Did you ever watch Cheap Seats (kind of like MST3k but featuring sports) when it was on ESPN Classic? I'm a huge fan of it and whenever I watched it I thought of 3k and how much it probably inspired the writers of Cheap Seats. It wasn't really a show for the typical Slashdot reader but the Sklar brothers are mighty hilarious in my book.
You probably don't need to hack the DS, just get something like an R4 or M3 which allows homebrew. I really don't think you need to hardware hack the DS to do anything on it.
The stories between the two regions is exactly the same, just in the US the sex scenes are implied and in the UK they are shown. Also one of the sex scenes is kinda hard to get unless you know what you're doing but the other is required I believe, but right at the end.
Not arguing either way, just expanding on your point for those interested.
I would agree with you that it is a small segment (only 1000 Steam users), but just how much money is coming from just those 1000 users? A lot of these multi-card gamers are probably buying two relatively expensive, high margin cards. The R&D on NVidia and ATI's side is done, now that second card bought by gamers is just extra dollars in the bank for them.
Now I have to ask you why it's a complete failure? Because they only managed to con 1000 Steam gamers into buying an extra card? Then maybe. Because they've sold 1000 extra video cards to Steam gamers? Not so much then.
Greatest ending to a movie ever. People say I'm a fool for thinking that but movies that end with a triumphant rock scene are simply awesome. More movies should end with a rock scene, the other one I can think of is Rat Race - even if it was Smash Mouth, it was awesome..
I still get two video game magazines (EGM and Computer Gaming... I mean Games for Windows) and I read them quite thoroughly. I also get Wired Magazine, Fast Company, and Game Developer. These are all subjects where I could easily get the exact same information online weeks in advance (and quite often I do), but I simply find it enjoyable to crash on the couch and flip through the magazine. There's still something to seeing video game screenshots in print to me, something I don't get from looking at image after image online. I can't really put my finger on it all, but it must be something or I simply wouldn't subscribe anymore (or seek out the many free offers out there).
The one thing that annoys me are the ads. The ads themselves are usually fine, some of them can be really cool or actually clue me in on something I wasn't aware of before. It's the quantity of ads, there are so incredibly many of them. But I suppose that's why many of my subscriptions are free.
This is the second article about Google Android today already and we never even discussed the original announcement, just what Ballmer and now ZDNet have to say. But I suppose there will be a long line of articles in the future so maybe it won't matter, just seems odd.
But simplified controls isn't all that is important to portable games. I personally think the most important is being able to start and stop at virtually any time. Many Nintendo DS games do this really well by allowing you to save whenever you want and getting back into the game takes about 10 seconds after a cold start. Not to mention being able to just close the DS, telling it to hibernate.
It's a portable game, that usually implies it is some kind of secondary action, whether you're in a bus, waiting at the airport, or playing in bed, being able to stop right now can be very important. I'll let Slashdot try to figure out that last one.
MLB.com has made a lot of mistakes lately, the most recent being their commitment to Silverlight, Microsoft's "Flash-killer". It's really quite annoying and I refuse to download their plugin (is there even a plugin for Firefox?).
I love baseball, but MLB can be so draconian about things. They have a subscription service that I would totally sign up for if everything MLB.com touched didn't eventually rot.
'Upcoming launches such as God of War: Chains of Olympus from a first-party perspective, and Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron from LucasArts, are certainly good examples of fantastic franchises made unique on the PSP,' he says. 'It's clear that consumers do not want the same game on their PSP that they play on console.' Actually, it's not clear at all when you list God of War and Star Wars Battlefronts as examples, basically more ports (original story or not) of console games.
I'm sure it will hurt the series in some way, but the original creator of God of War, David Jaffe, is still around. He worked on GoW 1 and 2 (along with Barlog).
Can you explain the connection (at first I typed link) between A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening? It's something I've never really seen, personally (and like I said as a reply to another post, Link's Awakening seems like more of a sequel to Wind Waker).
After Wind Waker came out, I always considered Link's Awakening to be like a psuedo sequel to it. Wind Waker ends with you sailing the high seas and Link's Awakening begins in the middle of a storm on the high seas.
But then again, I like to draw connections to things that shouldn't really connect. Like how I consider The Big Bounce to be a sequel to Shawshank Redemption (hey, it stars Morgan Freeman on a resort island, he obviously let Andy Dufresne build up the resort, then he killed him and took over - this happened all between the end of Shawshank and the beginning of The Big Bounce).
