I'd be willing to bet that by the end of 2007 there won't be a whole lot of difference in graphical appearance between the consoles.
Back when the Wii was still more rumor then fact and no screenshots released I would have thought the same, but with all the games I have seen so far there already is a huge graphical differente between XBox360 games and Wii games, bejoint just 480p vs 720p. If you look at some games like Battilion Wars 2 they already don't look very good by past generations standards, even
Zelda or Mario can't impress that much and they are the best looking Wii games I have seen so far. On the other side you have on the XBox360 or PS3 games like
Dead Rising or
Assassins Creed, which do look a lot more impressive, not just because they have funky shader stuff, but also because they can handle huge crowds, something that isn't just a graphical gymick that might be ignorable, but something that actually can impact game play a lot.
Wii lack of power could turn out to not just into a little less good graphics, but might also turn out to hinder some gameplay innovations, like large crowds. If that will really happen we have to see, but so far I haven't seen anything on the Wii that could really impress me, except of course the controller, but a good controller doesn't make a good game.
Not here under Linux, the GTtv player shows up and I hear the music, but the video isn't visible, using the latest Flashplayer, 7,0,63,0, which is available for Linux.
Pluto's relevent only because lots of people are used to thinking of Pluto as a planet
I would argue that most peoples understanding of Pluto is wrong for exactly that reason. If I think about planets, I think about large objects orbiting the sun in a nice ordered fashion, ie. all the orbits lie almost on a plane, all orbits are almost circular. Pluto however simply doesn't do that, he neither lies in the same plane as the rest of the planets, nor does he follow the classic ordering, every once in a while he is closer to the sun then Neptun.
Now what astronomers think of the issue might be a different thing, but I would throw it out of the 'planet' status especially because most people think it is one, when in truth it simply might not be exactly what people expect it to be.
Obeying robots.txt is "voluntary" in the same sense that obeying RFCs is voluntary. In other words, it isn't.
How about we have a look what the RFC-drafts (its not even official) say about robots.txt:
"Web site administrators must realise this method is voluntary, and
is not sufficient to guarantee some robots will not visit restricted
parts of the URL space."
"It is not an official standard backed by a standards body, or owned by any commercial organisation. It is not enforced by anybody, and there no guarantee that all current and future robots will use it."
Its really that simple, robots.txt is not a security tool, its a guideline, nothing else. If you don't want robots to collect your data simply don't send it them.
This is especially important with regard to services which mirror webpages. Doing so without the (assumed) consent of the author is a straightforward copyright violation
Its a straightforward copyright violation, yep, but that has nothing todo with robots.txt, since having it or not, doesn't make it any less a violation.
The article plainly states that some motion have trouble being recognized and the enormity of the problem just hit me.
It gets even worse then that, its not only difficult to detect the right motions, its also very hard, maybe impossible to detect them in time, meaning it will work like this: you swing your arm, system does motion detection, system starts the characters action. That however has to be a serial process to get a correct detection, so the system will only start the right action long ofter you already have swung your arm. This could mean that an action entered with the Wiimote gets delayed, maybe up to a second, till it enters the game and that effect could get worse the more Wiimote actions you have.
If its really a problem has to be seen, there are of course workarounds, doing true 1:1 mapping between character motion and Wiimote is probally the cleanest way to solve the issue, other solutions might work by having partial actions, ie. you wouldn't try to detect a whole swing of the Wiimote, but break the action into smaller parts like up-swing, down-swing, lefts-swing, etc., each of which could translate directly into the game without much delay, but chaining them would still give a wide varity of moves.
In the end we have to wait and see, there so far havn't been any reports of long-term gameplay, everything has been first impressions after a few minutes of Wii gameplay, which might have little todo with how the console feels after longer periods of time.
I'm pretty sure all of them are using the Wiimote in interesting ways.
Some will use the Wiimote in interesting ways, but all of them, no way. I wouldn't be suprised if half the launch titles turn out to be rather shitty normal-gameplay games quick&dirtily adopted to the Wiimote. For example Tony Hawk Downhill Jam only uses the Wiimote as analogstick replacement, not for anything exciting, which might mean that it actually plays worse with Wiimote then with a normal controller (Wiimote doesn't auto-center like analogstick, so controls could get pretty imprecise).
We will for sure see lots of interesting games on the Wii, but we will for sure also see a lot of bad ones. DS had its fair share of junk and the touchscreen is a lot easier to manage then a 3D Wiimote.
The second would have opened a hole in the BIOS for all time (allowing code to be run from a memory stick),
I don't see how that would be a hole. The PSP currently does allow you to run code from memory sticks, code however has to be signed, which makes it a no-go for homebrew, but it allows Sony to make game demos available online which you can than run from the memory stick. Patching games could work equally as the demos already do.
