Does it work the other way around too? Can I become an IT boss if I can do those things, write "hello world" and query a database? No, because seriously I'm getting tired of cleaning toilets for a -- no pun intended -- shit salary and then come read here about incompetent people in the IT industry.
"unique and fascinating mechanics that can't be diminished by the advancement of technology"
What a pretty hyperbole to mask the true reason why these games keep coming at every generation of consoles since they were invented in the early 80's! It's not due to an exceptional gameplay, it's simply because they never significantly change the game's mechanics, which makes those so-called remakes quick and dirt cheap to produce.
I don't know the numbers but I seriously doubt they sell a lot of these Pac-Man games. Yet, it must be profitable or they would stop doing it every so often and that's only possible because, no matter what Iguchi claims in the article, they just keep serving the same game over and over. The graphics are enhanced with the latest design trends (here the flashy light effects a la Geometry Wars) and the gameplay is slightly tweaked as to give the illusion they're presenting something new even though they are not.
The very low-cost production costs combined with a small core of early gaming devotees and "accidental customers" (people who lack a reason NOT to buy a product) must be enough to generate a revenue. To Namco's credit, it must be said they did try to get Pac-Man do something else than eating pellets in a maze (platformer, adventure, puzzle... respectively Pac in Time, The New Adventures and Pac-Attack) but with mild results and poor sales.
I'm fond of retrogaming and I believe some of the most interesting games have been made back then (am I lost in the haze?), however I don't think Pac-Man and Galaga qualify as imperishable classics like Super Mario or Castlevania. Early Namco titles have been unable to evolve beyond their original formula. The "true and fascinating mechanics" are impervious to the passage of time -- they don't even need to be remade to be enjoyed -- but they are also capable of moving forward with new ideas.
Re:Wasn't this already covered by Ghostbusters?
on
LHC Flips On Tomorrow
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· Score: 1
Deja vu. This news story inspires the same jokes. See also this Slashdot article from 1999 about a certain Heavy Ion Collider. Dan Simmons and Valve are making the usual guest appearance.
The book is 228 pages long and showcases 500 Nintendo toys and games prior to 1980 (took them 6 years of research!). The whole series will have 6 volumes totalling more than 1400 pages. Flabbergasting I daresay.
In the chatrooms of Suomi24, a Finnish site, they prevent hotmail.com addresses to be posted but no other mail service. In OkCupid their censorship is rather humorous, the only word not allowed in their IM is "Michael Jackson".
That's right, the RG (Renseignements Generaux) was a French intelligence agency which has been merged with the DST a couple of months ago. I guess they are reorganizing their agencies hence the revised database system.
Quoting the French interior minister:
Edvige will differ from the old RG file on two points only, "it will take into account underage individuals and be extended to sensitive data", such as sexual orientation.
I doubt it's different from the methods use by other countries to track potential troublemakers. What's different is that now all these decisions related to intelligence services go under public scrutiny and become all the rage among self-proclaimed champions of the civil liberties. In short, much ado about nothing.
Not that I disagree with the whole issue of pages playing unrequested music, but isn't that off-topic? Anyway... Having employees themselves, perhaps what HP figured is that they are not supposed to go browsing promotional websites during work. As an alternative solution, you can have earphones plugged at all times, whether you wear them or not, to avoid sudden noise bursts.
Lastly, I don't think Flash ads have anything to do with Web 2.0, you can very well embed Flash ads between the text on your grey background afterall. At least, thanks to better technology, it's not as painful as it was back then when you landed on an amateur page that desperately tried to load and play a damn midi file on your agonizing computer.
They're just trying to make Denmark look really big and noticeable since their VIRTUAL MACHINE was made there. The rest of the world just needs to know it's somewhere there, in the middle of Europe.
It is true video games are art, what they lack is the recognition from outside the gaming industry and community. A lot of things can be considered art as someone else pointed out in the thread, but what matters is the masterworks that transcend the limits set by individual tastes and elevate art to global appreciation. And that's one thing that video games may be lacking. They are popular of course, but not for their artistical assets, just because they're fun to play; it has become some cheap form of entertainment, like TV.
