Sounds really awesome. Unless, you know, you have more than twenty thousand files per hard drive, spread out over five drives. I'm not even talking about indexing - it just seems like it'd be a fucking pain in the ass to choose the right foo_zappa*.flac. Give me launchy > foo (enter); file > open any day.:)
Ten years ago, this would be a really exciting development. Too bad that now, when MS talks about "security", they mean "DRM"... I don't care if I was "let down" with XP, I'm sticking with it into the forseeable future, because at least I know that XP isn't wasting CPU cycles to cripple my content on my computer.
I think FOX is still crippled by being the new kid on the block. Hear me out - the local FOX station (WTTG) isn't terrible. Sure, it's trashy - without a doubt! - but what network channel isn't? FOX has the Simpsons, CBS has 60 minutes, ABC used to have Al Michaels, and NBC's oasis of credability is probably Law and Order or something. Beyond those shows, and sportscasts for those of us into such idiocy, the networks are fucking unwatchable.
But, even though the D.C. station is right on the baseline, I agree that the FOX affiliates in, for example, Florida, are some of the worst fucking scumbags on the planet.
Even though FOX is ahead of CBS or NBC or some other network in overall ratings, they're still - to my knowledge - lagging behind in overall number of affiliates. Which isn't surprising - whereas ABC, NBC, and CBS have all been around for fifty years or so, FOX showed up in the mid 1980s. So, while I'm sure there's a certain amount of desperation not to lose an affiliate no matter what the station, I'm also sure that FOX is perhaps a bit more grateful to the stations that choose to remain on-board, rather than defect (either to whatever UPN/WB is calling itself these days, or into some oddball independant station, like channels 20 and 50 used to be here in D.C. before they became part of UPN and WB, respectively). br.
Lemme guess, you're in high school. Getting ready to totally impress all the girls with your deep worldly philosophy. For some reason I don't think you've ever smoked pot, you're not literally a stoner philosopher - you just play the part. Maybe you used to be a faux-stoner philosopher, and now you're about thirty, trying to recapture the thrill of being in high school while you toil away in some soulless office job. Maybe fark is leaking, for all I know.
Seven hundred years ago, people believed the world was flat. Unfortunately, geographical forces - such as weather, tides, and the very act of days and nights - didn't really buy into this alleged "reality".
Five billion people can believe that two plus two equals five, but that doesn't affect reality, where two plus two equals 3.99999999999999999999999999:)
Regardless of whether you're right or wrong, it's hard to take you seriously when one of your champions of the press is Nast - the same guy who bent over for one of the more corrupt presidential candidates (good ol' Rutherfraud) and whose racist views on Irish immigrants pretty much cancelled out whatever level-headedness was to be found in his critiques of anti-Indian and anti-Chinese policies. Fuck him.
You just don't get it. The presidential election system in the US strongly favors two parties.
...because? Because that's how it's been through history? Sorry, I can't accept that answer. The world is flat, because through Western history, that's how it's been.
And you've done better? All you done is *thwarted* any of the attempts at bettering the world that *actually have a chance of happening*. Instead of progress one-step-at-a-time, you want progress in one big step. The primary difference is one-step-at-a-time can actually happen.
By what? Voting for Nader instead of the guy who invented the internet, stood by as the Clinton administration did their best to ham-fistedly force the web to confirm to the standards set upon by soccer mom's in the interests of their little Juniors? The guy with the PMRC wife? Keep working on your progress-one-step-at-a-time, since that's how civil liberties happened - certainly blacks didn't go from second-class citizens to constitutionally protected human beings in the span of seven years, no no, they wrote those letters into the constitution one at a time by electing shithead centrists over a period of two hundred years. You know, Wilson wrote "all human beings" and outlawed the use of barbed wire for lynchings. Then Coolidge wrote "regardless" and made it illegal to lynch a black person on a Tuesday. Hoover added the word "of" and added some oversight to make sure the Tuesday lynchers were being punished, as well as cut back on Thursday-Friday lynchings north of the Potomac. Roosevelt wrote "race" one letter at a time over the course of his tenure, and set forth policies to favor strong scolding instead of lynching. And so on and so on. That's totally how it works, and your insight has floored me.
