To the other AC, I actually do import - I play a lot of Beatmania, and the only one that ever came out here was 9 years late and bad. Also, with the DMS4 modchip I don't have to boot the HDLoader disc (which doesn't seem to be sold anywhere anyway) - when I press the power button, HDLoader just comes up booting off the hard drive.
To the other other AC, I know it's a reckless and legally questionable stance, but I think even if I lost I'd raise enough valid points and bring enough attention to the issue to make it worthwhile. The odds are incredibly tiny that I would ever appear in court for downloading copywritten material, especially since most of it lies outside North American jurisdiction, but regardless it's something to think about and prepare for before it happens.
Haha, this discussion is days old - no one will read this anyway...
For as long as I pay a levy on any recordable media, I will continue to download what I like. If they'd like to challenge me in court, I look forward to asking what exactly I paid that tax for whenever I buy a spool of CDs, DVDs, etc. Royalties for nothing? Government trying to profit from illegal activity?
And I will continue to apply hacks wherever needed to get around designed weaknesses/inabilities/stupidity. For example, I have a hard disk in my PS2 - I need a modchip to load games off this disk. I load all of my store-bought games onto this disk because if I keep using the PS2's DVD drive, it will almost certainly fail within a few years. I used to use a "digital video stabilizer" to strip Macrovision scrambling off of DVDs so I could watch them - the only way between my player and TV was through my VCR (it converted co-ax to composite) and the Macrovision messed with my VCR, so I removed it. I pity the fool who tries to charge me for something like this.
Most "retro" games are somewhat less involved than modern ones, especially in the action genre. You could start it up, play, and put it away. Now most of the games I play are still like that - The Burnout series, the Guitar Hero and Beatmania games, fighting games.
When I start a game and it goes "ok, now watch the makers' logos for 5 minutes. Now a 10 min opening movie! Now you start a game and... watch a 30 minute opening cutscene. Now walk around in a big empty 3D space looking for a clue. Now do some redundant tutorial bits for 45 minutes... now watch another cutscene! Now beat a boss... AND NOW YOU CAN SAVE YOUR GAME... Well, those games get tossed. I don't have time for that crap, regardless of how "good" the game might be when played in 3 hour sessions. I want gameplay, period. It's not much to ask, but it always gets diluted in the "creator's vision" of the game now. Maybe spending $3-5 million to make the game they figure they'd better pad it with enough filler to make X hours minimum playtime...
Compare this with movie theatres. It's no problem if you have to watch an ad or two before the feature right?
Well, how about when you pay $15 to see a movie - for that price you should get a DVD on your way out - and then you have to sit through 15-20 min. of ads? Ads to subsidize... the poor theatre that's barely making a ton of money hand over fist for admissions and $3 candy bars anyway?
It's greedy. It's arrogant. It's a waste of my time, and I refuse to put up with it.
I've had it with Flash anyway - that involuntary CPU-killing bandwidth sucking abortion. I go to a webpage and 5 instances of flash fire up, 2 of which use my connection to stream video while the others display supercomplex animated scenes that murder anything older than a year.
Screw flash. Any site that requires it is dead to me.
Quite simply, they don't do more Linux/OSS stuff because the GPL and similar agreements don't let them play by their rules. Also, as it is, it's far more profitable for them to continue as they've been doing. They're not exactly hurting for money by forsaking or even fighting the open source community.
Say what you will about MS, but they've very good at raking in the cash!
Creative Labs can die as far as I'm concerned. They used to be THE sound card to get, but they've managed to get worse and worse until they've exceeded any other hardware company I'm aware of.
