You know, one of the worst things about adventure games was the inane logic. In some games, it was alright. Mostly the LucasArts and DiscWorld games, because they were set in pretty wacky premises to begin with. The Dig is a notable exception from LucasArts' other games, as the puzzles are much more realistic in terms of solvability.
I remember in Day of the Tentacle there was a point where you had to wash a wagon (in the late 1700s) to make it rain so that you could get Ben Franklin struck by lightning. Why would washing a wagon make it rain? Because if you have Bernard Bernouli look at the car parked outside the mansion in the present, he says it always rains when he washes his car.
That's the kind of weird logic I'm talking about. And one of the other comments had a link to something even more stupid and drawn out, in Gabriel Knight 3 (a game that is supposed to be relatively realistic) where you have to make a fake mustache so that you can disguise yourself as a person who doesn't even HAVE a mustache. You steal his passport and draw the mustache on with a marker. WTF? Why did I bother doing all that crap with the cat, the spray bottle, the candy, the syrup, and the masking tape when he doesn't have a mustache to begin with?
If developers could figure out that shit like that isn't fun, then maybe adventure games would come back.
Unless the game doesn't require a subscription fee... Like most games on the PS2 don't. I can only think of FFXI off the top of my head. Are there others?
The "Ratings may change" tag is reserved for games that specifically allow you to interact with other players over the internet. The reason for this is because there really are deuchebags out there who do nothing but make life suck for everyone else, and there are also some really nice people. Your particular game experience will depend on the kind of people you meet in the game.
Now I think maybe games should have a tag that says content unlocked with third party devices was not intended to be available to the players. It seems like common sense.. but then again, so does Mature 17+. Stupid people.
They're allowing pornographic UMDs for the PSP. That's a proprietary format on a proprietary handheld. If Sony is going to make the decision, I'd say they don't care about porn on their disks.
"AMD gets a rush off copying every implementation Intel's ever made, and yet, when Intel does the same they cry foul? That's not sportsmanly at all, that's just being a whiner."
What are you talking about, copying implementations? They license Intel's proprietary instruction sets, they didn't COPY them. They are paying Intel to have them. And having them is important for compatibility reasons. EM64T is also licensed by Intel from AMD. Nobody is stealing or copying anything.
Did you even read the complaint against Intel? They have been using anti-competitive methods to keep OEMs pumping out more Intel and less AMD. They have even gone so far as to threaten company heads that were going to attend the Athlon64 launch parties.
Actually I must ask if you even understand what anti-competitive behavior is. Intel releasing the Pentium M, a cooler and potentially faster chip, is perfectly acceptable. AMD did it with the Athlon64, after all. Selling new and advanced technology that you developed is how those companies function. If the Pentium M just happens to be better than Athlon's offering at the time, that doesn't mean it's anticompetitive.
I dismiss music appreciation because I actually went a step further and tried learning 3 or 4 instruments, and taking singing lessons. I appreciate music. In the school system, Music Appreciation is a useless class that people take to waste an hour of their day.
I'm not suggesting any type of Right of Passage. It's a solid idea. If you wanna get your assignment finished before the end of class, you'd better type a little faster than with two fingers. You'd better spell your commands correctly, and with the right syntax. You'd better understand what the commands you're using actually do.
It is much more of a challenge, and much more mentally involved to copy and paste a file in Unix than to drag and drop. It's almost on the level of letters vs. pictures in books.
I'm not a programmer, but having read some of the comments on this thread I've figured out the real issue.
ICC uses a CPUID call to see what processor is running the code. It will only use its' processor optimizations if the returned name is GenuineIntel. However, the CPUID call also generates a list of processor features, MMX/SSE etc. and AMD chips support everything that Intel chips do with the exception of SSE3 which apparently nobody ever uses.
The complaint is that ICC doesn't care what the feature-set is, and ONLY cares about the brand. And now I can even think of a good way to tell if this is really the case - you can change the name of a P4 chip to something other than GenuineIntel - if the optimizations don't run, then the only thing the compiler is anti-competitive in nature.
I don't think the issue is whether ICC is doing this for non-Intel processors (we know it does, because the code ASKS for the processor's name) so much that the code it uses for PIVs works perfectly fine on AMD processors.
