Actually the Junk to Quality Ratio on the DS is pretty much 10:1, which is not too bad for a successful gaming system.
And I agree the DS in the recent months has become a dumping ground for the quick buck to be made, the junk to quality ration used to be way better.
But there are a lot of gems, while you mention starfox, I dont think this is a quick buck port, the game is excellent, super mario 64 also was no straight port but altered, but it had the usual first lineup problem they did not know how to get the controls right.
Besides that there are things like another code, trauma center etc... which are very original and not original Nintendo.
But it is like with every other nintendo system, the original concepts are more to be found on the nintendo side, and the most boring stuff usually is from EA, while the rest has a hard time to reach a good quality level to be able to rival with nintendo.
The main problem is that Nintendos games have excellent quality, every game which does not come close to this quality or even tries to, looks like a stinker, while on other systems they might pass as average games.
If you deliver excellent quality you can compete with Nintendo also on Nintendo systems.
Classic example is Rayman Raving rabbits, probably the only non Nintendo must have title for the Wii. And just because the game really is designed for the wii (it would not work on other consoles that way, due to the control scheme)
Publishers like EA who constantly just recycle the same garbage have a hard time on Nintendo systems, but others who try different things and have good quality like Ubisoft lately or also Capcom lately are quite happy there.
Nintendo produces bad games very rarely, while I do not even touch games from certain publishers.
Actually if you look at the mario and zelda games, you will see that the characters often are recycled but the gameplay differs quite a lot, which is a lot compared to many other publishers who recycled the gameplay and exchange the characters and hammer a different title onto them.
I recently had the chance to play mario 64 (bought it over the virtual console) and was quite surprised how different the gameplay was to what I was expecting. Instead of doing another pure jump and run this game had an amazing puzzle density from the beginning.
Another one is Zelda, twilight princess is simply excellent and quite different compared to the old zelda titles which I had played (although probably very similar to occarina of time)
You can blame nintendo for many things, but not for recycling the game over and over again like EA does.
prototype while being cool, has been kicked out of some projects already again, due to the stance of the developers of hijacking language features and
important keyword sequences for their own use.
it is not funny to have a lib which hijacks the dollar sign or extends a base object of javascript in several ways.
one word check out the dojo toolkit www.dojotoolkit.org, then you can see which codesizes we are already dealing with. The dojo toolkit is not the only javascript codebase of significant size already outside in the wild, the more interactive the applications become the more you see toolkits of that size becoming the norm not the exception.
i sum it up simple and easy, namespaces provide constructs that you do not end up with functions looking like that
org_slashdot_module1_submodule2_classname_function name
ok given that you can embed functions in functions you at least can block these names on definition level
of the subfunctions, but you cannot on the root level of the function.
Sorry to say that, but the problem really is there, and it is severe, someone mentioned you do not need this stuff because javascript scripts are small and not application level. I do a lot of web2 stuff and I can assure you there are huge code libraries which heavily utilize javascript and some of them go wild hoops to add the namespacing to avoid this problem (and also to simplify the crude prototype inheritance constructs)
the classic example of this would be the dojo toolkit www.dojotoolkit.org. We are already in javascript at codesizes of middle size applications, if you run that stuff on a serious interactive level.
Soap is too complex yes, but I do not agree with the assumption you do not a tool = good, tool = bad, we have been relying on tools since the first assemblers, after all an assembler also is a tool to generate 0 and 1 or at an higher level hex codes, which people used to program directly.
What the soap tools do, is just to generate the glue code instead of having it done implicitely by a library trying to cover the general remoting complexities generally.
That soap shoots over the top with its crude xml binding layer syntax and that things could be and are done simpler is another issue, which inherently came from the fact that lots of parts of soap stem from the roots of Microsoft who basically have an inherent complexity problem when it comes to all things object (see COM/OLE as one of the worst examples of components done wrong)
I would not call javascript more dense,
scripting languages usually have a denser syntax due to shortcuts and introspection on language level.
Javascript is one of the weakest scripting languages thanks to missing namespaces and prototype
handling in those aspects.
I would not even call it denser the missing namespaces result in overly long class and function names.
Actually javascript has good concepts, but its execution is missing the vital 5% of namespaces, and good object syntax constructs.
If you want to see javascript done right check out groovy for instance, same idea as javascript in language design, but way better in execution.
I would not say most conservative, more along the lines of being the worst Hicks of western europe.
