You can quite often apply a moderation which is correct in the context of the surrounding posts, but which gets you slapped in M2.
That's why, when I metamod, if there's a question of context, I always make sure to get the parent of the original message....
I agree it should be easier to do this, though. I also think there should be an option you can enable that, when you get mod points, will temporarily set your threshold to -1....
Re:The Colour of Magic is a weird choice...
on
Top 20 Geek Novels
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Of course it's a matter of opinion....
I think Colour of Magic was picked was because it was closer in tone to Hitchhiker's, in is extreme inventiveness and randomness. I agree that the later books are probably better (Small Gods, Reaper Man, Men at Arms, Soul Music, Last Hero), but anything with Rincewind as protagonist will always have a place in my heart....
I too come for the comments. There are some real gems. Quite often, they've been modded into oblivion by some idiot who ( inexplicably) has mod points. That's why I don't read slashdot at +4; slashdot's moderation, to be blunt, doesn't work. Because it is so often punitive and/or ideologically driven, it makes no sense to trust it to limit what you read; and because it is anonymous, there is no ability for the community to rein in such abuses.
The solution to that, of course, has always been metamoderation, but that itself has been revealed to be broken in recent months by users who use the Overrated and Underrated mods, which are used to mark comments up or down without risking a reduction in mod points from negative metamods. Meaning over time, disproportionately many mod points may be put in the hands of these people.
Of course, some of this is speculation. But it'd explain some strangenesses I've noticed lately in moderations I've seen towards my own comments, and those I've seen of other people.
Why complain ? It is their stuff, and they can price it at any level they want.
Um, maybe because we installed iTunes based on a promise that it wouldn't work this way, because we've already bought music that only iTunes can play, and because it S-U-C-K-S.
If we didn't complain, they'd probably blame something else for their sudden lack of revenue. Like, oh, piracy or something.
Dear god people, if you're gona upvote or downvote something, go ahead and commit, instead of just marking it "overrated" or "underrated!" Is meta-moderation that scary?
Not Ready, Aim, Tomatoes, not Panic on Funkotron, and not the recent X-box update (which wasn't bad, mind you, but not up to the original).
The original is possibly the coolest game on the Genesis. 25-level, whacked-out, randomly-generated two-player gameplay with very meaningful co-op. (The developers considered it a two-player game with a one-player option.) More importantly, it took all the important lessons from Roguelike games. It fits the Roguelike description, in fact, much better than Diablo and Diablo II.
TJ&E III: Mission to Earth (the X-box update) messed up by making everything pre-identified from the start, by discarding the "stacked" level structure (meaning falling off was considerably less meaningful and never useful as it was sometime in the original game), by putting in mini-games where none were needed, and by riding its "funk" theme a little too hard, turning an extremely silly game more like Hitchhiker's Guide mixed with George Clinton into something that seemed like it actually wanted to be from Da Hood.
Somewhere I have an issue of Play magazine where they interview the guy who was the voice of Earl, and it's almost scary how badly he got the character wrong; he is NOT some kind of urban warrior-type, he is a big friendly alien without much going on upstairs and whose pants periodically fall down!
More importantly, a game with innovative and subtle gameplay is better suited to something weird and whimiscal than something that markets itself to a subculture that is sometimes seen as unduly confrontational. For all people complain about Nintendo's "kiddy" games, this is one lesson no one's ever had to teach them.
Oh, no worries. If I got offended over something little like that, I'd have degenerated into a writhing mass of hate by now from posting so much on Slashdot.
BTW, isn't it funny how many writhing masses of hate we see these days?
Yep, I know all about the Katamari creator's objections to making the sequel. Actually, the original game was not a huge moneymaker for Namco, but it was excellent public relations and garnered them a good number of awards for relatively little cost.
Concerning Kameo, it remains to be seen if it'll be any good. The lustre has worn a bit off of Rare from the Banjo-Kazooie, Goldeneye and Blast Corps days.
and even We Love Katamari (remember the original, the game that was supposed to rid us of derivative games? It has a sequel).
