This isn't surprising. These systems really aren't more than a souped-up x86 server that are tweaked to Sun's specifications. But realistically, this can give Sun a broader appeal even to non-Solaris people as well as a larger installation base.
For example, one of the Windows admins here got a 1U loaner Sun box running Windows {something} Server. (I don't remember which specific version.) He was very impressed by the speed and stability(!!!) of the system. Being a Sun admin for over 10 years, I, of course, had to bust his chops about the Sun logo on the box and "upgrading to a better operating system." That's when he told me that it ran Windows.
They have a great marketing opportunity: a highly-optimized system that can run not one, not two, but three operating systems! Not only that, it will run all three of them well! Sun also gives a three-year warranty on their hardware. Most of the other systems that I've seen require you to pay extra for a 3-year contract.
Although I know that many will look at this as "moving to the Dark Side", I don't see a problem with this personally. It gets Sun in front of people that otherwise would not have looked at their hardware. Maybe - just maybe - that will help to broaden Sun's customer base, which can only help in the long run if Sun plays their marketing cards correctly. After all, their current business model is to sell the hardware, but they'll be glad to throw in the OS for free. So, they're not looking to make money off the Windows install. They're looking to make money because they got a sale that otherwise would have gone to HP/Dell/other.
Who knows? In the future as hardware progresses such admins might say, "Well, we have this Sun box that doesn't really do anything now. Let's download Solaris and see what it's like." Of course, I'd rather have them say, "Hey, you want this? We don't use it anymore...":)
And since I'm ranting, one of these days I'll learn to better proofread what I type before I post, damn it! What the hell is "manufacturers are merely looking gain" supposed to mean???
Maybe that's what we should call "mebibytology"! The study of people who know how to proofread properly but for some reason forget how at certain times!
Almost time to go home... Almost time to go home...:)
He could have bought those seven drives in bulk and that the disks might have been involved in some kind of RAID or used on different data servers. It's not uncommon for datacenters to buy identical hard drives in bulk, particularly if the disks were part of a massive, capacity upgrade.
I didn't miss the humor in your statement. I just didn't want it to seem as though his statement was automatically one of bad, repeated judgement. After all, if there was a RAID-5 or RAID 0+1 (instead of 1+0) involved, all that you need is for two drives to fail and the whole thing is gone.
Of course, the big question is - if the data was so valuable, where were the backups?
It's quite clear (to me anyway) that these prefices were made up to sound just differently enough from the base-10 meaning be distinguishable yet still sound close to the accepted spelling/pronunciation. Unfortunately, this is a task that should have been assigned to linguists!
"Tebibyte" looks and sounds more like a cousin to a trilobite. When I first read the term, it just struck me as being a more appropriate title for an ancient arthropod.
"Kibibyte" makes me immediately think of the old dog food commercial. I'm gonna get me some Kibibs and Bytes!
"Mebibytes" sounds like it should be some kind of new science. Hello, class, and welcome to mebibytology 101.
I have great respect for engineers because I know that I could never do their job or look at things quite as they do, but this is clearly something that should have been handed over to techically-competent linguists.
Regardless, until the OPERATING SYSTEMS start showing their disk capacities in base-10, there will always be a presumption of loss of data. There is not one operating system that I know of that uses base-10 for disk capacity calculation. Until that changes, the hard drive manufacturers are merely looking gain a marketing advantage by advertising a capacity that is not silimarly represented in the operating system.
Paraphrasing Jean-Luc Picard: "While the French displayed their colors more appropriately as blue, white, and red." Not the same as red, white, and blue - spectrally, politically, or ideologically.;)
When reading your post, I remembered when I was the assistant manager/film technician at a local theatre. The most recent "Lord of the Flies" (1990) had just come out. That movie has a ton of psychology to it, but not (as I recall) a lot of overt violence.
For example, when Piggy had the boulder dropped on his head that scene could have been far, far more disgusting than it was. Hell, one could call it tame compared to what could have been done with it. If I recall correctly, the boulder hit his head, he staggered, and fell back. That was just about all. No gratuitous blood spray or anything. The next shot of him was of him lying of the ground, glasses broken, and - yes - blood and some material of the ground, but nothing like what could have been done - head split open, brains shown all over the place, blood splattered like it got hit with a Sledge-O-Matic... Yes, there was other violence in the movie, but not nearly as gratuitous or grotesque as one would think.
