Anything that takes technology and places it in the hands of more people is good. On the PS2, I don't have to worry about OS issues, DLL incompatibilies, drivers, etc, etc. All I worry about is knowing the interface to the program, which should be easy to figure out on the standard game controller.
Often times the programs you mention cost a lot of money, too, because they're "music" programs (kinda like how slapping "photography" on a chemical bucket makes it 50$ more expensive). If it's released for the console, chances are it'll be a bit less expensive:)
that it's just a remake, and not a prequel. Up until Metroid 4 (Fusion), the Metroid timeline was fairly easy to take seriously. Samus killed Space pirates, then killed the rest of the Metroids, then killed the last of the Metroids.
Then they added Prime and Fusion. Oh, look, more Metroids secretly bred by the scientists. Oh, look, the Space Pirates have more metroids in between 1 and 2.
Kinda like how in Mega Man 3, the robots "went evil" by themselves -- but it turned out to be Dr. Wily. Then in MM4, the evil Dr. Cossak was causing trouble -- because of Dr. Wily. And so on until Mega Man 8. Wily was a cool foe, but then he became overused and became a parody of himself.
Chances are this fellow runs on a 486DX4 100 because it's "more than fast enough to run anything" with its scary 48mb of RAM setup.
It's one thing to be wasteful of computing resources (O[n^2] algorithms everywhere), but it's just as bad to worship the little tin-god of performance.
My PCs use IBM PS2 keyboards, which have a sane-sized space bar, and a nice gap between ctrl and alt. Cost: 2$ CDN per keyboard.
Shortcuts are more than the winkey stuff I eschewed. They're things like alt+space (n for minimize, or m for move afterwards -- like a chord in emacs), alt+tab (and shift+alt+tab), ctrl+tab (sadly, few MDI apps use this in Linux; Mozilla does it:)), alt+f4, ctrl+esc, etc.
" no one ever said Microsoft and their idea of shortcuts were the best possible"
No, but if you learned Windows, they're good enough. Why sit down and relearn something when you're already using it and being effective? It either has to be very much better, or be quite a bit less expensive. Since this is personal time we're talking about, it's very expensive. Are your short cut any faster than mine? Probably not. And I haven't wasted personal time relearning them for no tangible benefit.
What I hate is when I go to an environment where my shortcuts don't work: ctrl+u doesn't automatically clear text fields on not-X11. By adding to my base of learned shortcuts with new ones (like ctrl+u), it means I augment my computing power, rather than throw everything away and start again because of some silly NiH disease.
Not only does it gloss over how Sony is pulling a Sega (price cut PS2; put out PS2+ with progressive DVD, built in network adaptor, and built in IrDA; put out PSX soonish; put out PS3 -- can you say Sega CD, Sega 32X, Sega Saturn?), it doesn't even have basic facts correct:
"A lithium-ion battery rather than awkward AA batteries (like the GBA SP) ".. all GBA SPs use LiIon, rather than AAs.
They don't have a picture of the N-Gage next to the paragraph talking about the N-Gage, even though all previous paragraphs had the apropos Sony technology displayed...
Then they gloss over all the "detailS" about how multi-CPU consoles (Jaguar, Saturn) are hard to program in favour of saying, "MORE POWER!" and throwing in a quote about how Nintendo quakes in its boots when Sony clears its throat.
Read the last sentence where the first-mover advantage is lauded as being the reason Sony's "winning" the console war, yet in the same sentence the author says that probably would be a stumbling block for Xbox 2. Well, is first-mover advantage real or not? He can't decide.
The only people that win from console competition is the consumer. When Sony was enjoying its 2000 and 2001 years, there were no price cuts, and the games sucked (first-gen and second-gen were also on CDs, for crying out loud!). When GCN and Xbox came along, Sony started to have to actually do things. Like lower the price on their console, and put out more good exclusives.
Microsoft has the only good online strategy and with standard system-link support, Nintendo is the first company to push a peripheral that'll be supported (because it's the GBA) by a lot of developers. Sony's ditching the Firewire port on the PS2+, much to the chagrin of the 3 or so systim link games out there. Except for Half-Life, I can't find games that support USB keyboard and mouse on the PS2.
