I agree almost 100%. I think you might be maligning the designers a bit, i've known some very good ones, some of whom have done a lot of creative work in other fields before working on video games. Sure there are designers who aren't very good, but there are programmers and artists who aren't very good either.
However your basic point is right on. In every game company i've worked at more than two thirds of the people have very little in depth tehnical experience. The designers can write simple scripts and use spreadsheets to balance stats, and the artists can use the appropriate art tools, but (on average) they know very little about programing, technical constraints, or the data pipeline.
There's always some artist who insists on exporting art files in the wrong way, even after you've told them three or more times that it will break stuff. The designers often make similar mistakes with the scripts, and frequently their first request for a new feature is totally unfeasible, requiring a programmer to come talk to them about what's possible and how to integrate that with what they want.
Unless the three companies i've worked at have been freak occurances, most game companies have non-technical people doing the art and design. If the design isn't good, either the designers just aren't very good, the programmers weren't able to implement it right (in which case the problem is not enough focus on tech, not too much focus) or as someone else suggested, management decided to get involved for whatever strange reason management always seems to have for screwing things up.
That's a bit rich coming from a guy who was "given an Xbox for Christmas and never opened it", but eagerly (and without any sense of shame or irony) turns round and calls the S controller "clunky".
Hey dude, if anyone has a fetish for the under powered, long in the tooth PS2, its clearly you!!
Go use a real man's console, the Xbox, and stop playing pretend with that weasly PS2.
Actually, if i had a preference for any of the consoles it would be the GameCube. However why are you accusing me of having a fetish for any console when i was clearing willing to point out flaws even in the consoles i like? And why should i bother opening the XBox when it doesn't have any games i want and i'm already incredibly backloged on the PS2 and GameCube?
As for the bit you're quoting, i was merely responding to the parents comment "So there you go. Don't blindly mock the Controller S for the Xbox because of your PS2 fetish." Strangely he uses the phrase first and gets moderated as Interesting, while i respond to him in an ironic tone and get moderated Flamebait.
You'll also note that i did not actually say that the S controller is clunky, i merely stated that i've heard that it is, at least compared to the other consoles. That would explain him feeling that the PS2 and/or GameCube controllers were "flimsy." However if anyone who regularly uses both consoles wants to speak up and state that the S controller and the PS2 controller are the same size, or at least as similar as the PS2 and GameCube controllers are, then i will take their word for it.
I only own the PS2 and the GameCube... well, technically i own an XBox since the last company i worked at gave me one for a christmas bonus, but i've never opened it.
The PS2 controller doesn't feel cheap or skinny at all to me, perhaps you're just used to the S controller which i've heard is still pretty clunky? Grab the handles on the dualshock and give it a twist, it barely moves at all. Using the analog sticks feels perfectly fine to me, although maybe it would feel odd to someone with smaller fingers than me. My only real complaint about the PS2 controller is the shoulder buttons. Trying to play with both your index and middle finger on L/R1 and L/R2 buttons respectively feels really unnatural to me. Not too many games require you to hit both the 1 and 2 buttons at the same time or in quick succession, but when they do it really sucks since i normally only use my index fingers. I don't understand why they don't curve the shoulder butotns back some more so they're more like triggers, especially for L/R2.
The GameCube controller feels great to me. How does it _feel_ "childlike" to you? How do the buttons being of different sizes bother you? Last i checked the XBox controller had at least two different button sizes. It certainly doesn't bother me any. I have about three complaints about the GameCube controller. Number one and a half is that the d-pad is too small, and it would be nicer if they swaped the d-pad with the analog stick to make it more symetrical, but perhaps they're afraid of being accused of copying sony that way. Number three is that the z-button is hard to hit, and there's only the three shoulder buttons. If they did add a fourth to match the PS2 i'd also like them to make them more trigger like, same as my wish for the PS2.
I've used the XBox controller for about five minutes in the store at the mall. I don't know if it was the original or the S type controller. All i do know is that my hands were starting to hurt by the end, and those black and white buttons are _WAY_ too small and closely placed.
So there you go, don't blindly mock the PS2 and GameCube controllers cause of your S controller fetish.
Re:Great, like traffic isn't bad enough as it is..
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Nano Body Building
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Well guess what, Malthus was wrong. Real life examples show that in the absense of some kind of social motivating force, when people become prosperous they stop having as many kids. This is where the stereotype of the farm family with a dozen kids vs. the suburban "nuclear family" of two parents and two kids comes from.
When underdeveloped nations first become prosperous there's a generation or two of lag before the birth rate drops, but currently many industrial nations are actually experiencing negative population growth when considered just in terms of births and deaths (ie, discounting imigration.) Australia is even paying people to have kids just to get back to parity.
The biggest problem with the current demographics is the preponderence of non-productive old people. A pill that allowed people to be healthy and productive throughout their lives would be the perfect solution to this. The
I'm talking about cliched characters, not cliched powers. I could quite easily write a character that is stereotypical in every way but special ability. Here's one: A naive, happy-go-lucky elf maiden who attacks evil with the power of math.
Okay, i'll grant you that Mog's dancing doesn't have much to do with his character, but i think Relm's painting actually does. It comes up a lot in the story, which Mog's dancing never does. When she goes around threatening to paint the other characters, it's more than just a special ability, and i don't think it's a cliche i've heard very often before. And the dancing bit aside, you think Moggles were a cliche?:)
By "one-dimensional" I mean that there's absolutely no believable character development. ... (By "two-dimensional," before you ask, I'm referring to when a character has believable development, but not much else. A three-dimensional character would have various facets of character other than those being developed; depth, in other words.)
