True, but there was a time when games had variety. The by far biggest annoyance of todays games is that they simply all play the same and even if a game comes up with a new idea, its instantly cloned in every other game, so that nothing stays unique for long.
That's not true either. Today you can easily find just about any kind of game you can think of, and many more in genres you have never even heard of. Cloning has also been part of the industry for as long as it has existed. The main difference is that due to lawsuits it's far less blatant than it used to be - look in magazines from around 1980-83 and you'll find plenty of ripoffs where the only difference is one letter changed in the name. Sequels became the mainstay of the industry during the first half of the 80s (a good example here is the British documentary Commercial Breaks which followed two game companies during the run-up to the Christmas '85 sales. Then press darlings Imagine went spectacularly bust due to mismanagement and technical overreach, while competitors Ocean played it safe by focusing on a sequel to last year's hit game.)
You still can waste time with them and have some fun, but noteworthy games that I will fondly remember in ten years down the line? Nope, most of them are pretty forgettable stuff that will be superseded by the improved sequel next year anyway.
Stop right there! This is just what I mean by selective memory. For every of these "classic" years, go and take a look at all the games released and then tell me how large the portion of truly memorable games is.
The uniqueness that you got back in the day, thanks to small teams and unique ideas, is pretty much gone in todays business driven world where each and every aspect of a game gets watered down so much that its near indistinguishable form the stuff you played last year.
Successful game companies were just as business driven then (again, watch the documentary linked above). Also, digital distribution, Xbox Live, the Playstation Network and plain old PayPal means it's far easier for small independent developers to make their games available.
It's not that we're hating on kids, but they are a new generation of gamers. One which I think are more concerned with pretty graphics than gameplay.
People have been using that argument for pretty much as long as videogames have existed, and it is just as dumb now as it was then. There never was a period when graphics didn't matter, or a period when crap shovelware games didn't exist. It's really all rose-colored glasses and extremely selective memories.
The Unreal Engine lawsuit was the start of it, but then the studio head Dennis Dyack went batshit insane and started attacking everyone who he felt had ever said anything not entirely positive about the game, the gaming press for daring to print opinions on games and the Internet for allowing people to express their opinions on games freely.
How can a motherboard manufacturer support Linux, when Linux doesn't want to be supported? The Linux kernel makes a point of not providing any guaranteed behaviour, and there's a ton of different kernel versions out there, and that's not counting all the different vendor-patched variants.
The only sane thing to do is what is already done, ie. for motherboard vendors to test and support operating systems with guaranteed stable functionality (eg. no patch will change how Windows XP interacts with the BIOS) and for Linux to lie about its identity to get the motherboard into a known state.
I've successfully run Half-Life 2 under Parallels Desktop (ie. on a Mac host). I had to turn all the details way down to get it running at a playable speed, but it ran. The big thing is to remember to increase the video memory allocation in the VM settings. By default it reserves only something like 4MB for the virtual machine, which obviously is not enough for any game made this century.
Yesterday the Fedora Core 9 installer couldn't even manage to produce a working Grub configuration, and I bumped into one bug which locked up KDE within five minutes of eventually managing to get it booted up. Ready for the desktop my ass.
Malloc isn't the only culprit - some old DOS-era linkers would directly allocate disk blocks but not clear them, so whatever old content that wasn't overwritten remained in the final binary.
The quoted speed of USB 3 is probably the bus speed, i.e. it's shared by all devices connected to the same host. So one disk won't saturate the bus, but if you plug in a bunch of them the bandwidth won't seem so incredibly massive anymore. Then you have to consider the bandwidth reserved by isochronous devices etc.
You're listening to your favorite Pink Floyd CD on your home stereo when you accidentally hit the "change CD" button on the control panel. All goes quiet for a bit as your CD player urgently shifts to play whatever is in the next tray. With dread, you desperately reach for the volume knob, but it's too late--your speakers blast the latest Green Day album.
But that is unrelated to the loudness of the record.
It's not a Doom engine clone, it actually uses the real Wolfenstein 3D engine. Story goes that iD were more than a little annoyed by Nintendo's treatment of Wolf3D so as "revenge" they licensed the game to Wisdom Tree who then re-skinned it as Super Noah's Ark 3D and released it without a Nintendo developer license.
Every year the newsgroup comp.sys.sinclair holds a "Crap Games Competition" where people code purposefully bad games in honor of a collection of truly rubbish games that was released for the Spectrum in the early 80s. The concept has proven so popular that it has spread to othersystems. However the other competitions have been accused of missing the point as the submissions are too good.
To summarize, while no-one may be playing bad games, the idea of bad games have certainly gained a cult following.
