We need Tetris The Grand Master 2 right now. Bring on the death mode!
Another refreshing shot into VGs?
on
Climbing the Colossus
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Ico was Refreshing. I had not played a game like that before, and I greatly enjoyed it. I just wish it had been a bit longer. I love the fact that there was almost no story and no understandable dialog (until you unlock the other language at least). The main character was a child stumbling into a situation without really understanding it, and the artful way the game was created allowed the player to feel the same.
I was very pleased back when they first announced Shadow of the Colossus (I think it was called Icon? or something else similar to Ico), and the more I see of it the more hopeful I am that it will be as unique and experiential as Ico was.
Although, I do kind of wonder how good the graphics will turn out. Ico was initially under development for the PS1, not sure if it was originally exclusive to the PS1, but there sure is a lot of footage of the PS1 test versions of it. I think one of the reasons it was so stunning when it first came out (other then the artistic prowess of the designers) was that it was already being optimized for a far less powerful system. I wonder if Shadow of the Colossus can be as awe inspiring. I think it will, but I am also an optimist.
Damn, I forgot Rare made that one. Come to think of it, they also made the Donkey Kong Country games and Perfect Dark, so almost all of the games I really liked for Nintendo systems. Thank god there's still chronotrigger, although I already have that for PS/PS2:-/
Maybe someday these can all be compiled onto a website...and that site will be posted as a story on/....and nobody will be able to read it...because the server will have died...
That's a tough one. I'd go with Diddy Kong Racing. Used to play that against co-workers at the store we worked at for hours (back when there was an N64 display model there). It's actually hard for me to pick. I guess because of the kinds of games I play. Pretty much everything I wanted to play was bad on N64. Destruction Derby for N64 was crap compared to Psygnosis' DD for PSX. No good fighting games. No good sims in general.
Can we suggest SNES games we want for Revolution? There's a ton of those...
Precisely. I remember when I was younger I stuck with video games more then a lot of my friends because they couldn't handle multiple tasks at once. I remember a couple of people would ask me to help them play games that involved mecha combat with a radar screen because they couldn't remember the pay attention to the radar and handle what was on the screen. I never understood why they had a problem with it.
Similarly I've used WinXP at work for about 3 years now, and Win2K since December of '99. Neither has given me trouble ever. No serious virii or spyware problems, no crashes, very fast...
I definately would not put down XP that much. I prefer 2K because the addons in XP are things that I have not had a need for yet, and the XP I use at work has themes and cleartype turned off (along with a few other things disabled).
Hell, I've even spent quite a bit of time on NT4 without any problems (but I wasn't looking for much hardware support just stability using standard office apps on ancient comps) and it went smoothly.
My favorite is when people make BSOD jokes. I've never gotten one in XP and only ever gotten them in Win2K when I was fiddling around with homebrew device drivers. BSOD meant something back when 9x was the most common home MS OS (aka the dark ages).
">> 7. Did I already mention that it was fast? From what I've seen, Firefox is faster under gnome, and Opera is faster under KDE. That conclusion however is from a scientific survey of two (2) users/systems."
Interesting, I actually found the opposite but I was running some very old comps. Under gnome on my old P3 700s Opera was scorching past FF but under KDE I didn't see much of a difference. Ehh, its probably something with configuration or system specs. I tend to break opera on older systems anyway because I pump up the ram cache quite a bit.
Oh thank god. Every time I try to talk about fighters people keep telling me about how much they love DOA, but it is Trash. Its a game for kiddies to look at teh b00bies.
Staying on topic with the story, I whole heartedly thank the Japanese for SFZ3, CvS2, VF4e, TTT, SoulEdge through to Soul Caliber 3, 3s, hell even MvC2 and Super Turbo.
I love the fact that this poster is claiming a proven link between a stimulus and a complex psychological behavior. "Do some actual research" is a great suggestion, that this poster needs to contemplate. Especially since the story the post links to draws a possible connection between playing video games and a general model of human behavior. Thats a link between a broad category of often qualitatively described experiences and a theory that is far from being considered applicable to even a majority, let alone to all.
At best, when examining a specific hypothesis you might be able to disprove the corresponding null hypothesis. But looking for absolute proof is just foolhearty. Especially when you deal with something like emotions that are often found to differ between cultures at a level that many casual readers don't seem to think possible.
We know so little about ourselves, our behaviors, and our emotions its startling. At this point we can do our best to figure out similar tendencies between people, but that amounts to correlation if it can be found, and not something that defines a cause-effect relationship.
