I remember reading your original post and found it intriguing, great to see some feedback after it's all said and done. Anyways, I would love to see some pictures! I skimmed through your write up and found many of it interesting (I'll read it completely tonight) but I would love to see some images of your completed work. Maybe I missed a link or something though.
That made me incredibly angry. Asmodean was one of my favorite characters, you never quite knew what is true intentions were. I think Jordan killed him off way too quickly and after I finished that book, I went online looking for answers and just found pages and pages of speculation with the only quote from Jordan saying "someone got it right." and that's that.
I could almost say the same thing about Robert Jordan and his books, so I am pretty pleased with Sanderson being appointed if you can say that about him.
Maybe not everyone agrees with me, and I've only read the first six books of the series, but even if the story is relatively dull throughout the novel, the last 10% is usually pretty awesome. Jordan usually just has Rand sitting on his hands for 500 some odd pages and then suddenly turns him into a monster for the last 100. I made it through the sixth book because my coworker promised me it had an explosive ending, and it did (haha, explosive was an accidental pun there, seriously).
I've enjoyed the Final Fantasy series quite a bit over the series. I'm no fanboy of the games but a few of them have interesting characters and a semi-decent plot. Others have pretty fun gameplay, unfortunately these don't meet very often in the series, but a lot of them are worth playing. I even enjoyed FFX-2 simply for the hyper fast battle system and the classes available (yes, you can turn off the magic dress changing sequences). I think my favorite of the bunch is FFX, a solid story and some very fun gameplay that's been ripped off a bunch since. I think my least favorite may well be FFXI, as that left me with a very bad taste in my mouth that I can still gag up every once in a while.
I'm sure this series will still be around in twenty years, but they'll probably only be on something like FF17 by then considering the development cost and times on these games is consistently near the highs of the industry. Twelve mainline games in twenty years seems awfully quick looking back.
Chrono Cross does rock, the opening song is great, I really like the song Orphan of Flame though from that game. I can't find any videos or anything featuring it though.
I also like the last five or six songs of Final Fantasy VIII. The score really came together there in some epic songs. I like the rest of the soundtrack too, but the climax is great.
I also like To Zanarkand, the opening piano song from Final Fantasy X, and the Hymn of the Faith, a great little piece that is redone many times throughout the game in different voices (low bass to soprano).
Chrono Trigger also features a great soundtrack all around, very memorable for me.
I'm into a lot of other soundtracks besides just Square games, but those have really stood out for me over my gaming/listening career. A few others of note are Katamari Damacy, Symphony of the Night, and Halo.
When I first saw the words "Crowdsourcing Software Development" it reminded me of the coding practices of the Federal Government in Snow Crash, where Y.T.'s mother worked on a tiny piece of code with no idea of what she was actually contributing to. Basically the coders would each handle one function and know nothing of the whole. Entire departments probably wouldn't even know what they were working on as the contracts were huge and the projects enormous. It was a cool concept (actually that whole chapter on Y.T.'s mom was a great read), just hope it never pans out.
This article seems nothing like that though... just a short stream of consciousness.
This has cost the USPS an extra 42 million dollars over the last two years and they're just complaining about the floppy edges now? It seems odd that this wasn't brought up a long time ago considering Netflix relies on the USPS for distribution and not keeping them happy means not keeping their customers happy. Seems like USPS could have just said, "See this no floppy edges on the Blockbuster envelopes? Do it like that. Now." 42 million dollars is a rather large wake up call.
While I agree that Firefox has its many flaws (it still fails to render ACID properly You may be interested in knowing that Firefox 3 (alpha public build) passes the Acid2 test. I checked it out for myself when I first downloaded the browser and here's some other random site detailing it.
Half-Life 2 (etc.) has some awesome levels. Lately I've been playing Psychonauts and the level design in that game is amazing. Basically the concept of the game is that you're jumping into different people's brains and experiencing and fixing things that are going wrong. The game starts out with a linear go here to here brain but then starts introducing some amazing designs.
Some of my favorite levels that I've played so far are: A giant war board game! The game places you in a room with two people playing a hexagonal board game, one of them is Napoleon so you have to help the less skilled player. You jump in the board game and are teleported down to the board where you can run around at the size of the buildings and playing pieces. Then you can go down even further and experience the level as if you were a real person on the board. The levels are very seamless and you can jump between them easily. Very fun level to play.
Another level has you jumping into the mind of a giant fish, where the main character is basically Godzilla. All the fish inhabitants of are yelling up at you as you crush their buildings and squash their tanks (you just crushed an orphanage Goggolor!).
Well, those are just two out of something like 15 levels, not sure, still haven't finished it! What's great is that each level is varied in setting and general gameplay.
