Vista's biggest (and IMO, only) problem is the huge decrease in performance from XP. If you're a gamer, DirectX 10 can mitigate some of that, as can the increase in support for 64bit compatibility that Vista ushered in (64bit = more ram = potentially better performance), but it's still disappointing that Vista is so sluggish by comparison.
The good news is that, even with some of the new features in Windows 7 (I really love the new task bar and aero peak, for example), it's supposedly outperforming Vista at the same time in a variety of benchmarks. I see the switch from XP->Vista->Win7 as an analog more to the switch from 3.1->95->98. 3.1 was stable and fast and well supported at the time. Windows 95 was buggy, and the performance was poor, and since the major change was largely cosmetic, I know a lot of people who skipped 95 altogether. 98 was essentially a reskin of 95, but it did a lot of things better and went on to be one of the more stable and long lived OSes in MS' history. Only time will tell if Win7 follows in it's footsteps.
The theory of alienation actually says the opposite. As I understand it, the theory of alienation states that by being paid for your labor (and, especially, since the capitalist claims the surplus value of your labor), you become "alienated" from the joys of labor.
This is part of the reason why paying people per unit of production rather than per unit of time tends to result in better productivity. It gives people a sense of worth that doesn't exist in other systems.
Marxist communism just would like to see the means of production moved from the capitalist (those who seek to increase their own wealth) to the laborer (those who seek to produce things).
It's just a shame that communism always seems to go hand in hand with centralized government in practice, because those two things will never work together.
"Talk about profitting off the backs of other's work- he's using U2's name (and website) to push his agenda!"
That's exactly what my first thought was...
This whole article basically reads as "We need to make government and ISP stoping consumers from stealing from artists... that's OUR job, and we want to maintain our monopoly on that."
Well, that stuff is a ways off. Currently, all GM foods are transgenic, which is only very slightly different than hybridization (other than the fact that it lets you transfer traits between two organisms who couldn't normally mate).
To be fair, GM crops undergo a great deal of testing, and many methods of genetic modification are actually safer than some of the existing hybridization techniques. I mean, imagine you want to get a trait in some wild, poisonous nut into a commercial peanut. With genetic modification, you can isolate the gene and insert it in your commercial peanut, and then grow the plant to fruit and see if the trait is there. With hybridization, you have to breed the wild plant into the commercial plant, and hope for the best. Above and beyond that, there's absolutely no way to know whether or not two non-poisonous cultivars will wind up producing something toxic when you breed them. At least with GM food, you have some idea of what might happen.
I think the only cation that needs to be made with GM food is what the motivations a particular producer has for modification. If they are just trying to increase the profit margin of their crops without regards to the quality or safety of the food, then there's cause for concern. If, however, they are trying to make the food more nutritious or able to grow in harsher climates, I think that's a noble goal and should be applauded.
>How moronic do they make Greens these days? Yea that pond scum will absorb a lot of CO2... and release it right back when you burn it for fuel. So it is carbon neutral unless you plan to compact the algae into bricks and bury it. Of course neutral still beats burning dead dinosaurs who fixed their carbon millions of years ago.
Haven't you ever heard of the carbon cycle? Lots of CO2 in the air doesn't cause global warming. Global Warming occurs when we are pumping so much CO2 into the air that we break the carbon cycle.
Basically, the primary carbon sink that occurs is algae. As algae (or animals that consume algae) dies and floats to the bottom of large regions of water, carbon is sequestered. The more CO2 that's in the air, the more algae a particular region can sustain. This creates a self-sustaining feedback loop that prevents any dramatic changes in the mean global temperature. It's only when this feedback loop can no longer keep up that global warming (or global cooling, in the opposite case) occurs.
Other natural and human events can alter the carbon cycle. Fertilizer run-off can cause a major algae bloom, which chokes out the O2 in a particular region of water, and results in dead space. This reduces the amount of future algae growth, and decreases the cooling ability of the cycle. Then there are issues with smog, volcanic erruption, and things of that nature.
