This is probably the most anti-climatic announcement ever. I mean it was billed as something really amazing, which for me really could only have been Shenmue 3 or Nights 2 or a new Panzer Dragoon or something.
What made Sega think this was something that could be described as big exciting news? The return of Alex Kidd would have been more exciting I think...
You pose a fair question about what constitutes a reasonable amount of work to ensure a system is secure. However, I'll go out on a limb and say that MS haven't done enough.
A good example I think is a problem a friend had last week. He had just installed XP Pro and within minutes of the installer finishing he had been infected with the Blaster virus. He couldn't download the fix or install a virus scanner because the machine would always reboot itself before he could complete the installation of either! And because it was his only computer he had no way of downloading the fix and applying it offline.
I know XP can check for updates during install, I don't know if he skipped this step or if it wouldn't have installed a Blaster fix anyway, but the problem is that the OS was practically useless within minutes of install.
Now while this might not be a problem for the techno-savvy guys around here, my friend is just your average person who knows enough to know the CD tray isn't a cup holder.
I think Microsoft should at least try to architect their software so that critical flaws cannot be exploited within minutes of the install finishing. The basic solution I can see for this is that the OS should not allow any network connections (except to microsoft.com) to download any necessary security updates. Once these have been installed the system should be allowed to see the rest of the web.
It depends, Shenmue has two types of save, there is the save point in Ryo's bedroom that you can only use at the end of the day. This save would be permanently stored on the VMU until you save over it. I think your save of the last day is probably this type.
The other save type was the "Interrupt" save that could be used pretty much anywhere and was accessed via the inventory screen. This is the one that gets deleted right after it's loaded to prevent "quick-save syndrome". If you did reset without saving a new interrupt you would have to go back to your last bedroom save, so at most you'd lose an in-game day's progress.
Shenmue captured the best of both save methods really, it allowed you to save whenever you wanted but you couldn't abuse the saves to speed your way through the game.
PS: Fingers crossed Sega's big announcement for E3 is Shenmue III!:)
Yeah there are a few good alternatives to quick save, my favourite is probably from Shenmue which let you save wherever you wanted but you could only reload that save once.
That way you could stop playing the game whenever you wanted but you couldn't abuse it like a quick save by reloading it again and again.
The only problem I have with difficult games is that now I have to be a "grown up" and go to work everyday I don't get much time to play games.
As little as 3 years ago it would have been fine for me to devote lots of time to a game like Ninja Gaiden, but now 30 minutes could be considered to be a big gaming session for me. Which is one of the reasons I like the quick save in PC games, true it makes a game very easy but it also means I can stop playing when I choose to and resume without having to play large sections of the game again to get back to where I was before.
With Ninja Gaiden if I die it often means replaying 10 minutes worth of stuff I've done before just to get back to the bit I'm having trouble with, which can be frustrating, it can also mean my entire gaming session is spent replaying the same part of the game over and over without making any new progress. I'd probably never see beyond level 1 of most games if we still lived in the days of consoles without memory cards. I lost count of how many hours it took to get to the end of Super Ghouls and Ghosts before being told to go through the whole game again by the princess because she'd dropped her bracelet.
I saw the other day that the creator of Ninja Gaiden wants to make the sequel just as hard, despite people's complaints. I admire the guy for sticking to his design ethics but I think he might out off a lot of potential buyers by doing this.
I think one of the bigger performance killers these days is unfair deadlines.
Management types these days expect code to be finished yesterday, and IMHO it's this which causes inefficient code to be written, as the programmer gets pressured to be finished ASAP, leaving no time for them to properly architect their system.
I always try to get programmers to be honest about how long they think something will take them to do, but I often find new recruits, who have previously had deadlines dictated to them, are nervous about telling me how long something will take because they think they might get fired if they take too long.
Optimising code can be worthwhile if you are given the time, I'm certain that these days many developers are being squeezed to the point where just finishing a project within the time limit is hard.
