Thankyou! You rock:-) Damn i read all of those. Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Three Investigators, all the Enid Blyton ones... before i discovered sci-fi and that was the end of it heh
Re:Experimental Noise Has Been Here Already
on
Soundless Music?
·
· Score: 1
Ummm, i'm not sure about that. How many people have stereos that accurately reproduce sounds below 20Hz and above 20KHz? Clearly and without a dire signal-noise ratio? Not Very Many. I doubt many average systems without a subwoofer will even go much below 50Hz, and that's certainly still audible. And the frequency range of CDs stops at 22050Hz = 22KHz, as well as turning into more-or-less square waves by then too.
It's all very well experimenting with this kind of sound, but it's pretty pointless to record it on to CD. It works best in a live environment where you can afford a sound system that will cleanly and LOUDLY(!) reproduce the full range of frequencies. That way you can also make sure you're controlling the space so as not to hit any resonant frequencies by accident.
Heh, whenever i played "Chase" by Giorgio Moroder at my old house my keys would rattle on my desk like crazy. Free live percussion:-)
No, this has been common knowledge (or at least theory) for years and years. The US Army experimented with sonic weapons, i think Frank Herbert might've mentioned them in Dune (and if not, David Lynch sure did in the movie)... i even remember reading a really old Enid Blyton book... Secret Seven? Or maybe it was the Hardy Boys... Definitely one of those kid's mystery books the Bad Guy was using ultra-low-frequency organ playing to make people feel uncomfortable and think a house was haunted. Hell it could've been Scooby Doo even, it was years ago. I always thought everyone knew about this kind of stuff? God knows there have been plenty of new age "gurus" who have taken advantage of it by releasing CDs full of "uplifting" one-finger-synth-chords.
Fight Cage, Johnny Fight
Use your split punch and make 'em cry
Be tough, shoot your green fire
The shadow kick, we all admire, is strong
Fight for your life
Mortal Kombat at the speed of light
So beat the bad guys and make 'em sigh
Johnny Cage is not afraid to die
Come on, people. Alta Vista has had text-only search for ages, and for at least a few years they've had raging.com which is just as aesthetically pleasing as Google. I find myself trying Google first and then going to raging.com if the topic i was looking for doesn't pop up in the first few Google pages (assuming Google has any results at all). Alta Vista picks up different results, and i'm sure lists a few pages that Google doesn't - mainly older pages that were around before Google existed and never got linked into the main spidering network.
You just very eloquently explained why calling it "the microsoft tax" is really not far from the truth.
I wasn't making the point that it isn't a tax. I was making the point that it's not in Sony/Dell/HP/Compaq/Toshiba/Fujitsu's interests to bother stocking non-Windows laptops. Look at it this way. If i walk into 7-11 looking for Bovril, it would be ridiculous to complain that they don't have it. Hardly any of their customers want it, so it's not worth them stocking it. Most people will buy any home-brand stock or Vegemite. Hell, i can't even find it at Safeway (US). If i want Bovril i'm going to have to go to a British import store - or maybe even order it specially online - and pay three or four times as much. Them's the breaks.
Sony and friends don't offer non-Windows laptops because IT WOULD COST THEM MONEY! This article is the biggest troll i've ever seen. In order to avoid "paying the Microsoft tax" you're just going to end up paying for someone to specifically take 1% of laptops off the production line before the Windows install, stock them somewhere marked differently from the generic (Windows) laptops, update their inventory database, notify their distibutors who will then have to notify the stores... all adding up to a hell of a lot more than it would cost them to just put Windows on it and say "reformat at home if you like". If you're that anal about not wanting to give Microsoft any money, perhaps you should look at starting a specifically non-Microsoft laptop company and see just how much business it'll get you. Note there are companies that sell "unbadged", "clean" laptops out there... catch is if you want to buy from them you're going to need to order in bulk just like Dell do.
Re:Helping with the death of weblogging.
on
Google buys Pyra Labs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
So why do it in the first place? The whole point of publishing something online is in the hope that someone out there will read it (for whatever reason). If it truely was "just for yourself" you would be writing it in a pen-and-paper journal, or in a personal document you never uploaded. Of course blog-writers want people to read their stuff. Unfortunately most of it is garbage.
There is no irony in the grand-parent's comment because it's a comment in a community. When blogs became popular people started calling Slashdot a "web log", but really it's always been a discussion forum, just like usenet but on the web. Blogs on the other hand are about a single person making some commentary about this subject or that. It's about the ego of the poster, whereas Slashdot and similar discussion sites are about the combined thoughts of all of the posters.
Moderators, this is NOT funny, it's insightful. There's nothing worse than doing a websearch for a serious topic and ending up with 50 hits, none of which are an informed source on the topic, and all of which are repeating some kind of rumor or random musing on the subject. Not to say that some blog-writers aren't informed, but the vast majority are not, and it's terribly frustrating to have to wade through countless pages of rambling and ranting to Get To The Point.
That said, i doubt Google will push blog hits in its results. A more likely result is a blog-specific search, or a way of networking together the resources that blogs link to. For example, Google's current algorithm seems to select sites based on "popularity" (number of links from other pages to that site)... blogs do this too, but in a social rather than statistical manner - certain "cool sites" become popular and blog-writers spam them around to other blog-writers and soon a whole bunch of blogs point to the same link - but only for a short time. Google might be able to lever this effect to produce date-ordered results related to a specific issue.
On the other hand, HTTP is great when you want to give lots of people unlimited ANONYMOUS access to something. I'm sure there is a way to throttle bandwidth, but can you do it on a class by class basis? In proftpd it's a simple "RateReadBPS xxx" and I'm set.
Cookies, my friend:-) You don't even need to use a login if all you want is to keep tabs on a person's individual connection. Use script to check the cookie (virtually nil overhead) and serve up the file.
Now that truly would be awesome. For thin clients it would be exactly the way to go. If AOL has sufficiently abstracted itself from the Windows API it could be plugged in to just about any back-end (Linux, whatever) and set up to be bootable, maybe from a 200MB disk-on-a-chip. Turn on the PC, instant boot, instant net connection, Java, Flash, MP3 and RealAudio on-board... It would be a boon for those internet terminals they have at airports or for other thin client solutions.
Why is that dangerous? I call it added value service. If you want it, you pay for it. It's like saying WSJ or Time should publish all their articles online for free because otherwise it's "fragmenting" the net into people who pay for the service and people who don't. That's silly. If companies are going to get any benefit from publishing online, they're going to have to provide paid content that non-paying users can't access. So you can't access AOL forums because you don't dial in through AOL? So pay $5 per month for their access-AOL-from-another-ISP service (yes it does exist).
First up is some Netscape 7.x news. Netscape 7.0 and 7.01 have had a total of over 14 million downloads. To quote an AOL exec, this fact is "impressive compared to AOL 8's 10 million downloads which were backed by AOL's marketing muscle."
Proof the AOL community is coming of age and realizing that AOL != the internet...?
...or is it that 10 million of those Netscape downloads were webmasters who wanted to check if their site ran on the new version?;-)
AOL redistributes and (IIRC) repackages IE. They pay money to do that.
Are you completely sure about that? Last i checked there were dozens of free (and commercial) web browsers that embedded an IE ActiveX control just like AOL does. That was the whole point of having IE integrated into the operating system in the first place! If you wanted you could rewrite Notepad to display HTML instead of TXT and do it in about 20 lines of VB or whatever programming language you like.
To be honest i'm not sure why AOL/TW haven't sold/EOLed Netscape long ago. Unless they're planning on providing services for other platforms, there just doesn't seem to be a lot of money in developing a separate web browsing platform. Plop in an IE control and you can be done with it. It'd save them a lot of grief.
Actually you pirated the game:-) It was copy-protection. All you had to do was click on the planets that were designated in that manual... then escape from the base and it showed the final anime. The same goes for recognizing the mech parts at the beginning of the game - if you had the manual you could see exactly what each part was. Otherwise you ended up writing everything down, all the combinations, trying desperately to end up with one that worked:-) Of course doing that on the map room screen would've taken a lifetime.
A Syndicate-style game would make a pretty cool OSS project, because it takes a relatively small amount of art, and can be played with few system requirements.
Yes indeed. Actually i was talking with someone who wanted to do it with the UT2003 engine, because it has real wind physics. His dream was to set it up such so that the trenchcoats of your agents whipped around in the wind just to get the ultra-gritty cyberpunk feel. I think that'd rock, but it's pretty taxing on the hardware side of things. The isometric engine was pretty damn cool - and if you could smoothly rotate it so you could see around buildings, plus add thermal imaging when you're inside buildings, that would be perfect. I think Syndicate Wars got pretty close to this.
The cool thing about Syndicate is that it BENEFITS from product-placement, just like Blade Runner. Part of what made it such a good game were those giant advertising video screens, just pure sexy cyberpunk. Love it. If a suitably enterprising developer did it right, he might be able to get a financial advance in exchange for product placement, and take some time off "real" work to develop the main engine. I know i'd certainly be up for contributing to a high-quality OSS or shareware Syndicate clone.
The one problem with an OSS implementation is the artistic side. There aren't many top-notch artists, musicians and sound guys who want to work with open-source. Too many OSS games have very sub-par graphics and sound, and to me that's intensely disappointing. Part of what made games like Dune 2 and Syndicate so immersive was the whole universe they were in, the way the mood was set.
In fact, as I recall you didn't even have to do that, you could just let the game run on the map screen and you'd get money as time passed, but failing the second mission speeded things up somewhat.
That was a feature, not a bug:-) The theory was that this was all happening in real-time. You might also notice that gradually the people in your captured countries got less and less happy with the tax rate until they revolted and you had to play the mission over. I think the idea was to give the game a bit more of a frantic element, even between missions. Unfortunately your people didn't revolt often enough, and other syndicates never conquered your countries, so you're right - you could just leave the computer on for an hour to get all kinds of tech discoveries.
You know, the whole "Matrix-type needle" thing bugs me. It's so... clinical. I want a fuckin rock'n'roll guitar jack in my head a la the Shadowrun RPG. If you're going to plug your PC into your head the least you could do is make sure it's a fashion statement and not some kinda wimpy little pin interface.
I can see it now:
Dell jack - Comes in beige plastic and lasts about two weeks.
Toshiba jack - "It's not a jack, it's a mini-jack." For the mobile computing professional.
Sun jack - "We don't sell jacks." You need com.sun.java.io.jack installed on whatever other jack you have.
Sony jack - Comes with integrated DRM to fry you if you download MP3s to your brain.
VIA jack - Mini-ITX version implants the whole PC in your head.
IBM jack - It's square. And comes in clusters.
Apple jack - Mmmm yum. Comes in translucent tangerine, but doesn't actually do anything because all the connections are wireless.
In the first Battletech you're a guy with no mech. You have some money in the bank, but you can't buy a mech because you're a student and not a soldier. You walk around and train at the mech training place, where you start with missions like picking up some rubble, shooting a "dead" mech, shooting some robots, etc. You can't train 24/7 so you also walk around the rest of the city and train in other areas like rifles, pistols, vibroblades etc. You can also learn how to fix mechs. You can buy hand weapons, talk to random people in various buildings, check your bank account for interest...
Eventually in the middle of a training mission you are attacked by an invading force and the city is destroyed. If you run like hell you can escape inside a mech, but if you die you eject and have to walk around. Then it's a matter of going anywhere. You can visit any of the other cities on the map and talk to people there, heal up at a hospital, train further in various skills, buy new weapons, talk to more people. Depending on who you talk to and when you talk to them they might join your party or give you some information about what you're supposed to be doing next. Basically it's about the freedom to run around talking to whoever doing whatever. If your mech is destroyed, that's it bub, you're walkin', you know? It's actually very similar to those early SSI AD&D games, but with a skills-based system instead of str/dex/con/cha/etc.
Wow! I did not know that. It's definitely the same Westwood, because i remember when i first started up Dune II years later i recognized the exact same sparkling-rectangle logo... I'm gonna go have a look around for more info now. Infocom... Hmm:-)
Syndicate was AWESOME. Syndicate is one of the top PC games of all time in my books. The intro was nothing short of orgasmic, and the cutscenes were gorgeous. The gameplay was sweet and it had some cool interactive music too, though unfortunately it only had two "themes", where Dune II had five or six at least. And the sound of that mini-gun! One of the most amazing sounds ever to come out of a computer game. How come no other game mini-guns just tore shit out like that? It sounds like it's blasting several hundred bullets a minute.
I'm not sure if i'd call Syndicate a real-time strategy on the level of Dune II, though, mainly because a lot of the strategy happened between missions when you taxed your countries and outfitted your team. It reminds me of another old game called Steel Empires (Cyber Empires in America) where you built up resources and outfitted your giant robots before switching to the real-time part where you had a top-down view and ran around blasting the other guy. Great fun in two-player mode:-)
Heh yeah, archers rocked the Casbah:-) I'm glad someone else remembers it and it wasn't just some figment of my imagination. Sure it wasn't realtime? In my memory it was something like... you could see all your little guys slowly moving around the level. But maybe that was between turns? Hmm.
I really think more and more games are getting too clever for their own good. Warcraft 3 being a perfect example. Certainly hardcore gamers will go in there and memorize 25 different hotkeys and be able to follow games running at turbo speeds... but when we look back at Dune II and Warcraft I they played fairly slowly, you only had about 4 hotkeys (Move, Attack, Guard and Harvest/Mine/etc is all i remember)... you didn't have to remember a whole bunch of stuff before you could even play a game. The same thing is happening in first-person-shooters.
I was talking to a friend the other day who said he thinks things started getting out of hand when Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat came out because there were all these combos of up-down-left-right-high-punch-low-punch-jump-back... I think he's probably right. Certainly i've memorized my share of secret moves and fatalities, and i even played TIE Fighter and various flight sims... but games like real-time strategy and first-person-shooters i always considered the Space Invaders of today... games where you can just kick back and click around and shoot and that's it. Who knows? Maybe we'll see a back-to-basics movement in the future when they start simplifying all this stuff again. Either that or a more intuitive input system (like thought-controlled-movement:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Thankyou! You rock :-) Damn i read all of those. Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Three Investigators, all the Enid Blyton ones... before i discovered sci-fi and that was the end of it heh
Ummm, i'm not sure about that. How many people have stereos that accurately reproduce sounds below 20Hz and above 20KHz? Clearly and without a dire signal-noise ratio? Not Very Many. I doubt many average systems without a subwoofer will even go much below 50Hz, and that's certainly still audible. And the frequency range of CDs stops at 22050Hz = 22KHz, as well as turning into more-or-less square waves by then too.
It's all very well experimenting with this kind of sound, but it's pretty pointless to record it on to CD. It works best in a live environment where you can afford a sound system that will cleanly and LOUDLY(!) reproduce the full range of frequencies. That way you can also make sure you're controlling the space so as not to hit any resonant frequencies by accident.
Heh, whenever i played "Chase" by Giorgio Moroder at my old house my keys would rattle on my desk like crazy. Free live percussion :-)
No, this has been common knowledge (or at least theory) for years and years. The US Army experimented with sonic weapons, i think Frank Herbert might've mentioned them in Dune (and if not, David Lynch sure did in the movie)... i even remember reading a really old Enid Blyton book... Secret Seven? Or maybe it was the Hardy Boys... Definitely one of those kid's mystery books the Bad Guy was using ultra-low-frequency organ playing to make people feel uncomfortable and think a house was haunted. Hell it could've been Scooby Doo even, it was years ago. I always thought everyone knew about this kind of stuff? God knows there have been plenty of new age "gurus" who have taken advantage of it by releasing CDs full of "uplifting" one-finger-synth-chords.
*ahem*
Fight Cage, Johnny Fight
Use your split punch and make 'em cry
Be tough, shoot your green fire
The shadow kick, we all admire, is strong
Fight for your life
Mortal Kombat at the speed of light
So beat the bad guys and make 'em sigh
Johnny Cage is not afraid to die
(With thanks to Praga Khan)
Come on, people. Alta Vista has had text-only search for ages, and for at least a few years they've had raging.com which is just as aesthetically pleasing as Google. I find myself trying Google first and then going to raging.com if the topic i was looking for doesn't pop up in the first few Google pages (assuming Google has any results at all). Alta Vista picks up different results, and i'm sure lists a few pages that Google doesn't - mainly older pages that were around before Google existed and never got linked into the main spidering network.
Dude it was a joke :) I live in Australia :)
Cricket.
I wasn't making the point that it isn't a tax. I was making the point that it's not in Sony/Dell/HP/Compaq/Toshiba/Fujitsu's interests to bother stocking non-Windows laptops. Look at it this way. If i walk into 7-11 looking for Bovril, it would be ridiculous to complain that they don't have it. Hardly any of their customers want it, so it's not worth them stocking it. Most people will buy any home-brand stock or Vegemite. Hell, i can't even find it at Safeway (US). If i want Bovril i'm going to have to go to a British import store - or maybe even order it specially online - and pay three or four times as much. Them's the breaks.
Sony and friends don't offer non-Windows laptops because IT WOULD COST THEM MONEY! This article is the biggest troll i've ever seen. In order to avoid "paying the Microsoft tax" you're just going to end up paying for someone to specifically take 1% of laptops off the production line before the Windows install, stock them somewhere marked differently from the generic (Windows) laptops, update their inventory database, notify their distibutors who will then have to notify the stores... all adding up to a hell of a lot more than it would cost them to just put Windows on it and say "reformat at home if you like". If you're that anal about not wanting to give Microsoft any money, perhaps you should look at starting a specifically non-Microsoft laptop company and see just how much business it'll get you. Note there are companies that sell "unbadged", "clean" laptops out there... catch is if you want to buy from them you're going to need to order in bulk just like Dell do.
So why do it in the first place? The whole point of publishing something online is in the hope that someone out there will read it (for whatever reason). If it truely was "just for yourself" you would be writing it in a pen-and-paper journal, or in a personal document you never uploaded. Of course blog-writers want people to read their stuff. Unfortunately most of it is garbage.
There is no irony in the grand-parent's comment because it's a comment in a community. When blogs became popular people started calling Slashdot a "web log", but really it's always been a discussion forum, just like usenet but on the web. Blogs on the other hand are about a single person making some commentary about this subject or that. It's about the ego of the poster, whereas Slashdot and similar discussion sites are about the combined thoughts of all of the posters.
Moderators, this is NOT funny, it's insightful. There's nothing worse than doing a websearch for a serious topic and ending up with 50 hits, none of which are an informed source on the topic, and all of which are repeating some kind of rumor or random musing on the subject. Not to say that some blog-writers aren't informed, but the vast majority are not, and it's terribly frustrating to have to wade through countless pages of rambling and ranting to Get To The Point.
That said, i doubt Google will push blog hits in its results. A more likely result is a blog-specific search, or a way of networking together the resources that blogs link to. For example, Google's current algorithm seems to select sites based on "popularity" (number of links from other pages to that site)... blogs do this too, but in a social rather than statistical manner - certain "cool sites" become popular and blog-writers spam them around to other blog-writers and soon a whole bunch of blogs point to the same link - but only for a short time. Google might be able to lever this effect to produce date-ordered results related to a specific issue.
Cookies, my friend :-) You don't even need to use a login if all you want is to keep tabs on a person's individual connection. Use script to check the cookie (virtually nil overhead) and serve up the file.
Now that truly would be awesome. For thin clients it would be exactly the way to go. If AOL has sufficiently abstracted itself from the Windows API it could be plugged in to just about any back-end (Linux, whatever) and set up to be bootable, maybe from a 200MB disk-on-a-chip. Turn on the PC, instant boot, instant net connection, Java, Flash, MP3 and RealAudio on-board... It would be a boon for those internet terminals they have at airports or for other thin client solutions.
Why is that dangerous? I call it added value service. If you want it, you pay for it. It's like saying WSJ or Time should publish all their articles online for free because otherwise it's "fragmenting" the net into people who pay for the service and people who don't. That's silly. If companies are going to get any benefit from publishing online, they're going to have to provide paid content that non-paying users can't access. So you can't access AOL forums because you don't dial in through AOL? So pay $5 per month for their access-AOL-from-another-ISP service (yes it does exist).
...or is it that 10 million of those Netscape downloads were webmasters who wanted to check if their site ran on the new version? ;-)
Are you completely sure about that? Last i checked there were dozens of free (and commercial) web browsers that embedded an IE ActiveX control just like AOL does. That was the whole point of having IE integrated into the operating system in the first place! If you wanted you could rewrite Notepad to display HTML instead of TXT and do it in about 20 lines of VB or whatever programming language you like.
To be honest i'm not sure why AOL/TW haven't sold/EOLed Netscape long ago. Unless they're planning on providing services for other platforms, there just doesn't seem to be a lot of money in developing a separate web browsing platform. Plop in an IE control and you can be done with it. It'd save them a lot of grief.
Actually you pirated the game :-) It was copy-protection. All you had to do was click on the planets that were designated in that manual... then escape from the base and it showed the final anime. The same goes for recognizing the mech parts at the beginning of the game - if you had the manual you could see exactly what each part was. Otherwise you ended up writing everything down, all the combinations, trying desperately to end up with one that worked :-) Of course doing that on the map room screen would've taken a lifetime.
Yes indeed. Actually i was talking with someone who wanted to do it with the UT2003 engine, because it has real wind physics. His dream was to set it up such so that the trenchcoats of your agents whipped around in the wind just to get the ultra-gritty cyberpunk feel. I think that'd rock, but it's pretty taxing on the hardware side of things. The isometric engine was pretty damn cool - and if you could smoothly rotate it so you could see around buildings, plus add thermal imaging when you're inside buildings, that would be perfect. I think Syndicate Wars got pretty close to this.
The cool thing about Syndicate is that it BENEFITS from product-placement, just like Blade Runner. Part of what made it such a good game were those giant advertising video screens, just pure sexy cyberpunk. Love it. If a suitably enterprising developer did it right, he might be able to get a financial advance in exchange for product placement, and take some time off "real" work to develop the main engine. I know i'd certainly be up for contributing to a high-quality OSS or shareware Syndicate clone.
The one problem with an OSS implementation is the artistic side. There aren't many top-notch artists, musicians and sound guys who want to work with open-source. Too many OSS games have very sub-par graphics and sound, and to me that's intensely disappointing. Part of what made games like Dune 2 and Syndicate so immersive was the whole universe they were in, the way the mood was set.
That was a feature, not a bug :-) The theory was that this was all happening in real-time. You might also notice that gradually the people in your captured countries got less and less happy with the tax rate until they revolted and you had to play the mission over. I think the idea was to give the game a bit more of a frantic element, even between missions. Unfortunately your people didn't revolt often enough, and other syndicates never conquered your countries, so you're right - you could just leave the computer on for an hour to get all kinds of tech discoveries.
You know, the whole "Matrix-type needle" thing bugs me. It's so... clinical. I want a fuckin rock'n'roll guitar jack in my head a la the Shadowrun RPG. If you're going to plug your PC into your head the least you could do is make sure it's a fashion statement and not some kinda wimpy little pin interface.
I can see it now:
Dell jack - Comes in beige plastic and lasts about two weeks.
