dcw303

Good point. What do you think is forcing them to release the system before most games are ready? I know Wii U hasn't been a great success, but would holding off the Switch for another six months have been so dire?

I had to laugh when during the livestream they were going through each of the innovations of their past systems, and the only thing they could mention about the Gamecube was that it had a handle :)

But overall I think they continue to show real innovation in gaming. They're the only company who puts so much effort into maximizing their software with the uniqueness of their hardware.

I have a high preference to games of skill over games of chance. Most of the fun I get out of video games is in understanding the patterns and behaviour of the game world, and then using that understand to master the environment. For this to work, the game needs to be fairly deterministic in nature.

It's interesting that when tried World of Warcraft, I lost interest quickly as I found it too much like a slot machine.

I don't know if it's a personality trait (I'm a programmer so I tend to analyze everything) or because I grew up in the era of 8/16-bit games, where games were a lot more skill based in nature.

> It's the same mechanics as almost everything else with a lower amount of difficulty with the auto running and jumping

We'll have to agree to disagree, but this is essence of Nintendo's acclaimed level design. Yes, the basic run through is easy, which makes it accessible to anyone. But I'll be damned if getting all the black coins isn't excruciatingly tough. The beauty is that the same game can be played on many levels.

I may not have expressed it well, but I agree with you 100% - clearing the levels for the first time is only one part of the fun.

The appeal is what Mario has always been to me - gameplay mechanics and level design. I'll concede that this may not be interesting to a majority of people, but Nintendo games have always immersed me due to the consistency of their in game universes. Once you get the controls down, you can apply the lessons to any level, and things just work the way you expect them to. It's a level of intuitiveness that I have not seen anywhere else. Yes, that's replays after the first hour, but that's not an order of magnitude different to game length in the 8/16 bit era.

You are right that there are many ways to play Mario on many different devices, and I'm not arguing that focused gameplay in front of a big tv isn't the best way to play for extended hours, but for ten minutes waiting in a queue or on the subway (when there is an internet connection available - don't get me started on that because I'm not a big enough fanboi to be happy with that situation), it's much more convenient than carrying along a 3DS. I think Nintendo did their homework on how people will play this game. It's accessible enough to play in short bursts, which suits mobile gamers.

I do respect that you don't see any depth in this. That's fine. I know that enjoyment of games is very subjective. I'm biased in that I grew up in the golden era of 8 and 16-bit 2D games, so I'm aware that this type of game has more appeal to me than others. (Nintendo probably knows that my demographic is more likely to convert to a purchase as well, but I digress) I've tried to stay engaged with recent stuff on Playstation, but triple A titles require large time commitments and have lots of grind, and hence don't appeal to me. This does.

I played through the first couple of levels and was instantly hit by how much better the level design, gameplay and characters were than the usual mobile game. I happily plonked down my ten bucks.

I cleared the game in a single lunch hour, but I'm not disappointed. The game design easily surpasses anything I've ever played on my phone, and there's a bucket of replayability. Pink/purple/black coins to get, speed runs on rally to try, etc.

Giving the first 3 levels for free was a good move - the install is essentially a demo that is enough to let a customer decide if they want to front for the whole game.

I didn't have a problem paying, but I've read a lot of whining on twitter and other places. Younger gamers have an expectation that everything on mobile should be free, but kudos to Nintendo on having the balls to stay away from cheap pay2win tricks and stick to an old school pricing model.

I don't know if it's going to turn a profit, but I really hope so. This race to the bottom amongst mobile game devs is madness and has to stop.

Tell me about it. I'm selling a MacBook Pro in Tokyo, and the thought of dealing with those queries is pretty depressing. Plus the fact that the items on this list are not moving at all:

https://tokyo.craigslist.jp/search/sys?query=macbook

Of course! It was either that or some public domain clone. The commander I remember using was black and white only. I vaguely remember using "dc" to launch it? Google doesn't find much.

My hacking coming of age story involves Doom.

In eleventh grade, we had a classroom with around 20 486 PCs connected in a token ring network. When the teacher wasn't watching, we used to sneak in Doom on floppies, exit Windows out to the dos prompt, and do a manual install.

This was great, but it was a major hassle to do this every time we wanted to play, and to delete the files afterwards.

I came up with the idea of marking the folders as hidden from DOS, and for that extra obfuscation, renaming the folder to start with an extended ASCII character. Sure enough, no one else but my friends could figure out a way in. (We all had Midnight Commander on floppies to run around such problems).

This all went well for a few weeks until the class teacher must have found some way in that we didn't know about. I got dragged up in front of the principal and accused of "hacking the system", since apparently the teacher couldn't figure out a way to remove the files.

I barely escaped a suspension, but that was a great lesson for me in what happens when you usurp your authority figures.

Thanks. I'm thinking of replacing my MBP for a Surface Pro 4.

I'd heard the battery life wasn't great but didn't know about it taking a long time to wake up.

which version of Surface Pro? 2 / 3 / 4 ?

Thanks for this! Strangely, I had tried fx 6/7, but I was putting them over the existing chords, which was as ugly as it sounds! Guess I should RTFM :D

I got a Pocket CHIP recently too. I'm having lots of fun with the music tracker in PICO-8.

I just wish I could figure out a way to write chords that didn't take up three of the precious four channels! Makes you realise how impressive some of those 8-bit chip tunes really are.

This may be related to Scott McCloud's analysis of comic frame transitions in Understanding Comics [0]. I don't have my copy in front of me, but from memory he observed that Japanese manga has a much larger amount of aspect-to-aspect transitions, whereas traditional American super hero comics are more heavily saturated in action-to-action and subject-to-subject.

0: http://www.d.umn.edu/~cstroupe/ideas/assets/mccloud_transiti...

