> But since hollywood and the gun make[r]s have the
> money that is the way things go.
Well, Hollywood has been making a ton off hackers, too (The Matrix, Independence Day, the last 8 James Bond films, any movie with computer graphics in it...) you'd think they'd be a bit kinder.
"THE Trinity? The one who cracked the DVD encryption technology? I thought you were a nerdy man, not a superbabe."
"Most nerdy men do. Here's a jpeg of Liz Hurley. You can see her ass crack and her nips and her patch and her toes and her lips and her other lips and her ribcage and..."
> The problem is, lawmakers are getting into a
> trend of punishing possession of something capable
> of doing something illegal (eg. guns, DeCSS,
> Dmitry's eBook software...), rather than the
> actual crime itself.
I beg to differ. It's hardly new. Uncounted drugs are illegal because of what people might use them for, even if otherwise safe and beneficial to an otherwise legal user (not just the "usual suspects", but others, e.g. safe and effective speed-like weightloss drugs used in Europe being illegal here since the 60's because some addict might illegally get ahold of it.)
It's worse, yet. At any point, a citizen of this country should be able to go to the government and say, "Is this act legal or illegal?" and get a yes or no answer.
When Microsoft went to the government and asked, "Would bundling our browser be legal or illegal?" the government replied, "We'll decide that after we see the effect." You may love or hate Microsoft, but even they have the right to ask this question of the government. How the government got away with it, I'll never know.
> Are our courts set up to decide what a person
> should or shouldn't know?
Yes. Jury Nullification exists, and the people are well aware of it, say the courts, yet lawyers cannot let the juries in any given case know of its existance because that would wreak havoc on the government, say the courts.
No one ever said, though, that they'd do a good, or even logical, job of it.
IANAL, but I think it's never been against the law to build your own cable decoder, nor to sell plans on how to build one, it's only been illegal to sell cable decoders themselves (unless you are the cable company itself, of course.)
Hey, man! Don't crush his groove! Don't come down on him so hard! Don't be a square, man!
He's only following that very generation's advice -- "Never trust anyone over 30!"
You remember that generation? The ones who wanted legal drugs everywhere (and now jail people for life for that) and wanted free sex everywhere (and now extradite people across state lines for pr0n.)
The 60's generation: evil, two-faced, power-hungry sacks o' shit. Yes, 60's generation. This means you.
> If he had thought things through he might have
> noted that far more movies are made in India
>...than in Hollywood, and that most computer
> manufacturing occurs in Taiwan or other locations
> in south-east Asia.
Do you know what's the most hideously two-faced thing Hollywood is doing in all this?
The reason movies are centered in Hollywood is because all these suddenly noble, intellectual property rights-protecting Big Studios located themselves in southern California around the turn of the century because they wanted to violate Tom Edison's movie patents, and wanted, literally, to be able to make a run for the border at a moment's notice.
The Big Studios got their start, and built their industry, in Hollywood because of, and by way of, violating someone else's intellectual property!!!.
> Instant access provided by the Internet is the
>functional equivalent of personal presence of the
> person posting the material on the Web...as if the
> poster is instantaneously present in different
> places at the same time...the reach of the
> Internet is also the reach of the extension of the
> poster's presence.
This is god-damned precious.
Like all power-hungry thugs, the governments just glom on more and more power. Here is the ultimate statement -- Anyone who posts on the Internshould be liable, even criminally, in every single jurisdiction the Internet reaches, which is identical to every single jurisdiction on the planet.
So: according to this judge, it certainly IS ok for China to extradite and execute you for posting anti-China stuff, and for Backward Tennessee to extradite (Rusty and Eddie?) people for posting pr0n, and for Iraq to extradite and execute the South Park guys for making fun of him, etc. etc. etc.
You believe in a pick-and-choose political philosophy, live by the sword, die by the sword. Either people have the right to their bodies or they don't. Either it's OK to make abortion illegal or you must make prostitution legal. No fudging. The above is the logical, idiotic, ultimate extension of that belief.
