Well, it does support a car adapter and a portable LCD screen, so it does come damn close to being the most portable console ever. I've played my fair share of Soul Caliber II in my car...
1. Battle system is meaningless. In one savegame with under 30 hours total gametime I managed to create a party with an average level of 85, and have beaten Kefka with one character in 5 turns. Vanish-doom kills virtually everything you could possibly want to kill, and is incredibly easy to learn. Ultima does insane damage to all enemies, and it's possible to cast it 4 times in one turn for 5 mp. Cyan can do up to 79998 unblockable damage (ie, not effected by defense) in one turn for 1 mp *WITHOUT* the genji glove, at approximately level 50 (which can be achieved by 20 hours gametime.) You get the general picture - a retarded monkey could beat this game.
2. Too many characters. Too many characters. Too many characters. Seriously, there were a lot of duds in that cast - sure, Locke and Shadow and Celes are cool, but do you really need over a dozen playable characters in a game where you can only have 4 people in your current party?
3. Bugs, bugs bugs galore, many of them showstoppers. Try controlling the wrong enemy with Relm - there goes your save game.
Top 8 reasons why FF8 is worse than FF7:
1. Absolutely retarded battle system. Multiple methods of making your party invincible for no cost, the whole "draw" system, having to sit through boring GF animations every single time you summoned, limit breaks that could kill anything ever concievable dead. At least you can turn the random battles off though - that's a plus.
2. The whole "orphanage" subplot is by far the most retarded thing I've ever seen in a Final Fantasy game - even if you make it so Squall never uses a GF, he still loses his childhood memories regardless. WTF?
3. There's no way of determining whose bitching is more inane - Sephie's, Rinoa's, Quistis's, Zell's, or Irving's. Squall actually is cool in his own way, but the supporting cast SUCKED.
4. Too many unnecessary characters. I mean, Squall has a critical hit rate of 100% if your reflexes are good and can't miss the enemy (to say nothing of his limit break), Rinoa's limit breaks make you invincible, and Zell's limit break damage is incredible. There's no reason to ever use the other characters - even in the (spoiler) end battle, you can just let the useless ones die and have 'em be replaced by the good ones. In FF7, sure, Cloud was a lot better than the other characters, but the difference wasn't so pronounced - you could argue that Cloud, Cid and Tifa's the best party, but you could throw Vincent or Yuffie into the equation and have a big old mess on your hands. There's no argument about the best party in FF8.
5. Utterly dumbassed design decisions - say you (SPOILER) wanted to equip Edea with magic during the brief period she's in your party. Where does that magic go when she leaves? Well, not back to you, that's for sure!
6. How could you waste three perfectly awesome characters - Laguna, Kiros, and Ward? I mean, I'd rather play the game as these characters, yet for whatever reason, you get to be them for perhaps two hours at most during the entire game. Oh, and the mechanism behind the whole Laguna thing is never adequately explained. I mean, it's obvious (spoiler) Laguna is Squall's father, but why the fuck would using GFs cause Squall to collapse and see life through the eyes of his father decades ago?
7. Features the worst first five hours of any Final Fantasy game ever. Totally butchered - many fans couldn't bring themselves to play through it was so boring.
8. I will admit FF8 had the best ending of any of the Final Fantasies. Just seeing a portion of it in the mall once was motivation enough for me to actually play through the entire beast. But why give such a horrible, pointless game such a great ending?
Uhh, speaking as someone who owns the said version of Phantasy Star III on the Gameboy Advance, I think you're a little off-base. Remember, all custom chips have reliable inputs and outputs, so if you're switching a program over to a system lacking a specific custom chip, it's not very hard to find something with equivalent functionality on the current system or to just hack through it with software. There really isn't a line drawn in the sand between translation and emulation - I'd say that translation's essentially an emulator optimized specifically to play one game correctly, to hell with the rest. Like Final Fantasy Chronicals - hell, FFC has a real, working Japanese ROM of Chrono Trigger on the CD that works perfectly in emu.
