10+ hours one one set of batteries? I've had a LED mag lite for years now, and it's got the original batteries still in it. It gets used probably about 1-2 hours a day, as by the time I get home it's dark and I need to take care of our horses. I absolutely love the thing, I wouldn't even consider using one with a normal bulb again.
Respectable stores like Steam will warn you about the types of DRM used by the game in clear terms
Steam only warns about the additional/external DRM, not about itself. There is no "Warning: to play this game you need to be logged in on Steam and have the game fully updated"
A very large reason for this is the fact that it's rather obvious that you need to have Steam running and be logged in to play.
Only obvious if you've used steam before, as someone who pre-ordered half-life 2 and couldn't play it for nearly a week after receiving the disk (had to pull my desktop over to a friend's house to activate it, as my internet was too slow)..no, it was not obvious that i needed to be online and signed in to play the single player.
For people saying "but there's an offline mode!" , you can't set that while your internet is down, you have to set that while the network is up and you're still connected to steam, and your games on initial activation force the patches immediately, which is fun when you have a 5GB a month download cap.
I fixed that though, since i already owned a copy and couldn't return it, at least i grabbed the pirated copy that doesn't need steam at all to play (the crack was out well before steam even became stable), but I never have, and never will buy or pirate a game from steam, or from valve at all, again. I still have my original install disks for half life, op4, blue-shift, tfc, counter-strike, etc.. so at least i can still play those to some extent. (local multiplayer at least for TFC/CS)
my kingdom for a mod point...though now I have this (somewhat disturbing) vision of the LOTR cast endlessly grinding through level after level of ghosts, barbarians, and other creatures, looting insane amounts of treasure, and eating every 30 seconds
This is EXACTLY why we have to constantly buy new hardware, and upgrade the CPU/RAM to do the same exact tasks were were doing with 1/100 the power 5 years ago....
^ This
Strip any copied text/dialogs, etc, and re-make it as a clone in the spirit of the origional, you can release the full game without the worries of using their copyright at all. (unless it's an RPG or text adventure,then you're in for a lot of work:/ )
Ahh, awesome. They still need to get together then...maybe with the two of them we can have awesome, fully automatic AI singers like Sharon..just don't let it have access to any military hardware:)
Pretty much everything you listed DID exist in UO with the later expansions (soulbind, WoW-like quest system, instancing (bosses only though, not the entire level). Not sure what the UI complaint is though, UO's UI was fully customizable, you could drag anything anywhere onto the screen, spend a few minutes and you could make the UI look exactly like WoW if you wanted to. Personally I didn't like the additions though, they really took away from the open world feel of the game. (you have to remember, soulbinding wasn't NECESSARY, as gear meant almost nothing at first, you lose yours just buy another set from a vendor on the cheap)
Role-playing is the big one, I've yet to see that...at all in any current game. I miss setting up the conference table and chairs in the middle of our guild castle and having a (in character) meeting about the state of our alliance. I know about the UO freeservers too, they'd be great if they weren't so vacant of life, laggy, plagued by cheating, and the AI being ridiculously dumb even in comparison to the original. Not to mention there doesn't seem to be any role-players on them anyways.
^ This ^ God i wish i had modpoints when i actually wanted to use them.. Every time i hear about the complaints about ganking and the like, that's UO past the release of WOW when they decided to make "WOW 2.0" really, and it sucked in every way. Looting armor was useless before, at best you did it to make sure they guy had to go back to town before coming back. And who traveled alone in UO anyways? It was all about the player run cities, and aside from small tasks you'd always have at least one person watching your back.
screen-scraper aimbots, they've existed before and if onlive isn't just the world biggest April fools joke (which i still think it is) they will exist again.
As for the LAN issue... I really don't get the stink. How many multi-player PC games even have a LAN option for multi-player anymore? Really, how hard is it to just connect to a match making server, set up a private room, and play from there? Hell, everyone can still be in the same room. I think the whole (uh-oh, I'm gonna get a "troll" mod, oh dear!) LAN thing is nothing but a bunch of silly nostalgic niggling, the inclusion, or lack of LAN play does absolutely nothing to add to or hurt the quality of a game.
Almost all of them? And yes, exclusion of LAN is a BIG deal to some of us, even if it's not to you, it kills our ability to have local tournaments...
2) People running it on crap hardware. Vista has a much higher minimum bar than XP for good performance. You really want a dual core and 2GB minimum for a nice system (as opposed to a P4 and 1GB being fine for XP)..
Uhh...how exactly is that supposed to prove that vista isn't slower than xp? The OS itself is dog slow on identical hardware...we're downward directed to deploy vista to all workstations 10 minutes ago at my work and we're having to upgrade the hell out of or buy entirely new machines just to get the same level of usability we had before...
If we want to go that route though, solaris 10 is WAYYY faster than windows xp or vista... i run it on 8 spark 64 processors with 256 gigs of ram, it's way faster than my old P4 box running xp!
"piqued the curiosity of a few of us" Is an understatement...I can't be the only one who started monitoring freshmeat for the inevitable post...even if it is just to know what the project is
this is genius marketing even if it was unintentional:)
True, but remember the 22MHz it squishes on also works both ways for that, with 12 effectively 1/4 of the bandwidth would be completely clear, and 13 a half would be clear. (no other channels interfering. Channel 14 in itself isn't illegal, so the parts of 12 and 13 that step on it are fine)
It's 2483.5 MHz that's the beginning of the "illegal" band, 12 can't possibly hit that, and 13 comes to a max of 2483 MHz. While it's true you'll still get interference from channel 11 (and tiny bits from 9 and 10), it will be far...far less than the lower channels
Not to mention ".ogm"...which almost all of my media is in (i couldn't imagine converting all of it either...it would probably kill my hard drives). I've been using MediaTomb to transcode though.
I believe channels 12-14 are reserved due to them being adjacent to satellite communications frequencies, and can potentially interfere. 14 is illegal to use (it actually overlaps with satellite frequencies) but 12 and 13 actually aren't, they're merely disabled for being too close that they could POTENTIALLY interfere. As long as you're running at fairly low power (no external antenna with linear amplifier), those channels are legal to use and should be near 100% clear of traffic.
I would recommend using 12 , it's legal and nobody else will be on them due to only DD-WRT and other modded firmwares being able to set them:)
I was going to mod you up (hopefully someone else will!) but figured I'd chime in. Many of us are already playing blu-ray using mplayer for YEARS now...and it's easy to do straight from the disk. Heck...before i got a blu-ray drive for my PC...i was ripping and playing them on the PS3:)
How many of us have played J-RPGs that have been "localized" and made terrible either by censorship or by forcing us to listen to sub-par English voice actors?
Ugh...seriously.."localization" to some companies means..remove half the story, all the jokes, then let the local high school re-voice it. (seriously...WHERE do you find such terrible voice actors, i can't even hire ones that bad myself)
Thank GOD NIS America leaves the JA voice track in the games... (which by extension means Gust's games also)
Let's take the wayback machine to somewhere around...say..1998, granted though in this case they were acquired BEFORE their big MMO:)
To date, as far as I can tell, Origin Systems has never made a bad (debatable, based on personal taste) or unsuccessful (not up for debate) game. They've got a perfect record. And they're raking in more money every month. If that's a recipe for disaster, sign me up!
They never could follow up UO, everything after it ended up getting canceled, blizzard's path seems eerily similar. It's not a perfect comparison, but still...
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Wrong organization though, this sounds more like a case for the EFF. http://www.eff.org/
10+ hours one one set of batteries? I've had a LED mag lite for years now, and it's got the original batteries still in it. It gets used probably about 1-2 hours a day, as by the time I get home it's dark and I need to take care of our horses. I absolutely love the thing, I wouldn't even consider using one with a normal bulb again.
Respectable stores like Steam will warn you about the types of DRM used by the game in clear terms
Steam only warns about the additional/external DRM, not about itself. There is no "Warning: to play this game you need to be logged in on Steam and have the game fully updated"
A very large reason for this is the fact that it's rather obvious that you need to have Steam running and be logged in to play.
Only obvious if you've used steam before, as someone who pre-ordered half-life 2 and couldn't play it for nearly a week after receiving the disk (had to pull my desktop over to a friend's house to activate it, as my internet was too slow)..no, it was not obvious that i needed to be online and signed in to play the single player.
For people saying "but there's an offline mode!" , you can't set that while your internet is down, you have to set that while the network is up and you're still connected to steam, and your games on initial activation force the patches immediately, which is fun when you have a 5GB a month download cap.
I fixed that though, since i already owned a copy and couldn't return it, at least i grabbed the pirated copy that doesn't need steam at all to play (the crack was out well before steam even became stable), but I never have, and never will buy or pirate a game from steam, or from valve at all, again. I still have my original install disks for half life, op4, blue-shift, tfc, counter-strike, etc.. so at least i can still play those to some extent. (local multiplayer at least for TFC/CS)
my kingdom for a mod point...though now I have this (somewhat disturbing) vision of the LOTR cast endlessly grinding through level after level of ghosts, barbarians, and other creatures, looting insane amounts of treasure, and eating every 30 seconds
and a modern PC it doesn't matter at all.
This is EXACTLY why we have to constantly buy new hardware, and upgrade the CPU/RAM to do the same exact tasks were were doing with 1/100 the power 5 years ago....
^ This Strip any copied text/dialogs, etc, and re-make it as a clone in the spirit of the origional, you can release the full game without the worries of using their copyright at all. (unless it's an RPG or text adventure,then you're in for a lot of work :/ )
Ahh, awesome. They still need to get together then...maybe with the two of them we can have awesome, fully automatic AI singers like Sharon..just don't let it have access to any military hardware :)
I can't read the full story from at work here, but these guys need to get together with Yamaha. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocaloid
How much is it worth now?
I believe they're known as a Ferrari...
