Wow. And I thought people complained alot about the contents of and time between WoW patches. Imagine if you weren't paying to play the game at all, but were rather paying 100% of your subscription fee ONLY to download and install said patches...
Wait wait wait, so let me get this straight: you have to sit in that seat and stare at the 4 buttons they specifically told you not to push? For hours on end? That is my own vision of a personal hell.
Ah, but you see, you've fallen afoul of the chief misunderstanding with regards to the FCC. I don't particularly like their brand of chiling effect / censorship, but here's the good news: they ONLY HAVE CONTROL OVER RADIO TRANSMISSIONS. That's not just "radio" as in "only comes out of a radio," but also "radio" as in "transmitted via the radio spectrum." I.e. the portion of TV you get with rabbit ears.
The thinking is that if television/radio is going to be transmitted everywhere, into every household without their consent, it must conform to some lowest common denominator that offends only a tiny acceptable minority. As much as I hate censorship, I have to admit, that's a pretty fair comprimise. Of course, a kid needs a radio/TV to access this content, and you could argue that it's the parents' job to keep those electronics out of their hands, but I say if you're going to broadcast a signal into every home whether they like it or not, you've got to adhere to some rules.
So, to answer your complaint, they DON'T control cable television. It might seem that way because a) television networks broadcast over airways are still present on cable, and b) non-broadcast cable programs often continue to adhere voluntarily to what is considered "acceptable" on television, simply because to do otherwise alienates advertisers. Was Comedy Central, for example, fined for the use of "shit" on South Park? And have they been fined for their late-night uncensored movies? Nope. Outside of the FCC's jurisdiction. Had a cable-only ESPN been the only program showing the superbowl with the unwelcome Jackson'age, there'd probably still be a mild uproar, but the FCC wouldn't have even come into the discussion.
Indeed, FCC fines aren't even legally imposed penalties. It's not like you show titty and the cops show up at your door. If the FCC tells you to pay a fine, and you simply say "No," then the repurcussions are simple and make sense: you lose your FCC-granted license to broadcast in that band.
The problem, however, is that the broadcast TV networks are the big boys, even in the cable arena, if only because they have a combined audience of cable and non-cable viewers. It just seems like all of TV is censored because 90% of the most well-funded, most-talked-about, and just flat out most-viewed programs come from this financially vocal minority.
So as silly as beeping out harmless "bad words" might seem, I can't get too worked up about it. Those programs that fall afoul of the FCC only do so because they're trying for the large audience the broadcast networks represent. I say quit whining and move to the deregulated arena; if more people did so, their censorship would become pointless. I'm interested to see what will happen to this de-facto censorship once broadcast television becomes such a tiny minority that it is no longer financially viable to keep the antennae running. I long for the day when Leno utters an unbleeped "goddamn" and, looking at the tiny percentage of their viewers not using cable television, NBC simply decides not to pay the fine.
Make you a deal: I'll stop mentally drawing a line from "Germans" to "Nazis" when they stop attempting to solve their problems with fascist edicts and restrictions.
My worst - and most embarrassing - gamer "wall" was the chest puzzle early on in the game Sorcerer, an Infocom text adventure. About half an hour into the game, you find a chest in the basement of the first building with different-colored buttons on the side, each with a corresponding shape such as a crown on the purple button. Pushing the buttons only returns a message about it making a "click." Nowhere in the building was there any mention of a series of colors or shapes, or indeed any real mention of the chest at all.
After weeks, off and on, of frustration, my 14-year-old temper had had enough, and the box went on the shelf. Several times over the next few years, I came back to the game, and each time I was forced to rediscover why I'd put it down as I hit that goddamn chest.
So flash forward to my 18th year and, bored one afternoon, I'm going through my old games and I decide to finish that stupid puzzle once and for all. But again, I get stuck on that chest. Frustrated, I start to thumb through the manual accompanying the game, thinking maybe it's mentioned offhand there (a long shot, and one I'd tried before). It's not, but it's when I'm looking through another included little pamphlet in the box - the "Field Guide to the Creatures of Frobozz," a small color book of illustrations and descriptions of monsters in the gameworld - that the text at the end of one entry finally, FINALLY catches my eye. "Bloodworms are usually white and grey and black and red and black." "A common house rotgrub is gray and red and gray and purple and red." And it goes on, with this weird color description at the end of every entry.
Elsewhere in the small area of the game explorable before the chest, one part that had always bugged me was a note that discussed the current "password" and mentioned a monster type. It was different every playthrough, and was the only thing that was. So, firing up the game, I found the note, which mentioned "Bloodworms" this time, and proceeded quickly to the chest. Referring to my guide, I pushed "white, gray, black, red, black" on the buttons and BAM! It's opened. After four years of attempts, the bloody thing was OPEN. I actually started cheering and dancing around the room like a madman, exclaiming to my surprised parents down the hall that "the damn chest is OPEN!"