I've owned... - Creative SoundBlaster Pro: An excellent card. Great drivers. Supported every game that knew what a sound card was. No complaints. This one also had an IDE controller for a CD drive. - Creative SoundBlaster 16: Again, no complaints - Creative/Ensoniq32 (wrong name?): Pretty cheap. Sound quality was so-so with lots of noise. I could hear the noise level "click" into place as I adjusted the volume. There couldn't have been more than a dozen volume levels... but it worked. - Creative 6x DVD drive: Good. No problem. Lasted a long time. - Creative DXR3 DVD decoder: OMG this thing had issues. Crappy software came with it and was the only DVD player that could use it. It had problems with things like menus, stopping and starting, dragging a video window, etc. I had a massive driver conflict with it - caused by my soundblaster drivers. I told Creative how to fix it - not the other way around like it should be! - Creative SoundBlaster Live!: Eh, it can't do 5.1, but I still love it. There are better technologies than EAX, but it is quite nice. - Creative SoundBlaster Audigy: I didn't own any of these, but two friends did - they both lost their motherboards and some other parts (RAM, PSU) to the "squeal of death" and wild voltage fluctuations caused by the card. Go ahead and disbelieve me - I didn't think it was possible to make something THAT bad until I saw the results myself. - Creative Nomad Jukebox 5GB: One of the first hard disk MP3 players. You have to match the right REGION of firmware and synching software. Also, match the VERSION. Even then, it will often fail to see the player. If you walk with the player on your person, the laptop hard drive inside will fail to read the next song, and it will crash. It'll also crash at random. The batteries last a few hours tops. The menus are logically made, but hard to use - selecting artist/album etc by letter fails because it skips letters! Also, lower-case and upper-case letters are in a different group so it sorts A to Z to a to z.
No, but I remember the "Mind Drive" galvanic response fingerpad. I tried it in a store 10 or 15 years ago. I remember it kinda worked... there was a skiing game that you could mentally steer. It was really hit and miss though.
Even the units that read from your head don't seem to have much luck aside from actual brain implants though...
I quit Eve long ago. I actually liked the demo enough to pay for a month or two and get an industrial ship for mining. The mechanics were fairly fun when I actually got to interact and build/customize the ships...
My problem was that I was, for any purpose I had, rolling in cash just from doing hours on end of mindless mining with a couple well-equipped ships. I couldn't buy anything though because I didn't have the skills to use it. I didn't have the skills because it doesn't matter how much you DO in the game, you learn things by waiting for progress bars - so it was just the same whether or not I played.
I did some missions, but by the gods they were boring. Hit "autopilot." Watch your ship approach a gate, go through, warp to the next one, fly up to it, go through, etc for 20-30 minutes. Then dock, go to the NPC and say "here you go." Then repeat ad infinitum. Once I stopped looking at the shiny graphics and marvelling at the realistic distances, it really started to grate on me. It was obvious there was something wrong when I'd have to fire up a game console/handheld and play ANOTHER GAME while waiting for my ship to go somewhere.
I could almost have put up with that if not for the skill system. Basically, you pay CCP loads of cash to sit on your ass and wait forever for a progress bar to reach its arbitrary end point. The day I quit was the day I found out that you couldn't even train skills on two characters at once, and they didn't even take 10 seconds to write a paper-thin sci-fi excuse for it! What a sham
On one hand, the squatters legally bought the domain names......on the other, they're choking the available range of names out so that if it keeps up, you'll have to say "Just visit my website at... um... www.nameserver02.ei135gpz7.net... ah, forget it, come to 192.168.3.24!"
As a resident Windows "apologist" (haha) I have to agree. This will probably end up like ASF/WMV or MS Office files - strict control of who's allowed to decode their proprietary format. Even if it starts open, they could just release a new version that's incompatible then change the rules.
It's a bit on the big side compared to JPEG, but I'm a fan of PNG. Used optimally, it's even pretty small too.
What I'd really like to see though is a mostly lossless format that's optimized for extremely high-res images on minimal hardware configurations, if nothing else, just to fill that gap. There are good phones/MP3 players that can show some pretty big JPEGs, but they still require a lot of processing power, and usually a fair bit of memory to open it up with any kind of speed... Then again, it may become a moot point as handheld devces get beefier.
It's an easy mistake to make since unless a game company goes out of its way to kill homebrew (thanks, Nintendo!) the pirate carts and the home devkits are the same thing. I have a flash cartridge for my GBC (Doctor Flash 64m,) and one for my GBA (X-ROM 512MB) that could both play pirated games, but they are also excellent homebrew tools for each - particularly the X-ROM since you can send small code straight to the GBA with the linker and leave the cartridge out of it.
