This is a good example of what I find so striking.
I fess up that Windows is an inferior platform to the Mac in terms of usability/stability, hence my desire to migrate to it. But instead of fessing up that the Mac is so inferior for gaming, the non-solution is to hand wave the problem away instead of actually addressing it. As far as I can tell, Apple is doing the same thing.
See my other post in this thread justifying the existence of PC as a gaming platform coexisting with console systems.
Umm.. I wonder just how many orders of magnitude bigger the PC gaming industry is now. I somehow doubt that Kings Quest 1 and friends were in the hundreds of millions in terms of revenue. It goes through cycles of growing and shrinking, overall yea, consoles dominate over PC gaming.. but..
Considering that Consoles dominate PCs and PCs dominate Apple, doesn't that actually kind of support the logic that an emphasis on gaming can be a seriously good thing?
Better graphics :... err.. no. PC is still king of graphics. Every time the gap appears to close, it widens radically again. Consoles have the advantage of consistency, they can be sure that it will look the same for every person playing. This is being annoyingly offset by cross platform games that either take a lowest common denominator approach or just release somewhat stripped down inferior versions on the weaker platforms.
$3500 : Huh? Try less then a 1/3rd of that for a very high-end machine. You can go 1/5th of that for a capable machine. More expensive sure, but it's going to be more powerful then any console, and it's going to be.. well.. a computer too. Web, office apps, email, IM, you know. If -all- you do is play games, then yea, your cost-benefit analysis throws you right into the lap of a console.. unless..
Better selection of games : Pure opinion. Entire genres aren't even represented on console systems (and visa versa). Consoles don't have anything even remotely resembling the (legal) gaming mod community. I don't argue that consoles are way more carefree, and I also don't argue that Apples are more carefree then PCs. That's my whole point, the PC has a lot of extremely good games you simply won't ever get represented properly on any current console system or the Mac. If it weren't for the PC exclusive games, I most definitely would -not- be running windows.
There's the possibility that say, 5 years from now, everybody will have these awesome HDTVs, and all consoles will have hard drives ( unlikely, it seems that every console manufacturer is backing off the HD idea ) and with all games running at 720p or higher, the main advantages of PC gaming could potentially evaporate. I honestly don't think it's going to happen. As far as I can tell, the PC's upgradability and modability are going to leave it perpetually on the cutting edge and there's always going to be development houses that are going to knock on that door and consistantly unleash the most technologically advanced games on PC first. More likely then anything, we'll have our awesome high end PCs attached to those awesome HDTVs and PC gaming may hit a new stride must-have-it-ness.
"and if you're *that* into PC gaming, why the hell are you buying a Mac in the first place?"
Indeed.
If it were computer gaming and not PC gaming, I'd own several Macs and not several PCs.
I think Apple really dropped the ball here by not aggressively marketing to developers, making it easier to port and assisting them. Nothing drives hardware sales like games. People who play games would prefer to have a simpler care free platform to do it on, but the games just aren't there. It's a giant missed opportunity.
It seems like even if they started trying now, by the time they even were respectable enough for games to be an option, Microsoft will probably have caught up with Apple in most regards. Apple knows you hook people young on a platform, how could they have not factored games into that ?
I wonder if Apple ever intends to crack the gaming nut.. I think there is a huge community of gamers that would drop windows in a heartbeat if Apple even came -close- to being a competitive games platform. Gaming also drives hardware sales like nothing else imaginable. If I could play all the same games on a Mac that I do on a PC, I think I'd be willing to pay around $400 more for a similar powered computer without the wintel platform nuissance.
Actually, from my perspective, it's becoming too late. Whereas Windows 98 was pure hell in terms of usability, hardware compatibility, inconsistency, and stability, Windows XP massively shrunk the gap between itself and the overall Mac platform. By the time Apple would catch up, if ever, in the gaming market, the gap might be too small to bother a migration.
But the fact of the matter was that having fewer pixels and a -drastically- small color palette that you didn't need to be able to get as much light reflecting off the screen to not feel like you were missing something.