People rant about bloat, and people rant about eyecandy, but none of the window managers people rant about hove usable, out of the box normal configs.
What am I talking about? A window manager that has keyboard shortcuts that happen to be configured in a normal way. I don't know if the Mac-like WMs properly do option-Q, etc, but I do know that IceWM is the only WM I've found that has a superset of Win16, Win32, and OS/2 shortcuts in its sane, default configuration. Rather than spending hours hacking away at some obscure config file, or googling around for one that worked, this Window manager worked out of the box in ways I expected.
Keyboard feel is why I've never used any other Window manager for longer than a few days. I've been 100% linux since 2000, and had been using it since 1996, and have always enjoyed how I haven't had to relearn everything, hack files, or lose my couple of years of Windows and OS/2 experience to move up to something better.
So why don't you try IceWM for a bit, and see how much faster you can work with good shortcuts.
"Before you say a quick 'no', be aware of the recent decision by the German courts that eBay.com, despite being an American company, is subject to German law (hence the removal of their nazi paraphanelia)."
Guess what: US companies aren't subject to German laws. If people order shit that's illegal, the German post office is supposed to stop it. And, because they're nice, those companies (as you read in the article) will try and follow those rules. But it's not a legal requirement.
If it's in the air, it's out. There's no way you can honestly enforce this, at least not in Canada. Why? It's illegal for them to broadcast in Canada (for whatever reason); Canadian judges have ruled that it's not illegal to decode these signals since they don't offer them.
If your phone is hardwired and you make the effort to ensure it's fine, then police need a warrant to tap it. If you are using a cell phone, they don't. If you leave your curtains open, it's not illegal for the police to look in. It is illegal for them to use alternate imaging equipment which views wavelengths that'll pass through most visible-light opaque material, as was ruled.
Once again: if you are broadcasting a signal of some kind, or emiting reflected waves that you are not taking the effort to not transmit via curtains or using wires, you have no legal equivalnce of wired security, and are doing so at your own risk. Due dilligence is important.
but I'd argue that there is some price fixing. One of the products of price fixing is piracy.
Consider that new CD releases (at least in my city) have been slowly getting cheaper by about a buck every other year since 1999. A lot of new releases try to include something extra, like multimedia files, or a DVD. Why? They're trying to give value to a consumer that won't bat an eye at breaking the law. Offer value, and you can beat free.
Right now, what really strikes me as suspicious is that Canadian DVD prices (I'm Canadian) and US prices are numerically the same. I went to the US and thought I could get the Kubrick DVD box set -- but it was 199$ USD! This shocked me, as the same set was 199$ CDN back home. That (at the time) meant Canada had it for 100$ CDN/64$ USD cheaper. CNL, a Canadian DVD retailer, was the only place I found online that had prices comparable to the local ones, because all the other sites were in USD and thus 1.5x as expensive as buying locally.
Ask yourself why a DVD would have the same numerical MSRP when things like video games and music CDs have different MSRPs in our two respective countries. Ask yourself why CNL says they can't ship to the US.
While Might and Magic itself wasn't a really interesting game to me, Heroes of Might and Magic (the turn based strategy game) was always a favourite of mine. Thanks to the also defunct Loki games, I can play it under Linux as well.
Heroes 3 was the first game I noticed to use MP3 encoding for the background music/sound effects. This made it chug on the low end machines of the time, but it was still awesome.
They've also touched on a few other things that did well. The problem was that they had nothing to back it up with, except for another stupid Army Men game.
I can say that Sony has done just as much to me as Microsoft has. If by done stuff, you mean they've bullied or killed projects and products I dearly love, and have wasted my time with inferior versions.
This time around, though, Microsoft's doing better since the Xbox doesn't suck, while the PS2 does suck.
Everquest is the only MMOG mentioned that has online game cards. I know at least a few customers who don't have or use credit cards who can only play EQ because of this.
Related to this, the EQ online adventures for the PS2 has been the biggest flop ever. A handful of people bought it. Then they lowered the price within a week. A week later it was free with the PS2 network adapter. People didn't even want it then. Their next step? The game retails for 20$ USD, and they have free week game discs that are supposed to be given to every network adaptor owning PS2 user. It's still a flop.
