We already have tons of data concerning the nature of the Earth's core. Duh. There was a documentary shot on this very subject sometime in the sixties; it showed the center of the Earth to be a rather tropical, oceanic/tropical place, where dinosaurs still roamed free on land. Big, sail-backed dinosaurs: that's all there is at the center of the Earth. This iron-ball thing sounds like a waste of time.
So, since you bought your PS2 almost three years ago, how many times have you cleaned the lens? Yeah, you're going to get a disc read error with nine-hundred days' worth of dust clogging up the important bits. Crap! Thanks sony for not issueing a billion-dollar product recall to do simple post-warrenty maintenance that the customer should know enough to do themselves...
I mean, sure, we can go back and forth with the same old MS vs Apple BS... but there is something new and humorous to point out here:
Did anybody notice the desktop image used in the promo photo of the MS/HP Athens (top right of atricle page)? It's as if MS said: "you're damned right we're copying Apple. Fuck them! We'll copy their default desktop image, too, pompous bastards that they are!"
Ico is, without question, the single greatest gaming experience I have had. Says David Smith in his review for ps2.ign.com:
Ico is a bit of a difficult study. Well, honestly, why beat around the bush? This is the damnedest game to come down the pike in a long while, and not just in the Buchigire Kongou/Drum Mania "ain't that goofy?" sense. In gameplay terms, it is an extremely simple piece of work. On the most basic level, the challenge is just to move from point A to point B, overcoming the inanimate obstacles in between. As an experience, though, it's almost impossible to describe.
Ico is short, Ico is quiet, and Ico is in fact nearly incomprehensible. It has an action quotient very close to zero. It has a story, but you see and hear only tiny hints and snatches, spending most of the game on one side of an impenetrable language barrier. So what is there to actually recommend this game, given that I do recommend it almost without reservation? The experience.
The feeling of simply being in the world that Ico creates is one of the most fascinating things I've ever seen in a videogame. The visuals, sound, and original puzzle design come together to make something that is almost, if not quite, completely unlike anything else on the market, and feels wonderful because of it. The sensation is like a very strange dream -- a little frightening, a little beautiful, intriguing throughout -- and its only main problem is the same one all dreams suffer from. It's over a good deal sooner than you might like.
The Ico team of developers made absolutely sure that every aspect of the Ico experience contributed to the atmospheric oneness of the game, as a whole.
Besides the simple elegance of the premise (a young boy with horns guides a strangely beautiful girl out of an enormous labyrinthian castle as shadowy abstractions of evil attempt to abduct her at every turn), the designers have managed to turn a very linear quest into something much more rewarding: they have created an emotional glimpse into a rich, complete (yet completely foreign), beautiful world. If you manage to get your hands on a copy of this now-classic title for the Playstation 2, you'll understand my words the first time you pan the camera around with the right analog stick and see, off in the distance, a part of this gargantuan castle you visited hours before. The sense of scale and of environment are nigh indescribable.
Thanks for the education. Now, some insight: until some script-kiddy comes up with an outlook worm to exploit security holes in any number of these items (a worm that changes the "valid lifetime" of all your documents to.01 seconds sounds pretty rough to me), these things don't sound all that bad.
"IRM is a persistent file-level technology from Microsoft that allows the user to specify permission for who can access and use documents or e-mail messages, and helps prevent sensitive information from being printed, forwarded, or copied by unauthorized individuals. Once permission for a document or message has been restricted with this technology, the access and usage restrictions are enforced no matter where the information is."
I know I'm showing my ignorance here, but how is this different from traditional filesystem permissions? If I chown something to myself and make it readable to noone but me, won't I be the only person who can then alter those permissions again in the future (except for superusers and such, but I assume windows "administrator" accounts will have the same priveleges)? Just curious.
I suspect all this time we spend worrying about the dark future that is Palladium/Next-Generation Secure Computing Base/DRM-in-general will turn out to be quite small potatoes indeed, once the other shoe drops. It can't be too long before MS announces that it is opening its own movie studio and/or record label (if not just buying up some of the smaller-yet-successful of the established ventures)... at that point, when MS is both giving us the content and telling us what we are and are not permitted to do with that content, that's when everything will truly suck.
...So I guess most of those unneccessary top-level DNS requests were for www.clownpenis.fart, right? We chuckled when it was on SNL, but now... alas, it brings out beloved internet to its knees...
So the volume doesn't change quantitatively, just qualitatively? That is, you've got one three-dimensional liter of water versus one fractionally-dimensional liter of water? Ok, I guess that makes sense... in an ooh-my-head-hurts-folding-space kind of way;^)
The article, in its initial description of fratal geometry, cited this comparison: where a rectangluar prism has volume of length times width times height, a snowflake has a volume that is fractal in nature. The article went on to say that while the rectangular prism's volume is three-dimensional, the volume of the snowflake, being fractal, was fractionally dimensional (i.e. 1/2d or 0.8d or something, instead of 3d).