Even for Austrians which are very close to Bavaria in many aspects (But fortunately not in their boneheadedness and idiocy) Bavaria slowly becomes a joke and a part we also are ashamed of.
Sorry to say that northern friends but currently you guys are a sick joke, even for us.
Probably more, the number of Wiis sold, is roughly 2 mio and i assume given my experiences (most of the first shipments in the store I visited were gobbled up by students) half of them already are given proper use.
Now we have 50 confirmd cases of broken straps and almost zero of any real hardware problems, I would say this is a quality product.
I agree, I own to Wiimotes (I love the Wii btw, excellent machine and Zelda is awesome) and it is beyound me how you can break those things at all. The strap is very strong even in its thin edition.
I guess only a few straps really broke, I assume that in some of those cases the strap was deliberately broken afterwards to gather the insurance money for the broken TV.
After all it is hard to lose the wiimote, but possible, but loosing the wiimote and breaking the strap is really really hard, if possible at all.
I am not saying that all of the confirmed cases were fakes, but some of them probably are.
Anyway, I am glad Nintendo reacts so swiftly. Nintendo is one of the few companies which still take customer satisfaction very seriously, and this reaction only shows nothing more or less, of what I would expect from them.
(Sony can you hear?)
You know that the offense against the web came from the fact, that they did not do any development on ie except hole fixes for somewhat seven years. I never was their intent to support open standards, they wanted to take over the web, and not supporting standards fully while shouting to the press we do it, is one of their tactics, which they have used a lot of times.
(The other one is fud and smear campaigns)
Until governments enforce certain standards up to the level that compliance tests have to be passed, there is no way to stop them to use those tactics to take over open standards and close them in the long run (the classic example of this is the once open SMB protocol, invented and published by IBM!!!!)
Guess who nowadays pays many of the Samba devs for their reverse engineering work to at least have one open SMB option, IBM. IBM used to be bad, but they never stole open standards from the general and then closed them off while shouting we invent and this is our property!
Mozart himself was an oversexed party guy, it is a common myth that Mozart was poor, fact is he was very rich in his income, but he blew all the money out of the window with an exaggerated lifestyle.
Also he was supposed to be a very rude person, parts of his letters were reedited after his death by his wife and her later husband, to clean up his image.
Re:It's not really a Firefox alpha
on
Firefox 3 In Alpha
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This is more than ie7 was, ie7 was a frontend change with only a handful of bugfixes in the backend, and even the top 10 list of worst bugs was not fully fixed.
Easy, stronger game buy rate, many psp owners simply have bought it to play emus and shy new software due to firmware updates which close the homebrew hole.
The games are way less expensive to develop for and the controller interface opens possibilities formerly only being possible with a mouse.
Btw. the sales numbers have been corrected by others I do not comment on them.
I actually like the strategy element, and btw. you can expect from nintendo to try new things once in a while, most of the times they are right on, but sometimes they fail.
Btw. the strategy element should have been in one of the early Starfox games, which was axed due to the pending N64 release, so it is not really new, it just never made it into a published game.
The strategy element is excellent, the time limits are the problem of Starfox DS.
Could be, I checked the strap on my wiimote and it does not seem to be easy to break.
But neither is it easy to lose the grip on the wiimote.
I do not know what those people were doing I dont think losing the grip and breaking the strap at the same time is very easy.
I almost forgot, reports from germany and also from the local store I went in seemed to indicate that the stores only were getting a fraction of the intended number of consoles.
No component cables were sold, and the wiimote only was buyable in combination with wii games (which is nice but not really worth the price)
Another sidenote, I just wonder how Nintendo europe wants to handle the whole wiipoints thing. As for now and this has been a nuisance for years now, Nintendo europe only accepts user registrations from a small number of EU countries (around 5-7). I am not sure if you can buy wiipoints in the stores as well.
But for most Europeans and even EU citizens there is no way currently, to either register your console on the web or to open a user account at the Nintendo Europe User page.
