Also, when the banners at the start are displaying, the game connects to the patch servers to see if any patches are available. There just aren't any yet.
Hardly malicious, nor even particularly unexpected.
and my impressions are that had this game come out a year or two ago, it would have made a much bigger impact than it will now. Why? Because, while it's a solid package, it doesn't really have anything unique to offer outside of theming elements. Sure, it's cool to run around Middle Earth, but outside of that, it's very much WoW-lite, and with a horrid, unresponsive interface to boot.
Was it fun? Yeah, it was. But after playing for a couple of weeks, I already had the feeling that the game didn't have legs. The landscapes were beautiful and mostly well designed, and the quest writing was fantastic, but ultimately the game doesn't have anything to offer that hasn't been done before in just about every other MMORPG on the market.
My recommendation: Buy it if you're bored and looking for something to do. It'll hold you over till the next thing that catches your attention. But if you're looking for a deep game that will tie you in for a long time, this probably isn't going to be the one.
Wii... Viiv... What's with the double ii lately?
on
Both Sides of Wii
·
· Score: 1
I guess two i's are better than one. Must be a matter of perception.
"These same gamers often look forlornly at their Mac-wielding mates and their groovier-than-thou machines, and wonder why they're stuck with their beige-coloured HP or Dell boxes (obviously Alienware owners have no such envy)".
Right. Because style is way more important than functionality, availability of software, or ability to upgrade. The reason Apple's products sell well is because they tend to combine out-of-the-box style with ease of use. Having to set up your machine to multi-boot and then manage/maintain dual operating systems does not qualify as "easy to use" in my opinion.
I have nothing against the new macs -- in fact, I think it would be cool to have one to tinker with. But this article gives no real reasons other than the style-factor why gamers would actually want to switch to mac machines. Consequently, this article is useless prognosticating based on someone's gut feeling. I think we can do better than that.
Out of all the CS professors I had at UCD, Matloff was the only one I DIDN'T like. Why? I found him to be arrogant, condescending, egotistical, and at times incoherent.
The one thing that really stuck in my mind about him from when I used to attend his networking class: he would read STRAIGHT FROM THE BOOK to us. I thought I was taking an upper division class, not kindergarten.
That said, he's obviously well regarded in some circles. From from this former-student's perspective, he is pretty much the LAST person in the CS department that I would have wanted as my advisor.
was just featured in an article on Salon.com, and had an interesting reductionist argument to make:
For a long time it seemed clear to just about everybody that the beauty and elegance of the world seemed to be prima facie evidence for a divine creator. But the philosopher David Hume already realized three centuries ago that this was a bad argument. It leads to an infinite regression. You can't statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you're still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing. Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.
Because not everybody that buys a PS3 will have a PS2 or PS1. I bought my PS2, and was happy that I could dip back into the PS1 archive that I had missed because I never bought a PS1.
Even so, if my PS3 plays PS2 and PS1 games, that means I can keep one console in my living room and put the PS2 elsewhere in my house. If it's not backwards compatible, I have to keep them both in my living room, which means more clutter.
The was announced yesterday, and there's a movie at Gamespot
You'll have to be a member (free membership) to get it there, but it's mirrored at other places around the web, including a few fan sites (such as EQii.com).
There have been many polls showing that the expansions created when Brad was still around (Kunark and SoV) were FAR more popular than LDoN and PoP have been.
People get tired of being a faceless DPS-machine on 72 person raids.
The biggest problem with not including a standard ethernet port or hard drive is that games that want to reach the largest target audience on the console will not be able to take advantage of these features. That in turn gives players less of an incentive to purchase them, which in turn means even less software that will use them. It's a self-reinforcing cycle.
My guess is that Sony would like to see MMORPGs become more popular than they currently are, given that they not only bring in money for the console and software, but also a regular monthly fee. In order to do that most effectively, built-in broadband and a hard drive and/or large build-in flash memory storage seems very reasonable to include.
Heh, I was just rereading my last post and I wanted to clarify. When I said "and we generally eat snacks and board game for somewhere between 3 and 6 hours.", we DO NOT eat the board games.
I board game at least one day every weekend with various friends. I round up 3 or 4 of them, and we generally eat snacks and board game for somewhere between 3 and 6 hours. I'd classify most of my friends as semi-geeky (eg. they're science majors). Regardless of sex, I have not introduced one to board gaming who hasn't asked to be reinvited for another session. The great thing about board gaming is that _everyone_ can relate to it, and the only people who aren't likely to enjoy it are those who simply aren't competitive in any way. That doesn't exclude many.
