I'd like to see a game that let's you play through the original and let you use your orginal charecter, even if he is god-like.
The much-maligned FFX-2 sort of lets you do this; you restart with stats back to level 1, but pretty much everything else in hand, including all your accessories that increase stats by what is an obscene amount even by the end of the game.
In Fable you used the katana or the hammer because they did the most damage. That was basically it. Adding powers to weapons was nice too.
If you want to play a "weapons management" game, try Angband sometime. Working out what to wear and wield is surprisingly challenging.
In Michigan, sure, sometimes they get a week right.
On the other hand, sometimes they're so far off you can barely recognize the week. What seems to happen is a lot of storms stall that they don't expect, or they expect something to stall and it doesn't.
Probably the funniest was the recent "hurricane" over Michigan (about a month ago), which even made Fark. This storm complex stalled for a week and change, and basically every day of the week, the prediction was that it would move away by tomorrow.
Michigan seems to be at a meeting point for storm systems coming from the West, cold air coming from Canada, and wet, moist air coming from the Gulf. Predicting which will "win" for any given day seems to give the models fits. For example, the worst winter storms for us are when the cold Canadian air meets the warm, moist Gulf air, but predicting exactly where they will meet and drop all the snow seems to have an error bar of several hundred miles (i.e., for a prediction of hitting Lansing, smack dab in the middle of the lower peninsula, you're looking at it actually hitting anywhere from mid-Ohio to the top of the UP.) I've noticed that for predicting precipitation, you're almost better off just watching a couple of hours of the radar loop and making your own prediction.
I consider financial problems to be separate from quality problems.
Moreover, I'm not convinced the financial problems are "solvable" in any real sense. The root problem of the financial problems the health systems have isn't lack of compassion, it's not bad social policies, it's not greed, it's much simpler than that: The demand for health care services is infinite.
(Remember that infinity doesn't always mean "a really big number"; it is the thing that is larger than all other numbers. What this means is that health-care demand is larger than all other numbers of interest, no matter what you do, and in fact as supply rises demand has only grown faster.)
Those other things may exacerbate the problem to some degree, but eliminate all the greed, all the waste, and somehow implement some magically optimal social policy, and there would still be problems, and they would still be getting worse, just slightly later.
Which doesn't make fixing those problems a low priority. In fact given the net gain in goodness it's a high one. But blaming "the system" isn't a good solution; too diffuse, too prone to slap-dash "solutions" that just make the problem worse. In fact, we already have several of those patches in place. But the only ultimate solution is to decrease demand. This seems unlikely to happen. Medical costs have not yet begun to rise.
If, from this, you can still get the idea that I'm some sort of Pollyanna... you need to learn to read what people are actually saying and stop sorting them into your prepared idea slots. Or at least get some new idea slots.
Our infant mortality is high because our pre-natal survivability is quite good. Many babies are "born" today who would have been still-births in other countries. When a doctor fails to keep them alive, we count that as an infant death; in other countries they either die before birth or are not counted as an infant death for statistical purposes. Under those circumstances, as medical technology advances this measure of infant mortality can rise. See also. In general, infant mortality statistics are not comparable between countries or across definition changes within the same country.
Life expectancy I have no easy answer for, although our diet has some serious problems, and I believe our "scientific" nutritionists have gotten stuck on some bad memes and no science, and have merely made the problem worse.
And as for dying of the mumps, there are several old diseases that are making a comeback. Some jackass started spreading the unsubstantiated rumor that vaccines cause autism (even if they did, the effect would have to be undetectable if it went unnoticed this long and lots of things have little undetectable effects), and as a result a large number of people have been "saving" their children from vaccination. As this passes a critical percentage, the disease begins to resurge. Measles are also doing this, from what I understand. Unfortunately, correcting this problem is quite difficult as it plays into the paranoia meme; anybody with the authority to tell people this isn't true are themselves part of the conspiracy. But it has more to do with freedom to not vaccinate than the health system per se. (A freedom that may well be taken away at some point if the diseases continue; public health tends to override a lot of other rights.)
The US does have an obesity problem which I believe is caused more by diet and the lack of true science than anything else, and that hurts some of the statistics. Other than that, if you want the best treatment, you by-and-large come to the US. (There are some exceptions, mostly in treatments that have not passed FDA approval. One can argue about the FDA's thresholds, but it's hard to find an objective standard there.)
