When I was at the high school here associated with the University of Illinois (a while ago -- I graduated in '94), we actually played games in history class a couple times a year. One of the teachers there had actually worked with some former students to develop a couple of somewhat primitive but very fun and educational games for his classes. I don't know if they ever were used elsewhere, but they were all really good.
The same teacher ran an extracurricular group where we played Avalon Hill wargames and also had a couple board games of his own devising that we played in class as well. Very cool stuff. As for LAN parties at school, that never really happened, although the last year I was there there was a good deal of rampant MUDding going on in the lab at all hours.:)
Uhm....read it again. They are against DeCSS. Unless you really meant that was your side, but it doesn't sound like it from the rest of your post.
If you don't understand why they are against it, think about it. They own all the copyrights to their sports events' recordings, so every time someone wants to show it in a highlight film or something, they get a cut. Some of the other comments in this thread explain the reasons better, but basically, they are content providers, just like the movie studios, so they think there's going to be hundreds of people pirating "Baseball's Greatest Hits" or something.
Planescape: Torment was not a product of BioWare, it just used the Infinity Engine that was originally used in Baldur's Gate. Planescape:Torment was from Black Isle Software, the same people who brought you Fallout and Fallout 2.
This game has been one of the few I've seen advertised on TV, although it was one of the bestselling computer titles even before that happened. It's a great game where you have to build an amusement park and complete certain goals within a certain amount of time (like 900 guests in the park, a park value of $10,000, etc). I played it once and then had to go out and buy it it was so addicting, and I am not really a huge fan of Sim games usually.
You can pick it up for probably 20 bucks now, plus another 20 for a combo pack with each expansion. While there's no sandbox mode (which is probably it's biggest problem), you can download trainers which can let you have pretty close to the same thing (the main disadvantage is you can't save these parks:/).
It'd probably be great for kids between 8 or so on up; some of the scenarios can be a little frustrating and building your own rollercoasters takes a little practice and good spacial perception. Be careful though, you tend to lose track of time and end up playing this little bugger until the wee hours of the night.:)
Catcher in the Rye is not JD Salinger's only book, it's only his most famous. Do a bibliographic search of his works and you'll see he has plenty of other books to his credit.
Well, I'm one of those people who really prefers 'realistic' FPSes (well, I am a Rogue Spear addict, and my appetite for Quake, or AvP, has rapidly diminished to almost nothing), but I think that saying I have a problem with suspension of disbelief is not quite true.
Playing Rogue Spear or Rainbow Six is a totally different experience from Quake or Unreal; in Quake or Unreal, the goal is to rack up your kills, there's not really any penalty for doing things the quick and dirty way (the worst that could happen is that you die and you have to sit out for like 5 seconds). Rogue Spear is more about accomplishing a more complicated goal (usually), and the difficulty level is a lot harder (and if you screw up, there's no second chances). For me, that ramps the tension up a ton and makes the game a lot more exciting, even if a tango cuts me down in the first 5 seconds of the battle.
That's not to say I didn't have fun playing Quake or AvP -- it's just a different sort of experience altogether.
Tom Dowd is now the head of FASA Interactive now, actually, and Nigel Findley died of a heart attack, not in a car accident. I haven't seen anything from any of the new authors (of the novels or the game materials) to really make me want to buy anything lately -- the only books I've bought for Third Edition have been the Big Black Book and the Corporate Download, whereas I used to buy everything that came out for Second Edition, even though I was a poor college student at the time.
Well, the reasons are too many to mention really, but I can give you a couple of the high points.
1. The whole Indian situation makes no sense; the US government is not going to give up control of half the country to 2 million people and displace ten times that many. They aren't going to start herding them into death camps and executing them en masse either, unless the public goes totally mad. Furthermore, there's no way the Indians could have won the Ghost Dance war, and I doubt in real life they would even want to fight it.
2. The South is not going to rise again any time soon -- no one is going to secede from the most powerful country on the face of the planet for no good reason.
