Exactly...rarely have ever put so much forethought into a fight. Every time I had to take down a Big Daddy I would look around and see what I could use. "Look, there's a turret, I could hack it and lure him in front of it. Look, there's a nitro splicer, I can use my Telekinesis to fling Grenades at the Big Daddy if I can just lure him over this way..."
Other things like the oil pools and standing water allowed you to make tactical decisions if you had the right plasmids equipped. Snapping research photos was a little adventure in and of itself. Even with both research plasmids equipped it could be hard to get enough points to finish the last research level. However, use your Hypnotize Big Daddy plasmid to get a Big Daddy to attack a splicer for you and all of a sudden you have a multi-subject action shot for an A rating!
And sorry for the double post here...but you probably spent more time complaing on a slashdot board about the controls than it would've taken for you to look up "Controls" in TOC and look at the diagram. Maybe you should check your priorities.
No I don't. Please don't tell me how I hold a game controller, thank you.
If I actually held the controller that way, my hands would be aching in minutes, instead I put in index fingers on the trigger and move them up as needed to the shoulder buttons. Of the 20+ Xbox 360 games I've played, holding the controller this way doesn't impact the game play in any way. Mass Effect is the first game I've played where you need to use the trigger and shoulder, on the same side of the controller, at the same time. IMO, that's just bad design.
I didn't tell you how to hold a controller. You said you couldn't fire both at the same time, I told you how you could. Simply because you refuse to do so doesn't mean it's impossible. Not to mention, you don't really need the ability to shoot them both at the same time, but if you do, it's there. Stop whining.
I just drove up and killed them the old fashioned, non-sniping way. (Plus running them over was more fun than shooting.) I didn't zoom at all, and I'm sure people who did would be able to cope it the zoom function was activated by, say, clicking down on a thumbstick (like most other games use.)
Well, had you known how to zoom, perhaps you wouldn't have needed to use both weapons at the same time? Plus, the zoom is controlled by one of the thumbsticks IIRC. You go into first person mode with the LT button, and then click R3 IIRC to zoom in up to two successive levels. Didn't COD2 use the LT to look down the iron sights?
No. It's the year 2007. The vast majority of games have standard controls. The rest have tutorials. There are minimum quality standards here, and expecting the game to explain its controls is not some crazy request, it's expected.
I should have mentioned in my original review that if they were going to screw with controls for no reason, they could have at least added a tutorial mode to teach you, for example, how to drive the Mako for the first time.
Again, this is the year 2007... if it was 1997, I'd be more tolerant of confusing, non-standard controls. But the Mako is basically a Halo vehicle, similar appearance, similar physics-- would it have killed them to use Halo controls that every Xbox gamer instantly recognizes and understands?
So you would rather sit through a tutorial than read a manual? Personally, I'm sick of games that make me sit through tutorials when all the same information was already in the manual. Just because you're apparently illiterate when it comes to game literature doesn't mean the design needs to spend extra time crafting a tutorial that everyone else will have to through just so you can figure out how to zoom the cannon. Hell, you don't even have to read the whole thing, just look up "Controls" in the Table of Contents and it will show you where the control layout is.
Furthermore, if they had just ripped off the controls for Halo, I'm sure someone else would complain that they're not more like the vehicles in X...or that it's just another Halo clone in terms of controls. They came up with their own little interface that actually works...unless of course you can't read and/or have freakish hands that can't press two buttons at once.
Ummm... You use your index finger on the RB button and your middle finger on the RT button. Also, left trigger operated the first person mode and allowed you to zoom. Did you actually read the manual?
That's not necessarily true. For example, this database might track those charged with domestic violence as well as those convicted of it...that would be bad. There are many cases of divorces and child custody disputes going bad, and then the wife trying to bring up charges of domestic violence in order to tip the scales...hell, a few men have probably tried it to.
Or what a woman is dating some guy and he breaks up with her? She decides she wants revenge, so she slams a door on her cheek to give herself a shiner and then charges him...now he's on that database, probably forever, and she's just gotten her revenge by ruining his dating prospects for the rest of his life.
Making every offense searchable on the net isn't necessarily a good thing... Plus, since you started off by quoting the Bible, how about the bit about "Forgive and Forget"? The internet never forgets it seems, and someone could be stuck on there well into their 60's because of a mistake they made in their teens. Is that really fair?
If they wanted it to go away permanently, wouldn't it have been easier to just delete the trouble ticket...or make it a call back for 12/31/2099? Putting it exactly 10 years forward is a little stupid, whereas someone striking 0 instead of 9 (especially since they're right next to each other if you're using the number keys on the main section of the keyboard instead of the number pad) is a very simple mistake.