I would have assumed the M3 could do homebrew... can't it? Or its many clones? Or the various PassMe cards? Is it really so hard to run your own code on the DS? That sucks... score one more for PSP (who tries - and fails horribly to stop homebrew)
I've beleived this for a while now. I guess our temporal lobes, along with hyperactive pattern recognition come together to give us a combination "I'm not alone..." and "There it is!" response that becomes the belief in a god/angels/spirits watching over us.
Personally, I'm one of the exceptions to the rule - When I'm alone in a room, I'm the only one there. Nothing mystical here. I do believe that humans of all cultures naturally lean toward religious behaviour though. I'm not even going to judge if that's a good or bad thing, since it's way too broad to qualify...
I'll never buy a 360......but I've never even SEEN a Wii. Not even a demo unit. And I've been looking because back when they launched, I really wanted one. Now my interest is waning, but it's still (as far as I'M concerned,) as good as vaporware. No stores have them locally, and none even know a ballpark figure of when they'll have them on shelves.
Please provide a link to this latest "evidence." I don't believe either the BBC or CNN would collaborate with something like 9/11.
I am however quite certain that the towers were VERY professionally done controlled demolitions though, as the odds are almost impossible that even one of the towers would collapse so neatly in one shot. That, and I've seen various footage of them falling: "*popopopopopopop* *WHOOSH!*" If it were a simple crash & burn, it would have decimated the burning floors, maybe removing the top of one tower.... then the fires would be put out and they'd repair the building like every other huge multi-floor skyscraper fire. If something DID damage them enough to fall, there is no way they'd collapse neatly into their own footprints like that, and for all the debris there was already (of course...) there would be more large pieces, especially given the buildings' construction.
And even if that whole last paragraph is to be ignored, like you said, the official stories are still more holes than facts.
So I'm pretty much on board with you, but please provide a reference for this "new evidence."
Also, as a Canadian, I both agree with the decision AND think our gov't is too soft on terror/ists. Truth is, the act was useless and should be trimmed out, but we should do a LOT more to screen immigrants/refugees with serious criminal records both coming and going from the country because yeah... we ARE a weak spot for terrorist immigration to the USA. It's improving, and it'll take time, but mind-boggling dumb mistakes have been made. Still, especially for the incredible rarity of any serious attack, we should (almost) NEVER SACRIFICE FREEDOM FOR SECURITY as we'd end up with neither every time. (Sorry, but I can't remember the original author of that statement... Thomas Jefferson?)
grr... the rest of my comment vanished! Here it is:...I just disconnect my brakes. My bike can quick-remove both tires, so the brakes open right up in about 5 seconds. No one's tried stealing it yet, but if they fail to notice, I don't think they'll make it too far.
Heheh... I live in a small... FAIRLY safe city of ~50k people. On the occasions I forget my bike lock (can't mount it, have to carry it in my pocket >:)
Actually, I forgot to ask - why can't you train skills on more than one character at once? It's not like the character is out there making money and altering standings with different factions. They're not the same as other characters in the same account, and it would still take forever to catch them up. There isn't even a cheesy "pod capsule pilot" type explanation for it - it's just another route to grab cash... The day I quit was the day I started an alternate character and tried to do this.
Do you guys feel there is any ethical concern about having people pay monthly for a game where most of your time is either spent waiting for your ship to autopilot somewhere, waiting for it to drill an asteroid, or waiting for a skill training timer to finish? These are all arbitrary and unneccesary wastes of time, yet you have to pay monthly to "play..."
Was there any debate about going a different route when the game was in development? I played EO for a while and thought it got a lot of things very right, but I couldn't help but feel like a sucker paying to watch progress bars creep over the course of weeks, so I quit.
I stopped caring some time ago - I've never seen a Wii in a store, or even been to a store where they could say when they're getting some. Until it's available for purchase, it's as good as vaporware to me. Of course, I'd imagine this means Nintendo is making a killing - good for them, I didn't want to see them drop out of the console market which I figured they'd do if Wii failed.
