License board points are obtained by defeating monsters, similar to but separate from the traditional experience points. While gaining levels does make a character stronger, it's the application of license points that makes them more versatile.
You _have_ played the earlier Final Fantasy games right? You compare the license points to the "traditional experience points" as if they're some of new fangled idea the likes of which have never been seen before. Ability Points under one name or another have been a staple of the game since at least FF5 for sure and I believe they made an appearance in FF3. (I remember that FF3 features jobs but I don't remember the exact system.) Offhand i can think of six previous FF games that have used the "gain special not-experience points to unlock abilities" system in one form or another and using various different names. Fundamentally they are all pretty similar however.
This wouldn't be a big deal except you seem to do be doing a fair bit of comparing FF12 to the previous games in the series. As such you really shouldn't be giving people any reason to doubt your credentials for making such comparisons.
Difference between FF12 and the others is that the game automates this for you instead of "rinse repeat" of the previous games. In the end it just degenerated to a lot of repeat actions anyway which is what computers are actually good at doing.
I'm about ten hours in and am undecided about the combat so far. However take a moment to consider things from the perspective of the "old guard." For example imagine a slightly different case, "In the newest Street Fighter you program your fighters to perform specific moves under certain conditions. If your oponent is jumping you always want to do an uppercut, if your oponent attacks you at close range you always want to block. By using the Gambits in SF Beta Prime the game will automate this for you intead of the 'rinse repeat' of the prebious games. In the end it just degenerated to a lot of repeat actions anyway which is what computers are actually good at doing."
Yes i know you can identify a lot of areas in which the two cases would not be the same, particularly the fact that one is dexterity based and the other isn't. However i think a game in which you programmed an AI for a fighting game could be fun, and a lot of people might enjoy it. That doesn't mean however that the fans of the previous Street Fighter games would be unreasonable in wanting to have a game where you actually control the fighters directly. If that contingent was told that they were getting the programming AI game _instead_ of a standard fighting game i expect they'd be rather put out.
As someone who has very little interested in MMORPGs i was rather peeved when FF11 was announced to be one. When FF12 was announced I was alternately glad that there was going to be another single player FF game and then annoyed when i learned that a lot of the gameplay elements had been lifted from a style of RPG i'm not particularly fond of. I haven't decided yet where the balance falls out.
They don't need computers! They need clean water and food and medical care! We shouldn't be wasting money on something like this!!
... wait, this isn't a OLPC debate? And it clearly shows an example of how "poor" people from a third world country can use computers to their benefit and voluntarily choose to do so? I'm going to withdraw from this debate before i damage the credibility of my claims any further.
Silly individuals, didn't anyone tell you that since big corporations were the ones who pushed the DCMA provisions through congress that they can only be used to defend those big corporations? Equal protection under the law is _so_ 20th (or perhaps 19th) century!
In the late seventies, one of the co-chairman of Sony, Morita, requested the audio division create a portable tape player capable of playing his operas while he was on transpacific flights to the US.
Note to everyone at Sony, especially the executives and the people in the music division, _that_ is the way to do business if you want to make popular products and make money in the process. The key to great devices should be "I'd like to be able to do that, I bet our customers would like it to," not the current trend of "Our customers want to do lots of cool things with our products, let's see what we can do to stop them."
It probably isn't legal by a strict definition, but you'd have to have a pretty twisted sense of ethics to have an ethical problem with this. Nintendo hasn't released it in the US in over a decade and has indicated that they probably never will, so who could the fans possibly be hurting by translating it themselves? One might argue that everyone who wanted to try it out would be _more_ ethical if they imported a japanese copy of the cart before playing the translated ROM, but given that Nintendo has taken steps to try and prevent imported games from working (though admitedly pretty lame attempts for the NES and SNES) and that any carts you could get ahold of at this point would almost certainly be used so no money would be going back the original creators anyways, i think that argument doesn't hold much water.
