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I see all the default clothes are bland and I need to pay real money for a cool outfit. Aesthetics are important to me. (Which is why I spend so much time on sculpting my character.) So I really don’t want to spend the rest of my time looking at these blando outfits. Sigh. Fine. What’s a pretend suit of armor cost these days? Three bucks? Five bucks?

FORTY SIX AMERICAN DOLLARS? ARE YOU TRYING TO START A FIGHT?

The cheap outfits can be had for $22. They also offer ladies underwear sets for just $7, if you want to run around in your underpants. (I don’t, thanks.)

(They also offer similar options for male characters. I was tempted to get the outfit that would let my kung-fu guy go shirtless, because he’s a kung-fu dude. But all of the choices looked like modern-day boxers. You can’t just wear baggy pants with no shirt.)

Would you like to dye that super-expensive outfit you just bought? Or any other outfit? That will set you back another $10. And that’s somehow a rental. Your ten bucks gets you a month of being allowed to have dyed clothes. After the month is up, your clothes revert to their original colors and you gotta fork over another $10.

Do you enjoy wheeling and dealing at the auction house in other games, but the egregious 35% tax on all your sales is making it impossible for you to have fun or turn a profit? Pay fifteen real-world dollars and the tax will go down to the normal 5%. (For one month.)

Everything is exorbitantly priced like this. It’s so outrageously expensive that I get immediately pissed off. It’s not even about the money, it’s about the sheer audacity of the seller to ask this much[2] for what should be trivial virtual goods. Even if you’re a millionaire, you’re still likely to get offended if someone tries to sell you a stick of ordinary gum for five bucks.

If you spend fifty million dollars making System Shock then you’ll never get a return on your investment. This game is only viable as a low / mid budget title, and Nightdive has made it clear they’re not interested in making that sort of game, even if they somehow got another infusion of cash.

So the only hope was the modest budget title which these guys promised they were going to do, and then they essentially betrayed the backers.

> The UE4 Star Wars thing is real enough. It's also running on $12,000 worth of GPUs at 30fps in 1080p

Uhm, try $50K for the Nvidia DGX Station running on four Volta GPUs.

> Well the answer is no, it is here.

Outcast, back in 1999, did real-time ray tracing and voxel rendering

The only difference is 20 years later we can do it hardware.

I agree about Microsoft's business practices, but that is not their only problem.

In the posts here and in the articles by Shamus Young (http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=34549) Kunedog linked to, the software quality of Windows Store in combination with Windows 10 is described as pretty abysmal. At the same time, Steam works pretty well these days.

So I expect the Windows Store to become a fiasco of Zune proportions ;-)

Two great articles by Shamus Young show just what a trainwreck the Windows Store is:

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twe...
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twe...

I'm sure most here already knew that, but he really lays out how MS doesn't seem to care about the customer experience or competing with Steam (just muscling them out through lock-in). It's sad that Valve can't seem to make the Steambox concept work, but if MS's platform is the one that succeeds, then we all lose.

Two great articles by Shamus Young show just what a trainwreck the Windows Store is:

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twe...
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twe...

I'm sure most here already knew that, but he really lays out how MS doesn't seem to care about the customer experience or competing with Steam (just muscling them out through lock-in). It's sad that Valve can't seem to make the Steambox concept work, but if MS's platform is the one that succeeds, then we all lose.

Which is why I find it uncomfortable when a GM resorts to the aforementioned rule.

For a game that runs any real amount of time a GM eventually has to. For very simplified systems the rules are more open ended and vague, which inevitably means more responsibility on the GM to make judgements. But, even on a very bloated and complicated system like D&D 3.5 edition there are plenty of cases where the rules don't cover bizarre technicalities or overlap in ways that simply won't make sense. Off the top of my head, a rogue can pull out a tower shield, gain total cover from standing behind it, and automatically succeed at a Hide check. There are nigh-impossible shenanigans a wizard with a very low CON score could attempt to wind up with a higher amount of HP than what's normally possible (though it would be unlikely to happen and wouldn't be worth the trouble). And there are a number of rules, especially in the expansion books, that straight up say to consult with your GM for a decision on what the benefits of your choice would actually be.

Of course, I'm sure you speak of Gygaxian bullies that create meatgrinder deathtraps for his amusement or excessively railroady ones who behave like the DM in this comic, but the fact of the matter is that someone needs to run the material, and that someone needs to know all the secrets without giving them away and make judgements for edge cases in the rules or to balance things out for a more enjoyable experience. Those last two words are important, because it can be very easy for GMs to become selfish or mean.

