Persistent, Niggling Questions

[Wowbagger]

i dunno wut you 2 are complaining. Calm the heck DOWN!!!!(!)

:P

[Nate the Great]

For some reason I still attempt to follow the debacle that is Duke Nukem Forever. The current word is that until the lawsuit is resolved no announcements can be made, and any trailer we may see are completely fanmade. Furthermore, the case will last for at least another year.

The game engine already looks dated. Nobody at 3D Realms is working on it right now in any real capacity. Nobody else can work on it until the lawsuit is resolved. Thus if it's another year before anybody can actually work on it, it'll be at least another year past that before anything remotely presentable can be released. Now we're getting up to 15 years since the thing was announced.

PNQ1: If 3D Realms actually wins this case, where is the money going to come from to rework the game for the umpteenth time to keep up with technology? Who's going to trust them with ten million dollars or whatever?

PNQ2: If Take2 wins this case, odds are they'll start over from scratch on a new cutting-edge game and not use the Duke Nukem Forever name at all. How long will that take, and will anybody be interested?

[Nate the Great]

I just saw a new message on a pre-online video ad. "Is this advertisement relevant to you?"

PNQ: Um, what? Like I could seriously click "no" every time and never see ads again because none of them are relevant?

[Nate the Great]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttZjvfj_P0E

A German dub of the "You Are My Sunshine" segment from "Someone To Watch Over Me."

PNQ: Why wasn't the singing dubbed? It's not like matching the mouth movements precisely was ever absolutely required for the dialogue. In addition, hearing the German voice actor cut to Robert Picardo just breaks a person out of the experience, right?

[JVTruman]

Actually, out of all of the characters on Voyager, isn't the Doctor the only one where that happening could be logically explained? He just has a separate voice program for singing. Unless someone specifically mentioned him not doing something like that...

[Nate the Great]

Having discovered the miracle of Super Mario Crossover, I'm contemplating getting a gamepad to play the thing properly.

PNQ1: Are there USB gamepads out there that I could also use to play older DOS games?

I should probably know the proper terms for these connectors, but I don't. Here's a Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-subminiature

I have a few older joysticks and gamepads, but they all have 15-pin (DA) male connectors, and my serial port is meant for stuff that uses 9-pin (DE) female connectors.

I suppose it's time for...

PNQ2: Can a Flash game on Windows XP even use a gamepad plugged into a serial port?

[Nate the Great]

From listening to a commentary for the 1966 Batman movie...

PNQ: How does a dehydrating ray help in making alcoholic beverages?

[Sa'ar Chasm]

Assuming the beverage is already somewhat alcoholic, a dehydrating ray can remove some of the water and concentrate the ethanol, basically turning a glass of near-beer into a shot of moonshine.

If there isn't any alcohol there already, you'll just be left with dehydrated beverage (just add water!).

Q: Why are you trying to make sense out of the 1966 Batman movie?

[Nate the Great]

That raises another question. If the Commodore Schmidlapp's invention removes water and only water from the test subject, what about the liquids humans contain other than water? Fat and so forth.

[Nate the Great]

So I just saw "In a Mirror, Darkly"...

PNQ: What's the point?

Okay, I know what the point was: Mirror Universe stories always get lots of viewers, and seeing the cast in TOS uniforms especially when they're miniskirts doesn't hurt the ratings.

But I mean, in the grand scheme of things, what affect did this have on the main crew? It's like that episode of Voyager when the duplicates fell apart into metal ooze. Our crew didn't learn anything at all. No morals about the human condition were imparted. Once again it just feels like the creators were getting bored with the small box that THEY HAD WRITTEN THEMSELVES INTO, and the only solution was to ditch the boring characters that they'd written to make a plot that has no impact on the show they're supposed to be making.

(Actually, this is reminding me of my complaints about Trek 11. The existing characters were deemed boring, so make new ones without any regard for continuity)

But really, pull these two episodes out and nothing is lost. The regular versions of the characters never appeared, so there was no characterization.