I think it's really a matter of probability. There are a lot of factors that go into whether a game will be "good" or not. Some of those factors aren't even under the control of the people who made the game, and the sum of all the different factors makes it practically impossible to predict how well a game will do. (How many of you can think of a game you loved that for some reason never recieved the widespread financial succees it "deserved"?) About the only sure thing is that _usually_ a sequel will sell more than an identical game that doesn't have a franchise name behind it, which is why companies are always so eager to make sequels.
However when they start work on a new game in the series they have a bit of a dilema. If they stick with the same forumla and mechanics as the previous game they're going to be acused of just milking the franchise, so they usually try to change at least a few things. However when they change things around the risk alienating the fans. Add on top of this that the new game is frequently made by a different team, sometimes an entirely new team, sometimes even at a different company, but even if it's with the "same" team there's usually been some turnover in terms of individual employees. So a different group of people is trying to make a game that's at least somewhat different from the previous one and in effect they are rolling the dice on the percieved quality of the final product.
This makes it similar to the "curse" that follows sports stars who are featured on various magazines and products that the Straight Dope analyzed awhile back (you can look up the exact column yourself if you wish.) They pointed out that such acolades are given to atheletes that have just experienced an exceptional year, just as sequels are usually financed for games that did exceptionally well or were exceptionally well recieved. Statistically speaking it is unlikely that the next game/season will be just as exceptional as the previous one. So it may seem like a "curse" or a tendency to "ruin" sequels, but a lot of it is really just probability and statistics.
"next-generation models such as Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii"?
Did i wake up in backwards land today? Or did the Nielsen company not get the same memo that every other company apparently received that says when they refer to next-generation consoles in a press release they're supposed to mention only the PS3 and the XBox 360 and pretend that the Wii doesn't even exist?
"The series of articles Why Apple Will Change TV compared how Apple is poised for success in areas where Microsoft is currently failing. But circumstances are subject to change!"
What's with the excited exclamation mark? In something purporting to be a news story/blurb i usually expect a recitation of facts combined with a calm statement of opinion. Shouting makes it sound like either a rant or something intended as a dire warning. Are you a fan of microsoft who is vehemently denying that apple will actually experience the success that some people believe they are posed for? Or are you an apple fan sending out a call to arms to other apple fans to make sure that this opportunity doesn't waste away? I can't tell which way you're leaning but the exclamation mark sure makes it seem like you think it's _really_ important for one reason or another.
Unfortunately the developers totally screwed up the new version by making it the game one big quest mode. You always have to play as Robin Hood, you always have to go through the tutorial bit at the begining, you always have to go through the rest of the story elements for the remainder of the game.
How much extra work would it have taken to add an extra mode where you could start a strategy only game which allowed you to pick any one of the sides? I can't imagine that much, expecially compared to the amount of replay it would have enabled. I was a also a little disapointed with the battle system. You have three "channels" down which you can send groups of troops to fight the enemy, it was interesting but in the long run i felt it was too twitch based and wished they had stuck with something simple and strategic like the original game.
The PS2 game was fun for what it offered, but i couldn't help feeling disapointed because it could have been so much more if they'd just put a little more effort in.
So is this your comic? Or do you know the person whose comic it is? Or did you get the quote from elsewhere yourself? Or did you just get ripped off?:)
Re:They're delivering what we want
on
Will the Wii Work?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Really? Last I checked dedicated gamers were complaining left and right about stagnating gameplay, lack of innovation and "next generation" being nothing but prettied up graphics. The dedicated gamer wants the Wii (not necessarily to the exclusion of other consoles) because he hopes for new game experiences.
Somewhere along the line "dedicated gamer" seems to have been hijacked (by the media presumably?) to mean something like "compulsive graphics whore who will brainlessly follow whatever the newest trend is." Maybe it happened back when FPSs became the big thing when every "dedicated gamer" seemed to be upgrading their graphics card every other week in order to be able to play the latest game. Regardless of when it came about however i don't think that interpretation has ever fit me, and i like to consider myself a dedicated gamer, though perhaps one who has somewhat lapsed in recent years as i've had to learn how to balance gaming, a social life and a career. There may may be a few people out there that fit that negative stereotype but i really hope that the gamers who are actually _dedicated_ to their hobby are actually intelligent and thoughtfull people who will put more thought into their purchasing decisions than that. But perhaps i'm beeing hopelessly optimistic.
Now honestly, show of hands: who has their console (not PC!) connected to a display device capable of 1080p? Who plans on buying a device capable of 1080p?
My PS3 and my Rev will both be attached to the same five year old 27" (i think) standard def CRT tv that my PS2 and GameCube are currently connected to. I upgrade my PC on a somewhat regular basis, i upgrade my consoles, i don't really see any compelling reason to upgrade my tv.
Whether you consider it fortunate or unfortunate, the linked article makes it sound like the problem was entirely with the people running the election, not the machines themselves. I'd love to be able to blame another failure on Diebold but it doesn't seem like it's going to be the case this time.
"Because of this he was born in (modern-day)France, didn't visit England until he was 16 and didn't spend any appreciable time there until he was 20. I'd say it was a fair bet he used French when cussing the clergy..."
Was it part of France at the time? Or was it part of Normandy? And given that he was Duke of Normandy as well as King of England it seems quite likely that he spoke Anglo-Norman and Middle English as well as Old French. Which he would prefer for cussing is open for debate (Anglo-Norman was after all the "courtly" language in England and Middle English the "common" lanaguage,) as is which he would used when talking to his English knights.
But in any case, whichever of the three it was, clearly the words that were said were nothing like the words we would use to express a similar sentiment today.
I think whatever words he said he would have said them in French. 1066 and all that...
Uh, yes, 1066 and all that, so why do you say in French? "Middle English is the name given by historical linguistics to the diverse forms of the English language spoken between the Norman invasion of 1066 and the mid-to-late 15th century." Thomas Becket died on December 29, 1170, well into the middle english period.
Sorry, I'm not American so it didn't occur to me that school-kid knowledge of history would be regarded as elitism.
Funny, i've always heard it as "will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest," although admitedly neither i nor i expect any other american actually learned about it in school as a child, so it is most certainly _not_ "school-kid knowledge of history" for everyone. Secondly, if you want people to listen to you you might want to adopt a slightly less agressive tone. "If you're going to quote someone at least get it right" is much more likely to be taken as elitism than a phrase like "i was told the original quote was" or something along those lines.
And lastly, before you chastise someone else for getting the quote wrong, make sure you yourself have got it right. Wikipedia certainly isn't infallible, but their page on Thomas Becket says it was "passionate words from the angry king" and then lists several phrases that were reputedly used, so no one is really sure what the exact utterance was to begin with. Not to mention the fact that this was during the period when middle english was being spolen and what he said probably only had a passing relationship with a modern english interpretation of the same words. I therefore strongly suspect that _all_ of us are wrong, or all of us are right, depending on how you choose to look at it. It seems rather unlikely however that you can conclusively proove you are more correct than the person you corrected.
1. Would you eat vat grown meat?
2. Would you eat vat grown human meat?
3. Would you eat your body's meat grown in a vat?
Is there any particular reason you put the questions in that order? Is it just from less specific to more specific or do you think that's the less disturbing to more disturbing order? Personally i'd be far more willing to chow down on a piece of myself than of some other person. Between chewing on fingernails, sucking on small cuts and the natural shedding of cells from mucous membranes i've probably already ingested quite a lot of myself over the years.
Although as pointed out by the other responder, eating human meat would require _much_ higher health standards on the part of the "manufacturers," so there could be quite a big gap between being theoretically willing to do #2 and #3 above and considering it to be practically safe.
