See people? This sort of thinking is why kids hate their parents. If my parents had bought me an N-gage, I'd stop cutting the lawn. Ok, so I stopped cutting it when they bought me my GBC, but that was because I was playing Tetris 24/7.
Anyway, it's not going to have more appeal. You think we're all full of shit, but you're striking at the usual straw men. We don't say it sucks because it can't render 13 billion blah blah's per frame. It sucks for many reasons - poor game support, choppy control response, lousy control layout, the crappy view range afforded by the vertical screen, etc etc etc etc etc.
The ONLY one of these problems they've fixed with the QD is that you don't have to remove the battery to change games anymore. Everything else still sucks. No matter what kind of games are on it, it still feels like the controls are lined with wet cornstarch. It's just not fun to play with that sort of junk.
America is really backwards when it comes to sex. I posted this once before. Our local newspaper here in Saginaw does phone-in polls daily. They happen to log phone numbers (so people can't try to vote repeatedly), but they say it's entirely anonymous, and they delete the phone number record at the end of the day to clear the way for the next poll.
A few years back, they had a poll, "Should pornography be illegal?" The results were very skewed - over 90% yes.
Six weeks later, "Do you use pornographic materials?" Around 2/3 yes.
Right away, something should click as wrong. You may think that because it's a voluntary poll, different questions would get different people to call in. For example, when they asked if people were satisfied with the mayor, they got 100% no responses - but two days later, the mayor was reeleted in a crushing landslide. The poll only got the people who were really mad to get up and call.
But, it turns out, many of the same people voted in these same polls. Nearly all of the phone numbers of people who admitted to using pornographic materials had been used to vote yes on making porn illegal. They had a fun little article about the whole thing (this was before they closed down the phone numbers and just started faking the polls).
Saying sex is dirty and bad and such is a popular thing in America. We're told its the Christian thing to do. Sex is bad. People who have sex are terrible people who will get terrible diseases and die terrible deaths for their terrible sins. So on and soforth.
Why do you think we sell our porn in unmarked brown wrappers in back rooms with curtains over the doors? Why do people run into strip clubs with wide-brimmed caps on and coats pulled up like they're trying to get out of the rain, despite the fact that it's warn and sunny out? We don't want anybody to know just how hypocritical we can be about this stuff.
There are also a fair number of h-games with minors and almost incest angles.
Fair number? Almost incest? According to J-list, there are upwards of 50 H-games released per month in Japan, and they typically have you chasing after at least one cousin. Heck, by the standards of the gere, an H-game that isn't disgusting is one in which you don't rape your mother with the help of a nun.
My uncle particularly managed to live with it quite well. He went to special schools when he was growing up. I don't know what they did, but apparantly they have special teaching techniques that could give him employable skills. I remember my psychology professor talking about how experiments have been done like teaching autistic children to perform fairly complex tasks through repetitive conditioning, rather than traditional teaching. It could be something like that. He certainly didn't get a full education (no science or history, minimal math, basically enough English to read the newspaper)
Between medicine and education, he's managed to make a decent living as an electrician. They recently put him on a new set of medications, and he seems perfectly normal to talk to now.
One correction: Stimpaks are not addictive (Thank god!).
Not sure about superstims, but they're pretty nasty as it is (They fully restore your HP immediately, but you lose a portion of the gain a while later. I used them through a hard fight, and a little while later dropped dead from the delayed HP loss).
Most of the addictions aren't too bad. Just about every Fallout character I've made has suffered through Buffout, Mentat, Rad-X, and Rad-away withdrawal. The only drug that's really dangerous is Jet. Just for fun, I tried to get through the game after getting addicted to Jet as soon as I reached Klamath. Nearly impossible. I finally broke down and went through the quest to find the cure.
I play Ashen Empires. It doesn't have addiction, but it has the next thing. Alcoholic drinks restore the appetite bar, but drain the stamina bar sharply (making it more difficult to run, especially while carrying a heavy load of loot or ore or whatever you were doing, making you attack slower, and making it impossible to cast spells). It only takes a minute or so to get back up to about 70% (where many people try to keep stamina), but in the meantime, you're a sitting duck to anything or anyone who comes by and wants to kill you. When ales were first introduced, people were hitting up the few people who had quest exp saved up to raise their brewing skills early on for beer. Good brewers made a lot of money that day. After about six hours, though, people realized that the stamina drain was a serious limitation, and nobody uses beer except when they're inside a safezone chatting and notice their blue bar nearly empty - even then beef stew or even keeping a stockpile of mutton or venisen is better and far cheaper (The best beer is 75 gp, the best food is about 30, and helps more than the best beer).