If that's the case, why would the ICC compiler treat Pentium III chips the same way it treats AMD chips? It obviously is not optimizing all of Intel's chips in that case. They crippled ICC on PIII to improve benchmarks on PIV and make the new chips look better, even though the PIIIs were faster originally. If they're willing to cripple their own chips to make the P4 seem like a better chip, then they're willing to cripple everyone else's as well.
Now really, if public education in America were up to snuff.. would we have elected George W Bush? He's like the posterchild for his own No Child Left Behind act.
School computers should not have GUIs.
I'm only 19, my first operating system was DOS, and I have been miles ahead of classmates in literacy tests since 2nd grade.
If they have to deal with something archaic like DOS or even more advanced like Unix, it's still more difficult to execute most functions than using Windows or MacOS. It will require a little more thought, they'll have to spell their commands correctly and make sure their syntax is correct. The kids will complain about how their computer at home is so much better. Well let them. Maybe it might get them to actually appreciate the advances technology has made in the past 30 years.
So here we have a rudimentary spelling and grammar (syntax) lesson, along with Technology History and Appreciation. A little like Mustic Appreciation, but maybe somewhat less useless.
Might I recommend that you watch the movie Metropolis? My HTML sucks so I can't give you a link, but you can google it pretty easily.
The animation looks almost Popeyeish [the manga the movie is based on was made in the 50's] but is quite simply the smoothest I've ever seen in any cartoon. Ever.
I quick look to Wikipedia had this to say:
"Unlike the Minidisc, another proprietary Sony-developed format, blank media will not be commercially available, in order to avoid piracy. However, there has been recent discussion about the UMD movie and music formats being opened by Sony, although it is not clear if this will result in the development of UMD "burners" (through CD or DVD burners). Sony has said that it intends to keep the game-formatted UMD specifications to itself, in order to avoid competition (and presumably to profit from licensing fees)."
Perhaps if all they're doing is offering the service of printing UMDs for outside companies [at an extremely inflated cost, as usual] then in that case they wouldn't be able to control who gets to put what on their disks. But if that were the case, why would they have to put both the Sony and the PSP logo on each disk?
Nobody is complaining that the parts are cheap. They're making the point that Microsofts consoles video card is using API software FAR removed from Microsofts proprietary DirectX stuff, which was originally created to be a unifying graphics architecture....
The current X-Box has only drawn profit for one quarter out of the 4 years it's been out. I don't think Microsoft cares if they lose money. They know that if they can keep throwing enough at the games industry, they can infect and destroy all competition.
Sony controls all UMD disk printing. They reaaaally want to keep it under their control rather than anyone elses. They even put their logo on porn movie UMDs @_@
Amen brother.
I used to work at Best Buy and the guys in the games department were clueless. My supervisor had been working in games since the PSX came out, and the only game console he had ever owned was an X-Box. Believe it or not, Best Buys training program puts a strong emphasis on customer service (they're noncommission, now, too) and you can give fairly good service with minimal knowledge of the products you're selling - but there comes a point where fifteen minute videos (such as the one we were forced to watch just prior to the PS2 Network Adapter release) simply aren't good enough.
I've been on both sides of your story, telling sales guys stuff they had no idea was even possible, and having customers tell me new stuff. What really matters is how you react - when a customer tells me something I didn't know, I'll certainly respect them for out-trivia-ing me and I'll go and research it when I get home. When a sales guy doesn't know something they should, I would expect similar respect. Most of the time, however, I get "That's not true" "It's only a rumor" or similar responses. It makes me very sad.
They've been aiming for the Do-Everything machine since the creation of SCEI... Riiight. They didn't want to make a game machine when Nintendo asked them to make a CD-rom system for the SNES. They didn't want to sell a complete CD game machine when Nintendo scrapped the SNES-CD idea. They didn't want their machine to be for games when they released THOUSANDS of games for their systems. My take on Kutaragi's comments is that he flubbed up in the interview. The PS3 is going to be a game machine that happens to be a Blu-Ray/DVD player with an internet connection and Bluetooth connectivity as well. Sony is going to sell the PS3 on the ability to play Blu-Ray as well as DVD (backwards compatibility for your movies!) since Blu-Ray players still haven't reached American shores to my knowledge, and probably won't before the PS3's release. After that we can all start fighting over HD-DVDs or Blu-Ray. I've gone off on a tangent >. Sony doesn't want people who don't play games to see the PS3 and think games are all it can do. I used to work in retail, and I've seen lots of people pass over X-Boxes because they want a DVD player that can play mp3 CDs... The X-box does that, and it's probably cheaper than the DVD player they're going to end up buying. But they don't know that.
