And you pay obscene amounts for them in America. I live in Japan, where middle schoolers would not be caught dead with a $100 US cellphone. When I, having never owned a cellphone before, was presented with the bevy of options (video camera phone, regular camera phone, TV tuner, remote control, etc) I said "Give me the 'old granny' model, I don't want to deal with the complexity" (it came with a one mega-pixel camera -- "Sorry, sir, thats the dumbest we could find in stock"). My cell phone cost me $10, which was waived. There was a $17 setup fee for my service contract, and the contract is renewable on a monthly basis (i.e. if I decide I don't want it any more I call them up and say so -- no additional charges, no minimum of a year, etc).
Bully on India for new manufacturing techniques but we can already make cell phones which are as commodity appliances as alarm clocks.
Sure, it had physical manifestations, but it has, from the very start, existed as an Internet entity.
This is like saying Microsoft is an Internet entity. Its true, up to a point, but like every Internet entity it requires physical infrastructure to survive. Afghanistan wasn't just harboring OBL and giving him rack space for his servers, it also provided physical security and space for terrorist training camps for that certain tactical expertise you can't quite get from playing Counterstrike (he also had a $6 million house next to the Kabul airport -- gack, I wish I lived my life "on the run" like that).
Even to the extend Al Quaeda is a "brand"/"franchise system of terror" it relies on personal, face-to-face communication between the franchisees and a semi-centralized infrastructure. The London bombers, for example, got their instructions at a face-to-face meeting in Pakistan. (http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/LondonBlasts/story?id=9 40198&page=1 )
You can do a lot of these apps with a cell-phone (or at least you can if you're with me in Japan). They're, how can I put this gently, not exactly the sort of application that makes me exalt at being alive on the leading wave in a technical revolution. Yay, I can get directions to participating restaraunts within sight of where I am currently. But my eyes can accomplish the same thing, and the restaraunts who haven't payed the listing fee are still visible! Fancy that! I can even download a menu by visually interfacing with the fake-food display and pricelist outside the shop.
That dating service idea is, frankly, bonkers.
The only feature I consistently use the phone for (aside from email and communications) is train schedules. That way I can know in advance when I leave my house whether I have to rush to make the thrice-hourly train to Nagoya or know if I'm going to miss a connecting train and be delayed to a meeting or something. But you don't have to have ubiquitous wireless to do this -- if you're at home, your PC works just as well, and if you're at the train station, you can just read the scrolling monitor or tap one of the employees on the shoulder and ask.
Would a big, multi-national corporation get punished for "accidentally" frying the computer of someone who was thought to be intruding into the corporation's computers?
I'm sure McDonalds wishes every time they spill coffee on someone that the "It was an accident!" and "I'm a big, multi-national corporation! Haven't you read any cyberpunk? We're above the law, and have private armies!" mattered a hill of beans to an ambulance-chaser with a license to sue. Or see burglers who sued after being injured in an attempt to burgle the restaraunt, etc.
Here's some food for thought: imagine a simple instant messaging program, written in your favorite programming languages. One the connection to your chat party is established, all you need to do is send the text the user types, and wait for incoming text and display it. Now, imagine implementing the same sort of application in an environment where the only possible communication is you making an HTTP request and receiving an XML response.
You have just described the dominant chatroom software used in Japan, which is a CGI script that works like the world's most primitive IRC server. You load the proper web page, you get put in a "room" with everyone else looking at the same web page, and you have a user-configurable clock until the next HTTP reload happens (or, of course, you hit the form submit button with your message). I'm told it was quite popular in the early days of the Internet when browsers could handle Japanese text but the IM clients could not and it continues to be popular due to the chicken-and-egg issue (why use AIM if everyone you want to talk to uses a different service?)
Anyhow, point being, there is nothing preventing the AJAX model from working for a lot of apps. The question is what it brings to the table that you can't already get from client side apps or java applets. I don't have the answer to that one.
Memo to college professors: if you have 400 students in your physics class, you can't really do much to increase student participation. There, I said it. What, do you think having a database tabulate responses to your questions like some maniacal Nielsen-for-classroom-instruction is going to make this room feel like it has fifteen students in it? Survey says: no (+/- 80% due to equipment malfunction).
