The problem is, you're trying to force the art of games into the same form as other visual arts. The art in gaming is not about music, scenery, visuals, etc, or even storytelling and character development. Those can be pieces of it...elements.
But the art in gaming is making a GAME to play. Making something that people want to play. Some other poster talked about tetris....that is one butt-ugly looking game, and some variations had some nasty music and sound as well. And there's no character development or plot. But in the art of gameplay, it was very well done.
You and Ebert's comparisons are like a painter looking at a piece of sheet music, and thinking, Huh, it's only black and white, and what's with all the lines and dots? That's clearly not very good art.
1. Although tetris has been superceded in competitive gameplay, it was one of the most innovative games ever created, and definitely qualifies as one of the most important game design achievements of recent times.
2. Chess went through quite a few changes to become the current game we now know as international chess. I choose to believe that "chess-type" games such as the ancient indian Chaturanga, and chinese chess (Xiangqi), are important works of art and design in gaming. They laid the foundation for the improvements, over many many years, until we have our current chess. Tetris could be compared to Chaturanga. Is there this high level of competition in Chaturanga? Not as much....its value is in innovation, and laying the foundation for the better game.
3. Why do mathematical proofs of the game lessen the game's value? This game swept the world, being known and loved by all sorts of people, gamers and non-gamers alike. Just because the hardcore gamers have realized that there may be more competitive variations doesn't mean that the game isn't fun, accessible, innovative, and very interesting.
"Change it yourself" is like saying "if skinheads painted Nazi slogans on your house wall, just repaint it". Is that really OK and is all that should be done? Nobody should be pursued for this?
No, but you shouldn't be sued if some skinhead paints the nazi slogans on your house wall. The person who put them up should be responsible. But John Seigen-whatever-his-name-is wants to make the house owner responsible.
Or if you own a little quick-stop, and you have a bulletin board up in front. People can pin stuff up (you know, "want to join a band?", "looking to sell a car", "lost my cat", etc). Some jerk comes along and pins up some small libelous note. Of course, it's small and the board is crowded, so you as the owner don't notice it. But John thinks you should be legally responsible for the message in that note, not the person that posted it.
Obviously you use your computer differently than I do.
I have a laptop. 75% of the time, it sits on the desk, right next to the router. But it's that other 25% of the time that made my $30 wireless router worth it. Being able to yank the power plug and usb hub, and pull the laptop onto the couch while watching tv. Or reading slashdot, deciding I want to take a dump, and hauling the computer onto the pot. Or when the wife has company over, so I want to go take the computer and hide in the other room.
Why mess with all the hassle of setting up HPNA, or running wires, when you could just buy a $30 router and it works ANYWHERE in the apartment, and you are free to move around?
Sure, I'll be the first to admit that there are problems with wireless, just like everyone else is saying. Speed is slower, and overcrowding, yeah yeah. But I don't think it's overhyped -- I use it because it's cheap and convenient. That's not hype, it's quality. And if the high quality means that the rest of the non-geek world catches on and wants to use it, well, so be it. Sure, it could have the side-effect of lowering the quality slightly for me, but that doesn't mean that there's too much enthusiasm. It means the world has caught on to something useful.
Ok, you being a notes fan, I would like to know what is right about notes. Not trolling, I'm serious. I see that you say it allows rapid development. Development of what?
I tend to think Lotus notes sucks, but that's probably because the only time I used it was at a company that only used it for email. As a pure email client, it was rather bad. But it always seemed like there was a lot more that could be done with it. I just never understood WHAT those things were (other than calendar sharing type things).
And whenever I looked for information about it, the answers were always marketing babble that didn't really mean anything.
So, you being a fan, what does "groupware" REALLY mean, and what do YOU use Lotus Notes for?
Nobody cares about me? thanks for the ego boost. But I would disagree.
Right now I live in China. I have some pretty interesting life experiences, compared to my family and friends in the US. They all love to hear from me, but face it, it's hard to keep in good contact with all my friends and family, all the time. That's where a blog comes in. My 15 friends and family members (who DO care about me!) get to read up about my life in China. In an unobtrusive way, on their time and terms.
I don't plan on getting famous with my blog, I don't plan on changing the world. I just plan on letting people know what's going on with my life. And based on the response I get from people I know, or used to know, it's worthwhile.
So I'm sorry you don't have any friends or family that care. I do.
The closest thing I've found is something like audacity.
