I love how enviromentalists are willing ignore the rights of the logging companies to have and use their PRIVATE property just so that they protest. Seems to me the right to private property is one of the biggest tenants of liberty, which gives them the opportunity to protest. Protesting is fine until it starts infringing on other people's rights.
And, of course, the fact that the logging that Pacific Lumber Company is ok, since it doesn't hurt anyone else.
It hasn't filled Humboldt Bay with mud, seriously degrading the habitat for fish, and it hasn't seriously damaged the ability of the watershed to filter and buffer rainfall from storms, which made Freshwater Creek less likely to flood.
The fact that residents of Eureka now see a lot more flooding, and the flooding being directly traceable to the logging doesn't matter, does it? The fact that their logging doesn't just affect their private property, but is damaging large amounts of both private and public property isn't important?
I'm sure if you found your PRIVATE PROPERTY was regularly getting flooded and your PRIVATE PROPERTY was being destroyed by the actions of the logging companies, that you'd be a little less likely to say "they're only doing it on their private property, they have that right!"
Massive amounts of logging affect much more than just the land that's logged. So would it be fair to say "Logging is fine until it starts infringing on other people's rights"?? Because that is EXACTLY what this company is doing.
It's very odd what gets approved and what doesn't.
A kid writes a review along the lines of "This game is awesome you must buy it now!" for a game that won't be released for another month gets posted.
Write an in-depth review of Super Monkey Ball 2, comparing it to the first one, and then saying it's not nearly as good, however, and get your review deleted. Apparently saying negative things about a potentially big title, and say them clearly and justify them, and get your review squashed because it might cost them money.
(And, yes, I have a number of reviews posted already, and I know the guidelines, so it wasn't violating them that kept the review from being posted)
Arcades are dead. Arcades are, for all intents and purposes, a singleplayer experience. The handful of head-to-head games don't count
Arcades were dying, restriced to fighting games, shooting games, racing games, and huge gimmick games (like "Sky Pirates", where you fly a balloon around a huge screen and the seats move up and down with the your balloon). Mainly games with some sort of gimmick that made them a bit tougher to play at home - Daytona 2 by Sega just can't be the same at home as it can be at, say, a Gameworks, where they have 8 machines linked together and the seats move and all that.
However, Konami has managed almost singlehandedly to help resurrect the places with their Bemani series of music games - especially Dance Dance Revolution. They do have the "gimmick" - a control scheme hard to copy at home - but the social aspect of those games seems to be great also. I go twice a week, for three hours at a time - and most nights I'm there, there's a number of other people there also playing DDR. It's the busiest machine in the place, and I suspect easily the top grossing machine there.
They're not going to die as long as they know where to focus - experiences you can't duplicate at home.
And to relate it more to the topic - I'd love to see a gaming arena focused on Dance Dance Revolution - there's a lot that can be done to improve the experience.
Even worse is that they can't even keep their services working well. I've lost 8th row tickets because of their "you must check out in 5 minutes" rule when their website wouldn't work well enough to let me purchase the tickets in that allotted 5 minutes. Or even worse, getting on for a presale right when it starts, and being told "there are no more tickets available" while talking to other people who were purchasing tickets throughout the time it wouldn't find any for me.
In other words, why take the advice of this person? What reason is there to believe they're not trying to find another way to make money off of doing nothing, and doing it badly?
"Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has become known as the 'gray goo problem.' Though masses of uncontrolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term 'gray goo' emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less inspiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superior in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valueable.
The gray goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear: We cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers.
The whole "gray goo" issue is more or less a red herring by those against nanotech. Why do I say that?
There's no reason to expect that anyone would even have a need to build self-replicating nanotech devices that were designed to be able to use whatever resources at hand. There are numerous incredibly-simple safeguards that could be implemented to make sure nothing like this ever happens.
For example, require specific, hand-to-find materials in the construction of self-replicating nanotech devices - so that way, any that were out in the wild would not have access to those materials to be able to replicate.
Or require there to be some sort of radio signal present to activate self-replicating - no signal, no replication.
