Pinkerton agents, who aren't legally sanctioned but they ARE brute force sanctioned, threatened their way into this guy's house to steal a product he legally paid for, just to enforce a street date. The corporations run things now.
Remember, any law who's penalty is a fine is only a law for poor people. To the rich, it's just a fee. This isn't about the law though. It's about a company having Shinra soldiers to enforce the company's will out in the world.
Also, the police are a historically recent invention created to enforce control of slaves. We didn't need them, as a species, before that.
Duh duh duh duuuuh nenene- or whatever. Sadly there's not an easy way to post musical notation in text.
Goldeneye is a game adaptation of more legendary status than the movie it's based on. It was one of the first truly successful FPS games on consoles, helped really motivate controller sales thanks to the N64's adoption of four ports as standard, and really showed what the N64 could do that the Playstation struggled with.
But, above any of those things, it created a shooter subgenre. Many imitated, but only Perfect Dark and Time Splitters 2 (both games made by the same team) managed to capture the design well. This was a game that combined fun gunplay and stealth mechanics, wide explorable level design, and multiple unique level objectives as well as a variety of means to accomplish many of those objectives. While some games had much more developed RPG design (such as System Shock), none combined those mechanics with solid arcadey shooter design almost as well put together as Quake.
However, we should start graphically. Goldeneye wasn't even the best looking shooter of it's day. Quake came out the year before and Quake II was a few months away. (Likewise, Half-Life and Unreal would come out the next year, redefining what could be done graphically in shooters once again.) Compared to those games, Goldeneye was an undetailed blurry mess with tiny levels. Indeed, it hasn't aged well either. Pretty much any game designed to look "photorealistic" hasn't aged well compared to things meant to take on an unrealistic art style. But, what it lacked in graphical fidelity it made up for with it's amazing motion captured animations. While Quake's animations lacked even basic interpolation and were clearly done "by hand" in a way that resembled claymation, Goldeneye was setting a modern standard. But, the hardware could hardly keep up. Maybe the game could have been better optimized. Certainly the explosions could have. Those bring even the 360 version to a crawl. In any event, they did do ONE thing to make the game playable even at it's abysmal frame rate. They specifically coded the game to pick which frames to "skip" so that it preferentially used "important" frames. That is, changes of direction, your actions, enemy's actions. Whenever something was changing from before, that frame got rendered and frames "around" those key changes got skipped. This technique made sure that even though the game was running pretty badly, even by the standards of games like F-Zero, it still had a very "playable" feel to it.
Then there's the enemy design. Enemies react to your presence in interesting ways, can surrender if you sneak up behind, get startled, run for help or to set alarms, duck behind boxes, and react in unique ways when you shoot them. They even set a modern standard with the first body-dependent shot recognition system. Well, one of the first. It seems the original "beta" releases of Team Fortress 1 managed to JUST beat Goldeneye by a few months, but it certainly was the one most players found out about it from, including Romero himself, the Doomsman of Id. Yes, you can thank Goldeneye for the "headshot", and for a very funny way of negating them. If you hit someone in their precious hat, the hat comes off and they remain unharmed, if confused. Frankly, the list of things Goldeneye innovated from that to giving enemies "pathing personalities" and so many other things wrapped in a game that was actually fun to shoot in is staggering in retrospect. For someone who didn't truly "get" games like Doom and Quake until years later, THIS was my entry point into truly falling in love with these games in the way they were meant to be played (without cheating), as well as my entry point into this very forum. Now, the enemies have all kinds of fun behavior you can exploit. Many of them take time to really line up their shot, and this can be exploited to rush in up close, duck, and just karate chop their knees into crushed bone jelly. The most dangerous attack animation an enemy can take is the "marching slowly forward while holding down the trigger" one. If they do that, hide. You're not going to get away with only a little damage. Also, enemies have a lot of trouble seeing past anything even remotely an obstacle to their movement. You can use this to line up free headshots across railings or large gaps, or to lure enemies around long paths while you just fire away.
