ACK, HD-DVD as a add-on would fail, on the other side it shouldn't hurt if Microsoft added HD-DVD support in later XBox360s, of course it would be unusable for games since not all XBox360s would have it, but as a added bonus for XBox-as-MediaCenter it might be quite nice.
I havn't played Bone yet, but the screenshots look rather ugly, the same 'ugly' that was already present in Sam'n Max2 screenshot. And no, that kind of ugly doesn't come from a lack of shaders, but from going 3D in the first place. Both Bone and Sam'nMax seem to be a perfect fit for good old classic 2D graphics, going 3D just trashes that style down, which is why I don't understand why they did go 3D. The old Sam'nMax looked perfectly fine and even today it looks still quite good, replace the 320x200 graphics with something along the lines of 1024x768 and you could reuse the graphics basically 1:1. There is no need for 3D shaders and all, they should have simply skipped all that completly.
That said, I don't mind use of 3D in adventures, Fahrenheit looks briliant in 3D, but for comic style graphics I don't consider 3D much of a good choice, sometimes cell-shading can help to get the style closer to classic 2D look, but they didn't even use that in either Bone or Sam'nMax2.
### Because is the real controversy about GTA is that you're driving around a city, whacking mobsters and the like? Uhhh. No. The real controversy is that GTA gives you a living city that you can drive around in, and do basically whatever you want in.
Whatever you want, as long as it involves a lot of violence, stealing, robbery, etc. that is... Heck, GTA isn't a sandbox game, it has maybe some elements of it and a much wider varity of missions then most games but in the end you still have to do whatever the developers planed for you to do and that involves violence for most part. Maybe I missed something, but last time I locked you couldn't make it very far in the game without using violence, sure you can steal a police car or a firetruck and have fun for a few minutes, but that won't bring you very far anytime soom.
If GTA really would be a free-form sandbox game and had probally a bit more realistic damage model, so you couldn't go massacre dozens or hundreds of people without getting yourself in basically no throuble at all, I doubt there would be much uproar, but in GTA a play a criminal and have to commit crime. So will the uproar might not be valid, its quite understandable.
If you look around the adventure genre is far less dead than many people claim, with AnotherCode/TraceMemory and Phoenix Wright there are two decent ones for the NintendoDS, there also was Fahrenheit recently for PC, XBox and PS2, soon there will be Dreamfall and if you look a bit in the past there was The Moment of Silence, Westerner, Black Mirror, Runaway, Syberia, Still Life and plenty of others. Not all of them might be up to the legendary LucasArts ones, but many of them are still quite good, some, like Fahrenheit, even try something different then classic point&click and succeed at doing so, some other of course not so much (BrokenSword3).
So while the adventure genre has far less games to offer then the first person shooter genre, there are still plenty of gems available that shouldn't be missed and several other on the way. The adventure genre seems to have found it niche to live in.
No idea what the real reasons are, but I would guess one would be that Gnome is simply, less config options to tweak and to get wrong then KDE thus less support costs.
From a pure game mechanics points of view I agree with you, the puzzles aren't so special and the fights are actually plain boring. Nothing so great in that area. So if you are looking for great game mechanics you probally won't find them in Ico. However, except the fighting, which I really consider pretty annoying and pointless, the stuff doesn't get much in the way either and in the end the game really is more about the experince and athmosphere then about the pure game mechanics. Few games before or after it manage to create such a dense and uniq athomsphere and thats what the game is all about in the end, its an experince and less something that is actually fun in the normal sense. It takes quite a while to get into and you probally need to be in the right mood for this type of game, but if you are it simply makes you go 'wow'.
There should be either an option in the preferences or if that still isn't the case, you can use gconf-editor to turn Naulitus into browse-mode at default:/apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_browser
About less direct access, yes, Gnome only exposes the important stuff via the GUI, rest is only available via gconf-editor, however I havn't found that to be much of a problem, since gconf entries are documented and searchable it isn't much of a problem to find them.
In the end I think Gnomes by far biggest problem is Nautilus and they should have got rid of that years ago, it never was pretty, it was extremly slow, down to simply being completly unusable for large directories for years and only got fixed resently, I have no idea why they picked at the default file browser. There are many aspects that I love about Gnome, but I could never stand using Nautilus for longer periods of time, it simply makes so much obvious things just plain wrong. Gnome should have choosen Rox, turn that a bit more into a Gnome app and be done with it, it provides a much more sane user experince.
### You forget that the FSF zealots believe that commercial software is inherantly evil.
No, they only think closed source software is evil, commercial software is quite fine for them, you can even order from them: https://agia.fsf.org/order/ if you want to.
From all the providers I had in the years nobody of them ever had the alt.binary.* groups available. So which provider actually do have them available and how are they surviving in todays times where sharing a little bit of music can get you jail time?
### 8 bit colour is pretty much "enough". I realize this may sound like the infamous 640K is enough for anybody, but really, in this case it pretty much is.
It really depends on what one wants, if one simply wants photo or tv quality on a monitor then yep, 8bit is enough and if it isn't then maybe 12bit is enough, but you don't really need much beyond that. However when it comes to a true representation of reality 8bit for sure arn't enough, just compare the picture on your monitor to the 'picture' that you get when you look out of the window, the monitor is not quite up to that quality level and a few more bits and a few more levels of brightness could help quite a bit. However all that would be beyond 'photorealism', so in the end I doubt that it will come one day, but probally not anytime soon, especially in mass-media.
### Shh! You're not supposed to ask questions like this. Console proponents hate when you point out that an RTS or FPS completely sucks ass on these "gaming systems".
They don't suck, its simply a matter of getting the controls and gameplay balanced. Nobody doubts that you can aim more precisly with the mouse, but in the end its a completly non-issue in singleplayer games, since a little bit of auto-aim can make up for the difference. At the extreme end you can also do it like MetroidPrime and go for lock-on, no precise aiming required at all, yet the game seems still to be extremly popular. Pikmin was quite cool as well, again just a matter of figuring out controls that work with what you have. If you of course just brute force port a game from PC to Console you will have some throuble, but then jump'n runs don't play that good with mouse either.
### It's completely beyond me why anyone with the option not too should continue to use a mouse in the first place.
One reason, at least for me, is that trackballs suck for drag&drop, be it dragging files around or simply doing a rectangle selection, because those force you to old down one finger in a fixed position and wiggle around with another to move the cursor, feels very unnatural. Whenever I have a task that involves lots of drag&drop I switch back to mouse (Blender, gaming, etc). That said I find a trackball at the right side of the keyboard extremly usefull, especially when doing keyboard heavy tasks (Emacs), since its much quicker to reach then the mouse at the right side due to the numpad which is in the way. And while the Marble Mouse Trackball is quite nice, have one of those too, last not least because it was the only one for the left end, I found those trackballs that require your thumb to navigate the trackball extremly unconfortable, while they might be good for your wrist, they kill your thumb.
### How is 120 fps going to be better if you can't even distinguish it?
You can, probally not easily and probally not everybody (think eSport people), but 60fps is certainly not the upper end. You can for example quite easily distinguish a 60Hz monitor refresh rate from 100Hz, while not directly comparable to screen redraws, it shows that there is still room bejoint 60Hz. Its of course also true that 30fps with motion blur are enough for many uses, but if I could 120fps instead of 60fps I wouldn't say no. If the PS3 really is that powerfull, way not?
Well, it kind of already was a GBA title, three of them actually (Circle of the Moon, Harmony of Dissonance, Aria of Sorrow). Dawn of Sorrow doesn't really have much to set it appart from the rest, it feels pretty much like Aria of Sorrow just with improved graphics and new levels, even the enemies are for large part identical. However overall I like Dawn of Sorrow, it looks a lot better then the GBA titles, and while the stylus stuff doesn't add that much to the gameplay its a nice addition, I agree however that having action on top and map on bottom would have been better, stylus stuff would still have be performable if they simply switch from map to a special stylus screen in the few situations where it is needed.
Re:Please explain... Nintendo Nazis?
on
20 Years of NES
·
· Score: 1
### Giana Sisters was "one of the most popular games for the Amiga"?
Well, it probally was more popular on the C64 then on the Amiga, but it was quite popular back then. Might not have sold a lot due to being removed from the shelfs, but it was copied a heck of a lot and I wouldn't be suprised if most people have it in their personal top-ten list of C64 games.
Re:20 years - will it be 20 more?
on
20 Years of NES
·
· Score: 1
### Will players like having the complex system this controller offers?
What complex system? The controller as two buttons for actions, the rest is all done via hand movement. The whole point of the controller is to turn the complexity *down*.
### Furthermore, what will the actual system look like?
pictures of that have been floating around on the net for month.
### We will have to wait and see, but it is likely to play, yet again, on a normal and boring (although HD) television set.
Yes, normal TV, but no HD, Nintendo has multiple times said that they won't go HD-TV to reduce the cost of the console.
### A little while back a homemade CGI animation "advertisement" video floated around, purporting to show the Nintendo "RevolutiON". It turned out to be nothing more than a very well made fan video (very well made)
The real Nintendo Revolution is actually quite close to the system shown in that video, sure you don't have a headset, but having a 3D-mouse, which the Revolution controller is after all, is the first step into 'real' VR. Take two of those controllers, add a headset and you have most of 'NintendoON'.
### Unfortunately, due to the failure of the Virtual Boy, we will likely never see a system like this appear,
I wouldn't say never, but such system have some huge throuble to appeal to a wider audience, since they bring all kinds of throuble with them (motion sickness, headaches, etc). Beside from that today even something simple as a joystick for the PC seems already be enough to turn people away, so everything has to be dumped down to work with mouse and keyboard. So if you can't even get people to buy joysticks, getting them to buy VR glasses will be a long way.
Re:Please explain... Nintendo Nazi's?
on
20 Years of NES
·
· Score: 1
### So please explain.. how in hell did Nintendo some how be come a gaming saviour?
Nintendo wasn't the first when it comes to Videogames, nobody ever claims that, but they seem to have come in at a point were the industrie in the USA where at a pretty low point, which is why some might see them as saviour:
C64, Amiga and AtariST never played that much of a role in the USA or Japan as they did in Europe from what I understand, so its understandable that they don't get that much coverage from there.
And just for the record, Turrican and Giana Sisters, two of the most popular games for the C64 and Amiga were heavily inspired by SuperMarioBros and Metroid from Nintendo. So if you like it or not, Nintendo had a huge impact on the industrie as a whole, even so they were not the only ones.
### Since these systems have no advantage whatsoever over non-anonymous systems like Bittorrent except when being used to distribute material illegally,
Can't say about Mule, but one of the things I love about Freenet is that it totally gets away with central data storage, everything you upload becomes parts of the network and is requestable via a its checksum. The nodes share content completly automatically, so once something is uploaded nobody alone needs holds it. With Bittorrent or basically most other non-anonymous P2P on the other side content is still hosted centrally and people have to take care about what they want to make available to other, with Freenet on the other side you just say 'here is some free diskspace, use it for whatever you want'.
### if they just stick to compact flash for each console, they could have the ultimate in storage and compatibility
One problem I see with CompactFlash is that its pretty fragile, not the CF card itself, but the slot. If some child inserts the card sideways it should be pretty easy to get a few pins bend and thus rendering the slot and probally the whole console unusable. With todays propritary memory cards on the other side that impossible, since there simply is nothing that you can easily bend.
With the next console generation things are however changing, the Nitendo Revolution will use SD-cards and the Playstation3 uses MemoryStickDuos, XBox360 on the other side still uses its own propritary format for memory cards.
### You say that like it's a good thing. Much as I dislike the MPAA, the fact is that movies cost money to make.
I don't think his point was 'give me movies for free', but 'give me movies the way I like them'. Currently the movie industrie simply doesn't provide an alternative to P2P, if you want a movie at the same time it is in the cinema on your home screen you have to go to download it via P2P, there is no way to legally optain it. If you want some older movie again P2P is often the easiest alternative, getting it by legal means can be far harder. Since a few years we have the bandwidth to distribute movies online, the movie industrie however still almost completly fails to deliever its movies via that media in an acceptable form.
### DS' wireless protocol being different than 802.11
The DS 'talks' 802.11, however when two DSs connect to each other directly they don't use TCP/IP, but some custom proprietary protocol. Internet enabled games however should be able to use normal TCP/IP, so they should also work via any normal WiFi router.
The NintendoDS doesn't even have a TCP/IP stack in its current form, so you can't do anything on the Internet with the DS alone, the games however might provide a browser or similar software and there is some rumour about PalmOS for the DS, however if that will ever happen is a different story.
### All of which were general-purpose computers and not game consoles.
Well, yes, thats kind of the point, if you remove the content control and let everybody develop for it, every computer becomes a 'general purpose' computer. An XBox or Playstation to which I connect a USB Keyboard and a harddisk is no less a general purpose computer then an Amiga was one, only difference is that Sony/Microsoft don't allow you to develop for it officially, while Commadore did allow you todo exactly that. Only different is really the control, not the hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
ACK, HD-DVD as a add-on would fail, on the other side it shouldn't hurt if Microsoft added HD-DVD support in later XBox360s, of course it would be unusable for games since not all XBox360s would have it, but as a added bonus for XBox-as-MediaCenter it might be quite nice.
### Please define "bad graphics".
"Unpleasent to look at"
I havn't played Bone yet, but the screenshots look rather ugly, the same 'ugly' that was already present in Sam'n Max2 screenshot. And no, that kind of ugly doesn't come from a lack of shaders, but from going 3D in the first place. Both Bone and Sam'nMax seem to be a perfect fit for good old classic 2D graphics, going 3D just trashes that style down, which is why I don't understand why they did go 3D. The old Sam'nMax looked perfectly fine and even today it looks still quite good, replace the 320x200 graphics with something along the lines of 1024x768 and you could reuse the graphics basically 1:1. There is no need for 3D shaders and all, they should have simply skipped all that completly.
That said, I don't mind use of 3D in adventures, Fahrenheit looks briliant in 3D, but for comic style graphics I don't consider 3D much of a good choice, sometimes cell-shading can help to get the style closer to classic 2D look, but they didn't even use that in either Bone or Sam'nMax2.
### Because is the real controversy about GTA is that you're driving around a city, whacking mobsters and the like? Uhhh. No. The real controversy is that GTA gives you a living city that you can drive around in, and do basically whatever you want in.
Whatever you want, as long as it involves a lot of violence, stealing, robbery, etc. that is... Heck, GTA isn't a sandbox game, it has maybe some elements of it and a much wider varity of missions then most games but in the end you still have to do whatever the developers planed for you to do and that involves violence for most part. Maybe I missed something, but last time I locked you couldn't make it very far in the game without using violence, sure you can steal a police car or a firetruck and have fun for a few minutes, but that won't bring you very far anytime soom.
If GTA really would be a free-form sandbox game and had probally a bit more realistic damage model, so you couldn't go massacre dozens or hundreds of people without getting yourself in basically no throuble at all, I doubt there would be much uproar, but in GTA a play a criminal and have to commit crime. So will the uproar might not be valid, its quite understandable.
If you look around the adventure genre is far less dead than many people claim, with AnotherCode/TraceMemory and Phoenix Wright there are two decent ones for the NintendoDS, there also was Fahrenheit recently for PC, XBox and PS2, soon there will be Dreamfall and if you look a bit in the past there was The Moment of Silence, Westerner, Black Mirror, Runaway, Syberia, Still Life and plenty of others. Not all of them might be up to the legendary LucasArts ones, but many of them are still quite good, some, like Fahrenheit, even try something different then classic point&click and succeed at doing so, some other of course not so much (BrokenSword3).
So while the adventure genre has far less games to offer then the first person shooter genre, there are still plenty of gems available that shouldn't be missed and several other on the way. The adventure genre seems to have found it niche to live in.
No idea what the real reasons are, but I would guess one would be that Gnome is simply, less config options to tweak and to get wrong then KDE thus less support costs.
From a pure game mechanics points of view I agree with you, the puzzles aren't so special and the fights are actually plain boring. Nothing so great in that area. So if you are looking for great game mechanics you probally won't find them in Ico. However, except the fighting, which I really consider pretty annoying and pointless, the stuff doesn't get much in the way either and in the end the game really is more about the experince and athmosphere then about the pure game mechanics. Few games before or after it manage to create such a dense and uniq athomsphere and thats what the game is all about in the end, its an experince and less something that is actually fun in the normal sense. It takes quite a while to get into and you probally need to be in the right mood for this type of game, but if you are it simply makes you go 'wow'.
There should be either an option in the preferences or if that still isn't the case, you can use gconf-editor to turn Naulitus into browse-mode at default: /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_browser
About less direct access, yes, Gnome only exposes the important stuff via the GUI, rest is only available via gconf-editor, however I havn't found that to be much of a problem, since gconf entries are documented and searchable it isn't much of a problem to find them.
In the end I think Gnomes by far biggest problem is Nautilus and they should have got rid of that years ago, it never was pretty, it was extremly slow, down to simply being completly unusable for large directories for years and only got fixed resently, I have no idea why they picked at the default file browser. There are many aspects that I love about Gnome, but I could never stand using Nautilus for longer periods of time, it simply makes so much obvious things just plain wrong. Gnome should have choosen Rox, turn that a bit more into a Gnome app and be done with it, it provides a much more sane user experince.
### Basically, they're selling you what fair use already allows you to do!
That however would requires that you already have the book at hand, which most often you don't.
### You forget that the FSF zealots believe that commercial software is inherantly evil.
No, they only think closed source software is evil, commercial software is quite fine for them, you can even order from them: https://agia.fsf.org/order/ if you want to.
From all the providers I had in the years nobody of them ever had the alt.binary.* groups available. So which provider actually do have them available and how are they surviving in todays times where sharing a little bit of music can get you jail time?
### 8 bit colour is pretty much "enough". I realize this may sound like the infamous 640K is enough for anybody, but really, in this case it pretty much is.
It really depends on what one wants, if one simply wants photo or tv quality on a monitor then yep, 8bit is enough and if it isn't then maybe 12bit is enough, but you don't really need much beyond that. However when it comes to a true representation of reality 8bit for sure arn't enough, just compare the picture on your monitor to the 'picture' that you get when you look out of the window, the monitor is not quite up to that quality level and a few more bits and a few more levels of brightness could help quite a bit. However all that would be beyond 'photorealism', so in the end I doubt that it will come one day, but probally not anytime soon, especially in mass-media.
### Shh! You're not supposed to ask questions like this. Console proponents hate when you point out that an RTS or FPS completely sucks ass on these "gaming systems".
They don't suck, its simply a matter of getting the controls and gameplay balanced. Nobody doubts that you can aim more precisly with the mouse, but in the end its a completly non-issue in singleplayer games, since a little bit of auto-aim can make up for the difference. At the extreme end you can also do it like MetroidPrime and go for lock-on, no precise aiming required at all, yet the game seems still to be extremly popular. Pikmin was quite cool as well, again just a matter of figuring out controls that work with what you have. If you of course just brute force port a game from PC to Console you will have some throuble, but then jump'n runs don't play that good with mouse either.
### It's completely beyond me why anyone with the option not too should continue to use a mouse in the first place.
One reason, at least for me, is that trackballs suck for drag&drop, be it dragging files around or simply doing a rectangle selection, because those force you to old down one finger in a fixed position and wiggle around with another to move the cursor, feels very unnatural. Whenever I have a task that involves lots of drag&drop I switch back to mouse (Blender, gaming, etc). That said I find a trackball at the right side of the keyboard extremly usefull, especially when doing keyboard heavy tasks (Emacs), since its much quicker to reach then the mouse at the right side due to the numpad which is in the way. And while the Marble Mouse Trackball is quite nice, have one of those too, last not least because it was the only one for the left end, I found those trackballs that require your thumb to navigate the trackball extremly unconfortable, while they might be good for your wrist, they kill your thumb.
### How is 120 fps going to be better if you can't even distinguish it?
You can, probally not easily and probally not everybody (think eSport people), but 60fps is certainly not the upper end. You can for example quite easily distinguish a 60Hz monitor refresh rate from 100Hz, while not directly comparable to screen redraws, it shows that there is still room bejoint 60Hz. Its of course also true that 30fps with motion blur are enough for many uses, but if I could 120fps instead of 60fps I wouldn't say no. If the PS3 really is that powerfull, way not?
### It should have been a GBA title.
Well, it kind of already was a GBA title, three of them actually (Circle of the Moon, Harmony of Dissonance, Aria of Sorrow). Dawn of Sorrow doesn't really have much to set it appart from the rest, it feels pretty much like Aria of Sorrow just with improved graphics and new levels, even the enemies are for large part identical. However overall I like Dawn of Sorrow, it looks a lot better then the GBA titles, and while the stylus stuff doesn't add that much to the gameplay its a nice addition, I agree however that having action on top and map on bottom would have been better, stylus stuff would still have be performable if they simply switch from map to a special stylus screen in the few situations where it is needed.
### Giana Sisters was "one of the most popular games for the Amiga"?
Well, it probally was more popular on the C64 then on the Amiga, but it was quite popular back then. Might not have sold a lot due to being removed from the shelfs, but it was copied a heck of a lot and I wouldn't be suprised if most people have it in their personal top-ten list of C64 games.
### Will players like having the complex system this controller offers?
5 -468e-accd-c68afd37d282.jpg
What complex system? The controller as two buttons for actions, the rest is all done via hand movement. The whole point of the controller is to turn the complexity *down*.
### Furthermore, what will the actual system look like?
Like this:
http://media.nintendo.com/mediaFiles/d1ab3f47-ac8
pictures of that have been floating around on the net for month.
