Yes, I've read most of them. They're pretty good. However, the storytelling in the games is distinct from the storytelling in the novels, and the quality of one does not affect the interpretation of the other.
I was limiting myself to parts of the story that you actually learn from the games. As far as I'm concerned, the Halo novels are irrelevant to discussions of the game characters. Sure, they're not bad books, but they don't affect a discussion of in-game storytelling.
I would prefer to have the best of both worlds. I see no intrinsic reason why you can't have both a good, detailed story and great gameplay. The only real reason is that the developers with the best storywriters are rarely the ones with the best game designers. Valve has come close, but they still skimp on the world-building, and they still have some segregation of storytelling and gameplay, ie. you can tell whether you're in "shoot the bad guy" mode or "listen to Mr. Exposition" mode.
I've been saying this for a while now. Videogame culture is not defined by national boundaries. I have more in common with a Japanese gamer than I do with the sport-freak American down the street. Videogame culture is about 40% American/Other Western Countries, 40% Japanese/Other Asian Countries, and about 20% original.
Yes, Japanese developers are very behind in game design. You look at, say FFXIII. Big-name game, big-name people. They're about par with America in terms of art, music, maybe a bit behind in programming because they don't pay as well. But their game designers are probably ten years behind. Go to an American game-design site like Gamasutra. They'll talk about interaction looks, gameplay design AS the story. Then go to Japan, where most of their game design is "like this game, but with different numbers and colors." They just do not get game design as a science.
In interests of fairness, however, there is a lot American developers could learn from Japan. First, story. Japanese writers are good at making unique characters. Compare (to use well-known examples) Cloud Strife to Master Chief. Both have unique art designs, but look at the characters. One is an ex-elite soldier recovering from torture/experiment-induced amnesia and a feeling of duty to a dead comrade. The other is a supersoldier who is REALLY good at killing things, and is the last survivor of a battle that, until last week, was never really shown. Now, which sounds like a more interesting story?
Inafune-san, on the extremely slim chance that you read this, I understand what you're saying, and I'm glad that you're coming to us to learn. However, don't give up entirely on Japanese developers. They have much to teach us as well.
Uh, data transfer speeds went up too. A 72x CD drive can read at 10.8 megabits/second. A 1x DVD drive can read at 10.5 megabits/second, nearly as fast. DVD drives currently max out at 24x, about 260 megabits/second.
but who says the wall is going to win that collision? I've seen it time and time again: a problem is encountered, and dealt with. Optical disk rotation speed. Parallel data buses. Processor clock speeds. They all hit a wall, and we got around that wall. We lowered the wavelength of the laser instead of go to 56x CDs. We switched to serial buses when parallel encountered clocking issues. We switched to multicore processors when we couldn't keep upping the gigahertz. I'm fully confident we'll figure out a solution to this problem as well, whether it be new manufacturing techniques, memristors, or just larger Flash chips.
Same here. I can't completely ditch FF, though, since it has all my webcomic RSS feeds set up just so, and Chrome doesn't do Live Bookmarks. And trying to recreate that list in another RSS reader would take days.
You can't run a jet engine on solar power. And AFAIK, propellers are actually easier to maintain than jets, since they have much simpler parts. The main advantages to jets are ability to burn fuel at higher altitude and ability to attain higher speeds.
The good thing about computers is that they respond to the same input identically. If you do X one day, it will do the same thing when you press X tomorrow.
Part of this is that the input is knowable. I can tell that I just pressed "d", or that I just moved the mouse 2.1 inches to the left, and I can tell by experience what that's going to do. Once you factor in things humans don't naturally know, like heart rate or blood pressure, you get a useless input device, as far as interaction goes. The only uses I can think of are highly-targeted advertisements, health/stress apps, and maybe gaming, since Valve is researching this idea as well, for much different reasons.
Huh. Well that is a bit of a loophole. If you make it impossible, or at least very difficult, to contact the business, you might be able to get away with breaking the GPL. And, judging by tech support, companies have gotten very good at avoiding contact with consumers on the consumer's terms.
It won't work for big enough projects, but small ones could do it, for some time. Of course, it would be somewhat pointless. The only reason to close-source it would be to protect a patent or trade secret, but it wouldn't offer any protection against someone who actually wants it, rendering the whole thing moot.
