As my "buy way more old games than you probably should" thing continues, today I only spent $17, but got great stuff... SNES Yoshi's Island ($6), for one, but finally the store that got a Sega CD a few weeks ago got another Genesis 1, this one with a working power supply... so I got a Sega CD. :) The Genesis 1 it came with seems to be broken, but oh well... since I only have one Genesis 1 power supply I can't use them together anyway... (running it with my Genesis 2 I got a few months back). Price (SCD, Genesis, power supply, RFU)? $5... untested, but fortunately the thing that I wanted, the Sega CD, works fine. :) Had to clean the connector, but now it works, battery RAM included... (I can tell because it's full -- three Lunar saves are filling it up. Sadly no Lunar game, though... :()
Hmm, Sega CD games... not many available around here. I've only seen Battlecorps, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Loadstar, Sewer Shark, Star Wars: Rebel Assualt (*tries to tell self:* I already have two copies of the better PC version... I already have two copies of the better PC version...), and Third World War. Since getting all of them would cost about $23, I might end up with all six (though I might be able to resist Sewer Shark, given its quite poor reputation)... we'll see.
... I know I've made previous threads like this, but still... (though it is true that as the summer progressed I greatly slowed down my game buying -- just didn't have enough money... bought a lot of stuff the first month, but quite less since then. Still, I got stuff like Illusion of Gaia ($10, haven't started it yet), Mario Paint with mouse and mousepad (also $10 - more for the novelty of the thing...)... a $5 copy of Donkey Kong Country III... Genesis games like Ranger-X and (personal favorite of mine) Outrun 2019... I just got a Genesis in the beginning of t summer yest I have about 35 games... Dynamite Headdy, Lightening Force, Thunder Force II, Sonics 1, 2, and Knuckles, Rocket Knight Adventures, Contra: Hard Corps...Hardball III (my favorite baseball series...)...
Oh yeah, and Turrican for Gameboy. :) (The Turrican series is awesome, I was really happy to find this one, despite the obvious problems that come from porting a PC(Amiga, Commodore 64, etc, not DOS or Mac)/Genesis game to the Gameboy... you have five weapons, for instance, which are a bit confusing to access, and the massive levels lead to tiny sprites (to try to fit everything on the screen)... oh well, fun anyway.)... Metroid: Zero Mission for GBA too. Plenty of others too, everything except what I got today is on my IGN list. (I like lists, so I enjoy keeping it up to date... it's so much simpler than spreadsheets or pieces of paper and the back pages of notebooks and stuff, like I used to do! :D)
Found this enlightening (from over at badastronomy.com). The last thing we need is to send a picture of a soup can great distances only for them to think it's our god (or worse, a threat of invasion).
Quote:I am not an artist, though I appreciate art. I like some types, I don’t like others, just like most humans. There’s a great deal of art I don’t understand, which itself is understandable: art is a way of expressing what is happening inside one’s mind.
We all have different experiences, making a complete understanding of a piece of artwork impossible. But we have enough similar experiences that the work will translate– it will just touch us all in a different way. It may even invoke a reaction totally unanticipated by the artist, but this is part and parcel of what makes art, well, art.
So when an artist says something like this, I have to react:
If I were [ET] trying to communicate with beings elsewhere in the universe…I’d try to express something about myself in the most universal language I could imagine: I’d send art.
My reaction? This guy is a goofball.
Art is the least universal communication method there is. It changes from person to person. Heck, it changes even in one person; I listen to Tchaikovsky as well as ABBA. It’s difficult to understand art from another culture without first knowing something about that culture — scholars still argue over the meaning of cave art from tens of thousands of years ago, and those guys were still human. This pretty much precludes understanding alien art, especially if it is sent via radio from another star without any sort of lesson in alien sociology. And even if it does invoke a reaction in us humans, it almost certainly won’t be what the aliens had in mind.
Have no doubt, art is part of what it is to be human. That cave art I mentioned indicates that there was something different about the creatures who drew it over their ancient ancestors. Animals, it seems likely, don’t grasp metaphors, and seeing the Universe metaphorically is what art is.
Metaphors depend on their context. I suspect that even if aliens had art, we wouldn’t even recognize it as such.
The Universal language, if there is such a thing, is the language the Universe itself speaks: math. The symbols might change, but the relationships (like gravity dropping off with the square of the distance, and the peak wavelength emitted by a star depending linearly on temperature) are true everywhere.
I’m not trying to be a soulless scientist stereotype here; like I said, I have my own eye for art (I recently discovered Leonardo Nierman, and if anyone wants to buy me one of his paintings, there was a version of "Firebird" I saw in a gallery in New Orleans for only $15,000). Art is a way of expressing our desires, our fears, our human qualities… which is precisely what makes it such a terrible way to try to communicate with aliens.
There’s a poetry in the idea of using art to communicate that appeals to our emotion, but poetry just won’t work as a way to initiate contact. Binary streams of ones and zeros may seem cold and heartless… but aliens may in fact have lower body temperatures and no hearts.
I have created a cool new companion app for Tendo City.
