I bought Mount & Blade: Warband for $7.50 during a Steam sale recently, and it might qualify as what you're talking about.
It's basically Darklands, but worse (shallower gameplay and less-interesting world) in most ways save for AWESOME large battles and a cool kingdom-building aspect. Bonus: it's one of the most alt-tab friendly games I've ever seen. I've been playing it on a middle-ish level PC and I can smoothly alt-tab to a Linux VirtualBox VM to do work while my party travels between cities, then right back when I remember I've got a game open and waiting for me to do something:)
I'd probably class the excellent FPS STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl as middle-tier. It's got two sequels, but I haven't played them yet.
The Witcher might qualify, in that it came out of no-where but wasn't ultra-low-budget. PC-only RPG, and it's damn good. Easily one of the best non-Bioware RPGs I've ever played. Sequel's coming out pretty soon, available for pre-purchase on Steam.
Cortex Command is alpha software (unplayable for me, weird cursor bug), Osmos isn't as good as dozens of free Flash games, Machinarium won't download (for me and others--maybe it's working for some), Revenge of the Titans won't launch at all (no error, nothing pops up, just a brief busy cursor), and I just discovered that Braid, the whole reason I bought the bundle, doesn't let you re-map its controls to a gamepad, so I'm stuck dicking around with Joy2Key to get the game to work as well as goddamn Commander Keen.
If not for the charity aspect I'd be seeking a refund. Really, really wish I'd cranked up the charity sliders and left nothing for the devs.
Odd, I don't remember Morrowind having leveled enemies. IIRC, if you didn't level "perfectly" you might not be able to go to a certain area as soon as someone who did (or you might have to use more dirty tricks to pull it off) but you could always just gain a couple more levels and then do it; Oblivion was the opposite, in that failing to level perfectly meant you actually got worse with each level, relative to every enemy in the game.
I certainly don't recall ever finding that I couldn't level my way through a tough area in Morrowind, while in Oblivion leveling generally made things harder rather than easier unless you broke out the damn spreadsheets. I think Morrowind might have spawned more golden-whatevers and elemental monsters around Daedric temples as you leveled, but that's about it.
Then again, the storyline gives you some potentially huge non-level-related stat boosts about half way through, so maybe that's why I never noticed any trouble with leveled enemies (or even that there were any) in Morrowind.
They didn't follow the "breadcrumb-trail main quest leading you through sidequest hubs that suck you in" formula to any great degree in Morrowind, Oblivion, or even very well in Fallout 3, where tradition would have dictated it. Nor did they make you choose skills to focus on, except for the very early game, in any of those three--they're in love with the "you're the best around at everything by the end game" school of RPGs, which sort of made sense in Morrowind (spoiler?) but didn't really in Oblivion, and certainly didn't in F3. It's also the opposite of role-playing, for the most part.
I'm guessing they'll stick with their usual style. I'm just hoping they give us an interesting world this time, but I'm starting to think that the Morrowind setting was the only one that diverse and exciting to explore on the whole damn continent and that that game's perfection won't be reached again even if everything else is right, because the other regions just aren't as cool.
Hopefully they at least won't do the completely fucking stupid leveled loot crap. I got the same quality of loot from a bandit as I did from a well-guarded chest deep in an ancient ruin, and every chest contained the same damn stuff so it never felt like I was somewhere unique. Bring back unique artifacts and distinct-looking dungeons, damnit! Copy-pasted dungeons with the same leveled chests are boring as hell. Every Dwemer ruin felt unique and like it had its own history--at least a half-dozen distinct ones stick in my mind, because every single one had its own character, its own architecture/features, and its own loot. The Aelid ruins from Oblivion are a blur to me, because all but a couple of them are practically identical. Hell, even most of the caves in Morrowind felt unique. That is what I most want them to bring back to the series.
On the contrary, I thought archery was too powerful. I got through most of the game on the strength of multiplier-bonused damage from sneak attacks with my bow. IMO it's the easiest way to play the game, with magic-focus being a close second and melee combat lagging as a distant third, and a last resort for archers and mages for the rare occasions that they don't destroy their enemies at range.
However like everyone else you insist on ignoring the possibility of a system C, a free-market in health care. This is a "non-starter" politically because no wealthy PACs would get a free ride on it, of course, so I understand why they dont want to talk about it, but for us little people it would be a far better option than your false dillema of current-US-fascist system vs. current-EU-socialist system.
It's also a non-starter because we don't have concrete examples of it working anywhere else.
Our choices are:
Current system--pay the most in the world per-capita for results that aren't better than anywhere else, while providing no coverage for many and causing all kinds of huge problems, like reduced social mobility, reduced entrepreneurship, high bankruptcy rates, and a closely-related Medicare fiscal crisis (which dwarfs any problems we may have with Social Security, and will be much harder to fix if we don't start trying soon).
Copy an existing system--copy part or all of one or more existing systems in other OECD nations. Difficulty: they're all "socialist" by U.S. standards. Every last one, not just in the EU. They all have their own problems, of course, though I think it's hard to argue that any but the worst come close to matching the problems of our current system, so this option is basically a guaranteed small net improvement and likely a huge one.
Try something new--Trash the old system, skip the ones we know work better than what we have now, and try something that, so far, exists only on paper, like an insuranceless free-market system or cross-border insurance plans or whatever. A tough sell for a damn good reason: it's probably a bad idea.
This is from the first couple pages of the first two Google searches I tried. Not fucking hard to find.
Do you want to do carbon credits next? That one should be even easier.
Re:That's one heck of a "long goodbye"
on
Goodbye, VGA
·
· Score: 1
If they phase out S-Video, the best-possible display mode on some older consoles will no longer be an option, notably on the SNES, N64, and Gamecube (at least the component-out-capable Wii will play the GC library, but so long to playing GBA games on the TV except with an emulator)
If we ever lose composite, too, then they'll all be unusable, unless we want to plug them in to the antenna in, which is a huge pain in the ass if you have more than one, provides a terrible picture, and may not be an option if they stop including analog tuners in TVs.
Maybe adapters could save us? S-Video and Composite to Component or HDMI?
It's been way longer than that. More like since our try at "classic" imperialism in the late 19th century. We've been invading little shithole countries primarily in the name of business interests for over 100 years.
I mean hell, it's pretty much a tautology. "The best system of government is one run by a person who is best at running governments". Even Socrates/Plato didn't consider it practical, and later created a more realistic framework for good governance.
Besides, "arguing" with the philosophers is a big part of how reading them teaches one to think. Of course you'll be wrong more often than not, but after reading a few and reading some commentary that points out the actual errors or weak spots, you'll eventually be able to tear apart political columns, spot poor premises or incomplete accounting for actors in grad-level papers almost effortlessly, and maybe even catch quite a few errors in older philosophy texts that you didn't read the first time through.
Being wrong sometimes is part of why they're instructive.
One of those releases--I think it was 9.4--was like stepping in to a time machine, as far as sound was concerned. They switched to the PulseAudio sound system for reasons that I still don't understand, which it turns out was developed only to late alpha levels at best.
That release gave me more trouble with sound than I've seen since back when you had to have OSS compatibility installed because not everything had switched over to ALSA yet. Sound was a thing that was "just working" in Ubuntu and most other Distros, and they broke it for no damn reason.
God, seriously. I hate having to watch movies with the remote ever at the ready. "they're talking, shit can't hear it, quick, volume up six or seven notches! OH DAMNIT ACTION SCENE WE'RE GONNA PISS OFF THE NEIGHBORS TURN IT DOWN!!!"
I don't remember this being a problem with VHS. 5.1 audio mixes do seem to be the worst about this, when played through 2.0 or 2.1 speakers (which is what I'm guessing 90% or more of people have, so I don't know why so many DVDs only have a 5.1 option...) but lately even stereo mixes have been giving me trouble.
I'm not sure whether I'm expected to spend $500+ dollars on hardware and run speaker wire all over my living room to fix it, or what. Not sure why the default audio mix on most media wouldn't be designed to work well with the hardware that the vast majority of consumers own, and the conditions under which most people view it.
All three have very weak libraries. Anything else they've done that's interesting or novel is overshadowed by that. Maybe that will change, but so far this looks like the Generation of the Handhelds, as that's where most of the good games are.
Maybe it was Outcast, then. One of the two was nothing but a who-manages-to-hit-their-force-power-or-super-attack-in-one-specific-stance-button-while-the-other-is-recovering-from-trying-to-do-the-same fest.
Doesn't work at all in some VMs, not even a menu, and others fail when I try to run the game itself. Maybe there's a way to make it software render that might fix it, but I haven't noticed it, and I'm pretty sure it's a problem with its being coded for a super-early version of DirectX.
Bioshock isn't at all like System Shock or SS2. As with many sequels and "spiritual successors" (Deus Ex 2 and Fallout 3--but not New Vegas--come to mind) its designers managed to copy a few surface details and miss the soul of the game.
For one thing, Bioshock isn't any more scary than, say, Half Life 2. Maybe less. That puts it in an entirely different sub-category of FPS games right of the bat.
From what I can recall, every single Jedi Academy lightsaber match online was decided one of three ways:
1) Force choke, throw off ledge 2) Force push off a ledge or just to the ground; finishing saber blow as appropriate. 3) Landing that one super-overpowered move where you flip over your opponent and stab them in the back.
It was the opposite of complex. It was a matter of who managed to do one of those three things while the other didn't happen to be guarding. Any other move would have a 100% chance of resulting in one of those three things being done to you.
I'm not complaining because I was bad at it--I was actually pretty good, once I stopped being a n00b and trying to, you know, actually lightsaber dual, which was a great way to get killed over and over.
Maybe I'm thinking of Outcast, though. I've only played one of the two online. Pretty sure it was Academy, but I could be wrong.
Granted, even those somewhat silly rock-paper-scissors fights are a huge step up from the damn-near-random lightsaber fights in DF:Jedi Knight, caused in part by the game and in part by the fact that most of the people playing it were still on dial-up (including me). Great game anyway, and the saber fighting seemed awesome at the time, but god was it wacky.
Whoa, really? I guess I haven't played it in so long--Perfect Dark is so much better that my friends and I always (still, to this day) just play it. I guess that's one of the reasons, but I'd totally forgotten about it.
As for the framerate issues, haha, yeah, when 20 proximity mines go off at once I guess you can't blame the machine for chugging a little.
From what I've read, they've removed the best parts of the game and turned it in to a mediocre Modern Warfare clone (and given that Modern Warfare is, itself, pretty mediocre, that's saying something).
No bots(!!!), no weapon pickups (so you can't have a proximity mine match unless everyone picks the "class" that has them, for example) and horrible framerate issues when there are explosions in multiplayer.
That's what I've read. Can anyone who has it verify that this is accurate? If so, let's hope that's not the kind of "re-make" we're in store for with other older FPS games--re-makes that gut the original of what made it great.
As for my own FPS re-make wish list:
Deus Ex System Shock 1 and 2 The Gunman Chronicles Dark Forces Thief (all of them, even 3 could use a re-make)
In summary, Nintendo, on it's second attempt, has the best, (and possibly best-selling, although there have been a freakin ton of PS/2's sold), SIXTH generation console, but it took them until 2006 to bring to it market.
Allowing for the sake of argument that the Wii is a 6th-generation console, it's not the best. The Playstation 2 has a waaaaaay better library than any of the three current game systems. Hell, it's got a better library than the three combined. At the rate good games are coming out, I doubt any one console this generation will match it, the PS1, or the SNES in the game library department.
This generation (plus the Wii, if you don't count it as 7th) is a dud.
Maybe if the Wii had more power they could have not ruined the Goldeneye re-release by leaving the bots out.
I hope it was a hardware issue, 'cuz if it was a deliberate choice then I'll be extra disappointed. Leaving it out by choice is unforgivable, leaving it out because your boss says "the game must look as good as X 100% of the time" and X already gives you framerate issues when there are explosions, I can at least kind of understand.
honestly the slow pace of classes is what i hated the most.. i would much rather get them over with - summer classes where easier and more informative than normal semester classes.
Oh god, so true. Just about every course but my foreign language ones (French) were far too slow. 8-week online courses are much better, but truly most could be 4-week courses if you cut out all the bullshit.
* He uses mainly Wikipedia (for background), Amazon for the free pages, and Google Academics for the abstracts. Everything else he spins from educated guesswork and outright bullshit with lots and lots of filler.
Most real students do the exact same thing. Well, most real students who know how to use the Internet, at least, and the others would if they knew about it.
Professor requires that three sources be from actual honest-to-god books? Fuck going to the library, and certainly fuck actually reading a significant part of any of your sources; Amazon sample pages and Google Books give you everything you need. Granted it takes a bit of skill with a search engine and the ability to recognize the parts that are most likely to be useful just from the table of contents, but most often you can get enough for a source in a typical undergrad paper from somewhere in the first 10 pages or so of the book's introduction.
Need more sources? 90% of the time you can get all you need from the references section of one or more Wikipedia pages.
Managed to get a topic you already know quite a bit about? Just write the paper, don't bother to find sources until you're already done. This is ideal, because you can search for exactly what you need; saves reading a bunch of crap you already know to find the parts you want to use.
These techniques won't necessarily help if you're expected to actually know much about the topic, but as best I can tell "writing emphasis" courses and most 100-200 level English and History courses exist primarily to teach the above skills.
Slashdot Mirror
Well it seems I am wrong and have judged a game by its tutorial, or whatever the expression is in this situation.
I bought Mount & Blade: Warband for $7.50 during a Steam sale recently, and it might qualify as what you're talking about.
It's basically Darklands, but worse (shallower gameplay and less-interesting world) in most ways save for AWESOME large battles and a cool kingdom-building aspect. Bonus: it's one of the most alt-tab friendly games I've ever seen. I've been playing it on a middle-ish level PC and I can smoothly alt-tab to a Linux VirtualBox VM to do work while my party travels between cities, then right back when I remember I've got a game open and waiting for me to do something :)
I'd probably class the excellent FPS STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl as middle-tier. It's got two sequels, but I haven't played them yet.
The Witcher might qualify, in that it came out of no-where but wasn't ultra-low-budget. PC-only RPG, and it's damn good. Easily one of the best non-Bioware RPGs I've ever played. Sequel's coming out pretty soon, available for pre-purchase on Steam.
Cortex Command is alpha software (unplayable for me, weird cursor bug), Osmos isn't as good as dozens of free Flash games, Machinarium won't download (for me and others--maybe it's working for some), Revenge of the Titans won't launch at all (no error, nothing pops up, just a brief busy cursor), and I just discovered that Braid, the whole reason I bought the bundle, doesn't let you re-map its controls to a gamepad, so I'm stuck dicking around with Joy2Key to get the game to work as well as goddamn Commander Keen.
If not for the charity aspect I'd be seeking a refund. Really, really wish I'd cranked up the charity sliders and left nothing for the devs.
Odd, I don't remember Morrowind having leveled enemies. IIRC, if you didn't level "perfectly" you might not be able to go to a certain area as soon as someone who did (or you might have to use more dirty tricks to pull it off) but you could always just gain a couple more levels and then do it; Oblivion was the opposite, in that failing to level perfectly meant you actually got worse with each level, relative to every enemy in the game.
I certainly don't recall ever finding that I couldn't level my way through a tough area in Morrowind, while in Oblivion leveling generally made things harder rather than easier unless you broke out the damn spreadsheets. I think Morrowind might have spawned more golden-whatevers and elemental monsters around Daedric temples as you leveled, but that's about it.
Then again, the storyline gives you some potentially huge non-level-related stat boosts about half way through, so maybe that's why I never noticed any trouble with leveled enemies (or even that there were any) in Morrowind.
They didn't follow the "breadcrumb-trail main quest leading you through sidequest hubs that suck you in" formula to any great degree in Morrowind, Oblivion, or even very well in Fallout 3, where tradition would have dictated it. Nor did they make you choose skills to focus on, except for the very early game, in any of those three--they're in love with the "you're the best around at everything by the end game" school of RPGs, which sort of made sense in Morrowind (spoiler?) but didn't really in Oblivion, and certainly didn't in F3. It's also the opposite of role-playing, for the most part.
I'm guessing they'll stick with their usual style. I'm just hoping they give us an interesting world this time, but I'm starting to think that the Morrowind setting was the only one that diverse and exciting to explore on the whole damn continent and that that game's perfection won't be reached again even if everything else is right, because the other regions just aren't as cool.
Hopefully they at least won't do the completely fucking stupid leveled loot crap. I got the same quality of loot from a bandit as I did from a well-guarded chest deep in an ancient ruin, and every chest contained the same damn stuff so it never felt like I was somewhere unique. Bring back unique artifacts and distinct-looking dungeons, damnit! Copy-pasted dungeons with the same leveled chests are boring as hell. Every Dwemer ruin felt unique and like it had its own history--at least a half-dozen distinct ones stick in my mind, because every single one had its own character, its own architecture/features, and its own loot. The Aelid ruins from Oblivion are a blur to me, because all but a couple of them are practically identical. Hell, even most of the caves in Morrowind felt unique. That is what I most want them to bring back to the series.
On the contrary, I thought archery was too powerful. I got through most of the game on the strength of multiplier-bonused damage from sneak attacks with my bow. IMO it's the easiest way to play the game, with magic-focus being a close second and melee combat lagging as a distant third, and a last resort for archers and mages for the rare occasions that they don't destroy their enemies at range.
It's also a non-starter because we don't have concrete examples of it working anywhere else.
Our choices are:
Current system--pay the most in the world per-capita for results that aren't better than anywhere else, while providing no coverage for many and causing all kinds of huge problems, like reduced social mobility, reduced entrepreneurship, high bankruptcy rates, and a closely-related Medicare fiscal crisis (which dwarfs any problems we may have with Social Security, and will be much harder to fix if we don't start trying soon).
Copy an existing system--copy part or all of one or more existing systems in other OECD nations. Difficulty: they're all "socialist" by U.S. standards. Every last one, not just in the EU. They all have their own problems, of course, though I think it's hard to argue that any but the worst come close to matching the problems of our current system, so this option is basically a guaranteed small net improvement and likely a huge one.
Try something new--Trash the old system, skip the ones we know work better than what we have now, and try something that, so far, exists only on paper, like an insuranceless free-market system or cross-border insurance plans or whatever. A tough sell for a damn good reason: it's probably a bad idea.
Boston Globe
Kansas Matters (w/ large AP story)
Fox News (appears to be the same as first, from the AP)
Huffinton Post
NYTimes (Economix blog)
allmilitary.com (Miami Herald article)
Another good one
A great one, a 1993 article from Reason
Orrin Hatch
This is from the first couple pages of the first two Google searches I tried. Not fucking hard to find.
Do you want to do carbon credits next? That one should be even easier.
If they phase out S-Video, the best-possible display mode on some older consoles will no longer be an option, notably on the SNES, N64, and Gamecube (at least the component-out-capable Wii will play the GC library, but so long to playing GBA games on the TV except with an emulator)
If we ever lose composite, too, then they'll all be unusable, unless we want to plug them in to the antenna in, which is a huge pain in the ass if you have more than one, provides a terrible picture, and may not be an option if they stop including analog tuners in TVs.
Maybe adapters could save us? S-Video and Composite to Component or HDMI?
It's been way longer than that. More like since our try at "classic" imperialism in the late 19th century. We've been invading little shithole countries primarily in the name of business interests for over 100 years.
Spanish-American War
Smedley Butler
How is that not true?
I mean hell, it's pretty much a tautology. "The best system of government is one run by a person who is best at running governments". Even Socrates/Plato didn't consider it practical, and later created a more realistic framework for good governance.
Besides, "arguing" with the philosophers is a big part of how reading them teaches one to think. Of course you'll be wrong more often than not, but after reading a few and reading some commentary that points out the actual errors or weak spots, you'll eventually be able to tear apart political columns, spot poor premises or incomplete accounting for actors in grad-level papers almost effortlessly, and maybe even catch quite a few errors in older philosophy texts that you didn't read the first time through.
Being wrong sometimes is part of why they're instructive.
One of those releases--I think it was 9.4--was like stepping in to a time machine, as far as sound was concerned. They switched to the PulseAudio sound system for reasons that I still don't understand, which it turns out was developed only to late alpha levels at best.
That release gave me more trouble with sound than I've seen since back when you had to have OSS compatibility installed because not everything had switched over to ALSA yet. Sound was a thing that was "just working" in Ubuntu and most other Distros, and they broke it for no damn reason.
God, seriously. I hate having to watch movies with the remote ever at the ready. "they're talking, shit can't hear it, quick, volume up six or seven notches! OH DAMNIT ACTION SCENE WE'RE GONNA PISS OFF THE NEIGHBORS TURN IT DOWN!!!"
I don't remember this being a problem with VHS. 5.1 audio mixes do seem to be the worst about this, when played through 2.0 or 2.1 speakers (which is what I'm guessing 90% or more of people have, so I don't know why so many DVDs only have a 5.1 option...) but lately even stereo mixes have been giving me trouble.
I'm not sure whether I'm expected to spend $500+ dollars on hardware and run speaker wire all over my living room to fix it, or what. Not sure why the default audio mix on most media wouldn't be designed to work well with the hardware that the vast majority of consumers own, and the conditions under which most people view it.
All three have very weak libraries. Anything else they've done that's interesting or novel is overshadowed by that. Maybe that will change, but so far this looks like the Generation of the Handhelds, as that's where most of the good games are.
Maybe it was Outcast, then. One of the two was nothing but a who-manages-to-hit-their-force-power-or-super-attack-in-one-specific-stance-button-while-the-other-is-recovering-from-trying-to-do-the-same fest.
Doesn't work at all in some VMs, not even a menu, and others fail when I try to run the game itself. Maybe there's a way to make it software render that might fix it, but I haven't noticed it, and I'm pretty sure it's a problem with its being coded for a super-early version of DirectX.
I'm a heretic. I prefer Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries.
Damn thing won't run on a modern machine, though, but it's Windows only so Dosbox can't come to the rescue. Stupid early DirectX games.
Bioshock isn't at all like System Shock or SS2. As with many sequels and "spiritual successors" (Deus Ex 2 and Fallout 3--but not New Vegas--come to mind) its designers managed to copy a few surface details and miss the soul of the game.
For one thing, Bioshock isn't any more scary than, say, Half Life 2. Maybe less. That puts it in an entirely different sub-category of FPS games right of the bat.
From what I can recall, every single Jedi Academy lightsaber match online was decided one of three ways:
1) Force choke, throw off ledge
2) Force push off a ledge or just to the ground; finishing saber blow as appropriate.
3) Landing that one super-overpowered move where you flip over your opponent and stab them in the back.
It was the opposite of complex. It was a matter of who managed to do one of those three things while the other didn't happen to be guarding. Any other move would have a 100% chance of resulting in one of those three things being done to you.
I'm not complaining because I was bad at it--I was actually pretty good, once I stopped being a n00b and trying to, you know, actually lightsaber dual, which was a great way to get killed over and over.
Maybe I'm thinking of Outcast, though. I've only played one of the two online. Pretty sure it was Academy, but I could be wrong.
Granted, even those somewhat silly rock-paper-scissors fights are a huge step up from the damn-near-random lightsaber fights in DF:Jedi Knight, caused in part by the game and in part by the fact that most of the people playing it were still on dial-up (including me). Great game anyway, and the saber fighting seemed awesome at the time, but god was it wacky.
Whoa, really? I guess I haven't played it in so long--Perfect Dark is so much better that my friends and I always (still, to this day) just play it. I guess that's one of the reasons, but I'd totally forgotten about it.
As for the framerate issues, haha, yeah, when 20 proximity mines go off at once I guess you can't blame the machine for chugging a little.
From what I've read, they've removed the best parts of the game and turned it in to a mediocre Modern Warfare clone (and given that Modern Warfare is, itself, pretty mediocre, that's saying something).
No bots(!!!), no weapon pickups (so you can't have a proximity mine match unless everyone picks the "class" that has them, for example) and horrible framerate issues when there are explosions in multiplayer.
That's what I've read. Can anyone who has it verify that this is accurate? If so, let's hope that's not the kind of "re-make" we're in store for with other older FPS games--re-makes that gut the original of what made it great.
As for my own FPS re-make wish list:
Deus Ex
System Shock 1 and 2
The Gunman Chronicles
Dark Forces
Thief (all of them, even 3 could use a re-make)
Allowing for the sake of argument that the Wii is a 6th-generation console, it's not the best. The Playstation 2 has a waaaaaay better library than any of the three current game systems. Hell, it's got a better library than the three combined. At the rate good games are coming out, I doubt any one console this generation will match it, the PS1, or the SNES in the game library department.
This generation (plus the Wii, if you don't count it as 7th) is a dud.
Maybe if the Wii had more power they could have not ruined the Goldeneye re-release by leaving the bots out.
I hope it was a hardware issue, 'cuz if it was a deliberate choice then I'll be extra disappointed. Leaving it out by choice is unforgivable, leaving it out because your boss says "the game must look as good as X 100% of the time" and X already gives you framerate issues when there are explosions, I can at least kind of understand.
Oh god, so true. Just about every course but my foreign language ones (French) were far too slow. 8-week online courses are much better, but truly most could be 4-week courses if you cut out all the bullshit.
Most real students do the exact same thing. Well, most real students who know how to use the Internet, at least, and the others would if they knew about it.
Professor requires that three sources be from actual honest-to-god books? Fuck going to the library, and certainly fuck actually reading a significant part of any of your sources; Amazon sample pages and Google Books give you everything you need. Granted it takes a bit of skill with a search engine and the ability to recognize the parts that are most likely to be useful just from the table of contents, but most often you can get enough for a source in a typical undergrad paper from somewhere in the first 10 pages or so of the book's introduction.
Need more sources? 90% of the time you can get all you need from the references section of one or more Wikipedia pages.
Managed to get a topic you already know quite a bit about? Just write the paper, don't bother to find sources until you're already done. This is ideal, because you can search for exactly what you need; saves reading a bunch of crap you already know to find the parts you want to use.
These techniques won't necessarily help if you're expected to actually know much about the topic, but as best I can tell "writing emphasis" courses and most 100-200 level English and History courses exist primarily to teach the above skills.