Actually, they were wiped out by aliens. This was mentioned in a number of episodes.
But of course, we all know that the Earth of the future was wiped out by something far more insidious, a force even more dastardly than the giant brains, the giant anti-brains at Fox. If it doesn't have bitch-slaps, gratuitous cleavage or people being humiliated, it's not for Fox. Of course this doesn't explain "24" and "Malcolm in the Middle", two other good shows, but it does explain most of them.
I buy used games all the time. At $5-$10/each I don't mind if I find myself spending much time with only one out of every 3 or 4 titles. Games are a funny thing, you often have to own them for a while before you know for sure if you really want them. If I drop $50 for a game, it better be something really special... and I'm no starving college student anymore. I can afford those games, but I just don't feel it's worth it. Most of the games I've spent the most time with lately I picked up in bargain bins, and I can never predict if something that gets me hooked will be one I picked up for $20 (or occasionally $30 or 40 or more), or some obscure or older bargain I get for $5.
They'd better realize that by not burying radioactive waste they are endangering an ecosystem. It would be an affront to nature and biodiversity to stop using nuclear power. James Lovelock sez so.
Star Wars wasn't just a huge success as a movie... it had a huge impact on American culture as a whole. There were a whole flurry of SF movies that followed it, along with TV shows (anyone remember Quark?). It was probably the biggest pop cultural event of the 70's next to disco. Maybe you weren't around back then, and maybe my vision is a little slanted since I was 12, the perfect target audience, but Star Wars was HUGE.
If 8-1/2" x 11" was good enough for the Apostles Peter and Paul, then it's good enough for me.
Besides, the Stonecutters have seen fit to keep the Metric System down despite its obvious superiority. I would love to be able to purchase my toilet paper by the milliare.
Just the pay is enough. I'd love to be a teacher (and I know I'm good at it too after lots of positive dfeedback from volunteer work with kids and having 4 kids of my own who are bright, inquistive and full of neat ideas), but I'd have to forgo about 2/3 of my salary to do so, and probably have to put up with a bureaucracy that would drive me postal inside a month.
The high point of my week is often spending an hour and a quarter with a classroom full of eager 2nd graders talking about faith and religion. I know I could do even better with topics like science, math and (gasp!) computer science, topics actually related to my degree and work experience.
to my delight the Microsoft icon looked genuine and trustworthy
Now wait just a minute... the user verified the integrity of the file by looking at the icon! It "looked" trustworthy and genuine. That's gotta be proof enough that the executable was indeed from Microsoft, after all, no one would could possibly duplicate a Microsoft icon. That'd be as hard as copying those fancy holograms on their packaging. If we can't trust icons, next you'll be telling me you can't trust the filename either.
I'd chalk this story up to "Slow News Day" or perhaps "Dogpile on Stupid User Day". I bet he didn't have backups either.
Re:Games are getting ridiculous
on
Perfect Digital Skin
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yeah, I've been saying this since the days of the original Amiga. There are good games out there, just look around. My strategy is to buy stuff that's a year or two old. That way I pay about 1/4th the price and can afford to get a stinker or two for every gem I find.
As far as a video game industry crash... it'd probably do the industry a lot of good. Video games are all trying to become Hollywood blockbuster movies: big, dumb and bland.
How is this different than any other software industry. Bads management, unrealistic goals, development schedules dictated by marketing... this is true in every aspect of software development. Part of it is the nature of the work, software development is still very new on the industrial time-scale, people haven't reduced it to a science or even an art yet. Look at Microsoft (or any other company), who is incapable of doing anything, no matter how advanced or sophisticated without glaring bugs and obvious flaws. What other industry is like this? Cars have problems, but not like software... and they've had 100 years to figure out how to build them and the product is cheaper, works better, safer and more reliable than even 20 years ago. Software is more powerful, but is it more reliable? Cheaper? Safer? Or is the software industry driving the hardware industry, which in turn drives the software industry, forcing us to upgrade endlessly depsite the fact that we all own supercomputers by the standards of the 1980's. For games this is understandable, but for word processing?