Toshiba jack - "It's not a jack, it's a mini-jack." For the mobile computing professional.
Sun jack - "We don't sell jacks." You need com.sun.java.io.jack installed on whatever other jack you have.
Sony jack - Comes with integrated DRM to fry you if you download MP3s to your brain.
VIA jack - Mini-ITX version implants the whole PC in your head.
IBM jack - It's square. And comes in clusters.
Apple jack - Mmmm yum. Comes in translucent tangerine, but doesn't actually do anything because all the connections are wireless.
In the first Battletech you're a guy with no mech. You have some money in the bank, but you can't buy a mech because you're a student and not a soldier. You walk around and train at the mech training place, where you start with missions like picking up some rubble, shooting a "dead" mech, shooting some robots, etc. You can't train 24/7 so you also walk around the rest of the city and train in other areas like rifles, pistols, vibroblades etc. You can also learn how to fix mechs. You can buy hand weapons, talk to random people in various buildings, check your bank account for interest...
Eventually in the middle of a training mission you are attacked by an invading force and the city is destroyed. If you run like hell you can escape inside a mech, but if you die you eject and have to walk around. Then it's a matter of going anywhere. You can visit any of the other cities on the map and talk to people there, heal up at a hospital, train further in various skills, buy new weapons, talk to more people. Depending on who you talk to and when you talk to them they might join your party or give you some information about what you're supposed to be doing next. Basically it's about the freedom to run around talking to whoever doing whatever. If your mech is destroyed, that's it bub, you're walkin', you know? It's actually very similar to those early SSI AD&D games, but with a skills-based system instead of str/dex/con/cha/etc.
Wow! I did not know that. It's definitely the same Westwood, because i remember when i first started up Dune II years later i recognized the exact same sparkling-rectangle logo... I'm gonna go have a look around for more info now. Infocom... Hmm :-)
Syndicate was AWESOME. Syndicate is one of the top PC games of all time in my books. The intro was nothing short of orgasmic, and the cutscenes were gorgeous. The gameplay was sweet and it had some cool interactive music too, though unfortunately it only had two "themes", where Dune II had five or six at least. And the sound of that mini-gun! One of the most amazing sounds ever to come out of a computer game. How come no other game mini-guns just tore shit out like that? It sounds like it's blasting several hundred bullets a minute.
I'm not sure if i'd call Syndicate a real-time strategy on the level of Dune II, though, mainly because a lot of the strategy happened between missions when you taxed your countries and outfitted your team. It reminds me of another old game called Steel Empires (Cyber Empires in America) where you built up resources and outfitted your giant robots before switching to the real-time part where you had a top-down view and ran around blasting the other guy. Great fun in two-player mode :-)
Heh yeah, archers rocked the Casbah :-) I'm glad someone else remembers it and it wasn't just some figment of my imagination. Sure it wasn't realtime? In my memory it was something like... you could see all your little guys slowly moving around the level. But maybe that was between turns? Hmm.
I really think more and more games are getting too clever for their own good. Warcraft 3 being a perfect example. Certainly hardcore gamers will go in there and memorize 25 different hotkeys and be able to follow games running at turbo speeds... but when we look back at Dune II and Warcraft I they played fairly slowly, you only had about 4 hotkeys (Move, Attack, Guard and Harvest/Mine/etc is all i remember)... you didn't have to remember a whole bunch of stuff before you could even play a game. The same thing is happening in first-person-shooters.
I was talking to a friend the other day who said he thinks things started getting out of hand when Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat came out because there were all these combos of up-down-left-right-high-punch-low-punch-jump-back. .. I think he's probably right. Certainly i've memorized my share of secret moves and fatalities, and i even played TIE Fighter and various flight sims... but games like real-time strategy and first-person-shooters i always considered the Space Invaders of today... games where you can just kick back and click around and shoot and that's it. Who knows? Maybe we'll see a back-to-basics movement in the future when they start simplifying all this stuff again. Either that or a more intuitive input system (like thought-controlled-movement :-)