After particularly long sessions of Burnout, I've had flashes while driving where I just think how cool it would be if I suddenly turned into the opposite lane of traffic or drove through a guard rail. Not suicidal at all, mind you, but strictly thinking how cool it would look.
And yes, I'm being dead serious about this. (No, I've never acted on the impulses!)
I actually talked to one of the guys at Looney Labs over email a while back... This is the response I got (back in November '04, so who knows if things have changed since then?)
Hi Ian,
Thanks for giving us the chance to consider your game (sounds like a fun concept), and we wish you the best of luck in finding a publisher. Unfortunately, it cannot be us.
Looney Labs is still a small company and our own ideas greatly exceed our capability to publish new products. It is difficult for us to imagine ever running out of ideas and our company was founded with the mission of publishing our own inventions, not those of others.
But there are a few companies out there who do publish games by independent inventors. The best advice we can give you is to read a recently-published book called "The Game Inventors Guidebook" by Brian Tinsman (http://www.looneylabs.com/OurStores/product.html? ProductID=162). The link includes a detailed review of the book.
Good luck, [name withheld to preserve her privacy]
Maybe I can put it in perspective a bit... I'm 22 years old, and I've only really started following politics in the last couple years when I started listening to NPR and watching The Daily Show. Feel free to make fun of me/ignore me as appropriate based on those two primary sources for keeping up.
Anyways, my point is that I have no idea what the political landscape was like even 4 years ago, aside from Dubya being in office (don't blame me! I voted Kodos/strike> Badnarik. I especially don't know what Massachusetts politics is like, as most of what I follow is national interest kind of stuff. I only know aout Romney because he's been in the news a lot lately.
From what I understand, he's basically done a major flip-flop. I don't know if it's true, but from what I've heard it sounds like he used to be pro gay marriage. From anecdotal evidence, it certainly seems like Massachusetts is a very gay-friendly state, but then again I don't have much exposure apart from the Boston and North Shore areas. Therefore, his attack on gay marriage seems to be not just a flip-flop, but in fact a turn against what his constituents want, in a blatant attempt to curry favor with the nation at large at the expense of his home state for a white house run in '08.
Anyways, this is just the image I've been given of the situation from my liberally-biased sources, so think of it what you will. I don't pretend that this is the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but it's what I've come to understand as a reasonable facsimile thereof.
Oh, and before I get labelled as a liberal nutjob, I'd like to consider myself more centrist. Anti-corporation, pro-small business, anti-pork, pro-(well spent) taxes, etc. Only current potential '08 candidate I like is McCain.
From TFA: Azureus is best known for developing a BitTorrent client, or program, that allows large media files to be easily shared over the internet.
That's just... so... gah. I mean, it's one thing when the media oversimplifies things, that at least doesn't hurt anything, but in this case they make it sound like Azureus invented bit torrent!
Also: "...a BitTorrent client, or program..." Now this is more like the oversimplification thing, but that's just plain stupid. Was that really a neccessary clarification to make? I mean, I'm not saying that everyone out there would understand what a client is, but defining it as a program just seems unneccessary. I think the meaning of a client is at least somewhat obvious from the context.
You're kidding, right? They never said anything like that in any episode that I know of. Have a citation?
The reason they all speak English is because it's a TV show, and while it wasn't so bad in the movie having them slowly learn the natives' language, it would quickly get repetitive when every single episode spends half the time with Daniel Jackson doing a bunch of research to learn how to say "take me to your leader."
I got a launch 360 (for the record, I didn't specifically want it; my birthday's November 27th, and my dad's just that cool even though I told him I was waiting for a wii).
It died a few months later, maybe within 90 days. Not sure. I sent it back, they replaced it no hassle, even sent me a box to send it in. They ended up sending me a "new" one (by which I mean different from the one I sent them, it was likely refurbished).
Anyways, that one died on me about a month or two ago (almost a year since original purchase) and they replaced it fine (there were some unrelated tech support hassles, with their systems being down so it took me 2 weeks to actually get a repair ticket...), but I had to pay for shipping. Was about $25 at the post office, including $300 worth of insurance.
Overall, I think the 360 is relatively faulty, but MS also seems to be pretty good about replacing them.
I don't have my Wii yet, but I actually bought Rayman in anticipation and played it on a friend's console.
Anyways, there's this one game where you're looking at a beach, and rabbits in scuba gear are coming towards you from underwater. You've got to shoot them with carrot juice. You use the wiimote to aim the hose, and you rapidly move the nunchuk up and down to pump carrot juice...
