Pretending that a company can compete with government, where government forces everyone to pay for their service, is a terrible twist of the word "competition." It's like saying that Wendy's can "compete" with McDonalds if the government passes a new law that everyone has to pay to eat all their meals at McDonalds, and then can show up and get the food they already had to pay for for no additonal charge. In order to go to Wendy's, you have to also buy a McDonalds meal and throw it away. That's not "free market competition."
This issue is easily resolved.
As you know, the USPS (and similar entities) are sponsered by the government - however, the primary (and most visible fee) is the stamp on the envelope. While you may also have to pay taxes if you don't use the postal service, it is still based around use. Regardless of whether you pay for services you don't use, UPS and Fedex are still prosperous and highly recognized alternatives. These two companies survive against government competition because they specialized in large package shipments.
Municipal-sponsered Internet access can also be set-up in this fashion. The city may have an initial setup fee that appears in taxes - however the municipality has it's main charge for it's usage. Any telcos that want to compete (especially for profit) can attract customers from the municipality by giving service that the municipality can't (e.g. faster speeds, technical support, etc.)
If Canada has developed the concept of a Crown Corporation, then so should the United States. While there isn't usually much competition to crown corporations (because they fill a specific need that for-profit enterprises don't go after), there is competition for at least some of those businesses (e.g. CTV competes with CBC.)
My blogs, and even my Slashdot profile, identify me and who I am. Under the proposed rules that could make the entire publication "an advertisement". No lawyer who wants to keep on being a lawyer is going to take a chance on that.
Of all the people to attempt to deprive of their rights, lawyers would be right at the bottom of my list. They seem quite well equipped to defend themselves.
They are only equipped to deal with threats within the system. As soon as you change the system (e.g. switch to Despotism), lawyers instantly become obsolete since the law has changed overnight. They can retrain themselves, but it does not change the fact that law is on a whim of a despot.
Also, unless you are willing to issue firearms and bulletproof vests to lawyers, they are not able to really defend themselves when their right to safety is threatened. An example of what I'm referring to is an assassination attempt on a lawyer dealing with estate inheritance - who is lucky to even be alive after being shot at seven times (at point blank). Naturally, the assassin has a $2 million bond set for bail - but that's a post-incident defence rather than an active defence.
Of course game demos is an essential method of getting purchases. It worked for the shareware version of Doom, Quake, and the whole slew of games in ~1990-1995.
It's also the reason the "demo" levels tend to be the most polished in the full versions of the game - it's been tested heavily by the users that point out every single flaw in the map/whatever. Compare this to the "final" levels in the retail, which appear to be rushed in order to meet some deadline.
The last game I purchased was Shadowgrounds - based on the demo - and I am now proceeding to take screenshots of every single plot point. Since I took a bundle purchase, I also got Darwinia - a game where I wouldn't have bought otherwise (since it looked like it was a guarenteed victory game, especially on demo difficulty).
If you don't have some sort of demo system, then don't expect as many sales. It's a simple rule, especially with the software gaming industry.
There's also "J-Space for Windows". The only instance I heard about it was in a small book listing cheats for ~101 PC games in circulation at the time.
The tip for that game was don't buy it, since it got 4% -- PC Format's lowest ever rating. Other than that single comment, it seems as if the game disappeared from the face of the Earth. I have no idea why it was bad, since that comment didn't really cite when it was reviewed.
And then there's the "You're at the airport and some people want to inspect what's on your computer" situation
In this situation, having a bootable Win9x partition has the same effect. Say that you need it for "compatability reasons", and install games such as Diablo. A LILO bootloader will help -- unless you configure it to display a menu, the security team will just consider it to be yet another power-on password.
Nowadays, laptop manufacturers do not expect you to use W9x, since it is outside of Microsoft's product lifecycle. Driver availablility may be limited - but at least your data won't be scanned.
As long as encryption is invisible (or has invisible stages), the guards won't be any wiser.
I hate to tell you this, but there was a strafe in DOOM and DOOM 2 - and I used it to "pwn" many a fellow player
It wasn't configured well - by default, it was ',' and '.' for strafe and arrow keys for walking/turning.