It's fashionable to bash the US, and fashionable to bash "Western Medicine", and bashing US Medicine gets you two for the price of one. But that's all it is: fashionable, built on anecdotes. Not terribly well grounded in data.
Your point about opportunity costs is backwards; the opportunity cost for a developer is much, much higher for a developer than a data-entry clerk. If the data-entry clerk was doing such important work, they'll be getting paid more than $7.50/hr.
Opportunity costs make the error even worse than it seems, it doesn't mitigate it at all.
First, I read the course descriptions of the Masters program, and drooled. Most of my peers recoiled in horror. I say, go with your gut on that one. You're not going to have a chance to get that education as easily.
The second one won't apply to you. I had to decide in 1999 whether to try to get a job or go into a post-grad program, before the pop. However, I fully expected it to occur, and I figured after two years things should have settled down. As it turns out I was wrong and it was still pretty tough going even in 2002, but I wouldn't have been any better off outside of school. At least they paid me to go.
As for whether it will be useful outside of school, I am a firm believer that if you start from the assumption that your schooling was worthless, you will never even realize how wrong you are; you'll encounter certain hard problems, and waste time hacking out partial solutions when you could have actually solved the problem better and in less time if you used your schooling. Having a Master's level education ups the problems you can attack with confidence even further. However, if you are stuck in the "school is useless" ideation, then for goodness' sake don't waste another two years of your life in it. You need some real experience to evaluate your position better. You might end up coming to the same decision that more school isn't for you, but you'll be making that decision on a much firmer basis.
Why would you report to Google that a product has been purchased any earlier than the completion of the transaction?
If, at that point, you start to have trouble with people cancelling, that's easy: You require them to call in to cancel. You may find that in the real world, this is already the case, if you can cancel at all. By the time a bot can fake a phone call, we'll have other problems and solutions.
I'm not sure if it's possible to reverse credit charges without a phone call, but again, if an automated credit charge reverser is online, and it starts to get abused, it'll come offline real quick. If there isn't one online, again, no bot is going to be calling the credit card company and reversing charges.
I'm not sure how a botnet can attack this when properly implemented. The gaming opportunities are moved to the advertiser side, and while that too will have some issues, I believe they will also be solvable, unlike the current situation where the bots have a natural advantage that can not be practically overcome.
You realize that to the game it doesn't matter if your twirling an analog stick, mashing a d-pad, or pressing the "Y" button. To the game its just input signals.
Technically true, but who cares?
What we care about is the full system, from the output of the human brain back into the input to the game device. At that level, there can be large differences in button vs. stick vs. something else entirely. Plus, not all signals are created equally; "analog" signals can carry a lot more info than digital button presses.
Now, I don't know what EA's plans are, and I don't know exactly how accurate the Wiimote is. But, if the Wiimote is as accurate with the accelerometers as it should be, and if EA is going all out, they could set it up so that you actually make a throwing motion, with full control over direction and speed as quickly as you can make the motion. This would be a qualitative improvement over any existing control setup, which has no feasible way to extract this much information from the player in any way the player could hope to deliver it. There is going to be no other way to tap into our throwing circuits anywhere near as well, and those are extremely refined by Mother Nature.
To the game, it's just another input. To the human, it's anything but.
This is supposition. I think it's possible that the Wiimote will be able to handle this technically (this is actually just an accelerometer application, exact positioning would be irrelevant, so even if positioning is wonky there's no good reason this won't have a sensing accuracy far in excess of the signals your body can generate), but I would be somewhat surprised if EA implemented this, as it would be a lot harder than button translation. But they are talking the talk, so one can at least hope they are walking the walk.
If you were a real conservative, you'd be shocked and angered by the actions of the Bush administration.
Who says he isn't?
Some of us are capable of thinking that even if the President is not pure evil incarnate, he may not always be correct or perfect.
One of the most repulsive aspects of hard-core leftism is how many people think in black-and-white. Extra-double-bonus-points when they accuse others of thinking in black and white.
(Besides, "conservatism" is an under-defined term. Ironically, one of the modern meanings of "Conservative" is "Classical Liberal". When you figure that out, you're on your way to understanding the real meaning of the terms "liberal" and "conservative". (Hint: They're meaningless until defined.))
Oh, and if you think I just accused you of being a hard-core leftist, you need to brush up on your reading skills.
What sets my cynicism meters a-twitchin' is that episodic content seems ultimately to derive from the game companies desires to turn periodic purchases into purchase streams. I've yet to see a case where a company turns something that is naturally a periodic purchase into a stream and actually benefit the consumer more than leaving it alone. You can't create revenue streams by corporate fiat. If you want streams, you're going to need to offer products that are naturally streams, live "server access" (MMORPGS) or other such things.