I'd say it was attempted, and completed rather successfully to boot - although the sound quality was noticably degraded... I imagine that code was probably ripped out and redone. But the game plays just fine if you're "in" to that kind of thing.
Actually, the way they get all those sick specs is by overclocking the system like crazy and installing a really nasty cooling system. Considering the insane prices they're charging for the thing it's so not worth it.
But yeah, if you do order one, it'll probably live up to the claims - it'll just be a huge waste of money.
You the same bitwise that brought Veon Prism to Portal of Evil's attention?
You are aware that you weren't supposed to whore that link out because the server it's on already was having bandwidth problems and it now links to a person of a retarded person because of your said whoring, right?
1. Awesome graphics for the time. I actually was one of the minority who didn't mind the "walking around graphics," and everything else looked fantastic.
2. Excellent characters - Sephiroth, Cloud and Aeris are three of the most memorable video game characters ever, simply because they weren't total cliches - you'll note you didn't start seeing a lot of bad-ass bishonen with white hair as villains in RPGs until after FF7. And don't get me started about having Mr. T in your party...
3. An astonding soundtrack - on a technical level, it's not that amazing, but FF7's soundtrack fits the game perfectly, and sounds good in its own right.
4. Customizable gameplay that isn't totally, completely cheap - you really have to work hard to get your characters up to godlike status in FF7, whereas in most of the other Final Fantasies and new-school rpgs there are easily exploitable tactics that make you ridiculously powerful. You don't have to level in FF7 unless you want to beat the weapons. This is in contrast to FF6, which is one of the easiest games of all-time because of many, many obvious flaws in the battle system, and FF8, which could be THE easiest game of all time.
5. A cool setting that wasn't completely stolen from other sources - Nibelheim is my favorite original RPG town of all time.
6. A story that, while not quite as deep as FF4's, managed to entertain. I liked how it was left to the player to figure out a lot of what the hell went on - it's too damn easy to skip those Zack sequences.
7. Excellent replay value for an RPG. There's a lot of good mini-games, details you wouldn't pick up on just one play-through, materia to miss, ways to customize your party, etc. I know people who've beaten FF7 over a dozen times.
I mean, seriously, people still are playing this game. Check out gamefaqs - every single year FF7 always creeps back up into the top ten FAQ list come middle of summer when no new games are released. Not bad for a game that came out in 1997...
You're assuming that the transmitters are all in the same exact physical location and the radiation is concentrated. Actual, real life exposure will be much, much smaller because the microwaves are radiated, not concentrated. I can't say by how much because honestly, assuming all the transmitters are 3 feet away from each other in a desk formation, just graphing that beast would require a better part of a day of messing around in mathematica, but it'll likely be in the safe spectrum.
Speaking as someone who's actually BEEN exposed to unsafe levels of microwave radiation (Took apart a microwave when I was a kid without unplugging it,) I honestly don't think it really makes a difference. You can actually take the tube out of a microwave and try to use it as a gun and still live to tell the tale. I'll testify that the inside of one of those tubes is one of the coolest sights you'll ever, ever see. Hell, just flying on a airplane will expose you to radiation levels 100x what you get from a cell phone. Just saying "this causes cancer" doesn't really phase me anymore - it's a disease with so many causes you can almost just chalk it up to old age and be done with it. Either the phone the guy made was emitting unsafe levels of radiation or the cancer case was coincidental. Radiation below a certain threshold really doesn't seem to do anything.
They tried it with Megaman, the Wily Wars, for the Genesis.
It sucked. They remixed the music and changed the way the games played enough so that they seemed merely mediocre. It's strange how the little details in a game can make it good or bad.
Anyway, I've been a Megaman fan from the get-go, and this is pretty interesting. I've played 1-8, and I've also played Power Battles, but imo Power Battles sucked. Too easy. Since every single one of those games was re-released on the PS1 with the exception of 7, you'd think this'd be a PS exclusive. Weird. I seriously hope all the graphics and sound are NES-perfect.