Contrary to a lot of the posts I've read so far, I'd have to say that if the monk knew what the book was he wouldn't have messed with it.
My dad has just recently converted to catholicism, and he is very impressed by the shear volume of knowledge that the church posesses. They have their hands in many sciences like astrology and numerology, and they seem to value every bit of it they can get regardless of whether it is contrary to the religion.
Maybe they weren't like that back in the days before the Rennaisance, but it would definitely explain why monks spent all their time recording books.
In any case, I would think that the monk just needed paper and grabbed the nearest book. It just happened to be a math book [the traditions still burn strong today, I ruin my math books too!]. This book also survived the city it was in burning to the ground.. maybe because it was a prayer book by then =)
To me backwards compatibility is not "Can I get games on the cheap?" It's "Can I play the stuff I own, and will I be able to play the good games I missed?" If I haven't played Final Fantasy XII by the time the PS3 comes out, I'm going to be angry if I can't play it on my new system, regardless of how much the game itself cost.
Now that I think about it, there aren't really a lot of games on the X-Box that I'd miss. Nothing I can think of is anything I'd care about playing ever again, especially after the sequals to them have been released for the 360. Not like anything on the X-Box except maybe Morrowind and KOTOR had any kind of storyline that I'd be missing out on.
I think the GC is one of the most underrated systems of all time.
I don't know if any of the other comments replying to this have said anything... but I must point you to the Sega Dreamcast....
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It apparently injected the subject of a topic I posted in earlier. Mai bad.
You know, one of the worst things about adventure games was the inane logic. In some games, it was alright. Mostly the LucasArts and DiscWorld games, because they were set in pretty wacky premises to begin with. The Dig is a notable exception from LucasArts' other games, as the puzzles are much more realistic in terms of solvability.
I remember in Day of the Tentacle there was a point where you had to wash a wagon (in the late 1700s) to make it rain so that you could get Ben Franklin struck by lightning. Why would washing a wagon make it rain? Because if you have Bernard Bernouli look at the car parked outside the mansion in the present, he says it always rains when he washes his car.
That's the kind of weird logic I'm talking about. And one of the other comments had a link to something even more stupid and drawn out, in Gabriel Knight 3 (a game that is supposed to be relatively realistic) where you have to make a fake mustache so that you can disguise yourself as a person who doesn't even HAVE a mustache. You steal his passport and draw the mustache on with a marker. WTF? Why did I bother doing all that crap with the cat, the spray bottle, the candy, the syrup, and the masking tape when he doesn't have a mustache to begin with?
If developers could figure out that shit like that isn't fun, then maybe adventure games would come back.
When Apple makes it transition to x86 will it make a difference if Yahoo has G5 compatible software?
Unless the game doesn't require a subscription fee... Like most games on the PS2 don't. I can only think of FFXI off the top of my head. Are there others?
The "Ratings may change" tag is reserved for games that specifically allow you to interact with other players over the internet. The reason for this is because there really are deuchebags out there who do nothing but make life suck for everyone else, and there are also some really nice people. Your particular game experience will depend on the kind of people you meet in the game.
Now I think maybe games should have a tag that says content unlocked with third party devices was not intended to be available to the players. It seems like common sense.. but then again, so does Mature 17+. Stupid people.
You forget about David Letterman's "Bill Clinton Monica Lewinski Sex Scandal Gate?"
They're allowing pornographic UMDs for the PSP. That's a proprietary format on a proprietary handheld. If Sony is going to make the decision, I'd say they don't care about porn on their disks.
"AMD gets a rush off copying every implementation Intel's ever made, and yet, when Intel does the same they cry foul? That's not sportsmanly at all, that's just being a whiner."