Against the little problem of "I don't think they have a customer-benefitting reason to exist", all the other problems pale into insignificance.
(Note: I speak of generalities. It's great that you love episodic content, but you are not the totality of the game market. Are gamers as a whole really clamoring to be nickle-and-dimed to death, especially when that saying translates to $5-$10?)
Close. The law should read "Every/. post of reasonable length complaining about spelling or grammar will contain at least one spelling or grammar error, no matter how many times you use the Preview button."
Just to be a daredevil, I'm not going to Preview at all.
No, that's just how you have to wade through unfiltered stuff. 90% of everything is crap. The thing is, the 10% that isn't is different for everybody.
I use a similar process for OCRemix.org; there are torrents of the songs you can grab, about 1500, then I just filter through the list once, pluck out the ones I like, and trash the rest. I'd say I'm keeping about 5%, if that, but that's still some neat music you won't find any other way.
(Also, grab the Doom torrent. You'd never know that wasn't a full professionial production.)
There is an implied license granted to Slashdot when you post to do what Slashdot does. I think you'd have a hard time standing up in court and claiming damages from Slashdot doing exactly what you expected Slashdot to do.
Could that be a little more bullet-proof? Yes. Does it matter? Not until someone sues them and tries to make this argument. I don't think that's going to be anytime soon.
Copyright's broken, but this isn't one of the ways in which it is broken.
I haven't bailed yet, but I can see what you're saying.
This is one of the reasons I'm a bottom-feeder; somehow, blowing $50 feel much more than 2.5 times worse than blowing $20.
My biggest complaint so far is completely unrelated to any of that; I was hoping for a sci-fi RPG, not a fantasy RPG with spaceships. I suppose I should have known better; Japan's RPGs are pretty stuck in their groove.
This was probably the deciding factor between it and Suikoden, which was next to it.
(An especial shame in FF9, where the end boss seemed terribly out of proportion to the lead up thereto, and marred a game I thoroughly enjoyed otherwise.)
I had the same problem in FFX too. Everything up to that point I thought was pretty well balanced for someone who wants challenging fights that you can win with thought and a couple of tries. But it seemed to me the end boss was a real jump after that.
Eventually I cheated; I found that I had just enough stuff to "mix" a Trio of 9999, which makes all damage computations lock to 9999; combine that with some multi-shot magic skills and the boss goes down. But I wasn't very close to beating him without that trick I couldn't have discovered without a FAQ, and while I enjoyed the game and don't feel cheated (only paid $12 for it, after all), I felt no desire to follow up with the rest of it.
Compare to FFX-2, which I eventually 100%'ed, because that could be done in nice, bite-sized pieces. (The story is inferior, but I liked the mechanics much better. And no Sphere Grid!)
Interesting counterpoint; I lost my fully-unlocked save file for DDRMAX2, which unlocks things purely on a song play-through basis. I thought I'd try this basic trick, only in this case I just muted the game and periodically hit "x". (I don't have a turbo controller.)
Bastards programmed it so you have to actually meet some minimum performance guidelines for the play to count. And no unlock codes, of course, even though there is really no reason not to include them.
I really enjoy DDR, but this is by far my biggest pet peeve, and DDRExtreme2 is even worse with the unlocking, since it actually involves skill. I'm glad that wasn't my first DDR or it would have put me off the genre entirely when it would have taken me months to unlock more than a handful of new songs, leaving the majority of the content untouchable.
I bold that phrase because I wish somebody from Konami would see it. Fuck your hardcore fans, if they want to play unlocking games, let them use their own discipline to do it. This policy makes me think really hard about whether I want to buy your game at all. I've basically not bothered tracking down DDRExtreme1 because I think it works this way and it's just not cool.
So wait, it was OK when GTA San Andreas had you wait til 1/3rd of the game was done before you could buy any weapons?
Eh, San Andreas was f'ed up in a number of ways. I just can't be bothered to play it anymore, because even after I cheat to get the jetpack or helicopter it still takes too damn long to retry a mission. I'm not sure whether to respect or pity the people who actually finish that game. (Maybe they never fail a mission, I dunno.)
