I wonder- what priority of government are you referring to that is different than serving the demands of the public?
OK, I'm going to ignore the "have you stopped beating your wife?"-esqueness of this question, though rest assured I had a nice counter-snark prepared involving post-Reconquista Spain, among other things:)
Rather than respond in kind, let my attempt to address this head-on:
I don't think you're looking at the whole picture; the actions of a bunch of individuals within a system (their generation of a certain kind of economic demand, for instance) do not necessarily reflect their actual desires--they reflect their (hopefully rational) reactions to the circumstances they are placed in. This is precisely what the story of the Tragedy of the Commons is about; obviously, anyone in the story who realizes that the commons is being ruined will want use of it to be regulated, however, in absence of regulation their best choice is to go ahead and use it as much as they can. The details of the story itself are obviously poor analogues to what we're talking about, but the core idea of desires running counter to economic actions is exactly the same.
It is entirely possible that the vast majority of people want standardization of the chargers, but are lacking an economic incentive to make an individual choice supporting standardization. Especially given that much of the benefit of buying a phone that uses some kind of standard charger style is absent without widespread or universal use of said charger, this strikes me as being very likely. Will the market sort it out eventually despite this? Maybe. But we can certainly sort it out now.
A more serious discussion would be one over whether this is the proper role of government or not--and on an example this trivial, the argument against it would not be without reason. Arguing that that governmental intervention in business must necessarily be contrary to public desire (as surely people would have simply "voted with their dollars" if they wanted otherwise), on the other hand, is more than a bit silly, as I suspect (and hope) you knew when you asked the above-quoted question.
Occasionally in a "best for the company's bottom line" sense. Check out the role of government in Japan's recovery after WWII; their corporations won big, and a lot of that was due to government-encouraged (or enforced) cooperation and collaboration. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry was the key player, if you're interested.
More often, a government knows better in a "best for the consumer and general welfare of the economy" sense, or in a "best for encouraging competition" sense. Standardization of things like this greases the wheels of the free market, and brings its mechanisms to bear on the products and corporations in question. After all, what's the point of free-market capitalism if not using the power of competition to improve our lives? Standardization of common parts like this removes inefficiency from the system, encourage competition, and brings down prices. Not exactly a controversial concept.
It's not so much that the government knows better, as that they have different priorities and the power to mandate that those priorities are respected. I'm sure many of the people in the corporations know that these things are possible, but they don't care to do them on their own for various reasons.
Seriously. We can start talking about helping these organizations when copyright terms get back to something reasonable--I'd like 14 years like it was originally (in the US, at least), but I'd take the 28 it was extended to.
Until then, fark 'em. They're the criminals. Modern popular art and media is vastly poorer than it should be thanks to the efforts of these organizations.
I never finished the first GTA 3--I did play through a few of the missions, but not that many. I spent loads of time screwing around in it, though.
Vice City I finished. Easily my favorite GTA. Great story, great atmosphere and the missions were usually fun.
San Andreas had promise but I eventually quit because I got sick of the "defend your turf" crap. That stuff wasn't fun, and it took up way too much time. However, it is probably the most fun one to just put in codes and go crazy in. My favorite is putting in the code to give the pedestrians weapons, then the one to make them attack each other randomly. What do I do during the resulting chaos? Why, do Taxi missions while dodging rockets, of course:)
Ah, nostalgia. The days when a Mac fan could immediately (and correctly) be dismissed as an idiot.
"You pay more because it's faster hardware!" no, I assure you it's not. I've used your $1200 mac and my $400 PC, and your mac is slow as hell.
"OS9 doesn't crash as often as Windows!" seriously? Have you even used the two operating systems you're talking about? They both go down more often than a $5 whore!
Now with OSX, sensible people can be Mac fanboys. Everything's so complicated.