A better configuration is the classic 'w', 'a', 's', 'd' and mouse movement, or using 'e' and 'r' as strafe. However, since keyboard configuration had to be performed in an external setup program, it is generally a trial-and-error to find out how you like your keyboard configuation (and you might not necessarly notice between reconfigurations.) In addition, you had to be careful not to have your keybindings conflict with hard-coded Doom commands (e.g. talking with other players.)
There's also Strafe50 implemented with Doom - for thatn you need to optimize your config, especially with keyboards behaving differently when you press too many keys at once.
Not to mention I never once had an "Oh shit I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die" feeling from D3, while in almost every big monster infested room you got that feeling with the original dooms.
The main reason you don't have that feeling anymore is because of the strafe command. If you played Doom as your first video game today (after having a friend give you a crash course in game configuration), the fear will be significantly cut down because you can sidestep fireball attacks with ease.
In this kind of action game, fear only works once. Once you learn the "pattern", you are no longer really afraid. However, games can still make the player feel a bit uneasy - especially with something similar to "trigger_random" where something happens only half the time.
Yes, but retaliating against bullies is often cited as a primary reason for many real school shootings.
Such retailitations are often cited as the primary symptom of a defective school system that railroads students into an artifical social environment.
Any of the following will significantly cut down on the number of "school shootings": - Private tutoring. (e.g. Home schooling or private schooling) - Education based on skill level instead of chronological age. - Reducing the impact of young offender protections (e.g. repeat violent offencers are more likely to enter adult court.) - Providing an education within public schools. - Removing the "grind" necessary to advance through most courses. (Not recommended, but neither is the 2:1 homework ratio that appears to be the most common.) - Martial arts training.
In the GTA games, yes you can kill prostitutes, but then again you can kill everybody, and while killing people takes a central role in the GTA series, killing prostitutes specifically does not. Now it could be argued that killing gang members and drug dealers is no better than killing prostitutes, but that is another argument.
In GTA, the player is already implied to have made the choice to enter a life of crime. (In theory, he could pull out and travel across the world and change carreers.)
In Bully, the player is railroaded by his parents - he doesn't have a choice in his path.
Whether one is better than the other isn't much of an issue - the issue is that the PC is forced to do his actions and doesn't have much of a choice.
Some always-on devices are just plain stupid. Like computers: remember when computer PSUs had a physical switch that cut the power to the computer?
They still do - it's located on the back of the power-supply as opposed to being on the front.
Not to mention the extra power consumption...
Could be worse - ~1995-1998, there were plenty of computers that automatically turned themselves on (by default) as soon as the phone rang, complete with the two minute bootup sequence. This principle still exists today, as my 21" tv automatically turns itself on after a power failure occurrs.
In order to buy even single-player games through Valve, players need to sign up for residential high-speed Internet access.
I've downloaded an ISO through a dial-up connection - it took 2-4 weeks.
I'm sure that the various single player games would take a similar amount of time - or if they are "optimized", it would download the most critical content first (e.g. models, textures) so that you can at least make some progress within the game before the next download point. I know Source Engine games have this advantage as Steam is built around that engine.
In order to buy games suitable for everyone or for teens through Valve, players need to be 18 or older.
Isn't this almost true for any online business?
In any case, if you want to make a cheque or money order payment, contact customer support. Alternativly, go for one of the "pre-paid" credit or debit cards where you don't have to have a credit rating or be over 18.
There is no requirement in the subscribers agreement stating that you must be over 18. You just need to be able to make the payment and ensure that your guardian does not contest it.
It's not enforced in XP. If it is in Vista, people really are going to start getting pissed off about it
My older brother bought a custom-built computer from a generic computer store. The system's hard drive crashed enough times that Microsoft started to refuse to reactivate Windows - the only reason it's activated is because he insisted that the problems occurred because he could not obtain the updates necessary to stabalize the system.
After pointing out other problems with the gaming system he purchased (e.g. it uses an integrated graphics card), I offered to assemble his next computer.
While many things done in the license are not enforced by Microsoft to random users, there's plenty of limitations in the lesser versions of the operating systems that generally mean that you don't get maximum output from the operating system. (i.e. file encryption is available in WXPP but not WXPH).
