Like most other 'deep' concepts that humanity has come up with, this one again has the standard, and quite frankly shocking, level of intellectual arrogance attached to it.
I mean, for all you know, plants are sentient. I love a burger as much as the next person, but those herd animals that we raise purely to slaughter so that we can eat, it's not outside the realms of possibilty that they freak out once they understand that they are being lined up to be killed in that big building.
Can you hear the lambs screaming, Clarice?
May I suggest this rather simple alternative to your ethics that more fits in with your thinking:
Value sentience in creatures that can covey said sentience to us. If we can't work out what they're trying to say, or we lack the capacity to understand it, then it's open season. (Although by this logic SysAdmins and Accountants are probably just as fucked as sheep) And what do we care? They just look like mindless blocks of carbon working with some inbuilt instictive urge to do whatever it is that they are doing. They clearly aren't as feeling or as smart as us.
This is the first time in a long while where a beloved franchise making a core change to the gameplay mechanics finds me actually excited at the prospects instead of lamenting the developers need to (as in most cases of this situation) dumb the system down.
Of course one of the most recent situations in which I lamented the change was Civ 4 taking on 3D, but that's another story.
Hexes should make a brilliant game that much better.
This is the truth. No one has the balls to stand behind their convictions. It's much easier to just use this is stupid justification to pirate it. Then whinge again next time when the next DRM comes out.
The reason he feels gamers are more of a threat to his family is because a gamer left a threatening note under his door one night. No biker has done that.
Exactly. The bikers that blew themselves up in their car last week in Adelaide while taking a bomb to go kill another rival biker were missing that 'note under the door' edginess to really let the other biker gang know that they meant business. All the really dangerous types know that the best way to take care of the opposition is via slips of paper under the door. Let someone know you're coming for that extra added suprise.
If someone was actually going to do something incredibly idiotic like trying to hurt him because of a game classification rating, I don't know if starting out with a nasty note is the way to go. I suppose it's not like he has a WoW character to camp though.
Also, we're talking about a guy that made up a story about bikers BBQing and eating a cat, later proven to be completely false. In addition to this being the guy that wanted online political commentary to be accompanied by actual names and postcodes because of an example poster that was clearly a fake name working as an opposition shill, because Atkinson knows everyone in his district. Except the guy actually existed, lived half a km away from his office, and had actually been in there before.
It's not entirely outside the realms of possibilty for this to also have been made up. Back when there was just some quiet rumblings as to his "I know whats best for everyone else" control mentality, he was quietly smug and arrogant. Now that the real backlash and the reality of that is coming out, the crazy we all assumed was simmering beneath the surface is coming to the fore.
This is correct. Australia is not liberal, and definitely not the lucky country, nor the smart county that I believe is/was attempted to be portrayed in the ads of old. When it's described as laid-back, what most of us mean is that it's full of apathetic retards who neither know nor understand what's going on most of the time. But what a lot of people here do know is that they want their government to do their thinking for them, and to protect them from themselves. They're happy to introduce a secret blacklist that blocks a few thousand 'fringe' topics, because if it stops a single post of a picture that someones parent took of their own 5 year old child in the bathtub then it's worthwhile to them.
While we're bringing up examples, about a year ago a couple in an eastern state here tragically lost their child in their own (I believe unfenced) backyard swimming pool after leaving her unattended "for only a second". Their response was to have their 15 minutes going on a mini-crusade to attempt to get the government to implement a commitee that would oversee the checking of all pools for mandatory fences. Because the threat of losing a child to drowning in it apparently isn't enough and the goverment needed to step in to force parents to look after the safety of their children. This country is becoming a nanny state and there are plenty of people here that will welcome it.
"Where the bloody hell are you?"
Well, I'm here, but I'm wishing I was somewhere else.
I'm guessing you're just being stupid, or ultra subtle, or something else I'm not picking up on yet because I haven't had coffee.
I imported a copy of GTA3 on PC from the UK and it was subject to a 'random' customs search (or the idiots I bought it from put a detailed invoice on the outside, I'll never know), and I got a nice polite customs form letter saying that the game was RC in it's non-Australian form and thus was illegal to have anything to do with, and as such has been 'surrendered to the crown'. I went in to customs thinking it would be a simple case of saying "wait you've got it wrong, I'm actually 23, you can give me my game now" and was told in no uncertain terms that I wasn't getting it and there was a subtle threat that I actually could have got in trouble for making the attempt to import it. I was told the senator I could bring it up with, whose name I can't remember (the dishonorable member for Croydon wasn't on the tip of everyone's tongue back in those days) but was told that it was likely a waste of time.