Also, none of the games really interest me yet. For the last few generations I've been a Sony fan and I LOVE my PSP. I figure the people who get bored with theirs must not have a PC... but anyway, I'm not really seeing much on the PS3 either which is a moot point since they're so expensive. The 360? Don't make me laugh... I know a lot of people with 360s, and about 60% of them are on at least their second units (or third...) and from reading internet forums it seems to be about par. That crap WILL break, it's just a matter of (very short) time. On top of that, no games. On top of that, the XBox "power cord" recall and its solution puts users' homes and safety directly at risk, so I don't trust any MS console hardware after such a sleazy cheap coverup (look it up, the real problem was the power supply... easily fixed, but very dangerous.)
So ultimately this new generation leaves me exactly where I was before - I feel like I should explore more GameCube games, but ultimately I happily do most of my gaming on my PS2 - which is well adequate to house a fun game, and has hundreds of great titles I haven't even started to play yet. The Wii? I'll get around to it in a year or two... if there are any games... and if it's in stores by then.
I was thinking the same thing, though the flicker only bothers me personally if I'm working at a CRT screen. I try to use the compact fluorescents when I can, but I also find they're really annoying in quiet areas since the ones I've seen make an annoying hum too.
Like I'd mentioned, I mostly use the GTA games for fooling around. I find the missions way to buggy and chancey to bother with. I go out, try to spraypaint, but it's jammed and won't work. I run right up to my car door to get back in, press the button to enter, and my character turns 180, runs across the street 20 feet and tries to get into the police car chasing me. I brake too quickly on a bike, wedging it permanently halfway into the road. I drive to a mission only to be blown up in a spontaneous chain reaction of explosions in traffic in front of me (Or have a plane crash straight into my car! WTF!) Or the old classic, I'll just be jogging around and fall through the ground of the level... So like a lot of people I just used GTA as a sandbox to play in, except San Andreas starts you with an inept character you have to grind so you can play with YOUR skills, not your skills -20% or whatever the number is.
Glad to hear it worked out for you, but to me, it was just another "start as a wimp and grind up" game that the article complained about. Granted, SA didn't take nearly as long as most RPGs to do this in.
Slashdot Mirror
That's Mr. T, foo'!
To the other AC, I actually do import - I play a lot of Beatmania, and the only one that ever came out here was 9 years late and bad. Also, with the DMS4 modchip I don't have to boot the HDLoader disc (which doesn't seem to be sold anywhere anyway) - when I press the power button, HDLoader just comes up booting off the hard drive.
To the other other AC, I know it's a reckless and legally questionable stance, but I think even if I lost I'd raise enough valid points and bring enough attention to the issue to make it worthwhile. The odds are incredibly tiny that I would ever appear in court for downloading copywritten material, especially since most of it lies outside North American jurisdiction, but regardless it's something to think about and prepare for before it happens.
Haha, this discussion is days old - no one will read this anyway...
For as long as I pay a levy on any recordable media, I will continue to download what I like. If they'd like to challenge me in court, I look forward to asking what exactly I paid that tax for whenever I buy a spool of CDs, DVDs, etc. Royalties for nothing? Government trying to profit from illegal activity?
And I will continue to apply hacks wherever needed to get around designed weaknesses/inabilities/stupidity. For example, I have a hard disk in my PS2 - I need a modchip to load games off this disk. I load all of my store-bought games onto this disk because if I keep using the PS2's DVD drive, it will almost certainly fail within a few years. I used to use a "digital video stabilizer" to strip Macrovision scrambling off of DVDs so I could watch them - the only way between my player and TV was through my VCR (it converted co-ax to composite) and the Macrovision messed with my VCR, so I removed it. I pity the fool who tries to charge me for something like this.
Most "retro" games are somewhat less involved than modern ones, especially in the action genre. You could start it up, play, and put it away. Now most of the games I play are still like that - The Burnout series, the Guitar Hero and Beatmania games, fighting games.
When I start a game and it goes "ok, now watch the makers' logos for 5 minutes. Now a 10 min opening movie! Now you start a game and... watch a 30 minute opening cutscene. Now walk around in a big empty 3D space looking for a clue. Now do some redundant tutorial bits for 45 minutes... now watch another cutscene! Now beat a boss... AND NOW YOU CAN SAVE YOUR GAME... Well, those games get tossed. I don't have time for that crap, regardless of how "good" the game might be when played in 3 hour sessions. I want gameplay, period. It's not much to ask, but it always gets diluted in the "creator's vision" of the game now. Maybe spending $3-5 million to make the game they figure they'd better pad it with enough filler to make X hours minimum playtime...
