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User: Soul-Burn666

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Comments · 977

  1. Re:Back to the Future: Interactive Fiction on When Will Games Disturb Us? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I think it's not the graphics, it's the sound. Today, sound can be reproduced to 99% of real life quality, in surround. Hearing the clanging of metal when you walk on a catwalk and then screams behind the walls can seriously freak someone out. And not only realistic sounds, music has a very strong effect on the player, at least on me. Fact is, the original Doom soundtrack is great and every time I hear it, I get chills. Doom3 had little if at all music during the gameplay, it made it feel bland. While in comparison, the audio in Prey is awesome using the same engine and it's certainly a funner game. Moreover, Doom1/2 was scarier than Doom3 (I mean it!) because of "roaming sounds", which is sound monsters do when you're close they are not alerted.

    Not to knock off story telling, which sets up the mood nicely, but most of the game you don't interact with the story directly and there the music and environmental sounds plays the role of the mood setter.
    Check out any game you could describe as moody/creepy and tell me how is the audio in that game...

  2. Re:Useless? on Hellgate London Code Stolen? · · Score: 1

    Of course I do, i've been playing them since wolf3d.
    System Shock was a bit different in the sense you could set that the combat to inactive, pretty much removing the whole "shooter" part, leaving more room to plot/puzzles/exploration.

    If you say Oblivion is in the RPG-land, how can Hellgate not be? With its plot (tho probably simplistic), numerous side-quests, and flexible weapons, armor and magic systems that were promised by the developer?

    Anyways, this is an argument about nothing. In my opinion HG will be an ARPG with FPS controls, making it both and neither one nor the other.

    I just hope it delivers, and I'm glad it's not an MMO.

  3. Re:Useless? on Hellgate London Code Stolen? · · Score: 1

    Eh, Nethack is an FPS. It may have quite a few RPG elements, but the main focus is on firing magic and hack n slash.

    The only resemblance between Hellgate and standard FPSes is that it can be played in first person. Can you say Oblivion is an FPS? Can you say System Shock is an FPS? Didn't think so.

  4. Re:HL2 on Hellgate London Code Stolen? · · Score: 1

    Heard of Disk-On-Keys in readonly mode? CD/DVD ROM? Verified one-way links to your intranet?
    Other than that, memory keyboards exists which can save text as a clipboard.

  5. Re:Useless? on Hellgate London Code Stolen? · · Score: 1

    First of all, Hellgate isn't an FPS. It's an ARPG played from the 1st or 3rd person perspective. The game is stat based, meaning your leet FPS aiming skills won't do much good, but rather your RPG item-hunting/stat building will be the winner here.

    The graphics are akin to a FPS, but the major part of the game is the highly anticipated random map generator and actual game content.

  6. Re:good idea! on Nanotube Lube Replenishment for Massive Drives · · Score: 1

    Just as the original poster's.

  7. Re:The subject of tabs vs spaces should be clear on Elastic Tabstops — An End to Tabs vs. Spaces? · · Score: 1

    How about Java or C# where you write everything "inline".

    In these cases, the seperation is made by having interfaces and classes implementing these interfaces.

    Regardless of that, any modern text editor/IDE has context sensitive text folding, i.e something that reduces functions to definitions and code regions to title.

  8. Re:Huh? on IBM using Napoleon Dynamite Quote to Encrypt Data · · Score: 1

    Yes.
    If you don't want normal people to access the project, a standard encryption like 128bit AES is enough to feel safe.
    By normal people I mean bored people with only little computing power.

    But if you for some reason want to pass around data about your nuclear projects or such, you'd take many more precautions and use multiple and stronger encryption schemes, to be on the safer side of safe.
    These projects are in the interest of strong governments who have we don't know how much computing power and intention to get those documents.
    And even that will probably not be enough against black-ops a la your-favorite-secret-agent-franchise...

