IMO, Normal mode fills that niche just fine: I'm not even that good, and I can run through a normal campaign with bots, hitting every car alarm, leaving bots behind to die if they annoy me, plowing through hordes rather than finding a corner, etc. and still only use a couple of health packs. The only part that requires any attention is the finale, and that's mostly to keep the bots alive so they can distract some portion of the hordes.
I mean, it doesn't bother me that Easy mode is included--the more options the better, I say--but the only use I can see for it is if someone wants to be able to go run some errands without pausing their game, come back, and still be at full health. I'm not really sure why they left any damage in it at all, when it's effectively God Mode anyway.
Normal is super easy. I recommend that new players play one or two levels (not campaigns) on normal, then crank it up to advanced and never go back. Experienced FPS players who have someone to guide them around levels ought to just start on advanced.
These days, I only bother playing Expert when I do Coop. Versus is where the big replay value's at, but if you can get some friends together IRL, Expert campaign is wonderful.
It's like this:
- Easy is unplayable. Ugh. Serously, the zombies do like 1 damage per hit, and there's NO friendly fire. The tank dies if just one or two people empty their Uzis into it, and can't possibly get close if you're paying any attention whatsoever, let alone actually hit you. Why bother? - Normal is easy enough that you can screw around and do dumb things intentionally and still win. Tank still goes down too fast, and even if you've already got one guy dead you should be able to take it with 3 before it hits you at all. - Advanced will punish you severely for screwing around too much, but legitimate mistakes (and a limited amount of screwing around) can usually be recovered from. Tank is now a threat, especially if you have Tier 1 weapons. - Expert allows for few or no mistakes, and absolutely zero screwing around. Mess up once and your team might well get wiped out and have to re-start the level. Tank is a monster and will haunt your nightmares.
Some bonus advice: if you haven't started playing Versus yet, I'd recommend waiting until you feel like you've gotten what you want out of Coop; playing Versus for any length of time will ruin the AI infected for you, with the exception of the tank, by making them a total joke and non-threat, even on expert.
Mind you, I'm not 'leet by any means, and I only rarely get sucked in to online games of any sort (the only other online FPS games I've gotten in to in a real way were RTCW:Enemy Territory, ST:Elite Force, and SW:DFII:Jedi Knight), so this isn't some godlike FPS player telling you to play on Expert because Normal is for wimps or anything. I think that a player of average ability should enjoy Advanced more than Normal, given the nature of the game, and after a while will be able to do OK in Expert, which is where the Coop play gets really good IMO.
My wife's an elementary school teacher, and I've been toying with an idea a science lesson (or series of lessons) for her class: you create an artificial system based to one degree or another on natural systems that have already been dealt with by science, then present it to the kids and task them with finding things out about it from what they can sense.
The point of all this is to have the kids do all the major parts of real science, rather than just data collection or setting up some pre-determined experiment or running a technology demonstration. Those things have their place, but I think it'd be valuable for the kids to see what actual science is, and to have to reason through and struggle with their problem to solve it, or at the very least research and apply the methods that were devised to tackle the real-life version of the problem.
The only one I've come up with so far (and I haven't really developed it) is to put a spot on the floor in a gym or some other big space, and have that be the kids' "home planet", where they will stand to take measurements. Then, stick dots on stands some distance out, representing their sun and other celestial bodies. Move these around at set intervals (possibly over several days) to represent the passage of time, and have the kids determine things like the distance of these bodies from theirs, etc.
The same thing could be done at a higher difficulty level (but with potential for more learning, and with higher fidelity to the real-life problems) using dots projected on a sheet across the room from them.
I'm hoping to come up with some way to have them make their own instruments, too.
Other lessons with the same basic premise could be made even more abstract from reality, to make them easier, or have physical laws modified to make truly fictional and alien systems (higher difficulty).
Someone has to have done something like this before, but I haven't been able to find anything. Seems like a good alternative to finding honest-to-god real cutting-edge science for them to do, which I'd imagine is difficult to impossible (certainly would be for me) and is potentially a bit more interesting than many of the small-scale experiments they can do in a classroom (which, again, often turn in to scripted programs or technology demonstrations anyway)
Don't feel bad, The Gimp is notoriously hard to get used to. IIRC, to make a circle you have to make a circular selection then tell it to make a line around that, or something along those lines. "Draw a straight line" is another common task that newbies often fail at.
