1.) Black and White may be pretty but it is a horribly boring game.
2.) Blizzard wants people to be in US/Canada so that everyone can be close in timezones. Thus there will be more people online during the beta.
3.) Blizzard also doesn't feel like paying shipping to everywhere in the world.
4.) Can you imagine if someone in Hong Kong or Taiwan won a beta? There'd be $3 Warcraft 3 Beta CDs for sale all throughout Asia, and they'd probably set up their own Battle.net so they could play without Blizzard shutting off that CD Key.
Diablo and Diablo II were just shallow graphical ripoffs of Roguelike RPG games. Go play Nethack, Angband, or ADOM. They have much more depth and gameplay, although they are lacking in storyline.
Diablo was good for its time, but Diablo II isn't. It barely improved....
Another note. All the BGH games are on Fastest speed, which turns the game into a test of how quick you can click instead of a test of strategy. Blizzard even stated somewhere that Fastest and Slowest had both been joke settings i.e. "LOL look how my marine is walking in slow motion" or "lol look my zergling is hyperactive". Except the idiots made it so that if you actually try to set the game to something below Fastest you get cursed at.
You can't do "anything" with the trigger system. It is just a simple scripting language intended to make single player campaign maps. Instead everyone felt the need to try to turn Starcraft into something else: If you want to play an RPG, go buy Baldur's Gate II. If you want to play Pokemon, go buy Pokemon. If you want to bomb Bin Laden, join the USAF. The fact is that all these "conversions" have the same units, tilesets, sounds, spells, etc.. of original Starcraft. And for the most part they all suck. (And the idiots who make them fell the need to name the files in all caps, l33t speak, and using nonstandard characters: you get filenames like "+åßßß$|\|1pe|2 P@1n+ß@ll GOLD ULTRA FINAL VERSION V2.08!@!@(TM).scx" which actually cause problems with the Windows filesystem if you ever feel like moving them or deleting them or something)
Trigger Maps along with Hunters/BGH ruined Starcraft for everyone except the *very* good and the morons. There are basically three types of games running in Starcraft:
1)High level ladder games. You have to be either a very good Korean, or a cheater, or both, to have any chance up here.
2)BGH with morons.
3)Crapass trigger maps with morons.
I really wish Warcraft 3 would not include multiplayer Trigger maps, but it probably will, and within a few months it will probably descend into the same idiocy as Starcraft.
Find the "Warcraft Battlechest" in your friendly local computer games store. It has Warcraft I, Warcraft II, and the Warcraft II expansion.
The original Battlechest is probably about $10 now and I think I saw the Battle.net (you can play Warcraft II over the Internet) enabled version of the Battlechest for like $20.
Warcraft I is way too old to enjoy now, but it was good for its time and you will want to play it to see how everything started. Warcraft II is definitely an all time classic.
I tried looking through all the files to get an understanding of this but it is way beyond me. Those guys are too l33t I guess.
The most understanding I could get was that you were supposed to write up your own C code to 0wn the victim, and insert it into the w00aimexp.c source file, compile, and then when you run the exploit it will cause that C code to be run on the victim's computer. Am I right? I gotta learn to program sometime.
I was looking at the TV license website and they claim they have vans that can pick up the signals of a specific TV component.
Their wording made it seem like they require some sort of locator beacon to be built into every British TV. Is this the case or do their vans just pick up escaped EM radiation from the TV? If there is a beacon, do any of you ever open up your TVs and disable it? Or how about putting your TV inside a Faraday Cage?
I don't know how you guys over there can support this as it seems from some of the other posts, having officers running around in vans and knocking on your door to make sure you don't have something completely harmless in your house without their approval seems way too big brother to me...
I agree, her character was pretty damn stupid. First she puts the sword to Aragorn's neck for no damn reason. Then she runs like hell to the ford to deliver her big stupid "come and claim him" line. Then they have that annoying tacked-on romance scene...
- Aragorn draws his FULL LENGTH sword?!?!?
I guess they felt it was better for him to have a sword instead of just fighting baddies with his fists...
- Big argument at the Council of Elrond. Never happened.
