Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Everything posted by blackboxme

  1. The history features on firefox suck, at least relative to the ones you find in Google Chrome. How can this be the number two browser in the world, used by millions of open-source programmers, and nobody's written a fully featured history plugin? Anybody else running up against this problem?
  2. Why does the history on Firefox suck so much?

    Yeah, but there aren't any date or time markings associated with that, which makes it less useful.
  3. Why does the history on Firefox suck so much?

    Google told me to...
  4. Why does the history on Firefox suck so much?

    Hmm, well, I did find something a bit better. If you hit shift+ctrl+h, you can at least get a full screen view of the history. What can I say, I like to be able to see the date and time on my history, and have it be treated like a normal DOM'd up web-page like Chrome has it, whatevs.
  5. Thanks Jake, this gives me something to listen to while getting ready for work this morning.
  6. Mass Effect 2

    Nachmir: yeah, but I'm not that disappointed if backwoods planets are boring. If the citadel is unimpressive, that's something else.
  7. Mass Effect 2

    You know what I wish Mass Effect had? Pre-rendered cut-scenes. An introductory cutscene for a world could do a lot to make it seem more lifelike.
  8. Quick check, Did anybody else think that MGS4 was a Video game interpretation of the novel Notes from the Underground?
  9. Mass Effect 2

    That trailer was the coolest thing at E3. If you haven't watched it yet, you totally should.
  10. Max Payne 3

    I loved Max Payne 1. You really got the feeling that Max had no where to go, and his only option was to dig deeper into the criminal underground. Then there's the survival mode in Max Payne 2, holy crap, that is so much fun. Think they'll be doing a take on "Man on Fire"? Trying to find the little girl could be a good plot for this kind of thing.
  11. There is a developer called Artificial Mind & Movement, here's their website: Also, Jake, we love you: you are the mom of the idle thumbs family.
  12. It's just that I heard that same week, a To The Best Of Our Knowledge interview with Jason Rohrer. In the TTBOOK interview, Rohrer specifically called out MGS4 as a failed avenue for game design. I think the screenplay thing was probably a joke: he knows that the cutscenes are widely criticized. But, people didn't take it as a joke, they took it as, "this guy's the hack we thought he was." Maybe he was being serious, but it seems like Kojima is a person who makes strange and confrontational jokes. Look at Raiden from MGS2: Kojima killed Snake, and gave you an incompetent metrosexual who slips in bird shit. My point is, I think Kojima isn't a well respected designer right now. I could be totally wrong, and just the Rohrer interview implanted ideas + hearing that half the people didn't give props at the lifetime achievement awards.
  13. Yeah, that's a good example. It's like, first this guy had to work on the MSX, then on the Sega CD, then the Playstation, then the Ps2 as opposed to xbox or pc, but he was able to make work of lasting quality on all these limited platforms. So, on the one hand, it's not impressive because there was more ambitious stuff going on elsewhere. But on the other hand, he was on limited hardware and managed to achieve a lot.
  14. I liked hearing the stuff about Kojima vs GDC. It definitely seems like the kinds of people who would go to GDC, would be the kinds of people who would not respect Kojima. He's the guy who makes long cut-scenes, he's just a failed film director, his games are the perfect example of a failed direction for games, etc. But at the same time, he's progressive for his circumstances. Not many people made blockbuster Playstation games that are still fantastic to this day and reward you for not killing people. Yet when he goes to get his lifetime achievement award, people are like F this guy, he's a hack. I don't think he's a hack, I just think he's not ambitious in a showy way. I mean, you don't get any credit for your facial animations in Snake Eater, that's kind of too subtle a point for people to think that's interesting or worth paying attention to. The freedom of Splinter Cell seems much more interesting from the perspective "I'm a game player, freedom in game play is what is interesting." Of course that's interesting, but so is Snake Eater.
  15. Fair enough, though I think it's a good general example of a piece of something having a barrier to entry of expertise before it can be really appreciated. My uncle's favorite games are Ico and Pixeljunk Eden, and those are pretty much the only games he's ever played, aside from like Punch Out on the NES. He's like 42. I think there are games that everyone can get and say that they're pretty interesting, so I'm not giving up on the old folks. Fair enough. The idea of an abstract test to decide merit is annoying. My Ebert test is not about merit though, it's about what would convince Ebert, which I only care about for the sake of arguing with Ebert. I want more smart people and good writers thinking about this stuff. If this corner of the world is just made up of fans of games, that's a pretty terrible intellectual ghetto to live in.
  16. Seriously? I think you're in the minority on that one, though it's certainly a valid experience.
  17. I don't think that's what they were driving at. You have to know a lot about films and film history to appreciate what Citizen Kane does, but if you don't know about that stuff that doesn't make you stupid. Ebert isn't like, the editorial director of IGN's Gamecube website, and neither is Remo. I want to see what Ebert and or Remo or other smart sorts of people have to say.
  18. Yeah, that makes me wonder why Remo was supporting the Ebert argument. Maybe there's a point about the argument that we're ignoring?
  19. OnLive - high-end PC gaming without the PC

    This is crazy.
  20. I often think of the Ebert test, not as a measure of actual merit, but in terms of how easy it would be to use a game to get Ebert to revisit his ideas. But, here's an argument anyway: So Ebert says that games can't be serious art because a lot of authorial control is yielded to the player, but with a piece of music, a musician can perform it and interpret it the way they like. Is Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring not serious because the musician has the freedom to interpret it? Fantastic episode, really top notch discussion.
  21. Impressions from playing Portal

    -the first game in which skipping as a form of locomotion is heartily encouraged (edit: Half-Life 2 does this too actually! wonder if Half-Life 1 does as well) -was the companion cube making fun of Ico? lol -I can't think of any games that made me feel so playful and creative. For instance, sticking just my arm out of the portal and dropping something. On my end, the portal is on a wall, but on the other end, it's coming out of a ceiling. That's so cool. That's like being a magical creature. I feel like Portal falls into a type of game that I call "literary," by which I mean that: 1. It makes a powerful, unique statement of its own 2. Within its DNA, it is aware of the history of games, and it speaks in the language developed by that history to make further comments. I use the term "literary" because this kind of communication seems to be at the core of books, while in other media people seem more indifferent to the broader discussion within the medium. For instance, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights: In and of itself not the best story ever told, but it indelibly stamps certain ideas and characters into the world of fiction. Whenever you read something from then on about an isolated community(or a distant past remembered with nostalgia) Wuthering Heights gives you a point of reference, something to refer to and play with. When I was playing through Portal, I was constantly thinking about Portal in reference to other games, and what Portal was saying in the broader discussion. It was really fun and exciting to play a game that was so playful within its own medium. So, do you think my concept of "literary" games is fair? Got a better term? Do you ever have these experiences of games talking to each other in the "literary" way?
  22. The RTS pause/break button

    Most RTS give the ability to pause the action using pause/break and issue orders. What is your opinion on it? Among my friends, all the best RTS players use pause/break constantly in single player mode. Then in multi player, when they obviously never use it, they're brilliant.
  23. Impressions from playing Portal

    It was never challenging for me, but it was just a mindblowing mechanic. It was like being in a looney toons cartoon. But ah, yeah. I wasn't blown away by the ending either, but I can definitely see what people were enjoying about it.
  24. Impressions from playing Portal

    Yay! Something positive came out of this clusterfuck of a thread