The knock on this game is that it has a "kiddie" look to it. I was worried that might be the case, but after seeing the game in action, I'm glad to say it works.
It does have a semi-cartoony look to it, but I don't think it detracts from the game. Previous Zelda games have had what I would consider "kiddie" looks to them. Even Ocarina of Time made link look more like a little kid than an elf. What's been great about the Zelda series is the game play, which is deep and engrossing.
Playing the new game, you quickly get caught up in it, and the cell-shaded look just works. It hasn't been overused enough yet to be cliche (although it's getting close), and it fits pretty well with the Zelda franchise. And, after seeing screen shots, you think I'm an idiot, I'd advise you to hold off on your judgement. The screen shots don't do it justice. Before I got my hands on the game, they weren't convicing me, either.
I was just playing this a little bit. It looks very much like Super Metroid, but the enemies look cooler. The combat seems to be improved somewhat from what I remember. On the SNES, it could be simple and tedious to shoot the bad guys. On the GBA, it seems to take a little more skill and concentration, and is more fun.
While Metroid Prime for the 'Cube reminds me of a PC FPS, the GBA incarnation of Metroid looks like the best of classic side-scrolling action, with some tweaks to make it even better.
"Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information," Gould wrote in his 1977 book "Ever Since Darwin." "It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors."
I believe he wrote that in response to creationists' arguments that scientist were biased, and because of that, evolution is a flawed concept. His point was that of course scientists have opinions and beliefs, and this is a good and necessary thing.
At the risk of being a pimple-faced fanboy, Spiderman has "spider strength," the proportional strength of a spider. This allows him to lift many times his own body weight, and might explain how he keeps his arms from ripping off from the centripital force of his swinging.
Kevin Mitnick broke into computer systems, he copied a bunch of data that he was not authorized to copy. He made a bunch of cell phone calls without paying.
What he did not do was use any of that data (including credit cards) for any fraudulent purposes (other than the free cell phone calls). He did not physically hurt anyone. He did not publish any trade secrets.
And he spent 5 years in jail. For comparison, I checked out some standard sentencing guidelines for my home state of Washington. Crimes for 2nd time offenders that warrant less than 5 years in prison include:
Robbery
Vehicular Homicide
Arson
Manslaughter
Possesion with intent to deliver Heroin or Cocaine
Drive by Shooting
I don't dispute that Kevin did something wrong. But what he did and the punishment he got were unbeleivably out of proportion. By portraying Kevin as some sort of super-hacker, the prosecution was able to get away with quite a bit courts with technically illiterate judges.
Also, the police used questionable tactics to find and arrest him, including lying to a judge to obtain a warrant and illegally tapping cell phones. These actions should have been enough to get Kevin's case thrown out.
Call me a "Mitnick apologist" if you want, but in this case, justice went overboard, and made a scapegoat out of a Kevin.
when you strip away all the hype, the product tie-ins, the in your face constant advertising, and just go see the movie on it's own merits, it's not really all that bad.
I have to agree with that statement, however, this is Star Wars, and "not bad" is simply not good enough. An average sci-fi movie with great effects, a tedious plot, and annoying dialogue is not what fans expect or deserve. I really hope George Lucas is spending less time on the marketing of AOTC and more time on the filmaking, but until I see the finished product, I'm skeptical of this article's spin.
...MS knows it's gonna take heavy losses to get the market penetration required to start making serious money on the software.
It is amazing to me how much money Microsoft is bleeding out with the XBox. It's an insane strategy if making money off game software royalties is their goal. However, I don't think that they ever intend for XBox to turn a profit, at least in this generation. Rather, they are protecting their monopoly.
Microsoft has the monopoly on the PC OS. But what if, 5 or 10 years from now, nobody used a PC? What if everyone used a TV set-top appliance that played games and DVD's, was a PVR, surfed the web as an internet appliance, wrote letters and resumes and balanced the checkbook. This theoretical "convergence box" is the direction that many pundits see the industry heading. So if, in the future, everyone uses this box instead of a PC, Microsoft would be out of business.
