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Frankly, yes. It's a Wiki. A type of 'user editable' database so easy to administer that individuals set them up for damn near everything. The money brought in is in massive excess of their needs to administer the site and the foundation.
The only anime I'd put in the same category of gripping every last bit of your attention (although with less clever and engaging writing that Death Note falls into and with a completely different atmosphere) is Mushishi.
I won't even describe it to you. Just download it (or buy it, i think there is a dub sold in north america now) and watch it. You will be glad.
"The Road" was an absolute piece of dry dog-shit.
I can't believe this is the same author that gave us "No Country for Old Men". As far as post-apocalyptic fiction goes, even Bob McCammon's 'Swan Song' was better then that drivel.
Good SF authors: Vernor Vinge, Julian May (you must read the Saga of Pliocene Exile) Dan Simmons (nuff said already) and Neal Stephenson! his branching off into historical fiction with Cryptonomicon (half cypherpunk, half historical fiction, all awesomeness) and the amazing Baroque Cycle are some of my all time faves now.
Like so many young geeks grown up and married with children now, AD&D was a -huge- part of my youth. Starting in Grade 6, playing my first campaign with a DM who was so lazy he didn't bother calculating XP, he simply rolled a d4 to see how many levels you went up at the end of a module, I was hooked. I ran out and bought a DM's guide with my savings, and realized just how crappy a DM my friend was, and promply took over DM duties.
The lessons I learned, interests I discovered (computers) and the friends I made playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons all have stayed with me all my life. Thank you, Gary. You will not be forgotten.
I'll be pouring out an ale for my fallen homie when I get home tonight.
We have a 27" Sony SDTV for the living room, the old 24" Zenith is in the bedroom, and the girls each have a 19" crapbox from Superstore so they stay off ours.
Why do you need a wall-sized screen? How much teevee do you really watch?
Admittedly we're looking at 42" as the smallest when we make the move to HDTV but that's still a year to 2 years off.
And I am a middle mananger in a technology company with more then enough income to kit the house out in full HD everywhere if I actually cared enough to. I just don't.
2042 feet after a huge sequence of balloon-bouncing and fart-restorations. Just barely crawled over the 2k mark after bouncing gently off 3 sets of boobies. Daym what an addicting little gem.
Gotta keep in mind, you can make a pretty serious Lord Voldemort lookalike from the Forsaken, for when playing your "Harry Potter in Hermione's Secret Chamber" LARP sessions...
From Pod People:
Kid: "Trumpy, you can do magic things!"
Servo: "It's called evil kid"
Perhaps I am overdrawn at the memory bank, but I thought that the line (also one of my faves) was:
From Pod People:
Kid: "Trumpy, you can do magic things!"
Servo: "Trumpy, you can do STUPID things!"
You smart/.-ers know as well as I do that you would recognize this error for what it was instantly (unless drunk, then it might take you all of $3 instead of the first dollar) and not only that, you'd take the machine for all it had without thinking twice and walk away grinning like a fool.
This applies to a good 80% of you, and you know it in your hearts. It's easy to justify, odds are that you've already lost a good chunk of what you brought into the casino to begin with (and unless you are a professional gambler, resentment is at least a seed, and most likely a blooming tree in your heart over this) and the chance to stick it to 'the man' would be impossible to pass up.
The only people who honestly claim they would not take advantage are a/ non-gamblers who rarely if ever have ventured into a casino, b/ stakeholders in a gambling business or c/followers of a strong moral code, and not likely to be in a casino anyway.
God I used to play Stroker 64 like a master(bater), i'm ashamed to admit.
I could get that thing the size of a tower in the sky before blowing ASCII baby batter all over the hand.....good times.
That game definately qualifies as 'so bad it's good'.
It depends on the movie. Certain films, and/or certain moments in films (the destruction of the Death Stars at the ends of Star Wars and Return of the Jedi stand out in my childhood memories of films where people stood and cheered, this in more 'reserved' Canada) will elicit a response where people will cheer or react other then just laughing at a funny moment. There were a couple scenes in "Highlander II" where fans of the original (like me) stood and loudly booed, or threw popcorn at the screen, too.