This has to be one of the lamest attempts to cash in on the Bond franchise yet. EA have been trying to recapture GoldenEye's greatness for years now and they still haven't managed it.
All I can say is, thank goodness for Project 64 (http://pj64.emulation64.com/iedefault.htm)!
I think that there is link to be made between violence in games/films/TV and violence in real life but this link is not what you might expect.
I think people with violent tendencies will always exist, and even if there is no violent material in the media these people will still likely commit violent crimes.
For example, those kids who decided to hop into their parents car and go shooting other drivers on the freeway like in GTA; would they have done this if they hadn't played GTA? Possibly not, they'd probably have just wandered next door to shoot their neighbours instead.
Removing violence from the media just deprives those who are well adjusted of some forms of entertainment. Broadcasting the Teletubbies 24/7 will do nothing to fix the problem these people have in their heads. TV/games/films didn't make them unstable, so changing what people watch/read/play won't fix them.
I'd like nothing more than to do this, but the problem is we're just getting the bounce notifications because our domain is the reply-to address in the spam, so the traffic isn't coming directly from ChinaNet but from the systems rejecting their spam.
The spammer's database of email addresses must have thousands of addresses that don't exist, but why should he care, he doesn't have to deal with the bounce traffic...
Plus we also get hundreds of abuse emails from people who think the spam originated with us. Which is understandable, if highly frustrating!:)
SPF is definitely in our future, but I don't know if SPF would help in this situation, the problem is that ChinaNet appear to be allowing their users to spam.
So even with SPF, ChinaNet just need to create an SPF record and their spammers would be able to broadcast their trash again.
Unless there's something I missed about how SPF works?
I see ChinaNet are on that list. Some !#@%er on ChinaNet is joe-jobbing our webmail system, we have virus and spam scanning but that takes up a lot of processing time, coupled with the vast barrage of bounces from the spammer its bringing our system to its knees.
Complaining to ChinaNet has made no difference, all we've had is an automated response that was in Chinese.
The sooner we just start blocking sources of spam wholesale the sooner we could see results I believe. I know it's a very extreme response, but if you look at the case where Blueyonder removed themselves from the Usenet system (before they were banned instead), it forced them to sort out their spamming problem. Since then they have been able to sort out the spammers and rejoin the rest of usenet.
When the rest of an ISPs customers cannot send or receive email the ISP will have to respond or face losing their customers.
I believe some stations employ this kind of ID3 tag overlapping to prevent people from ripping.
I'm not sure why some stations try to prevent ripping, but I think it's to prevent people just leaving a copy of Winamp open on some other PC downloading their entire collection and skipping their adverts. One site I listen to (www.gamingfm.com) claims in their FAQ that they can tell when you are ripping and will ban you for it. They don't say why though...
The other "problems" I had last time I used StreamRipper was that some stations fade between 2 songs so you don't get a decent cut-off between them. So you can end up with songs missing their start and songs fading in another song before ending. Also some stations fade their adverts in on the end of a song, so anything you rip will have their adverts. (Not that I'm complaining about them needing adverts, they have to pay the bills somehow)
Still, these drawbacks do bring back the nostalgic feeling of taping stuff off the radio to create my own mix tape!
One of our customers is a fairly large motor company and I was having lunch with some of their software guys last week when they told me about one of their new cars which will have over 40 special chips distributed throughout the car.
Apparently the diagnostic kit for this car alone costs 7000! Apparently the main reason for this is not to create disposable cars (although that's something I'm sure they'd love!) but to prevent unofficial garages from being able to perform repairs, thereby essentially restricting the the owner of the car to an official garage for the lifetime of the car.
Another off-topic thing of interest they mentioned was that the diagnostics of the car are accessed wirelessly and that these diagnostics can operate pretty much any feature in the car! I give it about a week before an exploit to unlock the car and start the engine is released...;)
I can't see Sony bringing out this game and its peripheral for the US and Europe somehow...