Well damnit, if murdering entire planetsfull of people, and enslaving an entire galaxy doesn't demand revenge, what does? Has everyone forgotten the outrage at ROTJ with the last-second "redemption" of this mass-murdering thug?
"The Attack of the Clones" is better then "Clones Attack!" Yeah, we all know The Emperor got his start during the "Clone Wars", but golly, can't they call it "Clone Wars"?
And what are they clones of? Great fighters? People loaded with mitochondria, sorry, midiclorians?
Imagine 40,000 Yodi coming over the hill at you...shudder.
Yes, a planetary queen and her court would continue to drag a ne'er-do-well slacker with them through the galaxy.
Although, his ability to defy the laws of physics when moving, seeming like a cartoon character rather than something with mass and momentum, certainly requires further scientific study...
>> 6.) Diablo (the original)
>
> It was addictive, for sure, but was it really
> that great a game? I don't think so. I'd put it
> around 30. Maybe.
I think I stopped playing it around level 14 or so (or was it level 8?) "Gee, the dogs are a tenth different color, and the spit they bark at you is a tenth different color and is more damaging." Thank god the graphics are so bleeding edge...oh wait, they're not.
>> 1.) Doom
>
> Whatever.
I completely agree with you. If you freeze-frame it, you can pinpoint the exact moment where most of these guys got their first erection. Too young to see the looming Richter 9-scale earthquake shift on the horizon from "static 3D", aka Dungeon Master, the later D&D games, etc. to "moving 3D", aka Wolf 3D and it's lesser-known precursor cousin, they all jammed on Doom, which just happened to be the technologically leading-edge FPS at the time they all went into college and discovered a networked FPS game.
Doom? Whazzat? Oh, that's that game with the marginally better graphics than Wolf 3D that filled the gap until Duke Nukem. It's one technological innovation, being able to climb on things (i.e. not just one flat level to run around on) was much smaller than the revolution of Wolf 3D and the much greater evolution to full rotational 3D of Quake (or Descent, for that matter, which I didn't like much as a game.)
Yes, Pong was boring. Now Warlords was Pong on steroids, and could have made the list.
Up to four players, one in each corner, trying to destroy the other 3's castles. Pong with much more to do, multiplayer (up to 4 players - massivly multiplayer for that time, Atari 2600.)
We aren't quite at the point where people who remember Zork or Pong or Odyssee are dying off in droves, but you can certainly see the weighting towards latter-day games. Just the love of the relatively lame Super Mario Brothers (really blows your socks off compared to dozens of previous hop-around games?) seen around here shows this.
What's really scary is that there are kids whose first non-child's game computer experience is something like EverQuest or Quake III or Half-Life. Really old games like those on Atari (much less text-based RPG's) will seem incalculably boring and stupid to them.
No, you can't go back. But if anyone starts talking about how cool the Power Rangers were, I'm gonna have (the old) Speed Racer punch you right in the shnozz.
That's why I always play FPS on the hardest levels. Quake on Nightmare is now trivial to me. Duke Nukem (hardest non-monster-respawn), "Game Over!" Seriously Sam, naturally, and I even fought the end boss to a standstill for 45 in-game minutes before figuring out I was supposed to go into the pyramid and do the trick kill. Thief? Expert, no-kill-youski, now that's a challenge. Real RPG-like, too. Why should you, a Thief, be able to beat a guard in a 1-on-1 confrontation?
> This may sound retarded, but i wouldn't mind
> playing a nice side scrolling platform jumper
> again.
Ehh, the isometric views of Diablo II and BG II are hideously outdated (heck, the I's were hideously outdated) but the games are still fun to play. I swore after BG I that I would never again buy another isometric game, but I gave in for the II's of both.
It's too bad this (and Dark Castle) were on the Mac, or they'd have made the list certainly.
While the PC traded off having color for having pixels the size of JLo's right ass cheek, the Mac, pure B&W, had teeny-tiny square pixels and this excellent Lode Runner game, with digitized sound (another feature years away on the PC in any kind of quantity.)
