I exagerated a bit by saying 2 hours, but it was an excruciatingly long time to pull off a couple of the solutions simply because there was too much trial and error involved. Thrusting you into the game gives you no explanation of game mechanics at all, you're left to just figure them out on your own. So when it came to the sands of time styled levels (particularly the one where you have to bait and switch on a rabbit) I was left trying over and over to get the timing right. It was annoying and not fun.
As to why I thought I would get power-ups, the reason is simple. If you come across something you need to collect in a game, and it is just out of reach with no way of climbing higher to drop down to it, what is the first conclusion many people would come to? Well, since games have had power-ups since even before the 8-bit era, Occam's Razor says that the solution is something that lets you jump higher. The solution being that a platform appears after you collect other pieces is certainly inventive, but I think having an outline where the platform is supposed to appear would have made that obvious without actually telling the player how to go about getting the piece. You see the outline, assume a platform shows up at some point, and come back later to see if you activated it. Easy, and frustration free.
Don't get me wrong here, I did like that you were thrown into the game, but I didn't like that dick-all was explained aside from movement controls. Maybe I've gotten lazy from getting spoon fed direction in games for too long, but I really felt that I could do with at least a little more direction than was provided. Perhaps a 'frequency of hints' options would have been a good idea; let those that want to fumble around in the dark do so, but give a little helping hand to those that need it. I mean the developer wants people to play the game all the way through right? Seems like an extra option to make everyone happy would have helped accomplish that.
Truth be told I was unaware that the game was done by a single person. With that being the case, the game did turn out quite nice. The controls and physics are rather polished and function as one would expect. However overall, I found the game unpolished due to the lack of what I consider staple features in games (especially PC games). Once I find the time I'll go back and play through again now that I know more of what to expect, I never would have quit in the first place had I had any of this information available. Thanks.
I have a complaint about Braid (no, the irony of posting this here is not lost on me.)
No explanations. You just get thrown into the game. You get spoon fed the controls in the first level, and spoon fed the story little by little as you play. I kind of understand the whole 'mystery' aspect of it, compelling the player to press onward and find out what is actually going on. But it wasn't enough. The story alluded to a backstory for the main character, but after 5 chapters I was still left wondering 'what the fuck is going on?' Add to that the seemingly unreachable puzzle pieces. My assumption was that at some point the main character would get a new ability that would allow him to reach those pieces, so I pressed on. And again, after 5 chapters I was left wondering 'where the fuck are my new abilities?' Add to that the fact that you can't remap the controls (the defaults were awkward and I never got used to them), limited resolution support (every new game should support 1080p IMO), and retardedly difficult puzzles (I don't want to spend 30 minutes figuring out a solution, then another 2 hours figuring out how to execute it perfectly enough to work) just really gave the game an unpolished feel. And for the record, 'And Yet It Moves' was the same way, but I loved the hell out of that game.
Since you've apparently played the game, could you tell me if it all finally makes sense at some point? Do I have to reach the 'end' of the game first before I go back to collect those unreachable puzzle pieces? The game felt like it had a lot of potential, but it frustrated me far too much to find out.
Sucks doesn't it? They target the impulsive younger audience that is more willing to pay for a shitty game so they can increase profit margins, rather than target those of us (older usually) gamers with the disposable income to blow on any and every game we want.
Think about it though. The more free time you have, the less picky you are about the games you play. So those of us that have little free time now have to decide carefully what to spend our precious little free time playing. It's all about the value you're getting out of the game, where value = enjoyment/time. But as time progresses aren't games supposed to be getting better and better? If games really were better than they were back in the days of our youth, then our perceived value from those games would have stayed the same. But it hasn't. With value = enjoyment/time, if time goes down, enjoyment must go up in order to maintain equilibrium. At the very least our drop in free time has outpaced the increased enjoyment from games, lowering perceived value below an acceptable threshold.
I still play games in my free time, but I'm damn sure pickier than I used to be back in middle/high-school. Hell back in high-school I would buy a new game almost every week, I was beating them so fast. I wasn't picky about quality or even enjoyment as I had free time to burn and games were how I chose to spend that time. Once college rolled around, and then a career, I started playing only the most enjoyable of games; which is the expected response. However a funny thing has occured as I have gotten older. When I was younger it seemed that a large majority of the games out there were 'above par'. Even if I decided not to play them, I didn't expect that actually playing it would make me want to shoot myself. However these days it seems that there are far fewer diamonds amongst a much larger rough. Games have always fallen into three groups for me: Must Play, Good if I Find Time, and Holy Shit Keep it Away From Me. Back when, it seemed like most games fell into the first two groups with a spattering in the third, probably close to a 20/70/10 split. These days it seems more like 10/10/80. This shift seems to be much larger in magnitude than one would expect from an aging gamer; you would expect a person's standards to rise over time, but the shift appears disproportionate. So while I agree that there are 'winner' games out there that are very popular and heavily played, the industry as a whole has taken a huge nose-dive. Which is probably why people complain so much and pine for the 'Good Ol' Days'.