The other issue, which sets games apart is just that... unless word processing, or spreadsheets or browsers or any of the other 95% of things that computers are used for, pushing the technological boundaries isn't necessary and in fact causes as many problems as it solves. With games, pushing the limits is integral to the experience. How do you think id has stayed in business releasing the same game over and over for 15 years, because each new release pushes the technology in new ways and makes the experience more intense and immersive. Can you really say the same need exists for word processing. As a casual user, I could do anything I would ever want to do with a WP program 10 years ago or more.
Anyhow, I guess I've rambled long enough. I love games and would be a hell of a game designer, because it's been an interest of mine since I was designing war games with graph paper and dymo labels for counters in middle school, and I've dabbled in rewriting one of the older roguelikes, but I wouldn't want to be in this industry... I'd rather have a life. And even though I wor in other software fields, about once every three months I swear I'm going to chuck it all and become a teacher.
Maybe the "crunch time" is a little more extreme in game development, but I don't think it is unique and it certainly isn't necessary. It's just how business works. If we knew how to do it better, our society would be much more advanced than it is now... and in another few generations, it probably will be.
Yeah, but Joe Twelve-pack won't have his XP firewall turned on if he doesn't know to enable it... at least not until XP service pack 2.
Could all virus and worm writers just lay off for a couple months? Thank you.
Forget bad coding for a minute... Microsoft wouldn't have half the problems they have if they would simply not choose the most perversely stupid default settings.
Yeah, I could have guessed that. I think a lot of people are using your/. account to post. I see that username dozens of times in every story.
I'm surprised that the classic "xyzzy" isn't in the list. Other words I would have expected to see "fred", "bofh", "windows", and "billgatescanbitemyshinymetalass".
That's OK. Of course, you do know you're going to Hell for playing those things.;-)
Playability is an interesting thing. It is a rare combination of good UI design, responsiveness (this is crucially important in real-time games) as well as an appropriate level of complexity.
The last is the hardest of all to deal with because I'm convinced that under certain circumstances, the range of complexity where the game feels too simple (like MOO2, which I love, and still play, but I wish it had more depth) and the range of complexity where it feels too much like work (like MOO3, which I've spent a few unfruitful few hours with, but I've got it on order, and will make a real effort to learn it) can almost overlap.
id's games are simple, the mechanics of the game are fluid and don't get in the way of the reality it creates. For what they are trying to do, they've got it right. But I tend to play turn-based games.
Whoa, slow down there, cowboy. I never said there was anything wrong with it. And even if I did, that would hardly be grounds to accuse me of being crazy.
Simply said, it's a simple, albeit fun, idea. I just got tired of it 10 years ago. That's not a psychological problem.
Have fun shooting demons. I hope id sells a million copies. But some of us are looking for something a little more original.
No doubt, playability is a huge factor in the more recent games, as it was in Doom. For all its incredible breakthrough technology, Doom had playability that has rarely been matched by other companies. I didn't mean to short-change them in that regard.
As far as my favorite FPS for playability, I prefer the Descent series. I hope we see another one some day.
The go to the Underdogs site, find the great games from the past and enjoy some real gaming.
I don't even bother with games that are less than about a year old. The market is so ruthless that after that much time, the price is down to $10-$20 and there's a much better chance it will run on my hardware.
Of course, my system is probably pretty lame compared to the hardcore gamer systems, and up until a year ago, my main machine was a dual Celeron 433 machine. Now I run a 1.58 GHz Athlon with last year's nVidia card.
Still, I find no lack of good games to enjoy, despite not being on the cutting edge.
Besides, I went through the whole (games-are-driven-by-graphics-rather-than-gameplay thing with my Amiga almost 15 years ago. Once you get past that, you start looking for the right kind of games, regardless of high-tech graphics and other cool stuff. You have more fun and spend less money.
