D&D was not, during those versions, a tactical game. In my opinion, the feats, skill points, and tactical combat in 3rd edition have slowed down the game and made it feel more like a CRPG brought to pen and paper.
There's probably some truth to that, but they've also added something SORELY lacking from second edition: BALANCE. Consistency is also a plus, if you learn how one thing works in the system you pretty much know how everything works in the system (the different table for EACH stat in the AD&D 2nd PHB is my favorite example of why this is a good thing). Third edition allowed character customization and freedom in how a character would progress in a way that never occurred to anyone developing AD&D. All in all, I think it's been a good thing. It's really much harder for a 3rd edition character to become either imbalancing or irrelevant in a game.
Plus proficiency slots were awful. I mean, REALLY REALLY awful. And multiclassing/dual classing was completely broken.
Since reactivating my WoW account I've spent significantly less purchasing new games. At the end of the day it's saved me money.
I like the gp, prefer to invest my scarce resources in more rewarding pursuits.
I wouldn't call GTA rewarding, personally. There are some games out there that are considered "art" and really should be experienced for the experience's sake, but most of them aren't from this generation anyway...
Finally, one can "beat" MMORPGs, as well. You'll always have the power-levelers who max out their characters within a week. What's in it for them? Mostly set-piece PVP battles. I don't think that games such as World of Warcraft and Everquest present new content every month.
There's plenty of progression left after reaching maximum level, at least in a good game there is... And WoW's "content" patches are every 2-3 months usually...
Based solely on reading your comment one could assume then that console gamers are made up entirely of self-righteous, elitist, condescending assholes. Generalizations are fun, aren't they?
In most MMOs there's about equal numbers of wage earners playing the game as "immature brats"--and honestly, the majority is probably more in favor of 20-30 somethings than kids. But of course you don't remember the normal (or even "nice") people you interact with in such an environment, just the ones that piss you off. Which brings me back to your comment rather nicely...
Locking yourself away in a room to play with yourself doesn't make you a better person than anyone else who chooses not to. Depending on who you talk to, it may make you blind, though... Likewise, choosing to spend your time on an MMO doesn't make your tastes any more refined nor does it mean you're any more socially adept than the next person.
Spouting vitriol about someone who decides to spend their free time in some other (legal) pursuit than you, however, does cast some doubt as to your value as a human being.
No, there's plenty of antisocial shut-ins left in the world. Look at the SomethingAwful forums, if nothing else...
Seriously though, there's nothing wrong with a "good single-player" game. The problem is there are so FEW of those on the market today, and finding time to lock one's self away on the off chance that a game actually turns out to be good is just not high on most people's priority lists. Even a bad game can be fun with friends, but giving up human contact for something that turns out to be mediocre is just pretty lousy...
I tried to play Okami, it's a genuinely great game, but why should I play Okami when I can play something with my fiance? See my friends? Hell, even Gears of War was nowhere near as fun as when my brother sat down to play it co-op with me... And killing dumb NPCs in Oblivion can't compare to fighting real people in WoW. Why should I be stuck w/ a linear game playing experience when I can choose my own path elsewhere?
Single player games will never disappear, but I'm pretty sure they'll never be taken as a serious force in gaming again. I'd expect most of them to fit the "casual" category from now on with a few rare holdouts like Square-Enix.
The saddest thing here is that you seem to think it's perfectly OK to object to the US spying on its own people, but you have no problem with your government authorising completely open-ended spying on anyone else, for any purpose, regardless of whether they are political allies or otherwise friendly, etc.
What world do you live in? We already spy on everyone (who aren't Americans), and (unsurprisingly) they all spy on us as well. This has been business as usual for the entire past century.
The only reason SWAT members discharge their weapons is if there is an immediate danger to themselves or others (I.E. madman pointing a gun at police or shooting from a window at people below).
Don't worry, they can always make up a reason for the shooting afterwards.
Normally I'm very willing to listen to the Police's side of the story when it comes to allegations of abuse on things like traffic stops and such (I said listen, not believe), because in that case it's in public and there should be a dash-cam watching the whole thing anyway. But no-knock raids are so blatantly unconstitutional and so incredibly unnecessary that it shocks me that the federal courts turn a blind eye (and don't give me "IT'S TEH BUSH FAULT!!1!!!!!", this has been going on for DECADES, he's just not doing anything to help), and with that in mind I have not one ounce of sympathy for an officer's claims of being forced into a split-second decision that leads to a person being shot in their own home.