My question: if you were to find a huge snowflake, and melt it down, and measure that water in a graduate, wouldn't you find its volume? And wouldn't that volume be 3d? How does its volume, assuming it remains constant, change from being 1/2d or whatever to 3d? Sorry if I sound ignorant, but fractal mathematics is a little beyond me.
The best way I know of is to go to the nearest town with a decent college scene and hit the clubs. Find out which caves are the most consistantly decent, and hit the shows for the bands you've never heard of. You don't want the bar that the high school punk bands use, you have to wait five years on those groups. And you don't want the nightclub that books well-known-but-not-yet-mainstream acts, because that would probably be defeating the purpose (I mean, you already know all that music, right?). A happy medium bar/club will have a rather ecclectic schedule of up-and-coming acts from across the spectrum of musical tastes. It costs a few bucks, but hey--you can steal their music in a few years after they get a decent contract.
I guess they took the title too seriously. I know what you're thinking: "But Impossible Mission on the Commodore 64 and Apple II was a GREAT game! How dare you lump it in with the rest of this garbage!" And you have a point -- IM WAS a great game on those systems, and it almost was on the 7800, except for one little tidbit: this mission really is impossible. It seems the U.S. releases of this game contain a programming glitch where some of the final pieces of the puzzle are hidden in an area where you cannot find them. This huge oversight renders the rest of the game moot and reduces an otherwise enjoyable game to a pointless exercise, making it one of the most shameful QA blunders in all of video gaming.
9. Donkey Kong (Intellivision)
Coleco pulled off quite a coup when they licensed Nintendo's Donkey Kong. Atari usually nabbed the rights to the mega-hits, so DK became Coleco's big chance to show how superior their new ColecoVision game console really was. And just to prove it, Coleco released horrible versions of the game for the competing Atari 2600 and Intellivision machines. The 2600 port's deficiencies are easier to forgive. However, there can be no forgiving the awful mess that was Donkey Kong on the powerful Intellivision. The game gives new meaning to the phrase "lack of detail" by rendering everything in oversized pixels and painting all objects a single color. Donkey Kong occupies the wrong side of the screen, and he's green, for God's sake! The sound effects are terrible, play control is worse, and only two out of the four levels from the arcade are included. Nobody knows for certain if the powers at Coleco intentionally ruined the game just to make the ColecoVision port look good, but if so, they were shrewd but slimy. If not, they were just inept. Either way, Intellivision Donkey Kong is a game to regret.
8. Bebe's Kids (Super NES)
You know, it was tough choosing just 10 games for this feature. I had a long list of mediocre and stupid titles like Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City, Shaq-Fu, Kasumi Ninja, Sssnake, and a whole bunch of other flotsam I'd prefer not to think about. But I couldn't pick them all, so to choose, I scoured the Internet to see which title most frequently appeared next to the phrase "worst game ever." The "winner" was Bebe's Kids, a piece of 16-bit garbage you may have missed, but only if you were lucky.
As gamers know all too well, a game based on a movie is usually bad news. It gets worse when the movie isn't very popular. And it gets downright pathetic when the game doesn't come out for over a year after the unpopular film leaves theaters. Somehow Radical Entertainment decided to press on anyway, adapting the 1992 animated feature Bebe's Kids into a dull and depressing side-scrolling bore'em-up. Boasting incredibly repetitive, nonsensical gameplay and a childish appearance ("they look like they were made in Microsoft Paint" seems to be a common comment about the graphics), Bebe's Kids may not be the Worst Game Ever, but it'll do until the real one comes along.
7. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Atari 2600)
Contrary to popular belief, this isn't the worst Atari 2600 title of all time. Buried in the console's huge library are games that make E.T. look like Citizen Kane by comparison. Why then does E.T. have such an enduring reputation for being a bottom-of-the-barrel 2600 title? It's just what happens when unrealistic hype and expectations come crashing down.
E.T. (the movie) was a triumph that smashed box office records and inspired enduring love in the hearts of children and adults everywhere. Atari decided that they could capture the tremendous magic of the film and compress it into a cartridge, and that they only needed five weeks to do it! To have the game ready for Christmas, Atari forced the programmer to do a major rush job that prevented any real fine-tuning of gameplay. Despite this, Atari anticipated a huge demand, stocked its warehouses with millions of cartridges and advertised E.T. like the Second Coming. Lots of people bought it at first, but gradually the word spread that the gameplay consisted mainly of E.T. falling into an endless series of pits, and the game was much too frustrating for the young kids for whom it was intended. Demand dropped so precipitously that millions of unsold E.T. carts had to be dumped in a landfill. The game is sometimes accused (not altogether without justification) of single-handedly causing the "crash" of the video games market in the mid-'80s. So, worst or not, E.T. remains one of the most embarrassing, most ill-fated titles in the entire 2600 library.