Aka, take original gameboy tetris and put it in the original GBA and play it just fine, then put in metroid zero and spaz out because you're desperately trying to get it angled just right so that you can actually tell if it's a regular or super bomb door. It was workable, but the difference between the GBA and GBA SP is so utterly profound that it's almost criminal it wasn't lit in the first place.
I totally think Sony is playing the PSP for the long term. A lot of people are making a lot of comparisons to all the other failed platforms but what I don't think any of them are realizing is that we are talking about Sony.
Is it not the most unbelievable thing in the world that the Minidisc is still on shelves? How much of a failure was that? Didn't the original players/recorders cost like $500? Is anybody even buying it now? Who knows, but for some reason you can still buy them and they are now down around $100 and have up to 56 hours battery life off a single AA. It's probably still a relative failure, but the fact remains that Sony has managed to keep those things on shelves for what seems like 8 or so years now.
Sony can do the same thing with the PSP if they have to. They will not let it die and disappear like so many Sega, Wonderswan or whatever the chuck handhelds. That thing will stay on shelves as the the Minidisc of handhelds forever if it has to, and that price will creep down and down and down until rather suddenly it's competitive. I'm going to guess it'll do better then the Minidisc because it won't suddenly find itself antiquated by something as simple as interchangable portable MP3 players.
Even more importantly, another aspect of it being Sony is that it has the potential to tap the adult market in the same way the Playstation 1 did. People were too embarrassed to buy nintendo/sega systems as they were basically completely associated with kids, but the Playstation rapidly became associated with more 'mature' content and games and unleashed a whole new wave of consumers. Sony is pushing this aspect even harder by making it an 'entertainment platform' capable of movies/music as opposed to just simply a souped-up gameboy. Quite a few people justified their Playstation 2 purchase because it could also play DVDs in a pinch.
Well what you are seeing above is exactly how Sony was able to capture such a huge untapped market. Image. Sony reawakened adult gaming because people were too embarrassed to go buy Mario or Sonic flagship titles no matter how good they are. Meanwhile a flood of M rated games came out for Sony.
Heck, I'd say that a big part of why gaming has grown so much relative to other media lately is that it's high end wasn't PG-13ified. All the top box office action/thriller movies lately are watering themselves down to get the more supposedly more profitable PG-13 rating, while video games just keep pushing harder and harder on that 'M' in many cases. With each movie unable to see it's effect on the industry as a whole, a vaccum for 'mature' content was created and gaming filled it, and Sony was straight up there for that for the mainstream.
A lot of people here bringing up other nintendo-related cartoons have existed for a long time. This is a business story on how they plan to start producing the anime themselves. That's a very considerable decision.
What it means to me most interestingly is that the two art forms, anime and games will be brought closer together overall through talent working side by side as opposed to through 3rd party proxies. I can't entirely see how this might make games any better. It would seem to increase the likliness of seeing a "Dragon's Lair'esque game though, which I think the current market could definitely fit.
.. you submerged a nuke down a volcano in a kind of downward firing stabilizing rocket with enough shielding to survive at least a half mile or until it hit solid rock and then blew it up.
A lot of the best games now tend to try to accomplish both. Grand Theft Auto 3 is obviously going to be the immortal example of this.
Spiderman 2 for the consoles is a pretty amazing example of pulling it off while in a movie license because it manages a significant amount of freeform exploration story-less play, follows the storyline of the movie well enough, but also intertwines unexpected comic book stuff as filler to flush out an otherwise short and overly predictable story element.
Some games can thrive off of an almost totally linear story by having the means by which you travel through the story very nonlinear, such as in the case of most RPGs. While you usually can't stray far from the main linear plot, or there might be one or two major branches, the means by which you get through the combat is wildly diverse.
I don't think plot oriented games are in any kind of decline whatsoever, if anything more emphasis then ever is on having good plots that people can actually get into. Good voice acting is making or breaking games more then ever as the standards for story telling are going up dramatically.
Even classic staples in nonlinear progression are integrating storylines, Tony Hawk Pro Skater's progression to Tony Hawk Underground is probably the biggest selling example of this.
