I would add a fourth reason, which is that the most of these titles are being downloaded by nostalgic older gamers who lived through the NES/SNES era. As such, they're probably first buying games that they already owned on previous systems; an act that, by virtue of the relative number of Nintendo games available vs. third parties, heavily favors Nintendo.
Later, they might branch out and try something new. But older gamers are all too aware that the vast majority of third party titles in those days were utter crap. There were notable exceptions, of course, and also a few first-party klunkers, but by and large, the Nintendo name on a cartridge was reason to believe the game was at least halfway playable. I know that I'd sooner pick up a first party title like Kid Icarus than take a chance on Legend of Kage or Mighty Bomb Jack.
You don't even have to go that far afield to find a good example of defunct services that were revolutionary. Just look at Napster -- the original Napster, mind you, not the pale, Roxio-owned imitation of today. Though long gone, the Napster of yore did more to drive the popularity of the MP3 format than any other factor. Additionally, it introduced hundreds of thousands of users to peer-to-peer, many of them people who previously did little more with their computers than e-mail and Word Processing.
In the broadest sense, "witnesses" includes "physical evidence".
Very interesting. It still seems to me it should be required that a human witness corroborate the physical evidence. Apparently that's not the case, but it should be.
Based on your information and the number of unsuccessful attempts to fight red light cameras I've read about, the government has worked out a way to make them technically legal. But there's still something about being criminalized exclusively on the basis of non-human evidence that just feels inherently wrong to me.
I did play it on the Amiga, but sadly, I did not own one myself. I was reduced to playing occasionally at a friends house, which was far less than I would have liked to.
Thankfully, I've been able to revisit your fine game recently through the magic of emulation. Sorry to hear that Cinemaware isn't doing right by their original developers, but they do earn some points in my book for making the old ROMs available.
Feel free to toot away on that horn. King of Chicago was great fun, and a close race with Rocket Ranger as my favorite Cinemaware title. Helping Pinky turn the other hoods against The Old Man was a hoot.
From my perspective, the worst thing about red light cameras is that there's no human entity there to accuse you of committing a crime.
If I go to court over one of these tickets, aren't I entitled to face my accuser? Obviously, I can't question the box that took my picture, so it's my word against whose exactly? The manufacturer? The guy who periodically calibrates the device? Or is it just assumed that the machine is infallible and no argument on my part is necessary or worthy of consideration?
It just seems that red light cameras subvert some of my fundamental rights as a citizen, and the local governments are willing to be complicit in that because the cameras generate bigtime revenue.
What is it about Maniac mansion that so many people remember stuff from? We never hear this kind of thing about Broken Sword or Monkey island, so why does this one game seem to have talkative developers?
Because it was the first of its kind.
Sierra On-Line broke a lot of ground with the King's Quest games, but those early Sierra games required a combination of arrow keys and typed verb-noun phrases. Maniac Mansion was the first completely point-and-click adventure; all others, including Broken Sword and Monkey Island (another Ron Gilbert game, by the way) sprung from its fertile loins.
Incidentally, that's also why the subsequent LucasArts games run on an engine called SCUMM. It stands for "Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion."
If you want to calibrate to a large TV just build a simple rig with a couple of IR LEDs and a battery. You can then set the LEDs as far apart as you want to scale up the 'virtual' screen size.
If you want to go even more low-tech, you can actually just light a couple of little votive candles and put them on either corner of the TV. Voila, instant sensor bar.
Sounds like Muslix is doing his part to help keep the entertainment industry regular.
Does the entertainment industry really need the help? From what I've seen, Hollywood has no problem producing massive heaps of crap on a regular schedule.
I'm not sure whether HD-DVD discs have a scratchproof layer out of the box, but the discs containing porn will gradually acquire a thin veneer of transparent goo that should provide some protection.
Ah, very good point. For some reason that slipped my mind while I was doing the calculations; probably because A) I drank way too much coffee yesterday, and B) a bigger number makes my point seem more effective.
So consider 2,500 a worst-case estimate. I would expect the actual number to be quite a bit less than that, since amniocentesis is not highly recommended these days until the mother is at least 35. And then, of course, some of those will opt out, many due to FUD about the miscarriage rate, and others out of fear of pain during the procedure -- though my wife had one of these done a few months back and said it was no big deal.
Let me adjust my numbers based on what was in that linked article. 3,000 out of 35,000 in the study underwent amniocentesis, which comes to about 8.5%. If we apply that to the 4-million-odd annual births, we get about 343,000 tests performed each year (I realize that 4-million does not cover cases like twins, nor does it include women who miscarry, but it's probably good enough for a ballpark figure.) Divide that by 1,600 and you get 214 miscarriages annually.
Even so, 214 a year is a lot of dead babies. Keep in mind, too, that that number only covers miscarriages. It does not include other negative ramifications such as infection or damage to the amniotic sac that, while not resulting ultimately in miscarriage, can be harmful to both mother and fetus.
I get your point about thinking rationally, but I'm not sure it makes sense to be totally objective when we're talking about unnecessary death. People will naturally put more weight on a.06% chance of death than, say, a.06% sales tax; and much as I like to be as rational as possible, I think that's a good thing.
At any rate, the point may be moot to this thread. Somebody has pointed out elsewhere in that the amniotic fluid containing stem cells can be harvested after birth.
Statistically speaking, 1% is pretty small. Realistically speaking, 1% means the death of 1 out of every 100 embryos whose mothers undergo this procedure. Keep in mind, those are not "unwanted" embryos destined for abortion; the mothers are expecting to carry them to term and have a healthy baby at the end of their labors.
That said, there's some new research that suggests that the risk is more like 1 in 1,600. Even so, with about 4 million born in the U.S. alone annually, that's 2500 dead babies per year due to an elective procedure. And I assure you, if one of those 2500 was yours, you wouldn't be taking that statistic so lightly.
There are a couple of GameStop and EB Games locations in my neck of the woods that claim to have already received a second shipment of Wiis, but they aren't selling them. Instead, they're holding on to their supply for Black Friday.
I have to wonder whether they really have been resupplied, or if they're just putting it out there to draw in customers.
Even if they do have stock, I can't say I really understand the point of holding on to it. The only people who are likely to find out that GameStop has consoles are the gamers who have been poking their heads into every location and asking daily. Sure, they might come back Friday and buy a Wii, but they would just as soon have bought it today.
Meanwhile, the faceless shopping hordes will probably remain ignorant that GameStop has consoles in stock. If they're looking to get somebody a Wii for Christmas, they were likely going to head to a few specialty gaming shops anyway. So GameStop gets the same customer flow as they would otherwise, but manage to piss off their customer base in the meantime.
One thing I found sort of interesting in the TFA: Quite a few of the responders indicated that they weren't going to pick up a PS3 because it doesn't really bring anything to the table that their Xbox 360 doesn't already do.
So it looks like MS's gambit of bringing their next gen console out a year early -- considered risky by many because most people would presumably wait and see what Sony had up their sleeve -- might have paid off after all.
Then to find the console will be $249 (and Nintendo then has the nerve to hype the fact that they are making profit on each Wii) and come with just one controller. Wi + $60 = Wii. Bringing the total to $310. Then for families and those who bought into the four player experience hype, we have $430.
Disappointment with the price point I can understand. Disappointment with there only being a single controller included -- which admittedly you're not making as big an issue as some others here -- I don't get at all.
I don't recall any game console in the last decade being packaged with more than one controller. In fact, the last console I bought that had two controllers was the original NES, and in that case the second controller was only included because R.O.B. the robot needed buttons to press. For every gamer out there who plays with family and friends, there are a couple dozen that play solo exclusively. It makes no sense at all to require these people to pay extra for an additional controller.
The trend of console makers not including a pack-in, on the other hand, has always left a bad taste in my mouth. No doubt it's also burnt a great many uninformed parents on Christmas morning, when they suddenly realized that their expensive present for Billy didn't even come with a game -- or worse, came with a demo disc that rubbed Billy's nose in all the fun his friends with more clued-in parents were likely having at that very moment. I'm personally happy to see the return of the bundled game, and I suspect its inclusion will both generate goodwill for Nintendo, and be much more effective at making the Wii appear a good value than a second controller would.
Is this the first Nintendo console to release with no Mario game ready at launch date?
No, there have been at least three, and probably more depending on how liberally you define what constitutes a launch title and/or a Mario game.
The Nintendo Entertainment System didn't launch with a Mario game either, though many people remember Super Mario Bros as a pack-in title. The original NES came bundled with Duck Hunt and Gyromite (and therefore, with the Zapper light gun and R.O.B. robot.) Super Mario Bros didn't come out until several months later, and didn't become the official pack-in title until several months after that.
After that, we've got:
Super NES: Super Mario World
Virtual Boy: nada, unless you want to count Mario's Tennis (and if you're going to do that, you might as well call Tennis a Mario launch title for NES, since the titular plumber acted as chair umpire in that game)
Game Boy Mono: Super Mario Land
Nintendo 64: Super Mario 64
Game Boy Color: nada, although Super Mario Bros DX came out not long after
Game Boy Advance: Super Mario Advance (if you want to count a decades-old port as a separate title)
GameCube: Luigi's Mansion (sort of)
Game Boy DS: Super Mario 64 DS (again with the porting)
Only if the voting database actually reports the contents of your ballot.
