It's a suggestion. Ratings are suggestions designed to educate people about game (and movie) contents.
Why should this be enforced? If Matrix Reloaded is 14-A because of the action sequences and such, it means that they think the earliest age you can understand and handle that is 14. That's not always true both ways. It's still a personal decision: the parent should be watching what the child does.
If the parent gives the child 70$ and says to go get a game, and the kid gets Vice City, whose fault is it? The parent or the store? I think the parent. When you put that much buying power into the hands of someone, you are making the assumption they'll buy what you think is fine. I'd consider suggesting gift certificates if you want to give buying power that's restricted to your children.
If a kid walks up to me and has 70$ and wants Vice City, I'll buy it for them. If their parents cared, either that kid wouldn't have that money, or the parent would be there to see that they bought something age appropriate (which might even be Vice City, if their parents are liberal minded).
Plus, if you cut off the children, the only people buying Vice City would be the people who are mentally immature;)
" Ok, so a video game is the complex program written by a lot of programmers, " artists, story boarders, musicians, producers, directors, QA testers, focus testers, play testers, level designers, writers, etc.
A programmer can write GNUMeric. A programmer can't write a game, at least not without wearing all those other hats or having someone there to support them. Don't short them just because you only see the engine writting part of the entire game development. There is a lot more to it than that. See how Quake or Doom plays without the PAK/WAD files that contain the sprites, tiles, textures, sounds, levels, etc. Not nearly as much fun:p
I'm not sure how you did it, but./ pulls up a nice cut/copy/paste menu (as well as allowing me to use x/v/p) on any PalmOS 4 and greater model. Earlier models don't show the menu, but still respond to the shortcut.
As for enter/tab, enter is a stroke starting from the top-right to down left ala/` (not the bottom left to up-right./); tab is tap, up, right like a little arrow. I've never had problems with these grafiti shortcuts on any of my 3 Palm units or the many units my friends have.
The reviewer seems clueless about memory sticks. There are two kinds: MagicGate, and MagicGate Pro.
MagicGate is limited to 128mb. There are 256mb MagicGate sticks that work by "choosing" which of the 128mb you have access to via a switch.
MagicGate Pro is limited to 1gb, and is more expensive overall.
Compatibility between the stick and device would be indicated my the MG logo on the back (like on my NR70V/U). Just don't let some salesdrone at the Sony store talk to you about it. The one I spoke with said I couldn't play MP3s from non-MGPro sticks, which was a bald-faced lie.
A 128mb MagicGate stick not by Sony costs ~75$+tx CDN. That's only 15-20$ more than a similar size CF card (and 50$ cheaper than a Sony one from the Sony store), so it's not as big of a deal for pricing.
"The conveinences everyone claims that GSM has (eg SIM cards) are already being standardized in cdma2000, and will be here soon. "
Yea, because consumers have always waited for the perfect technology, rather than adopting a marginally worse technology that exists today.
Oh, wait, VHS was before Betamax and was worse. Oh, wait, the PC was before the Macintosh and had less usability. Oh, wait..
I can go on and on. If CDMA was truly better enough today, it would've been standardized in every aspect like GSM, and we wouldn't even know about GSM because of it.
While K5's not as bad as it used to be, Rusty still hasn't updated the site to NOT use the FrankenHTML that works on NS 4.x. I know that some people consider Mozilla bad in this day and age, but anything beats Netscape 4.x.
Unfortunately, not everyone sees it this way, and Rusty's not about to cut off the readership.
I'm using Moz 1.3. The floating bar is an annoyance, but I'm sure they could set a prefs cookie to leave it pinned (assuming they bothered to research it). In a way, though, it's handy to have, since it's always there without scrolling being required. If Moz's repaints weren't so slow, it'd be much cooler.
They don't underline their links, which should be a crime -- we're not all awesome at seeing the difference between colours, especially as our eyes age or if we're unlucky enough to be colour blind.
Oh, and they tickle the Moz font spacing EM bug. Basically, text will overlap if they use em spacing in the CSS because Mozilla's still broken in big ways internally. For someone like me who turns the fonts waaay up (I like a mix of readability and high fidelity), it's very annoying. But again, that's a browser bug.
What if you had a health meter that watched your vital signs. The moment they stopped, the recorders would stop and broadcast the last 5 minutes of your life (on video + health signals) to the police, so they could arrest any potential murderer.
This is a monitor of how you responded to a situation where what you decide affects other people. This allows courts to properly find who was at fault in an accident, possibly for deaths, and punish accordingly. If you'd pull your head out of your Orwellian Fear Box, you'd notice that things that record (such as books, VCRs, computers, video cameras) are used for much good in society. Like any tool, they can be abused, but that doesn't outweigh the benefits of the tool.