The movie got an "R".
Although my memory of violence content in that movie might be lacking, I do remember all of us - managers and staff - looking at each other after the employee screening, asking, "Why did that get an R?"
Since it was a movie from a book that most high school students read and many teachers told the students to see the movie, we relaxed the "R" restrictions and let high school students in without restriction.
The whole flashback just made me wonder what happened to make gobs o' violence acceptable enough to warrant "PG-13", yet the totally natural act that helps to propagate the species is considered to be "R" material (or in the case of GTA "AO" material). Truly mind boggling.
No, the main difference is pure psychology. There is technically a one-year difference in the "recommendations" between M (17) and AO (18); however, most chain stores will carry "M" but they absolutely refuse to carry "AO". This is exactly the same thing as theatres that will show "R" rated movies (under 17 must be admitted by parent or guardian) but will absolutely refuse to show "NC-17" (no one under 17) purely because of the psychological stigma that people seem to have against the various ratings.
Mind you, there are no laws, at least on a nationwide level, that say that stores and theatres must adhere to the ratings of games or movies. They're all purely voluntary. Unfortunately, too many Americans put so much emphasis on ratings that they're completely blindsided and outraged with stupid stuff like the "Hot Coffee" mod occurs.
I am a red-white-and-blue, flag-waving American conservative, and even I am appalled by the astounding hypocrisy regarding sex. A movie or game can have "F" bombs every third word, blood, violence, death, horror, and destruction and it will receive a mediocre rating of PG-13 or M. But if any sex is involved -- WHOOSH! -- hear that rating skyrocket to R or AO even if there are comparatively few vulgarities, blood, violence, death, horror, and destruction.
The whole "Hot Coffee" thing is so ridiculously overblown just for the purposes of advancing the political agendas or stealing the spotlight on both sides of the political spectrum that it almost makes you want to engage in violence against the opportunists. So, I guess there might be some validity about video games causing violence, but only when ridiculous accusations and moral condemnations are made against those games. I have no intentions of playing "GTA:SA" just because that's not my type of game, but I still might buy it just to show support for Rockstar.
If these people are so against sex, then the best thing that they can do for all of us is to not reproduce.
Um... which is exactly why I said that it should be a paid-for download. I never said that it should have been free.
There is nothing saying that Sierra would have to take the calls. They're just distributors.
Valve could just as easily been the ones to take the service calls. And for all we know they were ready to.
For that matter, if Valve had the game finished and Sierra backed away from distribution, why didn't Valve just allow a paid-for download direct from them? I guess the whole murky waters of legality come into play, but if Sierra agreed to distribute then suddenly decided not to, wouldn't Valve have the ability to accuse Sierra of breach of contract and distribute the Mac version themselves? Not a lawyer... just trying to make some sense out of it.
I guess the whole discussion is academic now anyway, so supposition and conjecture are about all that we've got.
Most sound cards are full-duplex and allow the input to be the mixer or "as you hear it". So, they effectively already have a loopback built into them. I've done this before in Windows.
- Set the input to be the mixer or the "as you hear it" function
- Start the Sound Recorder (or other sound editing program)
- Open the audio file in another tool
- Start recording
- Start playing
- Done
Even then, how many of us have multiple computers? Here is a simple and effective DRM disabler:
Line out (PC 1) --> Line in (PC 2)
That's the thing that fervent, DRM supports just don't seem to understand. If you can hear it, you can record it.
Half-Life for the Mac, goddamit. Sierra had the thing finished--but didn't go forward to releasing it, purportedly for marketing reasons. So I guess they prefer to lose their entire effort of porting it than spend another 10% to try to sell the thing.
You'd think that they could have at least released it as a download. No boxes, no distribution, no middleman. Make the game available as a paid-for download, put the word out to the Mac community, and let them purchase and download it electronically.
It sure as hell would have been better than what they did. At least if it was a downloadable game, they would have gotten something financial back rather than nothing, which is what they got!
The short-sighted nature of companies that do this sort of waste never ceases to amaze me.
Here are the last two paragraphs, bold emphases mine for those who don't want to read through the whole article.