Unless that box had a Microsoft logo on it instead of a Sony one. I think that this is the real reason Microsoft got into the console business, and the reason they are willing to lose so much money. They want to protect the monopoly, plain and simple. If they lose a billion dollars on X-Box over 4 years, but keep the industry stranglehold that earns them tens of billions of dollars annually, then it was money well lost.
If house guests are concerned about privacy, they should ask (and sue for fraud if they found out I lied).
I guess it depends on what is a reasonable expectation of privacy. I would think that privacy in the bathroom or bedroom, even if you are a guest, is a reasonable expectation. You shouldn't have to opt out of being surveilled in the bathroom of a friend's house.
I understand your concerns, because of your particular problems with vandalism, but I think that people who were victimized the other way (like Susan Wilson) would have the exact opposite opinion.
Ways around that are to petition your HOA for a rule change... Easier said than done. No trespassing signs would suggest that trespassing is a problem (which it is, particularly because of vandalism), depressing property values. People here try to hide the problem rather than deal with it.
Well, not to be harsh, but that sounds like your problem. As you said, you agreed to the HOA covenants before you moved in. That the larger community (city, state, nation) should not pass laws because your HOA covanant makes it difficult to do what you want to do and comply with the larger community's rules, seems, to me, an unreasonable expectation.
Ways around that are to petition your HOA for a rule change, or move somewhere else. I may be reading too much in your comment but you seem to be willing to have your HOA curtail what you can do on your own property, but not the federal gov't.
The flip side of your argument is that someone who films house guests using the shower could say "I was only trying to protect my property from criminals."
Here is a rant from a woman who stayed at a friends house, and later found that he was secretly videotaping all his female guests.
Movie reviewers are often given junkets to premieres, interviews with movie stars, etc. There is a whole segment of movie reviewer who seem to take the goodies in exchange for quotes that can be put in the ad. Quote whores who get their names in the movie ads get a degree of fame and, paradoxically, credibility. That this marketing model is being transferred to the game industry is not surprising.
Well, it all depends on your view of what success is. You say sarcastically So they got everyone to use a product (IE) by giving it away for free as part of the default install on 99% of PCs sold.
But that was Microsoft's goal, and that was (and still is) Microsoft's main strategy. They leverage their monopoly to maintain control over the OS market.
Back in '96, Netscape was advancing HTML features ahead of the IETF, because, being everyone's de facto browser, it could. There was serious talk about web based services running on web appliances, and how they would replace the PC. That never happened, and Microsoft still owns the desktop. They have a lot of influence over web standards. Netscape, one of the first serious competitors to Microsoft in a long time, died a slow, horrible death.
I agree that the meme is not exactly accurate. What it should be is that got caught with their pants down with competition from an unexpected direction. They turned on a dime to quash that competition.
That brings us to the console wars. Microsoft seems to view the video game as competition - they see "home entertainment machines", combination web browser/video game/dvd player/pvr - as a potential replacement for the PC. So they are throwing their massive financial resources and PC industry dominance behind an attack on that threat.
The difference this time is that Sony is no Netscape. They are a huge company with their own financial resources. They are also protecting their primary market. They make home electronics, and the "home entertainment machine" seems a likely future for that market.
Perhaps it will be Sony that breaks Microsoft's monopoly, and in the future we will have a world of "home entertainment machines" with real competition.
From 2600 magazine's Summer 2001 issue, Emmanuel Goldstein wrote an editorial, about the DeCSS linking case and other legal fights with which 2600 was involved. It seems pretty relevant to the Pets Warehouse case:
"...the injustice takes on an even more serious tone when it no longer seems to matter whether or not you're found guilty or innocent - whether you win or lose. If you're even brought into the game, you lose regardless of whether or not you win. Sounds crazy? It is. And it's what the American justice system has turned into...
Every time we find ourselves in a court of law, we seem to have lost by default, something even a victory can't seem to change. Not that we don't relish the idea of standing up to any of the bullies who put us through this hell. But every time we do, it costs us and not just financially. We have to devote tremendous resources into the act of simply defending who we are and what we've been doing for all these years."
