Perhaps the person who posted the article should have used the preview button, to avoid embarassing typos like "Tolkein," which appears twice (once in the title, another in the description)?
As for the game itself... unfortunately, it looks uncomfortably like a WarCraft III clone using the land of Middle Earth as a draw. I'm also a tad concerned about one aspect of the interface - some of the screenshots would seem to indicate a limit to the number of units selectable at once? This makes it a bit hard to order your thousand-strong horde of Uruk-Hai to attack Helm's Deep as one unified, screaming mob.
Among other reasons, it is *fan*subbing, so typically it creates an installed fanbase in a newly-licensed country that, more often than not, will lap up the higher-quality licensed DVDs and merchandising. Also, in some cases, a series is considered so niche that it would never be released outside of Japan. In those cases, I suppose the companies don't mind fansubs too much because, short of importing the Japanese DVD and hiring a personal Japanese translator, there would be no other way for a foreigner interested in the series to watch it. Finally, sometimes the popularity of a fansub brings to light a new market for a series that the companies had previously thought would be profitless... and we all know how all companies jump at the chance to make a profit.
All your base... oh, forget it.
Having watched a fair amount of anime myself, I can attest to this... often in the Japanese intro/extro songs of anime, the singer will be crooning along in Japanese, and then burst out with "My Sweet Emotion!" or "Cloud Age Symphony!". I've even seen it infect very well-known anime like Miyazaki's Spirited away... in the Japanese version, the boiler-room man, Kamaje (sp?) yells out "Good-o luck!" at one point.
If you're willing to take a slightly harder but more rewarding route with the kids, I'd suggest Blitz Basic, available over at BlitzBasic.com . Unlike many of the other applications mentioned already, it's a true programming language, with a nice clean syntax (somewhere between C and Basic) and very good support for a wide variety of media. It's also blazing fast in comparison.
I'd suggest this route as a sort of middle road between game programming libraries such as Allegro, which are likely to be frustrating for such young kids, and pre-packaged game-makers like Klik-n-Play, which they will very likely find too limiting.
Also, there's already a large, very newbie-friendly community over at BlitzCoder.com , of which I am an active member. The site has very active and helpful forums, as well as a broad range of tutorials written for everyone from complete beginniners to experienced programmers.
Interestingly enough, no, it doesn't choke on DivX. I saw an old freeware demo of DivX running on a GBA emulator; the video quality was fairly poor, but it *did* work (the video in question was of the original Zelda demo for the 'Cube).
Broadband wasn't really intended to be used for P2P networks in the first place. It was mostly advertised as a way to cut down on loading times for web pages and interacting with media-rich pages. Even for those media-rich pages, the user isn't constantly downloading at the maximum rate; it's sporadic, at best, and most sites don't provide download speeds that can max out a broadband connection. In fact, the only sites I've found that can are those of Microsoft and AOL. With P2P software, however, it's possible for the connection to be maxed out almost all the time - and that's a problem for the broadband providers, because they assumed that not everyone would be using their connections to their full potential all the time (as a matter of fact, I believe many could only provide a hundredth of the bandwidth necessary to do that).
Perhaps this will lead to a divergence in broadband services: one service that's actually only really providing the bandwidth of a dial-up connection, but in concentrated bursts(this is what broadband was originally intended for) and "true", always full speed broadband for the P2P users. Needless to say, the second option would be much more expensive...
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Perhaps the person who posted the article should have used the preview button, to avoid embarassing typos like "Tolkein," which appears twice (once in the title, another in the description)? As for the game itself... unfortunately, it looks uncomfortably like a WarCraft III clone using the land of Middle Earth as a draw. I'm also a tad concerned about one aspect of the interface - some of the screenshots would seem to indicate a limit to the number of units selectable at once? This makes it a bit hard to order your thousand-strong horde of Uruk-Hai to attack Helm's Deep as one unified, screaming mob.
Among other reasons, it is *fan*subbing, so typically it creates an installed fanbase in a newly-licensed country that, more often than not, will lap up the higher-quality licensed DVDs and merchandising. Also, in some cases, a series is considered so niche that it would never be released outside of Japan. In those cases, I suppose the companies don't mind fansubs too much because, short of importing the Japanese DVD and hiring a personal Japanese translator, there would be no other way for a foreigner interested in the series to watch it. Finally, sometimes the popularity of a fansub brings to light a new market for a series that the companies had previously thought would be profitless... and we all know how all companies jump at the chance to make a profit.
All your base... oh, forget it. Having watched a fair amount of anime myself, I can attest to this... often in the Japanese intro/extro songs of anime, the singer will be crooning along in Japanese, and then burst out with "My Sweet Emotion!" or "Cloud Age Symphony!". I've even seen it infect very well-known anime like Miyazaki's Spirited away... in the Japanese version, the boiler-room man, Kamaje (sp?) yells out "Good-o luck!" at one point.
A lot of the waste could actually be recycled into usable fuel, but in the US it can't be because of legal restrictions. *sighs*
If you're willing to take a slightly harder but more rewarding route with the kids, I'd suggest Blitz Basic, available over at BlitzBasic.com . Unlike many of the other applications mentioned already, it's a true programming language, with a nice clean syntax (somewhere between C and Basic) and very good support for a wide variety of media. It's also blazing fast in comparison. I'd suggest this route as a sort of middle road between game programming libraries such as Allegro, which are likely to be frustrating for such young kids, and pre-packaged game-makers like Klik-n-Play, which they will very likely find too limiting. Also, there's already a large, very newbie-friendly community over at BlitzCoder.com , of which I am an active member. The site has very active and helpful forums, as well as a broad range of tutorials written for everyone from complete beginniners to experienced programmers.
Interestingly enough, no, it doesn't choke on DivX. I saw an old freeware demo of DivX running on a GBA emulator; the video quality was fairly poor, but it *did* work (the video in question was of the original Zelda demo for the 'Cube).
Broadband wasn't really intended to be used for P2P networks in the first place. It was mostly advertised as a way to cut down on loading times for web pages and interacting with media-rich pages. Even for those media-rich pages, the user isn't constantly downloading at the maximum rate; it's sporadic, at best, and most sites don't provide download speeds that can max out a broadband connection. In fact, the only sites I've found that can are those of Microsoft and AOL. With P2P software, however, it's possible for the connection to be maxed out almost all the time - and that's a problem for the broadband providers, because they assumed that not everyone would be using their connections to their full potential all the time (as a matter of fact, I believe many could only provide a hundredth of the bandwidth necessary to do that).
Perhaps this will lead to a divergence in broadband services: one service that's actually only really providing the bandwidth of a dial-up connection, but in concentrated bursts(this is what broadband was originally intended for) and "true", always full speed broadband for the P2P users. Needless to say, the second option would be much more expensive...