will we ever again need a strategy guide to complete a Zelda game?
A game - any game - shouldn't need a strategy guide to complete. Besides, what's so hardcore about using strategy guides in first place? Real Men and Women complete the games without doing any of that crud =)
And Zeldas have not needed a whole lot of hints to complete. (Well, the NES ones were probably exceptions.) Nor do really a whole lot of other Nintendo titles. I've usually reached GameFAQs only to get hints on occasion on how to heck to get all of the junk that you can collect...
Pure Hacking's Gatford said the problem is compounded by the slim chance of an enterprise patching Java Runtime vulnerabilities.
"It would be an extremely difficult and laborious process for an organization trying to patch Java Runtime across the enterprise," he said.
Oh wow, that sounds really scary. I really wouldn't want to be in the Enterprisey world. I mean, they don't seem to have apt-get there. Or any of those mass-update tools in Windowsland. And they disabled that Java Windows autoupdate thingy because, well, who needs that?...
* We trust our math applications to do math properly
The old problem of "do what I mean, not what I type" applies to mathematical programs. You're expected to give the computer the exactly correct formulae - and sanity-check both the input and the results. If you get wrong results and everything is in place, you're supposed to notice at some level. "Whoops, I forgot to read the documentation for this function" is the most common complaint.
* We trust our spell checkers to check properly
Yet the publishers, for some reason, still keep employing "editors" - those pesky people who keep finding tons of errors in the perfectly spellchecked manuscripts you submitted. =)
Actually, verification of a solution to any NP-complete problem (like traveling salesman) can be done in polynomial time, so you could completely automate that part.
I know, I just couldn't think of a practical problem that would be hard all the possible ways. Plus, if a human can solve TSP easily, they can also sanity-check TSP easily - and let's not forget that no matter what they do, they always get stuck in the traffic anyway no matter how good route they pick. =)
The VM's have an ability to run native code, oestensibly to 'patch' a compromised decoder.
(Disclaimer: Typical Slashdot Speculation Without Knowing All the Details follows.)
So does the Bluray licensor demand that all newly produced Bluray discs have all patches for all compromised decoders? Can they demand remastering of re-released titles with new patches?
Oh, this will be fun - obviously, the patch code is copyrighted, so you need to sign a contract regarding its distribution, which means the studio depends on some technology forum that can foist whatever native code they want on the releases the studio puts out. If the studios don't sign such agreements, they may be in breach of copyright - maybe the patches get distributed for free and at some point someone at the tech forum notices "oops, we distributed stuff for free, now it's time for everyone to pay."
Or better yet: Patches only get licensed to Big Studios, while the small and independent studios have to fight piracy (if they choose to) much harder than the big ones. Yay!
Get the rest of the difficult AI problems into CAPTCHAs. We've finally figured out a way to finance AI research!
And while the problem remains unsolved, you can use it for distributed problem-solving! Instant sponsoring opportunities from the big industry!
"So you want to sign up for an account? Okay, we need your name, email, and password twice... and could you figure out the optimal shipping route that goes through all of these cities, and only visits each of them once?"
(Turns out to be a route for some annoying door-to-door salesman. Boy, wonder what he feels like when he finds out someone sent a completely misleading solution! At least sanity-check them first =)
I'd really like to see "fuzzy" values next. Particularly fuzzy values for dates.
Almost every application out there stores absolute times. But very often you don't know the exact date and time and you'd like the computer to be able to still record, display (in localised form) and sort it according to what precision you do have - sorting "January 6, 2007" before "Some time in summer 2007". Free text fields and ad-hoc date notations suck.
I've rambled about this for a long time, so here's my random well-weighed opinion: Ocarina of Time isn't just the Best Game Ever. It's the reference Best Game Ever.
