Re:Such Innovation In a Time of Little
on
We Love Katamari
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· Score: 1
You're thinking of The Grand List Of Console Role Playing Game Clichés. Some highlights:
"No! My beloved peasant village!"
The hero's home town, city, slum, or planet will usually be annihilated in a spectacular fashion before the end of the game, and often before the end of the opening scene.
"Silly Squall, bringing a sword to a gunfight..."
No matter what timeframe the game is set in -- past, present, or future -- the main hero and his antagonist will both use a sword for a weapon. (Therefore, you can identify your antagonist pretty easily right from the start of the game just by looking for the other guy who uses a sword.) These swords will be far more powerful than any gun and often capable of distance attacks.
Bed Bed Bed
A good night's sleep will cure all wounds, diseases, and disabilities, up to and including death in battle.
Short Attention Span Principle
All bookshelves contain exactly one book, which only has enough text on it to fill up half a page.
Golden Chocobo Principle
There will be at least one supremely ultimate improvement for your weapon or some way to make your trusted steed capable of going anywhere and doing anything, requiring hours and hours of hard work to acquire. Once you do achieve this, you will use it once, and it will be completely useless for the rest of the game.
I'd be surprised if you can. While this is possible in battle mode, the description of co-op seems to indicate two princes and a single katamari, with each player controlling one of the two sides of the ball (a single analog stick each) rather than one player controlling both.
The article mentions a cooperative mode in this iteration, with two players working in sync to move a single katamari. I think this is the most exciting part of the announcement; we could guess most of the rest, really. This is a great reason to buy the new edition. Personally, I didn't enjoy the battle mode in the first volume (which the article says will be improved as well), but co-op sounds like a blast.
As the author of the article in question, I'd be happy to take some constructive criticism.
Quick summary for the link-wary:
Drupal doesn't use PHP's classes, for a few reasons such as support for PHP 4 and problems with conditional code inclusion.
Drupal does have an architecture that reflects many of the underlying principles of OOP.
Drupal also implements many of the standard Gang of Four design patterns.
The designers are open to the use of OOP language constructs, so long as they don't require PHP 5 (Debian is still on 4.1!) and they aren't "classes for the sake of classes"; that is, they must provide a benefit that cannot be trivially realized using the current methods.
What does Democrat and Republican stand for? Both seem rather rightwing...
They are. Democrats are slightly "left" of Republicans. Also, using "left" and "right" exclusively oversimplifies things. For a somewhat better view, see the political compass.
And why are only these two standpoints ever mentioned?
Are there only two parties?
They are the two largest by leaps and bounds. There are many more.
What if I'm not satisfied with those two? Am I allowed to start my own party?
Sure. Just don't expect to get any votes. At issue here is the plurality voting system that the U.S. uses, and the way it discourages people from voting for third parties for fear of throwing away their votes.
Zendo is my favorite Icehouse game. If the set interests you, get the Zendo box which includes the stones you'll need to play that game. It's a lovely inductive logic game that appeals to most science types.
Chrononauts is good too, but the new Early American version is better in that the rules are easier to pick up. All in all, I can't recommend Looney Labs enough as a company.
The technologies are barely related; Apple is not ripping off QS/LB in the least here. Spotlight is a technology for searching through files based on their conent and metadata. QS/LB are utilities for finding files based on easily typed mnemonics. You are looking at one aspect of Spotlights appearance (the dropdown search pane in the corner) and assuming it's a ripoff based on some similarity to the appearance of the other utilities.
In fact, the Spotlight indexing technology will be a boon to the utilities, as they will be able to leverage this newly available metadata to execute even more powerful searches. Quicksilver is already invaluable to me, and I expect it to just get better.
No, apps do not need to be made "spotlight-aware." The indexing happens whenever the kernel notes a file write; even command-line changes to files will cause the index to be updated.
The grandparent is correct; "20 times smaller" is just plain wrong. But even newspapers have problems with this error, which gives some copy editors fits.
iTunes doesn't use the right mouse button, a serious problem for a Windows app.