You leave out (on purpose?) the fact that it was the only game of the ones listed that truly deserved a sequel. All the other games were sequels of sequels of sequels. You don't cut We Love Katamari some slack for being a mere sequel, despite the fact that almost everyone who played the original would agree it was much too short?
As for it ridding us of derivative games, yeah sure like magically the release of one title will end the painful deluge of sports games like Roster Update '06. Not even Katamari has that kind of mojo, bunky, although it's a start....
She only has some popularity because the mind-numbed basement dwelling dorks of the internet haven't gotten out enough to see what a hot chick looks like, so they think that some wrinkled, over-made-up, clearly face-lifted, over-40 dyed-blonde gitch is actually "hot" and somehow morphed that into "wow, she's smart". So she can string a few words together. Great.
Wow. I've never had to defend my opinion of sexy before. I'm almost happy.
I already do. But the economics of opportunity are getting in the way; companies can make more money by sinking it into dreck than into the next Katamari.
You go to see a movie, becuase Angelina Jolie is in it - not because Kathy bates is in it.
NOcommaI DO NOTperiod
Indeed, over time it seems to me that the "hotness factor" of the lead actress is mattering less and less.
Movies have attractive, stereotypical characters in them, because that's what sells.
Actually, they sell for other reasons. These reasons are not always good ones, but still.... This is why the Tomb Raider games are remembered much less fondly the further into the series you go, although Lara Croft is objectified more and more as it continues.
So you can have games where you play a balding middle aged chunkster in his mom's basement or a weflare queen with six kids and four ex husbands living in a trailer park, but that will never achieve more than underground success and you will never play, say, an MMORPG that isn't filled with the stereotypical kinds of characters you'd expect.
Actually... in City of Heroes, the most interesting characters, it seems, are the ones who choose to play "non-traditional" heroes. I've already encountered two people playing tranvestites, and honestly, they tend to show rather more personality than Random Miss Zappy.
Why? Because there wont' be much of a community to rally around it, since most will go for the generic, already done stuff.
Er, don't you see how you've argued against your point? MMORPGs may attempt to build a community by going after scantilly-clad fantasy archetypes, but the fact is most of the worlds of these games don't have an awful lot to distinguish them from each other. Meaning that gamers can jump ship between fairly easily, as they come to be seen more and more as being synonyms for each other.
And, again, there's nothing wrong with the whole sexualization, objectification, sterotypical male/female characters. After all, that's how you pick your mate and you treat people based on how they live up to those attributes in real life. Why should games be any different?
Again with the second person perspective, argh! I'd like to respond with the deference due to your low ID number, but still....
I will admit that if Angelina Jolie were to show up out of the blue and want to spend time with me that I wouldn't exactly refuse her... but that's probably only over the very short term. Xeni Jardin (the BoingBoing gal) is hotter any day of the week, 'cause she's got a brain in her head.
The point isn't that women derive their entire sense of self from one videogame representation of them.
1. It's that lots of kids play video games, and some of those play Metroid (including some young girls -- especially the cool ones). People get their views of the world and themselves from many sources, and video games are a potentially influential one since they're often targeted towards the formative years. Whether they actually influence a damn thing is up for debate, but it's certainly possible. A relatively kick-ass female protagonist could be taken as a role model for many girls. Yeah, I'd suggest they find one that wasn't a game character, but we don't get to make that choice for them.
2. It's the old thing: we are creatures of our environment. Most female depictions are far less than complementary. A single instance may not have much effect, but if it's everywhere... and more importantly, its in the heads of all your friends and family. The cumulative effect is enormous. The author was trying to complement the Metroid series for at least contributing positively to female images of worth instead of tearing them down.
Male characters in games are just as "stereotyped" and generic and unoriginal as the female ones. So what? So are magazine covers. So are movies. So are characters in most books. So are most anime characters. My vote goes to stop whining and start playing more.
But what if we don't want to play more, because of all the afore-mentioned steretypes? Because we have the same opinion on those movies, books and (especially) anime characters?