Of course I picked up a copy on the way home, took it home and changed the regional settings on my PC and hey presto, but that's another story.
Fry: Now here's a party I can get excited about. Sign me up! Voter Apathy Party Man: Sorry, not with that attitude. Fry: Okay then, screw it. Voter Apathy Party Man: Welcome aboard, brother! Fry: All right! Voter Apathy Party Man: You're out.
Thanks IMDB for saving me having to try and remember it off the top of my head.
Disappointing in addition to boring. It's like the perfect picture of everything that is wrong with the dumbing down of gaming to cater for the console crowd, emphasized that much more when people claim that it's some sort of spiritual successor to System Shock 2. Bioshock shouldn't be allowed to be mentioned in the same paragraph as SS2.
It has all the standard gripes with a console FPS, sluggish aiming, a horrible FOV, massive targeting reticule... and then it ends up using that amazing setting, atmosphere and those characters for a straight up shooter. There is a pseudo-inventory of those bottles or whatever they were but you get all the powers and you just get limited arbitrarily by what you can use at any one time by simply virtue of the fact that it's been made for a console controller. It's not like effort went into the game to make multi-solution puzzles that required different approaches based on your character 'build'; the only time people played it through more than once were 360 achievement whores who alternately killed and saved all the little sisters.
Personally I would have tolerated actually playing it had it been given at least some thought to a decent PC version, because my god the feel of it and the atmosphere was amazing, but being as clunky as it was on PC, and as simple as it was for a game that was always being discussed with reference to the world of Shodan, I went it expecting too much and got burned by a console shooter.
6 discs, two disc for each movie, first disc is the remastered, edited crap, the second is the original release. I watched the original release of IV a couple of weekends ago and it's still brilliant fun, even if you can clearly see that everything is plastic in the trench run.
What really needs to be released on DVD is the remasted but non-edited versions. Where the look has been cleaned up but the content is untouched. Han shoots first in remasted form. There were those blue (PAL at least) VHS tapes that I used to have but accidentally sold, because, you know, who's going to keep VHS over the gold boxed DVD version, right? Damnit.
I think you've slightly missed the point. When they say bogus they don't mean the content on a site like Wikipedia, although that site provides a useful example to explain my point. Try to go to Wikipedia, except do a typo.
I imagine this is likely to be what they're talking about when they say bogus or a scam. Take any of your favourite websites and slightly misspell the URL. Then extrapolate out over everyones favourite, popular websites. Then realise that there are probably dozens of variations for each one.
I hope this isn't just nostalgia, but some old Garfield comics (when I was a teenager, so 15 odd year ago) were actually properly funny. Not the head-in-hands, laugh-so-I-don't-cry Garfield comics that you see nowadays.
I remember the female boss fight from Jedi Knight 2 as being insanely hard. I couldn't beat her fairly. In the end I waited for her big jump to try and get over your head and I force pushed her as high as I could then let her fall, and she splat hard. I don't know if that was an intended way of beating her but my god was it satisfying.
It's likely similar to later Civ games, but if you want to see real CPU player cheating, turn Civ 2 onto a hard difficulty, then enable the cheat to see all the map from the start, then watch the CPU player turns. 2 settlers coming out of a level 1 town on the first or second turn is enough to make you cry.
I never wanted constant saving, or multiple slots. Just a simple option for "save and quit" that actually saves the current level, not simply the soul and player level, and boss deaths, and then delete that save upon resuming. How hard is that. The current setup is simply bad design for the sake of trying too hard to be hardcore. Losing current level progress because the real world interrupts the game just isn't good design.
It started off as a cult game that looked really promising in it's original Asian release, then someone in the western gaming community got a hold of it and it became a real bandwagon game, being name-dropped everywhere. With a huge following of people that have probably hardly played it, claiming that they love difficult games, because that's what everyone else is doing. Also see : God Hand. Actually, Demon's Souls owes more than a bit to the Gothic games, for which it plays basically like a linear version of, except with bosses.
