I didn't ask you if you trust that APA more than that guy, that was just a random anti-Electroconvulsive Therapy page I came up with. I was asking if you accept the APA's position on Electroconvulsive Therapy.
And your position that the APA is credible is an appeal to authority, no matter how you try to spin it. You aren't Bill O'Reilly by any chance?
The American Psychological Association is putting it's credibility behind this. If the APA can be bought like a Washington DC think tank, then we're all in serious trouble.
Nice appeal to authority there. I'm assuming you support their position on Electroconvulsive therapy as well.
Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the American Psychiatric Association's 2001 Task Force Report on The Practice of Electro convulsive Therapy: Recommendations for Treatment, Training, and Privileging, 2nd ed. (p. 102), which states that "in light of the accumulated body of data dealing with structural effects of ECT, 'brain damage' should not be included [in the ECT consent form] as a potential risk of treatment."
But 50 years ago, when some proponents were careless with the truth about ECT, Paul H. Hoch, co-author of a major psychiatric textbook and New York State's Commissioner of Mental Hygiene, commented, "This brings us for a moment to a discussion of the brain damage produced by electroshock.... Is a certain amount of brain damage not necessary in this type of treatment? Frontal lobotomy indicates that improvement takes place by a definite damage of certain parts of the brain." ("Discussion and Concluding Remarks," Journal of Personality, 1948, vol. 17, pp. 48-51)
-- Public Hearing on Electro convulsive Treatment before the Mental Health Committee of the New York State
I will most likely get the Revolution and either the PS3 or 360, but due to the price I plan to sell my Xbox and Gamecube to buy said consoles. That being said I don't know if I'm willing to hang on to my Gamecube long enough to play the new Zelda.
If you are definitely buying a Revolution, I don't see this as an issue. The Revolution will be 100% backward compatible with Gamecube games according to Nintendo, so you'll be able to play it on that.
I understand you. The Metroid Prime series is a spinoff of the Metroid series. It's sort of a modders dreamland version of Metroid Quake, but it is only tangentially related to the Metroid series that began on the NES and continues on the Gameboy (or should that be continued, past tense, since Metroid Prime is the series on the DS).
This of course has been the relentless march of "3-D" versus "2-D," killing off popular "2-D" game series in order to replace them with new series using similar "3-D" versions of the art and sometimes similar storylines.
However, I consider it quite correct that if you are going to make a "3-D" game and call it Metroid, it is best to use a tried-and-true "3-D" style game. In this case, the first person adventure, a hybrid of RPG and FPS that an early example of was Ultima: Underworld and later examples were System Shock. I'm not opposed to spin-offs except when they kill off the original, still popular game series that spawned them for pure marketing reasons.
An 8-year-old girl who suffers from a rare digestive disorder and cannot consume wheat has had her first Holy Communion declared invalid because the wafer contained none, violating Catholic doctrine.
If it isn't wheat, it isn't the body of Christ, period.
Well, I don't disagree (the game was great). However, I think what they were saying was, "This game could have been better and we should have taken the time to make it so."
I wasn't meaning to imply that Eiji Aonuma was saying, "Wind Waker sucks" but the fact that he felt the need to apologise for any aspect of the game shows that he thought it could have been better.
I know some Nintendo fans who said, "Why did he have to say anything? It was a well-reviewed, best-selling game. This just provides ammo for the Sony/Microsoft fanboys." Can you imagine Ken Kutaragi or Steve Balmer doing something like that. (In fact, some gamers felt that Halo 2 was lacking as well... I can't think of a Sony example because as far as I know Sony doesn't make any AAA titles.)
The best article I ever read on what you are describing was Tom Chick's "My Dinner With Origin," which unfortunately is no longer available online despite my best efforts to search for it. In it some greedy, fictional middle-manager at Origin (or Electronic Arts, I forget which) takes glee in canceling the JANES combat sim series in order to focus only on online games that allow for metered play. (Heh, remember when Ultima online was the big MMO?)
Of course, as always, the reason why MMO games are being pushed as a replacement for Single Player games is because of marketing. Some greedy scumbags in suits think that the key to affording more ivory backscratchers for themselves is to make players pay monthly fees for games they want to play, forever. In other words, you won't be able to fire up a game like, say, Starcraft anymore unless you've paid your monthly subscription fees.