C'mon, this game was the best garbage collector sim I've ever played. There are tons games where you play as a secret agent or a soldier, but this is one of the few truly ground-breaking games that lets you pick up virtual garbage.
It would have been even better if you could have played as a park employee. Think of the action: people who are sick of waiting in line yelling at you, passing out from heat exhaustion in your costume, having small children puke on you... Now that would've been a game.
DNS is already distributed. You're friendly neighborhood ISP caches the most often used DNS info, and 80% of internet traffic is resolved there. Only a small portion of traffic has to be escalated to a root server. That's why, as the article said, 8 of the 13 root servers would have to be taken out simultaneously for users to notice any slowdown. An attack on the A root server would be more symbolic than actually damaging. Even if it was done by the Stay-Puffed Marshmellow Man.
Re:Tomb Raider did flop...
on
Resident Evil
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· Score: 4, Funny
Real breasts don't move that way.
The movie was just being true to the video game. They made Angelina Jolie's chest move just like Lara Croft's does in the video game. I think the film's faithful adaptation of breasts was the best thing about it.
So, you can park your laptop, order a burger/beer, then email in a movie review all w/o disturbing your fellow patrons. Cool!:)
Great, they turned the movie theater into the equivelant of my home theater set up, only instead of waiting for rentals, I can see first run movies. Will I be able to pause the picture when I get a phone call or have to go to the restroom?
Best video game movie ever?
on
Resident Evil
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· Score: 2
This is the best movie based on a video game that I have ever seen. But that may be like saying she's the smartest supermodel of all time or something.
The Resident Evil game was basically a horror movie turned into a video game, so I guess it's pretty easy to turn it back into a horror movie. Still, for all it's big budget and Milla star power, it is just a horror movie. The genre isn't exactly deep. If you don't expect "something more", you can enjoy this movie.
Not only the bandwidth, but that's 7 songs per month for every person in the world with internet access. That's a lot of music. I know a lot of people who aren't pulling their weight, illegal-download-wise, so the worst offenders must do nothing but steal music 24/7. Common sense says that number is garbage. But Mr. Greene prefaces the statistic by saying, "The RIAA estimates..." He might as well have said, "The RIAA made up this number to shock people into letting us get bad legislation passed..."
A closer look reveals the Marvel Universe's artificiality. For example, social networks have a property called clustering... the Marvel network is only very weakly clustered - about 1.5 times more than a random network.
Another example of the artificiality of the Marvel Universe is that there are a bunch of people with super powers in it, where as in reality, there are realitively few people who can shoot lasers out of there eyes or turn into a gigantic green monster when they are angry.
Right-wing nutcase or not, the principal of this case seems to be firmly established, and Mr. Robinson is in the wrong. Linking to articles or quoting small relevant portions is the simple way around this problem. If someone were to mirror the FR site in its entirety, but include some of the anti-government commentary Mr. Robinson is so busily deleting, you can bet he would take steps similar to those taken by the LA Times and the Washignton Post.
Even free speech champion/. knows this sort of thing is not allowed.
Ford has a history of bullying websites around. Their long running problems with Blue Oval News is a perfect example.
The history is here, but basically, Blue Oval News published internal Ford documents that talked about performance problems in the '99 Mustang Cobra. Basically, Ford was advertising better performance than the Mustang delivered. Ford sued to have the documents removed from the website, saying that the documents were trade secrets and were copyrighted. Ford convinced BON's ISP that BON was violating a court order by publishing the documents (despite the fact that the court case had not convened and no orders had been issued), and got the site shut down for a few days. Eventually, Blue Oval News won the case.
If Ford is willing to fight so hard to keep actual facts from being published, I guess it's not surprising that they would want to regulate the disemination of unflattering opinions as well.
I guess that Standard Oil could be considered under that reasoning as well, then. They had a strangle-hold on the railroads, who were helped by the gov't, and with the transitive property of anti-trust, they had gov't help.
I would say that Ayn Rand is wrong in this case. What governmental protections did Standard Oil, or the Sugar and Tobacco Trusts receive? I think AT&T is the exception here, not the rule.