Doom 3 is a good example. id hasn't had a new gaming idea since the original Doom in the early 90's (and that, it could be argued was just an evolution of Wolf 3D, although multi-player counts as a lot). They are wizards at pushing the state-of-the-art in technology, and have refined the idea extensively, but at the end of the day, you'll be running around brown labyrinths shooting demons. I'm sure it will be cool, but it really doesn't interest me. After watching the evolution of Quake from the early descriptions by id to a sleeker, fancier, yet ultimately similar Doom, I realized these guys are graphics hackers (not that that's a bad thing), but not really game hackers.
Yes, I know... I've made this comment before and people chime in about lookspring or rocketjump or nosepick or whatever the newest move is being a huge innovation, but in the end, you are still running around brown labyrinths shooting demons.
Furthermore, as was stated above, it guarantees preexisting rights. It does not, as many people seem to think, grant those rights. Of course, thanks to an absurdly broad interpretation of the so-called Interstate Commerce clause, the original intent of the Founding Fathers has been subverted to fuel a monstrous centralized government that tries to control all aspects of our lives. (Of course, despite that I think the U.S. is still overall a good place to live, but if we aren't careful it won't stay that way).
The U.S. Constitution is a beautiful document, written by men whose wisdom has seldom been matched in the history of the world, but is very quickly being eroded into irrelevancy by simple-minded, power-hungry politicians who would argue the meaning of the most simple and obvious words, or carelessly loophole our rights away in the interests of "protecting" us.
We will all be perfectly safe the same day we all become criminals.
I agree, but tell that to the government that's imprisoned you.
Last time I checked, it seems the only rights you have in the U.S. are to privacy and to not be offended.
Neither of these are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
The former is a good idea, but it's not there, enamations of penumbras to the contrary. The second has become a defacto 0th amendment of the new Bill of Rights, trumping all others, even though it is ludicrous on its face.
Welcome to the future, where feelings are law and facts are irrelevant.
I hear Gilette has been sitting on the patent for the non-dulling ceramic razor blade for over 30 years! Those evil corporations!
Actually, to be honest it's probably the Stonecutters! After all, they admitted to stifling the electric car and adoption of the metric system. And we all know that despite his Oscar-worthy performance in "Three Men and a Baby", Steve Guttenberg wouldn't be nearly as popular...
They will charge 10x the cost per byte of every other possible solution. ZIP disks were obsolete 6 years ago as far as I was concerned, since CD-R or CD-RW stored more for a tiny fraction of the cost per byte and were more reliable and nearly as fast. If ZIP's had been priced at a dollar a piece in 1996, or Jaz's at $20 a piece, they would own the removeable magnetic media market today, but they have always arrogantly refused to lower their prices, dooming their products, good or bad, to oblivion. I used a Jaz drive for a couple of years to take data back and forth to work every day, but it soon became far easier and essentially cheaper to stick a harddrive in a removeable chassis. I've never considered IOmega products since. They were outrageously expensive and less useable compared all the alternatives.
Around 1994, I remember picking up a 340MB hard drive from MicroCenter or CompUSA (maybe they were SoftwareHouse back then) during their Buck-a-Meg sale. 10 years later the typical harddrive costs less than a dollar a gig, but Zip disks are still roughly the same price (with a factor of 1.5 or 2). Who needs 'em? For portable storage, I have a 256MB SD card in a little USB widgie that fits in my pocket and set me back about $70 total, and I don't need a friggin' drive to read the media. I can use any USB-equipped machine or my PocketPC.
This product could be really good, but if the media cost more than a dollar a gig, I can't imagine ever buying it. And with the drive at MSRP'ing at $400 or so, even that wouldn't cut it. I'd just as soon buy a stack of DVD-R's and another 250GB drive.
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Actually, they were wiped out by aliens. This was mentioned in a number of episodes.
But of course, we all know that the Earth of the future was wiped out by something far more insidious, a force even more dastardly than the giant brains, the giant anti-brains at Fox. If it doesn't have bitch-slaps, gratuitous cleavage or people being humiliated, it's not for Fox. Of course this doesn't explain "24" and "Malcolm in the Middle", two other good shows, but it does explain most of them.
That's just a specific instance of #1.
