1) It bombed horribly in Japan. At that point in time, the Japanese market had a much bigger influence on gaming than it does now (EA & Ubisoft were much smaller than the are now, for starters, and MS wasn't in the market). Also, with Nintendo being a Japanese company, they generally care more about doing well in Japan than they do about the rest of the world.
2) It sold great for about 3 years, then sales slowed to a crawl. Lots of games were released for it early on, but development really slowed down in the later years of the console. PS1 sales increased significantly around the same time as the N64 sales decreased, making things look even worse.
Nintendo hasn't done much to stop DS stuff. The first hack of the DS worked by putting a pass through device into the DS slot. You'd then insert a regular game into that pass through. It would let the regular game card start the boot process and load the main executable, then when the DS asked the card what memory address execution should start at, the pass through device would intercept it and specify an address in the GBA slot memory space. You'd write your homebrew to run off GBA flash carts.
One DS firmware update modified the boot code to reject startup memory addresses that weren't in main memory.
The only other change Nintendo did with an affect on homebrew was to make it so the firmware could only be modified if you shorted a jumper. But that wasn't an attempt to prevent homebrew, that was just preventing bad code from bricking the DS.
Those are icons for minimized windows. If the window isn't minimized, it doesn't get an icon at the bottom. As opposed to the taskbar, shows icons for both minimized and non-minimized windows.
I said bluray appears to be the winner technology wise. My reasoning is because of the capacity of a bluray disk vs hddvd. Bluray wins with 50GB versus HD-DVD's 30GB disc.
BluRay wins from a pure technology spandpoint easily. There's no question on that, even from the HD-DVD camp.
The entire point of this war is BluRay is better technology, but HD-DVD is cheaper to make. Not so much on the consumer end, but on the manufacturing end. BluRay requires all new manufacturing equipment, whereas HD-DVD just requires some fairly cheap upgrades to the existing DVD manufacturing equipment.
Unless you're really trying to push the limits of your target platform hard, programming is a drop in the bucket compared to the work done by the artists and level designers. The level designers probably have more to do with good gameplay than the programmers.
Level design is also a REALLY tedious process. Making a good level requires replaying the level over and over slightly tweaking things to get them just right. It gets old fast, and you get really sick of the level in the process. And of course you have to deal with the issues that come up from playing the level that many times. It's very easy to memorize the level you're working on, and end up making the level way too difficult because of that.
The remote desktop thing for example, means you can connect to any machine in your network thru your WHS. So no, that's not the same as having to configure your Inet access router to point to different machines to access all of them.
What's the difference between that and configuring your router to forward remote access to one machine, then connecting from there to the other machines?
Please show me a NAS that allows me to remote desktop to my workstation.
Why do you need a NAS to do that? Install VNC or turn on XP's remote desktop access functionality on your workstation, then set up a port forward or SSH tunnel on your router.
I can't see someone concerned about a NAS and referring to their computer as a workstation not having a router capable of a task that simple.
No one with a lick of sense gives a flying fuck. Unless you're counting the lines, rather than playing the game, you can't tell if there are 640 lines or 720. Give me a break.
Realistically, no, it doesn't matter much. At this point, graphics increases don't mean much, as we're well past the point where adding graphics power lets you create game play you couldn't do before. But the Xbox 360 and PS3 are sold on the premise of HD resolution graphics. To the people who bought the systems for that reason, anything less than 720p isn't what they were led to believe they would get.
It's hardly "incredibly short" (took me 8ish hours), and every game ever made (except some RPGs) is linear. You can hardly bash Halo 3 for being what 90% of games are, buddy.
Well, 90% of games (or anything) is crap. That doesn't mean we shouldn't bash a bad game. Obviously every game is linear at some level, but some a lot more so than others. Halo games are far over on the linear side of things. Whether that's a good thing or bad depends on your tastes, but singling out Halo 3 for it after Halo and Halo 2 set the bar for it is silly.
