Every Atari game had fancy box art. None of the games looked remotely like the boxes. Nobody who owned more than one Atari game would have had an issue with the game's look.
I read that book. As a teenager I remember finding it to be among the funniest I'd read, right up there with Hitchhiker's Guide. Haven't read it in a few decades, so I'm not sure if it weathered well, but I still think of it fondly.
I agree with your logic as far as the nature of star populations goes, but there's been advanced land-based life on Earth for close to a billion* years. Dinosaurs kept mammals down for more than a third of a billion before we got a chance. Unless you're also arguing that intelligent life will necessarily require the same sort of treatment on any other planet, it seems like there's easily hundreds of millions of years where some intelligent variation of dinosaur could have evolved instead. Even if one of the filters is the string of extinctions and regrowth, it's easy enough to imagine another world where the mass extinctions came tens or fifties of millions of years more frequently, advancing the pace of evolution.
You also have to wonder, did single-cellular life really need three billion* years to turn into multi-cellular life? Why not pull it off on some world in two billion, or 2.5, or even 2.75 billion and still leave intelligent life an extra 250 million years head start elsewhere? What happened on Earth is telling for being the only known success story thus far, but it's a given that it has to take that long. Even if a billion years is high, a few million seems way too low.
*My numbers are all really fuzzy and probably wrong, but probably good enough for a napkin-style calculation.
The way MMORPGs implement it, crafting is dull, tedious, and limited. The players can't employ imagination to create novel items, they are restricted to a small set of fixed recipes. The game designers couldn't allow much latitude on crafting, or the players could and would make items so powerful that they completely unbalance the main game.
It's not just game balance, it's coding for the flexibility. It's one thing to code eight potions for eight reagents, with the restriction that each potion gets exactly one reagent, and another thing to code for roughly 100 different potions, if you free it up to allow each potion to have any combination of 1-8 reagents in it. What do all those potions do? What are they called? Can you even think up 100 different unique effects for them to have? And, ultimately, does it even add anything to the game to have a 100-potion exploration space (and do you give hints for recipes, or let players keep a cookbook to remember, or is discovery part of the game?) rather than just a simple setup of 8 obviously handy potions. Is the time required to allow this advanced crafting better spent on coding more spells, or another level, or doing more gameplay testing?
Good one. I'm stealing it and putting it in my novel about a parody dungeon crawler video game. I'd give you credit, but, frankly, "Thanks to Assmasher" isn't something I'm willing to put in print. Er, a second time, since I guess I just said it once.
It seems like this has to exist by this point, but is there a game with a laser shark yet? Ideally maybe some sort of underwater "flight simulator" where you ride on the backs of large fish and shoot at each other.
And they should. You can't go around screaming "mercury" like there's only one form of an element, and it always has the same property no matter what chemical compound it's part of. Imagine we had the same lecture about "sodium" (an explosive metal) or "chlorine" (a deadly poison). Can you BELIEVE they put sodium AND chlorine in our TABLE SALT! It's an explosive deadly poison! They're killing us all!
Oh, actually, I didn't get through the quackery far enough to see that chlorine came up in drinking water. This AC really hasn't ever heard of table salt.
Most of the stuff in that post is conspiracy level "they're lying to us and everything's a poison" diatribe. Do a little research and you'll see that 1) thimerosol wasn't in most vaccines and was removed from nearly all of them at this point because of the paranoia and FUD, 2) even when it was in some vaccines, it is mercury compound with no demonstrated physical harm, unlike, say, the stuff in old thermometers, 3) this "mercury is always evil" argument ignores any rational analysis of toxicity levels, disregarding how minimal the amount of mercury was in any of the vaccines compared to other general exposure.
That's a curious take. I'm not sure I'd trust myself to actually wake up, though I guess I could keep the sound-based alarm as a backup until I was sure. I've also got young kids and occasionally have a *really* short night of sleep, which again makes me think I might sleep though light on bad days.
It's certainly not quite as efficient on the power side of the spectrum, but I'd guess not bad if it's just a few minutes. How do you tell the alarm "okay, turn off now, I'm up"? Just set the timer for x minutes and assume it'll be enough?
I've tried duct tape art, a web game, a book, and a dot-com startup, but no apps yet. I think that's next of my checklist of educational monetary failures, though. If they say you've got to try seven businesses before one becomes successful*, I've only got three more to go before I hit it big.
He also neglected to include any sort of interest/growth in that calculation. You could easily get there in much less time at $25k/year with even 5% interest. Or some problems come up and it takes you 30 years instead of 25 - that's still shorter than most people work. Or get a few raises and work your way up to contributing $50k/year in a decade.
In other words, there are obstacles, but there's plenty of wiggle room in both directions. If you're paying even a little attention, it's not a hard goal to hit with a developer's salary, which is generally considerably above median income.
Really? I think most people would accept "net worth" as the proper metric.
Now there's probably some who don't think about that much and assume millionaires have tons of cash on hand and spend wildly, but generally you don't get to be (or stay) a millionaire doing that.
If a wooden block can be a car and a stick can be a gun, I'm gonna call shenanigans on this. It's not a limitation of the specialty pieces, but of the imagination.
Don't be silly. Survival of the fittest applies to the wild. The entire *point* of culture/civilization is to blunt that harshest of rules. It doesn't always work so well, and it can easily be exploited, but the GP is entirely correct when he says that bullying should be treated as wrong and discouraged.
4. When their quota/sales target is not met, developers/publishers are under pressure to make up the difference. 5. One of the easiest ways to boost sales is to introduce items which will confer a greatly desired benefit on its purchasers. OTOH, non-buyers who cannot enjoy the greatly desired benefit will endure a comparatively degraded playing experience.
These two aren't necessarily true.
4. Smaller developers especially may not have things like quotas and sales targets which dictate their entire behavior. They're also more likely to be developing for fun as much as income such that $$ aren't the only consideration. And they're more likely to pick free to play as a model just because nobody will pay up front for a game/company they've never heard of.
5. There are plenty of ways around this. Many games don't even require direct player-to-player competition. You can also segregate players so that payers and non-payers can compete in different tiers, or allow modes of gameplay which exclude or dampen the benefits of "pay to win" items. You can even allow ways for non-playing players to gain the same benefits, but in ways that are inconvenient enough the really dedicated will do it, while some others will decide they'd rather pay than put in the effort.
Thanks for the discussion about Hearthstone. I hadn't heard about it, but it's been fun. I played a little Magic back in the 90's and miss that style of game. Free is an excellent price for a little dabbling.
Also, PvZ2 includes a lot of components that you cannot eventually earn, but can only buy. A handful of plants, a number of other bonuses. I added it all up at one point, and it was well over $50, just for the perpetual benefits, not even consumables. I resist paying that much for an AAA title. No way in hell will I pay it for a little iPhone distracter. I was late to the original and only paid $5, which I thought was fair. I'd pay $5 or even $10 for everything in #2. But not $50 or $60. Ridiculous.
Sure, I understand the double-blind system. But it's not placebo vs. actual medicine, it's placebo vs (medicine + placebo.) Outside of the study, when your doctor gives you a pill, you're not only getting the full benefit of the medicine, but also the psychological benefits of the placebo effect. It's *not* a placebo, but your brain is still telling you that you feel better for the same reasons, and any treatment you get should automatically convey those benefits.
I acknowledge your point about side effects - there's a greater chance of negatives, which could balance out some positives.
I thought it wasn't just lack of mastery, but actually poor controls, which contributed to the inability to master it. This isn't a sad movie making you sad, this is a skipping DVD during a crucial movie scene inducing rage when you can't get it to work.
I still remember the one and only time I beat the original Castlevania. Only time I made it past the Reaper, actually, with some kind of luck. From there the run to Dracula wasn't bad, but I had to retry that boss fight dozens of times. It took so many times I had to pause the game and leave it running overnight and keep trying after school the next day. Finally only beat him by accident, I think, which involved getting hit at a weird point and landing somewhere I didn't expect to be, but running with it. Perhaps the crowning achievement of my NES days.
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Every Atari game had fancy box art. None of the games looked remotely like the boxes. Nobody who owned more than one Atari game would have had an issue with the game's look.
I read that book. As a teenager I remember finding it to be among the funniest I'd read, right up there with Hitchhiker's Guide. Haven't read it in a few decades, so I'm not sure if it weathered well, but I still think of it fondly.
What happened on Earth is telling for being the only known success story thus far, but it's a given that it has to take that long.
It's NOT a given. Whoops.
I agree with your logic as far as the nature of star populations goes, but there's been advanced land-based life on Earth for close to a billion* years. Dinosaurs kept mammals down for more than a third of a billion before we got a chance. Unless you're also arguing that intelligent life will necessarily require the same sort of treatment on any other planet, it seems like there's easily hundreds of millions of years where some intelligent variation of dinosaur could have evolved instead. Even if one of the filters is the string of extinctions and regrowth, it's easy enough to imagine another world where the mass extinctions came tens or fifties of millions of years more frequently, advancing the pace of evolution.
You also have to wonder, did single-cellular life really need three billion* years to turn into multi-cellular life? Why not pull it off on some world in two billion, or 2.5, or even 2.75 billion and still leave intelligent life an extra 250 million years head start elsewhere? What happened on Earth is telling for being the only known success story thus far, but it's a given that it has to take that long. Even if a billion years is high, a few million seems way too low.
*My numbers are all really fuzzy and probably wrong, but probably good enough for a napkin-style calculation.
The way MMORPGs implement it, crafting is dull, tedious, and limited. The players can't employ imagination to create novel items, they are restricted to a small set of fixed recipes. The game designers couldn't allow much latitude on crafting, or the players could and would make items so powerful that they completely unbalance the main game.
It's not just game balance, it's coding for the flexibility. It's one thing to code eight potions for eight reagents, with the restriction that each potion gets exactly one reagent, and another thing to code for roughly 100 different potions, if you free it up to allow each potion to have any combination of 1-8 reagents in it. What do all those potions do? What are they called? Can you even think up 100 different unique effects for them to have? And, ultimately, does it even add anything to the game to have a 100-potion exploration space (and do you give hints for recipes, or let players keep a cookbook to remember, or is discovery part of the game?) rather than just a simple setup of 8 obviously handy potions. Is the time required to allow this advanced crafting better spent on coding more spells, or another level, or doing more gameplay testing?
Good one. I'm stealing it and putting it in my novel about a parody dungeon crawler video game. I'd give you credit, but, frankly, "Thanks to Assmasher" isn't something I'm willing to put in print. Er, a second time, since I guess I just said it once.
Focus more on axes or sharks with laser beams.
It seems like this has to exist by this point, but is there a game with a laser shark yet? Ideally maybe some sort of underwater "flight simulator" where you ride on the backs of large fish and shoot at each other.
And they should. You can't go around screaming "mercury" like there's only one form of an element, and it always has the same property no matter what chemical compound it's part of. Imagine we had the same lecture about "sodium" (an explosive metal) or "chlorine" (a deadly poison). Can you BELIEVE they put sodium AND chlorine in our TABLE SALT! It's an explosive deadly poison! They're killing us all!
Oh, actually, I didn't get through the quackery far enough to see that chlorine came up in drinking water. This AC really hasn't ever heard of table salt.
Most of the stuff in that post is conspiracy level "they're lying to us and everything's a poison" diatribe. Do a little research and you'll see that 1) thimerosol wasn't in most vaccines and was removed from nearly all of them at this point because of the paranoia and FUD, 2) even when it was in some vaccines, it is mercury compound with no demonstrated physical harm, unlike, say, the stuff in old thermometers, 3) this "mercury is always evil" argument ignores any rational analysis of toxicity levels, disregarding how minimal the amount of mercury was in any of the vaccines compared to other general exposure.
That's a curious take. I'm not sure I'd trust myself to actually wake up, though I guess I could keep the sound-based alarm as a backup until I was sure. I've also got young kids and occasionally have a *really* short night of sleep, which again makes me think I might sleep though light on bad days.
It's certainly not quite as efficient on the power side of the spectrum, but I'd guess not bad if it's just a few minutes. How do you tell the alarm "okay, turn off now, I'm up"? Just set the timer for x minutes and assume it'll be enough?
Don't be silly. Miscarriage isn't intentional. It would be prosecuted under involuntary manslaughter.
That there is the true secret to my success.
I've tried duct tape art, a web game, a book, and a dot-com startup, but no apps yet. I think that's next of my checklist of educational monetary failures, though. If they say you've got to try seven businesses before one becomes successful*, I've only got three more to go before I hit it big.
