They picked the opening sequence, which is very good, but for me the "Night of the Living Dead" bit where you're defending the house against hordes of zombies was better. And I think the Village level in Mercenary mode is best of all.
If I'm reading that legislation right then making a phone call with a pre-recorded voice (like Stephen Hawking's artificial voicebox) isn't allowed... although, to be fair, if he called me I'd assume it was someone pranking me and I'd ask how his rap career is going.
Re:And like feng shui, IT'S BULLSHIT!
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Your post was badly formatted and spelt poorly, does that mean that we should ignore what you're saying too?
Yeah, all the uberleet hardcore Viva Pinata and Barbie's Horse Adventure gamerz on Xbox 360 aren't going to play something as kiddy as Red Steel or Resident Evil Umbrella Chronicles on Wii.
Yellow Dog Linux is coming out for the PS3. Buying one and using it exclusively as a linux PC would work pretty well if you want to cost Sony some cash. And FreeCiv is probably better than most of the launch games.:)
"On one hand, they demand that economies cut reliance on fossil fuels, and on the other hand, they malign the only clean alternative that is available now. They can't have it both ways. Choose one or the other. And if you can't choose, shut the fsck up."
Um, classical environmentalists want option 3: use less power.
Mind you, I consider myself an environmentalist and have nothing against nuclear power, so long as it's reasonably safe and cheap.
Don't forget you could also be getting a DS, PSP, Gameboy Micro/SP, PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, or new graphics card, unless you already have them. The gaming market is going to be very crowded soon, with two generations of each Sony/MS/Nintendo home consoles all getting at least the odd new release and plentiful second hand for the older gen, and three sucessful handhelds plus the PC. That's 10 platforms, up from 5 three years ago.
You don't have to play the voice recognition part of the game (apart from once or twice on a new save). Once you unlock more tests you can choose which to play when finding you brain age, so you can just ignore the broken Stroop test. It's a flaw but it's not a show stopper, there are enough other modes to keep my family busy with the game.
It is pretty weird that they shipped the game with this mode featured so prominently though.
Many films are largely CGI now. Getting good focus on King Kong doesn't need a lens. If the lifelike virtual actor thing ever works out then we could remove those pesky photons from the equation entirely.
Perhaps it's not as hard as I thought then. Still, they'd have to work out a server browser and do extra, more complicated testing. I'm not sure they'd bother, it's not like people won't buy Smash Brothers 64 just because it doesn't have online...
Well, for a NES era game, I'd have said $2 for most with perhaps the very best (SMB3, FF) costing more.
As for hosting and bandwidth, NES games are only a few hundred kilobytes, i.e. a couple of webpages. They could put a banner ad on the download page and cover that entirely. It's nothing. They're hosting video files on their pages right now that use more bandwidth than selling NES games ever will.
They could use a premium number for tech support and recoup that cost in call charges.
Online play is very doubtful, that's really hard to do with an emulator. Online games need to be coded for latency, a classic ROM isn't.
So, all your points amount to nothing. Developing an emulator and testing are their real costs.
Check out Nildram, the UK ISP with a Pay As You Go plan. Low free with free voice calls, 8Mbit DSL, 2.5 gig transfer per month, £1 per extra gigabyte.
Now THAT's a reasonable ISP business model that doesn't involve lying to your customers. Plus, if you do that then people like me who want to max their connections with a torrent every night won't even sign up.
Yes. I know. That's why I said that developers would have to do two controller setups, make every game support 1 and 2 analog stick play so people with the old PSP can still play the games, using the same controller setups as they already have been.
And adding it as a nunchuck peripheral obviously wouldn't have this problem.
The PS1 went from no thumbsticks to 2 during its lifespan, so introducing another on the PSP isn't impossible. It doesn't splinter the market, it just means developers have to mess about supporting two different control configurations with their games.
They could perhaps even add a Wii-style nunchuck attached via the USB port, though I'm not sure how comfortable holding the PSP one-handed is.
There are millions of more useful science-related things to be learning about, and universities are complaining that their intake of science students doesn't know enough science. Skip the fluffy stuff and teach them Feynman diagrams or special relativity - cool, mindbending physics that will get kids interested in science for its own sake. What we don't need is more of the cult-of-personality that surrounds many scientists. Science is fundamentally independent of people, this is something that often seems to be misunderstood.
Yes, I know you don't control the curriculum and this post is pointless; I just think it has to be said.
There are two Square launch games on that list. I don't think Nintendo has any interest in messing with Square. And I don't think Square would put out Dragon Quest out at the same time as Final Fantasy.
Of course, it's a lot more likely that the Dragon Quest game is a launch game in Japan but not elsewhere - they've had FF12 for ages, and localisation takes time. In fact, the article doesn't say anything about which territories the games launch in, so before you get excited remember that we can probably expect a slightly cut down list - although most of the games seem to be Western.