Of course, MMO games don't appeal to me, because I'm an old man who doesn't feel like being hassled by a bunch of foul-mouthed barely literate 12 year olds any time I want to sit down to play a game. (Always a risk with MMO games). I either want to play a game by myself or only with people I've thoroughly screened first. Oh, and I'm a parsimonious fellow who refuses to even have a monthly contract for my cellphone, so I'm not going to have a monthly contract just so I can play a decent RTS or RPG. I can always go back to boardgames, why I hear that Avalon Hill is back...
It reminds me of a few other gaming shifts. The one that I took most personally was the shift from "2-D" games to "3-D" games. (I'm using quotes here because, of course, there are no 3-D games. What they mean is the shift from sprite based games to games that use polygons to model 3-D objects which are then displayed on a 2-D screen.)
Much like, MMO versus Single Player games, there was no reason that this needed to be set up as an either/or proposition. Some games, like FPS's, since they were always designed to create the illusion of a 3-D environment actually use polygons well. Other game genres were completely annihilated by Nintendo+Sony's marketing needs during the 32 Bit generation, because they were replaced by spinoffs (such as Mario 64 or that horrible "3-D" Megaman game that we do not speak of. Oh and of course development dollars were wasted bringing Samurai Spirits and King of the Fighters into "3-D," horrible!!!) Why was it done? Easy, in order to prove that the Playstation and N64 were great leap forwards in technology over their predecessors. So, popular series were tossed on the bonfire or replaced by spinoffs set in a "3-D" environment. (Yes, I'm aware that Nintendo helped preserve "2-D" gaming with the GBA and Sony of Japan were more willing to allow "2-D" games than the bastards at Sony of America... but as I'm an American and Sony works so hard to enforce region coding, this means nothing to me.)
But I digress. The only MMO I've been remotely interested in is Guild Wars, because it isn't metered. Even so, I'd prefer a finished version of Vampire:Bloodlines please.
The good news is that I hear that Dawn of War: Winter Assault is going to focus on having an excellent single player gaming experience in addition to its multiplayer content, which was a little weak in the first game. I've already pre-ordered it, of course.
And yet, there's the rub, as it were. The Technocracy can't make any new superscience these days against this monolithic tide of apathy. People just won't accept it. Look at the outcry against cloning, or the total lack of interest in the space program. Humanity has chosen to live in a world of crap. It's a least-common denominator dystopia, and neither Traditionalist or Technocrat can jar these sixbillion lumps of flesh from their programmed complacency. That's why the Ascension War really ended, kid. The Masses have spoken, and they've chosen absolute slack-ass mediocrity.
-- from Mage: The Ascension Core Book Revision
That's the whole story as I remember it from reading it in Machines that Think, a short story anthology I loved as a child. My guess is that it's from a Baen book of short stories and that "chapter" is a misnomer.
That story impressed me especially, because it was different (of course, by then I could go home and use my Atari 800 to log on to Compuserve, so it didn't seem as prophetic to me as it would have for someone of my Dad's generation). I loved stories about robots. I think that in the 40's especially, you were far more likely to read a story in which cheap, household robots were common than cheap, household computers.
I've played some games lately that had the potential for greatness (the most personally annoying for me being Vampire: Bloodlines) where it was obvious at some point that the developers ran out of time.
A quote something like this was attributed to Shigeru Miyamoto "A game delayed may eventually be good, but a bad game released is bad forever." I'm glad he's taking his own advice.
Besides, you should be happy that the gamers are the ones craving such devices, pushing the manufacturers to go further with their technology. Because eventually that stuff trickles into the "Work" stuff.
And occaisionally "work" designs that have been discontinued will be brought back for "gaming."
It reminds me of a non-funny version of MADs snappy answers to stupid questions. Where to begin:
Dead or Alive: Beach Volleyball: Is not a game about "World Class Volleyball Players." It's a game about the Dead or Alive girls playing beach volleyball. It would be like if Maxim magazine made a Maxim Volleyball issue. Do the people who wrote this think that the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is about swimsuits?