To me it seems like RMS totally dodged the question.
RMS is the wrong person to ask such a question, Free Software never was about money and never will be, its about Free Software and little else. Its a philosophical concept and not an economic model, especially not one that could make you more money then closed sources. Its kind of like asking a free speech activist how to make a profit from that kind of activities, which is however simply not the goal of such doings.
The OpenSource movement started with talking about money and how about OpenSource could lead to more success in the business world, the OpenSource movement however has nothing to do with the FreeSoftware one and RMS is pretty clear on that one.
That doesn't means that RMS is oposed to making money with FreeSoftware, quite the oposite, he has done that himself, he however doesn't advocate FreeSoftware because you can money with it, but simply because its The Right Thing[tm] to do.
But at 512GB you could keep a good bit of your life there. I keep a 32GB stick on my keychain which is enough for almost anything.
And somewhen in 2030 you might end up having 1 Petabyte, which then should finally be enough to actually store your whole life, not just a bit of it, but everything you ever heard or have seen in good video and audio quality. That might end up being enough for everybody.
You don't want compression. You don't want everything packed together. You want all the files and directory structure to be preserved as-is.
Whats wrong with wanting a backup solution that is transparent and actually works? In case of emergency I really don't want to be stuck with a bunch of proprietary archive files or compressed files that only make a bad situation worse (bit flip in a normal file is easy to recover, in compressed file not so much). Of course there is a need for a little bit of metadata to do incremental backups, but transparent as-is file storage really is something that I would consider must-have for any usable backup-at-home solution and so far I havn't found one either. Every backup tool I checked so far was overly complicated, restricted to proprietary data formats, unsuited for DVD backup or otherwise seriously limited and simply not ready for the task, which is why I am currently using good old "rsync --backup-dir" and a little bit of hand crafted Ruby script to do the splitting in DVD sized chunks.
I'm not sure which media you've been reading, but most of the hands-on reports I've seen have been, on the whole, excited about the potential that the Wii control schemes bring.
Bingo! They are excited about the *potential* of the Wii, but thats is a completly different thing then being excited about what the Wii actually delivered. So far most hands on reports havn't sound half as good as those earlier ones that where based on pure tech-demos, Wii simply seems to have a hard time to hold up to the hype. Quotes like "For a system whose agenda is to be more accessible, Wii sure makes Zelda complicated." don't sound all that excited about the Wii.
But you are right, we have to wait and see, potential is there, but it also has to be used and at the moment I simply don't see that beeing the case.
Hello? We're talking about Nintendo here, the gameplay freaks that will fine-tune everything until they're sure the player'll have the best experience available.
And yet people complained how they couldn't aim at the TV screen at E3, but instead head to aim below it to actually hit something. So if Nintendo can't get it right for presentation, I am not sure if JoeSmuck gamer will have a lot more luck with it, especially since calibration in 3d space is simply a lot more complicated then 2d one on analogstick or touchscreen.
It was published that third-parties wouldn't get network access till the beginning of next year. No one knows why, but that's pretty much a fact
The important thing about this is actually not so much the online in itself, but the fact that third party yet again don't seem to have priority, which is one of the main reason why Gamecube tanked. Maybe not critical in the long run, but definitvly not a good start.
The DS didn't have any online game for the whole beginning of it's life, BTW
DS still doesn't have a solid online offering, sure random game matches are better then nothing, but an XBox-live killer that is definitvly not. I hope that Wii will get better, but Nintendo doesn't seem to have that much intend for real online play.
And finally the Xbox only went "Live" a year after the console's release
Which was ok back then, because nobody had solid online back then (well, Dreamcast, but that didn't turn out very successfull). Today Microsoft however has rock solid online, if Sony and Nintendo can hold up to that we have to see, but I have some serious doubt.
Have you seen the leaked Madden demo video? Me sez that the Wii has more than enough power to please the eye.
No, I havn't, but so far everything I have seen on the Wii wasn't exactly impressive. It didn't look bad, but neither did it look that much better then average Gamecube game.
Now don't get me wrong, I like the Wii, maybe it will turn out number one this generation, but so far I simply havn't seen anything that could really impress me on that console, neither in terms of graphics, controls or gamedesign. It has potential, but so far thats all it has for me.
Red Steel has implemented full "real" sword fighting on the latest builds and managing the screen has been greatly improved; you can not judge an early build of a game on the polish of the control mechanism because they will continue to improve in any good game, this is something that bloggers (and fanboys) don't seem to get.
Red Steel was the first official Wii titel that we got to see, so I would have expected that they've shown us the best they have, if however *that* was the best they have, poor Nintendo. Now of course they can polish and improve the titel and maybe they will end up with something good, but so far I prefer to judge the games but what they are, not by what they might have been and so far Wii just couldn't deliever much of the initial hype.
