Where did the games like "Tetris" or "Lemmings", with a simple, but fascinating idea, that keeps you countless hours playing, go?
I think there are still games around like this, but they are harder to find because of the massive industry today. Here's some ones I've come across, but I'm sure there are a lot more that I haven't yet and probably never will (though I just bought an XBox 360 this week and am going to have a browse through the Arcade store when it arrives):
Games like fl0w and Flower by Jenova Chen are both fun games just to sit and while away your time playing. It doesn't take long to "complete" them, but they're more about the actual play experience than completing individual levels, and therefore they're fun to replay. fl0w has a great aural soundscape and a game design where there is really no right or wrong, no rules and no instructions. The controls and concepts are fairly basic, but it took me a while just to figure out just what the hell was going on! There are a few "trophies" you can get by completing certain challenges though. Flower is just a lot of fun and very relaxing. It's kind of like a flight sim but you're flying a bunch of flower petals rather than a plane. It's not as lame as it sounds, honest!
Swarm looks Lemmings-esque and is being made by Ron Gilbert: creator of the original Monkey Island game. They recently released a game called DeathSpank which was cheap and good fun, and took me a couple of weeks to get through because of the RPG syle play.
Then you have the Rock Band and Guitar Hero games - they're pretty simple concepts, but rather addictive (and admittedly expensive if you buy lots of songs and controllers). They don't have the same randomised gameplay as Tetris which does mean that they get easier as you become more familiar with individual songs, but the gameplay mechanic is a lot of fun. Same kind of thing as Lemmings I suppose. I'd definitely count dancing and music games as new concepts, but I'm not sure if there have been any other new developments.
And I know it doesn't quite fit into your definition, but the online play in games these days is often quite "simple but fascinating", simply because you're playing against other people in a way that just wasn't possible when Tetris and Lemmings were invented. Create a few different levels that people can play in, give them some guns or other method of competing, and watch them go. Playing against other humans really turns a simple game world into a constantly fluctuating and rewarding challenge, as long as you have worthy opponents of course:)
Well, I've never played Pirates! but it seems unfair to compare a relatively open world strategy game to a story, puzzle and combat driven FPS like Uncharted. It's more comparable to stuff like Oblivion and Red Dead Redemption that have very large (but sparsely populated) areas to explore and random enemy encounters and side missions etc.
These games are of course still fun, and I do prefer open world games to single path ones in general, but that doesn't detract from the fact that Uncharted 2 was an awesome experience. The first was so good that I enjoyed replaying it again on the harder difficulty levels. With the second I was waiting until my brother or flatmate got it before replaying it with them in co-op mode (which has new levels/puzzles), but neither of them have bought it yet.
I think I was right to recommend it to Trepidity as a game that will capture his attention with its cinematic style/storytelling and fun gameplay, and he'll want to play it through to completion. There are a lot of games I have that could be completed in less than a day, but no other game since Operation Flashpoint has made me want to stay up all night playing it (Operation Flashpoint took me 3 days to complete and I slept something like 7 hours in that time I think).
I was already pretty experienced with the game style and controls from the first game. If I replayed something like Half Life or Half Life 2 I'd be finished it in well under 13 hours. These games are worth it for the story, plus they have multiplayer modes should you so wish.
Uncharted 2 obviously doesn't have any of the mods that made HL 1 and 2 such crazy good value for money though. But I was commenting on how good the single player experience was. It has good fun combat, climbing, puzzle solving etc. The sound and graphics are indeed very good. Levels like the ice caves really left an impression on me.
Of course some games last longer, but I was just pointing out games I've enjoyed in single player mode recently. Red Dead Redemption is the other great single player game that was released in the last year. While it is enjoyable and compelling in its own way, it's a different experience from Uncharted, and is much more of a "slog" to unlock certain things in the game.
Yep, a lot of the popular games these days have awful single player, but are fun online.
The best single player experience I've had recently was Uncharted 2, although it is on PS3 only. I played it for 13 hours straight until I'd completed it, it was great:)
I'm not trying to make any statements about how sensible it would be to do such a thing, but your example of Alexander Supertramp is in fact an example that it is possible to go off and live as a hermit, completely avoiding taxes, if you really want to. It is indeed a pretty stupid idea if you have no real survival skills, but someone as well trained as Ray Mears could probably manage it if he so desired.
