Well, normally in the comics they would be webbed up and delivered to the nearest convenient cop. This sounds like limitations of the console (or programmer) taking out what are considered (by him/her) unnecessary details. (Think of Space Invaders, for example, when you blow up the alian space ship, there's no wreckage, it just disappears. In this case the knocked out bad guys aren't a threat anymore, so they disappear.) Truthfully, it is rare that a game can live up to the comic book it is taken from. (I still think the Capcom Marvel vs. Capcom games are the best.)
Not that Spiderman comics are appropriate for 5 year olds, just that Spiderman himself never kills anyone.
I don't know if they are still doing this, but in the old Sonic games when you beat a bad robot it would turn into a cute, fluffy animal (ditto for Sega's old Mickey Mouse games) rather than disappearing, and then the animal would just scamper off-screen. (I remember my cousin Andrew thought that that was disgustingly saccarine.) Most games figure that just having the badguy vanish is enough, though.
Look, here's what it seems, if your son had a seizure while playing a video game then he probably has epilepsy. Hopefully he wasn't badly hurt, and now you know. He'll need treatment to minimize the effects of the condition, so that his next seizure doesn't happen while he's riding his bicycle in the street or something. (Hey, it could happen, all that is necessary is for the right trigger.)
They put warnings on videogames specifically for epileptics, and people with histories of epilepsy in their families.
However, and this is something you need to check, the seizure wasn't necessarily caused by the game. It could have been caused by something he ate, or some congenital problem unrelated to epilepsy. See a doctor. That's what I did when my hands broke out in an itchy, painful rash two Christmases ago, even though I presumed that it was from handling the Christmas tree.
Unfortunately, the doctor had no clue what the trigger was, but he did prescribe me some pills (steroids) that made the horrible, intense pain go away. (And no, I don't think Christmas trees need to come with warnings.)
Well, I'm late to the party but there are two things we need to take into account when we speak of those worthless pieces of green (and now multicolored) paper called American dollars. The first is petrodollars. The term petrodollar is basically shorthand for the fact that oil producing countries generally accept dollars in exchange for oil and not some other currency. Oil is the most valuable thing in the modern world, and every country on Earth is going to want the currency that is used to buy it.
A reserve currency is a currency which is held in significant quantities by other governments and institutions as part of their foreign exchange reserves.
The United States Dollar is the most important reserve currency in the world today, followed by the Euro and the Japanese Yen.
This means that the worthless green pieces of paper we convince foriegners to collect are often not spent at all but stacked in bank vaults.
What this means is that the whole, "Indians are buying dollars with there labor and those dollars will eventually have to be used to buy American goods" is flawed. People don't just buy dollars to spend, they buy them to stack. When they do buy them to spend, they (or their banks where the dollars are exchanged for rupees) may be spending them on Saudi Arabian oil, or in other countries that want to spend them on oil.
What does this all mean? Dollars are considered to be worth more than they actually are. The American economy is getting something for nothing. This can't last for ever.
Believe it or not, there is actually a problem like this. Not ink, but acidic paper. If you've ever had a book you loved printed on this garbage you will know what I mean. Over time, the paper begins to fall apart. For more information:
Of course, this wasn't done deliberately, it is just a consequence of using junk paper. My parents have a fairly large library in which the pages of some of the books are either falling apart or have to be handled carefully or they will shatter.
Well, remember, some of the gaming Websites like to think they helped kill Sega recently. So to them, laughing at Sega is good sport. I mean to us it would be sort of like tripping an old lady who used to be a gorgeous matinee idol into a ditch full of stagnant water and laughing at her as she flailed around, but to the some gaming Websites, it's good sport.
Now, I don't give the gaming sites credit for effectively killing off Sega (well, it is on life-support, not completely dead), that was caused by mismanagement on Sega's part. Sega was like one of these creative artist types that couldn't get his life together.
However, gaming sites used to trumpet both:
A. How Sega was doomed (to the point that it seemed like they were shouting, "just die already!") and B. How the market would be so much better off if Sega transformed into a multi-platform game company.
Well, they were right about Sega being doomed (more's the pity) but dead wrong about the multi-platform thing. All that has meant that if you love Sega's adult games you'd better own an X-Box and a PS2, and if you like Sega's family games you'd better own a Gamecube. And nothing is guaranteed unless you own all three systems (Skies of Arcadia? Dreamcast or Gamecube only, for example).