What are you talking about, copying implementations? They license Intel's proprietary instruction sets, they didn't COPY them. They are paying Intel to have them. And having them is important for compatibility reasons. EM64T is also licensed by Intel from AMD. Nobody is stealing or copying anything.
Did you even read the complaint against Intel? They have been using anti-competitive methods to keep OEMs pumping out more Intel and less AMD. They have even gone so far as to threaten company heads that were going to attend the Athlon64 launch parties.
Actually I must ask if you even understand what anti-competitive behavior is. Intel releasing the Pentium M, a cooler and potentially faster chip, is perfectly acceptable. AMD did it with the Athlon64, after all. Selling new and advanced technology that you developed is how those companies function. If the Pentium M just happens to be better than Athlon's offering at the time, that doesn't mean it's anticompetitive.
I have made plastic, I have used tape drives.
I dismiss music appreciation because I actually went a step further and tried learning 3 or 4 instruments, and taking singing lessons. I appreciate music. In the school system, Music Appreciation is a useless class that people take to waste an hour of their day.
I'm not suggesting any type of Right of Passage. It's a solid idea. If you wanna get your assignment finished before the end of class, you'd better type a little faster than with two fingers. You'd better spell your commands correctly, and with the right syntax. You'd better understand what the commands you're using actually do.
It is much more of a challenge, and much more mentally involved to copy and paste a file in Unix than to drag and drop. It's almost on the level of letters vs. pictures in books.
I'm not a programmer, but having read some of the comments on this thread I've figured out the real issue. ICC uses a CPUID call to see what processor is running the code. It will only use its' processor optimizations if the returned name is GenuineIntel. However, the CPUID call also generates a list of processor features, MMX/SSE etc. and AMD chips support everything that Intel chips do with the exception of SSE3 which apparently nobody ever uses. The complaint is that ICC doesn't care what the feature-set is, and ONLY cares about the brand. And now I can even think of a good way to tell if this is really the case - you can change the name of a P4 chip to something other than GenuineIntel - if the optimizations don't run, then the only thing the compiler is anti-competitive in nature.
I don't think the issue is whether ICC is doing this for non-Intel processors (we know it does, because the code ASKS for the processor's name) so much that the code it uses for PIVs works perfectly fine on AMD processors.
If that's the case, why would the ICC compiler treat Pentium III chips the same way it treats AMD chips? It obviously is not optimizing all of Intel's chips in that case. They crippled ICC on PIII to improve benchmarks on PIV and make the new chips look better, even though the PIIIs were faster originally. If they're willing to cripple their own chips to make the P4 seem like a better chip, then they're willing to cripple everyone else's as well.
Now really, if public education in America were up to snuff.. would we have elected George W Bush? He's like the posterchild for his own No Child Left Behind act.
School computers should not have GUIs. I'm only 19, my first operating system was DOS, and I have been miles ahead of classmates in literacy tests since 2nd grade. If they have to deal with something archaic like DOS or even more advanced like Unix, it's still more difficult to execute most functions than using Windows or MacOS. It will require a little more thought, they'll have to spell their commands correctly and make sure their syntax is correct. The kids will complain about how their computer at home is so much better. Well let them. Maybe it might get them to actually appreciate the advances technology has made in the past 30 years. So here we have a rudimentary spelling and grammar (syntax) lesson, along with Technology History and Appreciation. A little like Mustic Appreciation, but maybe somewhat less useless.
Might I recommend that you watch the movie Metropolis? My HTML sucks so I can't give you a link, but you can google it pretty easily. The animation looks almost Popeyeish [the manga the movie is based on was made in the 50's] but is quite simply the smoothest I've ever seen in any cartoon. Ever.
I quick look to Wikipedia had this to say: "Unlike the Minidisc, another proprietary Sony-developed format, blank media will not be commercially available, in order to avoid piracy. However, there has been recent discussion about the UMD movie and music formats being opened by Sony, although it is not clear if this will result in the development of UMD "burners" (through CD or DVD burners). Sony has said that it intends to keep the game-formatted UMD specifications to itself, in order to avoid competition (and presumably to profit from licensing fees)."