There are plenty of areas here in tiny Scotland that someone could go and get lost. In the south and east there are plenty of roads and towns, but in the north and west things are a lot more empty, people have moved down to the cities, etc. There are many abandoned crofts from the time of the Highland Clearances. So I'm sure if you put enough research and work into it then you could probably have a workable croft somewhere out of the way, and you wouldn't have to die such a horrible death. Obviously it would be very tough - probably next to impossible if you didn't have assistance from a family or other like minded people. It wouldn't be much fun having all your clothing made from sheepskin and wool either.
There are other much larger places like Mongolia and Africa where you could theoretically band up with a nomadic group and survive outside the bounds of modern society. You wouldn't have to pay taxes, but neither would you have any of the conveniences you usually expect from society: property, shops, police, fire service, etc. You could argue that any tribe itself is a form of society, but it is severely limited in its scope compared to type of society that Spun was referring to, since he counted the Amish as being outside of society.
I think if you buy a new luxury car with both a built-in cell phone and a built-in cell phone jammer, you deserve to pay extra for something you can't use. You're a moron.
Well, I assume the slot for the SIM card is just standard equipment on some cars like Mercs and Jags, and the jammers would only be fitted to cars sold in America. European and Japanese cars certainly aren't going to have the jammers built in.
Well, you don't really need to get all three consoles to be fair. I'm not getting the 360 for the exclusives, I'm just getting it to play online games with those of my friends who can't afford a PS3!
Of course now if there are any exclusives I actually want to play, it will be an option:) Now that I think of it, that creepy black and white platformer on Xbox Arcade or whatever it's called looked pretty cool, will have to give it a bash before LittleBigPlanet 2 and Gran Turismo 5 come out!
I seriously think LittleBigPlanet 2 alone could make buying a PS3 worth it - it's going to be crazy.
And don't forget cars with built in phones. Hopefully the government will reimburse all the buyers of luxury vehicles and hands free headsets..
if making it impossible to use a mobile phone while in a car can save lives, he's all for it."
Fun scenario: car crashes, passengers are trapped. Scrambler stays active. Passengers (and possibly people nearby) can't call for help. Hopefully the scramblers will have a very short range..
The scrambler may also run down the battery in your cell phone pretty quick if the phone ramps up power to the antennae to try and get a signal.
PS3 was about £350. Xbox was maybe £300 for the top model, I can't remember. Still a hell of a lot cheaper than buying a gaming PC with good bang/buck ratio. IMO that usually amounts to about £600-800 if you're wanting to play the latest games with decent graphics settings.
The Wii is more like PS2 in terms of graphical ability though, not quite the same league as Xbox 360 and PS3.
PC specs of course keep developing at a phenomenal rate, so it's maybe possible to build an equivalent powered gaming rig for the same price these days, but it definitely wouldn't have been at launch - especially if you also wanted a blu-ray drive in there..
Historically when I was speccing up gaming rigs I used to buy ones that cost around 2-3x as much as a console.
Of course I've just bought an Xbox 360 today, which means I've bought a Wii, PS3 and 360 in the last 3 years, and ended up spending as much as I would have on a gaming PC anyway:p When you add in peripherals too that adds up to quite a bit more than I would have on the PC. But if I'd bought a gaming PC 3 years ago, I'd probably be buying a new one soon, or at least have spent hundreds on upgrades.
If a hostile nation refines this technology to make antimatter bombs without blowing themselves up, we're done for.
What's wrong with nukes? Seems a lot more practical and better understood to me. I don't think we'd really be "done for" though, because some other "friendly" nation could nuke them at the first sign of such things..
I was thinking something along the same lines, but what do you do on an international level? Just leave things to national governments to decide the prizes? I think some kind of collective effort would be good, like the prize they were trying to give to Grigory Perelman recently.. only in the field of engineering I'd imagine there are a lot more known challenges to be cracked than there are currently in maths.
Was that Win 7? The versions of Windows I've used the most (98, 2000 and XP) tended to have nice short startup times on fresh installs, but as you installed more stuff, that time started to extend.
Ubuntu 8 and 9 versions always started up faster than OSX and Windows on my previous machines (counting from power on to usable desktop), and since version 10.04 they've improved the startup time even more, though I no longer use Windows or OSX. I have no idea how Kubuntu startup time relates to Ubuntu either, but if it's the same as Windows, it sounds like it's slower..
I'd try Chrome over FF.. FF currently is atrocious on my netbook, even if you don't take into account the long load times (which are worse on Windows - I used to have to use the Firefox Preloader to avoid a 20-30 second wait on starting the app).
just wait until they decide to put noninspectable packages in the not-moving-at-all-lane-until-key-provided.