Pure puzzle brilliance and you could design your own levels, too. Yeah, it came out a decade later on the PC as a nostalgia game (which I bought), but still.
I do note a curious lack of puzzle games. Where is the Lemmings series? Tetris is on there, but that's about it. I think the bias showed up in the comments over Half-Life, where they denegrate the last episode because of all the jumping puzzles. As someone who loves puzzle games (not to mention once being in an excellent Quake clan) the "troublesome" jumping was right up my alley.
> If we want to go retro, why is Starcraft in there?
And how could Starcraft outrank Total Annhilation (much less the tragedy of TA only ranking 50th?) Yes, the inter-mission banter was novel, but the gameplay? Good, but that spectacular?
Anyhoo, if you see Dark Colony in a bargain bin, it's a pretty good RTS, too. Very similar to Warcraft, but prettier. It never took off like TA and Starcraft, sadly.
Spaceward Ho! (4.0) and Pax Imperia on the Mac (years before the 2.0 PC version) left "hot" PC games like Master of Orion so far in the dust it's not even funny.
I once had a bug on Pax Imperia where the population on my planet warped around somehow, and poof! I had 600 billion people or something on that one planet. Yeah, they weren't doing too well, but just a little tax on them and I could pop out fleets of up-to-date dreadnaughts and clear wide swaths through the galaxy.
Slashdot Mirror
> But since hollywood and the gun make[r]s have the
> money that is the way things go.
Well, Hollywood has been making a ton off hackers, too (The Matrix, Independence Day, the last 8 James Bond films, any movie with computer graphics in it...) you'd think they'd be a bit kinder.
"THE Trinity? The one who cracked the DVD encryption technology? I thought you were a nerdy man, not a superbabe."
"Most nerdy men do. Here's a jpeg of Liz Hurley. You can see her ass crack and her nips and her patch and her toes and her lips and her other lips and her ribcage and..."
"Oooooooh!"
> The problem is, lawmakers are getting into a
> trend of punishing possession of something capable
> of doing something illegal (eg. guns, DeCSS,
> Dmitry's eBook software...), rather than the
> actual crime itself.
I beg to differ. It's hardly new. Uncounted drugs are illegal because of what people might use them for, even if otherwise safe and beneficial to an otherwise legal user (not just the "usual suspects", but others, e.g. safe and effective speed-like weightloss drugs used in Europe being illegal here since the 60's because some addict might illegally get ahold of it.)
It's worse, yet. At any point, a citizen of this country should be able to go to the government and say, "Is this act legal or illegal?" and get a yes or no answer.
When Microsoft went to the government and asked, "Would bundling our browser be legal or illegal?" the government replied, "We'll decide that after we see the effect." You may love or hate Microsoft, but even they have the right to ask this question of the government. How the government got away with it, I'll never know.
> Are our courts set up to decide what a person
> should or shouldn't know?
Yes. Jury Nullification exists, and the people are well aware of it, say the courts, yet lawyers cannot let the juries in any given case know of its existance because that would wreak havoc on the government, say the courts.
No one ever said, though, that they'd do a good, or even logical, job of it.
IANAL, but I think it's never been against the law to build your own cable decoder, nor to sell plans on how to build one, it's only been illegal to sell cable decoders themselves (unless you are the cable company itself, of course.)
Oh, no! Not more Duncan Idahoes!
Hey, man! Don't crush his groove! Don't come down on him so hard! Don't be a square, man!
He's only following that very generation's advice -- "Never trust anyone over 30!"
You remember that generation? The ones who wanted legal drugs everywhere (and now jail people for life for that) and wanted free sex everywhere (and now extradite people across state lines for pr0n.)
The 60's generation: evil, two-faced, power-hungry sacks o' shit. Yes, 60's generation. This means you.
> Just one more reason to kick California out of the union I say.
Didn't CA's state legislature vote about 10 years ago to pursue splitting into 5 states in the federal government?
Whatever happened to that? I thought the north was sick and tired of a one-way tax flow south?