It's like they took Vice City, which IIRC I 100%'ed (so it's not like I dislike the game play), and said "We want to make this twice as long", so they just expanded the world and blew out the first 10% of Vice City (you know, the most boring 10%) into I-don't-know-how-much-of- the-game-because-I-can't-finish-it, but definately "way too much".
For similar reasons, I noticed I'm losing the ability to play console RPGs.
I recently picked up Star Ocean 3 on the cheap (I'm a bottom feeder, what can I say?) and I'm not sure I'm going to be able to finish it. I'm still in the first sixth of the game and already there was a dungeon I barely could get to the next save point before I had to stop anyhow. I'm nervous that this game, which I otherwise enjoy so far, is going to throw a required three+ hours to the save point at me, and that's going to require me like blocking out weekend time... if I bother. (At least this doesn't have random battles making the backtrack time to a save point indeterminate, and the enemies do chase you down but they didn't do the cheap shit with them unavoidably jumping at you; look, if you're not doing random encounters, roll with it, don't try to sneak them in the back door!)
I'm also getting tired of "stomping on rats" just to get to the point where I have a decent selection of abilities. That is, I'd like to start at the moral equivalent of level 10-15. Will it really break the game for my spellcaster to start out with basic heal, basic fire, basic water, basic group attack, etc., and my fighter to already know a couple of techniques?
To its credit, Star Ocean 3 does have a decent "event skipping" system, although IMHO the designers were forced into adding it against their will and it feels like they're a bit snotty about it when you select that function. (Too bad for them; it works OK.) And it doesn't have the God-awful "Your Time Is Worthless To Us" Sphere system from FFX, turning all but the simplest level ups into multi-minute sphere-popping extravaganzas, for which much can be forgiven...
The low-level hypocrisy is in their claims in this lawsuit that the artistic merit of the work must be maintained, and thus they can't create censored versions for DVD, whereas they are willing to produce censored versions for television. Thus, obviously, there are concerns above and beyond the artistic merit of the work, or they'd refuse to censor for television (and thus, they wouldn't be able to air their movies on television.)
The word "low-level" isn't redundant; one can profitably argue that there are other factors in play. But there is still a bit of them trying to have it both ways.
Its a remarkable stupid situation where one company can't do something that other companies have done every day.
There is a world of difference between WalMart asking the movie companies to produce a sanitized version for them, and the movie/music companies agreeing, and people chopping up the movie despite the movie studios objection.
You may think that this shouldn't matter, or you may (correctly) observe there's some low levels of hypocrisy here on the movie studios part. (I'm personally still at a loss as to why these sanitizers can't seem to get a license to do what they are doing, as it seems to me that would basically be free money for the studios. But it's not for me to decide what contracts they choose to enter into.) But the fact remains that there is a big difference between WalMart censorship and the story that might just have some sort of effect on the outcome.
(I side with the movie studios on this one because this is a clear integrity issue; we all have the right to insist that people not slice and dice our copyrighted works, which include everything like political pamphlets and even this comment, against our will. Movies are just a special case of that, and we shouldn't be blinded by hatred in deciding whether or not this is a good idea. If I want a right to integrity, that means the movie studios get it too, even if I don't agree with them on many other issues.)
I think it's time that YRO either got re-named or re-thought.
Clearly we need a "Legal" or "Law" section. But if YRO was re-focused back to its original purpose, that might still be useful too.
(To forstall the inevitable "Why?" and "Who cares?", the answer is "So you can correctly filter the stories.", which is the only reason to have the sections at all. Someone can be interested in law stories like this and not actual YRO stories, or vice versa. And the purpose of these sections is so we can tell people who bitch about a particular set of stories to just filter them out, thus keeping the comment area that much cleaner.)
If English were as fantastically easy as Romaji, there would never be a spelling bee in this country again.
Kanji, on the other hand... heh, I'd like to see someone promote a Kanji system for English as a solution to the spelling problem with a straight face. That would be fun.
(In fact, I'm wondering if Kanji's days aren't numbered; right now it's going strong on tradition, kind of like our spelling, but I wonder if they won't switch over to pure hiragana and katakana in the next, say, 150 years. It's neat and cultural and all, but it's really not an effective use of their time...)
Maybe they're going to release on September 9th. Dark horse consoles released on September 9th always do well, right? Certainly, getting crushed by a Sony Playstation after release on that date never happens...
Although, ideally, you ought to wait until 2009 for 9/9/9
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to see a game that let's you play through the original and let you use your orginal charecter, even if he is god-like.