6. Atari 5200 Joysticks
I bent the rules on this one, since joysticks are obviously pieces of hardware and not actual games. But I ask you -- which is more important, individual games or the instrument you use to play them? As any 5200 fan could tell you, even the best game can be ruined by a lousy controller. And boy, these are some of the lousiest controllers you're likely to subject your wrists to. Prior to the fall of 1982, the video game world was a-buzz with speculation about Atari's follow-up to the 2600. It was allegedly a "Super System," with amazing capabilities and advanced new joysticks that would surpass anything else available. But when the 5200 hit the market, gamers were treated to a library of fantastic titles that were rendered all but un-enjoyable by the machine's imprecise, non-centering analog sticks. Games that required careful, measured movements were hardly playable, and such games constituted the majority of the popular titles then on the market. To be fair, some gamers managed to enjoy the 5200 anyway, and some even liked the joysticks, but even those players couldn't excuse the controllers' shoddy workmanship. Atari built the things so cheaply that they routinely malfunctioned after regular use (or even without it!). Atari probably could have redeemed itself by offering a sturdier, self-centering alternate controller, but shamefully, the company never did.
5. Action 52 (Sega Genesis and Nintendo Entertainment System)
The idea behind this cartridge is actually kind of interesting -- rather than saddling the player with one long game, Active Enterprises decided to offer up a smorgasbord of 52 minigames all jam-packed into one cart. The company planned to peddle its masterpiece to rental locations for the low, low price of $199. Hey, that's only about $4 a game! Trouble is, it's hard to find even $4 worth of enjoyment in this endless parade of inept programming, repetitive design and outright stupidity. You'd think that out of 52 titles, at least ONE of them wouldn't make you want to tear your own eyes out in horror. Alas, apparently that was too much to expect, as Active Enterprises brought 52 examples of awful game design to not one but two console systems. Of the two versions, the Sega Genesis release is the more shameful, because here the designers had more power to work with and still managed to squander it miserably. Action 52 provides over four dozen reminders that some programmers should never be let near a development kit.
4. Pac-Man (Atari 2600)
In the arcades, Pac-Man was more than a game; it was a craze, a phenomenon, an obsession. The public clamored for a home version to feed its insatiable Pac-addiction, and Atari scored the most valuable license imaginable when they secured the home video rights to Namco's smash hit. So they proceeded to churn out a vulgar abomination that was an affront to both the eyes and the ears. Most of the coin-op's elements are here, but they're misshapen and wrong. The "dots" are huge rectangles. Pac-Man is a blocky blob with strangely robotic movements. The ghosts flicker so much that they're practically invisible. The sound is a god-awful series of shrill touch-tone phone beeps and flats. Atari obviously rushed a product out the door without a care for quality, but what is perhaps more sad is that at the time, nobody seemed to care. So desperate were people for Pac-Man at home that they snapped up the cartridge in huge numbers and happily played it, apparently oblivious to the travesty they'd brought into their homes. Now, admitting that you once enjoyed Atari 2600 Pac-Man might be considered a mark of shame, but despite it all, you wouldn't be alone.
3. Superman (Nintendo 64)
I know this game is bad, but I wanted some testimonials to back me up. So I took a quick look around the 'Net, and here's a sampling of the kind of comments I found:
"Horrible, horrible game"
"Non-existent controls" "Truly appalling" "Butchers Superman's reputation" "CRAP!!" "One of the worst games EVER made"
Ugh. This is the kind of thing that makes you just want to apologize to comic book lovers throughout the world. Superman is one of the most beloved characters in American pop culture, a real hero who stands for justice and good. So what nefarious kind of Kryptonite were the developers exposed to that caused them to turn the Man of Steel into the Man of Suck? Gameplay is so terrible, the controls so unresponsive, and the graphics so foggy that the developer had to spin some silly backstory about Lex Luthor creating a "virtual reality" Metropolis, since nothing this bad could possibly exist in the real world. Unfortunately, in the cold, hard reality of bad game design, N64 Superman traveled faster than a speeding bullet... into the trash cans of N64 owners everywhere.
2. Super Pitfall (Nintendo Entertainment System)
In the Atari 2600 days, Pitfall! had been perhaps the hottest home console game franchise around, one that delighted gamers everywhere. After the NES began to dominate the market, Activision made the wise decision to bring the series to Nintendo's hot new platform. Unfortunately, they made the unwise decision to let notoriously inept developer Pony Canyon handle the job. Pony Canyon took all of the elements that had made Pitfall! a rollicking jungle adventure and bludgeoned them mercilessly until all that was left was an unrecognizable, joyless mess. Our hero has gone from a slender athletic adventurer to a squat bastardization of Mario dressed in ugly purple clothes. The jungles and caverns of previous Pitfalls have been replaced by bland and crudely drawn surroundings. And the already atrocious gameplay is further hampered by bad scrolling, pointless randomness and just plain bugginess. Playing this game is like playing a parody of Pitfall! written by a mentally challenged first grader. How Activision saw fit to release this trash is anybody's guess.
