I remember finishing Quake II, where the final encounter was a standard big boss encounter, no "little trickies" to solve. At that point, you could save up your pentagrams of protection (well, a shield of protection in that game) and your quad damage. So when the radio message from HQ came in, "Terminate with extreme prejudice", I hit both, and fired the BFG non-stop. I gotta hand it to the boss, though, he took it all and still outlived my quad/pent dual powerup.
But not by more than about 10 seconds. =D
And I never went back and did it without the quad, pent, or BFG "just to see". My orders were to terminate with prejudice, and I did just that.
First through Knights of the Old Republic II, the second encounter with the undead guy, as well as Darty Trayus and her three floating scimitars, so to speak, was very tough (playing on "difficult", though difficult wasn't all that tough except for the boss encounters.)
Second and all subsequent times through the encounters were very easy. I even got the encounters down to basically 1-shot Nihilus (discovering a bug in the game if you off him too quickly) and almost, but not quite 1-shotting the undead guy the second time. Trayus and her scimmies went down just as fast. Nothing like a right-hander doing 82, count it, 82 points max damage, with the other hand at "only" 56, but optimized with expanded crit threat (17-20) and a huge honkin amount of crit extra points + Master Speed + Master Flurry. Love 200+ and a few 100+ in one swat. The weapon basically approximated the damage capacity of the movie weapons, if not moreso since boss encounters, even unbalanced ones like Dooku vs. Anakin/Obiwan 1, last more than a few swats.
> I don't grasp why using real-world combat tactics which work > very well at keeping you alive are considered "n00b" in FPS combat games.
In poorly-designed MMORPGs, using tactics like shooting at monsters where they can't get at you or from a ledge is considered an exploitation. Indeed, supposedly monsters could NOT originally hit you through a wall, but they had to allow that to prevent people from shooting at stupid giants in Oasis of Marr through the doors of the huts, who'd just stand there indefinitely, struggling to get at you through the door they could not fit through.
Ahh, that was a fun game. I remember when people figured out that the ships were actually coded as if they were NPCs, and the speed of the ship was controlled by "giving" it a very heavy weapon that slowed it down to the desired speed.
So some enterprising warriors started using the "disarm" ability on the ship, which would drop its weapon, and the ships would go wizzing through the oceans. Oh, the hilarity of it all.
Then you could cast a certain spell on your skeleton pet (dull mind), which wouldn't do anything, but once in awhile it would take (or not take and wear off, as the case may be) converting your pet into an NPC skeleton monster mad at you. Recast pet over and over until it's at max level (you used to have to do this), give your pet two daggers to turn them into a slice and dice machine (also a cool feature now long gone) and do this right by a zone, and zone out when it takes. Pet sticks around as an NPC attacking anyone who comes near.
And then there was PvP charming the bad guys like Trolls and Ogres, and making them sit (as a friendly pet) next to a guard in Freeport, then leaving. Charm eventually wears off, guard suddenly sees them as an enemy. Poof!
And you used to let your pet be able to/guard you and have it stand in a place. It would attack any non-positive faction NPC that wandered by, not just ones attacking you. Hence it would run around like the guards outside the halfling city used to do, killing bats and rats for hours. That fun was taken away, too.
And in WWII Online, things like bushes were permanent, indestructible fixtures on the landscape. Now the physics engine was quite good -- if a car or truck crashed, it might flip over. A truck would even spill the soldiers sitting in back. So what people would do was load up a truck with soldiers, and deliberately crash at high speed into a bush, flipping the soldiers over the fence into the German camp, thus avoiding the "proper" assault through the front gates.
In Serious Sam, I was playing it on Serious (the hardest setting, at least without playing it fully through to unlock "You are not serious" setting, which appeared to be Serious + the monsters fading in and out.) I fought that giant thing all the way to the pyramid, killing all the other monsters, shooting the big guy lower and lower in health. He'd recharge by sucking health in from the world around from time to time. Running low on ammo, I fought my way all the way back around to the gate where ammo would respawn slowly, but indefinitely.