Maybe I'm missing something here, why is there so much concern over DRM? It's already way easier to rip a DVD then to access and convert a tivo video feed. On top of that the DVD has higher quality potential and special features. The Tivo version of it is probably going to be limited to VHS quality.
Building more DRM into it just seems unneccesary overkill and would just reinforce the DVD solution, indirectly increasing their disposition to pirating it because it's easier in that environment.
If GPS units were cheaper, you could put one in the cartridge, then make a game where part of it was to walk around looking for secret battle chips through a tricorder type interface.
You'd just use the GPS to track that they are going to new places to randomly give them chips while gathering wireless network info in the background, when they sync with the internet to process their new chips it sends you the net infomation, you scour over it and next time they sync you have the game tell the kid to go back to more interesting looking locations for a special bonus, at which point the software then actually connects to the network in the background doing more specific actions that you specify.
Basically transparently distributed warwalking with the extra bonus that kids can innocently just be in out of place areas without total suspicion.
I don't quite know how you get away with all of this without somebody blatently noticing weird scans on their network the same time some kid is standing around with a gameboy and it immediately being tracked back to you:) Also imagine how incredibly sued you'd be as soon the first kid got kid by a train because it looked like a special bonus was on the tracks.
And on the flipside, many games have came and gone trying to recapture or reinvent what CS got so strikingly correct, hence a slight rehash of an old game can be massively appealing. Old players see their classic game given a much needed face lift and new players get to discover the classic gameplay formula in it's more or less pure form.
Do we need to change chess every year with some new fangled feature to make it a good game again? I'm just saying there is a reason CS has such incredible staying power with so many failed imitators lying in a broken heap next to it.
Making death in the game be your -one- life for what is in essence one singular instance of reality is a feeling of heightened awareness and desire for survival you don't often get from standard respawning games. That downtime builds up the anticipation. It's also a good time to consume beer or BS with friends.
Reseting everything back to the starting point makes each instance of reality stand as being meaningful and potentially memorable as a whole. Definitely the best part of the whole thing is that you start with everybody back in the same spot, so when you play on public servers there is a certain amount of forced teamwork that is virtually impossible in games like Battlefield where everybody ends up scattered all over the entire map and the whole thing ends up feeling very disconnected.
The best way to play CS imo is on any 'rush' server where the time limit is around 3 minutes forcing the attacking team to blitz, many of the maps are balanced so well that this is actually an advantage to the attacking team where the natural tendency to be scared and hang back actually hurts them because they get picked off one at a time rather then just showing up in force.
I'm a bit partial because I used to be so into counterstrike much, but even small changes to counterstrike, as long as they are in positive direction, is a huge multiplayer deal.
Basically to me, counterstrike is the most solid multiplayer experience I've ever had to this day. Most people would complain about the rampant cheating, but my experience has been that with at least some anti-cheat software going for the most part you won't run into rampant cheating.
From there, CS has a few seriously major things going for it. For me, the single biggest factor is the game's movement stability and believability, which is more or less consistent across all half-life engine games. All the other multiplayer games I've attempted to get into have serious stability issues with the movement of other players, warping slightly around, eratically changing speeds in fake looking ways, choppy movement, etc. Call of duty was actually pretty good in this regard, but that was actually too much like CS except that it was even easier, and virtually neccesary, to camp. I'm actually able to score in the top 3 regularly using just an MP5 and rush/flank techniques, which is somewhat realistic in the terrorist/counterterrorist realm of combat, and admitedly, I really only play a small number of maps where thats a valid option, I don't like the long corridor sniping maps.
If they can preserve that good netcode, in combination with the very solid feel of the counterstrike weapons, and provide more excellently balanced maps, while simultaneously bringing the game up to more modern standards, CS: Source is going to be a big big deal compared to Doom 3's very sloppy feeling chop fest.
The most striking single thing to me, which I admit, has very little cause and effect associations to go with it, was seeing my stepfather's high school year book from around 1960.