If you want to see something REALLY bizarre, go to a midnight screening of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show". That's the same wherever you are in the world.
Even though The Godfather is a bad game on all platforms and Trauma Center is better on the DS?
??Have you played either game on the Wii or are you just guessing here? Trauma Center is almost a different game on the Wii with the addition of a number of new operations (thankfully ones that are more like RL, rather then chasing down bio-engineered bugs) re-worked operations like the bomb defusing one and the wii-mote + Nunchuck combo completely re-invents the interface from one of torture to one of FEELING like a surgeon, as much as a videogame can do that. Seriously, even if you have played the DS version, try the Wii one before you sound off on/.
Godfather is not a great game I grant you, but it's 10x more fun on the Wii then on any other platform by virtue of, you guessed it, the control interface. Again, try it first. Don't extrapolate. It's not even close to the ps2 kludge-fest.
The Wii does have strong sales, but the fact is that its no more powerful than an Xbox. It's last gen and nothing will change that. It doesn't have the legs to carry it more than a few years
I don't give a wet hamster fart if the Wii was LITERALLY two Gamecubes duct-taped together like the wannabe web-comedians claim. The fact that I can choke a wiseguy out in The Godfather by making throttling motions with my hands or perform acts of miracle surgery in an intuitive and fun manner in Trauma Center is what makes the Wii win out over the more powerful but less flexible MS and Sony boxen. The market has spoken. Just as important, the PUBLISHERS have spoken. Sneering that it's 'last gen' dosen't convince anyone that this untrue fact is relevant but you, yourself and thou.
(That or you've been burned in the lineup for a wii at Best Buy too many times and are just sour-grapes'ing it.)
In order to both re-capture the grown-up gamer that once owned and loved a PET/Vic20/C64/C128/Amiga1000/2000/500/600/1200/300 0etc and has nothing but fond memories and much more disposable income, the 'new' commodore needs to make sometihng almost like a fusion of an Xbox and PC. What i mean is:
Build a truely uniquely styled case ala the imac, and include high quality but low-price PC-compatible hardware with the emphasis on a custom graphics processor that will not only run modern games tolerably well, but contain both a Commodore-customized distro of Linuk and also include a commodore-API that would allow hardware-level access to the custom hardware and allow 'commodore' games to be coded, that would allow it's own gaming library that would be superior to the average PC but still be fully PC compatible for all other games.
They would also have to develop their own 'commodore' games for the time being, as no 3rd party would touch it without extensive hardware sales, but the API could also be released to home-brewers. A very enthusiastic community, and also allow porting of a large Linux library.
It should also contain custom chip-based emulators of the Amiga 3000, 500, 1200 and C-128 (GO64 and all) I say chip-based and not software emulated because I want the emulated machines to also have hardware-level access to the HD and RAM and create their own partitions (and imagine a 1gb ram-disk for an amiga? heh)
Package this all together with a small-ish but high quality LCD screen and sell it for console prices at a small profit for now, with the hope of more later as costs go down and software sells. Commodore would truely be reborn.
Of course this is just a pie-in-the-sky dreamers wish, but I sure would like the new IP holders to consider this. It would probablly sell a lot better then plain old clones with images to cash in on our nostalgia and a copy of VICE pre-installed.
Wow, what console-focussed cack. What about Ultima, going from the birth of the graphical RPG to the most respected franchise of the 80s/mid 90's only to choke to death in the birth of 3d with U8 an U9? or Star Control, wrested from Toys for Bob after the godly and never-bettered Star Control 2 and turned into a retarded retread/ofshoot in SC3, only to linger in development hell forever after? or even Prince of Persia, PC rooted, console raped of every last gasp of integrety.
Lets remember the roots and not just the last 10 years of consoles, people!
The Airbus A380 just landed here at YVR (Vancouver International) a few days back, and I got to see the mofo. It's definately FAR too big to be 'vapor anything', it's as real as you can touch and see. Possibly not ride for 99.9% of people as of yet, but it's there and real.