If there's a movie, then do the whole thing through the eyes of the fantasy characters, but have them behave as if they were players. THAT would be a D&D movie. It's Shamus Young's DM of the Rings" in film form.

Shamus Young (a columnist for the Escapist) recently wrote a small 2D game (almost completely) by himself called Good Robot and chronicled its development in a 30-part blog series:

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twe...
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twe...

Those are the first and last entries; they're all numbered and contain links to the next one in the series. He didn't finish the game (and doesn't know if he will), but he did produce a complete playable alpha. I don't know if it's exactly what you're looking for, but Shamus is a good writer (as well as a programmer) and cares a lot about mechanics and gameplay. Several of the blog entries are dedicated to those topics (power-ups, enemies, etc.).

Shamus Young (a columnist for the Escapist) recently wrote a small 2D game (almost completely) by himself called Good Robot and chronicled its development in a 30-part blog series:

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twe...
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twe...

Those are the first and last entries; they're all numbered and contain links to the next one in the series. He didn't finish the game (and doesn't know if he will), but he did produce a complete playable alpha. I don't know if it's exactly what you're looking for, but Shamus is a good writer (as well as a programmer) and cares a lot about mechanics and gameplay. Several of the blog entries are dedicated to those topics (power-ups, enemies, etc.).

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twe...

Just today Twenty Sided blogged about the "Uncanny Valley" in games when better AI makes the game feel more stupid.

Yup, procedural cities are nothing new.

Here is an cool open source "night time city" project using procedural textures + buildings
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=3237

Index ... scroll down to "Pixel City"
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?page_id=16458

Yup, procedural cities are nothing new.

Here is an cool open source "night time city" project using procedural textures + buildings
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=3237

Index ... scroll down to "Pixel City"
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?page_id=16458

I don't entirely agree with this. I think the reason major development houses don't put resources into procedural content generation is lack of imagination, and fear of taking risks. Several independent software researchers have solo developed demonstration projects recently that hint at what can be achieved and how much work it takes, and in terms of programmer hours vs. artist hours it actually looks very promising, as well as in terms of actual product quality. I think the big studios just have a winning formula that is making them millions and they are afraid to step out of their comfort zone and risk trying something new.

Ingenuity and creativity are among the casualties, while developers and publishers are trying every way under the Sun to extract as much money as possible from customers, from activation limits, to invasive DRM, to serious considerations to kill used game sales...

You know who is making a ton of money while not doing all that crap and still staying creative? Valve. Valve understands how to go after downmarket sales. They make customers out of people who are willing to pay $20 for a game, and make a killing doing it.

I can't take credit for noticing this. I got it from Shamus Young.

That was a cool line for a bad guy in a movie, sure. But real corporations don't think that way - not out of altruism, but simple this-quarter-ism. The kind of long term vision required for that sort of conspiracy theory just isn't to be found around the modern company (and if it were, no doubt someone would realize the far greater long term downside of getting caught at it - so you're proposing a very specific level of foresight here).

It can be hard to break into (but well worth it) alas I can only provide a UK perspective but I suspect its valid elsewhere

The main problem is finding people to game with options include

• finding a (physical) games shop and seeing it it has a players wanted board
• googling for phrases like 'games day' 'games fest' 'games convention' 'games club|soc|society'
• if there is a local university, collage or similar see if they have a games soc.

one really radical solution is to start your own games day!! I go to one that was started by a guy who wanted to play games but didn't have any so he advertised a games day. For the first few meets you need somewhere free but with luck you have an entry fee and hire a hall.

The main thing to remember is that you may need to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your perfect group. There are a lot of styles of play from the hyper stimulationist where they endlessly discuss agrarian economics and the effects that low level magic usage would have on it, to group that likes to hang out and crack poor quality jokes

try reading GM of the Rings and Darths and Droids to get a idea of different play styles (I'd give my eye teeth to be in the Darths and Droids group!!!)

There's Lulu, which was recommended here, but I haven't used the service myself, so I can't vouch for how hard/easy it was to use.

Buying the game gives as signal that you agree with Blizzard-Activision's actions. $1 Billion revenue says that Blizzard-Activision did an excellent job. The following screenshot is a clear indication a lot of people can't stick to their principles: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/images/mw2_boycott.jpg

To be fair steam sorts players by in-game first then online then offline, so the screen-shot is somewhat misleading. That said there were a fair number of people I know that said they would boycott it (including my son) that ended up buying the game. I have no idea what the percentage is, but probably two orders of magnitude less than the people that did say they would boycott and bought the game just because of the hype.

