Yep, emulator is the only way I play old games now. I ditched my NES since I would rather play most of the games on PC.
Some games are playable without it, but even simple games like Mario can benefit--sure, you shouldn't need a save file to beat the game the quickest possible way, but what if you want to go through Mario 3 playing every single level? Who the hell has time to do that in one go (assuming you don't die) aside from young kids on summer break?
Most JRPGs--even modern ones--have terrible save systems, IMO. Boring as hell to repeat sections, and painfully easy to die. Too long between saves, so you have to block out a huge chunk of time to make sure you can get to the next save, then, even if you still want to play, you have to stop if you don't have enough time left to get to another one. I play them in spite of this, but it does raise the bar significantly for how good the game must be for me to bother with it. I'll play through a shitty PC FPS because it's probably short and I can (generally) save at any time, but I'll quit a JRPG after a couple hours if it's not really, really good.
Ditto for the Zelda series; I'm finally playing through Ocarina of Time because I can use an emulator and save-states. It's worth the occasional graphical glitch for that feature. I have the cartridge, but I don't use it.
I keep trying to play WindWaker (no 'cube emulator worth using yet, unfortunately) and losing 30 minutes to an hour of progress, then putting it down for a couple weeks out of frustration. It's going to take me a couple years to get through it at this rate:(
Sounds a little bit like the old RPG Darklands, in the ability to choose a background and multiple paths to advancement. I mean, they're very different games, but that sounds like something you might like, if you haven't already tried it.
I'm pretty sure it's on Home of the Underdogs as abandonware. You need the manual for to answer its periodic copy protection scheme questions, which should be on there as well. You'll probably need Dosbox to run it.
Yeah, they added some factions and did expand the map, but there's an unfortunate hard cap on the total number of factions, forcing modders to make sacrifices.
I think EB's map goes a bit farther east still, all the way out to the limit of Alexander's conquests, so that there's a real frontier on the edge and the far-east successor states are better represented.
The also include a major Arabian power that isn't in RTR, and IIRC the organized tribes of the Steppes are more accurately depicted. IMO, they handle smaller "barbarian" factions better as well; they have intricate regional and province-by-province rules on the behavior and army composition for the "rebel" faction to emulate small but unfocused powers like the Illyrians, rather than giving them their own faction. Same with the lesser Iberian tribes, upper Egypt (that's the part to the south, right? I always get that mixed up. Stupid upside-down river), and Numidia.
I don't know about Medieval and Shogun, but Rome has a couple of excellent realism mods.
My personal favorite is Europa Barbarorum. They even use the local names for cities and factions, rather than the Roman ones (e.g. Carthage isn't called Carthage, the cities in Gaul have Gaulish names with no Romanization, etc.) and have their generals giving commands in the faction's language, at least for the Romans and Greek successor states--I think they were working on the Celt, German, and Arabian factions, too, but I don't know if those were ever finished.
The other big one is Rome Total Realism. Also damn good. I played it until I found EB. Much more Rome-centric, ignoring a few large nations at the periphery of the empire in favor of including minor but closer groups like the Illyrians. Uses Roman names for most (all?) cities and factions.
Oooh, man, that's a tough button to hit without looking. Right next to the delete key, which is the only one on that side that I'm muscle-memoried in to being able to hit reliably.
The terminal-posting thing sounds cool, though. I hate having to use the finicky and non-replace-friendly select+middle-click paste method.
Looking at the screenshots (but never having used it) I think my first try at printing would be to click the little down-arrow next to the "save" "undo" and "reload"(?) buttons.
Then I'd probably try right-clicking on the "home" tab.
That orb doesn't look like it'd open a menu at all. My first guess would be that it would open some sort of MS Office "launcher" window that shows all the office programs I can use, in pretty icon form.
I'm a (primarily) PC gamer who's tried to get in to console gaming, but I just can't do it.
I try games that are supposed to be awesome, and they usually suck. Sometimes the controls are so horrible that it's unplayable, sometimes the story isn't 1/2 as good as it'd been made out to be, and sometimes the game mechanics are just bad.
