Lightsabers aren't traditional swords, and Jedi not traditional swordsmen, therefore I think it a little far-fetched to expect much in the way of historical realism from something such as this.
If you're looking for authenticity in sword fighting, you might try something like Rob Roy instead of a science-fiction flick.
Oh man, memories. I thought those things were so fantastic.
A friend of mine had one that had a "game" on it; basically numbers would march across the screen and you'd have to match them on the calculator and type them in to "shoot" them down before they reached the left side of the display.
I begged my parents for one when I was a kid, and used to think about all the unbelievably fun things I would do with the calculator watch (?).
I finally got one, when they were cheap enough to be out of vogue. By that time it wasn't nearly as cool, and it broke in a few months anyway. I think by that time I had a digital watch that turned into a miniature Transformer.
If they want to adapt something from White Wolf, why not make a script based on Vampire: The Masquerade?
They already did, it was called Underworld. No, not precisely based off White Wolf's game, but enough so that WW filed a lawsuit. And the actors all look and behave like bad LARPers, so really, I think it works.
So beware this discovery of games by Madison Avenue: prepare to find the games you've paid for to interrupt your play for commercials, or to sacrifice playability to product placements.
I'm prepared. I'm also prepared to take such a game right back to the store, or put it in the trash bin, and never purchase another game from that company again, assuming I was deceived enough to purchase it in the first place.
I have no problem voting with my dollar where such things are concerned.
"And I also predict that in the future Valve will employ teams of jackbooted thugs to come to your door and shoot you in the face if they catch you using a CD crack..."
Okay, never mind the unthinking, chicken-little attitude of this article. Never mind the technological "predictions" that are often nothing short of ludicrous (a game that deletes the older levels as you play? What game company would do such a thing, and why?) Never mind the article's total ignorance of market forces, i.e. assuming that players will just put up with one staggering inconvenience after another and never migrate to an easier-to-use entertainment medium (isn't this why we have been hearing about the "death of the PC" for so long anyway)? This guy just needs to plain old proofread:
"Quake players didn't need to with for a no-CD hack and Half-life players didn't need to connect to a master server to play single-player games, but DooM III and Half-life 2 owners just might have to."
Apparently he's so curmudgeonly he's started speaking his own language.
Maybe I am just a naive Pollyanna, but if I saw any video game on the shelf that required a monthly subscription fee, no physical media, and gigabytes of downloading to play, I'd leave it there without a second thought. I'd like to think there are others out there who would say the same. (Note: I know there are MMORPGs out there that are already somewhat like this, but I don't play them.)
Let's get one thing clear right now... if you researchers think that's going to stop or even slow down the tide of 'virgin comic book guy living in his parent's basement' jokes around here, you are sadly mistaken!
...is knowing how successful this spam becomes. I get a lot of it, and I have to think that you'd have to be beyond merely dim or technically inept to take it seriously -- you'd have to be insane or have some sort of debilitating head injury. (Granted, that still may leave a lot of the Internet covered, but still).
Spammers seem to have a lot of success when they're emulating more legitimate sources like Ebay, Microsoft, etc., but I get spam now that can't even seem to decide what it's selling. The subject line says "get rid of mortgage payments" and the body is selling "V.I.A.G.01331.A." I'm not even sure what I'd be getting if I were dull enough to actually click on anything in the message. Heck, I'm not sure if even the SPAMMERS know.
I'd be interested to know if these spams are as successful as past efforts have been.
I don't know that they were really seeking to "fool" anyone at all. The game is pretty up-front about what it is as far as I could tell.
I disagree that skill and strategy are not major factors. I personally spent a lot of money on the game (more than I should have), and have been beated by players with inferior decks who play very cleverly.
AFAIK, you can play the "simple" game with a small deck of common cards for no money... just to get a feel for it, or play a simple game. Sure, it's a bit stripped down, but no cost involved.
