As long as every great game gets it own thread, I believe that Solar Jetman was among the 10 best Nintendo games ever. Good old Rare... stupid Microsoft purchacing them =(.
Some other top 10 games that deserver mention:
River City Ransom
Super Dodge Ball
Bionic Commando
Zelda
Zelda 2
Mike Tyson's Punch Out
Metroid
Yeah but before 50 years are up, the music industry will have crushed all "non-popular" forms of music expression, and those who play a latin rhythm will have to be "reeducated" by the microsoft police.
The possibility of the great photographs of our day being erased with an accidental click of a button or the failure of a hard drive read head worries me.
As technologies become more prevalent so do the technologies that support them. Backups are becoming more common among standard computer users. Consumers can use raid arrays (not all that expensive now), or can back things up and switch hard drives as soon as they find a bad cluster. Hard drives last longer, and everyone has a CDR now. I've lost more pictures due to water damage then to harddisk failure. Anyone who is a professional should be able to keep their data alive indefinately.
Digitial information has yet to replace analog as a means of long term storage, but when it does, the computer world will adjust itself appropriatly. I believe that all things will eventually be safter, faster, cheaper, and better in digital form. It just might take a few more years.
The companies also agreed to distribute $75.7 million worth of CDs to public entities and nonprofit organizations in all 50 states.
Unfortunately, right before this distribution they're going to raise CD prices to 1 million dollars per CD, so 76 CDs will be given out to public entities... they'll be expecting their.3million change too.
ever see Grand Theft Auto 3 on a PC vs. PS2? Ever see Unreal Tournament or Quake 3? The res is much higher, the frame-rate can be better. Just look at an explosion in quake 3. Pause one of your TV games and look at those big polygons.
Standard controllers (more then 1), and games to fit them.
What truely makes consels better is being in the same room as players who are of mixed experience levels and all playing at once.
PC hardware is perfectly capable of blowing away consoles, and for anyone who's played GTA3 on PS2 and on PC they know that it does.
While PCs have mice and keyboard combos, which is far superior for rtses and first persons, they have no standard handheld controllers.
Console controllers allow for good gaming, like a new mario, monkey-ball, or fighting game. A lot of people don't want to deal with the hassle of learning a complex rts or difficult to control first person. Super Smash Bros (for example) is easy to learn, hours of fun, and 4-player on one machine.
PC's don't hook to TVs (so they have small screens for multiple players), only have 1 person per room (usually), and have steap learning curves.
PCs need to have a good common handheld controller and they need to plug into each other so you can have at least 4. I know they exist, but they need to be included or something that will get people to have them so game developers can develop for them. They also need tv-outs commonplace on high-end video (they might have that now).
PC controllers is the only way I would consider using my PC instead of my game-cube, ps2, or other for party gaming or "casual" gaming. My PC is reserved for when I feel like making a greater commitment, like a 30 person game of Counter Strike, or some Warcraft 3 action. You can't just sit down during a meal and pick up the controller between courses (course 1 = sausage, course 2 = another sausage, mmmmm).
As an experience gamer, I know that computers are better for gaming, and worth the effort. But people need an easy fix/party game as well as the real deal, and that's why I have nearly every consel since atari 7800, and why the public still goes for them.
You've been warned, if you're here to mod offtopic, have some heart man.
I took a year long break from conan myself. He's always funny, but his jokes are identical (he's done that new Quarter graphics joke at least 5 times). He gets old, but a long break can make him very funny again.
I just threw him on the other day and enjoyed him a lot. He's exactly as he always was... I'd flip him on again if I were you. A couple nights ago he did a bit on Triumph the Comic dog at the VMA (video music awards). It was pretty good, and I'm not really a fan of Triumph.
I never watch the interview unless they're with someone outstanding... without them, it's only a 15 minute commitment, and that's worth the effort.
WARNING: NEW BAND LEADER, and he's not very good. At least, there was a new band leader on a couple nights ago and he wasn't very good them.