Sure TV was already on the scene, but what strikes me as being the major difference is that it wasn't particularly possible to spend 95% of your freetime watching it yet, so I allow myself to freely associate a lot of the differences of culture then and now to television, not because I can find specific examples of it's influence but because it's just so incredibly pervasive now. That's pretty flimsy, but I don't generally try to form persuasive arguments from that basis.
It wasn't just the fact that the grammar, spelling and even handwriting were massively superior across the board compared to what today's typical yearbook signature looks like, it was the subject matter. These people, at 17 and 18 years old, were truly mature adults expressing their feelings to each other in a very heartfelt way that people of the same age would tend to openly laugh at today. There was a lot of between the lines sorrow of all the life long friendships being seperated by college, military, jobs, and new families.
Also, there's gotta be some kind of social commentary in the fact that the debate team which won a state championship that year got just about as much coverage as the football team in the yearbook of a standard public high school.
So ideally if we wanted to keep our rights but at the same time keep people on their toes about that kind of abuse, false flash mobs would be neccesary in order to make the individual scrutinize their sources and use their own heads more.
Aaaah shoe! I'm using a text browser and I didn't notice that was even a link. Blorg! Thanks for the heads up.
The only thing I can complain about now is that article doesn't show us the full poll question in it's original form. It manages to quote one part of it which supports your viewpoint but I've seen that kind of thing still manage to be skewed given the greater -actual- context of the poll. There's a good chance that'd be a bit difficult given the information that is at hand, but the obvious opinion of that editorial makes me wonder just a tad.
If it really was obviously specific like that, the only thing I can say is that's a perfect example of how partisan people are. They are beyond critical thinking.
There is one insightful response on that page, to the basic effect of "what we have here is a meta-story from the media about how misinformed people are, who got their information from the media in the first place. What do you expect when mainstream media is too afraid of it's own ratings to stand up to the administration at it's most popular point and just bends over to whatever they're told?"
What amazes me more then anything is that there have been tons of relatively politically justifiable reasons to kick Saddam out over the years, even if it isn't equitable compared to all the other dictators we could kick out for even bigger reasons, and our administration and powers that be fed us the worst, most sloppily founded stuff imaginable.
I guess it just proves that if you ever need to justify something to a large body of average people, go for the most emotionally founded rationales at the expense of logic if you have to and you'll come out ahead in the long run, even if you are proven massively wrong, it won't matter, the people who bought into your illogic are just as invested in defending and justifying it as you are.
"And that would be different from now in what way? Newsweek recently conducted a poll that shows that 42% of people still believe that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks. How is this representative of an informed people?"
That sounds like one of those terrible poll questions. What does it mean when you ask whether or not an entire country, as some kind of vague entity is in someway, anyway, involved? It could mean absolutely anything. If the 9/11 attacks were partially motivated by the first US invasion, you could say that it was involved.
My point is, I wouldn't try to prove any points about how informed people are off of such a lousy poll.
If the purpose of the question was to gauge whether or not the Iraqi government actually had something to do with it why don't they ask questions like "Do you think Saddam helped specifically plan or sponsor the 9/11 attacks?" As far as I can tell they want to have muddled results that they can use to mean almost anything they want.
If you are trying to show that the link between Iraq and terrorism justification was invalid, you have a flawed poll because it's limited to only 9/11. You can do next to nothing with this poll. Your usage of it to show that people are not informed I think is flawed. I think the poll is so flawed and vague that most people simply responded with their basic partisan answer without even having to think.
Let me try making a more specific, but biased and loaded, question: "Do you believe that overthrowing Saddam's government will make other countries think twice before supporting terrorism?" The problem with that question as a yes/no poll is that just by answering at all there's a good chance you are implicitly agreeing that Saddam supported terrorism.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a good example of what I find so striking.
I fess up that Windows is an inferior platform to the Mac in terms of usability/stability, hence my desire to migrate to it. But instead of fessing up that the Mac is so inferior for gaming, the non-solution is to hand wave the problem away instead of actually addressing it. As far as I can tell, Apple is doing the same thing.