Compare this with movie theatres.
It's no problem if you have to watch an ad or two before the feature right?
Well, how about when you pay $15 to see a movie - for that price you should get a DVD on your way out - and then you have to sit through 15-20 min. of ads? Ads to subsidize... the poor theatre that's barely making a ton of money hand over fist for admissions and $3 candy bars anyway?
It's greedy. It's arrogant. It's a waste of my time, and I refuse to put up with it.
I've had it with Flash anyway - that involuntary CPU-killing bandwidth sucking abortion. I go to a webpage and 5 instances of flash fire up, 2 of which use my connection to stream video while the others display supercomplex animated scenes that murder anything older than a year.
Screw flash. Any site that requires it is dead to me.
The dog takes about 3 seconds to kill... right click, "Turn off the animated character."
If it worked on DR-DOS 2.0 and VMS it would be truly cross-platform. What you want is omni-platform. (Good luck with that!)
Quite simply, they don't do more Linux/OSS stuff because the GPL and similar agreements don't let them play by their rules. Also, as it is, it's far more profitable for them to continue as they've been doing. They're not exactly hurting for money by forsaking or even fighting the open source community.
Say what you will about MS, but they've very good at raking in the cash!
Creative Labs can die as far as I'm concerned. They used to be THE sound card to get, but they've managed to get worse and worse until they've exceeded any other hardware company I'm aware of.
I've owned...
- Creative SoundBlaster Pro: An excellent card. Great drivers. Supported every game that knew what a sound card was. No complaints. This one also had an IDE controller for a CD drive.
- Creative SoundBlaster 16: Again, no complaints
- Creative/Ensoniq32 (wrong name?): Pretty cheap. Sound quality was so-so with lots of noise. I could hear the noise level "click" into place as I adjusted the volume. There couldn't have been more than a dozen volume levels... but it worked.
- Creative 6x DVD drive: Good. No problem. Lasted a long time.
- Creative DXR3 DVD decoder: OMG this thing had issues. Crappy software came with it and was the only DVD player that could use it. It had problems with things like menus, stopping and starting, dragging a video window, etc. I had a massive driver conflict with it - caused by my soundblaster drivers. I told Creative how to fix it - not the other way around like it should be!
- Creative SoundBlaster Live!: Eh, it can't do 5.1, but I still love it. There are better technologies than EAX, but it is quite nice.
- Creative SoundBlaster Audigy: I didn't own any of these, but two friends did - they both lost their motherboards and some other parts (RAM, PSU) to the "squeal of death" and wild voltage fluctuations caused by the card. Go ahead and disbelieve me - I didn't think it was possible to make something THAT bad until I saw the results myself.
- Creative Nomad Jukebox 5GB: One of the first hard disk MP3 players. You have to match the right REGION of firmware and synching software. Also, match the VERSION. Even then, it will often fail to see the player. If you walk with the player on your person, the laptop hard drive inside will fail to read the next song, and it will crash. It'll also crash at random. The batteries last a few hours tops. The menus are logically made, but hard to use - selecting artist/album etc by letter fails because it skips letters! Also, lower-case and upper-case letters are in a different group so it sorts A to Z to a to z.
No, but I remember the "Mind Drive" galvanic response fingerpad. I tried it in a store 10 or 15 years ago. I remember it kinda worked... there was a skiing game that you could mentally steer. It was really hit and miss though.
Even the units that read from your head don't seem to have much luck aside from actual brain implants though...
I quit Eve long ago. I actually liked the demo enough to pay for a month or two and get an industrial ship for mining. The mechanics were fairly fun when I actually got to interact and build/customize the ships...
My problem was that I was, for any purpose I had, rolling in cash just from doing hours on end of mindless mining with a couple well-equipped ships. I couldn't buy anything though because I didn't have the skills to use it. I didn't have the skills because it doesn't matter how much you DO in the game, you learn things by waiting for progress bars - so it was just the same whether or not I played.