I am in no way trying to be snarky here, but can I ask what is meant by the phrase, "Capital D Depressed"? I've also seen someone use "Capital A Architect". Does the meaning change by capitalizing a word that isn't usually? Is this something to do with making it into a proper noun?

Sorry that this is off-topic but it's something that's bugged me for a long time. I've never understood it and it's very hard to google for an answer.

I never said career. But it pays better than other common working holiday jobs, like bartending.

About ten years ago I took a year off to teach English in Japan. Within a couple of months I was dying to go back to development.

Trust me, even compared to other white collar jobs, you would not believe how cushy we have it.

I'm pretty happy that pico-8 1.9 support is done. Now just waiting for my one month old order to ship in "November".

edit: Wow, glad I checked my spam folder. I had to confirm my mailing address to get my pre-order to ship!

That's the one. It hasn't been updated since Meteor 0.6(?) a few years ago, so I'd be amazed if it still worked.

I've been guilty of this. When meteor.js was new, I made an issue tracker, and proudly submitted it to HN with a title something like "Issue tracker made with Meteor".

Some things I found:

1. You have a much better chance of getting upvotes if you appeal to a popular technology. Had I not mentioned Meteor I suspect I would never have made it to the front page.

2. In my case, most of the initial interest came from those more interested in the underlying technology than the application.

3. I found it very difficult to market the project as an issue tracker as it was already established as a meteor project.

The site makes no claims as such, but it undermines its own credibility if it uses .js files.

Surely they could have figured a way to do without them.

When I was googling the PocketCHIP I was surprised to find some random forum posts warning people NOT to peel the clear plastic coating off the keys, as apparently they hold them in place! That's certainly something I can imagine doing.

I'm waiting for a PocketCHIP (mainly to mess with pico8) that I preordered at the start of this month, and it has estimated shipping of November.

I wonder if the Chip Pro shipping in December will have any impact on my order.

I'm about to hit 40 as well, and I completely identify with the pressure to keep up to date with new languages and frameworks, with the fact that I've lost memory of many things I haven't used recently, and that despite the proliferation of the new new thing, there really aren't that many new ideas out there.

But the thing is, I really like that I must always be learning. I just have that kind of brain that is attracted to learning new things, so for me this career has always been a natural fit.

In the last few years I learnt Meteor.js and built an issue tracker from scratch; I made several attempts at gaming projects using C++, C#, Swift, and others; I played Microcorruption and Cryptopals and Starfighter to learn a bunch about assembly, reverse engineering, crypto and security; I learnt Go and built a compiler with it; and right now my attention is moving towards lua to do some pico8 games. I did all this on the side of my boring corporate java developer job, and for no other reason than I wanted to learn new things. (OK, maybe I had big dreams of a startup with the issue tracker, but the others were purely for fun.)

I'm probably never going to be well known for any of those things, and I really haven't built up the chops to be considered an expert in any of them. But I'm content being a dilettante. Perhaps one day I'll get exhausted of exploring new things, but until then it's just fun to just dabble in whatever takes my fancy.

It's important to highlight that Nintendo have stayed true to one of their core principles: that the game should reflect the characteristics of the hardware it is played on. They've done this to great success before - think of Super Mario 64 pioneering 3d control with the analog stick, or the wiimote gestures used in Wii Sports.

They've correctly identified that mobile gaming is done with one hand, and even if this is not the first runner game on an iPhone, it's the right choice for a Mario game.

It would have been easy for them to whack up a virtual d-pad in a traditional 2d platform scroller, but I'm glad they've attempted something new.

Potential usability issue: The majority of people wear watches on their left wrist; the ticket gate barriers in Japan have the NFC sensor on the right hand side.

Being a child of the 80s, I was first introduced to PKD through Total Recall - the original, good one with Schwarzenegger in it. The mix of sci-fi, paranoia, and reality bending was mesmerising. Verhoeven is the only director who really got to the essence of what Philip K Dick was about.

With the exception of the occasional episode of Star Trek TNG, I didn't have much access to much mindfuck sci-fi, so whatever I could get would leave pretty deep impression on me. I didn't immediately read through his stuff, though. I wouldn't really be reminded of it until I got into Sonic Youth in my late teens and found out that the Sister LP was a loose biography. Sonic Youth's guitar rock/pop mixed with discordant feedback was basically the musical equivalent of PKD's paranoia.

After that I spent years going through a big chunk of his catalog. Obviously, a classic like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is worth your time. The Man in the High Castle is alternate history, and features what I still consider to be the best execution of a things-are-not-what-you-think-they-are ever. I've also been thinking of The Game Players of Titan recently, but that's probably because of the talking self driving car. Ubik is also really, really good, but I can't explain it to you at all.

If you want some fiction that will make you question your grip on reality, I highly recommend reading through his stuff. Just don't wait until you're too old - once your ideals are firmly set in place it gets a lot harder to get into it.

Question about on-boarding email: does the strategy lose its effectiveness as more products do it?

Software developers are among the most cynical when it comes to marketing, so I expect us to say that these suck.

What I wonder though is if every company starts to take the same approach, does a public collective fatigue set in?

I imagine that the conversion rate on direct mailers that look like novelty checks started off quite high, but the public eventually became immune as the "trick" is absorbed.

there are trade offs all the way along the convenience spectrum. If you're reading HN, you're probably not in the target market for youtube apps embedded in smart tvs. But these customers do exist.

I imagine the main selling point is they don't have to connect or configure any external set top box or media pc, and they don't have to install or maintain the app. If you don't have the skills (or the time) to do so, this may be appealing.

The polar opposite would be a Linux expert running their own media center - absolute control but at the cost of said time and skills.