If you're looking for graphical/point-and-click adventures and cheap entertainment all in one ball of wax, I highly recommend the free remakes of Sierra's King's Quest I, II and III as well as Hero's Quest. They're available from AGD Interactive and did I mention they're free?
A neat idea, but why did they abandon the text parser? Sure it could be frustrating at times, but at least it kept the games from just being mindless hunt-and-click. Make them apply that vocabulary!
With local network and server the multiplayer aspect is wonderful. If you get into building and don't want to fight the creatures, you can turn them off.
Minecraft is a great way to introduce someone to team play, organisation, and resource management. All of these are vital for broadening one's gaming skills.
Minecraft is fun, but it has approximately nothing in common with an adventure game. Adventure games are all about story; Minecraft has many strong points, but story is not one of them.
Different angle than what you're asking for, but I think a better game for a child than a mind-numbing hack-n-slash.
Probably best to start with King's Quest V for the semi-modern graphics. Earlier than that might turn a kid off to the series.
I also have great memories of the King's Quest series, although I'm not sure how easy it is to get up and running on any of them these days. The advantage of the LucasArts adventure games is that they are pretty easy to acquire and run on modern machines.
That said, I think Kings Quest 4 would be a great one to try. No, the graphics are not as nice as V and VI, but I think it was pretty much the height of the text parser. Endless fun (and sometimes frustration) figuring out not only what you need to do but how to tell Rosella to do it. IMO much more interesting, rewarding and (dare I say it) educational than the click hunts that the entirely graphics-based games devolved into.
Cold wars are better for business than fighting wars. In a cold war, you get lots of funding but don't actually have to deliver anything. Cyberwar is even better, because whatever you do deliver becomes obsolete about ten seconds after deployment (at the latest), so you can keep getting the funding. A cyberwar with China is perfect, because there's always the possibility that it will turn into a shooting war, so you need to keep spending money on jets, drones, aircraft carriers, and so on, but there's no real chance that it will, so you don't have to waste much money on things like soldiers (who inconveniently take money away from shareholders' pockets, where it belongs).
See the increasing moves towards unmanned combat vehicles. Expensive (but cheaper than manned vehicles), expendable, and you don't have to worry about losing your own people and therefore jeopardizing the war. They will revolutionize war by making it not only profitable, but sustainable!
He just said the same people who contribute to Palin pages positively are the same ones editing the Paul Revere page. This rules out people trying to screw her reputation, this rules out trolls. This does not rule out supporters and random lunatics, though.
You have to understand. Who wants to buy an Apple product only to turn around and see some poor person with one. How are you supposed to feel superior to them if they have one too.
Exactly. A friend of mine won an iPad in a raffle, and he is not exactly the target demographic. For God's sake he's a Raiders fan, and I don't know if he has ever sat in a (independent) coffee shop for hours on end pretending to be a writer/artist/musician. Every time he pulls that iPad out you can just feel Apple's image being sucked down the drain.
However, without such basic controls as strafe, this demo is not playable. No mouse input hurts but DOS versions had unusable mouse anyway so it's just a throwback to the old times. I estimate I've clocked around 4000 hours those days so I'd cope:p Heck, even comma/dot might be acceptable if they don't want to allow redefining keys, although I'd really prefer a sane setup like Z/X=strafe, alt=fire, shift=run (assuming no autorun like in the original).
Alt=fire? You must have some strange, deformed hands. Clearly Ctrl should be fire.
It's the number one selling game in history (mw2). You are rolling in cash. Why are you fucking over your customers???
When is it enough Activision?, you greedy fucking bastards?!!
Well, when they realized people are willing to pay $60 a year every year for basically a graphical update (plus another $15 a year for a couple of maps), they seem to have realized that CoD players are mindless zombies who will fork over whatever is asked.
I'm only a half-zombie; I skipped MW2 but got talked into Black Ops. No way I'm buying MW3.
... that there is a lot of intra-state airplane traffic - that's how Southwest got their start.
Does TSA have any authority over air traffic that doesn't cross state boundaries?
I don't know for sure, but I believe all airspace is administered by the federal government, not the states. This is why there are not pilot licenses for individual states. I suppose there might be an argument that states have authority over uncontrolled airspace, but that won't help you if you are flying into/out of most airports.
