Did anyone else get out of breath just watching the girl play breakout?
Haven't seen the video, but depending on what age she was and how much she was bouncing about, I'm guessing a lot of/.ers got out of breath watching her:P
Anyway, I feel exactly the opposite when it comes to performing motions in computer games. I love that drumming at expert level on Rock Band actually needs real drumming skills. My drumming improved greatly within a couple of months of getting Rock Band (I've never had real lessons, just taught myself) and within maybe 4 months I had completed the whole thing on Expert, was well chuffed with that (Run to the Hills is insanely fast and it took a month or two just to be able to do it even after I had completed everything else).
I was going to say that I'd much prefer being able to fight myself than using a controller, but using full force and speed of technique without actually having a target to hit is pretty bad for your muscles and joints, so you are kind of right that it's better to have a real partner. But I'd love a game that actually took control of a fighting robot or something so that you could spar anytime you wanted instead of having to pay a lot of money each month to a martial arts club (where yes you can do proper sparring depending on what you're learning, but most of the time it will just be practicing individual techniques and grading patterns etc). A robot of that quality would obviously be quite pricey, but so is joining a real sports club. If the robot also doubled up as a sex slave, then it would be a complete bargain!
They're probably release the same games and controller for Vista/Windows 7? They will be desperate to get people to upgrade after the disaster they've had the last couple of years surely..
If they do release the control system for PC I know it might encourage me to go back to Windows (at least for some gaming) rather than sticking with my Linux/PS3 combo, but I expect Sony will be able to do similar tricks with the eyetoy within a year or two anyway (if they haven't already been working on something like this).
I suppose the major problem with this is that it cannot tell the difference between truth and lies or urban legends
Most humans can't either, how do you expect a search engine to?
There will be a lot of false positives and negatives that will be hard to identify as such unless it directly works with something like snopes.com , which kind of defeats the purpose because it means someone has had to research every question anyway.
If a project like this which simply scoured the whole 'net, you wouldn't really be able to verify anything beyond people's opinions or beliefs, which may or may not be 'true'.
I think something like this would work really well for factual results if it was only allowed to draw conclusions from verified sources, say something like Wikipedia articles that have been verified by experts in the appropriate field (I've not been following all this type of thing recently but perhaps that is what Wolfram Alpha does already). It could perhaps be useful to have it search the general internet for supplementary results for some questions though, especially those of a philosophical nature where it may be impossible to establish definite answers ("is there a god" and the like).
Yes, sport without actually having to have a large group of friends who are free and willing to play at any one time, or the weather to be good, or to embarrass yourself in front of people, or to be able to just pause/stop whenever you want, or even just for a bit of variety from doing other sports or variety in the scenery if you like jogging/running etc mean that a lot of people would find it worthwhile.
20-frickin-million people have bought Wii Fit, and now there are better programs coming out that incorporate personal trainer type assistants that can plan out an exercise regime for you depending on what your goals are and what exercise equipment you have at home. That's a great use for computers - most people don't really need or want to pay for a personal trainer to make a varied workout plan for them. I no more want to write up a little exercise chart to follow any more than I want to write letters to people when I can just email them instead. As it is my exercise routine is pretty random and unstructured but I gave my Wii away to my sister before Wii Fit came out, and I don't feel it's worth paying for another one and Wii fit, considering it would be the only thing I'd use it for (PS3 does everything else - better games, PVR, blu-ray player, web browsing).
Just think about it - if you put some rewards into WoW or some other game that could only be unlocked by jogging for 20 minutes on a treadmill each day or whatever, soon a lot of gamer geeks would be just as fit as people who are more into real sports. I've never been a big sports fan (used to just end up just hurting the opposing team in football (soccer style, not american football)), but I do love games and staying in shape.
A lot of people stand up all day at work and do work with their arms, it's very possible. Lifting a couple of light controllers is nothing compared to stacking shelves or other manual labour. You might have to take a break every few hours, but apparently we're meant to be doing that even with the normal games..
