Seriously, that's messed up. I wasn't really interested in picking up what were more or less straight ports anyway, but this more or less seals it. I know there's some sort of online stickers or whatever added, but I don't really care about that. I honestly can't figure out why they'd actually lower the graphics. I mean the Wii itself suffers no slowdown when I play Metroid Prime 1 ON it, and it's basically just a Gamecube with more RAM and faster processors, so why exactly would they feel the need? Apparently there's also censoring? What would need to be sensored? I'm scratching my head there too. The controls just don't look as tight I'll note. I prefer being able to switch weapons instantly with the flick of a control stick to holding some button down and then aiming my Wii remote. From everything I've read, the new control scheme is mandatory, not optional. I think that's my biggest problem with these Wii remakes. They don't seem to want to add in BOTH schemes and let the player decide, they just out and out replace it. It's why I hesitate to get the Wii version of Pikmin (that, and I already own it), and it's a problem I had with Twilight Princess. From what I've read on that game there are a few things that simply control better using a controller.
Nintendo is a little too controlling when it comes to their player base in general these days. Their online is another example. I'd think it's in the best interests of a business to give the people what they want and let them decide what they want to do.
Basically this is a rant thread on the various abuses many companies have thrust upon us in this new era of downloadable content.
I will preface this with a note that I love DC, I love the concept and many developers do use it to the fullest to truly expand on a game, such as the Brotherhood of Steel pack for Fallout 3. I do this even though I'm sure people will STILL, as they often do, accuse me of hating the technology in spite of the fact I said I love it. I just hate the abuses some companies do.
With that, on with the rant!
One abuse that borders on the criminal is the downloadable "key" to unlock content that is, for a fact, already on the disk of the game you just bought. Whether free or charged, though the latter is certainly worse, this is a practice that needs to stop. There is no reason at all that I should ever have to unlock content in my game that is already in the game via a download from somewhere else. Now admittedly this practice has lessened somewhat. I'll note that it's original form was developed by Nintendo with their cruel "link up" tech which forced people to buy, say, the Gameboy version of a game to unlock content in the N64 version.
Allow me to clarify. I am not talking about content that is NOT already in the game. I'm not even talking about content that is sort of on the disk but in an unfinished state where a patch provided online adds it in by repairing or finishing the content. I'm specifically talking about 1KB files that do nothing more than tell your game "okay let them access this content now". I would say that when one actually has to pay for it, it's probably illegal. I believe there are consumer protection laws that outlaw charging a customer for the same product twice, which such a practice is, in a very literal sense, doing. Thou art guilty.
This leads me to another version of this that is more morally nebulous but still rather questionable. This is the fairly recent act of selling downloadable content for a game on day one. What this says is basically that you had the content already completed, but to make more money out of the game you decided to intentionally cut it from the game and force it as an extra purchase. Any reasonable person could figure out for a fact that had this game been released in the absence of DC, that content would be IN the game proper from the start as they'd have no reason to cut it. This isn't content they didn't have time to finish, or content they later thought up to expand the game, this is just some random bit of content they cut exclusively to boost their profits. It's morally nebulous because you never paid for it to begin with so it's not like one can make demands, but still is very much a seedy move you know they didn't have to make. Thou art... suspiciuos.
These two lead me to what I consider the newest and greatest of the DC sins. The "time limited exclusive download". This is basically what keeps Gamestop in business alone these days. As of late, more and more games are offering collector's editions with all sorts of extras from cloth maps to "making of" DVDs to helmets to batarangs. Do what they will, that extra stuff is costly to add to the set and for those that can afford it, great, it's all very well and good that such things are limited runs while the cheaper to make stuff with just the game gets a full run. Totally understandable so far. However to really set them "apart" too many companies have adopted the strategy of pre-order EXCLUSIVE GAMEPLAY CONTENT! This is a slap in the face more than anything. It reeks of both of the sins mentioned above, but more than that, they have forced scarcity they're shoving around. Whatever you may say about the first two, at the very least, it's still THERE, you can always get that content even if you wait a while. With this, if you missed out on the preorder for whatever reason, it's gone, that content is gone forever.