It's not nearly as good...it has trouble syncing things properly with some soundcards, and doesn't really do midi at all (just audio), or automatic looping/syncing/etc. But it is nice to have a decent free multitrack recording tool.
I used eclipse for awhile on my 2 Ghz Athlon machine with 512 Meg of ram, but it just wasn't cutting it. I would often right click on something, and have to wait 3 or 4 seconds for the context menu to appear.
While I love the IDEA of eclipse, I can't see how it has gained such popularity, unless all developers have workstations that are significantly better than mine. As a developer, I like my tools to be snappy -- to be able to do everything with the keyboard, and no waiting. For that reason, for me, eclipse still hasn't arrived (at least for large projects with hundreds of files. For small stuff, it seemed a bit snappier).
Seriously, for those of you who love using eclipse, does it work quickly? Maybe I'm doing something wrong. Or maybe the 1 or 2 second delay doesn't bother you as much? I'm not trying to troll -- I just really want to understand the draw of eclipse!
I'm also waiting for a good vi-style plugin for eclipse. To be able to jump around the editor quickly without taking my hands off the keyboard is essential -- arrow keys and pageup/pagedown are just too inefficient. Not that vi is the only way to do so, but it's the method my hands have grown used to, so it would be the most appealing to me to avoid having to relearn.
I've been itching to switch to eclipse for the last year, but every time I try, those 2 things stop me, and I end up going back to what I'm used to. But maybe someone here can give me a few tips.....
Actually, I know. The comics, the riddles, the puzzles. Good idea. horrible implementation. I like the idea of all the puzzles working together. But the game consisted of randomly moving items from room to room, hoping that you'd trigger a clue.
The first few were easy (take item X to room X), but later ones were crazy, 12 items having to be in the correct 12 rooms, then all rearranged for the next clue.
I finally finished earthworld with the help of the web a couple years ago. And believe me, after SEEING the solution, I hated the game even more. As a kid, I always figured there was some cool meaning or puzzle to solving the game, but really, the solution was no cooler than randomly rearranging items.
Re:Why does everyone hate E.T. so MUCH?
on
20 Years of NES
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· Score: 1
Half the people that rip on E.T. never played it more than once or twice. It's just become the cool thing to rip on recently, because everyone has learned the stories about the piles of the carts in a landfill.
I had E.T. and it wasn't a particularly good game, but it was playable. It beat the pants off of swordquest anyday (earthworld at least*), and a few other games that were so bad they were basically unplayable. But all these kiddies that love to rip on E.T. probably never played swordquest either. They just read about how bad E.T. was and decided it was fun to rip on.
Just like how all the new gaming magazines, in their list of worst video games, all love to include Custer's Revenge. C'mon, who EVER heard of Custer's Revenge when the Atari was big? But now, it's this perpetuated thing, where everyone keeps hearing about it from each other, and so each magazine talks about it like it was a game that people actually played back in the day.
Enough with the E.T. bashing, and enough nonsense about Custer's Revenge.
(* I never played fireworld, did ANYONE ever play any of the other ones on ACTUAL hardware, not an emulator?)
While all that you are saying is true, the funny thing about it is that open source fans will always go on about "oh, it's missing the feature I need? No problem, I'll just code it." While I'm glad that's possible, 95% of the time, it's not practical. Too much work/time/effort/money involved.
So while it's true that it's possible, it's not quite as wonderful as the open source fans would like you to believe.
Check out the GBA dev scene. All sorts of stuff being made recently. Of course, some of it better than others. (yeah, there's a whole lot of tetris clones, but there's a few real gems in there too).
Maybe some people want to pirate games, but some of us just get a big kick out of seeing our games run on actual console hardware.
Just a couple small corrections....(I live in China, so I know)
Now, if most of the 100 million internet active in China cannot afford an item that is manufactured in their borders and available at a fraction of what it costs here (an internet capable computer)
Actually, computers are about the same price in the US and China. Misc computer peripherals (mice, webcams, etc) are cheaper here in China, but the computer itself is about the same.
A cell phone, I can concede that point, but only with the caveat that the infrastructure for its use is not on par with the ubiquitous coverage in the US.
Actually, the coverage is arguable the same or better here. And you don't get all that crap with lock in plans and stuff. The chinese cell phone system actually kicks the crap out of the U.S. one.
Anyway, that doesn't contradict your point any, but it was worth saying.
Don't work? Yeah they do. I watch them all the time. Although, it's true that the quality is lower. On US DVD players, about 1/3 of them won't play without a few glitches. On chinese dvd players, they play with no problems. Don't know what it is, but Chinese DVD players can play a lot of crap that US ones don't.
You do tend to quickly learn which vendors have better quality ones. The guy downstairs from my office has really crappy ones. But if I walk 2 blocks from my apartment, we've had a really high success rate with a guy there. And his are only 5 RMB (about 75 cents).
The funniest is outside of wal-mart, there's always a few guys with stands selling them. Every few months, when the US managers come by to see the local store, wal-mart manages to drive the street vendors off, but it only takes a week or so for them to come back.
Running on a 2Ghz machine with 512 Meg RAM, it took forever to start. Once started, it was fast enough on tiny projects, but once you added more than about 100 files to a project, it started to crawl. Projects with closer to 1000 files, I sometimes had to wait about 45 seconds between right clicking something, and the right click menu appearing.
On a friend's advice, I upgraded to 1G of RAM, and suddenly eclipse worked like a relatively normal IDE. Still a tiny bit sluggish at times, but bearable.
So my verdict: yes, it's horribly slow. If you've got a nice machine, you can make it usable, but is it really worth it?
What I really want is a full featured IDE like eclipse, but where the editor window is gvim. That would be heaven.
Thank you. Every time someone describes sniping, I wonder, do they just not understand the way ebay is supposed to work? Is there something you and I are missing, or all those snipers just idiots?
At the moment, I'm in my apartment in Shenzhen, using skype. No problems.
Of course, that might mean they haven't gotten around to blocking it, or just that I'm now on their bad list.
In response to a lot of other posts, though, the articles indicates that just the one major telecom plans to block it. It doesn't say that it's going to be blocked at the great firewall level. (like google groups, blogspot, and even gbadev.org).
Slashdot Mirror
And that's how I (who live and work in China) end up working with so many people who choose "English" names like CocoCat, Neo, Pile, Uranus, and Door.
I'm not making this up.
c. And once you've used the interface for months, can you use the function quickly and efficiently?
The problem is, you're trying to force the art of games into the same form as other visual arts. The art in gaming is not about music, scenery, visuals, etc, or even storytelling and character development. Those can be pieces of it...elements.
But the art in gaming is making a GAME to play. Making something that people want to play. Some other poster talked about tetris....that is one butt-ugly looking game, and some variations had some nasty music and sound as well. And there's no character development or plot. But in the art of gameplay, it was very well done.
You and Ebert's comparisons are like a painter looking at a piece of sheet music, and thinking, Huh, it's only black and white, and what's with all the lines and dots? That's clearly not very good art.
Three thoughts in response to those statements:
1. Although tetris has been superceded in competitive gameplay, it was one of the most innovative games ever created, and definitely qualifies as one of the most important game design achievements of recent times.
2. Chess went through quite a few changes to become the current game we now know as international chess. I choose to believe that "chess-type" games such as the ancient indian Chaturanga, and chinese chess (Xiangqi), are important works of art and design in gaming. They laid the foundation for the improvements, over many many years, until we have our current chess. Tetris could be compared to Chaturanga. Is there this high level of competition in Chaturanga? Not as much....its value is in innovation, and laying the foundation for the better game.
3. Why do mathematical proofs of the game lessen the game's value? This game swept the world, being known and loved by all sorts of people, gamers and non-gamers alike. Just because the hardcore gamers have realized that there may be more competitive variations doesn't mean that the game isn't fun, accessible, innovative, and very interesting.
"Change it yourself" is like saying "if skinheads painted Nazi slogans on your house wall, just repaint it". Is that really OK and is all that should be done? Nobody should be pursued for this?
No, but you shouldn't be sued if some skinhead paints the nazi slogans on your house wall. The person who put them up should be responsible. But John Seigen-whatever-his-name-is wants to make the house owner responsible.
Or if you own a little quick-stop, and you have a bulletin board up in front. People can pin stuff up (you know, "want to join a band?", "looking to sell a car", "lost my cat", etc). Some jerk comes along and pins up some small libelous note. Of course, it's small and the board is crowded, so you as the owner don't notice it. But John thinks you should be legally responsible for the message in that note, not the person that posted it.
Obviously you use your computer differently than I do.
I have a laptop. 75% of the time, it sits on the desk, right next to the router. But it's that other 25% of the time that made my $30 wireless router worth it. Being able to yank the power plug and usb hub, and pull the laptop onto the couch while watching tv. Or reading slashdot, deciding I want to take a dump, and hauling the computer onto the pot. Or when the wife has company over, so I want to go take the computer and hide in the other room.
Why mess with all the hassle of setting up HPNA, or running wires, when you could just buy a $30 router and it works ANYWHERE in the apartment, and you are free to move around?
Sure, I'll be the first to admit that there are problems with wireless, just like everyone else is saying. Speed is slower, and overcrowding, yeah yeah. But I don't think it's overhyped -- I use it because it's cheap and convenient. That's not hype, it's quality. And if the high quality means that the rest of the non-geek world catches on and wants to use it, well, so be it. Sure, it could have the side-effect of lowering the quality slightly for me, but that doesn't mean that there's too much enthusiasm. It means the world has caught on to something useful.
Ok, you being a notes fan, I would like to know what is right about notes. Not trolling, I'm serious. I see that you say it allows rapid development. Development of what?
I tend to think Lotus notes sucks, but that's probably because the only time I used it was at a company that only used it for email. As a pure email client, it was rather bad. But it always seemed like there was a lot more that could be done with it. I just never understood WHAT those things were (other than calendar sharing type things).
And whenever I looked for information about it, the answers were always marketing babble that didn't really mean anything.
So, you being a fan, what does "groupware" REALLY mean, and what do YOU use Lotus Notes for?
But then, who is going to install winamp on a work computer?
me. Do you think I'm going to use the windows media player crap to listen to my music at work?
Nobody cares about me? thanks for the ego boost. But I would disagree.
Right now I live in China. I have some pretty interesting life experiences, compared to my family and friends in the US. They all love to hear from me, but face it, it's hard to keep in good contact with all my friends and family, all the time. That's where a blog comes in. My 15 friends and family members (who DO care about me!) get to read up about my life in China. In an unobtrusive way, on their time and terms.
I don't plan on getting famous with my blog, I don't plan on changing the world. I just plan on letting people know what's going on with my life. And based on the response I get from people I know, or used to know, it's worthwhile.
So I'm sorry you don't have any friends or family that care. I do.
The closest thing I've found is something like audacity. It's not nearly as good...it has trouble syncing things properly with some soundcards, and doesn't really do midi at all (just audio), or automatic looping/syncing/etc. But it is nice to have a decent free multitrack recording tool.
yeah, but I love bad jokes. They make me so amped.
I used eclipse for awhile on my 2 Ghz Athlon machine with 512 Meg of ram, but it just wasn't cutting it. I would often right click on something, and have to wait 3 or 4 seconds for the context menu to appear.
While I love the IDEA of eclipse, I can't see how it has gained such popularity, unless all developers have workstations that are significantly better than mine. As a developer, I like my tools to be snappy -- to be able to do everything with the keyboard, and no waiting. For that reason, for me, eclipse still hasn't arrived (at least for large projects with hundreds of files. For small stuff, it seemed a bit snappier).
Seriously, for those of you who love using eclipse, does it work quickly? Maybe I'm doing something wrong. Or maybe the 1 or 2 second delay doesn't bother you as much? I'm not trying to troll -- I just really want to understand the draw of eclipse!
I'm also waiting for a good vi-style plugin for eclipse. To be able to jump around the editor quickly without taking my hands off the keyboard is essential -- arrow keys and pageup/pagedown are just too inefficient. Not that vi is the only way to do so, but it's the method my hands have grown used to, so it would be the most appealing to me to avoid having to relearn.
I've been itching to switch to eclipse for the last year, but every time I try, those 2 things stop me, and I end up going back to what I'm used to. But maybe someone here can give me a few tips.....
Actually, I know. The comics, the riddles, the puzzles. Good idea. horrible implementation. I like the idea of all the puzzles working together. But the game consisted of randomly moving items from room to room, hoping that you'd trigger a clue.
The first few were easy (take item X to room X), but later ones were crazy, 12 items having to be in the correct 12 rooms, then all rearranged for the next clue.
I finally finished earthworld with the help of the web a couple years ago. And believe me, after SEEING the solution, I hated the game even more. As a kid, I always figured there was some cool meaning or puzzle to solving the game, but really, the solution was no cooler than randomly rearranging items.
Half the people that rip on E.T. never played it more than once or twice. It's just become the cool thing to rip on recently, because everyone has learned the stories about the piles of the carts in a landfill.
I had E.T. and it wasn't a particularly good game, but it was playable. It beat the pants off of swordquest anyday (earthworld at least*), and a few other games that were so bad they were basically unplayable. But all these kiddies that love to rip on E.T. probably never played swordquest either. They just read about how bad E.T. was and decided it was fun to rip on.
Just like how all the new gaming magazines, in their list of worst video games, all love to include Custer's Revenge. C'mon, who EVER heard of Custer's Revenge when the Atari was big? But now, it's this perpetuated thing, where everyone keeps hearing about it from each other, and so each magazine talks about it like it was a game that people actually played back in the day.
Enough with the E.T. bashing, and enough nonsense about Custer's Revenge.
(* I never played fireworld, did ANYONE ever play any of the other ones on ACTUAL hardware, not an emulator?)
That is the funniest one I've heard in a long time. I wish I had mod points to give to you....
While all that you are saying is true, the funny thing about it is that open source fans will always go on about "oh, it's missing the feature I need? No problem, I'll just code it." While I'm glad that's possible, 95% of the time, it's not practical. Too much work/time/effort/money involved.
So while it's true that it's possible, it's not quite as wonderful as the open source fans would like you to believe.
(by the way, Hi! haven't seen ya in awhile!)
Check out the GBA dev scene. All sorts of stuff being made recently. Of course, some of it better than others. (yeah, there's a whole lot of tetris clones, but there's a few real gems in there too).
Maybe some people want to pirate games, but some of us just get a big kick out of seeing our games run on actual console hardware.
Nah, it's the TH that really gives them grief. People here (in China) always choke over my name: Nathan. It usually comes out like nation.
But I tend to butcher most Chinese words as bad or worse.
Just a couple small corrections....(I live in China, so I know)
Now, if most of the 100 million internet active in China cannot afford an item that is manufactured in their borders and available at a fraction of what it costs here (an internet capable computer)
Actually, computers are about the same price in the US and China. Misc computer peripherals (mice, webcams, etc) are cheaper here in China, but the computer itself is about the same.
A cell phone, I can concede that point, but only with the caveat that the infrastructure for its use is not on par with the ubiquitous coverage in the US.
Actually, the coverage is arguable the same or better here. And you don't get all that crap with lock in plans and stuff. The chinese cell phone system actually kicks the crap out of the U.S. one.
Anyway, that doesn't contradict your point any, but it was worth saying.
Don't work? Yeah they do. I watch them all the time. Although, it's true that the quality is lower. On US DVD players, about 1/3 of them won't play without a few glitches. On chinese dvd players, they play with no problems. Don't know what it is, but Chinese DVD players can play a lot of crap that US ones don't.
You do tend to quickly learn which vendors have better quality ones. The guy downstairs from my office has really crappy ones. But if I walk 2 blocks from my apartment, we've had a really high success rate with a guy there. And his are only 5 RMB (about 75 cents).
The funniest is outside of wal-mart, there's always a few guys with stands selling them. Every few months, when the US managers come by to see the local store, wal-mart manages to drive the street vendors off, but it only takes a week or so for them to come back.
My experience with eclipse:
Running on a 2Ghz machine with 512 Meg RAM, it took forever to start. Once started, it was fast enough on tiny projects, but once you added more than about 100 files to a project, it started to crawl. Projects with closer to 1000 files, I sometimes had to wait about 45 seconds between right clicking something, and the right click menu appearing.
On a friend's advice, I upgraded to 1G of RAM, and suddenly eclipse worked like a relatively normal IDE. Still a tiny bit sluggish at times, but bearable.
So my verdict: yes, it's horribly slow. If you've got a nice machine, you can make it usable, but is it really worth it?
What I really want is a full featured IDE like eclipse, but where the editor window is gvim. That would be heaven.
Or how about "even after hours digging on google, ubuntu still wouldn't recognize my wireless card. I'll use an OS that lets me use my wireless."
Thank you. Every time someone describes sniping, I wonder, do they just not understand the way ebay is supposed to work? Is there something you and I are missing, or all those snipers just idiots?
At the moment, I'm in my apartment in Shenzhen, using skype. No problems.
Of course, that might mean they haven't gotten around to blocking it, or just that I'm now on their bad list.
In response to a lot of other posts, though, the articles indicates that just the one major telecom plans to block it. It doesn't say that it's going to be blocked at the great firewall level. (like google groups, blogspot, and even gbadev.org).
did any of the emails contain Natalie Portman and grits?