I liked the original Xenogears, even in spite of the text... that... read... like... this. The storyline was cool and there were lots of evil characters from the outset, only to be bested by one of them, and then we're left to question whether or not said character was really evil in the first place. And I liked how the intro cinematic was just this disconnected, looming scene until about three-quarters in the game when it finally begins to come together.
But Xenosaga was a pithy, monumental mess of a game. It lacked any of the interesting characters from the first game. It bastardized the battle system from the first game. It recited its storyline like it was some demented gospel. And it took itself so damn seriously, I honestly laughed. The best part is getting e-mail from this futuristic world, talking about nonsense like AGWS converters, that the game takes for granted I'm supposed to instantly understand. I guess that's what the huge built-in encyclopedia is for. Lame.
What's also remarkable is when you check out the size of some of Unreal Tournament 2003/2004's OGG files. Some are scarcely larger than a meg, but hold over 3 minutes of CD-quality music.
This is very true. As the Half-Life speed run and many other 3D games show us, it's very difficult to obstruct the player's path in 3D, especially if the game aims to have realistic environments. Enemies usually have to move in order to attack, and you can only lock so many doors.;)
My primary computer came with a Seagate drive and out of the many brands I've owned (Western Digital, Maxtor, IBM, and Hitachi), I've come to like the Seagate the best. Even after 2 years of use, it's still completely silent and reliable, compared to the rattly Maxtor that is slaved to it. It strikes me as a drive of superior quality, and I'll be sure my next drive is a Seagate.
It's true what you say about Final Fantasy ushering in a new paranoia about gameplay time. Some of the best games prior to Final Fantasy VII, where the fad really started, took far less than 5 hours to complete. Most of the Mario games can be wrapped up in that time frame. Metroid certainly. Zelda can become a lengthy game, but it's certainly no 40 hours.
What's wrong is when reviewers start to criticize games and detract points for anything shorter than that.
Simply put, the mystical 10 hour mark can't possibly hold for every game genre. We're designing a video game on the cusp of the 10 hour mark. It's a brawler in the same vein as the old Ninja Turtles brawler games, using today's technology and graphics. Would a Ninja Turtles game get really old after 10 hours? Yep. Heck, you can blaze through TMNT IV in about 30 minutes.
While I'm not advocating that as an acceptable amount, replayability has to be taken into account. What made TMNT fun was the ability to play it over and over again to kill time. The same truth holds for popular first-person shooters like Quake and Unreal Tournament. Most wouldn't play ten hours of Unreal Tournament single player, but dozens of hours accumulate through repeated Internet games and botmatches. There's no ongoing storyline, and no stupid little sidequests. It's fun to play over and over again, simple as that.
Yet, replayability is a factor that eludes poor game reviewers these days. People who pay $30-$50 for games deserve to spend a few hours with it. But when game reviewers started bitching about Game Boy Advance titles being under 10 hours, I draw the line. There is a quality in the two-hour game that's so concentrated and fun that I'll play it repeatedly, as opposed to the 80-hour game with the meaningless side-quests and pointless characters that exist solely to bolster the game's length that I'll only play once.
Perhaps I'm just being an old skool gamer, but I'll be glad when the day returns that a video game is "fun" and no longer a long-term "commitment."
I agree. Instead, Anaconda is more of a post-choice arrangement. Once you select all your packages, then it tells you what CDs will be required. The process should probably be reversed.
Either way, what with Knoppix, Mepis, etc., there's no reason why I shouldn't have the essential e-mail, Internet, office productivity, and graphics tools on the first disk alone. It's a win-win for everyone. A win for users because they don't have to download gigs of packages they don't want, and a win for the always-congested Red Hat servers and mirrors.
I think there's a CD swap on Fedora Core 2 when OpenOffice installs. The fourth CD is not really needed for a typical install, but Red Hat's "Typical" install does require the first three CDs.
I agree, when Mepis can cram all of those mandatory apps on one CD, it's silly for Red Hat to make people download over 2 gigs of data for three CDs.
Whether or not Interplay says they want to make a new Fallout game is irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that they are in deep financial turmoil. They have recently pitched forth several game plans that will probably never come to fruition (a similar promise was made of Descent 4).
