So you get this lameness of having to change your hand positions whenever you get into or exit a car.
Yeah, I hate that too. Hear this, auto industry! We will no longer stand for having to move our hands from our sides to grasp the steering wheel, stick, and other forms of control, upon entry into a motor vehicle.
...Life doesn't have a unified control scheme, dude. While I would tend to agree that a lack of significant remappability is not good, as the way we drive is not the way we walk one might say that what you call 'lameness' is actually 'verisimilitude.'
The US is operating well within its rights in this situation. It's a simple case of eminent domain...
Unlike other sigs, I can speak with an English accent!
Ah, for the days when I leeched software for my Atari 800 at 2400 baud on a Kaypro 4..and then transferring it at 300 baud, waiting hours upon hours to find out if any of the files I downloaded actually did anything.
Or the hours I spent at the virtual command prompts at Drexel Hill North Star,DHN* for short, hoping that there was more gaming goodness available there than LadDer 1, 2, or 3 (download the Java version...it's excellent...like Donkey Kong meets Rogue...vaguely). Remember Aldo's Adventures? Same damn set of games, minus the slick ASCII engine of the originals. Ahhh...
Or the time when I was about 8, when a spin with an ersatz chat with the sysop of some BBS or another offended me (or rather just confused me) for some reason or another (I think it asked me about my mother or some such). The sysops (who must have been at least post-pubescent...they were very amused by the situation) called to make sure nothing was up or to glean further amusement from the situation...anyway, when they asked what I was using to call the board I answered quite honestly, "a terminal for the upstairs computer." One responded, "when I was 8 I couldn't even spell terminal!"
It's "Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast" (Dark Forces III if you must) and "Return To Castle Wolfenstein."
Unless I haven't been looking closely enough at the RTCW cutscenes...in which the titular Castle somehow makes a stealthy return to Germany after years of extensive reconstructive surgery.
Does anyone else find an eerie similarity between the subject matter at hand and the old sequences on Square One in which shots of the commission of simple arithmetical errors were juxtaposed with engineering disaster footage and a voiceover saying something like "If this mistake hadn't been made...THIS wouldn't have happened"?
Off-topic how? It was and continues to be spelled wrong in the story. Things like this don't fix themselves. It takes a little coaxing, I imagine. Oh well.
I dunno. Between the two of them, I think the various media powers that be have done a good job of portraying Dune. Admittedly, the original movie was...shall we say incomprehensible. So it can't really stand on its own story-wise. I still think its visual presentation was superior. The Sci-Fi series did a much better job of portraying the transition from Paul the child to Paul the ruthless revolutionary (I mean, duh...it was totally glossed over in the film). The movie, however, had a much more mythical tone to it...and it wasn't as *clean* as the Sci-Fi version, which I thought was a little visually sterile. The Bene Gesserit in the Sci-Fi version were total pushovers, nowhere near the force they represented in either the book *or* the film. No weirding in the Sci-Fi version...also not a good thing. So, to summarize, the film was not all that "god-awful;" it did a lot right that the miniseries did wrong. The miniseries succeeded in portraying the political elements of the story (not having Princess Irulan as a character in the film was kind of inexcusable), while the film did a much better job of, well, being mysterious and mythical and cool. There is much to like in both.
I was into it for the most part but for two major points.
1) I am just not interested in playing any more games about 12-year-olds. I can't play Illusion of Gaia anymore for that very reason. I similarly shied away from FF9 because the the would-be womanizing first character looked about 13, and, well, I don't find the prospect of directing or even bearing witness to a character's poorly written, barely-pubescent escapades very appealing. If you are going to put female characters in tight outfits, at least make *some* effort to reduce the head-body ratio. They look *far* younger from the neck up than they do from the neck down. I understand that's a general anime convention, but I don't think the formula translates comfortably into 3D.
2) The Disney part. If after such a fantastically vivid and surreal dream, I found myself on a giant stained-glass picture of Snow White, I would consider my imagination a loss. [This dream brought to you by Disney...eucch] Some things just don't belong in my subconscious, and Disney iconography is counted among those things.
Although this info is quite relevant to Slashdot, and of interest for many/. users...unless Lethyos has concluded from the available evidence that Slashdot ought to be nuclearly sent into deep space, where it might perhaps be more profitable, this post most definitely does not belong here.
What disappoints me most about contemporary NASA policy is how they persistently ignore the fact that we've got to get to the Devron system! You'd think they'd have figured that out by now. It's like the chicken and the egg!