Anarchy Online spikes up right in 2001 when they let everyone who applied for a beta have a copy + a month of game time. It quickly lowers because it was buggy as all shit, and a major turn off for most people.
WW2 online came and went in 2001. Anyone past there would've started to play Battle Field 1942. Another flop, although not as spectacular as EQ online adventures.
I can't wait to see how True Fantasy Live online for Xbox goes. That one looks good:)
The thing I've been trying to find is Half-Life for Dreamcast, axed by Sierra after it was complete, and recently released to people with the units. It'd be the ultimate addition to my library (which is all paid for legit software; I wish I could buy DC Half-Life), and would let me break out the DC keyboard/mouse for another fun time on that console:)
kg is actually a unit of mass. At sea level, you weigh 735.75 newtons. Your mass is invariant, while your weight is calculated as the acceleration vector * your mass (on the moon, you're 122.625 newtows, for example).
The units of mass in imperial are called slugs, which is why no one uses them;)
Money for nothing is what services are about. Being a company that licences games is all well and good, unless no one is buying games for the system anymore. Adding the magic of Live! pixie dust makes even offline games more interesting (Burnout 2's scoreboards and Splinter Cell/TJ&E's new levels, etc). Once you play it and enjoy it, you really like it. Even if you turn off the service, you still get to play all those games in offline mode.
There's nothing they can do about that. Remember when Homer broke the legs off Prof. Frink's autodialer after it tried to escape? Same deal.
The network is a commons, though. One they own, and which we pay to access. That's totally within their right to ban cheaters and chippers from. More power to them!
How is he an asshole by saying, "If you are on our Xbox Live! service, we reserve the right to boot you if you have a modchip or other cheat device (such as Action Replay hacked saves) turned on for your Xbox Live! games."
I love that they ban cheaters and people who are just assholes. Why do you think I stopped playing PC games? People'd always accuse me of cheating if I was winning.
Whinning that he has rights but won't let you mod chip Xboxs that are on Live! is like Bill Gates whinning that he can't just come into your house and pee on your floor. It's your private property to use as you please, just like the entire Live! network is MS property to do with as they fucking well please.
Seriously, people who do break the law deserve no sympathy. If you've ever worked in a video game store, you'll be familiar with people who come in and try to seem cool by saying that they download all their games. They're just assholes living off the hard work of real people who give a crap about life.
Most 3D developers nowadays are still writting simplistic, low-poly, engines that don't work any worse on single-pass, single-texture cards. A lot of computer games have very high sounding system requirements, but play fine on older hardware. Similarly, a lot of multiplatform titles are written for the PS2 (the weakest of all consoles), and shoddily ported the GCN, Xbox, and PC (Enter the Matrix).
I only know of a fewdeveloprs who are targetting hardware that does single-pass, multitexturing, proper dynamic lighting, pixel shading, and so on. At least most of the games that come out that aren't super-awesome looking have good gameplay, unlike most of the worst LCD offenders.
"The Matrix game was pre-ordered 4 million times, as far as I know"
No, that's way off. The most pre-ordered game is still Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker at 650,000 preorders. There were a lot of Matrix preorders, but the real number is probably around 300,000 -- nowhere near 4 million.
Considering the game itself just broke 1 million units, this only adds further doubt to your inflated numbers.
On my Vx with PPK, I couldn't use all the shortcuts I wanted (neither can I on the Clie's keyboard). I think that's a basic limitation of an OS designed around a touch screen, rather than a keyboard. Maybe they'll address it later on. Until then, there is the pointer hack you can use on 3.x devices (and some 4.x) which lets you control a software mouse via the keyboard.
I haven't tried any OS 5 devices out (except a Tungsten, which had the menu). Sorry:(
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Anything that takes technology and places it in the hands of more people is good. On the PS2, I don't have to worry about OS issues, DLL incompatibilies, drivers, etc, etc. All I worry about is knowing the interface to the program, which should be easy to figure out on the standard game controller.
:)
Often times the programs you mention cost a lot of money, too, because they're "music" programs (kinda like how slapping "photography" on a chemical bucket makes it 50$ more expensive). If it's released for the console, chances are it'll be a bit less expensive
That's why, despite owning all the Metroids, I've only not beaten Prime. Prime was ok, but felt like Super Metroid in 3D.
At least in Metroid is remade, it'll be like playing FF Origins: yes, it's the same, but it's a fresh taste of a classic.
that it's just a remake, and not a prequel. Up until Metroid 4 (Fusion), the Metroid timeline was fairly easy to take seriously. Samus killed Space pirates, then killed the rest of the Metroids, then killed the last of the Metroids.
Then they added Prime and Fusion. Oh, look, more Metroids secretly bred by the scientists. Oh, look, the Space Pirates have more metroids in between 1 and 2.
Kinda like how in Mega Man 3, the robots "went evil" by themselves -- but it turned out to be Dr. Wily. Then in MM4, the evil Dr. Cossak was causing trouble -- because of Dr. Wily. And so on until Mega Man 8. Wily was a cool foe, but then he became overused and became a parody of himself.
Chances are this fellow runs on a 486DX4 100 because it's "more than fast enough to run anything" with its scary 48mb of RAM setup.
It's one thing to be wasteful of computing resources (O[n^2] algorithms everywhere), but it's just as bad to worship the little tin-god of performance.
My PCs use IBM PS2 keyboards, which have a sane-sized space bar, and a nice gap between ctrl and alt. Cost: 2$ CDN per keyboard.
:)), alt+f4, ctrl+esc, etc.
Shortcuts are more than the winkey stuff I eschewed. They're things like alt+space (n for minimize, or m for move afterwards -- like a chord in emacs), alt+tab (and shift+alt+tab), ctrl+tab (sadly, few MDI apps use this in Linux; Mozilla does it
" no one ever said Microsoft and their idea of shortcuts were the best possible"
No, but if you learned Windows, they're good enough. Why sit down and relearn something when you're already using it and being effective? It either has to be very much better, or be quite a bit less expensive. Since this is personal time we're talking about, it's very expensive. Are your short cut any faster than mine? Probably not. And I haven't wasted personal time relearning them for no tangible benefit.
What I hate is when I go to an environment where my shortcuts don't work: ctrl+u doesn't automatically clear text fields on not-X11. By adding to my base of learned shortcuts with new ones (like ctrl+u), it means I augment my computing power, rather than throw everything away and start again because of some silly NiH disease.
Not only does it gloss over how Sony is pulling a Sega (price cut PS2; put out PS2+ with progressive DVD, built in network adaptor, and built in IrDA; put out PSX soonish; put out PS3 -- can you say Sega CD, Sega 32X, Sega Saturn?), it doesn't even have basic facts correct:
.. all GBA SPs use LiIon, rather than AAs.
"A lithium-ion battery rather than awkward AA batteries (like the GBA SP) "
They don't have a picture of the N-Gage next to the paragraph talking about the N-Gage, even though all previous paragraphs had the apropos Sony technology displayed...
Then they gloss over all the "detailS" about how multi-CPU consoles (Jaguar, Saturn) are hard to program in favour of saying, "MORE POWER!" and throwing in a quote about how Nintendo quakes in its boots when Sony clears its throat.
Read the last sentence where the first-mover advantage is lauded as being the reason Sony's "winning" the console war, yet in the same sentence the author says that probably would be a stumbling block for Xbox 2. Well, is first-mover advantage real or not? He can't decide.
The only people that win from console competition is the consumer. When Sony was enjoying its 2000 and 2001 years, there were no price cuts, and the games sucked (first-gen and second-gen were also on CDs, for crying out loud!). When GCN and Xbox came along, Sony started to have to actually do things. Like lower the price on their console, and put out more good exclusives.
Microsoft has the only good online strategy and with standard system-link support, Nintendo is the first company to push a peripheral that'll be supported (because it's the GBA) by a lot of developers. Sony's ditching the Firewire port on the PS2+, much to the chagrin of the 3 or so systim link games out there. Except for Half-Life, I can't find games that support USB keyboard and mouse on the PS2.
Who's innovating again? Not Sony.
People rant about bloat, and people rant about eyecandy, but none of the window managers people rant about hove usable, out of the box normal configs.