3. The US government is not going to let corporations become totally extraterritorial because of the legal and economic problems that would cause. Some form of limited autonomy maybe (see my site below for what I did -- essentially corporations can enforce the law on their own property but must turn over criminals to government authorities for prosecution).
Those are the high points -- if you look at my site listed below, you can see what I changed; most of it was done to a) make the game make more sense and b) reduce the influence of magic in the game. You can also look at a discussion of the Indian question on rec.games.frp.cyber a few months ago that initially spurred my efforts.
Hrm.....to be honest, a lot of the Shadowrun novels are complete trash, but a good number of them (especially the earlier ones and anything written by Nigel Findley or Tom Dowd, both of which have since left the SR team) are pretty good reads. _Night's Pawn_ and _Burning Bright_ by Tom Dowd and _2XS_ and _House of Sun_ by Nigel Findley are probably the best.
Jon, as someone who has played Shadowrun since about 1993, you should really know better than to start using Shadowrun as a primary source. Shadowrun is drawn from cyberpunk literature like _Neuromancer_ and movies like _Alien_ and _Blade Runner_, where this was a hallmark. I'm pretty sure RTG's Cyberpunk 2020 game was already out when Shadowrun debuted too.
I like Shadowrun, but to be honest, most of the setting makes no sense to someone who knows politics, history, and economics. I had to rewrite most of it when I created my No Carrier setting simply because it was not believable, although admittedly most of this did not have to do with the megacorporate aspect.
Shadowrun may have Ares and Saeder-Krupp, but before them, Gibson had Tessier-Ashpool, _Blade Runner_ had the Tyrell Corporation, and Cyberpunk 2020 had Arasaka. Please don't forget to give credit where credit is due. I am pretty sure Tom Dowd would want it that way.
It's interesting, this review appearing right after Memorial Day, and after I visited the USAF Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton last week. The United States, and perhaps the world at large, is becoming increasingly unwilling to engage in any sort of military action in which friendly casualties might be inflicted, while the number of dictators and violent regimes throughout the world has not gone down.
While there may be less and less chance of any major power in the world going to war against another, with the threat of nuclear reprisals hanging over their heads (although China seems to be increasingly willing to threaten the use of nuclear weapons in offensive actions, judging by the rhetoric of their military), the number of regimes like that in Serbia and the Sierra Leone rebels, for instance, does not seem to be on a downward turn.
The United States does not seem to be prepared, mentally or physically, to engage in any sort of real warfare anymore, preferring to try a slipshod aerial bombardment approach that can only work when backed up by forces on the ground. Instead, we claim victory but do nothing of real value and attain neither our goal of a peaceful resolution or an end to the suffering that prompted our action in the first place.
The last generation that remembers that sometimes, in a war, a lot of people have to die in order to save the rest of us, and that some of those people might be in your family, that they might even be you, is slowly dying off. Soon there will be no one left who remembers that, and that's going to be a scary time, because all that's needed for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing, which is exactly what they want to do now.
To be honest, I found this review sort of ironic coming from Jon Katz, who, while I usually find his columns interesting, seems to trumpet the call of how technology is going to make the world some sort of wonderful new place -- making the same mistake that people who think smart bombs and cruise missiles are going to make war nice and tidy do.
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Re:This may sound heretical...
on
Sim Plague
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· Score: 1
No, you're not the only one. I didn't get the Sims (I haven't bought any new games in a while actually; nothing that great has come out this year really) and I don't really see what the point is of simulating someone's real life is. I play games for escape, so I don't see any point in playing a game where I get to be a regular shlub.:)
The fact that you have to micromanage your people so much (making them run to the bathroom, for crying out loud, geez) also does not make the game appeal to me much....
"Jon Katz, you ignorant slut," was a reference to an old Saturday Night Live routine (way back when it was funny). It's what Bill Murray would say to Jane Curtin at the newsdesk when she gave opinion segments.