Apparently this has been discontinued. Aaaanyway, only having used one of Numonics' boards (over the summer whilst working there), I can't directly compare it and the Smartboard...but I have heard that Numonics boards are both larger and more durable than their Smartboard counterparts...for whatever that's worth. I imagine that would make them a bit more appropriate for use in an educational setting.
I've played Marble Madness...a few levels worth and then I got bored.::shrug::. What'd I miss? I can see the physics potentially resulting in some clever situations, but I didn't get nearly as drawn in as you did. Perhaps I'll check it out again.
While we're in the vein of slightly more abstract games (as opposed to the nigh-cinematic and nigh-literary pieces I mentioned), I'd like to nominate Journey to the Planets (screenshots and a few spoilers can be found at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/7953/ 8bit/journey.html) a game for the Atari 400/800. T'was a game about an astronaut type stranded in another galaxy by some power or another. Said astronaut had to solve 8 planets' worth of puzzles which, as the above site mentions, required varying degrees of reflex and intellect. I think a great deal of my immersion of the game was due to my age when playing it (I must have been 5 or 6 when I started). Perhaps my railing against the godlike powers that stranded the poor astronaut in that universe was a little on the silly side...but the feeling of accomplishment once I was able to leave the alternate galaxy, land next to five identical spaceships, and see two or three astronaut types greet the formerly stranded guy was, I recall, very intense.
In any event, Journey to the Planets was and continues to be a frustrating but fascinating game. I recommend it to anyone interested in making sense of strange symbolic systems. Good for children with patience, it is. "Anchors Aweigh" does get old after a while but it certainly makes you want to land that ship!
the previous comment *formatted correctly*
on
Are Videogames Art?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Simply designing an experience for an audience does not necessarily create art. A balance betwixt sound, color, and pace is not necessarily art. (The following example is not designed to draw flak. I am not anti-porn or pro-censorship or whatever by any means..) Most porn, for example, is an experince designed for an audience in which sound, color, and pace is more or less balanced. For the most part, however, porn is an object for consumption and not for contemplation. It's just a quick way to get from point A to point B. Porn, again for the most part (not exclusively), is not an end unto itself but a tool designed for a very specific purpose or set of purposes.
Many modern conventional movies are the same way. Though they may be artistic -- that is, the camera work may be spot-on, the scoring unusually good, or the costumes particularly well-done -- as a whole many movies cannot be admitted as art in large part, I think, because of a lack of an intention to be treated as such. Intention _must_ be taken into consideration. There *is* a difference between a movie and a film, between "movies" and "cinema" (beyond, of course, the fact that 'film' and 'cinema' are, I think, derived directly from French). The difference lies not only in how members of each are treated but in why they are made. So too are most (not all by any means, but most) video games designed for consumption and not contemplation.
I imagine that a 'movie/film'-type paradigm will emerge among video games once they begin to be looked at and criticized more seriously. I seriously hope that game reviewers will learn to stop throwing around the term "beautiful" so much. It and other similar terms imply a degree of depth that for the most part I just haven't yet seen in most console and computer releases. I think it's *entirely* appropriate that we ask ourselves the last time -- or indeed, if ever -- we were truly moved by a piece of electronic entertainment. Could we perhaps throw these out into the before we christen the entire genre as art? Please? Ones that occur to me include:
Homeworld (the destruction of Kharak was particuarly unbelievable...poignant music, great voice acting, the slow movement of the fireball across the surface of the planet, the piteousness of the task of retrieving the 600,000 colonists, the last of their race...play it, it's amazing)
Photopia, retrievable at the author's home page -- http://adamcadre.ac -- dubiously interactive, but a very moving story that I don't think could have been as effectively told through another medium)
Check out http://www.ifcompetition.org/ -- a lot of interactive ficiton is really straining the borders between computer games and art..indeed, there is an interactive fiction art gallery... http://members.aol.com/iffyart/gallery.htm
But I ramble. aanyway.
I dunno about that.../ Bring on the good stuff!
on
Are Videogames Art?
