Try Legerdemain, it does very much what you have described, having a very limited inventory system that forces you to take only what you need for each trip. It's single-player, though.
There is a clear correlation between game vastness/complexity and bugginess. As an old-time player of CRPG's, I have seen that almost in every occasion where someone released a CRPG of epic proportions, or otherwise groundbreaking, the game was much buggier than average (at least in its first version). Examples: Ultima VII, Ultima Underworld, Daggerfall, Fallout 1. More into the 4x genre, Master of Magic was also complex and groundbreaking and buggy as hell. All of these are cult games and widely considered not only among the best in their genre, but among the most complex, vast and nonlinear. The likes of Final Fantasy or Zelda, which are also cult games but much simpler and more linear in their design, didn't have many issues with bugginess as far as I can remember.
Do you think that is a general law? In my personal and subjetive experience (I don't have any reliable data, but neither do you in your post) it is the case for laptops, for example, but not for digital cameras. It seems pretty common for digital cameras to fail during the first year, the second, or well, pretty much any year.
This seems to be reflected on the prices of extended warranties, at least in my country the extended warranty for a laptop may add something like 10% to the price, but the extended warranty for a camera may very well add 50%.
In Spain we also have a law like that, but in practice it's totally useless: in theory you should have warranty for two years (or even three, I can't remember); but then the law says that after the first year the burden of proof of not having broken/misused the item is on the customer. Obviously it's impossible to prove that you haven't misused the item, so the law doesn't work and the companies just ignore you if you invoke it. I guess you could get a refund in court, but that's as always, we laymen don't have (or aren't willing to spend) time/resources to go to court, so people just keep buying extended warranties.
I personally try to buy things that have a warranty of at least 3 years by default, since this seems to indicate that the manufacturer is somewhat confident that it won't break. For example Thinkpad laptops have cheap models with 1 year warranty by default, and more expensive models with 3 years warranty. I buy the latter.
Thinkpad W500 here, 15.4", 1920x1200. It's perfect for a laptop monitor, in fact it fatigues my eyes much less than other laptop monitors that I have seen. I'm running Windows XP, with a custom DPI setting (150% of default size) and large fonts. Sure, there are some places (system dialogs and the likes, mainly) where you still see small letters. But the way I work with the laptop, I spend 99% of the time looking at either the browser (Opera, I have the default zoom set to 150% and you can zoom in/out with +/-, right now I'm using 190% for Slashdot), a terminal (can configure the font size without problem), an IDE/text editor (no problems either) or a PDF viewer (again, no problems). In exchange for having to do some font configuration, I get everything looking much smoother. And the resolution is awesome for gaming.
I go to 3-4 computer science conferences a year. Last year, I went to one in the US. At the customs, I got singled out for no reason and taken into a room with other 50-60 people. I had to wait for a long time while a bully guard was saying that we were not American citizens so they had the right to search our luggage and retain us for as long as necessary (no one had asked him anything, he was just saying it out of sheer pleasure, it seems). They interrogated me and didn't want to tell me why I was taken there. They wouldn't let us use our mobile phones. I spent like 3 hours there until they let me go, fortunately I was able to catch my connecting flight (to a different US city) in the last minute (since I had been told that if I missed it due to the interrogation no one would pay anything, since it was "for security".
After the experience, I decided not to go to the US anymore unless it is strictly necessary. This year I have not submitted papers to any conference taking place in the US, and I don't plan to do so in the future, unless I have a coauthor willing to go. Sorry guys, it's not that I don't like your country, in fact everyone was really nice to me once I was *inside* the US. But being treated like a piece of sh*t at the customs without even being given a reason is not a nice experience. Perhaps if you haven't gone through it you may think that it's just a minor nuisance, but it really gets to your nerves being there, waiting, unable to do anything, surrounded by heavily armed guards as if you were a criminal, receiving no explanation whatsoever for your situation, and getting nervous as the time for your next flight is approaching and they don't let you go. Even if the country is nice, it's just not worth it.
