gfoot

When I was a lad, boys my age usually went out on the village green and played football with their friends, and maybe occasionally with their friends' fathers. Their mothers never played, but nobody thought that was odd; and no girls in the village played either. It just didn't interest them, nobody forced them, and nobody thought of changing the rules to try to appeal to them more.

At work we use QuickTime Pro to make movies out of whole series of stills (TGA files). We registered it though - I think there was a demo version but I'm not sure what the limitations are. QT Pro can also control certain kinds of camera rigs, and automatically take the photos, which is good for doing spins around objects and time lapse, respectively. (We don't do that though, our stills are screenshots from a modelling tool, but maybe it's more relevant for you.) It can also output those interactive movies, where you can drag over the window to show different frames, e.g. rotate around the object. Another option is Dave's Targa Animator, aka DTA, which is a really old school program for converting various still frame formats to an FLC file (I think). I believe FLC files don't do lossy compression, though, so they're pretty big.

Sony have responded... http://www.computerandvideo games.com/article.php?id=148110

More like Goodfellas... http://www.folloder.com/sounds/full_funny.wav Or Casino, that's got some choice quotes in it. I can't find a soundbite for that in a hurry though.

Wow, I never realised Guitar Hero appealed to real musicians.

Pretty accurate really - I haven't played on Live since 2002. Those were the days though. (The new days are probably good too, I just haven't got a 360 yet.)

Armadillo Run is great. In many ways it's like Bridge Builder / Pontifix, yes, but it's more fun when it's a (kind of) animal rather than a train. I strongly recommend Elastomania, too - maybe it's an old concept, it's been done a lot in web applets too, but the implementation in Elastomania is great and it's approximately one million times more responsive than the Java/flash/whatever applets on web sites. If you find it too easy, try playing without using the left/right arrow keys... much harder. On the other hand, if you like web site minigames, try mousebreaker.com - it's mostly a collection from other sources, they don't own the games, but there are some nice ones there. -- gfoot - minigames aren't just for the small minded

You could come back and work for free?

It's a bit like key changes. A recent trend has been to ignore hundreds of years of music theory, and just raise the key by a few tones for the last repeat of the chorus. Yes, West Life, I'm looking at you. (Right now I'm listening to the roar of a stack of servers in the middle of the room...) -- gfoot - fuck off West Life, I'll stick to Park Life

Ours are mostly about women's hair blowing in the wind and their puppies dangling in the street.

How much are PS2s these days?

Key 9? You mean the predictive mode? The best match on Google is "transforming your company's transformation capability". The more I read of their web page, the better it gets. Anyway, I agree that there's a flaw in any system where you have to actually look at the screen to know for sure that what you typed came through all right. Trivial things like not being able to write "home" show how badly designed the system is. I would have thought it would be more natural on your side of the pond, though, as don't you already use the lettered keypads as a mnemonic - the only case I've ever seen of that happening over here is the 0800-REVERSE advert, which funnily enough is done with an American accent. I guess the ad worked though, because I remembered the mnemonic. Unfortunately the T9 system might be hard to avoid in the near future - it seems to be making inroads everywhere. -- gfoot - bring on the T9000...

But five days later... ick. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6063502.stm -- gfoot - everybody was ko fighting

I find it pleasantly ironic that you post in a text-based non-real-time forum about not wanting to use a text-based non-real-time messaging system while you're on the move. I'm not crazily into text messaging, but it is useful for things which are not urgent - like email, it allows you to deal with the communication when it's convenient for you. If someone phones me at work, I usually cancel the call and call back when I'm not busy, but some people think this is rude. I, on the other hand, find it rude when people answer their phones on non-urgent personal calls while they're in the middle of asking me for help with something. Text messages get round the whole issue, though - you're not necessarily expected to reply immediately, it's certainly much less pressing than a phone call, you get a permanent record of the conversation, and you have time to think about your reply. All good. -- gfoot - alive in seki is still alive

Accessibility doesn't mean there's a lack of challenge, it just means there's a smooth difficulty ramp-up. I don't think it should be seen as patronizing - doesn't everybody like games that break them in gently? A number of FPS games have come out recently without giving you a weapon for the first level, to give you a chance to learn the controls in a safe environment. Not wanting to spend every waking hour playing games is also a contentious issue, but it's not limited to girls either. Since getting a job, and especially since getting a wife and child, I haven't been able to spend nearly as much time playing games as I used to. I still enjoy playing Enemy Territory, but mostly when my brother visits, as it's a great game to play cooperatively with two PCs in the same room. But it's hard to orchestrate when you have a baby, and it's not fair on the wife either - she used to get utterly fed up with the audio ("I need a medic! I am an engineer!"). These days I'm much more in search of simple games which you can play for half an hour at a time, without any penalty for saving. I still like the idea of games that require you to perform a long task without errors, or rather, games that don't let you constantly restart a task in order to do every single thing perfectly - there's something old-school about it, from back when games just didn't have save features, and it feels like more of an achievement. But I rarely get the opportunity to fit this kind of play into my daily life. I suspect there are a lot of people out there like me, who are much better off playing smaller-scoped handheld games at whatever opportunity arises. Regarding the price of games, I'd love to see these smaller games made available at a lower price point, but that doesn't seem to be the way it works. When Nintendo released a few old classics for the GBA, the price they were changing was ridiculous - I don't think it was quite as high as a "new" game, but it was well above what I'd be prepared to pay for Pacman. The price point is also set partly by the amount of development the game needs (which is rising fast), and of course it includes the console manufacturer's stealth tax. But justifying the price point in this way does raise the same issues as justifying the price point of the PS3 by the fact that it includes a Blu-ray player. -- gfoot - SDTV4EVA