Actually, there's a trick to using the top spin. If you do it right after you jump while you're in the air, it won't screw up. If you press the button too late, you're screwed, but I find that the only time it messes up for me is if I use it while colliding into the enemy. I've actually used it to help me get through stages before, and it always works for me when I fight Shadow Man - it's no metal blade but, heck, anything that makes Shadow Man easy is okay in my book.
Objective C is a mac and next-step centric language. That alone ought to knock it off the list. As for regular C... I don't think anyone out there goes "I only know C, I don't use C++ because I hate OOP and all the new extensions and improvements and such." And assembler is processor-specific. There's PowerPC assembly and 68000 assembly and x86 assembly... all effectively different languages that are grouped under this banner of assembly. Besides, nobody hires an assembler programmer these days who can't use C - computers are so fast that it's obsolete, and hard to develop for.
As for the others:
Brainfuck's a hobbyist language and is harder to use than assembler. VBScript isn't used on hundreds of thousands of webpages unnecessarily. Basic is useless for real world applications.
I'm not sure why Pascal and Awk aren't on the list. I think awk's more a scripting language (like applescript or vbscript) than a robust language, but you'd think there's legacy code in Pascal that needs updating...
Thanks. (Site's been slashdotted)
Anyone else amazed that there's more jobs open for Java programmers than C programmers? Do that many people really need cross-platform development support? And is visual basic really a... language? I know it's a good language to prototype applications and such, but I didn't think anybody paid MONEY for being able to use it. Oh well, learn something new every day. I suppose if you want a programming job it's best to know a variety of languages than to just market yourself as a C coder.
What is this -/ad.? The book isn't even out yet unless you want to pay a fortune on ebay, and we know absolutely nothing about it other than the fact it's by William Gibson - who, btw, I've never heard of. Anyone else read his previous work, or, god forbid, actually has read this so called "novel?"
Such a goddamn waste of money. I built a computer that has an Athlon 2700+ (which I plan overclocking), Raid 0 with 2 western digitals as well, 1 gig ram as well, Ati 9700 all in wonder, etc, etc, FOR LESS THAN 1/3 THE COST. I know mine goes a LITTLE slower, but damn, that thing doesn't even have hyperthreading... How old is that review?
The technology for changing the weather already exists. However, imagine the liability if a hurricane-seeding program changed the path of a hurricane from going through an empty field to going through a major U.S. city by accident. The weather service would get its pants sued off. Similarly, what happens if they don't seed a hurricane in a particular incidence and someone dies? Other weather controlling initiatives have similar problems. It's why we'll likely never see weather-changing technology used for civilian benefit.
The above is also a reason why something is SERIOUSLY awry with the U.S. legal system.
If you buy a 16:9 television, you're screwed if you want to watch regular TV. You have to compromise - either you get a distorted picture that fills the screen and makes everyone look fat, or you have to live with twin vertical gray bars - with plasma I don't think the bars are an option, so the picture's just stretched to hell. 16:9 televisions are also hell to play video games on - DO NOT HOOK A PS2 TO A 16:9 Television or your games WILL look crappy and aliased, except for GTA3: Vice City, which actually has an option to correct for that. Although 16:9 televisions are good to watch DVDs on, watching anything else, even with an HDTV signal, is murder. Basically, the television buyer of today is in hell. You CAN'T get a decent sized 4:3 tube-based TV anymore - it's all projection, which is BAD to play games on. There are all of these competing standards and stuff - and to make it worse, the true plasma displays are all hideously expensive for their size. If you're buying a new TV, STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM Circuit City - we got ROYALLY shafted there last television purchase. And if you plan on watching TV, stay away from the 16:9 format as well. I think the television market has just gone to hell since the introduction of HDTV.
Just my 2 cents.
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Well, it does support a car adapter and a portable LCD screen, so it does come damn close to being the most portable console ever. I've played my fair share of Soul Caliber II in my car...
I'm sad to say I read east Indian as "little endian." I think I need to go outside and get some fresh air.
