Other instances where playing against a robot opponent will make you consider chaning your day job:
1) You're the last man between him and the keeper, and you've got to make the tackle. You just know the bastard programmer's going to have him step on your balls.
2) Wall in front of a robot free kick. You think that he's calculating where to hit a 200mph ball so it ricochets off you and in.
3) Goalie during a penalty shot.
4) In the box for a robot corner kick. Hmm...lots of metal trying to get to a ball you're trying to get to...with metal elbows...
5) The road team playing in the robot team's home stadium...and all the drunk robot hooligans are in force.
I think I'll keep my organic and non-organic players separate. The robots would have a far easier time winning than Big Blue ever did.
Precisely...yeah right. You think Microsoft's going to be any better at making cheat-proof servers than the company who wrote the game?
More than likely, Microsoft just wants to extract more cash for the games.
As far as frequent backups go, they will NOT be listening to user's requests. No game with a HUGE amount of data is going to listen to ONE customer who gets a "cheater" and needs to restore his data from the previous day, week, whatever. Blizzard runs backups, and the only time they use them is once they've done something and horribly screwed the game up.
There isn't any real way to stop all cheating. I don't think cheating stops people from playing as much as they think. Cheating pisses people off yes, but what about all the flaws that are in the games as they are designed? People camping out spots where monsters respawn and what-not? That's no fun. Less cheating isn't going to make that aspect of the game any better.
Cheaters make games suck...but people will still play a good game with cheaters on it. I played Counter-Strike well after all the cheats starting coming out. Eventually, we'd find a place where there weren't cheaters and have a good time. I didn't bother trying to do that with Tribes 2, even though there weren't any cheaters there. If the game's GOOD people will find a community of other players they can play with and they'll have an enjoyable time. If it isn't, they won't, cheating or no cheating.
Yeah, they did. I noticed a couple DVDs wouldn't play, but I just set the ol' Apex back to region 1, and it played just fine.
Speaking of which, Apex is from Taiwan, I don't see why they wouldn't region-free the damn things, they've been doing it all this time anyway.
Combine this with the fact that if a movie is released anywhere in the world and within 30 days had not been officially releaed in Taiwan, the copyrights don't apply there, and you've got a pretty royal ass-fucking lining up for the MPAA.
Not shoot a lot in paintball? Only if you're one of the good players. On "Speedball" and "Hyperball" matches though, you just go through a lot of paint no matter how good you are.
I play about every other month. Most players burn through a lot of balls...probably about a hopper of 200+ per map.
Besides, I've seen some players with "Gamer Physique" out on the courses, and they generally last 2-3 maps, max. I think this is going to be much better for cops than it will be for gamers. Judging by the lot of people at E3, most gamers can't even stay MOVING for very long, much less attempting to dodge, and pick up the rocket launcher again.
Gattaca is on a list of 3 movies for me...movies I've fallen asleep watching. The other 2 are Cabin Boy and the live action version of Wicked City.
Gattaca was boring, and moreover, thoroughly predictable, and not as plausible as the reviewer thinks. Think of how hard it is for you to EAT without leaving crumbs. No understand that there is absolutely NO WAY you'd be able to keep every stray hair, every fingerprint, every fleck of dried skin in check.
All those ways he "fooled" the tests were hokey. A simple X-Ray on the guy would his "discreet" heightening, and they'd notice the sleight of hand after oh, say the first week, especially considering how suspicious looking Ethan Hawke always managed to make himself.
Hell, we can't even fully get rid of dandruff.
And you knew how the stupid movie was going to end after you find out about him & his brother swimming, and then you discover that his brother's working the case...movie's over right there. I think that's at about the point I dozed off. Woke up to see him getting on the shuttle. Yay. The fact that apartments in the movie are located on my brother's college campus couldn't make the movie any more interesting.
It's great that it wasn't a movie chock full of explosions and all. But it also was devoid of any drama or excitement.
And everyone knew "Gattaca" was a reference to DNA nucleotides. But you could make a movie called "Gat-A-Tat-Tatta" about genetically engineered super soldiers and it would have the same reference.
Because as we all know, 2nd place is the 1st loser.
I've been saying since E3 and TGS last year that the X-Box was going to end up finishing 3rd this year, maybe even 4th if the GBA was categorized as a console. Why? It's got no game(s)!
I looked at the lineup at the XBox booths at both venues and noticed no originality at all. All the games they had were either sequels lifted from other consoles, racing games, really pathetic fighting games, or Halo.
While GameCube had a pathetic start out of the gate, its lower price, and titles which actually had a following (I know several people who picked up a GC to play Resident Evil...how many people picked up an XBox to get Munch's?) Microsoft is hurting in a big way this round.
The gaming industry has never been able to support 3 consoles. Look at all the times in history when there was any console besides Sony and Nintendo. They died off. Then when Sony entered, they beat Sony and Nintendo at their own game, Nintendo not stepping up to CD fast enough, Sega not getting the premier titles.
Then the DC died off. It was inenvitable. The majority of the gaming populace is either high school or college students. No college student is going to be happy about forking out $1,000 in just consoles and controllers in the span of a year. No parent's going to plunk down that same amount of money at Christmastime.
With the initial deployment of 250,000 units still not being sold out in stores in Japan (you can still buy the "limited edition" units in stores.) and still no good games looming on the horizon, Microsoft may as well pack it in this round, and start preparing to launch its next-generation Home PC...oh I mean coffee table...sorry, game console. Microsoft HAS to finish at least 2nd with XBox 2, or it's over.
Yeah, how are they going to gain experience? Like, let's say you were a journalist, would you just go around posting on fliers to gain experience?
Then slowly, as you built up a rapport with the community, your fliers would start to look better, and be in more visible positions...Hey wait a second...
They must be incredibly pissed at Cox Cable, who preempt their commercials to run their OWN commercials, which basically amounts to stealing and reselling their commercials. Don't hear them bitching about that, though. Pssh...the last thing I need is to hear another multi-billion dollar company whining. Go back to cooking your books, you bastards.
Well, I went to see the digital screening of Final Fantasy at the Spectrum in Irvine. The damn thing crashed 3/4ths of the way through the previews, and I had to see the trailer for "Max Keeble's Big Move" twice.
I don't know if I'll catch Episode 2 in digital. It may be slightly better quality, but I think it'll definitely be offset by the lower quality air that the fools camping in line are ruining.
Man...I don't know about which part of the country you live in, but here in the decent parts, we don't do any frying of bread, and we haven't for oh, say, thousands of years.
Re:1.1 billion CD's doesn't mean 1.1 BLN copies.
on
The Culture of CD Burning
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Exactly...what about all the companies that use CD-Rs as the lifeblood of their company? Game companies and software development houses burning the new builds. People backing up their HDs as they prepare to format, and other legitimate data storage. Decorative purposes, the list goes on. (I seriously had a friend who used them as highly reflective curtains.)
Next they're going to start bitching about how many gigs of hard drive space are being sold. Hillary's starting to become the new blink tag of the internet. People are just getting far too tired of her played out, immature antics. BTW, the biggest music "thieves"...people who work in the music industry. Mostly the interns they hire from local colleges.
I wouldn't care if someone copied my paper anyway. Hell, I'd take someone's SATs for them. Anyone else frightened by Hillary Rosen talking to young people?
How the hell were any of those snippets considered "poetry"?! I'll let haiku go because it has a highly restricted form, but it ain't a poem if it doesn't rhyme...you're just not trying at that point. I mean, heck most poetry is just BS anyway...if you're not going to even try to make it rhyme, I'll just read the nutritional info on my cereal box.
I know, seriously. I mean, you have a game where you have to finish the level with all 3 characters...but they get STUCK ALL THE TIME! How can you not notice?!
I mean, I understand that bug in Final Fantasy 8, where the testers had gotten "too good" over there, and didn't test one part of the game with a timer...if you failed, it hosed your saves...but nobody in the testing department bothered to fail that section...
This is totally different...every tester in the room must have been pulling their hair out or asking to get their names removed from the game...
Someone has been going around in my area (Irvine, CA) and posting these bright neon stickers that say "SCAM" over the last 4 digits of the phone number, or breaking off the bottom 4 digits. If I ever see them defacing the signs, I'll stop my car and shake their hand.
My favorite example of a bough review coming back to bite the company who wrote it in the ass is PC Gamer's review of Outpost.
When the game was first reviewed, the game got an Editor's Award, or whatever PC Gamer gives paid advertisers. Then, 3 years later when they list their worst games of all time, which game is #1?
Being a game reviewer is a WAY easier job than being a game tester. If you ever think different, imagine a job consisting of 2 days at least where you have to run through your least favorite part of your favorite game, making sure all the commas are in the right place, and that the word you thought was spelled wrong that flashed by in the upper left corner of the screen for a 1/2 was actually spelled wrong...with no save areas for the next 15 minutes.
Or better yet, take a game where you've beaten the crap out of a game...I mean, totally played it to death, as part of your entertainment life. Then you get hired by a company to do the expansion pack, and the first thing you have to do is look through the previous version of the game for bugs...that the dev team won't fix now.
The biggest problem with being a game tester is that the clueless people above you, you know, the Marketing types responsible for shipping your games out ahead of their completion, think the same thing, that you're just in there playing games. Most companies exclude QA from the perks, respect, and courtesy provided to even the temporary secretary.
QA is essentially a thankless job, a job that every one out there playing a game thinks they can do better than you. Take Fallout 2, for example. Remember how buggy that game was? How it would crash right off, and the back half of the car would travel with you wherever you went? Well on the Message Boards who did everyone blame? The developers? Marketing? No, they blamed the testers, as if every tester cooped up at Interplay for 12+ hours a day didn't notice the back of the car following them along on every screen. And Interplay never said, "Wait, this isour fault in upper management...we pushed the game out too early." They just sat there and let QA take it.
The sad fact is, that a lot of people in QA are seriously unqualified for the position. You get high school dropouts and the like in there. The company I started testing with asked that we all have some sort of college. All you people who run around in Counter-Strike and can't tell which "your" to use, or which "its", you cannot be game testers...grammar and spelling are important parts of game testing, and probably result in over 50% of all bugs written up for any given game that isn't fighting.
Not to mention that no company makes 100% hits. Wanna spend the next 6-9 months of your life telling John Romero that Daikatana sucks while he does nothing to fix it? How about playing some Chocobo Racing or Chocobo Dungeon 2 for 3 months? And who wants a nice big side of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing 3D? Remember, a lot of the video game companies don't make just games...they're edutainment companies, too.
Anyone know anywhere to find those Titanium Chopsticks they mentioned? There are some Snow Brand "Carry-on" Chopsticks that are part wood, and part brushed aluminum (dubbed titanium), but I haven't found any of the weapons grade Titanium chopsticks the guy talks about in the article, except on this Korean site that didn't actually sell anything.
They are all over half.com, and Ebay doesn't give a damn about it. I had some guy try and sell me a burn of a Dreamcast game as "Like New". As soon as I complain, 15 other people complain that the guy has sold discs that don't even work, have no data on them, etc. I email Ebay and Sega, and months later the guy's still suckering people.
There is a much better, (i.e. intentionally funny) Street Fighter movie, and it's also from HK. It's called Future Cops, and it's available on DVD now, too.
The plotline doesn't really follow SF (Vega is good, E. Honda and Ken are evil, Guile has black hair, etc.) but it's funny as hell. And Chingmy Yau's a hottie.
I think what happens to most of these movies is they get caught in between camp/special effects/trying to make a plot. If you just go for the cheese straight out, you'll at least please the people that wanted a comedy.
Who marked this as "Troll"? There is an HK live action Dragonball movie, released in '89, and if the box cover and actor list are any indication, it does suck. I was at DVD Planet last weekend, and I happened to see it on sale.
Slashdot Mirror
Other instances where playing against a robot opponent will make you consider chaning your day job:
1) You're the last man between him and the keeper, and you've got to make the tackle. You just know the bastard programmer's going to have him step on your balls.
2) Wall in front of a robot free kick. You think that he's calculating where to hit a 200mph ball so it ricochets off you and in.
3) Goalie during a penalty shot.
4) In the box for a robot corner kick. Hmm...lots of metal trying to get to a ball you're trying to get to...with metal elbows...
5) The road team playing in the robot team's home stadium...and all the drunk robot hooligans are in force.
I think I'll keep my organic and non-organic players separate. The robots would have a far easier time winning than Big Blue ever did.
Precisely...yeah right. You think Microsoft's going to be any better at making cheat-proof servers than the company who wrote the game?
More than likely, Microsoft just wants to extract more cash for the games.
As far as frequent backups go, they will NOT be listening to user's requests. No game with a HUGE amount of data is going to listen to ONE customer who gets a "cheater" and needs to restore his data from the previous day, week, whatever. Blizzard runs backups, and the only time they use them is once they've done something and horribly screwed the game up.
There isn't any real way to stop all cheating. I don't think cheating stops people from playing as much as they think. Cheating pisses people off yes, but what about all the flaws that are in the games as they are designed? People camping out spots where monsters respawn and what-not? That's no fun. Less cheating isn't going to make that aspect of the game any better.
Cheaters make games suck...but people will still play a good game with cheaters on it. I played Counter-Strike well after all the cheats starting coming out. Eventually, we'd find a place where there weren't cheaters and have a good time. I didn't bother trying to do that with Tribes 2, even though there weren't any cheaters there. If the game's GOOD people will find a community of other players they can play with and they'll have an enjoyable time. If it isn't, they won't, cheating or no cheating.
Yeah, they did. I noticed a couple DVDs wouldn't play, but I just set the ol' Apex back to region 1, and it played just fine.
Speaking of which, Apex is from Taiwan, I don't see why they wouldn't region-free the damn things, they've been doing it all this time anyway.
Combine this with the fact that if a movie is released anywhere in the world and within 30 days had not been officially releaed in Taiwan, the copyrights don't apply there, and you've got a pretty royal ass-fucking lining up for the MPAA.
Woo! Go China!
Not shoot a lot in paintball? Only if you're one of the good players. On "Speedball" and "Hyperball" matches though, you just go through a lot of paint no matter how good you are.
I play about every other month. Most players burn through a lot of balls...probably about a hopper of 200+ per map.
Besides, I've seen some players with "Gamer Physique" out on the courses, and they generally last 2-3 maps, max. I think this is going to be much better for cops than it will be for gamers. Judging by the lot of people at E3, most gamers can't even stay MOVING for very long, much less attempting to dodge, and pick up the rocket launcher again.
Gattaca is on a list of 3 movies for me...movies I've fallen asleep watching. The other 2 are Cabin Boy and the live action version of Wicked City.
Gattaca was boring, and moreover, thoroughly predictable, and not as plausible as the reviewer thinks. Think of how hard it is for you to EAT without leaving crumbs. No understand that there is absolutely NO WAY you'd be able to keep every stray hair, every fingerprint, every fleck of dried skin in check.
All those ways he "fooled" the tests were hokey. A simple X-Ray on the guy would his "discreet" heightening, and they'd notice the sleight of hand after oh, say the first week, especially considering how suspicious looking Ethan Hawke always managed to make himself.
Hell, we can't even fully get rid of dandruff.
And you knew how the stupid movie was going to end after you find out about him & his brother swimming, and then you discover that his brother's working the case...movie's over right there. I think that's at about the point I dozed off. Woke up to see him getting on the shuttle. Yay. The fact that apartments in the movie are located on my brother's college campus couldn't make the movie any more interesting.
It's great that it wasn't a movie chock full of explosions and all. But it also was devoid of any drama or excitement.
And everyone knew "Gattaca" was a reference to DNA nucleotides. But you could make a movie called "Gat-A-Tat-Tatta" about genetically engineered super soldiers and it would have the same reference.
I saw at my local big screen 8:45pm. My thoughts. 3.5 of 5, here's my non-Lone Gunman Review:
Attack Of the Clones: "Hand Me My Lightsaber. It's Purple and Says, 'Bad Jedi Mother.....'"
Speaking of...one of my friends who saw it says that N'Sync is in the big Jedi battle sequence at the end? Confirm/Deny? (I'm hoping for deny.)
Because as we all know, 2nd place is the 1st loser.
I've been saying since E3 and TGS last year that the X-Box was going to end up finishing 3rd this year, maybe even 4th if the GBA was categorized as a console. Why? It's got no game(s)!
I looked at the lineup at the XBox booths at both venues and noticed no originality at all. All the games they had were either sequels lifted from other consoles, racing games, really pathetic fighting games, or Halo.
While GameCube had a pathetic start out of the gate, its lower price, and titles which actually had a following (I know several people who picked up a GC to play Resident Evil...how many people picked up an XBox to get Munch's?) Microsoft is hurting in a big way this round.
The gaming industry has never been able to support 3 consoles. Look at all the times in history when there was any console besides Sony and Nintendo. They died off. Then when Sony entered, they beat Sony and Nintendo at their own game, Nintendo not stepping up to CD fast enough, Sega not getting the premier titles.
Then the DC died off. It was inenvitable. The majority of the gaming populace is either high school or college students. No college student is going to be happy about forking out $1,000 in just consoles and controllers in the span of a year. No parent's going to plunk down that same amount of money at Christmastime.
With the initial deployment of 250,000 units still not being sold out in stores in Japan (you can still buy the "limited edition" units in stores.) and still no good games looming on the horizon, Microsoft may as well pack it in this round, and start preparing to launch its next-generation Home PC...oh I mean coffee table...sorry, game console. Microsoft HAS to finish at least 2nd with XBox 2, or it's over.
Anyone else think that it's ironic that by declaring "I ANAL" you are stating that you're NOT a lawyer?
10 bucks says that the person downloading music was in the Marketing Dept.
Yeah, how are they going to gain experience? Like, let's say you were a journalist, would you just go around posting on fliers to gain experience?
Then slowly, as you built up a rapport with the community, your fliers would start to look better, and be in more visible positions...Hey wait a second...
They must be incredibly pissed at Cox Cable, who preempt their commercials to run their OWN commercials, which basically amounts to stealing and reselling their commercials. Don't hear them bitching about that, though. Pssh...the last thing I need is to hear another multi-billion dollar company whining. Go back to cooking your books, you bastards.
Well, I went to see the digital screening of Final Fantasy at the Spectrum in Irvine. The damn thing crashed 3/4ths of the way through the previews, and I had to see the trailer for "Max Keeble's Big Move" twice.
I don't know if I'll catch Episode 2 in digital. It may be slightly better quality, but I think it'll definitely be offset by the lower quality air that the fools camping in line are ruining.
Man...I don't know about which part of the country you live in, but here in the decent parts, we don't do any frying of bread, and we haven't for oh, say, thousands of years.
Exactly...what about all the companies that use CD-Rs as the lifeblood of their company? Game companies and software development houses burning the new builds. People backing up their HDs as they prepare to format, and other legitimate data storage. Decorative purposes, the list goes on. (I seriously had a friend who used them as highly reflective curtains.)
Next they're going to start bitching about how many gigs of hard drive space are being sold. Hillary's starting to become the new blink tag of the internet. People are just getting far too tired of her played out, immature antics. BTW, the biggest music "thieves"...people who work in the music industry. Mostly the interns they hire from local colleges.
I wouldn't care if someone copied my paper anyway. Hell, I'd take someone's SATs for them. Anyone else frightened by Hillary Rosen talking to young people?
How the hell were any of those snippets considered "poetry"?! I'll let haiku go because it has a highly restricted form, but it ain't a poem if it doesn't rhyme...you're just not trying at that point. I mean, heck most poetry is just BS anyway...if you're not going to even try to make it rhyme, I'll just read the nutritional info on my cereal box.
Modern art is bull.
"Artists", formerly called
"Strange mental patients". =)
I know, seriously. I mean, you have a game where you have to finish the level with all 3 characters...but they get STUCK ALL THE TIME! How can you not notice?!
I mean, I understand that bug in Final Fantasy 8, where the testers had gotten "too good" over there, and didn't test one part of the game with a timer...if you failed, it hosed your saves...but nobody in the testing department bothered to fail that section...
This is totally different...every tester in the room must have been pulling their hair out or asking to get their names removed from the game...
Someone has been going around in my area (Irvine, CA) and posting these bright neon stickers that say "SCAM" over the last 4 digits of the phone number, or breaking off the bottom 4 digits. If I ever see them defacing the signs, I'll stop my car and shake their hand.
My favorite example of a bough review coming back to bite the company who wrote it in the ass is PC Gamer's review of Outpost.
When the game was first reviewed, the game got an Editor's Award, or whatever PC Gamer gives paid advertisers. Then, 3 years later when they list their worst games of all time, which game is #1?
Outpost.
Being a game reviewer is a WAY easier job than being a game tester. If you ever think different, imagine a job consisting of 2 days at least where you have to run through your least favorite part of your favorite game, making sure all the commas are in the right place, and that the word you thought was spelled wrong that flashed by in the upper left corner of the screen for a 1/2 was actually spelled wrong...with no save areas for the next 15 minutes.
Or better yet, take a game where you've beaten the crap out of a game...I mean, totally played it to death, as part of your entertainment life. Then you get hired by a company to do the expansion pack, and the first thing you have to do is look through the previous version of the game for bugs...that the dev team won't fix now.
The biggest problem with being a game tester is that the clueless people above you, you know, the Marketing types responsible for shipping your games out ahead of their completion, think the same thing, that you're just in there playing games. Most companies exclude QA from the perks, respect, and courtesy provided to even the temporary secretary.
QA is essentially a thankless job, a job that every one out there playing a game thinks they can do better than you. Take Fallout 2, for example. Remember how buggy that game was? How it would crash right off, and the back half of the car would travel with you wherever you went? Well on the Message Boards who did everyone blame? The developers? Marketing? No, they blamed the testers, as if every tester cooped up at Interplay for 12+ hours a day didn't notice the back of the car following them along on every screen. And Interplay never said, "Wait, this isour fault in upper management...we pushed the game out too early." They just sat there and let QA take it.
The sad fact is, that a lot of people in QA are seriously unqualified for the position. You get high school dropouts and the like in there. The company I started testing with asked that we all have some sort of college. All you people who run around in Counter-Strike and can't tell which "your" to use, or which "its", you cannot be game testers...grammar and spelling are important parts of game testing, and probably result in over 50% of all bugs written up for any given game that isn't fighting.
Not to mention that no company makes 100% hits. Wanna spend the next 6-9 months of your life telling John Romero that Daikatana sucks while he does nothing to fix it? How about playing some Chocobo Racing or Chocobo Dungeon 2 for 3 months? And who wants a nice big side of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing 3D? Remember, a lot of the video game companies don't make just games...they're edutainment companies, too.
Anyone know anywhere to find those Titanium Chopsticks they mentioned? There are some Snow Brand "Carry-on" Chopsticks that are part wood, and part brushed aluminum (dubbed titanium), but I haven't found any of the weapons grade Titanium chopsticks the guy talks about in the article, except on this Korean site that didn't actually sell anything.
They are all over half.com, and Ebay doesn't give a damn about it. I had some guy try and sell me a burn of a Dreamcast game as "Like New". As soon as I complain, 15 other people complain that the guy has sold discs that don't even work, have no data on them, etc. I email Ebay and Sega, and months later the guy's still suckering people.
Also, that guy selling Luis Gonzalez' used chewing gum looks like he's got a scam going.
What about those clothes from "The Diamond Age". The ones with all the nanomachines in them that get out stains. Now that'd be worth paying for.
There is a much better, (i.e. intentionally funny) Street Fighter movie, and it's also from HK. It's called Future Cops, and it's available on DVD now, too.
The plotline doesn't really follow SF (Vega is good, E. Honda and Ken are evil, Guile has black hair, etc.) but it's funny as hell. And Chingmy Yau's a hottie.
I think what happens to most of these movies is they get caught in between camp/special effects/trying to make a plot. If you just go for the cheese straight out, you'll at least please the people that wanted a comedy.
Who marked this as "Troll"? There is an HK live action Dragonball movie, released in '89, and if the box cover and actor list are any indication, it does suck. I was at DVD Planet last weekend, and I happened to see it on sale.