To be fair, the mob at 2ch likes to flood amazon.co.jp with 1-star reviews for anything they don't like. On amazon.co.jp, Dragon Quest IX was flooded with 1-star reviews immediately after it was released. It's a fantastic game, but the 2ch decided to flood it with bad reviews just because it had multiplayer. It's only back up to 3 stars now after the people who've actually played the game have left reviews. Note that on the American Amazon site, it's been sitting at 4.5 stars for quite some time now.
The whole zone gets divided into little tiny rooms for no particularly good reason other than lazy level design.
Actually, it was so that the PS2 could handle it. You may have noticed that in the earlier zones that are wide open without tiny rooms, they frequently have fairly little actually in the zone and have a very short draw distance (compared to normal PC games). The game has a very large PS2 user base in Japan, but the PS2's RAM is incredibly limited compared to any modern PC, so they have to take lots of short cuts in order to make the game playable.
They never released 13 for PC gamers yet they want to shovel us yet another failed piece of mmo garbage?!?! there are 9999999 cute asian RPG's out there, and most of them are free. You cant have an epic RPG story in an MMO with doods coming up to you asking if you want to join their guild just as Aerith is getting killed by scyther!
I know you want that steady subscription money like WOW and EQ got but sheesh, Give it up.
The only non-MMO FF games that have been released for the PC were VII and VIII, which sold quite poorly compared to their console counterparts, so you really shouldn't be surprised that there's no PC version of XIII.
On the other hand, you may have missed FFXI, an MMORPG that has actually done quite well by non-WoW standards, and it has a reputation for having a very good story. That's not even qualified by "as far as MMOs go"; the story was arguably better than the last few single player FF games, even.
- oh, we all grew up together, but somehow we all just forgot that (while still living together the whole time. We're not talking people who lived somewhere else for 20 years and forgot their friends from kindergarten, but people who forgot their friends from kindergarten while still living in the same room with them.)
- oh, and that evil chick we've been trying to kill for the last two discs and viceversa? we kinda forgot she's our adoptive mother who raised us since we were babies. (Yeah, I guess it's the kind of thing that just slips one's mind.)
I'm not disagreeing with you that FFVIII's plot had some serious problems, but they didn't just "somehow" lose their memories. Another one of the game's twist is when it is revealed that using Guardian Forces literally removes a person's memories. None of them have heir childhood memories because the GFs removed them.
Why not just end the 'Final' title and come up with a new game and name altogether?
Might steer people away from the inevitable comparisons to the previous 13 versions of the game. Just a thought.
Because there's no point to that. For one, the prior 13 FF games were actually different games, not just previous versions of the same game. Surprisingly, the same is true of video game series in general, with a few exceptions.
Also, the reviews for FFXIV have nothing to do with comparisons to previous games in the series and everything to do with the fact that it's a bad game, regardless of title.
Why bring that up? Well, it's an example of how the majority of people don't want PvP
I don't think that's the right conclusion at all. Even on WoW's PvE realms, arena and battlegrounds are very popular, and there are always people dueling outside Orgrimmar. I think the right conclusion is that people want to be able to control when they PvP.
On a PvP realm, you can be out in the wilderness, minding your own business, and then some level 80 guy with a 6000 gearscore comes along and murders you. And if he's bored, he'll sit there and murder you over and over. On a PvE realm, I can go out and kill monsters and do quests all I want, and then when I want to compete against other players, I can turn my PvP flag on or go join in the designated PvP events.
WoW isn't successful because it caters to the lowest common denominator; it's successful because any "denominator" can have fun. I can log on and do quests for an hour, or I can work on earning acheivements, or I can grind dailies, or I can do random dungeons, or I can do battlegrounds, or I can join an arena team or a raiding guild and do 25-man ICC... Those things appeal to different crowds and they're all designed to be fun. In FFXIV, your options are to either grind XP on killing monsters or beat your head against the obtuse crafting system. That's it.
MMOs are too easy these days. Wah wah kill the same creature over and over again. None of these kids know anything about difficulty and repetition.
You seem to be making the same mistake as many other FFXI veterans and FFXIV players, which is that you're confusing tedium with difficulty. It's not hard to kill the same monster over and over again for weeks in a row. Anybody who can push a few buttons can be trained to do that. Very few things in FFXI or EQ were actually hard, you just had to be willing to throw yourself at it over and over until you got the result you wanted.
Maybe you should go play Demon's Souls, or maybe Ninja Gaiden (on Master Ninja mode, of course). Those are hard.
