Namco has stated that they're not planning on doing any more Katamari games, and if they were I see no indication as to why it would remain a Sony exclusive. They were planning on releasing a game in the series for the DS, but it got canceled.
The funny part is that the GC Wireless controller (the Wavebird- the best controller I've ever owned, and the first Wireless controller that actually got it right) doesn't have Force Feedback either. And I've never cared. It's still a fantastic controller, and it not vibrating has never negatively affected my game-playing experience.
If the battery life is anything close to the Wavebird, I'm perfectly happy with them using AAs. I've gotten a lot of use out of my Wavebird and I've only ever replaced the batteries in it a couple of times. The rare occasion when it runs out, I just need to run to the pantry to get a few replacements rather than wait for it to recharge.
All in all, I'd say the Wavebird is the single best console controller I've ever used. It's wireless, responsive, feels good in your hands, lightweight, and the batteries last forever. It doesn't have force-feedback (while the Wii-mote apparently does), but I've honestly never missed it.
Don't believe the camera bit.
on
More Wii-mote Info
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The bit in the article about the camera is pretty idiotic. IGN is completely misunderstanding the information they've got.
It can read relative position on the screen to a resolution that is roughly a megapixel. Somehow they read this as a potential camera. It's not. It's no more a camera than your computer mouse is.
Stop being pedantic. You know what they meant. Semantic nonsense over what is and isn't theft doesn't change the argument, just the verbage. Take every instance of "theft" and replace it with "copyright infringement" and the arguments will all be the same.
Besides, "theft" is a fairly wide definition that applies to more than just larceny. In US the theft of services is indeed considered theft and charged as larceny. If something as non-tangible as services can be stolen, surely the definition can extend to intellectual property such as music.
I've copied plenty of music, and my doing so has led me to the legitimate purchase of lots of music I would have never otherwise. Overall I'd say that the free distribution of music in many ways helps the artist more than it hinders. That does not however, change the laws. Copyright infringement is still illegal, whether it's theft or not. The whole "copyright infringement isn't theft" thing seems to be a crutch of an argument people fall on to ignore the issue.
He was talking about the button that switches between analog and digital mode on the controller.
The button that almost never gets used considering most games boot with the controller in the correct mode, and there's rarely a reason to turn analog off in a game that supports it. The only game I can think of where it's necessary is Chrono Cross, where analog mode is off by default for some reason.
You can copyright the expression of the game— the artwork and the way the manual is written.
You can trademark the name of the game.
And most importantly you can patent a unique mechanic of a game.
I'm 99.9% certain the Hasbro does not own a patent on any of the mechanics used in Risk. They do however own the copyright on the board artwork and the wording of the rules, as well as a trademark on the name "Risk".
All you need to do in order to be legit in this case is to stop calling it "Risk".
Little known fact*:
When the Greeks invaded Troy, they first attempted to sneak past the Trojans in a large wooden alligator. The subsequent bad PR that resulted when said alligator erupted into a flurry of Greek soldiers led the Greeks to later rebrand their distribution model under the guise of a much friendlier-looking horse. The resulting slaughter was much the same, but had a much better marketing campaign.
Years later Gator followed the same pattern, only replacing the large wooden animals with spyware, and the murderous Greek soldiers with pop-up ads.
The Greek implementation is arguably less irritating.
*Fact may or may not be complete and utter bullshit.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if this is just a big publicity stunt.
Think about it:
-Early on in the development of Spiderman 2 there were rumors that the Lizard was going to be one of the villains. This turned out to be false.
-Sam Raimi has stated multiple times that he had no intention of including the Venom story arc in any of his movies, because he wanted to recreate the comics he remember reading as a kid.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is just a joke that Raimi and Dunst are pulling on the press.
No, the Hobgoblin was a different villain that just happened to find a stash of the Green Goblin's old equipment. Harry Osborn becomes the second incarnation of the Green Goblin.
The problem is, your bandwidth is available to the public. By posting it on the web you're effectively giving people permission to link to and access your stuff.
It's kind of like printing out your website and putting it in a box you leave downtown that says "FREE" on it. Do you have any right to complain about people taking multiple copies and telling their friends?
Likewise, this is Slashdot. Any complaint about linking to peoples' sites and using up bandwidth is pure hypocrisy as you're currently on a site that does nothing but that.
That was my point. A skill roll with a target number of six is no more difficult than a skill roll with a target number of seven. SR3's probability curve was somewhat... odd.
This is the same system that had a statistically identical chance of rolling a 6 as a 7, right?
The new Shadowrun rules have changed, but it doesn't affect the game anywhere near as much as the changes to the setting have.