Re:$33 cd? It is going to decrease profit
on
RIAA's Nasty Easter Egg
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
This wouldn't surprise me. Although a service like iTMS doesn't turn much of a profit for Apple it's certainly very successful, and definitely doesn't help the RIAA with it's argument that online music sales won't work and that piracy is killing their business.
An alternative is that perhaps the RIAA has seen that online music stores can work and they want to kill the opposition by raising prices before introducing their own service.
Please kindly permit me to express myself to you. My name is Mohammed Bah Abba from Nigeria. I recently won money from Rolex watch company that mandated me to search for good and reliable company/individual person who can assist me to safe keep some amount of US$100,000 dollars. This fund is paid into a fixed deposit account with coded secret account number and my coded name in a bank in Europe.
Now, I am wanted by the NIGERIAN SCAMMERS who have mandated that all my assets, bank account home and abroad be confisicated to pay for their email fraud schemes.
I need trust worthy investor who can go to bank in europe to receive money either through the transfer system for certified draft in his or her name to redeposit this money in your country for good investment. If you can handle this process myself or my attorney to have meeting with you anywhere in europe to go to the bank with legal letter of administration to change beneficiary to your name as investment proxy and investor to our family investments.
This is very confidential handling if you can be able to handle it with us, I have mapped 20% for you and new fridge that not need electricity. You should contact me urgently on my email: mohammedbahabba@gmail.com.
This is 100% risk free and demands absolute secret and confidentially.
If you are being good to good I pray we succeed. respond urgently.
Aside from the "black helicopter" argument, I think another reason for not deleting emails could be for preventing duplication of data. Why store 1 million+ copies of the lastest funny picture everyone is forwarding to each other when you can just store 1 copy and point everyone's email to the same file?
If they want everyone to have 1Gb of storage, tricks like this will help them to reduce the amount of actual disk space they need.
Although what happens to this plan when the next Windows mass mailing worm inserts some random text into each email preventing GMail from creating a single instance of the email I don't know.
I also think that they will compress all the emails stored, a mailbox that is 1Gb when uncompressed may only be a few hundred Mbs in reality thereby saving Google high disk costs.
The recent Linux kit for the PS2 was more reasonably priced at around 200 which included a USB keyboard, USB mouse, hard drive and network adaptor. (http://playstation2-linux.com/)
While I don't think the Linux kit has inspired a home-brew market like the X-Box one, it does offer excellent learning value for someone wanting to get relevant experience programming the PS2.
I would imagine an SDK for the PSP would allow someone to create a Gameboy Advance (and maybe DS) emulator, which I'm sure Sony would unofficially be pleased about.
We get the short end of it in Europe when it comes to games releases, we can sometimes wait more than 6 months for a game to be released over here. When the game is finally released there are often large black borders (because the PAL TV system has more lines than the NTSC one) and the game is often slower due to PAL running at 50Hz not 60Hz. Most modern TVs can handle an NTSC signal but not all, which is why our games are often "crippled" in this way.
I got sick of this back in the Super Famicom days and have been importing machines and games ever since. Good ol' Sega tried their best with the Dreamcast and offered 60Hz with no borders options on most of their games but to my knowledge Sony, Nintendo and MS have not followed suit with their machines. (I haven't bought a UK console game in years!)
It annoys me greatly to be immediately associated with pirates whenever I tell someone I have a modded console, I just love playing games and I hate having to wait for the games companies to get around to tossing out an inferior version for the EU market.
If they sold mod-chips that let me play import games but not pirates I would buy it in a shot. Sadly I think most mod-chip companies would see a drop in profits if they did that.
Yeah I was amazed that Zero Wing wasn't in that list. Then again maybe the story made perfect sense before it was translated.
I find the absense of "Ninja Golf" for the Atari 2600 quite surprising too, since it's about a Ninja who must pass the final test to become a true ninja: complete a round of golf on a golf course filled with sharks, snakes and other ninjas out to kill you...
And of course there's the grand-daddy of them all: Pacman, the obesity simulator that rewards you for eating lots. Plus it glamorises drug taking by encouraging you to eat ghosts while high.;)
if you don't speak the language you're bloody stupid to buy the game anyway
That's true to a certain extent, the Japanese version of a game like Final Fantasy would certainly be impenetrable. But simpler more arcade type games are usually >90% English anyway. For example the Japanese version of Crazy Taxi for the Dreamcast doesn't have a single word of Japanese anywhere.
Also sometimes games in Japanese are more fun, I fondly remember that Super Mario World on the Super Famicom had blocks scattered throughout the game that you could hit to get information. I hadn't got a clue what it was saying but I thought it must have been really important and exciting.
Then I played the English version and I was really disappointed to find the blocks just said banal things like: "To do a spin jump, press the A button. A Super Mario spin jump can break some of the blocks and defeat some of the tougher enemies".
I was shocked to find the game was just telling me stuff I had worked out by pushing all the buttons on the pad!:)
I was thinking the other day about how the games press blatantly lie to get "exclusives" on games.
For example: remember all the superlatives heaped on Metal Gear Solid 2? How it was the best stealth-action game ever? Then what happened when people played it? They found out the story was ridiculously convoluted, the main character of the series was sidelined and 90% of the time was spent watching people in the same room talk via radio...
And what about all of the reviews for Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness? Not one of the reviews I read mentioned any problems whatsoever with the PC version, but for some reason the version in the shops had more bugs in it than Starship Troopers!
These days I only visit places like IGN or GameSpot for screenshots and movies of games, you can't trust their opinions to be objective, especially IGN who will turn into vapid fanboys the moment someone agrees to pay them advertising money.
I usually try to make my own mind up about games now. If they look like good original games in the pictures and videos I will try to find a demo and if that's good I will consider buying it.
The other good way of telling if a game is good is by the general word of mouth, once the marketing hype has died down. But that method means waiting for other people to buy the game, meaning you can't be the l337 person who gets all the games on import before everyone else!
Slashdot Mirror
This is probably the most anti-climatic announcement ever. I mean it was billed as something really amazing, which for me really could only have been Shenmue 3 or Nights 2 or a new Panzer Dragoon or something.
What made Sega think this was something that could be described as big exciting news? The return of Alex Kidd would have been more exciting I think...
You pose a fair question about what constitutes a reasonable amount of work to ensure a system is secure. However, I'll go out on a limb and say that MS haven't done enough.
A good example I think is a problem a friend had last week. He had just installed XP Pro and within minutes of the installer finishing he had been infected with the Blaster virus. He couldn't download the fix or install a virus scanner because the machine would always reboot itself before he could complete the installation of either! And because it was his only computer he had no way of downloading the fix and applying it offline.
I know XP can check for updates during install, I don't know if he skipped this step or if it wouldn't have installed a Blaster fix anyway, but the problem is that the OS was practically useless within minutes of install.
Now while this might not be a problem for the techno-savvy guys around here, my friend is just your average person who knows enough to know the CD tray isn't a cup holder.
I think Microsoft should at least try to architect their software so that critical flaws cannot be exploited within minutes of the install finishing. The basic solution I can see for this is that the OS should not allow any network connections (except to microsoft.com) to download any necessary security updates. Once these have been installed the system should be allowed to see the rest of the web.
It depends, Shenmue has two types of save, there is the save point in Ryo's bedroom that you can only use at the end of the day. This save would be permanently stored on the VMU until you save over it. I think your save of the last day is probably this type.
:)
The other save type was the "Interrupt" save that could be used pretty much anywhere and was accessed via the inventory screen. This is the one that gets deleted right after it's loaded to prevent "quick-save syndrome". If you did reset without saving a new interrupt you would have to go back to your last bedroom save, so at most you'd lose an in-game day's progress.
Shenmue captured the best of both save methods really, it allowed you to save whenever you wanted but you couldn't abuse the saves to speed your way through the game.
PS: Fingers crossed Sega's big announcement for E3 is Shenmue III!
Yeah there are a few good alternatives to quick save, my favourite is probably from Shenmue which let you save wherever you wanted but you could only reload that save once.
That way you could stop playing the game whenever you wanted but you couldn't abuse it like a quick save by reloading it again and again.
The only problem I have with difficult games is that now I have to be a "grown up" and go to work everyday I don't get much time to play games.
As little as 3 years ago it would have been fine for me to devote lots of time to a game like Ninja Gaiden, but now 30 minutes could be considered to be a big gaming session for me. Which is one of the reasons I like the quick save in PC games, true it makes a game very easy but it also means I can stop playing when I choose to and resume without having to play large sections of the game again to get back to where I was before.
With Ninja Gaiden if I die it often means replaying 10 minutes worth of stuff I've done before just to get back to the bit I'm having trouble with, which can be frustrating, it can also mean my entire gaming session is spent replaying the same part of the game over and over without making any new progress. I'd probably never see beyond level 1 of most games if we still lived in the days of consoles without memory cards. I lost count of how many hours it took to get to the end of Super Ghouls and Ghosts before being told to go through the whole game again by the princess because she'd dropped her bracelet.
I saw the other day that the creator of Ninja Gaiden wants to make the sequel just as hard, despite people's complaints. I admire the guy for sticking to his design ethics but I think he might out off a lot of potential buyers by doing this.
I think one of the bigger performance killers these days is unfair deadlines.
Management types these days expect code to be finished yesterday, and IMHO it's this which causes inefficient code to be written, as the programmer gets pressured to be finished ASAP, leaving no time for them to properly architect their system.
I always try to get programmers to be honest about how long they think something will take them to do, but I often find new recruits, who have previously had deadlines dictated to them, are nervous about telling me how long something will take because they think they might get fired if they take too long.
Optimising code can be worthwhile if you are given the time, I'm certain that these days many developers are being squeezed to the point where just finishing a project within the time limit is hard.
This has to be one of the lamest attempts to cash in on the Bond franchise yet. EA have been trying to recapture GoldenEye's greatness for years now and they still haven't managed it.
All I can say is, thank goodness for Project 64 (http://pj64.emulation64.com/iedefault.htm)!
I think that there is link to be made between violence in games/films/TV and violence in real life but this link is not what you might expect.
I think people with violent tendencies will always exist, and even if there is no violent material in the media these people will still likely commit violent crimes.
For example, those kids who decided to hop into their parents car and go shooting other drivers on the freeway like in GTA; would they have done this if they hadn't played GTA? Possibly not, they'd probably have just wandered next door to shoot their neighbours instead.
Removing violence from the media just deprives those who are well adjusted of some forms of entertainment. Broadcasting the Teletubbies 24/7 will do nothing to fix the problem these people have in their heads. TV/games/films didn't make them unstable, so changing what people watch/read/play won't fix them.
I'd like nothing more than to do this, but the problem is we're just getting the bounce notifications because our domain is the reply-to address in the spam, so the traffic isn't coming directly from ChinaNet but from the systems rejecting their spam.
:)
The spammer's database of email addresses must have thousands of addresses that don't exist, but why should he care, he doesn't have to deal with the bounce traffic...
Plus we also get hundreds of abuse emails from people who think the spam originated with us. Which is understandable, if highly frustrating!
SPF is definitely in our future, but I don't know if SPF would help in this situation, the problem is that ChinaNet appear to be allowing their users to spam.
So even with SPF, ChinaNet just need to create an SPF record and their spammers would be able to broadcast their trash again.
Unless there's something I missed about how SPF works?
I see ChinaNet are on that list. Some !#@%er on ChinaNet is joe-jobbing our webmail system, we have virus and spam scanning but that takes up a lot of processing time, coupled with the vast barrage of bounces from the spammer its bringing our system to its knees.
Complaining to ChinaNet has made no difference, all we've had is an automated response that was in Chinese.
The sooner we just start blocking sources of spam wholesale the sooner we could see results I believe. I know it's a very extreme response, but if you look at the case where Blueyonder removed themselves from the Usenet system (before they were banned instead), it forced them to sort out their spamming problem. Since then they have been able to sort out the spammers and rejoin the rest of usenet.