Besides, by trying hard to look like films -which they will never be- by borrowing from them and emulating them, some contemporary games have just given up the uniqueness of video games. I think the artistic soul of video games can be more easily found in its past rather than in its present, because back then they had a personality, an identity that was truly unique; exactly what art needs to live up to its definition.
Perhaps they wanted the name to rhyme with Gary Gygax?
There's one thing the name does well though, it's to match the awkward design: it tries hard to look trendy (weeee! check out my reflections) but ends up looking like a cheap PHP-Nuke template. The blog section is god-awful, back to the early 2000! No one stumbling on that site would think its intent is social networking.
Personally it's not the Awesome Bar that bothers me, it's the antialising on resized gif images; it's ugly and it screws up some of my site's design ideas. It was annoying enough that I decided to revert back to Firefox 2.
However I didn't need to upgrade or downgrade, I have the two versions installed. I can't run the two at the same time, one version overrides the other and that makes the whole thing a bit shaky but it works nonetheless. I'm wondering if they're still going to pester me with the upgrade.
(and this seems another reason for not using Firefox 3; incidentally it happened to me today)
That reminds me... has anyone mentioned the SHM-CDs? Has it ever been discussed on Slashdot? There's not even an entry in the English Wikipedia. It seems almost unknown outside Japan. I was tempted to submit a news item about it once, but being lazy as I am I've never done it.
Opinions vary a lot, some claim the quality is similiar or even inferior to CDs, while others, possibly the majority -- the format seems rather popular in Japan given the increasing number of releases -- say the quality is noticeably higher.
Anyway, here's the Japanese Wikipedia page about the SHM-CD,and the summary from CD Japan:
The high quality SHM-CD (Super High Material CD) format features enhanced audio quality through the use of a special polycarbonate plastic. Using a process developed by JVC and Universal Music Japan discovered through the joint companies' research into LCD display manufacturing, SHM-CDs feature improved transparency on the data side of the disc, allowing for more accurate reading of CD data by the CD player laser head. SHM-CD format CDs are fully compatible with standard CD players
Does that mean they just had sex there or that the ladies were actually soliciting the clients from inside the toilet room? And most important of all, were they dubbed "high-tech prostitutes" as a result? I wonder if there's any geek among the old profession who will be kind enough to provide the technical details...
But just a short ferry ride away is a wild-life preserve that will soon become its first green city.
Green city or not, what they're going to do is to clearcut a natural area as big as Manhattan (!). This green project is probably just an excuse to cover up the dreadful scale of the project. Understandably they need to put the people somewhere, but is building a fairly large city right from the start a solution or just a showoff?
They should rather work on solutions to fix what's wrong in the way people and existing cities affect their natural surroundings. According to the article, they already seem to have good ideas and iniatives, so why not trying to apply them to the rest of the country rather than having the colossal prospect of building a test city from the ground up?
The Family Basic was just one feature among many that made the Famicom a console innovative for its time, like the FDS, the microphone inside the controller (now in the DS), the fitness mat (now on the Wii), ROB (nowhere else... yet) and other oddities (the Famicom Network System, the Disk Fax, etc).
The paradox here is that the Famicom (NES) was so ahead of its time there was already in early 1985 a Basic language program sold by Nintendo in Japan, ãfããfYãfãf¼ãf(TM)ãf¼ããffãï¼ï¼" (Family Basic V3). So it was in a way a computer well before MIT students thought this up.
Relic of the Future got it right. You get the confirmation sound after pressing A. You guys haven't played Contra/Probotector enough, and don't tell you didn't need the 30 lives !
Slashdot Mirror
Does it work the other way around too? Can I become an IT boss if I can do those things, write "hello world" and query a database? No, because seriously I'm getting tired of cleaning toilets for a -- no pun intended -- shit salary and then come read here about incompetent people in the IT industry.
