Would author- and artist-approved scanning, proofreading, and HTMLization (to say nothing of an excellent Javascript app that can handle inventory management, skill advancement, and combat) meet your definition of technical sprucing?
Granted, Project Aon is the first link at the bottom of the above-cited Wikipedia article -- but just in case, I thought I'd point it out. I was a huge fan of the series when I was younger, and as such it's good to see the books preserved so well.
It's been shown that not only do squirrels communicate with each other for practical purposes, but they also have a fairly sophisticated system of music. Quoth the small woodland bard:
When you're a kid and you wanna go "wheeeee," but you ain't got drugs yet You hold out for your life Hold on to your little gonads...and strife.
Those wishing for a more consistent Roguelike world -- indeed, it has an extensive overland map -- and a pretty interesting story besides (if you survive long enough to start to learn it) ought to try Thomas Biskup's Ancient Domains of Mystery, or ADOM for short. As devious as Nethack and SLASH-EM can be, I'm always pulled back to ADOM's imperiled world, which is also ridiculously deep and as such a blast to learn. Note that while the game is free, the source is closed (largely in order to prevent the development of variants inconsistent with the author's vision of the world and the monsters that inhabit it) and as of yet there are no OSX or Amiga ports.
Among other things, Call of Duty was pretty heavily influenced by the fantastic HBO miniseries Band of Brothers (rent it or buy it! You won't be sorry!). Hell, the first of the three campaigns in the game puts you in the shoes (or rather, the chute) of a member of the 101st Airborne as he and a bunch of other paratroopers drop over Normandy the night before D-Day; Band of Brothers follows the 101st from training to Normandy through the European theater of operations. Several of the missions from the war covered in the show are modeled in Call of Duty. Particularly impressive is the similarity between BoB and CoD's interpretations of the Battle at Brecourt, an assault on German artillery emplacements connected by a system of trenches. Damn cool stuff.:)
The chapel area in Duke3D
on
SimChurch
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· Score: 1
If memory serves, there was a tiny chapel in the prison break level of the first episode (the one that began with you in a very damaging electric chair-esque contraption). It looked innocent enough, but there was a hidden switch on the front of the podium/lectern thingie (that incidentally looked like a shroud of sorts but was in fact a somewhat distorted alien head, or something like that) that, if pushed,
- turned the light in the room red and evil-like,
- opened up a secret door near the back of the chapel,
- and flipped the cross upside-down (neat effect, that)
Behind the secret door (there may have been a stained glass window or two to bash) lay two floating alien brain guys, at least on normal, and the legless corpse of the Doom guy. Upon seeing the corpse, Duke cracks "Damn. That's one doomed Space Marine!"
There was indeed a (hanged) nun hanging in the rafters, near an atomic health powerup. Either that or she contained the powerup, I can't remember precisely...
This sounds a lot, at least on the surface, like Ernest Rutherfurd's London, a novel (in this case spanning 2000 years) that tracks the development of the eponymous city and a few families thereabouts. It's a good read, provided you don't have to finish it on a deadline.
From the article: 'In a
desperate attempt to clamp down on out-of-control illegal gambling, Greek parliament passed in 2002 a law that summarily banned all public gaming conducted by electronic and mechanical means.
I believe the point is that the playing field is skewed by the age of the readership and thus what they've been exposed to. It is certainly *possible*, and in many cases true, that many newer games are better than their older counterparts...but you can't trust someone without working familiarity with (or even awareness of) all games in a given category to be able to choose the best of them. If I say that The Maltese Falcon is a far superior film to Casablanca, it's a totally meaningless claim because I haven't seen either of them.
Good point. Now, if Gamespy could record and make the age breakdown of the voting block publicly available, there'd be a lot of fun statisticking to be done.
"Looking at the data here, it's no surprise at all that so few voted for Missile Command, only such-and-such percent of the voters were even *alive*, let alone of gaming age, when that was in popular circulation!"
He was Commander Kril, IIRC (unless my memory of the exchange
--...and only I hold the secret to the Fronter. Only I know the location of the Starfighter base, and therefore only I will give the order to fire!
-- Forgive me, Xur. -- You are forgiven, Commander Kril.
is wrong. I watched TLS a lot when I was little)...unless he received a posthumous rank or something from whatever the bits and pieces of the Armada remained after all that last starfightering went down:)
Sierra released a Myst-like adventure game based on the Rama series in 1997. I think I might still have my copy in a box somewhere...it was pretty good and pleasingly mindbending, IIRC. Included an interview with Clarke and Gentry Lee to boot. Having only read _Garden of Rama_ and _Rama Revealed_ I can't say how well it adapted _Rendezvous_ or _Rama II_, but Sierra's version was certainly recognizable to me.