We've all played monopoly and life and a ton of other American roll-the-dice-and-move games. It's no wonder we're all turned off by the time we're adults. Many of those games were written 30 or 40 years ago. As with so many things, board game "theory" (for lack of a better word) has come a long way since then, and the board games have gotten remarkably more innovative since then.
There's a great list at board game geek that shows the top 50 user-rated board games. I've played probably half of them on the list and it's exceedingly accurate in general.
I've been playing computer games since about the time I learned to read. It's amazing the things I've learned.
I've learned TONS of geography. For example, I can tell you approximately where Bombay, Calcutta, and the Himilayian mountains are in India, thanks to games like Railroad Tycoon 2. I know where a lot of cities are in the Caribbean thanks to Pirates!
I was reading Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond and he was talking about how fledgling societies that start near an abundance of natural resources tend to grow more quickly and advance faster. Anybody who's ever played Civ could have told you that.
I've developed more of a vocabulary through encountering words I didn't know in an understandable context. I learned about storytelling through adventure games like Grim Fandango.
I learned tons of problem solving. Wasteland and Everquest reinforced that often, using a little bit of brains is more important than using a lot of might. I've learned about consequence (killing NPCs randomly means you sometimes can't finish quests that involve them) and diplomacy.
I learned a bit about math and statistics from playing RPGs like and influenced by AD&D from all that dice rolling and min-maxing.
I learned about the principles of the stock market and speculating from playing BBS games. And about supply and demand economics from online MMORPGS.
Games often tend to mimic real life, even when they include imaginative elements, and often do a great job of taking a complex system and making it simple and understandable by putting it in a larger context. It gives people the opportunity to explore a subset of a subject thats accessible to someone without much of a background in that topic area, and the knowledge gained can then be used as a stepping stone into more complex topics that are more directly applicable to the real world.
As you can see, the above topics hit a wide variety of areas. I think that playing games gave me a better appreciation and a better foundation for the multitude of topics that I would encounter later in life. I've always wondered if it would be possible to write an interesting book entirely on the multitude of areas that computer games reflect real life -- because I think non-gamers simply don't realize how broad the correlation is!
"Christian" kiddies aren't allowed to play mainstream games, so we'll make games they are allowed to play
I've always been amused that the classic German board game The Settlers of Catan spawned a Christian version (The Settlers of Canaan) last year. Thing is, I've never played a more theme-neutral game in my life... so it's obviously not that the theme is offensive.
The amusing part is that they changed the relatively inoffensive concept of the robber to "the plague". Which is more "evil" in your mind, sic-ing the robber on someone's wheat field or giving them the plague?
I agree, Monopoly is not a great game by any means, it's just THE game that most Americans have been exposed to.
Here in the US, board gaming seems to be something mostly done by hobbyists and bored couples, but in Germany (from what I understand) it's considered something to do with the whole family. As such, there are a TON of great German designers designing some incredible games that are making their way over into the states. Don't worry, the majority of them have domestic versions, so you don't have to read German to play.
I would HIGHLY recommend: The Settlers of Catan Carcassone Bohnanza Puerto Rico
Two player games are a little harder to come by, but there are quite a few good ones out there. You might consider: Lost Cities Zeus and Hera Odin's Ravens Hammer of the Scots
Once you play any of these games, you'll never want to play Monopoly again. You can find more information on them at Board Game Geek, and you can buy them at FunAgain.com or GameSurplus.
Why do we as a society label everything that's addictive or causes antisocial behavior as intrinsicly bad?
First off, let me state flat out I'm a video game addict. I play a lot of games, it's what I like to do when I get home from work, and I occasionally do it to the detriment of other things in my life (like the dishes in my sink are about to get up and walk away if I don't clean them soon). While I do play a fair number of online games, I also play single games because sometimes I just don't feel like dealing with people. Usually this is after work, when I'm tired and maybe a little cranky. Trust me, my friends are much happier when I lose myself in a good anti-social video game than when I'm tired and try to hang out with them.
There are lots of different kinds of people. Some people are totally energized by social interactions, others aren't. I'm somewhat in the middle -- if I don't get much social interaction or spend too many days in the house, I start to crave it. But if I spend too many days out and about with friends, I wear down. I get tired of it. I need some time off to myself to refresh my batteries.
