You're right, and that was my first thought, but I think that trinity is the basic minimum for a strong party in a dungeon-crawler (roguelike, Diablo, WoW.) Dungeon crawlers are like you said, action games - often D&D themed, but with little roleplay.
In Ragnarok I played a thief, turned assassin, who could sneak and steal, and dish out massive melee damage to a single enemy, but get crushed by a handful, so at least I needed a tank for hectic dungeons. Then, while I had a ton of HP, I healed really slowly, so an acolyte or priest to heal and buff made me 20x as powerful overall.
I've played games like Eve Online where you don't have classes, but I find that can mess up socialization in online play because you may not know what your party needs to be effective, and you can't just say "looking for _____." Instead of "ah, a priest - are you combat or healing?" it's more like "Ok, do you have missile training? Seeking missiles? Can you use kinetic weapons? Energy based? Can you operate ECMs to disrupt weapon locks? How about mining equipment? Can you mine ice too? Do you own an industrial ship for hauling?" and so on...
He could not do it himself, as he's not a pro racer. I believe he later got someone who was, and found the same thing that most such comparisons do - that the GT time was a little bit faster than the real one because push it as you may, you don't want to die in a real car.
I have Forza 3 and GT5P at home. I can't take Forza's physics seriously as long as grass bogs you down like wet clay, slowing you faster than your own brakes could - and orange paint seems to have a similar, maybe even more pronounced effect. Grass stopped being a mystery substance in GT4.
I also have to wonder why I can take a car like an Exige or an R32 and just nail the handbrake once the guideline turns red, then drift all the way around a corner when I'm using a controller to drive. Any other sim would kick my ass without mercy if I tried that, and I make no claims to having that level of skill. I have all assists but ABS off, and damage modelling all the way up.
I found suspension tuning in GT to be pretty good, if a bit too technical for non-mechanics. In F3 I've yet to actually notice a difference from suspension upgrades and stiffening, but since it's affordable, I still do it.
The aerodynamics I've seen in Forza so far seem to boil down to a direct traction increase at all speeds - I won a tuned Viper with a huge spoiler, but the way the tires stick to the road, even from a standstill, you'd think it was pushing 100hp/ft-lbs. In Gran Turismo you can actually face the dilemma of braking and losing downforce vs keeping speed and downforce up as you round a corner. It'll even model the wind sound and doppler effect from a spectator's perspective.
I have screenshots I took from playing GT4 where my cars are a good 5-10 feet in the air, so they will go airborne - they just won't be doing barrel rolls. They don't fly several feet above the track as they sometimes do in F3. You can still run into the situation where you're hard on the throttle, fly over a ripple in the road, and spin the wheels so they burn out when you land and skew you to one side.
The damage model GT demonstrated looks about as good as the one that shipped with Forza 3 - which is basically the same as TOCA 3 - big chunks of the body, and a few key components have overall hit points, and look gradually more damaged as they lose HP. If you gently grind your front bumper on someone's rear for a minute, your whole hood will look scuffed up and crunched in as if you'd tried to take a shortcut under a semi trailer. In GT5's damage amounts to a few big cosmetic zones, and a few key components, then it will be on par with Forza 3 (and admittedly, 1, as long as sneezing doesn't trash your alignment.)
I also wonder about F3's AI as it seems really rubber banded. In many races I'll blow by every one in the first lap, and then run another 5 laps with them 20m behind me, even if I do better or worse than the first lap. I do however MUCH prefer it to GT's now slightly enhanced slotcar AI that will take its line whether you're in the way or not. You can leave them way behind and lap them, but they have the self-preservation instinct of a bowling ball.
When it's all said and done, I think Forza 3 is much more fun. It has much more to offer as a game, where as you said, GT is an encyclopedia; GTPSP is so sterile it doesn't even feel like a game. F3 is also far better at giving you a grey area between being in and out of control. For realism, I'd say it's fighting with Need for Speed: Shift, not Gran Turismo 5, and NFS seems to be winning as far as I've played.
I got a Sony PRS-505 a while ago and one thing that surprised me is how many fonts I do see in plain text books - some from HTML, PDF, TXT, BBEB, LIT, they all seem to have a slightly different feel to them. No DRM either - well, I've never bought anything from the Sony bookstore - I have so many forms of text and comics on my PC it will be many a decade before I need to buy a DRM'ed ebook. Largely right now I'm using it to read textfiles of books I own on paper but haven't finished.
