There's something about them. They make you institutionalized. At first you hate them. Then you learn to live with them. And before you know it, you find yourself depending on them.
TA does reward twich reflexes like no other puzzle game, but before you can even get to that point, you have to spend weeks or months REWIRING YOUR BRAIN to see the patterns and setups needed. That's pretty cerebral, imo. Also, a classic like Tetris unquestionably requires some major twitch reflexes, and I wouldn't hesitate to call it a puzzle game.
I've never really liked Bejeweled. It always seemed like a simplistic and limited (luck-dependent) copy of Tetris Attack, which IMO is one of the best and deepest puzzle games out there. Can anyone who's spent a lot of time with Bejeweled give us a quick summary of what the elements of depth are when you're at a more expert level?
There was an article about "mind-controlling" parasites in SciAm or another one of the mass-consumption journals 2-3 years ago. It highlighted one, which bored into the soft tissue of marine crabs, and caused them to become all hairy (yuck) and eventually behave as though they were pregnant, waving their claws around to spread the worm's larvae into the water.
In another, some bird parasite would form an encrusted cashing around the brains of a particular fish, and would cause the fish to swim up to the surface sideways, making it shimmer under the water and be more likely to be eaten by the birds.
They also had a picture of a parasitic worm that would eat the tongue of a fish and "take its place" in the host's mouth. That was a freakish, alien-like thing.
Wow, a built-in speaker. I guess there's no mechanical click or pivot like the current mouse. I wonder if that's a good idea, considering they ended up changing the ipod's all-solid-state interface to the clickwheel...I like the tactile aspect to using a mouse and I think I'm going to miss it (I hate the lack of feedback when I tap-to-click on a touchpad).
But back to the speaker: I wonder if you can hack it to make it talk! Touch the mouse and it grunts "STOP POKING ME!!!!" or "Why do you keep touching me???"
I just tried mplayer, it's indeed smoother. It looks like by default it uses the FFmpeg h.264 decoder.
Now, there are some noticealbe differences in quality between this and the apple decoder. If you view the Fantastic 4 720p trailer, using mplayer it has a smooth framerate, but when you see the "Marvel" logo come into frame, the red gradient fade around the lettering isn't smooth, the color transition is mottled, almost as if it were in 16-bit color. On QT7 it's smooth. The difference is really hard to notice most of the time, especially with lots of motion on-screen but it's there and probably accounts for a lot of the speed discrepency.
I'll take the mplayer version running 24fps anyday, but hopefully Apple gets their act together with quicktime and gets at least 720p running full-rate on a 1.6-1.8ghz CPU.
Also, while sleuthing it became clear that the 1080p trailers are all still visible in the page source for each movie, it's just not displayed for Windows, but you can hit the direct link and download it anyways:/
Since the 720p version is already over 100MB, I wouldn't be surprised. However, from another pragmatic standpoint, the performance on 720p for WinQT7 is so poor that I'm not surprised they disabled 1080p for now.
Some people are saying that they're getting full-speed rendering under mplayer, so it sounds like it's QT that's at fault. In fact, the performance is so poor that I don't even think true Mac zealots would buy the whole "superiority of PowerPC" argument completely.
on the 720p Batban Begins. Doesn't go under 10fps, doesn't go over 17fps. Shrinking the window doesn't help and might even slow things down, so the bottleneck is not drawing the decoded scene to screen.
It does look a lot crisper than those WMV-HD Imax clips up at Microsoft's site. But I'm able to play those at full speed, even the 1080 ones. So there could be some major tweaking left to do.
Apple seems to have disabled the 1080i links for the x86 version of QT. They're controlling what version can be shown through quicktime directly on the movies page: Right-click the 480p or 720p tabs on the movie page and you'll see they're quicktime controls (complete with grayed out teaser links to entice you to update to Pro so you can same the movies to hard drive)
I bet you can copy the file from a Mac and try to play it though - might need a dual dual-core Opteron though?;)
This is probably an obvious point to most, but it doesn't come through explicitly in Stevie's talk: It seems like Centrino and Pentium-M is a huge (perhaps THE) reason this is happening. Intel processors providing more performance per watt? They can only be talking about Pentium-M, - any comparison of Pentium-4 and Pentium-D to PowerPC would show enormous power consumption on the x86 side, whereas Pentium-M has been described from many benchmarks as providing "more performance per Mhz than Athlon 64." Even without SSE-3 or hyperthreading, the P-M competes brilliantly even as a "mobile-only" solution. And with Yonah, dual-core + (iirc) SSE3+HT support will bring P-M performance even closer to the G5 and P4 for streaming media which both perform particularly well on. For the P4-3.6 used for today's demo, I'm sure they just wanted a solid system with absolute fast speed to show the public, and I'm sure the current build of Marklar has been majorly vectorized for SSE-3.
Also, the talk about the laptop market growing 3-4x as fast as desktops, the failure to deliver G5 powerbooks as of late, etc. highlights this.
Finally, a lot of people wonder why Apple is going with Intel, whom many consider lower on performance, more hungry on power, less-efficient and well-designed, and more expensive in comparison to AMD. This is only true if you're comparing Pentium4 to Opteron - bring the P-M v. Turion into the market and the picture becomes clear. You may lose absolute performance, but the "bang for the buck," especially for portables, is clearly on Intel's side.
They're right in that OTEC theory has been around for years. But I remember in an oceanography class I took that the Hawaii project essentially failed because the deep water was so nutrient-rich that it cause absolutely massive algae blooms that gummed up the works as it was pumped up from depth.
If they've solved that problem, then it definitely has a chance of making a huge global impact.
From what I remember, the GBA platform was described by Nintendo as being more or less equivalently capable as that of the SNES, so that actually makes a lot of sense. I haven't heard that it's significantly more powerful, but if we had more games that look like GSH, maybe it'd be obvious:)
GSH looks like it's going to be great. It's been years since I've touched a GBA, but I never knew it was possible to eke out so much from the hardware! But maybe that's just because I haven't spent that much time outside of Advance Wars...
Sure it is, but seriously now, for all the people here bashing the guy, how many are like you? Also, for all the "rote memorization" claims, it's pretty clear from what he's done and the festivals/competitions he's been in that the dude is an accomplished piano player, and chances are he's better than most people who simply claim they have 10-20 years of standard training.
Besides, I'm assuming that 1) he did his own composing/transcribing, and 2) the playing that he's doing is unquestionably at a pretty high level. Being able to play blindfolded and backwards is pretty cool as well.
Nobody's saying this guy is a prodigy or the next Mozart, but come on now - a lot of the stuff that gets gushing praise here is stuff that most of us could do with a little time, effort, and practice too (DIY steadycam? USB disco floor? Rube Goldberg contraptions? Sticking an ipod shuffle into a pair of old headphones?)...just saying the guy's pretty good at what he does, it's a shame everyone thinks they're way better.
If we really had this many accomplished piano players on/., Juliard might as well close up shop.
Pretty harsh comments, considering it's not likely that a single person here could do any better. I've had piano lessons for over 8 years (since I was 5) and it's easy to tell that this guy is head and shoulders above anything I could do. He's got a gift, and I'm glad he uses some of it to belt out old-school video game tunes.
Besides, it's pretty obvious this is a hobby/fun thing for him - I doubt he practices 5/hours a day of Mario so he can upload a video to the web.
Yeah, it took about 3-4 minutes to load on my connection (the longest-loading flash site I've been to in a while) and all it's got is one frontpage and a lot of loud sound:P
I hope they'll have some interesting updates (like high-res frame renders) eventually.
The streaming trailer is dying on my puny shared DSL connection. I know you can download the full trailer for free somewhere, but from the few frames that load up, it looks like the same one up Gamespot and elsewhere. Everything else says "coming soon."
Slashdot Mirror
There's something about them. They make you institutionalized. At first you hate them. Then you learn to live with them. And before you know it, you find yourself depending on them.
All I asked for are some frickin' sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads!!
TA does reward twich reflexes like no other puzzle game, but before you can even get to that point, you have to spend weeks or months REWIRING YOUR BRAIN to see the patterns and setups needed. That's pretty cerebral, imo. Also, a classic like Tetris unquestionably requires some major twitch reflexes, and I wouldn't hesitate to call it a puzzle game.
I've never really liked Bejeweled. It always seemed like a simplistic and limited (luck-dependent) copy of Tetris Attack, which IMO is one of the best and deepest puzzle games out there. Can anyone who's spent a lot of time with Bejeweled give us a quick summary of what the elements of depth are when you're at a more expert level?
There was an article about "mind-controlling" parasites in SciAm or another one of the mass-consumption journals 2-3 years ago. It highlighted one, which bored into the soft tissue of marine crabs, and caused them to become all hairy (yuck) and eventually behave as though they were pregnant, waving their claws around to spread the worm's larvae into the water. In another, some bird parasite would form an encrusted cashing around the brains of a particular fish, and would cause the fish to swim up to the surface sideways, making it shimmer under the water and be more likely to be eaten by the birds. They also had a picture of a parasitic worm that would eat the tongue of a fish and "take its place" in the host's mouth. That was a freakish, alien-like thing.