So what am I getting at? I'm a games addict, and I'm antisocial at times. I've turned down requests to go out with friends because I was too busy being caught up in a game. But taken as a whole, I'd consider my life to be pretty normal. I work a full-time job, I go out with friends at least 3 times a week, I'm dating a nice girl, I find the time to cook myself dinner a couple times a week, I make it a point to do exercise at least every other day, etc...
The point is, while these activities may not be particularily healthy in and of themselves, they're a vital part of my fairly balanced life. They make me happy, they keep me going, they keep me wanting to go out and be social and do all the things that are considered stereotypically healthy.
It's all about keeping the balance. If addictive or anti-social behavior isn't throwing your balance totally out of whack, then so what?
Are gamers anti-social? Some are always. Some are sometimes. Is it only for geeks? Probably not, though a lot of people will bother to try. Is it a non-productive use of time? Are doing activities that help keep me happy considered non-productive?
There are plenty of other well accepted anti-social, potentially addictive activities that don't have negative stigma: reading is a good example.
It seems to me interviewing geeky lan-party-going gamers about these things is the wrong way to go. You'd be better off interviewing non-stereotypical gamers and presenting that to non-gamers to reinforce the view that such activities aren't limited to one subset of the population that happens to be anti-social addicts.
You're assuming that this sport appeals primarily to kids -- and I'll tell you this isn't the case. I'm 27, and I love it. Geocaching is definately an all-ages sport -- I've seen people anywhere from 15 to 70 doing it, sometimes alone, sometimes in small groups, sometimes as a family unit. It anybody booby-trapped a cache, it would as likely be found by an adult as a kid -- and I'd wages an adult would be much more likely to be the first to find a new cache than a kid/family would be.
Also note that there are caches EVERYWHERE -- in the cities, in the country along the roads, in the deep wilderness. Anywhere you can lawfully hide a container is fair game. I've even read the cache page for a cache that was placed under water in a stream!
There's a certain appeal to hiding your caches in places people don't tend to go very often (read: off the beaten path) because it minimizes the chance of someone inadvertantly stumbling across the cache and either removing it thinking it's trash or just plundering the contents.
I had a party of 6 characters, one of them being a monk named "Green Booger". Hey, I was like 10 at the time. Give me a break. It was funny.
Anyway, there was this tower in the upper left hand corner of the map -- I can't remember what it was called, but it had one of those dragon statues (or was it some kind of guardian?) guarding it. The tower was pretty high level for my characters, so my forays were usually pretty short and limited, and my characters were wiped out fast and often. Usually Green Booger was the last standing due to his incredible AC. In case you don't remember, monks in that game lost an AC every level (with lower being better -- silly old school AD&D conventions!).
Well, one day I entered the tower and actually made it through a couple of battles. Upon trying to find my way back to the entrance, I stumbled upon some kind of trap which caused a few members of my party to go insane. My party mutinied. Of course, Green Booger was one the insane ones. After a few minutes of infighting, everyone was dead except Green Booger.
"Finally!", I thought. Now I could load my saved game and try again. But no such luck -- Green Booger-the-now-raving-lunatic turned his evil fists upon himself. Unfortunately, his AC was so low, he couldn't hit himself.
I watched for at least ten minutes as messages like "Green Booger punches at Green Booger but misses!". "Green Booger tries to strike Green Booger but misses!". Finally, after the amusement from the whole situation wore off and realizing this was an infinite loop, I rebooted.
I think it was the first time I realized that sometimes things happened in games that not even the game designers anticipated. It was, for all intents and purposes, my very first experience with design-level game flaws.
Capcom has been sitting on the PS2 version of Catan for a while now -- I wonder if they're holding it back due to the lack of installed network adaptors? Trying to figure out how to price it? Trying to figure out how to market it? Not yet bothered to translate it from the Japanese version?
There's been almost no word on this one period -- I even wrote Capcom to find out what's up and they told me they couldn't tell me anything. Guess I'll have to stick to playing the Java version for now...
Slashdot Mirror
Also, when the banners at the start are displaying, the game connects to the patch servers to see if any patches are available. There just aren't any yet.
Hardly malicious, nor even particularly unexpected.
if 3 activations isn't enough for a particular user, it is possible to call EA and request more. A hassle, yeah, but better than not playing.
or play Age of Conan, so you don't have to.