So yes, I'm sure these kinds of border controls harm tourism. I don't want to go to the US while the situation is like that, and I'm aware of more people of the same opinion.
PS: I have been to like 20 or 30 countries, including poor and rich countries, and I haven't been treated so badly in any other place, only in the US customs.
I haven't tried TFG (this is Slashdot, after all); but perhaps the thing is that they are not looking from direct input from the users to design specific ICs, but rather to gather data about how humans approach this problem so as to be able to develop new heuristics. We humans are quite good at finding decent solutions to NP-complete problems in limited time, so trying to find out which heuristics and rules-of-thumb be use to imitate them in algorithms can be an interesting approach.
The thing is that, as opposed to graphics, text characters are symbols that have been explicitly designed (and evolved) to be easily distinguishable.
There are several roguelikes that give you the option of using ASCII or tiles (Nethack, Dwarf Fortress if you count that as a roguelike, Crawl, etc.) but tiles are mostly a choice for newbies who are scared of ASCII. An experienced player will always choose ASCII because it will give him a broader view of the situation. With ASCII, it is easy to have an 80x50 dungeon in full view, with every object perfectly distinguishable. To do that with tiles in most current screens, you would need 16x16 tiles and those tiles are just too small to look decent and distinguishable (see this one, for example) while an ASCII char is perfectly distinguishable at even smaller sizes than that.
So roguelikes using tiles typically just let you see a smaller part of the dungeon, which is a disadvantage, and thus any experienced player who wants to play in the best way possible will choose ASCII.
So no, it's not just a matter of being easier to code or saving CPU time. For some kinds of games, ASCII is just better.
Well, I'm one of those old school fans and I think Daggerfall was clearly the best game in the saga, and it has been getting worse since then.
Morrowind (Elder Scrolls III) is a very good game, and definitely worth buying. It still has the flexibility and freedom that made Daggerfall great, as well as a complex plot with lots of factions that you can join. However, the world design philosophy is different. The dungeons are no longer so huge and randomly generated, all the map is crafted by hand. This means that there is more attention to detail, but anyway I preferred the sheer hugeness of Daggerfall. Compared to that, Morrowind felt just small (it's still bigger than most games from other franchises, though). The character creation system was also not as deep as Daggerfall's, and we hardcore CRPG fans like our character creation systems. And the immersion, although very good, was not as good as Daggerfall because Daggerfall's soundtrack must be one of the best videogame soundtracks of all time (despite being plain MIDI). So my personal evaluation of Morrowind is: very good game, very respectable, but quite worse than Daggerfall at least for me (I'm aware that other people prefer the hand-crafted attention to detail to the vastness of the randomly-generated world, and I can understand that opinion, but I know plenty of CRPG's that have that attention to detail and Daggerfall was giving me something different, that no other CRPG had, and Morrowind abandoned).
As for Oblivion (Elder Scrolls IV), unfortunately, I think it's just crap. I'm really sad to have to say this, because I had an enormous respect for the Elder Scrolls saga, but I'm afraid they just screwed up with this one. The graphics are impressive, the world is really nice, but the game just feels bland and uninteresting. And the reason for this can pretty much be summed up in two words: level scaling. Enemies in the game are adjusting according to your level, which kills all the excitement in the game. You can go slay the hugest enemies when you're level 1 because their strength will be according to your level (and they will drop crappy items, too); and when you're high-level you have to be careful of even the lamest enemies, and even the same petty bandits you fought at the beginning will be on par with you and drop posh armour. So there is no longer the thrill of going to a red dragon lair, getting slaughtered, and wondering how you're going to defeat it... returning 20 levels later to crush all the dragons.
I must say that I'm not against level scaling in general, but I think if it is applied it must be done with moderation, and it's extremely hard to do it right. ADOM is an example of an excellent game with level scaling, but this is because it applies it in a very slight way: enemies tend to get somewhat tougher over time as they get experienced, but in the end dragons are still dragons, and rats are still rats (and anyway the thing still has its drawbacks... google uberjackal effect). In Oblivion, they applied level scaling up to a point where every location in the world has the same difficulty, and where you are never surprised by finding an out-of-depth item or monster because everything is uniform, and this makes the game feel just dull. In fact, the best way to finish the game (I haven't tried it personally, but there are numerous accounts all over the internet) is trying not to level and staying all the time at level 1, for God's sake. That's a flawed design if I've ever seen one.
I wouldn't recommend you to play Oblivion unless you're a game designer and you have a professional interest in seeing what not to do, and how to totally screw up a game that could be great by a couple of horrible design choices. It's also a curious example of a game that gets top scores in the reviews but then bores the hell out of actual players, simply because the first impressions are great (they were great for me, too) until you begin to realise that there is something terribly wrong with the gameplay, which c
I completed the game in its time, without any cheating or teleporting. And without even applying cheap character creation strategies like certain race-resistance combinations (I did choose the constraint not to wear leather and chain armour, but those are features and should be obvious by the second time you create a character). So yes, it is difficult, but definitely not impossible.
People nowadays are too spoiled and used to easy games. The thing about ancient liches and vampires was fighting a lot of fights, clearing a lot of dungeons and collecting a lots of items and spells until you were experienced and equipped enough to fight them. And once you could do that, it felt like a truly epic fight. Not like in Oblivion, where enemies are just scaled so you can fight them.
I advise everyone to play this game. In my opinion it is the best CRPG of all time (and I've played most known CRPG's since the times of Might and Magic I and Ultima I).
Breadcrumbs are nice, but they are not a valid substitute of the Up button for a reason: the Up button is always in the same place on a window, so once you get used to it you don't even have to look. You go there by instinct. On the other hand, breadcrumbs change their position (in the X axis) depending on the number and length of the names in the current path, so you have to look closely and locate them. This loses you one second or so, which doesn't seem like much, but it *is* a lot during a session where you are messing with lots of files and doing that "up" operation all the time.
Not to mention that, when directory names are long (or the path itself is long), the breadcrumbs may not fit on the window, which is a nuisance.
In summary: it's not that I hate breadcrumbs. I think they can be an useful addition. But they don't eliminate the necessity for the Up button, so I want it back (if not by default, as an option at the very least).
I personally switched to classic view when I found out that if I typed "c:\putty\putty.exe" in the Vista box, Vista didn't execute the damned program. Since I'm doing "Start - Run..." all the time, and I didn't find out how to do it with Vista's default settings, I switched to classic and it was fine.
I have an iLiad and I just love it. I had always wanted one since I knew about its existence, because it was... well, cool. But I thought it would be just a whim, something that I wouldn't really use much in practice. But I do use it, a lot. For someone who likes reading, like me, it's a better investment than a PDA or any other small gadget.
At work I use it for research papers. It's good both for reading other people's work (printing less stuff that you're going to throw away immediately - I have never liked reading PDF's on a computer screen) and for reviewing one's own (you can mark and add notes with the stylus).
At home I use it mainly to read classic books out of copyright, because I don't find the price of commercial ebooks attractive. Although reading an ebook on the iLiad is very close to the real thing, and in some senses even better, I still feel that paying for an ebook almost the same as for a physical book is wasting money. Possibly the new generations will not have this problem.
I love Java, and I find it much more pleasant to use than C/C++, but I generally agree with TFA. I have seen many people doing things like this
//build a string with 10K a's String as = ""; for ( int i = 0 ; i < 10000 ; i++ ) as += "a";
which creates 10K temporary objects to construct a single string*. This is because they started learning programming with a high abstraction level so they have no idea of what is going on behind the scenes. It's something similar to starting programming with one of these new "intelligent" IDE's such as Eclipse, which do lots of things for you so you don't have to figure them out for yourself. I think all these abstractions are great for people who already know how to program, not for beginners. You wouldn't give a calculator to 6 year old kids learning math, would you?
