HL isn't an RPG, it's FPS, and I feel it has a very appropriate story for what it is.
One thing I found hugly lacking in HL2 in terms of story was goal-orientation. The first few hours in HL2 are spend for nothing that matters, first you have to walk a way that you normally should have been teleported acroos, then you have to run through Ravenholme since a few lausy stones blocked your path. Later on when trying to free Alyx father it finally gets somewhat more goal oriented, only to then turn into kind of a joke when the rebellion takes place while Gordon is stuck in a teleporter for a week or so. In the final then one enters the Citadel without any plan whatsoever, only that the Gravy-Gun can be magically turned into a super-weapon by pure luck.
I would have much prefered if the player would actually had an active part on attacking the Citadel and leading the rebellion instead of it all being a thing of following a linear path of lucky coincidences. The lack of goal-orientated acting all made HL2 look quite fake and unrealistic for me.
Nintendo, while sticking to a handful of properties is always trying to innovate and we should applaud them for that.
There is nothing wrong with trying something new, there is however something very wrong with forcing a control scheme into a game where it simply doesn't fit and thats exactly what Nintendo did here. Zelda Phantom Hourglass is another case where they added pretty weird touchscreen controls instead of sticking to good old and trusted dpad controls, we still have to see how that works out, but I havn't that much hope.
I want the touchscreen to improve my gaming experience, not to ruin it for no good reason. Especially with StarFox this is kind of sad, since basically every successor to the orignal SNES game has been a disapointment, while StarFox64 was still pretty good, Adventures was plain awful and Assault didn't get much fans either. There are many people out there that want a game that sticks close to the original formula simply because it worked *by far* the best, every try to improve it so far was a failure.
If Nintendo wants to use the touchscreen, they should design new games, like they already do with Nintendogs or BrainAge, but trying to force touchscreen into every type of game just doesn't work.
If you want a story which couldn't have been done in "conventional" media, you can go and get 'Ever 17' right now, you don't need to sit around waiting for whatever faltering first steps he's going to be taking.
Could you explain a bit more about what makes those games/visual novel special in terms of storytelling? Since I, and probally many other slashdotters as well, havn't heard about them, which given that some don't even have an english translation isn't a big suprise.
Movies and games are an outward journey into somebody else's imagination, and books are an inward journey into your own.
How do you come to that conclusion? Books are every bit as predefined as movies, your only term of interaction consists of page-turning, every word is prewritten by somebody elses imagination. Games, while often also heavily limited, at least offer you to interact with the world that is presented and not just consume it in a passive way.
Now I am not saying that books are bad, they have some nice advantages as being very cheap to produce, being producable by a single person and limited for most part only by the imagination of the author, not by the budget for special effects. But for most part its really more a cost and marketing issue than, then any deeper philosophical one, I could after all have a black screen with narator simply read me the book after all, not very easy to sell to the cinemas, but very doable. The main throuble with book to movie adoption is simply that they have to squish a 10 hour book into a 2 hour movie, so no supprise that some stuff gets lost in the translation.
Seriously, when are developers going to realize that you don't need a keyboard for chat channels when you can have ACTUAL CHAT. When you're chatting around the water cooler with your friends at work do you need a fucking keyboard?!?! The 360 has built in voice chat--USE IT!!!
What I am waiting for is a game that combines speech recognition with voice synthesis and thus giving you a voice that actually fits the character and setting. While voice chat alone is already a nice addition, it simply can spoil the athmosphere if what should be an experinced militar commander as the peepy voice of a twelve year old. That said, for most games its not to much of an issue, since there isn't much atmosphere in death-matches to begin with, but some games it might be a very welcome addition.
It would really ruin the sense of claustrophobia if you could spin around while aiming, so I presume the controls in Umbrella Chronicles will be similar to those in Biohazard 4.
It would also destroy the sense of realism. In reality people don't just run around and shoot at the same time like in almost every first person shooter, aiming is something that takes time and concentration if you actually want to hit something, it just doesn't work while running around and I am very happy that ResidentEvil forces you to stop when aiming and shooter.
The thing that sucked with the first parts was that you couldn't aim 'analog', meaning you could only shot straight, up or down, so if a zombie was a few meters away on the ceiling, you simply couldn't hit him, since your aim was always 45 degrees streight up and you had to wait for it to come into range, might have added some suspense, but also looked extremly retard. In RE4 they have however fixed that and aiming now works very well.
Too late. Nintendo's offering developer kits to the public for a price. This is old news. Sounds pretty accepting of homebrew to me.