Can I get a link to at least 10 articles (you did say most didn't you?) complaining about the Wii controller?
You can basically pick whatever hands on review you want, most of them have quite some negatives in it, some examples Heise, 1up and
Kikizo. Some quotes
"Using the controller with the bow & arrow for example doesn't make things much easier than using a standard controller,",
"For a system whose agenda is to be more accessible, Wii sure makes Zelda complicated.". Now of course that doesn't mean that Wii will flop, but it means that programming for the Wiimote is hard if even Nintendo can't get it right for its most prominent launch title, for third party titles that could mean that the results are devestating.
No, the main thing that Nintendo has going with the Wii is that it is a unique product in a market full of generic products;
Uniqueness doesn't sell consoles, good games do. If Wiimote helps Nintendo to create better games, so be it, but there is still huge risk that plenty of games on Wii will turn out to look much worse and control much worse then on PS3 or XBox360, since they are just so many ways to use the Wiimote in a shitty way (see Tony Hawk...).
You do realize that you're making judgements based off of a pre-release build you have not played of a launch title running on a pre-release build of a system you have not played.
We are three month away from launch, not a year, not two years, if they still havn't figured out how to actually use the controller correctly for all the games that will get released, which most information seems to hint, then thats a very bad sign. The Wii controller isn't an added gimmick like the motion sensing in the PS3 controller, its the primary way to interact with the Wii and one of the main reasons why the Wii is interesting.
And nope, I don't believe all problems will magically fade away just because its Nintendo. First of even Nintendo has its fair share of problems in the past (GBA without light) and secondly a lot of problems are much more fundamental and can't just be wiped away with a bit of polish, some require wastly different game design and that is something that simply won't happen very soon, which might mean we end up with a lot of weak third party tiles.
Well, its actually rather easy. If the games suck, Wii will flop and so far I havn't seen much to indicate that this is not the case. Just because the Wii controller is new and innovative doesn't mean that it will actually work for the games people want to play with it. There already has been a lot of disapointment when people found out that RedSteel didn't have real sword fighting and turning the character around seems to be problematic in many games. There are also unsolved problems like what happens if you put the controller to the side in a first person shooter, will the character start to spin around like crazy? Or will there be some magic that detects when you are activly playing or be busy with something else? And lets not forget the callibrarition, what if the Wii will be a hell to setup to work correctly? That wouldn't be something to please casual gamers. Or what if Zelda turns out to play a lot worse then with the classic Gamecube controller, not exactly good advertisment for the Wiimote. Or what about online, there doesn't seem to be any online for third parties this years, meaning Nintendo yet again, nothing will support online right from start nor its third parties.
Now maybe none of these worst case scenarios will happen, maybe Nintendo will figure out a way to actually solve some of the issues the Wiimote has. But so far most hands-on reporst about the Wii havn't been all that positive, a few interesting ideas here and there, but also a lot of controller throuble in other areas. And lets not forget the lack of power of the Wii, maybe the developers of other consoles will find ways to turn that power into great innovative gameplay, the crowds in Dead Rising already look very improssive and even if Motorstorm might not look as good as the rendervideos from 2005 I still see a lot more potential in that game then in Nintedos 'abuse-the-Wiimote-as-poor-steering-wheel' ExciteTruck game.
The main thing that Nintendo has going for the Wii currently is price, but as one has seen with the Gamecube, price alone simply doesn't matter much when the games are lacking and if the games actually will be half as awesome as marketing wants as to believe we will have to wait and see.
I think the main problem aren't classes, but simply the point in time when you have to choose them. With most RPGs, both online and offline, you have to choose your classes at the very beginning of a game, even before you do your first steps in the game world. That however doesn't make any sense from a players perspective, how am I supposed to make an informed decision if I don't know anything about the game world? I can now of cause use an FAQ and basically cheat my way through the class selection, but forcing users to do that isn't exactly a nice thing to do.
The solution to that however is relativly simple and demonstrated well in Gothic (offline RPG). Instead of having to pick your character at the beginning of the game, you simply get a default one assigned, there is nothing you can or have to customize at this point. You then are put into the world and can go and solve your quest and have fun, all of this is basically skill driven, only much later in the game, about 1/4 of the total game you have to actually pick a class by joining a guilde, which is reasonably easy to do at that point, since you then already know what the whole game is about and how you have mastered the first quarter of the game.
For example, if I have Outlook open, why can't I bind a keyboard shortcut to focus on that window rather than simply opening a new instance? So say I hit ctrl+alt+O and up comes Outlook if it's already open. If there were multiple instances of that process, then hitting the combination again would simply rotate through each instance like alt+tab and if one instance wasn't open then the program would be started.
