I'm going to need to say you're wrong here. Being able to physically fire the bow added a huge level of immersion for me. Particularly with poisons, the sneak attack 4x bonus, and the zoom at level 50. Sneaking up on a target, poisoning the arrow, and then gently sliding it into the back of his head was a sublime thrill.
No, I'm right, but right for me - and I do realise with how popular FPSes are that I'm very much in a minority. If I have to move with one stick at the same time as using the other stick to try and make some targeting element and my intended target coincide, in real-time, I'm not interested in the game. I'm no good at it, I don't enjoy it, and yes, the two things do feed off each other in a downwards spiral.
I was really disappointed that this experience is totally lost in Dragon Age. You hit auto attack, and your character fires arrows as fast as they particularly feel like it. They hit if their hit dice says they will.
See, that's exactly what I'm after in an RPG. My character has skills, I provide the guiding intelligence telling them how and when to use those skills - just as I would in a pen-and-paper RPG. Whether they succeed in a particular activity is down to their skills and the fall of the dice. Whether they succeed in their larger goal is down (at least in part) to my skills in decision-making.
I'm more bothered by FPS elements creeping into RPGs. Prime offender in my eyes was Oblivion, which required far too much in the way of twitch-shooter ability to play to be any fun at all - I still haven't tried Mass Effect (bought, but yet unplayed) or Fallout 3 to see if either of these titles as more playable for me.
Not saying everything has to be turn-based - although it's still very much my preference, NWN-style "close to real-time but pausable" works, as does anything with time limits, action points etc (some Final Fantasy turn-based variations, Eternal Sonata, etc). Anything where the *character's* ability to hit things is determined by *my* dexterity with the right thumb stick, in an FPS style, is a complete non-starter for me, though.
In an unexpected outbreak of common sense, this is not the case in the UK (and I believe the EU as a whole), where PayPal have been successfully duck-typed and do now have to operate as a financial institution.
Oblivion is an FPS with RPG trappings. If success in combat depends more on *my* ability to manipulate twin thumb-sticks and buttons quickly than *my character's* supposed combat abilities (driven by my decision-making), the game is a shooter, not an RPG.
I've just picked up Mass Effect cheaply, but haven't played yet. I'm hoping it's better in this regard; some previous forum trawling suggests that I'll be able to steer the gameplay in the direction of tactical combat decisions over twitch shooting.
True, but considering both computers should easily be able to saturate a 100baseT connection, shouldn't both configurations be able to saturate a 22Mbps link?
Even if they *can* saturate a 100baseT connection, which is not guaranteed with some POS NIC like a Realtek, that's not anything like filling a cross-continent (or inter-continental) 22Mb/s WAN. Google "long fat network", "selective ack" and "tcp window scaling" for starters.
Once you hit five authorized computers, you can kill them *all* off through the ITMS and start again. Only once per long-time-period though, I'm not sure if 12 months or 18. You can't do this until you hit your max five authorizations though, which confused me for a bit - I'm in the position where I have a dead / sold / not-properly-deauthed machine *somewhere* taking one of my slots, but I can't kill it til I add some more.
I know some people in the UK moan (moan in the UK? Surely not?), moan about the utility companies at year end when they are in credit. A simple phone call to adjust payments is very straight forward and if you feel you're paying too much, they'll decrease the payments without question. I once told them I wouldn't be a home weekends any more and they instantly reduced monthly payments by 25%.
It's not specifically about paying too much, for me, it's about paying the *right* bill, at the time. One of the things I despise about utility companies is their insane estimated bills (both high and low), and the hoops you have to jump through with some of them to get them to accept a corrected reading.
I'd quite happily pay by DD if they would collect my meter readings once a quarter, then debit the correct bill. But the choices are always either monthly estimates by DD, or manual payment of quarterly bills. At least I can get *some* of the discount by receiving and paying the quarterly bills on-line.