Regarding the recent kerfuffle over a new Sam & Max title in development at LucasArts but subsequently cancelled, Purcell is relatively sanguine: "While at Pixar I was consulting on Sam & Max 2 after hours. I got word that it was cancelled from the team but the subsequent fan backlash was an unexpected side effect. Thirty thousand people signed the online petition protesting the decision. I had no idea there had been that level of anticipation for the game."
That would seem to bode well. I'm sure that if he had gotten no response he would have just assumed "Well, I guess no one is interested." (I hope that that I didn't just do a TripMaster Monkey, inane summarization there. Immense apologies if I did.)
Finally, Steve concludes his comments with equivocation about whether his involvement in the game industry is completely behind him: "Would I get back into games? Sure. The [Sam & Max] license is back in in my hands now so we'll see what happens in the near future."
Oh, well. I inadvertently duplicated your sentiments in my own post. Looks like we were both typing at the same time.
A lot of the Sam and Max: FP developers created their own company, Telltale Games - www.telltalegames.com. Although they have not expressly said that they're negotiating with Steve Purcell, they have not ruled it out. Apparently, Steve Purcell was very upset with LucasArt's decision and TTG has the benefit of being the team that worked on Sam and Max: FP.
So, maybe after they're finished with their first major project Bone, based on the comic book of the same name, they'll be able to enter talks with Purcell.
This list is missing a lot of in-progress-then-cancelled games for the PC.
Where is Sam and Max: Freelance Police from that list? It was one of the most anticipated games in LucasArts' "Coming Soon" line-up with an estimated completion of 85-90% (based on statements by its developers) when LucasArts suddenly pulled it citing market reasons.
How about Full Throttle 2?
(Does Duke Nuke 'Em Forever count or is that "still" in development?)
In fact, it has been fairly well debunked [proudlyserving.com] for years now... yet people continue to cite it as proof of MS' evil empire.
Give it a rest.
You're so full of shit that your eyes are brown.
Go get some MS-DOS 6.22 disks and look for a file called os2.txt. Take a look at all of Microsoft's resolutions for installing MS-DOS while OS/2 is on a separate partition. All of Microsoft's options require the complete REMOVAL of OS/2 from the system! Yes, all of them!
I was so furious that I went out and bought IBM PC-DOS 7, which is IBM's repackaging of MS-DOS. Worked without a problem with OS/2 on a separate partition.
Care to repeat your highly ignorant statement again about Microsoft not intentionally breaking competitors' products? Well, in this case you're right. Microsoft didn't break OS/2 - it required the obliteration of OS/2.
Uh... and I'm supposed to be concerned about the "shooting down" from someone who has to post as Anonymous Coward? Yeah. Watch me quake in fear that you might have had to shoot me down yourself in disagreement.
If you post AC, don't expect anyone to put too much weight on your argument.
Now, you should know very well that there would have to be TWO shows. It would be no fun to have G-Spot unless it's also shown with something new to most Slashdotters - 4-Play.
Of course, most Slashdotters won't get that either. What do you mean? The Nintendo 64 allows four people to play at once!
Okay, I'll grant you that one. That was kind of lame now that you mention it. But the game as a whole was no less impressive than the others. I just hope that they do a fourth game because I really want to see what turn the storyline takes now that the Keepers are no longer hidden.
(It's been a year since the game came out, so if I spoiled the game ending for anyone, you should have played the damned game by now!)
"Magic Carpet" is still one of the best games around. Fully-deformable terrain with terrain morphing, topology that was actually made of rolling hills and valleys, instead of boring polygonal plains with suddenly-jutting mountains, full 640x480 resolution (which was astounding for its time since there was no 3D acceleration), almost totally dynamic gameplay, difficult puzzles, reasonable AI particularly when your opponents decide to gang up on you... even the fun of the hokey "Magic Eye" 3D stereo effects and the red/blue anaglyph 3D effects. My God, that game was just incredible. And sadly, there really has not been any game like it. I specifically built a 350 MHz system running PC-DOS 7.0 and SloMo earlier this year in order to play the game again. (Windows 3.1 with Netscape 4.07 and full TCP/IP connectivity with DHCP just for the hell of it, too. Laugh all you want, but it's f**king FAST!!)
I don't understand why the Bullfrog team, who went to other projects after EA dissolved the company, didn't try to continue their game series, even if they were under different names to avoid copyright issues. Bullfrog was to the 486/Pentium gaming world what Epyx and Activision were to the C64 world - almost every game could be considered an instant classic.
I also have to agree with "Freespace". "Freespace 2" did have its weaknesses, but when it came to graphics and gameplay, it was a great game to play, especially over a LAN.
A few that were left off the list:
"Sam and Max". Okay, game companies. Lucas doesn't own the rights to it any more. Will someone PLEASE talk to Steve Purcell about getting a "Sam and Max" sequel out?!
"Max Payne". I confess -- "Max Payne 2" isn't all that old, but I loved both games. Even of there are no extra functionalities to a third release, I'll still buy it in a heartbeat.
"No One Lives Forever". Fun to play. Great level design. Babe who has no problems kicking ass. A hell of a lot of funny lines. What more needs to be said?
I fully agree that we need more "Thief". Without question one of the most immersive game series ever created. And -- horrors! -- rich with story! Imagine that!
But let's not get TOO hasty! "Thief: Deadly Shadows" was only released less than a year ago! (Contrary to what another poster says, I thought that "Thief: DS" was phenomenal! If someone was not totally freaked out out by the sanitarium level, then that person must be bereft of the ability to have an emotional reaction.)
For the time being, I strongly recommend "T2X: Shadows of the Metal Age" at http://www.thief2x.com/default2.asp. This "Thief 2" add-on is just as good as the full game. I was very impressed by it.
While I completely agree with points 1, 2, 4, and 5, I disagree completely with #3.
The primary concern is not if a book or comic is transferred to a theatrical release but rather whether or not it's done well and faithfully based on the original material.
I am thrilled that Peter Jackson did Lord of the Rings. Even with all of the (often unnecessary) literary licenses that he took in The Two Towers, the trilogy as a whole was very, very well done and did not rely on special effects but instead focused on the characters. I would have done certain scenes differently (like eliminating the warg rider attack, which never occurred in the books), but his movies were IMO the best adaptation of the books that Hollywood has made.
I've heard that Sin City is exceptionally close to the comics. It's a bit too violent for me, so I doubt that I'll see it, but everyone that I've spoken to who is a fan of the comics says that it was very well made.
The Spider-Man movies were also very well done.
Sadly, for every good adaptation of a book there are a number of bad adaptations of that book or others, such as The Hulk. We just have to pan those as the badly done movies that they are, but no more or less than any other movie.
I agree that there is a point of saturation. If too many movies of a certain type come out in a short span, movie-goers are going to be turned off, just like when a song gets far too much radio air play, but the saturation is more often because what's gettng repeated either sucks or just isn't good for multiple viewings/hearings.
If a book adaptation can be written well, presented well, and yet remain faithful to the original matieral, then there is no reason why it should not be made just because another book adaptation was recently released.
Again, try C64.com. They list the publisher for each game. In many cases they also list the composer of the music, since obviously that was some of the shinig glory of the C64.
What do you consider "pirating"? The vast majority of (if not all) Commodore games are abandonware: the manufacturers are either out of business or no longer sells and supports them. You can't buy them. You can't find them for sale anywhere. There is no company to make any serious profit from it. Sure, Activition and EA are still around, but I doubt sincerely that they're going to file a lawsuit or consider you a hard-core criminal if you download TEMPLE_OF_APSHAI.D64 - or was that Epyx? Either way, you get the idea.
I recommend c64.com among others. They've been around for many years.
On a somewhat related note, I just noticed that Shoutcast, the streaming audio division of WinAMP, has a few stations that are dedicated to remixed C64 songs. It's absolutely amazing how many people still are incredibly creative with C64 game music.
I'll go one better - Doom over a serial connection with each player in different rooms. That was deadly, having that thick serial cable sprawled across the floor between rooms.
I've really been in the mood for some of those old games lately. My wife (then fiancee) and I spent hundreds of hours in front of my 12 MHz 286 playing "Tank Wars" until all hours of the night.
I've really wanted to play that lately. It was a hell of a lot of fun in its simplicity and ease of use. Unfortunately, it did not have proper clock/tick synchronization, so my AMD Athlon 64 3200 makes it jump to Ludicrous Speed, so it's unplayable as is.