Whether or not the jargon is correct is another question, but you are in fact talking about the same thing:
Jack: "Let me tell you a little bit about Tyler Durden. Tyler was a night person. While the rest of us were sleeping, he worked. He had one part time job as a projectionist. You see, a movie doesn't come all on one big reel. It comes on a few. So someone has to be there to switch the projectors at the exact moment that one reel ends and the next one begins. If you look for it you can see these little dots come into the upper right hand corner of the screen."
Tyler: "In the industry we call them cigarette burns."
Jack: "That's the cue for a change-over. He flips the projectors, the movie keeps right on going and nobody in the audience has any idea."
Tyler: "Why would anyone want this shit job?!"
Jack: "Because it affords him other interesting opportunities."
Tyler: "Like splicing single frames of pornography into family films!"
Jack: "So when the snooty cat and the courageous dog with the celebrity voices meet for the first time in reel 3, that's when you'll catch a flash of Tyler's contribution to the film. Nobody knows that they saw it but they did."
Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was acid...other kings said I was daft to build a castle on an acid field, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the acid. So, I built a second one. That sank into the acid. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the acid, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle on this planet!
No RPGs, books, movies, TV shows, or songs ought ever be made again...I mean, the ideas aren't NEW, are they? I mean jeez, I'm so sick of stories about *people* or otherwise sentient creatures -- people have been making them for thousands of years! Bring on the epic moss movies, I say!
Just because something is novel doesn't necessarily make it good...
While its shots might have passed through enemies, the lightning gun did not fire in bursts, but rather continuously fired until you released the fire button or your cells ran out. The only time it fired in a burst was if you used it underwater, and in that case it had a (albeit painful) BFG-like splash spread if I'm not mistaken:)
As for a railgun-style weapon being "impossible" in Doom, while you definitely couldn't make a projectile trail animation (though you can in the modern remakes of the engine), it is entirely possible -- nay, common -- to take out multiple enemies in a single line with the regular shotgun because each shot is composed of several discrete projectiles, which upon firing immediately reach their point of impact (be it an enemy or a wall). A Doomly "railgun," then, need only have a relatively dense and tiny spread of projectiles. Heh, even a shotgun blast compressed into the rough span of a pistol shot could take out four or five zombies if you aimed it properly. I do agree, though, that the general Doom/Quake weaponset has changed fairly little since it was invented.
Slashdot Mirror
Would author- and artist-approved scanning, proofreading, and HTMLization (to say nothing of an excellent Javascript app that can handle inventory management, skill advancement, and combat) meet your definition of technical sprucing?
Granted, Project Aon is the first link at the bottom of the above-cited Wikipedia article -- but just in case, I thought I'd point it out. I was a huge fan of the series when I was younger, and as such it's good to see the books preserved so well.
or the great^10 nanoparticle-unresistant grandchildren you fail to sire because of said nanoparticles...
It's been shown that not only do squirrels communicate with each other for practical purposes, but they also have a fairly sophisticated system of music. Quoth the small woodland bard:
When you're a kid and you wanna go "wheeeee," but you ain't got drugs yet
You hold out for your life
Hold on to your little gonads...and strife.
We could learn a lot from the little guys, no?
Just as there is a difference between cheating your customers and just being extraordinarily stingy.
I don't know about that; would you want severe burns on *your* perineum?
Those wishing for a more consistent Roguelike world -- indeed, it has an extensive overland map -- and a pretty interesting story besides (if you survive long enough to start to learn it) ought to try Thomas Biskup's Ancient Domains of Mystery, or ADOM for short. As devious as Nethack and SLASH-EM can be, I'm always pulled back to ADOM's imperiled world, which is also ridiculously deep and as such a blast to learn. Note that while the game is free, the source is closed (largely in order to prevent the development of variants inconsistent with the author's vision of the world and the monsters that inhabit it) and as of yet there are no OSX or Amiga ports.
Worst attempt to remember the word acronym ...ever
Among other things, Call of Duty was pretty heavily influenced by the fantastic HBO miniseries Band of Brothers (rent it or buy it! You won't be sorry!). Hell, the first of the three campaigns in the game puts you in the shoes (or rather, the chute) of a member of the 101st Airborne as he and a bunch of other paratroopers drop over Normandy the night before D-Day; Band of Brothers follows the 101st from training to Normandy through the European theater of operations. Several of the missions from the war covered in the show are modeled in Call of Duty. Particularly impressive is the similarity between BoB and CoD's interpretations of the Battle at Brecourt, an assault on German artillery emplacements connected by a system of trenches. Damn cool stuff. :)
If memory serves, there was a tiny chapel in the prison break level of the first episode (the one that began with you in a very damaging electric chair-esque contraption). It looked innocent enough, but there was a hidden switch on the front of the podium/lectern thingie (that incidentally looked like a shroud of sorts but was in fact a somewhat distorted alien head, or something like that) that, if pushed,
- turned the light in the room red and evil-like,
- opened up a secret door near the back of the chapel,
- and flipped the cross upside-down (neat effect, that)
Behind the secret door (there may have been a stained glass window or two to bash) lay two floating alien brain guys, at least on normal, and the legless corpse of the Doom guy. Upon seeing the corpse, Duke cracks "Damn. That's one doomed Space Marine!"
There was indeed a (hanged) nun hanging in the rafters, near an atomic health powerup. Either that or she contained the powerup, I can't remember precisely...
I haven't the foggiest idea, actually. Nothing a little googling couldn't fix.
I think you're thinking of the 40-button monstrosity that is the Steel Battalion controller, which remains quite expensive even in resale.
Yep!
This sounds a lot, at least on the surface, like Ernest Rutherfurd's London, a novel (in this case spanning 2000 years) that tracks the development of the eponymous city and a few families thereabouts. It's a good read, provided you don't have to finish it on a deadline.
I believe the point is that the playing field is skewed by the age of the readership and thus what they've been exposed to. It is certainly *possible*, and in many cases true, that many newer games are better than their older counterparts...but you can't trust someone without working familiarity with (or even awareness of) all games in a given category to be able to choose the best of them. If I say that The Maltese Falcon is a far superior film to Casablanca, it's a totally meaningless claim because I haven't seen either of them.
Good point. Now, if Gamespy could record and make the age breakdown of the voting block publicly available, there'd be a lot of fun statisticking to be done.
"Looking at the data here, it's no surprise at all that so few voted for Missile Command, only such-and-such percent of the voters were even *alive*, let alone of gaming age, when that was in popular circulation!"
Whaaa? Nethack is lumped in with Infocom games and Adventure...
Sierra released a Myst-like adventure game based on the Rama series in 1997. I think I might still have my copy in a box somewhere...it was pretty good and pleasingly mindbending, IIRC. Included an interview with Clarke and Gentry Lee to boot. Having only read _Garden of Rama_ and _Rama Revealed_ I can't say how well it adapted _Rendezvous_ or _Rama II_, but Sierra's version was certainly recognizable to me.
Whether or not the jargon is correct is another question, but you are in fact talking about the same thing:
Jack: "Let me tell you a little bit about Tyler Durden. Tyler was a night person. While the rest of us were sleeping, he worked. He had one part time job as a projectionist. You see, a movie doesn't come all on one big reel. It comes on a few. So someone has to be there to switch the projectors at the exact moment that one reel ends and the next one begins. If you look for it you can see these little dots come into the upper right hand corner of the screen."
Tyler: "In the industry we call them cigarette burns."
Jack: "That's the cue for a change-over. He flips the projectors, the movie keeps right on going and nobody in the audience has any idea."
Tyler: "Why would anyone want this shit job?!"
Jack: "Because it affords him other interesting opportunities."
Tyler: "Like splicing single frames of pornography into family films!"
Jack: "So when the snooty cat and the courageous dog with the celebrity voices meet for the first time in reel 3, that's when you'll catch a flash of Tyler's contribution to the film. Nobody knows that they saw it but they did."
Tyler: "A nice, big cock!"
Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was acid...other kings said I was daft to build a castle on an acid field, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the acid. So, I built a second one. That sank into the acid. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the acid, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle on this planet!
No RPGs, books, movies, TV shows, or songs ought ever be made again...I mean, the ideas aren't NEW, are they? I mean jeez, I'm so sick of stories about *people* or otherwise sentient creatures -- people have been making them for thousands of years! Bring on the epic moss movies, I say!
Just because something is novel doesn't necessarily make it good...
Yes. It, like MyDoom, seems to install backdoors and such.
While its shots might have passed through enemies, the lightning gun did not fire in bursts, but rather continuously fired until you released the fire button or your cells ran out. The only time it fired in a burst was if you used it underwater, and in that case it had a (albeit painful) BFG-like splash spread if I'm not mistaken :)
As for a railgun-style weapon being "impossible" in Doom, while you definitely couldn't make a projectile trail animation (though you can in the modern remakes of the engine), it is entirely possible -- nay, common -- to take out multiple enemies in a single line with the regular shotgun because each shot is composed of several discrete projectiles, which upon firing immediately reach their point of impact (be it an enemy or a wall). A Doomly "railgun," then, need only have a relatively dense and tiny spread of projectiles. Heh, even a shotgun blast compressed into the rough span of a pistol shot could take out four or five zombies if you aimed it properly. I do agree, though, that the general Doom/Quake weaponset has changed fairly little since it was invented.
The railgun didn't officially appear until Quake II, though I gather the railgun and Quake mentioned above is III.