Tomba on the PS1 and God of War on the PS2 are the only 2 games I don't have in my collection which would happen to be exclusive and that I would be interested in. My PS2 game collection is around 40 titles; none of them are EA titles or games which are out on other platforms, but not many of them are super must haves (except ones like ZOE2 and the DDRs) -- because the PS2 does not get as many must-haves as the GameCube (to a gamer of my tastes).
The majority of the non-EA games, such as Soul Calibur 2 and Street Fighter Alpha 3, have versions on other platforms which are superior. It is redundant to list Soul Blade when the Dreamcast had both Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Soul Calibur.
Tiger Woods, Madden, and other mindless sequel games aren't worth mentioning because they are noise. It's like if you tried to make a list of the 100 best movies on the past 10 years. How many movies really worth watching come out in a decade's time?
And the 2 PSP titles: Lumines and the 4 or 5th appearance of GTA on the list. If 1/20th of your list is GTA (the same game every time with minor plot changes), you might as well start listing all the MegaMan games: same gameplay, minor story changes! At least Lumines (the other Tetsuya Mizugchi game, besides Rez) is worth having (although it's more worth having as a download onto a 1.5 PSP, since the PSP is pretty boring when it's not also able to be a NES emulator).
All the Powerbook webpages proudly display the battery life. They're not lieing, either; when I use my laptop for note taking at school, I get 5 hours from it with wireless on and the screen dimmed a bit.
MacBook Pro's website makes no mention of battery life.
Contrary to this statement posted by eldavojohn (898314): "I don't want a computer program diagnosing me at a hospital even if it is built on solid Bayesian probability models..."
I encourage you to build up solid, researched, statistical models you can use to keep me in good health, using as much data as is possible from subjects will to contribute it. I recently went to a wonderful talk given by the acting head of CS at MIT at my University going over the statistical and graphical medical techniques they were developing for brain operations. I can say with complete confidence that I would greatly prefer that to some random guy and a knife working based on illustrations in a textbook that may or may not resemble what I actually look like on the inside.
K5 scaled decently for a while, but then got taken off its selected topics by a mass of readers who had nothing in common with the "old guard" K5 folks who wanted something like/., but more egalitarian.
It didn't work. Rusty is a nice guy, but he didn't predict what would happen. It's easy to say something will happen, but you have to prove it before anyone will care.
Kuro5hin had this. Rusty set it up, and we got some content going. It worked out very well. We got some great, well written, well thought out stories. We also got some great links.
Then something happened. It became about politics. Because and others like me did not have the personal time to mod down every stupid story that came in (from our point of view), the site gradually became more about obscure US politics than about technology or interesting things that were happening.
I hear there's a new "anti-slashdot" called Digg, and I'm sure that unless they take steps, the same thing will happen. Slashdot has a group of people who are paid to keep a particular "topic" of story flowing, and they have mechanisms to enforce it. This keeps the site, as a whole, focused on a topic to the point where the discussions become valuable and fun. The foot traffic is the other advantage.
Much like on K5, lots of people like to jaw and whine about this and that, but unlike K5, you don't have to worry about the story flavour changing over a few months. There's a state format, clear intent, and enforcement of it. Not that K5 is bad, but it's just not interesting to me and probably most/. readers now.
but instead of being a main-page link(wank)er, link to the permalink for the entry -- without that link, your "topical" link will be useless (in fact, it already is, since I had to scroll around to find the anecdote in question!).
Contra is an action game. Ikaruga is a shooter. Final Fight is a brawler. Dragon Warrior is an RPG. Super Mario Bros is a platformer. Mario 64 is a 3D platformer.
It's very difficult to have a high-quality gaming conversation with people who are unaware of what games belong in what genres, and what those genres are named.
"I highly recommend it if you're into shooters or brawlers."
Pardon my incredulity, but Ikaruga and Final Fight are not really that similar in terms of gameplay. How is it that people who like shooters or brawlers (being so different) would be inclined to play this game?
I think you missed the point of Link's Awakening. The entire game you work to recover mystical instruments. That's the musical theme.
