I've been playing FPSes since Wolfenstein 3D, and the original Halo blew me away. The regenerating-shields mechanic cut down on "get stuck at 3% health and die a million times before the next medkit" frustrations. The weapon mechanic (two selectable guns, with melee and grenades on separate triggers) made for a lot of interesting tactical choices. None of those were entirely new ideas, but I hadn't seen them all stitched together in one game before. As a fan of written sci-fi, I appreciated the effort taken to put together a coherent universe and ask the occasional interesting question in between all the shooting, and it was nice to get an straight answer to the question "why is my space marine a million times more badass than all the other space marines?"
So, yeah. It's annoying that Halo has become the go-to game for the fratboys-and-12-year-olds crowd, but it really does have its own merits.
Sure you're not talking about Quake 1 here (at least for software mode)?
I didn't say it ran well.;) You'd want a fair bit more to get best performance out of it, but 90mHz/16MB is the official minimum spec. Either way, the PS3 should have no trouble handling it.
"Only" 256MB RAM? Accurate or not, what do you think we're emulating here? The SNES had a total of 256 kilobytes of RAM, with cartridge ROMs topping at 6MB. Quake 2 ran on a Pentium/90 with 16MB.
The PS3's specs might be a problem for a Windows box that demands half a gig for OS overhead, but Linux isn't supposed to have those problems.
I tend to distrust anyone who, in a public forum, claims to work in the intelligence community. Either they don't, or they do and don't know how to keep their mouth shut.
The CIA is not Fight Club, dude. American intelligence guys are allowed to discuss non-classified aspects of their jobs all they want.
Of identifying your sexual orientation in your profile anyway? Leave that for your Facebook/Myspace profiles or your blog, or maybe even shut up about your sexual orientation like all of us straight people do about ours. Just a thought anyway.
Because it says "tell us about yourself", dumbsh*t. Does that mean something different in your world?
And if you think that straight people don't blather about their orientation too, with no penalties at all, you obviously don't play a lot of Xbox.
Not heard of Second Life, then? MMOs don't have to be competitive D&D knockoffs. Warcraft and its competitors have that market pretty much sewn up, anyway. There's plenty of potential for open virtual-world/shared-content-creation gaming.
And the Wii should have put to rest any fears about the viability of targeting "non-gamer" demographics.
It'll be more like the recent Star Wars Legos games, but without the licensed property. So, it'll be likely a medieval setting.
No. It'll be a LEGO setting. Again, see Second Life. There is no requirement for a social MMO to have a single, coherent setting and story.
As for whining about "purposely bad (blocky) graphics", I should think that the recent explosion of indie games and (again) the Wii should've taught you that simple, stylized graphics are just as viable as ultra-realistic, and much cheaper to develop.
This seems more of a limit on a jetpack than I'd be willing to accept. I mean, cruising along 100 feet over the ground (Well, the water) is fine until you hit a dock, or accidentally go over land. Then you've got 100 feet of free-fall.
As a bonus, you're almost guaranteed for this thing to ONLY fail when you're NOT over water, eliminating the only chance you have of surviving that big of a fall.
Yeah, that's always bugged me about cars. Cruising along at 60mph is fine until you accidentally hit a light pole. Then suddenly you're flying through the windshield!
As a bonus, they almost always run fine on a smooth, flat surface--if you are thrown from your car there's almost certainly a large, solid object right in front of you.
Your anecdote is hilariously quaint. Please do some research before opening your lying mouth... you sound like a logging puppet actually.
That's old growth, smart guy. He already said that old growth has been replaced with new. It's not the same trees that were there before, but it's still a hell of a lot of healthy trees.
And there are other groups, like the National Program Office, to ensure continuity of government even if, say, D.C. is nuked along with the whole line of succession.
So the 'input design input' is basically beta-testing.
No, it's not. The first couple of paragraphs are misleading, yes, but if you actually read the entire article you'll find that what they've done is get players involved involved with the basic conceptual design before ever writing a line of code, as well as things like voice-acting and localization. That is new.
