I've no interest in the Wii at all right now, but if they ever really get the lightgun functionality worked out (and maybe release a proper gun for it) and then release some stuff like House of the Dead, Time Crisis, Confidential Mission, or Virtua Cop, or even that Konami series from the Genesis whose name I can't remember, I'll get one in a heartbeat.
I've been seriously missing that stuff, and Dreamcast lightguns won't work with my TV since it deinterlaces frames (seems to mess them up somehow).
Also, on Live Arcade, Assault Heroes is a great 2 player game, and Alien Hominid is great too. I get the impression that Arcade is finally starting to get its act together. Personally, I want 3 things on it (none of which will ever happen): Zombie Smashers X2, Alien Shooter: Vengeance, and an HD remake of Tyrian.
D2 was Gauntlet on steroids, not a collecting game. WoW is just a lame timekiller in comparison. Alien Shooter has more in common with D2 than WoW does.
For the record, Thief 3 is great. Seriously, you can get a copy for a couple of dollars now, and its well worth it. Its got some really creepy levels. If anything, I just wish that the city/hub level was bigger with more to explore, but that's a minor gripe.
Black wasn't meant to be realistic, it was an arcade-ish shooter that was really all about headshots (notice that it had very distinct audio feedback for headshots, the sharp clink of a helmet getting shot off, at the same volume regardless of the distance of the enemy). The pistols kicked ass. I loved it; every level was memorable, and its one of the only shooters I've bothered to clear every difficulty on in years. And Black didn't have bad snipers (they were easily flanked), if you want bad snipers play Call of Duty or something.
I consider it a spiritual successor to Soldier of Fortune.
Now if only they'd get the 360 backwards compatibility really working on it... they were off to a good start with the 1080i support (and the first two or three levels play flawlessly), but in the later levels the audio is badly bugged and there are graphical and even logic problems (pick up a new gun, and instead lose both of your guns and your ability to get new ones as well? that never happened with the original executable...).
Its hard to define what I hate in an FPS. I know one thing would be inconsistent hitboxes (both on enemies and scenery, like scaffolding that can't be shot through, etc). I can't stand the Battlefield games at all due to their awful hitboxes and sloppy movement. In multiplayer, I can't stand games with identical looking teams that are only distinguishable by friend-or-foe indicators above people's heads (Day of Defeat, FEAR). I don't like enemies in single player that dart around like madmen while firing wildly, such as to be impossible to hit (play Jedi Knight 2 and rush some stormtroopers with a gun, they go nuts). I don't like overly detailed environments (Jedi Knight 2 comes to mind again)... they look nice in screenshots but give me eyestrain since I want to focus on everything. Some newer games are addressing this with focal-point blur effects, which are reasonably effective.
R-Type and R-Type II can be had on one disc for the PS1 (R-Types), and it works fine on the PS2 too. Actually, if you hunt around for PS1/PS2 stuff, the only R-Types you can't get are III (SNES only?) and Leo (arcade). Hell, I only bought a PS2 for arcade and arcade-ish games, as there are actually a lot available for it.
I've seen an X20 survive worse than that. I carried one every day for almost five years. It did finally sort of die; its had some manner of hardware failure that makes it unable to recognize batteries at all, and it can't sleep anymore. I gave it to my dad around 6 months ago when that happened, and he's still using it, plugged in next to his TV remote caddy (its the internet remote).
I can't say much for the new T60s though, I played with a new T60p at work and thought it was nasty (awful screen and keyboard)... got an old Tecra M2 for really cheap instead, and its a good enough computer.
Have you seen 'Bad Day L.A.'? Download and play the demo, finish clawing your eyes out, and then tell us again that art (much less other aspects of game design) should be outsourced to India and China.
Gradius V is considerably harder than Ikaruga. Also, if you like R-Type, you can also get R-Type Delta and R-Types (arcade R-Type I and R-Type II) for the PS/PS2. They're all great. There's also a good Gradius III & IV compilation, and the arcade Gradius III is quite a bit different from the SNES one in terms of enemy placement and speed.
You should approach one of the training/reorganization organizations like the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB). They do a lot of work with poor and/or underperforming school systems and, while software is not an area they presently address, you may find common cause with them.
