Some do, and in a few cases I agree that they should have Admin access. I can understand that cases exist where it's necessary. However, an alarming number doesn't bother. The latter group tends to want admin access because they're too lazy or impatient to adhere to reasonable security procedures. To the sharks for these systems, as long as it's not on my head.
Incidentally, we do also offer VMware Player as an alternative where people can have admin access. The lazy variety tend not to want to go through this extra step, so in practice it's the people who really need Admin that get VMware - when they don't need direct hardware access.
In our environment, it's the legal staff that decree protection of most documents. They're quite adamant about it, and this approach works pretty well for us. We don't prevent users from doing much aside from having admin access, which is required of us - and those who require it go on a separate subnet where they can infect each other if it comes to that. If they get admin, they sign off on our involvement with the system, as they are now their own support, and we're both happy until their system breaks. Then they get a fresh image, and some relinquish Admin privileges since it caused their grief to begin with. The only time we end up clamping down too much is when the next tier of security gets involved, in which case our hands are basically tied.
Also, Zelda should have required you to pull back to load an arrow, so it's more realistic.
I'd rather it didn't, the aiming almost certainly would have been painful in a few places when you were trying to do three things at a time. The part where you have to kill the flying monsters with the bow while also killing the other monsters riding the boars, and douse the fire off the wagon with the wind magic in particular would have been a nightmare. Button activation was about as realistic as I wanted in that instance. Of course, the knife throwing minigame in Rayman: Raving Rabbids was certainly humorous, but it didn't necessarily block you from getting past part of the game.
I'm happy with the Wii so far. I'm enjoying the games that I purchased so far, and am looking forward to more of the games coming in the next few months. Bring on the DDR game that uses both the remote and dance pad too. People who stop by our place always want to give it a shot, presumably because it's still a relatively difficult to acquire commodity. Once supply catches up, there will be a number of Wii owners who wouldn't have considered a console in the past based on those experiences.
If you want to see more of that, try Wario Ware: Smooth Moves. Of course, Wii Sports is always fun. If you have four remotes and players, tennis is particularly interesting. Just make sure there's enough room so they don't kill each other.
do we really only have those 2 chooses? Are you suggesting that games now rule our society to the point that we have to go a round-about way to get people to get in shape?
My observations would seem to suggest that this is pretty close to the truth for a large number of gamers. I've never had a weight problem myself, but I know enough people that do.
I believe there should be more then couch potato and couch potato playing Wii.
You're right of course, there should be (and are!) other alternatives to sitting on the couch. Unfortunately, these alternatives seem widely ignored by a good chunk of the population. Think of it as a form of positive reinforcement.
Kids tend to enjoy playing video games, and a growing number of adults do so as well. Generations who have grown up with video games will only cause this trend to continue. Given this fact, would you rather they sit on the couch to play or get up and move around? Personally, I've always preferred video games that get you into the game beyond the simple joypad/joystick controller. They haven't necessarily promoted exercise, arcade driving games that you actually sit in the cabinet to play for example, but the exercise that comes with the Wii and games like DDR is always a bonus.
If it's an effective tool, I say don't knock it. Doing anything at all is better than nothing. I'd think it would be more depressing to see the industry continue to knock out games where people just sit on the couch, gorging on junk food. Believe me, I've been (and still am, sometimes) there.;)
I understand about the graphics chipsets, but I really don't care to pay for that when there's an alternative. I just want games that run and run well. The Wii's graphics seem fine to me, we've only seen what the launch titles look like and the current engines are probably just Gamecube engines with little modification. Some Gamecube titles look quite a bit better than what we've seen so far, and the Wii has a better CPU and higher clocked graphics. I'm not sure what to make about the intensity comment though, Wii tennis with four people playing seriously is about as intense as games get. It's fun to watch too.
Once the other consoles dip down in price, I'll probably buy one that has games I want to play. That may be a while though - I bought my PS2 for $120, albeit used, so my wife could play more DDR games. We have Guitar Hero and Katamari Damacy on it as well, generally it's games with unique experiences that we go for.