Where I work, we're mostly a company of gamers, and we all really, really want to produce the most kickass game we can (this is fairly typical in the gaming industry).
I hope you guys are able to follow through with that. I'm really looking forward to Super Clog Dancer 3 Turbo.
By definition what you have in this moment is simultaneously the best and worst you can have at that moment because you have no frame of reference. The frame of reference is only that moment, thus what you have has no comparison. Get it? Calling it 'the best' for that moment is simply looking for the silver lining. Since you can't change the past, you always have the best that you can have, but not necessarily the best you could have had, or that you could have in the future. Treating what you have now as the best you can have is simple optimism, while treating it as the best you could ever have is what breeds complacency. Complacency is not without virtue however, as there is certainly a point where the ROI you get from your time spent improving things just isn't worth the improvement itself. At that point it's acceptable to become complacent. There is definitely a point where 'good enough' truly is good enough.
That doesn't mean shit. You have to infringe on all of them. Look at number three:
triggering action taken by said electronic equipment in response to said handheld device's sending of a signal to indicate said action is desired
Sounds a hell of a lot like something a TV remote has been doing for decades. If you only had to infringe on one claim to be infringing on the entire patent then Thinktopic would have never been granted their patent in the first place.
Art is a form of expression with the intention to create an emotional response. [...]or even an object used in a way that differs from its intended purpose, such as making a statement.
And to think that people called me uncivilized when I laughed at that monkey in a cowboy outfit riding a dog around like a horse.
As I understand this artist used bittorrent to download so he can be sued.
There's a bit of logical fallacy in your claim here, but I'll concede that it may just be due to simple ignorance. BT clients can be set to only download and never upload by either setting the outbound bandwidth usage cap to zero or setting the outgoing connection pool to zero. So, even though the artist used bittorrent it is not necessarily true that he can be sued. Well, I guess technically they could be sued no matter how they downloaded the files (anyone can sue for any reason) however the case would have no merit if the artist asserts they took care not to upload any of what they downloaded. Burden of proof to the contrary would be on the 'prosecution' side, and if the arist is telling the truth there would be no evidence.
Because then the camera would be about as large as the SX-70 was(is). And the market seems to demand that cameras now be these tiny little pieces of shit that break the second you fart on them. At least with consumer level point-and-shoot cameras, not so much with expensive professional cameras. But then again professional cameras are expected to be a bit bigger and bulkier to begin with, and if you're using one chances are you don't give a toss about the instant feature. The people that want the instant photos are the ones that also want the little breakable you can slip in your back pocket. A neat little idea you have, but it wouldn't sell very well.
Cyber Crime is a huge fucking problem. It impacts employment, terrorism, and immanent threats to America.
You're correct. Combatting Cyber-Crime could create thousands of new jobs.
Terrorism? I dunno, unless you're worried about hipsters pissing themselves because they can't reach the new york times website because that's the only website they go to for news, then sure, maybe. But I hardly see how Cyber-Crime is affecting terrorism. Terrorist groups seem to prefer funding themselves off of drug, weapon, and human trafficking. That's not to say that some of the money stolen through Cyber-Crime doesn't make its way into terrorist hands, but I don't see it as a primary or even significant funding source.
As for it impacting "immanent threats to America" I'm going to have to ask for an example, because I have no clue what the hell you're trying to convey there.
I have to disagree about it being a 'good thing'. As others have mentioned, there is no reason the RICO act couldn't already be applied to perpetrators of cyber-crime. Having additional language added to the act is unnecessary, wasting both time and valuable tax dollars. I would prefer if the government would spend their time and my money on shit that actually fucking matters, like the recession and alternative fuels.
But because it might involve teenage geeks going to prison, suddenly everyone's up in arms about the rights of the accused.
Depends on how the judge hands down the sentencing. If they get tossed in maxsec with all the buff murders and rapists, then fuck yes I'll be up in arms about it. Toss 'em in a minsec cut off from the world where they can learn their lesson, don't throw them to the wolves to be some 300 pound black man's bitch.