What greatly disappoints me is how many books show up as lines of text wrapping a line and a half across, then being punctuated by a one line gap between each line-and-a-half. It's not the most readable thing in the world, but there's no built in fix for it, so I'd have to fix the formatting and print it as a PDF, or mess around with autoconverting different kinds of line breaks and so on to get it to look halfway decent.
For manga though, it's slightly small, but pretty excellent. Just more black and grey rather than black and white.
To be honest, I think both sides are being pretty irrational about this lately, it's sad. What you said basically sums up the pro-change argument. The argument I've been hearing from the other side basically boils down to the idea that since some scientists said things that could be taken as a coverup, then any and all data from the last 150 years that suggests an unnatural change in climate must have all been faked.
All in all, it's an issue that needs more examination, so opponents do no more good for their cause by making fantastically overreaching assumptions than proponents do by pretending it's all decided and agreed upon and that anyone who questions their data must be on the fringe... both sides are too hard headed to reach anything like a reasonable middle ground.
Personally I'm less concerned with its elegance as a language, or what a capable programmer can do with it, and more concerned about what a malicious programmer might do - like the vast ocean of exploits for everything - not just Netscape and IE, but Firefox, Opera, Safari/OSX, Adobe Acrobat, and so on... Virtually any language will have its abuses, but I think they'd be better served by dumping Javascript and starting from scratch - it's a toss-up whether it or ActiveX is the more dangerous scripting language to allow...
True, I knew a few "anonymous cells" (4chan, 711chan, Wakachan, etc) before they ever went after CoS - they're a group in the same way mankind is a group, and have no cohesive agenda or points of common agreement. It's more like at any given time, enough people are willing to identify themselves as "anonymous" and go protesting, but anonymous is... anonymous. It is just people who have not made their identities known.
If someone booted my car and I could remove it myself, I'd simply dispose of it and say "what? I thought you already sent someone to remove it while I was out after I paid the ticket!" and leave it to them to audit and trace and sort out. They'd assume I wasn't the one to remove it.
I think the risk of damaging the wheel rims and fender, with the problems of locking a car into a place it shouldn't be in the first place is needlessly punitive, risky, and counterproductive, so I'm glad they don't use them where I live (Alberta).
This is it. Also, I've been to cons - even booths with Western-made anime-styled comics get mostly passed over. Go even more unrelated and try to promote an alternative computer OS that doesn't get the best exposure even among computer geeks, and I think this booth will be completely invisible, assuming they're allowed to exhibit there in the first place (space is usually at a premium at these things.)
But yeah, while you can run many Japanese games on Linux with enough knowhow and the right software, I don't think there's an official version of any big hits for Linux - Fate/Stay Night, Tsukihime, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, Touhou Project, etc...
If this ever happens in an OS I paid for (well... I suppose not counting the XBox 360 - maybe) then I will crusade against it to the very end. If they're just tying up the patent to keep it from happening, good for them! One more reason to support them! If they're doing it just so you have to pay royalties to them when advertising in normal programs... it's unethical, but I'd laugh anyway...
I'm thinking maybe a thumbstick the steering wheel of high-performance cars for people who just have to control everything - let the user control the distribution of braking force to each wheel... of course the onboard computer would do a better job, but it is one actual use for a joystick in a car...
A lot of people are writing this off because the lower bitrate couldn't possibly sound better. Personally I couldn't judge because I never use either codec. I did notice in my experiments with MP3 over the years though that quality is also highly dependent on the encoder. 96kps (Joint Stereo, 44.1kHz) on Fraunhofer would sound far better than 160kps on Xing (but encode in 5x the time).
Ultimately though, MP3 has become the lingua franca for digital audio, so it's more like "two formats were compared that don't play on any of my dozen or so portable players; some preferences were revealed." I have MP3s from a decade ago that still play fine now on anything with a CPU and sound output, but my Yamaha YQF files? Lost them, and I might even be hard pressed to find a player. For me, quality takes a backseat to long-term playability. Both formats have this in theory, but at the moment, they aren't even that playable in the present day.