What am I talking about? A window manager that has keyboard shortcuts that happen to be configured in a normal way. I don't know if the Mac-like WMs properly do option-Q, etc, but I do know that IceWM is the only WM I've found that has a superset of Win16, Win32, and OS/2 shortcuts in its sane, default configuration. Rather than spending hours hacking away at some obscure config file, or googling around for one that worked, this Window manager worked out of the box in ways I expected.
Keyboard feel is why I've never used any other Window manager for longer than a few days. I've been 100% linux since 2000, and had been using it since 1996, and have always enjoyed how I haven't had to relearn everything, hack files, or lose my couple of years of Windows and OS/2 experience to move up to something better.
So why don't you try IceWM for a bit, and see how much faster you can work with good shortcuts.
"Before you say a quick 'no', be aware of the recent decision by the German courts that eBay.com, despite being an American company, is subject to German law (hence the removal of their nazi paraphanelia)."
Uh, no, that was France. Plus, if you didn't know, eBay avoided any legal problems.
Guess what: US companies aren't subject to German laws. If people order shit that's illegal, the German post office is supposed to stop it. And, because they're nice, those companies (as you read in the article) will try and follow those rules. But it's not a legal requirement.
If it's in the air, it's out. There's no way you can honestly enforce this, at least not in Canada. Why? It's illegal for them to broadcast in Canada (for whatever reason); Canadian judges have ruled that it's not illegal to decode these signals since they don't offer them.
If your phone is hardwired and you make the effort to ensure it's fine, then police need a warrant to tap it. If you are using a cell phone, they don't. If you leave your curtains open, it's not illegal for the police to look in. It is illegal for them to use alternate imaging equipment which views wavelengths that'll pass through most visible-light opaque material, as was ruled.
Once again: if you are broadcasting a signal of some kind, or emiting reflected waves that you are not taking the effort to not transmit via curtains or using wires, you have no legal equivalnce of wired security, and are doing so at your own risk. Due dilligence is important.
but I'd argue that there is some price fixing. One of the products of price fixing is piracy.
Consider that new CD releases (at least in my city) have been slowly getting cheaper by about a buck every other year since 1999. A lot of new releases try to include something extra, like multimedia files, or a DVD. Why? They're trying to give value to a consumer that won't bat an eye at breaking the law. Offer value, and you can beat free.
Right now, what really strikes me as suspicious is that Canadian DVD prices (I'm Canadian) and US prices are numerically the same. I went to the US and thought I could get the Kubrick DVD box set -- but it was 199$ USD! This shocked me, as the same set was 199$ CDN back home. That (at the time) meant Canada had it for 100$ CDN/64$ USD cheaper. CNL, a Canadian DVD retailer, was the only place I found online that had prices comparable to the local ones, because all the other sites were in USD and thus 1.5x as expensive as buying locally.
Ask yourself why a DVD would have the same numerical MSRP when things like video games and music CDs have different MSRPs in our two respective countries. Ask yourself why CNL says they can't ship to the US.
While Might and Magic itself wasn't a really interesting game to me, Heroes of Might and Magic (the turn based strategy game) was always a favourite of mine. Thanks to the also defunct Loki games, I can play it under Linux as well.
Heroes 3 was the first game I noticed to use MP3 encoding for the background music/sound effects. This made it chug on the low end machines of the time, but it was still awesome.
They've also touched on a few other things that did well. The problem was that they had nothing to back it up with, except for another stupid Army Men game.
I can say that Sony has done just as much to me as Microsoft has. If by done stuff, you mean they've bullied or killed projects and products I dearly love, and have wasted my time with inferior versions.
This time around, though, Microsoft's doing better since the Xbox doesn't suck, while the PS2 does suck.
But it and EQ are the only ones that really have no. Anarchy Online, Ultima Online, ShadowBane, WW2 online, etc, don't have such stuff.
Perhaps because EA meant to target younger girls, they wanted the game time cards out there (considering they don't do the same thing for Ultima).
What crack head moded my post flamebait?
Everquest is the only MMOG mentioned that has online game cards. I know at least a few customers who don't have or use credit cards who can only play EQ because of this.