You know, I would have thought that I'd have more staying power in that game, but holy hell was I wrong. Maybe I was pumping too hard, but my arm was fricking tired at the end of the, I think, 50 seconds you needed to last to beat it.
I went through the list of cult classics looking for one game, and am quite happy it was there:
Battle Engine Aquila
Freaking absolutely fantastic game. If you haven't played it, you really owe it to yourself.
Otherwise, there were a few games I was surprised to see... I always thought MechAssault was pretty popular, being the first Xbox Live game and all (and a great one at that). Also figured Fuzion Frenzy was considered a hit.
You make excellent points. Unfortunately, it isn't a level playing field. I know Windows, I'm comfortable with it, and it's Linux's job to convince me that IT is better if I was ever to switch.
*A pentium 2 with 128 mbs of ram can watch movies under Linux, something that the same PC could not do under Windows.
That may well be. It's also pretty damned irrelevant. If someone's primary computer is a Pentium 2 with 128 mbs of ram, then they probably don't care enough about computers to WANT to watch movies on their computer. It's also worth mentioning that AFAIK it's illegal to watch [encrypted] DVDs on Linux since there isn't a legal decoder. I don't really count that against Linux, though, so much as against the MPAA.
*You have more area to work with (workspaces)
I'm not going to outright discount this-- I used to think tabs were the stupidest thing ever (would typically keep open dozens of browser windows), but I forced myself to use them for a week and never looked back. That said, I personally don't see how workspaces are helpful and actually think I'd find trying to use them very... disorienting. I have no problem alt+tabbing between a bunch of different windows.
*and more free memory.
Much like the whole playing movies on a pentium 2 thing, this is totally irrelevant. There are two situations that a user might need lots of memory (not counting servers and such): Editing large media files (huge pictures or something) and playing the more power-intensive games. If you're going to be editing large media files regularly, you're probably a professional and will have a kickass system which makes the difference between Linux and Windows negligible. If you're playing games... well... do you REALLY want to compare gaming experiences on Linux and Windows? Thought not.
*And you can customize to your liking.
I've got to agree with you on this. This is a solid plus for Linux over Windows. While it is possible to customize Windows, it requires a lot of effort and programs which often aren't free. That said, I'm a huge fan of the Windows scheme (sharp corners, muted gray window backgrounds, white form elements, etc) and so this isn't really a big deal for me. YMMV.
I actually didn't intend for my NTFS experience to be my gripe... It was just a specific example of the sort of thing I've encountered when trying to do things with Linux.
I've just recently installed Linux on my home system and really tried to figure out. And I've gotta say, the whole thing sucks. I've tried Fedora and Ubuntu. Fedora installed much easier than Ubuntu, although that's partially because Ubuntu was installed to replace Fedora. Fedora, however, had an option to automatically remove all Linux partitions and install there, while Ubuntu's only analog (and default even if there's plenty of unpartitioned space) is to delete the entire drive! Not something I'd want to do when I'm dual booting.
From there, things just got worse. I spent a long time researching how to mount an NTFS partition in Fedora, finally found some good links for Ubuntu (hence the change). I managed to mount the NTFS partition and listen to the music stored thereon, but I really only had a vague idea of what I was doing. Some of the stuff was reasonably obvious. For example, the fstab file is obviously supposed to be default mountings when you boot up. However, the syntax used inside of it is all gibberish to me, as was most of the commands I used during the process of installing everything I needed for this project. I basically just copy-pasted everything, filling in specific information like/dev/hdb1 when neccessary. I don't know what the -l in fdisk -l means. Hell, if it weren't for using it in DOS I wouldn't even know what fdisk was. I don't understand the commands that I used to grab the software from the internet.
And every single tutorial is exactly the same. They either assume you know something, or they tell you what to do without explaining why you're doing it. It'd be nice if there were some tutorials that actually took the time to tell you, for example, "fdisk -l" invokes the fdisk program with the -l switch. Fdisk is used for viewing and editing partitions and the -l switch makes it (I assume) list the current partitions.
I installed Linux so that I could learn how to use it, but all I've learned is how many arcane commands with even more arcane syntaxes (syntaces) it has.
Keep in mind, also, that I'm the exception. I'm a Windows user with no practical interest in Linux, who's only doing it for the learning experience. I'm actually willing to go out and look stuff up, to some extent. As I said, though, Linux is just a curiosity to me. I'm not going to spend all day figuring out how to exit the "help" given by the man command (seriously, how do you exit it? Aside from closing the terminal, I mean? I know I can prest shift+zz because someone told me that, but how the hell would anyone ever guess that?).
Linux, even the best distributions, have a long, long, long way to go before they're anywhere near as usable as Windows.
If I just want to find out what something is and I've got a pretty good idea of what to search for, I go to Wikipedia.
But for pretty much everything else, I use google. Wikipedia is a great resource for finding out about specific things, but that's only a small percentage of what I need to find online. For example, at work a while back we were having power issues with a recently upgraded room (a computer lab, previously filled with laptops and now filled with desktops, plus there were more systems than before put in as well), so I had to go online and try to find out what the energy draw was on everything in that room. That's not something Wikipedia could have helped me with.
For things that I *need* to find out, it's almost invariably google I turn to because in most cases like that google suits my needs better than Wikipedia. For things I'm just curious about, I'd say it's probably split 50/50.
Morons.org is an atheist/gay politically charged site. I like their method of moderation. Basically, anyone the mods flag as a troll cannot be replied to. It just locks the thread and sends it to the bottom of the list. Doesn't censor them, since they can still be read, but it also removes the primary impetus for trolling... being fed.
How soon is too soon? At all. For them, at least. There is no real reason for them to admit anything. They don't really lose a whole lot by not admitting things. A couple savvy users isn't really worth the cost of the bad PR. Yeah, ideally they'd let everyone know as soon as the possibility of a leak was made known to them, but this world doesn't run on ideals.
True security only comes when it's in the best interests of the person for whom the security is a cost, particularly at a corporate level. I'm sure they spare no expense on the armored car that takes their booty to the bank*.
*Yeah, I know that they probably do all their transactions financially. I suck at coming up with real-world examples.
I've got the flashblock extension for Firefox. It automatically blocks all flash, with a transparent placeholder frame and small icon that I can click on to play the flash.
Slashdot Mirror
After particularly long sessions of Burnout, I've had flashes while driving where I just think how cool it would be if I suddenly turned into the opposite lane of traffic or drove through a guard rail. Not suicidal at all, mind you, but strictly thinking how cool it would look.
And yes, I'm being dead serious about this. (No, I've never acted on the impulses!)
"..." just hit the pirate bay and man, this shit is TIGHT!
I actually talked to one of the guys at Looney Labs over email a while back... This is the response I got (back in November '04, so who knows if things have changed since then?)
? ProductID=162). The link
Hi Ian,
Thanks for giving us the chance to consider your game (sounds like a fun
concept), and we wish you the best of luck in finding a publisher.
Unfortunately, it cannot be us.
Looney Labs is still a small company and our own ideas greatly exceed our
capability to publish new products. It is difficult for us to imagine ever
running out of ideas and our company was founded with the mission of
publishing our own inventions, not those of others.
But there are a few companies out there who do publish games by independent
inventors. The best advice we can give you is to read a recently-published
book called "The Game Inventors Guidebook" by Brian Tinsman
(http://www.looneylabs.com/OurStores/product.html
includes a detailed review of the book.
Good luck,
[name withheld to preserve her privacy]
Maybe I can put it in perspective a bit... I'm 22 years old, and I've only really started following politics in the last couple years when I started listening to NPR and watching The Daily Show. Feel free to make fun of me/ignore me as appropriate based on those two primary sources for keeping up.
Anyways, my point is that I have no idea what the political landscape was like even 4 years ago, aside from Dubya being in office (don't blame me! I voted Kodos/strike> Badnarik. I especially don't know what Massachusetts politics is like, as most of what I follow is national interest kind of stuff. I only know aout Romney because he's been in the news a lot lately.
From what I understand, he's basically done a major flip-flop. I don't know if it's true, but from what I've heard it sounds like he used to be pro gay marriage. From anecdotal evidence, it certainly seems like Massachusetts is a very gay-friendly state, but then again I don't have much exposure apart from the Boston and North Shore areas. Therefore, his attack on gay marriage seems to be not just a flip-flop, but in fact a turn against what his constituents want, in a blatant attempt to curry favor with the nation at large at the expense of his home state for a white house run in '08.
Anyways, this is just the image I've been given of the situation from my liberally-biased sources, so think of it what you will. I don't pretend that this is the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but it's what I've come to understand as a reasonable facsimile thereof.
Oh, and before I get labelled as a liberal nutjob, I'd like to consider myself more centrist. Anti-corporation, pro-small business, anti-pork, pro-(well spent) taxes, etc. Only current potential '08 candidate I like is McCain.