1. Custer's Revenge (Atari 2600)
This monumentally bad idea came to light when Mystique, the publisher of the "Swedish Erotica" line of porno films, decided to create "adult" games for the Atari 2600. It's doubtful that the sight of monochromatic stick figures getting it on could be that exciting to anybody, but Mystique plunged ahead and created a line of trashy games anyway. The idea of peddling porno on a kids' gaming system was shameful enough, but Mystique upped the ante with the release of Custer's Revenge. In this game, the player took control of a naked General George Custer, who had to navigate a battlefield to have sex with an Indian maiden who was tied to a post. Although Mystique claimed the sex was just a consensual bondage escapade and not rape, Native American groups as well as the National Organization for Women believed the game promoted sexual violence and staged national protests against it.
In hindsight, there are two ways of looking at the game, and neither way speaks well of it. If Mystique really did intend Custer's Revenge to be a thinly-veiled rape fantasy, it's that much more sickening and disturbing. If Mystique didn't, then shouldn't the company have realized that having the girl tied up, making her a Native American, and putting the word "revenge" in the title would make people think it was about rape? Custer's Revenge is either a monument to sexual abuse or to sheer stupidity, and it's shameful whichever way you choose to look at it.
As scary as it may seem, these 10 titles are only a sampling of how low games can sink. There are many more where these came from. But remember, there are plenty of good games out there too. If you managed to read through this entire list, my advice is to immediately boot up your favorite game, play it, and try, just try to put all this ugliness behind you.
So if I use two of these, set up in a typical side-by-side configuration, and I use them to display a pair of slightly-different, slightly-stereo 3D images, and I deep-focus my eyes to bring these two already-3D images together to become one, will I go blind?
I mean, come on... we didn't think we were actually buying anything, did we? We haven't allowed ourselves to believe that the physical media into which copyrighted information is embedded actually becomes property once paid for, have we? How silly... we're lucky, some may even say blessed, to have so wonderous an oportunity as to pay a one-time (and fully taxable) fee for indefinite rental rights to said vessel of copyrighted creation. Resale? Don't you feel that this is asking a bit much? The RIAA can only do so much, and I feel that it is childish (perhaps even morally wrong) for us to continue whining in this fashion. All we do is take, take, take from this honorable, upstanding congregation of the most hardworking individuals in the recording world. Perhaps, instead of crying over some antiquity that is the idea of "used" record stores, we should take this moment to give something back to the RIAA. I say: rush out and show the true colors of your consumerism this instant! Don't be shy, you know you want the "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" soundtrack...
Sounds interesting enough...
on
Equilibrium
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
From the review:
...mankind has become a race of self medicating drones who live their lives under constant supervision. The advent of the drug Prozium has helped erase war, murder, and all of the other things that the oppressive powers that be determine is forbidden and each member of society injects the drug to suppress their moods and stave off that hideous thing known as emotion.
Their enemies are known as "Sense Offenders", people who feel and take in music and art into their lives...
Sounds like somebody thought about where this current Bush-Ashcroft Ministry of Truth/Thought Police thing was going, listened to 2112 a few times (and maybe a few times too many), watched Fellowship and realized what a good actor Sean Bean is, and started putting 2 and 2 and 2 together. In any case, it will give me something to do next weekend besides pine over The Two Towers...
LG Electronics, a division of Korean conglomerate LG and (IIRC) the top brand of electronics and electronic appliances worldwide, is going ape-shit for internet appliances. Their coming "Good Morning" kitchen set is all about internet connectivity, and LG is probably the largest purveyor of internet fridges as well (an idea that, if you put aside all the obvious "who the hell needs one of those?" crap, is actually kind of cool; you run out of milk, the fridge checks the local stores for the lowest price on your favorite brand of milk, and buys it for you to pick up or have delivered).
Even though we (in the US) probably have never heard of LG, if you use a Verizon or Sprint mobile phone it is most likely that you own an LG Electronics product and don't even know it. A lot of GE electronics and Sears/Kenmore appliances are also LG.
Anyway, LG plans on launching the LG Electronics brand in the US sometime next year, and you can be sure they'll be bringing all their kooky internet appliances with them.
And the coolest thing about it is that I did it 3 years ago when I actually read the book.
Sad thing about BRAIN, though, is that it apparently hasn't made much improvement over the years (even though it has been in a constant state of development); I ran this same test, rendering the battle at Helm's Deep, some decades past and got very similar results to those you achieved just three years ago.
So, um, did any of you guys recommending 3DSMax read this part of his initial query? Um... anyway, if OS X is to be your platform, the only software you need to bother with is Cinema 4D. Get r8 and a nice openGL card (whatever the newest nVidia card Apple will sell you), and you will not be disappointed.
