Every Supervillain worth their salt has a completely tricked-out lair, worthy of MTV cribs (or "Lifestyles" for the older set). At the top of the list are just about every major Bond villian and, of course, Lex Luthor; for them high security *and* oppulance were must-have items.
Even the self-proclaimed "bad guy" from Unbreakable had a pretty nice art gallery.
(However the lax security Luthor's yacht from the latest Superman movie is a bit of a WTF)
the President's job isn't to lead, it is to keep Congress in check by using the veto pen more often than not.
I wish I saw more of this kind of commentary out there - does everyone already understand this, or do they not get the big picture here?
Those looking for a healthier government need to not only take into consideration the next president, but who represents them in congress. Perhaps people will figure this out when the next president is elected and, mysteriously, nothing happens since capitol hill is still up to the same shennanigans as the year before.
I need a President who looks over the vast bills on his/her desk, and starts signing the veto line whenever he/she finds something that is not within the power of the Congress to create, or the President to execute.
Amen to that. Just once I want to see a president show up on the congress floor in a suprise visit, take the podium vetoed-bill-in-hand, and say "C'mon guys, items 1,5,6 are great, but the rest is total bunk. Quit sending me garbage I can't sign."
The golden aluminum follows work a little more than year ago where Drs. Guo and Vorobyev reported that they could make gold and other metals look black -- indeed a black that is blacker than the usual black, sucking up almost all light that impinged upon it.
We were able to reach Mr. Tufnel, an expert in the field, about this amazing technology:
That's pretty cool man. It's so black, it's like, how much more black can it be? The Answer is none. None more black.
Deathklok was unavailable for comment, citing trouble with a rare similing disorder on behalf of their bassist.
BTW, you're entirely too nice to be posting AC. Get an account already, we need fewer trolls around here.:)
I don't have the hardware chops, but someday, I'd love to have the cash to work on something like that. I'll carry this little tidbit with me until the day I do.
Really, I look at it this way: a fully capable device with the absolute minimum number of external connections (contacts, buttons, etc) is the lowest possible point on the manufacturing vs use curve. The problem, is that it's not the current local minimum (mini-pci, firewire, SATA, depeding on your point of view), so it'll take some effort to get there, since you have to climb out of that valley. In the end, we'll have this - networking tech is already headed in this direction.
But yea, a wiki might be cool. Thanks, I'll consider it.
or perhaps components could communicate by simply "seeing" each other and transmitting data via light.
I've dreamed of this for a long time. Everything just plugs into "the bus", by mating lenses, GND and +5V rails. Plus, optical interconnects have just silly amounts of bandwidth at their disposal, all interference free. The major problem is having a cheap-but-good UART of sorts that can drink from that firehose.
The neat thing about this is that your tech problems then devolve into rather trival territory:
- "Don't plug that into slot 5, the lens is scratched." - "I can't use that, I need a few more mA on my power supply, plus my bus manager has feckity power management." - "I had a device conflict since that network adapter was factory preset to 'blue' - I switched it to 'red' and off I went."
Anyway, you're right: this'll be a huge boon for portables. Removing the sheer number of metal-to-metal contacts on devices would be a huge step towards proper miniaturization of a lot of devices. You may also see some broad compatibility between desktops, laptops, palmtops and cellphones, depending on the level of miniaturization involved.
The largest ramification I can think of is that using artifical base-pairs for DNA would lead to easier identification of engineered life in "the wild". This could be something as simple as a repeated "NOP" sequence that identifies the part and manufacturuer like a serial number, by way of frequency and sequence of these artifical protiens.
Things could even go as far as to impose government controls on engineered organisms, forcing such identification mechanisms for forensics purposes. This would be handy since you'd never mistake the engineered protiens for anything natural. It would also have serious patent control implications, as tracing the linage of a "pirated hybrid organism" would be possible.
Artifical base pairs could also help with more exotic DNA-based tools that only communicate in and amongst themselves, thereby side-stepping any natural DNA machinery about. This would be useful for medical purposes, or even to harden the engineered organism against swapping DNA with it's wild/natural ancestor types. For instance: any swap with a wild bacterium could be set to have a high likelyhood of killing both would-be hybrids.
Another set of possibilities is along the lines of bettering mother nature: to have a set of DNA-like building blocks that are more robust and capable than the natural ones. Better radiation endurance, for one, sticks out in my mind as a potentially useful attribute. I'm sure there's other tricks protiens can be taught.