Too true. "He who stares into the abyss" and all that.
Most of those responding seemed to miss my stance. I'm not advocating actually doing that. I'm actually glad that there's laws against that sort of thing, although how well those laws are enforced is disappointing.
Rather, I was proposing this, essentially, in jest. Unfortunately, as with all good jokes, there's a kernel of truth, in that it might actually be crazy enough to work. It's a bad idea, and I knew it when I posted it. I just thought it was a funny bad idea.
That just gave me an evil idea. We can't tell that companies like Microsoft aren't using GPL code in their products. Therefore (and I'm using MAFIAA logic here), we should be able to sue them, or at least get some raids done, based on the fact that they have not proven themselves innocent.
Of course, they will promptly show the code to a judge, and prove that they aren't violating the GPL. But, after enough of this, they'll come to realize that the best defense against that would be to release their code. And then we've won.
Sure, these tactics would be unethical, even evil. Maybe even illegal. But it's worth a thought, if only for the irony of defeating closed-source using techniques from those even more evil.
That actually looks like a pretty big loophole, if true. However, and I'm going on recollection here, I'm pretty sure it specifies that the code must be released as soon as the binaries are released publicly. Would someone who speaks legalese care to check?
Yes, the public knows who Wikileaks is. Maybe not every member of the public, but more than enough to defend it.
Yes, the US Government cares what the world thinks. Most importantly, the politicians in charge are very sensitive to the opinion of their electorate - if the public is defending Wikileaks, nobody in an elected position is going to outright attack them. And the military is fully controlled by the government, and won't attack it without orders.
Are people criticizing Wikileaks? Yes. Usually with some justification. Wikileaks is not perfect. Their "sanitization" of the Afghanistan data shows that much.
What you need to look at is the big picture - Wikileaks is being publicly defended, and all the attacks have so far been in the form of a press conference, not a cruise missile.
The problem is that Wikileaks has public support. The US military and intelligence services are very publicity-aware. They know that many people outside the US already consider them "evil". They know that directly attacking Wikileaks would be seen by most people as "evil". Ergo, they will not directly attack Wikileaks. They will not call in a missile strike on their servers. They will not assassinate anyone. They will probably not even risk publicity attacks, just because getting caught doing so would be more damaging than letting Wikileaks continue operating. You'll notice that they still haven't called Wikileaks "evil" or "un-American". They've said that they violate laws (true) and that their operations endanger soldiers and civilians (also true).
What they WILL do is try to shut down their sources. Because, while everyone stands up for Wikileaks, very few people are actively protecting the leakers themselves. So, the US military will beef up its IT security, and bump up personnel security checks, and slow the number of leaks that get out. They can't get 100%, but they can make it difficult for Wikileaks to get intel on them, at which point Wikileaks will probably find some other organization to use as its big target.
I skimmed through that list, and all the ones that looked potentially innocent by name turned out to be legitimate terrorist or terrorist-supporting organizations. I won't say it's 100% perfect, but I didn't spot anyone on it that didn't deserve to be there.
Besides, they won't bother using software license raids on, say, Aum Shinrikyo, the Islamic Army of Aden, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or the Ulster Freedom Fighters. They would just, y'know, raid them for being terrorist organizations. As far as I can see, that list is pretty much what it says: terrorist organizations.
I would use Firefox exclusively, except I keep experiencing a weird lag problem, sometimes bogging down to about 1 frame every ten seconds. With FF as the only program running, on a dual-core gaming laptop.
So now I dual-wield browsers: Chrome for normal surfing, Firefox to read the scores of RSS feeds I follow. If Chrome had something on par with Live Bookmarks, I'd use it, but until then, two browsers works fine.
Except for that one issue, FF is a superior browser to Chrome, in my opinion. Better UI, better extensions, better browsing experience in general.
Surprisingly, I was voted "Most likely to give Bill Gates a run for his money".
And nobody ever figured out who did the Halo hack. Probably why it took so long for them to catch it: nobody was bragging about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I've read most of them. They're pretty good. However, the storytelling in the games is distinct from the storytelling in the novels, and the quality of one does not affect the interpretation of the other.
I was limiting myself to parts of the story that you actually learn from the games. As far as I'm concerned, the Halo novels are irrelevant to discussions of the game characters. Sure, they're not bad books, but they don't affect a discussion of in-game storytelling.