I don't know if it's personal preference, or if the console gaming community just has lower standards, or what. Halo, Metroid Prime, God of War, Resident Evil 4... all suck. Not just a little, either--they'd be lucky to sell in the bargain bin in the PC section. The only single-player console games I've played that were anywhere near the same level as PC games at keeping my interest are a handful of JRPGs and a few adventure-type games (Zelda series for example, though even those are pretty damn flawed).
I look at the back catalog of single-player console games that I feel comfortable calling "great", and there are only a few, especially since the SNES era. Chrono Trigger (SNES, in fact) and Chrono Cross, the Suikoden series, a few of the Final Fantasies (but again, most of them from before the PSone). Tons of games on the NES and SNES were great, of course, especially in the context of their time, but that was a while ago.
Then I look at the PC, and it just destroys consoles. Deus Ex, the Thief series, The Witcher, System Shock 1/2, Bioshock (sure, it was available on the 360, but who in their right mind wants to play it that way? And, in point of fact, it suffers from its consolized parts, though they don't destroy it like they did Deus Ex 2), Red Alert 1 and 2, Starcraft, Darklands (oooold school), Morrowind and Oblivion (again, available on console in both cases, but again, terrible on the console), the entire Half Life series (shit, some of the free 3rd party mods for them are better than a few of the "AAA" titles I've tried for console), Portal, Fallout 1 and 2, Arcanum, STALKER... the list goes on and on.
It seems to me like the average really great single-player PC game (they're the same these days in multiplayer since all the consoles went online, except for odd-balls like, uh, most games on the Wii) is light-years better than the average "really great" console game. Better stories, better game mechanics, better controls. God knows I'd rather not deal with the problems associated with PC gaming, but consoles don't even look like competition, let alone real alternatives.
I really wish they were, but as it stands I'm counting on the PC to deliver the next of many truly amazing gaming experiences for me, while those who game on consoles exclusively may have only a vague idea of what an amazing gaming experience is. Certainly the glowing reviews (user and professional) that accompany the poor-to-mediocre games I keep getting suckered in to trying on consoles give me that impression.
Consoles have failed to impress me as anything more than JRPG and party-game machines. They're fine at that, but (almost) every time I use them to play a game outside those narrow confines, they fail hard when compared with my PC. Oh, platformers, I suppose they still have that niche cornered. Hooray. Ooh, but now that I think about it, best platformer I've ever played? Commander Keen series, especially 4 and 5. PC games. The only thing that might tie it is Mario 3.
I've been playing Left 4 Dead and Fallout 3 on my laptop with a mobile Nvidia 8600. I play Fallout at about a 2 on a 1-5 scale of quality (but keep in mind that that's got a horribly inefficient Bethesda 3D engine) and L4D at 4 or so.
High-wattage power supplies are definitely not required for a decent (though not top-of-the-line) gaming rig, if I can do that on my lowly laptop.
Best "party game" system of that generation, easily.
4 controller capability out of the box, 007 Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Mario Kart, all the good wrestling games (hey, they were fun at the time...) etc.
The PS1 was only good for racing games and RPGs, IMO. Oh, and Bushido Blade 1 and 2.
Kind of like the Wii vs. 360/PS3. Any time we plug in a PS3 at a get-together, it's to ooh and ah over the graphics and maybe take turns playing the single player mode of a cool game (Need for Speed or something). When the Wii's plugged in it's so we can all play games together.
Then again, no one I know likes console shooters, especially ones that don't do split-screen (and if they do, they better dumb it down like Goldeneye/Perfect Dark so it's fun rather than frustrating with the damn broken console controller--we all like PC shooters), so that may be why we don't get any multiplayer action out of those other consoles.
/ I see you are a fark.com user, too// Slashies right back at ya!
The same goes for fantasy. I read Tolkien as a kid, but when I went to see Fellowship of the Ring in the theatre, I kept looking at my watch and wondering when it was going to end (that was the longest movie I've sat through in a long time). I didn't even bother with the other two.
You missed little. The first one is by far the best.
Yeah, hell, I can't imagine trying to develop for anything other than Firefox these days (initially, at least). Firebug, the web developer toolbar, Yslow, open poster... I even do FTP from Firefox, since the FireFTP extension is superior to any stand-alone solution I've seen in Linux.
I do pretty much what you do: develop in firefox, test IE7 every now and then, then when I'm done I take a look (and have a laugh) at how screwed up it looks in IE6 so I can figure out whether I need to tear it all up and have a separate stylesheet or just a couple little hacks.
If I have time I give Opera and/or Konqueror a whirl, but 99% of the time they look acceptably similar to Firefox, so I don't treat that as a priority.
Heh, I've been kind of hoping someone writes a Geany/Notepad++-like text editor as a Firefox addon. Then I'd be able to do an entire site, from the point where I have the graphics prepared to the end, inside Firefox! I'd be able to use the exact same tools on Windows and Linux. Pretty sweet.
I just got back from my first trip to Chicago last Monday, and I'll definitely be avoiding those damned toll roads next time. I was used to the kind where you take a ticket when you get on and pay once when you exit, but those fuckers had me paying every 5 miles or so! AND they had some of the most poorly-planned construction I'd ever seen! Turns out it would have been nearly an hour faster to do the "avoid toll roads" route on our GPS, after all that is factored in.
Anywho, my co-worker here was just telling me, after I complained that the pay-online option expires after 7 days (doesn't say that on the damned signs, hm, I wonder why?), he said he just goes through the easy-pass lanes and has never gotten a ticket or paid a toll, and he used to live in Chicago and has never actually owned a pass. So, I'm inclined to agree with you about those lanes not being very closely monitored, if at all.
Unfortunately, I tried to be law-abiding, but after getting off the toll road to hit an ATM (I'd run out of change after the third goddamned toll booth) I found myself faced with an unmanned booth at the ramp to get back on the road, and it wouldn't take bills! The fuckers clearly want people to miss tolls. I expect to be rewarded for my efforts with a ticket any day now. Lovely.
That's the future. I think it'll grow up from the tiny devices rather than down from the big machines. Your next TV game console may just be [an iPhone connected to a television|http://www.macrumors.com/2008/12/05/outputting-iphone-apps-to-a-tv-moto-chaser-demo/].
God, I hope not. It's hard enough to get a handle on modern console games when you can feel the buttons; an iPhone game controller would be horrible, because you'd have to look down at it constantly if the control scheme was even a little bit more complicated than that of Super Mario Brothers.
The motion-sensitive stuff is cool and all, but everyone I know who has a Wii only uses it for a handful of games, even when all of the others support it. Swinging your arm to make your character swing his sword loses its novelty quickly, and after a while you just want your damn "A" button or whatever.
I'd play maybe 20% of current console games with an iPhone as my interface without complaining. It'd probably work for some racing games and most RPGs. For the rest... well, I'd probably just stop playing them if the iPhone was my only option, because they'd suck.
Can you imagine Super Smash Brothers with an iPhone as the controller? Or any fighting game released post-NES? Any FPS that wasn't painfully dumbed down (as if they weren't already painfully dumbed down for consoles)? Any RTS or deeper turn-based game (to be fair, these fail on consoles with practically ANY common control scheme)? Most action games like Zelda or any platformer, where timing and precise button presses are crucial, and any failure due to trouble with the controller will quickly lead to throwing-it-across-the-room frustration?
I could see game consoles and portable game systems merging in the near-ish future, but they're still going to have external controllers for playing the games intended for "console" mode.
I've found that Versus play gives the game way, way more longevity. It's just about the only thing I play now.
But yeah, they probably needed at least 2 more regular campaigns and 2 more versus campaigns at launch. Sure, it's already got 20 actual maps, which is quite a few for a multiplayer-only game (how many does TF2 ship with?) but this particular game needs more.
Judging from what Valve's said and what they've done with past games, I expect significant free content releases for the game over the next couple of years, so there's that. The real savior of the game, IMO, will be the release the map editor. When that happens, there'll be dozens of new maps and play modes coming out every month.
Switched to Slackware because Mandrake 7.1 sucked.
You got out at the right time. 8 was even worse, and 9 was terrible. They eventually drove me to Gentoo, and by its 3rd or 4th version Ubuntu won me over.
