Re:Total Revolution - flame on
on
Wii-mote In Action
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm nearly as sold on the Wii as the original poster. I spent over four hours playing games on it at E3 and enjoyed the heck out of the experience. Overall, I was more impressed with the 360 and PS3, but the Wii was fun, and it will be cheap. More importantly, it will be a system my daughter will love and that we will be able to play together. The chance of the PS3 or 360 having a good lineup of games a four-year old can enjoy seems very slim. I haven't decided yet between the 360 and PS3 (lots will depend on if I get a free system for reviews), but the Wii is a definite buy. Now, as far as the games so far...Excite Truck is awesome, Red Steel was great in the FPS portions and not-so-great in the swordplay, Tony Hawk sucked, Mario was okay, Metroid was good, but didn't benefit much from the wii-mote controls, I loved the horse racing game (name's escaping me at the moment), the sports titles were a blast (especially tennis), Madden was blah (and I sucked at it). I guess Excite Truck was the biggest surprise. The controller worked great for that one.
It certainly wasn't simply the old school gamers growing up. The videogame market is absolutely huge compared to what it was before the crash. Back then, videogames, though they made a lot of money, were still a niche hobby. Now, they are pretty much mainstream. I don't give Microsoft a lot of credit though. It is Sony who has led the industry for two straight generations (and an entire decade), something never done before.
"Any class can do anything at the cost of a feat or cross class skill - This option almost completely dissolves the class archetypes that were once a staple of fantasy roleplaying games."
I can't comment on your other concerns because I haven't actually played 3E D&D (heck, I haven't played any edition D&D in nearly 20 years);however, I disagree that the softening of archetypes is a bad thing. I always found it frustrating that characters were so locked into a particular class with basic D&D and later AD&D and 2nd edition. I suppose it makes sense that a seventy-year old mage wouldn't be able to swing a sword deftly, but I see no reason that a young mage couldn't possibly have physical skills to allow him to be great in combat or a muscle-bound fighter to be smart enough to learn some spells. I appreciated the dual-class options from 2nd Edition (were those there in 1st also?) and often played a fighter-mage or other combo.
You won't see that in the US. The prices for PC and console games tend to be identical no matter where you are shopping. If Best Buy has it for 50.00, you can bet it is 50.00 everywhere else. Walmart does tend to have more in the way of loss-leader pricing for DVDs than the competitors, but I've never seen a videogame as a loss-leader in a Wal-mart or any other retailer. Now, where Wal-mart can really save the PC-game fan money is with the late-adopters. Wal-mart seems to discount PC games heavily much sooner than EB or Best Buy. Half-life 2 original edition was 29.99 at Wal-mart for three months before our other local stores reduced it.
Let's see. I'm a huge Lem fan, but I would put the following US writers ahead of him on the list of great speculative fiction writers:
Harlan Ellison (enormous body of great short stories)
Philip K. Dick (Man in the High Castle, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, Valis)
Gene Wolfe (New Sun, Fifth Head of Cerberus)
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Slaughterhouse Five, Player Piano, Cat's Cradle)
Richard Matheson (I am Legend)
Dan Simmons (Hyperion Cantos)
>"How do you convince people who want to spend ~$500 on a PC to spend $1500?"
Well, apparently, Microsoft feels that you do it by making Halo 2 a Vista exclusive. Of course, anyone that hyped for Halo 2 PC probably has a "gaming" pc already capable of running Vista. Everyone else could just buy an Xbox for 100 bucks from a local VG store. The only way I'm getting Vista myself is if the college I teach for buys it for us. That has happened before with upgrades (WinNT), so it might happen again, but I wonder how much it will cost to get just our labs up to running Vista, much less have money left over to upgrade everyone's personal systems.
Nothing new here? Could you please point me to the earlier game that let you evolve a single-celled organism into a sentient being and then take the created race out into a universe populated by beings created by other users.
Really? You are opposed to a living language? If it wasn't for the evolution of meaning and usage throughout a language's history, we would have a much less vibrant and effective language. If it means that something like "irony" loses its specific meaning and becomes a catch-all term for odd interactions of expectation and reality, it is a small (though annoying) price to pay. However, I'll agree with you that the coining of words and phrases in area-specific jargon is much less jarring for this linguist than the period of adjustment to new usage of words with perfectly good, commonly understood meanings.
