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Comment Re:Traditional wet shaving (Score 1) 635

Ever since I watched Predator, I just dry shaved. Then razors got kerazy expensive. Then I discovered the Norelco Saturday Night Special electric razor. For 20$, you get many years worth of shaves if you only use it once every month or so. I probably save 1.2 billion dollars a year using this and not minding a trim beard.

Comment I don't mind old graphics, I mind 10,000 FPS (Score 2) 167

My modern card turns on the high gear fans when I play... Asheron's Call 1. I just got it because it is my favorite MMORPG and there are no monthly fees anymore, just a one time fee of 10$. I don't know how to play with my driver software because I'd assume you could frame cap it. If anyone still remembers when Starcraft 2 came out, lots of people's cards fried because they were doing way over 60 FPS, and Blizzard needed to patch.

There's no reasons modern cards should engage into all out maximized FPS mode on old games. I also don't like the extra heat in the summer. I'm thinking of playing some AC1 in a few months when it gets colder. There's no reason AC1 should crank much heat at all, but I guess I just don't know how to turn my graphics card from going all out on an older game.

Comment Re:Fleeing abusive companies? (Score 1) 257

The government who is supposed to regulate isn't going to change things for the better. If anything they'll make things worse since they're bought off by the corporations.

For a long time the idiots would say,"Well who cares if the corporations buy off the government? The corporations need the people to survive so they act in the people's best interest."

Comment Can a little guy publish successful PNP RPG today? (Score 1) 203

Hello, I wrote a cool PNP RPG back when I was a teenager, and I played it with my friends in highschool for years. I wanted to make money on it, so I tried to make the world's first MMORPG in 1992, but quit when Ultima Online came out in like 98 or 99. Much later I realized, a live game master RPG genre could take off with a game master network and even paid game masters. So I made www.abcrpg.com. The problem I encountered is that I could get a group of people to play online. My online system isn't terribad, but it still needs debugged more.

I was thinking of dusting off my old books, solidifying the lore in a way that is solid, and then publishing the RPG. The problem I have is: How would I make any money at all on this? If I made any amount of money on it, I could spend my days making new adventures and polishing the online gaming engine. It is a good game, but I have no idea how to monetize it. Can a little guy make it today?

My only tactic would be to finish the rules, and then charge people 0.50-1$/hr to play the game with me as a live game master with my online game master network. Anyone have a better idea? The game was called Intergalactic Bounty Hunter.

Comment I have a true question. (Score 1) 127

Lets say I know how to make quality games in OpenGL already. Is there a reason for me to pick up Unity or UnrealEngine? To me, it seems like they don't have all the possible features having access to the raw data at the lowest level gives... Including really cutting edge networking techniques. I know all the jobs are looking for Unity developers, but it feels like I won't have as much control over the details. Should I spend a few months and learn Unity, or should I be content with getting things done at a lower level?

I've been tossing the idea in my head for an Xwing vs TieFighter(like) MOBA in my mind, and it wouldn't be out of the scope of what I could do in 2-3 years.

Comment Re:And this is the same for copyrights. (Score 1) 240

I guess I didn't complete my thought:

Patents have gotten so out of hand that many patents for obvious things have been granted. Anyone who writes any software typically trips over dozens of obvious patents. And corporations collect thousands of obvious patents so they have the right to sue anyone they please.

Comment Re:And this is the same for copyrights. (Score 4, Insightful) 240

Well for great feats of man, more investment is required. Could Pixar have been kickstarted for ToyStory 1? I think they went to great lengths because there was more money to be made.

I agree there should be a limit on copyrights, but it shouldn't be much more than 10 years. At this time, people can use your characters and such, but guess what, after 10 years of the public enjoying something, it is a part of their life too.

Finally, everyone remember radio? Radio was invented way before it was it actually became reality. Why? Because everyone had patents on different parts of the radio and they didn't want to collaborate. I hear it wasn't until around WWI that the government stepped in to be able to use it for the military.

Anyone who thinks patents help the little guy haven't seen troll lawsuits smack little guys senseless. Anyone who thinks patents help the little guy haven't seen big corporations crush their competitors they perceive as a threat.

Comment Re:No, school should not be year-round. (Score 4, Informative) 421

I agree. Don't take away summer vacation. Smart kids can use it to educate themselves independently. And all of us citizens of Earth need to educate ourselves over our entire lives. This whole "Done at secondary education" stuff doesn't fly anymore now that we can study on the Internet.

