'Untouchable' - Defeat 200 mobster bosses. 'Speeder' and 'Speed Demon' - Navigate the Christmas-only ski slopes in Pocket D (twitch-haters LOATHE these since they cannot be ground.) 'Transmogrified' - Save the Terra Volta nuclear reactor core from melting down while it's being attacked by waves of enemies (Skyraiders, Freaks, or Rikti aliens). This is, incidentally, also the trial which earns players the right to respecify their powers.
Two of the hardest to achieve are 'Master at Arms' and 'Demolitionist'. They require the player to participate in 10 or more 3-6 group raids to plant bombs on the crashed Rikti Mothership and then to fight the Rikti Master at Arms, U'kon G'rai (You con grey).
Op is so full of fail and retard that he's not worth listening to.
First, the game devs have been working to put the experience gain curve completely into the control of the player's hands. They're not really concerned about how fast you level. First, there's the 'Patrol Experience' feature, which was introduced with the last issue. It works about like 'Rested' experience in other games. There are other boosters that increase experience gain. There is also a voluntary switch that users can toggle on and off to eliminate EXP gain.
The devs are concerned about keeping the game challenging. They are eliminating objects that don't fight back from the architect system and have implemented a special game currency that's dropped based on how much effort you put into fighting an enemy.
Yep. They're skee-ball tickets you trade for drop rewards at the vendor outside the mission. You get more of them based on how much work you do inside the mission... so 'easy farming' is a contradiction.
They are concerned about copyright violations. If you make a mission about fighting the Incredible Hulk and Spiderman, you can bet that your mission will be banned nigh-instantly. They're also concerned about inappropriate content. The architect interface features a real-time word checker that will warn you for inserting vulgarity or profanity into your missions.
As for the PVP issue, yes, it was recently revamped in terms of how powers worked. Unlike the infamous 'New Game Experience' in SWG, no powers were removed. Several were added, and made available for PVE players as well. Powers were revamped slightly in how they worked, making 'one shotting' and other kinds of grief play not work. The only people upset about this are the core of PVPers who got their jollies by making life difficult for everyone else. The other PVPers and even a good number of PVEers are reather happy with it.
Another change they made was to add PVP-only drops. If you defeat another player, you have a chance of getting a GOOD drop from them. It doesn't take anything of theirs away and encourages more people to play PVP, particularly in Arena matches. Again, this makes the griefers unhappy because they don't get invited to the matches.
PVP in CoH was pretty much dead. Now it's burgeoning. I personally don't care for it, but all my friends are doing it.
So in other words, OP is full of shit. Go read the CoH boards for a better view on what's going on.
Calling MacOSX a 'commercial unix' just doesn't taste right coming out of the mouth. It's like calling Microsoft Windows a 'Server Operating System' or an 'Enterprise Solution'.
Yeah, there are people who use them that way, but that way madness lies.
'Enterprise Solution' tastes pretty damn foul all by itself.
This guy's name is Honey. It's one of those things were like, the guy is so fuckin' badass that he gives himself a really pussy name, so that when people are like "hey pussy, nice pussy name", he fuckin' does a backflip and breaks your neck. They call him a "lolishota". I don't know what that is, but I think it's some kinda martial art like Hokuto Shinkey because this kid's a fuckin' ninja or some shit. Matter of fact? Dude check this shit out. There's this one part where this kid is all like TAAAAAAAAARZAAAAAAAAAN an he totally fuckin' kicks the shit out of some Jin-Roh-lookin' motherfuckers. He's totally harsh.
After the Mrs. got stung with the various SecureROM trojans fubaring her system, she made the hard decision not to buy any more EA titles.
I was excited about Spore, but refused to buy either it or the creature creator pack.
Apparently there were quite enough people (who also spammed Amazon.com feedback, perhaps?) who made the same decisions that EA felt a bit of monetary sting.
Player comments over at the official boards are pretty much ecstatic. NCSoft and their players are getting endless free content and every fanboy who's interested in 'rolling their own MMO' now has a way to write for a real MMO.
Oh, there are concerns about abuse and stupidity, but the general consensus is that Mission Architect is a very, very good thing. It's been designed from the ground up with player requests in mind and NCSoft has a pretty decent track record of pleasing players.
No one at NCSoft, nor their players expect CoH anything to be a 'WoW Killer', but City of Heroes is profitable and has an active community. This will only help expand that.