Can you tell me more about the filter for the now showing guide? I'm not familiar with that.
As I don't watch live tv very often, I rarely use it, but here's what I remember (I'm not at home, so I can't check).
Bring up live tv, then open the guide. Hit Enter (it says something about this at the bottom of the guide window). It should open up a sub-menu about filter options. You can set it only to display movies (for example). This only works for the guide, they really need similar functionality for the now playing screen.
Maybe someone who has their tivo handy can try this out and post some more info if I've missed anything.
This [All In wonder card] is a cheap and effective alternative to TIVO
I disagree:
A year or 2 ago, before I purchaced my tivo, I tried exactly what you are saying (I still use my all in wonder radeon, not a 7500 though).
Point 1: Tivo is stand alone: You don't want to have to not play a game (or whatever) because your card is capturing some show. Trust me, the drain on your processor is noticable, and if you run anything intensive, the recording quality drops way down.
Point 2: Tivo has better hardware: Tivo has better quality tv capture then the all-in-wonder. For the price of tivo-equivlent capture and playback, you'd have to spend closer to $300, which is almost the price of a tivo. Oh, and you'd have to get a remote control and hook the thing into your tv if you want it to be as convienient... so that's a few more bucks.
Point 3: Tivo has MUCH better software: Tivo's have season passes (choose a show, record all episodes), priority systems (record show a over b, b over c...), preferences (I like action, I like comedy, I like the Simpsons, I like Jackie Chan), searches (I want to see all shows that star Jet Li, are movies, and are foreign).
Also the commands like fast forward are tweaked to be very smart. You can jump forward to 15 minute increments easily. You can jump back 6 seconds for an instant reply with one button. When fast forwarding at (full speed = like 32x or something) when you hit play to stop your fastforward it automatically jumps back about half a second worth of fast-forward time... if you're good you can always hit the start of a show right on. It has slomo, a buffer for live tv, you can save your buffer to disk thus recording a show you only started watching in the middle (clears buffer on channel change).
Tivo is totally essential to anyone who really enjoys TV but has a job, or school, or friends, or something that makes them not a couch potato. I don't watch too much, but what I do watch is all prime goodness.
My Tivo has 60some hours of recording time. And it's more than enough.
First of all, 1200 hrs = about 700 hrs of high quality (your 60hr tivo has closer to 35hrs of high quality record time).
Secondly, 1200 hours of tivo action would give you greater flexability with how you use your tivo. You wouldn't need to delete good shows just because you had already seen them. You could keep a collection of HBO movies instead of buying the DVDs. The entire season of Sopranos, whatever. Tivo is smart, if you already have a show, it won't re-record it (assuming the guide has the epiosde information).
Tivo doesn't have a way of cropping a video such that only a desired scene is kept (one of my suggestions for upgrade), so you need to, for example, save the whole Conan just for the 10 second bit on The guy who's protected from three inch bees. I love that bit, but my 30 hr can't afford an hour for every scene I want to keep around to show my friends when they visit, neither could my 60, or even 120 if I had them. I'd still have the world cup on my tivo if I could, if just to illustrate what I was talking about to my friends when I complain about Kahn crushing my country =(.
With 1200 hrs, maybe tivo will release some software that allows us to put some of our programs into archives, or have some kind of sorting tools. All they have now is a filter for the now-showing guide.
If you actually intend to base a company around the technology covered by the patent, then you're deluding yourself if you try to draft and prosecute the patent yourself.
What do you know, a practicing patent attorney is in favor of paying for patent attorneys (espesially those in smaller... firms that use patent agents. I wonder if that's like his firm).
It's very possible that you are right, but your opinion is too biased to take at face value.
I think this is a great idea. Old Nintendo games are sometimes rare, and often still worth playing (Bionic Commando, River City Ransom, Super Dodge Ball, Contra).
I have on more then one occasion hunted down an old great for a friend on his birthday and it's always well received. As time progresses it's getting harder to find working copies (funco land is a great place, though they charge as much as $20 for the rare ones if they have them, and sometimes they don't have much life left in them).