Buying the game gives as signal that you agree with Blizzard-Activision's actions. $1 Billion revenue says that Blizzard-Activision did an excellent job.
The following screenshot is a clear indication a lot of people can't stick to their principles: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/images/mw2_boycott.jpg

So, to sum it up: if you want to automate tabletop games with rigid rules and heavy bookeeping, like wargames, it's probably great (apart from the fact it does not alleviate some specific problems like being able to see the other's player pieces, how to simulate fog-of-war and so on, unless you force players to take turns at the table).

If you want to participate in a shared narrative game (like I would say any RPG is, even those heavily influenced by wargames, like D&D) it's probably better to have a lighter set of rules, and allow the referee to edit things on the fly without having the players to necessarily spot any inconsistencies.

I both agree and disagree with you here. I think it is better to have clearly defined parts of the game where the players know the rules and can feel that they are on a level playing field with the GM, and let the light and fluffy rules apply to everything outside of that. If the game master spends too much time editing reality just to fit the predefined story then you might as well strap the players onto a flatcar and push them down the tracks.

You can play fast and easy all you want with setting up the story, introducing the villains and leading up to a big showdown at the end, but once the miniatures are on the map and the fighting starts you need to play fair with the players. If that means letting somebody's character get an amazingly lucky shot which puts and arrow through your carefully prepared villain's eye from the other side of the castle in the opening round, then so be it. Grabbing the dice and saying "Uh... that didn't happen" is just cheating.

As a game master you just need to deal with it. Do some quick rewrites and reveal that the late big bad guy was just a pawn and now there's a new guy in charge, or arrange to have him spirited away by his minions and show up a few sessions later with an eyepatch and an even bigger grudge than before, but don't cheat your players just because something that they did doesn't fit in with the narrative you had in mind. Remember that RPGs are a shared experience where all of the participants develop the story together. Railroading them into the storyline that you prepared for them is just boring for everybody.

This is a humorous web comic of the LotR movie being run as a D&D campaign. Very well done.

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?cat=14

I can very easily rip my media, and then use a digital copy while storing the physical copy somewhere secure. Oh, they don't allow that.

Ultimately, there are two parts to this:
The right to make backups, resell, lend, etc.
The responsibility to make backups, not lose discs, not destroy discs, etc.
Whoever has the one, has the other. Simple and easy. If you have the responsibility to protect the media, than you have the implicit right to take such steps as you see fit to protect it.

See: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1894 for a more detailed treatment of this topic.

He's what we need to do, hire writers, pay them starvation wages and provide them with shitloads of high quality hallucinogens.

Already been done. The result was Indigo Prophecy (aka Fahrenheit).

the real role players who knew there was more to role playing than dungeon crawls were mortified.

"Even more reviled than a typical roleplayer is a roleplayer who insists on roleplaying. When the dorks need to feel superior, this is the guy they denounce as a dork. Honestly. The only person worse than him is the DM himself."
    -- Shamus Young, The DM of the Rings

"You punks stay in character! I was playing D&D before you got your first nintendo!" -- Gimli

His other works include Rollercoaster Bowling and DM of the Rings
Very worthwhile stuff, and an all around cool guy.

Of course, they will never make a comic book adaptation as epic and as lavish as mine: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=612 The trick is to get them to do the adaptation before you write the comic. Saves a lot of hassle that way.

Any game that features PvE and PvP is never going to please everyone.

That's very much true. Shamus Young wrote an interesting article about that just that last week. In it, he has a neat little analogy involving Will Wright and Cliff Bleszinski, representing the two types of players, making sandcastles on the beach.

That's it. I had enough.
I'm buying the playstation 3. Period. NO Windows installation, NO driver update, NO DirectX reinstalling, NO malware / spyware / trojans / viruses.

Just pure and simple PLUG&PLAY.

And here's another two sales lost on the DM of the Rings guy. (Plus a hilarious comic.) Is there some public list we could all sign stating our refusal to buy these games?

There are times when I voluntarily turn off AdBlock for particular sites, so that the people producing the content there will get deserved money. http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale comes to mind, particularly. It's unlikely I'd do that for (non-browser-based) games, though, as they're generally designed to be more immersive than, say, a blog.