I was kind of hoping for a controlled experiment: you have a group of FedEx planes with the system and a control group of FedEx planes without the system. Then you hand out SAMs at the street corner and tell everyone to fire them with wild abandon at FedEx planes. Explain that they are big flying pinatas. At the end of a month or when everyone is out of SAMs you tally up how many FedEx planes are left and see which group they were in. Easy.
Well, my role models were more or less Han Solo (or Indiana Jones, or whatever name he has at the moment), Douglas Adams, and Richard Nixon, and I turned out with a rather odd personality.
That is one of the reasons I stopped watching TV about 15 years ago... commercials absolutely infuriate me (so do those morning "news" shows, and the normal news shows, and most of the rest of little breaks between the commercials). Granted, I still pick up a show on DVD every now and then if its recommended, but I haven't subscribed to or regularly wathed a live feed since middle school.
That problem might be caused by the biggest software flaw on the phone (and if you already know this, ignore me):
It doesn't close built-in and first-party applications when you close them (many third-party apps do close properly).
If the phone is sluggish, misses calls, or locks (doesn't come out of standy instantly), go to: Start->Settings->System->Memory->Running Programs and hit "Stop All" (or just stop the ones you want).
Unfortunately, there's no way to pin this control panel to the start menu or to place a shortcut to it in a more accessible spot, but it should stop the phone from being sluggish. Window Live mobile, while awesome, is the biggest offender I've found in this regard, it frequently makes the phone unresponsive in standby if I leave it running.
I've got one of those... its reasonably neat, though it lacks a true hands-free mode. The speakerphone can be turned on only when you're already in a call, and turns off when the call ends. Only other problem that I have with it is that while it easily connects to wifi networks, I can't find any way to access other PCs through the wifi, only the Internet, which is a shame, particularly since I wanted to test a site I was making on pocket IE and Opera Mobile (despite everything I'd heard, its no better than pocket IE, but I keep it installed anyway). Pocket Excel is nice, though I can't say much for the other included applications. There are a lot of great third party apps for Window Mobile though, and it can run either smartphone or pda variants of them. The new Windows Live mobile app is particularly awesome.
I've been using it a lot to check email and whatnot lately since my laptop died, and while its somewhat clumsy it gets the job done without any trouble.
That said, if there are some good apps avaialable for this iPhone when it hits other carriers in '09, if there aren't any restrictions on what software/files I can or can't use with it, if it works well with non-Apple PCs and OSs, and if its not a lockup-prone mess like the hard drive iPods, I'll probably be interested. It looks like a very well thought out gadget from a hardware perspective.
I keep hearing that IE7 autoloaded, but it didn't autoload on any of the four computers I regularly use. Its installer was downloaded and cached, but never run.
I finally installed it on one of my two work machines a few days ago just to see it (and am using it at the moment)... the favorites menu finally has a scrollbar, but other than that its a downgrade. The toolbar layout can't be modified anymore and I especially hate the tabs... I already run a window manager with controls for quickly switching between windows, why would I want a second window manager inside my application that's invisible to the OS window manager?
Well, I have no computer science training at all and I managed to solve that in JS in about an hour. I figured I'd attempt since that sounded like a good idea for a useful function. JS follows, I had to really condense the code to get it past the "lameness filter" and then slashdot mangled it anyway by inserting random spaces... it will work if you carefully remove the spaces, I checked. Why does slashdot hate code so much? It took me an additional half hour just to manage to post it...