According to the Electronic Frontier Finland article, the troubled system was used in areas representing 2% of the electoral roll, but actually affected only 232 voters total. Finland has a population of 5.5 million. Depending on how many of those voted, less than 0.01% of all votes were actually lost; a much better margin of error than most paper ballot systems.
Only the Turre Legal blog mentions the "2% of all votes" figure, and its source is...another Slashdot summary, which is also wrong.
It's still a problem, especially at the municipal level, but it's a much smaller problem than it's made out to be.
Well, they've been blaming Apple for DRM for years even though Apple never wanted DRM but was forced to use it by the record companies, and has been fighting it all along. So now I'm expecting everyone to blame Apple for SecuROM or preachy messages on DVDs or some other thing they have no control over.
Aaaand now I'm going to get modded Troll for saying something nice about Apple. Woo.
Some years back, my university computer lab had a handful of Linux machines with red paper standups on top of the monitors identifying them, so kids who just wanted to check their e-mail wouldn't get confused.
Computers with red hats. Red Hat machines.
It took me years to figure out what the name actually meant.
Yeah, I'm not sure if you've noticed this, but pretty much every non-television news source from the New York Times to the Onion does book reviews, including the BBC.
So, y'know, welcome to the world.
Wasn't Dijkstra the one who said "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes"?
Great as he was, I'd say in the modern era he's part of the problem, i.e. CS programs producing students who know loads and loads of theory and can't write a damn line of actual code.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been playing FPSes since Wolfenstein 3D, and the original Halo blew me away. The regenerating-shields mechanic cut down on "get stuck at 3% health and die a million times before the next medkit" frustrations. The weapon mechanic (two selectable guns, with melee and grenades on separate triggers) made for a lot of interesting tactical choices. None of those were entirely new ideas, but I hadn't seen them all stitched together in one game before. As a fan of written sci-fi, I appreciated the effort taken to put together a coherent universe and ask the occasional interesting question in between all the shooting, and it was nice to get an straight answer to the question "why is my space marine a million times more badass than all the other space marines?"
So, yeah. It's annoying that Halo has become the go-to game for the fratboys-and-12-year-olds crowd, but it really does have its own merits.
You think $200 for a phone is cheap? Yeah, hate to break it to you buddy, but you're both rich and out-of-touch.
Quake 2 ran on a Pentium/90 with 16MB.
Sure you're not talking about Quake 1 here (at least for software mode)?
I didn't say it ran well. ;) You'd want a fair bit more to get best performance out of it, but 90mHz/16MB is the official minimum spec. Either way, the PS3 should have no trouble handling it.
"Only" 256MB RAM? Accurate or not, what do you think we're emulating here? The SNES had a total of 256 kilobytes of RAM, with cartridge ROMs topping at 6MB. Quake 2 ran on a Pentium/90 with 16MB.
The PS3's specs might be a problem for a Windows box that demands half a gig for OS overhead, but Linux isn't supposed to have those problems.
Just about everyone does this, yeah. You have to if you want your business to be competitive. That's what this research is aimed at addressing.
I tend to distrust anyone who, in a public forum, claims to work in the intelligence community. Either they don't, or they do and don't know how to keep their mouth shut.
The CIA is not Fight Club, dude. American intelligence guys are allowed to discuss non-classified aspects of their jobs all they want.
"They" can scratch and scrape for information all they want. Doesn't matter in the end; the US can still obliterate any adversary.
Damn straight, just like we did in Vietnam, or when we destroyed Al-Qaida and brought bin Laden to justice.
Oh wait.
Of identifying your sexual orientation in your profile anyway? Leave that for your Facebook/Myspace profiles or your blog, or maybe even shut up about your sexual orientation like all of us straight people do about ours. Just a thought anyway.
Because it says "tell us about yourself", dumbsh*t. Does that mean something different in your world?
And if you think that straight people don't blather about their orientation too, with no penalties at all, you obviously don't play a lot of Xbox.
This isn't Wikipedia, we call them "KB" here. Thanks.