Yeah, it's a shame you lose the dice pools, but Edge (the Karma Pool replacement) is more flexible and makes up for the loss of decisions involved with it.
If anything, the changes made in Shadowrun 4 make it a more flexible and general-purpose game system. I liked Shadowrun 3, but it had some issues with it that the new edition actually fixes up fairly well. A better probability curve and more flexible character creation are just a few of the things that the new edition adds. Plenty of other minor changes (like well-expanded Contact rules) are also welcome additions.
So, don't be a curmudgeon and give the new rules a chance before you bash them too much. The game has only been released for what... five days now? And in limited quantity no less (I had to wait in line for 45 minutes for my copy). I doubt you've had a chance to read the rulebook and run a few sessions in that time. Give it a chance, and you may like it. Or maybe not. Who knows, a few months down the road I might decide I hate it and switch back to SR3, but so far I like what I see, and I'm willing to give it a chance.
The Lexmark case however ruled that the DMCA does not protect a device that exists purely for copy protection. The encrypted information has to be copyrightable to be protected by the DMCA. A serial number is not copyrightable.
Now, if Microsoft encrypts the communication between the controller and console, that may be protected by the DMCA, but probably not as long as it's reverse engineered in a legal manner (which is the catch).
Copland was the code-name for the original Mac OS 8. It was supposed to be a revolutionary upgrade along the lines of what OS X was. Instead it got delayed and stripped down repeatedly, until finally Apple released a different OS 8 that included only a small handful of the features that were promised in Copland.
The main feature that was retained was the marginally prettier interface.
So what the Windows users seem to be missing is that this joke is at Apple's expense.
Yeah, what really makes the Shuffle better than the competitors doesn't have anything to do with the iPod brand or the Shuffle itself- it's the autofill feature built into iTunes. Without that feature it would be worthless even if it did have a screen.
No, Orange Micro was a third party vendor of a similar product. Apple actually produced such cards of their own and bundled them with their own machines. Early ones were labeled "DOS Compatible" while later ones were labeled "PC Compatible". I recall the default key command to switch between them being simply Command-Return, but I could be remembering that wrong.
Of course, they had plenty of problems. The hardware was pretty non-standard, so you pretty much had to use the drivers that came with the card. They had no onboard memory, so you actually had to dedicate some of your RAM to the card itself. That was before RAM was dirt cheap, so that actually was a pretty huge liability.
Also, I recall that the pass-through cable that allowed you to use the same monitor was occasionally faulty and irritating to work with in general.
All in all, it was an interesting idea, but far from a practical one.
It wasn't the OS that was code-named "Carl Sagan," it was an early PowerMac model (the 7100).
Part of what might have upset Carl Sagan about the situation was that the other two models in the series (the 6100 and the 8100) were both given scientific hoaxes as code-names (Piltdown Man and Cold Fusion, respectively).
If you used to watch Pokemon, you are likely too young to understand. This is about nostalgia for people who grew up watching Transformers back in the '80s.
Honestly? The show was just a long commercial for a gimmicky line of toys. But back then it rocked my world.
FASA didn't rip off those designs. They licensed them.
Unfortunately the company they licensed them was a licensee themselves, and it turned out they didn't have the right to offer a sublicense to begin with. Oops.
Anyway, FASA might have actually had a chance in court, but they didn't have the finances to fight Harmony Gold (a much larger company).
BoardGameGeek in general is what I consider the absolute best source of information on tabletop games available. It's a great community overall.
Re:Dear MC Chris...
on
Ask mc chris
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· Score: 4, Informative
His work is in a sub-genre of rap known as "Nerdcore" along with other artists such as MC Frontalot and Optimus Rhyme.
He (along with the other artists I mentioned) will be playing at PAX this year.
His most famous track is about Star Wars. One of his songs uses music samples from the arcade game Gauntlet. A lot of his other stuff covers fairly geeky subject matter.
So, you might not like his work. That's understandable. But he's still as relevent to Slashdot as anything else posted today.
I don't know about other Family Video stores, but the one here in town isn't terribly impressive.
Their selection is pretty miserable. Rarely will they have what I'm looking for unless it's a new release from a major studio.
Also, I've noticed that if the DVD extras come on a second disc, you're out of luck because they only include the disc with the actual film on it. I'm not sure whether that's corporate policy or not, but my local store has burned me on that deal before.
That said, I'll admit that there's very few video rental places that I care much for. Four Star Video here in town probably has the best selection, but it's rather out of the way for me. I normally end up going to Blockbuster for simplicity's sake, but with their new late fee policy (the subject of the article) I'm thinking I'll be taking my business elsewhere. I'm just not sure where yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Namco has stated that they're not planning on doing any more Katamari games, and if they were I see no indication as to why it would remain a Sony exclusive. They were planning on releasing a game in the series for the DS, but it got canceled.