Every dungeon you entered, your goal was an instrument. In previous games, you had to do it for pieces of the Triforce -- this was a big plot change.
Dragon Warrior 3 and 4 both don't require you play 1 and 2; indeed, 3 is a prequel to 1 and 2, and 4 is set someplace else. Few would argue that Dragon Warrior 7 and 8 are net sequels to this disparate games. To do the same on Zelda is silly. They are sequels. They are not shitty, stupid, drivel sequels, like Madden 20XX (or, indeed, the latest MegaMan games, damn you, Capcom), but they are sequels all the same.
"In the case of the Legend of Zelda games, none of the games have really been a continuation of others."
Except "Zelda II: The Adventure of Link", a direct sequel to "The Legend of Zelda". Or "Majora's Mask", a direct sequel to "The Ocarina of Time".
If you're going to base your entire post on a premise, at least make sure it's sound. You do have some points other, but there are Zelda sequels. That alone should be reason to not have a score of +5.
" Link's Awakening and the two NES Zeldas were the only action RPGs that didn't have any special game mechanism."
Well, "Legend of Zelda" did have that extra entire world afterwards. An arrange game was new at the time. "Link's Adventure" went in 2D top-down and 2D side-scrolling. Again, new at the time, old hat now.
"Link's Awakening" was pretty much "Link to the Past" with a different story and more of a slant on music, a theme Miyamoto has revisted many times in the series. I do believe it was the first time music was the main focus (it does predate Ocarina), and it can be argued that this makes it special in its own way -- most future Zelda games take the music theme and modify it (be it for time travel or wind control).
"For example, over the last 10-15 years, a lot of states have dropped the DUI (driving under the influnce) BAC cutoff (blood alcohol content) from 0.1% to 0.08%. Lower is better, right?"
Given that for most people, to get the impairment of 0.08 requires 2 shots in 5 minutes, I'd say that's fair. You want to set rules such that most people who are driving are doing so with due care an attention. Why are speeding tickets so great?
"If we're going to make a 0.81% BAC illegal (and punish it with major fines)"
No need to make 0.81% illegal; that's 0.31 over the LD50 level!
I can see some of those games being good enough that the gameplay/story could be looked at again, but let's face some facts.
Sonic CD has a sequel, called Sonic Rush on the DS. All the same kinds of graphics, and a soundtrack well worth downloading (since the OST is not available outside of Japan). It's a better OST than the Sonic CD one!
Beyond Good and Evil had some good ideas, but the execution was so poor, that the managers responsible for shoving such a half-baked came out the door should be fired. Yes, it has many good points, like a heroine who isn't just ass and cleavage, and a story that seems interesting at first -- but the story falls flat. It's not nearly as deep as reviewers like this seem to think it is, and the ending sucked royally. A bad ending can make anything good suck (look at Terminator 3; a decent Terminator movie with a terrible ending is not a good movie).
Alice proved to me that a platformer on the PC does not work. I want deeper gameplay than having to float to the next excruciatingly place toadstool, having to restart if I miss the target. I want boss fights that are interesting, not exercises in shooting a whole lot.
I think this reviewer has their personal opinion seeping in on games they particularly liked, but which weren't actually that good. Games that are 5/10 or 6/10 (like the ones on the list here) are not ones worth investigating further. The gameplay is not compelling enough, or the story is too half-baked. (I'm not saying they're all bad; I haven't played Grim Fandango through yet, so I reserve judgement on it, but BG&E is a crap fest that deserved to die, and was most certainly not the best game of 2004.)
I had no idea Harmonix made Guitar Heroes; I had commented to my friends how very much like Amplitude/Frequency the core gameplay was (the engine would need minimal modifications). I saw it more as Red Octane giving North American rhythm gamers what they wanted, since Konami likes to keep its Bemani line in Japan.
The only way I can see the PSP succeeding in any capacity is if it somehow got some system selling titles and a price cut. No one is going to buy something that expensive that can be lost, and it's not like a cellphone that you can use all the time and get on a plan to make less expensive. I doubt we'll see this, because the consoles will continue to take all the standard game ideas. I expect it'll just have ports till it dies.