Well, early on it feels awkward, that's for sure. But once you start picking up the standard Zelda weapons, I liked it more. At the beginning all you have is a sword and fighting enemies is as easy as tapping them with your stylus, but once you get the boomerang or the bombchus, fighting baddies and solving puzzles is more fun. For the boomerang you draw it's path on the screen, not a very realistic boomerang but more fun than just throwing it straight and then it comes back to you. Bombchus are like walking bombs and you draw their path on the map and they follow it. Those are probably the most stylus unique weapons, otherwise you have the bow and arrow which you just aim with the stylus or a hammer which feels like it was just tacked in at the end.
If you didn't like it at first, I'd play until you get the boomerang. It gets better after that but if you still don't like the gameplay by then, you probably won't enjoy this game much. It was an experiment by Nintendo and I personally think they did a good job with it. Not for everyone though.
I recently finished the game and wrote my review on Sunday, giving it an 8 out of 10. I felt like that the new stylus driven gameplay aspects were great and really added to the series, but the game focused way too much on repetitiveness. You literally run through the same dungeon something like 5 or 6 times throughout the course of the game, and the dungeon is just kind of obnoxious. Plus the whole "phantom hourglass" only matters in that one particular dungeon, basically negating what could have been a cool concept or object nearly completely.
I didn't think the sailing was as bad in this game as in Wind Waker (which I still enjoyed in that game too). You would draw on a map point A to point B, and your ship would go there for you. The only annoying part was having to fight enemies on the way with your cannon (very basic bad guys - cannon fodder if you excuse me) on the way, sometimes it's just nice to sit back and check out the scenery as you sail. There were also six warp points that allowed you to get to point B very quickly, basically eliminating any long and tedious journeys.
I also thought the exploration was fun, and appreciated "uncharted islands" and such, really kind of felt like I was setting out on the new ground. There was an island shaped like a Nintendo DS though, and that breaking of the fourth wall was really out of place.
Anyways, my review is here if you're interested, just a little side site I run to more or less keep track of what games I beat.
I learned to write a few of my hiragana and katakana characters in the wrong stroke order, and native readers could tell just by glancing at my handwriting that I was doing it wrong. I concentrated much harder on this aspect when I was learning kanji, but I'm sure I still do many of them wrong.
Two years ago I received an email from IT informing me that I was using the application Firefox and that a "major security vulnerability" had been discovered. They told me I had to use Internet Explorer as it was "much more secure".
Whether or not IE was actually more secure on our network isn't really the point, but I still had a great laugh out of it. I simply updated Firefox and that took care of that, never heard from them again about it.
Well, you're arguing something else. Non-skippable cutscenese are annoying, especially to players on their second, third, or hundredth time through a game. I would agree that all cutscenes should be skippable, and developers are getting a lot better about this over the last few years. However, I don't think that cutscenes themselves are the problem.
Not a very meaty article, and I don't really like how the writer says "my game". Yes, it is "your" game, but it was written, directed, and developed by someone else. The Metal Gear Solid series is directed by Hideo Kojima, who has a very large, convoluted, and highly entertaining story to tell. Kojima chooses to tell that story through non-pre-rendered cutscenes and radio conversations. Whether you like it or not, that's how he chose to tell "his" story and you undoubtedly know what you're getting into when you start a Metal Gear Solid game. There are many, many games out there that don't have cutscenes or choose to tell their story in alternative methods (see Okami which begins with 30 minutes of text reading).
I honestly don't see a problem with cutscenes as long as they're still telling a story and not just wasting time or trying to show off their FMVs. Some genres and games work great with cutscenes, others don't.
I review games out of 10, but I think the actual content in my written review is much more important than the overall final score (that's my justification for writing really long reviews). I consider the final scores to be simply for comparison's sake, so it's easy to say that this reviewer thought this game was better than this game but worse than this game. I also think of my scores as fluid and I've changed a score a couple of times because I played another game that I thought deserved that score, but now the other game didn't.
Anyways, the industry puts too much emphasis on the scores, it should really be about the actual thoughts and feelings while playing, something that can be written down relatively easily but doesn't always translate to an abstract score.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you ever watch Cheap Seats (kind of like MST3k but featuring sports) when it was on ESPN Classic? I'm a huge fan of it and whenever I watched it I thought of 3k and how much it probably inspired the writers of Cheap Seats. It wasn't really a show for the typical Slashdot reader but the Sklar brothers are mighty hilarious in my book.