I work at one of the universities that has banned Napster and I know that the major concern here was the bandwidth problem. Gets a little annoying waiting to do something important, like grabbing patches, etc, when you are held up by the fact that Joe Moron, is busy downloading four gig of crappily-encoded MP3s.
Katz seems to go to far talking about Mitnick and others like him too -- even Mitnick admits that what he did was wrong and illegal, and that's not the problem. The problem is that the Justice Department not on threw the Bill of Rights out the window going after him, but told the judge things any reasonable person would understand to be blatantly false (like you can hack into anyone's machine with a computer and no network connection of any type, or that you can't make Russians launch nukes by whistling into a telephone) in order to impede his defense (and now, give him insane terms of parole so that he almost has to break the law to make a living).
I don't know exactly what Jon is talking about when he is saying that the roots of pornography were in Victorian England; I know there was sexually explicit literature long before the late 1800s. The Marquis De Sade's books were from before the French Revolution I think.
The Puritanical, fanatical repression of sex and sexuality in American culture only serves to make sex all that more scandalous and enticing. That's the ironic part about all this. It's like the kids and the cookie jar. If you tell them its "bad" and they shouldn't look at it, it only makes them want to look at it even more. Worse, children who are wrestling with their sexuality and are looking for answers and support are told that they can't look for others who are grappling with the same issues, because there's no open discussion of sexuality. I know what that can be like; I am glad that I was able to find newsgroups and other place to discuss the problems I was having when I was in high school (6 or 7 years ago). I think I'm a much more stable and sane individual because of it.
Young kids, who have had decent family lives, before they reach puberty, aren't going to be looking for porn; hell, most of them think the opposite sex is "gross" and aren't even thinking about it. Once they hit puberty, parents should be talking to them and helping them find the RIGHT places to learn about sex. If they want to look at porn after that, there's nothing you're going to do that will stop them and they probably aren't going to be horribly affected by it either. On the other hand, if you tell them sex is bad and they should never talk about it, they're going to go to the wrong places and get some pretty screwed up ideas about what sex and relationships are all about.
Please, parents, speaking as someone who has grappled with some pretty tough and disturbing sexual issues, make sure your kids know they can talk to you about sex, and make sure you are ready to be supportive if they have a nonstandard sexual identity/orientation.
Did anyone else notice the mentions about how these two and some of their competitors are losing value (and fast -- 80% loss in one year, ouch)?
I hope this is a sign that the market is realizing how absolutely worthless most of these companies are. When AOL, Amazon, and the others of that lot supposedly have billions of dollars in worth but have never posted a single profit, something is seriously wrong. It's very sick when Boeing and General Electric (who make 747s and nuclear bombs) are supposedly worth less than a really crappy "ISP" and an online bookstore. I _hope_ there is a serious paradigm shift in the market soon so that this sort of inflation is curtailed before it reaches the point of October, 1929....
The real root of the problem here is the publishing industry as a whole, not just the recording industry. While the market is a bit more open in the book publishing industry, the return that the artist sees is about the same. As an author (unpublished as of yet, but), if I sell a novel, the publishing company will sell it for, lets say, 5.99. How much of that do I see? If I'm lucky, I might see a whole quarter -- or maybe 50 cents if I have a proven track record of bestsellers. That means if my book sells 100,000 copies (that's pretty damn good, for a first novel anyway), I make a whole $50,000. That will keep me just fine -- but the publishing company makes over ten times as much!
I imagine the story is much the same with the music industry. I don't mind paying for CDs (I am not really fond of MP3s, but I tend to make a lot of MDs from my CDs and friends'), but it sort of makes me sick to think that 90% of my purchase is not going to the people who created it, it's going to the people who market it. Granted, they deserve their fair share, but when they basically screw over the artist, it gives me a bad taste in my mouth.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was at the high school here associated with the University of Illinois (a while ago -- I graduated in '94), we actually played games in history class a couple times a year. One of the teachers there had actually worked with some former students to develop a couple of somewhat primitive but very fun and educational games for his classes. I don't know if they ever were used elsewhere, but they were all really good.
