gfoot

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About gfoot

  • Rank
    Thumb Tourist
  • Birthday 04/20/1973

Converted

  • Biography
    http://www.allegro.cc/members/GeorgeFoot/profile
  • Location
    Brighton & Hove
  • Interests
    Learning to play Go
  • Occupation
    Programme^WSoftware Engineer
  • Favorite Games
    Enemy Territory
  1. Xbox 360 vs PS3 (yawn?)

    Yeah. It is an admission, though, that they were planning to screw consumers by releasing the same game on a new platform with the old assets. Anyway, releasing abandoned projects for free is good. Wolfenstein Enemy Territory is a great example of that, and it's been my favourite FPS game for years now. Because it's free, the online community will probably never die, so there will always be somebody to play against.
  2. Xbox 360 vs PS3 (yawn?)

    I sort of feel sorry for Ken Kutaragi now, he's made a fool of himself and got demoted... http://www.computerandvideo games.com/article.php?id=150186 Still, he'll always be remembered for his classic quotations, and he was the godfather of the PS2. GT:HD has also been half-canned - not a great day for the PS3.
  3. Xbox 360 vs PS3 (yawn?)

    Sometimes it's useful to think of time as a dimension (e.g. 2D graphs often have a time axis), but there's nothing definitive about it, and I don't think it really helps you understand the idea of a fourth dimension, because you end up associating it too closely with time, which is more restricted than the three dimensions we're used to (e.g. we're used to only moving forwards in time, as you guys pointed out). I'm pretty sure arbitrarily travelling back in time really is impossible - if it was possible, we'd already know about it. The choice of what to use as a fourth dimension is as arbitrary as the choice of what to use to represent two dimensions in a three dimensional world. It's like holding a piece of paper horizontally, and saying, "this is two dimensional", but then finding your friend is holding his piece of paper vertically - it's still two dimensional, just a different two dimensions, embedded in the three dimensional world we generally perceive and understand. Since our perception is essentially three-dimensional, what would we see in a fourth dimension - what can we get out of it? Mostly, we're probably restricted to viewing projections into 3D, like shadows. Much as we often look at 2D images and perceive a third dimension, it's possible that while looking at a 3D image we could also comprehend a fourth dimension which it represents. It's probably far more useful to consider the implications of having freedom in a fourth dimension - what does it allow us to do that we can't do already? Things like escaping from locked rooms might be possible, if they're not fully enclosed in the fourth dimension as well as the three we perceive. Maybe Houdini used special 4D handcuffs?
  4. Xbox 360 vs PS3 (yawn?)

    I prefer the smug little apple. The point is, does the "increase" in quality justify the increase in price? That's what sensible end users should care about. Look back to the last generation... To a large extent the Xbox suffered in the last generation through lack of decent software, despite being technically more powerful than the PS2. That was mostly the developers'/publishers' choice, probably because there were at least ten times as many PS2s on the planet, and the Xbox never gained much momentum. It doesn't make the PS2 a technically better system, but it does make it a better choice for the gamer, unless you're particularly fond of some Xbox-only game. Yeah right. Sony are selling the PS3 as being more powerful, but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter whether it is actually more powerful or not - what matters is whether developers exploit this alleged power enough to justify consumers paying the extra cash. Feel free to comment that as the PS3 only just launched it's not surprising if the games don't make best use of the system. I do think it's still a valid comparison, though - the better-looking PS3 launch titles are standing on the shoulders of the Xbox 360 versions they were ported from, and the original titles are looking decidedly ropey, IMHO. There will be a leap in quality for the original titles, as they figure out how to do next-gen graphics well, but the ones built on previous Xbox 360 engines are unlikely to experience that leap, because in effect they're already second-generation games. I really feel sorry for the Japanese console-buyers, I think they've made a huge mistake - unless in actual fact 10x as many of them buy the Wii, in which case it will all make sense again.
  5. Xbox 360 vs PS3 (yawn?)

    And almost the entire Japanese console market. Apparently, more PS3s sold in Japan in the first two weeks after launch than Xbox 360s since its own launch last year. I wonder what Japanese Wii sales are going to look like.
  6. Xbox 360 vs PS3 (yawn?)

