### Eh? We rave about the possibilities of the Rev controller, for new types of games, for immersive gameplay.
Thats the point, the rave is about imagination of the players, not about actual games that Nintendo or another company is goining to produce. That will probally change after E3, but so far the Rev Controller, or better the games that will use it, is more dream than reality.
### So why is there such a big market for joystick style controllers for flight simulators if a standard controller should work fine?
Because those games where not designed to work with a standard controller. The point that Keita Takahashi is trying to make, is according to my interpretation, not that the new controller is bad, but simply that you can make good and creative games no matter what controller you actually have at hand and I think he his perfectly right with that one. Current games are not all the same because the controller limits them to be nothing more, but because the developers fail to come up with creative ideas (or the publisher not letting those get through). Just look at the C64 or Amiga, those had *tons* of extremly creative games, sure, not all where good, but they had a varity of genres that is well beyoint what we have now and that, for most part they worked with a one-button digital joystick.
### this makes the game more about the human and less about the controller.
In the end that might be true, but as it stands right now its all about the controller and only about the controller, we know exactly *nothing* about the games we will play on Revolution (except a few screenshots of Red Steel and N64, SNES, NES, etc. of course) and that is most likly what he is complaining about.
With the N64 we had Mario64, so we raved about Mario64 and not the new analog-stick, with the Rev we rave about the controller, not the games and that is what he is rightfully complaining about. I doubt that he has anything against the controller, but its just that, a controller, nothing more nothing less, the games are what matters in the end and I for one prefer to play a good game with a bad controller then a bad game with a good one. If the Rev of course will provide us good games with a good controller we will all be happy, but so far we havn't seen anything.
Last not least the Rev controller might end up like a solution searching for a problem, depending on how many actually game ideas Nintendo really has. The DS has a similar faith, sure its a success, but the number of great games that would only work with the touchscreen is very small, most great games play just like all other games with dpad and buttons, there its however not a problem since it has both and they don't conflict, with the Rev it might turn out more throublesome, since it might come only with the new controller.
Amdahl's Law has little impact when the number of cores is small and the available task is "large", as todays multitaskin OSs are.
Of course that doesn't mean that AMD will get a 100% improvment, but something close to that migth be doable if they can break the tasks at hand into parallel stuff at a much smaller level then threads.
While historically the japanese version was the "real" SMB2, the US version had IMHO much more impact on the Mario series as a whole, plenty of enemies got taken over to the main series and some charakter behaviour as well, while with the japanese version there is pretty much nothing left. The insane difficulty hasn't been seen in other Marios, neither have the evil-bonuses. In the end SMB2(jp) really was more like a Add-On to SMB then a fully new part, so while SMB2(us) might have its faults, I am very happy that Nintendo did create it instead of just releasing SMB2(jp).
As a mod tool Half Life is truly awesome, but as a game itself I never found it very impressive. Sure, the level structuring was interesting, the whole game was basically just one large level, and the AI is quite good, but thats basically it, the story is hardly worth to talk about and that all NPC locked the same also didn't exactly increase the enjoyment for me, I mean even back then a few different face textures wouldn't have been that difficult. That the whole story is only told through Gordons eyes, is yet another point which bothered me, while intersting at first, it simply didn't work for me, not getting to know the guy that was the core part of the game was probally my main issue with it, felt like some big part is missing from the whole. In the end it simply was a standard FPS with a few basic improvent, but nothing to spectacular.
Know speaking of Half Life 2, which I however only played the demo of, I have to say that I have mostly the same feeling with it as with Half Life 1, mostly just yet-another-fps without anything really interesting. Sure gravity gun is a nice twist, but I found it felt very forced to have to throw so much stuff around simply due to the lack of ammo. It never felt real, it all felt very forced, like the developers had a new toy to play around with, but nothing more. The same can be said about the other characters in the game, demo had not much of them, but what I saw was pretty disapoint, there never was real interaction with them, I couldn't even shoot them, instead they poped up in a few locations, said a few words, gave you a gun or so, and disappeared. All felt extremly script-triggered and never authentic, same can be said about the leveldesign has well, sure it looked like a real part of a city, but instead of having some kind of free movement, one was forced to very limited paths, everything else was blocked, very annoying and steeling all the realisim from the game.