Besides, look at Wii Fit. A lot of people want to combine exercise and entertainment. I know I do, I'm a little annoyed at myself this week for playing so much Red Faction: Guerilla - I haven't out for a walk even once, usually I'd have been out for a couple of walks along the beach boulevard by now. I'd love a treadmill like device that could do the equivalent of WSAD movement while you played games..
I agree it isn't very likely to gain a significant share in this generation, but you never know. Not many people expected the Wii to take off like it has, but look at the market today! Admittedly there's less likely to be a 'must have' game for it that doesn't have something similar possible on the Wii when their motion plus controller is out, but you can never say for sure how it's all going to turn out. The PS3 system looks much better than the Wii's controller (it does what I thought the Wii's controller was going to do when I first bought one). Besides, as long as there are a few good motion control games out I don't care how many people are playing it - as long as the 10% of us are having fun, why should we care about market penetration?
I don't particularly want the PS3 market flooded with cheap minigames like the Wii market is, and if a small developer can develop a really good game or series of games that makes use of both the PS3's motion controls and processing power, they can make themselves a tidy profit. Just look at the success of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. If a game is good enough, people will pay for controllers even just for that one game. I must have spent about 300 pounds (500 dollars) or more on Guitar Hero and Rock Band over the last couple of years. Wasn't there a story a few months ago about how Guitar Hero III has made more money than any other computer game, ever? I expect most of that will be down to the expensive controllers, with the rest due to the DLC.
Sure it does tilt the ball in the hole type stuff, as well as accelerometers I think - it works great for fl0w and Flower but I admit I haven't seen any other games where it was worth using the motion controls over the joysticks, even driving games (and I have a steering wheel for those anyway).
It is less capable than the PS3 or 360, no doubt - but even the PSP and the DS can handle free roaming 3D environments (see: the Grand Theft Auto Stories games, though I have only played them on the PSP, not the DS). Likewise the PS2 had all 3 GTA III titles on it and I'm pretty sure the Wii is more powerful than a PS2? If the developer is complaining that the Wii can't do dynamic loading/free roaming, they are just flat out lying due to laziness.
AI and graphics are more of a problem, but still I doubt the AI cannot be optimised, and the Wii is still capable of pretty enough graphics if they bothered to simplify the models a bit. Zelda was very easy on the eye, and it was out pretty much as soon as the Wii was.
Due to the fact that you can play good text games for free (google "MUDs" or "Multi User Dungeons") they probably aren't selling well at all, but if you want to know the percentage of people that enjoy those games, try this formula:
x / (x + y) * 100
x = people who know that books are often much better than the equivalent movie (while movies can still be enjoyable and take much less time and effort) and that text based games can be just as much fun as the latest photorealistic creation
You know they have a PS3 out now, right? And it already has partial motion control. I certainly am going to buy the PS3 motion controllers, and I think a lot of the other PS3 owners will buy it too. What's more, developers will probably write games that utilise it too, considering the success the Wii has had. Motion controllers in the past just have been "before their time" or not accurate enough, but now it seems we can make decent motion control systems that are cheap enough for the average consumer, and the world has clearly fallen in love with it.
While I agree that most games on the Wii tend to be lacking in depth compared to the types of games that you get on other systems, I take issue with this:
If we had done a Wii version, it would have been toned down, probably linear; it wouldn't have been an open-world game, and so it would have been a very different experience."
If the DS and PSP can handle Grand Theft Auto III games including dynamic loading (the PSP definitely can, though I only noticed the DS version of GTA was out the other day and I don't feel the urge to dust off my DS to have a go of it), there's no reason at all that the Wii can't do dynamic loading too.
I agree that the AI would probably need optimisation/cutting back and the graphics would need simplified models and effects, but I expect they probably just don't consider it worth the time it would take to do all of that rather than it being impossible to create a game that approaches the same level of gameplay. Having said that, I haven't played any of the Prince of Persia games since the 2D original (and the HD remake). Perhaps the AI is something rather special, or there are hundreds of enemies to simulate at once? Attempting a situation like the last level of Heavenly Sword with literally thousands of enemies probably wouldn't be possible on the Wii without slowing to a crawl.
