Other than the occasional driver modifying/adding program (and not all of them), I've found that I don't need to reboot for several programs that even instruct me to in their installer.
Firstly, Halo 2 isn't "innovation" in that it simply adds balance to Halo 1 (and nice balance). I will, therefore, focus on Halo 1. I enjoy playing the game splitscreen or LAN with friends, but still, it's no PC FPS.
Health/shields - This idea I like. Especially for Halo's speed and ground based gameplay.
Vehicles - Tribes 1 (late 1998) and even better, Tribes 2 (2000). Tribes 1 has a basic "scout" vehicle that could fly around slowly and shoot easy to avoid rockets. It also had two flying APCs. Tribes 2 has a ground-based hovering "grav cycle" for fast light armor transport; a three man bomber, having a pilot, a gunner, and a guy that stands on top repairing the vehicle, using a sensor jammer pack if he chooses, and throwing flares / weapons to help avoid enemies; a one-man shrike that's fast and good for transportation, anti air, slamming into enemy cappers, bailing out of near the enemy flag to let your own capper have a ride, and it has a fairly good pulse sensor built in; the tank, which requires a driver and a gunner; and the APC which has room for 5 passengers (kaboom!). Not to mention all the other modern games which now have vehicles, like the Battlefields and the UT2Kx's.
Carrying only two weapons at a time - Tribes 1 and 2 (limited to three weapons with light armor, four with medium, five with heavy.) Most people use light or heavy, so the strategy is definately there for light. As well, Tribeses add other things that the player can choose before fighting: you can pick your armour, your weapons, and your pack. And you can choose them all at inventory stations, so there's no hunting around.
Melee attacks - Nice in a ground based game like Halo. I think they're a bit more fun in Halo 2, but yes, nice.
Grenades - In Tribes (if you havn't guessed, I like this game) grenades and mines can be held and used with seperate buttons by all players. You can use them for similiar things as in Halo.
Plasma / particle weapons - Tribes: Blasters puncture shields, elfs drain energy, and the weapons work quite differently (ie. mortar is strong as heck but has quite the arc to it).
Motion tracker - Tribes has one up on this, I think, especially in the teamwork sense. Enemies only show up on player's Command Circuit, or have IFFs over their head, if they are in range of the team's sensor network. The sensor network is built up on long-range base sensors (part of map), deployable pulse sensors, deployable cameras (which can be looked through as well), and deployable motion sensors (lower range, but can detect cloakers or people with sensor jammers). As well, if an enemy is close enough to a player and in view, that player's armour suit will automatically send the enemy's position to the sensor net. =)
IMHO, the biggest draw of Halo is that it's the best console FPS. It's not that terrific compared with some PC FPS games, but you can play this one with 3 other friends on the same machine. That's fun.
Halo isn't as "by the numbers" as, say, Doom 3. But then, when you take Tribes' "skiing" (rapidly jumping down hill to gain speeds that can get to 100kph easily), jet packs, and other things, Halo still looks pretty much over to the every other FPS side of the spectrum. Half-life 2 isn't so much better, but the story telling, physics, and modability (Big!) of HL2 are just cool.
These things are generally like normal 3d graphics as any old console or computer would display, but with two "cameras" ingame at once instead of one. Each camera is slightly offset left/right from one another. In this way, you get one image for each eye, and the illusion works best when looking straight on.
This is how the nVidia drivers and most any other stereo 3d drivers do it, so I assume that if the rumour holds then Nintendo will follow the pattern. Actually doing multiple angles or whole 3d environments and objects is probably pretty resource intensive.
Canada and some Australian providers, actually (not on G4, there's some tech channel or something in Australia that picked it up). It beats everything else on Call for Help, just a shame that the American G4 hasn't the sense to show it.
Not sure which program it replaces on the Canadian G4, it's all junk anyways.
I've found the hx4700 a bit too expensive, but really the cheaper (non VGA) PocketPCs don't do a shabby job at all either.
If you have a 1GB memory card and a Palm or PocketPC, you can fit the whole text of the Wikipedia on there, and can view it wherever you go. If you have wifi access, you can just get at it (and the whole wealth of the internet) that way. The grandparent post's idea seems already to exist, to an extent.
Many Playstation 2 games use a pretty large amount of the space on their DVDs for annoying cinematic FMV files. Audio/video/image compression is improving as well, and with the more powerful processor the Xbox 2 could save space that way.
The only super valid point you have there is over the standalone movie playing, but people with high-end TVs generally don't use the current generation consoles to play movies anyways.
I remember the last router that I had from D-Link. I actually had to return it because of gaming. The thing's DMZ and port forwarding didn't work reliably for some odd reason (I've heard others with the same problem), and the router died/restarted when I tried doing much P2P. Even worse, the router died when using Xbox Live, despite being "Xbox Live Compatible". Tech support was useless, yadda yadda typical hardware problem story, I returned it and bought a nice Linksys that works perfectly.
They apparently have sold very few or no copies of CherryOS. However, when this first got announced, I saw it on several "tech news" (quotation marks for effect) websites, with people saying how great it could be and yadda yadda. If not for people actually spreading the truth and showing the lie that this is, they might have actually sold a copy by now.
I've seen this comment before. In this very story, actually.
Re:IMHO DS is far better and the review is compari
on
PSP And DS Duke It Out
·
· Score: 1
Ehh, let me check DS' "good games list".
Nanostray, Metroid Prime: Hunters, Advance Wars DS, Animal Crossing DS, Jam With the Band, Meteos, Final Fantasy III and Crystal Chronicles, Katamari Damacy, Kirby's Magic Paintbrush, Mario Kart DS, Polarium.
I don't know, it sounds pretty good to me. Many of those will be out before winter, others have been announced w/o a date. It is a stupid wait though. Japan already has some pretty well reviewed games, Nintendo seems to have rushed to launch here in North America. As well, Nintendo is selling non-game things in Japan, such as an advanced dictionary, logic puzzles, math/language trainer, and MP3 / movie player (which is unfortunately a GBA cart, so it doesn't use both screens and all the fancyness).
To the PSP side, there are some good games, but most of them that are coming out don't seem that appealing to myself. There is a reason I don't have a PS2 (Xbox myself), and it is that I don't care for the types of games the Playstation consoles seem to get.
But that's just my personal opinion there. I won't go telling you that you're a complete idiot for doing as you with. I won't even imply it. Definately in the minority anyways, looking at the PS2 sales.
My high school seems to block all web traffic that doesn't go through their firewalled/censored/adblocked proxy. If you want to use Firefox (or in a couple of crazy kid's cases, laptops), you have to set it up to use the proxy. It looks pretty possible to me.
Easy enough to get Firefox working with it though, one just clicks the "import settings" thing in the browser and off you go.
It's a form of fanboyism, a typical thing done by immature console users to help justify their brand decisions and blah blah blah.
(Personally I think they all sound stupid. I even own and like an Xbox and think that it sounds stupid. The name currently that I don't mind is the Gamecube, because it's so zany. (OMG! A cube with games!))
AoE DS will be a remake of Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings. Apparently, it will now be a "fast-paced" turn-based strategy game. There will be at least 5 civilizations to choose from, at least 15 different types of buildings, and more than 50 unit types. A combat advisor will help you with tactics for battle during your campaign.
Source: Nintendo Power
They do show potential screenshots, but they look nothing like Age of Kings. Actually, they look downright horrible. But heck, if this pans out, it could be quite interesting. I love RTS games, and Age of Kings is one of the best.
Then I might suggest ye olde placebo. Unless it's some fancy holographic-style thing, or has head tracking, there would be no difference between that 3D movie through one eye and seeing a 2D movie.
With one eye? Can your non-seeing eye pick up any light at all? Even if you can't percieve it, it may be that it picks up "shadows" of the image and that might explain it.
But if it could see nothing, there should be absolutely no way that you could pick up the 3D. All 3d movies do is feed a different image for each eye. With only one of those two images, it's just a 2D movie.
And then, I didn't the article. It goes on to say this, which is slightly contradictory but raises my optimism slightly. They aren't 80's style anaglyphs.
Forget the old days of wearing the red and blue glasses and the eyestrain. All of that is behind us now. These new active glasses that you're wearing and seeing 3-D with are a breakthrough in technology.
""Star Wars" creator George Lucas and "Titanic" director James Cameron were among those promoting a new digital alteration that converts two-dimensional movies into 3-D.
Theatergoers still have to wear those familiar cardboard glasses with red-and-blue cellophane, although backers of the new technology say it doesn't cause the eyestrain common with past 3-D efforts."
There are two big problems with this. Firstly, as it only requires on projector, this solution apparently uses Red/Blue glasses instead of, say, polarized glasses like at the Imax. This might allow more theaters to use it, but my head is already hurting at the thought. Red/Blue (anaglyph, I guess) glasses always seem to reduce the light hitting your eyes, as well as screwing up the colour. The result is not incredibly pleasant, causing you to strain more to see the picture.
The other thing is that this is a 2D -> 3D conversion. Those almost never turn out looking natural. Too often you'll see a few characters or objects in the foreground that stick way out of the scene and look out of place.
But then, heck, I like stereoscopic 3d thingies. I want to see how this turns out, I'm just not optimistic about it. IF it does turn out pretty good, I wouldn't mind seeing more (or all) movies in the format.
To get the "stereoscopic" cues, you do. There are other cues that let people with one eye sort of see in 3d, such as shadows, the blurring of further away objects, movement, etc.
2D movies already provide pretty much all of these, but to get the even more dramatic "3D" effect, you need to feed a different image to each eye. Until Star Wars style holograms, that's how they all function. If you've only got vision in one eye, you're naturally stuck at the current "2D" level.
Perfect Dark was rated M. For whatever reason, I can distinctly remember a Rogers Video employee pointing that out to my mother, as well as the fact that we needed one of those memory expansions. (A quick Google for Perfect Dark ESRB has confirmed this.)
You're right about Goldeneye. However, this proposed law would still apparently cover it as well. Goldeneye has human against human violence causing severe injury or death, which is covered by the law.
From the previous Slashdot article:...He seeks to impose legislation that will prohibit the distribution, sale, rental and availability of mature video games to children younger than 18...
It sounds as though this does not apply only to retailers, but to parents as well. I'm not going to say the obvious about how parents should be parenting their children and not the government, but this is still interesting.
And what constitutes "Mature"? I've played M rated games in my youth (pre-teen and near there), such as Goldeneye and Perfect Dark on the N64. I'm certainly not any the worse for it, I quite detest violence myself. Now if it was Postal 2 on the other hand...
I saw a problem a couple times on "Phoenix" 0.4 or 0.3, I think. Since then Firefox has rendered the site perfectly fine. It looks identical to what IE and Opera give me, every time.
Perhaps the people's ISPs are dropping packets or something?
Slashdot Mirror
Other than the occasional driver modifying/adding program (and not all of them), I've found that I don't need to reboot for several programs that even instruct me to in their installer.
Firstly, Halo 2 isn't "innovation" in that it simply adds balance to Halo 1 (and nice balance). I will, therefore, focus on Halo 1. I enjoy playing the game splitscreen or LAN with friends, but still, it's no PC FPS.
Health/shields - This idea I like. Especially for Halo's speed and ground based gameplay.
Vehicles - Tribes 1 (late 1998) and even better, Tribes 2 (2000). Tribes 1 has a basic "scout" vehicle that could fly around slowly and shoot easy to avoid rockets. It also had two flying APCs. Tribes 2 has a ground-based hovering "grav cycle" for fast light armor transport; a three man bomber, having a pilot, a gunner, and a guy that stands on top repairing the vehicle, using a sensor jammer pack if he chooses, and throwing flares / weapons to help avoid enemies; a one-man shrike that's fast and good for transportation, anti air, slamming into enemy cappers, bailing out of near the enemy flag to let your own capper have a ride, and it has a fairly good pulse sensor built in; the tank, which requires a driver and a gunner; and the APC which has room for 5 passengers (kaboom!). Not to mention all the other modern games which now have vehicles, like the Battlefields and the UT2Kx's.
Carrying only two weapons at a time - Tribes 1 and 2 (limited to three weapons with light armor, four with medium, five with heavy.) Most people use light or heavy, so the strategy is definately there for light. As well, Tribeses add other things that the player can choose before fighting: you can pick your armour, your weapons, and your pack. And you can choose them all at inventory stations, so there's no hunting around.
Melee attacks - Nice in a ground based game like Halo. I think they're a bit more fun in Halo 2, but yes, nice.
Grenades - In Tribes (if you havn't guessed, I like this game) grenades and mines can be held and used with seperate buttons by all players. You can use them for similiar things as in Halo.
Plasma / particle weapons - Tribes: Blasters puncture shields, elfs drain energy, and the weapons work quite differently (ie. mortar is strong as heck but has quite the arc to it).
Motion tracker - Tribes has one up on this, I think, especially in the teamwork sense. Enemies only show up on player's Command Circuit, or have IFFs over their head, if they are in range of the team's sensor network. The sensor network is built up on long-range base sensors (part of map), deployable pulse sensors, deployable cameras (which can be looked through as well), and deployable motion sensors (lower range, but can detect cloakers or people with sensor jammers). As well, if an enemy is close enough to a player and in view, that player's armour suit will automatically send the enemy's position to the sensor net. =)
IMHO, the biggest draw of Halo is that it's the best console FPS. It's not that terrific compared with some PC FPS games, but you can play this one with 3 other friends on the same machine. That's fun.
Halo isn't as "by the numbers" as, say, Doom 3. But then, when you take Tribes' "skiing" (rapidly jumping down hill to gain speeds that can get to 100kph easily), jet packs, and other things, Halo still looks pretty much over to the every other FPS side of the spectrum. Half-life 2 isn't so much better, but the story telling, physics, and modability (Big!) of HL2 are just cool.
These things are generally like normal 3d graphics as any old console or computer would display, but with two "cameras" ingame at once instead of one. Each camera is slightly offset left/right from one another. In this way, you get one image for each eye, and the illusion works best when looking straight on.
This is how the nVidia drivers and most any other stereo 3d drivers do it, so I assume that if the rumour holds then Nintendo will follow the pattern. Actually doing multiple angles or whole 3d environments and objects is probably pretty resource intensive.
Canada and some Australian providers, actually (not on G4, there's some tech channel or something in Australia that picked it up). It beats everything else on Call for Help, just a shame that the American G4 hasn't the sense to show it.
Not sure which program it replaces on the Canadian G4, it's all junk anyways.
Or maybe, you know, support for running Mandriva on the Xbox...
?
I've found the hx4700 a bit too expensive, but really the cheaper (non VGA) PocketPCs don't do a shabby job at all either.
If you have a 1GB memory card and a Palm or PocketPC, you can fit the whole text of the Wikipedia on there, and can view it wherever you go. If you have wifi access, you can just get at it (and the whole wealth of the internet) that way. The grandparent post's idea seems already to exist, to an extent.
Many Playstation 2 games use a pretty large amount of the space on their DVDs for annoying cinematic FMV files. Audio/video/image compression is improving as well, and with the more powerful processor the Xbox 2 could save space that way.
The only super valid point you have there is over the standalone movie playing, but people with high-end TVs generally don't use the current generation consoles to play movies anyways.
I remember the last router that I had from D-Link. I actually had to return it because of gaming. The thing's DMZ and port forwarding didn't work reliably for some odd reason (I've heard others with the same problem), and the router died/restarted when I tried doing much P2P. Even worse, the router died when using Xbox Live, despite being "Xbox Live Compatible". Tech support was useless, yadda yadda typical hardware problem story, I returned it and bought a nice Linksys that works perfectly.
Not that quote/cliche again.
They apparently have sold very few or no copies of CherryOS. However, when this first got announced, I saw it on several "tech news" (quotation marks for effect) websites, with people saying how great it could be and yadda yadda. If not for people actually spreading the truth and showing the lie that this is, they might have actually sold a copy by now.
You're not in politics either, are you?
I've seen this comment before. In this very story, actually.
Ehh, let me check DS' "good games list".
Nanostray, Metroid Prime: Hunters, Advance Wars DS, Animal Crossing DS, Jam With the Band, Meteos, Final Fantasy III and Crystal Chronicles, Katamari Damacy, Kirby's Magic Paintbrush, Mario Kart DS, Polarium.
I don't know, it sounds pretty good to me. Many of those will be out before winter, others have been announced w/o a date. It is a stupid wait though. Japan already has some pretty well reviewed games, Nintendo seems to have rushed to launch here in North America. As well, Nintendo is selling non-game things in Japan, such as an advanced dictionary, logic puzzles, math/language trainer, and MP3 / movie player (which is unfortunately a GBA cart, so it doesn't use both screens and all the fancyness).
To the PSP side, there are some good games, but most of them that are coming out don't seem that appealing to myself. There is a reason I don't have a PS2 (Xbox myself), and it is that I don't care for the types of games the Playstation consoles seem to get.
But that's just my personal opinion there. I won't go telling you that you're a complete idiot for doing as you with. I won't even imply it. Definately in the minority anyways, looking at the PS2 sales.
My high school seems to block all web traffic that doesn't go through their firewalled/censored/adblocked proxy. If you want to use Firefox (or in a couple of crazy kid's cases, laptops), you have to set it up to use the proxy. It looks pretty possible to me.
Easy enough to get Firefox working with it though, one just clicks the "import settings" thing in the browser and off you go.
It's a form of fanboyism, a typical thing done by immature console users to help justify their brand decisions and blah blah blah.
(Personally I think they all sound stupid. I even own and like an Xbox and think that it sounds stupid. The name currently that I don't mind is the Gamecube, because it's so zany. (OMG! A cube with games!))
More news on Age of Empires DS!
AoE DS will be a remake of Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings. Apparently, it will now be a "fast-paced" turn-based strategy game. There will be at least 5 civilizations to choose from, at least 15 different types of buildings, and more than 50 unit types. A combat advisor will help you with tactics for battle during your campaign.
Source: Nintendo Power
They do show potential screenshots, but they look nothing like Age of Kings. Actually, they look downright horrible. But heck, if this pans out, it could be quite interesting. I love RTS games, and Age of Kings is one of the best.
Exactly. I like the feature myself. For example: just type Slashdot into the address bar and voila, you are here.
Then I might suggest ye olde placebo. Unless it's some fancy holographic-style thing, or has head tracking, there would be no difference between that 3D movie through one eye and seeing a 2D movie.
*shrug*
With one eye? Can your non-seeing eye pick up any light at all? Even if you can't percieve it, it may be that it picks up "shadows" of the image and that might explain it.
But if it could see nothing, there should be absolutely no way that you could pick up the 3D. All 3d movies do is feed a different image for each eye. With only one of those two images, it's just a 2D movie.
And then, I didn't the article. It goes on to say this, which is slightly contradictory but raises my optimism slightly. They aren't 80's style anaglyphs.
Forget the old days of wearing the red and blue glasses and the eyestrain. All of that is behind us now. These new active glasses that you're wearing and seeing 3-D with are a breakthrough in technology.
And I shall quote.
""Star Wars" creator George Lucas and "Titanic" director James Cameron were among those promoting a new digital alteration that converts two-dimensional movies into 3-D.
Theatergoers still have to wear those familiar cardboard glasses with red-and-blue cellophane, although backers of the new technology say it doesn't cause the eyestrain common with past 3-D efforts."
There are two big problems with this. Firstly, as it only requires on projector, this solution apparently uses Red/Blue glasses instead of, say, polarized glasses like at the Imax. This might allow more theaters to use it, but my head is already hurting at the thought. Red/Blue (anaglyph, I guess) glasses always seem to reduce the light hitting your eyes, as well as screwing up the colour. The result is not incredibly pleasant, causing you to strain more to see the picture.
The other thing is that this is a 2D -> 3D conversion. Those almost never turn out looking natural. Too often you'll see a few characters or objects in the foreground that stick way out of the scene and look out of place.
But then, heck, I like stereoscopic 3d thingies. I want to see how this turns out, I'm just not optimistic about it. IF it does turn out pretty good, I wouldn't mind seeing more (or all) movies in the format.
To get the "stereoscopic" cues, you do. There are other cues that let people with one eye sort of see in 3d, such as shadows, the blurring of further away objects, movement, etc.
2D movies already provide pretty much all of these, but to get the even more dramatic "3D" effect, you need to feed a different image to each eye. Until Star Wars style holograms, that's how they all function. If you've only got vision in one eye, you're naturally stuck at the current "2D" level.
Perfect Dark was rated M. For whatever reason, I can distinctly remember a Rogers Video employee pointing that out to my mother, as well as the fact that we needed one of those memory expansions. (A quick Google for Perfect Dark ESRB has confirmed this.)
You're right about Goldeneye. However, this proposed law would still apparently cover it as well. Goldeneye has human against human violence causing severe injury or death, which is covered by the law.
No problem with a bit of typing. Thanks.
Do you have a link to the proposed law? I'm curious to read the text, but I can't locate it.
From the previous Slashdot article: ...He seeks to impose legislation that will prohibit the distribution, sale, rental and availability of mature video games to children younger than 18...
It sounds as though this does not apply only to retailers, but to parents as well. I'm not going to say the obvious about how parents should be parenting their children and not the government, but this is still interesting.
And what constitutes "Mature"? I've played M rated games in my youth (pre-teen and near there), such as Goldeneye and Perfect Dark on the N64. I'm certainly not any the worse for it, I quite detest violence myself. Now if it was Postal 2 on the other hand...
I saw a problem a couple times on "Phoenix" 0.4 or 0.3, I think. Since then Firefox has rendered the site perfectly fine. It looks identical to what IE and Opera give me, every time.
Perhaps the people's ISPs are dropping packets or something?