The price is $2000 if I remember correctly, cheaper then Sonys official devkit, but still a though price considering that you can get inofficial homebrew and development up and running on Gamecube, NintendoDS and GBA for around $100. Beside, you can't just buy the devkits, you have to be an experienced game developer or have to have a large publisher to back you up to even make it past the entrance door, you can't just go to WarioWorld throw the devkit in your shopping cart and enter a credit card number to get one.
If this is such a dealbreaker... why the success of Nintendo's wavebird?
Trouble is that you can't know how much more successfull it would have been if it would have had rumble. I for example avoided the Wavebird due to its lack of rumble support, wireless is nice, but it just wasn't enough for me to give up the rumble, the higher price of the Wavebird of course also played a large role, but rumble was really the thing that stopped me buying it.
Author should own up to his mistake and buy a game that will keep his attention during however long it takes to play. Good games are always too short ('cept maybe Deus Ex). From the article, it seems like he's just itching to move on to those "other games beckoning".
Very true, with most games the fun simply doesn't hold up for more then 10 or 20 hours, which in itself isn't a problem, if however a game with 10h of fun however takes 30h to finish, then the game as a whole simply has a problem. One such case would be Gothic2, while the game was lots of fun for the first 20h, it however simply didn't provide enough for the 60h you needed to finish it. If Gothic2 would have been 20 or 30h long it would have been an awesome game, as it is, its still very good, but it left a bad aftertaste, since lots of the last few hours simply felt like a waste of time (crushing the first orc was awesome, crushing the next 200 not so much).
The problem is he doesn't have 40 hours to devote to the game.
The trouble is that Tomb Raider is only around 7 hours long, so how how he came up with 40 hours I have no idea. The game really isn't that complicated and doesn't require dozens of combos to remember or a map, it also has plenty of checkpoints, so you never have to replay a section again and again. I can't understand how he sank that many hours into a game that is so short as Tomb Raider Legend.
If he got stuck on a puzzle, he should have consulted a walkthrough, since there is really no point in getting frustrated by being stuck. If he died a lot, then, well, maybe he should turn the difficulty down. But if with the help of neither of those he still spends 40h on such a game, then well, maybe he should look for different genres, since I really can't see how you could have fun by dieing that often.
They might be 20 hour games that you play through once, but if it's fun the first time and good the second time that's fine.
Not sure if that would help that much. You might end up with a situation that is equally unsatisfying then the current one, namely you simply won't see half the game due to the lack of time for a second run. I find it extremly annoying to find out that I have to play the whole game again a second time to see the 'real' ending. With games that are truly free form like SimCity, Sims and friends, which simply don't have an ending its of course different, but since he actually mentioned story driven games it can get really hard.
What the industry needs is games like Katamari damacy
Speaking about "We love Katamari" (first part never reached PAL), while a nice game, it had a rather awkward interface for level select, which made it really hard to see what you already had accomplished or where the next level is located. For people that have little time on their hand that can be catastrophic if they simply can't find the area which they havn't already visited and thus getting stuck before they can even start the level.
In the end I can understand the basic problem he is describing, I have tons of games I never finished myself, due to losing interest and difficult rentry into the game after a few weeks of not playing them. However I totally fail to understand how this connects to Tomb Raider: Legend, that game should have been almost perfect for a casual gamer, nice story, relativly short, not too challanging, plenty of checkpoints, no crazy key combos, etc. If he fails at that game he simply might be trying to play the wrong genre, because you can't really get much easier or shorter then Tomb Raider while still selling it for $50.
I am sorry, but this guy must really suck at gaming. I finishing Tomb Raider: Legend on 'normal' setting and it only took me around 6 or 7 hours, so it was one of the shortest games I have played in while and also one of the easier ones. Adding the mansion level, which isn't part of the main game and the treasure hunting I could boost it to 20h total for getting 100% in the game. If I wouldn't have used a walkthrough for the treasures, it might have taken me 30h, but there is no way to boost it to 40h for the main game alone without dieing maybe a hundred times between checkpoints, of which there are also plenty.
To make it short, his complaint is totally the wrong way around. If he would have complained about dieing a hundred times or about lack of an extra-noob difficulty setting or whatever I could have understand, but Tomb Raider simply isn't a lengthy game, by absolutly no definition of the word and neither is it a hard one. If he sucks so much, maybe he should turn down the difficulty and use a walkthrough, any serious gamer should be able to beat the game with those help in a matter of maybe around three hours.