It works brilliantly in Firefox 1.5.0.1. I just realized that I no longer have Opera installed on any of my PCs. It was my browser of choice for a while, but the Firefox extensions have simply made my browsing faster and more friendly.
I use my PSP for browsing when I'm on the road (well, in hotels, airports and such) and it is great. However, the clam-shell case, touch pad, dual monitors, and fast power-on of the DS should make it a better device if, and only if, the system is powerful enough to run a browser with a good selection of common extensions.
Oh, I can imagine the like--you should see some of the documentation styles my students still try to use, but you need to look back at the post I was replying to. I've had things turned in in most of the formats you've mentioned and other obscure formats, but it was the Works files that failed to open in OO.org in the past two years. Mostly people have stopped with the other weird stuff over the past half decade when computers dropped to "everyone can afford them" prices. My first batch of students in the early 90's were using Brother typewriter/word processor combos and the like, but I didn't allow students back then to turn in floppy copies--it was hard copy only back then.
Yep the Works files are the problem. Even MS Office can't open some of the Works versions! I ask the students to Save As.. Word 97 or html (or WP 5.1 if their program doesn't support the others). I have dozens of word processors on my PII 300 in the garage (which at one time was my main computer for class work) and all of them but a few, including Works versions from 95-2002, have the ability to save as older Word and WordPerfect files. Unless someone is still running a DOS box, they should be able to save as one of those files. Heck, I'm running Word Perfect 5.1 on my only remaining DOS box, so I have a computer from the early 90's that allows me to meet the class requirements. Admittedly though, I'm not sure about the popular Linux WPs. I've only used the OO.org that is included with the Knoppix Live CD (or, maybe DSL).
As far as formatting goes, I'll forgive some formatting errors as long as they don't obscure the intent of the student's writing. Online courses are still a relatively new phenomenon and I try to remain flexible.
I've been using OpenOffice.org for my primary work office suite for over three years now and I'm very, very happy with it. I have students that turn things in in the most obscure, dated formats imaginable and I've only had, maybe, six or seven times out of say 1000 assignments that I wasn't able to open the file and work with it. Of course, if students just understood how to do a "Save as.." command, I wouldn't have to worry about it.
I was up all night playing Day of Defeat: Source and hadn't set Lost Coast to pre-load. Can't wait to get home to give it a try (after waiting an hour for the download). My gaming computer is now only in the mid/high-low range of power, but DoD runs great with HDR in effect. Valve said LC would give much more of a hit though, so I'm not sure how it will play on my box.
Anyone know?
P4 2.4 ghz
256 Meg Radeon 9600 Pro
1 gig memory
I think we can assume that, as it always does in marketing numbers, "below X" means a penny below X--so $399.99 seems to be the figure in question. That lines up with the Xbox's real version, so I would not be surprise to see this rumour play out.
As a literature professor, let me say...you are partially correct. The writing in P:T was at least on par with most mainstream "pop" novels and maybe a little better. I don't, however, feel you need to enter the "Classics" section of the bookstore to find better writing. Still, since "most" books are crap (just as most of every genre is crap), you are right to say that P:T is better than most books.
I'm not sure a couple of missions meets his definition, but you're right, I forgot those. My memory card was corrupted half-way through the game and I had to replay the whole thing while enormously pissed off. I've apparently blocked the whole game out of my mind.
"Ok, so here's a big one. Why is it that half the games on the market begin with your character as the sole survivor of some mysterious holocaust?"
Hey, I've got an answer for him...they don't. Using hyperbole like this to establish an argument when there are actual real issues that could be discussed is simply bad writing. There are many ways to see that this is a straw man argument.
An examination of the past year's releases and the upcoming year's releases shows how lame this argument is.