“The location bar has to go. It has many problems. For one, it’s always visible and constantly takes up a large amount of space. Secondly, it’s hard to read, since people don’t really understand URLs. Moreover, it’s modal: it has a mode for displaying the current page’s location and a mode for entering your next destination. It’s not always immediately obvious which mode you’re in and what the current text is indicating, and switching modes is not easy either."
That is the stupidest thing I've read in a while. Really? The URL bar takes up too much space? It is slightly larger than one line of text. If they aer so concerned about saving space, maybe they should get rid of the title bar and the little mozilla icon in the corner - that is a hell of a lot less useful than the URL bar. Sure, hiding the bar might be a great idea on a smart phone or something with severely limited screen real estate, but to apply this across the board as the default is just stupid.
The URL is hard to read? Seriously? It tells you the address of the page you are looking at. That's pretty damn simple. Yes, it is a long string of characters, which I'm sure offends graphic designers everywhere (which seem to be the people driving the current rash of browser UI changes - screw usability, it has to look "nice"), but it really is a simple way to tell you what you are looking at.
It isn't always obvious if you are entering the next destination or looking at your current location? Really? There are people that click in the bar, start typing a new address, and then forget what they are doing and think that the address they just (partially) typed is what they are looking at right now? That argument simply doesn't make any sense.
Mozilla seems to have a serious case of me-too-itis lately. Chrome's version is increasing too fast? Fine, we'll start pumping out new version numbers to compete - yeah, 4.0 just came out, that's okay; this next version we'll just call 5.0 instead of the 4.0.4 that it really is. We'll catch up in no time! Chrome offers the option to hide the URL bar? Hah! Those losers! We're going to get rid of it entirely because we're awesome like that! Here's some made-up BS to justify it even though approximately zero users want this!
At least in America, there has been a "computer" installed in every licensed vehicle for decades that has been illegal to modify or disable:
The Odometer
No, it isn't illegal to modify or disable the odometer. It is only illegal to do so if your intent is to defraud. If the mileage shown on the odometer does not represent actual mileage, you need to disclose that the actual mileage is unknown prior to sale of the vehicle (which reduces the value of the vehicle, obviously).
Call it OCD if you will, but it's just annoying getting black bands on the screen that constantly remind you that black levels on LCDs suck. Might be less of a problem on those fancy-shmancy LED-backlit LCDs or OLEDs or AMOLEDs or what-have-you, but for the rest of the people who have TN panels, (not really)black bands really suck.
That might sort of make sense, except that 99.5% of movies are not 16:9 so you get black bands anyway. Pushing 1920x1080 instead of the traditional (for computers) 1920x1200 is purely cost-cutting, there just isn't any other good reason for it (well, you know, except for commonality in screen sizes between TVs and computer monitors, but that's basically just another cost-cutting measure).
The name that has everyone snickering in Germany: A shameless attempt at raising associations with the MIT by giving a German university a similar name.
And here I thought they were trying to associate themselves with David Hasselhoff. You know, KIT -> KITT -> The Hoff.
In 1999, after the successful flight of AMS-01, the total cost of the AMS program was estimated to be $33 million, with AMS-02 planned for flight to the ISS in 2003. After the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, and after a number of technical difficulties with the construction of AMS-02, the cost of the program ballooned to an estimated $1.5 billion.
So... the cost ballooned from $33 million to $1.5 billion? That has to be one of the biggest cost overruns in history. Not to say that it won't perform valuable observations; I just find it amazing that initial estimates were so wildly off, and yet it still got built and launched.
That's not the most controversial part of the bill, though. SB550 also has provisions that would allow law enforcement to begin inspecting disc replication plants without a warrant in order to verify that they're complying with the law. These inspections must take place during regular business hours, but if officers find equipment that they suspect is being used for non-legit purposes, it can be seized.
I wonder how the summary somehow left out that these warrentless searches are of commercial disc replication plants.
I would assume that all commercial buildings are subject to warrentless searches to enforce various safety and workplace laws...
Anyway, I don't support any degradation of the 4th amendment, but I don't appreciate the deceptive manipulation of large numbers of people who can be counted on to not read the fucking article either.