1) Smash Bros Brawl being delayed until next year. Mr. Iwata personally told me that he was hoping to make this game a release title for the "Revolution" (this was in 2005). We're now more than a year overdue, and for something like Smash that really doesn't imply 6.5 solid years of development time. They were simply slow to start on it.
The problem with SSB Brawl is Iwata made a promise he couldn't possibly deliver. Iwata publicly announced a SSB game as a Wii launch title in late '05, THEN went to the designer of the previous games in the series and asked him to make the game. The guy had left Nintendo a few years prior. So, Nintendo had 1 year to get the guy to agree to make the game, get a dev team for him to work with, and create the game. Once this became public knowledge, it was pretty clear it wasn't going to be a launch game. In the end, it took them a little over two years to put it together, assuming no further delays.
There is NOTHING in the law permitting one to make one or more backup copies of anything else as "fair use".
The law spells out the big things. Fair Use is the little things that go against the spirit of the law but have been determined to be ok, as they don't go against the spirit of the law.
Backup copies of software ISN'T Fair Use. It's an explicit exception to Copyright Law. It was made because when the laws were written, it a reasonable thing for people to do.
Taping TV shows with a VCR is considered Fair Use. It's not allowed in copyright law, but the courts ruled that it was a reasonable thing to do as it's just a matter of personal convenience, hence time shifting became Fair Use.
Also, the Audio Home Recording Act allows personal copies of music. Not just for backups, but for giving to family members and for use in portables. Don't ask me the specifics of it though, as it's a confusing law.
Let's be fair comparing the cameras in Mario 64 and Galaxy. In Mario 64, the camera gave you a crappy angle most of the time and you had to adjust it yourself frequently. Galaxy gives you a pretty good angle almost all of the time, but often doesn't let you change it when there's a bad angle. Overall, the Galaxy camera is far far better, but of course people tend to remember when they try changing it but can't rather than the fact that on the vast majority of the levels, you'll never think about changing it.
With the running and jumping challenges, that's just what most Mario games are about. With Mario Sunshine, most people seemed to really like the sections where you didn't have the water pack and had run & jump obstacle course style levels and have mixed feelings about the rest, so, it's not too surprising the direction they went in.
Any particular reason you feel that way? Myself and everyone I've talked to about it has considered 3 the worst of the three. The first two hours or so and a section near the end are basically generic FPS junk and really out of place in a Metroid game. As for the middle, there's way too much hand holding - the amount of hints they give you with hints turned off is almost as much as I'd expect with the hints turned on. The upgrades seemed too limited in 3, especially when you factor in that ~10% or so of the items are ship missile expansions, which are only useful a few times early in the game, then can't be used at all after that.
The checkpoint system wasn't bad, but I think it was only really necessary due to the gameplay being more story driven. Between the first two games, there were only a few bosses that didn't have a save point immediately before them. It only took a minute to backtrack to them after the fights.
I think Nintendo, the retailers, and the analysts are all aware that when Best Buy tells someone they don't have a Wii in stock, the person is most likely going to check the Circuit City down the road if they haven't already. You'd have to be a pretty bad market analyst to not take that into account when you make your projections.
To deal with it, the stores don't take preorders other than for the initial launch. Nintendo is working with GameStop to take a limited number of preorders (a few tens of thousands) this holiday season but is requiring you to prepay in full for the system in exchange for January delivery.
That's what they attempted to do. They ramped up production months ago, hoping to have a surplus for Christmas. But even at the increased production rate they still can't meet the demand.
You've got an extremely narrow view of the world if you believe that. Practically everyone who works in an office or at a school uses Word or an equivalent. Some more than others, sure, but secretaries are quite the minority. They aren't the ones making the business reports, documenting things, writing contracts, working with clients, etc. Secretaries are support staff, they're not the ones doing the real work of the business and are outnumbered (usually substantially) by the rest of the office staff.
Also, stop and think how many students there are and how often they need to write papers.