Oh, and my Linux experience back then wasn't nearly as good as yours--it would skip when I sent or received an IM, saved any kind of document, when browsed to a new web page, or when it decided it needed to do some kind of housekeeping thing in the background. Not every time, but fairly often. It was better than Windows (which basically couldn't be used for anything else if you wanted to hear your music at all) but BeOS was still superior. I wasn't using super-light distros, though, so it may have been that (mostly Debian and Mandrake)
Any Linux distribution at the time. Well, any of them with a GUI, at least. Linux was kind of a sluggish booter back then, and X was slow as hell to start up.
Oh, yeah, I'm not at all surprised that I wasn't giving it a proper work-out. That's just the oldest hardware I ever ran it on, and it took an almost 4x increase in hardware power for Win98 to get almost, kind-of as responsive as BeOS. The Linux GUI was a horrible mess at the time, with KDE and Gnome seemingly competing to see which one of them could shit themselves more frequently and more spectacularly, not to mention how poorly X drew its windows in pre-compositing times, so while it was a tad better than Win98 performance-wise it was still much slower than BeOS, and rough as hell on top of it.
BeOS is what I want any OS to be: slim, good-looking, and good at staying the hell out of the way while transparently allocating system resources in a sane manner.
Yes yes, the Be folks loved to play 5 mp3s at the same time just to show off
Shit, I was just happy to be able to play one MP3 while simultaneously browsing a single website or (not and) using IM without it skipping constantly. Win98 and Linux couldn't do that on the same hardware. QNX could, but it was even more of a pain-in-the-ass than BeOS. Hell, Win98 and Linux on that weak hardware couldn't even be relied upon to just play an MP3 while doing nothing else, which is why I used BeOS on my little business-surplus IBM Pentium I, which was my MP3 jukebox for a while (not to mention my web-browsing box when I managed to break my main desktop while screwing around on it, which was often).
I even remember the BeBoxes, with their twin row of LEDs up the front of the case that would should you the load of each (PowerPC) processor. I guess my big problem is that it always felt like a big impressive tech demo instead of an OS. I had a roommate with it and he was always strugging to get non-trivial applications running on the thing.
I got in to BeOS pretty late in the game--it became nearly-impossible to find a new copy just a month or two after I bought mine--and I've never even seen a BeBox in person, so I can't really say much about that. I mean, the company did fail, and I wouldn't be surprised if what you're talking about was part of the reason. I just know that BeOS x86 running on normal PC hardware kicked the living shit out of its contemporaries, and at the time I got in to it it had about as many decent desktop-user applications as Linux did (so, not many, but it wasn't lagging so far behind back then).
Failed business plan or no, they'd made a hell of an OS.
A lot of open-source apps used to run on BeOS. No idea if they still do. Firefox was ported, as was (IIRC) OpenOffice. I'm pretty sure it's posix-compatible (more or less, at least) and it had a GTK port, so loads of other stuff had been ported over by enthusiasts. You could run most of the same end-user apps as in Linux or BSD, plus many of the server apps (Apache had a port, I think). Also, it had a few exclusive programs--I had a 3-disc RPG for mine, only ever released on BeOS. Never finished it, but I'm more in to RPGs now than I was then and as I recall it was pretty good, so trying it out again is on my long-term list of "stuff to do".
No idea what the state of it is now. The last time I actually used it was, oh, 2001 or 2002, and it's been a few years since I even looked at any of the user community sites.
If Haiku has anywhere near the performance that BeOS did, I'll be using it for pretty much any "appliance"-type application I have. Homemade set-top boxes and the like.
That OS put all of its contemporaries to shame with its smooth multitasking and media playing, and it did it on hardware that would cry, have a nervous breakdown, and melt into a pile of goo from merely being in the same room as the installation disc for a modern graphical OS.
BeOS is easily the most pleasant-to-use operating system I've ever seen. It could also multi-task while flawlessly playing back an MP3 on a 166Mhz Pentium with 32MB ram while showing minimal UI slowdown, which was impressive even back then; compared to the performance of operating systems now it's down-right miraculous.