Comment AI is no longer something hard to think of (Score 1) 33

In the 80s, you had movies like Tron where a learning algorithm goes rogue, or people talking about the model of the brain, but those don't give you a clear path to making AI. All you need are sensors to translate the world to a 3d imagination space like a video game. Once the AI knows its environment, it can do tasks inside it. AI isn't hard to think of. Here is my AI page. It shouldn't be hard to read.

Comment Re:The market is getting tighter and tighter (Score 1) 203

1: I'm not complaining about the analog inputs on the N64, but more the "lets stick a trigger under neath the whole thing". Look at Wii games like Donkey Kong Country or New Super Mario Bros, and you'll be holding the joystick one way playing the game fine, but then have to shake the controller for another input which could simply have been another button. It disjoints your game play like having to switch from 2 handed keyboard to mouse and back on some web games.

2:I think calling when we're talking of quality reflex games that are fun to play, Battletoads doesn't really make my list for a game to be remembered. There are actually a lot of quality relfex games for the NES era such as The Legend of Zelda 1&2, SuperMario Bros, Contra, etc etc. Calling reflex games bad by nature by picking out one that isn't an example of a good one is disingenuous.

3:I think you simply misunderstood me: Cerebral has another definition than "Brain to computer interface", it means it feels good to your brain. Tasks that map well to the brain with low frustration are cerebral. I'm sure you've heard this before as a brain researcher. When I say link your brain, I'm talking NES/SNES or PS3/XBOX360 controllers, but some game developers should take the pressure off to map every last button to a unique action. Sometimes having less buttons and actions to select from puts the user in more of a comfortable box to play from with limited choices. Not every game would benefit from limited number of actions, but some would.

Comment Continued (dodging Slashdot filter) (Score 2) 203

Again, I'll say it that I think Nintendo would have a lot of success in Android/iOS/PC markets just making games and controllers. I mean what they could do easily is have their old games available on Android/iOS/PC through some sort of official emulator instead of the underground doing it. Then they could use Steam and people could buy old Nintendo games for whatever discounted price they wanted to sell them for. People living today can't get all those old games easily unless they go the illegal rom route, and not everyone feels it is right to use ROMs they didn't pay for. Sure some don't care, and I have nothing against piracy, but some do. I bet there would be a bunch of money in either: A: releasing those old games on other platforms, or B: Lowering the price drastically on the WiiU on those old games so they're not 30$, but maybe 1$. If people knew they could buy a WiiU and a ton of old games on the cheap, they would be buying the WiiU.

So yes, if I was CEO of Nintendo, I'd have as many old games to buy on WiiU for as cheap as possible: like 30-90 cents. If your WiiU system had such legacy dominance that people could know they had all the old games, more people would be buying WiiU. I bet they'd fly off the shelves. Then once having paid the overhead of having the system, they'd buy more premium games. It is time to stop pretending pirates aren't out there, and competing with them for your legacy software. Every sale of legacy software is one more than you'd have otherwise. Not every 12 year old has been around for the past 30 years or has parents who have been video gamers. You start giving kids the ability to play video game history on the cheap, and your system will be loved.

In fact I'd make it a selling point of every Nintendo system from here on out to provide an online network to buy legacy titles at the appropriate price point. There's a point where you don't want to sell the last generations titles which are still around for too cheap, but the general concept to allow legacy titles to be purchased on future Nintendo systems, and this could be a way Nintendo not only dodges today's storm, but sures up an unsinkable ship moving forward. It would be almost similar to a homebrew Steam store... Nintendo could even swing license deals with people who made old games to get them on there.

Comment The market is getting tighter and tighter (Score 1) 203

Between old games still being there for us to play, new free to play web games, playerbases condensing into specific multiplayer games, and the extra power XBOX and PS4 go, Nintendo can only offer us sequels to popular games they had. Cell phones and Tablets are huge competitors to Nintendo too. I think Nintendo could pull out a win by stop gimmicking it up with their controller. Better yet, they could make the defacto standard controller designed for cell phone/Tablets and continue to make software.

I know a lot of people had fun on the N64,gamecube,wii, and WiiU, but the last game system I took serious that Nintendo made was the Snes. It was the last game system which controller wasn't a gimmick, and before PC games became generally better in terms of content. Now don't get me wrong, there were a couple games there after SNES that I know are popular, but I didn't get into. I always thought the idea of console gaming was focused on the controller to be action reflex oriented, and hidden buttons underneath the controller, or motion sensors just distract. The best games link your brain with pure cerebral responses to what happens in the game. If your controller requires 200 extra milliseconds just to engage the button, or you can't hit all the buttons with any hand configuration, you screwed up as a game controller designer. The games should be the toys, not the gimmick controllers.

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