I majored in Japanese and CS in college (at a university with very small average class sizes compared to large state schools like the ones in the article). The difference between a 12-man discussion section and a 90-man lecture is like night and day. When there are 12 you can tailor your lessons to the room and if Billy is skipping class or obviously not getting the material despite trying you will know, instantly. When there are 90, you probably get to know those 5 kids who are really too good to be in this class and those 10 who use every trick in the book to avoid getting out of doing assignments, and for the 75 students in the middle you're lucky if you even know their names. (My best CS professor, ever, had academic standards about as sharp as a butter knife and lecturers which did not succeed in imparting much material but he knew *every* kid in the class and worked the labs like it was his job to the point where he knew some of the 15 team's project status better than the lazier team members did -- nothing says "I care" like "Hey, Bob, how's it going? Did you guys get that regexp engine working right for the poetry project yet? Time's a wasting, remember there are other ways to skin the cat. Anyhow, if you need to chat about it come see me after class or on Thursday. Hey Suzy! I loved the design on the last project but this is AI, not the perl obfuscation contest. More comments on the magic bits next time, OK? Hey Joe! I haven't seen you in three weeks?. Should I be concerned or is this just 'This is not a class I care for?' in which case I can just give you a B- and write you off?")
If this had caught on when it was first discovered global warming would have been much less noticeable then it is now.
No, because conservation of energy means that 220V of electricity has to come from somewhere, and the electric plant backing it is probably using fossil fuels. Not that wood-burning fires are in any way significant to global warming, but even if they were (and even if global warming were conclusively proven to be happening) early adoption of this device wouldn't have slowed it one iota.
Well, lets see. First, you need to completely break backwards compatibility with the entire existing Internet infastructure for that to work (or else people will circumvent it trivially -- "Sorry, this user is running an obsolete client"). Oh, and spend many billions or trillions doing it, depending on which protocols exactly you want to reengineer (TCP/IP? Saves you the trouble of having to rewrite every application but you'll have to rewrite every network driver... Application layer? Congratulations, you're screwed.)
Second, this also breaks the anonymity part of the Internet. Third, who exactly is going to be doing the certification here? I'm smelling "government" since thats the only organization that concievably has the resources to administer a program of near this magnitude. Which government? I don't want Communist China saying whether I can or cannot access the Internet, principally because I criticize their genocidal policies fairly frequently, and I don't want the US doing it because frankly I think that with honorable exceptions people, at all levels of government from filing-clerk to congressman, are just terrible at anything connected to computers.
To guard against a Sybil attack, they require you to get a certificate from a central server (single point of failure) to be able to rate files. To prevent you from just requesting an arbitrarily large number of certificates, they require you to first download a very large file before applying for the certificate (I assume they just create random data and have you respond to a challenge based on the data -- like "OK, you tell me the SSH2 hash of the file at www.gohere.com/youruseridhere.txt and I'll tell you your certificate").
So how do you break the system? Simple: request a lot of certificates, slashdot their "large file" server, and watch as legitimate peers are unable to use the system for lack of their own certificates. All you have to do is have more bandwidth at your disposal than two undergraduates do. What are the odds that the RIAA or an interested adversary with a bot-net can manage this? Survey says: pretty darn likely.
Polluters can mod 98% of the files they vote on correctly -- you can afford to create a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand spurious peers on the network and then have each of them vote "correctly" on either files you do not care about or garbage you have injected into the network which is designed to be garbage, not look like actual content ("Hah, look at user RIAAccount3458234, he has a 49500 of his last 50000 "bad" mods were accurate at picking out RIAA garbage! Imagine that!").
Now, take the set of identities you have constructed and hash them against the set of files you care about. If thats 40 files (say, the Top Fourty for this week), you can have 1,000 dummy accounts saying "RIAA crap!" for every "true" Top Fourty song you find on the network (or just mod everything down -- if the system says every file is illegitimate its useless, right?), or alternately you can mod up 4000 decoys with 10 "I downloaded it and it works for me!" mods. But your guys won't cluster together, because you can let those nice hashing properties keep people from discovering connections between your army of mod bots. They will look, from the outside, like dedicated users with 98% accurate detection rates who have never voted in common on any subset of songs before.
Amen to parent. At zero cost to impersonate a peer on the network and no central authority to measure a peer against you can trivially create any n, as large as you desire, of users and files to make your pronouncements on files as trustworthy as anyone else's.
I wonder if someone could leverage a major breakin at one general or specialist Internet site with low protection due to perceived lack of value of accounts (I don't know, a large message board community or something) and then parlay that to account disclosures on a site with significant value -- say, Amazon or Paypal or somewhere you can actually monetize the data. When you're talking about sites which have some measurable percentage of the entire population of the Internet as users, it seems like you could do a non-trivial amount of damage just by trying every username/password combination you have and just skim the.5% that worked. With a botnet to do the scanning you could spread your millions of invalid logins over 50,000 IPs and a month to not look suspicious on logs, then gradually siphon from the compromised accounts and get lost in the fradulent transactions background noise...
The spammer is not being restricted from sending mail at all.
I agree with your overall point but the quoted bit is sheer sophistry. If somebody in the University of California system managed to >>/dev/null every message which had Bush in it, that would pretty clearly be a speech infringement, even if "The mail can still be sent". The user can't percieve the difference between the mail being deleted before it leaves their local machine by BigB rotherSpyware and by it being/dev/null'ed at the recipient's location.
So, basically, when the recipient is a government institution, yes, they do have to be sensitive to free speech concerns. The Constitutional way to accomplish this and not flood people with dating service offers is Time, Place, and Manner restrictions which are enforced neutrally with respect to content (actually, strictly speaking commercial speech gets a wee bit less protection than non-commercial speech but you can time/place/manner restrict either). Say, "We will issue one warning, and then ban, any IP address which attempts to deliver bulk email to addresses under our control. Bulk is defined as..."
I had a choice between two name software houses and working for the Japanese government in a vaguely techy position when I got out of college. Either of the two software jobs would have probably nearly doubled my salary (although I'm not sure about take-home pay -- my rent is 95% subsidized, etc, and the cost of living differential between Silicon Valley and rural Japan is so crazy on so many levels it befuddles me), but I took the job where I get home at 5:00 on the late days.
I somehow doubt anyone with the skills to get a job working at Blizzard will be on the wrong side of the McD's counter anytime soon. Blizzard has just discovered a license to print money which is good in three gigantic world markets -- what game developer couldn't use a slice of the brain-trust behind that? Plus these are already likely guys who have that elusive experience/shipped titles qualification needed to get into doors in the industry. Now, if they're giving severence to CS reps or testers those folks might have problems, but unfortunately next to the engineers neither the industry nor Slashdot could care a whit.
Move to Japan. The future is already here. Telephone service comes from Yahoo BB (my ISP) but feels exactly like telephone service: you pick up the phone and dial. And you're done. The only way you can distinguish it from regular telephone service is its 80% cheaper (great for long-distance calls back to the States). There are some regulatory headaches (I have to pay the telephone monopoly to be able to receive calls from certain classes of people, costs about $10 a month plus the one-time licensing fee that is a weird artifact of Japan's late-industrializing telephone scheme) but after it was set up its totally seamless. Why should you have to care about protocols for a telephone? Thats like having to program your microwave or flash the firmware on your alarm clock -- these sorts of devices should just bloody work.
Why do we have movie reviewers when we can have box office receipts to tell the same thing (substitute books, games, etc)? Answer: because its more useful for you to have someone whose judgement you trust act as a proxy for your utility than it is to have the market average act as a proxy for your utility.
Information aquisition costs regarding software are insane, too, compared to the price of a book. Cost of determining Harry Potter #6 was definately a good read: $23 and 8 hours of reading. Cost of determining Red Hat CCM was a package I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy and was totally unsuited for the purposes our customers wanted to put it to: in excess of $2,500 of dev time (luckily billed to my employer, not to me).
[i] Why would you be able to reverse a major plot point just because it's being remade?[/i]
Because FFVII is not just a work of art, it is a commercial product, and because Square stands to reap massive profits from fairly little effort for reversing that one design decision. The same reason they broke the "We don't make sequels to FF games" rule with FF:X-2 and now with the Advent Children thing. Regardless of how much artistic integrity is imputed to them, eventually the dollar (or yen, as appropriate) will win out.
No, believe it or not, there are some open source programs whose primary users are not intended to also wear a developer hat. I saw an Ask Slashdot for a OSS movie ticketing system. The $6 / hr (sorry, not up on US minimum wage, insert proper number) teenagers and resident tech geek who keeps the printers running are both unlikely to be able to delve into the code and fix a race condition. It will be "Reset, kick box, pray" like it is in most of the world.
There was also Dire Maul (level-cap-ish instance for a 5-man PVE group with some very mild optional PVP attached), Mauradon (mid-high level instance), and various and sundry PVE changes to released areas (if you played Andorhal before the patch its now 1000000000000000000000000000000000 times less annoying). Oh, and the elemental invasion events (nice break in essence farming tedium), although thats more a miscellaneous item than anything.
