I think I have a pretty good grasp of 3D space, I've managed to navigate through at least a dozen rooms today and haven't collided with any walls.
It sounds like you're trying to tell me that I can't dislike the game because I don't like the controls because the controls are absolutely perfect, which is completely asinine. Just like you get to like the game all you want, I get to dislike it all I want for whatever reasons I choose. For this game, it's the controls. I don't like them, and I've completed over half the game, so I'm pretty sure I've gotten as good at the controls that I'm going to get.
If you and your wife love it, then great. But I get to think that the controls are broken for my playstyle, too.
Galaxy is one of the best platformers ever made. It would take a dramatic amount of incompetence to have your progress stunted by the controls, which are fluid and tactile. My wife, who never played video games until this year, is able to play through the game. You seem to be less skilled at games than a woman who has approximately 2 months of total video game experience to her name. Apparently you can only deal with reality if the camera is peering over the top of your head from behind. One of the most fun aspects of Galaxy is dealing with the shifting geometry in 3D space, dodging obstacles and enemies at the same time.
Wow, that's quite the leap. I found the camera disorienting when it's obviously flawless so I'm must be massively incompetent?
The camera can move around all it wants, that doesn't really bother me, but I expect that Up is always Up, i.e., when I press Up, my character goes toward the top of the screen. In Galaxy, Up is Up until the camera changes angles, and then suddenly Up is Keep Moving Forward Even Though That Direction Might Not Be Up In Relation To Your Screen... Until you stop moving, then Up is Up again. I keep trying to correct what direction I'm pressing in relation to whichever direction the camera's pointing, and that doesn't work. For example, I'm running on a planetoid, pressing Up, and the view shifts so that the direction I was heading is now Right, so I shift the stick to point Right, which is now Down since I haven't stopped moving. Then I run smack into a wall, a pit, or the gaping maw of some enemy I was trying to avoid.
If 'the camera doesn't behave the way I want it to' is synonymous with 'dramatic incompetence' then you're absolutely correct and it's obviously my fault for having preferences that aren't in line with the game's prescribed controls.
Apparently we have differing definitions of 'amazingly good'. I've repeatedly been attempting to play through Galaxy, but keep getting stymied by the poor controls and bizarre camera angles, which are both a result of running around on those little spheroids. Of course, the awful camera was also in Super Mario Sunshine, too, so it's probably to be expected at this point.
No, the last 'amazingly good' Mario game was Super Mario 64.
This isn't exactly a new development. Remember Diablo II? Its 'expansion' was really just the end of the story started in the main game, a.k.a. Act V. The same could be said about Warcraft III and its expansion.
That may be, but how are those GBA games going to get to the SD cards? Unless I can cram my old carts into the SD slot, I'm thinking that I'm going to have to buy them all again.
Generally people who pirate games can not afford more than 1 or 2 games a month. But if they pirate them they can try 10 a month.
If they can afford to buy one game a month, then they can get a membership at Gamefly or their local Blockbuster and play far more games for the same amount of dollars.
short of the difficulty of offline play, I don't know too many people with genuine complaints about Steam.
My biggest beef with Steam is that Valve has a kill switch that they could use if they want to. That's far more control over my purchase than they should have.
Now, I'm not a professional editor by any means, but here's my small attempt at making this thing readable. Disclaimer, everything I know from the book I gleaned from the review, so if I screwed up any of the details, I'm sure it just increased the 'review's readability, and blame the whacked out Idle CSS for the formatting not working properly:
-----------
If you like stories about maverick billionaires, cliche mercenaries, government sponsored teams of super heroes, leading-edge technology, and the ultimate evil of an alien human resources department, then Special Operations Team Raptor The African Incident, by Daniel A. Dawson, just might be for you. Weighing in at a scant 103 pages, SOTR won't waste more than a couple of hours of your life, and while it may be as fresh and creative as Wallet Craft Class at Summer camp, it's not a complete waste of time. Keep reading to see if your mom would like it as much as she loved changing your dirty diapers when you were an infant.