That's true, but it would probably be better for them to keep the console's price down in the design phase. I realize they're pushing for Blu-Ray, but I couldn't even conceive of spending much more than $200 on a console primarily intended for games. I've typically spent less than $150 per console in the past, and that includes the PS2. I really don't care how powerful a game system is, I already have a few PCs and don't need another device claiming to be one. I don't even want a Blu-Ray player. I just want a platform that plays fun games, without the hiccups or conflicts that can happen on a PC.
The Wii price point was marginal despite the interesting input devices, oddly enough it was the price of the competition that caused me to view it in a favorable light and purchase one. The Xbox 360 price was out of line IMO, although it can no doubt come down over time. The PS3 at this point is a ridiculous joke. The 360 going down in price might find me purchasing one, but I'm not sure if Sony can make back through licensing what they're likely to lose on the PS3 with further price cuts. If they can bring it to around $200, I might buy one. I don't see it happening within the next few years.
Computers and their components become faster over time, and the price for components generally goes down when they have been in production for some time. Ideally, a console would consist of parts which are favorable to reasonably priced mass production while providing good performance. Sony has thrown balance out the window and attempted to make the most powerful console. This sounds nice in theory, but they're using parts that are difficult to manufacture, expensive, and unproven (in the case of Cell.) Passing the costs on to consumers obviously doesn't work in this case, but how much of the cost can Sony eat? What if someone gets one and uses it as e.g. a Linux box without playing games on it? They may never receive software licensing revenue for that unit, so each instance is a net loss.
The local pet shops all agree that the heat lamp is safer for lizards than a heating pad, and since the bearded dragon originally came from a desert climate it should provide a more home-like feeling along with the "calcium" sand. We let Kaijyu out most days to roam, but he/she (we haven't checked, since it could be a painful process) always wants to go back in the cage after a short time - probably due to the temperature difference.
Sure, go ahead and work towards solving the crisis. Subsidize more efficient technologies, and tax the less efficient. PG&E (the electric company here in Cali, at least North California) provides discounts for reduced energy use and increased rates for excessive use. I see no problem with that. Just don't go around banning technologies when there are justifiable uses where the alternative will not suffice. I do vote, and have been known to be rather vocal at times.
It's a wash if you have a pet that relies on an incandescent heat lamp to survive as well as a flourescent UV lamp, uses the light from both to determine when to sleep, and whose skin would burn with a heating pad. We keep a reptile as a pet that wouldn't survive terribly long at room temperature.
Not to sound too negative, but why? There are already handhelds on the market (one from Sony and two from Nintendo, even the GBA still sells) that are more than capable of fending off an uninspired phone/console combo. People who play games probably want to do so on a dedicated gaming device, to avoid killing their phone's battery life. A built-in game or two couldn't hurt, and there are already a number of games you can download based on Java. It almost seems like they want to lose money with these devices.
I guess on the plus side it couldn't suck as badly as the original N-Gage, they must have learned something from the horrible control layout and weak graphics capability. Good luck to them, and let's hope for a solid implementation.
"NASA" doesn't want to end it per se, there are people who work on that project and use the data who would like to see it continue. The issue is whether there are sufficient funds to keep the Hubble telescope going, while taking care of other ongoing missions and work to prepare for the planned future missions. If congress hands NASA a lump of cash and tells them "This is for Hubble", Hubble will be serviced. Until that happens, there's a lot of work to be done before we have our shuttle replacement and a manned base on the moon. My humble opinion, not the opinion of NASA, legalese blah blah blah, but based on observation.
I really don't get why one would want them to go bankrupt. There are many people who work for them who would be out of a job if Sony just went out of business. OTOH I'd rather have a few competing consoles on the market rather than one dominant player, I don't want to see a Sony-dominated console generation (or any vendor for that matter) again. I'm enjoying the Wii console's games now, but if Sony brings the price down by maybe 50% and releases some games I'd want to play I might add a PS3 to my collection.
I have to ask how the casual gamer reacts when he is first exposed to Oblivion or Gears of War.
That experience varies, some people like the graphics while others dislike the violence. I can tell you that in my experience, all the non-gamers and casual gamers who have seen it reacted surprisingly well to the Wii's control scheme and had no complaints. Wii Sports was really the first killer app for people who wouldn't consider themselves video gamers, with Rayman:RR and Wario Ware being excellent follow-ups through the humor angle. A few (who might be considered hard-core gamers, including a Sony employee who works for SCEA) were critical of the graphics in Wii Sports, but still enjoyed the gameplay.
My take is that there are more non-gamers than hard core gamers, and including the baby boomers in the target audience as they retire (i.e. have plenty of money for entertainment) is a master stroke on Nintendo's part. The PS3 may do very well, but it will probably need to go down in price quite a bit before the majority of households will be able to afford one. The 360 has a viable price point, but it's more of the same thing that only gamers tend to go for. Neither has displaced my other consoles the way the Wii has.
That's good news for the PSP, but I haven't seen anything that made me want one just yet. We already have a Wii, two DS systems, a GBA SP, and a PS2 (along with several older consoles.) It has to differentiate itself somehow for me to add it to my console collection though, these things happen when you get married...
Not to nitpick - but when we picked up a DS in the States the charger was 110V only
Not at all, that's an excellent point. I mentioned between US and Japan, as the US is typically 110-120v at 60hz; both our DS systems come with chargers that work from 100-120v at 50 and 60hz. Since my wife's family is in Japan I tend to travel there more than other places, so it's been perfect for us.
if the DS were the one to utilize UMD, I submit that it wouldn't be the commercial flop it is.
It's not because of marketing, Sony is no slouch there, nor because there aren't people loyal to Sony's platform. Sony's product simply makes it difficult to be loyal. Why do people want to re-buy their DVDs in a low res medium they can only play on the handheld, with no TV output, especially when Sony wants people to buy movies again in the high def Blu-Ray now? If the DS utilized UMD, I doubt it would be as small nor have the same battery life as the DS light. The media would be larger as well. Handhelds get carried around, sometimes on long trips, and these factors can be important. My wife and I used our DS systems on our last trip to Japan and had no worries about battery life on either ~11 hour flight - nor the extra connecting flights in Narita. No problems fitting both DS systems and all our games in carry-on luggage.
We picked up a bit of software for the DS in Japan as well, including DQM:Joker, a Japanese dictionary application for myself that uses the stylus to recognize input Japanese characters, and an English TOEIC training game for my wife. We also left a game from the US for my brother-in-law's kids. The lack of region coding (this even extends to the AC adapters between the US and Japan, both unlike the Wii unfortunately) in the DS systems makes it ideal for our usage. Not sure about the PSP, perhaps it also has no region encoding, but it felt good to not have to worry about regions.
*shrug* Everyone has their areas of familiarity, I just happened to have worked on various projects using both frameworks. Often in conjunction with Windows developers. They work on several platforms one might not suspect, SDL works with BeOS and Allegro will even do DOS (well, it did when I last used it anyway.)
Well, for starters, point #1 was really aimed at the lack of an analog to DirectX on the Linux front. Yes, there's OpenGL and OpenML and OpenAL, but they're not a combined effort the way DirectX has Direct3D and DirectSound (and DirectInput and DirectNetwork and DirectEtc, Etc).
There is SDL, which is what most Linux games seem to get created under these days and is quite portable. It should be possible to create abstraction interfaces for OpenGL and the other libraries mentioned to avoid having to code directly to any external API, although this would likely cause a performance decrease. The Allegro library is also portable, handles more internally, and may even cover all the bases you mentioned these days. SDL is rather simpler to work with and install though, and it seems faster under X11 from my experience. Not to mention that SDL is more or less ubiquitous on Linux distributions.
In any case, there are certainly portable APIs under which one can write games. More work could go into it, but I have no doubt that it will.
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Absolutely. The line eater also takes on an entirely different meaning in this implementation.
Python (Monty).
Some do, and in a few cases I agree that they should have Admin access. I can understand that cases exist where it's necessary. However, an alarming number doesn't bother. The latter group tends to want admin access because they're too lazy or impatient to adhere to reasonable security procedures. To the sharks for these systems, as long as it's not on my head.