Kept at him for awhile, and fought my way back to the pyramid yet again. Draining the big guy way down half a dozen times, eventually I figured out you were supposed to go in the pyramid! Yikes!
And in Duke Nuke'em 3D, again on the hardest (non-monster-respawn, intented for multiplayer) setting, I started the final battle on the football field with nothing more than a half-full 3-barreled machine gun. Rocket Launcher: empty. Devastator: empty. When I finally took down the big guy and "game over!" happened, I jumped up with joy.
>> When I saw the headline, and even after reading the first few sentences >> of the intro, I thought this was about the sort of "boss" that employs >> you, not the video game variety. And I had to wonder, why isn't my boss >> cool enough to have laser blast? >
I thought exactly the same thing. My thoughts as I read the header: > The Guardian Gamesblog has a piece on knowing your enemy to better pwn > him.
Ya, I'd like to know how to manage my boss and bring him under my thumb!
> Specifically, they go through some tried and true rules about surviving > boss battles. From the article: "If the boss stops, panic.
Yeah, yeah?
> Bosses usually move about - when they stop it means they're about to > unleash their signature move
Hehe, some pointy-haired commentary like from The Office or Dilbert or sumpthin'!
> Unfortunately tha same decree of similarity can be demostrated > between the US and Nazi Germany, or Israel or Nazi Germany if one is so inclined.
I am so inclined to hear this from you. Please show how the US or Israel are engaged in deliberate mass extermination of innocent people and the active suppression and jailing of dissent. Then show how this is an inaccurate comparison for China. Or at least how the comparison vs. China is no worse than that which you've described for the US and Israel.
Hint: Hyperbole and actions by a handful of rogue soldiers are not the equivalent to official government policy.
Having a condescending attitude like that is a form of racism. That you, enlightened westerner, know what's best for third world countries, by disallowing them to grow out of poverty the exact same way the western countries originally did, bootstrapping via cheap labor manufacturing.
You sit there in the middle of a wealthy society that arose on the back of its own people in sweatshops, a position that gave them longer, not shorter lives and hold up your nose at it, pretending it didn't exist, like the bellybutton girl in the cloud city in the old Star Trek episode with the cromags doing all the mining work. Yes, let them eat cake.
> Censorship is not the same as handing Anne Frank over to the NAZIs.
Yes, but handing over records so the government can find an individual and throw them into jail as a political prisoner for 10 years is only a half-step away from Anne Frank. It should be far enough along the "slippery slope" that it should severely bother you.
Of course not. I saw this Star Trek episode once where the people on the Enterprise (TOS) were fighting Klingons, and they were being resurrected over and over again to fight to the death for ever and ever, the rage feeding some ethereal entity. I found it very prescient of the future online FPS games like Quake.
Moreover, invoking Godwin's Law is typically in the context where it is overexaggerated hyperbole, not when it is, sadly and disgustingly, a reasonably accurate a comparison.
"But today (echo: ooo-day, ooo-day, ooo-day) I consider myself (eye-self, eye-self, eye-self) The fattest man (attest man, attest man, attest man) On the face of the earth (cheers drown out echos!)"
Three hundred million dollars of emergency mobile homes bought for Katrina victims are sitting, rotting and unused, and may have to be torn down, never used.
It's just three hundred million dollars, though. Barely one ten thousandth of the budget last year. Yes, you, big government lovers, read that right. Three hundred million dollars is only one ten thousandth of the federal budget last year.
Well, this is why no game recently has thrilled me. WoW seems utterly banal. It looks good, and taking a ride on a griffen is awesome, but there's really nothing there except the grind. Lots of missions are nice. Different missions (are you listening, MxO?) But it just seems lacking something. I feel too much like I'm weilding a wiffle ball bat.
