Bah. I think it's fun to see what people come up with here in universe B. For years, the actual news has been chock full of stuff easily more ridiculous than this; we have much work to do if we are to develop the levels of satire and parody necessary to stick out in this twilight zone of a reality.
This is far more fun, in any case. If we're going to have a story about followers of something obsolete team up with followers of something remarkably ignorant, this is a nice light-hearted chuckle compared to, say, oh I don't know, Republican leaders joining with neo-nazis.
"That's stealing. It's no different than ripping music. It's no different than pirating movies."
True. It's my computer and those are my shiny discs full of bits. Using a blocker to customize the way I interact with web pages is no more wrong than moving my music from a CD to a more-convenient file. Since blu-rays I own refuse to play on my secondary TV (an old CRT), pirating those movies gives me no moral hesitation whatsoever. Nor does turning off flash, blocking ads, or doing any of the dozens of things I do with my browsers and my other software on my computers.
If somebody wants to call what I do "stealing", well, fine. I never put my monitor up for rent as a billboard, so I could say anyone who tries to use it as such is trespassing and vandalizing my property.:^) The fact that ads are so far out of control that people will use non-free (and non-Free) blockers to avoid them is pretty telling.
To anyone. Certainly not to anyone who's got such varied motives as Apple.
Providing good, untracked, unbubbled search is its own worthy end; please let's not distort it by bending it to serve the latest iFad or getting all wrapped up in some specific ecosystem. How about we continue to build on open standards and make stuff that's useful for everyone? Apple used to understand that (so did Google) but the whole point is that their like can't be trusted at this point.
Anyway DuckDuckGo has been my default engine for a few years now, and I've been very pleased with how good it's gotten. I hope they keep up the good work and manage to avoid falling out of touch with what made them special to begin with.
To be fair, conducting a study about distracted driving in Utah is like hosting a philosophical debate in the mosh pit of a Gwar concert. It can be done, but the noise is going to be overwhelming.
I lived and drove there for ten years, which taught me fear as I have never known. Utah drivers don't need any help being terrible, but they welcome it anyway.
You're right: Any Wii remote control scheme would feel tacked on and wrong.
You're wrong: The Wii classic controller is at least as good for Street Fighter games as Sony or MS pads. Quite a bit better, in my opinion.
Those of us who wanted this game on Wii definitely already have classic controllers, so it's a shame they're ignoring the platform. But, we've got several flavors of Virtual Console Street Fighter II to choose from anyway; I can't imagine anybody's terribly upset about this.
Windows has become completely unusable, in part because of all the layers upon layers of crap that have been piled on. We see tons of inconsistencies at the surface, but the problem is much worse underneath, in the actual application code. House of cards, except made of crap.
Unless this gets canned like the promised interesting bits of Longhorn, I can see it now: A new radial menu opens a shiny Vista menu which opens a goofy XP task menu which opens a 2000 "personalized" menu which, once expanded to show the useful stuff, opens a 9X menu, upon which right-clicking opens a radial menu from which the whole exercise can begin again.
It would surprise me greatly if there wasn't some manner of skill-matching, given the plethora of other options this game will have. (Have you seen the settings for weighting the random music selections on a per-stage basis?)
Anonymous battles could keep a ranking that is never exposed, so people don't get assy about it, or the "skill" rating could be derived from other data, local and friend battle records, or even performance in single-player, etc.
Another option, the one I think will probably be implemented, would be Planet Puzzle League's solution: Beginners have their own segregated area. Once you win enough, you're kept out of that, away from other beginners. Suck it up consistantly afterward, and you'll be let back in. A setup like that could actually be multi-tiered, and entirely transparent if the developers so desired.
I foresee some whining about the fact that it won't build up ranking data from anonymous battles, but after playing several DS games online, this setup actually sounds like a good thing to me. Hear me out.:^)
In Mario Kart, random, non-friend battles are ranked. So, when some lamer is losing, he quits. Wouldn't want to blemish his record. Game over, no getting to finish, no closure. In Planet Puzzle League, the Smash Bros approach is taken, and random battles are "free". Not ONCE has somebody dropped out mid-game on me, no matter how badly I was pounding them. And no matter how badly I was being pounded, the little devil on my right shoulder never even suggested dropping out.
Take away the stats in anonymous mode, and suddenly the incentive to be a prick for the sake of some arbitrary numbers, dissolves. If you still want the bragging rights, play within a known circle of friends, which should also reduce the prick incentive. This way we can concentrate on having fun playing a kickass game, instead of worrying about the metadata. That might seem wussy to the frat boy Halo crowd, but to me, it's what gaming has always been about.
I second such a plea. If the game itself is actually good, no nonsense like uptight brick-and-mortar retailers not carrying it is going to stop me from playing it.
But... Currently, Nintendo's policy (and I'm pretty sure Sony's too) is not to license AO games. As I understand it, Nintendo approached Rockstar about this particular game, so it's not impossible to imagine them making an exception or changing their policy. As it stands, however, Rockstar wouldn't just have a hard time selling the game, they might not be able to get it licensed. We therefore need to include Nintendo and Sony in our plea; they've got to step up to the plate on this as well if we want AO-rated games to ever be viable for any publisher.
The thing that really irks me is that we have this M rating for 17-years-plus, and AO for 18-plus. Is anybody so much more "mature" after one more year of living that suddenly they can handle more gruesome subject matter? AO has some other subtle differences, I know, but it appears to exist primarily so that games like this one can be censored and/or effectively banned.
As long as we're off-topic anyway, I was SURE, absolutely SURE, that we'd get hi-def Star Wars last month. 30th anniversary for cryin' out loud, and all that comes of it is some animated series, a postal service publicity stunt, and a few quick cash-in documentaries. Movies old and new are being shoveled out in HD all the time nowadays and I thought there was no way on Earth that Lucas would pass up the chance to sell us those movies yet again.
I was so sure it would happen, that I didn't get the pitiful non-anamorphic DVDs of the original trilogy when they came out. I know I'll still get a chance to have good transfers of Han-shoots-first and Ghost-Anakin-is-old someday, but I'm genuinely surprised they didn't use this multiple-of-ten anniversary to introduce it.
Whenever it does come out, I guarantee it will be only on HD-DVD, at least at first. I know, because I will own a PS3 at some point. I've never, ever backed the right horse.
I heartily agree. I've been bitten many times by abandoned software, Animator Pro on DOS had a sort-of spiritual successor in Animator Studio, but it died there, lost between Windows 3.1 and 95. Blender was nearly lost to a similar fate; fortunately enough money was raised to buy out the source and release it under the GPL.
Being at the software vendor's mercy for an application's longevity sucks hard, and it's one of the reasons I've been embracing Free and open software so passionately. As long as anyone still cares, the program will live on. Good software shouldn't die. That said, anything related to FoxPro can and should be erased from existance as soon as possible as far as I'm concerned, but surely somebody's happy about this, so good for them.
Diva? Definitely. I mean, sure the guy's entitled to his opinion, but he's also full of it, and full of himself.
I find it enormously ironic that here's a guy passionate about gaming as an art form, but very very narrow-minded about what "art" is. WarioWare is art. It's every bit as much a work of art as ICO is. He can't tell me it's not "art" just because it's "fun". Art can be fun. In fact, if it's a video game, maybe it even SHOULD be fun.
What the guy's really pissed off about is that his preferred art form and style is very CPU and GPU hungry, which could lead him to a valid criticism of the Wii. Come on fella, just say it's an annoyingly weak machine and quit whining. A creative developer can deal with that and still get quite a bit of number-crunching and pretty pictures out of the Wii, and if such creativity is too hard for this guy, then it's time to stop throwing tantrums about games as an art form.
Reality just doesn't support this guy's opinion. The PS2 was the weakest of the last-gen machines, and it had Okami, Shadow of the Colossus, ICO, God of War, Katamari, all these games that are widely regarded as "art". Nintendo's no stranger to art either: Odama, Killer 7, Pikmin, Eternal Darkness, Trauma Center, Electroplankton, even Wii Play.
There are many kinds of art. We get it, Spore eats CPU cycles for breakfast. Great. Electroplankton doesn't. Michaelangelo's David doesn't either. Must not be art then, huh?;^) Diva.
If they're gonna use the Commodore name though, I hope they take it halfway seriously. There should be preinstalled an emulator and as much software as copyright issues allow, to play nice with those of us with nostalgia for the old Commodores.
More importantly though, it should come with a useful programming language whose learning curve isn't too steep. BASIC has become obsolete, but when I think Commodore, I think typing in code from the back of magazines. Python or something of that nature should be easily accessible right out of the box, letting users tinker and do their own thing on the machine. Writing Javascript in Notepad to be run in IE doesn't count; a computer should come with a way to write real programs, and a machine called Commodore would be the perfect place to start the trend.
I haven't updated in a while, but I do have some bugfixes and improvements in CVS if you're brave. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but some folks find it to be quite fun, at least in short spurts.:^)
You know, your analogy of PS3 and Saturn gets a lot of mileage...
+ Third home console from the company. + Cocky from the success of the predecessor. + Geared mainly for the popular graphical style of the day (2D leading up to saturn, 3D leading up to PS3). + Controller's basically the previous model, plus a borrowed Nintendo feature (shoulder buttons/motion). + High-tech portable companion system nowhere near as popular as Nintendo's low-tech portable. + 3rd parties starting to question or drop exclusivity. + Shiny and black looks cool even in completely ridiculous shapes, right?
I assume you're joking, but for the sake of anyone who's genuinely confused (I do tend to phrase things poorly, after all) I was speaking of Hula.
I daren't say anything about the Microsoft deal, because I don't have sufficient information yet. The real consequences of that deal will shake out over the next few years. Many a short-term "good deal" becomes a long-term "what-the-crap-were-we-thinking", but I'm not convinced that Novell's "deal with the devil" will turn out that way. Nor am I convinced it won't. In the meantime, I've got code to write and checks to take home, so it's hard to be too unhappy.
My excuses aren't great; basically I've had very little time for programming outside of work. I do hope to still contribute when time permits. As for the bits I was hacking on, the loosest ends got tied up, and some polish was actually put on by other team members. But yes, I do hope to go in and clean up some things I left messy. I wish I could do so on company time, but I consider myself lucky to have been paid to work on Hula while it was going strong. I still frequent #hula on GimpNet (as penduin), though I haven't had much to say lately.
I don't think there's going to be a Maui. I haven't heard what Novell's story is for NetMail customers, either. For some of them, Hula will probably work, I'm not sure what state the migration/upgrade tools were left in though.
Short answer: No, believe it or not, Microsoft wasn't in on this.
Longer answer: I work at Novell, and for about a year, I was on Hula. I loved it. I still run it on my home server, and it still bothers me that I didn't get to finish and polish the bits I was hacking on. An insufficient degree of planning and management led to the magic "1.0" getting pushed farther out and being less clearly defined. Inside Novell culture (and elsewhere, I would think), that's a bad sign. Other projects were in the spotlight, some Ximian modus operandi kept a lot of Hula's exciting stuff secret, and a few months back, the already-thin team was cut back dramatically. At the same time, its release deadline was moved up, and Hula was still without what I'd call a manager. The writing was on the wall well before the Microsoft deal came around.
I made the mistake of getting pretty emotionally attached to Hula, so this has all been pretty rough for me to watch. I worked weekends and wee hours on that code, and I'd do it again. I can't blame anyone for using this news as fuel for the fire and/or shouting "Novell just doesn't get it", and I can't blame anyone for being highly suspicious given the recent Microsoft deal (I'm still not sure how I feel about that, by the way). But I can say, and you can take with as much salt you want: No, this was the result, a long time coming, of numerous mistakes, and of other decisions that truly didn't seem like mistakes at the time. As much as I love to blame Microsoft for stuff, the facts say otherwise in this case.
Its death as a Novell-sponsored project is unfortunate, but Hula's not dead - it's grown a small community and a bunch of us still have commit access. Read the mailing list message, take a breather, and if you still feel like being pissed off at Novell or Microsoft, fine. I tried. But at least check out Hula. It still has a ton of promise and is surprisingly useful today.
I can't speak for the pro-Sony lunatics, but I happen to be a different kind of lunatic - a Metal Gear addict. As far as anybody's heard, the next one is PS3-only, just as the last one was PS2-only. Once the price sees a drastic drop or two and the hardware is revised enough that it won't burn my house down or have its precious stupid blu-ray laser fail, by then maybe the inevitable super-edition of Metal Gear Solid 4 will be out and I'll finally cave and get one of these damn things.
But at launch? Oh hell no. And for love of Sony? Pff. I could try and say something like "at least they're not as evil as Microsoft", but that's saying so little as to be meaningless. I just don't want to miss out on tasty gaming simply because the console manufacturer pisses me off.
Fucking hell, those I-am-not-a-robot images are hard to read! How the hell much interest is there in spambotting slashdot anyway?...I'm sorry Slashdot, you just caught me in a Sony-inspired grumpy mood.
I'm hoping that's true. This "For a limited time only" crap doesn't strike me as very convincing, especially considering that 2007 will be the 30th anniversary of the original Star Wars release.
I'm trying to be pickier these days about how much I whore myself to corporate interests. I really think I'll have another shot at the original, un-fucked-up Star Wars trilogy, so I'm going to wait this out, just as I have the special editions (well, ok, he got me back in the VHS days). It's only a matter of time before Metal Gear Solid 4 shows up and convinces me I need a PlayStation 3, and when that happens I'll have a blue-ray player, which I otherwise wouldn't give two shits about. By that time, perhaps Lucas's boys will find it in their hearts to do a decent transfer after all, in high-definition even.
All that's left then is for HD-DVD to start catching on like wildfire to ensure that I get screwed yet again.
I'll admit the jury's out on HAMMER. It looks to me like there's more going on than prescripted animations, but I could be wrong or overly-optimistic or something.
Mario Galaxy includes some funky gravity hubs that, when pointed to, attract Mario according to the game's own playful sense of physics. More interestingly, though, hop onto a springy tree-looking thing and you can use the Wiimote to slingshot Mario off of it, quite accurately aiming and determining force within the game's own world. That's the sort of thing I was talking about - real 1:1 action/reaction with the controller, without the need for complex real-world physics.
The Red Steel developers say they're working again on revamped control that's more like what you're talking about. Whether that will come to fruition versus their generic gesturing system, we can only hope. I seriously doubt it was a CPU issue though. Bigger problems arise from the fact that you can swing out in front of you even if you're facing a wall, and how do you reconcile that in the game without putting in too many limitations or hacks that interfere with the 1:1 Wiimote to virtual sword movement.
Are "sidestepping" the direct control issue and "solving" it really mutually exclusive? I'm not convinced that a huge amount of CPU cycles need to be spent to result in physical simulation that looks and feels pretty damn good, even if the underlying algorithms are actually not very sophisticated. Asteroids felt like it understood inertia, momentum, and angular collisions, but what that Atari 2600 was doing under the hood was much more simplistic.
I'll agree that an easy way out for the developers would be to say, "Well, let's just put in a bunch of pre-scripted animations and build a gesture system to sort-of match - there's not enough CPU for a proper physics engine". But I think a more clever developer would be more tempted to take that direct input and map it to some flexible and well-designed reactions that feel just right 99% of the time....It's not even that gesturing is bad, we just want our light saber game, dammit!:^)
There are a lot of ways to solve the various dynamic action problems, some of which would be very CPU-intensive but some that wouldn't.
For example, Project HAMMER looks like it does a lot of what you're talking about, turning freeform controller movement into big action/reaction stuff on-screen. There's probably not an ultra-sophisticated physics engine calculating impacts, modeled using complex inertia and friction attributes, but rather much simpler algorithms that plug the angle and velocity of the user's input into simple functions that change the action onscreen. Some kind of middle ground between all-out dynamic collision computation and a collection of preset animations.
There are plenty of other possibilities too. Watching the videos of Super Mario Galaxy, I can't reconcile what's going on with any physics engine I know of. The game's world is its own crazy and wonderful thing where yes, you have direct and precise control that translates into unique reactions, but all on its own terms - outside the "physics calculations are complciated" world we're familiar with.
Nothing's stopping a developer from using an internally simpler approach and mapping it to a realistic game world, either. Even on GameCube, Resident Evil 4 looked realistic but used very primitive methods of collision detection and motion. You could shoot down an axe that was thrown at you, not because the physics were perfectly modeled or because the aiming mechanics were perfectly precise, but actually because they weren't. It still felt real though, thanks to the game's presentation and style. I bet we'll see plenty of stuff that looks for the world like every action is completely dynamic, whether or not it actually is. Don't underestimate the power of faking it!:^)
I pine for the Nintendo/Sega days too, because it was more about the actual gaming at that point. Both Nintendo and Sega wanted to sell entertainment in the form of fun games. Sony and Microsoft entered the gaming market so that they could sell, period. Both have (bought) game development studios now, but they're in it to sell electronics and licenses, not juicy gameplay.
Sony and Microsoft are to videogames as MTV and under-the-table payola are to music. Yeah, you can go there to get your hot new chart-topping entertainment, but if you want to enjoy stuff that has a soul, you'll have to go elsewhere. Fortunately, while MTV may shovel crap unto the masses, music itself is alive and well. Same goes for these non-gaming game consoles - those of us who still want real gaming can still find it.
Personally I couldn't care less if the Wii "loses" the "console war". I don't care if I use a niche platform, as long as it's got what I want. (I run Slackware for cripe's sake...) If it turns out to be Nintendo's Dreamcast, well, so be it. My Dreamcast still runs fine, and has games that my PS2 can only dream of.
Slashdot Mirror
Bah. I think it's fun to see what people come up with here in universe B. For years, the actual news has been chock full of stuff easily more ridiculous than this; we have much work to do if we are to develop the levels of satire and parody necessary to stick out in this twilight zone of a reality.
This is far more fun, in any case. If we're going to have a story about followers of something obsolete team up with followers of something remarkably ignorant, this is a nice light-hearted chuckle compared to, say, oh I don't know, Republican leaders joining with neo-nazis.
"That's stealing. It's no different than ripping music. It's no different than pirating movies."
True. It's my computer and those are my shiny discs full of bits. Using a blocker to customize the way I interact with web pages is no more wrong than moving my music from a CD to a more-convenient file. Since blu-rays I own refuse to play on my secondary TV (an old CRT), pirating those movies gives me no moral hesitation whatsoever. Nor does turning off flash, blocking ads, or doing any of the dozens of things I do with my browsers and my other software on my computers.
If somebody wants to call what I do "stealing", well, fine. I never put my monitor up for rent as a billboard, so I could say anyone who tries to use it as such is trespassing and vandalizing my property. :^) The fact that ads are so far out of control that people will use non-free (and non-Free) blockers to avoid them is pretty telling.
To anyone. Certainly not to anyone who's got such varied motives as Apple.
Providing good, untracked, unbubbled search is its own worthy end; please let's not distort it by bending it to serve the latest iFad or getting all wrapped up in some specific ecosystem. How about we continue to build on open standards and make stuff that's useful for everyone? Apple used to understand that (so did Google) but the whole point is that their like can't be trusted at this point.
Anyway DuckDuckGo has been my default engine for a few years now, and I've been very pleased with how good it's gotten. I hope they keep up the good work and manage to avoid falling out of touch with what made them special to begin with.
To be fair, conducting a study about distracted driving in Utah is like hosting a philosophical debate in the mosh pit of a Gwar concert. It can be done, but the noise is going to be overwhelming.
I lived and drove there for ten years, which taught me fear as I have never known. Utah drivers don't need any help being terrible, but they welcome it anyway.
You're right: Any Wii remote control scheme would feel tacked on and wrong.
You're wrong: The Wii classic controller is at least as good for Street Fighter games as Sony or MS pads. Quite a bit better, in my opinion.
Those of us who wanted this game on Wii definitely already have classic controllers, so it's a shame they're ignoring the platform. But, we've got several flavors of Virtual Console Street Fighter II to choose from anyway; I can't imagine anybody's terribly upset about this.
Windows has become completely unusable, in part because of all the layers upon layers of crap that have been piled on. We see tons of inconsistencies at the surface, but the problem is much worse underneath, in the actual application code. House of cards, except made of crap.
Unless this gets canned like the promised interesting bits of Longhorn, I can see it now: A new radial menu opens a shiny Vista menu which opens a goofy XP task menu which opens a 2000 "personalized" menu which, once expanded to show the useful stuff, opens a 9X menu, upon which right-clicking opens a radial menu from which the whole exercise can begin again.
It would surprise me greatly if there wasn't some manner of skill-matching, given the plethora of other options this game will have. (Have you seen the settings for weighting the random music selections on a per-stage basis?)
Anonymous battles could keep a ranking that is never exposed, so people don't get assy about it, or the "skill" rating could be derived from other data, local and friend battle records, or even performance in single-player, etc.
Another option, the one I think will probably be implemented, would be Planet Puzzle League's solution: Beginners have their own segregated area. Once you win enough, you're kept out of that, away from other beginners. Suck it up consistantly afterward, and you'll be let back in. A setup like that could actually be multi-tiered, and entirely transparent if the developers so desired.
I foresee some whining about the fact that it won't build up ranking data from anonymous battles, but after playing several DS games online, this setup actually sounds like a good thing to me. Hear me out. :^)
In Mario Kart, random, non-friend battles are ranked. So, when some lamer is losing, he quits. Wouldn't want to blemish his record. Game over, no getting to finish, no closure. In Planet Puzzle League, the Smash Bros approach is taken, and random battles are "free". Not ONCE has somebody dropped out mid-game on me, no matter how badly I was pounding them. And no matter how badly I was being pounded, the little devil on my right shoulder never even suggested dropping out.
Take away the stats in anonymous mode, and suddenly the incentive to be a prick for the sake of some arbitrary numbers, dissolves. If you still want the bragging rights, play within a known circle of friends, which should also reduce the prick incentive. This way we can concentrate on having fun playing a kickass game, instead of worrying about the metadata. That might seem wussy to the frat boy Halo crowd, but to me, it's what gaming has always been about.
I second such a plea. If the game itself is actually good, no nonsense like uptight brick-and-mortar retailers not carrying it is going to stop me from playing it.
But...
Currently, Nintendo's policy (and I'm pretty sure Sony's too) is not to license AO games. As I understand it, Nintendo approached Rockstar about this particular game, so it's not impossible to imagine them making an exception or changing their policy. As it stands, however, Rockstar wouldn't just have a hard time selling the game, they might not be able to get it licensed. We therefore need to include Nintendo and Sony in our plea; they've got to step up to the plate on this as well if we want AO-rated games to ever be viable for any publisher.
The thing that really irks me is that we have this M rating for 17-years-plus, and AO for 18-plus. Is anybody so much more "mature" after one more year of living that suddenly they can handle more gruesome subject matter? AO has some other subtle differences, I know, but it appears to exist primarily so that games like this one can be censored and/or effectively banned.
*leaves hands down* I agree entirely. Yawn.
As long as we're off-topic anyway, I was SURE, absolutely SURE, that we'd get hi-def Star Wars last month. 30th anniversary for cryin' out loud, and all that comes of it is some animated series, a postal service publicity stunt, and a few quick cash-in documentaries. Movies old and new are being shoveled out in HD all the time nowadays and I thought there was no way on Earth that Lucas would pass up the chance to sell us those movies yet again.
I was so sure it would happen, that I didn't get the pitiful non-anamorphic DVDs of the original trilogy when they came out. I know I'll still get a chance to have good transfers of Han-shoots-first and Ghost-Anakin-is-old someday, but I'm genuinely surprised they didn't use this multiple-of-ten anniversary to introduce it.
Whenever it does come out, I guarantee it will be only on HD-DVD, at least at first. I know, because I will own a PS3 at some point. I've never, ever backed the right horse.
I heartily agree. I've been bitten many times by abandoned software, Animator Pro on DOS had a sort-of spiritual successor in Animator Studio, but it died there, lost between Windows 3.1 and 95. Blender was nearly lost to a similar fate; fortunately enough money was raised to buy out the source and release it under the GPL.
Being at the software vendor's mercy for an application's longevity sucks hard, and it's one of the reasons I've been embracing Free and open software so passionately. As long as anyone still cares, the program will live on. Good software shouldn't die. That said, anything related to FoxPro can and should be erased from existance as soon as possible as far as I'm concerned, but surely somebody's happy about this, so good for them.
Nouns get verbed all the time, get over it. ;^)
Diva? Definitely. I mean, sure the guy's entitled to his opinion, but he's also full of it, and full of himself.
;^) Diva.
I find it enormously ironic that here's a guy passionate about gaming as an art form, but very very narrow-minded about what "art" is. WarioWare is art. It's every bit as much a work of art as ICO is. He can't tell me it's not "art" just because it's "fun". Art can be fun. In fact, if it's a video game, maybe it even SHOULD be fun.
What the guy's really pissed off about is that his preferred art form and style is very CPU and GPU hungry, which could lead him to a valid criticism of the Wii. Come on fella, just say it's an annoyingly weak machine and quit whining. A creative developer can deal with that and still get quite a bit of number-crunching and pretty pictures out of the Wii, and if such creativity is too hard for this guy, then it's time to stop throwing tantrums about games as an art form.
Reality just doesn't support this guy's opinion. The PS2 was the weakest of the last-gen machines, and it had Okami, Shadow of the Colossus, ICO, God of War, Katamari, all these games that are widely regarded as "art". Nintendo's no stranger to art either: Odama, Killer 7, Pikmin, Eternal Darkness, Trauma Center, Electroplankton, even Wii Play.
There are many kinds of art. We get it, Spore eats CPU cycles for breakfast. Great. Electroplankton doesn't. Michaelangelo's David doesn't either. Must not be art then, huh?
Hell yeah I'd like a Commodore 64(bit)! :^)
If they're gonna use the Commodore name though, I hope they take it halfway seriously. There should be preinstalled an emulator and as much software as copyright issues allow, to play nice with those of us with nostalgia for the old Commodores.
More importantly though, it should come with a useful programming language whose learning curve isn't too steep. BASIC has become obsolete, but when I think Commodore, I think typing in code from the back of magazines. Python or something of that nature should be easily accessible right out of the box, letting users tinker and do their own thing on the machine. Writing Javascript in Notepad to be run in IE doesn't count; a computer should come with a way to write real programs, and a machine called Commodore would be the perfect place to start the trend.
As its author, I'm obligated to plug TONG:
:^)
http://www.nongnu.org/tong/
I haven't updated in a while, but I do have some bugfixes and improvements in CVS if you're brave. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but some folks find it to be quite fun, at least in short spurts.
You know, your analogy of PS3 and Saturn gets a lot of mileage...
+ Third home console from the company.
+ Cocky from the success of the predecessor.
+ Geared mainly for the popular graphical style of the day (2D leading up to saturn, 3D leading up to PS3).
+ Controller's basically the previous model, plus a borrowed Nintendo feature (shoulder buttons/motion).
+ High-tech portable companion system nowhere near as popular as Nintendo's low-tech portable.
+ 3rd parties starting to question or drop exclusivity.
+ Shiny and black looks cool even in completely ridiculous shapes, right?
I assume you're joking, but for the sake of anyone who's genuinely confused (I do tend to phrase things poorly, after all) I was speaking of Hula.
I daren't say anything about the Microsoft deal, because I don't have sufficient information yet. The real consequences of that deal will shake out over the next few years. Many a short-term "good deal" becomes a long-term "what-the-crap-were-we-thinking", but I'm not convinced that Novell's "deal with the devil" will turn out that way. Nor am I convinced it won't. In the meantime, I've got code to write and checks to take home, so it's hard to be too unhappy.
My excuses aren't great; basically I've had very little time for programming outside of work. I do hope to still contribute when time permits. As for the bits I was hacking on, the loosest ends got tied up, and some polish was actually put on by other team members. But yes, I do hope to go in and clean up some things I left messy. I wish I could do so on company time, but I consider myself lucky to have been paid to work on Hula while it was going strong. I still frequent #hula on GimpNet (as penduin), though I haven't had much to say lately.
I don't think there's going to be a Maui. I haven't heard what Novell's story is for NetMail customers, either. For some of them, Hula will probably work, I'm not sure what state the migration/upgrade tools were left in though.
Short answer:
No, believe it or not, Microsoft wasn't in on this.
Longer answer:
I work at Novell, and for about a year, I was on Hula. I loved it. I still run it on my home server, and it still bothers me that I didn't get to finish and polish the bits I was hacking on. An insufficient degree of planning and management led to the magic "1.0" getting pushed farther out and being less clearly defined. Inside Novell culture (and elsewhere, I would think), that's a bad sign. Other projects were in the spotlight, some Ximian modus operandi kept a lot of Hula's exciting stuff secret, and a few months back, the already-thin team was cut back dramatically. At the same time, its release deadline was moved up, and Hula was still without what I'd call a manager. The writing was on the wall well before the Microsoft deal came around.
I made the mistake of getting pretty emotionally attached to Hula, so this has all been pretty rough for me to watch. I worked weekends and wee hours on that code, and I'd do it again. I can't blame anyone for using this news as fuel for the fire and/or shouting "Novell just doesn't get it", and I can't blame anyone for being highly suspicious given the recent Microsoft deal (I'm still not sure how I feel about that, by the way). But I can say, and you can take with as much salt you want: No, this was the result, a long time coming, of numerous mistakes, and of other decisions that truly didn't seem like mistakes at the time. As much as I love to blame Microsoft for stuff, the facts say otherwise in this case.
Its death as a Novell-sponsored project is unfortunate, but Hula's not dead - it's grown a small community and a bunch of us still have commit access. Read the mailing list message, take a breather, and if you still feel like being pissed off at Novell or Microsoft, fine. I tried. But at least check out Hula. It still has a ton of promise and is surprisingly useful today.
I can't speak for the pro-Sony lunatics, but I happen to be a different kind of lunatic - a Metal Gear addict. As far as anybody's heard, the next one is PS3-only, just as the last one was PS2-only. Once the price sees a drastic drop or two and the hardware is revised enough that it won't burn my house down or have its precious stupid blu-ray laser fail, by then maybe the inevitable super-edition of Metal Gear Solid 4 will be out and I'll finally cave and get one of these damn things.
...I'm sorry Slashdot, you just caught me in a Sony-inspired grumpy mood.
But at launch? Oh hell no. And for love of Sony? Pff. I could try and say something like "at least they're not as evil as Microsoft", but that's saying so little as to be meaningless. I just don't want to miss out on tasty gaming simply because the console manufacturer pisses me off.
Fucking hell, those I-am-not-a-robot images are hard to read! How the hell much interest is there in spambotting slashdot anyway?
I'm hoping that's true. This "For a limited time only" crap doesn't strike me as very convincing, especially considering that 2007 will be the 30th anniversary of the original Star Wars release.
I'm trying to be pickier these days about how much I whore myself to corporate interests. I really think I'll have another shot at the original, un-fucked-up Star Wars trilogy, so I'm going to wait this out, just as I have the special editions (well, ok, he got me back in the VHS days). It's only a matter of time before Metal Gear Solid 4 shows up and convinces me I need a PlayStation 3, and when that happens I'll have a blue-ray player, which I otherwise wouldn't give two shits about. By that time, perhaps Lucas's boys will find it in their hearts to do a decent transfer after all, in high-definition even.
All that's left then is for HD-DVD to start catching on like wildfire to ensure that I get screwed yet again.
I'll admit the jury's out on HAMMER. It looks to me like there's more going on than prescripted animations, but I could be wrong or overly-optimistic or something.
...It's not even that gesturing is bad, we just want our light saber game, dammit! :^)
Mario Galaxy includes some funky gravity hubs that, when pointed to, attract Mario according to the game's own playful sense of physics. More interestingly, though, hop onto a springy tree-looking thing and you can use the Wiimote to slingshot Mario off of it, quite accurately aiming and determining force within the game's own world. That's the sort of thing I was talking about - real 1:1 action/reaction with the controller, without the need for complex real-world physics.
The Red Steel developers say they're working again on revamped control that's more like what you're talking about. Whether that will come to fruition versus their generic gesturing system, we can only hope. I seriously doubt it was a CPU issue though. Bigger problems arise from the fact that you can swing out in front of you even if you're facing a wall, and how do you reconcile that in the game without putting in too many limitations or hacks that interfere with the 1:1 Wiimote to virtual sword movement.
Are "sidestepping" the direct control issue and "solving" it really mutually exclusive? I'm not convinced that a huge amount of CPU cycles need to be spent to result in physical simulation that looks and feels pretty damn good, even if the underlying algorithms are actually not very sophisticated. Asteroids felt like it understood inertia, momentum, and angular collisions, but what that Atari 2600 was doing under the hood was much more simplistic.
I'll agree that an easy way out for the developers would be to say, "Well, let's just put in a bunch of pre-scripted animations and build a gesture system to sort-of match - there's not enough CPU for a proper physics engine". But I think a more clever developer would be more tempted to take that direct input and map it to some flexible and well-designed reactions that feel just right 99% of the time.
There are a lot of ways to solve the various dynamic action problems, some of which would be very CPU-intensive but some that wouldn't.
:^)
For example, Project HAMMER looks like it does a lot of what you're talking about, turning freeform controller movement into big action/reaction stuff on-screen. There's probably not an ultra-sophisticated physics engine calculating impacts, modeled using complex inertia and friction attributes, but rather much simpler algorithms that plug the angle and velocity of the user's input into simple functions that change the action onscreen. Some kind of middle ground between all-out dynamic collision computation and a collection of preset animations.
There are plenty of other possibilities too. Watching the videos of Super Mario Galaxy, I can't reconcile what's going on with any physics engine I know of. The game's world is its own crazy and wonderful thing where yes, you have direct and precise control that translates into unique reactions, but all on its own terms - outside the "physics calculations are complciated" world we're familiar with.
Nothing's stopping a developer from using an internally simpler approach and mapping it to a realistic game world, either. Even on GameCube, Resident Evil 4 looked realistic but used very primitive methods of collision detection and motion. You could shoot down an axe that was thrown at you, not because the physics were perfectly modeled or because the aiming mechanics were perfectly precise, but actually because they weren't. It still felt real though, thanks to the game's presentation and style. I bet we'll see plenty of stuff that looks for the world like every action is completely dynamic, whether or not it actually is. Don't underestimate the power of faking it!
I pine for the Nintendo/Sega days too, because it was more about the actual gaming at that point. Both Nintendo and Sega wanted to sell entertainment in the form of fun games. Sony and Microsoft entered the gaming market so that they could sell, period. Both have (bought) game development studios now, but they're in it to sell electronics and licenses, not juicy gameplay.
Sony and Microsoft are to videogames as MTV and under-the-table payola are to music. Yeah, you can go there to get your hot new chart-topping entertainment, but if you want to enjoy stuff that has a soul, you'll have to go elsewhere. Fortunately, while MTV may shovel crap unto the masses, music itself is alive and well. Same goes for these non-gaming game consoles - those of us who still want real gaming can still find it.
Personally I couldn't care less if the Wii "loses" the "console war". I don't care if I use a niche platform, as long as it's got what I want. (I run Slackware for cripe's sake...) If it turns out to be Nintendo's Dreamcast, well, so be it. My Dreamcast still runs fine, and has games that my PS2 can only dream of.