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Comment Re:Everything old is new again (Score 1) 511

by Justus (#27402295) Attached to: Game Companies Face Hard Economic Choices

Although, it has worked swimmingly for blizz and WoW.

That's largely because their competition, at the time, didn't even do that. To take FFXI as an example, the crabs (yes, seriously) you fight at level 60 are visually identical to the crabs you fight at level 1. It was actually a nice improvement to pick up WoW and see differently colored trolls and things.

Modern MMOGs tend to have substantially more art assets, but then of course they have the difficulty of competing with nearly five years of live game content development. Large game publishers lust over Blizzard's subscriber numbers, but how do you break into that market with a new game and survive for longer than 6-12 months?

Comment Re:Lost Touch (Score 1) 88

by Justus (#27398563) Attached to: Early Look At the New <em>Wolfenstein</em> Game

Although Spear of Destiny is the prequel to Wolfenstein 3D, it was released about six months afterward. Not that Wolfenstein 3D itself was particularly serious, what with mecha-Hitler, the zombies, etc.

The series has always had a pretty fantastical bent to it. It's actually worked rather well, in my opinion, and I just hope that they have something similar to Enemy Territory (or original RTCW) multiplayer included.

Comment Re:The lack of tech understanding in popular cultu (Score 1) 395

by Justus (#26613345) Attached to: Daemon

Technical sloppiness is really the last problem I think Ludlum fans would have with the Bourne movies.

The plot of the films is essentially entirely different than that of the books, with the exception of some character names and the fact that the main character suffers from amnesia for a time. By the time you get to worrying about technical details, you've already accepted that it's just another Hollywood action vehicle, so who cares?

Comment Re:They already have their answer. (Score 1) 254

by Justus (#26108077) Attached to: Ubisoft Testing PC <em>Prince of Persia</em> Without DRM

but in peer-to-peer networks composed mostly of people who do not have infinite storage and bandwidth

Peer-to-peer networks are today's warez scene, by and large. Do you think people twenty years ago had infinite storage and bandwidth, too? No, and there were still people who collected as many pieces of software as they could.

I know several people who have this mentality; they download as many videos as they can, often without watching the majority of them. Don't ask me why.
PC Games (Games)

November Indie Game Round-Up 39

Posted by Soulskill from the digging-for-treasure dept.
cyrus_zuo writes with this month's round-up of independent game reviews. Leading the pack is World of Goo, a popular puzzle game in which you build structures to get blobs of goo from one place to another. "WoG could have zero personality and still be a good game, but on top of the tremendous technical execution, you are presented with a quirky and odd world that teems with character. WoG has a style all its own and the flair and dynamics of the world just add to the pleasure of losing time with the game." Also scoring high were action RPG Mount & Blade and the third release in the Strong Bad series.
Handhelds

A Copyright Cop In Every Zune 454

Posted by timothy from the not-just-brown-but-stinky dept.
Mike writes "As if the Zune wasn't already crippled and unpopular enough, now comes a story indicating that Microsoft may build a 'Copyright Cop' into every Zune. A future update of the software for Microsoft's portable media player will likely include a 'feature' that will block unauthorized copies of copyrighted videos from being played on it. The president of digital distribution for NBC, J. B. Perrette, said the plan is to create 'filtering technology that allows for playback of legitimately purchased content versus non-legitimately purchased content.' Of course there's no way to tell legitimate content that you create from 'non-legitimate' content, so this looks like just another nail in the coffin of the Zune." Update: 05/08 20:50 GMT by T : From Microsoft employee Cesar Menendez comes this categorical denial of any such filtering mechanism.
Portables

Best Technology For Long-Distance Travel? 257

Posted by kdawson from the unbeaten-path-warrior dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Over the past year I have traveled across the globe for work but I can't seem to find the right balance of technology to take with me. After reading a CNET article about tech for traveling, I'm still slightly undecided about what hardware suits me best. On the work side of things I need a laptop, nothing fancy but it can't be too heavy or slow. I also need a smart phone that can receive emails across the world and if possible a satellite navigation device, as I need to get to less-traveled locations on a regular basis. From a personal perspective I need my music but I don't care about video, so I'm looking for something with high-quality audio and great battery life. A compact camera wouldn't go amiss but dSLRs are too heavy for my needs and carrying strength, so something I can tuck in a pocket would be perfect. Any suggestions greatly appreciated."
Supercomputing

Half-Petaflop Supercomputer Deployed In Austin 130

Posted by kdawson from the one-teraflop-per-researcher dept.
SethJohnson writes "Thanks to a $59 million National Science Foundation grant, there's likely to be a new king of the High Performance Computing Top 500 list. The contender is Ranger, a 15,744 Quad-Core AMD Opteron behemoth built by Sun and hosted at the University of Texas. Its peak processing power of 504 teraflops will be shared among over 500 researchers working across the even larger TeraGrid system. Although its expected lifespan is just four years, Ranger will provide 500 million processor hours to projects attempting to address societal grand challenges such as global climate change, water resource management, new energy sources, natural disasters, new materials and manufacturing processes, tissue and organ engineering, patient-specific medical therapies, and drug design."
Earth

Biofuels Make Greenhouse Gases Worse 506

Posted by kdawson from the no-free-lunch dept.
vortex2.71 sends us to the Seattle Times for an account of two studies published in the prestigious journal Science pointing to the conclusion that almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse-gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these "green" fuels are taken into account. "The benefits of biofuels have come under increasing attack in recent months, as scientists took a closer look at the global environmental cost of their production. These plant-based fuels were originally billed as better than fossil fuels because the carbon released when they were burned was balanced by the carbon absorbed when the plants grew. But that equation proved overly simplistic because the process of turning plants into fuels causes its own emissions — for refining and transport, for example. These studies... for the first time take a detailed, comprehensive look at the emissions effects of the huge amount of natural land that is being converted to cropland globally to support biofuels development."
Internet Explorer

Microsoft to Force IE7 Update on February 12th 480

Posted by Zonk from the they-know-best dept.
Z80xxc! writes "InfoWorld is reporting that on February 12th, Microsoft will roll out Internet Explorer 7 through Windows Server Update Services to all systems - regardless of whether or not the update had been requested previously. The piece also mentions ways to prevent the update from occurring, for sysadmins who do not want to use IE7 on their systems. Microsoft claims that the decision was made due to 'security concerns'."
Media

Vinyl Gets Its Groove Back 751

Posted by kdawson from the what-goes-around-comes-ariynd dept.
theodp writes "Time reports that vinyl records are suddenly cool again. Vinyl has a warmer, more nuanced sound than CDs or MP3s; records feature large album covers with imaginative graphics, pullout photos, and liner notes. 'Bad sound on an iPod has had an impact on a lot of people going back to vinyl,' says 15-year-old David MacRunnel, who owns more than 1,000 records."
Sun Microsystems

Sun's Trading Symbol Going From SUNW To JAVA 356

Posted by CowboyNeal from the big-whoop dept.
Mortimer.CA writes "Straight from Jonathan Schwartz's weblog, Sun is changing their ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA: 'JAVA is a technology whose value is near infinite to the internet, and a brand that's inseparably a part of Sun (and our profitability). [...] To be very clear, this isn't about changing the company name or focus — we are Sun, we are a systems company, and we will always be a derivative of the students that created us, Stanford University Network is here to stay. But we are no longer simply a workstation company, nor a company whose products can be limited by one category — and Java does a better job of capturing exactly that sentiment than any other four letter symbol.'"
Microsoft

Microsoft Axes 'Get The Facts' 241

Posted by CowboyNeal from the fanning-the-flames dept.
tom66 writes "Seems like a long time coming, as Microsoft today has axed it's Anti-Linux campaign 'Get the Facts', and Microsoft has replaced it with a new campaign, called 'compare'. This article touches up on why they may have done it, and the criticism surrounding Get the Facts."

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