Re:Why is it so hard to make a good Star Trek game
on
Star Trek Legacy Review
·
· Score: 0, Troll
> Someone please mod the parent a troll. Bakula was star of the long running > highly regarded sci-fi TV series "Quantum Leap", and has starred in a few > feature films, asside from his Enterprise experience.
In their defense, there is no way anyone would consider "Quantum Leap" a highly regarded TV series.
The sad part about this game was that it was one of the few good Trek games [i]back then[/i]. By that point, about 15 years ago, they already had had enough bad Trek games that a good one like this was already the odd one out.
That'd probably be the Star Trek 25 Anniversary game -- an adventure game that was mostly old-schook King's Quest style adventure with a handful of space battles thrown in, one of which was by another Constitution class starship, improbably commandeered by a space pirate.
The best part of that game was that most missions had a special way to get the redshirt killed -- quite amusing. In one mission, you assign the redshirt to futz with the control panel of a door to get into a cave or some such. He fails, so you tell him to try again. After about the 5th or 6th attempt, he fries himself.
Reminds me of a sci-fi story where the "Number 8", the highest still-existing human since humans began numbering themselves, and essentially a god(dess) in abilities, had f***** up an experiment royally and destroyed a galaxy and all the people in it.
If you want to improve your standing even more, tell 'em it's in binary.
> Really, all this indicates is that, while the days of gamers striving > for the number one high score have been supplanted by most games being > story-based (or at least, game-completion based), there's still an > attracting to having a number that says you're exactly this much better > or worse than the next guy.
Ahh, I long for the days when you knew you were better than the next guy because a mouselook down showed his bloodied head lying on the metal catwalk at your feet. Outscoring the number 2 guy by over 100 points in one of your best CTF games ever, or fragging a clan LGD guy and making him go "BULLSHIT!" in another.
It's too bad Quake (I) doesn't run on modern computers without choking the network connection as it tries to send out a network message every one of it's 30,000 frames per second. Quake II and beyond all completely lost the charm.
> "Office 2007, coming out Jan. 30, is a 'radical revision,' writes > the Wall Street Journal's Walter S. Mossberg. 'The entire user > interface, the way you do things in these familiar old programs, > has been thrown out and replaced with something new. In Word, > Excel and PowerPoint, all of the menus are gone -- every one. None > of the familiar toolbars have survived, either. In their place is > a wide, tabbed band of icons at the top of the screen called the > Ribbon. And there is no option to go back to the classic interface.' > He adds, 'It has taken a good product and made it better and fresher."
Kent Brockman: Just miles from your doorstep, hundreds of men are given weapons and trained to kill. The government calls it the Army, but a more alarmist name would be... The Killbot Factory.
All these things and more come into play. For every factor you think of, there are probably 10 you can't. Also remember there are pressures to live longer as a successful reproducer. After you stop reproducing, you are a drag (which you always are as you consume resources) with only the mild help as a social asset to being in your benefit. And that may not be enough.
Counter to this are pressures to reproduce rapidly (generation to generation) to maximize the search speed of the evolutionary gradient descent space. More reshufflings of features = more likelihood of finding beneficial adaptations. Which is, of course, why sexual reproduction evolved in the first place -- it gave several magnitudes increase to the spead that "new forms" were tried, with organisms no longer waiting for the occasional stray neutron or copy error to much more slowly achieve the same ends.
> Imagine a mouse with a DNA sequence that makes it want to run into > mousetraps when it reaches a certain age. Obviously something like > won't have much of a chance to procreate.
Unless that age is, on average, long after it has stopped procreating.
The reason we still have heart disease is because very few people die of it before squeezing out some puppies. When it does typically occur, the kids are usually teens or later, and thus evolutionary advantage from maintaining a living parent are largely gone. So as far as evolution is concerned, you did your job, and now you're on your own. Here comes the heart disease, strokes, and cancer.
If only God had thought to put redundant blood vessels in the heart and brain like He did for some of the other organs. Dammit!
Mar 23, 2006 -- Although the plastic surgery to soften the slight sharpness of Morgan Webb's face makes her objectively prettier, many fans feel her visage has lost some of its character, which had attracted them in the first place.
Dec 30, 2006 -- Child lies to me that they had "talked to Best Buy in Westland" and that they did in fact have a new shipment of wiis that morning. After driving 35 minutes to get there, manager notes they have no such shipment, and expects none in the forseable future. Child admits he was actually put on hold for 10 minutes that morning, then gave up and remembered they had told him a week and a half earlier that they'd be getting a shipment on that particular day, and he "just assumed it would have arrived."