Okay, so you just don't understand the proper usage of the terms. I stole this from a list of literary terms: "Dimension - Used to describe the depth of character. Generally a one dimensional character simply has a function (The Butler), two dimensional characters have function and some personality (Jeeves the Butler), three dimensional characters have function, personality and identifiable human qualities such as contradictions, weakness, involvements."
So clearly the FF1 chracters were one dimensional, and the later characters were two or three dimensional. Character development is a prerequisite for three dimensional characters, not two dimensional ones.
Cecil starts out as a Dark Knight, then suddenly becomes a Paladin with little to no introspection (unless you count that lame battle with his old self as "introspection").
You mean other than the point about thirty seconds into the game where he's questioning why they attacked the Mysidians, the point when he brings those questions up with the King of Baron, causing him to get demoted from Captain of the Red Wings to messgenger boy, the point where after unwittingly killing off almost everyone in Mist Village and decides to defy his king rather than kill the sole survivor, other than the point where he goes to other kingdoms to help them repell attacks by his former liege, or the part where he goes to Mysidia and apoligizes for what he did? Yeah, other than that, there's absolutly no introspection. [/sarcasm]
Kain flip-flops loyalties like a double-agent on speed for no reason other than Golbez's hypnotic powers.
Yeah, and things fall for no other reason than gravity, your point?:) The other characters recognize that he's acting like a lunatic, and for the most part act appropriatly. I wouldn't really call Kain's magic-induced-psychosis character development, and i don't remember if he has any other development to speak of. Not all the characters develop, Cecil develops the most, with Tellah and Rydia developing some, and the rest are mostly two dimensional. However i think it's unfair to say that all the characters are two dimensional. And certainly FF7 and 8 don't develop _every_ chracter either.
Unlike all of the other FFs, it doesn't even try to be unique. (Which, of course, makes it unique. Hah.) There's also the fact that it goes back to old, unfulfilling modes of story and characterization.
Oh, and the main character has a tail. Come on, a tail.
What exactly does the character having a tail have to do with anything? Is a tial magically worth -2 characterization points or something?
How exactly did FF7 and FF8 show more characterization and character development than FF9? They may have gone back to some of the old gameplay elements, but the characters were far better developed than the NES or SNES games
Yes, those are some fine examples of cliched, two-dimensional characters.
You think a Moogle who attck by dancing or a pre-teen girl who attacks by painting pictures were cliched when FF6 came out? What have you been smoking, and where can i get some of it?
As for FF4, you're way off base, or perhaps you don't understand what one dimensional and two dimensional characters mean. FF1 had one dimensional characters, they only had one dimension to them, their jobs. I believe characters became two dimensional (a job and a personality) around FF2 or FF3.
(Spoilers for FF4, for the one person who hasn't played it but still plans to) In FF4 the main character is Cecil, a knight who thinks he's serving his kingdom, only to be overcome with regret at the actions he is ordered to carry out. When he objects he is unwittingly sent out on a mission where he ends up commiting genocide, causing him to break away from his liege. He travels to other kingdoms attempting to prevent tragedies like the ones he helped create before. He eventually becomes enlightned and discoveres his father was a member of an alien race native to the moon. He then discovers that the person who corrupted the kingdom he originally served is actually his brother.
There's a lot of cliches in there, sure, but Cecil clearly has a personality, so he's not just one dimensional. I would argue that since his personality and motives are developed over the course of the game that he's a three dimensional character. Two dimensional would be if he just started the game with a description that said "Cecil once served in an evil kingdom, but then he saw the error of his ways and became a good person." Starting with "reformed bad guy" is two dimensional, watching the process of the bad guy becoming a good guy is three dimensional. but possibly cliched.
You can make a fully developed three dimensional character using only a stack of cliches, the two are not mutually exclusice. A well rounded character is made by giving them different facets to their personality, and having them change over time, both of which Cecil did.
Of course if you try to reduce a character, or a real person, down to a short one sentence description they're going to sound like a cliche. And if one believes the work of Joseph Campbell, all we've ever had to work with since ancient times is cliches, so all we can do is rearange them into new and interesting patterns.
but not better than the ones in the later FFs (except FF9, of course).
What do you have against FF9 as opposed to the other later FFs? Personally i throught FF8 was a lot more cliched and stupid than FF9.
I know IGN and GameSpot and GameSpy have lots of coverage, but unless they're paying you off, why not mention a few of the more smaller (and in my opinion more interesting) sites?
My (current) personal favorite is Games Are Fun. I consider them to be the spirtual successors to the GIA. The _actual_ successor to the GIA, GameForms, has a decent amount of E3 stuff, but normally they're glacially slow on updates.
The Magic Box is also pretty good. They're sometimes a little slow to update, but they've got a fair bit of E3 stuff up now.
What other smaller and mostly independent game websites do people like to visit, both for E3 news and normal day to day happenings?
I'm still stumpted as to why DS would be able to play GBA games if it's an entirely different system, but whatever.
I think it's a marketing thing. The Gameboy and the PS2 have "proven" that backwards compatibility is a real plus for a game system. People don't bitch as much about a lack of new games if they can play the latest "old" games on it as well.