To create gray goo, it would take designers that were both geniuses - to create a devide that can self-replicate with whatever materials are on hand - and idiots - to not include safeguards - at the same time.
Black goo, an intentionally designed device to do the above, will be more of a threat than than gray goo will ever, ever be. And that will require a nanotech defense system to be in place to prevent such a thing - meaning that development of mature nanotech needs to be done by responsible people before rogue nations and groups get to the point to create black goo.
When a Library chooses not to carry "Jugs" magazine, it doesn't mean they are forced to also leave out, say, books on breast cancer, magazines dealing with health issues that include sexual health, and such.
If there was a filter out there that ONLY blocked pornography, then it would be a different story.
But there isn't one. Requiring a library to install a filter that also blocks information on medical issues, religious minorities, sexuality issues, and discussions of problems with filters is clearly wrong.
Let's make this clear - NOBODY is in favor of adding pornography to the libraries. The people challenging this law just feel that all the non-pornography that has to be blocked in the process because of the poor state of filtering is reason not to allow the law.
Sadly, this US piece of crap (also known as MTV Drumscape) should never have been put together.
Why?
It's not a game. At all. You insert money, pick a song from either the 70's, 80's, or 90's, and bang on the electrionic drum set as you wish for the length of the song. No score. No indication what you're supposed to do. It's just a "toy", and a bad one at that.
I've watched people walk away from it shortly after they start "playing", realizing it has no point to it.
Konami's DrumMania, part of their Bemani series, on the other hand, does it right, and is tons of fun (though DDR is still better). Because it has an actual game, with an actual challenge.
I am no longer going to buy ANY pre-recorded music until the industry stops treating good, responsible consumers like myself as criminals.
Ummm, instead of the blanket statement, restrict it to not buying any pre-recorded music from the large music companies, ones who are members of the RIAA.
There are tons of independent artists and labels around who want nothing to do with the RIAA, and are actively doing things the RIAA would never do.
For example, one independent artist I really enjoy is Emilie Autumn. Not only are her and her label, Traitor Records, not part of the RIAA, but they've made her entire catalog available for ROYALTY-FREE download to internet radio webcasters. Also, when you order an album of hers online, you get a user name and password for you to download ALL of the tracks from the album as MP3s. No protected audio formats. I'm not trying to advertise for her here, just let people know that some artists actually care about their fans.
I saw the first LOTR twice in the theatres. The first time, it was a great crowd, quiet, no distractions, so much fun.
The second time, three different cell phones rang during the movie, and two of the people even had converstations! If the one guy who was in the row in front of me was only a couple seats closer to me, I would have reached down and turned off his phone for him. Perhaps even with the power button instead of throwing it against the wall.
It's not an urban legend - they're not common, but it happens.
List of games that have sucked up this girl's free time:
Quake/Quake 2 SimCity/SC2K/SC3K The Sims Civilization/2/3/Alpha Centauri/MOM/MOO Star Control 2 Rollercoaster Tycoon Super Mario World Super Mario Kart Legend of Zelda Secret of Mana Street Fighter II (+ incarnations) Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 Virtua Fighter Super Smash Bros. Melee Eternal Darkness Super Monkey Ball Animal Crossing DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION!!
I just happened to have parents that did some game playing also - they bought an Atari VCS not long after it came out, and they were playing it more than I was at first. And there was also plenty of time as a family working on old Scott Adams text adventures back on the TI-99/4A. So I really didn't get the "games are for boys" message that was rampant when they first hit the scene. And at this point in time, besides tons of PC games, I also have like 8 console systems at last count...
You are incorrect - the first poster is correct. Let me give the listing:
Blue Streak Cedar Creek Mine Ride Corkscrew Disaster Transport (the former Avalanche Run) Gemini Gemini Jr. (kiddie coaster) Iron Dragon Magnum XL-200 Mantis Mean Streak Milennium Force Raptor Wicked Twister Wildcat Woodstock Express (kiddie coaster)
That is ALL of the coasters at the park. Just about every coaster was in some way a record breaker when it was first built, and most of them are still some of the best.