Strictly speaking Demon's Souls isn't a hard game, as once you get into the hang of it you'll find that most deaths come from lack of carelessness. You can't simply rush head-long into everything and know that the game won't hurt you for it, like most games. It's just a very punishing one; when you do make a mistake it really does kick you in the nuts. And someone in the design team has confused flawed design with difficulty. No pausing? No ability to save, even to a single constantly overwritten slot, just in case? There is difficult, there is masochistic, and then there is just plain bad game design. I don't regard having to find a safe spot before being able to take a leak or answer the phone to be 'hardcore', just stupid.
Speaking of God Hand, it is a much better example of proper difficulty. In Demon's Souls, if you tip-toe around, you'll go okay most of the time, and most lessons you learn once and you're okay from then on. God Hand kicks your ass early on, and you wonder how it got released in such an unworkable state (also, if you're an IGN reviewer, you'll likely go off and start writing at this point), but if you pay attention to the combat system and start out on an easy level, you'll become comfortable with the combat system, and then eventually you'll start tearing up the place, ready to advance in difficulty, and things that once seemed impossible will now merely present a fun challenge instead of sending you back, tail between your legs. Urban Reign did the same thing. They are great games.
Not playing/buying the game at all has exactly the same effect.
Small problem here, in that we're well entrenched in the entitlement generation, meaning that simply not playing it because of unwelcome DRM isn't an option in the mindset of most people. This quickly leads to using DRM as a incredibly weak justification to pirate stuff, which is not only dumb logic but completely ignores the fact that piracy was how we ended up here in the first place.
Unfortunately I don't have a handy example to show you what I mean, but I'm sure you get the point.
Slashdot Mirror
Like most other 'deep' concepts that humanity has come up with, this one again has the standard, and quite frankly shocking, level of intellectual arrogance attached to it.
I mean, for all you know, plants are sentient. I love a burger as much as the next person, but those herd animals that we raise purely to slaughter so that we can eat, it's not outside the realms of possibilty that they freak out once they understand that they are being lined up to be killed in that big building.
Can you hear the lambs screaming, Clarice?
May I suggest this rather simple alternative to your ethics that more fits in with your thinking:
Value sentience in creatures that can covey said sentience to us. If we can't work out what they're trying to say, or we lack the capacity to understand it, then it's open season. (Although by this logic SysAdmins and Accountants are probably just as fucked as sheep) And what do we care? They just look like mindless blocks of carbon working with some inbuilt instictive urge to do whatever it is that they are doing. They clearly aren't as feeling or as smart as us.
At least then you're not denying your ignorance.
It's a loose claim though, everyone is still allowed to use it, the just have to say it slowly, and write it out like this : C-A-A-N-A-D-A-A
This is the first time in a long while where a beloved franchise making a core change to the gameplay mechanics finds me actually excited at the prospects instead of lamenting the developers need to (as in most cases of this situation) dumb the system down.
Of course one of the most recent situations in which I lamented the change was Civ 4 taking on 3D, but that's another story.
Hexes should make a brilliant game that much better.
This is the truth. No one has the balls to stand behind their convictions. It's much easier to just use this is stupid justification to pirate it. Then whinge again next time when the next DRM comes out.
The reason he feels gamers are more of a threat to his family is because a gamer left a threatening note under his door one night. No biker has done that.
Exactly. The bikers that blew themselves up in their car last week in Adelaide while taking a bomb to go kill another rival biker were missing that 'note under the door' edginess to really let the other biker gang know that they meant business. All the really dangerous types know that the best way to take care of the opposition is via slips of paper under the door. Let someone know you're coming for that extra added suprise.
If someone was actually going to do something incredibly idiotic like trying to hurt him because of a game classification rating, I don't know if starting out with a nasty note is the way to go. I suppose it's not like he has a WoW character to camp though.
Also, we're talking about a guy that made up a story about bikers BBQing and eating a cat, later proven to be completely false. In addition to this being the guy that wanted online political commentary to be accompanied by actual names and postcodes because of an example poster that was clearly a fake name working as an opposition shill, because Atkinson knows everyone in his district. Except the guy actually existed, lived half a km away from his office, and had actually been in there before.
It's not entirely outside the realms of possibilty for this to also have been made up. Back when there was just some quiet rumblings as to his "I know whats best for everyone else" control mentality, he was quietly smug and arrogant. Now that the real backlash and the reality of that is coming out, the crazy we all assumed was simmering beneath the surface is coming to the fore.
