I don't know if you've read the story but a major plot point is that Fogg *believes* he makes it back home roughly 24 hours late. Then he realises that due to crossing time zones he's adjusted his watch forwards a total of 24 hours (and forgotten about the international date line, or possibly it hadn't been invented yet), and makes it back to the club just in time.
My point is that if you were to write an interplanetary version of the same novel, you could use the same plot device, only use relativity instead of time zones, because time is subjective. 90 days apparently pass for the fast-moving Fogg, but only 89 for the gentlemen back home... see? Just a thought.
I don't know what the acceleration profile of the plasma shooter thing is, but accelerating to 11.7 kilometres per second (as the article suggests) is equivalent to accelerating at a comfortable one Earth gravity for just under twenty minutes. Sound okay?
This is actually a well-known function of comedy movies. When the Monty Python team were first putting together And Now For Something Completely Different (which is essentially a whole string of sketches) they ran it in front of a test audience and found that about two-thirds of the way in, people just stopped laughing, but picked up again towards the end. They went back to the drawing board, changed the sketches around into a different order, screened it again, and the exact same thing happened.
Moral: Make like Shaun Of The Dead. Start with lots of funny, put your serious emotional stuff in right at the optimal time nearer the end, and go out funny.
Something of a tangent, and something of a ***spoiler***, but in the animated movie Batman Beyond: Return Of The Joker, the Joker does indeed get killed. Twice. It's actually a pretty good movie, I recommend it.
That would be more of a good thing. I haven't seen the new Justice League Extreme series, but Justice League was one of the best animated series I'd seen in a good long while. If the FF show compares then I'll be happy.
Has nobody considered the possibility that the overall quality of UK music might just be getting worse? Honestly, the generic, talentless, verse-chorus-verse rubbish I try to avoid hearing on the radio these days...
If you are playing console games with a mouse and keyboard, most likely you already own a gaming-capable PC. I doubt many people would voluntarily switch.
I'm kind of half-and-half on the joypad vs. keyboard and mouse issue.
I appreciate that the mouse provides precision and speed to those with the skill. You can turn 180 degrees almost instantaneously, which you can't with a joystick (or in real life, but that is very much beside the point). Personally I was brought up on GoldenEye and Perfect Dark and I am firmly of the opinion that GE's is the best control system of any game, video or otherwise, but if you think you can get better accuracy with a mouse, then bring it on;)
I will also concede happily that the official Xbox pad is indeed below par.
But the clicky buttons on the mouse aren't really ideal for a game. You need more of those controls on your fast and dextrous thumb in my opinion. And as for the keyboard: great for typing, but disastrous as a means of controlling a videogame. Poorly laid out, overcomplicated, too large. Somebody needs to design a keyboard with the same number of keys (or maybe a few fewer... just a personal choice, I feel simplicity is a virtue), but laid out in a design which a gamer can use - maybe even moulded into a handheld peripheral that you can actually use with a console (are you expecting to play Halo 2 with the keyboard and mouse on your lap, or do you have some odd flat desk layout figured out?), with all the functions but twice the usability.
I always think that the main aspect holding back professional competitive videogaming is the spectator aspect. Videogames have always been designed (with greater or lesser success) to be entertaining for the players alone. As yet I'm not aware of any videogame that is also designed to be entertaining to watch, even for a non-gamer. Spectating a game of - for example - Counter-Strike is insanely confusing for someone who has no idea what is going on, especially if the map is far too large to perceive all at once, and you can only follow one character at once. And unless you have some direct experience of the game it's difficult to appreciate the skills of the players too.
But the pessimist is never disappointed. Go into this with the right mental attitude: Halo 2 may not prove to be the most earth-shatteringly amazing game ever, but stands a good chance of being well over half-decent... and I dare say you will enjoy H2 more.
Oh yeah, one other piece of advice: don't read those big, blabbing reviews which give away everything the game has to offer over the course of 8 or 10 pages. Either read a more restrained mag - like, e.g., Edge - or just check the score and put the magazine back on the shelf. Let them be pleasant surprises instead.