Oops, sorry about that, I swapped the names of the last two cases. "Tainted Love" was, of course, the infamous masochistic sexrobodogbot from the Playgirls Gone Wild satellite channel who was visiting South Dakota in late 2044.
2027: Jeebus v. Fidooid -- A hand transplanted onto a leg counts as a kick, both as a direct impact as well as counting under the "subsequent bounces" clause.
2035: Tainted Love v. United States of America -- A bionic leg with an inherent (and at least) Class 12 intellect counts as a robotic actor for the purpose of an intentional kick, and is therefore not an accidental kick, even if the biocybernetic-half issued specific neural orders to not kick the robot dog.
2047: Brutus v. South Dakota -- A state law allowing sexbot robodogs counts as authorizing a kickable dog, but the federal law still applies in that the sexrobodogbot must not experience pain, even if it is a masochist model designed to enjoy the pain.
> would you ever feel bad about kicking a robot dog?
I can see the legislation now:
"Laws of Robot Rights: Title MVIX, Article 12, Section 14, Subsection 8: The kicking of robot dogs shall be forbidden except for robot dogs created for the purpose of being kicked. Said kickable robot dogs shall not experience pain as a result of being kicked, either directly or as a result of bouncing into things. 'Pain', for the purpose of this subsection, shall include the perception of physical pain as well as mental anguish and mental disabilities or disfigurements or suffering as a result from experiencing the kick, whether the kick was physically painful or not. 'Kick', for the purpose of this subsection, shall include both the direct impact by the intentional foot of a human, or robot acting directly or indirectly under the orders of a human, or the subsequent impacts from bouncing around, but shall expressly not include the accidental impact of a human's foot, or the foot of a robot acting directly or indirectly under the orders of a human. Nothing in this subsection shall be construed as waiving the right of the robot dog to sue in the case of accidental kicks from humans, robots, or normal animals of any kind, pursuant to other enabling legislation in this Act or others, and this clause is severable pending court rulings."
"A tiny skeleton from the Early Cretaceous shows an embryonic or newborn reptile with two heads and two necks, called axial bifurcation ('two-headedness') (a well-known developmental flaw among reptile species today such as turtles and snakes) was...recovered from the Yixian Formation, which is nearly 150 million years old."
So God's been fucking up his engineering for a lot longer than 6,000 years?!?!?
At least hyperbole isn't the Newspeak that could still be found on the BBSs of what would turn into the Internet in a few years, wherein people claimed with a straight face that the Berlin Wall was to keep people in the West from fleeing to the communist countries (claimed by people in the West, naturally.)
The government, as is it's way, dumped huge amounts of money to force into existence a handful of long distance networks, short ones (inside a building, building-to-nearby-building) already existing anyway.
It toddered along, largely useless except for some eggheads, much like the space program, for a couple of decades. Then computers became powerful enough to store, or even just show porn gifs, so people wanted to swap 'em around, and people started bitching not to post pictures in Usenet discussion newsgroups but they were shouted down like the losers they are and private investors found something to invest in and dwarfed the government spending, no not on the original trivial Internet, I mean all government spending for several years.
And since we're all good little socialists, well-trained, we believe honestly that private industry would not be here at this point if it weren't for the government, just like there won't be private rocketry or private airplanes or private piston engines or private steam engines.
One wonders if it still represents an actual pound of gold or silver or whatever (what was it a pound of anyway originally?) Or if it just represents an (arbitrary sound that sounds like "pound"), deflated, of gold, i.e. a few grams worth.
> For the citizenry to defeat its own military it would need RPGs, > Surface to Air missiles, military explosives and various other > weaponry to defeat a well armed military.
There are plenty of engineers with knowledge of how to do this, and more than a few with access to source code and compilers for it. Even if the entire military supported Bush, and they wouldn't (remember how that general in Russia in charge of the paratroopers refused to send them in to take out Yeltsin?) The People and their industry would never support it and would move to counter it quickly. And Bush couldn't push very hard without massively losing military support.
No, this is a theory of disasterbation that feels good to leftists to contemplate in a wierd way, the way most people are sitting around waiting for CNN to interrupt Dr. Phil with news that a building has blown up, or a mushroom cloud is spotted over Manhattan.
Slashdot Mirror
> Someone please mod the parent a troll. Bakula was star of the long running
> highly regarded sci-fi TV series "Quantum Leap", and has starred in a few
> feature films, asside from his Enterprise experience.
In their defense, there is no way anyone would consider "Quantum Leap" a highly regarded TV series.
