard for American gamers. Instead we got Doki Doki Panic with Mario characters added in.
2) Linux vs. GNU/Linux -- RMS's view of history (as opposed to other views like the ones prevelent in the BSD/X11 communities) is accepted by most knowledgeable Linux users. I'd call that a victory.
That one issue is probably the biggest one contributing to people disliking him. 1/3 of the software on the Linux distro he looked at was GNU? That means 2/3 isn't. And I'd say almost all of the critical stuff isn't GNU.
I won't deny GCC is critical. glibc is important, but there are other libc's if people really cared. Other than that, what other GNU software is crucial? Everything else can easily be replaced.
4) Healing the KDE / Gnome rift -- Winning.... freedesktop.org, etc...
Um, RMS still bashes KDE. He's making things worse.
5) GPL vs. BSD/MIT licenses An obvious victory.
Huh? What's an obvious victory there? The only issue I can possibly see is the advertising clause of the BSD license, but that never affected the MIT license, so I don't know what you're talking about.
You're right about RMS helping with the Qt licensing. The Emacs/XEmacs battles I don't really know about, so I can't comment.
You also forgot about the BitKeeper flamewar. All RMS has accomplished is pissing of LKML.
They're selling "Super Mario Bros 3" for the GameBoy Advance. If you simply buy the cartridge, and nothing else, that's what you get. You can buy cards to get bonus features.
Oh, last I heard, it hasn't been confirmed if the levels are in the game or on the cards. Each card holds about 6k. The original SMB3 NES ROM was 384KB. There were close to 100 levels in the game. Even ignoring the fact that a significant portion of the ROM was taken up by the artwork and code, each level would be well under 6k. So it's perfectly feasible to put an entire level on a card.
"Although PS2 was a sales success because it had a DVD player function, Ummm... No. PS2 was a sales success because of the titles offered at launch and the solid reputation as a platform garnered by PS1. Backwards compatibility with PS1 titles and great design didn't hurt either. But to say that its success stems from the fact that it has a DVD player is silly.
The PS2 didn't have any good launch games. It took about a year or so for any must haves to come out. In Japan, people bought the PS2 at launch because it was cheaper than other DVD players at the time. About a year after it launched in Japan, the games to systems sold ratio was about 1.5:1. That's terrible. I don't know US figures, but I hear it was similar. Anyway, when the Xbox and GameCube launched, most stores required you to buy a bundle of 3 games and a 2nd controller with the system. That's directly because of how terribly PS2 games sold at launch.
He cited Pokemon, a franchise that has sold more than 10 million GBA games worldwide, as one exception to the rule and seemed to indicate that the industry needs more titles like that. No question. If Microsoft and Sony would only, then perhaps they could have a glut of non-selling consoles, too!
You do realize the GBA is outselling the major consoles significantly, right? The GBA amounts for about 45% of all video game system sales.
As to the Cube, they shipped a huge number of systems right before Zelda came out, because they expected Zelda to cause a huge increase in Cube sales. It ended up not having that much of an effect on sales, hence the oversupply of Cubes. Oh, when Nintendo announced the price cut to $99, they also mentioned that Cube production will start again soon.
Also, if the Cube is a non-selling system, then what does that make the Xbox? Remember, the Cube is ahead of the Xbox worldwide.
He once more stressed the pitfalls of online gaming and the problems of subscription networks, and then pointed to new Pokemon games for the GBA as alternatives to Internet play. Pokemon for the GBA as an alternative to Internet play??? Is this guy for real???
Yes, he is for real. He's talking from a business sense. It costs a lot of money to set up the infrastructure for online gaming. You need a large number of subscribers to make it profitable. Pokemon games are much less expensive to make than a 3D console game, yet sell better than 99% of games do. They make a *huge* profit off Pokemon.
Iwata is out of touch.
With your wants, maybe so. But with what makes business sense, no.
That statement is so full of crap. Tha Free Software movement is, by definition, extremist.
Look at the average user of free software. They most likely use a mix of free and non-free software. They usually pick the best tool for the job and go with it.
Now look at RMS. Try suggesting to him that he use some non-free software. If you're lucky, all you'll get is a long rant about why non-free software is the most evil thing possible.
Even saying "My computer runs Linux" will probably get him fuming.
Now compare RMS to Linus. Linus will just go with the flow, and use the best tool for the job. He'll give preference to something free over something not free, but only if they're otherwise approximately equal.
RMS is as extreme as can be when it comes to free software. Most people aren't.
How are the GNU ideals lessened for keeping the original views?
He didn't say the ideals are lessened. He said the idea - the creation of a completely free Unix - is lessened by the ideals. Have you not noticed how many flamewars RMS starts? Have you not noticed how many people dislike him over his insistance that Linux distributions be called GNU/Linux? I lot of people don't want to get involved directly with the GNU project simply because of RMS.
I respect RMS for the work he's done. The guy has done a lot of amazing stuff. But honestly, most of the attention he gets nowadays is from starting flamewars. It's certainly lowered my opinion of GNU. If RMS came off as a nice, easy to work with guy, I'd probably contribute to some GNU projects. But he comes off as a jerk, so I don't want to get involved.
I remember the geeks cheering when MSFT crushed OS/2 to secure Windows' place on the desktop. Hooray! No more IBM monopoly!
That's kinda funny, because everyone I knew wanted OS/2 to win. I never saw people really want to deal with Windows until it became clear it wasn't going to go away.
The Segway is a mode of transportation that requires power.
A car is a mode of transportation that requires power.
When the low power light goes on on a Segway, it means "Stop using it now or you'll get hurt."
When the low gas (power) light goes on on a car, it means "Refill the gas tank when you get a chance. It doesn't have to be immediately, but fairly soon."
I'm sure that most people using the Segway expect the low power light to operate similar to how it does in a car.
I wouldn't be surprised if the main point of the software upgrade was to make the low battery light come on sooner.
If you continue to drive your car when the low gas light comes on, you're not going to get hurt.
The low battery light on the Segway should come on when there is still sufficient power for you to travel a reasonable distance to recharge it. Kinda like how when the low gas light on your car comes on, you don't have to get out and push it to a gas station.
If you're into EA games, don't worry. Nintendo and EA signed a deal a few months ago where EA would release around 20 GameCube titles over the next or so. Miyamoto would help make some of them.
HTML 3.2 is a pretty good choice. Most obscure browsers can render HTML 3.2 just fine, but start having trouble when you go past that. HTML complexity increased a lot after 3.2.
But it's really too bad that it is so difficult, because Nintendo could have sold the devices at $199 for a nice profit, including a Linux disk or something, making it a simple browse the web from the set-top solution, etc.
Several companies tried business plans like that around 99 or so. It didn't work.
#1 I remember someone at Nintendo taunting Microsoft for their Sega GT/JSRF bundle deal saying that bundles and price drops are an insult to early adopters. Well, insult on then.
I think you're mistaken. They've always offered bundles, and would regularly cut the price of their systems over their lifetimes.
Well, when I bought my SNES (about halfway between the releases of the SNES and N64), it was either $100 for the system by itself, or $130 for the system, 2 controllers, Mario World, and another bonus game that varied depending on the store. I got it with Mario Paint and the mouse, but I also saw it Mario Kart bundled. I think there was a version that had Mario All Stars + Mario World all on one cart.
I know I bought my N64 at $150 a year after release. I'm pretty sure it dropped to $100 a year after that, which would be the same point in the console's lifespan that the GameCube is at now.
On the 386 and 486 you are limited to 4GB no matter what.
The Pentium added Page Address Extensions (PAE), which increased the maximum addressable memory to 36 bit addressing. Any one segment is still limited to 4 GB, but by using multiple segments you could use all the supported memory.
It's not Intel's fault that OS developers aren't taking advantages of the features of the CPU.
Enable segmentation and you're good. The only limit is you can't have one continuous memory allocation be greater than 4GB.
Using segmentation would also almost completely eliminate buffer overrun exploits. Through the heap into one non-executable segment, the stack into another, and isolate the code into a read-only executable segment. Yes, a few overrun exploits of still possible, but the vast majority won't work, and it'd be really hard to do anything with what would still work.
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I can go to the video game store and buy used games cheaper.
Sure, for say the Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt cartridge. But not for stuff that's less common that that (read: every other game ever made).
Well, Metroid never sold well in Japan. That's why their was no N64 Metroid. There's only a GameCube Metroid because every time Miyamoto came to the US, people repeatedly asked him about a new Metroid. This is really obvious when you realize that Metroid Fusion was developed in Japan, but released in the US several months before the Japanese release.
As to Star Wars, I'd venture to say the movies are probably much more popular in the US than in Japan. So you'd expect game sales to match.
Eternal Darkness just didn't sell well anywhere.
The cheaters banned in Warcraft have been people using maphacks which remove the fog of war. The usual way to check it is to watch a replay, and see if the person clicked on something they shouldn't be able to see.
Warcraft 3 does a pretty good job with skill matching (my record is somewhere around 60% wins, and unless you're at the very top or very bottom of the rankings should level out around 50% for each ideally), but the trash talking and insults are still FAR too prevalent for it to be enjoyable.
You'd be surprised how few people on battle.net actually understand how the winning percentage should work out. If you don't have a ~75% winning percent (and it has to be at solo), then you get harassed and called a newb all the time. Try reading the forums at www.battle.net, they're all terrible about that.
The last level of Zelda II was pretty tough, but not too bad. You had to be cheap though. If you tried fighting the more difficult enemies head on, you'd get destroyed.
Blue birds with shields? When you break through the breakable blocks right before them, stay very high. get in a position so that if you kneel and swing your sword, it will hit the bird's head at the peak of his jump. They can't defend against that, and they can't hurt you.
The next to last boss is just a bitch. The last one had a trick, but I don't remember it offhand.
You want a hard game though? Try Might Bomb Jack. The game is long, has branching paths, and no backtracking once you go through a door. If you pick the wrong path, it'll be about half an hour or more before you find out. You'll just get stuck in a room with no exit.
That discussion was about the modified version of GCC Linksys used that was created by Broadcom.
The issue here is Linksys added additional files to the kernel (not modules) but didn't include them in their source distribution.
You can't even successfully run make config on the code they're giving out, let alone actually build a kernel.
Also Zelda TWW (kaze no takuto) is also quite a bit harder when trying to find the triforce shards.
That was changed in the American version because EVERYONE bitched about how tedious it was in the Japanese game. Take a look at any import review; they all say the game gets really tedious towards the end.
The most glaring example is Super Mario Bros 2. It wasn't released here because it was considered too hard for American gamers. Instead we got Doki Doki Panic with Mario characters added in.
2) Linux vs. GNU/Linux --
.... freedesktop.org, etc...
RMS's view of history (as opposed to other views like the ones prevelent in the BSD/X11 communities) is accepted by most knowledgeable Linux users. I'd call that a victory.
That one issue is probably the biggest one contributing to people disliking him. 1/3 of the software on the Linux distro he looked at was GNU? That means 2/3 isn't. And I'd say almost all of the critical stuff isn't GNU.
I won't deny GCC is critical. glibc is important, but there are other libc's if people really cared. Other than that, what other GNU software is crucial? Everything else can easily be replaced.
4) Healing the KDE / Gnome rift --
Winning
Um, RMS still bashes KDE. He's making things worse.
5) GPL vs. BSD/MIT licenses
An obvious victory.
Huh? What's an obvious victory there? The only issue I can possibly see is the advertising clause of the BSD license, but that never affected the MIT license, so I don't know what you're talking about.
You're right about RMS helping with the Qt licensing. The Emacs/XEmacs battles I don't really know about, so I can't comment.