Just making sure, the Korean words for "happiness" and "severe radiation poisoning" aren't similar, are they?
The funny part is that the GC Wireless controller (the Wavebird- the best controller I've ever owned, and the first Wireless controller that actually got it right) doesn't have Force Feedback either. And I've never cared. It's still a fantastic controller, and it not vibrating has never negatively affected my game-playing experience.
If the battery life is anything close to the Wavebird, I'm perfectly happy with them using AAs. I've gotten a lot of use out of my Wavebird and I've only ever replaced the batteries in it a couple of times. The rare occasion when it runs out, I just need to run to the pantry to get a few replacements rather than wait for it to recharge. All in all, I'd say the Wavebird is the single best console controller I've ever used. It's wireless, responsive, feels good in your hands, lightweight, and the batteries last forever. It doesn't have force-feedback (while the Wii-mote apparently does), but I've honestly never missed it.
The bit in the article about the camera is pretty idiotic. IGN is completely misunderstanding the information they've got. It can read relative position on the screen to a resolution that is roughly a megapixel. Somehow they read this as a potential camera. It's not. It's no more a camera than your computer mouse is.
Stop being pedantic. You know what they meant. Semantic nonsense over what is and isn't theft doesn't change the argument, just the verbage. Take every instance of "theft" and replace it with "copyright infringement" and the arguments will all be the same.
Besides, "theft" is a fairly wide definition that applies to more than just larceny. In US the theft of services is indeed considered theft and charged as larceny. If something as non-tangible as services can be stolen, surely the definition can extend to intellectual property such as music.
I've copied plenty of music, and my doing so has led me to the legitimate purchase of lots of music I would have never otherwise. Overall I'd say that the free distribution of music in many ways helps the artist more than it hinders. That does not however, change the laws. Copyright infringement is still illegal, whether it's theft or not. The whole "copyright infringement isn't theft" thing seems to be a crutch of an argument people fall on to ignore the issue.
He was talking about the button that switches between analog and digital mode on the controller.
The button that almost never gets used considering most games boot with the controller in the correct mode, and there's rarely a reason to turn analog off in a game that supports it. The only game I can think of where it's necessary is Chrono Cross, where analog mode is off by default for some reason.
Here's the trick:
You can not copyright the rules to a game.
You can copyright the expression of the game— the artwork and the way the manual is written.
You can trademark the name of the game.
And most importantly you can patent a unique mechanic of a game.
I'm 99.9% certain the Hasbro does not own a patent on any of the mechanics used in Risk. They do however own the copyright on the board artwork and the wording of the rules, as well as a trademark on the name "Risk".
All you need to do in order to be legit in this case is to stop calling it "Risk".
Little known fact*: When the Greeks invaded Troy, they first attempted to sneak past the Trojans in a large wooden alligator. The subsequent bad PR that resulted when said alligator erupted into a flurry of Greek soldiers led the Greeks to later rebrand their distribution model under the guise of a much friendlier-looking horse. The resulting slaughter was much the same, but had a much better marketing campaign. Years later Gator followed the same pattern, only replacing the large wooden animals with spyware, and the murderous Greek soldiers with pop-up ads. The Greek implementation is arguably less irritating. *Fact may or may not be complete and utter bullshit.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if this is just a big publicity stunt.
Think about it:
-Early on in the development of Spiderman 2 there were rumors that the Lizard was going to be one of the villains. This turned out to be false.
-Sam Raimi has stated multiple times that he had no intention of including the Venom story arc in any of his movies, because he wanted to recreate the comics he remember reading as a kid.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is just a joke that Raimi and Dunst are pulling on the press.
No, the Hobgoblin was a different villain that just happened to find a stash of the Green Goblin's old equipment. Harry Osborn becomes the second incarnation of the Green Goblin.
The problem is, your bandwidth is available to the public. By posting it on the web you're effectively giving people permission to link to and access your stuff.
It's kind of like printing out your website and putting it in a box you leave downtown that says "FREE" on it. Do you have any right to complain about people taking multiple copies and telling their friends?
Likewise, this is Slashdot. Any complaint about linking to peoples' sites and using up bandwidth is pure hypocrisy as you're currently on a site that does nothing but that.
That was my point. A skill roll with a target number of six is no more difficult than a skill roll with a target number of seven. SR3's probability curve was somewhat... odd.
Shadowrun had "flexibility" in its dice system?
This is the same system that had a statistically identical chance of rolling a 6 as a 7, right?
The new Shadowrun rules have changed, but it doesn't affect the game anywhere near as much as the changes to the setting have.
Yeah, it's a shame you lose the dice pools, but Edge (the Karma Pool replacement) is more flexible and makes up for the loss of decisions involved with it.
If anything, the changes made in Shadowrun 4 make it a more flexible and general-purpose game system. I liked Shadowrun 3, but it had some issues with it that the new edition actually fixes up fairly well. A better probability curve and more flexible character creation are just a few of the things that the new edition adds. Plenty of other minor changes (like well-expanded Contact rules) are also welcome additions.
So, don't be a curmudgeon and give the new rules a chance before you bash them too much. The game has only been released for what... five days now? And in limited quantity no less (I had to wait in line for 45 minutes for my copy). I doubt you've had a chance to read the rulebook and run a few sessions in that time. Give it a chance, and you may like it. Or maybe not. Who knows, a few months down the road I might decide I hate it and switch back to SR3, but so far I like what I see, and I'm willing to give it a chance.
The Lexmark case however ruled that the DMCA does not protect a device that exists purely for copy protection. The encrypted information has to be copyrightable to be protected by the DMCA. A serial number is not copyrightable.
Now, if Microsoft encrypts the communication between the controller and console, that may be protected by the DMCA, but probably not as long as it's reverse engineered in a legal manner (which is the catch).
You miss the Copland reference.
Copland was the code-name for the original Mac OS 8. It was supposed to be a revolutionary upgrade along the lines of what OS X was. Instead it got delayed and stripped down repeatedly, until finally Apple released a different OS 8 that included only a small handful of the features that were promised in Copland.
The main feature that was retained was the marginally prettier interface.
So what the Windows users seem to be missing is that this joke is at Apple's expense.
Yeah, what really makes the Shuffle better than the competitors doesn't have anything to do with the iPod brand or the Shuffle itself- it's the autofill feature built into iTunes. Without that feature it would be worthless even if it did have a screen.
No, Orange Micro was a third party vendor of a similar product. Apple actually produced such cards of their own and bundled them with their own machines. Early ones were labeled "DOS Compatible" while later ones were labeled "PC Compatible". I recall the default key command to switch between them being simply Command-Return, but I could be remembering that wrong.
Of course, they had plenty of problems. The hardware was pretty non-standard, so you pretty much had to use the drivers that came with the card. They had no onboard memory, so you actually had to dedicate some of your RAM to the card itself. That was before RAM was dirt cheap, so that actually was a pretty huge liability.
Also, I recall that the pass-through cable that allowed you to use the same monitor was occasionally faulty and irritating to work with in general.
All in all, it was an interesting idea, but far from a practical one.
You're right, it isn't redundant.
Unfortunately it isn't funny either.
It wasn't the OS that was code-named "Carl Sagan," it was an early PowerMac model (the 7100).
Part of what might have upset Carl Sagan about the situation was that the other two models in the series (the 6100 and the 8100) were both given scientific hoaxes as code-names (Piltdown Man and Cold Fusion, respectively).
If you used to watch Pokemon, you are likely too young to understand. This is about nostalgia for people who grew up watching Transformers back in the '80s.
Honestly? The show was just a long commercial for a gimmicky line of toys. But back then it rocked my world.
FASA didn't rip off those designs. They licensed them.
Unfortunately the company they licensed them was a licensee themselves, and it turned out they didn't have the right to offer a sublicense to begin with. Oops.
Anyway, FASA might have actually had a chance in court, but they didn't have the finances to fight Harmony Gold (a much larger company).
BoardGameGeek in general is what I consider the absolute best source of information on tabletop games available. It's a great community overall.
His work is in a sub-genre of rap known as "Nerdcore" along with other artists such as MC Frontalot and Optimus Rhyme.
He (along with the other artists I mentioned) will be playing at PAX this year.
His most famous track is about Star Wars. One of his songs uses music samples from the arcade game Gauntlet. A lot of his other stuff covers fairly geeky subject matter.
So, you might not like his work. That's understandable. But he's still as relevent to Slashdot as anything else posted today.
I don't know about other Family Video stores, but the one here in town isn't terribly impressive.
Their selection is pretty miserable. Rarely will they have what I'm looking for unless it's a new release from a major studio.
Also, I've noticed that if the DVD extras come on a second disc, you're out of luck because they only include the disc with the actual film on it. I'm not sure whether that's corporate policy or not, but my local store has burned me on that deal before.
That said, I'll admit that there's very few video rental places that I care much for. Four Star Video here in town probably has the best selection, but it's rather out of the way for me. I normally end up going to Blockbuster for simplicity's sake, but with their new late fee policy (the subject of the article) I'm thinking I'll be taking my business elsewhere. I'm just not sure where yet.