Yeah, I was wondering about that too. There are certainly cases where government representatives can conduct unannounced inspections (OSHA, fire marshal, etc.), but in all the cases I know of those are safety-related inspections. There isn't a safety issue at all here, they just want to be able to check and make sure that the unique codes that are apparently required for all media (first I've heard of this...) are actually being imprinted on the media.
Not as evil as the summary/article portrays (it doesn't allow going around to random people and searching them for counterfeit media), but it is very troubling.
Eh. India's current Prime Minister is an economist, and used to teach at Oxford. And ironically enough, his son is an attorney for the ACLU (oops). However, the former President used to be a rocket scientist.
Umm, according to the wikipedia article you linked to that would be his daughter that worked for the ACLU, and apparently she now works at the Open Society Justice Initiative (whatever that is).
People only sell games that aren't good enough to play after playing through once. Thus the used game market only damages bad games, enabling the consumers to express their opinion after they bought the product.
Not really. Even good games are usually available used reasonably soon after the game hits retail. There are apparently a lot of people that get rid of games as soon as they've played through it once (of course, it can take months or even years for GameStop and their ilk to set reasonable prices on used games - it does disgust me somewhat when they are selling a brand-new game for $60, and the used copy for $55 when you know they are only paying $25 for the trade-in).
Personally I've never sold a game back to one of the retail stores (or anyone else for that matter), just in case I might want to pick it up again in a year or two... or five... or ten...
Slashdot Mirror
If you're looking for graphical/point-and-click adventures and cheap entertainment all in one ball of wax, I highly recommend the free remakes of Sierra's King's Quest I, II and III as well as Hero's Quest. They're available from AGD Interactive and did I mention they're free?
A neat idea, but why did they abandon the text parser? Sure it could be frustrating at times, but at least it kept the games from just being mindless hunt-and-click. Make them apply that vocabulary!
Minecraft.
With local network and server the multiplayer aspect is wonderful. If you get into building and don't want to fight the creatures, you can turn them off.
Minecraft is a great way to introduce someone to team play, organisation, and resource management. All of these are vital for broadening one's gaming skills.
Minecraft is fun, but it has approximately nothing in common with an adventure game. Adventure games are all about story; Minecraft has many strong points, but story is not one of them.
Different angle than what you're asking for, but I think a better game for a child than a mind-numbing hack-n-slash.
Probably best to start with King's Quest V for the semi-modern graphics. Earlier than that might turn a kid off to the series.
I also have great memories of the King's Quest series, although I'm not sure how easy it is to get up and running on any of them these days. The advantage of the LucasArts adventure games is that they are pretty easy to acquire and run on modern machines.
That said, I think Kings Quest 4 would be a great one to try. No, the graphics are not as nice as V and VI, but I think it was pretty much the height of the text parser. Endless fun (and sometimes frustration) figuring out not only what you need to do but how to tell Rosella to do it. IMO much more interesting, rewarding and (dare I say it) educational than the click hunts that the entirely graphics-based games devolved into.
Cold wars are better for business than fighting wars. In a cold war, you get lots of funding but don't actually have to deliver anything. Cyberwar is even better, because whatever you do deliver becomes obsolete about ten seconds after deployment (at the latest), so you can keep getting the funding. A cyberwar with China is perfect, because there's always the possibility that it will turn into a shooting war, so you need to keep spending money on jets, drones, aircraft carriers, and so on, but there's no real chance that it will, so you don't have to waste much money on things like soldiers (who inconveniently take money away from shareholders' pockets, where it belongs).
See the increasing moves towards unmanned combat vehicles. Expensive (but cheaper than manned vehicles), expendable, and you don't have to worry about losing your own people and therefore jeopardizing the war. They will revolutionize war by making it not only profitable, but sustainable!
He just said the same people who contribute to Palin pages positively are the same ones editing the Paul Revere page. This rules out people trying to screw her reputation, this rules out trolls. This does not rule out supporters and random lunatics, though.
Department of Redundancy Department?
You have to understand. Who wants to buy an Apple product only to turn around and see some poor person with one. How are you supposed to feel superior to them if they have one too.