Wow, a built-in speaker. I guess there's no mechanical click or pivot like the current mouse. I wonder if that's a good idea, considering they ended up changing the ipod's all-solid-state interface to the clickwheel...I like the tactile aspect to using a mouse and I think I'm going to miss it (I hate the lack of feedback when I tap-to-click on a touchpad). But back to the speaker: I wonder if you can hack it to make it talk! Touch the mouse and it grunts "STOP POKING ME!!!!" or "Why do you keep touching me???"
How is this figured? Are people just randomly surfing two-letters TLDs 12 minutes upon installing windows and hopping on the net?
Now, there are some noticealbe differences in quality between this and the apple decoder. If you view the Fantastic 4 720p trailer, using mplayer it has a smooth framerate, but when you see the "Marvel" logo come into frame, the red gradient fade around the lettering isn't smooth, the color transition is mottled, almost as if it were in 16-bit color. On QT7 it's smooth. The difference is really hard to notice most of the time, especially with lots of motion on-screen but it's there and probably accounts for a lot of the speed discrepency.
I'll take the mplayer version running 24fps anyday, but hopefully Apple gets their act together with quicktime and gets at least 720p running full-rate on a 1.6-1.8ghz CPU.
Also, while sleuthing it became clear that the 1080p trailers are all still visible in the page source for each movie, it's just not displayed for Windows, but you can hit the direct link and download it anyways :/
Some people are saying that they're getting full-speed rendering under mplayer, so it sounds like it's QT that's at fault. In fact, the performance is so poor that I don't even think true Mac zealots would buy the whole "superiority of PowerPC" argument completely.
I don't know if it's the encoding process or the source quality, but the H.264 files seem much, much more crisp at a pixel level.
It does look a lot crisper than those WMV-HD Imax clips up at Microsoft's site. But I'm able to play those at full speed, even the 1080 ones. So there could be some major tweaking left to do.
I bet you can copy the file from a Mac and try to play it though - might need a dual dual-core Opteron though? ;)
Also, the talk about the laptop market growing 3-4x as fast as desktops, the failure to deliver G5 powerbooks as of late, etc. highlights this.
Finally, a lot of people wonder why Apple is going with Intel, whom many consider lower on performance, more hungry on power, less-efficient and well-designed, and more expensive in comparison to AMD. This is only true if you're comparing Pentium4 to Opteron - bring the P-M v. Turion into the market and the picture becomes clear. You may lose absolute performance, but the "bang for the buck," especially for portables, is clearly on Intel's side.
If they've solved that problem, then it definitely has a chance of making a huge global impact.
The motorcycles are "beemers" (and OK, sometimes "beamers") but given that, it still doesn't include the 3-series.
I can just see them in nano-scale, coursing through my blood and rewiring my brain.
From what I remember, the GBA platform was described by Nintendo as being more or less equivalently capable as that of the SNES, so that actually makes a lot of sense. I haven't heard that it's significantly more powerful, but if we had more games that look like GSH, maybe it'd be obvious :)
GSH looks like it's going to be great. It's been years since I've touched a GBA, but I never knew it was possible to eke out so much from the hardware! But maybe that's just because I haven't spent that much time outside of Advance Wars...
Besides, I'm assuming that 1) he did his own composing/transcribing, and 2) the playing that he's doing is unquestionably at a pretty high level. Being able to play blindfolded and backwards is pretty cool as well.
Nobody's saying this guy is a prodigy or the next Mozart, but come on now - a lot of the stuff that gets gushing praise here is stuff that most of us could do with a little time, effort, and practice too (DIY steadycam? USB disco floor? Rube Goldberg contraptions? Sticking an ipod shuffle into a pair of old headphones?)...just saying the guy's pretty good at what he does, it's a shame everyone thinks they're way better.
If we really had this many accomplished piano players on /., Juliard might as well close up shop.
Pretty harsh comments, considering it's not likely that a single person here could do any better. I've had piano lessons for over 8 years (since I was 5) and it's easy to tell that this guy is head and shoulders above anything I could do. He's got a gift, and I'm glad he uses some of it to belt out old-school video game tunes. Besides, it's pretty obvious this is a hobby/fun thing for him - I doubt he practices 5/hours a day of Mario so he can upload a video to the web.
Yeah, it took about 3-4 minutes to load on my connection (the longest-loading flash site I've been to in a while) and all it's got is one frontpage and a lot of loud sound :P
I hope they'll have some interesting updates (like high-res frame renders) eventually.
The streaming trailer is dying on my puny shared DSL connection. I know you can download the full trailer for free somewhere, but from the few frames that load up, it looks like the same one up Gamespot and elsewhere. Everything else says "coming soon."
So just one blue screen and he's out, huh? Harsh.
http://www.bedope.com/mike/segv/poperms.htm
Ah, I stand corrected then.