:)
The same teacher ran an extracurricular group where we played Avalon Hill wargames and also had a couple board games of his own devising that we played in class as well. Very cool stuff. As for LAN parties at school, that never really happened, although the last year I was there there was a good deal of rampant MUDding going on in the lab at all hours.
Replace it with the tasty "Speat" from Heavy Gear. It's close enough. :) And you can use the empty tins to repair Gear armor....
Uhm....read it again. They are against DeCSS. Unless you really meant that was your side, but it doesn't sound like it from the rest of your post.
If you don't understand why they are against it, think about it. They own all the copyrights to their sports events' recordings, so every time someone wants to show it in a highlight film or something, they get a cut. Some of the other comments in this thread explain the reasons better, but basically, they are content providers, just like the movie studios, so they think there's going to be hundreds of people pirating "Baseball's Greatest Hits" or something.
Planescape: Torment was not a product of BioWare, it just used the Infinity Engine that was originally used in Baldur's Gate. Planescape:Torment was from Black Isle Software, the same people who brought you Fallout and Fallout 2.
This game has been one of the few I've seen advertised on TV, although it was one of the bestselling computer titles even before that happened. It's a great game where you have to build an amusement park and complete certain goals within a certain amount of time (like 900 guests in the park, a park value of $10,000, etc). I played it once and then had to go out and buy it it was so addicting, and I am not really a huge fan of Sim games usually.
:/).
:)
You can pick it up for probably 20 bucks now, plus another 20 for a combo pack with each expansion. While there's no sandbox mode (which is probably it's biggest problem), you can download trainers which can let you have pretty close to the same thing (the main disadvantage is you can't save these parks
It'd probably be great for kids between 8 or so on up; some of the scenarios can be a little frustrating and building your own rollercoasters takes a little practice and good spacial perception. Be careful though, you tend to lose track of time and end up playing this little bugger until the wee hours of the night.
Catcher in the Rye is not JD Salinger's only book, it's only his most famous. Do a bibliographic search of his works and you'll see he has plenty of other books to his credit.
Well, I'm one of those people who really prefers 'realistic' FPSes (well, I am a Rogue Spear addict, and my appetite for Quake, or AvP, has rapidly diminished to almost nothing), but I think that saying I have a problem with suspension of disbelief is not quite true.
Playing Rogue Spear or Rainbow Six is a totally different experience from Quake or Unreal; in Quake or Unreal, the goal is to rack up your kills, there's not really any penalty for doing things the quick and dirty way (the worst that could happen is that you die and you have to sit out for like 5 seconds). Rogue Spear is more about accomplishing a more complicated goal (usually), and the difficulty level is a lot harder (and if you screw up, there's no second chances). For me, that ramps the tension up a ton and makes the game a lot more exciting, even if a tango cuts me down in the first 5 seconds of the battle.
That's not to say I didn't have fun playing Quake or AvP -- it's just a different sort of experience altogether.
Tom Dowd is now the head of FASA Interactive now, actually, and Nigel Findley died of a heart attack, not in a car accident. I haven't seen anything from any of the new authors (of the novels or the game materials) to really make me want to buy anything lately -- the only books I've bought for Third Edition have been the Big Black Book and the Corporate Download, whereas I used to buy everything that came out for Second Edition, even though I was a poor college student at the time.
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Well, the reasons are too many to mention really, but I can give you a couple of the high points.
1. The whole Indian situation makes no sense; the US government is not going to give up control of half the country to 2 million people and displace ten times that many. They aren't going to start herding them into death camps and executing them en masse either, unless the public goes totally mad. Furthermore, there's no way the Indians could have won the Ghost Dance war, and I doubt in real life they would even want to fight it.
2. The South is not going to rise again any time soon -- no one is going to secede from the most powerful country on the face of the planet for no good reason.
3. The US government is not going to let corporations become totally extraterritorial because of the legal and economic problems that would cause. Some form of limited autonomy maybe (see my site below for what I did -- essentially corporations can enforce the law on their own property but must turn over criminals to government authorities for prosecution).
Those are the high points -- if you look at my site listed below, you can see what I changed; most of it was done to a) make the game make more sense and b) reduce the influence of magic in the game. You can also look at a discussion of the Indian question on rec.games.frp.cyber a few months ago that initially spurred my efforts.
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Hrm.....to be honest, a lot of the Shadowrun novels are complete trash, but a good number of them (especially the earlier ones and anything written by Nigel Findley or Tom Dowd, both of which have since left the SR team) are pretty good reads. _Night's Pawn_ and _Burning Bright_ by Tom Dowd and _2XS_ and _House of Sun_ by Nigel Findley are probably the best.
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Jon, as someone who has played Shadowrun since about 1993, you should really know better than to start using Shadowrun as a primary source. Shadowrun is drawn from cyberpunk literature like _Neuromancer_ and movies like _Alien_ and _Blade Runner_, where this was a hallmark. I'm pretty sure RTG's Cyberpunk 2020 game was already out when Shadowrun debuted too.
I like Shadowrun, but to be honest, most of the setting makes no sense to someone who knows politics, history, and economics. I had to rewrite most of it when I created my No Carrier setting simply because it was not believable, although admittedly most of this did not have to do with the megacorporate aspect.
Shadowrun may have Ares and Saeder-Krupp, but before them, Gibson had Tessier-Ashpool, _Blade Runner_ had the Tyrell Corporation, and Cyberpunk 2020 had Arasaka. Please don't forget to give credit where credit is due. I am pretty sure Tom Dowd would want it that way.
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It's interesting, this review appearing right after Memorial Day, and after I visited the USAF Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton last week. The United States, and perhaps the world at large, is becoming increasingly unwilling to engage in any sort of military action in which friendly casualties might be inflicted, while the number of dictators and violent regimes throughout the world has not gone down.
While there may be less and less chance of any major power in the world going to war against another, with the threat of nuclear reprisals hanging over their heads (although China seems to be increasingly willing to threaten the use of nuclear weapons in offensive actions, judging by the rhetoric of their military), the number of regimes like that in Serbia and the Sierra Leone rebels, for instance, does not seem to be on a downward turn.
The United States does not seem to be prepared, mentally or physically, to engage in any sort of real warfare anymore, preferring to try a slipshod aerial bombardment approach that can only work when backed up by forces on the ground. Instead, we claim victory but do nothing of real value and attain neither our goal of a peaceful resolution or an end to the suffering that prompted our action in the first place.
The last generation that remembers that sometimes, in a war, a lot of people have to die in order to save the rest of us, and that some of those people might be in your family, that they might even be you, is slowly dying off. Soon there will be no one left who remembers that, and that's going to be a scary time, because all that's needed for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing, which is exactly what they want to do now.
To be honest, I found this review sort of ironic coming from Jon Katz, who, while I usually find his columns interesting, seems to trumpet the call of how technology is going to make the world some sort of wonderful new place -- making the same mistake that people who think smart bombs and cruise missiles are going to make war nice and tidy do.
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No, you're not the only one. I didn't get the Sims (I haven't bought any new games in a while actually; nothing that great has come out this year really) and I don't really see what the point is of simulating someone's real life is. I play games for escape, so I don't see any point in playing a game where I get to be a regular shlub. :)
The fact that you have to micromanage your people so much (making them run to the bathroom, for crying out loud, geez) also does not make the game appeal to me much....
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Not as far as I know....I don't think it's quite prepared to be Slashdotted though. :) :/
I guess you just need to keep trying to reload the page.
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Someone with far too much time on his hands decided to see how badly he could break the game on ISCA BBS -- here's the results:
http://us4n6.dnaco.net/simz/I particularly like the fireman watching people keel over dead in the street....
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"Jon Katz, you ignorant slut," was a reference to an old Saturday Night Live routine (way back when it was funny). It's what Bill Murray would say to Jane Curtin at the newsdesk when she gave opinion segments.