Exactly. A friend of mine won an iPad in a raffle, and he is not exactly the target demographic. For God's sake he's a Raiders fan, and I don't know if he has ever sat in a (independent) coffee shop for hours on end pretending to be a writer/artist/musician. Every time he pulls that iPad out you can just feel Apple's image being sucked down the drain.
However, without such basic controls as strafe, this demo is not playable. No mouse input hurts but DOS versions had unusable mouse anyway so it's just a throwback to the old times. I estimate I've clocked around 4000 hours those days so I'd cope :p Heck, even comma/dot might be acceptable if they don't want to allow redefining keys, although I'd really prefer a sane setup like Z/X=strafe, alt=fire, shift=run (assuming no autorun like in the original).
Alt=fire? You must have some strange, deformed hands. Clearly Ctrl should be fire.
The rest is okay.
I just can't understand the fucking greed.
It's the number one selling game in history (mw2). You are rolling in cash. Why are you fucking over your customers???
When is it enough Activision?, you greedy fucking bastards?!!
Well, when they realized people are willing to pay $60 a year every year for basically a graphical update (plus another $15 a year for a couple of maps), they seem to have realized that CoD players are mindless zombies who will fork over whatever is asked.
I'm only a half-zombie; I skipped MW2 but got talked into Black Ops. No way I'm buying MW3.
... that there is a lot of intra-state airplane traffic - that's how Southwest got their start.
Does TSA have any authority over air traffic that doesn't cross state boundaries?
I don't know for sure, but I believe all airspace is administered by the federal government, not the states. This is why there are not pilot licenses for individual states. I suppose there might be an argument that states have authority over uncontrolled airspace, but that won't help you if you are flying into/out of most airports.
Their replacement launcher, TouchWiz,...
Eeew.
It's because Mozilla is struggling to stay relevant when they are losing market share year after year to Chrome.
Which, of course, just decreases their relevancy further and faster.
This from the article:
“The location bar has to go. It has many problems. For one, it’s always visible and constantly takes up a large amount of space. Secondly, it’s hard to read, since people don’t really understand URLs. Moreover, it’s modal: it has a mode for displaying the current page’s location and a mode for entering your next destination. It’s not always immediately obvious which mode you’re in and what the current text is indicating, and switching modes is not easy either."
That is the stupidest thing I've read in a while. Really? The URL bar takes up too much space? It is slightly larger than one line of text. If they aer so concerned about saving space, maybe they should get rid of the title bar and the little mozilla icon in the corner - that is a hell of a lot less useful than the URL bar. Sure, hiding the bar might be a great idea on a smart phone or something with severely limited screen real estate, but to apply this across the board as the default is just stupid.
The URL is hard to read? Seriously? It tells you the address of the page you are looking at. That's pretty damn simple. Yes, it is a long string of characters, which I'm sure offends graphic designers everywhere (which seem to be the people driving the current rash of browser UI changes - screw usability, it has to look "nice"), but it really is a simple way to tell you what you are looking at.
It isn't always obvious if you are entering the next destination or looking at your current location? Really? There are people that click in the bar, start typing a new address, and then forget what they are doing and think that the address they just (partially) typed is what they are looking at right now? That argument simply doesn't make any sense.
Mozilla seems to have a serious case of me-too-itis lately. Chrome's version is increasing too fast? Fine, we'll start pumping out new version numbers to compete - yeah, 4.0 just came out, that's okay; this next version we'll just call 5.0 instead of the 4.0.4 that it really is. We'll catch up in no time! Chrome offers the option to hide the URL bar? Hah! Those losers! We're going to get rid of it entirely because we're awesome like that! Here's some made-up BS to justify it even though approximately zero users want this!
How the hell are they going to grip fiber with their hooves?
By the husk?
At least in America, there has been a "computer" installed in every licensed vehicle for decades that has been illegal to modify or disable:
The Odometer
No, it isn't illegal to modify or disable the odometer. It is only illegal to do so if your intent is to defraud. If the mileage shown on the odometer does not represent actual mileage, you need to disclose that the actual mileage is unknown prior to sale of the vehicle (which reduces the value of the vehicle, obviously).
