No, he's not saying that it would be good, just that it would be funny. Subtle difference there.
Bad for users of alternative browsers?
on
IE To Block Pop-Ups
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The thing is, before now companies who did the pop-up thing didn't bother figuring out how to get around existing pop-up blockers because the browsers that had them are not remotely in the majority, and I'll bet that there isn't a terribly significant percentage using separate pop-up blockers, either- kinda like how Mac/Linux users are mostly safe from viruses because most viruses are designed for Windows because most people use Windows. If pop-up blocking is integrated into the browser that 90% of the web-surfing population is using, you can bet that they'll start figuring out how to get around it- or worse, figure out some more annoying method of advertising. Either way, us Mozilla(Firebird)/Opera users might get screwed along with the IE users.
Or they'll just exploit one of IE's 40 billion security holes to get the pop-ups through and everyone else will be just fine.
And I beleive that that they also did the cards because it saved them the trouble of trying to pronounce the names of the people they were trying to capture (which was difficult for some of them)- they could refer to them as the 2 of hearts instead of masahhala al-quday.
But how much time do you spend on it? I got a PS1 Christmas of 98. Only had the overheating problem once. Early 2002, after three and a half years and thousands of hours of playing it, I died in Arc the Lad 1, pushed reset, and rebooted back into the BIOS screen as if there was no disc inserted. I'm thinking that the motor that moves the laser back and forth gave out.
I also recall a bunch of people with older model Playstations who had to replace theirs when Final Fantasy 8 came out.
Yes, Sony's made systems that have broken after too much use. It could be worse, though- they could have released a portable system with a screen that was impossible to see.
I'd recommend holding off and getting one of the newest models when Sony decides to drop the price (which the will do within the next month, most probably.) I'm actually not sure how the PS2 model numbers go, though- if 390001 is one of the newer ones, you should be okay.
While the idea that anyone who ever wants to make games or consider themselves a serious gamer should play these games is kinda dumb, I think that someone should compile a list of games that are historically significant in some way or another- games that somehow affected games that came after it, and they should know WHY these games were important.
Pong, Mario Bros., Zelda, Dragon Warrior, Mortal Kombat, Warcraft, DOOM, Counter-Strike, Final Fantasy 7, Metal Gear Solid, Grand Theft Auto 3, anything else that you can think of. Just like anyone who wants to get into film making should watch classic/influential movies, people who want to get into games should do the same.
I seem to recall that Sony produced a one-handed controller for the PSOne. Dunno how good the layout is (probably not that effective for the more action-oriented games,) and I recall the lack of analog control sticks, but there was one out there at some point. This would be a tad more difficult to do with most current game controllers, though.
And as another poster said, Earthbound was designed so that you could play the game with your left hand only(control pad, L, and select buttons,) though some functions were a bit quicker to access with the buttons on the right side. Keep in mind that Earthbound was on the level of Dragon Warrior when it came to gameplay style; this would be impossible with any game more action-oriented than that.
As far as PC games go, I think there are specialized controllers for RTS and FPS games on ThinkGeek; that might be a better solution than a keyboard. Or perhaps the one-handed PSOne controller combined with a PS-PC adaptor (of which there are many out there, Lik-Sang has a wide array of them) would help.
You could also take up DDR. No need for hands in that game.
Can someone please tell me what the hell is: MUD - ??? UO - Ultima Online EQ - EverQuest AC - ??? DAOC - Dark Age of Camelot SWG - Star Wars Galaxies AFK entertainers - ???
MUD means Multi-User Dungeon/Dimension. It's basically a text-based MMORPG. And they're usually free, too.
AC is Asheron's Call. AFK means Away From the Keyboard, so AFK entertainers are entertainers (a class in SWG, if I'm not mistaken) who are away from the keyboard (ie letting their character dance while they go do something else.)
The N64 did this over here too, dropping from a $250 launch price to a $200 launch price, but this was a 'matching-the-competitors-price' drop as opposed to a 'we-can't-sell-any-more-at-this-price' drop. The GC in the UK was probably the same way.
When you drop prices to match the competitor, that's smart business. When you drop the price like Nokia's doing now (and the Dreamcast was doing back in 2000, though not nearly as fast,) that's a big sign that you're desparate. On the other hand, it appears that it's an individual retailer as opposed to Nokia doing this, so they're probably not desparate to sell them so much as they're desparate to get rid of them.
And on another note, should we be sorry for the people who bought it in the past week because they could have waited a week and saved $100, or that they bought the POS at all?
I think this is just an early sign of Sony feeling the heat from Microsoft and Nintendo. The only way you can ignore Microsoft and Nintendo as a factor in this case would be either,
Considering the fact that Sony is still in the lead by a metric fuckload, I don't think "feeling the heat" is the right word here. But Sony is definetly not as dominant in this generation as they were last time. Back then, you had the N64 which had a handful of good first party titles and the PS1 had everything else.
Now we have the GC which, while still mostly relying on good first-party titles, has a lot more of them this time around, the XBox which has a few good exclusives (Halo, KOTOR) and the advantage of online play (yes, PS2 and GC have it too, but the XBox comes with a hard drive and modem, whereas you need to buy those add-ons with the others,) and the PS2, which has, well, everything else. It's two "B" systems and one "A" system as opposed to one "A" system and one "C" system.
So, yeah. Sony's still winning by a landslide, it's just a much smaller one.
This news erases all doubt in my mind that they're going to drop the price of the PS2 (hopefully to $99) before Christmas. The only people who don't have a PS2 who would ever get one are probably just waiting for the price to go a little lower anyway.:)
This probably didn't have that much to do with the GC's price drop (espcially since this is about sales for the entire quarter, not just the past couple of weeks,) but sales will not get much better if they continue selling PS2s for almost twice the price of Gamecubes.
I think that episodic content would work out much better if the content was delivered online. On the console level, this would mean that it couldn't work out too well until the next generation (aside from XBox) (and this is assuming that the PS3 and Nintendo's next system wil have hard drives thrown in.) Broadband would also be a good idea. It would be a lot cheaper, and you could break it down into as many chunks as you want and charge $1-2 per episode, which would make it easier to get people into (people would rather spend $1 on 1/25 of a game than $40 on a fourth of it, as it is with.Hack)
If you'd RTFA, you'd know that by the time Mozilla reaches version 2.0, it won't be the combination mail client/browser that we currently call Mozilla, but the separate browser and mail clients that we currently call Firebird and Thunderbird bundled together as Mozilla browser and Mozilla mail.
So, it is being aimed at the consumer projects forked off mozilla.
I got my dad, who isn't a technophobe but isn't all that computer-savvy either, to switch to Firebird. It runs a helluva lot faster than IE on his 400mhz K6-2, partly because of the lack of pop-up ads that bog everything down.
You don't get congress to go against measures like this (i.e., measures that assure corporate "donations") unless there is a *really* massive demonstration. The kind that the American public has not shown any sort of willingness or poise to do in oh-so-many years.
There's an idea. The "million geek march." Or something like that.
And I'm sure that a significant portion of those NGages were bought by people who work for video game publications because they kinda had to buy one in order to tell the world how shitty they are.
All the Playstation FF remakes (1-6, we didn't get 3, but I'm pretty sure they did that for the PS too in Japan) added in a shiny intro and ending FMV, and that was it. No cutscenes were replaced. CT added new anime cutscenes for some of the plot scenes, yes. It also added in an ending movie that helped tie the game to Chrono Cross. Anthologies and Chronicles (not Chronology) did have some extra art and stuff, and some minor gameplay fixes (like the addition of a 'run' button for the FFs.) I don't know about the FF2 remake, but Origins had a bunch of gameplay improvements (like the addition of an 'easy' mode.)
However, FF4 and CT still had issues with load times (and FF4's music didn't play right if you had the PS2's fast loading on.) And FF 1 & 2 did get a full graphical overhaul. But they got the overhaul for the Wonderswan Color version, and they simply used those graphics for the Playstation version. If they had done any of these remakes with polygon graphics on pre-rendered backgrounds a la the playstaion FFs, I would have been interested. But Square(-Enix)'s too lazy for that, they're just looking to sqeeze a bit more money out of their classic games. While some improvements have been made, these games are all still just old games running on an emulator running on a system that isn't quite powerful enough to emulate them right.
I meant the demo of Halo. Not Half-Life 2. Sorry if that got a little mixed-up there. I don't even think there is a playable HL2 leak (like there was for doom 3). The source code could compile an executable, but you still couldn't play anything with it.
This actually brings up to me the one thing I didn't like about the Half-Life 2 benchmarks, and these benchmarks as well- they run the games at the highest resolutions with all the bells and whistles turned on. I downloaded the demo and ran it just fine on my integrated Geforce 4 MX- admittedly, I ran it at 640X480 with all detail levels set to low, but I'm willing to accept that. If I want it to look perfect, I'll save up and buy a new video card. Or just get an XBox and play the original.
I believe that if you need to spend hours doing mind-numbing tasks just to be able to keep playing, you're either A) doing something wrong or B) playing a badly-designed game.
Exactly. Ideally, an RPG should have a monster-power/level-up curve such that the random battles you have are just enough to get you as powerful as you need, and excess levelling is only needed if you the sort of person who gets off on getting a party of gods. Paladin's Quest was a horrible offender here, if I recall correctly. So was Lagoon. Both games made you spend hours leveling up every step of the way. Not a good way to inflate playtime.
In my opinion, one of the unforgivable sins of RPG design is to keep the player:enemy power ratio fairly constant, then have a final boss who kicks your ass in five seconds that you have to spend hours levelling up to beat. The game's approching climax, and then they go and COMPLETELY fuck up the pacing by making you stop to level up right before the end. SaGa Frontier 2, the only RPG I ever purchased that I did not finish, was a horrible offender here, because it didn't even let me leave the dungeon to level up/get more supplies. Some said that FF8 and FF9 were bad with this too, but I was a good boy and did my sidequests, so I was fine.
Though I'll admit that in Final Fantasy Tactics, I had fun levelling up, because (1) the combat system itself was very enjoyable and (2) it was fun to kill all of the enemies except one, paralyze the survivor and spend an hour having my characters hitting and healing each other until they were all godlike.
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No, he's not saying that it would be good, just that it would be funny. Subtle difference there.
Or they'll just exploit one of IE's 40 billion security holes to get the pop-ups through and everyone else will be just fine.
Not imports. Pirate bootlegs. :)
And I beleive that that they also did the cards because it saved them the trouble of trying to pronounce the names of the people they were trying to capture (which was difficult for some of them)- they could refer to them as the 2 of hearts instead of masahhala al-quday.
Yes, Sony's made systems that have broken after too much use. It could be worse, though- they could have released a portable system with a screen that was impossible to see.
I'd recommend holding off and getting one of the newest models when Sony decides to drop the price (which the will do within the next month, most probably.) I'm actually not sure how the PS2 model numbers go, though- if 390001 is one of the newer ones, you should be okay.
If a ball of incredibly dense matter explodes and forms a universe, and nobody's around to hear it, did it really explode?
Pong, Mario Bros., Zelda, Dragon Warrior, Mortal Kombat, Warcraft, DOOM, Counter-Strike, Final Fantasy 7, Metal Gear Solid, Grand Theft Auto 3, anything else that you can think of. Just like anyone who wants to get into film making should watch classic/influential movies, people who want to get into games should do the same.
Same reason why there are very few *nix viruses. The vast majority of computer users don't use them, and those that do are smart enough to avoid them.
And as another poster said, Earthbound was designed so that you could play the game with your left hand only(control pad, L, and select buttons,) though some functions were a bit quicker to access with the buttons on the right side. Keep in mind that Earthbound was on the level of Dragon Warrior when it came to gameplay style; this would be impossible with any game more action-oriented than that.
As far as PC games go, I think there are specialized controllers for RTS and FPS games on ThinkGeek; that might be a better solution than a keyboard. Or perhaps the one-handed PSOne controller combined with a PS-PC adaptor (of which there are many out there, Lik-Sang has a wide array of them) would help.
You could also take up DDR. No need for hands in that game.
MUD means Multi-User Dungeon/Dimension. It's basically a text-based MMORPG. And they're usually free, too. AC is Asheron's Call. AFK means Away From the Keyboard, so AFK entertainers are entertainers (a class in SWG, if I'm not mistaken) who are away from the keyboard (ie letting their character dance while they go do something else.)
When you drop prices to match the competitor, that's smart business. When you drop the price like Nokia's doing now (and the Dreamcast was doing back in 2000, though not nearly as fast,) that's a big sign that you're desparate. On the other hand, it appears that it's an individual retailer as opposed to Nokia doing this, so they're probably not desparate to sell them so much as they're desparate to get rid of them.
And on another note, should we be sorry for the people who bought it in the past week because they could have waited a week and saved $100, or that they bought the POS at all?
Considering the fact that Sony is still in the lead by a metric fuckload, I don't think "feeling the heat" is the right word here. But Sony is definetly not as dominant in this generation as they were last time. Back then, you had the N64 which had a handful of good first party titles and the PS1 had everything else.
Now we have the GC which, while still mostly relying on good first-party titles, has a lot more of them this time around, the XBox which has a few good exclusives (Halo, KOTOR) and the advantage of online play (yes, PS2 and GC have it too, but the XBox comes with a hard drive and modem, whereas you need to buy those add-ons with the others,) and the PS2, which has, well, everything else. It's two "B" systems and one "A" system as opposed to one "A" system and one "C" system.
So, yeah. Sony's still winning by a landslide, it's just a much smaller one.
This probably didn't have that much to do with the GC's price drop (espcially since this is about sales for the entire quarter, not just the past couple of weeks,) but sales will not get much better if they continue selling PS2s for almost twice the price of Gamecubes.
I think that episodic content would work out much better if the content was delivered online. On the console level, this would mean that it couldn't work out too well until the next generation (aside from XBox) (and this is assuming that the PS3 and Nintendo's next system wil have hard drives thrown in.) Broadband would also be a good idea. It would be a lot cheaper, and you could break it down into as many chunks as you want and charge $1-2 per episode, which would make it easier to get people into (people would rather spend $1 on 1/25 of a game than $40 on a fourth of it, as it is with .Hack)
So, it is being aimed at the consumer projects forked off mozilla.
I got my dad, who isn't a technophobe but isn't all that computer-savvy either, to switch to Firebird. It runs a helluva lot faster than IE on his 400mhz K6-2, partly because of the lack of pop-up ads that bog everything down.
*BARF*
There's an idea. The "million geek march." Or something like that.
Al Gore invented Velcro, dumbass.
And I'm sure that a significant portion of those NGages were bought by people who work for video game publications because they kinda had to buy one in order to tell the world how shitty they are.
However, FF4 and CT still had issues with load times (and FF4's music didn't play right if you had the PS2's fast loading on.) And FF 1 & 2 did get a full graphical overhaul. But they got the overhaul for the Wonderswan Color version, and they simply used those graphics for the Playstation version. If they had done any of these remakes with polygon graphics on pre-rendered backgrounds a la the playstaion FFs, I would have been interested. But Square(-Enix)'s too lazy for that, they're just looking to sqeeze a bit more money out of their classic games. While some improvements have been made, these games are all still just old games running on an emulator running on a system that isn't quite powerful enough to emulate them right.
I meant the demo of Halo. Not Half-Life 2. Sorry if that got a little mixed-up there. I don't even think there is a playable HL2 leak (like there was for doom 3). The source code could compile an executable, but you still couldn't play anything with it.
Exactly. Ideally, an RPG should have a monster-power/level-up curve such that the random battles you have are just enough to get you as powerful as you need, and excess levelling is only needed if you the sort of person who gets off on getting a party of gods. Paladin's Quest was a horrible offender here, if I recall correctly. So was Lagoon. Both games made you spend hours leveling up every step of the way. Not a good way to inflate playtime.
In my opinion, one of the unforgivable sins of RPG design is to keep the player:enemy power ratio fairly constant, then have a final boss who kicks your ass in five seconds that you have to spend hours levelling up to beat. The game's approching climax, and then they go and COMPLETELY fuck up the pacing by making you stop to level up right before the end. SaGa Frontier 2, the only RPG I ever purchased that I did not finish, was a horrible offender here, because it didn't even let me leave the dungeon to level up/get more supplies. Some said that FF8 and FF9 were bad with this too, but I was a good boy and did my sidequests, so I was fine.
Though I'll admit that in Final Fantasy Tactics, I had fun levelling up, because (1) the combat system itself was very enjoyable and (2) it was fun to kill all of the enemies except one, paralyze the survivor and spend an hour having my characters hitting and healing each other until they were all godlike.