OS X doesn't even have a serial key, let alone activation.
OS X is clamped to work only on Apple hardware. Also, it's guarenteed to come with each Apple computer, and thus there's almost no point in pirating the OS. In addition, there isn't much of a demand for pirated versions of Mac OS - mainly because the latest versions 10.2 through 10.4 don't seem to differ enough.
Dos/Windows were released at a time where there is already a massive deployment of PCs. PCs can also be bought "naked". Because of these two factors, anti-piracy factors were felt as necessary by Microsoft. Whether or not they are needed or are in Microsoft's best interests is another story, beyond the scope of a simple forum posting.
People that play games like athletes ruin the fun for everyone else. The way these poeple play kill all the dumbed down casual fun around.
Some games have already started to solve that problem. For example, Age of Mythology tries to match players with equal skill levels, and assigns a slight handicap if there is no equal-skill matching available.
A more obvious example would be Sin Episodes, where you have visible results of the difficulty level being adjusted on the fly. The only difference is this is single player, but it's not too much of a jump to configure multiplayer to do something similar (i.e. increase the starting spawn loadout of weaker players.)
Can't believe I didn't see this one listed for anyone! Was always one of my favorites, every 6 or 8 months I end up digging up a copy of StarCraft (and some of the addons) and get stuck playing for hours.
Starcraft isn't mindless. Instead of weedwhacking everything that comes into range, you have to build your forces with optimal effect and make sure that you can recover from any enemy counters that gets used (i.e. make sure your carriers don't get nailed by a single ghost using EMP lockdown.)
And as with most "RTS" strategy games, the instant something breaks the fourth wall is the same instant you'll get a bit of frustration.
have you encountered a subject in school that was so opaque, arbitrary and ridiculous that you thought that the people involved in it must be fooling a lot of people into thinking that this was a serious academic subject, instead of a bunch of hoakum? That they must just be making it up, because it really didn't make any sense at all?
For me, it would be math. For the first eight yeras in school (including elementry and high), the courses taught that "7-9 is impossible". Then suddenly, they introdced a new concept known as negative numers. Likewise, they also had dividing by 0 to be impossible - for some reason, they insisted on that through high-school and college. Perhaps the first person to divide by 0 successfully could get a noble prise... >/joke<
On a more serious note, it may be an issue with improper teaching. While there are no guarentees that a good teacher will solve every case, you can solve a lot of problems by not giving out false information (such as the example above) and by teaching at the intelligence level rather than age level. The disadvantage is that this may be more expensive before AI gets invented, unless there's some factor that I didn't yet discover.
I fully understand your point of view - I did have weaknesses with non-musical arts even though it was more of an issue of permanent writer's block. While I haven't fully overcome this, there are treatments for math learning disabilities. They might not be as formalized as dyslexia, I do know that they existed and that others have worked hard in getting the affected students to succeed.
Every damn one of those things makes the same noise, EVERY time it's booted.
There is a way to change it. I know for sure since I've been falsly accussed of changing the startup sound to something that lasts around 90 seconds. In addition, I know that a "damaged" startup sound did get repaired on a reinstallation of MacOS X.
There's no information on how he changed it, or even if he stuck with an official version of the MacOS X system. However, there was difficulty in muting the sound while it was playing - if it wasn't a startup sound, the prankster would have been asked to leave the library.
Case in point: the Thief series. 1+2 had a specialized engine (Dark, IIRC) that didn't focus so much on graphics, but allowed huge, sprawling levels and wonderful sound cues. 3 used some variant of the Unreal engine, and suddenly you were stuck with *tiny* levels and loading zones.
That's actually a single game issue.
The small loading zones were caused by trying to fit the game on an XBox while maintaining good graphics. The same applies to Deus Ex: Invisible War - the levels had to fit within 64MB or RAM. These small levels caused the buyers of the PC version to complain about consolitis and long loading times. If you take a look at other games within the same "generation", such as Doom 3 or Painkiller, you will find much more comfortable level sizes (even if loading time is long.)