If the database only reports that the registrar has a record of your vote, the ballot remains secret, but the benefits of being able to ensure that your vote was counted remain.
Slashdot Mirror
I would add a fourth reason, which is that the most of these titles are being downloaded by nostalgic older gamers who lived through the NES/SNES era. As such, they're probably first buying games that they already owned on previous systems; an act that, by virtue of the relative number of Nintendo games available vs. third parties, heavily favors Nintendo.
Later, they might branch out and try something new. But older gamers are all too aware that the vast majority of third party titles in those days were utter crap. There were notable exceptions, of course, and also a few first-party klunkers, but by and large, the Nintendo name on a cartridge was reason to believe the game was at least halfway playable. I know that I'd sooner pick up a first party title like Kid Icarus than take a chance on Legend of Kage or Mighty Bomb Jack.
You don't even have to go that far afield to find a good example of defunct services that were revolutionary. Just look at Napster -- the original Napster, mind you, not the pale, Roxio-owned imitation of today. Though long gone, the Napster of yore did more to drive the popularity of the MP3 format than any other factor. Additionally, it introduced hundreds of thousands of users to peer-to-peer, many of them people who previously did little more with their computers than e-mail and Word Processing.
Very interesting. It still seems to me it should be required that a human witness corroborate the physical evidence. Apparently that's not the case, but it should be.
Based on your information and the number of unsuccessful attempts to fight red light cameras I've read about, the government has worked out a way to make them technically legal. But there's still something about being criminalized exclusively on the basis of non-human evidence that just feels inherently wrong to me.
I did play it on the Amiga, but sadly, I did not own one myself. I was reduced to playing occasionally at a friends house, which was far less than I would have liked to.
Thankfully, I've been able to revisit your fine game recently through the magic of emulation. Sorry to hear that Cinemaware isn't doing right by their original developers, but they do earn some points in my book for making the old ROMs available.
Mea culpa. I noticed that after I posted my wise-ass response, but by then it was too late.
I was hoping it would simply get lost in the sea of other poorly planned comments. I should really know Slashdot better by now.
Feel free to toot away on that horn. King of Chicago was great fun, and a close race with Rocket Ranger as my favorite Cinemaware title. Helping Pinky turn the other hoods against The Old Man was a hoot.
Thanks for the great memories.
I'm sure that will be a great consolation to you while they're fitting you for your neck brace.
Amen, brother!
From my perspective, the worst thing about red light cameras is that there's no human entity there to accuse you of committing a crime.
If I go to court over one of these tickets, aren't I entitled to face my accuser? Obviously, I can't question the box that took my picture, so it's my word against whose exactly? The manufacturer? The guy who periodically calibrates the device? Or is it just assumed that the machine is infallible and no argument on my part is necessary or worthy of consideration?
It just seems that red light cameras subvert some of my fundamental rights as a citizen, and the local governments are willing to be complicit in that because the cameras generate bigtime revenue.
Because it was the first of its kind.
Sierra On-Line broke a lot of ground with the King's Quest games, but those early Sierra games required a combination of arrow keys and typed verb-noun phrases. Maniac Mansion was the first completely point-and-click adventure; all others, including Broken Sword and Monkey Island (another Ron Gilbert game, by the way) sprung from its fertile loins.
Incidentally, that's also why the subsequent LucasArts games run on an engine called SCUMM. It stands for "Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion."
If you want to go even more low-tech, you can actually just light a couple of little votive candles and put them on either corner of the TV. Voila, instant sensor bar.
I'm not sure whether HD-DVD discs have a scratchproof layer out of the box, but the discs containing porn will gradually acquire a thin veneer of transparent goo that should provide some protection.
Interesting. So that brings our data set from .00000327% of the Earth's estimated age all the way up to .00000778%?
All right. Now I'm convinced.
Ah, very good point. For some reason that slipped my mind while I was doing the calculations; probably because A) I drank way too much coffee yesterday, and B) a bigger number makes my point seem more effective.
.06% chance of death than, say, a .06% sales tax; and much as I like to be as rational as possible, I think that's a good thing.
So consider 2,500 a worst-case estimate. I would expect the actual number to be quite a bit less than that, since amniocentesis is not highly recommended these days until the mother is at least 35. And then, of course, some of those will opt out, many due to FUD about the miscarriage rate, and others out of fear of pain during the procedure -- though my wife had one of these done a few months back and said it was no big deal.
