Re:Good review
on
Review: Spore
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Don't get me wrong, the DRM issue with this game is significant. It's hurting customers, and the pirates were not affected at all. They are a large company trying to protect their product of course, and they were sure they had a hit game on their hands.
The DRM issue will go away with this particular game, I feel. Without the DRM, the game still has it's own set of problems though. It's got it's good aspects as well. In the long run, they can start to remove the DRM through patches or by just setting the server to say 'yes' to any installs under 10. The initial DRM is important to them because they don't want the game to be pirated more than bought.
The game is also a misleading on what it is. It says evolution, but in the end it's a dummied down RTS. Which is fine, as it's fun, but 'eh' it's not everything we were lead to believe, I guess.
Keep up the campaign on the DRM, really, but just don't let it overshadow the fact that there is a game involved here too, and if they remove the DRM, you want people to play it, to prove that it was the DRM preventing them from doing so.
Good review
on
Review: Spore
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I think the OP did a solid job with the review. You didn't get caught up in the DRM issue, which is a big one. Good job on it.
My biggest disappointment so far are the controls, the camera to a degree, and the lag. The lag is particular bad when you land on a planet for the first time. I wouldn't mind a longer wait screen, but when I have 6 minutes to find one particular creature, and it takes 2-4 minutes for the landscape to finishing rendering, it sucks. This particular shortcoming is killing my fun in the later stages of the space game. The 'radar' sucks too, as it doesn't start working properly until the landscape renders. (Imagine the 'pop in' problem on loading textures, but it's not just textures but entire cities.)
The lack of a randomize button on a lot of different creatures is sad too. Sometimes I don't care how the building or ship works, and I'd rather use something unique. heh
I'm not sure how that would work. A family of four would have a total of 99 square feet, IF the entire thing was devoted to living space, which it won't be. Otherwise, it's down to 24 square feet if you have individual places, and I don't know many people who want to live in a 4x6 room, about the room of a small bathroom.
The bonuses suck because they're split and don't stack, but 305 m^3 isn't a lot of space, so he's going to want a lot of expanders with it's two low slots..
I think that the disparity between PVP in different MMOs cannot be more different between Eve Online and World of Warcraft, actually. Age of Conan isn't that different but it's not quite as different. Plus, half the content is not even there yet.
In World of Warcraft, PVP is common on PVP servers, but it doesn't have any downside other than lost time. If you die 4 times because someone is being an asshole to you, then that's it, you lose the 20 minutes it takes to corpse run a couple times, and then you go on your way. Occasionally, your death might be to a mob, and then you have a 10% damage bill, so maybe a gold or three, no big deal usually for your level. Or, if you join a PVE server, you can opt out of PVP entirely, and never fight a single other player. You also have the option of fighting in the cross realm PVP areas, but you have to horde to win anything really. It's pretty unbalanced most of the time, with known requirements for what makes a good PVP team. In the end: Massive amounts of time and practice.
In Eve Online, PVP is inherent to the game. You can carebear in empire, and avoid the fringes of society, but occasionally a good marketing deal or a mission might take you into at least low sec. Even if you're flying an interceptor with warp and inertial stabs, you can be grabbed by a broadsword getting sensor boosted and infinite warp scrambling. Hell, those things can grab pods with enough people boosting them. And then everything you had on you, gone. You make a mistake in empire and grab a can you shouldn't have, someone aggros you, and you're gone. You join someone's gang to a mission, they have a war target after them, you're gone. You get deceived by someone, suck it up and deal princess.
Life in general in WoW is pretty mild on the low end. But Eve is all around brutal to people. Even if you play it safe 100% of the time, there are chances for something going horribly wrong. Plus, the one-universe view of Eve, and the TIME it takes to make a good character... If you have someone who wants to grief you hard, you cannot start over easily in Eve. You have to sacrifice a LOT if someone has it out for you. In WoW, you switch servers, make a new character, in a month you're running around at a high level doing the same things over again.