I do love the irony when Slashdotters insist on tradition over correctness.
Not heard of Second Life, then? MMOs don't have to be competitive D&D knockoffs. Warcraft and its competitors have that market pretty much sewn up, anyway. There's plenty of potential for open virtual-world/shared-content-creation gaming.
And the Wii should have put to rest any fears about the viability of targeting "non-gamer" demographics.
It'll be more like the recent Star Wars Legos games, but without the licensed property. So, it'll be likely a medieval setting.
No. It'll be a LEGO setting. Again, see Second Life. There is no requirement for a social MMO to have a single, coherent setting and story.
As for whining about "purposely bad (blocky) graphics", I should think that the recent explosion of indie games and (again) the Wii should've taught you that simple, stylized graphics are just as viable as ultra-realistic, and much cheaper to develop.
Aaaand another sarcasm fail for Slashdot!
This seems more of a limit on a jetpack than I'd be willing to accept. I mean, cruising along 100 feet over the ground (Well, the water) is fine until you hit a dock, or accidentally go over land. Then you've got 100 feet of free-fall.
As a bonus, you're almost guaranteed for this thing to ONLY fail when you're NOT over water, eliminating the only chance you have of surviving that big of a fall.
Yeah, that's always bugged me about cars. Cruising along at 60mph is fine until you accidentally hit a light pole. Then suddenly you're flying through the windshield!
As a bonus, they almost always run fine on a smooth, flat surface--if you are thrown from your car there's almost certainly a large, solid object right in front of you.
Your anecdote is hilariously quaint. Please do some research before opening your lying mouth ... you sound like a logging puppet actually.
That's old growth, smart guy. He already said that old growth has been replaced with new. It's not the same trees that were there before, but it's still a hell of a lot of healthy trees.
And there are other groups, like the National Program Office, to ensure continuity of government even if, say, D.C. is nuked along with the whole line of succession.
So the 'input design input' is basically beta-testing.
No, it's not. The first couple of paragraphs are misleading, yes, but if you actually read the entire article you'll find that what they've done is get players involved involved with the basic conceptual design before ever writing a line of code, as well as things like voice-acting and localization. That is new.
It's still not open-source, but it's pretty cool.
Uhhh, where the hell did I say that? Technically, I thanked him!
Another thing some alleged techies don't get is that most humans understand sarcasm.
So believing things that make you happy is more important than whether or not they happen to be true?
"Just" elected? No, man, that was eight years ago.
According to the Electronic Frontier Finland article, the troubled system was used in areas representing 2% of the electoral roll, but actually affected only 232 voters total. Finland has a population of 5.5 million. Depending on how many of those voted, less than 0.01% of all votes were actually lost; a much better margin of error than most paper ballot systems.
Only the Turre Legal blog mentions the "2% of all votes" figure, and its source is...another Slashdot summary, which is also wrong.
It's still a problem, especially at the municipal level, but it's a much smaller problem than it's made out to be.
What are people going to whine about now?
Well, they've been blaming Apple for DRM for years even though Apple never wanted DRM but was forced to use it by the record companies, and has been fighting it all along. So now I'm expecting everyone to blame Apple for SecuROM or preachy messages on DVDs or some other thing they have no control over.
Aaaand now I'm going to get modded Troll for saying something nice about Apple. Woo.
Cue a bunch of humor-impaired Slashdotters exploding in 5...4... Shit, too late.
Some years back, my university computer lab had a handful of Linux machines with red paper standups on top of the monitors identifying them, so kids who just wanted to check their e-mail wouldn't get confused. Computers with red hats. Red Hat machines. It took me years to figure out what the name actually meant.
Fine, you're not posting "bogus facts", you're just lying. Better?
Yeah, I'm not sure if you've noticed this, but pretty much every non-television news source from the New York Times to the Onion does book reviews, including the BBC. So, y'know, welcome to the world.
Wasn't Dijkstra the one who said "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes"? Great as he was, I'd say in the modern era he's part of the problem, i.e. CS programs producing students who know loads and loads of theory and can't write a damn line of actual code.