Didn't GWB have an interest in manned exploration of Mars? I think we have our first "volunteer".
and my impressions are that had this game come out a year or two ago, it would have made a much bigger impact than it will now. Why? Because, while it's a solid package, it doesn't really have anything unique to offer outside of theming elements. Sure, it's cool to run around Middle Earth, but outside of that, it's very much WoW-lite, and with a horrid, unresponsive interface to boot.
Was it fun? Yeah, it was. But after playing for a couple of weeks, I already had the feeling that the game didn't have legs. The landscapes were beautiful and mostly well designed, and the quest writing was fantastic, but ultimately the game doesn't have anything to offer that hasn't been done before in just about every other MMORPG on the market.
My recommendation: Buy it if you're bored and looking for something to do. It'll hold you over till the next thing that catches your attention. But if you're looking for a deep game that will tie you in for a long time, this probably isn't going to be the one.
I guess two i's are better than one. Must be a matter of perception.
"These same gamers often look forlornly at their Mac-wielding mates and their groovier-than-thou machines, and wonder why they're stuck with their beige-coloured HP or Dell boxes (obviously Alienware owners have no such envy)".
Right. Because style is way more important than functionality, availability of software, or ability to upgrade. The reason Apple's products sell well is because they tend to combine out-of-the-box style with ease of use. Having to set up your machine to multi-boot and then manage/maintain dual operating systems does not qualify as "easy to use" in my opinion.
I have nothing against the new macs -- in fact, I think it would be cool to have one to tinker with. But this article gives no real reasons other than the style-factor why gamers would actually want to switch to mac machines. Consequently, this article is useless prognosticating based on someone's gut feeling. I think we can do better than that.
You didn't know me then. :)
Out of all the CS professors I had at UCD, Matloff was the only one I DIDN'T like. Why? I found him to be arrogant, condescending, egotistical, and at times incoherent.
The one thing that really stuck in my mind about him from when I used to attend his networking class: he would read STRAIGHT FROM THE BOOK to us. I thought I was taking an upper division class, not kindergarten.
That said, he's obviously well regarded in some circles. From from this former-student's perspective, he is pretty much the LAST person in the CS department that I would have wanted as my advisor.
Because not everybody that buys a PS3 will have a PS2 or PS1. I bought my PS2, and was happy that I could dip back into the PS1 archive that I had missed because I never bought a PS1.
Even so, if my PS3 plays PS2 and PS1 games, that means I can keep one console in my living room and put the PS2 elsewhere in my house. If it's not backwards compatible, I have to keep them both in my living room, which means more clutter.
The was announced yesterday, and there's a movie at Gamespot
You'll have to be a member (free membership) to get it there, but it's mirrored at other places around the web, including a few fan sites (such as EQii.com).
I watched it yesterday -- it's quite excellent.
that we should be able to live in this country without ever being offended by anything?
It's not a constitutional right. It's not even something we should be fighting for. In fact, it's the exact opposite of tolerance.
You can write Michael Powell at Michael.Powell@fcc.gov and tell him how you feel. I did this morning.
There have been many polls showing that the expansions created when Brad was still around (Kunark and SoV) were FAR more popular than LDoN and PoP have been.
People get tired of being a faceless DPS-machine on 72 person raids.
The biggest problem with not including a standard ethernet port or hard drive is that games that want to reach the largest target audience on the console will not be able to take advantage of these features. That in turn gives players less of an incentive to purchase them, which in turn means even less software that will use them. It's a self-reinforcing cycle.
My guess is that Sony would like to see MMORPGs become more popular than they currently are, given that they not only bring in money for the console and software, but also a regular monthly fee. In order to do that most effectively, built-in broadband and a hard drive and/or large build-in flash memory storage seems very reasonable to include.
You can buy these games at:
Funagain
Games Surplus
Fair Play Games
Boulder Games
You can also sometimes find them on Ebay (a good place to look for out of print ones) and The BoardGameGeek marketplace
Heh, I was just rereading my last post and I wanted to clarify. When I said "and we generally eat snacks and board game for somewhere between 3 and 6 hours.", we DO NOT eat the board games.
Has anybody seen my comma?