Despite what Linux mags would have you think OpenOffice vs MS Office isn't going in the same direction as Firefox vs IE. Out of everyone I've spoken to the only people I know who didn't much prefer Office 2007 to 2003 was an Access trainer, who was very familiar with Access 2003.
From my experience, the only people who did prefer Office 2007 were the kind of people that barely knew enough about Office to get their job done. Those people only cared because the ribbon had icons for things that weren't in the default toolbar of the version they were using before.
Anyone with even a slight skill level found it harder to use, as the UI doesn't operate like any other app's UI. Button designs aren't even consistent within the ribbon. You have to throw out everything you've ever learned about how UIs are supposed to be designed to understand Office 2007.
The people who don't like Office 2007 are mostly people who are not computer savvy enough to even know about the existence of OpenOffice.
I take that to mean you like Office 2007 and don't see why other people wouldn't like it.
Office 2007 has a drastically different UI than just about every other GUI software ever made. The UI goes against every prior set of UI guidelines. You've got major functionality placed in a menu that normally only has window management features. You've got core functionality (save, undo) placed in the title bar. The ribbons are a mish-mash of controls with no obvious logic on how it was designed. You go across the ribbon and you'll see each set of buttons has a different style. Button sizes aren't remotely uniform. Some buttons are labelled with text while others aren't. Even within a set of related buttons (say cut/copy/paste), you get completely different styles for the buttons.
You've also got things like options organized into categories such as "Popular". It's hard to make things harder to find than that, as there isn't any way to know what category an option would fit into with categories like that.
The people most likely to not like the Office 2007 interface are the people who are familiar enough with computers to have expectations of how a UI is supposed to be designed.
People who are totally computer unsavy are just going to think it's different, neither good or bad.
Perhaps screen scraping was the wrong choice of words. Yes, some implementations (particularly X ones) hook into the screen display at lower levels to gain efficiency. The important part is VNC sends a bitmap of the screen image, however it is obtained, while MS's Remote Desktop sends the drawing commands to produce it.
The kind of people that are alienated by MS Office 2007's new interface are the same kind of people that are NOT going to bother installing and learning OpenOffice.
Wouldn't it be the people that AREN'T alienated by it be the people that wouldn't bother with OpenOffice?
The people who don't like it are going to be the ones trying something else. Why would the people who like it or don't care either way bother switching?
MS's Remote Desktop works a lot better than VNC. VNC does screen scraping and sends the final bitmap over the connection. Remote Desktop sends the drawing commands over the connection, requiring it to transfer a lot less data to do the same thing.
For home systems, yeah, remote access isn't very common. But it is common for people to access their office computers from home.
Because no one else has enough users to really matter.
We just hit the recompile button and hey presto!
Try recompiling that KDE 1 app against the KDE 4 headers and see what happens. Here's a hint: the last line of the compiler output will be something similar to "Error: too many errors."
Try recompiling Flash against the latest libraries. Oh, wait...
You're arguing that features that were so hard to get right that Miyamoto almost canceled the project over were trivial and are insisting the real accomplishments lie in things that they've never discussed in any interviews.
Space jump is spinning through the air and jumping repeatedly. Something not possible from a first person view. Look for interviews with Retro about the Screw Attack in Echoes. They realized people were disappointed by not having anything resembling the original space jump, so they made an effort to recreate it in Echoes. The Screw Attack in Echoes was intended entirely to recreate the 2D experience of the space jump. It wasn't actually possible to use it as an attack until near the end of the development process, and was only done do to feedback from people playing prerelease demo builds. That's what the developers said. Yeah, it's not as good as 2D space jump, but it at least resembles it. You're the one who went off about the double jump version of space jump.
Have I played 2D platformers dumb enough to use select for jump? No. But there's plenty that arranged the face button assignments awkwardly making it hard to hit the necessary button combos. But there's plenty where it's hard to control your jumps (like using WASD to move in an FPS) or the ledges are too small. Most people write them off as bad games and forget them.