I buy used games all the time. At $5-$10/each I don't mind if I find myself spending much time with only one out of every 3 or 4 titles. Games are a funny thing, you often have to own them for a while before you know for sure if you really want them. If I drop $50 for a game, it better be something really special... and I'm no starving college student anymore. I can afford those games, but I just don't feel it's worth it. Most of the games I've spent the most time with lately I picked up in bargain bins, and I can never predict if something that gets me hooked will be one I picked up for $20 (or occasionally $30 or 40 or more), or some obscure or older bargain I get for $5.
...are freaked out about nuclear waste.
They'd better realize that by not burying radioactive waste they are endangering an ecosystem. It would be an affront to nature and biodiversity to stop using nuclear power. James Lovelock sez so.
Star Wars wasn't just a huge success as a movie... it had a huge impact on American culture as a whole. There were a whole flurry of SF movies that followed it, along with TV shows (anyone remember Quark?). It was probably the biggest pop cultural event of the 70's next to disco. Maybe you weren't around back then, and maybe my vision is a little slanted since I was 12, the perfect target audience, but Star Wars was HUGE.
So you're saying that kangaroos and wallabies and "G'day Mite!" and "Shrimp on the Barbee" comes from Europe? I guess I am ignorant.
Now you'll be telling me your toilets don't go backwards...
If 8-1/2" x 11" was good enough for the Apostles Peter and Paul, then it's good enough for me.
Besides, the Stonecutters have seen fit to keep the Metric System down despite its obvious superiority. I would love to be able to purchase my toilet paper by the milliare.
Just the pay is enough. I'd love to be a teacher (and I know I'm good at it too after lots of positive dfeedback from volunteer work with kids and having 4 kids of my own who are bright, inquistive and full of neat ideas), but I'd have to forgo about 2/3 of my salary to do so, and probably have to put up with a bureaucracy that would drive me postal inside a month.
The high point of my week is often spending an hour and a quarter with a classroom full of eager 2nd graders talking about faith and religion. I know I could do even better with topics like science, math and (gasp!) computer science, topics actually related to my degree and work experience.
to my delight the Microsoft icon looked genuine and trustworthy
Now wait just a minute... the user verified the integrity of the file by looking at the icon! It "looked" trustworthy and genuine. That's gotta be proof enough that the executable was indeed from Microsoft, after all, no one would could possibly duplicate a Microsoft icon. That'd be as hard as copying those fancy holograms on their packaging. If we can't trust icons, next you'll be telling me you can't trust the filename either.
I'd chalk this story up to "Slow News Day" or perhaps "Dogpile on Stupid User Day". I bet he didn't have backups either.
Yeah, I've been saying this since the days of the original Amiga. There are good games out there, just look around. My strategy is to buy stuff that's a year or two old. That way I pay about 1/4th the price and can afford to get a stinker or two for every gem I find.
As far as a video game industry crash... it'd probably do the industry a lot of good. Video games are all trying to become Hollywood blockbuster movies: big, dumb and bland.
How is this different than any other software industry. Bads management, unrealistic goals, development schedules dictated by marketing... this is true in every aspect of software development. Part of it is the nature of the work, software development is still very new on the industrial time-scale, people haven't reduced it to a science or even an art yet. Look at Microsoft (or any other company), who is incapable of doing anything, no matter how advanced or sophisticated without glaring bugs and obvious flaws. What other industry is like this? Cars have problems, but not like software... and they've had 100 years to figure out how to build them and the product is cheaper, works better, safer and more reliable than even 20 years ago. Software is more powerful, but is it more reliable? Cheaper? Safer? Or is the software industry driving the hardware industry, which in turn drives the software industry, forcing us to upgrade endlessly depsite the fact that we all own supercomputers by the standards of the 1980's. For games this is understandable, but for word processing?
The other issue, which sets games apart is just that... unless word processing, or spreadsheets or browsers or any of the other 95% of things that computers are used for, pushing the technological boundaries isn't necessary and in fact causes as many problems as it solves. With games, pushing the limits is integral to the experience. How do you think id has stayed in business releasing the same game over and over for 15 years, because each new release pushes the technology in new ways and makes the experience more intense and immersive. Can you really say the same need exists for word processing. As a casual user, I could do anything I would ever want to do with a WP program 10 years ago or more.
