D3 was never frantic enough. Painkiller and the Serious Sam games were much, much more faithful to the original Doom formula. D3 tried to be the original (reason's out the window, monster closets everywhere) while trying for a more modern, atmospheric scariness (booooo, it's all dark, you're afraid!) and placing greater emphasis on the story (hey, look, audio logs!)
IMO, they failed to do any of that well. Too few enemies for a classic Doom feel, too predictable for a creepier kind of fright, and the added story elements were weak and unnecessary.
I actually find Steam to be, generally, easier and more convenient than pirating.
Which is why I can't understand publishers sticking MORE DRM on top of it, e.g. Bioshock. Way to defeat the whole point, jackasses.
There are several competing desires here, for me:
1. Desire to play the game (duh) 2. Desire to support the creators 3. Desire NOT to have my machine fucked up by DRM 4. Desire to get the game in the easiest way possible
Buying a game at the store with no DRM or with DRM that is not very intrusive satisfies 1, 2, and 3. I'll probably do it.
Buying the game on Steam satisfies ALL FOUR. Definite buy.
Buying a game at the store with awful DRM satisfies only 1 and 2. Fucking up my machine is not worth it, EVER, so I'll pirate and get 1,3, and 4 at the expense of 2. Sorry. Incompetently failing to allow Steam to do its job and making your Steam release not meet desire 3? Haha, no. Still playing it, though. Sorry.
Haha, I just posted higher up the page about the same game! Almost bought it on Steam last week, remembered having heard about nasty DRM on it, checked, and even the damned Steam version (yes, I tolerate Steam, because it at least gives me something in return for the restrictions, and has never interfered with any of my other software) has it!
Unlike you, I'm still playing it. Just didn't pay for it. If I had an X-box 360, I'd have probably bought a (used) copy for that system, but I don't. *shrug*
The first Max Payne game, when it was still in the full-sized box package (I'm sure it's down to a single, unboxed jewel case by now, if you can even find it outside of some kind of bundled pack) came with a kickass Max Payne mousepad. Not one of those cheap, flimsy, thin ones either--a nice one with a cloth top. Used it for years. Would still be using it, but it's still packed somewhere from our last move. Very nice bonus.
I was minutes away from buying Bioshock last week, when I remembered hearing about it having some really nasty DRM. I checked, and sure enough, even the Steam version (the one I'd planned to buy) was crippleware. WTF? Steam is just about the only DRM I've seen that didn't piss me off--it gives me enough benefits to compensate that I can deal with it--AND it's pretty damned secure, but they felt the need to put MORE on top of it?
Consequently, I'm still playing the game, but the Bioshock folks are a few bucks poorer than they'd have been without the extra DRM on their Steam release.
He personally edited practically the entire film, if not the entire film.
My understanding of it is that the first edit was a complete mess, and bombed at a couple of test screenings. A couple other people (one of whom being his wife, IIRC, or I may be thinking of something else) totally re-did the whole thing, including some famous creative editing (the looped Tusken Raider thing), often having to search through various takes to find one that had what they wanted, then take that shot right up to the word "cut".
There's an amazing SW fan documentary out there that covers all of this, WHILE showing the whole movie in the background, seamlessly splicing in behind-the-scenes shots, long-ish cut sections (including the entire Tosche Station scene) and interviews. It's THE best making-of documentary I've ever seen. Called "Deleted Magic". You can probably find it on some torrent sites. WELL worth a watch.
There should have been way more of Anakin trying to do the right thing, but moving closer to the dark side in the process. It would have made some of the parts of the original trilogy more meaningful, especially where Ben and Yoda implore Luke not to go to Cloud City.
The worst part is that their own, official stories in the new movies fit less well with the universe created in the original trilogy than much of the Expanded Universe stuff does. Midiclorians? WTF? The stormtroopers are all clones of Boba Fett's dad? It's like really, really bad fan fiction.
I could name a half-dozen prolific SW writers who could have scripts for the prequels that would have been better than Lucas' in every way. Zahn, Stackpole, and even the much-maligned Kevin J. Anderson would have been good choices, for instance. All three have shown a talent for keeping the "feel" of the original trilogy in new works, and KJA even managed it with stories set way, way back in the past (the great Tales of the Jedi comics)
Even the ships they came up with for the new trilogy felt wrong, while the expanded universe people have created TONS of new ships, and only rarely have they had that problem. Some of them were even supposed to have been from the Clone Wars time period, and could have been "borrowed" by Lucas for the new movies (Victory-class Star Destroyers, Z-95 Headhunters, etc.)
Back in my youth I popped a few 2/3-liters and had some fun
20-ouncers work the best, I find. It's not about volume, it's about PSI. 2-liters pop too early. Also, watch out for 20-ounce water bottles; they aren't designed to hold pressurized liquids, so they go FAST, and often their caps just pop off.
20-ounce, plain-jane pop bottles give you the biggest BOOM. Avoid oddly-shaped bottles like Coke bottles, as they also don't take as much pressure.
Also, if you ever get the chance, take one of those vending machine plastic container things (the little bubbles with the lid), put a little dry ice and water in it, pop the lid on, and set it on the ground lid-down. Cheap home DIY rocketry (sort of)!
Same here. Wife's got the same problem, but she lucked out and I was able (with several hours of searching) to get hers 99% functional under XP (special laptop function buttons still don't work).
I tried it with mine, spent two days on it, and STILL didn't have any goddamned audio, along with a host of more minor problems, and since the only reason I would want Windows on my laptop at all is for games and occasional video editing (I do almost all of my real work in Linux) the no-audio thing was unacceptable.
That's a game that did darkness WELL. You could still see what was happening most of the time, but it was still dim and grim. Full darkness was only used occasionally, and to great effect.
IIRC, the last level was the only one that was anywhere near as dark as Doom 3 was in general. I remember running out of some tunnel network in total darkness, following my map, a dozen blips chasing after me, firing whenever I got the tiniest sliver of light and could actually see them. It was frantic and fun. Doom 3's "creep into room with flashlight, see enemy, bring up gun, fire into darkness and hope enemy hasn't moved, bring up flashlight, realize you missed, bring up gun, fire into darkness..." was just frustrating and, eventually, boring, and was not remotely scary.
A lot of things are easier in CSS than with tables, not the least of which is producing legible markup. Table layouts are always a confusing mess, no matter how skilled the author, whereas a CSS/(X)HTML writer of even moderate skill can produce complex layouts that are, if not wonderful, at least much, much easier to read and understand than tables.
Then again, some things are harder in CSS, but that has more to do with IE's horrible implementation than with a flaw in CSS itself. In the end, very simple sites won't have those problems, so you might as well use CSS to keep things clean, and more complicated sites WILL have CSS problems but they'll still be easier to deal with than digging through a soup of TABLE, TR, TD, and TH tags.
It's always fun to see in what new and exciting ways my pages break when I try them in IE7 after designing in/for Firefox/Opera/Safari/Every other sort-of-standards-based web browser.
I'm pretty sure you're thinking of Mechwarrior: Mercenaries.
Supercalifragisexy was one of the codes for it. Most of the Dark Forces codes started with "la" (for "Lucas Arts", I suppose), kind of like how a lot of the Doom codes start with "id". lalame, laskip, things like that.
If you run all your heating, air, water heater, and oven off electricity, you may need 200A service.
I know, because we're considering switching our house to all-electricity with an air-source heat pump and an electric water heater with heat recovery from the AC function of the air pump.
Most of the guys who've checked it out have said we'll need 200A service to make sure all of that works smoothly.
It's not hyperbole. Awesomebar didn't give me anything I wanted, and made the one thing I do want ('x' should bring up xkcd as its first recommendation, 's' should bring up the slashdot mainpage, etc.) less reliable. I do not need the added features at all, so they are in the way. I just don't visit enough websites with the same first letters in the URL on a regular basis to make the search thing more convenient than simple autocomplete. The first day I had it, I muscle-memoried myself to the wrong place so many times that it took a couple more days of very careful tabbing to get what I wanted back to the top of the list.
In the end, I just installed an addon that gave me my old bar back. It's still slower than the old one, which sucks, since the one and only thing I didn't like about the old bar was that it was slow. *shrug* maybe in 4.0.
On another note, what's with the lack of hosting services providing PostgreSQL? I would love to use it, at least for some projects, but the fact that it's not available on many hosts makes it quite a hard decision to make. I don't want to pick up another hosting provider, or switch over all my stuff just to use a different database.
Slashdot Mirror
D3 was never frantic enough. Painkiller and the Serious Sam games were much, much more faithful to the original Doom formula. D3 tried to be the original (reason's out the window, monster closets everywhere) while trying for a more modern, atmospheric scariness (booooo, it's all dark, you're afraid!) and placing greater emphasis on the story (hey, look, audio logs!)