If the maps were designed in the same way that Unreal 2 was designed, there wouldn't be any small-level complaints. While the maps might not be as large as those found in Thief, they would at least be large enough to avoid the bulk of the complaints. Alternativly, you can simply drop texture quality and free up memory for use in level size.
The making-fun-of-women stunt they pulled on April 1st was an utter disgrace.
Their annual April 1st behaviour is an utter disgrace. Out of all the posings on April 1st, the only good one is about subliminal messages in the movie "The March is Over". It's so bad that they don't even bother trying to make them look legitimate (e.g. plop everything on the front page.) When the day was over, it was an anti-climatic Wikipedia entry listing every single AFJ - and given the target audience, we already bloody know that the Internet Tubes are being saturated with that crud.
If you check the tags for that day, you'll see the word "lame" appearing very frequently. Because of this, the best method of celebrating April 1st is to behave as if nothing has happened (i.e. don't seek out AFJs, simply report as normal) - some afjs will slip through, but nobody would care since that is expected. In addition, it will keep actual events from being communicated as well so that the site doesn't become useless for 36 hours (counting the 12-hours where Slashdot gets decoyed by fake news.)
After all, the conspiracy theorists have some compelling points--the collapse of WTC #7, that none of the released footage of the Pentagon attack shows what actually hit the building,
Correction: None of the released footage clearly shows the impact of the plane against the building.
There's an article on Snopes that gives extremely detailed information about the attack. Even though it doesn't show the impact, it shows various photographs about the situation, including:
Collateral daamge penetrating four rings of the pentagon wing.
A tail of the airplane.
A preliminary shot of the damage just after the hit - showing impact marks from wings.
A shot of a fire being extinguished, with the building section collapsing shortly after.
Honestly, I'm about as anti-conspiracy as one can get. There's just so damn much about 9/11 that's so glaring, so obvious, so uncomplicated, that I'm left with two conclusions: massive unprecedented incompetence by a team headed by some of the most competent political operatives in America (Cheney, Rove, etc.)...or a conspiracy.
If you want to see the conspiracy angle, try taking a look at the relation between the Bin laden family and the Bush family. The faking of the 9/11 attack on the pentagon is not a component of this conspiracy.
3) References to things in current events 4) References to real history
This usually results in something anacronistic. Games are not always intended to be set in the "real world", and are free to use any world they want to - for example, they can have Hillary Clinton win the 2001 general US election.
The issues with stories that clamp themselves to the "real world" is that they don't factor in future events. For example, Star Trek II had Khan leave Earth sometime in 1980 or 1990, using technology that was expected to be developed by now.
1) it largely appeals to geeks who are fond of the subtle and contemplative play style, and also literary types who appreciate the biblical themes.
2) Myst players look down on players of games which resort to such crass mechanics as 'action' and 'excitement', and particularly those who look up the solutions to puzzles on the internet
I find that Myst was rather slow for an IF (e.g. the tram maze which you had to use twice.) While this could be a side effect of wanting action, it's rather a tiredness of "grinding". Another example of slowness is the telescope at the top - if something turns much more slowly than the mouse moves, it kills paitence since there's no reason a freely rotating item should move slowly. A third example would be tracking down the five transmitters with the radio system. Holding down the mouse button causes rotation to go too quickly, while clicking makes it go too slowly.
I have nothing wrong with adventure games - however, there should *never* be trouble because of the user interface (unless such trouble is intended to be part of the game or satirizing such problems in other games), or trouble because you have to guess the author's line of thought (e.g. impersonate a guy by gluing cat hair above your lip.)
If you want to know why videogames became the Bogeyman, you only have to look at adolescent idiocies like Hot Coffee and Super Columbine Massacre RPG!
The Super Columbine Massacre RPG was designed to attract media attention (i.e. it was a media whore, just like you know-who). In the same manner of JFK reloaded, it causes a massive amount of "omg-evil" reaction to something that is ultimatly minor - in the same way that Cecil, the brooding Dark Knight, has to prove his goodness in a quest that is ultimatly meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
Hot Coffee was not intended to be released. Also, the video game that it appears for was developed in Europe, not America - wherein the culture has more tolerance for sex stuff but less tolerance for violence. It's no different than a Canadian accusing all American stores of selling "prohibited" automatics and handguns because they are banned in Canada. Regardless, it closed off a loophole in the rating system that excluded content that is not available on the disk.