A starter pack is like $15, roughly equivalent to what something like Bejeweled would cost. And buying a ton of cards doesn't really net you much (I know, I blew a wad on this game when I first started playing, and it hasn't given me a commanding edge by any means).
I don't know, I think it fits. Half the girl gamers I know pose as guys when playing online. It's the only way they can get anything done without legions of nerds making clumsy passes at them.
Yeah, sorry to speak from my own personal experience instead of yours. Next time I'll don my telepathy helmet before posting.
I work for a university that used to have a Zip drive in every machine. Now the machines all have CD burners and the Zip drives are in the closets or the trash. And the (prohibitively expensive) media is no longer for sale in the university bookstore, though they still do business in the much older floppy disk.
So yes, I'm sure there are people who still use them, but they've certainly fallen out of heavy use where I work, and none too soon as far as I am concerned.
I watched this a while back, when the Fellowship movie came out. Call me crazy (and yeah, you will by the time I'm done here), but I actually find that video kind of charming in its own stupid, campy way.
I mean, it's bad -- really terrible -- anyone talking about Jackson's interpretation of LotR making Tolkien roll over in his grave really ought to have a gander at this.
But I find a kind of endearing naivete in the way this is put together... "Let's have Leonard Nimoy sing a song about Bilbo Baggins, and put him in a junkyard with a bunch of teenaged girls... and here at the part where he's describing all these battles and adventures, let's just have the kids throw some crap up in the air. That's kind of like re-enacting a battle. Here, take this piece of plastic junk, that looks like a ring... have Leonard toss that around awhile. Yeah, yeah."
And then someone put money into it (granted, not much). And produced it. And shot it. And put it on the air.
If they made something like this today (shudder), it would be awash in irony and campy winks to the audience. I think whomever made this genuinely thought it would be entertaining as presented... which, again, is so innocent I think it's great.
The entertainment media we get these days is, for the most part, slickly produced and well-budgeted, maybe even well-written if you're lucky. This dippy little movie is none of these and still gives it all it's got.
William Shatner recorded a couple of bad records, what, back in the Sixties? Longer ago than most Slashdotters have been alive. Since then he's done a couple of appearances on SNL and that thing with Fear of Pop, written some bad novels, some priceline commercials... not exactly a man constantly in the public eye, despite, perhaps, his best efforts to the contrary.
And yet, whenever a discussion of Shatner comes up, it seems everyone shouts "Yeah, Captain Kirk, sure, but did you know he recorded Mister Tambourine Man! Mister... Tambourine...Man!" (Doing the wildly exaggerated "Captain Kirk" impression which, despite watching a lot of classic Star Trek, I've never actually seen him do.)
The fact that people can't seem to stop talking about a musical recording he made four decades ago probably gave him the idea that that's what his "fans" wanted. Way to go, guys!
I see one of two things happening here:
1) It will be so bad it will finally kill off the immortal cachet generated by his original recordings back in the 60s.
2) It will be so bad it will make him immortal for another forty years.
Personally, I hope it's the latter. The world would be a more boring place without William Shatner.
Ah yes, Ambrosia Software... finally, in the year 2003, you can play an updated version of Xevious! On your Mac! The future is now!
Seriously, this game came bundled with my iBook, touted as a game with "cutting-edge sound and graphics." Um. It's Xevious. Neat game and all, but I kinda played it before... in 1982!
I love Rockstar Games and the GTA series remains one of my all-time favorites. I respect the fact that Rockstar makes its living being as controversial and over-the-top as they feel like, and generally don't compromise. To some extent, I can even get behind the fairly brainless conceit of this game (you're a psychopath, go hit people in the head and light them on fire... mission successful!)