There's a little bit of argument in the books, but in the books it is more subdued and drawn out. It would be boring in the movie
- Merry and Pippin setting off Gandalf's fireworks. In Harry Potter (a fine movie adaptation of a book), maybe, but here it is gratuitous comic relief.
It's also their character - like Pippin knocking down the skeleton in Moria or looking into the Palantir later, they like to fiddle with things and screw stuff up.
- The cave troll troll never was never part of the fight in Moria (Frodo stabbed him with Sting and he ran away), yet they devoted a whole fight scene to it.
Don't be such a purist. It makes for a cool fight scene, they needed something big to fight.
- Saruman bringing down an avalanche from Caradhras? Umm, no.
Needed for the movie adaptation. In the book they just struggle for a while and give up, movie needs it to be more exciting. I did want to see Gandalf use his magic to burn a path through the snow though...
- Shadowfax seems to have gone to the glue factory.
If I remember the books right right Gandalf got Shadowfax before Frodo set off, but then he doesn't have the horse when they meet up at Rivendell. I forget where it was during this time, but I hope to see shadowfax in the next movies.
- In the book, Gollum doesn't get mentioned until the Fellowship is on the river. He never says "gollum", either.
Frodo saw Gollum in Moria. In Gollum's description in The Hobbit, he is given that name because he has a habit of often saying "gollum".
- Neither Boromir nor any of the other characters (with one major exception MUCH later) touches the Ring.
I don't remember them touching the ring in the movie.. Boromir picked it up by the chain and looked at it but he didn't touch it...
- Saruman is represented as being completely under Sauron's thumb, which wasn't the case at all.
They do portray him as too much on Sauron's side but when he asks the head Uruk Hai "Who Do you serve?" he answers "Saruman" NOT "Sauron"...
- Elendil and Isildur look like refugees from a Seattle grunge band. Actually, that whole intro was completely unnecessary and lame. Jackson wasted all the suspense potential of the first half of the book in favor of a big crowd-pleasing CGI fight scene. Bah.
I missed about the first two minutes, so I can't comment on this part...
- Saruman shows Gandalf the Palantir before he imprisons him??????? Whaaaaat????
I don't have any comment to this one really...
You have an overly purist view. If they made the movie scene for scene and word for word from the book it would probably come out sucking. You missed a lot, especially since you didn't complain about it any, I am assuming you missed the Balrog/ Bridge of Khazad Dum scene which was the best part of the movies...
I have three (1 big, 2 small) complaints about the movie though:
1)Isengard looks too much like a park when Gandalf first gets there. Especially those chain+post things along the path. I was just like "WTF! Why is he in a fuckin park!" when I first saw that.
2)When I heard Boromir's horn I thought a Mack truck had parked itself right outside the theater and proceeded to blast the air horn.
3) The big complaint - Galadriel's temptation with the ring was way too overdone. The visual and audio effects were just garish and stupid. In the book it mentioned that she looked more powerful and stuff when Frodo offered her the ring, not like a possessed demonic monster..
I think maybe some people should reconsider using these systems, it wont happen, but if people atleast turned them off when they wern't around, there would be a lot less of a bandwith problem going around...
If people turned them off when they weren't around, there would be a lot less filesharing too. A lot of people leave their computers on all the time sharing files on irc, WinMX, Morpheus/Kazaa, it is the basis of the system. If everyone turned the stuff off as soon as they downloaded whatever they wanted, pretty soon no one would be able to get anything...
It would be interesting to setup a filesharing service throughout the apartment. Probably gnutella or something could be set up to search the apartment complex before the whole Internet, thus if whatever you want to download has already been downloaded by someone else in the apartment building you could get it from them off the gigabit Ethernet instead of off some guy with an upload capped 128kbit Cable line....
It would have to have anonymity though, you wouldn't want your next door neighbor being able to find out exactly what sick fetishes are in your pr0n collection.
Do a Google search on Schrodinger's Cat. Basically it is a situation where under the theories of quantum physics you could have a cat that is both alive and dead at the same time. It is theoretically possible but as I understand it practically impossible, because you would need a container (commonly called the Cat Box) which *NOTHING* could penetrate...
Sauron, the badguy, invested the majority of his power into making the One Ring. Thus, he cannot make it again because, he needs it back so he can get his full power back and conquer Middle Earth, and when the Ring is destroyed Sauron also dies.