The last change to Scholo effectively opens up another instance for 5-man groups, too, since it literally took it from an 6-8 hour instance to a 2-3 hour instance.
I've only played the Japanese version but I assume you guys get pretty much the same thing -- not like Kirby has a million lines of witty dialog, right? Anyhow, Kirby Touch! or whatever you call it is fun.
Its fun because the average time to play through an entire level (i.e. from time you can powerdown safely to time you can powerdown safely and still have progress) is under five minutes (and generally under three). If you have enough time to physically get the DS out of your pocket you have time to play Kirby.
Its fun because it has a nice combination of intuitive, easy to grasp gameplay in the story mode and a bonus mode which is the best puzzle game I have played in years. Picture The Incredible Machine, except controlled with a stylus and involving much more Kirby. The time trial Gold medals are so down to the wire in some cases that you have to memorize the timing of an (offscreen) cannon half way down the level and make SURE you get to it at the right point in its cycle because if you have to wait two seconds for it to reorient itself to the direction you need to travel in you will fall to silver. Some of the paint trials (don't know what they call them in English) are similarly anal -- try getting Gold on RocketA, its really a skill map. I like the flexibility to have a nice six-year-old-can-play game and a hard-core let-me-show-you-how-its-meant-to-be-played game wrapped into one cute package.
Its fun because the saccarine sweet art style is everything you expected of Kirby. Big fountains of lava which are contextually menacing but kind of cute, etc.
Its fun because the gameplay mechanic is simple but the environments make it wonderfully compelling. You have five controls in the game -- tap Kirby in normal mode to have him do a dash attack (if Kirby hits most enemies, he will kill them). Tap an enemy to stun them (if Kirby hits a stunned enemy, he will kill them). Draw a line on the screen to spill out a rainbow, which acts as an impenetrable barrier for enemies and Kirby, and also accelerates Kirby if he is on top or below it (he "sticks" to it). And when you are drawing him a rainbow through a cavern of lava ("Oh no you don't Kirby! I gotcha! This way!") its just fun.
Seriously, the game cannot be described without reference to a childish sense of joy. Do you have another word for that in English?
Slashdot Mirror
Bully on India for new manufacturing techniques but we can already make cell phones which are as commodity appliances as alarm clocks.
This is like saying Microsoft is an Internet entity. Its true, up to a point, but like every Internet entity it requires physical infrastructure to survive. Afghanistan wasn't just harboring OBL and giving him rack space for his servers, it also provided physical security and space for terrorist training camps for that certain tactical expertise you can't quite get from playing Counterstrike (he also had a $6 million house next to the Kabul airport -- gack, I wish I lived my life "on the run" like that).
Even to the extend Al Quaeda is a "brand"/"franchise system of terror" it relies on personal, face-to-face communication between the franchisees and a semi-centralized infrastructure. The London bombers, for example, got their instructions at a face-to-face meeting in Pakistan. (http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/LondonBlasts/story?id=9 40198&page=1 )
That dating service idea is, frankly, bonkers.
The only feature I consistently use the phone for (aside from email and communications) is train schedules. That way I can know in advance when I leave my house whether I have to rush to make the thrice-hourly train to Nagoya or know if I'm going to miss a connecting train and be delayed to a meeting or something. But you don't have to have ubiquitous wireless to do this -- if you're at home, your PC works just as well, and if you're at the train station, you can just read the scrolling monitor or tap one of the employees on the shoulder and ask.
I'm sure McDonalds wishes every time they spill coffee on someone that the "It was an accident!" and "I'm a big, multi-national corporation! Haven't you read any cyberpunk? We're above the law, and have private armies!" mattered a hill of beans to an ambulance-chaser with a license to sue. Or see burglers who sued after being injured in an attempt to burgle the restaraunt, etc.
You have just described the dominant chatroom software used in Japan, which is a CGI script that works like the world's most primitive IRC server. You load the proper web page, you get put in a "room" with everyone else looking at the same web page, and you have a user-configurable clock until the next HTTP reload happens (or, of course, you hit the form submit button with your message). I'm told it was quite popular in the early days of the Internet when browsers could handle Japanese text but the IM clients could not and it continues to be popular due to the chicken-and-egg issue (why use AIM if everyone you want to talk to uses a different service?)