I've been using C4D since version 5, and have been using it in OS X since it has been possible to do so. Cinema is a wonderful piece of software: the modelling workflow puts 3DSMax to absolute shame, the animation system (while still lacking in some areas) is rapidly, and I mean rapidly catching up to the bigdogs (check out this site (Mash is a C4D developer) for some really beautiful examples of the leaps and bounds r8 has made in the soft-IK department), and you simply will not find a faster renderer (as far as single workstation rendering goes--I'm sure Pixar's n-cpu PrMan farm offers serious competition).
The biggest downfalls for C4D are a lack of n-sided polys and a lackluster implementation of boolean modelling. These weaknesses, when weighed against the outrageous strengths displayed in nearly every other area, make C4D the obvious choice for Mac users. Shit, I've found the environment to be even more work-condusive than Maya's sometimes... now if only Maxon could figure a way to incorporate something like A|W's marking-menus without legally stepping on some toes...
...in fact it is a variation on an fusion based pellet design...
Hate to be one to make such a lame, editorially nit-picky comment, but for fuck's sake! Come on allready! AN FUSION? sheesh...
In related news, the recent surge of in-depth bookkeeping oversight measures enacted in light of rampant corporate malfeasance has turned up a $600 credit on the Microsoft Office team's balance sheet that they can not account for.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, if only they would incorporate a business ethics cleaning group, maybe we'll see some progress.
And, yes, please somebody respond to the oxymoronic notion of "business ethics," I'm just begging for it.
We already have tons of data concerning the nature of the Earth's core. Duh. There was a documentary shot on this very subject sometime in the sixties; it showed the center of the Earth to be a rather tropical, oceanic/tropical place, where dinosaurs still roamed free on land. Big, sail-backed dinosaurs: that's all there is at the center of the Earth. This iron-ball thing sounds like a waste of time.
So, since you bought your PS2 almost three years ago, how many times have you cleaned the lens? Yeah, you're going to get a disc read error with nine-hundred days' worth of dust clogging up the important bits. Crap! Thanks sony for not issueing a billion-dollar product recall to do simple post-warrenty maintenance that the customer should know enough to do themselves...
I mean, sure, we can go back and forth with the same old MS vs Apple BS... but there is something new and humorous to point out here:
Did anybody notice the desktop image used in the promo photo of the MS/HP Athens (top right of atricle page)? It's as if MS said: "you're damned right we're copying Apple. Fuck them! We'll copy their default desktop image, too, pompous bastards that they are!"
Besides the simple elegance of the premise (a young boy with horns guides a strangely beautiful girl out of an enormous labyrinthian castle as shadowy abstractions of evil attempt to abduct her at every turn), the designers have managed to turn a very linear quest into something much more rewarding: they have created an emotional glimpse into a rich, complete (yet completely foreign), beautiful world. If you manage to get your hands on a copy of this now-classic title for the Playstation 2, you'll understand my words the first time you pan the camera around with the right analog stick and see, off in the distance, a part of this gargantuan castle you visited hours before. The sense of scale and of environment are nigh indescribable.
Thanks for the education. Now, some insight: until some script-kiddy comes up with an outlook worm to exploit security holes in any number of these items (a worm that changes the "valid lifetime" of all your documents to .01 seconds sounds pretty rough to me), these things don't sound all that bad.
I suspect all this time we spend worrying about the dark future that is Palladium/Next-Generation Secure Computing Base/DRM-in-general will turn out to be quite small potatoes indeed, once the other shoe drops. It can't be too long before MS announces that it is opening its own movie studio and/or record label (if not just buying up some of the smaller-yet-successful of the established ventures)... at that point, when MS is both giving us the content and telling us what we are and are not permitted to do with that content, that's when everything will truly suck.
Here is the one-step process MicroSoft will surely follow in the interest of sidestepping those patents you mention:
1. Billions upon billions of dollars
...So I guess most of those unneccessary top-level DNS requests were for www.clownpenis.fart, right? We chuckled when it was on SNL, but now... alas, it brings out beloved internet to its knees...
So the volume doesn't change quantitatively, just qualitatively? That is, you've got one three-dimensional liter of water versus one fractionally-dimensional liter of water? Ok, I guess that makes sense... in an ooh-my-head-hurts-folding-space kind of way ;^)
The article, in its initial description of fratal geometry, cited this comparison: where a rectangluar prism has volume of length times width times height , a snowflake has a volume that is fractal in nature. The article went on to say that while the rectangular prism's volume is three-dimensional, the volume of the snowflake, being fractal, was fractionally dimensional (i.e. 1/2d or 0.8d or something, instead of 3d).
My question: if you were to find a huge snowflake, and melt it down, and measure that water in a graduate, wouldn't you find its volume? And wouldn't that volume be 3d? How does its volume, assuming it remains constant, change from being 1/2d or whatever to 3d? Sorry if I sound ignorant, but fractal mathematics is a little beyond me.
