Chrono Trigger is by far and away the best RPG that square ever put out, and I'll say even further the best RPG in the linear, console style (as opposed to say Ultima, which has far more exploring but a less driven story)
Why, you ask?
1- the story made sense. I can't emphasize this enough. The game threw no curve balls. There were no 11th hour magical items, supernatural dieties, or sudden revelations required to make the plot make sense. By about 10 hours into the game, the major story device (time travel), the major enemy (lavos), and most of the main characters had all been revealed. The framework was set, and while the plot was gripping and surprising, the game never "broke character." Compare this to the senseless twists and turns of FF7 and FF8 and the slow descent into incomprehensible philosophizing in FF10.
2- small cast of well-developed characters. Chrono Cross was such a dissapointment. Great battle system, yes. Best Graphics on PSX, yes. Shitty, shitty RPG.
What I would really like to see is a game that mixes the event map system of chrono trigger (walk around environments, see enemies walking around, fight them in place, no cut to battle) with the battle system of FF Tactics or Ogre Battle (turn based, tactical combat with a strong emphasis on movement and positioning, rich class system with a LOT of customization potential) with a more exploration based design similar to metriod or castlevania, yet without losing the epic story arc. an easy design to pull off? probably not. but there seems to be some talent behind this new entity.
oh and 3 - The Kingdom of Zeal was just plain friggin' cool. best reinterperetation of the Fall of Rome/Dark Ages theme I've ever seen.
Schala Lives!
opinionated nerdy fanboy signing off.
Slashdot is nowhere near as bad as the college I attend (coincidentally in New York) as far as senseless acronyms are concerned. It seems like your student group or department or office or whatever is denied recognition and budget until you come up with a clever acronymic name.
My favorite: Lesbians and Bisexuals in Action, LABIA.
The Sims reinforces suburban consumerist ideas of the good life. Your characters are happier with higher-paying jobs and more stuff. So bring on the marketing and the product-placement. It's perfectly in line with their philosophy.
Anyone who actually thinks about the anticorporate position, and doesn't just yell slogans for the fun of it would wonder why this should be a surprise at all in such a game.
actually, it's latin for "thus." and it isn't usually placed after spelling errors, but after odd grammar that cannot be fixed without altering the original context.
Editors of real publications will fix spelling and inconsequential grammatical errors before publishing them. But if they're say... quoting George W. Bush, and the mistake is part of the reason they're quoting it, then they'll put in [sic] to show that it's the person being quoted, not the person typing up the quote that made the error.
note: [sic] almost always conveys a sense of the writer thinking him or herself better and more intellegent than the source. it's a very arrogant little journalistic device. it's sometimes needed, but not very often.
This is true: evolution produces things perfectly tuned to their environments, ergo: the extreme fragility of life in highly specific ecologies (such as rainforests, tropical islands, etc.)
Human design arrogangly ignores environment, and is thus better suited to unpredictable change. However, I have to believe that evolutionary design could come up with something like the common rat, able to survive and work almost anywhere. As long as the environment that the device evolved in was made to fluctuate and be inconsistant, the device could not evolve to rely on the temperature, humidity, magnetism, radio signals, etc. that exist only in the lab.
Human design is limited by human thought patterns. Interferance and other such effects are viewed by human engineers as problems that have to be designed around. Evolutionary design responds to the whole environment, "problems" and all.
It is not at all surprising that circuits designed by evolutionary process rather than intelligent design are radically different than what any team of engineers would create. It is however, interesting on the deepest levels.
God created that circuit! Are you trying to tell me that transistors can come together at random and create a working device? If a tornado blew through an Intel cleanroom, would it throw together a computer?
Ummm... did you read the parent post?
He's saying that racism and opression are still alive and well in America. We've wiped out the easy and visible signs of it- segregation, the KKK, etc. but that hasn't changed a lot of people's attitudes about race.
Good luck on your English Ph.D. It might help if you learn to read.
Speaking as someone who lives a few blocks south and west of the historic neighborhoods of south Harlem, the reason is simple: old Harlem doesn't exist.
125th street is as much of a mall as you'll find on the island. The old storefronts, clubs, and apartments have been replaced by chain outlets like Old Navy and the like. The few remnants of the old days have been completely comodified and stripped of their sincerity. The Apollo no longer has any sort of focus on Jazz or Blues, and even then Jazz and Blues stopped being innovative areas of music decades ago. Harlem in the 1930s was a cultural center, a breeding ground for a new and uniquely American style of poetry, music, and art. Now it's just the last frontier for the complete Gentrification and Disnification of Manhattan.
Are you defending this system? Does your stated belief that the supposed liberals who posted this story would be happy if rich white people were profiled (a belief that has no basis in any fact) have any bearing on the story whatsoever?
If they created a similar database of potential corporate criminals, some people would be happy with that, but would they be any less wrong with those who create this biased system?
You've said nothing loudly. Congratulations.
Re:Gloves that improve spelling?
on
Speech For The Deaf
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Commenting on posters' spelling = pompous.
Commenting on editors' spelling = legitimate expectation of quality from a service that claims to be "news."
It's silly to expect random people commenting as fast as they can in order to deal with a stupid default "oldest post first" system to be paragons of grammar and spelling. You're lucky to understand them at all.
I don't think it's too much to ask that Slashdot editors, or people taking the time to post stories, run submissions at least through a half-decent spell check.
Of course then there's the nerds like me who look at screenshots and descriptions of Doom3 and think "wow, that's gonna be one hell of a fun engine to play around with"
Will Wright is a genius though. When are we going to get the 21st century update of SimEarth and SimLife?
If MacOS were available for a lot of platforms, it wouldn't work as well as MacOS.
I seriously doubt that it's even possible to create a truly reliable OS for an uncontrolled hardware base.
Macs work like Macs, you plug stuff in and it just magically starts to function. If they ported to x86 and the 1x10^9 bits of associated hardware, they could no longer insure that this would be true. At that point, they're just a smaller Microsoft with better art school grads.
Sticking to propriatary hardware allows Apple to avoid price wars (PC hardware is a virtually profit free industry) and make better products. They might sell a bit more software by porting to x86, but they'd lose every competitive edge they have. This is why SJ quickly killed off the clone makers. This is why the iPod has no documented support on non-Mac platforms. If Apple changed their strategy, Macs would no longer Just Work (TM) and they'd be just as unpredictable and idiot unfriendly as all other computers.
Legit DVDs are dirt cheap in some countries to fight piracy. Even the MPAA knows that if a DVD costs more than the average worker's weeks' wage, then piracy is going to be rampant. Even if region encoding breaks down, they can't sell $20 DVDs in Russia.
Prices might go up a bit in these countries, but a much more likely effect will be prices dropping in the US. Which sounds great to me. Ask yourself this: since DVDs cost about as much to license + manufacture as CDs, how can they justify selling them at double the cost? Especially considering that most movies have allready made enough in theater profits to completely cover the cost of manufacturing and promoting the DVD 100 times over.
It's in dictionaries because it's commonly [mis]used. Look it up on dictionary.com and they have a little paragraph debating whether or not it's real.
First off, by the standards of English, it's absolutely pointless to have an ir- prefix with a -less suffix. It's a double negative. It probably began as a mis-informed combination of the words "disregardless" and "irrespective"
In educated circles, it's considered a faux-pas indicitive of someone who is trying to sound like they have a larger vocabulary than they really do.
note: disregardless is a word because "disregard" is a word.
having said this, i'm changing my sig pretty soon, it's basically an open invitation for people to comment on my (frequent and admitted) spelling errors.
but the point remains: virii isn't a word. ask any doctor. it was made up by computer guys who wanted to sound smart by making a -us word plural with an -i, but english isn't consistant with pluralization words (and the latin word virus' plural isn't even viri or virii, it's virus)
of course, english sometimes accepts malapropisms into the general vocabulary. woodrow wilson coined the term "normalcy" when he misspoke in a famous speach. i'm worried thate W. could pull a similar gramatical innovation.
The KPCOFGS system has always bugged me. (pun intended) It's a a more or less arbitrary system, that only does a so-so job of reflecting evolutionary descent.