After this generation of handhelds however Nintendo may try to diverge the two handhelds some more. The "DS 2" might no longer play GBA games, it certainly won't play "GBA 2" games, nor will the GBA 2 play DS 2 games. I'm still expecting that in the next generation the DS line will be able to play GameCube games. I suspect Nintendo just wants to get their foot in the door now before the high end handheld market is monoplized by the PSP.
I saw a news program a few weeks ago on a similar technolgy. However instead of bothering with some new king of pictogram it just read normal barcodes.
The basic system which they showed in use allowed you to take a picture of a barcode in a store with your cell phone, and it would bring up a picture and description of the product with some usefull info attached (nutritional info for food items for example.)
This was just a beta type product, and they were planing on expanding it's capabilities. I think one of the things they said they were considering was to have it bring up prices for the same item at other nearby stores.
As for the CueCat, that sounds like a half-assed early implementation of the idea. You had to have your computer there whenever you wanted to scan a barcode in. The advantage of cell phones with built in cameras and internet is that you now have an extremely portable device that will actually be available when you want to use it. I don't know if i's use it myself, but implementing it as part of a cell phone seems about a hundred times more usefull than implementing it as a part of your computer.
Wow, so much mis-information. You're right that designing nanotech that would be able to survive and reproduce in the world would be difficult, but if that hurdle was passed they wouldn't be as easy to destroy as you make out.
They're not going to rust. First of all, they probably won't be made out of iron, they'll probably be made out of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. The chemical bonds that are necessary for oxidation or any other kind of reaction are already being used to attach the various pieces of the nanotech together. If there are no free electrons or "holes" nothing else is going to latch on. In effect, it's already "rusted."
What makes you think they'll have computer circuits that could be affected by an EMP? They could just as easily be using rod-logic or something similar.
As for "diamonds" being brittle, not at the scale we're talking about. The type of sound waves needed to break carbon bonds at a microscopic level would destroy just about anything else as well. What do you do if a person gets affected? Shooting at them with a beam of something that breaks all carbon bonds is _not_ a good solution.
Why would moderate temperature changes cause them to break? You can get large structures to break by changing the temperature repeatedly, but that takes a long time, and it's because of the aggregate expansion of all the molecules inside. Small structures, such as the cells of our body for instance, don't fall apart from the stress of small temperature changes. You can denature proteins and set stuff on fire if you make things hot enough, but that's because of chemical changes, not expansion/contraction.
Oh, and depending on the nature of the nanotech "reprograming" them might be difficult or impossible. They might only be capable of the specific task they were designed for if they have physical logic rather then reprogramable circuits. That would make terrorism much harder, up until the point technology advances enough to let anyone with a home lab cook up some nano-tech. In terms of grey-goo the biggest threat will probably be programming error, followed by mad scientist, followed by terroists.
Of more pressing concern is possible enviromental dangers (potentially very serious when one of the possible enviroments is your body) and smaller malfunctions. It's a quite possible for nanotech to screw up and kill you in a way that doesn't involve grey-goo or threaten the rest of the planet.
I've got 30 tabs open in Netscape right now. I'd have more, but once i hit about 30 tabs the vertical scroll bar goes off the right edge of the screen, so i delete older tabs to make room for new ones.
I've got a starting set of 9 tabs and as i read through articles and posts i'll open referenced pages in new tabs. I'll then go through the tabs later and read the referenced material. Some of those tabs i'll close when i'm done reading, others i'll keep open so i can show them to my girlfriend later in the day.
When i'm researching something i'll often keep several windows open on the subject at once. I currently have seven tabs open on pages about Venus and the effects of a planet's tilt on seasons/climate as reference to an idea for a science fiction novel someone is working on.
Got another three or four tabs open to statistics and a message board for an online game i play. I usually check in on it ever three or four hours, so i tend to just leave them open.
Once you start to multitask it all really adds up quick.
As for opening time, after first rebooting my computer Netscape usually takes between 10 and 30 seconds to open, depending on how grumpy my laptop is feeling. Of course part of that is because i told it not to pre-load its components. IE opens in about five seconds. Once i've used them both the both re-load in a second or two. Or are you talking about the individual loading of pages? The only serious problem i've noticed is that sometimes i need to load a page twice because the first time it will time out, but on the second attempt it loads right away. I have no idea if that's a problem with Netscape or a problem with my ISP however.
Are you really trying that hard? Where do you live? Are you literally in some tiny town surrounded by a vast plain where K-Mart and Wal-Mart are the _only_ stores?
Are there no supermarkets near you? No Stater Brothers or Albertsons or whatever you have in your area? What about Target? What about a mall for that matter?
What is it you're looking for that you can't find at K-Mart that you need to go to Wal-Mart for??
Seriously, names all mean something. So, if you were an alien, wouldn't your name be translated too? You'd have aliens with Indian sounding names like "Son of the stars".
The rest of what you say is perfectly valid, but the above would actually be a usefull function to add to a translator. It would be much more usefull for it to know to leave "Joe Smith" alone. That way when the aliens say "Joe Smith," he'll know they're talking about him. And given the odd results you can get by translating a phrase back and forth between langauges, it could also save some of the confusion that might result when they said his "name" and it came back as "The Lord Added a Man Who Hammers Metal."
Regarding shooting Pete Sampras to win in tennis: You wouldn't win the match! That's not legal within the limits of the game.