The best way I know of is to go to the nearest town with a decent college scene and hit the clubs. Find out which caves are the most consistantly decent, and hit the shows for the bands you've never heard of. You don't want the bar that the high school punk bands use, you have to wait five years on those groups. And you don't want the nightclub that books well-known-but-not-yet-mainstream acts, because that would probably be defeating the purpose (I mean, you already know all that music, right?). A happy medium bar/club will have a rather ecclectic schedule of up-and-coming acts from across the spectrum of musical tastes. It costs a few bucks, but hey--you can steal their music in a few years after they get a decent contract.
I guess they took the title too seriously. I know what you're thinking: "But Impossible Mission on the Commodore 64 and Apple II was a GREAT game! How dare you lump it in with the rest of this garbage!" And you have a point -- IM WAS a great game on those systems, and it almost was on the 7800, except for one little tidbit: this mission really is impossible. It seems the U.S. releases of this game contain a programming glitch where some of the final pieces of the puzzle are hidden in an area where you cannot find them. This huge oversight renders the rest of the game moot and reduces an otherwise enjoyable game to a pointless exercise, making it one of the most shameful QA blunders in all of video gaming.
9. Donkey Kong (Intellivision)
Coleco pulled off quite a coup when they licensed Nintendo's Donkey Kong. Atari usually nabbed the rights to the mega-hits, so DK became Coleco's big chance to show how superior their new ColecoVision game console really was. And just to prove it, Coleco released horrible versions of the game for the competing Atari 2600 and Intellivision machines. The 2600 port's deficiencies are easier to forgive. However, there can be no forgiving the awful mess that was Donkey Kong on the powerful Intellivision. The game gives new meaning to the phrase "lack of detail" by rendering everything in oversized pixels and painting all objects a single color. Donkey Kong occupies the wrong side of the screen, and he's green, for God's sake! The sound effects are terrible, play control is worse, and only two out of the four levels from the arcade are included. Nobody knows for certain if the powers at Coleco intentionally ruined the game just to make the ColecoVision port look good, but if so, they were shrewd but slimy. If not, they were just inept. Either way, Intellivision Donkey Kong is a game to regret.
8. Bebe's Kids (Super NES)
You know, it was tough choosing just 10 games for this feature. I had a long list of mediocre and stupid titles like Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City, Shaq-Fu, Kasumi Ninja, Sssnake, and a whole bunch of other flotsam I'd prefer not to think about. But I couldn't pick them all, so to choose, I scoured the Internet to see which title most frequently appeared next to the phrase "worst game ever." The "winner" was Bebe's Kids, a piece of 16-bit garbage you may have missed, but only if you were lucky.
As gamers know all too well, a game based on a movie is usually bad news. It gets worse when the movie isn't very popular. And it gets downright pathetic when the game doesn't come out for over a year after the unpopular film leaves theaters. Somehow Radical Entertainment decided to press on anyway, adapting the 1992 animated feature Bebe's Kids into a dull and depressing side-scrolling bore'em-up. Boasting incredibly repetitive, nonsensical gameplay and a childish appearance ("they look like they were made in Microsoft Paint" seems to be a common comment about the graphics), Bebe's Kids may not be the Worst Game Ever, but it'll do until the real one comes along.
7. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Atari 2600)
Contrary to popular belief, this isn't the worst Atari 2600 title of all time. Buried in the console's huge library are games that make E.T. look like Citizen Kane by comparison. Why then does E.T. have such an enduring reputation for being a bottom-of-the-barrel 2600 title? It's just what happens when unrealistic hype and expectations come crashing down.
E.T. (the movie) was a triumph that smashed box office records and inspired enduring love in the hearts of children and adults everywhere. Atari decided that they could capture the tremendous magic of the film and compress it into a cartridge, and that they only needed five weeks to do it! To have the game ready for Christmas, Atari forced the programmer to do a major rush job that prevented any real fine-tuning of gameplay. Despite this, Atari anticipated a huge demand, stocked its warehouses with millions of cartridges and advertised E.T. like the Second Coming. Lots of people bought it at first, but gradually the word spread that the gameplay consisted mainly of E.T. falling into an endless series of pits, and the game was much too frustrating for the young kids for whom it was intended. Demand dropped so precipitously that millions of unsold E.T. carts had to be dumped in a landfill. The game is sometimes accused (not altogether without justification) of single-handedly causing the "crash" of the video games market in the mid-'80s. So, worst or not, E.T. remains one of the most embarrassing, most ill-fated titles in the entire 2600 library.
6. Atari 5200 Joysticks
I bent the rules on this one, since joysticks are obviously pieces of hardware and not actual games. But I ask you -- which is more important, individual games or the instrument you use to play them? As any 5200 fan could tell you, even the best game can be ruined by a lousy controller. And boy, these are some of the lousiest controllers you're likely to subject your wrists to. Prior to the fall of 1982, the video game world was a-buzz with speculation about Atari's follow-up to the 2600. It was allegedly a "Super System," with amazing capabilities and advanced new joysticks that would surpass anything else available. But when the 5200 hit the market, gamers were treated to a library of fantastic titles that were rendered all but un-enjoyable by the machine's imprecise, non-centering analog sticks. Games that required careful, measured movements were hardly playable, and such games constituted the majority of the popular titles then on the market. To be fair, some gamers managed to enjoy the 5200 anyway, and some even liked the joysticks, but even those players couldn't excuse the controllers' shoddy workmanship. Atari built the things so cheaply that they routinely malfunctioned after regular use (or even without it!). Atari probably could have redeemed itself by offering a sturdier, self-centering alternate controller, but shamefully, the company never did.
5. Action 52 (Sega Genesis and Nintendo Entertainment System)
The idea behind this cartridge is actually kind of interesting -- rather than saddling the player with one long game, Active Enterprises decided to offer up a smorgasbord of 52 minigames all jam-packed into one cart. The company planned to peddle its masterpiece to rental locations for the low, low price of $199. Hey, that's only about $4 a game! Trouble is, it's hard to find even $4 worth of enjoyment in this endless parade of inept programming, repetitive design and outright stupidity. You'd think that out of 52 titles, at least ONE of them wouldn't make you want to tear your own eyes out in horror. Alas, apparently that was too much to expect, as Active Enterprises brought 52 examples of awful game design to not one but two console systems. Of the two versions, the Sega Genesis release is the more shameful, because here the designers had more power to work with and still managed to squander it miserably. Action 52 provides over four dozen reminders that some programmers should never be let near a development kit.
4. Pac-Man (Atari 2600)
In the arcades, Pac-Man was more than a game; it was a craze, a phenomenon, an obsession. The public clamored for a home version to feed its insatiable Pac-addiction, and Atari scored the most valuable license imaginable when they secured the home video rights to Namco's smash hit. So they proceeded to churn out a vulgar abomination that was an affront to both the eyes and the ears. Most of the coin-op's elements are here, but they're misshapen and wrong. The "dots" are huge rectangles. Pac-Man is a blocky blob with strangely robotic movements. The ghosts flicker so much that they're practically invisible. The sound is a god-awful series of shrill touch-tone phone beeps and flats. Atari obviously rushed a product out the door without a care for quality, but what is perhaps more sad is that at the time, nobody seemed to care. So desperate were people for Pac-Man at home that they snapped up the cartridge in huge numbers and happily played it, apparently oblivious to the travesty they'd brought into their homes. Now, admitting that you once enjoyed Atari 2600 Pac-Man might be considered a mark of shame, but despite it all, you wouldn't be alone.
3. Superman (Nintendo 64)
I know this game is bad, but I wanted some testimonials to back me up. So I took a quick look around the 'Net, and here's a sampling of the kind of comments I found:Ugh. This is the kind of thing that makes you just want to apologize to comic book lovers throughout the world. Superman is one of the most beloved characters in American pop culture, a real hero who stands for justice and good. So what nefarious kind of Kryptonite were the developers exposed to that caused them to turn the Man of Steel into the Man of Suck? Gameplay is so terrible, the controls so unresponsive, and the graphics so foggy that the developer had to spin some silly backstory about Lex Luthor creating a "virtual reality" Metropolis, since nothing this bad could possibly exist in the real world. Unfortunately, in the cold, hard reality of bad game design, N64 Superman traveled faster than a speeding bullet... into the trash cans of N64 owners everywhere.
2. Super Pitfall (Nintendo Entertainment System)
In the Atari 2600 days, Pitfall! had been perhaps the hottest home console game franchise around, one that delighted gamers everywhere. After the NES began to dominate the market, Activision made the wise decision to bring the series to Nintendo's hot new platform. Unfortunately, they made the unwise decision to let notoriously inept developer Pony Canyon handle the job. Pony Canyon took all of the elements that had made Pitfall! a rollicking jungle adventure and bludgeoned them mercilessly until all that was left was an unrecognizable, joyless mess. Our hero has gone from a slender athletic adventurer to a squat bastardization of Mario dressed in ugly purple clothes. The jungles and caverns of previous Pitfalls have been replaced by bland and crudely drawn surroundings. And the already atrocious gameplay is further hampered by bad scrolling, pointless randomness and just plain bugginess. Playing this game is like playing a parody of Pitfall! written by a mentally challenged first grader. How Activision saw fit to release this trash is anybody's guess.
1. Custer's Revenge (Atari 2600)
This monumentally bad idea came to light when Mystique, the publisher of the "Swedish Erotica" line of porno films, decided to create "adult" games for the Atari 2600. It's doubtful that the sight of monochromatic stick figures getting it on could be that exciting to anybody, but Mystique plunged ahead and created a line of trashy games anyway. The idea of peddling porno on a kids' gaming system was shameful enough, but Mystique upped the ante with the release of Custer's Revenge. In this game, the player took control of a naked General George Custer, who had to navigate a battlefield to have sex with an Indian maiden who was tied to a post. Although Mystique claimed the sex was just a consensual bondage escapade and not rape, Native American groups as well as the National Organization for Women believed the game promoted sexual violence and staged national protests against it.
In hindsight, there are two ways of looking at the game, and neither way speaks well of it. If Mystique really did intend Custer's Revenge to be a thinly-veiled rape fantasy, it's that much more sickening and disturbing. If Mystique didn't, then shouldn't the company have realized that having the girl tied up, making her a Native American, and putting the word "revenge" in the title would make people think it was about rape? Custer's Revenge is either a monument to sexual abuse or to sheer stupidity, and it's shameful whichever way you choose to look at it.
As scary as it may seem, these 10 titles are only a sampling of how low games can sink. There are many more where these came from. But remember, there are plenty of good games out there too. If you managed to read through this entire list, my advice is to immediately boot up your favorite game, play it, and try, just try to put all this ugliness behind you.
So if I use two of these, set up in a typical side-by-side configuration, and I use them to display a pair of slightly-different, slightly-stereo 3D images, and I deep-focus my eyes to bring these two already-3D images together to become one, will I go blind?
I mean, come on... we didn't think we were actually buying anything, did we? We haven't allowed ourselves to believe that the physical media into which copyrighted information is embedded actually becomes property once paid for, have we? How silly... we're lucky, some may even say blessed, to have so wonderous an oportunity as to pay a one-time (and fully taxable) fee for indefinite rental rights to said vessel of copyrighted creation. Resale? Don't you feel that this is asking a bit much? The RIAA can only do so much, and I feel that it is childish (perhaps even morally wrong) for us to continue whining in this fashion. All we do is take, take, take from this honorable, upstanding congregation of the most hardworking individuals in the recording world. Perhaps, instead of crying over some antiquity that is the idea of "used" record stores, we should take this moment to give something back to the RIAA. I say: rush out and show the true colors of your consumerism this instant! Don't be shy, you know you want the "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" soundtrack...
LG Electronics, a division of Korean conglomerate LG and (IIRC) the top brand of electronics and electronic appliances worldwide, is going ape-shit for internet appliances. Their coming "Good Morning" kitchen set is all about internet connectivity, and LG is probably the largest purveyor of internet fridges as well (an idea that, if you put aside all the obvious "who the hell needs one of those?" crap, is actually kind of cool; you run out of milk, the fridge checks the local stores for the lowest price on your favorite brand of milk, and buys it for you to pick up or have delivered).
Even though we (in the US) probably have never heard of LG, if you use a Verizon or Sprint mobile phone it is most likely that you own an LG Electronics product and don't even know it. A lot of GE electronics and Sears/Kenmore appliances are also LG.
Anyway, LG plans on launching the LG Electronics brand in the US sometime next year, and you can be sure they'll be bringing all their kooky internet appliances with them.
Sad thing about BRAIN, though, is that it apparently hasn't made much improvement over the years (even though it has been in a constant state of development); I ran this same test, rendering the battle at Helm's Deep, some decades past and got very similar results to those you achieved just three years ago.
I'd be using it in Mac OS X
So, um, did any of you guys recommending 3DSMax read this part of his initial query? Um... anyway, if OS X is to be your platform, the only software you need to bother with is Cinema 4D. Get r8 and a nice openGL card (whatever the newest nVidia card Apple will sell you), and you will not be disappointed.
I've been using C4D since version 5, and have been using it in OS X since it has been possible to do so. Cinema is a wonderful piece of software: the modelling workflow puts 3DSMax to absolute shame, the animation system (while still lacking in some areas) is rapidly, and I mean rapidly catching up to the big dogs (check out this site (Mash is a C4D developer) for some really beautiful examples of the leaps and bounds r8 has made in the soft-IK department), and you simply will not find a faster renderer (as far as single workstation rendering goes--I'm sure Pixar's n-cpu PrMan farm offers serious competition).
The biggest downfalls for C4D are a lack of n-sided polys and a lackluster implementation of boolean modelling. These weaknesses, when weighed against the outrageous strengths displayed in nearly every other area, make C4D the obvious choice for Mac users. Shit, I've found the environment to be even more work-condusive than Maya's sometimes... now if only Maxon could figure a way to incorporate something like A|W's marking-menus without legally stepping on some toes...
...in fact it is a variation on an fusion based pellet design... Hate to be one to make such a lame, editorially nit-picky comment, but for fuck's sake! Come on allready! AN FUSION? sheesh...
In related news, the recent surge of in-depth bookkeeping oversight measures enacted in light of rampant corporate malfeasance has turned up a $600 credit on the Microsoft Office team's balance sheet that they can not account for.
They might not have an answer for this, exactly, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who's dying to know: What the FUCK?