Cheap Seats
You probably don't need to hack the DS, just get something like an R4 or M3 which allows homebrew. I really don't think you need to hardware hack the DS to do anything on it.
The stories between the two regions is exactly the same, just in the US the sex scenes are implied and in the UK they are shown. Also one of the sex scenes is kinda hard to get unless you know what you're doing but the other is required I believe, but right at the end.
Not arguing either way, just expanding on your point for those interested.
Maybe after a few personal emails from Nigerian princes the judge will have changed her mind.
I would agree with you that it is a small segment (only 1000 Steam users), but just how much money is coming from just those 1000 users? A lot of these multi-card gamers are probably buying two relatively expensive, high margin cards. The R&D on NVidia and ATI's side is done, now that second card bought by gamers is just extra dollars in the bank for them.
Now I have to ask you why it's a complete failure? Because they only managed to con 1000 Steam gamers into buying an extra card? Then maybe. Because they've sold 1000 extra video cards to Steam gamers? Not so much then.
And it comes complete with CmdPlum
Greatest ending to a movie ever. People say I'm a fool for thinking that but movies that end with a triumphant rock scene are simply awesome. More movies should end with a rock scene, the other one I can think of is Rat Race - even if it was Smash Mouth, it was awesome..
I was able to find two HD pictures:
http://www.selene.jaxa.jp/image/communication/img_071114_01.jpg
http://www.selene.jaxa.jp/image/communication/img_071114_02.jpg
1920x1080
Couldn't find anything else though. Disappointing.
I still get two video game magazines (EGM and Computer Gaming... I mean Games for Windows) and I read them quite thoroughly. I also get Wired Magazine, Fast Company, and Game Developer. These are all subjects where I could easily get the exact same information online weeks in advance (and quite often I do), but I simply find it enjoyable to crash on the couch and flip through the magazine. There's still something to seeing video game screenshots in print to me, something I don't get from looking at image after image online. I can't really put my finger on it all, but it must be something or I simply wouldn't subscribe anymore (or seek out the many free offers out there).
The one thing that annoys me are the ads. The ads themselves are usually fine, some of them can be really cool or actually clue me in on something I wasn't aware of before. It's the quantity of ads, there are so incredibly many of them. But I suppose that's why many of my subscriptions are free.
This is the second article about Google Android today already and we never even discussed the original announcement, just what Ballmer and now ZDNet have to say. But I suppose there will be a long line of articles in the future so maybe it won't matter, just seems odd.
But simplified controls isn't all that is important to portable games. I personally think the most important is being able to start and stop at virtually any time. Many Nintendo DS games do this really well by allowing you to save whenever you want and getting back into the game takes about 10 seconds after a cold start. Not to mention being able to just close the DS, telling it to hibernate.
It's a portable game, that usually implies it is some kind of secondary action, whether you're in a bus, waiting at the airport, or playing in bed, being able to stop right now can be very important. I'll let Slashdot try to figure out that last one.
MLB.com has made a lot of mistakes lately, the most recent being their commitment to Silverlight, Microsoft's "Flash-killer". It's really quite annoying and I refuse to download their plugin (is there even a plugin for Firefox?).
I love baseball, but MLB can be so draconian about things. They have a subscription service that I would totally sign up for if everything MLB.com touched didn't eventually rot.
I'm sure it will hurt the series in some way, but the original creator of God of War, David Jaffe, is still around. He worked on GoW 1 and 2 (along with Barlog).
Can you explain the connection (at first I typed link) between A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening? It's something I've never really seen, personally (and like I said as a reply to another post, Link's Awakening seems like more of a sequel to Wind Waker).
After Wind Waker came out, I always considered Link's Awakening to be like a psuedo sequel to it. Wind Waker ends with you sailing the high seas and Link's Awakening begins in the middle of a storm on the high seas.
But then again, I like to draw connections to things that shouldn't really connect. Like how I consider The Big Bounce to be a sequel to Shawshank Redemption (hey, it stars Morgan Freeman on a resort island, he obviously let Andy Dufresne build up the resort, then he killed him and took over - this happened all between the end of Shawshank and the beginning of The Big Bounce).
