"Initial systems: However, all is not lost, if you excuse the pun. The system used to demonstrate the game to us today was an Athlon 64 3800+ with 2GB of RAM and a GeForce 6800GT - high end for many people, but not stratospheric. If you needed further proof, the 1024x768 2xAA screenshots featured in this article were taken on a 1.6Ghz Centrino notebook with only 1GB of RAM and an aging 128MB FireGL graphics card. True, it ran at 10FPS at High Detail, but it was playable enough to appreciate the overall achievement."
Note that this is for the Lost Coast level - which is pretty much a playable tech demo - not the expansion.
I agree the parent poster made a silly argument but I guess I'm wondering why you felt compelled to post at all. You didn't say "I wish Valve supported Macs and I won't be playing Valve games until they do" or something similar. The PC games market is dominated by the Windows platform and for profits sake that's where PC game developers do most of their business. x86 Linux users can run a lot of Windows games through Cedega with varying degrees of success. Mac users have to deal with a lower amount of game releases and a longer time to market. I think Blizzard is about the only ones that develop internally for Mac.
Re:No Thanks... I will just settle for my...
on
Review: Nintendogs
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· Score: 1
Once you get the level 50, the only thing there is to do from there is to roll up a new character and start over.
What? You don't consider running the Hamidon raid over and over again to be something to do?
(OK, so neither do I)
I think City of Villains should add additional higher end options with the base building, raiding and PVP zones. It remains to be seen however. I don't think World of Warcraft has a great approach for high end content either. The necessity to run the same dungeons over and over again to get your uber loot is annoying. The high end crafting and faction stuff is even more repetitive (i.e. running a quest over 800 times so you can get a purple striped cat mount).
Blasters were not the only ones to get big changes. Controllers for example had changes which siginificantly affect their play style. Controllers can no longer have multiple pets out, their area of effect holds last half as long and take twice as long to "cooldown" and damage dealt by controllers to targets that are held has been increased. Other classes have also had big changes and there are global changes to character defense levels and strength of PVE bad guys. There is a lot of speculation that these broad level changes coming after the game has been out for over a year, are to help balance the game in relation to the upcoming City of Villains. City of Villains will offer new character classes (although utilizing some of the same power sets) and has a large PVP and base raiding component.
In my world, we pretend to be doing real work, that our bosses want the company to succeed and that our SDLC makes sense.
And is it any wonder that so many of our fantasy games revolve around developing powers and abilities so that we can kill the bosses and take their loot?
And someday 100s of years in the future archaeologists will dig it up. Do you think they will be able to create a plausible theory representing the E.T. cartridges as religious objects?
"I know Democrats want to wash their hands of the whole Iraq war, but 110 Democrat Senators and Representatives voted to allow the war."
Sure did. Because politically it was the safest move. Speak out against the war get branded "unpatriotic". Vote for the war and either you look good if the war is a success, or you get to shit on the Republicans if the war fails by stating that Mr. President lied.
The only thing it preempted was an Allied (predominantly U.S.) invasion of Japan. The Japanese were not about to invade the U.S. at that point in the war.
While I do run AV software on my Windows game box, I have never had a virus infection at home because I follow safe practices as you outlined in your post. Generally speaking that will keep you in good shape, provided you have a firewall and run the Windows patches as they are released. Avoiding IE and using an alternative browser can help in avoiding those viruses that spread over the web via IE exploits.
"I know you are being tongue in cheek, but there is an error in thinking if you cure the symptom rather than the root cause. If you can't trust your partners to be safe, why don't you consider finding safe partners? In this regard, Microsoft is like the town *****."
Yeah, I am aware of this. Unfortunately, not being the owner of the company I work at - I can't just dictate that we move the entire staff to OSX or Linux or BSD. And even if I could, from a business standpoint there are a lot of business applications in the small/medium business space that have no off the shelf equivalents in the open source world. And believe me I have tried. All of our internal network monitoring and security runs on BSD servers. All of our web servers WERE running on Linux and BSD until the President's nephew got the job to do the company websites. Of course the nephew is a.Net guy, and wham - there went Linux. So I'm more like the parent of randy teenagers who has to make sure that they are protected when they inevitably hook up with the town whore.
