I think it was pretty clear from the context that he means the Constitution was written in the time before one armed individual could cause a massacre, not that massacres didn't exist prior to the invention of the machine gun.
Let's assume that in fact this statistic is accurate (I know, I know, a rather absurd assumption.) There's a statistic that MUST precede this that is conveniently absent: how many gamers know what DRM is? It's easy to get lost in the echo chamber here on/. and assume that DRM is as well known as Santa Claus, but among non-techie gamers it's just so much alphabet soup.
Why do so many of these non-tech people not care about DRM? I suspect two things are going on here.
1) They can't tell a DRM-related issue from any old computer problem. Pretty self-explanatory really.
2) Not enough time has passed yet. If a game gives you five installs, you are almost certainly not going to use them all at once. This ridiculous finite install scheme is still very new, let's say eighteen months old (I don't remember anything big using this prior to Bioshock, and that was just over a year ago, but I'll give it a bit of slack). For the non-hobbyist gamer, who doesn't upgrade components but rather just buys a whole new rig every three years or so, the DRM is still invisible outside of actual software problems. Uninformed hobbyists (who didn't know about the DRM) will likely start hitting these limits within a year or two, but the majority of the market will start hitting their install limits later than that, probably more akin to seven to ten years (assuming the activation servers remain online).
In other words, this type of DRM will remain "unobtrusive" for the masses just long enough for the jerks responsible for it to make their mint and jump ship. Seems awfully convenient to me. I guess I'm going to either have to play console versions of these games if I want to own them properly or forgo them altogether. It's a shame since I was really looking forward to Red Alert 3 too.
Let's play a game. I'm going to list the ending to all of Blizzard's games (as I remember them, anybody chime in if I miss something), then you're going to tell me how all (hell, even most) of these are cliffhangers.
Obviously, spoilers ahead.
War1: The Orcs destroy Stormwind Keep and kill King Wrynn War2: The Humans destroy the Orcish headquarters (the name escapes me at the moment, was it Blackrock again?) and kill Warchief Doomhammer War2x: The Humans close the Dark Portal, cutting off the Orcs' ability to reinforce and effectively ending the Second War War3: Archimonde is defeated by the combined forces of the Horde, Alliance, and Sentinels at the cost of the World Tree War3x: Arthas defeats Illidan in single combat and ascends to become the Lich King World of Warcraft: Your wife leaves you and your house is repossessed (kidding, kidding! There is no ending though)
Diablo: Diablo is defeated, the PC sticks the Soulstone in his head to contain Diablo Diablo 2: Diablo is defeated again Diablo 2x: Baal is defeated, the Worldstone shatters
Starcraft: A Protoss carrier crashes into the Overmind, destroying both Brood War: Kerrigan ascends to become Queen of the Zerg, the UED fleet is destroyed as it tries to limp away
So far as I can tell, the only thing that approaches a cliffhanger in that list is the original Diablo, and even that's uncertain since it isn't as though Diablo is going to possess the PC the moment after we get cut off. Are you suggesting that each game has unresolved plot threads that leave grounds for a sequel? I certainly wouldn't argue with that, although I don't see why that's a problem.
To get back on topic, I read this as them saying that Starcraft 2 will have 2 expansion packs planned from the start. As someone who cares much more about the 1p content than the multiplayer game, this is great news since more campaigns are always welcome.
The protagonists each wear what is essentially the same generic armorsuit that sci-fi characters have been wearing for years, if not decades.
Same problem with your assertion that "both games are about fighting aliens." Well, yeah. So are a ton of other games, many of which predate Half-Life. I don't see anything original about that idea at all.
The Flood and the Headcrabs are pretty much the only similar enemies that come to mind, and even then it's not at all an original idea. Both are different takes on an old sci-fi staple, except that the enemies don't act at all the same (headcrab zombies just lurch toward you and try to claw you to death, the Flood will also use guns against you or those weird suicide bombers). This is not even considering the fact that both games have entire stables of additional adversaries that are nothing alike.
What about all the other differences I pointed out? It still seems to me that this is a really thin argument.
I can think of a lot of legitimate complaints you can level against Halo, not least of which is that it's not very original, but borrowing liberally from Half-Life of all things? I don't see it. Quite the contrary, the two games are so different that my friends can be readily divided into the pro-Halo camp and the pro-Half-Life camp, neither of which much likes the other's game. Let's compare the first game of each series.
The plot?. Halo has you playing a super-powered space marine, Half-Life has you playing a scientist in some sort of magic hazard suit. Halo is part of a long war, Half-Life happens moments after an experiment goes wrong and releases bestial alien creatures into Freeman's dimension. Halo's aliens are part of a spectacularly advanced and highly religious culture, Half-Life's aliens appear to be little more than beasts for much of the game. Halo's marines try (in vain) to help you, Half-Life's marines try to kill you. Halo's in the future on a ring world out in space, Half-Life is in the present (well, I guess the past now) in a secret research lab in the United States.
Enemies? Halo pits you against the Covenant, a highly organized military force armed to the teeth with rockin' plasma weaponry. Half-Life has you dealing with packs of wild alien monsters, many of which aren't at all sentient, and which seem to have no sense of military tactics nor any group cohesion. Perhaps you're trying to argue that the Flood = headcrabs + zombies? I guess they're rather similar, but you can't seriously be suggesting that Half-Life invented the headcrab concept.
Gameplay mechanics? Halo gives you an endlessly regenerating energy shield to keep you in the fight. Half-Life uses the traditional health pack system. The Chief can carry two weapons at a time, whereas Freeman has access to a bag of holding and totes around what, nine guns at a time? Halo has a independent melee and grenade buttons, in Half-Life both of those are part of the normal weapon list and you have to switch to them. Halo has your standard gameplay pausing cutscenes while Half-Life never leaves Freeman's perspective. Halo has ten independent stages while Half-Life seamlessly moves from one area to the next with just a brief line of white text to tell you that you're in a new "stage."
The similarities that come to mind are things that vastly predate both of them, like the aforementioned headcrabs. So, care to elaborate? They seem like two very different games to me.
Now this is a fun thought experiment. I'll use the 360 controller since I'm not very familiar with the PS3 controller.
We've got your four basic face buttons (A, B, X, Y), so you could map those to four actions. The 360 has four shoulders (two buttons, two triggers), so treating each of those as a basic toggle would allow you access to sixteen more buttons. That's twenty.
Full disclaimer, my MMO experience is limited to about three weeks of playing WoW (three actual weeks of playing 0-4 hours a day, not hundreds of hours). As such, the next part might be completely insane.
What if we treat combinations of the shoulders as additional toggles? For example, holding down any combination of two shoulders would be toggles five through ten, holding down combinations of three shoulders would be toggles eleven through fourteen, and holding down all shoulders would be toggle fifteen. 4(15 + 1) = 64 "buttons" you could use for abilities using just those eight actual buttons. If you wanted to include the d-pad or make multiple taps of the shoulder buttons call up different bars you could potentially get a silly number of "buttons".
The 360 also has a chatpad attachment that gives you a mini-QWERTY setup on the bottom of your controller, if my idea is too absurd.
This of course doesn't mean there aren't problems. On the one hand, the ergonomics would initially be maddening to people not used to heavy shoulder use. I don't think it's impossible though as I played through Devil May Cry 4 recently holding down at least two shoulders while rapidly pressing a third. This is not even considering that DMC4 is an outrageously difficult and complicated reflx-based action game. The average MMORPG might as well be turn-based by comparison. I think I'd be more worried about the memorization problems involved with that many skill bars, but again considering just how many keyboard hotkeys dedicated players use perhaps that's not insurmountable either.
There may well be obstacles that I'm unaware of, but I think it would be vastly more possible to make such a game than people seem to believe. It would just require a lot of thought and development time to get it right. Maybe MMO dev teams just need some more of the latter to apply the former.