function numbler(){ var n; n=prompt("Enter a phone number!");//get a number var allowed="23456789"; var i=0;//strip disallowed characters while(n.length>0 && i<n.length){if(allowed.indexOf(n.substring(i,i+1)) ==-1){ n=n.substring(0,i)+n.substring(i+1,n.lengt h);i=i-1;}i=i+1;} var words = new Array();//declare an array of strings //start the array with the appropriate letters if(n.length>0){switch(n.substring(0,1)){ case "2":words[0]="a";words[1]="b";words[2]="c";break; case "3":words[0]="d";words[1]="e";words[2]="f";break; case "4":words[0]="g";words[1]="h";words[2]="i";break; case "5":words[0]="j";words[1]="k";words[2]="l";break; case "6":words[0]="m";words[1]="n";words[2]="o";break; case "7":words[0]="p";words[1]="q";words[2]="r";words[3 ]="s";break; case "8":words[0]="t";words[1]="u";words[2]="v";break; case "9":words[0]="w";words[1]="x";words[2]="y";words[3 ]="z";break; }n=n.substring(1,n.length);} //and then start the recursive function if(n.length>0){words=permutate(words,n); } //I don't have a dictionary lookup, but here's a quick one: var dictionary="i|am|batman|and|this|is|a|test"; //lo okup each term in the dictionary, and shout the good ones var i=0;while(i<words.length){ if(dictionary.indexOf( words[i])!=-1){alert(words[i]);} i=i+1;}}
func tion permutate(words,n){ var letters;var i=0;var j=0;var k=0;var temp=new Array(); if(n.length>0){switch(n.substring(0,1)){ case "2":letters="abc";break; case "3":letters="def";break; case "4":letters="ghi";break; case "5":letters="jkl";break; case "6":letters="mno";break; case "7":letters="pqrs";break; case "8":letters="tuv";break; case "9":letters="wxyz";break; }while(i<words.length*l etters.length){ j=0;while(j<words.length){k=0 wh ile(k<letters.length){temp[i]=words[j]+letters.sub string(k,k+1); i=i+1;k=k+1;}j=j+1;}} n=n.substri ng(1,n.length); words=permutate(temp,n);} else{r eturn words;} return words;}
In a 'drive by wire' car, how does the control reflect the extent to which the wheels are turned? On a normal car, I know the relationship between wheel position and tire position, but I've never been able to figure out how that would map to a joystick control.
Well, in my dorm there was frequently no RA... but there was me and my roommate, who would go out at 3AM or so and cleanse the dorm and its environs. We always burned all of the campus election propaganda, broke the wooden signs, and got rid of all the bulletin board spam. Sometimes we would take some of the stupider bulletin board spam, scan it, photoshop it, and reprint it with different phone numbers, pictures, and text for kicks, but largely we burnt it. We also burnt the dorm lounge's original (rotten) wicker furniture to encourage the college to get something decent. Worked, too.
How is that Quadro FX? I saw that Toshiba was putting that in the M5, but I couldn't find any specs or info on it anywhere (even NVIDIA wouldn't return my mail)... does it perform reasonably well for games, keep a decent temperature, etc?
I thought this was hilarious, until I realized it was only searching in the 'Microsoft.com' domain. I had thought it was supposed to be a complete web search. Its still sort of funny though.
I've had a Sansa e260 for a month or two now, and its never locked on me, and has generally been far more robust than my ex-iPod. I'd say its the most reliable mp3 player I've seen since the original Rios. Its not perfect though, it only plays one format of video (quicktime based I believe, I messed with it once and never looked again, though it does come with a converter), the big center button really should be the play/pause button yet isn't, and it comes out of the box with a firmware problem that causes incorrect song listing refreshes when music is moved off of the device (though this is easily fixed with a new firmware, and is likely fixed out of the box on newer units). Its reliable though, gets a great battery life, and works just like a usb stick to load and unload files (you won't need anybody's crappy music organizer program).
Slashdot Mirror
I've no interest in the Wii at all right now, but if they ever really get the lightgun functionality worked out (and maybe release a proper gun for it) and then release some stuff like House of the Dead, Time Crisis, Confidential Mission, or Virtua Cop, or even that Konami series from the Genesis whose name I can't remember, I'll get one in a heartbeat.
I've been seriously missing that stuff, and Dreamcast lightguns won't work with my TV since it deinterlaces frames (seems to mess them up somehow).
Also, on Live Arcade, Assault Heroes is a great 2 player game, and Alien Hominid is great too. I get the impression that Arcade is finally starting to get its act together. Personally, I want 3 things on it (none of which will ever happen): Zombie Smashers X2, Alien Shooter: Vengeance, and an HD remake of Tyrian.
D2 was Gauntlet on steroids, not a collecting game. WoW is just a lame timekiller in comparison. Alien Shooter has more in common with D2 than WoW does.
