Karateka was first, then Prince of Persia, then Another World and only then Flashback. That said, Flashback had the most fluent animation for quite a few years to come.
Super Mario Kart, the original for the SNES, is definitively not your average casual game, quite the opposite. Some characters such as Bowser or DonkeyKongJr are pretty much completly undriveable unless you have some real skill and tracks like Rainbow Road were the tiniest mistakes is punished by a huge time penalty isn't exactly what you expect from a casual game either. Now the Mario Karts that followed after it were very much tuned for casual gameplay, the insanely difficult Rainbow Road got a balustrade, making it completly harmless and boring and the hard to play characters got a lot easier and the overall singleplayer difficulty went down an order of magnitude.
Anyway, calling it the most influential game in history might be bullshit, but so would be calling any game, different games had influence in very different areas. However that doesn't mean that it influence wasn't huge. You just have to look at some pre-Super Mario Kart racing games to see that there was quite a bit of difference between what came before and what came after it. Super Mario Kart pretty much nailed all those elements that you consider given these days, replay, ghost driver, weapons, 3D track and plenty more.
Make X many embryos, and scan them for various traits. Pick the ones you want. Simple, and non threatening to the species.
Don't be so sure about that, after all we didn't need gene mucking to turn the Wolf into the Chihuahua. That said, it will be quite a while till this tech is applied to any significant number of humans to matter for the gene pool and once we are at that point, we likely have enough technology to just fix things when problems pop up.
Eroded? Plenty of countries never had a 'free speech' thing like the US in the first place, instead they have lightweight lookalikes that really aren't worth a damn.
Sure that you mean Strike Commander? I can't remember anything procedural in that game, maybe the terrain, but other then that it was a very artwork heavy game, quite similar to what we have today. Procedural stuff such in Elite or Elite2 on the other side was extremely impressive, whole solar systems that fit onto a floppy disk, neat stuff. But that was a long time ago and color swapping an image to produce yet another planet isn't going to impress people today. The big disadvantage of real 100% procedural graphics is that they are quite heavy on the CPU if you want to make stuff look good (see Roboblitz or those 64KB demos, tiny download, but requires quite a while till they are actually ready), so I don't think they will get all that much use in mainstream games for the time being (aside from a few oddballs like Spore).
However on the positive side of things proceduralism is sneaking into the backdoor, there are already plenty of games that use procedurally generates trees for example, those are all offline generated, so they don't grow in the game itself, but its a clear indication that when it comes to things like nature procedurally generated things look already more then good enough to be used in todays AAA games. Hopefully just a matter of time till somebody has a few spare cycles on the CPU left to let the procedure stuff happen in the game itself.
All that texture/model data aside, one thing that I find a little annoying is that the gameplay itself is still so very prescripted. Games like EF2000 or XCom:UFO had a full dynamic war going back in 1995 or even before that, yet todays FPS are more often then not just a rail shooter with a little free movement thrown in, times when an enemy actually surprises or when your doing actually has consequences are few and far between. If procedural levels are to much, I'd like to at least see some procedural enemy placement and movement. But as with all good things, it might just be a matter of time, after all Battlefield Bad Company already brought destructible walls not unlixe XCom:UFO back and we had games like Assassins Creed, which did a hell of a lot stuff right, before the developers ran out of ideas and implemented one of the lamest missions systems in history.
And also lets not forget that BluRay is pretty damn slow. In the case of MGS4 you needed 8 minutes of install time to the HD and then again like 4 minutes on each chapter change, not fun. Having gigantic amounts of storage isn't all that useful when you can't read them from the disc fast enough.
Somebody please correct me when I am wrong here, but I was under the impression that technology like those 240Hz TVs are meant for movies, not for games. As far as I understand it, they take a handful of frames and then calculate inbetweens to reduce the jitter when the camera is panning in a film. So far so good, the problem however is that they actually need the last frame before they can start displaying the first one, meaning they will generate plenty of lag, which is a non-issue for movies, but makes them unusable for gaming.
Freenet has an answer to the trust chaining problem.
I wouldn't call it an 'answer', because it is complete non-functional in practice, there are just way to few people in the world who have enough trustworthy friends who also run freenet to make it function and for those that have sneakernet likely runs a hell of a lot better. The whole problem with darknet is that it pretty much completly breaks apart when you add an untrusted friend, so you have to be really careful with whom you add, which in turn makes it impossible to get enough people.
If you would have send humans, they would have already left the planet years ago and never made that discovery in the first place. Oh, an of course it would have cost 1000 times as much as those rovers. Humans in space really only serves the purpose of learning how to keep humans alive in space, if you want to get actual science done, you are much better of spending that money robots.
I have far more sympathy for the continental European tendency to view sex as good and violence as bad
Actually this isn't fully true. While nudity is seen here (Germany) much more relaxed then violence, real actual sex really isn't, its just as illegal to make it available to anyone under 18 as it is in the USA. In practice this means you will see plenty of naked people and violence on normal broadcast TV, but never ever real sex.
Make school interesting enough that the students care and you won't have to punish them for getting bored. Make the classes small enough and students won't feel so disconnected that they think they can get away with ignoring the teacher.
Its easy to talk about individual punishment all day long, but thats ignoring that the system itself is broken and punishing the students won't fix that.
An earth devastated by an asteroid is still a much more friendly place to live on then either Moon or Mars. Self sustaining off-world colonies won't happen for many many years to come.
Some of us have been recording replays of interesting events back in 1991 in Indianapolis 500 on the Amiga, not exactly a new thing. Going trough the history of gaming shows up tons of cool things have seem to have been lost and forgotten.
You could say the same thing about every FPS that followed MIDI Maze. That still doesn't change the fact that Halo pretty much defined the console FPS as we know it today and that it had plenty of original elements that differed from your average PC FPS. Rechargeable shields, one-button grenades, only two carryable weapons, decent AI, vehicles and stuff were maybe not 100% new, but in days where most FPS followed the Doom formula and gave you a dozen carryable weapons, healthpacks and a grenade that you had to select from menu before you could use it, it was quite a refreshing change. And yeah, the whole online thing of course was kind of a big deal for console users as well.
The only exploit is the user herself. Just don't open attachments from people you don't know.
Viruses have already become more clever then that long ago, From headers have zero trust value and are constantly faked and using titles from documents found on a users disks have replaced non-trustworthy gibberish. So getting mail from a friend with trustworthy subject tells you little to nothing.
This really isn't something you can fix socially, if you could we would have already solved it. Its just a technical problem that needs fixing, a mail program should just run attachment in a chroot/jail/vm-like environment and the problem pretty much disappears.
Root access or not doesn't really matter if a virus wants to cause harm or spread itself, all the users data happens to be user accessible and his favorite email app and webstuff of course too. But even if that isn't enough, it wouldn't be to hard for a virus to fake a password prompt to catch the password or just to wait for the user to use sudo and then use it himself, since sudo is often used with a timeout that gives the user full root access without a password for a couple of minutes or even forever.
On normal single-user desktop the separation of root and user account is nothing more then a little annoyance then a real barrier for a virus writer.
Now that doesn't mean that one can't build a secure Linux box, Sugar on the OLPC tries something like that with each application running in its own isolated environment which would make it pretty hard to break out of, but your average Ubuntu box doesn't do that and likely won't until viruses become a real problem for Linux.
Wikipedia isn't a webdirectory or product comparison website or a webhost,
What exactly do you expect? Its software after all and knowing a bit about when it was first released, how it developed over time and what features it has now and on what systems it runs is almost everything you would want to know. Heck, most pages about movies, books and whatever don't really do much more then that.
Its much easier to put a link to a main clearinghouse for homebrew and let people go there and read about the thousands of home brew apps to their hearts content.
Except that doesn't work. History gets easily lost, since many projects don't keep a perfect track record over past versions. In case of homebrew things might get shutdown due to lawsuits or disappear for other reasons. Also the creators webpage might not exactly be very NPOV.
Knowing that RockingDude87 made a little application to blow up blocks with another colored block in 2004 for a school project doesn't give us any greater understanding of homebrew as a whole.
You are again trying to argue a strawmen again. Look for example at the pandora battery, kind of a 'big deal' in the PSP homebrew scene, yet Wikipedia currently doesn't mention it with a single word.
The advice wasn't faulty, Debians interpretation of it was, but thats not even the important point. The problem here was that Debian modified the software in the first place. Its Debians job to package software, not to mess around with it and modify it, but thats exactly what they did. And with a important piece like OpenSSL thats just inexcusable. Removing lines of code you don't understand just because valgrind cave errors on them is just complete incompetence.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see any turn-based strategy titles on the list like Langrisser, Fire Emblem, or Super Robot Taisen.
Advanced Wars is on there.
No Flashback (first motion capture)
Karateka was first, then Prince of Persia, then Another World and only then Flashback. That said, Flashback had the most fluent animation for quite a few years to come.
Super Mario Kart, the original for the SNES, is definitively not your average casual game, quite the opposite. Some characters such as Bowser or DonkeyKongJr are pretty much completly undriveable unless you have some real skill and tracks like Rainbow Road were the tiniest mistakes is punished by a huge time penalty isn't exactly what you expect from a casual game either. Now the Mario Karts that followed after it were very much tuned for casual gameplay, the insanely difficult Rainbow Road got a balustrade, making it completly harmless and boring and the hard to play characters got a lot easier and the overall singleplayer difficulty went down an order of magnitude.
Anyway, calling it the most influential game in history might be bullshit, but so would be calling any game, different games had influence in very different areas. However that doesn't mean that it influence wasn't huge. You just have to look at some pre-Super Mario Kart racing games to see that there was quite a bit of difference between what came before and what came after it. Super Mario Kart pretty much nailed all those elements that you consider given these days, replay, ghost driver, weapons, 3D track and plenty more.
Make X many embryos, and scan them for various traits. Pick the ones you want. Simple, and non threatening to the species.
Don't be so sure about that, after all we didn't need gene mucking to turn the Wolf into the Chihuahua. That said, it will be quite a while till this tech is applied to any significant number of humans to matter for the gene pool and once we are at that point, we likely have enough technology to just fix things when problems pop up.
Eroded? Plenty of countries never had a 'free speech' thing like the US in the first place, instead they have lightweight lookalikes that really aren't worth a damn.
(or at least since Strike Commander)
Sure that you mean Strike Commander? I can't remember anything procedural in that game, maybe the terrain, but other then that it was a very artwork heavy game, quite similar to what we have today. Procedural stuff such in Elite or Elite2 on the other side was extremely impressive, whole solar systems that fit onto a floppy disk, neat stuff. But that was a long time ago and color swapping an image to produce yet another planet isn't going to impress people today. The big disadvantage of real 100% procedural graphics is that they are quite heavy on the CPU if you want to make stuff look good (see Roboblitz or those 64KB demos, tiny download, but requires quite a while till they are actually ready), so I don't think they will get all that much use in mainstream games for the time being (aside from a few oddballs like Spore).
However on the positive side of things proceduralism is sneaking into the backdoor, there are already plenty of games that use procedurally generates trees for example, those are all offline generated, so they don't grow in the game itself, but its a clear indication that when it comes to things like nature procedurally generated things look already more then good enough to be used in todays AAA games. Hopefully just a matter of time till somebody has a few spare cycles on the CPU left to let the procedure stuff happen in the game itself.
All that texture/model data aside, one thing that I find a little annoying is that the gameplay itself is still so very prescripted. Games like EF2000 or XCom:UFO had a full dynamic war going back in 1995 or even before that, yet todays FPS are more often then not just a rail shooter with a little free movement thrown in, times when an enemy actually surprises or when your doing actually has consequences are few and far between. If procedural levels are to much, I'd like to at least see some procedural enemy placement and movement. But as with all good things, it might just be a matter of time, after all Battlefield Bad Company already brought destructible walls not unlixe XCom:UFO back and we had games like Assassins Creed, which did a hell of a lot stuff right, before the developers ran out of ideas and implemented one of the lamest missions systems in history.
And also lets not forget that BluRay is pretty damn slow. In the case of MGS4 you needed 8 minutes of install time to the HD and then again like 4 minutes on each chapter change, not fun. Having gigantic amounts of storage isn't all that useful when you can't read them from the disc fast enough.
Somebody please correct me when I am wrong here, but I was under the impression that technology like those 240Hz TVs are meant for movies, not for games. As far as I understand it, they take a handful of frames and then calculate inbetweens to reduce the jitter when the camera is panning in a film. So far so good, the problem however is that they actually need the last frame before they can start displaying the first one, meaning they will generate plenty of lag, which is a non-issue for movies, but makes them unusable for gaming.
Freenet has an answer to the trust chaining problem.
I wouldn't call it an 'answer', because it is complete non-functional in practice, there are just way to few people in the world who have enough trustworthy friends who also run freenet to make it function and for those that have sneakernet likely runs a hell of a lot better. The whole problem with darknet is that it pretty much completly breaks apart when you add an untrusted friend, so you have to be really careful with whom you add, which in turn makes it impossible to get enough people.
If you would have send humans, they would have already left the planet years ago and never made that discovery in the first place. Oh, an of course it would have cost 1000 times as much as those rovers. Humans in space really only serves the purpose of learning how to keep humans alive in space, if you want to get actual science done, you are much better of spending that money robots.
I have far more sympathy for the continental European tendency to view sex as good and violence as bad
Actually this isn't fully true. While nudity is seen here (Germany) much more relaxed then violence, real actual sex really isn't, its just as illegal to make it available to anyone under 18 as it is in the USA. In practice this means you will see plenty of naked people and violence on normal broadcast TV, but never ever real sex.
Make school interesting enough that the students care and you won't have to punish them for getting bored. Make the classes small enough and students won't feel so disconnected that they think they can get away with ignoring the teacher.
Its easy to talk about individual punishment all day long, but thats ignoring that the system itself is broken and punishing the students won't fix that.
An earth devastated by an asteroid is still a much more friendly place to live on then either Moon or Mars. Self sustaining off-world colonies won't happen for many many years to come.
Good old violence, yeah, if it doesn't work, use more of it...
So instead of fixing the problem of too large classes, we doctor around the symptoms. Good way to wreak an education system.
And Halo 3 introduced the "Theater" feature,
Some of us have been recording replays of interesting events back in 1991 in Indianapolis 500 on the Amiga, not exactly a new thing. Going trough the history of gaming shows up tons of cool things have seem to have been lost and forgotten.
God of War? Good? It's a boring version of Painkiller with a slightly better theme.
What has God of War to do with Painkiller? Those are some very different games you try to compare there.
You could say the same thing about every FPS that followed MIDI Maze. That still doesn't change the fact that Halo pretty much defined the console FPS as we know it today and that it had plenty of original elements that differed from your average PC FPS. Rechargeable shields, one-button grenades, only two carryable weapons, decent AI, vehicles and stuff were maybe not 100% new, but in days where most FPS followed the Doom formula and gave you a dozen carryable weapons, healthpacks and a grenade that you had to select from menu before you could use it, it was quite a refreshing change. And yeah, the whole online thing of course was kind of a big deal for console users as well.
The only exploit is the user herself. Just don't open attachments from people you don't know.
Viruses have already become more clever then that long ago, From headers have zero trust value and are constantly faked and using titles from documents found on a users disks have replaced non-trustworthy gibberish. So getting mail from a friend with trustworthy subject tells you little to nothing.
This really isn't something you can fix socially, if you could we would have already solved it. Its just a technical problem that needs fixing, a mail program should just run attachment in a chroot/jail/vm-like environment and the problem pretty much disappears.
Running Linux will.
Never underestimate the compatibility of Wine.
Root access or not doesn't really matter if a virus wants to cause harm or spread itself, all the users data happens to be user accessible and his favorite email app and webstuff of course too. But even if that isn't enough, it wouldn't be to hard for a virus to fake a password prompt to catch the password or just to wait for the user to use sudo and then use it himself, since sudo is often used with a timeout that gives the user full root access without a password for a couple of minutes or even forever.
On normal single-user desktop the separation of root and user account is nothing more then a little annoyance then a real barrier for a virus writer.
Now that doesn't mean that one can't build a secure Linux box, Sugar on the OLPC tries something like that with each application running in its own isolated environment which would make it pretty hard to break out of, but your average Ubuntu box doesn't do that and likely won't until viruses become a real problem for Linux.
and if that is the only source, how is wikipedia going to make it npov?
Its not the only source, you also have plenty of blogs, forums and all that stuff, but those of course isn't accepted for stupid reasons.
Am I? You're arguing for total inclusion.
I never argued for total inclusion, I argued against crazy deletionism.
As yes there is no article on the pandora's battery because the only source is the battery itself. Nothing else.
Its information that everybody with a PSP can verify if he wants to. That stuff is even sold on Amazon.
As I've also pointed out if you're worried about information being lost, start a wikia about it.
I consider splits and forks and stuff a part of the problem, not the solution.
Wikipedia isn't a webdirectory or product comparison website or a webhost,
What exactly do you expect? Its software after all and knowing a bit about when it was first released, how it developed over time and what features it has now and on what systems it runs is almost everything you would want to know. Heck, most pages about movies, books and whatever don't really do much more then that.
Its much easier to put a link to a main clearinghouse for homebrew and let people go there and read about the thousands of home brew apps to their hearts content.
Except that doesn't work. History gets easily lost, since many projects don't keep a perfect track record over past versions. In case of homebrew things might get shutdown due to lawsuits or disappear for other reasons. Also the creators webpage might not exactly be very NPOV.
Knowing that RockingDude87 made a little application to blow up blocks with another colored block in 2004 for a school project doesn't give us any greater understanding of homebrew as a whole.
You are again trying to argue a strawmen again. Look for example at the pandora battery, kind of a 'big deal' in the PSP homebrew scene, yet Wikipedia currently doesn't mention it with a single word.
The movie is not about Gordon Freeman, which elegantly sidesteps that problem.
The advice wasn't faulty, Debians interpretation of it was, but thats not even the important point. The problem here was that Debian modified the software in the first place. Its Debians job to package software, not to mess around with it and modify it, but thats exactly what they did. And with a important piece like OpenSSL thats just inexcusable. Removing lines of code you don't understand just because valgrind cave errors on them is just complete incompetence.