I'm so glad to finally be back in Photoshop. I've got more total time in The Gimp by far, but Photoshop's still easier to use and gets in my way less often (though it is buggy as hell, which is something I've never had a problem with in The Gimp)
I believe our country was founded in an anomalous period, "The Enlightenment", and our Founding Fathers erroneously assumed that reason was not just a passing fad.
No, they assumed that moderately-to-fabulously well-to-do white men would retain some minimal ability to reason. "The Masses" scared the shit out of most of them.
Not only that, but they didn't even expect the landed white men to be smart and learned enough to vote for those in higher offices whose work was more abstracted from their daily experience. Senators were to be chosen by state legislatures, and the President was to be chosen by local people elected specifically for that purpose, as it is ridiculous to expect the candidates to effectively campaign to an entire nation and equally ridiculous to expect any significant portion of the general population to be remotely qualified to judge a candidate for that position.
BTW your crazy reforms were in The Constitution as originally adopted, I guess you meant irony.
Oh, OK, so you already knew that. I leave the above for the sake of those who don't.
Democracy on a scale as large as the US blows. We need more republicanism (small-R, not the party).
Knowledge of basic information about our world is vital for making good decisions in the voting booth.
Either we should expect the average person to have at least a 6th-grade understanding of how the world works, or we should abandon our current conception of democracy for one less direct that only expects the voters to understand local issues and to be able to judge the character and wisdom of people in their own community, with those trusted community members choosing the next level of representative and so on.
Perhaps a good start would be some crazy reforms like having people vote for a representative to choose the president on their behalf rather than voting directly for the candidate, or having state legislatures choose federal senators.
But I digress: my point is, if you don't expect the average person to know simple things like this, you must admit that democracy on a large scale is fundamentally flawed and even dangerous.
I played through it on Veteran on the 360 and never encountered anything like the grenade spam I did on Call of Duty 5 where it literally got as silly as at some points (i.e. taking out the artillery guns on the second last level) ending up with around 10 grenades on you and in the immediate area, that kind of thing made the "throw back grenade" mechanic pointless it seemed.
Clearly, you were meant to use the "throw back grenades" mechanic instead.
Ditto, extensions are the only things keeping me on it.
Too much bloat like the awesome bar
Ugh, no kidding. Perfect example of what's wrong with the project these days. Is it occasionally useful? Sure. Does it slow me down the other 99% of the time because it takes way longer to do a huge history search than a simple match on just URLs? HELL yes. Should have been an extension, or at least have had some sort of toggle next to the address bar or via a right-click menu.
It's not the failed economy; it's the political climate and societal priorities. Those of nearly any other "western" nation would fit me better and likely improve my life in some areas that I consider key parts of the standard of living.
I've been posting that link quite a bit, because it has been very, very appropriate in so many threads lately, and I've found--much to my surprise--that many people (not you, I'm betting you already knew of it) don't properly appreciate it.
No joke. If not for my friends and family (primarily the former) I'd already be in Canada or Ireland. As it is, I'm hoping things get better, because if they don't then staying here will have been a huge mistake. Certainly staying here means not having kids, unless we get our collective head out of our ass and create a non-retarded health care system. Probably means a lower standard of living regardless--and I'm not just talking about income.
The other thing you may not have experienced is Accident and Emergency. If you're well enough to come in and report to reception yourself (rather than be rushed in in an ambulance), waits of 4 hours or so are not uncommon.
True in the US, as well. Depends on the hospital of course, but it's not exactly rare for one to have wait times like that (or worse) when you've got a relatively minor problem.
Sounds miss-titled. Looks like it's relying on trendy, targeted marketing for sales. Possibly a bit insulting. Wouldn't buy it for anyone whose intelligence I respected.
Or IBM's new 'take a step to the right' body armor. Can you imagine putting that on sailors and watching them fall overboard when you shoot at them?
It's better than the previous "jump to the left" body armor. Keep an eye out for the upcoming "put your hands on your hips" version, though; I hear it's gonna be fabulous.
Re:Downloading at 1kb a sec !!!
on
Jurassic Web
·
· Score: 1
Not so bad given the size of the pages.
Do a "view source" on the linked Yahoo archived front pages--they're super-tiny by today's standards.
