Actually, at least in Michigan, the lawsuit winners don't get a dubious victory, they get jack squat. For example, many of the CDs are going to troops in Iraq, which isn't a bad thing, unless you were expecting some of the settlement.
The article only covers a small part of the CDs, but according to WNEM, the settlement CDs are also being placed in all the public non-emergency vehicles in the state (which would include the personal cars of most of the state politicians, refuse collection trucks, mosquito-sprayers, and so on), being given to state employees, and so on. Those people who were to actually benifit from the settlement get a big old goose egg.
5) No truly stupid plot devices or super abuse of physics (like replicators, or holodecks
The replicators and holodecks weren't so bad. Well, the holodecks were sorta annoying when holograms proceeded to take over the ship or something. Didn't these people learn from 2001 that you always build your potentially psychotic machines with a conveniently located "Off" switch?
The thing that got on my nerves was that damn deflector dish. That thing just did way too many things that it wasn't designed to do.
Haven't played Everquest since my 7 free days I got when I bought the game (way back when it came out) expired, but that doesn't count for all MMORPGs.
The way Ashen Empire's PvP combat works, it comes down to skill, much as players say otherwise. A lot of people just fight it out by beating on each other and clicking their potions, switching to a staff and casting remedy, etc, but the experienced PvPers all know that if you time your movements, you can get in hits on your opponent without them being able to hit you.
The good PvP players (the old FU guild (Fear Us) being some of the best in their day) would regularly kill level 60's and 80's with level 16 and 20 newbie characters. That's harder now with the rebalances, but it's still more about timing than stats. Not very long ago, a major PKer actually quit the game when a dozen or so level 10's looted his Staff of Enervation. To loot, you have to keep a person away from their body for about three minutes, meaning this guy got killed at least two or three times by people 80 and 90 levels below him. It's rare, but not at all unheard of for high level characters to loose items to groups of newbies.
Really, does anything have revolutionary graphics anymore? Now that cell shading is all over the place, we're back to the same place we've been the last few years: Double the pixels, double the polygons, barely noticeable increase in quality.
Lots of magazines reviewed lots of shit as better than true gems. Six months after the fact, however, it's safe to say that the magazines were all wrong and the players who say otherwise were right.
Yet again I have to quote my CSC professor: If the program CAN do it, the program SHOULD do it. Not so the user doesn't have to, but so the user DOESN'T TRY, because the user is an idiot.
It's great to have lots of stuff in config files for advanced users to fuck around with, but when you put mundane and common stuff in there (which seems all too common, as this is an exampel), and when the user finds out how to change it and goes to try, oh fuck, he just rendered his system unbootable and calls tech support to ask why his mouse isn't responding.
No insect has ever been shown to recognize itself in the mirror. They respond to their image (if they can see it - some don't see in the visible spectrum, and sum mirrors don't reflect very well outside of it) the same way they respond to another bug in the room.
So long as its confined to Doom/Duke Nukem 3D style autoaiming on the verticle axis, it's doable. Unfortunately, the maker of the James Bond FPS games on the GBA seemed to overlook this fact.
I agree with all those points, but it's a bit late for that for Fallout 3. Interplay's on the rocks, and likely to be gone before long. As far as I know, they're still gripping to their game rights like grim death. I hope they get smart and liquidate their intellectual property. Sure, it won't save Interplay, but at least then we have a hope in hell of getting Fallout 3 made and Interplay's brass can make a truckload of money and laugh all the way to the bank like they want to so much.
The Fallout/KOTOR connection is pretty logical when you think about it. The vast majority of RPGs are fall into some variation on fantasy. Fallout and KOTOR are two of the few big names in that segment of the genre.
Sadly, that's not the bottom 5% of the userbase. In the last three months, I've had to fix six home user computers and one that was used to track the finances of a church. Four of the home computers had never had Windows Update run (and both of the other two had only been force-fed updates through manufacturer-installed support software), and the Church computer was still vulnerable to the Blaster worm (Thankfully the thing wasn't connected to the Internet)
If you think that's bad, I recently reformatted a relative's Win2k computer because of a trashed partition. I then connected to the internet to download Zonelarm onto it and run windows update, and it was almost immediately infected with W32Blaster. Getting on a year after the patch came out, and most of a year since the virus made such a mess of things, there's still enough people out there with this virus (and hence, without the patch to protect against it) to make it dangerous to unpatched computers.