. It's just a play on "as far as the eye can see."
I know, that's why it was funny. But I changed my joke from "as far as the eye can see" because in reality it's the horizon that causes the issue, and technically the eye can see infinitely far away given a strong enough light source and enough time for the light to reach the eye...
Yes, if you want to be precise then A levels are somewhere between Higher and Advanced Higher.. it's all roughly the same though, with maybe a year's difference depending on where you are. One place I moved to in Scotland was on a little island and they actually put me a year ahead for the 4 months that I was there because their primary school curriculum was easier than the one I'd been doing, so it can depend as much on the regional curriculum or school itself as on the country. If we'd stayed there then I may have been at University by 16 rather than 17..
my wife and I [..] get to a plateau on top of some of the highest mountains in the area, with a nice and beautiful view of the mountain ranges as far as your GPU will render.
For some reason that strikes me as one of the nerdiest things I've ever read. Gone are the days of "you can see x island from here on a clear day!", now it's "you can see x island from here if your graphics card can has enough memory!".
What did I say that was false? All UK school curriculum are basically equivalent, but with different names for the qualifications. I don't need google to teach me what I already know from school and friends who lived in England and Northern Ireland.
The characters in Wall-E are very well done, but the plot.. it just wasn't as 'special' as I expected it to be. I actually was just getting bored and wishing the film would end at some points, despite having wanted to see it for months. To me it was just a lesson not to build up too much anticipation for anything, otherwise it's very unlikely to excel or even live up to your expectations. Not every film can be The Dark Knight.
I don't think that word means what you think it means:p
I like the first half of transformers a lot, and most of the action is okay - though at the cinema I thought it would be a lot better with the shots of the transformers being done from further away so that you could get a better view of the battles. The most annoying bit for me was when he had to take apart a monitor just to create something that would make noise on a line, and that he wrote a chat program that converts and receives ASCII morse in half a minute, though I suppose it wouldn't be that hard to come up with something like that quickly if you knew morse code well and could isolate a couple of pins on the serial port or whatever. Optimus going on about how humans are good and worth saving, yada yada, was quite boring and cliched the first time I saw it (I'd been watching a lot of anime around the time, lots of them go on about the human potential for awesomeness, blah blah.. it can be inspiring if done right of course but sometimes it just gets annoying..), for some reason it wasn't so bad the second time round, and I decided he probably did have time to make friends with Sam and appreciated those soldiers helping out and whatnot.
Glad that I'm not the only person who didn't think it was really amazing though. Usually I buy heavily CGI movies on blu-ray, but I avoided even buying it on DVD until I saw it for £5 at a supermarket and thought what the hell I'll give it another go. The adverts for the sequel do make it look like it'll have a lot more kickassery this time round though, and I certainly won't say no to more of Megan Fox:)
I suppose you're right, been about 7 years since I watched it now though, and I still think of them as mechs despite them being mostly organic. They're large pilotable humanoid creatures and that's what matters, no matter how they were made - perhaps we could do something similar with a mix of cloning and genetic modification (as disturbing as that idea is).
Yeah I admit it's a good kids movie, I just meant the sentient robot thing is cliched - perhaps that's just because I read Asimov's Complete Robot short story collection as a kid, not to mention loving stuff like Short Circuit and Batteries Included. I suppose I did say it doesn't do the cliche like I expected (just because it is a cliche doesn't mean it has to be bad though, boy meets girl stories have been done probably billions of times, but they can still be done well), but that's more because the advert made it look like the cliched situation of a robot developing sentience a la Skynet, Johnny 5, iRobot, etc but then it turned out that no, the garbage robot was for some reason developed with the capacity for emotion. Who would want to give a garbage compacting robot emotion? He'd end up half-suicidal and bored out of his mind like Marvin the Paranoid Android.