So anything that is carbon neutral is a huge step forward from where we're at now. The sooner we stop pumping new CO2 into the atmosphere, the more likely it is that the carbon cycle will be able to control the mean global temperature.
There was another PC game circa 2000 or so that was similar. It was a "D.W. Bradley" game, I think it was called "Wizards and Warriors" (not to be confused with the platformer of the same name). I think there were 3 or 4 base classes, and then all of the other ones had to be attained by class-changes later in the game. I forget what the penalty was for class changing, but I think you could change back and forth as long as you met the requirements. I didn't get very far before I stopped playing, and unfortunately it won't work on XP or windows 2000, so I haven't been able to give it another shot.
I did really like it, though. It gave a game that otherwise didn't have much of a character development system (it was similar to some of the later Wizardry games, I think) a lot more flexibility. Do you continue developing the base warrior class because it levels fast, and it's all around solid, or do you switch to a specialty class that can cast some magic, or is better at ranged attacks, or something along those lines?
I've been working a few RPG ideas over in my head for the past few years, piling details on as I find ideas I like or think I could improve upon in other games, and the class vs. skill debate is something I'm very familiar with.
I think the biggest problem with the skill system is that it makes the experience way too "loose" for the incoming player, and in MMOs or traditional CRPGs, that can be a serious problem. With a class-based system, you can make the player focus on one or two things early on instead of allowing them to run free, which gives them an ample chance to learn the game, the interface, and to get familiar with the characters and story. With a skill-based system, there's more of an unstructured feeling. You can't really force everyone into doing a few basic skills right away, because if those skills don't interest the person, they are going to feel like they are wasting their time. Since a lot of the developers who make large scale games, esspecially MMOs, don't have the time/money/desire to put a lot of instruction and guidance in for every single skill combination in the early game, it can be tough for people to stick with it long enough to find their niche.
I think that's why a lot of MMOs go with a sort of combination of the two. You get a class (or even just give characters generic experience levels that effect statistics and the ability to use equipment), and then later allow them to learn and explore different trade-skills. Some MMOs even go for keeping the character as a jack-of-all-trades earlier on, and then allowing the player to specialize once they are familiar with the different skills that they can use.
I still think that some of the best games only have skills. UnReal World is one of my favorite roguelike CRPGs, and I really enjoy it's skill system.
To be honest, there are plenty of bugs in console games. One of the Prince of Persia 3D games, for example, had a save point where if you saved, but did not continue playing, the game would be unfinishable. Save points seem to be a common source of problems, with some games allowing you to save where death is unavoidable the next time you play, or something along those lines.
I've had a few other games crash/die on me, but you're right, it's less frequent on consoles than it is on PCs. But there's a good reason for that. Consoles generally have a single specification to work with (or, in the case of systems with a few hardware revisions, a small number of extremely similar specifications). Each of these systems have a rather closed OS, and except for on some of the newer systems, the game is the only application ever running. Compare that to the PC, where system configurations vary a great deal, and there can be any number of other programs also running at the same time, it's very difficult to anticipate the sorts of bugs that would pop up, and perform adequate testing to make sure everything runs smoothly.
Quoth the parent: "1. produce better tasting bread (whether that was more ecological or bio I do not care - it tasted good and contained less chemicals)"
So, what you're saying is, it contained more gasses and larger chemicals than the other stuff? Why is that a selling point? Granted, gluten is a HUGE chemical, since it's essentially a polymer matrix, but it's important for good, high quality bread. And, of course, CO2 is a gas, and it's also a chemical that's so very important to making good bread. But still. I don't understand why less chemicals is a selling point. Shouldn't it be better, tastier, healthier chemicals? I don't want to be paying for more air.
Organic farmers may be using expensive chemicals too.
For growing produce, organic farmers use pesticides derived from fungal and bacterial toxins instead of synthetic ones. They also apply Bt-producing Bacteria instead of growing genetically modified crops that contain the Bt toxin. Using feces to fertilize crops also poses it's own risks over using something like saltpeter. Risks of fecal born disease (like that caused by E-coli bacteria) requires careful composting, which requires time and money. Organic farmers tend to use other methods, like growing nitrogen fixing crops between other crops. Again, this takes time and money.