Re-releasing the games is good, and making them small and "tradeable" sounds like fun, assuming they are sufficently cheap and random. I wouldn't mind buying a pack of nintendo cards, getting another copy of Super Spike V-Ball as my rare and trying to trade for my friends Solar Jetman, maybe I'll throw in a Ninja Gaiden. A lot more interesting to me then magic the gathering or baseball cards.
It's good that work is being done to make a good weigted spam filter.
It's funny how bad the standard Microsoft spam filter is (the one present in outlook). It's simply a word lookup, where if the word is present the message is marked as spam. It looks for things like "for free?". You can see the full list here, near the bottom. It's a little old, but not outdated (I think you can upgrade your spam filters, but I tested these, and the ones I tested work).
How long until Microsoft uses a stealth boat to start a war between the US and Japan just so that they have exclusive media coverage of the events as they unfold, or with Germany just so they can start a trade embargo that will limit our ability to use that cool new KDE Groupware System?
Does anyone know about any other competitions, or similar AI programming games? I did a couple classes in college where you designed real-time and turned based AIs for games, and it was a lot of fun. RTSes interest me the most... I don't suppose there's an open starcraft clone or something with a good AI interface?
A possible solution to the problem of battery life and heat is to enable the cellphone P2P only when it is in it's caddy. This might limit the system quite a bit, but with a smart system maybe not. Also, a lot of people leave their phones in chargers at work, in the car, and at home, and they would do it even moreso if it was the only time their downloading worked.
You could still browse, search, and use normal cellphone operations while your phone was in hand, but it wouldn't begin downloads or uploads until returned to a charger.
I'm not sure how the noding would work, but with leaf node shielding and stuff, you might be able to limit searches enough to allow phones to receive upload and search requests while portable, but queue uploads and downloads until caddied.
Of course, they could always make new batteries and better phones that use less power while transmitting data too. Now they'll have a better reason to (instead of just making them smaller).
What makes robotwars so entertaining is that the robots are made by a couple of grease monkeys in their garage on a 2 thousand dollar budget with lawn motor engines and old shoes. When one of the really well made spinning disks hits a piece of junk it breaks into tiny peaces.
Some of them are well made, and they usually rip the competition in half. When two monsters face each other it kind of sucks (like the world championship between drillzilla and razor that was on TNN recently) but it's not that bad because it's always some kind of grudge match.
In battlebots, all you get is invunerable robots scoring points on each other by getting weapon hits and doing no damage. They never show the little guys running around trying not to catch on fire.
I don't know about the movie rentals as compared to game rentals, probably fairly even.
I doubt it's even close. I play 10 times as many video games as I watch movies (and buy accordingly) and yet I rent at least 10 times as many movies as video games. Among the 8.4 billion in rental revenue, it said 7 billion were vhs and 1.4 billion were dvd. It didn't even mention video games. Maybe they weren't part of the study, but I bet that they did not have a significant effect on the total (I never see 45 copies of the new ps2 game on the shelves at blockbuster, but what new release doesn't get that kind of treatment).
I have no idea about video sales, but I doubt they're as high as video rentals.
Video games are big business, and may eclipse movies (if they haven't already).
video game industry in 2001: $9.4 billion
Movie rental in 2001: $8.42 billion
Box Office in 2001: $8.35 billion
So even though the video game industry isn't quite up to speed with the entire movie industry, it's bigger then rentals or theatures on it's own. Not bad.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as every great game gets it own thread, I believe that Solar Jetman was among the 10 best Nintendo games ever. Good old Rare... stupid Microsoft purchacing them =(.
Some other top 10 games that deserver mention:
River City Ransom
Super Dodge Ball
Bionic Commando
Zelda
Zelda 2
Mike Tyson's Punch Out
Metroid
I'll leave the other 2 open.
Yeah but before 50 years are up, the music industry will have crushed all "non-popular" forms of music expression, and those who play a latin rhythm will have to be "reeducated" by the microsoft police.
The possibility of the great photographs of our day being erased with an accidental click of a button or the failure of a hard drive read head worries me.
As technologies become more prevalent so do the technologies that support them. Backups are becoming more common among standard computer users. Consumers can use raid arrays (not all that expensive now), or can back things up and switch hard drives as soon as they find a bad cluster. Hard drives last longer, and everyone has a CDR now. I've lost more pictures due to water damage then to harddisk failure. Anyone who is a professional should be able to keep their data alive indefinately.
Digitial information has yet to replace analog as a means of long term storage, but when it does, the computer world will adjust itself appropriatly. I believe that all things will eventually be safter, faster, cheaper, and better in digital form. It just might take a few more years.
The companies also agreed to distribute $75.7 million worth of CDs to public entities and nonprofit organizations in all 50 states.
.3million change too.
Unfortunately, right before this distribution they're going to raise CD prices to 1 million dollars per CD, so 76 CDs will be given out to public entities... they'll be expecting their
...there alot of security issues with that.
hmmm, if only we had some kind of guide that would help us to write secure web applications... but where?
most console games look much better than PC games
I disagree completely.
ever see Grand Theft Auto 3 on a PC vs. PS2? Ever see Unreal Tournament or Quake 3? The res is much higher, the frame-rate can be better. Just look at an explosion in quake 3. Pause one of your TV games and look at those big polygons.
Standard controllers (more then 1), and games to fit them.
What truely makes consels better is being in the same room as players who are of mixed experience levels and all playing at once.
PC hardware is perfectly capable of blowing away consoles, and for anyone who's played GTA3 on PS2 and on PC they know that it does.
While PCs have mice and keyboard combos, which is far superior for rtses and first persons, they have no standard handheld controllers.
Console controllers allow for good gaming, like a new mario, monkey-ball, or fighting game. A lot of people don't want to deal with the hassle of learning a complex rts or difficult to control first person. Super Smash Bros (for example) is easy to learn, hours of fun, and 4-player on one machine.
PC's don't hook to TVs (so they have small screens for multiple players), only have 1 person per room (usually), and have steap learning curves.
PCs need to have a good common handheld controller and they need to plug into each other so you can have at least 4. I know they exist, but they need to be included or something that will get people to have them so game developers can develop for them. They also need tv-outs commonplace on high-end video (they might have that now).
PC controllers is the only way I would consider using my PC instead of my game-cube, ps2, or other for party gaming or "casual" gaming. My PC is reserved for when I feel like making a greater commitment, like a 30 person game of Counter Strike, or some Warcraft 3 action. You can't just sit down during a meal and pick up the controller between courses (course 1 = sausage, course 2 = another sausage, mmmmm).
As an experience gamer, I know that computers are better for gaming, and worth the effort. But people need an easy fix/party game as well as the real deal, and that's why I have nearly every consel since atari 7800, and why the public still goes for them.
It's like combining a nose hair trimmer with a toothbrush
I call the patent!
or do you have super patent-savers?
You've been warned, if you're here to mod offtopic, have some heart man.
I took a year long break from conan myself. He's always funny, but his jokes are identical (he's done that new Quarter graphics joke at least 5 times). He gets old, but a long break can make him very funny again.
I just threw him on the other day and enjoyed him a lot. He's exactly as he always was... I'd flip him on again if I were you. A couple nights ago he did a bit on Triumph the Comic dog at the VMA (video music awards). It was pretty good, and I'm not really a fan of Triumph.
I never watch the interview unless they're with someone outstanding... without them, it's only a 15 minute commitment, and that's worth the effort.
WARNING: NEW BAND LEADER, and he's not very good. At least, there was a new band leader on a couple nights ago and he wasn't very good them.
Can you tell me more about the filter for the now showing guide? I'm not familiar with that.
As I don't watch live tv very often, I rarely use it, but here's what I remember (I'm not at home, so I can't check).