Tendo City PM Pager, this app monitors for new private messages and notifies you. Get rid of those annoying ticking page refresh sounds with the cool new app, it runs in the background and pops up with new messages similar to outlook 2003. All you have to do is make sure your logged into Tendo city threw Internet Explorer and PM pager does the rest! After you log in the first time you never have to open Internet Explorer again, I promise! In addition more panels such as news and events will be made available soon.
Current Version 1.01 BETA R3
Requires Windows 2000 / XP, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Installer (Ships With Windows)
Quote:Experts at defence firm BAE Systems have been working on developing a new super-adherent material they say acts like "molecular Velcro". The textile, which they have labelled Synthetic Gecko, does not use glue or pressure to stick to walls but recreates the natural adhesion of the lizard which gives it its name.
So scientists have recreated the natural adhesion of geckos. Unlike insects, which can use suction cups and hooks to do the job, larger creatures have the issue of scale (since volume increases faster than area when you pump up the size of something, and density being constant, that means that a 10X fly is bearing more weight relative to it's size on those feet than a normal fly). As the article says, geckos instead use properties of the electron shields to "bond" with anything they walk on.
These will make mountain climbing a lot easier, or robbing a skyrise apartment complex, you know whatever.
Looks okay, not much different graphically from a GC game it seems... decent though. Racing games certainly are the main thing that benefits from the tilt functions of the controller... well, vehicular games in general, actually, but racing are the most prominent of those.
This kind of game could be done on the PS3 also, I expect... I bet that eventually there will be games that are "tilt on PS3 and Wii, not on X360"... but the question is, how good is tilt anyway? I mean, it's existed in some form (SNES third party controller, PC gamepads, etc) for almost 15 years now, and it has never really worked as well in practice as it seems like it should in potential... though maybe part of that is due to numbers -- only a relative few had MS Sidewinder tilt gamepads, so games that used it exclusively really weren't developed... and Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble on the GBC was fun. :) So I'm hopeful... but I definitely would say that the positional aspects of the controller are probably more useful overall than the tilt, though both do work together to create the "freehand" nature of the Wii controller... anyway, we'll see how it turns out.
(Oh yeah, and as for simplicity of control... games like this are simple and only use the basic features of the Wii controller, but learning how to play a game like Zelda? Those controls look like they are possibly even more complex than playing the game on a GC pad would be... just like the DS -- they talked about "simplicity" but the touchpad has in some games actually made things more complex. Not that that's bad, as harder-core gamers often want complexity, but it does kind of go against their stated intentions... oh well.)
According to this, Sony has "everything under control" as far as getting your old PS1 and PS2 saves to a PS3 (for anyone who decides to buy it).
Problem? Since it does not in fact have slots for old memory cards, you'll need to buy an adapter.
Fortunatly, once moved over you can actually just create "virtual memory cards" (which is something that should have been done when the PS2 hard disk was released actually, as it's just plain easier than always moving files back and forth when you want to play a game) on the hard disk so you can store all your old data and much much more. I assume you have to actively assign various virtual memory cards to "slots" before playing the game, but that's fine. No more awkward than inserting and removing memory cards manually.
Now MS, it's YOUR turn.
Come to think of it, I hope Nintendo includes "virtual memory card creation" in their Wii system. It would be a lot cheaper than buying new Gamecube memory cards, that's for sure. A one-time copy of all my data into the Wii flash memory or a memory stick (or hopefully a hard disk) and then all I ever really need to do, assuming I ever actually have so many saves it'll be required, is just reassing various "virtual memory cards" to memory card slots. The big thing in this though is that Nintendo needs to allow ANY of the saved data to be moved (if not copied). The system could easily be designed to do just that if they wanted to. If the data can be read off the memory card, it can be copied. I mean yeesh, who cares if someone makes a copy of F-Zero GX data anyway?
Seriously, we haven't had an once of rain here in exactly one MONTH. Not one bit of rain has falled since July 4th. It might be bearable if it weren't for the fact that it's also 100+ degress outside EVERY SINGLE DAY. I really like summer break, but summer weather is the pits.
Has anyone read Mark Z. Danielewski's debut novel?
It's been out for years, but I only recently picked it up, after hearing some trusted people give it rave reviews. So far, I totally agree with them. I'm about 300 pages in (out of around 700), and so far I have to consider it one of the most thoroughly engrossing novels I've ever read, and I have the feeling that by the time I finish, it may well be one of my all-time favorites.
The book is a multi-layered narrative about a man named Johnny Truant, who finds a manuscript written by a blind man named Zampano. The manuscript is an analysis of a documentary made by a photographer named Will Navidson, who purchases a house in rural Virginia, hoping the change of scenery will improve his family life. Instead, after returning from a vacation, he finds that the house has a room that wasn't there earlier, and when he explores the new room, he finds that it leads to a spiral staircase, which leads to a labyrinth that at times seems immeasurably large, and at others impossibly small. The writing style involves you as you read, using many neat tricks to make you feel the story in a different way. The narrative shifts back and forth between Zampano's narrative of The Navidson Record, and Truant's slide into insanity as he begins to uncover the mysteries contained within the narrative about the house and its impossible secrets.
So far, I'm completely gripped. I haven't enjoyed a book this much in a very long time.
