Whether it's 150 million sperm or 60 million sperm per milliliter, isn't that still a hell of a lot of sperm? Or will we suddenly have to worry about (or celebrate) a reduction in children conceived?
Re:Those are america's problems
on
American Nerd
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I don't think it's the problem in America it once was. I graduated from high school in Spring of '07. In my high school the nerds/geeks were either left alone, sought after for homework help, or treated just like anybody else. The most nerd bullying I can remember was a bit of occasional verbal abuse in middle school, but people grew out of it.
Video games now are especially not considered a geek thing anymore. Obviously the popularity of Halo, Madden, Guitar Hero, and Call of Duty have cemented that, but I can even remember going to a party hosted by one of the "popular kids" and even he couldn't resist joining in some pickup fighting game tournaments. Fighting games are definitely nerdy compared to Guitar Hero, but that didn't stop him.
I think the trend of nerdiness becoming socially acceptable is only going to increase. My little brother is an epitome of nerdiness--his computer is an old laptop that runs linux, DWM, and a firefox extension that makes his browser feel like vi. He plans on majoring in math and he competes in the AMC/AIME/USAMO. He also regularly gets calls from girls asking questions or inviting him to parties.
Today the US has no problem with accepting nerds, as long as they can be the least bit sociable.
As for the definitions of "dork," "geek," and "nerd," it's a waste of time. I thought about it for a while, came up with objective definitions that clearly separated them, but found out that even I didn't use my definitions with any consistency.
I have trouble believing that CS environments are inherently hostile. The most misogynistic thing that happened in our CS class is one of the students (who was married, by the way) said "OMG A GIRL IN COMPUTER SCIENCE" when the new batch of freshmen came in the first day. After that she was just another face. She's a friendly face, but there hasn't been any "hitting on" going on.
In my first internship, there was a woman who worked with us, but aside from going with all the other employees to an occasional lunch the only thing that happened between us and her was work.
I think it's a terrible stereotype being propagated that CS students are so sex-starved that they'll pounce on any girl who walks into the computer lab. If women don't want to go into CS because of the long hours on the job, intensive coursework, or some similar reason, fine. But if they are staying out because they are afraid of being in a class with a bunch of nerd predators, that's ridiculous and insulting.
I read through the list of comics and most of them seem like they could contain heavy amounts of generic comic-book action and special effects. Are any of these comics more about story/character development than fight scenes? I enjoyed the dialogue/character development parts of Iron Man, but was bored with the fight scenes.
I'm not a Sundance fanatic, I just want to know if there are any upcoming comic book movies that will be significantly different than the usual?
While Giant Bomb lampoons the ESRB summaries like this, I applaud them. Previously the only people who would give parents information about the inappropriateness of video game content were a few small parent group or Christian ministry sites that either were woefully incomplete in their games lists or tainted their reviews with particular ideologies. It's nice to see such graphic detail written by objective professionals. For example, Penny Arcade is definitely a niche game, but I can see why parents might be attracted to it--if they don't know better, the game does look pretty cute and cartoony. What could possibly land it an M rating?
My friends and I would play against the bots and ended up in this same situation. We downloaded the Sorian AI mod, which fixed the problem. Seems odd that a modder is required to fix the catatonic AI, but the guy does a really good job.
In this case, simply building uber units won't work, as the enemy bases will almost certainly have enough shields and defense to bring them down before they even reach the defenses. While you may be able to hold your own, you can get stuck in nasty stalemates, so try experimenting with new strategies.
Screw that, when are you going to get a WWII game that shows you the real horrors of war--pitting you as a German SS soldier committing war crimes and implementing "the final solution" in the name of Hitler?
It's really not meant to be flamebait--I'm tired of war games that show war as this epic struggle that only involves soldiers vs soldiers destroying each other with cool toys. You never have to make tough moral decisions--you either shoot him or he shoots you. Where's a game where you're commanded to search for hiding Jewish families, arrest them, and ship them off to concentration camps? Would you? It's only a game, right? You need to do it to complete the objective. Is that all the prompting gamers need? It would be an interesting experiment anyway.
Parent is spot on. Remember the Slashdot crowd is very different from the Kotaku/Destructoid/Joystiq crowd. Whereas Slashdotters may boycott to orgasm, many gaming forums are quieter, preferring to grumble a bit before paying anyway. There's some crossover, but ultimately what Slashdot sees as consumer rape is simply a hazard of the hobby for others. There's actually more animosity towards pirates on gaming forums "ruining it for everybody else," rather than the game companies who are instituting the rules.
Katamari has no killing or wealth-amassing, you just roll around a giant sticky ball and pick up anything in your path. We Love Katamari has a mode where you and a friend can cooperatively control said sticky ball and try to achieve the same objectives. This is harder than it sounds, but if it's cooperation and communication you want, this is it. As for learning, teaching, and helping others, there isn't too much of it of any real value in the Katamari series, but I still recommend it.
Also, anybody who recommended anything from Sid Meier's Civilization series for the PC was spot on. I almost never conduct wars in that game. I instead concentrate on science, culture, and exploration to a ridiculous degree. I don't get bored of it--that's the game to me. Seeing an advanced civilization that's large, learned, and wealthy is its own reward.
I think her books are ridiculous as well, but if someone was feeling mercenary they could choke their way through it and BS their way to the prize. After competing in a lot of essay contests, I've learned it's not the most well-written essay that wins, it's the one that says what the judges want to hear.
No ivory tower around me--I prefer unrealistic games to simulations. And I already made the point in my previous post that graphics != realism.
The main idea of my post was that a simulation strives for realism--that's why shooters aren't called "soldier sims" and role-playing games aren't called "medieval mercenary sims." Quake may have been revolutionary with its physics, but it's very much a game and not a sim. You use WASD to move your avatar at 50km/h, jump off cliffs with no disabling injury (i.e. you don't limp,) you fire weapons that never overheat, jam, or need reloading and wield a rocket launcher that can apparently fit 60 rockets snugly in its body. In short, that would be akin to saying Mario Kart is a racing sim. Quake is fun, Quake is gritty, but Quake is NOT a sim.
Fine, the super-realistic cockpits aren't necessary to enjoy a good sim. I simply make the argument that very few AAA games coming out right now are true "sims." Developers are in love with realism, but often not at the expense of making the game inaccessible or un-fun to their target audience. That's why there's so many super-detailed games with decidedly video game-looking trappings.
To be absolutely fair, the Ayn Rand Institute gives tens of thousands of dollars to students each year in essay contests where you write about Ayn Rand's books. I don't know about you, but for $10,000 I'd absolutely LOVE Atlas Shrugged. =p
Really? When I think of "simulations" I think of flight sims, racing sims, mech sims, or any type of game that's designed for hardcore enthusiasts that want to make an experience as real as possible--the kind that would make their PC desk look and act like an airplane cockpit just to make the simulation better. Or at the very least, the kind that refuse to play driving games without a racing wheel.
Your average game is very much a game, as lots of compromises are made in realism to make the gameplay more manageable. Sure the models have super high res textures and a million polygons or whatever, but if all you have to do to pick up a gun is walk over it, what kind of simulation is that?
The site is being slow and the search function doesn't work too well, so I'm light on the details, but how does the $4000 tax credit pan out? Do I say "Hey, I did 100 hours of community service" on my tax return, and get $4000 back in my return provided I didn't lie? Can I do this for all the years I'm in college, effectively giving me a $4000 budget/year in a hypothetical worst case scenario where I remain jobless for the next 2.5 years? (I don't expect I will, but it's nice to have a safety net).
While I have misgivings about how the government will be able to afford this, I am a poor college student who really enjoys eating everyday and keeping debt as low as possible.
I wasn't arguing that music > video games. I was simply stating that it's not as simple as saying "well, a video game is 50 hours and a CD is 40 minutes, so a video game is the better deal when you calculate the dollars per minute."
Not to mention that there's no guarantee that you'll finish a video game. You might get sick of the gameplay, or hit a wall that you can't surpass, or you'll have other games that you'd rather play instead. The CD would have to be a hell of an unlistenable album for one to not make it through once.
Also, DRM notwithstanding, you can use a CD in a lot more places than you can use a videogame. You can use it in your car, your computer, or your speaker setup. You can rip it to your hard drive and make derivative works with the songs or mix CDs/cassettes/mp3 players with your favorite tracks. A game can only be used on its given platform for its given purpose--gaming. Sure, some people make derivative works (mods, machinima) from video games, but it's much easier to slap a song on your home videos and webcam sessions than it is to animate and script a game world.
Voted in NE Ohio early at roughly 7:00am. The poll was in a small elementary school gym. There were relatively long lines given the size of the building, but it only took about 15 minutes for everything to happen. There was a bake sale going on next to the line, which was an excellent idea considering most people hadn't eaten yet. We had completely electronic ballot machines (by Diebold of course), but at this point there's nothing I can do about that. My campus' student government is hosting a party at 8:00pm for everyone to wait to see who is announced President-elect. That might be a fun way to have this whole election over and done with.
I can't speak for everyone, but considering all the ugly debate that's been going on in my classes and labs, it's nice that the election will end on a positive note.
It was my experience that registering to vote was already pretty easy, at least compared to some other government-run license-registering (the DMV comes to mind). My college had students all over campus with big signs that said "REGISTER TO VOTE NOW" and clipboards with voter registration forms. It was a matter of taking a minute to fill out the form and they'd take care of the rest. Sure you had to do it 60 days or so before the election, but the campus-wide campaign to get everyone to vote had been going on for quite a while, anybody there who wanted to register probably did.
I believe all the popular Web 2.0 services, Youtube, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, will become treasure troves in a couple of centuries. You can see and hear people's fashions, homes, behaviours, speech, customs, and ideals conveniently distilled into text, image, and flash video format. Archeologists today would KILL to have that kind of detailed, unfettered access to ancient cultures.
We just need to make sure that the data isn't corrupted and that the technology to view old formats is kept up. I think it will be.
While all the game modes are more or less the same, niceties such as a PC-style options menu (i.e. meticulous control of the options), an included IRC client, and a playlist editor are nowhere to be found. I used all these features extensively in UT2004 and I thought it was a given that they would be in UT3.
As for bugs well what game doesn't?
I won'd deny that no software is free from bugs. However, I never experienced problems with an unpatched UT2k4 install, let alone the current version I have installed and play regularly right now. I'd be happy to remove this bullet point if Epic released 1.4 or whatever it takes to have the game functional enough to play without troubleshooting or ignoring features. Plus it's unacceptable to have this "beta" release as a demo. I believe the UT2004 demo had an update that included current code and new maps. But even if it didn't, the old demo just worked.
And last let us not forget that Epic much like Id is about the game engine
Being a "game engine developer" doesn't mean I'll give you a free pass if you make a shoddy game. That goes for id, Epic, or anybody.
So which came first? The low sales and then the "shitting"? Or was it "shitting" first then low sales? The thing about piracy is it makes for lousy ammo regardless of which side one's on.
It doesn't matter. If I ran a kitchenware company, auto company, or ANY company for that matter, it would be unprofessional and frankly stupid to insult my customers. If you've followed Epic over the past few months, they have acted atrociously toward their PC customers. Before announcing Gears of War 2 would not be coming to PC, they also announced that Unreal Engine 4 would be designed especially for "next-gen consoles first." Tim Sweeney is dealing with gaming nerds, he knows that sentence is flamebait. They have blamed the relative failures of UT3 and Gears PC on piracy, while ignoring the faults of the products themselves. (Gears was ported to the PC too late and too buggy to be relevant, regardless of any extra content they shoehorned in.) Forum topics politely voicing legitimate complaints about these products have been locked and ignored.
In other gaming news sites Epic still enjoys a level of popularity because of 360 owners who are hyped about Gears of War 2. Epic Games is a business, and if they feel there is more profit in consoles then that's their prerogative. Abandoning PC for console in itself is not bad. My anger comes from their burning bridges by treating their existing fanbase, one that has been loyal for over a decade, with such disdain. It's tasteless and PC gamers shouldn't put up with it. I won't.
I was pretty miffed at Epic for making comments insulting PC gamers, but I picked up UT3 for the PC anyway because I figured I'd at least I'd try to show that not all PC gamers were 'thieves' as they suggest. It was underwhelming.
The reason PC gamers aren't going wild for Epic's games recently is because Epic stopped caring for PC gamers. The only thing UT3 has going for it is that it's prettier than UT2k4. There's less content, less features, and it's buggier. There's a fantastic mod community for it, but I'd expected much more official extras (like the prequels). There's no word on what's going to happen for patch 1.4 or indeed, if there will be a patch 1.4 (there damn well better be, voice chat still gives me issues over private Hamachi games!). Epic hasn't rereleased a stable demo yet, preferring to just keep offering their garbage "beta demo."
I hate to sound crusty, but Epic had a big hit in the form of Gears of War and all of a sudden decided that PC gamers weren't worth paying attention to. So they shit on us and then complain that we don't buy their games? I'm not going to buy any more Epic products until Epic issues an apology and makes a PC game worth paying for. Anybody who enjoyed UT/UT2003/4 on PC should do the same. I have a 360, but I'm not buying Gears 1 or 2.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether it's 150 million sperm or 60 million sperm per milliliter, isn't that still a hell of a lot of sperm? Or will we suddenly have to worry about (or celebrate) a reduction in children conceived?
I don't think it's the problem in America it once was. I graduated from high school in Spring of '07. In my high school the nerds/geeks were either left alone, sought after for homework help, or treated just like anybody else. The most nerd bullying I can remember was a bit of occasional verbal abuse in middle school, but people grew out of it.
Video games now are especially not considered a geek thing anymore. Obviously the popularity of Halo, Madden, Guitar Hero, and Call of Duty have cemented that, but I can even remember going to a party hosted by one of the "popular kids" and even he couldn't resist joining in some pickup fighting game tournaments. Fighting games are definitely nerdy compared to Guitar Hero, but that didn't stop him.
I think the trend of nerdiness becoming socially acceptable is only going to increase. My little brother is an epitome of nerdiness--his computer is an old laptop that runs linux, DWM, and a firefox extension that makes his browser feel like vi. He plans on majoring in math and he competes in the AMC/AIME/USAMO. He also regularly gets calls from girls asking questions or inviting him to parties.
Today the US has no problem with accepting nerds, as long as they can be the least bit sociable.
As for the definitions of "dork," "geek," and "nerd," it's a waste of time. I thought about it for a while, came up with objective definitions that clearly separated them, but found out that even I didn't use my definitions with any consistency.
A nuclear family simply means a father, mother, and kids.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_family
I have trouble believing that CS environments are inherently hostile. The most misogynistic thing that happened in our CS class is one of the students (who was married, by the way) said "OMG A GIRL IN COMPUTER SCIENCE" when the new batch of freshmen came in the first day. After that she was just another face. She's a friendly face, but there hasn't been any "hitting on" going on.
In my first internship, there was a woman who worked with us, but aside from going with all the other employees to an occasional lunch the only thing that happened between us and her was work.
I think it's a terrible stereotype being propagated that CS students are so sex-starved that they'll pounce on any girl who walks into the computer lab. If women don't want to go into CS because of the long hours on the job, intensive coursework, or some similar reason, fine. But if they are staying out because they are afraid of being in a class with a bunch of nerd predators, that's ridiculous and insulting.
But now that it's in outer space it's managed to stay dry.
I read through the list of comics and most of them seem like they could contain heavy amounts of generic comic-book action and special effects. Are any of these comics more about story/character development than fight scenes? I enjoyed the dialogue/character development parts of Iron Man, but was bored with the fight scenes.
I'm not a Sundance fanatic, I just want to know if there are any upcoming comic book movies that will be significantly different than the usual?
While Giant Bomb lampoons the ESRB summaries like this, I applaud them. Previously the only people who would give parents information about the inappropriateness of video game content were a few small parent group or Christian ministry sites that either were woefully incomplete in their games lists or tainted their reviews with particular ideologies. It's nice to see such graphic detail written by objective professionals. For example, Penny Arcade is definitely a niche game, but I can see why parents might be attracted to it--if they don't know better, the game does look pretty cute and cartoony. What could possibly land it an M rating?
My friends and I would play against the bots and ended up in this same situation. We downloaded the Sorian AI mod, which fixed the problem. Seems odd that a modder is required to fix the catatonic AI, but the guy does a really good job.
http://code.google.com/p/sorian-ai-mod/
In this case, simply building uber units won't work, as the enemy bases will almost certainly have enough shields and defense to bring them down before they even reach the defenses. While you may be able to hold your own, you can get stuck in nasty stalemates, so try experimenting with new strategies.
Screw that, when are you going to get a WWII game that shows you the real horrors of war--pitting you as a German SS soldier committing war crimes and implementing "the final solution" in the name of Hitler?
It's really not meant to be flamebait--I'm tired of war games that show war as this epic struggle that only involves soldiers vs soldiers destroying each other with cool toys. You never have to make tough moral decisions--you either shoot him or he shoots you. Where's a game where you're commanded to search for hiding Jewish families, arrest them, and ship them off to concentration camps? Would you? It's only a game, right? You need to do it to complete the objective. Is that all the prompting gamers need? It would be an interesting experiment anyway.
Parent is spot on. Remember the Slashdot crowd is very different from the Kotaku/Destructoid/Joystiq crowd. Whereas Slashdotters may boycott to orgasm, many gaming forums are quieter, preferring to grumble a bit before paying anyway. There's some crossover, but ultimately what Slashdot sees as consumer rape is simply a hazard of the hobby for others. There's actually more animosity towards pirates on gaming forums "ruining it for everybody else," rather than the game companies who are instituting the rules.
Katamari has no killing or wealth-amassing, you just roll around a giant sticky ball and pick up anything in your path. We Love Katamari has a mode where you and a friend can cooperatively control said sticky ball and try to achieve the same objectives. This is harder than it sounds, but if it's cooperation and communication you want, this is it. As for learning, teaching, and helping others, there isn't too much of it of any real value in the Katamari series, but I still recommend it.
Also, anybody who recommended anything from Sid Meier's Civilization series for the PC was spot on. I almost never conduct wars in that game. I instead concentrate on science, culture, and exploration to a ridiculous degree. I don't get bored of it--that's the game to me. Seeing an advanced civilization that's large, learned, and wealthy is its own reward.
I think her books are ridiculous as well, but if someone was feeling mercenary they could choke their way through it and BS their way to the prize. After competing in a lot of essay contests, I've learned it's not the most well-written essay that wins, it's the one that says what the judges want to hear.
No ivory tower around me--I prefer unrealistic games to simulations. And I already made the point in my previous post that graphics != realism.
The main idea of my post was that a simulation strives for realism--that's why shooters aren't called "soldier sims" and role-playing games aren't called "medieval mercenary sims." Quake may have been revolutionary with its physics, but it's very much a game and not a sim. You use WASD to move your avatar at 50km/h, jump off cliffs with no disabling injury (i.e. you don't limp,) you fire weapons that never overheat, jam, or need reloading and wield a rocket launcher that can apparently fit 60 rockets snugly in its body. In short, that would be akin to saying Mario Kart is a racing sim. Quake is fun, Quake is gritty, but Quake is NOT a sim.
Fine, the super-realistic cockpits aren't necessary to enjoy a good sim. I simply make the argument that very few AAA games coming out right now are true "sims." Developers are in love with realism, but often not at the expense of making the game inaccessible or un-fun to their target audience. That's why there's so many super-detailed games with decidedly video game-looking trappings.
http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=education_contests_index
To be absolutely fair, the Ayn Rand Institute gives tens of thousands of dollars to students each year in essay contests where you write about Ayn Rand's books. I don't know about you, but for $10,000 I'd absolutely LOVE Atlas Shrugged. =p
Really? When I think of "simulations" I think of flight sims, racing sims, mech sims, or any type of game that's designed for hardcore enthusiasts that want to make an experience as real as possible--the kind that would make their PC desk look and act like an airplane cockpit just to make the simulation better. Or at the very least, the kind that refuse to play driving games without a racing wheel.
Your average game is very much a game, as lots of compromises are made in realism to make the gameplay more manageable. Sure the models have super high res textures and a million polygons or whatever, but if all you have to do to pick up a gun is walk over it, what kind of simulation is that?
Maybe that you should stop being a dick instead of being proud of it?
Says someone who has a homonym for "Phallus" in his username. (:
The site is being slow and the search function doesn't work too well, so I'm light on the details, but how does the $4000 tax credit pan out? Do I say "Hey, I did 100 hours of community service" on my tax return, and get $4000 back in my return provided I didn't lie? Can I do this for all the years I'm in college, effectively giving me a $4000 budget/year in a hypothetical worst case scenario where I remain jobless for the next 2.5 years? (I don't expect I will, but it's nice to have a safety net).
While I have misgivings about how the government will be able to afford this, I am a poor college student who really enjoys eating everyday and keeping debt as low as possible.
I wasn't arguing that music > video games. I was simply stating that it's not as simple as saying "well, a video game is 50 hours and a CD is 40 minutes, so a video game is the better deal when you calculate the dollars per minute."
Not to mention that there's no guarantee that you'll finish a video game. You might get sick of the gameplay, or hit a wall that you can't surpass, or you'll have other games that you'd rather play instead. The CD would have to be a hell of an unlistenable album for one to not make it through once.
Also, DRM notwithstanding, you can use a CD in a lot more places than you can use a videogame. You can use it in your car, your computer, or your speaker setup. You can rip it to your hard drive and make derivative works with the songs or mix CDs/cassettes/mp3 players with your favorite tracks. A game can only be used on its given platform for its given purpose--gaming. Sure, some people make derivative works (mods, machinima) from video games, but it's much easier to slap a song on your home videos and webcam sessions than it is to animate and script a game world.
Voted in NE Ohio early at roughly 7:00am. The poll was in a small elementary school gym. There were relatively long lines given the size of the building, but it only took about 15 minutes for everything to happen. There was a bake sale going on next to the line, which was an excellent idea considering most people hadn't eaten yet. We had completely electronic ballot machines (by Diebold of course), but at this point there's nothing I can do about that. My campus' student government is hosting a party at 8:00pm for everyone to wait to see who is announced President-elect. That might be a fun way to have this whole election over and done with.
I can't speak for everyone, but considering all the ugly debate that's been going on in my classes and labs, it's nice that the election will end on a positive note.
It was my experience that registering to vote was already pretty easy, at least compared to some other government-run license-registering (the DMV comes to mind). My college had students all over campus with big signs that said "REGISTER TO VOTE NOW" and clipboards with voter registration forms. It was a matter of taking a minute to fill out the form and they'd take care of the rest. Sure you had to do it 60 days or so before the election, but the campus-wide campaign to get everyone to vote had been going on for quite a while, anybody there who wanted to register probably did.