### We will have to wait and see, but it is likely to play, yet again, on a normal and boring (although HD) television set.
Yes, normal TV, but no HD, Nintendo has multiple times said that they won't go HD-TV to reduce the cost of the console.
### A little while back a homemade CGI animation "advertisement" video floated around, purporting to show the Nintendo "RevolutiON". It turned out to be nothing more than a very well made fan video (very well made)
The real Nintendo Revolution is actually quite close to the system shown in that video, sure you don't have a headset, but having a 3D-mouse, which the Revolution controller is after all, is the first step into 'real' VR. Take two of those controllers, add a headset and you have most of 'NintendoON'.
### Unfortunately, due to the failure of the Virtual Boy, we will likely never see a system like this appear,
I wouldn't say never, but such system have some huge throuble to appeal to a wider audience, since they bring all kinds of throuble with them (motion sickness, headaches, etc). Beside from that today even something simple as a joystick for the PC seems already be enough to turn people away, so everything has to be dumped down to work with mouse and keyboard. So if you can't even get people to buy joysticks, getting them to buy VR glasses will be a long way.
### So please explain.. how in hell did Nintendo some how be come a gaming saviour?
1 983
Nintendo wasn't the first when it comes to Videogames, nobody ever claims that, but they seem to have come in at a point were the industrie in the USA where at a pretty low point, which is why some might see them as saviour:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_
C64, Amiga and AtariST never played that much of a role in the USA or Japan as they did in Europe from what I understand, so its understandable that they don't get that much coverage from there.
And just for the record, Turrican and Giana Sisters, two of the most popular games for the C64 and Amiga were heavily inspired by SuperMarioBros and Metroid from Nintendo. So if you like it or not, Nintendo had a huge impact on the industrie as a whole, even so they were not the only ones.
### Since these systems have no advantage whatsoever over non-anonymous systems like Bittorrent except when being used to distribute material illegally,
Can't say about Mule, but one of the things I love about Freenet is that it totally gets away with central data storage, everything you upload becomes parts of the network and is requestable via a its checksum. The nodes share content completly automatically, so once something is uploaded nobody alone needs holds it. With Bittorrent or basically most other non-anonymous P2P on the other side content is still hosted centrally and people have to take care about what they want to make available to other, with Freenet on the other side you just say 'here is some free diskspace, use it for whatever you want'.
### if they just stick to compact flash for each console, they could have the ultimate in storage and compatibility
One problem I see with CompactFlash is that its pretty fragile, not the CF card itself, but the slot. If some child inserts the card sideways it should be pretty easy to get a few pins bend and thus rendering the slot and probally the whole console unusable. With todays propritary memory cards on the other side that impossible, since there simply is nothing that you can easily bend.
With the next console generation things are however changing, the Nitendo Revolution will use SD-cards and the Playstation3 uses MemoryStickDuos, XBox360 on the other side still uses its own propritary format for memory cards.
### You say that like it's a good thing. Much as I dislike the MPAA, the fact is that movies cost money to make.
I don't think his point was 'give me movies for free', but 'give me movies the way I like them'. Currently the movie industrie simply doesn't provide an alternative to P2P, if you want a movie at the same time it is in the cinema on your home screen you have to go to download it via P2P, there is no way to legally optain it. If you want some older movie again P2P is often the easiest alternative, getting it by legal means can be far harder. Since a few years we have the bandwidth to distribute movies online, the movie industrie however still almost completly fails to deliever its movies via that media in an acceptable form.
Time to start a 'Burn all XML' capain and get everybody to switch the good old S-Expressions =;)
### DS' wireless protocol being different than 802.11
The DS 'talks' 802.11, however when two DSs connect to each other directly they don't use TCP/IP, but some custom proprietary protocol. Internet enabled games however should be able to use normal TCP/IP, so they should also work via any normal WiFi router.
The NintendoDS doesn't even have a TCP/IP stack in its current form, so you can't do anything on the Internet with the DS alone, the games however might provide a browser or similar software and there is some rumour about PalmOS for the DS, however if that will ever happen is a different story.
### All of which were general-purpose computers and not game consoles.
Well, yes, thats kind of the point, if you remove the content control and let everybody develop for it, every computer becomes a 'general purpose' computer. An XBox or Playstation to which I connect a USB Keyboard and a harddisk is no less a general purpose computer then an Amiga was one, only difference is that Sony/Microsoft don't allow you to develop for it officially, while Commadore did allow you todo exactly that. Only different is really the control, not the hardware.