- Ability to create NPC allies and enemies using CoH's costume creator and power selector - Ability to link up to 25 mission objectives into one mission - Ability to link up to 5 missions into one arc - Ability to customize all dialogue, souvenirs, etc... - User voting for 'Hall of Fame', Dev selection for 'Dev's Choice'. - Vote tracking to reduce 'vote griefing'
World of Goo is DRMless. There are no copy protections upon it.
It's also very worth the $20. There's a level editor and fan-made levels starting to spring up as well, so even after you've exhausted the LENGTHY puzzle challenge, you can play other challenges to your heart's content.
City of Heroes and City of Villains make extensive use of PhysX to impliment ragdoll physics for humanoid characters. When you, as a super-powered character knock the tar out of an enemy, they can go flying across the room or high into the air.
With some skill, it's possible to use knockback as the ultimate crowd control device. You keep your enemies knocked down or penned into a corner where they can't hurt you.
In my opinion, this is far more entertaining and far more visually stimulating than any other method of defeating your enemies.
Planetes is a japenese cartoon about this very subject, and other unpleasant realities of space travel including space-radiation induced cancer, the birth problems of people living on the moon, and the long delay involved in inter-planetary travel.
The main character, 'Hachimaki', is basically a space garbage collector.
I wouldn't mind virtually any amount of explicit content in ads if I was on my own, but I'd be unhappy if there were kids watching it with me.
I submit that this is a cultural artifact.
You either see nothing offensive in ads with explicit content or feel that you can safely ignore it because you understand the difference between real life and the image of life that such advertisements would present. However, you'd be uncomfortable showing a child the same thing. Why is this?
I suspect there are a few reasons ranging the spectrum from cultural guilt, to superstition, and taboo abeyance.
Perhaps you'd feel responsible for educating the child on the differences between real life and the image of life that are presented by advertisers. In any other context, this is something we don't even think about. We know that simply eating breakfast cereal doesn't suddenly make you super-athletic and attractive. We don't have any difficulty repeating that to children, or explaining what's necessary to achieve those goals in the real world. But since our culture has placed such a strict taboo about imparting sex education to children, we feel incapable of telling the same kids that drinking beer and wine coolers doesn't make you attractive to half-naked dancers. We don't tell them that getting drunk in order to seek sexual gratification is a really risky, self-destructive behavior.
Arguably the latter is a much more important life lesson, but that same taboo forbids us from admitting that children have sexuality, let alone that they're even more vulnerable to being pandered to than adults.
You're giving 'Anonymous' a bit much credit there. Anonymous doesn't have an agenda, per se. They do it for the Lulz. Scientology is an easy target. Mrs. Palin is, if anything, an easier target due to her sudden and dramatic rise. I have no doubt in my mind that if Anonymous could find Mr. Obama's personal email account, they would do the same thing with exactly the same glee.
'Anonymous' extends from the anonymous posting habits on 4chan and certain other message boards, where it's easy to bullshit, dickwave, and otherwise behave in a sociopathic manner. They hate because it's fun and not because it serves any purpose. It's not about supporting one candidate or the other. It's about hatred, misanthropy, ego gratification, and taking sadistic pleasure in torturing someone. Bigotry, sexism, and racism probably play into the mix as well.
Anonymous published Mrs. Palin's email address with exactly the same glee that they would report a Camwhore's secrets to her family and school administration.
It should be remembered that bad people are sometimes responsible for good products. Case in point is the Volkswagon Beetle. 'Volkswagon', the 'People's Car' itself was a term coined by none other than Der Fuhrer himself, Adolph Hitler. Ferdinand Porsche and his employees designed the Bug with considerable oversight, funding, and purchase incentives from the Third Reich. While the car was designed based on previous models lost in WWII bombing by Porsche and Komenda, his chief designer, Hitler personally made a lot of design and construction choices.
Yeah, thread GODWINNED, baby!
Anyway, Hitler died and the war was over before Volkswagon ever rolled the first Beetle off the production line. The Beetle helped draw Germany out of the post-war recession and contributed in a big way to make Germany the industrial powerhouse it is today, partially because of a genocidal mad-man's plans for world domination.
Hans Reiser is apparently quite the freak. I'm in no way comparing him to Hitler other than to say they are both villains.
Reiser FS is a good filesystem. There is absolutely no reason it should not outlive its creator's murderous legacy with the work of good people to maintain and update it.
Wait, what was I talking about? Oh yeah. Cats. Anyone who's owned a cat for ANY length of time knows that these creatures are perfectly self aware of of their own bodies.
Verify it for yourself. Put a large mirror in a room where an adult cat can easily access it. Hold the cat so that they can see themselves in the mirror. They'll try to act as if they don't like what they see and want AWAY from the mirror. A few more aggressive males will even pretend to fight with it.
Now leave the cat unsupervised in front of the mirror and watch obliquely by pretending to read a book.
Most cats will start to examine themselves in the mirror after a few minutes, turning so that they can see their body parts at different angles. They'll never look directly at their own face because a wide-eyed inspecting stare makes them uncomfortable. However, they will use the mirror to examine their own backs.
I don't buy many games any more for PCs or consoles because of the absolutely combative way the game industry treats PC gamers. I'll play my MMO which I pay a monthly fee for and open source games, or older games that I bought a long time ago. When I do play a game that requires some sort of copy protection, such as a CD check or the like, I always feel irritation. "Wow, thanks for treating me like a criminal. See if I buy your next game, choad."
The MMO I play, unlike a certain MMO from Blizzard, does not run invasive system checks.
The newer DRM schemes simply seem to break computers. My first personal experience with SecureRom was when my wife came to me with a hardware problem. After she installed one of the Sims 2 expansion packs, her CDRW quit working. Its driver conflicted with SecureRom. Not only are you being treated like a criminal, but the game companies are willing to risk harming your computer. I paid 30 odd dollars for your CDRom so my wife can play her favorite game, but here you are damaging her OS installation. I'm sure as hell not going to shell out for the next disc, am I?
The first game I've had any desire to play in a long time is Spore. Its videos look great. The gameplay demo video given by Will Wright was awesome. However, Spore, like the Sims, is going to be distributed by EA, so it will almost certainly have SecureRom attached. I think the demos and the 'Creature Creator' disc also had SecureRom attached, but can't say for sure. Accordingly, despite the fact that I'd like to play, I won't. I'm not going to shell out for something that's probably going to break my PC. Fool me twice, shame on me!
Both player super powers and quite a bit of Paragon City and the Rogue Isles have been designed or retrofitted for PhysX capabilities in mind.
For example, when a fire blaster sends a bad guy to the burn ward, bits of flame and whatnot fly around, catching on nearby terrain or even other players or enemies. The same things happen with electric and other blasters that have a big visual 'splash'.
My earth controller leaves lots of stones and pebbles lying around. Enemies, players, and my stone golem have to wade through these and kick them out of the way to get to where they're going. When her wind powers kick up, the rocks frequently roll around in the gusts.
Anyone who uses firearms in Paragon, Rhode Island or in the Rogue Isles generates LOTS of brass. If you're not careful, they'll pile up around your feet and go scattering when you walk around. If a flier-type happens to go around them, they'll be blown around by his wake.
Perhaps the most dramatic use of PhysX in player powers is the 'Propel' power. This allows some telekinetics and gravity control types to throw bits of the terrain around (summoned out of pocket-space, of course). It's frequently possible to litter a zone with 'Propel Junk', that you have to shove out of the way to get anywhere. It's quite a fantastic thing to knock out a gangster with a ballistic fork lift. Gravity control just does bad things to physics particles in general, such as spraying piles of the forementioned casing brass all over the place.
A flier who tears through a tree will see lots of leaves and maybe a branch or two swirl behind in his wake.
The real bonus to PhysX is ragdoll model physics. When you punt someone hard enough to send them flying, they often land... awkwardly. It takes a few seconds for a mook who's just been skipping along the pavement by his teeth to pull himself back together. A favorite bonus is to knock an enemy into a railing. You can often leave them helpless, hanging by their feet or even their head in some rare cases.
PhysX in City of Heroes uses the CPU-only dll by default, but will also work with an add on Aegia card or with the newer CUDA drivers from nVidia.
Agreed. NCYL gives me quite a bit of hope for the human species in general. If we can produce an attorney who cares about common sense, justice, and the rights of the individual maybe we're not so doomed as I fear.
There's some 'embrace, extend, obsolete' in here somewhere, but I'm beginning to think that this behavior from MS has a lot more to do with Ballmer's seemingly obsessive desire to overtake Google.
In other words, in order to defeat their enemy, they're going to try to BECOME their enemy first. MS is trying to emulate everything Google does, including supporting open source projects.
This is what happens when a apathetic populace lets fascism or corporatism slide. Florida is well used to letting megacorps and others who let their money talk for them get their way. Accordingly, they're the first to be taken advantage of.
Florida's not the only one, certainly. The attitude of letting money talk is endemic all over the country. It's over the entire country. Corporations want cheap labor and will do what it takes to get it. They'd prefer slave labor, but compared to Americans, Indians are cheap enough to make the bottom line look good. Human rights mean NOTHING to them.
Unless the American people stop this, it's going to get worse. WE allowed this to happen. WE allow companies like Neilsen and Citigroup to take advantage of us like this. Accordingly, WE get reamed.
Compare to sex education. Parents typically can't do it or aren't effective when they do it. When real (read: abstinence only doesn't work) sex education occurs, teens almost universally have fewer STDs and unwanted pregnancies.
In this case, parents are not NEARLY as internet saavy as their kids. Nor are they very motivated. They just want the kids to 'not do that'. That's the same logical trap as 'abstinence only'. The kids ARE going to do it.
If there's internet safety education in schools, the kids are going to have a little more knowledge than they would have otherwise. Accordingly, they'll be a little better able to protect themselves.
What much of the commentary here misses is that a significant number of CoH and CoV players have been ASKING for in-game ads from real-world companies from some time.
Paragon City (and the Rogue Isles) are sprawling metropolises with billboards, public transportation, store fronts, movie posters, video screens, and the like. In a real city, these are all COVERED with advertising. We don't get quite the volume of advertising, fake or otherwise, in CoH, so our city feels a little lacking in that area. City of Gyros, Infront Steakhouse, and El Super Mexicano all have a ridiculous number of locations throughout Paragon City. It'd be neat to see at least a few of them replaced with other restaurants. If they happen to be real restaurants, then more the bonus.
COH Forum thread for player Q&A. COH Devs are typically very forthcoming with information, so there's quite a bit of real information here. Posts by 'Red Names' are either game devs or NCSoft reps.
Slashdot Mirror
City of Heroes did the whole 'Accomplishments' thing fairly early on.
Some of my favorites are
'Untouchable' - Defeat 200 mobster bosses.
'Speeder' and 'Speed Demon' - Navigate the Christmas-only ski slopes in Pocket D (twitch-haters LOATHE these since they cannot be ground.)
'Transmogrified' - Save the Terra Volta nuclear reactor core from melting down while it's being attacked by waves of enemies (Skyraiders, Freaks, or Rikti aliens). This is, incidentally, also the trial which earns players the right to respecify their powers.
Two of the hardest to achieve are 'Master at Arms' and 'Demolitionist'. They require the player to participate in 10 or more 3-6 group raids to plant bombs on the crashed Rikti Mothership and then to fight the Rikti Master at Arms, U'kon G'rai (You con grey).
Op is so full of fail and retard that he's not worth listening to.
First, the game devs have been working to put the experience gain curve completely into the control of the player's hands. They're not really concerned about how fast you level. First, there's the 'Patrol Experience' feature, which was introduced with the last issue. It works about like 'Rested' experience in other games. There are other boosters that increase experience gain. There is also a voluntary switch that users can toggle on and off to eliminate EXP gain.
The devs are concerned about keeping the game challenging. They are eliminating objects that don't fight back from the architect system and have implemented a special game currency that's dropped based on how much effort you put into fighting an enemy.
Yep. They're skee-ball tickets you trade for drop rewards at the vendor outside the mission. You get more of them based on how much work you do inside the mission... so 'easy farming' is a contradiction.
They are concerned about copyright violations. If you make a mission about fighting the Incredible Hulk and Spiderman, you can bet that your mission will be banned nigh-instantly. They're also concerned about inappropriate content. The architect interface features a real-time word checker that will warn you for inserting vulgarity or profanity into your missions.
As for the PVP issue, yes, it was recently revamped in terms of how powers worked. Unlike the infamous 'New Game Experience' in SWG, no powers were removed. Several were added, and made available for PVE players as well. Powers were revamped slightly in how they worked, making 'one shotting' and other kinds of grief play not work. The only people upset about this are the core of PVPers who got their jollies by making life difficult for everyone else. The other PVPers and even a good number of PVEers are reather happy with it.