Map design is what sets this subgenre apart however in ways that are almost never imitated. Doom and Quake set a standard for levels that encourage a lot of free exploration and some puzzle solving. Half-Life, later on, redefined the shooter as a largely cinematic endeavor. That is, Half-Life popularized shooters as a means of telling stories full of cut scenes and voice acting that very rarely encouraged much exploration and felt more "on rails". While Half-Life is good in it's own right and deserved the praise it got, the industry as a whole was itself guided "on rails" into making Half-Life again and again from that point forward, and only thanks to the more modern Doom games have we seen any hope of breaking out of that rut. But, Goldeneye stands apart. Predating Half-Life, this game skews towards encouraging exploration. It didn't start out that way. Goldeneye was originally envisioned as something more like Virtua Cop, a TRULY on-rails shooter involving a lot of ducking behind crates and firing at enemies in a more automated fashion. In fact, a few levels still have vestiges of that older design, namely the train. Elements like the body zone based damage and detailed animations are hangovers from that which made it into the final version. One thing that stayed throughout the design was a developer insistence that every map "feel like" a real location. Doom and Quake unapologetically don't care how "realistic" their locations feel. They are very much built to be video game levels first and foremost. Goldeneye instead first designed a location that was layed out semi-realistically, THEN went back and added in obstacles, enemies, NPCs and objectives to flesh it out into a fully realized map. This turned out to be the right move for a game designed around playing as a spy instead of a one-man army. Now you're watching patrol paths in some sections to sneak by, or in others finding the best way to take out enemies without worrying about taking too much damage, or avoid damaging mission-critical components. It's to this game's credit they still kept it's "level based" design. Failing a mission by accidentally destroying or killing something important isn't so devastating when you've only lost a few minutes.
Mission difficulty is also interesting. Higher difficulty adds additional mission objectives that make certain rather "empty" feeling levels now brim with greater purpose. The added challenge of far more accurate enemies and less ammo/armor combine with these to make it really worthwhile to play through the game at least three times. Consider it "training", and fun as the game is it really is worthwhile to see a lot of these levels multiple times. There's also very fun rewards. There's two bonus levels, and the first is simply the most challenging in the game. Aztec is absolutely punishing. The second is more of a walk in the park, a "victory lap" you can take. While the puzzle of how to actually unlock the golden gun is just trial and error (sadly there is no way to find out without just experimenting over and over again, or looking up the solution online), once you have it down, it's easy to remember for life. One thing this game does better than Perfect dark is these bonus levels. There's only two, but each gets a dedicated level, enemies, and even guns.
About that variation. Objectives are directly tied, mostly, to specific item statuses. That means that while the game is designed for you to accomplish the objectives a certain way, so long as you manage to get the object in it's desired state, that's all the objective tracker actually cares about. You can thus create unique solutions to problems. So, in the Facility for example, the level is designed for you to hit certain buttons on consoles to open doors ahead, but you can instead skip some of those buttons altogether by alerting guards to your presence with gunfire and making them open the door for you giving you an alternate path in. About the most egregious exception I can think of is a case where a remote mine "modified" into a timed mine (why not just use a timed mine?) is the only method you can use to destroy a certain helicopter. Had they allowed it to be destroyed via other tools, it would have opened up that level a bit more, since grenades can also be found in that level. It's also possible in a few levels to "sneak" through without ever alerting guards to your presence and thus avoiding an endless swarm of them spawning into the level. In fact, level "interaction" in this game is a step above what typical shooters had. Duke Nuke Them 3D started the trend towards greater interactivity, and this game ran with that and expanded it thanks to unique "spy gadgets" that enabled new means of interacting with things.
Combining the free exploration, the feeling that each area of the level has a purpose, the high degree of interactivity with objects throughout, and impressive (for the time) AI that included passive behaviors as well as how they handled player actions, and you get the complete package that truly created a sense of sneaking through, gunning down opposition, and accomplishing espionage tasks in a way no game really had before. Again, System Shock and games like it must take credit for innovating a lot of the 3D interaction and RPG elements beyond just shooting, but those games didn't have solid shooting mechanics and a good physics system combined with that. Other games that did have solid physical mechanics like Metal Gear Solid and Thief wouldn't come out for another year with their take on sneaking missions. (Metal Gear 1 and 2 do deserve some credit as well, but they predated the 3D revolution.)