Bring up live tv, then open the guide. Hit Enter (it says something about this at the bottom of the guide window). It should open up a sub-menu about filter options. You can set it only to display movies (for example). This only works for the guide, they really need similar functionality for the now playing screen.
Maybe someone who has their tivo handy can try this out and post some more info if I've missed anything.
This [All In wonder card] is a cheap and effective alternative to TIVO
I disagree:
A year or 2 ago, before I purchaced my tivo, I tried exactly what you are saying (I still use my all in wonder radeon, not a 7500 though).
Point 1: Tivo is stand alone: You don't want to have to not play a game (or whatever) because your card is capturing some show. Trust me, the drain on your processor is noticable, and if you run anything intensive, the recording quality drops way down.
Point 2: Tivo has better hardware: Tivo has better quality tv capture then the all-in-wonder. For the price of tivo-equivlent capture and playback, you'd have to spend closer to $300, which is almost the price of a tivo. Oh, and you'd have to get a remote control and hook the thing into your tv if you want it to be as convienient... so that's a few more bucks.
Point 3: Tivo has MUCH better software: Tivo's have season passes (choose a show, record all episodes), priority systems (record show a over b, b over c...), preferences (I like action, I like comedy, I like the Simpsons, I like Jackie Chan), searches (I want to see all shows that star Jet Li, are movies, and are foreign).
Also the commands like fast forward are tweaked to be very smart. You can jump forward to 15 minute increments easily. You can jump back 6 seconds for an instant reply with one button. When fast forwarding at (full speed = like 32x or something) when you hit play to stop your fastforward it automatically jumps back about half a second worth of fast-forward time... if you're good you can always hit the start of a show right on. It has slomo, a buffer for live tv, you can save your buffer to disk thus recording a show you only started watching in the middle (clears buffer on channel change).
Tivo is totally essential to anyone who really enjoys TV but has a job, or school, or friends, or something that makes them not a couch potato. I don't watch too much, but what I do watch is all prime goodness.
My Tivo has 60some hours of recording time. And it's more than enough.
First of all, 1200 hrs = about 700 hrs of high quality (your 60hr tivo has closer to 35hrs of high quality record time).
Secondly, 1200 hours of tivo action would give you greater flexability with how you use your tivo. You wouldn't need to delete good shows just because you had already seen them. You could keep a collection of HBO movies instead of buying the DVDs. The entire season of Sopranos, whatever. Tivo is smart, if you already have a show, it won't re-record it (assuming the guide has the epiosde information).
Tivo doesn't have a way of cropping a video such that only a desired scene is kept (one of my suggestions for upgrade), so you need to, for example, save the whole Conan just for the 10 second bit on The guy who's protected from three inch bees. I love that bit, but my 30 hr can't afford an hour for every scene I want to keep around to show my friends when they visit, neither could my 60, or even 120 if I had them. I'd still have the world cup on my tivo if I could, if just to illustrate what I was talking about to my friends when I complain about Kahn crushing my country =(.
With 1200 hrs, maybe tivo will release some software that allows us to put some of our programs into archives, or have some kind of sorting tools. All they have now is a filter for the now-showing guide.
not one to let down the porn lurkers:
/-\
| | | (==
\-/
better?
If you actually intend to base a company around the technology covered by the patent, then you're deluding yourself if you try to draft and prosecute the patent yourself.
What do you know, a practicing patent attorney is in favor of paying for patent attorneys (espesially those in smaller... firms that use patent agents. I wonder if that's like his firm).
It's very possible that you are right, but your opinion is too biased to take at face value.
And please, no replies from Uppity suburban kids quoting the travesties our government committed from your Rage Against the Machine CD linear notes.
Fuck you, I wont do what you tell me!
I think this is a great idea. Old Nintendo games are sometimes rare, and often still worth playing (Bionic Commando, River City Ransom, Super Dodge Ball, Contra).