For the record, Thief 3 is great. Seriously, you can get a copy for a couple of dollars now, and its well worth it. Its got some really creepy levels. If anything, I just wish that the city/hub level was bigger with more to explore, but that's a minor gripe.
Black wasn't meant to be realistic, it was an arcade-ish shooter that was really all about headshots (notice that it had very distinct audio feedback for headshots, the sharp clink of a helmet getting shot off, at the same volume regardless of the distance of the enemy). The pistols kicked ass. I loved it; every level was memorable, and its one of the only shooters I've bothered to clear every difficulty on in years. And Black didn't have bad snipers (they were easily flanked), if you want bad snipers play Call of Duty or something.
I consider it a spiritual successor to Soldier of Fortune.
Now if only they'd get the 360 backwards compatibility really working on it... they were off to a good start with the 1080i support (and the first two or three levels play flawlessly), but in the later levels the audio is badly bugged and there are graphical and even logic problems (pick up a new gun, and instead lose both of your guns and your ability to get new ones as well? that never happened with the original executable...).
Its hard to define what I hate in an FPS. I know one thing would be inconsistent hitboxes (both on enemies and scenery, like scaffolding that can't be shot through, etc). I can't stand the Battlefield games at all due to their awful hitboxes and sloppy movement. In multiplayer, I can't stand games with identical looking teams that are only distinguishable by friend-or-foe indicators above people's heads (Day of Defeat, FEAR). I don't like enemies in single player that dart around like madmen while firing wildly, such as to be impossible to hit (play Jedi Knight 2 and rush some stormtroopers with a gun, they go nuts). I don't like overly detailed environments (Jedi Knight 2 comes to mind again)... they look nice in screenshots but give me eyestrain since I want to focus on everything. Some newer games are addressing this with focal-point blur effects, which are reasonably effective.
R-Type and R-Type II can be had on one disc for the PS1 (R-Types), and it works fine on the PS2 too. Actually, if you hunt around for PS1/PS2 stuff, the only R-Types you can't get are III (SNES only?) and Leo (arcade). Hell, I only bought a PS2 for arcade and arcade-ish games, as there are actually a lot available for it.
I've seen an X20 survive worse than that. I carried one every day for almost five years. It did finally sort of die; its had some manner of hardware failure that makes it unable to recognize batteries at all, and it can't sleep anymore. I gave it to my dad around 6 months ago when that happened, and he's still using it, plugged in next to his TV remote caddy (its the internet remote).
I can't say much for the new T60s though, I played with a new T60p at work and thought it was nasty (awful screen and keyboard)... got an old Tecra M2 for really cheap instead, and its a good enough computer.
Have you seen 'Bad Day L.A.'? Download and play the demo, finish clawing your eyes out, and then tell us again that art (much less other aspects of game design) should be outsourced to India and China.
Gradius V is considerably harder than Ikaruga. Also, if you like R-Type, you can also get R-Type Delta and R-Types (arcade R-Type I and R-Type II) for the PS/PS2. They're all great. There's also a good Gradius III & IV compilation, and the arcade Gradius III is quite a bit different from the SNES one in terms of enemy placement and speed.
You should approach one of the training/reorganization organizations like the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB). They do a lot of work with poor and/or underperforming school systems and, while software is not an area they presently address, you may find common cause with them.
I was kind of hoping for a controlled experiment: you have a group of FedEx planes with the system and a control group of FedEx planes without the system. Then you hand out SAMs at the street corner and tell everyone to fire them with wild abandon at FedEx planes. Explain that they are big flying pinatas. At the end of a month or when everyone is out of SAMs you tally up how many FedEx planes are left and see which group they were in. Easy.
Well, my role models were more or less Han Solo (or Indiana Jones, or whatever name he has at the moment), Douglas Adams, and Richard Nixon, and I turned out with a rather odd personality.
You seriously need to write your own Bible translation/version.
That is one of the reasons I stopped watching TV about 15 years ago... commercials absolutely infuriate me (so do those morning "news" shows, and the normal news shows, and most of the rest of little breaks between the commercials). Granted, I still pick up a show on DVD every now and then if its recommended, but I haven't subscribed to or regularly wathed a live feed since middle school.