Interestingly, the BBC website has plenty of coverage of the case but doesn't mention this vital fact. I thought they were better than that.
You're quite right about piracy. I would have no reservations whatsoever in warezing a game I couldn't get legally anyway, and would probably make a point of distributing it to any less connected friends just to show them what the government considers worth banning. If I thought it was genuinely unjustified I might even leave some CD-Rs in, say, the local pub:)
Board games, sports, pen-and-paper RPGs, pinball and other carnival games are all clear ancestors of computer games, or at least several of the genres. Pong was an attempt at making tennis!
"The entire gaming industry hasn't come up with anything new since Wolfenstein 3d. How many times can I run through a dark hallway and blast an alien/terrorist?"
Considering that Wolfenstein 3D didn't even have a lighting system, and therefore no dark hallways, I think you've just disproved your own "never anything new" point. They added dark hallways.
Yeah, and Metal Slug 3D looks worse than the 2D ones. My actual point was that 2D graphics have limitations that 3D graphics don't - 2D graphics are really a subset of 3D graphics so that makes sense.
And yes, I apologise, you can have 2D vector graphics.
"Look at Resident Evil and Resident Evil Zero on the GameCube and tell me that their engine wouldn't be perfect for an adventure game. The backgrounds are 2D, but the 3D models blend into them perfectly, and the graphics are quite stunning." Haven't played them so I can't really comment. I remember it being pretty easy to tell what was 3D and what was 2D in the PS1 Resi games. It's a good point rhough - Resident Evil games (pre Resi 4) are basically adventure games with extra zombies. The genre seems less dead the more you think about it.
"An alternate solution would be a fully 3D engine with fixed camera angles, which would far more flexible than having pre-rendered backgrounds, and would allow for things like dynamic lighting." Absolutely. Lots of games do this to great effect, e.g. Ikaruga, Alien Swarm for UT2004. The OP was complaining about realtime rendering full stop, not 3D gameplay.
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They picked the opening sequence, which is very good, but for me the "Night of the Living Dead" bit where you're defending the house against hordes of zombies was better. And I think the Village level in Mercenary mode is best of all.
If I'm reading that legislation right then making a phone call with a pre-recorded voice (like Stephen Hawking's artificial voicebox) isn't allowed...
although, to be fair, if he called me I'd assume it was someone pranking me and I'd ask how his rap career is going.
Your post was badly formatted and spelt poorly, does that mean that we should ignore what you're saying too?
Yeah, all the uberleet hardcore Viva Pinata and Barbie's Horse Adventure gamerz on Xbox 360 aren't going to play something as kiddy as Red Steel or Resident Evil Umbrella Chronicles on Wii.
All consoles have kid stuff and grown up stuff.
Yellow Dog Linux is coming out for the PS3. Buying one and using it exclusively as a linux PC would work pretty well if you want to cost Sony some cash. :)
And FreeCiv is probably better than most of the launch games.
An article that complains about buzzword compliance yet finishes with the phrase:
"Welcome to the games industry, version 2.0."
I was almost fooled for a minute...
"On one hand, they demand that economies cut reliance on fossil fuels, and on the other hand, they malign the only clean alternative that is available now. They can't have it both ways. Choose one or the other. And if you can't choose, shut the fsck up."
Um, classical environmentalists want option 3: use less power.
Mind you, I consider myself an environmentalist and have nothing against nuclear power, so long as it's reasonably safe and cheap.
Sir, as a layabout whose sole owned tool is a bottle opener, let me assure you that this saying is untrue. More's the pity.
"This part of your post got me thinking. How exactly would you check performance?"
That's easy. Frags per minute.
Don't forget you could also be getting a DS, PSP, Gameboy Micro/SP, PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, or new graphics card, unless you already have them. The gaming market is going to be very crowded soon, with two generations of each Sony/MS/Nintendo home consoles all getting at least the odd new release and plentiful second hand for the older gen, and three sucessful handhelds plus the PC. That's 10 platforms, up from 5 three years ago.
You don't have to play the voice recognition part of the game (apart from once or twice on a new save).
Once you unlock more tests you can choose which to play when finding you brain age, so you can just ignore the broken Stroop test. It's a flaw but it's not a show stopper, there are enough other modes to keep my family busy with the game.
It is pretty weird that they shipped the game with this mode featured so prominently though.
Many films are largely CGI now. Getting good focus on King Kong doesn't need a lens.
If the lifelike virtual actor thing ever works out then we could remove those pesky photons from the equation entirely.
Perhaps it's not as hard as I thought then. Still, they'd have to work out a server browser and do extra, more complicated testing. I'm not sure they'd bother, it's not like people won't buy Smash Brothers 64 just because it doesn't have online...
