I'm sorry, but Linux is in many ways archaic. "ls" instead of "list", "man" instead of "manual"... a lot of these things were done to satiate extreme technical limitations of old-school unix and Linux still has them 'cause the users are all used to them. The command line may be efficient for a lot of things, but it's most definitely scaring away "Joe User."
Not only that, but pretty much any Linux distro I've gotten to install (for the sake of argument, lets assume that it's my computer's fault that just about every distro doesn't boot after install, but Windows runs absolutely perfectly) has been a royal pain in the ass to use. I'm not just talking about doing the configuration/setup stuff, I'm taling about day-to-day tasks. Maybe it's 'cause I'm used to windows, and maybe it's 'cause I haven't memorized a hundred console commands and all their archaic non-descriptive switches, but even the simplest tasks in Linux (Slackware/Gnome) were kludgy and painful.
It's not me. Seriously, if I can get used to Solaris 7/CDE without a manual, then I sure as hell can get used to just about anything. I know a lot of you think that tons of choice is a great thing, and that having hundreds of different programs that do the same thing is wonderful, but frankly it makes Linux into a Frankenstein OS, where nothing really fits together quite as it should.
Here here on the DVD drive. That thing is a piece of crap, and I've repaired one so far for a friend (though I have a later model PS2 so I don't have that problem).
Also, about your comment about the "emotional engine" feature not being used today... "Emotion Engine" is the name of the PS2's CPU (and for completeness, "Graphics Synthesizer" is the name of the GPU). It's not a feature at all. The reason they kept saying that it would add emotion to games is that the 300 MHz (350 MHz?) clock speed was such a jump at the time that the console would be able to handle much more complicated AI than the PS1. They encouraged development houses to try to write AI routines for their characters that simulated emotion. The main example of this is from Driving Emotion S (yes I know it sucks). Opponent AI's would drive more aggressively if your actions "angered" them (I imagine the pseudo code is something like if (nudged) angry++; if (angry > threshhold) driving_style = aggressive;). As the race wore on, they would get "tired" and make mistakes... etc. So basically, "Emotion Engine" was a bit of marketing speak that boasted the fact that the PS2's higher CPU speed and increased memory allowed for more complicated AI routines.
The original source was a Japanese CG modeling magazine. They were talking to Capcom graphic designers who do modeling and texture art, not people who program. This is an example of computer specs as percieved by artists.
When the PS2 came out, it was a huge leap over the ammount of memory in the PS1 (I believe 32 MB for the PS2 and 2 MB for the PS1... but I may be off). Same with the Gamecube, which has 64 MB total memory (system + graphics) and the N64 (4 MB shared). They figured that it was such an increase over what developers were currently using, that it would take them a while to get any real use out of it. Also, getting 128 MB for only $30 more sounds great for a PC (back then), but when you're talking about a console that's only $200 at launch, that's a 15% increase in price. And, yes, when these systems were designed (not launched), the ammount of memory in them was huge for a console.
"The PS2, does however, have a large Direct Memory Access bandwidth, which will allow the developers to provide a high amount of textures into the game."
Well, that sounds good! If it made sense! But didn't he just say we couldn't have a load of textures?
But wait! Some of the textures have had to be reduced from 24-bit to 8 or even "4-bit". Yes, folks, the PS2 is so back they are using 16 colour greyscale! Either that or he's talking out his ass.
His source? "Various Japanese publications." Interesting!
And, despite this uber-DMA, they are still shit out of luck apparently. He continues:
"But, if they choose to do this, the game's framerate will drop substantially, this is due to the PS2's, as stated before, limited texture memory capacity."
You're right, it pretty much is a shitty article, but here's what's really going on: First of all, the main source is an interview with Capcom graphic designers in the latest issue of CG magazine (that's the source cited in another incarnation of this article I saw elsewhere).
Second: they totally botched the details. The PS2 has a very limited ammount of space for textures being rendered, so they've had to go down to 8 and 4 bit textures in some places (probably lightmaps and/or alpha maps which can sometimes be saved with low color depth). Another alternative, since the PS2 has DMA between the system RAM and the graphics processor is to store textures in system RAM and swap them in and out of texture memory as you go. One will result in a decrease in visual quality, the other will result in a decrease in speed.
They've had to decrease the number of polygons on each model for the PS2 version. The reason why is that the PS2 rendering pipeline will require multiple passes to do most of the effects that the GCN does in one pass. The PS2 will probably end up rendering about the same number of polygons as the GCN version in the end, but it suffers from having to render the same polygons several times over.
So, even though this article is inciting all sorts of flamewars around the internet as we speak, it's really just saying that it's hard to port a game to one platform when it's been specifically designed for another.
The PS2 isn't necesarily "underpowered," but it is older hardware than the Gamecube. It's weaker for sure, but that's just a sign of its age and not an implication of poor quality. This also has to do with the fact that the game was specifically designed with the Gamecube hardware in mind. Getting it to work on the PS2 is going to be a minor miracle.
The complaints in this article aren't entirely accurate either. In the writeup on Forza Motorsport, he criticizes the Gran Turismo series for not having drivers in the car (something GT4 will have, which comes out before Forza), and for not having a career mode (which it's had since the beginning,... just without all the retarded plot).
I honestly don't know much about the other series mentioned, but it's not like a racing sim + online component breaks the bounds of originality.
I say this in all seriousness, and I will be flamed for it.... but if somebody writes a phonebook/notepad/general PDA program for the Nintendo DS that supports WiFi e-mail and AIM/Yahoo Messenger/MSN/ICQ, I would buy it in a heartbeat (and a DS for that matter). As much as I like PDA's in general, it's not as constantly useful as gaming to me.
GTA is only one game. I bet you won't find the stereotype applying for Katamari Damacy, or Metroid Prime, or the even more rare Elastomania. There are literally thousands of games out there that don't fall into the whole over-testosteroned under-sexed gamer category. That tends to describe people who play crap like Tony Hawk or Madden. You know, frat guys.
If there is a bias, it's probably not 'against Nintendo' as much as it is 'for Sony'. By that, I mean that it doesn't seem that people are going out of their way to attack Nintendo, but they are doing so to boost the PSP.
There sure as hell is a bias against Nintendo over at EGM. How exactly do GTA:San Andreas and Halo 2 get perfect 10's? Especially since I can point out maybe a dozen or so very real problems with Halo 2 after a half hour of playing. (c'mon, even if you like it, it's not perfect, even X-Box fanboys have complaints about the cutscene loading and the short single-player mode). Meanwhile, Resident Evil 4 came out and got a perfect 10 on 1up.com, which was later edited down to a 9.something. While a lot of people have their ideas why, I find it suspect that they only pull this crap on games made for Nintendo systems.
I don't care how much you like Halo 2. Even if you're an X-Box fanboy, I can think of games for the X-Box that are better, or at the very least have fewer flaws.
I also love the way they took points away from Metroid Prime for not having multiplayer, and then took points away from Metroid Prime 2 for having multiplayer.
First, I liked the panoramic pictures, and I knew exactly what was going on. I just like to shoot on a wider format, and the guide in the viewfinder was helpful. Besides, with my little "point and shoot" camera, film quality isn't really a major concern.
Second of all, I'm not gonna foam at the mouth until I see some screenshots for comparrison. I can't honestly believe that I would've bought 4 of those movies, watched them, and then never noticed that there was stuff missing both on the sides and on the top & bottom.
Wait a minute. Why can't MGM answer a simple question -- did they letterbox a pan-and-scan cut of a movie and try to pass it off as a widescreen movie? Although technically they might be correct, this is a pretty blatant way to try to rip off consumers.
I'd really like an answer to that too. Does anybody have a screenshot of any of these movies? I'll check UHF tonight... it has both the widescreen and the fullscreen versions on the disc, so comparrison should be simple. I'm almost certain though that there's nothing missing (or at least that the movie wasn't made from the pan & scan version).
Some films are indeed shot at 1.33:1 and then matted to their intended aspect ratio. This is so that there's some "buffer" room at the top and bottom where the editor can remove things like boom mics and improve the positioning of objects.
You don't see the boom mic in the fullscreen version because DVD's are created in the same way TV versions are: by scaling the widescreen version up and then panning around it.
Below is a link to an article about shooting in different aspect ratios. Here is the relevant quote:
The successful answer was Widescreen movies. This was, and still is, achieved in two different ways. One is by using the anamorphic lens which gives us an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. That's the real real wide movies. The other is shot at 1.33:1 and matted in the theater (with that gate that I mentioned earlier) to 1.85:1 which creates a Widescreen display.
Well, it's that you can send the product back and get either $7.10 or a DVD from a list of about 400 or so. Unfortunately, the way this thing is worded there's no indication of whether you'll get a "correct" version of the movie you sent in or if you'll just get to pick a movie from MGM's existing library (or even that the list of movies you get to choose from will contain anything at all worth seeing... MGM makes tons of movies, I bet they could find 400 or so clunkers that they'd be happy to unload on us).
Sure there is. Remember when Dave Perry wrecked his hotel room and overdosed on heroin? Or when Richard Garriot drank a shot glass full of LSD?
Oh wait... that's how rock stars burned out. Dave Perry became management and Richard Garriot retired years ago (though I've been hearing his name a lot recently... did he come out of retirement?).
The article does mention John Romero and Trip Hawkins, both former big-wigs in gaming, now relegated to the mobile market after unsuccessful "shovelware." What annoyed me in the article, though, was this paragraph:
Could it be that John Carmack's obsession with amazing graphical effects is similar to the way in which middle-aged rock stars start to 'experiment' with the latest technology and trendy genres -...
You can't really blame John Carmack for Doom3 being boring. I mean, seriously, all he does is code the game engine. I'm sure we all can agree that with the proper set of graphic artists and level designers, the Doom3 engine has a lot of potential to make a good game. I say John Carmack still did a damn good job, even if the game is repetitive and dumb.
The cheapest color screen palm I could find on Pricewatch was a Zire 31 for $131. Also, to rebuke the grandparent, Famicom games are about 1/4 the size of NES games. In asia, this product is probably far more practical. It's also aimed at people who already have a lot of cartridges and people interested in the "cool" factor of it.
If you are really concerned with what anti-gun nuts call "assault weapons," may I suggest that you put your efforts into opposing the sale to civilians of ANY armament which is sold to ANY military organization in the world.
(A) The point I was trying to make with my original post is that, like holding a gun manufacturer responsible for murders committed with a gun manufactured for self defense and hunting, holding a P2P author responsible for willful copyright violations by the end-user is ridiculous.
(B) The sale of military guns to civilians is essentially what I was driving at (sorry if my wording was unclear). I personally don't feel that anybody needs to have a "tool" that was specifically designed for efficiently killing large ammounts of human beings unless they are military or SWAT. When I say "assault weapons," I'm typically thinking of an AK-47 or an M-16. Maybe my definition doesn't fit with the publically accepted one, but I always figured the term "assault weapons" meant "weapons we use in an assault on an enemy base."
And the sad part is that, even if the review is a good one, the game's been out for like 5 months now. I've been playing it for 3. I've submitted much more interesting stories that never ever made it to the games page, much less the front page. "First emulator to play commercial x-box games? Fuck that story, we've got an old game to review!"
Are you being serious or humorous? Virtually every single gun has at least one safety on it to prevent accidental discharges.
Well, the analogies can only go so far, but even still, I think the gun one is appropriate. A P2P software maker can be fined or jailed under this proposed law if their software does not take "reasonable" (very vague) precautions to ensure that users do not break the law with it. Note that this includes willful acts of copyright infringement.
Now apply the gun analogy. Say we have a law, and under that law a gun maker can be fined or jailed if the gun itself does not take "reasonable" precautions to ensure that users do not break the law willfully with it. Breaking the law willfully can include using a gun in the commission of an armed robbery, or even injuring or killing another person.
As we've all heard from the NRA, a gun is just a tool for self defense and hunting. Anybody who uses it for any other reason is completely misusing the product and is responsible for his or her own actions. No sarcasm intended here... many guns are manufactured with exactly that purpose in mind, as opposed to assault weapons, which are designed specifically for human targets.
As an aside, I agree with the parent post that guns take reasonable precautions to prevent accidental discharges, and the manufacturer's advocacy of gun safety training is a wonderful thing, but it'll never be able to rid us of intentional misuse (a.k.a. murder). Should a gun manufacturer be liable for that? Only if they designed and marketed a gun specifically for killing other people (i.e. "Boss giving you a hard time? Buy a Winchester and shut him up for good!"). I believe the same for P2P authors at least. I don't believe they should be liable as long as they (a) educate the user on the appropriate use of their software, (b) don't market it specifically for the use of violating copyrights.
::sigh:: You think at a women's rights conference he would dare suggest that envrionmental factors causing a gender discrepency in mathematics was anything but "the truth?" What he's saying, as many other people have said before, is that real empirical data will put down the misconception of biological difference once and for all.
What reason could you have for running a huge study on the intellectual limits of one sex or another, or one race or another, but to use that information to exclude that race or sex on the basis of their supposed lack of ability?...
... He deserves to be roasted.
From the RTFA department: What he actually said was that there are differences between male and female performance in the mathematics world, and that, while we would like to believe that this is entirely due to environmental factors, more study needs to be done to determine the exact reason.
Personally I refuse to lambast a scientist who states that he needs more empirical data to make a determination. True, he made vague comments on a controversial topic, and acknowledged the presence of a gender discrepency, but from what he actually said I see no reason to get riled up.
Which sucks for us safe young male drivers. 16-25 year old males in NJ have the highest car insurance rates in the world. Whee! Nice to be #1 in something. Now if only that didn't mean I had to pay $2200 a year for minimum coverage on a 17 year old car. When your car goes 0-60 in about 35-45 seconds, you learn to be a patient driver. Seriously, though, I should get a "1980's economy car - less than 100 hp" discount.
And before you complain that you have a higher rate, keep in mind that I'm paying minimum liability insurance only and have a perfect driving record.
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Knock Halo out of the equation and honestly, what is XBox left with?
Billions and billions of dollars siphoned from the MS Office department.
I'm sorry, but Linux is in many ways archaic. "ls" instead of "list", "man" instead of "manual" ... a lot of these things were done to satiate extreme technical limitations of old-school unix and Linux still has them 'cause the users are all used to them. The command line may be efficient for a lot of things, but it's most definitely scaring away "Joe User."
Not only that, but pretty much any Linux distro I've gotten to install (for the sake of argument, lets assume that it's my computer's fault that just about every distro doesn't boot after install, but Windows runs absolutely perfectly) has been a royal pain in the ass to use. I'm not just talking about doing the configuration/setup stuff, I'm taling about day-to-day tasks. Maybe it's 'cause I'm used to windows, and maybe it's 'cause I haven't memorized a hundred console commands and all their archaic non-descriptive switches, but even the simplest tasks in Linux (Slackware/Gnome) were kludgy and painful.
It's not me. Seriously, if I can get used to Solaris 7/CDE without a manual, then I sure as hell can get used to just about anything. I know a lot of you think that tons of choice is a great thing, and that having hundreds of different programs that do the same thing is wonderful, but frankly it makes Linux into a Frankenstein OS, where nothing really fits together quite as it should.
Here here on the DVD drive. That thing is a piece of crap, and I've repaired one so far for a friend (though I have a later model PS2 so I don't have that problem).
... "Emotion Engine" is the name of the PS2's CPU (and for completeness, "Graphics Synthesizer" is the name of the GPU). It's not a feature at all. The reason they kept saying that it would add emotion to games is that the 300 MHz (350 MHz?) clock speed was such a jump at the time that the console would be able to handle much more complicated AI than the PS1. They encouraged development houses to try to write AI routines for their characters that simulated emotion. The main example of this is from Driving Emotion S (yes I know it sucks). Opponent AI's would drive more aggressively if your actions "angered" them (I imagine the pseudo code is something like if (nudged) angry++; if (angry > threshhold) driving_style = aggressive;). As the race wore on, they would get "tired" and make mistakes... etc. So basically, "Emotion Engine" was a bit of marketing speak that boasted the fact that the PS2's higher CPU speed and increased memory allowed for more complicated AI routines.
Also, about your comment about the "emotional engine" feature not being used today
The original source was a Japanese CG modeling magazine. They were talking to Capcom graphic designers who do modeling and texture art, not people who program. This is an example of computer specs as percieved by artists.
When the PS2 came out, it was a huge leap over the ammount of memory in the PS1 (I believe 32 MB for the PS2 and 2 MB for the PS1... but I may be off). Same with the Gamecube, which has 64 MB total memory (system + graphics) and the N64 (4 MB shared). They figured that it was such an increase over what developers were currently using, that it would take them a while to get any real use out of it. Also, getting 128 MB for only $30 more sounds great for a PC (back then), but when you're talking about a console that's only $200 at launch, that's a 15% increase in price. And, yes, when these systems were designed (not launched), the ammount of memory in them was huge for a console.
Second: they totally botched the details. The PS2 has a very limited ammount of space for textures being rendered, so they've had to go down to 8 and 4 bit textures in some places (probably lightmaps and/or alpha maps which can sometimes be saved with low color depth). Another alternative, since the PS2 has DMA between the system RAM and the graphics processor is to store textures in system RAM and swap them in and out of texture memory as you go. One will result in a decrease in visual quality, the other will result in a decrease in speed.
They've had to decrease the number of polygons on each model for the PS2 version. The reason why is that the PS2 rendering pipeline will require multiple passes to do most of the effects that the GCN does in one pass. The PS2 will probably end up rendering about the same number of polygons as the GCN version in the end, but it suffers from having to render the same polygons several times over.
So, even though this article is inciting all sorts of flamewars around the internet as we speak, it's really just saying that it's hard to port a game to one platform when it's been specifically designed for another.
The PS2 isn't necesarily "underpowered," but it is older hardware than the Gamecube. It's weaker for sure, but that's just a sign of its age and not an implication of poor quality. This also has to do with the fact that the game was specifically designed with the Gamecube hardware in mind. Getting it to work on the PS2 is going to be a minor miracle.
The complaints in this article aren't entirely accurate either. In the writeup on Forza Motorsport, he criticizes the Gran Turismo series for not having drivers in the car (something GT4 will have, which comes out before Forza), and for not having a career mode (which it's had since the beginning, ... just without all the retarded plot).
I honestly don't know much about the other series mentioned, but it's not like a racing sim + online component breaks the bounds of originality.
I say this in all seriousness, and I will be flamed for it.... but if somebody writes a phonebook/notepad/general PDA program for the Nintendo DS that supports WiFi e-mail and AIM/Yahoo Messenger/MSN/ICQ, I would buy it in a heartbeat (and a DS for that matter). As much as I like PDA's in general, it's not as constantly useful as gaming to me.
GTA is only one game. I bet you won't find the stereotype applying for Katamari Damacy, or Metroid Prime, or the even more rare Elastomania. There are literally thousands of games out there that don't fall into the whole over-testosteroned under-sexed gamer category. That tends to describe people who play crap like Tony Hawk or Madden. You know, frat guys.
I don't care how much you like Halo 2. Even if you're an X-Box fanboy, I can think of games for the X-Box that are better, or at the very least have fewer flaws.
I also love the way they took points away from Metroid Prime for not having multiplayer, and then took points away from Metroid Prime 2 for having multiplayer.
First, I liked the panoramic pictures, and I knew exactly what was going on. I just like to shoot on a wider format, and the guide in the viewfinder was helpful. Besides, with my little "point and shoot" camera, film quality isn't really a major concern.
Second of all, I'm not gonna foam at the mouth until I see some screenshots for comparrison. I can't honestly believe that I would've bought 4 of those movies, watched them, and then never noticed that there was stuff missing both on the sides and on the top & bottom.
You don't see the boom mic in the fullscreen version because DVD's are created in the same way TV versions are: by scaling the widescreen version up and then panning around it.
Below is a link to an article about shooting in different aspect ratios. Here is the relevant quote: http://www.amateurhometheater.com/In%20Laymans%20
Well, it's that you can send the product back and get either $7.10 or a DVD from a list of about 400 or so. Unfortunately, the way this thing is worded there's no indication of whether you'll get a "correct" version of the movie you sent in or if you'll just get to pick a movie from MGM's existing library (or even that the list of movies you get to choose from will contain anything at all worth seeing ... MGM makes tons of movies, I bet they could find 400 or so clunkers that they'd be happy to unload on us).
Sure there is. Remember when Dave Perry wrecked his hotel room and overdosed on heroin? Or when Richard Garriot drank a shot glass full of LSD?
Oh wait... that's how rock stars burned out. Dave Perry became management and Richard Garriot retired years ago (though I've been hearing his name a lot recently... did he come out of retirement?).
The cheapest color screen palm I could find on Pricewatch was a Zire 31 for $131. Also, to rebuke the grandparent, Famicom games are about 1/4 the size of NES games. In asia, this product is probably far more practical. It's also aimed at people who already have a lot of cartridges and people interested in the "cool" factor of it.
Also, wasn't the show called "Knight Rider", not "Night Rider?" 'cause his name was Michael Knight. Remember? ... I'm such a geek.
(B) The sale of military guns to civilians is essentially what I was driving at (sorry if my wording was unclear). I personally don't feel that anybody needs to have a "tool" that was specifically designed for efficiently killing large ammounts of human beings unless they are military or SWAT. When I say "assault weapons," I'm typically thinking of an AK-47 or an M-16. Maybe my definition doesn't fit with the publically accepted one, but I always figured the term "assault weapons" meant "weapons we use in an assault on an enemy base."
And the sad part is that, even if the review is a good one, the game's been out for like 5 months now. I've been playing it for 3. I've submitted much more interesting stories that never ever made it to the games page, much less the front page. "First emulator to play commercial x-box games? Fuck that story, we've got an old game to review!"
Now apply the gun analogy. Say we have a law, and under that law a gun maker can be fined or jailed if the gun itself does not take "reasonable" precautions to ensure that users do not break the law willfully with it. Breaking the law willfully can include using a gun in the commission of an armed robbery, or even injuring or killing another person.
As we've all heard from the NRA, a gun is just a tool for self defense and hunting. Anybody who uses it for any other reason is completely misusing the product and is responsible for his or her own actions. No sarcasm intended here
As an aside, I agree with the parent post that guns take reasonable precautions to prevent accidental discharges, and the manufacturer's advocacy of gun safety training is a wonderful thing, but it'll never be able to rid us of intentional misuse (a.k.a. murder). Should a gun manufacturer be liable for that? Only if they designed and marketed a gun specifically for killing other people (i.e. "Boss giving you a hard time? Buy a Winchester and shut him up for good!"). I believe the same for P2P authors at least. I don't believe they should be liable as long as they (a) educate the user on the appropriate use of their software, (b) don't market it specifically for the use of violating copyrights.
Personally I refuse to lambast a scientist who states that he needs more empirical data to make a determination. True, he made vague comments on a controversial topic, and acknowledged the presence of a gender discrepency, but from what he actually said I see no reason to get riled up.
Which sucks for us safe young male drivers. 16-25 year old males in NJ have the highest car insurance rates in the world. Whee! Nice to be #1 in something. Now if only that didn't mean I had to pay $2200 a year for minimum coverage on a 17 year old car. When your car goes 0-60 in about 35-45 seconds, you learn to be a patient driver. Seriously, though, I should get a "1980's economy car - less than 100 hp" discount.
And before you complain that you have a higher rate, keep in mind that I'm paying minimum liability insurance only and have a perfect driving record.