This is correct. Australia is not liberal, and definitely not the lucky country, nor the smart county that I believe is/was attempted to be portrayed in the ads of old. When it's described as laid-back, what most of us mean is that it's full of apathetic retards who neither know nor understand what's going on most of the time. But what a lot of people here do know is that they want their government to do their thinking for them, and to protect them from themselves. They're happy to introduce a secret blacklist that blocks a few thousand 'fringe' topics, because if it stops a single post of a picture that someones parent took of their own 5 year old child in the bathtub then it's worthwhile to them.
While we're bringing up examples, about a year ago a couple in an eastern state here tragically lost their child in their own (I believe unfenced) backyard swimming pool after leaving her unattended "for only a second". Their response was to have their 15 minutes going on a mini-crusade to attempt to get the government to implement a commitee that would oversee the checking of all pools for mandatory fences. Because the threat of losing a child to drowning in it apparently isn't enough and the goverment needed to step in to force parents to look after the safety of their children. This country is becoming a nanny state and there are plenty of people here that will welcome it.
"Where the bloody hell are you?"
Well, I'm here, but I'm wishing I was somewhere else.
You can import it yourself.
I'm guessing you're just being stupid, or ultra subtle, or something else I'm not picking up on yet because I haven't had coffee.
I imported a copy of GTA3 on PC from the UK and it was subject to a 'random' customs search (or the idiots I bought it from put a detailed invoice on the outside, I'll never know), and I got a nice polite customs form letter saying that the game was RC in it's non-Australian form and thus was illegal to have anything to do with, and as such has been 'surrendered to the crown'. I went in to customs thinking it would be a simple case of saying "wait you've got it wrong, I'm actually 23, you can give me my game now" and was told in no uncertain terms that I wasn't getting it and there was a subtle threat that I actually could have got in trouble for making the attempt to import it. I was told the senator I could bring it up with, whose name I can't remember (the dishonorable member for Croydon wasn't on the tip of everyone's tongue back in those days) but was told that it was likely a waste of time.
Of course I picked up a copy on the way home, took it home and changed the regional settings on my PC and hey presto, but that's another story.
In other news, The Office of Homeland Security is now offering FREE BOATS to the following people ...
Fry: Now here's a party I can get excited about. Sign me up!
Voter Apathy Party Man: Sorry, not with that attitude.
Fry: Okay then, screw it.
Voter Apathy Party Man: Welcome aboard, brother!
Fry: All right!
Voter Apathy Party Man: You're out.
Thanks IMDB for saving me having to try and remember it off the top of my head.
Anybody with a brain knows that many agile practices don't apply to certain kinds of projects.
But isn't it management that comes up with the development methods? I forsee issues here.
That's because claiming the waterfall is flawed is easier than backing up the model the author is trying to sell.
I hear you shouldn't chase them either.
Someone needs to contact this guy and tell him that his emails are being posted on /.
Disappointing in addition to boring. It's like the perfect picture of everything that is wrong with the dumbing down of gaming to cater for the console crowd, emphasized that much more when people claim that it's some sort of spiritual successor to System Shock 2. Bioshock shouldn't be allowed to be mentioned in the same paragraph as SS2.
It has all the standard gripes with a console FPS, sluggish aiming, a horrible FOV, massive targeting reticule ... and then it ends up using that amazing setting, atmosphere and those characters for a straight up shooter. There is a pseudo-inventory of those bottles or whatever they were but you get all the powers and you just get limited arbitrarily by what you can use at any one time by simply virtue of the fact that it's been made for a console controller. It's not like effort went into the game to make multi-solution puzzles that required different approaches based on your character 'build'; the only time people played it through more than once were 360 achievement whores who alternately killed and saved all the little sisters.
Personally I would have tolerated actually playing it had it been given at least some thought to a decent PC version, because my god the feel of it and the atmosphere was amazing, but being as clunky as it was on PC, and as simple as it was for a game that was always being discussed with reference to the world of Shodan, I went it expecting too much and got burned by a console shooter.
Sorry about the random Australian store link but this is exactly what you want
https://www.jbhifionline.com.au/dvd/dvd-genres/sci-fi-fantasy/star-wars-trilogy-episodes-4-6-6-dvd-set/362116
6 discs, two disc for each movie, first disc is the remastered, edited crap, the second is the original release. I watched the original release of IV a couple of weekends ago and it's still brilliant fun, even if you can clearly see that everything is plastic in the trench run.