See my other post in this thread justifying the existence of PC as a gaming platform coexisting with console systems.
PC gaming declining since the advent of the NES?
*tilts head sideways*
Umm.. I wonder just how many orders of magnitude bigger the PC gaming industry is now. I somehow doubt that Kings Quest 1 and friends were in the hundreds of millions in terms of revenue. It goes through cycles of growing and shrinking, overall yea, consoles dominate over PC gaming.. but..
Considering that Consoles dominate PCs and PCs dominate Apple, doesn't that actually kind of support the logic that an emphasis on gaming can be a seriously good thing?
Bigger screen : True
... err.. no. PC is still king of graphics. Every time the gap appears to close, it widens radically again. Consoles have the advantage of consistency, they can be sure that it will look the same for every person playing. This is being annoyingly offset by cross platform games that either take a lowest common denominator approach or just release somewhat stripped down inferior versions on the weaker platforms.
.. well.. a computer too. Web, office apps, email, IM, you know. If -all- you do is play games, then yea, your cost-benefit analysis throws you right into the lap of a console.. unless..
Better graphics :
$3500 : Huh? Try less then a 1/3rd of that for a very high-end machine. You can go 1/5th of that for a capable machine. More expensive sure, but it's going to be more powerful then any console, and it's going to be
Better selection of games : Pure opinion. Entire genres aren't even represented on console systems (and visa versa). Consoles don't have anything even remotely resembling the (legal) gaming mod community. I don't argue that consoles are way more carefree, and I also don't argue that Apples are more carefree then PCs. That's my whole point, the PC has a lot of extremely good games you simply won't ever get represented properly on any current console system or the Mac. If it weren't for the PC exclusive games, I most definitely would -not- be running windows.
There's the possibility that say, 5 years from now, everybody will have these awesome HDTVs, and all consoles will have hard drives ( unlikely, it seems that every console manufacturer is backing off the HD idea ) and with all games running at 720p or higher, the main advantages of PC gaming could potentially evaporate. I honestly don't think it's going to happen. As far as I can tell, the PC's upgradability and modability are going to leave it perpetually on the cutting edge and there's always going to be development houses that are going to knock on that door and consistantly unleash the most technologically advanced games on PC first. More likely then anything, we'll have our awesome high end PCs attached to those awesome HDTVs and PC gaming may hit a new stride must-have-it-ness.
*looks around shifty eyed*
s/\sOmni/ Mega/g
*submits to editor*
"and if you're *that* into PC gaming, why the hell are you buying a Mac in the first place?"
Indeed.
If it were computer gaming and not PC gaming, I'd own several Macs and not several PCs.
I think Apple really dropped the ball here by not aggressively marketing to developers, making it easier to port and assisting them. Nothing drives hardware sales like games. People who play games would prefer to have a simpler care free platform to do it on, but the games just aren't there. It's a giant missed opportunity.
It seems like even if they started trying now, by the time they even were respectable enough for games to be an option, Microsoft will probably have caught up with Apple in most regards. Apple knows you hook people young on a platform, how could they have not factored games into that ?
I wonder if Apple ever intends to crack the gaming nut.. I think there is a huge community of gamers that would drop windows in a heartbeat if Apple even came -close- to being a competitive games platform. Gaming also drives hardware sales like nothing else imaginable. If I could play all the same games on a Mac that I do on a PC, I think I'd be willing to pay around $400 more for a similar powered computer without the wintel platform nuissance.
Actually, from my perspective, it's becoming too late. Whereas Windows 98 was pure hell in terms of usability, hardware compatibility, inconsistency, and stability, Windows XP massively shrunk the gap between itself and the overall Mac platform. By the time Apple would catch up, if ever, in the gaming market, the gap might be too small to bother a migration.
But the fact of the matter was that having fewer pixels and a -drastically- small color palette that you didn't need to be able to get as much light reflecting off the screen to not feel like you were missing something.