Ken Levine was the project director on Bioshock and was also the lead designer on some of the Thief and System Shock games. I wish we knew more about what happened during development that ticked off so many developers, but at least 2K was able to recognize their talent and seemingly devotion to the series that they're letting them continue.
But why should someone later in life be punished because they weren't motivated enough when they were young? I think it's great that they're encouraging their students to go to school. Why should high school C students receiving a diploma cheapen your degree? If they went to college and graduated, they earned exactly what they're given.
No, the game is not directed towards kids. I would say kids could play it, but it's kinda like a darker Shrek movie where all the really funny jokes fly right over the kids' heads. About the graphics, I thought they were really good, though I don't own any next gen systems or a PC. I guess I really enjoyed the art style.
I started playing Psychonauts this weekend (on the original Xbox) and my God, is that a great game. I used to play Monkey Island and Full Throttle when I was younger so I don't know why I ignored this game for so long. Everything about it is awesome. Great graphics, great voice acting, great story, amazing level design. I put in about 12 hours this weekend and had to struggle to stop last night. I seriously have to recommend this game to just about everyone. Right now it's free on Gametap through the end of the year but you can also find it on Steam and now Xbox Live. I bought a copy from a friend for cheap and it's been worth every penny.
You're never too young to learn on your DS either. Taco seems to think it'd be funny if she scored a good brain age, but why the heck not let her try? All of us grew up seeing Game Boys and Nintendos as basically toys. It'd be great if the next generation saw them as learning devices along with entertainment devices.
Not only that but you can buy all the games that stoolpigeon recommended and then put them on the R4 so you never have to worry about your daughter losing any of her games. But maybe she's more responsible than a 23 year old "adult" and she won't have that problem (if anyone sees my Mario Kart, let me know).
Best Buy has zero loyalty. That's basically a fact. You may do great work, you may be super nice, but if they're looking for a scapegoat or someone to take a fall, you will go down.
I don't know what else to say about this matter except if you haven't yet, head over to BestBuySux.org...
Wait, what the heck? That site is now owned by Best Buy or some related PR company? Tis a sad day that so many great stories are gone.
I think Bioware is trying to do this with Mass Effect, as it's a planned trilogy and choices in the first game will affect things in the second and third game. Don't know how that will actually turn out but I don't really have high hopes, it just seems way too complex. But I suppose if a character dies out in the first game they shouldn't be around later on, but someone else may keep them around all the way through. Should be interesting when it's all said and done.
Speaking of Valve, they just released a ton of player stats on Episode 2, pointing out how long people played, where they died, etc. This was all in very broad terms, but imagine if they did something similar to moral decisions. Say in Episode 3 you have the choice to save Alyx but something else really bad happens to a lot more people, or you save the world but Alyx has to die. Now Valve would keep track of whether or not you saved Alyx the first time through, and then release the stats to everyone. I think this would be very interesting to look at.
Seeing as you seem to be involved with the HTML 5 proposal, could you explain this line from the FAQ to me:
When will HTML 5 be finished? It is estimated that HTML5 will reach a W3C recommendation in the year 2022 or later. This will be approximately 18-20 years of development, since beginning in mid-2004.
Funny you bring up Hormel and them being "cool" with spam, considering a five year legal battle just finished in the last week between Hormel and Spam Arrest.
Not sure if they're actually being cool about it now, but their actions in the past are biting them in the butt now.
I bought a Wii at launch and sold it about a month later to my brother-in-law on the cheap because he wanted one. At the time I really don't think I made a mistake, and I still mostly agree with that. Until Mario Galaxy came out, there were absolutely zero games I was interested in. I played through Zelda and put tons of hours into Wii Sports with family and friends, good fun and all, but what has come out since then? Metroid and Mario basically. Maybe Zack and Wiki but I don't really know anything about that. I played the first hour of Metroid and though it was a great deviation from the Metroid-norm, it still didn't do much for me.
But Mario is out now and Super Smash Bros. Brawl will be out in a couple of months. Everyone says Mario is awesome and I put something like 2000 hours into Smash Bros. Melee so all of a sudden I'm thinking maybe it was a mistake? Not sure, but one or two games aren't really enough for me to rebuy a system, so it'll probably be a while until I actually pick up another Wii. I still have tons of last generation games to play though, and my DS, so I'll manage.
I played Jet Force Gemini last week perfectly on the latest stable release of Project 64. Widescreen worked just fine and the sound worked a lot better than on ePSXe.
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I remember reading your original post and found it intriguing, great to see some feedback after it's all said and done. Anyways, I would love to see some pictures! I skimmed through your write up and found many of it interesting (I'll read it completely tonight) but I would love to see some images of your completed work. Maybe I missed a link or something though.