Way back when, I played the hell out of Warcraft. The original one, Orcs & Humans, where you had to left-click twice to do anything and could only select four units at a time. Still a great time, as are War2, War2x, War3, and War3x. I fell in love with the universe at some point, probably the point where I realized that sheep exploded when you clicked on them too much. There was a bizarre personality that other games seemed to lack, and it was all entwined with wonderfully polished gameplay.
I've dabbled a bit in WoW, but am not sure I'm keen enough on it to play it all the way to see the end. With that in mind, what I'd like to know from somebody who's played lots of WoW is where the hell the story goes after this.
War3x set up a few major antagonists for the series' future. Arthas and Illidan were the major baddies, along with some minor baddies like Kael'thas' Blood Elves and Vashj's Naga. The latter two, to my limited knowledge, can already be killed in WoW. The Burning Crusade allows you to kill Illidan and now Wrath of the Lich King will go up to freakin' Arthas himself as a boss.
I'm admittedly a bit bitter that I feel like huge chunks of story are being told in a game that I don't really enjoy that much, but I can get over that. What I'm more curious about is who, if anyone, they're setting up for a theoretical War4 (and gods help them if there isn't a War4!). The WoW people are about to kill off the last major antagonist that I'm familiar with, so who's going to step up next? Or is it just going to go back to Alliance v. Horde (which is apparently now the Forsaken too)? Another demonic invasion, assuming you guys haven't already worked your way up the Burning Legion's chain of command? Inquiring minds want to know!
As someone who's been watching the Daily Show since the Kilborn days, I suggest you check the online archives (which go back to the Clinton years). The Daily Show's real targets are A) people who make fools of themselves in public and B) the mass media's poor attempts to cover actual news with any depth.
The reason they've been hitting the Republicans more in recent years is that they've been the party in power, and have had all the decision-making power and media spotlight. Since the Democrats took Congress in 2006, the Daily Show's constantly berated them for being ineffectual and failing to provide any of the reform they campaigned on (small surprise to anyone who pays attention, I know) while asking for peoples' votes again.
He's going to attempt to block the release of the game unless something is done about this? Oh no! They'd better remove it immediately then. Surely that will be the end of this.
It's not like Mr. Thompson has a preexisting bias against these folks and fully intends to try to block release of this game, using any excuse regardless of how flimsy it might be. No, I'm certain that if they were to take this out or change it then Mr. Thompson would just leave them alone and let them release their game without any comment.
I think the best scare I've had in a very long time comes from Bioshock. (This is intentionally vague to avoid spoilers, so don't worry)
Scattered throughout the game world are various containers, desks, cabinets, etc that all have goodies in them. On top of that, there are audio diaries throughout the world that contain characters who fill in the backstory about what's going on. These combine to give you strong motivation to search high and low since you really want to listen to subsequent entries to see how thing unfold and what happens to these people.
The most common enemies in this game are bizarre folks known as Splicers. For much of the game they're a major threat if they close in on you since they can take a hefty amount of lead to finish without any sorts of upgrades. They're also completely and utterly mad, cackling and gibbering like lunatics. This means that when you pick up an audio diary you'll often stand still to listen to it so you can clearly hear the whole thing.
At a point in the game (I won't say when, part of the fun is that you don't know it's coming) you'll enter a foggy area. I look around and check that the area's clear of threats, then I look for loot. Off in a corner is a desk with an audio diary on it. I grab it and listen to the whole thing. When I turn around, there's a Splicer standing there. No, not at the end of the hallway - six inches from your face, grinning like a demon but otherwise standing there silently. I promptly unloaded a whole clip into it for good measure, but had to stop there for the night. Oh, this is even more fun when it's 1 AM and you're playing alone in a dark room. Not to mention the Splicer is dressed thematically for the area which makes him even more terrifying since this is one of the darker-themed areas of the game.
There's an area beyond this that contains more scares beyond that even, but I can't think of a way to describe it without spoilers. Most of the game isn't about these sorts of ZOMG KILL IT ARGH! type scares, but rather the creepy ambiance. Still, I can't remember the last movie that kept me up because it instilled that same sense of fear after setting you up to think you had found a brief respite.