Another change they made was to add PVP-only drops. If you defeat another player, you have a chance of getting a GOOD drop from them. It doesn't take anything of theirs away and encourages more people to play PVP, particularly in Arena matches. Again, this makes the griefers unhappy because they don't get invited to the matches.
PVP in CoH was pretty much dead. Now it's burgeoning. I personally don't care for it, but all my friends are doing it.
So in other words, OP is full of shit. Go read the CoH boards for a better view on what's going on.
Calling MacOSX a 'commercial unix' just doesn't taste right coming out of the mouth. It's like calling Microsoft Windows a 'Server Operating System' or an 'Enterprise Solution'.
Yeah, there are people who use them that way, but that way madness lies.
'Enterprise Solution' tastes pretty damn foul all by itself.
From the Badass Manly Anime Reviewer:
After the Mrs. got stung with the various SecureROM trojans fubaring her system, she made the hard decision not to buy any more EA titles.
I was excited about Spore, but refused to buy either it or the creature creator pack.
Apparently there were quite enough people (who also spammed Amazon.com feedback, perhaps?) who made the same decisions that EA felt a bit of monetary sting.
Player comments over at the official boards are pretty much ecstatic. NCSoft and their players are getting endless free content and every fanboy who's interested in 'rolling their own MMO' now has a way to write for a real MMO.
Oh, there are concerns about abuse and stupidity, but the general consensus is that Mission Architect is a very, very good thing. It's been designed from the ground up with player requests in mind and NCSoft has a pretty decent track record of pleasing players.
No one at NCSoft, nor their players expect CoH anything to be a 'WoW Killer', but City of Heroes is profitable and has an active community. This will only help expand that.
- A very lengthy podcast about the design and testing of Mission Architect
Basic features include:
- Ability to create NPC allies and enemies using CoH's costume creator and power selector
- Ability to link up to 25 mission objectives into one mission
- Ability to link up to 5 missions into one arc
- Ability to customize all dialogue, souvenirs, etc...
- User voting for 'Hall of Fame', Dev selection for 'Dev's Choice'.
- Vote tracking to reduce 'vote griefing'
World of Goo is DRMless. There are no copy protections upon it.
It's also very worth the $20. There's a level editor and fan-made levels starting to spring up as well, so even after you've exhausted the LENGTHY puzzle challenge, you can play other challenges to your heart's content.
Go purchase this game.
City of Heroes and City of Villains make extensive use of PhysX to impliment ragdoll physics for humanoid characters. When you, as a super-powered character knock the tar out of an enemy, they can go flying across the room or high into the air.
With some skill, it's possible to use knockback as the ultimate crowd control device. You keep your enemies knocked down or penned into a corner where they can't hurt you.
In my opinion, this is far more entertaining and far more visually stimulating than any other method of defeating your enemies.
Planetes is a japenese cartoon about this very subject, and other unpleasant realities of space travel including space-radiation induced cancer, the birth problems of people living on the moon, and the long delay involved in inter-planetary travel.
The main character, 'Hachimaki', is basically a space garbage collector.
I submit that this is a cultural artifact.
You either see nothing offensive in ads with explicit content or feel that you can safely ignore it because you understand the difference between real life and the image of life that such advertisements would present. However, you'd be uncomfortable showing a child the same thing. Why is this?
I suspect there are a few reasons ranging the spectrum from cultural guilt, to superstition, and taboo abeyance.
Perhaps you'd feel responsible for educating the child on the differences between real life and the image of life that are presented by advertisers. In any other context, this is something we don't even think about. We know that simply eating breakfast cereal doesn't suddenly make you super-athletic and attractive. We don't have any difficulty repeating that to children, or explaining what's necessary to achieve those goals in the real world. But since our culture has placed such a strict taboo about imparting sex education to children, we feel incapable of telling the same kids that drinking beer and wine coolers doesn't make you attractive to half-naked dancers. We don't tell them that getting drunk in order to seek sexual gratification is a really risky, self-destructive behavior.
Arguably the latter is a much more important life lesson, but that same taboo forbids us from admitting that children have sexuality, let alone that they're even more vulnerable to being pandered to than adults.
http://www.schneier.com/skein.html
I get one or two of these car warranty scam calls a day, all from exactly the same number, hers or another victim's I would assume.
It's NEVER been about the money. It's not about compensating the artists. (Ha!)
This is 100% about trying to keep control of an entire industry in the hands of a very rich, very corrupt few.