As far as produced food goes, it's generally more expensive because they tend to use more expensive (i.e. higher quality) ingredients, not because the organic food is any more or less expensive to grow. Have you ever wondered why organic foods made by "organic" companies tend to taste better than organic foods made by the big corperations? The corperations use the same crappy ingredients they used before, they just produce them organically.
So I'd say, if you want to get the best deal with the least cruelty involved, do some research. See if you can find a local farm that you can see is "cruelty free". Don't assume organic will be better in any way, do your research to determine whether or not the company that produces the organic variety uses better feed/takes better care of the animals/whatever than the competition.
Harry Houdini might be another good one. I'm not sure if he has any formal training as a scientist, but I know that he embodied the skeptic spirit, and used science to debunk a lot of the less ethical "magicians" and hucksters of his era.
This article is talking about games more along the lines of the old Kings Quest games, Grim Fandango, Myst or Syberia. I hear Monkey Island also fits the bill, but I never played that series.
Nintendo's already got one well recieved Adventure game for the DS (Another Code), and another that looks like it'll also be great (Hotel Dusk). I don't know how Another Code sold, but considering that Nintendo's allowing the developer to make another similar game is great!
Here's hoping that we'll see games like Unforgiven and Shadowgate make a come back. There's nothing quite so exciting as dying a hundred times, in a hundred different, sometimes "scary" ways, while trying to learn through pattern recognition.
There have already been a few other examples listed as replies, but there are SO many different games that match YPP's business model coming out of korea.
I played one game that hadn't "launched" yet (the "item mall" wasn't open) called Goonzu. It was actually pretty good for a free game, and a lot of the item mall things could be acquired in game (like a bag to double your storage capacity, for example). The games you listed have one thing in common: They are all sold at retail in the US. That's ignoring such a huge chunk of the market, it's not even funny.
The fact that they are willing to put this kind of effort into a secondary feature is great. Most console/handheld internet browsers aren't that great, mostly because of the resolution and/or screen size. Just imagine what they will be able to do with the Wii.
Obviously, with the Wii, the pointer will work to control the cursor on screen. A lapboard could be sold that would plug into the Wiimote as a means to enter text. What I hope they do to get around the resolution limitations is use the tilt functionality of the wiimote to allow easy panning and zooming.
Although, on the other hand, imagine some kid seeing porn for the first time on the system, zooming in and out... He'll sit there with a wii in both hands, using the same motion to manipulate one as he does the other.
I'm one of those hobby game design types who thinks up great ideas, but doesn't have the patience to really see any of them through. Spore's inspired a lot of good ideas, I think, that could revolutionize the RPG (particularily the MMORPG) genre, but it doesn't look like anyone is taking to them.
An item creation system that functioned like the creature builder in Spore would go a long way to revitilize the MMO genre for people who are big into crafting. Instead of having to gain a few levels to be able to purchase a new blueprint, crafters could get different technologies that would allow them to manipulate raw materials in different ways. The game would determine the properties (durability, damage, speed, etc.) of the item based upon it's shape and material components.
Another idea, for a single player game, would just be to use that vast ammount of data created for Spore to create and populate worlds for the hero to explore. No more killing the same orc or spider or whatever a billion times, if you get sick of the monsters that populate one game, you can transfer your character to another for a new sort of challange.
I just wish I had the money to hire a (more) competant (than me) staff to realize some of these ideas.
I don't remember the box, but Heroes of the Lance sounds right.
I do remember that, of the three krynn games, only the middle came on 720KB floppies. We got copies of the other two games, but they wouldn't work on our system because our floppy couldn't read 1.44MB discs. That was the first one we got, and I played the heck out of it and beat it many times. I don think I got very far in either of the other games, though.