Never read it, but some people I know who have tell me it's crap.
>>>Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Good stuff...
>>>J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
This one is very nice, although I had an English teacher ruin it for me by trying to find symbolism and metaphors and all that bullcrap everywhere.
>>>Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
Absolute garbage. They tool around in Africa being racist and killing black people and such, and oh look theres some guy whos lording it over the natives and getting it on with the native women till he gets sick and dies, and thats such an interesting look into the human psyche... BS.
>>>Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire Never read, don't know anyone who has, no comment....
By any chance are you an English teacher? 2 of those books I had to read for English classes in the past few years, and people in non-Honors classes had to read 2 of the others....
English teachers have the disturbing habit of ruining otherwise good books by making you fool around trying to overanalyze them and tear apart all the symbolism, and if there isn't any symbolism to be found you have to make it up. Then write a paper full of whatever BS explanations you can find to connect the book with a theme or a quote or a thesis or some such like that...
Serious Sam has a COOP mode, and I guess Serious Sam 2 (coming out soon) will also have one. It's fun to take on the final boss with a whole bunch of people.
Tim
Re:Neverwinter Nights For Linux
on
Uplink
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Bioware is releasing a Linux version at the same time it releases a Linux version
In other gaming news, Blizzard will release the Windows version of Warcraft III on the SAME DAY as the Windows version of Warcraft III is released.
Back to World News, when Osama bin Laden is caught and executed by the US experts predict that he will die at the same time...
TI calculators are programmed either in TI-BASIC, which you only need the calculator to do, or in assembly, but then you need the Computer to Calculator Link Cable and some special software.
It seems to me to be a decent way to learn a little programming. The fact that you can carry it around with you and whenever you are bored whip it out and code a few more lines is a plus factor, not like my computer where when I sit down on it there's a lot more to do that distracts me from ever learning how to program on it...
The whole point of hacking is to make things work above their abilities. I wrote a multiplayer Tic Tac Toe type game for the TI-83 that worked over the link cable, which was pretty cool. (Turns out though that the link cable connection isn't good enough to do anything requiring speed or anything close to two way communication, so any multiplayer action type games are out...)
For a lark I am now programming a 3D Wireframe Renderer for my TI-83. It reads XYZ points from a matrix variable and then reads which points to connect with lines from another matrix variable. It is pretty cool, not useful for anything, but still cool.
Slashdot Mirror
1.) Black and White may be pretty but it is a horribly boring game.
2.) Blizzard wants people to be in US/Canada so that everyone can be close in timezones. Thus there will be more people online during the beta.
3.) Blizzard also doesn't feel like paying shipping to everywhere in the world.
4.) Can you imagine if someone in Hong Kong or Taiwan won a beta? There'd be $3 Warcraft 3 Beta CDs for sale all throughout Asia, and they'd probably set up their own Battle.net so they could play without Blizzard shutting off that CD Key.
Tim
Diablo and Diablo II were just shallow graphical ripoffs of Roguelike RPG games. Go play Nethack, Angband, or ADOM. They have much more depth and gameplay, although they are lacking in storyline.
Diablo was good for its time, but Diablo II isn't. It barely improved....
Tim
Blizzard does not require you to sign an NDA for their beta tests.
Adding text waiting for the 20 seconds to pass... fuck me for typing fast!
Tim
Another note. All the BGH games are on Fastest speed, which turns the game into a test of how quick you can click instead of a test of strategy. Blizzard even stated somewhere that Fastest and Slowest had both been joke settings i.e. "LOL look how my marine is walking in slow motion" or "lol look my zergling is hyperactive". Except the idiots made it so that if you actually try to set the game to something below Fastest you get cursed at.
Tim
You can't do "anything" with the trigger system. It is just a simple scripting language intended to make single player campaign maps. Instead everyone felt the need to try to turn Starcraft into something else: If you want to play an RPG, go buy Baldur's Gate II. If you want to play Pokemon, go buy Pokemon. If you want to bomb Bin Laden, join the USAF. The fact is that all these "conversions" have the same units, tilesets, sounds, spells, etc.. of original Starcraft. And for the most part they all suck. (And the idiots who make them fell the need to name the files in all caps, l33t speak, and using nonstandard characters: you get filenames like "+åßßß$|\|1pe|2 P@1n+ß@ll GOLD ULTRA FINAL VERSION V2.08!@!@(TM).scx" which actually cause problems with the Windows filesystem if you ever feel like moving them or deleting them or something)
Trigger Maps along with Hunters/BGH ruined Starcraft for everyone except the *very* good and the morons. There are basically three types of games running in Starcraft:
1)High level ladder games. You have to be either a very good Korean, or a cheater, or both, to have any chance up here.
2)BGH with morons.
3)Crapass trigger maps with morons.
I really wish Warcraft 3 would not include multiplayer Trigger maps, but it probably will, and within a few months it will probably descend into the same idiocy as Starcraft.
Tim
Find the "Warcraft Battlechest" in your friendly local computer games store. It has Warcraft I, Warcraft II, and the Warcraft II expansion.
The original Battlechest is probably about $10 now and I think I saw the Battle.net (you can play Warcraft II over the Internet) enabled version of the Battlechest for like $20.
Warcraft I is way too old to enjoy now, but it was good for its time and you will want to play it to see how everything started. Warcraft II is definitely an all time classic.
Tim
I tried looking through all the files to get an understanding of this but it is way beyond me. Those guys are too l33t I guess.
The most understanding I could get was that you were supposed to write up your own C code to 0wn the victim, and insert it into the w00aimexp.c source file, compile, and then when you run the exploit it will cause that C code to be run on the victim's computer. Am I right? I gotta learn to program sometime.
Tim
I was looking at the TV license website and they claim they have vans that can pick up the signals of a specific TV component.
Their wording made it seem like they require some sort of locator beacon to be built into every British TV. Is this the case or do their vans just pick up escaped EM radiation from the TV? If there is a beacon, do any of you ever open up your TVs and disable it? Or how about putting your TV inside a Faraday Cage?
I don't know how you guys over there can support this as it seems from some of the other posts, having officers running around in vans and knocking on your door to make sure you don't have something completely harmless in your house without their approval seems way too big brother to me...
Tim
But all the people with the really good cars would make you give them copies of 2 or 3 cars before they would let you copy one of theirs.
And if you don't already have a car to trade, then you have to wait in line forever before you can copy someone else's car.
I guess they felt it was better for him to have a sword instead of just fighting baddies with his fists...
There's a little bit of argument in the books, but in the books it is more subdued and drawn out. It would be boring in the movie It's also their character - like Pippin knocking down the skeleton in Moria or looking into the Palantir later, they like to fiddle with things and screw stuff up.
Don't be such a purist. It makes for a cool fight scene, they needed something big to fight.
Needed for the movie adaptation. In the book they just struggle for a while and give up, movie needs it to be more exciting. I did want to see Gandalf use his magic to burn a path through the snow though...
If I remember the books right right Gandalf got Shadowfax before Frodo set off, but then he doesn't have the horse when they meet up at Rivendell. I forget where it was during this time, but I hope to see shadowfax in the next movies.Frodo saw Gollum in Moria. In Gollum's description in The Hobbit, he is given that name because he has a habit of often saying "gollum".
I don't remember them touching the ring in the movie.. Boromir picked it up by the chain and looked at it but he didn't touch it...
They do portray him as too much on Sauron's side but when he asks the head Uruk Hai "Who Do you serve?" he answers "Saruman" NOT "Sauron"...
I missed about the first two minutes, so I can't comment on this part...
I don't have any comment to this one really...
You have an overly purist view. If they made the movie scene for scene and word for word from the book it would probably come out sucking. You missed a lot, especially since you didn't complain about it any, I am assuming you missed the Balrog/ Bridge of Khazad Dum scene which was the best part of the movies...
I have three (1 big, 2 small) complaints about the movie though:
1)Isengard looks too much like a park when Gandalf first gets there. Especially those chain+post things along the path. I was just like "WTF! Why is he in a fuckin park!" when I first saw that.
2)When I heard Boromir's horn I thought a Mack truck had parked itself right outside the theater and proceeded to blast the air horn.
3) The big complaint - Galadriel's temptation with the ring was way too overdone. The visual and audio effects were just garish and stupid. In the book it mentioned that she looked more powerful and stuff when Frodo offered her the ring, not like a possessed demonic monster..
Tim
If people turned them off when they weren't around, there would be a lot less filesharing too. A lot of people leave their computers on all the time sharing files on irc, WinMX, Morpheus/Kazaa, it is the basis of the system. If everyone turned the stuff off as soon as they downloaded whatever they wanted, pretty soon no one would be able to get anything...
Tim
It would be interesting to setup a filesharing service throughout the apartment. Probably gnutella or something could be set up to search the apartment complex before the whole Internet, thus if whatever you want to download has already been downloaded by someone else in the apartment building you could get it from them off the gigabit Ethernet instead of off some guy with an upload capped 128kbit Cable line....
It would have to have anonymity though, you wouldn't want your next door neighbor being able to find out exactly what sick fetishes are in your pr0n collection.
Tim
I don't see your e-mail address anywhere... I was going to send you something as a joke...
Tim
Do a Google search on Schrodinger's Cat. Basically it is a situation where under the theories of quantum physics you could have a cat that is both alive and dead at the same time. It is theoretically possible but as I understand it practically impossible, because you would need a container (commonly called the Cat Box) which *NOTHING* could penetrate...
Tim
Sauron, the badguy, invested the majority of his power into making the One Ring. Thus, he cannot make it again because, he needs it back so he can get his full power back and conquer Middle Earth, and when the Ring is destroyed Sauron also dies.
Tim
>>>William Golding - Lord of the Flies
Never read it, but some people I know who have tell me it's crap.
>>>Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Good stuff...
>>>J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
This one is very nice, although I had an English teacher ruin it for me by trying to find symbolism and metaphors and all that bullcrap everywhere.
>>>Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
Absolute garbage. They tool around in Africa being racist and killing black people and such, and oh look theres some guy whos lording it over the natives and getting it on with the native women till he gets sick and dies, and thats such an interesting look into the human psyche... BS.
>>>Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire
Never read, don't know anyone who has, no comment....
By any chance are you an English teacher? 2 of those books I had to read for English classes in the past few years, and people in non-Honors classes had to read 2 of the others....
English teachers have the disturbing habit of ruining otherwise good books by making you fool around trying to overanalyze them and tear apart all the symbolism, and if there isn't any symbolism to be found you have to make it up. Then write a paper full of whatever BS explanations you can find to connect the book with a theme or a quote or a thesis or some such like that...
Tim
Tim
The cool part was that you could use said fuel to put out a match. It would only burn when it was very highly pressurized.
Tim
Nowadays on slashdot when you see [yahoo.com] it might as well say [goatse.cx]...
Tim
Serious Sam has a COOP mode, and I guess Serious Sam 2 (coming out soon) will also have one. It's fun to take on the final boss with a whole bunch of people.
Tim
In other gaming news, Blizzard will release the Windows version of Warcraft III on the SAME DAY as the Windows version of Warcraft III is released.
Back to World News, when Osama bin Laden is caught and executed by the US experts predict that he will die at the same time...
Is this site coming up 403 Forbidden for anyone else or have they just decided they want to ban all Verizon DSL users such as myself?
Tim
TI calculators are programmed either in TI-BASIC, which you only need the calculator to do, or in assembly, but then you need the Computer to Calculator Link Cable and some special software.
Tim
It seems to me to be a decent way to learn a little programming. The fact that you can carry it around with you and whenever you are bored whip it out and code a few more lines is a plus factor, not like my computer where when I sit down on it there's a lot more to do that distracts me from ever learning how to program on it...
The whole point of hacking is to make things work above their abilities. I wrote a multiplayer Tic Tac Toe type game for the TI-83 that worked over the link cable, which was pretty cool. (Turns out though that the link cable connection isn't good enough to do anything requiring speed or anything close to two way communication, so any multiplayer action type games are out...)
For a lark I am now programming a 3D Wireframe Renderer for my TI-83. It reads XYZ points from a matrix variable and then reads which points to connect with lines from another matrix variable. It is pretty cool, not useful for anything, but still cool.
Tim
Shouldn't the FBI be out arresting murderers, kidnappers, and terrorists instead of warez kiddies?
Tim