I personally would being with C and then jump to Java. C is not so complicated as a first language if you don't introduce all its features from day one. It was my first language and I think it was a good choice, it shows you enough low-level concepts to be able to make efficient optimised code in higher-level languages. Besides, when you later jump to a more high-level OO language you appreciate the difference and learn it with interest.
* I know modern compilers are able to optimise that automatically using a StringBuffer or StringBuilder. I just chose that (somewhat unrealistic) example for the sake of simplicity, but the same happens in other cases that aren't so easily handled by the compiler.
I'll take SETI Program over Cure for Cancer without any doubt. At the stage of the game when you can build these things, you shouldn't have big civil disorder problems if you've been playing well. And not having to build research labs is great for your economy.
For me, Daggerfall is the Best. RPG. Ever. Period. The modern sequels of the Elder Scrolls saga are also great, but don't have the overwhelming vastness of Daggerfall. With those randomly-generated dungeons you could spend hours exploring.
Unfortunately, great nonlinear RPG's are really complex games, so they tend to be somewhat buggy. The same happened to another classic, Ultima Underworld.
The most obvious flaw in that list is the lac of an RPG, IMHO. I would have added either Ultima IV (an RPG featuring a complex world where all your character's actions had some kind of influence, and monster bashing was not the only goal) or any good representative of the roguelike genre, or maybe both. And I would *definitely* drop Sensible World of Soccer.
Anyway, the list is quite good. When I ask most people what they think are the most important games of all time, they usually come up with things like Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy Whatever, GTA San Andreas and suchlike. Luckily these people don't go around creating canons.
Slashdot Mirror
Try Legerdemain, it does very much what you have described, having a very limited inventory system that forces you to take only what you need for each trip. It's single-player, though.
There is a clear correlation between game vastness/complexity and bugginess. As an old-time player of CRPG's, I have seen that almost in every occasion where someone released a CRPG of epic proportions, or otherwise groundbreaking, the game was much buggier than average (at least in its first version). Examples: Ultima VII, Ultima Underworld, Daggerfall, Fallout 1. More into the 4x genre, Master of Magic was also complex and groundbreaking and buggy as hell. All of these are cult games and widely considered not only among the best in their genre, but among the most complex, vast and nonlinear. The likes of Final Fantasy or Zelda, which are also cult games but much simpler and more linear in their design, didn't have many issues with bugginess as far as I can remember.
Do you think that is a general law? In my personal and subjetive experience (I don't have any reliable data, but neither do you in your post) it is the case for laptops, for example, but not for digital cameras. It seems pretty common for digital cameras to fail during the first year, the second, or well, pretty much any year.
This seems to be reflected on the prices of extended warranties, at least in my country the extended warranty for a laptop may add something like 10% to the price, but the extended warranty for a camera may very well add 50%.
In Spain we also have a law like that, but in practice it's totally useless: in theory you should have warranty for two years (or even three, I can't remember); but then the law says that after the first year the burden of proof of not having broken/misused the item is on the customer. Obviously it's impossible to prove that you haven't misused the item, so the law doesn't work and the companies just ignore you if you invoke it. I guess you could get a refund in court, but that's as always, we laymen don't have (or aren't willing to spend) time/resources to go to court, so people just keep buying extended warranties.
I personally try to buy things that have a warranty of at least 3 years by default, since this seems to indicate that the manufacturer is somewhat confident that it won't break. For example Thinkpad laptops have cheap models with 1 year warranty by default, and more expensive models with 3 years warranty. I buy the latter.
Thinkpad W500 here, 15.4", 1920x1200. It's perfect for a laptop monitor, in fact it fatigues my eyes much less than other laptop monitors that I have seen. I'm running Windows XP, with a custom DPI setting (150% of default size) and large fonts. Sure, there are some places (system dialogs and the likes, mainly) where you still see small letters. But the way I work with the laptop, I spend 99% of the time looking at either the browser (Opera, I have the default zoom set to 150% and you can zoom in/out with +/-, right now I'm using 190% for Slashdot), a terminal (can configure the font size without problem), an IDE/text editor (no problems either) or a PDF viewer (again, no problems). In exchange for having to do some font configuration, I get everything looking much smoother. And the resolution is awesome for gaming.
I go to 3-4 computer science conferences a year. Last year, I went to one in the US. At the customs, I got singled out for no reason and taken into a room with other 50-60 people. I had to wait for a long time while a bully guard was saying that we were not American citizens so they had the right to search our luggage and retain us for as long as necessary (no one had asked him anything, he was just saying it out of sheer pleasure, it seems). They interrogated me and didn't want to tell me why I was taken there. They wouldn't let us use our mobile phones. I spent like 3 hours there until they let me go, fortunately I was able to catch my connecting flight (to a different US city) in the last minute (since I had been told that if I missed it due to the interrogation no one would pay anything, since it was "for security".
After the experience, I decided not to go to the US anymore unless it is strictly necessary. This year I have not submitted papers to any conference taking place in the US, and I don't plan to do so in the future, unless I have a coauthor willing to go. Sorry guys, it's not that I don't like your country, in fact everyone was really nice to me once I was *inside* the US. But being treated like a piece of sh*t at the customs without even being given a reason is not a nice experience. Perhaps if you haven't gone through it you may think that it's just a minor nuisance, but it really gets to your nerves being there, waiting, unable to do anything, surrounded by heavily armed guards as if you were a criminal, receiving no explanation whatsoever for your situation, and getting nervous as the time for your next flight is approaching and they don't let you go. Even if the country is nice, it's just not worth it.
So yes, I'm sure these kinds of border controls harm tourism. I don't want to go to the US while the situation is like that, and I'm aware of more people of the same opinion.
PS: I have been to like 20 or 30 countries, including poor and rich countries, and I haven't been treated so badly in any other place, only in the US customs.
I haven't tried TFG (this is Slashdot, after all); but perhaps the thing is that they are not looking from direct input from the users to design specific ICs, but rather to gather data about how humans approach this problem so as to be able to develop new heuristics. We humans are quite good at finding decent solutions to NP-complete problems in limited time, so trying to find out which heuristics and rules-of-thumb be use to imitate them in algorithms can be an interesting approach.
Am I the only one who misunderstood the title as (Windows 7 Clean Install) (Only in Europe) rather than (Windows 7) (Clean Install Only) (in Europe)?
The thing is that, as opposed to graphics, text characters are symbols that have been explicitly designed (and evolved) to be easily distinguishable.
There are several roguelikes that give you the option of using ASCII or tiles (Nethack, Dwarf Fortress if you count that as a roguelike, Crawl, etc.) but tiles are mostly a choice for newbies who are scared of ASCII. An experienced player will always choose ASCII because it will give him a broader view of the situation. With ASCII, it is easy to have an 80x50 dungeon in full view, with every object perfectly distinguishable. To do that with tiles in most current screens, you would need 16x16 tiles and those tiles are just too small to look decent and distinguishable (see this one, for example) while an ASCII char is perfectly distinguishable at even smaller sizes than that.
So roguelikes using tiles typically just let you see a smaller part of the dungeon, which is a disadvantage, and thus any experienced player who wants to play in the best way possible will choose ASCII.
So no, it's not just a matter of being easier to code or saving CPU time. For some kinds of games, ASCII is just better.
Well, I'm one of those old school fans and I think Daggerfall was clearly the best game in the saga, and it has been getting worse since then.