That made me incredibly angry. Asmodean was one of my favorite characters, you never quite knew what is true intentions were. I think Jordan killed him off way too quickly and after I finished that book, I went online looking for answers and just found pages and pages of speculation with the only quote from Jordan saying "someone got it right." and that's that.
I could almost say the same thing about Robert Jordan and his books, so I am pretty pleased with Sanderson being appointed if you can say that about him.
Maybe not everyone agrees with me, and I've only read the first six books of the series, but even if the story is relatively dull throughout the novel, the last 10% is usually pretty awesome. Jordan usually just has Rand sitting on his hands for 500 some odd pages and then suddenly turns him into a monster for the last 100. I made it through the sixth book because my coworker promised me it had an explosive ending, and it did (haha, explosive was an accidental pun there, seriously).
I've enjoyed the Final Fantasy series quite a bit over the series. I'm no fanboy of the games but a few of them have interesting characters and a semi-decent plot. Others have pretty fun gameplay, unfortunately these don't meet very often in the series, but a lot of them are worth playing. I even enjoyed FFX-2 simply for the hyper fast battle system and the classes available (yes, you can turn off the magic dress changing sequences). I think my favorite of the bunch is FFX, a solid story and some very fun gameplay that's been ripped off a bunch since. I think my least favorite may well be FFXI, as that left me with a very bad taste in my mouth that I can still gag up every once in a while.
I'm sure this series will still be around in twenty years, but they'll probably only be on something like FF17 by then considering the development cost and times on these games is consistently near the highs of the industry. Twelve mainline games in twenty years seems awfully quick looking back.
Chrono Cross does rock, the opening song is great, I really like the song Orphan of Flame though from that game. I can't find any videos or anything featuring it though.
I also like the last five or six songs of Final Fantasy VIII. The score really came together there in some epic songs. I like the rest of the soundtrack too, but the climax is great.
I also like To Zanarkand, the opening piano song from Final Fantasy X, and the Hymn of the Faith, a great little piece that is redone many times throughout the game in different voices (low bass to soprano).
Chrono Trigger also features a great soundtrack all around, very memorable for me.
I'm into a lot of other soundtracks besides just Square games, but those have really stood out for me over my gaming/listening career. A few others of note are Katamari Damacy, Symphony of the Night, and Halo.
When I first saw the words "Crowdsourcing Software Development" it reminded me of the coding practices of the Federal Government in Snow Crash, where Y.T.'s mother worked on a tiny piece of code with no idea of what she was actually contributing to. Basically the coders would each handle one function and know nothing of the whole. Entire departments probably wouldn't even know what they were working on as the contracts were huge and the projects enormous. It was a cool concept (actually that whole chapter on Y.T.'s mom was a great read), just hope it never pans out.
This article seems nothing like that though... just a short stream of consciousness.
This has cost the USPS an extra 42 million dollars over the last two years and they're just complaining about the floppy edges now? It seems odd that this wasn't brought up a long time ago considering Netflix relies on the USPS for distribution and not keeping them happy means not keeping their customers happy. Seems like USPS could have just said, "See this no floppy edges on the Blockbuster envelopes? Do it like that. Now." 42 million dollars is a rather large wake up call.
http://ajaxian.com/archives/firefox-30-passes-acid-2-css-test
Half-Life 2 (etc.) has some awesome levels. Lately I've been playing Psychonauts and the level design in that game is amazing. Basically the concept of the game is that you're jumping into different people's brains and experiencing and fixing things that are going wrong. The game starts out with a linear go here to here brain but then starts introducing some amazing designs.
Some of my favorite levels that I've played so far are:
A giant war board game! The game places you in a room with two people playing a hexagonal board game, one of them is Napoleon so you have to help the less skilled player. You jump in the board game and are teleported down to the board where you can run around at the size of the buildings and playing pieces. Then you can go down even further and experience the level as if you were a real person on the board. The levels are very seamless and you can jump between them easily. Very fun level to play.
Another level has you jumping into the mind of a giant fish, where the main character is basically Godzilla. All the fish inhabitants of are yelling up at you as you crush their buildings and squash their tanks (you just crushed an orphanage Goggolor!).
Well, those are just two out of something like 15 levels, not sure, still haven't finished it! What's great is that each level is varied in setting and general gameplay.
Ken Levine was the project director on Bioshock and was also the lead designer on some of the Thief and System Shock games. I wish we knew more about what happened during development that ticked off so many developers, but at least 2K was able to recognize their talent and seemingly devotion to the series that they're letting them continue.