I'll be voting for the party whose views represent my own, not for the party who promises they'll go up there into that office, take a deep breath, flex their flabby muscles and compromise.
The time to compromise and game the system was twenty years ago. Grow a spine.
And, somehow, *SPLITTING* the progressive/liberal vote between the Democratic candidate and the top third-party leftist candidate is going to work out better?
You don't think that the Democrats (who are centrists, not leftists, stop deluding yourself) might catch on that their party isn't quite left enough, and start changing their platform accordingly? You know, like what they did during the civil rights era? Hmm.
Coming in second and third doesn't mean shit. Only first place matters.
I don't think you know politics. If a party receives something like five percent of the popular vote, they're eligible for special funding and consideration. If a party receives thirty percent of the vote, I think that says something to your average "go-with-the-flow" Newsweek reader that, hey, there's a new alternative.
The rest of your post was, forgive me, stupid as fuck and pointless to get into. I'm sure Clinton didn't enact the DCMA (wait) or do his best to continue the media monopoly trend started by Reagan by easing restrictions on telecom ownership (wait again), or pass any nasty conservative bills allowing states to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman only (oh shit, wait, wait) -- well you're right, at least he didn't fuck up anything overseas, except for, you know, that pesky Iraq Liberation Act.
Still, better to piss away your vote so you can have a spineless do-nothing sleazebucket in office and feel powerful and righteous 'cause your team won, rather than, you know, vote for any sort of positive change. It's sure worked out in your Earnest Student Democrat favor the past two Presidential elections. Good going with that.
Face it, in the US(and here in Canada, Liberal vs. Conservative, both equally useless parties), there aren't really any choices.
You're jaded, and I'm jaded as well. But at least I don't succumb to bullshit circular logic like "the only choices are the Dems and the Repubs, because third parties are worthless". There is a choice, it's just that most of the population is too busy trying to game the system ("a vote for green is a vote for red") and not busy enough actually voting with their hearts.
Clinton made it possible to deport terrorists to other countries where they could be tortured (see: Extraordinary rendition). Jimmy Carter was open to the possibility of re-newing the Draft. I'd sooner vote Green and suffer the sneers of hipster assholes than ever walk away from the voting booth having given my vote to a bullshit asshole.
More and more, I feel that the reason people react so snarkishly to the term "sheeple" is because it's a bit too offensive, a bit too on the mark. Really, I'd like to stop calling you Earnest Student Democrat folks "dumb shitheads", but as long as you continue to act like such, I can't help myself. After years of turbulent bickering amongst the left/liberal wing of politics, the greater percentage of American liberals tried the whole "smile and turn the other cheek" thing (i.e., "I understand that this guy is NOT PERFECT but I will VOTE FOR HIM ANYWAY because he is in all actuality BETTER THAN THAT OTHER SHITHEAD") in the 80s, and it got us eight years of Reagan, four years of Bush, and eight years of William "CDA / OH LORD THE CHILDREN / Extraordinary Rendition" Clinton. Fuck that shit - you're assholes, shitheads, and need to change the way you view the world, before you all choke to death on the noxious fumes of your elected leader-of-the-moment's horseshit.
Jack Valenti was a fuckhead scumbag and I hope the idiocy that tainted his soul is never allowed to infect another human being for the rest of eternity.
But he wasn't on the Grassy Knoll, and you sound like a loony.
I think it "might" just be a case of a deranged religious mother going off the deep end and doing her silly god-fearing best to turn her daughter into a blessed saint, with the help of some unhinged story-telling from a student no doubt eager to do a friendly favor for his bff (or whatever terms you want to dress it up in).
As does Jack Thompson. Now there's a man who is not afraid to stand up for what he believes in! A fine individual if I
okay can't go on, i already feel sick in my stomach. but seriously, "he was a human being with convinctions" is about the dumbest thing I've read on slashdot in the last six months, including first-post spam.
You should read the writings of Lloyd Kaufman on the subject. He's the guy behind Troma Studios, and he does a much better job explaining why the ratings system which gives Terminator 2 a PG-13 rating and Bloodsucking Freaks an "X" is terminally fucked than I ever could.
Fortunately, we are spared the burden of trying to find a way; his comments do more damage to his own reputation than ANYTHING another human being could possibly say.
