joystick posts

Prey 2, the long discussed sequel to 2006's sci-fi first person shooter, has apparently been revealed via the cover to the new print issue of France-based gaming magazine Joystick. The cover image was posted by French-based web site NoFrag.com

Aside from the cover image there's no other details yet on this sequel. The original game was first developed, and then canceled, by 3D Realms in the late 1990s. It was later revived and then released in 2006 by publisher 2K Games. It used id Software's Doom 3 engine with Human Head Studios handing most of the development duties with 3D Realms as a "producer". Human Head has yet to release a game since Prey came out nearly five years ago. In 2009 it was revealed that the IP rights to Prey to Zenimax Media, the parent company of Bethesda Softworks.

[Via Blue's News]

WIMP Environment [noun]: Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing device (or Pull-down menu) - A graphical-user-interface environment such as X or the Macintosh interface, esp. as described by a hacker who prefers command-line interfaces.

- The Jargon File

These wonderful, powerful, magic boxes of ours can turn long strings of ones and zeroes into dazzling graphics with breathtaking speed, perform tremendous, complicated mathematical computations in the blink of an eye, and, in a pinch, do a fair impersonation of a space heater. They are ours to command, ready to do our (possibly nefarious) bidding. Whether we know what we want or not, if it's within the operational parameters and capabilities, a PC will do exactly what we tell it to do.

Of course, there's a catch or two. First, we need to know how to tell it to what we want. Heuristics be damned, other than on-the-fly spell-checking, no matter how sophisticated the modern PC is, it's not clairvoyant. Ask anyone who's done time in a call center how much disconnect can exist between what a user wants, and what they say they want. Unlike our not-so-hypothetical phone staffer, the computer can't ask questions or make inferences. They're fabulously literal.

The second catch is having some way to communicate our wants and needs to our willing digital minions. And that's where our input devices come into play.