It's just the final death throes of a dying company. Let it go, already.
"I really don't see how this differs from what Gnome does..."
You answered your own mystery: Gnome does it.;)
It doesn't matter than Windows has offered a similar system since Windows 98. Now that Gnome is doing it, it's supposed to be treated as a hot new thing in computating, capisce?
Of course they aren't obliged. That's why, if you read closely, you caught my disclaimer about it not necessarily being good business sense to ignore consumer problems. No one ever said it was a smart thing to do, but some game developers are certainly doing it.
As for EA, they continue to be the most powerful video game publisher in the world and they have been doing it for well over 15 years. Suffice it to say, after countless Sims expansion packs, EA doesn't have any scruples about running a series into the ground so long as it will turn a profit. Although, I must admit, I never had any of those problems you've had with Red Alert 2, which runs perfectly fine for me at the highest resolution.
I'd pounce on the lawsuit insinuation, only you saved yourself by marking it as an extreme case.
They don't "HAVE TO" support anything. Those are the terms of Valve's licensing system. It may not be good business sense for Valve, but it's their choice as a company to do so. You don't like it? Tough. Don't offer Valve's games.
Yet they are present for a reason - as incentive for inventors to come up with new ideas and be able to make some money based on them. Or, at least that's what the original premise was. The problem today is that the big companies are using the system to patent every idea out there, thereby shooing the "little guy" out of the system.
And it is, as another poster said, also the effect of lawyers becoming so heavily involved. Like it or not, our world is increasingly run by lawyers and economists, who have formed a vast array of confusing jargon and rules only they can interpret. Much like the economists who play the stock market on emotional impulse and force it to become more erratic than it should be, IP lawyers have created a system so perplexing and so confusing that their role is necessary. They manufactured a niche for themselves. And guess who can afford them? Not the individiual inventors patents were supposed to prevent - rather, the big companies. And who can afford to pay the lawyer fees to interpret patents and defend patents? The big companies.
My friend, the patent system itself is not the problem. Its abuse is the problem. That why we need some seriously hardline people at the USPO to put a stop to frivilous patents and pay special attention to companies who try to get rich on patent portfolios and patenting everything under the sun. Alas, this simply won't happen because as I said before, the USPO is a profit-minded entity. To deny big corporations would be to deny their primary source of income. It's a very blatant conflict of interest, and if it weren't for the minor fact that virtually all members of the government sleep with the big corporations, something would have changed by now.
When did XHTML come into common usage with browsers though? Would the people back on Netscape Communicator or Internet Explorer 5 still be able to view it?
It's purely conflict of interest. The U.S. Patent Office makes money with each patent it grants. Even the application fee alone is substantial. Therefore, there is no economic incentive for the Patent Office to deny patents, no matter how dubious they are. That's why they seem to pass through the system like diarrhea.
The irony is that now both parties and the judicial branch of the government will likely spend more money just sorting out the dilemma created by the greedy Patent Office's apathy. Not that the Patent Office cares. They already have their cash.
But the desire to separate the browser from the e-mail client is what led to Firefox and Thunderbird and additionally why I like it. The Mozilla suite, as a whole, feels clunky to me compared to these refined, individual components. Even though I used to use Mozilla proper religiously, I switched to Firefox/Thunderbird a few months ago and have been very pleased with it. I tried the Mozilla 1.7 RC2 build yesterday and was disappointed by it. Compared to Firefox, the Mozilla suite seems to lack polish and quality, slowly succumbing to nonsensical feature creep.
Where I work, we have to use Outlook for e-mail because of the meeting scheduler, so unfortunately Thunderbird is not an option. But, I can easily replace IE with Firefox without problems.
My wishlist would have Thunderbird - or a branch therein - evolving into something similar to Evolution, like a personal information management program.
I was under the impression that XHTML was more about being able to eXtend the functionality of HTML by allowing the user to create new tags and modules as needed. Sort of like the Scheme approach of giving the user a minimal set of commands and allowing them to derive more complicated ones manually. Being XML based, it also supposedly has better interaction with databases. It is also much stricter than plain HTML.
Which is great and all, except I don't need all of that power.
