Serious Sam II had a "flowers" option where monsters exploded with a spray of flowers instead of blood. No doubt it was activated permanently and cynically for countries such as that, to prove the point.
Another reason Total Annihilation was ahead of its time -- the "corpses" of your giant robots were burned out hulks on the battlefield, which could then be mined for metal. They also provided blocking areas, too. And if they took enough damage, they turned into a small debris field that no longer blocked, but could still be mined, although for a much reduced amount of metal. Trees could be mined for energy, but if the forest caught on fire and burned, the burned stalks could only be mined for much less energy.
Yeah, it was sweet to be able to use elevation to your advantage for hiding or shooting farther. The lame POS that was Warcraft III allowed this, but on all the maps, I only ever found one spot where I could use the elevation to my advantage such that my tower would shoot farther than a god damned meatwagon, at least on the hardest mode.
I recall starting to DM a new group of guys at college lo 20 years ago. For some odd reason, they were afraid to do anything. Eventually I found out that their former DM (actually still a current one as they went to both) was fond of sudden death traps like 50,000 volts on a statue and crap like that. It took a little while.
We actually played "Keep on the Borderlands" on a giant laminated 1" square grid my dad, umm, borrowed from the drafting department at work, such that the entire cave area would fit on it yet we could use the little pewter figurines. Pretty awesome when lain out on the floor.
> and the decaying body (which would bring in disease, as well as the smell of a dead body
Only if they're there for more than 24 hours. And serious, vomit-inducing, disabling stink probably won't really start taking for 2 or 3 days, depending on the temp.
Oh, wait. You were the "average people" who refused to play it on expert level, wherein you were forbidden from killing anyone (although knocking them out was functionally the same, though often harder to do as you could only do this by sneaking up on them.)
WHICH WAS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE GAME If I wanted a first person slasher, I'd go play Quake with the axe.
That's fine -- as long as they carry through to the logical extension -- you can blow up the corpses into smaller and smaller fragments, or grab them and throw them out of the way.
I'm sick of bushes that either don't exist as immaterial, or are like a spike of some mithril adamantium substance that causes a truck to flip over.
> the US has 300 million inhabitants, compared to the minuscule > populations in many European countries that do first class research.
It should be straightforward to normalize this per capita, and see if socialism does slow down technological growth because, by providing for everybody just about everything, people lose their hunger to excel.
I mean, wouldn't it be a kick in the balls if socialism was a net detriment to society because it slowed the rate of technological growth, even just a little bit, and thus, for example, people continued to die when they wouldn't (due to cures and treatments) developed in faster-paced technological societies?
Just something to think about. Like certain anti-depressant drugs giving some suicidal people the balls and confidence and clarity and willpower to actually kill themselves, it could have a net result worse than the disease of unrestricted capitalism, with all it's poor people sitting in front of cameras.
Better yet, show me a large scale project of that nature where the "local peasantry" would prefer not to have a job at the new place and would prefer to keep living on their farm.
"How green was my valley" is more important to people living in comfort in the west than it is to poor masses on farms.
Well, your character is persistent -- the world is not. Nothing you do makes a permanent change. Stuff just respawns. The same guy gets kidnapped again and again, needing rescue.
It's true there are occasional 1-time events as a world change comes into being, usually part of the release of an expansion pack or new online update, and occasional cyclic events (like the Greatfather Winter crap or the circus in Goldshire junk in WoW, or the Winter Lord and Trick or Treating in CoH). But I can only think of one example in any MMORPG where what players did made a difference.
In SWG, they would tally, per server, the Empire vs. Rebels in some particular contest, and the side that won (for that server) would determine if one of the sides would or would not get some minor new power/weapon/whatever.
IIRC, the one time they did this, the Empire won on every server but one, thus denying the losers, er, Rebels, their new power almost everywhere. And thus making it even less desirable to play a Rebel.