In my perfect world it would have at least 75% of the desktop market and I'd rarely have to work on anything else. It's just a dream, but it's a good one.
Doesn't everyone love Niecy and her hair flowers, and Trish's "I sound like I need a throat lozenge" voice?
Heh. The worst part is that the company I'm with is working on a couple of "reality" type shows (though semi-decent ones, IMO--not picked up by any networks yet, we're still in the "pitching" phase) so any attempt on my part to even sort-of enjoy shows like "Clean House" are destined for failure.
I'm constantly thinking, "oh, god, that was so obviously set-up" when they make one of those "deals" with the homeowner to give them a couch or whatever if they give up such-and-such thing, or (worse) wondering how many takes they did of an "off-the-cuff" witty exchange. Oh, and then there's the editing where, just every now and then, you can really tell that they've butchered a conversation to make it fit what they needed it to be or they cut a statement short because the person rambled. Totally ruins it.
Specifically, the fact that her main use for the cable is watching those god-awful HGTV/TLC shows: "John and Kate Plus Eight", "Flip that House", "Property Virgins", "Clean House", that kind of thing.
The trouble is that no one seems to bother putting that crap on the usual torrent sites. I can understand why, but I really wish I could find it. Haven't been able to so far, and most of the shows aren't even available on the official websites.
IMHO, Deus Ex is an all-around better game. It has flaws, to be sure, but I think that SS2 had more. Deus Ex also brings a lot to the table that SS2 doesn't even try to--and that's not really a failing of SS2, but I think that it makes Deus Ex a deeper and more substantial game.
Both are superb, though, and both are easily in my personal top-10 list of games.
Oh, and I forgot about the Thief series. Completing the third one... man, the whole thing felt so epic for a game series with such a small focus, if that makes any sense.
Hm, some more on games as art:
I read quite a bit, and not just shitty genre fiction (though I read my fair share of that too)--I'm very much enjoying working through the huge body of "canonical" literature. I watch movies, including some that make critic's lists. IMO, games hold up very well to those two forms of media as a method of artistic expression, and some of my most moving experiences with fiction have been in games. Depending on what kind of experience you're looking for, they may even be a better method for conveying your message.
Saving Private Ryan impressed with its gritty opening scene that famously gave the audience a glimpse of hell, but I doubt any movie could have given me as much insight--however slight it may be--in to the concept of shell-shock as the first Russian level of CoD did.
The feelings evoked by traveling through the worlds of Morrowind and (to a lesser extent) Oblivion were occasionally very similar to those I've felt appreciating real landscapes and natural beauty, and their rich histories and in-game lore rival that of all but the best fantasy literature. Chrono Trigger/Cross, a couple of the Final Fantasies, Arcanum, a couple of the Suikoden games, Planescape: Torment, Darklands--ALL better than the average fantasy/sci-fi novel.
No book or movie has come close to being as terrifying as a number of the games I've played. IMO, games are the clear master of several types of horror, some of which overlap with those attempted in film and books.
Half Life 2's coast section had a lonely atmosphere of a quality that can only be seen in some of the best movies.
Fallout I/II and similar games where you have to make moral choices can tell you things about yourself that you might not discover in a book or movie; for instance, I've found that I can't bring myself to do a "bad" play-through my first time in a game.
One of the only good parts of Fallout 3--and it was a damn good one--was the bit with Harold, which is among the most heart-wrenching experiences I've ever had with any form of fiction, bar none, and the interactive form it took was integral to that experience.
BINGO. Serious Sam and Painkiller are the real successors to Doom I/II. Doom III was horrible in every way; it failed at emulating the successful formula of the first two games, AND it failed at blending in elements from other game formulas (the attempt at a story, the apparent attempt at a more atmospheric and realistic feel and horror type, etc.)
