I could see how losing the preteen crowd could hurt puppet-based scifi. This show is so obviously targeted at the preteen market (an alien puppet that likes to fart?) that I can see how they might lose much of their audience by switching the show to past their bedtimes. It must really bother the parents who have to endure all the whining about not being able to see their show. Really, they should just convert it into an actual cartoon. Clearly that's their target demographic.
+1 interesting. I'll have to check out that story. I don't think this would qualify as prior art to the US patent office though. Bradbury may have had the basic idea first but Paramount can claim that their idea is novel and non-obvious because it's about a holodeck in space.
Some people would say that this "pulp crap", as you call it, is about as good as science fiction gets. Of course those people may not have seen Blade Runner. Blade Runner and The Matrix may be the only two good SciFi movies ever made. There may be a few others, but I can't think of them at the moment. Good scifi is tough to film, and also tough to write. Is there even such a thing as a good scifi book? Cryptonomicon is perhaps my favorite novel, but I don't think it qualifies as scifi.
But I thought that was supposed to be Tasha's daughter, not Tasha herself. I could be wrong about this though. How did they explain how Tasha herself ended up being a Romulan? Actually, I liked that episode (Yesterdays Enterprise) even though it had an annoying romance subplot with Tasha and the first officer from "C".
Re:Agree: Time Travel, Holodeck, and Q plots suck
on
Star Trek: Pick A Plot
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· Score: 1
Near human lifetime interstellar travel, even the 4.3 lightyears to Alpha Centauri is impossible based on current knowledge. We have no tech and no viable theories to construct such a craft. And, no, Project Orion type ships will not do it either. I find this kind of depressing. For some seriously interesting details on why check out Nasa's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics (BPP)project (http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/bpp/) which, like most Nasa projects, is unfortunately losing alot of its funding. Not surprising though, when you consider that it is, by definition, a project which will probably not be succesful in the next 50 years or so.
Fine, but before you write all those scripts, kill Mr. Quantum Leap with some errant phaser fire or something. He's really annoying. Shatner was a bad actor, but at least he had some presence...
This is the reason I like TNG but not the other series. Technobabble. TNG was not about plots which were usually predictable in their basic structure. It was about the "Gee Whiz" factor.
The most convincing portrayal of an android ever (except for the his offensively stupid name; couldn't they have just called him "android" as in "Hey get the android!"). This is solely attributable to Brent Spiner's excellent acting. He seems like he was born for that part.
The most convincing portrayal of the ultimate in virtual reality with the "holodeck". AFAIK, the holodeck was an original concept. In fact I'm surprised Paramount didn't patent the idea (or maybe they did). [Before anyone tells me you can't patent an idea, go browse patents on uspto.gov for a while and then return.] And even if it wasn't original, the concept was popularized by the TNG series.
Practical examples of far-fetched concepts out of relativistic physics. Time loops, causality loops, wormholes, antimatter, spacetime... All technobabble, yes, but also things that guys like me are curious about. I think the world would be more interesting with these things.
The whole point of all this is to escape from the boring reality of today into an uber-technological future of exciting science. The point is not about what happens to those particular characters. I found the "human" stories without technobabble or far-fetched scientific concepts to be quite dull and often unwatchable.
People who focus on the plots are missing the point. It's about fulfilling the ultimate geek fantasies. Episodes like "Clues", "Cause and Effect", "Time Squared", "Remember Me", and parts of "Royale" were the only reason I watched the series, although "Violations", and "Frame of Mind" are some examples of some good non tech episodes (although hardly original).
I have little interest in the whole "Space Opera" thing. I want to see portrayals of ultra advanced tech, and practical examples of far-fetched physics portrayed convincingly with decent effects. Some decent actors like Brent Spiner, Patrick Stewart, and Levar Burton don't hurt either. There should also be a bit of surrealism and the plot should seem impossible/contradictory at least in the beginning. If I can't figure out what really happened by the end, even better.
The only real dramatic significance of ST:TNG was in its use of recursive plot constructs. "Clues" is a perfect example of this. The typical waking up from a dream about dreaming of dreaming kind of recursion has certainly become a cliche. But the concept is still effective. The shaking you out of one reality and putting you into another is the payoff. I find it addicting and always seek out movies that do this well. The ST:TNG formula for this is to trick you into believing that one thing is happening and then make you realize later that that is not really whats going on.
Err. What about Tasha.The Romulan lookalike was supposed to be her daughter. Although I can't remember if that means that her mother either survived the Blob or just got sidetracked into an alternate timeline. Anyway, I don't think they ever showed the actress again playing her old character. Not even in the movies.
Didn't you ever play "Space War" on one of those old DECs? That was good fun. Forget graphics or even text (well maybe a little text), just little "+"s to represent ship positions. Did it even output to a monitor or did it use some kind of printer? Fire those phasers! Actually, now, 20 something years later it all strikes me as rather dull, but then so does pretty much everything else in life. Getting old. If only I could play Lisa Gerrard's "Meltdown" continuously for the remainder of my life without getting sick of it.
If they can do this, why haven't they updated their aging DV camcorders with a real HDcam? I'm tired of 3 CCD camcorders with only 1/4" or 1/3" CCDs with only 400k pixels. How about producing something for 1080p resolution and 3/4" or 7/8" CCDs. The GL2 and the PD150 are both nice cameras, but Sony HDW-F900s (24FPS 1080i 2200k pixels per 2/3" sensor) they are not. How about some of this Uber-progress on other fronts?
Pretty impressive, but you still can't get the constrasts and subtle shadows and depth that you can get with film. I still happily use a 2mpixel camera. I don't usually print my photos and my monitor can't go past 1200x1600 anyway.
Perhaps what's most impressive about this leaked announcement is that Canon is not playing the release only in small increments game that companies usually do. Why release a product 4 times better than your competitors when you can keep releasing disabled products for the next 4 years that will still beat your competitors by 10% every year. Do you think Intel would just go ahead and release a 40 Ghz processor next week if they could figure out how to do it? The question is are they going to have 11mpixel cameras in their consumer and prosumer lines or just in their professional cameras?
This is so ridiculous. If any terrorist group has a problem with the US government they can attempt a coup. Personally, I think it's about time for a change of government, although I don't want to see Afganistan's form of government here. Laisez faire capitalism or just plain anarchy would be nice though. I'd even fight for that and risk my life and all.
But blowing up a couple of tall buildings full of civilians is just plain stupid. It accomplishes nothing. Just senseless murder, like the work of a serial killer for instance. The killing of civilians always accomplishes nothing. If you want to overthrow a government, you need to defeat(or convert)its armed forces. There is no other way. So called "terrorism" is useless. I agree that the Pentagon and Camp David *are* valid military targets to an enemy. You're right about that not really being "terrorism". But most of the deaths were in the trade center. They screwed up with the military targets.
Hate to be pedantic, but I think he's probably rolling in his grave right now. Wells. As in H.G., wrote The Time Machine. Not George Orwell of 1984 and Animal Farm fame. Yikes.
Except that Joe doesn't have broadband and may not even have it in ten years, since it will always be more expensive than dial up and dial up works ok for the surfing that most people do.
This is a good point. It will be interesting to see if those Taiwanese MB manufacturers that were willing to thumb their noses at MS with extensive overclocking options as prominent features and selling points will be willing to do the same with a "Disable DRM" option either in the BIOS or as a DIP switch on the board itself. However this may not be possible if all of the functionality is within the CPU. Intel and AMD have not forgotten what happened with the overclocking fiasco. And neither have the engineers working on implementing DRM. At the very least we can hope that one of the two companies will be careless either by and leave open an easy hardware hack, like shorting two jumpers or something. I can just imagine the detailed instructions for the modification on TomsHardware.
This is a good point. From a subjective standpoint, 2004 need not arrive at all when it comes to my computing life. The days when the processor was the bottleneck have been over for awhile anyway. For those few apps where it really makes a difference, just remember that patience is a virtue. We can all wait for the system to be hacked, even if it never is. Of course,MS will have countermeasures if this happens etc, etc. If I imagine being on a secluded desert island with a solar powered laptop, why does it matter? Intel and AMD *will* lose customers over this. They would lose even more customers if people understood the tech. And MS *will* lose market share because of this. This in combination with their insistence on finally trying to get everyone to pay for their copy of windows is the biggest boost that Linux/*BSD has ever seen. Apple will also be very happy about this development. Time to buy some Apple stock.
Dual? How about a quad? The trick is going to be buying the last *real* CPU with the highest clock speed. It also wouldn't be a bad idea to buy a couple of high end laptops pre-palladium. In fact I am going to do this. I've resisted buying a laptop for years. And of course I won't be installing any Microsoft OS after Win98 and Win2k either. When these OSes finally become obsolete and impossible to use with current apps (like DOS 3.3 is today), I'll just switch to Linux or even buy an Apple. Or maybe VIA will figure out how to make fast CPUs and catch up to the big boys.
Perhaps, but did his patent claim that his invention was "a method for aiding vision, reducing costs, enabling progress, and allowing productivity, through the use of photons, electrons, chemical elements, matter, energy and science including any new discoveries related to these. If Edison were filing a patent today, it would cover not only light bulbs but lasers, ovens, heaters, mirrors, computer monitors, TVs, film projectors, etc. Anything that used photons or electrons since the light bulb uses electrons to create photons. Perhaps he would have even been allowed to patent photons and electrons themselves. Something that I'd actually like to try.
What do you mean? If there's no patent on it already, that must mean that *it hasn't been invented yet*. So just apply for the patent and then you will be the inventor. Everyone else is just infringing. The real question is can you sue them for retro-active infringement, for infringing on your idea even before you thought of it?
This is a good point. Except that if the patent office is willing to grant these ludicrously broad patents on obvious everyday ideas now, then perhaps when they expire they will be willing to re-patent the same ideas again to whoever is clever enough to first try this. The US patent office is not aware of such a thing as "public domain" except maybe as something that might be patentable, especially if the inventor uses the phrase "with a computer".
Perhaps, but, as a rule, the government is even worse. Individuals have the same selfish (self-interested) motivations whether as employees of the government or of private industry. The main difference is that government employees cannot be fired as easily and tend to do even more damage than even the most evil of large corporations. Don't forget about the ecological damage that the Soviet government left. In those sorts of situations the government is expected to oversee itself.
Would the Union Carbide incident in Bhopal (India) have been any different if the plant had been government run. It clearly was an accident. Union Carbide obviously did not intend to kill all those people. It cost them alot of money and more than a little bad publicity. Compare this to the Soviet accidents at Chernobyl or Sverdlovsk. Admittedly the damage that government run entities can do is severely limited by their inefficiency in getting anything done at all.
When you mix governments and evil corporations what you end up with is our current situation where these supposed enemies are actually the best of friends.
To the corporation, the government is just another supplier, a provider of a service. It's no different than paying a powerful "criminal" organization for eliminating your competition or even forcing people to buy your products at inflated prices. Just don't forget that governments consist of real people. And some of these people will always be open to the highest bidder. Perhaps it is better than nothing. Perhaps not.
My instincts tend to agree with what you're saying. Human behavior seems to tend naturally tend toward evil. Large corporations merely reflect this. I don't see any easy solution except perhaps Immediate Global Thermonuclear War, which might help a little. Governments rarely solve anything.
Why don't you admit that you don't have a dog or a cat? Kids are really something. Glad I don't have one.
The creatures could get pretty annoying however. The learning algorithms were not sufficiently complex. They were dumbed down because the dev team couldn't get the more complex ones to work. So it would be like trying to teach a really stupid animal with a very bad memory. I kept thinking that buying an AIBO and training that would be a much better use of my time than trying to train that stupid ape.
Wasn't the name of his next game supposed to be called "Black and White 2"? I didn't know he was working on some kind of system to compete with MegaHal. Clearly, this guy wants to make games and do AI research at the same time. Hence, all the attempts to integrate games with near cutting edge AI technology.
If I remember correctly, Black and White was originally supposed to have used actual neural networks as a learning model for the creatures. They couldn't get it to work well enough however in the time the had to get the game out. The use of Neural Nets for the creatures was what first caught my interest in the game. I thought "finally!". What I liked about the idea was the total unpredictability of the system. With a neural net, you really are teaching something in a very real sense. No heuristics or other tricks to make the creatures *seem* like they are learning.
Before the Patch, the game was so buggy that it was almost unplayable and nearly impossible to finish. Even after the patch I was unable to finish it (although I came very close). However, I loved the game. It was my first RTS game and I spent alot of time building houses and gathering food. Other fun included poisoning the food supplies of enemy villages and using the pack of wolves miracle. I'll look forward to whatever Peter has planned and I'll probably buy it when or if it is ever released.
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I could see how losing the preteen crowd could hurt puppet-based scifi. This show is so obviously targeted at the preteen market (an alien puppet that likes to fart?) that I can see how they might lose much of their audience by switching the show to past their bedtimes. It must really bother the parents who have to endure all the whining about not being able to see their show. Really, they should just convert it into an actual cartoon. Clearly that's their target demographic.
+1 interesting. I'll have to check out that story. I don't think this would qualify as prior art to the US patent office though. Bradbury may have had the basic idea first but Paramount can claim that their idea is novel and non-obvious because it's about a holodeck in space.
This is funny and true, but it cuts both ways.
Deanna: But it's only natural that [EMOTIONAL FLUFF].
Wesley: But [EMOTIONAL FLUFF] is so [EMOTIONAL FLUFF].
I find the PsychoBabble and EmotionalBabble and RomanticBabble to be more annoying than the TechnoBabble.
Some people would say that this "pulp crap", as you call it, is about as good as science fiction gets. Of course those people may not have seen Blade Runner. Blade Runner and The Matrix may be the only two good SciFi movies ever made. There may be a few others, but I can't think of them at the moment. Good scifi is tough to film, and also tough to write. Is there even such a thing as a good scifi book? Cryptonomicon is perhaps my favorite novel, but I don't think it qualifies as scifi.
But I thought that was supposed to be Tasha's daughter, not Tasha herself. I could be wrong about this though. How did they explain how Tasha herself ended up being a Romulan? Actually, I liked that episode (Yesterdays Enterprise) even though it had an annoying romance subplot with Tasha and the first officer from "C".
Near human lifetime interstellar travel, even the 4.3 lightyears to Alpha Centauri is impossible based on current knowledge. We have no tech and no viable theories to construct such a craft. And, no, Project Orion type ships will not do it either. I find this kind of depressing. For some seriously interesting details on why check out Nasa's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics (BPP)project (http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/bpp/) which, like most Nasa projects, is unfortunately losing alot of its funding. Not surprising though, when you consider that it is, by definition, a project which will probably not be succesful in the next 50 years or so.
Fine, but before you write all those scripts, kill Mr. Quantum Leap with some errant phaser fire or something. He's really annoying. Shatner was a bad actor, but at least he had some presence...
This is the reason I like TNG but not the other series. Technobabble. TNG was not about plots which were usually predictable in their basic structure. It was about the "Gee Whiz" factor.
The most convincing portrayal of an android ever (except for the his offensively stupid name; couldn't they have just called him "android" as in "Hey get the android!"). This is solely attributable to Brent Spiner's excellent acting. He seems like he was born for that part.
The most convincing portrayal of the ultimate in virtual reality with the "holodeck". AFAIK, the holodeck was an original concept. In fact I'm surprised Paramount didn't patent the idea (or maybe they did). [Before anyone tells me you can't patent an idea, go browse patents on uspto.gov for a while and then return.] And even if it wasn't original, the concept was popularized by the TNG series. Practical examples of far-fetched concepts out of relativistic physics. Time loops, causality loops, wormholes, antimatter, spacetime... All technobabble, yes, but also things that guys like me are curious about. I think the world would be more interesting with these things.
The whole point of all this is to escape from the boring reality of today into an uber-technological future of exciting science. The point is not about what happens to those particular characters. I found the "human" stories without technobabble or far-fetched scientific concepts to be quite dull and often unwatchable.
People who focus on the plots are missing the point. It's about fulfilling the ultimate geek fantasies. Episodes like "Clues", "Cause and Effect", "Time Squared", "Remember Me", and parts of "Royale" were the only reason I watched the series, although "Violations", and "Frame of Mind" are some examples of some good non tech episodes (although hardly original).
I have little interest in the whole "Space Opera" thing. I want to see portrayals of ultra advanced tech, and practical examples of far-fetched physics portrayed convincingly with decent effects. Some decent actors like Brent Spiner, Patrick Stewart, and Levar Burton don't hurt either. There should also be a bit of surrealism and the plot should seem impossible/contradictory at least in the beginning. If I can't figure out what really happened by the end, even better.
The only real dramatic significance of ST:TNG was in its use of recursive plot constructs. "Clues" is a perfect example of this. The typical waking up from a dream about dreaming of dreaming kind of recursion has certainly become a cliche. But the concept is still effective. The shaking you out of one reality and putting you into another is the payoff. I find it addicting and always seek out movies that do this well. The ST:TNG formula for this is to trick you into believing that one thing is happening and then make you realize later that that is not really whats going on.
Err. What about Tasha.The Romulan lookalike was supposed to be her daughter. Although I can't remember if that means that her mother either survived the Blob or just got sidetracked into an alternate timeline. Anyway, I don't think they ever showed the actress again playing her old character. Not even in the movies.
Didn't you ever play "Space War" on one of those old DECs? That was good fun. Forget graphics or even text (well maybe a little text), just little "+"s to represent ship positions. Did it even output to a monitor or did it use some kind of printer? Fire those phasers! Actually, now, 20 something years later it all strikes me as rather dull, but then so does pretty much everything else in life. Getting old. If only I could play Lisa Gerrard's "Meltdown" continuously for the remainder of my life without getting sick of it.
But what about the "contrast range and shadow detail"?
If they can do this, why haven't they updated their aging DV camcorders with a real HDcam? I'm tired of 3 CCD camcorders with only 1/4" or 1/3" CCDs with only 400k pixels. How about producing something for 1080p resolution and 3/4" or 7/8" CCDs. The GL2 and the PD150 are both nice cameras, but Sony HDW-F900s (24FPS 1080i 2200k pixels per 2/3" sensor) they are not. How about some of this Uber-progress on other fronts?
Pretty impressive, but you still can't get the constrasts and subtle shadows and depth that you can get with film. I still happily use a 2mpixel camera. I don't usually print my photos and my monitor can't go past 1200x1600 anyway.
Perhaps what's most impressive about this leaked announcement is that Canon is not playing the release only in small increments game that companies usually do. Why release a product 4 times better than your competitors when you can keep releasing disabled products for the next 4 years that will still beat your competitors by 10% every year. Do you think Intel would just go ahead and release a 40 Ghz processor next week if they could figure out how to do it? The question is are they going to have 11mpixel cameras in their consumer and prosumer lines or just in their professional cameras?
This is so ridiculous. If any terrorist group has a problem with the US government they can attempt a coup. Personally, I think it's about time for a change of government, although I don't want to see Afganistan's form of government here. Laisez faire capitalism or just plain anarchy would be nice though. I'd even fight for that and risk my life and all.
But blowing up a couple of tall buildings full of civilians is just plain stupid. It accomplishes nothing. Just senseless murder, like the work of a serial killer for instance. The killing of civilians always accomplishes nothing. If you want to overthrow a government, you need to defeat(or convert)its armed forces. There is no other way. So called "terrorism" is useless. I agree that the Pentagon and Camp David *are* valid military targets to an enemy. You're right about that not really being "terrorism". But most of the deaths were in the trade center. They screwed up with the military targets.
Hate to be pedantic, but I think he's probably rolling in his grave right now. Wells. As in H.G., wrote The Time Machine. Not George Orwell of 1984 and Animal Farm fame. Yikes.
Except that Joe doesn't have broadband and may not even have it in ten years, since it will always be more expensive than dial up and dial up works ok for the surfing that most people do.
This is a good point. It will be interesting to see if those Taiwanese MB manufacturers that were willing to thumb their noses at MS with extensive overclocking options as prominent features and selling points will be willing to do the same with a "Disable DRM" option either in the BIOS or as a DIP switch on the board itself. However this may not be possible if all of the functionality is within the CPU. Intel and AMD have not forgotten what happened with the overclocking fiasco. And neither have the engineers working on implementing DRM. At the very least we can hope that one of the two companies will be careless either by and leave open an easy hardware hack, like shorting two jumpers or something. I can just imagine the detailed instructions for the modification on TomsHardware.
This is a good point. From a subjective standpoint, 2004 need not arrive at all when it comes to my computing life. The days when the processor was the bottleneck have been over for awhile anyway. For those few apps where it really makes a difference, just remember that patience is a virtue. We can all wait for the system to be hacked, even if it never is. Of course,MS will have countermeasures if this happens etc, etc. If I imagine being on a secluded desert island with a solar powered laptop, why does it matter? Intel and AMD *will* lose customers over this. They would lose even more customers if people understood the tech. And MS *will* lose market share because of this. This in combination with their insistence on finally trying to get everyone to pay for their copy of windows is the biggest boost that Linux/*BSD has ever seen. Apple will also be very happy about this development. Time to buy some Apple stock.
Dual? How about a quad? The trick is going to be buying the last *real* CPU with the highest clock speed. It also wouldn't be a bad idea to buy a couple of high end laptops pre-palladium. In fact I am going to do this. I've resisted buying a laptop for years. And of course I won't be installing any Microsoft OS after Win98 and Win2k either. When these OSes finally become obsolete and impossible to use with current apps (like DOS 3.3 is today), I'll just switch to Linux or even buy an Apple. Or maybe VIA will figure out how to make fast CPUs and catch up to the big boys.
Perhaps, but did his patent claim that his invention was "a method for aiding vision, reducing costs, enabling progress, and allowing productivity, through the use of photons, electrons, chemical elements, matter, energy and science including any new discoveries related to these. If Edison were filing a patent today, it would cover not only light bulbs but lasers, ovens, heaters, mirrors, computer monitors, TVs, film projectors, etc. Anything that used photons or electrons since the light bulb uses electrons to create photons. Perhaps he would have even been allowed to patent photons and electrons themselves. Something that I'd actually like to try.
What do you mean? If there's no patent on it already, that must mean that *it hasn't been invented yet*. So just apply for the patent and then you will be the inventor. Everyone else is just infringing. The real question is can you sue them for retro-active infringement, for infringing on your idea even before you thought of it?
This is a good point. Except that if the patent office is willing to grant these ludicrously broad patents on obvious everyday ideas now, then perhaps when they expire they will be willing to re-patent the same ideas again to whoever is clever enough to first try this. The US patent office is not aware of such a thing as "public domain" except maybe as something that might be patentable, especially if the inventor uses the phrase "with a computer".
Perhaps, but, as a rule, the government is even worse. Individuals have the same selfish (self-interested) motivations whether as employees of the government or of private industry. The main difference is that government employees cannot be fired as easily and tend to do even more damage than even the most evil of large corporations. Don't forget about the ecological damage that the Soviet government left. In those sorts of situations the government is expected to oversee itself.
Would the Union Carbide incident in Bhopal (India) have been any different if the plant had been government run. It clearly was an accident. Union Carbide obviously did not intend to kill all those people. It cost them alot of money and more than a little bad publicity. Compare this to the Soviet accidents at Chernobyl or Sverdlovsk. Admittedly the damage that government run entities can do is severely limited by their inefficiency in getting anything done at all.
When you mix governments and evil corporations what you end up with is our current situation where these supposed enemies are actually the best of friends.
To the corporation, the government is just another supplier, a provider of a service. It's no different than paying a powerful "criminal" organization for eliminating your competition or even forcing people to buy your products at inflated prices. Just don't forget that governments consist of real people. And some of these people will always be open to the highest bidder. Perhaps it is better than nothing. Perhaps not.
My instincts tend to agree with what you're saying. Human behavior seems to tend naturally tend toward evil. Large corporations merely reflect this. I don't see any easy solution except perhaps Immediate Global Thermonuclear War, which might help a little. Governments rarely solve anything.
Why don't you admit that you don't have a dog or a cat? Kids are really something. Glad I don't have one. The creatures could get pretty annoying however. The learning algorithms were not sufficiently complex. They were dumbed down because the dev team couldn't get the more complex ones to work. So it would be like trying to teach a really stupid animal with a very bad memory. I kept thinking that buying an AIBO and training that would be a much better use of my time than trying to train that stupid ape.
Wasn't the name of his next game supposed to be called "Black and White 2"? I didn't know he was working on some kind of system to compete with MegaHal. Clearly, this guy wants to make games and do AI research at the same time. Hence, all the attempts to integrate games with near cutting edge AI technology.
If I remember correctly, Black and White was originally supposed to have used actual neural networks as a learning model for the creatures. They couldn't get it to work well enough however in the time the had to get the game out. The use of Neural Nets for the creatures was what first caught my interest in the game. I thought "finally!". What I liked about the idea was the total unpredictability of the system. With a neural net, you really are teaching something in a very real sense. No heuristics or other tricks to make the creatures *seem* like they are learning.
Before the Patch, the game was so buggy that it was almost unplayable and nearly impossible to finish. Even after the patch I was unable to finish it (although I came very close). However, I loved the game. It was my first RTS game and I spent alot of time building houses and gathering food. Other fun included poisoning the food supplies of enemy villages and using the pack of wolves miracle. I'll look forward to whatever Peter has planned and I'll probably buy it when or if it is ever released.