WoW is like going to any corporate theme park, their goal is to make you have fun, and even if you're upset by something, you waste some time, and you get your money back in the end. Eve Online is like going to downtown in a major city, and if you happen to get mugged, then you better not be carrying much money. Oh yeah, and the cops don't care if they didn't see it happen. And there are some areas you should just avoid entirely.
I've lived in 0.0 for a year at a time in Eve and have a Kara keyed Wow character, so I've been around. But this factional warfare thing that Eve is doing? Yeah, the low sec piracy is going to get worse and worse because of it. Should be fun. That is, if you don't mind the occasional loss of a couple months of work.
It's one thing to run your business systems well. But I do have to point out that hacks to code and systems are required from time to time. If your business is doing anything beyond just using single package A, there is always integration with other packages. Things go wrong. People have to recover somehow.
I'm particularly... well I'm not proud of this, but I feel accomplished for figuring it out. The pipe command of << stopped working on my jumpstart, and while I don't know WHY it happened, I figured out what it was breaking and worked around it. It's annoying, yes, but at least now google will hopefully pick it up, and the next person who has to do the same ugly ugly hack will not be alone.
In the comic, as a sysadmin, I'm the one who's breaking the branch that I'm tied to, so instead I'm tying it to 10 other small branches that would break one at a time, but collectively, hold together. At least, sometimes that's how it goes. But at least the next person who has the error knows that doing this might work for them.
100,000 times? Try more like 1,000. That's usually the level that is promised by commercial products, anyway. I'm not sure where he got the 100,000 number from.
It's not a good replacement for a consumer hard drive. There are applications that would use it, I'm sure, but make sure it's low on the writes.
Apparently, we take the opinions of analysts as news now? Especially ones that have been wrong in the past? This is the same guy who said:
"At the end of the day, we don't play games for social interaction... We play games to escape." Microsoft's strategy is "absolutely flawed," he said.
I suppose he has never seen the game of World of Warcraft or any of the other games that allow you to play with your friends.
Seriously Zonk, try to have some news objectivity. I'm sure if you dug around, you could find some analyst on the Sony payroll to say how it was the xbox360's extra content causing the holdup.
yeah, god forbid you have to log into a game and play it.
You do realize you can set longer skills, and plan it around your schedule. Evemon helps with that. And yeah, there are a lot of 2 hour skills, but you're past those pretty quickly, usually in a month. Then you're into the couple day skills. And you don't have to complete it, you can switch skills mid training. I'd take that over grinding those sames skills by killing the same thing over and over again.
I guess you didn't play for very long, it's not a game for everyone. For instance, BS 5 takes 35 days for most people, so, yeah there are advanced skills like you describe.
There are a couple games I can play for a long long time. Right now, I think I'd go with Eve Online. I think any under development, active MMO would be more fun long term than most other static single player games. But here are some other candidates.
Nethack: Because the dev team has thought of everything. Lots of variety, lots of challenges, and can run on nearly anything.
Star Control 2: There's so much going on in the different systems. If there wasn't the 4 year limitation, I would most likely make the effort to mine every planet. (and is very similar to Eve. heh)
Pokemon: Sadly enough, Pokemon is addicting. Though without being able to trade them with other losers who play it, I would never catch them all.
Neverwinter Nights: The mod community stepped up, made the game interesting for everyone. Plus, it runs on any sort of machine you could ask for. heh
Armada: (If I had friends on the island) This is a console game that is a lot of fun with friends.
Quake II CTF: This was THE multiplayer game for me. This would be great if I only had an internet connection. (And people still played it. heh)
Er there is something to keep track of your skills, EveMon. The rest, you don't really need if you're not in game. heh
And nope, no multiplatform client, though there are a bunch of people running it on linux via Cedega.
And you don't need a 'stick' when you have a mouse. It's more strategy than twitch shooting, though the twitch element is there. (Recently lost a t1 cruiser because I didn't get the nos on the assault frig fast enough.)