I know someone with Asperger's who makes a half million a year and watches enterprise religiously. Doesn't say much for his taste, though.
You like 6 and 8?
Top 3 reasons why 6 is worse than 7:
1. Battle system is meaningless. In one savegame with under 30 hours total gametime I managed to create a party with an average level of 85, and have beaten Kefka with one character in 5 turns. Vanish-doom kills virtually everything you could possibly want to kill, and is incredibly easy to learn. Ultima does insane damage to all enemies, and it's possible to cast it 4 times in one turn for 5 mp. Cyan can do up to 79998 unblockable damage (ie, not effected by defense) in one turn for 1 mp *WITHOUT* the genji glove, at approximately level 50 (which can be achieved by 20 hours gametime.) You get the general picture - a retarded monkey could beat this game.
2. Too many characters. Too many characters. Too many characters. Seriously, there were a lot of duds in that cast - sure, Locke and Shadow and Celes are cool, but do you really need over a dozen playable characters in a game where you can only have 4 people in your current party?
3. Bugs, bugs bugs galore, many of them showstoppers. Try controlling the wrong enemy with Relm - there goes your save game.
Top 8 reasons why FF8 is worse than FF7:
1. Absolutely retarded battle system. Multiple methods of making your party invincible for no cost, the whole "draw" system, having to sit through boring GF animations every single time you summoned, limit breaks that could kill anything ever concievable dead. At least you can turn the random battles off though - that's a plus.
2. The whole "orphanage" subplot is by far the most retarded thing I've ever seen in a Final Fantasy game - even if you make it so Squall never uses a GF, he still loses his childhood memories regardless. WTF?
3. There's no way of determining whose bitching is more inane - Sephie's, Rinoa's, Quistis's, Zell's, or Irving's. Squall actually is cool in his own way, but the supporting cast SUCKED.
4. Too many unnecessary characters. I mean, Squall has a critical hit rate of 100% if your reflexes are good and can't miss the enemy (to say nothing of his limit break), Rinoa's limit breaks make you invincible, and Zell's limit break damage is incredible. There's no reason to ever use the other characters - even in the (spoiler) end battle, you can just let the useless ones die and have 'em be replaced by the good ones. In FF7, sure, Cloud was a lot better than the other characters, but the difference wasn't so pronounced - you could argue that Cloud, Cid and Tifa's the best party, but you could throw Vincent or Yuffie into the equation and have a big old mess on your hands. There's no argument about the best party in FF8.
5. Utterly dumbassed design decisions - say you (SPOILER) wanted to equip Edea with magic during the brief period she's in your party. Where does that magic go when she leaves? Well, not back to you, that's for sure!
6. How could you waste three perfectly awesome characters - Laguna, Kiros, and Ward? I mean, I'd rather play the game as these characters, yet for whatever reason, you get to be them for perhaps two hours at most during the entire game. Oh, and the mechanism behind the whole Laguna thing is never adequately explained. I mean, it's obvious (spoiler) Laguna is Squall's father, but why the fuck would using GFs cause Squall to collapse and see life through the eyes of his father decades ago?
7. Features the worst first five hours of any Final Fantasy game ever. Totally butchered - many fans couldn't bring themselves to play through it was so boring.
8. I will admit FF8 had the best ending of any of the Final Fantasies. Just seeing a portion of it in the mall once was motivation enough for me to actually play through the entire beast. But why give such a horrible, pointless game such a great ending?
Uhh, speaking as someone who owns the said version of Phantasy Star III on the Gameboy Advance, I think you're a little off-base. Remember, all custom chips have reliable inputs and outputs, so if you're switching a program over to a system lacking a specific custom chip, it's not very hard to find something with equivalent functionality on the current system or to just hack through it with software. There really isn't a line drawn in the sand between translation and emulation - I'd say that translation's essentially an emulator optimized specifically to play one game correctly, to hell with the rest. Like Final Fantasy Chronicals - hell, FFC has a real, working Japanese ROM of Chrono Trigger on the CD that works perfectly in emu. I'd say it was attempted, and completed rather successfully to boot - although the sound quality was noticably degraded... I imagine that code was probably ripped out and redone. But the game plays just fine if you're "in" to that kind of thing.