I never had seen a demonstration of how much better a S-Video connection was over a A/V connection. I also wasn't aware of the details of how the sharpness adjustment on the TV worked, or other details throughout the article.
In other words, it wasn't a no-brainer for everyone, thus, it was useful for some of us.
Personally, I found it about 100x more interesting than another annoucement about how some backwater town has installed linux on some computer in a government office so Microsoft is clearly on the way to bankruptcy, or how someone has finally ported some Windows 1.0 program to work part of the time on the latest window manager that nobody uses.
Of course - why didn't I think of that? I'll run out right now and buy Super Smash Bros. Melee, Monkey Ball 1 and 2, Eternal Darkness, and Animal Crossing for my PC right now. Oh, and I need to spend more than I spent on the Gamecube to get a good enough graphics card to get equivalent images, and probably upgrade my processor - AND I STILL CAN'T PLAY THOSE GAMES ON THE PC CAUSE THEY DON'T HAVE THEM FOR THE PC!!
Duh, not ALL games worth playing are made for the PC.
Besides, I never have had a crash, corrupted files, installation issues, or required hardware upgrades for my $150 Gamecube.
Killer Instinct was a simple memorization game all prettied up to look like a fighting game. The game play was more or less whoever got the combo started first and made sure to get the right button presses to perform the 645-move "Ultra-Hyper-Pathetic-Unimaginative-Overused Combo". The game was about as much fun as Night Trap. (Was that the correct name for that pathetic FMV Sega CD game?)
My god, Eternal Darkness is SO not a game for kids - I've had it freak ME out, along with a number of friends, and at 28, it takes a bit to do such a thing. I would suspect that any 13-14 year old is going to really get affected, with the possibility of nightmares (I've come close myself).
Then again, it might not be so bad if I wasn't playing the game only at night with all the lights off...
I still refuse to go into that bathroom ever since the tub scene. I did watch a friend look at the tub, and summarily scream and scoot backwards across the floor about 10 feet - I haven't seen a game do that before - ever.
That's probably pretty accurate - there were a few games that were simply ports from other systems that more or less restricted themselves to using the 68000 chip. Thus, those were clearly games that could be described as 16-bit games.
Some of the more complex ones, such as T2k, AvP, and Battlesphere, are definately not restricting themselves to that chip. If I remember right, it might have been T2K that actually send the 68000 chip a shutdown command after it got the game up and running, though it may have been another one.
So how do you define the bitness of a machine that has no CPU? There are specialized graphics processors that are 32 and 64 bit on tom, specialized sound processors that are 32 bit on jerry, and one general purpose 68000 chip that's there, as some Jaguar developers put it, to read the joysticks. (IE it is NOT there to do any significant amount of processing, no matter what some fanboys used to scream in years past)
But the Pentium didn't have 64 bit processors on the chip, now did it? Besides the 64-bit system bus, the "tom" chip has two of it's three components doing full 64-bit processing, not just accessing the system bus.
Does anyone remember the game with the cavemen for the Jaguar? I always wanted to play it, but I don't know the name.
Dino Dudes Evolution. Not that great of game, really, but a good time-wasting puzzler. I never did get all that far in the game, it just never interested me enough to work past the tougher puzzles.
The graphics processor, "Tom", consisted of the GPU, which was 32-bit, but could read all 64 bits of data off of the system bus, and the Object Processor and Blitter, both of which were 64-bit chips. The Sound processor, "Jerry", had a 32-bit DSP, and a couple other minor features. The 68000, the third chip, was the standard ship.
Was it a 64-bit system? Well, it had a 64-bit system bus, and some chips that did 64-bit processing.