As was pointed out elsewhere, you simply go by Galactic rotation. "East" on the Earth is defined as the direction that Earth rotates towards. More simply put, if you're looking at the Earth from above the north pole, then Earth rotates in a clockwise fashion. The direction of rotation is what we call "East", and the reverse of it is what we call "West". (I will concede that you need some sort of agreed upon terminator here, but that's not different from any other system that seeks to divide up an area. You will always need agreed upon line...we're just talking about the terms used to describe and catalog them)
The same logic, applied on a Galactic level, will still work. Our Galaxy has a definite rotation, so you merely label the direction of rotation as "East", and the others will fall into line. Again, you still need a starting point, but once you have that you can figure out the rest.
For example, let's say Earth lies in the "North" section of the Galaxy. Looking at the galactic plane you merely have to follow the rotation to determine that the next section is "East", then "South" and finally "West". If Earth were in the "Alpha Quadrant" though, how would you proceed? Were the quadrants labeled in ascending ordering along the direction of rotation, or against it? Were they named in order of discovery? Activity? Proximity? That's why the N, E, S, W system is easier.
Perhaps the giant gas cloud not only has anti-matter but anti-brain particles as well. The more we look at it and talk about, the more we absorb and the less intelligent and easily confused we'll get. Eventually it will get so bad that....Oh, SHINY!!!
Actually, it's not. One other problem with the Alpha-Delta thing is that their names do not describe their relation to each other. If you know which portion of the galaxy is "North", you can figure out where South, East and West. If you know which area is "Alpha" though, where's Beta? To the left, the right, up, down?
While your system would in fact name them, it does not provide an clues to the location of the other sections...which means it's not as good of a system. If you require an example, that's easy. Tell me where the Delta Quadrant in Star Trek is in relation to the Alpha Quadrant. Do you actually know? Do you which spiral arm it encompasses? Probably not, unless you have some sort of "official" Star Trek liscensed map. That's probably why they didn't use it.
The point he was making was that calling "Alpha Quadrant" is just as aribtrary as calling it the "Wester portion of the Galaxy". Heck, it's just as arbitrary as calling it "Trish". Anything we use to describe will just a lable assigned to an agreed upon area, so why not use something we're already familiar with?
Then you'd be a hypocrite (or a shill, or a sellout...)
That's not necessarily true. I used to work at an engineering firm doing lab work. I was not very pleased with some of the engineers at the firm and how they handled themselves, as well as some of our field techs. I worked in the lab though, not as an engineer or field tech, so why would my opinion make me a hypocrite? I was perfectly able to perform my job while simultaneously thinking that the field techs were f-ing things up and the engineers didn't give a damn.
See, you're making a common mistake... If you look at the banner at the top, it's actually two separate statements, "NEWS FOR NERDS. STUFF THAT MATTERS.", there's no comma in it like yours.
This means we can have situations that satisfy the first condition (news for nerds), but not the second (stuff that matters). This story is merely just a prime example of that exact phenomenon.
Having your IRL identity linked inexorably to your avatar is indeed worrisome. What if I were to become very vocal about some of the practices of say, Viacom, and then I applied for a job there? My comments on their practices might have nothing to do with the scope of the work that I'm applying for, yet it could affect my chances of employment...or even get me fired if I was working there.
Or perhaps because you feel that your legs are strong and quick, your brain is trying to trying to train you on what you could do if you couldn't use your legs. What if you twisted your ankle while running? Then you might have to turn and face your attacker, rather than that running.
That's what the TFA was getting at. It's not so much that your brain is like "This is the most likely scenario", but rather that it's decided that this is a "feasible" scenario that you should be prepared for.
Oh, and in case some smartass tries to say "Well cell phones and land lines are completely different things", then let me use a better example. It's like saying that cell phones are obvious tech and not worth a patent because of wireless "walkie talkies".
Thing is, while they bear some similarities to each other because they both transmit wirelessly and they make use of signal variance to reach different users, they're completely different. Just like ordering from your PC/Phone and driving over there is very different than hitting a button on your iPhone that automatically orders your drink and adds it to your tab.
Exactly, this is quite different from the old "Pick up the phone and call in for a pizza." You're talking a completely encapsulated ordering interface, WiFi connection, order queue interrupt (to bump yours into the queue for those barristas to make) and a billing system. It's like saying that a cell phone is obvious tech because you had a landline for years.
The major question that this article doesn't answer though, is will there be a virtual tip jar???
It already does -- take a look at the new Ratchet and Clank. Heavenly Sword is pretty awesome too, tho much of it is simply high-def cutscenes.
The OP was talking specifically about multi-platform releases. Take Madden for example...the 360 version looked great, but the PS3 version could only get 30fps (as opposed to 60 on the 360) going. This is a problem.
First party games are always optimized for that platform, it's the multi-platform releases where you start to see who's better at what. Last-gen I only bought multi-platform releases for my XBox because they just simply looked better.
For current-gen, at least so far anyway, it seems to be going the same direction. The 360 has the best looking games (again, only talking multi-platform here), the Wii has the interesting IP's and control scheme, and the PS3 has what? They lost Assassin's Creed, GTA, DMC and a whole host of other exclusives... Sure, they have the FF series, but the 360 has a bunch of exclusive Mistwalker RPG's coming out!
If the PS3 doesn't clean up their act (and their graphics) in very short order, they're going to have problems.
There's a simpler explanation. Obviously the black hole particle jet is producing a tachyon emission that's made it's way to the Milky Way and is now causing us to relive the same/. stories over, and over, and over, and over, and over...
The main idea of an ebook reader is to carry lots (and i mean lots as in 1GB) of "rich text" (text and images) in an object the size of a real book. If you only need to carry one store every say, 2 weeks (thats how long I take to read a book), then a stanard book is good for you, but if you need to access to that 1GB of media in one day and you can not, or do not want to carry 500kg of dead trees then you certainly would benefit from an ebook reader.
I think that's the point that us "Luddites" are trying to make. For 90% of people, eBooks are just another tech gadget. It doesn't necessarily take 2 weeks to read a single book (sometimes longer, sometimes less...) but I certainly don't ever really read multiple books in a single day.
For applications like technical manuals, reference books, encyclopedias, etc, it's a great. Why carry about 12 ASTM volumes when you can have them all on an eBook? But having all the Hyperion/Endymion books on an eBook??? Not so much... There's 4, and they cost me about $20. They're on a shelf right now, and they're not DRM'ed.
Maybe someday when everything isn't DRM'ed and the cost is significantly cheaper eBooks will be a better option...but right now, they're either just another nifty gadget to show off or something only needed for heavy duty reference work.
A Slashdot story is summary written by someone like Zonk. They're not exactly penning a peer reviewed doctorate thesis here... The simple fact is, at Slashdot if you pay you get the stories early. On XBox Live if you pay you get the demos early. Plus, as you pointed out, it doesn't affect the actual game that's purchased at all, just the demo.
There's no difference here, other than the fact that one involves Microsoft.
7/31/07: Apple announces hitting the 3 Billion mark with it's iTunes downloads. Now, assuming that an equivalent amount have been distributed illegally since the inception of the internet we can come up with a conservative estimate of what the damages would look like.
$9,250 per song x 3,000,000,000 songs = $27,750,000,000,000
For those of your not used to so many zeroes that's 27.75 trillion dollars. You would have to almost take every sale of music since Edison first made the Phonograph to come up with that kind of money.
You're missing the whole point here. If you run over the neighbor's prize show cat that had won numerous awards, there's a reasonable expectation that the cat would have continued winning awards in the future. However the cat could have been run over because it suffered a fatal stroke in the middle of the street a split second before you hit it...
We award damages all the time for things like. Wrongful death suits, pain and suffering, continued medical care, etc.. The way the law is currently written the RIAA doesn't have to prove the full extent of the damages, only the possibility of them.
For example, imagine that you burn 1,000 copies of a Britney Spears CD and leave them in a park so that people can enjoy her music for free. Anyone can take them, right? They could be picked up and thrown away by a garbage man, someone could take all 1,000 or 1,000 people could take one. There's no way to know. Does that change the intent though? No, because your intent was to mass-copy and then distribute copyrighted media, and just because you can't tell how many people it was distributed to, doesn't mean you tried to distribute it.
Oh, and BTW, something to note from the Ars Technica write up... "The jury awarded the RIAA statutory damages of $9,250 per song, for a total of $222,000, out of a maximum of $150,000 per track." They awarded way down at the low end of that range. Now, that doesn't mean the range is correct, not all copyright protection in the same. What it does mean though is that she could've been ordered to pay millions for what she did because of how the laws, however poorly equipped to deal with this sort of situation, were crafted.
Slashdot Mirror
Other things like the oil pools and standing water allowed you to make tactical decisions if you had the right plasmids equipped. Snapping research photos was a little adventure in and of itself. Even with both research plasmids equipped it could be hard to get enough points to finish the last research level. However, use your Hypnotize Big Daddy plasmid to get a Big Daddy to attack a splicer for you and all of a sudden you have a multi-subject action shot for an A rating!
And sorry for the double post here...but you probably spent more time complaing on a slashdot board about the controls than it would've taken for you to look up "Controls" in TOC and look at the diagram. Maybe you should check your priorities.
I didn't tell you how to hold a controller. You said you couldn't fire both at the same time, I told you how you could. Simply because you refuse to do so doesn't mean it's impossible. Not to mention, you don't really need the ability to shoot them both at the same time, but if you do, it's there. Stop whining.
Well, had you known how to zoom, perhaps you wouldn't have needed to use both weapons at the same time? Plus, the zoom is controlled by one of the thumbsticks IIRC. You go into first person mode with the LT button, and then click R3 IIRC to zoom in up to two successive levels. Didn't COD2 use the LT to look down the iron sights?
So you would rather sit through a tutorial than read a manual? Personally, I'm sick of games that make me sit through tutorials when all the same information was already in the manual. Just because you're apparently illiterate when it comes to game literature doesn't mean the design needs to spend extra time crafting a tutorial that everyone else will have to through just so you can figure out how to zoom the cannon. Hell, you don't even have to read the whole thing, just look up "Controls" in the Table of Contents and it will show you where the control layout is.
Furthermore, if they had just ripped off the controls for Halo, I'm sure someone else would complain that they're not more like the vehicles in X...or that it's just another Halo clone in terms of controls. They came up with their own little interface that actually works...unless of course you can't read and/or have freakish hands that can't press two buttons at once.
Ummm... You use your index finger on the RB button and your middle finger on the RT button. Also, left trigger operated the first person mode and allowed you to zoom. Did you actually read the manual?
Whose films will I mercilessly mock now??? I guess there's always the faint hope that they'll greenlight Ghost Rider 2...
Or what a woman is dating some guy and he breaks up with her? She decides she wants revenge, so she slams a door on her cheek to give herself a shiner and then charges him...now he's on that database, probably forever, and she's just gotten her revenge by ruining his dating prospects for the rest of his life.
Making every offense searchable on the net isn't necessarily a good thing... Plus, since you started off by quoting the Bible, how about the bit about "Forgive and Forget"? The internet never forgets it seems, and someone could be stuck on there well into their 60's because of a mistake they made in their teens. Is that really fair?
If they wanted it to go away permanently, wouldn't it have been easier to just delete the trouble ticket...or make it a call back for 12/31/2099? Putting it exactly 10 years forward is a little stupid, whereas someone striking 0 instead of 9 (especially since they're right next to each other if you're using the number keys on the main section of the keyboard instead of the number pad) is a very simple mistake.
The same logic, applied on a Galactic level, will still work. Our Galaxy has a definite rotation, so you merely label the direction of rotation as "East", and the others will fall into line. Again, you still need a starting point, but once you have that you can figure out the rest.
For example, let's say Earth lies in the "North" section of the Galaxy. Looking at the galactic plane you merely have to follow the rotation to determine that the next section is "East", then "South" and finally "West". If Earth were in the "Alpha Quadrant" though, how would you proceed? Were the quadrants labeled in ascending ordering along the direction of rotation, or against it? Were they named in order of discovery? Activity? Proximity? That's why the N, E, S, W system is easier.
Perhaps the giant gas cloud not only has anti-matter but anti-brain particles as well. The more we look at it and talk about, the more we absorb and the less intelligent and easily confused we'll get. Eventually it will get so bad that....Oh, SHINY!!!
While your system would in fact name them, it does not provide an clues to the location of the other sections...which means it's not as good of a system. If you require an example, that's easy. Tell me where the Delta Quadrant in Star Trek is in relation to the Alpha Quadrant. Do you actually know? Do you which spiral arm it encompasses? Probably not, unless you have some sort of "official" Star Trek liscensed map. That's probably why they didn't use it.
The point he was making was that calling "Alpha Quadrant" is just as aribtrary as calling it the "Wester portion of the Galaxy". Heck, it's just as arbitrary as calling it "Trish". Anything we use to describe will just a lable assigned to an agreed upon area, so why not use something we're already familiar with?
http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Product_Id=357371/
That's not necessarily true. I used to work at an engineering firm doing lab work. I was not very pleased with some of the engineers at the firm and how they handled themselves, as well as some of our field techs. I worked in the lab though, not as an engineer or field tech, so why would my opinion make me a hypocrite? I was perfectly able to perform my job while simultaneously thinking that the field techs were f-ing things up and the engineers didn't give a damn.
This means we can have situations that satisfy the first condition (news for nerds), but not the second (stuff that matters). This story is merely just a prime example of that exact phenomenon.
Having your IRL identity linked inexorably to your avatar is indeed worrisome. What if I were to become very vocal about some of the practices of say, Viacom, and then I applied for a job there? My comments on their practices might have nothing to do with the scope of the work that I'm applying for, yet it could affect my chances of employment...or even get me fired if I was working there.
That's what the TFA was getting at. It's not so much that your brain is like "This is the most likely scenario", but rather that it's decided that this is a "feasible" scenario that you should be prepared for.
Thing is, while they bear some similarities to each other because they both transmit wirelessly and they make use of signal variance to reach different users, they're completely different. Just like ordering from your PC/Phone and driving over there is very different than hitting a button on your iPhone that automatically orders your drink and adds it to your tab.
The major question that this article doesn't answer though, is will there be a virtual tip jar???
The OP was talking specifically about multi-platform releases. Take Madden for example...the 360 version looked great, but the PS3 version could only get 30fps (as opposed to 60 on the 360) going. This is a problem.
First party games are always optimized for that platform, it's the multi-platform releases where you start to see who's better at what. Last-gen I only bought multi-platform releases for my XBox because they just simply looked better.
For current-gen, at least so far anyway, it seems to be going the same direction. The 360 has the best looking games (again, only talking multi-platform here), the Wii has the interesting IP's and control scheme, and the PS3 has what? They lost Assassin's Creed, GTA, DMC and a whole host of other exclusives... Sure, they have the FF series, but the 360 has a bunch of exclusive Mistwalker RPG's coming out!
If the PS3 doesn't clean up their act (and their graphics) in very short order, they're going to have problems.
There's a simpler explanation. Obviously the black hole particle jet is producing a tachyon emission that's made it's way to the Milky Way and is now causing us to relive the same /. stories over, and over, and over, and over, and over...
I think that's the point that us "Luddites" are trying to make. For 90% of people, eBooks are just another tech gadget. It doesn't necessarily take 2 weeks to read a single book (sometimes longer, sometimes less...) but I certainly don't ever really read multiple books in a single day.
For applications like technical manuals, reference books, encyclopedias, etc, it's a great. Why carry about 12 ASTM volumes when you can have them all on an eBook? But having all the Hyperion/Endymion books on an eBook??? Not so much... There's 4, and they cost me about $20. They're on a shelf right now, and they're not DRM'ed.
Maybe someday when everything isn't DRM'ed and the cost is significantly cheaper eBooks will be a better option...but right now, they're either just another nifty gadget to show off or something only needed for heavy duty reference work.
There's no difference here, other than the fact that one involves Microsoft.
[Hint: Look at the main page of /. where it says subscribers get stories earlier]
I guess now Major Nelson is ripping off Commander Taco for ideas, right?
http://hypebot.typepad.com/hypebot/2007/07/itunes-hits-3-b.html/
7/31/07: Apple announces hitting the 3 Billion mark with it's iTunes downloads. Now, assuming that an equivalent amount have been distributed illegally since the inception of the internet we can come up with a conservative estimate of what the damages would look like.
$9,250 per song x 3,000,000,000 songs = $27,750,000,000,000
For those of your not used to so many zeroes that's 27.75 trillion dollars. You would have to almost take every sale of music since Edison first made the Phonograph to come up with that kind of money.
We award damages all the time for things like. Wrongful death suits, pain and suffering, continued medical care, etc.. The way the law is currently written the RIAA doesn't have to prove the full extent of the damages, only the possibility of them.
For example, imagine that you burn 1,000 copies of a Britney Spears CD and leave them in a park so that people can enjoy her music for free. Anyone can take them, right? They could be picked up and thrown away by a garbage man, someone could take all 1,000 or 1,000 people could take one. There's no way to know. Does that change the intent though? No, because your intent was to mass-copy and then distribute copyrighted media, and just because you can't tell how many people it was distributed to, doesn't mean you tried to distribute it.
Oh, and BTW, something to note from the Ars Technica write up... "The jury awarded the RIAA statutory damages of $9,250 per song, for a total of $222,000, out of a maximum of $150,000 per track." They awarded way down at the low end of that range. Now, that doesn't mean the range is correct, not all copyright protection in the same. What it does mean though is that she could've been ordered to pay millions for what she did because of how the laws, however poorly equipped to deal with this sort of situation, were crafted.