On my particular server, losing Anchorhead to a group of 2-3 Empire, was a nightly occurance. The minimaxers had already figured out that, since you could pick-and-choose from any tree you wanted (as long as you climbed (clumb?) the tree the proper way to get to higher powers) you could pick up the low level defensive powers from half a dozen different trees, and you were suddenly untouchable.
> why couldn't we fly against (even a moddable?) Yuuzhan Vong coralskipper?
Because fewer than one in one hundred thousand Star Wars fans even knows what that is. If Macs, at 1/10 the PC market size, can only generate enough to warrant only the hugest games be ported, how much less for lesser things from the bookworld?
> The first problem with that is the Jedi problem. Every Player and its > freaking dog would want to be a User. I wanted to suggest that the > User could be a reachable rank, but then there'll just be grinders > doing that too. It's hard to balance against human nature. May I > suggest - leave the User as something special.
You could make it like the Jedi, v. 2.0 in SWG: A greatly wimped thing. Then everybody could be one, no problem!
I recall the original promise of the ultimately terrible Horizons -- you could be one of many normal races/classes, or you could also be a Dragon. If you were a dragon, it would take 2 years to get to ancient dragon status, but once you did, you would be an even fight for any 3 maxxed out regular PC characters. The goal being that you'd build your lair, collect treasure, and they would seek your lair and try to take it.
But then a committee took control of Horizons, and the rest is history.
And sadly SWG went the wrong way with the Jedi, too. (Neglecting the other "wrong way" when 8 people would kill giraffes by having 7 shoot it with supposedly advanced laser weapons from point blank range, while the 8th doused it with a flamethrower, and the animal wouldn't instantly die or run screaming, but would bite back for a good 30 seconds.
Man, there's a Doberman! We have 8 guys, three with rifles, two with.57 Magnums, and two with a flamethrower, and one with a rocket propelled grenade launcher. Should we chance it?:rollseyes
> To be a wizard in Harry Potter's world would still be special. > It wouldn't require a lightning bolt scar on everyone's head. > All it requires is a difference experience
As a minimax-er, I'm already drooling about whatever it takes to make sure I get the badass Darth Vader-esque wand to "choose" me. You know, the one with 2.3x the mana regen speed and 1.4x the mental control multiplier. Yes, it also has a high ego, making me fly into a rage, but once I spec for my own mental control prowess points, so I can pwn the want in ego battles, Hermione shall be mine!
> Example: don't make an MMORPG about Harry Potter...you're also going to > have five thousand people who can't succeed without a ragged scar on > their forehead in an entirely predictable way
Nah, that's for teh l4m3rz. I'm thinking a 16 year old Hermyohmyione with the Dumblemelon slider all the way to Pumpkin.
ilreguardlessadj Without any guards due to the mind control spell "Imagined Pepperment Schnapps Queasiness", because the guards have run away, after it has worn off, and before they have had time to return to their posts. Pewbieville was ilreguardless for thirteen minutes after the deflected but nearly catastrophic attack by the Necromuffdevourers Consortium.
Hi! Welcome to Lilo and Stitch's World of Online Adventures!
Fluffy Bunny says: Hi! I'm Fluffy Bunny! My real name is Butters, though. I was just lookin' here at this cute little rabbit hole. Where do you think it goes?
You chug Rage powerup. You chug Rage powerup. You chug Rage powerup. You chug Rage powerup. You chug Rage powerup. **You quad-attack Fluffy Bunny for 47, 47, 47, 46 damage!**
There are many papers describing how everything from intelligent life, to life itself, to the universe itself, may have come about. If you have technical beefs with them, please present them. They may be wrong, but they are not "articles of faith". I have good reason to believe my car won't suddenly disintegrate and leave me skidding along the highway at 70 miles per hour. This is not "faith". It is a sound conclusion.
Religion, being pushed into a corner by people demanding it put up proof or shut up, massaged itself until it coerced into existence a god who values belief without proof. Which is more likely, that such a god has this odd property, or that it actually does not exist?