Morrowind (Elder Scrolls III) is a very good game, and definitely worth buying. It still has the flexibility and freedom that made Daggerfall great, as well as a complex plot with lots of factions that you can join. However, the world design philosophy is different. The dungeons are no longer so huge and randomly generated, all the map is crafted by hand. This means that there is more attention to detail, but anyway I preferred the sheer hugeness of Daggerfall. Compared to that, Morrowind felt just small (it's still bigger than most games from other franchises, though). The character creation system was also not as deep as Daggerfall's, and we hardcore CRPG fans like our character creation systems. And the immersion, although very good, was not as good as Daggerfall because Daggerfall's soundtrack must be one of the best videogame soundtracks of all time (despite being plain MIDI). So my personal evaluation of Morrowind is: very good game, very respectable, but quite worse than Daggerfall at least for me (I'm aware that other people prefer the hand-crafted attention to detail to the vastness of the randomly-generated world, and I can understand that opinion, but I know plenty of CRPG's that have that attention to detail and Daggerfall was giving me something different, that no other CRPG had, and Morrowind abandoned).
As for Oblivion (Elder Scrolls IV), unfortunately, I think it's just crap. I'm really sad to have to say this, because I had an enormous respect for the Elder Scrolls saga, but I'm afraid they just screwed up with this one. The graphics are impressive, the world is really nice, but the game just feels bland and uninteresting. And the reason for this can pretty much be summed up in two words: level scaling. Enemies in the game are adjusting according to your level, which kills all the excitement in the game. You can go slay the hugest enemies when you're level 1 because their strength will be according to your level (and they will drop crappy items, too); and when you're high-level you have to be careful of even the lamest enemies, and even the same petty bandits you fought at the beginning will be on par with you and drop posh armour. So there is no longer the thrill of going to a red dragon lair, getting slaughtered, and wondering how you're going to defeat it... returning 20 levels later to crush all the dragons.
I must say that I'm not against level scaling in general, but I think if it is applied it must be done with moderation, and it's extremely hard to do it right. ADOM is an example of an excellent game with level scaling, but this is because it applies it in a very slight way: enemies tend to get somewhat tougher over time as they get experienced, but in the end dragons are still dragons, and rats are still rats (and anyway the thing still has its drawbacks... google uberjackal effect). In Oblivion, they applied level scaling up to a point where every location in the world has the same difficulty, and where you are never surprised by finding an out-of-depth item or monster because everything is uniform, and this makes the game feel just dull. In fact, the best way to finish the game (I haven't tried it personally, but there are numerous accounts all over the internet) is trying not to level and staying all the time at level 1, for God's sake. That's a flawed design if I've ever seen one.
I wouldn't recommend you to play Oblivion unless you're a game designer and you have a professional interest in seeing what not to do, and how to totally screw up a game that could be great by a couple of horrible design choices. It's also a curious example of a game that gets top scores in the reviews but then bores the hell out of actual players, simply because the first impressions are great (they were great for me, too) until you begin to realise that there is something terribly wrong with the gameplay, which c
I completed the game in its time, without any cheating or teleporting. And without even applying cheap character creation strategies like certain race-resistance combinations (I did choose the constraint not to wear leather and chain armour, but those are features and should be obvious by the second time you create a character). So yes, it is difficult, but definitely not impossible.
People nowadays are too spoiled and used to easy games. The thing about ancient liches and vampires was fighting a lot of fights, clearing a lot of dungeons and collecting a lots of items and spells until you were experienced and equipped enough to fight them. And once you could do that, it felt like a truly epic fight. Not like in Oblivion, where enemies are just scaled so you can fight them.
I advise everyone to play this game. In my opinion it is the best CRPG of all time (and I've played most known CRPG's since the times of Might and Magic I and Ultima I).
Breadcrumbs are nice, but they are not a valid substitute of the Up button for a reason: the Up button is always in the same place on a window, so once you get used to it you don't even have to look. You go there by instinct. On the other hand, breadcrumbs change their position (in the X axis) depending on the number and length of the names in the current path, so you have to look closely and locate them. This loses you one second or so, which doesn't seem like much, but it *is* a lot during a session where you are messing with lots of files and doing that "up" operation all the time.
Not to mention that, when directory names are long (or the path itself is long), the breadcrumbs may not fit on the window, which is a nuisance.