    Another screenshot/video comparison of cross-platform games on the two consoles. http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3155393 Why is there no option for "Xbox 360 looks better"? Nice Kutaragi quotes, though!
  7. Children of mana is shit

    We've always sent spreadsheets for localization, with each language in a different column. But they get a copy of the game as well, and we try to be responsive at answering queries about context. Often we get sent back screenshots with wobbly circles drawn on them, highlighting problem areas and asking which string in the spreadsheet they need to change to fix it. In each case I can remember, it pretty much took up an entire coder's time to coordinate merging back the translations, supplying information and new builds of the game to the translators, and double-checking that the text actually fits on the screen afterwards. It needs some investment from both sides really. The sadness is when really common gaming slang words get literal translations. That's the real give-away that a company is just hiring cheap foreign students, rather than people with any understanding, or interest in, games. I guess the other give-away is when a high percentage of the translators are women. Sometimes you also suspect that they're not actually playing through the game anyway. I think there's a lot to be said for running translation and QA in parallel, rather than having a separate pass of QA for the translations later on. Why should localisation bugs be treated differently to any other kind of bug?
  8. PlayStation Mayhem

    My pet peeve is educated people writing "of" instead of "have". I also have peeves against people objecting to the use of the word "got", and the word "till". I used to be really pedantic about this kind of thing, but I grew out of it, so now I'm just grumpy about it without being terribly vocal.
  9. Connecting console to TV

    Technically it's great, it has a lot of useful features (you missed out things like VCRs being able to change the channel on your digital box), but the core concept of having so many wires and signal formats is really the flaw, to me. Some of them may be unconnected at either end - some of them might not be connected in your cable either. And the average person wouldn't even know. At some point it really is better to have a different connector and a different cable, just so people actually know what signal format they're using. They should at least be able to tell "high quality socket" vs "low quality socket" without trial and error or reading the manual. Compare it to PC video file formats - e.g. AVI. It's a container format, so the fact that something is an AVI file tells you nothing about whether your computer will actually be able to play it. If every codec used a different file extension then it would be a lot clearer whether your computer can or cannot play the file, and arguably much easier to find the codec for download. But unless you've done quite a bit of research, you just blew £30 on an admitedly overpriced "advanced" scart cable without it being very clear what it actually is, or whether your TV even supports it. And you'll never know whether you really did need to buy that cable, or whether you could make do with the crap cable you got for free with the console.
  10. Connecting console to TV

    It might be worth trying the s-video thing again, making sure you try both sockets - as already mentioned, some TVs (e.g. mine) with two SCART sockets do indeed only support RGB input on one of the connectors; but on mine, only the other connector supports S-video. I don't know how common that is, but maybe you just had it plugged into the wrong one. SCART connectors are a nightmare to plug in, but at least they provide support for an RGB signal, which is about as good as it gets on consumer TV hardware. It's an interesting idea to have one connector with every signal under the sun going through some of its pins, but the fact that it's possible for both devices on the cable to just not bother connecting half the pins makes it far too confusing.
  11. Firefox 2.0

    My main problem with Firefox (at least pre v2) was suspend and resume on my laptop - sometimes it would take literally ten minutes to resume the laptop. With plenty of patience, I'd wait, and Firefox would always be unresponsive and using all the CPU. Closing tabs and windows wouldn't affect it; even opening an empty tab and closing everything else wouldn't help, though in theory nothing should be running at that point. I don't know whether it's still the case in v2 - I tend to totally close it now to avoid the problem. There are some reports of the bug online, mostly pointing at bad Flash or Javascript, which is possible, but not really much help. It makes me despise the use of Flash in adverts - I don't much mind ads appearing around web pages whose content I like but don't pay for, but I do mind ads using up all my CPU. Still, maybe it's fixed now.
  12. Sam and Max

    Maybe you should measure the depth of point-and-click adventures by how long it takes a bunch of trained monkeys to complete by randomly clicking all over the screen?
  13. Halloween

    I thought you were going to dress up?
  14. Jinkies! I'm likely to be UK bound!

    http://maps.google.co.uk/, or http://local.live.com - the latter has a bird's eye view of some places (including Birmingham), which is really quite good for seeing what the streets actually look like - you can look from four different directions at a 45 degree down-angle. Regarding trains, you can go to http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/ to look up train times and prices. It can route you via the tube as well where necessary.
  15. Movie/TV recommendations

    I thought the subtitle of The Hobbit was "There and Back Again" - so there you go, two movies.