NeXTSTEP and today MacOSX already do that for most part, ie. if you click something it will launch it, if it was already launched before and you click again you simply will be directed to that already existing window. This has its problems when the machine is low on RAM and closing the last Window does not result in closing the application. In the long however that is really a step that must be taken, applications must no longer be coupled with processes, ie. if I click the app icon, I should be brought to the application and not trigger a low level action that will run foo.exe, the user really needs to be freed of such low level tasks.
If one thinks that further one has actually to get rid of a whole lot other stuff that we use in todays environments. For example 'saving' is something we could get rid of, the OS should simply save everything, harddisks are by far large enough that and there really is no good reason to force users to manually save his work. What is even worse often the user can't even save his complete work, things like undo-history are lost with almost all application today. The OS could simply keep track of all those task, 'saving' shouldn't be no longer needed, instead giving the document a proper title should be enough, all editing on the document should be versioned.
And one could of course even get rid of applications or at least merge a whole lot of them, for example today we have vector editing programms (Inkscape), a word processors (OpenOffice Write) and a spread sheets (Excel), all of them however do basically the same thing, which gets rather obvious since they all duplicate a lot of each others functionality, Excel has vector drawing utilites, so does every word processor and workprocessors also have spread sheet capabilites and vector tools of course a lot of text layout things. So in the end there is no need to keep them seperate, instead the OS should provide some kind of virtual paper onto which one can work with all those tools at the same time.
In the end a real interface of the future would need to do a lot of stuff very different then todays OS do it, not so much by providing a completly different interface, but mainly by removing a whole lot of low level tasks and borders between applications.
I don't understand this backlash on tutorials recently...
There is absolutly nothing wrong with a *good* tutorial, fact however is that lots of tutorials these days are completly rubish, they teach you little to nothing and are absolutly boring to play. The tutorial of Black&White1 (can't comment on part 2) spends a good ten minutes with teaching you extremly basic mouse moving skills, which everybody could figure out himself in a few seconds without much throuble. All this completly unskipable, it wasn't even possible to interrupt the game to change the resolution/graphic details for quite a while, great if the game runs like shit in the default settings. This all might be acceptable if you only have to endure it once in your lifetime, but if you ever, have to reinstall the game or are already familiar with a similar game it becomes simply extremly painfull to endure the tutorial. The worst part is that Black&White1 tries hard to restrict every freedom in the tutorial, try to zoom out a bit, computer resets you, try to move around, computer resets you, absolutly no fun.
Another bad tutorial was that of Ninja Gaiden, while not that annoying to play, it actually tought you little to nothing about how to actually play the game, which actually made the whole thing rather pointless, since you were still forced to try&error around for quite a while to figure out how the game should actually be played.
There are of course other tutorials around, the one of Fahrenheit so far was one of the best I have seen, mostly because it didn't try to somehow mush the tutorial into the first level, but instead it seperated it completly from the main game, neither setting or characters had anything todo with the rest of the game. Instead the tutorial presented the gamedesigner himself who then told you how to move around and interact with objects in the game. So the main game could do whatever it wanted to do without trying to teach the player anything, since he already would new the important stuff. Very well done and actually very original, havn't seen anything like that before in a game, so the tutorial ended up being a lot of fun to play.
So in the end, tutorials are good and often needed, but they need to actually teach you something, be skipable and should not try to teach you something by force, some people prefer to learn by try&error, without some computer voice correcting every one of their steps.
But in terms of allowing random strangers to communicate, Nintendo would just face far too much risk to allow that.
I don't really see where there is the risk, people already communicate via the Internet and they won't stop doing so just because Nintendo invented friend codes. The communication still happens, only difference is that it gets much more complicated for those who want to use it for legitimate reasons. Especially since both Wii and DS will get webbrowsers there isn't much Nintendo can do to stop communication between players.
Some strategy guides are ok to use, but those that contain full walk-throughs, with pictures, are cheating and just plain tick me off.
You know, there are some peoples that actually play games for fun, if cheating and walkthroughs help them have more fun, more power to them, nohing wrong with that.
For me this only became painfully obvious when I was playing Dreamfall: The longest journey, the other day.
This game, on multiple occasions, left me clueless on what to do. Instead of (as in the good ol' days) trying every possibility for hours, I just gave up after five minutes and went for a quick browse to gamefaqs; thus solving the problem at hand but not really getting any satisfaction out of it.
Dreamfall is a bad example, since its actually by far one of the easiest adventure games around, only difficult part is the cave in chapter 5, but thats more due to the invincible trolls then due to the nature of the puzzle, rest of the game is more like an audio-book, then a normal adventure game since there simply aren't really much puzzles worth to talk about.