End result: In any RPG, gameplay will always have an impact on RP. Anoter example: Fallout II. Jet gives some pretty impressive benefits. More than enough to turn the tides in an otherwise hopeless fight. But the cost (buying/finding/looting enough Jet, or the stat drain and endless withdrawl if you don't can't) mean that it's not worth the effort.
Drugs have a disadvantage in games: They effect the character, but not the player behind the character. Real drugs give with one hand and take with all the others. In a game, you don't really have anything forcing you to keep taking the drug. You know that if you put up with the disadvantages of withdrawal for a while, and give up the advantages of addiction, you'll more than make up for it by saving all that money for new equipment. All you have to do is put up with reduced performance for 25 hours. During that time, you can still think as clearly as normal, and you can easily keep your eye on all those extra gp you're going to have once it's all done.
In real life, you can say all that, but it's different. Every smoker knows the numbers: Stop smoking, and in two years you have enough money for a new car. The problem in real life is that 25 hours spent in agony. After a day or so of ciggarette withdrawal, you can't think about the money you'd save by quitting. Instead, all you can think about is that if you just give in and have a smoke, the headaches and twitches would go away.
I went to the Saginaw Arts and Sciences Academy in Michigan. When I went there, we averaged three entries a year that qualified for the ISEF. Saginaw's idea of "rich" is if your house has a second floor AND a basement.
The periodic mass extinctions don't usually coincide with magnetic field reversals. Field reversals are much more frequent than mas extinctions.
The main body of empirical evidence for the field reversals are the alignment of magnetic domains in the ocean floor. However, the magnetic field described in this article would be weak and transient. It wouldn't have a fixed north and south. It would have multiple norths and souths, which themselves wouldn't be far more variable than the "normal" magnetic field. If you think about it, since it's being generated by the solar wind, which remains roughly fixed in relation to the sun while the earth spins around, the temporary magnetic field that would form during the reversal would probably remain more oriented to the solar wind than to Earth. It wouldn't be strong enough or constant enough to leave its mark on forming rock.
The only thing they really have for it is models. It's a phenomenon that, assuming it happens, wouldn't leave a measurable trace. I guess we'll have to wait until it happens and see how things work.
The hole in your suspicion lies here: To pull a stunt like this, they had to run an eBay account as legitamte for quite a while, then turn it over to another person and intentionally violate eBay TOS. Then, lie to the postal service, break laws in two countries, and then NOT EVEN LINK THE PAGE back to SA. That would be like Nintendo paying a bunch of people dance naked through the streets, but then forget to have them all carry GBA's with them.
Yes, but it still goes against their portrayal as mercenary developers. The wonderswan has never really held water. The companies that develop for it are almost entirely peripheral to the industry, or fading oldies. They wanted to get into the handheld market, and they went so far as to release games that had no hope of turning a profit to do so. The only thing the Wonderswan really had going for it sales-wise were the Digimon games, and those were just riding on the coat-tails of the Pokemon franchise, which is well past its prime.
The article didn't, but the Slashdot post did.
Anyway, Mars also has no significant atmosphere of its own either.
Of course, this raises the question of why it doesn't work on Venus, which has a very substantial atmosphere, but no magnetic field worth mentioning.
Erm, I seem to remember a Slashdot article where it was something closer to 5000 units sold by the time they dropped the price, which was, what, two months after the fact?
Actually, they don't mix as much as you may think. There are still linguists (like my Spanish professor three semesters ago) who can place somebody by county based on their speech.
Just because the solar wind will help produce a magnetic field in place of the Earth's natural one doesn't mean it'll point in the right direction. That compass may be just as useless with this field as it would with none at all. How will you feel when your compass informs you that you're traveling straight up?
Radical Dreamers was the second game, Chrono Chross was the third. It was on the Satellaview (sp?), which was a SNES/SFC accessory released in Japan where you could download games. Didn't have much for it. Had a remake of the original Legend of Zelda, and some pretty low-key games.
Radical Dreamers was more interactive fiction than game, but it was definitely part of the Chrono series. It had Serge, Kid, and Lynx from Chrono Chross and Magus from Chrono Trigger.