Before OoT, games could be just ordinarily BGEs. After OoT, you could easily compare your favourite BGE with something. Here, we finally got the BGE where just about everything was top notch and you can't really complain too much about any aspect of the game, be it aesthetic or design-related. Great graphics and music, great play mechanics, story appears to work well, there's nice original ideas, and foremost, it's fun to play, has a good atmosphere, takes a while to complete, and is worth replaying.
There will be better games, and what exactly is a "best game" will always be an opinion that changes daily for each of us. OoT is just something that tends to stay as the Best Game Ever, with appropriate qualifications.
That said, the list here doesn't include Ultima series at any point. Argh. Dropping Ultima VII from the list is just sad. Well, here's what you get when you try to make a list of best games ever, you always drop some that some people think obviously qualify for the list. At least they got the Reference Game in the right spot. =)
"Trespasser", the Jurassic Park game produced by DreamWorks.
I had never heard of this game, so I read the Wikipedia article, and now all I can say is... oh wow, I want that game. =) Sounds like it would have been an interesting game if they had done it on today's hardware and with today's actually working 3D engines and bits of game middleware. (Kind of like Ultima IX in 1999 - good concept, shot down by slow hardware averages, moving 3D hardware targets, diversions and the Boss Far Above telling to run to market.)
Actually, that condition looks quite shocking and disturbing, until you get to the point where the specific condition is stated: "in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published". Now, compare this language in a random US-published paperback:
Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as "unsold or destroyed" and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.
Starting to get the point? Bookstores act as intermediaries between the publisher and the public, and don't actually own the books they sell, they just get a big cut if they happen to sell the book; the publisher wants the unsold books returned later on. For paperbacks, they only want covers back to prove that the books have been destroyed. Paperbacks, like periodicals, are not worth recirculating. Now, the publisher may get mighty annoyed if the books aren't sent to recycling, as agreed, but instead end up being sold nevertheless to unsuspecting public...
I'm pretty certain that publishers couldn't care less what sort of covers you really use for books as long as they were legitimately sold when they were new. It just is that as it happens, based on these two examples (AFAIK IANAL etc), Britain is on stronger legal grounds in protecting the publishing houses from unscrupulous retailers.
GIMP lacks so basic features such as a usable grid, 16-bit/HDR image support, and requires special plugins with numerical inputs to draw a simple rounded rectangle, let alone something more complex.
On the rectangle issue:
Meanwhile, you can't do something as basic as debugging ActionScript in Flash files while you're sitting in Photoshop.
GIMP isn't meant for rounded rectangles. It's not a vector program and doesn't even try to do vector stuff; the logical conclusion is not to gripe about it but use an application that's more appropriate for the task at hand. For diagramming and vector art, there's better programs out there (Inkscape, for instance) and you can import that stuff in GIMP for further editing - you can export a.png in Inkscape just as much you can import a.svg in GIMP.
GIMP isn't meant to solve all graphics problems. It's part of a toolkit.
There in fact were computerized solutions 20+ years ago for writing documents with Scandinavian characters and Japanese pictographs/romanizations that are less bloated than today's.
Yeah, less bloated, but if there's one thing that's constant, it's the lack of interchange. File formats were a mess. But most of all, character sets were a mess, and for the most part, they still are. Um... 20 years ago, I believe I was dealing with PETSCII and it's funny ideas of how to deal with scandinavic letters (in my particular case, that was to say: there weren't any). A bit later, we got to the DOS world, with tons of weird mutually mess-uppery IBM codepages. My first touch to the Internet, and I saw people spreading "seagull wing" documents (7-bit ASCII, with a-with-diaresis represented with "{") And when everyone moved to Windows and Latin-1, oh boy, was that fun or what. And now, with mysterious Unicode encodings, frequently mistaken for something else entirely, showing up everywhere...
"Nyt on vuosi 2007 ja ne perkeleen skandit eivät vieläkään toimi." (In Finnish, "It's year 2007 and the goddamn Scandinavic letters still don't work."... I haven't tried posting any stuff with a-with-those-dot-things for a long time, I can't remember if Slashdot has fixed this, at least the stuff shows up in preview - if this won't work, I rest my case. =)
Will there be an API so that clients (extensions) can store arbitrary additional metadata for history and bookmark entries?