-ster as a suffix in the english language is "Someone who is, or who is associated with, or who does something specified".
So someone who is associated with a gang is a gangster, someone who is associated with a mob is a mobster, and someone associated with women's privates is a monster.
It's not so much that the country isn't sustainable, it's that there are a lot of PHBs in the government intent on managing it into the ground, lining their own pockets on the way.
And let's not start the trite 'Well you're all stupid to keep electing them' argument. It's a broken system where the person campaigning for office isn't the person that takes the office once they win. The ballot box has seen its day and is no longer a viable solution to the problem. And we all know what the next step in that chain is.
The trick is in getting your ROI into the positive numbers. If you create more scarcity of human beings than you create scarcity of resources killing those humans, you've solved your problem instead of compounding it. Of course that's from the amoral standpoint of lowering the population unnaturally 'solves' the problem and is not in itself a problem. The question is whether it is more humane to let a person starve to death than it is to simply kill them outright. At least in the war situation the strong survive, (hopefully) increasing the chance that overpopulation doesn't happen again (assuming 'strong' in this case is paired with intelligence and foresight.)
Personally I would not be opposed to such a war. It is my (admittedly baseless) opinion that the world left afterward would be better for it.
I get the feeling those lasers were mislabeled. The bill of materials for a 1W laser likely comes to over $250 simply due to it being an emergent technology (shot in the dark, don't chide me if I guessed wrong.) If 1W laser diodes were really $30-$40 (expected 40-50% of the price of the unit, the rest being the power supply, driver, casing etc) then we'd be hearing a lot more about holographic storage for mainstream consumer use. Sorry to say but I think you got taken for a ride. I seem to recall some ~100mW laser I saw once as able to light matches at a distance; far less than 1W. Still, even if that 100mW laser was only 1/10th as powerful as stated, $9 is a pretty good deal.
Slashdot Mirror
I exagerated a bit by saying 2 hours, but it was an excruciatingly long time to pull off a couple of the solutions simply because there was too much trial and error involved. Thrusting you into the game gives you no explanation of game mechanics at all, you're left to just figure them out on your own. So when it came to the sands of time styled levels (particularly the one where you have to bait and switch on a rabbit) I was left trying over and over to get the timing right. It was annoying and not fun.
As to why I thought I would get power-ups, the reason is simple. If you come across something you need to collect in a game, and it is just out of reach with no way of climbing higher to drop down to it, what is the first conclusion many people would come to? Well, since games have had power-ups since even before the 8-bit era, Occam's Razor says that the solution is something that lets you jump higher. The solution being that a platform appears after you collect other pieces is certainly inventive, but I think having an outline where the platform is supposed to appear would have made that obvious without actually telling the player how to go about getting the piece. You see the outline, assume a platform shows up at some point, and come back later to see if you activated it. Easy, and frustration free.
Don't get me wrong here, I did like that you were thrown into the game, but I didn't like that dick-all was explained aside from movement controls. Maybe I've gotten lazy from getting spoon fed direction in games for too long, but I really felt that I could do with at least a little more direction than was provided. Perhaps a 'frequency of hints' options would have been a good idea; let those that want to fumble around in the dark do so, but give a little helping hand to those that need it. I mean the developer wants people to play the game all the way through right? Seems like an extra option to make everyone happy would have helped accomplish that.
Truth be told I was unaware that the game was done by a single person. With that being the case, the game did turn out quite nice. The controls and physics are rather polished and function as one would expect. However overall, I found the game unpolished due to the lack of what I consider staple features in games (especially PC games). Once I find the time I'll go back and play through again now that I know more of what to expect, I never would have quit in the first place had I had any of this information available. Thanks.
I have a complaint about Braid (no, the irony of posting this here is not lost on me.)
No explanations. You just get thrown into the game. You get spoon fed the controls in the first level, and spoon fed the story little by little as you play. I kind of understand the whole 'mystery' aspect of it, compelling the player to press onward and find out what is actually going on. But it wasn't enough. The story alluded to a backstory for the main character, but after 5 chapters I was still left wondering 'what the fuck is going on?' Add to that the seemingly unreachable puzzle pieces. My assumption was that at some point the main character would get a new ability that would allow him to reach those pieces, so I pressed on. And again, after 5 chapters I was left wondering 'where the fuck are my new abilities?' Add to that the fact that you can't remap the controls (the defaults were awkward and I never got used to them), limited resolution support (every new game should support 1080p IMO), and retardedly difficult puzzles (I don't want to spend 30 minutes figuring out a solution, then another 2 hours figuring out how to execute it perfectly enough to work) just really gave the game an unpolished feel. And for the record, 'And Yet It Moves' was the same way, but I loved the hell out of that game.
Since you've apparently played the game, could you tell me if it all finally makes sense at some point? Do I have to reach the 'end' of the game first before I go back to collect those unreachable puzzle pieces? The game felt like it had a lot of potential, but it frustrated me far too much to find out.
Sucks doesn't it? They target the impulsive younger audience that is more willing to pay for a shitty game so they can increase profit margins, rather than target those of us (older usually) gamers with the disposable income to blow on any and every game we want.
Think about it though. The more free time you have, the less picky you are about the games you play. So those of us that have little free time now have to decide carefully what to spend our precious little free time playing. It's all about the value you're getting out of the game, where value = enjoyment/time. But as time progresses aren't games supposed to be getting better and better? If games really were better than they were back in the days of our youth, then our perceived value from those games would have stayed the same. But it hasn't. With value = enjoyment/time, if time goes down, enjoyment must go up in order to maintain equilibrium. At the very least our drop in free time has outpaced the increased enjoyment from games, lowering perceived value below an acceptable threshold.
I still play games in my free time, but I'm damn sure pickier than I used to be back in middle/high-school. Hell back in high-school I would buy a new game almost every week, I was beating them so fast. I wasn't picky about quality or even enjoyment as I had free time to burn and games were how I chose to spend that time. Once college rolled around, and then a career, I started playing only the most enjoyable of games; which is the expected response. However a funny thing has occured as I have gotten older. When I was younger it seemed that a large majority of the games out there were 'above par'. Even if I decided not to play them, I didn't expect that actually playing it would make me want to shoot myself. However these days it seems that there are far fewer diamonds amongst a much larger rough. Games have always fallen into three groups for me: Must Play, Good if I Find Time, and Holy Shit Keep it Away From Me. Back when, it seemed like most games fell into the first two groups with a spattering in the third, probably close to a 20/70/10 split. These days it seems more like 10/10/80. This shift seems to be much larger in magnitude than one would expect from an aging gamer; you would expect a person's standards to rise over time, but the shift appears disproportionate. So while I agree that there are 'winner' games out there that are very popular and heavily played, the industry as a whole has taken a huge nose-dive. Which is probably why people complain so much and pine for the 'Good Ol' Days'.
Where I work, we're mostly a company of gamers, and we all really, really want to produce the most kickass game we can (this is fairly typical in the gaming industry).
I hope you guys are able to follow through with that. I'm really looking forward to Super Clog Dancer 3 Turbo.
By definition what you have in this moment is simultaneously the best and worst you can have at that moment because you have no frame of reference. The frame of reference is only that moment, thus what you have has no comparison. Get it? Calling it 'the best' for that moment is simply looking for the silver lining. Since you can't change the past, you always have the best that you can have, but not necessarily the best you could have had, or that you could have in the future. Treating what you have now as the best you can have is simple optimism, while treating it as the best you could ever have is what breeds complacency. Complacency is not without virtue however, as there is certainly a point where the ROI you get from your time spent improving things just isn't worth the improvement itself. At that point it's acceptable to become complacent. There is definitely a point where 'good enough' truly is good enough.
This is slashdot, no-one reads the summary or the article anymore, so no-one will get it. Ten years ago they would have gotten the joke though.
You must be female then. Now zip your pants back up and get back on topic.
Sounds a hell of a lot like something a TV remote has been doing for decades. If you only had to infringe on one claim to be infringing on the entire patent then Thinktopic would have never been granted their patent in the first place.
Oh the delicious irony of destroying art in order to create it. I commend you good Tigger, mad though you may be.
Art is a form of expression with the intention to create an emotional response. [...]or even an object used in a way that differs from its intended purpose, such as making a statement.
And to think that people called me uncivilized when I laughed at that monkey in a cowboy outfit riding a dog around like a horse.
Someone probably said that about the first painting of a woman without eyebrows or something...
Ah, Art.
Thank you for giving us rule 34 of the internet long before the internet was even conceived.
Don't be silly. Anyone wearing a beret obviously lacks the upper body strength to lift an iPad. They'd stick to their iPhone.
As I understand this artist used bittorrent to download so he can be sued.