I board game at least one day every weekend with various friends. I round up 3 or 4 of them, and we generally eat snacks and board game for somewhere between 3 and 6 hours. I'd classify most of my friends as semi-geeky (eg. they're science majors). Regardless of sex, I have not introduced one to board gaming who hasn't asked to be reinvited for another session. The great thing about board gaming is that _everyone_ can relate to it, and the only people who aren't likely to enjoy it are those who simply aren't competitive in any way. That doesn't exclude many.
We've all played monopoly and life and a ton of other American roll-the-dice-and-move games. It's no wonder we're all turned off by the time we're adults. Many of those games were written 30 or 40 years ago. As with so many things, board game "theory" (for lack of a better word) has come a long way since then, and the board games have gotten remarkably more innovative since then.
There's a great list at board game geek that shows the top 50 user-rated board games. I've played probably half of them on the list and it's exceedingly accurate in general.
Among my personal favorites are:
Settlers of Catan
Puerto Rico
El Grande
Throw out everything you think you know about board games. These are _fun_, for both adults and kids alike.
that I ran across a few weeks ago: http://www.cronus.com/electionfraud
It IS interesting to note how many dollars have flowed between Diebold and the Republican party...
I've been playing computer games since about the time I learned to read. It's amazing the things I've learned.
I've learned TONS of geography. For example, I can tell you approximately where Bombay, Calcutta, and the Himilayian mountains are in India, thanks to games like Railroad Tycoon 2. I know where a lot of cities are in the Caribbean thanks to Pirates!
I was reading Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond and he was talking about how fledgling societies that start near an abundance of natural resources tend to grow more quickly and advance faster. Anybody who's ever played Civ could have told you that.
I've developed more of a vocabulary through encountering words I didn't know in an understandable context. I learned about storytelling through adventure games like Grim Fandango.
I learned tons of problem solving. Wasteland and Everquest reinforced that often, using a little bit of brains is more important than using a lot of might. I've learned about consequence (killing NPCs randomly means you sometimes can't finish quests that involve them) and diplomacy.
I learned a bit about math and statistics from playing RPGs like and influenced by AD&D from all that dice rolling and min-maxing.
I learned about the principles of the stock market and speculating from playing BBS games. And about supply and demand economics from online MMORPGS.
Games often tend to mimic real life, even when they include imaginative elements, and often do a great job of taking a complex system and making it simple and understandable by putting it in a larger context. It gives people the opportunity to explore a subset of a subject thats accessible to someone without much of a background in that topic area, and the knowledge gained can then be used as a stepping stone into more complex topics that are more directly applicable to the real world.
As you can see, the above topics hit a wide variety of areas. I think that playing games gave me a better appreciation and a better foundation for the multitude of topics that I would encounter later in life. I've always wondered if it would be possible to write an interesting book entirely on the multitude of areas that computer games reflect real life -- because I think non-gamers simply don't realize how broad the correlation is!
I've always been amused that the classic German board game The Settlers of Catan spawned a Christian version (The Settlers of Canaan) last year. Thing is, I've never played a more theme-neutral game in my life... so it's obviously not that the theme is offensive.
The amusing part is that they changed the relatively inoffensive concept of the robber to "the plague". Which is more "evil" in your mind, sic-ing the robber on someone's wheat field or giving them the plague?
I agree, Monopoly is not a great game by any means, it's just THE game that most Americans have been exposed to.
Here in the US, board gaming seems to be something mostly done by hobbyists and bored couples, but in Germany (from what I understand) it's considered something to do with the whole family. As such, there are a TON of great German designers designing some incredible games that are making their way over into the states. Don't worry, the majority of them have domestic versions, so you don't have to read German to play.
I would HIGHLY recommend:
The Settlers of Catan
Carcassone
Bohnanza
Puerto Rico
Two player games are a little harder to come by, but there are quite a few good ones out there. You might consider:
Lost Cities
Zeus and Hera
Odin's Ravens
Hammer of the Scots
Once you play any of these games, you'll never want to play Monopoly again. You can find more information on them at Board Game Geek, and you can buy them at FunAgain.com or GameSurplus.
Why do we as a society label everything that's addictive or causes antisocial behavior as intrinsicly bad?
First off, let me state flat out I'm a video game addict. I play a lot of games, it's what I like to do when I get home from work, and I occasionally do it to the detriment of other things in my life (like the dishes in my sink are about to get up and walk away if I don't clean them soon). While I do play a fair number of online games, I also play single games because sometimes I just don't feel like dealing with people. Usually this is after work, when I'm tired and maybe a little cranky. Trust me, my friends are much happier when I lose myself in a good anti-social video game than when I'm tired and try to hang out with them.
