I believe they mentioned that customers were asking for bigger screens on surveys. Also, speaking anecdotally, I remember my mom wondering aloud "how can you see anything on that tiny screen?" several times with the older Gameboys and the original Nintendo DS. Of course, she now uses a smartphone with a screen that's not much bigger, so I suppose she's got that worked out now.
Fairly simple - in the real world you can go to another store and buy the "you name it" that Wal-Mart refuses to sell. There are no other (definitely legal) app stores you can turn to on the iPhone. There are of course alternative phones, but it's typically neither simple nor inexpensive to make such a switch - and if one does switch, there's usually no guarantee that the next carrier/OS creator won't limit you in similar ways.
Our family once owned an old Sony VAIO desktop. It came with a floppy drive, but as it was the year 2000, floppies were quickly becoming unfashionable. Because of this, Sony hid the floppy drive behind a small plastic hatch. The problem? The hatch attached to the case with a small but fairly powerful magnet... which corrupted every single disk inserted into the drive. To this day I'm wary of Sony products (and VAIOs in particular) because of that little screw-up.
Not to defend ogg vorbis too much, but it has actually achieved success in a few realms - it's the audio format of choice on Wikipedia, which is one of the web's most popular sites, and it's used in tons of video games (precisely because it doesn't need to be licensed, I think). The things that made it successful in those areas (matching ideology and price/compression performance, respectively) don't really mean much to the average MP3 player user, though.
"Man-millenia" - it might only take a year (or less) to reimplement, but the number of hours put into the project (spread across a large number of programmers) would be huge.
Except I'm pretty sure that there are modern languages and libraries that can handle this without Fortran. I don't have much experience with it myself, but I'm pretty sure that's exactly what MATLAB is for, for one.
Plastic is a petroleum product. Can the conversion process be reversed? At what point does that million square miles of plastic gook start to look like a mine-able resource and not simply pollution? Certainly it could be recycled into new products, too.
Actually, it makes perfect sense. They wanted to distance themselves from the old brand - just by dint of the name, GameBoy has connotations of a (male) child's toy. The DS has seen success in much broader markets, just as the Wii has, and at least some fraction of that is due to the more approachable branding. Yes, people really do get hung up on names that much.
They threw the backwards compatibility in simply because it was convenient (the DS has an ARM7 processor that can be clocked down to behave identical to GBA hardware) and because the folks who actually care about such compatibility will know to look for it. Amusingly enough, Slashdot is the only site that I've ever seen confuse the name of the system... this isn't the first time they've done it.
I gotta note here that when I was installing the latest Java SDK a while back, the installer had a banner ad for OpenOffice.org. I have seen some of the described adware behavior in Office 2007 - most notably, it linked me to an official PDF converter at one point - but that was somewhat less blatant than the OOo one.
So, basically we need an actively intervening God (or a god-like entity), is what you're saying. That could help us in lots of ways, but I've still always been a fan of free will.
I would respectfully disagree. Even the most abstract puzzle game exercises pattern-recognition, logic, and reflexes; many others tell relatively complex and entertaining stories. A few, like Animal Crossing, even facilitate creativity and socializing. There are indeed meaningless progress-quest games out there that roughly fall under the definition you've given (mostly amongst the more vapid web-games and RPGs), but they do not and should not define the medium for you or for anyone.
If third-parties can manage at least decent emulation of the GPU (PCSX2 presently plays most games, though there are of course plenty of glitches), I'd bet Sony - with access to the original specs and a team of full-time programmers - could probably manage it too.
To be honest, I would be surprised if they did anything that constructive. From what I've seen, Fallout's "fans" have spent their time of late doing little more than moan and speculate endlessly about Bethesda Softwork's upcoming entry into the series. Some of their concern may be justified, to be sure; Bethesda has had their fair share of issues in the past, and their most recent AAA title, Oblivion, was no exception. So far, though, they've shown one poster and one teaser image for the game (both of which have appeared entirely in keeping with the "vibe" of the series), and for that they've received the most vitriolic stream of abuse and hatred that I've ever seen this side of fundamentalist religion.