Would something along the lines of 'Explicit Lyrics' stickers make him feel better?
How about the label: If you buy this for your kids, you are a douchebag and a bad parent.
If people would spend even 5 minutes understanding the ESRB, all these problems would go away. People understand R rated movied, why can't they understand M rated games? Jack Thompson should just get people to learn more about the ESRB, but I don't see how he can get paid doing that. heh
I completely agree. If it's not an xbox 360 fan boy story or a ps3 hater story, it doesn't get put up. If you'd like some examples from the past 2 weeks, I come up with this pretty rough count based on article titles:
Sony: 11 anti, 2 pro Microsoft: 1 anti, 6 pro Nintendo: 4 anti, 5 pro
Granted, Sony is screwing up pretty badly, and the xbox 360 is hitting it's stride, it is a pretty annoying bias.
We get it. We're interrupting your gears of war sessions and you can't find a ps3. But get over it. heh
I really do not understand the people who say that DVD9 is big enough for games. Especially when we have releases like this. It's obvious that if there is space on the disc, the developers will find some use for it.
While printing multiple DVD's would be cheaper than making a single HD DVD, it is still aggravation for the players and the developers in the long term. The players will actually have to 'get up' from their computer to watch extras, for example. I know I get bothered having to switch cd's instead of installing off a single DVD on my computer, and it's usually sitting right next to me. What happens in a couple years when they start doing the multiple DVD's just for game play? We, as consumers, are generally lazy.
But I think it's 10x worse for the developers. They want to fit on a single DVD9 and get major pressure from the publishers to do so. They want to use the HD power of these devices, but if they are having to lossy compress material to make it fit, they might not have that option. This is especially true on any cut scene intensive game. While I truly believe in games that can be fun without major hardware, I wouldn't to limit a studio in doing whatever they want.
My best example of this might be Star Control 2. That game had incredible detail. Now, imagine if they took each one of the several thousand worlds on there and gave it 'life' in an HD format. It would be an incredible amount of space. Not to mention the possible full motion video you could introduce with each of the alien races. It would be a lot of data, and while procedural generated content seems to be rapidly becoming popular, it might not be good enough for a company's art department. And I would not want to limit someone's vision by a hardware constraint.
Most of this is grousing of an old man who yearns for an older era of great game play over graphics, but if you're going to do great graphics, at least give the people the tools for the job to make it easy for us lazy bastards. After all, I want my Gauntlet 12: Voyage to Change The DVD Again to be as great as the original, if they can make it.
Yes, replying to my own message. I found a copy of very cheap wired ones, like in the 30 buck range, from SolidTek, such as the ACK-540, but the ball mouse built in doesn't work with linux and the cord is only 6'. Or they might be from Adesso, they seem to be using the same model numbers. Some of them are highly rated on newegg, others are rated very poorly. And it seems like everyone and their mother wants to charge an extra 50 bucks on top of the price to include a mouse and/or if they call it a 'media keyboard'. bleh.
There's the overly complicated BELKIN MediaPilot F8E838 for around $83, for instance, with remote, RF wireless, and linux support out of the box. SpecResearch seems to have a 50 buck one though that might fit the bill though, the 01027 or whatever, but so so reviews.
Can anyone present reasonable alternatives to this? I am in the market for my home media center, but the model M and non-roller mouse is working okay as long as I don't mind getting down on the floor.
I'm looking for all in one wireless keyboard and mouse that is light and not fragile. Microsoft's idea won't work for me, as it has things I don't care for. Logitech doesn't seem to have anything close to what I want as they want you to have a seperate keyboard and mouse. And while the VersaPoint RF is great at work, I don't need RF, nor do I need a 140 buck keyboard.
So we know the Phantom is crap, and possibly outright fiction, what is a good, buyable alternative? (links to company websites, not to vendors please.)