He's talking about the other comment in the summary: That it would be great just to grow the parts of the animal that you are interested in.
Thank you AC, that's exactly what i was talking about. "Cloned" may technically be incorrect usage, but if there's an official term for taking the genetic material of a creature and using that material to grow copies of just a part of the original i don't know what it is.
Now, I happen to be vegetarian, but certainly not for your standard ethical reasons. I'm all for animal experimentation, for example. I just find that our country's meat-heavy diet is expensive and inefficient. We're depleting our fresh water aquifers at a rapid rate, trying to grow feed for our cattle. American's waists are expanding, in part from our high-calorie meat diet.
One of the _other_ big benefits of cloned meat would be that, once properly developed, it would consume far less resources to produce than traditional meat on the hoof. You wouldn't have to keep it around for as long before harvesting it, you wouldn't have to waste calories growing body parts that aren't of any nutritional use, and you probably wouldn't even need to waste resources growing grain or grass to feed it. You could grow a lot of it just using recycled organic waste.
Furthermore with sufficient development in the technology you could probably grow healthier cuts of meat with less saturated fat and other bad stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
You _have_ played the earlier Final Fantasy games right? You compare the license points to the "traditional experience points" as if they're some of new fangled idea the likes of which have never been seen before. Ability Points under one name or another have been a staple of the game since at least FF5 for sure and I believe they made an appearance in FF3. (I remember that FF3 features jobs but I don't remember the exact system.) Offhand i can think of six previous FF games that have used the "gain special not-experience points to unlock abilities" system in one form or another and using various different names. Fundamentally they are all pretty similar however.
This wouldn't be a big deal except you seem to do be doing a fair bit of comparing FF12 to the previous games in the series. As such you really shouldn't be giving people any reason to doubt your credentials for making such comparisons.
I'm about ten hours in and am undecided about the combat so far. However take a moment to consider things from the perspective of the "old guard." For example imagine a slightly different case, "In the newest Street Fighter you program your fighters to perform specific moves under certain conditions. If your oponent is jumping you always want to do an uppercut, if your oponent attacks you at close range you always want to block. By using the Gambits in SF Beta Prime the game will automate this for you intead of the 'rinse repeat' of the prebious games. In the end it just degenerated to a lot of repeat actions anyway which is what computers are actually good at doing."
Yes i know you can identify a lot of areas in which the two cases would not be the same, particularly the fact that one is dexterity based and the other isn't. However i think a game in which you programmed an AI for a fighting game could be fun, and a lot of people might enjoy it. That doesn't mean however that the fans of the previous Street Fighter games would be unreasonable in wanting to have a game where you actually control the fighters directly. If that contingent was told that they were getting the programming AI game _instead_ of a standard fighting game i expect they'd be rather put out.
As someone who has very little interested in MMORPGs i was rather peeved when FF11 was announced to be one. When FF12 was announced I was alternately glad that there was going to be another single player FF game and then annoyed when i learned that a lot of the gameplay elements had been lifted from a style of RPG i'm not particularly fond of. I haven't decided yet where the balance falls out.
Silly individuals, didn't anyone tell you that since big corporations were the ones who pushed the DCMA provisions through congress that they can only be used to defend those big corporations? Equal protection under the law is _so_ 20th (or perhaps 19th) century!
Note to everyone at Sony, especially the executives and the people in the music division, _that_ is the way to do business if you want to make popular products and make money in the process. The key to great devices should be "I'd like to be able to do that, I bet our customers would like it to," not the current trend of "Our customers want to do lots of cool things with our products, let's see what we can do to stop them."