It all starts when maverick billionaire Adrian Garland finds a mysterious sphere composed of an unknown metal at one of his mining sites. He orders his men to drill into it, after which the drill breaks. At this point Adrian concludes what any sane person would: The sphere is from an alien civilization. He has his secretary, Mrs. Whisper, contact his personal mercenary team to break into a DARPA research facility, codenamed Mind Shaft, to steal a top secret laser called The Lighthouse project. You're never quite sure how he knows about this super-secret laser. Perhaps at some point he needed to tarnish the reputation of a professor by popping a massive amount of popcorn in his house from space. The book, though, is a bit unclear. What is clear is that even with a billion dollars the quality of mercenaries in this day and age is less than spectacular
Adrian's team is led by Frank Edwards, a professional thief who suffers from a bit of a Fezzik complex, he only steals from countries or very large corporations because when he tries stealing from just one person or a single bank he fails miserably. One such bank heist in Atlanta has Frank down on his luck, he can outwit countries but not the local FBI who did such great work in the Richard Jewell case.
Miguel is the tech guy, on the run from the Cuban government after they caught him double crossing them. The fact that the People's Computer Defense Network, were able to gather around their 486 and track him doesn't seem to worry anybody. Undoubtedly, Miguel simply updated his Facebook page with, "Ripping off the Cubans, BRB."
Next comes The Darkness. The Darkness is an amalgamation of every cool, bad-ass killer in every movie you have ever seen. He tracked down 241 secret agents across Europe and killed them in 70 days, making him the leading cause of death in Africa. This guy is so bad-ass that he walked up to a CNN reporter one time and the reporter died of fright. The Darkness is in every nightmare Chuck Norris ever had. While he is a genius at killing, he isn't very discreet.When we meet him, German agents had found his family and killed them all, making him very Dark, indeed.
Lastly, we have Lisa Johan, who isn't a regular part of the gang. She's essentially what The Shadow would have been if he were cute little Swedish woman. Lisa is being held captive in the basement of Gina's Sex Plex, a strip club, where her captors are auctioning her off to the highest and most unsavory bidder. She's unable to control anyone's mind and escape because somehow strip clubs in this criminally insane universe are havens for the strong-willed. She gets recruited by the team, even though they are wary of her. As Miguel cleverly observes, "Women can't be trusted. A woman with mind control means you can't trust anybody and everybody trusts somebody."
This ragtag team then makes some fake IDs and attacks the DARPA facility. It only takes a few minutes for our heroes to kill all of the Keystone Cops guarding our nation's secrets. But that just paved the way for the delici
This isn't a book review, it's a book report. With the super-short sentences that I'd expect to see coming out of a middle school English class:
"The Laser finally burns through the sphere. Three Aliens walk out. They try to communicate with the assembled scientists, researchers and technicians."
Doing a funny review of a bad book is all well and good, but samzenpus's meandering trainwreck of a writing style, combined with his painfully unfunny commentary and his... creative use of punctuation means that he's really not the one to be doing them.
I didn't really think that my actual, real name was too common until I started trying to Google myself. Wikipedia has a page with my name on it, but none of the people referenced there are me.
Trying to 'reclaim' my identity from these millions and millions of pages with my name on it doesn't seem to be a particularly good use of my time. I'm more concerned with my username being used by some engineering company in Nigeria, since that's my 'real' online identity.
Do you work in a clean room or something? Most non-tech folks that I know don't realize you're supposed to open your computer and clear out the gunk once in a while, and where I work folks regularly bring in computers to be repaired that haven't been moved from underneath their desks since they bought them. You'd be amazed how much dirt will pile up in five or more years if the computers haven't been moved. Less if they're in a particularly filthy environment.
Nobody has this game. Nobody ever heard of it until the plagiarism got scolded publicly. It is an elaborate publicity stunt. Got mine in the mail today. It's totally real.
still I'm very pleased of the level of functionality offered by steam. with some exception (bioshock) activation, playing without cd and losing discs is not an issue anymore. also now steam allow to play game offline, and downloading If Valve ever went under for some reason (not likely, but it could happen, pretend a big earthquake leveled their headquarters), I'd bet product activation or losing the CDs would become an issue very quickly.
Also, don't forget that Valve still controls access to stuff you've bought and can deactivate it at will if you use it in a manner they don't like (i.e. outside the proper geographic territory).
I'm not sure that I suggested that you change your handle. I don't really care which one you use, but if I went to, say, Chevrolet forums and created an an account with the name of 'ChevyCarsSuckBalls', then any of my posts about Chevy vehicles are going to be met with hostility, regardless of the validity of any of the points I might make. But, hey, keep it, name your kids 'MandrivaDupe' and 'SUSEDupe', if that's what you want. That won't bother me a bit.
I didn't whine to anyone about my install problems because I've been trained not to do so, it's because I understood the risk of installing an operating system, and more than likely actually did something wrong. It happens, and I was the unlucky one to be bitten by that bug.
If think that the install docs are lacking, then why haven't you fixed them? There's a wiki you can contribute to, and there's a page here that tells you to back up everything and have your installation media for all of your operating systems handy.
Besides all that, it's pretty clear from your commenting that you've been scared off from trying Ubuntu or any other distribution of Linux ever again, and that's totally your decision. If it's broken for you, don't use it. But have you tried it again since your first attempt? Things rarely go right the first time when doing something new, even if you're properly prepared. A lot of development has taken place in the last two or so years. Maybe the bug you encountered has been fixed. Of course, it might not have if you have some weird nonstandard setup. Or are you frightened that your issue might have accidentally gotten fixed and you'll have no more ammunition for your flamethrower?
About five years ago I tried to install Slackware. I heard good things about it, and I've had a little experience installing and using a few different distributions in the past, and I just wanted to check it out. When the install completed, I was presented with its choice of bootloader, LILO, which I was only partially familiar with, but went ahead and accepted its defaults and rebooted. When I did, I was presented with a screen that just said "LI" and the computer would go no further. Trying to reinstall Linux didn't help and trying to repair the MBR also failed for some reason (it's been five years, I kind of forget what the specific Windows error was). I didn't have a second computer to dump my data on or a live CD, or a friend that could assist with any of those things at the time (it was late on a weeknight). So I lost everything on my computer. All of my documents, pictures, movies, game saves, emails, all of it. Gone forever because I had a problem with the installer and was a little impatient. So I reformatted the drive, reinstalled Windows, and was back up and running in a couple of hours.
After that, did I take out some personal vendetta against Slackware? No. Did I spew vitriol every time a Slackware story came up on Slashdot? No. Did I adopt a new screen name 'SlackwareDupe' because I need to constantly remind people that I was that guy that had that problem with the installer that one time? No. Did I go to the forums and kvetch about my problems to the community? No. Did I silently curse to myself and resolve to not use Slackware again for a while. Why yes, yes I did, and that's all I did. But I'm not much of an attention whore.
Microsoft will not use activation as a tool to force people to upgrade. Activation is merely an anti-piracy tool, nothing else.
Microsoft will also support the activation of Windows XP throughout its life and will likely provide an update that turns activation off at the end of the product's lifecycle so users would no longer be required to activate the product.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe we watched a different version of the show, but his job was to press the button repeatedly, sometimes for up to an hour a day.
According to this post Zonk works for Massively as of mid-April.
I think I have a pretty good grasp of 3D space, I've managed to navigate through at least a dozen rooms today and haven't collided with any walls.
It sounds like you're trying to tell me that I can't dislike the game because I don't like the controls because the controls are absolutely perfect, which is completely asinine. Just like you get to like the game all you want, I get to dislike it all I want for whatever reasons I choose. For this game, it's the controls. I don't like them, and I've completed over half the game, so I'm pretty sure I've gotten as good at the controls that I'm going to get.
If you and your wife love it, then great. But I get to think that the controls are broken for my playstyle, too.
Galaxy is one of the best platformers ever made. It would take a dramatic amount of incompetence to have your progress stunted by the controls, which are fluid and tactile. My wife, who never played video games until this year, is able to play through the game. You seem to be less skilled at games than a woman who has approximately 2 months of total video game experience to her name. Apparently you can only deal with reality if the camera is peering over the top of your head from behind. One of the most fun aspects of Galaxy is dealing with the shifting geometry in 3D space, dodging obstacles and enemies at the same time.
Wow, that's quite the leap. I found the camera disorienting when it's obviously flawless so I'm must be massively incompetent?
The camera can move around all it wants, that doesn't really bother me, but I expect that Up is always Up, i.e., when I press Up, my character goes toward the top of the screen. In Galaxy, Up is Up until the camera changes angles, and then suddenly Up is Keep Moving Forward Even Though That Direction Might Not Be Up In Relation To Your Screen... Until you stop moving, then Up is Up again. I keep trying to correct what direction I'm pressing in relation to whichever direction the camera's pointing, and that doesn't work. For example, I'm running on a planetoid, pressing Up, and the view shifts so that the direction I was heading is now Right, so I shift the stick to point Right, which is now Down since I haven't stopped moving. Then I run smack into a wall, a pit, or the gaping maw of some enemy I was trying to avoid.
If 'the camera doesn't behave the way I want it to' is synonymous with 'dramatic incompetence' then you're absolutely correct and it's obviously my fault for having preferences that aren't in line with the game's prescribed controls.
Apparently we have differing definitions of 'amazingly good'. I've repeatedly been attempting to play through Galaxy, but keep getting stymied by the poor controls and bizarre camera angles, which are both a result of running around on those little spheroids. Of course, the awful camera was also in Super Mario Sunshine, too, so it's probably to be expected at this point.
No, the last 'amazingly good' Mario game was Super Mario 64.
If you knew who he was, he wouldn't be much of a ninja.
This isn't exactly a new development. Remember Diablo II? Its 'expansion' was really just the end of the story started in the main game, a.k.a. Act V. The same could be said about Warcraft III and its expansion.
That may be, but how are those GBA games going to get to the SD cards? Unless I can cram my old carts into the SD slot, I'm thinking that I'm going to have to buy them all again.
An even easier solution is to volunteer to be the one that 'throws it away' in the 'dumpster'.
Insight Communications in Indiana and Kentucky have been doing this for a while now.
Generally people who pirate games can not afford more than 1 or 2 games a month. But if they pirate them they can try 10 a month.
If they can afford to buy one game a month, then they can get a membership at Gamefly or their local Blockbuster and play far more games for the same amount of dollars.
"I don't see many low id's complaining, I wonder why..."
Because I didn't bother signing in.
short of the difficulty of offline play, I don't know too many people with genuine complaints about Steam.
My biggest beef with Steam is that Valve has a kill switch that they could use if they want to. That's far more control over my purchase than they should have.
That sounds suspiciously like the reason I usually buy from XFX, and register promptly, except theirs is a Double Lifetime Warranty
Now, I'm not a professional editor by any means, but here's my small attempt at making this thing readable. Disclaimer, everything I know from the book I gleaned from the review, so if I screwed up any of the details, I'm sure it just increased the 'review's readability, and blame the whacked out Idle CSS for the formatting not working properly:
-----------
If you like stories about maverick billionaires, cliche mercenaries, government sponsored teams of super heroes, leading-edge technology, and the ultimate evil of an alien human resources department, then Special Operations Team Raptor The African Incident, by Daniel A. Dawson, just might be for you. Weighing in at a scant 103 pages, SOTR won't waste more than a couple of hours of your life, and while it may be as fresh and creative as Wallet Craft Class at Summer camp, it's not a complete waste of time. Keep reading to see if your mom would like it as much as she loved changing your dirty diapers when you were an infant.
It all starts when maverick billionaire Adrian Garland finds a mysterious sphere composed of an unknown metal at one of his mining sites. He orders his men to drill into it, after which the drill breaks. At this point Adrian concludes what any sane person would: The sphere is from an alien civilization. He has his secretary, Mrs. Whisper, contact his personal mercenary team to break into a DARPA research facility, codenamed Mind Shaft, to steal a top secret laser called The Lighthouse project. You're never quite sure how he knows about this super-secret laser. Perhaps at some point he needed to tarnish the reputation of a professor by popping a massive amount of popcorn in his house from space. The book, though, is a bit unclear. What is clear is that even with a billion dollars the quality of mercenaries in this day and age is less than spectacular
Adrian's team is led by Frank Edwards, a professional thief who suffers from a bit of a Fezzik complex, he only steals from countries or very large corporations because when he tries stealing from just one person or a single bank he fails miserably. One such bank heist in Atlanta has Frank down on his luck, he can outwit countries but not the local FBI who did such great work in the Richard Jewell case.
Miguel is the tech guy, on the run from the Cuban government after they caught him double crossing them. The fact that the People's Computer Defense Network, were able to gather around their 486 and track him doesn't seem to worry anybody. Undoubtedly, Miguel simply updated his Facebook page with, "Ripping off the Cubans, BRB."
Next comes The Darkness. The Darkness is an amalgamation of every cool, bad-ass killer in every movie you have ever seen. He tracked down 241 secret agents across Europe and killed them in 70 days, making him the leading cause of death in Africa. This guy is so bad-ass that he walked up to a CNN reporter one time and the reporter died of fright. The Darkness is in every nightmare Chuck Norris ever had. While he is a genius at killing, he isn't very discreet.When we meet him, German agents had found his family and killed them all, making him very Dark, indeed.