The sad part about this game was that it was one of the few good Trek games [i]back then[/i]. By that point, about 15 years ago, they already had had enough bad Trek games that a good one like this was already the odd one out.
That'd probably be the Star Trek 25 Anniversary game -- an adventure game that was mostly old-schook King's Quest style adventure with a handful of space battles thrown in, one of which was by another Constitution class starship, improbably commandeered by a space pirate.
The best part of that game was that most missions had a special way to get the redshirt killed -- quite amusing. In one mission, you assign the redshirt to futz with the control panel of a door to get into a cave or some such. He fails, so you tell him to try again. After about the 5th or 6th attempt, he fries himself.
Reminds me of a sci-fi story where the "Number 8", the highest still-existing human since humans began numbering themselves, and essentially a god(dess) in abilities, had f***** up an experiment royally and destroyed a galaxy and all the people in it.
If you want to improve your standing even more, tell 'em it's in binary.
> Really, all this indicates is that, while the days of gamers striving
> for the number one high score have been supplanted by most games being
> story-based (or at least, game-completion based), there's still an
> attracting to having a number that says you're exactly this much better
> or worse than the next guy.
Ahh, I long for the days when you knew you were better than the next guy because a mouselook down showed his bloodied head lying on the metal catwalk at your feet. Outscoring the number 2 guy by over 100 points in one of your best CTF games ever, or fragging a clan LGD guy and making him go "BULLSHIT!" in another.
It's too bad Quake (I) doesn't run on modern computers without choking the network connection as it tries to send out a network message every one of it's 30,000 frames per second. Quake II and beyond all completely lost the charm.
> "IBM touted 2006 as a resurgence year for the mainframe"
I heard vinyl albums made a comeback last year, too. Evidently people love the nostalgia of it all.
Whine, whine, whine. You sound like a politician bitching about evil drug companies, that also save hundreds of millions of lives.
> "Office 2007, coming out Jan. 30, is a 'radical revision,' writes
> the Wall Street Journal's Walter S. Mossberg. 'The entire user
> interface, the way you do things in these familiar old programs,
> has been thrown out and replaced with something new. In Word,
> Excel and PowerPoint, all of the menus are gone -- every one. None
> of the familiar toolbars have survived, either. In their place is
> a wide, tabbed band of icons at the top of the screen called the
> Ribbon. And there is no option to go back to the classic interface.'
> He adds, 'It has taken a good product and made it better and fresher."
"Also, it's slow as shit."
Thank you, Lisa Simpson.
Kent Brockman: Just miles from your doorstep, hundreds of men are given weapons and trained to kill. The government calls it the Army, but a more alarmist name would be... The Killbot Factory.
All these things and more come into play. For every factor you think of, there are probably 10 you can't. Also remember there are pressures to live longer as a successful reproducer. After you stop reproducing, you are a drag (which you always are as you consume resources) with only the mild help as a social asset to being in your benefit. And that may not be enough.
Counter to this are pressures to reproduce rapidly (generation to generation) to maximize the search speed of the evolutionary gradient descent space. More reshufflings of features = more likelihood of finding beneficial adaptations. Which is, of course, why sexual reproduction evolved in the first place -- it gave several magnitudes increase to the spead that "new forms" were tried, with organisms no longer waiting for the occasional stray neutron or copy error to much more slowly achieve the same ends.
> Imagine a mouse with a DNA sequence that makes it want to run into
> mousetraps when it reaches a certain age. Obviously something like
> won't have much of a chance to procreate.
Unless that age is, on average, long after it has stopped procreating.
The reason we still have heart disease is because very few people die of it before squeezing out some puppies. When it does typically occur, the kids are usually teens or later, and thus evolutionary advantage from maintaining a living parent are largely gone. So as far as evolution is concerned, you did your job, and now you're on your own. Here comes the heart disease, strokes, and cancer.
If only God had thought to put redundant blood vessels in the heart and brain like He did for some of the other organs. Dammit!
Mar 23, 2006 -- Although the plastic surgery to soften the slight sharpness of Morgan Webb's face makes her objectively prettier, many fans feel her visage has lost some of its character, which had attracted them in the first place.
Dec 30, 2006 -- Child lies to me that they had "talked to Best Buy in Westland" and that they did in fact have a new shipment of wiis that morning. After driving 35 minutes to get there, manager notes they have no such shipment, and expects none in the forseable future. Child admits he was actually put on hold for 10 minutes that morning, then gave up and remembered they had told him a week and a half earlier that they'd be getting a shipment on that particular day, and he "just assumed it would have arrived."
