Can I get a third differential? I'd like to know if the metacritics are capable of detecting a magazine that is trying to appear average by artificially lowering sucky games (that buy few ads anyway, ideally are also a small European company that's not got much else going on) in order to offset their high reviews of games that buy ads...
> Not if you're wearing >250 in fire resist. > School that girl of yours with crappy games, > this is important information!
Tell ya what. Put on the best body armor you can find, and I'll stand there with a gatling gun like from Superman Returns. We'll see if ya do just as well.
While you're at it, let's see how you do vs. a real flamethrower, too. Somebody forgot to flip the "easy" switch on reality, my friend. And not many people are leaving for other games, I would like to point out...
> To make things easier, I need automatic object tracking
Actually, this is basically there, and with no single camera needed. Great Britain, sorry, the UK, is currently implementing this.
Seems like they've been putting cameras all over the place, especially on streets and intersections. Then someone realized they could do OCR to get license plate numbers. Then, just recently, some braniac realized you could write software to look at license plate readings + their time stamps, and map out a route cars are taking. As each new camera is passed, you can live-track a particular vehicle as it goes over the map. Of course, that leaves ample room for Mission: Impossible!-style antics, but those people aren't much threat to power grabs anyway.
Dawkins also describes the Christian god Yahweh as "the most evil fictional character ever."
Think about it. This creature will ultimately resurrect, then heave into Hell almost every person who ever lived, where they will lie in unending agony. Very few get into Heaven, after all. The Bible tells us so.
Now torturing almost everyone who ever lived, for ever and ever, isn't the definition of worst possible being, I don't know what is.
No need to argue or debate whether God is real or not -- just conclude that, either way, it is evil beyond Hitler and Stalin and Ghengis Kahn and John Wayne Gacy put together. Anthropologists estimate 75 billion people have lived, more or less, so far. All but 144,000 of them are going to be excruciatingly tortured for ever and ever. Or a few million. Or even a few billion. Googol to the googolplex years, and the remaining scores of billions are still just getting started.
> I personally think it's a Sisyphusian task, but I'm certainly not against trying.
That would be nasty, a giant rock at the bottom of a hill in a game like this, and you get 10 gold for rolling it to the top. It rolls back down and you can get another gold.
The only problem: It takes 10 minutes to roll it to the top, other players can knock you away and take over, and only the guy pushing when it actually crests gets the gold.
> Economy is the problem. If there is 10x as much gold because > people are "producing" more of it by farming, then those who > don't farm can't buy the good items. It actively decreases the > value of other players' gold.
It all levels out, though. If 10% of the people buy gold, and the other 90% don't, if there are only enough "high end" items for 5% of the people, the prices will skyrocket. If there's enough "high end" items for 20%, prices will plummet. "What the market will bear" still applies, and if the game is that stingy that the handful of gold buyers can entirely eat it up, well, that's that.
You should be earning your stuff out in the field in a game like this, anyway. Getting the actual drop, not farming for cash to buy it from someone else. But that's a tale of busted design for another day, as is the associated issue of farming of rare drops "blocking" legitimate play.
Fortunately the games are so disturbingly easy you really don't need the best equipment, and the best equipment doesn't really help vs. the top bosses.
So earning all this stuff is a rather pointless exercise. I'm still waiting for a good MMOFPS/RPG mixture, where lamers can go for the predefined-motion classes, and I can play a guy with a rocket launcher with damage based on my aiming skill rather than predefined autoattacks with to-hit percentages.
This is, of course, the downside to loving a clause that opens the door to almost any law, against original intentions. Your enemies can use it to justify their sh*t legislation just as easily as you use it for your sh*t legislation.
See also: Republicans toying with the "nuclear option" in the Senate to get their judges passed. Don't do it -- it'll come back to bite you in the @$$ some day when the shoe is on the other foot.
In DII I usually leave about 15-25 points unspent as I level up, to use in an emergency if I find some nice piece of equipment I want to use and suddenly need more points in Dex instead of Str (or whatever DII calls 'em, I forget.)
Wake of fire trapsassin with bowazon sidekick, save all skill tree points for wake of fire and supporting, get to Pindleskin, crank through a hundred times, go to nightmare, crank through to Pindle again, you're level 60, nothing can touch you, you have gold claws that you don't use because your fire trap is phenomenal, and those fire traps you don't use because your bowazon sidekick, "the lawnmower", can handle the entire run with her gold bow.
> 'The court is persuaded that requiring AT&T to confirm or deny whether > it has disclosed large quantities of telephone records to the federal > government could give adversaries of this country valuable insight > into the government's intelligence activities'
Whew! That was a close one! Now terrorist organizations may continue to presume and operate as if AT&T did not disclose the records.
> They are claiming you owe them some sum of money. You dispute the claim. > You don't pay. If they want their money, they will have to take legal > action against you. And they'll need to demonstrate that you actually do owe them money.
IIRC, accorting to TFA, he can't do this because the company is also their phone provider and they won't split the bill so he can refuse to pay the ISP portion.
And, corporations don't have to take you to court -- they can and will report you as a deadbeat to a credit reporting agency. Then they forget about you until you can't get a loan because your credit rating sucks, and you come crawling back to pay them just to get that off your credit rating.
Didn't you ever read Acts of Gord?
Re:Too Much Serious Violence
on
Prey Review
·
· Score: 1
Although one should point out that for every alternate universe in which the beholder died a violent death, there are anywhere from ten to ten thousand alternate ones where the players died a violent death.
So, statistically, the beholder is doing quite well, thank you very much.
> You are deceiving yourself: of course there will be another election in > the US in 2008. It will be another joke, and another Republican puppet > will be elected. The ruling party needs to maintain the illusion of > democracy -- at least for a while -- or there likely will be a public backlash.
Either that, or the Democrats can't put together a coherent response other than Buchcheneyhaliburton!!!!!!!!!1!11!!!one voteforusinstead.
What do the Democrats offer in response? I'm not talking about rhetoric that the faithful lap up, I mean the middle of the road people you need to switch to win?
And now, for the FPS version of "Imagine a Beowulf cluster..."
Imagine a Quake Done Quicker of this!
Some guy portals a robot to get it up to speed, portals it under himself and the robot hits him and knocks him upward, and he keeps repeating that climbing a wall "he shouldn't be able to".
> I'm curious how they plan to let you get yourself out of an infinite portal loop
Several possibilities have been presented -- shooting another portal somewhere else as you fall, or swimming through the air until you get to the edge and hit (assuming the portal doesn't force auto-centering.)
I can see I'm gonna be playing this game on nightmare while you play it on "Don't hurt me, daddy".
With limited in-air control, as are typical with games like this, you could work your way to the edge, although you might hit with a lot of force and kill yourself anyway.
Indeed, if they put in limited in-air control, the physics on how to escape will fall naturally out of the design, no special programming needed.
Yeah, jumping through portals in Duke Nukem 3D was pretty cool -- you could shoot your weapon through the portal too. You just couldn't see through them, which is rather neat.
Of course, that isn't all that new, either. Serious Sam had portals you could see through, even one that rotated, and I know they weren't the first with this.
However, a hole-shooting gun is rather a cool thing. Now that everyone sees the video and how fantastic it would be to play a game like this, it's obvious....in retrospect, as are a lot of things, like 1-click buy.
While unidirectional holes might be useful as a game mechanism, it's absolutely needless for the technology, which clearly showed one robot bouncing up and down, in and out two portals in the floor.
Note that this also gets rid of the problem of whether you're placing an out or an in portal. You're just placing one of two, then you go through it to the other, end of story. Hence it doesn't matter which one you're placing, since they're the same (except for color.) You're just placing (moving) the oldest one.
However, I'd still like independent control of red vs. blue placement. Why? I may want to go through the portal then "move the other one" several times in a row (going back and forth) without having to change one end of the portal. While you could do this by just constantly replacing the "fixed" one right where it already is, it would be nice to have optional independent control over the placement.
Now real fun would be 3 colors, say, red, blue, and green, and you go through them in that order.
I like some of the more devious examples from the video, where they put a portal way down and another further away, jump down, falling a bit before you hit the portal, then go through the other end, also in the floor, and conserve your momentum to go up to reach a shelf (although why you couldn't put it on the shelf I don't know, distance limit of placement maybe).
Einstein was laughed at because peoples' minds weren't great enough to encompass that.
Bozo was laughed at because he was trying to make people laugh.
I liken many self-styled (and not consciously fraudulent) psychics as more akin to the third great target of laughter: the drunk bum. At first sight, you laugh a little in spite of yourself, trying to hide it, then just feel sorry for them and look away.
Strange. I'd think they'd use it to expose their Democratic opponents and to spy on them, as well as the reverse.
Although I suppose having the ability to monitor all phone calls between top Democrats without anyone knowing or supervising comes functionally close, even if they're not actually misusing it for that.
Worse, in my dreams, I always wake up just before I close the deal with a cute girl, or we're just inside the open door and there is a whole party outside the door just around the corner out of view, and I can't seem to get alone enough...
Although there are two lucky versions of me running around in some parallel universe that have, how shall we say this, got down on their knees for both Posh and Britney (pre-marriage and babies.)
So I guess that shoots down both your theories, eh?
BTW, I've been killed in my dreams before, if you count having my guts hogged out ala someone scooping out a pumpkin, or being smashed in the face by a speeding white station wagon as killer events. Events where I did not wake up just before or as the event happened, but significantly later.
Slashdot Mirror
Can I get a third differential? I'd like to know if the metacritics are capable of detecting a magazine that is trying to appear average by artificially lowering sucky games (that buy few ads anyway, ideally are also a small European company that's not got much else going on) in order to offset their high reviews of games that buy ads...
That would totally suck. Where's the hack to disable that?
> Not if you're wearing >250 in fire resist.
> School that girl of yours with crappy games,
> this is important information!
Tell ya what. Put on the best body armor you can find, and I'll stand there with a gatling gun like from Superman Returns. We'll see if ya do just as well.
While you're at it, let's see how you do vs. a real flamethrower, too. Somebody forgot to flip the "easy" switch on reality, my friend. And not many people are leaving for other games, I would like to point out...
> To make things easier, I need automatic object tracking
Actually, this is basically there, and with no single camera needed. Great Britain, sorry, the UK, is currently implementing this.
Seems like they've been putting cameras all over the place, especially on streets and intersections. Then someone realized they could do OCR to get license plate numbers. Then, just recently, some braniac realized you could write software to look at license plate readings + their time stamps, and map out a route cars are taking. As each new camera is passed, you can live-track a particular vehicle as it goes over the map. Of course, that leaves ample room for Mission: Impossible!-style antics, but those people aren't much threat to power grabs anyway.
Dawkins also describes the Christian god Yahweh as "the most evil fictional character ever."
Think about it. This creature will ultimately resurrect, then heave into Hell almost every person who ever lived, where they will lie in unending agony. Very few get into Heaven, after all. The Bible tells us so.
Now torturing almost everyone who ever lived, for ever and ever, isn't the definition of worst possible being, I don't know what is.
No need to argue or debate whether God is real or not -- just conclude that, either way, it is evil beyond Hitler and Stalin and Ghengis Kahn and John Wayne Gacy put together. Anthropologists estimate 75 billion people have lived, more or less, so far. All but 144,000 of them are going to be excruciatingly tortured for ever and ever. Or a few million. Or even a few billion. Googol to the googolplex years, and the remaining scores of billions are still just getting started.
That's a perfect and omnibenevolent god for ya!
> I personally think it's a Sisyphusian task, but I'm certainly not against trying.
That would be nasty, a giant rock at the bottom of a hill in a game like this, and you get 10 gold for rolling it to the top. It rolls back down and you can get another gold.
The only problem: It takes 10 minutes to roll it to the top, other players can knock you away and take over, and only the guy pushing when it actually crests gets the gold.
> Economy is the problem. If there is 10x as much gold because
> people are "producing" more of it by farming, then those who
> don't farm can't buy the good items. It actively decreases the
> value of other players' gold.
It all levels out, though. If 10% of the people buy gold, and the other 90% don't, if there are only enough "high end" items for 5% of the people, the prices will skyrocket. If there's enough "high end" items for 20%, prices will plummet. "What the market will bear" still applies, and if the game is that stingy that the handful of gold buyers can entirely eat it up, well, that's that.
You should be earning your stuff out in the field in a game like this, anyway. Getting the actual drop, not farming for cash to buy it from someone else. But that's a tale of busted design for another day, as is the associated issue of farming of rare drops "blocking" legitimate play.
Fortunately the games are so disturbingly easy you really don't need the best equipment, and the best equipment doesn't really help vs. the top bosses.
So earning all this stuff is a rather pointless exercise. I'm still waiting for a good MMOFPS/RPG mixture, where lamers can go for the predefined-motion classes, and I can play a guy with a rocket launcher with damage based on my aiming skill rather than predefined autoattacks with to-hit percentages.
And don't say Planetside, thanks.
This is, of course, the downside to loving a clause that opens the door to almost any law, against original intentions. Your enemies can use it to justify their sh*t legislation just as easily as you use it for your sh*t legislation.
See also: Republicans toying with the "nuclear option" in the Senate to get their judges passed. Don't do it -- it'll come back to bite you in the @$$ some day when the shoe is on the other foot.
It's similar to the way government operates with respect to illegal activities:
- Government bans something
- Government makes arrests
- Illegal business pays fines, hires new people, treats it as the cost of doing business
- Government says to the people, "Look what I did for you"
- Government collects money in fines and seizures
In DII I usually leave about 15-25 points unspent as I level up, to use in an emergency if I find some nice piece of equipment I want to use and suddenly need more points in Dex instead of Str (or whatever DII calls 'em, I forget.)
Wake of fire trapsassin with bowazon sidekick, save all skill tree points for wake of fire and supporting, get to Pindleskin, crank through a hundred times, go to nightmare, crank through to Pindle again, you're level 60, nothing can touch you, you have gold claws that you don't use because your fire trap is phenomenal, and those fire traps you don't use because your bowazon sidekick, "the lawnmower", can handle the entire run with her gold bow.
> 'The court is persuaded that requiring AT&T to confirm or deny whether
> it has disclosed large quantities of telephone records to the federal
> government could give adversaries of this country valuable insight
> into the government's intelligence activities'
Whew! That was a close one! Now terrorist organizations may continue to presume and operate as if AT&T did not disclose the records.
> They are claiming you owe them some sum of money. You dispute the claim.
> You don't pay. If they want their money, they will have to take legal
> action against you. And they'll need to demonstrate that you actually do owe them money.
IIRC, accorting to TFA, he can't do this because the company is also their phone provider and they won't split the bill so he can refuse to pay the ISP portion.
And, corporations don't have to take you to court -- they can and will report you as a deadbeat to a credit reporting agency. Then they forget about you until you can't get a loan because your credit rating sucks, and you come crawling back to pay them just to get that off your credit rating.
Didn't you ever read Acts of Gord?
Although one should point out that for every alternate universe in which the beholder died a violent death, there are anywhere from ten to ten thousand alternate ones where the players died a violent death.
So, statistically, the beholder is doing quite well, thank you very much.
> Finding even simple organisims that evolved on Mars would be of fantastic value.
I predict the Bible predicts this, by the way.
- 5% of bloggers have news as their primary topic
- 37 percent of the surveyed blogs were reporting on their personal life
- 11 percent on political matters
- 7 percent on entertainment
- 6 percent on sport
And the remaining 34% could not be categorized as researchers fell asleep reading those pages.> You are deceiving yourself: of course there will be another election in
> the US in 2008. It will be another joke, and another Republican puppet
> will be elected. The ruling party needs to maintain the illusion of
> democracy -- at least for a while -- or there likely will be a public backlash.
Either that, or the Democrats can't put together a coherent response other than Buchcheneyhaliburton!!!!!!!!!1!11!!!one voteforusinstead.
What do the Democrats offer in response? I'm not talking about rhetoric that the faithful lap up, I mean the middle of the road people you need to switch to win?
And now, for the FPS version of "Imagine a Beowulf cluster..."
Imagine a Quake Done Quicker of this!
Some guy portals a robot to get it up to speed, portals it under himself and the robot hits him and knocks him upward, and he keeps repeating that climbing a wall "he shouldn't be able to".
> I'm curious how they plan to let you get yourself out of an infinite portal loop
Several possibilities have been presented -- shooting another portal somewhere else as you fall, or swimming through the air until you get to the edge and hit (assuming the portal doesn't force auto-centering.)
I can see I'm gonna be playing this game on nightmare while you play it on "Don't hurt me, daddy".
With limited in-air control, as are typical with games like this, you could work your way to the edge, although you might hit with a lot of force and kill yourself anyway.
Indeed, if they put in limited in-air control, the physics on how to escape will fall naturally out of the design, no special programming needed.
Yeah, jumping through portals in Duke Nukem 3D was pretty cool -- you could shoot your weapon through the portal too. You just couldn't see through them, which is rather neat.
...in retrospect, as are a lot of things, like 1-click buy.
Of course, that isn't all that new, either. Serious Sam had portals you could see through, even one that rotated, and I know they weren't the first with this.
However, a hole-shooting gun is rather a cool thing. Now that everyone sees the video and how fantastic it would be to play a game like this, it's obvious.
While unidirectional holes might be useful as a game mechanism, it's absolutely needless for the technology, which clearly showed one robot bouncing up and down, in and out two portals in the floor.
Note that this also gets rid of the problem of whether you're placing an out or an in portal. You're just placing one of two, then you go through it to the other, end of story. Hence it doesn't matter which one you're placing, since they're the same (except for color.) You're just placing (moving) the oldest one.
However, I'd still like independent control of red vs. blue placement. Why? I may want to go through the portal then "move the other one" several times in a row (going back and forth) without having to change one end of the portal. While you could do this by just constantly replacing the "fixed" one right where it already is, it would be nice to have optional independent control over the placement.
Now real fun would be 3 colors, say, red, blue, and green, and you go through them in that order.
I like some of the more devious examples from the video, where they put a portal way down and another further away, jump down, falling a bit before you hit the portal, then go through the other end, also in the floor, and conserve your momentum to go up to reach a shelf (although why you couldn't put it on the shelf I don't know, distance limit of placement maybe).
Einstein was laughed at because peoples' minds weren't great enough to encompass that.
Bozo was laughed at because he was trying to make people laugh.
I liken many self-styled (and not consciously fraudulent) psychics as more akin to the third great target of laughter: the drunk bum. At first sight, you laugh a little in spite of yourself, trying to hide it, then just feel sorry for them and look away.
Strange. I'd think they'd use it to expose their Democratic opponents and to spy on them, as well as the reverse.
Although I suppose having the ability to monitor all phone calls between top Democrats without anyone knowing or supervising comes functionally close, even if they're not actually misusing it for that.
Worse, in my dreams, I always wake up just before I close the deal with a cute girl, or we're just inside the open door and there is a whole party outside the door just around the corner out of view, and I can't seem to get alone enough...
Although there are two lucky versions of me running around in some parallel universe that have, how shall we say this, got down on their knees for both Posh and Britney (pre-marriage and babies.)
So I guess that shoots down both your theories, eh?
BTW, I've been killed in my dreams before, if you count having my guts hogged out ala someone scooping out a pumpkin, or being smashed in the face by a speeding white station wagon as killer events. Events where I did not wake up just before or as the event happened, but significantly later.