I'm playing this on my DS right now, and while I do intend to beat it and all, I gotta say it's way worse than I expected. The pacing is crazy bad, the control scheme is atrocious, and I'm not sure what all the "depth" is for when there's no reason to manually cast anything other than a revive spell. The reason I'm enjoying the game at all is the AWESOME musical score that's largely carried over from the actual FFXII game. That alone keeps me playing. But good grief as an RTS it's unbelievably shallow, controls like a pig (I'm a leftie, and it's just bollocks having to select my party with 'X', then scroll the map with the control pad, then fumble the stylus back into grip with my left hand and click on the enemy to attack), and has some of worst 2-d sprites I've seen in two decades. Every "zoom in" is so bad they should have avoided them IMO. Or used better sprites. The weapon crafting with the random questions? What the hell, hehe.
Overall, the game IS enjoyable. I already like the characters since I played FFXII and loved it, the music is some of my favorite of all time for a game, and the FMV graphics are fantastic. Also I like the light-hearted nature of the game. But OMG it's such a POS from a gameplay perspective that I can't recommend it to anyone else. If you ask me, this is how to *not* do an RTS on a handheld. They should just port Starcraft and leave it at that ^_^
I would also have to give it to Mass Effect this year. Last year it was Oblivion, with stiff competition from Gears of War, Final Fantasy XII, Okami, and LoZ: Twilight Princess. I just like open-ended RPGs with immersive worlds more than anything else, I guess.
This year Mass Effect has similarly strong competition from Bioshock, Halo 3, and Mario Galaxy (as far as "regular," non-Guitar Hero-type games go), but it managed to really draw me in the way Oblivion did. I haven't been this into a game since Gears of War and FFXII, and it's been a year since then ^^
Mass Effect's story is decent enough on the surface (your character is badass and everyone knows it so you are sent to take out another badass -- simple but cool) and it really shines in the details. Very real character development takes place. You get attached to them. I do wish they had a bit more "presence" during combat, the way your teammates in Gears do, but that's a small complaint.
The character models are fantastic, and the visual design of the game in general is quite good. The ligthing and shadows are sometimes very bad, and texture loading is very noticeably slow, but that rarely distracts, which is important.
The flow of one mission to another, the way subquests are introduced and progressed -- it's all quite immersive.
In short, Mass Effect is the closest I've come to feeling like I'm controlling a movie or miniseries. (Oblivion felt like I was playing a spinoff of Hercules The Legendary Journeys, which was sweet, hehe.)
Oh, also the "world" Mass Effect introduces is cool and easily one of my favorite in sci-fi now.
I'm well aware. I'm not sure what folks are really getting on my case about; I posted to provide a link to what they used mostly, and threw in a joke to go with it. I suppose people are keen to look for weakness in whatever posts they see so they could boost karma or whatever, but in this case it really wasn't necessary.
GREEN LASER OF DEATH (as far as I could tell from the report; they said a $50 laser from RadioShack).
So... don't buy one of these pens or you might shine it at a chopper at night by accident and then spend 20 years in the slammer or pay a quarter mil or whatevs. Though for forking over that much dough for a stupid laser pen to begin with, a $250,000 fine may ironically be appropriate.
Def Leppard's new stuff is on the level of other "good" bands around nowadays. Not great, pretty generic, but the production value is still high and at least they're productive. I'm waiting for something truly good to come from them once again (yay for Scorpions' new album, by the way ^_^), but I mostly was talking about their 80s stuff. They're still performing it, and they're still with a big label.
My point really was that big labels have some fantastic bands signed, in spite of the RIAA being pure evil. Being indie doesn't make you better, and many of the best bands do get contracts with labels once they get on their radar (and then "improve" due to having more money to produce music).
Muse is a band that grew on me. I didn't even think that much of them until I saw them live. (Incidentally they win "Best live band" awards every year and I'd say they deserve 'em.) Matt Bellamy (the vocalist/lead guitar/keyboard/songwriter) writes a lot of melodic progressions you just don't hear in rock otherwise, and his versatility is pretty stunning. (Very talented musician, total idiot otherwise, go figure. Same as Tom Cruise with acting, I guess.)
I'd suggest songs, but everyone finds a particular one they like best. Muse's most well-known is probably Stockholm Syndrome. An interesting one is Showbiz, as it has little melodic progression and is more about the buildup in intensity from beginning to end. Its ending, as long as you're listening to a good recording (or lucky enough to see it live, I wasn't:-/), is chillingly good IMO but to each his own.