EXACTLY! I loved nothing so much in Fallout 2 as building a brawler, and then stealing the brass 'nucks from that thug in one of the early towns and then looking for fights, PRAYING for the critical head-busting punch that made me grin for hours on end....
They had better keep the same gallows humor in a Fallout MMORPG unless they want a massive backlash from the very people who would be dedicated to spreading the word otherwise, the Fallout faithful.
Agree. I know a certain opiate addict who has not only maintained his addiction at a (relatively) steady level for several years, but has in that time moved up from an entry level job into operations management and successfully raised two children and kept his wife completely oblivious to his habit.
Addiction is not nearly as cut and dry as some would think.
I intend to. It's always made me bitter how little Commodore's song is sung these days. In an ideal world we'd all be typing these messages on Slashdot on AmigaOS based PCs rather then Windows-based or 'i'd rather die then use Windows so I use Linux'-based PCs.:(
I guess I am very lucky having a wife who's a graveyard-shift stocker at Superstore (where they dont do preorders) and her best friend is a stocker in the Electronics section. Guess who's going to wake up to a PS3 at the foot of the bed in the morning?
Even though the Canadian price is going to be a bit higher, I should have no trouble flipping the unit on Ebay for enough to buy a loaded-out Wii (which will launch with actual fun games) or even build a killer PC for the games that matter.
Thank you, Sony, for creating a culture of obsessive fools with a 'gotta have it NOW' mentality! The same kind of mentality that allows gold-farmers in WoW to thrive and power a whole segment of China's economy.
To paraphrase The Joker, "This world needs an enema."
So many of those games especially the so-called 'honorable mentions' are among my all time favourites. I do have a beef with some of the listings however.
STARCRAFT the RTS that everyone skips the cutscenes on and the inferior-story-but-first-3D-FF-game FF7 get in the top 5 but Xenogears, possibly the richest and most intricate storyline ever developed for the limited genre that is the console RPG only gets an HR? That's just wrong. Xenogears is the game that completely turned around my opinion of the "level and follow this narrow path like a pig in the slaughterhouse chute" console RPG to realize just how compelling a story could be told, if the writers dare to tell it.
The writers of Xenogears told an epic and moving (and controversial) tale of the origins of man and the nature of God that rivalled any DaVinci Code for it's thought-provoking nature, and frankly belongs in a strong #2 position behind Deus Ex, which i agree firmly should be #1.
Another game that deserved at least an HR was Neuromancer for it's novel method of interaction using first BBS-style forums and e-mail systems of deepening sophistication until your neural link was upgraded enough for you to enter 'cyberspace' itself and interact in a VR environment with artificial intelligences. Considering it came out on 8-bit C-64 and Atari machines with their inherent limitations made the game even more amazing.
Slashdot Mirror
" Dear readers in Canada, time is running out in 2016 to help Wikipedia. To protect our independence, we'll never run ads. We're sustained by donations averaging about $15. Only a tiny portion of our readers give. If everyone reading this right now gave $3, we wouldn’t need to fundraise for years to come. That's right, the price of a cup of coffee is all we need. If Wikipedia is useful to you, please take one minute to keep it online and growing. Thank you. "
Frankly, yes. It's a Wiki. A type of 'user editable' database so easy to administer that individuals set them up for damn near everything. The money brought in is in massive excess of their needs to administer the site and the foundation.
The only anime I'd put in the same category of gripping every last bit of your attention (although with less clever and engaging writing that Death Note falls into and with a completely different atmosphere) is Mushishi. I won't even describe it to you. Just download it (or buy it, i think there is a dub sold in north america now) and watch it. You will be glad.
"The Road" was an absolute piece of dry dog-shit. I can't believe this is the same author that gave us "No Country for Old Men". As far as post-apocalyptic fiction goes, even Bob McCammon's 'Swan Song' was better then that drivel. Good SF authors: Vernor Vinge, Julian May (you must read the Saga of Pliocene Exile) Dan Simmons (nuff said already) and Neal Stephenson! his branching off into historical fiction with Cryptonomicon (half cypherpunk, half historical fiction, all awesomeness) and the amazing Baroque Cycle are some of my all time faves now.