While I'm not familiar with how SQLite is used in Firefox, I believe the answer is "probably yes" and it's called something like "CREATE TABLE foo" and "INSERT INTO foo (blah, bookmark_id)...". =)
In theory, the Wikipedia version will constantly have "Bigfoot" added over and over again whereas the other one will not.
No, that's not a problem. In general, we're dealing with simple vandalism pretty well in Wikipedia (and Wikispecies, I suppose, though I'm not really active there).
In wikis, it's the user conduct in general and especially PoV pushing that's more of a problem. If Wikispecies ever gets an Arbitration Commitee of its own, the first case they'll probably have to deal with will be to settle the differences between "Which dinosaur is cooler, Tyrannosaurus Rex or Triceratops?" camps, and of course, the problems raised by the tiger fanboys. =)
Suppose one were to have a CRON entry that does touch/* -R every night at 3AM?
Bah. Install the hypothetic +reallyeff'dupkernelfromcompletelunatic kernel patch, and enable the CONFIG_MTIMES_HUH_WHAT_MTIMES ("muck up the utime() system call to always write 0 to the modtime field").
You know, it doesn't pay to be just paranoid. Slight paranoia is healthy for you in many cases. If you want to be properly insane, you also have to be dangerous to people around you, or at very least, your kernel's file access features. =)
But usually, there's more of a chance of it including crackpot stuff than leaving important stuff out.
Yup. I've only seen two major kinds of problems in Wikipedia content: Overinclusiveness (for an exaggerated example: "Examples of major geek news websites include Slashdot, Digg and Bob's Two-Penny Playstation 2 News Site That Was Last Updated In 2003") and occasional lack of updates on stuff that's not in current news. The former, well, it's somewhat simple to spot and remove (though in severe cases needs some serious assessment of what to include), the latter is a matter of checking sources. Wikipedia is inclusive by its nature: People add interesting stuff to it, but if they try to remove stuff "just because", they will raise objections.
Of course, a few weeks later they realized the erros of their ways and sent me the l33t tin edition of Q3A for Linux....
My first reaction to your subject line was "hey wait, Q3A Linux version ruled", but at least you acknowledge as much. =)
Ammo box. You can't get cooler box for a shooter, ever.
It's one of the few boxes I keep upright on my game shelf to show it off and to cover up the boring row of other boxes. The other two fulfilling the same role are Myth II: Soulblighter (because I happen to like fantasy art) and PC Tomb Raider (because I don't have any other iconic classic games to show off, and, well, it's a good game =) and I usually keep The Complete Ultima VII on my desk lodged between the DVD-case game shelf and the speaker.
But on the topic of boring game art: I usually don't object to any cover art (unless it's actually visually distressing, like in many of the cases shown in this article - fortunately, the 1980s and 1990s are long gone =) I think the biggest problem these days are the budget releases: These usually look just plain bad. The most tastefully done ones I've seen are maybe the GameCube Player's Choice and Playstation Platinum series. You know, almost like original cover except a dash of grey edges. While on PC, the budget series take the "Shrink the cover and add some irritatingly coloured logos" approach. (Yeah, I know it got bazillion out of ten in Sellout Magazine. Which is exactly why the game is still in demand after 10 years, no? No need to shrink the cover to add that in retroactively...)
I didn't know Leonardo da Vinci knew anything about programming! Well, it sure does explains a few peculiar things about some modern programming languages, like the how PostScript is stack-based and how you essentially write it backward.
This is a nice conspiracy theory, but there's one giant big thing that makes it all fall crumbling down:
GTK+ and Qt are just GUI toolkits. The *nix APIs that are used to develop the actual application logic are the same in both cases - and the GNOME and KDE folks have also shared quite a few of the standards they've developed and will work on unifying stuff more through freedesktop.org. If you want to port an application from GTK+ to Qt or Qt to GTK+, you can do so.
Meanwhile in Win32 land, there have also always been multiple "GUI toolkits". Nobody programmed on bare Win32 - everyone used something on top of that, and not always MFC. Even Microsoft used multiple different GUI abstractions depending on how things worked for them, and backed up whatever that helped them sell Visual Studio.
He has a Wikipedia entry, so he must be real. Right.....????
Hey, a very good example. Jack Thompson is singlehandedly responsible for the institution of Wikipedia's Office Actions policy and our brush with him played big part in instituting Biographies of Living Persons policy.
You know, when faced with an angry lawyer, the best course of action is saying "Oops, obviously, we don't have enough rules. Just wait a while, we'll work out a really nice new policy (based on all relevant legislation too), and make sure this thing that annoyed you is entirely compliant with this new policy."
A little bit simplified explanation of what happened... Before, the situation was basically this: "Jack Thompson is a litigious bastard." Now, the situation is this: "According to our very, very reliable sources, Jack Thompson is a litigious bastard."
This has to be the worst Slashdot headline ever. Makes FORTRAN sound like a type of cancer or something. (I thought that stuff was more of COBOL's league.)
But the notability guideline states that every article must have at least some reliable secondary sources.
Reliable secondary sources that explain the notability of the concept. Where there's a game, there's sales numbers. Where there's a game, there's press hype. =)
They have an article about Bellsprout.
And we have dozens of different printed Pokémon game guides and the games themselves present the statistics in the way that even the 10-year-olds can figure them out. So where's the problem? =)
As I understand it, Wikipedia doesn't want strategy guides because original strategy guides are attributable only against primary sources (the game itself), not secondary sources.
Eh, no. Wikipedia doesn't want strategy guides because Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia and encyclopaedias don't cover in-depth information, such as strategy guides.
(There are small attribution issues with game guides, though, but not as severe as you say: Attribution policy says "Edits that rely on primary sources should only make descriptive claims that can be checked by anyone without specialist knowledge"; Most plot description and gameplay-related material is practically in this category, because they're highly descriptive in nature and don't speculate. "The protagonist has to jump to the flag pole to end these levels" is descriptive and okay. "This glitch may mean that the designers intended A---- to live" is not okay because it's kind of guessing. However, things like item lists and monster stats and like are probably research-like in nature and harder to verify for a layman, so they should probably be used with much more caution.)
We used to have game guides in Wikibooks, but they were removed because they didn't fit Wikibooks' mission - providing material that is useful in education. Explaining gameplay is not really educating (similar to having film guides that only say "Be especially sharp at 0:32:10, 0:42:15 and 1:02:52 to not miss the funny cameo appearances!"). That's why sites like StrategyWiki are better for this.
cvs? It sounds like someone's already using subversion...
To avoid all gits from using subversion and leading us to the darcs alleys of police state tactics, we should make the arch of laws as monotone as possible!
To my peripheral knowledge, there were active efforts at Bungie to bring a number of their titles to Linux and Halo was one of them.
I'm not so sure of Bungie's own involvement in the matter, but they did let Loki to port Myth II: Soulblighter to Linux, and allowed it to run (along with Win/Mac versions) on Bungie.net.
Slashdot Mirror
A game - any game - shouldn't need a strategy guide to complete. Besides, what's so hardcore about using strategy guides in first place? Real Men and Women complete the games without doing any of that crud =)
And Zeldas have not needed a whole lot of hints to complete. (Well, the NES ones were probably exceptions.) Nor do really a whole lot of other Nintendo titles. I've usually reached GameFAQs only to get hints on occasion on how to heck to get all of the junk that you can collect...
Oh wow, that sounds really scary. I really wouldn't want to be in the Enterprisey world. I mean, they don't seem to have apt-get there. Or any of those mass-update tools in Windowsland. And they disabled that Java Windows autoupdate thingy because, well, who needs that?...