Just because IE isn't stable doesn't mean Firefox can't aspire to be. IE is an archaic browser as far as I'm concerned, and that's why Mozilla and Netscape are actually gaining momentum. Prior to Mozilla 1.0, IE dominated. Now, at least according to my statistic, it's more of a 90%-10% or 85%-15% distribution. And although that may seem small, in something as gigantic as the browser market, that's actually quite a lot of people.
Why are they gaining? They offer technologies people want. Tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, and are generally less crashy. They are also generally more immune to the various sorts of crap unscrupulous advertisers have been pulling that "infects" IE. To keep gaining, these browsers need to keep doing this. That means not allowing large and highly documented bugs like the memory leak in question to be ignored.
It would also probably cut the number of web pages you can view by half as well.
I still write in HTML 4.0 Transitional and validate it. Why should I be left out? XHTML is unnecessarily complex for my needs. At the end of the day, I merely want a site that looks reasonably good and is functional. I don't really need the wizardry and features XHTML can offer.
Perhaps, but even then you have to hit a fundamental limit. Even if you swap out applications to compensate for the rising demand, at some point that demand is going to outpace the available RAM. Then what? Linux is not immune to this either, though perhaps it handles it more gracefully. Windows XP goes into a very sluggish, stuttering mode where it becomes difficult to innoculate the offending program.
But on a more basic level, while Microsoft can work to prevent thrashing, program authors also need to fix legitimate memory leakages. Otherwise, it's like asking the government to step in to regulate something because people are too lazy to fix their own problems (i.e. video game violence, movie violence, fast food lawsuits, etc). It's really not Microsoft's responsibility to "Make Firefox not leak memory." Microsoft's job is to handle the "thrashing" gracefully if and when it does happen.
I don't think so. If Interplay goes, I suspect the trademarks go to the highest bidder. Interplay holding on to the Descent and FreeSpace licenses isn't doing anyone any favors.
As another replier already said, it's not exactly what I would call a panacea to all of PC gaming's woes.
A user would have to reboot the system just to play a game. Switching between games becomes a hassle, especially if you only play for short spurts at a time.
You still have to support all of the hardware. Even if you based it on Linux, you'd need a reasonably competent hotplug system to auto-detect hardware configurations. Even though you might think this puts everything on "your terms," it's not really circumventing the problem of supporting many configurations. And now the burden falls entirely on you to get it right, as opposed to any help Windows could give you.
Writing configuration to the hard drive seems awkward. Supposedly, this is how you'd have to apply patches and record player data. So whenever I put in a CD, I would have to apply a patch every single time, unless you installed the entire game to the hard drive, which is how we are already doing it. A LiveCD shouldn't have to rely on a hard drive being there. Otherwise, what advantage does this format really have?
LiveCDs are SLOW. Knoppix and Mepis are no fun when it comes to speed of their LiveCD versions. It's slower to read from the CD-ROM than it is off the hard drive, which means longer load times and the need for more RAM to run a game effectively (unless you install to the hard drive).
In short, while it is a novel approach, it is hardly a panacea, which probably explains why a lot of developers haven't done it.
I think it depends a lot on your definition of "friendly."
Gentoo has a definite forum, user community, and very extensive documentation. In this respect, it is "friendly." Yet, despite that, I wouldn't expect Joe Average to be able to get through that documentation and actually set the whole thing up.
But then you have the Fedoras and the Mandrakes that configure everything for you and have happy little UIs that let you tinker with everything else. In that sense, these distros are also friendly, imho.
Slashdot Mirror
Truly.
I liked the original Xenogears, even in spite of the text... that... read... like... this. The storyline was cool and there were lots of evil characters from the outset, only to be bested by one of them, and then we're left to question whether or not said character was really evil in the first place. And I liked how the intro cinematic was just this disconnected, looming scene until about three-quarters in the game when it finally begins to come together.
But Xenosaga was a pithy, monumental mess of a game. It lacked any of the interesting characters from the first game. It bastardized the battle system from the first game. It recited its storyline like it was some demented gospel. And it took itself so damn seriously, I honestly laughed. The best part is getting e-mail from this futuristic world, talking about nonsense like AGWS converters, that the game takes for granted I'm supposed to instantly understand. I guess that's what the huge built-in encyclopedia is for. Lame.
What's also remarkable is when you check out the size of some of Unreal Tournament 2003/2004's OGG files. Some are scarcely larger than a meg, but hold over 3 minutes of CD-quality music.
This is very true. As the Half-Life speed run and many other 3D games show us, it's very difficult to obstruct the player's path in 3D, especially if the game aims to have realistic environments. Enemies usually have to move in order to attack, and you can only lock so many doors. ;)
My primary computer came with a Seagate drive and out of the many brands I've owned (Western Digital, Maxtor, IBM, and Hitachi), I've come to like the Seagate the best. Even after 2 years of use, it's still completely silent and reliable, compared to the rattly Maxtor that is slaved to it. It strikes me as a drive of superior quality, and I'll be sure my next drive is a Seagate.
What's wrong is when reviewers start to criticize games and detract points for anything shorter than that.
Simply put, the mystical 10 hour mark can't possibly hold for every game genre. We're designing a video game on the cusp of the 10 hour mark. It's a brawler in the same vein as the old Ninja Turtles brawler games, using today's technology and graphics. Would a Ninja Turtles game get really old after 10 hours? Yep. Heck, you can blaze through TMNT IV in about 30 minutes.
While I'm not advocating that as an acceptable amount, replayability has to be taken into account. What made TMNT fun was the ability to play it over and over again to kill time. The same truth holds for popular first-person shooters like Quake and Unreal Tournament. Most wouldn't play ten hours of Unreal Tournament single player, but dozens of hours accumulate through repeated Internet games and botmatches. There's no ongoing storyline, and no stupid little sidequests. It's fun to play over and over again, simple as that.
Yet, replayability is a factor that eludes poor game reviewers these days. People who pay $30-$50 for games deserve to spend a few hours with it. But when game reviewers started bitching about Game Boy Advance titles being under 10 hours, I draw the line. There is a quality in the two-hour game that's so concentrated and fun that I'll play it repeatedly, as opposed to the 80-hour game with the meaningless side-quests and pointless characters that exist solely to bolster the game's length that I'll only play once.
Perhaps I'm just being an old skool gamer, but I'll be glad when the day returns that a video game is "fun" and no longer a long-term "commitment."
Either way, what with Knoppix, Mepis, etc., there's no reason why I shouldn't have the essential e-mail, Internet, office productivity, and graphics tools on the first disk alone. It's a win-win for everyone. A win for users because they don't have to download gigs of packages they don't want, and a win for the always-congested Red Hat servers and mirrors.
I think there's a CD swap on Fedora Core 2 when OpenOffice installs. The fourth CD is not really needed for a typical install, but Red Hat's "Typical" install does require the first three CDs.
I agree, when Mepis can cram all of those mandatory apps on one CD, it's silly for Red Hat to make people download over 2 gigs of data for three CDs.
Whether or not Interplay says they want to make a new Fallout game is irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that they are in deep financial turmoil. They have recently pitched forth several game plans that will probably never come to fruition (a similar promise was made of Descent 4).
It's just the final death throes of a dying company. Let it go, already.
I'm probably totally wrong on this, but I thought Gnome came before KDE?
You answered your own mystery: Gnome does it. ;)
It doesn't matter than Windows has offered a similar system since Windows 98. Now that Gnome is doing it, it's supposed to be treated as a hot new thing in computating, capisce?
As for EA, they continue to be the most powerful video game publisher in the world and they have been doing it for well over 15 years. Suffice it to say, after countless Sims expansion packs, EA doesn't have any scruples about running a series into the ground so long as it will turn a profit. Although, I must admit, I never had any of those problems you've had with Red Alert 2, which runs perfectly fine for me at the highest resolution.
I'd pounce on the lawsuit insinuation, only you saved yourself by marking it as an extreme case.
They don't "HAVE TO" support anything. Those are the terms of Valve's licensing system. It may not be good business sense for Valve, but it's their choice as a company to do so. You don't like it? Tough. Don't offer Valve's games.