The DS is so much cheaper and has so much more that's fun to play, but the same can be said about the GameCube, which has about 30 titles worth playing, and is cheaper, yet is behind the Xbox in North America!
This pundit is just looking at the trends of the past 5 years and mentioning them in terms of the next year.
Sony trying to get people onto the PS3 via shortages? Sure, it's working on the 360, and worked on the PS2, etc.
Microsoft having lots of 360s on the shelf when PS3 comes out? It'd be dumb of them not to, especially when they've said Halo 3 comes out right then.
Nintendo continuing to cater to the new, larger, unwashed of gaming, rather than the hardcore? Business as usual.
What these predictions lack is any kind of foresight over new trends. How hard is it to predict new MegaMan games?! If this person had their finger on the pulse of these companies and could predict brand new, interesting games (like Ribbit King, Katamari Damacy, and Guitar Heroes), that'd be something really worth getting excited over.
Also, Nokia already said the N-Gage was a failure. Why mention it? The PSP is also a pretty spectacular failure, since you get the same games you could play on a nice TV with surround sound, but on a smaller screen with terrible battery life. Maybe the PSP get a game worth buying beyond Lumines, but not even the GTA rehash (one of Sony's big cards) for it is boosting sales.
SOP seems to be to get such a device away from its handler, stick it into something that'll absorb a blast, and then detonate a second charge such that the original device cannot function and is disabled.
Was this person's Xbox toasted? Will airport security be footing the bill for a replacement?
"See? We're not engaging in anti-copetitive behavior. We're developing Office for a competing OS."
And, ""See? We're not engaging in anti-copetitive behavior. We're developing Internet Explorer for a competing OS."
Although this fought against their assertation that IE was a part of the OS, it did allow them to say, "only support IE, it's on everything anyone can pay to run!"
Jobs was smart enough to start his own browser development so that the MacOS could stand on its own. A browser is one of the most important applications an OS can have in this day and age -- even as early as 1997/1998, what OS I ran was determined by the browsers available (which is why OS/2 with its crippled NS 2.x was switched away from at the time).
The DS is the only game system I am buying genuinely new and interesting titles for. The touch screen certainly helps this, with games like Trauma Center (deviously hard as it is), and such.
The DS version is awesome. In 2004, I spent a good amount of time playing through AW and AW2. When I would play AW after AW2, I would miss out on the updated art work and extra CO moves. AW:DS does this much better by making everything truly 3D. It's not that obvious at first (it's a subtle 3D), but going back to the old GBA ones is really noticable.
The have the new dual-strike CO mode + CO swaps, which adds a whole extra level to the gameplay. You can really save yourself from a tight spot. On the flip side, it makes the COM tougher in some situations. Careful strategy still wins the day. The extra units are kinda neat, although the new tank is silly:)
One interesting thing I find in this patch is that there is a modicum of dexterity, of skill to be found.
WoW is a decent MMO, but one thing it still has in it is that I may be good, and I may be the best I am at playing my character, but someone who has better stats earned through simply sitting on their ass and grinding can still beat me if they're high enough level. No amount of skill can overcome the fact that they have more time to spend on a game than I do.
You can argue that more time spent would equal a greater skill at using the character, but I can just as easily argue that my previous experience with other games would start me off at a distinct advantage (it's like starting at level 10 I suppose) if the combat was based more on the rules of an FPS and less on simple stats.
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Works in userContent.css. No more flash unless you click it to play with no extra code.
Slashdot Mirror
Tomba on the PS1 and God of War on the PS2 are the only 2 games I don't have in my collection which would happen to be exclusive and that I would be interested in. My PS2 game collection is around 40 titles; none of them are EA titles or games which are out on other platforms, but not many of them are super must haves (except ones like ZOE2 and the DDRs) -- because the PS2 does not get as many must-haves as the GameCube (to a gamer of my tastes).