Neurosis -- I'll give them a listen when I get the chance at home. Always on the lookout for good music:-)
If you think Muse has production cost as an advantage, listen to them live. I've seen them in a small venue (before they became big in the US, which I figure they have since they played at the Garden this Summer) and no, there aren't indie bands like them. There aren't any other bands like them right now, period. Also, an indie band better than Def Leppard? Please send me the name because if you're right (I doubt it), then I will be your best friend, no joke about it.
Oh good grief, are you joking or do you seriously think that musicians who aren't contracted with companies represented by the RIAA are actually better musicians who write better music? Because, well, that's rubbish. RIAA might be pretty freaking evil but don't confuse them with the songwriters and performers that the RIAA hounds people for listening to.
Even if there were a ton of indie bands as good as bands with labels represented by RIAA (Muse, U2, Def Leppard, etc.), which there aren't, what you said would be wholly unfair. Shit, even if Muse went batshit loco and started personally crusading against piracy and pushing for more RIAA lawsuits, it would make them total assholes but they'd still be fantastic musicians with great music.
No, he was above those other guys, really. (BTW Russel was different from Seagal and Lundgren, in that he starred in big-budget films like Stargate and such, so I wouldn't group him with them.) Norris was off the radar entirely by the time Van Damme's career took off, and it was well past anything the other guys you mention achieved. He starred in John Woo's first US film (Hard Target), Timecop made good money at the box office for those days, etc. Certainly Van Damme never achieved the status that Arnold did, not even close, but I swear as a big action film fan that he was part of that "pantheon" in the early nineties and was mentioned in the same breath when folks were talking about "action superstars." Van Damme *was* an action superstar.
His career took a bigger fall than most ever do, to be honest. But he's cleaned up his life in recent years and is doing much better for himself, though he's still off the radar as far as being a movie star.
I used to have a friend that said things along the lines of what you said, but in seriousness to try and argue against something. I approached your post with the wrong mindset and I'm glad I was mistaken.
Well, Van Damme and Seagal continue to this day to make movies, but with nothing going for them other than their martial arts skills, they just stopped being marketable once Jackie Chan came around. Wesley Snipes stayed slightly afloat with the Blade movies but then disappeared just the same.
Likewise, when Van Damme came along people basically forgot Chuck Norris (well things weren't quite that simple but once again the timelines fit).
I think it's in large part a question of something better coming along, and the previous star just being unable to rise to the occasion.
Yeah AC2 is actually the one I meant but oh well. I even got a proper response from an AC about AC (haha) for my original post about it.
I actually tried out AC2 the month it came out... it was like playing Shadow of the Collossus but without the horse and without the collossi and without the cool music.
Heheh... was he before your time maybe? Van Damme used to be one of the "big 3 superstars" in the early nineties. It was Schwarzenegegger, Stallone, and Van Damme.
The guy did reasonably well at the box office, particularly with Timecop, and his career was taking off until... (can you guess?)... Rumble in the Bronx hit US shores.
Jackie Chan basically put a stop to Van Damme and Seagal's success because he set the bar so high right away. They never recovered.
Oh no I'm sorry Jean-Claude I won't say anything about your career again! Although why did you post as an anonymous coward? Oh wait maybe because that's all you are to anyone anymore! harharhar
Wow Dan East your NLP system is a real piece of trash. You should look at how most systems of this sort are actually put together before making a pointless straw man.:-P
Just so we're "in the know" on the livelihood of Dreamcast. Also please have daily updates on how dead the Sega Saturn is, how dead Asheron's Call servers are, how dead Betamax is, how dead the musket is, and finally how dead Van Damme's career is.
This is only true for basic queries where interpreting the queries as bags of words would suffice.
Besides, for communication via speech it's completely unnatural to say "france capital" to a machine as opposed to "what is the capital of France," even. So for speech recognition systems NLP really helps out.
He's already done the latter enough that I don't expect any different this time around. Jackson has shown with his adaptation of LotR that he thought he can do a better job with some portions of the story than Tolkien did. He, IMO, was wrong.
One thing I know to expect from The Hobbit is yet more of some of the worst editing in modern day cinema. King Kong had plenty as well, btw.
Natural language processing is useful when it is well-done. Getting it well-done is the tough part. Don't let Google reps trick you into thinking otherwise just because their R&D in the field isn't where they'd probably like it to be.
Here are some situations where it's useful: 1) interpreting a question rather than just treating it as a "bag of words." For instance, one can type "how tall is Mt. Everest" in the search bar and Google, rather than searching for documents that contain those 5 (or so) tokens will interpret that as a query asking for height and also search for documents that contain "Mt.", "Everest", and "height". Take that a step further and it might look for strings that represent height such as a number followed by "ft" or "meters" or "m".
2) Condensing query chains. Suppose you want to know what sport our 4th president enjoyed playing most. You can ask "what sport did the fourth president of the US like playing?" and the system will give you an answer by first interpreting "fourth president of the US" as Madison, and then searching for what sports Madison enjoyed playing. If not for such interpretation you would either have to run 2 queries (first to find out who the 4th president was, then what sports he liked), or hope that there is a document out there that Google's indexed that contains the words in that initial query.
3) Speech recognition! If you want to run a Q/A session with a computer system that has a speech recognition front end, it is more natural (easier and faster) to ask it "how tall is mt. everest?" than to say "mount everest height" or whatever you would end up typing into Google today. People like to speak using *natural language,* after all. They would gladly do it with computers if the SR systems in them were good enough (some are).
4) More precise query results. What's better, getting back a document that is likely to contain the answer to your query, or getting back the sentence that contains it? Or better yet, getting back the answer and nothing else? The more robust an NLP system the more complicated queries it can interpret and the more elegant its result can be.
On that note, Google actually *does perform* NLP on queries despite what from the summary (I didn't RTFA) looks like claims to the contrary. If you ask Google "how tall is Mt. Everest?" it actually DOES interpret that particular sentence and gives you the answer -- 29000ft or thereabouts. And you only get such an elegant result if you type "how tall is Mt. Everest" (without quotes) or "Mt. Everest how tall". Other queries of this nature will not give you quite as precise a response.
Man I'm not even going to read the summary or TFA no time for that time to hire a ton of bees! Forget outsourcing to China and India and Eastern Europe, teh beehive is where it's at.
Wow that's fantastic. I would have expected at least white and yellow, since our *own* star, aka the Sun, isn't exactly white. But then again I was watching The Soup and they had a clip where one of the hosts of The View wasn't sure if the Earth is flat or not. So, um, yeah.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm playing this on my DS right now, and while I do intend to beat it and all, I gotta say it's way worse than I expected. The pacing is crazy bad, the control scheme is atrocious, and I'm not sure what all the "depth" is for when there's no reason to manually cast anything other than a revive spell. The reason I'm enjoying the game at all is the AWESOME musical score that's largely carried over from the actual FFXII game. That alone keeps me playing. But good grief as an RTS it's unbelievably shallow, controls like a pig (I'm a leftie, and it's just bollocks having to select my party with 'X', then scroll the map with the control pad, then fumble the stylus back into grip with my left hand and click on the enemy to attack), and has some of worst 2-d sprites I've seen in two decades. Every "zoom in" is so bad they should have avoided them IMO. Or used better sprites. The weapon crafting with the random questions? What the hell, hehe.
Overall, the game IS enjoyable. I already like the characters since I played FFXII and loved it, the music is some of my favorite of all time for a game, and the FMV graphics are fantastic. Also I like the light-hearted nature of the game. But OMG it's such a POS from a gameplay perspective that I can't recommend it to anyone else. If you ask me, this is how to *not* do an RTS on a handheld. They should just port Starcraft and leave it at that ^_^
I would also have to give it to Mass Effect this year. Last year it was Oblivion, with stiff competition from Gears of War, Final Fantasy XII, Okami, and LoZ: Twilight Princess. I just like open-ended RPGs with immersive worlds more than anything else, I guess.
This year Mass Effect has similarly strong competition from Bioshock, Halo 3, and Mario Galaxy (as far as "regular," non-Guitar Hero-type games go), but it managed to really draw me in the way Oblivion did. I haven't been this into a game since Gears of War and FFXII, and it's been a year since then ^^
Mass Effect's story is decent enough on the surface (your character is badass and everyone knows it so you are sent to take out another badass -- simple but cool) and it really shines in the details. Very real character development takes place. You get attached to them. I do wish they had a bit more "presence" during combat, the way your teammates in Gears do, but that's a small complaint.
The character models are fantastic, and the visual design of the game in general is quite good. The ligthing and shadows are sometimes very bad, and texture loading is very noticeably slow, but that rarely distracts, which is important.
The flow of one mission to another, the way subquests are introduced and progressed -- it's all quite immersive.
In short, Mass Effect is the closest I've come to feeling like I'm controlling a movie or miniseries. (Oblivion felt like I was playing a spinoff of Hercules The Legendary Journeys, which was sweet, hehe.)
Oh, also the "world" Mass Effect introduces is cool and easily one of my favorite in sci-fi now.
I'm well aware. I'm not sure what folks are really getting on my case about; I posted to provide a link to what they used mostly, and threw in a joke to go with it. I suppose people are keen to look for weakness in whatever posts they see so they could boost karma or whatever, but in this case it really wasn't necessary.
Did I say it's impossible to hit an aircaft with it or something? I said it's expensive.
GREEN LASER OF DEATH (as far as I could tell from the report; they said a $50 laser from RadioShack).
So... don't buy one of these pens or you might shine it at a chopper at night by accident and then spend 20 years in the slammer or pay a quarter mil or whatevs. Though for forking over that much dough for a stupid laser pen to begin with, a $250,000 fine may ironically be appropriate.
Def Leppard's new stuff is on the level of other "good" bands around nowadays. Not great, pretty generic, but the production value is still high and at least they're productive. I'm waiting for something truly good to come from them once again (yay for Scorpions' new album, by the way ^_^), but I mostly was talking about their 80s stuff. They're still performing it, and they're still with a big label.
My point really was that big labels have some fantastic bands signed, in spite of the RIAA being pure evil. Being indie doesn't make you better, and many of the best bands do get contracts with labels once they get on their radar (and then "improve" due to having more money to produce music).
Muse is a band that grew on me. I didn't even think that much of them until I saw them live. (Incidentally they win "Best live band" awards every year and I'd say they deserve 'em.) Matt Bellamy (the vocalist/lead guitar/keyboard/songwriter) writes a lot of melodic progressions you just don't hear in rock otherwise, and his versatility is pretty stunning. (Very talented musician, total idiot otherwise, go figure. Same as Tom Cruise with acting, I guess.)
:-/), is chillingly good IMO but to each his own.
:-)
I'd suggest songs, but everyone finds a particular one they like best. Muse's most well-known is probably Stockholm Syndrome. An interesting one is Showbiz, as it has little melodic progression and is more about the buildup in intensity from beginning to end. Its ending, as long as you're listening to a good recording (or lucky enough to see it live, I wasn't
Neurosis -- I'll give them a listen when I get the chance at home. Always on the lookout for good music
If you think Muse has production cost as an advantage, listen to them live. I've seen them in a small venue (before they became big in the US, which I figure they have since they played at the Garden this Summer) and no, there aren't indie bands like them. There aren't any other bands like them right now, period. Also, an indie band better than Def Leppard? Please send me the name because if you're right (I doubt it), then I will be your best friend, no joke about it.
Oh good grief, are you joking or do you seriously think that musicians who aren't contracted with companies represented by the RIAA are actually better musicians who write better music? Because, well, that's rubbish. RIAA might be pretty freaking evil but don't confuse them with the songwriters and performers that the RIAA hounds people for listening to.
Even if there were a ton of indie bands as good as bands with labels represented by RIAA (Muse, U2, Def Leppard, etc.), which there aren't, what you said would be wholly unfair. Shit, even if Muse went batshit loco and started personally crusading against piracy and pushing for more RIAA lawsuits, it would make them total assholes but they'd still be fantastic musicians with great music.
Dude when peak oil occurs (2015 according to my own really hardcore research) the entire planet will just vaporize so it's no problem.
No, he was above those other guys, really. (BTW Russel was different from Seagal and Lundgren, in that he starred in big-budget films like Stargate and such, so I wouldn't group him with them.) Norris was off the radar entirely by the time Van Damme's career took off, and it was well past anything the other guys you mention achieved. He starred in John Woo's first US film (Hard Target), Timecop made good money at the box office for those days, etc. Certainly Van Damme never achieved the status that Arnold did, not even close, but I swear as a big action film fan that he was part of that "pantheon" in the early nineties and was mentioned in the same breath when folks were talking about "action superstars." Van Damme *was* an action superstar.
His career took a bigger fall than most ever do, to be honest. But he's cleaned up his life in recent years and is doing much better for himself, though he's still off the radar as far as being a movie star.
Oh, well then nvm ^_^
I used to have a friend that said things along the lines of what you said, but in seriousness to try and argue against something. I approached your post with the wrong mindset and I'm glad I was mistaken.
Well, Van Damme and Seagal continue to this day to make movies, but with nothing going for them other than their martial arts skills, they just stopped being marketable once Jackie Chan came around. Wesley Snipes stayed slightly afloat with the Blade movies but then disappeared just the same.
Likewise, when Van Damme came along people basically forgot Chuck Norris (well things weren't quite that simple but once again the timelines fit).
I think it's in large part a question of something better coming along, and the previous star just being unable to rise to the occasion.
Yeah AC2 is actually the one I meant but oh well. I even got a proper response from an AC about AC (haha) for my original post about it.
I actually tried out AC2 the month it came out... it was like playing Shadow of the Collossus but without the horse and without the collossi and without the cool music.
Heheh... was he before your time maybe? Van Damme used to be one of the "big 3 superstars" in the early nineties. It was Schwarzenegegger, Stallone, and Van Damme.
The guy did reasonably well at the box office, particularly with Timecop, and his career was taking off until... (can you guess?)... Rumble in the Bronx hit US shores.
Jackie Chan basically put a stop to Van Damme and Seagal's success because he set the bar so high right away. They never recovered.
Oh no I'm sorry Jean-Claude I won't say anything about your career again! Although why did you post as an anonymous coward? Oh wait maybe because that's all you are to anyone anymore! harharhar
Wow Dan East your NLP system is a real piece of trash. You should look at how most systems of this sort are actually put together before making a pointless straw man. :-P
Just so we're "in the know" on the livelihood of Dreamcast. Also please have daily updates on how dead the Sega Saturn is, how dead Asheron's Call servers are, how dead Betamax is, how dead the musket is, and finally how dead Van Damme's career is.
Eh? That comes up as #2. This is what comes up as #1:
Mount Hood -- Elevation: 11,249 feet (3,429 meters)
This is only true for basic queries where interpreting the queries as bags of words would suffice.
Besides, for communication via speech it's completely unnatural to say "france capital" to a machine as opposed to "what is the capital of France," even. So for speech recognition systems NLP really helps out.
He's already done the latter enough that I don't expect any different this time around. Jackson has shown with his adaptation of LotR that he thought he can do a better job with some portions of the story than Tolkien did. He, IMO, was wrong.
One thing I know to expect from The Hobbit is yet more of some of the worst editing in modern day cinema. King Kong had plenty as well, btw.
It does do some low-level parsing. Google "how tall is Mt. Hood" for example.
Natural language processing is useful when it is well-done. Getting it well-done is the tough part. Don't let Google reps trick you into thinking otherwise just because their R&D in the field isn't where they'd probably like it to be.
Here are some situations where it's useful:
1) interpreting a question rather than just treating it as a "bag of words." For instance, one can type "how tall is Mt. Everest" in the search bar and Google, rather than searching for documents that contain those 5 (or so) tokens will interpret that as a query asking for height and also search for documents that contain "Mt.", "Everest", and "height". Take that a step further and it might look for strings that represent height such as a number followed by "ft" or "meters" or "m".
2) Condensing query chains. Suppose you want to know what sport our 4th president enjoyed playing most. You can ask "what sport did the fourth president of the US like playing?" and the system will give you an answer by first interpreting "fourth president of the US" as Madison, and then searching for what sports Madison enjoyed playing. If not for such interpretation you would either have to run 2 queries (first to find out who the 4th president was, then what sports he liked), or hope that there is a document out there that Google's indexed that contains the words in that initial query.
3) Speech recognition! If you want to run a Q/A session with a computer system that has a speech recognition front end, it is more natural (easier and faster) to ask it "how tall is mt. everest?" than to say "mount everest height" or whatever you would end up typing into Google today. People like to speak using *natural language,* after all. They would gladly do it with computers if the SR systems in them were good enough (some are).
4) More precise query results. What's better, getting back a document that is likely to contain the answer to your query, or getting back the sentence that contains it? Or better yet, getting back the answer and nothing else? The more robust an NLP system the more complicated queries it can interpret and the more elegant its result can be.
On that note, Google actually *does perform* NLP on queries despite what from the summary (I didn't RTFA) looks like claims to the contrary. If you ask Google "how tall is Mt. Everest?" it actually DOES interpret that particular sentence and gives you the answer -- 29000ft or thereabouts. And you only get such an elegant result if you type "how tall is Mt. Everest" (without quotes) or "Mt. Everest how tall". Other queries of this nature will not give you quite as precise a response.
Man I'm not even going to read the summary or TFA no time for that time to hire a ton of bees! Forget outsourcing to China and India and Eastern Europe, teh beehive is where it's at.
Wow that's fantastic. I would have expected at least white and yellow, since our *own* star, aka the Sun, isn't exactly white. But then again I was watching The Soup and they had a clip where one of the hosts of The View wasn't sure if the Earth is flat or not. So, um, yeah.