> If he had thought things through he might have ...than in Hollywood, and that most computer
> noted that far more movies are made in India
>
> manufacturing occurs in Taiwan or other locations
> in south-east Asia.
Do you know what's the most hideously two-faced thing Hollywood is doing in all this?
The reason movies are centered in Hollywood is because all these suddenly noble, intellectual property rights-protecting Big Studios located themselves in southern California around the turn of the century because they wanted to violate Tom Edison's movie patents, and wanted, literally, to be able to make a run for the border at a moment's notice.
The Big Studios got their start, and built their industry, in Hollywood because of, and by way of, violating someone else's intellectual property!!!.
> Instant access provided by the Internet is the
>functional equivalent of personal presence of the
> person posting the material on the Web...as if the
> poster is instantaneously present in different
> places at the same time...the reach of the
> Internet is also the reach of the extension of the
> poster's presence.
This is god-damned precious.
Like all power-hungry thugs, the governments just glom on more and more power. Here is the ultimate statement -- Anyone who posts on the Internshould be liable, even criminally, in every single jurisdiction the Internet reaches, which is identical to every single jurisdiction on the planet.
So: according to this judge, it certainly IS ok for China to extradite and execute you for posting anti-China stuff, and for Backward Tennessee to extradite (Rusty and Eddie?) people for posting pr0n, and for Iraq to extradite and execute the South Park guys for making fun of him, etc. etc. etc.
You believe in a pick-and-choose political philosophy, live by the sword, die by the sword. Either people have the right to their bodies or they don't. Either it's OK to make abortion illegal or you must make prostitution legal. No fudging. The above is the logical, idiotic, ultimate extension of that belief.
Star Wars Episode II: Natalie Portman Copulates With A Badboy
Maybe you should get busy mass-murdering people so you can catch her attention...
Well damnit, if murdering entire planetsfull of people, and enslaving an entire galaxy doesn't demand revenge, what does? Has everyone forgotten the outrage at ROTJ with the last-second "redemption" of this mass-murdering thug?
"The Attack of the Clones" is better then "Clones Attack!" Yeah, we all know The Emperor got his start during the "Clone Wars", but golly, can't they call it "Clone Wars"?
And what are they clones of? Great fighters? People loaded with mitochondria, sorry, midiclorians?
Imagine 40,000 Yodi coming over the hill at you...shudder.
Yes, a planetary queen and her court would continue to drag a ne'er-do-well slacker with them through the galaxy.
Although, his ability to defy the laws of physics when moving, seeming like a cartoon character rather than something with mass and momentum, certainly requires further scientific study...
Oops! The problem with lists is you always think of something after you make it. I left Wolf 3D itself out, should be at #3.
>> 6.) Diablo (the original)
>
> It was addictive, for sure, but was it really
> that great a game? I don't think so. I'd put it
> around 30. Maybe.
I think I stopped playing it around level 14 or so (or was it level 8?) "Gee, the dogs are a tenth different color, and the spit they bark at you is a tenth different color and is more damaging." Thank god the graphics are so bleeding edge...oh wait, they're not.
>> 1.) Doom
>
> Whatever.
I completely agree with you. If you freeze-frame it, you can pinpoint the exact moment where most of these guys got their first erection. Too young to see the looming Richter 9-scale earthquake shift on the horizon from "static 3D", aka Dungeon Master, the later D&D games, etc. to "moving 3D", aka Wolf 3D and it's lesser-known precursor cousin, they all jammed on Doom, which just happened to be the technologically leading-edge FPS at the time they all went into college and discovered a networked FPS game.
As far as FPS's go:
1. Half-Life
2. Duke Nukem
3. Thief
4. Quake
5. Unreal
Doom? Whazzat? Oh, that's that game with the marginally better graphics than Wolf 3D that filled the gap until Duke Nukem. It's one technological innovation, being able to climb on things (i.e. not just one flat level to run around on) was much smaller than the revolution of Wolf 3D and the much greater evolution to full rotational 3D of Quake (or Descent, for that matter, which I didn't like much as a game.)