In the end I think if there wouldn't have been all the modding, Half Life would have been forgotten long ago, it wasn't bad, but really not that much better then the rest of standard fps.
There is really nothing akward with holding two, the only problem might be the weigth, but that isn't really much an issue. The N64 controller has after all the analogstick in the center, so balancing is a non-issue.
### Have you played Goldeneye recently? It's not as good as it used to be. The controls are kinda wacky compared to modern FPSes.
Havn't played Goldeneye, but I did play PerfectDark(N64) recently and that controlled just as good as Halo and turned out to be actually more fun. Not sure how much you can configure the controls in Goldeneye, but PerfectDark had a setup which used two N64 controller, so you get two analogsticks just like on todays pads.
### as long as the seller can trade a username and password for real life cash, they can't be stopped.
The IP should easily give away the true location of the user, so if some account login who used to come from china suddenly comes from the usa there migth be a good chance that the account was traded. It might also be possible to analyse the patterns of playing, if a player all of a sudden goes from power leveling to random walking around, there is also a good chance that something is wrong. Of course the throuble is that all this requries extra work and here and there some valid accounts migth fall under the raster, but it shouldn't be that difficult to find some of thoses traded accounts.
### I agree that it would not make a very compelling game, but it would certainly be an interesting toy.
Something like The Room could be the perfect base for some kind of "Alice in Wonderland"-like adventure game.
What I like about The Room is that it bends the laws of nature, something far to few games do. Most games restrict themself to emulating reality and at best adding some explosions and special effects, but doors that lead you seamlessly to other places when you walk through them instead of around them is something I havn't seen to often. It migth be not easy to turn the room into a normal game, but I don't think it would be impossible give a bit of creativty. Not every game has to end up as FPS or RTS, so why not a Myst-like game?
And as a side note: Maybe its just me, but the room looked like the perfect playground for the Nintendo Revolution controller.
Its not that easy, we not only need to simulate the creature itself, but also enough of environment to train it. If you pack a baby in a dark box and shield it from all outer influences it won't really result in something intelligent either, if it survives at all. So it wouldn't be impossible, but generating all the needed input could provide not that easy.
You can plug a Gamecube Controller into the Revolution and there is also rumour about a thing called "shell" which will be a normal controller into which you plug the Revolution controller, searching for it on google will give you a few pictures on how it might look like, however Nintendo hasn't yet released official informations about that thing.
### (Just add graphics for the chars. I am wondering if someone ever thought of generating a Diablo like GUI for the original nethack:) )
I neither know Diablo nor nethack very good, but from my understanding a simply GUI change won't turn nethack into a Diablo-like game, since nethack is esentially roundbased while Diablo is not. There are GUIs around with Diablo-like graphics, Falcon's Eye being probally the most prominent, but the roundbased nature gives it a very weird feel.
### but you kid yourself if you think kids didn't ask their friends how to get past the hard parts and they all figured it out on their own.
Twenty years ago there simply wasn't anybody to ask, no internet and even game magazines were rare, so hard facts on a game where pretty much non-existant, sure there where rumors and stuff, but nothing that gets close to today where two seconds in google open up all those secrets you ever wanted to know about a game. I am not saying that I want to go back to that time, but those times certainly gave games a mystery feel, since you never knew something for certain until you have seen and experienced it yourself.
### Surprisingly to me, I can't really take playing them for more than a few minutes nowadays before I get a sad sense that I'm not going to get that childhood feeling back.
You have to play those old games for more than a few minutes to really get into them. Many old games suffer from bad user interfaces, lack of tutorials and other problems, so its easy to dismiss them, since they just arn't that smoothly played as many todays games. However once one is past that initial throuble they can be as fun or more fun then any game today. It might still not bring back the full childhood feelings, but they can still provide a great experience.
Last not least I think one of the things that ruined the childhood-feeling isn't just the getting older or the quality of the games, but also the advent of the internet. With the internet walkthroughs, cheats and other helps are readily available, for todays games often at release day or just shortly after. Back in my childhood however it could take month or years till you get a walkthrough or cheat for a game, so it was just you, some friends and the game. Since games also often lacked any kind of auto-mapping, quicksaves or other helps that is pretty much standard these days, those old games really turned out to be an interesting challange, beating a game really meant something and felt like an acomplishment. While today beating a game is for most part not a problem at all, getting bored of a game is the biggest danger of not completing it, not difficulty. And a final reason might simply be that older games are far more intense in terms of gameplay, there is no running around in circles to solve some stupid svitch-puzzle in SuperMario, the goal is always completly clear, but getting there can be extremly hard, today getting there is however often trivial, finding it is the hard (and often anoying) part.
### Twenty years ago you couldn't make your own fun in computer games like you can in HL2 by painting zombies and walls with the grav gun, or in BF1942 where you can forgo the game for acrobatics like detpack jeep boosting and wing to wing transfers.
Twenty years ago, well alomst, I created my first own levels via Boulder Dash Construction kit. And when it comes to stunts and stuff, Stunt Island had that 14 years ago. Making your own fun with computer games is nothing new, even so the advent of physics engines of course helps a bit.
### Games today embody strategy, tactics and sometimes even empathy, things that could never by fortold 20 years ago.
Difficulty in games of today is often so damn low that you can finish plenty of games without even dieing *once*. Just compare something like Metroid Prime Hunters (DS) vs. Metroid (NES), the last one (19 years old) requires far more skill and tactics, without acting a bit clever you won't survive for a minute. In Multiplayer it is true that you need some more skill, but Singleplayer games have only gotten easier and seldomly require any real kind of tactics or strategie. And in case of puzzle solving it looks even worse, while adventures always provided fun and interesting puzzles, even 20 years ago, games today are often bugged by unimaginative stupid key/door puzzles.
That doesn't mean that all games today are bad, neither does it mean all games 20 years ago where great. But the last game that really had that jaw-drop feel for me was Mario64 and that was already 10 years ago, after that nothing really groundbreaking happened. What makes the situation quite a bit frustrating is that games today often contain the same basic flaws that already bothered me years ago (no body in first person shooters, lack of a interesting story, doors still open without anybody touchnig the doorhandle, etc.). Improvments in the last 10 years have for most part simply been of cosmetic nature, more polygons, more shaders, but the basic gameplay is still the same, even so there would be plenty of room for impromvent. And in terms of genre there has been a lot varity lost, where are the flight simulators today? Where are the WingCommanders of today? And why does every RTS look like a ripoff of Warcraft, why doesn't somebody try something else (think Syndicate)?
Games havn't gotten a lot worse in the last years, but neither have they gotten a lot better, which in turn is one of the reason why I often prefer old games over new ones. However its true that 20 years ago games where still in their beginning and sometimes lacking, so I prefer the 10-15 years ago timescale for most part.
A third column showing how said game would actually look in reality would have been nice. Especially with videos it often becomes pretty obvious that todays games aren't a lot closer to reality then those games 20 years ago, sure they look pretier today, but animation, physics and 'flexibility' of the environment don't even get close to how complex reality is. Animation is also often very primitive since motion captured sequences don't blend together all that well, making everything look robotic. Physics are still missing from many games, especially when it comes to objects that aren't the main focus of the game (ie. a car might have a (often lame) damage model, but the environment is far to often indestructable). And the player is also limited to a few predefined actions in very many games, so that the key differences between games today and games of the past is made by the more buttons we have on the controller, not by the rest of the game.
### Flight simulators have also come quite a long way since I first started playing them. The only thing that hasn't advanced for some reason is the way human necks are modeled. Flight sim cockpit views still shift around as if the player's head is a perfect sphere mounted on top of a pole.
Inaccurate modeling of the human body and physical interaction is a problem not only flight simulators suffer from. In many first person shooters the "hero" is still nothing more then a pair of flying arms, no legs, no body, nada. And even NextGen titels like Oblivion completly fail at providing proper hit feedback (hiting a rat with a sword looks as good as RPGs in 1990 already did, ie. not good at all) and realistic animation (NPC don't touch doors, they open automatically). While plain graphics have advanced, the underlying games and physics haven't much at all, which is why games today often look no different then games 10 or 20 years ago when one manages to see past the shiny shaders and reflections.
### Watches do not procreate and change to suit their environment.
A living thing doesn't change to suit their environment either, the changes are completly random, independed of the environment. The point of evolution is that those creatures with random changes that turn out to benefit to the living thing get to reproduce, while those that aren't die out.
Back to the watch: build a 100 watches which varry in some details, smash them, those that don't break into a thousand pieces on hit you reproduce again with random changes and go smashing them again, repeat that a lot and you get a watch pretty good at tacking hammer hits without much throuble.
All such an app requires is a clever way to store cache data, sure loading a large multiple megabyte photo is no fun and loading a hundred of them at the same time will cause your machine to halt for quite a while, but as long as the app makes sure that the photo is only loaded at a resolution close to that that is equal to the screen resolution at the current zoom level there should be little problem and a reasonable way to store such intermediate thumbnails should solve the problem. Its not really an unsolvable problem, but it might require to use a bit of extra space on the harddrive to cache the data efficently.
There is nothing that stops you on adding some automatic categorization or searching on top of such a zoomable interface, the point however is that you have a zoomable interface to begin with, since zoomable interfaces are a lot more natural to use, since they give you space to play around with, which a normal thumbnail view doesn't give you. And this space to play in is quite important, since it can both act as space for organisation as well as for presentation, it also makes the application much more mode-less, there no longer is a special view for each and every task, if the thumbnails are to small, you zoom in and job done.
Its true that zoomable interfaces might be slower as a well categorized collection, but most people don't have a well categorized collection to begin with, so nothing is lost. In the end however zoomable interfaces mainadvantage is probally that they are fun to work with, they work as you expect them to work, you can browse and sort through a foto collection as you would do with a staple of photos in real life, categorization doesn't give you that.
I have never used Photomesa, but from the screenshots it looks just like a regular Thumbnailviewer, LowFat is a different beast, since it tries to give the feeling of a real staple of photos, you can zoom, you can drag photos around, rotate them and stuff, pretty much the same as you would in real life, thumbnail viewers can't do that.
Slashdot Mirror
### Eh? We rave about the possibilities of the Rev controller, for new types of games, for immersive gameplay.
Thats the point, the rave is about imagination of the players, not about actual games that Nintendo or another company is goining to produce. That will probally change after E3, but so far the Rev Controller, or better the games that will use it, is more dream than reality.
### So why is there such a big market for joystick style controllers for flight simulators if a standard controller should work fine?
Because those games where not designed to work with a standard controller. The point that Keita Takahashi is trying to make, is according to my interpretation, not that the new controller is bad, but simply that you can make good and creative games no matter what controller you actually have at hand and I think he his perfectly right with that one. Current games are not all the same because the controller limits them to be nothing more, but because the developers fail to come up with creative ideas (or the publisher not letting those get through). Just look at the C64 or Amiga, those had *tons* of extremly creative games, sure, not all where good, but they had a varity of genres that is well beyoint what we have now and that, for most part they worked with a one-button digital joystick.
### this makes the game more about the human and less about the controller.
In the end that might be true, but as it stands right now its all about the controller and only about the controller, we know exactly *nothing* about the games we will play on Revolution (except a few screenshots of Red Steel and N64, SNES, NES, etc. of course) and that is most likly what he is complaining about.
With the N64 we had Mario64, so we raved about Mario64 and not the new analog-stick, with the Rev we rave about the controller, not the games and that is what he is rightfully complaining about. I doubt that he has anything against the controller, but its just that, a controller, nothing more nothing less, the games are what matters in the end and I for one prefer to play a good game with a bad controller then a bad game with a good one. If the Rev of course will provide us good games with a good controller we will all be happy, but so far we havn't seen anything.
Last not least the Rev controller might end up like a solution searching for a problem, depending on how many actually game ideas Nintendo really has. The DS has a similar faith, sure its a success, but the number of great games that would only work with the touchscreen is very small, most great games play just like all other games with dpad and buttons, there its however not a problem since it has both and they don't conflict, with the Rev it might turn out more throublesome, since it might come only with the new controller.
Quick guess:
Amdahl's Law has little impact when the number of cores is small and the available task is "large", as todays multitaskin OSs are.
Of course that doesn't mean that AMD will get a 100% improvment, but something close to that migth be doable if they can break the tasks at hand into parallel stuff at a much smaller level then threads.
How about a true sequel to Monkey Island 2 instead? Monkey3 wasn't bad, but as a sequel to 2 it was a huge disappointment.
While historically the japanese version was the "real" SMB2, the US version had IMHO much more impact on the Mario series as a whole, plenty of enemies got taken over to the main series and some charakter behaviour as well, while with the japanese version there is pretty much nothing left. The insane difficulty hasn't been seen in other Marios, neither have the evil-bonuses. In the end SMB2(jp) really was more like a Add-On to SMB then a fully new part, so while SMB2(us) might have its faults, I am very happy that Nintendo did create it instead of just releasing SMB2(jp).
As a mod tool Half Life is truly awesome, but as a game itself I never found it very impressive. Sure, the level structuring was interesting, the whole game was basically just one large level, and the AI is quite good, but thats basically it, the story is hardly worth to talk about and that all NPC locked the same also didn't exactly increase the enjoyment for me, I mean even back then a few different face textures wouldn't have been that difficult. That the whole story is only told through Gordons eyes, is yet another point which bothered me, while intersting at first, it simply didn't work for me, not getting to know the guy that was the core part of the game was probally my main issue with it, felt like some big part is missing from the whole. In the end it simply was a standard FPS with a few basic improvent, but nothing to spectacular.
Know speaking of Half Life 2, which I however only played the demo of, I have to say that I have mostly the same feeling with it as with Half Life 1, mostly just yet-another-fps without anything really interesting. Sure gravity gun is a nice twist, but I found it felt very forced to have to throw so much stuff around simply due to the lack of ammo. It never felt real, it all felt very forced, like the developers had a new toy to play around with, but nothing more. The same can be said about the other characters in the game, demo had not much of them, but what I saw was pretty disapoint, there never was real interaction with them, I couldn't even shoot them, instead they poped up in a few locations, said a few words, gave you a gun or so, and disappeared. All felt extremly script-triggered and never authentic, same can be said about the leveldesign has well, sure it looked like a real part of a city, but instead of having some kind of free movement, one was forced to very limited paths, everything else was blocked, very annoying and steeling all the realisim from the game.
In the end I think if there wouldn't have been all the modding, Half Life would have been forgotten long ago, it wasn't bad, but really not that much better then the rest of standard fps.
In addition to that it was also present in the Gameboy Color game SuperMarioBros Delux.
There is really nothing akward with holding two, the only problem might be the weigth, but that isn't really much an issue. The N64 controller has after all the analogstick in the center, so balancing is a non-issue.
### Have you played Goldeneye recently? It's not as good as it used to be. The controls are kinda wacky compared to modern FPSes.
Havn't played Goldeneye, but I did play PerfectDark(N64) recently and that controlled just as good as Halo and turned out to be actually more fun. Not sure how much you can configure the controls in Goldeneye, but PerfectDark had a setup which used two N64 controller, so you get two analogsticks just like on todays pads.
### as long as the seller can trade a username and password for real life cash, they can't be stopped.
The IP should easily give away the true location of the user, so if some account login who used to come from china suddenly comes from the usa there migth be a good chance that the account was traded. It might also be possible to analyse the patterns of playing, if a player all of a sudden goes from power leveling to random walking around, there is also a good chance that something is wrong. Of course the throuble is that all this requries extra work and here and there some valid accounts migth fall under the raster, but it shouldn't be that difficult to find some of thoses traded accounts.
### I agree that it would not make a very compelling game, but it would certainly be an interesting toy.
Something like The Room could be the perfect base for some kind of "Alice in Wonderland"-like adventure game.
What I like about The Room is that it bends the laws of nature, something far to few games do. Most games restrict themself to emulating reality and at best adding some explosions and special effects, but doors that lead you seamlessly to other places when you walk through them instead of around them is something I havn't seen to often. It migth be not easy to turn the room into a normal game, but I don't think it would be impossible give a bit of creativty. Not every game has to end up as FPS or RTS, so why not a Myst-like game?
And as a side note: Maybe its just me, but the room looked like the perfect playground for the Nintendo Revolution controller.
Its not that easy, we not only need to simulate the creature itself, but also enough of environment to train it. If you pack a baby in a dark box and shield it from all outer influences it won't really result in something intelligent either, if it survives at all. So it wouldn't be impossible, but generating all the needed input could provide not that easy.
Freecraft wasn't killed, the underlying engine simply got renamed to Stratagus and the Warcraft rules to Wargus, all still available online.
You can plug a Gamecube Controller into the Revolution and there is also rumour about a thing called "shell" which will be a normal controller into which you plug the Revolution controller, searching for it on google will give you a few pictures on how it might look like, however Nintendo hasn't yet released official informations about that thing.
### (Just add graphics for the chars. I am wondering if someone ever thought of generating a Diablo like GUI for the original nethack :) )
I neither know Diablo nor nethack very good, but from my understanding a simply GUI change won't turn nethack into a Diablo-like game, since nethack is esentially roundbased while Diablo is not. There are GUIs around with Diablo-like graphics, Falcon's Eye being probally the most prominent, but the roundbased nature gives it a very weird feel.
### but you kid yourself if you think kids didn't ask their friends how to get past the hard parts and they all figured it out on their own.
Twenty years ago there simply wasn't anybody to ask, no internet and even game magazines were rare, so hard facts on a game where pretty much non-existant, sure there where rumors and stuff, but nothing that gets close to today where two seconds in google open up all those secrets you ever wanted to know about a game. I am not saying that I want to go back to that time, but those times certainly gave games a mystery feel, since you never knew something for certain until you have seen and experienced it yourself.
### Surprisingly to me, I can't really take playing them for more than a few minutes nowadays before I get a sad sense that I'm not going to get that childhood feeling back.
You have to play those old games for more than a few minutes to really get into them. Many old games suffer from bad user interfaces, lack of tutorials and other problems, so its easy to dismiss them, since they just arn't that smoothly played as many todays games. However once one is past that initial throuble they can be as fun or more fun then any game today. It might still not bring back the full childhood feelings, but they can still provide a great experience.
Last not least I think one of the things that ruined the childhood-feeling isn't just the getting older or the quality of the games, but also the advent of the internet. With the internet walkthroughs, cheats and other helps are readily available, for todays games often at release day or just shortly after. Back in my childhood however it could take month or years till you get a walkthrough or cheat for a game, so it was just you, some friends and the game. Since games also often lacked any kind of auto-mapping, quicksaves or other helps that is pretty much standard these days, those old games really turned out to be an interesting challange, beating a game really meant something and felt like an acomplishment. While today beating a game is for most part not a problem at all, getting bored of a game is the biggest danger of not completing it, not difficulty. And a final reason might simply be that older games are far more intense in terms of gameplay, there is no running around in circles to solve some stupid svitch-puzzle in SuperMario, the goal is always completly clear, but getting there can be extremly hard, today getting there is however often trivial, finding it is the hard (and often anoying) part.
### Twenty years ago you couldn't make your own fun in computer games like you can in HL2 by painting zombies and walls with the grav gun, or in BF1942 where you can forgo the game for acrobatics like detpack jeep boosting and wing to wing transfers.
Twenty years ago, well alomst, I created my first own levels via Boulder Dash Construction kit. And when it comes to stunts and stuff, Stunt Island had that 14 years ago. Making your own fun with computer games is nothing new, even so the advent of physics engines of course helps a bit.
### Games today embody strategy, tactics and sometimes even empathy, things that could never by fortold 20 years ago.
Difficulty in games of today is often so damn low that you can finish plenty of games without even dieing *once*. Just compare something like Metroid Prime Hunters (DS) vs. Metroid (NES), the last one (19 years old) requires far more skill and tactics, without acting a bit clever you won't survive for a minute. In Multiplayer it is true that you need some more skill, but Singleplayer games have only gotten easier and seldomly require any real kind of tactics or strategie. And in case of puzzle solving it looks even worse, while adventures always provided fun and interesting
puzzles, even 20 years ago, games today are often bugged by unimaginative stupid key/door puzzles.
That doesn't mean that all games today are bad, neither does it mean all games 20 years ago where great. But the last game that really had that jaw-drop feel for me was Mario64 and that was already 10 years ago, after that nothing really groundbreaking happened. What makes the situation quite a bit frustrating is that games today often contain the same basic flaws that already bothered me years ago (no body in first person shooters, lack of a interesting story, doors still open without anybody touchnig the doorhandle, etc.). Improvments in the last 10 years have for most part simply been of cosmetic nature, more polygons, more shaders, but the basic gameplay is still the same, even so there would be plenty of room for impromvent. And in terms of genre there has been a lot varity lost, where are the flight simulators today? Where are the WingCommanders of today? And why does every RTS look like a ripoff of Warcraft, why doesn't somebody try something else (think Syndicate)?
Games havn't gotten a lot worse in the last years, but neither have they gotten a lot better, which in turn is one of the reason why I often prefer old games over new ones. However its true that 20 years ago games where still in their beginning and sometimes lacking, so I prefer the 10-15 years ago timescale for most part.
A third column showing how said game would actually look in reality would have been nice. Especially with videos it often becomes pretty obvious that todays games aren't a lot closer to reality then those games 20 years ago, sure they look pretier today, but animation, physics and 'flexibility' of the environment don't even get close to how complex reality is. Animation is also often very primitive since motion captured sequences don't blend together all that well, making everything look robotic. Physics are still missing from many games, especially when it comes to objects that aren't the main focus of the game (ie. a car might have a (often lame) damage model, but the environment is far to often indestructable). And the player is also limited to a few predefined actions in very many games, so that the key differences between games today and games of the past is made by the more buttons we have on the controller, not by the rest of the game.
### Flight simulators have also come quite a long way since I first started playing them. The only thing that hasn't advanced for some reason is the way human necks are modeled. Flight sim cockpit views still shift around as if the player's head is a perfect sphere mounted on top of a pole.
Inaccurate modeling of the human body and physical interaction is a problem not only flight simulators suffer from. In many first person shooters the "hero" is still nothing more then a pair of flying arms, no legs, no body, nada. And even NextGen titels like Oblivion completly fail at providing proper hit feedback (hiting a rat with a sword looks as good as RPGs in 1990 already did, ie. not good at all) and realistic animation (NPC don't touch doors, they open automatically). While plain graphics have advanced, the underlying games and physics haven't much at all, which is why games today often look no different then games 10 or 20 years ago when one manages to see past the shiny shaders and reflections.
### Watches do not procreate and change to suit their environment.
A living thing doesn't change to suit their environment either, the changes are completly random, independed of the environment. The point of evolution is that those creatures with random changes that turn out to benefit to the living thing get to reproduce, while those that aren't die out.
Back to the watch: build a 100 watches which varry in some details, smash them, those that don't break into a thousand pieces on hit you reproduce again with random changes and go smashing them again, repeat that a lot and you get a watch pretty good at tacking hammer hits without much throuble.
All such an app requires is a clever way to store cache data, sure loading a large multiple megabyte photo is no fun and loading a hundred of them at the same time will cause your machine to halt for quite a while, but as long as the app makes sure that the photo is only loaded at a resolution close to that that is equal to the screen resolution at the current zoom level there should be little problem and a reasonable way to store such intermediate thumbnails should solve the problem. Its not really an unsolvable problem, but it might require to use a bit of extra space on the harddrive to cache the data efficently.
There is nothing that stops you on adding some automatic categorization or searching on top of such a zoomable interface, the point however is that you have a zoomable interface to begin with, since zoomable interfaces are a lot more natural to use, since they give you space to play around with, which a normal thumbnail view doesn't give you. And this space to play in is quite important, since it can both act as space for organisation as well as for presentation, it also makes the application much more mode-less, there no longer is a special view for each and every task, if the thumbnails are to small, you zoom in and job done.
Its true that zoomable interfaces might be slower as a well categorized collection, but most people don't have a well categorized collection to begin with, so nothing is lost. In the end however zoomable interfaces mainadvantage is probally that they are fun to work with, they work as you expect them to work, you can browse and sort through a foto collection as you would do with a staple of photos in real life, categorization doesn't give you that.
I have never used Photomesa, but from the screenshots it looks just like a regular Thumbnailviewer, LowFat is a different beast, since it tries to give the feeling of a real staple of photos, you can zoom, you can drag photos around, rotate them and stuff, pretty much the same as you would in real life, thumbnail viewers can't do that.