·
· Score: 0
Simply designing an experience for an audience does not necessarily create art. A balance betwixt sound, color, and pace is not necessarily art. (The following example is not designed to draw flak. I am not anti-porn or pro-censorship or whatever by any means..) Most porn, for example, is an experince designed for an audience in which sound, color, and pace is more or less balanced. For the most part, however, porn is an object for consumption and not for contemplation. It's just a quick way to get from point A to point B. Porn, again for the most part (not exclusively), is not an end unto itself but a tool designed for a very specific purpose or set of purposes. Many modern conventional movies are the same way. Though they may be artistic -- that is, the camera work may be spot-on, the scoring unusually good, or the costumes particularly well-done -- as a whole many movies cannot be admitted as art in large part, I think, because of a lack of an intention to be treated as such.
Intention _must_ be taken into consideration. There *is* a difference between a movie and a film, between "movies" and "cinema" (beyond, of course, the fact that 'film' and 'cinema' are, I think, derived directly from French). The difference lies not only in how members of each are treated but in why they are made.
So too are most (not all by any means, but most) video games designed for consumption and not contemplation. I imagine that a 'movie/film'-type paradigm will emerge among video games once they begin to be looked at and criticized more seriously. I seriously hope that game reviewers will learn to stop throwing around the term "beautiful" so much. It and other similar terms imply a degree of depth that for the most part I just haven't yet seen in most console and computer releases.
I think it's *entirely* appropriate that we ask ourselves the last time -- or indeed, if ever -- we were truly moved by a piece of electronic entertainment.
Could we perhaps throw these out into the before we christen the entire genre as art? Please?
Ones that occur to me include:
Homeworld (the destruction of Kharak was particuarly unbelievable...poignant music, great voice acting, the slow movement of the fireball across the surface of the planet, the piteousness of the task of retrieving the 600,000 colonists, the last of their race...play it, it's amazing)
Photopia, retrievable at the author's home page -- http://adamcadre.ac -- dubiously interactive, but a very moving story that I don't think could have been as effectively told through another medium)
Check out http://www.ifcompetition.org/ -- a lot of interactive ficiton is really straining the borders between computer games and art..indeed, there is an interactive fiction art gallery... http://members.aol.com/iffyart/gallery.htm
But I ramble. aanyway.
Slashdot Mirror
So you get this lameness of having to change your hand positions whenever you get into or exit a car.
Yeah, I hate that too. Hear this, auto industry! We will no longer stand for having to move our hands from our sides to grasp the steering wheel, stick, and other forms of control, upon entry into a motor vehicle.
...Life doesn't have a unified control scheme, dude. While I would tend to agree that a lack of significant remappability is not good, as the way we drive is not the way we walk one might say that what you call 'lameness' is actually 'verisimilitude.'
The US is operating well within its rights in this situation. It's a simple case of eminent domain... Unlike other sigs, I can speak with an English accent!
Ah, for the days when I leeched software for my Atari 800 at 2400 baud on a Kaypro 4..and then transferring it at 300 baud, waiting hours upon hours to find out if any of the files I downloaded actually did anything.
Or the hours I spent at the virtual command prompts at Drexel Hill North Star,DHN* for short, hoping that there was more gaming goodness available there than LadDer 1, 2, or 3 (download the Java version...it's excellent...like Donkey Kong meets Rogue...vaguely). Remember Aldo's Adventures? Same damn set of games, minus the slick ASCII engine of the originals. Ahhh...
Or the time when I was about 8, when a spin with an ersatz chat with the sysop of some BBS or another offended me (or rather just confused me) for some reason or another (I think it asked me about my mother or some such). The sysops (who must have been at least post-pubescent...they were very amused by the situation) called to make sure nothing was up or to glean further amusement from the situation...anyway, when they asked what I was using to call the board I answered quite honestly, "a terminal for the upstairs computer." One responded, "when I was 8 I couldn't even spell terminal!"
I was so proud.
It's "Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast" (Dark Forces III if you must) and "Return To Castle Wolfenstein." Unless I haven't been looking closely enough at the RTCW cutscenes...in which the titular Castle somehow makes a stealthy return to Germany after years of extensive reconstructive surgery.
Does anyone else find an eerie similarity between the subject matter at hand and the old sequences on Square One in which shots of the commission of simple arithmetical errors were juxtaposed with engineering disaster footage and a voiceover saying something like "If this mistake hadn't been made...THIS wouldn't have happened"?
First post? I revel in the possible primacy of this post. Wheee!
For the love of God, or Webster, or both Funk and Wagnalls, it's Arctic, not Artic.
A little review...
Artic
Arctic
Artic
Arctic
Sheesh.
Off-topic how? It was and continues to be spelled wrong in the story. Things like this don't fix themselves. It takes a little coaxing, I imagine. Oh well.
I dunno. Between the two of them, I think the various media powers that be have done a good job of portraying Dune. Admittedly, the original movie was...shall we say incomprehensible. So it can't really stand on its own story-wise. I still think its visual presentation was superior. The Sci-Fi series did a much better job of portraying the transition from Paul the child to Paul the ruthless revolutionary (I mean, duh...it was totally glossed over in the film). The movie, however, had a much more mythical tone to it...and it wasn't as *clean* as the Sci-Fi version, which I thought was a little visually sterile. The Bene Gesserit in the Sci-Fi version were total pushovers, nowhere near the force they represented in either the book *or* the film. No weirding in the Sci-Fi version...also not a good thing.
So, to summarize, the film was not all that "god-awful;" it did a lot right that the miniseries did wrong. The miniseries succeeded in portraying the political elements of the story (not having Princess Irulan as a character in the film was kind of inexcusable), while the film did a much better job of, well, being mysterious and mythical and cool. There is much to like in both.
Zelazny. Zelazny. Zelazny.
Sure. Pick on the race that annihilated itself to save itself from the Ur-Quan. Sicko.
I was into it for the most part but for two major points.
1) I am just not interested in playing any more games about 12-year-olds. I can't play Illusion of Gaia anymore for that very reason. I similarly shied away from FF9 because the the would-be womanizing first character looked about 13, and, well, I don't find the prospect of directing or even bearing witness to a character's poorly written, barely-pubescent escapades very appealing. If you are going to put female characters in tight outfits, at least make *some* effort to reduce the head-body ratio. They look *far* younger from the neck up than they do from the neck down. I understand that's a general anime convention, but I don't think the formula translates comfortably into 3D.
2) The Disney part. If after such a fantastically vivid and surreal dream, I found myself on a giant stained-glass picture of Snow White, I would consider my imagination a loss. [This dream brought to you by Disney...eucch] Some things just don't belong in my subconscious, and Disney iconography is counted among those things.
I hear ya. I fear stangling monopolies too, most notably because I haven't the foggiest idea of what it means to be stangled. How stange...
Although this info is quite relevant to Slashdot, and of interest for many /. users...unless Lethyos has concluded from the available evidence that Slashdot ought to be nuclearly sent into deep space, where it might perhaps be more profitable, this post most definitely does not belong here.
What disappoints me most about contemporary NASA policy is how they persistently ignore the fact that we've got to get to the Devron system! You'd think they'd have figured that out by now. It's like the chicken and the egg!
Sheesh.
Actually that music shows up after spending 10 minutes in Special Zone, which you access *from* Star Road. Sheesh.
Apparently this has been discontinued. Aaaanyway, only having used one of Numonics' boards (over the summer whilst working there), I can't directly compare it and the Smartboard...but I have heard that Numonics boards are both larger and more durable than their Smartboard counterparts...for whatever that's worth. I imagine that would make them a bit more appropriate for use in an educational setting.
Flipcharts, you say? http://www.numonics.com/ifcpage.htm
I've played Marble Madness...a few levels worth and then I got bored. ::shrug::. What'd I miss? I can see the physics potentially resulting in some clever situations, but I didn't get nearly as drawn in as you did. Perhaps I'll check it out again.
While we're in the vein of slightly more abstract games (as opposed to the nigh-cinematic and nigh-literary pieces I mentioned), I'd like to nominate Journey to the Planets (screenshots and a few spoilers can be found at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/7953/ 8bit/journey.html) a game for the Atari 400/800. T'was a game about an astronaut type stranded in another galaxy by some power or another. Said astronaut had to solve 8 planets' worth of puzzles which, as the above site mentions, required varying degrees of reflex and intellect. I think a great deal of my immersion of the game was due to my age when playing it (I must have been 5 or 6 when I started). Perhaps my railing against the godlike powers that stranded the poor astronaut in that universe was a little on the silly side...but the feeling of accomplishment once I was able to leave the alternate galaxy, land next to five identical spaceships, and see two or three astronaut types greet the formerly stranded guy was, I recall, very intense.
In any event, Journey to the Planets was and continues to be a frustrating but fascinating game. I recommend it to anyone interested in making sense of strange symbolic systems. Good for children with patience, it is. "Anchors Aweigh" does get old after a while but it certainly makes you want to land that ship!
Simply designing an experience for an audience does not necessarily create art. A balance betwixt sound, color, and pace is not necessarily art. (The following example is not designed to draw flak. I am not anti-porn or pro-censorship or whatever by any means..) Most porn, for example, is an experince designed for an audience in which sound, color, and pace is more or less balanced. For the most part, however, porn is an object for consumption and not for contemplation. It's just a quick way to get from point A to point B. Porn, again for the most part (not exclusively), is not an end unto itself but a tool designed for a very specific purpose or set of purposes.
Many modern conventional movies are the same way. Though they may be artistic -- that is, the camera work may be spot-on, the scoring unusually good, or the costumes particularly well-done -- as a whole many movies cannot be admitted as art in large part, I think, because of a lack of an intention to be treated as such. Intention _must_ be taken into consideration. There *is* a difference between a movie and a film, between "movies" and "cinema" (beyond, of course, the fact that 'film' and 'cinema' are, I think, derived directly from French). The difference lies not only in how members of each are treated but in why they are made. So too are most (not all by any means, but most) video games designed for consumption and not contemplation.
I imagine that a 'movie/film'-type paradigm will emerge among video games once they begin to be looked at and criticized more seriously. I seriously hope that game reviewers will learn to stop throwing around the term "beautiful" so much. It and other similar terms imply a degree of depth that for the most part I just haven't yet seen in most console and computer releases. I think it's *entirely* appropriate that we ask ourselves the last time -- or indeed, if ever -- we were truly moved by a piece of electronic entertainment. Could we perhaps throw these out into the before we christen the entire genre as art? Please? Ones that occur to me include:
Homeworld (the destruction of Kharak was particuarly unbelievable...poignant music, great voice acting, the slow movement of the fireball across the surface of the planet, the piteousness of the task of retrieving the 600,000 colonists, the last of their race...play it, it's amazing)
Photopia, retrievable at the author's home page -- http://adamcadre.ac -- dubiously interactive, but a very moving story that I don't think could have been as effectively told through another medium)
Check out http://www.ifcompetition.org/ -- a lot of interactive ficiton is really straining the borders between computer games and art..indeed, there is an interactive fiction art gallery... http://members.aol.com/iffyart/gallery.htm But I ramble. aanyway.
Simply designing an experience for an audience does not necessarily create art. A balance betwixt sound, color, and pace is not necessarily art. (The following example is not designed to draw flak. I am not anti-porn or pro-censorship or whatever by any means..) Most porn, for example, is an experince designed for an audience in which sound, color, and pace is more or less balanced. For the most part, however, porn is an object for consumption and not for contemplation. It's just a quick way to get from point A to point B. Porn, again for the most part (not exclusively), is not an end unto itself but a tool designed for a very specific purpose or set of purposes. Many modern conventional movies are the same way. Though they may be artistic -- that is, the camera work may be spot-on, the scoring unusually good, or the costumes particularly well-done -- as a whole many movies cannot be admitted as art in large part, I think, because of a lack of an intention to be treated as such. Intention _must_ be taken into consideration. There *is* a difference between a movie and a film, between "movies" and "cinema" (beyond, of course, the fact that 'film' and 'cinema' are, I think, derived directly from French). The difference lies not only in how members of each are treated but in why they are made. So too are most (not all by any means, but most) video games designed for consumption and not contemplation. I imagine that a 'movie/film'-type paradigm will emerge among video games once they begin to be looked at and criticized more seriously. I seriously hope that game reviewers will learn to stop throwing around the term "beautiful" so much. It and other similar terms imply a degree of depth that for the most part I just haven't yet seen in most console and computer releases. I think it's *entirely* appropriate that we ask ourselves the last time -- or indeed, if ever -- we were truly moved by a piece of electronic entertainment. Could we perhaps throw these out into the before we christen the entire genre as art? Please? Ones that occur to me include: Homeworld (the destruction of Kharak was particuarly unbelievable...poignant music, great voice acting, the slow movement of the fireball across the surface of the planet, the piteousness of the task of retrieving the 600,000 colonists, the last of their race...play it, it's amazing) Photopia, retrievable at the author's home page -- http://adamcadre.ac -- dubiously interactive, but a very moving story that I don't think could have been as effectively told through another medium) Check out http://www.ifcompetition.org/ -- a lot of interactive ficiton is really straining the borders between computer games and art..indeed, there is an interactive fiction art gallery... http://members.aol.com/iffyart/gallery.htm But I ramble. aanyway.