The two titles you give, Sins and Mass Effect are pretty much shovelware as well. Did Stardock or Ironclad do anything spectacular in the RTS field? No, not really. It's pretty much a mashup of various Sci-Fi RTS games (Haegamonia, Homeworld and Starcraft). Mass Effect is just another KotoR clone (It's even developed by Bioware, who made Kotor) the with the names jumbled and some new artwork. Nothing new there.
You'd actually have to look really hard to find a new, unique RPG these days. If it hasn't been regurgitated a million times already, studios just aren't making it.
Obviously you've never played fallout 3. While, yes, there's a lot of emphasis on "shooting stuff", "shooting stuff" is not actually necessary to play,
Other than during dialogue, and some missions (The Wasteland Survival Guide Mission with the mud crabs) you DO need to shoot stuff to win the game. Just because you can stop shooting long enough to get two factions to shoot each other/blow themselves up instead doesn't mean that pretty much most of the game involves mandatory shooting.
One thing I wish I could do is turn OFF the bullet time slow-mo stuff in VATS. I get so tired of watching my bullets blow up yet another NPC's head. It was cool watching the first one pop off, and the second.. And by the 50th time, I was about ready to just stop playing the game. In fact, I haven't beaten it and I haven't really touched it in over a month because I know when I start playing it again I'll have to sit through bullet time for every kill just about and to me it's frustrating.
I guess you didn't really get the SchrÃdinger's cat reference. the GP post was more of an illustration of the attitudes of two differing viewpoints on an unknowable.
You know, I'd actually buy games from them, but after browsing their store, you start to almost feel like they're trying to rip you off. Like, Majesty Gold for $40? Really? I just got it off Impulse for $10 and I'm sure I could get it to run in wine if I wanted to. Poking around, none of the games have seem to have dropped in price.. Knights and Merchants (1998) $38?! Kohan (2001) $46? Oh, and Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood (2002, $40), and I got it from Stardock years ago in a bundle with Disciples 2 (2002, $45), and a host of other stuff for less than the combinination of the two.
I'd like to support Linux gaming, but if they want to compete, they need to work a little on the price side. I'm not going to pay 4-5 times the price just because they ported it to linux. I almost get the feeling they just buy some of these games (Like NWN, is that even a linux native binary?) off eBay/Amazon and throw them up there for more than retail price. You'd think they'd realize geeks can actually search the web for better deals.
You know what's really annoying me about the app store is these companies that make the stupid mmo games, and to a lesser degree, the ebook peoples.
In the first example, the mmo games, one company will churn out say 10-20 (I'm not exaggerating) variants of it, and stick it into all sorts of categories other than RPG. So when you go to find an actual RPG, or a strategy game, or whatever, you end up having to dig through the whole mess of them. and since there's easily a 6-10 of these developers, it's just pages of garbage.
With the ebook peoples, some companies have a proper reader which you run and buy books that way. Others have a seperate release for every single book they've published. So if you search for, say, "ebook" or "reader", you end up with (again) pages and pages of garbage ($25 for an ebook fanfic about WoW? All I can say is... Wow.).
Anyhow, it seems that even though the process is taking longer, they're still going for quantity over quality. I wish they'd change their policies around, but I believe that's being optimistic.
The randomly generated terrain they talk about in Oblivion is purely limited to vegetation. So, a hill that was in one game is still in another game. It'll always be a hill. But that tree or bunch of trees on the hill might be positioned differently, or they might not even be there at all on another game. There's really very little that is random about it at all. Even the "random" encounters always happen on the same spots with the same levelled critters attacking you with more or less the same equipment. Even the treasure in the caves was more or less the same every playthrough.
I've played through all of Morrowind (Before the expansions), and Oblivion when it came out too. Unless you actually played all the way through DF before the other ones, I can see where you wouldn't really understand the differences.
For me, the main difference was the randomly generated towns. They weren't completely random, but they were/different/ every time you started a new game and then stayed the same for that entire play through. Also, you randomly uncovered points of interest through conversations and quests that could be re-visited if you wanted to, but were also tied to your current game. You could also properly buy houses, ships, horses and carts (And they weren't introduced via a patch/mod either, they actually planned for this). There were bookstores which contained literally libraries of interesting books, pamphlets, papers and scrolls. I know they exist in Oblivion too, but it's not the same. In oblivion you go up to a vendor and tell him "Sell!" "Buy!" and get a long list of his inventory. In DF you walked up to the bookshelf and browsed the contents, taking the items you wanted into your inventory.