As for side-effects: who knows. We might get another branch off the tree of life out of this, or sound the march towards post-humanism, or we might just get a bunch of really fragile microbes suitable for only the most niche of engineering and science tasks.
In order to change the way things are going, running for office can certainly help. You'll be bringing awareness to fresh concerns and issues just by voicing your platform, even if you have worse odds than a snowball in hell.
After all, the only reason why people cast their vote to maintain the status quo, is because it has worked so well for them so far. If you have a good job, good healthcare, retirement plan, managable mortgage, a car you like, 2.5 kids and a wife, why rock the boat? These are the people that need to be educated about the facts, whatever they are. It's a hard job since they're really not wanting for anything except a better tax rate, and maybe lower interest on their home loan.
Another way is to look for a way to actively engage and alter the public consciousness of issues. This can be accomplished through the arts: dance, music, sculpture, websites, etc. The idea is to give folks something that they'll eventually carry with them on the way to the ballot box. A tougher nut to crack, is making sure they stay mindful of your message while watching TV, but I digress.
I think you're on to something there. If you work the kinks out of the technology, such that the gun itself doesn't wear out very fast, then all you need is a lot of electricity.
Add on a few nuke reactors, and/or a nice capacitor bank, and you're suddenly only restricted by how many projectiles you can carry. As you mention, these are going to be simple - basically just metal slugs. There's no more powder or fuel required for the task, which is in sharp contrast to conventional weaponry.
I call shennanigans. Recovery after thermite? Not a chance.
Any ferrous material brought above the Curie Point is no longer magnetic, and looses any magnetism it had prior to heating. You can test this yourself with a magnet, a butter knife and a blowtorch. No matter what combination of iron and impurities your drive surface has, its Curie Point is easily below the temperature of molten iron - the product of your thermite reaction.
So even if the discs were heated by thermite, rather than just plain destroyed, it's unlikely that the heating would allow any data to survive unless the iron was already pretty cold.
That said, this was a surveillance plane flying over a foreign country in a (presumably) covert fashion. If it had such a self-destruct, it would be a mil-spec component. In case of a crash, I doubt there would be much of a plane left, let alone drive platter pieces to be recovered.
PS My favourite Lego add-on in the 70s was a large, motorised block that had a wired remote for forward and backward movement. You could put on wheels or caterpillar tracks and then stick on your favourite Lego parts. When we had two, my brother and I would use them for Robot Wars type battles (long before Robot Wars existed).
I know how you feel.
Once I took all of my mideval minifigs, taped numbered slips of paper to the backs of each, and organized them into "red" and "blue" teams. Once placed on a "ruined castle" terrain, a sheet tracking hitpoints for each man, and some dice at the ready, I began to engage in "scale warfare" with my brother.
Many years later, I learned about this new thing called "Warhammer". Good times.
"synthetic" fertilizers (Scott's) that have components made from natural gas.
I felt this was worth repeating. If folks want to go "green" they have to look farther than what's being sold at the pump and take the whole food chain into consideration.
The fact that some commercial fertilizers are made from natural gas (basically petroleum) means that any crop-based ethanol (corn, rapeseed, etc.) may not be 100% carbon neutral, depending on how it's farmed. That said, converting existing waste streams into fertilizer or directly into fuel makes a lot more sense.
Thanks for clearing that up. I was confused too - so the legs are talking to each other then? I guess that makes sense since they probably wouldn't do such a great job if they acted independently of one another. I agree that a wired rendition makes more sense from an engineering perspective, but it would make some basic stuff like putting on clothes a little more cumbersome than the prosthetics already are. Perhaps the design motivation here is psychological - kind of like the benefit of complicated prosthetic legs over a simple-but-reliable wheelchair?
Oh well. I guess this is where we're going to be until someone hacks together an RFC for "IP over nervous system.":)
And that's why the rest of us wait for format wars to end.
Exactly.
I simply sit in the trench and wait until the cacohpany of cash registers and emptying bank accounts comes to a halt. I then peer out from my fox-hole and look to see the vast wasteland around me: HD-DVD players being thrown out by the dozens, consumers with smoking holes in their wallets, and the wreckage of packing waste and store displays strewn about as if by some hurricane.
Somewhere, distant as if on the wind, I can hear the quiet sobbing of some videophile, lamenting the death of his preferred format.
In theory, the only reason why a W2 is superior to a 1099 is the legal backdrop and reduced responsibilities that go with it.
I'll leave the pros and cons to both out of the discussion here as I'm sure most folks have a clue what they are.:)
I mean, in todays world of "at will" employment, and the lack of loyalty from either employer or employee, why not just get the formalities of W2 employment out of the way, and call the workforce of today, what it is, and pay for it that way.
This. What I wanted to contribute is this may be one tipping point where contracting may come ahead of being an employee in the years to come. With "right to work" laws being what they are in most states, the notion of "job security" and "employer loyalty" is obviously being more spurious, with "layoffs" being the happy norm over outright firings. It would seem that "sue the pants off the bastards" is not as much of a deterrent to loosing one's job as we'd all like to believe, so you're left with about the same security as an independent contractor would have.
For that matter, putting your fiscal and professional future in the hands of an entity that things of nothing but the bottom line seems like rather spurious judgment. This is especially so when put in the cold light of the rash of IT layoffs ten years ago.
That's something even a hard nosed suit can appreciate, is it not?
Not if said hard-nosed suit has "people skills" and "golfing at just 4 over par" as their sole bread-winning talents. Despite what benefits it may impart on society, it's still a threat to the status-quo and their rather comfy niche within it.
I just can't wait for the day when a Renderman-esque engine does the in-game graphics.
While I'm not a modeler, I do have a healthy respect for what that tool does for you guys. But surely we can do better than that.
How about fractal maps? Endlessly deformable terrain/rooms? Lighting-fast downloadable 3D content*?
All that's missing is a physics engine that can work with arbitrary surfaces - but since they're procedural, I guess that's not to terribly hard a problem to solve. Still, that's a buttload of math when you take the raytracer into account.
(*Procedural surfaces and textures could build the cornerstone of a sandbox-style MMO where content downloads quick since everything is compressed into a stream of rendering parameters. And that's before you apply traditional compression.)
Anyway, enough rambling. There's a video embedded in TFA that shows a raytraced curved mirror (akin to one you might see at a drugstore) being used in a FPS style scenario. It made my day. The actor zooms in on the surface, watchs the target come down the hallway, and then "Boom! Headshot."
That should be *the* primary feature of this MMO. Forget graphics, gameplay or anything else. The physics engine should be solid enough that this becomes more than just a playground. Something like a highly capable sandbox for newtonian physics that could allow budding aerospace engineers to block out everything from mission plans to designing basic spacecraft for other players to use.
The upper screenshot looks quite boring, because it has no lights and no shadows in it. In the lower example each pixel is being lit by an average of 3-5 light sources simultaneously.
If we use ray tracing to render all the shadows accurately, then each pixel would ordinarily require one visibility ray and 4 shadow rays. If we were to use rasterization to achieve the same quality image, it would only save us the 1 visibility ray per pixel. Rasterization techniques simply are not robust enough to achieve the same kind of accuracy and fidelity as ray tracing for shadows, reflections and refractions. If you imagine a trend toward higher and higher quality, the savings of using rasterization for the visibility determination trends towards insignificance.
It's worth noting that in order to do decent looking shadows using a rasterizer, you need to use structures that simulate a shadow by way of a shadow volume. At some point, having scene graphs with a multitude of light sources will simply overwhelm a rasterizer by virtue of requiring too much space/time, due to how this kind of technique works. So the current standard is only useful within a certain envelope of scene complexity and computer power, rather than offering itself as an endlessly scalable solution.
Another thing to consider is that a ray tracing engine is practically a drop-in replacement for a standard triangle rasterizer; BSP maps, shaders and meshes work fine with ray tracing. If that's not enough, ray tracers come equipped with lots of extras: free shading, free mirrors, z-buffering isn't really needed, and you can use algorithms to define surfaces instead of relying high poly-count models. So as consumer-grade computers get more and more internally parallelized, this will become the clear way ahead for gaming graphics since it's more robust, and doesn't require a major shake-up of your art department's toolchain.
The FDA Approves Shit Anyway This is the same FDA that has permitted plenty of E. coli outbreaks because they refuse to put an end to unhealthy meat practices.
This game is an excellent play, and well worth the download. The retro-style graphics are fun, leaving the overall game design and wonderful music to reveal what a well-built game this really is. Here's another review, along with a link to the game, over at TIGSource.
Not to steal the paren't thunder here, but this bears mentioning twice: New players really should review the first few walkthrough videos on youtube. While these give the first few puzzles away, it will make the game several orders of magnitude less frustrating for the reasons cited above (saving the game and warping), as well as helping set the mode for the kind of brutality the dungeon throws at the player. Also, there's some hints in the game manual - be sure to read the item descriptions!
Oh, and the 10-20 hours cited above only applies if you know what you're doing or playing right out of the strategy guide. Real world time is probably something more on the order of 50-60 hours, and could easily be ten times that if you forego any outside help - kind of like The Legend of Zelda.
In short, La-Mulana really does harken back to the good 'ol days of platform gaming when "beating the game" had some bragging rights attached to it.
Have you ever found yourself lying awake at night, staring at the ceiling and wondering just how much better your life would be if someone decided to create a funky game fusion of Worms and Counter-strike, then pump it full of Red Bull and steroids?
Soldat is a real-time, multiplayer shoot 'em up combat game that has the soul of a vicious FPS packaged in the body of a system friendly side-scroller. Players move their soldiers around levels, strolling across hills and using their jet packs to navigate environments that bear no small similarity to ant farms, all the while trying their hardest to evade hurricanes of small arms fire.
Slashdot Mirror
Missing Option: Evil Lair of Doom.
Every Supervillain worth their salt has a completely tricked-out lair, worthy of MTV cribs (or "Lifestyles" for the older set). At the top of the list are just about every major Bond villian and, of course, Lex Luthor; for them high security *and* oppulance were must-have items.
Even the self-proclaimed "bad guy" from Unbreakable had a pretty nice art gallery.
(However the lax security Luthor's yacht from the latest Superman movie is a bit of a WTF)
There are simply too many layers of complexity present in any electronic system to deem it 100% secure.
Those looking for a healthier government need to not only take into consideration the next president, but who represents them in congress. Perhaps people will figure this out when the next president is elected and, mysteriously, nothing happens since capitol hill is still up to the same shennanigans as the year before. Amen to that. Just once I want to see a president show up on the congress floor in a suprise visit, take the podium vetoed-bill-in-hand, and say "C'mon guys, items 1,5,6 are great, but the rest is total bunk. Quit sending me garbage I can't sign."
Deathklok was unavailable for comment, citing trouble with a rare similing disorder on behalf of their bassist.
I don't have the hardware chops, but someday, I'd love to have the cash to work on something like that. I'll carry this little tidbit with me until the day I do.
Really, I look at it this way: a fully capable device with the absolute minimum number of external connections (contacts, buttons, etc) is the lowest possible point on the manufacturing vs use curve. The problem, is that it's not the current local minimum (mini-pci, firewire, SATA, depeding on your point of view), so it'll take some effort to get there, since you have to climb out of that valley. In the end, we'll have this - networking tech is already headed in this direction.
But yea, a wiki might be cool. Thanks, I'll consider it.
How about that. I like me some good trek-tech.
I've dreamed of this for a long time. Everything just plugs into "the bus", by mating lenses, GND and +5V rails. Plus, optical interconnects have just silly amounts of bandwidth at their disposal, all interference free. The major problem is having a cheap-but-good UART of sorts that can drink from that firehose.
The neat thing about this is that your tech problems then devolve into rather trival territory:
- "Don't plug that into slot 5, the lens is scratched."
- "I can't use that, I need a few more mA on my power supply, plus my bus manager has feckity power management."
- "I had a device conflict since that network adapter was factory preset to 'blue' - I switched it to 'red' and off I went."
Anyway, you're right: this'll be a huge boon for portables. Removing the sheer number of metal-to-metal contacts on devices would be a huge step towards proper miniaturization of a lot of devices. You may also see some broad compatibility between desktops, laptops, palmtops and cellphones, depending on the level of miniaturization involved.
The largest ramification I can think of is that using artifical base-pairs for DNA would lead to easier identification of engineered life in "the wild". This could be something as simple as a repeated "NOP" sequence that identifies the part and manufacturuer like a serial number, by way of frequency and sequence of these artifical protiens.
Things could even go as far as to impose government controls on engineered organisms, forcing such identification mechanisms for forensics purposes. This would be handy since you'd never mistake the engineered protiens for anything natural. It would also have serious patent control implications, as tracing the linage of a "pirated hybrid organism" would be possible.
Artifical base pairs could also help with more exotic DNA-based tools that only communicate in and amongst themselves, thereby side-stepping any natural DNA machinery about. This would be useful for medical purposes, or even to harden the engineered organism against swapping DNA with it's wild/natural ancestor types. For instance: any swap with a wild bacterium could be set to have a high likelyhood of killing both would-be hybrids.
Another set of possibilities is along the lines of bettering mother nature: to have a set of DNA-like building blocks that are more robust and capable than the natural ones. Better radiation endurance, for one, sticks out in my mind as a potentially useful attribute. I'm sure there's other tricks protiens can be taught.
As for side-effects: who knows. We might get another branch off the tree of life out of this, or sound the march towards post-humanism, or we might just get a bunch of really fragile microbes suitable for only the most niche of engineering and science tasks.
In order to change the way things are going, running for office can certainly help. You'll be bringing awareness to fresh concerns and issues just by voicing your platform, even if you have worse odds than a snowball in hell.
After all, the only reason why people cast their vote to maintain the status quo, is because it has worked so well for them so far. If you have a good job, good healthcare, retirement plan, managable mortgage, a car you like, 2.5 kids and a wife, why rock the boat? These are the people that need to be educated about the facts, whatever they are. It's a hard job since they're really not wanting for anything except a better tax rate, and maybe lower interest on their home loan.
Another way is to look for a way to actively engage and alter the public consciousness of issues. This can be accomplished through the arts: dance, music, sculpture, websites, etc. The idea is to give folks something that they'll eventually carry with them on the way to the ballot box. A tougher nut to crack, is making sure they stay mindful of your message while watching TV, but I digress.
I think you're on to something there. If you work the kinks out of the technology, such that the gun itself doesn't wear out very fast, then all you need is a lot of electricity.
Add on a few nuke reactors, and/or a nice capacitor bank, and you're suddenly only restricted by how many projectiles you can carry. As you mention, these are going to be simple - basically just metal slugs. There's no more powder or fuel required for the task, which is in sharp contrast to conventional weaponry.
I call shennanigans. Recovery after thermite? Not a chance.
Any ferrous material brought above the Curie Point is no longer magnetic, and looses any magnetism it had prior to heating. You can test this yourself with a magnet, a butter knife and a blowtorch. No matter what combination of iron and impurities your drive surface has, its Curie Point is easily below the temperature of molten iron - the product of your thermite reaction.
So even if the discs were heated by thermite, rather than just plain destroyed, it's unlikely that the heating would allow any data to survive unless the iron was already pretty cold.
That said, this was a surveillance plane flying over a foreign country in a (presumably) covert fashion. If it had such a self-destruct, it would be a mil-spec component. In case of a crash, I doubt there would be much of a plane left, let alone drive platter pieces to be recovered.
I know how you feel.
Once I took all of my mideval minifigs, taped numbered slips of paper to the backs of each, and organized them into "red" and "blue" teams. Once placed on a "ruined castle" terrain, a sheet tracking hitpoints for each man, and some dice at the ready, I began to engage in "scale warfare" with my brother.
Many years later, I learned about this new thing called "Warhammer". Good times.
I felt this was worth repeating. If folks want to go "green" they have to look farther than what's being sold at the pump and take the whole food chain into consideration.
The fact that some commercial fertilizers are made from natural gas (basically petroleum) means that any crop-based ethanol (corn, rapeseed, etc.) may not be 100% carbon neutral, depending on how it's farmed. That said, converting existing waste streams into fertilizer or directly into fuel makes a lot more sense.
Thanks for clearing that up. I was confused too - so the legs are talking to each other then? I guess that makes sense since they probably wouldn't do such a great job if they acted independently of one another. I agree that a wired rendition makes more sense from an engineering perspective, but it would make some basic stuff like putting on clothes a little more cumbersome than the prosthetics already are. Perhaps the design motivation here is psychological - kind of like the benefit of complicated prosthetic legs over a simple-but-reliable wheelchair?
:)
Oh well. I guess this is where we're going to be until someone hacks together an RFC for "IP over nervous system."
CATS: All ur cheezbergr r belong to us
/got nuthin'
//slashies!
I simply sit in the trench and wait until the cacohpany of cash registers and emptying bank accounts comes to a halt. I then peer out from my fox-hole and look to see the vast wasteland around me: HD-DVD players being thrown out by the dozens, consumers with smoking holes in their wallets, and the wreckage of packing waste and store displays strewn about as if by some hurricane.