Pretty much everything you listed DID exist in UO with the later expansions (soulbind, WoW-like quest system, instancing (bosses only though, not the entire level). Not sure what the UI complaint is though, UO's UI was fully customizable, you could drag anything anywhere onto the screen, spend a few minutes and you could make the UI look exactly like WoW if you wanted to. Personally I didn't like the additions though, they really took away from the open world feel of the game. (you have to remember, soulbinding wasn't NECESSARY, as gear meant almost nothing at first, you lose yours just buy another set from a vendor on the cheap)
Role-playing is the big one, I've yet to see that...at all in any current game. I miss setting up the conference table and chairs in the middle of our guild castle and having a (in character) meeting about the state of our alliance. I know about the UO freeservers too, they'd be great if they weren't so vacant of life, laggy, plagued by cheating, and the AI being ridiculously dumb even in comparison to the original. Not to mention there doesn't seem to be any role-players on them anyways.
^ This ^ God i wish i had modpoints when i actually wanted to use them.. Every time i hear about the complaints about ganking and the like, that's UO past the release of WOW when they decided to make "WOW 2.0" really, and it sucked in every way. Looting armor was useless before, at best you did it to make sure they guy had to go back to town before coming back. And who traveled alone in UO anyways? It was all about the player run cities, and aside from small tasks you'd always have at least one person watching your back.
screen-scraper aimbots, they've existed before and if onlive isn't just the world biggest April fools joke (which i still think it is) they will exist again.
1.5Mb in 1998?? You live in a nice area, we just got 1.5 Mb out here a year ago.., 1998 we'd just gotten upgraded to 56k..
As for the LAN issue... I really don't get the stink. How many multi-player PC games even have a LAN option for multi-player anymore? Really, how hard is it to just connect to a match making server, set up a private room, and play from there? Hell, everyone can still be in the same room. I think the whole (uh-oh, I'm gonna get a "troll" mod, oh dear!) LAN thing is nothing but a bunch of silly nostalgic niggling, the inclusion, or lack of LAN play does absolutely nothing to add to or hurt the quality of a game.
Almost all of them? And yes, exclusion of LAN is a BIG deal to some of us, even if it's not to you, it kills our ability to have local tournaments...
2) People running it on crap hardware. Vista has a much higher minimum bar than XP for good performance. You really want a dual core and 2GB minimum for a nice system (as opposed to a P4 and 1GB being fine for XP). .
Uhh...how exactly is that supposed to prove that vista isn't slower than xp? The OS itself is dog slow on identical hardware...we're downward directed to deploy vista to all workstations 10 minutes ago at my work and we're having to upgrade the hell out of or buy entirely new machines just to get the same level of usability we had before... If we want to go that route though, solaris 10 is WAYYY faster than windows xp or vista... i run it on 8 spark 64 processors with 256 gigs of ram, it's way faster than my old P4 box running xp!
Just implement RFC 3514 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3514
"piqued the curiosity of a few of us" Is an understatement...I can't be the only one who started monitoring freshmeat for the inevitable post...even if it is just to know what the project is this is genius marketing even if it was unintentional :)
True, but remember the 22MHz it squishes on also works both ways for that, with 12 effectively 1/4 of the bandwidth would be completely clear, and 13 a half would be clear. (no other channels interfering. Channel 14 in itself isn't illegal, so the parts of 12 and 13 that step on it are fine)
It's 2483.5 MHz that's the beginning of the "illegal" band, 12 can't possibly hit that, and 13 comes to a max of 2483 MHz. While it's true you'll still get interference from channel 11 (and tiny bits from 9 and 10), it will be far...far less than the lower channels
Not to mention ".ogm" ...which almost all of my media is in (i couldn't imagine converting all of it either...it would probably kill my hard drives). I've been using MediaTomb to transcode though.
I believe channels 12-14 are reserved due to them being adjacent to satellite communications frequencies, and can potentially interfere. 14 is illegal to use (it actually overlaps with satellite frequencies) but 12 and 13 actually aren't, they're merely disabled for being too close that they could POTENTIALLY interfere. As long as you're running at fairly low power (no external antenna with linear amplifier), those channels are legal to use and should be near 100% clear of traffic.
:)
I would recommend using 12 , it's legal and nobody else will be on them due to only DD-WRT and other modded firmwares being able to set them
I was going to mod you up (hopefully someone else will!) but figured I'd chime in. Many of us are already playing blu-ray using mplayer for YEARS now...and it's easy to do straight from the disk. Heck...before i got a blu-ray drive for my PC...i was ripping and playing them on the PS3 :)
How many of us have played J-RPGs that have been "localized" and made terrible either by censorship or by forcing us to listen to sub-par English voice actors?
Ugh...seriously.."localization" to some companies means..remove half the story, all the jokes, then let the local high school re-voice it. (seriously...WHERE do you find such terrible voice actors, i can't even hire ones that bad myself)
Thank GOD NIS America leaves the JA voice track in the games... (which by extension means Gust's games also)
To date, as far as I can tell, Origin Systems has never made a bad (debatable, based on personal taste) or unsuccessful (not up for debate) game. They've got a perfect record. And they're raking in more money every month. If that's a recipe for disaster, sign me up!
They never could follow up UO, everything after it ended up getting canceled, blizzard's path seems eerily similar. It's not a perfect comparison, but still...