One or two enemies per room, "hiding" behind a pillar (IN EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN ROOM) does not frighten me, nor does it keep with the frantic style of the first two games. Inexplicable monster closets are out of place in a game that makes any attempt at all at being something other than a silly action game. Being able to see my enemy or shoot at it, but not both at the same time is the sort of game mechanic that is only barely tolerable even in 3rd person survival-horror games in the mold of Alone in the Dark or Haunting Ground or something like that. I guess they realized that the single-zombie-or-imp-in-the-same-"hiding"-spot-in-every-room thing was too dull, and threw that crap in to "liven it up" or something--I mean, that's gotta be it, right?
I'd have been happy with a real Doom I/II-style game for Doom III, or with a more updated game that turned it in to a nerve-wracking survival-horror experience. They gave us neither of those things.
That said, two parts I enjoyed:
1. The opening cut-scene, up to about 15-20 minutes after the big event. During this part, my best guess was that I was going to be playing something like System Shock 2 minus the RPG elements crossed with the atmosphere and run-and-gun style of Alien vs. Predator, which was damn fine by me.
2. The last 1/4 or so of the game. Everything from Hell on felt much more like Doom how I remember it. If the whole game had been like that, I'd have been satisfied with it.
Maybe not "art", but comparable to things that sometimes are considered art:
Max Payne 2--it's obviously not "The Godfather", but it's certainly better than your average gangster/cop movie. A damn-near flawless game. Does what it sets out to do, does it well, tells its story, and makes a graceful exit.
Many RPGs are every bit as good as a decent fantasy novel. Some are even better.
Term-limits was the first "take back" from the Republican revolution of '94 that got me worrying.
But however could they possibly implement their sweeping changes if they had to leave in 4 years? Sure, kick that other guy out, but me, I need more time to do the right thing!
*eyeroll*
Re:Can I get Battlestar Galactica in HD on it?
on
Miro 2.0 Launches Today
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It heavily promotes a large number of legal video RSS feeds (many of them very good), however you can use any torrent (or direct download, I think) RSS feed you want with the program. So, find a BSG HD torrent RSS feed (I'm sure they exist several places) and you're good to go.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I'm going to ignore the "have you stopped beating your wife?"-esqueness of this question, though rest assured I had a nice counter-snark prepared involving post-Reconquista Spain, among other things :)
Rather than respond in kind, let my attempt to address this head-on:
I don't think you're looking at the whole picture; the actions of a bunch of individuals within a system (their generation of a certain kind of economic demand, for instance) do not necessarily reflect their actual desires--they reflect their (hopefully rational) reactions to the circumstances they are placed in. This is precisely what the story of the Tragedy of the Commons is about; obviously, anyone in the story who realizes that the commons is being ruined will want use of it to be regulated, however, in absence of regulation their best choice is to go ahead and use it as much as they can. The details of the story itself are obviously poor analogues to what we're talking about, but the core idea of desires running counter to economic actions is exactly the same.
It is entirely possible that the vast majority of people want standardization of the chargers, but are lacking an economic incentive to make an individual choice supporting standardization. Especially given that much of the benefit of buying a phone that uses some kind of standard charger style is absent without widespread or universal use of said charger, this strikes me as being very likely. Will the market sort it out eventually despite this? Maybe. But we can certainly sort it out now.
A more serious discussion would be one over whether this is the proper role of government or not--and on an example this trivial, the argument against it would not be without reason. Arguing that that governmental intervention in business must necessarily be contrary to public desire (as surely people would have simply "voted with their dollars" if they wanted otherwise), on the other hand, is more than a bit silly, as I suspect (and hope) you knew when you asked the above-quoted question.
Didn't say government doesn't have problems.
Sometimes, they most certainly do.
Occasionally in a "best for the company's bottom line" sense. Check out the role of government in Japan's recovery after WWII; their corporations won big, and a lot of that was due to government-encouraged (or enforced) cooperation and collaboration. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry was the key player, if you're interested.