Today, it was discovered Myspace seems to extend life! A recent study today found that there are at least 100,000 people on the site that are reportedly 99 years old. This number of older people seems to indicate that all the 99 year old people in the world are either using Myspace, or it is extending life to that age.
Tom had no comment other than to say that he's your friend.
Bleh, should have taken the 5 seconds to search for this, but yeah, since December of last year. And this article has a ton more content. Must be a slow news day.
Er, these have been around for awhile as part of the personalized home page stuff. I know because I've been using them for like 3 months or so. I should search back through slashdot, but this is such a dupe. http://www.google.com/ig is the real page, which would have been nice to link to. Just click in the upper left corner to add more clutter to your home page.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't get me wrong, the DRM issue with this game is significant. It's hurting customers, and the pirates were not affected at all. They are a large company trying to protect their product of course, and they were sure they had a hit game on their hands.
The DRM issue will go away with this particular game, I feel. Without the DRM, the game still has it's own set of problems though. It's got it's good aspects as well. In the long run, they can start to remove the DRM through patches or by just setting the server to say 'yes' to any installs under 10. The initial DRM is important to them because they don't want the game to be pirated more than bought.
The game is also a misleading on what it is. It says evolution, but in the end it's a dummied down RTS. Which is fine, as it's fun, but 'eh' it's not everything we were lead to believe, I guess.
Keep up the campaign on the DRM, really, but just don't let it overshadow the fact that there is a game involved here too, and if they remove the DRM, you want people to play it, to prove that it was the DRM preventing them from doing so.
I think the OP did a solid job with the review. You didn't get caught up in the DRM issue, which is a big one. Good job on it.
My biggest disappointment so far are the controls, the camera to a degree, and the lag. The lag is particular bad when you land on a planet for the first time. I wouldn't mind a longer wait screen, but when I have 6 minutes to find one particular creature, and it takes 2-4 minutes for the landscape to finishing rendering, it sucks. This particular shortcoming is killing my fun in the later stages of the space game. The 'radar' sucks too, as it doesn't start working properly until the landscape renders. (Imagine the 'pop in' problem on loading textures, but it's not just textures but entire cities.)
The lack of a randomize button on a lot of different creatures is sad too. Sometimes I don't care how the building or ship works, and I'd rather use something unique. heh
Square feet = measure of floor space.
If you have a 2000 square foot house, that's the sum of all of it's floors.
I'm not sure how that would work. A family of four would have a total of 99 square feet, IF the entire thing was devoted to living space, which it won't be. Otherwise, it's down to 24 square feet if you have individual places, and I don't know many people who want to live in a 4x6 room, about the room of a small bathroom.
It looks almost like a Kestrel. So it will have 4 launchers, and 0 turrets.
EVE
Kestrel
The bonuses suck because they're split and don't stack, but 305 m^3 isn't a lot of space, so he's going to want a lot of expanders with it's two low slots..
I think that the disparity between PVP in different MMOs cannot be more different between Eve Online and World of Warcraft, actually. Age of Conan isn't that different but it's not quite as different. Plus, half the content is not even there yet.
In World of Warcraft, PVP is common on PVP servers, but it doesn't have any downside other than lost time. If you die 4 times because someone is being an asshole to you, then that's it, you lose the 20 minutes it takes to corpse run a couple times, and then you go on your way. Occasionally, your death might be to a mob, and then you have a 10% damage bill, so maybe a gold or three, no big deal usually for your level. Or, if you join a PVE server, you can opt out of PVP entirely, and never fight a single other player. You also have the option of fighting in the cross realm PVP areas, but you have to horde to win anything really. It's pretty unbalanced most of the time, with known requirements for what makes a good PVP team. In the end: Massive amounts of time and practice.