Well, early on it feels awkward, that's for sure. But once you start picking up the standard Zelda weapons, I liked it more. At the beginning all you have is a sword and fighting enemies is as easy as tapping them with your stylus, but once you get the boomerang or the bombchus, fighting baddies and solving puzzles is more fun. For the boomerang you draw it's path on the screen, not a very realistic boomerang but more fun than just throwing it straight and then it comes back to you. Bombchus are like walking bombs and you draw their path on the map and they follow it. Those are probably the most stylus unique weapons, otherwise you have the bow and arrow which you just aim with the stylus or a hammer which feels like it was just tacked in at the end.
If you didn't like it at first, I'd play until you get the boomerang. It gets better after that but if you still don't like the gameplay by then, you probably won't enjoy this game much. It was an experiment by Nintendo and I personally think they did a good job with it. Not for everyone though.
I recently finished the game and wrote my review on Sunday, giving it an 8 out of 10. I felt like that the new stylus driven gameplay aspects were great and really added to the series, but the game focused way too much on repetitiveness. You literally run through the same dungeon something like 5 or 6 times throughout the course of the game, and the dungeon is just kind of obnoxious. Plus the whole "phantom hourglass" only matters in that one particular dungeon, basically negating what could have been a cool concept or object nearly completely.
I didn't think the sailing was as bad in this game as in Wind Waker (which I still enjoyed in that game too). You would draw on a map point A to point B, and your ship would go there for you. The only annoying part was having to fight enemies on the way with your cannon (very basic bad guys - cannon fodder if you excuse me) on the way, sometimes it's just nice to sit back and check out the scenery as you sail. There were also six warp points that allowed you to get to point B very quickly, basically eliminating any long and tedious journeys.
I also thought the exploration was fun, and appreciated "uncharted islands" and such, really kind of felt like I was setting out on the new ground. There was an island shaped like a Nintendo DS though, and that breaking of the fourth wall was really out of place.
Anyways, my review is here if you're interested, just a little side site I run to more or less keep track of what games I beat.
So how many users chopped off the intruder's appendages with a katana and then had their homemade daemons clean up their handiwork?
I learned to write a few of my hiragana and katakana characters in the wrong stroke order, and native readers could tell just by glancing at my handwriting that I was doing it wrong. I concentrated much harder on this aspect when I was learning kanji, but I'm sure I still do many of them wrong.
Two years ago I received an email from IT informing me that I was using the application Firefox and that a "major security vulnerability" had been discovered. They told me I had to use Internet Explorer as it was "much more secure".
Whether or not IE was actually more secure on our network isn't really the point, but I still had a great laugh out of it. I simply updated Firefox and that took care of that, never heard from them again about it.
Well, you're arguing something else. Non-skippable cutscenese are annoying, especially to players on their second, third, or hundredth time through a game. I would agree that all cutscenes should be skippable, and developers are getting a lot better about this over the last few years. However, I don't think that cutscenes themselves are the problem.
Not a very meaty article, and I don't really like how the writer says "my game". Yes, it is "your" game, but it was written, directed, and developed by someone else. The Metal Gear Solid series is directed by Hideo Kojima, who has a very large, convoluted, and highly entertaining story to tell. Kojima chooses to tell that story through non-pre-rendered cutscenes and radio conversations. Whether you like it or not, that's how he chose to tell "his" story and you undoubtedly know what you're getting into when you start a Metal Gear Solid game. There are many, many games out there that don't have cutscenes or choose to tell their story in alternative methods (see Okami which begins with 30 minutes of text reading).
I honestly don't see a problem with cutscenes as long as they're still telling a story and not just wasting time or trying to show off their FMVs. Some genres and games work great with cutscenes, others don't.
I review games out of 10, but I think the actual content in my written review is much more important than the overall final score (that's my justification for writing really long reviews). I consider the final scores to be simply for comparison's sake, so it's easy to say that this reviewer thought this game was better than this game but worse than this game. I also think of my scores as fluid and I've changed a score a couple of times because I played another game that I thought deserved that score, but now the other game didn't.
Anyways, the industry puts too much emphasis on the scores, it should really be about the actual thoughts and feelings while playing, something that can be written down relatively easily but doesn't always translate to an abstract score.
Crap, I almost went to that party in Minnetonka too. Looks like a blast! I'll be there in 10 years...