That said, I can understand his problems with games, I just can't understand his problems with Tomb Raider, since most other games around are long and harder. There of course are plenty of games around that take more time then they are worth (Final Fantasy,...). And when people don't play regularly many games simply become unbeatable because you forget how they are played after a while (what combos are there, which button does what, etc.) and many games simply don't provide a proper tracking of the quests. If a puzzle requires you to find item A, then you get interrupted don't play the game for two weeks and then load your save you might have totally forgotten about that item A and run aimlessly around in the gameworld for hours. This even happened to me quite often, I never finished Banjo on the N64, not because its impossible to beat, but simply because I have no idea how to continue that game, I simply can't find the entrance to the next level and walking around for an hour on the worldmap just isn't any fun, so I always ended up quitting before I found out how to continue.
Re:The problem with guis is they don't work
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GUIs Get a Makeover
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So if I'm airbrushing a busy background out of a photo, which has enough colour variation to make it a bit confusing where the background ends and main thing begins (I edit photos for the technical manuals I write for industrial equipment), you can do this in GIM with scripting?!
No. Unless something has recently changed, which I doubt, you can't. Gimp doesn't provide way to script tools like the airbrush and friends, neither can you do anything that requires complex GUI interactions, since the build-in scriping languge simply doesn't provide anything in that area beside the very basics. Gimps scripting system is really rather limited and also rather ugly (single values are returned as lists, few meaningfull error messages, pain to debug, etc.). Gimp also lacks a macro recorder, so there isn't an easy transition from knowing how to do a job via the GUI to writing a script. That the scripting doesn't even allow you to access many GUI features directly makes things even more complicated. So even if you had the brain to actually write an algorithm for your task, Gimp scripting is simply to limited to even allow it.
One can escape some limitations of Gimp buildin scripting language by using other external languages, but no matter what, Gimp scripting never really gets very enjoyable, since it just has far to many annoying things that will make your life far harder then neccesarry.
BTW: Corel Photopaint had most of those stuff back in 1996 already...
A potential probem with that plan is that the DS has a lower resolution screen than most of the consoles used.
The SNES and most other early consoles have a resolution of 256×224 (varies here and there, but that one seems to be most widespread), the DS has two screens with 256x192, so it shouldn't be to much of an issue, especially considering that many games use some of the vertical space for HUD and not for the game itself (HUD could go to the second screen on DS). There of course are games were things get problematic with the DS, since it simply has quite a lot less power then a Wii, but since the emulated games are hand-picked anyway it shouldn't be an issue, since the DS doesn't need to function as a 100% compatible SNES emulator.
Algorithms to create hires pictures from multiple low resolution images do exists, its called super resolution. It is also possible to extract 3d data from 2D photos or videos and there are algorithms around that can put an unsharp out-of-focus image back into being a sharp image with proper focus. So having unsharp source data and usable end results is not unthinkable, however pretty much all movies and tv shows just go way beyond what is technically doable and turn into something completly ridiculous. Which is really shame, since with a little bit of extra effort they should be able to come up with something that is actually believable.
I don't see the appeal. If I wanted to look at pictures of animals, I would just watch a national geographic movie,
Meanwhile the rest of the world plays Grand Turismo instead of driving on a real racetrack, plays FIFA instead of doing real soccer and playing Counter-Strike instead of... uhm... ok lets stop here. It of course depends on what kind of gameplay they pack into that Africa game and how good the animal AI is, but I can imagine this to be great fun. That Africa game seems to have some quite realistic animal behaviour and some gigantic landscapes to explore, something that almost no other game has. Even if your only way to interact would be photoshooting one could probally spend quite some hours in there. Yes, this might not appeal to the twitch gamer, but if I just want to relax a bit, then I probally prefer that game over Tekken any time.
I am of course not sure what they will finally make out of this game, but at this point it does look like they have a very good base to build something up on. It looks nice and has plenty of realistic looking animals not seen in other games these days. Nintedogs sold like crazy and there you only have some single rather stupid dog, maybe Africa will appeal to a similar group. No matter how it turns out, I am very happy to actually see a game that isn't yet another stupi0, always the same, shoot-everything-that-moves title. Innovation is good and that Africa title seems to have some of it.
If the game sells at half price to start, and I can buy just the cars I like and all the tracks at a price lower than most of the other retail titles - then the idea will be a good one for the game designers and consumers alike.
The trouble is that this system turns classic rewards in video games on its head. Back in the arcade you had to insert a coint when you failed a level, with this new system you have to insert a coin when you beat it. So success will be punished instead of rewarded, could be a great way to let motivation drop down quite a bit, even if the total money wouldn't be that different.
I don't think there is anything wrong with micropayment in itself, in fact I think its great for true additional content, but designers have to be very care full to not turn it into an annoyancy. The system in GT HD doesn't sound like they sell you additional content, it sounds like they sell you content you would have gotten with the game for 'free' a few years ago. This again has little todo with actual money, even so they probally wouldn't do it if they could gain more profit from it, but much more with psychology. Gaming should be first and for most fun, being forced to think about paying for the next level or track however isn't something that I would consider fun, I simply don't want to be bothered by such things when playing the game.
Everybody knows that the first titles to come out for a console are not exactly the best a console can do. That has been true of all consoles.
That only was true because in past generation changes in the consoles where always fundamental, going from 2D to 3D means you have to completly redesign everything, controls, graphics, etc. Its no suprise that the first title are surpassed by later ones. Even with N64 to Gamecube you still have wastly different hardware to work with.
The Wii on the other side is, for all we know, basically a Gamecube, a faster Gamecube sure, but nothing changed fundamentally. The architecture is the same, the way graphics are created are the same, the thing is still a single-processor machine and the API is most likely still very similar (I assume graphics API is still GX). So the jumps from first-gen titles to last-gen titles will be much smaller, they might still exist, but even on the Gamecube they already weren't that large, Rogue Leader still holds up rather well.
I am not saying that Wii won't have enough power, maybe it will, but so far I simply can't see any proof of it. And given the past talk about its inofficial specs and lack of shader support I really have some fear that it will lack behind the rest in a major way (lack of shader and HDR is what makes most of the difference between current and nextgen).
BTW: s/bejoint/beyond/
No DVD Playback a problem?
Its not a big problem, but certainly an annoyancy, since it means one more box to place next to the Wii, which especially given the Wiis form factor, is a shame. And hey, wouldn't it be fun to navigate DVD menus with the Wiimote? I hope that they will sell DVD playback later on, but so far they don't seem to care about that feature, maybe they will even make it impossible via hardware (non-standard DVD drive like on the Gamecube).
That's what we're here for in the first place isn't it? More choice is better.
More choice is only better when the different things to choose from actually do something different. Choice between BSDL and GPL is good, because they try something quite different yet remain somewhat compatible, at least in one direction (GPL code can use BSDL code). Choice between GPLv2 and GPLv3 is however totally pointless, both try to do the exact same thing, just with some details smaller changes, however they are incompatible in both direction. If I no longer have the freedom to combine two free programs together, because they use very similar but incompatible licensese, a lot of freedom is simply wasted for no good reason.
It is stupid to call the Wii Graphics "low-end". Yes, it has a less powerful processor, but it is by no-means a "low-end" one.
Stupid? I would call it 'judging by the current facts'. Sure, we still don't have any final confirmation on the power of the Wii, so we can only guess how high or low it will be in terms of CPU and GPU power, but unless some miracle happens I don't see a reason to not call it "low-end". The best screenshots around so far (Zelda, Metroid, Mario, Red Steel) look nice, but not bejoint what current generation graphics can do. However a lot of third party titels also so ugly that they would even disappoint as Gamecube titles, look for example at this
Farcry screenshot or this
other one. Sorry, but that game looked a lot better when it was released last year on the old XBox and even more so when it was released two years ago for PC.
And what do you mean by "lack of functionality" with the Wii? What functions and features exactly is it missing besides the dubious Blu-Ray player?
The main reason why the Wii can't fail is because the PS3 is totally out of reach for many gamers and will so for at least a year or two. The XBox360, while a solid console, simply doesn't have much of a stand in Japan and without Japan, it is in throuble. That of course doesn't mean that the Wii can't flop, if the controller turns out totally buggy with calibration problems and what ever, sure the Wii might tank and a price of $250 and $60 for controllers is also a bit more step than good. However when the Wii will fail, it will most likly fail against the PS2, not the PS3. The PS2 still quite a bit cheaper then the Wii and has a very solid game lineup, something the Wii won't reach for quite a while, and unless the XBox and Gamecube, the PS2 still has a steady stream of new quality game releases and probally will continue to have for a while.
In the end I however think that Nintendo has done their homework to ensure that Wii won't suffer to much from technical problems, so chance of failure should be quite low.
Seems to me, if they can start launching satellites for tens of thousands of dollars
They can't, it looks like they want to get payload with a rocket up to 100km. Which is nice and probally usefull for some tasks, but for satellites they would need quite a bit more altitude and of course speed, else gravity will simply catch them and the whole thing falls back to earth.
The planes fuselage acts as a non-perfect faraday cage, so most of the signals get blocked, to compensate the mobile phones transmit at full power, which however isn't all that good for the planes electronic. If they have a GSM mini station on board the mobile phone will send with low power, since the signal isn't blocked by the fuselage anymore. It would of course also make the calls more stable, since there is a lot less probability for disconnects, GSM wasn't designed for planes traveling at high altitude with high speed.
Will Nintendo release a (free?) devkit to make Nintendo Wi-Fi games (for the Wii and/or the DS)?
We have to wait and see, so far there hasn't been any indication that they will, beside of course their talk on E3 2005 (on Wii big idea will triumph over big money, or something like that), that however might just be natural, since the Wii isn't released and final devkits havn't been around for long. Things might change if the Wii actually got released.
On the plus side however the Wii will come with Opera browser that should be able to handle Flash, so even if there would be no devkit, that at least might be enough for some fun little lightgun games.
Better readable to whom? To someone whose spent 20 years mostly working with imperative languages?
To absolutly everybody, guess why Scheme has a for-each and why don't do a (let loop (l lst)...code... (if (not (null? l)))(loop (cdr l))) each time you need to iterate over a list. Recursion is great for some algorithms, but lots of programming code aren't algorithms from the next best algorithm books, but simply library calls patched together. If I want to sort a list these days I write sort(lst) and don't start writing a recursive quick sort algorithm.
At any rate, with a functional language its usually fairly easy to define both C-like for loops and for-each loops
Which again is my point, the throuble isn't that you can't define them, but that you have to define them. Scheme simply provides far to little in that area.
Scheme and other similarly "pure" languages (heavily focussed on one paradigm, more than is usually necessary or even desirable in many uses) are important,
Yes, they are important, but mostly for academic study, I have yet to see a "pure" language that has any larger relevance in the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing I found hugly lacking in HL2 in terms of story was goal-orientation. The first few hours in HL2 are spend for nothing that matters, first you have to walk a way that you normally should have been teleported acroos, then you have to run through Ravenholme since a few lausy stones blocked your path. Later on when trying to free Alyx father it finally gets somewhat more goal oriented, only to then turn into kind of a joke when the rebellion takes place while Gordon is stuck in a teleporter for a week or so. In the final then one enters the Citadel without any plan whatsoever, only that the Gravy-Gun can be magically turned into a super-weapon by pure luck.
I would have much prefered if the player would actually had an active part on attacking the Citadel and leading the rebellion instead of it all being a thing of following a linear path of lucky coincidences. The lack of goal-orientated acting all made HL2 look quite fake and unrealistic for me.
There is nothing wrong with trying something new, there is however something very wrong with forcing a control scheme into a game where it simply doesn't fit and thats exactly what Nintendo did here. Zelda Phantom Hourglass is another case where they added pretty weird touchscreen controls instead of sticking to good old and trusted dpad controls, we still have to see how that works out, but I havn't that much hope.
I want the touchscreen to improve my gaming experience, not to ruin it for no good reason. Especially with StarFox this is kind of sad, since basically every successor to the orignal SNES game has been a disapointment, while StarFox64 was still pretty good, Adventures was plain awful and Assault didn't get much fans either. There are many people out there that want a game that sticks close to the original formula simply because it worked *by far* the best, every try to improve it so far was a failure.
If Nintendo wants to use the touchscreen, they should design new games, like they already do with Nintendogs or BrainAge, but trying to force touchscreen into every type of game just doesn't work.
Could you explain a bit more about what makes those games/visual novel special in terms of storytelling? Since I, and probally many other slashdotters as well, havn't heard about them, which given that some don't even have an english translation isn't a big suprise.
How do you come to that conclusion? Books are every bit as predefined as movies, your only term of interaction consists of page-turning, every word is prewritten by somebody elses imagination. Games, while often also heavily limited, at least offer you to interact with the world that is presented and not just consume it in a passive way.
Now I am not saying that books are bad, they have some nice advantages as being very cheap to produce, being producable by a single person and limited for most part only by the imagination of the author, not by the budget for special effects. But for most part its really more a cost and marketing issue than, then any deeper philosophical one, I could after all have a black screen with narator simply read me the book after all, not very easy to sell to the cinemas, but very doable. The main throuble with book to movie adoption is simply that they have to squish a 10 hour book into a 2 hour movie, so no supprise that some stuff gets lost in the translation.
What I am waiting for is a game that combines speech recognition with voice synthesis and thus giving you a voice that actually fits the character and setting. While voice chat alone is already a nice addition, it simply can spoil the athmosphere if what should be an experinced militar commander as the peepy voice of a twelve year old. That said, for most games its not to much of an issue, since there isn't much atmosphere in death-matches to begin with, but some games it might be a very welcome addition.