Those of you paying attention have probably already realized my ultimate shame. That's right, folks, I was defeated by the $%@#$%@#$% COPY PROTECTION for the game.
As much as I'd like to believe that's true, that's not really what this mess is about. And it's important that all involved understand that, because if Thompson was guilty of nothing more than a wildly unpopular - among a certain group, anyway - and conservative worldview, then we'd have no hope of him being disbarred.
No, what this is about is Jack Thompson, a crazy man practicing law. What exact view he presents, and whom he attempts to target with his wild accusations and lawsuits, is not the case here. He's a flat-out frothing-at-the-mouth smearing-shit-on-the-walls lunatic that is nevertheless certified to practice law in Florida solely because the last time they tried this he threatened them with a civil suit.
It's important that the gaming community at large not gloat too much should this go the way I so sincerely hope it does - i.e, that Thompson is removed to a position in society where he can do minimal harm. If we start waving the flags and claiming victory over those who ignore the research and continue to claim that video game violence produces killers, then we risk making a nutjob a martyr, and watching three more spring up in his place. The sensible long-term response is, "regardless of my views on gaming and media censorship, it's good for ALL Americans that this man is out of the discussion, and we can continue to argue for our rights with those opponents who approach the issue with dignity, respect, and above all, sanity."
That's not to say this news doesn't make me happy in my pants. Oh, it does. It VERY MUCH does.
Rockbox makes the device work exactly as you describe. As far as I know, it works on most modern Ipods. The exception is the absolute newest version of 'pod, 5.5, though as I understand it they've discovered the problem there and it should be fixed very shortly.
Well, this one might not be entirely in the spirit of the original question since it's not a cool "hack" so much as it is just an amusing error in planning, but here we go anyway:
Back in '95, my father was a VP of research for a large manufacturer of transmissive and reflective coatings for various glass applications (think insulated windows for the simplest example of said product) in Palo Alto, California. I was 15 and in highschool at the time, and having spent many a year trying like hell to keep a series of shitty no-name x86 computers up and running well enough to play the latest games, I had a sufficient skillset (and my dad had sufficient clout) to get me a job in their IT department. I did pretty well, and quickly found that users generally only got mean-spirited when made to look stupid, so a small dose of humility coupled with an interest in details on their primary task - "While I fix these printer drives you accidentally deleted, I was curious, what does a spectral photometer do?" - kept me out of trouble. Long story short, next year when I switched to full-time for the summer break, my boss actually brought me for a one-day business trip to our plant in Tempe, Arizona.
Now, you've got to realize, a business trip for a 16 year old (this was '96 now) is freakin' AWESOME. I was nervous as hell, had been up since the crack of dawn to take a red-eye with my boss out to the plant, and was deathly afraid I'd do something to embarrass not just me, but my father for having recommended me. So it was pretty unnerving to learn that my first job involved going into a large clean room production area, kept free from particles that could settle on the film during that specific type of sputtering process. We're talking the full disposable "bunny suit" that covered everything but the eyes, even with little slippers, and an airlock-type blower to clean you of all particles before entering.
The problem was a simple fix, really. The brand of 486 motherboard we were using at the time had a tendency, in about 1 out of every 3 units, to burn out the CMOS battery much earlier than you'd expect. And for a manufacturing-floor computer, not having a correct internal clock was a bad thing, not to mention that the lab techs had to go through some errors at startup with BIOS setings no longer being saved. So I suited up, cleaned off the replacement part and my tools as ordered, and went to find the bad machine.
That took some doing, oddly enough, since these computers were rarely shut down due to a 24/7 production schedule, so I had to go through back records on hand to find the lab techs' notes during the last power cycle on which computer had the boot errors. But, once located, the terminal was taken offline and I was able - after being told I had 20 minutes for the repair, tops, before the company would start to lose money as they needed that terminal again - to drag it off to a quiet, out of the way corner for the swap.
But see, there was a problem in the planning stages when this plant was set up. The PCs they used to control the machines were pretty complicated to configure, and the machines run in the clean room were just slightly modified versions of those used in the full-on manufacturing area in the main plant in Palo Alto. It was actually only a pretty small fraction of these production machines that had to operate in a clean environment. So when it came time to set these terminals up, they carefully washed off the outside of the older computers - computers, mind you, that have been sitting on a 24/7 PRODUCTION FLOOR with 10+ lab techs nearby at all times and various debris kicked up from the manufacturing process - and shuffled them off into the clean room.