More often, a government knows better in a "best for the consumer and general welfare of the economy" sense, or in a "best for encouraging competition" sense. Standardization of things like this greases the wheels of the free market, and brings its mechanisms to bear on the products and corporations in question. After all, what's the point of free-market capitalism if not using the power of competition to improve our lives? Standardization of common parts like this removes inefficiency from the system, encourage competition, and brings down prices. Not exactly a controversial concept.
It's not so much that the government knows better, as that they have different priorities and the power to mandate that those priorities are respected. I'm sure many of the people in the corporations know that these things are possible, but they don't care to do them on their own for various reasons.
Prisoner's dilemma?
Grok that idea + the tragedy of the commons and you'll understand 99% of the problems with capitalism.
Seriously. We can start talking about helping these organizations when copyright terms get back to something reasonable--I'd like 14 years like it was originally (in the US, at least), but I'd take the 28 it was extended to.
Until then, fark 'em. They're the criminals. Modern popular art and media is vastly poorer than it should be thanks to the efforts of these organizations.
I never finished the first GTA 3--I did play through a few of the missions, but not that many. I spent loads of time screwing around in it, though.
Vice City I finished. Easily my favorite GTA. Great story, great atmosphere and the missions were usually fun.
San Andreas had promise but I eventually quit because I got sick of the "defend your turf" crap. That stuff wasn't fun, and it took up way too much time. However, it is probably the most fun one to just put in codes and go crazy in. My favorite is putting in the code to give the pedestrians weapons, then the one to make them attack each other randomly. What do I do during the resulting chaos? Why, do Taxi missions while dodging rockets, of course :)
OS9 was such a POS.
Ah, nostalgia. The days when a Mac fan could immediately (and correctly) be dismissed as an idiot.
"You pay more because it's faster hardware!" no, I assure you it's not. I've used your $1200 mac and my $400 PC, and your mac is slow as hell.
"OS9 doesn't crash as often as Windows!" seriously? Have you even used the two operating systems you're talking about? They both go down more often than a $5 whore!
Now with OSX, sensible people can be Mac fanboys. Everything's so complicated.
Oh, and my Linux experience back then wasn't nearly as good as yours--it would skip when I sent or received an IM, saved any kind of document, when browsed to a new web page, or when it decided it needed to do some kind of housekeeping thing in the background. Not every time, but fairly often. It was better than Windows (which basically couldn't be used for anything else if you wanted to hear your music at all) but BeOS was still superior. I wasn't using super-light distros, though, so it may have been that (mostly Debian and Mandrake)
Any Linux distribution at the time. Well, any of them with a GUI, at least. Linux was kind of a sluggish booter back then, and X was slow as hell to start up.
Oh, yeah, I'm not at all surprised that I wasn't giving it a proper work-out. That's just the oldest hardware I ever ran it on, and it took an almost 4x increase in hardware power for Win98 to get almost, kind-of as responsive as BeOS. The Linux GUI was a horrible mess at the time, with KDE and Gnome seemingly competing to see which one of them could shit themselves more frequently and more spectacularly, not to mention how poorly X drew its windows in pre-compositing times, so while it was a tad better than Win98 performance-wise it was still much slower than BeOS, and rough as hell on top of it.
BeOS is what I want any OS to be: slim, good-looking, and good at staying the hell out of the way while transparently allocating system resources in a sane manner.
Shit, I was just happy to be able to play one MP3 while simultaneously browsing a single website or (not and) using IM without it skipping constantly. Win98 and Linux couldn't do that on the same hardware. QNX could, but it was even more of a pain-in-the-ass than BeOS. Hell, Win98 and Linux on that weak hardware couldn't even be relied upon to just play an MP3 while doing nothing else, which is why I used BeOS on my little business-surplus IBM Pentium I, which was my MP3 jukebox for a while (not to mention my web-browsing box when I managed to break my main desktop while screwing around on it, which was often).
I got in to BeOS pretty late in the game--it became nearly-impossible to find a new copy just a month or two after I bought mine--and I've never even seen a BeBox in person, so I can't really say much about that. I mean, the company did fail, and I wouldn't be surprised if what you're talking about was part of the reason. I just know that BeOS x86 running on normal PC hardware kicked the living shit out of its contemporaries, and at the time I got in to it it had about as many decent desktop-user applications as Linux did (so, not many, but it wasn't lagging so far behind back then).
Failed business plan or no, they'd made a hell of an OS.
A lot of open-source apps used to run on BeOS. No idea if they still do. Firefox was ported, as was (IIRC) OpenOffice. I'm pretty sure it's posix-compatible (more or less, at least) and it had a GTK port, so loads of other stuff had been ported over by enthusiasts. You could run most of the same end-user apps as in Linux or BSD, plus many of the server apps (Apache had a port, I think). Also, it had a few exclusive programs--I had a 3-disc RPG for mine, only ever released on BeOS. Never finished it, but I'm more in to RPGs now than I was then and as I recall it was pretty good, so trying it out again is on my long-term list of "stuff to do".
No idea what the state of it is now. The last time I actually used it was, oh, 2001 or 2002, and it's been a few years since I even looked at any of the user community sites.
If Haiku has anywhere near the performance that BeOS did, I'll be using it for pretty much any "appliance"-type application I have. Homemade set-top boxes and the like.
That OS put all of its contemporaries to shame with its smooth multitasking and media playing, and it did it on hardware that would cry, have a nervous breakdown, and melt into a pile of goo from merely being in the same room as the installation disc for a modern graphical OS.
BeOS is easily the most pleasant-to-use operating system I've ever seen. It could also multi-task while flawlessly playing back an MP3 on a 166Mhz Pentium with 32MB ram while showing minimal UI slowdown, which was impressive even back then; compared to the performance of operating systems now it's down-right miraculous.
In my perfect world it would have at least 75% of the desktop market and I'd rarely have to work on anything else. It's just a dream, but it's a good one.
I say keep it alive.
I take it you've never heard of 4chan.
Heh. The worst part is that the company I'm with is working on a couple of "reality" type shows (though semi-decent ones, IMO--not picked up by any networks yet, we're still in the "pitching" phase) so any attempt on my part to even sort-of enjoy shows like "Clean House" are destined for failure.
I'm constantly thinking, "oh, god, that was so obviously set-up" when they make one of those "deals" with the homeowner to give them a couch or whatever if they give up such-and-such thing, or (worse) wondering how many takes they did of an "off-the-cuff" witty exchange. Oh, and then there's the editing where, just every now and then, you can really tell that they've butchered a conversation to make it fit what they needed it to be or they cut a statement short because the person rambled. Totally ruins it.
Indeed.
I never thought I'd find myself rooting for Amazon in an IP law case, but I hope they destroy these assholes if it goes to court.
My big road block to ditching cable? My wife.
Specifically, the fact that her main use for the cable is watching those god-awful HGTV/TLC shows: "John and Kate Plus Eight", "Flip that House", "Property Virgins", "Clean House", that kind of thing.
The trouble is that no one seems to bother putting that crap on the usual torrent sites. I can understand why, but I really wish I could find it. Haven't been able to so far, and most of the shows aren't even available on the official websites.
Any idea where I might find it? Anyone?
This can probably play any console game from the Atari to the N64/PS1 via emulator, though. That's some good added value.
Legal? No. The first thing every single person I know who has even a little computer knowledge would do with a box like this? Yep.
IMHO, Deus Ex is an all-around better game. It has flaws, to be sure, but I think that SS2 had more. Deus Ex also brings a lot to the table that SS2 doesn't even try to--and that's not really a failing of SS2, but I think that it makes Deus Ex a deeper and more substantial game.
Both are superb, though, and both are easily in my personal top-10 list of games.
Oh, and I forgot about the Thief series. Completing the third one... man, the whole thing felt so epic for a game series with such a small focus, if that makes any sense.
