Once again: you've never done this yourself. Moderation of posts just moves the problem out of the public eye - the spammer is a robot, it neither knows nor cares whether it's attempts are successful. It will inundate the website with hundreds of posts, which moderators must manually crawl through for human posters. Whether these moderators are the site's admins or a crowdsourced force of slashdot-style mods, it's an enormous waste of people's time and energy.
As I said, I was looking for a good party game. Something like Super Smash, Mariokart, or Powerstone II. So far, all they've given us are buggy, boring minigames.
You've obviously never fought off a bb spammer. They don't use one or two accounts to spam one or two messages - they inundate the board from a long list of IPs. Even without spamming messages, they create hordes of accounts just for the pagerank provided by the links within their personal account pages. Plus, admin-approval-delays degrade quality for the user. It creates a huge headache all around to handle maintaining banlists and cleaning out garbage.
Captchas are by far the better solution.
The problem is that, long term, they will eventually be cracked. I'm imagining the ultimate solution will only be to allow users with email addresses from "approved" major ISPs.
Yep, that fits. Nintendo consoles have, since the N64, always been like that. Wonderful first-party stuff (and console-specific stuff from Rare), and mediocre third-party-stuff. Basically the same story now, but with Sega's Sonic Team taking Rare's place... although Sonic Team replaces the furstratingly-difficulty of Rare games with frustrating-camera-controls of Sonic games.
I bought a wii at launch time, and so far have been pretty disappointed. Wii Sports is nice, but every title I've picked up since then has been something of a disappointment - cooking mama is terrible, Monkeyball is nice but the minigames are hideously bad (and reviews of Sonic say it's more of the same), and the Metroid title promises to be singleplayer. I've yet to see a multiplayer title for the Wii where the multiplayer gaming is anything but hacked-up minigames.
I'm worried that the Wii will end up collecting dust the same way my DS does.
Well said. The GPLV2 is full of bewildering ambiguities and is frequently misapplied. The verbiage is all code-specific, but it is frequently applied to non-code content, leaving the non-code content in legal limbo. Not to mention the ambiguity of linking, particularly in scripting languages where code can be much less interdependant than in C.
I have to disagree. StarFox 64 was wonderful when it was following the typical SNES-style shooter mode, but frustratingly bad when playing the free-flight parts of the game - I never understand why my friends loved the multiplayer (which was exclusively the painful free-flight mode dogfights). The GameCube version was inferior in most ways, but it had the one advantage of the superior free-flight mode.
And as for Turtles - the description really should mention that it's also one of the most viciously difficult games available on the NES.
Actually, your list just gave me another idea - ditch Civ, Magic: The Gathering, and Might & Magic, and get the game that mixed those together into a perfect (though buggy and horribly balanced) fusion: Master of Magic.
I've been begging for a solid RTS for my DS since they were launched (and don't want to deal with the headache of modding needed for Touch of War). StarCraft would be a good start.
Awesome. I can now look forward to Sonic Team's other wonderful contributions to classic Sega titles such as the Sonic Adventure series. After all, the Sonic series (and Shadow) are awesome, wonderful games aren't they?
I know, we'll split the game up into parts - for one third you play Nights in fast pacing dream-catching adventure, then for one part you'll play an exciting scavenger-hunt platformer as the girl from the series, and then we'll have a nice dating-sim storyline for the boy. Of course by "one third" I actually meant one-level-in-three... the Nights levels will each only be about 5 minutes to complete, while the scavenger-hunt platformer will take about 2 hours per level, partially owing to badly-translated clues.
And then we'll do it all over again, but this time with Reala and two evil kids./not bitter at all, no.
Well said. The MMORPG is dominant for valid marketing reasons - they're more inclusive and higher time-committment than conventional games.
I have trouble believing that any MMO game will ever catch on without these elements. Without the constant progression, it'd be hard to keep players coming back for months and years.