So picture the scene: our hero, an extremely nervous 16-year-old on his first business trip in full head-to-toe bunny suit gear in the corner of a white, immaculately clean production floor opens his target computer to find a system so full of dust that he can't even SEE the goddamn cards inside. We're talking full-
"While we all know from reading the internets that Wal-Mart is irredeemably evil"
Note the use of "the Internets" to immediately and subtly ridicule the subject "we." Also pay attention to the hyperbole of "irredeemably evil," a phrase that you'd seldom even seen applied to Microsoft in a story summary on slashdot, not because the submitters don't believe it, but because it's such an over-the-top term that it's generally useless in a discussion. And look at the following "world's largest retailer," which is a purposefully neutral description at odds with the first part of the sentence, intended for the careful reader to indicate where the actual point begins. Yep, what we have here is sarcasm, poking fun at those who are quick to label Wal-Mart based on recent articles posted here and elsewhere on the 'web.
Of course, you could try the Alanis Morisette defense (the song "Ironic" is purposefully ironic itself in that the examples it presents aren't actually irony - uh huh, pull the other one, it has bells on) and say you were, in turn, being sarcastic...
My favorite roguelike remains Ancient Domains of Mystery (ADOM). It's closed source and written by one guy, so while it's not as large as a group project like Nethack, it has a focus and polish to it that's very impressive. For me, it's the only game on the planet that might just be soaring into the quadruple digits in hours played over my lifetime, and yet I've only actually beat it 4 or 5 times. There's not many games that can make me jump up, dance around the room, and phone some gamer friends to gloat when the ending screen finally rolls around.
I wholeheartedly agree. I got about 90 hours into the game, and enjoyed it mostly (though the game is simply too long - I'd long since forgotten, going into the last few areas, why I was doing anything from a story standpoint), but this strategy guide concept sickens me to no end. As I approached the final area, I decided to take my first glance at a FAQ to see if, in my extensive searches, I'd missed any major loot. I then read on in horror to discover I'd missed an incredibly large number of major items because I didn't approach certain situations without reading about them in advance. In addition to the bizarre "4 chest" example given by the parent poster, I discovered that failing to steal during a certain stage of a certain boss fight had irreperable consequences. It's not that I didn't try stealing; I stole from every mob in the game, more or less, out of habit. But with every other mob, you can steal one item and that's it. For this fight, for no particular reason and with no in-game clues, you have to steal repeatedly during different pieces of the fight. Failing to do so means you've permanently forgone your only chance to get the most powerful armor set in the game; sucks to be you.
To be fair, I'm unclear if it's actually an attempt to sell strategy guides, of if it's simply inexcusably poor game design. Either way, even with the end of this bloated epic in sight, this gamer found it so depressing I put it down and never looked back. If I wasn't the sort of compulsive "collect everything" gamer this type of thing would annoy, I wouldn't be playing a genre based on extensive exploration and powergaming!
Actually, you've fallen afoul of yet more shitty slashdot editing. From the link:
Chengdu based Aurora Technology is forcing some reality back into fantasy role playing games as it places a visual verification restriction to players that want to play female characters in the company's new game Feng Yun Online. Only female gamers can play female characters. If successful, the policy should reduce confusion and broken hearts in the game.
So the government has nothing to do with it, nor is it in any sense a product of an overarching regulatory action. It's one MMO that's using "our girls are REALLY girls" as a selling point.
*sigh* I've defended the slashdot editors in the past (and been modded down for it), but this is getting silly. The optimist in me hopes it's a secret campaign to point out people who don't actually read the articles, just the summary, and make them look like fools. I know I, for one, feel like an idiot for IM'ing a few friends that link with "OMG, teh Chin3se are teh anti-mangirlz!"
I'm sure you're also very upset with the home version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" because it includes neither Regis Philbin nor $1,000,000.
You can't expect the video game to exactly mimic your pen and paper experiences.
Of course not. But if the games' main selling point is its emulation of the pen-and-paper version of the ruleset, and it utterly fails in that respect, I'd say it's worth commenting. Or, to use your bizarre example, if the box claimed "Contains an actual tiny Regis Philbin, and 1 million dollars!" then yes, I'd be annoyed - if not particularly surprised - to discover it didn't.
As a late-twenties nerd with fond memories of many a college weekend spent with the tabletop D&D variants, my biggest problem with NW2 (after about 3-4 hours of play, which was all I could stomach) is the pacing. Not in terms of script or anything like that; I mean more in terms of the overall flow of combat. With things happening in realtime - and yes, I know I can pause - and with throwaway wilderness or dungeon battles around every turn, no matter how closely the rules mirror the tabletop version, it's not going to FEEL like pizza-and-coke-and-DM-mat fridays. In a five hour session with the original, we'd only see maybe 3 or 4 smaller battles, each one difficult, unique, and requiring clever solutions and some lucky rolls to survive. There was no such thing as multiple random packs of three wolves in a field because that'd be boring as hell to handle, and the DM just wouldn't bother. I guess I'm lamenting a carefully crafted turn-based structure designed for intricate set-piece scuffles being shoehorned onto a basic top-down hack-and-slash, really. Toss around electronic dice rolls and carefully crafted rulesets mirroring the original all you want; if I'm spending most of my time letting the ai just swing at random mob #372, it's not going to feel like D&D.