That problem might be caused by the biggest software flaw on the phone (and if you already know this, ignore me):
It doesn't close built-in and first-party applications when you close them (many third-party apps do close properly).
If the phone is sluggish, misses calls, or locks (doesn't come out of standy instantly), go to: Start->Settings->System->Memory->Running Programs and hit "Stop All" (or just stop the ones you want).
Unfortunately, there's no way to pin this control panel to the start menu or to place a shortcut to it in a more accessible spot, but it should stop the phone from being sluggish. Window Live mobile, while awesome, is the biggest offender I've found in this regard, it frequently makes the phone unresponsive in standby if I leave it running.
I've got one of those... its reasonably neat, though it lacks a true hands-free mode. The speakerphone can be turned on only when you're already in a call, and turns off when the call ends. Only other problem that I have with it is that while it easily connects to wifi networks, I can't find any way to access other PCs through the wifi, only the Internet, which is a shame, particularly since I wanted to test a site I was making on pocket IE and Opera Mobile (despite everything I'd heard, its no better than pocket IE, but I keep it installed anyway). Pocket Excel is nice, though I can't say much for the other included applications. There are a lot of great third party apps for Window Mobile though, and it can run either smartphone or pda variants of them. The new Windows Live mobile app is particularly awesome.
I've been using it a lot to check email and whatnot lately since my laptop died, and while its somewhat clumsy it gets the job done without any trouble.
That said, if there are some good apps avaialable for this iPhone when it hits other carriers in '09, if there aren't any restrictions on what software/files I can or can't use with it, if it works well with non-Apple PCs and OSs, and if its not a lockup-prone mess like the hard drive iPods, I'll probably be interested. It looks like a very well thought out gadget from a hardware perspective.
I keep hearing that IE7 autoloaded, but it didn't autoload on any of the four computers I regularly use. Its installer was downloaded and cached, but never run.
I finally installed it on one of my two work machines a few days ago just to see it (and am using it at the moment)... the favorites menu finally has a scrollbar, but other than that its a downgrade. The toolbar layout can't be modified anymore and I especially hate the tabs... I already run a window manager with controls for quickly switching between windows, why would I want a second window manager inside my application that's invisible to the OS window manager?
Microsoft's own Calc doesn't have a File menu... you should've shown them that.
In a 'drive by wire' car, how does the control reflect the extent to which the wheels are turned? On a normal car, I know the relationship between wheel position and tire position, but I've never been able to figure out how that would map to a joystick control.
Well, in my dorm there was frequently no RA... but there was me and my roommate, who would go out at 3AM or so and cleanse the dorm and its environs. We always burned all of the campus election propaganda, broke the wooden signs, and got rid of all the bulletin board spam. Sometimes we would take some of the stupider bulletin board spam, scan it, photoshop it, and reprint it with different phone numbers, pictures, and text for kicks, but largely we burnt it. We also burnt the dorm lounge's original (rotten) wicker furniture to encourage the college to get something decent. Worked, too.
Only online, there's no fire.
I once sailed under 2 B2s flying south across the Ware River, in Gloucester VA. They could have been coming from the Washington area.
How is that Quadro FX? I saw that Toshiba was putting that in the M5, but I couldn't find any specs or info on it anywhere (even NVIDIA wouldn't return my mail)... does it perform reasonably well for games, keep a decent temperature, etc?
er... Diablo II wasn't an RPG at all, though it was (and is) the single greatest Gauntlet derivation ever created.
I thought this was hilarious, until I realized it was only searching in the 'Microsoft.com' domain. I had thought it was supposed to be a complete web search. Its still sort of funny though.
I've had a Sansa e260 for a month or two now, and its never locked on me, and has generally been far more robust than my ex-iPod. I'd say its the most reliable mp3 player I've seen since the original Rios. Its not perfect though, it only plays one format of video (quicktime based I believe, I messed with it once and never looked again, though it does come with a converter), the big center button really should be the play/pause button yet isn't, and it comes out of the box with a firmware problem that causes incorrect song listing refreshes when music is moved off of the device (though this is easily fixed with a new firmware, and is likely fixed out of the box on newer units). Its reliable though, gets a great battery life, and works just like a usb stick to load and unload files (you won't need anybody's crappy music organizer program).