Lastly, we have Lisa Johan, who isn't a regular part of the gang. She's essentially what The Shadow would have been if he were cute little Swedish woman. Lisa is being held captive in the basement of Gina's Sex Plex, a strip club, where her captors are auctioning her off to the highest and most unsavory bidder. She's unable to control anyone's mind and escape because somehow strip clubs in this criminally insane universe are havens for the strong-willed. She gets recruited by the team, even though they are wary of her. As Miguel cleverly observes, "Women can't be trusted. A woman with mind control means you can't trust anybody and everybody trusts somebody."
This ragtag team then makes some fake IDs and attacks the DARPA facility. It only takes a few minutes for our heroes to kill all of the Keystone Cops guarding our nation's secrets. But that just paved the way for the delici
This isn't a book review, it's a book report. With the super-short sentences that I'd expect to see coming out of a middle school English class:
Doing a funny review of a bad book is all well and good, but samzenpus's meandering trainwreck of a writing style, combined with his painfully unfunny commentary and his... creative use of punctuation means that he's really not the one to be doing them.
Is data from over a million and a half samples not useful?
Who's the wiseguy that sent in the half a sample?
I didn't really think that my actual, real name was too common until I started trying to Google myself. Wikipedia has a page with my name on it, but none of the people referenced there are me.
Trying to 'reclaim' my identity from these millions and millions of pages with my name on it doesn't seem to be a particularly good use of my time. I'm more concerned with my username being used by some engineering company in Nigeria, since that's my 'real' online identity.
Do you work in a clean room or something? Most non-tech folks that I know don't realize you're supposed to open your computer and clear out the gunk once in a while, and where I work folks regularly bring in computers to be repaired that haven't been moved from underneath their desks since they bought them. You'd be amazed how much dirt will pile up in five or more years if the computers haven't been moved. Less if they're in a particularly filthy environment.
Also, don't forget that Valve still controls access to stuff you've bought and can deactivate it at will if you use it in a manner they don't like (i.e. outside the proper geographic territory).
I'm not sure that I suggested that you change your handle. I don't really care which one you use, but if I went to, say, Chevrolet forums and created an an account with the name of 'ChevyCarsSuckBalls', then any of my posts about Chevy vehicles are going to be met with hostility, regardless of the validity of any of the points I might make. But, hey, keep it, name your kids 'MandrivaDupe' and 'SUSEDupe', if that's what you want. That won't bother me a bit.
I didn't whine to anyone about my install problems because I've been trained not to do so, it's because I understood the risk of installing an operating system, and more than likely actually did something wrong. It happens, and I was the unlucky one to be bitten by that bug.
If think that the install docs are lacking, then why haven't you fixed them? There's a wiki you can contribute to, and there's a page here that tells you to back up everything and have your installation media for all of your operating systems handy.
Besides all that, it's pretty clear from your commenting that you've been scared off from trying Ubuntu or any other distribution of Linux ever again, and that's totally your decision. If it's broken for you, don't use it. But have you tried it again since your first attempt? Things rarely go right the first time when doing something new, even if you're properly prepared. A lot of development has taken place in the last two or so years. Maybe the bug you encountered has been fixed. Of course, it might not have if you have some weird nonstandard setup. Or are you frightened that your issue might have accidentally gotten fixed and you'll have no more ammunition for your flamethrower?
About five years ago I tried to install Slackware. I heard good things about it, and I've had a little experience installing and using a few different distributions in the past, and I just wanted to check it out. When the install completed, I was presented with its choice of bootloader, LILO, which I was only partially familiar with, but went ahead and accepted its defaults and rebooted. When I did, I was presented with a screen that just said "LI" and the computer would go no further. Trying to reinstall Linux didn't help and trying to repair the MBR also failed for some reason (it's been five years, I kind of forget what the specific Windows error was). I didn't have a second computer to dump my data on or a live CD, or a friend that could assist with any of those things at the time (it was late on a weeknight). So I lost everything on my computer. All of my documents, pictures, movies, game saves, emails, all of it. Gone forever because I had a problem with the installer and was a little impatient. So I reformatted the drive, reinstalled Windows, and was back up and running in a couple of hours.
After that, did I take out some personal vendetta against Slackware? No. Did I spew vitriol every time a Slackware story came up on Slashdot? No. Did I adopt a new screen name 'SlackwareDupe' because I need to constantly remind people that I was that guy that had that problem with the installer that one time? No. Did I go to the forums and kvetch about my problems to the community? No. Did I silently curse to myself and resolve to not use Slackware again for a while. Why yes, yes I did, and that's all I did. But I'm not much of an attention whore.
That information used to be available here, but has mysteriously vanished from the revamped page. It's still on this international page, however.