IIRC, that's pretty much the picture painted by Herman and Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent.
Basically, the news sucks and serves the interests of powerful people not out of some sort of conspiracy, but because it's way, way cheaper than doing real journalism.
Ask a tough question at a press conference? You won't be allowed in next time. Got an exclusive interview aboard Air Force One, but used it in a negative article? You won't be invited aboard again.
Gotta get a story out? Well, here's this handy press release that you can slightly reword (or not) and get on to the next job! As a bonus, it only takes one person a few minutes to do that, while writing a meaningful story to fill the same space might require several people and way more time.
I'd definitely take a 4-5% pay cut to get 4 weeks of vacation time rather than the standard 2.
Hell, give me a 15% cut and put me on a completely continental European work schedule--4 or 5 weeks vacation, extra holidays, and occasionally some "faire le pont" when a holiday falls only one day from a weekend. That'd be more than a fair cut for that.
Barring legislation mandating such things, it'll never be a realistic desire for someone who doesn't wish to be stuck at the bottom of their career's pecking order for eternity... but I can dream!
Actually The region codes are for piracy. Nintendo never had region codes on their handhelds until the Dsi and that's probably because it's so easy for anyone to produce something, like the R4, and it can be used across the globe and cause more damage.
Yeah, I think that's true of most states. Worse, even if you had one done very recently, you have to do it again anyway.
As if the pay, kids, parents, and administrators weren't enough to deter would-be teachers, every state makes you jump through all kinds of often-ridiculous hoops. I'm glad I don't have to do it--sucks for my wife, though.
I've never seen one where which answer went with which "type" wasn't completely obvious.
Just pick how you want it to turn out, and answer consistently. Piece of cake. I'd be shocked if anyone with half a brain did anything other than that.
Surely even if you try to answer it honestly you're unintentionally favoring the answers that you want to be true (or the ones that you believe to be expected) rather than the ones that are true.
As it turns out, I bought a slimline PS2 a few months after they had hit the shelves. Until this day, the Final Fantasy games and Dragon Quest games are still the ONLY games I own for the PS2.
You should really, really pick up Suikoden III and Suikoden V. Also, the Crono Trigger PS1 re-release and Crono Cross, if you don't have them.
I'm not talking about bugs, at least not in the interface. It's things like having no good way to access the server browser (you have to do it from console) and being dumped back to the menu if both you and another person attempt to join a game with 7/8 players at the same time via the "join a game" search function, rather than it simply re-trying the search with the same parameters. Not bugs--just lack of polish.
The things that might take a bit longer to fix are exploits occurring as a result of flaws in level design. They've gotten some of these already, but more have been exposed since then.
The only true bug I can think of is a freezing issue with multi-core processors. Short freezes a few seconds long. Fixed by setting processor affinity to one core. My understanding is that it's an engine problem that's existed in Source for a while.
My point was simply that there have not yet been the huge updates that had been talked about, and that even quite a bit of minor stuff hasn't been fixed yet, which implies (to me) that the large updates aren't coming for a while. It's not really fair to credit Valve with updates that haven't happened yet. Their behavior with other games indicates that they will support this game very well, but L4D can't yet be used to back up their support record. So, that part of the statement "TF2 and L4D receive huge in game updates a few times a year" is false.
Personally, I think it's silly that an expansion is coming out so quickly period. To me--a person who loved RA2 but who hasn't purchased RA3--this signals that they released a deliberately-incomplete game so that they could push "expansions" (i.e. things that should have been in it to begin with) out the door right after. I hate expansion treadmills, and EA is famous for them (The Sims, anyone?), so with this news I doubt I'll even buy it when it's bargain-binned down to $10.
Well, L4D hasn't actually received any huge updates yet. There are even a number of annoyances still unpatched, both in the interface and in-game. One patch even removed some functionality (ability for the server to set the difficulty in Versus mode), then the next one removed even more (ability for the players to call a vote to change difficulty in Versus mode) for no apparent reason. The former could have been a temporary fix until they were able to change the game to let players choose versus difficulty in the lobby (like they do with campaign mode) but the latter is simple removal of functionality.
I never used it (didn't even know you could still make the vote in vs. 'till it showed up in their changelog as having been removed) but it still bugs me that they are trimming choices out. So far there are a lot of things still wrong with it, including extremely minor and presumably very easy to fix problems with the menus and server-joining system, but they remain unfixed.
It's Valve, so I expect them to get to most of this eventually, and I do expect the "huge game updates" you talk about, but for the record there have been zero of them so far.
It'll be like anything else digital that's illegal in one country but legal in another.
There'll be a server with the files in the country where it's legal with a little banner at the top of its web page saying "These files are legal to distribute in this country but not in some others. Please do not download them if it is illegal for you to do so." There will be no actual checks of any kind, of course.
Just like that Australian branch of Project Gutenberg.
Oh, I agree, they had some great episodes, up there with the best of TNG. Not as many though, IMO. But, as I said, they also had fewer cringe-worthy shitty episodes.
And yes, Pale Moonlight is one of the best bits of television I've ever seen. The ending monologue gives me chills every time.
I thought DS9 was the most consistent of the new Trek series, especially past season 1.
IMO, TNG had a much bigger "amazing episode followed by an unwatchable POS that doesn't even seem like the same show" problem. I think that DS9 generated fewer 5-out-of-5 excellent individual episodes, but also fewer 1-out-of-5ers. Still a few 5s, though, and loads of 4s.
The multi-episode and season-long story arcs are why it's my favorite.
I looked through several comprehensive lists of mods to find all of the ones that sounded like things I wanted and which would play nice together, and dumped them all in at once, so I'm not entirely certain which one added the regional quests, but I think it was the super-famous and certainly must-have Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul (OOO). It may have been an improved landscapes mod that I use, though.
Unique Landscapes -- Scroll down to Section 2 for download links for completed landscape areas. I use all of them, and it's made it much more fun to run around new areas rather than just fast-traveling everywhere.
- Nonsense story, completely true, you are thrust into a world where you can live a life of any range of karma (angel, good, neutral, bad, evil) but no matter how to choose to live your life the main story is always the same. The Water of Life. Not open ended and extremely boring. Forcing the player into a boring and linear story ruins almost the entire single-player experience once you get to the worst and most disappointing ending I've ever experience. Remember, Bethesda specifically promised over 200 unique endings, saying that the character could end the game in almost 200 different ways. Later on their own forums for Fallout 3 they admitted it was an error and that there are only four endings, not 200, quite a large discrepancy between 200 endings and four.
I'd have settled for a short little pre-rendered video and a voiceover for each major side quest (hell, there weren't very many significant ones, which is another problem altogether) at the end, like in its predecessors. That and a couple days of intensive editing and modification of the main story by a person who was willing to say "wait a minute, WTF?" could have salvaged it from my current rating of "oh, wow, kind of bad" and boosted it up to "a worthy but weak entry in the series".
Rumor has it that Bethesda spent significant amounts of budget on hiring the voice actors for the game, specifically two or three more famous ones, and that it broke the bank on the project. They invested so much money into voice acting that other aspects of the game had no extra budget.
Ah. I'd been deliberately avoiding news about the game so I wouldn't spoil the experience of my first playthrough (HA!), so I hadn't heard anything like that. Certainly sounds like something Bethesda would do, though.
I love the frameworks of the games they put out, but the games themselves are notoriously half-assed. I was sure that wouldn't happen this time since they were just building off the Oblivion engine and wouldn't have the same difficulty and expense of building that part, but they still managed to disappoint.
- Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 - still have high hopes for this, even though I do think it's time the PS2 was allowed to die gracefully.
It's great. I watched my wife play some of Persona 3 and didn't care for it, but we're playing 4 together and it's really good so far (~70% of the way through now). It does suffer occasionally from Guide Dang It, but that's just something you've gotta put up with in most JRPGs. That's my only complaint, and it really could be much, much worse.