Perhaps if all they're doing is offering the service of printing UMDs for outside companies [at an extremely inflated cost, as usual] then in that case they wouldn't be able to control who gets to put what on their disks. But if that were the case, why would they have to put both the Sony and the PSP logo on each disk?
Nobody is complaining that the parts are cheap. They're making the point that Microsofts consoles video card is using API software FAR removed from Microsofts proprietary DirectX stuff, which was originally created to be a unifying graphics architecture....
The current X-Box has only drawn profit for one quarter out of the 4 years it's been out. I don't think Microsoft cares if they lose money. They know that if they can keep throwing enough at the games industry, they can infect and destroy all competition.
Sony controls all UMD disk printing. They reaaaally want to keep it under their control rather than anyone elses. They even put their logo on porn movie UMDs @_@
Amen brother. I used to work at Best Buy and the guys in the games department were clueless. My supervisor had been working in games since the PSX came out, and the only game console he had ever owned was an X-Box. Believe it or not, Best Buys training program puts a strong emphasis on customer service (they're noncommission, now, too) and you can give fairly good service with minimal knowledge of the products you're selling - but there comes a point where fifteen minute videos (such as the one we were forced to watch just prior to the PS2 Network Adapter release) simply aren't good enough. I've been on both sides of your story, telling sales guys stuff they had no idea was even possible, and having customers tell me new stuff. What really matters is how you react - when a customer tells me something I didn't know, I'll certainly respect them for out-trivia-ing me and I'll go and research it when I get home. When a sales guy doesn't know something they should, I would expect similar respect. Most of the time, however, I get "That's not true" "It's only a rumor" or similar responses. It makes me very sad.
They've been aiming for the Do-Everything machine since the creation of SCEI... Riiight. They didn't want to make a game machine when Nintendo asked them to make a CD-rom system for the SNES. They didn't want to sell a complete CD game machine when Nintendo scrapped the SNES-CD idea. They didn't want their machine to be for games when they released THOUSANDS of games for their systems. My take on Kutaragi's comments is that he flubbed up in the interview. The PS3 is going to be a game machine that happens to be a Blu-Ray/DVD player with an internet connection and Bluetooth connectivity as well. Sony is going to sell the PS3 on the ability to play Blu-Ray as well as DVD (backwards compatibility for your movies!) since Blu-Ray players still haven't reached American shores to my knowledge, and probably won't before the PS3's release. After that we can all start fighting over HD-DVDs or Blu-Ray. I've gone off on a tangent >. Sony doesn't want people who don't play games to see the PS3 and think games are all it can do. I used to work in retail, and I've seen lots of people pass over X-Boxes because they want a DVD player that can play mp3 CDs... The X-box does that, and it's probably cheaper than the DVD player they're going to end up buying. But they don't know that.
Contrary to a lot of the posts I've read so far, I'd have to say that if the monk knew what the book was he wouldn't have messed with it. My dad has just recently converted to catholicism, and he is very impressed by the shear volume of knowledge that the church posesses. They have their hands in many sciences like astrology and numerology, and they seem to value every bit of it they can get regardless of whether it is contrary to the religion. Maybe they weren't like that back in the days before the Rennaisance, but it would definitely explain why monks spent all their time recording books. In any case, I would think that the monk just needed paper and grabbed the nearest book. It just happened to be a math book [the traditions still burn strong today, I ruin my math books too!]. This book also survived the city it was in burning to the ground.. maybe because it was a prayer book by then =)
To me backwards compatibility is not "Can I get games on the cheap?" It's "Can I play the stuff I own, and will I be able to play the good games I missed?" If I haven't played Final Fantasy XII by the time the PS3 comes out, I'm going to be angry if I can't play it on my new system, regardless of how much the game itself cost. Now that I think about it, there aren't really a lot of games on the X-Box that I'd miss. Nothing I can think of is anything I'd care about playing ever again, especially after the sequals to them have been released for the 360. Not like anything on the X-Box except maybe Morrowind and KOTOR had any kind of storyline that I'd be missing out on.
I think the GC is one of the most underrated systems of all time. I don't know if any of the other comments replying to this have said anything... but I must point you to the Sega Dreamcast....