Flat characters DO have a role to play, even in good writing. But most haves have nothing but flat characters, and that's bad, especially when the player is supposed to closly identify with the protagonist, who's usually the flattest of the bunch.
(Any moment now, someone will say "Lara Croft may be many things, but she sure-as-hell ain't FLAT!" and chuckle in a fratboyish fashion. I wait painfully for that moment.)
Who the hell describes playing video games as "joyous"? Don't undercut the valuable ideals of equality by pandering to women with vacuous, feel-good language.
I do, muthafucka!
Indeed, I can't think of a more appropriate adjective to explain Katamari Damacy. Sometimes, the word fits.
1. I think it matters more what the women whan to be than what you want them to be. (Okay, that one was cheap, I admit....)
2. Samus isn't Randian, thank god. She might look like it at first, but there is nothing she says that can allow us to make any assured statements about her own views. We don't know what the heck Samus thinks. She does her job, she gets out, if you did it fast enough she takes off some clothes, SEE YOU NEXT MISSION. As near as we can tell from this, she believes in Speed Nudism and not much else. She doesn't say a word in most games -- indeed, the one in which she says the most, Metroid Fusion, is considered by some (ex: me) to be the worst in the series.
Kingdom Hearts one had, as its theme, Disney animation. Which is well and good, because animation has historically been the thing Disney does best. Although many of the worlds of the game were wildly different from each other as to invite cognative dissonance (Jack Skellington and Alladin, Beast and those Final Fantasy dweebs?), at least they could cop to "Disney magic" being the theme, which, although it may be a lousy piece of corporate propaganda to build a game around, at least it attempted to dodge the issue.
And, the animation on the main Disney guys WAS pretty good.
This time around, they're putting Tron and Pirates of the Carribean into a game. For the characters in the game, no problem, these are just another set of "worlds" to travel though, they're supposed to be different from each other.
For the player, however, or to ME at least, this just seems like a lousy exercise in enhancing brand recognition. What's Disney-magical about Tron? When it came out, most people didn't even HAVE a computer.
Yeah, I bitched and moaned about the original Kingdom Hearts too. (Warning: link contains extreme invective.) No one listened to me then either. What's it gonna take, Kingdom Hearts 3, containing all the Buena Vista and Miramax characters? Is Sora and company going to run into Mr. 3000 and Hot Chick next? Will they go on a Mission to Mars to avert Armageddon? Play B-Ball with Air Bud? Will they meet Dante and Randall? Will they stick it to the corporate man alongside Michael Moore in a Fahrenheit 9/11 world, doing 9999 damage to a hulking George W. Bush? Will...
Dammit, I'd better stop. This is getting too cool.
I've played hundreds of games, from the Atari 2600 days through to today, and it'd depressing for me to notice that my opinion of video games is largely the same as his.
There's just not that much interesting out there. I even come to agree with him on his synopsis of Nintendo games, which is about as positive as I've heard from him. He said, of Mario and Zelda, that they're good and fun, well-made, but you probably won't be surprised by them.
Here's what I consider to be the great tragedy here. This is a man who is so obviously equipped to be one of the greatest game designers we've ever known. Out of the gates he created Katamari Damacy! And video games are, arguably, the creative field with the most potential.
But all that potential is, most of the time, wasted.
On the CoH boards, the reaction to Prestige's extremely low earn rates compared to what the really cool stuff costs is extremely negative, but I kind of hope they leave it as it is. I mean, why have the cheaper alternatives even there if everyone always buys the biggest and best? Everything can be sold back without cost penalty, which is cool. Rent could be a bit of a pain, however....
I've not had the chance to play with Salvage yet (since the cheapest workshop costs 100,000p, heh), would you happen to know what kinds of things you can build with it?
Slashdot Mirror
Why? Because Magic Sword is a very high level of cool, but while it's in this PSP collection, it's not in the PS2 Capcom collection!
You can quite often apply a moderation which is correct in the context of the surrounding posts, but which gets you slapped in M2.
That's why, when I metamod, if there's a question of context, I always make sure to get the parent of the original message....
I agree it should be easier to do this, though. I also think there should be an option you can enable that, when you get mod points, will temporarily set your threshold to -1....
Of course it's a matter of opinion....
I think Colour of Magic was picked was because it was closer in tone to Hitchhiker's, in is extreme inventiveness and randomness. I agree that the later books are probably better (Small Gods, Reaper Man, Men at Arms, Soul Music, Last Hero), but anything with Rincewind as protagonist will always have a place in my heart....
I too come for the comments. There are some real gems. Quite often, they've been modded into oblivion by some idiot who ( inexplicably) has mod points. That's why I don't read slashdot at +4; slashdot's moderation, to be blunt, doesn't work. Because it is so often punitive and/or ideologically driven, it makes no sense to trust it to limit what you read; and because it is anonymous, there is no ability for the community to rein in such abuses.
The solution to that, of course, has always been metamoderation, but that itself has been revealed to be broken in recent months by users who use the Overrated and Underrated mods, which are used to mark comments up or down without risking a reduction in mod points from negative metamods. Meaning over time, disproportionately many mod points may be put in the hands of these people.
Of course, some of this is speculation. But it'd explain some strangenesses I've noticed lately in moderations I've seen towards my own comments, and those I've seen of other people.
Why complain ? It is their stuff, and they can price it at any level they want.
Um, maybe because we installed iTunes based on a promise that it wouldn't work this way, because we've already bought music that only iTunes can play, and because it S-U-C-K-S.
If we didn't complain, they'd probably blame something else for their sudden lack of revenue. Like, oh, piracy or something.
Dear god people, if you're gona upvote or downvote something, go ahead and commit, instead of just marking it "overrated" or "underrated!" Is meta-moderation that scary?
I was mostly kicking myself for missing something in plane sight that I should have seen.
Something plain like that?
(Ducking, running, crying "Whoo-hoo-hoo" like Daffy Duck)
Wow. That's almost enough to try to get me to figure out how the heck to install Timidity correctly again....
Not Ready, Aim, Tomatoes, not Panic on Funkotron, and not the recent X-box update (which wasn't bad, mind you, but not up to the original).
The original is possibly the coolest game on the Genesis. 25-level, whacked-out, randomly-generated two-player gameplay with very meaningful co-op. (The developers considered it a two-player game with a one-player option.) More importantly, it took all the important lessons from Roguelike games. It fits the Roguelike description, in fact, much better than Diablo and Diablo II.
TJ&E III: Mission to Earth (the X-box update) messed up by making everything pre-identified from the start, by discarding the "stacked" level structure (meaning falling off was considerably less meaningful and never useful as it was sometime in the original game), by putting in mini-games where none were needed, and by riding its "funk" theme a little too hard, turning an extremely silly game more like Hitchhiker's Guide mixed with George Clinton into something that seemed like it actually wanted to be from Da Hood.
Somewhere I have an issue of Play magazine where they interview the guy who was the voice of Earl, and it's almost scary how badly he got the character wrong; he is NOT some kind of urban warrior-type, he is a big friendly alien without much going on upstairs and whose pants periodically fall down!
More importantly, a game with innovative and subtle gameplay is better suited to something weird and whimiscal than something that markets itself to a subculture that is sometimes seen as unduly confrontational. For all people complain about Nintendo's "kiddy" games, this is one lesson no one's ever had to teach them.
But um, yeah. The original game was aces.
Oh, no worries. If I got offended over something little like that, I'd have degenerated into a writhing mass of hate by now from posting so much on Slashdot.
BTW, isn't it funny how many writhing masses of hate we see these days?
Yep, I know all about the Katamari creator's objections to making the sequel. Actually, the original game was not a huge moneymaker for Namco, but it was excellent public relations and garnered them a good number of awards for relatively little cost.
Concerning Kameo, it remains to be seen if it'll be any good. The lustre has worn a bit off of Rare from the Banjo-Kazooie, Goldeneye and Blast Corps days.
Well it's about time!
And while you're at it, knock off all that evil!
and even We Love Katamari (remember the original, the game that was supposed to rid us of derivative games? It has a sequel).
You leave out (on purpose?) the fact that it was the only game of the ones listed that truly deserved a sequel. All the other games were sequels of sequels of sequels. You don't cut We Love Katamari some slack for being a mere sequel, despite the fact that almost everyone who played the original would agree it was much too short?
As for it ridding us of derivative games, yeah sure like magically the release of one title will end the painful deluge of sports games like Roster Update '06. Not even Katamari has that kind of mojo, bunky, although it's a start....
Yep, mentioned that. Mentioned that I hated that, in fact.
She only has some popularity because the mind-numbed basement dwelling dorks of the internet haven't gotten out enough to see what a hot chick looks like, so they think that some wrinkled, over-made-up, clearly face-lifted, over-40 dyed-blonde gitch is actually "hot" and somehow morphed that into "wow, she's smart". So she can string a few words together. Great.
Wow. I've never had to defend my opinion of sexy before. I'm almost happy.
My kingdom, my kingdom for some mod points!
Well, then stop playing those games.
I already do. But the economics of opportunity are getting in the way; companies can make more money by sinking it into dreck than into the next Katamari.
You go to see a movie, becuase Angelina Jolie is in it - not because Kathy bates is in it.
NO comma I DO NOT period
Indeed, over time it seems to me that the "hotness factor" of the lead actress is mattering less and less.
Movies have attractive, stereotypical characters in them, because that's what sells.
Actually, they sell for other reasons. These reasons are not always good ones, but still.... This is why the Tomb Raider games are remembered much less fondly the further into the series you go, although Lara Croft is objectified more and more as it continues.
So you can have games where you play a balding middle aged chunkster in his mom's basement or a weflare queen with six kids and four ex husbands living in a trailer park, but that will never achieve more than underground success and you will never play, say, an MMORPG that isn't filled with the stereotypical kinds of characters you'd expect.
Actually... in City of Heroes, the most interesting characters, it seems, are the ones who choose to play "non-traditional" heroes. I've already encountered two people playing tranvestites, and honestly, they tend to show rather more personality than Random Miss Zappy.
Why? Because there wont' be much of a community to rally around it, since most will go for the generic, already done stuff.
Er, don't you see how you've argued against your point? MMORPGs may attempt to build a community by going after scantilly-clad fantasy archetypes, but the fact is most of the worlds of these games don't have an awful lot to distinguish them from each other. Meaning that gamers can jump ship between fairly easily, as they come to be seen more and more as being synonyms for each other.
And, again, there's nothing wrong with the whole sexualization, objectification, sterotypical male/female characters. After all, that's how you pick your mate and you treat people based on how they live up to those attributes in real life. Why should games be any different?
Again with the second person perspective, argh! I'd like to respond with the deference due to your low ID number, but still....
I will admit that if Angelina Jolie were to show up out of the blue and want to spend time with me that I wouldn't exactly refuse her... but that's probably only over the very short term. Xeni Jardin (the BoingBoing gal) is hotter any day of the week, 'cause she's got a brain in her head.
The point isn't that women derive their entire sense of self from one videogame representation of them.
1. It's that lots of kids play video games, and some of those play Metroid (including some young girls -- especially the cool ones). People get their views of the world and themselves from many sources, and video games are a potentially influential one since they're often targeted towards the formative years. Whether they actually influence a damn thing is up for debate, but it's certainly possible. A relatively kick-ass female protagonist could be taken as a role model for many girls. Yeah, I'd suggest they find one that wasn't a game character, but we don't get to make that choice for them.
2. It's the old thing: we are creatures of our environment. Most female depictions are far less than complementary. A single instance may not have much effect, but if it's everywhere... and more importantly, its in the heads of all your friends and family. The cumulative effect is enormous. The author was trying to complement the Metroid series for at least contributing positively to female images of worth instead of tearing them down.
Male characters in games are just as "stereotyped" and generic and unoriginal as the female ones. So what? So are magazine covers. So are movies. So are characters in most books. So are most anime characters. My vote goes to stop whining and start playing more.
But what if we don't want to play more, because of all the afore-mentioned steretypes? Because we have the same opinion on those movies, books and (especially) anime characters?
Flat characters DO have a role to play, even in good writing. But most haves have nothing but flat characters, and that's bad, especially when the player is supposed to closly identify with the protagonist, who's usually the flattest of the bunch.
(Any moment now, someone will say "Lara Croft may be many things, but she sure-as-hell ain't FLAT!" and chuckle in a fratboyish fashion. I wait painfully for that moment.)
Who the hell describes playing video games as "joyous"? Don't undercut the valuable ideals of equality by pandering to women with vacuous, feel-good language.
I do, muthafucka!
Indeed, I can't think of a more appropriate adjective to explain Katamari Damacy. Sometimes, the word fits.
1. I think it matters more what the women whan to be than what you want them to be. (Okay, that one was cheap, I admit....)
2. Samus isn't Randian, thank god. She might look like it at first, but there is nothing she says that can allow us to make any assured statements about her own views. We don't know what the heck Samus thinks. She does her job, she gets out, if you did it fast enough she takes off some clothes, SEE YOU NEXT MISSION. As near as we can tell from this, she believes in Speed Nudism and not much else. She doesn't say a word in most games -- indeed, the one in which she says the most, Metroid Fusion, is considered by some (ex: me) to be the worst in the series.
Kingdom Hearts one had, as its theme, Disney animation. Which is well and good, because animation has historically been the thing Disney does best. Although many of the worlds of the game were wildly different from each other as to invite cognative dissonance (Jack Skellington and Alladin, Beast and those Final Fantasy dweebs?), at least they could cop to "Disney magic" being the theme, which, although it may be a lousy piece of corporate propaganda to build a game around, at least it attempted to dodge the issue.
And, the animation on the main Disney guys WAS pretty good.
This time around, they're putting Tron and Pirates of the Carribean into a game. For the characters in the game, no problem, these are just another set of "worlds" to travel though, they're supposed to be different from each other.
For the player, however, or to ME at least, this just seems like a lousy exercise in enhancing brand recognition. What's Disney-magical about Tron? When it came out, most people didn't even HAVE a computer.
Yeah, I bitched and moaned about the original Kingdom Hearts too. (Warning: link contains extreme invective.) No one listened to me then either. What's it gonna take, Kingdom Hearts 3, containing all the Buena Vista and Miramax characters? Is Sora and company going to run into Mr. 3000 and Hot Chick next? Will they go on a Mission to Mars to avert Armageddon? Play B-Ball with Air Bud? Will they meet Dante and Randall? Will they stick it to the corporate man alongside Michael Moore in a Fahrenheit 9/11 world, doing 9999 damage to a hulking George W. Bush? Will...
Dammit, I'd better stop. This is getting too cool.
Just to play devil's advocate, what makes you think lightning would strike twice?
Of course there's no guarentee... but for most people, it doesn't even strike once.
And the guy's words lead me to believe it was not necessarily an accident.
I've played hundreds of games, from the Atari 2600 days through to today, and it'd depressing for me to notice that my opinion of video games is largely the same as his.
There's just not that much interesting out there. I even come to agree with him on his synopsis of Nintendo games, which is about as positive as I've heard from him. He said, of Mario and Zelda, that they're good and fun, well-made, but you probably won't be surprised by them.
Here's what I consider to be the great tragedy here. This is a man who is so obviously equipped to be one of the greatest game designers we've ever known. Out of the gates he created Katamari Damacy! And video games are, arguably, the creative field with the most potential.
But all that potential is, most of the time, wasted.
On the CoH boards, the reaction to Prestige's extremely low earn rates compared to what the really cool stuff costs is extremely negative, but I kind of hope they leave it as it is. I mean, why have the cheaper alternatives even there if everyone always buys the biggest and best? Everything can be sold back without cost penalty, which is cool. Rent could be a bit of a pain, however....
I've not had the chance to play with Salvage yet (since the cheapest workshop costs 100,000p, heh), would you happen to know what kinds of things you can build with it?