Of the Top 10 releases of 2004, none involve a character who is the "sole survivor of some holocaust." Actually, none are close, though we almost got a holocaust in Halo 2 and we likely will in Halo 3:
1. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PS2) - 5.1 million
2. Halo 2 (Xbox) - 4.2 million
3. Madden NFL 2005 (PS2) - 3.2 million
4. ESPN NFL 2K5 (PS2) - 1.5 million
5. Need for Speed Underground 2 (PS2) - 1.4 million
6. Pokémon FireRed (with adapter) (GBA) - 1.2 million
7. NBA Live 2005 (PS2) - 1.2 million
8. Spider-Man 2 (PS2) - 1.1 million
9. Halo: Combat Evolved (Xbox) - 1.1 million
10. ESPN NFL 2K5 (Xbox)- 1.0 million
(Note: I'm not interested in his other points at the moment, but it doesn't look like jiggly boobs and a cinematic experience hurt GTA sales all that much and I'm not sure that any of the other titles included T&A. Heck, less than half of them featured a "hero" as the main character. GTA, and arguably the Halo games, feature an anti-hero. The sports games don't focus on a single character, nor do the racing games. So, only Halo, Halo 2, Spiderman, and Pokemon have the player playing as a hero. Only GTA features T&A. Only GTA, Spider-man, and the Halo games feature cinematic cut scenes. Of those, only the Halo games commit his sin of being, God forbid, Epic. I'm not aware that any of the games have you getting captured half-way through the game and having to recover your weapons. I've played lots of games that had you do that back in the 90's. I don't think I've played a single one on the current consoles, but I might be forgetting something.)
Additionally, here is a list of the upcoming releases on the PS2 as previewed by one of the major video game sites. I have marked the ones that don't feature a solo hero in a post-holocaust setting.
Jak X: Combat Racing****
Ratchet: Deadlocked****
World Poker Tour 2K6****
Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks****
The Sims 2****
The Incredibles: Rise of the Underminer****
Tak: The Great Juju Challenge****
Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood****
Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers****
True Crime: New York City****
Driver: Parallel Lines****
X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse****
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire****
Heroes of the Pacific****
Ultimate Spider-Man****
World Racing 2****
Gene Troopers
DT Racer****
S.L.A.I. -Steel Lancer Arena International-****
Knights of the Temple 2****
Radiata Stories****
Conflict: Global Terror****
One Piece Grand Battle!****
EyeToy: Kinetic****
Ponkotsu Roman Daikatsugeki Bumpy Trot****
Evil Dead Regeneration
Pac-Man World 3****
World Series of Poker****
Ryu Ga Gotoku****
Shining Force Neo****
Guitar Hero****
NASCAR 06: Total Team Control****
StarCraft: Ghost
Black
24: The Game****
James Bond 007: From Russia With Love****
Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves****
Aeon Flux
Fatal Frame III: The Tormented****
Trapt****
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe****
I immediately thought Diceland also, though Diceland is not collectable. All the sets can be bought for less than $50.00 total and it is a blast. I wrote a review of it when it first came out. Check it out here.
http://www.armchairempire.com/Miscellaneous/dicela nd.htm
Slashdot Mirror
I'm nearly as sold on the Wii as the original poster. I spent over four hours playing games on it at E3 and enjoyed the heck out of the experience. Overall, I was more impressed with the 360 and PS3, but the Wii was fun, and it will be cheap. More importantly, it will be a system my daughter will love and that we will be able to play together. The chance of the PS3 or 360 having a good lineup of games a four-year old can enjoy seems very slim. I haven't decided yet between the 360 and PS3 (lots will depend on if I get a free system for reviews), but the Wii is a definite buy. Now, as far as the games so far...Excite Truck is awesome, Red Steel was great in the FPS portions and not-so-great in the swordplay, Tony Hawk sucked, Mario was okay, Metroid was good, but didn't benefit much from the wii-mote controls, I loved the horse racing game (name's escaping me at the moment), the sports titles were a blast (especially tennis), Madden was blah (and I sucked at it). I guess Excite Truck was the biggest surprise. The controller worked great for that one.
It certainly wasn't simply the old school gamers growing up. The videogame market is absolutely huge compared to what it was before the crash. Back then, videogames, though they made a lot of money, were still a niche hobby. Now, they are pretty much mainstream. I don't give Microsoft a lot of credit though. It is Sony who has led the industry for two straight generations (and an entire decade), something never done before.