Anyway, I have developed a slightly better perspective on life (which includes movie watching, heh) in general since that movie came out, and now that I don't have unrealistic pre-conceptions of it I might enjoy it better, but I don't know if I'll ever enjoy it as much as everyone else seems to.
Indeed it is uncool and impractical, and it is the only reason the mechs in Evangelion are kind of lame compared to Transformers, Gundam Wing, RahXephon, etc. But it is still an option if you keep the back well protected and for some reason need a crazy powerful mech;) You'd think if you put a 1500HP tank engine and a few electric motors in it then you could have it being self powered though. I'm not a mech engineer so I don't know what kind of power they'd require to be useful:p
But that's just the thing - as you said "Pixar just asked us to suspend our disbelief about that. *All* the robotic characters had sentience of some sort. Get over it.".
So I don't think there's any point trying to come up with explanations for it, it just seems that all the robots in the movie have anthropomorphic tendencies. No exceeding of programming required. Most of the other robots were too distracted by their jobs to explore their own potential, whereas Wall-E had fsck all to do really and started building cities and tinkering with junk he found. All of that is acceptable since it is just a story, just the ads seemed to me to be annoyingly misleading. I don't like finding out all the plot of a movie in advance, and in fact I often just avoid reviews completely, but the ads for Wall-E to my eyes made it seem like it was going to be a lot more awesome than it was. That is quite typical of adverts, but usually just because they compress all the action sequences of the movie into about 15 seconds.. the adverts for Wall-E however were rather barren and peaceful (while still beautiful in their own way) and then IIRC the wasteland section of the movie didn't last all that long, and it all soon degenerated into slapstick comedy and crazy chases.
I think perhaps I might still be taking it all a little too seriously, despite this being/. I am almost tempted to get the movie and watch it again with lower expectations, it might be better than I remember..
Slashdot Mirror
Possibly it recognises breasts as extra joints?
Did anyone else get out of breath just watching the girl play breakout?
Haven't seen the video, but depending on what age she was and how much she was bouncing about, I'm guessing a lot of /.ers got out of breath watching her :P
Anyway, I feel exactly the opposite when it comes to performing motions in computer games. I love that drumming at expert level on Rock Band actually needs real drumming skills. My drumming improved greatly within a couple of months of getting Rock Band (I've never had real lessons, just taught myself) and within maybe 4 months I had completed the whole thing on Expert, was well chuffed with that (Run to the Hills is insanely fast and it took a month or two just to be able to do it even after I had completed everything else).
I was going to say that I'd much prefer being able to fight myself than using a controller, but using full force and speed of technique without actually having a target to hit is pretty bad for your muscles and joints, so you are kind of right that it's better to have a real partner. But I'd love a game that actually took control of a fighting robot or something so that you could spar anytime you wanted instead of having to pay a lot of money each month to a martial arts club (where yes you can do proper sparring depending on what you're learning, but most of the time it will just be practicing individual techniques and grading patterns etc). A robot of that quality would obviously be quite pricey, but so is joining a real sports club. If the robot also doubled up as a sex slave, then it would be a complete bargain!
They're probably release the same games and controller for Vista/Windows 7? They will be desperate to get people to upgrade after the disaster they've had the last couple of years surely..
If they do release the control system for PC I know it might encourage me to go back to Windows (at least for some gaming) rather than sticking with my Linux/PS3 combo, but I expect Sony will be able to do similar tricks with the eyetoy within a year or two anyway (if they haven't already been working on something like this).
I suppose the major problem with this is that it cannot tell the difference between truth and lies or urban legends
Most humans can't either, how do you expect a search engine to?
There will be a lot of false positives and negatives that will be hard to identify as such unless it directly works with something like snopes.com , which kind of defeats the purpose because it means someone has had to research every question anyway.
If a project like this which simply scoured the whole 'net, you wouldn't really be able to verify anything beyond people's opinions or beliefs, which may or may not be 'true'.