However I doubt that strategie guides had anything to do with the death of adventure games, for one simple reason getting stuck *SUCKS*. Its simply no fun, plain and simple. If I get stuck there is a very good chance that I simply drop the game and go do something else, especially when its the "I don't even know what I am doing wrong" kind of being stuck, which in adventure games it often ends up being. Strategie guides on the other side resolve the stuckiness and allow me to actually enjoy the game, so if anything they should have increased the enjoyment of adventure games. There is of course a danger of getting more out of a strategie guide then you want to, spoilers ain't no fun, but compared to being frustrated for days or weeks, its really a small payoff. Beside I had a strategie guide for every adventure since ZakMcKracken, so those aren't really anything new either.
The truth why adventure games died almost out (still rather alive over here in europe) is plain and simple: LucasArts stopped making them and there was nobody to step into their shoes. There simply weren't much great games around after LucasArts, there where still plenty of good ones, but almost nothing great, nothing that would drive the non-adventure crowed into the genre. And there of course also was no innovation. While every genre moved forward, the adventure game had its last jump back when ManiacMansion was released, after that almost 20 years of nothing, little jump again with Myst, but that was more a sidestep then a leap forward. Only recently Fahrenheit tried something new again, something that wasn't the same old point&click which most people got already tired of 10 years ago. And a lot of the good aspects of adventure games of course also got absorbed into other genres, each FPS now has some kind of puzzles and most RPGs tell more interesting stories then the average adventure game.
There is a good reason. Apple doesn't want children to be contacted by strangers online.
For protection a small portion of the user based, crippling online for *everyone*, is not a good reason, its simply lazyness to implement proper messures.
As I already said, they don't piss of all the older gamers. I'm definitely an older gamer, and I like friend codes and anonymous online gaming because I don't want to be harassed by 15-years-olds who have nothing better to do than scream swear words and tell me how gay I am if I beat them in Mario Kart.
They are pissing of lots of old gamers, heck, also a lot of younger gamers as well. You know, if you don't want to chat, simply don't chat, but don't force everybody else to stop chatting just because you don't like it.
Slashdot Mirror
Back when the Wii was still more rumor then fact and no screenshots released I would have thought the same, but with all the games I have seen so far there already is a huge graphical differente between XBox360 games and Wii games, bejoint just 480p vs 720p. If you look at some games like Battilion Wars 2 they already don't look very good by past generations standards, even Zelda or Mario can't impress that much and they are the best looking Wii games I have seen so far. On the other side you have on the XBox360 or PS3 games like Dead Rising or Assassins Creed, which do look a lot more impressive, not just because they have funky shader stuff, but also because they can handle huge crowds, something that isn't just a graphical gymick that might be ignorable, but something that actually can impact game play a lot.
Wii lack of power could turn out to not just into a little less good graphics, but might also turn out to hinder some gameplay innovations, like large crowds. If that will really happen we have to see, but so far I haven't seen anything on the Wii that could really impress me, except of course the controller, but a good controller doesn't make a good game.
Not here under Linux, the GTtv player shows up and I hear the music, but the video isn't visible, using the latest Flashplayer, 7,0,63,0, which is available for Linux.
No, but mixing GPL-incompatible with GPL means that you have a work that is not distributable at all, since the licenses violates themself.
Think of it as something like an apt-get for games, just with some added stuff for copy-protection and payment.
There is, its called Wine and works suprisingly well.
I would argue that most peoples understanding of Pluto is wrong for exactly that reason. If I think about planets, I think about large objects orbiting the sun in a nice ordered fashion, ie. all the orbits lie almost on a plane, all orbits are almost circular. Pluto however simply doesn't do that, he neither lies in the same plane as the rest of the planets, nor does he follow the classic ordering, every once in a while he is closer to the sun then Neptun.
Now what astronomers think of the issue might be a different thing, but I would throw it out of the 'planet' status especially because most people think it is one, when in truth it simply might not be exactly what people expect it to be.
How about we have a look what the RFC-drafts (its not even official) say about robots.txt:
"Web site administrators must realise this method is voluntary, and is not sufficient to guarantee some robots will not visit restricted parts of the URL space."
"It is not an official standard backed by a standards body, or owned by any commercial organisation. It is not enforced by anybody, and there no guarantee that all current and future robots will use it."
Its really that simple, robots.txt is not a security tool, its a guideline, nothing else. If you don't want robots to collect your data simply don't send it them.
Its a straightforward copyright violation, yep, but that has nothing todo with robots.txt, since having it or not, doesn't make it any less a violation.
It gets even worse then that, its not only difficult to detect the right motions, its also very hard, maybe impossible to detect them in time, meaning it will work like this: you swing your arm, system does motion detection, system starts the characters action. That however has to be a serial process to get a correct detection, so the system will only start the right action long ofter you already have swung your arm. This could mean that an action entered with the Wiimote gets delayed, maybe up to a second, till it enters the game and that effect could get worse the more Wiimote actions you have.
If its really a problem has to be seen, there are of course workarounds, doing true 1:1 mapping between character motion and Wiimote is probally the cleanest way to solve the issue, other solutions might work by having partial actions, ie. you wouldn't try to detect a whole swing of the Wiimote, but break the action into smaller parts like up-swing, down-swing, lefts-swing, etc., each of which could translate directly into the game without much delay, but chaining them would still give a wide varity of moves.
In the end we have to wait and see, there so far havn't been any reports of long-term gameplay, everything has been first impressions after a few minutes of Wii gameplay, which might have little todo with how the console feels after longer periods of time.
Some will use the Wiimote in interesting ways, but all of them, no way. I wouldn't be suprised if half the launch titles turn out to be rather shitty normal-gameplay games quick&dirtily adopted to the Wiimote. For example Tony Hawk Downhill Jam only uses the Wiimote as analogstick replacement, not for anything exciting, which might mean that it actually plays worse with Wiimote then with a normal controller (Wiimote doesn't auto-center like analogstick, so controls could get pretty imprecise).
We will for sure see lots of interesting games on the Wii, but we will for sure also see a lot of bad ones. DS had its fair share of junk and the touchscreen is a lot easier to manage then a 3D Wiimote.
I don't see how that would be a hole. The PSP currently does allow you to run code from memory sticks, code however has to be signed, which makes it a no-go for homebrew, but it allows Sony to make game demos available online which you can than run from the memory stick. Patching games could work equally as the demos already do.
RMS is the wrong person to ask such a question, Free Software never was about money and never will be, its about Free Software and little else. Its a philosophical concept and not an economic model, especially not one that could make you more money then closed sources. Its kind of like asking a free speech activist how to make a profit from that kind of activities, which is however simply not the goal of such doings.
The OpenSource movement started with talking about money and how about OpenSource could lead to more success in the business world, the OpenSource movement however has nothing to do with the FreeSoftware one and RMS is pretty clear on that one.
That doesn't means that RMS is oposed to making money with FreeSoftware, quite the oposite, he has done that himself, he however doesn't advocate FreeSoftware because you can money with it, but simply because its The Right Thing[tm] to do.
And somewhen in 2030 you might end up having 1 Petabyte, which then should finally be enough to actually store your whole life, not just a bit of it, but everything you ever heard or have seen in good video and audio quality. That might end up being enough for everybody.
Whats wrong with wanting a backup solution that is transparent and actually works? In case of emergency I really don't want to be stuck with a bunch of proprietary archive files or compressed files that only make a bad situation worse (bit flip in a normal file is easy to recover, in compressed file not so much). Of course there is a need for a little bit of metadata to do incremental backups, but transparent as-is file storage really is something that I would consider must-have for any usable backup-at-home solution and so far I havn't found one either. Every backup tool I checked so far was overly complicated, restricted to proprietary data formats, unsuited for DVD backup or otherwise seriously limited and simply not ready for the task, which is why I am currently using good old "rsync --backup-dir" and a little bit of hand crafted Ruby script to do the splitting in DVD sized chunks.
Bingo! They are excited about the *potential* of the Wii, but thats is a completly different thing then being excited about what the Wii actually delivered. So far most hands on reports havn't sound half as good as those earlier ones that where based on pure tech-demos, Wii simply seems to have a hard time to hold up to the hype. Quotes like "For a system whose agenda is to be more accessible, Wii sure makes Zelda complicated." don't sound all that excited about the Wii.
But you are right, we have to wait and see, potential is there, but it also has to be used and at the moment I simply don't see that beeing the case.
And yet people complained how they couldn't aim at the TV screen at E3, but instead head to aim below it to actually hit something. So if Nintendo can't get it right for presentation, I am not sure if JoeSmuck gamer will have a lot more luck with it, especially since calibration in 3d space is simply a lot more complicated then 2d one on analogstick or touchscreen.
The important thing about this is actually not so much the online in itself, but the fact that third party yet again don't seem to have priority, which is one of the main reason why Gamecube tanked. Maybe not critical in the long run, but definitvly not a good start.
Red Steel was the first official Wii titel that we got to see, so I would have expected that they've shown us the best they have, if however *that* was the best they have, poor Nintendo. Now of course they can polish and improve the titel and maybe they will end up with something good, but so far I prefer to judge the games but what they are, not by what they might have been and so far Wii just couldn't deliever much of the initial hype.
You can basically pick whatever hands on review you want, most of them have quite some negatives in it, some examples Heise, 1up and Kikizo. Some quotes "Using the controller with the bow & arrow for example doesn't make things much easier than using a standard controller,", "For a system whose agenda is to be more accessible, Wii sure makes Zelda complicated.". Now of course that doesn't mean that Wii will flop, but it means that programming for the Wiimote is hard if even Nintendo can't get it right for its most prominent launch title, for third party titles that could mean that the results are devestating.
Uniqueness doesn't sell consoles, good games do. If Wiimote helps Nintendo to create better games, so be it, but there is still huge risk that plenty of games on Wii will turn out to look much worse and control much worse then on PS3 or XBox360, since they are just so many ways to use the Wiimote in a shitty way (see Tony Hawk...).
We are three month away from launch, not a year, not two years, if they still havn't figured out how to actually use the controller correctly for all the games that will get released, which most information seems to hint, then thats a very bad sign. The Wii controller isn't an added gimmick like the motion sensing in the PS3 controller, its the primary way to interact with the Wii and one of the main reasons why the Wii is interesting.
And nope, I don't believe all problems will magically fade away just because its Nintendo. First of even Nintendo has its fair share of problems in the past (GBA without light) and secondly a lot of problems are much more fundamental and can't just be wiped away with a bit of polish, some require wastly different game design and that is something that simply won't happen very soon, which might mean we end up with a lot of weak third party tiles.
Well, its actually rather easy. If the games suck, Wii will flop and so far I havn't seen much to indicate that this is not the case. Just because the Wii controller is new and innovative doesn't mean that it will actually work for the games people want to play with it. There already has been a lot of disapointment when people found out that RedSteel didn't have real sword fighting and turning the character around seems to be problematic in many games. There are also unsolved problems like what happens if you put the controller to the side in a first person shooter, will the character start to spin around like crazy? Or will there be some magic that detects when you are activly playing or be busy with something else? And lets not forget the callibrarition, what if the Wii will be a hell to setup to work correctly? That wouldn't be something to please casual gamers. Or what if Zelda turns out to play a lot worse then with the classic Gamecube controller, not exactly good advertisment for the Wiimote. Or what about online, there doesn't seem to be any online for third parties this years, meaning Nintendo yet again, nothing will support online right from start nor its third parties.
Now maybe none of these worst case scenarios will happen, maybe Nintendo will figure out a way to actually solve some of the issues the Wiimote has. But so far most hands-on reporst about the Wii havn't been all that positive, a few interesting ideas here and there, but also a lot of controller throuble in other areas. And lets not forget the lack of power of the Wii, maybe the developers of other consoles will find ways to turn that power into great innovative gameplay, the crowds in Dead Rising already look very improssive and even if Motorstorm might not look as good as the rendervideos from 2005 I still see a lot more potential in that game then in Nintedos 'abuse-the-Wiimote-as-poor-steering-wheel' ExciteTruck game.
The main thing that Nintendo has going for the Wii currently is price, but as one has seen with the Gamecube, price alone simply doesn't matter much when the games are lacking and if the games actually will be half as awesome as marketing wants as to believe we will have to wait and see.
I think the main problem aren't classes, but simply the point in time when you have to choose them. With most RPGs, both online and offline, you have to choose your classes at the very beginning of a game, even before you do your first steps in the game world. That however doesn't make any sense from a players perspective, how am I supposed to make an informed decision if I don't know anything about the game world? I can now of cause use an FAQ and basically cheat my way through the class selection, but forcing users to do that isn't exactly a nice thing to do.
The solution to that however is relativly simple and demonstrated well in Gothic (offline RPG). Instead of having to pick your character at the beginning of the game, you simply get a default one assigned, there is nothing you can or have to customize at this point. You then are put into the world and can go and solve your quest and have fun, all of this is basically skill driven, only much later in the game, about 1/4 of the total game you have to actually pick a class by joining a guilde, which is reasonably easy to do at that point, since you then already know what the whole game is about and how you have mastered the first quarter of the game.
NeXTSTEP and today MacOSX already do that for most part, ie. if you click something it will launch it, if it was already launched before and you click again you simply will be directed to that already existing window. This has its problems when the machine is low on RAM and closing the last Window does not result in closing the application. In the long however that is really a step that must be taken, applications must no longer be coupled with processes, ie. if I click the app icon, I should be brought to the application and not trigger a low level action that will run foo.exe, the user really needs to be freed of such low level tasks.
If one thinks that further one has actually to get rid of a whole lot other stuff that we use in todays environments. For example 'saving' is something we could get rid of, the OS should simply save everything, harddisks are by far large enough that and there really is no good reason to force users to manually save his work. What is even worse often the user can't even save his complete work, things like undo-history are lost with almost all application today. The OS could simply keep track of all those task, 'saving' shouldn't be no longer needed, instead giving the document a proper title should be enough, all editing on the document should be versioned.
And one could of course even get rid of applications or at least merge a whole lot of them, for example today we have vector editing programms (Inkscape), a word processors (OpenOffice Write) and a spread sheets (Excel), all of them however do basically the same thing, which gets rather obvious since they all duplicate a lot of each others functionality, Excel has vector drawing utilites, so does every word processor and workprocessors also have spread sheet capabilites and vector tools of course a lot of text layout things. So in the end there is no need to keep them seperate, instead the OS should provide some kind of virtual paper onto which one can work with all those tools at the same time.
In the end a real interface of the future would need to do a lot of stuff very different then todays OS do it, not so much by providing a completly different interface, but mainly by removing a whole lot of low level tasks and borders between applications.
There is absolutly nothing wrong with a *good* tutorial, fact however is that lots of tutorials these days are completly rubish, they teach you little to nothing and are absolutly boring to play. The tutorial of Black&White1 (can't comment on part 2) spends a good ten minutes with teaching you extremly basic mouse moving skills, which everybody could figure out himself in a few seconds without much throuble. All this completly unskipable, it wasn't even possible to interrupt the game to change the resolution/graphic details for quite a while, great if the game runs like shit in the default settings. This all might be acceptable if you only have to endure it once in your lifetime, but if you ever, have to reinstall the game or are already familiar with a similar game it becomes simply extremly painfull to endure the tutorial. The worst part is that Black&White1 tries hard to restrict every freedom in the tutorial, try to zoom out a bit, computer resets you, try to move around, computer resets you, absolutly no fun.
Another bad tutorial was that of Ninja Gaiden, while not that annoying to play, it actually tought you little to nothing about how to actually play the game, which actually made the whole thing rather pointless, since you were still forced to try&error around for quite a while to figure out how the game should actually be played.
There are of course other tutorials around, the one of Fahrenheit so far was one of the best I have seen, mostly because it didn't try to somehow mush the tutorial into the first level, but instead it seperated it completly from the main game, neither setting or characters had anything todo with the rest of the game. Instead the tutorial presented the gamedesigner himself who then told you how to move around and interact with objects in the game. So the main game could do whatever it wanted to do without trying to teach the player anything, since he already would new the important stuff. Very well done and actually very original, havn't seen anything like that before in a game, so the tutorial ended up being a lot of fun to play.
So in the end, tutorials are good and often needed, but they need to actually teach you something, be skipable and should not try to teach you something by force, some people prefer to learn by try&error, without some computer voice correcting every one of their steps.
I don't really see where there is the risk, people already communicate via the Internet and they won't stop doing so just because Nintendo invented friend codes. The communication still happens, only difference is that it gets much more complicated for those who want to use it for legitimate reasons. Especially since both Wii and DS will get webbrowsers there isn't much Nintendo can do to stop communication between players.
You know, there are some peoples that actually play games for fun, if cheating and walkthroughs help them have more fun, more power to them, nohing wrong with that.
Dreamfall is a bad example, since its actually by far one of the easiest adventure games around, only difficult part is the cave in chapter 5, but thats more due to the invincible trolls then due to the nature of the puzzle, rest of the game is more like an audio-book, then a normal adventure game since there simply aren't really much puzzles worth to talk about.
However I doubt that strategie guides had anything to do with the death of adventure games, for one simple reason getting stuck *SUCKS*. Its simply no fun, plain and simple. If I get stuck there is a very good chance that I simply drop the game and go do something else, especially when its the "I don't even know what I am doing wrong" kind of being stuck, which in adventure games it often ends up being. Strategie guides on the other side resolve the stuckiness and allow me to actually enjoy the game, so if anything they should have increased the enjoyment of adventure games. There is of course a danger of getting more out of a strategie guide then you want to, spoilers ain't no fun, but compared to being frustrated for days or weeks, its really a small payoff. Beside I had a strategie guide for every adventure since ZakMcKracken, so those aren't really anything new either.
The truth why adventure games died almost out (still rather alive over here in europe) is plain and simple: LucasArts stopped making them and there was nobody to step into their shoes. There simply weren't much great games around after LucasArts, there where still plenty of good ones, but almost nothing great, nothing that would drive the non-adventure crowed into the genre. And there of course also was no innovation. While every genre moved forward, the adventure game had its last jump back when ManiacMansion was released, after that almost 20 years of nothing, little jump again with Myst, but that was more a sidestep then a leap forward. Only recently Fahrenheit tried something new again, something that wasn't the same old point&click which most people got already tired of 10 years ago. And a lot of the good aspects of adventure games of course also got absorbed into other genres, each FPS now has some kind of puzzles and most RPGs tell more interesting stories then the average adventure game.