Unfortunately I think Doom 3 was a bad demo of the id Tech 4 engine's capabilities because of their horrible textures. Try playing Prey, probably the best product made from that engine. Unfortunately it still suffers many of the limits of the engine (it's indoors, only a handful of enemies at a time), but the texture work is brilliant. Not only is it detailed but some of the grosser sections are absolutely sickening in their realism.
Where do you go with such workers? I will agree that this may be the case for many workers, but they are paid to not show it when they're dealing with customers, even if the customer is difficult. Some give me a smile and some don't, but as long as they can do their job reasonably well I don't care too much--I'm in a hurry anyway.
I almost never use the self-service machines because they're poorly designed and because I'm not THAT antisocial--yet.
In the older Diablos, this was sometimes the case. The dungeon would be pitch black, but there would be a circle of light right around you. You could increase the radius of this circle by equipping certain "radiant" items. I think those screenshots, along with the ones with the noise effect applied, are trying to recapture a retro Diablo feel as closely as possible.
In an interview with Time magazine moot said his real name was Christopher Poole, and this article says the same thing. The only problem is that his real name is not Christopher Poole.
Maybe it's the fact that his initials spell "CP," otherwise expanded as child porn. Or maybe that his last name is Poole, a possible reference to the "Pool's Closed" meme. Or maybe it's the fact that the day that article went live, moot made the headline of/b/ "HAHAHA YOU GOT TROLLED FAGGOTS!" You'd think that if this guy did all this research, he would have caught it by now. What else in this article is suspect?
Here's a young'un's experience with a couple of puzzle/adventure games of yore:
I decided to play Zork once because it seemed like an interesting challenge--having to go on an adventure with the only clues being written descriptions of the world around me. So I dove into it and explored and picked up everything, and then I got to a maze. Of twisty little passages. All alike. I thought I had read somewhere that the wording varied slightly throughout the maze to suggest different parts of the maze. So I explored a little bit. Nope. The wording's the same for this whole maze. For all I know I've been walking through portals that lead to the same box of a room. Plus I have limited amounts of light. This isn't logic or problem solving, this is just blind running around. Screw that.
I recently picked up the Myst 10th anniversary box because the idea of Myst always intrigued me-- a bunch of lonely, desolate, beautiful worlds with a past behind them. So I install Myst and start playing. It took some doing, but I figured out the puzzle on the Myst island. It took a bit of reading and exploring and taking notes, but when it all came together I was so proud of myself! And then I jumped into a book and went to the next island. Don't read on if don't want the Stoneship Age spoiled for you.
I play the same game, exploring and piecing together the island. Eventually there's only one thing keeping me from progressing, and that's that the rooms beneath the deck of the ship are completely dark, and I need to light it up. So I wander around, seeing if there's anything I missed, and I come across a secret passage in the hallways in the stone pillar. I open it and I see a giant compass. Cool. I look at it, and press the center, just to test the waters. Nothing happens. So I carefully touch one of the myriad of blue knobs on the end. BRAAP BRAAP BRAAP! An alarm went off and all the lights went out. I fumbled my way above ground, spun the generator to get more power, and went back down under.
This happens a couple of times and I give up and press the hint button. It says I need to move the compass's direction somehow. Cool. I guess I need to find a magnet. Well, I look up and down every room in the Stoneship Age with no luck. Of course, I can't find anything beneath the deck of the ship because it's too dark. I finally give up and read the walkthrough, and it says that I needed to note the two lines on the telescope, and that the angle they appear at is the angle at which I press the compass buttons. Really. I mean, great job incorporating geometry into the game, but the solution didn't make ANY LOGICAL SENSE. What's worse is I spent a ton of time ransacking rooms with medicines, needles, maps, geegaws, and all kinds of stuff, and it was all worthless. It was just a bunch of eye candy and animations.
I haven't given up on Myst yet, but solutions that are arbitrary instead of logical leave a bad taste in my mouth.
Didn't XP have that "initializing your desktop" too? First you spun the disk and it made the partitions and copied all the files. Then you rebooted and you clicked a few options (time zone, language, etc) and you spent the next 20-30 minutes waiting for it to set up Network stuff and other nebulous background processes. Then you rebooted, made an account, and were good to go.
My only experience of Vista was briefly trying the beta on my PC and I didn't see anything too upsetting in the install process. Did something change later?