In Eve Online, PVP is inherent to the game. You can carebear in empire, and avoid the fringes of society, but occasionally a good marketing deal or a mission might take you into at least low sec. Even if you're flying an interceptor with warp and inertial stabs, you can be grabbed by a broadsword getting sensor boosted and infinite warp scrambling. Hell, those things can grab pods with enough people boosting them. And then everything you had on you, gone. You make a mistake in empire and grab a can you shouldn't have, someone aggros you, and you're gone. You join someone's gang to a mission, they have a war target after them, you're gone. You get deceived by someone, suck it up and deal princess.
Life in general in WoW is pretty mild on the low end. But Eve is all around brutal to people. Even if you play it safe 100% of the time, there are chances for something going horribly wrong. Plus, the one-universe view of Eve, and the TIME it takes to make a good character... If you have someone who wants to grief you hard, you cannot start over easily in Eve. You have to sacrifice a LOT if someone has it out for you. In WoW, you switch servers, make a new character, in a month you're running around at a high level doing the same things over again.
WoW is like going to any corporate theme park, their goal is to make you have fun, and even if you're upset by something, you waste some time, and you get your money back in the end. Eve Online is like going to downtown in a major city, and if you happen to get mugged, then you better not be carrying much money. Oh yeah, and the cops don't care if they didn't see it happen. And there are some areas you should just avoid entirely.
I've lived in 0.0 for a year at a time in Eve and have a Kara keyed Wow character, so I've been around. But this factional warfare thing that Eve is doing? Yeah, the low sec piracy is going to get worse and worse because of it. Should be fun. That is, if you don't mind the occasional loss of a couple months of work.
This makes it clear it's only a matter of time before xkcd predictions become reality.
It's one thing to run your business systems well. But I do have to point out that hacks to code and systems are required from time to time. If your business is doing anything beyond just using single package A, there is always integration with other packages. Things go wrong. People have to recover somehow.
I'm particularly... well I'm not proud of this, but I feel accomplished for figuring it out. The pipe command of << stopped working on my jumpstart, and while I don't know WHY it happened, I figured out what it was breaking and worked around it. It's annoying, yes, but at least now google will hopefully pick it up, and the next person who has to do the same ugly ugly hack will not be alone.
In the comic, as a sysadmin, I'm the one who's breaking the branch that I'm tied to, so instead I'm tying it to 10 other small branches that would break one at a time, but collectively, hold together. At least, sometimes that's how it goes. But at least the next person who has the error knows that doing this might work for them.
No, you misheard them. They will be baked, and then there will be cake.
It's not a good replacement for a consumer hard drive. There are applications that would use it, I'm sure, but make sure it's low on the writes.
The only power source capable of generating 1.21 gigawatts of electricity is a bolt of lightning.
(Just reinforcing the reference. heh)
Apparently, we take the opinions of analysts as news now? Especially ones that have been wrong in the past? This is the same guy who said:
... We play games to escape." Microsoft's strategy is "absolutely flawed," he said.
"At the end of the day, we don't play games for social interaction
I suppose he has never seen the game of World of Warcraft or any of the other games that allow you to play with your friends.
Seriously Zonk, try to have some news objectivity. I'm sure if you dug around, you could find some analyst on the Sony payroll to say how it was the xbox360's extra content causing the holdup.
I sought out the infamous penn and teller game too. And I have driven a bus to Las Vegas, but crashed on the way home. I got one point for that.
You do realize you can set longer skills, and plan it around your schedule. Evemon helps with that. And yeah, there are a lot of 2 hour skills, but you're past those pretty quickly, usually in a month. Then you're into the couple day skills. And you don't have to complete it, you can switch skills mid training. I'd take that over grinding those sames skills by killing the same thing over and over again.
I guess you didn't play for very long, it's not a game for everyone. For instance, BS 5 takes 35 days for most people, so, yeah there are advanced skills like you describe.
And nope, no multiplatform client, though there are a bunch of people running it on linux via Cedega.
And you don't need a 'stick' when you have a mouse. It's more strategy than twitch shooting, though the twitch element is there. (Recently lost a t1 cruiser because I didn't get the nos on the assault frig fast enough.)