I believe all the popular Web 2.0 services, Youtube, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, will become treasure troves in a couple of centuries. You can see and hear people's fashions, homes, behaviours, speech, customs, and ideals conveniently distilled into text, image, and flash video format. Archeologists today would KILL to have that kind of detailed, unfettered access to ancient cultures.
We just need to make sure that the data isn't corrupted and that the technology to view old formats is kept up. I think it will be.
Well first of all it's about the same features.
While all the game modes are more or less the same, niceties such as a PC-style options menu (i.e. meticulous control of the options), an included IRC client, and a playlist editor are nowhere to be found. I used all these features extensively in UT2004 and I thought it was a given that they would be in UT3.
As for bugs well what game doesn't?
I won'd deny that no software is free from bugs. However, I never experienced problems with an unpatched UT2k4 install, let alone the current version I have installed and play regularly right now. I'd be happy to remove this bullet point if Epic released 1.4 or whatever it takes to have the game functional enough to play without troubleshooting or ignoring features. Plus it's unacceptable to have this "beta" release as a demo. I believe the UT2004 demo had an update that included current code and new maps. But even if it didn't, the old demo just worked.
And last let us not forget that Epic much like Id is about the game engine
Being a "game engine developer" doesn't mean I'll give you a free pass if you make a shoddy game. That goes for id, Epic, or anybody.
So which came first? The low sales and then the "shitting"? Or was it "shitting" first then low sales? The thing about piracy is it makes for lousy ammo regardless of which side one's on.
It doesn't matter. If I ran a kitchenware company, auto company, or ANY company for that matter, it would be unprofessional and frankly stupid to insult my customers. If you've followed Epic over the past few months, they have acted atrociously toward their PC customers. Before announcing Gears of War 2 would not be coming to PC, they also announced that Unreal Engine 4 would be designed especially for "next-gen consoles first." Tim Sweeney is dealing with gaming nerds, he knows that sentence is flamebait. They have blamed the relative failures of UT3 and Gears PC on piracy, while ignoring the faults of the products themselves. (Gears was ported to the PC too late and too buggy to be relevant, regardless of any extra content they shoehorned in.) Forum topics politely voicing legitimate complaints about these products have been locked and ignored.
In other gaming news sites Epic still enjoys a level of popularity because of 360 owners who are hyped about Gears of War 2. Epic Games is a business, and if they feel there is more profit in consoles then that's their prerogative. Abandoning PC for console in itself is not bad. My anger comes from their burning bridges by treating their existing fanbase, one that has been loyal for over a decade, with such disdain. It's tasteless and PC gamers shouldn't put up with it. I won't.
I was pretty miffed at Epic for making comments insulting PC gamers, but I picked up UT3 for the PC anyway because I figured I'd at least I'd try to show that not all PC gamers were 'thieves' as they suggest. It was underwhelming.
The reason PC gamers aren't going wild for Epic's games recently is because Epic stopped caring for PC gamers. The only thing UT3 has going for it is that it's prettier than UT2k4. There's less content, less features, and it's buggier. There's a fantastic mod community for it, but I'd expected much more official extras (like the prequels). There's no word on what's going to happen for patch 1.4 or indeed, if there will be a patch 1.4 (there damn well better be, voice chat still gives me issues over private Hamachi games!). Epic hasn't rereleased a stable demo yet, preferring to just keep offering their garbage "beta demo."
I hate to sound crusty, but Epic had a big hit in the form of Gears of War and all of a sudden decided that PC gamers weren't worth paying attention to. So they shit on us and then complain that we don't buy their games? I'm not going to buy any more Epic products until Epic issues an apology and makes a PC game worth paying for. Anybody who enjoyed UT/UT2003/4 on PC should do the same. I have a 360, but I'm not buying Gears 1 or 2.
So what the article suggests is that up to age 39 our brain is racing like a hare, but after that it's turtles all the way down?
Very clever, young man.