And for me it comes down to personal experience. I play a lot of violent video games. I get in to them and often experienced the increased heart rate that researchers describe, but the violent tendencies aren't there before I play and they still aren't there after I play. If they were there before, I can imagine video games could increase my experience of aggressive emotions, just like some researchers believe being in an overcrowded environment (like any US city) hightens all emotional responses, be them good (feeling happy) or bad (feeling angry or violent). But they aren't there for me.
So why is there evidence that suggests a tie between video games and violence? My thought is that there are people that get a lot of pleasure out of the heightened emotional state of being very aggressive or even very angry (it gets the chemicals flowing). Once they play a game that increases these feelings, and thus the pleasure, they will naturally want to go back because the act of playing video games is a positive reinforcer.
Yeah, I doubt it'd ever 100% support a standard. Can't say as I blame them though. When a for-profit company controls the vast majority of the market, I wouldn't really expect them to change their own design goals to match rules laid down by outside parties.
So far I am enjoying the Beta. But, I was really hoping it would have some level of image resampling, for instance on downsized GIF images. I got spoiled by Opera having this, but no other browser seems to do this.
What games? I only have a few, Doom 3, Half Life 2, UT2K4, they're all multithreaded.
But, I was under the impression, and I'm not some expert, that the benchmarks showed games like these running better on processors that don't necessarily have better threading capabilities, which leaves me with the impression that while these games are multithreaded the bulk of the work still relies on only a handful or even one thread. Again, no expert so I could be totally wrong.
I know personally I love threading because I am a n00b programmer and probably will be for life since I never spend time on it, and I just started using the Allegro library to throw together something quick with graphics, and threading is insanely simple to program in that, I assume far simpler then actually implementing it on my own. On the simple stuff I do, often running multiple math functions at once on tons of data, the multi threading helps with performance a bit. I would guess better programmers would get better results and that professionals could probably turn the multiple cores or whatever of the PS3 into something pretty powerful.
Doesn't sound like they are using portable old code, so much as another bit of code has the same vulnerability. Kinda like how WINE had(or still has?) the WMF vulnerability. Not the same code, just the same kind of problem.
Hell I reinstalled Windows on a mid-range laptop from Dell. I started uninstalling crap and after about 10 minutes I decided there was just too much to bother with. Viewpoint Media Player? Microsoft Works? Who the hell uses Microsoft Works? Dell support programs that sit in the task bar and use 35 megs of ram to generate a popup once every 2 hours? It was absolutely ridiculous.
Its good to see this 30" dell at least supports HDCP. It still miffs me that the 30" Apple one doesn't. It seems like a waste not to include it since most HD TVs do. Its been a while since I've seen an update on HDCP but last I checked support for it in consumer hardware was widespread and the format was pretty well developed.
"In short, Linux is a kernel and drivers. Everything else is GNU, Apache, Mozilla, etc. The distros bundle that all together in different ways. Most people forget that fact most of the time, and it makes it easy for the unscrupulous and the incompetent to compare apples to oranges."
This brings up some key points about all these comparisons. The first time I tried to look at Linux (having no experience with it at all beforehand) I ended up frustrated at distros that required 900megs just for the install. While, at the same time, I had NT4 and could install it on my ancient PCs, my new PCs, my mac, an alpha if I had one...so it seemed to make more sense. Now that I know I can get Linux however I want it, it makes me wish I could do the same for windows just for compatibility sake.
Its possible to hack up a win2k install to be command prompt only and its requirements are tiny. If a simple gui is wanted, its possible to use the smaller explorer from NT4 to keep the performance good. But its so freaking annoying (and I'm sure license violating) to do any of this. And when you do it there are so few good command-prompt only apps for it its killed. It's like the opportunity to make a product that actually could be compared to Linux (at least on standard computer platforms) is there but completely unexplored. I guess if M$ ever did this it would become a gateway-drug into Linux usage in the end. Or maybe it'd be too complex for many of the MS certified IT "professionals" out there...
This PR stunt is a pile of crap mostly, but give a little credit. WinXP will install on a Pentium Pro 150 with 64 megs of ram and still be somewhat useable out of the box. Turn off the themes and a few other non-essential services and you can get it down to a 40 meg memory foot print from a fresh boot and it runs better then 98 would on the same machine (I used to dual boot 98 and XP on this setup at the office a while back). You just have to run the setup with the command prompt switch to disable minimum requirement checks.
And Win2K will install on a P133 with 32 megs of ram (maybe lower, but thats as low as I've run).
