Macs don't come with versions of windows that you don't want or need, though. Of course not all PCs do either, but if you're paying for Vista and an upgrade to XP when you buy your new Dell, this is relevant.
I see things a little differently. Advertisers will only pay to advertise in games where the target audience is expected to be large, which means samey blockbusters. This could be a massive revenue boost for the next GTA or Gears of War, but it's unlikely to mean much for the next Psychonauts.
The eventual effects of increased advertising will probably be complex. It might help small, independent developers increase their revenue marginally, but I think it's more significant as a disincentive for major studios to try anything different or quirky. Onward, to the lowest common denominator!
ten years ago I would have considered this, and would probably have accepted a negotiated version. Not anymore. What little goodwill I once had toward this industry has been burnt to the ground. From me, they get nothing.
mod up for an insightful second point regarding the fact that we can't always measure what we don't understand. Mod back down for ridiculous claim that any "undeniable" observations of the supernatural exist. Why would any scientist want to discard legitimate evidence of astounding phenomena? (drug company trials not withstanding)
It's possible that our soul, as you call it, is really just the result of complex circuitry in our head, powered and altered by electricity generated biologically. We don't really know enough to say for sure, but it can be observed that certain thoughts or actions or feelings tend to be co-occurring with increased electrical activity in parts of the brain. This does not necessitate correlation, but it suggests a viable model in which the "energy" that constitutes our being is just electricity generated by biological processes, and it stops when we do.
possibly it's tied into the "denial" part of grief. More than just stressed, a mind confronted with the permanent loss of a loves one rebels. The subconscious hope that 'maybe there has been some mistake, this hasn't really happened' is so strong that it elevates confirmation bias to the level of a sixth sense.
Just a maybe.
That's an oft repeated anecdote but I've never seen any proof. A better example might be looking out a window to tell if it's raining. Sometimes, if the rain is thin enough, it can take a while to see; you don't know exactly what you're looking for. Once you see the rain, you can look away and then see it again almost instantly when you turn back since your brain knows the approximate size and speed of the droplets, and can find them more easily.
Both of these are discussed in Waking Life, the linklater film. I dunno if you're referencing that movie or not, but if you haven't seen it, I recommend it highly.
Anywhere with lower taxes.
Allow me to restate my point: They don't believe that higher-taxes disincentivize productivity, they believe that it removes incentive for that productivity to occur in the US as opposed to elsewhere. It doesn't even have to be that US taxes are higher than those elsewhere; a relative increase in taxes, combined with any number of other push or pull factors, will theoretically relocate some economic activity from the US to elsewhere.
Now I think the global economy is a lot more complicated than that, but I'm only an econ 101 student so I can't refute the point really. It makes sense on the surface, but we all know that logic won't carry you very far in analyzing the economy these days.
It's more an issue of, if they can have a Ferrari in some other country but only, say, a Chevy in the US, they're going to move to the other country, and invest in its economy.
It's not that simple, and I don't buy it. But it's one of the major arguments raised against taxation.
combat
VATS as a combat system has absolutely nothing to do with role-playing. In fact, they couldn't have found a better way to break up any sense of immersion I was starting to feel. It's silly of you to assume that I expect the game to be more like an fps; my whole point was basically that Bethesda took the franchise in the wrong direction. Now, I think what this game needed was some kind of legitimate, turn-based system, but frankly FPS would have been okay too, so long as it was internally consistent. With VATS, I find that using melee weapons causes my character to teleport spontaneously around the battleground, swinging like a madman at the air around my opponents. Even with ranged weapons, where the result makes sense visually, using VATS feels cheap and too easy, for reasons other people have raised. And VATS, though a huge, glaring mistake, isn't the only problem with combat. Crippled limbs happen too often and fail to have any significant effect. Enemies become hung-up on walls. Almost every enemy without a ranged weapon can be destroyed by running backwards in a wide circle, firing clips into its face. Meds are too easy to use in combat, too plentiful in the world, and often somewhat overpowered (the souped-up nuka-cola which greatly increased AP comes to mind). That's just a sampling. I won't claim that combat in either of the first 2 Fallout games was perfect, but it was consistent internally. Nothing looked buggy or unintended, sensible tactics were required, and logical cohesion was present.
Writing/Quests
I haven't finished the game so I'll admit I don't have all the information here, but I can still make a judgment based on what I've seen.
Aspects of the main quest are ridiculously obvious. I don't want to spoil anything, but there are certain things about your pops which should be obvious early, and furthermore, are made obvious often thereafter. I believe this is the form of exposition referred to as the "beating a dead horse" method. Well, fine. We also have the problems endemic to Bethesda dialogue system; in every town there are about 30 people with the same things to say to you in about 5 different voices. The things people say when you bump into them are often strangely at odds with what they say when you enter into dialogue with them (when someone says "how ARE you," I eagerly enter conversation expecting something useful, only to be greeted with "I don't want to talk to you" or "get away from me" or some such. Maybe it's my breath.) Similarly, whenever I looked at a door or chest or anything, I got some garbage about "I see you eying that," which was honestly sort of cool, and still really fucking annoying. I suppose it's an uncanny valley thing, since I never mistook any of the characters in the first two fallout games for real and it didn't bother me, but it's rather confounding how the population of Fallout 3 could almost just about pass as an enormous colony of retarded siblings. As for quests; often I wasn't sure if what I was doing would solve a quest or forever break it, a feeling I'm familiar with in Bethesda games. Questing in Bethesda games is more about guessing what the designers had in mind than it is about finding a logical solution. Consider the quest about the missing android in rivet city. It was fairly obvious where I had to go, and once I did, it was clear who I had to talk to, what I would be given, and where I would then have to go to complete things. But the dialogue options I needed to access weren't available because I hadn't followed the quest exactly as they expected me to, and substantial back-tracking was required before I could solve things.
Other
Stealing mechanics are silly. The whole open-world feels samey. Radiation is too easy to get rid of and has no real consequence anyway. Repair system, not a great choice. Large areas often feel insignificant, irrelevant to the rest of the game (e.g. minefield, grayditch). Vendors seem to gradually get an expanded list of wa
that the fallout 3 expansion will be similar in size and scope to the oblivion expansion! It seems obvious to me that in between Oblivion and Fallout 3 they jettisoned their old design paradigm and followed a radical new direction! This is so totally unexpected!
Srsly though, I bought fallout 3 a while back and rolled a (sort of) melee character. So I basically got "oblivion with guns" without the guns.
There are some quality artists at Bethesda. Beyond that, I have absolutely nothing good to say about them. Writing? fucked. Combat? fucked. Quests? oh boy. Character progression? there isn't any, thanks to that ridiculously stupid difficulty scaling. In fact, I propose a trade. How about you, Bethesda, get to keep your DLC, and in exchange you stay the fuck away from decent, god-fearing franchises like Fallout. Thanks guys.
Just because you don't like moral relativism doesn't make it folly. It's just like your belief in god; I'm not crazy about it, but that doesn't make you wrong.
Cloning a neanderthal is certainly an interesting idea, but if I may I'd like to go somewhat tangential here.
It seems like there would be more obvious value in cloning our direct genetic ancestors. If the oldest homo-sapiens are extremely close to us genetically, cloning them might give us interesting insights into such things as the Jungian concept of genetic memory. Would they perceive the world differently, even if they were raised identically? Perhaps certain archetypes which we take for granted would be non-obvious for them. I suspect we could learn a lot about our own psychology by studying the behavior of a genetically ancient homo-sapien raised as we are raised today.
An interesting point; a clone of our ancestors might shed new light on the old nature/nurture problem. Moreover, I wonder if it might finally prove or repudiate the concept of genetic memory?
It's just not clear exactly what you're saying, and thus possible to read a lot of bigotry into it. On the other hand, you're right. Most notably, the idea of the corporation as a legal person is ludicrous and corrosive to our very society. Dogs and cats are also not people, despite the financial ownership rights they are rather nonsensically accorded.
The idea of any human being as not a person, however, is an incredibly loaded contention. There is very little room for debate here, except in certain cases (the very beginning of life; it's very end; the schaivo scenario). It was just too easy to read what you said as, "certain ethnic/religious/special-needs/other groups do not consist of persons, we just say so out of charity".
Slashdot Mirror
Macs don't come with versions of windows that you don't want or need, though. Of course not all PCs do either, but if you're paying for Vista and an upgrade to XP when you buy your new Dell, this is relevant.
seconded
I see things a little differently. Advertisers will only pay to advertise in games where the target audience is expected to be large, which means samey blockbusters. This could be a massive revenue boost for the next GTA or Gears of War, but it's unlikely to mean much for the next Psychonauts.
The eventual effects of increased advertising will probably be complex. It might help small, independent developers increase their revenue marginally, but I think it's more significant as a disincentive for major studios to try anything different or quirky. Onward, to the lowest common denominator!
I do not want to have to pay for: [...] A gun - to protect myself from getting mugged by hobos
I'm gonna take a wild guess and say you already own a gun.
What I posted is, however, the general response you'll get from the man on the street
that's why it wasn't obvious that you were being sarcastic. Can't blame the mods for that.
ten years ago I would have considered this, and would probably have accepted a negotiated version. Not anymore. What little goodwill I once had toward this industry has been burnt to the ground.
From me, they get nothing.
and I guess painkillers are ordinance now?
mod up for an insightful second point regarding the fact that we can't always measure what we don't understand. Mod back down for ridiculous claim that any "undeniable" observations of the supernatural exist. Why would any scientist want to discard legitimate evidence of astounding phenomena? (drug company trials not withstanding)
or maybe we'll argue on the merits. You, and your ideology, are not victims here.
It's possible that our soul, as you call it, is really just the result of complex circuitry in our head, powered and altered by electricity generated biologically. We don't really know enough to say for sure, but it can be observed that certain thoughts or actions or feelings tend to be co-occurring with increased electrical activity in parts of the brain. This does not necessitate correlation, but it suggests a viable model in which the "energy" that constitutes our being is just electricity generated by biological processes, and it stops when we do.
"...and heck, why stop there?"
possibly it's tied into the "denial" part of grief. More than just stressed, a mind confronted with the permanent loss of a loves one rebels. The subconscious hope that 'maybe there has been some mistake, this hasn't really happened' is so strong that it elevates confirmation bias to the level of a sixth sense.
Just a maybe.
That's an oft repeated anecdote but I've never seen any proof. A better example might be looking out a window to tell if it's raining. Sometimes, if the rain is thin enough, it can take a while to see; you don't know exactly what you're looking for. Once you see the rain, you can look away and then see it again almost instantly when you turn back since your brain knows the approximate size and speed of the droplets, and can find them more easily.
Both of these are discussed in Waking Life, the linklater film. I dunno if you're referencing that movie or not, but if you haven't seen it, I recommend it highly.
experiences in things that scientifical people would say don't happen -- even when it happened in front of them. [CITATION NEEDED]
...but what!? WHO WAS SEW?
I find your rampant speculation refreshing
Anywhere with lower taxes.
Allow me to restate my point: They don't believe that higher-taxes disincentivize productivity, they believe that it removes incentive for that productivity to occur in the US as opposed to elsewhere. It doesn't even have to be that US taxes are higher than those elsewhere; a relative increase in taxes, combined with any number of other push or pull factors, will theoretically relocate some economic activity from the US to elsewhere.
Now I think the global economy is a lot more complicated than that, but I'm only an econ 101 student so I can't refute the point really. It makes sense on the surface, but we all know that logic won't carry you very far in analyzing the economy these days.
In response to your second point:
It's more an issue of, if they can have a Ferrari in some other country but only, say, a Chevy in the US, they're going to move to the other country, and invest in its economy.
It's not that simple, and I don't buy it. But it's one of the major arguments raised against taxation.
Allow me to be more specific.
combat
VATS as a combat system has absolutely nothing to do with role-playing. In fact, they couldn't have found a better way to break up any sense of immersion I was starting to feel. It's silly of you to assume that I expect the game to be more like an fps; my whole point was basically that Bethesda took the franchise in the wrong direction. Now, I think what this game needed was some kind of legitimate, turn-based system, but frankly FPS would have been okay too, so long as it was internally consistent. With VATS, I find that using melee weapons causes my character to teleport spontaneously around the battleground, swinging like a madman at the air around my opponents. Even with ranged weapons, where the result makes sense visually, using VATS feels cheap and too easy, for reasons other people have raised. And VATS, though a huge, glaring mistake, isn't the only problem with combat. Crippled limbs happen too often and fail to have any significant effect. Enemies become hung-up on walls. Almost every enemy without a ranged weapon can be destroyed by running backwards in a wide circle, firing clips into its face. Meds are too easy to use in combat, too plentiful in the world, and often somewhat overpowered (the souped-up nuka-cola which greatly increased AP comes to mind). That's just a sampling. I won't claim that combat in either of the first 2 Fallout games was perfect, but it was consistent internally. Nothing looked buggy or unintended, sensible tactics were required, and logical cohesion was present.
Writing/Quests
I haven't finished the game so I'll admit I don't have all the information here, but I can still make a judgment based on what I've seen.
Aspects of the main quest are ridiculously obvious. I don't want to spoil anything, but there are certain things about your pops which should be obvious early, and furthermore, are made obvious often thereafter. I believe this is the form of exposition referred to as the "beating a dead horse" method. Well, fine. We also have the problems endemic to Bethesda dialogue system; in every town there are about 30 people with the same things to say to you in about 5 different voices. The things people say when you bump into them are often strangely at odds with what they say when you enter into dialogue with them (when someone says "how ARE you," I eagerly enter conversation expecting something useful, only to be greeted with "I don't want to talk to you" or "get away from me" or some such. Maybe it's my breath.) Similarly, whenever I looked at a door or chest or anything, I got some garbage about "I see you eying that," which was honestly sort of cool, and still really fucking annoying. I suppose it's an uncanny valley thing, since I never mistook any of the characters in the first two fallout games for real and it didn't bother me, but it's rather confounding how the population of Fallout 3 could almost just about pass as an enormous colony of retarded siblings. As for quests; often I wasn't sure if what I was doing would solve a quest or forever break it, a feeling I'm familiar with in Bethesda games. Questing in Bethesda games is more about guessing what the designers had in mind than it is about finding a logical solution. Consider the quest about the missing android in rivet city. It was fairly obvious where I had to go, and once I did, it was clear who I had to talk to, what I would be given, and where I would then have to go to complete things. But the dialogue options I needed to access weren't available because I hadn't followed the quest exactly as they expected me to, and substantial back-tracking was required before I could solve things.
Other Stealing mechanics are silly. The whole open-world feels samey. Radiation is too easy to get rid of and has no real consequence anyway. Repair system, not a great choice. Large areas often feel insignificant, irrelevant to the rest of the game (e.g. minefield, grayditch). Vendors seem to gradually get an expanded list of wa
that the fallout 3 expansion will be similar in size and scope to the oblivion expansion! It seems obvious to me that in between Oblivion and Fallout 3 they jettisoned their old design paradigm and followed a radical new direction! This is so totally unexpected!
Srsly though, I bought fallout 3 a while back and rolled a (sort of) melee character. So I basically got "oblivion with guns" without the guns.
There are some quality artists at Bethesda. Beyond that, I have absolutely nothing good to say about them. Writing? fucked. Combat? fucked. Quests? oh boy. Character progression? there isn't any, thanks to that ridiculously stupid difficulty scaling. In fact, I propose a trade. How about you, Bethesda, get to keep your DLC, and in exchange you stay the fuck away from decent, god-fearing franchises like Fallout. Thanks guys.
Just because you don't like moral relativism doesn't make it folly. It's just like your belief in god; I'm not crazy about it, but that doesn't make you wrong.
Cloning a neanderthal is certainly an interesting idea, but if I may I'd like to go somewhat tangential here.
It seems like there would be more obvious value in cloning our direct genetic ancestors. If the oldest homo-sapiens are extremely close to us genetically, cloning them might give us interesting insights into such things as the Jungian concept of genetic memory. Would they perceive the world differently, even if they were raised identically? Perhaps certain archetypes which we take for granted would be non-obvious for them. I suspect we could learn a lot about our own psychology by studying the behavior of a genetically ancient homo-sapien raised as we are raised today.
An interesting point; a clone of our ancestors might shed new light on the old nature/nurture problem. Moreover, I wonder if it might finally prove or repudiate the concept of genetic memory?
It's just not clear exactly what you're saying, and thus possible to read a lot of bigotry into it. On the other hand, you're right. Most notably, the idea of the corporation as a legal person is ludicrous and corrosive to our very society. Dogs and cats are also not people, despite the financial ownership rights they are rather nonsensically accorded.
The idea of any human being as not a person, however, is an incredibly loaded contention. There is very little room for debate here, except in certain cases (the very beginning of life; it's very end; the schaivo scenario). It was just too easy to read what you said as, "certain ethnic/religious/special-needs/other groups do not consist of persons, we just say so out of charity".