The only people I hear talking on live are kids, but myself and the other adult gamers I know only break out our headsets if we're grouped and working as a team. I suspect that many other adults are the same way. I have no problem muting the obnoxious kids and getting my game on. Though I have no hard data to back that up, I'd definitely be willing to form it into a hypothesis and collect some data (assuming I had time for that sort of thing).
Amusing anecdote: I remember playing one game once, where two kids were talking, one sounded about high school age, the other probably junior high. The Junior high kid had to leave the game for a moment, his mother had some chores for him. His mother took over the controller and headset, apparently the high school kid was a neighbor of theirs so the conversation continued. The mother complained that "billy" didn't have any of the guns she liked and then proceeded to kick all of our asses anyway.
I actually agree with your sentiment, just thought I'd point out the one game out of the three you mentioned that still gets some love in case you wanted to revisit it, or as gleaned from previous postings of yours, share it with your family (assuming you hadn't already).
I haven't tried Win 8 at all, aside from demos at PC stores. I hate the interface (I'm someone who actually likes the ribbon interface in recent iterations of Office) and am leery to try it out. Win7 reminds me a lot of WinXP in terms of stability and BC so I'm quite happy with it. I haven't tried any mid to late 90's games that aren't available for sale on Steam or GoG though (the ones I do own through those services all run great though).
That is one thing that's always bugged me about games compared to other media. Books can easily be reprinted or digitized, music and movies and can easily stored and moved from format to format, but games often require specific hardware, specific software or some workaround to those requirements, which requires a great deal of effort be put in to preserve them for future generations. Even DosBox or a future "Win9XBox" would need someone maintaining the codebase for future iterations of Hardware and OS that may not readily support old versions.
I definitely feel that video games are art, are part of our culture, our heritage and need to be preserved. Doom may not win any awards for storytelling, but it's part of our history, and not just the history of gamers. Doom has been blamed for shootings, it prompted a movie, it's been referenced, it's been copied, it spawned new ways to interact socially. Hell, I've got friends that I only know because of Doom and it's not the only game I can claim that for. Much of the same can be said about many other games out there.
100 years ago, Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" was debuted, and whatever the actual cause, prompted violence from the audience. Some fault the music, some fault the choreography, some just say it was an odd fluke. Regardless of the cause, I can take this bit of history as a story I read about. I can then go a step further and listen to the actual music which has been preserved in multiple forms. Though the original choreography has been lost to time, we (as a society) have managed to piece together what we could of it as best we can from various notes and sketches that were discovered. This is a piece of our history and we can still experience much of it. Why should video games be any different?
I never did homework until I got to college. Especially Math homework. I had D overall averages in most of my Math courses, I never did the homework, never showed my work on the tests, never picked up a calculator, had an A test average. My stepmother was a Math teacher and assumed I was cheating, especially after talking to my teachers. So she sat me down one night and forced me to do my homework, and I was going to do it right there at the table in front of her. She was shocked when 15 minutes later I was done and had a page full of "Question number: Answer". Fuck, high school Math was easy.
It was until I started taking college level Math that I learned the value of homework and showing your work step by step. Sure I still come across a few problems in the homework that I can look at and solve without picking up a pencil, but those are usually only a handful of the problems in the section (the ones that are intentionally simple).
I was going to make a joke about class warfare, and how that could be used to inhibit class mobility. Then I realized it would probably be taken seriously and turn into a flame war. Probably will anyway.
I love classes like this. It takes the emphasis away from rote memorization and places it on your ability to reason through a problem. Of course it also means that tests need to be written with this in mind.
The only time anything needs to be memorized is if there is a definite need to be able to recall that information without referencing it.
I've had good textbooks and bad textbooks. If the teacher is good, there is no need for me to open the textbook other than for homework. If the teacher is bad, then I usually need to spend more time reading the book in addition to any homework. Given that all my classes recently have been on-line, the textbook gets relied on more. Bad textbooks really hurt in this case as the teacher is typically less accessible (even if they are awesome). Various on-line resources can help, but sometimes a textbook can be so bad that it's hard to follow those resources.
I just finished a Math course, ended up with an A in it, though my understanding of the material is rather weak (compared to how I normally fare in Math courses). The textbook used for the course was horrible, poor explanations, non-standard terminology and notation, bizarre order of material presentation.
In most classes, if I struggle with a particular concept, I look for an appropriate on-line lecture (I typically like the MIT ones, though Khan Academy has been good to me as well) and fill in the gaps. Sometimes this isn't the textbooks fault, some concepts are just easier to get with a live explanation and demonstration. In this case, it was entirely the textbooks fault, in fact it was so bad that even the on-line lectures were ineffective. Why? Since the book used non-standard terminology and didn't follow the order of presentation used by most other references I looked to, I ended up having to go back and watch multiple lectures just to get a foundation for the lecture I needed. If I was a full-time student this wouldn't really be an issue for me, but as a part-time student with a demanding job and family, I have to balance school with everything else and unfortunately, I just didn't have the time to put in that extra effort. Of course, I shouldn't have had to in the first place since I am paying the school to teach me.
No wonder they complain, an English teacher using "there" instead of "their"?;)
Most of my classes are on-line, but I occasionally I get the opportunity to take a class in a classroom based setting. I took the standard freshman English/Writing course about 2 years ago. The class was a mix of students like myself (adult, full time job, part time student) and recently out of high school students. Out of both groups I saw quite a bit of the attitude you stated (granted not from everyone). The fun part about it though was that the teacher liked class discussion and peer review of our work, so at least once a week we were swapping drafts and providing constructive criticism to each other.
A few things I got out of the peer review:
1. Relative to my peers in that class, I am a much better writer than I thought I was. Note: I am not trying to say I was the best in the class or anything, I've never considered myself to be a good writer, but contrasting my work against quite a few of the other students gave me some confidence in my abilities. Additionally the teacher went out of her way to e-mail me and thank me for actually submitting something worth reading, which was a nice ego-boost if a little unprofessional on her part.
2. The ones doing the complaining about not needing the course were typically the worst writers in the class. I don't even think they were half-assing it. Some of that stuff was literally painful to read!
Then again, I approach every class with an open mind, even if I feel I don't need the course. Even if I have to repeat a course (not every credit is accepted everywhere) I generally find it to be worthwhile as it lets me improve and dig a little deeper.
Holy Crap how was I not aware of X3. It's installed on my freakin laptop! Must have grabbed it on a steam sale while drunk. I really should poke my head out of the window from time to time ^_^
Actually Square still patches and maintains FF VII and it runs awesome under current versions of windows, I even paid the $10 for the download from their site since I lost my original discs a long time ago. You can even run it at a modern resolution (granted this only affects the 3d models, which are still insanely low polycount, all the 2d work is still low res). There is even a mod community that has sprung up with high res textures and high poly models.
I have it installed on all of my machines currently.
I suppose if I wasn't working on a degree part-time while working full-time I would probably agree with that statement. Once I'm finished with school I'll probably end up spending more time with the more complex games I own. A typical modern "AAA" title will occupy only an hour or so of my time on a given evening, anything more complicated will cause me to lose sleep, so I typically avoid.
I think it was Al Lowe who stated that there is a lot of money in hint books...
DLC/DRM it's always been there, the form just keeps changing.... (I had a game in the late 80's where if you tried to circumvent the copy protection on the disks, it "nuked" the disks and rendered the game unplayable, as a child with divorced parents, carrying a box of disks between houses was a major pain the ass - note that this type of copy protection also prevented HDD installs).
Of course now as an adult I have a binder of console games I typically bring with me when I travel (though next trip will probably be laptop only).
I've heard good things about Freespace, but haven't gotten around to trying it yet. I was looking at Strike Suit Zero, but it seems a bit more arcade style than what I'd like. I am genuinely looking forward to Star Citizen and hopefully it will be great. I tried out Star Conflict recently, but it felt more like a typical shooter but in space than anything else.
A multiplayer space combat sim with X-wing styled mechanics and a persistent objective based battle space similar to Planetside 2 would be awesome. Co-op against large targets, escort missions, etc would also be freakin awesome. Start Citizen sounds like it might meet some of this, and hopefully it will and well.