I think something like this would work really well for factual results if it was only allowed to draw conclusions from verified sources, say something like Wikipedia articles that have been verified by experts in the appropriate field (I've not been following all this type of thing recently but perhaps that is what Wolfram Alpha does already). It could perhaps be useful to have it search the general internet for supplementary results for some questions though, especially those of a philosophical nature where it may be impossible to establish definite answers ("is there a god" and the like).
Yes, sport without actually having to have a large group of friends who are free and willing to play at any one time, or the weather to be good, or to embarrass yourself in front of people, or to be able to just pause/stop whenever you want, or even just for a bit of variety from doing other sports or variety in the scenery if you like jogging/running etc mean that a lot of people would find it worthwhile.
20-frickin-million people have bought Wii Fit, and now there are better programs coming out that incorporate personal trainer type assistants that can plan out an exercise regime for you depending on what your goals are and what exercise equipment you have at home. That's a great use for computers - most people don't really need or want to pay for a personal trainer to make a varied workout plan for them. I no more want to write up a little exercise chart to follow any more than I want to write letters to people when I can just email them instead. As it is my exercise routine is pretty random and unstructured but I gave my Wii away to my sister before Wii Fit came out, and I don't feel it's worth paying for another one and Wii fit, considering it would be the only thing I'd use it for (PS3 does everything else - better games, PVR, blu-ray player, web browsing).
Just think about it - if you put some rewards into WoW or some other game that could only be unlocked by jogging for 20 minutes on a treadmill each day or whatever, soon a lot of gamer geeks would be just as fit as people who are more into real sports. I've never been a big sports fan (used to just end up just hurting the opposing team in football (soccer style, not american football)), but I do love games and staying in shape.
A lot of people stand up all day at work and do work with their arms, it's very possible. Lifting a couple of light controllers is nothing compared to stacking shelves or other manual labour. You might have to take a break every few hours, but apparently we're meant to be doing that even with the normal games..
Besides, look at Wii Fit. A lot of people want to combine exercise and entertainment. I know I do, I'm a little annoyed at myself this week for playing so much Red Faction: Guerilla - I haven't out for a walk even once, usually I'd have been out for a couple of walks along the beach boulevard by now. I'd love a treadmill like device that could do the equivalent of WSAD movement while you played games..
Heh, illiterate may have been a better choice.. probably shouldn't have had that Red Bull as well as the coffee..
I agree it isn't very likely to gain a significant share in this generation, but you never know. Not many people expected the Wii to take off like it has, but look at the market today! Admittedly there's less likely to be a 'must have' game for it that doesn't have something similar possible on the Wii when their motion plus controller is out, but you can never say for sure how it's all going to turn out. The PS3 system looks much better than the Wii's controller (it does what I thought the Wii's controller was going to do when I first bought one). Besides, as long as there are a few good motion control games out I don't care how many people are playing it - as long as the 10% of us are having fun, why should we care about market penetration?
I don't particularly want the PS3 market flooded with cheap minigames like the Wii market is, and if a small developer can develop a really good game or series of games that makes use of both the PS3's motion controls and processing power, they can make themselves a tidy profit. Just look at the success of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. If a game is good enough, people will pay for controllers even just for that one game. I must have spent about 300 pounds (500 dollars) or more on Guitar Hero and Rock Band over the last couple of years. Wasn't there a story a few months ago about how Guitar Hero III has made more money than any other computer game, ever? I expect most of that will be down to the expensive controllers, with the rest due to the DLC.
Sure it does tilt the ball in the hole type stuff, as well as accelerometers I think - it works great for fl0w and Flower but I admit I haven't seen any other games where it was worth using the motion controls over the joysticks, even driving games (and I have a steering wheel for those anyway).
It is less capable than the PS3 or 360, no doubt - but even the PSP and the DS can handle free roaming 3D environments (see: the Grand Theft Auto Stories games, though I have only played them on the PSP, not the DS). Likewise the PS2 had all 3 GTA III titles on it and I'm pretty sure the Wii is more powerful than a PS2? If the developer is complaining that the Wii can't do dynamic loading/free roaming, they are just flat out lying due to laziness.