But I've played this demo, and it's pretty much junk. Dated graphics (and I say this as someone who is not a graphics whore), clunky control scheme, animations which are satisfyingly gruesome the first time but quickly grow repetitive... all in all I think I liked the first Postal better, and honestly that was not very much to begin with. Sure, peeing on everything in sight is fun for awhile (just like in real life!), but the novelty wears off pretty fast. And I say this as someone who's killed many, many hours running over people in GTA3 and trying to find all the hidden jumps, etc. -- so I have a pretty high tolerance for repitition.
If this demo is representative of what the final version of Postal is going to be like, the game is going to be a serious failure. I hope that's not the case, because it seems like the fine folks at Rockstar could do much better than this (and have, years ago now).
"The presence of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on the shelves of national distributors and retailers... continues to constitute a clear and present danger for Haitian nationals in the United States. Residents of Little Haiti (in Miami) have become like a sitting duck," Jean-Robert Lafortune of the Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition told Reuters on Thursday."
So, apparently, all we need to do is just wait a bit, and the massive tidal wave of death, carnage, and destruction will wipe out every last Haitian on the planet, due to the blood-crazed killing madness that is evidently sweeping the nation at this very moment.
So, once all Miami is in flames, no more Haitians... no more fuss. We won't even have to get the courts involved. From what this guy is saying, in fact, it's useless to get them involved anyway... all we can do is declare martial law to try to stem the tide of hate crime devastation.
Unless, of course, Jean-Robert Lafortune is overstating things... just a wee bit.
I mean, I'm all for cultural sensitivity and all, but this guy makes it sound like Haitians are being lynched in the street. What are GTA players going to do? Beat them to death with their PS2 controllers?
What the fuck is wrong with you people? Are your souls dead? Are you so satisfied in your insulated safe little lives, so dependent on the government and society in general providing youwith a safety net that you cannot concive stepping out of it?
Slashdot Mirror
This is great work, but you could make this article much shorter in one easy step:
1) Peter Jackson's work is a movie, not a book.
Done.
Lightsabers aren't traditional swords, and Jedi not traditional swordsmen, therefore I think it a little far-fetched to expect much in the way of historical realism from something such as this.
If you're looking for authenticity in sword fighting, you might try something like Rob Roy instead of a science-fiction flick.
Oh man, memories. I thought those things were so fantastic.
A friend of mine had one that had a "game" on it; basically numbers would march across the screen and you'd have to match them on the calculator and type them in to "shoot" them down before they reached the left side of the display.
I begged my parents for one when I was a kid, and used to think about all the unbelievably fun things I would do with the calculator watch (?).
I finally got one, when they were cheap enough to be out of vogue. By that time it wasn't nearly as cool, and it broke in a few months anyway. I think by that time I had a digital watch that turned into a miniature Transformer.
If they want to adapt something from White Wolf, why not make a script based on Vampire: The Masquerade?
They already did, it was called Underworld. No, not precisely based off White Wolf's game, but enough so that WW filed a lawsuit. And the actors all look and behave like bad LARPers, so really, I think it works.
So beware this discovery of games by Madison Avenue: prepare to find the games you've paid for to interrupt your play for commercials, or to sacrifice playability to product placements.
I'm prepared. I'm also prepared to take such a game right back to the store, or put it in the trash bin, and never purchase another game from that company again, assuming I was deceived enough to purchase it in the first place.
I have no problem voting with my dollar where such things are concerned.
"And I also predict that in the future Valve will employ teams of jackbooted thugs to come to your door and shoot you in the face if they catch you using a CD crack..."
Okay, never mind the unthinking, chicken-little attitude of this article. Never mind the technological "predictions" that are often nothing short of ludicrous (a game that deletes the older levels as you play? What game company would do such a thing, and why?) Never mind the article's total ignorance of market forces, i.e. assuming that players will just put up with one staggering inconvenience after another and never migrate to an easier-to-use entertainment medium (isn't this why we have been hearing about the "death of the PC" for so long anyway)? This guy just needs to plain old proofread:
"Quake players didn't need to with for a no-CD hack and Half-life players didn't need to connect to a master server to play single-player games, but DooM III and Half-life 2 owners just might have to."
