That might have been true some three years ago, but its constantly improving at rapid speed since it went OpenSource. True, it has still some uglynesses here and there, but overall once you learn the interface, now easier then ever with all the official docu and the video tutorials available, its very pleasant and comfortable to use. Sure, you have to remember some keyboard shortcuts to use it well, but everything is now available via menu too.
'Non-game' refers to games that have no clear goal or end, but which are more like a sandbox, give the player a few toys and let him play, without dictating the direction into which the player plays.
### May as well do a second pass with/dev/random, though it's not like the cops are going to send your drive in for forensic recovery unless you're a big fish./dev/random is a bad idea since it tries to create true randomness and thus takes basically forever to produce any output worth to talk about. So unless you want to wait a few month till its done you better use/dev/urandom which is much faster since it doesn't try to create true randomness.
### How long until there are televised Madden games?
Over here in germany we have a tv show sending four hours a week exclusivly about eSports, havn't seen Madden there, but plenty of Fifa, Pro Evolution Soccer and all those other games.
Back at the time when I used Win95 there was a collection of tools called PowerToys, they provided a "Send To->Command", should be easy to get the job done with that given you have a zip tool that works without GUI (infozip or so might do) and especially without shareware reminder...
### No GUI makes this easy to do.
Sure, you just need to know how to use them. Not all todays GUI make it always easy, but there is nothing fundamentally wrong with GUIs that makes such jobs hard, quite the opposite actually. A GUI could do (not saying that todays GUI actually do) *everything* you do with a shell and *more*, simply because there is nothing that the shell can do and the GUI can't, remember the GUI has tons of windows listboxes and text-input, while the shell only as text-input.
I really don't care if Zelda comes in cell-shading look or with a more realistic look, I think both look fine. What I however care about is gameplay and the world in which it plays and seriously Zelda couldn't grab me on that one for a long long time.
Each Zelda game so far felt the same, basically like a set of script-triggers and dungeons hold together by some duct tape. Running through a town in Zelda doesn't feel like running through some town in a fantasy world, but more like running through a town full of braindead sprites. Hardly anybody ever moves and basically nobody has ever anything meaningfull to say. All people are simply waiting for Link to ask them, they don't feel like having a live of their own. Its also the same with the puzzles, its always 'find special item', 'use special item to open door/blockade/etc.' or 'find small key', 'use small key (and lose it...)', etc.. While that was quite original a decade ago, it feels today like the red, blue, green keys in Doom, ie. stupid things to force you run around a bit, but don't really have any purpose of their own. This is made even worse since plenty of items are always the same and even those that are different often have the same purpose as previous items. Its just so boring and predictable.
I really would like to love the Zelda games, the controls in Zelda games are still a lot better than many other such as Drakan or Gothic. The Zelda games also feel far more polishes and finished then those two. But when it comes to exciting worlds Drakan or Gothic simply feel lightyears ahead of Zelda, since the worlds in them look far less 'prepared for the player by the gamedesigner', but more live-like.
### I have yet to see a GUI that allows me to select files in this manner
Its called Windows95[1] and doable with a few button presses:
Press "F3" to get the search dialog Type "*.c *.h" into the search box Press "Return" start the search Open Explorer and go to/var/backup/ Back in the search dialog select 'Mark all' and drag&drop all files over to/var/backup
Or in Rox:
Press '?' to get the select dialog Enter "'*.h', '*.c'" Right-Click 'Send To' to send them to a previously configured application
I would even go so far to say that such stuff is not only doable, but also far easier and more secure via a real GUI, since unless with the Shell I actually see what stuff my search expression actually matches and I can also manually tweak the selection if needed. Oh, and it also doesn't do random stuff if a newline or space ends up in the filename, unless most shell one-lines which simply can't handle unnormal filenames[2]. Its true that I still will have a hard time to make this more automatic, but a proper macrorecorder would fix that (not sure if MacOSX can do that, but it has a macro recorder).
Yes, the shell is extremly powerfull and flexible, but its also chumbersome and error prone at the same time. From tomorrows UI I would expect that it combines the power of the shell with easy preview and sane filename handling (ie. use real objects instead of plain strings to refer to a file) that you get in today GUIs.
### Suggesting that the corners of the screen ought to do something is right out of the stone age, too. Stop making me move my mouse cursor all over the place. I hate that.
You have to take Fitt's laws into account, the corners are *by far* the most easy to reach places, since you don't need todo anything beside throwing your cursor into their direction to hit them.
[1] Sadly in more recent Windows version they have replaced the great Win95 search dialog with some stupid annoying dog which makes that process a lot more complicated...
[2] Yes, 'find . -name "*.[ch]" -exec mv --target-directory/var/backup {} \;' or so should fix this case, but doing robust one-liners is extremly difficult.
### That's funny....I was under the impression that preferences were exactly the answer to this issue.
The problem with preferences is that they are quite often not used to configure important stuff, but more in a terms of "We don't know how to do it correctly, so lets the user figure it out himself via Prefs". This than leads to inconsistency and throuble, since you can't predict how stuff will work on the users computer (MacOSX style menu at top is not much fun with focus-follows-mouse, etc.).
But I agree that configurabilty is absolutly important especially for the UI of tomorrow. Tomorrows UI must be able to adopt to whatever problem I throw at it, but at its core it has to be consistent, so that even which changed preferences there is stuff one can depend upon when developing applications.
If Myth had killed the adventure genre, we would be flooded know with Myst-style adventures, but we aren't. Actually I can hardly remember any adventure game in Myst-style that got popular on a larger scale beside Myst itself. What killed adventure was the race for better graphics, adventure simply never could offer any advances in terms of graphics, it was always 2d background + 2d sprites and it worked for the games, but not in the eyes of the publisher. In addition to that we got such hopeless tries to 'improve' adventure games via pseudo-3D in Grim, Monkey4 or more recently BrokenSword3, which simply made the games a lot less playable then the predecessors, without adding anything in terms of gameplay.
### And that is usually around 30 frames per second for most individuals
Detecting a difference between 30fps and 60fps is pretty easy for basically any gamer, detecting a difference between 60fps and 100fps already gets a bit more difficult, but is still doable for many people. So up until you have at the very least 60fps, better 100fps, constantly in all situations I wouldn't call the framerate irrelevant, sure, a game gets playable much earlier, but that wasn't the point. Everything above 100fps gets rather irrelevant quickly since it goes bejoint monitor refresh rates, but the human can pretty well detect framerate changes well bejoint 30fps.
### Maybe, we are reaching the point where there simply aren't any more new ideas to do.
Even just looking at the games of the past I see tons of genres and gameplay areas that have been mostly lost in time and are today ignored for most part. Simply revisiting older games (by that I mean staying true to their nature, not turning them into yet-another-FPS) could already spawn a heaplot of new and fresh ideas, which are basically nowhere seen in todays games. This would of course still be 'recycling', but it shows that there are plenty of areas left to either explore or even uncover in the first place.
WarioWareTouched has multiplayer, its however 'two person on a single DS'-multiplayer. Can't remember what multiplayer games are included, but one is a simple ping pong game where one player plays with L and the other with R.
### I just don't think that kind of game mechanic is immersive in the slightest.
As with most of the other points it again depends on the type of game. In pure action games I agree quicksave can ruin the game, since part of the gam e is actually remembering the enemies movement and using that info on the second try. However in more free form games like DeusEx or OperationFlashpoint I find that quicksave makes those games a lot of more fun, since quicksave gives you a hell of a lot more freedom to experiment with different tactics. They give you a way to explore how a scenario would have evolved if you would have done things different, something that wouldn't be possible without quicksave, since the situation can turn out completly different on a retry.
### 11. [...] On the PC, configurable keys are standard.
Sadly this is only true for keyboard keys, free configuration of joystick axis and buttons is still quite seldomly seen in PC games, thus a lot of games are unplayable with the control device of your choice. Having rudders and throttle mixed up and no way to fix is another good way to ruin the fun. Luckily many joystick/gamepad drivers come with a way to remap joystick buttons to keyboard keys, which at least helps to get some games playable, but its still rather ugly to force the user into falling back to a non-standard third party configuration tool to get a game playable.
A favorit example would be Gothic, perfect controlls for a gamepad, except that it doesn't support a gamepad, hrmpf...
Don't see anything fundamentally complicated in the config file. Only thing that can be a bit confusing is that grub uses other Devicenames then Linux, but since you can tab-complete your way around the filesystem its not that difficult to find them out:
title Windows NT/2000/XP (loader) root (hd0,0) makeactive chainloader +1
title Debian GNU/Linux root (hd1,0) kernel/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.11-1-k7 root=/dev/hdb1 ro acpi=off single initrd/boot/initrd.img-2.6.11-1-k7
While the road that Gnome takes is certainly a very rough and often frustrating one, I am extremly happy that they are taking it. Yes, the other button order can be confusion, the tab-completion in the new file dialog is still rather broken and nautilus is still the same pile of junk that it was from day one, but in the end they are taking that road not to please you today with what you are used to, but to please you in the long run, by doing things the 'right' way, instead of the used one. I sure would have been happier if the switch from Gnome1.4 to Gnome2.0 would have been a less dramatic feature-removal cut, but on the other side now with Gnome2.10 most of the stuff is back and better ordered and working then before.
Looking back at the past games from Nintendo over the last years many of them felt rushed, not up to the quality that one was used from Nintendo, be it MarioSunshine, ZeldaWindwaker, Pikmin or WarioWareTouched. So while a delay might be annoying, I strongly prefer a delayed game over a rushed one, especially on a console where you will be stuck with that game forever, on the PC at least a rushed game can with a bunch of patches be brought to the quality that it should have had from the begining.
### I've wondered, in a way, how anyone can not like Zelda.
I'll bite, I liked Zelda at the times of the NES, I liked it as well on the SNES, I loved it on the Gameboy with Links Awakening and recently I had plenty of fun with Zelda - FourSwords. But the rest of the series just bores me quite a bit, maybe not because its bad, but simply because its so annoying predictable and uninteresting for me. Its for most part the same pointless 'kill ganon' plot with no supprising twists throughout each and every game. All the characters are so empty and unreal, they just guide you from puzzle to puzzle, but don't really have any live of their own. The whole puzzles also have this totally fake feel to them, they feel like a level designer placed them there, basically never does a puzzle feel like it could have evolved out of the dynamics of the gameworld itself. Everything just feels extremly constructed. The the whole game boils down to:
1) walk around 2) find puzzle 3) solve puzzle 4) goto 1
With no real fun inbetween and the puzzles also end up being more annoying then fun, they also end up feeling the same, bomb here, move block there, play melodie, kill this monster, kill that monster... an endless pointless oddysee.
On the NES and SNES I might have fun with it because it was still something new and maybe because I was younger back then. LinksAwakening on the other side had by far the best story of all Zeldas around. FourSwords was fun because it was cooperative and had some new gameplay elements. But the rest, included OoT, just feld extremly tedious.
Slashdot Mirror
That might have been true some three years ago, but its constantly improving at rapid speed since it went OpenSource. True, it has still some uglynesses here and there, but overall once you learn the interface, now easier then ever with all the official docu and the video tutorials available, its very pleasant and comfortable to use. Sure, you have to remember some keyboard shortcuts to use it well, but everything is now available via menu too.
'Non-game' refers to games that have no clear goal or end, but which are more like a sandbox, give the player a few toys and let him play, without dictating the direction into which the player plays.
### May as well do a second pass with /dev/random, though it's not like the cops are going to send your drive in for forensic recovery unless you're a big fish. /dev/random is a bad idea since it tries to create true randomness and thus takes basically forever to produce any output worth to talk about. So unless you want to wait a few month till its done you better use /dev/urandom which is much faster since it doesn't try to create true randomness.
### How long until there are televised Madden games?
Over here in germany we have a tv show sending four hours a week exclusivly about eSports, havn't seen Madden there, but plenty of Fifa, Pro Evolution Soccer and all those other games.
### But they are all zip files
Back at the time when I used Win95 there was a collection of tools called PowerToys, they provided a "Send To->Command", should be easy to get the job done with that given you have a zip tool that works without GUI (infozip or so might do) and especially without shareware reminder...
### No GUI makes this easy to do.
Sure, you just need to know how to use them. Not all todays GUI make it always easy, but there is nothing fundamentally wrong with GUIs that makes such jobs hard, quite the opposite actually. A GUI could do (not saying that todays GUI actually do) *everything* you do with a shell and *more*, simply because there is nothing that the shell can do and the GUI can't, remember the GUI has tons of windows listboxes and text-input, while the shell only as text-input.
Yes, the layout is awful for the web, but at least they provide an alternative layout (little 'text' link at the bottom:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/print/9/4
I really don't care if Zelda comes in cell-shading look or with a more realistic look, I think both look fine. What I however care about is gameplay and the world in which it plays and seriously Zelda couldn't grab me on that one for a long long time.
Each Zelda game so far felt the same, basically like a set of script-triggers and dungeons hold together by some duct tape. Running through a town in Zelda doesn't feel like running through some town in a fantasy world, but more like running through a town full of braindead sprites. Hardly anybody ever moves and basically nobody has ever anything meaningfull to say. All people are simply waiting for Link to ask them, they don't feel like having a live of their own. Its also the same with the puzzles, its always 'find special item', 'use special item to open door/blockade/etc.' or 'find small key', 'use small key (and lose it...)', etc.. While that was quite original a decade ago, it feels today like the red, blue, green keys in Doom, ie. stupid things to force you run around a bit, but don't really have any purpose of their own. This is made even worse since plenty of items are always the same and even those that are different often have the same purpose as previous items. Its just so boring and predictable.
I really would like to love the Zelda games, the controls in Zelda games are still a lot better than many other such as Drakan or Gothic. The Zelda games also feel far more polishes and finished then those two. But when it comes to exciting worlds Drakan or Gothic simply feel lightyears ahead of Zelda, since the worlds in them look far less 'prepared for the player by the gamedesigner', but more live-like.
### I have yet to see a GUI that allows me to select files in this manner
/var/backup/ /var/backup
/var/backup {} \;' or so should fix this case, but doing robust one-liners is extremly difficult.
Its called Windows95[1] and doable with a few button presses:
Press "F3" to get the search dialog
Type "*.c *.h" into the search box
Press "Return" start the search
Open Explorer and go to
Back in the search dialog select 'Mark all' and drag&drop all files over to
Or in Rox:
Press '?' to get the select dialog
Enter "'*.h', '*.c'"
Right-Click 'Send To' to send them to a previously configured application
I would even go so far to say that such stuff is not only doable, but also far easier and more secure via a real GUI, since unless with the Shell I actually see what stuff my search expression actually matches and I can also manually tweak the selection if needed. Oh, and it also doesn't do random stuff if a newline or space ends up in the filename, unless most shell one-lines which simply can't handle unnormal filenames[2]. Its true that I still will have a hard time to make this more automatic, but a proper macrorecorder would fix that (not sure if MacOSX can do that, but it has a macro recorder).
Yes, the shell is extremly powerfull and flexible, but its also chumbersome and error prone at the same time. From tomorrows UI I would expect that it combines the power of the shell with easy preview and sane filename handling (ie. use real objects instead of plain strings to refer to a file) that you get in today GUIs.
### Suggesting that the corners of the screen ought to do something is right out of the stone age, too. Stop making me move my mouse cursor all over the place. I hate that.
You have to take Fitt's laws into account, the corners are *by far* the most easy to reach places, since you don't need todo anything beside throwing your cursor into their direction to hit them.
[1] Sadly in more recent Windows version they have replaced the great Win95 search dialog with some stupid annoying dog which makes that process a lot more complicated...
[2] Yes, 'find . -name "*.[ch]" -exec mv --target-directory
### That's funny....I was under the impression that preferences were exactly the answer to this issue.
The problem with preferences is that they are quite often not used to configure important stuff, but more in a terms of "We don't know how to do it correctly, so lets the user figure it out himself via Prefs". This than leads to inconsistency and throuble, since you can't predict how stuff will work on the users computer (MacOSX style menu at top is not much fun with focus-follows-mouse, etc.).
But I agree that configurabilty is absolutly important especially for the UI of tomorrow. Tomorrows UI must be able to adopt to whatever problem I throw at it, but at its core it has to be consistent, so that even which changed preferences there is stuff one can depend upon when developing applications.
Just out of interest, how does the result of that filter look? Don't have Photoshop, so I can't try myself.
They don't do that and that alone wouldn't help either, since then you simply take two pictures and compare which pixels are equal.
If Myth had killed the adventure genre, we would be flooded know with Myst-style adventures, but we aren't. Actually I can hardly remember any adventure game in Myst-style that got popular on a larger scale beside Myst itself. What killed adventure was the race for better graphics, adventure simply never could offer any advances in terms of graphics, it was always 2d background + 2d sprites and it worked for the games, but not in the eyes of the publisher. In addition to that we got such hopeless tries to 'improve' adventure games via pseudo-3D in Grim, Monkey4 or more recently BrokenSword3, which simply made the games a lot less playable then the predecessors, without adding anything in terms of gameplay.
#### The war didn't prevent any attacks on the US.
### And you know that how?
Maybe you have missed the fact that the US invaded the country, searched it for month and found absolutly no evidance of any plans to attack to US?
It seems less a problem of intelligence, but more one of money. Without a car and no place to go, its difficult to leave the city.
### And that is usually around 30 frames per second for most individuals
Detecting a difference between 30fps and 60fps is pretty easy for basically any gamer, detecting a difference between 60fps and 100fps already gets a bit more difficult, but is still doable for many people. So up until you have at the very least 60fps, better 100fps, constantly in all situations I wouldn't call the framerate irrelevant, sure, a game gets playable much earlier, but that wasn't the point. Everything above 100fps gets rather irrelevant quickly since it goes bejoint monitor refresh rates, but the human can pretty well detect framerate changes well bejoint 30fps.
### Maybe, we are reaching the point where there simply aren't any more new ideas to do.
Even just looking at the games of the past I see tons of genres and gameplay areas that have been mostly lost in time and are today ignored for most part. Simply revisiting older games (by that I mean staying true to their nature, not turning them into yet-another-FPS) could already spawn a heaplot of new and fresh ideas, which are basically nowhere seen in todays games. This would of course still be 'recycling', but it shows that there are plenty of areas left to either explore or even uncover in the first place.
WarioWareTouched has multiplayer, its however 'two person on a single DS'-multiplayer. Can't remember what multiplayer games are included, but one is a simple ping pong game where one player plays with L and the other with R.
### I just don't think that kind of game mechanic is immersive in the slightest.
As with most of the other points it again depends on the type of game. In pure action games I agree quicksave can ruin the game, since part of the gam e is actually remembering the enemies movement and using that info on the second try. However in more free form games like DeusEx or OperationFlashpoint I find that quicksave makes those games a lot of more fun, since quicksave gives you a hell of a lot more freedom to experiment with different tactics. They give you a way to explore how a scenario would have evolved if you would have done things different, something that wouldn't be possible without quicksave, since the situation can turn out completly different on a retry.
### 11. [...] On the PC, configurable keys are standard.
Sadly this is only true for keyboard keys, free configuration of joystick axis and buttons is still quite seldomly seen in PC games, thus a lot of games are unplayable with the control device of your choice. Having rudders and throttle mixed up and no way to fix is another good way to ruin the fun. Luckily many joystick/gamepad drivers come with a way to remap joystick buttons to keyboard keys, which at least helps to get some games playable, but its still rather ugly to force the user into falling back to a non-standard third party configuration tool to get a game playable.
A favorit example would be Gothic, perfect controlls for a gamepad, except that it doesn't support a gamepad, hrmpf...
Don't see anything fundamentally complicated in the config file. Only thing that can be a bit confusing is that grub uses other Devicenames then Linux, but since you can tab-complete your way around the filesystem its not that difficult to find them out:
/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.11-1-k7 root=/dev/hdb1 ro acpi=off single /boot/initrd.img-2.6.11-1-k7
title Windows NT/2000/XP (loader)
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
title Debian GNU/Linux
root (hd1,0)
kernel
initrd
How is that easier than:
/dev/hda /boot/grub/menu.lst
grub-install
nano
reboot
?
While the road that Gnome takes is certainly a very rough and often frustrating one, I am extremly happy that they are taking it. Yes, the other button order can be confusion, the tab-completion in the new file dialog is still rather broken and nautilus is still the same pile of junk that it was from day one, but in the end they are taking that road not to please you today with what you are used to, but to please you in the long run, by doing things the 'right' way, instead of the used one. I sure would have been happier if the switch from Gnome1.4 to Gnome2.0 would have been a less dramatic feature-removal cut, but on the other side now with Gnome2.10 most of the stuff is back and better ordered and working then before.
Looking back at the past games from Nintendo over the last years many of them felt rushed, not up to the quality that one was used from Nintendo, be it MarioSunshine, ZeldaWindwaker, Pikmin or WarioWareTouched. So while a delay might be annoying, I strongly prefer a delayed game over a rushed one, especially on a console where you will be stuck with that game forever, on the PC at least a rushed game can with a bunch of patches be brought to the quality that it should have had from the begining.
There is UFO: Alien Invasion which is based on Q2:
http://ufo.myexp.de/
And there is Nexuiz for Quake1:
http://www.nexuiz.com/
### I've wondered, in a way, how anyone can not like Zelda.
I'll bite, I liked Zelda at the times of the NES, I liked it as well on the SNES, I loved it on the Gameboy with Links Awakening and recently I had plenty of fun with Zelda - FourSwords. But the rest of the series just bores me quite a bit, maybe not because its bad, but simply because its so annoying predictable and uninteresting for me. Its for most part the same pointless 'kill ganon' plot with no supprising twists throughout each and every game. All the characters are so empty and unreal, they just guide you from puzzle to puzzle, but don't really have any live of their own. The whole puzzles also have this totally fake feel to them, they feel like a level designer placed them there, basically never does a puzzle feel like it could have evolved out of the dynamics of the gameworld itself. Everything just feels extremly constructed. The the whole game boils down to:
1) walk around
2) find puzzle
3) solve puzzle
4) goto 1
With no real fun inbetween and the puzzles also end up being more annoying then fun, they also end up feeling the same, bomb here, move block there, play melodie, kill this monster, kill that monster... an endless pointless oddysee.
On the NES and SNES I might have fun with it because it was still something new and maybe because I was younger back then. LinksAwakening on the other side had by far the best story of all Zeldas around. FourSwords was fun because it was cooperative and had some new gameplay elements. But the rest, included OoT, just feld extremly tedious.