Well, for a NES era game, I'd have said $2 for most with perhaps the very best (SMB3, FF) costing more.
As for hosting and bandwidth, NES games are only a few hundred kilobytes, i.e. a couple of webpages. They could put a banner ad on the download page and cover that entirely. It's nothing. They're hosting video files on their pages right now that use more bandwidth than selling NES games ever will.
They could use a premium number for tech support and recoup that cost in call charges.
Online play is very doubtful, that's really hard to do with an emulator. Online games need to be coded for latency, a classic ROM isn't.
So, all your points amount to nothing. Developing an emulator and testing are their real costs.
Check out Nildram, the UK ISP with a Pay As You Go plan. Low free with free voice calls, 8Mbit DSL, 2.5 gig transfer per month, £1 per extra gigabyte.
Now THAT's a reasonable ISP business model that doesn't involve lying to your customers. Plus, if you do that then people like me who want to max their connections with a torrent every night won't even sign up.
Yes. I know. That's why I said that developers would have to do two controller setups, make every game support 1 and 2 analog stick play so people with the old PSP can still play the games, using the same controller setups as they already have been.
And adding it as a nunchuck peripheral obviously wouldn't have this problem.
The PS1 went from no thumbsticks to 2 during its lifespan, so introducing another on the PSP isn't impossible. It doesn't splinter the market, it just means developers have to mess about supporting two different control configurations with their games.
They could perhaps even add a Wii-style nunchuck attached via the USB port, though I'm not sure how comfortable holding the PSP one-handed is.
There are millions of more useful science-related things to be learning about, and universities are complaining that their intake of science students doesn't know enough science. Skip the fluffy stuff and teach them Feynman diagrams or special relativity - cool, mindbending physics that will get kids interested in science for its own sake. What we don't need is more of the cult-of-personality that surrounds many scientists. Science is fundamentally independent of people, this is something that often seems to be misunderstood.
Yes, I know you don't control the curriculum and this post is pointless; I just think it has to be said.
There are two Square launch games on that list. I don't think Nintendo has any interest in messing with Square. And I don't think Square would put out Dragon Quest out at the same time as Final Fantasy.
Of course, it's a lot more likely that the Dragon Quest game is a launch game in Japan but not elsewhere - they've had FF12 for ages, and localisation takes time.
In fact, the article doesn't say anything about which territories the games launch in, so before you get excited remember that we can probably expect a slightly cut down list - although most of the games seem to be Western.
Well, if you repaired whatever damage occurred to turn the cells cancerous you could recover the original dog!
Try doing that with bacteria.
(I Am Not A Biologist, so this is quite likely a stupid idea)
In the "Manhunt" case it was the victim who played the game.
:)
source
Interestingly, the BBC website has plenty of coverage of the case but doesn't mention this vital fact. I thought they were better than that.
You're quite right about piracy. I would have no reservations whatsoever in warezing a game I couldn't get legally anyway, and would probably make a point of distributing it to any less connected friends just to show them what the government considers worth banning. If I thought it was genuinely unjustified I might even leave some CD-Rs in, say, the local pub
"Computer games have nothing to draw from."
Board games, sports, pen-and-paper RPGs, pinball and other carnival games are all clear ancestors of computer games, or at least several of the genres. Pong was an attempt at making tennis!
"The entire gaming industry hasn't come up with anything new since Wolfenstein 3d. How many times can I run through a dark hallway and blast an alien/terrorist?"
Considering that Wolfenstein 3D didn't even have a lighting system, and therefore no dark hallways, I think you've just disproved your own "never anything new" point. They added dark hallways.
Yeah, I know, hyperbole...
Yeah, and Metal Slug 3D looks worse than the 2D ones. My actual point was that 2D graphics have limitations that 3D graphics don't - 2D graphics are really a subset of 3D graphics so that makes sense.
And yes, I apologise, you can have 2D vector graphics.
"Look at Resident Evil and Resident Evil Zero on the GameCube and tell me that their engine wouldn't be perfect for an adventure game. The backgrounds are 2D, but the 3D models blend into them perfectly, and the graphics are quite stunning."
Haven't played them so I can't really comment. I remember it being pretty easy to tell what was 3D and what was 2D in the PS1 Resi games. It's a good point rhough - Resident Evil games (pre Resi 4) are basically adventure games with extra zombies. The genre seems less dead the more you think about it.
"An alternate solution would be a fully 3D engine with fixed camera angles, which would far more flexible than having pre-rendered backgrounds, and would allow for things like dynamic lighting."
Absolutely. Lots of games do this to great effect, e.g. Ikaruga, Alien Swarm for UT2004. The OP was complaining about realtime rendering full stop, not 3D gameplay.