"Any class can do anything at the cost of a feat or cross class skill - This option almost completely dissolves the class archetypes that were once a staple of fantasy roleplaying games." I can't comment on your other concerns because I haven't actually played 3E D&D (heck, I haven't played any edition D&D in nearly 20 years);however, I disagree that the softening of archetypes is a bad thing. I always found it frustrating that characters were so locked into a particular class with basic D&D and later AD&D and 2nd edition. I suppose it makes sense that a seventy-year old mage wouldn't be able to swing a sword deftly, but I see no reason that a young mage couldn't possibly have physical skills to allow him to be great in combat or a muscle-bound fighter to be smart enough to learn some spells. I appreciated the dual-class options from 2nd Edition (were those there in 1st also?) and often played a fighter-mage or other combo.
You won't see that in the US. The prices for PC and console games tend to be identical no matter where you are shopping. If Best Buy has it for 50.00, you can bet it is 50.00 everywhere else. Walmart does tend to have more in the way of loss-leader pricing for DVDs than the competitors, but I've never seen a videogame as a loss-leader in a Wal-mart or any other retailer. Now, where Wal-mart can really save the PC-game fan money is with the late-adopters. Wal-mart seems to discount PC games heavily much sooner than EB or Best Buy. Half-life 2 original edition was 29.99 at Wal-mart for three months before our other local stores reduced it.
Let's see. I'm a huge Lem fan, but I would put the following US writers ahead of him on the list of great speculative fiction writers: Harlan Ellison (enormous body of great short stories) Philip K. Dick (Man in the High Castle, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, Valis) Gene Wolfe (New Sun, Fifth Head of Cerberus) Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Slaughterhouse Five, Player Piano, Cat's Cradle) Richard Matheson (I am Legend) Dan Simmons (Hyperion Cantos)
>"How do you convince people who want to spend ~$500 on a PC to spend $1500?" Well, apparently, Microsoft feels that you do it by making Halo 2 a Vista exclusive. Of course, anyone that hyped for Halo 2 PC probably has a "gaming" pc already capable of running Vista. Everyone else could just buy an Xbox for 100 bucks from a local VG store. The only way I'm getting Vista myself is if the college I teach for buys it for us. That has happened before with upgrades (WinNT), so it might happen again, but I wonder how much it will cost to get just our labs up to running Vista, much less have money left over to upgrade everyone's personal systems.
Nothing new here? Could you please point me to the earlier game that let you evolve a single-celled organism into a sentient being and then take the created race out into a universe populated by beings created by other users.
Really? You are opposed to a living language? If it wasn't for the evolution of meaning and usage throughout a language's history, we would have a much less vibrant and effective language. If it means that something like "irony" loses its specific meaning and becomes a catch-all term for odd interactions of expectation and reality, it is a small (though annoying) price to pay. However, I'll agree with you that the coining of words and phrases in area-specific jargon is much less jarring for this linguist than the period of adjustment to new usage of words with perfectly good, commonly understood meanings.
It works brilliantly in Firefox 1.5.0.1. I just realized that I no longer have Opera installed on any of my PCs. It was my browser of choice for a while, but the Firefox extensions have simply made my browsing faster and more friendly.
I use my PSP for browsing when I'm on the road (well, in hotels, airports and such) and it is great. However, the clam-shell case, touch pad, dual monitors, and fast power-on of the DS should make it a better device if, and only if, the system is powerful enough to run a browser with a good selection of common extensions.
Oh, I can imagine the like--you should see some of the documentation styles my students still try to use, but you need to look back at the post I was replying to. I've had things turned in in most of the formats you've mentioned and other obscure formats, but it was the Works files that failed to open in OO.org in the past two years. Mostly people have stopped with the other weird stuff over the past half decade when computers dropped to "everyone can afford them" prices. My first batch of students in the early 90's were using Brother typewriter/word processor combos and the like, but I didn't allow students back then to turn in floppy copies--it was hard copy only back then.