Actually, the way they get all those sick specs is by overclocking the system like crazy and installing a really nasty cooling system. Considering the insane prices they're charging for the thing it's so not worth it. But yeah, if you do order one, it'll probably live up to the claims - it'll just be a huge waste of money.
You the same bitwise that brought Veon Prism to Portal of Evil's attention? You are aware that you weren't supposed to whore that link out because the server it's on already was having bandwidth problems and it now links to a person of a retarded person because of your said whoring, right?
Say what you will about FF7...
1. Awesome graphics for the time. I actually was one of the minority who didn't mind the "walking around graphics," and everything else looked fantastic.
2. Excellent characters - Sephiroth, Cloud and Aeris are three of the most memorable video game characters ever, simply because they weren't total cliches - you'll note you didn't start seeing a lot of bad-ass bishonen with white hair as villains in RPGs until after FF7. And don't get me started about having Mr. T in your party...
3. An astonding soundtrack - on a technical level, it's not that amazing, but FF7's soundtrack fits the game perfectly, and sounds good in its own right.
4. Customizable gameplay that isn't totally, completely cheap - you really have to work hard to get your characters up to godlike status in FF7, whereas in most of the other Final Fantasies and new-school rpgs there are easily exploitable tactics that make you ridiculously powerful. You don't have to level in FF7 unless you want to beat the weapons. This is in contrast to FF6, which is one of the easiest games of all-time because of many, many obvious flaws in the battle system, and FF8, which could be THE easiest game of all time.
5. A cool setting that wasn't completely stolen from other sources - Nibelheim is my favorite original RPG town of all time.
6. A story that, while not quite as deep as FF4's, managed to entertain. I liked how it was left to the player to figure out a lot of what the hell went on - it's too damn easy to skip those Zack sequences.
7. Excellent replay value for an RPG. There's a lot of good mini-games, details you wouldn't pick up on just one play-through, materia to miss, ways to customize your party, etc. I know people who've beaten FF7 over a dozen times.
I mean, seriously, people still are playing this game. Check out gamefaqs - every single year FF7 always creeps back up into the top ten FAQ list come middle of summer when no new games are released. Not bad for a game that came out in 1997...
You're assuming that the transmitters are all in the same exact physical location and the radiation is concentrated. Actual, real life exposure will be much, much smaller because the microwaves are radiated, not concentrated. I can't say by how much because honestly, assuming all the transmitters are 3 feet away from each other in a desk formation, just graphing that beast would require a better part of a day of messing around in mathematica, but it'll likely be in the safe spectrum.
Speaking as someone who's actually BEEN exposed to unsafe levels of microwave radiation (Took apart a microwave when I was a kid without unplugging it,) I honestly don't think it really makes a difference. You can actually take the tube out of a microwave and try to use it as a gun and still live to tell the tale. I'll testify that the inside of one of those tubes is one of the coolest sights you'll ever, ever see. Hell, just flying on a airplane will expose you to radiation levels 100x what you get from a cell phone. Just saying "this causes cancer" doesn't really phase me anymore - it's a disease with so many causes you can almost just chalk it up to old age and be done with it. Either the phone the guy made was emitting unsafe levels of radiation or the cancer case was coincidental. Radiation below a certain threshold really doesn't seem to do anything.
They tried it with Megaman, the Wily Wars, for the Genesis. It sucked. They remixed the music and changed the way the games played enough so that they seemed merely mediocre. It's strange how the little details in a game can make it good or bad. Anyway, I've been a Megaman fan from the get-go, and this is pretty interesting. I've played 1-8, and I've also played Power Battles, but imo Power Battles sucked. Too easy. Since every single one of those games was re-released on the PS1 with the exception of 7, you'd think this'd be a PS exclusive. Weird. I seriously hope all the graphics and sound are NES-perfect.