Would you like to elaborate on why you don't like them? Or what you using as an investment vehicle instead?
He also neglected to include any sort of interest/growth in that calculation. You could easily get there in much less time at $25k/year with even 5% interest. Or some problems come up and it takes you 30 years instead of 25 - that's still shorter than most people work. Or get a few raises and work your way up to contributing $50k/year in a decade.
In other words, there are obstacles, but there's plenty of wiggle room in both directions. If you're paying even a little attention, it's not a hard goal to hit with a developer's salary, which is generally considerably above median income.
Really? I think most people would accept "net worth" as the proper metric.
Now there's probably some who don't think about that much and assume millionaires have tons of cash on hand and spend wildly, but generally you don't get to be (or stay) a millionaire doing that.
If a wooden block can be a car and a stick can be a gun, I'm gonna call shenanigans on this. It's not a limitation of the specialty pieces, but of the imagination.
Survival of the fittest is the only rule in life.
Don't be silly. Survival of the fittest applies to the wild. The entire *point* of culture/civilization is to blunt that harshest of rules. It doesn't always work so well, and it can easily be exploited, but the GP is entirely correct when he says that bullying should be treated as wrong and discouraged.
4. When their quota/sales target is not met, developers/publishers are under pressure to make up the difference.
5. One of the easiest ways to boost sales is to introduce items which will confer a greatly desired benefit on its purchasers. OTOH, non-buyers who cannot enjoy the greatly desired benefit will endure a comparatively degraded playing experience.
These two aren't necessarily true.
4. Smaller developers especially may not have things like quotas and sales targets which dictate their entire behavior. They're also more likely to be developing for fun as much as income such that $$ aren't the only consideration. And they're more likely to pick free to play as a model just because nobody will pay up front for a game/company they've never heard of.
5. There are plenty of ways around this. Many games don't even require direct player-to-player competition. You can also segregate players so that payers and non-payers can compete in different tiers, or allow modes of gameplay which exclude or dampen the benefits of "pay to win" items. You can even allow ways for non-playing players to gain the same benefits, but in ways that are inconvenient enough the really dedicated will do it, while some others will decide they'd rather pay than put in the effort.
Thanks for the discussion about Hearthstone. I hadn't heard about it, but it's been fun. I played a little Magic back in the 90's and miss that style of game. Free is an excellent price for a little dabbling.
Also, PvZ2 includes a lot of components that you cannot eventually earn, but can only buy. A handful of plants, a number of other bonuses. I added it all up at one point, and it was well over $50, just for the perpetual benefits, not even consumables. I resist paying that much for an AAA title. No way in hell will I pay it for a little iPhone distracter. I was late to the original and only paid $5, which I thought was fair. I'd pay $5 or even $10 for everything in #2. But not $50 or $60. Ridiculous.
Sure, I understand the double-blind system. But it's not placebo vs. actual medicine, it's placebo vs (medicine + placebo.) Outside of the study, when your doctor gives you a pill, you're not only getting the full benefit of the medicine, but also the psychological benefits of the placebo effect. It's *not* a placebo, but your brain is still telling you that you feel better for the same reasons, and any treatment you get should automatically convey those benefits.
I acknowledge your point about side effects - there's a greater chance of negatives, which could balance out some positives.
I thought it wasn't just lack of mastery, but actually poor controls, which contributed to the inability to master it. This isn't a sad movie making you sad, this is a skipping DVD during a crucial movie scene inducing rage when you can't get it to work.
ET was bad, but not even in the same league as Ghosts 'n' Goblins.
I still remember the one and only time I beat the original Castlevania. Only time I made it past the Reaper, actually, with some kind of luck. From there the run to Dracula wasn't bad, but I had to retry that boss fight dozens of times. It took so many times I had to pause the game and leave it running overnight and keep trying after school the next day. Finally only beat him by accident, I think, which involved getting hit at a weird point and landing somewhere I didn't expect to be, but running with it. Perhaps the crowning achievement of my NES days.
I have long maintained that if you could induce the placebo effect 50% of the time you'd be doing better than modern medicine.
Don't you think modern medicine should have just as much of a chance of tapping into the placebo effect as anything else?