What really needs to be released on DVD is the remasted but non-edited versions. Where the look has been cleaned up but the content is untouched. Han shoots first in remasted form. There were those blue (PAL at least) VHS tapes that I used to have but accidentally sold, because, you know, who's going to keep VHS over the gold boxed DVD version, right? Damnit.
I think you've slightly missed the point. When they say bogus they don't mean the content on a site like Wikipedia, although that site provides a useful example to explain my point. Try to go to Wikipedia, except do a typo.
http://www.wikapedia.org/
http://www.wikipeedia.org/
http://www.wickipedia.org/
http://www.wikepedia.org/
I imagine this is likely to be what they're talking about when they say bogus or a scam. Take any of your favourite websites and slightly misspell the URL. Then extrapolate out over everyones favourite, popular websites. Then realise that there are probably dozens of variations for each one.
And if they've got a bazooka, you always run toward, never away.
- E. Izzard
CLAP, YOU BASTARDS
I hope this isn't just nostalgia, but some old Garfield comics (when I was a teenager, so 15 odd year ago) were actually properly funny. Not the head-in-hands, laugh-so-I-don't-cry Garfield comics that you see nowadays.
But then, maybe I was just a stupid kid.
And be sure to make the final part of the email a request to let you know if he didn't receive it.
I remember the female boss fight from Jedi Knight 2 as being insanely hard. I couldn't beat her fairly. In the end I waited for her big jump to try and get over your head and I force pushed her as high as I could then let her fall, and she splat hard. I don't know if that was an intended way of beating her but my god was it satisfying.
It's likely similar to later Civ games, but if you want to see real CPU player cheating, turn Civ 2 onto a hard difficulty, then enable the cheat to see all the map from the start, then watch the CPU player turns. 2 settlers coming out of a level 1 town on the first or second turn is enough to make you cry.
I never wanted constant saving, or multiple slots. Just a simple option for "save and quit" that actually saves the current level, not simply the soul and player level, and boss deaths, and then delete that save upon resuming. How hard is that. The current setup is simply bad design for the sake of trying too hard to be hardcore. Losing current level progress because the real world interrupts the game just isn't good design.
Oops. I'm not even sure why I wrote 'lack of' in the first place. Lack of carefulness? That doesn't even sound right. Sigh.
It started off as a cult game that looked really promising in it's original Asian release, then someone in the western gaming community got a hold of it and it became a real bandwagon game, being name-dropped everywhere. With a huge following of people that have probably hardly played it, claiming that they love difficult games, because that's what everyone else is doing. Also see : God Hand. Actually, Demon's Souls owes more than a bit to the Gothic games, for which it plays basically like a linear version of, except with bosses.
Strictly speaking Demon's Souls isn't a hard game, as once you get into the hang of it you'll find that most deaths come from lack of carelessness. You can't simply rush head-long into everything and know that the game won't hurt you for it, like most games. It's just a very punishing one; when you do make a mistake it really does kick you in the nuts. And someone in the design team has confused flawed design with difficulty. No pausing? No ability to save, even to a single constantly overwritten slot, just in case? There is difficult, there is masochistic, and then there is just plain bad game design. I don't regard having to find a safe spot before being able to take a leak or answer the phone to be 'hardcore', just stupid.
Speaking of God Hand, it is a much better example of proper difficulty. In Demon's Souls, if you tip-toe around, you'll go okay most of the time, and most lessons you learn once and you're okay from then on. God Hand kicks your ass early on, and you wonder how it got released in such an unworkable state (also, if you're an IGN reviewer, you'll likely go off and start writing at this point), but if you pay attention to the combat system and start out on an easy level, you'll become comfortable with the combat system, and then eventually you'll start tearing up the place, ready to advance in difficulty, and things that once seemed impossible will now merely present a fun challenge instead of sending you back, tail between your legs. Urban Reign did the same thing. They are great games.
Not playing/buying the game at all has exactly the same effect.
Small problem here, in that we're well entrenched in the entitlement generation, meaning that simply not playing it because of unwelcome DRM isn't an option in the mindset of most people. This quickly leads to using DRM as a incredibly weak justification to pirate stuff, which is not only dumb logic but completely ignores the fact that piracy was how we ended up here in the first place.
Unfortunately I don't have a handy example to show you what I mean, but I'm sure you get the point.