FUDdy, huh?
The old problem of "do what I mean, not what I type" applies to mathematical programs. You're expected to give the computer the exactly correct formulae - and sanity-check both the input and the results. If you get wrong results and everything is in place, you're supposed to notice at some level. "Whoops, I forgot to read the documentation for this function" is the most common complaint.
Yet the publishers, for some reason, still keep employing "editors" - those pesky people who keep finding tons of errors in the perfectly spellchecked manuscripts you submitted. =)
I know, I just couldn't think of a practical problem that would be hard all the possible ways. Plus, if a human can solve TSP easily, they can also sanity-check TSP easily - and let's not forget that no matter what they do, they always get stuck in the traffic anyway no matter how good route they pick. =)
(Disclaimer: Typical Slashdot Speculation Without Knowing All the Details follows.)
So does the Bluray licensor demand that all newly produced Bluray discs have all patches for all compromised decoders? Can they demand remastering of re-released titles with new patches?
Oh, this will be fun - obviously, the patch code is copyrighted, so you need to sign a contract regarding its distribution, which means the studio depends on some technology forum that can foist whatever native code they want on the releases the studio puts out. If the studios don't sign such agreements, they may be in breach of copyright - maybe the patches get distributed for free and at some point someone at the tech forum notices "oops, we distributed stuff for free, now it's time for everyone to pay."
Or better yet: Patches only get licensed to Big Studios, while the small and independent studios have to fight piracy (if they choose to) much harder than the big ones. Yay!
And while the problem remains unsolved, you can use it for distributed problem-solving! Instant sponsoring opportunities from the big industry!
"So you want to sign up for an account? Okay, we need your name, email, and password twice... and could you figure out the optimal shipping route that goes through all of these cities, and only visits each of them once?"
(Turns out to be a route for some annoying door-to-door salesman. Boy, wonder what he feels like when he finds out someone sent a completely misleading solution! At least sanity-check them first =)
I'd really like to see "fuzzy" values next. Particularly fuzzy values for dates.
Almost every application out there stores absolute times. But very often you don't know the exact date and time and you'd like the computer to be able to still record, display (in localised form) and sort it according to what precision you do have - sorting "January 6, 2007" before "Some time in summer 2007". Free text fields and ad-hoc date notations suck.
I've rambled about this for a long time, so here's my random well-weighed opinion: Ocarina of Time isn't just the Best Game Ever. It's the reference Best Game Ever.
Before OoT, games could be just ordinarily BGEs. After OoT, you could easily compare your favourite BGE with something. Here, we finally got the BGE where just about everything was top notch and you can't really complain too much about any aspect of the game, be it aesthetic or design-related. Great graphics and music, great play mechanics, story appears to work well, there's nice original ideas, and foremost, it's fun to play, has a good atmosphere, takes a while to complete, and is worth replaying.
There will be better games, and what exactly is a "best game" will always be an opinion that changes daily for each of us. OoT is just something that tends to stay as the Best Game Ever, with appropriate qualifications.
That said, the list here doesn't include Ultima series at any point. Argh. Dropping Ultima VII from the list is just sad. Well, here's what you get when you try to make a list of best games ever, you always drop some that some people think obviously qualify for the list. At least they got the Reference Game in the right spot. =)
I had never heard of this game, so I read the Wikipedia article, and now all I can say is... oh wow, I want that game. =) Sounds like it would have been an interesting game if they had done it on today's hardware and with today's actually working 3D engines and bits of game middleware. (Kind of like Ultima IX in 1999 - good concept, shot down by slow hardware averages, moving 3D hardware targets, diversions and the Boss Far Above telling to run to market.)
Actually, that condition looks quite shocking and disturbing, until you get to the point where the specific condition is stated: "in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published". Now, compare this language in a random US-published paperback:
Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as "unsold or destroyed" and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.