A random googled example of the script: http://www.blk.mmtr.or.jp/~naka/chatbbs/contents/c hat.shtml (click on any of the obvious English labels at left).
Anyhow, point being, there is nothing preventing the AJAX model from working for a lot of apps. The question is what it brings to the table that you can't already get from client side apps or java applets. I don't have the answer to that one.
I majored in Japanese and CS in college (at a university with very small average class sizes compared to large state schools like the ones in the article). The difference between a 12-man discussion section and a 90-man lecture is like night and day. When there are 12 you can tailor your lessons to the room and if Billy is skipping class or obviously not getting the material despite trying you will know, instantly. When there are 90, you probably get to know those 5 kids who are really too good to be in this class and those 10 who use every trick in the book to avoid getting out of doing assignments, and for the 75 students in the middle you're lucky if you even know their names. (My best CS professor, ever, had academic standards about as sharp as a butter knife and lecturers which did not succeed in imparting much material but he knew *every* kid in the class and worked the labs like it was his job to the point where he knew some of the 15 team's project status better than the lazier team members did -- nothing says "I care" like "Hey, Bob, how's it going? Did you guys get that regexp engine working right for the poetry project yet? Time's a wasting, remember there are other ways to skin the cat. Anyhow, if you need to chat about it come see me after class or on Thursday. Hey Suzy! I loved the design on the last project but this is AI, not the perl obfuscation contest. More comments on the magic bits next time, OK? Hey Joe! I haven't seen you in three weeks?. Should I be concerned or is this just 'This is not a class I care for?' in which case I can just give you a B- and write you off?")
No, because conservation of energy means that 220V of electricity has to come from somewhere, and the electric plant backing it is probably using fossil fuels. Not that wood-burning fires are in any way significant to global warming, but even if they were (and even if global warming were conclusively proven to be happening) early adoption of this device wouldn't have slowed it one iota.
Second, this also breaks the anonymity part of the Internet. Third, who exactly is going to be doing the certification here? I'm smelling "government" since thats the only organization that concievably has the resources to administer a program of near this magnitude. Which government? I don't want Communist China saying whether I can or cannot access the Internet, principally because I criticize their genocidal policies fairly frequently, and I don't want the US doing it because frankly I think that with honorable exceptions people, at all levels of government from filing-clerk to congressman, are just terrible at anything connected to computers.
This just in! Running arbitrary code from an untrusted source not a security best-practice!
In a country where I pay $12-15 for a *single* I think I will suck up the "premium" on top of what they charge the American market.
And now that they had the IPO, they can bet other people's farms, too! :)
So how do you break the system? Simple: request a lot of certificates, slashdot their "large file" server, and watch as legitimate peers are unable to use the system for lack of their own certificates. All you have to do is have more bandwidth at your disposal than two undergraduates do. What are the odds that the RIAA or an interested adversary with a bot-net can manage this? Survey says: pretty darn likely.
Now, take the set of identities you have constructed and hash them against the set of files you care about. If thats 40 files (say, the Top Fourty for this week), you can have 1,000 dummy accounts saying "RIAA crap!" for every "true" Top Fourty song you find on the network (or just mod everything down -- if the system says every file is illegitimate its useless, right?), or alternately you can mod up 4000 decoys with 10 "I downloaded it and it works for me!" mods. But your guys won't cluster together, because you can let those nice hashing properties keep people from discovering connections between your army of mod bots. They will look, from the outside, like dedicated users with 98% accurate detection rates who have never voted in common on any subset of songs before.
Amen to parent. At zero cost to impersonate a peer on the network and no central authority to measure a peer against you can trivially create any n, as large as you desire, of users and files to make your pronouncements on files as trustworthy as anyone else's.
Scary scenario.
I agree with your overall point but the quoted bit is sheer sophistry. If somebody in the University of California system managed to >> /dev/null every message which had Bush in it, that would pretty clearly be a speech infringement, even if "The mail can still be sent". The user can't percieve the difference between the mail being deleted before it leaves their local machine by BigB rotherSpyware and by it being /dev/null'ed at the recipient's location.
So, basically, when the recipient is a government institution, yes, they do have to be sensitive to free speech concerns. The Constitutional way to accomplish this and not flood people with dating service offers is Time, Place, and Manner restrictions which are enforced neutrally with respect to content (actually, strictly speaking commercial speech gets a wee bit less protection than non-commercial speech but you can time/place/manner restrict either). Say, "We will issue one warning, and then ban, any IP address which attempts to deliver bulk email to addresses under our control. Bulk is defined as..."
Not that any of my coworkers do... Poor folks.
I somehow doubt anyone with the skills to get a job working at Blizzard will be on the wrong side of the McD's counter anytime soon. Blizzard has just discovered a license to print money which is good in three gigantic world markets -- what game developer couldn't use a slice of the brain-trust behind that? Plus these are already likely guys who have that elusive experience/shipped titles qualification needed to get into doors in the industry. Now, if they're giving severence to CS reps or testers those folks might have problems, but unfortunately next to the engineers neither the industry nor Slashdot could care a whit.
Move to Japan. The future is already here. Telephone service comes from Yahoo BB (my ISP) but feels exactly like telephone service: you pick up the phone and dial. And you're done. The only way you can distinguish it from regular telephone service is its 80% cheaper (great for long-distance calls back to the States). There are some regulatory headaches (I have to pay the telephone monopoly to be able to receive calls from certain classes of people, costs about $10 a month plus the one-time licensing fee that is a weird artifact of Japan's late-industrializing telephone scheme) but after it was set up its totally seamless. Why should you have to care about protocols for a telephone? Thats like having to program your microwave or flash the firmware on your alarm clock -- these sorts of devices should just bloody work.
Information aquisition costs regarding software are insane, too, compared to the price of a book. Cost of determining Harry Potter #6 was definately a good read: $23 and 8 hours of reading. Cost of determining Red Hat CCM was a package I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy and was totally unsuited for the purposes our customers wanted to put it to: in excess of $2,500 of dev time (luckily billed to my employer, not to me).
[i] Why would you be able to reverse a major plot point just because it's being remade?[/i] Because FFVII is not just a work of art, it is a commercial product, and because Square stands to reap massive profits from fairly little effort for reversing that one design decision. The same reason they broke the "We don't make sequels to FF games" rule with FF:X-2 and now with the Advent Children thing. Regardless of how much artistic integrity is imputed to them, eventually the dollar (or yen, as appropriate) will win out.
No, believe it or not, there are some open source programs whose primary users are not intended to also wear a developer hat. I saw an Ask Slashdot for a OSS movie ticketing system. The $6 / hr (sorry, not up on US minimum wage, insert proper number) teenagers and resident tech geek who keeps the printers running are both unlikely to be able to delve into the code and fix a race condition. It will be "Reset, kick box, pray" like it is in most of the world.
The last change to Scholo effectively opens up another instance for 5-man groups, too, since it literally took it from an 6-8 hour instance to a 2-3 hour instance.
Its fun because the average time to play through an entire level (i.e. from time you can powerdown safely to time you can powerdown safely and still have progress) is under five minutes (and generally under three). If you have enough time to physically get the DS out of your pocket you have time to play Kirby.
Its fun because it has a nice combination of intuitive, easy to grasp gameplay in the story mode and a bonus mode which is the best puzzle game I have played in years. Picture The Incredible Machine, except controlled with a stylus and involving much more Kirby. The time trial Gold medals are so down to the wire in some cases that you have to memorize the timing of an (offscreen) cannon half way down the level and make SURE you get to it at the right point in its cycle because if you have to wait two seconds for it to reorient itself to the direction you need to travel in you will fall to silver. Some of the paint trials (don't know what they call them in English) are similarly anal -- try getting Gold on RocketA, its really a skill map. I like the flexibility to have a nice six-year-old-can-play game and a hard-core let-me-show-you-how-its-meant-to-be-played game wrapped into one cute package.
Its fun because the saccarine sweet art style is everything you expected of Kirby. Big fountains of lava which are contextually menacing but kind of cute, etc.
Its fun because the gameplay mechanic is simple but the environments make it wonderfully compelling. You have five controls in the game -- tap Kirby in normal mode to have him do a dash attack (if Kirby hits most enemies, he will kill them). Tap an enemy to stun them (if Kirby hits a stunned enemy, he will kill them). Draw a line on the screen to spill out a rainbow, which acts as an impenetrable barrier for enemies and Kirby, and also accelerates Kirby if he is on top or below it (he "sticks" to it). And when you are drawing him a rainbow through a cavern of lava ("Oh no you don't Kirby! I gotcha! This way!") its just fun.
Seriously, the game cannot be described without reference to a childish sense of joy. Do you have another word for that in English?
You must be new here, five-digit user ID or no.