Neo can still be hurt, and every time they got into a potential battle I was sensing the danger. I didn't really feel danger when Neo fought Agent Smith after seeing the Oracle, but I did feel it when everyone else dealth with Agents and rogue programs.
Adzoox wrote: "I'd like to know what you ACTUALLY thought about the post. Your post was unnecessary and rather immature."
Yes, and? Welcome to Slashdot, where we use teasing freely. I reserve the right to tease you if you're not coherent.
"The post was quite on topic as there are LOTS of things we are unaware that can be used against us."
Without you actually saying that, it comes across as incoherent. It's like having a conversation with someone, where half of what they say is with their "inner" voice. That's why I wound up with the wrong impression. That's also why it's a good idea to walk away for a bit (or read a different browser window/tab) before rereading what you wrote. You'll see that stuff staring up at you in a way that you wouldn't otherwise have noticed.
"Besides, we're talking American freedoms, you live in Canada!"
Statements like this validate my reason for writting my original post. "Besides, we're talking WHITE freedoms, you're black!" How different are we really?
If you didn't notice, I "picked on" a lot of people who argued againist the onboard recording device with/no/ reason specified. People who were like, "that's double plus ungood!" with nothing to back it up are idiots. You have to think why you're saying something, not just respond with, "government bad!"
If you'd specified WHY your first anecdote was bad, instead of just saying the main part of the joke without any kind of punchline, then seguing into a bit about the recorder which just became incoherent, then your post might've had some meat to respond to. Since it didn't, my post reflects that.
Blah, police note, blah, used against him. [NOTE: does not resolve anything, reader must assume that police report is negative and was BAD]
Blah, blah, blah, FREEDOM FREEDOM
Seriously, the first part of your post is barely coherent, up until you just "veer" back onto topic, and then you delve straight into incoherency afterwards.
Yes, when you use something that is traceable, it is recorded. Welcome to modern life. Yes, people will remember you. Back in the 1800s, you'd have a reputation in the town -- now you have a credit history and rap sheet at the local post office. Karma, dude -- live with it.
At worst, your black box going -20 means you're automatically at fault in an accident because you were driving a fault vehicle.
Why do people have problems with honesty? This is merely being honest about your driving leading to an accident. The person who's guilty of reckless driving will not like it, but normal people are fine.
In a court of law, if you're proven to have tampered with something, chances are you will lose -- even if you weren't at fault in the accident!
The best solution is honesty. As long as you drive defensively, and don't do stupid things, you will be fine. Your black box will record that you did what you could to not get in trouble.
Only people with questionable driving skills/habits will be affected by the black box.
They don't want to make games unplayable without the GBA linkup feature.
However, especially in Animal Crossing, if you have the feature, you're in for even more wicked gameplay. A whole bunch of the connectivity they're showing (GBA as a controller, GBA 4 swords link to Cube, Crystal Chronicles, etc) looks like they thought about the games around the GBAs. Pokemon Collesium's probably going to really take advantage of it, not just as something that's cheaper and more reliable than ye olde N64 transfer pack, but as something that lets you monitor your Pokemon on screen without giving away details and strategies to other trainers.
They're just starting to get into their connectivity stride, the same way MS is just getting into the online stride. Sony's frantically copying both companies (online bundle, camera USB device.. which is funny, since Monster Rancher 3 lets you use Picture Paradise on Sony USB cameras), and might start to lose momentum these next 6 months. We'll see how the summer and fall turn out.
GBA SP has a frontlit screen, otherwise the LiIon inside it would last about 4 hours with the light on, and horribly wash out the colour compared to when it's off.
Mr. Carmack has said from the beginning he will target the GeForce as the platform for Doom 3. He's upgraded the engine a few times to take advantage of changes in the pixel shader technology. All of this is what the Xbox is easily capable of.
The built in gfx card is a GeForce 3 with fairly recent pixel shader technology and non fixed-function T while the 64mb of RAM in it is shared, there's no OS to get in the way, and the textures are going to be compressed in memory. The HD lets you cache them coming off of the DVD, so it's not like you'll have wicked evil load times like some PS2 games (especially the blue CDROM-based ones).
None of my PCs have GeForce 3s in them. If they did, I'd still need 8x the memory (at least), a few gigs of HD space, and about 2-3x the horsepower (CPU wise) to meet the same kind of gaming experience. If I had more, I could get more, but I'd rather spend 70$ for the game than 70$ + 3000$ for upgrades and get an experience that's close enough.
