Here is a simple test, take that deep blue computer and replace the chessboard with a checkers board. Or a go board. Watch it flounder. I don't know kasparov but I am fairly certain that he would be able to cope JUST like every other non-retarded person in this world.
That is intelligence. The capabilty to react to a constantly changing world.
Humans can react to changing circumstances that are outside their current experiences. Basically they can react outside of their programming/training. Computers still cannot. If you really want to see how true this is go to a car plant. Plenty of robots AND plenty of people with the job of making sure the robots don't get confused. Or doing small tasks that require human intelligence.
If you just paid attention. The balancing problem has been solved. What has not been solved is the power requirement and mechincal complexity. Simply put more legs equals more mechanics AND increases power consumption.
Balancing takes a lot of computer power while a multi legged construction can take all the time it needs to calculate the next move. However in the mean time computing power has improved so much that the problem has gone away.
Hell, people even got lego to balance. Such a system is so much simpler you drastically increase reliabilty. That is the reason you see this robot with two wheels. It works and is simple.
It is simply not true that multiple legs are easier to control. Balance is easier but moving is harder because you got to move more elements.
The idea is pretty good. Some people can spend an awfull lot of time in a game and worse they can stand to do all the time doing just 1 thing over and over to rake in the cash.
It is similar to the "exploits" in single player rpgs where a mob keeps respawning to give in theory infinite xp. If you got the patience to kill the same mob, go through the same conversation, clear the same dungeon again and again.
The problem is that most MMO designers are pretty clueless about basic economy (why do they insist on "repair" or whatever costs to get money out of the system instead of simple taxes?) but worse the few clever ones think that real world capatalism is the thing to emulate.
Small problem is that capatalism isn't much fun for the majority wage slaves. In real life the wage slaves ain't got much choice but in game they do. They can stop paying and find something else to do.
The problem is that unlike the real world it is very easy to calculate expenditure vs profit in an mmo. Weapon A costs so much but will allow me to gain that much profit in its lifetime that I make enough profit to buy a new one. In general the more powerfull a weapon the more costly but also the higher the return on investment. Result, in order to make a reasonable income you got to invest in good weapons meaning you have to do the money grind.
MMO's need to stop thinking they are single player games, they need to stop thinking that real world economics work in a fun enviroment.
Single player RPG economies are already screwed up enough. Or I am the only one swimming in unneeded and even unspendable money in games like Baldurs gate, Neverwinter Nights, Deus EX, Morrowind, etc etc. Add taxation and tax the high earners more. But at all costs avoid where a big enough group of superrich exists to ruin it for the rich. Or at least if you want this similarity of the real world add other things from the real world as well. REVOLUTION. Murderers and thiefs. Paternity suits and frivolous lawsuits.
But frankly there are so many problems to fix with the MMO scene. First they should figure out a way for a game to remain fun for month after month without betting on the "maybe I will have fun with just 1 more level" element.
But maybe a simple way of doing both is to decrease the reliance in combat on "super" weapons but instead make for a character depended weapon performance. Meaning that both a newbie and elite warrior use exactly the same weapon but the elite will just be better at it. No expensive gadgets needed then no need for gold to pay them. Focus on character development OVER gadget hoarding.
Hard? Well yes and no. Both EQ2 and WoW apparently have added more involved combat. Expand on this.
A PC is not a console. There is a reason PC gamers spend several times the amount console gamers do on hardware. It is not just penis extensions. We believe that in exchange for the much higher hardware costs we get much a different type of games that we enjoy more.
So why exactly is it such a bad idea? First off most PC games still come on CD because more people have a CD player then a DVD player. Going to DVD only games would be easier but so far no game company wants to take the risk of upsetting the non-dvd owners.
Second is do you really trust microsoft to choose the most optimal installation place for your games? Not everyone of us have just one partition.
Third you can say goodbay to editing your game files if they are on a read only media. Many PC games have a happy modding community that is unique to PC gaming. But this works only if you can modify the game files.
Fourth many people who buy their games in the shop still use no-cd fixes because it allows them to play the game they want without first searching for the CD. I am even worse as my gaming PC is a monster wich makes a lot of noise so I put it in another room two doors away. Going back to the days of searching through a stack of CD's before I can play is not a step forward.
Fifth is that no matter how much more advanced DVD players become they will always be lagging behind the speed of a HD.
Sixth wich problem does it really solve? People who think installing a game is to nerdie won't be using a PC for gaming in the first place.
But most important this is microsoft trying to be smart. I love the "Close Combat" series of games but it was a microsoft game and so unlike every other game of that era it required me to manaually set the color depth from 32 to 16 to play the game. Yes a microsoft game was not able to use directx to simply do that for me. If MS wants to make games easier then they should start with their own games. MS flight simulator playing from a readonly media? It would ruin the game.
Perhaps MS should do a test to see how many windows users have got the autoplay feature they added turned off.
You see it takes some time to get things out there. 30 years for these two so even if rocket engines have improved by leaps and bounds it will be a while before we can get anything else out there.
The history of the voyager missions is a real lesson in making do. That they still work at all tells you that 30 years ago nasa did a damn good job. Scrapping them to save a tiny handfull of cash seems however like a very typical thing for the americans to do. "Look we are cutting costs and giving the filthy rich tax breaks. Ain't we good!" No matter that canceling this project will means loss of data loss of jobs and the money will easily be used on some meaningless project that will never have half the impact but makes for better headlines.
Recently a dutch minister said he wanted to The Netherlands do have its own nasa. A few million is easily in our budget. Take it over from the americans and you got instant space mission rather then being the country that supplied the toilet paper for the international space station.
So much has changed. ID made it big with wolvenstein but really got well known for Doom. Even big enough to have talks of making a movie out of it and that is pretty big for a vid game.
Duke Nukem already existed as a platformer but after the success of doom it also went 3D. Or rather 2.5D if I remember correctly. Like Doom I don't recall being able to walk under things. Meaning the floor plan was essentially 1 story with differences in heights. Odd because at the same time the game System Shock did have a full 3D world although still using 2D sprites for characters.
Then in 1998 talk really started about a sequel being in the works. To give you an idea how old duke nukem 3D was then already. The new Duke Nukem would use the quake 2 engine. So ID had done Quake AND quake 2 by the time 3D realms was ready for its next attempt.
Since then ID has released Quake 3 and of course Doom 3. 3D realms in the mean time switched from the quake 2 engine to the unreal engine while over the years the unreal engine has had plenty of upgrades as well.
Luckily 3Dreals claims that they replaced most of the unreal code. Good thing because the original while ground breaking at the time is now a bit dated.
But not just graphics engines have changed. The pure "walk around shooting things and collecting key cards" thing has changed. Games like Half-Life added a story. Dues EX added character interaction beyond getting strippers to flash their titties and started with physics (I still love being able to shoot your rifle up in the air and then hearing the bullets fall back down). Half-Life 2 added an even better physics engine that worked on more of the world. Operation Flashpoint added huge outdoor worlds with vehicles.
No game has yet done it all but my fear is that Duke Nukem Forever is trying to do just that. Lets face it. They can't get away with a Doom or even a Quake clone. Unreal has beaten them to it. We gonna at least want a bit of story telling ala half-life. Some nice open levels at least of the unreal level if not Operation Flashpoint. Something to drive perhaps. Physics and some destruction of the level.
The bar just keeps being raised higher and higher for 3d realms. Who can beat the looks of Doom 3 (yeah yeah anybody that can put the pc monitor in power save mode)?
We all remember daikatana. Tried so much. Failed at even more.
Now 3D realms is using its own money to fund this so perhaps it is nothing more then an excentric rich guy funding some magazine that never makes a profit. Their money their right to waste it.
Frankly if the demo is half as good as it sounds then just release the damn game already. Either the demo is as fake as the Half-Life 2 E3 demo was OR 3D realms just is stuck because they want their game to be the best at everything and other game companies keep beating them by focusing on only a small section.
3D realms, there is room for more then 1 nice FPS out there. You don't need to be the best to win. Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 both had their missing features and did well. Just release and start work on Duke Nukem "and you thought the previous one took a long a time".
MPEG wich is the video codec for DVD's is a pretty old one. Modern hardware can do much more crunch work so can use a thighter compression method. DivX and others can easily be setup to not loose any image information. It would be like saying RLE encoded images are not as good quality as BMP let alone GIF. Different encodings. Exactly the same image IF you convert with lossless settings.
Further more during the encoding you can enhance the image wich would be to costly to do during live playback but doesn't matter during a one time encode.
Frankly a good encoder can really save a DVD suffering from blocks.
As for the sound. Well someone else already pointed out that DivX is for video not for sound. Most of the container formats (avi/ogm/mkv) allow you to use any audio codec you want.
Ease? Well lets see. Mplayer comes with linux easily and plays everything for free. DVD player costs money and requires me to open my PC. It is all relative.
Frankly I don't like DVD's. Why oh way do the search functions suck so much. Not to say anything of the FBI warnings. Only way I can see the warnings is if I got a legal copy. Kinda like the police pulling people who are driving the legal limit over telling them not to speed while letting the speeders go free.
DVD's you can keep them. Long live DivX/Xvid/Godknows(or cares) + audio codec in the container format of your choice. Just that the next person to mistake DivX for anything but a video codec will get one between the eyes.
In those days 64mb MAIN memory was the absolute minimum for a PC with that kind of cpu power. 128 was far more standard and any halfway serious gamer had more.
in fact if you had bought 64mb strips then you were being overcharged if you count the price per megabyte.
Does it hurt? Well yes. Look at the x-box/pc game morrowind. On the PC there was an awfull lot of loading for very small game zones. This was the same as in the x-box version. However the PC only expansion packs had much larger zones using the easily double amount of memory a PC has.
The x-box had 64mb total. PC has its main memory + video memory for the same job.
It is also the reason people complain about the small levels in games like Thief 3 and Dues EX 2 when compared with their PC only ancestors.
Speed matters little for this. Complex open levels (you can save memory by making only a small portion of a big level available to be viewed. Quake and doom used this an awfull lot) require lots of ram. Consoles don't have that.
I am most amazed by sony's reluctance to add more memory. Their own PC games EQ2 and Star Wars galaxies are memory hogs working only well with 1gb. Either the code is horrible OR they never want to put these games on a console.
True PC have higher resolutions wich means more space needed for textures BUT the gap between the 1gb that their own PC games require and the amount on offer in the current consoles is a bit big.
I guess memory is just to expensive. Oh and speedy stuff being more expensive? Well not entirely true. Don't forget the massive discounts you get when you order your memory by the truckload vs stick.
Why? Because VHS and DVD and CD are all brands. At one time you had both VHS and V2000 and betamax trying it JUST like the console wars of today. In those days if you walked into a video store you were often restricted in your choice of movies depending on wich brand player you had.
Oh and at the same time you also had laserdisc competing and of course the even older format of simple film reels.
That you now think of DVD or any of the others as a standard format independent of brand shows you either got a very short memory span or just don't pay much attention. For a more recent example look at the different formats depending on brand that DVD burners came in.
In the days of betamax you could pretty much count that every sony movie also came out on betamax. You are also far more likely to find sony music available on minidisc.
Further more your suggestion would ruin competition. The PC is like this were it doesn't matter wich brand PC I got I can play most games for the PC platform.
Sadly this also means an awfull lot of PC games are still compatible with old hardware. Consoles don't come out all at the same time and so will have very different hardware capabilties. I prefer my games to make the most of the hardware. Not for them to limit themselves to the most restricted console out there. The most obvious restriction being memory or the presence of a harddisk. Just because 1 console would not have a harddisk we would still be in the days of savepoints vs save anywhere on consoles like the x-box?
Your argument is both not true and would limit game developers. Just ask youreselve this. Is it a waste of shelve space for a supermarket to carry both Coca Cola and Pepsi? It is called choice. I prefer having it.
Kids of today got no....... We all know this line. We grow up hearing it and grow old saying it. It is how we work. Oh and those who claim they never say it because they are so in tune. Grow up.
Each new generation will try to find their own way in life. This is nothing new. What is new that each new generation in the last two centuries has some amazing new toys to do it with. Before the technology of the father was the same as of the son and for that matter the same as that of the grandfather.
Nowadays there are huge differences. My parents age had computers but they were like power stations. Used somewhere to do very important work but not something you ever expected to be working with. The idea that a major part of your freetime would be spend with it is alien to them. Same as say being glued to the tv was to their grandparents. Then again we can't see why our grandparents went to the movies to watch the news.
Different generations. Different technologies. Different ways of spending our free time.
The problem is that apart from not being able to see the value in the others generation toy is that each of the toys also has different morals.
A feature film can do with just 1 murder and last 1.5 hours. TV you then already got 2 programs so 2 murders. A session of half-life or whatever and 1.5 hours will get you a body count that would shock a WW2 veteran.
There are problems in the world but the world has always had problems. Youth gangs are nothing new but that doesn't make for gripping headlines. The media has for more influence in making us scared of loss of morals then in installing any morals.
So do I think game creators should apply morals to their games?
Well yes. I would dearly love to play RPG's were your moral choices really affected the game. An evil character will find progress easier and faster but pay the price of being hunted by the goverment and generally not being trusted by either lawfull and unlawfull people. But also were being a good character is HARD. Real hard. Of course this requires rpg's to get a decent economy first but lets make being good be something more then giving a few credits to some random npc when you are swimming in cash (my playstyle means I never spend on med packs and sell the med packs I find).
But as a final note I do remember on recent racing game that was set in cities in wich civilians could be run over. Not for points or anything just that they were impossible to avoid. That I found totally ammoral. It also just ruined any fun. Sure it was a console port but wouldn't the game have been more fun if you had to swerve to avoid hitting people. Maybe that level of driving is to hard with a gamepad.
But no. Games can't teach people morals. At a fundamental level I don't think morals can be thought unless at a very young age. Either you have learned that hurting other people is bad as a small child or you haven't.
Then again we are all immoral anyway. We are here wasting resources on meaningless drivel about games while childeren are starving. How moral is that.
I got 3 pc's (1 linux desktop 1 linux "server" and 1 windows 2003 game machine) The noise from them is pretty bad especially the desktop wich is an old kayah or whater hp called them.
Anyway invested in two 5 meter kvm cables and a switch and voila. INSTANT dead silence.
Only problem is CD's but I only need them for games and nocd patches are the best.
As for heat. It is a large closet with bare concrete walls and a high ceiling. During the peak of summer it gets uncomfortable at head lvl but the PC's are on the ground and kept cool by just having some big fans blowing directly across the motherboard.
Frankly it is the easiest method of silencing and the most effective. Just don't do it with earlier windows versions as you will get insane from the constant hard resets. Oh and to be fair from the hard resets when you are working on a new kernel config.
It is just your arrogance in thinking the world revolved around. Perfectly normal for a teenager but your missing the real impact star wars had.
It was a huge movie popular accross the ages. EVERYONE had seen the movie. Not everyone grew into rabid fans but it sure became a part of film history like few films have managed before or since.
The seond series is aimed at.... Well frankly I don't know. It is claimed by people like you that we are to old and if only we were still young we would enjoy it. HOWEVER if you look at kids today they are not liking it anywhere close to how much our generation like the originals. Epside 1-2 have not become part of movie history. Star wars toys are not a staple ingredient of every toystore.
I think there are two reasons. The real fans have since been exposed to some real quality star wars. Some of the books are just plain good. In away a movie just can't compete with a trilogy book. Simply put the star wars cast got themselves thoughts wich are easy to express in a book but very hard in a movie.
But I think the second reason is far simpler. George lucas is an excellent movie maker. An excellent producer but a lousy director. Excepts he seems to disagree and think he can direct. Perhaps he was not so arrogant during the orignals and those working with him could step in. Perhaps the stories were simpler requiring less acting and less directing. Perhaps the actors involved were better capable of resisting his bad direction.
But there may be a simpler reason after all. Episode 1 was not a movie of this time. The worlds tastes chance. A new hope had a fresh boy defeating the evil meanie. Was the audience of that day rooting for dart vader? Not really but now plenty of fans seem to want a far darker story with the villan being the hero.
We want our heros to be a little bit more grubby then a clean shaven curly blond haired boy.
Goverments care only about one thing and that is being re-elected. Why?
It is not all self-centered. Trying to introduce your policy is tricky. You can't do it immidiatly after an election because there is to much to do and your people ain't worked in yet. But after everything is settled in you only got a very small window to do something before the next election starts for the other part of goverment (senate vs congress?) and doing it to close to election is risky because the other side might capatalize on any bad publicity about it (true or not). Win that election and most of your people will have started to become to settled to influenced (corrupt if you like) and perhaps thinking about the next election where they might loose their jobs. Then it all starts over again.
Tackling the enviroment problems would be a huge headache. With only 2 years between elections no US goverment can really afford to cause an upset. Worse any halway decent effort would span several years. Introducing a tax rise now wich creates jobs in the next term? So the other side (because a tax rise will loose you the elections) can claim the job increase? Noway. Instant fixes or nothing.
It has nothing to do with wether it would really cost jobs or far more likely create jobs but with what the headlines say in the run up to the election.
Try to find out when was the last time older goverments really DID something. I mean something they pledged to do during election and then did and stuck with it.
Only a few generations we had things like "new deals" "national health service" "moon race" etc etc. Now ever minor reforms and projects get mired and just fizzle away.
Lets not forget that clinton did absolutly nothing for 8 years. And he is remembered as a good president. Americans don't like their goverment to do things. Other countries are not much different but america is hurting bad because of its two party system. Note that england wich is pretty close to only having two parties ain't doing to hot on reducing CO2 either.
In a country like the netherlands left wing means something entirly different then in the US and central parties better listen unless they want to loose massive votes to the left from people on the center left. In the US what are the left wing people going to do? Everything left of extreme-right has no choice but democrat unless they want their vote to be thrown away.
Even here we got a huge problem wich nobody wants to taggle. Farm subsidies. Effectively because of EU subsidies to farmer most of the food bought in stores is subsidised. Meaning that the prize you pay is not the real price but that part of it is payed through your taxes. Coupled with over production it leads to EU tax money being spend on shipping food under cost price to third world nations wich are pressured into buying it destroying the local farmers all at huge cost to the EU tax payer who could get the same cheap food from 3rd world countries who could also really use the income from selling their own food rather then importing western food.
But any party that would cut subsidies can count on blaring headlines about poor farmers being made jobless. Electoral suicide because even if you cut subsidies you will in the beginning have to spend the money saved on transit deals so no tax cut until much later (AFTER you lost the election).
First shoot the lawyers might be a nice thought but if we really want to fix the world it would be better to first shoot the reporters. As long as they make their living by creating hype and fear no goverment can do anything.
Not all security holes are the same. I remember one MS study wich showed that Apache was less secure the ISS. They also just counted the security alerts. This was not so long after all that red worm and other crap.
So everyone just laughed and spotted the fatal flaw. There is a HUGE difference between a security hole that is wide open on EVERY install of your OS even if the user never installed the webserver part on purpose (ISS) vs most of the apache ones wich only applied if your installed some obscure expansion.
What counts is not the number of security problems but how serious they are and how many people are affected.
The real truth is the there are lies, damn lies and statistics. You can always twist the figures to suit your angle. Measure the number of "hacked" sites? But do you count "amateur" sites? How do you classify "amateur" sites. Measure the amount of security holes in a default install? But MS OS used to install ISS default even if never used making the chance of a ISS having the default setup far greater then on a linux install. Hell most "proper" distros only install what you want it might have changed but apache used to be an optional extra.
All to often I have read a security alert on apache but on reading the details could conclude that it did not apply to me as my install was to different or my setup already had the suggested fix applied.
There are many many ways to run a webserver yet have only port 80 and/or 443 open and yet update.
Update the machine locally. Sure you need access to the machine but this is not impossible if you really want it.
Use a modem set to only accept calls from your telephone number to give remote access to the terminal.
Use firewall rules to only accept other ports from certain adresses.
Use multiple IP's perhaps even using a dedicated machine to handle your ssh wich in turn connects to the servers. Hard to attack a machine wich is unknown.
Sure most people will have 1 server handling all tasks running somewhere outside their reach but there are ways around having every damn service in the world open to the entire world.
If you don't know the doom setting I must express my sympaties with your relatives for you are braindead. Just in case you are one of the living dead however it is this. Marines on a mars research base overrun by demons from hell and humans possesed.
So there is indeed no plot to ruin. Doom3 has a plot but not the original 2 games. Basically it is shooting and at the end you shoot an awfull lot and close the gate.
So plenty of freedom to make almost any movie you want. Just as long as you set it on mars, add some marines and some tasty demons.
It is like making a movie called titanic and setting it in tibet. A movie called D-day and setting in an office in houston.
People have made plenty of movies around d-day from action to war drama to love story. None of them replaced the allies with aliens battling herds of albino cows.
Have you read the same letter as me? He claims that hollywood wouldn't allow him to make his "original" "unapologetic and hyper-violent" doom movie that we were all supposed to be love as a true doom movie.
Ehm? Wha?
So what is so "risky" about mars or marines? I can see demons upsetting some right wingers but they would be upset by anything. Hasn't stopped hollywood dealing with demons before.
So who exactly is stopping him. Who is funding the movie and why? I don't believe the hollywood wouldn't accept it. It has accepted riskier stuff and what is stopping them from making it outside of hollywood? They are hardly trying to court A-list crew members.
No I see this as a badly writter rant by a crap writer who thinks he has some skills and trying to defend his ego trip in changing every single story element. As has been pointed out time and time again Doom is very simple.
As for the violence. I see more death in an epside of CSi and more graphic. Hell they have insde shots of exploding skulls. AND THAT IS ON TV.
Awh shit. We all knew this was gonna suck. They managed to ruin tomb raider. Even simpler story. Big tits, jiggle.
Doom is doom. It is marines at a research base on mars being overrun by the legions from hell. This story could be found in the readme.txt in the original Doom. If you bothered.
Doom 3 expands a bit on it by adding such nicesties as in game story to the mix. It adds a "bad guy" or something.
Now after years of talk someone is trying to turn the Doom game into a movie. We get a list of staff that belong neither on the A-list or the cult list. It screams direct-to-video.
Then all we hear is about things they are going to change. I could understand if this guy was a Steven Spielberg but surely he can't be that deluded? You are a nothing given a ready made universe. USE IT. MILK IT. We hear things like cost being bandied about but how expensive is a mars base anyway? Geez this is the age of CGI. Hell you got the sets in Doom3. Rerender and keep the shots very short. This guy is only showing how crap he is by complaing about budget. Exactly how much did the shot in Star Wars cost that firmly set luke on an alien planet? I am not a photographer but what is the cost of a double exposure nowadays? All you need for a mars exterior is a sand desert with a red filter. The BBC can do it for a docu/drama.
Now he is complaining that the fans are upset because he is taking all the doom out of doom. Note that he doesn't actually refute any of the changes that are rumored.
Learn something from better movie makers. learn something from every goddamn suckass bad game license movie that came before. You got a very simple frame work in wich you can make one hell of an action movie. All you need to do is have the hero be a marine, set it on mars and the bad guys are demons or possesed humans. The rest of the story is up to you. You can make it an alien or an aliens. You can make it pure horror or comedy. You can add a love interest JUST AS LONG AS IT IS ON MARS, HAS MARINES AND DEMONS.
What the fuck is this guy problem. I would very much like to know what the people at ID are thinking. Are they paid a huge amount for the license or have they never watched any of the other game license movies. I don't think a new Doom is planned so are they planning to really sink the license once and for all?
The guy seems to have a George Lucas attitude that the fans will just have to swallow what ever he makes. One problem George Lucas got big before his ego swelled. The current George Lucas has with the new star wars movies not repeated the success. The first three movies are a part of culture. The new ones are not. Just make a proper Doom movie then use your fame to make your virus swat team movie.
Oh well maybe Half-life will get a proper movie. Oh, they wanted a love interest for Freeman? Never mind.
Nintendo has made crap in the past. GBA with no light. GBA SP with no headphone jack. Design decisions or just being stupid?
As for being inovative. Well nintendo took the safe rout. Rather then investing in real development to finally create a powerfull handheld capable of playing game less then a decade old they added a gimick. No expensive LCD's for them, just two very cheap ones. No super expensive cpu for them. Just a slight increase.
LCD death pixels are a headache. I have in front of me a very nice LCD screen with zero defects (pets monitor and says good boy) but it came as a replacement for the original wich after a few days developed 1 dead sub pixel. Lucky I had asked the sales clerk multiple times what they meant with their death pixel policy.
Dead pixels can't be fixed and can't be prevented. You can test the screen over and over and 1 second after the user switches it on a pixel can die.
The other problems sound more serious but I have heard to many horror stories from tiny sites.
Basically both companies have taken a gamble. Nintendo has to keep its crown and sony wants to take it. Sony can afford to loose more. For nintendo the gameboy is the money maker they will need to offset the gamecube.
The DS has a nice gimmick but a small screen and nintendo's game catalog has a lot of childish platformers. It is a nice robuust system but perhaps you pay a lot for old tech.
Sony has a more sleek design but is ultimately just a handheld PS2. On the other hand you get a decent amount of hardware for your money.
Because not every expert reads wikipedia and not everyone who considers themselve an expert is an expert and because facts are often just plain wrong even if 99% of people think they are true.
So what does this mean for wikipedia? Well at best it can contain nothing more then a grey goo of widely accepted facts hopefully most of wich are "true". Group think.
At worst it will contain a complety random mix of hard facts, accepted facts and plain errors. Anybodies guess as to wich is wich.
Usually with "facts" we are given some info on the person claiming that the facts are true. Call me weird but I am more likely to take facts about space from an NASA engineer then from a farmer BUT I wouldn't trust a NASA engineer to tell one end of a cow from another.
A good example is the TV program "myth" busters. It airs on discovery in europe right now. It has two movie special effects makers trying to recreate urban myths and prove or disprove them.
Some of the "experiments" are valid enough but just a few of them are plain bad research. The biggest problem seems to be they consider themselves pretty hot stuff. While they might be able to fit some rockets to a car and disprove the jato myth but disproving the 'ice bullet' myth by freezing water in liqued nitrogen and noticing how brittle ice is is slightly less convincing. Anyone who knows anything about freezing knows that different speeds of freezing results in different ice crystals. Note I am not claiming that ice bullets exist. Just that there research to disprove it was lacking.
An earlier/. article had someone noting that 1 article about a person had the wrong birthdate. It turns out that this is a common mistake with all kinds of works listing 1 of 2 dates. The only correct way to handle this is to list both dates and clearly states that it is unknown wich is correct perhaps with theory as to why.
Sadly there is no way to stop anyone from then thinking "oh I know the right date" and remove the second date.
Wikipedie at the moment is a nice "lightweight" reference especially for "modern" stuff. For depth almost anything else is better but just perhaps you might find a good link to start at wikipedia.
Relying on wikipedia is like getting your medical advice from a guy down the pub. He might just be a doctor, he might just be a big mouth or you might just be talking to a quak doctor.
Plenty of real world races. Perhaps a sequel to the cult hit Grand Prix Legends? Or wait. Here I got a silly idea. How about a fictional race. Geared towards the unique limitations of the pc (you know like no actual physical feedback real drivers rely on) and taking advantage of the fact that you cannot die and that there need not be silly regulations. F1 Unlimited. Built and design an 8 wheel F1 monster and run it.
Go to the future, go to the past. Be inventive.
Plenty of other game genres work around having to license stuff. What percentage of FPS games uses licensed weapons? How many RPG's/Adventures use real world names?
Frankly I think this is a good idea. It will force everyone else to get inventive or at least offer a clearly better game with "fantasy" names.
You obviously don't have an afterburner or other light system. Or your a lying bastard.
Meanwhile I will be playing with a screen easily 4 times the size, that works without me having to twist to catch the light, with graphics from this century all at the cost of carrying a few spare batteries around and a recharger. Woopie!
Well depends if like in europe flights take also a lot of waiting on airports and you take public transport to and from the airport.
Luckily it comes with a removable battery and although it is a special model it should be easy enough to take 1 or even 2 spares with you. TADA problem solved.
On the other hand you could take the DS wich doesn't have the battery life either AND increased eyestrain for looking at a tiny screen.
Optimal solution? A book. Certain to work for the entire flight. Just hope you don't have to make an emergency stop in the bible belt. They are suspicious of those things down there.
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That is intelligence. The capabilty to react to a constantly changing world.
Humans can react to changing circumstances that are outside their current experiences. Basically they can react outside of their programming/training. Computers still cannot. If you really want to see how true this is go to a car plant. Plenty of robots AND plenty of people with the job of making sure the robots don't get confused. Or doing small tasks that require human intelligence.
Balancing takes a lot of computer power while a multi legged construction can take all the time it needs to calculate the next move. However in the mean time computing power has improved so much that the problem has gone away.
Hell, people even got lego to balance. Such a system is so much simpler you drastically increase reliabilty. That is the reason you see this robot with two wheels. It works and is simple.
It is simply not true that multiple legs are easier to control. Balance is easier but moving is harder because you got to move more elements.
You and I probably count WC3 standards. Others like the parent post probably count IE standards. See how that changes everything?
It is similar to the "exploits" in single player rpgs where a mob keeps respawning to give in theory infinite xp. If you got the patience to kill the same mob, go through the same conversation, clear the same dungeon again and again.
The problem is that most MMO designers are pretty clueless about basic economy (why do they insist on "repair" or whatever costs to get money out of the system instead of simple taxes?) but worse the few clever ones think that real world capatalism is the thing to emulate.
Small problem is that capatalism isn't much fun for the majority wage slaves. In real life the wage slaves ain't got much choice but in game they do. They can stop paying and find something else to do.
The problem is that unlike the real world it is very easy to calculate expenditure vs profit in an mmo. Weapon A costs so much but will allow me to gain that much profit in its lifetime that I make enough profit to buy a new one. In general the more powerfull a weapon the more costly but also the higher the return on investment. Result, in order to make a reasonable income you got to invest in good weapons meaning you have to do the money grind.
MMO's need to stop thinking they are single player games, they need to stop thinking that real world economics work in a fun enviroment.
Single player RPG economies are already screwed up enough. Or I am the only one swimming in unneeded and even unspendable money in games like Baldurs gate, Neverwinter Nights, Deus EX, Morrowind, etc etc. Add taxation and tax the high earners more. But at all costs avoid where a big enough group of superrich exists to ruin it for the rich. Or at least if you want this similarity of the real world add other things from the real world as well. REVOLUTION. Murderers and thiefs. Paternity suits and frivolous lawsuits.
But frankly there are so many problems to fix with the MMO scene. First they should figure out a way for a game to remain fun for month after month without betting on the "maybe I will have fun with just 1 more level" element.
But maybe a simple way of doing both is to decrease the reliance in combat on "super" weapons but instead make for a character depended weapon performance. Meaning that both a newbie and elite warrior use exactly the same weapon but the elite will just be better at it. No expensive gadgets needed then no need for gold to pay them. Focus on character development OVER gadget hoarding.
Hard? Well yes and no. Both EQ2 and WoW apparently have added more involved combat. Expand on this.
So why exactly is it such a bad idea? First off most PC games still come on CD because more people have a CD player then a DVD player. Going to DVD only games would be easier but so far no game company wants to take the risk of upsetting the non-dvd owners.
Second is do you really trust microsoft to choose the most optimal installation place for your games? Not everyone of us have just one partition.
Third you can say goodbay to editing your game files if they are on a read only media. Many PC games have a happy modding community that is unique to PC gaming. But this works only if you can modify the game files.
Fourth many people who buy their games in the shop still use no-cd fixes because it allows them to play the game they want without first searching for the CD. I am even worse as my gaming PC is a monster wich makes a lot of noise so I put it in another room two doors away. Going back to the days of searching through a stack of CD's before I can play is not a step forward.
Fifth is that no matter how much more advanced DVD players become they will always be lagging behind the speed of a HD.
Sixth wich problem does it really solve? People who think installing a game is to nerdie won't be using a PC for gaming in the first place.
But most important this is microsoft trying to be smart. I love the "Close Combat" series of games but it was a microsoft game and so unlike every other game of that era it required me to manaually set the color depth from 32 to 16 to play the game. Yes a microsoft game was not able to use directx to simply do that for me. If MS wants to make games easier then they should start with their own games. MS flight simulator playing from a readonly media? It would ruin the game.
Perhaps MS should do a test to see how many windows users have got the autoplay feature they added turned off.
The history of the voyager missions is a real lesson in making do. That they still work at all tells you that 30 years ago nasa did a damn good job. Scrapping them to save a tiny handfull of cash seems however like a very typical thing for the americans to do. "Look we are cutting costs and giving the filthy rich tax breaks. Ain't we good!" No matter that canceling this project will means loss of data loss of jobs and the money will easily be used on some meaningless project that will never have half the impact but makes for better headlines.
Recently a dutch minister said he wanted to The Netherlands do have its own nasa. A few million is easily in our budget. Take it over from the americans and you got instant space mission rather then being the country that supplied the toilet paper for the international space station.
Duke Nukem already existed as a platformer but after the success of doom it also went 3D. Or rather 2.5D if I remember correctly. Like Doom I don't recall being able to walk under things. Meaning the floor plan was essentially 1 story with differences in heights. Odd because at the same time the game System Shock did have a full 3D world although still using 2D sprites for characters.
Then in 1998 talk really started about a sequel being in the works. To give you an idea how old duke nukem 3D was then already. The new Duke Nukem would use the quake 2 engine. So ID had done Quake AND quake 2 by the time 3D realms was ready for its next attempt.
Since then ID has released Quake 3 and of course Doom 3. 3D realms in the mean time switched from the quake 2 engine to the unreal engine while over the years the unreal engine has had plenty of upgrades as well.
Luckily 3Dreals claims that they replaced most of the unreal code. Good thing because the original while ground breaking at the time is now a bit dated.
But not just graphics engines have changed. The pure "walk around shooting things and collecting key cards" thing has changed. Games like Half-Life added a story. Dues EX added character interaction beyond getting strippers to flash their titties and started with physics (I still love being able to shoot your rifle up in the air and then hearing the bullets fall back down). Half-Life 2 added an even better physics engine that worked on more of the world. Operation Flashpoint added huge outdoor worlds with vehicles.
No game has yet done it all but my fear is that Duke Nukem Forever is trying to do just that. Lets face it. They can't get away with a Doom or even a Quake clone. Unreal has beaten them to it. We gonna at least want a bit of story telling ala half-life. Some nice open levels at least of the unreal level if not Operation Flashpoint. Something to drive perhaps. Physics and some destruction of the level.
The bar just keeps being raised higher and higher for 3d realms. Who can beat the looks of Doom 3 (yeah yeah anybody that can put the pc monitor in power save mode)?
We all remember daikatana. Tried so much. Failed at even more.
Now 3D realms is using its own money to fund this so perhaps it is nothing more then an excentric rich guy funding some magazine that never makes a profit. Their money their right to waste it.
Frankly if the demo is half as good as it sounds then just release the damn game already. Either the demo is as fake as the Half-Life 2 E3 demo was OR 3D realms just is stuck because they want their game to be the best at everything and other game companies keep beating them by focusing on only a small section.
3D realms, there is room for more then 1 nice FPS out there. You don't need to be the best to win. Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 both had their missing features and did well. Just release and start work on Duke Nukem "and you thought the previous one took a long a time".
Further more during the encoding you can enhance the image wich would be to costly to do during live playback but doesn't matter during a one time encode.
Frankly a good encoder can really save a DVD suffering from blocks.
As for the sound. Well someone else already pointed out that DivX is for video not for sound. Most of the container formats (avi/ogm/mkv) allow you to use any audio codec you want.
Ease? Well lets see. Mplayer comes with linux easily and plays everything for free. DVD player costs money and requires me to open my PC. It is all relative.
Frankly I don't like DVD's. Why oh way do the search functions suck so much. Not to say anything of the FBI warnings. Only way I can see the warnings is if I got a legal copy. Kinda like the police pulling people who are driving the legal limit over telling them not to speed while letting the speeders go free.
DVD's you can keep them. Long live DivX/Xvid/Godknows(or cares) + audio codec in the container format of your choice. Just that the next person to mistake DivX for anything but a video codec will get one between the eyes.
in fact if you had bought 64mb strips then you were being overcharged if you count the price per megabyte.
Does it hurt? Well yes. Look at the x-box/pc game morrowind. On the PC there was an awfull lot of loading for very small game zones. This was the same as in the x-box version. However the PC only expansion packs had much larger zones using the easily double amount of memory a PC has.
The x-box had 64mb total. PC has its main memory + video memory for the same job.
It is also the reason people complain about the small levels in games like Thief 3 and Dues EX 2 when compared with their PC only ancestors.
Speed matters little for this. Complex open levels (you can save memory by making only a small portion of a big level available to be viewed. Quake and doom used this an awfull lot) require lots of ram. Consoles don't have that.
I am most amazed by sony's reluctance to add more memory. Their own PC games EQ2 and Star Wars galaxies are memory hogs working only well with 1gb. Either the code is horrible OR they never want to put these games on a console.
True PC have higher resolutions wich means more space needed for textures BUT the gap between the 1gb that their own PC games require and the amount on offer in the current consoles is a bit big.
I guess memory is just to expensive. Oh and speedy stuff being more expensive? Well not entirely true. Don't forget the massive discounts you get when you order your memory by the truckload vs stick.
Oh and at the same time you also had laserdisc competing and of course the even older format of simple film reels.
That you now think of DVD or any of the others as a standard format independent of brand shows you either got a very short memory span or just don't pay much attention. For a more recent example look at the different formats depending on brand that DVD burners came in.
In the days of betamax you could pretty much count that every sony movie also came out on betamax. You are also far more likely to find sony music available on minidisc.
Further more your suggestion would ruin competition. The PC is like this were it doesn't matter wich brand PC I got I can play most games for the PC platform.
Sadly this also means an awfull lot of PC games are still compatible with old hardware. Consoles don't come out all at the same time and so will have very different hardware capabilties. I prefer my games to make the most of the hardware. Not for them to limit themselves to the most restricted console out there. The most obvious restriction being memory or the presence of a harddisk. Just because 1 console would not have a harddisk we would still be in the days of savepoints vs save anywhere on consoles like the x-box?
Your argument is both not true and would limit game developers. Just ask youreselve this. Is it a waste of shelve space for a supermarket to carry both Coca Cola and Pepsi? It is called choice. I prefer having it.
Good customer service helps people out overcome mistakes. Bad customer service blames people for mistakes.
Each new generation will try to find their own way in life. This is nothing new. What is new that each new generation in the last two centuries has some amazing new toys to do it with. Before the technology of the father was the same as of the son and for that matter the same as that of the grandfather.
Nowadays there are huge differences. My parents age had computers but they were like power stations. Used somewhere to do very important work but not something you ever expected to be working with. The idea that a major part of your freetime would be spend with it is alien to them. Same as say being glued to the tv was to their grandparents. Then again we can't see why our grandparents went to the movies to watch the news.
Different generations. Different technologies. Different ways of spending our free time.
The problem is that apart from not being able to see the value in the others generation toy is that each of the toys also has different morals.
A feature film can do with just 1 murder and last 1.5 hours. TV you then already got 2 programs so 2 murders. A session of half-life or whatever and 1.5 hours will get you a body count that would shock a WW2 veteran.
There are problems in the world but the world has always had problems. Youth gangs are nothing new but that doesn't make for gripping headlines. The media has for more influence in making us scared of loss of morals then in installing any morals.
So do I think game creators should apply morals to their games?
Well yes. I would dearly love to play RPG's were your moral choices really affected the game. An evil character will find progress easier and faster but pay the price of being hunted by the goverment and generally not being trusted by either lawfull and unlawfull people. But also were being a good character is HARD. Real hard. Of course this requires rpg's to get a decent economy first but lets make being good be something more then giving a few credits to some random npc when you are swimming in cash (my playstyle means I never spend on med packs and sell the med packs I find).
But as a final note I do remember on recent racing game that was set in cities in wich civilians could be run over. Not for points or anything just that they were impossible to avoid. That I found totally ammoral. It also just ruined any fun. Sure it was a console port but wouldn't the game have been more fun if you had to swerve to avoid hitting people. Maybe that level of driving is to hard with a gamepad.
But no. Games can't teach people morals. At a fundamental level I don't think morals can be thought unless at a very young age. Either you have learned that hurting other people is bad as a small child or you haven't.
Then again we are all immoral anyway. We are here wasting resources on meaningless drivel about games while childeren are starving. How moral is that.
Anyway invested in two 5 meter kvm cables and a switch and voila. INSTANT dead silence.
Only problem is CD's but I only need them for games and nocd patches are the best.
As for heat. It is a large closet with bare concrete walls and a high ceiling. During the peak of summer it gets uncomfortable at head lvl but the PC's are on the ground and kept cool by just having some big fans blowing directly across the motherboard.
Frankly it is the easiest method of silencing and the most effective. Just don't do it with earlier windows versions as you will get insane from the constant hard resets. Oh and to be fair from the hard resets when you are working on a new kernel config.
It was a huge movie popular accross the ages. EVERYONE had seen the movie. Not everyone grew into rabid fans but it sure became a part of film history like few films have managed before or since.
The seond series is aimed at.... Well frankly I don't know. It is claimed by people like you that we are to old and if only we were still young we would enjoy it. HOWEVER if you look at kids today they are not liking it anywhere close to how much our generation like the originals. Epside 1-2 have not become part of movie history. Star wars toys are not a staple ingredient of every toystore.
I think there are two reasons. The real fans have since been exposed to some real quality star wars. Some of the books are just plain good. In away a movie just can't compete with a trilogy book. Simply put the star wars cast got themselves thoughts wich are easy to express in a book but very hard in a movie.
But I think the second reason is far simpler. George lucas is an excellent movie maker. An excellent producer but a lousy director. Excepts he seems to disagree and think he can direct. Perhaps he was not so arrogant during the orignals and those working with him could step in. Perhaps the stories were simpler requiring less acting and less directing. Perhaps the actors involved were better capable of resisting his bad direction.
But there may be a simpler reason after all. Episode 1 was not a movie of this time. The worlds tastes chance. A new hope had a fresh boy defeating the evil meanie. Was the audience of that day rooting for dart vader? Not really but now plenty of fans seem to want a far darker story with the villan being the hero.
We want our heros to be a little bit more grubby then a clean shaven curly blond haired boy.
It is not all self-centered. Trying to introduce your policy is tricky. You can't do it immidiatly after an election because there is to much to do and your people ain't worked in yet. But after everything is settled in you only got a very small window to do something before the next election starts for the other part of goverment (senate vs congress?) and doing it to close to election is risky because the other side might capatalize on any bad publicity about it (true or not). Win that election and most of your people will have started to become to settled to influenced (corrupt if you like) and perhaps thinking about the next election where they might loose their jobs. Then it all starts over again.
Tackling the enviroment problems would be a huge headache. With only 2 years between elections no US goverment can really afford to cause an upset. Worse any halway decent effort would span several years. Introducing a tax rise now wich creates jobs in the next term? So the other side (because a tax rise will loose you the elections) can claim the job increase? Noway. Instant fixes or nothing.
It has nothing to do with wether it would really cost jobs or far more likely create jobs but with what the headlines say in the run up to the election.
Try to find out when was the last time older goverments really DID something. I mean something they pledged to do during election and then did and stuck with it.
Only a few generations we had things like "new deals" "national health service" "moon race" etc etc. Now ever minor reforms and projects get mired and just fizzle away.
Lets not forget that clinton did absolutly nothing for 8 years. And he is remembered as a good president. Americans don't like their goverment to do things. Other countries are not much different but america is hurting bad because of its two party system. Note that england wich is pretty close to only having two parties ain't doing to hot on reducing CO2 either.
In a country like the netherlands left wing means something entirly different then in the US and central parties better listen unless they want to loose massive votes to the left from people on the center left. In the US what are the left wing people going to do? Everything left of extreme-right has no choice but democrat unless they want their vote to be thrown away.
Even here we got a huge problem wich nobody wants to taggle. Farm subsidies. Effectively because of EU subsidies to farmer most of the food bought in stores is subsidised. Meaning that the prize you pay is not the real price but that part of it is payed through your taxes. Coupled with over production it leads to EU tax money being spend on shipping food under cost price to third world nations wich are pressured into buying it destroying the local farmers all at huge cost to the EU tax payer who could get the same cheap food from 3rd world countries who could also really use the income from selling their own food rather then importing western food.
But any party that would cut subsidies can count on blaring headlines about poor farmers being made jobless. Electoral suicide because even if you cut subsidies you will in the beginning have to spend the money saved on transit deals so no tax cut until much later (AFTER you lost the election).
First shoot the lawyers might be a nice thought but if we really want to fix the world it would be better to first shoot the reporters. As long as they make their living by creating hype and fear no goverment can do anything.
So everyone just laughed and spotted the fatal flaw. There is a HUGE difference between a security hole that is wide open on EVERY install of your OS even if the user never installed the webserver part on purpose (ISS) vs most of the apache ones wich only applied if your installed some obscure expansion.
What counts is not the number of security problems but how serious they are and how many people are affected.
The real truth is the there are lies, damn lies and statistics. You can always twist the figures to suit your angle. Measure the number of "hacked" sites? But do you count "amateur" sites? How do you classify "amateur" sites. Measure the amount of security holes in a default install? But MS OS used to install ISS default even if never used making the chance of a ISS having the default setup far greater then on a linux install. Hell most "proper" distros only install what you want it might have changed but apache used to be an optional extra.
All to often I have read a security alert on apache but on reading the details could conclude that it did not apply to me as my install was to different or my setup already had the suggested fix applied.
Sure most people will have 1 server handling all tasks running somewhere outside their reach but there are ways around having every damn service in the world open to the entire world.
If you don't know the doom setting I must express my sympaties with your relatives for you are braindead. Just in case you are one of the living dead however it is this. Marines on a mars research base overrun by demons from hell and humans possesed.
So there is indeed no plot to ruin. Doom3 has a plot but not the original 2 games. Basically it is shooting and at the end you shoot an awfull lot and close the gate.
So plenty of freedom to make almost any movie you want. Just as long as you set it on mars, add some marines and some tasty demons.
It is like making a movie called titanic and setting it in tibet. A movie called D-day and setting in an office in houston.
People have made plenty of movies around d-day from action to war drama to love story. None of them replaced the allies with aliens battling herds of albino cows.
Ehm? Wha?
So what is so "risky" about mars or marines? I can see demons upsetting some right wingers but they would be upset by anything. Hasn't stopped hollywood dealing with demons before.
So who exactly is stopping him. Who is funding the movie and why? I don't believe the hollywood wouldn't accept it. It has accepted riskier stuff and what is stopping them from making it outside of hollywood? They are hardly trying to court A-list crew members.
No I see this as a badly writter rant by a crap writer who thinks he has some skills and trying to defend his ego trip in changing every single story element. As has been pointed out time and time again Doom is very simple.
As for the violence. I see more death in an epside of CSi and more graphic. Hell they have insde shots of exploding skulls. AND THAT IS ON TV.
Awh shit. We all knew this was gonna suck. They managed to ruin tomb raider. Even simpler story. Big tits, jiggle.
Doom 3 expands a bit on it by adding such nicesties as in game story to the mix. It adds a "bad guy" or something.
Now after years of talk someone is trying to turn the Doom game into a movie. We get a list of staff that belong neither on the A-list or the cult list. It screams direct-to-video.
Then all we hear is about things they are going to change. I could understand if this guy was a Steven Spielberg but surely he can't be that deluded? You are a nothing given a ready made universe. USE IT. MILK IT. We hear things like cost being bandied about but how expensive is a mars base anyway? Geez this is the age of CGI. Hell you got the sets in Doom3. Rerender and keep the shots very short. This guy is only showing how crap he is by complaing about budget. Exactly how much did the shot in Star Wars cost that firmly set luke on an alien planet? I am not a photographer but what is the cost of a double exposure nowadays? All you need for a mars exterior is a sand desert with a red filter. The BBC can do it for a docu/drama.
Now he is complaining that the fans are upset because he is taking all the doom out of doom. Note that he doesn't actually refute any of the changes that are rumored.
Learn something from better movie makers. learn something from every goddamn suckass bad game license movie that came before. You got a very simple frame work in wich you can make one hell of an action movie. All you need to do is have the hero be a marine, set it on mars and the bad guys are demons or possesed humans. The rest of the story is up to you. You can make it an alien or an aliens. You can make it pure horror or comedy. You can add a love interest JUST AS LONG AS IT IS ON MARS, HAS MARINES AND DEMONS.
What the fuck is this guy problem. I would very much like to know what the people at ID are thinking. Are they paid a huge amount for the license or have they never watched any of the other game license movies. I don't think a new Doom is planned so are they planning to really sink the license once and for all?
The guy seems to have a George Lucas attitude that the fans will just have to swallow what ever he makes. One problem George Lucas got big before his ego swelled. The current George Lucas has with the new star wars movies not repeated the success. The first three movies are a part of culture. The new ones are not. Just make a proper Doom movie then use your fame to make your virus swat team movie.
Oh well maybe Half-life will get a proper movie. Oh, they wanted a love interest for Freeman? Never mind.
As for being inovative. Well nintendo took the safe rout. Rather then investing in real development to finally create a powerfull handheld capable of playing game less then a decade old they added a gimick. No expensive LCD's for them, just two very cheap ones. No super expensive cpu for them. Just a slight increase.
LCD death pixels are a headache. I have in front of me a very nice LCD screen with zero defects (pets monitor and says good boy) but it came as a replacement for the original wich after a few days developed 1 dead sub pixel. Lucky I had asked the sales clerk multiple times what they meant with their death pixel policy.
Dead pixels can't be fixed and can't be prevented. You can test the screen over and over and 1 second after the user switches it on a pixel can die.
The other problems sound more serious but I have heard to many horror stories from tiny sites.
Basically both companies have taken a gamble. Nintendo has to keep its crown and sony wants to take it. Sony can afford to loose more. For nintendo the gameboy is the money maker they will need to offset the gamecube.
The DS has a nice gimmick but a small screen and nintendo's game catalog has a lot of childish platformers. It is a nice robuust system but perhaps you pay a lot for old tech.
Sony has a more sleek design but is ultimately just a handheld PS2. On the other hand you get a decent amount of hardware for your money.
We will see wich one wins.
So what does this mean for wikipedia? Well at best it can contain nothing more then a grey goo of widely accepted facts hopefully most of wich are "true". Group think.
At worst it will contain a complety random mix of hard facts, accepted facts and plain errors. Anybodies guess as to wich is wich.
Usually with "facts" we are given some info on the person claiming that the facts are true. Call me weird but I am more likely to take facts about space from an NASA engineer then from a farmer BUT I wouldn't trust a NASA engineer to tell one end of a cow from another.
A good example is the TV program "myth" busters. It airs on discovery in europe right now. It has two movie special effects makers trying to recreate urban myths and prove or disprove them.
Some of the "experiments" are valid enough but just a few of them are plain bad research. The biggest problem seems to be they consider themselves pretty hot stuff. While they might be able to fit some rockets to a car and disprove the jato myth but disproving the 'ice bullet' myth by freezing water in liqued nitrogen and noticing how brittle ice is is slightly less convincing. Anyone who knows anything about freezing knows that different speeds of freezing results in different ice crystals. Note I am not claiming that ice bullets exist. Just that there research to disprove it was lacking.
An earlier /. article had someone noting that 1 article about a person had the wrong birthdate. It turns out that this is a common mistake with all kinds of works listing 1 of 2 dates. The only correct way to handle this is to list both dates and clearly states that it is unknown wich is correct perhaps with theory as to why.
Sadly there is no way to stop anyone from then thinking "oh I know the right date" and remove the second date.
Wikipedie at the moment is a nice "lightweight" reference especially for "modern" stuff. For depth almost anything else is better but just perhaps you might find a good link to start at wikipedia.
Relying on wikipedia is like getting your medical advice from a guy down the pub. He might just be a doctor, he might just be a big mouth or you might just be talking to a quak doctor.
Go to the future, go to the past. Be inventive.
Plenty of other game genres work around having to license stuff. What percentage of FPS games uses licensed weapons? How many RPG's/Adventures use real world names?
Frankly I think this is a good idea. It will force everyone else to get inventive or at least offer a clearly better game with "fantasy" names.
Meanwhile I will be playing with a screen easily 4 times the size, that works without me having to twist to catch the light, with graphics from this century all at the cost of carrying a few spare batteries around and a recharger. Woopie!
Luckily it comes with a removable battery and although it is a special model it should be easy enough to take 1 or even 2 spares with you. TADA problem solved.
On the other hand you could take the DS wich doesn't have the battery life either AND increased eyestrain for looking at a tiny screen.
Optimal solution? A book. Certain to work for the entire flight. Just hope you don't have to make an emergency stop in the bible belt. They are suspicious of those things down there.