Obviously, Google intends to release an application or service designed to stir the people of the United Kingdom into some sort of frenzy. Hence, Great Britain Rouser. "gbrowser".
My question is: of all the cruise control machines in the world, what are the odds that the first one to malfunction in such a spectacular fashion would ALSO have a swipe card ignition system?
It's a half-good simulation which enables us to start figuring out the total mind-job quantum algorithms that we'll be using once we get the real thing working. 's called research.
The only reason we can't pin down a tenth planet is because there are several candidates, all of them considerably MORE worthy of the title "planet" than Pluto, which should by rights be an asteroid.
FPSs on the GBA just strike me as a bad idea generally. Personally, I'd settle for a top-down version. You know, maybe similar to the SNES Zelda games, but obviously with a different graphical style. Or the Game Boy version of Perfect Dark. That could actually work.
Actually, that's a *terrible* way to generate random numbers. Even discounted psychological factors (ask someone to pick a number between one and ten, and there's a significantly higher probability than 1/10 that they'll pick 7), it's pretty flawed: the chances of a person in the street picking an integer are pretty high, even though there are uncountably more real numbers than integers. The chance of them picking a number less than, say, Graham's number are pretty high, but almost all numbers are larger than g64. Moreover the Kolmogorov complexity of any number they can name in a finite time will by definition be finite - whereas the vast majority of numbers are of infinite Kolmogorov complexity and hence inexpressible. This last thing is what I believe the author is getting at when he tries to define randomness as a quantity.
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I don't know if you've read the story but a major plot point is that Fogg *believes* he makes it back home roughly 24 hours late. Then he realises that due to crossing time zones he's adjusted his watch forwards a total of 24 hours (and forgotten about the international date line, or possibly it hadn't been invented yet), and makes it back to the club just in time.
My point is that if you were to write an interplanetary version of the same novel, you could use the same plot device, only use relativity instead of time zones, because time is subjective. 90 days apparently pass for the fast-moving Fogg, but only 89 for the gentlemen back home... see? Just a thought.
I don't know what the acceleration profile of the plasma shooter thing is, but accelerating to 11.7 kilometres per second (as the article suggests) is equivalent to accelerating at a comfortable one Earth gravity for just under twenty minutes. Sound okay?
Or Japanese fauna?
This is actually a well-known function of comedy movies. When the Monty Python team were first putting together And Now For Something Completely Different (which is essentially a whole string of sketches) they ran it in front of a test audience and found that about two-thirds of the way in, people just stopped laughing, but picked up again towards the end. They went back to the drawing board, changed the sketches around into a different order, screened it again, and the exact same thing happened.
Moral: Make like Shaun Of The Dead. Start with lots of funny, put your serious emotional stuff in right at the optimal time nearer the end, and go out funny.
There is a link between violence and videogames in my opinion; the latter is an outlet for the former.
Keep the box it came in.
Something of a tangent, and something of a ***spoiler***, but in the animated movie Batman Beyond: Return Of The Joker, the Joker does indeed get killed. Twice. It's actually a pretty good movie, I recommend it.
That would be more of a good thing. I haven't seen the new Justice League Extreme series, but Justice League was one of the best animated series I'd seen in a good long while. If the FF show compares then I'll be happy.
It's an animated series about the Fantastic Four, not four animated series which are all fantastic.
Has nobody considered the possibility that the overall quality of UK music might just be getting worse? Honestly, the generic, talentless, verse-chorus-verse rubbish I try to avoid hearing on the radio these days...
If you are playing console games with a mouse and keyboard, most likely you already own a gaming-capable PC. I doubt many people would voluntarily switch.
I'm kind of half-and-half on the joypad vs. keyboard and mouse issue.