With all the stories of people being shot WHILE trying to submit (or even asking "What's going on?"), of babies having their heads smashed in, of people being shot while "carrying a weapon" which turned out to be a TV remote or phone, you'd better believe I'm going to make sure they have a reason to shoot me. If I'm likely to get shot anyway, might as well make it worth my time. If no one cares about the innocent victims being shot, maybe a high attrition rate in SWAT missions involving mistaken identity will lead to a change in tactics.
This is rather depressing to me, as well, because I spent several years working closely with my local Police (including SWAT) and I know most of them (including SWAT) to be rather good guys. At least locally, our SWAT is only deployed for hostage situations and as a "last choice", not the first... I think some departments have forgotten that they're not the military, and that they're not in a foreign country.
Who would have thought that taking a concept like DDR and turning it into a guitar shredding rockfest would turn out to be one of the most fun gaming experiences on the market?
Konami, as they did this a long long time ago with Guitar Freaks, one of their Bemani games. Problem being of course it didn't have classic American/British rock on it, so not gonna fly over here...
1) As someone else pointed out, you CAN audit the source 2) Being able to audit source code does nothing to prove that the binaries you're running are actually based on the source code. The backdoor might be put in by the compiler, and the compiler may put the backdoor in itself if it recompiles itself. Sound far fetched? It's already been done. 3) Even assuming you can prove that there's no obvious backdoors in the code, you're conveniently ignoring my point about Firefox: most every open source application has "bugs" in it that allow a serious security breach. ALL interesting software has a potential to have them. But what looks like a bug could just be a cleverly crafted backdoor. If I was putting a backdoor in my code, I sure wouldn't put comments around it saying "this is a backdoor", I'd make it look like a one-off error or buffer overflow and just depend on the fact that they can go undiscovered for years, even with Open Source software. So yes, you could theoretically audit the code and PROVE it's bulletproof, but good luck on that one, that's like solving halts().
Except that it wasn't hidden and has to be enabled by someone who already has unencrypted access to the disk. This isn't a backdoor, and especially not a classic one.
With propretary software, there's no way to know. It could have any number of malicious or ill-conceived/insecure features. Why risk it?
Because a backdoor can just as easily be slipped into open source software, if not more easily since everyone's assuming "Oh it's open, someone else is looking for backdoors." On top of that, when things go south there's no one to point the finger at and no one to go to for support.
Look at all the security flaws that have popped up in Firefox over the past two years that could have led to a complete security breach on a user's machine. Most were probably just innocent mistakes, but what if they were intentional? How would we know? And who could we blame?
Putting a GPL license on something doesn't automatically make it pure and holy.
And yet the GPL doesn't give the author any power over his code he didn't already have when using it for personal use. It does, however, lead him to give away some of his rights in regard to the work when he distributes it. As I said, GPL doesn't protect authors, it protects users. Users know that they retain access to the source of whatever they're running and can work on it themselves or have anyone else they wish work on it. No vendor lock-in, no security through obscurity. None of this does anything to add value for or protect an author.
Incorrect. The GPL protects users, not authors. The argument being that since everyone uses software, if we protect the users we protect everybody. Or something like that.
It wasted a lot of tax money that could have been better spent on American schools and hospitals
Except the advances in science and technology were put back into American schools and hospitals... Then there's those nifty things called communication satellites, GPS, LandSats, etc. You, sir, are a clueless, bitter, bitter man. As someone else already pointed out, Stalin was well past room temperature when this all started. Heck, JUST reading the article would have told you that.
And the space race led directly to greater cooperation between the US and the USSR. The Apollo/Soyuz project was a big deal and was for a lot more than show. Shuttle/Mir let the US come in and help the Russians w/o them losing face and that was continued into ISS. So your other attacks on it are specious at best.
"Haptic" is nothing but a disgustingly pretentious way to say "tactile".