Another sidenote, there are rumours that the only country in Europe currently overstocked with Wii is swizerland (also one of the countries on Nintendo Europes, we do not know this country list)
so if you are in a bad need for a wii and you live in one of the neighbouring countries, you might give it a chance.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the Junk to Quality Ratio on the DS is pretty much 10:1, which is not too bad for a successful gaming system. And I agree the DS in the recent months has become a dumping ground for the quick buck to be made, the junk to quality ration used to be way better. But there are a lot of gems, while you mention starfox, I dont think this is a quick buck port, the game is excellent, super mario 64 also was no straight port but altered, but it had the usual first lineup problem they did not know how to get the controls right. Besides that there are things like another code, trauma center etc... which are very original and not original Nintendo. But it is like with every other nintendo system, the original concepts are more to be found on the nintendo side, and the most boring stuff usually is from EA, while the rest has a hard time to reach a good quality level to be able to rival with nintendo.
The main problem is that Nintendos games have excellent quality, every game which does not come close to this quality or even tries to, looks like a stinker, while on other systems they might pass as average games.
If you deliver excellent quality you can compete with Nintendo also on Nintendo systems. Classic example is Rayman Raving rabbits, probably the only non Nintendo must have title for the Wii. And just because the game really is designed for the wii (it would not work on other consoles that way, due to the control scheme)
Publishers like EA who constantly just recycle the same garbage have a hard time on Nintendo systems, but others who try different things and have good quality like Ubisoft lately or also Capcom lately are quite happy there.
Nintendo produces bad games very rarely, while I do not even touch games from certain publishers.
Actually if you look at the mario and zelda games, you will see that the characters often are recycled but the gameplay differs quite a lot, which is a lot compared to many other publishers who recycled the gameplay and exchange the characters and hammer a different title onto them. I recently had the chance to play mario 64 (bought it over the virtual console) and was quite surprised how different the gameplay was to what I was expecting. Instead of doing another pure jump and run this game had an amazing puzzle density from the beginning. Another one is Zelda, twilight princess is simply excellent and quite different compared to the old zelda titles which I had played (although probably very similar to occarina of time) You can blame nintendo for many things, but not for recycling the game over and over again like EA does.
prototype while being cool, has been kicked out of some projects already again, due to the stance of the developers of hijacking language features and important keyword sequences for their own use. it is not funny to have a lib which hijacks the dollar sign or extends a base object of javascript in several ways.
one word check out the dojo toolkit www.dojotoolkit.org, then you can see which codesizes we are already dealing with. The dojo toolkit is not the only javascript codebase of significant size already outside in the wild, the more interactive the applications become the more you see toolkits of that size becoming the norm not the exception.
i sum it up simple and easy, namespaces provide constructs that you do not end up with functions looking like that org_slashdot_module1_submodule2_classname_function name
ok given that you can embed functions in functions you at least can block these names on definition level of the subfunctions, but you cannot on the root level of the function.
Sorry to say that, but the problem really is there, and it is severe, someone mentioned you do not need this stuff because javascript scripts are small and not application level. I do a lot of web2 stuff and I can assure you there are huge code libraries which heavily utilize javascript and some of them go wild hoops to add the namespacing to avoid this problem (and also to simplify the crude prototype inheritance constructs)
the classic example of this would be the dojo toolkit www.dojotoolkit.org. We are already in javascript at codesizes of middle size applications, if you run that stuff on a serious interactive level.
Soap is too complex yes, but I do not agree with the assumption you do not a tool = good, tool = bad, we have been relying on tools since the first assemblers, after all an assembler also is a tool to generate 0 and 1 or at an higher level hex codes, which people used to program directly. What the soap tools do, is just to generate the glue code instead of having it done implicitely by a library trying to cover the general remoting complexities generally. That soap shoots over the top with its crude xml binding layer syntax and that things could be and are done simpler is another issue, which inherently came from the fact that lots of parts of soap stem from the roots of Microsoft who basically have an inherent complexity problem when it comes to all things object (see COM/OLE as one of the worst examples of components done wrong)
I would not call javascript more dense, scripting languages usually have a denser syntax due to shortcuts and introspection on language level. Javascript is one of the weakest scripting languages thanks to missing namespaces and prototype handling in those aspects. I would not even call it denser the missing namespaces result in overly long class and function names. Actually javascript has good concepts, but its execution is missing the vital 5% of namespaces, and good object syntax constructs. If you want to see javascript done right check out groovy for instance, same idea as javascript in language design, but way better in execution.
They did indeed, the german population by now is pretty mixed especially in larger cities...
I was playing Wii basketball, and slam dunked the wii mote into the TV, the problem was the strap survived, the wii mote as well, the tv didnt.
I would not say most conservative, more along the lines of being the worst Hicks of western europe. Even for Austrians which are very close to Bavaria in many aspects (But fortunately not in their boneheadedness and idiocy) Bavaria slowly becomes a joke and a part we also are ashamed of. Sorry to say that northern friends but currently you guys are a sick joke, even for us.
Probably more, the number of Wiis sold, is roughly 2 mio and i assume given my experiences (most of the first shipments in the store I visited were gobbled up by students) half of them already are given proper use. Now we have 50 confirmd cases of broken straps and almost zero of any real hardware problems, I would say this is a quality product.
To clear up the situation, the Wii has around 2 million confirmed sold machines, 50 cases of strap breaking have been confirmed so far....
Get another wife and fry your cat...
Actually Sony would push your through 15 layers of automated tech support questions before a person tells you politely screw yourself...
I agree, I own to Wiimotes (I love the Wii btw, excellent machine and Zelda is awesome) and it is beyound me how you can break those things at all. The strap is very strong even in its thin edition. I guess only a few straps really broke, I assume that in some of those cases the strap was deliberately broken afterwards to gather the insurance money for the broken TV. After all it is hard to lose the wiimote, but possible, but loosing the wiimote and breaking the strap is really really hard, if possible at all. I am not saying that all of the confirmed cases were fakes, but some of them probably are. Anyway, I am glad Nintendo reacts so swiftly. Nintendo is one of the few companies which still take customer satisfaction very seriously, and this reaction only shows nothing more or less, of what I would expect from them. (Sony can you hear?)
You know that the offense against the web came from the fact, that they did not do any development on ie except hole fixes for somewhat seven years. I never was their intent to support open standards, they wanted to take over the web, and not supporting standards fully while shouting to the press we do it, is one of their tactics, which they have used a lot of times. (The other one is fud and smear campaigns) Until governments enforce certain standards up to the level that compliance tests have to be passed, there is no way to stop them to use those tactics to take over open standards and close them in the long run (the classic example of this is the once open SMB protocol, invented and published by IBM!!!!) Guess who nowadays pays many of the Samba devs for their reverse engineering work to at least have one open SMB option, IBM. IBM used to be bad, but they never stole open standards from the general and then closed them off while shouting we invent and this is our property!
On handhelds they are... some of the Nintendo DS games already have made it in the top 10 list of games with most sells ever...
Mozart himself was an oversexed party guy, it is a common myth that Mozart was poor, fact is he was very rich in his income, but he blew all the money out of the window with an exaggerated lifestyle. Also he was supposed to be a very rude person, parts of his letters were reedited after his death by his wife and her later husband, to clean up his image.
to be released end of next week in europe
This is more than ie7 was, ie7 was a frontend change with only a handful of bugfixes in the backend, and even the top 10 list of worst bugs was not fully fixed.
Easy, stronger game buy rate, many psp owners simply have bought it to play emus and shy new software due to firmware updates which close the homebrew hole. The games are way less expensive to develop for and the controller interface opens possibilities formerly only being possible with a mouse. Btw. the sales numbers have been corrected by others I do not comment on them.
I actually like the strategy element, and btw. you can expect from nintendo to try new things once in a while, most of the times they are right on, but sometimes they fail. Btw. the strategy element should have been in one of the early Starfox games, which was axed due to the pending N64 release, so it is not really new, it just never made it into a published game. The strategy element is excellent, the time limits are the problem of Starfox DS.
Could be, I checked the strap on my wiimote and it does not seem to be easy to break. But neither is it easy to lose the grip on the wiimote. I do not know what those people were doing I dont think losing the grip and breaking the strap at the same time is very easy.
I almost forgot, reports from germany and also from the local store I went in seemed to indicate that the stores only were getting a fraction of the intended number of consoles.
No component cables were sold, and the wiimote only was buyable in combination with wii games (which is nice but not really worth the price)
Another sidenote, I just wonder how Nintendo europe wants to handle the whole wiipoints thing. As for now and this has been a nuisance for years now, Nintendo europe only accepts user registrations from a small number of EU countries (around 5-7). I am not sure if you can buy wiipoints in the stores as well. But for most Europeans and even EU citizens there is no way currently, to either register your console on the web or to open a user account at the Nintendo Europe User page.
Another sidenote, there are rumours that the only country in Europe currently overstocked with Wii is swizerland (also one of the countries on Nintendo Europes, we do not know this country list) so if you are in a bad need for a wii and you live in one of the neighbouring countries, you might give it a chance.