I did some missions, but by the gods they were boring. Hit "autopilot." Watch your ship approach a gate, go through, warp to the next one, fly up to it, go through, etc for 20-30 minutes. Then dock, go to the NPC and say "here you go." Then repeat ad infinitum. Once I stopped looking at the shiny graphics and marvelling at the realistic distances, it really started to grate on me. It was obvious there was something wrong when I'd have to fire up a game console/handheld and play ANOTHER GAME while waiting for my ship to go somewhere.
I could almost have put up with that if not for the skill system. Basically, you pay CCP loads of cash to sit on your ass and wait forever for a progress bar to reach its arbitrary end point. The day I quit was the day I found out that you couldn't even train skills on two characters at once, and they didn't even take 10 seconds to write a paper-thin sci-fi excuse for it! What a sham
On one hand, the squatters legally bought the domain names... ...on the other, they're choking the available range of names out so that if it keeps up, you'll have to say "Just visit my website at... um... www.nameserver02.ei135gpz7.net... ah, forget it, come to 192.168.3.24!"
As a resident Windows "apologist" (haha) I have to agree. This will probably end up like ASF/WMV or MS Office files - strict control of who's allowed to decode their proprietary format. Even if it starts open, they could just release a new version that's incompatible then change the rules.
It's a bit on the big side compared to JPEG, but I'm a fan of PNG. Used optimally, it's even pretty small too.
What I'd really like to see though is a mostly lossless format that's optimized for extremely high-res images on minimal hardware configurations, if nothing else, just to fill that gap. There are good phones/MP3 players that can show some pretty big JPEGs, but they still require a lot of processing power, and usually a fair bit of memory to open it up with any kind of speed... Then again, it may become a moot point as handheld devces get beefier.
It's an easy mistake to make since unless a game company goes out of its way to kill homebrew (thanks, Nintendo!) the pirate carts and the home devkits are the same thing. I have a flash cartridge for my GBC (Doctor Flash 64m,) and one for my GBA (X-ROM 512MB) that could both play pirated games, but they are also excellent homebrew tools for each - particularly the X-ROM since you can send small code straight to the GBA with the linker and leave the cartridge out of it.
I would have assumed the M3 could do homebrew... can't it? Or its many clones? Or the various PassMe cards? Is it really so hard to run your own code on the DS? That sucks... score one more for PSP (who tries - and fails horribly to stop homebrew)
I've beleived this for a while now. I guess our temporal lobes, along with hyperactive pattern recognition come together to give us a combination "I'm not alone..." and "There it is!" response that becomes the belief in a god/angels/spirits watching over us.
Personally, I'm one of the exceptions to the rule - When I'm alone in a room, I'm the only one there. Nothing mystical here. I do believe that humans of all cultures naturally lean toward religious behaviour though. I'm not even going to judge if that's a good or bad thing, since it's way too broad to qualify...
I'll never buy a 360... ...but I've never even SEEN a Wii. Not even a demo unit. And I've been looking because back when they launched, I really wanted one. Now my interest is waning, but it's still (as far as I'M concerned,) as good as vaporware. No stores have them locally, and none even know a ballpark figure of when they'll have them on shelves.
*goes back to PS2 DC and GC*
Please provide a link to this latest "evidence." I don't believe either the BBC or CNN would collaborate with something like 9/11.
I am however quite certain that the towers were VERY professionally done controlled demolitions though, as the odds are almost impossible that even one of the towers would collapse so neatly in one shot. That, and I've seen various footage of them falling: "*popopopopopopop* *WHOOSH!*" If it were a simple crash & burn, it would have decimated the burning floors, maybe removing the top of one tower.... then the fires would be put out and they'd repair the building like every other huge multi-floor skyscraper fire. If something DID damage them enough to fall, there is no way they'd collapse neatly into their own footprints like that, and for all the debris there was already (of course...) there would be more large pieces, especially given the buildings' construction.
And even if that whole last paragraph is to be ignored, like you said, the official stories are still more holes than facts.
So I'm pretty much on board with you, but please provide a reference for this "new evidence."
Also, as a Canadian, I both agree with the decision AND think our gov't is too soft on terror/ists. Truth is, the act was useless and should be trimmed out, but we should do a LOT more to screen immigrants/refugees with serious criminal records both coming and going from the country because yeah... we ARE a weak spot for terrorist immigration to the USA. It's improving, and it'll take time, but mind-boggling dumb mistakes have been made. Still, especially for the incredible rarity of any serious attack, we should (almost) NEVER SACRIFICE FREEDOM FOR SECURITY as we'd end up with neither every time. (Sorry, but I can't remember the original author of that statement... Thomas Jefferson?)
grr... the rest of my comment vanished! Here it is: ...I just disconnect my brakes. My bike can quick-remove both tires, so the brakes open right up in about 5 seconds. No one's tried stealing it yet, but if they fail to notice, I don't think they'll make it too far.
Heheh... I live in a small... FAIRLY safe city of ~50k people. On the occasions I forget my bike lock (can't mount it, have to carry it in my pocket >:)
I can't help you about getting a copy, but to me this sounds like Dungeon & Fighter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_%26_Fighter
I don't know if it's an MMO per se, but do you do have to log in online to play it.
Actually, I forgot to ask - why can't you train skills on more than one character at once? It's not like the character is out there making money and altering standings with different factions. They're not the same as other characters in the same account, and it would still take forever to catch them up. There isn't even a cheesy "pod capsule pilot" type explanation for it - it's just another route to grab cash... The day I quit was the day I started an alternate character and tried to do this.
Do you guys feel there is any ethical concern about having people pay monthly for a game where most of your time is either spent waiting for your ship to autopilot somewhere, waiting for it to drill an asteroid, or waiting for a skill training timer to finish? These are all arbitrary and unneccesary wastes of time, yet you have to pay monthly to "play..."
Was there any debate about going a different route when the game was in development? I played EO for a while and thought it got a lot of things very right, but I couldn't help but feel like a sucker paying to watch progress bars creep over the course of weeks, so I quit.
I stopped caring some time ago - I've never seen a Wii in a store, or even been to a store where they could say when they're getting some. Until it's available for purchase, it's as good as vaporware to me. Of course, I'd imagine this means Nintendo is making a killing - good for them, I didn't want to see them drop out of the console market which I figured they'd do if Wii failed.
Also, none of the games really interest me yet. For the last few generations I've been a Sony fan and I LOVE my PSP. I figure the people who get bored with theirs must not have a PC... but anyway, I'm not really seeing much on the PS3 either which is a moot point since they're so expensive. The 360? Don't make me laugh... I know a lot of people with 360s, and about 60% of them are on at least their second units (or third...) and from reading internet forums it seems to be about par. That crap WILL break, it's just a matter of (very short) time. On top of that, no games. On top of that, the XBox "power cord" recall and its solution puts users' homes and safety directly at risk, so I don't trust any MS console hardware after such a sleazy cheap coverup (look it up, the real problem was the power supply... easily fixed, but very dangerous.)
So ultimately this new generation leaves me exactly where I was before - I feel like I should explore more GameCube games, but ultimately I happily do most of my gaming on my PS2 - which is well adequate to house a fun game, and has hundreds of great titles I haven't even started to play yet. The Wii? I'll get around to it in a year or two... if there are any games... and if it's in stores by then.
I was thinking the same thing, though the flicker only bothers me personally if I'm working at a CRT screen.
I try to use the compact fluorescents when I can, but I also find they're really annoying in quiet areas since the ones I've seen make an annoying hum too.
Like I'd mentioned, I mostly use the GTA games for fooling around. I find the missions way to buggy and chancey to bother with. I go out, try to spraypaint, but it's jammed and won't work. I run right up to my car door to get back in, press the button to enter, and my character turns 180, runs across the street 20 feet and tries to get into the police car chasing me. I brake too quickly on a bike, wedging it permanently halfway into the road. I drive to a mission only to be blown up in a spontaneous chain reaction of explosions in traffic in front of me (Or have a plane crash straight into my car! WTF!) Or the old classic, I'll just be jogging around and fall through the ground of the level... So like a lot of people I just used GTA as a sandbox to play in, except San Andreas starts you with an inept character you have to grind so you can play with YOUR skills, not your skills -20% or whatever the number is.
Glad to hear it worked out for you, but to me, it was just another "start as a wimp and grind up" game that the article complained about. Granted, SA didn't take nearly as long as most RPGs to do this in.