Slashdot Mirror
So in other words, may the best objectivist win ; )
I think it was pretty clear from the context that he means the Constitution was written in the time before one armed individual could cause a massacre, not that massacres didn't exist prior to the invention of the machine gun.
Let's assume that in fact this statistic is accurate (I know, I know, a rather absurd assumption.) There's a statistic that MUST precede this that is conveniently absent: how many gamers know what DRM is? It's easy to get lost in the echo chamber here on /. and assume that DRM is as well known as Santa Claus, but among non-techie gamers it's just so much alphabet soup.
Why do so many of these non-tech people not care about DRM? I suspect two things are going on here.
1) They can't tell a DRM-related issue from any old computer problem. Pretty self-explanatory really.
2) Not enough time has passed yet. If a game gives you five installs, you are almost certainly not going to use them all at once. This ridiculous finite install scheme is still very new, let's say eighteen months old (I don't remember anything big using this prior to Bioshock, and that was just over a year ago, but I'll give it a bit of slack). For the non-hobbyist gamer, who doesn't upgrade components but rather just buys a whole new rig every three years or so, the DRM is still invisible outside of actual software problems. Uninformed hobbyists (who didn't know about the DRM) will likely start hitting these limits within a year or two, but the majority of the market will start hitting their install limits later than that, probably more akin to seven to ten years (assuming the activation servers remain online).
In other words, this type of DRM will remain "unobtrusive" for the masses just long enough for the jerks responsible for it to make their mint and jump ship. Seems awfully convenient to me. I guess I'm going to either have to play console versions of these games if I want to own them properly or forgo them altogether. It's a shame since I was really looking forward to Red Alert 3 too.
Let's play a game. I'm going to list the ending to all of Blizzard's games (as I remember them, anybody chime in if I miss something), then you're going to tell me how all (hell, even most) of these are cliffhangers.
Obviously, spoilers ahead.
War1: The Orcs destroy Stormwind Keep and kill King Wrynn
War2: The Humans destroy the Orcish headquarters (the name escapes me at the moment, was it Blackrock again?) and kill Warchief Doomhammer
War2x: The Humans close the Dark Portal, cutting off the Orcs' ability to reinforce and effectively ending the Second War
War3: Archimonde is defeated by the combined forces of the Horde, Alliance, and Sentinels at the cost of the World Tree
War3x: Arthas defeats Illidan in single combat and ascends to become the Lich King
World of Warcraft: Your wife leaves you and your house is repossessed (kidding, kidding! There is no ending though)
Diablo: Diablo is defeated, the PC sticks the Soulstone in his head to contain Diablo
Diablo 2: Diablo is defeated again
Diablo 2x: Baal is defeated, the Worldstone shatters
Starcraft: A Protoss carrier crashes into the Overmind, destroying both
Brood War: Kerrigan ascends to become Queen of the Zerg, the UED fleet is destroyed as it tries to limp away
So far as I can tell, the only thing that approaches a cliffhanger in that list is the original Diablo, and even that's uncertain since it isn't as though Diablo is going to possess the PC the moment after we get cut off. Are you suggesting that each game has unresolved plot threads that leave grounds for a sequel? I certainly wouldn't argue with that, although I don't see why that's a problem.
To get back on topic, I read this as them saying that Starcraft 2 will have 2 expansion packs planned from the start. As someone who cares much more about the 1p content than the multiplayer game, this is great news since more campaigns are always welcome.
The protagonists each wear what is essentially the same generic armorsuit that sci-fi characters have been wearing for years, if not decades.
Same problem with your assertion that "both games are about fighting aliens." Well, yeah. So are a ton of other games, many of which predate Half-Life. I don't see anything original about that idea at all.
The Flood and the Headcrabs are pretty much the only similar enemies that come to mind, and even then it's not at all an original idea. Both are different takes on an old sci-fi staple, except that the enemies don't act at all the same (headcrab zombies just lurch toward you and try to claw you to death, the Flood will also use guns against you or those weird suicide bombers). This is not even considering the fact that both games have entire stables of additional adversaries that are nothing alike.