I do have to wonder what is with all this waiting for paper bills to arrive in the post, and then waiting for a cheque to go back in the post? On-line statements, on-line banking has been the obvious answer for years, and telephone banking for years before that. That, and keeping decent records - if you *know* what your balance is, you can pay it on the statement date (not the due date) without any need for a statement.
If by 'superior' you mean 'have some spec-related number on a piece of paper that's larger', you're probably right.
If, instead, you mean 'offer a better experience to the user', I'd disagree with all three, although I grant the last one is up for debate if you're either a non-console gamer or enjoy doing mix-and-match hardware.
Actually, credit where credit's due, she asked the people operating the social-networking sites popular with children what could be done to keep paedophiles off those sites. They offered the facility to ban people from registering with black-listed email addresses. ISPs are simply not in the loop.
The weaker part is getting the paedophiles[0] to register their email addresses, in the same way as they have to register their physical address. We all know it's easy to create new email addresses, but the point here is that for said paedophile, creating / using a new email address becomes an offense (or at least a cause for investigation) in itself, in the same way that registering one postal address and being found to be living at another would be. The assumption is that they wouldn't need a new non-registered address unless they were planning to do something wrong.
It's not a perfect analogy, but it seems to me a pretty reasonable attempt to do something, involving the right people - users of web sites and admins of web sites - without stomping all over everyone else's use of the Internet.
[0] For whatever definition of that is in the measures. Not all paedophiles are on the Sex Offenders Register, and not everyone on the Sex Offenders Register is a paedophile.
A: Yes. Q: Are you sure? A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. Q: Why is top posting annoying in email?
Especially in emails that address a lot of complicated things in one mail, and require a response to each (rather than 'who wants lunch?'), it's *so* much easier to follow the style:
At least it *has* threading. This is another reason, I think, for the Outlook 'quote everything' mentality - there is no threading. How is this even possible? I know for a fact I was using threaded email readers on Unix 15 years ago, I've just checked and elm pre-dates that by another 5 years. That's normally within Microsoft's time-frame to steal important features from other software...
(Before someone gets smart, 'Group by Conversation', or whatever the damn thing is called, is *not* threading. It doesn't follow References / In-Reply-To headers, and it chomps screen space something awful by turning every single-email 'thread' in a mailbox into a multi-line 'group'.)
In response to a later reply, I'd love to have a look at Mail.app threads compared to Thunderbird. A lot of its features seem quite nice on paper, but it's so mouse-heavy for navigation that it's completely unusuable for me.
ACK. I repeatedly get asked why I send my emails "all funny" - that is quote-trimmed, converted from HTML to plain text, bottom-posted (or interleave-posted if it's something that requires separate responses to several points). It's definitely a case of people brought up on Outlook / Exchange not knowing that there's any other way than top-posted, quote-everything, usually in blue MS Comic Sans *spit*.
Thank you. It winds me up seeing the product getting a slamming because it's "only" 99% accurate, or because "it sucks - so much better to type". While they might be marketing it at people who are too lazy to type, or who think it's cool to talk to their computer, it's an absolute boon for people who really *can't* type.
My wife has been through bouts of severe RSI, and while a lot of the time she can now manage with a specialist keyboard, Dragon kept her able to work and to communicate through a long bad stretch after the initial onset, and is an ongoing help. 5% time typing to go back and make manual corrections is still 95% less trying to painfully use the keyboard.
Now I have a real chance of getting her off the PC and onto a Mac - no more Windows support for me!:)
Contrary to popular wisdom, there are good, fun games that aren't FPS. Personally, I don't find any FPSes fun, but I'm prepare to accept they're quite popular. It just winds me up that the genre has to be the be-all and end-all of gaming - witness the endless "consoles suck because you don't have keyboard + mouse".
Metroid Prime, at least in its original incarnation (I've recently (finally) finished the first, but not played 2 or 3) isn't an FPS in any meaningful sense. It's a first-person explore / puzzle-solve / platformer, that sometimes has you shoot things. Calling it an FPS is like calling a 2D Mario a shoot-em-up because of the fire flowers. Good game, but too many buttons at the same time needed in places.