Hot Coffee is also tame compared to Duke3D.
Also, your list was missing I'm O.k., a video game designed by Jack Thompson that is just as violent as the Super Columbine Massacre RPG.
It is the handful of games from the handful of publishers we all know are aiming for the flashpoint.
GTA3, is rated 'M', which is 17+. If anyone is emotional enough to react negativly to this kind of content to a degree where they want games banned, they are not 'M'ature. (A person emotional enough to react negativly to not like the game is A-OK.)
I was actually surprised to see Firefox ship with a popup blocker that was enabled by default.
Taking this from another perspective, allowing popups without question is a bug instead of a feature. As an example, open a webpage that recursivly opens popups - with Netscape 4.7. Best case scenario is that you have to take out a browser session (end task or kill -9) - worst case is Windows 95/98/ME running out of handles, taking out the system.
This can occurr because of bad programming, or over-zealous advertisers.
Do you remember the prank about the Good Times virus? If you don't, it relied on users making an incorrect assumption about computers auto-executing code. If you do... now you'll understand why browers can and should restrict popups.
P.S. Entering "type c:\con\con" will crash Windows 95/98. Loading a webpage that attempts to read that JPEG file on your hard drive will also cause a crash.
I'm not suprised that people can't complete a 40-hour game. Most give up on a Sin Episodes: Emergance, although it could be dismissed as people not submitting stats after winning the game.
In my opinion, games should take around ~10-15 hours to complete properly for at least one of the good endings (best ending can take any amount of time), perhaps ~5-10 on a low difficulty level.
However, endings that require grinding to acquire tend to kill interest in the game very quickly. Long battle-sequences qualify, especially when you have a tactic that is guarenteed to take out anything (but each hit-point sponge takes 3 minutes to destroy even when inflicting maximum damage per second.)
Slashdot Mirror
This issue is easily resolved.
As you know, the USPS (and similar entities) are sponsered by the government - however, the primary (and most visible fee) is the stamp on the envelope. While you may also have to pay taxes if you don't use the postal service, it is still based around use. Regardless of whether you pay for services you don't use, UPS and Fedex are still prosperous and highly recognized alternatives. These two companies survive against government competition because they specialized in large package shipments.
Municipal-sponsered Internet access can also be set-up in this fashion. The city may have an initial setup fee that appears in taxes - however the municipality has it's main charge for it's usage. Any telcos that want to compete (especially for profit) can attract customers from the municipality by giving service that the municipality can't (e.g. faster speeds, technical support, etc.)
If Canada has developed the concept of a Crown Corporation, then so should the United States. While there isn't usually much competition to crown corporations (because they fill a specific need that for-profit enterprises don't go after), there is competition for at least some of those businesses (e.g. CTV competes with CBC.)
One word: Pseudonym.
They are only equipped to deal with threats within the system. As soon as you change the system (e.g. switch to Despotism), lawyers instantly become obsolete since the law has changed overnight. They can retrain themselves, but it does not change the fact that law is on a whim of a despot.
Also, unless you are willing to issue firearms and bulletproof vests to lawyers, they are not able to really defend themselves when their right to safety is threatened. An example of what I'm referring to is an assassination attempt on a lawyer dealing with estate inheritance - who is lucky to even be alive after being shot at seven times (at point blank). Naturally, the assassin has a $2 million bond set for bail - but that's a post-incident defence rather than an active defence.
Of course game demos is an essential method of getting purchases. It worked for the shareware version of Doom, Quake, and the whole slew of games in ~1990-1995.
It's also the reason the "demo" levels tend to be the most polished in the full versions of the game - it's been tested heavily by the users that point out every single flaw in the map/whatever. Compare this to the "final" levels in the retail, which appear to be rushed in order to meet some deadline.
The last game I purchased was Shadowgrounds - based on the demo - and I am now proceeding to take screenshots of every single plot point. Since I took a bundle purchase, I also got Darwinia - a game where I wouldn't have bought otherwise (since it looked like it was a guarenteed victory game, especially on demo difficulty).