Slashdot Mirror
The knock on this game is that it has a "kiddie" look to it. I was worried that might be the case, but after seeing the game in action, I'm glad to say it works.
It does have a semi-cartoony look to it, but I don't think it detracts from the game. Previous Zelda games have had what I would consider "kiddie" looks to them. Even Ocarina of Time made link look more like a little kid than an elf. What's been great about the Zelda series is the game play, which is deep and engrossing.
Playing the new game, you quickly get caught up in it, and the cell-shaded look just works. It hasn't been overused enough yet to be cliche (although it's getting close), and it fits pretty well with the Zelda franchise. And, after seeing screen shots, you think I'm an idiot, I'd advise you to hold off on your judgement. The screen shots don't do it justice. Before I got my hands on the game, they weren't convicing me, either.
I was just playing this a little bit. It looks very much like Super Metroid, but the enemies look cooler. The combat seems to be improved somewhat from what I remember. On the SNES, it could be simple and tedious to shoot the bad guys. On the GBA, it seems to take a little more skill and concentration, and is more fun.
While Metroid Prime for the 'Cube reminds me of a PC FPS, the GBA incarnation of Metroid looks like the best of classic side-scrolling action, with some tweaks to make it even better.
"Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information," Gould wrote in his 1977 book "Ever Since Darwin." "It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors."
I believe he wrote that in response to creationists' arguments that scientist were biased, and because of that, evolution is a flawed concept. His point was that of course scientists have opinions and beliefs, and this is a good and necessary thing.
At the risk of being a pimple-faced fanboy, Spiderman has "spider strength," the proportional strength of a spider. This allows him to lift many times his own body weight, and might explain how he keeps his arms from ripping off from the centripital force of his swinging.
I like the name he had for his product: which he named advanced sub-carrier modulation (ASCM). The initials look like A SCaM.
What he did not do was use any of that data (including credit cards) for any fraudulent purposes (other than the free cell phone calls). He did not physically hurt anyone. He did not publish any trade secrets.
And he spent 5 years in jail. For comparison, I checked out some standard sentencing guidelines for my home state of Washington. Crimes for 2nd time offenders that warrant less than 5 years in prison include:
I don't dispute that Kevin did something wrong. But what he did and the punishment he got were unbeleivably out of proportion. By portraying Kevin as some sort of super-hacker, the prosecution was able to get away with quite a bit courts with technically illiterate judges.
Also, the police used questionable tactics to find and arrest him, including lying to a judge to obtain a warrant and illegally tapping cell phones. These actions should have been enough to get Kevin's case thrown out.
Call me a "Mitnick apologist" if you want, but in this case, justice went overboard, and made a scapegoat out of a Kevin.
when you strip away all the hype, the product tie-ins, the in your face constant advertising, and just go see the movie on it's own merits, it's not really all that bad.
I have to agree with that statement, however, this is Star Wars, and "not bad" is simply not good enough. An average sci-fi movie with great effects, a tedious plot, and annoying dialogue is not what fans expect or deserve. I really hope George Lucas is spending less time on the marketing of AOTC and more time on the filmaking, but until I see the finished product, I'm skeptical of this article's spin.
...MS knows it's gonna take heavy losses to get the market penetration required to start making serious money on the software.
It is amazing to me how much money Microsoft is bleeding out with the XBox. It's an insane strategy if making money off game software royalties is their goal. However, I don't think that they ever intend for XBox to turn a profit, at least in this generation. Rather, they are protecting their monopoly.
Microsoft has the monopoly on the PC OS. But what if, 5 or 10 years from now, nobody used a PC? What if everyone used a TV set-top appliance that played games and DVD's, was a PVR, surfed the web as an internet appliance, wrote letters and resumes and balanced the checkbook. This theoretical "convergence box" is the direction that many pundits see the industry heading. So if, in the future, everyone uses this box instead of a PC, Microsoft would be out of business.