One might try to defend the practice by noting that often it's just something cosmetic like a golden chainsaw gun, but very often it's something more like an entire level or custom equipment or custom stages.
However there's something much worse than that. No other medium could ever get away with this. Can you imagine if a new Harry Potter book came out, but with a pre-order EXCLUSIVE CHAPTER that no one else gets to read? How about a pre-order EXCLUSIVE SCENE in a new Batman movie that no one else gets to see? People would complain and rightly so, so why do we let EXCLUSIVE PREORDER GAMEPLAY slide by without so much as a minor complaint? Normally the strategy is to ADD content to a game as time goes on, that's the advantage of DC. However, some marketers in some room have managed to actually turn this around and use DC to REMOVE content from a game shortly after it comes out! This is not the future, this isn't even the past! It's just stupid. What of those poor collectors years from now? Will any of these exclusive levels in games like Arkham Asylum or Fable 2 ever be obtainable by them? Heck what of some guy that just heard about the game and wants to pick it up? Did the geniuses that thought up this crazy plan ever consider that maybe someone who realizes they can't ever get the full game might just decide "oh well screw it" and move on to something else instead, like say from a company like Nintendo that, for all the faults one might find, never jerks around their customers in this fasion? For this sin, I judge thee super double dip guilty pants!
TinStar
Developed by Software Creations
Published by Nintendo of America
Released in 1994 on the SNES in the US only (not released in other regions)
Tin Star is a light-gun game on the Super Nintendo. It is really a quite fun game, and definitely is very under-appreciated. It was developed by Software Creations (an American developer) and published by Nintendo (NOA particularly), and is single player only, unfortunately. It supports gamepad, mouse, or Super Scope; I played with the mouse, because it's vastly superior to pad in this kind of game.
The graphics are great and music good, definitely high-end SNES stuff. Parallax, great cartoony art designs, robot cowboys (all the characters are robots!)... :) It's got a plot too, with cutscenes between every stage, telling the often-funny story. The main character, Tin Star, is a heroic sheriff, trying to defeat the dastardly villains who want to take over the helpless town. They try to run him out of town, con people into throwing him out as sheriff, break villains out from jail, and more... a few times I thought that maybe there was a bit too much text, but you can skip cutscenes by pressing both mouse buttons together, so you don't have to watch them if you've seen them before or don't want to. The game is broken into seven stages, one for each day from Monday to Sunday. The game actually has SAVING, and you can save between each stage section (usually). There are three save slots. It costs money (points) to save, though, so if you want a good high score you might not want to save every time you can... but if you don't and then die, you'll be sent back farther. So it's got a good balance there for people trying to get a good high score, between saving more and getting more points.
The actual gameplay is consistently fun, with lots of variety for a light gun game. There are 'keep hitting up the bottle' minigames before each day. The stages involve shooting bad guys, but there are a variety of settings; some do repeat later in the game, but there are always new ones as well. The stages, and bosses, start out easy but get harder as you progress. In some you just see the target on the screen and shoot enemies (while protecting a building, say; you aren't being attacked in these stages, you just need to keep the enemies from succeeding at their task), in others you actually see Tin Star on the screen as he runs around through the stage. You can't control him, but it definitely adds something to actually see your character going around, and also makes it so that instead of just having to stop anything from hitting the screen, you have to keep things from hitting Tin Star. It works very well. At the end of each day you play a minigame-like boss fight in the form of a duel. In this you have to wait for the 'bullets' icon to appear on screen, click on it, and then click on the enemy before they fire. You'll have to hit each enemy six or eight times to win. It starts out very easy, but by the end you need split-second timing and very good aim to not get hit... this game would be so much harder without the mouse! :)
In addition, the game has three endings, depending on how much money you had at the end. You need a lot of money to get anything better than the bad ending though (750,000 for the medium ending, 1,000,000 for the good one), and that's not going to happen the first time you play. The best score I got during this play was 160,000 I believe. I saved every time I could, and your score resets each time you die and load your last save of course. Given that the game does have battery save, it probably will save the top 10 high scores, as well as those three save files, so there is reason to try to get better scores in addition to this.
