TAoL really gets more flack than it deserves... I love that game...
I think it gets less now than it used to. It used to be more of an odd one out - the side-scrolling action instead of the other games' top-down model was certainly weird. It didn't feel at all the same as the other games, and so it got a fair amount of abuse. I loved it myself - I'd played it first, and only got the others rather later, so I didn't see it as so strange - but I can understand the criticism.
That was the case while Zelda II was compared with Zelda I, LttP and Awakening. All top-down adventures clearly related to each other, leaving Zelda II out in the cold.
Then Nintendo decided to change the rules a bit. I remember feeling a certain trepidation when I heard what was being done. 3D? How'll that work? The whole thing was pretty much a complete rethink, making the difference between Zelda II and the other three seem rather less significant.
And then the game came out, and... well, there's Civilization II and Super Mario Bros. III, and maybe Half-Life, and that's all that stands comparison.
Now Zelda II isn't so much seen as an oddball, a black sheep of the family. It's a precursor to Ocarina, ahead of its time. Fighting side on? You do it in Ocarina, when you're not viewing it from behind instead. Using magic spells? Well, that's what the ocarina's for. And better yet, Ocarina explicitly endorsed the awesomeness of Zelda II: Rauru. Ruto. Saria. Mido. Nabooru. Darunia.
Now, I'm looking forward to the second (or the first exclusively) Wii Zelda. I hope to find out at last just who Kasuto was:-)
Wind Waker makes a lot of semi-obscure references to Ocarina of Time...
Such as the bloody great statue of the Hero of Time, and the stained glass windows of the Seven Sages.
And Ocarina itself reverse-referenced Zelda II, retconning the village names into people. And Twilight Princess also gave the occasional nod to Ocarina - take a good look at the photographs at the fishing pond.
Re:Requiring the use of the microphone was a bad i
on
Phantom Hourglass Review
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· Score: 4, Informative
And don't even get me started about having to shout.....
Snap your fingers in front of the microphone. One of the NPCs even tells you about that trick;-)
You literally run through the same dungeon something like 5 or 6 times throughout the course of the game, and the dungeon is just kind of obnoxious.
Actually, I quite liked that.
Yes, you're going through the same dungeon over and over again. But each time you do it you've got more equipment while going through the repeated parts to reach the new bit. Once you get kit like bombchus and the hookshot and the shovel, you can cut out huge slices of that dungeon - if you notice where to use them, that is. It's hugely satisfying, bypassing a level you remember as obnoxiously tough and annoying by just hopping over a little gap with the bungee hookshot;-) The last time you do it you can actually kill the phantoms - exterminate them from a stage and you get bonus loot.
It should be no surprise, then, that ancient alien city of T'Leth is right in the center of the Gulf of Mexico. Those damn aliens were the second impact!
Second Impact was in Antarctica.
Yes, I did always name my main X-COM base in Japan 'NERV'. Why do you ask?
And what about Mt. Pinatubo, its eruption in 1991injected 20- million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere.... Is that more than all the sulfur dioxide man puts into the atmosphere?
17 million tons is the reference I found. For comparison, in 2005 China alone was estimated to release 25.5 million tons of sulphur dioxide through industrial activity.
How? He has an Italian name and a comedy accent. Other than that... I don't see it. I've never seen him eat pasta. He's not in the Mafia. He doesn't sing opera. He doesn't change sides halfway through the fight. He's never even tried to bribe Koopa.
Unless the current Italian stereotype involves diving through pipes to jump up and down on mushrooms, I just don't get what you mean here.
the jetski-size Sentry (inset) could help a terrorist plot such as Al Qaeda's attack on the USS Cole in December 2000.
Not sure what the problem is with the grammar, but it appears that there's bigger news than just robot patrol ships. This, clearly, is a robot patrol ship equipped with a flux capacitor. How else could something they just invented help a terrorist plot that happened seven years ago?
If the uranium tamper is replaced with lead, the overall efficiency is cut in half. The fallout, however, is cut by a lot more, and is relatively low. That Soviet union, knowing their desire for showing off their power, choose to do this, is pretty good.
Well, I imagine they didn't particularly want to irradiate vast amounts of their own territory. Plus, if the final fission stage had gone ahead and Tsar had been a 100Mt detonation, the bomber that dropped it would never have reached a safe distance in time. Even in Soviet Russia, it's hard to find volunteers for that kind of mission:-)
The rest of these figures are about right AFAIK, but this one's well over. A lot of British bombs have been retired lately - mostly old air-drop ones that would have needed V-bombers to carry - and more have been mothballed, leaving only around 250 in service on the Trident subs.
True enough, at the current state of the art, network-wise. So... if you were a big media company what would you do?
Give up.
No, seriously. All this copy protection is pissing off the paying customers who find that their TV, while quite capable of displaying HD signals, won't display this signal because Hollywood won't trust it. Or whose new PC is dedicating clock cycles every second of the day to enforcing a Hollywood-mandated lockdown on the whole system, and will crash the fuck out if anything's even slightly suspect. Meanwhile, as we're seeing, it's hardly even showing the pirates down.
Now all we need to find is some evidence of raptors being able to open up doors, and we'll have proof that Hollywood knows more about Dinosaurs than Science.
Raptors can open doors, but they are slowed by them. They take 5 minutes to open the first door and half the time for each subsequent door. Remember, raptors run at 10m/s and they do not know fear.
I enjoyed KOTOR and KOTOR 2 but I always felt the alignment system wasn't good vs evil but good and jerk. I always felt their evil options weren't that natural.
I think the chief problem is that RPGs are classically driven by the quest-issuing NPC. He's the guy who stands around in the marketplace saying 'Oh, won't somebody help me', and who gives you a quest when spoken to. Most of the sidequests revolve around helping these guys out.
What's the dark side option going to be? Kill him on the spot and just take the reward, that's one way, but makes the dark side game rather short and uninteresting. Better is an option like 'Turn him over to the bounty hunters who are the cause of his troubles and get a larger reward'. KOTOR had a fair few decent dark options - sell the medicine to the profiteering gangster rather than the doctor, say. KOTOR 2 was better - Kreia had some rather nasty teachings to impart, if you let her.
But in the end, I'm with the Korriban storekeeper. Why does everyone get the idea that 'dark side' always has to mean 'hooligan'?
Maybe they'll actually put out a complete game this time.
You will find the Internet is full of surprises. At long last the community effort to restore the missing ending is nearing completion; it appears that the main functionality is fully armed and operational, although there are a few exposed thermal exhaust ports they're working to clear up before the public release.
Is there anything beyond the natural? no: then we're living in a strictly materialistic world where there is no morality (no right and no wrong).
I'm not actually convinced that there's a well-defined morality even if there is a God.
Let us assume that God presents the world with his definitive opus, 'How To Be Good', in a manner which leaves no doubt at all as to its authenticity. Even so, how do we know that what God says is good actually is good? If God defines good, then that's objective all right but it's rather arbitrary. What if God changes the rules? What if God orders something we consider abhorrent? Personally, I read the story of Abraham and I think he failed God's test - he should have refused point blank when ordered to kill his son.
Alternatively, God might not just be making up rules, but might simply be a far wiser, more intelligent philosopher than us - God is able to work out correctly what rules are best for us to live by, and tells us his findings. But if that's the source of God's rules, then we don't necessarily need God - we can, at least in principle, work out the same rules ourselves.
I would assume that the percentage of atheists in prison probably corresponds with the percentage of atheists outside of prison. Is that reasonable?
Surveys vary, but tend to show a lower proportion of atheists in jail than in the general population. Whether this is because atheists are more law-abiding citizens, or because atheists know that 'finding Jesus' while inside plays well with the parole board, is another matter...
For anybody missing the reference, I believe he's refering to the BBC show Torchwood.
Actually, Army of Ghosts was the second-to-last episode of the second series of the new Doctor Who. Torchwood, a secret organisation based out of Canary Wharf, were tinkering with a negative space wedgie and were causing widespread sightings of ghosts all over the place. After a while they overdid it and all the ghosts turned out to be a Cyberman invasion force. Then the Sealed Evil In A Can they were keeping in the basement opened up. Mayhem ensued.
Torchwood proper got pretty much wiped out as a result, leaving a bunch of bicurious Cardiff-based incompetents to carry on the name in the spinoff series.
Yes, you know yourself that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is less plausible than Christianity.
How, exactly? Certainly the idea that the creator of the Universe would manifest as spaghetti is pretty implausible, but is that inherently more weird than manifesting as an Iron Age carpenter? Who went on to get killed and then come back from the dead so that he could forgive everyone for something that happened four thousand years previously, except that it probably never actually happened at all?
Why is it so hard to comprehand that something like ghosts/spirits might be real, given all that we know that we don't know.
Might be real is one thing. Actually is real is quite another. Absolutely anything you could name might be real; but in order to take the claim seriously we need some pretty sound evidence, and none has ever been presented.
Since the existence of God can't be proved or disproved by scientific means
Why can't it? Specifically, why can't the existence of God be proved by scientific means? If a god is proposed to exist, a being of vast power intervening in the world in response to human requests, why should we not attempt to observe these changes he allegedly makes?
Oh, wait. God does it so subtly that we can't tell the difference, right? God's hiding from us. Doesn't want to, you know, force us to believe or anything, by giving us actual evidence. Wouldn't be fair.
It's not that the existence of God couldn't in principle be proved by scientific means. It's that the existence of a God who uses all his divine powers and vast cleverness to hide his own existence that we could never prove. Of course, that raises the interesting philosophical puzzle of what exactly the difference is between a totally and perpetually undetectable god and no god at all...
Slashdot Mirror
That is all.
I think it gets less now than it used to. It used to be more of an odd one out - the side-scrolling action instead of the other games' top-down model was certainly weird. It didn't feel at all the same as the other games, and so it got a fair amount of abuse. I loved it myself - I'd played it first, and only got the others rather later, so I didn't see it as so strange - but I can understand the criticism.
That was the case while Zelda II was compared with Zelda I, LttP and Awakening. All top-down adventures clearly related to each other, leaving Zelda II out in the cold.
Then Nintendo decided to change the rules a bit. I remember feeling a certain trepidation when I heard what was being done. 3D? How'll that work? The whole thing was pretty much a complete rethink, making the difference between Zelda II and the other three seem rather less significant.
And then the game came out, and... well, there's Civilization II and Super Mario Bros. III, and maybe Half-Life, and that's all that stands comparison.
Now Zelda II isn't so much seen as an oddball, a black sheep of the family. It's a precursor to Ocarina, ahead of its time. Fighting side on? You do it in Ocarina, when you're not viewing it from behind instead. Using magic spells? Well, that's what the ocarina's for. And better yet, Ocarina explicitly endorsed the awesomeness of Zelda II: Rauru. Ruto. Saria. Mido. Nabooru. Darunia.
Now, I'm looking forward to the second (or the first exclusively) Wii Zelda. I hope to find out at last just who Kasuto was :-)
Such as the bloody great statue of the Hero of Time, and the stained glass windows of the Seven Sages.
And Ocarina itself reverse-referenced Zelda II, retconning the village names into people. And Twilight Princess also gave the occasional nod to Ocarina - take a good look at the photographs at the fishing pond.
Snap your fingers in front of the microphone. One of the NPCs even tells you about that trick ;-)
Actually, I quite liked that.
Yes, you're going through the same dungeon over and over again. But each time you do it you've got more equipment while going through the repeated parts to reach the new bit. Once you get kit like bombchus and the hookshot and the shovel, you can cut out huge slices of that dungeon - if you notice where to use them, that is. It's hugely satisfying, bypassing a level you remember as obnoxiously tough and annoying by just hopping over a little gap with the bungee hookshot ;-) The last time you do it you can actually kill the phantoms - exterminate them from a stage and you get bonus loot.
Kids who put hamsters in microwaves back in my century get taken away from their parents and put into care. So DON'T DO IT.
Second Impact was in Antarctica.
Yes, I did always name my main X-COM base in Japan 'NERV'. Why do you ask?
(The UK one was 'UNIT', of course.)
17 million tons is the reference I found. For comparison, in 2005 China alone was estimated to release 25.5 million tons of sulphur dioxide through industrial activity.
True enough - the stereotype that women are physically weak but can levitate temporarily has held back gender equality for decades.
How? He has an Italian name and a comedy accent. Other than that... I don't see it. I've never seen him eat pasta. He's not in the Mafia. He doesn't sing opera. He doesn't change sides halfway through the fight. He's never even tried to bribe Koopa.
Unless the current Italian stereotype involves diving through pipes to jump up and down on mushrooms, I just don't get what you mean here.
Polish? No. They ran out of paint.
Not sure what the problem is with the grammar, but it appears that there's bigger news than just robot patrol ships. This, clearly, is a robot patrol ship equipped with a flux capacitor. How else could something they just invented help a terrorist plot that happened seven years ago?
Well, I imagine they didn't particularly want to irradiate vast amounts of their own territory. Plus, if the final fission stage had gone ahead and Tsar had been a 100Mt detonation, the bomber that dropped it would never have reached a safe distance in time. Even in Soviet Russia, it's hard to find volunteers for that kind of mission :-)
The rest of these figures are about right AFAIK, but this one's well over. A lot of British bombs have been retired lately - mostly old air-drop ones that would have needed V-bombers to carry - and more have been mothballed, leaving only around 250 in service on the Trident subs.
Give up.
No, seriously. All this copy protection is pissing off the paying customers who find that their TV, while quite capable of displaying HD signals, won't display this signal because Hollywood won't trust it. Or whose new PC is dedicating clock cycles every second of the day to enforcing a Hollywood-mandated lockdown on the whole system, and will crash the fuck out if anything's even slightly suspect. Meanwhile, as we're seeing, it's hardly even showing the pirates down.
Raptors can open doors, but they are slowed by them. They take 5 minutes to open the first door and half the time for each subsequent door. Remember, raptors run at 10m/s and they do not know fear.
I think the chief problem is that RPGs are classically driven by the quest-issuing NPC. He's the guy who stands around in the marketplace saying 'Oh, won't somebody help me', and who gives you a quest when spoken to. Most of the sidequests revolve around helping these guys out.
What's the dark side option going to be? Kill him on the spot and just take the reward, that's one way, but makes the dark side game rather short and uninteresting. Better is an option like 'Turn him over to the bounty hunters who are the cause of his troubles and get a larger reward'. KOTOR had a fair few decent dark options - sell the medicine to the profiteering gangster rather than the doctor, say. KOTOR 2 was better - Kreia had some rather nasty teachings to impart, if you let her.
But in the end, I'm with the Korriban storekeeper. Why does everyone get the idea that 'dark side' always has to mean 'hooligan'?
You will find the Internet is full of surprises. At long last the community effort to restore the missing ending is nearing completion; it appears that the main functionality is fully armed and operational, although there are a few exposed thermal exhaust ports they're working to clear up before the public release.
Essentially true, though. Any computer can emulate any other computer, as long as it's given enough memory.
I'm not actually convinced that there's a well-defined morality even if there is a God.
Let us assume that God presents the world with his definitive opus, 'How To Be Good', in a manner which leaves no doubt at all as to its authenticity. Even so, how do we know that what God says is good actually is good? If God defines good, then that's objective all right but it's rather arbitrary. What if God changes the rules? What if God orders something we consider abhorrent? Personally, I read the story of Abraham and I think he failed God's test - he should have refused point blank when ordered to kill his son.
Alternatively, God might not just be making up rules, but might simply be a far wiser, more intelligent philosopher than us - God is able to work out correctly what rules are best for us to live by, and tells us his findings. But if that's the source of God's rules, then we don't necessarily need God - we can, at least in principle, work out the same rules ourselves.
Surveys vary, but tend to show a lower proportion of atheists in jail than in the general population. Whether this is because atheists are more law-abiding citizens, or because atheists know that 'finding Jesus' while inside plays well with the parole board, is another matter...
Actually, Army of Ghosts was the second-to-last episode of the second series of the new Doctor Who. Torchwood, a secret organisation based out of Canary Wharf, were tinkering with a negative space wedgie and were causing widespread sightings of ghosts all over the place. After a while they overdid it and all the ghosts turned out to be a Cyberman invasion force. Then the Sealed Evil In A Can they were keeping in the basement opened up. Mayhem ensued.
Torchwood proper got pretty much wiped out as a result, leaving a bunch of bicurious Cardiff-based incompetents to carry on the name in the spinoff series.
How, exactly? Certainly the idea that the creator of the Universe would manifest as spaghetti is pretty implausible, but is that inherently more weird than manifesting as an Iron Age carpenter? Who went on to get killed and then come back from the dead so that he could forgive everyone for something that happened four thousand years previously, except that it probably never actually happened at all?
Might be real is one thing. Actually is real is quite another. Absolutely anything you could name might be real; but in order to take the claim seriously we need some pretty sound evidence, and none has ever been presented.
Why can't it? Specifically, why can't the existence of God be proved by scientific means? If a god is proposed to exist, a being of vast power intervening in the world in response to human requests, why should we not attempt to observe these changes he allegedly makes?
Oh, wait. God does it so subtly that we can't tell the difference, right? God's hiding from us. Doesn't want to, you know, force us to believe or anything, by giving us actual evidence. Wouldn't be fair.
It's not that the existence of God couldn't in principle be proved by scientific means. It's that the existence of a God who uses all his divine powers and vast cleverness to hide his own existence that we could never prove. Of course, that raises the interesting philosophical puzzle of what exactly the difference is between a totally and perpetually undetectable god and no god at all...