Wow, for someone who says that only Sith deal in absolutes that post was chock full of stereotyping. You could've at least thrown a "most", or a "many", or possibly a "generally" in there.
But what about customer service, quality and a raft of other things? Don't they count? Or is the Internet just about low, low, low prices and everything else counts for nothing?
Ahem. From my comment:
If Mr. Quuxly can't get lower prices than Foobar Drug then he needs to either demonstrate that his store is actually worth more to shop in (service, selection, etc) or go out of business.
I own an Apple computer, and not because it was cheaper. I like Netflix's service enough that it justifies a greater cost than using one of its competitors. BUT I'll always welcome competition between companies; this ruling encourages that. Price is only one way of competing.
But this judgement, extended into the Main Street Druggist Wars, says that Mr. Quuxly HAS NO SUCH RIGHT. He has to grit his teeth as Foobar Drug swarms his store with leafleteers and buttonholers, harassing his customers and interfering with his business.
Good. Free market and all that. Security through obscurity (hoping that your customers don't know about the lower prices) doesn't really work well anyway. If Mr. Quuxly can't get lower prices than Foobar Drug then he needs to either demonstrate that his store is actually worth more to shop in (service, selection, etc) or go out of business.
The Dig was (and is) awesome. I couldn't believe it when I sat a friend down (who'd never played adventure games) to see The Dig and he mocked the blocky graphics; I'd never noticed! I still play it on ScummVM, the nifty filters make it look nice even at high resolution.
I have a big directory with all of my old lucasarts games: Monkey Island 1, 2 and 3 (4 made me sad); The Dig; Full Throttle; Day of the Tentacle; Maniac Mansion; Loom; and Sam and Max. Of course 3d isn't all bad, my favorite of the lucasarts games is Grim Fandango and it used 3d very well. But I'm still more a fan of the 2d adventure games than 3d.
Movie clip games could have been good, but they tried to work before the hardware was really ready. I think they *could* work now, except that the genre killed itself with mediocre titles. Gabriel Knight 2 was the best game in the series but it was practically unplayable because of its crash prone movie clip format and long load times.
What about Ultima 7? I've been having a lot of fun replaying that gem via exult.
Weird, I don't remember the control scheme to D:F. Maybe I blocked it out?:-)
But what you say is true, I'd *love* a current 3d space fighter. In fact, that's the one case I can think of for a controller to be a better controller in an FPS; so why aren't console games all about it?
And bring back Lucasarts style adventure games.:-/
Why put the movie adaptations aside? They are still fun games! But Nintendo isn't the last holdout for fun games, it is the last holdout developing a significant number of its games as kid friendly though.
I have more fun playing Splinter Cell, Ninja Gaiden, etc. than playing the more kid oriented games (unless you count Jade Empire as kid oriented, kid friendly yes, but not kid oriented); but they don't sound like the kind of games you want your kid to be playing.
If it's capship fighting in the WC vein that you want: you seriously need to check out Descent: Freespace. It has absolutely nothing to do with the Descent FPS game, but it's spaceship fighting with awesome ships, cool plots, cluster missles, and HUGE capship fighting.
Some of the ships you fight are incredibily enormous, they can take up to five minutes just to fly past -- all the while lauching fighters and shooting turrets, etc.
If you haven't played WC2 or Tie Fighter then you've really missed out on some of the best of the genre. WC3's space battles paled in comparison to those in WC2. I remember the first time I saw the Concordia (your home capship) shoot its BIG gun; the shot flew right past my ship and dwarfed it. If I had been any closer I was have been instantly fried! When there was a multi-ship battle going on around you it was just awesome.
But as awesome as WC1 and 2 were, Descent: Freespace 1 and 2 simply blew them away in plot, graphics, gamespot, and wingman AI.
Sure, I'd love to see another Wing Commander game with Mark Hammil and Tom Wilson, but that's not what the gaming industry is producing.
Sweet merciful Hobbes! You want another Wing Commander 3 or 4, or even...5? Holy mass drivers and neutron guns, did you play Wing Commander 1 or 2? Even the WC1 eclipsed WC[3-5] in quality and fun factor.
You go into this rehash of the tired, whining rant of "but where's the fun" and then hold up one of the worst (or best?) examples of the trend that you lament?!
You want to sit your kid in front of good, modern games? Fine! Monkey Ball! Katamari Damacy! Jade Empire! (if you play it with him) Rogue Squadron on the Gamecube! Donkey Conga! Dance Dance Revolution! Lumines! Psychonauts! (one awesome game!) Legend of Zelda the Wind Waker! Paper Mario! (tell me that cool graphics didn't enhance that game) Kingdom Hearts! Madagascar! The Incredibles! Mario Cart: Double Dash! Sly 2! Harvest Moon! Harry Potter! Spiderman 2! Tak 2! Eco the Dolphin(on Dreamcast)! Wallace and Gromit!
Want more? Just go to gamespot and search for [your system] + [for kids].
Games are still fun, in fact, if you take off the rose colored glasses then you'd see that games are more fun now than they've ever been. Take it from someone who replays old Atari, NES, SNES, and PC games all the time (Lucasarts adventure games are the best kid friendly games ever made, hands down; ScummVM is your friend). Sure I love a good romp in Zork, to stop the evil pirate LeChuck, to bobble those bubbles as much as anyone; but that doesn't mean that games today are superbly and amazingly awesome.
But if you kid likes SNES games and you like SNES games and you can still buy used SNES games at your nearest (Gamestop, Game Crazy, EB Games, thrift store, eBay) then what's the problem? We'll have fun with the new stuff!
I have too little caffeine in my system to be reading such comments; please post them with a warning.
That comment contains so much ignorance about Christianity and religion in general that it boggles the mind. Hey, Christians believe in God too; so is creating the universe (or even just a planet) another test they should pass?
"I see you have constructed a new lightsaber." -- Darth Vader in ROTJ wielding Luke's new lightsaber. Luke lost Annakin's old lightsaber because it was still being held by the arm that fell onto Bespin in ESB.
For many people it's the other way around. They will play a game once and then put it straight on eBay, whereas books will be re-read many, many times.
Not me though, I replay and reread just about everything.
But surely you wouldn't use a mouse and a controller in combination...that's just weird.
Hmm, actually a specialized controller designed to complement a mouse would be pretty sweet.
Re:And Paramount's response?
on
P2P and TV
·
· Score: 1
No, the studio thought it wasn't lucrative and that's a huge difference. Remember that the viewers are the product that the studio delivers to the advertisers. Why make an expensive, high quality show that will appeal to a few (e.g. Firefly) when they could make a cheap, low quality show that will appeal to many (e.g. Reality Show Double Dare Dating Game Extreme)?
Just move your main music library to the "Shared" folder and (unfortunately) set it read/writeable by all users; then make an alias to the folder and put it in each of your music directories with the proper name (sans "alias").
Works like a charm, especially when you want to store your massive music collection on a second hard disk. Ditto for the iPhoto library, we keep ours separate but on the second hard disk.
My wife and I have a subscription to Wired. Every month when an issue arrives (just got the remix issue yesterday!) we spend a few days discussing all the cool articles. Inevitably we always remark on how consistently good the magazine is.
Let's look at some cool bits in the past months:
November 2004: Wired came with a cd containing songs all distributed with the creative commons share and share alike license! Want to remix some Beastie Boys and Danger Mouse?
December 2004: Awesome issue on the present state and future of exploration.
April 2005: Hybrid cars, a good article on China, an awesome article on Robert Rodriguez.
I could go on, but suffice to say that the magazine consistently puts out well researched and quality articles.
Why is destroying democracy immoral? Ill-advised and a bad idea, sure; but immoral?
Besides, the middle class is going nowhere; it's just expanding.
The real problem is that the jobs can move freely between borders, but the people can't (at least not as freely as the jobs). When it becomes just as easy to take a job in India or China as it is to take a job from North Carolina to California; then we'll all be better off.
Given the state of the world today, I'm not optimistic about that happening anytime soon.
My parents were the same. Violence and foul language were all ok in movies and videogames; while we were young (and supposedly easily influenced) they just made sure to remind us that some things are ok in fantasy land that aren't ok in the real world.
To the best of my recollection I never had trouble distinguishing movies and videogames from the real world. In fact, my ability to separate fact from fiction comes in pretty handy; and that doesn't come from being isolated from the world until 18 and then flooded with it!
I posit that these overreactionaries are the ones who cannot separate fantasy from reality. They willingly and easily believe anything that the television tells them, even if it says ludicrous things like their angelic children will turn into demonspawn if they play certain videogames, read certain books, or watch certain movies.
Yes, people who pine for the glorious days of simple gameplay and "when games were just fun" don't remember the simple days when graphics were an impediment to the gameplay.
I do have fun playing some of the old games with the Atari Collection for the XBox (especially the arcade version of Lunar Lander); but wow, those rose colored glasses really alter those old games until you play them again.
I still want to play Miner 2049er again though. And:
Caverns of Mars
Autoduel (or an updated GTA style autoduel!)
Mail Order Monsters
Ultima 4-6
Berserk
"the trippy game in the maze with the flashing clown that took your map and compass away and freaked me out and then exit to the maze sometimes had a lot of wind blowing out to keep you from going straight out"
Karateka
"the game where you had to stop the bugs inside the computer"
I believe it. Given that this place requires teamwork, skill, practice, and no "hacks" then it is an acceptable use of the game as far as I'm concerned.
That said, I've never done this exploit and haven't had it done to me. Maybe I don't play enough Halo 2?
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, for someone who says that only Sith deal in absolutes that post was chock full of stereotyping. You could've at least thrown a "most", or a "many", or possibly a "generally" in there.
But what about customer service, quality and a raft of other things? Don't they count? Or is the Internet just about low, low, low prices and everything else counts for nothing?
Ahem. From my comment:
If Mr. Quuxly can't get lower prices than Foobar Drug then he needs to either demonstrate that his store is actually worth more to shop in (service, selection, etc) or go out of business.
I own an Apple computer, and not because it was cheaper. I like Netflix's service enough that it justifies a greater cost than using one of its competitors. BUT I'll always welcome competition between companies; this ruling encourages that. Price is only one way of competing.
But this judgement, extended into the Main Street Druggist Wars, says that Mr. Quuxly HAS NO SUCH RIGHT. He has to grit his teeth as Foobar Drug swarms his store with leafleteers and buttonholers, harassing his customers and interfering with his business.
Good. Free market and all that. Security through obscurity (hoping that your customers don't know about the lower prices) doesn't really work well anyway. If Mr. Quuxly can't get lower prices than Foobar Drug then he needs to either demonstrate that his store is actually worth more to shop in (service, selection, etc) or go out of business.
Without vocal nuance only good, well written satire is recognizable.
The Dig was (and is) awesome. I couldn't believe it when I sat a friend down (who'd never played adventure games) to see The Dig and he mocked the blocky graphics; I'd never noticed! I still play it on ScummVM, the nifty filters make it look nice even at high resolution.
I have a big directory with all of my old lucasarts games: Monkey Island 1, 2 and 3 (4 made me sad); The Dig; Full Throttle; Day of the Tentacle; Maniac Mansion; Loom; and Sam and Max. Of course 3d isn't all bad, my favorite of the lucasarts games is Grim Fandango and it used 3d very well. But I'm still more a fan of the 2d adventure games than 3d.
Movie clip games could have been good, but they tried to work before the hardware was really ready. I think they *could* work now, except that the genre killed itself with mediocre titles. Gabriel Knight 2 was the best game in the series but it was practically unplayable because of its crash prone movie clip format and long load times.
What about Ultima 7? I've been having a lot of fun replaying that gem via exult.
Weird, I don't remember the control scheme to D:F. Maybe I blocked it out? :-)
:-/
But what you say is true, I'd *love* a current 3d space fighter. In fact, that's the one case I can think of for a controller to be a better controller in an FPS; so why aren't console games all about it?
And bring back Lucasarts style adventure games.
Why put the movie adaptations aside? They are still fun games! But Nintendo isn't the last holdout for fun games, it is the last holdout developing a significant number of its games as kid friendly though.
I have more fun playing Splinter Cell, Ninja Gaiden, etc. than playing the more kid oriented games (unless you count Jade Empire as kid oriented, kid friendly yes, but not kid oriented); but they don't sound like the kind of games you want your kid to be playing.
If it's capship fighting in the WC vein that you want: you seriously need to check out Descent: Freespace. It has absolutely nothing to do with the Descent FPS game, but it's spaceship fighting with awesome ships, cool plots, cluster missles, and HUGE capship fighting.
Some of the ships you fight are incredibily enormous, they can take up to five minutes just to fly past -- all the while lauching fighters and shooting turrets, etc.
If you haven't played WC2 or Tie Fighter then you've really missed out on some of the best of the genre. WC3's space battles paled in comparison to those in WC2. I remember the first time I saw the Concordia (your home capship) shoot its BIG gun; the shot flew right past my ship and dwarfed it. If I had been any closer I was have been instantly fried! When there was a multi-ship battle going on around you it was just awesome.
But as awesome as WC1 and 2 were, Descent: Freespace 1 and 2 simply blew them away in plot, graphics, gamespot, and wingman AI.
Sure, I'd love to see another Wing Commander game with Mark Hammil and Tom Wilson, but that's not what the gaming industry is producing.
Sweet merciful Hobbes! You want another Wing Commander 3 or 4, or even...5? Holy mass drivers and neutron guns, did you play Wing Commander 1 or 2? Even the WC1 eclipsed WC[3-5] in quality and fun factor.
You go into this rehash of the tired, whining rant of "but where's the fun" and then hold up one of the worst (or best?) examples of the trend that you lament?!
You want to sit your kid in front of good, modern games? Fine! Monkey Ball! Katamari Damacy! Jade Empire! (if you play it with him) Rogue Squadron on the Gamecube! Donkey Conga! Dance Dance Revolution! Lumines! Psychonauts! (one awesome game!) Legend of Zelda the Wind Waker! Paper Mario! (tell me that cool graphics didn't enhance that game) Kingdom Hearts! Madagascar! The Incredibles! Mario Cart: Double Dash! Sly 2! Harvest Moon! Harry Potter! Spiderman 2! Tak 2! Eco the Dolphin(on Dreamcast)! Wallace and Gromit!
Want more? Just go to gamespot and search for [your system] + [for kids].
Games are still fun, in fact, if you take off the rose colored glasses then you'd see that games are more fun now than they've ever been. Take it from someone who replays old Atari, NES, SNES, and PC games all the time (Lucasarts adventure games are the best kid friendly games ever made, hands down; ScummVM is your friend). Sure I love a good romp in Zork, to stop the evil pirate LeChuck, to bobble those bubbles as much as anyone; but that doesn't mean that games today are superbly and amazingly awesome.
But if you kid likes SNES games and you like SNES games and you can still buy used SNES games at your nearest (Gamestop, Game Crazy, EB Games, thrift store, eBay) then what's the problem? We'll have fun with the new stuff!
Ahaa! Ghaah! *blork*
I have too little caffeine in my system to be reading such comments; please post them with a warning.
That comment contains so much ignorance about Christianity and religion in general that it boggles the mind. Hey, Christians believe in God too; so is creating the universe (or even just a planet) another test they should pass?
"I see you have constructed a new lightsaber." -- Darth Vader in ROTJ wielding Luke's new lightsaber. Luke lost Annakin's old lightsaber because it was still being held by the arm that fell onto Bespin in ESB.
For many people it's the other way around. They will play a game once and then put it straight on eBay, whereas books will be re-read many, many times.
Not me though, I replay and reread just about everything.
But surely you wouldn't use a mouse and a controller in combination...that's just weird.
Hmm, actually a specialized controller designed to complement a mouse would be pretty sweet.
No, the studio thought it wasn't lucrative and that's a huge difference. Remember that the viewers are the product that the studio delivers to the advertisers. Why make an expensive, high quality show that will appeal to a few (e.g. Firefly) when they could make a cheap, low quality show that will appeal to many (e.g. Reality Show Double Dare Dating Game Extreme)?
Just move your main music library to the "Shared" folder and (unfortunately) set it read/writeable by all users; then make an alias to the folder and put it in each of your music directories with the proper name (sans "alias").
Works like a charm, especially when you want to store your massive music collection on a second hard disk. Ditto for the iPhoto library, we keep ours separate but on the second hard disk.
My wife and I have a subscription to Wired. Every month when an issue arrives (just got the remix issue yesterday!) we spend a few days discussing all the cool articles. Inevitably we always remark on how consistently good the magazine is.
Let's look at some cool bits in the past months:
November 2004: Wired came with a cd containing songs all distributed with the creative commons share and share alike license! Want to remix some Beastie Boys and Danger Mouse?
December 2004: Awesome issue on the present state and future of exploration.
April 2005: Hybrid cars, a good article on China, an awesome article on Robert Rodriguez.
I could go on, but suffice to say that the magazine consistently puts out well researched and quality articles.
* Wired reader since 1994
What about podcasting and rss?
Good job, you found the Forbidden City (with the moat around it). Not many people can home in on Beijing without guidelines, so feel accomplished!
Tiananmen Square is directly south from that (the grey rectangle).
How was Terminator in a scifi setting? Or is the present day so science-fictiony to you? Bit of a stretch, eh?
Where do you place Gattaca?
Why is destroying democracy immoral? Ill-advised and a bad idea, sure; but immoral?
Besides, the middle class is going nowhere; it's just expanding.
The real problem is that the jobs can move freely between borders, but the people can't (at least not as freely as the jobs). When it becomes just as easy to take a job in India or China as it is to take a job from North Carolina to California; then we'll all be better off.
Given the state of the world today, I'm not optimistic about that happening anytime soon.
But they can't hide behind freedom of speech. The principal can punish them (detention, suspension, expulsion) with impunity for any reason.
My parents were the same. Violence and foul language were all ok in movies and videogames; while we were young (and supposedly easily influenced) they just made sure to remind us that some things are ok in fantasy land that aren't ok in the real world.
To the best of my recollection I never had trouble distinguishing movies and videogames from the real world. In fact, my ability to separate fact from fiction comes in pretty handy; and that doesn't come from being isolated from the world until 18 and then flooded with it!
I posit that these overreactionaries are the ones who cannot separate fantasy from reality. They willingly and easily believe anything that the television tells them, even if it says ludicrous things like their angelic children will turn into demonspawn if they play certain videogames, read certain books, or watch certain movies.
THOMPSON: Children don`t have a 1st Amendment...
Is this actually true?
Of course it's true. Or do you think that kids in high school have a full and unabridged right to free speech?
I do have fun playing some of the old games with the Atari Collection for the XBox (especially the arcade version of Lunar Lander); but wow, those rose colored glasses really alter those old games until you play them again.
I still want to play Miner 2049er again though. And:
*sigh*
I believe it. Given that this place requires teamwork, skill, practice, and no "hacks" then it is an acceptable use of the game as far as I'm concerned.
That said, I've never done this exploit and haven't had it done to me. Maybe I don't play enough Halo 2?