There are some flaws, however. The game isn't that long -- I started and finished it today, and it only took a couple of hours at most. And other than trying on Hard or trying for a higher score (and different ending), there isn't much reason to play it again, and as I said at the beginning there is no multiplayer. Also it'd probably be a little frustrating at times without the mouse, as with most light-gun games. Those are the main problems with the game. Still, the good points more than outweigh them. The graphics are great, with a great cartoony style, multiple background layers, and plenty of variety. The music is good 'wild west' style stuff and works well. The saving is unexpected in a light-gun game and is a fantastic addition. And finally, it's very cheap and not particularly well known. All in all I'd definitely recommend that anyone who sees a copy for a few bucks should pick it up. Tin Star, if it is thought of at all, seems to be remembred as 'that other Wild-West-with-robots game, behind Wild Guns', but while Wild Guns is definitely a fantastic game, I think that that's selling Tin Star a little short. It's a great game on its own right. It's perhaps one of Software Creations' better games. Though my favorite game published by them will probably always be Hexxagon, this one is pretty impressive for something I didn't have high expectations for.
Gameplay - 9/10
Graphics - 9/10
Sound - 8/10
Single Player - 8/10
Multi Player - N/A
Other/Value - 8/10
Overall: 88% (not an average). Tin Star is a game many more Super Nintendo owners should play, and is definitely one of the system's better light-gun games.
Quote:three million years ago, a radiation leak killed the crew of the mining ship, Red Dwarf. The only survivor was Dave Lister, the chicken soup machine repairman. He spends his time on the ship with a holographic projection of Arnold Rimmer (his dead bunkmate), Cat (a life-form that evolved from Dave's cat), Holly (the ship's senile computer), and Kryten (a service mechanoid). Written by Garrett Hobbs
The year is 2077. Dave Lister is a Liverpudlian caretaker working on-board "Red Dwarf" a gigantic space freighter traveling to Earth, the ship is commanded by Captain Ed Hollister. Lister is obsessed with eating curries and he irritates his pompous and cowardly boss and bunk-mate Arnold "Judas" Rimmer. Lister is sentenced to 6-months in suspended animation for smuggling his pet cat Frankenstine on-board. Lister awakes from suspended animation, only to find the crew have been wiped out in a radioactive disaster, he has been frozen for 3 million years and Red Dwarf is lost in the middle of deep space. But Lister is not alone on-board Red Dwarf. Also on-board Red Dwarf is: Holly, the ship's computer who has lost his intelligence after not being used for so long, A hologram simulation of Rimmer (A electronic ghost), The Cat, a humanoid that evolved from Lister's pet cat Frankenstine and Kryten, robot butler rescued from the American space cruiser 'Nova 5'.
Some old 1980's British sci-fi comedy I never heard of until this month, Sci-fi comedy has never really managed to gain acceptance on American tv, The only successful American made sci-fi comedies I can think of is futurama and 3rd Rock from the Sun (meh).
Red Dwarfs tacky low budget set and props make it even more funny, There is a number of episodes that paraody sci-fi films and shows, My favorite episode thus far is the season 3 premier " Backwards".
Quote:Bill would give president emergency control of Internet
by Declan McCullagh
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Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.
They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.
The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.
"I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. "It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill."
Representatives of other large Internet and telecommunications companies expressed concerns about the bill in a teleconference with Rockefeller's aides this week, but were not immediately available for interviews on Thursday.
A spokesman for Rockefeller also declined to comment on the record Thursday, saying that many people were unavailable because of the summer recess. A Senate source familiar with the bill compared the president's power to take control of portions of the Internet to what President Bush did when grounding all aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001. The source said that one primary concern was the electrical grid, and what would happen if it were attacked from a broadband connection.
When Rockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Commerce committee, and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced the original bill in April, they claimed it was vital to protect national cybersecurity. "We must protect our critical infrastructure at all costs--from our water to our electricity, to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records," Rockefeller said.
The Rockefeller proposal plays out against a broader concern in Washington, D.C., about the government's role in cybersecurity. In May, President Obama acknowledged that the government is "not as prepared" as it should be to respond to disruptions and announced that a new cybersecurity coordinator position would be created inside the White House staff. Three months later, that post remains empty, one top cybersecurity aide has quit, and some wags have begun to wonder why a government that receives failing marks on cybersecurity should be trusted to instruct the private sector what to do.