You've yet to come up with any reason it's impressive other than they designed the jump with reasonable distances, which is rule #1 of designing jumping challenges. You also attribute space jump for making it easier, but in Prime 1 you don't get space jump until ~1/3 through the game, and in the last 1/3 of the game, a lot of the jumps require you to come very close to the max jumping distance possible with the space jump, which makes things harder, not easier.
Jumping in the Primes comes down to: 1) Reasonable jumping distances 2) Analog movement allowing you to alter your trajectory mid-air 2) A control scheme that makes it easy to jump while having full control of your weapons
Okay you should be more clear then since I was talking about the actual space jump in the game and how they designed it to make jumping more forgiving, and you were talking about "proper" space jump and screw attack separately in one paragraph, but then switched to using "space jump" to mean "'proper' space jump as represented by screw attack in Prime 2" without any explanation that you were doing so. That's very confusing.
I was clear. I brought it up when talking about things that wouldn't transition well from the 2D games when I brought up space jump, mentioning that they didn't even attempt it until Prime 2 and didn't make it a core part of the game. That's the only context I ever brought up space jump in. You responded by talking about the implementation of space jump in the 3D games, which is something very different from space jump in the 2D games.
The camera angle is WHY First-Person anything before Prime had terrible jumping! You can't just say "Oh it's an adventure game with a different camera angle, so it makes sense that jumping would work well", because that ignores how you make it work well with the different camera angle. It's not automatic! Prime is not the first "first person adventure" game, but it is the first one that had natural jumping. "FPS" vs "FPA" isn't what makes jumping difficult to get right, it's "FP" vs "TP".
No, the camera angle isn't why. If the camera angle was the reason why, then it would've sucked in Prime as well. Prime 1 & 2 tilted the camera very slightly when you jump. A lot of people - myself included - considered that to be a benefit. But Prime 3 doesn't do that, and it isn't any harder to jump in that game. I don't see how you can blame the camera angle if Metroid could pull it off great with the same camera angle.
That's basically what it comes down to. The only first person perspective game with jumping puzzles you've played is Prime, which is the only one to have gotten it right, therefore you don't appreciate it's accomplishments in this regard and just assume it's as simple as declaring your game to be an adventure not a shooter. It's easy to take something for granted if you don't know anything different.
I haven't put significant time into many shooters, but I've played a little of them every now and then. The problems I've had with jumping in them was 1) using WASD to move, which gives you very little precision in your movement speed and 2) bad level design requiring you to land on ledges so small there was no margin of error at all. On the console end, the biggest issue has usually been on a dual analog setup, the the face buttons aren't quick to access.
That's basically what it comes down to. The only first person perspective game with jumping puzzles you've played is Prime, which is the only one to have gotten it right, therefore you don't appreciate it's accomplishments in this regard and just assume it's as simple as declaring your game to be an adventure not a shooter. It's easy to take something for granted if you don't know anything different.
The adventure aspect comes into play in the control design. If they did a dual analog control scheme focused around a typical shooting experience, the jumping would've sucked. If your thumbs are expected to be on the analog sticks, you can't make effective use of the buttons.
I really don't get where you're coming from. You've stated that you haven't really played any other first person games and thus aren't aware of the problems they had, you've also said you give props to Retro for making the best 3d game ever -- what's your hangup against just acknowledging that, while you may not have appreciated it at the time, one of their non-trivial accomplishments was creating the first jumping puzzles in a first person game that weren't annoying?
I just really see the jumping as the least of their accomplishments. Retro doesn't seem to think it's that big a deal either. If you read any interviews with them, their difficulties wer
Slashdot Mirror
The N64 had two problems:
1) It bombed horribly in Japan. At that point in time, the Japanese market had a much bigger influence on gaming than it does now (EA & Ubisoft were much smaller than the are now, for starters, and MS wasn't in the market). Also, with Nintendo being a Japanese company, they generally care more about doing well in Japan than they do about the rest of the world.
2) It sold great for about 3 years, then sales slowed to a crawl. Lots of games were released for it early on, but development really slowed down in the later years of the console. PS1 sales increased significantly around the same time as the N64 sales decreased, making things look even worse.
Nintendo hasn't done much to stop DS stuff. The first hack of the DS worked by putting a pass through device into the DS slot. You'd then insert a regular game into that pass through. It would let the regular game card start the boot process and load the main executable, then when the DS asked the card what memory address execution should start at, the pass through device would intercept it and specify an address in the GBA slot memory space. You'd write your homebrew to run off GBA flash carts.
One DS firmware update modified the boot code to reject startup memory addresses that weren't in main memory.
The only other change Nintendo did with an affect on homebrew was to make it so the firmware could only be modified if you shorted a jumper. But that wasn't an attempt to prevent homebrew, that was just preventing bad code from bricking the DS.
Those are icons for minimized windows. If the window isn't minimized, it doesn't get an icon at the bottom. As opposed to the taskbar, shows icons for both minimized and non-minimized windows.
I said bluray appears to be the winner technology wise. My reasoning is because of the capacity of a bluray disk vs hddvd. Bluray wins with 50GB versus HD-DVD's 30GB disc.
BluRay wins from a pure technology spandpoint easily. There's no question on that, even from the HD-DVD camp.
The entire point of this war is BluRay is better technology, but HD-DVD is cheaper to make. Not so much on the consumer end, but on the manufacturing end. BluRay requires all new manufacturing equipment, whereas HD-DVD just requires some fairly cheap upgrades to the existing DVD manufacturing equipment.
Unless you're really trying to push the limits of your target platform hard, programming is a drop in the bucket compared to the work done by the artists and level designers. The level designers probably have more to do with good gameplay than the programmers.
Level design is also a REALLY tedious process. Making a good level requires replaying the level over and over slightly tweaking things to get them just right. It gets old fast, and you get really sick of the level in the process. And of course you have to deal with the issues that come up from playing the level that many times. It's very easy to memorize the level you're working on, and end up making the level way too difficult because of that.
The remote desktop thing for example, means you can connect to any machine in your network thru your WHS. So no, that's not the same as having to configure your Inet access router to point to different machines to access all of them.
What's the difference between that and configuring your router to forward remote access to one machine, then connecting from there to the other machines?
Please show me a NAS that allows me to remote desktop to my workstation.
Why do you need a NAS to do that? Install VNC or turn on XP's remote desktop access functionality on your workstation, then set up a port forward or SSH tunnel on your router.
I can't see someone concerned about a NAS and referring to their computer as a workstation not having a router capable of a task that simple.
No one with a lick of sense gives a flying fuck. Unless you're counting the lines, rather than playing the game, you can't tell if there are 640 lines or 720. Give me a break.
Realistically, no, it doesn't matter much. At this point, graphics increases don't mean much, as we're well past the point where adding graphics power lets you create game play you couldn't do before. But the Xbox 360 and PS3 are sold on the premise of HD resolution graphics. To the people who bought the systems for that reason, anything less than 720p isn't what they were led to believe they would get.
It's hardly "incredibly short" (took me 8ish hours), and every game ever made (except some RPGs) is linear. You can hardly bash Halo 3 for being what 90% of games are, buddy.
Well, 90% of games (or anything) is crap. That doesn't mean we shouldn't bash a bad game. Obviously every game is linear at some level, but some a lot more so than others. Halo games are far over on the linear side of things. Whether that's a good thing or bad depends on your tastes, but singling out Halo 3 for it after Halo and Halo 2 set the bar for it is silly.
1) Smash Bros Brawl being delayed until next year. Mr. Iwata personally told me that he was hoping to make this game a release title for the "Revolution" (this was in 2005). We're now more than a year overdue, and for something like Smash that really doesn't imply 6.5 solid years of development time. They were simply slow to start on it.