Let me adjust my numbers based on what was in that linked article. 3,000 out of 35,000 in the study underwent amniocentesis, which comes to about 8.5%. If we apply that to the 4-million-odd annual births, we get about 343,000 tests performed each year (I realize that 4-million does not cover cases like twins, nor does it include women who miscarry, but it's probably good enough for a ballpark figure.) Divide that by 1,600 and you get 214 miscarriages annually.
Even so, 214 a year is a lot of dead babies. Keep in mind, too, that that number only covers miscarriages. It does not include other negative ramifications such as infection or damage to the amniotic sac that, while not resulting ultimately in miscarriage, can be harmful to both mother and fetus.
I get your point about thinking rationally, but I'm not sure it makes sense to be totally objective when we're talking about unnecessary death. People will naturally put more weight on a
At any rate, the point may be moot to this thread. Somebody has pointed out elsewhere in that the amniotic fluid containing stem cells can be harvested after birth.
Statistically speaking, 1% is pretty small. Realistically speaking, 1% means the death of 1 out of every 100 embryos whose mothers undergo this procedure. Keep in mind, those are not "unwanted" embryos destined for abortion; the mothers are expecting to carry them to term and have a healthy baby at the end of their labors.
That said, there's some new research that suggests that the risk is more like 1 in 1,600. Even so, with about 4 million born in the U.S. alone annually, that's 2500 dead babies per year due to an elective procedure. And I assure you, if one of those 2500 was yours, you wouldn't be taking that statistic so lightly.
There are a couple of GameStop and EB Games locations in my neck of the woods that claim to have already received a second shipment of Wiis, but they aren't selling them. Instead, they're holding on to their supply for Black Friday.
I have to wonder whether they really have been resupplied, or if they're just putting it out there to draw in customers.
Even if they do have stock, I can't say I really understand the point of holding on to it. The only people who are likely to find out that GameStop has consoles are the gamers who have been poking their heads into every location and asking daily. Sure, they might come back Friday and buy a Wii, but they would just as soon have bought it today.
Meanwhile, the faceless shopping hordes will probably remain ignorant that GameStop has consoles in stock. If they're looking to get somebody a Wii for Christmas, they were likely going to head to a few specialty gaming shops anyway. So GameStop gets the same customer flow as they would otherwise, but manage to piss off their customer base in the meantime.
Not that I'm bitter...
One thing I found sort of interesting in the TFA: Quite a few of the responders indicated that they weren't going to pick up a PS3 because it doesn't really bring anything to the table that their Xbox 360 doesn't already do.
So it looks like MS's gambit of bringing their next gen console out a year early -- considered risky by many because most people would presumably wait and see what Sony had up their sleeve -- might have paid off after all.
I've heard that the forthcoming Xbox 451 will ignite paper on contact.
Disappointment with the price point I can understand. Disappointment with there only being a single controller included -- which admittedly you're not making as big an issue as some others here -- I don't get at all.
I don't recall any game console in the last decade being packaged with more than one controller. In fact, the last console I bought that had two controllers was the original NES, and in that case the second controller was only included because R.O.B. the robot needed buttons to press. For every gamer out there who plays with family and friends, there are a couple dozen that play solo exclusively. It makes no sense at all to require these people to pay extra for an additional controller.
The trend of console makers not including a pack-in, on the other hand, has always left a bad taste in my mouth. No doubt it's also burnt a great many uninformed parents on Christmas morning, when they suddenly realized that their expensive present for Billy didn't even come with a game -- or worse, came with a demo disc that rubbed Billy's nose in all the fun his friends with more clued-in parents were likely having at that very moment. I'm personally happy to see the return of the bundled game, and I suspect its inclusion will both generate goodwill for Nintendo, and be much more effective at making the Wii appear a good value than a second controller would.
No, there have been at least three, and probably more depending on how liberally you define what constitutes a launch title and/or a Mario game.
The Nintendo Entertainment System didn't launch with a Mario game either, though many people remember Super Mario Bros as a pack-in title. The original NES came bundled with Duck Hunt and Gyromite (and therefore, with the Zapper light gun and R.O.B. robot.) Super Mario Bros didn't come out until several months later, and didn't become the official pack-in title until several months after that.
After that, we've got:
Did I miss anything?
-- Bum
Only if the voting database actually reports the contents of your ballot.
If the database only reports that the registrar has a record of your vote, the ballot remains secret, but the benefits of being able to ensure that your vote was counted remain.
--Bum