Apparently he's so curmudgeonly he's started speaking his own language.
Maybe I am just a naive Pollyanna, but if I saw any video game on the shelf that required a monthly subscription fee, no physical media, and gigabytes of downloading to play, I'd leave it there without a second thought. I'd like to think there are others out there who would say the same. (Note: I know there are MMORPGs out there that are already somewhat like this, but I don't play them.)
New study shatters Internet 'geek' image
Let's get one thing clear right now... if you researchers think that's going to stop or even slow down the tide of 'virgin comic book guy living in his parent's basement' jokes around here, you are sadly mistaken!
We won't let you destroy our beloved tradition!
...is knowing how successful this spam becomes. I get a lot of it, and I have to think that you'd have to be beyond merely dim or technically inept to take it seriously -- you'd have to be insane or have some sort of debilitating head injury. (Granted, that still may leave a lot of the Internet covered, but still).
Spammers seem to have a lot of success when they're emulating more legitimate sources like Ebay, Microsoft, etc., but I get spam now that can't even seem to decide what it's selling. The subject line says "get rid of mortgage payments" and the body is selling "V.I.A.G.01331.A." I'm not even sure what I'd be getting if I were dull enough to actually click on anything in the message. Heck, I'm not sure if even the SPAMMERS know.
I'd be interested to know if these spams are as successful as past efforts have been.
I don't know that they were really seeking to "fool" anyone at all. The game is pretty up-front about what it is as far as I could tell.
I disagree that skill and strategy are not major factors. I personally spent a lot of money on the game (more than I should have), and have been beated by players with inferior decks who play very cleverly.
AFAIK, you can play the "simple" game with a small deck of common cards for no money... just to get a feel for it, or play a simple game. Sure, it's a bit stripped down, but no cost involved.
A starter pack is like $15, roughly equivalent to what something like Bejeweled would cost. And buying a ton of cards doesn't really net you much (I know, I blew a wad on this game when I first started playing, and it hasn't given me a commanding edge by any means).
Cue flood of "Bush Invades Mars" and WMD jokes in 3...2...1...
I don't know, I think it fits. Half the girl gamers I know pose as guys when playing online. It's the only way they can get anything done without legions of nerds making clumsy passes at them.
Yeah, sorry to speak from my own personal experience instead of yours. Next time I'll don my telepathy helmet before posting.
I work for a university that used to have a Zip drive in every machine. Now the machines all have CD burners and the Zip drives are in the closets or the trash. And the (prohibitively expensive) media is no longer for sale in the university bookstore, though they still do business in the much older floppy disk.
So yes, I'm sure there are people who still use them, but they've certainly fallen out of heavy use where I work, and none too soon as far as I am concerned.
Emphasis on "was." I ripped mine out years ago and I don't know of anyone who uses them now. Nor have I seen the media for sale in a long time.
I watched this a while back, when the Fellowship movie came out. Call me crazy (and yeah, you will by the time I'm done here), but I actually find that video kind of charming in its own stupid, campy way.
I mean, it's bad -- really terrible -- anyone talking about Jackson's interpretation of LotR making Tolkien roll over in his grave really ought to have a gander at this.
But I find a kind of endearing naivete in the way this is put together... "Let's have Leonard Nimoy sing a song about Bilbo Baggins, and put him in a junkyard with a bunch of teenaged girls... and here at the part where he's describing all these battles and adventures, let's just have the kids throw some crap up in the air. That's kind of like re-enacting a battle. Here, take this piece of plastic junk, that looks like a ring... have Leonard toss that around awhile. Yeah, yeah."
And then someone put money into it (granted, not much). And produced it. And shot it. And put it on the air.
If they made something like this today (shudder), it would be awash in irony and campy winks to the audience. I think whomever made this genuinely thought it would be entertaining as presented... which, again, is so innocent I think it's great.
The entertainment media we get these days is, for the most part, slickly produced and well-budgeted, maybe even well-written if you're lucky. This dippy little movie is none of these and still gives it all it's got.
Yeah, I know, I'm weird.
You people have no one but yourselves to blame!
William Shatner recorded a couple of bad records, what, back in the Sixties? Longer ago than most Slashdotters have been alive. Since then he's done a couple of appearances on SNL and that thing with Fear of Pop, written some bad novels, some priceline commercials... not exactly a man constantly in the public eye, despite, perhaps, his best efforts to the contrary.
And yet, whenever a discussion of Shatner comes up, it seems everyone shouts "Yeah, Captain Kirk, sure, but did you know he recorded Mister Tambourine Man! Mister... Tambourine...Man!" (Doing the wildly exaggerated "Captain Kirk" impression which, despite watching a lot of classic Star Trek, I've never actually seen him do.)
The fact that people can't seem to stop talking about a musical recording he made four decades ago probably gave him the idea that that's what his "fans" wanted. Way to go, guys!
I see one of two things happening here:
1) It will be so bad it will finally kill off the immortal cachet generated by his original recordings back in the 60s.
2) It will be so bad it will make him immortal for another forty years.
Personally, I hope it's the latter. The world would be a more boring place without William Shatner.
D'oh!
Seriously, this game came bundled with my iBook, touted as a game with "cutting-edge sound and graphics." Um. It's Xevious. Neat game and all, but I kinda played it before... in 1982!
Coincidence? I think not, sir!
I love Rockstar Games and the GTA series remains one of my all-time favorites. I respect the fact that Rockstar makes its living being as controversial and over-the-top as they feel like, and generally don't compromise. To some extent, I can even get behind the fairly brainless conceit of this game (you're a psychopath, go hit people in the head and light them on fire... mission successful!)
But I've played this demo, and it's pretty much junk. Dated graphics (and I say this as someone who is not a graphics whore), clunky control scheme, animations which are satisfyingly gruesome the first time but quickly grow repetitive... all in all I think I liked the first Postal better, and honestly that was not very much to begin with. Sure, peeing on everything in sight is fun for awhile (just like in real life!), but the novelty wears off pretty fast. And I say this as someone who's killed many, many hours running over people in GTA3 and trying to find all the hidden jumps, etc. -- so I have a pretty high tolerance for repitition.
If this demo is representative of what the final version of Postal is going to be like, the game is going to be a serious failure. I hope that's not the case, because it seems like the fine folks at Rockstar could do much better than this (and have, years ago now).
I got a rock.
Now I have acronym headache.
Oh, for mod points.
You summed up exactly what I wanted to say brilliantly. I salute you.
"The presence of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on the shelves of national distributors and retailers ... continues to constitute a clear and present danger for Haitian nationals in the United States. Residents of Little Haiti (in Miami) have become like a sitting duck," Jean-Robert Lafortune of the Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition told Reuters on Thursday."
So, apparently, all we need to do is just wait a bit, and the massive tidal wave of death, carnage, and destruction will wipe out every last Haitian on the planet, due to the blood-crazed killing madness that is evidently sweeping the nation at this very moment.
So, once all Miami is in flames, no more Haitians... no more fuss. We won't even have to get the courts involved. From what this guy is saying, in fact, it's useless to get them involved anyway... all we can do is declare martial law to try to stem the tide of hate crime devastation.
Unless, of course, Jean-Robert Lafortune is overstating things... just a wee bit.
I mean, I'm all for cultural sensitivity and all, but this guy makes it sound like Haitians are being lynched in the street. What are GTA players going to do? Beat them to death with their PS2 controllers?
What the fuck is wrong with you people? Are your souls dead? Are you so satisfied in your insulated safe little lives, so dependent on the government and society in general providing youwith a safety net that you cannot concive stepping out of it?
Ah, you must be new here.