If you don't have some sort of demo system, then don't expect as many sales. It's a simple rule, especially with the software gaming industry.
There's also "J-Space for Windows". The only instance I heard about it was in a small book listing cheats for ~101 PC games in circulation at the time.
The tip for that game was don't buy it, since it got 4% -- PC Format's lowest ever rating. Other than that single comment, it seems as if the game disappeared from the face of the Earth. I have no idea why it was bad, since that comment didn't really cite when it was reviewed.
In this situation, having a bootable Win9x partition has the same effect. Say that you need it for "compatability reasons", and install games such as Diablo. A LILO bootloader will help -- unless you configure it to display a menu, the security team will just consider it to be yet another power-on password.
Nowadays, laptop manufacturers do not expect you to use W9x, since it is outside of Microsoft's product lifecycle. Driver availablility may be limited - but at least your data won't be scanned.
As long as encryption is invisible (or has invisible stages), the guards won't be any wiser.
It wasn't configured well - by default, it was ',' and '.' for strafe and arrow keys for walking/turning.
A better configuration is the classic 'w', 'a', 's', 'd' and mouse movement, or using 'e' and 'r' as strafe. However, since keyboard configuration had to be performed in an external setup program, it is generally a trial-and-error to find out how you like your keyboard configuation (and you might not necessarly notice between reconfigurations.) In addition, you had to be careful not to have your keybindings conflict with hard-coded Doom commands (e.g. talking with other players.)
There's also Strafe50 implemented with Doom - for thatn you need to optimize your config, especially with keyboards behaving differently when you press too many keys at once.
The main reason you don't have that feeling anymore is because of the strafe command. If you played Doom as your first video game today (after having a friend give you a crash course in game configuration), the fear will be significantly cut down because you can sidestep fireball attacks with ease.
In this kind of action game, fear only works once. Once you learn the "pattern", you are no longer really afraid. However, games can still make the player feel a bit uneasy - especially with something similar to "trigger_random" where something happens only half the time.
Such retailitations are often cited as the primary symptom of a defective school system that railroads students into an artifical social environment.
Any of the following will significantly cut down on the number of "school shootings":
- Private tutoring. (e.g. Home schooling or private schooling)
- Education based on skill level instead of chronological age.
- Reducing the impact of young offender protections (e.g. repeat violent offencers are more likely to enter adult court.)
- Providing an education within public schools.
- Removing the "grind" necessary to advance through most courses. (Not recommended, but neither is the 2:1 homework ratio that appears to be the most common.)
- Martial arts training.
In GTA, the player is already implied to have made the choice to enter a life of crime. (In theory, he could pull out and travel across the world and change carreers.)
In Bully, the player is railroaded by his parents - he doesn't have a choice in his path.
Whether one is better than the other isn't much of an issue - the issue is that the PC is forced to do his actions and doesn't have much of a choice.
They still do - it's located on the back of the power-supply as opposed to being on the front.
Could be worse - ~1995-1998, there were plenty of computers that automatically turned themselves on (by default) as soon as the phone rang, complete with the two minute bootup sequence. This principle still exists today, as my 21" tv automatically turns itself on after a power failure occurrs.
Reclaiming a Hijacked Steam Account
Most likely, one of the following happened:
In any case, you should contact Valve customer support ASAP with the information shown on the support page.
I've downloaded an ISO through a dial-up connection - it took 2-4 weeks.
I'm sure that the various single player games would take a similar amount of time - or if they are "optimized", it would download the most critical content first (e.g. models, textures) so that you can at least make some progress within the game before the next download point. I know Source Engine games have this advantage as Steam is built around that engine.
Isn't this almost true for any online business?
In any case, if you want to make a cheque or money order payment, contact customer support. Alternativly, go for one of the "pre-paid" credit or debit cards where you don't have to have a credit rating or be over 18.
There is no requirement in the subscribers agreement stating that you must be over 18. You just need to be able to make the payment and ensure that your guardian does not contest it.
My older brother bought a custom-built computer from a generic computer store. The system's hard drive crashed enough times that Microsoft started to refuse to reactivate Windows - the only reason it's activated is because he insisted that the problems occurred because he could not obtain the updates necessary to stabalize the system.
