Get a NES game genie. The design of it was such that you never had to push the cart down, you just straight inserted it into the open face of the NES. No tricky alignment issues. I bought my game genie when they got cheap back in 1992, and I've loved it for years. I still use it today to play my NES games quickly and easily.
Some games do have worse voice lag than others, but the support is 100% across the board for Live! enabled online play games, and you get a wide variety of features (muting, masking, etc). It's fairly simple to get through firewalls (88 udp, 3074 udp/tcp -- although Mech Assault team chat fails to work with this), and it features independant volume and mute controls right next to your control buttons.
"And that's the problem. If you have no intention of ever using it, you don't lose anything if someone else has the right to pay to license it and use it themselves. But the consumers that demand the product do."
Before you think of the easy justifying scenario, consider the other scenarios. Do you really think people want their new idea for memory managment to be so loose that it can be taken out from under them? How do you define in use? Would there be specific legal restrictions, or would you be wanting to go on a case-by-case basis until there was enough precedent? How would the society we are based in (personal rights ueber alles) react to the much more socialistic treament of sharing unused ideas? Do you like the idea that all the code and writting on your HD which you scribbled years ago would suddenly be open for anyone to prod at?
You can't go making such large changes off of one case. First you have to understand the shortcomings of the current system, then you have to come up with a plan to address them. Show the need for change, show how your plan would address them. Bringing a whole slew of unanswered questions and possible problems to the table does not a plan make.
Part 4 pretty much is a single-paragraph decrying the entire concept of IP. Guess what -- if I own something, because I made it or bought the rights to it, it's my decision if I put it in a box in a graveyard to rot for all eternity. Today's digital age makes it easier to still obtain a copy, but that doesn't make it right, nor does it make IP outmoded.
It used to be you could get 200 day time minutes, 400 first-incoming minutes, unlimited evenings and weekends, and also have roaming, etc -- with evenings starting at 6 pm -- for about 35$ cdn a month.
Now they evenings start at 8. If evenings start at 9 there (when they're pracitcally into the night), I'd hate to see which direction your cell company is going, especially since I negotiated 10$ off of my 35$ CDN a month. You a lot pay more than I do for marginally worse service.
P = M * V means that truckers should be even more careful about not speeding, etc. By and large, they are. As drivers go, they are the ones with the least to lose in an accident since the other car will likely be pate. Yet you'll see little kids thinking they're in Fast and the Furious zipping past them. It's stupid.
But do you have the right to accept the risk for everyone else on the road?
As I mentioned, stopping distance increases as the square of the speed. Did you know about P = M * V? The energy imparted by a moving vehicle increases with the square of its speed; so a car travelling at 40 mph will dissipate four times more energy in an impact than one travelling at 20 mph.
So not only are you increasing stopping distance and decreasing the reaction time threshold, you are increasing the force you'll impart when you hit something.
Maybe you haven't realized it, but saying "speed doesn't kill" is as useful as saying "guns don't kill people, people do." Whenever you exceed the posted speed limit on a section of road, you are increasing the risk for everone who may be using that road. You're increasing the possibility that you'll be killing cyclists, jay walkers, pedestrians, other vehicles, etc.
To argue that a behaviour which increases the force and stopping distance while decreasing your safe reaction time on a road is not insane, is equivalent to arguing that it's the ground's fault that people who jump off of tall buildings die.
Stopping distance of a skidding car is directly proportional to the square of the speed of the car!
A car traveling 10 mi/hr may require 4 feet to skid to an abrupt halt; but a car going twice as fast -- 20 mi/hr -- will require four times the distance , a total of 16 feet to skid to a stop. A doubling of the speed results in a quadrupling of the stopping distance; a tripling of the speed would increase the stopping distance by a factor of nine; and a quadrupling of the speed would increase the stopping distance by a factor of 16.
The stopping distance is proportional to the square of the speed of the vehicle! If you're doing 90 in a 60 lane, you'd better have a following distance that's reasonable. Since all people who speed are impatient, that's unlikely.