There were a lot of ridiculous claims by people that the system was "64-bit" only by adding the bit sizes of all the chips together, or some silly garbage like that.
clip from the faq for completeness:
- "Tom"
- 750,000 transistors, 208 pins
- Graphics Processing Unit (processor #1)
- 32-bit RISC architecture (32/64 processor)
- 64 registers of 32 bits wide
- Has access to all 64 bits of the system bus
- Can read 64 bits of data in one instruction
- Rated at 26.591 MIPS (million instructions per second)
- Runs at 26.591 MHz
- 4K bytes of zero wait-state internal SRAM
- Performs a wide range of high-speed graphic effects
- Programmable
- Object processor (processor #2)
- 64-bit RISC architecture
- 64-bit wide registers
- Programmable processor that can act as a variety of different video
architectures, such as a sprite engine, a pixel-mapped display, a
character-mapped system, and others.
- Blitter (processor #3)
- 64-bit RISC architecture
- 64-bit wide registers
- Performs high-speed logical operations
- Hardware support for Z-buffering and Gouraud shading
- DRAM memory controller
- 64 bits
- Accesses the DRAM directly
- "Jerry"
- 600,000 transistors, 144 pins
- Digital Signal Processor (processor #4)
- 32 bits (32-bit registers)
- Rated at 26.6 MIPS (million instructions per second)
- Runs at 26.6 MHz
- Same RISC core as the Graphics Processing Unit
- Not limited to sound generation
- 8K bytes of zero wait-state internal SRAM
- CD-quality sound (16-bit stereo)
- Number of sound channels limited by software
- Two DACs (stereo) convert digital data to analog sound signals
- Full stereo capabilities
- Wavetable synthesis, FM synthesis, FM Sample synthesis, and AM
synthesis
- A clock control block, incorporating timers, and a UART
- Joystick control
- Motorola 68000 (processor #5)
- Runs at 13.295MHz
- General purpose control processor
Hehe - I knew what it was they were doing, I just didn't get to see it in action until last night. Someone picked up a time card, and even with constant play on the machine, had 30 credits left after an hour.
I bought $25 worth of credits, and hardly used any of them to play. But I still got blisters and achy legs anyways:)
Even better when you wander upon the Schaumburg Gameworks machine and someone has been nice enough to leave 30+ credits on the thing, like I've seen many a time - an entire evening's worth of play without spending a cent. Of course, that makes up for the fact that it's 6 credits for three songs there, which is overpriced - but people, like me, still do it.
OK, you know you're addicted when you're at Gameworks once a week pumping $20 a night into the thing. *sigh* Oh well, like I care - I'm doing it again tonight.:)
My thoughts exactly - if these web sites don't want people to link to them, then the search engines and directories should do exactly that. Remove all the links to those sites, and perhaps replace them with little text screens stating that they cannot give the user a link or URL to that site, because that site forbids links to it.
I would suspect when they see the amount of traffic on their site diminish, and someone with a clue sees the message on Google or whatever and realizes what the no-linking policy means, then things might change.
They should get what they want - no links to the sites, and the inability of users to locate them.
The point is that with the incredible advances in technology, arcade games no longer have that large graphical "edge" over home consoles and computers that they once did. Think of the differences between Gauntlet at the arcade, and on the Nintendo, back in like 1986. Compare that to now - name one arcade game that is graphically significantly beyond anything at home - there isn't anything.
The arcade games need something else then to attract people in. The various shooting games can do that, especially those with unusual equipment, like Silent Scope. Huge moving racing consoles like Daytona 2 and Indianapolis 500 offer unique features - building a moving platform at home would be way too expensive. Fighting games still have some of the social aspect, though not nearly as much as they used. For me, there's really only even one game that gets me to trek down to my local Gameworks on a regular basis - DDR. Beause it creates an experience not easily duplicated at home, especially when there's a crowd on the machine.
Arcades won't die for a long time, since there are plenty of people that grew up with them enough to keep going. But if they don't find more games with unique features to bring people in, they will get more and more sparse.
Also, I don't know if NexTEL is even known outside the US but it has a great advantage over regular wireless phones.
Yes, Nextel does have a number of operations outside of the US. However, the iDEN system it uses has a number of other customers around the world. I'm not sure where, but there are a number in Europe and Asia, including Korea.
I'm not sure what services and pricing plans are offered outside of Nextel's US plans, however.