Hm, some more on games as art:
I read quite a bit, and not just shitty genre fiction (though I read my fair share of that too)--I'm very much enjoying working through the huge body of "canonical" literature. I watch movies, including some that make critic's lists. IMO, games hold up very well to those two forms of media as a method of artistic expression, and some of my most moving experiences with fiction have been in games. Depending on what kind of experience you're looking for, they may even be a better method for conveying your message.
Saving Private Ryan impressed with its gritty opening scene that famously gave the audience a glimpse of hell, but I doubt any movie could have given me as much insight--however slight it may be--in to the concept of shell-shock as the first Russian level of CoD did.
The feelings evoked by traveling through the worlds of Morrowind and (to a lesser extent) Oblivion were occasionally very similar to those I've felt appreciating real landscapes and natural beauty, and their rich histories and in-game lore rival that of all but the best fantasy literature. Chrono Trigger/Cross, a couple of the Final Fantasies, Arcanum, a couple of the Suikoden games, Planescape: Torment, Darklands--ALL better than the average fantasy/sci-fi novel.
No book or movie has come close to being as terrifying as a number of the games I've played. IMO, games are the clear master of several types of horror, some of which overlap with those attempted in film and books.
Half Life 2's coast section had a lonely atmosphere of a quality that can only be seen in some of the best movies.
Fallout I/II and similar games where you have to make moral choices can tell you things about yourself that you might not discover in a book or movie; for instance, I've found that I can't bring myself to do a "bad" play-through my first time in a game.
One of the only good parts of Fallout 3--and it was a damn good one--was the bit with Harold, which is among the most heart-wrenching experiences I've ever had with any form of fiction, bar none, and the interactive form it took was integral to that experience.
BINGO. Serious Sam and Painkiller are the real successors to Doom I/II. Doom III was horrible in every way; it failed at emulating the successful formula of the first two games, AND it failed at blending in elements from other game formulas (the attempt at a story, the apparent attempt at a more atmospheric and realistic feel and horror type, etc.)
One or two enemies per room, "hiding" behind a pillar (IN EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN ROOM) does not frighten me, nor does it keep with the frantic style of the first two games. Inexplicable monster closets are out of place in a game that makes any attempt at all at being something other than a silly action game. Being able to see my enemy or shoot at it, but not both at the same time is the sort of game mechanic that is only barely tolerable even in 3rd person survival-horror games in the mold of Alone in the Dark or Haunting Ground or something like that. I guess they realized that the single-zombie-or-imp-in-the-same-"hiding"-spot-in-every-room thing was too dull, and threw that crap in to "liven it up" or something--I mean, that's gotta be it, right?
I'd have been happy with a real Doom I/II-style game for Doom III, or with a more updated game that turned it in to a nerve-wracking survival-horror experience. They gave us neither of those things.
That said, two parts I enjoyed:
1. The opening cut-scene, up to about 15-20 minutes after the big event. During this part, my best guess was that I was going to be playing something like System Shock 2 minus the RPG elements crossed with the atmosphere and run-and-gun style of Alien vs. Predator, which was damn fine by me.
2. The last 1/4 or so of the game. Everything from Hell on felt much more like Doom how I remember it. If the whole game had been like that, I'd have been satisfied with it.
Definitely art:
Deus Ex.
The Fallout games.
The Half-Life series + Portal
Perhaps System Shock 2
Maybe not "art", but comparable to things that sometimes are considered art:
Max Payne 2--it's obviously not "The Godfather", but it's certainly better than your average gangster/cop movie. A damn-near flawless game. Does what it sets out to do, does it well, tells its story, and makes a graceful exit.
Many RPGs are every bit as good as a decent fantasy novel. Some are even better.
But however could they possibly implement their sweeping changes if they had to leave in 4 years? Sure, kick that other guy out, but me, I need more time to do the right thing!
*eyeroll*
It heavily promotes a large number of legal video RSS feeds (many of them very good), however you can use any torrent (or direct download, I think) RSS feed you want with the program. So, find a BSG HD torrent RSS feed (I'm sure they exist several places) and you're good to go.
heh, good point.