Incidentally, we do also offer VMware Player as an alternative where people can have admin access. The lazy variety tend not to want to go through this extra step, so in practice it's the people who really need Admin that get VMware - when they don't need direct hardware access.
In our environment, it's the legal staff that decree protection of most documents. They're quite adamant about it, and this approach works pretty well for us. We don't prevent users from doing much aside from having admin access, which is required of us - and those who require it go on a separate subnet where they can infect each other if it comes to that. If they get admin, they sign off on our involvement with the system, as they are now their own support, and we're both happy until their system breaks. Then they get a fresh image, and some relinquish Admin privileges since it caused their grief to begin with. The only time we end up clamping down too much is when the next tier of security gets involved, in which case our hands are basically tied.
Also, Zelda should have required you to pull back to load an arrow, so it's more realistic.
I'd rather it didn't, the aiming almost certainly would have been painful in a few places when you were trying to do three things at a time. The part where you have to kill the flying monsters with the bow while also killing the other monsters riding the boars, and douse the fire off the wagon with the wind magic in particular would have been a nightmare. Button activation was about as realistic as I wanted in that instance. Of course, the knife throwing minigame in Rayman: Raving Rabbids was certainly humorous, but it didn't necessarily block you from getting past part of the game. I'm happy with the Wii so far. I'm enjoying the games that I purchased so far, and am looking forward to more of the games coming in the next few months. Bring on the DDR game that uses both the remote and dance pad too. People who stop by our place always want to give it a shot, presumably because it's still a relatively difficult to acquire commodity. Once supply catches up, there will be a number of Wii owners who wouldn't have considered a console in the past based on those experiences.
If you want to see more of that, try Wario Ware: Smooth Moves. Of course, Wii Sports is always fun. If you have four remotes and players, tennis is particularly interesting. Just make sure there's enough room so they don't kill each other.
I wonder if Nintendo and MS wouldn't be better off doing what Sony did and dropping regional controls altogether.
You bet. This is the only reason I'd even consider a modchip. I have Japanese software for my DS, why not on the Wii console?
do we really only have those 2 chooses? Are you suggesting that games now rule our society to the point that we have to go a round-about way to get people to get in shape?
My observations would seem to suggest that this is pretty close to the truth for a large number of gamers. I've never had a weight problem myself, but I know enough people that do.
I believe there should be more then couch potato and couch potato playing Wii.
You're right of course, there should be (and are!) other alternatives to sitting on the couch. Unfortunately, these alternatives seem widely ignored by a good chunk of the population. Think of it as a form of positive reinforcement.
Kids tend to enjoy playing video games, and a growing number of adults do so as well. Generations who have grown up with video games will only cause this trend to continue. Given this fact, would you rather they sit on the couch to play or get up and move around? Personally, I've always preferred video games that get you into the game beyond the simple joypad/joystick controller. They haven't necessarily promoted exercise, arcade driving games that you actually sit in the cabinet to play for example, but the exercise that comes with the Wii and games like DDR is always a bonus.
;)
If it's an effective tool, I say don't knock it. Doing anything at all is better than nothing. I'd think it would be more depressing to see the industry continue to knock out games where people just sit on the couch, gorging on junk food. Believe me, I've been (and still am, sometimes) there.
I understand about the graphics chipsets, but I really don't care to pay for that when there's an alternative. I just want games that run and run well. The Wii's graphics seem fine to me, we've only seen what the launch titles look like and the current engines are probably just Gamecube engines with little modification. Some Gamecube titles look quite a bit better than what we've seen so far, and the Wii has a better CPU and higher clocked graphics. I'm not sure what to make about the intensity comment though, Wii tennis with four people playing seriously is about as intense as games get. It's fun to watch too.
Once the other consoles dip down in price, I'll probably buy one that has games I want to play. That may be a while though - I bought my PS2 for $120, albeit used, so my wife could play more DDR games. We have Guitar Hero and Katamari Damacy on it as well, generally it's games with unique experiences that we go for.
That's true, but it would probably be better for them to keep the console's price down in the design phase. I realize they're pushing for Blu-Ray, but I couldn't even conceive of spending much more than $200 on a console primarily intended for games. I've typically spent less than $150 per console in the past, and that includes the PS2. I really don't care how powerful a game system is, I already have a few PCs and don't need another device claiming to be one. I don't even want a Blu-Ray player. I just want a platform that plays fun games, without the hiccups or conflicts that can happen on a PC.
The Wii price point was marginal despite the interesting input devices, oddly enough it was the price of the competition that caused me to view it in a favorable light and purchase one. The Xbox 360 price was out of line IMO, although it can no doubt come down over time. The PS3 at this point is a ridiculous joke. The 360 going down in price might find me purchasing one, but I'm not sure if Sony can make back through licensing what they're likely to lose on the PS3 with further price cuts. If they can bring it to around $200, I might buy one. I don't see it happening within the next few years.
Computers and their components become faster over time, and the price for components generally goes down when they have been in production for some time. Ideally, a console would consist of parts which are favorable to reasonably priced mass production while providing good performance. Sony has thrown balance out the window and attempted to make the most powerful console. This sounds nice in theory, but they're using parts that are difficult to manufacture, expensive, and unproven (in the case of Cell.) Passing the costs on to consumers obviously doesn't work in this case, but how much of the cost can Sony eat? What if someone gets one and uses it as e.g. a Linux box without playing games on it? They may never receive software licensing revenue for that unit, so each instance is a net loss.
Thank you for your kind consideration.
The lizard's a bearded dragon, you can see a few pictures of Kaijyu over time here:
http://xyzzy.dyn.dhs.org/camera/kaijyu/
The local pet shops all agree that the heat lamp is safer for lizards than a heating pad, and since the bearded dragon originally came from a desert climate it should provide a more home-like feeling along with the "calcium" sand. We let Kaijyu out most days to roam, but he/she (we haven't checked, since it could be a painful process) always wants to go back in the cage after a short time - probably due to the temperature difference.
As long as they provide an alternative that suits me and keeps the lizard happy, sure, it's perfectly fine. Run with it.
Sure, go ahead and work towards solving the crisis. Subsidize more efficient technologies, and tax the less efficient. PG&E (the electric company here in Cali, at least North California) provides discounts for reduced energy use and increased rates for excessive use. I see no problem with that. Just don't go around banning technologies when there are justifiable uses where the alternative will not suffice. I do vote, and have been known to be rather vocal at times.
It's a wash if you have a pet that relies on an incandescent heat lamp to survive as well as a flourescent UV lamp, uses the light from both to determine when to sleep, and whose skin would burn with a heating pad. We keep a reptile as a pet that wouldn't survive terribly long at room temperature.
Not to sound too negative, but why? There are already handhelds on the market (one from Sony and two from Nintendo, even the GBA still sells) that are more than capable of fending off an uninspired phone/console combo. People who play games probably want to do so on a dedicated gaming device, to avoid killing their phone's battery life. A built-in game or two couldn't hurt, and there are already a number of games you can download based on Java. It almost seems like they want to lose money with these devices.
I guess on the plus side it couldn't suck as badly as the original N-Gage, they must have learned something from the horrible control layout and weak graphics capability. Good luck to them, and let's hope for a solid implementation.
"NASA" doesn't want to end it per se, there are people who work on that project and use the data who would like to see it continue. The issue is whether there are sufficient funds to keep the Hubble telescope going, while taking care of other ongoing missions and work to prepare for the planned future missions. If congress hands NASA a lump of cash and tells them "This is for Hubble", Hubble will be serviced. Until that happens, there's a lot of work to be done before we have our shuttle replacement and a manned base on the moon. My humble opinion, not the opinion of NASA, legalese blah blah blah, but based on observation.
I really don't get why one would want them to go bankrupt. There are many people who work for them who would be out of a job if Sony just went out of business. OTOH I'd rather have a few competing consoles on the market rather than one dominant player, I don't want to see a Sony-dominated console generation (or any vendor for that matter) again. I'm enjoying the Wii console's games now, but if Sony brings the price down by maybe 50% and releases some games I'd want to play I might add a PS3 to my collection.
I have to ask how the casual gamer reacts when he is first exposed to Oblivion or Gears of War.
That experience varies, some people like the graphics while others dislike the violence. I can tell you that in my experience, all the non-gamers and casual gamers who have seen it reacted surprisingly well to the Wii's control scheme and had no complaints. Wii Sports was really the first killer app for people who wouldn't consider themselves video gamers, with Rayman:RR and Wario Ware being excellent follow-ups through the humor angle. A few (who might be considered hard-core gamers, including a Sony employee who works for SCEA) were critical of the graphics in Wii Sports, but still enjoyed the gameplay.
My take is that there are more non-gamers than hard core gamers, and including the baby boomers in the target audience as they retire (i.e. have plenty of money for entertainment) is a master stroke on Nintendo's part. The PS3 may do very well, but it will probably need to go down in price quite a bit before the majority of households will be able to afford one. The 360 has a viable price point, but it's more of the same thing that only gamers tend to go for. Neither has displaced my other consoles the way the Wii has.
That's good news for the PSP, but I haven't seen anything that made me want one just yet. We already have a Wii, two DS systems, a GBA SP, and a PS2 (along with several older consoles.) It has to differentiate itself somehow for me to add it to my console collection though, these things happen when you get married...
Not to nitpick - but when we picked up a DS in the States the charger was 110V only
Not at all, that's an excellent point. I mentioned between US and Japan, as the US is typically 110-120v at 60hz; both our DS systems come with chargers that work from 100-120v at 50 and 60hz. Since my wife's family is in Japan I tend to travel there more than other places, so it's been perfect for us.
It's not because of marketing, Sony is no slouch there, nor because there aren't people loyal to Sony's platform. Sony's product simply makes it difficult to be loyal. Why do people want to re-buy their DVDs in a low res medium they can only play on the handheld, with no TV output, especially when Sony wants people to buy movies again in the high def Blu-Ray now? If the DS utilized UMD, I doubt it would be as small nor have the same battery life as the DS light. The media would be larger as well. Handhelds get carried around, sometimes on long trips, and these factors can be important. My wife and I used our DS systems on our last trip to Japan and had no worries about battery life on either ~11 hour flight - nor the extra connecting flights in Narita. No problems fitting both DS systems and all our games in carry-on luggage.
We picked up a bit of software for the DS in Japan as well, including DQM:Joker, a Japanese dictionary application for myself that uses the stylus to recognize input Japanese characters, and an English TOEIC training game for my wife. We also left a game from the US for my brother-in-law's kids. The lack of region coding (this even extends to the AC adapters between the US and Japan, both unlike the Wii unfortunately) in the DS systems makes it ideal for our usage. Not sure about the PSP, perhaps it also has no region encoding, but it felt good to not have to worry about regions.
*shrug* Everyone has their areas of familiarity, I just happened to have worked on various projects using both frameworks. Often in conjunction with Windows developers. They work on several platforms one might not suspect, SDL works with BeOS and Allegro will even do DOS (well, it did when I last used it anyway.)
Well, for starters, point #1 was really aimed at the lack of an analog to DirectX on the Linux front. Yes, there's OpenGL and OpenML and OpenAL, but they're not a combined effort the way DirectX has Direct3D and DirectSound (and DirectInput and DirectNetwork and DirectEtc, Etc).
There is SDL, which is what most Linux games seem to get created under these days and is quite portable. It should be possible to create abstraction interfaces for OpenGL and the other libraries mentioned to avoid having to code directly to any external API, although this would likely cause a performance decrease. The Allegro library is also portable, handles more internally, and may even cover all the bases you mentioned these days. SDL is rather simpler to work with and install though, and it seems faster under X11 from my experience. Not to mention that SDL is more or less ubiquitous on Linux distributions.
In any case, there are certainly portable APIs under which one can write games. More work could go into it, but I have no doubt that it will.