Many sites on the same IP can share the same certificate.
Only if you want the certs to not validate. Any decent browser will flag this in some way, and IE7 now complains loudly, obviously and very red-ly if the site you entered in the address bar doesn't match the CN on the certificate.
You could probably do something with a wildcard cert and *.lamearsehomepagesservice.com for whatever today's equivalent of Tripod, Angelfire et al is, but those are generally wading so deep in web-provider inserted ads that no-one would notice a few more from the eyeball-provider anyway...
And 6/10 should be 'a bit above average'. *Bad* games should be getting 2s, 3s and 4s. What's the point of a 1-10 scale where half of it is effectively out-of-bounds?
but the king is Empires in Arms, the grand campaign of which is reputed to last 200 hours Not even close. Campaign for North Africa (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/4815) has a listed playing time of 1000 hours:)
On the long, but not insane, front, I'd recommend both Here I Stand and Pax Romana from GMT Games (http://www.gmtgames.com/) as multi-player diplomacy / wargame / empire-building combos that play in a day to a couple of days flat out, or a lot of evenings. (I've been playing both by email over a number of weeks).
Fighting games might be "twitch," but Oblivion? Nah.
Oblivion is an FPS masquerading as an RPG. I can't remember the last time I regretted spending money on a game quite so much.
Back on topic, I'd love to see some of the old (proper, turn-based) RPGs re-made with the same game-play, but prettier (and working on today's hardware / OSes). The Bard's Tale and Pool of Radiance series' in particular - the latter could now have the text, maps etc in-game rather than a dirty great book of numbered paragraphs...
Pricing-schmicing. Launching an EDGE-only device in a country where people who have any interest in mobile Interwebs have already experienced 3G is frankly barking. It's barely a step up from launching a dial-up ISP at this point in the game.
"Finally" switching is not about "growing a sack". It's about the fact that OS X is fucking excellent, and the prior Mac OSes sucked cold baboon piss through a straw. The hardware's always been nice, but foul software. No more foul than Windows, 'tis true, but then again my platform of choice has gone Amiga -> Linux -> OS X, so I've always had nice OSes:)
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I'm going to need to say you're wrong here. Being able to physically fire the bow added a huge level of immersion for me. Particularly with poisons, the sneak attack 4x bonus, and the zoom at level 50. Sneaking up on a target, poisoning the arrow, and then gently sliding it into the back of his head was a sublime thrill.
No, I'm right, but right for me - and I do realise with how popular FPSes are that I'm very much in a minority. If I have to move with one stick at the same time as using the other stick to try and make some targeting element and my intended target coincide, in real-time, I'm not interested in the game. I'm no good at it, I don't enjoy it, and yes, the two things do feed off each other in a downwards spiral.
I was really disappointed that this experience is totally lost in Dragon Age. You hit auto attack, and your character fires arrows as fast as they particularly feel like it. They hit if their hit dice says they will.
See, that's exactly what I'm after in an RPG. My character has skills, I provide the guiding intelligence telling them how and when to use those skills - just as I would in a pen-and-paper RPG. Whether they succeed in a particular activity is down to their skills and the fall of the dice. Whether they succeed in their larger goal is down (at least in part) to my skills in decision-making.
I'm more bothered by FPS elements creeping into RPGs. Prime offender in my eyes was Oblivion, which required far too much in the way of twitch-shooter ability to play to be any fun at all - I still haven't tried Mass Effect (bought, but yet unplayed) or Fallout 3 to see if either of these titles as more playable for me.
Not saying everything has to be turn-based - although it's still very much my preference, NWN-style "close to real-time but pausable" works, as does anything with time limits, action points etc (some Final Fantasy turn-based variations, Eternal Sonata, etc). Anything where the *character's* ability to hit things is determined by *my* dexterity with the right thumb stick, in an FPS style, is a complete non-starter for me, though.
In an unexpected outbreak of common sense, this is not the case in the UK (and I believe the EU as a whole), where PayPal have been successfully duck-typed and do now have to operate as a financial institution.