AI and graphics are more of a problem, but still I doubt the AI cannot be optimised, and the Wii is still capable of pretty enough graphics if they bothered to simplify the models a bit. Zelda was very easy on the eye, and it was out pretty much as soon as the Wii was.
Due to the fact that you can play good text games for free (google "MUDs" or "Multi User Dungeons") they probably aren't selling well at all, but if you want to know the percentage of people that enjoy those games, try this formula:
x / (x + y) * 100
x = people who know that books are often much better than the equivalent movie (while movies can still be enjoyable and take much less time and effort) and that text based games can be just as much fun as the latest photorealistic creation
y = illiteral idiots
You know they have a PS3 out now, right? And it already has partial motion control. I certainly am going to buy the PS3 motion controllers, and I think a lot of the other PS3 owners will buy it too. What's more, developers will probably write games that utilise it too, considering the success the Wii has had. Motion controllers in the past just have been "before their time" or not accurate enough, but now it seems we can make decent motion control systems that are cheap enough for the average consumer, and the world has clearly fallen in love with it.
While I agree that most games on the Wii tend to be lacking in depth compared to the types of games that you get on other systems, I take issue with this:
If we had done a Wii version, it would have been toned down, probably linear; it wouldn't have been an open-world game, and so it would have been a very different experience."
If the DS and PSP can handle Grand Theft Auto III games including dynamic loading (the PSP definitely can, though I only noticed the DS version of GTA was out the other day and I don't feel the urge to dust off my DS to have a go of it), there's no reason at all that the Wii can't do dynamic loading too.
I agree that the AI would probably need optimisation/cutting back and the graphics would need simplified models and effects, but I expect they probably just don't consider it worth the time it would take to do all of that rather than it being impossible to create a game that approaches the same level of gameplay. Having said that, I haven't played any of the Prince of Persia games since the 2D original (and the HD remake). Perhaps the AI is something rather special, or there are hundreds of enemies to simulate at once? Attempting a situation like the last level of Heavenly Sword with literally thousands of enemies probably wouldn't be possible on the Wii without slowing to a crawl.
. It's just a play on "as far as the eye can see."
I know, that's why it was funny. But I changed my joke from "as far as the eye can see" because in reality it's the horizon that causes the issue, and technically the eye can see infinitely far away given a strong enough light source and enough time for the light to reach the eye...
It doesn't, but it isn't as funny if you put it like that.
Yes, if you want to be precise then A levels are somewhere between Higher and Advanced Higher.. it's all roughly the same though, with maybe a year's difference depending on where you are. One place I moved to in Scotland was on a little island and they actually put me a year ahead for the 4 months that I was there because their primary school curriculum was easier than the one I'd been doing, so it can depend as much on the regional curriculum or school itself as on the country. If we'd stayed there then I may have been at University by 16 rather than 17..
Other options include making the airport not as attractive to birds as other areas outside the flight path
Easy - require that they take their shoes off and go through millimetre wave scanners before they're allowed anywhere near the planes.
my wife and I [..] get to a plateau on top of some of the highest mountains in the area, with a nice and beautiful view of the mountain ranges as far as your GPU will render.
For some reason that strikes me as one of the nerdiest things I've ever read. Gone are the days of "you can see x island from here on a clear day!", now it's "you can see x island from here if your graphics card can has enough memory!".
What did I say that was false? All UK school curriculum are basically equivalent, but with different names for the qualifications. I don't need google to teach me what I already know from school and friends who lived in England and Northern Ireland.
The characters in Wall-E are very well done, but the plot.. it just wasn't as 'special' as I expected it to be. I actually was just getting bored and wishing the film would end at some points, despite having wanted to see it for months. To me it was just a lesson not to build up too much anticipation for anything, otherwise it's very unlikely to excel or even live up to your expectations. Not every film can be The Dark Knight.
aweful
I don't think that word means what you think it means :p
I like the first half of transformers a lot, and most of the action is okay - though at the cinema I thought it would be a lot better with the shots of the transformers being done from further away so that you could get a better view of the battles. The most annoying bit for me was when he had to take apart a monitor just to create something that would make noise on a line, and that he wrote a chat program that converts and receives ASCII morse in half a minute, though I suppose it wouldn't be that hard to come up with something like that quickly if you knew morse code well and could isolate a couple of pins on the serial port or whatever. Optimus going on about how humans are good and worth saving, yada yada, was quite boring and cliched the first time I saw it (I'd been watching a lot of anime around the time, lots of them go on about the human potential for awesomeness, blah blah.. it can be inspiring if done right of course but sometimes it just gets annoying..), for some reason it wasn't so bad the second time round, and I decided he probably did have time to make friends with Sam and appreciated those soldiers helping out and whatnot.
Glad that I'm not the only person who didn't think it was really amazing though. Usually I buy heavily CGI movies on blu-ray, but I avoided even buying it on DVD until I saw it for £5 at a supermarket and thought what the hell I'll give it another go. The adverts for the sequel do make it look like it'll have a lot more kickassery this time round though, and I certainly won't say no to more of Megan Fox :)
I suppose you're right, been about 7 years since I watched it now though, and I still think of them as mechs despite them being mostly organic. They're large pilotable humanoid creatures and that's what matters, no matter how they were made - perhaps we could do something similar with a mix of cloning and genetic modification (as disturbing as that idea is).
Yeah I admit it's a good kids movie, I just meant the sentient robot thing is cliched - perhaps that's just because I read Asimov's Complete Robot short story collection as a kid, not to mention loving stuff like Short Circuit and Batteries Included. I suppose I did say it doesn't do the cliche like I expected (just because it is a cliche doesn't mean it has to be bad though, boy meets girl stories have been done probably billions of times, but they can still be done well), but that's more because the advert made it look like the cliched situation of a robot developing sentience a la Skynet, Johnny 5, iRobot, etc but then it turned out that no, the garbage robot was for some reason developed with the capacity for emotion. Who would want to give a garbage compacting robot emotion? He'd end up half-suicidal and bored out of his mind like Marvin the Paranoid Android.
Anyway, I have developed a slightly better perspective on life (which includes movie watching, heh) in general since that movie came out, and now that I don't have unrealistic pre-conceptions of it I might enjoy it better, but I don't know if I'll ever enjoy it as much as everyone else seems to.
Indeed it is uncool and impractical, and it is the only reason the mechs in Evangelion are kind of lame compared to Transformers, Gundam Wing, RahXephon, etc. But it is still an option if you keep the back well protected and for some reason need a crazy powerful mech ;) You'd think if you put a 1500HP tank engine and a few electric motors in it then you could have it being self powered though. I'm not a mech engineer so I don't know what kind of power they'd require to be useful :p
But that's just the thing - as you said "Pixar just asked us to suspend our disbelief about that. *All* the robotic characters had sentience of some sort. Get over it.".
So I don't think there's any point trying to come up with explanations for it, it just seems that all the robots in the movie have anthropomorphic tendencies. No exceeding of programming required. Most of the other robots were too distracted by their jobs to explore their own potential, whereas Wall-E had fsck all to do really and started building cities and tinkering with junk he found. All of that is acceptable since it is just a story, just the ads seemed to me to be annoyingly misleading. I don't like finding out all the plot of a movie in advance, and in fact I often just avoid reviews completely, but the ads for Wall-E to my eyes made it seem like it was going to be a lot more awesome than it was. That is quite typical of adverts, but usually just because they compress all the action sequences of the movie into about 15 seconds.. the adverts for Wall-E however were rather barren and peaceful (while still beautiful in their own way) and then IIRC the wasteland section of the movie didn't last all that long, and it all soon degenerated into slapstick comedy and crazy chases.
I think perhaps I might still be taking it all a little too seriously, despite this being /. I am almost tempted to get the movie and watch it again with lower expectations, it might be better than I remember..