For more excellent D&D humor, I highly recommend DM of the Rings by Samus Young. He gets into almost everything that can go wrong during a game: Power gamers, Monty Python quotes, players ignoring the plot and murdering key NPCs by sheer dumb luck, etc. The guy has obviously been around the block a few times. Some of the comments are great, too.

FYI, 3E is not without its flaws (it's still D&D) but it is way simpler than what came before. Getting rid of THAC0 alone is a huge help

and that's before you consider simplified saving throws (or do you want to remember your saves for PPD, PP, RSW, BW and Spells separately?)

attacks of opportunity, etc.

This is true, but Obsidian basically did the same thing with Neverwinter Nights 2. I pre-ordered because it seemed like a slam-dunk (and hey, it'd be better than KoToR2 because they would've learned their lessons, and didn't have Lucasarts rushing the thing out), but no.

Horrible performance, loads of bugs, Plot Driven Doors, pointless quests, etc. Which is a shame, because the start of KoToR2 was absolutely awesome, they've got some writing talent in there somewhere.

Not buying Mask of the Betrayer, I think I've given up on PC gaming completely except for my City of Heroes addiction.

Shamus Young (the creator of the "DM of the Rings") recently introduced a captcha on his site to deal with comment spam. In his post about using a captcha on his site, he notes that:

... I used to get many hundreds of spam a day. Traffic here has jumped up since then, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find I'm getting a couple of thousand a day by this point. But all of them bounce off the CAPTCHA, and I never even see them. I only see a spam make it through about once every other week, and I'm betting the ones that do make it though are entered manually... In any case, these are really impressive results for a CAPTCHA with only one short phrase that never changes.

Emphasis mine. He's running a fairly popular site, and using a captcha based off of a single, unchanging, three-character phrase. Just the presence of the captcha was enough to effectively eliminate his spam problem. The indication seems to be that just the presence of a captcha is enough to keep spam off of even a moderately popular site.

You know, as a security sort of person, I tend to agree in principle. I do, however, find it fascinating how principle and reality don't quite line up all that often. A case in point, one of the blogs I read fairly regularly uses captchas. He doesn't really obscure it too much, and it's always the same 3 character string, related to the name of the site. Any spammer who actually posted more than once could easily figure it out. So far, none have. He wrote about his experiences with this here. So maybe captchas don't need to be all that complex...

I would be remiss if I did not point out that LOTR as D&D campaign has already been done.

No, the anonymous D&D quest is much lower in quality than the actual LotR.

I also agree that DRM is a major negative for the consumer. It's interesting that you mention that quote from the guys at Stardock, I commented on that at the time and I'm still impressed with their attitude towards their customers and the market in general.

Having said that, I plan to get GalCiv II on CD and not digital download, because I really do like to own things. :)

I also agree that DRM is a major negative for the consumer. It's interesting that you mention that quote from the guys at Stardock, I commented on that at the time and I'm still impressed with their attitude towards their customers and the market in general.

Having said that, I plan to get GalCiv II on CD and not digital download, because I really do like to own things. :)

Men are fricking war machines,

You have nailed it.

For those that doubt it. Take a peek at nature. I think people would be shocked at just how much of our violent behavior is a result of base, primitive drives that reflect behaviors we see in animals. Even the most timid, rotund little accountant has the genes for skull-splitting combat buried beneath all the layers of civilization.

Think about the first time your girlfriend was attracted to another guy. How did you feel? Upset that she was so feckless? If you were a teenager, you probably wanted to kick his ass, even though that doesn't make any sense. That's the same wiring used when males needed to compete, via combat, for the right to mate. Now there it is in your 15-year-old civilized brain and you don't know what to do with it.

You can't educate these drives away, and the next best thing is to find a non-destructive way in which to satisfy those primal urges. Sports are another way to accomplish this.

We have other base drives, and we (ahem) manage to satisfy those even when we're not in a position to actually mate. Take sports and games out of our lives, and those primal combat drives will still be there, but we will be without the tools to deal with them.

Ahem. STUDY: Violent Video Games Turn Teens Into Fat, Weakling Killing Machines.

I already HAVE a network-enabled gaming machine with a harddrive that is based on MS. It's my PC. If I'm going to shell out for a console, why not, you know, spread the love around?

Looks Japaneese gamers might be coming to the same conclusion.

Also, how dumb does a company have to be to under-stock just before Christmas?