But you're absolutely right that - even with the "simplistic" graphics and sound - they were FUN because they were forced to focus on gameplay. Only after 256-color games and 640x480 VGA graphics came into play was there an evident push to visuals at the expense of gameplay.
Fortunately, open source and freeware utilities like ScummVM are making it easier to play a lot of those older games.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't surprising. These systems really aren't more than a souped-up x86 server that are tweaked to Sun's specifications. But realistically, this can give Sun a broader appeal even to non-Solaris people as well as a larger installation base.
:)
For example, one of the Windows admins here got a 1U loaner Sun box running Windows {something} Server. (I don't remember which specific version.) He was very impressed by the speed and stability(!!!) of the system. Being a Sun admin for over 10 years, I, of course, had to bust his chops about the Sun logo on the box and "upgrading to a better operating system." That's when he told me that it ran Windows.
They have a great marketing opportunity: a highly-optimized system that can run not one, not two, but three operating systems! Not only that, it will run all three of them well! Sun also gives a three-year warranty on their hardware. Most of the other systems that I've seen require you to pay extra for a 3-year contract.
Although I know that many will look at this as "moving to the Dark Side", I don't see a problem with this personally. It gets Sun in front of people that otherwise would not have looked at their hardware. Maybe - just maybe - that will help to broaden Sun's customer base, which can only help in the long run if Sun plays their marketing cards correctly. After all, their current business model is to sell the hardware, but they'll be glad to throw in the OS for free. So, they're not looking to make money off the Windows install. They're looking to make money because they got a sale that otherwise would have gone to HP/Dell/other.
Who knows? In the future as hardware progresses such admins might say, "Well, we have this Sun box that doesn't really do anything now. Let's download Solaris and see what it's like." Of course, I'd rather have them say, "Hey, you want this? We don't use it anymore..."
And since I'm ranting, one of these days I'll learn to better proofread what I type before I post, damn it! What the hell is "manufacturers are merely looking gain" supposed to mean???
... Almost time to go home ... :)
Maybe that's what we should call "mebibytology"! The study of people who know how to proofread properly but for some reason forget how at certain times!
Almost time to go home
He could have bought those seven drives in bulk and that the disks might have been involved in some kind of RAID or used on different data servers. It's not uncommon for datacenters to buy identical hard drives in bulk, particularly if the disks were part of a massive, capacity upgrade.
I didn't miss the humor in your statement. I just didn't want it to seem as though his statement was automatically one of bad, repeated judgement. After all, if there was a RAID-5 or RAID 0+1 (instead of 1+0) involved, all that you need is for two drives to fail and the whole thing is gone.
Of course, the big question is - if the data was so valuable, where were the backups?
It's quite clear (to me anyway) that these prefices were made up to sound just differently enough from the base-10 meaning be distinguishable yet still sound close to the accepted spelling/pronunciation. Unfortunately, this is a task that should have been assigned to linguists!
"Tebibyte" looks and sounds more like a cousin to a trilobite. When I first read the term, it just struck me as being a more appropriate title for an ancient arthropod.
"Kibibyte" makes me immediately think of the old dog food commercial. I'm gonna get me some Kibibs and Bytes!
"Mebibytes" sounds like it should be some kind of new science. Hello, class, and welcome to mebibytology 101.
I have great respect for engineers because I know that I could never do their job or look at things quite as they do, but this is clearly something that should have been handed over to techically-competent linguists.
Regardless, until the OPERATING SYSTEMS start showing their disk capacities in base-10, there will always be a presumption of loss of data. There is not one operating system that I know of that uses base-10 for disk capacity calculation. Until that changes, the hard drive manufacturers are merely looking gain a marketing advantage by advertising a capacity that is not silimarly represented in the operating system.
Paraphrasing Jean-Luc Picard: "While the French displayed their colors more appropriately as blue, white, and red." Not the same as red, white, and blue - spectrally, politically, or ideologically. ;)
When reading your post, I remembered when I was the assistant manager/film technician at a local theatre. The most recent "Lord of the Flies" (1990) had just come out. That movie has a ton of psychology to it, but not (as I recall) a lot of overt violence.
... Yes, there was other violence in the movie, but not nearly as gratuitous or grotesque as one would think.
For example, when Piggy had the boulder dropped on his head that scene could have been far, far more disgusting than it was. Hell, one could call it tame compared to what could have been done with it. If I recall correctly, the boulder hit his head, he staggered, and fell back. That was just about all. No gratuitous blood spray or anything. The next shot of him was of him lying of the ground, glasses broken, and - yes - blood and some material of the ground, but nothing like what could have been done - head split open, brains shown all over the place, blood splattered like it got hit with a Sledge-O-Matic
The movie got an "R".
Although my memory of violence content in that movie might be lacking, I do remember all of us - managers and staff - looking at each other after the employee screening, asking, "Why did that get an R?"
Since it was a movie from a book that most high school students read and many teachers told the students to see the movie, we relaxed the "R" restrictions and let high school students in without restriction.
The whole flashback just made me wonder what happened to make gobs o' violence acceptable enough to warrant "PG-13", yet the totally natural act that helps to propagate the species is considered to be "R" material (or in the case of GTA "AO" material). Truly mind boggling.
No, the main difference is pure psychology. There is technically a one-year difference in the "recommendations" between M (17) and AO (18); however, most chain stores will carry "M" but they absolutely refuse to carry "AO". This is exactly the same thing as theatres that will show "R" rated movies (under 17 must be admitted by parent or guardian) but will absolutely refuse to show "NC-17" (no one under 17) purely because of the psychological stigma that people seem to have against the various ratings.
Mind you, there are no laws, at least on a nationwide level, that say that stores and theatres must adhere to the ratings of games or movies. They're all purely voluntary. Unfortunately, too many Americans put so much emphasis on ratings that they're completely blindsided and outraged with stupid stuff like the "Hot Coffee" mod occurs.
I am a red-white-and-blue, flag-waving American conservative, and even I am appalled by the astounding hypocrisy regarding sex. A movie or game can have "F" bombs every third word, blood, violence, death, horror, and destruction and it will receive a mediocre rating of PG-13 or M. But if any sex is involved -- WHOOSH! -- hear that rating skyrocket to R or AO even if there are comparatively few vulgarities, blood, violence, death, horror, and destruction.
The whole "Hot Coffee" thing is so ridiculously overblown just for the purposes of advancing the political agendas or stealing the spotlight on both sides of the political spectrum that it almost makes you want to engage in violence against the opportunists. So, I guess there might be some validity about video games causing violence, but only when ridiculous accusations and moral condemnations are made against those games. I have no intentions of playing "GTA:SA" just because that's not my type of game, but I still might buy it just to show support for Rockstar.
If these people are so against sex, then the best thing that they can do for all of us is to not reproduce.
Like Valve is going to let customers download games rather than buy them at a store.
Yeah, I guess that would be a stretch.
Wait a minute...
bandwidth and customer service are not free.
... which is exactly why I said that it should be a paid-for download. I never said that it should have been free.
... just trying to make some sense out of it.
Um
There is nothing saying that Sierra would have to take the calls. They're just distributors. Valve could just as easily been the ones to take the service calls. And for all we know they were ready to.
For that matter, if Valve had the game finished and Sierra backed away from distribution, why didn't Valve just allow a paid-for download direct from them? I guess the whole murky waters of legality come into play, but if Sierra agreed to distribute then suddenly decided not to, wouldn't Valve have the ability to accuse Sierra of breach of contract and distribute the Mac version themselves? Not a lawyer
I guess the whole discussion is academic now anyway, so supposition and conjecture are about all that we've got.
Most sound cards are full-duplex and allow the input to be the mixer or "as you hear it". So, they effectively already have a loopback built into them. I've done this before in Windows.
- Set the input to be the mixer or the "as you hear it" function
- Start the Sound Recorder (or other sound editing program)
- Open the audio file in another tool
- Start recording
- Start playing
- Done
Even then, how many of us have multiple computers? Here is a simple and effective DRM disabler:
Line out (PC 1) --> Line in (PC 2)
That's the thing that fervent, DRM supports just don't seem to understand. If you can hear it, you can record it.
Half-Life for the Mac, goddamit. Sierra had the thing finished--but didn't go forward to releasing it, purportedly for marketing reasons. So I guess they prefer to lose their entire effort of porting it than spend another 10% to try to sell the thing.