It probably isn't legal by a strict definition, but you'd have to have a pretty twisted sense of ethics to have an ethical problem with this. Nintendo hasn't released it in the US in over a decade and has indicated that they probably never will, so who could the fans possibly be hurting by translating it themselves? One might argue that everyone who wanted to try it out would be _more_ ethical if they imported a japanese copy of the cart before playing the translated ROM, but given that Nintendo has taken steps to try and prevent imported games from working (though admitedly pretty lame attempts for the NES and SNES) and that any carts you could get ahold of at this point would almost certainly be used so no money would be going back the original creators anyways, i think that argument doesn't hold much water.
However when they start work on a new game in the series they have a bit of a dilema. If they stick with the same forumla and mechanics as the previous game they're going to be acused of just milking the franchise, so they usually try to change at least a few things. However when they change things around the risk alienating the fans. Add on top of this that the new game is frequently made by a different team, sometimes an entirely new team, sometimes even at a different company, but even if it's with the "same" team there's usually been some turnover in terms of individual employees. So a different group of people is trying to make a game that's at least somewhat different from the previous one and in effect they are rolling the dice on the percieved quality of the final product.
This makes it similar to the "curse" that follows sports stars who are featured on various magazines and products that the Straight Dope analyzed awhile back (you can look up the exact column yourself if you wish.) They pointed out that such acolades are given to atheletes that have just experienced an exceptional year, just as sequels are usually financed for games that did exceptionally well or were exceptionally well recieved. Statistically speaking it is unlikely that the next game/season will be just as exceptional as the previous one. So it may seem like a "curse" or a tendency to "ruin" sequels, but a lot of it is really just probability and statistics.
Did i wake up in backwards land today? Or did the Nielsen company not get the same memo that every other company apparently received that says when they refer to next-generation consoles in a press release they're supposed to mention only the PS3 and the XBox 360 and pretend that the Wii doesn't even exist?
What's with the excited exclamation mark? In something purporting to be a news story/blurb i usually expect a recitation of facts combined with a calm statement of opinion. Shouting makes it sound like either a rant or something intended as a dire warning. Are you a fan of microsoft who is vehemently denying that apple will actually experience the success that some people believe they are posed for? Or are you an apple fan sending out a call to arms to other apple fans to make sure that this opportunity doesn't waste away? I can't tell which way you're leaning but the exclamation mark sure makes it seem like you think it's _really_ important for one reason or another.
[/punctuation nazi]
Unfortunately the developers totally screwed up the new version by making it the game one big quest mode. You always have to play as Robin Hood, you always have to go through the tutorial bit at the begining, you always have to go through the rest of the story elements for the remainder of the game.
How much extra work would it have taken to add an extra mode where you could start a strategy only game which allowed you to pick any one of the sides? I can't imagine that much, expecially compared to the amount of replay it would have enabled. I was a also a little disapointed with the battle system. You have three "channels" down which you can send groups of troops to fight the enemy, it was interesting but in the long run i felt it was too twitch based and wished they had stuck with something simple and strategic like the original game.
The PS2 game was fun for what it offered, but i couldn't help feeling disapointed because it could have been so much more if they'd just put a little more effort in.
So is this your comic? Or do you know the person whose comic it is? Or did you get the quote from elsewhere yourself? Or did you just get ripped off? :)
Somewhere along the line "dedicated gamer" seems to have been hijacked (by the media presumably?) to mean something like "compulsive graphics whore who will brainlessly follow whatever the newest trend is." Maybe it happened back when FPSs became the big thing when every "dedicated gamer" seemed to be upgrading their graphics card every other week in order to be able to play the latest game. Regardless of when it came about however i don't think that interpretation has ever fit me, and i like to consider myself a dedicated gamer, though perhaps one who has somewhat lapsed in recent years as i've had to learn how to balance gaming, a social life and a career. There may may be a few people out there that fit that negative stereotype but i really hope that the gamers who are actually _dedicated_ to their hobby are actually intelligent and thoughtfull people who will put more thought into their purchasing decisions than that. But perhaps i'm beeing hopelessly optimistic.