First, as a teacher and now homeschool mom who attempted to use Linux for over a year I must say that the comment on moving to Linux was uncalled for. I loved it for its stability, but had to give it up due to the lack of quality (appealing and intuitive interface, non-crashing, easy to install, and actually educational in nature) educational games and resources. Good design is especially important when dealing with children, espcially those with special needs (read special ed students), and with adults who need occuptaional/recreational therapy. There is, or was last year, a significant lack of quality educational games that are stable

Aside from that, there are plenty of good games out there, especially ones which are educational (which would prove especially helpful in dealing with stroke as they would help rebuild the pathways and make new ones.)

There are many good educational sites that are free to use and that are very simple to get to, especially if you were to make her homepage a custom designed web portal with links to all the sites and activities you think she will enjoy. I did this for my kids, designing a site for each that has picture links to all their favorite web sites.

Depending on the level and area of damage you should be able to make a portal of links that would suit her needs. If you need a jumping off point with a variety of educational sites you could look through the links on our site: http://www.shamusyoung.com/kidsportal/kidshome.htm l. Feel free to copy and use the source if you like. I would look through the different sites and see what is most likely to work on the areas she needs, i.e. Memory (the game), math games, logic games, etc.

http://www.popcap.com/ games, Real.com, Shockwave, and Yahoo also have some great games that help build problem solving skills, working with the logic/mathmatical part of the brain, even Tetris is good for logic developement. (if you don't mind the occasional spyware, in fact installing http://www.lavasoft.com/ Ad-aware and an anti-virus program like http://www.grisoft.com/doc/1 AVG would be wise prior to any downloads).

If you can get a hold of the old "Doctor Brain" games they are wonderful for this type of situation as they are fun to play (even for adults) and deliberately work on different parts of the brain, i.e. File Sorting to work with memory, etc. The Incredible Machine games and Lemmings are also good for logic and problem solving developement.

System Shock, the 1994 classic in which he was involved, affected me so much I wrote an entire novel based on the game.

Amazing guy.

Why stop there? If we can get such great service from the government on this, why not other services? Taxpayer-funded ice cream for the disadvantaged! Subsidized soda machines for people that don't carry loose change! Free spice channel for people too embarrased to call up and order the service themselves! Government ass-wiping for really, really lazy people!

It doesn't matter if this is a good service or not. This isn't food or housing. This is Wi-Fi access for crying out loud. If the government should provide this, then is there anything the government shouldn't provide?

You seem confident it will be a good serve, but even if the service sucks and it turns out to be a huge waste of cash, you'll never get rid of it once it's in place. Rotten businesses go out of business, but rotten government programs just eat more tax money.

I know in the end you people will win. Its human nature to want to believe we can all live in luxury for free, to get things we have not earned or worked for, and to believe that we can make life wonderful but having the government take money from other people and use it to buy us nice things. A little bit at a time, you will get your way, and get all your "free" things from your government.

For my part, I promise to go kicking and screaming all the way.

(Unless maybe I can get in on some of the free ice cream)

fascism (noun): A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.

America has become a facist state? I'm all with you on the "both parties are assholes" thing, but who the fuck modded this post +5 insightful? Fascism does not mean "really annoying" or "extra mean", it is an oppressive system of goverment that in the past has had a penchant for murdering its own citizens on the scale of millions. You demonstate your magnificent ignorance by claiming the US is such.

If this WERE a fascist state, there wouldn't be any "pressure" for people to alter their findings: they would just be rounded up and killed or jailed. Fascist states have murdered people on a horrifying scale, and you using the term to villify your political enemies is a gross abuse of the word.

Also, the Dems and Rebubs are NOT the same party, by any stretch of the imagination. They advocate very divergent positions. Just because you and I disagree with BOTH sets of ideas doesn't mean they are the same ideas.

However, when you say this:

Clinton may have talked the liberal talk, and Bush may talk the conservative talk, but their policies are virtually indistinguishable.

Then I am in agreement with you. See also: This.

How about a story based on the game? Free Radical is based on the original SS storyline and surprisingly, doesn't suck. Worth a look, IMO.

I would highly recommend this story by Shamus Young. Its online, free, relatively short, but its a nonstop futuristic hacking and zombie killing romp from start to finish. Did I mention it was heavily based off of System Shock 2? ;0)

Sorry you're being robbed and all, but stop messing with my rights as an individual and a consumer.

But, as has been pointed out all over this thread, this website, this community, and the whole stinking internet: sales are not down due to piracy, they are down because the quality of the product is low and people now have access to other sources of music.

And because I think it's funny, I'm mentioning this again: New UCD is ultimate weapon against piracy.