You also forgot about the BitKeeper flamewar. All RMS has accomplished is pissing of LKML.
They're selling "Super Mario Bros 3" for the GameBoy Advance. If you simply buy the cartridge, and nothing else, that's what you get. You can buy cards to get bonus features.
Oh, last I heard, it hasn't been confirmed if the levels are in the game or on the cards. Each card holds about 6k. The original SMB3 NES ROM was 384KB. There were close to 100 levels in the game. Even ignoring the fact that a significant portion of the ROM was taken up by the artwork and code, each level would be well under 6k. So it's perfectly feasible to put an entire level on a card.
"Although PS2 was a sales success because it had a DVD player function,
Ummm... No. PS2 was a sales success because of the titles offered at launch and the solid reputation as a platform garnered by PS1. Backwards compatibility with PS1 titles and great design didn't hurt either. But to say that its success stems from the fact that it has a DVD player is silly.
The PS2 didn't have any good launch games. It took about a year or so for any must haves to come out. In Japan, people bought the PS2 at launch because it was cheaper than other DVD players at the time. About a year after it launched in Japan, the games to systems sold ratio was about 1.5:1. That's terrible. I don't know US figures, but I hear it was similar. Anyway, when the Xbox and GameCube launched, most stores required you to buy a bundle of 3 games and a 2nd controller with the system. That's directly because of how terribly PS2 games sold at launch.
He cited Pokemon, a franchise that has sold more than 10 million GBA games worldwide, as one exception to the rule and seemed to indicate that the industry needs more titles like that.
No question. If Microsoft and Sony would only, then perhaps they could have a glut of non-selling consoles, too!
You do realize the GBA is outselling the major consoles significantly, right? The GBA amounts for about 45% of all video game system sales.
As to the Cube, they shipped a huge number of systems right before Zelda came out, because they expected Zelda to cause a huge increase in Cube sales. It ended up not having that much of an effect on sales, hence the oversupply of Cubes. Oh, when Nintendo announced the price cut to $99, they also mentioned that Cube production will start again soon.
Also, if the Cube is a non-selling system, then what does that make the Xbox? Remember, the Cube is ahead of the Xbox worldwide.
He once more stressed the pitfalls of online gaming and the problems of subscription networks, and then pointed to new Pokemon games for the GBA as alternatives to Internet play.
Pokemon for the GBA as an alternative to Internet play??? Is this guy for real???
Yes, he is for real. He's talking from a business sense. It costs a lot of money to set up the infrastructure for online gaming. You need a large number of subscribers to make it profitable. Pokemon games are much less expensive to make than a 3D console game, yet sell better than 99% of games do. They make a *huge* profit off Pokemon.
Iwata is out of touch.
With your wants, maybe so. But with what makes business sense, no.
I'd check that statement if I were you. Most Linux users I know don't have any non-free software on their machine.
Got an Nvidia or ATI graphics card? If you want 3D, you've got non-free software installed.
How about Java? Non-free software there. Same with Flash.
Sure, plenty of server boxes don't have any non-free software. But for a desktop, at the very least, you'll have a few pieces of non-free software.
That statement is so full of crap. Tha Free Software movement is, by definition, extremist.
Look at the average user of free software. They most likely use a mix of free and non-free software. They usually pick the best tool for the job and go with it.
Now look at RMS. Try suggesting to him that he use some non-free software. If you're lucky, all you'll get is a long rant about why non-free software is the most evil thing possible.
Even saying "My computer runs Linux" will probably get him fuming.
Now compare RMS to Linus. Linus will just go with the flow, and use the best tool for the job. He'll give preference to something free over something not free, but only if they're otherwise approximately equal.
RMS is as extreme as can be when it comes to free software. Most people aren't.
How are the GNU ideals lessened for keeping the original views?
He didn't say the ideals are lessened. He said the idea - the creation of a completely free Unix - is lessened by the ideals. Have you not noticed how many flamewars RMS starts? Have you not noticed how many people dislike him over his insistance that Linux distributions be called GNU/Linux? I lot of people don't want to get involved directly with the GNU project simply because of RMS.
I respect RMS for the work he's done. The guy has done a lot of amazing stuff. But honestly, most of the attention he gets nowadays is from starting flamewars. It's certainly lowered my opinion of GNU. If RMS came off as a nice, easy to work with guy, I'd probably contribute to some GNU projects. But he comes off as a jerk, so I don't want to get involved.
I remember the geeks cheering when MSFT crushed OS/2 to secure Windows' place on the desktop. Hooray! No more IBM monopoly!
That's kinda funny, because everyone I knew wanted OS/2 to win. I never saw people really want to deal with Windows until it became clear it wasn't going to go away.
When the low gas light on a car comes on, it doesn't mean instant trouble. You have time to respond.
Not the case with a Segway.
The Segway is a mode of transportation that requires power.
A car is a mode of transportation that requires power.
When the low power light goes on on a Segway, it means "Stop using it now or you'll get hurt."
When the low gas (power) light goes on on a car, it means "Refill the gas tank when you get a chance. It doesn't have to be immediately, but fairly soon."
I'm sure that most people using the Segway expect the low power light to operate similar to how it does in a car.
I wouldn't be surprised if the main point of the software upgrade was to make the low battery light come on sooner.
If you continue to drive your car when the low gas light comes on, you're not going to get hurt.
The low battery light on the Segway should come on when there is still sufficient power for you to travel a reasonable distance to recharge it. Kinda like how when the low gas light on your car comes on, you don't have to get out and push it to a gas station.
If you're into EA games, don't worry. Nintendo and EA signed a deal a few months ago where EA would release around 20 GameCube titles over the next or so. Miyamoto would help make some of them.
If you're playing multiplayer, why would you use headphones? What fun is multiplayer if you can't hear your friends whine when you beat them?
HTML 3.2 is a pretty good choice. Most obscure browsers can render HTML 3.2 just fine, but start having trouble when you go past that. HTML complexity increased a lot after 3.2.
But it's really too bad that it is so difficult, because Nintendo could have sold the devices at $199 for a nice profit, including a Linux disk or something, making it a simple browse the web from the set-top solution, etc.
Several companies tried business plans like that around 99 or so. It didn't work.
A quick search on Ebay brings up this auction
t em =3048434152
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&i
Both games, on one cartridge.
#1 I remember someone at Nintendo taunting Microsoft for their Sega GT/JSRF bundle deal saying that bundles and price drops are an insult to early adopters. Well, insult on then.
I think you're mistaken. They've always offered bundles, and would regularly cut the price of their systems over their lifetimes.
Well, when I bought my SNES (about halfway between the releases of the SNES and N64), it was either $100 for the system by itself, or $130 for the system, 2 controllers, Mario World, and another bonus game that varied depending on the store. I got it with Mario Paint and the mouse, but I also saw it Mario Kart bundled. I think there was a version that had Mario All Stars + Mario World all on one cart.
I know I bought my N64 at $150 a year after release. I'm pretty sure it dropped to $100 a year after that, which would be the same point in the console's lifespan that the GameCube is at now.
On the 386 and 486 you are limited to 4GB no matter what.
The Pentium added Page Address Extensions (PAE), which increased the maximum addressable memory to 36 bit addressing. Any one segment is still limited to 4 GB, but by using multiple segments you could use all the supported memory.
It's not Intel's fault that OS developers aren't taking advantages of the features of the CPU.
Enable segmentation and you're good. The only limit is you can't have one continuous memory allocation be greater than 4GB.
Using segmentation would also almost completely eliminate buffer overrun exploits. Through the heap into one non-executable segment, the stack into another, and isolate the code into a read-only executable segment. Yes, a few overrun exploits of still possible, but the vast majority won't work, and it'd be really hard to do anything with what would still work.