No, it's fear of shooting tortoises.
Oblivion is an FPS with RPG trappings. If success in combat depends more on *my* ability to manipulate twin thumb-sticks and buttons quickly than *my character's* supposed combat abilities (driven by my decision-making), the game is a shooter, not an RPG.
I've just picked up Mass Effect cheaply, but haven't played yet. I'm hoping it's better in this regard; some previous forum trawling suggests that I'll be able to steer the gameplay in the direction of tactical combat decisions over twitch shooting.
True, but considering both computers should easily be able to saturate a 100baseT connection, shouldn't both configurations be able to saturate a 22Mbps link?
Even if they *can* saturate a 100baseT connection, which is not guaranteed with some POS NIC like a Realtek, that's not anything like filling a cross-continent (or inter-continental) 22Mb/s WAN. Google "long fat network", "selective ack" and "tcp window scaling" for starters.
Once you hit five authorized computers, you can kill them *all* off through the ITMS and start again. Only once per long-time-period though, I'm not sure if 12 months or 18. You can't do this until you hit your max five authorizations though, which confused me for a bit - I'm in the position where I have a dead / sold / not-properly-deauthed machine *somewhere* taking one of my slots, but I can't kill it til I add some more.
It's not specifically about paying too much, for me, it's about paying the *right* bill, at the time. One of the things I despise about utility companies is their insane estimated bills (both high and low), and the hoops you have to jump through with some of them to get them to accept a corrected reading.
I'd quite happily pay by DD if they would collect my meter readings once a quarter, then debit the correct bill. But the choices are always either monthly estimates by DD, or manual payment of quarterly bills. At least I can get *some* of the discount by receiving and paying the quarterly bills on-line.
I do have to wonder what is with all this waiting for paper bills to arrive in the post, and then waiting for a cheque to go back in the post? On-line statements, on-line banking has been the obvious answer for years, and telephone banking for years before that. That, and keeping decent records - if you *know* what your balance is, you can pay it on the statement date (not the due date) without any need for a statement.
Not at all - your girlfriend has exceptional market penetration.
If by 'superior' you mean 'have some spec-related number on a piece of paper that's larger', you're probably right.
If, instead, you mean 'offer a better experience to the user', I'd disagree with all three, although I grant the last one is up for debate if you're either a non-console gamer or enjoy doing mix-and-match hardware.
What about people who want human-readable zone-files, not sub-bad-Perl-quality line-noise?
http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/magical%20trevor%204/
That is all.
Actually, credit where credit's due, she asked the people operating the social-networking sites popular with children what could be done to keep paedophiles off those sites. They offered the facility to ban people from registering with black-listed email addresses. ISPs are simply not in the loop.
The weaker part is getting the paedophiles[0] to register their email addresses, in the same way as they have to register their physical address. We all know it's easy to create new email addresses, but the point here is that for said paedophile, creating / using a new email address becomes an offense (or at least a cause for investigation) in itself, in the same way that registering one postal address and being found to be living at another would be. The assumption is that they wouldn't need a new non-registered address unless they were planning to do something wrong.
It's not a perfect analogy, but it seems to me a pretty reasonable attempt to do something, involving the right people - users of web sites and admins of web sites - without stomping all over everyone else's use of the Internet.
[0] For whatever definition of that is in the measures. Not all paedophiles are on the Sex Offenders Register, and not everyone on the Sex Offenders Register is a paedophile.
A: Yes.
Q: Are you sure?
A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
Q: Why is top posting annoying in email?
Especially in emails that address a lot of complicated things in one mail, and require a response to each (rather than 'who wants lunch?'), it's *so* much easier to follow the style:
Than the foul Outlook style that goes:
Now, which one of those is easier to understand?
At least it *has* threading. This is another reason, I think, for the Outlook 'quote everything' mentality - there is no threading. How is this even possible? I know for a fact I was using threaded email readers on Unix 15 years ago, I've just checked and elm pre-dates that by another 5 years. That's normally within Microsoft's time-frame to steal important features from other software...