What about all the other differences I pointed out? It still seems to me that this is a really thin argument.
I can think of a lot of legitimate complaints you can level against Halo, not least of which is that it's not very original, but borrowing liberally from Half-Life of all things? I don't see it. Quite the contrary, the two games are so different that my friends can be readily divided into the pro-Halo camp and the pro-Half-Life camp, neither of which much likes the other's game. Let's compare the first game of each series.
The plot?. Halo has you playing a super-powered space marine, Half-Life has you playing a scientist in some sort of magic hazard suit. Halo is part of a long war, Half-Life happens moments after an experiment goes wrong and releases bestial alien creatures into Freeman's dimension. Halo's aliens are part of a spectacularly advanced and highly religious culture, Half-Life's aliens appear to be little more than beasts for much of the game. Halo's marines try (in vain) to help you, Half-Life's marines try to kill you. Halo's in the future on a ring world out in space, Half-Life is in the present (well, I guess the past now) in a secret research lab in the United States.
Enemies? Halo pits you against the Covenant, a highly organized military force armed to the teeth with rockin' plasma weaponry. Half-Life has you dealing with packs of wild alien monsters, many of which aren't at all sentient, and which seem to have no sense of military tactics nor any group cohesion. Perhaps you're trying to argue that the Flood = headcrabs + zombies? I guess they're rather similar, but you can't seriously be suggesting that Half-Life invented the headcrab concept.
Gameplay mechanics? Halo gives you an endlessly regenerating energy shield to keep you in the fight. Half-Life uses the traditional health pack system. The Chief can carry two weapons at a time, whereas Freeman has access to a bag of holding and totes around what, nine guns at a time? Halo has a independent melee and grenade buttons, in Half-Life both of those are part of the normal weapon list and you have to switch to them. Halo has your standard gameplay pausing cutscenes while Half-Life never leaves Freeman's perspective. Halo has ten independent stages while Half-Life seamlessly moves from one area to the next with just a brief line of white text to tell you that you're in a new "stage."
The similarities that come to mind are things that vastly predate both of them, like the aforementioned headcrabs. So, care to elaborate? They seem like two very different games to me.
Now this is a fun thought experiment. I'll use the 360 controller since I'm not very familiar with the PS3 controller.
We've got your four basic face buttons (A, B, X, Y), so you could map those to four actions. The 360 has four shoulders (two buttons, two triggers), so treating each of those as a basic toggle would allow you access to sixteen more buttons. That's twenty.
Full disclaimer, my MMO experience is limited to about three weeks of playing WoW (three actual weeks of playing 0-4 hours a day, not hundreds of hours). As such, the next part might be completely insane.
What if we treat combinations of the shoulders as additional toggles? For example, holding down any combination of two shoulders would be toggles five through ten, holding down combinations of three shoulders would be toggles eleven through fourteen, and holding down all shoulders would be toggle fifteen. 4(15 + 1) = 64 "buttons" you could use for abilities using just those eight actual buttons. If you wanted to include the d-pad or make multiple taps of the shoulder buttons call up different bars you could potentially get a silly number of "buttons".
The 360 also has a chatpad attachment that gives you a mini-QWERTY setup on the bottom of your controller, if my idea is too absurd.
This of course doesn't mean there aren't problems. On the one hand, the ergonomics would initially be maddening to people not used to heavy shoulder use. I don't think it's impossible though as I played through Devil May Cry 4 recently holding down at least two shoulders while rapidly pressing a third. This is not even considering that DMC4 is an outrageously difficult and complicated reflx-based action game. The average MMORPG might as well be turn-based by comparison. I think I'd be more worried about the memorization problems involved with that many skill bars, but again considering just how many keyboard hotkeys dedicated players use perhaps that's not insurmountable either.
There may well be obstacles that I'm unaware of, but I think it would be vastly more possible to make such a game than people seem to believe. It would just require a lot of thought and development time to get it right. Maybe MMO dev teams just need some more of the latter to apply the former.
Way back when, I played the hell out of Warcraft. The original one, Orcs & Humans, where you had to left-click twice to do anything and could only select four units at a time. Still a great time, as are War2, War2x, War3, and War3x. I fell in love with the universe at some point, probably the point where I realized that sheep exploded when you clicked on them too much. There was a bizarre personality that other games seemed to lack, and it was all entwined with wonderfully polished gameplay.
I've dabbled a bit in WoW, but am not sure I'm keen enough on it to play it all the way to see the end. With that in mind, what I'd like to know from somebody who's played lots of WoW is where the hell the story goes after this.
War3x set up a few major antagonists for the series' future. Arthas and Illidan were the major baddies, along with some minor baddies like Kael'thas' Blood Elves and Vashj's Naga. The latter two, to my limited knowledge, can already be killed in WoW. The Burning Crusade allows you to kill Illidan and now Wrath of the Lich King will go up to freakin' Arthas himself as a boss.
I'm admittedly a bit bitter that I feel like huge chunks of story are being told in a game that I don't really enjoy that much, but I can get over that. What I'm more curious about is who, if anyone, they're setting up for a theoretical War4 (and gods help them if there isn't a War4!). The WoW people are about to kill off the last major antagonist that I'm familiar with, so who's going to step up next? Or is it just going to go back to Alliance v. Horde (which is apparently now the Forsaken too)? Another demonic invasion, assuming you guys haven't already worked your way up the Burning Legion's chain of command? Inquiring minds want to know!
As someone who's been watching the Daily Show since the Kilborn days, I suggest you check the online archives (which go back to the Clinton years). The Daily Show's real targets are A) people who make fools of themselves in public and B) the mass media's poor attempts to cover actual news with any depth.
The reason they've been hitting the Republicans more in recent years is that they've been the party in power, and have had all the decision-making power and media spotlight. Since the Democrats took Congress in 2006, the Daily Show's constantly berated them for being ineffectual and failing to provide any of the reform they campaigned on (small surprise to anyone who pays attention, I know) while asking for peoples' votes again.
He's going to attempt to block the release of the game unless something is done about this? Oh no! They'd better remove it immediately then. Surely that will be the end of this.
It's not like Mr. Thompson has a preexisting bias against these folks and fully intends to try to block release of this game, using any excuse regardless of how flimsy it might be. No, I'm certain that if they were to take this out or change it then Mr. Thompson would just leave them alone and let them release their game without any comment.
I think the best scare I've had in a very long time comes from Bioshock. (This is intentionally vague to avoid spoilers, so don't worry)
Scattered throughout the game world are various containers, desks, cabinets, etc that all have goodies in them. On top of that, there are audio diaries throughout the world that contain characters who fill in the backstory about what's going on. These combine to give you strong motivation to search high and low since you really want to listen to subsequent entries to see how thing unfold and what happens to these people.
The most common enemies in this game are bizarre folks known as Splicers. For much of the game they're a major threat if they close in on you since they can take a hefty amount of lead to finish without any sorts of upgrades. They're also completely and utterly mad, cackling and gibbering like lunatics. This means that when you pick up an audio diary you'll often stand still to listen to it so you can clearly hear the whole thing.
At a point in the game (I won't say when, part of the fun is that you don't know it's coming) you'll enter a foggy area. I look around and check that the area's clear of threats, then I look for loot. Off in a corner is a desk with an audio diary on it. I grab it and listen to the whole thing. When I turn around, there's a Splicer standing there. No, not at the end of the hallway - six inches from your face, grinning like a demon but otherwise standing there silently. I promptly unloaded a whole clip into it for good measure, but had to stop there for the night. Oh, this is even more fun when it's 1 AM and you're playing alone in a dark room. Not to mention the Splicer is dressed thematically for the area which makes him even more terrifying since this is one of the darker-themed areas of the game.
There's an area beyond this that contains more scares beyond that even, but I can't think of a way to describe it without spoilers. Most of the game isn't about these sorts of ZOMG KILL IT ARGH! type scares, but rather the creepy ambiance. Still, I can't remember the last movie that kept me up because it instilled that same sense of fear after setting you up to think you had found a brief respite.