I don't want to sound like I'm trying to out-geek anybody here, but I've never really understood huge appeal of Settlers. Try out some of the really good European board games like Princes of Florence, Puerto Rico, El Grande or Agricola. YMMV, but I find they have far more strategy and less luck involved, making them much more enjoyable.
If "you" are representative of the general gaming population, then yes - the game designer does have a problem.
Thankfully, the designers of Portal didn't think that "you" were representative, and I would say experience has proved them right.
Sadly, vast numbers of game designers do agree with you. That's a shame, but I can live with it, as long as I get the occasional gem like Portal to play. I don't have time to play many games through to completion anyway, there's far too many other more interesting things to occupy my time for me to become a hardcore gamer.
If you don't have the self control to not cheat, that's your problem, not the game designer's. Leaving out puzzles is no solution to cheating.
The hard parts of action games can be bypassed using cheat codes. The hard parts of online games can be bypassed using hacks, aimbots etc.
Should we stop making games entirely, because it's possible to cheat at any of them? Perhaps we could stop writing mystery books too, because someone might read the final page first?
From reading the article (sorry about that) I get the impression the author doesn't really understand Google's AppEngine offering.
Yes, these services let you pull more CPU cycles from thin air whenever demand appears, but they can't solve the deepest problems that make it hard for applications to scale gracefully
AppEngine does exactly that (or at least tries to). In order to do so, it takes away many features that you might consider essential, and forces you to organise your code and your database in very specific ways. But if you can accept all of these limitations, and learn to work with them rather than against them, your application automatically becomes unbelievably scalable.
This is all IMHO of course, as a developer who's got into playing with AppEngine in his spare time simply because the whole thing's so damned cool. I'm no expert yet, I'm not doing this as a job, and I've no experience of any of the other services mentioned, so take my opinions with a grain of salt.
I don't get it. "Internet Explorer 7 is the best release we ever did"? They're saying that IE7 is better than Firefox 3?
I can see their general point, Firefox drives Microsoft to keep releasing improved versions of IE. Fair enough. But to say that IE7 is better than FF3, joke or not, is not only a weird admission to make, it's also blatently untrue.
white guy: "I'm sparticus!"
white guy: "I'm sparticus!"
white guy: "I'm sparticus!"
white guy: "I'm sparticus!"
white guy: "I'm sparticus!"
white guy: "I'm sparticus!"
black guy: "I'm sparticus!"
police officer: "Well you guys can all sod off, we're looking for Spartacus."
No he wasn't. You can't completely guard against the possibility of loss or theft of small items like cellphones. What you can do, however, is always store sensitive data in a securely encrypted device. Anything less is tantamount to publishing the information in the public domain.
Even as a devout fan of Radiohead's music, I'm sick of the press pushing this line. Radiohead let people download their album for free. Could someone point out where the innovation is? Thousands of bands did this before them.
What's more, people like me quite happily paid for the album because they thought this business model deserved to be supported. If the band can take all of my £10 instead of it going into the pockets of record execs, that's fine by me.
So I ended up with a crappy (128Kbit, badly encoded) version of the album, with no artwork or liner notes, which I'd paid full price for. Thom Yorke said afterwards that anyone who wanted the album would go out and buy the CD. I have no use for a piece of shiny plastic taking up space in my home, thanks all the same Thom.
When they then proceeded to charge people not once, but five times over, for the multitrack of their song and the privilege of doing them a remix, I pretty much lost faith.
I still love their music, they're one of my favourite bands of all time, but all their posturing about new business models sounds like empty rhetoric to me now.
It was the stories they told that made BioWare great. MMOs don't have stories, by definition. Sure, they have quests, but they don't have grand over-arching storylines. It's a limitation of the medium.
I fail to see how the fact that BioWare are writing an MMO is anything other than a cause for commiseration. Another great development studio has been subsumed and repurposed. Thanks EA.
This would also be a boon to anyone else concerned about civil liberties, presumably. I can't imagine many governments being particularly happy to see such a plan come to fruition.
Slashdot Mirror
Silence.
D'oh!
If you try all three approaches at once, you end up eating engineers
Mmmmm, engingeers...
It is not a gaff like...
No, it's not a gaff quite like any of those, in the sense that this one actually happened.
Snopes is your friend. Well, okay, maybe not your friend, but it's certainly a friend to pedants like me.
Dell itself did not use the term in press releases or discussions with indexed English-language media sources from 1996 to 2006
Why were they using the term prior to 1996, and why did they suddenly stop?
VIA Nano SSL benchmark
The first result in Google (hardly in-depth, but better than nothing). The second result is your comment.
I suggest we are in need of a Free Up Congress to Keep Yammering On but Ultimately Come to Understand their Naming's Terribly Stupid act.
I don't want to sound like I'm trying to out-geek anybody here, but I've never really understood huge appeal of Settlers. Try out some of the really good European board games like Princes of Florence, Puerto Rico, El Grande or Agricola. YMMV, but I find they have far more strategy and less luck involved, making them much more enjoyable.
If "you" are representative of the general gaming population, then yes - the game designer does have a problem.
Thankfully, the designers of Portal didn't think that "you" were representative, and I would say experience has proved them right.
Sadly, vast numbers of game designers do agree with you. That's a shame, but I can live with it, as long as I get the occasional gem like Portal to play. I don't have time to play many games through to completion anyway, there's far too many other more interesting things to occupy my time for me to become a hardcore gamer.
If you don't have the self control to not cheat, that's your problem, not the game designer's. Leaving out puzzles is no solution to cheating.
The hard parts of action games can be bypassed using cheat codes. The hard parts of online games can be bypassed using hacks, aimbots etc.
Should we stop making games entirely, because it's possible to cheat at any of them? Perhaps we could stop writing mystery books too, because someone might read the final page first?
It's hard to overstate his satisfaction.
A fucking parrot can do that.
What sort of parrot?
From reading the article (sorry about that) I get the impression the author doesn't really understand Google's AppEngine offering.
Yes, these services let you pull more CPU cycles from thin air whenever demand appears, but they can't solve the deepest problems that make it hard for applications to scale gracefully
AppEngine does exactly that (or at least tries to). In order to do so, it takes away many features that you might consider essential, and forces you to organise your code and your database in very specific ways. But if you can accept all of these limitations, and learn to work with them rather than against them, your application automatically becomes unbelievably scalable.
This is all IMHO of course, as a developer who's got into playing with AppEngine in his spare time simply because the whole thing's so damned cool. I'm no expert yet, I'm not doing this as a job, and I've no experience of any of the other services mentioned, so take my opinions with a grain of salt.
Yeah, but not quite to the extent you've had one for the past seven years.
I don't get it. "Internet Explorer 7 is the best release we ever did"? They're saying that IE7 is better than Firefox 3?
I can see their general point, Firefox drives Microsoft to keep releasing improved versions of IE. Fair enough. But to say that IE7 is better than FF3, joke or not, is not only a weird admission to make, it's also blatently untrue.
Looks to me like you should take up Python. :)
white guy: "I'm sparticus!"
white guy: "I'm sparticus!"
white guy: "I'm sparticus!"
white guy: "I'm sparticus!"
white guy: "I'm sparticus!"
white guy: "I'm sparticus!"
black guy: "I'm sparticus!"
police officer: "Well you guys can all sod off, we're looking for Spartacus."
he was foolish to have it stolen so obviously
No he wasn't. You can't completely guard against the possibility of loss or theft of small items like cellphones. What you can do, however, is always store sensitive data in a securely encrypted device. Anything less is tantamount to publishing the information in the public domain.
Radiohead is once again pushing forward
Even as a devout fan of Radiohead's music, I'm sick of the press pushing this line. Radiohead let people download their album for free. Could someone point out where the innovation is? Thousands of bands did this before them.
What's more, people like me quite happily paid for the album because they thought this business model deserved to be supported. If the band can take all of my £10 instead of it going into the pockets of record execs, that's fine by me.
So I ended up with a crappy (128Kbit, badly encoded) version of the album, with no artwork or liner notes, which I'd paid full price for. Thom Yorke said afterwards that anyone who wanted the album would go out and buy the CD. I have no use for a piece of shiny plastic taking up space in my home, thanks all the same Thom.
When they then proceeded to charge people not once, but five times over, for the multitrack of their song and the privilege of doing them a remix, I pretty much lost faith.
I still love their music, they're one of my favourite bands of all time, but all their posturing about new business models sounds like empty rhetoric to me now.
It was the stories they told that made BioWare great. MMOs don't have stories, by definition. Sure, they have quests, but they don't have grand over-arching storylines. It's a limitation of the medium.
I fail to see how the fact that BioWare are writing an MMO is anything other than a cause for commiseration. Another great development studio has been subsumed and repurposed. Thanks EA.
Moderated parent -1, Too Informative.
This would also be a boon to anyone else concerned about civil liberties, presumably. I can't imagine many governments being particularly happy to see such a plan come to fruition.
At this point, the midget comes out of the closet...
I seem to remember enjoying reading pretty much all sci-fi when I was a kid. But some more specific "for kids" stuff that stuck in my memory is: -
The Men From P.I.G. and R.O.B.O.T. - Harry Harrison
Empty World - John Christopher
A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair - Nicholas Fisk
And, although it's more fantasy than sci-fi, I seem to remember enjoying pretty much everything by Dianne Wynne Jones.