Or like having a stiff hip; not two prothesis. I wonder how long the battery pack for the actuators lasts? And I wonder if they have a regenerative cycle to charge the batteries and recover some of the energy from the motions each step?

Yes. The naturally aspirated v8 engines were increasingly irrelevant for road car technology, so the aims of the new engine rules were to introduce the types of technology that are relevant to road cars (turbo, regenerative braking, fuel efficiency).

Two less-intended side effects are that these are the most expensive engines ever (in an era when everybody is talking about cost reductions!) and that everyone is wondering whether anyone will finish the first race...

They actually had the battery packs last year, but this year have reduced the fuel allocation by a third but without reducing the power output of the power units.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Inside-the-2014-Renault-F1-engine

Cool *animation. Can anyone explain why they need such big battery packs and use regenerative breaking? Are they driving hybrids or something?

Um, really? Did you just ask that?
How did any of them Gain their powers: Mutant X Gene

•Healing Powers: Regenerative powers, Long life span,
Immunities to viruses and poisons
•Accelerated Senses: Hearing, Smell, Sight
•Bone Claws
•Feral instincts

Seems like he kind of missed the boat by a few years. There was a lot of talk about using flywheels in regenerative braking (and even as the primary power source for things like busses) and such several years ago, but it seems like none of it really panned out. They have to be so massive as to be impractical that way, or spin at such ridiculous speeds that makes manufacturing tolerances so tight as to be impractical. They can also be very dangerous if they fail catastrophically.

Of course, that doesn't mean they should stop pursuing the concept. It's a very interesting idea.

Regenerative braking FTW !
/me wants !!!!

>> ^NetRunner:

I'm starting to feel like Yahtzee is a bad reviewer of games. I haven't played Resistance 3 yet, but all I got from this was that he loves it because its mechanics are old-fashioned.
Maybe all of us gamers are starting to get a bit long in the tooth, but I've not become particularly nostalgic for "the good old days" of gaming. I mean, do most gamers spend a lot of time wishing old game mechanics would come back from the dead? I've played enough remakes of "classic" games I loved to realize that most of them don't hold up in comparison to modern games. Gaming has largely moved on.
I for one love the addition of cover and regenerating health to shooters, and don't really like the idea of going back to health pickups and strafing in and out of cover.
Oh, and maybe I just don't play a lot of shooters, but are any of the top-tier series really still all/mostly brown? The only ones I know of are Gears and Resistance...in their first iteration only. From hearing Yahtzee, you'd think this was some mistake developers are still making, but I can't recall the last game I played that didn't make use of a healthy portion of the color wheel.


I'd like to experience some of the good old days of shooters again not because games were better back then, much of the design has moved on, but now days there is just a flood of games all using the same mechanics as each other with no variety or substance.

Resistance 3 was a breath of fresh air, old school style gameplay mixed with modern mechanics. The health system, however was imbalanced. They could've done more to make it work better, but overall though, i really enjoyed Resistance dispite a few questionable design decisions. The fact that you can carry all the weapons at once nearly made me tear up.

DNF is a good example of totally cocking up the "old school" approach by implementing the WRONG modern features. Firstly the regenerating health. This right away causes a problem; you can regenerate your health, so for some challenge we need to make the enemies do a lot more damage to keep the player from abusing the system. What happens? You are almost always sitting back behind cover while waiting for your health to regen before firing again. That's not Duke Nukem! I heard other ideas were that you needed to kill an enemy to regain health, THAT is Duke.
Then there's the 2 weapon limit. George Broussard in all his game design incompetence said they couldn't find a way to implement a weapon wheel effectively on consoles... Resistance 3 seemed to do it fine. So did HL2 years back. Moron.

Regen health and 2 weapon limit can and do work for some games like Call of Duty, Halo and Gears of War, but FFS let's try something a little different once in a while. But some developers use them as a development crutch; less testing, balancing and design required. Less effort in other words. Or they use it to make the game less complex, which is a bad thing. Ninja Gaiden is a good example. It seems to be going down a path of less and less substance, there's only the combat. This is terrible. The original game's store, upgrades, potions, rewards for exploration, non-linear main world all helped to pace the game better rather than an exhausting trudge through constant unrelenting combat seen in Ninja Gaiden 2 and from the sounds, even more so for the third game.

>> ^Asmo:

I think Yahzee isn't technically a reviewer of games, he's oped'ing about games with humour.

I think that's right. Even if he was a reviewer, I already know that for the most part he hates games I like, and likes games I couldn't care less about (Hi there Driver: San Francisco!).

>> ^Asmo:
Winning a fight with a few % health left against all odds is far more satisfying than hunkering down behind a wall, regen'ing, popping out to shoot, regen'ing etc.

I guess this is why I'm not a big shooter fan. Narrowly winning a fight usually makes me think I've made a mistake, suck generally, or just need to turn the difficulty down a notch.

Most times these days you're only really in danger in boss battles, and usually there's some trick to the encounter you need to figure out, and once figured out it's not that hard to execute it.

>> ^Asmo:
Dead Island doesn't have regenerating health or a cover system, which really do help ramp up the 'survival horror' factor.


I bet ammo's hard to find too? Yeah, for a survival horror game, it seems like keeping you feeling desperate and overmatched is the name of the game. Regenning health has no place in a game like that.