Like all game design questions, it depends on whether or not the designer SHOULD make the game scale to you.
The World Ends With You for the DS is a great example - you can choose whatever attack types and styles suit you best. You can also turn up the difficulty to get better item drops. You basically tailor the game to your play style and change it as needed.
Touhou 6: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil on the other hand, will notice that you're doing well, and crank up the difficulty higher and higher until you die, basically only ensuring that you never see the end of the game. Brilliant, but not entirely unexpected for a game of its sort.
Very true on the selection bias thing - they're probably in 60-80% of the systems that come in. There is a mix of other brands installed though, and they haven't failed. Interesting that the two brands that DO noticably fail are one in the same though.
Yeah. Now that I'm out of school and can afford to, I buy my copies of Windows. If they charged by time period, I wouldn't be against cracking them again.
The rootkit thing is widely misunderstood, which is somewhat Sony's fault for their name branding on all their divisions...
For one, Sony BMG paid a company to implement a protection scheme on their CDs. This is kind of like if a movie studio licensed Macrovision protection and it broke someone's VCR, so everyone boycotts the studio.
Also, Sony is kind of like a single company keiretsu, so boycotting Sony Computer Entertainment Japan because Sony BMG music did something you don't like is kind of like boycotting Mitsubishi Motors because you got a Nikon camera that messed up for you. For all intents and purposes, they're different companies, and believe me, Sony is woefully bad at communicating between silos, as you see in the feature gap between portable music players and handheld game systems.
I agree. I'm a gamer and would love a free one, but if you're just going to repurpose it, then you could cheaply have a more capable, quieter, less power-hungry media centre PC that you could do more things with. These days it's probably really not practical to mod it or use as-is for non-gaming activities unless you like Netflix.
In my experience at work ordering Dell desktops and laptops, by far the most common defect is 1-3% of machines with bad RAM. Typically it's made by Hynix, occasionally Hyundai, and I've never seen other brands fail. On many occasions though, I've predicted Hynix, pulled it, and sure enough theirs was the piece causing the errors in Memtest86+...
Future Shop has done this - they're the Canadian Best Buy, though we also have Best Buy now. I bought two sets of headphones. One review that said they were great was posted. One that pointed out weaknesses and suggested that the other set - also sold there - were better never showed up.
Yes - if a news site charges for news, people will go elsewhere. If they have exclusive news no one else does... they're probably making it up, so it's not news, and is worth even less.
So really, if they want to charge for anything, they'd better find some way to add value to the service above and beyond just offering news. Perhaps non-fictional in-depth articles like Time or National Geographic...
Yeah. There are countless ways to make a point. Rather than saying a claim is bogus, they could simply say that it sounds pretty spurious, or state that the claims run contrary to general consensus. It's one thing to call someone a fraud, and very different legally to simply say that they seem suspicious.
Precisely my thoughts. They each have a monopoly on repairing their own cars - or in slightly better cases, the shop buys an expensive diagnostic tool specifically for that brand/era of car. There's no reasonable technical reason why they have to be so closed and mutually incomprehensible, so I say take them to court for monopolistic practices... unless it's legally allowed because you can buy anyone's closed black-box car...
I would have loved this in high school. Our teachers couldn't be arsed to actually teach or supervise, so we'd just have to run laps for 20 minutes straight some days while they wandered off and chatted with friends or whatever. I remember some times where I'd run so hard I could feel my teeth throbbing and hear my heartbeat in my ears while I tried not to get sick.
Incidentally, what a stupid way to teach the importance of exercise. If I wasn't into biking naturally, I'd probably have taken that as a queue to avoid exercise whenever possible since it was so hellish at school. Done right, it's actually fun and healthy...
This is great, though the link doesn't state how bright they are. It seems that lightbulb replacements lag behind the state of LED technology though - I once found an emitter array of 12 Seoul Semiconductor P4 chips that would output 2100 Lumens, I think at 12V, 1500mA. Cooling requirements weren't stated, but that's not a whole lot of power for that much light!
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You're right, and that was my first thought, but I think that trinity is the basic minimum for a strong party in a dungeon-crawler (roguelike, Diablo, WoW.) Dungeon crawlers are like you said, action games - often D&D themed, but with little roleplay.
In Ragnarok I played a thief, turned assassin, who could sneak and steal, and dish out massive melee damage to a single enemy, but get crushed by a handful, so at least I needed a tank for hectic dungeons. Then, while I had a ton of HP, I healed really slowly, so an acolyte or priest to heal and buff made me 20x as powerful overall.
I've played games like Eve Online where you don't have classes, but I find that can mess up socialization in online play because you may not know what your party needs to be effective, and you can't just say "looking for _____." Instead of "ah, a priest - are you combat or healing?" it's more like "Ok, do you have missile training? Seeking missiles? Can you use kinetic weapons? Energy based? Can you operate ECMs to disrupt weapon locks? How about mining equipment? Can you mine ice too? Do you own an industrial ship for hauling?" and so on...
He could not do it himself, as he's not a pro racer. I believe he later got someone who was, and found the same thing that most such comparisons do - that the GT time was a little bit faster than the real one because push it as you may, you don't want to die in a real car.
He actually once wrote a glowing review for the Sunday Times. They've taken it down, but this forum post mirrors it:
http://tsikot.yehey.com/forums/showthread.php?s=f010e07b0f76cff17028b036c7e7d519&t=21445
I have Forza 3 and GT5P at home. I can't take Forza's physics seriously as long as grass bogs you down like wet clay, slowing you faster than your own brakes could - and orange paint seems to have a similar, maybe even more pronounced effect. Grass stopped being a mystery substance in GT4.
I also have to wonder why I can take a car like an Exige or an R32 and just nail the handbrake once the guideline turns red, then drift all the way around a corner when I'm using a controller to drive. Any other sim would kick my ass without mercy if I tried that, and I make no claims to having that level of skill. I have all assists but ABS off, and damage modelling all the way up.
I found suspension tuning in GT to be pretty good, if a bit too technical for non-mechanics. In F3 I've yet to actually notice a difference from suspension upgrades and stiffening, but since it's affordable, I still do it.
The aerodynamics I've seen in Forza so far seem to boil down to a direct traction increase at all speeds - I won a tuned Viper with a huge spoiler, but the way the tires stick to the road, even from a standstill, you'd think it was pushing 100hp/ft-lbs. In Gran Turismo you can actually face the dilemma of braking and losing downforce vs keeping speed and downforce up as you round a corner. It'll even model the wind sound and doppler effect from a spectator's perspective.
I have screenshots I took from playing GT4 where my cars are a good 5-10 feet in the air, so they will go airborne - they just won't be doing barrel rolls. They don't fly several feet above the track as they sometimes do in F3. You can still run into the situation where you're hard on the throttle, fly over a ripple in the road, and spin the wheels so they burn out when you land and skew you to one side.
The damage model GT demonstrated looks about as good as the one that shipped with Forza 3 - which is basically the same as TOCA 3 - big chunks of the body, and a few key components have overall hit points, and look gradually more damaged as they lose HP. If you gently grind your front bumper on someone's rear for a minute, your whole hood will look scuffed up and crunched in as if you'd tried to take a shortcut under a semi trailer. In GT5's damage amounts to a few big cosmetic zones, and a few key components, then it will be on par with Forza 3 (and admittedly, 1, as long as sneezing doesn't trash your alignment.)
I also wonder about F3's AI as it seems really rubber banded. In many races I'll blow by every one in the first lap, and then run another 5 laps with them 20m behind me, even if I do better or worse than the first lap. I do however MUCH prefer it to GT's now slightly enhanced slotcar AI that will take its line whether you're in the way or not. You can leave them way behind and lap them, but they have the self-preservation instinct of a bowling ball.
When it's all said and done, I think Forza 3 is much more fun. It has much more to offer as a game, where as you said, GT is an encyclopedia; GTPSP is so sterile it doesn't even feel like a game. F3 is also far better at giving you a grey area between being in and out of control. For realism, I'd say it's fighting with Need for Speed: Shift, not Gran Turismo 5, and NFS seems to be winning as far as I've played.
I got a Sony PRS-505 a while ago and one thing that surprised me is how many fonts I do see in plain text books - some from HTML, PDF, TXT, BBEB, LIT, they all seem to have a slightly different feel to them. No DRM either - well, I've never bought anything from the Sony bookstore - I have so many forms of text and comics on my PC it will be many a decade before I need to buy a DRM'ed ebook. Largely right now I'm using it to read textfiles of books I own on paper but haven't finished.
What greatly disappoints me is how many books show up as lines of text wrapping a line and a half across, then being punctuated by a one line gap between each line-and-a-half. It's not the most readable thing in the world, but there's no built in fix for it, so I'd have to fix the formatting and print it as a PDF, or mess around with autoconverting different kinds of line breaks and so on to get it to look halfway decent.
For manga though, it's slightly small, but pretty excellent. Just more black and grey rather than black and white.
To be honest, I think both sides are being pretty irrational about this lately, it's sad. What you said basically sums up the pro-change argument. The argument I've been hearing from the other side basically boils down to the idea that since some scientists said things that could be taken as a coverup, then any and all data from the last 150 years that suggests an unnatural change in climate must have all been faked.
All in all, it's an issue that needs more examination, so opponents do no more good for their cause by making fantastically overreaching assumptions than proponents do by pretending it's all decided and agreed upon and that anyone who questions their data must be on the fringe... both sides are too hard headed to reach anything like a reasonable middle ground.
Personally I'm less concerned with its elegance as a language, or what a capable programmer can do with it, and more concerned about what a malicious programmer might do - like the vast ocean of exploits for everything - not just Netscape and IE, but Firefox, Opera, Safari/OSX, Adobe Acrobat, and so on... Virtually any language will have its abuses, but I think they'd be better served by dumping Javascript and starting from scratch - it's a toss-up whether it or ActiveX is the more dangerous scripting language to allow...
True, I knew a few "anonymous cells" (4chan, 711chan, Wakachan, etc) before they ever went after CoS - they're a group in the same way mankind is a group, and have no cohesive agenda or points of common agreement. It's more like at any given time, enough people are willing to identify themselves as "anonymous" and go protesting, but anonymous is... anonymous. It is just people who have not made their identities known.
If someone booted my car and I could remove it myself, I'd simply dispose of it and say "what? I thought you already sent someone to remove it while I was out after I paid the ticket!" and leave it to them to audit and trace and sort out. They'd assume I wasn't the one to remove it.
I think the risk of damaging the wheel rims and fender, with the problems of locking a car into a place it shouldn't be in the first place is needlessly punitive, risky, and counterproductive, so I'm glad they don't use them where I live (Alberta).
This is it. Also, I've been to cons - even booths with Western-made anime-styled comics get mostly passed over. Go even more unrelated and try to promote an alternative computer OS that doesn't get the best exposure even among computer geeks, and I think this booth will be completely invisible, assuming they're allowed to exhibit there in the first place (space is usually at a premium at these things.)
But yeah, while you can run many Japanese games on Linux with enough knowhow and the right software, I don't think there's an official version of any big hits for Linux - Fate/Stay Night, Tsukihime, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, Touhou Project, etc...
If this ever happens in an OS I paid for (well... I suppose not counting the XBox 360 - maybe) then I will crusade against it to the very end.
If they're just tying up the patent to keep it from happening, good for them! One more reason to support them!
If they're doing it just so you have to pay royalties to them when advertising in normal programs... it's unethical, but I'd laugh anyway...
I'm thinking maybe a thumbstick the steering wheel of high-performance cars for people who just have to control everything - let the user control the distribution of braking force to each wheel... of course the onboard computer would do a better job, but it is one actual use for a joystick in a car...
A lot of people are writing this off because the lower bitrate couldn't possibly sound better. Personally I couldn't judge because I never use either codec. I did notice in my experiments with MP3 over the years though that quality is also highly dependent on the encoder. 96kps (Joint Stereo, 44.1kHz) on Fraunhofer would sound far better than 160kps on Xing (but encode in 5x the time).
Ultimately though, MP3 has become the lingua franca for digital audio, so it's more like "two formats were compared that don't play on any of my dozen or so portable players; some preferences were revealed." I have MP3s from a decade ago that still play fine now on anything with a CPU and sound output, but my Yamaha YQF files? Lost them, and I might even be hard pressed to find a player. For me, quality takes a backseat to long-term playability. Both formats have this in theory, but at the moment, they aren't even that playable in the present day.
Like all game design questions, it depends on whether or not the designer SHOULD make the game scale to you.
The World Ends With You for the DS is a great example - you can choose whatever attack types and styles suit you best. You can also turn up the difficulty to get better item drops. You basically tailor the game to your play style and change it as needed.
Touhou 6: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil on the other hand, will notice that you're doing well, and crank up the difficulty higher and higher until you die, basically only ensuring that you never see the end of the game. Brilliant, but not entirely unexpected for a game of its sort.
Very true on the selection bias thing - they're probably in 60-80% of the systems that come in. There is a mix of other brands installed though, and they haven't failed.
Interesting that the two brands that DO noticably fail are one in the same though.
Yeah. Now that I'm out of school and can afford to, I buy my copies of Windows. If they charged by time period, I wouldn't be against cracking them again.
The rootkit thing is widely misunderstood, which is somewhat Sony's fault for their name branding on all their divisions...
For one, Sony BMG paid a company to implement a protection scheme on their CDs. This is kind of like if a movie studio licensed Macrovision protection and it broke someone's VCR, so everyone boycotts the studio.
Also, Sony is kind of like a single company keiretsu, so boycotting Sony Computer Entertainment Japan because Sony BMG music did something you don't like is kind of like boycotting Mitsubishi Motors because you got a Nikon camera that messed up for you. For all intents and purposes, they're different companies, and believe me, Sony is woefully bad at communicating between silos, as you see in the feature gap between portable music players and handheld game systems.
I agree. I'm a gamer and would love a free one, but if you're just going to repurpose it, then you could cheaply have a more capable, quieter, less power-hungry media centre PC that you could do more things with. These days it's probably really not practical to mod it or use as-is for non-gaming activities unless you like Netflix.
In my experience at work ordering Dell desktops and laptops, by far the most common defect is 1-3% of machines with bad RAM. Typically it's made by Hynix, occasionally Hyundai, and I've never seen other brands fail. On many occasions though, I've predicted Hynix, pulled it, and sure enough theirs was the piece causing the errors in Memtest86+...
Future Shop has done this - they're the Canadian Best Buy, though we also have Best Buy now.
I bought two sets of headphones. One review that said they were great was posted. One that pointed out weaknesses and suggested that the other set - also sold there - were better never showed up.
In case some haven't heard of it, Montreal cops were caught red-handed doing exactly that.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/story/2007/08/23/police-montebello.html
Yes - if a news site charges for news, people will go elsewhere. If they have exclusive news no one else does... they're probably making it up, so it's not news, and is worth even less.
So really, if they want to charge for anything, they'd better find some way to add value to the service above and beyond just offering news. Perhaps non-fictional in-depth articles like Time or National Geographic...
Yeah. There are countless ways to make a point. Rather than saying a claim is bogus, they could simply say that it sounds pretty spurious, or state that the claims run contrary to general consensus. It's one thing to call someone a fraud, and very different legally to simply say that they seem suspicious.
Precisely my thoughts. They each have a monopoly on repairing their own cars - or in slightly better cases, the shop buys an expensive diagnostic tool specifically for that brand/era of car. There's no reasonable technical reason why they have to be so closed and mutually incomprehensible, so I say take them to court for monopolistic practices... unless it's legally allowed because you can buy anyone's closed black-box car...
I would have loved this in high school. Our teachers couldn't be arsed to actually teach or supervise, so we'd just have to run laps for 20 minutes straight some days while they wandered off and chatted with friends or whatever. I remember some times where I'd run so hard I could feel my teeth throbbing and hear my heartbeat in my ears while I tried not to get sick.
Incidentally, what a stupid way to teach the importance of exercise. If I wasn't into biking naturally, I'd probably have taken that as a queue to avoid exercise whenever possible since it was so hellish at school. Done right, it's actually fun and healthy...
This is great, though the link doesn't state how bright they are. It seems that lightbulb replacements lag behind the state of LED technology though - I once found an emitter array of 12 Seoul Semiconductor P4 chips that would output 2100 Lumens, I think at 12V, 1500mA. Cooling requirements weren't stated, but that's not a whole lot of power for that much light!