By the same token, the "rest anytime out of combat" idea is incredibly detrimental to the whole affair. In the tabletop version, we'd maybe get 1 or 2 rest stops in a nightly session, and as a wizard, trying to predict what spells you'd be using the next day was a major undertaking. Here, once the last enemy in a group falls, click a button and wait 5 seconds; all your spells come rushing back. I suppose it's a necessity with the aforementioned combat-heavy exploration, but it plays havok with class balance (a warrior is no match for a wizard when the wizard gets to enter every combat with a full complement of spells) and even further serves to alienate the CRPG from its pen-and-paper predescessor.
I'm not sure I could really describe a computer game that could accurately depict a real D&D session; but if it DID exist, it would look little like this attempt. NW2 (and NW1, for that matter) attempt to be both an electronic version of a pen-and-paper RPG and a serviceable, fast-paced action game in a fantasy setting. Ultimately, it falls flat on its face in both arenas. Baldur's Gate, by sticking closer to the action side of things and tweaking the rules away from the original wherever it seemed necessary, managed to produce the latter of these two extremes with much more success. I've never seen any computer game come close to succeeding in an accurate portrayal of the tabletop game, though I don't want to discourage companies from continuing to try; if someone actually DID manage to balance it right, with all turn-based action and little or no battles that weren't just throwaway scuffles, it could be something truly fantastic.
Yay, patch 3. Pity I probably won't be able to use it, at least not without more work than I care to put into patching a game. For those who haven't played NW2: the publisher has made the bizarre decision to have the ONLY way to patch be with the official patcher. This would be an inconvenient (at times) bit of trivia if the damn thing worked; but as many, many posts on the official forums will attest, it will often error out with little (even if you turn on debug mode in the registry) indication of what went wrong. How, then, did I end up having to patch the game to its current, still-quite-buggy state with patch 2? Well, first I spent a couple hours of attempted workarounds, registry hacks, and various other jury-rigging; then I checked the official forums, and spent another hour trying a number of user-suggested fixes listed there. In the end, I actually had to download a fan made patch program which, combined with direct links to the hidden files the official patcher targets, allowed me to slowly and with much difficulty shoehorn on these updates.
Just exactly WHY they chose to go with this system is a matter of much debate. The optimist in me hopes that they didn't forsee the problems and hoped it would be a convenient solution. However, the realist in me, noticing that there is no official manual patcher or workaround despite many users with unpatchable games, believes it's the other option: their patcher is designed to only patch official versions of the game, and just occasionally misidentifies legitimate copies and quietly refuses to work. That's right, folks: the goddamn PATCH SYSTEM is crippled by anti-piracy measures.
It's a good thing the game sucks balls, or this whole mess would be a real shame.
...and mod grandparent down. I am, you see, either retarded, blind, or both. In my defense, I was searching for "soundtrack" and didn't realize it was called "score" - a paltry excuse for not moving your eyes two inches down, I know, but there ya go. Still, I stand by my statement that these awards are stupid, based largely on Bully not winning for its score. I turned off the canned, annoying music in Oblivion very early on; it was boring and added little to the game.
The first time I looked at this years' entrants, it took all of 5 seconds to dismiss this entire contest as irrelevant; namely, it just took a quick glance at the "best soundtrack" category. GTA? Scarface? Guitar Hero 2? MADDEN!? This, when this year celebrated one of the most outstanding soundtracks in a game that I've heard in years: Bully, from Rockstar Games. The music accompanying your schoolyard antics is outstanding, managing to be original, appropriate to what you're doing in-game at the time, and non-intrusive while still having enough of a melody to keep you humming it hours later. How do these other canned collections of whatever random crap was cheap to license even belong in the same category? Perhaps what I'm really lobbying for is a seperate "best original soundtrack" group, but frankly, I don't see why any of the four games actually up for this award deserve any sort of recognition at all. Honors like these should reward the best examples of creativity in an industry, not just pay lip service to who chose the best trash to recycle from other sources.
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Wow. And I thought people complained alot about the contents of and time between WoW patches. Imagine if you weren't paying to play the game at all, but were rather paying 100% of your subscription fee ONLY to download and install said patches...
Setting Grand Theft Auto in the safest big city in America would be like setting Halo in Disneyland.