IMO, they failed to do any of that well. Too few enemies for a classic Doom feel, too predictable for a creepier kind of fright, and the added story elements were weak and unnecessary.
As long as it gets us another free, cross-platform multiplayer shooter like Enemy Territory, bring on the new Wolfensteins!
I think I've bought maybe 2-3 new console games, ever, out of perhaps 80-90. The rest were all used.
I actually find Steam to be, generally, easier and more convenient than pirating.
Which is why I can't understand publishers sticking MORE DRM on top of it, e.g. Bioshock. Way to defeat the whole point, jackasses.
There are several competing desires here, for me:
1. Desire to play the game (duh)
2. Desire to support the creators
3. Desire NOT to have my machine fucked up by DRM
4. Desire to get the game in the easiest way possible
Buying a game at the store with no DRM or with DRM that is not very intrusive satisfies 1, 2, and 3. I'll probably do it.
Buying the game on Steam satisfies ALL FOUR. Definite buy.
Buying a game at the store with awful DRM satisfies only 1 and 2. Fucking up my machine is not worth it, EVER, so I'll pirate and get 1,3, and 4 at the expense of 2. Sorry. Incompetently failing to allow Steam to do its job and making your Steam release not meet desire 3? Haha, no. Still playing it, though. Sorry.
Haha, I just posted higher up the page about the same game! Almost bought it on Steam last week, remembered having heard about nasty DRM on it, checked, and even the damned Steam version (yes, I tolerate Steam, because it at least gives me something in return for the restrictions, and has never interfered with any of my other software) has it!
Unlike you, I'm still playing it. Just didn't pay for it. If I had an X-box 360, I'd have probably bought a (used) copy for that system, but I don't. *shrug*
The first Max Payne game, when it was still in the full-sized box package (I'm sure it's down to a single, unboxed jewel case by now, if you can even find it outside of some kind of bundled pack) came with a kickass Max Payne mousepad. Not one of those cheap, flimsy, thin ones either--a nice one with a cloth top. Used it for years. Would still be using it, but it's still packed somewhere from our last move. Very nice bonus.
I was minutes away from buying Bioshock last week, when I remembered hearing about it having some really nasty DRM. I checked, and sure enough, even the Steam version (the one I'd planned to buy) was crippleware. WTF? Steam is just about the only DRM I've seen that didn't piss me off--it gives me enough benefits to compensate that I can deal with it--AND it's pretty damned secure, but they felt the need to put MORE on top of it?
Consequently, I'm still playing the game, but the Bioshock folks are a few bucks poorer than they'd have been without the extra DRM on their Steam release.
Sounds like the easiest way to cheat without being caught would be to hack & compile Wine with the cheats built-in.
My understanding of it is that the first edit was a complete mess, and bombed at a couple of test screenings. A couple other people (one of whom being his wife, IIRC, or I may be thinking of something else) totally re-did the whole thing, including some famous creative editing (the looped Tusken Raider thing), often having to search through various takes to find one that had what they wanted, then take that shot right up to the word "cut".
There's an amazing SW fan documentary out there that covers all of this, WHILE showing the whole movie in the background, seamlessly splicing in behind-the-scenes shots, long-ish cut sections (including the entire Tosche Station scene) and interviews. It's THE best making-of documentary I've ever seen. Called "Deleted Magic". You can probably find it on some torrent sites. WELL worth a watch.
There should have been way more of Anakin trying to do the right thing, but moving closer to the dark side in the process. It would have made some of the parts of the original trilogy more meaningful, especially where Ben and Yoda implore Luke not to go to Cloud City.
The worst part is that their own, official stories in the new movies fit less well with the universe created in the original trilogy than much of the Expanded Universe stuff does. Midiclorians? WTF? The stormtroopers are all clones of Boba Fett's dad? It's like really, really bad fan fiction.
I could name a half-dozen prolific SW writers who could have scripts for the prequels that would have been better than Lucas' in every way. Zahn, Stackpole, and even the much-maligned Kevin J. Anderson would have been good choices, for instance. All three have shown a talent for keeping the "feel" of the original trilogy in new works, and KJA even managed it with stories set way, way back in the past (the great Tales of the Jedi comics)
Even the ships they came up with for the new trilogy felt wrong, while the expanded universe people have created TONS of new ships, and only rarely have they had that problem. Some of them were even supposed to have been from the Clone Wars time period, and could have been "borrowed" by Lucas for the new movies (Victory-class Star Destroyers, Z-95 Headhunters, etc.)