  9. Re:Nethack. on Mechanics That Changed Gameplay Forever · · Score: 1

    Not when playing on nethack.alt.org, i.e on a remote server.
    But playing online has its benefit. If you get stuck in a sticky situation, others can spectate your game and help you out, you can spectate others and obviously there's the benefit of bragging rights when you ascend and get into the high scores.
    Here's mine :)
    642 4,788,222 Sakura -5/49 322/382 Val Dwa Fem Law ascended 2004-03-11

  10. Shmups, Shmups, Shmups! on Mechanics That Changed Gameplay Forever · · Score: 1

    Try playing Japanese style shmups like Ikaruga or the Zun games on harder difficulty.
    Watch one of the Ikaruga gameplay vids (level 3 to 5 are mad).
    Or look at a screeny from a game like Perfect Cherry Blossom here. The playable char is the girl on the bottom.

    In both games, one hit from an enemy or a projectile means death and extra lives aren't easy to come by.

    It saddens me aswell that Ninja Gaiden is an XBox exclusive, meaning I will probably never play it (and get raped).

  11. Re:Makes sense on PS3 Apparently A Computer · · Score: 1

    PC plays PS1 games, and not necessarily all that well.

    I completely but humbly disagree. PC plays PS1 games seriously better than the PS1 does.
    I want to see a PS1 play a 3D game in 1600x1200, 60fps, 16xFSAA and trilinear filtering. A standard PC can usually do that now.
    Sure there are sometimes 2d glitches, but the real PS1 wasn't perfect either.

    Same goes for any consoles before it, including the N64 which can be perfectly emulated and looks many times better than the original N64.

    The PS2 can't be reasonably emulated yet tho. A high end PC with the most advanced PS2 emu runs 3d games at about 5 fps :)

  12. Re:Player's note on RuneScape - Digging The Virtual Economy · · Score: 1

    Don't laugh. Farming is actually a skill in this game. You can plant herbs and trees and have to water them and protect them from pests for some time until they grow valuable.

  13. Re:Wii/DS Hookup aint right on Nintendo President Talks Wii/DS Hookup · · Score: 1

    By definition, incest is fun for the whole family! Just like the Wii :)

  14. Re:Implied sex? on Jack Thompson's Game Bill Moves Forward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    For fuck's sake. In GTA, while the car is rocking you can still move the camera. Move it to the front and you'll no movement, the dude's hands on the wheel and the car spontaneously moving.
    If implied sex is that bad, go and ban games like Civ. The population in the cities increases and it's known there was no cloning at that time. Guess what? Those simulated people had sex and multiplied.

    THE HORROR!

  15. As I replied in the last article on cloaking..... on Plan For Cloaking Device Unveiled · · Score: 1

    I'll believe it when I don't.

  16. Re:Expect the Playstation to underperform. on PS3 to Sell at Over $800 in UK · · Score: 1

    Funny you include the Dreamcast in your comment and forget that the Dreamcast was the first of the last gen of consoles, shipping a year before the Playstation2 and having a nice assortment of games at the PS2's launch. Yet it failed miserably against Sony's advertising.
    It's true though that the PS2 was certainly stronger than the DC, spec-wise, while the PS3 is not that much stronger than the X360.

  17. Re:Hmmm. on Cloak of Invisibility Coming Soon · · Score: 4, Funny

    I'll believe it when I don't!

  18. Re:It's not all bad actually on Bill Would Outlaw Digital Receiver Recorders · · Score: 2, Funny

    How about this. 100 people make a disjoint set of short excerpts of some movie/tv show and share it over the Internet and then a system to automatically download all these excerpts!

    loophole.

  19. Re:Current- vs. Next-Gen on Sony's Expected E3 Titles · · Score: 2, Interesting

    That is interesting.
    In a way, it would seem that the stability of the console's hardware specs pushes forward optimizations, which while mostly are hardware specific, are also algorithmic and can be used on other platforms.
    From a different pov, does the gradual progress on the PC market actually stifle these kinds of optimizations? A dev team might think "oh, next year they'll sell a stronger card, so I can assume this awfully slow algorithm will work well" and therefore don't strive to optimize more.