Like so many young geeks grown up and married with children now, AD&D was a -huge- part of my youth. Starting in Grade 6, playing my first campaign with a DM who was so lazy he didn't bother calculating XP, he simply rolled a d4 to see how many levels you went up at the end of a module, I was hooked. I ran out and bought a DM's guide with my savings, and realized just how crappy a DM my friend was, and promply took over DM duties. The lessons I learned, interests I discovered (computers) and the friends I made playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons all have stayed with me all my life. Thank you, Gary. You will not be forgotten. I'll be pouring out an ale for my fallen homie when I get home tonight.
We have a 27" Sony SDTV for the living room, the old 24" Zenith is in the bedroom, and the girls each have a 19" crapbox from Superstore so they stay off ours. Why do you need a wall-sized screen? How much teevee do you really watch? Admittedly we're looking at 42" as the smallest when we make the move to HDTV but that's still a year to 2 years off. And I am a middle mananger in a technology company with more then enough income to kit the house out in full HD everywhere if I actually cared enough to. I just don't.
2042 feet after a huge sequence of balloon-bouncing and fart-restorations. Just barely crawled over the 2k mark after bouncing gently off 3 sets of boobies. Daym what an addicting little gem.
Gotta keep in mind, you can make a pretty serious Lord Voldemort lookalike from the Forsaken, for when playing your "Harry Potter in Hermione's Secret Chamber" LARP sessions...
You smart /.-ers know as well as I do that you would recognize this error for what it was instantly (unless drunk, then it might take you all of $3 instead of the first dollar) and not only that, you'd take the machine for all it had without thinking twice and walk away grinning like a fool.
This applies to a good 80% of you, and you know it in your hearts. It's easy to justify, odds are that you've already lost a good chunk of what you brought into the casino to begin with (and unless you are a professional gambler, resentment is at least a seed, and most likely a blooming tree in your heart over this) and the chance to stick it to 'the man' would be impossible to pass up.
The only people who honestly claim they would not take advantage are a/ non-gamblers who rarely if ever have ventured into a casino, b/ stakeholders in a gambling business or c/followers of a strong moral code, and not likely to be in a casino anyway.
God I used to play Stroker 64 like a master(bater), i'm ashamed to admit. I could get that thing the size of a tower in the sky before blowing ASCII baby batter all over the hand.....good times. That game definately qualifies as 'so bad it's good'.
It depends on the movie. Certain films, and/or certain moments in films (the destruction of the Death Stars at the ends of Star Wars and Return of the Jedi stand out in my childhood memories of films where people stood and cheered, this in more 'reserved' Canada) will elicit a response where people will cheer or react other then just laughing at a funny moment. There were a couple scenes in "Highlander II" where fans of the original (like me) stood and loudly booed, or threw popcorn at the screen, too. If you want to see something REALLY bizarre, go to a midnight screening of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show". That's the same wherever you are in the world.
No love for the GP32 or GP2X, the Linux-based homebrew god of handhelds. For that matter, they include the Ngage but skip the Gizmondo? Poor article.
Gah, I tried to format this, honestly. /. needs edit function. :(
In order to both re-capture the grown-up gamer that once owned and loved a PET/Vic20/C64/C128/Amiga1000/2000/500/600/1200/300 0etc and has nothing but fond memories and much more disposable income, the 'new' commodore needs to make sometihng almost like a fusion of an Xbox and PC. What i mean is:
Build a truely uniquely styled case ala the imac, and include high quality but low-price PC-compatible hardware with the emphasis on a custom graphics processor that will not only run modern games tolerably well, but contain both a Commodore-customized distro of Linuk and also include a commodore-API that would allow hardware-level access to the custom hardware and allow 'commodore' games to be coded, that would allow it's own gaming library that would be superior to the average PC but still be fully PC compatible for all other games.
They would also have to develop their own 'commodore' games for the time being, as no 3rd party would touch it without extensive hardware sales, but the API could also be released to home-brewers. A very enthusiastic community, and also allow porting of a large Linux library.