Yes, Pong was boring. Now Warlords was Pong on steroids, and could have made the list.
Up to four players, one in each corner, trying to destroy the other 3's castles. Pong with much more to do, multiplayer (up to 4 players - massivly multiplayer for that time, Atari 2600.)
We aren't quite at the point where people who remember Zork or Pong or Odyssee are dying off in droves, but you can certainly see the weighting towards latter-day games. Just the love of the relatively lame Super Mario Brothers (really blows your socks off compared to dozens of previous hop-around games?) seen around here shows this.
What's really scary is that there are kids whose first non-child's game computer experience is something like EverQuest or Quake III or Half-Life. Really old games like those on Atari (much less text-based RPG's) will seem incalculably boring and stupid to them.
No, you can't go back. But if anyone starts talking about how cool the Power Rangers were, I'm gonna have (the old) Speed Racer punch you right in the shnozz.
What do they mean by "Top 50"?
- Most evolutionary (e.g. Half-Life?)
- Most revolutionary (e.g. Wolf 3D?)
- Most time-wastingly-addictive (EverQuest, Quake CTF?)
- Biggest thrills (Duke Nukem, Half-Life?)
Their list (and the reasoning presented by the selectors) shows some kind of mish-mash of these things.
"News for nerds. Stuff that matters."
THAT is why it is here!!!!!
Duh!!!
Besides, rocket jumping to places "you're not supposed to be" is so much more satisfying than successfully doing a 540.
That's why I always play FPS on the hardest levels. Quake on Nightmare is now trivial to me. Duke Nukem (hardest non-monster-respawn), "Game Over!" Seriously Sam, naturally, and I even fought the end boss to a standstill for 45 in-game minutes before figuring out I was supposed to go into the pyramid and do the trick kill. Thief? Expert, no-kill-youski, now that's a challenge. Real RPG-like, too. Why should you, a Thief, be able to beat a guard in a 1-on-1 confrontation?
> This may sound retarded, but i wouldn't mind
> playing a nice side scrolling platform jumper
> again.
Ehh, the isometric views of Diablo II and BG II are hideously outdated (heck, the I's were hideously outdated) but the games are still fun to play. I swore after BG I that I would never again buy another isometric game, but I gave in for the II's of both.
It's too bad this (and Dark Castle) were on the Mac, or they'd have made the list certainly.
While the PC traded off having color for having pixels the size of JLo's right ass cheek, the Mac, pure B&W, had teeny-tiny square pixels and this excellent Lode Runner game, with digitized sound (another feature years away on the PC in any kind of quantity.)
Pure puzzle brilliance and you could design your own levels, too. Yeah, it came out a decade later on the PC as a nostalgia game (which I bought), but still.
I do note a curious lack of puzzle games. Where is the Lemmings series? Tetris is on there, but that's about it. I think the bias showed up in the comments over Half-Life, where they denegrate the last episode because of all the jumping puzzles. As someone who loves puzzle games (not to mention once being in an excellent Quake clan) the "troublesome" jumping was right up my alley.
> If we want to go retro, why is Starcraft in there?
And how could Starcraft outrank Total Annhilation (much less the tragedy of TA only ranking 50th?) Yes, the inter-mission banter was novel, but the gameplay? Good, but that spectacular?
Anyhoo, if you see Dark Colony in a bargain bin, it's a pretty good RTS, too. Very similar to Warcraft, but prettier. It never took off like TA and Starcraft, sadly.
Spaceward Ho! (4.0) and Pax Imperia on the Mac (years before the 2.0 PC version) left "hot" PC games like Master of Orion so far in the dust it's not even funny.
I once had a bug on Pax Imperia where the population on my planet warped around somehow, and poof! I had 600 billion people or something on that one planet. Yeah, they weren't doing too well, but just a little tax on them and I could pop out fleets of up-to-date dreadnaughts and clear wide swaths through the galaxy.
No, that's this problem.