  20. Re:Pokari Sweat on Developers React To 'Wii' · · Score: 1

    Just FYI, that's how Japanese people show their affection to anime characters. If a character is popular, hentai doujin WILL be made. As a matter of fact Cardcaptor Sakura is one of the characters that have the most of these :)
    Hell, they even made doujins of a girl appearing in ONE friggin' drawing, advertising some refrigerator (or was it air conditioning?), and of a girl from a booklet teaching English to students before college tests.

    A game was invented by westerners because of these quirks. Open up google images and type in a random word or Japanese character. Then you browse through the images until you see something that makes you regret you ever started playing it. It NEVER fails, NEVER.

    It's not a surprise the target audience in Japan for "magical girl" shows is girls 6-12 and males 18-30 :)

  21. Re:Problem is not the name but the reason on Developers React To 'Wii' · · Score: 1

    Friend of mine only has a super overclocked PC and a GC, no other consoles. He played the GC more than enough to justify buying it.

    Their target is Rated E for "everyone". From the "casual" gamer that only plays maybe 10hr/week, through game with mild learning curve and simple controls up to the less casual gamers that can spend time getting used to more complex controls (for example using the nunchaku) and games that appeal to them.

    Does the name matter? Sure it does, but people who want to play games for their FUN won't really care. Those who buy a console because it's cool to have a console will be reluctant to have a "Wii". Everyone will just called a Nintendo anyways.

    Btw, Princess Peach is the girl from the Mario games, Peach Princess is an importer/translator of Japanese H-games :)

  22. Re:can't believe I havent seen this yet... on Developers React To 'Wii' · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Don't expect a bunch of high concept fantasy rpg's and gory blood drenched FPS's on this one

    Which is exactly why the first game which was officially presented is a gory blood drenched FPS, made by Ubisoft, a 3rd party developer. The game is called Red Steel.

    While some other games introduced include a new Madden game, a game called "Sadness" in black&white and well the standard Nintendo games (mario, zelda, metroid...)

    I'd say that's pretty Wii-ked

  23. Re:An old problem on Flawed AMD Chip Can Lead To Data Corruption · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Actually hardware IS different. As complex as hardware is, it is much less complex than software and has much simpler logic to check. This allows for systems for "formal verification" which happen to work exceedingly well for hardware. For example IBM's "RuleBase" is a system that uses temporal logic to verify a certain piece of "code" (which will later be compiled to hardware) against a set of logical rules.
    When the system can be used, it helps clear out logic bugs very efficiently.

    That being said, today's microprocessors are huge and therefore have to be split to modules in order to test like this. Moreover, it only tests logic. Other systems have to be used to test issues of overheating, cross-talk and actual physical design.

  24. Re:Well why not... on Updated CPU For 360 Next Year · · Score: 1

    Well said.
    More to your point, assume the original processor had some bug / undocumented feature / behaviour that was mistakenly used (i.e conceptual bug) in some game, but works fine on the older chip. The new chip might change something minor like allowing instructions X and Y to run in parallel when they previously weren't, and then the software bug rears its head and crash.

    When you have software that needs to work and cannot be changed later, you quite surely test it as thoroughly as possible. So if you do even a small change that you're sure won't make a difference, you MUST test it again because you don't know what butterfly effect this might have.

    For example function f(x) works correctly for 0x100 but is supposed to work for 0x1000. Even if in your testing, x was never outside that interval, changing a number might just throw it off and bang you're down.

  25. Re:stupid energy noob question on Organic LED Could Replace Light Bulbs? · · Score: 2, Informative

    1. Light bulbs heat around where they are, the ceiling and not where people usually are (closer to the floor).
    2. Heating allows for fine tuning of the temperature.
    3. In the summer, the excess heat from the light bulb must be negated by your cooling system, causing even more energy drain.