Not too sure which Fallout3 it was you bought "a while back". The game by Bethesda has been out for slightly less than a month, so either you fell through a time warp, you are aging superfast, or you have a very low attention span.
So far (with something like 30 hours of gameplay on a single character and only halfway through the main quest), I didn't think the writing was fucked at all. Most quests I found offer many different possible paths, some of which aren't obvious at first, and the dialogues have been consistently very good and well performed considering the aforementioned freedom and the fact that there is an incredible amount of spoken text in there.
Fucked combat? It wasn't through time you fell through, it was from an alternative universe . Combat in FO3 is stellar... for what it is trying to be, namely a Roleplaying Game. It is not a FPS, never was intended to be (nor were the previous Fallout instances). You are supposed to use VATS in most circumstances. The only ones I can think of where you don't use VATS are
very easy foes (radroaches after you reached a certain level, for example)
whenever you don't have any action points left but don't want/can't wait. In that case, and here I might be mistaken, your luck (the game stat) plays a bigger role in whether you'll hit or not than during VATS events where your skills are more important.
If you play like it's an FPS (or in your case as melee, as if it was Dark Messiah), then of course, you won't have much fun. Not Bethesda's fault that you can't read game descriptions though.
Character Progression? *PLENTY* of that, thanks to the very complex and involving quests (or show me any other relatively recent RPG who let you make as many moral choices during quests), and as someone else stated earlier, the difficulty scaling only defines what you'll meet in certain zones based on the level you have the first time you actually enter the zone. Oh wait.. I suddenly see the light! I know what you've been rambling about! You see, the game we're talking about here is Fallout 3, it is NOT W.O.W.! The character progression isn't defined by how much you grind, but by the choice you make concerning your character's personae and how it affects the character's future decision. This should of course be reflected in the way you set your skillpoints and the way you choose your perks. And that's something Fallout3 does very well, considering it's only a computer game and not a human GM. But of course, if you thought we were talking about W.O.W. (or maybe FFXI, or basically any MMORPG, along with most other single player ~RPGs~ (Diablo???) which came out lately), then all your comments make sense : "Shitty combat?" "check!" "Fucked writing?" "There was writing??? oh!... check!" "Character Progression?" "lots of that! I used a template I found on Tw1nK-R-Us, and was able to get to lvl 125 in a mere 5 hours... Basically I play a Mutant Dwarf Mage with Ranger and Animal Companion. Doesn't make sense in the story, but who cares. That's the winning build. Everybody is playing those"
I have an Acer Aspire One, with the awfully named Linpus distro on it. After making it boot to xfce instead of the very limited Linpus GUI, installing geany, blender, Krita (had problems with gimp sadly:/, code::block and pygame, the AA1 turned out to be great for on the road coding.
If you're like me and you prefer to code some minigame fast, instead of playing sudoku or solitaire while traveling, a netbook is just the thing to have. The keyboard of the AA1 is big enough to type blind (and I have big fingers) and the resolution isn't THAT bad if you decrease the font's size.
Admittedly, the Atom is not particularly powerful, the 512MB ram are less than stellar and the intel onboard gfx sucks donkey anus, but it should be enough for most applications if you're not actually trying to debug the LHC's main control program and it provides a good incentive to code in a CPU/mem efficient manner.
The small size and low weight (combined with a genius traveler trackball and a 16GB SSD card) means I can even code while leaning against a wall, or in a very cramped bus, and that I can just take it with me everywhere.. just in case I might have to wait for some time somewhere.
Oh... And it's a tech-girl magnet. Too bad there aren't many where I live though;)
Why? Because I assume people to take responsability of their action instead of blaming everybody else? If that's your definition of catholic, then I guess I am one in your very weird and twisted world, even though I don't believe carpenter wives just get pregnant because some ghostly entity with multiple personae disorder passed by.
I admit my analogy was not the best of all time, but it doesn't change the point that if you're knowingly doing something incredibly stupid (and that's what the woman in TFA did) you're to blame for the result too.
I'll try another one : you see someone running amok with a gun, and you, a passerby without any psychology background, decide to confront him. If you get shot, it doesn't make you a criminal, but you should acknowledge that you're partially to blame.
Saying "criminals are the ones to blame, victims are victims and should be left alone" is running away from taking responsability for your actions. I won't get into the whole "raped women" meme, as it's a hornest's nest which just can not be generalized. But in a similar vein, if you're having unprotected sex with someone you just met who has AIDS but didn't tell you and you end up being infected, then that someone is criminal... but you can blame yourself too. Doesn't make you criminal. It just makes you plain dumb.
So, if you try to cross a 4 lane highway during rush hour and you end up underneath a truck, no blame should be put on you?
Your logic relies heavily on the word "criminal". That's quite problematic, as its definition is not absolute. Crossing a highway IS criminally stupid. Falling for a well known scam and ignoring every warnings one is given is as stupid (though generally not as deadly). Spears saw it coming and didn't react, she is partially to blame for what happened to her.
Of course the compressed air needs to come from somewhere, nobody is denying that fact. The question is : where from?
I don't have much knowledge of physics or engineering, so I might be completely wrong, but it looks to me as if some of the compressor methods described here would be well suited for alternative energies. Basically, the compression seems to be the result of rotating elements, so one could imagine a dam or windmills creating compressed air directly, without transforming the energy to electricity first, and thus increasing the rentability of the thing.
Additionally, by your logic, people shouldn't even start to look into alternative ways to power engines, as there will always be a carbon footprint somewhere. So, why bother? let's just all drive our 20 liter/100km SUVs like there is no tomorow.
Where I live, we use Butane gas for cooking. Each house has its own portable gas tank, when it's empty we bring it back to the sales point and get a new one. Those tanks are then refilled and re-sold/lent and so far I still have to hear any story about any of those breaking up, or exploding when falling down or during a road crash.
Of course, I don't know how old those bottles can get but if it's safe enough for cooking gas, I guess it should be safe enough for air
As someone else pointed out earlier, 28mph IS approximately the speed limit in european cities. How high is it in the USA?
From personal experience, I'd say that all big European cities, be it Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, Munich, or even smaller ones like Heidelberg, Frankfurt,... etc suffer from traffic congestion, and actually achieving 28mph is only possible late at night when nobody else is out.
It's definitely not supposed to be an alternative for long-range travel.
I assume building and recycling a gas tank/engine is better for the environment than it's the case for batteries.
compressors needed to supply the compressed air in the first place are cheap and easy to make, and can easily take advantage of alternative energy.
Filling your gas tank is near-instanteanous (at least compared to recharging a battery)
it's noisy compared to electric motors, so no worry you get overrun by this pesky 28mph-race machine at night because you didn't hear it coming!
Seriously though, about the 28mph : this is marketed as a city car. Most of the time, in cities, you'd be happy to be driving at that speed. In most bigger cities, the circulation is stop and go for the better part of the day, along with some awfull air polution. Only airpowered car would be a blessing.. I guess there is a reason why India is so interested in this technology.
Maybe just technically interested. Writing and setting up a botnet like this one withing the limitations inherent to something that's illegal sounds like an interesting challenge.
As others have pointed out, my choice of the word "harder" wasn't exactly great.
The mods I use balance the game better. Some things are tougher (My char can't run fully loaded for longer than 30-40 seconds without having his vision getting blurred and starting to faint), some things get easier, after a while (killing rats or mudcrabs from level 5 or 6 onward for example).GeckoX explains it better than me in his answer.
I look at it from a different angle: Bethesda's game are the nearest you can get to a single player table-top and dice Roleplaying game.
Most GM's I played traditional RPGs with were interpreting the rulebooks to enhance the gameplay and the better one came up with their own quests and stories, while trying to keep in line with the official lore. Basically, they were modding the official game.
Bethesda gives you a world to roam, a background story, pre-defined quests and game rules which you might or might not like. As they are also trying to make money and are releasing their games for consoles too, the games tend to be easier than they could have been, but by releasing a construction kit they allow you to change the rules so that the gameplay fits your gaming style.. in short, you're allowed to change the Game Master.
If you check which (non-purely cosmetical) community mods were particularly successfull, you'll probably notice that they tend to make Oblivion more realistic and more difficult.
That's the equivalent of a Game Master saying : "WTF? According to this rulebook, with your skillset you're allowed to stay for 10mn under water?! No way... 2 minutes have passed, you still see movement on the shore above you. Your lungs fill like they'll explode and the plated armor drags you down. If you don't do anything, you'll die in 30 sec... Your move?"
On a sidenote : the CS for Fallout3 isn't available (yet?)
On the other hand, at least they made it easy (very relative term here) for things like Oscuro to be made.
I agree that vanilla Oblivion is a pretty boring game, but with the right community mods (those that made the game HARDER, not easier), it is still one of the best games to have ever been published.
... and I'm still waiting for my copy of Fallout3 to automagically appear in my mail:(
woah.. you ARE a troll. Too bad I can't mod you down right now
Games : lots of them, some with flashy grafics too. Of course, you won't find Fallout3 or Mirror's Edge... disgressing. I forgot to whom I was talking to, Crysis and WoW for Linux, but quite a few of the newer windows games DO run in wine. On the other hand, nobody stops you from dual booting to windows. That's what I do personally : boot windows if I want to play somethign I can't play in Linux, Linux for everything else
Easy to understand GUI : Gnome, KDE, even XFCE aren't exactly brain surgery (or rocket science if you happen to be a brain surgeon, which I very seriously doubt in your case). On the other hand, you'd probably say tha OSX isn't easy to understand, as it's NOT windows neither (as a side note, I find GNOME to be easier than OSX)
Basically, you're ranting, talking gibberish, and obviously stuck in a time warp that doesn't let you get away from the early 90s, but somehow I felt like I needed to feed you. By the way, you don't need a US$6000 rig to run linux comfortably. Actually, you don't even need that for VISTA, and that's telling much
People are listing their favourite games, be it WarcraftII, Starcraft, Counterstrike, whatever... but I think you miss the point.
The 80s games that are considered classics are generally not the "best" version, but the "first successfull" one.
Take Pacman : A classic 80s game if there ever was one. When you think of pacman, you think of a yellow mouthy thing, a blueish maze on a black background and the ghosts. What people forget, is that there were hundreds of pacman clones and sequels, some of which were actually better than the original. Nevertheless, the classic game is still Pacman, and not Ladybug, or Mousetrap, or whatever, because it was THE game that made maze-munching monster games popular.
In the same vein, the classic FPS is still Doom. Who, of you who are too young to have played it when it came out, ever played Quake 1? Now, how many played Doom? (yes, I'm actually aware that Wolfenstein came first)
I'm pretty sure most will have played Doom, but only a few ever played Quake1
So, will Warcraft or Starcraft ever make it as classics? Perhaps, but probably only one of them. The rest will fall under the "oh.. And there was that one too" category
Incidentally, many of the 90s games that became classics came from the Looking Glass Studio (System Shock2 and the Thief Serie anyone?), Bullfrog (Populous series, Syndicate, Magic Carpet), and other now-dead companies... There's probably a morale to that... something about gold sinking and some other material floating up:/
sigh.. it's not a question of being paranoid. Just of the traffic resulting from someone sending "root/123456" and a server answering "smegg off" for 5 hours.
Although it brings up another point : who will download OS (security?) updates if they have to pay for it?
Slashdot Mirror
Not too sure which Fallout3 it was you bought "a while back". The game by Bethesda has been out for slightly less than a month, so either you fell through a time warp, you are aging superfast, or you have a very low attention span.
So far (with something like 30 hours of gameplay on a single character and only halfway through the main quest), I didn't think the writing was fucked at all. Most quests I found offer many different possible paths, some of which aren't obvious at first, and the dialogues have been consistently very good and well performed considering the aforementioned freedom and the fact that there is an incredible amount of spoken text in there.
Fucked combat? It wasn't through time you fell through, it was from an alternative universe . Combat in FO3 is stellar ... for what it is trying to be, namely a Roleplaying Game. It is not a FPS, never was intended to be (nor were the previous Fallout instances). You are supposed to use VATS in most circumstances. The only ones I can think of where you don't use VATS are
If you play like it's an FPS (or in your case as melee, as if it was Dark Messiah), then of course, you won't have much fun. Not Bethesda's fault that you can't read game descriptions though.
Character Progression? *PLENTY* of that, thanks to the very complex and involving quests (or show me any other relatively recent RPG who let you make as many moral choices during quests), and as someone else stated earlier, the difficulty scaling only defines what you'll meet in certain zones based on the level you have the first time you actually enter the zone. Oh wait .. I suddenly see the light! I know what you've been rambling about! You see, the game we're talking about here is Fallout 3, it is NOT W.O.W.! The character progression isn't defined by how much you grind, but by the choice you make concerning your character's personae and how it affects the character's future decision. This should of course be reflected in the way you set your skillpoints and the way you choose your perks. And that's something Fallout3 does very well, considering it's only a computer game and not a human GM. ... check!" "Character Progression?" "lots of that! I used a template I found on Tw1nK-R-Us, and was able to get to lvl 125 in a mere 5 hours ... Basically I play a Mutant Dwarf Mage with Ranger and Animal Companion. Doesn't make sense in the story, but who cares. That's the winning build. Everybody is playing those"
But of course, if you thought we were talking about W.O.W. (or maybe FFXI, or basically any MMORPG, along with most other single player ~RPGs~ (Diablo???) which came out lately), then all your comments make sense :
"Shitty combat?" "check!" "Fucked writing?" "There was writing??? oh!
lots of talk just to tell you : you are wrong
I'll have to disagree on the "program" part.
I have an Acer Aspire One, with the awfully named Linpus distro on it. After making it boot to xfce instead of the very limited Linpus GUI, installing geany, blender, Krita (had problems with gimp sadly:/, code::block and pygame, the AA1 turned out to be great for on the road coding.
If you're like me and you prefer to code some minigame fast, instead of playing sudoku or solitaire while traveling, a netbook is just the thing to have. The keyboard of the AA1 is big enough to type blind (and I have big fingers) and the resolution isn't THAT bad if you decrease the font's size.
Admittedly, the Atom is not particularly powerful, the 512MB ram are less than stellar and the intel onboard gfx sucks donkey anus, but it should be enough for most applications if you're not actually trying to debug the LHC's main control program and it provides a good incentive to code in a CPU/mem efficient manner.
The small size and low weight (combined with a genius traveler trackball and a 16GB SSD card) means I can even code while leaning against a wall, or in a very cramped bus, and that I can just take it with me everywhere .. just in case I might have to wait for some time somewhere.
Oh ... And it's a tech-girl magnet. Too bad there aren't many where I live though ;)
Why? Because I assume people to take responsability of their action instead of blaming everybody else? If that's your definition of catholic, then I guess I am one in your very weird and twisted world, even though I don't believe carpenter wives just get pregnant because some ghostly entity with multiple personae disorder passed by.
I admit my analogy was not the best of all time, but it doesn't change the point that if you're knowingly doing something incredibly stupid (and that's what the woman in TFA did) you're to blame for the result too.
I'll try another one : you see someone running amok with a gun, and you, a passerby without any psychology background, decide to confront him. If you get shot, it doesn't make you a criminal, but you should acknowledge that you're partially to blame.
Saying "criminals are the ones to blame, victims are victims and should be left alone" is running away from taking responsability for your actions. I won't get into the whole "raped women" meme, as it's a hornest's nest which just can not be generalized. But in a similar vein, if you're having unprotected sex with someone you just met who has AIDS but didn't tell you and you end up being infected, then that someone is criminal ... but you can blame yourself too. Doesn't make you criminal. It just makes you plain dumb.
So, if you try to cross a 4 lane highway during rush hour and you end up underneath a truck, no blame should be put on you?
Your logic relies heavily on the word "criminal". That's quite problematic, as its definition is not absolute. Crossing a highway IS criminally stupid. Falling for a well known scam and ignoring every warnings one is given is as stupid (though generally not as deadly). Spears saw it coming and didn't react, she is partially to blame for what happened to her.
Close, if you just check the distance to the equator.
Offtopic : Cooking with gas > cooking with electricity. You have a better and more direct control of the heat produced.
I don't have much knowledge of physics or engineering, so I might be completely wrong, but it looks to me as if some of the compressor methods described here would be well suited for alternative energies. Basically, the compression seems to be the result of rotating elements, so one could imagine a dam or windmills creating compressed air directly, without transforming the energy to electricity first, and thus increasing the rentability of the thing.
Additionally, by your logic, people shouldn't even start to look into alternative ways to power engines, as there will always be a carbon footprint somewhere. So, why bother? let's just all drive our 20 liter/100km SUVs like there is no tomorow.
Where I live, we use Butane gas for cooking. Each house has its own portable gas tank, when it's empty we bring it back to the sales point and get a new one. Those tanks are then refilled and re-sold/lent and so far I still have to hear any story about any of those breaking up, or exploding when falling down or during a road crash.
Of course, I don't know how old those bottles can get but if it's safe enough for cooking gas, I guess it should be safe enough for air
As someone else pointed out earlier, 28mph IS approximately the speed limit in european cities. How high is it in the USA?
From personal experience, I'd say that all big European cities, be it Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, Munich, or even smaller ones like Heidelberg, Frankfurt, ... etc suffer from traffic congestion, and actually achieving 28mph is only possible late at night when nobody else is out.
It's definitely not supposed to be an alternative for long-range travel.
Seriously though, about the 28mph : this is marketed as a city car. Most of the time, in cities, you'd be happy to be driving at that speed. In most bigger cities, the circulation is stop and go for the better part of the day, along with some awfull air polution. Only airpowered car would be a blessing .. I guess there is a reason why India is so interested in this technology.
Maybe just technically interested. Writing and setting up a botnet like this one withing the limitations inherent to something that's illegal sounds like an interesting challenge.
As others have pointed out, my choice of the word "harder" wasn't exactly great. The mods I use balance the game better. Some things are tougher (My char can't run fully loaded for longer than 30-40 seconds without having his vision getting blurred and starting to faint), some things get easier, after a while (killing rats or mudcrabs from level 5 or 6 onward for example).GeckoX explains it better than me in his answer.
yep. More "consistent" is a better word for it. And actually the mod's name "Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul". Kind of late and I was abbreviating it.
If you didn't like Oblivion, and expect Fallout3 to be like it, why did you get it and are even starting to play it? Masochism?
I look at it from a different angle: Bethesda's game are the nearest you can get to a single player table-top and dice Roleplaying game.
Most GM's I played traditional RPGs with were interpreting the rulebooks to enhance the gameplay and the better one came up with their own quests and stories, while trying to keep in line with the official lore. Basically, they were modding the official game.
Bethesda gives you a world to roam, a background story, pre-defined quests and game rules which you might or might not like. As they are also trying to make money and are releasing their games for consoles too, the games tend to be easier than they could have been, but by releasing a construction kit they allow you to change the rules so that the gameplay fits your gaming style .. in short, you're allowed to change the Game Master.
If you check which (non-purely cosmetical) community mods were particularly successfull, you'll probably notice that they tend to make Oblivion more realistic and more difficult.
That's the equivalent of a Game Master saying : ... 2 minutes have passed, you still see movement on the shore above you. Your lungs fill like they'll explode and the plated armor drags you down. If you don't do anything, you'll die in 30 sec ... Your move?"
"WTF? According to this rulebook, with your skillset you're allowed to stay for 10mn under water?! No way
On a sidenote : the CS for Fallout3 isn't available (yet?)
On the other hand, at least they made it easy (very relative term here) for things like Oscuro to be made.
I agree that vanilla Oblivion is a pretty boring game, but with the right community mods (those that made the game HARDER, not easier), it is still one of the best games to have ever been published.
Linux Chick, passing Mac Guy and PC Guy who are waiting for credit cards to be approved : "Here, Have a penguin. And take a few for your friends"
woah .. you ARE a troll. Too bad I can't mod you down right now
Games : lots of them, some with flashy grafics too. Of course, you won't find Fallout3 or Mirror's Edge ... disgressing. I forgot to whom I was talking to, Crysis and WoW for Linux, but quite a few of the newer windows games DO run in wine. On the other hand, nobody stops you from dual booting to windows. That's what I do personally : boot windows if I want to play somethign I can't play in Linux, Linux for everything else
Easy to understand GUI : Gnome, KDE, even XFCE aren't exactly brain surgery (or rocket science if you happen to be a brain surgeon, which I very seriously doubt in your case). On the other hand, you'd probably say tha OSX isn't easy to understand, as it's NOT windows neither (as a side note, I find GNOME to be easier than OSX)
Basically, you're ranting, talking gibberish, and obviously stuck in a time warp that doesn't let you get away from the early 90s, but somehow I felt like I needed to feed you. By the way, you don't need a US$6000 rig to run linux comfortably. Actually, you don't even need that for VISTA, and that's telling much
You bought a copy of the song. the copy belongs to you, the original recording doesn't.
The big deal is that Vendetta is a MMORPG/Space Sim. I'm not aware of any other MMORPG allowing the players to create content. You?
I think liquidpele just uncovered that Open Office is actually subsidized by the Pastafarian Church.
People are listing their favourite games, be it WarcraftII, Starcraft, Counterstrike, whatever ... but I think you miss the point.
The 80s games that are considered classics are generally not the "best" version, but the "first successfull" one.
Take Pacman : A classic 80s game if there ever was one. When you think of pacman, you think of a yellow mouthy thing, a blueish maze on a black background and the ghosts. What people forget, is that there were hundreds of pacman clones and sequels, some of which were actually better than the original. Nevertheless, the classic game is still Pacman, and not Ladybug, or Mousetrap, or whatever, because it was THE game that made maze-munching monster games popular.
In the same vein, the classic FPS is still Doom.
Who, of you who are too young to have played it when it came out, ever played Quake 1?
Now, how many played Doom? (yes, I'm actually aware that Wolfenstein came first)
I'm pretty sure most will have played Doom, but only a few ever played Quake1
So, will Warcraft or Starcraft ever make it as classics? Perhaps, but probably only one of them. The rest will fall under the "oh .. And there was that one too" category
Incidentally, many of the 90s games that became classics came from the Looking Glass Studio (System Shock2 and the Thief Serie anyone?), Bullfrog (Populous series, Syndicate, Magic Carpet), and other now-dead companies ... ... something about gold sinking and some other material floating up :/
There's probably a morale to that
you win ;)
sigh .. it's not a question of being paranoid. Just of the traffic resulting from someone sending "root/123456" and a server answering "smegg off" for 5 hours.
Although it brings up another point : who will download OS (security?) updates if they have to pay for it?
Another nice analogy : want to pay for the spam that ends up in your mailbox (either real or electronic)? Beause that's what you are asking for.