At least one of the reviews of Resistance 3 said that it plays a lot more like a survival horror game than the previous ones did. Now if that's what they were going for, that seems like a good reason to do away with the regenerating health, but if they just did it to amp up the difficulty it seems like they could've done something different.

Also, it belatedly occurs to me that Resistance always had health packs. You had 4 little bubbles on your health bar. If you partially drained the bubble, not taking damage for a few seconds would make the bubble refill, but if you completely emptied it, it stayed lost. Health packs would refill empty bubbles. I wonder if they're still using the same system, or if there's no more regeneration.

Based on the story reasons for why your health regenerated in the first 2 games, the new protagonist should have regenerating health too...

>> ^NetRunner:

I'm starting to feel like Yahtzee is a bad reviewer of games. I haven't played Resistance 3 yet, but all I got from this was that he loves it because its mechanics are old-fashioned.
Maybe all of us gamers are starting to get a bit long in the tooth, but I've not become particularly nostalgic for "the good old days" of gaming. I mean, do most gamers spend a lot of time wishing old game mechanics would come back from the dead? I've played enough remakes of "classic" games I loved to realize that most of them don't hold up in comparison to modern games. Gaming has largely moved on.
I for one love the addition of cover and regenerating health to shooters, and don't really like the idea of going back to health pickups and strafing in and out of cover.
Oh, and maybe I just don't play a lot of shooters, but are any of the top-tier series really still all/mostly brown? The only ones I know of are Gears and Resistance...in their first iteration only. From hearing Yahtzee, you'd think this was some mistake developers are still making, but I can't recall the last game I played that didn't make use of a healthy portion of the color wheel.


I think Yahzee isn't technically a reviewer of games, he's oped'ing about games with humour. His reviews aren't particularly objective but they never claim to be.

And yeah, a lot of us do spend time wishing for old mechanics to come back. Winning a fight with a few % health left against all odds is far more satisfying than hunkering down behind a wall, regen'ing, popping out to shoot, regen'ing etc. Leaning around corners (rather than sticking to the wall and suddenly getting a huge panoramic as far as the camera can scan) is another example. No, we don't generally want verbatim copies of old games to come back, but some of the meatier bits would be nice.

I'd humbly submit that older games don't hold up against modern games because they aren't supposed to. That doesn't mean older game concepts don't hold up. eg. Dead Island doesn't have regenerating health or a cover system, which really do help ramp up the 'survival horror' factor.

Someone did this several times while I was playing. It affected about half of the server (frequent scrambles) and the healing ended up being much faster than what is in the video. Eventually the only real ways to kill people were headshots, backstabs, and large crits.

I'm sure it gets old quickly, but it's quite fun when entire servers have regen.

The video brought a lot of questions to mind, but the link answered most of them for me. Here's a summary:

What exactly am I seeing? Apparently it is a lightweight car chassis with an electric motor, regenerative braking as in hybrid cars, rowing-machine style generator for replenishing battery and/or increasing motor speed, and 2 or 4 seats all with access to the rowing-style power generation.

How fast can it go? It seems that with multiple people actively working the generators plus battery-driven electric power while going downhill, it could approach or exceed 60MPH.

Why not just use a bicycle? The bicycle is 100% powered by the rider. This has an electric motor, and can be driven without using the rowing-action generation at all; or you can supplement speed or battery life by rowing to whatever extent you desire. Safety and stability at moderate to high speed would be much better than a bicycle or motorbike. It also seems to go reasonably faster than a bicycle, on average.

OK, so why not just use an electric bicycle / electric motorbike (very popular item in China)? I would say either could be pretty useful if you buy into the general idea. This car could comfortably transport more passengers and probably go faster, but simply due to weight it would be less efficient in general and particularly on hills. However, an electric bicycle probably wouldn't cost you $15,500.

So, all in all it looks pretty cool but I think it would have to drop in price quite a bit before it would be more practical than either a good ol' gas guzzling car, hybrid car, electric bicycle, or standard bicycle for any particular niche application.

Maybe effective treatments using regenerative medicine (stem cells) will be available starting around the years 2030-2050.

>> ^quantumushroom:
Please stop highlighting the Canadian system, a country of 33 million talking smack about a country of 300 million. Any innovations in medicine up there? How about new drugs? We've got more illegal invaders than Canada has citizens.


Most of the major advances in sports medicine started in Canada, until the surgeon and his team of doctors in London(ont), got a better offer to goto the US. They wouldn't build him a new wing in the hospital. Most of the advances in diabetes come from Canada, we're world leaders in nanomedicine, and regenerative pathogen adaptive type treatments. Most of the big stuff dealing with hyperbaric medicine have come from here. Since I'm too lazy to look beyond what I know, you can do the hard work.

I've got one, when Americans stop coming to Canada for treatment illegally. I'll give a damn about your 'illegal immigrant' problem. You're bleeding border cities dry.

It seems barbaric that we can do nothing to prevent baby girls from having to grow up without their hands and legs. Regenerative medicine (stem cells) will eventually remedy that.

"So what exactly do you plan to do about it?"

Religions will be the same in a hundred years, because they by definition can't change, but human genius will have accomplished an enormous amount with technology during that time.

The case for invisible supernaturalism will be weakened by orders of magnitude once reprogenetics, neural engineering, and regenerative medicine are beyond the baby steps they're taking now.

...Or maybe technological progress will suddenly stop tomorrow and there will be nothing left for science to figure out?