Yeah, I was definitely feeling the Little Prince vibe, especially with the storybook. I've never read the WHOLE story of Little Prince, but I've read most of it, and I saw a theatrical version of it once that was very good (the "drinking man" scene was especially well portrayed). But yeah, I thought to myself, they must have read The Little Prince while creating the dramatic elements for Mario Galaxy, but now that I think about it, it's not hard to believe that they simply ended up on a parallel route.
Woot! I currently live up here, and though I'm planning on moving out of state, I'll probably come back up here every year or so to visit family. Alaska Airlines has always been on of the best in the country, as far as service goes, glad to see them leading the way with this as well.
Two choices on there are practically the worst music in the series: Sonic and Metroid.
First off, Metroid Prime 2: Title Theme is, far and away, the worst title music in the series out of a series of incredible themes. Metroid Prime 1's title music was amazing, and half the tracks in that game make my top 30 list of game music, but Echo's music and title music was horrendous, and sounded like a bad attempt at recapturing the glory of the original.
Second, I've heard the comment about Chemical Plant in Sonic, and I don't get it. That music is obnoxious as hell, and seeing that the first 3 games have a number of killer hits, why that one? Green Hill, Scrap Brain, Starlight, and Special Stage from the first title, are absolutely stunning. The Ice stage from the third is amazing, I really can't remember ANYTHING from the second game, but the Chemical Plant sticks out as incredibly obnoxious.
Some must-have game music:
Metroid: Lower Norfair / Magmoor Caverns - Timeless Mega Man 2: Flash Man stage - Deep Purple and Metallica put to shame by an NES synth Everything from Final Fantasy 6, 8, and 9 Chrono Trigger main theme Castlevania: Symphony of the Night title theme - I've never played the game, and even *I* know how awesome that is.
I agree. Now, the P-Wing had a limiter on it, after the level, it would turn into a normal racoon suit, and the Tenuki suit wasn't ALL that rape-o-licious. But the Bee suit isn't that rape-o-licious either. It has limited height and range, even less than racoon or cape (I didn't like the cape, I would have prefered the racoon in SMW, there was something more crazy about being a flying racoon, how cool is that?) But, also, there are lots of black holes in Galaxy, if you fly too high or too low, you're going to get sucked into one. Ghost Mario would have been a bit much since it can fly forever.
Thanks for clearing that up. I knew that SMB3 has about 70 levels (since each of the 8 worlds has a minimum of 7-13 levels, including castles and airship), it felt like SMW was expanded by about 50%, but maybe that was in the level length, not number. I was simply guessing.
OF COURSE I've played FF6 and FF7. FF6 made me choke up a few times (Celes' attempted suicide being a highlight), but FF7 never really got to me. I prefer FF8 and 9 to 7, actually, I just think they had a better sense of drama and much better characterization, I never could connect with anyone in 7.
But surprisingly, TP got to me even more. The drama was sparce, but when it was there, it was pretty heavy. I think they did an even better job of timing and presentation, that when they hit you with something, it hit both harder and more subtly than the Final Fantasy series does (nothing against the FF series, it's one of my favorites).
Compared to English, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic... French is pretty low. Look, I love French, I chose to take French back in HS because I love the language, but on a world scale of prevolence... French is the OS/2 of languages.
Ahhh... that's pretty much was I was hoping for, and why I think that Preview becomes clumsy for multi-page documents: it treated every page like a completely separate file. Now that they tie them all together, I have no more use for Reader. Good Bye.
Mario Galaxy draws on Mario 3 so much, and possibly because it tries so hard to be new and creative. With Mario 64, it was everything the team could do to make a game in 3D that still had some semblence of being a Mario (and whether they succeeded is still up for grabs), but there wasn't a whole lot of room for just laid-back, comfortable, experimentation. Something went wrong with Mario Sunshine, and I don't know exactly what, so I won't dwell on it. But Mario Galaxy... the guys just seem, comfortable, in their elements. They've already figured out the technical side of the equation, so now it's just sitting back and saying, "hey, wouldn't it be neat if we did ____!" That's really what made Mario 3 so great, every level was a fresh, new, inspired little world where you just couldn't help but saying, "that's really neat!" I mean, you had one level where you bounced around on flying beatles, and they would rise every time you jumped on them... that's it... one level, onto the next neat idea. You had another with platforms that would move in different directions every time you jumped on them.