What a pretty hyperbole to mask the true reason why these games keep coming at every generation of consoles since they were invented in the early 80's! It's not due to an exceptional gameplay, it's simply because they never significantly change the game's mechanics, which makes those so-called remakes quick and dirt cheap to produce.
I don't know the numbers but I seriously doubt they sell a lot of these Pac-Man games. Yet, it must be profitable or they would stop doing it every so often and that's only possible because, no matter what Iguchi claims in the article, they just keep serving the same game over and over. The graphics are enhanced with the latest design trends (here the flashy light effects a la Geometry Wars) and the gameplay is slightly tweaked as to give the illusion they're presenting something new even though they are not.
The very low-cost production costs combined with a small core of early gaming devotees and "accidental customers" (people who lack a reason NOT to buy a product) must be enough to generate a revenue. To Namco's credit, it must be said they did try to get Pac-Man do something else than eating pellets in a maze (platformer, adventure, puzzle... respectively Pac in Time, The New Adventures and Pac-Attack) but with mild results and poor sales.
I'm fond of retrogaming and I believe some of the most interesting games have been made back then (am I lost in the haze?), however I don't think Pac-Man and Galaga qualify as imperishable classics like Super Mario or Castlevania. Early Namco titles have been unable to evolve beyond their original formula. The "true and fascinating mechanics" are impervious to the passage of time -- they don't even need to be remade to be enjoyed -- but they are also capable of moving forward with new ideas.
Deja vu. This news story inspires the same jokes. See also this Slashdot article from 1999 about a certain Heavy Ion Collider. Dan Simmons and Valve are making the usual guest appearance.
This looks like an enhanced version of the company history Nintendo gives to the press, the one you can see on the European site too:
http://www.nintendo.co.uk/NOE/en_GB/service/corporate_2001.html
Much more interesting, at least if you speak French, is the "History of Nintendo", so far only one book has been published:
http://editionspixnlove.fr/collectiondetail.php?ID=6
The book is 228 pages long and showcases 500 Nintendo toys and games prior to 1980 (took them 6 years of research!). The whole series will have 6 volumes totalling more than 1400 pages. Flabbergasting I daresay.
I saw this one coming. They hide it as if it was just one word. Go MichaelJackson yourself!
You can write "bugmenot dot com" to bypass the protection, it works, I just tried. Or you can also link to the Slashdot article, like this:
http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/05/1741207
In the chatrooms of Suomi24, a Finnish site, they prevent hotmail.com addresses to be posted but no other mail service. In OkCupid their censorship is rather humorous, the only word not allowed in their IM is "Michael Jackson".
That's right, the RG (Renseignements Generaux) was a French intelligence agency which has been merged with the DST a couple of months ago. I guess they are reorganizing their agencies hence the revised database system.
Quoting the French interior minister:
I doubt it's different from the methods use by other countries to track potential troublemakers. What's different is that now all these decisions related to intelligence services go under public scrutiny and become all the rage among self-proclaimed champions of the civil liberties. In short, much ado about nothing.
Here's what the user-agent looks like:
Funnily it's not compatible yet with some of Google's own applications (Lively).
It's fast at least. Took me less time to get here than with Firefox.
Not that I disagree with the whole issue of pages playing unrequested music, but isn't that off-topic? Anyway... Having employees themselves, perhaps what HP figured is that they are not supposed to go browsing promotional websites during work. As an alternative solution, you can have earphones plugged at all times, whether you wear them or not, to avoid sudden noise bursts.
Lastly, I don't think Flash ads have anything to do with Web 2.0, you can very well embed Flash ads between the text on your grey background afterall. At least, thanks to better technology, it's not as painful as it was back then when you landed on an amateur page that desperately tried to load and play a damn midi file on your agonizing computer.
They're just trying to make Denmark look really big and noticeable since their VIRTUAL MACHINE was made there. The rest of the world just needs to know it's somewhere there, in the middle of Europe.
If they keep shedding light on dark matter, it's not going to remain dark for long.
No, I think what we've got here is a case of dissociative identity disorder.
It is true video games are art, what they lack is the recognition from outside the gaming industry and community. A lot of things can be considered art as someone else pointed out in the thread, but what matters is the masterworks that transcend the limits set by individual tastes and elevate art to global appreciation. And that's one thing that video games may be lacking. They are popular of course, but not for their artistical assets, just because they're fun to play; it has become some cheap form of entertainment, like TV.
Besides, by trying hard to look like films -which they will never be- by borrowing from them and emulating them, some contemporary games have just given up the uniqueness of video games. I think the artistic soul of video games can be more easily found in its past rather than in its present, because back then they had a personality, an identity that was truly unique; exactly what art needs to live up to its definition.
Perhaps they wanted the name to rhyme with Gary Gygax?
There's one thing the name does well though, it's to match the awkward design: it tries hard to look trendy (weeee! check out my reflections) but ends up looking like a cheap PHP-Nuke template. The blog section is god-awful, back to the early 2000! No one stumbling on that site would think its intent is social networking.
Personally it's not the Awesome Bar that bothers me, it's the antialising on resized gif images; it's ugly and it screws up some of my site's design ideas. It was annoying enough that I decided to revert back to Firefox 2.
However I didn't need to upgrade or downgrade, I have the two versions installed. I can't run the two at the same time, one version overrides the other and that makes the whole thing a bit shaky but it works nonetheless. I'm wondering if they're still going to pester me with the upgrade.
(and this seems another reason for not using Firefox 3; incidentally it happened to me today)
That reminds me... has anyone mentioned the SHM-CDs? Has it ever been discussed on Slashdot? There's not even an entry in the English Wikipedia. It seems almost unknown outside Japan. I was tempted to submit a news item about it once, but being lazy as I am I've never done it.
Opinions vary a lot, some claim the quality is similiar or even inferior to CDs, while others, possibly the majority -- the format seems rather popular in Japan given the increasing number of releases -- say the quality is noticeably higher.
Anyway, here's the Japanese Wikipedia page about the SHM-CD,and the summary from CD Japan:
Must have been only one guy using 42% of the respondents' accounts.
Does that mean they just had sex there or that the ladies were actually soliciting the clients from inside the toilet room? And most important of all, were they dubbed "high-tech prostitutes" as a result? I wonder if there's any geek among the old profession who will be kind enough to provide the technical details...
Same goes with last.fm. It would become every cracker's favorite website, you can see the most played songs of every user.
Right to the point. Note what the article says:
Green city or not, what they're going to do is to clearcut a natural area as big as Manhattan (!). This green project is probably just an excuse to cover up the dreadful scale of the project. Understandably they need to put the people somewhere, but is building a fairly large city right from the start a solution or just a showoff?
They should rather work on solutions to fix what's wrong in the way people and existing cities affect their natural surroundings. According to the article, they already seem to have good ideas and iniatives, so why not trying to apply them to the rest of the country rather than having the colossal prospect of building a test city from the ground up?
...is the reason why you should rejoice. It's like Parodius but with Hudson's characters (including Bomberman and a PC Engine shooting CDs !).
The Family Basic was just one feature among many that made the Famicom a console innovative for its time, like the FDS, the microphone inside the controller (now in the DS), the fitness mat (now on the Wii), ROB (nowhere else... yet) and other oddities (the Famicom Network System, the Disk Fax, etc).
The paradox here is that the Famicom (NES) was so ahead of its time there was already in early 1985 a Basic language program sold by Nintendo in Japan, ãfããfYãfãf¼ãf(TM)ãf¼ããffãï¼ï¼" (Family Basic V3). So it was in a way a computer well before MIT students thought this up.
Relic of the Future got it right. You get the confirmation sound after pressing A. You guys haven't played Contra/Probotector enough, and don't tell you didn't need the 30 lives !