Using Enter the Matrix a an example, the character models are really shitty low-poly things, and it runs as well on the PS2 as on the GCN and Xbox (since they don't take advantage of streaming textures or shaders/T&L), and the PC version requires 4 gb of HD space. I wouldn't want that PC version.
It's not going to be as bad as you seem to think. Look at Unreal Championship. That was a pretty good port, and with updates through Live!, I'm not really missing out on too much over the PC version (besides, I get the advantage of playing Mech Assault, PSO, etc, online:)).
"At its core, it's a Quake 1 engine. You can tell this by comparing Half-life's map compiling tools with those shipped with Quake1. You'll find very minor differences -- none of them are fundamental. The core rendering is architecturally identical to Quake1, the only "significant" change is removing the fixed palette, making map lighting RGB instead of 8 bit, and converting software rendering to be 16 bit color instead of 8 bit color, which was pretty easy and only required minor code changes. Our skeletal animation system is new, though it was heavily influenced by the existing model rendering code, as were a lot of our updated particle effects, though less so with our beam system. Decals are totally new, our audio system has some major additions to what already existed, and at ship time our networking was almost totally Quake1 / QuakeWorld networking but about a year later Yahn rewrote most of all of it to be very different in design. The most highly changed sections are the game logic; ours being written in C++ and Quake's being in written interpreted "Quake C". Our AI system is very very different from anything in Quake, and there's a lot of other significant architectural changes in the whole server and client implementations, though if you look hard enough you can find a few remnants of some nearly unmodified Quake1 era entities buried in places."
Slashdot Mirror
It's a suggestion. Ratings are suggestions designed to educate people about game (and movie) contents.
;)
Why should this be enforced? If Matrix Reloaded is 14-A because of the action sequences and such, it means that they think the earliest age you can understand and handle that is 14. That's not always true both ways. It's still a personal decision: the parent should be watching what the child does.
If the parent gives the child 70$ and says to go get a game, and the kid gets Vice City, whose fault is it? The parent or the store? I think the parent. When you put that much buying power into the hands of someone, you are making the assumption they'll buy what you think is fine. I'd consider suggesting gift certificates if you want to give buying power that's restricted to your children.
If a kid walks up to me and has 70$ and wants Vice City, I'll buy it for them. If their parents cared, either that kid wouldn't have that money, or the parent would be there to see that they bought something age appropriate (which might even be Vice City, if their parents are liberal minded).
Plus, if you cut off the children, the only people buying Vice City would be the people who are mentally immature
RE 2 and 3 had law enforcement officials.
If you count security guards, RE 0, RE 1, and RE:CV are also going to be restricted.
Secret of Mana? Yeah, you fight law enforcement officials.
It goes on and on.
" Ok, so a video game is the complex program written by a lot of programmers, " artists, story boarders, musicians, producers, directors, QA testers, focus testers, play testers, level designers, writers, etc.
:p
A programmer can write GNUMeric. A programmer can't write a game, at least not without wearing all those other hats or having someone there to support them. Don't short them just because you only see the engine writting part of the entire game development. There is a lot more to it than that. See how Quake or Doom plays without the PAK/WAD files that contain the sprites, tiles, textures, sounds, levels, etc. Not nearly as much fun
I'm not sure how you did it, but ./ pulls up a nice cut/copy/paste menu (as well as allowing me to use x/v/p) on any PalmOS 4 and greater model. Earlier models don't show the menu, but still respond to the shortcut.
/` (not the bottom left to up-right ./); tab is tap, up, right like a little arrow. I've never had problems with these grafiti shortcuts on any of my 3 Palm units or the many units my friends have.
As for enter/tab, enter is a stroke starting from the top-right to down left ala
The reviewer seems clueless about memory sticks. There are two kinds: MagicGate, and MagicGate Pro.
MagicGate is limited to 128mb. There are 256mb MagicGate sticks that work by "choosing" which of the 128mb you have access to via a switch.
MagicGate Pro is limited to 1gb, and is more expensive overall.
Compatibility between the stick and device would be indicated my the MG logo on the back (like on my NR70V/U). Just don't let some salesdrone at the Sony store talk to you about it. The one I spoke with said I couldn't play MP3s from non-MGPro sticks, which was a bald-faced lie.
A 128mb MagicGate stick not by Sony costs ~75$+tx CDN. That's only 15-20$ more than a similar size CF card (and 50$ cheaper than a Sony one from the Sony store), so it's not as big of a deal for pricing.
"The conveinences everyone claims that GSM has (eg SIM cards) are already being standardized in cdma2000, and will be here soon. "
..
Yea, because consumers have always waited for the perfect technology, rather than adopting a marginally worse technology that exists today.
Oh, wait, VHS was before Betamax and was worse. Oh, wait, the PC was before the Macintosh and had less usability. Oh, wait
I can go on and on. If CDMA was truly better enough today, it would've been standardized in every aspect like GSM, and we wouldn't even know about GSM because of it.
While K5's not as bad as it used to be, Rusty still hasn't updated the site to NOT use the FrankenHTML that works on NS 4.x. I know that some people consider Mozilla bad in this day and age, but anything beats Netscape 4.x.
Unfortunately, not everyone sees it this way, and Rusty's not about to cut off the readership.
I'm using Moz 1.3. The floating bar is an annoyance, but I'm sure they could set a prefs cookie to leave it pinned (assuming they bothered to research it). In a way, though, it's handy to have, since it's always there without scrolling being required. If Moz's repaints weren't so slow, it'd be much cooler.
They don't underline their links, which should be a crime -- we're not all awesome at seeing the difference between colours, especially as our eyes age or if we're unlucky enough to be colour blind.
Oh, and they tickle the Moz font spacing EM bug. Basically, text will overlap if they use em spacing in the CSS because Mozilla's still broken in big ways internally. For someone like me who turns the fonts waaay up (I like a mix of readability and high fidelity), it's very annoying. But again, that's a browser bug.
The only other timeline I've enjoyed so much was PA's post-Columbine timeline, including the Columbine mod for Half-Life.
Funny stuff for those who can lighten up.
Sell back the shift key to deadsaijinx* for billions of $$.
Blame should be rightly assigned.
What if you had a health meter that watched your vital signs. The moment they stopped, the recorders would stop and broadcast the last 5 minutes of your life (on video + health signals) to the police, so they could arrest any potential murderer.
This is a monitor of how you responded to a situation where what you decide affects other people. This allows courts to properly find who was at fault in an accident, possibly for deaths, and punish accordingly. If you'd pull your head out of your Orwellian Fear Box, you'd notice that things that record (such as books, VCRs, computers, video cameras) are used for much good in society. Like any tool, they can be abused, but that doesn't outweigh the benefits of the tool.
With Xboxes, all I need is 250$ CDN for each node + a tv. With Live! support, it's even easier.
Not so with PCs. I'd have to upgrade every PC I own.
Neo can still be hurt, and every time they got into a potential battle I was sensing the danger. I didn't really feel danger when Neo fought Agent Smith after seeing the Oracle, but I did feel it when everyone else dealth with Agents and rogue programs.
Adzoox wrote:
/no/ reason specified. People who were like, "that's double plus ungood!" with nothing to back it up are idiots. You have to think why you're saying something, not just respond with, "government bad!"
"I'd like to know what you ACTUALLY thought about the post. Your post was unnecessary and rather immature."
Yes, and? Welcome to Slashdot, where we use teasing freely. I reserve the right to tease you if you're not coherent.
"The post was quite on topic as there are LOTS of things we are unaware that can be used against us."
Without you actually saying that, it comes across as incoherent. It's like having a conversation with someone, where half of what they say is with their "inner" voice. That's why I wound up with the wrong impression. That's also why it's a good idea to walk away for a bit (or read a different browser window/tab) before rereading what you wrote. You'll see that stuff staring up at you in a way that you wouldn't otherwise have noticed.
"Besides, we're talking American freedoms, you live in Canada!"
Statements like this validate my reason for writting my original post. "Besides, we're talking WHITE freedoms, you're black!" How different are we really?
If you didn't notice, I "picked on" a lot of people who argued againist the onboard recording device with
If you'd specified WHY your first anecdote was bad, instead of just saying the main part of the joke without any kind of punchline, then seguing into a bit about the recorder which just became incoherent, then your post might've had some meat to respond to. Since it didn't, my post reflects that.
Blah, police note, blah, used against him. [NOTE: does not resolve anything, reader must assume that police report is negative and was BAD]
Blah, blah, blah, FREEDOM FREEDOM
Seriously, the first part of your post is barely coherent, up until you just "veer" back onto topic, and then you delve straight into incoherency afterwards.
Yes, when you use something that is traceable, it is recorded. Welcome to modern life. Yes, people will remember you. Back in the 1800s, you'd have a reputation in the town -- now you have a credit history and rap sheet at the local post office. Karma, dude -- live with it.
At worst, your black box going -20 means you're automatically at fault in an accident because you were driving a fault vehicle.
Why do people have problems with honesty? This is merely being honest about your driving leading to an accident. The person who's guilty of reckless driving will not like it, but normal people are fine.
In a court of law, if you're proven to have tampered with something, chances are you will lose -- even if you weren't at fault in the accident!
The best solution is honesty. As long as you drive defensively, and don't do stupid things, you will be fine. Your black box will record that you did what you could to not get in trouble.
Only people with questionable driving skills/habits will be affected by the black box.
I consider Silent Hill to be like FF: some names are similar, and some areas are the same, but each one can be considered separately.
Resident Evil, OTOH, is something Capcom's done a good job of weaving together (some non-cannon not withstanding).
How'd you get on with Rob & crew as a games reporter?
Considering that Silent Hill 1 and 2 were similar only in the fact that they took place in Silent Hill, I find this a funny statement.
;p
SH2 has little to do with SH1, except maybe indicate that this author should do some more homework before reporting on SH
They don't want to make games unplayable without the GBA linkup feature.
However, especially in Animal Crossing, if you have the feature, you're in for even more wicked gameplay. A whole bunch of the connectivity they're showing (GBA as a controller, GBA 4 swords link to Cube, Crystal Chronicles, etc) looks like they thought about the games around the GBAs. Pokemon Collesium's probably going to really take advantage of it, not just as something that's cheaper and more reliable than ye olde N64 transfer pack, but as something that lets you monitor your Pokemon on screen without giving away details and strategies to other trainers.
They're just starting to get into their connectivity stride, the same way MS is just getting into the online stride. Sony's frantically copying both companies (online bundle, camera USB device.. which is funny, since Monster Rancher 3 lets you use Picture Paradise on Sony USB cameras), and might start to lose momentum these next 6 months. We'll see how the summer and fall turn out.
GBA SP has a frontlit screen, otherwise the LiIon inside it would last about 4 hours with the light on, and horribly wash out the colour compared to when it's off.
Mr. Carmack has said from the beginning he will target the GeForce as the platform for Doom 3. He's upgraded the engine a few times to take advantage of changes in the pixel shader technology. All of this is what the Xbox is easily capable of.
The built in gfx card is a GeForce 3 with fairly recent pixel shader technology and non fixed-function T while the 64mb of RAM in it is shared, there's no OS to get in the way, and the textures are going to be compressed in memory. The HD lets you cache them coming off of the DVD, so it's not like you'll have wicked evil load times like some PS2 games (especially the blue CDROM-based ones).
None of my PCs have GeForce 3s in them. If they did, I'd still need 8x the memory (at least), a few gigs of HD space, and about 2-3x the horsepower (CPU wise) to meet the same kind of gaming experience. If I had more, I could get more, but I'd rather spend 70$ for the game than 70$ + 3000$ for upgrades and get an experience that's close enough.
Using Enter the Matrix a an example, the character models are really shitty low-poly things, and it runs as well on the PS2 as on the GCN and Xbox (since they don't take advantage of streaming textures or shaders/T&L), and the PC version requires 4 gb of HD space. I wouldn't want that PC version.
It's not going to be as bad as you seem to think. Look at Unreal Championship. That was a pretty good port, and with updates through Live!, I'm not really missing out on too much over the PC version (besides, I get the advantage of playing Mech Assault, PSO, etc, online :)).
Half-Life was based on the Quake 1 engine.
"At its core, it's a Quake 1 engine. You can tell this by comparing Half-life's map compiling tools with those shipped with Quake1. You'll find very minor differences -- none of them are fundamental. The core rendering is architecturally identical to Quake1, the only "significant" change is removing the fixed palette, making map lighting RGB instead of 8 bit, and converting software rendering to be 16 bit color instead of 8 bit color, which was pretty easy and only required minor code changes. Our skeletal animation system is new, though it was heavily influenced by the existing model rendering code, as were a lot of our updated particle effects, though less so with our beam system. Decals are totally new, our audio system has some major additions to what already existed, and at ship time our networking was almost totally Quake1 / QuakeWorld networking but about a year later Yahn rewrote most of all of it to be very different in design. The most highly changed sections are the game logic; ours being written in C++ and Quake's being in written interpreted "Quake C". Our AI system is very very different from anything in Quake, and there's a lot of other significant architectural changes in the whole server and client implementations, though if you look hard enough you can find a few remnants of some nearly unmodified Quake1 era entities buried in places."
More details over here.
So if they can do that with the Quake 1 engine, imagine what they should be able to do now.