WineX has not taken anything away from Wine. They use their code, and Wine is no worse off for it. Your criticism of TransGaming assumes that they would have written the same software if they had used the GPL. But they wouldn't have. If you want to sell software (and not support or some other intangible) you simply can't use the GPL. The only thing you can hope for is to tack a $1 surcharge on CDs shipped to people with connections to slow to download the free package.
Profit is a motivator for innovation, like it or not. I like and fully support the GPL, but I also like and fully support some things done by better for-profit software companies. If Transgaming had been forced to GPL their work, there would be no WineX.
"Support" good software that you want to use, in whatever form it comes in. If there's a product out there that is filling a gap, then support whatever system that created it. Linux may or may not succeed on the desktop. Linux will not succeed on the desktop with ONLY GPLed software.
For novice players, it is pretty much the same thing, only smaller armies (which is a good thing in my opinion)
In really competitive play, it actually plays quite differently from Starcraft, C&C, WC2, or Dune 2. The hero system really rewards micromanagement, and rushes aren't quite what they've been in the past. If you sit down and try to play WC3 like Starcraft, you'll lose pretty quickly. Warcraft 3 is not paced at all like previous RTSes.
However, these are deep, play-balance innovations. The overall format of the game is pretty much Warcraft 2 with smaller armies and stronger units.
What I would really like to see is a RTS (and shouldn't these games be called Real Time Tactics, the scale is a bit small to really be called "strategy" in the military sense) of WWII's Pacific theater, done at about Starcraft Scale. Storm beaches, knock out gun fortifications, take over islands, clear out airstrips, etc. It could be really interesting, and it wouldn't have any of that base-building nonsense (you don't train new soldiers and research new technology on the battlefield). Or play the Japanese side and try to defend.
Slashdot Mirror
Chrono Trigger is by far and away the best RPG that square ever put out, and I'll say even further the best RPG in the linear, console style (as opposed to say Ultima, which has far more exploring but a less driven story) Why, you ask? 1- the story made sense. I can't emphasize this enough. The game threw no curve balls. There were no 11th hour magical items, supernatural dieties, or sudden revelations required to make the plot make sense. By about 10 hours into the game, the major story device (time travel), the major enemy (lavos), and most of the main characters had all been revealed. The framework was set, and while the plot was gripping and surprising, the game never "broke character." Compare this to the senseless twists and turns of FF7 and FF8 and the slow descent into incomprehensible philosophizing in FF10. 2- small cast of well-developed characters. Chrono Cross was such a dissapointment. Great battle system, yes. Best Graphics on PSX, yes. Shitty, shitty RPG. What I would really like to see is a game that mixes the event map system of chrono trigger (walk around environments, see enemies walking around, fight them in place, no cut to battle) with the battle system of FF Tactics or Ogre Battle (turn based, tactical combat with a strong emphasis on movement and positioning, rich class system with a LOT of customization potential) with a more exploration based design similar to metriod or castlevania, yet without losing the epic story arc. an easy design to pull off? probably not. but there seems to be some talent behind this new entity. oh and 3 - The Kingdom of Zeal was just plain friggin' cool. best reinterperetation of the Fall of Rome/Dark Ages theme I've ever seen. Schala Lives! opinionated nerdy fanboy signing off.
Slashdot is nowhere near as bad as the college I attend (coincidentally in New York) as far as senseless acronyms are concerned. It seems like your student group or department or office or whatever is denied recognition and budget until you come up with a clever acronymic name.
My favorite: Lesbians and Bisexuals in Action, LABIA.
If there ever is a plan to do this, then call me a conspiracy theorist.
This really does fit in well with the Sims.
The Sims reinforces suburban consumerist ideas of the good life. Your characters are happier with higher-paying jobs and more stuff. So bring on the marketing and the product-placement. It's perfectly in line with their philosophy.
Anyone who actually thinks about the anticorporate position, and doesn't just yell slogans for the fun of it would wonder why this should be a surprise at all in such a game.
actually, it's latin for "thus." and it isn't usually placed after spelling errors, but after odd grammar that cannot be fixed without altering the original context.
Editors of real publications will fix spelling and inconsequential grammatical errors before publishing them. But if they're say... quoting George W. Bush, and the mistake is part of the reason they're quoting it, then they'll put in [sic] to show that it's the person being quoted, not the person typing up the quote that made the error.
note: [sic] almost always conveys a sense of the writer thinking him or herself better and more intellegent than the source. it's a very arrogant little journalistic device. it's sometimes needed, but not very often.
There are evolutionary and fractal based music generators out there. The results usually sound more like Cage or Bach than popular music though.
This is true: evolution produces things perfectly tuned to their environments, ergo: the extreme fragility of life in highly specific ecologies (such as rainforests, tropical islands, etc.)
Human design arrogangly ignores environment, and is thus better suited to unpredictable change. However, I have to believe that evolutionary design could come up with something like the common rat, able to survive and work almost anywhere. As long as the environment that the device evolved in was made to fluctuate and be inconsistant, the device could not evolve to rely on the temperature, humidity, magnetism, radio signals, etc. that exist only in the lab.
Human design is limited by human thought patterns. Interferance and other such effects are viewed by human engineers as problems that have to be designed around. Evolutionary design responds to the whole environment, "problems" and all. It is not at all surprising that circuits designed by evolutionary process rather than intelligent design are radically different than what any team of engineers would create. It is however, interesting on the deepest levels.
God created that circuit! Are you trying to tell me that transistors can come together at random and create a working device? If a tornado blew through an Intel cleanroom, would it throw together a computer?
Ummm... did you read the parent post? He's saying that racism and opression are still alive and well in America. We've wiped out the easy and visible signs of it- segregation, the KKK, etc. but that hasn't changed a lot of people's attitudes about race. Good luck on your English Ph.D. It might help if you learn to read.
Speaking as someone who lives a few blocks south and west of the historic neighborhoods of south Harlem, the reason is simple: old Harlem doesn't exist.
125th street is as much of a mall as you'll find on the island. The old storefronts, clubs, and apartments have been replaced by chain outlets like Old Navy and the like. The few remnants of the old days have been completely comodified and stripped of their sincerity. The Apollo no longer has any sort of focus on Jazz or Blues, and even then Jazz and Blues stopped being innovative areas of music decades ago. Harlem in the 1930s was a cultural center, a breeding ground for a new and uniquely American style of poetry, music, and art. Now it's just the last frontier for the complete Gentrification and Disnification of Manhattan.
So where's the virtual East Village of the 1970s?
sounds like there's another criminal to add to the list...
Are you defending this system? Does your stated belief that the supposed liberals who posted this story would be happy if rich white people were profiled (a belief that has no basis in any fact) have any bearing on the story whatsoever?
If they created a similar database of potential corporate criminals, some people would be happy with that, but would they be any less wrong with those who create this biased system?
You've said nothing loudly. Congratulations.
Commenting on posters' spelling = pompous.
Commenting on editors' spelling = legitimate expectation of quality from a service that claims to be "news."
It's silly to expect random people commenting as fast as they can in order to deal with a stupid default "oldest post first" system to be paragons of grammar and spelling. You're lucky to understand them at all.
I don't think it's too much to ask that Slashdot editors, or people taking the time to post stories, run submissions at least through a half-decent spell check.
Of course then there's the nerds like me who look at screenshots and descriptions of Doom3 and think "wow, that's gonna be one hell of a fun engine to play around with"
Will Wright is a genius though. When are we going to get the 21st century update of SimEarth and SimLife?
If MacOS were available for a lot of platforms, it wouldn't work as well as MacOS. I seriously doubt that it's even possible to create a truly reliable OS for an uncontrolled hardware base. Macs work like Macs, you plug stuff in and it just magically starts to function. If they ported to x86 and the 1x10^9 bits of associated hardware, they could no longer insure that this would be true. At that point, they're just a smaller Microsoft with better art school grads. Sticking to propriatary hardware allows Apple to avoid price wars (PC hardware is a virtually profit free industry) and make better products. They might sell a bit more software by porting to x86, but they'd lose every competitive edge they have. This is why SJ quickly killed off the clone makers. This is why the iPod has no documented support on non-Mac platforms. If Apple changed their strategy, Macs would no longer Just Work (TM) and they'd be just as unpredictable and idiot unfriendly as all other computers.
"This is Unix... I know this"
Bingo!
Macintoshes work better than PCs (Linux PCs included) for the exact same reason that it's easier to get GTA3 working on a PS2 than a computer.