I have on more then one occasion hunted down an old great for a friend on his birthday and it's always well received. As time progresses it's getting harder to find working copies (funco land is a great place, though they charge as much as $20 for the rare ones if they have them, and sometimes they don't have much life left in them).
Re-releasing the games is good, and making them small and "tradeable" sounds like fun, assuming they are sufficently cheap and random. I wouldn't mind buying a pack of nintendo cards, getting another copy of Super Spike V-Ball as my rare and trying to trade for my friends Solar Jetman, maybe I'll throw in a Ninja Gaiden. A lot more interesting to me then magic the gathering or baseball cards.
It's good that work is being done to make a good weigted spam filter.
It's funny how bad the standard Microsoft spam filter is (the one present in outlook). It's simply a word lookup, where if the word is present the message is marked as spam. It looks for things like "for free?". You can see the full list here, near the bottom. It's a little old, but not outdated (I think you can upgrade your spam filters, but I tested these, and the ones I tested work).
The adult filter isn't any better.
How long until Microsoft uses a stealth boat to start a war between the US and Japan just so that they have exclusive media coverage of the events as they unfold, or with Germany just so they can start a trade embargo that will limit our ability to use that cool new KDE Groupware System?
many geeks will automatically think of the same name?
Like the way I called the "Melnorme" from Starcontrol 2 the Melon-Drones.
ok, maybe that one was just me.
Does anyone know about any other competitions, or similar AI programming games? I did a couple classes in college where you designed real-time and turned based AIs for games, and it was a lot of fun. RTSes interest me the most... I don't suppose there's an open starcraft clone or something with a good AI interface?
A possible solution to the problem of battery life and heat is to enable the cellphone P2P only when it is in it's caddy. This might limit the system quite a bit, but with a smart system maybe not. Also, a lot of people leave their phones in chargers at work, in the car, and at home, and they would do it even moreso if it was the only time their downloading worked.
You could still browse, search, and use normal cellphone operations while your phone was in hand, but it wouldn't begin downloads or uploads until returned to a charger.
I'm not sure how the noding would work, but with leaf node shielding and stuff, you might be able to limit searches enough to allow phones to receive upload and search requests while portable, but queue uploads and downloads until caddied.
Of course, they could always make new batteries and better phones that use less power while transmitting data too. Now they'll have a better reason to (instead of just making them smaller).
What makes robotwars so entertaining is that the robots are made by a couple of grease monkeys in their garage on a 2 thousand dollar budget with lawn motor engines and old shoes. When one of the really well made spinning disks hits a piece of junk it breaks into tiny peaces.
Some of them are well made, and they usually rip the competition in half. When two monsters face each other it kind of sucks (like the world championship between drillzilla and razor that was on TNN recently) but it's not that bad because it's always some kind of grudge match.
In battlebots, all you get is invunerable robots scoring points on each other by getting weapon hits and doing no damage. They never show the little guys running around trying not to catch on fire.
Canon Mistakenly Announces 11-Megapixel Digital Camera
Later, they remedied this announcement to read: 11 Megapixel Digital Cameras.
Which was the extent of their sales last quarter.
I don't know about the movie rentals as compared to game rentals, probably fairly even.
I doubt it's even close. I play 10 times as many video games as I watch movies (and buy accordingly) and yet I rent at least 10 times as many movies as video games. Among the 8.4 billion in rental revenue, it said 7 billion were vhs and 1.4 billion were dvd. It didn't even mention video games. Maybe they weren't part of the study, but I bet that they did not have a significant effect on the total (I never see 45 copies of the new ps2 game on the shelves at blockbuster, but what new release doesn't get that kind of treatment).
I have no idea about video sales, but I doubt they're as high as video rentals.
Video games are big business, and may eclipse movies (if they haven't already).
video game industry in 2001: $9.4 billion
Movie rental in 2001: $8.42 billion
Box Office in 2001: $8.35 billion
So even though the video game industry isn't quite up to speed with the entire movie industry, it's bigger then rentals or theatures on it's own. Not bad.