Unless that box had a Microsoft logo on it instead of a Sony one. I think that this is the real reason Microsoft got into the console business, and the reason they are willing to lose so much money. They want to protect the monopoly, plain and simple. If they lose a billion dollars on X-Box over 4 years, but keep the industry stranglehold that earns them tens of billions of dollars annually, then it was money well lost.
If house guests are concerned about privacy, they should ask (and sue for fraud if they found out I lied).
I guess it depends on what is a reasonable expectation of privacy. I would think that privacy in the bathroom or bedroom, even if you are a guest, is a reasonable expectation. You shouldn't have to opt out of being surveilled in the bathroom of a friend's house.
I understand your concerns, because of your particular problems with vandalism, but I think that people who were victimized the other way (like Susan Wilson) would have the exact opposite opinion.
Ways around that are to petition your HOA for a rule change...
Easier said than done. No trespassing signs would suggest that trespassing is a problem (which it is, particularly because of vandalism), depressing property values. People here try to hide the problem rather than deal with it.
Well, not to be harsh, but that sounds like your problem. As you said, you agreed to the HOA covenants before you moved in. That the larger community (city, state, nation) should not pass laws because your HOA covanant makes it difficult to do what you want to do and comply with the larger community's rules, seems, to me, an unreasonable expectation.
Ways around that are to petition your HOA for a rule change, or move somewhere else. I may be reading too much in your comment but you seem to be willing to have your HOA curtail what you can do on your own property, but not the federal gov't.
The flip side of your argument is that someone who films house guests using the shower could say "I was only trying to protect my property from criminals."
Here is a rant from a woman who stayed at a friends house, and later found that he was secretly videotaping all his female guests.
Movie reviewers are often given junkets to premieres, interviews with movie stars, etc. There is a whole segment of movie reviewer who seem to take the goodies in exchange for quotes that can be put in the ad. Quote whores who get their names in the movie ads get a degree of fame and, paradoxically, credibility. That this marketing model is being transferred to the game industry is not surprising.
Well, it all depends on your view of what success is. You say sarcastically So they got everyone to use a product (IE) by giving it away for free as part of the default install on 99% of PCs sold.
But that was Microsoft's goal, and that was (and still is) Microsoft's main strategy. They leverage their monopoly to maintain control over the OS market.
Back in '96, Netscape was advancing HTML features ahead of the IETF, because, being everyone's de facto browser, it could. There was serious talk about web based services running on web appliances, and how they would replace the PC. That never happened, and Microsoft still owns the desktop. They have a lot of influence over web standards. Netscape, one of the first serious competitors to Microsoft in a long time, died a slow, horrible death.
I agree that the meme is not exactly accurate. What it should be is that got caught with their pants down with competition from an unexpected direction. They turned on a dime to quash that competition.
That brings us to the console wars. Microsoft seems to view the video game as competition - they see "home entertainment machines", combination web browser/video game/dvd player/pvr - as a potential replacement for the PC. So they are throwing their massive financial resources and PC industry dominance behind an attack on that threat.
The difference this time is that Sony is no Netscape. They are a huge company with their own financial resources. They are also protecting their primary market. They make home electronics, and the "home entertainment machine" seems a likely future for that market.
Perhaps it will be Sony that breaks Microsoft's monopoly, and in the future we will have a world of "home entertainment machines" with real competition.
From 2600 magazine's Summer 2001 issue, Emmanuel Goldstein wrote an editorial, about the DeCSS linking case and other legal fights with which 2600 was involved. It seems pretty relevant to the Pets Warehouse case:
"...the injustice takes on an even more serious tone when it no longer seems to matter whether or not you're found guilty or innocent - whether you win or lose. If you're even brought into the game, you lose regardless of whether or not you win. Sounds crazy? It is. And it's what the American justice system has turned into...
Every time we find ourselves in a court of law, we seem to have lost by default, something even a victory can't seem to change. Not that we don't relish the idea of standing up to any of the bullies who put us through this hell. But every time we do, it costs us and not just financially. We have to devote tremendous resources into the act of simply defending who we are and what we've been doing for all these years."
C'mon, this game was the best garbage collector sim I've ever played. There are tons games where you play as a secret agent or a soldier, but this is one of the few truly ground-breaking games that lets you pick up virtual garbage.
It would have been even better if you could have played as a park employee. Think of the action: people who are sick of waiting in line yelling at you, passing out from heat exhaustion in your costume, having small children puke on you... Now that would've been a game.
DNS is already distributed. You're friendly neighborhood ISP caches the most often used DNS info, and 80% of internet traffic is resolved there. Only a small portion of traffic has to be escalated to a root server. That's why, as the article said, 8 of the 13 root servers would have to be taken out simultaneously for users to notice any slowdown. An attack on the A root server would be more symbolic than actually damaging. Even if it was done by the Stay-Puffed Marshmellow Man.
Real breasts don't move that way.
The movie was just being true to the video game. They made Angelina Jolie's chest move just like Lara Croft's does in the video game. I think the film's faithful adaptation of breasts was the best thing about it.
So, you can park your laptop, order a burger/beer, then email in a movie review all w/o disturbing your fellow patrons. Cool! :)
Great, they turned the movie theater into the equivelant of my home theater set up, only instead of waiting for rentals, I can see first run movies. Will I be able to pause the picture when I get a phone call or have to go to the restroom?
This is the best movie based on a video game that I have ever seen. But that may be like saying she's the smartest supermodel of all time or something.
The Resident Evil game was basically a horror movie turned into a video game, so I guess it's pretty easy to turn it back into a horror movie. Still, for all it's big budget and Milla star power, it is just a horror movie. The genre isn't exactly deep. If you don't expect "something more", you can enjoy this movie.
All Watterson has going for him is hotter assistants
You say that like it's not an important thing.
By the way, the hottest ADA has got to be Carey Lowell as Jamie Ross. She was even a Bond girl once.
Not only the bandwidth, but that's 7 songs per month for every person in the world with internet access. That's a lot of music. I know a lot of people who aren't pulling their weight, illegal-download-wise, so the worst offenders must do nothing but steal music 24/7. Common sense says that number is garbage. But Mr. Greene prefaces the statistic by saying, "The RIAA estimates..." He might as well have said, "The RIAA made up this number to shock people into letting us get bad legislation passed..."
A closer look reveals the Marvel Universe's artificiality. For example, social networks have a property called clustering... the Marvel network is only very weakly clustered - about 1.5 times more than a random network.
Another example of the artificiality of the Marvel Universe is that there are a bunch of people with super powers in it, where as in reality, there are realitively few people who can shoot lasers out of there eyes or turn into a gigantic green monster when they are angry.
Right-wing nutcase or not, the principal of this case seems to be firmly established, and Mr. Robinson is in the wrong. Linking to articles or quoting small relevant portions is the simple way around this problem. If someone were to mirror the FR site in its entirety, but include some of the anti-government commentary Mr. Robinson is so busily deleting, you can bet he would take steps similar to those taken by the LA Times and the Washignton Post.
/. knows this sort of thing is not allowed.
Even free speech champion
Ford has a history of bullying websites around. Their long running problems with Blue Oval News is a perfect example.
The history is here, but basically, Blue Oval News published internal Ford documents that talked about performance problems in the '99 Mustang Cobra. Basically, Ford was advertising better performance than the Mustang delivered. Ford sued to have the documents removed from the website, saying that the documents were trade secrets and were copyrighted. Ford convinced BON's ISP that BON was violating a court order by publishing the documents (despite the fact that the court case had not convened and no orders had been issued), and got the site shut down for a few days. Eventually, Blue Oval News won the case.
If Ford is willing to fight so hard to keep actual facts from being published, I guess it's not surprising that they would want to regulate the disemination of unflattering opinions as well.
I guess that Standard Oil could be considered under that reasoning as well, then. They had a strangle-hold on the railroads, who were helped by the gov't, and with the transitive property of anti-trust, they had gov't help.
But it gets messy when theory meets practice.
I would say that Ayn Rand is wrong in this case. What governmental protections did Standard Oil, or the Sugar and Tobacco Trusts receive? I think AT&T is the exception here, not the rule.