Tomb Raider: Hailed as the second coming when it was created, Tomb Raider has steadily become more and more irrelevant. The only thing that has kept the series going at all is... Lara Croft, the lead character. This character was so successful that she was ripped off for a syndicated TV series (Relic Hunter starring Tia Carrera) and appeared in numerous magazines. Interestingly, the original game was almost universally popular when it came out, and had more crossover appeal then most Playstation games.
GTA (Series): Oh, they are upset with GTA for being objectionable? I'm sure over at R* they are saying, "Cool, we made another 'objectionable' list. Oh wait, it's only MAD magazine and Gamepro, bleh."
If these are why girls don't play games, then why haven't girls stopped watching movies? I notice a lot of prominent advertising for -shudder- Deuce Bigelow: European Gigolo, and yet girls still go to movies.
SEGA: To paraphrase Agnes (from The Simpsons), "SEGA is gone, Mad, long gone. You're SEGA." Picking on SEGA's "legacy of failure" is beating a dead horse. No, it's more like if a big, stong person you were afraid of was brought down and then you go over to kick them when they are safely unconscious. It's ugly behaviour, especially from Gamepro. Video games are less fun now than when SEGA was around.
The Sims: When were the Sims realistic? I didn't play it very long, but I remember my character chose the "Life of Crime" career path. This was in the first game with no supplements.
Well, that's enough. It sure doesn't belong in the "it's funny, laugh" section.
I noticed that when I was searching iTunes, I could only find covers (bad covers in my opinion) of tunes from Cowboy Bebop. These are allowed, of course, because of the compulsory license law that allows cover songs. I'm surprised that no one has thought to use this law to cater to the American J-Pop market.
Farnsworth: He's good all right. But he's no Clem Johnson. And Johnson played back in the days when steroid injections were mandatory.
Bender: Clem Johnson? That skin bag wouldn't have lasted one pitch in the old Robot Leagues! Now Wireless Joe Jackson, there was a blern hitting machine!
Leela: Exactly! He was a machine designed to hit blerns! I mean come on! Wireless Joe was nothing but a programmable bat on wheels.
Bender: Oh and I suppose pitching at 5000 was just a modified howitzer.
Leela: Yep.
Bender: You humans are so scared of a little robot competition you won't even let us on the field.
Fry: What are you talking about? There's all kinds of robots down there.
Bender: Yeah doing crap work! They're bat boys, ball polishers, sprinkler systems. But how many robot managers are there?
Fry: Eleven?
Bender: Zero! [He throws his bottle on the floor and it breaks. A small robot comes out and cleans it up.] And what a surprise! Look who's scraping up the filth! Is it a human child? I wish!
The article is also talking about Mass Drivers, which if you've seen Babylon 5, or read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress you'll know are pretty devestating space based weapons. They aren't for taking out "enemy satellites" they are for taking out cities without any of that nasty fallout you get from atom bombs.
Basically, a mass driver will take a chunk of material with a high resistance to the heat that is generated by re-entry into the earth's atmoshere and drop it from space on a target on earth. I'm not sure exactly how much devestation this could cause, but I'll just point out the wikipedia article on the Tunguska Blast.
As with any other weapon of mass destruction, once these things are created we'll be stuck with them, and God forbid an enemy should hijack them. (Or as might possibly happen, the democratic government of the U.S. fell and was replaced by a fascist one or any number of other nasty scenarios.)
[Chief Wiggum takes the bottle from Lou's hand and dabs his
finger with it, giving it a taste] Wiggum: My God, it's nothing but carrots and peyote. Eddie: Damn longhairs never learn, Chief. Wiggum: Eh, it's time for an old-fashioned hippie ass-whomping!
Well, I use computers to make a living too but they won't let me use anything but Windows at work.
At home I have networked a Mac Powerbook and a Windows PC that I built myself (it dual boots Linux, but I don't use it that much because it isn't compatible with my soundcard, and for some reason I've had a much easier time getting VNC configured on OS X and Windows than on Linux. I say for some reason, because I remember setting up VNC on Linux in the past and I had a much easier time doing it.)
For PC games, I originally planned to transitioning to being a Mac gamer, but that ended up not working out, which is why I built my Wintel box. It's not that there aren't a lot of good games for the Mac, it's that the one game I want will usually be on Windows only. Well, that and there are a lot more bargain games for Windows. Still, I have a lot of Mac games as well. The saddest are the ones I rebought for Mac that I already had for Windows, since I ended up getting an upgraded Windows box anyway.