You're not alone--I posted a detailed description of my dislike of F3 a bit higher up.
Long story short, I felt like it had about 1/10 the meaningful content that Fallout 2 had, and that the designers seemed to care almost not at all about telling an interesting story or making the player feel like they were making a difference in the world.
With luck, the modders will fix it. They managed to turn the broken and (even looking past the brokenness) mediocre game Oblivion in to one of my favorite games ever, so there's hope yet.
Fallout 3 had potential, but IMO it was definitely worse than the first two. I even though I was going to love it for the first 5 hours or so, but that turned out to be a premature judgement.
Nonsense story, terrible and surprisingly limited ending, very few side-quest arcs (and even fewer that had a satisfying payoff), and only 3 cities, only one of those had anywhere near as much depth as even Klamath did in F2.
IMO, STALKER:Shadow of Chernobyl is a better Fallout game than Fallout 3 is, and it isn't a Fallout game at all.
I do think the opening section was superb, and the VATS system managed, against all odds, to give an FPS-style game a very Fallout feel. Megaton was a good starting city, but was just a set-up for a big let-down when the player realized that they'd already found the most interesting city in the game right after stepping out of the vault.
If the modding community does to F3 what it did to Oblivion (and, to a lesser extent, Morrowind) then we'll see a thoroughly mediocre game with great underlying technology turn in to a spectacular game over the next couple years. As it stands, though, F3 missed the mark on so many points that should have been no-brainers that it isn't (yet) the classic that F1 and F2 are.
Bethesda needs to spend more money on writers and less on their managers that keep shipping obviously-unfinished games out the door.
On a happier note, I've finally decided to revisit Oblivion with a score of major mods installed, and I've spent more time playing through one of several very interesting regional quests added by one of the mods than I did on the entire main quest in vanilla Oblivion. It's amazing. It looks better, it plays better, there's more to do, and it's become one of my favorite games of all time. I hope for the sake of one of my favorite franchises that I'll be able to say the same of Fallout 3 in a few years.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, that's pretty much the picture painted by Herman and Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent.
Basically, the news sucks and serves the interests of powerful people not out of some sort of conspiracy, but because it's way, way cheaper than doing real journalism.
Ask a tough question at a press conference? You won't be allowed in next time. Got an exclusive interview aboard Air Force One, but used it in a negative article? You won't be invited aboard again.
Gotta get a story out? Well, here's this handy press release that you can slightly reword (or not) and get on to the next job! As a bonus, it only takes one person a few minutes to do that, while writing a meaningful story to fill the same space might require several people and way more time.
I'd definitely take a 4-5% pay cut to get 4 weeks of vacation time rather than the standard 2.
Hell, give me a 15% cut and put me on a completely continental European work schedule--4 or 5 weeks vacation, extra holidays, and occasionally some "faire le pont" when a holiday falls only one day from a weekend. That'd be more than a fair cut for that.
Barring legislation mandating such things, it'll never be a realistic desire for someone who doesn't wish to be stuck at the bottom of their career's pecking order for eternity... but I can dream!
This makes no sense at all.
Research every place you'll be beforehand and print out anything you think you might need.
When I'm travelling the only thing I ever want from the 'net is info on the locales. When I'm well prepared I don't even want that.
Pretty much every teacher does it, or they don't teach.
Many private schools even have that requirement (and even if they didn't, the pay's generally way lower there)
Yeah, I think that's true of most states. Worse, even if you had one done very recently, you have to do it again anyway.
As if the pay, kids, parents, and administrators weren't enough to deter would-be teachers, every state makes you jump through all kinds of often-ridiculous hoops. I'm glad I don't have to do it--sucks for my wife, though.
I've never seen one where which answer went with which "type" wasn't completely obvious.
Just pick how you want it to turn out, and answer consistently. Piece of cake. I'd be shocked if anyone with half a brain did anything other than that.
Surely even if you try to answer it honestly you're unintentionally favoring the answers that you want to be true (or the ones that you believe to be expected) rather than the ones that are true.
You should really, really pick up Suikoden III and Suikoden V. Also, the Crono Trigger PS1 re-release and Crono Cross, if you don't have them.
Avoid Suikoden IV; it's horrible.
Haha, if XII was the "good parts" of XI then I'm damn glad I never played XI.
I'm not talking about bugs, at least not in the interface. It's things like having no good way to access the server browser (you have to do it from console) and being dumped back to the menu if both you and another person attempt to join a game with 7/8 players at the same time via the "join a game" search function, rather than it simply re-trying the search with the same parameters. Not bugs--just lack of polish.
The things that might take a bit longer to fix are exploits occurring as a result of flaws in level design. They've gotten some of these already, but more have been exposed since then.
The only true bug I can think of is a freezing issue with multi-core processors. Short freezes a few seconds long. Fixed by setting processor affinity to one core. My understanding is that it's an engine problem that's existed in Source for a while.
My point was simply that there have not yet been the huge updates that had been talked about, and that even quite a bit of minor stuff hasn't been fixed yet, which implies (to me) that the large updates aren't coming for a while. It's not really fair to credit Valve with updates that haven't happened yet. Their behavior with other games indicates that they will support this game very well, but L4D can't yet be used to back up their support record. So, that part of the statement "TF2 and L4D receive huge in game updates a few times a year" is false.
Personally, I think it's silly that an expansion is coming out so quickly period. To me--a person who loved RA2 but who hasn't purchased RA3--this signals that they released a deliberately-incomplete game so that they could push "expansions" (i.e. things that should have been in it to begin with) out the door right after. I hate expansion treadmills, and EA is famous for them (The Sims, anyone?), so with this news I doubt I'll even buy it when it's bargain-binned down to $10.
Well, L4D hasn't actually received any huge updates yet. There are even a number of annoyances still unpatched, both in the interface and in-game. One patch even removed some functionality (ability for the server to set the difficulty in Versus mode), then the next one removed even more (ability for the players to call a vote to change difficulty in Versus mode) for no apparent reason. The former could have been a temporary fix until they were able to change the game to let players choose versus difficulty in the lobby (like they do with campaign mode) but the latter is simple removal of functionality.
I never used it (didn't even know you could still make the vote in vs. 'till it showed up in their changelog as having been removed) but it still bugs me that they are trimming choices out. So far there are a lot of things still wrong with it, including extremely minor and presumably very easy to fix problems with the menus and server-joining system, but they remain unfixed.
It's Valve, so I expect them to get to most of this eventually, and I do expect the "huge game updates" you talk about, but for the record there have been zero of them so far.
Chaplin's great. "Modern Times" and "The Great Dictator" are wonderful.
Keaton's another favorite of mine. Slapstick that doesn't make you feel stupid for having watched it.
It'll be like anything else digital that's illegal in one country but legal in another.
There'll be a server with the files in the country where it's legal with a little banner at the top of its web page saying "These files are legal to distribute in this country but not in some others. Please do not download them if it is illegal for you to do so." There will be no actual checks of any kind, of course.
Just like that Australian branch of Project Gutenberg.
Seriously.
I guess my complete discography in MP3 form is "old-fashioned".
If by "youtube" you mean "pr0n".
Oh, I agree, they had some great episodes, up there with the best of TNG. Not as many though, IMO. But, as I said, they also had fewer cringe-worthy shitty episodes.
And yes, Pale Moonlight is one of the best bits of television I've ever seen. The ending monologue gives me chills every time.
I thought DS9 was the most consistent of the new Trek series, especially past season 1.
IMO, TNG had a much bigger "amazing episode followed by an unwatchable POS that doesn't even seem like the same show" problem. I think that DS9 generated fewer 5-out-of-5 excellent individual episodes, but also fewer 1-out-of-5ers. Still a few 5s, though, and loads of 4s.
The multi-episode and season-long story arcs are why it's my favorite.