It would also destroy the sense of realism. In reality people don't just run around and shoot at the same time like in almost every first person shooter, aiming is something that takes time and concentration if you actually want to hit something, it just doesn't work while running around and I am very happy that ResidentEvil forces you to stop when aiming and shooter.
The thing that sucked with the first parts was that you couldn't aim 'analog', meaning you could only shot straight, up or down, so if a zombie was a few meters away on the ceiling, you simply couldn't hit him, since your aim was always 45 degrees streight up and you had to wait for it to come into range, might have added some suspense, but also looked extremly retard. In RE4 they have however fixed that and aiming now works very well.
The price is $2000 if I remember correctly, cheaper then Sonys official devkit, but still a though price considering that you can get inofficial homebrew and development up and running on Gamecube, NintendoDS and GBA for around $100. Beside, you can't just buy the devkits, you have to be an experienced game developer or have to have a large publisher to back you up to even make it past the entrance door, you can't just go to WarioWorld throw the devkit in your shopping cart and enter a credit card number to get one.
Trouble is that you can't know how much more successfull it would have been if it would have had rumble. I for example avoided the Wavebird due to its lack of rumble support, wireless is nice, but it just wasn't enough for me to give up the rumble, the higher price of the Wavebird of course also played a large role, but rumble was really the thing that stopped me buying it.
Very true, with most games the fun simply doesn't hold up for more then 10 or 20 hours, which in itself isn't a problem, if however a game with 10h of fun however takes 30h to finish, then the game as a whole simply has a problem. One such case would be Gothic2, while the game was lots of fun for the first 20h, it however simply didn't provide enough for the 60h you needed to finish it. If Gothic2 would have been 20 or 30h long it would have been an awesome game, as it is, its still very good, but it left a bad aftertaste, since lots of the last few hours simply felt like a waste of time (crushing the first orc was awesome, crushing the next 200 not so much).
The trouble is that Tomb Raider is only around 7 hours long, so how how he came up with 40 hours I have no idea. The game really isn't that complicated and doesn't require dozens of combos to remember or a map, it also has plenty of checkpoints, so you never have to replay a section again and again. I can't understand how he sank that many hours into a game that is so short as Tomb Raider Legend.
If he got stuck on a puzzle, he should have consulted a walkthrough, since there is really no point in getting frustrated by being stuck. If he died a lot, then, well, maybe he should turn the difficulty down. But if with the help of neither of those he still spends 40h on such a game, then well, maybe he should look for different genres, since I really can't see how you could have fun by dieing that often.
Not sure if that would help that much. You might end up with a situation that is equally unsatisfying then the current one, namely you simply won't see half the game due to the lack of time for a second run. I find it extremly annoying to find out that I have to play the whole game again a second time to see the 'real' ending. With games that are truly free form like SimCity, Sims and friends, which simply don't have an ending its of course different, but since he actually mentioned story driven games it can get really hard.
Speaking about "We love Katamari" (first part never reached PAL), while a nice game, it had a rather awkward interface for level select, which made it really hard to see what you already had accomplished or where the next level is located. For people that have little time on their hand that can be catastrophic if they simply can't find the area which they havn't already visited and thus getting stuck before they can even start the level.
In the end I can understand the basic problem he is describing, I have tons of games I never finished myself, due to losing interest and difficult rentry into the game after a few weeks of not playing them. However I totally fail to understand how this connects to Tomb Raider: Legend, that game should have been almost perfect for a casual gamer, nice story, relativly short, not too challanging, plenty of checkpoints, no crazy key combos, etc. If he fails at that game he simply might be trying to play the wrong genre, because you can't really get much easier or shorter then Tomb Raider while still selling it for $50.
I am sorry, but this guy must really suck at gaming. I finishing Tomb Raider: Legend on 'normal' setting and it only took me around 6 or 7 hours, so it was one of the shortest games I have played in while and also one of the easier ones. Adding the mansion level, which isn't part of the main game and the treasure hunting I could boost it to 20h total for getting 100% in the game. If I wouldn't have used a walkthrough for the treasures, it might have taken me 30h, but there is no way to boost it to 40h for the main game alone without dieing maybe a hundred times between checkpoints, of which there are also plenty.
To make it short, his complaint is totally the wrong way around. If he would have complained about dieing a hundred times or about lack of an extra-noob difficulty setting or whatever I could have understand, but Tomb Raider simply isn't a lengthy game, by absolutly no definition of the word and neither is it a hard one. If he sucks so much, maybe he should turn down the difficulty and use a walkthrough, any serious gamer should be able to beat the game with those help in a matter of maybe around three hours.