Granted I haven't played Master of Orion or Master of Magic, so I can't compare anything to them, Civ 5 has become my favorite in the Civ series. Though I think a lot of that has to do with the transition to hex tiles and the inability to stack military units. The city-states also add some variety, though they do get annoying after awhile. Granted I pretty much only play against the PC (hard to find someone willing to slug it out for hours in Civ), but quite a few of my Civ 5 games have been more memorable than any Civ I've built over the previous versions. I probably wont forget any time soon the game where I set up a highly effective Naval blockade, captured almost all of the important late game resources and then sat back and watched as my opponent broke his economy trying to keep up with me. Initially I had been completely peaceful, almost no military, my opponent declared war and then ended up begging for peace as I kicked my production into overdrive. That style of play never would have worked in the previous games with the over reliance on stacks of doom.
Part of me does miss the games that required reading a 100 page manual, and part of me doesn't. It's a lot easier to find the time for that when you're 12 than it is in your 30's.
so I just did some googling, apparently in the original DOS version of Zak, the mouse is by default disabled and you have to enable it by either pressing "Ctrl-M" or "Shift-M" (depending on which link from the search results you get your info from).
I can't remember if I was able to use a mouse when playing it as a child (PC version). I only remember recently attempting to play it in Dosbox and the mouse was a no go. Granted I also didn't put forth much effort to see if there was a solution and just assumed it was keyboard only.
Slashdot Mirror
It also wouldn't surprise me.
In this day and age it was probably youtube videos as opposed to monkey sex in the broom closets. But yeah, same deal.
Fuck blogs. We don't need any more of those.
The only people I hear talking on live are kids, but myself and the other adult gamers I know only break out our headsets if we're grouped and working as a team. I suspect that many other adults are the same way. I have no problem muting the obnoxious kids and getting my game on. Though I have no hard data to back that up, I'd definitely be willing to form it into a hypothesis and collect some data (assuming I had time for that sort of thing).
Amusing anecdote:
I remember playing one game once, where two kids were talking, one sounded about high school age, the other probably junior high. The Junior high kid had to leave the game for a moment, his mother had some chores for him. His mother took over the controller and headset, apparently the high school kid was a neighbor of theirs so the conversation continued. The mother complained that "billy" didn't have any of the guns she liked and then proceeded to kick all of our asses anyway.
I actually agree with your sentiment, just thought I'd point out the one game out of the three you mentioned that still gets some love in case you wanted to revisit it, or as gleaned from previous postings of yours, share it with your family (assuming you hadn't already).
I haven't tried Win 8 at all, aside from demos at PC stores. I hate the interface (I'm someone who actually likes the ribbon interface in recent iterations of Office) and am leery to try it out. Win7 reminds me a lot of WinXP in terms of stability and BC so I'm quite happy with it. I haven't tried any mid to late 90's games that aren't available for sale on Steam or GoG though (the ones I do own through those services all run great though).
That is one thing that's always bugged me about games compared to other media. Books can easily be reprinted or digitized, music and movies and can easily stored and moved from format to format, but games often require specific hardware, specific software or some workaround to those requirements, which requires a great deal of effort be put in to preserve them for future generations. Even DosBox or a future "Win9XBox" would need someone maintaining the codebase for future iterations of Hardware and OS that may not readily support old versions.
I definitely feel that video games are art, are part of our culture, our heritage and need to be preserved. Doom may not win any awards for storytelling, but it's part of our history, and not just the history of gamers. Doom has been blamed for shootings, it prompted a movie, it's been referenced, it's been copied, it spawned new ways to interact socially. Hell, I've got friends that I only know because of Doom and it's not the only game I can claim that for. Much of the same can be said about many other games out there.
100 years ago, Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" was debuted, and whatever the actual cause, prompted violence from the audience. Some fault the music, some fault the choreography, some just say it was an odd fluke. Regardless of the cause, I can take this bit of history as a story I read about. I can then go a step further and listen to the actual music which has been preserved in multiple forms. Though the original choreography has been lost to time, we (as a society) have managed to piece together what we could of it as best we can from various notes and sketches that were discovered. This is a piece of our history and we can still experience much of it. Why should video games be any different?
I'm fairly certain Max Payne 3 has officially taken the crown from the Metal Gear Solid series in that regard.
I never did homework until I got to college. Especially Math homework. I had D overall averages in most of my Math courses, I never did the homework, never showed my work on the tests, never picked up a calculator, had an A test average. My stepmother was a Math teacher and assumed I was cheating, especially after talking to my teachers. So she sat me down one night and forced me to do my homework, and I was going to do it right there at the table in front of her. She was shocked when 15 minutes later I was done and had a page full of "Question number: Answer". Fuck, high school Math was easy.
It was until I started taking college level Math that I learned the value of homework and showing your work step by step. Sure I still come across a few problems in the homework that I can look at and solve without picking up a pencil, but those are usually only a handful of the problems in the section (the ones that are intentionally simple).
I was going to make a joke about class warfare, and how that could be used to inhibit class mobility. Then I realized it would probably be taken seriously and turn into a flame war. Probably will anyway.
I love classes like this. It takes the emphasis away from rote memorization and places it on your ability to reason through a problem. Of course it also means that tests need to be written with this in mind.
The only time anything needs to be memorized is if there is a definite need to be able to recall that information without referencing it.
I've had good textbooks and bad textbooks. If the teacher is good, there is no need for me to open the textbook other than for homework. If the teacher is bad, then I usually need to spend more time reading the book in addition to any homework. Given that all my classes recently have been on-line, the textbook gets relied on more. Bad textbooks really hurt in this case as the teacher is typically less accessible (even if they are awesome). Various on-line resources can help, but sometimes a textbook can be so bad that it's hard to follow those resources.
I just finished a Math course, ended up with an A in it, though my understanding of the material is rather weak (compared to how I normally fare in Math courses). The textbook used for the course was horrible, poor explanations, non-standard terminology and notation, bizarre order of material presentation.
In most classes, if I struggle with a particular concept, I look for an appropriate on-line lecture (I typically like the MIT ones, though Khan Academy has been good to me as well) and fill in the gaps. Sometimes this isn't the textbooks fault, some concepts are just easier to get with a live explanation and demonstration. In this case, it was entirely the textbooks fault, in fact it was so bad that even the on-line lectures were ineffective. Why? Since the book used non-standard terminology and didn't follow the order of presentation used by most other references I looked to, I ended up having to go back and watch multiple lectures just to get a foundation for the lecture I needed. If I was a full-time student this wouldn't really be an issue for me, but as a part-time student with a demanding job and family, I have to balance school with everything else and unfortunately, I just didn't have the time to put in that extra effort. Of course, I shouldn't have had to in the first place since I am paying the school to teach me.
No wonder they complain, an English teacher using "there" instead of "their"? ;)
Most of my classes are on-line, but I occasionally I get the opportunity to take a class in a classroom based setting. I took the standard freshman English/Writing course about 2 years ago. The class was a mix of students like myself (adult, full time job, part time student) and recently out of high school students. Out of both groups I saw quite a bit of the attitude you stated (granted not from everyone). The fun part about it though was that the teacher liked class discussion and peer review of our work, so at least once a week we were swapping drafts and providing constructive criticism to each other.
A few things I got out of the peer review:
1. Relative to my peers in that class, I am a much better writer than I thought I was. Note: I am not trying to say I was the best in the class or anything, I've never considered myself to be a good writer, but contrasting my work against quite a few of the other students gave me some confidence in my abilities. Additionally the teacher went out of her way to e-mail me and thank me for actually submitting something worth reading, which was a nice ego-boost if a little unprofessional on her part.
2. The ones doing the complaining about not needing the course were typically the worst writers in the class. I don't even think they were half-assing it. Some of that stuff was literally painful to read!
Then again, I approach every class with an open mind, even if I feel I don't need the course. Even if I have to repeat a course (not every credit is accepted everywhere) I generally find it to be worthwhile as it lets me improve and dig a little deeper.
Holy Crap how was I not aware of X3. It's installed on my freakin laptop! Must have grabbed it on a steam sale while drunk. I really should poke my head out of the window from time to time ^_^
Well, I now know how I'm spending my weekend.
Minor correction:
Fans patched the original disc based version to run on modern hardware.
Square published a re-release of the game retooled to run on modern hardware.
The latter is what I currently have installed and not sure if the existing mods would work with it, though haven't tried either.
Actually Square still patches and maintains FF VII and it runs awesome under current versions of windows, I even paid the $10 for the download from their site since I lost my original discs a long time ago. You can even run it at a modern resolution (granted this only affects the 3d models, which are still insanely low polycount, all the 2d work is still low res). There is even a mod community that has sprung up with high res textures and high poly models.
I have it installed on all of my machines currently.
I suppose if I wasn't working on a degree part-time while working full-time I would probably agree with that statement. Once I'm finished with school I'll probably end up spending more time with the more complex games I own. A typical modern "AAA" title will occupy only an hour or so of my time on a given evening, anything more complicated will cause me to lose sleep, so I typically avoid.
I think it was Al Lowe who stated that there is a lot of money in hint books...
DLC/DRM it's always been there, the form just keeps changing.... (I had a game in the late 80's where if you tried to circumvent the copy protection on the disks, it "nuked" the disks and rendered the game unplayable, as a child with divorced parents, carrying a box of disks between houses was a major pain the ass - note that this type of copy protection also prevented HDD installs).
Of course now as an adult I have a binder of console games I typically bring with me when I travel (though next trip will probably be laptop only).
I've heard good things about Freespace, but haven't gotten around to trying it yet. I was looking at Strike Suit Zero, but it seems a bit more arcade style than what I'd like. I am genuinely looking forward to Star Citizen and hopefully it will be great. I tried out Star Conflict recently, but it felt more like a typical shooter but in space than anything else.
A multiplayer space combat sim with X-wing styled mechanics and a persistent objective based battle space similar to Planetside 2 would be awesome. Co-op against large targets, escort missions, etc would also be freakin awesome. Start Citizen sounds like it might meet some of this, and hopefully it will and well.
Granted I haven't played Master of Orion or Master of Magic, so I can't compare anything to them, Civ 5 has become my favorite in the Civ series. Though I think a lot of that has to do with the transition to hex tiles and the inability to stack military units. The city-states also add some variety, though they do get annoying after awhile. Granted I pretty much only play against the PC (hard to find someone willing to slug it out for hours in Civ), but quite a few of my Civ 5 games have been more memorable than any Civ I've built over the previous versions. I probably wont forget any time soon the game where I set up a highly effective Naval blockade, captured almost all of the important late game resources and then sat back and watched as my opponent broke his economy trying to keep up with me. Initially I had been completely peaceful, almost no military, my opponent declared war and then ended up begging for peace as I kicked my production into overdrive. That style of play never would have worked in the previous games with the over reliance on stacks of doom.
Part of me does miss the games that required reading a 100 page manual, and part of me doesn't. It's a lot easier to find the time for that when you're 12 than it is in your 30's.
Wishing I had mod points - and hadn't already posted.
My first modem was 300 baud. The joy of downloading a walkthrough slower than I could read it.
Assuming I didn't get a busy signal when dialing the BBS....
I'm sorry, but you pressed 'B'. Game Over. Would you like to reload from the last checkpoint?
I'm shocked I still remember what TSR stands for.
I'm pretty sure I had more custom boot disks than I had game disks.
I'm also glad those days are long long past.
Aha!
so I just did some googling, apparently in the original DOS version of Zak, the mouse is by default disabled and you have to enable it by either pressing "Ctrl-M" or "Shift-M" (depending on which link from the search results you get your info from).
I can't remember if I was able to use a mouse when playing it as a child (PC version). I only remember recently attempting to play it in Dosbox and the mouse was a no go. Granted I also didn't put forth much effort to see if there was a solution and just assumed it was keyboard only.
Maybe he has a really small display?