Anyhow, I guess I've rambled long enough. I love games and would be a hell of a game designer, because it's been an interest of mine since I was designing war games with graph paper and dymo labels for counters in middle school, and I've dabbled in rewriting one of the older roguelikes, but I wouldn't want to be in this industry... I'd rather have a life. And even though I wor in other software fields, about once every three months I swear I'm going to chuck it all and become a teacher.
Maybe the "crunch time" is a little more extreme in game development, but I don't think it is unique and it certainly isn't necessary. It's just how business works. If we knew how to do it better, our society would be much more advanced than it is now... and in another few generations, it probably will be.
Yeah, but Joe Twelve-pack won't have his XP firewall turned on if he doesn't know to enable it... at least not until XP service pack 2.
Could all virus and worm writers just lay off for a couple months? Thank you.
Forget bad coding for a minute... Microsoft wouldn't have half the problems they have if they would simply not choose the most perversely stupid default settings.
Yeah, I could have guessed that. I think a lot of people are using your /. account to post. I see that username dozens of times in every story.
I'm surprised that the classic "xyzzy" isn't in the list. Other words I would have expected to see "fred", "bofh", "windows", and "billgatescanbitemyshinymetalass".
That would be "Ugly Bags of Mostly Harmless Water"
That's OK. Of course, you do know you're going to Hell for playing those things. ;-)
Playability is an interesting thing. It is a rare combination of good UI design, responsiveness (this is crucially important in real-time games) as well as an appropriate level of complexity.
The last is the hardest of all to deal with because I'm convinced that under certain circumstances, the range of complexity where the game feels too simple (like MOO2, which I love, and still play, but I wish it had more depth) and the range of complexity where it feels too much like work (like MOO3, which I've spent a few unfruitful few hours with, but I've got it on order, and will make a real effort to learn it) can almost overlap.
id's games are simple, the mechanics of the game are fluid and don't get in the way of the reality it creates. For what they are trying to do, they've got it right. But I tend to play turn-based games.
Whoa, slow down there, cowboy. I never said there was anything wrong with it. And even if I did, that would hardly be grounds to accuse me of being crazy.
Simply said, it's a simple, albeit fun, idea. I just got tired of it 10 years ago. That's not a psychological problem.
Have fun shooting demons. I hope id sells a million copies. But some of us are looking for something a little more original.
No doubt, playability is a huge factor in the more recent games, as it was in Doom. For all its incredible breakthrough technology, Doom had playability that has rarely been matched by other companies. I didn't mean to short-change them in that regard.
As far as my favorite FPS for playability, I prefer the Descent series. I hope we see another one some day.
Not to mention Windows with improved security...
The go to the Underdogs site, find the great games from the past and enjoy some real gaming.
y thing
I don't even bother with games that are less than about a year old. The market is so ruthless that after that much time, the price is down to $10-$20 and there's a much better chance it will run on my hardware.
Of course, my system is probably pretty lame compared to the hardcore gamer systems, and up until a year ago, my main machine was a dual Celeron 433 machine. Now I run a 1.58 GHz Athlon with last year's nVidia card.
Still, I find no lack of good games to enjoy, despite not being on the cutting edge.
Besides, I went through the whole (games-are-driven-by-graphics-rather-than-gamepla
with my Amiga almost 15 years ago. Once you get past that, you start looking for the right kind of games, regardless of high-tech graphics and other cool stuff. You have more fun and spend less money.
Doom 3 is a good example. id hasn't had a new gaming idea since the original Doom in the early 90's (and that, it could be argued was just an evolution of Wolf 3D, although multi-player counts as a lot). They are wizards at pushing the state-of-the-art in technology, and have refined the idea extensively, but at the end of the day, you'll be running around brown labyrinths shooting demons. I'm sure it will be cool, but it really doesn't interest me. After watching the evolution of Quake from the early descriptions by id to a sleeker, fancier, yet ultimately similar Doom, I realized these guys are graphics hackers (not that that's a bad thing), but not really game hackers.