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I love how enviromentalists are willing ignore the rights of the logging companies to have and use their PRIVATE property just so that they protest. Seems to me the right to private property is one of the biggest tenants of liberty, which gives them the opportunity to protest. Protesting is fine until it starts infringing on other people's rights.
And, of course, the fact that the logging that Pacific Lumber Company is ok, since it doesn't hurt anyone else.
It hasn't filled Humboldt Bay with mud, seriously degrading the habitat for fish, and it hasn't seriously damaged the ability of the watershed to filter and buffer rainfall from storms, which made Freshwater Creek less likely to flood.
The fact that residents of Eureka now see a lot more flooding, and the flooding being directly traceable to the logging doesn't matter, does it? The fact that their logging doesn't just affect their private property, but is damaging large amounts of both private and public property isn't important?
I'm sure if you found your PRIVATE PROPERTY was regularly getting flooded and your PRIVATE PROPERTY was being destroyed by the actions of the logging companies, that you'd be a little less likely to say "they're only doing it on their private property, they have that right!"
Massive amounts of logging affect much more than just the land that's logged. So would it be fair to say "Logging is fine until it starts infringing on other people's rights"?? Because that is EXACTLY what this company is doing.
It's very odd what gets approved and what doesn't.
A kid writes a review along the lines of "This game is awesome you must buy it now!" for a game that won't be released for another month gets posted.
Write an in-depth review of Super Monkey Ball 2, comparing it to the first one, and then saying it's not nearly as good, however, and get your review deleted. Apparently saying negative things about a potentially big title, and say them clearly and justify them, and get your review squashed because it might cost them money.
(And, yes, I have a number of reviews posted already, and I know the guidelines, so it wasn't violating them that kept the review from being posted)
Arcades are dead. Arcades are, for all intents and purposes, a singleplayer experience. The handful of head-to-head games don't count
Arcades were dying, restriced to fighting games, shooting games, racing games, and huge gimmick games (like "Sky Pirates", where you fly a balloon around a huge screen and the seats move up and down with the your balloon). Mainly games with some sort of gimmick that made them a bit tougher to play at home - Daytona 2 by Sega just can't be the same at home as it can be at, say, a Gameworks, where they have 8 machines linked together and the seats move and all that.
However, Konami has managed almost singlehandedly to help resurrect the places with their Bemani series of music games - especially Dance Dance Revolution. They do have the "gimmick" - a control scheme hard to copy at home - but the social aspect of those games seems to be great also. I go twice a week, for three hours at a time - and most nights I'm there, there's a number of other people there also playing DDR. It's the busiest machine in the place, and I suspect easily the top grossing machine there.
They're not going to die as long as they know where to focus - experiences you can't duplicate at home.
And to relate it more to the topic - I'd love to see a gaming arena focused on Dance Dance Revolution - there's a lot that can be done to improve the experience.
Even worse is that they can't even keep their services working well. I've lost 8th row tickets because of their "you must check out in 5 minutes" rule when their website wouldn't work well enough to let me purchase the tickets in that allotted 5 minutes. Or even worse, getting on for a presale right when it starts, and being told "there are no more tickets available" while talking to other people who were purchasing tickets throughout the time it wouldn't find any for me.
In other words, why take the advice of this person? What reason is there to believe they're not trying to find another way to make money off of doing nothing, and doing it badly?
"Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has become known as the 'gray goo problem.' Though masses of uncontrolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term 'gray goo' emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less inspiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superior in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valueable.
The gray goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear: We cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers.
The whole "gray goo" issue is more or less a red herring by those against nanotech. Why do I say that?
There's no reason to expect that anyone would even have a need to build self-replicating nanotech devices that were designed to be able to use whatever resources at hand. There are numerous incredibly-simple safeguards that could be implemented to make sure nothing like this ever happens.
For example, require specific, hand-to-find materials in the construction of self-replicating nanotech devices - so that way, any that were out in the wild would not have access to those materials to be able to replicate.
Or require there to be some sort of radio signal present to activate self-replicating - no signal, no replication.