To get good performance with Office XP in WinXP, I've needed at least a P2 233 with 64 megs of ram.
But, on the other hand, to get decent performance out of Office XP on NT4server I've used as low as a P120 with 40 MB ram. And that NT4 could run on x86 (as low as a 486 33), alpha and Mac. Its kind of a shame they got away from focusing on different platforms in the first place...
Lower marketshare for browsers. Higher satisfaction towards Windows in general.
So many everyday computer users end up with crippled Windows systems because of IE. I think this will make people happier with Windows even if it does make them less likely to use IE.
My guess as to why any company is looking at Opera to purchase would be they want something that works, is cross-platform and is closed source. I think closed source would be a requirement for MS, and Google would definately want something proven to be successful. Opera seems to be the only for-profit company that makes a living off of its web browser.
On top of that, Opera has a lot of features in a very small package, is very fast, and very easily retooled for different uses. Its got versions for various OSes including SymbianOS and they've already had a service of quickly developing versions of their desktop software customized to individual companies. Its a very fast and flexible company thats overcome a lot of struggles.
To take that further, Windows XP can run quite nicely on P2 233s. I worked in an office full of Digital comps with P2 233s and 128megs of PC100 ram. They ran Windows XP (mostly using Office XP) quite admirably. The slowest computer I've personally used WinXP on is a Pentium Pro 233. That did not run very well at all, but it also only had 64 megs of ram.
Yeah but you can still get much better deals then this Book describes since the book is really overdoing it. XP for $100 and Office for $140 is usually possible right off newegg.
I just posted a link about this on the MCE + xbox 360 story discussion. This really does work out very well. Set this up plus grab a $10 mobile HD rack from newegg (I know the bytecc ones work well with the xbox, haven't seen any others in action) and it becomes a really easy and portable solution. Quickly copy all your fansubs to the HD, swap it into the xbox and run out the door to the con. Plus the bytecc racks have fans built in to help with the overheating although I don't know if they actually make a difference in the xbox.
I might have to pick up an XBox of my own. I've modded my Dreamcast so much there aren't any more useful mods for it (although I am still considering the PCMCIA port mod:D), and this seems to be the next step up in modding funness.
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We need Tetris The Grand Master 2 right now. Bring on the death mode!
Ico was Refreshing. I had not played a game like that before, and I greatly enjoyed it. I just wish it had been a bit longer. I love the fact that there was almost no story and no understandable dialog (until you unlock the other language at least). The main character was a child stumbling into a situation without really understanding it, and the artful way the game was created allowed the player to feel the same.
I was very pleased back when they first announced Shadow of the Colossus (I think it was called Icon? or something else similar to Ico), and the more I see of it the more hopeful I am that it will be as unique and experiential as Ico was.
Although, I do kind of wonder how good the graphics will turn out. Ico was initially under development for the PS1, not sure if it was originally exclusive to the PS1, but there sure is a lot of footage of the PS1 test versions of it. I think one of the reasons it was so stunning when it first came out (other then the artistic prowess of the designers) was that it was already being optimized for a far less powerful system. I wonder if Shadow of the Colossus can be as awe inspiring. I think it will, but I am also an optimist.
You realize he wasn't talking about an SMP machine right? He was talking about a dual core? Its a pretty big difference in performance.
Damn, I forgot Rare made that one. Come to think of it, they also made the Donkey Kong Country games and Perfect Dark, so almost all of the games I really liked for Nintendo systems. Thank god there's still chronotrigger, although I already have that for PS/PS2 :-/
Maybe someday these can all be compiled onto a website...and that site will be posted as a story on /. ...and nobody will be able to read it...because the server will have died...
That's a tough one. I'd go with Diddy Kong Racing. Used to play that against co-workers at the store we worked at for hours (back when there was an N64 display model there). It's actually hard for me to pick. I guess because of the kinds of games I play. Pretty much everything I wanted to play was bad on N64. Destruction Derby for N64 was crap compared to Psygnosis' DD for PSX. No good fighting games. No good sims in general.
Can we suggest SNES games we want for Revolution? There's a ton of those...
Precisely. I remember when I was younger I stuck with video games more then a lot of my friends because they couldn't handle multiple tasks at once. I remember a couple of people would ask me to help them play games that involved mecha combat with a radar screen because they couldn't remember the pay attention to the radar and handle what was on the screen. I never understood why they had a problem with it.
Correlation does not mean Causation.
The offenders would have their genitalia burned off as robotic arms ripped off their legs and beat them senseless with them.