How about the label: If you buy this for your kids, you are a douchebag and a bad parent.
If people would spend even 5 minutes understanding the ESRB, all these problems would go away. People understand R rated movied, why can't they understand M rated games? Jack Thompson should just get people to learn more about the ESRB, but I don't see how he can get paid doing that. heh
And the newly elected congress might be just busy enough to say 'sure sure' and pass something like this through.
I prefer the other MPAA story they have on their site though: MPAA to Thwart Pirates By Making All Movies Suck (It would be funnier if it wasn't so true.)
I completely agree. If it's not an xbox 360 fan boy story or a ps3 hater story, it doesn't get put up. If you'd like some examples from the past 2 weeks, I come up with this pretty rough count based on article titles:
Sony: 11 anti, 2 pro
Microsoft: 1 anti, 6 pro
Nintendo: 4 anti, 5 pro
Granted, Sony is screwing up pretty badly, and the xbox 360 is hitting it's stride, it is a pretty annoying bias.
We get it. We're interrupting your gears of war sessions and you can't find a ps3. But get over it. heh
While printing multiple DVD's would be cheaper than making a single HD DVD, it is still aggravation for the players and the developers in the long term. The players will actually have to 'get up' from their computer to watch extras, for example. I know I get bothered having to switch cd's instead of installing off a single DVD on my computer, and it's usually sitting right next to me. What happens in a couple years when they start doing the multiple DVD's just for game play? We, as consumers, are generally lazy.
But I think it's 10x worse for the developers. They want to fit on a single DVD9 and get major pressure from the publishers to do so. They want to use the HD power of these devices, but if they are having to lossy compress material to make it fit, they might not have that option. This is especially true on any cut scene intensive game. While I truly believe in games that can be fun without major hardware, I wouldn't to limit a studio in doing whatever they want.
My best example of this might be Star Control 2. That game had incredible detail. Now, imagine if they took each one of the several thousand worlds on there and gave it 'life' in an HD format. It would be an incredible amount of space. Not to mention the possible full motion video you could introduce with each of the alien races. It would be a lot of data, and while procedural generated content seems to be rapidly becoming popular, it might not be good enough for a company's art department. And I would not want to limit someone's vision by a hardware constraint.
Most of this is grousing of an old man who yearns for an older era of great game play over graphics, but if you're going to do great graphics, at least give the people the tools for the job to make it easy for us lazy bastards. After all, I want my Gauntlet 12: Voyage to Change The DVD Again to be as great as the original, if they can make it.
Yes, replying to my own message. I found a copy of very cheap wired ones, like in the 30 buck range, from SolidTek, such as the ACK-540, but the ball mouse built in doesn't work with linux and the cord is only 6'. Or they might be from Adesso, they seem to be using the same model numbers. Some of them are highly rated on newegg, others are rated very poorly. And it seems like everyone and their mother wants to charge an extra 50 bucks on top of the price to include a mouse and/or if they call it a 'media keyboard'. bleh.
There's the overly complicated BELKIN MediaPilot F8E838 for around $83, for instance, with remote, RF wireless, and linux support out of the box. SpecResearch seems to have a 50 buck one though that might fit the bill though, the 01027 or whatever, but so so reviews.
Can anyone present reasonable alternatives to this? I am in the market for my home media center, but the model M and non-roller mouse is working okay as long as I don't mind getting down on the floor.
I'm looking for all in one wireless keyboard and mouse that is light and not fragile. Microsoft's idea won't work for me, as it has things I don't care for. Logitech doesn't seem to have anything close to what I want as they want you to have a seperate keyboard and mouse. And while the VersaPoint RF is great at work, I don't need RF, nor do I need a 140 buck keyboard.
So we know the Phantom is crap, and possibly outright fiction, what is a good, buyable alternative? (links to company websites, not to vendors please.)
Tom had no comment other than to say that he's your friend.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/14/134623 1
I just wish a few of them were more customizable.