Premature? If it's ready for a price tag, then it's ready for a review. If I'm going to pay for a game, I expect it to actually be fun. If I wanted to help somebody test something, there are plenty of free games and beta tests out there. Maybe I'll give FFXIV another chance after a year or two, if it's still around.
By the way, there's more against the game other than the terrible UI and learning curve. There's also the terrible player economy, the lack of anything to do other than grinding, the needlessly complex crafting system, the poor graphics optimization, the copy-and-paste environments...
Imagine the Internet is a gun. URL Shorteners are the chambers. A bad link is the bullet.
Now imagine that gun is pointed at your head, and everytime you click on a shortened URL, you are pulling the trigger.
Imagine that analogies are a gun. Words are the chambers. False logic is the bullet.
Now imagine that gun is pointed at your head, and every time you say something, a koala bear climbs down a rainbow to give you a necklace made of flower petals.
I don't really know where this is going, just that it never made sense in the first place.
There is an observable phenomenon that is testable in a laboratory that we call "gravity." I don't know how it got there, but it's definitely there.
On the other hand, I have never seen anything resembling what fits the traditional Christian description of "God." There are other observable natural phenomena that I can't explain, but throughout history there have been countless other phenomena that were thought to be unexplainable but were later explained, so there's no reason to assume that some vengeful supernatural entity is behind the ones we still can't explain. Science does not have "the answer" -- it has a method for finding and testing answers.
And an old book means nothing. "Beowulf" and "The Odyssey" are old books, too, but I'm certainly not going to hold them up as works of historical fact. Why should I assume that this book you're referring to is anything other than a collection of bronze age fables?
Fortunately, there was a very educational documentary made several years back about starting up planetary cores. I think it was called something like "The Core."
I've been using it for around two years now and am continually amazed at how little press it's gotten compared to Thunderbird. It does everything I've ever wanted Thunderbird to do (and more), and it's much, much faster.
Neither. You only need if (foo), not if (foo==true). This is CS 101;)
But don't forget that in Javascript, if(foo) is actually the equivalent of if(typeof(foo) !== 'undefined' && foo !== null && foo !== false). That's not the same as if(foo === true) and may not actually be what you want.
Maybe some people just like things that you don't like. It's tough, I know, especially when you're in the minority.
Would you care to list all the books you like so that I can find one I think is utter trash? Then we can yell at each other for a while about how horrible our tastes are. It'll be fun.
the original, God-breathed WORD had no errors in it... IF there are any APPARENT contradictions in current bibles, then the problem has to be either in translation or our understanding, or sometimes even both.... II Corinthians 4:3-6... Psalms 12:6
I'm sure you think you're being convincing, but the thing you have to realize here is that every single argument you're making relies on the assumption that I think your holy book is perfect and infallible. I don't; I think it's a collection of fables and myths pieced together by bronze-age philosophers and farmers. The reason there seem to be contradictions isn't because of a bad translation or because I'm not reading it right; it's because the people who collected those fables didn't have their stories straight.
Please, present to me some argument why your book is divinely inspired that doesn't boil down to "believing this makes me feel good, so this must be true" or "I don't know the answer to a question, therefore this must be true."
FWIW, if you had never played the original... then beta-testing the sequel seems pretty silly. What use woould you be as a beta-tester of the game?
Maybe you would have been a great candidate for beta-testing the tutorials. Or beta-testing the campaign mode.
Maybe I'm just being grumpy... but for you to complain, never having played the original, that the beta-test of a sequel was not noob-friendly... well, it just seems like you're barking up the wrong tree.
As a software developer, I have to say that the best kinds of beta testers are the ones who go in with no expectations and no prior knowledge of the subject.
Experienced users/players already know how everything works, so they all click on things the same way, interact with things the same way, and use the same general set of features. Inexperienced users/players will click on random things, try unusual combinations of actions, and, in general, do things that no old timer would ever consider.
Heck, the entire point of a public beta test is to find problems that you didn't find in your internal testing.
I was pretty damn good at Quake and Unreal Tournament back in the day, but I no longer enjoy playing against humans as much as I used to. I don't have the time necessary to play games and study strategy eight hours a day any more, which means that I always lose against the people who do, and quite frequently they're immature, vulgar winners. I could go hang out at the local middle school if I wanted to hear a thirteen-year-old call me a fag.
So now I play single player games almost exclusively, because I can relax and take them at my own pace.
Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of the DNA double helix molecule said that it was so complex and so advanced, that the likelihood of it being a product of evolution (read CHANCE) is the same as the likelihood that a tornado blowing over a junkyard will produce a Boeing 747 jetliner!
First of all, the quote you're thinking of was said by Fred Hoyle, not Francis Crick. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle. Second, the quote was referring to abiogenesis, not evolution. Third, Hoyle was an astronomer, not a biologist. Fourth, order comes from disorder all the time; the tornado itself arising spontaneously is an example of that. There is no reason to believe it is not possible for a self-replicating molecule to be created as a result of a chemical reaction, and evolution takes care of the rest.
So you could have eons of time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. This is when the dinosaurs existed. There is much more information about this, but all of it is without any contradiction to science or the bible.
We work at my workplace, too, but every once in a while we take breaks so that we can relax a bit. Surprisingly, productivity over time is much greater when workers aren't constantly stressed. During our breaks we are generally allowed to browse web sites for fun or even to play games.
There are still regulations on what we're not allowed to use the network for, though, and one of those things is pornography. So leisure sites in general are fine, but Playboy is not, which means that the site referenced by the article would, indeed, be work-safe.
As somebody else who has a phobia of needles, I'll chip in that I desperately wish this kind of thing could work in reverse. The number one reason why I avoid going to a doctor whenever possible is because I know they're going to want to use a needle to inject or draw something, and I'd rather just cut my hand open with a knife and let them scoop the blood up than have a needle draw blood. Seriously.
But it would be really cool if I could at least get vaccinations through just applying a patch.
(and I think some kinds of spiders are pretty cute)
I would imagine that they'll use the name set as the credit card holder for your account.
Also, WoW's terms of service require that you be at least 13 to play; if you're under 13 and playing that means you're breaking the ToS and Blizzard is unaware of it, and they will doubtlessly ban you as soon as they are made aware.
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I do believe you're the first person who has ever pointed this out. Thanks! I certainly wouldn't have realized it.
To be fair, the mob at 2ch likes to flood amazon.co.jp with 1-star reviews for anything they don't like. On amazon.co.jp, Dragon Quest IX was flooded with 1-star reviews immediately after it was released. It's a fantastic game, but the 2ch decided to flood it with bad reviews just because it had multiplayer. It's only back up to 3 stars now after the people who've actually played the game have left reviews. Note that on the American Amazon site, it's been sitting at 4.5 stars for quite some time now.
The whole zone gets divided into little tiny rooms for no particularly good reason other than lazy level design.
Actually, it was so that the PS2 could handle it. You may have noticed that in the earlier zones that are wide open without tiny rooms, they frequently have fairly little actually in the zone and have a very short draw distance (compared to normal PC games). The game has a very large PS2 user base in Japan, but the PS2's RAM is incredibly limited compared to any modern PC, so they have to take lots of short cuts in order to make the game playable.
They never released 13 for PC gamers yet they want to shovel us yet another failed piece of mmo garbage?!?!
there are 9999999 cute asian RPG's out there, and most of them are free. You cant have an epic RPG story in an MMO with doods coming up to you asking if you want to join their guild just as Aerith is getting killed by scyther!
I know you want that steady subscription money like WOW and EQ got but sheesh, Give it up.
The only non-MMO FF games that have been released for the PC were VII and VIII, which sold quite poorly compared to their console counterparts, so you really shouldn't be surprised that there's no PC version of XIII.
On the other hand, you may have missed FFXI, an MMORPG that has actually done quite well by non-WoW standards, and it has a reputation for having a very good story. That's not even qualified by "as far as MMOs go"; the story was arguably better than the last few single player FF games, even.
- oh, we all grew up together, but somehow we all just forgot that (while still living together the whole time. We're not talking people who lived somewhere else for 20 years and forgot their friends from kindergarten, but people who forgot their friends from kindergarten while still living in the same room with them.)
- oh, and that evil chick we've been trying to kill for the last two discs and viceversa? we kinda forgot she's our adoptive mother who raised us since we were babies. (Yeah, I guess it's the kind of thing that just slips one's mind.)
I'm not disagreeing with you that FFVIII's plot had some serious problems, but they didn't just "somehow" lose their memories. Another one of the game's twist is when it is revealed that using Guardian Forces literally removes a person's memories. None of them have heir childhood memories because the GFs removed them.
Why not just end the 'Final' title and come up with a new game and name altogether?
Might steer people away from the inevitable comparisons to the previous 13 versions of the game. Just a thought.
Because there's no point to that. For one, the prior 13 FF games were actually different games, not just previous versions of the same game. Surprisingly, the same is true of video game series in general, with a few exceptions.
Also, the reviews for FFXIV have nothing to do with comparisons to previous games in the series and everything to do with the fact that it's a bad game, regardless of title.
Why bring that up? Well, it's an example of how the majority of people don't want PvP
I don't think that's the right conclusion at all. Even on WoW's PvE realms, arena and battlegrounds are very popular, and there are always people dueling outside Orgrimmar. I think the right conclusion is that people want to be able to control when they PvP.
On a PvP realm, you can be out in the wilderness, minding your own business, and then some level 80 guy with a 6000 gearscore comes along and murders you. And if he's bored, he'll sit there and murder you over and over. On a PvE realm, I can go out and kill monsters and do quests all I want, and then when I want to compete against other players, I can turn my PvP flag on or go join in the designated PvP events.
WoW isn't successful because it caters to the lowest common denominator; it's successful because any "denominator" can have fun. I can log on and do quests for an hour, or I can work on earning acheivements, or I can grind dailies, or I can do random dungeons, or I can do battlegrounds, or I can join an arena team or a raiding guild and do 25-man ICC... Those things appeal to different crowds and they're all designed to be fun. In FFXIV, your options are to either grind XP on killing monsters or beat your head against the obtuse crafting system. That's it.
MMOs are too easy these days. Wah wah kill the same creature over and over again. None of these kids know anything about difficulty and repetition.
You seem to be making the same mistake as many other FFXI veterans and FFXIV players, which is that you're confusing tedium with difficulty. It's not hard to kill the same monster over and over again for weeks in a row. Anybody who can push a few buttons can be trained to do that. Very few things in FFXI or EQ were actually hard, you just had to be willing to throw yourself at it over and over until you got the result you wanted.
Maybe you should go play Demon's Souls, or maybe Ninja Gaiden (on Master Ninja mode, of course). Those are hard.
Premature? If it's ready for a price tag, then it's ready for a review. If I'm going to pay for a game, I expect it to actually be fun. If I wanted to help somebody test something, there are plenty of free games and beta tests out there. Maybe I'll give FFXIV another chance after a year or two, if it's still around.
By the way, there's more against the game other than the terrible UI and learning curve. There's also the terrible player economy, the lack of anything to do other than grinding, the needlessly complex crafting system, the poor graphics optimization, the copy-and-paste environments...
Imagine the Internet is a gun. URL Shorteners are the chambers. A bad link is the bullet.
Now imagine that gun is pointed at your head, and everytime you click on a shortened URL, you are pulling the trigger.
Imagine that analogies are a gun. Words are the chambers. False logic is the bullet.
Now imagine that gun is pointed at your head, and every time you say something, a koala bear climbs down a rainbow to give you a necklace made of flower petals.
I don't really know where this is going, just that it never made sense in the first place.
There is an observable phenomenon that is testable in a laboratory that we call "gravity." I don't know how it got there, but it's definitely there.
On the other hand, I have never seen anything resembling what fits the traditional Christian description of "God." There are other observable natural phenomena that I can't explain, but throughout history there have been countless other phenomena that were thought to be unexplainable but were later explained, so there's no reason to assume that some vengeful supernatural entity is behind the ones we still can't explain. Science does not have "the answer" -- it has a method for finding and testing answers.
And an old book means nothing. "Beowulf" and "The Odyssey" are old books, too, but I'm certainly not going to hold them up as works of historical fact. Why should I assume that this book you're referring to is anything other than a collection of bronze age fables?
Fortunately, there was a very educational documentary made several years back about starting up planetary cores. I think it was called something like "The Core."
Ok, so basically your reason why C is better than Java is that if you write perfect code, you never have to worry about memory issues.
Why not just write in FORTRAN? Or Assembly, even?
Seriously: http://www.claws-mail.org/
I've been using it for around two years now and am continually amazed at how little press it's gotten compared to Thunderbird. It does everything I've ever wanted Thunderbird to do (and more), and it's much, much faster.
Neither. You only need if (foo), not if (foo==true). This is CS 101 ;)
But don't forget that in Javascript, if(foo) is actually the equivalent of if(typeof(foo) !== 'undefined' && foo !== null && foo !== false). That's not the same as if(foo === true) and may not actually be what you want.
(I hate Javascript)
Get contact lenses. They're cheaper than glasses and you might even get laid. ... I wore glasses until I was 50, when I fonally got contacts.
And now you're a crotchety old man who is making fun of people on Slashdot for wearing glasses. Do you feel like you've had a productive life?
(by the way, contacts are a pain to take care of, and my girlfriends and wife have all told me I look cute with glasses)
Maybe some people just like things that you don't like. It's tough, I know, especially when you're in the minority.
Would you care to list all the books you like so that I can find one I think is utter trash? Then we can yell at each other for a while about how horrible our tastes are. It'll be fun.
the original, God-breathed WORD had no errors in it ... IF there are any APPARENT contradictions in current bibles, then the problem has to be either in translation or our understanding, or sometimes even both. ... II Corinthians 4:3-6 ... Psalms 12:6
I'm sure you think you're being convincing, but the thing you have to realize here is that every single argument you're making relies on the assumption that I think your holy book is perfect and infallible. I don't; I think it's a collection of fables and myths pieced together by bronze-age philosophers and farmers. The reason there seem to be contradictions isn't because of a bad translation or because I'm not reading it right; it's because the people who collected those fables didn't have their stories straight.
Please, present to me some argument why your book is divinely inspired that doesn't boil down to "believing this makes me feel good, so this must be true" or "I don't know the answer to a question, therefore this must be true."
FWIW, if you had never played the original... then beta-testing the sequel seems pretty silly. What use woould you be as a beta-tester of the game?
Maybe you would have been a great candidate for beta-testing the tutorials. Or beta-testing the campaign mode.
Maybe I'm just being grumpy... but for you to complain, never having played the original, that the beta-test of a sequel was not noob-friendly... well, it just seems like you're barking up the wrong tree.
As a software developer, I have to say that the best kinds of beta testers are the ones who go in with no expectations and no prior knowledge of the subject.
Experienced users/players already know how everything works, so they all click on things the same way, interact with things the same way, and use the same general set of features. Inexperienced users/players will click on random things, try unusual combinations of actions, and, in general, do things that no old timer would ever consider.
Heck, the entire point of a public beta test is to find problems that you didn't find in your internal testing.
I was pretty damn good at Quake and Unreal Tournament back in the day, but I no longer enjoy playing against humans as much as I used to. I don't have the time necessary to play games and study strategy eight hours a day any more, which means that I always lose against the people who do, and quite frequently they're immature, vulgar winners. I could go hang out at the local middle school if I wanted to hear a thirteen-year-old call me a fag.
So now I play single player games almost exclusively, because I can relax and take them at my own pace.
Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of the DNA double helix molecule said that it was so complex and so advanced, that the likelihood of it being a product of evolution (read CHANCE) is the same as the likelihood that a tornado blowing over a junkyard will produce a Boeing 747 jetliner!
First of all, the quote you're thinking of was said by Fred Hoyle, not Francis Crick. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle. Second, the quote was referring to abiogenesis, not evolution. Third, Hoyle was an astronomer, not a biologist. Fourth, order comes from disorder all the time; the tornado itself arising spontaneously is an example of that. There is no reason to believe it is not possible for a self-replicating molecule to be created as a result of a chemical reaction, and evolution takes care of the rest.
So you could have eons of time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. This is when the dinosaurs existed. There is much more information about this, but all of it is without any contradiction to science or the bible.
By the way, there are LOTS of contradictions within the bible itself; see http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/by_name.html. We won't even start on places where it contradicts science.
You don't understand how evolution works. Read this: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/07/its_more_than_genes_its_networ.php
It's a lot more complex than "monkeys turned into people."
We work at my workplace, too, but every once in a while we take breaks so that we can relax a bit. Surprisingly, productivity over time is much greater when workers aren't constantly stressed. During our breaks we are generally allowed to browse web sites for fun or even to play games.
There are still regulations on what we're not allowed to use the network for, though, and one of those things is pornography. So leisure sites in general are fine, but Playboy is not, which means that the site referenced by the article would, indeed, be work-safe.
As somebody else who has a phobia of needles, I'll chip in that I desperately wish this kind of thing could work in reverse. The number one reason why I avoid going to a doctor whenever possible is because I know they're going to want to use a needle to inject or draw something, and I'd rather just cut my hand open with a knife and let them scoop the blood up than have a needle draw blood. Seriously.
But it would be really cool if I could at least get vaccinations through just applying a patch.
(and I think some kinds of spiders are pretty cute)
I would imagine that they'll use the name set as the credit card holder for your account.
Also, WoW's terms of service require that you be at least 13 to play; if you're under 13 and playing that means you're breaking the ToS and Blizzard is unaware of it, and they will doubtlessly ban you as soon as they are made aware.