The first (and only) reply to the thread's original post that isn't all pity-fishing and "oh, woe is me!"
Everybody had problems in high school, including the popular kids, and a lot of these problems were self-inflicted. And most of the so-called "non-conformists" were as conformist as everyone else, just to a different ideal. None of this justifies killing people, and you probably need professional attention if you sympathize with Klebold and Harris. Get over yourselves.
That said, high school is certainly designed to have a Lord-of-the-Flies social system, so created to prepare kids for the corporate-dominated real world, which is a lot more similar to high school than most people would like to admit. Read this.
The article says that this type of game '... is not found on the shelves of video game or consumer electronic stores. Nor is it sold on the DVD's that deliver interactive 3-D fantasies to millions of PlayStation 2 and Xbox game consoles...'
In that case, they probably shouldn't use the term "casual games" to describe them. Casual games (which are, you know, games that tend to be played casually) include sports games and The Sims, which are certainly sold in stores and on DVDs.
Turok 2: Seeds of Rage for the N64 featured 16 weapons, which could be accessed using a total of 3 buttons, and a maximum of 2 button presses per weapon. Because the N64's analog stick featured the indents in eighths, they divided the weapon selection up into 8 basic weapons and 8 uber-weapons. by pressing the first of the 2 weapon select buttons plus one joystick direction, you could switch instantly to one of the eight basic weapons. by pressing the second weapon button and one of the eight joystick directions, you could access the other eight.
Boy, you're right, that doesn't sound arbitrary or nonintuitive at all. I'm all for game designers removing needless control bloat, but the solution you just gave sounds worse than the problem. Compare to a PC FPS, which uses about five (on average) weapons keys, each of which covers a different weapons type (pistols, rifles, etc.) and you have to press each two or three times at the most to get to the desired weapon. Uses more keys, but it also requires a lot less memorization (and what memorization it does require is more intuitive).
I still haven't seen an alternate keymap for Nethack, BTW. Maybe you can criticize people for not reducing control complexity when you prove that you can do it yourself in such a way that won't degrade gameplay for the majority of users.
The GC controller flaws seem to result from a certain over-emphasis on a particular style of controller usage -- certain controls are emphasized at the expense of others -- but it's pretty clear that Nintendo thought through their preferred control scheme and made the controller work well for that case.
That would be fine if the GameCube was intended to play only Nintendo games, but, whoops, it's not! That's really emblematic of the problems that Nintendo has had in console hardware for the past decade: They don't seem to care about third parties, even though that's where most of a console's profit stems from. It's kind of funny that people jeer Ken Kutaragi for saying "developers will have to adapt" but don't say a thing when Nintendo does something similar.
Games that actually use 8 buttons are poorly designed.
That's Nintendo's argument, and it's a stupid one. They would say that Nethack is poorly designed because it uses like 50 keys, but I'd like to see them come up with a better way to configure the keymap for that game that drastically reduced the number of keys used.
Or maybe he's not a Sony fanboy and instead you're just a Nintendo fanboy, like a number of the other posters under this article. The Dual Shock has problems (mainly the ones you described, though I would also add the convex thumbpads and the difficulty of using all four shoulder buttons effectively), but it's still better than anything else that's out right now, with the arguable exception of the XBox S. And since the Dual Shock was designed long before the XBox S was, that's not too shocking; in fact, a few simple changes would likely make the DS the best traditional controller possible. Unfortunately Sony doesn't like to change designs, but I'm pretty hopeful that the XBox 360 controller will turn out to come close to that sort of perfection.
They're both a lot better than the GameCube controller with its ridiculous face buttons, the tiny D-pad and right analog stick (you complain about the split D-pad on the DS and don't complain about that?), the springy shoulder buttons, and the badly-placed Z button. The only post-8-bit standard controllers I can think of that are worse are the ones for the Dreamcast and the N64.
The only problems I had with it are that he gushes over the weak Dreamcast controller like Nerdshoe, and the Dual Shock part looks like it was written by a completely different person from the Dual Shock 2 one (I agree with the former, though I disagree with his verdict concerning the Select and L3 buttons). Besides that, I think this is pretty good, especially since he has the courage to speak the truth and say that the GameCube controller sucks.
This article is worthless without mention of the Intellivision controller.
They'd already mentioned the Colecovision controller, so it would've been repetitive. Intellivision's might have been a better choice, though, because its design was even worse than that of the Colecovision's controller.
Actually, yes I can. It was the mid-eighties. It was Sentinel, Skool Daze, Little Computer People, Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Thing On A Spring, Gribbly's Day Out, Head Over Heels, Paradroid, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Wizball, Deus Ex Machina, Revenge of the Mutant Camels...
Helps if you read the article. Though Zonk and/or whoever submitted the article loses points for not putting the first two sentences in the above paragraph in the blurb quote.