I think I speak for all gamers when I say this would, indeed, be awesome.
Would you like a little ketchup to go with that hand that feeds you?
Wait wait wait, so let me get this straight: you have to sit in that seat and stare at the 4 buttons they specifically told you not to push? For hours on end? That is my own vision of a personal hell.
Ah, but you see, you've fallen afoul of the chief misunderstanding with regards to the FCC. I don't particularly like their brand of chiling effect / censorship, but here's the good news: they ONLY HAVE CONTROL OVER RADIO TRANSMISSIONS. That's not just "radio" as in "only comes out of a radio," but also "radio" as in "transmitted via the radio spectrum." I.e. the portion of TV you get with rabbit ears.
The thinking is that if television/radio is going to be transmitted everywhere, into every household without their consent, it must conform to some lowest common denominator that offends only a tiny acceptable minority. As much as I hate censorship, I have to admit, that's a pretty fair comprimise. Of course, a kid needs a radio/TV to access this content, and you could argue that it's the parents' job to keep those electronics out of their hands, but I say if you're going to broadcast a signal into every home whether they like it or not, you've got to adhere to some rules.
So, to answer your complaint, they DON'T control cable television. It might seem that way because a) television networks broadcast over airways are still present on cable, and b) non-broadcast cable programs often continue to adhere voluntarily to what is considered "acceptable" on television, simply because to do otherwise alienates advertisers. Was Comedy Central, for example, fined for the use of "shit" on South Park? And have they been fined for their late-night uncensored movies? Nope. Outside of the FCC's jurisdiction. Had a cable-only ESPN been the only program showing the superbowl with the unwelcome Jackson'age, there'd probably still be a mild uproar, but the FCC wouldn't have even come into the discussion.
Indeed, FCC fines aren't even legally imposed penalties. It's not like you show titty and the cops show up at your door. If the FCC tells you to pay a fine, and you simply say "No," then the repurcussions are simple and make sense: you lose your FCC-granted license to broadcast in that band.
The problem, however, is that the broadcast TV networks are the big boys, even in the cable arena, if only because they have a combined audience of cable and non-cable viewers. It just seems like all of TV is censored because 90% of the most well-funded, most-talked-about, and just flat out most-viewed programs come from this financially vocal minority.
So as silly as beeping out harmless "bad words" might seem, I can't get too worked up about it. Those programs that fall afoul of the FCC only do so because they're trying for the large audience the broadcast networks represent. I say quit whining and move to the deregulated arena; if more people did so, their censorship would become pointless. I'm interested to see what will happen to this de-facto censorship once broadcast television becomes such a tiny minority that it is no longer financially viable to keep the antennae running. I long for the day when Leno utters an unbleeped "goddamn" and, looking at the tiny percentage of their viewers not using cable television, NBC simply decides not to pay the fine.
Wait, what laws? Is Ebay considered an extension of the government now?
But it was Germany when she was captured, was it not?
Deal.
Somewhere in Germany, little Anne Frank hides in the attic, frantically trying to hide the XBox as she hears the police knocking on the door...
Make you a deal: I'll stop mentally drawing a line from "Germans" to "Nazis" when they stop attempting to solve their problems with fascist edicts and restrictions.
My worst - and most embarrassing - gamer "wall" was the chest puzzle early on in the game Sorcerer, an Infocom text adventure. About half an hour into the game, you find a chest in the basement of the first building with different-colored buttons on the side, each with a corresponding shape such as a crown on the purple button. Pushing the buttons only returns a message about it making a "click." Nowhere in the building was there any mention of a series of colors or shapes, or indeed any real mention of the chest at all.
After weeks, off and on, of frustration, my 14-year-old temper had had enough, and the box went on the shelf. Several times over the next few years, I came back to the game, and each time I was forced to rediscover why I'd put it down as I hit that goddamn chest.
So flash forward to my 18th year and, bored one afternoon, I'm going through my old games and I decide to finish that stupid puzzle once and for all. But again, I get stuck on that chest. Frustrated, I start to thumb through the manual accompanying the game, thinking maybe it's mentioned offhand there (a long shot, and one I'd tried before). It's not, but it's when I'm looking through another included little pamphlet in the box - the "Field Guide to the Creatures of Frobozz," a small color book of illustrations and descriptions of monsters in the gameworld - that the text at the end of one entry finally, FINALLY catches my eye. "Bloodworms are usually white and grey and black and red and black." "A common house rotgrub is gray and red and gray and purple and red." And it goes on, with this weird color description at the end of every entry.
Elsewhere in the small area of the game explorable before the chest, one part that had always bugged me was a note that discussed the current "password" and mentioned a monster type. It was different every playthrough, and was the only thing that was. So, firing up the game, I found the note, which mentioned "Bloodworms" this time, and proceeded quickly to the chest. Referring to my guide, I pushed "white, gray, black, red, black" on the buttons and BAM! It's opened. After four years of attempts, the bloody thing was OPEN. I actually started cheering and dancing around the room like a madman, exclaiming to my surprised parents down the hall that "the damn chest is OPEN!"
Those of you paying attention have probably already realized my ultimate shame. That's right, folks, I was defeated by the $%@#$%@#$% COPY PROTECTION for the game.
I've hated DRM ever since.
As much as I'd like to believe that's true, that's not really what this mess is about. And it's important that all involved understand that, because if Thompson was guilty of nothing more than a wildly unpopular - among a certain group, anyway - and conservative worldview, then we'd have no hope of him being disbarred.
No, what this is about is Jack Thompson, a crazy man practicing law. What exact view he presents, and whom he attempts to target with his wild accusations and lawsuits, is not the case here. He's a flat-out frothing-at-the-mouth smearing-shit-on-the-walls lunatic that is nevertheless certified to practice law in Florida solely because the last time they tried this he threatened them with a civil suit.
It's important that the gaming community at large not gloat too much should this go the way I so sincerely hope it does - i.e, that Thompson is removed to a position in society where he can do minimal harm. If we start waving the flags and claiming victory over those who ignore the research and continue to claim that video game violence produces killers, then we risk making a nutjob a martyr, and watching three more spring up in his place. The sensible long-term response is, "regardless of my views on gaming and media censorship, it's good for ALL Americans that this man is out of the discussion, and we can continue to argue for our rights with those opponents who approach the issue with dignity, respect, and above all, sanity."
That's not to say this news doesn't make me happy in my pants. Oh, it does. It VERY MUCH does.
You're absolutely right. To call Oblivion "eye candy" is unfair and incorrect.
It looked like shit, too.
Rockbox makes the device work exactly as you describe. As far as I know, it works on most modern Ipods. The exception is the absolute newest version of 'pod, 5.5, though as I understand it they've discovered the problem there and it should be fixed very shortly.
Well, this one might not be entirely in the spirit of the original question since it's not a cool "hack" so much as it is just an amusing error in planning, but here we go anyway:
Back in '95, my father was a VP of research for a large manufacturer of transmissive and reflective coatings for various glass applications (think insulated windows for the simplest example of said product) in Palo Alto, California. I was 15 and in highschool at the time, and having spent many a year trying like hell to keep a series of shitty no-name x86 computers up and running well enough to play the latest games, I had a sufficient skillset (and my dad had sufficient clout) to get me a job in their IT department. I did pretty well, and quickly found that users generally only got mean-spirited when made to look stupid, so a small dose of humility coupled with an interest in details on their primary task - "While I fix these printer drives you accidentally deleted, I was curious, what does a spectral photometer do?" - kept me out of trouble. Long story short, next year when I switched to full-time for the summer break, my boss actually brought me for a one-day business trip to our plant in Tempe, Arizona.
Now, you've got to realize, a business trip for a 16 year old (this was '96 now) is freakin' AWESOME. I was nervous as hell, had been up since the crack of dawn to take a red-eye with my boss out to the plant, and was deathly afraid I'd do something to embarrass not just me, but my father for having recommended me. So it was pretty unnerving to learn that my first job involved going into a large clean room production area, kept free from particles that could settle on the film during that specific type of sputtering process. We're talking the full disposable "bunny suit" that covered everything but the eyes, even with little slippers, and an airlock-type blower to clean you of all particles before entering.
The problem was a simple fix, really. The brand of 486 motherboard we were using at the time had a tendency, in about 1 out of every 3 units, to burn out the CMOS battery much earlier than you'd expect. And for a manufacturing-floor computer, not having a correct internal clock was a bad thing, not to mention that the lab techs had to go through some errors at startup with BIOS setings no longer being saved. So I suited up, cleaned off the replacement part and my tools as ordered, and went to find the bad machine.
That took some doing, oddly enough, since these computers were rarely shut down due to a 24/7 production schedule, so I had to go through back records on hand to find the lab techs' notes during the last power cycle on which computer had the boot errors. But, once located, the terminal was taken offline and I was able - after being told I had 20 minutes for the repair, tops, before the company would start to lose money as they needed that terminal again - to drag it off to a quiet, out of the way corner for the swap.
But see, there was a problem in the planning stages when this plant was set up. The PCs they used to control the machines were pretty complicated to configure, and the machines run in the clean room were just slightly modified versions of those used in the full-on manufacturing area in the main plant in Palo Alto. It was actually only a pretty small fraction of these production machines that had to operate in a clean environment. So when it came time to set these terminals up, they carefully washed off the outside of the older computers - computers, mind you, that have been sitting on a 24/7 PRODUCTION FLOOR with 10+ lab techs nearby at all times and various debris kicked up from the manufacturing process - and shuffled them off into the clean room.