Some form of Steganography would prove useful in such a case. You could disguise your encrypted files as images or sound files for example.. it's not like they're going to have someone checking every single one of these to make sure they're real, and even if someone does enquire you could say it's "art".. heh.
I'm 6'1" and I quickly got used to the keyboard on my Dell Mini 9. It did take a week or two to stop hitting return every time I wanted an apostrophe (the key is very thin and right next to the enter key), but apart from that I type the same as I would on a full sized keyboard.
As Kjella points out, because of the compact layouts of netbook keyboards compared to their full sized counterparts, the keys aren't actually that much smaller.
Consumers like what they know and demand massive amounts of backwards compatibility. A decent linux distro can handle 80% of their needs, but not getting that 20% is unacceptable
Yet many people bought these Linux netbooks and are happy with them, and many people are happy with their iPads etc. These things are all in a really similar price range with overlapping functions, and different intended uses.
How long does it take to start up Windows 7 on a netbook? Part of the reason I originally moved away from Windows was so that when I got home I could boot quickly into an OS for basic media playing and web browsing functionality. My laptop at the time had pretty poor battery life so leaving it on standby wasn't a great option, and in my experience "hibernation" type modes have been nice in theory but often useless in practice.
Have you considered a mobile broadband dongle (or a laptop that has one built in, or install a WiFi sharing app on your phone to share its data connection)?
Obviously if you're in areas with no reception then that's not much use, but otherwise I think it would be more convenient, and probably just as cost effective.
If that doesn't float your boat, I've just checked and you can get USB dialup modems very cheaply.
Windows XP runs fine on a PII 866 with 384 MB of RAM, made in 2000
It may be fine if you're just running the OS, but try running AV and any applications, and you're in a world of hurt:/ You don't want to visit this world.
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Even if there were external forces acting to control your will in this universe, how do you know they're non-deterministic themselves?
Individuals certainly are responsible for their own choices anyway, even if you can accurately simulate 100% beforehand what they're going to choose.
Where did the games like "Tetris" or "Lemmings", with a simple, but fascinating idea, that keeps you countless hours playing, go?
I think there are still games around like this, but they are harder to find because of the massive industry today. Here's some ones I've come across, but I'm sure there are a lot more that I haven't yet and probably never will (though I just bought an XBox 360 this week and am going to have a browse through the Arcade store when it arrives):
Games like fl0w and Flower by Jenova Chen are both fun games just to sit and while away your time playing. It doesn't take long to "complete" them, but they're more about the actual play experience than completing individual levels, and therefore they're fun to replay. fl0w has a great aural soundscape and a game design where there is really no right or wrong, no rules and no instructions. The controls and concepts are fairly basic, but it took me a while just to figure out just what the hell was going on! There are a few "trophies" you can get by completing certain challenges though. Flower is just a lot of fun and very relaxing. It's kind of like a flight sim but you're flying a bunch of flower petals rather than a plane. It's not as lame as it sounds, honest!
Swarm looks Lemmings-esque and is being made by Ron Gilbert: creator of the original Monkey Island game. They recently released a game called DeathSpank which was cheap and good fun, and took me a couple of weeks to get through because of the RPG syle play.
Then you have the Rock Band and Guitar Hero games - they're pretty simple concepts, but rather addictive (and admittedly expensive if you buy lots of songs and controllers). They don't have the same randomised gameplay as Tetris which does mean that they get easier as you become more familiar with individual songs, but the gameplay mechanic is a lot of fun. Same kind of thing as Lemmings I suppose. I'd definitely count dancing and music games as new concepts, but I'm not sure if there have been any other new developments.
And I know it doesn't quite fit into your definition, but the online play in games these days is often quite "simple but fascinating", simply because you're playing against other people in a way that just wasn't possible when Tetris and Lemmings were invented. Create a few different levels that people can play in, give them some guns or other method of competing, and watch them go. Playing against other humans really turns a simple game world into a constantly fluctuating and rewarding challenge, as long as you have worthy opponents of course :)
A couple of seconds typing "class action uk" into google gave me this: http://www.contactlaw.co.uk/class-action-lawyers.html
You'd make a great parent.
Well, I've never played Pirates! but it seems unfair to compare a relatively open world strategy game to a story, puzzle and combat driven FPS like Uncharted. It's more comparable to stuff like Oblivion and Red Dead Redemption that have very large (but sparsely populated) areas to explore and random enemy encounters and side missions etc.