The first Uplift book by David Brin has a society where people who have the potential to be criminally violent (known as "Probationers") are ostracized and have less rights than normal citizens. At the end of the book it's suggested that some of Earth's colony worlds should allow Probationers to freely live on them (or perhaps even be Probationer-only) because "we might need them later." The obvious implication is that what is undesirable in peace may be very desirable in war.
There's a neat example of the Prisoner's Dilemma near the bottom:
After a while, I got a letter from Atari stating that they wanted to cancel the contest. They offered Steven and myself $15,000 each to agree and they offered a smaller amount, maybe like $2,000 to each of the finalists for Waterworld. I think the reason Steven and I got more than everyone else was because as winners of the first two contests, we had a definite chance of winning the Sword. Everyone involved had to agree or else the contest would continue. I tried to call Steven and some of the other people from the contest to see what they were going to do but I couldn't get in touch with anyone. I talked it over with my father and decided to accept the offer, figuring that someone else would decline.
BTW, it's amusing to see that he won the contest by brute-forcing it.
I thought this meant that Atari was making a sequel to Adventure now. Hey Slashdot editors, if you're not going to mention stuff like the fact that this contest happened in 1982 in the blurb, then why have a blurb?
You do realize that the acting in Resident Evil was supposed to be campy and terrible, right? The whole game was an homage to the concept of the B-movie. Good acting would've completely ruined that.
When Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was being hyped up before it was released, people were saying the same thing in reference to digital actors. Don't see too many people saying that now.
Final Fantasy didn't stray away from the games at all. Just add an identity crisis and a mysterious villain and you basically would've gotten Final Fantasy 7 (though the spirits sub-plot was more reminiscent of FF4).
Super Mario Brothers is a much better example of the movie not much resembling the game.
Slashdot Mirror
...you can just get this.
Rob
Many games exist that do not revolve around violent conflict. Some don't include it at all (Tetris, Lumines, etc).
Of course Tetris has violence in it. What do you think happens when the blocks disappear? It's a terrible genocide, I tell you!
Rob
The first (and only) reply to the thread's original post that isn't all pity-fishing and "oh, woe is me!"
Everybody had problems in high school, including the popular kids, and a lot of these problems were self-inflicted. And most of the so-called "non-conformists" were as conformist as everyone else, just to a different ideal. None of this justifies killing people, and you probably need professional attention if you sympathize with Klebold and Harris. Get over yourselves.
That said, high school is certainly designed to have a Lord-of-the-Flies social system, so created to prepare kids for the corporate-dominated real world, which is a lot more similar to high school than most people would like to admit. Read this.
Rob
The article says that this type of game '... is not found on the shelves of video game or consumer electronic stores. Nor is it sold on the DVD's that deliver interactive 3-D fantasies to millions of PlayStation 2 and Xbox game consoles...'
In that case, they probably shouldn't use the term "casual games" to describe them. Casual games (which are, you know, games that tend to be played casually) include sports games and The Sims, which are certainly sold in stores and on DVDs.
Rob
Men and women on average enjoy different movies, different books, different music, and enjoy these things in different quantities.
So you agree with him, then, that both men and women like (for instance) movies, but not necessarily the same kinds of movies.
You do know the difference between "forms" and "kinds," right?
Rob
Turok 2: Seeds of Rage for the N64 featured 16 weapons, which could be accessed using a total of 3 buttons, and a maximum of 2 button presses per weapon. Because the N64's analog stick featured the indents in eighths, they divided the weapon selection up into 8 basic weapons and 8 uber-weapons. by pressing the first of the 2 weapon select buttons plus one joystick direction, you could switch instantly to one of the eight basic weapons. by pressing the second weapon button and one of the eight joystick directions, you could access the other eight.
Boy, you're right, that doesn't sound arbitrary or nonintuitive at all. I'm all for game designers removing needless control bloat, but the solution you just gave sounds worse than the problem. Compare to a PC FPS, which uses about five (on average) weapons keys, each of which covers a different weapons type (pistols, rifles, etc.) and you have to press each two or three times at the most to get to the desired weapon. Uses more keys, but it also requires a lot less memorization (and what memorization it does require is more intuitive).
I still haven't seen an alternate keymap for Nethack, BTW. Maybe you can criticize people for not reducing control complexity when you prove that you can do it yourself in such a way that won't degrade gameplay for the majority of users.
Rob
The GC controller flaws seem to result from a certain over-emphasis on a particular style of controller usage -- certain controls are emphasized at the expense of others -- but it's pretty clear that Nintendo thought through their preferred control scheme and made the controller work well for that case.
That would be fine if the GameCube was intended to play only Nintendo games, but, whoops, it's not! That's really emblematic of the problems that Nintendo has had in console hardware for the past decade: They don't seem to care about third parties, even though that's where most of a console's profit stems from. It's kind of funny that people jeer Ken Kutaragi for saying "developers will have to adapt" but don't say a thing when Nintendo does something similar.
Rob
Games that actually use 8 buttons are poorly designed.
That's Nintendo's argument, and it's a stupid one. They would say that Nethack is poorly designed because it uses like 50 keys, but I'd like to see them come up with a better way to configure the keymap for that game that drastically reduced the number of keys used.
Rob
Or maybe he's not a Sony fanboy and instead you're just a Nintendo fanboy, like a number of the other posters under this article. The Dual Shock has problems (mainly the ones you described, though I would also add the convex thumbpads and the difficulty of using all four shoulder buttons effectively), but it's still better than anything else that's out right now, with the arguable exception of the XBox S. And since the Dual Shock was designed long before the XBox S was, that's not too shocking; in fact, a few simple changes would likely make the DS the best traditional controller possible. Unfortunately Sony doesn't like to change designs, but I'm pretty hopeful that the XBox 360 controller will turn out to come close to that sort of perfection.
They're both a lot better than the GameCube controller with its ridiculous face buttons, the tiny D-pad and right analog stick (you complain about the split D-pad on the DS and don't complain about that?), the springy shoulder buttons, and the badly-placed Z button. The only post-8-bit standard controllers I can think of that are worse are the ones for the Dreamcast and the N64.
Rob
The only problems I had with it are that he gushes over the weak Dreamcast controller like Nerdshoe, and the Dual Shock part looks like it was written by a completely different person from the Dual Shock 2 one (I agree with the former, though I disagree with his verdict concerning the Select and L3 buttons). Besides that, I think this is pretty good, especially since he has the courage to speak the truth and say that the GameCube controller sucks.
Rob
This article is worthless without mention of the Intellivision controller.
They'd already mentioned the Colecovision controller, so it would've been repetitive. Intellivision's might have been a better choice, though, because its design was even worse than that of the Colecovision's controller.
Rob
Right after he says that:
Actually, yes I can. It was the mid-eighties. It was Sentinel, Skool Daze, Little Computer People, Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Thing On A Spring, Gribbly's Day Out, Head Over Heels, Paradroid, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Wizball, Deus Ex Machina, Revenge of the Mutant Camels...
Helps if you read the article. Though Zonk and/or whoever submitted the article loses points for not putting the first two sentences in the above paragraph in the blurb quote.
Rob
The first Uplift book by David Brin has a society where people who have the potential to be criminally violent (known as "Probationers") are ostracized and have less rights than normal citizens. At the end of the book it's suggested that some of Earth's colony worlds should allow Probationers to freely live on them (or perhaps even be Probationer-only) because "we might need them later." The obvious implication is that what is undesirable in peace may be very desirable in war.
Rob
Yeah, it's just horrible that someone would inform people of new games and addons that they might be interested in but probably haven't heard about.
Zonk may have a lot of flaws as an editor, but this isn't one of them.
Rob
Yes, it could be cracked, but with these prices, why bother?
You obviously don't know too many pirates. (I mean the bullshit ISDA definition, not the definition which I presume this module is using.)
Rob
However, I find it ludicrous to say that women like The SIMS because women helped make it.
Didn't you know? Will Wright is actually a woman in disguise.
Rob
There's a neat example of the Prisoner's Dilemma near the bottom:
After a while, I got a letter from Atari stating that they wanted to cancel the contest. They offered Steven and myself $15,000 each to agree and they offered a smaller amount, maybe like $2,000 to each of the finalists for Waterworld. I think the reason Steven and I got more than everyone else was because as winners of the first two contests, we had a definite chance of winning the Sword. Everyone involved had to agree or else the contest would continue. I tried to call Steven and some of the other people from the contest to see what they were going to do but I couldn't get in touch with anyone. I talked it over with my father and decided to accept the offer, figuring that someone else would decline.
BTW, it's amusing to see that he won the contest by brute-forcing it.
Rob
I thought this meant that Atari was making a sequel to Adventure now. Hey Slashdot editors, if you're not going to mention stuff like the fact that this contest happened in 1982 in the blurb, then why have a blurb?
Rob
You do realize that the acting in Resident Evil was supposed to be campy and terrible, right? The whole game was an homage to the concept of the B-movie. Good acting would've completely ruined that.
Rob
When Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was being hyped up before it was released, people were saying the same thing in reference to digital actors. Don't see too many people saying that now.
Rob
i consider any movie that entertains/wows me for 2 hours to be a good movie.
Yeah, that's why the first Matrix movie was good and the other two sucked.
Rob
Just make sure you don't apply it to City of Heroes, otherwise Marvel might sue you.
Rob
I'm not sure that those aspects of his character were really explored until well past the 60s.
Rob
What the hell kind of text adventure allows the USE verb?
Rob
Final Fantasy didn't stray away from the games at all. Just add an identity crisis and a mysterious villain and you basically would've gotten Final Fantasy 7 (though the spirits sub-plot was more reminiscent of FF4).
Super Mario Brothers is a much better example of the movie not much resembling the game.
Rob