Actually, they can't under most conditions. Publishers deal with distributors who then deal with retailers. Those pulishers (be the of music, movies, books, or games) that deal directly with the retailers are like that one magazine that they only sell at that one Kessel's store and nobody else has ever heard of it.
Most games don't depict much suffering - mainly because death in most games takes place fairly quickly, and with fairly little visible "intermediate state" between uninjured and dead.
It's called Pandering, which can be defined as, "publishing crap that takes advantage of a target audience." I guarantee you if they made a video game version of the Passion of Christ, it would suck as a game, but it would still be successful just from the pander factor.
Most print game guides are made before the game comes out (which explains such hilarious mistakes as bosses having 1 hp instead of 250000 or entire levels being left out).
MMO games are even worse, because the games are usually actively developed well after they're released, and anything and everything in them is subject to change with any given update.
I've written several (particularly a static quest guide for a small MMORPG I play). It's actually quite fun, provided you love the game, and enjoy writing. If you're not obsessed with the game, though, it can be hard to push yourself to work on the guide.
"Carriers are the Protoss's ultimate offensive unit (edited for length) the fact that their attack is distributed from eight different sources, they are inneffective against heavily armored units like zerglings. Also, their poor armor makes them susceptible to many of the same units."
Maybe had they said Battlecruiser here, they'd be on the right track - a cruiser's armor and offensive power are death to a carrier. However, zerglings are neither well-armored nor prepared to take advantage of Carrier's weak defense. Scourge are the best way to take down a Carrier, due both to their poor defense and their slow retargeting.
Beyond paying for what you can get for free, GameFAQs (despite having a pretty high crap:gold ratio itself) also has better quality guides.
There used to be a game retailer in my area that would give you the guide for free if the game cost something like $50 or more, so I ended up with a number of them (before they went out of business). Every single one of them is arife with blatant mistakes: Wrong solutions to puzzels, bad data in tables (wrong HP counts for example), stupidly bad strategies (the one that came with Starcraft suggeted Zerglings as a counter to Carriers), or negligent errors (repeated misspellings of a charactter's name, mixing up location names, and so on).
The free guides on a site like GameFAQs have the same problems, but they have two advantages: 1. There's usually more than one guide, so if one doesn't work, try another - one's just as free as the next. 2. They can be easily revised with corrected data, data that wasn't known when the guide was first written, or improved strategies. Once a book is printed and sold, you're mistakes are pretty much written in stone.
Emulator runs aren't fake. It's the same game, and (baring horrible bugs in the emulator's support for some odd bit of add-on hardware in the cartridge) the mechanics are the same.
However, you are right, they aren't considered official records, since the ability to savestate around the game to shave seconds here or there means they don't have to restart the whole game every time somebody has to scratch their nose.
However, having used an emulator to plot a much faster route through the game, they can now go to the real hardware and take the same route. The official record they could make doing that would be a minute or two longer (to account mainly for mistakes in combat), but they're still pretty well guaranteed to break the standing hardware record.
Actually, they havn't always been as bad as you've just said. I bought a P200 almost as soon as the MMX chips came out, and it ran just about everything made for three years, with a new ($150) graphics card then to extend that almost another two.
My most recent computer (2.8 ghz Athelon) isn't a year old for another few months yet, and it already looks like it'll need a new video card soon, and I don't even buy the cutting-edge games anymore.
As the other reply said, it's alive and well in the underground scene: modds, homebrew games, all sorts of stuff.
But it's also not dead in the commercial scene. Dreamcast hardware is still used in arcade cabinets, as was mentioned a couple months back in the article about SNK dropping the aging NeoGeo hardware in their Arcade systems.
I don't know if it would work any better, but good luck getting the poloticians that run the major space programs to launch your inconvineiently large laboatory complex into orbit so you can try it out.
Anyway, if it could work in microgravity, I'd have to wonder what it would matter? It certainly could power a large space station if we ever build one, but what about power on the ground? About the only way to get the power back down to earth would be something like microwave transmission, and I'm assuming that at least some of the aforementioned politicians have played SimCity, and won't let you run anything involving microwave power transmission or Godzilla in a populated area.
While you're looking at the games listed above, I'll also suggest the translatioins of Front Mission and Bahamut Lagoon (although the BL translation by DeJap isn't much better than Engrish, it's still a pretty fun game). Also, the Star Ocean translation isn't "finished," just "complete." It's a good game, but I'd hold off on playing it for a while. At the very least, maybe ZSNES/Snes9x will improve their SDD-1 emulation and you'll be able to skip messing with the graphics packs if you wait.
Zophar.net is another site for this sort of thing. That and the Whirlpool have a lot of hacks/mods for different games. Most of the NES/SNES/GB hacks are translations, since a lot of the best games on all three systems never saw the light of day in the US, but there are also a lot of gameplay hacks, especially for games like the Zelda and Mario series.
I'm not sure how those lenses work, but if you look up pictures of ideal setups for stellar or galactic lensing, it produces a + -shapped arrangement. The central image is the lensing object, and it has four images of the lensed object around it. More often, the lensed object isn't aligned perfectly, and we don't even see that much - one image or two.
Also, after reading up on the subject, I made a mistake in my first post: The lensed supernova would be no brighter than a normal one. It would just appear to be in a different location than it otherwise would.
The lensing bends a very tiny amount of the supernova's output - It doesn't work exactly like a lens, per-se. It only focuses a ring of light around it on the focal point (us). The light passing closer to the sun that that ring is deflected to far, and focuses before it reaches us, and the light passing farther out doesn't get bent enough and focuses "behind" us. The extreme distances add up, and the lensed supernova will be much brighter than it normally would, but it still wouldn't be dangerously bright.
Furthurmore, it would have to be on a line-of-sight with a lensing star and us. Supernovae aren't exactly common on the cosmic time/space scale, so this is very unlikly.
We're probably in more danger of a star too close to us going supernova than getting caught at the wrong end of a celestial ant roaster.
Yeah, but they're the one's who SHOULD develop it. They were the people who were developing it to begin with. As I said before: There's a lot of people who can take Fallout 3 and run with it, but Obsidian are the one's I'd bet on to run in the right direction.
I'm particularly hoping for Obsidian, or one of the other companies that picked up lots of Black Isle workers. Bioware has some good work, but Black Isle worked on this game for a long time. They know what they wanted it to be.
From the developers posting on websites like nma-fallout.com, it sounded to me like they were fairly well along in development. They were writing quests, composing a storyline, inserting towns into the game world. Bioware might be able to take it and run, but it's a much more sure bet that the former Black Isle guys will take it and run in the right direction.
The truth is, the X-Box failed in Japan because of Microsoft's failure to sufficiently respect the Japanese market, not because of some supposed contempt for all things American on Japan's part.
A Japanese Ambassador spoke at my university in my freshman year. The X-Box specifically didn't come up, but this same sort of thing was discussed for a while.
One particular professor (who's about as ethnically open minded as a Grand Inquisitor) asked why Japanese consumers so widely reject US products, while Japanese products (from cars to video games to anime) sell well in the US.
The ambassador's reply was that Japanese consumers were, by and large, very open to new things, wherever they came from. American entertainment particularly is as popular in Japan as Japanese entertainment is in the US.
However, he said there's also a greater sense of "consumer sensibility" in Japan, particularly with large purchases.
A DVD, CD, or video game from the US doesn't typically cost much more than a comparable Japanese item, so they sell comparably well. However, American and European cars don't sell well because they take more gas and cost more (they cost more here, and when you add shipping costs to the US cars and subtract them from the Japanese cars, the difference only gets bigger), so it often doesn't make sense to buy them.
I think the same sort of thing can be applied to the X-Box. It costs more than the PS2, it doesn't have as many games available, particularly in the most popular genres in Japan, like RPGs, and many of those games that it does have are also available on other platforms, like the PS2, PC, or Game Cube, that people probably already have. In that sense, it just doesn't make sense to spend money on an X-Box.
Mars is a lot smaller. Small objects loose internal heat faster because of a higher area:volume ratio. Mars shows extensive evidence of having lost its internal heat. Some evidence suggests it still has enough to melt ice and produce steam, but...
Venus shows extensive evidence of still having at least some of that internal heat, and displays "recent" volcanic activity (much more recent than Mars at any rate, and it's atmosphere is comprised mostly of common volcanic gasses) on a nearly planet-wide scale.
Now, what you have is basically two dynamos.
One of them is spinning fairly rapidly (Mars spins almost as fast as Earth), but has nothing inside to generate a substantial field.
The other has the material needed to generate the field, possibly just as much as Earth does, but rotates extremely slowly.
Now, as for the lesser gas giants, dynamo theory HAS been reconciled with thier freakish multi-poled magnetic fields. It was even on Slashdot not long ago.
Furthur, a lightning bolt that could carve a trench the size of Valles Marineres would not produce what we see. It would produce mostly glass.
Ever seen where a powerful bolt of lightning struck the ground? If you carefully dig it out, you can find a VERY fragile glass-like structure resembling a taproot.
Most storms won't produce these. You see, your average lightning bolt on Earth can't even ignite wood unless it's very dry. The most powerful ones can melt tiny dirt particles. However, these bolts are lucky to be an inch wide, and they don't last long enough to do any damage to rock or much damage to soil (they're mostly limited to lighting shit on fire, and fire doesn't cut through a thousand miles of rock).
Now, assuming a linear relation (which it isn't, but this is much more forgiving on your theroy than the proper calculations), a bolt of lightning 100 miles wide, that is powerful enough to VAPORIZE rock thousands of feet deep, and lasting long enough to track accross 3000 miles of terrain is FUCKING BIG. My calculator overflows at 10e9999, and it overflows before I get to the 3000 mile long track part. Which is good, because lightning doesn't typically "track" along the ground. It stirkes a single spot, dissipates all its energy, and stops. To get a spark from a tesela coil or something to track, you need to constantly cause a voltage between it and the target faster than the bolt dissipates it. Lightning doesn't work that way.
Nothing can generate the kind of lightning bolt it would take to carve the Mariner rift, and even if it COULD, it wouldn't look like it does now, because right now, it looks a hell of a lot more like the African rift valley than it does like a tektite glass field.
One thing about Venus: I've never heard it say that retrograde spin is related to a lack of a magnetic field, but I have seen a simmilar suggestion: That it's unusually slow spin (243 days - although it's "day" is only 116 because it actually orbits faster than it rotates) doesn't stir up enough motion in its liquid core (if it has one, doesn't say anything on the page where I got the rotational speed) to produce a magnetic field.
While they're at it, they can patent tacos, and make themselves into the SCO of Mexican cuisine. If they sue enough taco eaters, I'm sure one or two will cough up the $200 for a Nokia Taco License.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, they can't under most conditions. Publishers deal with distributors who then deal with retailers. Those pulishers (be the of music, movies, books, or games) that deal directly with the retailers are like that one magazine that they only sell at that one Kessel's store and nobody else has ever heard of it.
Most games don't depict much suffering - mainly because death in most games takes place fairly quickly, and with fairly little visible "intermediate state" between uninjured and dead.
It's called Pandering, which can be defined as, "publishing crap that takes advantage of a target audience." I guarantee you if they made a video game version of the Passion of Christ, it would suck as a game, but it would still be successful just from the pander factor.
Most print game guides are made before the game comes out (which explains such hilarious mistakes as bosses having 1 hp instead of 250000 or entire levels being left out).
MMO games are even worse, because the games are usually actively developed well after they're released, and anything and everything in them is subject to change with any given update.
I've written several (particularly a static quest guide for a small MMORPG I play). It's actually quite fun, provided you love the game, and enjoy writing. If you're not obsessed with the game, though, it can be hard to push yourself to work on the guide.
It's just that printer cartridges are so damn expensive these days.
True, but here's the quote from the guide:
"Carriers are the Protoss's ultimate offensive unit (edited for length) the fact that their attack is distributed from eight different sources, they are inneffective against heavily armored units like zerglings. Also, their poor armor makes them susceptible to many of the same units."
Maybe had they said Battlecruiser here, they'd be on the right track - a cruiser's armor and offensive power are death to a carrier. However, zerglings are neither well-armored nor prepared to take advantage of Carrier's weak defense. Scourge are the best way to take down a Carrier, due both to their poor defense and their slow retargeting.
Beyond paying for what you can get for free, GameFAQs (despite having a pretty high crap:gold ratio itself) also has better quality guides.
There used to be a game retailer in my area that would give you the guide for free if the game cost something like $50 or more, so I ended up with a number of them (before they went out of business). Every single one of them is arife with blatant mistakes: Wrong solutions to puzzels, bad data in tables (wrong HP counts for example), stupidly bad strategies (the one that came with Starcraft suggeted Zerglings as a counter to Carriers), or negligent errors (repeated misspellings of a charactter's name, mixing up location names, and so on).
The free guides on a site like GameFAQs have the same problems, but they have two advantages:
1. There's usually more than one guide, so if one doesn't work, try another - one's just as free as the next.
2. They can be easily revised with corrected data, data that wasn't known when the guide was first written, or improved strategies. Once a book is printed and sold, you're mistakes are pretty much written in stone.
Emulator runs aren't fake. It's the same game, and (baring horrible bugs in the emulator's support for some odd bit of add-on hardware in the cartridge) the mechanics are the same. However, you are right, they aren't considered official records, since the ability to savestate around the game to shave seconds here or there means they don't have to restart the whole game every time somebody has to scratch their nose. However, having used an emulator to plot a much faster route through the game, they can now go to the real hardware and take the same route. The official record they could make doing that would be a minute or two longer (to account mainly for mistakes in combat), but they're still pretty well guaranteed to break the standing hardware record.
Actually, they havn't always been as bad as you've just said. I bought a P200 almost as soon as the MMX chips came out, and it ran just about everything made for three years, with a new ($150) graphics card then to extend that almost another two.
My most recent computer (2.8 ghz Athelon) isn't a year old for another few months yet, and it already looks like it'll need a new video card soon, and I don't even buy the cutting-edge games anymore.
Play as Christ or the Romans!
Somehow I think that playing as Christ would be somewhat lacking in gameplay options...
Since there are plenty of women who are both stupid AND ugly, such as Rush Limbaugh
Ok, I see where you're getting confused. You see, Rush isn't a stupid, ugly woman. He's a stupid, very ugly man.
As the other reply said, it's alive and well in the underground scene: modds, homebrew games, all sorts of stuff. But it's also not dead in the commercial scene. Dreamcast hardware is still used in arcade cabinets, as was mentioned a couple months back in the article about SNK dropping the aging NeoGeo hardware in their Arcade systems.
I don't know if it would work any better, but good luck getting the poloticians that run the major space programs to launch your inconvineiently large laboatory complex into orbit so you can try it out.
Anyway, if it could work in microgravity, I'd have to wonder what it would matter? It certainly could power a large space station if we ever build one, but what about power on the ground? About the only way to get the power back down to earth would be something like microwave transmission, and I'm assuming that at least some of the aforementioned politicians have played SimCity, and won't let you run anything involving microwave power transmission or Godzilla in a populated area.
While you're looking at the games listed above, I'll also suggest the translatioins of Front Mission and Bahamut Lagoon (although the BL translation by DeJap isn't much better than Engrish, it's still a pretty fun game). Also, the Star Ocean translation isn't "finished," just "complete." It's a good game, but I'd hold off on playing it for a while. At the very least, maybe ZSNES/Snes9x will improve their SDD-1 emulation and you'll be able to skip messing with the graphics packs if you wait.
Zophar.net is another site for this sort of thing. That and the Whirlpool have a lot of hacks/mods for different games. Most of the NES/SNES/GB hacks are translations, since a lot of the best games on all three systems never saw the light of day in the US, but there are also a lot of gameplay hacks, especially for games like the Zelda and Mario series.
I'm not sure how those lenses work, but if you look up pictures of ideal setups for stellar or galactic lensing, it produces a + -shapped arrangement. The central image is the lensing object, and it has four images of the lensed object around it. More often, the lensed object isn't aligned perfectly, and we don't even see that much - one image or two. Also, after reading up on the subject, I made a mistake in my first post: The lensed supernova would be no brighter than a normal one. It would just appear to be in a different location than it otherwise would.
The lensing bends a very tiny amount of the supernova's output - It doesn't work exactly like a lens, per-se. It only focuses a ring of light around it on the focal point (us). The light passing closer to the sun that that ring is deflected to far, and focuses before it reaches us, and the light passing farther out doesn't get bent enough and focuses "behind" us. The extreme distances add up, and the lensed supernova will be much brighter than it normally would, but it still wouldn't be dangerously bright.
Furthurmore, it would have to be on a line-of-sight with a lensing star and us. Supernovae aren't exactly common on the cosmic time/space scale, so this is very unlikly.
We're probably in more danger of a star too close to us going supernova than getting caught at the wrong end of a celestial ant roaster.
Another Earthworm Jim game? I'd forgotten all about that game. I knew there was something missing from my GBA collection. That's it.
Yeah, but they're the one's who SHOULD develop it. They were the people who were developing it to begin with. As I said before: There's a lot of people who can take Fallout 3 and run with it, but Obsidian are the one's I'd bet on to run in the right direction.
I'm particularly hoping for Obsidian, or one of the other companies that picked up lots of Black Isle workers. Bioware has some good work, but Black Isle worked on this game for a long time. They know what they wanted it to be.
From the developers posting on websites like nma-fallout.com, it sounded to me like they were fairly well along in development. They were writing quests, composing a storyline, inserting towns into the game world. Bioware might be able to take it and run, but it's a much more sure bet that the former Black Isle guys will take it and run in the right direction.
The truth is, the X-Box failed in Japan because of Microsoft's failure to sufficiently respect the Japanese market, not because of some supposed contempt for all things American on Japan's part.
A Japanese Ambassador spoke at my university in my freshman year. The X-Box specifically didn't come up, but this same sort of thing was discussed for a while.
One particular professor (who's about as ethnically open minded as a Grand Inquisitor) asked why Japanese consumers so widely reject US products, while Japanese products (from cars to video games to anime) sell well in the US.
The ambassador's reply was that Japanese consumers were, by and large, very open to new things, wherever they came from. American entertainment particularly is as popular in Japan as Japanese entertainment is in the US.
However, he said there's also a greater sense of "consumer sensibility" in Japan, particularly with large purchases.
A DVD, CD, or video game from the US doesn't typically cost much more than a comparable Japanese item, so they sell comparably well.
However, American and European cars don't sell well because they take more gas and cost more (they cost more here, and when you add shipping costs to the US cars and subtract them from the Japanese cars, the difference only gets bigger), so it often doesn't make sense to buy them.
I think the same sort of thing can be applied to the X-Box. It costs more than the PS2, it doesn't have as many games available, particularly in the most popular genres in Japan, like RPGs, and many of those games that it does have are also available on other platforms, like the PS2, PC, or Game Cube, that people probably already have. In that sense, it just doesn't make sense to spend money on an X-Box.
Mars is a lot smaller. Small objects loose internal heat faster because of a higher area:volume ratio. Mars shows extensive evidence of having lost its internal heat. Some evidence suggests it still has enough to melt ice and produce steam, but...
Venus shows extensive evidence of still having at least some of that internal heat, and displays "recent" volcanic activity (much more recent than Mars at any rate, and it's atmosphere is comprised mostly of common volcanic gasses) on a nearly planet-wide scale.
Now, what you have is basically two dynamos.
One of them is spinning fairly rapidly (Mars spins almost as fast as Earth), but has nothing inside to generate a substantial field.
The other has the material needed to generate the field, possibly just as much as Earth does, but rotates extremely slowly.
Now, as for the lesser gas giants, dynamo theory HAS been reconciled with thier freakish multi-poled magnetic fields. It was even on Slashdot not long ago.
Furthur, a lightning bolt that could carve a trench the size of Valles Marineres would not produce what we see. It would produce mostly glass.
Ever seen where a powerful bolt of lightning struck the ground? If you carefully dig it out, you can find a VERY fragile glass-like structure resembling a taproot.
Most storms won't produce these. You see, your average lightning bolt on Earth can't even ignite wood unless it's very dry. The most powerful ones can melt tiny dirt particles. However, these bolts are lucky to be an inch wide, and they don't last long enough to do any damage to rock or much damage to soil (they're mostly limited to lighting shit on fire, and fire doesn't cut through a thousand miles of rock).
Now, assuming a linear relation (which it isn't, but this is much more forgiving on your theroy than the proper calculations), a bolt of lightning 100 miles wide, that is powerful enough to VAPORIZE rock thousands of feet deep, and lasting long enough to track accross 3000 miles of terrain is FUCKING BIG. My calculator overflows at 10e9999, and it overflows before I get to the 3000 mile long track part. Which is good, because lightning doesn't typically "track" along the ground. It stirkes a single spot, dissipates all its energy, and stops. To get a spark from a tesela coil or something to track, you need to constantly cause a voltage between it and the target faster than the bolt dissipates it. Lightning doesn't work that way.
Nothing can generate the kind of lightning bolt it would take to carve the Mariner rift, and even if it COULD, it wouldn't look like it does now, because right now, it looks a hell of a lot more like the African rift valley than it does like a tektite glass field.
One thing about Venus: I've never heard it say that retrograde spin is related to a lack of a magnetic field, but I have seen a simmilar suggestion: That it's unusually slow spin (243 days - although it's "day" is only 116 because it actually orbits faster than it rotates) doesn't stir up enough motion in its liquid core (if it has one, doesn't say anything on the page where I got the rotational speed) to produce a magnetic field.
His opinions... matter more because he doesn't play sport games
/.'ed?
I don't play sports games. Can I get
While they're at it, they can patent tacos, and make themselves into the SCO of Mexican cuisine. If they sue enough taco eaters, I'm sure one or two will cough up the $200 for a Nokia Taco License.