There are lots of different kinds of people. Some people are totally energized by social interactions, others aren't. I'm somewhat in the middle -- if I don't get much social interaction or spend too many days in the house, I start to crave it. But if I spend too many days out and about with friends, I wear down. I get tired of it. I need some time off to myself to refresh my batteries.
So what am I getting at? I'm a games addict, and I'm antisocial at times. I've turned down requests to go out with friends because I was too busy being caught up in a game. But taken as a whole, I'd consider my life to be pretty normal. I work a full-time job, I go out with friends at least 3 times a week, I'm dating a nice girl, I find the time to cook myself dinner a couple times a week, I make it a point to do exercise at least every other day, etc...
The point is, while these activities may not be particularily healthy in and of themselves, they're a vital part of my fairly balanced life. They make me happy, they keep me going, they keep me wanting to go out and be social and do all the things that are considered stereotypically healthy.
It's all about keeping the balance. If addictive or anti-social behavior isn't throwing your balance totally out of whack, then so what?
Are gamers anti-social? Some are always. Some are sometimes. Is it only for geeks? Probably not, though a lot of people will bother to try. Is it a non-productive use of time? Are doing activities that help keep me happy considered non-productive?
There are plenty of other well accepted anti-social, potentially addictive activities that don't have negative stigma: reading is a good example.
It seems to me interviewing geeky lan-party-going gamers about these things is the wrong way to go. You'd be better off interviewing non-stereotypical gamers and presenting that to non-gamers to reinforce the view that such activities aren't limited to one subset of the population that happens to be anti-social addicts.
You're assuming that this sport appeals primarily to kids -- and I'll tell you this isn't the case. I'm 27, and I love it. Geocaching is definately an all-ages sport -- I've seen people anywhere from 15 to 70 doing it, sometimes alone, sometimes in small groups, sometimes as a family unit. It anybody booby-trapped a cache, it would as likely be found by an adult as a kid -- and I'd wages an adult would be much more likely to be the first to find a new cache than a kid/family would be.
Also note that there are caches EVERYWHERE -- in the cities, in the country along the roads, in the deep wilderness. Anywhere you can lawfully hide a container is fair game. I've even read the cache page for a cache that was placed under water in a stream!
There's a certain appeal to hiding your caches in places people don't tend to go very often (read: off the beaten path) because it minimizes the chance of someone inadvertantly stumbling across the cache and either removing it thinking it's trash or just plundering the contents.
I had a party of 6 characters, one of them being a monk named "Green Booger". Hey, I was like 10 at the time. Give me a break. It was funny.
Anyway, there was this tower in the upper left hand corner of the map -- I can't remember what it was called, but it had one of those dragon statues (or was it some kind of guardian?) guarding it. The tower was pretty high level for my characters, so my forays were usually pretty short and limited, and my characters were wiped out fast and often. Usually Green Booger was the last standing due to his incredible AC. In case you don't remember, monks in that game lost an AC every level (with lower being better -- silly old school AD&D conventions!).
Well, one day I entered the tower and actually made it through a couple of battles. Upon trying to find my way back to the entrance, I stumbled upon some kind of trap which caused a few members of my party to go insane. My party mutinied. Of course, Green Booger was one the insane ones. After a few minutes of infighting, everyone was dead except Green Booger.
"Finally!", I thought. Now I could load my saved game and try again. But no such luck -- Green Booger-the-now-raving-lunatic turned his evil fists upon himself. Unfortunately, his AC was so low, he couldn't hit himself.
I watched for at least ten minutes as messages like "Green Booger punches at Green Booger but misses!". "Green Booger tries to strike Green Booger but misses!". Finally, after the amusement from the whole situation wore off and realizing this was an infinite loop, I rebooted.
I think it was the first time I realized that sometimes things happened in games that not even the game designers anticipated. It was, for all intents and purposes, my very first experience with design-level game flaws.
Capcom has been sitting on the PS2 version of Catan for a while now -- I wonder if they're holding it back due to the lack of installed network adaptors? Trying to figure out how to price it? Trying to figure out how to market it? Not yet bothered to translate it from the Japanese version?
There's been almost no word on this one period -- I even wrote Capcom to find out what's up and they told me they couldn't tell me anything. Guess I'll have to stick to playing the Java version for now...