Is there actually a clause in whatever rulebook tennis has that says you are not allowed to shoot the other player? Even if that one is covered, is there a rule that you can't take a baseball bat to their knees ten minutes before the game starts? I seriously doubt it.
If you tried to assult the other player before the game you'd get arrested if you were caught, however it probably wouldn't be breaking the written rules of the game itself. Steroids were presumably only made illegal because lots of people thought they were unfair and whined about them, i'm sure the original rules for most games didn't cover drug use.
Rules change over time based on what people consider fair, and some "rules" are enforced by an authority other than the literal rules of the game. You break your opponents kneecaps and you'll get arrested by the police, spawn-camp or bunnyhop too much and you'll be ostracized or banned by the other players.
I don't think Clue would have worked as well if they hadn't turned it into a comedy and if it hadn't the cast of thousands it did.
I'm not sure if you're being unintentionaly Insightful or what. It seems a little unfair to say that it wouldn't have been as successful if they hadn't done the things that made it successful. However it does bring up the point that, at least in this particular case, what made the movie good was how it _differed_ from the game.
Games can be a good source of ideas for stories (of either the book or movie kind) however trying to slavishly emulate every aspect of the original game just leads to trouble. You need to take the basic concept of the game and rewrite it to fit the new medium.
Hence the statement you quouted, "It'd be interesting if XCor beat Scaled Composites with the first sub-orbital flight but couldn't claim the $10 million prize."
Normally in a sentence that begins "Actually..." you disagre with the statement you're responding to in some manner.
Most people are unwilling to view humans as merely a part of the complex biological system that exists on the surface of the planet. I see no logical reason why the human species should be set apart specially from everything else, and no reason to arbitrarily define human actions as "unnatural."
What "right" do we have to alter the Earth's climate, cooling it down, and preventing those species from emerging?
Either we're a part of the natural system as you posit in the first paragraph, and have the "right" to do damn well whatever we please for whatever reason we want, and it's all part of the natural cycle, or we are _not_ part of the natural system and therefore should limit the effect we have on said natural system, so we have every right to try and correct changes we made, because those changes weren't right in the first place. You can't have it both ways.
The (rational) pro-enviroment side of the argument claims that the changes we're potentially making are taking place far faster than ecosystems can adapt to them. I believe some measurements show that species are daying off at a rate close to that of some of the big extinction events in history. As such it's a bit more than a "kick in the pants" to evolution.
Will life survive? Probably. There is a amall chance we could screw up things beyond the ability of the ecosystem to recover, but most likely things will pull through in some form or another. However if all that survives are microbes and it takes another billion years for our level of development to emerge again, well, most people would conisder that a bad thing.
Certainly there's a certain level of practicality in that, there's also a certain level of selfishness in it, but that's fine too. Every species judges that they are better than any species that could possibly replace them. They'll fight to maintain their position in the world, even if they don't realize what they're doing or why they're doing it, because natural selection has seen to it that all species that don't are extinct. Likewise, our ecosystem, as represented by us, is judging ourself better than all possible replacements. Arrogant, perhaps, "natural," definitly.
But i was laid off six months ago. Not only would i have to come up with about $300 bucks for the registration cost, in order to meet their requirements for entry i would also have to pretend to still be employed by my ex-company and hope they didn't check up on it.
""Apply more Capitalism" is not an effective solution to "Capitalism causes these (generic) problems."
Well, I don't agree that capitalism is the source of the problems."
And that's a valid position to take, however arguing that the original poster's concerns could be solved simply by subscribing to the Capitalist system was a logical fallacy. Either he's wrong, in which case no solution is necessary, you just need to prove he's wrong, or he's right, in which case your solution wouldn't work.
Isn't that logic a bit circular? You're assuming they were stupid enough to give up their password, rather than making up a word to get free chocolate, and then saying that since they gave up that (presumed real) password, they're too stupid think of making one up.
"in an insane society, technology is used to create extra work (extra jobs), products that fill land fills as quickly as possible, and in general, waste everyone's time. Yay capitalism.
If you have a better plan, start your own business, market the reliability of your products, and make a bunch of money while improving the world. *That's* capitalism."
You're completly missing the point. His argument isn't that capitalism doesn't work. (Although it could certainly be argued that it doesn't, depending on what you claim capitalism is supposed to accomplish.)
What he's saying is that capitalism, especially when combined with a stupid and/or short-sighted consumerism, results in situations that are bad for the group as a whole. Like a system of always turning the other guy in the Prisoner's Dilema game.
It is entirely possible that there are solutions and/or systems that would cost more, but that would result in a better quality of life for everyone down the road. Such a system might very well fail under capitalism, and might not make him any money by trying to implement it, so your advice is ill-applied. "Apply more Capitalism" is not an effective solution to "Capitalism causes these (generic) problems."
However, Mike Fischer of Microsoft suggests that "game developers are tired of Sony's dominance in the market, and that that more Japanese-appropriate hardware will lead to better sales in Japan which will lead support from companies like Square/Enix which will then lead even greater acceptance in Japan."
Because if they get tired of Sony's dominance, clearly they have no one else to turn to besides Micorosoft, right?
If they want someone other than Sony but who has more "Japanese-appropriate hardware," there are good odds that they'll flock back to Nintendo long before they consider you.
You're talking about acrylamide, and if you had really read about it you'd know that it is a by-product of the cooking process and not a original component of starch-based foods.
Yeah, you caught me, i was just making it up, but it happens to be exactly like the chemical you linked to. By the way, if you had really read my comment you'd know that i said it was "found in cooked starches." (emphasis mine)
I don't know, maybe it's just me, but i thought that specifying it was in cooked starches implied that it wasn't in uncooked starches.
Or is your issue that you don't think bread and pasta have the chemical in them and therefore don't need to be labeled? Perhaps you come from a magical land where bread and pasta don't need to be cooked?
If i had actualy read something about it i might happen to know that bread accounted for 16% of acrylamide in the average diet in one test, the same amount as from french fries. (Yes, it says that french fries have especially high levels, but the quantity of the food in question that is normally eaten is also an important factor.) I might also know that pasta is most likely safe if you cook it by boiling, but that if you use any other method (say, frying it as part of a Hamburger Helper recipe or something similar) you're probably out of luck. Oh, wait, those facts all support my statement.
Bread and pasta are both risks for acrylamide, bread as much as french fries, and yet the health activists seem to be focused on french fries becuse they feel that french fries are especially bad for you in other regards. However if french fries have enough acrylamide to deserve labeling then bread should be labeled as well. So should pasta, although with a slightly different label, and any other starchy food that is meant to be cooked.
If acrylamide is going to be considered a health threat, _all_ foods containing it (or that will contain it when cooked) should have a warning. You can't let some foods off just because they also have health benefits. To cary an analaogy to the usual slashdot extremes, that would be like saying it's okay to sell rat poision as food because it's low in fat and cholesterol, which makes up for it being, well, poison.
Slashdot Mirror
However your basic point is right on. In every game company i've worked at more than two thirds of the people have very little in depth tehnical experience. The designers can write simple scripts and use spreadsheets to balance stats, and the artists can use the appropriate art tools, but (on average) they know very little about programing, technical constraints, or the data pipeline.
There's always some artist who insists on exporting art files in the wrong way, even after you've told them three or more times that it will break stuff. The designers often make similar mistakes with the scripts, and frequently their first request for a new feature is totally unfeasible, requiring a programmer to come talk to them about what's possible and how to integrate that with what they want.
Unless the three companies i've worked at have been freak occurances, most game companies have non-technical people doing the art and design. If the design isn't good, either the designers just aren't very good, the programmers weren't able to implement it right (in which case the problem is not enough focus on tech, not too much focus) or as someone else suggested, management decided to get involved for whatever strange reason management always seems to have for screwing things up.
Hey dude, if anyone has a fetish for the under powered, long in the tooth PS2, its clearly you!!
Go use a real man's console, the Xbox, and stop playing pretend with that weasly PS2.
Actually, if i had a preference for any of the consoles it would be the GameCube. However why are you accusing me of having a fetish for any console when i was clearing willing to point out flaws even in the consoles i like? And why should i bother opening the XBox when it doesn't have any games i want and i'm already incredibly backloged on the PS2 and GameCube?
As for the bit you're quoting, i was merely responding to the parents comment "So there you go. Don't blindly mock the Controller S for the Xbox because of your PS2 fetish." Strangely he uses the phrase first and gets moderated as Interesting, while i respond to him in an ironic tone and get moderated Flamebait.
You'll also note that i did not actually say that the S controller is clunky, i merely stated that i've heard that it is, at least compared to the other consoles. That would explain him feeling that the PS2 and/or GameCube controllers were "flimsy." However if anyone who regularly uses both consoles wants to speak up and state that the S controller and the PS2 controller are the same size, or at least as similar as the PS2 and GameCube controllers are, then i will take their word for it.
The PS2 controller doesn't feel cheap or skinny at all to me, perhaps you're just used to the S controller which i've heard is still pretty clunky? Grab the handles on the dualshock and give it a twist, it barely moves at all. Using the analog sticks feels perfectly fine to me, although maybe it would feel odd to someone with smaller fingers than me. My only real complaint about the PS2 controller is the shoulder buttons. Trying to play with both your index and middle finger on L/R1 and L/R2 buttons respectively feels really unnatural to me. Not too many games require you to hit both the 1 and 2 buttons at the same time or in quick succession, but when they do it really sucks since i normally only use my index fingers. I don't understand why they don't curve the shoulder butotns back some more so they're more like triggers, especially for L/R2.
The GameCube controller feels great to me. How does it _feel_ "childlike" to you? How do the buttons being of different sizes bother you? Last i checked the XBox controller had at least two different button sizes. It certainly doesn't bother me any. I have about three complaints about the GameCube controller. Number one and a half is that the d-pad is too small, and it would be nicer if they swaped the d-pad with the analog stick to make it more symetrical, but perhaps they're afraid of being accused of copying sony that way. Number three is that the z-button is hard to hit, and there's only the three shoulder buttons. If they did add a fourth to match the PS2 i'd also like them to make them more trigger like, same as my wish for the PS2.
I've used the XBox controller for about five minutes in the store at the mall. I don't know if it was the original or the S type controller. All i do know is that my hands were starting to hurt by the end, and those black and white buttons are _WAY_ too small and closely placed.
So there you go, don't blindly mock the PS2 and GameCube controllers cause of your S controller fetish.
When underdeveloped nations first become prosperous there's a generation or two of lag before the birth rate drops, but currently many industrial nations are actually experiencing negative population growth when considered just in terms of births and deaths (ie, discounting imigration.) Australia is even paying people to have kids just to get back to parity.