The much-maligned FFX-2 sort of lets you do this; you restart with stats back to level 1, but pretty much everything else in hand, including all your accessories that increase stats by what is an obscene amount even by the end of the game.
In Fable you used the katana or the hammer because they did the most damage. That was basically it. Adding powers to weapons was nice too.
If you want to play a "weapons management" game, try Angband sometime. Working out what to wear and wield is surprisingly challenging.
It might depend where you are.
In Michigan, sure, sometimes they get a week right.
On the other hand, sometimes they're so far off you can barely recognize the week. What seems to happen is a lot of storms stall that they don't expect, or they expect something to stall and it doesn't.
Probably the funniest was the recent "hurricane" over Michigan (about a month ago), which even made Fark. This storm complex stalled for a week and change, and basically every day of the week, the prediction was that it would move away by tomorrow.
Michigan seems to be at a meeting point for storm systems coming from the West, cold air coming from Canada, and wet, moist air coming from the Gulf. Predicting which will "win" for any given day seems to give the models fits. For example, the worst winter storms for us are when the cold Canadian air meets the warm, moist Gulf air, but predicting exactly where they will meet and drop all the snow seems to have an error bar of several hundred miles (i.e., for a prediction of hitting Lansing, smack dab in the middle of the lower peninsula, you're looking at it actually hitting anywhere from mid-Ohio to the top of the UP.) I've noticed that for predicting precipitation, you're almost better off just watching a couple of hours of the radar loop and making your own prediction.
I consider financial problems to be separate from quality problems.
Moreover, I'm not convinced the financial problems are "solvable" in any real sense. The root problem of the financial problems the health systems have isn't lack of compassion, it's not bad social policies, it's not greed, it's much simpler than that: The demand for health care services is infinite.
(Remember that infinity doesn't always mean "a really big number"; it is the thing that is larger than all other numbers. What this means is that health-care demand is larger than all other numbers of interest, no matter what you do, and in fact as supply rises demand has only grown faster.)
Those other things may exacerbate the problem to some degree, but eliminate all the greed, all the waste, and somehow implement some magically optimal social policy, and there would still be problems, and they would still be getting worse, just slightly later.
Which doesn't make fixing those problems a low priority. In fact given the net gain in goodness it's a high one. But blaming "the system" isn't a good solution; too diffuse, too prone to slap-dash "solutions" that just make the problem worse. In fact, we already have several of those patches in place. But the only ultimate solution is to decrease demand. This seems unlikely to happen. Medical costs have not yet begun to rise.
If, from this, you can still get the idea that I'm some sort of Pollyanna... you need to learn to read what people are actually saying and stop sorting them into your prepared idea slots. Or at least get some new idea slots.
Our infant mortality is high because our pre-natal survivability is quite good. Many babies are "born" today who would have been still-births in other countries. When a doctor fails to keep them alive, we count that as an infant death; in other countries they either die before birth or are not counted as an infant death for statistical purposes. Under those circumstances, as medical technology advances this measure of infant mortality can rise. See also. In general, infant mortality statistics are not comparable between countries or across definition changes within the same country.
Life expectancy I have no easy answer for, although our diet has some serious problems, and I believe our "scientific" nutritionists have gotten stuck on some bad memes and no science, and have merely made the problem worse.
And as for dying of the mumps, there are several old diseases that are making a comeback. Some jackass started spreading the unsubstantiated rumor that vaccines cause autism (even if they did, the effect would have to be undetectable if it went unnoticed this long and lots of things have little undetectable effects), and as a result a large number of people have been "saving" their children from vaccination. As this passes a critical percentage, the disease begins to resurge. Measles are also doing this, from what I understand. Unfortunately, correcting this problem is quite difficult as it plays into the paranoia meme; anybody with the authority to tell people this isn't true are themselves part of the conspiracy. But it has more to do with freedom to not vaccinate than the health system per se. (A freedom that may well be taken away at some point if the diseases continue; public health tends to override a lot of other rights.)
The US does have an obesity problem which I believe is caused more by diet and the lack of true science than anything else, and that hurts some of the statistics. Other than that, if you want the best treatment, you by-and-large come to the US. (There are some exceptions, mostly in treatments that have not passed FDA approval. One can argue about the FDA's thresholds, but it's hard to find an objective standard there.)
It's fashionable to bash the US, and fashionable to bash "Western Medicine", and bashing US Medicine gets you two for the price of one. But that's all it is: fashionable, built on anecdotes. Not terribly well grounded in data.
Your point about opportunity costs is backwards; the opportunity cost for a developer is much, much higher for a developer than a data-entry clerk. If the data-entry clerk was doing such important work, they'll be getting paid more than $7.50/hr.
Opportunity costs make the error even worse than it seems, it doesn't mitigate it at all.
I went for two reasons.
First, I read the course descriptions of the Masters program, and drooled. Most of my peers recoiled in horror. I say, go with your gut on that one. You're not going to have a chance to get that education as easily.
The second one won't apply to you. I had to decide in 1999 whether to try to get a job or go into a post-grad program, before the pop. However, I fully expected it to occur, and I figured after two years things should have settled down. As it turns out I was wrong and it was still pretty tough going even in 2002, but I wouldn't have been any better off outside of school. At least they paid me to go.
As for whether it will be useful outside of school, I am a firm believer that if you start from the assumption that your schooling was worthless, you will never even realize how wrong you are; you'll encounter certain hard problems, and waste time hacking out partial solutions when you could have actually solved the problem better and in less time if you used your schooling. Having a Master's level education ups the problems you can attack with confidence even further. However, if you are stuck in the "school is useless" ideation, then for goodness' sake don't waste another two years of your life in it. You need some real experience to evaluate your position better. You might end up coming to the same decision that more school isn't for you, but you'll be making that decision on a much firmer basis.
Why would you report to Google that a product has been purchased any earlier than the completion of the transaction?
If, at that point, you start to have trouble with people cancelling, that's easy: You require them to call in to cancel. You may find that in the real world, this is already the case, if you can cancel at all. By the time a bot can fake a phone call, we'll have other problems and solutions.
I'm not sure if it's possible to reverse credit charges without a phone call, but again, if an automated credit charge reverser is online, and it starts to get abused, it'll come offline real quick. If there isn't one online, again, no bot is going to be calling the credit card company and reversing charges.
I'm not sure how a botnet can attack this when properly implemented. The gaming opportunities are moved to the advertiser side, and while that too will have some issues, I believe they will also be solvable, unlike the current situation where the bots have a natural advantage that can not be practically overcome.
You realize that to the game it doesn't matter if your twirling an analog stick, mashing a d-pad, or pressing the "Y" button. To the game its just input signals.
Technically true, but who cares?
What we care about is the full system, from the output of the human brain back into the input to the game device. At that level, there can be large differences in button vs. stick vs. something else entirely. Plus, not all signals are created equally; "analog" signals can carry a lot more info than digital button presses.
Now, I don't know what EA's plans are, and I don't know exactly how accurate the Wiimote is. But, if the Wiimote is as accurate with the accelerometers as it should be, and if EA is going all out, they could set it up so that you actually make a throwing motion, with full control over direction and speed as quickly as you can make the motion. This would be a qualitative improvement over any existing control setup, which has no feasible way to extract this much information from the player in any way the player could hope to deliver it. There is going to be no other way to tap into our throwing circuits anywhere near as well, and those are extremely refined by Mother Nature.
To the game, it's just another input. To the human, it's anything but.
This is supposition. I think it's possible that the Wiimote will be able to handle this technically (this is actually just an accelerometer application, exact positioning would be irrelevant, so even if positioning is wonky there's no good reason this won't have a sensing accuracy far in excess of the signals your body can generate), but I would be somewhat surprised if EA implemented this, as it would be a lot harder than button translation. But they are talking the talk, so one can at least hope they are walking the walk.
If you were a real conservative, you'd be shocked and angered by the actions of the Bush administration.
Who says he isn't?
Some of us are capable of thinking that even if the President is not pure evil incarnate, he may not always be correct or perfect.
One of the most repulsive aspects of hard-core leftism is how many people think in black-and-white. Extra-double-bonus-points when they accuse others of thinking in black and white.
(Besides, "conservatism" is an under-defined term. Ironically, one of the modern meanings of "Conservative" is "Classical Liberal". When you figure that out, you're on your way to understanding the real meaning of the terms "liberal" and "conservative". (Hint: They're meaningless until defined.))
Oh, and if you think I just accused you of being a hard-core leftist, you need to brush up on your reading skills.
What sets my cynicism meters a-twitchin' is that episodic content seems ultimately to derive from the game companies desires to turn periodic purchases into purchase streams. I've yet to see a case where a company turns something that is naturally a periodic purchase into a stream and actually benefit the consumer more than leaving it alone. You can't create revenue streams by corporate fiat. If you want streams, you're going to need to offer products that are naturally streams, live "server access" (MMORPGS) or other such things.