The majority of the non-EA games, such as Soul Calibur 2 and Street Fighter Alpha 3, have versions on other platforms which are superior. It is redundant to list Soul Blade when the Dreamcast had both Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Soul Calibur.
Tiger Woods, Madden, and other mindless sequel games aren't worth mentioning because they are noise. It's like if you tried to make a list of the 100 best movies on the past 10 years. How many movies really worth watching come out in a decade's time?
And the 2 PSP titles: Lumines and the 4 or 5th appearance of GTA on the list. If 1/20th of your list is GTA (the same game every time with minor plot changes), you might as well start listing all the MegaMan games: same gameplay, minor story changes! At least Lumines (the other Tetsuya Mizugchi game, besides Rez) is worth having (although it's more worth having as a download onto a 1.5 PSP, since the PSP is pretty boring when it's not also able to be a NES emulator).
All the Powerbook webpages proudly display the battery life. They're not lieing, either; when I use my laptop for note taking at school, I get 5 hours from it with wireless on and the screen dimmed a bit.
MacBook Pro's website makes no mention of battery life.
You mean over a year ago. That news made the rounds in 2004. The other person finally confessed a few weeks after wards, just as 2005 started!
Contrary to this statement posted by eldavojohn (898314): "I don't want a computer program diagnosing me at a hospital even if it is built on solid Bayesian probability models ..."
I encourage you to build up solid, researched, statistical models you can use to keep me in good health, using as much data as is possible from subjects will to contribute it. I recently went to a wonderful talk given by the acting head of CS at MIT at my University going over the statistical and graphical medical techniques they were developing for brain operations. I can say with complete confidence that I would greatly prefer that to some random guy and a knife working based on illustrations in a textbook that may or may not resemble what I actually look like on the inside.
Thank you.
Signed
- Not Paranoid About Big Brother.
K5 scaled decently for a while, but then got taken off its selected topics by a mass of readers who had nothing in common with the "old guard" K5 folks who wanted something like /., but more egalitarian.
It didn't work. Rusty is a nice guy, but he didn't predict what would happen. It's easy to say something will happen, but you have to prove it before anyone will care.
"Maybe we could moderate entire articles."
/. readers now.
Kuro5hin had this. Rusty set it up, and we got some content going. It worked out very well. We got some great, well written, well thought out stories. We also got some great links.
Then something happened. It became about politics. Because and others like me did not have the personal time to mod down every stupid story that came in (from our point of view), the site gradually became more about obscure US politics than about technology or interesting things that were happening.
I hear there's a new "anti-slashdot" called Digg, and I'm sure that unless they take steps, the same thing will happen. Slashdot has a group of people who are paid to keep a particular "topic" of story flowing, and they have mechanisms to enforce it. This keeps the site, as a whole, focused on a topic to the point where the discussions become valuable and fun. The foot traffic is the other advantage.
Much like on K5, lots of people like to jaw and whine about this and that, but unlike K5, you don't have to worry about the story flavour changing over a few months. There's a state format, clear intent, and enforcement of it. Not that K5 is bad, but it's just not interesting to me and probably most
Story moderation is not a panacea.
Without a wallet, their bus pass would have to sit in their pocket naked and get all crumply!
but instead of being a main-page link(wank)er, link to the permalink for the entry -- without that link, your "topical" link will be useless (in fact, it already is, since I had to scroll around to find the anecdote in question!).
Contra is an action game.
Ikaruga is a shooter.
Final Fight is a brawler.
Dragon Warrior is an RPG.
Super Mario Bros is a platformer.
Mario 64 is a 3D platformer.
It's very difficult to have a high-quality gaming conversation with people who are unaware of what games belong in what genres, and what those genres are named.
"I highly recommend it if you're into shooters or brawlers."
Pardon my incredulity, but Ikaruga and Final Fight are not really that similar in terms of gameplay. How is it that people who like shooters or brawlers (being so different) would be inclined to play this game?
I think you missed the point of Link's Awakening. The entire game you work to recover mystical instruments. That's the musical theme.