While on this topic, there's also another Chrono Trigger remake in progress by the same group that translated Radical Dreamers (demiforce.com). No news on that remake except that it has a SourceForge page up and not much else. The page for it on Demiforce's website has been broken since he moved the page. It was intended to be an exact remake, though, and not a fancy looking remake like this one.
If a computer's running Windows 98, there's a good bet it doesn't support that much RAM. I have two computers that ran 98 (only one still does). Their max RAM was 16 and 64 megs.
Yes, but if Microsoft gives us a patch for a Microsoft program and it fucks us all over, we can come back and say, "Stupid evil Microsoft fucked us over." If some other guy gives us a patch for a Microsoft program and it fucks us all over, it's our own fault.
I don't know. My tape worm has yet to pee on me for no apparant reason.
Re:Capture and Sell them!
on
Koalas Gone Wild
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Or they could be sold zoo animals.
Every zoo worth its salt already has them, and they are being bred in captivity. Also, the existing zoo stock is more conditioned to humans and less likely to flip out on them (Despite being cute and cuddley, Koalas are fairly well armed for defense, as an above post described).
Furthur, good luck finding a market for tens of thousands of Koalas in zoos. Even if they weren't already in every zoo in the world, you'd be hard pressed to sell that many of them.
Or be relocated to eucalyptus reserves around australia, or in other parts of the world (maybe California).
The problem with Australia is that relocating them will allow them to breed FASTER (same population, more food) and in fifteen years, we'll have 500,000 of them and need to shoot 490,000 before the ecosystem collapses. Relocating does nothing if you don't figure out and fix what's wrong to allow them to overbreed their food supply like this.
A simple look at Australian history will tell you why relocating them to California is a big no-no. Australia is a case-study in how much damage an imported species can do to the existing ecosystem.
On the other hand, maybe Australia should seed Koala populations throughout the world. Sort of their way of saying, "How you like it now, bitch?"
make shows based on interesting game content, not just lame cliches.
And drop the patronizing crap, while they're at it. Comment on your target audience with their pale skin that hasn't seen natural sunlight since the invention of Atari and their inability to secure dates without doing their homework for them and guess what? Your target audience just left.
Slashdot Mirror
Effort starts with an E, not an A. You don't get A's for effort. You get A's for results.
See people? This sort of thinking is why kids hate their parents. If my parents had bought me an N-gage, I'd stop cutting the lawn. Ok, so I stopped cutting it when they bought me my GBC, but that was because I was playing Tetris 24/7.
Anyway, it's not going to have more appeal. You think we're all full of shit, but you're striking at the usual straw men. We don't say it sucks because it can't render 13 billion blah blah's per frame. It sucks for many reasons - poor game support, choppy control response, lousy control layout, the crappy view range afforded by the vertical screen, etc etc etc etc etc.
The ONLY one of these problems they've fixed with the QD is that you don't have to remove the battery to change games anymore. Everything else still sucks. No matter what kind of games are on it, it still feels like the controls are lined with wet cornstarch. It's just not fun to play with that sort of junk.
America is really backwards when it comes to sex. I posted this once before. Our local newspaper here in Saginaw does phone-in polls daily. They happen to log phone numbers (so people can't try to vote repeatedly), but they say it's entirely anonymous, and they delete the phone number record at the end of the day to clear the way for the next poll.
A few years back, they had a poll, "Should pornography be illegal?" The results were very skewed - over 90% yes.
Six weeks later, "Do you use pornographic materials?" Around 2/3 yes.
Right away, something should click as wrong. You may think that because it's a voluntary poll, different questions would get different people to call in. For example, when they asked if people were satisfied with the mayor, they got 100% no responses - but two days later, the mayor was reeleted in a crushing landslide. The poll only got the people who were really mad to get up and call.
But, it turns out, many of the same people voted in these same polls. Nearly all of the phone numbers of people who admitted to using pornographic materials had been used to vote yes on making porn illegal. They had a fun little article about the whole thing (this was before they closed down the phone numbers and just started faking the polls).
Saying sex is dirty and bad and such is a popular thing in America. We're told its the Christian thing to do. Sex is bad. People who have sex are terrible people who will get terrible diseases and die terrible deaths for their terrible sins. So on and soforth.
Why do you think we sell our porn in unmarked brown wrappers in back rooms with curtains over the doors? Why do people run into strip clubs with wide-brimmed caps on and coats pulled up like they're trying to get out of the rain, despite the fact that it's warn and sunny out? We don't want anybody to know just how hypocritical we can be about this stuff.
There are also a fair number of h-games with minors and almost incest angles.
Fair number? Almost incest? According to J-list, there are upwards of 50 H-games released per month in Japan, and they typically have you chasing after at least one cousin. Heck, by the standards of the gere, an H-game that isn't disgusting is one in which you don't rape your mother with the help of a nun.
and start ruining my favorite books instead!
My uncle particularly managed to live with it quite well. He went to special schools when he was growing up. I don't know what they did, but apparantly they have special teaching techniques that could give him employable skills. I remember my psychology professor talking about how experiments have been done like teaching autistic children to perform fairly complex tasks through repetitive conditioning, rather than traditional teaching. It could be something like that. He certainly didn't get a full education (no science or history, minimal math, basically enough English to read the newspaper)
Between medicine and education, he's managed to make a decent living as an electrician. They recently put him on a new set of medications, and he seems perfectly normal to talk to now.
One correction: Stimpaks are not addictive (Thank god!).
Not sure about superstims, but they're pretty nasty as it is (They fully restore your HP immediately, but you lose a portion of the gain a while later. I used them through a hard fight, and a little while later dropped dead from the delayed HP loss).
Most of the addictions aren't too bad. Just about every Fallout character I've made has suffered through Buffout, Mentat, Rad-X, and Rad-away withdrawal. The only drug that's really dangerous is Jet. Just for fun, I tried to get through the game after getting addicted to Jet as soon as I reached Klamath. Nearly impossible. I finally broke down and went through the quest to find the cure.
I play Ashen Empires. It doesn't have addiction, but it has the next thing. Alcoholic drinks restore the appetite bar, but drain the stamina bar sharply (making it more difficult to run, especially while carrying a heavy load of loot or ore or whatever you were doing, making you attack slower, and making it impossible to cast spells). It only takes a minute or so to get back up to about 70% (where many people try to keep stamina), but in the meantime, you're a sitting duck to anything or anyone who comes by and wants to kill you. When ales were first introduced, people were hitting up the few people who had quest exp saved up to raise their brewing skills early on for beer. Good brewers made a lot of money that day. After about six hours, though, people realized that the stamina drain was a serious limitation, and nobody uses beer except when they're inside a safezone chatting and notice their blue bar nearly empty - even then beef stew or even keeping a stockpile of mutton or venisen is better and far cheaper (The best beer is 75 gp, the best food is about 30, and helps more than the best beer).
End result: In any RPG, gameplay will always have an impact on RP. Anoter example: Fallout II. Jet gives some pretty impressive benefits. More than enough to turn the tides in an otherwise hopeless fight. But the cost (buying/finding/looting enough Jet, or the stat drain and endless withdrawl if you don't can't) mean that it's not worth the effort.
Drugs have a disadvantage in games: They effect the character, but not the player behind the character. Real drugs give with one hand and take with all the others. In a game, you don't really have anything forcing you to keep taking the drug. You know that if you put up with the disadvantages of withdrawal for a while, and give up the advantages of addiction, you'll more than make up for it by saving all that money for new equipment. All you have to do is put up with reduced performance for 25 hours. During that time, you can still think as clearly as normal, and you can easily keep your eye on all those extra gp you're going to have once it's all done.
In real life, you can say all that, but it's different. Every smoker knows the numbers: Stop smoking, and in two years you have enough money for a new car. The problem in real life is that 25 hours spent in agony. After a day or so of ciggarette withdrawal, you can't think about the money you'd save by quitting. Instead, all you can think about is that if you just give in and have a smoke, the headaches and twitches would go away.
I went to the Saginaw Arts and Sciences Academy in Michigan. When I went there, we averaged three entries a year that qualified for the ISEF. Saginaw's idea of "rich" is if your house has a second floor AND a basement.
The periodic mass extinctions don't usually coincide with magnetic field reversals. Field reversals are much more frequent than mas extinctions. The main body of empirical evidence for the field reversals are the alignment of magnetic domains in the ocean floor. However, the magnetic field described in this article would be weak and transient. It wouldn't have a fixed north and south. It would have multiple norths and souths, which themselves wouldn't be far more variable than the "normal" magnetic field. If you think about it, since it's being generated by the solar wind, which remains roughly fixed in relation to the sun while the earth spins around, the temporary magnetic field that would form during the reversal would probably remain more oriented to the solar wind than to Earth. It wouldn't be strong enough or constant enough to leave its mark on forming rock. The only thing they really have for it is models. It's a phenomenon that, assuming it happens, wouldn't leave a measurable trace. I guess we'll have to wait until it happens and see how things work.