At least it will be interesting to see what happens when the proper teaser trailer is released. Also, I'd absolutely love to be proven wrong; Van Buren does look like a neat (if somewhat incomplete) framework to build a game around.
I know you're probably trolling. Still - no, "games of that type" are far from gone. I get plenty lot of mileage out of some games that have graphics on par with or worse than this (like NetHack, for instance, or Within a Deep Forest, or Cave Story, or N, or Seiklus). Certainly I don't turn to such games for eye-searing graphics, though under the correct circumstances they can be perfectly good looking just the same.
All of the main-line Dragon Quest games have subtitles like this (see: Dragon Quest VIII - Journey of the Cursed King, etc). And the head honcho behind the game, Yuji Horii, has stated that it's an actual factual numbered entry in the series (check http://ds.ign.com/articles/750/750590p1.html). And it's got the same Level-5 team that made DQ8.
Don't bother. Canada's getting about 8,000 PS3s, sayeth a friendly Futureshop.ca employee on the Penny-Arcade forums (DeaconKnowledge, if you happen to stop by there sometime). There won't be a surplus.
Well, they've got to do something with all of that extra space on the BluRay discs. (seriously, such patches/firmware updates often get included - or even forced through - by newer games. see: PSP)
Actually, a lot of people complained about precisely that same "clickiness" with the original DS, which is why they made the change - the new controls are supposed to be more in line with the GB Micro and past systems like the SNES.
This "analyst speculation" flies in the face of what Microsoft is actually doing in the handheld realm - namely, giving fairly strong support to the DS. There's a version of Mechassault on its way, and Rare is doing up a new version of Diddy Kong Racing with some fairly nice extras (better graphics and a touchscreen-based track editor). If these rumors were true, I'd bet they wouldn't be using their licenses or developers for the benefit of a semi-direct competitor.
A few of the "games" weren't really games - they were just demonstration software, stuff like the Duck Hunt demo. And I believe they were counting the individual components of Wii Sports (tennis, golf, baseball) and Wii Music (orchestra, drums) as separate games, though I could be wrong. And there were the Virtual Console showings - Mario 64, Bonk, Sonic, and Super Mario World, though again I don't know if these counted as separate games. Then there were Zelda TTP, Metroid Prime 3, Mario Galaxy, Elebits, Wario Ware, Red Steel, Project HAMMER, Madden '07 Wii, and sundry third-party games... a reasonable lineup, I'd say.
Of course, some of their most interesting games were non-playable; I really liked the sound and look of Monolith's "Disaster," and Smash Bros. was looking good, too.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe they mentioned that customers were asking for bigger screens on surveys. Also, speaking anecdotally, I remember my mom wondering aloud "how can you see anything on that tiny screen?" several times with the older Gameboys and the original Nintendo DS. Of course, she now uses a smartphone with a screen that's not much bigger, so I suppose she's got that worked out now.
Fairly simple - in the real world you can go to another store and buy the "you name it" that Wal-Mart refuses to sell. There are no other (definitely legal) app stores you can turn to on the iPhone. There are of course alternative phones, but it's typically neither simple nor inexpensive to make such a switch - and if one does switch, there's usually no guarantee that the next carrier/OS creator won't limit you in similar ways.
Our family once owned an old Sony VAIO desktop. It came with a floppy drive, but as it was the year 2000, floppies were quickly becoming unfashionable. Because of this, Sony hid the floppy drive behind a small plastic hatch. The problem? The hatch attached to the case with a small but fairly powerful magnet... which corrupted every single disk inserted into the drive. To this day I'm wary of Sony products (and VAIOs in particular) because of that little screw-up.
Not to defend ogg vorbis too much, but it has actually achieved success in a few realms - it's the audio format of choice on Wikipedia, which is one of the web's most popular sites, and it's used in tons of video games (precisely because it doesn't need to be licensed, I think). The things that made it successful in those areas (matching ideology and price/compression performance, respectively) don't really mean much to the average MP3 player user, though.
Except I'm pretty sure that there are modern languages and libraries that can handle this without Fortran. I don't have much experience with it myself, but I'm pretty sure that's exactly what MATLAB is for, for one.
Plastic is a petroleum product. Can the conversion process be reversed? At what point does that million square miles of plastic gook start to look like a mine-able resource and not simply pollution? Certainly it could be recycled into new products, too.
Hm. Well, give Vernor Vinge a shot. His work can be in a somewhat similar vein to Stross' stuff, but I've liked it.
They threw the backwards compatibility in simply because it was convenient (the DS has an ARM7 processor that can be clocked down to behave identical to GBA hardware) and because the folks who actually care about such compatibility will know to look for it. Amusingly enough, Slashdot is the only site that I've ever seen confuse the name of the system... this isn't the first time they've done it.
Yes, you can find it online (legally, even). Vernor Vinge posted it on his site, right here: http://vrinimi.org/rainbowsend.html
I gotta note here that when I was installing the latest Java SDK a while back, the installer had a banner ad for OpenOffice.org. I have seen some of the described adware behavior in Office 2007 - most notably, it linked me to an official PDF converter at one point - but that was somewhat less blatant than the OOo one.
So, basically we need an actively intervening God (or a god-like entity), is what you're saying. That could help us in lots of ways, but I've still always been a fan of free will.
I would respectfully disagree. Even the most abstract puzzle game exercises pattern-recognition, logic, and reflexes; many others tell relatively complex and entertaining stories. A few, like Animal Crossing, even facilitate creativity and socializing. There are indeed meaningless progress-quest games out there that roughly fall under the definition you've given (mostly amongst the more vapid web-games and RPGs), but they do not and should not define the medium for you or for anyone.
If third-parties can manage at least decent emulation of the GPU (PCSX2 presently plays most games, though there are of course plenty of glitches), I'd bet Sony - with access to the original specs and a team of full-time programmers - could probably manage it too.
Well, the occupants won't necessarily be governed by any terrestrial laws (maybe international ones?), so I'd guess probably yes.
At least it will be interesting to see what happens when the proper teaser trailer is released. Also, I'd absolutely love to be proven wrong; Van Buren does look like a neat (if somewhat incomplete) framework to build a game around.
I know you're probably trolling. Still - no, "games of that type" are far from gone. I get plenty lot of mileage out of some games that have graphics on par with or worse than this (like NetHack, for instance, or Within a Deep Forest, or Cave Story, or N, or Seiklus). Certainly I don't turn to such games for eye-searing graphics, though under the correct circumstances they can be perfectly good looking just the same.
(apologies to any lawyers present)
I once saw a torrent composed of hundreds of pie recipes. That beats out Mozart easily.
All of the main-line Dragon Quest games have subtitles like this (see: Dragon Quest VIII - Journey of the Cursed King, etc). And the head honcho behind the game, Yuji Horii, has stated that it's an actual factual numbered entry in the series (check http://ds.ign.com/articles/750/750590p1.html). And it's got the same Level-5 team that made DQ8.
Don't bother. Canada's getting about 8,000 PS3s, sayeth a friendly Futureshop.ca employee on the Penny-Arcade forums (DeaconKnowledge, if you happen to stop by there sometime). There won't be a surplus.
Well, they've got to do something with all of that extra space on the BluRay discs. (seriously, such patches/firmware updates often get included - or even forced through - by newer games. see: PSP)
You're wanting Sketchup, then, I think. For creating in 3D, that's about as intuitive as it gets.
Actually, a lot of people complained about precisely that same "clickiness" with the original DS, which is why they made the change - the new controls are supposed to be more in line with the GB Micro and past systems like the SNES.
This "analyst speculation" flies in the face of what Microsoft is actually doing in the handheld realm - namely, giving fairly strong support to the DS. There's a version of Mechassault on its way, and Rare is doing up a new version of Diddy Kong Racing with some fairly nice extras (better graphics and a touchscreen-based track editor). If these rumors were true, I'd bet they wouldn't be using their licenses or developers for the benefit of a semi-direct competitor.
Of course, some of their most interesting games were non-playable; I really liked the sound and look of Monolith's "Disaster," and Smash Bros. was looking good, too.