Remember that the "spreadsheet" gameplay was originally implemented because it was the simplest way to do it. Physical challenges and tests of skill are harder to balance and harder to implement than a simple number-crunching. Every second that a developer spends on that stuff is a second they're _not_ focusing on content, and content is what'll keep the players coming back month-after-month.
They've had 10 billion years to visit us. The magnitude of that amount of time is staggering. Consider how far we've come in the last few hundred years. Consider how far along we'll be in a thousand years. Now consider that the universe is a million times older than that.
Even if it takes a thousand years to build a ship to colonize our nearest star, hypothetical aliens may have had enough time to do that enough times to colonize the whole galaxy.
That's the Fermi paradox. If space travel is possible, then the time and scale of the universe is so huge that it would have been done millions of times by now. Hence, space travel is impossible or no aliens exist but us.
Example: say Fnord. If you were the only person in the universe, then you would be the first person to ever say Fnord. However, there are billions of people on earth, and billions more have come and gone. So Fnord has been said many, many, many times. If "Fnord" could spread like a disease, then by now everyone would say "Fnord"... I think I just screwed up my analogy.
Well, you can hardly blame the users for that. I've tried doing proper stylistic approaches in MS Word 2000 (haven't tried it in later versions) and it is really, realy painful. Crawling though menus, fighting with all the backwards autocomplete features, poor hotkey support, etc. It's something of a UI nightmare. Far easier to just ignore styles and hope everything works allright.
Oh, is a manual page-feed also still part of the paragraph? That's always been my favourite screaming-wierdie in Word.
I'm sorry, no. Blizzard has never been all that for engines. They're good because of artistry and patience. An engine with great *support* for character animation is meaningless without good character animation. Blizzard has time and time again taken new genres and made the best game in the genre not for any particular technical improvement, but by raw force of quality gameplay and artistry. StarCraft, Diablo, WoW - all of these looked, technologically-speaking, primitive compared to their peers. The point is that Blizzard pours so much hard work into their games that they always succeed beyond expectations. StarCraft's 2D isometric engine looked archaic next to it's contemporaries like Total Annihilation... but the storyline, artwork, voice acting, and solid gameplay made them win. There is very little in Blizzard games that we haven't seen a hundred times before - but Blizzard gets it RIGHT.
WoW is just the same thing - take an established genre, and make the perfect game within it.
I feel sorry for the poor bugger who has to get all the way through Ikaruga, or anythign else in the "too freakishly hard" category.
Of course, legislators being silly, have no idea of these issues. Probably the ideal requirement would be "view a video showing a complete playthrough of the game that displays an example of every-single-piece of developer-created content within all relevantly distinct gameplay contexts"... so in other words, if a game was procedurally generated, video showing scenese that include every developer-made model, animation, sound, and texture need to be included.... since I'd be damned impressed with any procedurally-generated content that is scandallous that wouldn't have to be shown by that metric.
Of course, for most games that would be a helluvalot of video to go through... but in some cases it would be easier than trying to play the whole damned thing through.
Don't forget that the Ordos had one massive gap in their line: no standard missile launcher. The Deviator was a poor substitute for the long ranged missile launcher, since it was essential to attacking missile defenses (there was a one-square "sweet spot" where the missile tank outranged the missile defense).
My exact thought - who makes GH? The megaman games are chock-full of material, but they're Capcom. Minibosses cover of the Metroid themes remains my favourite.
Nice. Honestly, I've always thought that would be a very insightful game, if done by somebody like Maxis or something. At the end of the war, you get arrested by the Allies. So you can be a Schindler or a Mengele, depending on how you play. A perfect example of "gameplay as art" - the decisions a player would be forced to make would be the really fascinating parts of the game.
After all, Holocaust deniers often question the logistical challenges of killing 6 million people - why not make a game that shows exactly how a German industrialist ends up a monster, or a hero?
I thought Colonization was a wonderful game for exploring the same themes of "how did it come to these nasty decisions?" - the game gradually prods you into killing the same natives that welcomed you as guests when you first arrived.