It's also slightly confusing -- what constitutes "natural phenomena"? What if perceptions, etc. are generated in a parallel side world with completely different physics, that matter in this world can, by coincidence, interact with, and evolution latched onto it in that manner?
Would that count as "natural phenomena"? If those statements are claiming this universe, with it's 3D and quantum mechanics and Einstein is, most definitely, all there is, then I think they're claiming too much as an athiest stance.
But then I completely reject "spiritual" as a phenomenon separate from "physical", anyway. IF a god existed, he'd have to operate according to some kind of rules of physics, perhaps radically different, but it's there nonetheless. The wildest conception of a religious person in a "mind is a spirit is a soul existing in some holy spirit-space" is nevertheless a world of physics itself open to scientific scrutiny and understanding. If it exists, it has rules, and is understandable, at least in theory.
They pay huge dollars for the rights to make the game (the studios don't risk much -- they make the game company cough up huge bucks up front just to get to make the game, then the game company takes all the risk) then what you're left with is a huge investment by monied people, and they suddenly decide to micromanage the game design until it's a useless horse-designed-by-committee.
The Superman franchise suffered far worse fates in this department. I'm not aware of [i]any[/i] decent Superman games. I recall this especially bad monstrosity from Sunsoft for the Genesis. Or was it the Colecovision. I don't know. Thank god I only rented that POS. Cool, you're Superman! F**k! There's Kryptonite beams everywhere!
Slashdot Mirror
Serious Sam II had a "flowers" option where monsters exploded with a spray of flowers instead of blood. No doubt it was activated permanently and cynically for countries such as that, to prove the point.
Another reason Total Annihilation was ahead of its time -- the "corpses" of your giant robots were burned out hulks on the battlefield, which could then be mined for metal. They also provided blocking areas, too. And if they took enough damage, they turned into a small debris field that no longer blocked, but could still be mined, although for a much reduced amount of metal. Trees could be mined for energy, but if the forest caught on fire and burned, the burned stalks could only be mined for much less energy.
Yeah, it was sweet to be able to use elevation to your advantage for hiding or shooting farther. The lame POS that was Warcraft III allowed this, but on all the maps, I only ever found one spot where I could use the elevation to my advantage such that my tower would shoot farther than a god damned meatwagon, at least on the hardest mode.
> Persistent corpses was one of the early improvements for Dawn of
> War. It's actually an important strategic resource for the Necrons now.
Persistent corpses are an important strategic resource for the Neocons now, too.
Hah! Beat you to it!
I recall starting to DM a new group of guys at college lo 20 years ago. For some odd reason, they were afraid to do anything. Eventually I found out that their former DM (actually still a current one as they went to both) was fond of sudden death traps like 50,000 volts on a statue and crap like that. It took a little while.
We actually played "Keep on the Borderlands" on a giant laminated 1" square grid my dad, umm, borrowed from the drafting department at work, such that the entire cave area would fit on it yet we could use the little pewter figurines. Pretty awesome when lain out on the floor.
> and the decaying body (which would bring in disease, as well as the smell of a dead body
Only if they're there for more than 24 hours. And serious, vomit-inducing, disabling stink probably won't really start taking for 2 or 3 days, depending on the temp.
There were no blood stains in Thief since you were forbidden from killing anyone and could only knock them out.
Unless you played it on the "Chimpanzee" difficulty levels.
Kill? What kill?
Oh, wait. You were the "average people" who refused to play it on expert level, wherein you were forbidden from killing anyone (although knocking them out was functionally the same, though often harder to do as you could only do this by sneaking up on them.)
WHICH WAS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE GAME If I wanted a first person slasher, I'd go play Quake with the axe.
That's fine -- as long as they carry through to the logical extension -- you can blow up the corpses into smaller and smaller fragments, or grab them and throw them out of the way.
I'm sick of bushes that either don't exist as immaterial, or are like a spike of some mithril adamantium substance that causes a truck to flip over.
> the US has 300 million inhabitants, compared to the minuscule
> populations in many European countries that do first class research.
It should be straightforward to normalize this per capita, and see if socialism does slow down technological growth because, by providing for everybody just about everything, people lose their hunger to excel.
I mean, wouldn't it be a kick in the balls if socialism was a net detriment to society because it slowed the rate of technological growth, even just a little bit, and thus, for example, people continued to die when they wouldn't (due to cures and treatments) developed in faster-paced technological societies?
Just something to think about. Like certain anti-depressant drugs giving some suicidal people the balls and confidence and clarity and willpower to actually kill themselves, it could have a net result worse than the disease of unrestricted capitalism, with all it's poor people sitting in front of cameras.
Better yet, show me a large scale project of that nature where the "local peasantry" would prefer not to have a job at the new place and would prefer to keep living on their farm.
"How green was my valley" is more important to people living in comfort in the west than it is to poor masses on farms.
Well, your character is persistent -- the world is not. Nothing you do makes a permanent change. Stuff just respawns. The same guy gets kidnapped again and again, needing rescue.
It's true there are occasional 1-time events as a world change comes into being, usually part of the release of an expansion pack or new online update, and occasional cyclic events (like the Greatfather Winter crap or the circus in Goldshire junk in WoW, or the Winter Lord and Trick or Treating in CoH). But I can only think of one example in any MMORPG where what players did made a difference.
In SWG, they would tally, per server, the Empire vs. Rebels in some particular contest, and the side that won (for that server) would determine if one of the sides would or would not get some minor new power/weapon/whatever.
IIRC, the one time they did this, the Empire won on every server but one, thus denying the losers, er, Rebels, their new power almost everywhere. And thus making it even less desirable to play a Rebel.
On my particular server, losing Anchorhead to a group of 2-3 Empire, was a nightly occurance. The minimaxers had already figured out that, since you could pick-and-choose from any tree you wanted (as long as you climbed (clumb?) the tree the proper way to get to higher powers) you could pick up the low level defensive powers from half a dozen different trees, and you were suddenly untouchable.
> why couldn't we fly against (even a moddable?) Yuuzhan Vong coralskipper?
.57 Magnums, and two with a flamethrower, and one with a rocket propelled grenade launcher. Should we chance it? :rollseyes
Because fewer than one in one hundred thousand Star Wars fans even knows what that is. If Macs, at 1/10 the PC market size, can only generate enough to warrant only the hugest games be ported, how much less for lesser things from the bookworld?
> The first problem with that is the Jedi problem. Every Player and its
> freaking dog would want to be a User. I wanted to suggest that the
> User could be a reachable rank, but then there'll just be grinders
> doing that too. It's hard to balance against human nature. May I
> suggest - leave the User as something special.
You could make it like the Jedi, v. 2.0 in SWG: A greatly wimped thing. Then everybody could be one, no problem!
I recall the original promise of the ultimately terrible Horizons -- you could be one of many normal races/classes, or you could also be a Dragon. If you were a dragon, it would take 2 years to get to ancient dragon status, but once you did, you would be an even fight for any 3 maxxed out regular PC characters. The goal being that you'd build your lair, collect treasure, and they would seek your lair and try to take it.
But then a committee took control of Horizons, and the rest is history.
And sadly SWG went the wrong way with the Jedi, too. (Neglecting the other "wrong way" when 8 people would kill giraffes by having 7 shoot it with supposedly advanced laser weapons from point blank range, while the 8th doused it with a flamethrower, and the animal wouldn't instantly die or run screaming, but would bite back for a good 30 seconds.
Man, there's a Doberman! We have 8 guys, three with rifles, two with
> To be a wizard in Harry Potter's world would still be special.
> It wouldn't require a lightning bolt scar on everyone's head.
> All it requires is a difference experience
As a minimax-er, I'm already drooling about whatever it takes to make sure I get the badass Darth Vader-esque wand to "choose" me. You know, the one with 2.3x the mana regen speed and 1.4x the mental control multiplier. Yes, it also has a high ego, making me fly into a rage, but once I spec for my own mental control prowess points, so I can pwn the want in ego battles, Hermione shall be mine!
> Example: don't make an MMORPG about Harry Potter...you're also going to
> have five thousand people who can't succeed without a ragged scar on
> their forehead in an entirely predictable way
Nah, that's for teh l4m3rz. I'm thinking a 16 year old Hermyohmyione with the Dumblemelon slider all the way to Pumpkin.
ilreguardless adj Without any guards due to the mind control spell "Imagined Pepperment Schnapps Queasiness", because the guards have run away, after it has worn off, and before they have had time to return to their posts. Pewbieville was ilreguardless for thirteen minutes after the deflected but nearly catastrophic attack by the Necromuffdevourers Consortium.
Fluffy Bunny says: Hi! I'm Fluffy Bunny! My real name is Butters, though. I was just lookin' here at this cute little rabbit hole. Where do you think it goes?
You chug Rage powerup.
You chug Rage powerup.
You chug Rage powerup.
You chug Rage powerup.
You chug Rage powerup.
**You quad-attack Fluffy Bunny for 47, 47, 47, 46 damage!**
**Fluffy Bunny dies**
Fluffy Bunny says: God **** it!
I'm sure an ugly girl who gave out free BJs would get a hell of a lot more business than ones sittin' around waitin' for a marriage proposal, too.
There are many papers describing how everything from intelligent life, to life itself, to the universe itself, may have come about. If you have technical beefs with them, please present them. They may be wrong, but they are not "articles of faith". I have good reason to believe my car won't suddenly disintegrate and leave me skidding along the highway at 70 miles per hour. This is not "faith". It is a sound conclusion.
Religion, being pushed into a corner by people demanding it put up proof or shut up, massaged itself until it coerced into existence a god who values belief without proof. Which is more likely, that such a god has this odd property, or that it actually does not exist?
It's also slightly confusing -- what constitutes "natural phenomena"? What if perceptions, etc. are generated in a parallel side world with completely different physics, that matter in this world can, by coincidence, interact with, and evolution latched onto it in that manner?
Would that count as "natural phenomena"? If those statements are claiming this universe, with it's 3D and quantum mechanics and Einstein is, most definitely, all there is, then I think they're claiming too much as an athiest stance.
But then I completely reject "spiritual" as a phenomenon separate from "physical", anyway. IF a god existed, he'd have to operate according to some kind of rules of physics, perhaps radically different, but it's there nonetheless. The wildest conception of a religious person in a "mind is a spirit is a soul existing in some holy spirit-space" is nevertheless a world of physics itself open to scientific scrutiny and understanding. If it exists, it has rules, and is understandable, at least in theory.
I am unaware of any problems humans can solve that, in theory at least, a properly programmed computer could not solve.
They pay huge dollars for the rights to make the game (the studios don't risk much -- they make the game company cough up huge bucks up front just to get to make the game, then the game company takes all the risk) then what you're left with is a huge investment by monied people, and they suddenly decide to micromanage the game design until it's a useless horse-designed-by-committee.
The Superman franchise suffered far worse fates in this department. I'm not aware of [i]any[/i] decent Superman games. I recall this especially bad monstrosity from Sunsoft for the Genesis. Or was it the Colecovision. I don't know. Thank god I only rented that POS. Cool, you're Superman! F**k! There's Kryptonite beams everywhere!
"When logic does not offer a solution, the only logical thing...is to be illogical." -- Spock
> but Star Wars really does have much the same problem.
I recall in KotoR (I), it took an irritatingly long time to turn into a Jedi and get your light saber. "So we fixed that in KotoR II!"
Yay!
Wait, it takes even longer to get your saber in II, even though you are a Jedi from day one? FTW! >:(
> Add fast action and its no longer "Trek".
To prove the point, I have only two words: dune buggies
(But they're spray-painted silver so they're of the future! >:( )
> Paris Hilton is a celebrity.
Oh yeah? Who celebrates her? Take advantage of her. Mock her. Laugh at her. But celebrate her?