You'd think that they could have at least released it as a download. No boxes, no distribution, no middleman. Make the game available as a paid-for download, put the word out to the Mac community, and let them purchase and download it electronically.
It sure as hell would have been better than what they did. At least if it was a downloadable game, they would have gotten something financial back rather than nothing, which is what they got!
The short-sighted nature of companies that do this sort of waste never ceases to amaze me.
Steve Purcell is not giving up hope, so we definitely shouldn't! It's a month-old link, but I noticed it a few minutes ago on TTG's site.
t ory=6021
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?s
Here are the last two paragraphs, bold emphases mine for those who don't want to read through the whole article.
Regarding the recent kerfuffle over a new Sam & Max title in development at LucasArts but subsequently cancelled, Purcell is relatively sanguine: "While at Pixar I was consulting on Sam & Max 2 after hours. I got word that it was cancelled from the team but the subsequent fan backlash was an unexpected side effect. Thirty thousand people signed the online petition protesting the decision. I had no idea there had been that level of anticipation for the game."
That would seem to bode well. I'm sure that if he had gotten no response he would have just assumed "Well, I guess no one is interested." (I hope that that I didn't just do a TripMaster Monkey, inane summarization there. Immense apologies if I did.)
Finally, Steve concludes his comments with equivocation about whether his involvement in the game industry is completely behind him: "Would I get back into games? Sure. The [Sam & Max] license is back in in my hands now so we'll see what happens in the near future."
Oh, sweetness!
Oh, well. I inadvertently duplicated your sentiments in my own post. Looks like we were both typing at the same time.
A lot of the Sam and Max: FP developers created their own company, Telltale Games - www.telltalegames.com. Although they have not expressly said that they're negotiating with Steve Purcell, they have not ruled it out. Apparently, Steve Purcell was very upset with LucasArt's decision and TTG has the benefit of being the team that worked on Sam and Max: FP.
So, maybe after they're finished with their first major project Bone, based on the comic book of the same name, they'll be able to enter talks with Purcell.
At least we can hope.
This list is missing a lot of in-progress-then-cancelled games for the PC. Where is Sam and Max: Freelance Police from that list? It was one of the most anticipated games in LucasArts' "Coming Soon" line-up with an estimated completion of 85-90% (based on statements by its developers) when LucasArts suddenly pulled it citing market reasons.
How about Full Throttle 2?
(Does Duke Nuke 'Em Forever count or is that "still" in development?)
In fact, it has been fairly well debunked [proudlyserving.com] for years now... yet people continue to cite it as proof of MS' evil empire.
Give it a rest.
You're so full of shit that your eyes are brown.
Go get some MS-DOS 6.22 disks and look for a file called os2.txt. Take a look at all of Microsoft's resolutions for installing MS-DOS while OS/2 is on a separate partition. All of Microsoft's options require the complete REMOVAL of OS/2 from the system! Yes, all of them!
I was so furious that I went out and bought IBM PC-DOS 7, which is IBM's repackaging of MS-DOS. Worked without a problem with OS/2 on a separate partition.
Care to repeat your highly ignorant statement again about Microsoft not intentionally breaking competitors' products? Well, in this case you're right. Microsoft didn't break OS/2 - it required the obliteration of OS/2.
Uh ... and I'm supposed to be concerned about the "shooting down" from someone who has to post as Anonymous Coward? Yeah. Watch me quake in fear that you might have had to shoot me down yourself in disagreement.
If you post AC, don't expect anyone to put too much weight on your argument.
Now, you should know very well that there would have to be TWO shows. It would be no fun to have G-Spot unless it's also shown with something new to most Slashdotters - 4-Play.
;)
Of course, most Slashdotters won't get that either. What do you mean? The Nintendo 64 allows four people to play at once!
Okay, I'll grant you that one. That was kind of lame now that you mention it. But the game as a whole was no less impressive than the others. I just hope that they do a fourth game because I really want to see what turn the storyline takes now that the Keepers are no longer hidden.
(It's been a year since the game came out, so if I spoiled the game ending for anyone, you should have played the damned game by now!)
I don't understand why the Bullfrog team, who went to other projects after EA dissolved the company, didn't try to continue their game series, even if they were under different names to avoid copyright issues. Bullfrog was to the 486/Pentium gaming world what Epyx and Activision were to the C64 world - almost every game could be considered an instant classic.