I would prefer to have the best of both worlds. I see no intrinsic reason why you can't have both a good, detailed story and great gameplay. The only real reason is that the developers with the best storywriters are rarely the ones with the best game designers. Valve has come close, but they still skimp on the world-building, and they still have some segregation of storytelling and gameplay, ie. you can tell whether you're in "shoot the bad guy" mode or "listen to Mr. Exposition" mode.
As a European, I don't have a problem with American gun culture at all. Can't fire across the Atlantic, so nobody except Americans get hurt.
We've got ICBMs. Our stray fire could hit the moon.
The best truths are the ones that are obvious in hindsight.
read this one:
"I want to find ideas that are global."
I've been saying this for a while now. Videogame culture is not defined by national boundaries. I have more in common with a Japanese gamer than I do with the sport-freak American down the street. Videogame culture is about 40% American/Other Western Countries, 40% Japanese/Other Asian Countries, and about 20% original.
Yes, Japanese developers are very behind in game design. You look at, say FFXIII. Big-name game, big-name people. They're about par with America in terms of art, music, maybe a bit behind in programming because they don't pay as well. But their game designers are probably ten years behind. Go to an American game-design site like Gamasutra. They'll talk about interaction looks, gameplay design AS the story. Then go to Japan, where most of their game design is "like this game, but with different numbers and colors." They just do not get game design as a science.
In interests of fairness, however, there is a lot American developers could learn from Japan. First, story. Japanese writers are good at making unique characters. Compare (to use well-known examples) Cloud Strife to Master Chief. Both have unique art designs, but look at the characters. One is an ex-elite soldier recovering from torture/experiment-induced amnesia and a feeling of duty to a dead comrade. The other is a supersoldier who is REALLY good at killing things, and is the last survivor of a battle that, until last week, was never really shown. Now, which sounds like a more interesting story?
Inafune-san, on the extremely slim chance that you read this, I understand what you're saying, and I'm glad that you're coming to us to learn. However, don't give up entirely on Japanese developers. They have much to teach us as well.
Uh, data transfer speeds went up too. A 72x CD drive can read at 10.8 megabits/second. A 1x DVD drive can read at 10.5 megabits/second, nearly as fast. DVD drives currently max out at 24x, about 260 megabits/second.
but who says the wall is going to win that collision? I've seen it time and time again: a problem is encountered, and dealt with. Optical disk rotation speed. Parallel data buses. Processor clock speeds. They all hit a wall, and we got around that wall. We lowered the wavelength of the laser instead of go to 56x CDs. We switched to serial buses when parallel encountered clocking issues. We switched to multicore processors when we couldn't keep upping the gigahertz. I'm fully confident we'll figure out a solution to this problem as well, whether it be new manufacturing techniques, memristors, or just larger Flash chips.
It would still be more effective than DDoSing the MPAA site.
Same here. I can't completely ditch FF, though, since it has all my webcomic RSS feeds set up just so, and Chrome doesn't do Live Bookmarks. And trying to recreate that list in another RSS reader would take days.
You can't run a jet engine on solar power. And AFAIK, propellers are actually easier to maintain than jets, since they have much simpler parts. The main advantages to jets are ability to burn fuel at higher altitude and ability to attain higher speeds.
The good thing about computers is that they respond to the same input identically. If you do X one day, it will do the same thing when you press X tomorrow.
Part of this is that the input is knowable. I can tell that I just pressed "d", or that I just moved the mouse 2.1 inches to the left, and I can tell by experience what that's going to do. Once you factor in things humans don't naturally know, like heart rate or blood pressure, you get a useless input device, as far as interaction goes. The only uses I can think of are highly-targeted advertisements, health/stress apps, and maybe gaming, since Valve is researching this idea as well, for much different reasons.
Huh. Well that is a bit of a loophole. If you make it impossible, or at least very difficult, to contact the business, you might be able to get away with breaking the GPL. And, judging by tech support, companies have gotten very good at avoiding contact with consumers on the consumer's terms.
It won't work for big enough projects, but small ones could do it, for some time. Of course, it would be somewhat pointless. The only reason to close-source it would be to protect a patent or trade secret, but it wouldn't offer any protection against someone who actually wants it, rendering the whole thing moot.