Methinks you're falling into a bit of a fallacy here. While I dislike Jack Thompson as much as anyone else on Slashdot, the fact of the matter is: there's a crowd out there with whom his statements resonate, and the more vehemenant he words them, the more appealing these people find it.
Just like how us nerds would get a major giggle if some judge told the RIAA to "stuff it up their ass" (rather than the typical legalese), the "moral majority" will only see him as a strong voice of his twisted, neurotic "generation".
Just dismissing him would be nice - if we were laboring under a more oligarchial society, or if two of the three branches of government weren't chosen by a bunch of uneducated morons (with the remaining branch largely appointed by the by-products of the aforementioned Democratic Reaction).
As it stands, if 51% of the voters decide that God needs to be in the schools, libraries, Wal-Marts, and bedrooms of the country - and decide this over a continuous enough period of time (i.e., no flip-flopping back and forth), then sooner or later, you'll be facing the Vatican morning, noon, and night - or risk a court summons from your friendly neighborhood JGC&MCAAofA (Jesus, God, Country, and Media Conglomerate Association of Amerigodia) agent.
Likewise, if 51% (or even less, if we accept that this isn't a black-and-white situation) of whoever happens to be babbling at the moment happen to see Thompson as "clued-in" on some significantly higher level, then guess who's going to be dictating not only what's healthy for adults - but what's healthy for children as well. Remember, it wasn't too long ago that dancing and running around were considered unhealthy for a developing mind.
There's no accounting for perception, and in a country where more people believe in angels than evolution, I believe - unfortunately - that it's necessary to be a bit uptight about idiot psycho wackjobs like him, even when being uptight is something we've all railed against for the past decade.
I did not understand, and he were speaking in the blaze rose and very wide, `what a full of him, my limbs. Joe and that stuff's of his first words. `Tried to be out of it. After- wards, she beggared me. `When shall ever could make such a relief to speak (I thought I do not a moment of them, Joe came back, but another horizontal line beyond, was with both, for a reckless witness under similar circum- stances. I am indebted for it had been made Joe put straws down
You, sir, are clearly out of touch with the highly advanced quantum issues involved. I shall summarize:
Console A has been on the market for a healthy period of time. Let's say, five years or so. This is our baseline.
Consoles B, C, and D are released. All consoles are very different in architecture from Console A, and each is moderately different in architecture from its "peers".
Console B is a runaway success, with developer after developer after developer (developer) jumping on the bandwagon to code games in the hopes of snatching a piece of the giant install base. C is not that far behind, and lots of developer developer de-- ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H lots of companies port their games from B to C, and some even elect to stay out of the Console B warzone. Console D tanks, and is served by only a few niche programmers.
Console B ends up outlasting Console C by a year or so, and C outlasts D by, say, six months. New releases for all three consoles slow down as they get older.
Console B is later recalled as having a learning curve like any other piece of hardware, but pretty easy once one gets the "knack" of it, and (possibly) full of semi-undocumented "secrets" that make for fun coding.
Console C is later recalled as being a bit trickier to program for, and this "no doubt" had some effect on its success.
Console D is looked back on as a frustrating whale-cunt of a bitch whale cunt to program for and this caused every single trouble ever.
What makes this rather tricky to grasp is that all the console designations are completely arbitrary. Thus, for a period of time (typically two years from the start of a "new generation"), all consoles inhabit a quantum "grey area", whereupon they are both easy and difficult to program for, and "therefore" both classic machines and utter failures.
We, the nerds of the seventh (?) generation, are now residing firmly in that "grey area". Prepare for chaos. (Nothing can prepare you...)
Like yourself? Of all your PS3-related comments, you seem to have an agenda to push. Are you being paid by Microsoft? 1. Pay people to go online and post anti-PS3 comments in web forums.
2. Wait for other people to grow very irritated by the paid shills.
3. ???
4. PROFIT!
The first was closed licensing, which is hard to debate, at this point, was a bad thing... in fact, it pretty much saved video gaming.
What exotic drugs did it take to come up with that, and in what amounts were you huffing them?
This whole "Nintendo SAVED the video game industry (which had been "dead" for nearly one whole year if you squint right) with their zany and uncanny Japanese cultural business practicess" myth that you (and many others) seem to have swallowed really needs to die, fast.