Aka, take original gameboy tetris and put it in the original GBA and play it just fine, then put in metroid zero and spaz out because you're desperately trying to get it angled just right so that you can actually tell if it's a regular or super bomb door. It was workable, but the difference between the GBA and GBA SP is so utterly profound that it's almost criminal it wasn't lit in the first place.
I totally think Sony is playing the PSP for the long term. A lot of people are making a lot of comparisons to all the other failed platforms but what I don't think any of them are realizing is that we are talking about Sony.
Is it not the most unbelievable thing in the world that the Minidisc is still on shelves? How much of a failure was that? Didn't the original players/recorders cost like $500? Is anybody even buying it now? Who knows, but for some reason you can still buy them and they are now down around $100 and have up to 56 hours battery life off a single AA. It's probably still a relative failure, but the fact remains that Sony has managed to keep those things on shelves for what seems like 8 or so years now.
Sony can do the same thing with the PSP if they have to. They will not let it die and disappear like so many Sega, Wonderswan or whatever the chuck handhelds. That thing will stay on shelves as the the Minidisc of handhelds forever if it has to, and that price will creep down and down and down until rather suddenly it's competitive. I'm going to guess it'll do better then the Minidisc because it won't suddenly find itself antiquated by something as simple as interchangable portable MP3 players.
Even more importantly, another aspect of it being Sony is that it has the potential to tap the adult market in the same way the Playstation 1 did. People were too embarrassed to buy nintendo/sega systems as they were basically completely associated with kids, but the Playstation rapidly became associated with more 'mature' content and games and unleashed a whole new wave of consumers. Sony is pushing this aspect even harder by making it an 'entertainment platform' capable of movies/music as opposed to just simply a souped-up gameboy. Quite a few people justified their Playstation 2 purchase because it could also play DVDs in a pinch.
Well what you are seeing above is exactly how Sony was able to capture such a huge untapped market. Image. Sony reawakened adult gaming because people were too embarrassed to go buy Mario or Sonic flagship titles no matter how good they are. Meanwhile a flood of M rated games came out for Sony.
Heck, I'd say that a big part of why gaming has grown so much relative to other media lately is that it's high end wasn't PG-13ified. All the top box office action/thriller movies lately are watering themselves down to get the more supposedly more profitable PG-13 rating, while video games just keep pushing harder and harder on that 'M' in many cases. With each movie unable to see it's effect on the industry as a whole, a vaccum for 'mature' content was created and gaming filled it, and Sony was straight up there for that for the mainstream.
A lot of people here bringing up other nintendo-related cartoons have existed for a long time. This is a business story on how they plan to start producing the anime themselves. That's a very considerable decision.
What it means to me most interestingly is that the two art forms, anime and games will be brought closer together overall through talent working side by side as opposed to through 3rd party proxies. I can't entirely see how this might make games any better. It would seem to increase the likliness of seeing a "Dragon's Lair'esque game though, which I think the current market could definitely fit.
.. you submerged a nuke down a volcano in a kind of downward firing stabilizing rocket with enough shielding to survive at least a half mile or until it hit solid rock and then blew it up.
Just curious is all....
A lot of the best games now tend to try to accomplish both. Grand Theft Auto 3 is obviously going to be the immortal example of this.
Spiderman 2 for the consoles is a pretty amazing example of pulling it off while in a movie license because it manages a significant amount of freeform exploration story-less play, follows the storyline of the movie well enough, but also intertwines unexpected comic book stuff as filler to flush out an otherwise short and overly predictable story element.
Some games can thrive off of an almost totally linear story by having the means by which you travel through the story very nonlinear, such as in the case of most RPGs. While you usually can't stray far from the main linear plot, or there might be one or two major branches, the means by which you get through the combat is wildly diverse.
I don't think plot oriented games are in any kind of decline whatsoever, if anything more emphasis then ever is on having good plots that people can actually get into. Good voice acting is making or breaking games more then ever as the standards for story telling are going up dramatically.
Even classic staples in nonlinear progression are integrating storylines, Tony Hawk Pro Skater's progression to Tony Hawk Underground is probably the biggest selling example of this.