That said, I can understand his problems with games, I just can't understand his problems with Tomb Raider, since most other games around are long and harder. There of course are plenty of games around that take more time then they are worth (Final Fantasy, ...). And when people don't play regularly many games simply become unbeatable because you forget how they are played after a while (what combos are there, which button does what, etc.) and many games simply don't provide a proper tracking of the quests. If a puzzle requires you to find item A, then you get interrupted don't play the game for two weeks and then load your save you might have totally forgotten about that item A and run aimlessly around in the gameworld for hours. This even happened to me quite often, I never finished Banjo on the N64, not because its impossible to beat, but simply because I have no idea how to continue that game, I simply can't find the entrance to the next level and walking around for an hour on the worldmap just isn't any fun, so I always ended up quitting before I found out how to continue.
No. Unless something has recently changed, which I doubt, you can't. Gimp doesn't provide way to script tools like the airbrush and friends, neither can you do anything that requires complex GUI interactions, since the build-in scriping languge simply doesn't provide anything in that area beside the very basics. Gimps scripting system is really rather limited and also rather ugly (single values are returned as lists, few meaningfull error messages, pain to debug, etc.). Gimp also lacks a macro recorder, so there isn't an easy transition from knowing how to do a job via the GUI to writing a script. That the scripting doesn't even allow you to access many GUI features directly makes things even more complicated. So even if you had the brain to actually write an algorithm for your task, Gimp scripting is simply to limited to even allow it.
One can escape some limitations of Gimp buildin scripting language by using other external languages, but no matter what, Gimp scripting never really gets very enjoyable, since it just has far to many annoying things that will make your life far harder then neccesarry.
BTW: Corel Photopaint had most of those stuff back in 1996 already...
The SNES and most other early consoles have a resolution of 256×224 (varies here and there, but that one seems to be most widespread), the DS has two screens with 256x192, so it shouldn't be to much of an issue, especially considering that many games use some of the vertical space for HUD and not for the game itself (HUD could go to the second screen on DS). There of course are games were things get problematic with the DS, since it simply has quite a lot less power then a Wii, but since the emulated games are hand-picked anyway it shouldn't be an issue, since the DS doesn't need to function as a 100% compatible SNES emulator.
Algorithms to create hires pictures from multiple low resolution images do exists, its called super resolution. It is also possible to extract 3d data from 2D photos or videos and there are algorithms around that can put an unsharp out-of-focus image back into being a sharp image with proper focus. So having unsharp source data and usable end results is not unthinkable, however pretty much all movies and tv shows just go way beyond what is technically doable and turn into something completly ridiculous. Which is really shame, since with a little bit of extra effort they should be able to come up with something that is actually believable.
Meanwhile the rest of the world plays Grand Turismo instead of driving on a real racetrack, plays FIFA instead of doing real soccer and playing Counter-Strike instead of... uhm... ok lets stop here. It of course depends on what kind of gameplay they pack into that Africa game and how good the animal AI is, but I can imagine this to be great fun. That Africa game seems to have some quite realistic animal behaviour and some gigantic landscapes to explore, something that almost no other game has. Even if your only way to interact would be photoshooting one could probally spend quite some hours in there. Yes, this might not appeal to the twitch gamer, but if I just want to relax a bit, then I probally prefer that game over Tekken any time.
I am of course not sure what they will finally make out of this game, but at this point it does look like they have a very good base to build something up on. It looks nice and has plenty of realistic looking animals not seen in other games these days. Nintedogs sold like crazy and there you only have some single rather stupid dog, maybe Africa will appeal to a similar group. No matter how it turns out, I am very happy to actually see a game that isn't yet another stupi0, always the same, shoot-everything-that-moves title. Innovation is good and that Africa title seems to have some of it.
The trouble is that this system turns classic rewards in video games on its head. Back in the arcade you had to insert a coint when you failed a level, with this new system you have to insert a coin when you beat it. So success will be punished instead of rewarded, could be a great way to let motivation drop down quite a bit, even if the total money wouldn't be that different.
I don't think there is anything wrong with micropayment in itself, in fact I think its great for true additional content, but designers have to be very care full to not turn it into an annoyancy. The system in GT HD doesn't sound like they sell you additional content, it sounds like they sell you content you would have gotten with the game for 'free' a few years ago. This again has little todo with actual money, even so they probally wouldn't do it if they could gain more profit from it, but much more with psychology. Gaming should be first and for most fun, being forced to think about paying for the next level or track however isn't something that I would consider fun, I simply don't want to be bothered by such things when playing the game.