So picture the scene: our hero, an extremely nervous 16-year-old on his first business trip in full head-to-toe bunny suit gear in the corner of a white, immaculately clean production floor opens his target computer to find a system so full of dust that he can't even SEE the goddamn cards inside. We're talking full-
"While we all know from reading the internets that Wal-Mart is irredeemably evil"
Note the use of "the Internets" to immediately and subtly ridicule the subject "we." Also pay attention to the hyperbole of "irredeemably evil," a phrase that you'd seldom even seen applied to Microsoft in a story summary on slashdot, not because the submitters don't believe it, but because it's such an over-the-top term that it's generally useless in a discussion. And look at the following "world's largest retailer," which is a purposefully neutral description at odds with the first part of the sentence, intended for the careful reader to indicate where the actual point begins. Yep, what we have here is sarcasm, poking fun at those who are quick to label Wal-Mart based on recent articles posted here and elsewhere on the 'web.
Of course, you could try the Alanis Morisette defense (the song "Ironic" is purposefully ironic itself in that the examples it presents aren't actually irony - uh huh, pull the other one, it has bells on) and say you were, in turn, being sarcastic...
Saving some of us a click.
My favorite roguelike remains Ancient Domains of Mystery (ADOM). It's closed source and written by one guy, so while it's not as large as a group project like Nethack, it has a focus and polish to it that's very impressive. For me, it's the only game on the planet that might just be soaring into the quadruple digits in hours played over my lifetime, and yet I've only actually beat it 4 or 5 times. There's not many games that can make me jump up, dance around the room, and phone some gamer friends to gloat when the ending screen finally rolls around.
I wholeheartedly agree. I got about 90 hours into the game, and enjoyed it mostly (though the game is simply too long - I'd long since forgotten, going into the last few areas, why I was doing anything from a story standpoint), but this strategy guide concept sickens me to no end. As I approached the final area, I decided to take my first glance at a FAQ to see if, in my extensive searches, I'd missed any major loot. I then read on in horror to discover I'd missed an incredibly large number of major items because I didn't approach certain situations without reading about them in advance. In addition to the bizarre "4 chest" example given by the parent poster, I discovered that failing to steal during a certain stage of a certain boss fight had irreperable consequences. It's not that I didn't try stealing; I stole from every mob in the game, more or less, out of habit. But with every other mob, you can steal one item and that's it. For this fight, for no particular reason and with no in-game clues, you have to steal repeatedly during different pieces of the fight. Failing to do so means you've permanently forgone your only chance to get the most powerful armor set in the game; sucks to be you.
To be fair, I'm unclear if it's actually an attempt to sell strategy guides, of if it's simply inexcusably poor game design. Either way, even with the end of this bloated epic in sight, this gamer found it so depressing I put it down and never looked back. If I wasn't the sort of compulsive "collect everything" gamer this type of thing would annoy, I wouldn't be playing a genre based on extensive exploration and powergaming!
Actually, you've fallen afoul of yet more shitty slashdot editing. From the link:
Chengdu based Aurora Technology is forcing some reality back into fantasy role playing games as it places a visual verification restriction to players that want to play female characters in the company's new game Feng Yun Online. Only female gamers can play female characters. If successful, the policy should reduce confusion and broken hearts in the game.
So the government has nothing to do with it, nor is it in any sense a product of an overarching regulatory action. It's one MMO that's using "our girls are REALLY girls" as a selling point.
*sigh* I've defended the slashdot editors in the past (and been modded down for it), but this is getting silly. The optimist in me hopes it's a secret campaign to point out people who don't actually read the articles, just the summary, and make them look like fools. I know I, for one, feel like an idiot for IM'ing a few friends that link with "OMG, teh Chin3se are teh anti-mangirlz!"
I'm sure you're also very upset with the home version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" because it includes neither Regis Philbin nor $1,000,000.
You can't expect the video game to exactly mimic your pen and paper experiences.
Of course not. But if the games' main selling point is its emulation of the pen-and-paper version of the ruleset, and it utterly fails in that respect, I'd say it's worth commenting. Or, to use your bizarre example, if the box claimed "Contains an actual tiny Regis Philbin, and 1 million dollars!" then yes, I'd be annoyed - if not particularly surprised - to discover it didn't.
As a late-twenties nerd with fond memories of many a college weekend spent with the tabletop D&D variants, my biggest problem with NW2 (after about 3-4 hours of play, which was all I could stomach) is the pacing. Not in terms of script or anything like that; I mean more in terms of the overall flow of combat. With things happening in realtime - and yes, I know I can pause - and with throwaway wilderness or dungeon battles around every turn, no matter how closely the rules mirror the tabletop version, it's not going to FEEL like pizza-and-coke-and-DM-mat fridays. In a five hour session with the original, we'd only see maybe 3 or 4 smaller battles, each one difficult, unique, and requiring clever solutions and some lucky rolls to survive. There was no such thing as multiple random packs of three wolves in a field because that'd be boring as hell to handle, and the DM just wouldn't bother. I guess I'm lamenting a carefully crafted turn-based structure designed for intricate set-piece scuffles being shoehorned onto a basic top-down hack-and-slash, really. Toss around electronic dice rolls and carefully crafted rulesets mirroring the original all you want; if I'm spending most of my time letting the ai just swing at random mob #372, it's not going to feel like D&D.
By the same token, the "rest anytime out of combat" idea is incredibly detrimental to the whole affair. In the tabletop version, we'd maybe get 1 or 2 rest stops in a nightly session, and as a wizard, trying to predict what spells you'd be using the next day was a major undertaking. Here, once the last enemy in a group falls, click a button and wait 5 seconds; all your spells come rushing back. I suppose it's a necessity with the aforementioned combat-heavy exploration, but it plays havok with class balance (a warrior is no match for a wizard when the wizard gets to enter every combat with a full complement of spells) and even further serves to alienate the CRPG from its pen-and-paper predescessor.
I'm not sure I could really describe a computer game that could accurately depict a real D&D session; but if it DID exist, it would look little like this attempt. NW2 (and NW1, for that matter) attempt to be both an electronic version of a pen-and-paper RPG and a serviceable, fast-paced action game in a fantasy setting. Ultimately, it falls flat on its face in both arenas. Baldur's Gate, by sticking closer to the action side of things and tweaking the rules away from the original wherever it seemed necessary, managed to produce the latter of these two extremes with much more success. I've never seen any computer game come close to succeeding in an accurate portrayal of the tabletop game, though I don't want to discourage companies from continuing to try; if someone actually DID manage to balance it right, with all turn-based action and little or no battles that weren't just throwaway scuffles, it could be something truly fantastic.
Yay, patch 3. Pity I probably won't be able to use it, at least not without more work than I care to put into patching a game. For those who haven't played NW2: the publisher has made the bizarre decision to have the ONLY way to patch be with the official patcher. This would be an inconvenient (at times) bit of trivia if the damn thing worked; but as many, many posts on the official forums will attest, it will often error out with little (even if you turn on debug mode in the registry) indication of what went wrong. How, then, did I end up having to patch the game to its current, still-quite-buggy state with patch 2? Well, first I spent a couple hours of attempted workarounds, registry hacks, and various other jury-rigging; then I checked the official forums, and spent another hour trying a number of user-suggested fixes listed there. In the end, I actually had to download a fan made patch program which, combined with direct links to the hidden files the official patcher targets, allowed me to slowly and with much difficulty shoehorn on these updates.
Just exactly WHY they chose to go with this system is a matter of much debate. The optimist in me hopes that they didn't forsee the problems and hoped it would be a convenient solution. However, the realist in me, noticing that there is no official manual patcher or workaround despite many users with unpatchable games, believes it's the other option: their patcher is designed to only patch official versions of the game, and just occasionally misidentifies legitimate copies and quietly refuses to work. That's right, folks: the goddamn PATCH SYSTEM is crippled by anti-piracy measures.
It's a good thing the game sucks balls, or this whole mess would be a real shame.
...and mod grandparent down. I am, you see, either retarded, blind, or both. In my defense, I was searching for "soundtrack" and didn't realize it was called "score" - a paltry excuse for not moving your eyes two inches down, I know, but there ya go. Still, I stand by my statement that these awards are stupid, based largely on Bully not winning for its score. I turned off the canned, annoying music in Oblivion very early on; it was boring and added little to the game.
The first time I looked at this years' entrants, it took all of 5 seconds to dismiss this entire contest as irrelevant; namely, it just took a quick glance at the "best soundtrack" category. GTA? Scarface? Guitar Hero 2? MADDEN!? This, when this year celebrated one of the most outstanding soundtracks in a game that I've heard in years: Bully, from Rockstar Games. The music accompanying your schoolyard antics is outstanding, managing to be original, appropriate to what you're doing in-game at the time, and non-intrusive while still having enough of a melody to keep you humming it hours later. How do these other canned collections of whatever random crap was cheap to license even belong in the same category? Perhaps what I'm really lobbying for is a seperate "best original soundtrack" group, but frankly, I don't see why any of the four games actually up for this award deserve any sort of recognition at all. Honors like these should reward the best examples of creativity in an industry, not just pay lip service to who chose the best trash to recycle from other sources.