When the rest of an ISPs customers cannot send or receive email the ISP will have to respond or face losing their customers.
I believe some stations employ this kind of ID3 tag overlapping to prevent people from ripping.
I'm not sure why some stations try to prevent ripping, but I think it's to prevent people just leaving a copy of Winamp open on some other PC downloading their entire collection and skipping their adverts. One site I listen to (www.gamingfm.com) claims in their FAQ that they can tell when you are ripping and will ban you for it. They don't say why though...
The other "problems" I had last time I used StreamRipper was that some stations fade between 2 songs so you don't get a decent cut-off between them. So you can end up with songs missing their start and songs fading in another song before ending. Also some stations fade their adverts in on the end of a song, so anything you rip will have their adverts. (Not that I'm complaining about them needing adverts, they have to pay the bills somehow)
Still, these drawbacks do bring back the nostalgic feeling of taping stuff off the radio to create my own mix tape!
One of our customers is a fairly large motor company and I was having lunch with some of their software guys last week when they told me about one of their new cars which will have over 40 special chips distributed throughout the car.
;)
Apparently the diagnostic kit for this car alone costs 7000! Apparently the main reason for this is not to create disposable cars (although that's something I'm sure they'd love!) but to prevent unofficial garages from being able to perform repairs, thereby essentially restricting the the owner of the car to an official garage for the lifetime of the car.
Another off-topic thing of interest they mentioned was that the diagnostics of the car are accessed wirelessly and that these diagnostics can operate pretty much any feature in the car! I give it about a week before an exploit to unlock the car and start the engine is released...
No it will replace FireFox with IE7, then it will default your home page to their search engine. ;)
Boonga Boonga:
http://www.sixsixfive.com/229.html
I can't see Sony bringing out this game and its peripheral for the US and Europe somehow...
This wouldn't surprise me. Although a service like iTMS doesn't turn much of a profit for Apple it's certainly very successful, and definitely doesn't help the RIAA with it's argument that online music sales won't work and that piracy is killing their business.
An alternative is that perhaps the RIAA has seen that online music stores can work and they want to kill the opposition by raising prices before introducing their own service.
It's a good idea, but the first time it stops someone calling the emergency services I could see it getting banned.
As long as Mother Brain isn't played by Dennis Hopper and John Leguizamo isn't Samus' younger, wise-cracking sister this could be alright.
Dear Sir,
Please kindly permit me to express myself to you. My name is Mohammed Bah Abba from Nigeria. I recently won money from Rolex watch company that mandated me to search for good and reliable company/individual person who can assist me to safe keep some amount of US$100,000 dollars. This fund is paid into a fixed deposit account with coded secret account number and my coded name in a bank in Europe.
Now, I am wanted by the NIGERIAN SCAMMERS who have mandated that all my assets, bank account home and abroad be confisicated to pay for their email fraud schemes.
I need trust worthy investor who can go to bank in europe to receive money either through the transfer system for certified draft in his or her name to redeposit this money in your country for good investment. If you can handle this process myself or my attorney to have meeting with you anywhere in europe to go to the bank with legal letter of administration to change beneficiary to your name as investment proxy and investor to our family investments.
This is very confidential handling if you can be able to handle it with us, I have mapped 20% for you and new fridge that not need electricity. You should contact me urgently on my email: mohammedbahabba@gmail.com.
This is 100% risk free and demands absolute secret and confidentially.
If you are being good to good I pray we succeed. respond urgently.
Mohammed Bah Abba
Aside from the "black helicopter" argument, I think another reason for not deleting emails could be for preventing duplication of data. Why store 1 million+ copies of the lastest funny picture everyone is forwarding to each other when you can just store 1 copy and point everyone's email to the same file?
If they want everyone to have 1Gb of storage, tricks like this will help them to reduce the amount of actual disk space they need.
Although what happens to this plan when the next Windows mass mailing worm inserts some random text into each email preventing GMail from creating a single instance of the email I don't know.
I also think that they will compress all the emails stored, a mailbox that is 1Gb when uncompressed may only be a few hundred Mbs in reality thereby saving Google high disk costs.
The recent Linux kit for the PS2 was more reasonably priced at around 200 which included a USB keyboard, USB mouse, hard drive and network adaptor. (http://playstation2-linux.com/)
While I don't think the Linux kit has inspired a home-brew market like the X-Box one, it does offer excellent learning value for someone wanting to get relevant experience programming the PS2.
I would imagine an SDK for the PSP would allow someone to create a Gameboy Advance (and maybe DS) emulator, which I'm sure Sony would unofficially be pleased about.
I live in the UK, I use mod-chips.
We get the short end of it in Europe when it comes to games releases, we can sometimes wait more than 6 months for a game to be released over here. When the game is finally released there are often large black borders (because the PAL TV system has more lines than the NTSC one) and the game is often slower due to PAL running at 50Hz not 60Hz. Most modern TVs can handle an NTSC signal but not all, which is why our games are often "crippled" in this way.
I got sick of this back in the Super Famicom days and have been importing machines and games ever since. Good ol' Sega tried their best with the Dreamcast and offered 60Hz with no borders options on most of their games but to my knowledge Sony, Nintendo and MS have not followed suit with their machines. (I haven't bought a UK console game in years!)
It annoys me greatly to be immediately associated with pirates whenever I tell someone I have a modded console, I just love playing games and I hate having to wait for the games companies to get around to tossing out an inferior version for the EU market.
If they sold mod-chips that let me play import games but not pirates I would buy it in a shot. Sadly I think most mod-chip companies would see a drop in profits if they did that.
Yeah I was amazed that Zero Wing wasn't in that list. Then again maybe the story made perfect sense before it was translated.
;)
I find the absense of "Ninja Golf" for the Atari 2600 quite surprising too, since it's about a Ninja who must pass the final test to become a true ninja: complete a round of golf on a golf course filled with sharks, snakes and other ninjas out to kill you...
And of course there's the grand-daddy of them all: Pacman, the obesity simulator that rewards you for eating lots. Plus it glamorises drug taking by encouraging you to eat ghosts while high.
That's true to a certain extent, the Japanese version of a game like Final Fantasy would certainly be impenetrable. But simpler more arcade type games are usually >90% English anyway. For example the Japanese version of Crazy Taxi for the Dreamcast doesn't have a single word of Japanese anywhere.
Also sometimes games in Japanese are more fun, I fondly remember that Super Mario World on the Super Famicom had blocks scattered throughout the game that you could hit to get information. I hadn't got a clue what it was saying but I thought it must have been really important and exciting.
Then I played the English version and I was really disappointed to find the blocks just said banal things like: "To do a spin jump, press the A button. A Super Mario spin jump can break some of the blocks and defeat some of the tougher enemies".
I was shocked to find the game was just telling me stuff I had worked out by pushing all the buttons on the pad! :)
I was thinking the other day about how the games press blatantly lie to get "exclusives" on games.
For example: remember all the superlatives heaped on Metal Gear Solid 2? How it was the best stealth-action game ever? Then what happened when people played it? They found out the story was ridiculously convoluted, the main character of the series was sidelined and 90% of the time was spent watching people in the same room talk via radio...
And what about all of the reviews for Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness? Not one of the reviews I read mentioned any problems whatsoever with the PC version, but for some reason the version in the shops had more bugs in it than Starship Troopers!
These days I only visit places like IGN or GameSpot for screenshots and movies of games, you can't trust their opinions to be objective, especially IGN who will turn into vapid fanboys the moment someone agrees to pay them advertising money.
I usually try to make my own mind up about games now. If they look like good original games in the pictures and videos I will try to find a demo and if that's good I will consider buying it.
The other good way of telling if a game is good is by the general word of mouth, once the marketing hype has died down. But that method means waiting for other people to buy the game, meaning you can't be the l337 person who gets all the games on import before everyone else!