I don't like Windows, but I do like the games that come out for it, so I'm stuck with it. (Well, and if I want to take work home, occaisionally it will require a Windows PC, though not all the time of course.)
For Mac games I own:
Sacrifice: Great fun, I have it for Windows too. It might be cheap now.
Undying: I don't know, I've never gotten into it. It seems like it should be an interesting FPS.
Warcraft III: This is another one that I should like but I never play. I think it actually taxes my Powerbook to much. I probably need a memory upgrade. But I don't play it on PC either, so it's no great loss. (The package contains both Windows and Mac versions.)
Freedom Force: I really wanted to like this one, but I don't.
Starcraft: Love it, although I like Red Alert II (PC only) more. You can pick it up cheap in any computer store, the package contains both Windows and Mac versions.
Total Annihilation: One of these days I'll get around to really playing this. RTS fans praise it to high heavens.
When I originally bought my Powerbook, I had given it the "place of honor" in my home. I hooked it up to a nice monitor, and bought an external keyboard and mouse. Now it sits in my living room on the coffee table instead, and the monitor is hooked to my Wintel (the external mouse and keyboard just sit on a shelf), and it is actually the computer I use the most for accessing the Internet and reading Ebooks. In fact, I still use it so much more than my Windows PC, except when I have a brand new PC game I'm into, that I had to set up VNC so I would still use my Win PC sometimes. (Although the WinPC is the one with the CD burner, I may buy an external one for my Mac.)
When I heard that SC3 was going to be a PS2 exclusive, my immediate thought was that Sony put the screws to Namco over the fact that they got the worst of the three extra characters. XBox got Spawn, Gamecube got Link and PS2 got Heihachi Mishima. Now, I like Heihachi fine, but the fact is he just doesn't have the pizzazz of the other two.
Somebody really didn't want anyone to see this post.
Moderators cannot assume that other people have read the comments on other stories on San Andreas. As to the stories themselves being redundant, well this is one huge story, likely it will change the face of gaming forever.
Slashdot Mirror
And your position that the APA is credible is an appeal to authority, no matter how you try to spin it. You aren't Bill O'Reilly by any chance?
This of course has been the relentless march of "3-D" versus "2-D," killing off popular "2-D" game series in order to replace them with new series using similar "3-D" versions of the art and sometimes similar storylines.
However, I consider it quite correct that if you are going to make a "3-D" game and call it Metroid, it is best to use a tried-and-true "3-D" style game. In this case, the first person adventure, a hybrid of RPG and FPS that an early example of was Ultima: Underworld and later examples were System Shock. I'm not opposed to spin-offs except when they kill off the original, still popular game series that spawned them for pure marketing reasons.
I wasn't meaning to imply that Eiji Aonuma was saying, "Wind Waker sucks" but the fact that he felt the need to apologise for any aspect of the game shows that he thought it could have been better.
I know some Nintendo fans who said, "Why did he have to say anything? It was a well-reviewed, best-selling game. This just provides ammo for the Sony/Microsoft fanboys." Can you imagine Ken Kutaragi or Steve Balmer doing something like that. (In fact, some gamers felt that Halo 2 was lacking as well... I can't think of a Sony example because as far as I know Sony doesn't make any AAA titles.)
Of course, as always, the reason why MMO games are being pushed as a replacement for Single Player games is because of marketing. Some greedy scumbags in suits think that the key to affording more ivory backscratchers for themselves is to make players pay monthly fees for games they want to play, forever. In other words, you won't be able to fire up a game like, say, Starcraft anymore unless you've paid your monthly subscription fees.
Of course, MMO games don't appeal to me, because I'm an old man who doesn't feel like being hassled by a bunch of foul-mouthed barely literate 12 year olds any time I want to sit down to play a game. (Always a risk with MMO games). I either want to play a game by myself or only with people I've thoroughly screened first. Oh, and I'm a parsimonious fellow who refuses to even have a monthly contract for my cellphone, so I'm not going to have a monthly contract just so I can play a decent RTS or RPG. I can always go back to boardgames, why I hear that Avalon Hill is back...