But hey, at least some of those earlier Mandrake releases were better than Red Hat was at the time. It had that going for it. Hell, I'd say 7 and maybe even 8 were still better than their analogous Red Hat releases.
Hrm. Interesting. It was my impression that DeVry and the like had reputations similar to that of "Joe Bob's Correspondence University of Theoretical Physics". Perhaps I am mistaken. I don't know any HR people personally; maybe they don't feel that way after all!... in which case I really should have taken them up on that scholarship thing. DAMNIT!
Do you want people from the top 5%, ability and intelligence wise, teaching grade school and high school?
OK, OK, that's probably asking too much.
How about those around the 20-25% area? That's more reasonable.
OK. What's the average pay for someone around the 20th percentile on some sort of imaginary averaged blend of intelligence scales? Now, pay about that much. Wait a few years for new teachers to enter the system. Problem solved! At least the teacher part of it. Still having problems? Look elsewhere.
Teachers suck because the way we pay them and treat them is based on the assumption that they suck.
Raise the pay in increments, wait a few years for the new grads to come through the system, then check to see if they're where you want them yet. If not, repeat. When you can finally say, "good enough!", great, stop. If it becomes too expensive before then, stop, being aware that you're choosing to have teachers less capable then you'd like--so don't shit on the ones you do get, since they are exactly what you're asking for, in an economic sense.
Alternatively, go ahead and fire the bad ones, as Republicans are always saying we should do. This will be a whole lot of them, mind you. Wages will go up as a result of the severe shortage caused by this action. That's fine, too, especially if you don't mind a few years of volatility and even worse schools. Same end, different means.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, emulator is the only way I play old games now. I ditched my NES since I would rather play most of the games on PC.
Some games are playable without it, but even simple games like Mario can benefit--sure, you shouldn't need a save file to beat the game the quickest possible way, but what if you want to go through Mario 3 playing every single level? Who the hell has time to do that in one go (assuming you don't die) aside from young kids on summer break?
Most JRPGs--even modern ones--have terrible save systems, IMO. Boring as hell to repeat sections, and painfully easy to die. Too long between saves, so you have to block out a huge chunk of time to make sure you can get to the next save, then, even if you still want to play, you have to stop if you don't have enough time left to get to another one. I play them in spite of this, but it does raise the bar significantly for how good the game must be for me to bother with it. I'll play through a shitty PC FPS because it's probably short and I can (generally) save at any time, but I'll quit a JRPG after a couple hours if it's not really, really good.
Ditto for the Zelda series; I'm finally playing through Ocarina of Time because I can use an emulator and save-states. It's worth the occasional graphical glitch for that feature. I have the cartridge, but I don't use it.
I keep trying to play WindWaker (no 'cube emulator worth using yet, unfortunately) and losing 30 minutes to an hour of progress, then putting it down for a couple weeks out of frustration. It's going to take me a couple years to get through it at this rate :(
Sounds a little bit like the old RPG Darklands, in the ability to choose a background and multiple paths to advancement. I mean, they're very different games, but that sounds like something you might like, if you haven't already tried it.
I'm pretty sure it's on Home of the Underdogs as abandonware. You need the manual for to answer its periodic copy protection scheme questions, which should be on there as well. You'll probably need Dosbox to run it.
Yeah, they added some factions and did expand the map, but there's an unfortunate hard cap on the total number of factions, forcing modders to make sacrifices.
I think EB's map goes a bit farther east still, all the way out to the limit of Alexander's conquests, so that there's a real frontier on the edge and the far-east successor states are better represented.
The also include a major Arabian power that isn't in RTR, and IIRC the organized tribes of the Steppes are more accurately depicted. IMO, they handle smaller "barbarian" factions better as well; they have intricate regional and province-by-province rules on the behavior and army composition for the "rebel" faction to emulate small but unfocused powers like the Illyrians, rather than giving them their own faction. Same with the lesser Iberian tribes, upper Egypt (that's the part to the south, right? I always get that mixed up. Stupid upside-down river), and Numidia.
Jesus, yeah, that last strip.
Thanks for making me feel like a jackass for hoping you keep making awesome comics.
Punch in the stomach, man.
Sucks that the site's down. I'd saved a bunch of them, but I think they were on a hard drive that died a couple months back.
I don't know about Medieval and Shogun, but Rome has a couple of excellent realism mods.
My personal favorite is Europa Barbarorum. They even use the local names for cities and factions, rather than the Roman ones (e.g. Carthage isn't called Carthage, the cities in Gaul have Gaulish names with no Romanization, etc.) and have their generals giving commands in the faction's language, at least for the Romans and Greek successor states--I think they were working on the Celt, German, and Arabian factions, too, but I don't know if those were ever finished.
The other big one is Rome Total Realism. Also damn good. I played it until I found EB. Much more Rome-centric, ignoring a few large nations at the periphery of the empire in favor of including minor but closer groups like the Illyrians. Uses Roman names for most (all?) cities and factions.
Oooh, man, that's a tough button to hit without looking. Right next to the delete key, which is the only one on that side that I'm muscle-memoried in to being able to hit reliably.
The terminal-posting thing sounds cool, though. I hate having to use the finicky and non-replace-friendly select+middle-click paste method.
Looking at the screenshots (but never having used it) I think my first try at printing would be to click the little down-arrow next to the "save" "undo" and "reload"(?) buttons.
Then I'd probably try right-clicking on the "home" tab.
That orb doesn't look like it'd open a menu at all. My first guess would be that it would open some sort of MS Office "launcher" window that shows all the office programs I can use, in pretty icon form.
Could be both!
Yeah, loads of people hated it at the time. I didn't even like it that much at first. Seemed to add too many layers between me and my stuff, I think.
None of the professors used OpenOffice, but they usually didn't mind a PDF. file->export to PDF.
Actually, some of them still used Word Perfect (IIRC, it may have been some other off-beat WP program), and this was just a couple years ago. Weird.
FEED ME A STRAY CAT
I'm a (primarily) PC gamer who's tried to get in to console gaming, but I just can't do it.
I try games that are supposed to be awesome, and they usually suck. Sometimes the controls are so horrible that it's unplayable, sometimes the story isn't 1/2 as good as it'd been made out to be, and sometimes the game mechanics are just bad.
I don't know if it's personal preference, or if the console gaming community just has lower standards, or what. Halo, Metroid Prime, God of War, Resident Evil 4... all suck. Not just a little, either--they'd be lucky to sell in the bargain bin in the PC section. The only single-player console games I've played that were anywhere near the same level as PC games at keeping my interest are a handful of JRPGs and a few adventure-type games (Zelda series for example, though even those are pretty damn flawed).
I look at the back catalog of single-player console games that I feel comfortable calling "great", and there are only a few, especially since the SNES era. Chrono Trigger (SNES, in fact) and Chrono Cross, the Suikoden series, a few of the Final Fantasies (but again, most of them from before the PSone). Tons of games on the NES and SNES were great, of course, especially in the context of their time, but that was a while ago.
Then I look at the PC, and it just destroys consoles. Deus Ex, the Thief series, The Witcher, System Shock 1/2, Bioshock (sure, it was available on the 360, but who in their right mind wants to play it that way? And, in point of fact, it suffers from its consolized parts, though they don't destroy it like they did Deus Ex 2), Red Alert 1 and 2, Starcraft, Darklands (oooold school), Morrowind and Oblivion (again, available on console in both cases, but again, terrible on the console), the entire Half Life series (shit, some of the free 3rd party mods for them are better than a few of the "AAA" titles I've tried for console), Portal, Fallout 1 and 2, Arcanum, STALKER... the list goes on and on.
It seems to me like the average really great single-player PC game (they're the same these days in multiplayer since all the consoles went online, except for odd-balls like, uh, most games on the Wii) is light-years better than the average "really great" console game. Better stories, better game mechanics, better controls. God knows I'd rather not deal with the problems associated with PC gaming, but consoles don't even look like competition, let alone real alternatives.
I really wish they were, but as it stands I'm counting on the PC to deliver the next of many truly amazing gaming experiences for me, while those who game on consoles exclusively may have only a vague idea of what an amazing gaming experience is. Certainly the glowing reviews (user and professional) that accompany the poor-to-mediocre games I keep getting suckered in to trying on consoles give me that impression.
Consoles have failed to impress me as anything more than JRPG and party-game machines. They're fine at that, but (almost) every time I use them to play a game outside those narrow confines, they fail hard when compared with my PC. Oh, platformers, I suppose they still have that niche cornered. Hooray. Ooh, but now that I think about it, best platformer I've ever played? Commander Keen series, especially 4 and 5. PC games. The only thing that might tie it is Mario 3.
I've been playing Left 4 Dead and Fallout 3 on my laptop with a mobile Nvidia 8600. I play Fallout at about a 2 on a 1-5 scale of quality (but keep in mind that that's got a horribly inefficient Bethesda 3D engine) and L4D at 4 or so.
High-wattage power supplies are definitely not required for a decent (though not top-of-the-line) gaming rig, if I can do that on my lowly laptop.
So play co-op campaigns in Left 4 Dead.
He'll appreciate it when you knock that hunter off of him, and you'll keep your damn mouth shut when he fails to do the same.
Just watch the friendly fire.
The N64 was killed?
Best "party game" system of that generation, easily.
4 controller capability out of the box, 007 Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Mario Kart, all the good wrestling games (hey, they were fun at the time...) etc.
The PS1 was only good for racing games and RPGs, IMO. Oh, and Bushido Blade 1 and 2.
Kind of like the Wii vs. 360/PS3. Any time we plug in a PS3 at a get-together, it's to ooh and ah over the graphics and maybe take turns playing the single player mode of a cool game (Need for Speed or something). When the Wii's plugged in it's so we can all play games together.
Then again, no one I know likes console shooters, especially ones that don't do split-screen (and if they do, they better dumb it down like Goldeneye/Perfect Dark so it's fun rather than frustrating with the damn broken console controller--we all like PC shooters), so that may be why we don't get any multiplayer action out of those other consoles.
/ I see you are a fark.com user, too // Slashies right back at ya!
You missed little. The first one is by far the best.
I thought God Emperor was the perfect ending to the overall story.
I saw the books past that, and thought, "why?"
Then I read the first one and part of the second, and realized the answer is, "no particular reason".
You are correct: stop at God Emperor and move on. There's too much good stuff out there to spend time reading crap.
Yeah, hell, I can't imagine trying to develop for anything other than Firefox these days (initially, at least). Firebug, the web developer toolbar, Yslow, open poster... I even do FTP from Firefox, since the FireFTP extension is superior to any stand-alone solution I've seen in Linux.
I do pretty much what you do: develop in firefox, test IE7 every now and then, then when I'm done I take a look (and have a laugh) at how screwed up it looks in IE6 so I can figure out whether I need to tear it all up and have a separate stylesheet or just a couple little hacks.
If I have time I give Opera and/or Konqueror a whirl, but 99% of the time they look acceptably similar to Firefox, so I don't treat that as a priority.
Heh, I've been kind of hoping someone writes a Geany/Notepad++-like text editor as a Firefox addon. Then I'd be able to do an entire site, from the point where I have the graphics prepared to the end, inside Firefox! I'd be able to use the exact same tools on Windows and Linux. Pretty sweet.
I just got back from my first trip to Chicago last Monday, and I'll definitely be avoiding those damned toll roads next time. I was used to the kind where you take a ticket when you get on and pay once when you exit, but those fuckers had me paying every 5 miles or so! AND they had some of the most poorly-planned construction I'd ever seen! Turns out it would have been nearly an hour faster to do the "avoid toll roads" route on our GPS, after all that is factored in.
Anywho, my co-worker here was just telling me, after I complained that the pay-online option expires after 7 days (doesn't say that on the damned signs, hm, I wonder why?), he said he just goes through the easy-pass lanes and has never gotten a ticket or paid a toll, and he used to live in Chicago and has never actually owned a pass. So, I'm inclined to agree with you about those lanes not being very closely monitored, if at all.