And your comment is nothing but a very long winded way of proving yourself ignorant. Haptics in virtual reality encompasses much much more than just tactile feedback. And yes, I work in a VR lab so this is (finally) something I'm relatively knowledgeable about. Tactile feedback (like beauty) is only skin deep. Full blown haptic feedback goes much further than that. Compare a vibrotactile array (which is just a grid of cell-phone vibrators, really) with a device like a Sensable PHANToM pen or Chapel Hill's molecular docking simulator, which have more in common with robot arms than vibrators.
Man glad to know I'm not the only person who's read that book... And it was my first thought, too.
Looking at the proposed propulsion method (and how all the bad stuff is contained) makes me wonder how you'll use the explosions to power your gamma ray lasers, though...
Then you should be able to come up with specific examples. Is it proven because there's proof or is it proven because someone told you so?
Are you claiming the US hasn't been torturing people, in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere?
If, for the sake of argument, Abu Ghraib could be considered torture then it still doesn't help your argument as the behavior at Abu Ghraib was not okayed by some legislation but was illegal and led to several people facing criminal prosecution over mistreatment of prisoners. It had nothing to do with any policy decisions by the US and everything to do with some jackasses who never should have been in the military, much less wardens in charge of prisoners.
Being angry that America is torturing people and suspending Habeas Corpus (no matter how you'd prefer to spin it) is not "hysteria". Ignoring it is some kind of zombie walk. Actively looking for ways to deny it is worse.
It wouldn't be so easy to deny if someone could just produce proof it's happening instead of just claiming it's happening and attacking those who question them.
And your claim wasn't just that there was torture going on, your claim was that the US is torturing people TO DEATH. I have no doubt there have been cases of the US military abusing prisoners. But taking the rare case of abuse and trying to portray that as US POLICY instead of the acts of individuals and then to go so far as to say that not only are people being tortured to DEATH right NOW but that US policy allows and ENCOURAGES it without any proof to back up such a claim is ridiculous. At first glance seems that the only reason you believe such things is that you WANT to believe them, as a rational person would at least require proof before believing something so absurd.
Americans torture people to death in those "loopholes" you're defending. Congratulations.
Congratulations on utterly failing at reading comprehension. In response to my comment on how bad things are happening but there seems to be a lot of hysteria with little to no facts to back it up you 1) make a specious claim that BAD THINGS ARE HAPPENING RIGHT NOW REALLY TRUST ME THEY ARE and 2) say I'm defending these bad things (which no one seems to be able to prove exist) despite the fact that I agreed they are bad things.
Seriously, try reading what people write sometime instead of just reading what you want to see.
2) There is no reason to stay in a game if you are losing.
There is no reason to leave a game if you are losing. And if you do leave, it won't matter in the end since you're not stealing a "victory" from someone else's stats.
3) Little replay factor. Moving up in rankings gives players a completely new and fun way to play.
I don't think you understand how RANDOM this game is.
4) Competitiveness. You will find many players just goofing off since the game has no impact on anything. If you are a competitive player, it is no fun to play someone who isn't. The opposite is also true.
Obviously you've never played Super Smash Brothers. Most of the fun of the game is doing something completely asinine and having it pay off 1/100 times.
DK suicide kills never get old, for instance...
5) Fair play. In Xbox Live, you are matched up with people on a similar level as you.
Do you know anything at all about SSB? Look up about a page, someone else has already gove over how ridiculously complicated (read: impossible) developing a ranking system for Super Smash Brothers would be.
The title of your comment should have been "Honest comparison to Xbox Live to a game I don't know much about"
These Republicans, who so attacked Democrats for attempting to use an occasional filibuster while Republicans controlled the majority, now filibuster practically every bill Democrats try to pass. Republicans almost used the "nuclear option" to rewrite centuries-old Senate rules protecting the filibuster, to ram through their legislation. Now they've flipped the script, abusing the filibuster at every chance.
Actually the complaint was that the Democrats were using filibusters to hold up voting on judicial confirmations, NOT legislation. Filibustering legislation has always been accepted as valid (though annoying and cheap) by both sides of the aisle. Filibustering judicial nominees was (with one bipartisan exception) completely unheard of in the history of the country.
When the cops come to round you up in secret, on a malicious tip or just some typical bureaucratic mistake, then torture you to death because "you won't talk", the idea that it was "just politics" won't help you any.
If you're referring to this particular bill... Since it only applies outside US territories to non-citizens I don't think the majority of us have anything to worry about. Was MCA bad legislation? Quite possibly, but it won't lead to the scenario you're describing.
If you're talking about some general policy of the current government, can you actually offer up any examples of such abuses? I canthink of plenty of abuses by pastadministrations, but people aren't able to come up with many good examples for the current one. Yes they do bad things that should be fixed, but these wild claims that the secret police are coming to get us seem to be nothing more than hysteria.
The problem they have been talking about with the carbon fiber is the smoke can contain toxins that will kill you a heck of a lot faster, making escape from the fire a moot point because you are dead trying to find the exit.
What I find so interesting about this story is that people are ignoring that aluminum burns and produces toxic chemicals that cause fume fever. This was one of the complaints about the Bradley, it's aluminum armor would kill its crew if hit w/ incendiary ammunition. Toxic fumes in a burning plane are not a new thing. Maybe the composite burns less clean, but the old stuff wasn't exactly aromatherapy.
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I prefer the formatting at this site a lot more, myself. Put it up on buddy's big screen while gaming for quick reference. Really helpful.
There's probably some truth to that, but they've also added something SORELY lacking from second edition: BALANCE. Consistency is also a plus, if you learn how one thing works in the system you pretty much know how everything works in the system (the different table for EACH stat in the AD&D 2nd PHB is my favorite example of why this is a good thing). Third edition allowed character customization and freedom in how a character would progress in a way that never occurred to anyone developing AD&D. All in all, I think it's been a good thing. It's really much harder for a 3rd edition character to become either imbalancing or irrelevant in a game.
Plus proficiency slots were awful. I mean, REALLY REALLY awful. And multiclassing/dual classing was completely broken.
So get coffee at Dunkin' Donuts.
Since reactivating my WoW account I've spent significantly less purchasing new games. At the end of the day it's saved me money.
I wouldn't call GTA rewarding, personally. There are some games out there that are considered "art" and really should be experienced for the experience's sake, but most of them aren't from this generation anyway...
There's plenty of progression left after reaching maximum level, at least in a good game there is... And WoW's "content" patches are every 2-3 months usually...
Based solely on reading your comment one could assume then that console gamers are made up entirely of self-righteous, elitist, condescending assholes. Generalizations are fun, aren't they?
In most MMOs there's about equal numbers of wage earners playing the game as "immature brats"--and honestly, the majority is probably more in favor of 20-30 somethings than kids. But of course you don't remember the normal (or even "nice") people you interact with in such an environment, just the ones that piss you off. Which brings me back to your comment rather nicely...
Locking yourself away in a room to play with yourself doesn't make you a better person than anyone else who chooses not to. Depending on who you talk to, it may make you blind, though... Likewise, choosing to spend your time on an MMO doesn't make your tastes any more refined nor does it mean you're any more socially adept than the next person.
Spouting vitriol about someone who decides to spend their free time in some other (legal) pursuit than you, however, does cast some doubt as to your value as a human being.
No, there's plenty of antisocial shut-ins left in the world. Look at the SomethingAwful forums, if nothing else...
Seriously though, there's nothing wrong with a "good single-player" game. The problem is there are so FEW of those on the market today, and finding time to lock one's self away on the off chance that a game actually turns out to be good is just not high on most people's priority lists. Even a bad game can be fun with friends, but giving up human contact for something that turns out to be mediocre is just pretty lousy...
I tried to play Okami, it's a genuinely great game, but why should I play Okami when I can play something with my fiance? See my friends? Hell, even Gears of War was nowhere near as fun as when my brother sat down to play it co-op with me... And killing dumb NPCs in Oblivion can't compare to fighting real people in WoW. Why should I be stuck w/ a linear game playing experience when I can choose my own path elsewhere?
Single player games will never disappear, but I'm pretty sure they'll never be taken as a serious force in gaming again. I'd expect most of them to fit the "casual" category from now on with a few rare holdouts like Square-Enix.
What world do you live in? We already spy on everyone (who aren't Americans), and (unsurprisingly) they all spy on us as well. This has been business as usual for the entire past century.
Don't worry, they can always make up a reason for the shooting afterwards.
Normally I'm very willing to listen to the Police's side of the story when it comes to allegations of abuse on things like traffic stops and such (I said listen, not believe), because in that case it's in public and there should be a dash-cam watching the whole thing anyway. But no-knock raids are so blatantly unconstitutional and so incredibly unnecessary that it shocks me that the federal courts turn a blind eye (and don't give me "IT'S TEH BUSH FAULT!!1!!!!!", this has been going on for DECADES, he's just not doing anything to help), and with that in mind I have not one ounce of sympathy for an officer's claims of being forced into a split-second decision that leads to a person being shot in their own home.
With all the stories of people being shot WHILE trying to submit (or even asking "What's going on?"), of babies having their heads smashed in, of people being shot while "carrying a weapon" which turned out to be a TV remote or phone, you'd better believe I'm going to make sure they have a reason to shoot me. If I'm likely to get shot anyway, might as well make it worth my time. If no one cares about the innocent victims being shot, maybe a high attrition rate in SWAT missions involving mistaken identity will lead to a change in tactics.
This is rather depressing to me, as well, because I spent several years working closely with my local Police (including SWAT) and I know most of them (including SWAT) to be rather good guys. At least locally, our SWAT is only deployed for hostage situations and as a "last choice", not the first... I think some departments have forgotten that they're not the military, and that they're not in a foreign country.
Konami, as they did this a long long time ago with Guitar Freaks, one of their Bemani games. Problem being of course it didn't have classic American/British rock on it, so not gonna fly over here...
The problem isn't trolling in the comments, it's trolling in the article summaries that's the problem...
1) As someone else pointed out, you CAN audit the source
2) Being able to audit source code does nothing to prove that the binaries you're running are actually based on the source code. The backdoor might be put in by the compiler, and the compiler may put the backdoor in itself if it recompiles itself. Sound far fetched? It's already been done.
3) Even assuming you can prove that there's no obvious backdoors in the code, you're conveniently ignoring my point about Firefox: most every open source application has "bugs" in it that allow a serious security breach. ALL interesting software has a potential to have them. But what looks like a bug could just be a cleverly crafted backdoor. If I was putting a backdoor in my code, I sure wouldn't put comments around it saying "this is a backdoor", I'd make it look like a one-off error or buffer overflow and just depend on the fact that they can go undiscovered for years, even with Open Source software. So yes, you could theoretically audit the code and PROVE it's bulletproof, but good luck on that one, that's like solving halts().
Except that it wasn't hidden and has to be enabled by someone who already has unencrypted access to the disk. This isn't a backdoor, and especially not a classic one.
Because a backdoor can just as easily be slipped into open source software, if not more easily since everyone's assuming "Oh it's open, someone else is looking for backdoors." On top of that, when things go south there's no one to point the finger at and no one to go to for support.
Look at all the security flaws that have popped up in Firefox over the past two years that could have led to a complete security breach on a user's machine. Most were probably just innocent mistakes, but what if they were intentional? How would we know? And who could we blame?
Putting a GPL license on something doesn't automatically make it pure and holy.
And yet the GPL doesn't give the author any power over his code he didn't already have when using it for personal use. It does, however, lead him to give away some of his rights in regard to the work when he distributes it. As I said, GPL doesn't protect authors, it protects users. Users know that they retain access to the source of whatever they're running and can work on it themselves or have anyone else they wish work on it. No vendor lock-in, no security through obscurity. None of this does anything to add value for or protect an author.
Incorrect. The GPL protects users, not authors. The argument being that since everyone uses software, if we protect the users we protect everybody. Or something like that.
Except the advances in science and technology were put back into American schools and hospitals... Then there's those nifty things called communication satellites, GPS, LandSats, etc. You, sir, are a clueless, bitter, bitter man. As someone else already pointed out, Stalin was well past room temperature when this all started. Heck, JUST reading the article would have told you that.
And the space race led directly to greater cooperation between the US and the USSR. The Apollo/Soyuz project was a big deal and was for a lot more than show. Shuttle/Mir let the US come in and help the Russians w/o them losing face and that was continued into ISS. So your other attacks on it are specious at best.
And your comment is nothing but a very long winded way of proving yourself ignorant. Haptics in virtual reality encompasses much much more than just tactile feedback. And yes, I work in a VR lab so this is (finally) something I'm relatively knowledgeable about. Tactile feedback (like beauty) is only skin deep. Full blown haptic feedback goes much further than that. Compare a vibrotactile array (which is just a grid of cell-phone vibrators, really) with a device like a Sensable PHANToM pen or Chapel Hill's molecular docking simulator, which have more in common with robot arms than vibrators.
But who's going to save us from social security?
Man glad to know I'm not the only person who's read that book... And it was my first thought, too.
Looking at the proposed propulsion method (and how all the bad stuff is contained) makes me wonder how you'll use the explosions to power your gamma ray lasers, though...
Then you should be able to come up with specific examples. Is it proven because there's proof or is it proven because someone told you so?
If, for the sake of argument, Abu Ghraib could be considered torture then it still doesn't help your argument as the behavior at Abu Ghraib was not okayed by some legislation but was illegal and led to several people facing criminal prosecution over mistreatment of prisoners. It had nothing to do with any policy decisions by the US and everything to do with some jackasses who never should have been in the military, much less wardens in charge of prisoners.
It wouldn't be so easy to deny if someone could just produce proof it's happening instead of just claiming it's happening and attacking those who question them.
And your claim wasn't just that there was torture going on, your claim was that the US is torturing people TO DEATH. I have no doubt there have been cases of the US military abusing prisoners. But taking the rare case of abuse and trying to portray that as US POLICY instead of the acts of individuals and then to go so far as to say that not only are people being tortured to DEATH right NOW but that US policy allows and ENCOURAGES it without any proof to back up such a claim is ridiculous. At first glance seems that the only reason you believe such things is that you WANT to believe them, as a rational person would at least require proof before believing something so absurd.
Debatable, but not likely.
Congratulations on utterly failing at reading comprehension. In response to my comment on how bad things are happening but there seems to be a lot of hysteria with little to no facts to back it up you 1) make a specious claim that BAD THINGS ARE HAPPENING RIGHT NOW REALLY TRUST ME THEY ARE and 2) say I'm defending these bad things (which no one seems to be able to prove exist) despite the fact that I agreed they are bad things.
Seriously, try reading what people write sometime instead of just reading what you want to see.
There is no reason to leave a game if you are losing. And if you do leave, it won't matter in the end since you're not stealing a "victory" from someone else's stats.
I don't think you understand how RANDOM this game is.
Obviously you've never played Super Smash Brothers. Most of the fun of the game is doing something completely asinine and having it pay off 1/100 times.
DK suicide kills never get old, for instance...
Do you know anything at all about SSB? Look up about a page, someone else has already gove over how ridiculously complicated (read: impossible) developing a ranking system for Super Smash Brothers would be.
The title of your comment should have been "Honest comparison to Xbox Live to a game I don't know much about"
Actually the complaint was that the Democrats were using filibusters to hold up voting on judicial confirmations, NOT legislation. Filibustering legislation has always been accepted as valid (though annoying and cheap) by both sides of the aisle. Filibustering judicial nominees was (with one bipartisan exception) completely unheard of in the history of the country.
If you're referring to this particular bill... Since it only applies outside US territories to non-citizens I don't think the majority of us have anything to worry about. Was MCA bad legislation? Quite possibly, but it won't lead to the scenario you're describing.
If you're talking about some general policy of the current government, can you actually offer up any examples of such abuses? I can think of plenty of abuses by past administrations, but people aren't able to come up with many good examples for the current one. Yes they do bad things that should be fixed, but these wild claims that the secret police are coming to get us seem to be nothing more than hysteria.
What I find so interesting about this story is that people are ignoring that aluminum burns and produces toxic chemicals that cause fume fever. This was one of the complaints about the Bradley, it's aluminum armor would kill its crew if hit w/ incendiary ammunition. Toxic fumes in a burning plane are not a new thing. Maybe the composite burns less clean, but the old stuff wasn't exactly aromatherapy.
The only possible way this statement could be factual is if you are legally blind.