It should also contain custom chip-based emulators of the Amiga 3000, 500, 1200 and C-128 (GO64 and all) I say chip-based and not software emulated because I want the emulated machines to also have hardware-level access to the HD and RAM and create their own partitions (and imagine a 1gb ram-disk for an amiga? heh)
Package this all together with a small-ish but high quality LCD screen and sell it for console prices at a small profit for now, with the hope of more later as costs go down and software sells. Commodore would truely be reborn.
Of course this is just a pie-in-the-sky dreamers wish, but I sure would like the new IP holders to consider this. It would probablly sell a lot better then plain old clones with images to cash in on our nostalgia and a copy of VICE pre-installed.
Won't happen. For Dubya to call for an invasion on the chimps, he would have to admit beliving in evolution first. :p
Wow, what console-focussed cack. What about Ultima, going from the birth of the graphical RPG to the most respected franchise of the 80s/mid 90's only to choke to death in the birth of 3d with U8 an U9? or Star Control, wrested from Toys for Bob after the godly and never-bettered Star Control 2 and turned into a retarded retread/ofshoot in SC3, only to linger in development hell forever after? or even Prince of Persia, PC rooted, console raped of every last gasp of integrety. Lets remember the roots and not just the last 10 years of consoles, people!
The Airbus A380 just landed here at YVR (Vancouver International) a few days back, and I got to see the mofo. It's definately FAR too big to be 'vapor anything', it's as real as you can touch and see. Possibly not ride for 99.9% of people as of yet, but it's there and real.
EXACTLY! I loved nothing so much in Fallout 2 as building a brawler, and then stealing the brass 'nucks from that thug in one of the early towns and then looking for fights, PRAYING for the critical head-busting punch that made me grin for hours on end.... They had better keep the same gallows humor in a Fallout MMORPG unless they want a massive backlash from the very people who would be dedicated to spreading the word otherwise, the Fallout faithful.
Agree. I know a certain opiate addict who has not only maintained his addiction at a (relatively) steady level for several years, but has in that time moved up from an entry level job into operations management and successfully raised two children and kept his wife completely oblivious to his habit. Addiction is not nearly as cut and dry as some would think.
I intend to. It's always made me bitter how little Commodore's song is sung these days. In an ideal world we'd all be typing these messages on Slashdot on AmigaOS based PCs rather then Windows-based or 'i'd rather die then use Windows so I use Linux'-based PCs. :(
I guess I am very lucky having a wife who's a graveyard-shift stocker at Superstore (where they dont do preorders) and her best friend is a stocker in the Electronics section. Guess who's going to wake up to a PS3 at the foot of the bed in the morning? Even though the Canadian price is going to be a bit higher, I should have no trouble flipping the unit on Ebay for enough to buy a loaded-out Wii (which will launch with actual fun games) or even build a killer PC for the games that matter. Thank you, Sony, for creating a culture of obsessive fools with a 'gotta have it NOW' mentality! The same kind of mentality that allows gold-farmers in WoW to thrive and power a whole segment of China's economy. To paraphrase The Joker, "This world needs an enema."
So many of those games especially the so-called 'honorable mentions' are among my all time favourites. I do have a beef with some of the listings however. STARCRAFT the RTS that everyone skips the cutscenes on and the inferior-story-but-first-3D-FF-game FF7 get in the top 5 but Xenogears, possibly the richest and most intricate storyline ever developed for the limited genre that is the console RPG only gets an HR? That's just wrong. Xenogears is the game that completely turned around my opinion of the "level and follow this narrow path like a pig in the slaughterhouse chute" console RPG to realize just how compelling a story could be told, if the writers dare to tell it. The writers of Xenogears told an epic and moving (and controversial) tale of the origins of man and the nature of God that rivalled any DaVinci Code for it's thought-provoking nature, and frankly belongs in a strong #2 position behind Deus Ex, which i agree firmly should be #1. Another game that deserved at least an HR was Neuromancer for it's novel method of interaction using first BBS-style forums and e-mail systems of deepening sophistication until your neural link was upgraded enough for you to enter 'cyberspace' itself and interact in a VR environment with artificial intelligences. Considering it came out on 8-bit C-64 and Atari machines with their inherent limitations made the game even more amazing.