"To illustrate, ask yourself this question: why do most corporate computer users have permissions on their computer to download and execute arbitrary programs?"
Most likely because either:
1. The IT department is too stupid to lock down the computers.
or
2. They need to run some stupid Windows application that requires the user be an administrator.
The second option is all to common even now, and one of the major problems with desktop security in Windows.
Yeah, I'm taking all my anti-virus software off the computers right now. I don't know why I ever though it was useful anyway. It's more efficient to deal with the infections as they come in then it is to try to prevent it. I'm gonna stop using condoms too while I'm at it.
Absolutely. The prevention of discrimination based on religious belief was very important to many of the colonists who had left their countries due in order to be able to worship as they saw fit. The US hasn't always been the best at upholding this freedom of religion, as you can see by how the Mormons were treated. People would argue the same about the Branch-Davidians. I guess it's more freedom to worship how you see fit, so long as it's not too weird or cultish.
Myth was a fantasy RTS. Yes is was a campaign driven one that was not economically driven, but it was an RTS not a Diablo style game. And yes it was a great game.
Diablo built on the game structure outlined by much, much earlier games such as Rogue, Hack, Nethack, Larn, Angband, Sword of Fargoal etc. Now these were all turn based, but there were a couple of early efforts to bring this type of game to a more action oriented real time style of play. The most famous is of course the arcade game Gauntlet, which stripped out almost all of the little details of the previous game, focusing instead on a heavily action oriented arcade game play. Another early attempt that comes to mind, is the game Gateway to Apshai. This was a real time dungeon crawler that built on Epyx's Temple of Apshai series. Released for the Colecovision and Commodore 64, it was closer to the traditional Rogue style of gameplay than Gauntlet, but was played with a joystick in real time.
Diablo 2 is based on pre-rendered bitmap graphics and sprites. Only some of the special effects take advantage of 3D cards. What this means is that the low res graphics would not scale up well to a different resolution.
When me and my friend started playing DS 1 we were pretty excited. It seemed really cool at first. Shortly after that the boring-ness set in. DS 1 is one of a handful of games I have actually fallen asleep while playing. I really WANTED to enjoy the game as I am a big fan of the genre, having spent countless hours with games such as Sword of Fargoal, Rogue, Diablo and Neverwinter Nights.
Well, games are fun, fun is play, play = stress relief. No big science there. Plenty of people use gaming (not just videogames) as a stress reliever. In a sense this is an escape, you are taking your mind off of the object of stress, perhaps as a rough day at work. We all have day to day stress of one type or another and "serious work", whether you are a baby or an adult. Using entertainment as an escape to get your mind off of stressful events or circumstances, is normal. It's part of what play is about.
Hmmm. I guess his guild is raiding Molten Core.:D Honestly in WoW, you don't need to play this way until you get the stupid insanely rough end game. I don't mind 2 hours, or even 4 hours of gaming, but 5+ starts to put my ass to sleep and make me irritable. The gameplay curve is so whacked in WoW, you basically go from everything being accessible and doable without excessive time commitment smack into endless repitition and huge time commitment to make a trivial progression. I have a few in game guildies that were pretty die hard like that over the summer, but now they are back in school and can't do it anymore. To be honest when I was a kid on summer break I would put crazy hours into RPGs such as Ultima and the like. I would probably do the same with WoW if I were 13 or 14 today (discovered girls at 15, RPG use declined massively). But to do it for months on end just starts becoming work. Even more so if you have in game responsibilities to guild mates. After I hit 60 playing casually that's when I just decided those last parts of the game aren't for me, and too bad, I'll never get to see them but who really cares because the rewards are minimal for the effort required
Slashdot Mirror
"Initial systems: However, all is not lost, if you excuse the pun. The system used to demonstrate the game to us today was an Athlon 64 3800+ with 2GB of RAM and a GeForce 6800GT - high end for many people, but not stratospheric. If you needed further proof, the 1024x768 2xAA screenshots featured in this article were taken on a 1.6Ghz Centrino notebook with only 1GB of RAM and an aging 128MB FireGL graphics card. True, it ran at 10FPS at High Detail, but it was playable enough to appreciate the overall achievement."
Note that this is for the Lost Coast level - which is pretty much a playable tech demo - not the expansion.
I agree the parent poster made a silly argument but I guess I'm wondering why you felt compelled to post at all. You didn't say "I wish Valve supported Macs and I won't be playing Valve games until they do" or something similar.
The PC games market is dominated by the Windows platform and for profits sake that's where PC game developers do most of their business. x86 Linux users can run a lot of Windows games through Cedega with varying degrees of success. Mac users have to deal with a lower amount of game releases and a longer time to market. I think Blizzard is about the only ones that develop internally for Mac.
And I'll stick with my Mr. T Chia Pet.
"Scott McNealy is going to make Dell his bitch"
Worked well for John Romero, I'm sure it would work great for Sun.
I'm just surprised they didn't call the server line "Xtreeeme64".
Once you get the level 50, the only thing there is to do from there is to roll up a new character and start over.
What? You don't consider running the Hamidon raid over and over again to be something to do?
(OK, so neither do I)
I think City of Villains should add additional higher end options with the base building, raiding and PVP zones. It remains to be seen however.
I don't think World of Warcraft has a great approach for high end content either. The necessity to run the same dungeons over and over again to get your uber loot is annoying. The high end crafting and faction stuff is even more repetitive (i.e. running a quest over 800 times so you can get a purple striped cat mount).
Blasters were not the only ones to get big changes.
Controllers for example had changes which siginificantly affect their play style. Controllers can no longer have multiple pets out, their area of effect holds last half as long and take twice as long to "cooldown" and damage dealt by controllers to targets that are held has been increased.
Other classes have also had big changes and there are global changes to character defense levels and strength of PVE bad guys.
There is a lot of speculation that these broad level changes coming after the game has been out for over a year, are to help balance the game in relation to the upcoming City of Villains. City of Villains will offer new character classes (although utilizing some of the same power sets) and has a large PVP and base raiding component.
Come man! No way could Juggernaut defeat Hulk. The Hulk would just rip his stupid helmet off.
(I keed)
In my world, we pretend to be doing real work, that our bosses want the company to succeed and that our SDLC makes sense.
And is it any wonder that so many of our fantasy games revolve around developing powers and abilities so that we can kill the bosses and take their loot?
And someday 100s of years in the future archaeologists will dig it up. Do you think they will be able to create a plausible theory representing the E.T. cartridges as religious objects?
"I know Democrats want to wash their hands of the whole Iraq war, but 110 Democrat Senators and Representatives voted to allow the war."
Sure did. Because politically it was the safest move. Speak out against the war get branded "unpatriotic". Vote for the war and either you look good if the war is a success, or you get to shit on the Republicans if the war fails by stating that Mr. President lied.
The only thing it preempted was an Allied (predominantly U.S.) invasion of Japan. The Japanese were not about to invade the U.S. at that point in the war.
Agreed. It was just a joke. :D
While I do run AV software on my Windows game box, I have never had a virus infection at home because I follow safe practices as you outlined in your post. Generally speaking that will keep you in good shape, provided you have a firewall and run the Windows patches as they are released. Avoiding IE and using an alternative browser can help in avoiding those viruses that spread over the web via IE exploits.
"I know you are being tongue in cheek, but there is an error in thinking if you cure the symptom rather than the root cause. If you can't trust your partners to be safe, why don't you consider finding safe partners? In this regard, Microsoft is like the town *****."
.Net guy, and wham - there went Linux.
Yeah, I am aware of this. Unfortunately, not being the owner of the company I work at - I can't just dictate that we move the entire staff to OSX or Linux or BSD. And even if I could, from a business standpoint there are a lot of business applications in the small/medium business space that have no off the shelf equivalents in the open source world.
And believe me I have tried. All of our internal network monitoring and security runs on BSD servers. All of our web servers WERE running on Linux and BSD until the President's nephew got the job to do the company websites. Of course the nephew is a
So I'm more like the parent of randy teenagers who has to make sure that they are protected when they inevitably hook up with the town whore.
"To illustrate, ask yourself this question: why do most corporate computer users have permissions on their computer to download and execute arbitrary programs?"
Most likely because either:
1. The IT department is too stupid to lock down the computers.
or
2. They need to run some stupid Windows application that requires the user be an administrator.
The second option is all to common even now, and one of the major problems with desktop security in Windows.
Yeah, I'm taking all my anti-virus software off the computers right now. I don't know why I ever though it was useful anyway. It's more efficient to deal with the infections as they come in then it is to try to prevent it.
I'm gonna stop using condoms too while I'm at it.
I liked the inclusion of the old Pirates Gold game in the special edition. It was cool to have a little bit of nostalgic game history in the box.
Absolutely. The prevention of discrimination based on religious belief was very important to many of the colonists who had left their countries due in order to be able to worship as they saw fit.
The US hasn't always been the best at upholding this freedom of religion, as you can see by how the Mormons were treated. People would argue the same about the Branch-Davidians. I guess it's more freedom to worship how you see fit, so long as it's not too weird or cultish.
Myth was a fantasy RTS. Yes is was a campaign driven one that was not economically driven, but it was an RTS not a Diablo style game.
And yes it was a great game.
Diablo built on the game structure outlined by much, much earlier games such as Rogue, Hack, Nethack, Larn, Angband, Sword of Fargoal etc. Now these were all turn based, but there were a couple of early efforts to bring this type of game to a more action oriented real time style of play. The most famous is of course the arcade game Gauntlet, which stripped out almost all of the little details of the previous game, focusing instead on a heavily action oriented arcade game play.
Another early attempt that comes to mind, is the game Gateway to Apshai. This was a real time dungeon crawler that built on Epyx's Temple of Apshai series. Released for the Colecovision and Commodore 64, it was closer to the traditional Rogue style of gameplay than Gauntlet, but was played with a joystick in real time.
Diablo 2 is based on pre-rendered bitmap graphics and sprites. Only some of the special effects take advantage of 3D cards. What this means is that the low res graphics would not scale up well to a different resolution.
When me and my friend started playing DS 1 we were pretty excited. It seemed really cool at first. Shortly after that the boring-ness set in.
DS 1 is one of a handful of games I have actually fallen asleep while playing.
I really WANTED to enjoy the game as I am a big fan of the genre, having spent countless hours with games such as Sword of Fargoal, Rogue, Diablo and Neverwinter Nights.
Atuk zug zug Lana!
Well, games are fun, fun is play, play = stress relief. No big science there. Plenty of people use gaming (not just videogames) as a stress reliever. In a sense this is an escape, you are taking your mind off of the object of stress, perhaps as a rough day at work.
We all have day to day stress of one type or another and "serious work", whether you are a baby or an adult. Using entertainment as an escape to get your mind off of stressful events or circumstances, is normal. It's part of what play is about.
Hmmm. I guess his guild is raiding Molten Core. :D
Honestly in WoW, you don't need to play this way until you get the stupid insanely rough end game.
I don't mind 2 hours, or even 4 hours of gaming, but 5+ starts to put my ass to sleep and make me irritable. The gameplay curve is so whacked in WoW, you basically go from everything being accessible and doable without excessive time commitment smack into endless repitition and huge time commitment to make a trivial progression.
I have a few in game guildies that were pretty die hard like that over the summer, but now they are back in school and can't do it anymore. To be honest when I was a kid on summer break I would put crazy hours into RPGs such as Ultima and the like. I would probably do the same with WoW if I were 13 or 14 today (discovered girls at 15, RPG use declined massively). But to do it for months on end just starts becoming work. Even more so if you have in game responsibilities to guild mates. After I hit 60 playing casually that's when I just decided those last parts of the game aren't for me, and too bad, I'll never get to see them but who really cares because the rewards are minimal for the effort required