On the rectangle issue:
Meanwhile, you can't do something as basic as debugging ActionScript in Flash files while you're sitting in Photoshop.
GIMP isn't meant for rounded rectangles. It's not a vector program and doesn't even try to do vector stuff; the logical conclusion is not to gripe about it but use an application that's more appropriate for the task at hand. For diagramming and vector art, there's better programs out there (Inkscape, for instance) and you can import that stuff in GIMP for further editing - you can export a .png in Inkscape just as much you can import a .svg in GIMP.
GIMP isn't meant to solve all graphics problems. It's part of a toolkit.
Yeah, less bloated, but if there's one thing that's constant, it's the lack of interchange. File formats were a mess. But most of all, character sets were a mess, and for the most part, they still are. Um... 20 years ago, I believe I was dealing with PETSCII and it's funny ideas of how to deal with scandinavic letters (in my particular case, that was to say: there weren't any). A bit later, we got to the DOS world, with tons of weird mutually mess-uppery IBM codepages. My first touch to the Internet, and I saw people spreading "seagull wing" documents (7-bit ASCII, with a-with-diaresis represented with "{") And when everyone moved to Windows and Latin-1, oh boy, was that fun or what. And now, with mysterious Unicode encodings, frequently mistaken for something else entirely, showing up everywhere...
"Nyt on vuosi 2007 ja ne perkeleen skandit eivät vieläkään toimi." (In Finnish, "It's year 2007 and the goddamn Scandinavic letters still don't work." ... I haven't tried posting any stuff with a-with-those-dot-things for a long time, I can't remember if Slashdot has fixed this, at least the stuff shows up in preview - if this won't work, I rest my case. =)
While I'm not familiar with how SQLite is used in Firefox, I believe the answer is "probably yes" and it's called something like "CREATE TABLE foo" and "INSERT INTO foo (blah, bookmark_id) ...". =)
No, that's not a problem. In general, we're dealing with simple vandalism pretty well in Wikipedia (and Wikispecies, I suppose, though I'm not really active there).
In wikis, it's the user conduct in general and especially PoV pushing that's more of a problem. If Wikispecies ever gets an Arbitration Commitee of its own, the first case they'll probably have to deal with will be to settle the differences between "Which dinosaur is cooler, Tyrannosaurus Rex or Triceratops?" camps, and of course, the problems raised by the tiger fanboys. =)
Bah. Install the hypothetic +reallyeff'dupkernelfromcompletelunatic kernel patch, and enable the CONFIG_MTIMES_HUH_WHAT_MTIMES ("muck up the utime() system call to always write 0 to the modtime field").
You know, it doesn't pay to be just paranoid. Slight paranoia is healthy for you in many cases. If you want to be properly insane, you also have to be dangerous to people around you, or at very least, your kernel's file access features. =)
Yup. I've only seen two major kinds of problems in Wikipedia content: Overinclusiveness (for an exaggerated example: "Examples of major geek news websites include Slashdot, Digg and Bob's Two-Penny Playstation 2 News Site That Was Last Updated In 2003") and occasional lack of updates on stuff that's not in current news. The former, well, it's somewhat simple to spot and remove (though in severe cases needs some serious assessment of what to include), the latter is a matter of checking sources. Wikipedia is inclusive by its nature: People add interesting stuff to it, but if they try to remove stuff "just because", they will raise objections.
My first reaction to your subject line was "hey wait, Q3A Linux version ruled", but at least you acknowledge as much. =)
Ammo box. You can't get cooler box for a shooter, ever.
It's one of the few boxes I keep upright on my game shelf to show it off and to cover up the boring row of other boxes. The other two fulfilling the same role are Myth II: Soulblighter (because I happen to like fantasy art) and PC Tomb Raider (because I don't have any other iconic classic games to show off, and, well, it's a good game =) and I usually keep The Complete Ultima VII on my desk lodged between the DVD-case game shelf and the speaker.