20-ouncers work the best, I find. It's not about volume, it's about PSI. 2-liters pop too early. Also, watch out for 20-ounce water bottles; they aren't designed to hold pressurized liquids, so they go FAST, and often their caps just pop off.
20-ounce, plain-jane pop bottles give you the biggest BOOM. Avoid oddly-shaped bottles like Coke bottles, as they also don't take as much pressure.
Also, if you ever get the chance, take one of those vending machine plastic container things (the little bubbles with the lid), put a little dry ice and water in it, pop the lid on, and set it on the ground lid-down. Cheap home DIY rocketry (sort of)!
Crushed dry ice with some room-temperature water will do the same thing, without the harsh chemicals.
Same here. Wife's got the same problem, but she lucked out and I was able (with several hours of searching) to get hers 99% functional under XP (special laptop function buttons still don't work).
I tried it with mine, spent two days on it, and STILL didn't have any goddamned audio, along with a host of more minor problems, and since the only reason I would want Windows on my laptop at all is for games and occasional video editing (I do almost all of my real work in Linux) the no-audio thing was unacceptable.
That's a game that did darkness WELL. You could still see what was happening most of the time, but it was still dim and grim. Full darkness was only used occasionally, and to great effect.
IIRC, the last level was the only one that was anywhere near as dark as Doom 3 was in general. I remember running out of some tunnel network in total darkness, following my map, a dozen blips chasing after me, firing whenever I got the tiniest sliver of light and could actually see them. It was frantic and fun. Doom 3's "creep into room with flashlight, see enemy, bring up gun, fire into darkness and hope enemy hasn't moved, bring up flashlight, realize you missed, bring up gun, fire into darkness..." was just frustrating and, eventually, boring, and was not remotely scary.
A lot of things are easier in CSS than with tables, not the least of which is producing legible markup. Table layouts are always a confusing mess, no matter how skilled the author, whereas a CSS/(X)HTML writer of even moderate skill can produce complex layouts that are, if not wonderful, at least much, much easier to read and understand than tables.
Then again, some things are harder in CSS, but that has more to do with IE's horrible implementation than with a flaw in CSS itself. In the end, very simple sites won't have those problems, so you might as well use CSS to keep things clean, and more complicated sites WILL have CSS problems but they'll still be easier to deal with than digging through a soup of TABLE, TR, TD, and TH tags.
It's always fun to see in what new and exciting ways my pages break when I try them in IE7 after designing in/for Firefox/Opera/Safari/Every other sort-of-standards-based web browser.
And that's just the warm-up. Then I try IE6.
I'm pretty sure you're thinking of Mechwarrior: Mercenaries.
Supercalifragisexy was one of the codes for it. Most of the Dark Forces codes started with "la" (for "Lucas Arts", I suppose), kind of like how a lot of the Doom codes start with "id". lalame, laskip, things like that.
If you run all your heating, air, water heater, and oven off electricity, you may need 200A service.
I know, because we're considering switching our house to all-electricity with an air-source heat pump and an electric water heater with heat recovery from the AC function of the air pump.
Most of the guys who've checked it out have said we'll need 200A service to make sure all of that works smoothly.
No support in IE7, so it looks like it'll be a while before I get to use it for paying jobs.
Holy god, BeOS was great.
Nothing to add to the conversation, I just feel compelled to say that every time it's mentioned.
Hey, it still beats the hell out of IE6. Can't wait till that POS dies.
It's not hyperbole. Awesomebar didn't give me anything I wanted, and made the one thing I do want ('x' should bring up xkcd as its first recommendation, 's' should bring up the slashdot mainpage, etc.) less reliable. I do not need the added features at all, so they are in the way. I just don't visit enough websites with the same first letters in the URL on a regular basis to make the search thing more convenient than simple autocomplete. The first day I had it, I muscle-memoried myself to the wrong place so many times that it took a couple more days of very careful tabbing to get what I wanted back to the top of the list.
In the end, I just installed an addon that gave me my old bar back. It's still slower than the old one, which sucks, since the one and only thing I didn't like about the old bar was that it was slow. *shrug* maybe in 4.0.
I could already do that in FF2. Awesomebar added nothing but annoyance.
But hey, that's what add-ons are for, right?
I know you said you don't want to switch, but:
Lunarpages kicks ass.
Not an employee, just a long-time, satisfied customer.