Unfortunately, I tried to be law-abiding, but after getting off the toll road to hit an ATM (I'd run out of change after the third goddamned toll booth) I found myself faced with an unmanned booth at the ramp to get back on the road, and it wouldn't take bills! The fuckers clearly want people to miss tolls. I expect to be rewarded for my efforts with a ticket any day now. Lovely.
Don't the heatsink-only ones rely on better-than-average airflow through the case, which means more and/or stronger case fans?
That's the future. I think it'll grow up from the tiny devices rather than down from the big machines. Your next TV game console may just be [an iPhone connected to a television|http://www.macrumors.com/2008/12/05/outputting-iphone-apps-to-a-tv-moto-chaser-demo/].
God, I hope not. It's hard enough to get a handle on modern console games when you can feel the buttons; an iPhone game controller would be horrible, because you'd have to look down at it constantly if the control scheme was even a little bit more complicated than that of Super Mario Brothers.
The motion-sensitive stuff is cool and all, but everyone I know who has a Wii only uses it for a handful of games, even when all of the others support it. Swinging your arm to make your character swing his sword loses its novelty quickly, and after a while you just want your damn "A" button or whatever.
I'd play maybe 20% of current console games with an iPhone as my interface without complaining. It'd probably work for some racing games and most RPGs. For the rest... well, I'd probably just stop playing them if the iPhone was my only option, because they'd suck.
Can you imagine Super Smash Brothers with an iPhone as the controller? Or any fighting game released post-NES? Any FPS that wasn't painfully dumbed down (as if they weren't already painfully dumbed down for consoles)? Any RTS or deeper turn-based game (to be fair, these fail on consoles with practically ANY common control scheme)? Most action games like Zelda or any platformer, where timing and precise button presses are crucial, and any failure due to trouble with the controller will quickly lead to throwing-it-across-the-room frustration?
I could see game consoles and portable game systems merging in the near-ish future, but they're still going to have external controllers for playing the games intended for "console" mode.
I've found that Versus play gives the game way, way more longevity. It's just about the only thing I play now.
But yeah, they probably needed at least 2 more regular campaigns and 2 more versus campaigns at launch. Sure, it's already got 20 actual maps, which is quite a few for a multiplayer-only game (how many does TF2 ship with?) but this particular game needs more.
Judging from what Valve's said and what they've done with past games, I expect significant free content releases for the game over the next couple of years, so there's that. The real savior of the game, IMO, will be the release the map editor. When that happens, there'll be dozens of new maps and play modes coming out every month.
You got out at the right time. 8 was even worse, and 9 was terrible. They eventually drove me to Gentoo, and by its 3rd or 4th version Ubuntu won me over.
But hey, at least some of those earlier Mandrake releases were better than Red Hat was at the time. It had that going for it. Hell, I'd say 7 and maybe even 8 were still better than their analogous Red Hat releases.
Hrm. Interesting. It was my impression that DeVry and the like had reputations similar to that of "Joe Bob's Correspondence University of Theoretical Physics". Perhaps I am mistaken. I don't know any HR people personally; maybe they don't feel that way after all! ... in which case I really should have taken them up on that scholarship thing. DAMNIT!
Well, what do you want?
Do you want people from the top 5%, ability and intelligence wise, teaching grade school and high school?
OK, OK, that's probably asking too much.
How about those around the 20-25% area? That's more reasonable.
OK. What's the average pay for someone around the 20th percentile on some sort of imaginary averaged blend of intelligence scales? Now, pay about that much. Wait a few years for new teachers to enter the system. Problem solved! At least the teacher part of it. Still having problems? Look elsewhere.
Teachers suck because the way we pay them and treat them is based on the assumption that they suck.
Raise the pay in increments, wait a few years for the new grads to come through the system, then check to see if they're where you want them yet. If not, repeat. When you can finally say, "good enough!", great, stop. If it becomes too expensive before then, stop, being aware that you're choosing to have teachers less capable then you'd like--so don't shit on the ones you do get, since they are exactly what you're asking for, in an economic sense.
Alternatively, go ahead and fire the bad ones, as Republicans are always saying we should do. This will be a whole lot of them, mind you. Wages will go up as a result of the severe shortage caused by this action. That's fine, too, especially if you don't mind a few years of volatility and even worse schools. Same end, different means.