Of course not. We all know that once video game developers meet their financial projections, they don't deserve to make any more money than that. >_>
And it is, as another poster said, also the effect of lawyers becoming so heavily involved. Like it or not, our world is increasingly run by lawyers and economists, who have formed a vast array of confusing jargon and rules only they can interpret. Much like the economists who play the stock market on emotional impulse and force it to become more erratic than it should be, IP lawyers have created a system so perplexing and so confusing that their role is necessary. They manufactured a niche for themselves. And guess who can afford them? Not the individiual inventors patents were supposed to prevent - rather, the big companies. And who can afford to pay the lawyer fees to interpret patents and defend patents? The big companies.
My friend, the patent system itself is not the problem. Its abuse is the problem. That why we need some seriously hardline people at the USPO to put a stop to frivilous patents and pay special attention to companies who try to get rich on patent portfolios and patenting everything under the sun. Alas, this simply won't happen because as I said before, the USPO is a profit-minded entity. To deny big corporations would be to deny their primary source of income. It's a very blatant conflict of interest, and if it weren't for the minor fact that virtually all members of the government sleep with the big corporations, something would have changed by now.
When did XHTML come into common usage with browsers though? Would the people back on Netscape Communicator or Internet Explorer 5 still be able to view it?
The irony is that now both parties and the judicial branch of the government will likely spend more money just sorting out the dilemma created by the greedy Patent Office's apathy. Not that the Patent Office cares. They already have their cash.
AFAIK, Mozilla 1.0 was rebuilt from the ground up after tinkerings with the buggy Netscape 6 code proved to be unsalvagable.
Where I work, we have to use Outlook for e-mail because of the meeting scheduler, so unfortunately Thunderbird is not an option. But, I can easily replace IE with Firefox without problems.
My wishlist would have Thunderbird - or a branch therein - evolving into something similar to Evolution, like a personal information management program.
Which is great and all, except I don't need all of that power.
Why are they gaining? They offer technologies people want. Tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, and are generally less crashy. They are also generally more immune to the various sorts of crap unscrupulous advertisers have been pulling that "infects" IE. To keep gaining, these browsers need to keep doing this. That means not allowing large and highly documented bugs like the memory leak in question to be ignored.
I still write in HTML 4.0 Transitional and validate it. Why should I be left out? XHTML is unnecessarily complex for my needs. At the end of the day, I merely want a site that looks reasonably good and is functional. I don't really need the wizardry and features XHTML can offer.
But on a more basic level, while Microsoft can work to prevent thrashing, program authors also need to fix legitimate memory leakages. Otherwise, it's like asking the government to step in to regulate something because people are too lazy to fix their own problems (i.e. video game violence, movie violence, fast food lawsuits, etc). It's really not Microsoft's responsibility to "Make Firefox not leak memory." Microsoft's job is to handle the "thrashing" gracefully if and when it does happen.
I don't think so. If Interplay goes, I suspect the trademarks go to the highest bidder. Interplay holding on to the Descent and FreeSpace licenses isn't doing anyone any favors.
- A user would have to reboot the system just to play a game. Switching between games becomes a hassle, especially if you only play for short spurts at a time.
- You still have to support all of the hardware. Even if you based it on Linux, you'd need a reasonably competent hotplug system to auto-detect hardware configurations. Even though you might think this puts everything on "your terms," it's not really circumventing the problem of supporting many configurations. And now the burden falls entirely on you to get it right, as opposed to any help Windows could give you.
- Writing configuration to the hard drive seems awkward. Supposedly, this is how you'd have to apply patches and record player data. So whenever I put in a CD, I would have to apply a patch every single time, unless you installed the entire game to the hard drive, which is how we are already doing it. A LiveCD shouldn't have to rely on a hard drive being there. Otherwise, what advantage does this format really have?
- LiveCDs are SLOW. Knoppix and Mepis are no fun when it comes to speed of their LiveCD versions. It's slower to read from the CD-ROM than it is off the hard drive, which means longer load times and the need for more RAM to run a game effectively (unless you install to the hard drive).
In short, while it is a novel approach, it is hardly a panacea, which probably explains why a lot of developers haven't done it.I think it depends a lot on your definition of "friendly." Gentoo has a definite forum, user community, and very extensive documentation. In this respect, it is "friendly." Yet, despite that, I wouldn't expect Joe Average to be able to get through that documentation and actually set the whole thing up. But then you have the Fedoras and the Mandrakes that configure everything for you and have happy little UIs that let you tinker with everything else. In that sense, these distros are also friendly, imho.