Rockefeller's revised legislation seeks to reshuffle the way the federal government addresses the topic. It requires a "cybersecurity workforce plan" from every federal agency, a "dashboard" pilot project, measurements of hiring effectiveness, and the implementation of a "comprehensive national cybersecurity strategy" in six months--even though its mandatory legal review will take a year to complete.
The privacy implications of sweeping changes implemented before the legal review is finished worry Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "As soon as you're saying that the federal government is going to be exercising this kind of power over private networks, it's going to be a really big issue," he says.
Probably the most controversial language begins in Section 201, which permits the president to "direct the national response to the cyber threat" if necessary for "the national defense and security." The White House is supposed to engage in "periodic mapping" of private networks deemed to be critical, and those companies "shall share" requested information with the federal government. ("Cyber" is defined as anything having to do with the Internet, telecommunications, computers, or computer networks.)
"The language has changed but it doesn't contain any real additional limits," EFF's Tien says. "It simply switches the more direct and obvious language they had originally to the more ambiguous (version)...The designation of what is a critical infrastructure system or network as far as I can tell has no specific process. There's no provision for any administrative process or review. That's where the problems seem to start. And then you have the amorphous powers that go along with it."
Translation: If your company is deemed "critical," a new set of regulations kick in involving who you can hire, what information you must disclose, and when the government would exercise control over your computers or network.
The Internet Security Alliance's Clinton adds that his group is "supportive of increased federal involvement to enhance cyber security, but we believe that the wrong approach, as embodied in this bill as introduced, will be counterproductive both from an national economic and national secuity perspective."
Update at 3:14 p.m. PDT: I just talked to Jena Longo, deputy communications director for the Senate Commerce committee, on the phone. She sent me e-mail with this statement:
The president of the United States has always had the constitutional authority, and duty, to protect the American people and direct the national response to any emergency that threatens the security and safety of the United States. The Rockefeller-Snowe Cybersecurity bill makes it clear that the president's authority includes securing our national cyber infrastructure from attack. The section of the bill that addresses this issue, applies specifically to the national response to a severe attack or natural disaster. This particular legislative language is based on longstanding statutory authorities for wartime use of communications networks. To be very clear, the Rockefeller-Snowe bill will not empower a "government shutdown or takeover of the Internet" and any suggestion otherwise is misleading and false. The purpose of this language is to clarify how the president directs the public-private response to a crisis, secure our economy and safeguard our financial networks, protect the American people, their privacy and civil liberties, and coordinate the government's response.
Unfortunately, I'm still waiting for an on-the-record answer to these four questions that I asked her colleague on Wednesday. I'll let you know if and when I get a response.
More proof, I suppose, that Americans were so drunk on this HOPE bullshit that they would have voted for Vladmir Putin if he ran on the Democrat ticket last November. Is this the CHANGE you wanted?
Apparently, it's unofficially announced. Nintendo Power might announce it in the next issue. Based on what was said previously from Nintendo:
"I think it wasn't as lucrative a venture to give third parties the responsibilities of our franchises in some cases. (Starfox, F-Zero)"
...that this next installment of the rail-shooter saga will come straight from Nintendo. My thoughts on it are that it's going to be multiplayer savvy and this might be the title that showcases Wiispeak and possibly a smoother online experience, which may mean this game will be branded with a T for teen especially if Krystal shows up and starts bouncing those furry ears of hers.
I also have a sneaky suspicion that on-foot krap will make an appearance but judging by the Landmaster appearance in SSB:B I think we'll see a lot of updates to older levels. Starfox 64 is, to this day, the best out of all of them and is the highest selling. So hopefully that shows Nintendo exactly where they need to focus.
If I find any blurbs or news i'll post it here, otherwise regard this as rumor.
I'm really hoping that health care/insurance reform can happen despite this... chances for it already seemed quite bad, but this might kill it. That just can't happen, it's far, far too important, and that would be disastrous. :(