Yeah, what is it with you folks? It's been weeks and you still haven't fully read, comprehended, gotten your law department's approval and applied the new license. Sheesh! After all those years it took until the GPLv2 was accepted you'd think it would all still be in fresh memory and thus a quick job, but you lazy fucks haven't even started yet. Weeks!
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It's not an x86 cube. It's a MIPS cube.
That's not true either. Today you can easily find just about any kind of game you can think of, and many more in genres you have never even heard of. Cloning has also been part of the industry for as long as it has existed. The main difference is that due to lawsuits it's far less blatant than it used to be - look in magazines from around 1980-83 and you'll find plenty of ripoffs where the only difference is one letter changed in the name. Sequels became the mainstay of the industry during the first half of the 80s (a good example here is the British documentary Commercial Breaks which followed two game companies during the run-up to the Christmas '85 sales. Then press darlings Imagine went spectacularly bust due to mismanagement and technical overreach, while competitors Ocean played it safe by focusing on a sequel to last year's hit game.)
Stop right there! This is just what I mean by selective memory. For every of these "classic" years, go and take a look at all the games released and then tell me how large the portion of truly memorable games is.
Successful game companies were just as business driven then (again, watch the documentary linked above). Also, digital distribution, Xbox Live, the Playstation Network and plain old PayPal means it's far easier for small independent developers to make their games available.
Indeed. See also Jeff Minter's meltdown over Space Giraffe's sales numbers.
People have been using that argument for pretty much as long as videogames have existed, and it is just as dumb now as it was then. There never was a period when graphics didn't matter, or a period when crap shovelware games didn't exist. It's really all rose-colored glasses and extremely selective memories.
The Unreal Engine lawsuit was the start of it, but then the studio head Dennis Dyack went batshit insane and started attacking everyone who he felt had ever said anything not entirely positive about the game, the gaming press for daring to print opinions on games and the Internet for allowing people to express their opinions on games freely.
How can a motherboard manufacturer support Linux, when Linux doesn't want to be supported? The Linux kernel makes a point of not providing any guaranteed behaviour, and there's a ton of different kernel versions out there, and that's not counting all the different vendor-patched variants.
The only sane thing to do is what is already done, ie. for motherboard vendors to test and support operating systems with guaranteed stable functionality (eg. no patch will change how Windows XP interacts with the BIOS) and for Linux to lie about its identity to get the motherboard into a known state.
I just wish I could turn that new "theme music" into a stick and shove it up his ass.
I've successfully run Half-Life 2 under Parallels Desktop (ie. on a Mac host). I had to turn all the details way down to get it running at a playable speed, but it ran. The big thing is to remember to increase the video memory allocation in the VM settings. By default it reserves only something like 4MB for the virtual machine, which obviously is not enough for any game made this century.
Having people standing around with soap and buckets of water should be enough to keep the FSF at bay.
I propose we call up the FSF and ask for help getting HURD running.
One of the things Hans and Nina fought over was him letting their son play violent videogames. In conclusion, proprietary software kills.
Yesterday the Fedora Core 9 installer couldn't even manage to produce a working Grub configuration, and I bumped into one bug which locked up KDE within five minutes of eventually managing to get it booted up. Ready for the desktop my ass.
Wizkid was in fact released just over fifteen years ago.
Malloc isn't the only culprit - some old DOS-era linkers would directly allocate disk blocks but not clear them, so whatever old content that wasn't overwritten remained in the final binary.
It's also not a native version, it uses Cider like all the EA "ports" that have been released recently.
"They are squeezing the cheeks after the asstunnel has..."
The quoted speed of USB 3 is probably the bus speed, i.e. it's shared by all devices connected to the same host. So one disk won't saturate the bus, but if you plug in a bunch of them the bandwidth won't seem so incredibly massive anymore. Then you have to consider the bandwidth reserved by isochronous devices etc.
Explaining implied humour always makes it better.
It's not a Doom engine clone, it actually uses the real Wolfenstein 3D engine. Story goes that iD were more than a little annoyed by Nintendo's treatment of Wolf3D so as "revenge" they licensed the game to Wisdom Tree who then re-skinned it as Super Noah's Ark 3D and released it without a Nintendo developer license.
To summarize, while no-one may be playing bad games, the idea of bad games have certainly gained a cult following.
It was only the translation that was bad in Zero Wing. The game itself was OK, though not great by any means. This is what you're after.
Yeah, what is it with you folks? It's been weeks and you still haven't fully read, comprehended, gotten your law department's approval and applied the new license. Sheesh! After all those years it took until the GPLv2 was accepted you'd think it would all still be in fresh memory and thus a quick job, but you lazy fucks haven't even started yet. Weeks!