Similarly I've used WinXP at work for about 3 years now, and Win2K since December of '99. Neither has given me trouble ever. No serious virii or spyware problems, no crashes, very fast...
I definately would not put down XP that much. I prefer 2K because the addons in XP are things that I have not had a need for yet, and the XP I use at work has themes and cleartype turned off (along with a few other things disabled).
Hell, I've even spent quite a bit of time on NT4 without any problems (but I wasn't looking for much hardware support just stability using standard office apps on ancient comps) and it went smoothly.
My favorite is when people make BSOD jokes. I've never gotten one in XP and only ever gotten them in Win2K when I was fiddling around with homebrew device drivers. BSOD meant something back when 9x was the most common home MS OS (aka the dark ages).
">> 7. Did I already mention that it was fast? From what I've seen, Firefox is faster under gnome, and Opera is faster under KDE. That conclusion however is from a scientific survey of two (2) users/systems."
Interesting, I actually found the opposite but I was running some very old comps. Under gnome on my old P3 700s Opera was scorching past FF but under KDE I didn't see much of a difference. Ehh, its probably something with configuration or system specs. I tend to break opera on older systems anyway because I pump up the ram cache quite a bit.
Oh thank god. Every time I try to talk about fighters people keep telling me about how much they love DOA, but it is Trash. Its a game for kiddies to look at teh b00bies. Staying on topic with the story, I whole heartedly thank the Japanese for SFZ3, CvS2, VF4e, TTT, SoulEdge through to Soul Caliber 3, 3s, hell even MvC2 and Super Turbo.
I love the fact that this poster is claiming a proven link between a stimulus and a complex psychological behavior. "Do some actual research" is a great suggestion, that this poster needs to contemplate. Especially since the story the post links to draws a possible connection between playing video games and a general model of human behavior. Thats a link between a broad category of often qualitatively described experiences and a theory that is far from being considered applicable to even a majority, let alone to all.
At best, when examining a specific hypothesis you might be able to disprove the corresponding null hypothesis. But looking for absolute proof is just foolhearty. Especially when you deal with something like emotions that are often found to differ between cultures at a level that many casual readers don't seem to think possible.
We know so little about ourselves, our behaviors, and our emotions its startling. At this point we can do our best to figure out similar tendencies between people, but that amounts to correlation if it can be found, and not something that defines a cause-effect relationship.
And for me it comes down to personal experience. I play a lot of violent video games. I get in to them and often experienced the increased heart rate that researchers describe, but the violent tendencies aren't there before I play and they still aren't there after I play. If they were there before, I can imagine video games could increase my experience of aggressive emotions, just like some researchers believe being in an overcrowded environment (like any US city) hightens all emotional responses, be them good (feeling happy) or bad (feeling angry or violent). But they aren't there for me.
So why is there evidence that suggests a tie between video games and violence? My thought is that there are people that get a lot of pleasure out of the heightened emotional state of being very aggressive or even very angry (it gets the chemicals flowing). Once they play a game that increases these feelings, and thus the pleasure, they will naturally want to go back because the act of playing video games is a positive reinforcer.
Yeah, I doubt it'd ever 100% support a standard. Can't say as I blame them though. When a for-profit company controls the vast majority of the market, I wouldn't really expect them to change their own design goals to match rules laid down by outside parties.
So far I am enjoying the Beta. But, I was really hoping it would have some level of image resampling, for instance on downsized GIF images. I got spoiled by Opera having this, but no other browser seems to do this.
What games? I only have a few, Doom 3, Half Life 2, UT2K4, they're all multithreaded.
But, I was under the impression, and I'm not some expert, that the benchmarks showed games like these running better on processors that don't necessarily have better threading capabilities, which leaves me with the impression that while these games are multithreaded the bulk of the work still relies on only a handful or even one thread. Again, no expert so I could be totally wrong.
I know personally I love threading because I am a n00b programmer and probably will be for life since I never spend time on it, and I just started using the Allegro library to throw together something quick with graphics, and threading is insanely simple to program in that, I assume far simpler then actually implementing it on my own. On the simple stuff I do, often running multiple math functions at once on tons of data, the multi threading helps with performance a bit. I would guess better programmers would get better results and that professionals could probably turn the multiple cores or whatever of the PS3 into something pretty powerful.
Doesn't sound like they are using portable old code, so much as another bit of code has the same vulnerability. Kinda like how WINE had(or still has?) the WMF vulnerability. Not the same code, just the same kind of problem.
