I kind of doubt it that they "borrowed" the asserts to get release ready. I would assume that they used them as placeholder early on, which is a very common thing, and then forgot to replace them in the end before release. Its not like any of the asserts is some artistic masterpiece that would be impossible to recreate in a day or two.
The Computer inside DOTT that launches MM just launches a MM.exe, its doesn't run in the DOTT engine, so it doesn't help with emulation, unless of course one is running Dosbox.
Thanks to Aces High II I can actually list a ton of vehicles and planes from WWII, their weaknesses and strengths, etc.
I don't doubt that, I learned my fair share of weapon knowledge of weapon from video games as well, heck, I would say I learned more about weapons in games then when I spend my 10 months in the german army. However I do consider that knowledge basically worthless, it has no value. It doesn't tell you how the civilian suffer during war, it doesn't tell you why wars get started or how they might have been prevented. In fact it goes in the other direction, it makes war look cool, its free propaganda for the military, which is why I consider that knowledge pretty harmful or even dangerous. I would even go as far to say that a lot of that 'war is cool' image that the media has given over the last few decades is one of the core reason why the USA is in war with Irak today. People have forgotten that war simply isn't fun and so they don't really have all that much problems with starting one.
There's nothing worse than isolating children from reality, because it will start hitting them in the face one day or another. Let them watch the news, play video games, etc. It can't hurt.
I agree that you shouldn't isolate them to much from reality, but neither news or video games are reality. News compress the bad things of the world into tiny 15min action shows, what might be shown might be real to some degree, but its shown totally out of proportion. Planes might crash once a week, but thousands of them also land perfectly safely, news however doesn't show that, same with all the other bad stuff that happens. I wouldn't let my child watch news for quite a while, since there is really nothing you can learn from it when you don't even have a basic understanding of how the world works.
Now with video games things are even more extreme, they have absolutely no connection with reality, they might get inspiration from reality, but you next random WWII shooter isn't like fighting in WWII and GTA doesn't show the normal live on the street either. Now to some degree this is of course good, since well, its all fake and thus you can enjoy it without feeling all that bad, but on the other side I would prefer my child to learn facts about war from a good history book, not from a video game.
'stable' in Debian revers to the package dependencies and versions, *NOT* the software within the packages. If a driver has a bug and it get fixed you will sooner or later have that driver in 'unstable', there however is a good chance that you will *never* see that driver in 'stable', unless that bug is somehow security relevant, which most aren't.
Judging from the ratings the PSPs games aren't bad, in fact there are more and better ones then on the DS. However, I agree on the 'boring' part, those games that the PSP has might theoretically be good, but if I already played them half a years ago on the PS2 then thats worth nothing. The PSP is lacking good games that are designed from scratch to work with the system instead of just ported.
All that said, my DS is collecting dust just like the PSP, actually a bit more, since I like the PSP as eBook reader, but with the DS there are at least plenty of games that I can't get in a better version for one of the big consoles, with the PSP however there are almost none.
I think the main part that is new is that custom content is getting part of the game itself, instead of it being stuff that you create with an external editor or you download from some webpage and then patch into your program, custom content happens as gameplay in the gameworld itself.
1) Technologies don't get equally spread across all the population, just look at current day earth, we landed a men on the moon almost 40 years ago, yet still have bushmen hunting for their own food today. If you have plenty of farmland in a newly colonized solar system, why not use it in good old fashion? Btw. It only goes Western-style on the poorer outer planets, the central ones are perfectly normal sterile sci-fi as in many other movies. I actually consider that a quite realistic scenario.
2) I agree on that, the reavers and their whole backstory stretches imagination a bit more then needed. That the Alliance killed 30mil people and nobody noticed is just quite a bit to much over the top, especially considering that traveling between planets seems to be a rather normal activity in the Firefly universe.
3) River is not that much different from say Ender in Enders Game. Beside being extremely clever she also happens to be a psychic, which should give her quite some advantage in a fight.
I don't consider the movie terrible by any means and 1) and 3) are non issues, but 2) is really a plot-hole so large that I sometimes have to wonder why I heard to little complaining about it and if that weren't enough you also have that Mr.Universe character, which was never properly introduced, yet is a very important key figure. All that was a little to much Deus ex machine for my taste, especially since it was never hinted in the TV series.
The TV series itself was awesome, the movie still good, but only if one didn't thought to much about the story and its holes, the TV series just didn't have any plot holes as big as the movie.
### Tactical FPSs like the Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon series are heavily dumbed down when they're ported to consoles.
Operation Flashpoint played perfectly fine on the XBox and was a very authentic adoption of the PC original. I can't deny that games are often dumped down on consoles, but thats mostly due to the target audience (or whatever the publisher thinks it is), not due to the controller.
The only genre where I could see a console having a real problems are flight simulators, with something like Falcon4 you have every key on the keyboard mapped to a functions, many times twice. That would certainly get a little hard on with a gamepad, but everything else would work without much problem. Sure you get issues when you just try to port a game, but when you design a strategy game from ground up for a console you won't have much issues with a gamepad. If all fails developers could also just use a USB keyboard if they really want on a console.
### Most of us need a computer for something or another,
"Something or another" works with a computer that is five years old or even older, games seldomly stay enjoyable on a computer that is even just two years old. One problem that PC gaming is having is that PCs simply are fast enough now and have been for a few years.
And all that programming knowledge will help you *design* a game exactly how? Just because you are able to design an game engine doesn't mean that you can design a game. For game design, especially if you want to do something different then just yet another FPS game, you need knowledge of things outside of gaming and computers. Programming experience will help you program, but won't help you much with the non-programming aspects of games. It might not look at that from the distance, but game design is actually the hardest part to get right.
That said, some good knowledge of games is important as well and some solid knowledge of programming, sounds and graphics can help as well, but knowledge of the real world is still extremely important.
Try dslinux, it gives you telnet/ssh, a browser, irc client and a bunch of other stuff. All you need is a DS and a GBA flashcard + passme to run it, as far as I remember it doesn't work with the single-slot homebrew modules right now.
### Why can't this be done in Ruby or Python or Perl or JavaScript
Can't say about all of them, but most of them only allow you a single VM, which just isn't good enough when you want to keep your scripts apart from each other and secure (i.e. in a game a users script shouldn't crash the engine or change the behavior of other unrelated scripts). In Lua on the other side you can have as many VMs as you want and you never run the risk that any scripts breaks out of its little sandbox. You might be able to replicate that effect in other languages, but in Lua its simply the normal way of doing things, while in other its either impossible or requires lots of extra effort.
### What advantage does Lua have over perl/python/ruby/other existing scripting languages that makes it worth investing the time to learn?
When it comes to day to day scripting, I don't think its worth to learn, since it just doesn't provide much in that area, its just not what is was build for. What LUA however is very good at is getting embedded in other applications, in that area it just is way superior to perl/python/ruby/etc.
Its not just a matter of size, but mainly a matter of flexibility, i.e. if you want to run multiple VMs at once (say one for each game object), then you can simply do that in LUA, in other scripting languages you however can't do it at all or only with dirty hacks. The reason is that most other scripting languages are not meant to be embedded, but to run stand alone, their APIs just aren't build with that flexible in mind. Perl/Python/Ruby/etc. are for most part build so that you give control up to their interpreter, while LUA is build in a way that your C code always has full control.
In a LUA based application you have C code that runs LUA scripts, in a perl/python/ruby/etc. application on the other side you have perl/python/ruby/etc. that runs C code, big difference when you just want to extent an application instead of let the script take over.
I like Metroid and Mario a lot, but please not yet another retro release, Nintendo already had way to much of that in the last years or did everybody forget the Mario Advance series, Mario64DS, etc.? I am kind of sick and tired of getting the same games from Nintendo year after year. How about some completly new stuff instead of just another franchise milking game (YI2,...)? Pikmin was the last truly new thing that Nintendo did (ignoring all that casual gamer stuff, Nintendogs, Brainage, etc.) and that already was way to long ago.
If there ever come more rereleases for the DS then please in the form of a flashcard and downloads over the VirtualConsole, but not as full price cartridges.
Operation Flashpoint is among the most impressive games that I have seen when it comes to AI, not necessarily because its the most sophisticated, but because the AI has a very noticeable impact on the gameplay.
No matter how often you replay a mission, it will always come out totally different. This comes in large part from the very open nature of the game, namely there are basically no rooms, its all just one huge outdoor environment and both you and the enemies can go basically wherever they want. It also comes from the way the missions are designed, there are no soldiers that jump out from behind a rock to shoot at you, instead the enemy soliders just follow their routine, they walk their paths, drive a convoy along the road or whatever they have to do right now. Thanks to the large area, they don't have to walk on a stupid 10 meter long path and then turn around to repeat it over and over again. This all leads to a very realistic feel, because all the limits of classic FPSs are removed. Its also not you against 100 other, but often more like you + 5 team members against 10 other, so its a much more even match. In Operation Flashpoint the player is also completly equal to the enemy, one good targeted shot and you are dead, no 100% health that slowly goes done while enemies die on the first hit.
Another aspect that is noticeable in Flashpoint is that there is a very clear difference between the state of the enemies, you can easily tell when they are on patrol, when they are attacking you and when they are searching for you. If you shoot at them they will notice it and react appropriately, this also makes it easy to tell when they don't notice you, i.e. you can hide rather well, a tank won't see you when you are crawling directly infront of it, etc. As a player its simply easy to tell what the enemy is currently doing, since the animations and behaviors are rather distinct for each of the actions.
Last not least Flashpoint is also a game where you need your teammates and where they are not just stupid cannon fodder. Most of the time your teammates can take very well care of themself and you don't have to babysit them like in some other games (HalfLife2...).
All that said, the AI in Flashpoint is far from flawless, it can often be a nightmare to get your group to mount a vehicle or get to a certain point, they will do what you want, but when they crawl around for a minute before entering the vehicle it can get pretty annoying. But overall Flashpoint really is among the best, it is however not just the AI itself that does the job, but the overall game design that threads players and enemies basically the same, it also helps a lot that the whole gameworld is interactive, if you see a tank, then you can drive it, there are no artificial barriers, no pre-scripted events that happen outside of normal gameplay rules. That scripting that is there blends perfectly into the normal gameplay.
### Also, I don't agree that Zelda is the "bad" kind of motion control.
Its not bad, but its useless, I don't buy a motion-control console to have the same old control scheme as before, just with camera control removed (this could turn out pretty bad for some games) and wiggle motion as button press replacement.
### but that doesn't mean it doesn't feel different to the user
Most people just wiggle the Wiimote around after a few hours of gameplay, since doing full swings turn out rather pointless. And with wiggling the Wiimote I haven't really won anything, its still an abstract action, just as a button press, that has no direct connection to the game. Nintendo also removed Gamecube and Classic Controller support, so that people don't have a way to try the other control scheme, I guess they had their reason.
My main issue with the Wii is that Nintendo themself doesn't really seem to know what to do with it. Wii Sport was good and made good use of the controller, but with the rest of the games it just seems pointless. I have some doubt that this will change with Mario or Metroid, which after all worked perfectly fine with a normal controller. I simple miss that one killer title that shows that motion sensing is also good for 'real' games, not just mini-game collections, Zelda simply failed that one and everything announced so far doesn't look very impressive either.
I do see some good use for motion based controls, however not for such simple devices as the Wiimote. To make motion control really useful you would need exact position and rotation sensing, which however the Wiimote can't do, all it does is measure acceleration, which just isn't enough for many situation where you might want to map the controllers action 1:1 into the game.
### What makes us so sure that button mashing isn't a gimmick?
Simple, button mashing isn't the point why you play the game, motion sensing on the other side often is. Remove the motion sensing and you won't have much of a game left. Its like with the prerendered-movie-games, eToy and all that other stuff, its only fun for so long, once you are over the initial "oh, cool"-phase its the underlying game that matters, not the technique and more often then not the underlying games just aren't all that good when they rely heavily on the next cool gimmicky.
All that said, motion sensing doesn't have to stay a gimmick, just like with more powerful graphics hardware the important thing is what you do with it. You can use the new graphics power just to add some more shiny into the same old games and everybody will get bored soon after, you can however also put it to use and do games that where impossible on any other console before (for example huge crowds in Dead Rising). If motion sensing actually allows you to do things that you couldn't do with a normal controller then its great (speed and direction of the swing are seamlessly detected in Wii Sports), if its on the other side is just the same as a button-press (i.e. shake the Wiimote in Zelda for sword swing) then its pretty lame. At the moment most games have a tendency to go into the "lame" direction, they present you the same old game with the same old controls, just remapped to Wiimote motions.
### Right now my favorite Wii game is "Everybody Votes,"
Which kind of nicely shows that the Wii is in trouble right now.
The install base has of course an impact, but the graphic qualities does matter for many developers. Epic, id Software, Crytek and Co. are not throwing their last few years of engine development away just because Nintendo thought that last generation graphics would be enough. They will continue do develop what they did and will create games based on those engines, they however won't release them on the Wii, but on PC, PS3 and XBox360.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the Wii isn't selling 6 million to the hardcore gamers, its selling it to the casual one, those that don't care about graphical progress and don't care about normal games, they will be happily playing a handful of casual gamer games and will be happy with that, they won't buy 30 games like the hardcore ones.
What will happen and already is happening is that developers use the Wii as a dumping ground for quick&dirty ports from last generation, you might also see some original games, but those will be the Raymen: Raving Rabits, not the Gears of War, BioShocks or AssessinsCreed, since there simply isn't much of a market for them.
So far I haven't seen a single third party AAA title on the Wii, neither announced nor released, beside Mario and Metroid there really isn't much interesting coming out at all and even those will only get release at the end of the year. The future of the Wii doesn't look all that bright right now, sales numbers alone don't change that, Wii needs developers and so far it simply doesn't seem to have them.
For me the biggest issue is the price, not the size. A Flipstart costs $2000, a UMPC would cost me around $1000 and a Sony VAIO is in the $1000-$2000 range, tablet PCs are also around $2000, while a normal full size PC is just something around $500. Those prices are just plain wrong. A handheld should cost less then a full size PC not two or four times as much.
OLPC seems to get it right, the small laptop costs $150, make that $250 if it ever hits retail and its still a good price, I can also get PSP for $200, not exactly a full featured PC, not at all in fact, but a powerfull handheld at a good price, an for some uses like eBook reading actually quite good.
I don't need a handheld that can outperform my desktop computer, I don't even need one that gets close, just make it fast enough so that it can run ssh, VNC and friends. If I ever need a full PC, I just log into it remotely, no need to carry all that useless power around with me.
Handhelds need to be affordable, everything else is really secondary in the end, since at $2000 those things will never sell to the masses, no matter how pretty and small you make them, get them under $500 or under $300 if you really care and you might have something worth to buy.
What this shows is that the PSP gets better quality third-party titles and that the average PSP game is better then the average DS one, which this however fails to show is how much impact a game has on the market.
Both Nintendogs (83) and Brain age (77) for example scored rather low, but they did have quite a large impact. While many higher scoring PSP titles didn't have much impact at all. Why is that? Rather simple: Cute puppies attract new gamers, but are rather boring for normal gamers, since the game basically lacks any depth. Same with BrainAge, its basically just a glorified Flash/Javascript Mini game, nothing that would impress a normal gamer, but it comes nicely packaged, got some good advertisement and yet again attracts new people to games.
With the PSP on the other side you have half the games being the same games that got released on the PS2 half a year earlier, now they still might be good games if taken on their own, but there is little reason for anybody to actually buy them, since they already have played them (hard to beat 100mio PS2). And even those games that aren't simple ports are often simple sequels.
So to come back with to the Wii, its basically all the same, new games for new gamers. However the Wii has one huge problem, its not up against a PSP with its lackluster ports and sequels game offering, its up against the XBox360 and PS3 which has a ton of new and interesting games. Also the Wii has a serious lack in terms of third party support, even worse then the DS, most third parties do on the Wii exactly what they did to the PSP, ports of last years last-gen games (see PrinceOfPersia, Tiger Woods, Godfather, etc.). The new and interesting games aren't ending up on the Wii, but on the next gen hardware. This might not be an issue at all for the casual gamer that Nintendo attracts, but it certainly is a issue for all the normal gamers.
Nintendo certainly widened the gaming market, but that gain came at a high price, namely they have alienated many gamers and long term fans, me included. Before the Wii got released I hoped that it would bring back the glory days of the SNES, good hardware, at a good price with tons of games. Well, what we good was very outdated hardware with a new controller at a rather high price, sorry, but 250EUR for something which I payed only 200EUR for five years ago just doesn't look pretty, that it now feature 1.5 or 2.0 times the power of the Gamecube doesn't change that fact. Third parties seem yet again have little to no interest in the Wii. Sure, Ubisoft and EA are squeezing money out of it with for most part cheap ports, but the real AAA titles happen elsewhere, I have yet to see a single big third party Wii title to be announced. Even so many AAA titles now happen to be cross platform, the Wii is, yet again, the console that doesn't get the ports, since it just a console of a different generation (no UnrealEngine3 titels on the Wii and such).
Nintendo is certainly making money with the Wii and will continue for a while, but at the moment I am really not so sure of the long term causes. In terms of third party support the Wii already looks just as bad as the N64 or Gamecube, probably even worse. In terms of 'normal' games, i.e. the games that are not BrainAge, Nintendogs, Wii Sports and stuff like that, it also looks pretty bad on the Wii. Online support is also yet again a thing that Nintendo rather ignores, I don't mind all that rather useless Vote channel and stuff, but multiplayer network gaming, not on the Wii and not for a while, and with friends code it won't really be much fun anyway.
The Wii was the first Nintendo console that I didn't bought on launch day in over a decade, in fact I still haven't bought it and have some doubt if I ever will. Nintendo found a nice new niche to make money, good for them, but I do actually care about games and that bunch of Minigames on the Wii just can't get me excited.
I (ab)use my PSP for most part as eBook reader and it is great at that job, doesn't even require any kind of homebrew, just the build in imageviewer and a bit of ghostscript or khtml magic to convert whatever I want to read to JPEGs (render much faster then PNG on the PSP). Its not perfect since it lacks bookmarking and such, but when there is a longer piece of text, its much easier to read on the PSP then on a computer monitor and much less fuss then print stuff out on paper. PSP is far to pretty to just use it as a doorstop.
Irony of this is that it just shows how great the PSP display is at 2D graphics, which sadly is the kind of graphics that gets used by far the least in PSP games.
Do you have a computer monitor? If so then you have a HD-TV capable device. One doesn't need a 42" Plasma TV for thousands of dollar to make use of HD output, VGA cable for XBox360 will just do the same. Beside even without HD you still profit from a clear picture due to anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering and plain and simple more detailed and better looking scenery and models. Now little old granny playing some Wii Sport tennis might not care about the difference, but gamers *do* care. One could of course argue that the 'classic' gamers are not in Nintendos target audience...
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I kind of doubt it that they "borrowed" the asserts to get release ready. I would assume that they used them as placeholder early on, which is a very common thing, and then forgot to replace them in the end before release. Its not like any of the asserts is some artistic masterpiece that would be impossible to recreate in a day or two.
The Computer inside DOTT that launches MM just launches a MM .exe, its doesn't run in the DOTT engine, so it doesn't help with emulation, unless of course one is running Dosbox.
I don't doubt that, I learned my fair share of weapon knowledge of weapon from video games as well, heck, I would say I learned more about weapons in games then when I spend my 10 months in the german army. However I do consider that knowledge basically worthless, it has no value. It doesn't tell you how the civilian suffer during war, it doesn't tell you why wars get started or how they might have been prevented. In fact it goes in the other direction, it makes war look cool, its free propaganda for the military, which is why I consider that knowledge pretty harmful or even dangerous. I would even go as far to say that a lot of that 'war is cool' image that the media has given over the last few decades is one of the core reason why the USA is in war with Irak today. People have forgotten that war simply isn't fun and so they don't really have all that much problems with starting one.
I agree that you shouldn't isolate them to much from reality, but neither news or video games are reality. News compress the bad things of the world into tiny 15min action shows, what might be shown might be real to some degree, but its shown totally out of proportion. Planes might crash once a week, but thousands of them also land perfectly safely, news however doesn't show that, same with all the other bad stuff that happens. I wouldn't let my child watch news for quite a while, since there is really nothing you can learn from it when you don't even have a basic understanding of how the world works.
Now with video games things are even more extreme, they have absolutely no connection with reality, they might get inspiration from reality, but you next random WWII shooter isn't like fighting in WWII and GTA doesn't show the normal live on the street either. Now to some degree this is of course good, since well, its all fake and thus you can enjoy it without feeling all that bad, but on the other side I would prefer my child to learn facts about war from a good history book, not from a video game.
'stable' in Debian revers to the package dependencies and versions, *NOT* the software within the packages. If a driver has a bug and it get fixed you will sooner or later have that driver in 'unstable', there however is a good chance that you will *never* see that driver in 'stable', unless that bug is somehow security relevant, which most aren't.
Judging from the ratings the PSPs games aren't bad, in fact there are more and better ones then on the DS. However, I agree on the 'boring' part, those games that the PSP has might theoretically be good, but if I already played them half a years ago on the PS2 then thats worth nothing. The PSP is lacking good games that are designed from scratch to work with the system instead of just ported.
All that said, my DS is collecting dust just like the PSP, actually a bit more, since I like the PSP as eBook reader, but with the DS there are at least plenty of games that I can't get in a better version for one of the big consoles, with the PSP however there are almost none.
- Firefly features nice full color ePaper and some cool interactive holographic displays.
- the space suits in Planetes had interactive HUD displays in their helmets, kind of like some of that augumented reality stuff
- Ghost in the Shell is full of direct-to-brain interface stuff
In general animes are often full of technology, maybe there are some more interesting pieces to find.I think the main part that is new is that custom content is getting part of the game itself, instead of it being stuff that you create with an external editor or you download from some webpage and then patch into your program, custom content happens as gameplay in the gameworld itself.
1) Technologies don't get equally spread across all the population, just look at current day earth, we landed a men on the moon almost 40 years ago, yet still have bushmen hunting for their own food today. If you have plenty of farmland in a newly colonized solar system, why not use it in good old fashion? Btw. It only goes Western-style on the poorer outer planets, the central ones are perfectly normal sterile sci-fi as in many other movies. I actually consider that a quite realistic scenario.
2) I agree on that, the reavers and their whole backstory stretches imagination a bit more then needed. That the Alliance killed 30mil people and nobody noticed is just quite a bit to much over the top, especially considering that traveling between planets seems to be a rather normal activity in the Firefly universe.
3) River is not that much different from say Ender in Enders Game. Beside being extremely clever she also happens to be a psychic, which should give her quite some advantage in a fight.
I don't consider the movie terrible by any means and 1) and 3) are non issues, but 2) is really a plot-hole so large that I sometimes have to wonder why I heard to little complaining about it and if that weren't enough you also have that Mr.Universe character, which was never properly introduced, yet is a very important key figure. All that was a little to much Deus ex machine for my taste, especially since it was never hinted in the TV series.
The TV series itself was awesome, the movie still good, but only if one didn't thought to much about the story and its holes, the TV series just didn't have any plot holes as big as the movie.
### Tactical FPSs like the Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon series are heavily dumbed down when they're ported to consoles.
Operation Flashpoint played perfectly fine on the XBox and was a very authentic adoption of the PC original. I can't deny that games are often dumped down on consoles, but thats mostly due to the target audience (or whatever the publisher thinks it is), not due to the controller.
The only genre where I could see a console having a real problems are flight simulators, with something like Falcon4 you have every key on the keyboard mapped to a functions, many times twice. That would certainly get a little hard on with a gamepad, but everything else would work without much problem. Sure you get issues when you just try to port a game, but when you design a strategy game from ground up for a console you won't have much issues with a gamepad. If all fails developers could also just use a USB keyboard if they really want on a console.
### Most of us need a computer for something or another,
"Something or another" works with a computer that is five years old or even older, games seldomly stay enjoyable on a computer that is even just two years old. One problem that PC gaming is having is that PCs simply are fast enough now and have been for a few years.
And all that programming knowledge will help you *design* a game exactly how? Just because you are able to design an game engine doesn't mean that you can design a game. For game design, especially if you want to do something different then just yet another FPS game, you need knowledge of things outside of gaming and computers. Programming experience will help you program, but won't help you much with the non-programming aspects of games. It might not look at that from the distance, but game design is actually the hardest part to get right.
That said, some good knowledge of games is important as well and some solid knowledge of programming, sounds and graphics can help as well, but knowledge of the real world is still extremely important.
Try dslinux, it gives you telnet/ssh, a browser, irc client and a bunch of other stuff. All you need is a DS and a GBA flashcard + passme to run it, as far as I remember it doesn't work with the single-slot homebrew modules right now.
### Why can't this be done in Ruby or Python or Perl or JavaScript
Can't say about all of them, but most of them only allow you a single VM, which just isn't good enough when you want to keep your scripts apart from each other and secure (i.e. in a game a users script shouldn't crash the engine or change the behavior of other unrelated scripts). In Lua on the other side you can have as many VMs as you want and you never run the risk that any scripts breaks out of its little sandbox. You might be able to replicate that effect in other languages, but in Lua its simply the normal way of doing things, while in other its either impossible or requires lots of extra effort.
### What advantage does Lua have over perl/python/ruby/other existing scripting languages that makes it worth investing the time to learn?
When it comes to day to day scripting, I don't think its worth to learn, since it just doesn't provide much in that area, its just not what is was build for. What LUA however is very good at is getting embedded in other applications, in that area it just is way superior to perl/python/ruby/etc.
Its not just a matter of size, but mainly a matter of flexibility, i.e. if you want to run multiple VMs at once (say one for each game object), then you can simply do that in LUA, in other scripting languages you however can't do it at all or only with dirty hacks. The reason is that most other scripting languages are not meant to be embedded, but to run stand alone, their APIs just aren't build with that flexible in mind. Perl/Python/Ruby/etc. are for most part build so that you give control up to their interpreter, while LUA is build in a way that your C code always has full control.
In a LUA based application you have C code that runs LUA scripts, in a perl/python/ruby/etc. application on the other side you have perl/python/ruby/etc. that runs C code, big difference when you just want to extent an application instead of let the script take over.
I like Metroid and Mario a lot, but please not yet another retro release, Nintendo already had way to much of that in the last years or did everybody forget the Mario Advance series, Mario64DS, etc.? I am kind of sick and tired of getting the same games from Nintendo year after year. How about some completly new stuff instead of just another franchise milking game (YI2,...)? Pikmin was the last truly new thing that Nintendo did (ignoring all that casual gamer stuff, Nintendogs, Brainage, etc.) and that already was way to long ago.
If there ever come more rereleases for the DS then please in the form of a flashcard and downloads over the VirtualConsole, but not as full price cartridges.
Operation Flashpoint is among the most impressive games that I have seen when it comes to AI, not necessarily because its the most sophisticated, but because the AI has a very noticeable impact on the gameplay.
No matter how often you replay a mission, it will always come out totally different. This comes in large part from the very open nature of the game, namely there are basically no rooms, its all just one huge outdoor environment and both you and the enemies can go basically wherever they want. It also comes from the way the missions are designed, there are no soldiers that jump out from behind a rock to shoot at you, instead the enemy soliders just follow their routine, they walk their paths, drive a convoy along the road or whatever they have to do right now. Thanks to the large area, they don't have to walk on a stupid 10 meter long path and then turn around to repeat it over and over again. This all leads to a very realistic feel, because all the limits of classic FPSs are removed. Its also not you against 100 other, but often more like you + 5 team members against 10 other, so its a much more even match. In Operation Flashpoint the player is also completly equal to the enemy, one good targeted shot and you are dead, no 100% health that slowly goes done while enemies die on the first hit.
Another aspect that is noticeable in Flashpoint is that there is a very clear difference between the state of the enemies, you can easily tell when they are on patrol, when they are attacking you and when they are searching for you. If you shoot at them they will notice it and react appropriately, this also makes it easy to tell when they don't notice you, i.e. you can hide rather well, a tank won't see you when you are crawling directly infront of it, etc. As a player its simply easy to tell what the enemy is currently doing, since the animations and behaviors are rather distinct for each of the actions.
Last not least Flashpoint is also a game where you need your teammates and where they are not just stupid cannon fodder. Most of the time your teammates can take very well care of themself and you don't have to babysit them like in some other games (HalfLife2...).
All that said, the AI in Flashpoint is far from flawless, it can often be a nightmare to get your group to mount a vehicle or get to a certain point, they will do what you want, but when they crawl around for a minute before entering the vehicle it can get pretty annoying. But overall Flashpoint really is among the best, it is however not just the AI itself that does the job, but the overall game design that threads players and enemies basically the same, it also helps a lot that the whole gameworld is interactive, if you see a tank, then you can drive it, there are no artificial barriers, no pre-scripted events that happen outside of normal gameplay rules. That scripting that is there blends perfectly into the normal gameplay.
### Also, I don't agree that Zelda is the "bad" kind of motion control.
Its not bad, but its useless, I don't buy a motion-control console to have the same old control scheme as before, just with camera control removed (this could turn out pretty bad for some games) and wiggle motion as button press replacement.
### but that doesn't mean it doesn't feel different to the user
Most people just wiggle the Wiimote around after a few hours of gameplay, since doing full swings turn out rather pointless. And with wiggling the Wiimote I haven't really won anything, its still an abstract action, just as a button press, that has no direct connection to the game. Nintendo also removed Gamecube and Classic Controller support, so that people don't have a way to try the other control scheme, I guess they had their reason.
My main issue with the Wii is that Nintendo themself doesn't really seem to know what to do with it. Wii Sport was good and made good use of the controller, but with the rest of the games it just seems pointless. I have some doubt that this will change with Mario or Metroid, which after all worked perfectly fine with a normal controller. I simple miss that one killer title that shows that motion sensing is also good for 'real' games, not just mini-game collections, Zelda simply failed that one and everything announced so far doesn't look very impressive either.
I do see some good use for motion based controls, however not for such simple devices as the Wiimote. To make motion control really useful you would need exact position and rotation sensing, which however the Wiimote can't do, all it does is measure acceleration, which just isn't enough for many situation where you might want to map the controllers action 1:1 into the game.
### And whats to stop anyone from just forkign the kernel, and whatever they want, and keeping it on the v2 license?
Nothing, but in five or ten years that kernel would have little or no use beside some historic value if the kernel goes GPLv3.
### What makes us so sure that button mashing isn't a gimmick?
Simple, button mashing isn't the point why you play the game, motion sensing on the other side often is. Remove the motion sensing and you won't have much of a game left. Its like with the prerendered-movie-games, eToy and all that other stuff, its only fun for so long, once you are over the initial "oh, cool"-phase its the underlying game that matters, not the technique and more often then not the underlying games just aren't all that good when they rely heavily on the next cool gimmicky.
All that said, motion sensing doesn't have to stay a gimmick, just like with more powerful graphics hardware the important thing is what you do with it. You can use the new graphics power just to add some more shiny into the same old games and everybody will get bored soon after, you can however also put it to use and do games that where impossible on any other console before (for example huge crowds in Dead Rising). If motion sensing actually allows you to do things that you couldn't do with a normal controller then its great (speed and direction of the swing are seamlessly detected in Wii Sports), if its on the other side is just the same as a button-press (i.e. shake the Wiimote in Zelda for sword swing) then its pretty lame. At the moment most games have a tendency to go into the "lame" direction, they present you the same old game with the same old controls, just remapped to Wiimote motions.
### Right now my favorite Wii game is "Everybody Votes,"
Which kind of nicely shows that the Wii is in trouble right now.
The install base has of course an impact, but the graphic qualities does matter for many developers. Epic, id Software, Crytek and Co. are not throwing their last few years of engine development away just because Nintendo thought that last generation graphics would be enough. They will continue do develop what they did and will create games based on those engines, they however won't release them on the Wii, but on PC, PS3 and XBox360.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the Wii isn't selling 6 million to the hardcore gamers, its selling it to the casual one, those that don't care about graphical progress and don't care about normal games, they will be happily playing a handful of casual gamer games and will be happy with that, they won't buy 30 games like the hardcore ones.
What will happen and already is happening is that developers use the Wii as a dumping ground for quick&dirty ports from last generation, you might also see some original games, but those will be the Raymen: Raving Rabits, not the Gears of War, BioShocks or AssessinsCreed, since there simply isn't much of a market for them.
So far I haven't seen a single third party AAA title on the Wii, neither announced nor released, beside Mario and Metroid there really isn't much interesting coming out at all and even those will only get release at the end of the year. The future of the Wii doesn't look all that bright right now, sales numbers alone don't change that, Wii needs developers and so far it simply doesn't seem to have them.
For me the biggest issue is the price, not the size. A Flipstart costs $2000, a UMPC would cost me around $1000 and a Sony VAIO is in the $1000-$2000 range, tablet PCs are also around $2000, while a normal full size PC is just something around $500. Those prices are just plain wrong. A handheld should cost less then a full size PC not two or four times as much.
OLPC seems to get it right, the small laptop costs $150, make that $250 if it ever hits retail and its still a good price, I can also get PSP for $200, not exactly a full featured PC, not at all in fact, but a powerfull handheld at a good price, an for some uses like eBook reading actually quite good.
I don't need a handheld that can outperform my desktop computer, I don't even need one that gets close, just make it fast enough so that it can run ssh, VNC and friends. If I ever need a full PC, I just log into it remotely, no need to carry all that useless power around with me.
Handhelds need to be affordable, everything else is really secondary in the end, since at $2000 those things will never sell to the masses, no matter how pretty and small you make them, get them under $500 or under $300 if you really care and you might have something worth to buy.
Its the DS vs PSP all over again, just look at this little graph:
t acritic.png
http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/tmp/psp_vs_nds_me
What this shows is that the PSP gets better quality third-party titles and that the average PSP game is better then the average DS one, which this however fails to show is how much impact a game has on the market.
Both Nintendogs (83) and Brain age (77) for example scored rather low, but they did have quite a large impact. While many higher scoring PSP titles didn't have much impact at all. Why is that? Rather simple: Cute puppies attract new gamers, but are rather boring for normal gamers, since the game basically lacks any depth. Same with BrainAge, its basically just a glorified Flash/Javascript Mini game, nothing that would impress a normal gamer, but it comes nicely packaged, got some good advertisement and yet again attracts new people to games.
With the PSP on the other side you have half the games being the same games that got released on the PS2 half a year earlier, now they still might be good games if taken on their own, but there is little reason for anybody to actually buy them, since they already have played them (hard to beat 100mio PS2). And even those games that aren't simple ports are often simple sequels.
So to come back with to the Wii, its basically all the same, new games for new gamers. However the Wii has one huge problem, its not up against a PSP with its lackluster ports and sequels game offering, its up against the XBox360 and PS3 which has a ton of new and interesting games. Also the Wii has a serious lack in terms of third party support, even worse then the DS, most third parties do on the Wii exactly what they did to the PSP, ports of last years last-gen games (see PrinceOfPersia, Tiger Woods, Godfather, etc.). The new and interesting games aren't ending up on the Wii, but on the next gen hardware. This might not be an issue at all for the casual gamer that Nintendo attracts, but it certainly is a issue for all the normal gamers.
Nintendo certainly widened the gaming market, but that gain came at a high price, namely they have alienated many gamers and long term fans, me included. Before the Wii got released I hoped that it would bring back the glory days of the SNES, good hardware, at a good price with tons of games. Well, what we good was very outdated hardware with a new controller at a rather high price, sorry, but 250EUR for something which I payed only 200EUR for five years ago just doesn't look pretty, that it now feature 1.5 or 2.0 times the power of the Gamecube doesn't change that fact. Third parties seem yet again have little to no interest in the Wii. Sure, Ubisoft and EA are squeezing money out of it with for most part cheap ports, but the real AAA titles happen elsewhere, I have yet to see a single big third party Wii title to be announced. Even so many AAA titles now happen to be cross platform, the Wii is, yet again, the console that doesn't get the ports, since it just a console of a different generation (no UnrealEngine3 titels on the Wii and such).
Nintendo is certainly making money with the Wii and will continue for a while, but at the moment I am really not so sure of the long term causes. In terms of third party support the Wii already looks just as bad as the N64 or Gamecube, probably even worse. In terms of 'normal' games, i.e. the games that are not BrainAge, Nintendogs, Wii Sports and stuff like that, it also looks pretty bad on the Wii. Online support is also yet again a thing that Nintendo rather ignores, I don't mind all that rather useless Vote channel and stuff, but multiplayer network gaming, not on the Wii and not for a while, and with friends code it won't really be much fun anyway.
The Wii was the first Nintendo console that I didn't bought on launch day in over a decade, in fact I still haven't bought it and have some doubt if I ever will. Nintendo found a nice new niche to make money, good for them, but I do actually care about games and that bunch of Minigames on the Wii just can't get me excited.
I (ab)use my PSP for most part as eBook reader and it is great at that job, doesn't even require any kind of homebrew, just the build in imageviewer and a bit of ghostscript or khtml magic to convert whatever I want to read to JPEGs (render much faster then PNG on the PSP). Its not perfect since it lacks bookmarking and such, but when there is a longer piece of text, its much easier to read on the PSP then on a computer monitor and much less fuss then print stuff out on paper. PSP is far to pretty to just use it as a doorstop.
Irony of this is that it just shows how great the PSP display is at 2D graphics, which sadly is the kind of graphics that gets used by far the least in PSP games.
### HD is the future, but it isn't the present.
Do you have a computer monitor? If so then you have a HD-TV capable device. One doesn't need a 42" Plasma TV for thousands of dollar to make use of HD output, VGA cable for XBox360 will just do the same. Beside even without HD you still profit from a clear picture due to anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering and plain and simple more detailed and better looking scenery and models. Now little old granny playing some Wii Sport tennis might not care about the difference, but gamers *do* care. One could of course argue that the 'classic' gamers are not in Nintendos target audience...