I know you're being funny, but seriously nobody listens to K-Fed. He sold a few thousand albums before the sales stopped and he fell into obscurity. Most people stopped listening to NSync by the time they got to middle school.
I can't vouch for most music store's top 10 lists, but suffice to say there are still plenty of good musical acts around. Hang out at sites like Pitchfork Media (http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/) and Tiny Mix Tapes (http://www.tinymixtapes.com/). Once you're past all the pretentious hipster attitude, there's some pretty good sound to be found.
Beyond that, you can discover good music in television commercials (the only thing that make them worth watching), from late night talk shows, and from that one song you heard on Youtube, Pandora, or Last.fm.
Nobody's a slave to top 40 radio. Music is playing in so many other places you're bound to hear something you like.
I thought Harvey Dent was amazing. The hype for this movie was all about the Joker and even though Harvey Dent was in the movie, they didn't suggest that he actually became Two-Face. And then as he started to become unhinged he flipped a coin. And then there was the two-heads coin. And then his face was pressed into gasoline. The foreshadowing was so thick that you could tell where it was going, but for what was billed as a Joker movie, it was surprising nonetheless.
Also, it made sense, sorta, that Harvey Dent would be open to the Joker's ideas. Think about it. Because of Batman, the Joker's antics were resulting in more and more collateral damage. The police unit that was given the job of rescuing his girlfriend failed, and what's more, it's a police unit that he DIDN'T LIKE. All the "good guys" have dragged him through shit. And then all of a sudden the Joker comes along. He's polite and kind and just gives Harvey a couple of things to think about, and a gun. He doesn't try to coerce Harvey into anything, he just gives him the gun and says "do whatever." Harvey could have shot Joker right then and there, and the Joker wouldn't have cared. But to Harvey, who was more deserving of lead at that point, a guy who gives him a gun or his "friends" who dragged him through shit?
On the contrary, I have seen some extremely racist Looney Tunes cartoons and Disney stories. I remember one where Mickey was trying to adapt an island native to his way of life. The island native was portrayed as an absolute buffoon. I saw a WWII Bugs Bunny cartoon where he would beat up and blow up an imbecile Japanese soldier.
You don't need to read this to really young kids, but I think slightly older children would benefit from the history lesson. Their favorite characters weren't always clean mascots, compared to our standards. And back then, it was ACCEPTABLE for cartoon characters to be incredibly racist. Cartoons used to be rife with adult material. Some of course still are.
I'm not saying you have to think the cartoons are acceptable material for young kids. But they make an AWESOME history lesson, one that ISN'T about generals and politicians.
The Ewells in To Kill a Mockingbird were white, and their speech was rendered in "dialect" along with the black Tom Robinson, the tragic hero of the story. In Great Expectations the blacksmith, Joe Gargery, was white and British but he pronounced all his V's as W's aka "conwict" and "wittles' instead of "convict" and "vittles." Uncle Tom's Cabin, a controversial novel in the US in its time because of its strong anti-slavery stance, included plenty of "dialect."
It's not automatically racism every time someone's speech is rendered in nonstandard English. Even if it was, are you just going to deny it happened by "banishing" the offending books? I am sorry for the fact that you think banishing books is a good thing.
See how silly that is? It's an honest mistake, and here I am condemning you for it. I'm even suggesting that you can't spell AT ALL, even though you only made one mistake in the whole post. I'm making sweeping generalizations about your literacy based on a post on the Internet.
If you cut out applicants based on whether they have a squeaky clean Internet Posting Record, you are making a rather arbitrary (and poor) choice. You are also wasting your time on Myspace when you SHOULD be reading those resumes we spend hours on.
Why is it that whenever a shooter comes out with beautiful graphics, it's considered garbage, unimaginative, and "the reason PC gaming is dying?" People cry on message boards saying "Why release a game that requires a $2000 PC to play?" They say that their computer has a Geforce 3 still and if developers aren't going to cater to that, then fuck them.
Instead of imagining that PC gaming is in a sordid state, try this:
1. Go to some online electronics boutique and pay the $150 for a midrange video card that'll handle any modern game well. Make sure to check whether your motherboard has an AGP or PCI-Express slot, and buy accordingly.
2. Hang around some gaming websites like Destructoid and see what games interest other people. Find one that interests you. Buy it.