Nintendo had an open licensing policy in Japan, and last I checked the Famicom did pretty well over there. So the lack of this alleged "good thing" doesn't seem to have hurt the Japanese market much.
Nintendo's closed license policies in America probably hurt Nintendo in the long term, and the effectiveness in the short term is still open to debate. The only way I can make an argument that it was a good move at all was that it somehow enforced some vague notion of "quality control" - but come on now. A good portion of the games released in 1986 still blew ass (M.U.S.C.L.E. may have been borderline entertaining, especially given the time, and Dragon Power could also fall into the "good... for its time" category, but... King's Knight? Tag Team Wrestling? Deadly Towers? Jesus Christ!).
As I see it, and until a convincing argument is made otherwise, this policy was good for one party, and one party only: Nintendo. And specifically, the megalomaniacal control freaks within Nintendo. Not the video game industry as a whole, and certainly not good for the Nintendo Entertainment System or the shareholders/parties involved therein (think of all the money that could have been made had those "chip shortages" not existed - and think of all the consumers who were possibly put off by this, and turned to the competing systems which may not have been as "cool", but at least had games on the shelves).
Why do you think so many developers (EA in particular - back before they turned into Madden Nation, those guys could code) fell over themselves to program for the Sega Genesis, and propel it to a position where it managed to end up pretty much even with the Super Nintendo, seven years down the road? It had nothing to do with immediate market share in 1989, I can tell you that for sure.
Anyway, feel free to ignore this post and go back to your paper bag full of God-knows-what and those fantasies where every developer in the entire world develops for every system ever made, and where every developer learns the same thing from the same experience, and where the principles of proper memory storage routines weren't thought about at all in the twenty years of computing prior to the N64, but in "actuality" just happened to fall out of Nintendo's jewel-encrusted asshole around 1997 or thereabouts.
If there were a dirth of titles for the ps3 coming out, then this wouldn't be news
dearth n.
1. an inadequate supply; scarcity; lack: There is a dearth of good engineers.
2. scarcity and dearness of food; famine.
If you're going to use grown-up words in your rushed and half-witted attempt at getting first post, make sure you know what the words mean. Your dignity thanks you in advance.
Honestly? That they're games I keep bumping into (there was even a SNES port, if I'm not mistaken), keep wanting to play, keep installing/booting up, keep playing, and yet can never quite really wrap my head around. I wholeheartedly applaud the concept of "new sports" and all, but I think in the case of Speedball that the dated presentation makes it dauntingly impenetrable for a n00bey. They seem, from my limited insight, to be the sort of games where the AI beats you simply because it's more able to keep track of all ten billion statistics, and should end up being reasonably exploitable - but that's from a total of maybe thirty minutes of gameplay, tops, before bailing.
If there was ever an open-source, GL-riffic snazzy update, I'd be more than willing to check the series out yet again.
Without a doubt, my vote goes to Microsoft Office. Specifically, that devious little rapscillion known as "Clippy". The developers managed to give him a horribly irritating personality, which fit so well with his innate ability to figure out the one facet of Office that I was completely uninterested in at the moment, and start yamering on about it.
I always wondered, back in the dark ages of computing, what it would be like to type a letter with Steve Urkel reading over my shoulder. Hats off to Microsoft - they captured the feeling perfectly.
Writing an AI that makes the occasional "human error", or responds in a reasonable time is harder than writing the "best AI possible", but makes for a more believable (and of course, enjoyable (since who likes getting beaten all the time)) game experience.
True. And unfortunately, all-too-often AIs make the "human error" element completely predictable, thus missing the entire point of "human error", and becoming nothing more than "sloppy AI".
Hah. Glad I'm not the only one out there who's sick and tired of bad hockey AI.
All-time best: NHL '96, for SNES. The scoring trick is as follows: Skate with the puck. Take a slapshot right at the goalie from about the blue line. More often than not, it'll go right through the goalie. If that fails, deke, then shoot the same way you deked (i.e., the side of the net the goalie moved to). For whatever reason, while the AI goalie can make amazing glove saves (preventing the "classic" deke, shoot empty-side scoring trick in NHL 95), it has problems blocking a puck shot straight at it.