:)
Related to this, the EQ online adventures for the PS2 has been the biggest flop ever. A handful of people bought it. Then they lowered the price within a week. A week later it was free with the PS2 network adapter. People didn't even want it then. Their next step? The game retails for 20$ USD, and they have free week game discs that are supposed to be given to every network adaptor owning PS2 user. It's still a flop.
Anarchy Online spikes up right in 2001 when they let everyone who applied for a beta have a copy + a month of game time. It quickly lowers because it was buggy as all shit, and a major turn off for most people.
WW2 online came and went in 2001. Anyone past there would've started to play Battle Field 1942. Another flop, although not as spectacular as EQ online adventures.
I can't wait to see how True Fantasy Live online for Xbox goes. That one looks good
The thing I've been trying to find is Half-Life for Dreamcast, axed by Sierra after it was complete, and recently released to people with the units. It'd be the ultimate addition to my library (which is all paid for legit software; I wish I could buy DC Half-Life), and would let me break out the DC keyboard/mouse for another fun time on that console :)
kg is actually a unit of mass. At sea level, you weigh 735.75 newtons. Your mass is invariant, while your weight is calculated as the acceleration vector * your mass (on the moon, you're 122.625 newtows, for example).
;)
The units of mass in imperial are called slugs, which is why no one uses them
Money for nothing is what services are about. Being a company that licences games is all well and good, unless no one is buying games for the system anymore. Adding the magic of Live! pixie dust makes even offline games more interesting (Burnout 2's scoreboards and Splinter Cell/TJ&E's new levels, etc). Once you play it and enjoy it, you really like it. Even if you turn off the service, you still get to play all those games in offline mode.
There's nothing they can do about that. Remember when Homer broke the legs off Prof. Frink's autodialer after it tried to escape? Same deal.
The network is a commons, though. One they own, and which we pay to access. That's totally within their right to ban cheaters and chippers from. More power to them!
-- dupe items in PSO or have hacked save states.
-- modify the downloaded content in Mech Assault so their mechs have mega more armour.
-- ever would they put warez all over that 8gb drive with an interactive menu to pick games.
No one would ever do that!
How is he an asshole by saying, "If you are on our Xbox Live! service, we reserve the right to boot you if you have a modchip or other cheat device (such as Action Replay hacked saves) turned on for your Xbox Live! games."
I love that they ban cheaters and people who are just assholes. Why do you think I stopped playing PC games? People'd always accuse me of cheating if I was winning.
Whinning that he has rights but won't let you mod chip Xboxs that are on Live! is like Bill Gates whinning that he can't just come into your house and pee on your floor. It's your private property to use as you please, just like the entire Live! network is MS property to do with as they fucking well please.
Especially if they load that 8db HD with warez.
Seriously, people who do break the law deserve no sympathy. If you've ever worked in a video game store, you'll be familiar with people who come in and try to seem cool by saying that they download all their games. They're just assholes living off the hard work of real people who give a crap about life.
Most 3D developers nowadays are still writting simplistic, low-poly, engines that don't work any worse on single-pass, single-texture cards. A lot of computer games have very high sounding system requirements, but play fine on older hardware. Similarly, a lot of multiplatform titles are written for the PS2 (the weakest of all consoles), and shoddily ported the GCN, Xbox, and PC (Enter the Matrix).
I only know of a few developrs who are targetting hardware that does single-pass, multitexturing, proper dynamic lighting, pixel shading, and so on. At least most of the games that come out that aren't super-awesome looking have good gameplay, unlike most of the worst LCD offenders.
"The Matrix game was pre-ordered 4 million times, as far as I know"
No, that's way off. The most pre-ordered game is still Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker at 650,000 preorders. There were a lot of Matrix preorders, but the real number is probably around 300,000 -- nowhere near 4 million.
Considering the game itself just broke 1 million units, this only adds further doubt to your inflated numbers.
maybe you can also get a book on correct semi-colon useage ;)
On my Vx with PPK, I couldn't use all the shortcuts I wanted (neither can I on the Clie's keyboard). I think that's a basic limitation of an OS designed around a touch screen, rather than a keyboard. Maybe they'll address it later on. Until then, there is the pointer hack you can use on 3.x devices (and some 4.x) which lets you control a software mouse via the keyboard.
:(
I haven't tried any OS 5 devices out (except a Tungsten, which had the menu). Sorry