3. Install and play it. Discover that this isn't the 90's and that playing on "medium settings" doesn't mean everything looks like a muddy blob.
4. 2 years down the road, exercise self control and DON'T buy the latest video card. That's right. Just because a new generation of video cards comes out, doesn't mean you NEED to upgrade. You might be surprised to find out that new games will still run great on your old card!
5. Feel great knowing you're not just some whining tool who bashes a hobby that he doesn't know anything about.
P.S. Who the HELL do you talk to that bashes Half Life 2 because of the graphics? That game, like its ANCIENT predecessor, is still highly revered because of its storytelling techniques and finely tuned gameplay, not because of how many gigabytes of textures it had.
Why not have one box, one price, one disk, but multiple configurations? Like, "Performance/Gamer," "Server," "Home use," "Business," etc. When you pop the disk in to install, they let you either choose one of those packages to install or give you the whole smorgasbord to pick and choose which packages you want install
It's been years since I used Fedora Core, but I seemed to remember their installer letting me pick and choose the packages I wanted to install. If I need more, pop the disk in again and choose which ones.
Still, one generation old isn't bad. My 3850 idles around 40C and can run any game I throw at it. With Crysis I have to run the game at "High" instead of "Very High," but the difference is negligible.
Thank you. This is the post I was looking for. The summary was pretty distressing, so I waited for the voice of reason before I did anything irrational like shred my Diablo and Starcraft CDs.
The fact that EULAs now have copyright infringement threats attached to them doesn't make me particularly happy, but at least I won't be living in fear of what's on my RAM.
Plenty of PC games release part of their source code to allow modifications to be built on it. Some of the coders who release those mods release the source too.
Sure there's a Windows OS involved, but that's still a hell of a lot more "Free as in speech" than any console game.
Plus, some PC games that aren't console ports often have config files and command lines that can give a user full control of a game. I look at console game menus and am disappointed that something I want to do with the server isn't there. For example, many console games make you restart the server or vote every time a level is changed, instead of offering a maplist.
While we're at it, engineers are fucking stupid. I mean seriously, if you look at their tepid applications of math compared to someone who is engrossed in abstract mathematical thought such as I, you wonder why they even charge for their "services." A mathematician is clearly the only one who can do the job right.
(PS I'm a CS major, and if you ever catch me saying this with a straight face I give you permission to hit me!)
As opposed to, say, $400 + an HDTV to play the latest and greatest console games?
Here's the deal, you don't need to upgrade your video card every year. In fact, you don't need to drop $250 on a card, ever. Take a cheap Dell or Emachines PC and stick a $150 card in it, maybe $50 for 2GB of RAM if it's really lacking, and you're done for a couple of years AT LEAST. Even if a new generation of video cards come out, you don't need to upgrade if you don't want to.
At the LANs I host, almost everybody brings laptops. That means they all have 3-generation-old non-upgradeable cards. We've never had a problem. But then again, sometimes we play older games because they are still FUN. And sometimes we play games from 2008, and turn down the settings to accommodate our hardware. Sometimes we don't even need to turn down the settings.
PC games have gotten to the point where many of them still look EXCELLENT on low settings. Don't believe me? Download the Portal or Crysis demo and specifically play at low settings. Now play at highest settings. Except for some more lighting effects, there isn't much of a difference is there? Gone are the days of things looking like shapeless blobs because they are on "low settings."
Absolutely not. I'm a PC gamer because I pay $50 for not only a game, but SUPPORT. I know I'm going to get patches to fix the game and increase performance, I know I'm going to occasionally get additional content FOR FREE from the developers to keep the game alive, and I know there will be a mod community to provide everything else.
Valve and Epic and Blizzard don't shake up gameplay too much. They make shooters and RTS's and unless you are a huge shooter/RTS connoisseur you probably won't notice the difference between many of their games. But they support their customers, and that's why people come back to them. Blizzard gave Starcraft a DECADE of updates. Starcraft II is just going to be Starcraft I with better graphics, but with support like that I'll jump at the chance to play the Protoss in 3d.
I was in a Best Buy and saw two Sims 2 expansions called "Sims 2: H & M" and "Sims 2: Ikea." I kid you not. They wanted people to plunk $20 a pop to have brand name clothes and furniture in their game. This is what your suggestion will lead to, and that is exactly what we DON'T need.
Also, many Asian MMO's have that exact business model, and the game becomes less about the time and effort you put in and more about the money you put in. Not fun.
There's only one example I can think of where in-game ads were tasteful, and that's Crazy Taxi. Basically, Levi's and a couple of other real-life chains were possible places your customers would want to be driven to.
Except for reckless driving, Crazy Taxi wasn't much of a fantasy world, so seeing ads for real life stuff wasn't a big deal. PLUS they didn't throw the ads in your face. I paid very little attention to the buildings as I was mostly concentrating on getitng to point X and still having enough time to keep going.
Also, I didn't throw much of a fit about seeing banner adds in the Starcraft lobby, as long as I didn't see them in game. So it CAN be done, but not in the way advertisers would prefer.
And get yourself an anthology of short stories for 50 cents. There are a ton of good books that anyone can recommend, but there's a reason I'd recommend a book of short stories: Imagination. Within the course of a few hundred pages, your kids will be hit with so many new ideas and thoughts their heads will spin.
Just as an example, in my old copy of "The Year's Best Science Fiction" (17th annual), I read about cryogenics and long term space travel, making "backups" of the human mind and even real-life events, engineering a spaceship to be a habitat, a version of history where Mohammed was prevented from starting Islam, the dangers of living on the moon (because of low gravity), a sport where manipulating wavelengths is the key to success, modifying the human body to become more efficient to the environment... And I've only read about half of the book!
Many of the authors in this topic are amazing authors and a few of my childhood favorites, but don't let them miss out on the experience that is a sci-fi short story anthology.
I remember my Calculus I professor doing something like this:
"Okay open to page 337 that's 361 for the 5th edition and go to problem 41 which is... Problem 42 for the 5th edition."
I also lost my expensive latest edition calculus book last year and couldn't recover it. I used my brother's old, torn, and tattered 1-edition-old book for Calculus II, and didn't lose anything out of the experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately I think Doom 3 was a bad demo of the id Tech 4 engine's capabilities because of their horrible textures. Try playing Prey, probably the best product made from that engine. Unfortunately it still suffers many of the limits of the engine (it's indoors, only a handful of enemies at a time), but the texture work is brilliant. Not only is it detailed but some of the grosser sections are absolutely sickening in their realism.
Where do you go with such workers? I will agree that this may be the case for many workers, but they are paid to not show it when they're dealing with customers, even if the customer is difficult. Some give me a smile and some don't, but as long as they can do their job reasonably well I don't care too much--I'm in a hurry anyway.
I almost never use the self-service machines because they're poorly designed and because I'm not THAT antisocial--yet.
In the older Diablos, this was sometimes the case. The dungeon would be pitch black, but there would be a circle of light right around you. You could increase the radius of this circle by equipping certain "radiant" items. I think those screenshots, along with the ones with the noise effect applied, are trying to recapture a retro Diablo feel as closely as possible.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2007/20070125.jpg
I thought it was funny the first time I read it, it's scary that it may be more true now. )=
In an interview with Time magazine moot said his real name was Christopher Poole, and this article says the same thing. The only problem is that his real name is not Christopher Poole.
/b/ "HAHAHA YOU GOT TROLLED FAGGOTS!" You'd think that if this guy did all this research, he would have caught it by now. What else in this article is suspect?
Maybe it's the fact that his initials spell "CP," otherwise expanded as child porn. Or maybe that his last name is Poole, a possible reference to the "Pool's Closed" meme. Or maybe it's the fact that the day that article went live, moot made the headline of
Here's a young'un's experience with a couple of puzzle/adventure games of yore:
I decided to play Zork once because it seemed like an interesting challenge--having to go on an adventure with the only clues being written descriptions of the world around me. So I dove into it and explored and picked up everything, and then I got to a maze. Of twisty little passages. All alike. I thought I had read somewhere that the wording varied slightly throughout the maze to suggest different parts of the maze. So I explored a little bit. Nope. The wording's the same for this whole maze. For all I know I've been walking through portals that lead to the same box of a room. Plus I have limited amounts of light. This isn't logic or problem solving, this is just blind running around. Screw that.
I recently picked up the Myst 10th anniversary box because the idea of Myst always intrigued me-- a bunch of lonely, desolate, beautiful worlds with a past behind them. So I install Myst and start playing. It took some doing, but I figured out the puzzle on the Myst island. It took a bit of reading and exploring and taking notes, but when it all came together I was so proud of myself! And then I jumped into a book and went to the next island. Don't read on if don't want the Stoneship Age spoiled for you.
I play the same game, exploring and piecing together the island. Eventually there's only one thing keeping me from progressing, and that's that the rooms beneath the deck of the ship are completely dark, and I need to light it up. So I wander around, seeing if there's anything I missed, and I come across a secret passage in the hallways in the stone pillar. I open it and I see a giant compass. Cool. I look at it, and press the center, just to test the waters. Nothing happens. So I carefully touch one of the myriad of blue knobs on the end. BRAAP BRAAP BRAAP! An alarm went off and all the lights went out. I fumbled my way above ground, spun the generator to get more power, and went back down under.
This happens a couple of times and I give up and press the hint button. It says I need to move the compass's direction somehow. Cool. I guess I need to find a magnet. Well, I look up and down every room in the Stoneship Age with no luck. Of course, I can't find anything beneath the deck of the ship because it's too dark. I finally give up and read the walkthrough, and it says that I needed to note the two lines on the telescope, and that the angle they appear at is the angle at which I press the compass buttons. Really. I mean, great job incorporating geometry into the game, but the solution didn't make ANY LOGICAL SENSE. What's worse is I spent a ton of time ransacking rooms with medicines, needles, maps, geegaws, and all kinds of stuff, and it was all worthless. It was just a bunch of eye candy and animations.
I haven't given up on Myst yet, but solutions that are arbitrary instead of logical leave a bad taste in my mouth.
Didn't XP have that "initializing your desktop" too? First you spun the disk and it made the partitions and copied all the files. Then you rebooted and you clicked a few options (time zone, language, etc) and you spent the next 20-30 minutes waiting for it to set up Network stuff and other nebulous background processes. Then you rebooted, made an account, and were good to go.
My only experience of Vista was briefly trying the beta on my PC and I didn't see anything too upsetting in the install process. Did something change later?
I know you're being funny, but seriously nobody listens to K-Fed. He sold a few thousand albums before the sales stopped and he fell into obscurity. Most people stopped listening to NSync by the time they got to middle school.
I can't vouch for most music store's top 10 lists, but suffice to say there are still plenty of good musical acts around. Hang out at sites like Pitchfork Media (http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/) and Tiny Mix Tapes (http://www.tinymixtapes.com/). Once you're past all the pretentious hipster attitude, there's some pretty good sound to be found.
Beyond that, you can discover good music in television commercials (the only thing that make them worth watching), from late night talk shows, and from that one song you heard on Youtube, Pandora, or Last.fm.
Nobody's a slave to top 40 radio. Music is playing in so many other places you're bound to hear something you like.
I thought Harvey Dent was amazing. The hype for this movie was all about the Joker and even though Harvey Dent was in the movie, they didn't suggest that he actually became Two-Face. And then as he started to become unhinged he flipped a coin. And then there was the two-heads coin. And then his face was pressed into gasoline. The foreshadowing was so thick that you could tell where it was going, but for what was billed as a Joker movie, it was surprising nonetheless.
Also, it made sense, sorta, that Harvey Dent would be open to the Joker's ideas. Think about it. Because of Batman, the Joker's antics were resulting in more and more collateral damage. The police unit that was given the job of rescuing his girlfriend failed, and what's more, it's a police unit that he DIDN'T LIKE. All the "good guys" have dragged him through shit. And then all of a sudden the Joker comes along. He's polite and kind and just gives Harvey a couple of things to think about, and a gun. He doesn't try to coerce Harvey into anything, he just gives him the gun and says "do whatever." Harvey could have shot Joker right then and there, and the Joker wouldn't have cared. But to Harvey, who was more deserving of lead at that point, a guy who gives him a gun or his "friends" who dragged him through shit?
On the contrary, I have seen some extremely racist Looney Tunes cartoons and Disney stories. I remember one where Mickey was trying to adapt an island native to his way of life. The island native was portrayed as an absolute buffoon. I saw a WWII Bugs Bunny cartoon where he would beat up and blow up an imbecile Japanese soldier.
You don't need to read this to really young kids, but I think slightly older children would benefit from the history lesson. Their favorite characters weren't always clean mascots, compared to our standards. And back then, it was ACCEPTABLE for cartoon characters to be incredibly racist. Cartoons used to be rife with adult material. Some of course still are.
I'm not saying you have to think the cartoons are acceptable material for young kids. But they make an AWESOME history lesson, one that ISN'T about generals and politicians.
The Ewells in To Kill a Mockingbird were white, and their speech was rendered in "dialect" along with the black Tom Robinson, the tragic hero of the story. In Great Expectations the blacksmith, Joe Gargery, was white and British but he pronounced all his V's as W's aka "conwict" and "wittles' instead of "convict" and "vittles." Uncle Tom's Cabin, a controversial novel in the US in its time because of its strong anti-slavery stance, included plenty of "dialect."
It's not automatically racism every time someone's speech is rendered in nonstandard English. Even if it was, are you just going to deny it happened by "banishing" the offending books? I am sorry for the fact that you think banishing books is a good thing.
Pour millions upon millions into space travel! If we don't, those damn ruskies will beat us!
...Pretty please?
An applicant you mean? I don't know if I'd like to work for an employer who can't spell.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Applicate
See how silly that is? It's an honest mistake, and here I am condemning you for it. I'm even suggesting that you can't spell AT ALL, even though you only made one mistake in the whole post. I'm making sweeping generalizations about your literacy based on a post on the Internet.
If you cut out applicants based on whether they have a squeaky clean Internet Posting Record, you are making a rather arbitrary (and poor) choice. You are also wasting your time on Myspace when you SHOULD be reading those resumes we spend hours on.
Why is it that whenever a shooter comes out with beautiful graphics, it's considered garbage, unimaginative, and "the reason PC gaming is dying?" People cry on message boards saying "Why release a game that requires a $2000 PC to play?" They say that their computer has a Geforce 3 still and if developers aren't going to cater to that, then fuck them.
Instead of imagining that PC gaming is in a sordid state, try this:
1. Go to some online electronics boutique and pay the $150 for a midrange video card that'll handle any modern game well. Make sure to check whether your motherboard has an AGP or PCI-Express slot, and buy accordingly.
2. Hang around some gaming websites like Destructoid and see what games interest other people. Find one that interests you. Buy it.
3. Install and play it. Discover that this isn't the 90's and that playing on "medium settings" doesn't mean everything looks like a muddy blob.
4. 2 years down the road, exercise self control and DON'T buy the latest video card. That's right. Just because a new generation of video cards comes out, doesn't mean you NEED to upgrade. You might be surprised to find out that new games will still run great on your old card!
5. Feel great knowing you're not just some whining tool who bashes a hobby that he doesn't know anything about.
P.S. Who the HELL do you talk to that bashes Half Life 2 because of the graphics? That game, like its ANCIENT predecessor, is still highly revered because of its storytelling techniques and finely tuned gameplay, not because of how many gigabytes of textures it had.
Why not have one box, one price, one disk, but multiple configurations? Like, "Performance/Gamer," "Server," "Home use," "Business," etc. When you pop the disk in to install, they let you either choose one of those packages to install or give you the whole smorgasbord to pick and choose which packages you want install
It's been years since I used Fedora Core, but I seemed to remember their installer letting me pick and choose the packages I wanted to install. If I need more, pop the disk in again and choose which ones.
Still, one generation old isn't bad. My 3850 idles around 40C and can run any game I throw at it. With Crysis I have to run the game at "High" instead of "Very High," but the difference is negligible.
Thank you. This is the post I was looking for. The summary was pretty distressing, so I waited for the voice of reason before I did anything irrational like shred my Diablo and Starcraft CDs.
The fact that EULAs now have copyright infringement threats attached to them doesn't make me particularly happy, but at least I won't be living in fear of what's on my RAM.
Plenty of PC games release part of their source code to allow modifications to be built on it. Some of the coders who release those mods release the source too.
Sure there's a Windows OS involved, but that's still a hell of a lot more "Free as in speech" than any console game.
Plus, some PC games that aren't console ports often have config files and command lines that can give a user full control of a game. I look at console game menus and am disappointed that something I want to do with the server isn't there. For example, many console games make you restart the server or vote every time a level is changed, instead of offering a maplist.
Hooray sweeping generalizations!