There's a bit of logical fallacy in your claim here, but I'll concede that it may just be due to simple ignorance. BT clients can be set to only download and never upload by either setting the outbound bandwidth usage cap to zero or setting the outgoing connection pool to zero. So, even though the artist used bittorrent it is not necessarily true that he can be sued. Well, I guess technically they could be sued no matter how they downloaded the files (anyone can sue for any reason) however the case would have no merit if the artist asserts they took care not to upload any of what they downloaded. Burden of proof to the contrary would be on the 'prosecution' side, and if the arist is telling the truth there would be no evidence.
Because then the camera would be about as large as the SX-70 was(is). And the market seems to demand that cameras now be these tiny little pieces of shit that break the second you fart on them. At least with consumer level point-and-shoot cameras, not so much with expensive professional cameras. But then again professional cameras are expected to be a bit bigger and bulkier to begin with, and if you're using one chances are you don't give a toss about the instant feature. The people that want the instant photos are the ones that also want the little breakable you can slip in your back pocket. A neat little idea you have, but it wouldn't sell very well.
Cyber Crime is a huge fucking problem. It impacts employment, terrorism, and immanent threats to America.
You're correct. Combatting Cyber-Crime could create thousands of new jobs.
Terrorism? I dunno, unless you're worried about hipsters pissing themselves because they can't reach the new york times website because that's the only website they go to for news, then sure, maybe. But I hardly see how Cyber-Crime is affecting terrorism. Terrorist groups seem to prefer funding themselves off of drug, weapon, and human trafficking. That's not to say that some of the money stolen through Cyber-Crime doesn't make its way into terrorist hands, but I don't see it as a primary or even significant funding source.
As for it impacting "immanent threats to America" I'm going to have to ask for an example, because I have no clue what the hell you're trying to convey there.
I have to disagree about it being a 'good thing'. As others have mentioned, there is no reason the RICO act couldn't already be applied to perpetrators of cyber-crime. Having additional language added to the act is unnecessary, wasting both time and valuable tax dollars. I would prefer if the government would spend their time and my money on shit that actually fucking matters, like the recession and alternative fuels.
I'd mod you up if I had points. I'd be torn between funny and insightful however.
Because mobsters printed it on paper, derp. ;-P
But because it might involve teenage geeks going to prison, suddenly everyone's up in arms about the rights of the accused.
Depends on how the judge hands down the sentencing. If they get tossed in maxsec with all the buff murders and rapists, then fuck yes I'll be up in arms about it. Toss 'em in a minsec cut off from the world where they can learn their lesson, don't throw them to the wolves to be some 300 pound black man's bitch.
-ster as a suffix in the english language is "Someone who is, or who is associated with, or who does something specified".
So someone who is associated with a gang is a gangster, someone who is associated with a mob is a mobster, and someone associated with women's privates is a monster.
I prefer 'Kick the boy with one shoe'.
It's not so much that the country isn't sustainable, it's that there are a lot of PHBs in the government intent on managing it into the ground, lining their own pockets on the way.
And let's not start the trite 'Well you're all stupid to keep electing them' argument. It's a broken system where the person campaigning for office isn't the person that takes the office once they win. The ballot box has seen its day and is no longer a viable solution to the problem. And we all know what the next step in that chain is.
There is plenty of nuclear fission power in readily available uranium (and then thorium) to [...] produce chemical fertilizers.
"Dude! These ears of corn are fucking HUGE!"
The trick is in getting your ROI into the positive numbers. If you create more scarcity of human beings than you create scarcity of resources killing those humans, you've solved your problem instead of compounding it. Of course that's from the amoral standpoint of lowering the population unnaturally 'solves' the problem and is not in itself a problem. The question is whether it is more humane to let a person starve to death than it is to simply kill them outright. At least in the war situation the strong survive, (hopefully) increasing the chance that overpopulation doesn't happen again (assuming 'strong' in this case is paired with intelligence and foresight.)
Personally I would not be opposed to such a war. It is my (admittedly baseless) opinion that the world left afterward would be better for it.
I get the feeling those lasers were mislabeled. The bill of materials for a 1W laser likely comes to over $250 simply due to it being an emergent technology (shot in the dark, don't chide me if I guessed wrong.) If 1W laser diodes were really $30-$40 (expected 40-50% of the price of the unit, the rest being the power supply, driver, casing etc) then we'd be hearing a lot more about holographic storage for mainstream consumer use. Sorry to say but I think you got taken for a ride. I seem to recall some ~100mW laser I saw once as able to light matches at a distance; far less than 1W. Still, even if that 100mW laser was only 1/10th as powerful as stated, $9 is a pretty good deal.