Not impossible, just impractical. It's only a matter of how much processing power and time you can throw at any of them before it breaks. They may take months or years or decades to break with today's systems, but ten, fifteen, twenty years from now, they may take days or weeks or months, which isn't nearly as good. Of course, by that time, we'll have better encryption that will still take years to break, but instead of fighting a constant arms race to make sure our current encryption is strong enough that it's impractical to crack (but not impossible), why not just short circuit the whole mess and make them impossible to crack.
Don't set up a public display address. Ever. Anywhere. If you have to, use a throwaway spamtrap like Hotmail or Yahoo that you can just forget about if things get out of hand.
what's the point of releasing a massmog for the XBox in mid 2005 - when the neXtBox is going to hit at xmas05?
That's one of those places where backwards compatibility comes into play, if that comes into play with the Xbox successor. The promise for backwards compatibility in the PS1 let a lot of developers continue to pursue projects that would have vanished from late releases otherwise.
Getting the Xbox any kind of success in Japan is like Nintendo wanting to get their next console out before Sony for a change. It very well won't get them anything, and could end up costing them more in the long run, but it's a major psychological victory.
In Nintendo's case, being first to the market carries a long-running history of being the best seller. The exception to that history is the Dreamcast, which was killed as much by its own failures as by Sony's victories.
In Microsoft's case, it's something even more important, but less tangible. Just getting a US-built console sold in Japan will threaten Sony and Nintendo on their home turf. Nintendo especially should take note if Microsoft succeeds in this, since the Xbox is already beating the Gamecube in the US.
Think of it like putting your campaign sign on your oppontent's front lawn the Sunday before the election. It probably won't win you the election, but it'll certainly shake your opponent up a bit.
This is one of those cases where ignorance truely is bliss. It's just like cockroaches in the kitchen, or your roommate looking at porn on your computer. It's a pretty good bet it's going on, but just as long as you don't know about it, you'll never know the difference.
Hell, most of the shit companies are making now I won't even buy USED. Heck, most of them don't even look interesting enough for me to install the demos I get in the mail every month.
Nintendo was late out with the N64, and they got burned.
They were late with the Gamecube, and they got burned.
On the other hand, they'd gotten the NES and SNES out before anything comparable, and dominated.
It may not be the only cause, but Nintendo is at a serious disadvantage - the PS3 looks to have two generations worth of backwards-compatible game library built up behind it on top of the new PS3 releases, while the best Nintendo can do is the Gamecube library, which wasn't as good.
They need to get whatever toehold they can, or they're going to be stuck on the sidelines yet again. Getting their console out first won't guarantee them the top post, but it's one less failure to overcome.
1. API's don't mean FUCK. Half the gaming hardware out there is a nightmare to program for, but it still gets developers. The N-Gage isn't a nightmare to program for, it's just that NOBODY DOES.
2. Have you used it? I have. It's not the programmers. The keys feel like they're set in JELLO. I'm not even talking about games. I'm talking about DIALING the goddamn thing. You have to squeeze down on the buttons to get them to do anything, then you let go, they stay pressed for as much as a second.
3. It isn't like the GBA. The layout has every problem the original did. In the process of streamlining the controls, they've rendered several of them useless - they don't work in games, they don't work in anything else, either. They're just THERE.
4. There's a reason that virtually every piece of gaming hardware ever has a screen that's wider than it is tall. 90% of games put more action horizontally than vertically. Tomb Raider already had shitty visibility with a wide screen. Now, not only can you not see what you're shooting at, you're damn lucky if you can see your guns. Sonic the Hedgehog? You litterally move off the right side of the screen at high speeds. You have to take things slowly to give yourself enough reaction time. The name of the game is SONIC the Hedgehog, not Cautious the Porcupine. The Sonic developers had the forsight to give you a "wide" view to compensate for the screen setup, but they didn't actually give you a "wide" view, they just black off the top and bottom quarters of the screen, and leave you with EVEN LESS awareness of your surroundings. Neither of these games are playable compared to identical or effectively identical games on the GBA.
Then there's their soccer game. Had they set the field vertically, it would have been a blessing. but they didn't. They set the field horizontal. It doesn't give reaction time or the neccessary field of view.
And have you tried turning it on its side? If you can ever get any idea how to actually get your hands on the controls while doing so, let me know. The Wonderswan was smart about the vertical screen: They put a second set of controls along the long edge of the screen, so when you turned it, you could still play it. With the QD, they don't even have the decensy to remap the D-pad when its turned sideways, so you've still got to hold it the normal way while the game is displayed sideways.
Parents don't give a shit about performance. That's why mine bought me a $45 GBA and a $25 cell phone - and the nice thing is, that cell phone cost $12.95 a month for 2500 minutes, and if I go over that, it's $20.45, and three cents a minute if I go outside my "local" area, which accounts for all of four states and most of two more. I don't drive farther than Detroit, let alone Tenesee, but if I did, no roaming charge. Period. Two steps, both of which are cheaper than the N-Gage QD per month by a factor of two. And the really fun thing was that Meijer's had a special that week where they gave you a coupon for a free pizza when you bought a cell phone.
So, let's see, a gaming system/cell phone for $99, and a very expensive contract from there on, or a gaming system, cell phone, and pizza for $70, and still have enough left out of the $100 to pay for two months on the cell phone's contract AND buy a second pizza.
Like you said, parents care about price. They know they can pick up a cell phone for $5. It won't be a good cell phone, but remember? They don't care about performance.
The ZX Spectrum isn't a valid comparison. The Spectrum wasn't produced as a dedicated gaming system, and wasn't designed with them in mind. Despite that the games made for it were not bad by the standards of 1982. The graphics on the N-Gage QD are bad by the standards of 2004 hand-held systems. Its 2D games are just as blurry and flickery as the original N-Gage, whereas the (far cheaper) GBA-SP's are crisp and clear. Furthur, there's been at least proof of concept that the GBA-SP is capable of considerably better 3D than the N-Gage and actual games with INFINITELY smoother 3D than the N-Gage has to offer, even if developers have seen fit to make games FUN instead of trying to mine more pologons out of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh... Was the Falkland Island War in the 20th Century?
Actually, at least in Michigan, the lawsuit winners don't get a dubious victory, they get jack squat. For example, many of the CDs are going to troops in Iraq, which isn't a bad thing, unless you were expecting some of the settlement.
The article only covers a small part of the CDs, but according to WNEM, the settlement CDs are also being placed in all the public non-emergency vehicles in the state (which would include the personal cars of most of the state politicians, refuse collection trucks, mosquito-sprayers, and so on), being given to state employees, and so on. Those people who were to actually benifit from the settlement get a big old goose egg.
5) No truly stupid plot devices or super abuse of physics (like replicators, or holodecks
The replicators and holodecks weren't so bad. Well, the holodecks were sorta annoying when holograms proceeded to take over the ship or something. Didn't these people learn from 2001 that you always build your potentially psychotic machines with a conveniently located "Off" switch?
The thing that got on my nerves was that damn deflector dish. That thing just did way too many things that it wasn't designed to do.
When I played Uru, I was impressed. I'd expected the audio from the series to suffer because of the improvement in visuals.
Haven't played Everquest since my 7 free days I got when I bought the game (way back when it came out) expired, but that doesn't count for all MMORPGs.
The way Ashen Empire's PvP combat works, it comes down to skill, much as players say otherwise. A lot of people just fight it out by beating on each other and clicking their potions, switching to a staff and casting remedy, etc, but the experienced PvPers all know that if you time your movements, you can get in hits on your opponent without them being able to hit you.
The good PvP players (the old FU guild (Fear Us) being some of the best in their day) would regularly kill level 60's and 80's with level 16 and 20 newbie characters. That's harder now with the rebalances, but it's still more about timing than stats. Not very long ago, a major PKer actually quit the game when a dozen or so level 10's looted his Staff of Enervation. To loot, you have to keep a person away from their body for about three minutes, meaning this guy got killed at least two or three times by people 80 and 90 levels below him. It's rare, but not at all unheard of for high level characters to loose items to groups of newbies.
Really, does anything have revolutionary graphics anymore? Now that cell shading is all over the place, we're back to the same place we've been the last few years: Double the pixels, double the polygons, barely noticeable increase in quality.
Lots of magazines reviewed lots of shit as better than true gems. Six months after the fact, however, it's safe to say that the magazines were all wrong and the players who say otherwise were right.
Yet again I have to quote my CSC professor: If the program CAN do it, the program SHOULD do it. Not so the user doesn't have to, but so the user DOESN'T TRY, because the user is an idiot.
It's great to have lots of stuff in config files for advanced users to fuck around with, but when you put mundane and common stuff in there (which seems all too common, as this is an exampel), and when the user finds out how to change it and goes to try, oh fuck, he just rendered his system unbootable and calls tech support to ask why his mouse isn't responding.
No insect has ever been shown to recognize itself in the mirror. They respond to their image (if they can see it - some don't see in the visible spectrum, and sum mirrors don't reflect very well outside of it) the same way they respond to another bug in the room.
That would actually be pretty sweet if they could make it work and not unbalance the game.
So long as its confined to Doom/Duke Nukem 3D style autoaiming on the verticle axis, it's doable. Unfortunately, the maker of the James Bond FPS games on the GBA seemed to overlook this fact.
I liked it. After this, they can have my passwords.
I agree with all those points, but it's a bit late for that for Fallout 3. Interplay's on the rocks, and likely to be gone before long. As far as I know, they're still gripping to their game rights like grim death. I hope they get smart and liquidate their intellectual property. Sure, it won't save Interplay, but at least then we have a hope in hell of getting Fallout 3 made and Interplay's brass can make a truckload of money and laugh all the way to the bank like they want to so much.
The Fallout/KOTOR connection is pretty logical when you think about it. The vast majority of RPGs are fall into some variation on fantasy. Fallout and KOTOR are two of the few big names in that segment of the genre.
Sadly, that's not the bottom 5% of the userbase. In the last three months, I've had to fix six home user computers and one that was used to track the finances of a church. Four of the home computers had never had Windows Update run (and both of the other two had only been force-fed updates through manufacturer-installed support software), and the Church computer was still vulnerable to the Blaster worm (Thankfully the thing wasn't connected to the Internet)
If you think that's bad, I recently reformatted a relative's Win2k computer because of a trashed partition. I then connected to the internet to download Zonelarm onto it and run windows update, and it was almost immediately infected with W32Blaster. Getting on a year after the patch came out, and most of a year since the virus made such a mess of things, there's still enough people out there with this virus (and hence, without the patch to protect against it) to make it dangerous to unpatched computers.
Not impossible, just impractical. It's only a matter of how much processing power and time you can throw at any of them before it breaks. They may take months or years or decades to break with today's systems, but ten, fifteen, twenty years from now, they may take days or weeks or months, which isn't nearly as good. Of course, by that time, we'll have better encryption that will still take years to break, but instead of fighting a constant arms race to make sure our current encryption is strong enough that it's impractical to crack (but not impossible), why not just short circuit the whole mess and make them impossible to crack.
Don't set up a public display address. Ever. Anywhere. If you have to, use a throwaway spamtrap like Hotmail or Yahoo that you can just forget about if things get out of hand.
what's the point of releasing a massmog for the XBox in mid 2005 - when the neXtBox is going to hit at xmas05?
That's one of those places where backwards compatibility comes into play, if that comes into play with the Xbox successor. The promise for backwards compatibility in the PS1 let a lot of developers continue to pursue projects that would have vanished from late releases otherwise.
Getting the Xbox any kind of success in Japan is like Nintendo wanting to get their next console out before Sony for a change. It very well won't get them anything, and could end up costing them more in the long run, but it's a major psychological victory.
In Nintendo's case, being first to the market carries a long-running history of being the best seller. The exception to that history is the Dreamcast, which was killed as much by its own failures as by Sony's victories.
In Microsoft's case, it's something even more important, but less tangible. Just getting a US-built console sold in Japan will threaten Sony and Nintendo on their home turf. Nintendo especially should take note if Microsoft succeeds in this, since the Xbox is already beating the Gamecube in the US.
Think of it like putting your campaign sign on your oppontent's front lawn the Sunday before the election. It probably won't win you the election, but it'll certainly shake your opponent up a bit.
Nah. I think Purification by the Flame would be best in this case.
This is one of those cases where ignorance truely is bliss. It's just like cockroaches in the kitchen, or your roommate looking at porn on your computer. It's a pretty good bet it's going on, but just as long as you don't know about it, you'll never know the difference.
Hell, most of the shit companies are making now I won't even buy USED. Heck, most of them don't even look interesting enough for me to install the demos I get in the mail every month.
Nintendo was late out with the N64, and they got burned. They were late with the Gamecube, and they got burned. On the other hand, they'd gotten the NES and SNES out before anything comparable, and dominated. It may not be the only cause, but Nintendo is at a serious disadvantage - the PS3 looks to have two generations worth of backwards-compatible game library built up behind it on top of the new PS3 releases, while the best Nintendo can do is the Gamecube library, which wasn't as good. They need to get whatever toehold they can, or they're going to be stuck on the sidelines yet again. Getting their console out first won't guarantee them the top post, but it's one less failure to overcome.
1. API's don't mean FUCK. Half the gaming hardware out there is a nightmare to program for, but it still gets developers. The N-Gage isn't a nightmare to program for, it's just that NOBODY DOES.
2. Have you used it? I have. It's not the programmers. The keys feel like they're set in JELLO. I'm not even talking about games. I'm talking about DIALING the goddamn thing. You have to squeeze down on the buttons to get them to do anything, then you let go, they stay pressed for as much as a second.
3. It isn't like the GBA. The layout has every problem the original did. In the process of streamlining the controls, they've rendered several of them useless - they don't work in games, they don't work in anything else, either. They're just THERE.
4. There's a reason that virtually every piece of gaming hardware ever has a screen that's wider than it is tall. 90% of games put more action horizontally than vertically. Tomb Raider already had shitty visibility with a wide screen. Now, not only can you not see what you're shooting at, you're damn lucky if you can see your guns. Sonic the Hedgehog? You litterally move off the right side of the screen at high speeds. You have to take things slowly to give yourself enough reaction time. The name of the game is SONIC the Hedgehog, not Cautious the Porcupine. The Sonic developers had the forsight to give you a "wide" view to compensate for the screen setup, but they didn't actually give you a "wide" view, they just black off the top and bottom quarters of the screen, and leave you with EVEN LESS awareness of your surroundings. Neither of these games are playable compared to identical or effectively identical games on the GBA.
Then there's their soccer game. Had they set the field vertically, it would have been a blessing. but they didn't. They set the field horizontal. It doesn't give reaction time or the neccessary field of view.
And have you tried turning it on its side? If you can ever get any idea how to actually get your hands on the controls while doing so, let me know. The Wonderswan was smart about the vertical screen: They put a second set of controls along the long edge of the screen, so when you turned it, you could still play it. With the QD, they don't even have the decensy to remap the D-pad when its turned sideways, so you've still got to hold it the normal way while the game is displayed sideways.
Parents don't give a shit about performance. That's why mine bought me a $45 GBA and a $25 cell phone - and the nice thing is, that cell phone cost $12.95 a month for 2500 minutes, and if I go over that, it's $20.45, and three cents a minute if I go outside my "local" area, which accounts for all of four states and most of two more. I don't drive farther than Detroit, let alone Tenesee, but if I did, no roaming charge. Period. Two steps, both of which are cheaper than the N-Gage QD per month by a factor of two. And the really fun thing was that Meijer's had a special that week where they gave you a coupon for a free pizza when you bought a cell phone.
So, let's see, a gaming system/cell phone for $99, and a very expensive contract from there on, or a gaming system, cell phone, and pizza for $70, and still have enough left out of the $100 to pay for two months on the cell phone's contract AND buy a second pizza.
Like you said, parents care about price. They know they can pick up a cell phone for $5. It won't be a good cell phone, but remember? They don't care about performance.
The ZX Spectrum isn't a valid comparison. The Spectrum wasn't produced as a dedicated gaming system, and wasn't designed with them in mind. Despite that the games made for it were not bad by the standards of 1982. The graphics on the N-Gage QD are bad by the standards of 2004 hand-held systems. Its 2D games are just as blurry and flickery as the original N-Gage, whereas the (far cheaper) GBA-SP's are crisp and clear. Furthur, there's been at least proof of concept that the GBA-SP is capable of considerably better 3D than the N-Gage and actual games with INFINITELY smoother 3D than the N-Gage has to offer, even if developers have seen fit to make games FUN instead of trying to mine more pologons out of it.