But on the topic of boring game art: I usually don't object to any cover art (unless it's actually visually distressing, like in many of the cases shown in this article - fortunately, the 1980s and 1990s are long gone =) I think the biggest problem these days are the budget releases: These usually look just plain bad. The most tastefully done ones I've seen are maybe the GameCube Player's Choice and Playstation Platinum series. You know, almost like original cover except a dash of grey edges. While on PC, the budget series take the "Shrink the cover and add some irritatingly coloured logos" approach. (Yeah, I know it got bazillion out of ten in Sellout Magazine. Which is exactly why the game is still in demand after 10 years, no? No need to shrink the cover to add that in retroactively...)
I didn't know Leonardo da Vinci knew anything about programming! Well, it sure does explains a few peculiar things about some modern programming languages, like the how PostScript is stack-based and how you essentially write it backward.
This is a nice conspiracy theory, but there's one giant big thing that makes it all fall crumbling down:
GTK+ and Qt are just GUI toolkits. The *nix APIs that are used to develop the actual application logic are the same in both cases - and the GNOME and KDE folks have also shared quite a few of the standards they've developed and will work on unifying stuff more through freedesktop.org. If you want to port an application from GTK+ to Qt or Qt to GTK+, you can do so.
Meanwhile in Win32 land, there have also always been multiple "GUI toolkits". Nobody programmed on bare Win32 - everyone used something on top of that, and not always MFC. Even Microsoft used multiple different GUI abstractions depending on how things worked for them, and backed up whatever that helped them sell Visual Studio.
Hey, a very good example. Jack Thompson is singlehandedly responsible for the institution of Wikipedia's Office Actions policy and our brush with him played big part in instituting Biographies of Living Persons policy.
You know, when faced with an angry lawyer, the best course of action is saying "Oops, obviously, we don't have enough rules. Just wait a while, we'll work out a really nice new policy (based on all relevant legislation too), and make sure this thing that annoyed you is entirely compliant with this new policy."
A little bit simplified explanation of what happened... Before, the situation was basically this: "Jack Thompson is a litigious bastard."
Now, the situation is this: "According to our very, very reliable sources, Jack Thompson is a litigious bastard."
This has to be the worst Slashdot headline ever. Makes FORTRAN sound like a type of cancer or something. (I thought that stuff was more of COBOL's league.)
Reliable secondary sources that explain the notability of the concept. Where there's a game, there's sales numbers. Where there's a game, there's press hype. =)
And we have dozens of different printed Pokémon game guides and the games themselves present the statistics in the way that even the 10-year-olds can figure them out. So where's the problem? =)
Eh, no. Wikipedia doesn't want strategy guides because Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia and encyclopaedias don't cover in-depth information, such as strategy guides.
(There are small attribution issues with game guides, though, but not as severe as you say: Attribution policy says "Edits that rely on primary sources should only make descriptive claims that can be checked by anyone without specialist knowledge"; Most plot description and gameplay-related material is practically in this category, because they're highly descriptive in nature and don't speculate. "The protagonist has to jump to the flag pole to end these levels" is descriptive and okay. "This glitch may mean that the designers intended A---- to live" is not okay because it's kind of guessing. However, things like item lists and monster stats and like are probably research-like in nature and harder to verify for a layman, so they should probably be used with much more caution.)
We used to have game guides in Wikibooks, but they were removed because they didn't fit Wikibooks' mission - providing material that is useful in education. Explaining gameplay is not really educating (similar to having film guides that only say "Be especially sharp at 0:32:10, 0:42:15 and 1:02:52 to not miss the funny cameo appearances!"). That's why sites like StrategyWiki are better for this.
To avoid all gits from using subversion and leading us to the darcs alleys of police state tactics, we should make the arch of laws as monotone as possible!
I'm not so sure of Bungie's own involvement in the matter, but they did let Loki to port Myth II: Soulblighter to Linux, and allowed it to run (along with Win/Mac versions) on Bungie.net.