Every dungeon you entered, your goal was an instrument. In previous games, you had to do it for pieces of the Triforce -- this was a big plot change.
Dragon Warrior 3 and 4 both don't require you play 1 and 2; indeed, 3 is a prequel to 1 and 2, and 4 is set someplace else. Few would argue that Dragon Warrior 7 and 8 are net sequels to this disparate games. To do the same on Zelda is silly. They are sequels. They are not shitty, stupid, drivel sequels, like Madden 20XX (or, indeed, the latest MegaMan games, damn you, Capcom), but they are sequels all the same.
"In the case of the Legend of Zelda games, none of the games have really been a continuation of others."
Except "Zelda II: The Adventure of Link", a direct sequel to "The Legend of Zelda".
Or "Majora's Mask", a direct sequel to "The Ocarina of Time".
If you're going to base your entire post on a premise, at least make sure it's sound. You do have some points other, but there are Zelda sequels. That alone should be reason to not have a score of +5.
" Link's Awakening and the two NES Zeldas were the only action RPGs that didn't have any special game mechanism."
Well, "Legend of Zelda" did have that extra entire world afterwards. An arrange game was new at the time. "Link's Adventure" went in 2D top-down and 2D side-scrolling. Again, new at the time, old hat now.
"Link's Awakening" was pretty much "Link to the Past" with a different story and more of a slant on music, a theme Miyamoto has revisted many times in the series. I do believe it was the first time music was the main focus (it does predate Ocarina), and it can be argued that this makes it special in its own way -- most future Zelda games take the music theme and modify it (be it for time travel or wind control).
These are all points to keep in mind.
It means you can save all that money you'd waste on a 360, and instead get a Revolution or something else much better :)
"For example, over the last 10-15 years, a lot of states have dropped the DUI (driving under the influnce) BAC cutoff (blood alcohol content) from 0.1% to 0.08%. Lower is better, right?"
Given that for most people, to get the impairment of 0.08 requires 2 shots in 5 minutes, I'd say that's fair. You want to set rules such that most people who are driving are doing so with due care an attention. Why are speeding tickets so great?
"If we're going to make a 0.81% BAC illegal (and punish it with major fines)"
No need to make 0.81% illegal; that's 0.31 over the LD50 level!
I can see some of those games being good enough that the gameplay/story could be looked at again, but let's face some facts.
Sonic CD has a sequel, called Sonic Rush on the DS. All the same kinds of graphics, and a soundtrack well worth downloading (since the OST is not available outside of Japan). It's a better OST than the Sonic CD one!
Beyond Good and Evil had some good ideas, but the execution was so poor, that the managers responsible for shoving such a half-baked came out the door should be fired. Yes, it has many good points, like a heroine who isn't just ass and cleavage, and a story that seems interesting at first -- but the story falls flat. It's not nearly as deep as reviewers like this seem to think it is, and the ending sucked royally. A bad ending can make anything good suck (look at Terminator 3; a decent Terminator movie with a terrible ending is not a good movie).
Alice proved to me that a platformer on the PC does not work. I want deeper gameplay than having to float to the next excruciatingly place toadstool, having to restart if I miss the target. I want boss fights that are interesting, not exercises in shooting a whole lot.
I think this reviewer has their personal opinion seeping in on games they particularly liked, but which weren't actually that good. Games that are 5/10 or 6/10 (like the ones on the list here) are not ones worth investigating further. The gameplay is not compelling enough, or the story is too half-baked. (I'm not saying they're all bad; I haven't played Grim Fandango through yet, so I reserve judgement on it, but BG&E is a crap fest that deserved to die, and was most certainly not the best game of 2004.)
I had no idea Harmonix made Guitar Heroes; I had commented to my friends how very much like Amplitude/Frequency the core gameplay was (the engine would need minimal modifications). I saw it more as Red Octane giving North American rhythm gamers what they wanted, since Konami likes to keep its Bemani line in Japan.
The only way I can see the PSP succeeding in any capacity is if it somehow got some system selling titles and a price cut. No one is going to buy something that expensive that can be lost, and it's not like a cellphone that you can use all the time and get on a plan to make less expensive. I doubt we'll see this, because the consoles will continue to take all the standard game ideas. I expect it'll just have ports till it dies.
The DS is so much cheaper and has so much more that's fun to play, but the same can be said about the GameCube, which has about 30 titles worth playing, and is cheaper, yet is behind the Xbox in North America!
This pundit is just looking at the trends of the past 5 years and mentioning them in terms of the next year.
Sony trying to get people onto the PS3 via shortages? Sure, it's working on the 360, and worked on the PS2, etc.
Microsoft having lots of 360s on the shelf when PS3 comes out? It'd be dumb of them not to, especially when they've said Halo 3 comes out right then.
Nintendo continuing to cater to the new, larger, unwashed of gaming, rather than the hardcore? Business as usual.
What these predictions lack is any kind of foresight over new trends. How hard is it to predict new MegaMan games?! If this person had their finger on the pulse of these companies and could predict brand new, interesting games (like Ribbit King, Katamari Damacy, and Guitar Heroes), that'd be something really worth getting excited over.
Also, Nokia already said the N-Gage was a failure. Why mention it? The PSP is also a pretty spectacular failure, since you get the same games you could play on a nice TV with surround sound, but on a smaller screen with terrible battery life. Maybe the PSP get a game worth buying beyond Lumines, but not even the GTA rehash (one of Sony's big cards) for it is boosting sales.
SOP seems to be to get such a device away from its handler, stick it into something that'll absorb a blast, and then detonate a second charge such that the original device cannot function and is disabled.
Was this person's Xbox toasted? Will airport security be footing the bill for a replacement?
but in my language, we use vowels!
The only thing that matters are the concepts. Take it in Modula-2 or C++ or Delphi or Eiffel, but learn the object concepts.
Languages mean nothing. If you're still stuck on only knowing some languages, you have a lot more to learn than OO concepts.
"See? We're not engaging in anti-copetitive behavior. We're developing Office for a competing OS."
And, ""See? We're not engaging in anti-copetitive behavior. We're developing Internet Explorer for a competing OS."
Although this fought against their assertation that IE was a part of the OS, it did allow them to say, "only support IE, it's on everything anyone can pay to run!"
Jobs was smart enough to start his own browser development so that the MacOS could stand on its own. A browser is one of the most important applications an OS can have in this day and age -- even as early as 1997/1998, what OS I ran was determined by the browsers available (which is why OS/2 with its crippled NS 2.x was switched away from at the time).
The DS is the only game system I am buying genuinely new and interesting titles for. The touch screen certainly helps this, with games like Trauma Center (deviously hard as it is), and such.
The DS version is awesome. In 2004, I spent a good amount of time playing through AW and AW2. When I would play AW after AW2, I would miss out on the updated art work and extra CO moves. AW:DS does this much better by making everything truly 3D. It's not that obvious at first (it's a subtle 3D), but going back to the old GBA ones is really noticable.
:)
The have the new dual-strike CO mode + CO swaps, which adds a whole extra level to the gameplay. You can really save yourself from a tight spot. On the flip side, it makes the COM tougher in some situations. Careful strategy still wins the day. The extra units are kinda neat, although the new tank is silly
One interesting thing I find in this patch is that there is a modicum of dexterity, of skill to be found.
WoW is a decent MMO, but one thing it still has in it is that I may be good, and I may be the best I am at playing my character, but someone who has better stats earned through simply sitting on their ass and grinding can still beat me if they're high enough level. No amount of skill can overcome the fact that they have more time to spend on a game than I do.
You can argue that more time spent would equal a greater skill at using the character, but I can just as easily argue that my previous experience with other games would start me off at a distinct advantage (it's like starting at level 10 I suppose) if the combat was based more on the rules of an FPS and less on simple stats.
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:D
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embed[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"],
embed[src$=".swf"]
{ -moz-binding: url("http://www.floppymoose.com/clickToView.xml#c
Works in userContent.css. No more flash unless you click it to play with no extra code.
You're welcome