Actually, I did play those, but they aren't what I'm thinking of. The Krynn games, if I recall correctly, played like kind of crude version of modern AD&D (i.e. Baldur's Gate) games. I don't really remember how the overworld worked, but wandering around in towns and dungeons were done in first person, and encounters were an isometric tactical battle.
The game I'm thinking of had a hexagonal grid for an overworld, and the encounters and dungeons were all managed by the same isometric tactical method (I think it may have been "real time", and not turn based like the Krynn games). One thing that I really remember is that if you completed the final dungeon, which involved defeating the final boss and exciting the room behind him, you'd get a score tallied up from how many of the refugees you saved and how many of your hereos had survived (as well as the equipment and experience levels they had at endgame).
I think it was easy to "cheat" and just rush to the end, but the final boss was very difficult, and even if you beat him (which could be done, IIRC, by just sending all your mages to kamakazi with fireball spells), your score would probably suck because you didn't save anyone.
One of the first CRPGs I ever played was a Dragonlance game. I recognise all of these names, but I can't remember what the name of the game was. I remember that the goal of the game was to take your paltry band of adventurers (including Tanis, Goldmoon, and so forth), make your way down this hexagonal grid, finding items and rescuing refugees along the way, and then fight your way through a mountain cave that was only open certain times during the day.
Does anyone have any idea what the name of the game was?
Why not cut legacy support completely, and have a division work on a Vista (or Vista successor) compatable legacy support emulation system?
Heck, they could even partner with companies like VMWare, and release older versions of windows within the newer versions of windows. The New windows can be fast, secure, and up to date, while older software can be run within an emulator.
Granted, that doesn't exactly solve the problem of supporting legacy hardware devices, but I figure now's the time to end that since Vista's gonna require everyone to upgrade their gear anyhow.
Slashdot Mirror
Vista's biggest (and IMO, only) problem is the huge decrease in performance from XP. If you're a gamer, DirectX 10 can mitigate some of that, as can the increase in support for 64bit compatibility that Vista ushered in (64bit = more ram = potentially better performance), but it's still disappointing that Vista is so sluggish by comparison.
The good news is that, even with some of the new features in Windows 7 (I really love the new task bar and aero peak, for example), it's supposedly outperforming Vista at the same time in a variety of benchmarks. I see the switch from XP->Vista->Win7 as an analog more to the switch from 3.1->95->98. 3.1 was stable and fast and well supported at the time. Windows 95 was buggy, and the performance was poor, and since the major change was largely cosmetic, I know a lot of people who skipped 95 altogether. 98 was essentially a reskin of 95, but it did a lot of things better and went on to be one of the more stable and long lived OSes in MS' history. Only time will tell if Win7 follows in it's footsteps.
This isn't true at all.
The theory of alienation actually says the opposite. As I understand it, the theory of alienation states that by being paid for your labor (and, especially, since the capitalist claims the surplus value of your labor), you become "alienated" from the joys of labor.
This is part of the reason why paying people per unit of production rather than per unit of time tends to result in better productivity. It gives people a sense of worth that doesn't exist in other systems.
Marxist communism just would like to see the means of production moved from the capitalist (those who seek to increase their own wealth) to the laborer (those who seek to produce things).
It's just a shame that communism always seems to go hand in hand with centralized government in practice, because those two things will never work together.
"Talk about profitting off the backs of other's work- he's using U2's name (and website) to push his agenda!"
That's exactly what my first thought was...
This whole article basically reads as "We need to make government and ISP stoping consumers from stealing from artists... that's OUR job, and we want to maintain our monopoly on that."
Well, that stuff is a ways off. Currently, all GM foods are transgenic, which is only very slightly different than hybridization (other than the fact that it lets you transfer traits between two organisms who couldn't normally mate).
To be fair, GM crops undergo a great deal of testing, and many methods of genetic modification are actually safer than some of the existing hybridization techniques. I mean, imagine you want to get a trait in some wild, poisonous nut into a commercial peanut. With genetic modification, you can isolate the gene and insert it in your commercial peanut, and then grow the plant to fruit and see if the trait is there. With hybridization, you have to breed the wild plant into the commercial plant, and hope for the best. Above and beyond that, there's absolutely no way to know whether or not two non-poisonous cultivars will wind up producing something toxic when you breed them. At least with GM food, you have some idea of what might happen.