Maybe I'm missing something here, why is there so much concern over DRM? It's already way easier to rip a DVD then to access and convert a tivo video feed. On top of that the DVD has higher quality potential and special features. The Tivo version of it is probably going to be limited to VHS quality.
Building more DRM into it just seems unneccesary overkill and would just reinforce the DVD solution, indirectly increasing their disposition to pirating it because it's easier in that environment.
If GPS units were cheaper, you could put one in the cartridge, then make a game where part of it was to walk around looking for secret battle chips through a tricorder type interface.
:) Also imagine how incredibly sued you'd be as soon the first kid got kid by a train because it looked like a special bonus was on the tracks.
You'd just use the GPS to track that they are going to new places to randomly give them chips while gathering wireless network info in the background, when they sync with the internet to process their new chips it sends you the net infomation, you scour over it and next time they sync you have the game tell the kid to go back to more interesting looking locations for a special bonus, at which point the software then actually connects to the network in the background doing more specific actions that you specify.
Basically transparently distributed warwalking with the extra bonus that kids can innocently just be in out of place areas without total suspicion.
I don't quite know how you get away with all of this without somebody blatently noticing weird scans on their network the same time some kid is standing around with a gameboy and it immediately being tracked back to you
And on the flipside, many games have came and gone trying to recapture or reinvent what CS got so strikingly correct, hence a slight rehash of an old game can be massively appealing. Old players see their classic game given a much needed face lift and new players get to discover the classic gameplay formula in it's more or less pure form.
Do we need to change chess every year with some new fangled feature to make it a good game again? I'm just saying there is a reason CS has such incredible staying power with so many failed imitators lying in a broken heap next to it.
Making death in the game be your -one- life for what is in essence one singular instance of reality is a feeling of heightened awareness and desire for survival you don't often get from standard respawning games. That downtime builds up the anticipation. It's also a good time to consume beer or BS with friends.
Reseting everything back to the starting point makes each instance of reality stand as being meaningful and potentially memorable as a whole. Definitely the best part of the whole thing is that you start with everybody back in the same spot, so when you play on public servers there is a certain amount of forced teamwork that is virtually impossible in games like Battlefield where everybody ends up scattered all over the entire map and the whole thing ends up feeling very disconnected.
The best way to play CS imo is on any 'rush' server where the time limit is around 3 minutes forcing the attacking team to blitz, many of the maps are balanced so well that this is actually an advantage to the attacking team where the natural tendency to be scared and hang back actually hurts them because they get picked off one at a time rather then just showing up in force.
I'm a bit partial because I used to be so into counterstrike much, but even small changes to counterstrike, as long as they are in positive direction, is a huge multiplayer deal.
Basically to me, counterstrike is the most solid multiplayer experience I've ever had to this day. Most people would complain about the rampant cheating, but my experience has been that with at least some anti-cheat software going for the most part you won't run into rampant cheating.
From there, CS has a few seriously major things going for it. For me, the single biggest factor is the game's movement stability and believability, which is more or less consistent across all half-life engine games. All the other multiplayer games I've attempted to get into have serious stability issues with the movement of other players, warping slightly around, eratically changing speeds in fake looking ways, choppy movement, etc. Call of duty was actually pretty good in this regard, but that was actually too much like CS except that it was even easier, and virtually neccesary, to camp. I'm actually able to score in the top 3 regularly using just an MP5 and rush/flank techniques, which is somewhat realistic in the terrorist/counterterrorist realm of combat, and admitedly, I really only play a small number of maps where thats a valid option, I don't like the long corridor sniping maps.
If they can preserve that good netcode, in combination with the very solid feel of the counterstrike weapons, and provide more excellently balanced maps, while simultaneously bringing the game up to more modern standards, CS: Source is going to be a big big deal compared to Doom 3's very sloppy feeling chop fest.
"Football was not the million-dollar career choice back then as it is today.."
:)
Ah ha! Finally something that we can safely say is very directly related to the influence of television.
Or more simply, the cheap bastages probably didn't leave a tip.