My PS3 and my Rev will both be attached to the same five year old 27" (i think) standard def CRT tv that my PS2 and GameCube are currently connected to. I upgrade my PC on a somewhat regular basis, i upgrade my consoles, i don't really see any compelling reason to upgrade my tv.
Captain Subtext isn't a real person Steve.
I'm far more interested in what, if anything, Peter Jackson has planed for Naomi Novik's "Temeraire" series which he recently optioned.
Whether you consider it fortunate or unfortunate, the linked article makes it sound like the problem was entirely with the people running the election, not the machines themselves. I'd love to be able to blame another failure on Diebold but it doesn't seem like it's going to be the case this time.
Was it part of France at the time? Or was it part of Normandy? And given that he was Duke of Normandy as well as King of England it seems quite likely that he spoke Anglo-Norman and Middle English as well as Old French. Which he would prefer for cussing is open for debate (Anglo-Norman was after all the "courtly" language in England and Middle English the "common" lanaguage,) as is which he would used when talking to his English knights.
But in any case, whichever of the three it was, clearly the words that were said were nothing like the words we would use to express a similar sentiment today.
Uh, yes, 1066 and all that, so why do you say in French? "Middle English is the name given by historical linguistics to the diverse forms of the English language spoken between the Norman invasion of 1066 and the mid-to-late 15th century." Thomas Becket died on December 29, 1170, well into the middle english period.
Funny, i've always heard it as "will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest," although admitedly neither i nor i expect any other american actually learned about it in school as a child, so it is most certainly _not_ "school-kid knowledge of history" for everyone. Secondly, if you want people to listen to you you might want to adopt a slightly less agressive tone. "If you're going to quote someone at least get it right" is much more likely to be taken as elitism than a phrase like "i was told the original quote was" or something along those lines.
And lastly, before you chastise someone else for getting the quote wrong, make sure you yourself have got it right. Wikipedia certainly isn't infallible, but their page on Thomas Becket says it was "passionate words from the angry king" and then lists several phrases that were reputedly used, so no one is really sure what the exact utterance was to begin with. Not to mention the fact that this was during the period when middle english was being spolen and what he said probably only had a passing relationship with a modern english interpretation of the same words. I therefore strongly suspect that _all_ of us are wrong, or all of us are right, depending on how you choose to look at it. It seems rather unlikely however that you can conclusively proove you are more correct than the person you corrected.
And while we're at it, what the hell is this "/." thing that everyone keeps mentioning?
It's somewhat less attractive now that it's all corpsified and gross.
2. Would you eat vat grown human meat?
3. Would you eat your body's meat grown in a vat?
Is there any particular reason you put the questions in that order? Is it just from less specific to more specific or do you think that's the less disturbing to more disturbing order? Personally i'd be far more willing to chow down on a piece of myself than of some other person. Between chewing on fingernails, sucking on small cuts and the natural shedding of cells from mucous membranes i've probably already ingested quite a lot of myself over the years.
Although as pointed out by the other responder, eating human meat would require _much_ higher health standards on the part of the "manufacturers," so there could be quite a big gap between being theoretically willing to do #2 and #3 above and considering it to be practically safe.
Thank you AC, that's exactly what i was talking about. "Cloned" may technically be incorrect usage, but if there's an official term for taking the genetic material of a creature and using that material to grow copies of just a part of the original i don't know what it is.
One of the _other_ big benefits of cloned meat would be that, once properly developed, it would consume far less resources to produce than traditional meat on the hoof. You wouldn't have to keep it around for as long before harvesting it, you wouldn't have to waste calories growing body parts that aren't of any nutritional use, and you probably wouldn't even need to waste resources growing grain or grass to feed it. You could grow a lot of it just using recycled organic waste.
Furthermore with sufficient development in the technology you could probably grow healthier cuts of meat with less saturated fat and other bad stuff.
Pluto's response to the breaking news: "Damn you Neptune! This is all your fault! If I don't get to be a planet then I'm taking you down with me!"