The Last Express was an amazing (and also very innovative) adventure game. It had a great story, quality acting (rotoscoped into a unique pen-and-ink art style) and real-time gameplay. It was also well before its time, and despite being a critical success it was also a commercial failure, just like most "highbrow" movies.
I think The Last Express qualifies as a highbrow game by the standards of TFA. It is certainly an unusual subject matter for a video game -- the last ride of the Orient Express at the close of WWI. I learned a lot about the period just by playing the game. And the attention to detail was fantastic -- I ended up giving my copy away to a non-gamer girlfriend of mine, just because of her interest in trains. And there were truly amazing moments in it. I still remember the closing credits to this day: an animated map of Europe, where you could see the borders changing from before WWI to present day. I had no idea until that moment that the borders of countries were so malleable -- until that point I thought that the map was pretty fixes, with the occasional change due to war. In fact, the map of Europe has changed pretty much continuously over the last century.
If you like adventures and want to try a "highbrow" game, you could do worse than trying The Last Express if you can still find a copy.
But why would the Wii controller need more buttons, even for an EA game? That's the whole *point* of the Wiimote -- rather than having a zillion buttons to map to the various actions in the game, you use gestures of the controller itself. If it works out, playing games should be more like playing sports: easy to pick up, but with practice of the gestures comes mastery.
Think of it this way, if the terrorist watch list had a whole lot of John Smiths on it, then every John Smith in the world would have the same problem.
Well, the terrorist watch list does have the name David Smith on it, which is almost as common. I know that because it's my name, and until I figured out I should put my middle name on every travel booking I was unable to check in online and had to go through a screening call when checking in in person.
That's the whole problem with this "War on Terror". Everyone agrees that catching terrorists is a good thing, in the abstract. But what about the cost? Is it really worth inconveniencing thousands of people with a common name (whether it be Smith or Mohammed) to add a 0.0000001% probability that you might detect an actual terrorist? I can't say what the answer is, but I sure get the sense that no-one in power is asking the question.
the new controller works well with first person shooter games like Metroid Prime, but, currently, falls short in the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
If you RTFA though, you'll learn that the sense in which it "falls short" is that Zelda doesn't even use the motion-sensing capabilities for combat:
For some reason, Nintendo chose not to allow you use the controller when you were fighting with swords. That's done with button pushing - which takes some of the fun out of it. You simply use the controller to launch a whirling attack.
The failure is in expectations, not technical capability. My guess is that they haven't yet perfected swordfighting with motion-sensing and didn't include it in the E3 preview, but it will be included in the final release.
I've found it more comfortable to play putting the DS thumb-strap on my right index finger, and using that to look around with the touch pad. The problem is that the thumb-strap keeps slipping off my index finger, and I have to keep readjusting it. I wish someone would produce a "thimble"-like device that would fix snugly to my index finger that I could use to interact with the touch screen. It would be good if it had a surface near my fingerprint for sliding over the touchscreen for Metroid Prime, but also a pointing tool near the fingertip, to make it easier to switch between D-pad and touch-screen use (I find myself switching between them all the time on Animal Crossing, and it's a bit of a pain to have to hold the stylus while I'm using the buttons).
There's a market out there (me!) if anyone wants to make and sell one...
On an unrelated note, newegg has Metroid pinball for 18 bucks. To anyone out there who has it, would you recommend it?
As a real-work pinball junkie, I heartily recommend it. It's made by the same people that made the awesome Pro Pinball PC pinball simulations "The Web", "Timeshock", and "Big Race USA". (Disclaimer: I was a design consultant on the latter two, but I'd lost touch with the Pro Pinball guys a long time ago and didn't realise they were behind Metroid Pinball until I finished the game and saw the credits!) Metroid Pinball is less of a simulation and more of a pinball-themed game, but it's still very strong on real-world physics and just "feels" like a real pinball game. If you like pinball, go for it.
Well actually only 31% voted for Bush -- turnout in the election was 61%. And that's just 31% of eligible voters, which doesn't count children, alien residents, or felons for example. So it's hardly a sweeping mandate when you look at it in those terms. Easily more then 70% of the USA either didn't vote for Bush, or didn't vote at all, or wasn't allowed to vote.
Something I discovered recently is that Apple's Airport Express solves this problem for me. I have an Airport Express I use for business trips -- I can plug it into the fixed ethernet in the room and then have wifi in my hotel room. Anyway, I just realised I can use this when I'm travelling to play Mario Kart DS online, just by connecting to the access point created by the Airport Express.
I have a wireless router that I had to manually downgrade to 2Mbps transfer rate before I could take my DS online, which was a major pain. So now, when I'm at home, I just connect the Airport Express to one of the output from my crappy router using a short ethernet cable, and with my DS connect to the Airport Express instead of the DLink router. Works perfectly. The Airport Express is kinda pricey though, but if you have or want one it might be a good solution.
It's unlikely he can be identified: there's no formal registration process with Nintendo's WiFi service like there is with Xbox Live, for example. I guess the system can identify both the DS and the game card uniquely, but unless this guy registered his purchases with Nintendo, there's no way they can know who he is.
Y'know, for a lot of people, this might actually be effective. (I'd mod you Informative rather than Funny if I weren't responding.) I've been in a number of on-line situations where another person was reporting poor performance, latency, or lag, only to discover that they'd saturated their link with BitTorrent or similar. They had no idea it might possibly have an effect on their online experience...
It is due to be released in North America as Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day in April, and in Europe as Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain? in May.
But I don't see buying a separate DS card just to be able to browse the web, and then carrying it around with my DS all the time.
Yeah, because carrying around an extra 1.5 gram card is really going to do my back in. And there's not enough room in my briefcase for another huge DS cartridge as it is...
I really enjoyed the branding in Pikmin 2 on the Gamecube. It was kinda cool to see your little Pikmin drag around real Duracell batteries and that yellow lip cream container (but given that I've forgotten the name I guess it wasn't the greatest branding). It also helped to reinforce the idea that the setting was actually Earth, which was only subtly suggested in the first game.
plus, they also removed the power button. it's always been an annoyance sitting there on the face, i sometimes accidentally press it when trying to look for the start button with my left hand
That always annoyed me too. Many times I've turned a game off by mistake when I really wanted the Select button.
But how will you turn the DS Lite off, now? Closing the clamshell to suspend a game is too useful for them to replace with power-off. Maybe there'll be an on/off switch somewhere else on the case (maybe on the side?).
And considering switching from WEP to WPA does more to increase one's feelings of security than it does their actual security(it can be cracked as easily as WEP), it shouldn't be a priority(it's also far more resource intensive than WEP)
My guess is that the additional number-crunching power to support WPA over WEP is the reason that the DS doesn't support it. The DS processor isn't exactly lightning fast, and in fact to use the Nintendo Wi-Fi with some routers you have to throttle the throughput rate so that the DS can keep up. I think if it had to spend extra cycles on decryption the games could get laggy and suck. And that's why WPA isn't supported.
As it happens it support WEP just fine, and the games are fun and don't lag, so I'm perfectly happy with my DS.
Well, that kinda defeats the whole purpose of the show. Much of the interest and entertainment comes from the surprises you get when you try and do something practically, even if it's obvious from the outset what the result should be, and even then the Mythbusters are often surprised (e.g. who thought it was obvious leaving the tailgate of the pickup down makes drag worse?).
And while you might be right that from a purely *scientific* aspect the result of the bullet fired up experiment is obvious, what about the practical aspects? Maybe it's not practically possible to shoot a bullet straight up in the air -- even a small deviation from a vertical trajectory could mean a huge lateral translation. Maybe the deformation of the bullet when its fired introduces more drag than you'd expect? Maybe a passing seagull will always eat the bullet in the air so it can't fall to the ground? These are the unexpected things experimentation is for.
I remember as a kid, we were set a problem in class: if you observe an analog clock from 12AM to 12PM, how many times do the hour hand and minute hand occupy the same position. I sat and thought about it, and decided it was obviously 12 times. Some of the kids actually got a clock and wound it forward and counted the number of times -- 11. I thought at the time it was cheating, an "impure" way of solving the problem. Aristotle would have rolled in his grave! But now I see it was the right thing to do.
... the "one more turn" addictiveness of Civ makes those layover go by quickly
Sometimes too quickly! I got to SFO 3 hours early for a flight one time, so I sat down in the gate lounge, pulled out the laptop and started playing Civ III. What seemed like moments later, in the middle of a medieval war with the Romans, I looked up and noticed the gate lounge was empty, and my plane had arrived at the gate, boarded all the passengers, and was just pulling away from the jetway in front of me. I didn't see anyone board, and I didn't hear a single announcement, although I know these things happened. I couldn't believe 3 hours had passed so quickly! Luckily the gate agent was sympathetic and got me on the next flight.
So remember, if you're playing Civ, remember to look up every couple of turns! (Maybe Civ V will introduce a "Real-Life Adviser" to remind you...)
You don't need something as fancy as a power inverter. There are several third-party power adapters for the GBA that plug into the cigarette lighter. Many cars have a compatible 12V socket in the back seat area now, too.
And the GBA power adapters also work on the DS!
Definitely looks like a weekly cycle. It would be easy for Google to "seasonally adjust" these curves by scaling each day by the average traffic over the year. There's no reason to suppose any of these search terms would be more likely to be used than any other term on a Sunday than a Tuesday, and smoothing out the curves would make it much easier to see trends and differences.
That's eight gigatons of energy released a day by a single hurricane. Now how many did we have this year alone? That's a lotta fucking energy by mother nature alone.
Well, there's a big difference between heat energy being redistributed (as in a hurricane) to chemical energy being released by burning coal or oil, or atomic energy being released through nuclear fission. The heat energy in the ocean was going to end up somewhere anyway, whether in concentrated form in a hurricane, or in a more distributed form as rain, wind, or ocean currents. The chemical and atomic energy used for power generation wouldn't have been released unless it had been dug out of the ground by humans and stuck in a power plant or automobile.
To make a bad pun out of a stupid statement, that argument simply doesn't hold water.
Y'know, speaking of DDR, this would be a great game with the Revolution controllers. One of the problems with DDR is it looks like you're doing that Irish dancing when you play -- it's all in the legs, and your arms can just hang down at the side. But what if you played DDR on the usual footpad but you had a Revolution controller in each hand. There would be on-screen actions for both your feet and your hands. That would be cool, and a better workout to boot!
This is very cool. If you combine it with an avatar creator you can easily create some nice-looking emblems. I with there was a way to upload an emblem to the DS though.
I agree. This is one of the few shows that tries to answer questions by trying things out rather than merely speculating or just asking someone. I hope it inspires kids to think scientifically -- and I think the humour and entertainment provided by the show helps with that goal.
They do make use of the Scientific Method, although many times their experiments are hopelessly designed (usually by having too few data points, or investigating outside the range of interest). They're prone to extrapolate from limited data. They're also too quick to claim a myth "busted" -- just because you failed to demonstrate something doesn't mean it's impossible.
But, in the end, at least they experiment, and in a way that makes experimentation both useful and fun. And as a member of today's seemingly minority reality-based community, that's a welcome breath of fresh air.
I'd say that, for a mail application, "my email address doesn't work" is a pretty big bug. And that looks like exactly what might happen to UK users of gmail. Not having ironed out this possibility is a pretty good reason to stay in beta.
If you really think that beta is only concerned with "whether the program is complete" you have a very narrow view of what a software product comprises. It's not just the code. It's also the hardware, servers, software, customer service, packaging, delivery, and operations that need to be working to make the software useful and accessible to customers. Not every product has all these things, but in my experience no product has none of them. And when I run a beta I test all of these things, not just the code.
Of course, as of October 1, declaring bankruptcy isn't likely to solve a Nawlins refugee's problems. Bankruptcy rules will change so that it's no longer possible to write off most forms of consumer debt. And how would you like it, if after losing your home to the hurricane, you were forced to go to mandatory credit counseling?
Slashdot Mirror
The Last Express was an amazing (and also very innovative) adventure game. It had a great story, quality acting (rotoscoped into a unique pen-and-ink art style) and real-time gameplay. It was also well before its time, and despite being a critical success it was also a commercial failure, just like most "highbrow" movies.
I think The Last Express qualifies as a highbrow game by the standards of TFA. It is certainly an unusual subject matter for a video game -- the last ride of the Orient Express at the close of WWI. I learned a lot about the period just by playing the game. And the attention to detail was fantastic -- I ended up giving my copy away to a non-gamer girlfriend of mine, just because of her interest in trains. And there were truly amazing moments in it. I still remember the closing credits to this day: an animated map of Europe, where you could see the borders changing from before WWI to present day. I had no idea until that moment that the borders of countries were so malleable -- until that point I thought that the map was pretty fixes, with the occasional change due to war. In fact, the map of Europe has changed pretty much continuously over the last century.
If you like adventures and want to try a "highbrow" game, you could do worse than trying The Last Express if you can still find a copy.
But why would the Wii controller need more buttons, even for an EA game? That's the whole *point* of the Wiimote -- rather than having a zillion buttons to map to the various actions in the game, you use gestures of the controller itself. If it works out, playing games should be more like playing sports: easy to pick up, but with practice of the gestures comes mastery.
That's the whole problem with this "War on Terror". Everyone agrees that catching terrorists is a good thing, in the abstract. But what about the cost? Is it really worth inconveniencing thousands of people with a common name (whether it be Smith or Mohammed) to add a 0.0000001% probability that you might detect an actual terrorist? I can't say what the answer is, but I sure get the sense that no-one in power is asking the question.
There's a market out there (me!) if anyone wants to make and sell one...
Well actually only 31% voted for Bush -- turnout in the election was 61%. And that's just 31% of eligible voters, which doesn't count children, alien residents, or felons for example. So it's hardly a sweeping mandate when you look at it in those terms. Easily more then 70% of the USA either didn't vote for Bush, or didn't vote at all, or wasn't allowed to vote.
Something I discovered recently is that Apple's Airport Express solves this problem for me. I have an Airport Express I use for business trips -- I can plug it into the fixed ethernet in the room and then have wifi in my hotel room. Anyway, I just realised I can use this when I'm travelling to play Mario Kart DS online, just by connecting to the access point created by the Airport Express. I have a wireless router that I had to manually downgrade to 2Mbps transfer rate before I could take my DS online, which was a major pain. So now, when I'm at home, I just connect the Airport Express to one of the output from my crappy router using a short ethernet cable, and with my DS connect to the Airport Express instead of the DLink router. Works perfectly. The Airport Express is kinda pricey though, but if you have or want one it might be a good solution.
It's unlikely he can be identified: there's no formal registration process with Nintendo's WiFi service like there is with Xbox Live, for example. I guess the system can identify both the DS and the game card uniquely, but unless this guy registered his purchases with Nintendo, there's no way they can know who he is.
Y'know, for a lot of people, this might actually be effective. (I'd mod you Informative rather than Funny if I weren't responding.) I've been in a number of on-line situations where another person was reporting poor performance, latency, or lag, only to discover that they'd saturated their link with BitTorrent or similar. They had no idea it might possibly have an effect on their online experience...
Yeah, because carrying around an extra 1.5 gram card is really going to do my back in. And there's not enough room in my briefcase for another huge DS cartridge as it is...
I really enjoyed the branding in Pikmin 2 on the Gamecube. It was kinda cool to see your little Pikmin drag around real Duracell batteries and that yellow lip cream container (but given that I've forgotten the name I guess it wasn't the greatest branding). It also helped to reinforce the idea that the setting was actually Earth, which was only subtly suggested in the first game.
But how will you turn the DS Lite off, now? Closing the clamshell to suspend a game is too useful for them to replace with power-off. Maybe there'll be an on/off switch somewhere else on the case (maybe on the side?).
And while you might be right that from a purely *scientific* aspect the result of the bullet fired up experiment is obvious, what about the practical aspects? Maybe it's not practically possible to shoot a bullet straight up in the air -- even a small deviation from a vertical trajectory could mean a huge lateral translation. Maybe the deformation of the bullet when its fired introduces more drag than you'd expect? Maybe a passing seagull will always eat the bullet in the air so it can't fall to the ground? These are the unexpected things experimentation is for.
I remember as a kid, we were set a problem in class: if you observe an analog clock from 12AM to 12PM, how many times do the hour hand and minute hand occupy the same position. I sat and thought about it, and decided it was obviously 12 times. Some of the kids actually got a clock and wound it forward and counted the number of times -- 11. I thought at the time it was cheating, an "impure" way of solving the problem. Aristotle would have rolled in his grave! But now I see it was the right thing to do.
Sometimes too quickly! I got to SFO 3 hours early for a flight one time, so I sat down in the gate lounge, pulled out the laptop and started playing Civ III. What seemed like moments later, in the middle of a medieval war with the Romans, I looked up and noticed the gate lounge was empty, and my plane had arrived at the gate, boarded all the passengers, and was just pulling away from the jetway in front of me. I didn't see anyone board, and I didn't hear a single announcement, although I know these things happened. I couldn't believe 3 hours had passed so quickly! Luckily the gate agent was sympathetic and got me on the next flight.
So remember, if you're playing Civ, remember to look up every couple of turns! (Maybe Civ V will introduce a "Real-Life Adviser" to remind you...)
You don't need something as fancy as a power inverter. There are several third-party power adapters for the GBA that plug into the cigarette lighter. Many cars have a compatible 12V socket in the back seat area now, too. And the GBA power adapters also work on the DS!
Definitely looks like a weekly cycle. It would be easy for Google to "seasonally adjust" these curves by scaling each day by the average traffic over the year. There's no reason to suppose any of these search terms would be more likely to be used than any other term on a Sunday than a Tuesday, and smoothing out the curves would make it much easier to see trends and differences.
To make a bad pun out of a stupid statement, that argument simply doesn't hold water.
Y'know, speaking of DDR, this would be a great game with the Revolution controllers. One of the problems with DDR is it looks like you're doing that Irish dancing when you play -- it's all in the legs, and your arms can just hang down at the side. But what if you played DDR on the usual footpad but you had a Revolution controller in each hand. There would be on-screen actions for both your feet and your hands. That would be cool, and a better workout to boot!
This is very cool. If you combine it with an avatar creator you can easily create some nice-looking emblems. I with there was a way to upload an emblem to the DS though.
They do make use of the Scientific Method, although many times their experiments are hopelessly designed (usually by having too few data points, or investigating outside the range of interest). They're prone to extrapolate from limited data. They're also too quick to claim a myth "busted" -- just because you failed to demonstrate something doesn't mean it's impossible.
But, in the end, at least they experiment, and in a way that makes experimentation both useful and fun. And as a member of today's seemingly minority reality-based community, that's a welcome breath of fresh air.
If you really think that beta is only concerned with "whether the program is complete" you have a very narrow view of what a software product comprises. It's not just the code. It's also the hardware, servers, software, customer service, packaging, delivery, and operations that need to be working to make the software useful and accessible to customers. Not every product has all these things, but in my experience no product has none of them. And when I run a beta I test all of these things, not just the code.
Of course, as of October 1, declaring bankruptcy isn't likely to solve a Nawlins refugee's problems. Bankruptcy rules will change so that it's no longer possible to write off most forms of consumer debt. And how would you like it, if after losing your home to the hurricane, you were forced to go to mandatory credit counseling?