That only was true because in past generation changes in the consoles where always fundamental, going from 2D to 3D means you have to completly redesign everything, controls, graphics, etc. Its no suprise that the first title are surpassed by later ones. Even with N64 to Gamecube you still have wastly different hardware to work with.
The Wii on the other side is, for all we know, basically a Gamecube, a faster Gamecube sure, but nothing changed fundamentally. The architecture is the same, the way graphics are created are the same, the thing is still a single-processor machine and the API is most likely still very similar (I assume graphics API is still GX). So the jumps from first-gen titles to last-gen titles will be much smaller, they might still exist, but even on the Gamecube they already weren't that large, Rogue Leader still holds up rather well.
I am not saying that Wii won't have enough power, maybe it will, but so far I simply can't see any proof of it. And given the past talk about its inofficial specs and lack of shader support I really have some fear that it will lack behind the rest in a major way (lack of shader and HDR is what makes most of the difference between current and nextgen).
BTW: s/bejoint/beyond/
Its not a big problem, but certainly an annoyancy, since it means one more box to place next to the Wii, which especially given the Wiis form factor, is a shame. And hey, wouldn't it be fun to navigate DVD menus with the Wiimote? I hope that they will sell DVD playback later on, but so far they don't seem to care about that feature, maybe they will even make it impossible via hardware (non-standard DVD drive like on the Gamecube).
More choice is only better when the different things to choose from actually do something different. Choice between BSDL and GPL is good, because they try something quite different yet remain somewhat compatible, at least in one direction (GPL code can use BSDL code). Choice between GPLv2 and GPLv3 is however totally pointless, both try to do the exact same thing, just with some details smaller changes, however they are incompatible in both direction. If I no longer have the freedom to combine two free programs together, because they use very similar but incompatible licensese, a lot of freedom is simply wasted for no good reason.
Stupid? I would call it 'judging by the current facts'. Sure, we still don't have any final confirmation on the power of the Wii, so we can only guess how high or low it will be in terms of CPU and GPU power, but unless some miracle happens I don't see a reason to not call it "low-end". The best screenshots around so far (Zelda, Metroid, Mario, Red Steel) look nice, but not bejoint what current generation graphics can do. However a lot of third party titels also so ugly that they would even disappoint as Gamecube titles, look for example at this Farcry screenshot or this other one. Sorry, but that game looked a lot better when it was released last year on the old XBox and even more so when it was released two years ago for PC.
DVD playback.
In the end I however think that Nintendo has done their homework to ensure that Wii won't suffer to much from technical problems, so chance of failure should be quite low.
They can't, it looks like they want to get payload with a rocket up to 100km. Which is nice and probally usefull for some tasks, but for satellites they would need quite a bit more altitude and of course speed, else gravity will simply catch them and the whole thing falls back to earth.
The planes fuselage acts as a non-perfect faraday cage, so most of the signals get blocked, to compensate the mobile phones transmit at full power, which however isn't all that good for the planes electronic. If they have a GSM mini station on board the mobile phone will send with low power, since the signal isn't blocked by the fuselage anymore. It would of course also make the calls more stable, since there is a lot less probability for disconnects, GSM wasn't designed for planes traveling at high altitude with high speed.
We have to wait and see, so far there hasn't been any indication that they will, beside of course their talk on E3 2005 (on Wii big idea will triumph over big money, or something like that), that however might just be natural, since the Wii isn't released and final devkits havn't been around for long. Things might change if the Wii actually got released.
On the plus side however the Wii will come with Opera browser that should be able to handle Flash, so even if there would be no devkit, that at least might be enough for some fun little lightgun games.
Try to get a 100 score in every level of Yoshi Island and you should have a pretty good idea of why NewSuperMarioBros just isn't on the same league.
To absolutly everybody, guess why Scheme has a for-each and why don't do a (let loop (l lst) ...code... (if (not (null? l)))(loop (cdr l))) each time you need to iterate over a list. Recursion is great for some algorithms, but lots of programming code aren't algorithms from the next best algorithm books, but simply library calls patched together. If I want to sort a list these days I write sort(lst) and don't start writing a recursive quick sort algorithm.
At any rate, with a functional language its usually fairly easy to define both C-like for loops and for-each loopsWhich again is my point, the throuble isn't that you can't define them, but that you have to define them. Scheme simply provides far to little in that area.
Yes, they are important, but mostly for academic study, I have yet to see a "pure" language that has any larger relevance in the real world.