City of Heroes was almost DOA for me except for the scrapper class, a fighter class with awesome damage output AND relatively non-squishy. The only class in the only MMORPG where I felt a bit like I was playing a FPS. And even CoH killed that off with their "ED" hyper-mega-nerf. Every power you had, damage output, healing rate, "mana-equivalent" regeneration rate, defensive abilities, were all made about 0.6 of what they were. And.6 x.6 x.6 x.6 of what you were isn't a very good thing to be at the end of the day. (And I'm one who stuck out the EQ necromancer nerfs all the way along. Dagger speedup nerf. Pet -4 levels now nerf. Level cap on soul drain nerf. DOT-while-running nerf. It takes a lot of ball-kicking to get me to quit.)
> EQ's corpse run system is particularly irritating. This does > not mean that all risk is bad; it means that EQ's corpse run system is badly designed.
The worst part was that the corpse evaporated after a week, even with all your stuff on it, whether you logged on or not. I have no idea if that's still the case as I haven't played in several years, but damn was that annoying.
Worse, a corpse without anything on it decayed in like half an hour, so if you died going to get your corpse, you had to make a beeline for the new corpse and beg like the wind to get a resurrection for the other half of the massive death penalty: xp loss.
I think they could have solved a lot of this problem by letting the corpses exist indefinitely (5 corpses would cover 99.9% of the non-goofball scenarios), but only with the user logged on. Hell, 100 corpses would be fine as storage space is cheap, it'd only be a problem if stacked up in one area slowing the drawing, and even that can be dealt with.
But companies had to learn the hard way. You'll note EQ has long since also done away with the "magic book in your face meditation" feature. Nothing like having a lovely 3D world and making 2/3 of the population have to spend 2/3 of their time NOT seeing the 3D world. Nah, this game survived in spite of its best efforts, not because of them.
> Short travel times = no locality. Does it matter where you are if > you can be on the other side of the world in 10 minutes? This also > concentrates the market furthur into the big trade hubs since it is > so easy to get to them. I actually prefer the long travel times, so > long as the game is set up in a way which supports it (don't force > people to the ends of the earth every 5 minutes). Makes the world feel bigger.
City of Heroes has a nice balance of this -- you get good, fairly high-speed travel powers (we won't even get into the coolness that they're the only major MMORPG I've played, and that's 7 and counting, that has real 3D movement, and not just "spirit of bird" or whatever, i.e. you run along the ground, translated 6 feet up in the air. Oh how magnificent! I've forgotten what that EQ spell was called, enough blessed time has passed since 3 years in that hole.)
Granted, they have trains to shorten zone travel, as well as "Pocket D", so you're never more than 2.5 zones away from where you wanna go, unless it's deep inside Firebase Zulu. Any game that wanted to make more travel should make the amount you carry be much, much greater so you don't have the constant urge to travel to sell your stuff. Very important if this is 5 zones or more away, even at high speed CoH travel speeds.
And you get your travel powers at an early level -- 14 -- not level 40 or something idiotic. And every class gets it. And it's cheap, not eight hundred billion pieces of gold to buy a broken down mule that moves at 1.5x your run speed.
The real solution is the impossible one -- make the game a very hard game insofar as it takes skill to solve a problem. Thus the people with the best stuff are the best players at figuring stuff out. Unfortunately that'll never happen since you can't really come up with custom problems for each player, and web sites'll quickly fill up with solutions (or meta-solutions, should a low level of generic random problem be possible.)
> Princeton University geology Professor Kenneth Deffeyes has > been studying world petroleum production data and has come to > the conclusion that the world hit peak oil last December 16, 2005.
> total world oil production will never surpass what was produced last December.
Yikes, the cluelessness of this guy is astounding. Anyone wanna bet? Anyone? Hello? Bueller? Bueller?
> From the article: 'Compared to 2004, world oil production was up 0.8 percent > in 2005, nowhere near enough to compensate for a demand rise of roughly 3 percent.
The ability to increase takes time. If the demand will continue to rise at 3 percent, greedy capitalists will compensate. Also, the higher the price, the more alternatives are found, from exploration to better extraction to alternative ways to create oil to alternative fuels to alternative motors to things no command-and-control government bureaucrat can possibly predict.