And by the way, where did that mainline Archer hallucination come from? It wasn't the mainline NX-01 that the mirror guys found, it was the Defiant. In the timeframe the Defiant left, Archer was long dead. Mirror Archer read the file on Regular Archer and became haunted by it? Haunted by a guy he'd never meet who was long dead?

[Nate the Great]

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around this Ultimate Comics "reboot" over at Marvel...

PNQ1: If all of the previous Ultimate Marvel books still happened, how is this a reboot?
PNQ2: If using the Avengers name is okay now, why wasn't it okay before? Seriously, a superhero team called The Ultimates? Doesn't that sound like a team that believes in eugenics or something?

[Nate the Great]

I was watching an episode of DS9 that used the holocommunicator and decided to look it up at Memory Alpha...

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Holocommunicator

I'm especially annoyed at the line "you have to move the camera around so that audience can see that it's 3-D, but then it could look to them like the guy beamed in."

PNQ: Do we, as the audience, feel insulted by that?

All the writers had to do was drop the word "holocommunicator" and "hologram" into conversation every now and then and make sure the holographic base is visible to remind us the thing was in use. And make the guy talking on our end to step on an identical platform to make cuts between the two ships easier. And toss a subtle glow on the guy to remind us it's a hologram. And, oh, I don't know, not use any form of transporter effect, whether audio or video? If I see and hear the distinct effect of a holograph forming, I'd think it was a hologram, wouldn't you?

Or just think it through and not introduce the device at all. Nah, that's just crazy-talk.

[Nate the Great]

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news...Zelda-Timeline

From an interview regarding the upcoming Zelda Skyward Sword...

"The reason that Nintendo kept the timeline under wraps, Aonuma said, was so that it didn't constrain itself when it came to making new titles; saying that if he said a particular title was the first Zelda game, Nintendo would be unable to make a game before that. 'For us to add titles to the series,' he added. 'We have to have a way of putting the titles before or after each other.'"

PNQ: Erm, what? How does creating an "official timeline of all released games" mean that future games can now never exist at particular points in the timeline?

Seriously, I'm NOT FREAKING JOKING. Interquels have existed for DECADES. One of the Narnia books is set entirely within a single chapter of another. Announcing an official timeline of the Zelda universe does NOT mean that each and every major event in the history of Hyrule has now been revealed and there is no possible way to fit further events in between them.

[NAHTMMM]

Well, but if one of the selling points for a particular game is that it's "Link's First Adventure EVAR!", then somebody's going to be annoyed if Nintendo later releases a game starring Link that takes place even earlier.

[Nate the Great]

Why? Would people not really understand that the statement "this is the first game" only refers to the set of games that was out at the time? OOT used to be first, now it's not. The world did not end. Gamers did not riot. "Addition" does not mean "rearrangement".

[NAHTMMM]

Upon looking at the interview, Nintendo's probably just afraid of people quibbling over continuity errors. It's probably also assumed that people who care about the order in which the games occur will be able to piece it together well enough for their own satisfaction.

[Nate the Great]

I just hate fence-sitting. If they want to claim absolutely no interconnectivity between games, that's their prerogative. But I want them to stop teasing us with bits and pieces of continuity. Either the games are part of the same universe and history, or they're not. If they are, give us a timeline and add a note saying that it'll be modified as new games come along. If not, stop giving out clues and acting like they share a universe!

[Nate the Great]

PNQ: In your iTunes, Windows Media Player, or whatever, what songs do you have multiple copies of?

I just noticed that I have three identical copies of "Come On, Come On" by Smash Mouth in my library. One from the studio album Astro Lounge, one from the Kim Possible soundtrack, and one from a Radio Disney compilation.

P.S. It also seems I have four copies of the Christina Aguilera song "Reflection" (and the original Lea Salonga version, and three covers, and a remix).

[NAHTMMM]

The tracks from Descent and Descent II. MIDI sounds different from OGG, and someone did some really nice "tribute" versions a few years back.

(Well, you asked . . .)

[Nate the Great]

It just seems weird to have nine copies of the same song (when covers and such are added).