Course if you really want to get picky - what annoys me about futuristic games are the ones that have keyboards. Doom 3, Xenosaga - don't you think by the year 21XX we'd have something better by then? Maybe voice recognition? Or the nifty interfacing of Minority Report?
Naturally, robot humanoid characters who use keyboards are one notch above this oddness.;)
A large part of Ratchet & Clank was breaking the million and one crates in that game, every one dropping useful bolts (the game's currency). I never got tired of it.
You're blowing what I said way, way out of proportion. I'm merely pointing out that if Katamari has an ancestor, it probably lies with Pac-Man. In general, Katamari is a very innovative and interesting new idea, particularly with regard to the style with which it portrays it.
Re:Gamers never know what's good for them
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A good idea, so long as you have a game designed with very discrete battle arenas. A lot of games don't. In addition to discrete arenas, they might have ongoing gauntlets or a series of "stragglers" that lie in wait every time you pass a certain area.
Re:Gamers never know what's good for them
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A Gamer's Manifesto
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It's a good idea, but like most any good idea, there are always complications.;)
For example, suppose I went and vanquished the evil lurking right around the corner from this checkpoint. I, as a gamer, would backtrack to that checkpoint to "save" my progress so I wouldn't have to fight it again. But checkpoints, at least in the racing game sense, are sort of vague, one-use things. Once you reach it, you can only save when the next one shows up. And as many of the poorer games would demonstrate, it's not easy to "trust" that the designer anticipates this.:)
"Play is controlled with the analog sticks only. No buttons to press. No combos to cause distress. Featuring ball-rolling and object-collecting gameplay mechanics of mesmerizing fluidity, reduced to Pac-Man simplicity, through pure absurdity."
To be fair, Katamari can be easily likened to a very crazy variation of Pac-Man. It's an analogy Namco itself made, and not coincidentally, Namco made Pac-Man.:)
You might be thinking of one of the Ridge Racer games. Namco had a habit of placing their old games into them.
Re:Gamers never know what's good for them
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A Gamer's Manifesto
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That's a problem with poor checkpoint placement, not with the concept of save points themselves.
Letting you save at any point opens up various problems. For example:
- The game has to save virtually its entire state at that given point in time. The AI might have been in the middle of something. A character might have been midway through an important passage of dialogue. Compared to a save point, where character state can be reset and only trigger states need to be remembered.
- Suppose you save in a weird position, like when you are low on health. Does the game reset your health? Preserve current health? You could get yourself into an impossible situation.
- How would a "no save" area be defined? What tells me I can't? What logical explanation says I can't?
Re:He doesn't know what he's talking about
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A Gamer's Manifesto
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A better question though might be "How does better AI make a game more fun?" Because that's what it all boils down to, right? You could have some fancy pants neural network that enemies operate off of, learning from all of the player's actions. They could get smarter, duck around corners, anticipate your next attack, and whatnot. So what?
Granted, it depends on the genre. If you're going for something halfway realistic, like a Rainbow Six-type game, it would make a difference. But the Doom example he cites - Doom is and always was a arcade corridor shooter. And despite all of the pseudo-System Shock 2 details in Doom 3, doesn't really stray from that. Arcade enemies don't have to be tremendously smart. What's more important is that you're having fun mowing them down with your weaponry, getting your butt kicked every now and then, but generally prevailing.
And this is basically why Lay is still a free man. Although he and Skilling have been indicted on several counts, it takes a while to mount a case. A large corporation generates so much paperwork that to find the smoking gun can be very complicated. After all, you wouldn't want to bring a case against Lay and then lose due to lack of evidence. You'd want to make sure he spends the rest of his life behind bars and seize any assets he has.
Uematsu contributed only a couple themes to Chrono Trigger (I think the Tyranno Lair was one of them). The overwhelming majority were done by Yasunori Mitsuda (Chrono Cross, Xenogears).
The freeware ICEOWS handles and creates RAR files. It's one of the few Windows-based freeware RAR programs I've seen. It also handles a dozen other common compression formats as well.
That's basically what my attitude about it is. For example, in the specific case of Mepis, after installing the base distributions from one disk, I'll probably fetch five or six programs on Apt-Get to finish it off. Maybe exchange Mozilla for Firefox, or get Nvu instead of Composer. Who knows. Apt-Get is so easy to use, it doesn't really matter. Just check off all the things you want, and then go. Nothing to it.
If Fedora worked the same way, I think they'd have something.
Yes, and that's incredibly easy for anyone here to do. The question is - will Joe Average find it so easy? Since, after all, it's Joe Average who is probably clicking on these things.
Hmm, that's good information to know. I knew that the fourth one was unnecessary for what I install, but from Core to Core, you can't really tell until you try to install and it audits what it actually needs. And if you don't have that disk, then you have to wait another hour-and-a-half to get it. Perhaps next time I'll just get the first three and go from there.
In all truth, though, I have a feeling some of the larger sites will work with their advertising leeches to ensure a mixture of both beneficial and annoying pop-ups to throw the common user off balance. "You block our ads? Fine, we'll just make it so you can't check your webmail so easily."
For example, is including an easy-to-use frontend for Yum right "out of the box" so difficult? Is there a reason why that cruel joke of "Add/Remove Programs (so long as they came off the installation CD and if not we can't help you)" still persists? Doesn't seem like it, but we've been stuck with it since at least Red Hat 9, if not 8.
To be fair, FC3 is a great deal better than FC2. But, for me, it's still one of the least polished distributions out there.
I'm not sure it's a matter of it being bloated - more at just disorganized such that bloat is the end result. For example, Mepis and Ubuntu Linux each chime in at just one CD and it contains all of the essentials. An office suite, web browser, e-mail, and a GUI of some kind. With Fedora, you download four CDs worth of stuff, the majority of which the average user just plain doesn't need. But, Fedora is not organized such that the basic essentials are grouped on the first CD, making the other three extraneous. Instead, it's sprawled out evenly across four of them. The progress bar even shows that OpenOffice spans two CDs.
The Patriot Act coincided after the World Trade Center was attacked. At the time, there was a lot of patriotic propaganda. Bush had advanced the agenda that you either stood behind him, or you were with "them," i.e. Unamerican.
Hence, the Act is a play on that fear. What politician in their right mind would vote against patriotism?
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Yeah, I saw this too. At first I thought it was some kind of weird cloaking device.
Naturally, robot humanoid characters who use keyboards are one notch above this oddness. ;)
A large part of Ratchet & Clank was breaking the million and one crates in that game, every one dropping useful bolts (the game's currency). I never got tired of it.
You're blowing what I said way, way out of proportion. I'm merely pointing out that if Katamari has an ancestor, it probably lies with Pac-Man. In general, Katamari is a very innovative and interesting new idea, particularly with regard to the style with which it portrays it.
A good idea, so long as you have a game designed with very discrete battle arenas. A lot of games don't. In addition to discrete arenas, they might have ongoing gauntlets or a series of "stragglers" that lie in wait every time you pass a certain area.
For example, suppose I went and vanquished the evil lurking right around the corner from this checkpoint. I, as a gamer, would backtrack to that checkpoint to "save" my progress so I wouldn't have to fight it again. But checkpoints, at least in the racing game sense, are sort of vague, one-use things. Once you reach it, you can only save when the next one shows up. And as many of the poorer games would demonstrate, it's not easy to "trust" that the designer anticipates this. :)
"Play is controlled with the analog sticks only. No buttons to press. No combos to cause distress. Featuring ball-rolling and object-collecting gameplay mechanics of mesmerizing fluidity, reduced to Pac-Man simplicity, through pure absurdity."
And to point d, undoubtedly waste hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars repealing it.
To be fair, Katamari can be easily likened to a very crazy variation of Pac-Man. It's an analogy Namco itself made, and not coincidentally, Namco made Pac-Man. :)
You might be thinking of one of the Ridge Racer games. Namco had a habit of placing their old games into them.