Actually, there's a trick to using the top spin. If you do it right after you jump while you're in the air, it won't screw up. If you press the button too late, you're screwed, but I find that the only time it messes up for me is if I use it while colliding into the enemy. I've actually used it to help me get through stages before, and it always works for me when I fight Shadow Man - it's no metal blade but, heck, anything that makes Shadow Man easy is okay in my book.
Umm, are you sure that was the latest version?
Just on a 30 second glance through I caught 3 spelling errors and a sentence fragment, and I wasn't reading it very hard.
Objective C is a mac and next-step centric language. That alone ought to knock it off the list. As for regular C... I don't think anyone out there goes "I only know C, I don't use C++ because I hate OOP and all the new extensions and improvements and such." And assembler is processor-specific. There's PowerPC assembly and 68000 assembly and x86 assembly... all effectively different languages that are grouped under this banner of assembly. Besides, nobody hires an assembler programmer these days who can't use C - computers are so fast that it's obsolete, and hard to develop for. As for the others: Brainfuck's a hobbyist language and is harder to use than assembler. VBScript isn't used on hundreds of thousands of webpages unnecessarily. Basic is useless for real world applications. I'm not sure why Pascal and Awk aren't on the list. I think awk's more a scripting language (like applescript or vbscript) than a robust language, but you'd think there's legacy code in Pascal that needs updating...
Thanks. (Site's been slashdotted) Anyone else amazed that there's more jobs open for Java programmers than C programmers? Do that many people really need cross-platform development support? And is visual basic really a... language? I know it's a good language to prototype applications and such, but I didn't think anybody paid MONEY for being able to use it. Oh well, learn something new every day. I suppose if you want a programming job it's best to know a variety of languages than to just market yourself as a C coder.
What is this - /ad.? The book isn't even out yet unless you want to pay a fortune on ebay, and we know absolutely nothing about it other than the fact it's by William Gibson - who, btw, I've never heard of. Anyone else read his previous work, or, god forbid, actually has read this so called "novel?"
Such a goddamn waste of money. I built a computer that has an Athlon 2700+ (which I plan overclocking), Raid 0 with 2 western digitals as well, 1 gig ram as well, Ati 9700 all in wonder, etc, etc, FOR LESS THAN 1/3 THE COST. I know mine goes a LITTLE slower, but damn, that thing doesn't even have hyperthreading... How old is that review?
The technology for changing the weather already exists. However, imagine the liability if a hurricane-seeding program changed the path of a hurricane from going through an empty field to going through a major U.S. city by accident. The weather service would get its pants sued off. Similarly, what happens if they don't seed a hurricane in a particular incidence and someone dies? Other weather controlling initiatives have similar problems. It's why we'll likely never see weather-changing technology used for civilian benefit. The above is also a reason why something is SERIOUSLY awry with the U.S. legal system.
If you buy a 16:9 television, you're screwed if you want to watch regular TV. You have to compromise - either you get a distorted picture that fills the screen and makes everyone look fat, or you have to live with twin vertical gray bars - with plasma I don't think the bars are an option, so the picture's just stretched to hell. 16:9 televisions are also hell to play video games on - DO NOT HOOK A PS2 TO A 16:9 Television or your games WILL look crappy and aliased, except for GTA3: Vice City, which actually has an option to correct for that. Although 16:9 televisions are good to watch DVDs on, watching anything else, even with an HDTV signal, is murder. Basically, the television buyer of today is in hell. You CAN'T get a decent sized 4:3 tube-based TV anymore - it's all projection, which is BAD to play games on. There are all of these competing standards and stuff - and to make it worse, the true plasma displays are all hideously expensive for their size. If you're buying a new TV, STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM Circuit City - we got ROYALLY shafted there last television purchase. And if you plan on watching TV, stay away from the 16:9 format as well. I think the television market has just gone to hell since the introduction of HDTV. Just my 2 cents.