A way around timing would be to have "open" games. When a game is started, players join and are added to the two teams until the game is full (say with some extra "bench" players on each team who are substituted in to replace dropped connections and such), at which point the game begins. It would also be more fun that having fixed teams, since you end up playing with more different people. Fixed team games can be set up separately (sorta like private games on most multiplayer services) when teams have enough people available to fill a game.
There were some western-themed single player games (Gunman's Proof on the SNES (sorta westernish, anyway), Outlaws, etc), and they weren't really popular. Fantasy and sci-fi are the big sellers in single player or standard multiplayer, so they're the first picks for massively multiplayer.
The fact that all the western-themed games I know of sucked terribly doesn't factor that greatly into the equation, of course, since non-MMO games don't have to be good to be successful, they just have to get lots of people to buy them.
There's a live action role playing club in my area. It sounded 100% dorky, so obviously I checked them out once. While the idea of running around in the woods and playing D&D on a grand scale sounded cool for about ten minutes, I quickly realized that the really fun part about D&D wasn't the game at all, but sitting in a living room drinking pop and eating pizza and arguing about why intelligence and wisdom are separate stats.
This is also one of the big problems with MMORTS games like Shattered Galaxy.
Quick refernce: Each player in SG can have 48 units, which they can take into battle in gruops of 6 (up to 12, depending on their stats). The most common thing for players to do is to take six units of the same type into battle and use them as a single squad.
The thing is, in any given map, there are usually three to five control points that must be held, and a number of strategically useful postions to occupy (cliffs, choke points, cover, etc). Its great when you get mostly experienced players together who will coordinate to win the battle.
However, 99% of the time what happens is everybody mass swarms one point of the map while ten people try to play commander and give bad, conflicting orders. Ideally, somebody finds Arbalests (artillery units) in grid A1, they say, "Arbs a1" and a couple people with fast air-to-ground units will rush in to kill them quickly.
Ideally, its an easy situation and any enemy arbalasts are doomed the minute they open fire. But what happens usually is somebody finds arbs in A1, says, "Arbs A1" and every last player on the map abandons the strategic points and mobs A2 where they discover that the arbs are on top of a cliff and you can't reach them by ground, thus falling directly into the arbs' line of fire and get wasted, leaving all the strategic points wide open for the enemy to take.
I don't know how many times playing that game, I've had my tanks set up in a nice spot, but getting annoyed by really weak air-to-ground units. Meanwhile, some strong air-to-air units are sitting by. I say,"Hey, little help here?" and if I'm lucky, they just say, "hey, sup dude?" and ignore what is basically a free kill for them.
I guess that's why they listed high explosive among the uses. Even if you can't control the blast whatsoever, if it blows up, you can find a use for it.
This is pretty much what I thought when I read the article. The DMCA isn't shot down, in part or full, but at least one abuse of it has been hedged. Baby steps, I suppose...
Actually, not likely. A humanzee (the common name for a theoretical human/chip hybrid) would end up with an odd number of chromosomes (chimps have one less pair than humans, with one large chromosome correlating closely with two of ours). Bonobos have the same number of chromosomes as other chimpanzees, so they're not hybrids.
While a humanzee would probably be viable and could live a healthy life, they would be unable to produce viable offspring like almost all hybrids, even between more simmilar species than humans and chimps. Also, a humanzee wouldn't look like a bonobo, most likely. The closest thing ever found to a theoretical hybrid was the chimp Oscar, who some people claimed was a humanzee until a chromosome count proved otherwise. He had an almost disturbingly human face and head, as well as a slightly different hip and leg structure than most chimps, allowing him to walk upright easier than he could stooped.
Which would also be the logical conclusion from their behavior. Despite the stereotypes, male chimps are considerably more violent than gorillas, which are generally pretty laid-back if they're not threatened. If a female gorilla came anywhere near a troop of chimps, the males would most likely go ape-shit (pardon the pun) and chase her away. A lone female chimp would probably have a much better chance at approaching a group of gorillas.
Even a hybrid would be a major discovery. As far as I know, it would only be the second primate hybrid known, and the only great-ape hybrid.
Just as long as I don't hear the word Humanzee brought up, I think I'll keep reading. Whoever would volunteer for that experiment is both a hero to genetic science and a complete and utter freak, and guess which of those two will be remembered most fifty years from now?
I think they mean new species of primates. You just ran into a bunch of high school kids playing street hocky from the sounds of it. Strange as they are, they discovered those a long time ago.
I wouldn't worry so much about the game disks as the moving parts in the drive. I've had a cople laptops die hard on me, and its always the moving parts that get it. A laptop usually gets handled well, too - its own padded case, and owners typically treat them with kid gloves.
A portable game device, on the other hand, typically gets treated like dirt. They get dropped, tossed around, shoved into pockets and bookbags along with god knows what else, left in the car on hot summer/cold winter days, and so on. My GBA has survived all that, plus pulling double duty as a bookmark and getting closed in a door. I can easily see a PSP joining so many laptops in the Great LAN in the Sky for nothing else but that drive.
PSP currently has 90min battery life.... Which would mean 40 or 50 minutes if you use rechargebles.
Depends on what rechargeables. I had a set of very expensive AAA batteries that I used in my TI-86, old GB and GBC. They were very nice, and I could run the GBC half again as long with them as with regular Duracells. They cost me nearly $20 each, though, but they were worth it. I haven't bought a single AAA battery since, and I've used them in everything (even built myself a little thing out of wood and electrical tape so they can power my portable radio, which usually runs on D cells, and they last almost as long).
An interesting idea, but I don't see it happening short of selling at a loss, or cutting the features, or waiting until its really too late.
At this point, it's not even DS vs. PSP. They're still up against the existing GBA, with its ungodly sales figures, massive library, and still lots of new release which will probably continue little abated after the DS is released. The DS is really an enhanced GBA. Not every game, especially not early on, is likely to take advantage of its new features to an extent that it won't run on the GBA. Plus, Nintendo has a lot of very major franchises in their pocket, and even if Sony captures the older gamers, Nintendo is still good at catching the runaway crazes. First was Tetris, then Pokemon, more recently Yugioh, and who knows what else they have lined up for the next few years.
So it's not just PSP vs. DS here. It's PSP vs. DS+GBA+the sheer franchising power of Nintendo. Sony has plenty of franchises behind it, but none of them are as old as Nintendo's Old Reliables (Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Donkey Kong), and few if any series can compare in power to any of them, especially ones like Pokemon, which isn't just games, but a full-blown cultural phenomenon with multiple games, movies, anime, comics, toys, merchandising on levels that makes the WWE look like they're actually in the sports business. Nintendo doesn't directly reap the rewards of many of these, but it doesn't hurt them by any measure.
Sure, you can call them corporate whores for that. I know I sure will. But you can't deny that it sells like hell, and the sheer level of noise Pokemon made at the peak of its popularity eclipsed everything else.
It's been a long time since Nintendo's pulled this kind of franchise for the N64 or Gamecube, but they've kept it up with the Gameboy ever since Tetris. It'll only take one good craze to turn the tides one way or the other. Sure, Sony has a different target audience. Sure, Sony has a compeltely different kid of game than Nintendo. Sony will still end up making the GameGear of the next generation. They'll carve out a market that Nintendo doesn't really appeal to for whatever reason, and they'll scratch for a while.
What will be really interesting is what happens in the bigger picture in the long run. Sony has a mirror image of this situation in the console market. They've got the franchising - nothing compared to what Nintendo has made in the past, but still more than the Gamecube has managed.
I don't see Nintendo getting back to its glory days like the SNES with the console market again, but I also don't think they're going anywhere in the handheld market.
I just hope Microsoft remembers the N-Gage before they try to make a handheld sister system to the X-box. They've done ok in the console market, all things considered, but they're not in a secure position at all. If they make a handheld and it flops on the level of the N-Gage, it can only hurt them in the long run. There's already enough naysayers around the Xbox, and they'll only be easier to listen to after a serious fiasco.
One has been confirmed by Sony. They did admit to having serious battery problems, so much so that they've built a battery simulator into their dev kit so that developers can try to minimize their games' power drain.
If this was something like a burned out computer, a bolt shearing off, or the machine it was supposed to be bolted to failing and dumping the satellite on the ground, I'd agree with you. There are some things that just happen, even though every reasonable analysis says they won't.
However, there are still some things that shouldn't go wrong, ever, and there's not an excuse for it after the fact. This is one of them. You don't pull parts off something that's supposed to work without replacing them. This is almost akin to a mechanic servicing your engine and having "extra" parts left over when he closes the hood again. They were there for a reason, and they need to go back on before you finish whatever you're doing.
You have to remember than I'm an unemployed college student and a compulsive spender. If I have $3 in my pocket in the morning, by noon I'll have a six-pack in my fridge. For something to be a reasonable purchase for me, it has to cost less than a six-pack, or I'll never save up enough for it.
They don't complain about them. Most of us (myself included) keep saying we're going to pick one up one of these days, but have just never had the need since everything still comes on CDs anyway.
We also keep saying we'll pay for the drinks some day, but we always stick Eric with the bill at the end of the night.
Pokemon was not originally one of Nintendo's projects like Mario, Metroid, or Zelda, but an independent game. However, it did prove to be the best selling series on the Game Boy, and pretty quickly became one of their flagship products. So much so that Pikachu is probably more identified with the Gameboy consoles than any of Nintendo's traditional characters are.
I don't know about Halflife 2 yet, but a lot of games I have install the bulk of the data to the hard drive, and only leave things like movies and background music on the CD. They requie the CD in the drive more as copy protection than data. If that's the case with Halflife 2, it probably won't seriously effect things for better or worse.
Is this another case like broadband where Europe/Asia have better coverage than the US?
I don't have a DVD drive on any of my computers yet, and don't really plan to get one any time soon, and I know that many of the people I know don't have one either. Since most PC games still ship on CDs, I'm happy enough without spending money on one. I just assume that when games start doing this, the prices on a DVD drive will be down a bit and I can grab one on the cheap.
Anyway, back to my point: Are DVD drives more common in the UK than the US? Or do I just have a bunch of lame friends who can't play DVDs on their computers?
Spyware you can avoid (Don't use IE, turn off the features that it uses to install, run Spybot or Adaware regularly, etc), and when you get it, you can get rid of it.
Sitefinder is just *there*. You get it. Period. You can't get rid of it. And furthurmore, I've never had spyware that prevents me from getting otherwise useful error pages.
oh, and no-one had a mobile phone or a satellite when Einstein got his prize
We wouldn't (and couldn't), now, if it weren't for him, since all our orbits would be off slightly and they wouldn't stay up for very long. You need conceptual understanding first, and engineering applications after. If you were really a physicist, you'd know that. It would be a monumental waste of energy to absolutely no gain to launch a GPS system with only Newtonian level physics and only figure out that there's a relativisitic correction a year later when the entire network comes crashing down on Australia.
More energy to spin, but FAR less power to run the whole device. Remember, CD players don't have large amounts of RAM, and aren't very big in the computing power like a gaming system is. The GBA SP eats through batteries several times faster than a CD player, and the PSP will have a bigger screen, faster CPU, more features and moving parts, meaning even more power draw than the GBA.
Slashdot Mirror
A way around timing would be to have "open" games. When a game is started, players join and are added to the two teams until the game is full (say with some extra "bench" players on each team who are substituted in to replace dropped connections and such), at which point the game begins. It would also be more fun that having fixed teams, since you end up playing with more different people. Fixed team games can be set up separately (sorta like private games on most multiplayer services) when teams have enough people available to fill a game.
There were some western-themed single player games (Gunman's Proof on the SNES (sorta westernish, anyway), Outlaws, etc), and they weren't really popular. Fantasy and sci-fi are the big sellers in single player or standard multiplayer, so they're the first picks for massively multiplayer.
The fact that all the western-themed games I know of sucked terribly doesn't factor that greatly into the equation, of course, since non-MMO games don't have to be good to be successful, they just have to get lots of people to buy them.
There's a live action role playing club in my area. It sounded 100% dorky, so obviously I checked them out once. While the idea of running around in the woods and playing D&D on a grand scale sounded cool for about ten minutes, I quickly realized that the really fun part about D&D wasn't the game at all, but sitting in a living room drinking pop and eating pizza and arguing about why intelligence and wisdom are separate stats.
This is also one of the big problems with MMORTS games like Shattered Galaxy.
Quick refernce: Each player in SG can have 48 units, which they can take into battle in gruops of 6 (up to 12, depending on their stats). The most common thing for players to do is to take six units of the same type into battle and use them as a single squad.
The thing is, in any given map, there are usually three to five control points that must be held, and a number of strategically useful postions to occupy (cliffs, choke points, cover, etc). Its great when you get mostly experienced players together who will coordinate to win the battle.
However, 99% of the time what happens is everybody mass swarms one point of the map while ten people try to play commander and give bad, conflicting orders. Ideally, somebody finds Arbalests (artillery units) in grid A1, they say, "Arbs a1" and a couple people with fast air-to-ground units will rush in to kill them quickly.
Ideally, its an easy situation and any enemy arbalasts are doomed the minute they open fire. But what happens usually is somebody finds arbs in A1, says, "Arbs A1" and every last player on the map abandons the strategic points and mobs A2 where they discover that the arbs are on top of a cliff and you can't reach them by ground, thus falling directly into the arbs' line of fire and get wasted, leaving all the strategic points wide open for the enemy to take.
I don't know how many times playing that game, I've had my tanks set up in a nice spot, but getting annoyed by really weak air-to-ground units. Meanwhile, some strong air-to-air units are sitting by. I say,"Hey, little help here?" and if I'm lucky, they just say, "hey, sup dude?" and ignore what is basically a free kill for them.
I guess that's why they listed high explosive among the uses. Even if you can't control the blast whatsoever, if it blows up, you can find a use for it.
This is pretty much what I thought when I read the article. The DMCA isn't shot down, in part or full, but at least one abuse of it has been hedged. Baby steps, I suppose...
Actually, not likely. A humanzee (the common name for a theoretical human/chip hybrid) would end up with an odd number of chromosomes (chimps have one less pair than humans, with one large chromosome correlating closely with two of ours). Bonobos have the same number of chromosomes as other chimpanzees, so they're not hybrids.
While a humanzee would probably be viable and could live a healthy life, they would be unable to produce viable offspring like almost all hybrids, even between more simmilar species than humans and chimps. Also, a humanzee wouldn't look like a bonobo, most likely. The closest thing ever found to a theoretical hybrid was the chimp Oscar, who some people claimed was a humanzee until a chromosome count proved otherwise. He had an almost disturbingly human face and head, as well as a slightly different hip and leg structure than most chimps, allowing him to walk upright easier than he could stooped.
Which would also be the logical conclusion from their behavior. Despite the stereotypes, male chimps are considerably more violent than gorillas, which are generally pretty laid-back if they're not threatened. If a female gorilla came anywhere near a troop of chimps, the males would most likely go ape-shit (pardon the pun) and chase her away. A lone female chimp would probably have a much better chance at approaching a group of gorillas.
Even a hybrid would be a major discovery. As far as I know, it would only be the second primate hybrid known, and the only great-ape hybrid. Just as long as I don't hear the word Humanzee brought up, I think I'll keep reading. Whoever would volunteer for that experiment is both a hero to genetic science and a complete and utter freak, and guess which of those two will be remembered most fifty years from now?
I think they mean new species of primates. You just ran into a bunch of high school kids playing street hocky from the sounds of it. Strange as they are, they discovered those a long time ago.
I wouldn't worry so much about the game disks as the moving parts in the drive. I've had a cople laptops die hard on me, and its always the moving parts that get it. A laptop usually gets handled well, too - its own padded case, and owners typically treat them with kid gloves. A portable game device, on the other hand, typically gets treated like dirt. They get dropped, tossed around, shoved into pockets and bookbags along with god knows what else, left in the car on hot summer/cold winter days, and so on. My GBA has survived all that, plus pulling double duty as a bookmark and getting closed in a door. I can easily see a PSP joining so many laptops in the Great LAN in the Sky for nothing else but that drive.
PSP currently has 90min battery life.... Which would mean 40 or 50 minutes if you use rechargebles. Depends on what rechargeables. I had a set of very expensive AAA batteries that I used in my TI-86, old GB and GBC. They were very nice, and I could run the GBC half again as long with them as with regular Duracells. They cost me nearly $20 each, though, but they were worth it. I haven't bought a single AAA battery since, and I've used them in everything (even built myself a little thing out of wood and electrical tape so they can power my portable radio, which usually runs on D cells, and they last almost as long).
An interesting idea, but I don't see it happening short of selling at a loss, or cutting the features, or waiting until its really too late.
At this point, it's not even DS vs. PSP. They're still up against the existing GBA, with its ungodly sales figures, massive library, and still lots of new release which will probably continue little abated after the DS is released. The DS is really an enhanced GBA. Not every game, especially not early on, is likely to take advantage of its new features to an extent that it won't run on the GBA. Plus, Nintendo has a lot of very major franchises in their pocket, and even if Sony captures the older gamers, Nintendo is still good at catching the runaway crazes. First was Tetris, then Pokemon, more recently Yugioh, and who knows what else they have lined up for the next few years.
So it's not just PSP vs. DS here. It's PSP vs. DS+GBA+the sheer franchising power of Nintendo. Sony has plenty of franchises behind it, but none of them are as old as Nintendo's Old Reliables (Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Donkey Kong), and few if any series can compare in power to any of them, especially ones like Pokemon, which isn't just games, but a full-blown cultural phenomenon with multiple games, movies, anime, comics, toys, merchandising on levels that makes the WWE look like they're actually in the sports business. Nintendo doesn't directly reap the rewards of many of these, but it doesn't hurt them by any measure.
Sure, you can call them corporate whores for that. I know I sure will. But you can't deny that it sells like hell, and the sheer level of noise Pokemon made at the peak of its popularity eclipsed everything else.
It's been a long time since Nintendo's pulled this kind of franchise for the N64 or Gamecube, but they've kept it up with the Gameboy ever since Tetris. It'll only take one good craze to turn the tides one way or the other. Sure, Sony has a different target audience. Sure, Sony has a compeltely different kid of game than Nintendo. Sony will still end up making the GameGear of the next generation. They'll carve out a market that Nintendo doesn't really appeal to for whatever reason, and they'll scratch for a while.
What will be really interesting is what happens in the bigger picture in the long run. Sony has a mirror image of this situation in the console market. They've got the franchising - nothing compared to what Nintendo has made in the past, but still more than the Gamecube has managed.
I don't see Nintendo getting back to its glory days like the SNES with the console market again, but I also don't think they're going anywhere in the handheld market.
I just hope Microsoft remembers the N-Gage before they try to make a handheld sister system to the X-box. They've done ok in the console market, all things considered, but they're not in a secure position at all. If they make a handheld and it flops on the level of the N-Gage, it can only hurt them in the long run. There's already enough naysayers around the Xbox, and they'll only be easier to listen to after a serious fiasco.
One has been confirmed by Sony. They did admit to having serious battery problems, so much so that they've built a battery simulator into their dev kit so that developers can try to minimize their games' power drain.
Spender. I almost never drink myself, but there's almost always somebody passing through that does.
If this was something like a burned out computer, a bolt shearing off, or the machine it was supposed to be bolted to failing and dumping the satellite on the ground, I'd agree with you. There are some things that just happen, even though every reasonable analysis says they won't.
However, there are still some things that shouldn't go wrong, ever, and there's not an excuse for it after the fact. This is one of them. You don't pull parts off something that's supposed to work without replacing them. This is almost akin to a mechanic servicing your engine and having "extra" parts left over when he closes the hood again. They were there for a reason, and they need to go back on before you finish whatever you're doing.
You have to remember than I'm an unemployed college student and a compulsive spender. If I have $3 in my pocket in the morning, by noon I'll have a six-pack in my fridge. For something to be a reasonable purchase for me, it has to cost less than a six-pack, or I'll never save up enough for it.
They don't complain about them. Most of us (myself included) keep saying we're going to pick one up one of these days, but have just never had the need since everything still comes on CDs anyway.
We also keep saying we'll pay for the drinks some day, but we always stick Eric with the bill at the end of the night.
Pokemon was not originally one of Nintendo's projects like Mario, Metroid, or Zelda, but an independent game. However, it did prove to be the best selling series on the Game Boy, and pretty quickly became one of their flagship products. So much so that Pikachu is probably more identified with the Gameboy consoles than any of Nintendo's traditional characters are.
I don't know about Halflife 2 yet, but a lot of games I have install the bulk of the data to the hard drive, and only leave things like movies and background music on the CD. They requie the CD in the drive more as copy protection than data. If that's the case with Halflife 2, it probably won't seriously effect things for better or worse.
Is this another case like broadband where Europe/Asia have better coverage than the US?
I don't have a DVD drive on any of my computers yet, and don't really plan to get one any time soon, and I know that many of the people I know don't have one either. Since most PC games still ship on CDs, I'm happy enough without spending money on one. I just assume that when games start doing this, the prices on a DVD drive will be down a bit and I can grab one on the cheap.
Anyway, back to my point: Are DVD drives more common in the UK than the US? Or do I just have a bunch of lame friends who can't play DVDs on their computers?
Spyware you can avoid (Don't use IE, turn off the features that it uses to install, run Spybot or Adaware regularly, etc), and when you get it, you can get rid of it. Sitefinder is just *there*. You get it. Period. You can't get rid of it. And furthurmore, I've never had spyware that prevents me from getting otherwise useful error pages.
oh, and no-one had a mobile phone or a satellite when Einstein got his prize
We wouldn't (and couldn't), now, if it weren't for him, since all our orbits would be off slightly and they wouldn't stay up for very long. You need conceptual understanding first, and engineering applications after. If you were really a physicist, you'd know that. It would be a monumental waste of energy to absolutely no gain to launch a GPS system with only Newtonian level physics and only figure out that there's a relativisitic correction a year later when the entire network comes crashing down on Australia.
More energy to spin, but FAR less power to run the whole device. Remember, CD players don't have large amounts of RAM, and aren't very big in the computing power like a gaming system is. The GBA SP eats through batteries several times faster than a CD player, and the PSP will have a bigger screen, faster CPU, more features and moving parts, meaning even more power draw than the GBA.
The rumor mill that produced this whole thing did.