That's a problem with poor checkpoint placement, not with the concept of save points themselves.
Letting you save at any point opens up various problems. For example:
- The game has to save virtually its entire state at that given point in time. The AI might have been in the middle of something. A character might have been midway through an important passage of dialogue. Compared to a save point, where character state can be reset and only trigger states need to be remembered.
- Suppose you save in a weird position, like when you are low on health. Does the game reset your health? Preserve current health? You could get yourself into an impossible situation.
- How would a "no save" area be defined? What tells me I can't? What logical explanation says I can't?
A better question though might be "How does better AI make a game more fun?" Because that's what it all boils down to, right? You could have some fancy pants neural network that enemies operate off of, learning from all of the player's actions. They could get smarter, duck around corners, anticipate your next attack, and whatnot. So what? Granted, it depends on the genre. If you're going for something halfway realistic, like a Rainbow Six-type game, it would make a difference. But the Doom example he cites - Doom is and always was a arcade corridor shooter. And despite all of the pseudo-System Shock 2 details in Doom 3, doesn't really stray from that. Arcade enemies don't have to be tremendously smart. What's more important is that you're having fun mowing them down with your weaponry, getting your butt kicked every now and then, but generally prevailing.
It's a valid question, though. Would "Everyone Loves Katamari Damacy," the sequel to the PS2 game, retail for $20? Personally, I have my doubts.
...that a crackpot like Thompson is allowed to practice law.
And this is basically why Lay is still a free man. Although he and Skilling have been indicted on several counts, it takes a while to mount a case. A large corporation generates so much paperwork that to find the smoking gun can be very complicated. After all, you wouldn't want to bring a case against Lay and then lose due to lack of evidence. You'd want to make sure he spends the rest of his life behind bars and seize any assets he has.
Uematsu contributed only a couple themes to Chrono Trigger (I think the Tyranno Lair was one of them). The overwhelming majority were done by Yasunori Mitsuda (Chrono Cross, Xenogears).
The freeware ICEOWS handles and creates RAR files. It's one of the few Windows-based freeware RAR programs I've seen. It also handles a dozen other common compression formats as well.
If Fedora worked the same way, I think they'd have something.
Yes, and that's incredibly easy for anyone here to do. The question is - will Joe Average find it so easy? Since, after all, it's Joe Average who is probably clicking on these things.
Hmm, that's good information to know. I knew that the fourth one was unnecessary for what I install, but from Core to Core, you can't really tell until you try to install and it audits what it actually needs. And if you don't have that disk, then you have to wait another hour-and-a-half to get it. Perhaps next time I'll just get the first three and go from there.
In all truth, though, I have a feeling some of the larger sites will work with their advertising leeches to ensure a mixture of both beneficial and annoying pop-ups to throw the common user off balance. "You block our ads? Fine, we'll just make it so you can't check your webmail so easily."
You assume they are intelligent.
For example, is including an easy-to-use frontend for Yum right "out of the box" so difficult? Is there a reason why that cruel joke of "Add/Remove Programs (so long as they came off the installation CD and if not we can't help you)" still persists? Doesn't seem like it, but we've been stuck with it since at least Red Hat 9, if not 8.
To be fair, FC3 is a great deal better than FC2. But, for me, it's still one of the least polished distributions out there.
I'm not sure it's a matter of it being bloated - more at just disorganized such that bloat is the end result. For example, Mepis and Ubuntu Linux each chime in at just one CD and it contains all of the essentials. An office suite, web browser, e-mail, and a GUI of some kind. With Fedora, you download four CDs worth of stuff, the majority of which the average user just plain doesn't need. But, Fedora is not organized such that the basic essentials are grouped on the first CD, making the other three extraneous. Instead, it's sprawled out evenly across four of them. The progress bar even shows that OpenOffice spans two CDs.
Hence, the Act is a play on that fear. What politician in their right mind would vote against patriotism?