The other Fallout games aren't goofy, exactly, unless you count a couple of the very rare and easter-egg-like random encounters.
Fallout 3 was far goofier, IMO. The first two have a healthy dose of humor, but it's more often macabre than goofy.
Hell, it even still has some well-known and as-yet-unfixed bugs from Oblivion. They couldn't have done very much to it.
I looked through several comprehensive lists of mods to find all of the ones that sounded like things I wanted and which would play nice together, and dumped them all in at once, so I'm not entirely certain which one added the regional quests, but I think it was the super-famous and certainly must-have Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul (OOO). It may have been an improved landscapes mod that I use, though.
Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
A meta-list of Oblivion mod lists
Unique Landscapes -- Scroll down to Section 2 for download links for completed landscape areas. I use all of them, and it's made it much more fun to run around new areas rather than just fast-traveling everywhere.
I'd have settled for a short little pre-rendered video and a voiceover for each major side quest (hell, there weren't very many significant ones, which is another problem altogether) at the end, like in its predecessors. That and a couple days of intensive editing and modification of the main story by a person who was willing to say "wait a minute, WTF?" could have salvaged it from my current rating of "oh, wow, kind of bad" and boosted it up to "a worthy but weak entry in the series".
Ah. I'd been deliberately avoiding news about the game so I wouldn't spoil the experience of my first playthrough (HA!), so I hadn't heard anything like that. Certainly sounds like something Bethesda would do, though.
I love the frameworks of the games they put out, but the games themselves are notoriously half-assed. I was sure that wouldn't happen this time since they were just building off the Oblivion engine and wouldn't have the same difficulty and expense of building that part, but they still managed to disappoint.
It's great. I watched my wife play some of Persona 3 and didn't care for it, but we're playing 4 together and it's really good so far (~70% of the way through now). It does suffer occasionally from Guide Dang It, but that's just something you've gotta put up with in most JRPGs. That's my only complaint, and it really could be much, much worse.
You're not alone--I posted a detailed description of my dislike of F3 a bit higher up.
Long story short, I felt like it had about 1/10 the meaningful content that Fallout 2 had, and that the designers seemed to care almost not at all about telling an interesting story or making the player feel like they were making a difference in the world.
With luck, the modders will fix it. They managed to turn the broken and (even looking past the brokenness) mediocre game Oblivion in to one of my favorite games ever, so there's hope yet.
Dissenting opinion:
Fallout 3 had potential, but IMO it was definitely worse than the first two. I even though I was going to love it for the first 5 hours or so, but that turned out to be a premature judgement.
Nonsense story, terrible and surprisingly limited ending, very few side-quest arcs (and even fewer that had a satisfying payoff), and only 3 cities, only one of those had anywhere near as much depth as even Klamath did in F2.
IMO, STALKER:Shadow of Chernobyl is a better Fallout game than Fallout 3 is, and it isn't a Fallout game at all.
I do think the opening section was superb, and the VATS system managed, against all odds, to give an FPS-style game a very Fallout feel. Megaton was a good starting city, but was just a set-up for a big let-down when the player realized that they'd already found the most interesting city in the game right after stepping out of the vault.
If the modding community does to F3 what it did to Oblivion (and, to a lesser extent, Morrowind) then we'll see a thoroughly mediocre game with great underlying technology turn in to a spectacular game over the next couple years. As it stands, though, F3 missed the mark on so many points that should have been no-brainers that it isn't (yet) the classic that F1 and F2 are.
Bethesda needs to spend more money on writers and less on their managers that keep shipping obviously-unfinished games out the door.
On a happier note, I've finally decided to revisit Oblivion with a score of major mods installed, and I've spent more time playing through one of several very interesting regional quests added by one of the mods than I did on the entire main quest in vanilla Oblivion. It's amazing. It looks better, it plays better, there's more to do, and it's become one of my favorite games of all time. I hope for the sake of one of my favorite franchises that I'll be able to say the same of Fallout 3 in a few years.