Yep the Works files are the problem. Even MS Office can't open some of the Works versions! I ask the students to Save As.. Word 97 or html (or WP 5.1 if their program doesn't support the others). I have dozens of word processors on my PII 300 in the garage (which at one time was my main computer for class work) and all of them but a few, including Works versions from 95-2002, have the ability to save as older Word and WordPerfect files. Unless someone is still running a DOS box, they should be able to save as one of those files. Heck, I'm running Word Perfect 5.1 on my only remaining DOS box, so I have a computer from the early 90's that allows me to meet the class requirements. Admittedly though, I'm not sure about the popular Linux WPs. I've only used the OO.org that is included with the Knoppix Live CD (or, maybe DSL).
As far as formatting goes, I'll forgive some formatting errors as long as they don't obscure the intent of the student's writing. Online courses are still a relatively new phenomenon and I try to remain flexible.
I've been using OpenOffice.org for my primary work office suite for over three years now and I'm very, very happy with it. I have students that turn things in in the most obscure, dated formats imaginable and I've only had, maybe, six or seven times out of say 1000 assignments that I wasn't able to open the file and work with it. Of course, if students just understood how to do a "Save as.." command, I wouldn't have to worry about it.
I was up all night playing Day of Defeat: Source and hadn't set Lost Coast to pre-load. Can't wait to get home to give it a try (after waiting an hour for the download). My gaming computer is now only in the mid/high-low range of power, but DoD runs great with HDR in effect. Valve said LC would give much more of a hit though, so I'm not sure how it will play on my box.
Anyone know?
P4 2.4 ghz 256 Meg Radeon 9600 Pro 1 gig memory
I think we can assume that, as it always does in marketing numbers, "below X" means a penny below X--so $399.99 seems to be the figure in question. That lines up with the Xbox's real version, so I would not be surprise to see this rumour play out.
There is already a Nethack port...been around for months.
http://psp-news.dcemu.co.uk/nethackpsp.shtml
I got a little tear in my eye when I read the Peter Jackson/Halo story.
As a literature professor, let me say...you are partially correct. The writing in P:T was at least on par with most mainstream "pop" novels and maybe a little better. I don't, however, feel you need to enter the "Classics" section of the bookstore to find better writing. Still, since "most" books are crap (just as most of every genre is crap), you are right to say that P:T is better than most books.
I'm not sure a couple of missions meets his definition, but you're right, I forgot those. My memory card was corrupted half-way through the game and I had to replay the whole thing while enormously pissed off. I've apparently blocked the whole game out of my mind.
Hey, I've got an answer for him...they don't. Using hyperbole like this to establish an argument when there are actual real issues that could be discussed is simply bad writing. There are many ways to see that this is a straw man argument. An examination of the past year's releases and the upcoming year's releases shows how lame this argument is. Of the Top 10 releases of 2004, none involve a character who is the "sole survivor of some holocaust." Actually, none are close, though we almost got a holocaust in Halo 2 and we likely will in Halo 3:
(Note: I'm not interested in his other points at the moment, but it doesn't look like jiggly boobs and a cinematic experience hurt GTA sales all that much and I'm not sure that any of the other titles included T&A. Heck, less than half of them featured a "hero" as the main character. GTA, and arguably the Halo games, feature an anti-hero. The sports games don't focus on a single character, nor do the racing games. So, only Halo, Halo 2, Spiderman, and Pokemon have the player playing as a hero. Only GTA features T&A. Only GTA, Spider-man, and the Halo games feature cinematic cut scenes. Of those, only the Halo games commit his sin of being, God forbid, Epic. I'm not aware that any of the games have you getting captured half-way through the game and having to recover your weapons. I've played lots of games that had you do that back in the 90's. I don't think I've played a single one on the current consoles, but I might be forgetting something.)
Additionally, here is a list of the upcoming releases on the PS2 as previewed by one of the major video game sites. I have marked the ones that don't feature a solo hero in a post-holocaust setting.
I immediately thought Diceland also, though Diceland is not collectable. All the sets can be bought for less than $50.00 total and it is a blast. I wrote a review of it when it first came out. Check it out here. http://www.armchairempire.com/Miscellaneous/dicela nd.htm