Provided, of course, those command-and-control bureaucrats are held at bay. Which is this guy's point all along, and what the earth scientists never understood. Well, the ones writing gloom and doom books, anyway.
Games are known for allowing people to act out things they could never do in real life -- jumping cars, playing world-class sports, killing monsters and bad guys, but not graffiti! Hell no! Simulating doing graffiti is not allowed!
Too bad you guys don't have a Supreme Court that recognizes unlimited freedom of speech, including expression in game design (or mere game playing, in this case.)
And Moderators, I home you enjoy living somewhere where you're permitted by the government to mod me flamebait.
If Hyperspace is also a warped space generated by the ship's engines, then it'd be possible that he could do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs -- his ship warped the space into that small of a distance, a record.
Ummm, but the speed of light in Hyperspace would have to be faster since it'd still take like 15 years to travel 12 parsecs even at the speed of light.
> I Disagree. When Lucas said that he had planned all along to > make nine... um... six movies, I believe him. The
Except that he had no idea Luke and Leia were brothers (the "kiss" in the first one, and hints at romance in the second one, even as he had already decided Vader was the father in that very film -- something he may have had in the back of his mind given "darth vader" was jabberwocky for "dark father".
Of course, light sabers are really wimpy, dogs and giraffes can be sprayed with flamethrowers for 30 seconds and not die, or even just run away screaming in agony etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, possibly:
I knelt down before the Queen.
and
I knelt down before the queen.
Lola...lo lo lo lo Lola...
I remember finishing Quake II, where the final encounter was a standard big boss encounter, no "little trickies" to solve. At that point, you could save up your pentagrams of protection (well, a shield of protection in that game) and your quad damage. So when the radio message from HQ came in, "Terminate with extreme prejudice", I hit both, and fired the BFG non-stop. I gotta hand it to the boss, though, he took it all and still outlived my quad/pent dual powerup.
But not by more than about 10 seconds. =D
And I never went back and did it without the quad, pent, or BFG "just to see". My orders were to terminate with prejudice, and I did just that.
First through Knights of the Old Republic II, the second encounter with the undead guy, as well as Darty Trayus and her three floating scimitars, so to speak, was very tough (playing on "difficult", though difficult wasn't all that tough except for the boss encounters.)
Second and all subsequent times through the encounters were very easy. I even got the encounters down to basically 1-shot Nihilus (discovering a bug in the game if you off him too quickly) and almost, but not quite 1-shotting the undead guy the second time. Trayus and her scimmies went down just as fast. Nothing like a right-hander doing 82, count it, 82 points max damage, with the other hand at "only" 56, but optimized with expanded crit threat (17-20) and a huge honkin amount of crit extra points + Master Speed + Master Flurry. Love 200+ and a few 100+ in one swat. The weapon basically approximated the damage capacity of the movie weapons, if not moreso since boss encounters, even unbalanced ones like Dooku vs. Anakin/Obiwan 1, last more than a few swats.
> I don't grasp why using real-world combat tactics which work
/guard you and have it stand in a place. It would attack any non-positive faction NPC that wandered by, not just ones attacking you. Hence it would run around like the guards outside the halfling city used to do, killing bats and rats for hours. That fun was taken away, too.
> very well at keeping you alive are considered "n00b" in FPS combat games.
In poorly-designed MMORPGs, using tactics like shooting at monsters where they can't get at you or from a ledge is considered an exploitation. Indeed, supposedly monsters could NOT originally hit you through a wall, but they had to allow that to prevent people from shooting at stupid giants in Oasis of Marr through the doors of the huts, who'd just stand there indefinitely, struggling to get at you through the door they could not fit through.
Ahh, that was a fun game. I remember when people figured out that the ships were actually coded as if they were NPCs, and the speed of the ship was controlled by "giving" it a very heavy weapon that slowed it down to the desired speed.
So some enterprising warriors started using the "disarm" ability on the ship, which would drop its weapon, and the ships would go wizzing through the oceans. Oh, the hilarity of it all.
Then you could cast a certain spell on your skeleton pet (dull mind), which wouldn't do anything, but once in awhile it would take (or not take and wear off, as the case may be) converting your pet into an NPC skeleton monster mad at you. Recast pet over and over until it's at max level (you used to have to do this), give your pet two daggers to turn them into a slice and dice machine (also a cool feature now long gone) and do this right by a zone, and zone out when it takes. Pet sticks around as an NPC attacking anyone who comes near.
And then there was PvP charming the bad guys like Trolls and Ogres, and making them sit (as a friendly pet) next to a guard in Freeport, then leaving. Charm eventually wears off, guard suddenly sees them as an enemy. Poof!
And you used to let your pet be able to
And in WWII Online, things like bushes were permanent, indestructible fixtures on the landscape. Now the physics engine was quite good -- if a car or truck crashed, it might flip over. A truck would even spill the soldiers sitting in back. So what people would do was load up a truck with soldiers, and deliberately crash at high speed into a bush, flipping the soldiers over the fence into the German camp, thus avoiding the "proper" assault through the front gates.
In Serious Sam, I was playing it on Serious (the hardest setting, at least without playing it fully through to unlock "You are not serious" setting, which appeared to be Serious + the monsters fading in and out.) I fought that giant thing all the way to the pyramid, killing all the other monsters, shooting the big guy lower and lower in health. He'd recharge by sucking health in from the world around from time to time. Running low on ammo, I fought my way all the way back around to the gate where ammo would respawn slowly, but indefinitely.
Kept at him for awhile, and fought my way back to the pyramid yet again. Draining the big guy way down half a dozen times, eventually I figured out you were supposed to go in the pyramid! Yikes!
And in Duke Nuke'em 3D, again on the hardest (non-monster-respawn, intented for multiplayer) setting, I started the final battle on the football field with nothing more than a half-full 3-barreled machine gun. Rocket Launcher: empty. Devastator: empty. When I finally took down the big guy and "game over!" happened, I jumped up with joy.
>> When I saw the headline, and even after reading the first few sentences
>> of the intro, I thought this was about the sort of "boss" that employs
>> you, not the video game variety. And I had to wonder, why isn't my boss
>> cool enough to have laser blast?
>
I thought exactly the same thing. My thoughts as I read the header:
> The Guardian Gamesblog has a piece on knowing your enemy to better pwn
> him.
Ya, I'd like to know how to manage my boss and bring him under my thumb!
> Specifically, they go through some tried and true rules about surviving
> boss battles. From the article: "If the boss stops, panic.
Yeah, yeah?
> Bosses usually move about - when they stop it means they're about to
> unleash their signature move
Hehe, some pointy-haired commentary like from The Office or Dilbert or sumpthin'!
> , the aforementioned fist
Hyperbole, no doubt...
> or laser blast.
F*** me! They're talking about game boss battles.
> Unfortunately tha same decree of similarity can be demostrated
> between the US and Nazi Germany, or Israel or Nazi Germany if one is so inclined.
I am so inclined to hear this from you. Please show how the US or Israel are engaged in deliberate mass extermination of innocent people and the active suppression and jailing of dissent. Then show how this is an inaccurate comparison for China. Or at least how the comparison vs. China is no worse than that which you've described for the US and Israel.
Hint: Hyperbole and actions by a handful of rogue soldiers are not the equivalent to official government policy.
Having a condescending attitude like that is a form of racism. That you, enlightened westerner, know what's best for third world countries, by disallowing them to grow out of poverty the exact same way the western countries originally did, bootstrapping via cheap labor manufacturing.
You sit there in the middle of a wealthy society that arose on the back of its own people in sweatshops, a position that gave them longer, not shorter lives and hold up your nose at it, pretending it didn't exist, like the bellybutton girl in the cloud city in the old Star Trek episode with the cromags doing all the mining work. Yes, let them eat cake.
> Censorship is not the same as handing Anne Frank over to the NAZIs.
Yes, but handing over records so the government can find an individual and throw them into jail as a political prisoner for 10 years is only a half-step away from Anne Frank. It should be far enough along the "slippery slope" that it should severely bother you.
> AD&D is not the end of everything,
Of course not. I saw this Star Trek episode once where the people on the Enterprise (TOS) were fighting Klingons, and they were being resurrected over and over again to fight to the death for ever and ever, the rage feeding some ethereal entity. I found it very prescient of the future online FPS games like Quake.
In Soviet Russia, Godwin's Law applies itself to YOU!
Which, when I think about it, is another sad, but legitimate, use of Nazi comparison where Godwin's Law would not apply. Sigh.
Moreover, invoking Godwin's Law is typically in the context where it is overexaggerated hyperbole, not when it is, sadly and disgustingly, a reasonably accurate a comparison.
Better to bring the issue up at a shareholder meeting and ask for a vote.
I assume the shareholders as a body can decide not to go into China for any reason they desire, including not getting tangled up in opression.
> the World Series of Video Games
At some point 10 years or so from now:
"But today (echo: ooo-day, ooo-day, ooo-day)
I consider myself (eye-self, eye-self, eye-self)
The fattest man (attest man, attest man, attest man)
On the face of the earth (cheers drown out echos!)"
> a New Scientist study that indicates your subconscious
> mind is a better decision maker than you are.
I knew there was more to my dream of a mule with Natalie Portman's head ramming me in the @$$ with a Beowulf cluster than at first glance!
Three hundred million dollars of emergency mobile homes bought for Katrina victims are sitting, rotting and unused, and may have to be torn down, never used.
It's just three hundred million dollars, though. Barely one ten thousandth of the budget last year. Yes, you, big government lovers, read that right. Three hundred million dollars is only one ten thousandth of the federal budget last year .
Well, this is why no game recently has thrilled me. WoW seems utterly banal. It looks good, and taking a ride on a griffen is awesome, but there's really nothing there except the grind. Lots of missions are nice. Different missions (are you listening, MxO?) But it just seems lacking something. I feel too much like I'm weilding a wiffle ball bat.
.6 x .6 x .6 x .6 of what you were isn't a very good thing to be at the end of the day. (And I'm one who stuck out the EQ necromancer nerfs all the way along. Dagger speedup nerf. Pet -4 levels now nerf. Level cap on soul drain nerf. DOT-while-running nerf. It takes a lot of ball-kicking to get me to quit.)
City of Heroes was almost DOA for me except for the scrapper class, a fighter class with awesome damage output AND relatively non-squishy. The only class in the only MMORPG where I felt a bit like I was playing a FPS. And even CoH killed that off with their "ED" hyper-mega-nerf. Every power you had, damage output, healing rate, "mana-equivalent" regeneration rate, defensive abilities, were all made about 0.6 of what they were. And
> EQ's corpse run system is particularly irritating. This does
> not mean that all risk is bad; it means that EQ's corpse run system is badly designed.
The worst part was that the corpse evaporated after a week, even with all your stuff on it, whether you logged on or not. I have no idea if that's still the case as I haven't played in several years, but damn was that annoying.
Worse, a corpse without anything on it decayed in like half an hour, so if you died going to get your corpse, you had to make a beeline for the new corpse and beg like the wind to get a resurrection for the other half of the massive death penalty: xp loss.
I think they could have solved a lot of this problem by letting the corpses exist indefinitely (5 corpses would cover 99.9% of the non-goofball scenarios), but only with the user logged on. Hell, 100 corpses would be fine as storage space is cheap, it'd only be a problem if stacked up in one area slowing the drawing, and even that can be dealt with.
But companies had to learn the hard way. You'll note EQ has long since also done away with the "magic book in your face meditation" feature. Nothing like having a lovely 3D world and making 2/3 of the population have to spend 2/3 of their time NOT seeing the 3D world. Nah, this game survived in spite of its best efforts, not because of them.
> Short travel times = no locality. Does it matter where you are if
> you can be on the other side of the world in 10 minutes? This also
> concentrates the market furthur into the big trade hubs since it is
> so easy to get to them. I actually prefer the long travel times, so
> long as the game is set up in a way which supports it (don't force
> people to the ends of the earth every 5 minutes). Makes the world feel bigger.
City of Heroes has a nice balance of this -- you get good, fairly high-speed travel powers (we won't even get into the coolness that they're the only major MMORPG I've played, and that's 7 and counting, that has real 3D movement, and not just "spirit of bird" or whatever, i.e. you run along the ground, translated 6 feet up in the air. Oh how magnificent! I've forgotten what that EQ spell was called, enough blessed time has passed since 3 years in that hole.)
Granted, they have trains to shorten zone travel, as well as "Pocket D", so you're never more than 2.5 zones away from where you wanna go, unless it's deep inside Firebase Zulu. Any game that wanted to make more travel should make the amount you carry be much, much greater so you don't have the constant urge to travel to sell your stuff. Very important if this is 5 zones or more away, even at high speed CoH travel speeds.
And you get your travel powers at an early level -- 14 -- not level 40 or something idiotic. And every class gets it. And it's cheap, not eight hundred billion pieces of gold to buy a broken down mule that moves at 1.5x your run speed.
The real solution is the impossible one -- make the game a very hard game insofar as it takes skill to solve a problem. Thus the people with the best stuff are the best players at figuring stuff out. Unfortunately that'll never happen since you can't really come up with custom problems for each player, and web sites'll quickly fill up with solutions (or meta-solutions, should a low level of generic random problem be possible.)
> Princeton University geology Professor Kenneth Deffeyes has
> been studying world petroleum production data and has come to
> the conclusion that the world hit peak oil last December 16, 2005.
This is because he's a geologist and not an economist.
> If he is correct,
Don't worry, he is not.
> total world oil production will never surpass what was produced last December.
Yikes, the cluelessness of this guy is astounding. Anyone wanna bet? Anyone? Hello? Bueller? Bueller?
> From the article: 'Compared to 2004, world oil production was up 0.8 percent
> in 2005, nowhere near enough to compensate for a demand rise of roughly 3 percent.
The ability to increase takes time. If the demand will continue to rise at 3 percent, greedy capitalists will compensate. Also, the higher the price, the more alternatives are found, from exploration to better extraction to alternative ways to create oil to alternative fuels to alternative motors to things no command-and-control government bureaucrat can possibly predict.
Provided, of course, those command-and-control bureaucrats are held at bay. Which is this guy's point all along, and what the earth scientists never understood. Well, the ones writing gloom and doom books, anyway.
Games are known for allowing people to act out things they could never do in real life -- jumping cars, playing world-class sports, killing monsters and bad guys, but not graffiti! Hell no! Simulating doing graffiti is not allowed!
Too bad you guys don't have a Supreme Court that recognizes unlimited freedom of speech, including expression in game design (or mere game playing, in this case.)
And Moderators, I home you enjoy living somewhere where you're permitted by the government to mod me flamebait.
If Hyperspace is also a warped space generated by the ship's engines, then it'd be possible that he could do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs -- his ship warped the space into that small of a distance, a record.
Ummm, but the speed of light in Hyperspace would have to be faster since it'd still take like 15 years to travel 12 parsecs even at the speed of light.
Umm, nevermind.
Let's not forget when they cut out the scene where Wedge nails Leia.
> I Disagree. When Lucas said that he had planned all along to
> make nine... um... six movies, I believe him. The
Except that he had no idea Luke and Leia were brothers (the "kiss" in the first one, and hints at romance in the second one, even as he had already decided Vader was the father in that very film -- something he may have had in the back of his mind given "darth vader" was jabberwocky for "dark father".
> is as much an official as Star Wars Galaxies.
I guess anybody can be a Jedi after all!
Of course, light sabers are really wimpy, dogs and giraffes can be sprayed with flamethrowers for 30 seconds and not die, or even just run away screaming in agony etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum.