I'm with you. We're definitely not alone in wanting corporate branding bullshit to go away; it just disgusts me that there are folks who look at every surface, every medium, anything human senses will ever encounter and imagine how to slap an ad on it.
The problem is, at least to some extent, we'll put up with it, even in our games. Super Monkey Ball is so much fun that I forgive its blazen Dole endorsements. Maybe I'm selling out, or maybe I don't want to miss out on genuinely tasty gameplay just because some corporate schmoozing makes me roll my eyes.
There's plenty of grey area too. Pikmin 2 has real-world branded products in it, but they are used in a very curious way. The planet being explored is obviously Earth, but there are no people. No animals as we know them. Everything about our societies is long extinct in the game. The only remains are our trash that hasn't decomposed: our Duracell batteries, our 7-up bottle caps, parts from our Nintendo controllers. I mean, it's brand-name stuff, but is it advertising? It's almost an anti-corporate message: "What will you leave behind when you are gone? Something that represents you, or just some things?" Beyond that, is King Kong the game itself a big advertisement for King Kong the film? Will Halo the movie be a 90-minute ad for Halo the game? Those relationships are more complicated. A minor character in Metal Gear Solid 2 was jamming out with his generic portable tape player instead of paying full attention to his guard duties; what if he'd been listening to an iPod? Would that be advertising? Would it be more realistic? Either way, he ends up knocked out or dead.
I don't know what to make of in-game ads. The last thing I want when exploring Hyrule with Link is to be reminded that I'm living in a much less fantastic, corporate-driven world where I can't destroy evil with a sword. But if I cared about sports games (or, you know, sports) I'm not sure how offended I'd be by a game's playfield being lined with banners, simulating actual stadiums. In any case, like so many things I have immediate knee-jerk reactions to (in this case, "Hell no! Advertising bad!"), after a few minutes' thought, things are much less clear.:^)
Sweet! That's like... exactly the same as my criteria. Let me know if that happens, so I don't have to keep watching their compatibility list, eh?;^)
I still think Too Human belongs on Wii. From the previews I've read, Silicon Knights is trying to do with dual analog what could be much better with funky new free-pointing. Curse their obsession with cutting-edge graphics! And curse Eternal Darkness for convincing me that everything SK ever develops will be gold!:^)
Well said. Worse, Sony is playing with some misleading definitions.
Give me a new "game console" and I salivate at the idea of playing the latest and greatest Zelda or Final Fantasy or Metal Gear. Give me a new "computer" and I salivate at the idea of setting up a sweet multi-boot system and various flavours of GNU/Linux, and hacking to get my own pet projects up and running on it. Granted, I'm a geek in a world mostly populated by non-geeks, but come on. We geeks are the ones who get excited at the mention of a new fancy "computer".
Sony, unless you're seriously going to let me bang on the hardware with my own code (and preferably with the aid of GCC and other tools of my own choosing) then get off it. The PS3 is a living-room consumer device, packed to the gills with expensive components, designed to run game software to get Blue-ray into living rooms. If the PS2 Linux kit is any indication, only the most superficial gestures will be made to hacker folks like myself. Sure, maybe I can run some custom, patched distribution of Linux, but if I want to do any serious blitting and see what I can really get out of those snazzy new Cells, I bet I'm out of luck.
Really. I bet, oh, say, $600 that I'm out of luck.
I'll agree wholeheartedly with that. Now that I have something resembling a life, I can't pour too much time into games, at least not ones my wife doesn't find interesting.:^)
But the article whines about not getting to see everything a game has to offer, which is a little bit different. Yes, the racing game that refuses to give you the cool cars until you finish first in every cup is artificially making itself "longer", to the detriment of those of us who can't pour that much time into it. But should I be able to tap in some code buttons and immediately be able to jump into all the hidden, secret levels of a platformer? Or for that matter, should I be able to say, "ok, I've played this adventure game for 5 minutes, give me everything and stick me at the final boss battle"?
Ironically, the article rips on the notion of games being measured in hours, which is absolutely valid. Pac-man has great gameplay but it's nonsensical to talk about how "long" it is. But it's by that same measure that the author would like to be able to "have access to everything". With a book, you can skip to the last chapter if you really want to, but that's neither the way the author would want you to read it nor the best way to experience it. In a video game, the magic is not in the linear literary work but in the "live", interactive experience. The progression of a game itself is not the storyline it may or may not contain, but that by the time you finish it (if it even has an ending), you're interacting on a relatively deep level. The play itself is the progress, not which map you get to see or what car you drive. And that kind of progress doesn't have a proper analog if we talk about flipping to the last chapter of a book. It's an experience, which really doesn't map well to "let me have it all right now".
I've played through each of the Metal Gear Solid games a few times. The story is always the same (with some minor branches depending on the player's actions), but it's a different experience every time. At first, I was just awful at playing the game, was lucky to walk ten yards without getting caught, was just terrible at battles, and used the "Very Easy" which let me get quite a bit out of the game anyway. Now I play through on "Hard" with the option that if I'm spotted, it's game over. Totally different gaming experience. I know all the bosses, I've seen all the maps (except maybe some very tricky secret spots, which I think is great, no game should have to disclose everything) but the game goes on because I can play it differently now. It's a more complex game by miles and miles than Donkey Kong and its four repeating levels, but growing into the gameplay works exactly the same way.
Maybe the problem is that so many games don't provide good compromises like that. Every game probably should have some manner of easy mode that lets you experience basically everything the game has to offer, if only on a shallow level. Once the player is more familiar with a game and its mechanics, that's when the real game progress is happening, but we've been trained to think of games in terms of "hours" and "endings", so maybe more developers need to throw us a bone. Ikaruga (great game) could really use an infinite-lives mode to let sucky players get to the end, because getting to the end isn't the point, learning to chain kills and navigate swarms of obstacles artfully is the point. It in fact has such an infinite-lives mode, but you have to play the game for X number of hours before you have access to it. The requirement is actually not totally unfair if I remember right, but it's definitely higher than it should be. For those of us who want to reach the end, let us. If that's what it takes to hook us on the gameplay and get us really into it, it will be worth any compromises a cheap-way-through makes to a game.
I like the runner-up better too. Worse, my X server is spitting up a non-antialiased font in the new theme. Time to figure that out, I suppose. Hasn't mattered 'til now.:^)
I, for one, proudly watch DVDs under GNU/Linux, whether some giant media conglomerates think it should be legal for me to do so or not. It's pathetic that someone had to write (any equivilant of) deCSS to make it work, but you know what they say about necessity being the mother of invention. CSS and all forms of DRM are just problems, problems that can be solved in software. (Yes, even hardware DRM schemes. You don't think hardware is emulated and tested before it's etched in silicon?)
On a side note, who gives a flying fuck what Real thinks, anyway? "Do XYZ or die" is a funny message for a dead and irrelevant technology company to be sending.
And let's say Sony, Disney, MGM and whoever-the-hell else all decide that all their content will forever be locked up by digital restrictions, and they successfully buy more laws that make it not only illegal but even difficult to get our entertainment (that we've purchased copies of) to run on whatever system we please. Who freaking cares? Give me independant films and music then, odds are pretty good that the content will be at least as interesting even if the production values aren't much to brag about. I'll be damned if I'm going to let anybody slap DRM on anything I shoot with my own equipment and edit on my GNU/Linux box.
If it's a choice between freedom and convenient entertainment, it's a no-brainer. I already made that decision once, when I ditched Windows and all its games in favor of an empowering, useful, and curiosity-friendly OS.
This article makes broad, knee-jerk statements about a wide and diverse community based on a few scattered facts and ideas. Which I'm sure is different than the statistics-skewing and fanboyism being ranted about. Somehow.
You're right, Nintendo is supposedly already preparing a made-over version of the DS. And it only seems natural given their history of miniaturizing and tweaking their systems, handhelds especially.
It must be a matter of taste, 'cause I think the current DS is a pretty slick-looking. For folks with tiny hands I can imagine it might be a little cumbersome, but it feels just right to me. To each his own. I'll probably grab an upgraded unit when they roll out too, so my wife and I can both have one.:^) She can have the "new hotness" version, I'm quite happy with my DS as it is.
I thought the lack of online battle mode was a bit of a bum deal too, at first. It's actually a pretty hard problem technically, as even a small amount of lag could seriously hurt a twitch game like Mario Kart's battle mode. But beyond that, I've got to hand it to Mario Kart DS's online mode: it is absolutely ridiculous how easy it is to get going.
Choose the online mode, tweak which opponents you want to be hooked up with if you care to, and boom, you're lining up a match. A minute later, everybody's picking their characters and voting on tracks.
For every mode and option Nintendo could have added besides a straight-up set of four races, they would have divided the speed and painlessness of hooking up and going. They could have piled on more status monitors and features to see what the estimated wait time to jump into game type XYZ would be, but then suddenly the magic of this ridiculously-easy and quick setup starts to fade away.
So, "WTF were they thinking?" They were thinking that players don't enjoy moments of "WTF does this mean?" and "WTF am I waiting for?", and they put together one super-polished online mode. At the expense of rich features? Yeah, I suppose. But it's hella fun, and local matchups are better than ever if you're a Battle Mode fanatic.
Wow. Well I'm definitely with you that Linus is a hero. He's one of mine too.
I'll get this out of the way now: I don't use KDE or Gnome, but I use apps from each (and more apps from neither) and I see both room and need for both the simple/underwhelming approach and the kitchen-sink/overwhelming approach that Gnome and KDE respectively seem to gravitate around.
Linus is a great leader, no doubt, and makes tons of very good and well-reasoned decisions about complex technical and user-related issues on a daily basis. I think his suggestions, however blunt, to the Gnome development community are worth his while making and worth Gnome's while considering. Even if it's more myth and stereotype than fact, letting "it will confuse users" become an excuse to make less powerful software would be a bad idea. At the same time, it's not as though KDE couldn't learn some things from Gnome either. Sensible defaults, a concentrated effort not to overwhelm the user, and a more unified right-tool-for-the-job model are really appealing concepts in Gnome and often enough rather neglected in KDE. Let's not make the mistake of saying that somebody's gotten everything right. There is no truly one-size-fits-all hat, and there is also no adjustable hat that's not slightly clumsy.
Besides that though, I wonder how wise it is to say, hey, Linus knows his shit, so I'm going to bail on Gnome and be a KDE guy now. Taste and personality have a huge amount to do with what desktops you might like, moreso than what technologies underly each or what the design process is for either. Linus is my hero too, but just because the xconfig target of the kernel's makefile builds and launches a Qt app, and just because he prefers the powerful features KDE exposes to Gnome's simpler interface, doesn't mean I work the same way he does or like the same stuff in my environment. Emacs is my main text editor, but I wouldn't tell anybody to switch from vi unless they found themselves wishing for lisp interpretation - they probably use vi because it works better for them.
Anyhow, I think even Linus would tell you not to take his word as given, figure out what you like and think for yourself. His words aren't holier than anyone else's, no matter how great he is at keeping our favourite kernel together. All that said, if he's inspired you to check out KDE after not checking it out in a while, well then that's good. Tradition and laziness shouldn't dictate a person's desktop either.:^)
...The Win32 "Animator Studio" was ok too, but holy crap, that old DOS Animator Pro was one of my favorite programs ever. I'm quite fond of Gimp and its animation plugin (whose name eludes me for the moment) but I fell in love with PC animation with Animator Pro. I still use the term "Vgrad" from time to time!:^)
Oh, and the "Poco" script language... Man. I never thought I'd see the day where I missed running anything from DOS.
C'mon Autodesk, dig up that ancient code and release it into the wild! I'd even hack away at it myself if it meant I could get it to run on GNU/Linux...
...but if someone reviews a game, there shall be hell to pay. What kind of nerd reads AND plays games? (that was sarcasm, in case it got lost in the conversion to text)
Really though, I'm all over Castlevania. Haven't bought one of those since Circle of the Moon, but this one looks too sweet to pass up. I'm not so sure I'd even want to play a game about performing high-pressure surgery, but I think it's really cool that such a game exists. A gory game about saving lives... kinda refreshing, eh?
What I find disturbing is that when I went to the mall last weekend, the Christmas madness was beginning already. There are shops skipping over two perfectly good holidays! Christianity has not only invaded territories and cultures, it's usurping nearby MONTHS as well!
Really though, I wonder if, long-term, it really is so concrete as you say. Yeah, retailers "create" a Christmas rush, seemingly moreso every year, and the feedback they get is positive since consumer spending skyrockets during that time. But you and I and several dozen other/.'ers aren't the only ones who find it a bit riciculous. I may be crediting humanity (or at least the American public) with more sense than it actually has, but I think that over time, sheep-like behaviour can only decrease. Whether it takes a long time or not, eventually most people are probably in some way going to get sick of following artificial rushes. Even if I'm wrong about that, at some point the creditors are going to have to be more responsible about who they hand out those little magic plastic cards to. People can't spend more and more and more forever. Creditors can go ahead and buy legislation to make it harder to declare bankruptcy, that will bail them out for a while, but eventually they're going to have to act more responsibly. As a result, so are those dealt credit. And if the "demand" side of this retail economy we're examining becomes more responsible, the "supply" side will have to adjust.
Or maybe I'm full of it. My $.02 could be a drop in a giant bucket of loan-sharked debt for all anyone knows.:^)
...that is, Nintendo follows through and applies this policy to games as well. Why on Earth Electroplankton (quirky DS music-making "game") came out long ago in Japan and will get only a limited release in the 'States in January is beyond me, especially considering there is absolutely nothing to translate. In the past, the N64 DD expansion and its Mario Artist games never made it across the pond at all, and throughout all of Nintendo's history they've given Europe and Australia the shaft big-time, games sometimes coming out a year or more later than in Japan and/or the US.
Now if they'd only ditch their ridiculous region locking (to their credit, no Game Boy or DS system is reigon-locked, which I've taken advantage of several times) I'd be a happy camper. One step at a time, maybe.:^)
I'm surprisingly excited about the Revolution... As much as I love traditional video games, I've got to say the idea of some wacky new directions has a lot of appeal. After getting a taste of that "brave new world" stuff on the DS, I'm pretty confident it's not just rhetoric. New experiences, here we come! Not that I won't be suckered into buying a PS3 as well, I'm sure...
I don't know if it's even rooting for the underdog. It's just telling of how Microsoft and Apple target their products:
Apple and Macintosh are geared towards creating, be it composing news articles, illustrations, music, whatever.
Microsoft and Windows are geared towards consuming, everything "out there" is content that the Windows user pulls down.
Obviously those are gross generalizations, I've personally created more stuff on Windows than MacOS (and more yet on GNU/Linux) but look at the way each desktop is set up. To someone like an author, it's very likely that something from Apple will fit their needs better than something from Microsoft. To someone who wants to download pr0n, Microsoft's OS is where it's at. It's a bit funny that neither Microsoft or Apple really respects the user as a consumer (DRM, proprietary formats, arbitrary limitations), but Apple at least seems to respect the user as a creator.
GNU/Linux is, I suppose, even farther away from Microsoft on whatever continuum I'm talking about than Apple is. Not so hot in terms of consumer-oriented actions (though at least there's no DRM-style bullshit) and so far into the creator's side that the author types can change the OS itself....just a random tangent I thought I'd throw out there.:^)
"Baldrick, do you know what 'irony' is?" "Yeah, it's like goldy or bronzy only iron."
Now granted, it wasn't irony, it was sarcasm, I just like quoting BlackAdder. But yes, two points, the bubble and recession was exactly my point. MMORPGs are currently growing, therefore they will be wildly, insanely successful....We've heard this rubbish before.:^)
Totally with you; I enjoyed this film in a really unique way. No other movie I remember seeing (in a traditional cinema, anyway) captured me the way March of the Penguins did. It was very emotional, and I'm left in sheer wonder of life, having seen its cycles played out in such an uninhabitable place. It was watching the macro version of life itself in motion - almost every individual movement a penguin makes looks awkward and clumsy, but it's all a natural part of a vital chain of events without which there could be no survival. Any misstep along the way, if not for the numbers involved, could end it all instantly. Only by beating the odds over a long period of time can the population even sustain itself, let alone grow. Just boggling and awe-inspiring. Reminds me of a neat counter-statement to the idea of intelligent design: you couldn't create something that beautiful if you tried. Life! Ahh, it really does feel wonderful and refreshing to immerse yourself in the thoughts and feelings of life itself, to take a break from all the artificial layers of society and technology and beurocracy that we've built on top of it and so frequently get lost in. I'd like to someday thank the filmmakers personally for putting together something that evokes all that.
I'm also pleasantly surprised that it's doing so well. There were about six people at the screen when I saw it. Not that I'm complaining - no shrieking kids, no cellphones with human-shaped accessories, it was really an ideal and relaxing way to take in a film of this quality.
I've got an MSDN subscription through work, complete with misspelled last name and everything.
Anyhow, the first thing I did when I found out this was available was to...scroll down and see if there were any more interesting stories this morning. There were, but since this one's specifically asking what I think, I feel it's my duty to post.
So here's my quick review: I don't want to fire up IE to make MSDN's download tool will work, much less install and run this nonsense. Windows XP is still in beta as far as I'm concerned. Every time it screws up, if it can recover at all, it asks me to send a core dump or stack trace or something back to Microsoft. I'd hate to see what they think "beta quality" software is if XP's been "release" for how many years now. And don't get me started on Visual Studio.NET 2003. Attach to this process... oh, where'd Studio go? No, I don't want to send an error report to Microsoft!
So there you have it from an MSDN Subscriber: Don't know, don't care.
It's ok by me if a game uses pop music. Crazi Taxi featured some Bad Religion and Offspring, which matched the insane mood of the game perfectly. (DAMN I love that game!) Tony Hawk games do the same thing, using existing, high-engergy music that's *gasp* popular. That, I don't have a problem with. Some of us, myself included, might not get along real well with the kinds of disposable pop music that tend to be popular nowadays, and maybe that was your point, but I really think it's a seperate issue.
It doesn't surprise me one bit that MTV would feature this kind of game in its awards. I mean, it's the same stuff they advertise, on the odd chance they're showing something music-related, that is. But the reason this rubs me the wrong way, as I suspect it does others, is that these are not examples of video game music. They're examples of music, that was used in video games. Big difference.
Metroid Prime and Echoes have excellent music, both moody ambient type stuff and really gripping themes. Zelda: Wind Waker has a huge variety of music with a really wonderful, almost Celtic feel to it, incorporated into a half-dozen very memorable and well-arranged pieces that actually morph in subtle ways in real-time according to the player's situation. That kind of stuff is truly video game music, and deserves recognition as such. Pop songs slapped into a game, as well as that might work, simply are not "video game music".
There's some funny in-between stuff too. Songs adapted for rhythm games like Dance Dance revolution or Donkey Konga 2 fall into some sort of gray area, since even a straight pop-to-game song gets intertwined with the gameplay in those cases. In Sims 2, at least one pop band re-recorded some of their songs in jibberish "sim-speak", to melt it into the game's world. Exploring those kinds of things would have been really interesting, but it's not as though the world turns to MTV when "interesting" is what they want to see.
Man, I feel bad that I don't feel worse. Here we have someone who's died a violent death, and we're having quite a bit of fun joking about it.
Now obviously I don't think someone who spends his time choking thousands of servers and annoying millions of people should be given a medal, but I hope nobody here honestly believes that beating him to death would really be justified.
All the same, I'm finding all these morbid jokes to be pretty amusing. Perhaps I'm just a sick bastard. Or maybe those darn violent videogames have warped my mind and I can't tell fact from fiction anymore. What's that, violence doesn't matter anymore, it's sex in games that ruins people? Guess I'm behind the times. Probably though, it's just part of the human condition: it's not in our face, we know nothing redeeming and something damning about this person, and as a result we're far enough away that we can even joke about it.
I'm sure there's a good one to be made about him coming back as a "zombie" and continuing to spam, but I'm not sure how to put it together.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm with you. We're definitely not alone in wanting corporate branding bullshit to go away; it just disgusts me that there are folks who look at every surface, every medium, anything human senses will ever encounter and imagine how to slap an ad on it.
:^)
The problem is, at least to some extent, we'll put up with it, even in our games. Super Monkey Ball is so much fun that I forgive its blazen Dole endorsements. Maybe I'm selling out, or maybe I don't want to miss out on genuinely tasty gameplay just because some corporate schmoozing makes me roll my eyes.
There's plenty of grey area too. Pikmin 2 has real-world branded products in it, but they are used in a very curious way. The planet being explored is obviously Earth, but there are no people. No animals as we know them. Everything about our societies is long extinct in the game. The only remains are our trash that hasn't decomposed: our Duracell batteries, our 7-up bottle caps, parts from our Nintendo controllers. I mean, it's brand-name stuff, but is it advertising? It's almost an anti-corporate message: "What will you leave behind when you are gone? Something that represents you, or just some things?" Beyond that, is King Kong the game itself a big advertisement for King Kong the film? Will Halo the movie be a 90-minute ad for Halo the game? Those relationships are more complicated. A minor character in Metal Gear Solid 2 was jamming out with his generic portable tape player instead of paying full attention to his guard duties; what if he'd been listening to an iPod? Would that be advertising? Would it be more realistic? Either way, he ends up knocked out or dead.
I don't know what to make of in-game ads. The last thing I want when exploring Hyrule with Link is to be reminded that I'm living in a much less fantastic, corporate-driven world where I can't destroy evil with a sword. But if I cared about sports games (or, you know, sports) I'm not sure how offended I'd be by a game's playfield being lined with banners, simulating actual stadiums. In any case, like so many things I have immediate knee-jerk reactions to (in this case, "Hell no! Advertising bad!"), after a few minutes' thought, things are much less clear.
Sweet! That's like... exactly the same as my criteria. Let me know if that happens, so I don't have to keep watching their compatibility list, eh? ;^)
:^)
I still think Too Human belongs on Wii. From the previews I've read, Silicon Knights is trying to do with dual analog what could be much better with funky new free-pointing. Curse their obsession with cutting-edge graphics! And curse Eternal Darkness for convincing me that everything SK ever develops will be gold!
Well said. Worse, Sony is playing with some misleading definitions.
Give me a new "game console" and I salivate at the idea of playing the latest and greatest Zelda or Final Fantasy or Metal Gear. Give me a new "computer" and I salivate at the idea of setting up a sweet multi-boot system and various flavours of GNU/Linux, and hacking to get my own pet projects up and running on it. Granted, I'm a geek in a world mostly populated by non-geeks, but come on. We geeks are the ones who get excited at the mention of a new fancy "computer".
Sony, unless you're seriously going to let me bang on the hardware with my own code (and preferably with the aid of GCC and other tools of my own choosing) then get off it. The PS3 is a living-room consumer device, packed to the gills with expensive components, designed to run game software to get Blue-ray into living rooms. If the PS2 Linux kit is any indication, only the most superficial gestures will be made to hacker folks like myself. Sure, maybe I can run some custom, patched distribution of Linux, but if I want to do any serious blitting and see what I can really get out of those snazzy new Cells, I bet I'm out of luck.
Really. I bet, oh, say, $600 that I'm out of luck.
I'll agree wholeheartedly with that. Now that I have something resembling a life, I can't pour too much time into games, at least not ones my wife doesn't find interesting. :^)
But the article whines about not getting to see everything a game has to offer, which is a little bit different. Yes, the racing game that refuses to give you the cool cars until you finish first in every cup is artificially making itself "longer", to the detriment of those of us who can't pour that much time into it. But should I be able to tap in some code buttons and immediately be able to jump into all the hidden, secret levels of a platformer? Or for that matter, should I be able to say, "ok, I've played this adventure game for 5 minutes, give me everything and stick me at the final boss battle"?
Ironically, the article rips on the notion of games being measured in hours, which is absolutely valid. Pac-man has great gameplay but it's nonsensical to talk about how "long" it is. But it's by that same measure that the author would like to be able to "have access to everything". With a book, you can skip to the last chapter if you really want to, but that's neither the way the author would want you to read it nor the best way to experience it. In a video game, the magic is not in the linear literary work but in the "live", interactive experience. The progression of a game itself is not the storyline it may or may not contain, but that by the time you finish it (if it even has an ending), you're interacting on a relatively deep level. The play itself is the progress, not which map you get to see or what car you drive. And that kind of progress doesn't have a proper analog if we talk about flipping to the last chapter of a book. It's an experience, which really doesn't map well to "let me have it all right now".
I've played through each of the Metal Gear Solid games a few times. The story is always the same (with some minor branches depending on the player's actions), but it's a different experience every time. At first, I was just awful at playing the game, was lucky to walk ten yards without getting caught, was just terrible at battles, and used the "Very Easy" which let me get quite a bit out of the game anyway. Now I play through on "Hard" with the option that if I'm spotted, it's game over. Totally different gaming experience. I know all the bosses, I've seen all the maps (except maybe some very tricky secret spots, which I think is great, no game should have to disclose everything) but the game goes on because I can play it differently now. It's a more complex game by miles and miles than Donkey Kong and its four repeating levels, but growing into the gameplay works exactly the same way.
Maybe the problem is that so many games don't provide good compromises like that. Every game probably should have some manner of easy mode that lets you experience basically everything the game has to offer, if only on a shallow level. Once the player is more familiar with a game and its mechanics, that's when the real game progress is happening, but we've been trained to think of games in terms of "hours" and "endings", so maybe more developers need to throw us a bone. Ikaruga (great game) could really use an infinite-lives mode to let sucky players get to the end, because getting to the end isn't the point, learning to chain kills and navigate swarms of obstacles artfully is the point. It in fact has such an infinite-lives mode, but you have to play the game for X number of hours before you have access to it. The requirement is actually not totally unfair if I remember right, but it's definitely higher than it should be. For those of us who want to reach the end, let us. If that's what it takes to hook us on the gameplay and get us really into it, it will be worth any compromises a cheap-way-through makes to a game.
I like the runner-up better too. Worse, my X server is spitting up a non-antialiased font in the new theme. Time to figure that out, I suppose. Hasn't mattered 'til now. :^)
That'll teach me to look up words I don't understand. Uff da. Well, at least it wasn't a tubgirl link.
(I know, off-topic... but seriously!)
> So, you don't watch DVDs?
I, for one, proudly watch DVDs under GNU/Linux, whether some giant media conglomerates think it should be legal for me to do so or not. It's pathetic that someone had to write (any equivilant of) deCSS to make it work, but you know what they say about necessity being the mother of invention. CSS and all forms of DRM are just problems, problems that can be solved in software. (Yes, even hardware DRM schemes. You don't think hardware is emulated and tested before it's etched in silicon?)
On a side note, who gives a flying fuck what Real thinks, anyway? "Do XYZ or die" is a funny message for a dead and irrelevant technology company to be sending.
And let's say Sony, Disney, MGM and whoever-the-hell else all decide that all their content will forever be locked up by digital restrictions, and they successfully buy more laws that make it not only illegal but even difficult to get our entertainment (that we've purchased copies of) to run on whatever system we please. Who freaking cares? Give me independant films and music then, odds are pretty good that the content will be at least as interesting even if the production values aren't much to brag about. I'll be damned if I'm going to let anybody slap DRM on anything I shoot with my own equipment and edit on my GNU/Linux box.
If it's a choice between freedom and convenient entertainment, it's a no-brainer. I already made that decision once, when I ditched Windows and all its games in favor of an empowering, useful, and curiosity-friendly OS.
Here here.
This article makes broad, knee-jerk statements about a wide and diverse community based on a few scattered facts and ideas. Which I'm sure is different than the statistics-skewing and fanboyism being ranted about. Somehow.
Count me as proud, damn proud, to be a Wisconsinite! ...'Course, I live in Utah now, writing Free software for Novell, but HELL YEAH all the same!
I'll have to have some extra beer and cheese tonight.
You're right, Nintendo is supposedly already preparing a made-over version of the DS. And it only seems natural given their history of miniaturizing and tweaking their systems, handhelds especially.
:^) She can have the "new hotness" version, I'm quite happy with my DS as it is.
It must be a matter of taste, 'cause I think the current DS is a pretty slick-looking. For folks with tiny hands I can imagine it might be a little cumbersome, but it feels just right to me. To each his own. I'll probably grab an upgraded unit when they roll out too, so my wife and I can both have one.
I thought the lack of online battle mode was a bit of a bum deal too, at first. It's actually a pretty hard problem technically, as even a small amount of lag could seriously hurt a twitch game like Mario Kart's battle mode. But beyond that, I've got to hand it to Mario Kart DS's online mode: it is absolutely ridiculous how easy it is to get going.
Choose the online mode, tweak which opponents you want to be hooked up with if you care to, and boom, you're lining up a match. A minute later, everybody's picking their characters and voting on tracks.
For every mode and option Nintendo could have added besides a straight-up set of four races, they would have divided the speed and painlessness of hooking up and going. They could have piled on more status monitors and features to see what the estimated wait time to jump into game type XYZ would be, but then suddenly the magic of this ridiculously-easy and quick setup starts to fade away.
So, "WTF were they thinking?" They were thinking that players don't enjoy moments of "WTF does this mean?" and "WTF am I waiting for?", and they put together one super-polished online mode. At the expense of rich features? Yeah, I suppose. But it's hella fun, and local matchups are better than ever if you're a Battle Mode fanatic.
Wow. Well I'm definitely with you that Linus is a hero. He's one of mine too.
:^)
I'll get this out of the way now: I don't use KDE or Gnome, but I use apps from each (and more apps from neither) and I see both room and need for both the simple/underwhelming approach and the kitchen-sink/overwhelming approach that Gnome and KDE respectively seem to gravitate around.
Linus is a great leader, no doubt, and makes tons of very good and well-reasoned decisions about complex technical and user-related issues on a daily basis. I think his suggestions, however blunt, to the Gnome development community are worth his while making and worth Gnome's while considering. Even if it's more myth and stereotype than fact, letting "it will confuse users" become an excuse to make less powerful software would be a bad idea. At the same time, it's not as though KDE couldn't learn some things from Gnome either. Sensible defaults, a concentrated effort not to overwhelm the user, and a more unified right-tool-for-the-job model are really appealing concepts in Gnome and often enough rather neglected in KDE. Let's not make the mistake of saying that somebody's gotten everything right. There is no truly one-size-fits-all hat, and there is also no adjustable hat that's not slightly clumsy.
Besides that though, I wonder how wise it is to say, hey, Linus knows his shit, so I'm going to bail on Gnome and be a KDE guy now. Taste and personality have a huge amount to do with what desktops you might like, moreso than what technologies underly each or what the design process is for either. Linus is my hero too, but just because the xconfig target of the kernel's makefile builds and launches a Qt app, and just because he prefers the powerful features KDE exposes to Gnome's simpler interface, doesn't mean I work the same way he does or like the same stuff in my environment. Emacs is my main text editor, but I wouldn't tell anybody to switch from vi unless they found themselves wishing for lisp interpretation - they probably use vi because it works better for them.
Anyhow, I think even Linus would tell you not to take his word as given, figure out what you like and think for yourself. His words aren't holier than anyone else's, no matter how great he is at keeping our favourite kernel together. All that said, if he's inspired you to check out KDE after not checking it out in a while, well then that's good. Tradition and laziness shouldn't dictate a person's desktop either.
...The Win32 "Animator Studio" was ok too, but holy crap, that old DOS Animator Pro was one of my favorite programs ever. I'm quite fond of Gimp and its animation plugin (whose name eludes me for the moment) but I fell in love with PC animation with Animator Pro. I still use the term "Vgrad" from time to time! :^)
Oh, and the "Poco" script language... Man. I never thought I'd see the day where I missed running anything from DOS.
C'mon Autodesk, dig up that ancient code and release it into the wild! I'd even hack away at it myself if it meant I could get it to run on GNU/Linux...
...but if someone reviews a game, there shall be hell to pay. What kind of nerd reads AND plays games? (that was sarcasm, in case it got lost in the conversion to text)
Really though, I'm all over Castlevania. Haven't bought one of those since Circle of the Moon, but this one looks too sweet to pass up. I'm not so sure I'd even want to play a game about performing high-pressure surgery, but I think it's really cool that such a game exists. A gory game about saving lives... kinda refreshing, eh?
What I find disturbing is that when I went to the mall last weekend, the Christmas madness was beginning already. There are shops skipping over two perfectly good holidays! Christianity has not only invaded territories and cultures, it's usurping nearby MONTHS as well!
/.'ers aren't the only ones who find it a bit riciculous. I may be crediting humanity (or at least the American public) with more sense than it actually has, but I think that over time, sheep-like behaviour can only decrease. Whether it takes a long time or not, eventually most people are probably in some way going to get sick of following artificial rushes. Even if I'm wrong about that, at some point the creditors are going to have to be more responsible about who they hand out those little magic plastic cards to. People can't spend more and more and more forever. Creditors can go ahead and buy legislation to make it harder to declare bankruptcy, that will bail them out for a while, but eventually they're going to have to act more responsibly. As a result, so are those dealt credit. And if the "demand" side of this retail economy we're examining becomes more responsible, the "supply" side will have to adjust.
:^)
Really though, I wonder if, long-term, it really is so concrete as you say. Yeah, retailers "create" a Christmas rush, seemingly moreso every year, and the feedback they get is positive since consumer spending skyrockets during that time. But you and I and several dozen other
Or maybe I'm full of it. My $.02 could be a drop in a giant bucket of loan-sharked debt for all anyone knows.
...that is, Nintendo follows through and applies this policy to games as well. Why on Earth Electroplankton (quirky DS music-making "game") came out long ago in Japan and will get only a limited release in the 'States in January is beyond me, especially considering there is absolutely nothing to translate. In the past, the N64 DD expansion and its Mario Artist games never made it across the pond at all, and throughout all of Nintendo's history they've given Europe and Australia the shaft big-time, games sometimes coming out a year or more later than in Japan and/or the US.
:^)
Now if they'd only ditch their ridiculous region locking (to their credit, no Game Boy or DS system is reigon-locked, which I've taken advantage of several times) I'd be a happy camper. One step at a time, maybe.
I'm surprisingly excited about the Revolution... As much as I love traditional video games, I've got to say the idea of some wacky new directions has a lot of appeal. After getting a taste of that "brave new world" stuff on the DS, I'm pretty confident it's not just rhetoric. New experiences, here we come! Not that I won't be suckered into buying a PS3 as well, I'm sure...
I don't know if it's even rooting for the underdog. It's just telling of how Microsoft and Apple target their products:
...just a random tangent I thought I'd throw out there. :^)
Apple and Macintosh are geared towards creating, be it composing news articles, illustrations, music, whatever.
Microsoft and Windows are geared towards consuming, everything "out there" is content that the Windows user pulls down.
Obviously those are gross generalizations, I've personally created more stuff on Windows than MacOS (and more yet on GNU/Linux) but look at the way each desktop is set up. To someone like an author, it's very likely that something from Apple will fit their needs better than something from Microsoft. To someone who wants to download pr0n, Microsoft's OS is where it's at. It's a bit funny that neither Microsoft or Apple really respects the user as a consumer (DRM, proprietary formats, arbitrary limitations), but Apple at least seems to respect the user as a creator.
GNU/Linux is, I suppose, even farther away from Microsoft on whatever continuum I'm talking about than Apple is. Not so hot in terms of consumer-oriented actions (though at least there's no DRM-style bullshit) and so far into the creator's side that the author types can change the OS itself.
Red Dwarf wasn't even mentioned! Whoever came up with this list is a complete and utter smeghead.
"Baldrick, do you know what 'irony' is?"
...We've heard this rubbish before. :^)
"Yeah, it's like goldy or bronzy only iron."
Now granted, it wasn't irony, it was sarcasm, I just like quoting BlackAdder. But yes, two points, the bubble and recession was exactly my point. MMORPGs are currently growing, therefore they will be wildly, insanely successful.
...will keep growing the same way. That's why all dot-coms have been so insanely, wildly successful since the late 90s.
Totally with you; I enjoyed this film in a really unique way. No other movie I remember seeing (in a traditional cinema, anyway) captured me the way March of the Penguins did. It was very emotional, and I'm left in sheer wonder of life, having seen its cycles played out in such an uninhabitable place. It was watching the macro version of life itself in motion - almost every individual movement a penguin makes looks awkward and clumsy, but it's all a natural part of a vital chain of events without which there could be no survival. Any misstep along the way, if not for the numbers involved, could end it all instantly. Only by beating the odds over a long period of time can the population even sustain itself, let alone grow. Just boggling and awe-inspiring. Reminds me of a neat counter-statement to the idea of intelligent design: you couldn't create something that beautiful if you tried. Life! Ahh, it really does feel wonderful and refreshing to immerse yourself in the thoughts and feelings of life itself, to take a break from all the artificial layers of society and technology and beurocracy that we've built on top of it and so frequently get lost in. I'd like to someday thank the filmmakers personally for putting together something that evokes all that.
I'm also pleasantly surprised that it's doing so well. There were about six people at the screen when I saw it. Not that I'm complaining - no shrieking kids, no cellphones with human-shaped accessories, it was really an ideal and relaxing way to take in a film of this quality.
Didn't even notice that... But I did notice that they have FLASHLIGHTS attached to their FRIGGIN' GUNS...!
I've got an MSDN subscription through work, complete with misspelled last name and everything.
...scroll down and see if there were any more interesting stories this morning. There were, but since this one's specifically asking what I think, I feel it's my duty to post.
.NET 2003. Attach to this process... oh, where'd Studio go? No, I don't want to send an error report to Microsoft!
Anyhow, the first thing I did when I found out this was available was to
So here's my quick review: I don't want to fire up IE to make MSDN's download tool will work, much less install and run this nonsense. Windows XP is still in beta as far as I'm concerned. Every time it screws up, if it can recover at all, it asks me to send a core dump or stack trace or something back to Microsoft. I'd hate to see what they think "beta quality" software is if XP's been "release" for how many years now. And don't get me started on Visual Studio
So there you have it from an MSDN Subscriber: Don't know, don't care.
It's ok by me if a game uses pop music. Crazi Taxi featured some Bad Religion and Offspring, which matched the insane mood of the game perfectly. (DAMN I love that game!) Tony Hawk games do the same thing, using existing, high-engergy music that's *gasp* popular. That, I don't have a problem with. Some of us, myself included, might not get along real well with the kinds of disposable pop music that tend to be popular nowadays, and maybe that was your point, but I really think it's a seperate issue.
It doesn't surprise me one bit that MTV would feature this kind of game in its awards. I mean, it's the same stuff they advertise, on the odd chance they're showing something music-related, that is. But the reason this rubs me the wrong way, as I suspect it does others, is that these are not examples of video game music. They're examples of music, that was used in video games. Big difference.
Metroid Prime and Echoes have excellent music, both moody ambient type stuff and really gripping themes. Zelda: Wind Waker has a huge variety of music with a really wonderful, almost Celtic feel to it, incorporated into a half-dozen very memorable and well-arranged pieces that actually morph in subtle ways in real-time according to the player's situation. That kind of stuff is truly video game music, and deserves recognition as such. Pop songs slapped into a game, as well as that might work, simply are not "video game music".
There's some funny in-between stuff too. Songs adapted for rhythm games like Dance Dance revolution or Donkey Konga 2 fall into some sort of gray area, since even a straight pop-to-game song gets intertwined with the gameplay in those cases. In Sims 2, at least one pop band re-recorded some of their songs in jibberish "sim-speak", to melt it into the game's world. Exploring those kinds of things would have been really interesting, but it's not as though the world turns to MTV when "interesting" is what they want to see.
Oops, my two cents are spent.
Man, I feel bad that I don't feel worse. Here we have someone who's died a violent death, and we're having quite a bit of fun joking about it.
Now obviously I don't think someone who spends his time choking thousands of servers and annoying millions of people should be given a medal, but I hope nobody here honestly believes that beating him to death would really be justified.
All the same, I'm finding all these morbid jokes to be pretty amusing. Perhaps I'm just a sick bastard. Or maybe those darn violent videogames have warped my mind and I can't tell fact from fiction anymore. What's that, violence doesn't matter anymore, it's sex in games that ruins people? Guess I'm behind the times. Probably though, it's just part of the human condition: it's not in our face, we know nothing redeeming and something damning about this person, and as a result we're far enough away that we can even joke about it.
I'm sure there's a good one to be made about him coming back as a "zombie" and continuing to spam, but I'm not sure how to put it together.