In summary: it's not that I hate breadcrumbs. I think they can be an useful addition. But they don't eliminate the necessity for the Up button, so I want it back (if not by default, as an option at the very least).
I personally switched to classic view when I found out that if I typed "c:\putty\putty.exe" in the Vista box, Vista didn't execute the damned program. Since I'm doing "Start - Run..." all the time, and I didn't find out how to do it with Vista's default settings, I switched to classic and it was fine.
By the way, is the Up button back in Win 7?
And if you leave all the tables and conclusions blank when you publish the results, you have sextuple blind.
Well, the first link I posted was about African monkeys. Not exactly Western society.
That is a known myth spread by feminists. I'm afraid that actually, what research has consistently and repeatedly proven is just the opposite.
A couple of links (this is what I have just found in a 30-second google search, but there is much more evidence):
http://www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/108552
http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/family/08/20/parenting.gender/index.html
Please, don't take things from granted as if they were science just because they sound good.
I have an iLiad and I just love it. I had always wanted one since I knew about its existence, because it was... well, cool. But I thought it would be just a whim, something that I wouldn't really use much in practice. But I do use it, a lot. For someone who likes reading, like me, it's a better investment than a PDA or any other small gadget.
At work I use it for research papers. It's good both for reading other people's work (printing less stuff that you're going to throw away immediately - I have never liked reading PDF's on a computer screen) and for reviewing one's own (you can mark and add notes with the stylus).
At home I use it mainly to read classic books out of copyright, because I don't find the price of commercial ebooks attractive. Although reading an ebook on the iLiad is very close to the real thing, and in some senses even better, I still feel that paying for an ebook almost the same as for a physical book is wasting money. Possibly the new generations will not have this problem.
I don't think bars can sell records in the Europe, with or without authorization. It makes no difference whether their clients are judges or not.
I love Java, and I find it much more pleasant to use than C/C++, but I generally agree with TFA. I have seen many people doing things like this
which creates 10K temporary objects to construct a single string*. This is because they started learning programming with a high abstraction level so they have no idea of what is going on behind the scenes. It's something similar to starting programming with one of these new "intelligent" IDE's such as Eclipse, which do lots of things for you so you don't have to figure them out for yourself. I think all these abstractions are great for people who already know how to program, not for beginners. You wouldn't give a calculator to 6 year old kids learning math, would you?
I personally would being with C and then jump to Java. C is not so complicated as a first language if you don't introduce all its features from day one. It was my first language and I think it was a good choice, it shows you enough low-level concepts to be able to make efficient optimised code in higher-level languages. Besides, when you later jump to a more high-level OO language you appreciate the difference and learn it with interest.
* I know modern compilers are able to optimise that automatically using a StringBuffer or StringBuilder. I just chose that (somewhat unrealistic) example for the sake of simplicity, but the same happens in other cases that aren't so easily handled by the compiler.
I'll take SETI Program over Cure for Cancer without any doubt. At the stage of the game when you can build these things, you shouldn't have big civil disorder problems if you've been playing well. And not having to build research labs is great for your economy.
For me, Daggerfall is the Best. RPG. Ever. Period. The modern sequels of the Elder Scrolls saga are also great, but don't have the overwhelming vastness of Daggerfall. With those randomly-generated dungeons you could spend hours exploring. Unfortunately, great nonlinear RPG's are really complex games, so they tend to be somewhat buggy. The same happened to another classic, Ultima Underworld.
The most obvious flaw in that list is the lac of an RPG, IMHO. I would have added either Ultima IV (an RPG featuring a complex world where all your character's actions had some kind of influence, and monster bashing was not the only goal) or any good representative of the roguelike genre, or maybe both. And I would *definitely* drop Sensible World of Soccer.
Anyway, the list is quite good. When I ask most people what they think are the most important games of all time, they usually come up with things like Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy Whatever, GTA San Andreas and suchlike. Luckily these people don't go around creating canons.