Yes it does. There are context menus for both songs and playlists, at the least. Windows and Mac versions alike.
iTunes becomes non-responsive for long periods of time when used with my iPod.
I haven't personally noticed responsiveness problems, but I believe you.
iTunes requires you use the menu to perform simple tasks like adding a new playlist (or at least, I could find no way around that).
Click the big shiny "+" button at the bottom of the playlist pane.
It also wouldn't work with my iPod until I allowed it to delete every song on my iPod, a horrible design decision that I believe was made for political reasons.
Yes, that was definitely the reason.
About the only major fault I can find with WinTunes is Apple deciding to keep the UI identical to the Mac version, rather than making it behave like a standard Windows app. It's hard enough switching back and forth between platforms at work; I don't need confusion within a single platform's UI as to how things look/work.
Cliff Johnson is still working on his excellent puzzle-driven games. He has always (intelligently, in my opinion) kept the graphics and sound simple and out of the way of the real, fiendish puzzles and metapuzzles. You can download the old games, like The Fool's Errand and 3 in Three, from his website; he's even updated them to work on Mac OS X and modern Windows. The second in the Arcanum series (The Fool and His Money) is due out this fall.
We play Zendo asynchronously in my workplace (people take turns whenever they have a break, and we are pretty lax with turn order). This is an inductive logic game, like Eleusis. It's very friendly as opposed to competitive when we play, and is very social indeed as people talk over their reasoning with one another.
Well I really don't believe that there will be a bright future waiting for the so-called next generation consoles that Sony and Microsoft are advocating right now. As you may know I was developing games until quite recently myself, I know how it is, and if any of these developers come to me and say, look, CPU or processing power is ten times as much as today, graphic capability is twenty times, then I will say, that means more workload and slight difference with the current system in terms of letting people understand how improved the graphics shall be.
Nintendo's laid-back approach to upcoming generations worries me. I think the problem he cites is a real one; sheer processing power is only helpful if you have something to process, which can often mean longer development time. But he proposes that instead of beefing up the processing power they should be looking at alternate user interfaces (like they did with the DS). While there can be cool innovations this way, I'd prefer to see the company attack the problem head-on by aggressively working to make better tools for the developer. Microsoft appears to be working on this, and it just may pay off for them.
I've been overwhelmed by the competence and friendliness of the Drupal dev community. Most OSS projects I've been part of have one but not both of those.
If in the market for a blog, a community site, or a portal, give Drupal a serious look.
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Not "Caliber." http://www.soulcalibur.com/ Fix it. Please.
You're thinking of The Grand List Of Console Role Playing Game Clichés. Some highlights: "No! My beloved peasant village!" The hero's home town, city, slum, or planet will usually be annihilated in a spectacular fashion before the end of the game, and often before the end of the opening scene. "Silly Squall, bringing a sword to a gunfight..." No matter what timeframe the game is set in -- past, present, or future -- the main hero and his antagonist will both use a sword for a weapon. (Therefore, you can identify your antagonist pretty easily right from the start of the game just by looking for the other guy who uses a sword.) These swords will be far more powerful than any gun and often capable of distance attacks. Bed Bed Bed A good night's sleep will cure all wounds, diseases, and disabilities, up to and including death in battle. Short Attention Span Principle All bookshelves contain exactly one book, which only has enough text on it to fill up half a page. Golden Chocobo Principle There will be at least one supremely ultimate improvement for your weapon or some way to make your trusted steed capable of going anywhere and doing anything, requiring hours and hours of hard work to acquire. Once you do achieve this, you will use it once, and it will be completely useless for the rest of the game.
I'd be surprised if you can. While this is possible in battle mode, the description of co-op seems to indicate two princes and a single katamari, with each player controlling one of the two sides of the ball (a single analog stick each) rather than one player controlling both.