The most striking single thing to me, which I admit, has very little cause and effect associations to go with it, was seeing my stepfather's high school year book from around 1960.
Sure TV was already on the scene, but what strikes me as being the major difference is that it wasn't particularly possible to spend 95% of your freetime watching it yet, so I allow myself to freely associate a lot of the differences of culture then and now to television, not because I can find specific examples of it's influence but because it's just so incredibly pervasive now. That's pretty flimsy, but I don't generally try to form persuasive arguments from that basis.
It wasn't just the fact that the grammar, spelling and even handwriting were massively superior across the board compared to what today's typical yearbook signature looks like, it was the subject matter. These people, at 17 and 18 years old, were truly mature adults expressing their feelings to each other in a very heartfelt way that people of the same age would tend to openly laugh at today. There was a lot of between the lines sorrow of all the life long friendships being seperated by college, military, jobs, and new families.
Also, there's gotta be some kind of social commentary in the fact that the debate team which won a state championship that year got just about as much coverage as the football team in the yearbook of a standard public high school.
Hmm, that's a good thought.
So ideally if we wanted to keep our rights but at the same time keep people on their toes about that kind of abuse, false flash mobs would be neccesary in order to make the individual scrutinize their sources and use their own heads more.
'People of a certain age remember when "Television would rot the minds of the youth of America"'
Little did they know it would rot all minds.
SPam Routing Over Underdeveloped Trees
Aaaah shoe! I'm using a text browser and I didn't notice that was even a link. Blorg! Thanks for the heads up.
The only thing I can complain about now is that article doesn't show us the full poll question in it's original form. It manages to quote one part of it which supports your viewpoint but I've seen that kind of thing still manage to be skewed given the greater -actual- context of the poll. There's a good chance that'd be a bit difficult given the information that is at hand, but the obvious opinion of that editorial makes me wonder just a tad.
If it really was obviously specific like that, the only thing I can say is that's a perfect example of how partisan people are. They are beyond critical thinking.
There is one insightful response on that page, to the basic effect of "what we have here is a meta-story from the media about how misinformed people are, who got their information from the media in the first place. What do you expect when mainstream media is too afraid of it's own ratings to stand up to the administration at it's most popular point and just bends over to whatever they're told?"
What amazes me more then anything is that there have been tons of relatively politically justifiable reasons to kick Saddam out over the years, even if it isn't equitable compared to all the other dictators we could kick out for even bigger reasons, and our administration and powers that be fed us the worst, most sloppily founded stuff imaginable.
I guess it just proves that if you ever need to justify something to a large body of average people, go for the most emotionally founded rationales at the expense of logic if you have to and you'll come out ahead in the long run, even if you are proven massively wrong, it won't matter, the people who bought into your illogic are just as invested in defending and justifying it as you are.
"And that would be different from now in what way? Newsweek recently conducted a poll that shows that 42% of people still believe that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks. How is this representative of an informed people?"
That sounds like one of those terrible poll questions. What does it mean when you ask whether or not an entire country, as some kind of vague entity is in someway, anyway, involved? It could mean absolutely anything. If the 9/11 attacks were partially motivated by the first US invasion, you could say that it was involved.
My point is, I wouldn't try to prove any points about how informed people are off of such a lousy poll.
If the purpose of the question was to gauge whether or not the Iraqi government actually had something to do with it why don't they ask questions like "Do you think Saddam helped specifically plan or sponsor the 9/11 attacks?" As far as I can tell they want to have muddled results that they can use to mean almost anything they want.
If you are trying to show that the link between Iraq and terrorism justification was invalid, you have a flawed poll because it's limited to only 9/11. You can do next to nothing with this poll. Your usage of it to show that people are not informed I think is flawed. I think the poll is so flawed and vague that most people simply responded with their basic partisan answer without even having to think.
Let me try making a more specific, but biased and loaded, question: "Do you believe that overthrowing Saddam's government will make other countries think twice before supporting terrorism?" The problem with that question as a yes/no poll is that just by answering at all there's a good chance you are implicitly agreeing that Saddam supported terrorism.