Say again?
Yeah, yeah, big res, colour depth, blah blah - what was that bit about sound again?
"22.2-channel sound encoded at 48 or 96KHz in 16, 20 or 24 bits"
Oh....oh my...
2481 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Don't agree on the slider, as the Go was a monumental failure, and partly because of its flat controls. But I agree on the storage - it was soooo nearly standard Micro SD, but they had to tweak it. Then again, this is kinda to be expected. Nintendo have *never* used a standard storage format, and Sony do have form for promoting storage options no-one wants.
"It's going to have to play games much much better than the touch, otherwise I can't see this getting off the ground."
....You're fucking kidding me, right?
Available for iPod Touch, which has no physical game controls: Angry Birds.
Available for the PSP2, which is a dedicated gaming machine: Metal Gear Solid IV.
Been drooling over this since it was first announced. That said, I am still gobsmacked that it doesn't do video, at all. Also, it looks like, as with every console with a gimmick, all the first wave of titles are legally obligated to include as many touchscreen/shaking/rear touch/motion gimmicks as humanly possible. To my dismay, Super Stardust appears to be one of them.
"Crush asteroids with your finger." Riiiight, I could piss about doing that, or you could let me SHOOT THEM.
Personally I'm glad they left it alone. I *love* the visuals and animation in Flashback/Another World. Normally I'm quite welcoming to graphical updates, such as the Final Fantasy/Gradius upgrades on PSP, but these games are just so stylish that I would fear them losing that individuality.
Touchscreen though? You'd have to be nuts. It was infuriating enough on a real device, but on an iToy...?
I quite enjoyed the plane mission, though as mentioned, it's very simplified, and I too was reminded immediately of HAWX. I ditched the default over-the-wing and 3rd-person modes immediately, as I always do, and it seemed competent enough.
Where I thought it would really shine was the helicopter mission. To my surprise, it didn't come across well. The controls seem rather obtuse, like the developers should have played G Police first, and they've tried to bring over some of the dogfighty feel from plane combat by allowing you to dodge missiles...via barrel roll....
Yeah, that was kinda when my suspension of disbelief shattered entirely. The chopper mission is also hard as hell. I'll give it another shot this weekend, see if it improves with a second go.
I have Another World Anniversary on PC - I'd love to see the HD version too. Flashback was the first of the pair that I played, and I really liked it (other than the annoying chirping sounds on the first level). Pity some of the SNES versions had a game-breaking bug at the start of the second area. It was basically a pit that you could jump on the Mega Drive, but not on SNES. But I have the MD version now, so that's definitely on my to-do list.
"Most religions preach pacifism."
Reeeeeaaalllly?
"Anyone arrogant enough to reject the verdict of the judge or of the priest who represents the LORD your God must be put to death. Such evil must be purged from Israel." (Deuteronomy 17:12)
"Whoever sacrifices to any god, except the Lord alone, shall be doomed." (Exodus 22:19)
"Cursed be he who does the Lords work remissly, cursed he who holds back his sword from blood." (Jeremiah 48:10)
You and I have obviously been reading different holy books...
"Not all material on the Internet is good for children and not all people who practice religion are a good example of that religion."
You're absolutely right! A lot of Christians don't seem to be very good ones. They only practice the busybody interfering, and seem to have forgotten the genital mutilation, slavery, genocide, etc altogether!
"I did all sorts of things without my parents finding out (before the Web, but eg making fireworks, experimenting with mains electricity), and I was not particularly irresponsible compared with some I knew."
And how much of that melted your mind, corrupted your Christian soul and ruined your life?
What kind of fucking state do we have to be in when the group being consulted on MASS CENSORSHIP of modern communications is a fucking Christian mothers group?
nPower sent me my bill prediction for the next 6 months, based on an "estimate" that always seems to be for a family of 6 in a mansion. I sent them the correct readings, they acknowledged receipt of them, and then....kept my bills exactly the same...
And then when they overcharge, trying to get the money back is fun. Credit against my account? No mate, cheque in the mail, now.
2nd hand PC gaming is dying a death because the licences are locked online through kit like Steam, and there's NO way to get a new code/whatever for yourself. So you can't buy the game 2nd hand, ever. This online pass malarkey still sucks ass compared to previous consoles and games, but it's better than them going the PC route.
And haven't the X-box publishers been doing this for yonks?
My university course was, other than a few key modules, pretty damned useless. Almost everything I do as a developer involves stuff I taught myself or acquired on the job. I've since encouraged people younger than me to consider whether university is necessary for their career, or whether they would be better served spending that time getting direct work experience and skipping the large amounts of time and debt involved.
Personally, I'd have 3 of those 4 years back in a heartbeat.
The first series wasn't as good as the others, granted, but it did set a lot of stuff up, storywise. Sinclair's acting was bad, but in a funny way rather than a God-awful way. B5 just didn't work as well with the stand-alone episodic format, so once the main storyline got going it was much improved.
And compared to Star Trek? Much as I love the Trek and its cheesy dialogue, wooden arms-by-the-side acting, and tendency to resolve all problems in the last 5 minutes of the show with concentrated technobabble, it just doesn't come close to B5.
B5 definitely has its crap moments, but they are heavily outweighed by the good stuff. Riker incompetently firing one shot at a BoP and getting his ship destroyed, or Sheridan dive-bombing a ship full of nukes into Za'ha'dum, before throwing himself off a cliff because his balls are solid titanium?
Maemo has the best multitasking of any mobile OS, and the most competent system base. Not the fastest phone, but the sheer number of things you can do with it made it superb. Every time someone got a new thingy on their ShinyPhone, it would be something the N900 had been doing for donkey's years.
Real shame it's dead. :-( No idea what I'm going to use next.
"- Macbooks gather a lot of heat when the lid is closed. The forums are full of warnings that overheating is a reality."
^^^THIS^^^
Because they don't want to despoil their perfect design with ugly things like a proper cooling system, a lot of Mac laptops I've seen (all of them?) vent hot air through a slit in the lid hinge. This is stupid enough to start with, but then you close the lid and block/redirect the vent. Even on a 5 year old MacBook I've got here, it happens.
"Hosts a backup service over Internet/VPN. The trick... really smart (and expensive) backup software that only does deltas/incrementals."
Duplicity is an open source backup doodad that really needs a GUI and a port, because the command-line version I've set on a cron job is fantastic. Encrypted delta/incremental backups SCP'd to a test server, and it works well for me.
"Opera gets a bad rap, but most people honestly haven't tried it for a month."
Couldn't get along with it for a full month. I've never called it a bad browser, though its fanbase are even more annoying than Apple's. The simple reason I use FF is that it works the way I want it to. I'm a developer, and as far as I'm concerned, Firefox has the most consistently accurate rendering of all the browsers. It's also a lot faster in recent versions, and once you start building on top of its base functionality, the plugins I have installed have made it invaluable as a development tool.
For example, just the other day I discovered Poster, which is a tool for simulating POST/GET requests to APIs. Sure, there are other browsers and other add-ons which make this possible, but it's just such a well-made, nicely laid out and straightforward add-on that I've now installed it on every machine.
Being able to customise FF to *exactly* how I want it is what makes it perfect for what I do. My downloads open in a tab because I want them to, I've changed some of the menus, Flash only plays when I want it to, I never see ads, and I can literally edit pages in place, enable/disable their various features, etc. Firebug is so awesome that other browsers have almost copy-pasted it into their own interfaces, and extending it for Drupal/Moodle/PHP is just damned handy.
The awesome bar is also an absolute killer. It works better than anything I've used in any other browser, Chrome and Opera included. I almost never have to go directly into bookmarks or recent history, because it's just so good at finding what I'm looking for.
The same thing has happened with my phone. I used to use Opera Mobile, but since FF mobile got its act together and sped up a bit, I now use it exclusively. It syncs, just like Opera, but it brings with it the same features that I love from the desktop version, like the awesome bar, and for fullscreen browsing it's the best damn mobile browser out there. It had a rocky start, but it's gotten really quite good.
Opera's not bad, and if it wasn't for the spyware Chrome would be alright, but FF is just...better for me. Note: for me. You want to use Opera, that's dandy, but what you see in it isn't necessarily what's useful or right for other users.
Seriously though, Opera's fanbase don't help. You don't see roving bands of Chrome users posting on every browser article and downvoting anyone that speaks out against it, do you?
Becomes popular simply because it's fast.
Has rendering bugs.
Gains market share.
Gains proprietary extensions that only work in that one browser, fragmenting the web.
Still to come, the inevitable security issues of such an approach. I thought Google were trying to replace IE and it's shitty brethren, but it turns out they just wanted to *control* IE...
"Been tried many times before, and always ended in whining and ragequits, because the PC players wind up pwning the l33t console players almost without exception."
^^THIS^^
They tried it with a number of FPS games, and the superior PC controls let them run rings around their joypad-encumbered opponents. As a guy who likes his consoles, but adores his PC, I found it goddamned hilarious. If they brought it back, they might actually have created a reason for me to buy Halo. Plenty of willing and vocal targets on that shower of Microsoft mediocrity.
I'm not sure that it is, but Safari might be faster. That doesn't mean that it's any good. Every time I load up Safari on the iPhone I feel like I've stepped back in time a bit. The interface just feels a little bit clunky, uses more of the screen than it should, etc. I've gotten used to Firefox on Android, which once it got past it's creaking betas and slow start has become an excellent fullscreen browser that I couldn't be without. Compared to Safari, it may have less HTML5 support, but that will change, and in terms of a usable experience, it's leagues ahead IMO.
"Get real man: Every OS crashes. Especially Pre-Beta versions running in a VM."
Yes, but they normally get as far as loading the first screen of the first section of the installer... I did get it working in the end, thanks to the help shown here. It runs fine in IDE mode, but SATA crashes it out. Given that the vast majority of the drives these days are SATA, that's still not encouraging.
The transition between the touch interface and the traditional desktop feels both random and jarring. Some apps open in touch, some open in traditional, and there's sod all indication which is which until you click.
And trying to use Metro with a mouse is just painful. You can't hold and drag from what I can tell - manual scrollbars? Are you kidding me? I hope that gets sorted.
At least you can revert it and use the traditional desktop, which feels...well...exactly like Windows 7.