The article mentions a cooperative mode in this iteration, with two players working in sync to move a single katamari. I think this is the most exciting part of the announcement; we could guess most of the rest, really. This is a great reason to buy the new edition. Personally, I didn't enjoy the battle mode in the first volume (which the article says will be improved as well), but co-op sounds like a blast.
Nope. It supports 5 as of this release, but the requirement is 4.3 (can run on 4.1 with some features disabled).
As the author of the article in question, I'd be happy to take some constructive criticism.
Quick summary for the link-wary:
Your list needs to include Shake, which is software from Apple itself that requires a three-button mouse. A travesty, I tell you!
Zendo is my favorite Icehouse game. If the set interests you, get the Zendo box which includes the stones you'll need to play that game. It's a lovely inductive logic game that appeals to most science types. Chrononauts is good too, but the new Early American version is better in that the rules are easier to pick up. All in all, I can't recommend Looney Labs enough as a company.
Bic makes pens, not just razors and lighters.
The technologies are barely related; Apple is not ripping off QS/LB in the least here. Spotlight is a technology for searching through files based on their conent and metadata. QS/LB are utilities for finding files based on easily typed mnemonics. You are looking at one aspect of Spotlights appearance (the dropdown search pane in the corner) and assuming it's a ripoff based on some similarity to the appearance of the other utilities.
In fact, the Spotlight indexing technology will be a boon to the utilities, as they will be able to leverage this newly available metadata to execute even more powerful searches. Quicksilver is already invaluable to me, and I expect it to just get better.
No, apps do not need to be made "spotlight-aware." The indexing happens whenever the kernel notes a file write; even command-line changes to files will cause the index to be updated.
But the color blue is a trademark of the Dow Chemical Company.
Well, she is in Kingdom Hearts, so why not?
The "old space banjo tune" is called Journey of the Sorcerer. Share and enjoy!
The grandparent is correct; "20 times smaller" is just plain wrong. But even newspapers have problems with this error, which gives some copy editors fits.
Yes it does. There are context menus for both songs and playlists, at the least. Windows and Mac versions alike.
I haven't personally noticed responsiveness problems, but I believe you.
Click the big shiny "+" button at the bottom of the playlist pane.
Yes, that was definitely the reason.
About the only major fault I can find with WinTunes is Apple deciding to keep the UI identical to the Mac version, rather than making it behave like a standard Windows app. It's hard enough switching back and forth between platforms at work; I don't need confusion within a single platform's UI as to how things look/work.
Where's the fetus going to gestate? Are you going to keep it in a box?
Cliff Johnson is still working on his excellent puzzle-driven games. He has always (intelligently, in my opinion) kept the graphics and sound simple and out of the way of the real, fiendish puzzles and metapuzzles. You can download the old games, like The Fool's Errand and 3 in Three, from his website; he's even updated them to work on Mac OS X and modern Windows. The second in the Arcanum series (The Fool and His Money) is due out this fall.
We play Zendo asynchronously in my workplace (people take turns whenever they have a break, and we are pretty lax with turn order). This is an inductive logic game, like Eleusis. It's very friendly as opposed to competitive when we play, and is very social indeed as people talk over their reasoning with one another.
Iwata says...
Nintendo's laid-back approach to upcoming generations worries me. I think the problem he cites is a real one; sheer processing power is only helpful if you have something to process, which can often mean longer development time. But he proposes that instead of beefing up the processing power they should be looking at alternate user interfaces (like they did with the DS). While there can be cool innovations this way, I'd prefer to see the company attack the problem head-on by aggressively working to make better tools for the developer. Microsoft appears to be working on this, and it just may pay off for them.
...unless you get a dedicated card for the task, like the ATI Radeon 9500 ASC.
Blue hair. Gotta have blue hair.
Or like ActiveDeath technology?
Hear, hear.
I've been overwhelmed by the competence and friendliness of the Drupal dev community. Most OSS projects I've been part of have one but not both of those.
If in the market for a blog, a community site, or a portal, give Drupal a serious look.