Oops, sorry about that, I swapped the names of the last two cases. "Tainted Love" was, of course, the infamous masochistic sexrobodogbot from the Playgirls Gone Wild satellite channel who was visiting South Dakota in late 2044.
And the inevitable Supreme Court rulings:
2027: Jeebus v. Fidooid -- A hand transplanted onto a leg counts as a kick, both as a direct impact as well as counting under the "subsequent bounces" clause.
2035: Tainted Love v. United States of America -- A bionic leg with an inherent (and at least) Class 12 intellect counts as a robotic actor for the purpose of an intentional kick, and is therefore not an accidental kick, even if the biocybernetic-half issued specific neural orders to not kick the robot dog.
2047: Brutus v. South Dakota -- A state law allowing sexbot robodogs counts as authorizing a kickable dog, but the federal law still applies in that the sexrobodogbot must not experience pain, even if it is a masochist model designed to enjoy the pain.
> would you ever feel bad about kicking a robot dog?
I can see the legislation now:
"Laws of Robot Rights: Title MVIX, Article 12, Section 14, Subsection 8: The kicking of robot dogs shall be forbidden except for robot dogs created for the purpose of being kicked. Said kickable robot dogs shall not experience pain as a result of being kicked, either directly or as a result of bouncing into things. 'Pain', for the purpose of this subsection, shall include the perception of physical pain as well as mental anguish and mental disabilities or disfigurements or suffering as a result from experiencing the kick, whether the kick was physically painful or not. 'Kick', for the purpose of this subsection, shall include both the direct impact by the intentional foot of a human, or robot acting directly or indirectly under the orders of a human, or the subsequent impacts from bouncing around, but shall expressly not include the accidental impact of a human's foot, or the foot of a robot acting directly or indirectly under the orders of a human. Nothing in this subsection shall be construed as waiving the right of the robot dog to sue in the case of accidental kicks from humans, robots, or normal animals of any kind, pursuant to other enabling legislation in this Act or others, and this clause is severable pending court rulings."
So God's been fucking up his engineering for a lot longer than 6,000 years?!?!?
If good old King George (no, of England, not W.) had spied on email on servers, they would have written the protection of same into the Constitution.
Hence for our government to do this is smarmy and not in accord with the spirit of the Constitution at the very best.
At least hyperbole isn't the Newspeak that could still be found on the BBSs of what would turn into the Internet in a few years, wherein people claimed with a straight face that the Berlin Wall was to keep people in the West from fleeing to the communist countries (claimed by people in the West, naturally.)
The government, as is it's way, dumped huge amounts of money to force into existence a handful of long distance networks, short ones (inside a building, building-to-nearby-building) already existing anyway.
It toddered along, largely useless except for some eggheads, much like the space program, for a couple of decades. Then computers became powerful enough to store, or even just show porn gifs, so people wanted to swap 'em around, and people started bitching not to post pictures in Usenet discussion newsgroups but they were shouted down like the losers they are and private investors found something to invest in and dwarfed the government spending, no not on the original trivial Internet, I mean all government spending for several years.
And since we're all good little socialists, well-trained, we believe honestly that private industry would not be here at this point if it weren't for the government, just like there won't be private rocketry or private airplanes or private piston engines or private steam engines.
> How long before the first class action suit in the U.S. over bad Web site design?
I don't know, but Slashdot should probably talk to their lawyers, and fast.
One wonders if it still represents an actual pound of gold or silver or whatever (what was it a pound of anyway originally?) Or if it just represents an (arbitrary sound that sounds like "pound"), deflated, of gold, i.e. a few grams worth.
Homre: Uhhh, I have to go to the store. (stomp stomp stomp slam stomp stomp slam screeeeeech!)
> For the citizenry to defeat its own military it would need RPGs,
> Surface to Air missiles, military explosives and various other
> weaponry to defeat a well armed military.
There are plenty of engineers with knowledge of how to do this, and more than a few with access to source code and compilers for it. Even if the entire military supported Bush, and they wouldn't (remember how that general in Russia in charge of the paratroopers refused to send them in to take out Yeltsin?) The People and their industry would never support it and would move to counter it quickly. And Bush couldn't push very hard without massively losing military support.
No, this is a theory of disasterbation that feels good to leftists to contemplate in a wierd way, the way most people are sitting around waiting for CNN to interrupt Dr. Phil with news that a building has blown up, or a mushroom cloud is spotted over Manhattan.
> There are a great many Americans who expect Bush to pull
> some kind of trick to remain in office past 2008
Uhhh, the only people thinking this are conspiracy-oriented far leftists practicing disasterbation.