To create gray goo, it would take designers that were both geniuses - to create a devide that can self-replicate with whatever materials are on hand - and idiots - to not include safeguards - at the same time.
Black goo, an intentionally designed device to do the above, will be more of a threat than than gray goo will ever, ever be. And that will require a nanotech defense system to be in place to prevent such a thing - meaning that development of mature nanotech needs to be done by responsible people before rogue nations and groups get to the point to create black goo.
When a Library chooses not to carry "Jugs" magazine, it doesn't mean they are forced to also leave out, say, books on breast cancer, magazines dealing with health issues that include sexual health, and such.
If there was a filter out there that ONLY blocked pornography, then it would be a different story.
But there isn't one. Requiring a library to install a filter that also blocks information on medical issues, religious minorities, sexuality issues, and discussions of problems with filters is clearly wrong.
Let's make this clear - NOBODY is in favor of adding pornography to the libraries. The people challenging this law just feel that all the non-pornography that has to be blocked in the process because of the poor state of filtering is reason not to allow the law.
Sadly, this US piece of crap (also known as MTV Drumscape) should never have been put together.
Why?
It's not a game. At all. You insert money, pick a song from either the 70's, 80's, or 90's, and bang on the electrionic drum set as you wish for the length of the song. No score. No indication what you're supposed to do. It's just a "toy", and a bad one at that.
I've watched people walk away from it shortly after they start "playing", realizing it has no point to it.
Konami's DrumMania, part of their Bemani series, on the other hand, does it right, and is tons of fun (though DDR is still better). Because it has an actual game, with an actual challenge.
I am no longer going to buy ANY pre-recorded music until the industry stops treating good, responsible consumers like myself as criminals.
Ummm, instead of the blanket statement, restrict it to not buying any pre-recorded music from the large music companies, ones who are members of the RIAA.
There are tons of independent artists and labels around who want nothing to do with the RIAA, and are actively doing things the RIAA would never do.
For example, one independent artist I really enjoy is Emilie Autumn. Not only are her and her label, Traitor Records, not part of the RIAA, but they've made her entire catalog available for ROYALTY-FREE download to internet radio webcasters. Also, when you order an album of hers online, you get a user name and password for you to download ALL of the tracks from the album as MP3s. No protected audio formats. I'm not trying to advertise for her here, just let people know that some artists actually care about their fans.
I saw the first LOTR twice in the theatres. The first time, it was a great crowd, quiet, no distractions, so much fun.
The second time, three different cell phones rang during the movie, and two of the people even had converstations! If the one guy who was in the row in front of me was only a couple seats closer to me, I would have reached down and turned off his phone for him. Perhaps even with the power button instead of throwing it against the wall.
It's not an urban legend - they're not common, but it happens.
List of games that have sucked up this girl's free time:
Quake/Quake 2
SimCity/SC2K/SC3K
The Sims
Civilization/2/3/Alpha Centauri/MOM/MOO
Star Control 2
Rollercoaster Tycoon
Super Mario World
Super Mario Kart
Legend of Zelda
Secret of Mana
Street Fighter II (+ incarnations)
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2
Virtua Fighter
Super Smash Bros. Melee
Eternal Darkness
Super Monkey Ball
Animal Crossing
DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION!!
I just happened to have parents that did some game playing also - they bought an Atari VCS not long after it came out, and they were playing it more than I was at first. And there was also plenty of time as a family working on old Scott Adams text adventures back on the TI-99/4A. So I really didn't get the "games are for boys" message that was rampant when they first hit the scene. And at this point in time, besides tons of PC games, I also have like 8 console systems at last count...
You are incorrect - the first poster is correct. Let me give the listing:
Blue Streak
Cedar Creek Mine Ride
Corkscrew
Disaster Transport (the former Avalanche Run)
Gemini
Gemini Jr. (kiddie coaster)
Iron Dragon
Magnum XL-200
Mantis
Mean Streak
Milennium Force
Raptor
Wicked Twister
Wildcat
Woodstock Express (kiddie coaster)
That is ALL of the coasters at the park. Just about every coaster was in some way a record breaker when it was first built, and most of them are still some of the best.