:)
It wasn't supposed to be serious.
I work at one of the universities that has banned Napster and I know that the major concern here was the bandwidth problem. Gets a little annoying waiting to do something important, like grabbing patches, etc, when you are held up by the fact that Joe Moron, is busy downloading four gig of crappily-encoded MP3s.
Katz seems to go to far talking about Mitnick and others like him too -- even Mitnick admits that what he did was wrong and illegal, and that's not the problem. The problem is that the Justice Department not on threw the Bill of Rights out the window going after him, but told the judge things any reasonable person would understand to be blatantly false (like you can hack into anyone's machine with a computer and no network connection of any type, or that you can't make Russians launch nukes by whistling into a telephone) in order to impede his defense (and now, give him insane terms of parole so that he almost has to break the law to make a living).
I don't know exactly what Jon is talking about when he is saying that the roots of pornography were in Victorian England; I know there was sexually explicit literature long before the late 1800s. The Marquis De Sade's books were from before the French Revolution I think.
The Puritanical, fanatical repression of sex and sexuality in American culture only serves to make sex all that more scandalous and enticing. That's the ironic part about all this. It's like the kids and the cookie jar. If you tell them its "bad" and they shouldn't look at it, it only makes them want to look at it even more. Worse, children who are wrestling with their sexuality and are looking for answers and support are told that they can't look for others who are grappling with the same issues, because there's no open discussion of sexuality. I know what that can be like; I am glad that I was able to find newsgroups and other place to discuss the problems I was having when I was in high school (6 or 7 years ago). I think I'm a much more stable and sane individual because of it.
Young kids, who have had decent family lives, before they reach puberty, aren't going to be looking for porn; hell, most of them think the opposite sex is "gross" and aren't even thinking about it. Once they hit puberty, parents should be talking to them and helping them find the RIGHT places to learn about sex. If they want to look at porn after that, there's nothing you're going to do that will stop them and they probably aren't going to be horribly affected by it either. On the other hand, if you tell them sex is bad and they should never talk about it, they're going to go to the wrong places and get some pretty screwed up ideas about what sex and relationships are all about.
Please, parents, speaking as someone who has grappled with some pretty tough and disturbing sexual issues, make sure your kids know they can talk to you about sex, and make sure you are ready to be supportive if they have a nonstandard sexual identity/orientation.
The byline at the end of the article said the two authors were theoretical physicists at Northeastern University.
Did anyone else notice the mentions about how these two and some of their competitors are losing value (and fast -- 80% loss in one year, ouch)?
I hope this is a sign that the market is realizing how absolutely worthless most of these companies are. When AOL, Amazon, and the others of that lot supposedly have billions of dollars in worth but have never posted a single profit, something is seriously wrong. It's very sick when Boeing and General Electric (who make 747s and nuclear bombs) are supposedly worth less than a really crappy "ISP" and an online bookstore. I _hope_ there is a serious paradigm shift in the market soon so that this sort of inflation is curtailed before it reaches the point of October, 1929....
The real root of the problem here is the publishing industry as a whole, not just the recording industry. While the market is a bit more open in the book publishing industry, the return that the artist sees is about the same. As an author (unpublished as of yet, but), if I sell a novel, the publishing company will sell it for, lets say, 5.99. How much of that do I see? If I'm lucky, I might see a whole quarter -- or maybe 50 cents if I have a proven track record of bestsellers. That means if my book sells 100,000 copies (that's pretty damn good, for a first novel anyway), I make a whole $50,000. That will keep me just fine -- but the publishing company makes over ten times as much!
I imagine the story is much the same with the music industry. I don't mind paying for CDs (I am not really fond of MP3s, but I tend to make a lot of MDs from my CDs and friends'), but it sort of makes me sick to think that 90% of my purchase is not going to the people who created it, it's going to the people who market it. Granted, they deserve their fair share, but when they basically screw over the artist, it gives me a bad taste in my mouth.