I seem to recall NHL Stanley Cup '95 as being one of the few hockey games without a reliable, more-often-than-not scoring bug. It also had a rather crude imitation of degrading ice surface (one of the first games I remember that actually did this). Balancing these highlights out, though: there is no fighting because "OMG the NHL is a family sport", and checking in general is pretty retarded.
20 years later, and Ice Hockey for the NES is still the best overall hockey game. Blades of Steel being a respectable second. Sad, kinda.
Slashdot Mirror
Aren't you the same people muttering about war being peace, slavery being freedom, and us always being at war with... somebody or other?
Sounds really awesome. Unless, you know, you have more than twenty thousand files per hard drive, spread out over five drives. I'm not even talking about indexing - it just seems like it'd be a fucking pain in the ass to choose the right foo_zappa*.flac. Give me launchy > foo (enter); file > open any day. :)
And once again, a Mac user seems to lack even the most basic grasp of semantics, let alone the concept that words actually mean things.
Ten years ago, this would be a really exciting development. Too bad that now, when MS talks about "security", they mean "DRM"... I don't care if I was "let down" with XP, I'm sticking with it into the forseeable future, because at least I know that XP isn't wasting CPU cycles to cripple my content on my computer.
Fuck Vista.
I think FOX is still crippled by being the new kid on the block. Hear me out - the local FOX station (WTTG) isn't terrible. Sure, it's trashy - without a doubt! - but what network channel isn't? FOX has the Simpsons, CBS has 60 minutes, ABC used to have Al Michaels, and NBC's oasis of credability is probably Law and Order or something. Beyond those shows, and sportscasts for those of us into such idiocy, the networks are fucking unwatchable.
But, even though the D.C. station is right on the baseline, I agree that the FOX affiliates in, for example, Florida, are some of the worst fucking scumbags on the planet.
Even though FOX is ahead of CBS or NBC or some other network in overall ratings, they're still - to my knowledge - lagging behind in overall number of affiliates. Which isn't surprising - whereas ABC, NBC, and CBS have all been around for fifty years or so, FOX showed up in the mid 1980s. So, while I'm sure there's a certain amount of desperation not to lose an affiliate no matter what the station, I'm also sure that FOX is perhaps a bit more grateful to the stations that choose to remain on-board, rather than defect (either to whatever UPN/WB is calling itself these days, or into some oddball independant station, like channels 20 and 50 used to be here in D.C. before they became part of UPN and WB, respectively).
br.
Lemme guess, you're in high school. Getting ready to totally impress all the girls with your deep worldly philosophy. For some reason I don't think you've ever smoked pot, you're not literally a stoner philosopher - you just play the part. Maybe you used to be a faux-stoner philosopher, and now you're about thirty, trying to recapture the thrill of being in high school while you toil away in some soulless office job. Maybe fark is leaking, for all I know.
:)
Seven hundred years ago, people believed the world was flat. Unfortunately, geographical forces - such as weather, tides, and the very act of days and nights - didn't really buy into this alleged "reality".
Five billion people can believe that two plus two equals five, but that doesn't affect reality, where two plus two equals 3.99999999999999999999999999
Regardless of whether you're right or wrong, it's hard to take you seriously when one of your champions of the press is Nast - the same guy who bent over for one of the more corrupt presidential candidates (good ol' Rutherfraud) and whose racist views on Irish immigrants pretty much cancelled out whatever level-headedness was to be found in his critiques of anti-Indian and anti-Chinese policies. Fuck him.
"fairly attractive"? Uh... she looks like Linda Eddy (of Iowa Presidential Watch - definitely worth a drunken browse or two. Bitch be crazy).
In other words, I'd sooner fuck the horse she rode in on.
And you've done better? All you done is *thwarted* any of the attempts at bettering the world that *actually have a chance of happening*. Instead of progress one-step-at-a-time, you want progress in one big step. The primary difference is one-step-at-a-time can actually happen.