There's other things like that. The magic/enchant system in DF is way superior to MW/OB's that it's not really comparable. Playing with them in those two is like playing with miniature model trains/planes whereas in DF you were playing with full-sized scale working replicas.
Even the people in the game were random, you couldn't always expect the same npcs to be holding the same positions with the same attitudes every play through. Each game forced you to explore it, and truly felt alive and not some scripted paradise like the other two. I'm not saying it didn't have it's flaws, but I just don't see how a few mods (And I have played with quite a few mods for MW/OB) can re-create or surpass what I really enjoyed about it (Which was no two games being the same).
No kidding. I've always (Since Morrowind was announced, then released feeling me let down) felt that just updating the graphics on DF and fixing the annoying bugs (Like falling through the floor to your death, amongst others) would be so much better than any of the watered-down sequels. It seems as time goes on in the series it gets more and more simplified, to the point where I expect TES 5 to just be a hack and slash shooter somewhat equivalent to Hexen (Which was a good game in it's own right).
Well, I agree that he shouldn't have been held (if he indeed has been).
But, intent to commit a crime is in itself a criminal act. I'm sure most states have their own laws, but there's a federal law (United States Code TITLE 18 - CRIMES AND CRIMINAL PROCEDURE + PART I - CRIMES # CHAPTER 19 - CONSPIRACY) which conveniently covers "thought crime".
You can be held, arrested, and even found guilty of conspiracy to commit a crime which you haven't committed.
I've been wanting to try OpenNMS for years now, but it doesn't work out of the box with FreeBSD (all the java dependencies, etc..) and I could never actually get it to compile properly even after fiddling with it. It's really a shame too, I've only heard good things about it and REALLY tried to get it working with my current system (All *BSD boxes). Maybe someday I'll get a linux box that will work with it, but as of now I already have a network monitoring box with nagios, cacti, etc on it.
One of the boards I'm on does something similar. Except instead of throwing an error message for not choosing the right language, it lets you register and then silently discards your account.
So the spammer thinks they've beaten the system when in reality they haven't.:)
With network devices (Or anything actually) it's fairly easy to come up with a system to verify that you do indeed own a piece of hardware without actually keeping a paper trail of ownership. And Cisco already does this, actually.
It's called a serial number. Usually on the backside/bottom of the device, it's a unique number that can 'verify' that you have the device in-hand. Afterall, if you can recite it to them, you must have it right?
Also, MAC addresses are assigned to entities much like IP addresses are, and thus afaik are unique to each device, so that too would be a good way to figure out if you actually own the device.
And, the way to circumvent people from just posting it online is pretty easy too. If sopmeone in russia claims to have that serial number, and then the next day someone in kansas city does, it'd be pretty obvious that one or neither actually own it.:)
Or it could be that he has his connections limit set to something 'sane', like 75 or 50 rather than the 300-900 some clients seem to start it at. With that type of setup, even on a very well seeded torrent if you get 5 connections to dialup or sub-dsl users, your download speed can be atrocious. Kind of like my sentance layout.
Of course, that goes back to his configuration. However, I'd like to argue that it's also more polite to not have 500 connections going and totally saturating your connection.
I know noone will ever read this. But maybe you will if you happen to look in your profile.. But Microsoft DOES do preview/demo versions of their software that is time-limited. I think most of it is limited to 180 days, but I could've swore I saw something on there for longer (Like a year, iirc).
I don't think they've been doing it for too long now. I know for the past year, but not sure how much before that.
If you want to get that technical, the Roman Empire lasted from the founding of Rome by Romulous and Remus at approximately 753bc. It then split into Eastern and Western Roman Empires (Between 284-305AD, definately 306AD at the latest). After the fall of the Western Empire in about 480 with the death of the last official emperor, we're left with the Eastern Empire. And that lasted until about 1453 AD. Which before it's fall was commonly reffered to as the Byzantine Empire, but was actually in fact the last remnant of the Eastern Empire.
So, really the "Roman Civilization" lasted approximately 2200 years in various forms.
Because it's about Americans? It'd be like if their story about a blizzard in say Boston depicted some Norwegian standing in front of their city hall during a snowstorm. Yes, it's a city. And it's a city in a snowstorm. But it's not/boston/ in a snowstorm.
Or, if you like, the next rowing competition depicts a replica trireme rowing out of a harbor... Not really what the article is about:P
Really wish/. had an edit feature sometimes. But I also wanted to throw in that the kid knows how to rewind, fast-forward, skip-forward/back, and how to use the loop feature (Unfortunately) of the dvd player. He also knows how to change the language, and how to make the subtitles come on/off. And he's been able to do this for a long time now. Don't see how it's harder than vhs. If anything, it's faster and easier.
Overall the disks might not be very durable, but in the destructive hands of a small child I think they're MORE durable. Soon as they get that tape out of the cassette.. If you're not right there to stop it, you could (and I have) walked into a room covered with tape. Oh, they really like that. Magical string dispensor.
Absolutely. My kid is 7 now, but he started using the dvd player when he was 4-5. He figured out that if it doesn't start when the menu comes on to press the |> button on the remote and it'll play (Imagine that). He also learned that if it won't play to take it out, clean it and put it back in.
People don't give small children enough credit. The kid could've probably done it himself when he was younger, I just never let him. As it is, I still supervise what he's trying to stick in there and how.
That ruling really has nothing to do with the current situation. That case has to do with libel, and the fact that you can't just go around saying horrible stuff about people without being able to backup your claims.
In otherwords, I can't call you a thief, rapist, child molester unless you actually WERE all of those things. If you were, then I could freely go about telling everyone about it.
In this case, he's within his rights to say that the registrar of his domain is incompetent, and has taken his money without rendering services, because they HAVE done so. Or, haven't.
Slashdot Mirror
The two titles you give, Sins and Mass Effect are pretty much shovelware as well. Did Stardock or Ironclad do anything spectacular in the RTS field? No, not really. It's pretty much a mashup of various Sci-Fi RTS games (Haegamonia, Homeworld and Starcraft). Mass Effect is just another KotoR clone (It's even developed by Bioware, who made Kotor) the with the names jumbled and some new artwork. Nothing new there.
You'd actually have to look really hard to find a new, unique RPG these days. If it hasn't been regurgitated a million times already, studios just aren't making it.
Obviously you've never played fallout 3. While, yes, there's a lot of emphasis on "shooting stuff", "shooting stuff" is not actually necessary to play,
Other than during dialogue, and some missions (The Wasteland Survival Guide Mission with the mud crabs) you DO need to shoot stuff to win the game. Just because you can stop shooting long enough to get two factions to shoot each other/blow themselves up instead doesn't mean that pretty much most of the game involves mandatory shooting.
One thing I wish I could do is turn OFF the bullet time slow-mo stuff in VATS. I get so tired of watching my bullets blow up yet another NPC's head. It was cool watching the first one pop off, and the second.. And by the 50th time, I was about ready to just stop playing the game. In fact, I haven't beaten it and I haven't really touched it in over a month because I know when I start playing it again I'll have to sit through bullet time for every kill just about and to me it's frustrating.
I guess you didn't really get the SchrÃdinger's cat reference. the GP post was more of an illustration of the attitudes of two differing viewpoints on an unknowable.
You know, I'd actually buy games from them, but after browsing their store, you start to almost feel like they're trying to rip you off. Like, Majesty Gold for $40? Really? I just got it off Impulse for $10 and I'm sure I could get it to run in wine if I wanted to. Poking around, none of the games have seem to have dropped in price.. Knights and Merchants (1998) $38?! Kohan (2001) $46? Oh, and Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood (2002, $40), and I got it from Stardock years ago in a bundle with Disciples 2 (2002, $45), and a host of other stuff for less than the combinination of the two.
I'd like to support Linux gaming, but if they want to compete, they need to work a little on the price side. I'm not going to pay 4-5 times the price just because they ported it to linux. I almost get the feeling they just buy some of these games (Like NWN, is that even a linux native binary?) off eBay/Amazon and throw them up there for more than retail price. You'd think they'd realize geeks can actually search the web for better deals.
You know what's really annoying me about the app store is these companies that make the stupid mmo games, and to a lesser degree, the ebook peoples.
In the first example, the mmo games, one company will churn out say 10-20 (I'm not exaggerating) variants of it, and stick it into all sorts of categories other than RPG. So when you go to find an actual RPG, or a strategy game, or whatever, you end up having to dig through the whole mess of them. and since there's easily a 6-10 of these developers, it's just pages of garbage.
With the ebook peoples, some companies have a proper reader which you run and buy books that way. Others have a seperate release for every single book they've published. So if you search for, say, "ebook" or "reader", you end up with (again) pages and pages of garbage ($25 for an ebook fanfic about WoW? All I can say is... Wow.).
Anyhow, it seems that even though the process is taking longer, they're still going for quantity over quality. I wish they'd change their policies around, but I believe that's being optimistic.
The randomly generated terrain they talk about in Oblivion is purely limited to vegetation. So, a hill that was in one game is still in another game. It'll always be a hill. But that tree or bunch of trees on the hill might be positioned differently, or they might not even be there at all on another game. There's really very little that is random about it at all. Even the "random" encounters always happen on the same spots with the same levelled critters attacking you with more or less the same equipment. Even the treasure in the caves was more or less the same every playthrough.
I've played through all of Morrowind (Before the expansions), and Oblivion when it came out too. Unless you actually played all the way through DF before the other ones, I can see where you wouldn't really understand the differences.
For me, the main difference was the randomly generated towns. They weren't completely random, but they were /different/ every time you started a new game and then stayed the same for that entire play through. Also, you randomly uncovered points of interest through conversations and quests that could be re-visited if you wanted to, but were also tied to your current game. You could also properly buy houses, ships, horses and carts (And they weren't introduced via a patch/mod either, they actually planned for this). There were bookstores which contained literally libraries of interesting books, pamphlets, papers and scrolls. I know they exist in Oblivion too, but it's not the same. In oblivion you go up to a vendor and tell him "Sell!" "Buy!" and get a long list of his inventory. In DF you walked up to the bookshelf and browsed the contents, taking the items you wanted into your inventory.
There's other things like that. The magic/enchant system in DF is way superior to MW/OB's that it's not really comparable. Playing with them in those two is like playing with miniature model trains/planes whereas in DF you were playing with full-sized scale working replicas.
Even the people in the game were random, you couldn't always expect the same npcs to be holding the same positions with the same attitudes every play through. Each game forced you to explore it, and truly felt alive and not some scripted paradise like the other two. I'm not saying it didn't have it's flaws, but I just don't see how a few mods (And I have played with quite a few mods for MW/OB) can re-create or surpass what I really enjoyed about it (Which was no two games being the same).
No kidding. I've always (Since Morrowind was announced, then released feeling me let down) felt that just updating the graphics on DF and fixing the annoying bugs (Like falling through the floor to your death, amongst others) would be so much better than any of the watered-down sequels. It seems as time goes on in the series it gets more and more simplified, to the point where I expect TES 5 to just be a hack and slash shooter somewhat equivalent to Hexen (Which was a good game in it's own right).
Well, I agree that he shouldn't have been held (if he indeed has been).
But, intent to commit a crime is in itself a criminal act. I'm sure most states have their own laws, but there's a federal law (United States Code TITLE 18 - CRIMES AND CRIMINAL PROCEDURE + PART I - CRIMES # CHAPTER 19 - CONSPIRACY) which conveniently covers "thought crime".
You can be held, arrested, and even found guilty of conspiracy to commit a crime which you haven't committed.
Looks interesting. I was checking it out, but says I need an invite from a member. Would you be willing to send me one?
I've been wanting to try OpenNMS for years now, but it doesn't work out of the box with FreeBSD (all the java dependencies, etc..) and I could never actually get it to compile properly even after fiddling with it. It's really a shame too, I've only heard good things about it and REALLY tried to get it working with my current system (All *BSD boxes). Maybe someday I'll get a linux box that will work with it, but as of now I already have a network monitoring box with nagios, cacti, etc on it.
One of the boards I'm on does something similar. Except instead of throwing an error message for not choosing the right language, it lets you register and then silently discards your account.
:)
So the spammer thinks they've beaten the system when in reality they haven't.
With network devices (Or anything actually) it's fairly easy to come up with a system to verify that you do indeed own a piece of hardware without actually keeping a paper trail of ownership. And Cisco already does this, actually.
It's called a serial number. Usually on the backside/bottom of the device, it's a unique number that can 'verify' that you have the device in-hand. Afterall, if you can recite it to them, you must have it right?
Also, MAC addresses are assigned to entities much like IP addresses are, and thus afaik are unique to each device, so that too would be a good way to figure out if you actually own the device.
And, the way to circumvent people from just posting it online is pretty easy too. If sopmeone in russia claims to have that serial number, and then the next day someone in kansas city does, it'd be pretty obvious that one or neither actually own it.
But not as we know it.
Or it could be that he has his connections limit set to something 'sane', like 75 or 50 rather than the 300-900 some clients seem to start it at. With that type of setup, even on a very well seeded torrent if you get 5 connections to dialup or sub-dsl users, your download speed can be atrocious. Kind of like my sentance layout.
Of course, that goes back to his configuration. However, I'd like to argue that it's also more polite to not have 500 connections going and totally saturating your connection.
Or the "We don't like your ip naming scheme, because we think its too generic"
I know noone will ever read this. But maybe you will if you happen to look in your profile.. But Microsoft DOES do preview/demo versions of their software that is time-limited. I think most of it is limited to 180 days, but I could've swore I saw something on there for longer (Like a year, iirc).
I don't think they've been doing it for too long now. I know for the past year, but not sure how much before that.
If you want to get that technical, the Roman Empire lasted from the founding of Rome by Romulous and Remus at approximately 753bc. It then split into Eastern and Western Roman Empires (Between 284-305AD, definately 306AD at the latest). After the fall of the Western Empire in about 480 with the death of the last official emperor, we're left with the Eastern Empire. And that lasted until about 1453 AD. Which before it's fall was commonly reffered to as the Byzantine Empire, but was actually in fact the last remnant of the Eastern Empire.
So, really the "Roman Civilization" lasted approximately 2200 years in various forms.
Because it's about Americans? It'd be like if their story about a blizzard in say Boston depicted some Norwegian standing in front of their city hall during a snowstorm. Yes, it's a city. And it's a city in a snowstorm. But it's not /boston/ in a snowstorm.
:P
Or, if you like, the next rowing competition depicts a replica trireme rowing out of a harbor... Not really what the article is about
I, for one, welcome our eventual humorless overlords.
Really wish /. had an edit feature sometimes. But I also wanted to throw in that the kid knows how to rewind, fast-forward, skip-forward/back, and how to use the loop feature (Unfortunately) of the dvd player. He also knows how to change the language, and how to make the subtitles come on/off. And he's been able to do this for a long time now. Don't see how it's harder than vhs. If anything, it's faster and easier.
Overall the disks might not be very durable, but in the destructive hands of a small child I think they're MORE durable. Soon as they get that tape out of the cassette.. If you're not right there to stop it, you could (and I have) walked into a room covered with tape. Oh, they really like that. Magical string dispensor.
Absolutely. My kid is 7 now, but he started using the dvd player when he was 4-5. He figured out that if it doesn't start when the menu comes on to press the |> button on the remote and it'll play (Imagine that). He also learned that if it won't play to take it out, clean it and put it back in.
People don't give small children enough credit. The kid could've probably done it himself when he was younger, I just never let him. As it is, I still supervise what he's trying to stick in there and how.
I actually had the same thought. On the other side of the pond.
That ruling really has nothing to do with the current situation. That case has to do with libel, and the fact that you can't just go around saying horrible stuff about people without being able to backup your claims.
In otherwords, I can't call you a thief, rapist, child molester unless you actually WERE all of those things. If you were, then I could freely go about telling everyone about it.
In this case, he's within his rights to say that the registrar of his domain is incompetent, and has taken his money without rendering services, because they HAVE done so. Or, haven't.