More importantly Sega's fortunes have continued to decline with key staff leaving and Sammy proceeding with its hostile takeover and stating that in the future Sega will "focus on the arcade." (Which sounds ominous to me.)
(Proud owner of Genesis/SegaCD, Nomad, and Dreamcast. I also have a 32X, but I don't take pride in it.)
Hey, anyone ever see that old movie, Barabbas? In one scene, Barabbas, who had become a Christian, hears that "The Christians are burning Rome." Well, he picks up a piece of some burning building and sets fire to some other building.
Of course, later in the movie it turns out that it wasn't the Christians but Nero (the emperor at the time, who wanted an excuse to go after the Christians), and Barabbas looks to be quite the fool.
Hmm, this reminds me of the time that some of my friends got a copy of The Two Towers sent to them from their homeland (Thailand). It was on VCD, and dubbed into Thai. It was interesting for me to listen to, but it was hard to pay attention because I know like 4 words of Thai. I couldn't tell if the voice acting was competent or not, I tried to pay particular attention to Gollum.
Well, anyway, this VCD had the telltale sign of being a screener, every now and then on the bottom it would flash "For Your Consideration."
Well, this got my mind going, someone had actually hired voice actors to dub a pirate VCD. Will wonders never cease.
Incidentally, before my friends are condemned for being wicked and evil, I should point out that I had bought a used copy of The Two Towers on DVD that I would gladly have lent them, they just wanted to watch it translated into Thai.
CDs, by themselves are pretty small, ditto for DVDs. Gamecube games are even smaller, I was shocked at how little space they take up now that I've removed them from their packages and placed them in small Gamecube game caddies. (Since I am moving I've been trying to put all the stuff I don't need in storage at my parent's garage. There are a lot of empty boxes there now.)
Sure, no physical media might be ideal, but why are boxes for tiny Gamecube games the same size as DVD boxes? Why are DVD cases bigger than CD cases?
Besides, whenever something comes along that will allow someone to rip someone else off, smart people who consume the thing realize, "Oh God, they are going to rip me off," and smart (and bad) people who produce the thing think, "Oh, boy, now we can rip people off." (Sometimes vice versa...)
It's an unfortunate problem with what people like to call capitalism (though they really mean unbridled avarice).
Heh, I always thought that Stewart's turn as Sejanus (in I, Claudius) added some interesting dimensions to his role as Picard, since Sejanus was an evil, militaristic autocrat and Picard was a "good," militaristic autocrat. I mean it was interesting to compare the two roles.
That plus the fact that Stewart was playing a Frenchman with a British accent who enjoyed "tea, Earl Grey, hot" added some humor to the character.
It's like when I would imitate Picard to my brother and say, "In some ways I admire the Borg, they have a nice, rigid sense of order."
Of course, one of my favorite episodes was when he was replaced with an evil Picard clone who kept telling them to move the ship closer and closer to a pulsar.
Sejanus's tragic romance with Livilla was better realized than any of the attempts for poor Picard to have a romance, though. Still, Picard can be thankful that none of his romances turned out that way...
When stuff comes on TV that is aimed at me, it is either:
A. On the cartoon network. (Or kids WB, etc.)
B. Short lived.
I get tired of watching science fiction series X to have it cancelled, just as I am getting into the characters. (Besides the fact that there is a lot of bad, dumb or both science fiction on TV.)
Video games, on the other hand help me to use up hours and hours of my life without boring me to tears. I can't say that about reality show Y or Friends.
If they want the people who play video games to watch TV they should pay attention to what kinds of video games sell.
Hey, it worked for Peter Jackson.
Oh, and another thing, what is with the ads? How much show versus AD content is there these days? It seems like the AD content is steadily increasing, to the point where all shows are will be like the occaisionally entertaining "60 second radio hour" that they play on community radio around here, except with lots of ads interrupting every ten seconds.
Well, games are going to be like movies. Some will be chock full of ads like any recent James Bond movie, and some will not, like LOTR. ("Imagine Gollum plugging Pepsi half way through the Two Towers. It'll be like printing money. Hey, why is this pit opening up beneath my feet, aieeee...")
So, you just have to hope that the game series you love aren't among the ones on the James Bond side of the equation.
Recently, I was reading an article on the development of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. In the article, they explained that they had some of the stuff they cut out because they ran out of time. Fortunately, it seems to me that they managed to keep the story line intact.
However, I'll bet in the case of Eternal Darkness, which I haven't played that much, that the plot hole you ran into was because of something like this. Maybe originally there was a whole level you had to go through to get the object in question. Time got short, so they went with "Mysterious Delivery."
Kent: Mr. Simpson, how do you respond to the charges that petty
vandalism such as graffiti is down eighty percent, while heavy
sack-beatings are up a shocking nine hundred percent?
Homer: Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent.
Forfty percent of all people know that.
Kent: I see. Well, what do you say to the accusation that your group
has been causing more crimes than it's been preventing?
Homer: [amused] Oh, Kent, I'd be lying if I said my men weren't
committing crimes.
Actually, as a libertarian, myself, I'm more bothered by Eisenhower's "Strategic Highways" which amount to a handout to the automobile industry as well as a nice way to get more Federal control over the individual states. Since the Federal Government has gotten into the highway business, they've used it as a way to normalize state laws. (Things like drinking ages, speed limits and the like).
We'll never know what would have connected parts of the country (trains maybe), if not for this particular Federal program which was justified in the name of "National Defense." (i. e. when Russia decided to attack, everyone could use the highways in an orderly retreat from the cities, why do I think that's not what would have happened?).
The highway system is a form of public transportation which is paid for by my taxes. If I can't tell the government, "give me back my money, I don't want your highways," I should at least be able to tell them, "Switch some of the money you are wasting on highways to trains."
When trying to examine the SCO affair with a cold analytical eye I can't help but be worried. Over the last twelve months the SCO stock price has climbed from just over a dollar to nearly eighteen dollars and at its peak it was well over twenty dollars. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and if I had invested my life savings in SCO stock last Christmas I would now be a multi-millionaire, examining which speedboat to buy instead of which bills to pay.
I personally have seen my Red Hat stock rise by 165% since I bought it. Here's the one year chart: Basic Chart: RED HAT INC
What does this mean? Well, I never allow the market to determine whether a company is valuable or not, but if the market is telling us something, it is that SCO doesn't look good this year.
Remember if McBride is right, then SCO and Red Hat can't both survive. That's why Red Hat took them to court. So, if you judge things by the whims of the market (always a mistake, mind you), the market is betting on Red Hat.
A technology industry veteran, McBride has 19 years of executive management and leadership experience. Before joining SCO, McBride was the president of Franklin Covey's online planning business. Prior to that, McBride has been the CEO of PointServe, a workforce optimization software company; and the founder, chairman, and CEO of SBI and Company, a professional services company. While at the helm of these companies, McBride was responsible for raising more than $100 million in venture capital.
In other words, he is good at talking people into giving him money to fund his projects. People who read Slashdot probably don't believe this, but I will bet that he is slick to the "right" people.
So, the reason why he is considered an industry leader is because people believe him when he says, "I'm an industry leader." Confidence men work the same way. Did you ever read the life story of Carlo Ponzi? Here it is The Life of Carlo Ponzi. A lot of people have heard of Ponzi shcemes, but most people don't realize that at one time Carlo Ponzi was considered, you guessed it, a business leader:
With the success he experienced with Tony and Guiseppe, Carlo started Securities Exchange Company at 27 School Street in Boston the day after Christmas 1919. Advertising a 50-percent return in ninety days, money from investors large and small poured in.
With all this money pouring in, Carlo had to figure out a plausible explanation for how he could pay 50-percent interest in ninety days when no place in the world paid that much. But Carlo's ingenuity for scams came through again. He told investors that he had a network of agents in Europe that purchased depreciated European currencies, converting the currencies into international postal coupons, which were then redeemed at face value in the United States in U.S. dollars. Carlo claimed all the high rollers were doing it--the Rockefellers, J.P. Morgan, Jr., everybody. But Saint Carlo instead was sharing the wealth and helping the common man (while helping himself of course). Redistributing their money was more like it.
Every day, tens of thousands of dollars were deposited with Carlo's tellers. Outside the building, crowds lined up, waiting to invest. And every day, Carlo would arrive at work in his chauffeur-driven limousine. The key to the entire scheme continued to work its magic, as the deposit counters were usually a swarm of activity, and the withdrawal counters were practically deserted. As the deposits grew and grew, Carlo even opened branch offices, eventually totaling thirty-five. He also used some of the deposits to purchase two actual businesses, Hanover Trust Co. and J.P. Poole Co. Carlo even found time in his busy schedule to buy Rose a mansion.
Who knows, in the future we may call something, "A McBride scheme."
Slashdot Mirror
Not that Spiderman comics are appropriate for 5 year olds, just that Spiderman himself never kills anyone.
I don't know if they are still doing this, but in the old Sonic games when you beat a bad robot it would turn into a cute, fluffy animal (ditto for Sega's old Mickey Mouse games) rather than disappearing, and then the animal would just scamper off-screen. (I remember my cousin Andrew thought that that was disgustingly saccarine.) Most games figure that just having the badguy vanish is enough, though.
Shenmue II is like that... I finished it a long time ago and it still isn't over.
People have to pay off their student loans. In this case, especially, when considering student loans remember TANSTAAFL.
They put warnings on videogames specifically for epileptics, and people with histories of epilepsy in their families.
However, and this is something you need to check, the seizure wasn't necessarily caused by the game. It could have been caused by something he ate, or some congenital problem unrelated to epilepsy. See a doctor. That's what I did when my hands broke out in an itchy, painful rash two Christmases ago, even though I presumed that it was from handling the Christmas tree.
Unfortunately, the doctor had no clue what the trigger was, but he did prescribe me some pills (steroids) that made the horrible, intense pain go away. (And no, I don't think Christmas trees need to come with warnings.)
Am I the only one on /. who gives his computers girl's names?
(Ifurita, Ryoko, and I am building Red Destiny)
The second term we need to understand is reserve currency:
This means that the worthless green pieces of paper we convince foriegners to collect are often not spent at all but stacked in bank vaults.What this means is that the whole, "Indians are buying dollars with there labor and those dollars will eventually have to be used to buy American goods" is flawed. People don't just buy dollars to spend, they buy them to stack. When they do buy them to spend, they (or their banks where the dollars are exchanged for rupees) may be spending them on Saudi Arabian oil, or in other countries that want to spend them on oil.
What does this all mean? Dollars are considered to be worth more than they actually are. The American economy is getting something for nothing. This can't last for ever.
Be afraid.
The Permanent Paper Law
Of course, this wasn't done deliberately, it is just a consequence of using junk paper. My parents have a fairly large library in which the pages of some of the books are either falling apart or have to be handled carefully or they will shatter.
Now, I don't give the gaming sites credit for effectively killing off Sega (well, it is on life-support, not completely dead), that was caused by mismanagement on Sega's part. Sega was like one of these creative artist types that couldn't get his life together.
However, gaming sites used to trumpet both:
A. How Sega was doomed (to the point that it seemed like they were shouting, "just die already!") and B. How the market would be so much better off if Sega transformed into a multi-platform game company.
Well, they were right about Sega being doomed (more's the pity) but dead wrong about the multi-platform thing. All that has meant that if you love Sega's adult games you'd better own an X-Box and a PS2, and if you like Sega's family games you'd better own a Gamecube. And nothing is guaranteed unless you own all three systems (Skies of Arcadia? Dreamcast or Gamecube only, for example).
More importantly Sega's fortunes have continued to decline with key staff leaving and Sammy proceeding with its hostile takeover and stating that in the future Sega will "focus on the arcade." (Which sounds ominous to me.)
(Proud owner of Genesis/SegaCD, Nomad, and Dreamcast. I also have a 32X, but I don't take pride in it.)
Of course, later in the movie it turns out that it wasn't the Christians but Nero (the emperor at the time, who wanted an excuse to go after the Christians), and Barabbas looks to be quite the fool.
Well, anyway, this VCD had the telltale sign of being a screener, every now and then on the bottom it would flash "For Your Consideration."
Well, this got my mind going, someone had actually hired voice actors to dub a pirate VCD. Will wonders never cease.
Incidentally, before my friends are condemned for being wicked and evil, I should point out that I had bought a used copy of The Two Towers on DVD that I would gladly have lent them, they just wanted to watch it translated into Thai.
CDs, by themselves are pretty small, ditto for DVDs. Gamecube games are even smaller, I was shocked at how little space they take up now that I've removed them from their packages and placed them in small Gamecube game caddies. (Since I am moving I've been trying to put all the stuff I don't need in storage at my parent's garage. There are a lot of empty boxes there now.)
Sure, no physical media might be ideal, but why are boxes for tiny Gamecube games the same size as DVD boxes? Why are DVD cases bigger than CD cases?
Besides, whenever something comes along that will allow someone to rip someone else off, smart people who consume the thing realize, "Oh God, they are going to rip me off," and smart (and bad) people who produce the thing think, "Oh, boy, now we can rip people off." (Sometimes vice versa...)
It's an unfortunate problem with what people like to call capitalism (though they really mean unbridled avarice).
That plus the fact that Stewart was playing a Frenchman with a British accent who enjoyed "tea, Earl Grey, hot" added some humor to the character.
It's like when I would imitate Picard to my brother and say, "In some ways I admire the Borg, they have a nice, rigid sense of order."
Of course, one of my favorite episodes was when he was replaced with an evil Picard clone who kept telling them to move the ship closer and closer to a pulsar.
Sejanus's tragic romance with Livilla was better realized than any of the attempts for poor Picard to have a romance, though. Still, Picard can be thankful that none of his romances turned out that way...
A. On the cartoon network. (Or kids WB, etc.)
B. Short lived.
I get tired of watching science fiction series X to have it cancelled, just as I am getting into the characters. (Besides the fact that there is a lot of bad, dumb or both science fiction on TV.)
Video games, on the other hand help me to use up hours and hours of my life without boring me to tears. I can't say that about reality show Y or Friends.
If they want the people who play video games to watch TV they should pay attention to what kinds of video games sell.
Hey, it worked for Peter Jackson.
Oh, and another thing, what is with the ads? How much show versus AD content is there these days? It seems like the AD content is steadily increasing, to the point where all shows are will be like the occaisionally entertaining "60 second radio hour" that they play on community radio around here, except with lots of ads interrupting every ten seconds.
So, you just have to hope that the game series you love aren't among the ones on the James Bond side of the equation.
I was kind of stunned to find that there is a game for Gamecube that is a fantasy game based on Skittles...
However, I'll bet in the case of Eternal Darkness, which I haven't played that much, that the plot hole you ran into was because of something like this. Maybe originally there was a whole level you had to go through to get the object in question. Time got short, so they went with "Mysterious Delivery."
Thaksin's Potemkin Welcome for APEC
We'll never know what would have connected parts of the country (trains maybe), if not for this particular Federal program which was justified in the name of "National Defense." (i. e. when Russia decided to attack, everyone could use the highways in an orderly retreat from the cities, why do I think that's not what would have happened?).
The highway system is a form of public transportation which is paid for by my taxes. If I can't tell the government, "give me back my money, I don't want your highways," I should at least be able to tell them, "Switch some of the money you are wasting on highways to trains."
Damn, wrong stock symbol. But I expect to be right soon enough.
Even better, here's Red Hat versus SCO:
Chart: RedHat versus SCO
What does this mean? Well, I never allow the market to determine whether a company is valuable or not, but if the market is telling us something, it is that SCO doesn't look good this year.
Remember if McBride is right, then SCO and Red Hat can't both survive. That's why Red Hat took them to court. So, if you judge things by the whims of the market (always a mistake, mind you), the market is betting on Red Hat.
Darl McBride - President, CEO
I'll quote:
In other words, he is good at talking people into giving him money to fund his projects. People who read Slashdot probably don't believe this, but I will bet that he is slick to the "right" people.
So, the reason why he is considered an industry leader is because people believe him when he says, "I'm an industry leader." Confidence men work the same way. Did you ever read the life story of Carlo Ponzi? Here it is The Life of Carlo Ponzi. A lot of people have heard of Ponzi shcemes, but most people don't realize that at one time Carlo Ponzi was considered, you guessed it, a business leader:
Who knows, in the future we may call something, "A McBride scheme."Even the people being torn limb from limb or otherwise mangled by DARPA's new giant mechanical spiders?
Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc.