Yst

This is for the most part an urban legend. While in many respects the Betamax format can argue a mild quantitative statistical advantage over VHS, the practical effect of that statistical edge on final home NTSC TV viewing was ultimately trivial, while the significance of the greater recording length of the VHS format over Beta proved immediately fundamental to the value of the format. Meanwhile, tape dimensions proved a non-factor. The reasons for the acceptance of the one over the other are in many respects political, but the idea that politics thwarted the inherently superior format which deserved otherwise to succeed doesn't really hold water. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Well, not everyone uses the inferior NTSC standard. PAL, for example, has higher resolution and faster frame rate; just because the difference was negligible to the lowest common denominator doesn't mean it was non-existent. You may also think that analogue vinyl records have no better sound quality than a digital CDs, or vacuum tubes are obsolete in amplifiers but many audiophiles would argue the contrary. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Higher resolution? 576 line displays instead of 525 line displays using identical picture tube technology...it really doesn't change the situation, as far as Beta vs VHS quality concerns go. And the transmission standard's framerate is a separate matter entirely from the question of whether the quality of the picture tubes which displayed Beta and VHS recordings were sufficient to effectively differentiate them. It's a myth because no one used a home display which substantially differentiated Beta and VHS during that era. It's not a matter of the majority being relegated to crap. It's a matter of absolutely no one having a display which could meaningfully differentiate VHS from its rival in the mid '70s. Even some of the earliest and screwiest attempts at higher resolution TV displays (e.g., analog displays which deinterlaced and reprocessed a signal at twice the line count) were a long, long way into the future. Technology cannot depend on statistical advantages which fail to manifest themselves as functional advantages, and VHS vs. Beta is a case in point. VHS took hold of a critical functional advantage from the start by supplying two and three hour recording media where its competitor could only supply one hour recording media, and that manifested itself as an immediately functional advantage for the market as a whole. In a free market economy, advantages have to be useful and apparent to the market, and not just to gurus and geeks with a spec sheet in hand.

Indeed, I'll agree on the ridiculousness of the popular "graphics don't matter to me" contention which seems so stylish these days. Graphics do matter to me. My personal favourite game of all time, Planescape: Torment, offers a plot and a character cast superior to that of, say, BG1 (which I also loved), but the fact that its graphics are so much better than BG1's is also very important to me. And as much as I like its graphics, I'd love it if they were updated to the level made possible by current technology (impossible - merely hypothetical), even so. Even playing an older game like Chrono Trigger or FFVI - yeah, it matters to me that Chrono Trigger has really great pixel art graphics and I consider the ending sequence in FFVI to be some pretty cool eye-candy. That's right - SNES eye candy. If either game had the graphics of FF1 or DQ1/DW1 throughout, I would enjoy the game less. If it had VGA or SVGA graphics produced with skill equal to that of its original SNES pixel art, I would enjoy it the more for it. As soon as a world tries to portray immersive scenery, graphics start to matter. So for the classic RPGs I mentioned in my above post which largely use symbolic graphics (static 'avatar' and 'mob' icons, etc.), yeah, it really matters little as long as one can comprehend the nature of the character's strategic situation, but for anything past 1985, I think any argument for the irrelevance of immersive graphical technology is silly.

Speaking as someone who owns all the major Adventure games of the past decade (favourites, unsurprisingly, being Grim Fandango and The Longest Journey) and most of history's major Text Adventures, I nevertheless have concluded, over the past year... ...that the Adventure Game is indeed largely dead to the mass market (smaller releases continue), while Adventure's virtues are alive and well there, moreso than ever: they just go under different names now. The Text Adventure and its style of gameplay has been dead for a while. Its last major incarnation (i.e., of a text parsing engine in a major release) was in Starship Titanic, and it wasn't particularly successful either in sales or reviews, though I enjoyed it well enough. The virtues of Graphical Adventures, however, are all to be found still, and the best part is, they're mostly to be found outside the "Graphical Adventure" genre itself. The reason the adventure game genre is dead is that all its finest virtues are now represented elsewhere and are not restricted to an oversimplified classic graphical adventure interface anymore. The distinctive characterics of the classic graphical adventures were quality of dialogue, story-telling and puzzle solving and character interaction, but those characteristics have slowly begun to represent themselves beautifully in other genres and most especially in a few high quality RPGs. In the era of Tunnels of Doom, Adventure, the early Roguelikes and Garriot's early games, it made sense to distinguish Adventures, with their humour, their intelligent story-telling and their immersive worlds from RPGs with their statistics and monotonous dungeon crawls, but games like Jade Empire and the KotORs have eliminated Adventure's monopoly on quality writing, gratifying puzzles, dialogue, humour, intuitive interface and immersivity. I look forward to Dreamfall, but even Dreamfall is billed as a hybrid. The classic Adventure game is dead, and we're the better for it, I'd say. My only regret is the death of Graphical Adventures with text parsing interfaces, which truly represented a unique interface not represented elsewhere (a la Leisure Suit Larry and Starship Titanic). But I can live with it, because plot, story, character and immersivity are now the domain of story-based games in general, and not just adventures. So be it.

This is for the most part an urban legend. While in many respects the Betamax format can argue a mild quantitative statistical advantage over VHS, the practical effect of that statistical edge on final home NTSC TV viewing was ultimately trivial, while the significance of the greater recording length of the VHS format over Beta proved immediately fundamental to the value of the format. Meanwhile, tape dimensions proved a non-factor. The reasons for the acceptance of the one over the other are in many respects political, but the idea that politics thwarted the inherently superior format which deserved otherwise to succeed doesn't really hold water.

But sense needs to be made of it if the EU is to be built around these unstable foundations. A conclusion has to be made at the very least regarding which side of a contradiction is more appealing, or how any given contradiction can be reconciled. If George Lucas doesn't reconcile those contradictions, it's left to those other creative minds who work with Star Wars lore, and to the fans, to reach a concensus.

Anyway, I'll only buy one of these systems if it has a game I really, really want to play which is exclusive to it. They're both being produced by hugely evil, overtly anti-competitive monopolistic corporations, so there's no good guy to pick here. Only a choice between equivalent evils. If I can choose not to support either one, I certainly will. If some given game or games compel me to support one, I suppose I hope that it's the cheaper of the two, for lack of other concerns. Each contains adequate hardware to effectively eliminate any concern regarding the range of creative possibility available to it, so specs are essentially irrelevant, as far as I'm concerned, save insofar as they affect quality game development. And I've already stated my concerns regarding quality dev kits and intuitive architectures, on that count. We'll see how each plays out in that regard.

Indeed. The bottom line is that the PS3 for most purposes offers potentially higher performance than the Xbox 360. ...but potentially is the very, very, very key word there. It's also a less conventional architecture. And radically unconventional architectures have a rather unfortunate history in the gaming world. It may be that everyone jumps right into the Cell architecture, figures it out immediately and makes fantastic use of its remarkable potential. But there have been innovators who thought that way before. Sega was pretty sure that everyone would figure out the Saturn's very remarkable and forward-thinking, if rather complex, chipset right quick and make use of its fantastic potential. Unfortunately, by the time they had released adequate documentation and a quality SDK, the damage had already been done, and that potential was only ever demonstrated in a limited way. This is Sony, though. They're the big guys. They'd never make the mistake of afflicting developers with a lousy SDK which makes things harder for coders trying to make the most of their platform. Except that's exactly what they did with the Playstation 2. 1. Overhype esoteric system design 2. Release problematic SDK and documentation which does not make the maximisation of the design's potential at all easy. 3. ??? 4. Profit! They've got IBM behind them on this one. That's a very good thing. But whether this design's potential gets realised will be dependent on whether Sony can ease developers into it successfully. And they don't have a good history of doing that. Annecdotally, I was just playing on my (1981) TI/994A console/computer. Playing Munchman, a Pac-Man clone from 1982. It's a system with the history of whose architecture I'm intimately familiar. The TI 99/4A was a 16-bit machine. It possessed a whopping 16KB of graphics RAM. To put this in perspective, the total system RAM available to the Atari 2600 with which it most directly competed was 128 bytes. The TI 99/4A's on-die CPU cache alone, for that matter, was twice the 2600's total system RAM, nevermind the fact that it was operating on a 16 bit bus, interacting with a 16 bit CPU at over twice the clock rate. Which system's games look better? Well, they're mostly of similar calibre. Why? Because despite a number of high-quality components, the TI 99 was an arcane design with inadequate developer support. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Sony may well help developers make the most of their (though moreso, IBM's) unconventional architecture, but we'll have to watch and see. If they don't, expensive components can rather easily be made to come to naught.

Ugh. What concrete information there was on KotOR 3 development or a KotOR 3 development team is rather old and, at any rate, no longer relevant. What KotOR 3 "news" has bounced around since the axing of LA's internal KotOR 3 team has largely proven to be random baseless ponderings from less credible game news sites basing their contentions on out of date, irrelevant speculation and rumour. At present, all accumulated evidence and developer comment points against Obsidian being developer, at least presently, for KotOR 3, and no evidence meaningfully suggests that Bioware could be the replacement, although Bioware is a large enough company that it's always within the range of possibility. The sum total of all collected knowledge on KotOR 3 to present consists of our knowing that LA had a team, for some period of time, working in some respect on a KotOR 3 related project, and that team, whatever it was up to, was long since scrapped.

After some introspection and a bit of photoediting subsequent to seeing the final movie in the series, I've come to an ultimate conclusion regarding what Lucas really should have done with Episode III. Concept is as follows.

Awesome!

Heh. I have bigger causes to worry about than doing my part to ensure that Lucas' latest film is not only the highest grossing movie of all time, but the highest grossing film of all time by a slightly greater margin (it is #1 of all time in release day revenues, as of now). Really, regardless of how good or bad or (far more likely) largely irrelevant to Lucasfilm's profits the distribution of a crappy workprint of ROTS on the web is, taking the thwarting of its distribution up as a cause seems a bit silly. Only in the MPAA's deluded world of copyright-obsessed schizophrenia could the bootlegging of a lousy pre-release workprint amongst a bunch of nerds constitute a cause to be fought for.

Predictable, generic plotting, bad dialogue, poor acting and lack of directorial insight? Sounds like a Star Wars movie. Really, anyone who is surprised or disappointed by the presence of bad dialogue and acting in Star Wars must be looking for something other than the series that goes by that name. Me, I'm not surprised. I didn't watch the original Star Wars movies until early adulthood. Quite enjoyed them, but could recognise that they didn't really have anything to say, and that acting and writing were blatantly evident weak points. As far as I can tell, from my nostalgia-free point of view, there has never been a Star Wars movie with an overall high quality of dialogue writing and acting. Not even ESB. Somehow, the pulp-sci-fi-fantasy formula coheres in a way that often lets people look past the many weak points in the movies and that's terrific. But expecting those weak points to be absent even in this above par grand finale to the series is just unrealistic. As a consequence of this generally cynical outlook, I didn't hold a particularly negative opinion of either Phantom Menace or Attack of the Clones. Both seemed like reasonable sci-fi fantasy with some fairly goofy aspects. But with no rose-tinted nostalgic impression of the original trilogy to influence my opinion, those failings came as no real surprise. And so I was able to enjoy both movies for what they were. It's funny that a non-fan should have enjoyed the first two in the new series so much more than the genuine fans of the series, but I'm fairly certain that's how things played out. My expectations were never set sky-high. Actually, they weren't particularly high at all. So when I came out of the Phantom Menace on opening day, I felt satisfied that I'd experienced a pretty worthwhile high-budget, effects-heavy pulp fantasy flick, which was what I had set out to do. Meanwhile, around me, I found the Star Wars fans fuming, because some seem to have gone in expecting Shakespeare which George Lucas is not, and has never been. This phenomenon has settled down, as the new trology progressed, with fan expectations sinking lower and lower. At last, with ROTS, fans seem for the most part to have assumed a realistic outlook on both the new trilogy and the old, and have gone in expecting something closer to what Star Wars really is and has always been. Certainly, ROTS has been an improvement on the previous two flicks, but I think an equally major change which is boosting fan response is just the more realistic position that if Lucas so much as manages mediocre dialogue and tolerable acting, he's done pretty well for himself. Nothing like low expectations to make for positive reviews.

They're all using the in game engine, but not actual game footage. None of it is pre-rendered, its all real-time. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Apparently incorrect. According to Epic Megagames' Mark Rein: In addition to the Sony demos being shown by Phil Harrison, the Epic and EA presentations were the only third party portions actually running on the PS3 in real-time. But most of those movies, which I probably watched 3 or 4 during rehearsals for the event, look very achievable and some were probably rendered on the actual box but in non-real-time.

It makes me a very, very sad English Historical Linguist, when I encounter somebody correcting somebody criticising a source's grammar and find that all of the critics have a poorer grasp on the language than the source (the Restoration Project site) originally cited. Seriously. The Restoration Project homepage has more consistent grammar, capitalisation and spelling than EITHER the person who originally criticised its grammar, capitalisation and spelling here, OR the people who criticised him in turn.

Before I went vegitarian and subseuently vegan four and a half years ago (haven't eaten meat or dairy since), I enjoyed my hotdogs topped with - Sauerkraut - Mayo - Hot Peppers - Ketchup - Relish Mmm. But as for vegan foods, there just aren't that many really weird combinations of vegetables and other vegetable products.

Yeah, I have to wonder if Yoda's increasingly goofy speech was a result of Lucas' desire to stick to rules he believed he'd made for Yoda's sentence structure in a more reliable way. In the Original movies, Yoda would very frequently break the rules which normally apply to his sentence structure arbitrarily, just to make the line more coherent or less goofy, or more accessible to the audience. In Ep III, Lucas seemed to throw any intent to make Yoda's sentence structure not sound ridiculous out the window, and the result was the audience laughing at all sorts inappropriate times, during seriously delivered Yoda lines. Unfortunately, there's no way to get around the badly (well, probably not at all) thought out jive talk Lucas invented for his little green puppet at this point. I think he should have just gone on breaking all the rules of the aphasic dialect he'd invented here as well. We know Yoda doesn't actually follow any logical rules in his speech. We know Lucas really has no better idea what he's doing than having his puppet "speak all backwards" or some such thing. So enforcing the irrational variations on English he'd invented when they sound so ridiculous seems silly. The frustrating thing about it is that it's grammatically such a mess. It's just English word order, usually with phrases which would normally begin a sentence ending them, with some English grammar rules enforced when they break Yoda's rules, and some of Yoda's rules enforced when they break English rules, in a confused and incoherent pile of linguistic uncertainties. Since English itself has a very messy, often broken set of greatly varied rules on word order, you can apply Yoda's variations to those rules and claim he's speaking according to certain grammatical rules to derive a subset of English grammar's, but in reality, he's just speaking every-day Modern English with a couple words which appeared significant to Lucas moved from the sentence's beginning to the sentence's end. One can say things like "in first person indicative phrases, the nominative pronoun and its auxilliary verb will normally be sentence final if the auxilliary verb is present, or the nominative pronoun and the main clausal verb will be sentence final if no auxilliary verb is present," but that's just a fancy way of describing the result of Lucas sticking what he saw at the beginning of a sentence on the end of it instead, so it seems like a pointless exercise. I think Lucas should have stuck with having his little green man "talking all weird" in whatever way had originally occurred to him, but being strict about rules which don't even really formally exist when it makes lines sounds so silly strikes me as pointless.

Incidentally, best worst line: Vader: "Nooooo!!!" Pure hilarity. People were giggling all around me in the theatre.

Yeah, went to a downtown Toronto midnight showing. It was MUCH less an event than I expected. Sure, there were a few people dressed up, but not too many. And when I and my friends seated ourselves 1.5 hours before start, the theatre was still mostly empty. Contrast that with the LOTR FOTR/TTT/ROTK marathon showing at the same theatre, where two hours before showtime for FOTR, the theatre was almost completely packed. I'm sure it sold massively everywhere, but I was expecting a bit more response, locally. But I'm not really a Star Wars fanboy. I was just doing my duty as a nerd by attending.

He doesn't appear to be Japanese, actually.

How much smaller is it from the GBA-SP? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> As small as it could be without being simply too small

Because utter and complete nonsense continues to succeed in impressing large portions of the playerbase. Far larger portions than are disgusted by it. Whether or not nonsense hype is intentional or whether exaggeration is considered to be part of the game by marketing, it seems there's every reason to believe that outright bold-faced, intentional lies regarding hardware architecture are a largely beneficial and advisable marketing tactic at present.

Well, I bought Half Life 2 yesterday, after having finished and greatly enjoyed Jade Empire (I'm thinking I'll play it again soon and possibly again and again and again). I played Half Life and greatly enjoyed it in its time, and played a lot of TFC when it was big, before CS became the only game to play. And this game, Half Life 2, has gotten some absolutely ecstatic reviews ("best game ever" and such). So I thought I had to play it. But I'm starting to think, as I play this game, that the vanilla first person shooter is dead to me. I'm really not getting it. At all. Where's the sense of fulfilment? The number of usually identical enemies I kill? Maybe if the game kept count or something. But it doesn't. The story? I guess it's alright, but there isn't much of it, really. The characters? Yeah, again, they're alright, but there isn't much of them. Lots of games out there these days with stories and characters to at least compete and often to exceed HL2's, so that can't be all. The graphics are nice, but they're not really any more or less immersive than most games at present. Graphics have reached a bit of a plateau, it seems to me. We've got convincing 3D human characters, and we've had them for a couple years. Developers trying to convince me that the incrementally increased detail on the leg-hair of the fifth-commando-from-right should make all the difference in the world for my interaction with him in a given engine aren't likely to succeed. I played through Doom (the original) a short while back under the Doomsday engine after playing Doom 3 part way through (and getting bored), and enjoyed the prior substantially more, so graphics don't seem to sell even an FPS engine for me. By way of relevant contrast, I hadn't played Deus Ex until recently, and it's the last FPS style game I played. And honestly, aside from texture resolution, I'm not sure how you could possibly convince me that Half Life 2 is the future of the FPS and Deus Ex the past, putting them side by side (since I played them chronologically side by side). Playing Half Life 2 after Deus Ex, it feels like a giant leap...backwards.

I'll be yet another among the gamers who feel the need to say, "Hey Sony, look, it isn't 1985 anymore! The d-pad is no longer the fundamental console game control mechanism. Don't locate it as if it were. I'm sick of a d-pad which sits unused in the most ideally accessible place on the controller while my thumb strains to reach an analog stick which serves as the exclusive directional control mechanism for 90% of titles these days, but which is nevertheless placed uncomfortably almost out of reach." It seems doubtful that they would do this. 95% of NES and SNES games, Nintendo simply CANNOT unilaterally release for free, because they're other people's IP. For the 5% of games for which Nintendo and Nintendo alone owns the rights, well, they've been selling those or bundling those for a while now, so the idea that they would make some of them part of a 'deal' of some sort makes perfectly good sense. But releasing their entire in-house games library for free sounds very unlikely, while releasing the entire NES and SNES libraries as a whole would be legally impossible. Completely incoherent with their previous use of their old titles, and doesn't appear to make much business sense. Possibly for low prices, but who knows what their plans are there.

The Danish language's similarities to Old English are a strange historical coincidence, as they are indeed not part of the same branch of the Germanic language tree. Partly due to borrowing from the Danes and partly due to similar spelling masking quite deceptively what is in fact very disimilar pronunciation, they can appear to share a great deal. In reality, Modern German is the language which shares the most with Old English among major European languages. So much so that I'll sometimes be caught off guard by long strings of wholly intelligible Old English cognate words in German writing or speech. For example, taking the following verse from the song "Du Hast" and translating to Old English, one gets German: Du hast mich gefragt und ich hab nichts gesagt. Old English: