I saw "Bowling for Columbine", and it was a rip from the Oscar screener. There's a file doing the rounds right now in some places with Michael Moore giving his opinion on filesharing. So long as nobody is making a buck off his work, he has no problem with people downloading his movies and TV shows off the net.
Get friendly with your local video store manager. I was friends with the owner of a local store where I used to live and saw a ton of screeners. In fact on many occasions, she gave them directly to me to watch without watching them herself. Saw "Office Space" that way.
If you think about it, movies are a rip off. If you get bad service somewhere, you complain. You buy a carton of milk and it's bad, you take it back to the store and get your money back. But does anyone ever complain after seeing a shit film? I think pirating screeners is great for consumers personally. Weeds out the shit. It's good for the movie studios too. This past year I've bought about 10 DVD's that ordinarily I wouldn't have had I not grabbed the screeners off the net and watched them first. Since I don't live anywhere near a theatre, and haven't been able to get to one for three years, the studios are making money off me courtesy of pirated screeners letting me "try before I buy".
No, any self respecting ripper would use DiVX. XVID highlights everything that's wrong with open source. (Don't get me wrong, I love open source, but XVID is an awful format.)
Yes, but the problem with that is hard drive space. Given how little I have (and my system is already maxed out on drives) a couple of ISO's and it's game over for doing anything.
As for developers coding in stuff to not run with Daemon Tools, the developers of DT invariably have a new version out within a few days and it's back to square one for the developers of the games that won't run if you have Daemon Tools. HAHAHA!
I think it's bloody disgusting they do that. We already sign away our souls on the license agreements. It's a bit rich effectively dictating what you can and can't have on your system.
NWN is pretty innovative though. There has been nothing like it before. (At least not on the level of NWN anyway.)
This whole talk about a genre being at deaths door is nothing new. Every few months, some website or magazine says "(Insert genre here) is dead, consoles have killed it." Then every year we get "PC gaming is dead. Consoles killed it."
It's all bollocks. The fact is, to most people I know, the console RPG's are NOT really RPG's at all. They're no more RPG's than say Tomb Raider or Crash Bandicoot. At best you get to rename yourself. All of sudden there's one title on the XBox that's barely above average (KOTOR, and yes, I've played it. It's tedious) and suddenly the PC RPG genre is dying...
Warcraft 3 uses Securom. With a recent patch, Blizzard started requiring the regular EXE file to play online, you can't use a no-cd crack anymore.
What this has done is screw over customers like me who have problems running games with Securom. I own the game, but can't play it online anymore courtesy of Blizzard adding this new line of security. I guess maybe the exe can be hacked for cheating. If so, that's fair enough to add a CRC check to Battle Net, but if it's to stop people playing without a CD that's just retarded, especially when so many people routinely have problems with Securom.
You know the protection method is retarded when Infogrames (they ain't Atari to me, and never will be) were recommending people use no-cd cracks on the recent Neverwinter Nights expansion due to Securom causing so many problems.
At least Safedisc, so far, doesn't seem to have caused many problems. (Feel free to post evidence proving me wrong. I fucking hate Macrovision.)
really? almost everyone i know who has copied games recently has done it from friends. why? because the warez versions are hard to find one, and they are of lower quality.
That's complete nonsense. The downloads off the net are NOT that hard to find (even my "not too bright that department" friends can easily get them), and are exact copies of the original and, if you mount them in a virtual drive, you can bypass the protection anyway.
In short, they are indistinguishable from the real thing.
The thing that pisses me off with the attitude of the gaming industry is the fact that NOBODY I know who gets "warez" copies them from other people. They download them all. I can't remember the last time any friend of mine got a game by copying an original disk. Christ, I think it must have been 5 years ago. This bullshit about casual copying is nonsense.
As a parent to a two year old boy, I would be fully behind ANY product that let me back up my software that, under fair use laws, I should be able to backup anyway! All the Securom bullshit does on games is screw over legitimate consumers, while the game is still rampantly pirated.
The first product placement I remember in a game was F1GP on the Amiga. They had ads for Duckhams and a few other car related companies in it, and this was back in 1991 or thereabouts.
If all this nonsense actually DID increase security, then fair play. But it doesn't. From your statement you appear to believe that yet another privacy rape at the airport, in a climate where women have been forced to empty baby bottles because they might contain weapons, is worth it, do you? Would that be correct? It's all in the interests of national security...
Okay, then, over Christmas, the Bush regime (Heil Dubya!) raised the terror alert etc... saying an attack was likely.
Now let's see here, they claim this, which, to me, means ALL these new security measures have been a waste of time, effort and money, and done nothing other than strip American's of more and more of their rights. If there's a "clear and present danger" of an attack, the administration is admitting that all this nonsense at airports is rubbish because it has not stopped the potential for attacks.
In short: All this security at the airport is like the old adage.
"This rock in my hand keeps away all the lions." "But there are no lions here." "Exactly."
Let's look at it this way and assume the "threat" is real. The fingerprint system is ONLY as good as the intelligence it's received. If Joe Terrorist goes through and has never been fingerprinted before... Well woop de doo, when he flies a plane into a building, at least we'll know what his fingers looked like before they burnt up in the wreckage.
Not going to happen. At least not for a while. Too advanced I think. You can see rudimentary examples of this in some beat-em-up's. I can't remember which one is was now. Early to mid 90's anyway. Prior to that, a lot of them, you could find the weak spot and defeat the AI by repeating the same move over and over. (Generally a sweeping kick in my experience.) Then it came along... May have been Mortal Kombat, not sure. But the game learned. After doing the same move 2 or 3 times in a row, the game got wise and countered you.
I can't think of any other game off hand that has an adaptive ai that would count as learning, at least not one beyond "he's done that move three times, bet he does it again".
Feel free to prove me wrong as I would love to play a game that learnt and adapted.
Not entirely true. Racing games don't HAVE to have adapative ai. The Grand Prix series never has. Grand Prix Legends, from what I gather, is kind of adaptive. It will set the ai times by your best lap to a degree.
NASCAR Racing never used to have it until this last iteration. As I said, it works pretty well. Starting a race from the back at Daytona, I managed to fight up to 17th place by the end (10% race distance) which is pretty good, and it was a huge fight all the way.
One thing a racing games DOES need it for is consistency. Many people find themselves great at one track, and not so hot at another. Without adaptive ai, you can crush the AI at one track, then lose badly at the next. It's more a question of realism than anything else. It's rare these days to see a driver lead a race at one track, then get lapped by everyone at the next.
Warcraft 3 had one? Are you sure? Post links please:)
A lot of racing games have had adaptive AI's. Gran Turismo certainly does. And Papyrus' NASCAR Racing 2003 has it as well, it's an explicit option you can turn on, and it seems to work pretty well.
ADOM is great. Was hugely addicted to Nethack, but these days if I want Nethack, I play "Slashem", which is Nethack with a ton of stuff added. Adom really rules though. Great fun.
With all these articles, I'm thinking Gamespy bought Slashdot...
You can get a PC card that actually has a SID chip on it so you can faithfully emulate the C64 sounds. The High Voltage SIDS Collection has over 10,000 C64 tunes in it.
This guy is right. The music is timeless. I mean I can still hear the theme from Cannon Fodder on the Amiga (the piece on the main screen where you soldiers are buried) and get emotional from it. (Trust me, if you ever played the game, you'll understand.)
And nothing beats a good blast of ANY Rob Hubbard C64 tunes.
I think there is a place for cottage industry. I mean look at Out of the Park Baseball. Produced under those sort of circumstances, just three or four guys I believe.
I think a lot of these developers go under due to piss poor management more than anything else. Either that, or the conspiracy theory is true, that being the likes of EA contract these developers. If they're good, they absorb the talent, and if they're not, they bury them.
Slashdot Mirror
Elitist Heinlein fanboys...
I saw "Bowling for Columbine", and it was a rip from the Oscar screener. There's a file doing the rounds right now in some places with Michael Moore giving his opinion on filesharing. So long as nobody is making a buck off his work, he has no problem with people downloading his movies and TV shows off the net.
I personally can't see a teenager wanting to see ANY movie that has Diane Keaton naked in it.
There were. Plenty. Gigli just gets singled out due to who's in it.
Get friendly with your local video store manager. I was friends with the owner of a local store where I used to live and saw a ton of screeners. In fact on many occasions, she gave them directly to me to watch without watching them herself. Saw "Office Space" that way.
If you think about it, movies are a rip off. If you get bad service somewhere, you complain. You buy a carton of milk and it's bad, you take it back to the store and get your money back. But does anyone ever complain after seeing a shit film? I think pirating screeners is great for consumers personally. Weeds out the shit. It's good for the movie studios too. This past year I've bought about 10 DVD's that ordinarily I wouldn't have had I not grabbed the screeners off the net and watched them first. Since I don't live anywhere near a theatre, and haven't been able to get to one for three years, the studios are making money off me courtesy of pirated screeners letting me "try before I buy".
No, any self respecting ripper would use DiVX. XVID highlights everything that's wrong with open source. (Don't get me wrong, I love open source, but XVID is an awful format.)
It's totally bogus. 3D0 is on the list.
A) Army Men is listed, which is a game from about five years ago.
B) 3D0 went bankrupt last year.
It's just a random bunch of games listed. A load of them are extremely old (Might and Magic I anyone?). Complete fiction.
Yes, but the problem with that is hard drive space. Given how little I have (and my system is already maxed out on drives) a couple of ISO's and it's game over for doing anything.
As for developers coding in stuff to not run with Daemon Tools, the developers of DT invariably have a new version out within a few days and it's back to square one for the developers of the games that won't run if you have Daemon Tools. HAHAHA!
I think it's bloody disgusting they do that. We already sign away our souls on the license agreements. It's a bit rich effectively dictating what you can and can't have on your system.
NWN is pretty innovative though. There has been nothing like it before. (At least not on the level of NWN anyway.)
This whole talk about a genre being at deaths door is nothing new. Every few months, some website or magazine says "(Insert genre here) is dead, consoles have killed it." Then every year we get "PC gaming is dead. Consoles killed it."
It's all bollocks. The fact is, to most people I know, the console RPG's are NOT really RPG's at all. They're no more RPG's than say Tomb Raider or Crash Bandicoot. At best you get to rename yourself. All of sudden there's one title on the XBox that's barely above average (KOTOR, and yes, I've played it. It's tedious) and suddenly the PC RPG genre is dying...
What a crock...
Alcohol 120% is another option. I have a couple of games backed up using that. Very good little program.
Warcraft 3 uses Securom. With a recent patch, Blizzard started requiring the regular EXE file to play online, you can't use a no-cd crack anymore.
What this has done is screw over customers like me who have problems running games with Securom. I own the game, but can't play it online anymore courtesy of Blizzard adding this new line of security. I guess maybe the exe can be hacked for cheating. If so, that's fair enough to add a CRC check to Battle Net, but if it's to stop people playing without a CD that's just retarded, especially when so many people routinely have problems with Securom.
You know the protection method is retarded when Infogrames (they ain't Atari to me, and never will be) were recommending people use no-cd cracks on the recent Neverwinter Nights expansion due to Securom causing so many problems.
At least Safedisc, so far, doesn't seem to have caused many problems. (Feel free to post evidence proving me wrong. I fucking hate Macrovision.)
really? almost everyone i know who has copied games recently has done it from friends. why? because the warez versions are hard to find one, and they are of lower quality.
That's complete nonsense. The downloads off the net are NOT that hard to find (even my "not too bright that department" friends can easily get them), and are exact copies of the original and, if you mount them in a virtual drive, you can bypass the protection anyway.
In short, they are indistinguishable from the real thing.
The thing that pisses me off with the attitude of the gaming industry is the fact that NOBODY I know who gets "warez" copies them from other people. They download them all. I can't remember the last time any friend of mine got a game by copying an original disk. Christ, I think it must have been 5 years ago. This bullshit about casual copying is nonsense.
As a parent to a two year old boy, I would be fully behind ANY product that let me back up my software that, under fair use laws, I should be able to backup anyway! All the Securom bullshit does on games is screw over legitimate consumers, while the game is still rampantly pirated.
I originally typed that, but then deleted because I wasn't 100% sure.
Kudos, yep, that'd beat it.
There was a SNES game that was based on a 7-UP character if I recall.
Plus there was Zool which was sponsored (not products placed, outright sponsored) by Chupa-Chup's.
The first product placement I remember in a game was F1GP on the Amiga. They had ads for Duckhams and a few other car related companies in it, and this was back in 1991 or thereabouts.
Hardly a new idea.
where the Sept 11th terrorists moved around with impunity
Yes. Bush and his senior administration have visited Europe often haven't they...
If all this nonsense actually DID increase security, then fair play. But it doesn't. From your statement you appear to believe that yet another privacy rape at the airport, in a climate where women have been forced to empty baby bottles because they might contain weapons, is worth it, do you? Would that be correct? It's all in the interests of national security...
Okay, then, over Christmas, the Bush regime (Heil Dubya!) raised the terror alert etc... saying an attack was likely.
Now let's see here, they claim this, which, to me, means ALL these new security measures have been a waste of time, effort and money, and done nothing other than strip American's of more and more of their rights. If there's a "clear and present danger" of an attack, the administration is admitting that all this nonsense at airports is rubbish because it has not stopped the potential for attacks.
In short: All this security at the airport is like the old adage.
"This rock in my hand keeps away all the lions."
"But there are no lions here."
"Exactly."
Let's look at it this way and assume the "threat" is real. The fingerprint system is ONLY as good as the intelligence it's received. If Joe Terrorist goes through and has never been fingerprinted before... Well woop de doo, when he flies a plane into a building, at least we'll know what his fingers looked like before they burnt up in the wreckage.
It's a useless security measure.
Not going to happen. At least not for a while. Too advanced I think. You can see rudimentary examples of this in some beat-em-up's. I can't remember which one is was now. Early to mid 90's anyway. Prior to that, a lot of them, you could find the weak spot and defeat the AI by repeating the same move over and over. (Generally a sweeping kick in my experience.) Then it came along... May have been Mortal Kombat, not sure. But the game learned. After doing the same move 2 or 3 times in a row, the game got wise and countered you.
I can't think of any other game off hand that has an adaptive ai that would count as learning, at least not one beyond "he's done that move three times, bet he does it again".
Feel free to prove me wrong as I would love to play a game that learnt and adapted.
Not entirely true. Racing games don't HAVE to have adapative ai. The Grand Prix series never has. Grand Prix Legends, from what I gather, is kind of adaptive. It will set the ai times by your best lap to a degree.
NASCAR Racing never used to have it until this last iteration. As I said, it works pretty well. Starting a race from the back at Daytona, I managed to fight up to 17th place by the end (10% race distance) which is pretty good, and it was a huge fight all the way.
One thing a racing games DOES need it for is consistency. Many people find themselves great at one track, and not so hot at another. Without adaptive ai, you can crush the AI at one track, then lose badly at the next. It's more a question of realism than anything else. It's rare these days to see a driver lead a race at one track, then get lapped by everyone at the next.
That's more of an adaptive difficulty level though. Still, pretty cool. I didn't know it did that. (I only ever play skirmish, that's probably why.)
Warcraft 3 had one? Are you sure? Post links please:)
A lot of racing games have had adaptive AI's. Gran Turismo certainly does. And Papyrus' NASCAR Racing 2003 has it as well, it's an explicit option you can turn on, and it seems to work pretty well.
ADOM is great. Was hugely addicted to Nethack, but these days if I want Nethack, I play "Slashem", which is Nethack with a ton of stuff added. Adom really rules though. Great fun.
With all these articles, I'm thinking Gamespy bought Slashdot...
You can get a PC card that actually has a SID chip on it so you can faithfully emulate the C64 sounds. The High Voltage SIDS Collection has over 10,000 C64 tunes in it.
This guy is right. The music is timeless. I mean I can still hear the theme from Cannon Fodder on the Amiga (the piece on the main screen where you soldiers are buried) and get emotional from it. (Trust me, if you ever played the game, you'll understand.)
And nothing beats a good blast of ANY Rob Hubbard C64 tunes.
I think there is a place for cottage industry. I mean look at Out of the Park Baseball. Produced under those sort of circumstances, just three or four guys I believe.
I think a lot of these developers go under due to piss poor management more than anything else. Either that, or the conspiracy theory is true, that being the likes of EA contract these developers. If they're good, they absorb the talent, and if they're not, they bury them.
Yeah, but in fairness Mucky Foot deserved to go down for having a stupid name:)