Too true. "He who stares into the abyss" and all that.
Most of those responding seemed to miss my stance. I'm not advocating actually doing that. I'm actually glad that there's laws against that sort of thing, although how well those laws are enforced is disappointing.
Rather, I was proposing this, essentially, in jest. Unfortunately, as with all good jokes, there's a kernel of truth, in that it might actually be crazy enough to work. It's a bad idea, and I knew it when I posted it. I just thought it was a funny bad idea.
That just gave me an evil idea. We can't tell that companies like Microsoft aren't using GPL code in their products. Therefore (and I'm using MAFIAA logic here), we should be able to sue them, or at least get some raids done, based on the fact that they have not proven themselves innocent.
Of course, they will promptly show the code to a judge, and prove that they aren't violating the GPL. But, after enough of this, they'll come to realize that the best defense against that would be to release their code. And then we've won.
Sure, these tactics would be unethical, even evil. Maybe even illegal. But it's worth a thought, if only for the irony of defeating closed-source using techniques from those even more evil.
That actually looks like a pretty big loophole, if true. However, and I'm going on recollection here, I'm pretty sure it specifies that the code must be released as soon as the binaries are released publicly. Would someone who speaks legalese care to check?
Yes, the public knows who Wikileaks is. Maybe not every member of the public, but more than enough to defend it.
Yes, the US Government cares what the world thinks. Most importantly, the politicians in charge are very sensitive to the opinion of their electorate - if the public is defending Wikileaks, nobody in an elected position is going to outright attack them. And the military is fully controlled by the government, and won't attack it without orders.
Are people criticizing Wikileaks? Yes. Usually with some justification. Wikileaks is not perfect. Their "sanitization" of the Afghanistan data shows that much.
What you need to look at is the big picture - Wikileaks is being publicly defended, and all the attacks have so far been in the form of a press conference, not a cruise missile.
The problem is that Wikileaks has public support. The US military and intelligence services are very publicity-aware. They know that many people outside the US already consider them "evil". They know that directly attacking Wikileaks would be seen by most people as "evil". Ergo, they will not directly attack Wikileaks. They will not call in a missile strike on their servers. They will not assassinate anyone. They will probably not even risk publicity attacks, just because getting caught doing so would be more damaging than letting Wikileaks continue operating. You'll notice that they still haven't called Wikileaks "evil" or "un-American". They've said that they violate laws (true) and that their operations endanger soldiers and civilians (also true).
What they WILL do is try to shut down their sources. Because, while everyone stands up for Wikileaks, very few people are actively protecting the leakers themselves. So, the US military will beef up its IT security, and bump up personnel security checks, and slow the number of leaks that get out. They can't get 100%, but they can make it difficult for Wikileaks to get intel on them, at which point Wikileaks will probably find some other organization to use as its big target.
I skimmed through that list, and all the ones that looked potentially innocent by name turned out to be legitimate terrorist or terrorist-supporting organizations. I won't say it's 100% perfect, but I didn't spot anyone on it that didn't deserve to be there. Besides, they won't bother using software license raids on, say, Aum Shinrikyo, the Islamic Army of Aden, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or the Ulster Freedom Fighters. They would just, y'know, raid them for being terrorist organizations. As far as I can see, that list is pretty much what it says: terrorist organizations.
Didn't the Church of Scientology do something similar to this once?
So we need to teach them not just to lie to humans and to each other, but to themselves?
Well, if it tells the truth, it's not working right.
Nah, humans still outpace robots at mismanaging budgets and taking bribes.
I would use Firefox exclusively, except I keep experiencing a weird lag problem, sometimes bogging down to about 1 frame every ten seconds. With FF as the only program running, on a dual-core gaming laptop. So now I dual-wield browsers: Chrome for normal surfing, Firefox to read the scores of RSS feeds I follow. If Chrome had something on par with Live Bookmarks, I'd use it, but until then, two browsers works fine. Except for that one issue, FF is a superior browser to Chrome, in my opinion. Better UI, better extensions, better browsing experience in general.
Surprisingly, I was voted "Most likely to give Bill Gates a run for his money". And nobody ever figured out who did the Halo hack. Probably why it took so long for them to catch it: nobody was bragging about it.