Of course, it'd never happen - there are some subjects that no amount of kid gloves can properly handle.
I have to say, team-games that concentrate the action in a few spots would be the best - like VehicleCTF in UT, or TFC (as you suggested). The problem is keeping the action in view of the audience - a wide-ranging Domination-style game means action is happening everywhere at once. Sniper combat causes similar problems 'cause it's hard to show who shot who and whatnot. Probably UT's Assault and Bomb-run gametypes would be ideal for televised teamgames because the action is generally (by necessity) in one spot. A Bomb-run/TFC game would be nicest, I think. At least for team games. For individual games, standard DM, Arena, or Hunt modes would do well. Large-scale DM is generally lousy to watch since it's all offense - every player is fixated on getting kills instead of survival. Instagib is pretty dull to watch.
As for RTS games - Spring is incredibly nice to watch. The game's graphics are a little light (as most OSS games are) but the epic scale, physics, and fully free camera makes spectating a joy.
If it's an MMORPG that 12 people on the project who've been working on it for about a year, and they've got a small stack of concept art and some story documentation to show for it, it's probably a loser.
Global Warming Exists: - extremist environmentalist groups, who are infamous for having mountains of money
Global Warming is False: - The GOP - oil companies - car companies - trucking companies - heavy industry
Right, it's the MONEY that's causing all these "global warming exists" studies.
Seriously, who has anything to gain by pushing a fallacious concept of global warming? Even environmentalists have nothing to gain - there are numerous other *real* ecological causes for them to fight for, focusing on a fake issue would take them away from real ones.
And, ironically enough, seem to think they know more about global warming than climatologists.
I love watching businessmen and ministers claim they know more about global climate change than specialists... mostly because of a book written by a science-fiction author.
I just find it hilarious - the right wing is consistently wrong on controversial issues (Iraq WMDs, connecting Saddam to Al-Qaeda, and the various traditional issues of civil rights such as suffrage, seperate-but-equal, etc.) but every time a new issue comes up, they'll stalwartly dig their head in the sand and believe whatever they're told to believe.
Electric heaters? In California? Between the warm weather, the hot-air from the constant political nonsense, and the incredible sucking coming from Hollywood, I'd think they wouldn't need electric heaters much there. Besides, banning electric heaters is the fastest way to get a bunch of houses burned down while people try to learn to use kerosene ones.
So, anybody planning on getting rich on the upcoming underground lightbulb black-market?
Actually, what I find funny is how the beta versions had so many more powers for each unit. More armed spellcasters, more spells on normal units, etc. Given how much of a headache the micromanagement is in StarCraft, I can see why they took so much out. Too bad the landing-dropships didn't make the cut - that sounded cool.
Also funny that their throw-away alpha art is better than most FOSS games art.
Well, to be fair there are plenty of games that use simplified water for gameplay - various WaveRace-type games do have a full animated landscape of water that has waves and whatnot. "Spring" is an RTS that nicely mixes those wave effects. Alternately, there's the paint system from Mario Sunshine.... but that's not really fluid either.
The "BitTorrent" part is the important step here. _all_ of this crap is intended to prevent that... protecting the video path means no way to capture the video and convert it into open format.
The problem? It's ultimately pointless. No encryption is perfect - already there are people working around the HD-DVD encryption (sure, it's not as easy as DVD - it's ongoing instead of a one-off solution). Then you rip-it and put it up on The Pirate Bay. Unless Vista locks down the system so hard that untrusted apps can't display video (so no XVid player)... and at that point users just use Linux for viewing pirated movies.
Makes the job harder, yes... but never impossible, and never too hard for the average nerd. Occaisionally nerds make it easy enough for normal people - "here's a disk that you pop into an old computer that converts it into an HD-DVD copier and player - just plug it into your TV and enjoy!".
Slashdot Mirror
Once again: you've never done this yourself. Moderation of posts just moves the problem out of the public eye - the spammer is a robot, it neither knows nor cares whether it's attempts are successful. It will inundate the website with hundreds of posts, which moderators must manually crawl through for human posters. Whether these moderators are the site's admins or a crowdsourced force of slashdot-style mods, it's an enormous waste of people's time and energy.
As I said, I was looking for a good party game. Something like Super Smash, Mariokart, or Powerstone II. So far, all they've given us are buggy, boring minigames.
You've obviously never fought off a bb spammer. They don't use one or two accounts to spam one or two messages - they inundate the board from a long list of IPs. Even without spamming messages, they create hordes of accounts just for the pagerank provided by the links within their personal account pages. Plus, admin-approval-delays degrade quality for the user. It creates a huge headache all around to handle maintaining banlists and cleaning out garbage.
Captchas are by far the better solution.
The problem is that, long term, they will eventually be cracked. I'm imagining the ultimate solution will only be to allow users with email addresses from "approved" major ISPs.
Yep, that fits. Nintendo consoles have, since the N64, always been like that. Wonderful first-party stuff (and console-specific stuff from Rare), and mediocre third-party-stuff. Basically the same story now, but with Sega's Sonic Team taking Rare's place... although Sonic Team replaces the furstratingly-difficulty of Rare games with frustrating-camera-controls of Sonic games.
I bought a wii at launch time, and so far have been pretty disappointed. Wii Sports is nice, but every title I've picked up since then has been something of a disappointment - cooking mama is terrible, Monkeyball is nice but the minigames are hideously bad (and reviews of Sonic say it's more of the same), and the Metroid title promises to be singleplayer. I've yet to see a multiplayer title for the Wii where the multiplayer gaming is anything but hacked-up minigames.
I'm worried that the Wii will end up collecting dust the same way my DS does.
Well said. The GPLV2 is full of bewildering ambiguities and is frequently misapplied. The verbiage is all code-specific, but it is frequently applied to non-code content, leaving the non-code content in legal limbo. Not to mention the ambiguity of linking, particularly in scripting languages where code can be much less interdependant than in C.
I have to disagree. StarFox 64 was wonderful when it was following the typical SNES-style shooter mode, but frustratingly bad when playing the free-flight parts of the game - I never understand why my friends loved the multiplayer (which was exclusively the painful free-flight mode dogfights). The GameCube version was inferior in most ways, but it had the one advantage of the superior free-flight mode.
And as for Turtles - the description really should mention that it's also one of the most viciously difficult games available on the NES.
Actually, your list just gave me another idea - ditch Civ, Magic: The Gathering, and Might & Magic, and get the game that mixed those together into a perfect (though buggy and horribly balanced) fusion: Master of Magic.
I've been begging for a solid RTS for my DS since they were launched (and don't want to deal with the headache of modding needed for Touch of War). StarCraft would be a good start.
Awesome. I can now look forward to Sonic Team's other wonderful contributions to classic Sega titles such as the Sonic Adventure series. After all, the Sonic series (and Shadow) are awesome, wonderful games aren't they?
/not bitter at all, no.
I know, we'll split the game up into parts - for one third you play Nights in fast pacing dream-catching adventure, then for one part you'll play an exciting scavenger-hunt platformer as the girl from the series, and then we'll have a nice dating-sim storyline for the boy. Of course by "one third" I actually meant one-level-in-three... the Nights levels will each only be about 5 minutes to complete, while the scavenger-hunt platformer will take about 2 hours per level, partially owing to badly-translated clues.
And then we'll do it all over again, but this time with Reala and two evil kids.
Well said. The MMORPG is dominant for valid marketing reasons - they're more inclusive and higher time-committment than conventional games.
I have trouble believing that any MMO game will ever catch on without these elements. Without the constant progression, it'd be hard to keep players coming back for months and years.
Remember that the "spreadsheet" gameplay was originally implemented because it was the simplest way to do it. Physical challenges and tests of skill are harder to balance and harder to implement than a simple number-crunching. Every second that a developer spends on that stuff is a second they're _not_ focusing on content, and content is what'll keep the players coming back month-after-month.
They've had 10 billion years to visit us. The magnitude of that amount of time is staggering. Consider how far we've come in the last few hundred years. Consider how far along we'll be in a thousand years. Now consider that the universe is a million times older than that.
Even if it takes a thousand years to build a ship to colonize our nearest star, hypothetical aliens may have had enough time to do that enough times to colonize the whole galaxy.
That's the Fermi paradox. If space travel is possible, then the time and scale of the universe is so huge that it would have been done millions of times by now. Hence, space travel is impossible or no aliens exist but us.
Example: say Fnord. If you were the only person in the universe, then you would be the first person to ever say Fnord. However, there are billions of people on earth, and billions more have come and gone. So Fnord has been said many, many, many times. If "Fnord" could spread like a disease, then by now everyone would say "Fnord"... I think I just screwed up my analogy.
Well, you can hardly blame the users for that. I've tried doing proper stylistic approaches in MS Word 2000 (haven't tried it in later versions) and it is really, realy painful. Crawling though menus, fighting with all the backwards autocomplete features, poor hotkey support, etc. It's something of a UI nightmare. Far easier to just ignore styles and hope everything works allright.
Oh, is a manual page-feed also still part of the paragraph? That's always been my favourite screaming-wierdie in Word.
I'm sorry, no. Blizzard has never been all that for engines. They're good because of artistry and patience. An engine with great *support* for character animation is meaningless without good character animation. Blizzard has time and time again taken new genres and made the best game in the genre not for any particular technical improvement, but by raw force of quality gameplay and artistry. StarCraft, Diablo, WoW - all of these looked, technologically-speaking, primitive compared to their peers. The point is that Blizzard pours so much hard work into their games that they always succeed beyond expectations. StarCraft's 2D isometric engine looked archaic next to it's contemporaries like Total Annihilation... but the storyline, artwork, voice acting, and solid gameplay made them win. There is very little in Blizzard games that we haven't seen a hundred times before - but Blizzard gets it RIGHT.
WoW is just the same thing - take an established genre, and make the perfect game within it.
I feel sorry for the poor bugger who has to get all the way through Ikaruga, or anythign else in the "too freakishly hard" category.
Of course, legislators being silly, have no idea of these issues. Probably the ideal requirement would be "view a video showing a complete playthrough of the game that displays an example of every-single-piece of developer-created content within all relevantly distinct gameplay contexts"... so in other words, if a game was procedurally generated, video showing scenese that include every developer-made model, animation, sound, and texture need to be included.... since I'd be damned impressed with any procedurally-generated content that is scandallous that wouldn't have to be shown by that metric.
Of course, for most games that would be a helluvalot of video to go through... but in some cases it would be easier than trying to play the whole damned thing through.
Don't forget that the Ordos had one massive gap in their line: no standard missile launcher. The Deviator was a poor substitute for the long ranged missile launcher, since it was essential to attacking missile defenses (there was a one-square "sweet spot" where the missile tank outranged the missile defense).
My exact thought - who makes GH? The megaman games are chock-full of material, but they're Capcom. Minibosses cover of the Metroid themes remains my favourite.
Nice. Honestly, I've always thought that would be a very insightful game, if done by somebody like Maxis or something. At the end of the war, you get arrested by the Allies. So you can be a Schindler or a Mengele, depending on how you play. A perfect example of "gameplay as art" - the decisions a player would be forced to make would be the really fascinating parts of the game.
After all, Holocaust deniers often question the logistical challenges of killing 6 million people - why not make a game that shows exactly how a German industrialist ends up a monster, or a hero?
I thought Colonization was a wonderful game for exploring the same themes of "how did it come to these nasty decisions?" - the game gradually prods you into killing the same natives that welcomed you as guests when you first arrived.