The hole in your suspicion lies here: To pull a stunt like this, they had to run an eBay account as legitamte for quite a while, then turn it over to another person and intentionally violate eBay TOS. Then, lie to the postal service, break laws in two countries, and then NOT EVEN LINK THE PAGE back to SA. That would be like Nintendo paying a bunch of people dance naked through the streets, but then forget to have them all carry GBA's with them.
Yes, but it still goes against their portrayal as mercenary developers. The wonderswan has never really held water. The companies that develop for it are almost entirely peripheral to the industry, or fading oldies. They wanted to get into the handheld market, and they went so far as to release games that had no hope of turning a profit to do so. The only thing the Wonderswan really had going for it sales-wise were the Digimon games, and those were just riding on the coat-tails of the Pokemon franchise, which is well past its prime.
I'll agree what I saw (I wasn't at E3, though) looked pretty cool, but I need to make this joke:
"the fast action of pinball mixed with the ancient art of Japanese warfare"
"Garcon! More genres!"
The article didn't, but the Slashdot post did. Anyway, Mars also has no significant atmosphere of its own either. Of course, this raises the question of why it doesn't work on Venus, which has a very substantial atmosphere, but no magnetic field worth mentioning.
Erm, I seem to remember a Slashdot article where it was something closer to 5000 units sold by the time they dropped the price, which was, what, two months after the fact?
Actually, they don't mix as much as you may think. There are still linguists (like my Spanish professor three semesters ago) who can place somebody by county based on their speech.
Just because the solar wind will help produce a magnetic field in place of the Earth's natural one doesn't mean it'll point in the right direction. That compass may be just as useless with this field as it would with none at all. How will you feel when your compass informs you that you're traveling straight up?
The one thing I should point out is that, despite the suspicious wording of the article, the people got implanted BEFORE they got drunk.
Radical Dreamers was the second game, Chrono Chross was the third. It was on the Satellaview (sp?), which was a SNES/SFC accessory released in Japan where you could download games. Didn't have much for it. Had a remake of the original Legend of Zelda, and some pretty low-key games.
Radical Dreamers was more interactive fiction than game, but it was definitely part of the Chrono series. It had Serge, Kid, and Lynx from Chrono Chross and Magus from Chrono Trigger.
While on this topic, there's also another Chrono Trigger remake in progress by the same group that translated Radical Dreamers (demiforce.com). No news on that remake except that it has a SourceForge page up and not much else. The page for it on Demiforce's website has been broken since he moved the page. It was intended to be an exact remake, though, and not a fancy looking remake like this one.
Or what they gave her. And I'm not talking about flowers.
If a computer's running Windows 98, there's a good bet it doesn't support that much RAM. I have two computers that ran 98 (only one still does). Their max RAM was 16 and 64 megs.
Yes, but if Microsoft gives us a patch for a Microsoft program and it fucks us all over, we can come back and say, "Stupid evil Microsoft fucked us over." If some other guy gives us a patch for a Microsoft program and it fucks us all over, it's our own fault.
I don't know. My tape worm has yet to pee on me for no apparant reason.
Or they could be sold zoo animals.
Every zoo worth its salt already has them, and they are being bred in captivity. Also, the existing zoo stock is more conditioned to humans and less likely to flip out on them (Despite being cute and cuddley, Koalas are fairly well armed for defense, as an above post described).
Furthur, good luck finding a market for tens of thousands of Koalas in zoos. Even if they weren't already in every zoo in the world, you'd be hard pressed to sell that many of them.
Or be relocated to eucalyptus reserves around australia, or in other parts of the world (maybe California).
The problem with Australia is that relocating them will allow them to breed FASTER (same population, more food) and in fifteen years, we'll have 500,000 of them and need to shoot 490,000 before the ecosystem collapses. Relocating does nothing if you don't figure out and fix what's wrong to allow them to overbreed their food supply like this.
A simple look at Australian history will tell you why relocating them to California is a big no-no. Australia is a case-study in how much damage an imported species can do to the existing ecosystem.
On the other hand, maybe Australia should seed Koala populations throughout the world. Sort of their way of saying, "How you like it now, bitch?"
make shows based on interesting game content, not just lame cliches.
And drop the patronizing crap, while they're at it. Comment on your target audience with their pale skin that hasn't seen natural sunlight since the invention of Atari and their inability to secure dates without doing their homework for them and guess what? Your target audience just left.