The biggest problem with the current demographics is the preponderence of non-productive old people. A pill that allowed people to be healthy and productive throughout their lives would be the perfect solution to this. The
Okay, i'll grant you that Mog's dancing doesn't have much to do with his character, but i think Relm's painting actually does. It comes up a lot in the story, which Mog's dancing never does. When she goes around threatening to paint the other characters, it's more than just a special ability, and i don't think it's a cliche i've heard very often before. And the dancing bit aside, you think Moggles were a cliche? :)
By "one-dimensional" I mean that there's absolutely no believable character development.
...
(By "two-dimensional," before you ask, I'm referring to when a character has believable development, but not much else. A three-dimensional character would have various facets of character other than those being developed; depth, in other words.)
Okay, so you just don't understand the proper usage of the terms. I stole this from a list of literary terms:
"Dimension - Used to describe the depth of character. Generally a one dimensional character simply has a function (The Butler), two dimensional characters have function and some personality (Jeeves the Butler), three dimensional characters have function, personality and identifiable human qualities such as contradictions, weakness, involvements."
So clearly the FF1 chracters were one dimensional, and the later characters were two or three dimensional. Character development is a prerequisite for three dimensional characters, not two dimensional ones.
Cecil starts out as a Dark Knight, then suddenly becomes a Paladin with little to no introspection (unless you count that lame battle with his old self as "introspection").
You mean other than the point about thirty seconds into the game where he's questioning why they attacked the Mysidians, the point when he brings those questions up with the King of Baron, causing him to get demoted from Captain of the Red Wings to messgenger boy, the point where after unwittingly killing off almost everyone in Mist Village and decides to defy his king rather than kill the sole survivor, other than the point where he goes to other kingdoms to help them repell attacks by his former liege, or the part where he goes to Mysidia and apoligizes for what he did? Yeah, other than that, there's absolutly no introspection. [/sarcasm]
Kain flip-flops loyalties like a double-agent on speed for no reason other than Golbez's hypnotic powers.
Yeah, and things fall for no other reason than gravity, your point? :) The other characters recognize that he's acting like a lunatic, and for the most part act appropriatly. I wouldn't really call Kain's magic-induced-psychosis character development, and i don't remember if he has any other development to speak of. Not all the characters develop, Cecil develops the most, with Tellah and Rydia developing some, and the rest are mostly two dimensional. However i think it's unfair to say that all the characters are two dimensional. And certainly FF7 and 8 don't develop _every_ chracter either.
Unlike all of the other FFs, it doesn't even try to be unique. (Which, of course, makes it unique. Hah.) There's also the fact that it goes back to old, unfulfilling modes of story and characterization.
Oh, and the main character has a tail. Come on, a tail.
What exactly does the character having a tail have to do with anything? Is a tial magically worth -2 characterization points or something?
How exactly did FF7 and FF8 show more characterization and character development than FF9? They may have gone back to some of the old gameplay elements, but the characters were far better developed than the NES or SNES games
You think a Moogle who attck by dancing or a pre-teen girl who attacks by painting pictures were cliched when FF6 came out? What have you been smoking, and where can i get some of it?
As for FF4, you're way off base, or perhaps you don't understand what one dimensional and two dimensional characters mean. FF1 had one dimensional characters, they only had one dimension to them, their jobs. I believe characters became two dimensional (a job and a personality) around FF2 or FF3.
(Spoilers for FF4, for the one person who hasn't played it but still plans to) In FF4 the main character is Cecil, a knight who thinks he's serving his kingdom, only to be overcome with regret at the actions he is ordered to carry out. When he objects he is unwittingly sent out on a mission where he ends up commiting genocide, causing him to break away from his liege. He travels to other kingdoms attempting to prevent tragedies like the ones he helped create before. He eventually becomes enlightned and discoveres his father was a member of an alien race native to the moon. He then discovers that the person who corrupted the kingdom he originally served is actually his brother.
There's a lot of cliches in there, sure, but Cecil clearly has a personality, so he's not just one dimensional. I would argue that since his personality and motives are developed over the course of the game that he's a three dimensional character. Two dimensional would be if he just started the game with a description that said "Cecil once served in an evil kingdom, but then he saw the error of his ways and became a good person." Starting with "reformed bad guy" is two dimensional, watching the process of the bad guy becoming a good guy is three dimensional. but possibly cliched.
You can make a fully developed three dimensional character using only a stack of cliches, the two are not mutually exclusice. A well rounded character is made by giving them different facets to their personality, and having them change over time, both of which Cecil did.
Of course if you try to reduce a character, or a real person, down to a short one sentence description they're going to sound like a cliche. And if one believes the work of Joseph Campbell, all we've ever had to work with since ancient times is cliches, so all we can do is rearange them into new and interesting patterns.
but not better than the ones in the later FFs (except FF9, of course).
What do you have against FF9 as opposed to the other later FFs? Personally i throught FF8 was a lot more cliched and stupid than FF9.
My (current) personal favorite is Games Are Fun. I consider them to be the spirtual successors to the GIA. The _actual_ successor to the GIA, GameForms, has a decent amount of E3 stuff, but normally they're glacially slow on updates.
The Magic Box is also pretty good. They're sometimes a little slow to update, but they've got a fair bit of E3 stuff up now.
What other smaller and mostly independent game websites do people like to visit, both for E3 news and normal day to day happenings?
I think it's a marketing thing. The Gameboy and the PS2 have "proven" that backwards compatibility is a real plus for a game system. People don't bitch as much about a lack of new games if they can play the latest "old" games on it as well.
After this generation of handhelds however Nintendo may try to diverge the two handhelds some more. The "DS 2" might no longer play GBA games, it certainly won't play "GBA 2" games, nor will the GBA 2 play DS 2 games. I'm still expecting that in the next generation the DS line will be able to play GameCube games. I suspect Nintendo just wants to get their foot in the door now before the high end handheld market is monoplized by the PSP.
The basic system which they showed in use allowed you to take a picture of a barcode in a store with your cell phone, and it would bring up a picture and description of the product with some usefull info attached (nutritional info for food items for example.)
This was just a beta type product, and they were planing on expanding it's capabilities. I think one of the things they said they were considering was to have it bring up prices for the same item at other nearby stores.
As for the CueCat, that sounds like a half-assed early implementation of the idea. You had to have your computer there whenever you wanted to scan a barcode in. The advantage of cell phones with built in cameras and internet is that you now have an extremely portable device that will actually be available when you want to use it. I don't know if i's use it myself, but implementing it as part of a cell phone seems about a hundred times more usefull than implementing it as a part of your computer.
They're not going to rust. First of all, they probably won't be made out of iron, they'll probably be made out of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. The chemical bonds that are necessary for oxidation or any other kind of reaction are already being used to attach the various pieces of the nanotech together. If there are no free electrons or "holes" nothing else is going to latch on. In effect, it's already "rusted."
What makes you think they'll have computer circuits that could be affected by an EMP? They could just as easily be using rod-logic or something similar.
As for "diamonds" being brittle, not at the scale we're talking about. The type of sound waves needed to break carbon bonds at a microscopic level would destroy just about anything else as well. What do you do if a person gets affected? Shooting at them with a beam of something that breaks all carbon bonds is _not_ a good solution.
Why would moderate temperature changes cause them to break? You can get large structures to break by changing the temperature repeatedly, but that takes a long time, and it's because of the aggregate expansion of all the molecules inside. Small structures, such as the cells of our body for instance, don't fall apart from the stress of small temperature changes. You can denature proteins and set stuff on fire if you make things hot enough, but that's because of chemical changes, not expansion/contraction.
Oh, and depending on the nature of the nanotech "reprograming" them might be difficult or impossible. They might only be capable of the specific task they were designed for if they have physical logic rather then reprogramable circuits. That would make terrorism much harder, up until the point technology advances enough to let anyone with a home lab cook up some nano-tech. In terms of grey-goo the biggest threat will probably be programming error, followed by mad scientist, followed by terroists.
Of more pressing concern is possible enviromental dangers (potentially very serious when one of the possible enviroments is your body) and smaller malfunctions. It's a quite possible for nanotech to screw up and kill you in a way that doesn't involve grey-goo or threaten the rest of the planet.
I've got a starting set of 9 tabs and as i read through articles and posts i'll open referenced pages in new tabs. I'll then go through the tabs later and read the referenced material. Some of those tabs i'll close when i'm done reading, others i'll keep open so i can show them to my girlfriend later in the day.
When i'm researching something i'll often keep several windows open on the subject at once. I currently have seven tabs open on pages about Venus and the effects of a planet's tilt on seasons/climate as reference to an idea for a science fiction novel someone is working on.
Got another three or four tabs open to statistics and a message board for an online game i play. I usually check in on it ever three or four hours, so i tend to just leave them open.
Once you start to multitask it all really adds up quick.
As for opening time, after first rebooting my computer Netscape usually takes between 10 and 30 seconds to open, depending on how grumpy my laptop is feeling. Of course part of that is because i told it not to pre-load its components. IE opens in about five seconds. Once i've used them both the both re-load in a second or two. Or are you talking about the individual loading of pages? The only serious problem i've noticed is that sometimes i need to load a page twice because the first time it will time out, but on the second attempt it loads right away. I have no idea if that's a problem with Netscape or a problem with my ISP however.
Are there no supermarkets near you? No Stater Brothers or Albertsons or whatever you have in your area? What about Target? What about a mall for that matter?
What is it you're looking for that you can't find at K-Mart that you need to go to Wal-Mart for??
The rest of what you say is perfectly valid, but the above would actually be a usefull function to add to a translator. It would be much more usefull for it to know to leave "Joe Smith" alone. That way when the aliens say "Joe Smith," he'll know they're talking about him. And given the odd results you can get by translating a phrase back and forth between langauges, it could also save some of the confusion that might result when they said his "name" and it came back as "The Lord Added a Man Who Hammers Metal."
I'm not sure, but i think it's a slightly mutated descendent of the Roddenberry gene :)
Is there actually a clause in whatever rulebook tennis has that says you are not allowed to shoot the other player? Even if that one is covered, is there a rule that you can't take a baseball bat to their knees ten minutes before the game starts? I seriously doubt it.
If you tried to assult the other player before the game you'd get arrested if you were caught, however it probably wouldn't be breaking the written rules of the game itself. Steroids were presumably only made illegal because lots of people thought they were unfair and whined about them, i'm sure the original rules for most games didn't cover drug use.
Rules change over time based on what people consider fair, and some "rules" are enforced by an authority other than the literal rules of the game. You break your opponents kneecaps and you'll get arrested by the police, spawn-camp or bunnyhop too much and you'll be ostracized or banned by the other players.
I'm not sure if you're being unintentionaly Insightful or what. It seems a little unfair to say that it wouldn't have been as successful if they hadn't done the things that made it successful. However it does bring up the point that, at least in this particular case, what made the movie good was how it _differed_ from the game.
Games can be a good source of ideas for stories (of either the book or movie kind) however trying to slavishly emulate every aspect of the original game just leads to trouble. You need to take the basic concept of the game and rewrite it to fit the new medium.
Normally in a sentence that begins "Actually..." you disagre with the statement you're responding to in some manner.
What "right" do we have to alter the Earth's climate, cooling it down, and preventing those species from emerging?
Either we're a part of the natural system as you posit in the first paragraph, and have the "right" to do damn well whatever we please for whatever reason we want, and it's all part of the natural cycle, or we are _not_ part of the natural system and therefore should limit the effect we have on said natural system, so we have every right to try and correct changes we made, because those changes weren't right in the first place. You can't have it both ways.
The (rational) pro-enviroment side of the argument claims that the changes we're potentially making are taking place far faster than ecosystems can adapt to them. I believe some measurements show that species are daying off at a rate close to that of some of the big extinction events in history. As such it's a bit more than a "kick in the pants" to evolution.
Will life survive? Probably. There is a amall chance we could screw up things beyond the ability of the ecosystem to recover, but most likely things will pull through in some form or another. However if all that survives are microbes and it takes another billion years for our level of development to emerge again, well, most people would conisder that a bad thing.
Certainly there's a certain level of practicality in that, there's also a certain level of selfishness in it, but that's fine too. Every species judges that they are better than any species that could possibly replace them. They'll fight to maintain their position in the world, even if they don't realize what they're doing or why they're doing it, because natural selection has seen to it that all species that don't are extinct. Likewise, our ecosystem, as represented by us, is judging ourself better than all possible replacements. Arrogant, perhaps, "natural," definitly.
One for "yes," one for "no," one for "my diaper needs changing," one for "please kill me now."
But i was laid off six months ago. Not only would i have to come up with about $300 bucks for the registration cost, in order to meet their requirements for entry i would also have to pretend to still be employed by my ex-company and hope they didn't check up on it.
Well, I don't agree that capitalism is the source of the problems."
And that's a valid position to take, however arguing that the original poster's concerns could be solved simply by subscribing to the Capitalist system was a logical fallacy. Either he's wrong, in which case no solution is necessary, you just need to prove he's wrong, or he's right, in which case your solution wouldn't work.
Isn't that logic a bit circular? You're assuming they were stupid enough to give up their password, rather than making up a word to get free chocolate, and then saying that since they gave up that (presumed real) password, they're too stupid think of making one up.
If you have a better plan, start your own business, market the reliability of your products, and make a bunch of money while improving the world. *That's* capitalism."
You're completly missing the point. His argument isn't that capitalism doesn't work. (Although it could certainly be argued that it doesn't, depending on what you claim capitalism is supposed to accomplish.)
What he's saying is that capitalism, especially when combined with a stupid and/or short-sighted consumerism, results in situations that are bad for the group as a whole. Like a system of always turning the other guy in the Prisoner's Dilema game.
It is entirely possible that there are solutions and/or systems that would cost more, but that would result in a better quality of life for everyone down the road. Such a system might very well fail under capitalism, and might not make him any money by trying to implement it, so your advice is ill-applied. "Apply more Capitalism" is not an effective solution to "Capitalism causes these (generic) problems."
Because if they get tired of Sony's dominance, clearly they have no one else to turn to besides Micorosoft, right?
If they want someone other than Sony but who has more "Japanese-appropriate hardware," there are good odds that they'll flock back to Nintendo long before they consider you.
Yeah, you caught me, i was just making it up, but it happens to be exactly like the chemical you linked to. By the way, if you had really read my comment you'd know that i said it was "found in cooked starches." (emphasis mine)
I don't know, maybe it's just me, but i thought that specifying it was in cooked starches implied that it wasn't in uncooked starches.
Or is your issue that you don't think bread and pasta have the chemical in them and therefore don't need to be labeled? Perhaps you come from a magical land where bread and pasta don't need to be cooked?
If i had actualy read something about it i might happen to know that bread accounted for 16% of acrylamide in the average diet in one test, the same amount as from french fries. (Yes, it says that french fries have especially high levels, but the quantity of the food in question that is normally eaten is also an important factor.) I might also know that pasta is most likely safe if you cook it by boiling, but that if you use any other method (say, frying it as part of a Hamburger Helper recipe or something similar) you're probably out of luck. Oh, wait, those facts all support my statement.
Bread and pasta are both risks for acrylamide, bread as much as french fries, and yet the health activists seem to be focused on french fries becuse they feel that french fries are especially bad for you in other regards. However if french fries have enough acrylamide to deserve labeling then bread should be labeled as well. So should pasta, although with a slightly different label, and any other starchy food that is meant to be cooked.
If acrylamide is going to be considered a health threat, _all_ foods containing it (or that will contain it when cooked) should have a warning. You can't let some foods off just because they also have health benefits. To cary an analaogy to the usual slashdot extremes, that would be like saying it's okay to sell rat poision as food because it's low in fat and cholesterol, which makes up for it being, well, poison.