It reminds me of a few other gaming shifts. The one that I took most personally was the shift from "2-D" games to "3-D" games. (I'm using quotes here because, of course, there are no 3-D games. What they mean is the shift from sprite based games to games that use polygons to model 3-D objects which are then displayed on a 2-D screen.)
Much like, MMO versus Single Player games, there was no reason that this needed to be set up as an either/or proposition. Some games, like FPS's, since they were always designed to create the illusion of a 3-D environment actually use polygons well. Other game genres were completely annihilated by Nintendo+Sony's marketing needs during the 32 Bit generation, because they were replaced by spinoffs (such as Mario 64 or that horrible "3-D" Megaman game that we do not speak of. Oh and of course development dollars were wasted bringing Samurai Spirits and King of the Fighters into "3-D," horrible!!!) Why was it done? Easy, in order to prove that the Playstation and N64 were great leap forwards in technology over their predecessors. So, popular series were tossed on the bonfire or replaced by spinoffs set in a "3-D" environment. (Yes, I'm aware that Nintendo helped preserve "2-D" gaming with the GBA and Sony of Japan were more willing to allow "2-D" games than the bastards at Sony of America... but as I'm an American and Sony works so hard to enforce region coding, this means nothing to me.)
But I digress. The only MMO I've been remotely interested in is Guild Wars, because it isn't metered. Even so, I'd prefer a finished version of Vampire:Bloodlines please.
The good news is that I hear that Dawn of War: Winter Assault is going to focus on having an excellent single player gaming experience in addition to its multiplayer content, which was a little weak in the first game. I've already pre-ordered it, of course.
That story impressed me especially, because it was different (of course, by then I could go home and use my Atari 800 to log on to Compuserve, so it didn't seem as prophetic to me as it would have for someone of my Dad's generation). I loved stories about robots. I think that in the 40's especially, you were far more likely to read a story in which cheap, household robots were common than cheap, household computers.
TWILIGHT PRINCESS SHEDS NEW LIGHT
I've played some games lately that had the potential for greatness (the most personally annoying for me being Vampire: Bloodlines) where it was obvious at some point that the developers ran out of time.
A quote something like this was attributed to Shigeru Miyamoto "A game delayed may eventually be good, but a bad game released is bad forever." I'm glad he's taking his own advice.
Since when is 1up.com a Nintendo site?
A Logic Named Joe
"A Logic Called Joe"
first published in 1945.
Logitech Gaming Mouse Review
Dead or Alive: Beach Volleyball: Is not a game about "World Class Volleyball Players." It's a game about the Dead or Alive girls playing beach volleyball. It would be like if Maxim magazine made a Maxim Volleyball issue. Do the people who wrote this think that the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is about swimsuits?
Tomb Raider: Hailed as the second coming when it was created, Tomb Raider has steadily become more and more irrelevant. The only thing that has kept the series going at all is... Lara Croft, the lead character. This character was so successful that she was ripped off for a syndicated TV series (Relic Hunter starring Tia Carrera) and appeared in numerous magazines. Interestingly, the original game was almost universally popular when it came out, and had more crossover appeal then most Playstation games.
GTA (Series): Oh, they are upset with GTA for being objectionable? I'm sure over at R* they are saying, "Cool, we made another 'objectionable' list. Oh wait, it's only MAD magazine and Gamepro, bleh."
If these are why girls don't play games, then why haven't girls stopped watching movies? I notice a lot of prominent advertising for -shudder- Deuce Bigelow: European Gigolo, and yet girls still go to movies.
SEGA: To paraphrase Agnes (from The Simpsons), "SEGA is gone, Mad, long gone. You're SEGA." Picking on SEGA's "legacy of failure" is beating a dead horse. No, it's more like if a big, stong person you were afraid of was brought down and then you go over to kick them when they are safely unconscious. It's ugly behaviour, especially from Gamepro. Video games are less fun now than when SEGA was around.
The Sims: When were the Sims realistic? I didn't play it very long, but I remember my character chose the "Life of Crime" career path. This was in the first game with no supplements.
Well, that's enough. It sure doesn't belong in the "it's funny, laugh" section.