I appreciate that the mouse provides precision and speed to those with the skill. You can turn 180 degrees almost instantaneously, which you can't with a joystick (or in real life, but that is very much beside the point). Personally I was brought up on GoldenEye and Perfect Dark and I am firmly of the opinion that GE's is the best control system of any game, video or otherwise, but if you think you can get better accuracy with a mouse, then bring it on ;)
I will also concede happily that the official Xbox pad is indeed below par.
But the clicky buttons on the mouse aren't really ideal for a game. You need more of those controls on your fast and dextrous thumb in my opinion. And as for the keyboard: great for typing, but disastrous as a means of controlling a videogame. Poorly laid out, overcomplicated, too large. Somebody needs to design a keyboard with the same number of keys (or maybe a few fewer... just a personal choice, I feel simplicity is a virtue), but laid out in a design which a gamer can use - maybe even moulded into a handheld peripheral that you can actually use with a console (are you expecting to play Halo 2 with the keyboard and mouse on your lap, or do you have some odd flat desk layout figured out?), with all the functions but twice the usability.
I always think that the main aspect holding back professional competitive videogaming is the spectator aspect. Videogames have always been designed (with greater or lesser success) to be entertaining for the players alone. As yet I'm not aware of any videogame that is also designed to be entertaining to watch, even for a non-gamer. Spectating a game of - for example - Counter-Strike is insanely confusing for someone who has no idea what is going on, especially if the map is far too large to perceive all at once, and you can only follow one character at once. And unless you have some direct experience of the game it's difficult to appreciate the skills of the players too.
No game ever lives up to its hype.
But the pessimist is never disappointed. Go into this with the right mental attitude: Halo 2 may not prove to be the most earth-shatteringly amazing game ever, but stands a good chance of being well over half-decent... and I dare say you will enjoy H2 more.
Oh yeah, one other piece of advice: don't read those big, blabbing reviews which give away everything the game has to offer over the course of 8 or 10 pages. Either read a more restrained mag - like, e.g., Edge - or just check the score and put the magazine back on the shelf. Let them be pleasant surprises instead.
Obviously, Google intends to release an application or service designed to stir the people of the United Kingdom into some sort of frenzy. Hence, Great Britain Rouser. "gbrowser".
*ducks*
Yeah, if videogames could vote then we'd be at the mercy of the Lemmings, between them accounting for 96% of the voting share.
My question is: of all the cruise control machines in the world, what are the odds that the first one to malfunction in such a spectacular fashion would ALSO have a swipe card ignition system?
What's better is that the bit you cut out appears to change colour as you drag it.
That's Pow R Toc H by Pink Floyd, isn't it?
Well, that's how it's worked with Mario, Street Fighter, Tomb Raider...
New paradigm? No, same paradigm, working in the opposite direction.
It's a half-good simulation which enables us to start figuring out the total mind-job quantum algorithms that we'll be using once we get the real thing working. 's called research.
People always say this as though it's a bad thing... personally, I can see an upside to it...
The only reason we can't pin down a tenth planet is because there are several candidates, all of them considerably MORE worthy of the title "planet" than Pluto, which should by rights be an asteroid.
FPSs on the GBA just strike me as a bad idea generally. Personally, I'd settle for a top-down version. You know, maybe similar to the SNES Zelda games, but obviously with a different graphical style. Or the Game Boy version of Perfect Dark. That could actually work.
Actually, that's a *terrible* way to generate random numbers. Even discounted psychological factors (ask someone to pick a number between one and ten, and there's a significantly higher probability than 1/10 that they'll pick 7), it's pretty flawed: the chances of a person in the street picking an integer are pretty high, even though there are uncountably more real numbers than integers. The chance of them picking a number less than, say, Graham's number are pretty high, but almost all numbers are larger than g64. Moreover the Kolmogorov complexity of any number they can name in a finite time will by definition be finite - whereas the vast majority of numbers are of infinite Kolmogorov complexity and hence inexpressible. This last thing is what I believe the author is getting at when he tries to define randomness as a quantity.