I think the only cation that needs to be made with GM food is what the motivations a particular producer has for modification. If they are just trying to increase the profit margin of their crops without regards to the quality or safety of the food, then there's cause for concern. If, however, they are trying to make the food more nutritious or able to grow in harsher climates, I think that's a noble goal and should be applauded.
>How moronic do they make Greens these days? Yea that pond scum will absorb a lot of CO2... and release it right back when you burn it for fuel. So it is carbon neutral unless you plan to compact the algae into bricks and bury it. Of course neutral still beats burning dead dinosaurs who fixed their carbon millions of years ago.
Haven't you ever heard of the carbon cycle? Lots of CO2 in the air doesn't cause global warming. Global Warming occurs when we are pumping so much CO2 into the air that we break the carbon cycle.
Basically, the primary carbon sink that occurs is algae. As algae (or animals that consume algae) dies and floats to the bottom of large regions of water, carbon is sequestered. The more CO2 that's in the air, the more algae a particular region can sustain. This creates a self-sustaining feedback loop that prevents any dramatic changes in the mean global temperature. It's only when this feedback loop can no longer keep up that global warming (or global cooling, in the opposite case) occurs.
Other natural and human events can alter the carbon cycle. Fertilizer run-off can cause a major algae bloom, which chokes out the O2 in a particular region of water, and results in dead space. This reduces the amount of future algae growth, and decreases the cooling ability of the cycle. Then there are issues with smog, volcanic erruption, and things of that nature.
So anything that is carbon neutral is a huge step forward from where we're at now. The sooner we stop pumping new CO2 into the atmosphere, the more likely it is that the carbon cycle will be able to control the mean global temperature.
There was another PC game circa 2000 or so that was similar. It was a "D.W. Bradley" game, I think it was called "Wizards and Warriors" (not to be confused with the platformer of the same name). I think there were 3 or 4 base classes, and then all of the other ones had to be attained by class-changes later in the game. I forget what the penalty was for class changing, but I think you could change back and forth as long as you met the requirements. I didn't get very far before I stopped playing, and unfortunately it won't work on XP or windows 2000, so I haven't been able to give it another shot.
I did really like it, though. It gave a game that otherwise didn't have much of a character development system (it was similar to some of the later Wizardry games, I think) a lot more flexibility. Do you continue developing the base warrior class because it levels fast, and it's all around solid, or do you switch to a specialty class that can cast some magic, or is better at ranged attacks, or something along those lines?
I've been working a few RPG ideas over in my head for the past few years, piling details on as I find ideas I like or think I could improve upon in other games, and the class vs. skill debate is something I'm very familiar with.
I think the biggest problem with the skill system is that it makes the experience way too "loose" for the incoming player, and in MMOs or traditional CRPGs, that can be a serious problem. With a class-based system, you can make the player focus on one or two things early on instead of allowing them to run free, which gives them an ample chance to learn the game, the interface, and to get familiar with the characters and story. With a skill-based system, there's more of an unstructured feeling. You can't really force everyone into doing a few basic skills right away, because if those skills don't interest the person, they are going to feel like they are wasting their time. Since a lot of the developers who make large scale games, esspecially MMOs, don't have the time/money/desire to put a lot of instruction and guidance in for every single skill combination in the early game, it can be tough for people to stick with it long enough to find their niche.
I think that's why a lot of MMOs go with a sort of combination of the two. You get a class (or even just give characters generic experience levels that effect statistics and the ability to use equipment), and then later allow them to learn and explore different trade-skills. Some MMOs even go for keeping the character as a jack-of-all-trades earlier on, and then allowing the player to specialize once they are familiar with the different skills that they can use.
I still think that some of the best games only have skills. UnReal World is one of my favorite roguelike CRPGs, and I really enjoy it's skill system.
To be honest, there are plenty of bugs in console games. One of the Prince of Persia 3D games, for example, had a save point where if you saved, but did not continue playing, the game would be unfinishable. Save points seem to be a common source of problems, with some games allowing you to save where death is unavoidable the next time you play, or something along those lines.
I've had a few other games crash/die on me, but you're right, it's less frequent on consoles than it is on PCs. But there's a good reason for that. Consoles generally have a single specification to work with (or, in the case of systems with a few hardware revisions, a small number of extremely similar specifications). Each of these systems have a rather closed OS, and except for on some of the newer systems, the game is the only application ever running. Compare that to the PC, where system configurations vary a great deal, and there can be any number of other programs also running at the same time, it's very difficult to anticipate the sorts of bugs that would pop up, and perform adequate testing to make sure everything runs smoothly.
Quoth the parent:
"1. produce better tasting bread (whether that was more ecological or bio I do not care - it tasted good and contained less chemicals)"
So, what you're saying is, it contained more gasses and larger chemicals than the other stuff? Why is that a selling point? Granted, gluten is a HUGE chemical, since it's essentially a polymer matrix, but it's important for good, high quality bread. And, of course, CO2 is a gas, and it's also a chemical that's so very important to making good bread. But still. I don't understand why less chemicals is a selling point. Shouldn't it be better, tastier, healthier chemicals? I don't want to be paying for more air.
Organic farmers may be using expensive chemicals too.
For growing produce, organic farmers use pesticides derived from fungal and bacterial toxins instead of synthetic ones. They also apply Bt-producing Bacteria instead of growing genetically modified crops that contain the Bt toxin. Using feces to fertilize crops also poses it's own risks over using something like saltpeter. Risks of fecal born disease (like that caused by E-coli bacteria) requires careful composting, which requires time and money. Organic farmers tend to use other methods, like growing nitrogen fixing crops between other crops. Again, this takes time and money.
As far as produced food goes, it's generally more expensive because they tend to use more expensive (i.e. higher quality) ingredients, not because the organic food is any more or less expensive to grow. Have you ever wondered why organic foods made by "organic" companies tend to taste better than organic foods made by the big corperations? The corperations use the same crappy ingredients they used before, they just produce them organically.
So I'd say, if you want to get the best deal with the least cruelty involved, do some research. See if you can find a local farm that you can see is "cruelty free". Don't assume organic will be better in any way, do your research to determine whether or not the company that produces the organic variety uses better feed/takes better care of the animals/whatever than the competition.
Cub Foods in Minnesota also has pay-by-touch set up in many of their locations.
So fie on you, summary.
It's always nice to have a "Think of the children" law in an election year.
This year it was violent video game legislation. Who knows what it'll be in 2008.
Harry Houdini might be another good one. I'm not sure if he has any formal training as a scientist, but I know that he embodied the skeptic spirit, and used science to debunk a lot of the less ethical "magicians" and hucksters of his era.
Plus, it's magic. Kids like magic, right?
WTF does this have to do with FUD?
Unless FUD has a different meaning here on slashdot, in which case, I'd like to know what that meaning is.
Wrong kind of adventure.
This article is talking about games more along the lines of the old Kings Quest games, Grim Fandango, Myst or Syberia. I hear Monkey Island also fits the bill, but I never played that series.
Nintendo's already got one well recieved Adventure game for the DS (Another Code), and another that looks like it'll also be great (Hotel Dusk). I don't know how Another Code sold, but considering that Nintendo's allowing the developer to make another similar game is great!
Here's hoping that we'll see games like Unforgiven and Shadowgate make a come back. There's nothing quite so exciting as dying a hundred times, in a hundred different, sometimes "scary" ways, while trying to learn through pattern recognition.
There have already been a few other examples listed as replies, but there are SO many different games that match YPP's business model coming out of korea.
I played one game that hadn't "launched" yet (the "item mall" wasn't open) called Goonzu. It was actually pretty good for a free game, and a lot of the item mall things could be acquired in game (like a bag to double your storage capacity, for example). The games you listed have one thing in common: They are all sold at retail in the US. That's ignoring such a huge chunk of the market, it's not even funny.
The fact that they are willing to put this kind of effort into a secondary feature is great. Most console/handheld internet browsers aren't that great, mostly because of the resolution and/or screen size. Just imagine what they will be able to do with the Wii. Obviously, with the Wii, the pointer will work to control the cursor on screen. A lapboard could be sold that would plug into the Wiimote as a means to enter text. What I hope they do to get around the resolution limitations is use the tilt functionality of the wiimote to allow easy panning and zooming. Although, on the other hand, imagine some kid seeing porn for the first time on the system, zooming in and out... He'll sit there with a wii in both hands, using the same motion to manipulate one as he does the other.
I'm one of those hobby game design types who thinks up great ideas, but doesn't have the patience to really see any of them through. Spore's inspired a lot of good ideas, I think, that could revolutionize the RPG (particularily the MMORPG) genre, but it doesn't look like anyone is taking to them.
An item creation system that functioned like the creature builder in Spore would go a long way to revitilize the MMO genre for people who are big into crafting. Instead of having to gain a few levels to be able to purchase a new blueprint, crafters could get different technologies that would allow them to manipulate raw materials in different ways. The game would determine the properties (durability, damage, speed, etc.) of the item based upon it's shape and material components.
Another idea, for a single player game, would just be to use that vast ammount of data created for Spore to create and populate worlds for the hero to explore. No more killing the same orc or spider or whatever a billion times, if you get sick of the monsters that populate one game, you can transfer your character to another for a new sort of challange.
I just wish I had the money to hire a (more) competant (than me) staff to realize some of these ideas.
Ahh, nevermind, It's actually "Shadow Sorcerer" that I was thinking of. Good times.
I don't remember the box, but Heroes of the Lance sounds right. I do remember that, of the three krynn games, only the middle came on 720KB floppies. We got copies of the other two games, but they wouldn't work on our system because our floppy couldn't read 1.44MB discs. That was the first one we got, and I played the heck out of it and beat it many times. I don think I got very far in either of the other games, though.
Actually, I did play those, but they aren't what I'm thinking of. The Krynn games, if I recall correctly, played like kind of crude version of modern AD&D (i.e. Baldur's Gate) games. I don't really remember how the overworld worked, but wandering around in towns and dungeons were done in first person, and encounters were an isometric tactical battle. The game I'm thinking of had a hexagonal grid for an overworld, and the encounters and dungeons were all managed by the same isometric tactical method (I think it may have been "real time", and not turn based like the Krynn games). One thing that I really remember is that if you completed the final dungeon, which involved defeating the final boss and exciting the room behind him, you'd get a score tallied up from how many of the refugees you saved and how many of your hereos had survived (as well as the equipment and experience levels they had at endgame). I think it was easy to "cheat" and just rush to the end, but the final boss was very difficult, and even if you beat him (which could be done, IIRC, by just sending all your mages to kamakazi with fireball spells), your score would probably suck because you didn't save anyone.
One of the first CRPGs I ever played was a Dragonlance game. I recognise all of these names, but I can't remember what the name of the game was. I remember that the goal of the game was to take your paltry band of adventurers (including Tanis, Goldmoon, and so forth), make your way down this hexagonal grid, finding items and rescuing refugees along the way, and then fight your way through a mountain cave that was only open certain times during the day. Does anyone have any idea what the name of the game was?
It was... *narrows eyes, and shakes fist* Wornstrum.
Why not cut legacy support completely, and have a division work on a Vista (or Vista successor) compatable legacy support emulation system?
Heck, they could even partner with companies like VMWare, and release older versions of windows within the newer versions of windows. The New windows can be fast, secure, and up to date, while older software can be run within an emulator.
Granted, that doesn't exactly solve the problem of supporting legacy hardware devices, but I figure now's the time to end that since Vista's gonna require everyone to upgrade their gear anyhow.