Also when I checked there a year or so ago they still don't cloak the ip address on your hostmask like a lot of modern irc networks do now by default as well.
Carts used to have coprocessors and other add in chips in them.
I agree, it is the main advantage I see with the cartridges of old: the add-on chips extended the hardware functionality of the system, like the Super-FX, Cx4 and SA-1 chips in some Super Nintendo games, and all the memory mapper chips in the NES. They provided all kinds of neat affects.
Unfortunately, I think that unless the manufacturing costs become at least as low as optical media (ha, good luck), we'd be back to old days of seeing $80+ games (at least as they were up here in Canada) and considering a lot of people think $60 is expensive for a new game now, I don't think it would work out that well.
I think you gave your own answer there. The problem isn't with the number of hours per se, but basically with making a 10 hour game and padding it to 60 with 50 hours of dumb repetitive filler or with boss fights that you need to try 20 times to get to the next chunk of actual story.
The bolded part is what I felt was a big issue with Final Fantasy XIII to a slightly lesser degree. It seemed like it would have been okay as a 20-25 hour game, but it just dragged on and on for 55 hours.
I personally know Billy Mitchell and while he is a bit pompous, he is nothing like he was portrayed in the movie.
You're right, he's even more of a dick in real life, since Seth Gordon had to cut out the darker stuff while he filmed it. From this interview with him:
...The way we painted Billy and his actions is so much gentler that we could have, that it makes it hard for me to stomach the tiny little details that they are choosing to fight about, because his true actions were so ugly that we couldn’t use the complete truth, meaning we didn’t show him as dark as he really is.
Seriously, the problem is your TV. Processing lag is a real problem that most TV manufacturers are effectively ignoring, and the only way to know how bad it is with a TV is to do a special setup that dual outputs a timer to the screen being tested and a screen known to not have processing lag.
I believe the the newer Guitar Hero and Rockband games also have a calibration test that you can use as well to determine what the post-processing lag on your tv is like to see if it's acceptable or not.
Demos can be very misleading and give you an entirely wrong impression of the game. So you may end up spending money on the retail game based on certain expectations of the demo, but then see the full game is not at all what you thought it would be.
The Brutal Legends is quite bad in that regards.
Speaking of deciphering alien number systems, there was a very old computer game released in the 80s called Captain Blood, where progress in was achieved by communicating with other races of aliens using various symbols within the interface, where each symbol would mean different things to the aliens. You initially don't know anything about what they mean for each race, as a major part of the game is to figure that out so you can get critical information from them. By far the coolest concept in the game, one I've never really seen with that kind of interface used elsewhere.
Metroid Zero Mission acted as a reboot for the original Metroid game. I find it one of the best games in the series, as it was remade really well. Now all Nintendo really needs to do is give Metroid 2 the same kind of treatment.
Ha, lucky, up here in Canada, I remember paying for new games priced anywhere from $70 to $110 CDN on the SNES, Genesis and the N64 back in the day. I don't think the Saturn and PSX titles were much different in pricing, maybe a little bit less.
That being said, I find games much less expensive now then they were in the past.
The funny thing was that the original versions of Diablo and Starcraft also had "install spawn copy" feature, so that only one person would need the game to host multiplayer games, and the spawned copies could join those and only those games hosted by the person with the full version.
Between this and trying to sucker people into buying the same game three times for single player (one version for each race campaign, though this might have been changed since I last looked), I'll just pass out on Starcraft 2 entirely.
To make up for the fact that population growth in most 1st world nations where the gaming systems are sold is below replacement. Japan, where Nintendo is located, is particularly bad about that, since they are currently undergoing a negative growth rate. Hence they can't just expect growth from newer generations (if they could, the market share would just grow naturally in absolute terms), hence have to draw upon the existing population in order to get more people involved. It's all boils down to basic economics, essentially.
During the time the various rating organizations were coming to be around 1994, there was a rating system from the Recreational Software Advisory Council used for PC games. They had a rating scale of 0-4 for Violence, Sex/Nudity, and Language.
Of course, the main criticisms as pointed out in the wikipedia article include no general age guideline, it was only applied to computer games, and it was basically more complex and didn't stand out from the box, compared to the ESRB ratings. Either way, any rating system won't help if parents don't take them account when buying games for their children.
I definitely agree about the inconsistency of the ESRB ratings, though they've improved a lot since the last 15 years. For example, back around 1997 Final Fantasy VII for the PS1 had a Teen rating for 'realistic violence'. When it was rerated for the PS3 release on PSN, it was still rated as T, but with reasons being comic mischief, mild fantasy violence, mild language.
Congratulations, you've replaced one circumlocution for another. In addition, that doesn't solve the general case for exception handling except in the most trivial cases, and you've also made the code more unreadable by putting related blocks of code in separate functions, which defeats the whole point of using them in the first!
Also, C does not have an inline keyword, and whether a C++ (It is not the same as C) compiler will not just inline a function just because you tell it too. That's dependent on the complexity of the code present, and also the compiler specific optimizer.
But I guess it's pointless to care about performance if you don't care about parsers & code generation, operating systems, signal processing (audio, image, video), and various stuff in scientific computing that many others in this discussion have mentioned.
So how am I supposed to do error handling in a low level language that doesn't have any explicit exception handling mechanisms, like C? Also, how do I accomplish the same code using only while loops and flag variables without involving code duplication and a whole bunch of flag variables that I have to set, check, and reset, and also doesn't have a big performance cost and make it an unreadable mess. An example of such a use would be in a deeply nested loop 3+ levels deep that I'd want to break out to the outer most loop. On that note, do you have issues with people who use break, continue statements, or any other forms of flow control in the program, and follow goofy rules like the one entry, one exit philosophy? This is the impression I'm getting from you.
Any tool within the language can be abused. As long as the intent is clear and justified and there's no other better choice, I see no issues with using a goto or any of its variants in other languages (call/cc comes to mind) in when needed. That being said of course, there are richer flow control constructs in higher level languages that don't necessitate the need for goto as much anymore, possibly not at except in extreme circumstances.
Also, this is a great read from Knuth himself who shows ways you can use goto to improve code readability and make it easier to express ideas and correctness without unnecessarily tying your hands behind your back: Structured Programming with Goto statements. Food for thought.
In defense of the Atari 2600, it was at least a huge step forward compared to the Magnavox Odyssey. After watching a video about the Odysssey, I find it hard to believe it could be considered the first video game console.
Slashdot Mirror
Also when I checked there a year or so ago they still don't cloak the ip address on your hostmask like a lot of modern irc networks do now by default as well.
The issue you're describing already did happen with the older PS3 models, but in 2010: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10461881-1.html
Carts used to have coprocessors and other add in chips in them.
I agree, it is the main advantage I see with the cartridges of old: the add-on chips extended the hardware functionality of the system, like the Super-FX, Cx4 and SA-1 chips in some Super Nintendo games, and all the memory mapper chips in the NES. They provided all kinds of neat affects.
Unfortunately, I think that unless the manufacturing costs become at least as low as optical media (ha, good luck), we'd be back to old days of seeing $80+ games (at least as they were up here in Canada) and considering a lot of people think $60 is expensive for a new game now, I don't think it would work out that well.
The bolded part is what I felt was a big issue with Final Fantasy XIII to a slightly lesser degree. It seemed like it would have been okay as a 20-25 hour game, but it just dragged on and on for 55 hours.
You're right, he's even more of a dick in real life, since Seth Gordon had to cut out the darker stuff while he filmed it. From this interview with him:
But hey Mr. Coward, believe what you want.
Facebook breaches Canadian privacy law: commissioner
Can you not see that the end result of this conflict would not be Facebook cleaning up their act, but rather Facebook banning Canadian users?
They already did clean up their act, actually. There was even a slashdot story about that too, even.
I believe the the newer Guitar Hero and Rockband games also have a calibration test that you can use as well to determine what the post-processing lag on your tv is like to see if it's acceptable or not.
Indeed, Djikstra had written such a paper about that issue many years ago. On the foolishness of "natural language programming"
Demos can be very misleading and give you an entirely wrong impression of the game. So you may end up spending money on the retail game based on certain expectations of the demo, but then see the full game is not at all what you thought it would be. The Brutal Legends is quite bad in that regards.
Monopolies are not necessarily only monopsonies.
Check out Eyes of Nye. That's basically a modern, adult version of the old Bill Nye the Science Guy show.
'Tis but a flesh wound, you see.
Speaking of deciphering alien number systems, there was a very old computer game released in the 80s called Captain Blood, where progress in was achieved by communicating with other races of aliens using various symbols within the interface, where each symbol would mean different things to the aliens. You initially don't know anything about what they mean for each race, as a major part of the game is to figure that out so you can get critical information from them. By far the coolest concept in the game, one I've never really seen with that kind of interface used elsewhere.
Metroid Zero Mission acted as a reboot for the original Metroid game. I find it one of the best games in the series, as it was remade really well. Now all Nintendo really needs to do is give Metroid 2 the same kind of treatment.
Ha, lucky, up here in Canada, I remember paying for new games priced anywhere from $70 to $110 CDN on the SNES, Genesis and the N64 back in the day. I don't think the Saturn and PSX titles were much different in pricing, maybe a little bit less.
That being said, I find games much less expensive now then they were in the past.
The funny thing was that the original versions of Diablo and Starcraft also had "install spawn copy" feature, so that only one person would need the game to host multiplayer games, and the spawned copies could join those and only those games hosted by the person with the full version.
Between this and trying to sucker people into buying the same game three times for single player (one version for each race campaign, though this might have been changed since I last looked), I'll just pass out on Starcraft 2 entirely.
To make up for the fact that population growth in most 1st world nations where the gaming systems are sold is below replacement. Japan, where Nintendo is located, is particularly bad about that, since they are currently undergoing a negative growth rate. Hence they can't just expect growth from newer generations (if they could, the market share would just grow naturally in absolute terms), hence have to draw upon the existing population in order to get more people involved. It's all boils down to basic economics, essentially.
During the time the various rating organizations were coming to be around 1994, there was a rating system from the Recreational Software Advisory Council used for PC games. They had a rating scale of 0-4 for Violence, Sex/Nudity, and Language.
Of course, the main criticisms as pointed out in the wikipedia article include no general age guideline, it was only applied to computer games, and it was basically more complex and didn't stand out from the box, compared to the ESRB ratings. Either way, any rating system won't help if parents don't take them account when buying games for their children.
I definitely agree about the inconsistency of the ESRB ratings, though they've improved a lot since the last 15 years. For example, back around 1997 Final Fantasy VII for the PS1 had a Teen rating for 'realistic violence'. When it was rerated for the PS3 release on PSN, it was still rated as T, but with reasons being comic mischief, mild fantasy violence, mild language.
Congratulations, you've replaced one circumlocution for another. In addition, that doesn't solve the general case for exception handling except in the most trivial cases, and you've also made the code more unreadable by putting related blocks of code in separate functions, which defeats the whole point of using them in the first!
Also, C does not have an inline keyword, and whether a C++ (It is not the same as C) compiler will not just inline a function just because you tell it too. That's dependent on the complexity of the code present, and also the compiler specific optimizer.
But I guess it's pointless to care about performance if you don't care about parsers & code generation, operating systems, signal processing (audio, image, video), and various stuff in scientific computing that many others in this discussion have mentioned.
So how am I supposed to do error handling in a low level language that doesn't have any explicit exception handling mechanisms, like C? Also, how do I accomplish the same code using only while loops and flag variables without involving code duplication and a whole bunch of flag variables that I have to set, check, and reset, and also doesn't have a big performance cost and make it an unreadable mess. An example of such a use would be in a deeply nested loop 3+ levels deep that I'd want to break out to the outer most loop. On that note, do you have issues with people who use break, continue statements, or any other forms of flow control in the program, and follow goofy rules like the one entry, one exit philosophy? This is the impression I'm getting from you.
Any tool within the language can be abused. As long as the intent is clear and justified and there's no other better choice, I see no issues with using a goto or any of its variants in other languages (call/cc comes to mind) in when needed. That being said of course, there are richer flow control constructs in higher level languages that don't necessitate the need for goto as much anymore, possibly not at except in extreme circumstances.
Also, this is a great read from Knuth himself who shows ways you can use goto to improve code readability and make it easier to express ideas and correctness without unnecessarily tying your hands behind your back: Structured Programming with Goto statements. Food for thought.
In defense of the Atari 2600, it was at least a huge step forward compared to the Magnavox Odyssey. After watching a video about the Odysssey, I find it hard to believe it could be considered the first video game console.
Then how do you explain the success of Mega Man 9?
You definitely don't know what you're talking about if you think the Metroid series consists of path restricted linear games.
As a fellow Canadian, I am very curious where you're getting such a fast connection from. Also, what is the upload bandwidth?
Diablo 1 also had randomized dungeons/monsters/items, and online play through battle.net, IPX, Direct Connection or through a modem.