I never had seen a demonstration of how much better a S-Video connection was over a A/V connection. I also wasn't aware of the details of how the sharpness adjustment on the TV worked, or other details throughout the article.
In other words, it wasn't a no-brainer for everyone, thus, it was useful for some of us.
Personally, I found it about 100x more interesting than another annoucement about how some backwater town has installed linux on some computer in a government office so Microsoft is clearly on the way to bankruptcy, or how someone has finally ported some Windows 1.0 program to work part of the time on the latest window manager that nobody uses.
Of course - why didn't I think of that? I'll run out right now and buy Super Smash Bros. Melee, Monkey Ball 1 and 2, Eternal Darkness, and Animal Crossing for my PC right now. Oh, and I need to spend more than I spent on the Gamecube to get a good enough graphics card to get equivalent images, and probably upgrade my processor - AND I STILL CAN'T PLAY THOSE GAMES ON THE PC CAUSE THEY DON'T HAVE THEM FOR THE PC!!
Duh, not ALL games worth playing are made for the PC.
Besides, I never have had a crash, corrupted files, installation issues, or required hardware upgrades for my $150 Gamecube.
Killer Instinct was a simple memorization game all prettied up to look like a fighting game. The game play was more or less whoever got the combo started first and made sure to get the right button presses to perform the 645-move "Ultra-Hyper-Pathetic-Unimaginative-Overused Combo". The game was about as much fun as Night Trap. (Was that the correct name for that pathetic FMV Sega CD game?)
My god, Eternal Darkness is SO not a game for kids - I've had it freak ME out, along with a number of friends, and at 28, it takes a bit to do such a thing. I would suspect that any 13-14 year old is going to really get affected, with the possibility of nightmares (I've come close myself).
Then again, it might not be so bad if I wasn't playing the game only at night with all the lights off...
I still refuse to go into that bathroom ever since the tub scene. I did watch a friend look at the tub, and summarily scream and scoot backwards across the floor about 10 feet - I haven't seen a game do that before - ever.
That's probably pretty accurate - there were a few games that were simply ports from other systems that more or less restricted themselves to using the 68000 chip. Thus, those were clearly games that could be described as 16-bit games.
Some of the more complex ones, such as T2k, AvP, and Battlesphere, are definately not restricting themselves to that chip. If I remember right, it might have been T2K that actually send the 68000 chip a shutdown command after it got the game up and running, though it may have been another one.
So how do you define the bitness of a machine that has no CPU? There are specialized graphics processors that are 32 and 64 bit on tom, specialized sound processors that are 32 bit on jerry, and one general purpose 68000 chip that's there, as some Jaguar developers put it, to read the joysticks. (IE it is NOT there to do any significant amount of processing, no matter what some fanboys used to scream in years past)
But the Pentium didn't have 64 bit processors on the chip, now did it? Besides the 64-bit system bus, the "tom" chip has two of it's three components doing full 64-bit processing, not just accessing the system bus.
Does anyone remember the game with the cavemen for the Jaguar? I always wanted to play it, but I don't know the name.
Dino Dudes Evolution. Not that great of game, really, but a good time-wasting puzzler. I never did get all that far in the game, it just never interested me enough to work past the tougher puzzles.
Depends on what part of the system you look at.
The graphics processor, "Tom", consisted of the GPU, which was 32-bit, but could read all 64 bits of data off of the system bus, and the Object Processor and Blitter, both of which were 64-bit chips. The Sound processor, "Jerry", had a 32-bit DSP, and a couple other minor features. The 68000, the third chip, was the standard ship.
Was it a 64-bit system? Well, it had a 64-bit system bus, and some chips that did 64-bit processing.
There were a lot of ridiculous claims by people that the system was "64-bit" only by adding the bit sizes of all the chips together, or some silly garbage like that.
clip from the faq for completeness:
- "Tom"
- 750,000 transistors, 208 pins
- Graphics Processing Unit (processor #1)
- 32-bit RISC architecture (32/64 processor)
- 64 registers of 32 bits wide
- Has access to all 64 bits of the system bus
- Can read 64 bits of data in one instruction
- Rated at 26.591 MIPS (million instructions per second)
- Runs at 26.591 MHz
- 4K bytes of zero wait-state internal SRAM
- Performs a wide range of high-speed graphic effects
- Programmable
- Object processor (processor #2)
- 64-bit RISC architecture
- 64-bit wide registers
- Programmable processor that can act as a variety of different video
architectures, such as a sprite engine, a pixel-mapped display, a
character-mapped system, and others.
- Blitter (processor #3)
- 64-bit RISC architecture
- 64-bit wide registers
- Performs high-speed logical operations
- Hardware support for Z-buffering and Gouraud shading
- DRAM memory controller
- 64 bits
- Accesses the DRAM directly
- "Jerry"
- 600,000 transistors, 144 pins
- Digital Signal Processor (processor #4)
- 32 bits (32-bit registers)
- Rated at 26.6 MIPS (million instructions per second)
- Runs at 26.6 MHz
- Same RISC core as the Graphics Processing Unit
- Not limited to sound generation
- 8K bytes of zero wait-state internal SRAM
- CD-quality sound (16-bit stereo)
- Number of sound channels limited by software
- Two DACs (stereo) convert digital data to analog sound signals
- Full stereo capabilities
- Wavetable synthesis, FM synthesis, FM Sample synthesis, and AM
synthesis
- A clock control block, incorporating timers, and a UART
- Joystick control
- Motorola 68000 (processor #5)
- Runs at 13.295MHz
- General purpose control processor
Hehe - I knew what it was they were doing, I just didn't get to see it in action until last night. Someone picked up a time card, and even with constant play on the machine, had 30 credits left after an hour.
:)
I bought $25 worth of credits, and hardly used any of them to play. But I still got blisters and achy legs anyways
Even better when you wander upon the Schaumburg Gameworks machine and someone has been nice enough to leave 30+ credits on the thing, like I've seen many a time - an entire evening's worth of play without spending a cent. Of course, that makes up for the fact that it's 6 credits for three songs there, which is overpriced - but people, like me, still do it.
:)
OK, you know you're addicted when you're at Gameworks once a week pumping $20 a night into the thing. *sigh* Oh well, like I care - I'm doing it again tonight.
My thoughts exactly - if these web sites don't want people to link to them, then the search engines and directories should do exactly that. Remove all the links to those sites, and perhaps replace them with little text screens stating that they cannot give the user a link or URL to that site, because that site forbids links to it.
I would suspect when they see the amount of traffic on their site diminish, and someone with a clue sees the message on Google or whatever and realizes what the no-linking policy means, then things might change.
They should get what they want - no links to the sites, and the inability of users to locate them.
The point is that with the incredible advances in technology, arcade games no longer have that large graphical "edge" over home consoles and computers that they once did. Think of the differences between Gauntlet at the arcade, and on the Nintendo, back in like 1986. Compare that to now - name one arcade game that is graphically significantly beyond anything at home - there isn't anything.
The arcade games need something else then to attract people in. The various shooting games can do that, especially those with unusual equipment, like Silent Scope. Huge moving racing consoles like Daytona 2 and Indianapolis 500 offer unique features - building a moving platform at home would be way too expensive. Fighting games still have some of the social aspect, though not nearly as much as they used. For me, there's really only even one game that gets me to trek down to my local Gameworks on a regular basis - DDR. Beause it creates an experience not easily duplicated at home, especially when there's a crowd on the machine.
Arcades won't die for a long time, since there are plenty of people that grew up with them enough to keep going. But if they don't find more games with unique features to bring people in, they will get more and more sparse.
Also, I don't know if NexTEL is even known outside the US but it has a great advantage over regular wireless phones.
Yes, Nextel does have a number of operations outside of the US. However, the iDEN system it uses has a number of other customers around the world. I'm not sure where, but there are a number in Europe and Asia, including Korea.
I'm not sure what services and pricing plans are offered outside of Nextel's US plans, however.