I noticed that when I was searching iTunes, I could only find covers (bad covers in my opinion) of tunes from Cowboy Bebop. These are allowed, of course, because of the compulsory license law that allows cover songs. I'm surprised that no one has thought to use this law to cater to the American J-Pop market.
Just another example of Sony wallowing in their own crapulence.
Bender: Clem Johnson? That skin bag wouldn't have lasted one pitch in the old Robot Leagues! Now Wireless Joe Jackson, there was a blern hitting machine!
Leela: Exactly! He was a machine designed to hit blerns! I mean come on! Wireless Joe was nothing but a programmable bat on wheels.
Bender: Oh and I suppose pitching at 5000 was just a modified howitzer.
Leela: Yep.
Bender: You humans are so scared of a little robot competition you won't even let us on the field.
Fry: What are you talking about? There's all kinds of robots down there.
Bender: Yeah doing crap work! They're bat boys, ball polishers, sprinkler systems. But how many robot managers are there?
Fry: Eleven?
Bender: Zero! [He throws his bottle on the floor and it breaks. A small robot comes out and cleans it up.] And what a surprise! Look who's scraping up the filth! Is it a human child? I wish!
Basically, a mass driver will take a chunk of material with a high resistance to the heat that is generated by re-entry into the earth's atmoshere and drop it from space on a target on earth. I'm not sure exactly how much devestation this could cause, but I'll just point out the wikipedia article on the Tunguska Blast.
As with any other weapon of mass destruction, once these things are created we'll be stuck with them, and God forbid an enemy should hijack them. (Or as might possibly happen, the democratic government of the U.S. fell and was replaced by a fascist one or any number of other nasty scenarios.)
Guess I just found a new sig!
Please, think of the kittens.
Wiggum: My God, it's nothing but carrots and peyote.
Eddie: Damn longhairs never learn, Chief.
Wiggum: Eh, it's time for an old-fashioned hippie ass-whomping!
At home I have networked a Mac Powerbook and a Windows PC that I built myself (it dual boots Linux, but I don't use it that much because it isn't compatible with my soundcard, and for some reason I've had a much easier time getting VNC configured on OS X and Windows than on Linux. I say for some reason, because I remember setting up VNC on Linux in the past and I had a much easier time doing it.)
For PC games, I originally planned to transitioning to being a Mac gamer, but that ended up not working out, which is why I built my Wintel box. It's not that there aren't a lot of good games for the Mac, it's that the one game I want will usually be on Windows only. Well, that and there are a lot more bargain games for Windows. Still, I have a lot of Mac games as well. The saddest are the ones I rebought for Mac that I already had for Windows, since I ended up getting an upgraded Windows box anyway.
I don't like Windows, but I do like the games that come out for it, so I'm stuck with it. (Well, and if I want to take work home, occaisionally it will require a Windows PC, though not all the time of course.)
For Mac games I own:
Sacrifice: Great fun, I have it for Windows too. It might be cheap now.
Undying: I don't know, I've never gotten into it. It seems like it should be an interesting FPS.
Warcraft III: This is another one that I should like but I never play. I think it actually taxes my Powerbook to much. I probably need a memory upgrade. But I don't play it on PC either, so it's no great loss. (The package contains both Windows and Mac versions.)
Freedom Force: I really wanted to like this one, but I don't.
Starcraft: Love it, although I like Red Alert II (PC only) more. You can pick it up cheap in any computer store, the package contains both Windows and Mac versions.
Total Annihilation: One of these days I'll get around to really playing this. RTS fans praise it to high heavens.
When I originally bought my Powerbook, I had given it the "place of honor" in my home. I hooked it up to a nice monitor, and bought an external keyboard and mouse. Now it sits in my living room on the coffee table instead, and the monitor is hooked to my Wintel (the external mouse and keyboard just sit on a shelf), and it is actually the computer I use the most for accessing the Internet and reading Ebooks. In fact, I still use it so much more than my Windows PC, except when I have a brand new PC game I'm into, that I had to set up VNC so I would still use my Win PC sometimes. (Although the WinPC is the one with the CD burner, I may buy an external one for my Mac.)
Moderators cannot assume that other people have read the comments on other stories on San Andreas. As to the stories themselves being redundant, well this is one huge story, likely it will change the face of gaming forever.