But why should someone later in life be punished because they weren't motivated enough when they were young? I think it's great that they're encouraging their students to go to school. Why should high school C students receiving a diploma cheapen your degree? If they went to college and graduated, they earned exactly what they're given.
No, the game is not directed towards kids. I would say kids could play it, but it's kinda like a darker Shrek movie where all the really funny jokes fly right over the kids' heads. About the graphics, I thought they were really good, though I don't own any next gen systems or a PC. I guess I really enjoyed the art style.
I started playing Psychonauts this weekend (on the original Xbox) and my God, is that a great game. I used to play Monkey Island and Full Throttle when I was younger so I don't know why I ignored this game for so long. Everything about it is awesome. Great graphics, great voice acting, great story, amazing level design. I put in about 12 hours this weekend and had to struggle to stop last night. I seriously have to recommend this game to just about everyone. Right now it's free on Gametap through the end of the year but you can also find it on Steam and now Xbox Live. I bought a copy from a friend for cheap and it's been worth every penny.
You're never too young to learn on your DS either. Taco seems to think it'd be funny if she scored a good brain age, but why the heck not let her try? All of us grew up seeing Game Boys and Nintendos as basically toys. It'd be great if the next generation saw them as learning devices along with entertainment devices.
Not only that but you can buy all the games that stoolpigeon recommended and then put them on the R4 so you never have to worry about your daughter losing any of her games. But maybe she's more responsible than a 23 year old "adult" and she won't have that problem (if anyone sees my Mario Kart, let me know).
Best Buy has zero loyalty. That's basically a fact. You may do great work, you may be super nice, but if they're looking for a scapegoat or someone to take a fall, you will go down.
I don't know what else to say about this matter except if you haven't yet, head over to BestBuySux.org...
Wait, what the heck? That site is now owned by Best Buy or some related PR company? Tis a sad day that so many great stories are gone.
Sorry I started my post with an assumption like that, he must have only read that and jumped the gun.
I think Bioware is trying to do this with Mass Effect, as it's a planned trilogy and choices in the first game will affect things in the second and third game. Don't know how that will actually turn out but I don't really have high hopes, it just seems way too complex. But I suppose if a character dies out in the first game they shouldn't be around later on, but someone else may keep them around all the way through. Should be interesting when it's all said and done.
Speaking of Valve, they just released a ton of player stats on Episode 2, pointing out how long people played, where they died, etc. This was all in very broad terms, but imagine if they did something similar to moral decisions. Say in Episode 3 you have the choice to save Alyx but something else really bad happens to a lot more people, or you save the world but Alyx has to die. Now Valve would keep track of whether or not you saved Alyx the first time through, and then release the stats to everyone. I think this would be very interesting to look at.
Seeing as you seem to be involved with the HTML 5 proposal, could you explain this line from the FAQ to me:
When will HTML 5 be finished?
It is estimated that HTML5 will reach a W3C recommendation in the year 2022 or later. This will be approximately 18-20 years of development, since beginning in mid-2004.
http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#When_will_HTML_5_be_finished.3F
That seems like a really long time for something like this to go through, even for something as massive as the web standard.
Here you go:
http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/kanelynchdeadmen/review.html
I browsed through ten pages of scores which seemed to be about 200 user scores... there were only four that were not 1.0
Not sure what Gamespot or the PR people were thinking when they did this. Glad to see it is backfiring though.
Funny you bring up Hormel and them being "cool" with spam, considering a five year legal battle just finished in the last week between Hormel and Spam Arrest.
Not sure if they're actually being cool about it now, but their actions in the past are biting them in the butt now.
http://www.reuters.com/article/companyNewsAndPR/idUSN2856002320071128
I bought a Wii at launch and sold it about a month later to my brother-in-law on the cheap because he wanted one. At the time I really don't think I made a mistake, and I still mostly agree with that. Until Mario Galaxy came out, there were absolutely zero games I was interested in. I played through Zelda and put tons of hours into Wii Sports with family and friends, good fun and all, but what has come out since then? Metroid and Mario basically. Maybe Zack and Wiki but I don't really know anything about that. I played the first hour of Metroid and though it was a great deviation from the Metroid-norm, it still didn't do much for me.
But Mario is out now and Super Smash Bros. Brawl will be out in a couple of months. Everyone says Mario is awesome and I put something like 2000 hours into Smash Bros. Melee so all of a sudden I'm thinking maybe it was a mistake? Not sure, but one or two games aren't really enough for me to rebuy a system, so it'll probably be a while until I actually pick up another Wii. I still have tons of last generation games to play though, and my DS, so I'll manage.
I played Jet Force Gemini last week perfectly on the latest stable release of Project 64. Widescreen worked just fine and the sound worked a lot better than on ePSXe.