(Before someone gets smart, 'Group by Conversation', or whatever the damn thing is called, is *not* threading. It doesn't follow References / In-Reply-To headers, and it chomps screen space something awful by turning every single-email 'thread' in a mailbox into a multi-line 'group'.)
In response to a later reply, I'd love to have a look at Mail.app threads compared to Thunderbird. A lot of its features seem quite nice on paper, but it's so mouse-heavy for navigation that it's completely unusuable for me.
ACK. I repeatedly get asked why I send my emails "all funny" - that is quote-trimmed, converted from HTML to plain text, bottom-posted (or interleave-posted if it's something that requires separate responses to several points). It's definitely a case of people brought up on Outlook / Exchange not knowing that there's any other way than top-posted, quote-everything, usually in blue MS Comic Sans *spit*.
Thank you. It winds me up seeing the product getting a slamming because it's "only" 99% accurate, or because "it sucks - so much better to type". While they might be marketing it at people who are too lazy to type, or who think it's cool to talk to their computer, it's an absolute boon for people who really *can't* type.
:)
My wife has been through bouts of severe RSI, and while a lot of the time she can now manage with a specialist keyboard, Dragon kept her able to work and to communicate through a long bad stretch after the initial onset, and is an ongoing help. 5% time typing to go back and make manual corrections is still 95% less trying to painfully use the keyboard.
Now I have a real chance of getting her off the PC and onto a Mac - no more Windows support for me!
Contrary to popular wisdom, there are good, fun games that aren't FPS. Personally, I don't find any FPSes fun, but I'm prepare to accept they're quite popular. It just winds me up that the genre has to be the be-all and end-all of gaming - witness the endless "consoles suck because you don't have keyboard + mouse".
Metroid Prime, at least in its original incarnation (I've recently (finally) finished the first, but not played 2 or 3) isn't an FPS in any meaningful sense. It's a first-person explore / puzzle-solve / platformer, that sometimes has you shoot things. Calling it an FPS is like calling a 2D Mario a shoot-em-up because of the fire flowers. Good game, but too many buttons at the same time needed in places.
Only if you want the certs to not validate. Any decent browser will flag this in some way, and IE7 now complains loudly, obviously and very red-ly if the site you entered in the address bar doesn't match the CN on the certificate.
You could probably do something with a wildcard cert and *.lamearsehomepagesservice.com for whatever today's equivalent of Tripod, Angelfire et al is, but those are generally wading so deep in web-provider inserted ads that no-one would notice a few more from the eyeball-provider anyway...
And 6/10 should be 'a bit above average'. *Bad* games should be getting 2s, 3s and 4s. What's the point of a 1-10 scale where half of it is effectively out-of-bounds?
On the long, but not insane, front, I'd recommend both Here I Stand and Pax Romana from GMT Games (http://www.gmtgames.com/) as multi-player diplomacy / wargame / empire-building combos that play in a day to a couple of days flat out, or a lot of evenings. (I've been playing both by email over a number of weeks).
Oblivion is an FPS masquerading as an RPG. I can't remember the last time I regretted spending money on a game quite so much.
Back on topic, I'd love to see some of the old (proper, turn-based) RPGs re-made with the same game-play, but prettier (and working on today's hardware / OSes). The Bard's Tale and Pool of Radiance series' in particular - the latter could now have the text, maps etc in-game rather than a dirty great book of numbered paragraphs...
Pricing-schmicing. Launching an EDGE-only device in a country where people who have any interest in mobile Interwebs have already experienced 3G is frankly barking. It's barely a step up from launching a dial-up ISP at this point in the game.
"Finally" switching is not about "growing a sack". It's about the fact that OS X is fucking excellent, and the prior Mac OSes sucked cold baboon piss through a straw. The hardware's always been nice, but foul software. No more foul than Windows, 'tis true, but then again my platform of choice has gone Amiga -> Linux -> OS X, so I've always had nice OSes :)