I'm sure someone likes case-sensitive filenames, but they annoy me way more often than I find them useful. Maybe this will reduce or eliminate one of my biggest problems with them.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO, Normal mode fills that niche just fine: I'm not even that good, and I can run through a normal campaign with bots, hitting every car alarm, leaving bots behind to die if they annoy me, plowing through hordes rather than finding a corner, etc. and still only use a couple of health packs. The only part that requires any attention is the finale, and that's mostly to keep the bots alive so they can distract some portion of the hordes.
I mean, it doesn't bother me that Easy mode is included--the more options the better, I say--but the only use I can see for it is if someone wants to be able to go run some errands without pausing their game, come back, and still be at full health. I'm not really sure why they left any damage in it at all, when it's effectively God Mode anyway.
Normal is super easy. I recommend that new players play one or two levels (not campaigns) on normal, then crank it up to advanced and never go back. Experienced FPS players who have someone to guide them around levels ought to just start on advanced.
These days, I only bother playing Expert when I do Coop. Versus is where the big replay value's at, but if you can get some friends together IRL, Expert campaign is wonderful.
It's like this:
- Easy is unplayable. Ugh. Serously, the zombies do like 1 damage per hit, and there's NO friendly fire. The tank dies if just one or two people empty their Uzis into it, and can't possibly get close if you're paying any attention whatsoever, let alone actually hit you. Why bother?
- Normal is easy enough that you can screw around and do dumb things intentionally and still win. Tank still goes down too fast, and even if you've already got one guy dead you should be able to take it with 3 before it hits you at all.
- Advanced will punish you severely for screwing around too much, but legitimate mistakes (and a limited amount of screwing around) can usually be recovered from. Tank is now a threat, especially if you have Tier 1 weapons.
- Expert allows for few or no mistakes, and absolutely zero screwing around. Mess up once and your team might well get wiped out and have to re-start the level. Tank is a monster and will haunt your nightmares.
Some bonus advice: if you haven't started playing Versus yet, I'd recommend waiting until you feel like you've gotten what you want out of Coop; playing Versus for any length of time will ruin the AI infected for you, with the exception of the tank, by making them a total joke and non-threat, even on expert.
Mind you, I'm not 'leet by any means, and I only rarely get sucked in to online games of any sort (the only other online FPS games I've gotten in to in a real way were RTCW:Enemy Territory, ST:Elite Force, and SW:DFII:Jedi Knight), so this isn't some godlike FPS player telling you to play on Expert because Normal is for wimps or anything. I think that a player of average ability should enjoy Advanced more than Normal, given the nature of the game, and after a while will be able to do OK in Expert, which is where the Coop play gets really good IMO.
If my wife's play style in The Sims 2 is any indication of the sort of science that interests women, then it's Eugenics.
She's the Sims 2 Hitler. It's kind of disturbing.
My wife's an elementary school teacher, and I've been toying with an idea a science lesson (or series of lessons) for her class: you create an artificial system based to one degree or another on natural systems that have already been dealt with by science, then present it to the kids and task them with finding things out about it from what they can sense.
The point of all this is to have the kids do all the major parts of real science, rather than just data collection or setting up some pre-determined experiment or running a technology demonstration. Those things have their place, but I think it'd be valuable for the kids to see what actual science is, and to have to reason through and struggle with their problem to solve it, or at the very least research and apply the methods that were devised to tackle the real-life version of the problem.
The only one I've come up with so far (and I haven't really developed it) is to put a spot on the floor in a gym or some other big space, and have that be the kids' "home planet", where they will stand to take measurements. Then, stick dots on stands some distance out, representing their sun and other celestial bodies. Move these around at set intervals (possibly over several days) to represent the passage of time, and have the kids determine things like the distance of these bodies from theirs, etc.
The same thing could be done at a higher difficulty level (but with potential for more learning, and with higher fidelity to the real-life problems) using dots projected on a sheet across the room from them.
I'm hoping to come up with some way to have them make their own instruments, too.
Other lessons with the same basic premise could be made even more abstract from reality, to make them easier, or have physical laws modified to make truly fictional and alien systems (higher difficulty).
Someone has to have done something like this before, but I haven't been able to find anything. Seems like a good alternative to finding honest-to-god real cutting-edge science for them to do, which I'd imagine is difficult to impossible (certainly would be for me) and is potentially a bit more interesting than many of the small-scale experiments they can do in a classroom (which, again, often turn in to scripted programs or technology demonstrations anyway)
Don't feel bad, The Gimp is notoriously hard to get used to. IIRC, to make a circle you have to make a circular selection then tell it to make a line around that, or something along those lines. "Draw a straight line" is another common task that newbies often fail at.
I'm so glad to finally be back in Photoshop. I've got more total time in The Gimp by far, but Photoshop's still easier to use and gets in my way less often (though it is buggy as hell, which is something I've never had a problem with in The Gimp)
Well, they'll share one, renting time through the local robo-brothel.
Sufficiently-realistic robot "partners" may drive us to the brink of extinction well before we reach the holodeck stage.
No, they assumed that moderately-to-fabulously well-to-do white men would retain some minimal ability to reason. "The Masses" scared the shit out of most of them.
Not only that, but they didn't even expect the landed white men to be smart and learned enough to vote for those in higher offices whose work was more abstracted from their daily experience. Senators were to be chosen by state legislatures, and the President was to be chosen by local people elected specifically for that purpose, as it is ridiculous to expect the candidates to effectively campaign to an entire nation and equally ridiculous to expect any significant portion of the general population to be remotely qualified to judge a candidate for that position.
Oh, OK, so you already knew that. I leave the above for the sake of those who don't.
Democracy on a scale as large as the US blows. We need more republicanism (small-R, not the party).
I disagree.
Knowledge of basic information about our world is vital for making good decisions in the voting booth.
Either we should expect the average person to have at least a 6th-grade understanding of how the world works, or we should abandon our current conception of democracy for one less direct that only expects the voters to understand local issues and to be able to judge the character and wisdom of people in their own community, with those trusted community members choosing the next level of representative and so on.
Perhaps a good start would be some crazy reforms like having people vote for a representative to choose the president on their behalf rather than voting directly for the candidate, or having state legislatures choose federal senators.
But I digress: my point is, if you don't expect the average person to know simple things like this, you must admit that democracy on a large scale is fundamentally flawed and even dangerous.
I get Serenity, of course, and Legacy appears to be a reference to the flight that took Doohan's remains into orbit, but what are the other two?
Is Venture a reference to the Sci-Fi mag of the same name?
Earthrise? No clue on that one.
If you're looking for me,
You better look under the sea,
'Cuz that is where you'll find me...
Clearly, you were meant to use the "throw back grenades" mechanic instead.
Ditto, extensions are the only things keeping me on it.
Ugh, no kidding. Perfect example of what's wrong with the project these days. Is it occasionally useful? Sure. Does it slow me down the other 99% of the time because it takes way longer to do a huge history search than a simple match on just URLs? HELL yes. Should have been an extension, or at least have had some sort of toggle next to the address bar or via a right-click menu.
Holding it down works. Installing the mouse gestures plugin used to fix it (even if you disabled it) but I haven't tried it recently.
It's not the failed economy; it's the political climate and societal priorities. Those of nearly any other "western" nation would fit me better and likely improve my life in some areas that I consider key parts of the standard of living.
Tragedy of the commons
I've been posting that link quite a bit, because it has been very, very appropriate in so many threads lately, and I've found--much to my surprise--that many people (not you, I'm betting you already knew of it) don't properly appreciate it.
No joke. If not for my friends and family (primarily the former) I'd already be in Canada or Ireland. As it is, I'm hoping things get better, because if they don't then staying here will have been a huge mistake. Certainly staying here means not having kids, unless we get our collective head out of our ass and create a non-retarded health care system. Probably means a lower standard of living regardless--and I'm not just talking about income.
What are you talking about? I thought the ending in God Emperor was very satisfying.
Wait--are you trying to tell me he wrote books after that one?
True in the US, as well. Depends on the hospital of course, but it's not exactly rare for one to have wait times like that (or worse) when you've got a relatively minor problem.
I liked this part:
6. Halo
7. Resident Evil IV
HAHAHAHA
Of course it does.
Sounds miss-titled. Looks like it's relying on trendy, targeted marketing for sales. Possibly a bit insulting. Wouldn't buy it for anyone whose intelligence I respected.
It's better than the previous "jump to the left" body armor. Keep an eye out for the upcoming "put your hands on your hips" version, though; I hear it's gonna be fabulous.
Not so bad given the size of the pages.
Do a "view source" on the linked Yahoo archived front pages--they're super-tiny by today's standards.
Oh, good.
I'm sure someone likes case-sensitive filenames, but they annoy me way more often than I find them useful. Maybe this will reduce or eliminate one of my biggest problems with them.