Of course, it'd never happen - there are some subjects that no amount of kid gloves can properly handle.
I have to say, team-games that concentrate the action in a few spots would be the best - like VehicleCTF in UT, or TFC (as you suggested). The problem is keeping the action in view of the audience - a wide-ranging Domination-style game means action is happening everywhere at once. Sniper combat causes similar problems 'cause it's hard to show who shot who and whatnot. Probably UT's Assault and Bomb-run gametypes would be ideal for televised teamgames because the action is generally (by necessity) in one spot. A Bomb-run/TFC game would be nicest, I think. At least for team games. For individual games, standard DM, Arena, or Hunt modes would do well. Large-scale DM is generally lousy to watch since it's all offense - every player is fixated on getting kills instead of survival. Instagib is pretty dull to watch.
As for RTS games - Spring is incredibly nice to watch. The game's graphics are a little light (as most OSS games are) but the epic scale, physics, and fully free camera makes spectating a joy.
If it's an MMORPG that 12 people on the project who've been working on it for about a year, and they've got a small stack of concept art and some story documentation to show for it, it's probably a loser.
Let's compare the two cash sources on this issue:
Global Warming Exists:
- extremist environmentalist groups, who are infamous for having mountains of money
Global Warming is False:
- The GOP
- oil companies
- car companies
- trucking companies
- heavy industry
Right, it's the MONEY that's causing all these "global warming exists" studies.
Seriously, who has anything to gain by pushing a fallacious concept of global warming? Even environmentalists have nothing to gain - there are numerous other *real* ecological causes for them to fight for, focusing on a fake issue would take them away from real ones.
And, ironically enough, seem to think they know more about global warming than climatologists.
I love watching businessmen and ministers claim they know more about global climate change than specialists... mostly because of a book written by a science-fiction author.
I just find it hilarious - the right wing is consistently wrong on controversial issues (Iraq WMDs, connecting Saddam to Al-Qaeda, and the various traditional issues of civil rights such as suffrage, seperate-but-equal, etc.) but every time a new issue comes up, they'll stalwartly dig their head in the sand and believe whatever they're told to believe.
Electric heaters? In California? Between the warm weather, the hot-air from the constant political nonsense, and the incredible sucking coming from Hollywood, I'd think they wouldn't need electric heaters much there. Besides, banning electric heaters is the fastest way to get a bunch of houses burned down while people try to learn to use kerosene ones.
So, anybody planning on getting rich on the upcoming underground lightbulb black-market?
Actually, what I find funny is how the beta versions had so many more powers for each unit. More armed spellcasters, more spells on normal units, etc. Given how much of a headache the micromanagement is in StarCraft, I can see why they took so much out. Too bad the landing-dropships didn't make the cut - that sounded cool.
Also funny that their throw-away alpha art is better than most FOSS games art.
Well, to be fair there are plenty of games that use simplified water for gameplay - various WaveRace-type games do have a full animated landscape of water that has waves and whatnot. "Spring" is an RTS that nicely mixes those wave effects. Alternately, there's the paint system from Mario Sunshine.... but that's not really fluid either.
The "BitTorrent" part is the important step here. _all_ of this crap is intended to prevent that... protecting the video path means no way to capture the video and convert it into open format.
The problem? It's ultimately pointless. No encryption is perfect - already there are people working around the HD-DVD encryption (sure, it's not as easy as DVD - it's ongoing instead of a one-off solution). Then you rip-it and put it up on The Pirate Bay. Unless Vista locks down the system so hard that untrusted apps can't display video (so no XVid player)... and at that point users just use Linux for viewing pirated movies.
Makes the job harder, yes... but never impossible, and never too hard for the average nerd. Occaisionally nerds make it easy enough for normal people - "here's a disk that you pop into an old computer that converts it into an HD-DVD copier and player - just plug it into your TV and enjoy!".