The problem with SSB Brawl is Iwata made a promise he couldn't possibly deliver. Iwata publicly announced a SSB game as a Wii launch title in late '05, THEN went to the designer of the previous games in the series and asked him to make the game. The guy had left Nintendo a few years prior. So, Nintendo had 1 year to get the guy to agree to make the game, get a dev team for him to work with, and create the game. Once this became public knowledge, it was pretty clear it wasn't going to be a launch game. In the end, it took them a little over two years to put it together, assuming no further delays.
There is NOTHING in the law permitting one to make one or more backup copies of anything else as "fair use".
The law spells out the big things. Fair Use is the little things that go against the spirit of the law but have been determined to be ok, as they don't go against the spirit of the law.
Backup copies of software ISN'T Fair Use. It's an explicit exception to Copyright Law. It was made because when the laws were written, it a reasonable thing for people to do.
Taping TV shows with a VCR is considered Fair Use. It's not allowed in copyright law, but the courts ruled that it was a reasonable thing to do as it's just a matter of personal convenience, hence time shifting became Fair Use.
Also, the Audio Home Recording Act allows personal copies of music. Not just for backups, but for giving to family members and for use in portables. Don't ask me the specifics of it though, as it's a confusing law.
Let's be fair comparing the cameras in Mario 64 and Galaxy. In Mario 64, the camera gave you a crappy angle most of the time and you had to adjust it yourself frequently. Galaxy gives you a pretty good angle almost all of the time, but often doesn't let you change it when there's a bad angle. Overall, the Galaxy camera is far far better, but of course people tend to remember when they try changing it but can't rather than the fact that on the vast majority of the levels, you'll never think about changing it.
With the running and jumping challenges, that's just what most Mario games are about. With Mario Sunshine, most people seemed to really like the sections where you didn't have the water pack and had run & jump obstacle course style levels and have mixed feelings about the rest, so, it's not too surprising the direction they went in.
I'll respectfully disagree there. I think MP3 > MP1 > MP2.
Any particular reason you feel that way? Myself and everyone I've talked to about it has considered 3 the worst of the three. The first two hours or so and a section near the end are basically generic FPS junk and really out of place in a Metroid game. As for the middle, there's way too much hand holding - the amount of hints they give you with hints turned off is almost as much as I'd expect with the hints turned on. The upgrades seemed too limited in 3, especially when you factor in that ~10% or so of the items are ship missile expansions, which are only useful a few times early in the game, then can't be used at all after that.
The checkpoint system wasn't bad, but I think it was only really necessary due to the gameplay being more story driven. Between the first two games, there were only a few bosses that didn't have a save point immediately before them. It only took a minute to backtrack to them after the fights.
The game has dark lighting.
There are aliens.
Duke looks like he takes more steroids than all pro sports players combined.
That's really all you can get out of the trailer. Most of the video is Duke lifting weights in a really dark room.
I think Nintendo, the retailers, and the analysts are all aware that when Best Buy tells someone they don't have a Wii in stock, the person is most likely going to check the Circuit City down the road if they haven't already. You'd have to be a pretty bad market analyst to not take that into account when you make your projections.
To deal with it, the stores don't take preorders other than for the initial launch. Nintendo is working with GameStop to take a limited number of preorders (a few tens of thousands) this holiday season but is requiring you to prepay in full for the system in exchange for January delivery.
That's what they attempted to do. They ramped up production months ago, hoping to have a surplus for Christmas. But even at the increased production rate they still can't meet the demand.
Most people who use Word are secretaries.
You've got an extremely narrow view of the world if you believe that. Practically everyone who works in an office or at a school uses Word or an equivalent. Some more than others, sure, but secretaries are quite the minority. They aren't the ones making the business reports, documenting things, writing contracts, working with clients, etc. Secretaries are support staff, they're not the ones doing the real work of the business and are outnumbered (usually substantially) by the rest of the office staff.
Also, stop and think how many students there are and how often they need to write papers.
Despite what Linux mags would have you think OpenOffice vs MS Office isn't going in the same direction as Firefox vs IE. Out of everyone I've spoken to the only people I know who didn't much prefer Office 2007 to 2003 was an Access trainer, who was very familiar with Access 2003.
From my experience, the only people who did prefer Office 2007 were the kind of people that barely knew enough about Office to get their job done. Those people only cared because the ribbon had icons for things that weren't in the default toolbar of the version they were using before.
Anyone with even a slight skill level found it harder to use, as the UI doesn't operate like any other app's UI. Button designs aren't even consistent within the ribbon. You have to throw out everything you've ever learned about how UIs are supposed to be designed to understand Office 2007.
The people who don't like Office 2007 are mostly people who are not computer savvy enough to even know about the existence of OpenOffice.
I take that to mean you like Office 2007 and don't see why other people wouldn't like it.
Office 2007 has a drastically different UI than just about every other GUI software ever made. The UI goes against every prior set of UI guidelines. You've got major functionality placed in a menu that normally only has window management features. You've got core functionality (save, undo) placed in the title bar. The ribbons are a mish-mash of controls with no obvious logic on how it was designed. You go across the ribbon and you'll see each set of buttons has a different style. Button sizes aren't remotely uniform. Some buttons are labelled with text while others aren't. Even within a set of related buttons (say cut/copy/paste), you get completely different styles for the buttons.
You've also got things like options organized into categories such as "Popular". It's hard to make things harder to find than that, as there isn't any way to know what category an option would fit into with categories like that.
The people most likely to not like the Office 2007 interface are the people who are familiar enough with computers to have expectations of how a UI is supposed to be designed.
People who are totally computer unsavy are just going to think it's different, neither good or bad.
Perhaps screen scraping was the wrong choice of words. Yes, some implementations (particularly X ones) hook into the screen display at lower levels to gain efficiency. The important part is VNC sends a bitmap of the screen image, however it is obtained, while MS's Remote Desktop sends the drawing commands to produce it.
The kind of people that are alienated by MS Office 2007's new interface are the same kind of people that are NOT going to bother installing and learning OpenOffice.
Wouldn't it be the people that AREN'T alienated by it be the people that wouldn't bother with OpenOffice?
The people who don't like it are going to be the ones trying something else. Why would the people who like it or don't care either way bother switching?
MS's Remote Desktop works a lot better than VNC. VNC does screen scraping and sends the final bitmap over the connection. Remote Desktop sends the drawing commands over the connection, requiring it to transfer a lot less data to do the same thing.
For home systems, yeah, remote access isn't very common. But it is common for people to access their office computers from home.
Why would you need an alpha channel on the wallpaper? There'd be nothing behind it...
No one else needs to.
Because no one else has enough users to really matter.
We just hit the recompile button and hey presto!
Try recompiling that KDE 1 app against the KDE 4 headers and see what happens. Here's a hint: the last line of the compiler output will be something similar to "Error: too many errors."
Try recompiling Flash against the latest libraries. Oh, wait...
I will leave it at this.
You're arguing that features that were so hard to get right that Miyamoto almost canceled the project over were trivial and are insisting the real accomplishments lie in things that they've never discussed in any interviews.
Space jump is spinning through the air and jumping repeatedly. Something not possible from a first person view. Look for interviews with Retro about the Screw Attack in Echoes. They realized people were disappointed by not having anything resembling the original space jump, so they made an effort to recreate it in Echoes. The Screw Attack in Echoes was intended entirely to recreate the 2D experience of the space jump. It wasn't actually possible to use it as an attack until near the end of the development process, and was only done do to feedback from people playing prerelease demo builds. That's what the developers said. Yeah, it's not as good as 2D space jump, but it at least resembles it. You're the one who went off about the double jump version of space jump.
Have I played 2D platformers dumb enough to use select for jump? No. But there's plenty that arranged the face button assignments awkwardly making it hard to hit the necessary button combos. But there's plenty where it's hard to control your jumps (like using WASD to move in an FPS) or the ledges are too small. Most people write them off as bad games and forget them.
You've yet to come up with any reason it's impressive other than they designed the jump with reasonable distances, which is rule #1 of designing jumping challenges. You also attribute space jump for making it easier, but in Prime 1 you don't get space jump until ~1/3 through the game, and in the last 1/3 of the game, a lot of the jumps require you to come very close to the max jumping distance possible with the space jump, which makes things harder, not easier.
Jumping in the Primes comes down to:
1) Reasonable jumping distances
2) Analog movement allowing you to alter your trajectory mid-air
2) A control scheme that makes it easy to jump while having full control of your weapons
That's it. And I'm done.
Okay you should be more clear then since I was talking about the actual space jump in the game and how they designed it to make jumping more forgiving, and you were talking about "proper" space jump and screw attack separately in one paragraph, but then switched to using "space jump" to mean "'proper' space jump as represented by screw attack in Prime 2" without any explanation that you were doing so. That's very confusing.
I was clear. I brought it up when talking about things that wouldn't transition well from the 2D games when I brought up space jump, mentioning that they didn't even attempt it until Prime 2 and didn't make it a core part of the game. That's the only context I ever brought up space jump in. You responded by talking about the implementation of space jump in the 3D games, which is something very different from space jump in the 2D games.
The camera angle is WHY First-Person anything before Prime had terrible jumping! You can't just say "Oh it's an adventure game with a different camera angle, so it makes sense that jumping would work well", because that ignores how you make it work well with the different camera angle. It's not automatic! Prime is not the first "first person adventure" game, but it is the first one that had natural jumping. "FPS" vs "FPA" isn't what makes jumping difficult to get right, it's "FP" vs "TP".
No, the camera angle isn't why. If the camera angle was the reason why, then it would've sucked in Prime as well. Prime 1 & 2 tilted the camera very slightly when you jump. A lot of people - myself included - considered that to be a benefit. But Prime 3 doesn't do that, and it isn't any harder to jump in that game. I don't see how you can blame the camera angle if Metroid could pull it off great with the same camera angle.
That's basically what it comes down to. The only first person perspective game with jumping puzzles you've played is Prime, which is the only one to have gotten it right, therefore you don't appreciate it's accomplishments in this regard and just assume it's as simple as declaring your game to be an adventure not a shooter. It's easy to take something for granted if you don't know anything different.
I haven't put significant time into many shooters, but I've played a little of them every now and then. The problems I've had with jumping in them was 1) using WASD to move, which gives you very little precision in your movement speed and 2) bad level design requiring you to land on ledges so small there was no margin of error at all. On the console end, the biggest issue has usually been on a dual analog setup, the the face buttons aren't quick to access.
That's basically what it comes down to. The only first person perspective game with jumping puzzles you've played is Prime, which is the only one to have gotten it right, therefore you don't appreciate it's accomplishments in this regard and just assume it's as simple as declaring your game to be an adventure not a shooter. It's easy to take something for granted if you don't know anything different.
The adventure aspect comes into play in the control design. If they did a dual analog control scheme focused around a typical shooting experience, the jumping would've sucked. If your thumbs are expected to be on the analog sticks, you can't make effective use of the buttons.
I really don't get where you're coming from. You've stated that you haven't really played any other first person games and thus aren't aware of the problems they had, you've also said you give props to Retro for making the best 3d game ever -- what's your hangup against just acknowledging that, while you may not have appreciated it at the time, one of their non-trivial accomplishments was creating the first jumping puzzles in a first person game that weren't annoying?
I just really see the jumping as the least of their accomplishments. Retro doesn't seem to think it's that big a deal either. If you read any interviews with them, their difficulties wer