You're giving 'Anonymous' a bit much credit there. Anonymous doesn't have an agenda, per se. They do it for the Lulz. Scientology is an easy target. Mrs. Palin is, if anything, an easier target due to her sudden and dramatic rise. I have no doubt in my mind that if Anonymous could find Mr. Obama's personal email account, they would do the same thing with exactly the same glee.
'Anonymous' extends from the anonymous posting habits on 4chan and certain other message boards, where it's easy to bullshit, dickwave, and otherwise behave in a sociopathic manner. They hate because it's fun and not because it serves any purpose. It's not about supporting one candidate or the other. It's about hatred, misanthropy, ego gratification, and taking sadistic pleasure in torturing someone. Bigotry, sexism, and racism probably play into the mix as well.
Anonymous published Mrs. Palin's email address with exactly the same glee that they would report a Camwhore's secrets to her family and school administration.
It should be remembered that bad people are sometimes responsible for good products. Case in point is the Volkswagon Beetle. 'Volkswagon', the 'People's Car' itself was a term coined by none other than Der Fuhrer himself, Adolph Hitler. Ferdinand Porsche and his employees designed the Bug with considerable oversight, funding, and purchase incentives from the Third Reich. While the car was designed based on previous models lost in WWII bombing by Porsche and Komenda, his chief designer, Hitler personally made a lot of design and construction choices.
Yeah, thread GODWINNED, baby!
Anyway, Hitler died and the war was over before Volkswagon ever rolled the first Beetle off the production line. The Beetle helped draw Germany out of the post-war recession and contributed in a big way to make Germany the industrial powerhouse it is today, partially because of a genocidal mad-man's plans for world domination.
Hans Reiser is apparently quite the freak. I'm in no way comparing him to Hitler other than to say they are both villains.
Reiser FS is a good filesystem. There is absolutely no reason it should not outlive its creator's murderous legacy with the work of good people to maintain and update it.
FTFY
All your base are...
Wait, what was I talking about? Oh yeah. Cats. Anyone who's owned a cat for ANY length of time knows that these creatures are perfectly self aware of of their own bodies.
Verify it for yourself. Put a large mirror in a room where an adult cat can easily access it. Hold the cat so that they can see themselves in the mirror. They'll try to act as if they don't like what they see and want AWAY from the mirror. A few more aggressive males will even pretend to fight with it.
Now leave the cat unsupervised in front of the mirror and watch obliquely by pretending to read a book.
Most cats will start to examine themselves in the mirror after a few minutes, turning so that they can see their body parts at different angles. They'll never look directly at their own face because a wide-eyed inspecting stare makes them uncomfortable. However, they will use the mirror to examine their own backs.
Every cat I've ever owned has done this.
Captcha: Unions. I sure wish I belonged to one.
I wish parent could be modded up some more.
I don't buy many games any more for PCs or consoles because of the absolutely combative way the game industry treats PC gamers. I'll play my MMO which I pay a monthly fee for and open source games, or older games that I bought a long time ago. When I do play a game that requires some sort of copy protection, such as a CD check or the like, I always feel irritation. "Wow, thanks for treating me like a criminal. See if I buy your next game, choad."
The MMO I play, unlike a certain MMO from Blizzard, does not run invasive system checks.
The newer DRM schemes simply seem to break computers. My first personal experience with SecureRom was when my wife came to me with a hardware problem. After she installed one of the Sims 2 expansion packs, her CDRW quit working. Its driver conflicted with SecureRom. Not only are you being treated like a criminal, but the game companies are willing to risk harming your computer. I paid 30 odd dollars for your CDRom so my wife can play her favorite game, but here you are damaging her OS installation. I'm sure as hell not going to shell out for the next disc, am I?
The first game I've had any desire to play in a long time is Spore. Its videos look great. The gameplay demo video given by Will Wright was awesome. However, Spore, like the Sims, is going to be distributed by EA, so it will almost certainly have SecureRom attached. I think the demos and the 'Creature Creator' disc also had SecureRom attached, but can't say for sure. Accordingly, despite the fact that I'd like to play, I won't. I'm not going to shell out for something that's probably going to break my PC. Fool me twice, shame on me!
Both player super powers and quite a bit of Paragon City and the Rogue Isles have been designed or retrofitted for PhysX capabilities in mind.
For example, when a fire blaster sends a bad guy to the burn ward, bits of flame and whatnot fly around, catching on nearby terrain or even other players or enemies. The same things happen with electric and other blasters that have a big visual 'splash'.
My earth controller leaves lots of stones and pebbles lying around. Enemies, players, and my stone golem have to wade through these and kick them out of the way to get to where they're going. When her wind powers kick up, the rocks frequently roll around in the gusts.
Anyone who uses firearms in Paragon, Rhode Island or in the Rogue Isles generates LOTS of brass. If you're not careful, they'll pile up around your feet and go scattering when you walk around. If a flier-type happens to go around them, they'll be blown around by his wake.
Perhaps the most dramatic use of PhysX in player powers is the 'Propel' power. This allows some telekinetics and gravity control types to throw bits of the terrain around (summoned out of pocket-space, of course). It's frequently possible to litter a zone with 'Propel Junk', that you have to shove out of the way to get anywhere. It's quite a fantastic thing to knock out a gangster with a ballistic fork lift. Gravity control just does bad things to physics particles in general, such as spraying piles of the forementioned casing brass all over the place.
A flier who tears through a tree will see lots of leaves and maybe a branch or two swirl behind in his wake.
The real bonus to PhysX is ragdoll model physics. When you punt someone hard enough to send them flying, they often land... awkwardly. It takes a few seconds for a mook who's just been skipping along the pavement by his teeth to pull himself back together. A favorite bonus is to knock an enemy into a railing. You can often leave them helpless, hanging by their feet or even their head in some rare cases.
PhysX in City of Heroes uses the CPU-only dll by default, but will also work with an add on Aegia card or with the newer CUDA drivers from nVidia.
He was looking for a high-end brain specialist in neurochemistry at last report. Subby's dad fits the bill.
Agreed. NCYL gives me quite a bit of hope for the human species in general. If we can produce an attorney who cares about common sense, justice, and the rights of the individual maybe we're not so doomed as I fear.
There's some 'embrace, extend, obsolete' in here somewhere, but I'm beginning to think that this behavior from MS has a lot more to do with Ballmer's seemingly obsessive desire to overtake Google.
In other words, in order to defeat their enemy, they're going to try to BECOME their enemy first. MS is trying to emulate everything Google does, including supporting open source projects.
This is what happens when a apathetic populace lets fascism or corporatism slide. Florida is well used to letting megacorps and others who let their money talk for them get their way. Accordingly, they're the first to be taken advantage of.
Florida's not the only one, certainly. The attitude of letting money talk is endemic all over the country. It's over the entire country. Corporations want cheap labor and will do what it takes to get it. They'd prefer slave labor, but compared to Americans, Indians are cheap enough to make the bottom line look good. Human rights mean NOTHING to them.
Unless the American people stop this, it's going to get worse. WE allowed this to happen. WE allow companies like Neilsen and Citigroup to take advantage of us like this. Accordingly, WE get reamed.
Compare to sex education. Parents typically can't do it or aren't effective when they do it. When real (read: abstinence only doesn't work) sex education occurs, teens almost universally have fewer STDs and unwanted pregnancies.
In this case, parents are not NEARLY as internet saavy as their kids. Nor are they very motivated. They just want the kids to 'not do that'. That's the same logical trap as 'abstinence only'. The kids ARE going to do it.
If there's internet safety education in schools, the kids are going to have a little more knowledge than they would have otherwise. Accordingly, they'll be a little better able to protect themselves.
What much of the commentary here misses is that a significant number of CoH and CoV players have been ASKING for in-game ads from real-world companies from some time.
Paragon City (and the Rogue Isles) are sprawling metropolises with billboards, public transportation, store fronts, movie posters, video screens, and the like. In a real city, these are all COVERED with advertising. We don't get quite the volume of advertising, fake or otherwise, in CoH, so our city feels a little lacking in that area. City of Gyros, Infront Steakhouse, and El Super Mexicano all have a ridiculous number of locations throughout Paragon City. It'd be neat to see at least a few of them replaced with other restaurants. If they happen to be real restaurants, then more the bonus.
COH Forum thread for player Q&A. COH Devs are typically very forthcoming with information, so there's quite a bit of real information here. Posts by 'Red Names' are either game devs or NCSoft reps.
COH Players discuss what kinds of ads they WANT to see.
Brian Clayton, manager of NCSoft Norcal where COH is developed, makes the announcement and discusses logistics.
Players discuss the announcement. There's some wailing and gnashing of teeth, but the discussion here is mostly on logistics.