While we're at it, engineers are fucking stupid. I mean seriously, if you look at their tepid applications of math compared to someone who is engrossed in abstract mathematical thought such as I, you wonder why they even charge for their "services." A mathematician is clearly the only one who can do the job right.
(PS I'm a CS major, and if you ever catch me saying this with a straight face I give you permission to hit me!)
As opposed to, say, $400 + an HDTV to play the latest and greatest console games?
Here's the deal, you don't need to upgrade your video card every year. In fact, you don't need to drop $250 on a card, ever. Take a cheap Dell or Emachines PC and stick a $150 card in it, maybe $50 for 2GB of RAM if it's really lacking, and you're done for a couple of years AT LEAST. Even if a new generation of video cards come out, you don't need to upgrade if you don't want to.
At the LANs I host, almost everybody brings laptops. That means they all have 3-generation-old non-upgradeable cards. We've never had a problem. But then again, sometimes we play older games because they are still FUN. And sometimes we play games from 2008, and turn down the settings to accommodate our hardware. Sometimes we don't even need to turn down the settings.
PC games have gotten to the point where many of them still look EXCELLENT on low settings. Don't believe me? Download the Portal or Crysis demo and specifically play at low settings. Now play at highest settings. Except for some more lighting effects, there isn't much of a difference is there? Gone are the days of things looking like shapeless blobs because they are on "low settings."
Absolutely not. I'm a PC gamer because I pay $50 for not only a game, but SUPPORT. I know I'm going to get patches to fix the game and increase performance, I know I'm going to occasionally get additional content FOR FREE from the developers to keep the game alive, and I know there will be a mod community to provide everything else.
Valve and Epic and Blizzard don't shake up gameplay too much. They make shooters and RTS's and unless you are a huge shooter/RTS connoisseur you probably won't notice the difference between many of their games. But they support their customers, and that's why people come back to them. Blizzard gave Starcraft a DECADE of updates. Starcraft II is just going to be Starcraft I with better graphics, but with support like that I'll jump at the chance to play the Protoss in 3d.
I was in a Best Buy and saw two Sims 2 expansions called "Sims 2: H & M" and "Sims 2: Ikea." I kid you not. They wanted people to plunk $20 a pop to have brand name clothes and furniture in their game. This is what your suggestion will lead to, and that is exactly what we DON'T need.
Also, many Asian MMO's have that exact business model, and the game becomes less about the time and effort you put in and more about the money you put in. Not fun.
There's only one example I can think of where in-game ads were tasteful, and that's Crazy Taxi. Basically, Levi's and a couple of other real-life chains were possible places your customers would want to be driven to.
Except for reckless driving, Crazy Taxi wasn't much of a fantasy world, so seeing ads for real life stuff wasn't a big deal. PLUS they didn't throw the ads in your face. I paid very little attention to the buildings as I was mostly concentrating on getitng to point X and still having enough time to keep going.
Also, I didn't throw much of a fit about seeing banner adds in the Starcraft lobby, as long as I didn't see them in game. So it CAN be done, but not in the way advertisers would prefer.
And get yourself an anthology of short stories for 50 cents. There are a ton of good books that anyone can recommend, but there's a reason I'd recommend a book of short stories: Imagination. Within the course of a few hundred pages, your kids will be hit with so many new ideas and thoughts their heads will spin.
Just as an example, in my old copy of "The Year's Best Science Fiction" (17th annual), I read about cryogenics and long term space travel, making "backups" of the human mind and even real-life events, engineering a spaceship to be a habitat, a version of history where Mohammed was prevented from starting Islam, the dangers of living on the moon (because of low gravity), a sport where manipulating wavelengths is the key to success, modifying the human body to become more efficient to the environment... And I've only read about half of the book!
Many of the authors in this topic are amazing authors and a few of my childhood favorites, but don't let them miss out on the experience that is a sci-fi short story anthology.
Is Hugh Pickens the more generously filled brother of Slim Pickens?
I remember my Calculus I professor doing something like this:
"Okay open to page 337 that's 361 for the 5th edition and go to problem 41 which is... Problem 42 for the 5th edition."
I also lost my expensive latest edition calculus book last year and couldn't recover it. I used my brother's old, torn, and tattered 1-edition-old book for Calculus II, and didn't lose anything out of the experience.