I got the exact same vibe from Galaxy. You have one level (later one), where they entire level sort of melts in and out, as if there are some kind of cosmic spotlings, and any place they don't shine on, DOESN'T EXIST! How crazy and neat is that?! Or a conveyerbelt filled with holes, that you have to jump around.
Not only did it feel like the process was similar to Mario 3, I think it was obvious to the creators that there was a connection. The game practically begins with a re-arrangement of the Mario 3 airship music, in full 40-piece symphonic glory! And there were a few other Mario 3 musical references too, as well as some design similarities.
My only gripe with the game was the "suits". Mario 3 had, hands down, the greatest powerups in the series: Racoon, Tanuki, Eureka Shoe, Frog, and Hammer Bros, and so many of them were "secret". Mario Galaxy fell on it's ass with powerups. Not only were two of the suits a nightmare to control (Bee and Spring), but the times you could use them were completely regimented, and required. What was great about Mario 3 was that the suits could be used anywhere, so holding onto one suit through a few levels allowed you to do things, in other levels, that you wouldn't normally expect. In a castle, where there were nothing but fire flowers, if you had held onto a racoon suit, you could fly up to a secret area. In a lake with nothing but feathers, you could swim into a hidden cave with the frog suit. In Mario Galaxy, the suits are simply there to complete a certain given task for that level, and it feels really forced. It was even worse with Mario 64, but they were so incredibly minor, it didn't even really matter anyway.
All-in-all, hands down, best 3D Mario game. Mario 3 may still remain my favorite Mario, but Galaxy sits right up there with it and Mario World. Twilight Princess was able to knock out it's 2D and 3D counterparts for FAVORITE GAME OF ALL TIME, but I was suprised that Mario Galaxy could also do so well for me.
Please tell me you've seen the videos of Snake talking about various Smash Bros characters. I especially love his lude remarks about Samus's Zero Suit, or his reactions to Wario's farts. I'm just thrilled to see that Kojima has allowed Sakuria to turn his hard-boiled character into one big joke:
Twilight Princess was the first Zelda that made me cry (possibly the first GAME that made me tear up). Super Paper Mario had a similar effect (even though the game, as a whole, wasn't quite as good), and Mario Galaxy's story book totally got to me. The storybook probably solidified Galaxy as my favorite Mario game... it just brought everything together, from an emotional standpoint, even if the rest of the game wasn't so dramatic, the storybook supplied that side of it, and that was enough. Not to mention, it was an amazing storybook. It seems like a story written for adults to feel like a children's story, but with all the depth of emotion required for adult enjoyment. I got a similar feeling from the game ICO, or from the story in Super Paper Mario.
On other things, one thing that Mario 64 really back-treaded with was the number of levels. More levels = more different types of gaming styles. Here's Mario 3 and Super Mario World with 70+ and 120+ levels, all with their own unique style and gameplay gimmicks. Then there's Mario 64, with maybe 12 levels. You find yourself repeating yourself a lot, and for little reason. Obviously, the reason was because 3D levels are infinitely more complex, require more space on a cartridge, and more time in the design process. Now, with DVDs, it's possible to have many levels, and the design teams have learned how to make 3D levels as efficiently as they had with 2D levels. That's one of the main reasons why Mario Galaxy starts to feel more like Mario 3 or Mario World. I really missed having lots of little levels, each with it's own style, and not spending hours playing one level over and over again, on different "missions". With about 40 levels, Mario Galaxy just feels more like Mario 3 than almost any other game.
Re:That is pretty sensitive....
on
PDF Is Now ISO 32000
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Actually, he's making a joke about high-speed film (ISO in photography refers to the light-sensitivity of film, as standardized by the ISO council). Film with a high ISO rating is very "fast" which means that it can shoot in very dimly lit situations.
32000 ISO, however, is fucking insane. You could pick up big-bang background noise with that shit!
Thankfully, QuickTime (the app) is practically pointless on a Mac, since the whole fucking operating system can work with MOV files just fine. cheapo, 3rd party freeware can work with QT files just fine, as all they do is operating system calls. The only thing QuickTime "PRO" is good for, is that it's still my choice for encoding to H.264 MOVs. Unfortunately, for all you Windows users out there (which includes myself when I'm at work), we're FUCKED, because QuickTime Player is one of the only programs out there that you can play MOVs on. Apple should make a really really great version of QuickTime Player for windows, and just fucking burn QT Player for Mac, it's almost completely pointless now.
I will admit, though, that while Preview is great for small documents, it's not very well setup for long multi-page documents. Reader is better at navigating lengthy documents.
However, I have yet to try Preview out on Leopard, which may have very well become just as good at navigating epic PDFs.
Re:PDF is nice, but Acrobat ain't
on
PDF Is Now ISO 32000
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Mac OS Preview isn't a PDF reader... Mac OS X is! Preview is, like, about 20 lines of code, considering that the entire PDF format is built into Core Image... or should I say: Core Image is built completely around PDF.
+5 for Adobe +1 for Apple -5 for Microsoft -10 for Amazon (sorry Kindle, you're fucked)
How about charging the sender $0.01 for every email that's never opened. That way, spammers risk a HUGE number of people catching the trap and not opening their email. It wouldn't be worth it to advertise in that fashion, because you lose more than you make (spam requires 10s of thousands of emails to be effective, if 90% of those are unopened, than you risk losing over a hundred dollars on a scheme that might make you $50 on a good day)
The point isn't that iPods and other players don't have the power to decode Oggs (hell, they all do video, which is in a whole 'nother league), but more processing power sucks up more juice, and that's pretty crucial for portable devices. And we're talking about QUITE A BIT more battery power... like a 25% loss in consumption. Most people will trade the small decrease in sound quality just for that, even before we talk about it's widespread use.
Ogg, no... but seeing as though some 80% of all consumer portable music players are iPods, I think AAC is pretty well supported. Also seeing that Zune's and most other music players also support AAC, you could say that AAC is practically about as supported as MP3 nowadays.
Actually, I would say that wma's are more like English (since it's such a clunky language), but it just happens that everyone uses mp3s, which is like French... more streamlined, but hardly anyone speaks it.
Oggs take up more processing power, which means that they drain more power on portables = less battery life. MP3s and AACs (prefered), are less complicated algorythms, which means that, yes, they're a little larger, but they drain much less battery power when in use.
Boy, I really need to read/hear more Dawkins. I caught a pretty interesting lecture of his on youtube on certain aspects of socio-political evolution (namely, the evolution of biggotry) that fascinated me. I've also heard many quotes of his that seem spot on. It strikes me that he's probably one of the most important liberal philosophers of our time, next to Noam Chomsky. I was at Barnes & Nobel a few weeks ago, and the woman sitting next to me at the fireplace was reading this religious propoganda book, "The Dawkins Dillusion", and it seems that fundimentalists are truly scared of the guy... which means he's probably someone I should look into.
Strangely enough, the older I get, the more I've come to terms with religious people, and the more Athiestic I become. I used to call myself an agnostic, but I realize now that I wasn't being true to my actual beliefs, which are essentially humanistic.
Point well taken. But the fact is, it's INCREDIBLY difficult to try to convince people of something that conflicts with their underlying dogma. The only thing these kinds of arguments are good for is mental excercise, and maybe, if you're lucky, an understanding (but not agreement) of another philosophy... which is a good place to start.
Has anyone in the history of humanity ever been out-debated into changing their beliefs?
If it's unprovabal, it's not science, and therefor, has no place in the schoolroom. Evolution is a proven theory. A "proven theory" is the closest thing science has EVER come to "fact" (good scientists don't believe in "facts", because everything has at least SOME chance of being false).
I love the fact that ID people argue that evolution is just a "theory", "and even scientists call it that." All well and good, until you realize that "gravity" is also considered a theory.
What is taught as science, is what can be proven, substantially. It's like court. No convict, in the history of the human race, has ever been proven to be 100% guilty, there's always that SLIGHT chance that something unexplainable happened. But that's why we use the phrase "proven beyond reasonable doubt". Both gravity and evolution are provable beyond a reasonable doubt. Now, the details involving evolution may be still a bit rough, but the FUNDIMENTAL CONCEPT has never been disproven, and has been proven countless times. (I love it when ID people act as if the entire concept of evolution is under speculation, simply because scientists aren't quite sure of the details)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I was definitely feeling the Little Prince vibe, especially with the storybook. I've never read the WHOLE story of Little Prince, but I've read most of it, and I saw a theatrical version of it once that was very good (the "drinking man" scene was especially well portrayed). But yeah, I thought to myself, they must have read The Little Prince while creating the dramatic elements for Mario Galaxy, but now that I think about it, it's not hard to believe that they simply ended up on a parallel route.
Woot! I currently live up here, and though I'm planning on moving out of state, I'll probably come back up here every year or so to visit family. Alaska Airlines has always been on of the best in the country, as far as service goes, glad to see them leading the way with this as well.
Two choices on there are practically the worst music in the series: Sonic and Metroid.
First off, Metroid Prime 2: Title Theme is, far and away, the worst title music in the series out of a series of incredible themes. Metroid Prime 1's title music was amazing, and half the tracks in that game make my top 30 list of game music, but Echo's music and title music was horrendous, and sounded like a bad attempt at recapturing the glory of the original.
Second, I've heard the comment about Chemical Plant in Sonic, and I don't get it. That music is obnoxious as hell, and seeing that the first 3 games have a number of killer hits, why that one? Green Hill, Scrap Brain, Starlight, and Special Stage from the first title, are absolutely stunning. The Ice stage from the third is amazing, I really can't remember ANYTHING from the second game, but the Chemical Plant sticks out as incredibly obnoxious.
Some must-have game music:
Metroid: Lower Norfair / Magmoor Caverns - Timeless
Mega Man 2: Flash Man stage - Deep Purple and Metallica put to shame by an NES synth
Everything from Final Fantasy 6, 8, and 9
Chrono Trigger main theme
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night title theme - I've never played the game, and even *I* know how awesome that is.
I agree. Now, the P-Wing had a limiter on it, after the level, it would turn into a normal racoon suit, and the Tenuki suit wasn't ALL that rape-o-licious. But the Bee suit isn't that rape-o-licious either. It has limited height and range, even less than racoon or cape (I didn't like the cape, I would have prefered the racoon in SMW, there was something more crazy about being a flying racoon, how cool is that?) But, also, there are lots of black holes in Galaxy, if you fly too high or too low, you're going to get sucked into one. Ghost Mario would have been a bit much since it can fly forever.
Thanks for clearing that up. I knew that SMB3 has about 70 levels (since each of the 8 worlds has a minimum of 7-13 levels, including castles and airship), it felt like SMW was expanded by about 50%, but maybe that was in the level length, not number. I was simply guessing.
OF COURSE I've played FF6 and FF7. FF6 made me choke up a few times (Celes' attempted suicide being a highlight), but FF7 never really got to me. I prefer FF8 and 9 to 7, actually, I just think they had a better sense of drama and much better characterization, I never could connect with anyone in 7.
But surprisingly, TP got to me even more. The drama was sparce, but when it was there, it was pretty heavy. I think they did an even better job of timing and presentation, that when they hit you with something, it hit both harder and more subtly than the Final Fantasy series does (nothing against the FF series, it's one of my favorites).
Compared to English, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic... French is pretty low. Look, I love French, I chose to take French back in HS because I love the language, but on a world scale of prevolence... French is the OS/2 of languages.
Ahhh... that's pretty much was I was hoping for, and why I think that Preview becomes clumsy for multi-page documents: it treated every page like a completely separate file. Now that they tie them all together, I have no more use for Reader. Good Bye.
Mario Galaxy draws on Mario 3 so much, and possibly because it tries so hard to be new and creative. With Mario 64, it was everything the team could do to make a game in 3D that still had some semblence of being a Mario (and whether they succeeded is still up for grabs), but there wasn't a whole lot of room for just laid-back, comfortable, experimentation. Something went wrong with Mario Sunshine, and I don't know exactly what, so I won't dwell on it. But Mario Galaxy... the guys just seem, comfortable, in their elements. They've already figured out the technical side of the equation, so now it's just sitting back and saying, "hey, wouldn't it be neat if we did ____!" That's really what made Mario 3 so great, every level was a fresh, new, inspired little world where you just couldn't help but saying, "that's really neat!" I mean, you had one level where you bounced around on flying beatles, and they would rise every time you jumped on them... that's it... one level, onto the next neat idea. You had another with platforms that would move in different directions every time you jumped on them.
I got the exact same vibe from Galaxy. You have one level (later one), where they entire level sort of melts in and out, as if there are some kind of cosmic spotlings, and any place they don't shine on, DOESN'T EXIST! How crazy and neat is that?! Or a conveyerbelt filled with holes, that you have to jump around.
Not only did it feel like the process was similar to Mario 3, I think it was obvious to the creators that there was a connection. The game practically begins with a re-arrangement of the Mario 3 airship music, in full 40-piece symphonic glory! And there were a few other Mario 3 musical references too, as well as some design similarities.
My only gripe with the game was the "suits". Mario 3 had, hands down, the greatest powerups in the series: Racoon, Tanuki, Eureka Shoe, Frog, and Hammer Bros, and so many of them were "secret". Mario Galaxy fell on it's ass with powerups. Not only were two of the suits a nightmare to control (Bee and Spring), but the times you could use them were completely regimented, and required. What was great about Mario 3 was that the suits could be used anywhere, so holding onto one suit through a few levels allowed you to do things, in other levels, that you wouldn't normally expect. In a castle, where there were nothing but fire flowers, if you had held onto a racoon suit, you could fly up to a secret area. In a lake with nothing but feathers, you could swim into a hidden cave with the frog suit. In Mario Galaxy, the suits are simply there to complete a certain given task for that level, and it feels really forced. It was even worse with Mario 64, but they were so incredibly minor, it didn't even really matter anyway.
All-in-all, hands down, best 3D Mario game. Mario 3 may still remain my favorite Mario, but Galaxy sits right up there with it and Mario World. Twilight Princess was able to knock out it's 2D and 3D counterparts for FAVORITE GAME OF ALL TIME, but I was suprised that Mario Galaxy could also do so well for me.
Please tell me you've seen the videos of Snake talking about various Smash Bros characters. I especially love his lude remarks about Samus's Zero Suit, or his reactions to Wario's farts. I'm just thrilled to see that Kojima has allowed Sakuria to turn his hard-boiled character into one big joke:
http://www.smashbros.com/en_us/stages/stage13.html
Twilight Princess was the first Zelda that made me cry (possibly the first GAME that made me tear up). Super Paper Mario had a similar effect (even though the game, as a whole, wasn't quite as good), and Mario Galaxy's story book totally got to me. The storybook probably solidified Galaxy as my favorite Mario game... it just brought everything together, from an emotional standpoint, even if the rest of the game wasn't so dramatic, the storybook supplied that side of it, and that was enough. Not to mention, it was an amazing storybook. It seems like a story written for adults to feel like a children's story, but with all the depth of emotion required for adult enjoyment. I got a similar feeling from the game ICO, or from the story in Super Paper Mario.
On other things, one thing that Mario 64 really back-treaded with was the number of levels. More levels = more different types of gaming styles. Here's Mario 3 and Super Mario World with 70+ and 120+ levels, all with their own unique style and gameplay gimmicks. Then there's Mario 64, with maybe 12 levels. You find yourself repeating yourself a lot, and for little reason. Obviously, the reason was because 3D levels are infinitely more complex, require more space on a cartridge, and more time in the design process. Now, with DVDs, it's possible to have many levels, and the design teams have learned how to make 3D levels as efficiently as they had with 2D levels. That's one of the main reasons why Mario Galaxy starts to feel more like Mario 3 or Mario World. I really missed having lots of little levels, each with it's own style, and not spending hours playing one level over and over again, on different "missions". With about 40 levels, Mario Galaxy just feels more like Mario 3 than almost any other game.
Actually, he's making a joke about high-speed film (ISO in photography refers to the light-sensitivity of film, as standardized by the ISO council). Film with a high ISO rating is very "fast" which means that it can shoot in very dimly lit situations. 32000 ISO, however, is fucking insane. You could pick up big-bang background noise with that shit!
Thankfully, QuickTime (the app) is practically pointless on a Mac, since the whole fucking operating system can work with MOV files just fine. cheapo, 3rd party freeware can work with QT files just fine, as all they do is operating system calls. The only thing QuickTime "PRO" is good for, is that it's still my choice for encoding to H.264 MOVs. Unfortunately, for all you Windows users out there (which includes myself when I'm at work), we're FUCKED, because QuickTime Player is one of the only programs out there that you can play MOVs on. Apple should make a really really great version of QuickTime Player for windows, and just fucking burn QT Player for Mac, it's almost completely pointless now.
I will admit, though, that while Preview is great for small documents, it's not very well setup for long multi-page documents. Reader is better at navigating lengthy documents.
However, I have yet to try Preview out on Leopard, which may have very well become just as good at navigating epic PDFs.
Mac OS Preview isn't a PDF reader... Mac OS X is! Preview is, like, about 20 lines of code, considering that the entire PDF format is built into Core Image... or should I say: Core Image is built completely around PDF.
+5 for Adobe
+1 for Apple
-5 for Microsoft
-10 for Amazon (sorry Kindle, you're fucked)
How about charging the sender $0.01 for every email that's never opened. That way, spammers risk a HUGE number of people catching the trap and not opening their email. It wouldn't be worth it to advertise in that fashion, because you lose more than you make (spam requires 10s of thousands of emails to be effective, if 90% of those are unopened, than you risk losing over a hundred dollars on a scheme that might make you $50 on a good day)
The point isn't that iPods and other players don't have the power to decode Oggs (hell, they all do video, which is in a whole 'nother league), but more processing power sucks up more juice, and that's pretty crucial for portable devices. And we're talking about QUITE A BIT more battery power... like a 25% loss in consumption. Most people will trade the small decrease in sound quality just for that, even before we talk about it's widespread use.
Ogg, no... but seeing as though some 80% of all consumer portable music players are iPods, I think AAC is pretty well supported. Also seeing that Zune's and most other music players also support AAC, you could say that AAC is practically about as supported as MP3 nowadays.
Actually, I would say that wma's are more like English (since it's such a clunky language), but it just happens that everyone uses mp3s, which is like French... more streamlined, but hardly anyone speaks it.
Oggs take up more processing power, which means that they drain more power on portables = less battery life. MP3s and AACs (prefered), are less complicated algorythms, which means that, yes, they're a little larger, but they drain much less battery power when in use.
I did, didn't I? :(
Boy, I really need to read/hear more Dawkins. I caught a pretty interesting lecture of his on youtube on certain aspects of socio-political evolution (namely, the evolution of biggotry) that fascinated me. I've also heard many quotes of his that seem spot on. It strikes me that he's probably one of the most important liberal philosophers of our time, next to Noam Chomsky. I was at Barnes & Nobel a few weeks ago, and the woman sitting next to me at the fireplace was reading this religious propoganda book, "The Dawkins Dillusion", and it seems that fundimentalists are truly scared of the guy... which means he's probably someone I should look into.
Strangely enough, the older I get, the more I've come to terms with religious people, and the more Athiestic I become. I used to call myself an agnostic, but I realize now that I wasn't being true to my actual beliefs, which are essentially humanistic.
Actually, one argument is that you are impeding on God's intellectual property.
Point well taken. But the fact is, it's INCREDIBLY difficult to try to convince people of something that conflicts with their underlying dogma. The only thing these kinds of arguments are good for is mental excercise, and maybe, if you're lucky, an understanding (but not agreement) of another philosophy... which is a good place to start.
Has anyone in the history of humanity ever been out-debated into changing their beliefs?
If it's unprovabal, it's not science, and therefor, has no place in the schoolroom. Evolution is a proven theory. A "proven theory" is the closest thing science has EVER come to "fact" (good scientists don't believe in "facts", because everything has at least SOME chance of being false).
I love the fact that ID people argue that evolution is just a "theory", "and even scientists call it that." All well and good, until you realize that "gravity" is also considered a theory.
What is taught as science, is what can be proven, substantially. It's like court. No convict, in the history of the human race, has ever been proven to be 100% guilty, there's always that SLIGHT chance that something unexplainable happened. But that's why we use the phrase "proven beyond reasonable doubt". Both gravity and evolution are provable beyond a reasonable doubt. Now, the details involving evolution may be still a bit rough, but the FUNDIMENTAL CONCEPT has never been disproven, and has been proven countless times. (I love it when ID people act as if the entire concept of evolution is under speculation, simply because scientists aren't quite sure of the details)