Hell I reinstalled Windows on a mid-range laptop from Dell. I started uninstalling crap and after about 10 minutes I decided there was just too much to bother with. Viewpoint Media Player? Microsoft Works? Who the hell uses Microsoft Works? Dell support programs that sit in the task bar and use 35 megs of ram to generate a popup once every 2 hours? It was absolutely ridiculous.
Its good to see this 30" dell at least supports HDCP. It still miffs me that the 30" Apple one doesn't. It seems like a waste not to include it since most HD TVs do. Its been a while since I've seen an update on HDCP but last I checked support for it in consumer hardware was widespread and the format was pretty well developed.
"In short, Linux is a kernel and drivers. Everything else is GNU, Apache, Mozilla, etc. The distros bundle that all together in different ways. Most people forget that fact most of the time, and it makes it easy for the unscrupulous and the incompetent to compare apples to oranges."
This brings up some key points about all these comparisons. The first time I tried to look at Linux (having no experience with it at all beforehand) I ended up frustrated at distros that required 900megs just for the install. While, at the same time, I had NT4 and could install it on my ancient PCs, my new PCs, my mac, an alpha if I had one...so it seemed to make more sense. Now that I know I can get Linux however I want it, it makes me wish I could do the same for windows just for compatibility sake.
Its possible to hack up a win2k install to be command prompt only and its requirements are tiny. If a simple gui is wanted, its possible to use the smaller explorer from NT4 to keep the performance good. But its so freaking annoying (and I'm sure license violating) to do any of this. And when you do it there are so few good command-prompt only apps for it its killed. It's like the opportunity to make a product that actually could be compared to Linux (at least on standard computer platforms) is there but completely unexplored. I guess if M$ ever did this it would become a gateway-drug into Linux usage in the end. Or maybe it'd be too complex for many of the MS certified IT "professionals" out there...
This PR stunt is a pile of crap mostly, but give a little credit. WinXP will install on a Pentium Pro 150 with 64 megs of ram and still be somewhat useable out of the box. Turn off the themes and a few other non-essential services and you can get it down to a 40 meg memory foot print from a fresh boot and it runs better then 98 would on the same machine (I used to dual boot 98 and XP on this setup at the office a while back). You just have to run the setup with the command prompt switch to disable minimum requirement checks.
And Win2K will install on a P133 with 32 megs of ram (maybe lower, but thats as low as I've run).
To get good performance with Office XP in WinXP, I've needed at least a P2 233 with 64 megs of ram.
But, on the other hand, to get decent performance out of Office XP on NT4server I've used as low as a P120 with 40 MB ram. And that NT4 could run on x86 (as low as a 486 33), alpha and Mac. Its kind of a shame they got away from focusing on different platforms in the first place...
Lower marketshare for browsers.
Higher satisfaction towards Windows in general.
So many everyday computer users end up with crippled Windows systems because of IE. I think this will make people happier with Windows even if it does make them less likely to use IE.
My guess as to why any company is looking at Opera to purchase would be they want something that works, is cross-platform and is closed source. I think closed source would be a requirement for MS, and Google would definately want something proven to be successful. Opera seems to be the only for-profit company that makes a living off of its web browser.
On top of that, Opera has a lot of features in a very small package, is very fast, and very easily retooled for different uses. Its got versions for various OSes including SymbianOS and they've already had a service of quickly developing versions of their desktop software customized to individual companies. Its a very fast and flexible company thats overcome a lot of struggles.
To take that further, Windows XP can run quite nicely on P2 233s. I worked in an office full of Digital comps with P2 233s and 128megs of PC100 ram. They ran Windows XP (mostly using Office XP) quite admirably. The slowest computer I've personally used WinXP on is a Pentium Pro 233. That did not run very well at all, but it also only had 64 megs of ram.
Yeah but you can still get much better deals then this Book describes since the book is really overdoing it. XP for $100 and Office for $140 is usually possible right off newegg.
I just posted a link about this on the MCE + xbox 360 story discussion. This really does work out very well. Set this up plus grab a $10 mobile HD rack from newegg (I know the bytecc ones work well with the xbox, haven't seen any others in action) and it becomes a really easy and portable solution. Quickly copy all your fansubs to the HD, swap it into the xbox and run out the door to the con. Plus the bytecc racks have fans built in to help with the overheating although I don't know if they actually make a difference in the xbox.
:D), and this seems to be the next step up in modding funness.
I might have to pick up an XBox of my own. I've modded my Dreamcast so much there aren't any more useful mods for it (although I am still considering the PCMCIA port mod