... like "Maniac Mansion" and "Zak McKracken" came with a bunch of stuff in the box. Some of it was used for copy protection, but there were many clues (as well as deceptive ones!) in the documentation. That would also serve as an incentive to actually own the game rather than copy it. Sort of like with CDs now, where most of the time the packaging is really lame (compared to LPs).
Selling 6,000 units (5,000 blue + 1,000 white) seems quite an ambitious goal... if they manage to do that in the space of one month, that would represent already 50% of their sales (based on the most recent figures I could find at http://m-create.com/jpn/s_ranking.html). Wow!
I don't think it will be a problem of media. Seeing the specs, the PSP will be much more powerful than the GBA, and thus will have games with a much more ambitious scope, which will cost much more to develop. Besides, even if it is a great success, the PSP will have a much smaller user base for a while, which means lower potential sales. It is likely that the unit AND the games will be more expensive than the GBA and its games.
Citeseer was cited in the blurb, but a really nice service that they provide is the Computer Science Directory. There you can look for papers sorted by domain, and ranked by several criteria like "authority". The top papers are usually a good read if you are interested in a particular domain.
I am sure that there are other examples of robots (or automata) making music that are centuries old. There are many composers and artists interested in machines making music, from Conlan Nancarrow who wrote incredible player piano rolls to current musicians like Pierre Bastien or Frank Pahl (look them up).
The recent JAL (Japan Airlines) planes have two cameras, one in front of the cockpit and one at the back of the plane. But they make you pay through the nose for a ticket:(
Are you kidding? The voice acting in Eternal Darkness is atrocious. When I first played the game and heard the acting in the intro sequence, I feared that it may not be as good as the reviews inexplicably made it out to be... and unfortunately it turned out that horrible voice acting was just one minor problem in this pathetic excuse of a game; including but not limited to the abysmal animation and the mind-numbingly boring and repetitive gameplay.
If Eternal Darkness is an example of state of the art voice acting in video games, then let's be grateful there are so few voices in Nintendo game.
One thing that is very, VERY good about Mac OS X is the excellent I18N of the system, which works right out of the box. I use Japanese, English and French on a daily basis and the new improved Japanese input method makes this task quite manageable. An excellent idea was also to make the terminal (which still mostly sucks, but still) but UTF-8 by default. Including vim was also a smart move but WHY OH WHY did they have to compile it without multibyte support? It then becomes useless on the terminal they provide... fortunately this is easy to fix yourself.
Unfortunately titling is not very kinky. But Xmd can help you title the tracks on your MD (and the MD itself), which is much easier to do on a computer than on the MD device itself.
I cannot reply for the original poster, but there are several good reasons...
1. You don't need a computer to play/record MDs. The basic principles of audio editing are quite simple (title, move, split and join tracks), and some models have very good interface/ergonomy.
2. MDs sound better than MP3 (at the regular compression rate) and MP3 players suck anyway, yes I mean the iPod too.
3. You can record with a tiny MD player. I cannot stress how important this is. If you're a musician, this is one handy tool, much more practical (and much cheaper too) than DAT. You can record your rehearsal or improvisations and edit them very easily, you can make field recordings, interviews, records gigs, etc.
There may be more good or bad reasons, but those are three main ones that pop to mind. Although some might not seem very relevant to the Slashdot crowd:(
First off, fitting 3 or more hours of audio has nothing to do with NetMD, this is the so-called Long Play mode (LP2 fits twice as much audio, and LP4 fits four times as much). Of course you have to accept a less than perfect sound fidelity for the higher compression rate.
As for NetMD on the Mac, there's an application called Xmd that can do several interesting things like titling (good! especially if you choose to go with LP4 and have dozens of tracks on your MD) and playback, but it doesn't allow you to download music to your MD.
And anyway, NetMD won't allow to download tracks *from* your MD to your computer (even, maybe especially, the official Sony software) which renders it next to useless in any case.
Just got the game yesterday and played it a bit with my girlfriend, with whom we finished the GCA version (a few minigames have too much text in Japanese for me, fortunately not too many). Even though it's really just a party version of Made in Wario, it's still a lot of fun to play those minigames again. I haven't played all modes yet, and there's even something that looks like a small boardgame with the instructions (which don't give much instructions actually).
I'm sure the game will really take all its "meaning" with four players (or more!) but there is a chance that this may get old quickly. On the other hand it's relatively cheap and if you haven't played the original, you're in for a great experience.
If you want a party game with Mario characters, then why not play, hum, let's see, Mario Party? There are 2 to choose from on Gamecube (number 3 and 4), with number 5 coming out really soon.
The DVD for Nausicaa is coming out in Japan on Nov. 19th; usually the Ghibli DVDs have at least (good quality) English subtitles. Although they are a bit pricy (~5000 yen, something like 45 USD) and zone 2, this is a good news for importers I guess.
Also note that the Porco Rosso DVD has been out for a while and features not only English content, but also the *excellent* French dub (starring Jean Reno as Porco Rosso!) This is the movie that made Miyazaki famous in France and his other movies well distributed and correctly dubbed.
Slashdot Mirror
... like "Maniac Mansion" and "Zak McKracken" came with a bunch of stuff in the box. Some of it was used for copy protection, but there were many clues (as well as deceptive ones!) in the documentation. That would also serve as an incentive to actually own the game rather than copy it. Sort of like with CDs now, where most of the time the packaging is really lame (compared to LPs).
Selling 6,000 units (5,000 blue + 1,000 white) seems quite an ambitious goal... if they manage to do that in the space of one month, that would represent already 50% of their sales (based on the most recent figures I could find at http://m-create.com/jpn/s_ranking.html). Wow!
I don't think it will be a problem of media. Seeing the specs, the PSP will be much more powerful than the GBA, and thus will have games with a much more ambitious scope, which will cost much more to develop. Besides, even if it is a great success, the PSP will have a much smaller user base for a while, which means lower potential sales. It is likely that the unit AND the games will be more expensive than the GBA and its games.
Citeseer was cited in the blurb, but a really nice service that they provide is the Computer Science Directory. There you can look for papers sorted by domain, and ranked by several criteria like "authority". The top papers are usually a good read if you are interested in a particular domain.
I am sure that there are other examples of robots (or automata) making music that are centuries old. There are many composers and artists interested in machines making music, from Conlan Nancarrow who wrote incredible player piano rolls to current musicians like Pierre Bastien or Frank Pahl (look them up).
Captured by Robots sound like fun, though.
The recent JAL (Japan Airlines) planes have two cameras, one in front of the cockpit and one at the back of the plane. But they make you pay through the nose for a ticket :(
Are you kidding? The voice acting in Eternal Darkness is atrocious. When I first played the game and heard the acting in the intro sequence, I feared that it may not be as good as the reviews inexplicably made it out to be... and unfortunately it turned out that horrible voice acting was just one minor problem in this pathetic excuse of a game; including but not limited to the abysmal animation and the mind-numbingly boring and repetitive gameplay.
If Eternal Darkness is an example of state of the art voice acting in video games, then let's be grateful there are so few voices in Nintendo game.
One thing that is very, VERY good about Mac OS X is the excellent I18N of the system, which works right out of the box. I use Japanese, English and French on a daily basis and the new improved Japanese input method makes this task quite manageable. An excellent idea was also to make the terminal (which still mostly sucks, but still) but UTF-8 by default. Including vim was also a smart move but WHY OH WHY did they have to compile it without multibyte support? It then becomes useless on the terminal they provide... fortunately this is easy to fix yourself.
Unfortunately titling is not very kinky. But Xmd can help you title the tracks on your MD (and the MD itself), which is much easier to do on a computer than on the MD device itself.
I cannot reply for the original poster, but there are several good reasons... 1. You don't need a computer to play/record MDs. The basic principles of audio editing are quite simple (title, move, split and join tracks), and some models have very good interface/ergonomy. 2. MDs sound better than MP3 (at the regular compression rate) and MP3 players suck anyway, yes I mean the iPod too. 3. You can record with a tiny MD player. I cannot stress how important this is. If you're a musician, this is one handy tool, much more practical (and much cheaper too) than DAT. You can record your rehearsal or improvisations and edit them very easily, you can make field recordings, interviews, records gigs, etc. There may be more good or bad reasons, but those are three main ones that pop to mind. Although some might not seem very relevant to the Slashdot crowd :(
First off, fitting 3 or more hours of audio has nothing to do with NetMD, this is the so-called Long Play mode (LP2 fits twice as much audio, and LP4 fits four times as much). Of course you have to accept a less than perfect sound fidelity for the higher compression rate. As for NetMD on the Mac, there's an application called Xmd that can do several interesting things like titling (good! especially if you choose to go with LP4 and have dozens of tracks on your MD) and playback, but it doesn't allow you to download music to your MD. And anyway, NetMD won't allow to download tracks *from* your MD to your computer (even, maybe especially, the official Sony software) which renders it next to useless in any case.
Just got the game yesterday and played it a bit with my girlfriend, with whom we finished the GCA version (a few minigames have too much text in Japanese for me, fortunately not too many). Even though it's really just a party version of Made in Wario, it's still a lot of fun to play those minigames again. I haven't played all modes yet, and there's even something that looks like a small boardgame with the instructions (which don't give much instructions actually). I'm sure the game will really take all its "meaning" with four players (or more!) but there is a chance that this may get old quickly. On the other hand it's relatively cheap and if you haven't played the original, you're in for a great experience.
If you want a party game with Mario characters, then why not play, hum, let's see, Mario Party? There are 2 to choose from on Gamecube (number 3 and 4), with number 5 coming out really soon.
The DVD for Nausicaa is coming out in Japan on Nov. 19th; usually the Ghibli DVDs have at least (good quality) English subtitles. Although they are a bit pricy (~5000 yen, something like 45 USD) and zone 2, this is a good news for importers I guess. Also note that the Porco Rosso DVD has been out for a while and features not only English content, but also the *excellent* French dub (starring Jean Reno as Porco Rosso!) This is the movie that made Miyazaki famous in France and his other movies well distributed and correctly dubbed.