I also have to agree with "Freespace". "Freespace 2" did have its weaknesses, but when it came to graphics and gameplay, it was a great game to play, especially over a LAN.
A few that were left off the list:
I fully agree that we need more "Thief". Without question one of the most immersive game series ever created. And -- horrors! -- rich with story! Imagine that!
But let's not get TOO hasty! "Thief: Deadly Shadows" was only released less than a year ago! (Contrary to what another poster says, I thought that "Thief: DS" was phenomenal! If someone was not totally freaked out out by the sanitarium level, then that person must be bereft of the ability to have an emotional reaction.)
For the time being, I strongly recommend "T2X: Shadows of the Metal Age" at http://www.thief2x.com/default2.asp. This "Thief 2" add-on is just as good as the full game. I was very impressed by it.
IT'S DUCT TAPE!!! DUCT. NOT DUCK. DUCT.
;)
Actually, I thought the same thing until very recently when I was corrected on - ironically enough - Slashdot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_tape
"Your" in need of calming down. Maybe you should sit down over "their" and rest.
While I completely agree with points 1, 2, 4, and 5, I disagree completely with #3.
The primary concern is not if a book or comic is transferred to a theatrical release but rather whether or not it's done well and faithfully based on the original material.
I am thrilled that Peter Jackson did Lord of the Rings. Even with all of the (often unnecessary) literary licenses that he took in The Two Towers, the trilogy as a whole was very, very well done and did not rely on special effects but instead focused on the characters. I would have done certain scenes differently (like eliminating the warg rider attack, which never occurred in the books), but his movies were IMO the best adaptation of the books that Hollywood has made.
I've heard that Sin City is exceptionally close to the comics. It's a bit too violent for me, so I doubt that I'll see it, but everyone that I've spoken to who is a fan of the comics says that it was very well made.
The Spider-Man movies were also very well done.
Sadly, for every good adaptation of a book there are a number of bad adaptations of that book or others, such as The Hulk. We just have to pan those as the badly done movies that they are, but no more or less than any other movie.
I agree that there is a point of saturation. If too many movies of a certain type come out in a short span, movie-goers are going to be turned off, just like when a song gets far too much radio air play, but the saturation is more often because what's gettng repeated either sucks or just isn't good for multiple viewings/hearings.
If a book adaptation can be written well, presented well, and yet remain faithful to the original matieral, then there is no reason why it should not be made just because another book adaptation was recently released.
Again, try C64.com. They list the publisher for each game. In many cases they also list the composer of the music, since obviously that was some of the shinig glory of the C64.
What do you consider "pirating"? The vast majority of (if not all) Commodore games are abandonware: the manufacturers are either out of business or no longer sells and supports them. You can't buy them. You can't find them for sale anywhere. There is no company to make any serious profit from it. Sure, Activition and EA are still around, but I doubt sincerely that they're going to file a lawsuit or consider you a hard-core criminal if you download TEMPLE_OF_APSHAI.D64 - or was that Epyx? Either way, you get the idea.
I recommend c64.com among others. They've been around for many years.
On a somewhat related note, I just noticed that Shoutcast, the streaming audio division of WinAMP, has a few stations that are dedicated to remixed C64 songs. It's absolutely amazing how many people still are incredibly creative with C64 game music.
I'll go one better - Doom over a serial connection with each player in different rooms. That was deadly, having that thick serial cable sprawled across the floor between rooms.
I've really been in the mood for some of those old games lately. My wife (then fiancee) and I spent hundreds of hours in front of my 12 MHz 286 playing "Tank Wars" until all hours of the night. I've really wanted to play that lately. It was a hell of a lot of fun in its simplicity and ease of use. Unfortunately, it did not have proper clock/tick synchronization, so my AMD Athlon 64 3200 makes it jump to Ludicrous Speed, so it's unplayable as is.
But you're absolutely right that - even with the "simplistic" graphics and sound - they were FUN because they were forced to focus on gameplay. Only after 256-color games and 640x480 VGA graphics came into play was there an evident push to visuals at the expense of gameplay.
Fortunately, open source and freeware utilities like ScummVM are making it easier to play a lot of those older games.