The format also eliminated one of the crucial aspects of traditional poker called the tell, subtle clues such as facial ticks that may permit other players to make accurate guesses about the hidden cards held by their opponent.
Isn't this like facing world's best soccer player and the computer in a match of Fifa Soccer 2007?
Perhaps, but it's hard to say this gives the computer an advantage it wouldn't have anyway. If it's straight man versus machine, the machine only sees cards and bets, so it can't read the human's face, and the man only sees a black box with a perfect poker face.
I'd guess that if you put the poker pro and the machine both into a face-to-face game of poker with a bunch of amateurs, the human would do far better, because while he and the computer couldn't read each other's faces, he could read all the other guys' faces and clean them out. But one on one it's fair enough.
Nope. God started Islam, when he taught it to Adam. People forgot over time, so he tried again with Abraham. Then again with Moses. Then Isaiah. Then Jesus. Finally God got a fucking clue and actually thought to write it all down for Mohammed. So Mohammed just re-established Islam, rather than originating it.
St Paul originated it, but Lewis's version is more relevant here:
"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
Now if you'll excuse me, I've neglected a certain long-running saga of magicians and so forth since around 2002, and have three rather large volumes to catch up on before some git spoils the ending for me;)
So you can have your Wii and new Anime, but it requires the anime fans support the studios.
* examines T-shirts, wallscrolls, DVD boxsets, figurines dotted around room *
* examines ridiculous amount of bandwidth being consumed by Azureus for Haruhi-related purposes *
1) Good news. Wii doing well => likelihood of many years of good games for it => good for me as Wii owner
2) Bad news. Japanese watching less TV => likelihood of fewer cool anime shows being made => bad for me as otaku
Actually... I'm with Japan on this. Wii > Anime. But it's a damn tough trade-off to make!
Ebert's argument often seems to come down to 'any time the artist has to interact with the subject instead of 100% dictating the experience, it is lesser'.
Then is a videogame more like a performance? Much of the traditional folklore of every culture was preserved by bards and storytellers. These people would tell their tales, and would expand parts and gloss over others to suit their audience, gauging their reaction as they went through the story. Yet certainly their performance is a work of art, never quite the same twice but certainly there is a core routine, and a repertoire of common variations around it that the bard will use as the circumstances of the performance require.
You'll see it also in contemporary performances. Watch several shows by the same comedian - say, Bill Hicks or perhaps Eddie Izzard, someone who tends to revisit themes. You'll see the same joke, the same routine performed in different times and places. Certainly the joke is a work of art which that comedian has created and polished during his career. But each performance of it will be different, because the comedian will react to his audience and adjust what he does accordingly. Watch enough shows and you'll come to recognise the extras the comedian bolts on to the joke if he has time or if he thinks a longer build-up will make the audience appreciate the punchline more. Or watch rock performances, and see how each time they'll put together a different setlist dependent on the type of show, where they are on the bill, whether they're pushing a new album, and whether the crowd have started throwing bottles at them.
There are plenty of artforms which are interactive. I think the chief difference is that the typical videogame is one-to-one - it's only your input that determines how the game unfolds - while a performance would be an artist responding to the aggregate reaction of a large audience. But I don't think that's enough to disqualify games as an artform.
Zelda:TP felt more like a OoT mission disc then a new experience
Ironically, that's exactly what the purists wanted - indeed, what the purists insisted upon, very loudly. Remember the fuss, right here, when we first saw what Wind Waker was going to look like? Well, we got what we wished for. Twilight Princess: it's Ocarina but rather bigger and not quite as well lit.
I don't think it's a stretch to think there could be video game purists at this point. There are people who were there at the beginning and who have grown up with video games, knowing them a certain way. If they have developed a set of expectations based on those experiences, that would make them a purist.
A certain way? What way is this? Infocom text game? Roguelike? Endless early-eighties high-score hunt? 2D platformer? JRPG? Block-sorting puzzle? Hegemonising god game? Rodent rescue operation? FPS? RTS? MMORPG?
Presumably he is still lost in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, or perhaps in hot pursuit of a wumpus, or making a desperate attempt to kill a dragon with his bare hands, or maybe he is finally about to get hold of the Amulet of Yendor after twenty years of trying. So I'm not sure why he'd care what Nintendo are doing. I think in this context 'I'm a video game purist' is a code phrase for 'I don't like the Wiimote'. Not liking the Wiimote is a perfectly fair opinion, but attempting to present it as 'video game purism' is nonsense. There've been far greater changes than this in the way games have been played over the years.
I just get the impression we're going to end up throwing yet more electronic hardware away if this becomes a common trend, particularly if the upgrade is such a big jump as the DS to the DS Lite was that it does make a large difference getting the new kit.
What was the jump from DS to DS Lite? Physically smaller, brighter screen, longer battery life. Great for a portable. Utterly irrelevant for a home console. Nintendo might come out with a smaller Wii, as Sony did with the PS2, but that won't exactly obsolete the old ones. A hardware upgrade is a poor idea; you end up with Wii1 and Wii2 in the market at the same time, and developers who use the capabilities of Wii2 cut themselves off from the already enormous installed base of Wii1.
The obvious Wii upgrade would have to be a software jump: specifically, multimedia. I'm on record from last November as saying that DVD playing doesn't matter to me, because everyone has a DVD player already. I've cooled on that. The Wii is on, it's connected right the hell now, I can't be bothered messing with switches, the damn thing's got a remote control, I want to play a DVD in it. And since the Wii's a device on my wireless network, I'd be awfully happy if it could play video files from my PC over the network. I've an awful lot of anime I'd love to watch on the big screen downstairs. If they'd just get the mplayerhq.hu guys to produce a version for Wii that they could put out for download, that would be just great;-)
Personally, I tend to laugh at the "grown up" comments. What's "grown up"? Sex, violence, disturbing imagery, and online play that lets you swear at each other? I'm not really sure why any adult would want to exclusively subject themselves to such content, but that is their choice. It just doesn't make the "kiddie" argument against Nintendo any stronger.
It's a quirk of language. Adult content very rarely means just that; it usually means juvenile content. Gratuitous boobies, exciting gunplay, lots of blood, the typical action-movie recipe targeted at teenagers. Same goes for games. The core market right now is the Playstation generation, mostly boys who began gaming in around 1995 but who, twelve years on, are late teens and early twenties and want games that reinforce their image of themselves as manly men.
Nintendo's core market on the other hand is slightly older, NES and SNES veterans from the late eighties, early nineties. And as CS Lewis said, when I became a man I put aside childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be seen as being very grown up. The nice thing about having that as your core fanbase is that you can easily recruit the new generation of little kids with the same games you're selling to your base of gamers who are pushing thirty.
At any rate, Nintendo have never made bloodthirsty games. All the hardcore action games on the NES and SNES were made by the likes of Konami - I'm thinking Gradius or Contra here. The ultra-long JRPGs were again usually third party jobs, at least until the Pokémon era. I certainly can't speak for the whole demographic, but as a NES-era Nintendo fanboy who defected long ago to PC gaming, well, in this generation Nintendo have won me back. I said before that I was proved wrong in my traditionalism once before, insisting that Mario should be 2D, that Zelda should be top-down, right up until the moment I got hold of an N64 and played two of the greatest games there've ever been. What Nintendo are doing now... well, the third parties are making a bit of a hash of Wii at the moment, too many PS2 ports with poor Wiimote implementations, but going by the record of the DS they won't take too long to catch on.
Videogames are still a new and rapidly evolving artform. So what's a purist? A traditionalist, perhaps... but then I remember being extremely unhappy when I heard that my two favourite 2D franchises (a popular side-scrolling platformer, and a popular top-down action/RPG series) were going to be made into 3D games.
Until I played them.
Now Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are considered all-time classics, even by 'purists', even by old hands like me. Should Mario have stayed true to his 2D roots to satisfy purists? Should Zelda have stayed top-down? Certainly not. Purism of that kind leads to stagnation; while the occasional throwback like New SMB is wonderful, games have to evolve or become stale.
"Eureka" would be a fun and successful name... unfortunately, the company's products suck... (but they are supposed to... it's a vacuum cleaner company.) They should pick a name like that. Theseus makes people think of "Thesaurus"
So, you need to finely gauge your audience's exact level of knowledge of ancient Greek culture, then. They know 'Eureka', but think 'Theseus' is kind of like a dictionary. It's a tricky business, this...
All you'd have to do is bid 99 billion dollars, and you'd automatically win any auction, only paying a tiny fraction of your bid. That doesn't sound particularly fair to me.
Why not? With your silly bid, you'd get the goods, and you'd pay the amount of the highest sensible bid. Sounds fair to me.
Unless of course somebody else had the same idea, but only bid one billion dollars. Then you're fucked.
Actually, your first paragraph is probably irrelevant; that's just the blurb explaining why he has to make the order. Even if the original reason was because of OMG Terrorists, it might still be used against political opponents if the actual main text doesn't exclude that.
Fortunately, it does. 1(a)(i) restricts the scope to persons determined 'to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of'... threatening Iraqi reconstruction. Voting for parties whose policies might threaten Iraqi reconstruction is not an act of violence, so this does not ban all opposition to the Party.
It's still just the word of the President and his cabal that does the determining, but it's not as bad as is being portrayed here.
Whatever it is they're doing, whatever reason it is they give for it, if there's anything about it such that they say 'no, no, we'd never use it that way' - they're planning to do just that, just as soon as they can get away with it.
The truely interesting thing to me on that list is the DS. The lifetime Japan sales of the DS are showing as 18M, and PS2 is 20M. If thats right, the DS is about to surpass the PS2 in number of units sold!
DS did that long ago. Look again at the chart: eighteen million is the figure for 'DSL', while lower down the chart you'll see that something called 'NDS' has sold 6.5 million.
Between the DS and DS Lite, Nintendo have shifted nearly 26 million in Japan. That's about one in five of the entire Japanese population.
Could somebody please explain to me why the Official Slashdot Groupthink(tm) hates the PS3 and loves the Wii?
For about a year now Sony have been top of the Slashdot shitlist, displacing Microsoft, the RIAA, and France. This is because of the rootkits they put on music CDs.
I always thought the "Game Boy" name itself was -- how to put this diplomatically -- complete and total crap.
Fortunately, Nintendo have got better at naming games systems since those days. Yep. Nobody can accuse Nintendo of coming up with crap names these days. Not at all.
I am curious about Iwata's comments when the DS launched that the DS was not a replacement for the Gameboy and that a new gameboy would come eventually, has that tech been scrapped or just rolled into the next version of the DS. Concidering the DS has backwards compatability his comments never made sense to me anyway, but he went out of his way at the time to say that the GBA was a separate product line. Perhaps it was simply so the GBASP would continue to sell?
My guess is that the DS was originally conceived as a stop-gap. The PSP was known to be on the way. With the Gamecube doing poorly, the handhelds were vital for Nintendo's survival, and now Sony had lined up a monster portable that made the GBA look positively stone-aged. Hence the DS. They produce it quickly, come up with some nifty gimmicks to sell it with, and put it out. Where the GBA would have been no contest at all, the DS can compete with the PSP - it's noticeably less powerful, but hey! Two screens! One of them's touch sensitive! And look, Mario 64! Meanwhile Nintendo would continue work on the real successor to the Gameboy lineage.
I don't think anybody expected the DS to become what it is today.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this like facing world's best soccer player and the computer in a match of Fifa Soccer 2007?
Perhaps, but it's hard to say this gives the computer an advantage it wouldn't have anyway. If it's straight man versus machine, the machine only sees cards and bets, so it can't read the human's face, and the man only sees a black box with a perfect poker face.
I'd guess that if you put the poker pro and the machine both into a face-to-face game of poker with a bunch of amateurs, the human would do far better, because while he and the computer couldn't read each other's faces, he could read all the other guys' faces and clean them out. But one on one it's fair enough.
Nope. God started Islam, when he taught it to Adam. People forgot over time, so he tried again with Abraham. Then again with Moses. Then Isaiah. Then Jesus. Finally God got a fucking clue and actually thought to write it all down for Mohammed. So Mohammed just re-established Islam, rather than originating it.
As a lamentable but unavoidable side-effect of their brave and glorious duties, your troops might not but your pilots sure as hell do.
"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
Now if you'll excuse me, I've neglected a certain long-running saga of magicians and so forth since around 2002, and have three rather large volumes to catch up on before some git spoils the ending for me ;)
* examines T-shirts, wallscrolls, DVD boxsets, figurines dotted around room *
* examines ridiculous amount of bandwidth being consumed by Azureus for Haruhi-related purposes *
... I probably come out around even.
2) Bad news. Japanese watching less TV => likelihood of fewer cool anime shows being made => bad for me as otaku
Actually... I'm with Japan on this. Wii > Anime. But it's a damn tough trade-off to make!
Then is a videogame more like a performance? Much of the traditional folklore of every culture was preserved by bards and storytellers. These people would tell their tales, and would expand parts and gloss over others to suit their audience, gauging their reaction as they went through the story. Yet certainly their performance is a work of art, never quite the same twice but certainly there is a core routine, and a repertoire of common variations around it that the bard will use as the circumstances of the performance require.
You'll see it also in contemporary performances. Watch several shows by the same comedian - say, Bill Hicks or perhaps Eddie Izzard, someone who tends to revisit themes. You'll see the same joke, the same routine performed in different times and places. Certainly the joke is a work of art which that comedian has created and polished during his career. But each performance of it will be different, because the comedian will react to his audience and adjust what he does accordingly. Watch enough shows and you'll come to recognise the extras the comedian bolts on to the joke if he has time or if he thinks a longer build-up will make the audience appreciate the punchline more. Or watch rock performances, and see how each time they'll put together a different setlist dependent on the type of show, where they are on the bill, whether they're pushing a new album, and whether the crowd have started throwing bottles at them.
There are plenty of artforms which are interactive. I think the chief difference is that the typical videogame is one-to-one - it's only your input that determines how the game unfolds - while a performance would be an artist responding to the aggregate reaction of a large audience. But I don't think that's enough to disqualify games as an artform.
Ironically, that's exactly what the purists wanted - indeed, what the purists insisted upon, very loudly. Remember the fuss, right here, when we first saw what Wind Waker was going to look like? Well, we got what we wished for. Twilight Princess: it's Ocarina but rather bigger and not quite as well lit.
A certain way? What way is this? Infocom text game? Roguelike? Endless early-eighties high-score hunt? 2D platformer? JRPG? Block-sorting puzzle? Hegemonising god game? Rodent rescue operation? FPS? RTS? MMORPG?
Presumably he is still lost in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, or perhaps in hot pursuit of a wumpus, or making a desperate attempt to kill a dragon with his bare hands, or maybe he is finally about to get hold of the Amulet of Yendor after twenty years of trying. So I'm not sure why he'd care what Nintendo are doing. I think in this context 'I'm a video game purist' is a code phrase for 'I don't like the Wiimote'. Not liking the Wiimote is a perfectly fair opinion, but attempting to present it as 'video game purism' is nonsense. There've been far greater changes than this in the way games have been played over the years.
What was the jump from DS to DS Lite? Physically smaller, brighter screen, longer battery life. Great for a portable. Utterly irrelevant for a home console. Nintendo might come out with a smaller Wii, as Sony did with the PS2, but that won't exactly obsolete the old ones. A hardware upgrade is a poor idea; you end up with Wii1 and Wii2 in the market at the same time, and developers who use the capabilities of Wii2 cut themselves off from the already enormous installed base of Wii1.
The obvious Wii upgrade would have to be a software jump: specifically, multimedia. I'm on record from last November as saying that DVD playing doesn't matter to me, because everyone has a DVD player already. I've cooled on that. The Wii is on, it's connected right the hell now, I can't be bothered messing with switches, the damn thing's got a remote control, I want to play a DVD in it. And since the Wii's a device on my wireless network, I'd be awfully happy if it could play video files from my PC over the network. I've an awful lot of anime I'd love to watch on the big screen downstairs. If they'd just get the mplayerhq.hu guys to produce a version for Wii that they could put out for download, that would be just great ;-)
Yes. I think they wanted to cause a little extra mayhem ;-)
It's a quirk of language. Adult content very rarely means just that; it usually means juvenile content. Gratuitous boobies, exciting gunplay, lots of blood, the typical action-movie recipe targeted at teenagers. Same goes for games. The core market right now is the Playstation generation, mostly boys who began gaming in around 1995 but who, twelve years on, are late teens and early twenties and want games that reinforce their image of themselves as manly men.
Nintendo's core market on the other hand is slightly older, NES and SNES veterans from the late eighties, early nineties. And as CS Lewis said, when I became a man I put aside childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be seen as being very grown up. The nice thing about having that as your core fanbase is that you can easily recruit the new generation of little kids with the same games you're selling to your base of gamers who are pushing thirty.
At any rate, Nintendo have never made bloodthirsty games. All the hardcore action games on the NES and SNES were made by the likes of Konami - I'm thinking Gradius or Contra here. The ultra-long JRPGs were again usually third party jobs, at least until the Pokémon era. I certainly can't speak for the whole demographic, but as a NES-era Nintendo fanboy who defected long ago to PC gaming, well, in this generation Nintendo have won me back. I said before that I was proved wrong in my traditionalism once before, insisting that Mario should be 2D, that Zelda should be top-down, right up until the moment I got hold of an N64 and played two of the greatest games there've ever been. What Nintendo are doing now... well, the third parties are making a bit of a hash of Wii at the moment, too many PS2 ports with poor Wiimote implementations, but going by the record of the DS they won't take too long to catch on.
Until I played them.
Now Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are considered all-time classics, even by 'purists', even by old hands like me. Should Mario have stayed true to his 2D roots to satisfy purists? Should Zelda have stayed top-down? Certainly not. Purism of that kind leads to stagnation; while the occasional throwback like New SMB is wonderful, games have to evolve or become stale.
So, you need to finely gauge your audience's exact level of knowledge of ancient Greek culture, then. They know 'Eureka', but think 'Theseus' is kind of like a dictionary. It's a tricky business, this...
As a bay, it's been there for millions of years. As a military base, it's been there for decades. As a prison camp, it's all Bush's baby.
Why not? With your silly bid, you'd get the goods, and you'd pay the amount of the highest sensible bid. Sounds fair to me.
Unless of course somebody else had the same idea, but only bid one billion dollars. Then you're fucked.
Brave meaning 'panicking in terror about a 1 in 100,000 fatality rate in an incident six years ago'...
Fortunately, it does. 1(a)(i) restricts the scope to persons determined 'to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of'... threatening Iraqi reconstruction. Voting for parties whose policies might threaten Iraqi reconstruction is not an act of violence, so this does not ban all opposition to the Party.
It's still just the word of the President and his cabal that does the determining, but it's not as bad as is being portrayed here.
Whatever it is they're doing, whatever reason it is they give for it, if there's anything about it such that they say 'no, no, we'd never use it that way' - they're planning to do just that, just as soon as they can get away with it.
DS did that long ago. Look again at the chart: eighteen million is the figure for 'DSL', while lower down the chart you'll see that something called 'NDS' has sold 6.5 million.
Between the DS and DS Lite, Nintendo have shifted nearly 26 million in Japan. That's about one in five of the entire Japanese population.
For about a year now Sony have been top of the Slashdot shitlist, displacing Microsoft, the RIAA, and France. This is because of the rootkits they put on music CDs.
... but there are worse things. Cockatrices, for instance. Handle with care. Extreme care.
Fortunately, Nintendo have got better at naming games systems since those days. Yep. Nobody can accuse Nintendo of coming up with crap names these days. Not at all.
I know perfectly well it's not called the Game Boy DS, and I've called it that. Wired too deep into my brain now, I think...
Then again, I've heard the PSP called a Game Boy too. Ouch.
My guess is that the DS was originally conceived as a stop-gap. The PSP was known to be on the way. With the Gamecube doing poorly, the handhelds were vital for Nintendo's survival, and now Sony had lined up a monster portable that made the GBA look positively stone-aged. Hence the DS. They produce it quickly, come up with some nifty gimmicks to sell it with, and put it out. Where the GBA would have been no contest at all, the DS can compete with the PSP - it's noticeably less powerful, but hey! Two screens! One of them's touch sensitive! And look, Mario 64! Meanwhile Nintendo would continue work on the real successor to the Gameboy lineage.
I don't think anybody expected the DS to become what it is today.