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Max Payne 2 Previewed
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Here's how the post should read.
If a love story is properly done, it can add a lot to a game. See Cowboy Bebop for a story that has love in it, as well as guns and crazy ultraviolence without making it hackneyed, trite, or crappy. It's understated, wonderful, and probably one of the more enjoyable experiences in a game.
Of course, it won't be to my liking unless the lover in question dies. But I'm a sucker for the angst and the drama and such.
If a love story is properly done, it can add a lot to a game. See Cowboy Bebop for a story about love that's making it hackneyed, trite, or crappy. It's understated, wonderful, and probably one of the more enjoyable experiences in a game.
Of course, it won't be to my liking unless the lover in question dies. But I'm a sucker for the angst and the drama and such.
I actually played the Japanese Famicom a few years back the house of a friend of mine who was Korean.
It was pretty neat to play all the cool games years before they came out in the american Market, all bowderlized and generally edited to nothing.
Super contra was same damn good times. Another interesting part about the Famicom was how many bootleg games were made for it. We all know about the infamous black box tengen game series for the NES, but the Famicom had TONS of illegitimate carts for it.
I don't know about you guys, but this could conceivably make corporate espionage that much easier.
Companies had better get more thorough in destroying their documentation if their information can still be gleaned after shredding.
An evil thought occured to me. What sort of things could you glean from microsoft's trash using one of these programs. Any of the open-source crowd on here brave enough to find out? Could make for some amusing reading, those company memos.
Hm. That Mom test is more or less conclusive. I think I now have a way to have linux computer which my father (the most dangerous of technophobes, a lawyer) could probably handle using.
Looks like it'll be dual-booting for me sometime soon. My question though, is this a good OS for a Linux newbie such as myself to get started on, or is the GUI deceptive about the nature of Linux to the point when I move to a more hardcore style of linux that I'll be totally lost?
I just wonder if Penny-Arcade didn't get this one right too.
I wonder if the console market is really going to accomodate yet another system at this point. I hate to sound trollish, but I really see this system tanking. It sounds like a cool idea until you really think hard about what makes consoles successful. I wonder whether this system's methodology of acquiring games wouldn't make it a playground for piracy on a level heretofore unseen.
I'm sure somebody will install Linux on it within a day or so of it's release, heh.
But I'll put the question to y'all here on Slashdot. Do you guys think this console really has a chance of success, and, if so, why? I'm rather interested in what the other geeks think of this thing.
Were the people who were sent cease and desist letters particularly large scale in their file sharing? Or were these just dudes on a 56k modem downloading a couple hundred megs of MP3 fils every now and then?
It occurs to me that if we were able to figure out how the RIAA is picking out people to sue, we could perhaps find ways of spoofing their detection processes. I know there are some anonymous p2p programs out there, but I also wonder if not following the profile of the guys who got targeted by this stuff might also be helpful.
Hell, I'm one of you. The final scene of Cowboy Bebop caused me to weep, and then smile, realising it was probably the best ending I've seen for an anime.
And I do pity you, as well as myself when something bad happens to an anime. I still twitch with revulsion at what's done to some series, but you have to admit, the half-literate rantings I see exploding on some newsgroups expose the teenagers for the iconoclastic ignoramuses they are.
Sure, it's logical for us hard-core fans to want something that hasn't been hacked up but... frankly, children are suckers to some degree. At least according to the corpies that buy up anime and sell it to the american population seem to think. Unfortunately they're backed by wrong-headed groups of parents who think any objectionable material in a cartoon is bad. It comes down to lazy parenting vs. good storytelling. Lazy parents win. Because they control the money, and have a decent amount of clout with other suckers of like mind.
Heh, reminds me of the unpatched version of Fallout 2 with all the unfinishable quests which could cause fatal errors in the game. Heh.
Well, perhaps someone didn't notice the kid character models or something. Censors aren't all-knowing, after all. Human like everyone else. Even if we want to get a little Tommy Vercetti on their asses from time to time for messing up our cool games.
I wonder what violent sex scenes they are referring to that have been taken out of Japanese video games? I heard that in D2 (no, not diablo 2, the dreamcast D2) there was some tentacle rape or something taken out. (I used to work in game retail before graduating college and becoming a cubicle-bound minion of the state government.)
The way the German command and conquer games work is kind of funny. It reminds me of the old super nintendo mortal Kombat game, where they took out the blood and people stayed away in droves, going for the Blood coded genesis version.
One of the amusing things to note is how much of an uproar American otaku will cause whenever anything at all is taken out of a Japanese game which makes it to the US. Mind you, a lot of these fanboys probably are looking for the prurient detail, but I can understand if it was a major plot point. I rather pity anime fans every time certain companies (read funimation) picks up an anime, because it ends up edited to the point where it's no longer recognizeable.
A question to all the other/.ers out there, have you ever played a game which was notably edited for American market? I think the most obvious example of this was Xenosaga, although Metal Gear Solid 2 after 9/11 also got a number of cinema scenes axed. (A rather unfortunate thing in my mind, while the game was ridiculous, it was very pretty.)
War in middle earth. A strategy game from way back in the EGA days of gaming. Quite fun, and quite true to the books. Amusingly, I don't think it was possible to beat that game by gathering a large army and whooping on Sauron's ass. Why? Because you had to get the ringbearer to Mount Doom together with Gollum. It was quite a time killer back in the day, but there was an easy cheat for the game. This cheat was amusing. Ents and Huorns could kill virtually anything, and the Dark Tower's forces ALWAYS attacked Minas Tirith and Helm's deep, so if you got control of the Ents and sent them there, well, let's just say it was all over for the Dark Lord. Heck, you could even invade Mordor with the Ents and Huorns if you felt like REALLY abusing the game.
It's somewhat flameish to just decry this as another whore for money from Lucas, but it seems that the star wars license has gone from something nearly sacred to the developement of geeks to just another schlocky blockbuster, only with more questionably wooden acting than most, and a more disturbingly loyal fanbase.
But paying for a webcam, and deleted scenes? C'mon now guys. When you've merchandised everything else in the movies already, watching the blue screen work that presumably these actors are going to be doing really doesn't sound like much fun to me.
A question posed to the other slashdot readers here. How many folks are just a little bit more disillusioned with one of our childhood geek heroes (Lucas) every time we see a news post about the prequel trilogy?
It's become something of a car-crash phenomenon for me. I just can't look away. But I will balk at paying 20 bucks. It leads one to wonder if this is a result of the nature of Hollywood, for creating larger, more expensive, less true to the original concept material, or if it's the nature of man as the director, when they start believing their own hype.
I'll be the first to admit I adore Metal Gear, and maybe not every gamer currently playing games is familiar with the playstation title, I don't see why it is necessary to remake the title at this time, especially for the Gamecube, which has a relatively limited market within the United States, which is odd, considering that the Metal Gear series has always sold better in the USA, when compared to the sales of the series in Japan.
That being said, I'll seriously consider getting myself a Gamecube if only to play this game, and Metroid prime but... A new metal gear title rather than a rehashed one would seem from my perspective to be evidence of more substantive support for the gamecube, rather than something which, while selling well, will essentially be nothing new aside from the addition of some game mechanics that weren't previously featured.
I don't think the thrill of playing this rehash will replicate the 2 days off I took from college in order to beat the original metal gear solid. Living out of my neighbor's dorm room and only stopping for sleep and pizza. This game put a serious dent in my GPA when it initially came out, unlike the sons of liberty which took about 4 hours of total playing time to defeat.
In the sense that another generation of gamers will experience what I consider to be a piece of gaming history, it will be fantastic, but still... I cannot keep myself from wondering why two original metal gear titles could not have been released.
Hm. Let's see. Secure job as a social worker. Check. Father in Iraq so that somebody needs to be the man around the house. Check. Sister is home from college waiting for her summer job teaching at a camp to start, check. Oh, hey look, I'm supporting my damn family, also check.
Nah, about the only problem I have is waiting for my new alienware box to arrive.
Don't you have something better to do than snipe at people?
The deciding factor in a lot of sports, cliche though it is to say, is a will to win. You can't quantify heart, with a statistical breakdown. You can't predict a quarterback is going to stay in a game with a broken leg, (as Donovan McNabb did), or when someone just decides to throw in the towel due to psychological reasons.
Using statistics will get a reasonable margin of error, but if we always knew a winner was foreordained in any sporting contest nobody would gamble on them anymore.
Also, it'd be tough to take into account the factor of coaching. Sometimes you'll get a coach like Buddy Ryan who will actually put out bounties on opposing players, hoping that a vicious defense is going to hit them right off the field. As long as there is a human at the helm of a sports team, it will be very difficult to predict what even the most talented squad of individuals can do.
Gator's memory footprint and other amusements
on
Gator Examined
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· Score: 5, Insightful
There's nothing quite as much fun as finding that your system resources are being eaten up by this little program just because your sister decided it would be a "good idea" to download Kazaa and Gator and a couple of other spyware things beside, just so she could steal her collection of creatively bankrupt pop music more easily.
Eventually, I got so sick of the whole booting up to find a new and horrific new chunk of spyware on my comp, having been downloaded by her that I ended up just formatting C: and going back to my old system files.
I certainly hope Gator gets sued into oblivion. It'll be one less thing to clean off my hard drive after my sister comes within 5 feet of the computer.
A question, though. Has anyone here ever actually bought anything off a pop-up ad after seeing it? I know I haven't, nor have I heard of anyone doing so, it just seems to be a money hole for the advertisers on the whole.
Seems to me that at one point I could actually remember making decisions based on the quality of the service offer, not the pop-up ads or advertising hype that became an intrusive part of my daily life. But maybe that's just me feeling old at 23.
It strikes me as somewhat unlikely that the guys making this movie are going to break even on it unless it has some seriously spectacular appeal to it. 50 million dollars is a pretty big hole to recoup, though I'd imagine that probably merchandising and the all-powerful DVD sales will probably eventually make it profitable.
This will probably be the first video game-based Movie I'll actually bother to see in the theaters. Tomb Raider inspired contempt in me, and Resident Evil, while sparking some small degree of interest, didn't manage to get me out of my comfortable computer chair and to the local megaplex.
Onimusha's world is enjoyable and fun to spend time in. Let's hope that the movie is for once more or less true to the source material. I'll be in line at the Cinema for this one, even if it gets panned.
Judging from the interview, now I can figure out the exact point at which Sierra games started to suck.
Those perennial products and edutainment games weren't what people wanted to see from Sierra, as far as I can tell.
At one point I think Sierra or Dynamix, (they tend to sort of run together in my mind), produced a football game that was pretty brutally bad. It got pretty much owned by Madden, if I'm not incorrect.
Can someone tell me what the relationship of Sierra and Dynamic were? I just remember Sierra's magazine always selling Dynamix products such as A-10 tank Killer and the game with the futureistic hovertanks in it, the name of which escapes me at the moment. Stellar 7, that's it.
King's Quest 4 was the first game I picked up for my 286. The copy protection came as something of a suprise for a 10 year old, as I thought everyone was trustworthy and wouldn't steal games. You'd have to literally memorize the entire manual to get around the copy protection. It wasn't much fun at all, but the game was cool. Well, if you liked a single misstep sending you plummeting to your doom, or otherwise dying in a relatively amusing way in-game. I never realized the kind of production values and work that went into these games until I saw the crap that gets churned out today without a single interesting story thread. And no, I'm not some retro freak, I still play games, I just wonder whether these EGA graphics and text combining games didn't somehow lend themselves better to storytellers rather than corporate moneymongers.
But will stealing music change anything?
on
PressPlay + Roxio?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Why do these three chord songs continue to be popular? Is it a result of marketing or do they have a particular resonance within us as humans which makes us go, I'm no monkey but I know what I like?
On another note, I've recently been exposed to music from the Baroque and classical periods to a large extent and find it very enjoyable, but most people my age find it boring. It could be a result of attention spans that have been consistently shortened. Good music might not necessarily result from a new business model, just wider distribution of that which is listened to already anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, it won't be to my liking unless the lover in question dies. But I'm a sucker for the angst and the drama and such.
Of course, it won't be to my liking unless the lover in question dies. But I'm a sucker for the angst and the drama and such.
It was pretty neat to play all the cool games years before they came out in the american Market, all bowderlized and generally edited to nothing.
Super contra was same damn good times. Another interesting part about the Famicom was how many bootleg games were made for it. We all know about the infamous black box tengen game series for the NES, but the Famicom had TONS of illegitimate carts for it.
Companies had better get more thorough in destroying their documentation if their information can still be gleaned after shredding.
An evil thought occured to me. What sort of things could you glean from microsoft's trash using one of these programs. Any of the open-source crowd on here brave enough to find out? Could make for some amusing reading, those company memos.
Looks like it'll be dual-booting for me sometime soon. My question though, is this a good OS for a Linux newbie such as myself to get started on, or is the GUI deceptive about the nature of Linux to the point when I move to a more hardcore style of linux that I'll be totally lost?
I wonder if the console market is really going to accomodate yet another system at this point. I hate to sound trollish, but I really see this system tanking. It sounds like a cool idea until you really think hard about what makes consoles successful. I wonder whether this system's methodology of acquiring games wouldn't make it a playground for piracy on a level heretofore unseen.
I'm sure somebody will install Linux on it within a day or so of it's release, heh.
But I'll put the question to y'all here on Slashdot. Do you guys think this console really has a chance of success, and, if so, why? I'm rather interested in what the other geeks think of this thing.
It occurs to me that if we were able to figure out how the RIAA is picking out people to sue, we could perhaps find ways of spoofing their detection processes. I know there are some anonymous p2p programs out there, but I also wonder if not following the profile of the guys who got targeted by this stuff might also be helpful.
Anyone got any ideas as far as this goes?
And I do pity you, as well as myself when something bad happens to an anime. I still twitch with revulsion at what's done to some series, but you have to admit, the half-literate rantings I see exploding on some newsgroups expose the teenagers for the iconoclastic ignoramuses they are.
Sure, it's logical for us hard-core fans to want something that hasn't been hacked up but... frankly, children are suckers to some degree. At least according to the corpies that buy up anime and sell it to the american population seem to think. Unfortunately they're backed by wrong-headed groups of parents who think any objectionable material in a cartoon is bad. It comes down to lazy parenting vs. good storytelling. Lazy parents win. Because they control the money, and have a decent amount of clout with other suckers of like mind.
Well, perhaps someone didn't notice the kid character models or something. Censors aren't all-knowing, after all. Human like everyone else. Even if we want to get a little Tommy Vercetti on their asses from time to time for messing up our cool games.
The way the German command and conquer games work is kind of funny. It reminds me of the old super nintendo mortal Kombat game, where they took out the blood and people stayed away in droves, going for the Blood coded genesis version.
One of the amusing things to note is how much of an uproar American otaku will cause whenever anything at all is taken out of a Japanese game which makes it to the US. Mind you, a lot of these fanboys probably are looking for the prurient detail, but I can understand if it was a major plot point. I rather pity anime fans every time certain companies (read funimation) picks up an anime, because it ends up edited to the point where it's no longer recognizeable.
A question to all the other /.ers out there, have you ever played a game which was notably edited for American market? I think the most obvious example of this was Xenosaga, although Metal Gear Solid 2 after 9/11 also got a number of cinema scenes axed. (A rather unfortunate thing in my mind, while the game was ridiculous, it was very pretty.)
War in middle earth. A strategy game from way back in the EGA days of gaming. Quite fun, and quite true to the books. Amusingly, I don't think it was possible to beat that game by gathering a large army and whooping on Sauron's ass. Why? Because you had to get the ringbearer to Mount Doom together with Gollum. It was quite a time killer back in the day, but there was an easy cheat for the game. This cheat was amusing. Ents and Huorns could kill virtually anything, and the Dark Tower's forces ALWAYS attacked Minas Tirith and Helm's deep, so if you got control of the Ents and sent them there, well, let's just say it was all over for the Dark Lord. Heck, you could even invade Mordor with the Ents and Huorns if you felt like REALLY abusing the game.
But paying for a webcam, and deleted scenes? C'mon now guys. When you've merchandised everything else in the movies already, watching the blue screen work that presumably these actors are going to be doing really doesn't sound like much fun to me.
A question posed to the other slashdot readers here. How many folks are just a little bit more disillusioned with one of our childhood geek heroes (Lucas) every time we see a news post about the prequel trilogy?
It's become something of a car-crash phenomenon for me. I just can't look away. But I will balk at paying 20 bucks. It leads one to wonder if this is a result of the nature of Hollywood, for creating larger, more expensive, less true to the original concept material, or if it's the nature of man as the director, when they start believing their own hype.
That being said, I'll seriously consider getting myself a Gamecube if only to play this game, and Metroid prime but... A new metal gear title rather than a rehashed one would seem from my perspective to be evidence of more substantive support for the gamecube, rather than something which, while selling well, will essentially be nothing new aside from the addition of some game mechanics that weren't previously featured.
I don't think the thrill of playing this rehash will replicate the 2 days off I took from college in order to beat the original metal gear solid. Living out of my neighbor's dorm room and only stopping for sleep and pizza. This game put a serious dent in my GPA when it initially came out, unlike the sons of liberty which took about 4 hours of total playing time to defeat.
In the sense that another generation of gamers will experience what I consider to be a piece of gaming history, it will be fantastic, but still... I cannot keep myself from wondering why two original metal gear titles could not have been released.
Nah, about the only problem I have is waiting for my new alienware box to arrive.
Don't you have something better to do than snipe at people?
Using statistics will get a reasonable margin of error, but if we always knew a winner was foreordained in any sporting contest nobody would gamble on them anymore.
Also, it'd be tough to take into account the factor of coaching. Sometimes you'll get a coach like Buddy Ryan who will actually put out bounties on opposing players, hoping that a vicious defense is going to hit them right off the field. As long as there is a human at the helm of a sports team, it will be very difficult to predict what even the most talented squad of individuals can do.
Eventually, I got so sick of the whole booting up to find a new and horrific new chunk of spyware on my comp, having been downloaded by her that I ended up just formatting C: and going back to my old system files.
I certainly hope Gator gets sued into oblivion. It'll be one less thing to clean off my hard drive after my sister comes within 5 feet of the computer.
A question, though. Has anyone here ever actually bought anything off a pop-up ad after seeing it? I know I haven't, nor have I heard of anyone doing so, it just seems to be a money hole for the advertisers on the whole.
Seems to me that at one point I could actually remember making decisions based on the quality of the service offer, not the pop-up ads or advertising hype that became an intrusive part of my daily life. But maybe that's just me feeling old at 23.
This will probably be the first video game-based Movie I'll actually bother to see in the theaters. Tomb Raider inspired contempt in me, and Resident Evil, while sparking some small degree of interest, didn't manage to get me out of my comfortable computer chair and to the local megaplex.
Onimusha's world is enjoyable and fun to spend time in. Let's hope that the movie is for once more or less true to the source material. I'll be in line at the Cinema for this one, even if it gets panned.
Judging from the interview, now I can figure out the exact point at which Sierra games started to suck. Those perennial products and edutainment games weren't what people wanted to see from Sierra, as far as I can tell. At one point I think Sierra or Dynamix, (they tend to sort of run together in my mind), produced a football game that was pretty brutally bad. It got pretty much owned by Madden, if I'm not incorrect. Can someone tell me what the relationship of Sierra and Dynamic were? I just remember Sierra's magazine always selling Dynamix products such as A-10 tank Killer and the game with the futureistic hovertanks in it, the name of which escapes me at the moment. Stellar 7, that's it. King's Quest 4 was the first game I picked up for my 286. The copy protection came as something of a suprise for a 10 year old, as I thought everyone was trustworthy and wouldn't steal games. You'd have to literally memorize the entire manual to get around the copy protection. It wasn't much fun at all, but the game was cool. Well, if you liked a single misstep sending you plummeting to your doom, or otherwise dying in a relatively amusing way in-game. I never realized the kind of production values and work that went into these games until I saw the crap that gets churned out today without a single interesting story thread. And no, I'm not some retro freak, I still play games, I just wonder whether these EGA graphics and text combining games didn't somehow lend themselves better to storytellers rather than corporate moneymongers.
Why do these three chord songs continue to be popular? Is it a result of marketing or do they have a particular resonance within us as humans which makes us go, I'm no monkey but I know what I like? On another note, I've recently been exposed to music from the Baroque and classical periods to a large extent and find it very enjoyable, but most people my age find it boring. It could be a result of attention spans that have been consistently shortened. Good music might not necessarily result from a new business model, just wider distribution of that which is listened to already anyway.