These games are of course still fun, and I do prefer open world games to single path ones in general, but that doesn't detract from the fact that Uncharted 2 was an awesome experience. The first was so good that I enjoyed replaying it again on the harder difficulty levels. With the second I was waiting until my brother or flatmate got it before replaying it with them in co-op mode (which has new levels/puzzles), but neither of them have bought it yet.
I think I was right to recommend it to Trepidity as a game that will capture his attention with its cinematic style/storytelling and fun gameplay, and he'll want to play it through to completion. There are a lot of games I have that could be completed in less than a day, but no other game since Operation Flashpoint has made me want to stay up all night playing it (Operation Flashpoint took me 3 days to complete and I slept something like 7 hours in that time I think).
I was already pretty experienced with the game style and controls from the first game. If I replayed something like Half Life or Half Life 2 I'd be finished it in well under 13 hours. These games are worth it for the story, plus they have multiplayer modes should you so wish.
Uncharted 2 obviously doesn't have any of the mods that made HL 1 and 2 such crazy good value for money though. But I was commenting on how good the single player experience was. It has good fun combat, climbing, puzzle solving etc. The sound and graphics are indeed very good. Levels like the ice caves really left an impression on me.
Of course some games last longer, but I was just pointing out games I've enjoyed in single player mode recently. Red Dead Redemption is the other great single player game that was released in the last year. While it is enjoyable and compelling in its own way, it's a different experience from Uncharted, and is much more of a "slog" to unlock certain things in the game.
Yep, a lot of the popular games these days have awful single player, but are fun online.
The best single player experience I've had recently was Uncharted 2, although it is on PS3 only. I played it for 13 hours straight until I'd completed it, it was great :)
I'm not trying to make any statements about how sensible it would be to do such a thing, but your example of Alexander Supertramp is in fact an example that it is possible to go off and live as a hermit, completely avoiding taxes, if you really want to. It is indeed a pretty stupid idea if you have no real survival skills, but someone as well trained as Ray Mears could probably manage it if he so desired.
There are plenty of areas here in tiny Scotland that someone could go and get lost. In the south and east there are plenty of roads and towns, but in the north and west things are a lot more empty, people have moved down to the cities, etc. There are many abandoned crofts from the time of the Highland Clearances. So I'm sure if you put enough research and work into it then you could probably have a workable croft somewhere out of the way, and you wouldn't have to die such a horrible death. Obviously it would be very tough - probably next to impossible if you didn't have assistance from a family or other like minded people. It wouldn't be much fun having all your clothing made from sheepskin and wool either.
There are other much larger places like Mongolia and Africa where you could theoretically band up with a nomadic group and survive outside the bounds of modern society. You wouldn't have to pay taxes, but neither would you have any of the conveniences you usually expect from society: property, shops, police, fire service, etc. You could argue that any tribe itself is a form of society, but it is severely limited in its scope compared to type of society that Spun was referring to, since he counted the Amish as being outside of society.
There is no choice to not pay taxes in any industrialized country I've ever heard of
Hence his point about an exchange for living in society.
No, you can't live as a hermit, not legally any way
If you're truly wanting to live as a hermit, why would you care about social constructs such as laws?
You're talking about some kind of exchange for living in society; what exchange are you talking about?
tax
-noun : charge against a citizen's person or property or activity for the support of government.
It seems that while repeating something stupid does not make it clever, it does make it rather funny :)
I think if you buy a new luxury car with both a built-in cell phone and a built-in cell phone jammer, you deserve to pay extra for something you can't use. You're a moron.
Well, I assume the slot for the SIM card is just standard equipment on some cars like Mercs and Jags, and the jammers would only be fitted to cars sold in America. European and Japanese cars certainly aren't going to have the jammers built in.
Well, you don't really need to get all three consoles to be fair. I'm not getting the 360 for the exclusives, I'm just getting it to play online games with those of my friends who can't afford a PS3!
Of course now if there are any exclusives I actually want to play, it will be an option :) Now that I think of it, that creepy black and white platformer on Xbox Arcade or whatever it's called looked pretty cool, will have to give it a bash before LittleBigPlanet 2 and Gran Turismo 5 come out!
I seriously think LittleBigPlanet 2 alone could make buying a PS3 worth it - it's going to be crazy.
And don't forget cars with built in phones. Hopefully the government will reimburse all the buyers of luxury vehicles and hands free headsets..
if making it impossible to use a mobile phone while in a car can save lives, he's all for it."