Against the little problem of "I don't think they have a customer-benefitting reason to exist", all the other problems pale into insignificance.
(Note: I speak of generalities. It's great that you love episodic content, but you are not the totality of the game market. Are gamers as a whole really clamoring to be nickle-and-dimed to death, especially when that saying translates to $5-$10?)
Close. The law should read "Every /. post of reasonable length complaining about spelling or grammar will contain at least one spelling or grammar error, no matter how many times you use the Preview button."
Just to be a daredevil, I'm not going to Preview at all.
No, that's just how you have to wade through unfiltered stuff. 90% of everything is crap. The thing is, the 10% that isn't is different for everybody.
I use a similar process for OCRemix.org; there are torrents of the songs you can grab, about 1500, then I just filter through the list once, pluck out the ones I like, and trash the rest. I'd say I'm keeping about 5%, if that, but that's still some neat music you won't find any other way.
(Also, grab the Doom torrent. You'd never know that wasn't a full professionial production.)
Per Overzeetop's comment, scratch my post. There is an explicit license, although honestly, it sure is hard enough to find...
There is an implied license granted to Slashdot when you post to do what Slashdot does. I think you'd have a hard time standing up in court and claiming damages from Slashdot doing exactly what you expected Slashdot to do.
Could that be a little more bullet-proof? Yes. Does it matter? Not until someone sues them and tries to make this argument. I don't think that's going to be anytime soon.
Copyright's broken, but this isn't one of the ways in which it is broken.
I haven't bailed yet, but I can see what you're saying.
This is one of the reasons I'm a bottom-feeder; somehow, blowing $50 feel much more than 2.5 times worse than blowing $20.
My biggest complaint so far is completely unrelated to any of that; I was hoping for a sci-fi RPG, not a fantasy RPG with spaceships. I suppose I should have known better; Japan's RPGs are pretty stuck in their groove.
This was probably the deciding factor between it and Suikoden, which was next to it.
(An especial shame in FF9, where the end boss seemed terribly out of proportion to the lead up thereto, and marred a game I thoroughly enjoyed otherwise.)
I had the same problem in FFX too. Everything up to that point I thought was pretty well balanced for someone who wants challenging fights that you can win with thought and a couple of tries. But it seemed to me the end boss was a real jump after that.
Eventually I cheated; I found that I had just enough stuff to "mix" a Trio of 9999, which makes all damage computations lock to 9999; combine that with some multi-shot magic skills and the boss goes down. But I wasn't very close to beating him without that trick I couldn't have discovered without a FAQ, and while I enjoyed the game and don't feel cheated (only paid $12 for it, after all), I felt no desire to follow up with the rest of it.
Compare to FFX-2, which I eventually 100%'ed, because that could be done in nice, bite-sized pieces. (The story is inferior, but I liked the mechanics much better. And no Sphere Grid!)
Interesting counterpoint; I lost my fully-unlocked save file for DDRMAX2, which unlocks things purely on a song play-through basis. I thought I'd try this basic trick, only in this case I just muted the game and periodically hit "x". (I don't have a turbo controller.)
Bastards programmed it so you have to actually meet some minimum performance guidelines for the play to count. And no unlock codes, of course, even though there is really no reason not to include them.
I really enjoy DDR, but this is by far my biggest pet peeve, and DDRExtreme2 is even worse with the unlocking, since it actually involves skill. I'm glad that wasn't my first DDR or it would have put me off the genre entirely when it would have taken me months to unlock more than a handful of new songs, leaving the majority of the content untouchable.
I bold that phrase because I wish somebody from Konami would see it. Fuck your hardcore fans, if they want to play unlocking games, let them use their own discipline to do it. This policy makes me think really hard about whether I want to buy your game at all. I've basically not bothered tracking down DDRExtreme1 because I think it works this way and it's just not cool.
So wait, it was OK when GTA San Andreas had you wait til 1/3rd of the game was done before you could buy any weapons?
Eh, San Andreas was f'ed up in a number of ways. I just can't be bothered to play it anymore, because even after I cheat to get the jetpack or helicopter it still takes too damn long to retry a mission. I'm not sure whether to respect or pity the people who actually finish that game. (Maybe they never fail a mission, I dunno.)
It's like they took Vice City, which IIRC I 100%'ed (so it's not like I dislike the game play), and said "We want to make this twice as long", so they just expanded the world and blew out the first 10% of Vice City (you know, the most boring 10%) into I-don't-know-how-much-of- the-game-because-I-can't-finish-it, but definately "way too much".