Controlling the hardware is Apple's single biggest achievement. I'm glad they nipped the horrible idea of clones before it got out of hand.
Legit DVDs are dirt cheap in some countries to fight piracy. Even the MPAA knows that if a DVD costs more than the average worker's weeks' wage, then piracy is going to be rampant. Even if region encoding breaks down, they can't sell $20 DVDs in Russia.
Prices might go up a bit in these countries, but a much more likely effect will be prices dropping in the US. Which sounds great to me. Ask yourself this: since DVDs cost about as much to license + manufacture as CDs, how can they justify selling them at double the cost? Especially considering that most movies have allready made enough in theater profits to completely cover the cost of manufacturing and promoting the DVD 100 times over.
Perhaps the worst name in technology history?
Looks like 3L33T speak, takes a minute to think of how to pronounce. Why not "Redhat Media" or something like that?
It's in dictionaries because it's commonly [mis]used. Look it up on dictionary.com and they have a little paragraph debating whether or not it's real. First off, by the standards of English, it's absolutely pointless to have an ir- prefix with a -less suffix. It's a double negative. It probably began as a mis-informed combination of the words "disregardless" and "irrespective" In educated circles, it's considered a faux-pas indicitive of someone who is trying to sound like they have a larger vocabulary than they really do. note: disregardless is a word because "disregard" is a word. having said this, i'm changing my sig pretty soon, it's basically an open invitation for people to comment on my (frequent and admitted) spelling errors. but the point remains: virii isn't a word. ask any doctor. it was made up by computer guys who wanted to sound smart by making a -us word plural with an -i, but english isn't consistant with pluralization words (and the latin word virus' plural isn't even viri or virii, it's virus) of course, english sometimes accepts malapropisms into the general vocabulary. woodrow wilson coined the term "normalcy" when he misspoke in a famous speach. i'm worried thate W. could pull a similar gramatical innovation.
The KPCOFGS system has always bugged me. (pun intended) It's a a more or less arbitrary system, that only does a so-so job of reflecting evolutionary descent.
But I can't really think of a better replacement.
See, I totally disagree with this.
WineX has not taken anything away from Wine. They use their code, and Wine is no worse off for it. Your criticism of TransGaming assumes that they would have written the same software if they had used the GPL. But they wouldn't have. If you want to sell software (and not support or some other intangible) you simply can't use the GPL. The only thing you can hope for is to tack a $1 surcharge on CDs shipped to people with connections to slow to download the free package.
Profit is a motivator for innovation, like it or not. I like and fully support the GPL, but I also like and fully support some things done by better for-profit software companies. If Transgaming had been forced to GPL their work, there would be no WineX.
"Support" good software that you want to use, in whatever form it comes in. If there's a product out there that is filling a gap, then support whatever system that created it. Linux may or may not succeed on the desktop. Linux will not succeed on the desktop with ONLY GPLed software.
For novice players, it is pretty much the same thing, only smaller armies (which is a good thing in my opinion)
In really competitive play, it actually plays quite differently from Starcraft, C&C, WC2, or Dune 2. The hero system really rewards micromanagement, and rushes aren't quite what they've been in the past. If you sit down and try to play WC3 like Starcraft, you'll lose pretty quickly. Warcraft 3 is not paced at all like previous RTSes.
However, these are deep, play-balance innovations. The overall format of the game is pretty much Warcraft 2 with smaller armies and stronger units.
What I would really like to see is a RTS (and shouldn't these games be called Real Time Tactics, the scale is a bit small to really be called "strategy" in the military sense) of WWII's Pacific theater, done at about Starcraft Scale. Storm beaches, knock out gun fortifications, take over islands, clear out airstrips, etc. It could be really interesting, and it wouldn't have any of that base-building nonsense (you don't train new soldiers and research new technology on the battlefield). Or play the Japanese side and try to defend.
Linux has less than a 2% desktop share. Unless Linux gamers are willing to pay $500 for a native game, it's a money losing opportunity.
The only companies who will release Linux games are those that really really rely on geek support (like Id)
But on the bright side, just about everyone has come around to the conclusion that releasing Linux servers for their games is a good idea.