Somewhere, distant as if on the wind, I can hear the quiet sobbing of some videophile, lamenting the death of his preferred format.
Format war is hell.
In theory, the only reason why a W2 is superior to a 1099 is the legal backdrop and reduced responsibilities that go with it.
I'll leave the pros and cons to both out of the discussion here as I'm sure most folks have a clue what they are.
This. What I wanted to contribute is this may be one tipping point where contracting may come ahead of being an employee in the years to come. With "right to work" laws being what they are in most states, the notion of "job security" and "employer loyalty" is obviously being more spurious, with "layoffs" being the happy norm over outright firings. It would seem that "sue the pants off the bastards" is not as much of a deterrent to loosing one's job as we'd all like to believe, so you're left with about the same security as an independent contractor would have.
For that matter, putting your fiscal and professional future in the hands of an entity that things of nothing but the bottom line seems like rather spurious judgment. This is especially so when put in the cold light of the rash of IT layoffs ten years ago.
I just can't wait for the day when a Renderman-esque engine does the in-game graphics.
While I'm not a modeler, I do have a healthy respect for what that tool does for you guys. But surely we can do better than that.
How about fractal maps? Endlessly deformable terrain/rooms? Lighting-fast downloadable 3D content*?
All that's missing is a physics engine that can work with arbitrary surfaces - but since they're procedural, I guess that's not to terribly hard a problem to solve. Still, that's a buttload of math when you take the raytracer into account.
(*Procedural surfaces and textures could build the cornerstone of a sandbox-style MMO where content downloads quick since everything is compressed into a stream of rendering parameters. And that's before you apply traditional compression.)
Anyway, enough rambling. There's a video embedded in TFA that shows a raytraced curved mirror (akin to one you might see at a drugstore) being used in a FPS style scenario. It made my day. The actor zooms in on the surface, watchs the target come down the hallway, and then "Boom! Headshot."
That should be *the* primary feature of this MMO. Forget graphics, gameplay or anything else. The physics engine should be solid enough that this becomes more than just a playground. Something like a highly capable sandbox for newtonian physics that could allow budding aerospace engineers to block out everything from mission plans to designing basic spacecraft for other players to use.
It's worth noting that in order to do decent looking shadows using a rasterizer, you need to use structures that simulate a shadow by way of a shadow volume. At some point, having scene graphs with a multitude of light sources will simply overwhelm a rasterizer by virtue of requiring too much space/time, due to how this kind of technique works. So the current standard is only useful within a certain envelope of scene complexity and computer power, rather than offering itself as an endlessly scalable solution.
Another thing to consider is that a ray tracing engine is practically a drop-in replacement for a standard triangle rasterizer; BSP maps, shaders and meshes work fine with ray tracing. If that's not enough, ray tracers come equipped with lots of extras: free shading, free mirrors, z-buffering isn't really needed, and you can use algorithms to define surfaces instead of relying high poly-count models. So as consumer-grade computers get more and more internally parallelized, this will become the clear way ahead for gaming graphics since it's more robust, and doesn't require a major shake-up of your art department's toolchain.
Thanks for the chuckle.
Now, whenever my co-workers ask me why I'm reading about this I'll just tell them that "Frank made me do it."
Apparently so.
This game is an excellent play, and well worth the download. The retro-style graphics are fun, leaving the overall game design and wonderful music to reveal what a well-built game this really is. Here's another review, along with a link to the game, over at TIGSource.
Not to steal the paren't thunder here, but this bears mentioning twice: New players really should review the first few walkthrough videos on youtube. While these give the first few puzzles away, it will make the game several orders of magnitude less frustrating for the reasons cited above (saving the game and warping), as well as helping set the mode for the kind of brutality the dungeon throws at the player. Also, there's some hints in the game manual - be sure to read the item descriptions!
Oh, and the 10-20 hours cited above only applies if you know what you're doing or playing right out of the strategy guide. Real world time is probably something more on the order of 50-60 hours, and could easily be ten times that if you forego any outside help - kind of like The Legend of Zelda.
In short, La-Mulana really does harken back to the good 'ol days of platform gaming when "beating the game" had some bragging rights attached to it.
Read the Game Tunnel Review
I have to admit, the storyline and acting in Wing Commander IV was was really something special for when it was released.
I borrowed it from a friend and upon handing it back he asked: "So, what did you think?"
I replied: "Best movie I ever played."