For similar reasons, I noticed I'm losing the ability to play console RPGs.
I recently picked up Star Ocean 3 on the cheap (I'm a bottom feeder, what can I say?) and I'm not sure I'm going to be able to finish it. I'm still in the first sixth of the game and already there was a dungeon I barely could get to the next save point before I had to stop anyhow. I'm nervous that this game, which I otherwise enjoy so far, is going to throw a required three+ hours to the save point at me, and that's going to require me like blocking out weekend time... if I bother. (At least this doesn't have random battles making the backtrack time to a save point indeterminate, and the enemies do chase you down but they didn't do the cheap shit with them unavoidably jumping at you; look, if you're not doing random encounters, roll with it, don't try to sneak them in the back door!)
I'm also getting tired of "stomping on rats" just to get to the point where I have a decent selection of abilities. That is, I'd like to start at the moral equivalent of level 10-15. Will it really break the game for my spellcaster to start out with basic heal, basic fire, basic water, basic group attack, etc., and my fighter to already know a couple of techniques?
To its credit, Star Ocean 3 does have a decent "event skipping" system, although IMHO the designers were forced into adding it against their will and it feels like they're a bit snotty about it when you select that function. (Too bad for them; it works OK.) And it doesn't have the God-awful "Your Time Is Worthless To Us" Sphere system from FFX, turning all but the simplest level ups into multi-minute sphere-popping extravaganzas, for which much can be forgiven...
Good question.
The low-level hypocrisy is in their claims in this lawsuit that the artistic merit of the work must be maintained, and thus they can't create censored versions for DVD, whereas they are willing to produce censored versions for television. Thus, obviously, there are concerns above and beyond the artistic merit of the work, or they'd refuse to censor for television (and thus, they wouldn't be able to air their movies on television.)
The word "low-level" isn't redundant; one can profitably argue that there are other factors in play. But there is still a bit of them trying to have it both ways.
Good to call me on that.
Its a remarkable stupid situation where one company can't do something that other companies have done every day.
There is a world of difference between WalMart asking the movie companies to produce a sanitized version for them, and the movie/music companies agreeing, and people chopping up the movie despite the movie studios objection.
You may think that this shouldn't matter, or you may (correctly) observe there's some low levels of hypocrisy here on the movie studios part. (I'm personally still at a loss as to why these sanitizers can't seem to get a license to do what they are doing, as it seems to me that would basically be free money for the studios. But it's not for me to decide what contracts they choose to enter into.) But the fact remains that there is a big difference between WalMart censorship and the story that might just have some sort of effect on the outcome.
(I side with the movie studios on this one because this is a clear integrity issue; we all have the right to insist that people not slice and dice our copyrighted works, which include everything like political pamphlets and even this comment, against our will. Movies are just a special case of that, and we shouldn't be blinded by hatred in deciding whether or not this is a good idea. If I want a right to integrity, that means the movie studios get it too, even if I don't agree with them on many other issues.)
How the hell is this YRO?
I think it's time that YRO either got re-named or re-thought.
Clearly we need a "Legal" or "Law" section. But if YRO was re-focused back to its original purpose, that might still be useful too.
(To forstall the inevitable "Why?" and "Who cares?", the answer is "So you can correctly filter the stories.", which is the only reason to have the sections at all. Someone can be interested in law stories like this and not actual YRO stories, or vice versa. And the purpose of these sections is so we can tell people who bitch about a particular set of stories to just filter them out, thus keeping the comment area that much cleaner.)
Sorry, I did drop a word. You are correct. I meant as fantastically easy to spell, and that is a critical point.
If English were as fantastically easy as Romaji, there would never be a spelling bee in this country again.
Kanji, on the other hand... heh, I'd like to see someone promote a Kanji system for English as a solution to the spelling problem with a straight face. That would be fun.
(In fact, I'm wondering if Kanji's days aren't numbered; right now it's going strong on tradition, kind of like our spelling, but I wonder if they won't switch over to pure hiragana and katakana in the next, say, 150 years. It's neat and cultural and all, but it's really not an effective use of their time...)
September, eh?
Maybe they're going to release on September 9th. Dark horse consoles released on September 9th always do well, right? Certainly, getting crushed by a Sony Playstation after release on that date never happens...
Although, ideally, you ought to wait until 2009 for 9/9/9