After pointing out other problems with the gaming system he purchased (e.g. it uses an integrated graphics card), I offered to assemble his next computer.
While many things done in the license are not enforced by Microsoft to random users, there's plenty of limitations in the lesser versions of the operating systems that generally mean that you don't get maximum output from the operating system. (i.e. file encryption is available in WXPP but not WXPH).
OS X is clamped to work only on Apple hardware. Also, it's guarenteed to come with each Apple computer, and thus there's almost no point in pirating the OS. In addition, there isn't much of a demand for pirated versions of Mac OS - mainly because the latest versions 10.2 through 10.4 don't seem to differ enough.
Dos/Windows were released at a time where there is already a massive deployment of PCs. PCs can also be bought "naked". Because of these two factors, anti-piracy factors were felt as necessary by Microsoft. Whether or not they are needed or are in Microsoft's best interests is another story, beyond the scope of a simple forum posting.
Some games have already started to solve that problem. For example, Age of Mythology tries to match players with equal skill levels, and assigns a slight handicap if there is no equal-skill matching available.
A more obvious example would be Sin Episodes, where you have visible results of the difficulty level being adjusted on the fly. The only difference is this is single player, but it's not too much of a jump to configure multiplayer to do something similar (i.e. increase the starting spawn loadout of weaker players.)
Starcraft isn't mindless. Instead of weedwhacking everything that comes into range, you have to build your forces with optimal effect and make sure that you can recover from any enemy counters that gets used (i.e. make sure your carriers don't get nailed by a single ghost using EMP lockdown.)
And as with most "RTS" strategy games, the instant something breaks the fourth wall is the same instant you'll get a bit of frustration.
For me, it would be math. For the first eight yeras in school (including elementry and high), the courses taught that "7-9 is impossible". Then suddenly, they introdced a new concept known as negative numers. Likewise, they also had dividing by 0 to be impossible - for some reason, they insisted on that through high-school and college. Perhaps the first person to divide by 0 successfully could get a noble prise... >/joke<
On a more serious note, it may be an issue with improper teaching. While there are no guarentees that a good teacher will solve every case, you can solve a lot of problems by not giving out false information (such as the example above) and by teaching at the intelligence level rather than age level. The disadvantage is that this may be more expensive before AI gets invented, unless there's some factor that I didn't yet discover.
I fully understand your point of view - I did have weaknesses with non-musical arts even though it was more of an issue of permanent writer's block. While I haven't fully overcome this, there are treatments for math learning disabilities. They might not be as formalized as dyslexia, I do know that they existed and that others have worked hard in getting the affected students to succeed.
There is a way to change it. I know for sure since I've been falsly accussed of
changing the startup sound to something that lasts around 90 seconds. In addition, I know that a "damaged" startup sound did get repaired on a reinstallation of MacOS X.
There's no information on how he changed it, or even if he stuck with an official version of the MacOS X system. However, there was difficulty in muting the sound while it was playing - if it wasn't a startup sound, the prankster would have been asked to leave the library.
That's actually a single game issue.
The small loading zones were caused by trying to fit the game on an XBox while maintaining good graphics. The same applies to Deus Ex: Invisible War - the levels had to fit within 64MB or RAM. These small levels caused the buyers of the PC version to complain about consolitis and long loading times. If you take a look at other games within the same "generation", such as Doom 3 or Painkiller, you will find much more comfortable level sizes (even if loading time is long.)
If the maps were designed in the same way that Unreal 2 was designed, there wouldn't be any small-level complaints. While the maps might not be as large as those found in Thief, they would at least be large enough to avoid the bulk of the complaints. Alternativly, you can simply drop texture quality and free up memory for use in level size.
Their annual April 1st behaviour is an utter disgrace. Out of all the posings on April 1st, the only good one is about subliminal messages in the movie "The March is Over". It's so bad that they don't even bother trying to make them look legitimate (e.g. plop everything on the front page.) When the day was over, it was an anti-climatic Wikipedia entry listing every single AFJ - and given the target audience, we already bloody know that the Internet Tubes are being saturated with that crud.
If you check the tags for that day, you'll see the word "lame" appearing very frequently. Because of this, the best method of celebrating April 1st is to behave as if nothing has happened (i.e. don't seek out AFJs, simply report as normal) - some afjs will slip through, but nobody would care since that is expected. In addition, it will keep actual events from being communicated as well so that the site doesn't become useless for 36 hours (counting the 12-hours where Slashdot gets decoyed by fake news.)
Correction: None of the released footage clearly shows the impact of the plane against the building.
There's an article on Snopes that gives extremely detailed information about the attack. Even though it doesn't show the impact, it shows various photographs about the situation, including:
If you want to see the conspiracy angle, try taking a look at the relation between the Bin laden family and the Bush family. The faking of the 9/11 attack on the pentagon is not a component of this conspiracy.
This usually results in something anacronistic. Games are not always intended to be set in the "real world", and are free to use any world they want to - for example, they can have Hillary Clinton win the 2001 general US election.
The issues with stories that clamp themselves to the "real world" is that they don't factor in future events. For example, Star Trek II had Khan leave Earth sometime in 1980 or 1990, using technology that was expected to be developed by now.
I find that Myst was rather slow for an IF (e.g. the tram maze which you had to use twice.) While this could be a side effect of wanting action, it's rather a tiredness of "grinding". Another example of slowness is the telescope at the top - if something turns much more slowly than the mouse moves, it kills paitence since there's no reason a freely rotating item should move slowly. A third example would be tracking down the five transmitters with the radio system. Holding down the mouse button causes rotation to go too quickly, while clicking makes it go too slowly.
I have nothing wrong with adventure games - however, there should *never* be trouble because of the user interface (unless such trouble is intended to be part of the game or satirizing such problems in other games), or trouble because you have to guess the author's line of thought (e.g. impersonate a guy by gluing cat hair above your lip.)
Two words: Jack Thompson.
The Super Columbine Massacre RPG was designed to attract media attention (i.e. it was a media whore, just like you know-who). In the same manner of JFK reloaded, it causes a massive amount of "omg-evil" reaction to something that is ultimatly minor - in the same way that Cecil, the brooding Dark Knight, has to prove his goodness in a quest that is ultimatly meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
Hot Coffee was not intended to be released. Also, the video game that it appears for was developed in Europe, not America - wherein the culture has more tolerance for sex stuff but less tolerance for violence. It's no different than a Canadian accusing all American stores of selling "prohibited" automatics and handguns because they are banned in Canada. Regardless, it closed off a loophole in the rating system that excluded content that is not available on the disk.
Hot Coffee is also tame compared to Duke3D.
Also, your list was missing I'm O.k., a video game designed by Jack Thompson that is just as violent as the Super Columbine Massacre RPG.
GTA3, is rated 'M', which is 17+. If anyone is emotional enough to react negativly to this kind of content to a degree where they want games banned, they are not 'M'ature. (A person emotional enough to react negativly to not like the game is A-OK.)
Taking this from another perspective, allowing popups without question is a bug instead of a feature. As an example, open a webpage that recursivly opens popups - with Netscape 4.7. Best case scenario is that you have to take out a browser session (end task or kill -9) - worst case is Windows 95/98/ME running out of handles, taking out the system.
This can occurr because of bad programming, or over-zealous advertisers.
Do you remember the prank about the Good Times virus? If you don't, it relied on users making an incorrect assumption about computers auto-executing code. If you do... now you'll understand why browers can and should restrict popups.
P.S. Entering "type c:\con\con" will crash Windows 95/98. Loading a webpage that attempts to read that JPEG file on your hard drive will also cause a crash.
I'm not suprised that people can't complete a 40-hour game. Most give up on a Sin Episodes: Emergance, although it could be dismissed as people not submitting stats after winning the game.
In my opinion, games should take around ~10-15 hours to complete properly for at least one of the good endings (best ending can take any amount of time), perhaps ~5-10 on a low difficulty level.
However, endings that require grinding to acquire tend to kill interest in the game very quickly. Long battle-sequences qualify, especially when you have a tactic that is guarenteed to take out anything (but each hit-point sponge takes 3 minutes to destroy even when inflicting maximum damage per second.)