Speeding merely endagers everyone's lives because you reduce the window of reaction time you have as well as increasing the distance you need to stop. Saying speed isn't dangerous is a joke -- maybe in Sega GT or Gran Turismo!
Higher resolution diplays are designed so that the fonts are displayed with higher fidelity, not at smaller sizes. Stop thinking in terms of bitmap displays. I run at 1152x864 and have my min font size at 20. When at 1600x1200, I would set it to 24 or 26. The articles are very readable then.
Or do you prefer a slim column of size 8 fonts in the left 8% of your display? I don't, which is why I enforce things like minimum font sizes, and relative font size adjustments on the web.
I tend to road bike more than mountain bike. The speed and long distances are what I enjoy, so I regularly bike everywhere. I average 100k a week, or about 14 and same clicks a day. Usually I only do 8km days, so I make up for it with regular 60km days:)
I played this in beta a couple of weeks ago for one night. Frustrated, I put it away. Essentially, I logged in and spent an hour running around. No vehicles were available, and all the obvious quest boxes gave quests which were too hard to complete within a reasonable amount of time. Any time my character was close to destroying something, for example, I would have to run to avoid defenders. Then the health would shoot back up, and I'd be stuck with low health and a fresh, alerted enemy.
NPCs were inside of each other, text wasn't entereted (as you said). I figured that this was why the console versions had been cancelled (while the Xbox one could maybe be patched, the many gigs of patch data would not be something you could cram on; don't even think about a PS2 one). I also figured that the game would not be ready for an August launch.
Then I read it was launching on the 26th.
Kids, this game is so not ready for prime time, it's not funny. Do not get Star Wars Galaxies. It doesn't crash like Anarachy Online did at first, but it sure sucks the same. Spend your money on something better, like Daikatana -- or Anachronox, a good budget title you can buy 4 times over for the price of Galaxies.
Once again, bad people ruin fair use for good people.
I have lots of NES and SNES games that I'd love to be able to play on my GBA portably, but can't because the flash carts are impossible to find now. Why? Because people were just warezing like mad with these things. The only time I ran into a person with a flash cart (at a theatre), he bragged about how he had so man games, he couldn't even remember them. The flash cart he carried had 5 of them at the time on it.
As someone who owns over 250 games, I found it reprehensible. It's stealing, and we all end up paying for it. This time it was Lik-Sang that ended up paying for it, which is a shame because they sell a lot of cool stuff.
"But of course, gamers will probably forgive and forget if both of these titles turn out well, even after so many delays."
It'd be nice if that was true, but it's not. The moment you miss a target on an 18 month game development cycle, and don't address the issue, you've set yourself up for failure. Look at Daikatana. They slipped, and ended up having to get a new gaming engine (Quake 2). The results? They had to redo all the maps, QA testing, entity models, etc, just as if they'd started from scratch. The only difference was that they still had wasted all that money on the previous version.
Duke Nukem Forever is in the same situation. Because they were unwilling to release the versions based on the Unreal engine and the Quake engines, they've effectively flushed all the money they spent on those development branches down the toilet.
When you look at it this way, you realize that unless people will pay a couple hundred dollars a copy (or whatever it takes to make up for late shipping), you will be losing money in the long run compared to shipping on time. No game is that good.
Go out and buy yourself a copy of Boulder Dash EX for the GBA. It has the classic C64 game, as well as the updated story quest (complete with unlockables and more!).
I have always wondered why doesn't NOKIA put a direction pad and game buttons on 6150 phones. The 6150s have 160x160, 16-bit color screens, plus a fast CPU. Should be more than capable for running great games.
Moral of the story: sticking chicken feathers up your butt doesn't make you a chicken. Nintendo knows what they're doing, hopefully Sony does too.
" Actually, low-wattage 1mbps range limited 802.11b chipsets have the same kind of power consumption as BT chipsets. They also are similarly priced, have a similar range, and offer comparable bandwidth."
With none of the readily available compatibility (where is my low-power USB-dongle 802.11b chipset? I can buy a BT dongle), such as with the bluetooth cell phone, or the bluetooth dongle I can stick on my GBA SP.
Bluetooth is only dead to those who haven't bought a new portable device in the last 2 years.
In the same paragraph, "Resident Evil can only be done so many times before the series just bloats and dies." and "It took them this long to release a Mario Kart game?"
So, what, you do or do not want them to overdo sequels? A whole bunch of Mario Karts per system, or only one?
The same thing is happening with sports titles. Unlike back in the day, when all I'd have to do is buy Blades of Steel and enjoy the best damned hockey game ever, EA has made a franchise out of releasing the same damned crap over and over again. Unforutunately for us gamers, the people who buy sports titles are stupider than the people who buy Army Men games (the other great Trip Hawkins money making scheme), so EA's not going out of business any time soon.
Capcom may have the most manic depressive release cycle ever, but Nintendo -- thankfully -- has not overdone its sequels. You can whine about the same thing two different ways in the same breathe all you want.
While the Dreamcast, GCN, and Xbox seem to have been fairly easy to get up to speed on for developers (Xbox being DirectX, GCN having an easy Nintendo setup, and Dreamcast offering both SegaOS and WinCE DirectX), the PS2 was something oft-lamented. It wasn't until most development houses developed good middle-ware that the games started to not look like ass, or simple PS1 games with more polygons and no annoying perspective-correction bubbling.
Sony should've had a useable SDK for the game programmers from day one, not their "ship and forget" method. If it wasn't for Gran Tursimo 3 pulling people in, and then GTA 3 and Vice City holding them there, I don't think the PS2 would have quite the grip on the market they did. This would've been helped if Sega was more in a position to market the Dreamcast, but such is life.
While I agree that Sony is somewhat dominant, I still have yet to see anything that resembles a true competitor to Microsoft's Xbox Live!. Microsoft has everything in place so that once you buy your console, your games, and your Live! service, you get all the updates. There's no need to release Mech Assault 2 for the Xbox, because they'll just incrementally add that to the Live! servers. Microsoft wants your money, every month, and they'd rather just suplement what you have in your collection than have you buy a bunch of new games. How can Sony react to that? I don't think they've shown any true iniative in stopping Microsoft.
The final paragraph seemed totally confused about wether first mover advantage was one or not, and ignored the entire Live! aspect of Microsoft's console. The Live! part, if enough people pick it up (which seems to be happening) totally changes the online playing field, and adds the icremental updates to consoles that people haven't ever had before. Kinda like how the GBA, aka the only peripheral Nintendo has launched which will receive 3rd party support, is changing (a lot slower than Live! right now) how people interact with games on the GCN.
Sony's trying to push in the Tivo direction with the PSX, but the up front cost is so much higher. And how will consumers feel about the PS2+, PSX, and PS3 all coming out in 3 years? I think Sony is dangerously close to pulling a Sega in 200X after pulling a Nintendo in 199X.
that's actually a really good summary. I hadn't even thought about that stuff. Perhaps I am too jadded to noticed it, since I was happy with, "the last Metroid is in captivity. The Galaxy is at piece.":)
While the GBA doesn't have some of the features of the SNES (the lack XY buttons and 8-bit sound being my disapointment with a GBA SP), I'd love to see a Metroid pack with 1, 2, and 3 remade for the GBA. Even if they were released separately, it'd be really nice. Nintendo could even include a feature, ala Golden Sun, where beating the first one unlocked features in the second (..).
I think that'd be much nicer than making the plot continuity be broken and laugable.
If you think a cool Samus adventure would be good, I know I'd like to see more about the Col. and Samus than was revealed in Fusion. But, please, no more Metroids.
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Get a NES game genie. The design of it was such that you never had to push the cart down, you just straight inserted it into the open face of the NES. No tricky alignment issues. I bought my game genie when they got cheap back in 1992, and I've loved it for years. I still use it today to play my NES games quickly and easily.
F2 is a much faster rename than dragging your butt through a context menu.
Some games do have worse voice lag than others, but the support is 100% across the board for Live! enabled online play games, and you get a wide variety of features (muting, masking, etc). It's fairly simple to get through firewalls (88 udp, 3074 udp/tcp -- although Mech Assault team chat fails to work with this), and it features independant volume and mute controls right next to your control buttons.
I highly reccommend you try it out.
"And that's the problem. If you have no intention of ever using it, you don't lose anything if someone else has the right to pay to license it and use it themselves. But the consumers that demand the product do."
Before you think of the easy justifying scenario, consider the other scenarios. Do you really think people want their new idea for memory managment to be so loose that it can be taken out from under them? How do you define in use? Would there be specific legal restrictions, or would you be wanting to go on a case-by-case basis until there was enough precedent? How would the society we are based in (personal rights ueber alles) react to the much more socialistic treament of sharing unused ideas? Do you like the idea that all the code and writting on your HD which you scribbled years ago would suddenly be open for anyone to prod at?
You can't go making such large changes off of one case. First you have to understand the shortcomings of the current system, then you have to come up with a plan to address them. Show the need for change, show how your plan would address them. Bringing a whole slew of unanswered questions and possible problems to the table does not a plan make.
Part 4 pretty much is a single-paragraph decrying the entire concept of IP. Guess what -- if I own something, because I made it or bought the rights to it, it's my decision if I put it in a box in a graveyard to rot for all eternity. Today's digital age makes it easier to still obtain a copy, but that doesn't make it right, nor does it make IP outmoded.
It used to be you could get 200 day time minutes, 400 first-incoming minutes, unlimited evenings and weekends, and also have roaming, etc -- with evenings starting at 6 pm -- for about 35$ cdn a month.
Now they evenings start at 8. If evenings start at 9 there (when they're pracitcally into the night), I'd hate to see which direction your cell company is going, especially since I negotiated 10$ off of my 35$ CDN a month. You a lot pay more than I do for marginally worse service.
Just as dangerous, you mean.
P = M * V means that truckers should be even more careful about not speeding, etc. By and large, they are. As drivers go, they are the ones with the least to lose in an accident since the other car will likely be pate. Yet you'll see little kids thinking they're in Fast and the Furious zipping past them. It's stupid.
But do you have the right to accept the risk for everyone else on the road?
As I mentioned, stopping distance increases as the square of the speed. Did you know about P = M * V? The energy imparted by a moving vehicle increases with the square of its speed; so a car travelling at 40 mph will dissipate four times more energy in an impact than one travelling at 20 mph.
So not only are you increasing stopping distance and decreasing the reaction time threshold, you are increasing the force you'll impart when you hit something.
Maybe you haven't realized it, but saying "speed doesn't kill" is as useful as saying "guns don't kill people, people do." Whenever you exceed the posted speed limit on a section of road, you are increasing the risk for everone who may be using that road. You're increasing the possibility that you'll be killing cyclists, jay walkers, pedestrians, other vehicles, etc.
To argue that a behaviour which increases the force and stopping distance while decreasing your safe reaction time on a road is not insane, is equivalent to arguing that it's the ground's fault that people who jump off of tall buildings die.
Stopping distance of a skidding car is directly proportional to the square of the speed of the car!
A car traveling 10 mi/hr may require 4 feet to skid to an abrupt halt; but a car going twice as fast -- 20 mi/hr -- will require four times the distance , a total of 16 feet to skid to a stop. A doubling of the speed results in a quadrupling of the stopping distance; a tripling of the speed would increase the stopping distance by a factor of nine; and a quadrupling of the speed would increase the stopping distance by a factor of 16.
The stopping distance is proportional to the square of the speed of the vehicle! If you're doing 90 in a 60 lane, you'd better have a following distance that's reasonable. Since all people who speed are impatient, that's unlikely.
Speeding merely endagers everyone's lives because you reduce the window of reaction time you have as well as increasing the distance you need to stop. Saying speed isn't dangerous is a joke -- maybe in Sega GT or Gran Turismo!
Higher resolution diplays are designed so that the fonts are displayed with higher fidelity, not at smaller sizes. Stop thinking in terms of bitmap displays. I run at 1152x864 and have my min font size at 20. When at 1600x1200, I would set it to 24 or 26. The articles are very readable then.
Or do you prefer a slim column of size 8 fonts in the left 8% of your display? I don't, which is why I enforce things like minimum font sizes, and relative font size adjustments on the web.
I tend to road bike more than mountain bike. The speed and long distances are what I enjoy, so I regularly bike everywhere. I average 100k a week, or about 14 and same clicks a day. Usually I only do 8km days, so I make up for it with regular 60km days :)
Pocket NES, or the other emulators covered on this site.
It is also very possible that SNES on GBA stuff will exist soon.
I played this in beta a couple of weeks ago for one night. Frustrated, I put it away. Essentially, I logged in and spent an hour running around. No vehicles were available, and all the obvious quest boxes gave quests which were too hard to complete within a reasonable amount of time. Any time my character was close to destroying something, for example, I would have to run to avoid defenders. Then the health would shoot back up, and I'd be stuck with low health and a fresh, alerted enemy.
NPCs were inside of each other, text wasn't entereted (as you said). I figured that this was why the console versions had been cancelled (while the Xbox one could maybe be patched, the many gigs of patch data would not be something you could cram on; don't even think about a PS2 one). I also figured that the game would not be ready for an August launch.
Then I read it was launching on the 26th.
Kids, this game is so not ready for prime time, it's not funny. Do not get Star Wars Galaxies. It doesn't crash like Anarachy Online did at first, but it sure sucks the same. Spend your money on something better, like Daikatana -- or Anachronox, a good budget title you can buy 4 times over for the price of Galaxies.
Once again, bad people ruin fair use for good people.
I have lots of NES and SNES games that I'd love to be able to play on my GBA portably, but can't because the flash carts are impossible to find now. Why? Because people were just warezing like mad with these things. The only time I ran into a person with a flash cart (at a theatre), he bragged about how he had so man games, he couldn't even remember them. The flash cart he carried had 5 of them at the time on it.
As someone who owns over 250 games, I found it reprehensible. It's stealing, and we all end up paying for it. This time it was Lik-Sang that ended up paying for it, which is a shame because they sell a lot of cool stuff.
"But of course, gamers will probably forgive and forget if both of these titles turn out well, even after so many delays."
It'd be nice if that was true, but it's not. The moment you miss a target on an 18 month game development cycle, and don't address the issue, you've set yourself up for failure. Look at Daikatana. They slipped, and ended up having to get a new gaming engine (Quake 2). The results? They had to redo all the maps, QA testing, entity models, etc, just as if they'd started from scratch. The only difference was that they still had wasted all that money on the previous version.
Duke Nukem Forever is in the same situation. Because they were unwilling to release the versions based on the Unreal engine and the Quake engines, they've effectively flushed all the money they spent on those development branches down the toilet.
When you look at it this way, you realize that unless people will pay a couple hundred dollars a copy (or whatever it takes to make up for late shipping), you will be losing money in the long run compared to shipping on time. No game is that good.
Go out and buy yourself a copy of Boulder Dash EX for the GBA. It has the classic C64 game, as well as the updated story quest (complete with unlockables and more!).
Well worth it, and usually bargain priced.
I have always wondered why doesn't NOKIA put a direction pad and game buttons on 6150 phones. The 6150s have 160x160, 16-bit color screens, plus a fast CPU. Should be more than capable for running great games.
Moral of the story: sticking chicken feathers up your butt doesn't make you a chicken. Nintendo knows what they're doing, hopefully Sony does too.
L and R are there, too. That's 4. 6 if you count start and select.
" Actually, low-wattage 1mbps range limited 802.11b chipsets have the same kind of power consumption as BT chipsets. They also are similarly priced, have a similar range, and offer comparable bandwidth."
With none of the readily available compatibility (where is my low-power USB-dongle 802.11b chipset? I can buy a BT dongle), such as with the bluetooth cell phone, or the bluetooth dongle I can stick on my GBA SP.
Bluetooth is only dead to those who haven't bought a new portable device in the last 2 years.
In the same paragraph, "Resident Evil can only be done so many times before the series just bloats and dies." and "It took them this long to release a Mario Kart game?"
So, what, you do or do not want them to overdo sequels? A whole bunch of Mario Karts per system, or only one?
The same thing is happening with sports titles. Unlike back in the day, when all I'd have to do is buy Blades of Steel and enjoy the best damned hockey game ever, EA has made a franchise out of releasing the same damned crap over and over again. Unforutunately for us gamers, the people who buy sports titles are stupider than the people who buy Army Men games (the other great Trip Hawkins money making scheme), so EA's not going out of business any time soon.
Capcom may have the most manic depressive release cycle ever, but Nintendo -- thankfully -- has not overdone its sequels. You can whine about the same thing two different ways in the same breathe all you want.
You mean that giant blob of hyper links and advertisements that's impossible to use, compared to something that's elegant like PlanetGameCube?
Granted, Gamespot covers more (I think), I just don't have time to decipher the alien interface.
After staring at the Devil May Cry 2 cover, I can't see him as being some random, white action hero type.
While the Dreamcast, GCN, and Xbox seem to have been fairly easy to get up to speed on for developers (Xbox being DirectX, GCN having an easy Nintendo setup, and Dreamcast offering both SegaOS and WinCE DirectX), the PS2 was something oft-lamented. It wasn't until most development houses developed good middle-ware that the games started to not look like ass, or simple PS1 games with more polygons and no annoying perspective-correction bubbling.
Sony should've had a useable SDK for the game programmers from day one, not their "ship and forget" method. If it wasn't for Gran Tursimo 3 pulling people in, and then GTA 3 and Vice City holding them there, I don't think the PS2 would have quite the grip on the market they did. This would've been helped if Sega was more in a position to market the Dreamcast, but such is life.
While I agree that Sony is somewhat dominant, I still have yet to see anything that resembles a true competitor to Microsoft's Xbox Live!. Microsoft has everything in place so that once you buy your console, your games, and your Live! service, you get all the updates. There's no need to release Mech Assault 2 for the Xbox, because they'll just incrementally add that to the Live! servers. Microsoft wants your money, every month, and they'd rather just suplement what you have in your collection than have you buy a bunch of new games. How can Sony react to that? I don't think they've shown any true iniative in stopping Microsoft.
The final paragraph seemed totally confused about wether first mover advantage was one or not, and ignored the entire Live! aspect of Microsoft's console. The Live! part, if enough people pick it up (which seems to be happening) totally changes the online playing field, and adds the icremental updates to consoles that people haven't ever had before. Kinda like how the GBA, aka the only peripheral Nintendo has launched which will receive 3rd party support, is changing (a lot slower than Live! right now) how people interact with games on the GCN.
Sony's trying to push in the Tivo direction with the PSX, but the up front cost is so much higher. And how will consumers feel about the PS2+, PSX, and PS3 all coming out in 3 years? I think Sony is dangerously close to pulling a Sega in 200X after pulling a Nintendo in 199X.
that's actually a really good summary. I hadn't even thought about that stuff. Perhaps I am too jadded to noticed it, since I was happy with, "the last Metroid is in captivity. The Galaxy is at piece." :)
While the GBA doesn't have some of the features of the SNES (the lack XY buttons and 8-bit sound being my disapointment with a GBA SP), I'd love to see a Metroid pack with 1, 2, and 3 remade for the GBA. Even if they were released separately, it'd be really nice. Nintendo could even include a feature, ala Golden Sun, where beating the first one unlocked features in the second (..).
I think that'd be much nicer than making the plot continuity be broken and laugable.
If you think a cool Samus adventure would be good, I know I'd like to see more about the Col. and Samus than was revealed in Fusion. But, please, no more Metroids.