Call it OCD if you will, but it's just annoying getting black bands on the screen that constantly remind you that black levels on LCDs suck. Might be less of a problem on those fancy-shmancy LED-backlit LCDs or OLEDs or AMOLEDs or what-have-you, but for the rest of the people who have TN panels, (not really)black bands really suck.
That might sort of make sense, except that 99.5% of movies are not 16:9 so you get black bands anyway. Pushing 1920x1080 instead of the traditional (for computers) 1920x1200 is purely cost-cutting, there just isn't any other good reason for it (well, you know, except for commonality in screen sizes between TVs and computer monitors, but that's basically just another cost-cutting measure).
The name that has everyone snickering in Germany: A shameless attempt at raising associations with the MIT by giving a German university a similar name.
And here I thought they were trying to associate themselves with David Hasselhoff. You know, KIT -> KITT -> The Hoff.
From the wikipedia article:
In 1999, after the successful flight of AMS-01, the total cost of the AMS program was estimated to be $33 million, with AMS-02 planned for flight to the ISS in 2003. After the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, and after a number of technical difficulties with the construction of AMS-02, the cost of the program ballooned to an estimated $1.5 billion.
So... the cost ballooned from $33 million to $1.5 billion? That has to be one of the biggest cost overruns in history. Not to say that it won't perform valuable observations; I just find it amazing that initial estimates were so wildly off, and yet it still got built and launched.
I think it's hyperbole rather than bad research. Deaths in video games are more dramatic and often more bloody that they would be in real-life.
I would argue, in general, more dramatic but less bloody than real life.
Where's the baseball head-splat, and chainsaw training programs for citizens assist in the control of the spread of the disease?
Awesome idea, I'm going to start selling a line of baseball bats that comes with a little instruction tag like on fire extinguishers:
1. Hold handle firmly in both hands.
2. Swing at zombie cranium.
3. Repeat.
"'If zombies did start roaming the streets, CDC would conduct an investigation much like any other disease outbreak."
Really? How many known diseases cause humans to turn and attack each other? We're not dealing with very cooperative patients here.
Greed, envy, wrath...
We usually use dams to hold back water, not damns. Sure, sometimes the damn dam breaks, but that's no reason to damn it from the beginning.
That's not the most controversial part of the bill, though. SB550 also has provisions that would allow law enforcement to begin inspecting disc replication plants without a warrant in order to verify that they're complying with the law. These inspections must take place during regular business hours, but if officers find equipment that they suspect is being used for non-legit purposes, it can be seized.
I wonder how the summary somehow left out that these warrentless searches are of commercial disc replication plants.
I would assume that all commercial buildings are subject to warrentless searches to enforce various safety and workplace laws...
Anyway, I don't support any degradation of the 4th amendment, but I don't appreciate the deceptive manipulation of large numbers of people who can be counted on to not read the fucking article either.
Yeah, I was wondering about that too. There are certainly cases where government representatives can conduct unannounced inspections (OSHA, fire marshal, etc.), but in all the cases I know of those are safety-related inspections. There isn't a safety issue at all here, they just want to be able to check and make sure that the unique codes that are apparently required for all media (first I've heard of this...) are actually being imprinted on the media.
Not as evil as the summary/article portrays (it doesn't allow going around to random people and searching them for counterfeit media), but it is very troubling.
Eh. India's current Prime Minister is an economist, and used to teach at Oxford. And ironically enough, his son is an attorney for the ACLU (oops). However, the former President used to be a rocket scientist.
Umm, according to the wikipedia article you linked to that would be his daughter that worked for the ACLU, and apparently she now works at the Open Society Justice Initiative (whatever that is).
so, engineers are like Borg?
Except without the individuality.
People only sell games that aren't good enough to play after playing through once. Thus the used game market only damages bad games, enabling the consumers to express their opinion after they bought the product.
Not really. Even good games are usually available used reasonably soon after the game hits retail. There are apparently a lot of people that get rid of games as soon as they've played through it once (of course, it can take months or even years for GameStop and their ilk to set reasonable prices on used games - it does disgust me somewhat when they are selling a brand-new game for $60, and the used copy for $55 when you know they are only paying $25 for the trade-in).
Personally I've never sold a game back to one of the retail stores (or anyone else for that matter), just in case I might want to pick it up again in a year or two... or five... or ten...