Fun scenario: car crashes, passengers are trapped. Scrambler stays active. Passengers (and possibly people nearby) can't call for help. Hopefully the scramblers will have a very short range..
The scrambler may also run down the battery in your cell phone pretty quick if the phone ramps up power to the antennae to try and get a signal.
PS3 was about £350. Xbox was maybe £300 for the top model, I can't remember. Still a hell of a lot cheaper than buying a gaming PC with good bang/buck ratio. IMO that usually amounts to about £600-800 if you're wanting to play the latest games with decent graphics settings.
The Wii is more like PS2 in terms of graphical ability though, not quite the same league as Xbox 360 and PS3.
PC specs of course keep developing at a phenomenal rate, so it's maybe possible to build an equivalent powered gaming rig for the same price these days, but it definitely wouldn't have been at launch - especially if you also wanted a blu-ray drive in there..
Historically when I was speccing up gaming rigs I used to buy ones that cost around 2-3x as much as a console.
Of course I've just bought an Xbox 360 today, which means I've bought a Wii, PS3 and 360 in the last 3 years, and ended up spending as much as I would have on a gaming PC anyway :p When you add in peripherals too that adds up to quite a bit more than I would have on the PC. But if I'd bought a gaming PC 3 years ago, I'd probably be buying a new one soon, or at least have spent hundreds on upgrades.
If a hostile nation refines this technology to make antimatter bombs without blowing themselves up, we're done for.
What's wrong with nukes? Seems a lot more practical and better understood to me. I don't think we'd really be "done for" though, because some other "friendly" nation could nuke them at the first sign of such things..
I was thinking something along the same lines, but what do you do on an international level? Just leave things to national governments to decide the prizes? I think some kind of collective effort would be good, like the prize they were trying to give to Grigory Perelman recently.. only in the field of engineering I'd imagine there are a lot more known challenges to be cracked than there are currently in maths.
Was that Win 7? The versions of Windows I've used the most (98, 2000 and XP) tended to have nice short startup times on fresh installs, but as you installed more stuff, that time started to extend.
Ubuntu 8 and 9 versions always started up faster than OSX and Windows on my previous machines (counting from power on to usable desktop), and since version 10.04 they've improved the startup time even more, though I no longer use Windows or OSX. I have no idea how Kubuntu startup time relates to Ubuntu either, but if it's the same as Windows, it sounds like it's slower..
I'd try Chrome over FF.. FF currently is atrocious on my netbook, even if you don't take into account the long load times (which are worse on Windows - I used to have to use the Firefox Preloader to avoid a 20-30 second wait on starting the app).
just wait until they decide to put noninspectable packages in the not-moving-at-all-lane-until-key-provided.
Some form of Steganography would prove useful in such a case. You could disguise your encrypted files as images or sound files for example.. it's not like they're going to have someone checking every single one of these to make sure they're real, and even if someone does enquire you could say it's "art".. heh.
I'm 6'1" and I quickly got used to the keyboard on my Dell Mini 9. It did take a week or two to stop hitting return every time I wanted an apostrophe (the key is very thin and right next to the enter key), but apart from that I type the same as I would on a full sized keyboard.
As Kjella points out, because of the compact layouts of netbook keyboards compared to their full sized counterparts, the keys aren't actually that much smaller.
Consumers like what they know and demand massive amounts of backwards compatibility. A decent linux distro can handle 80% of their needs, but not getting that 20% is unacceptable
Yet many people bought these Linux netbooks and are happy with them, and many people are happy with their iPads etc. These things are all in a really similar price range with overlapping functions, and different intended uses.
How long does it take to start up Windows 7 on a netbook? Part of the reason I originally moved away from Windows was so that when I got home I could boot quickly into an OS for basic media playing and web browsing functionality. My laptop at the time had pretty poor battery life so leaving it on standby wasn't a great option, and in my experience "hibernation" type modes have been nice in theory but often useless in practice.
Have you considered a mobile broadband dongle (or a laptop that has one built in, or install a WiFi sharing app on your phone to share its data connection)?
Obviously if you're in areas with no reception then that's not much use, but otherwise I think it would be more convenient, and probably just as cost effective.
If that doesn't float your boat, I've just checked and you can get USB dialup modems very cheaply.
Windows XP runs fine on a PII 866 with 384 MB of RAM, made in 2000
It may be fine if you're just running the OS, but try running AV and any applications, and you're in a world of hurt :/ You don't want to visit this world.