But that's not all this game had to offer. Speedrunner bait was programmed into this game. Rare may not have even realized the full extent of what they'd done, but this game passes into legend as one of the oldest of the really popular old guard of speedrunning classics. That short list includes Super Mario Bros, Super Metroid, Doom, Quake, Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, and the one that eclipsed them all in popularity, Super Mario 64. Goldeneye may not be THE most popular speedrunning game of all time, but it's still on the list and for good reason. They programmed in a lot of cheats behind accomplishing certain goals, ranging from beating a level on a certain difficulty for the first time to beating a level within a certain amount of time. The latter is what really took the challenge up for those that had beaten the game on 00 Agent and wanted more. Every level has one difficult that has a time challenge. These range from easy to "Caverns and Facility". Sometimes it's just a matter of finding the quickest path and discovering what counts as accomplishing an objective (like, rescuing Natalia on one of the many... MANY times you need to rescue her only involves letting her see you through a door and then she just runs from the guards meant to... guard her). What isn't so fun is finding out just how many aspects require random luck, like where certain NPCs spawn, or where in a guarding path an enemy is when the level opens up. All in all though, some require such perfect execution. Caverns in particular gave me such trouble because that level is difficult to even survive in in the first place, and now you have to do it within a certain amount of time. QUICKLY taking out guards that are right next to sensitive exploding tanks that themselves are next to a mission critical radio you need to use is... frustrating. Still, the elation of finally achieving these goals is wonderful. The diagonal run is key to this, as well as using a far superior control scheme. 1.2 is similar to Turok's control scheme, and turned out to be the ideal way to control a shooter on the N64. It was more or less this style that got adopted in two stick control schemes later on and that's what we have to this day. With all this in mind, and with a LOT of room for improvement thanks to all those unique quirks and the flexibility the game's engine allows in resolving objectives, it was no wonder the challenge switched to beating other's times online, and the rest is history. Oh yes, and one additional detail regarding it. Goldeneye and Perfect Dark are two games that rely on the in-game timer and not an external timer to determine records. While an outside game timer would allow finer determination on times, the in-game one "accounts" for oddities in Bond's movement speed that an outside timer does not, allowing for times that better reflect player skill and not random luck.
Multiplayer is another story. Someone went and snuck that mode in working on it on their off-time as a side project and it almost didn't make it into the game. For something of such a sketchy quickly hashed out nature to turn out to be the part that defined it's play for so many people is nothing short of a gaming miracle. Numerous modes of play were introduced, but the basic deathmatch proved to be the most popular, followed by flag tag. Multiple preset loadouts were done, you hold whatever you find until you die, then scramble around hiding from all those who outgun you until you manage to get it all together again. What really impressed where the number of well thought out stages that really emphasized the stealthier side of Bond's shooty play, and those wonderful proximity mines! Even with everyone able to see the screen, you can take advantage of moments of high action elsewhere to covertly plant a bomb right under where an ammo crate or armor spawns, or next to a door, or most evilly a player spawn point. It may not really hold up today in this regard, as multiplayer shooter map design has really become a well developed science at this point, but it was amazing for it's time.
Sound deserves a mention. From the sound of each gun, to enemy banter, to even Bond's footsteps on different surfaces the sound design really is top notch. Music is absolutely amazing and stands up to even Doom and Quake's legendary scores. The Jungle deserves a mention here, as it mostly lacks a soundtrack altogether in favor of ambiance. This is apparently a glitch as there is a song specifically for it, but it goes unused. I think it's for the better. The ambient sounds of the jungle really make it stand out.
All in all, this game deserves it's reputation, but I think it deserves more. So very many articles that bring it up these days only vaguely allude to it being "important for console games" as a sort of backhanded compliment, without realizing that Goldeneye wasn't just "good for a console game", it was truly innovative in ways that survive to this day, and in other ways that very few games ever imitated. Even The World is Not Enough for N64 didn't capture that level design nearly so well.
I'd review the 360 enhanced port of Goldeneye, but that was never officially released. Instead, we have an emulated ROM. So, the only thing I can say about it is it allows fully customized duel stick controls based on the 1.2 control scheme, inverted, and even allows mapping movement to the wonderful XBox One d-pad. Do this to get full speed strafe-running back. It runs at a smooth 30 FPS, at higher resolution, but no improved draw distances and the textures all look "wrong". It's also got achievements for doing all the stuff you'd normally do to 100% the game. The only thing of note is this time through, it's the version I played. All in all, if you want to play the game emulated, there are better options. One of them is the 1964 emulator with a special profile mapping mouse and keyboard support into the game. If you're going to play emulated, that's the best way to do it.
But Perfect Dark did, no, it surpassed and that's what I'll review next time.
Just going to post the oldest recorded song in all history here. I didn't expect it to break into a solo rivaling the one from Stairway at the 5 minute mark, but there it is.
This is seriously, LITERALLY, the solution they are proposing. We need more people at the very bottom rung, homeless and helpless, for our economy to thrive. Or... OR... just tax the wealthy more. You know... that. The one thing they don't ever want to do. And by "they" I mean both parties, unfortunately. Outside of a few outliers (who are all solely in the democratic party), we've got a two party system that both think a good solution is "some people dying on the streets now and then", as if it's necessary, as if it's just an unavoidable fact of life, as if we can't do better.
And they wonder why my generation and younger are rejecting capitalism. This is why. If this system demands literal blood sacrifice, it's evil.
Sony is making a new handheld called the "Q Lite". https://kotaku.com/sony-playstation-vita...1850303111
But hold on now, because this isn't a new PSP or Vita. This is a tablet that functions as an additional screen for the PS5 and remote play, nothing more. It requires an online connection to work. It's an accessory that's basically what people THOUGHT the Wii U was, just a tablet for their existing console.
In his old age this man's become a complete waste of a neoliberal. He's promoted antivaccine rhetoric a number of times, went after pretty much any progressive plan, spoke from his rich tower about how the young poor aren't the SAME poor as his generation's poor and thus need to stop complaining, and gone after trans people as wanting too much too fast (where most of us would take the "injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere" stance).
But now, now he's saying that Trump, who he won't deny committed a LOT of crimes, shouldn't even be TRIED for them, not even at the state level like the case currently going on in New York.
The man is honestly arguing a sentiment I've seen here and there that "but we have to think of the political ramifications of this". No, the legal system should absolutely not be worried about polling numbers, nor should it be concerned about violent repercussions. It didn't when the mafia was threatening judges with direct violence, and it shouldn't now. First people were arguing that a "sitting president" shouldn't be tried because, I guess, the whole nation would instantly collapse if there wasn't an acting president (never mind that the whole series of succession such as the vice president's office was made TO allow the country to continue functioning in such an event, and we WILL see a president die in office again, especially as old as our presidents are getting now). Look, I'm not saying there isn't a risk of violence, or a risk that this could influence enough voters to let him win another election, but whether or not he's guilty and gets punished for his crimes should not EVER take those factors into consideration, or we only have laws for the commoners, not for the nobility. Sometimes, the deterrence theory of punishment is actually valid, and this is one of them. No consequences means no one at the top will bat an eye at trying to break laws. Trump, the most obvious criminal that ever was, got away with countless crimes, they'll all be thinking.
As for these consequences, the protestors and counter protestors in the streets have yet to come to blows, and Trump's popularity is waning bit by bit with each passing month. I'm not saying SOME violence in the streets won't happen, but I am saying it's worth it. Stop being so gutless Maher. But, moving forward, what about this turning him "into a martyr"? The deepest die hards were going to vote for Trump either way, but polling data hasn't shown a bit of this "effect" they think will happen. People are more sick of Trump than the coverage of Trump. Remember that Trump lost the last election BEFORE the Jan. 6 insurrection. He lost it BEFORE stealing military secrets and risking national security for his vanity. What do you think his reputation is going to be now?
Keep in mind this is the WEAKEST case against Trump. In the long run, it'll be a good thing this one was done first so that much stronger cases are what follows. Does anyone really honestly think that among the majority of voters, they're going to see all these legal challenges and think BETTER of Trump for it?
Oh and to that one news caster who said Trump looked "sad" and so we should remember he's human and what a shame he's in the legal system. I HOPE THE FORMER PRESIDENT NEVER HAS A SINGLE MOMENT OF HAPPINESS FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE! He deserves for all the bad things in the world to happen to him and only to him. Children fleeing from U.S. caused tyrannical rule in Central America were stolen from their parents and raped in cages by racist monsters because of him!
But... I'm afraid I have to poke a few holes in this. Firstly, using old CDs is all well and good, but they're still going into a product that to this day still has far too fragile shoulder bumpers and a flimsy USB-C port that isn't secured tightly enough to the board inside. The big problem is these controllers are still designed too badly to stay in use in the long term, and these weaknesses need to be fixed.
There's no reason why all of the current manufacturers shouldn't just be using this tech. There's enough room in all three of their controllers to work in two AAs and we can just get rechargeable ones that way that we can use across different devices. This is the real ecological solution, because proprietary battery sizes in all our consumer devices are basically a bunch of bombs waiting to go off. Heck, cell phones should have invented singular standards for the whole industry to use a long time ago, because that's one place our standard batteries WON'T fit.
I guess what I'm saying is this is another example of greenwashing, much like all those "plastic cutouts" in game cases they do now. If they really cared, they'd use something that biodegraded and eat the cost they can clearly afford. It's not... nothing, but it's not close to enough or what they could do. I miss paper game boxes, and there's some ways to design those to be as easy to open as modern plastic game cases. (I like the "sliding drawer" design a small number of PC games used.)
But, what will Fox say? This is Microsoft going "woke", whatever they think that means.
And nothing of value was lost. Well, alright that is a BIT of an exaggeration. At one point in time, E3 was valuable. Oh I don't mean just to the industry's big shots but to the humble independent developer. It originally really was a much smaller affair. Still industry-wide, yes, but the industry was smaller and a lot of companies were themselves smaller operations with "mere" million sellers. Someone could reasonably pay a small fee and get a booth to show off some silly game about cats painting fences or something for the Commodore 64. As time went on, E3 started to become better known to people outside the industry and by the end of the 90's it had really become a U.S. gaming touchstone all on it's own. At this point just about anyone could simply show up as a guest to play demos. Laser Link, for example.
But, as the new millennium went on, only three companies and their well-manicured shows came to "matter" at all. Only the press could attend. Costs for getting a booth became far greater, and only partly related to this, floor space for anyone who wasn't being directly promoted by Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo was sparse. While bigger name companies always had a bigger presence at E3, the sheer difference between the top and the bottom became so extreme by this point that independents no longer considered it even worth the cost for the meager exposure they were getting. Better to woo one of the "big three" to promote them instead and sign some exclusive contracts, or simply go their own way completely. In the midst of this, the internet's bandwidth and hosting space exploded again and again year after year, and full live streams of E3 became the norm. What did we get for this? Rather silly shows full of inside jokes, "half-time" shows, faked trailers, and all the other sort of detritus we all now associate with the event. It became apparent with Nintendo starting to distance themselves that even the huge corporations no longer really needed what E3 had to offer. Nintendo's direct streams became so popular that MS and Sony, to varying success, copied the formula themselves.
And then Covid happened. That is a disease which, you may be surprised, is still ravaging us. As the tall man says, it's never over... booooooy. In the wake of this, and a cancelled event that turned into numerous company streams, the question was asked again and again. What is the modern value? Well, I'd already made my mind up. I'd already switched to simply watching or reading much faster synopses of the announcements and had LOONG since grown very annoyed at the presenters and their frustrating sense of humor and insultingly bad sales pitches and jabs at each other. So, in the face of that, is it any wonder that the industry as a whole (meaning, well, the big three as well as EA and other major publishers) have basically given up on it? They did give their little statement that it "may return". That's a nothing phrase that means "we don't care about it any more".
Considering that it had turned into nothing but a monstrosity that really only promoted giant corporations that are fully capable of promoting themselves, we don't need E3 any more. None of us ever went in person, so what did it matter that it wasn't a physical event? As far as any of us are concerned, it's been a digital only event our entire lives. The side gig of promoting indie studios, well, things like Nintendo Direct are still making their partnerships to promote indie content anyway. I'd be in favor of a new tradeshow that was entirely composed of independent studios WITHOUT any interference from the big shots, but let's face facts, if it existed barely anyone would know about it, and it'd end up getting swallowed up by one of the big shots anyway. Heck if it ALREADY exists, my ignorance of it kind of goes to prove my point about it being too niche doesn't it?
E3 died a long time ago. All the big shots did was finally pull the plug.