Yes, I know... I've made this comment before and people chime in about lookspring or rocketjump or nosepick or whatever the newest move is being a huge innovation, but in the end, you are still running around brown labyrinths shooting demons.
Absolutely. It is elegant in its conciseness.
Furthermore, as was stated above, it guarantees preexisting rights. It does not, as many people seem to think, grant those rights. Of course, thanks to an absurdly broad interpretation of the so-called Interstate Commerce clause, the original intent of the Founding Fathers has been subverted to fuel a monstrous centralized government that tries to control all aspects of our lives. (Of course, despite that I think the U.S. is still overall a good place to live, but if we aren't careful it won't stay that way).
The U.S. Constitution is a beautiful document, written by men whose wisdom has seldom been matched in the history of the world, but is very quickly being eroded into irrelevancy by simple-minded, power-hungry politicians who would argue the meaning of the most simple and obvious words, or carelessly loophole our rights away in the interests of "protecting" us.
We will all be perfectly safe the same day we all become criminals.
I agree, but tell that to the government that's imprisoned you.
Last time I checked, it seems the only rights you have in the U.S. are to privacy and to not be offended.
Neither of these are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
The former is a good idea, but it's not there, enamations of penumbras to the contrary. The second has become a defacto 0th amendment of the new Bill of Rights, trumping all others, even though it is ludicrous on its face.
Welcome to the future, where feelings are law and facts are irrelevant.
A major question will be why the patentee waited so long to stake its claim.
Because they're dicks. We've seen this with GIF
1. Obtain a patent to something. (prerequisites: 1. You can fog a mirror 2. You can afford the application fee 3. You have third grade writing skills)
2. Don't enforce it until and unless it becomes a widely used standard.
3. Start threatening people and rake in the cash from those few companies that cave out of fear of the courts.
4. Profit.
5. Laugh at being one of the few people who doesn't have a "???" step.
... because at first I thought it said they were using Raffi to defuse suspicious packages.
I'd moderate you up for funny if I could. Of course, it's not as creepy sounding as "Three Men and a Little Lady PIG"
I hear Gilette has been sitting on the patent for the non-dulling ceramic razor blade for over 30 years! Those evil corporations!
Actually, to be honest it's probably the Stonecutters! After all, they admitted to stifling the electric car and adoption of the metric system. And we all know that despite his Oscar-worthy performance in "Three Men and a Baby", Steve Guttenberg wouldn't be nearly as popular...
They will charge 10x the cost per byte of every other possible solution. ZIP disks were obsolete 6 years ago as far as I was concerned, since CD-R or CD-RW stored more for a tiny fraction of the cost per byte and were more reliable and nearly as fast. If ZIP's had been priced at a dollar a piece in 1996, or Jaz's at $20 a piece, they would own the removeable magnetic media market today, but they have always arrogantly refused to lower their prices, dooming their products, good or bad, to oblivion. I used a Jaz drive for a couple of years to take data back and forth to work every day, but it soon became far easier and essentially cheaper to stick a harddrive in a removeable chassis. I've never considered IOmega products since. They were outrageously expensive and less useable compared all the alternatives.
Around 1994, I remember picking up a 340MB hard drive from MicroCenter or CompUSA (maybe they were SoftwareHouse back then) during their Buck-a-Meg sale. 10 years later the typical harddrive costs less than a dollar a gig, but Zip disks are still roughly the same price (with a factor of 1.5 or 2). Who needs 'em? For portable storage, I have a 256MB SD card in a little USB widgie that fits in my pocket and set me back about $70 total, and I don't need a friggin' drive to read the media. I can use any USB-equipped machine or my PocketPC.
This product could be really good, but if the media cost more than a dollar a gig, I can't imagine ever buying it. And with the drive at MSRP'ing at $400 or so, even that wouldn't cut it. I'd just as soon buy a stack of DVD-R's and another 250GB drive.