As far as I could tell Inivisible Wars was panned in reviews.
Where'd you get that impression? Deus Ex 2 for PC... average review : 80%. Looks like the critics liked it but the public stayed away. Too bad, I'm about halfway through and I'm liking the game.
Game development has become so complex that there really is no hope for a small team or a startup to make a decent game.
I don't know about that, I'd played the Painkiller demo and it looked really neat, an original engine, huge levels, Havok physics, dozens of monsters at the same time without slowdown. I was blown away that it was done by 20 guys in Poland. And one of the most talked about games is S.T.A.L.K.E.R. coming out of Ukraine.
Thats the loss I mourn... kids wont ever have the fun I had trying to make a game, and we might never be exposed to some new ideas these kids might have.
Nah, they'll have fun working on Half-Life II mods and Shockwave games (some of the stuff on the Havok XTRA site looks like it could be done by beginners), sure it's not working from scratch but I bet you didn't write your own compiler either.
ICQ is still around, I think most Americans have abandoned it but it's still used a lot in Canada and Europe and places AOL hasn't that strong a foothold. Not to say AIM isn't popular in Canada but a lot of people still use ICQ up here.
I think Star Trek was pretty accurate predicting how communication would work, in that it showed people using communicators 90% of the time, but occasionally sitting down in front of a screen to do the odd conferance.
Personally, I'd hate to be stuck sitting at the computer when talking to someone, but webcams and bandwidth are so cheap I can see videophones spreading despite not being a lot of demand out there.
Actually I'm a somewhat impressed with babelfish, it translated this article as the interestingly titled "Segway in financial difficulty", and comments are marked as "splendid discernment" or "it is funny".
Sure most of the comments are incomprehensible but it seems better than last time I checked a year ago.
LAN centers are the next evolutionary step in the high tech social scene.
Wouldn't surprise me. The article mentions how popular these places are in Korea and I've been seeing them crop up all the time in Toronto. Plus they seem to get a lot of business from non-gamers just stepping in to check email and stuff.
Another thing that might work in the favour of LANs is that there's a new crop of games like DOOM 3 coming out that have high system requirements but a lot more people are getting by with sub $500 PCs who don't want to upgrade.
Re:Here's a couple I really want to know
on
Comic Book Physics
·
· Score: 2, Funny
And what I'd like to know is, how can Xavier read the mind of someone who first language isn't English? I'd like to see a comic character say "I can read his thoughts, unfortunately they're in Chinese."
Re:I though otherwise, so did my physics teacher.
on
Comic Book Physics
·
· Score: 2, Informative
That reminds me, I read somewhere that Superman has the power of telekenesis, but only with things he is touching. Sounds useless but that allows him to pick up things like ships and buses without ripping them apart.
Good point though, I vaguely recall the hero of Starbrand contemplating lifting a cruise liner to safety but then realizing it would rip apart if he did.
Actually lots of bands do this, they call it a backing track. When groups like Nine Inch Nails use them, it's to have sounds that can't be produced live, but the vocals and guitars and drums are all live. And if something screws up with the backing track gets muted and the band keeps playing, all that's being lost is some samples and ambient noise so usually no one notices.
Actually I'm confused about what they're using all the computer technology for, the simplest thing to do would be to record the music you want to replace to DAT, then have your live musicians play along to that recording. The more complicated the setup the more things that can go wrong usually.
In America, most people can easily afford a computer and an Internet connection, so Internet cafe's are really an answer lacking a question.
I think the question is a little more complicated than that, like Toronto (as mentioned in this thread) has a ridiculous amount of 24hr internet places and also has some of the cheapest broadband and high penetration of home internet use in North America. Perhaps widespread home use spurs more use outside of home.
I'm surprised Oryx and Crake didn't make the list, Atwood had been nominated for the Nebula before and the novel did make the Booker shortlist. One of my favourite novels of last year.
It just so happened that they could manage to use a PS1 CPU for the I/O functions of the PS2, which made backward compatibility very easy to include. Otherwise, they wouldn't have done it.
True, but I'd reckon the PS2 still has enought power to emulate the Playstation in software, even if it didn't have the PS1 CPU. Like the Dreamcast could play Playstation games with an emulator and that was less powerful than the PS2.
Sure they shouldn't spend too much on backwards compatibility (it would have been dumb for the Gamecube to have a N64 port built in) but if it's done just in software the cost should be relatively cheap. This is assuming the XBOX 2 will still use DVDs.
Games have been at $50 for as long as I can remember, and Ubisoft actualy dropped the price for BG&E to $20 after poor sales.
The fact that BG&E dropped it's price from $50 to $20 and still didn't sell is interesting, that means the high $50 cost wasn't what was keeping consumers away. There was just a lack of interest.
Shitty thing is, in entertainment occasionally a great product will be put out that flops inexplicably. Like why did the movie Blade Runner or the album Pet Sounds flop? Who knows, things are risky.
The only way I could see this working is if you had some chip inside the camera doing the signiture, and the signiture was unique for each camera, and there was a time stamp, and there was a seal to show if the camera was opened up.
Sure you could fool the input, but then the timestamp would show the picture was taken much later, or you could hack the algorithm but if the thing was designed well you would have to open the camera up to do that and the camera would show signs of tampering.
Game companies charge $50 up front because people are willing to pay $50 up front.
Now since a company can make potentially hundreds of dollars from each player in subscriptions fees, why not just sell game cheap, like with a month free at $15 dollars or so? In order to get the player hooked. I'm guessing this hasn't occurred since the competition hasn't gotten intense enough between MMORPGs.
Maybe in the next couple years with the coming glut of these type of games, companies will take a risk and drop the initial fee to attract customers.
The game looked great when it came out, the problem was that it only ran well on a Voodoo card (I had a Voodoo 3) which had fallen out of favour by the time the game came out.
The neat thing was you could travel everywhere without loading screens, going from outside to inside dungeons without breaks. Lots of modern games can't even do that.
I hope they keep the names, heck it's science fiction, weird names add to the atmosphere. If Star Wars can have pseudo-Japanese sounding names (Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin, Amidala) why not Evangelion.
So what if Dan Rather, instead of travelling to the middle of a hurricane to report live, just used a blue screen and a wind machine, and had someone off screen throw a tree branch or two at him? Is that ok too?
Cokie Roberts tried something similar (putting on a coat and reporting in front of a blue sceen of Capitol Hill) years ago and got reprimanded for it. I think she may have made a remark about the weather there too. If she got reprimanded I think the radio reporter should too.
And funny you should mention Dan Rather, he got in a controversy too for reporting in front of a digitaly altered Times Sqaure, link.
For comparison, a lot of Japanese developers are still with their same company since the 8-bit days (Shigeru Miyamoto, Hideo Kajima, Hironobu Sakaguchi). The loyalty to employees marks the difference between US and Japanese corporate structure.
Still you could make the case for both sides, since a lot of American companies order around the original talent and still remain profitable, while a lot of Japanese corporations have been accused of being too loyal to employees and afraid of firing underperformers.
Talking about the population density of Canada is difficult, considering almost a thrid of the population (9 million?) live within a 100 miles of Toronto, and 90% live within 100 miles of the U.S. border. I'd expect broadband would be more expensive in Tuktoyaktuk.
Ironically, perhaps because Canada is so ridiculously spread out, a lot has been spent on telecommunciations resulting in lower costs, I could be wrong though.
Slashdot Mirror
Where'd you get that impression? Deus Ex 2 for PC... average review : 80%. Looks like the critics liked it but the public stayed away. Too bad, I'm about halfway through and I'm liking the game.
I don't know about that, I'd played the Painkiller demo and it looked really neat, an original engine, huge levels, Havok physics, dozens of monsters at the same time without slowdown. I was blown away that it was done by 20 guys in Poland. And one of the most talked about games is S.T.A.L.K.E.R. coming out of Ukraine.
Thats the loss I mourn... kids wont ever have the fun I had trying to make a game, and we might never be exposed to some new ideas these kids might have.
Nah, they'll have fun working on Half-Life II mods and Shockwave games (some of the stuff on the Havok XTRA site looks like it could be done by beginners), sure it's not working from scratch but I bet you didn't write your own compiler either.
ICQ is still around, I think most Americans have abandoned it but it's still used a lot in Canada and Europe and places AOL hasn't that strong a foothold. Not to say AIM isn't popular in Canada but a lot of people still use ICQ up here.
Yeah I think that sucks too, each game company has to make their own variation on the d-pad because nintendo owns the patent on the best design.
Personally, I'd hate to be stuck sitting at the computer when talking to someone, but webcams and bandwidth are so cheap I can see videophones spreading despite not being a lot of demand out there.
Sure most of the comments are incomprehensible but it seems better than last time I checked a year ago.
Wouldn't surprise me. The article mentions how popular these places are in Korea and I've been seeing them crop up all the time in Toronto. Plus they seem to get a lot of business from non-gamers just stepping in to check email and stuff.
Another thing that might work in the favour of LANs is that there's a new crop of games like DOOM 3 coming out that have high system requirements but a lot more people are getting by with sub $500 PCs who don't want to upgrade.
And what I'd like to know is, how can Xavier read the mind of someone who first language isn't English? I'd like to see a comic character say "I can read his thoughts, unfortunately they're in Chinese."
Good point though, I vaguely recall the hero of Starbrand contemplating lifting a cruise liner to safety but then realizing it would rip apart if he did.
Actually I'm confused about what they're using all the computer technology for, the simplest thing to do would be to record the music you want to replace to DAT, then have your live musicians play along to that recording. The more complicated the setup the more things that can go wrong usually.
I think the question is a little more complicated than that, like Toronto (as mentioned in this thread) has a ridiculous amount of 24hr internet places and also has some of the cheapest broadband and high penetration of home internet use in North America. Perhaps widespread home use spurs more use outside of home.
Slashdot | Oryx and Crake
That actually sounds reasonable. At least they're not wasting taxpayers money and government resources by calling in the FBI on every uncapper.
True, but I'd reckon the PS2 still has enought power to emulate the Playstation in software, even if it didn't have the PS1 CPU. Like the Dreamcast could play Playstation games with an emulator and that was less powerful than the PS2.
Sure they shouldn't spend too much on backwards compatibility (it would have been dumb for the Gamecube to have a N64 port built in) but if it's done just in software the cost should be relatively cheap. This is assuming the XBOX 2 will still use DVDs.
The fact that BG&E dropped it's price from $50 to $20 and still didn't sell is interesting, that means the high $50 cost wasn't what was keeping consumers away. There was just a lack of interest.
Shitty thing is, in entertainment occasionally a great product will be put out that flops inexplicably. Like why did the movie Blade Runner or the album Pet Sounds flop? Who knows, things are risky.
Sure you could fool the input, but then the timestamp would show the picture was taken much later, or you could hack the algorithm but if the thing was designed well you would have to open the camera up to do that and the camera would show signs of tampering.
Hmm, I hadn't considered the marketing aspects of having boxes in stores, good point.
But in general, sequels cost more and make less money.
Now since a company can make potentially hundreds of dollars from each player in subscriptions fees, why not just sell game cheap, like with a month free at $15 dollars or so? In order to get the player hooked. I'm guessing this hasn't occurred since the competition hasn't gotten intense enough between MMORPGs.
Maybe in the next couple years with the coming glut of these type of games, companies will take a risk and drop the initial fee to attract customers.
The neat thing was you could travel everywhere without loading screens, going from outside to inside dungeons without breaks. Lots of modern games can't even do that.
I think the way Hollywood works, they'll do this...
1. Make the characters a few years older
2. Make Shinji more of a hero
3. Make the ending less messed up
4. Downplay the religious aspects
but at that point they might as well just call it RahXephon.
I hope they keep the names, heck it's science fiction, weird names add to the atmosphere. If Star Wars can have pseudo-Japanese sounding names (Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin, Amidala) why not Evangelion.
Cokie Roberts tried something similar (putting on a coat and reporting in front of a blue sceen of Capitol Hill) years ago and got reprimanded for it. I think she may have made a remark about the weather there too. If she got reprimanded I think the radio reporter should too.
And funny you should mention Dan Rather, he got in a controversy too for reporting in front of a digitaly altered Times Sqaure, link.
Still you could make the case for both sides, since a lot of American companies order around the original talent and still remain profitable, while a lot of Japanese corporations have been accused of being too loyal to employees and afraid of firing underperformers.
Ironically, perhaps because Canada is so ridiculously spread out, a lot has been spent on telecommunciations resulting in lower costs, I could be wrong though.