By what? Voting for Nader instead of the guy who invented the internet, stood by as the Clinton administration did their best to ham-fistedly force the web to confirm to the standards set upon by soccer mom's in the interests of their little Juniors? The guy with the PMRC wife? Keep working on your progress-one-step-at-a-time, since that's how civil liberties happened - certainly blacks didn't go from second-class citizens to constitutionally protected human beings in the span of seven years, no no, they wrote those letters into the constitution one at a time by electing shithead centrists over a period of two hundred years. You know, Wilson wrote "all human beings" and outlawed the use of barbed wire for lynchings. Then Coolidge wrote "regardless" and made it illegal to lynch a black person on a Tuesday. Hoover added the word "of" and added some oversight to make sure the Tuesday lynchers were being punished, as well as cut back on Thursday-Friday lynchings north of the Potomac. Roosevelt wrote "race" one letter at a time over the course of his tenure, and set forth policies to favor strong scolding instead of lynching. And so on and so on. That's totally how it works, and your insight has floored me.
I'll be voting for the party whose views represent my own, not for the party who promises they'll go up there into that office, take a deep breath, flex their flabby muscles and compromise.
The time to compromise and game the system was twenty years ago. Grow a spine.
You don't think that the Democrats (who are centrists, not leftists, stop deluding yourself) might catch on that their party isn't quite left enough, and start changing their platform accordingly? You know, like what they did during the civil rights era? Hmm.
Coming in second and third doesn't mean shit. Only first place matters.
I don't think you know politics. If a party receives something like five percent of the popular vote, they're eligible for special funding and consideration. If a party receives thirty percent of the vote, I think that says something to your average "go-with-the-flow" Newsweek reader that, hey, there's a new alternative.
The rest of your post was, forgive me, stupid as fuck and pointless to get into. I'm sure Clinton didn't enact the DCMA (wait) or do his best to continue the media monopoly trend started by Reagan by easing restrictions on telecom ownership (wait again), or pass any nasty conservative bills allowing states to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman only (oh shit, wait, wait) -- well you're right, at least he didn't fuck up anything overseas, except for, you know, that pesky Iraq Liberation Act.
Still, better to piss away your vote so you can have a spineless do-nothing sleazebucket in office and feel powerful and righteous 'cause your team won, rather than, you know, vote for any sort of positive change. It's sure worked out in your Earnest Student Democrat favor the past two Presidential elections. Good going with that.
You're jaded, and I'm jaded as well. But at least I don't succumb to bullshit circular logic like "the only choices are the Dems and the Repubs, because third parties are worthless". There is a choice, it's just that most of the population is too busy trying to game the system ("a vote for green is a vote for red") and not busy enough actually voting with their hearts.
Clinton made it possible to deport terrorists to other countries where they could be tortured (see: Extraordinary rendition). Jimmy Carter was open to the possibility of re-newing the Draft. I'd sooner vote Green and suffer the sneers of hipster assholes than ever walk away from the voting booth having given my vote to a bullshit asshole.
More and more, I feel that the reason people react so snarkishly to the term "sheeple" is because it's a bit too offensive, a bit too on the mark. Really, I'd like to stop calling you Earnest Student Democrat folks "dumb shitheads", but as long as you continue to act like such, I can't help myself. After years of turbulent bickering amongst the left/liberal wing of politics, the greater percentage of American liberals tried the whole "smile and turn the other cheek" thing (i.e., "I understand that this guy is NOT PERFECT but I will VOTE FOR HIM ANYWAY because he is in all actuality BETTER THAN THAT OTHER SHITHEAD") in the 80s, and it got us eight years of Reagan, four years of Bush, and eight years of William "CDA / OH LORD THE CHILDREN / Extraordinary Rendition" Clinton. Fuck that shit - you're assholes, shitheads, and need to change the way you view the world, before you all choke to death on the noxious fumes of your elected leader-of-the-moment's horseshit.
HAND
Jack Valenti was a fuckhead scumbag and I hope the idiocy that tainted his soul is never allowed to infect another human being for the rest of eternity.
But he wasn't on the Grassy Knoll, and you sound like a loony.
Key word: "Might".
;-)
I think it "might" just be a case of a deranged religious mother going off the deep end and doing her silly god-fearing best to turn her daughter into a blessed saint, with the help of some unhinged story-telling from a student no doubt eager to do a friendly favor for his bff (or whatever terms you want to dress it up in).
Sorta like that vegetable girl up in Massachusetts.
I also think that my "might-scenario" is mightier than yours.
(I know you already knew this, hence your capslock bolded "might" - but I'm just summarizing for those who are too lazy to click the wiki link)
As does Jack Thompson. Now there's a man who is not afraid to stand up for what he believes in! A fine individual if I
okay can't go on, i already feel sick in my stomach. but seriously, "he was a human being with convinctions" is about the dumbest thing I've read on slashdot in the last six months, including first-post spam.
You should read the writings of Lloyd Kaufman on the subject. He's the guy behind Troma Studios, and he does a much better job explaining why the ratings system which gives Terminator 2 a PG-13 rating and Bloodsucking Freaks an "X" is terminally fucked than I ever could.
Methinks you're falling into a bit of a fallacy here. While I dislike Jack Thompson as much as anyone else on Slashdot, the fact of the matter is: there's a crowd out there with whom his statements resonate, and the more vehemenant he words them, the more appealing these people find it.
Just like how us nerds would get a major giggle if some judge told the RIAA to "stuff it up their ass" (rather than the typical legalese), the "moral majority" will only see him as a strong voice of his twisted, neurotic "generation".
Just dismissing him would be nice - if we were laboring under a more oligarchial society, or if two of the three branches of government weren't chosen by a bunch of uneducated morons (with the remaining branch largely appointed by the by-products of the aforementioned Democratic Reaction).
As it stands, if 51% of the voters decide that God needs to be in the schools, libraries, Wal-Marts, and bedrooms of the country - and decide this over a continuous enough period of time (i.e., no flip-flopping back and forth), then sooner or later, you'll be facing the Vatican morning, noon, and night - or risk a court summons from your friendly neighborhood JGC&MCAAofA (Jesus, God, Country, and Media Conglomerate Association of Amerigodia) agent.
Likewise, if 51% (or even less, if we accept that this isn't a black-and-white situation) of whoever happens to be babbling at the moment happen to see Thompson as "clued-in" on some significantly higher level, then guess who's going to be dictating not only what's healthy for adults - but what's healthy for children as well. Remember, it wasn't too long ago that dancing and running around were considered unhealthy for a developing mind.
There's no accounting for perception, and in a country where more people believe in angels than evolution, I believe - unfortunately - that it's necessary to be a bit uptight about idiot psycho wackjobs like him, even when being uptight is something we've all railed against for the past decade.
I did not understand, and he were speaking in the blaze rose and very wide, `what a full of him, my limbs. Joe and that stuff's of his first words. `Tried to be out of it. After- wards, she beggared me. `When shall ever could make such a relief to speak (I thought I do not a moment of them, Joe came back, but another horizontal line beyond, was with both, for a reckless witness under similar circum- stances. I am indebted for it had been made Joe put straws down
(c) 2007 Nugneant's PC, with help from Markov and http://johno.jsmf.net/knowhow/ngrams/index.php. No user interference or assitance, in compliance with Amazon.com's patent.
- Console B is later recalled as having a learning curve like any other piece of hardware, but pretty easy once one gets the "knack" of it, and (possibly) full of semi-undocumented "secrets" that make for fun coding.
- Console C is later recalled as being a bit trickier to program for, and this "no doubt" had some effect on its success.
- Console D is looked back on as a frustrating whale-cunt of a bitch whale cunt to program for and this caused every single trouble ever.
What makes this rather tricky to grasp is that all the console designations are completely arbitrary. Thus, for a period of time (typically two years from the start of a "new generation"), all consoles inhabit a quantum "grey area", whereupon they are both easy and difficult to program for, and "therefore" both classic machines and utter failures.We, the nerds of the seventh (?) generation, are now residing firmly in that "grey area". Prepare for chaos. (Nothing can prepare you...)
Like yourself? Of all your PS3-related comments, you seem to have an agenda to push. Are you being paid by Microsoft? 1. Pay people to go online and post anti-PS3 comments in web forums. 2. Wait for other people to grow very irritated by the paid shills. 3. ??? 4. PROFIT!
What exotic drugs did it take to come up with that, and in what amounts were you huffing them?
This whole "Nintendo SAVED the video game industry (which had been "dead" for nearly one whole year if you squint right) with their zany and uncanny Japanese cultural business practicess" myth that you (and many others) seem to have swallowed really needs to die, fast.
Nintendo had an open licensing policy in Japan, and last I checked the Famicom did pretty well over there. So the lack of this alleged "good thing" doesn't seem to have hurt the Japanese market much.
Nintendo's closed license policies in America probably hurt Nintendo in the long term, and the effectiveness in the short term is still open to debate. The only way I can make an argument that it was a good move at all was that it somehow enforced some vague notion of "quality control" - but come on now. A good portion of the games released in 1986 still blew ass (M.U.S.C.L.E. may have been borderline entertaining, especially given the time, and Dragon Power could also fall into the "good... for its time" category, but... King's Knight? Tag Team Wrestling? Deadly Towers? Jesus Christ!).
As I see it, and until a convincing argument is made otherwise, this policy was good for one party, and one party only: Nintendo. And specifically, the megalomaniacal control freaks within Nintendo. Not the video game industry as a whole, and certainly not good for the Nintendo Entertainment System or the shareholders/parties involved therein (think of all the money that could have been made had those "chip shortages" not existed - and think of all the consumers who were possibly put off by this, and turned to the competing systems which may not have been as "cool", but at least had games on the shelves).
Why do you think so many developers (EA in particular - back before they turned into Madden Nation, those guys could code) fell over themselves to program for the Sega Genesis, and propel it to a position where it managed to end up pretty much even with the Super Nintendo, seven years down the road? It had nothing to do with immediate market share in 1989, I can tell you that for sure.
Anyway, feel free to ignore this post and go back to your paper bag full of God-knows-what and those fantasies where every developer in the entire world develops for every system ever made, and where every developer learns the same thing from the same experience, and where the principles of proper memory storage routines weren't thought about at all in the twenty years of computing prior to the N64, but in "actuality" just happened to fall out of Nintendo's jewel-encrusted asshole around 1997 or thereabouts.
dearth n.
1. an inadequate supply; scarcity; lack: There is a dearth of good engineers.
2. scarcity and dearness of food; famine.
If you're going to use grown-up words in your rushed and half-witted attempt at getting first post, make sure you know what the words mean. Your dignity thanks you in advance.
Honestly? That they're games I keep bumping into (there was even a SNES port, if I'm not mistaken), keep wanting to play, keep installing/booting up, keep playing, and yet can never quite really wrap my head around. I wholeheartedly applaud the concept of "new sports" and all, but I think in the case of Speedball that the dated presentation makes it dauntingly impenetrable for a n00bey. They seem, from my limited insight, to be the sort of games where the AI beats you simply because it's more able to keep track of all ten billion statistics, and should end up being reasonably exploitable - but that's from a total of maybe thirty minutes of gameplay, tops, before bailing.
If there was ever an open-source, GL-riffic snazzy update, I'd be more than willing to check the series out yet again.
Without a doubt, my vote goes to Microsoft Office. Specifically, that devious little rapscillion known as "Clippy". The developers managed to give him a horribly irritating personality, which fit so well with his innate ability to figure out the one facet of Office that I was completely uninterested in at the moment, and start yamering on about it.
I always wondered, back in the dark ages of computing, what it would be like to type a letter with Steve Urkel reading over my shoulder. Hats off to Microsoft - they captured the feeling perfectly.
True. And unfortunately, all-too-often AIs make the "human error" element completely predictable, thus missing the entire point of "human error", and becoming nothing more than "sloppy AI".
Hah. Glad I'm not the only one out there who's sick and tired of bad hockey AI.
All-time best: NHL '96, for SNES. The scoring trick is as follows: Skate with the puck. Take a slapshot right at the goalie from about the blue line. More often than not, it'll go right through the goalie. If that fails, deke, then shoot the same way you deked (i.e., the side of the net the goalie moved to). For whatever reason, while the AI goalie can make amazing glove saves (preventing the "classic" deke, shoot empty-side scoring trick in NHL 95), it has problems blocking a puck shot straight at it.
I seem to recall NHL Stanley Cup '95 as being one of the few hockey games without a reliable, more-often-than-not scoring bug. It also had a rather crude imitation of degrading ice surface (one of the first games I remember that actually did this). Balancing these highlights out, though: there is no fighting because "OMG the NHL is a family sport", and checking in general is pretty retarded.
20 years later, and Ice Hockey for the NES is still the best overall hockey game. Blades of Steel being a respectable second. Sad, kinda.