From TFA: Azureus is best known for developing a BitTorrent client, or program, that allows large media files to be easily shared over the internet.
That's just... so... gah. I mean, it's one thing when the media oversimplifies things, that at least doesn't hurt anything, but in this case they make it sound like Azureus invented bit torrent!
Also: "...a BitTorrent client, or program..." Now this is more like the oversimplification thing, but that's just plain stupid. Was that really a neccessary clarification to make? I mean, I'm not saying that everyone out there would understand what a client is, but defining it as a program just seems unneccessary. I think the meaning of a client is at least somewhat obvious from the context.
You're kidding, right? They never said anything like that in any episode that I know of. Have a citation?
The reason they all speak English is because it's a TV show, and while it wasn't so bad in the movie having them slowly learn the natives' language, it would quickly get repetitive when every single episode spends half the time with Daniel Jackson doing a bunch of research to learn how to say "take me to your leader."
I got a launch 360 (for the record, I didn't specifically want it; my birthday's November 27th, and my dad's just that cool even though I told him I was waiting for a wii).
It died a few months later, maybe within 90 days. Not sure. I sent it back, they replaced it no hassle, even sent me a box to send it in. They ended up sending me a "new" one (by which I mean different from the one I sent them, it was likely refurbished).
Anyways, that one died on me about a month or two ago (almost a year since original purchase) and they replaced it fine (there were some unrelated tech support hassles, with their systems being down so it took me 2 weeks to actually get a repair ticket...), but I had to pay for shipping. Was about $25 at the post office, including $300 worth of insurance.
Overall, I think the 360 is relatively faulty, but MS also seems to be pretty good about replacing them.
The sad part is... Sonic 3D (for the Genesis) was actually pretty decent.
But frankly, the only sonic games of recent years worth playing were the ones on the GBA.
I don't have my Wii yet, but I actually bought Rayman in anticipation and played it on a friend's console.
Anyways, there's this one game where you're looking at a beach, and rabbits in scuba gear are coming towards you from underwater. You've got to shoot them with carrot juice. You use the wiimote to aim the hose, and you rapidly move the nunchuk up and down to pump carrot juice...
You know, I would have thought that I'd have more staying power in that game, but holy hell was I wrong. Maybe I was pumping too hard, but my arm was fricking tired at the end of the, I think, 50 seconds you needed to last to beat it.
I went through the list of cult classics looking for one game, and am quite happy it was there:
Battle Engine Aquila
Freaking absolutely fantastic game. If you haven't played it, you really owe it to yourself.
Otherwise, there were a few games I was surprised to see... I always thought MechAssault was pretty popular, being the first Xbox Live game and all (and a great one at that). Also figured Fuzion Frenzy was considered a hit.
I just picked it up about an hour ago... The gamestop I went to had dozens of copies.
You make excellent points. Unfortunately, it isn't a level playing field. I know Windows, I'm comfortable with it, and it's Linux's job to convince me that IT is better if I was ever to switch.
*A pentium 2 with 128 mbs of ram can watch movies under Linux, something that the same PC could not do under Windows.
That may well be. It's also pretty damned irrelevant. If someone's primary computer is a Pentium 2 with 128 mbs of ram, then they probably don't care enough about computers to WANT to watch movies on their computer. It's also worth mentioning that AFAIK it's illegal to watch [encrypted] DVDs on Linux since there isn't a legal decoder. I don't really count that against Linux, though, so much as against the MPAA.
*You have more area to work with (workspaces)
I'm not going to outright discount this-- I used to think tabs were the stupidest thing ever (would typically keep open dozens of browser windows), but I forced myself to use them for a week and never looked back. That said, I personally don't see how workspaces are helpful and actually think I'd find trying to use them very... disorienting. I have no problem alt+tabbing between a bunch of different windows.
*and more free memory.
Much like the whole playing movies on a pentium 2 thing, this is totally irrelevant. There are two situations that a user might need lots of memory (not counting servers and such): Editing large media files (huge pictures or something) and playing the more power-intensive games. If you're going to be editing large media files regularly, you're probably a professional and will have a kickass system which makes the difference between Linux and Windows negligible. If you're playing games... well... do you REALLY want to compare gaming experiences on Linux and Windows? Thought not.
*And you can customize to your liking.
I've got to agree with you on this. This is a solid plus for Linux over Windows. While it is possible to customize Windows, it requires a lot of effort and programs which often aren't free. That said, I'm a huge fan of the Windows scheme (sharp corners, muted gray window backgrounds, white form elements, etc) and so this isn't really a big deal for me. YMMV.
I actually didn't intend for my NTFS experience to be my gripe... It was just a specific example of the sort of thing I've encountered when trying to do things with Linux.
Thank you, that actually looks like a decent resource! :)
I've just recently installed Linux on my home system and really tried to figure out. And I've gotta say, the whole thing sucks. I've tried Fedora and Ubuntu. Fedora installed much easier than Ubuntu, although that's partially because Ubuntu was installed to replace Fedora. Fedora, however, had an option to automatically remove all Linux partitions and install there, while Ubuntu's only analog (and default even if there's plenty of unpartitioned space) is to delete the entire drive! Not something I'd want to do when I'm dual booting.
/dev/hdb1 when neccessary. I don't know what the -l in fdisk -l means. Hell, if it weren't for using it in DOS I wouldn't even know what fdisk was. I don't understand the commands that I used to grab the software from the internet.
From there, things just got worse. I spent a long time researching how to mount an NTFS partition in Fedora, finally found some good links for Ubuntu (hence the change). I managed to mount the NTFS partition and listen to the music stored thereon, but I really only had a vague idea of what I was doing. Some of the stuff was reasonably obvious. For example, the fstab file is obviously supposed to be default mountings when you boot up. However, the syntax used inside of it is all gibberish to me, as was most of the commands I used during the process of installing everything I needed for this project. I basically just copy-pasted everything, filling in specific information like
And every single tutorial is exactly the same. They either assume you know something, or they tell you what to do without explaining why you're doing it. It'd be nice if there were some tutorials that actually took the time to tell you, for example, "fdisk -l" invokes the fdisk program with the -l switch. Fdisk is used for viewing and editing partitions and the -l switch makes it (I assume) list the current partitions.
I installed Linux so that I could learn how to use it, but all I've learned is how many arcane commands with even more arcane syntaxes (syntaces) it has.
Keep in mind, also, that I'm the exception. I'm a Windows user with no practical interest in Linux, who's only doing it for the learning experience. I'm actually willing to go out and look stuff up, to some extent. As I said, though, Linux is just a curiosity to me. I'm not going to spend all day figuring out how to exit the "help" given by the man command (seriously, how do you exit it? Aside from closing the terminal, I mean? I know I can prest shift+zz because someone told me that, but how the hell would anyone ever guess that?).
Linux, even the best distributions, have a long, long, long way to go before they're anywhere near as usable as Windows.
If I just want to find out what something is and I've got a pretty good idea of what to search for, I go to Wikipedia.
But for pretty much everything else, I use google. Wikipedia is a great resource for finding out about specific things, but that's only a small percentage of what I need to find online. For example, at work a while back we were having power issues with a recently upgraded room (a computer lab, previously filled with laptops and now filled with desktops, plus there were more systems than before put in as well), so I had to go online and try to find out what the energy draw was on everything in that room. That's not something Wikipedia could have helped me with.
For things that I *need* to find out, it's almost invariably google I turn to because in most cases like that google suits my needs better than Wikipedia. For things I'm just curious about, I'd say it's probably split 50/50.
Actually, Tom Taylor would be T.T.
I don't believe that the period is a unary mathematical operator, is it?
I mean, maybe it's just me, but I'd interpret his intitials as T+T, not T*T.
Morons.org is an atheist/gay politically charged site. I like their method of moderation. Basically, anyone the mods flag as a troll cannot be replied to. It just locks the thread and sends it to the bottom of the list. Doesn't censor them, since they can still be read, but it also removes the primary impetus for trolling... being fed.
Nope. Thinking FF sucks is actually a well-documented psychological condition. It's called "sanity."
Modern medicine is close to wiping it out, though, and soon this condition will live on only in the history books.
Long streams of video with brief moments of interactivity? Final Fantasy!
That's gonna be a fun file type to say out loud...
"Dude, check out this mung!"
How soon is too soon? At all. For them, at least. There is no real reason for them to admit anything. They don't really lose a whole lot by not admitting things. A couple savvy users isn't really worth the cost of the bad PR. Yeah, ideally they'd let everyone know as soon as the possibility of a leak was made known to them, but this world doesn't run on ideals.
True security only comes when it's in the best interests of the person for whom the security is a cost, particularly at a corporate level. I'm sure they spare no expense on the armored car that takes their booty to the bank*.
*Yeah, I know that they probably do all their transactions financially. I suck at coming up with real-world examples.
I've got the flashblock extension for Firefox. It automatically blocks all flash, with a transparent placeholder frame and small icon that I can click on to play the flash.