I just bought this during Steam's huge sale a week or two ago. It's a 30GB game, and I beat it in 11 hours, a large portion of which was replaying levels / bosses due to the combination of extremely cheap deaths and really shitty placement of autosave / checkpoints. 22 minutes per GB? Are you fucking kidding me?
I have a Droid Eris, and as a guy with bigger hands that usually has trouble with these kinds of devices, I have to say I'm very happy with the accuracy - I almost never make a mis-click, even typing quite fast on the touchscreen keyboard. However, I'm disappointed in responsiveness. The interface reminds me of playing an online game on a shitty internet connection when your roommate is loading a new YouTube video ever few minutes - without warning, for no apparent reason, and rarely in doing the same action twice, a click / tap will take up to 2 or 3 seconds to register. It's accurate, sure, but that's meaningless when I can't tell whether the thing is froze up or it just didn't detect my click, and don't dare click again for fear of accidentally clicking whatever happens to be in that same spot on the next page if the first click did register.
I think it also depends quite a lot on the type of game or what's going on in the game at the time the frame rate dips*. If quick, precise reactions / controls are important, a dip in fps is just horrible. For e.g. adventure games (even with free movement instead of in 'steps' like in Myst), or RTS's where you may need to act quickly, but not terribly precisely due to the map being made up of a grid, or an MMO like WoW or Eve where again speed is necessary, but not really precision because you lock onto and switch targets by clicking anywhere on them, and then all actions thereafter are automatically applied to the target, dipping down to 24 - 30 won't hurt gameplay. It might be annoying to me, but it's not going to really hurt me. OTOH, with games like First Person Shooters or Platformers with difficult 'jumping / timing puzzles' or enemies that have to be attacked in a special way to be defeated, a sudden dip in frame rate will make the game noticeably more difficult.
*This is another important thing that others have alluded to - suddenly dropping from 60 to 30 fps in the middle of a game is BAD, especially since it's likely that the reason the frame rate dipped is because the game just got a lot more difficult / complicated. However, running consistently at 30 fps on the exact same game might be playable (if still somewhat annoying). Noticeably bad fps is not nearly as frustrating as generally good fps with a few points of noticeably bad fps mixed in.
What then happened was a major overload of games, most of which were not worth buying, and consumers got feed up and simply stopped buying.
*cough*Wii*cough*
I got a Wii about two years ago, and haven't bothered to even browse the Wii section of games in stores in probably 1.5 years. It's basically just a convenient emulator as far as I'm concerned - it's simply not worth the bother of browsing through the gobs and gobs of utterly horrible movie-tie-in and mini-game shovelware to find the bare handful of games that are Wii exclusives and worth playing. I can understand trying to hit a broader / more casual market, but I don't think anybody can deny that the vast majority of Wii games are simply shit without crossing their fingers behind their back.
Ditto. Probably for what submitter wants, a 2XXX would be fine, although I've even got a little 1320n I bought for a couple dispatch terminals at the police dept that's seen moderate use pretty much 24/7 for a couple years now and just keeps happily running along.
So given that the 6000 miles figure is obviously going to be optimistic, You're basically paying 1$ per mile to look like an idiot and probably be even more vulnerable to getting in an accident than a bicyclist. No, I don't think I'll be getting one of these.
Net Neutrality is important and I hope it succeeds, but I what I would really like to see - that is, what would have the greatest impact on me personally - is requirements for reasonable QoS and limits on the 'up to X speed' marketing. That would be in keeping with the 'upgrade your hardware' statement. I'm tired of paying for a certain level of service, only to discover that between 3:30pm and midnight or so, my bandwidth / latency are utter shit because the ISP has more customers than it's hardware can handle during prime use times, but they get away with it because, on average (figuring in non-prime time hours), their service looks pretty good.
Although I've heard the tower referred to as 'the hard drive', more often I seem to get people calling it 'the CPU'. I've stopped trying to correct people, but it still makes me cringe or have a confused brain freeze-up when somebody's case fan is going bad and they say that their hard drive or their CPU is making a funny noise ("Are you sure it's the CPU? Because...I don't, um, think that's...er.... Nevermind. I'll just come take a look at it.")
I don't understand why they called Eve's launch bad. It would have been a catastrophe if it had been as big as some of the fantasy ones listed, because of the way they run everything on one server. Can you imagine them trying to do 50k simultaneous users back before they had RamSans, with their 2003 budget? No way.
But they have steadily grown and improved, just as intended; running a profitable independent game company for over 5 years is no small feat.
Except that even the windows steps start with something familiar, My Computer. Maybe even My Documents. Or if you want to get extremely advanced, open Windows Explorer.
Wow, what a missed opportunity for the direction I thought your post was going to go. Linux geeks, have a look at this guide for the filesystem layout of Debian. I dare you to come up with a sensible explanation for why this is a good, user-friendly, intuitive idea. Let's not even get into the further mucking of the issue that comes from software written for different distros expecting directories to be used for different things, or to be located in different places.
Compare to Windows: You have 'My Documents', which contains - surprise! - your documents. It also has subfolders for your pictures, downloads, videos, etc., all named in a sane and consistent fashion that makes it immediately obvious what the folder is for. Then you have 'Windows', which contains all the scary OS related stuff that 99% of users, even very advanced users, will never have to muck around with. Bar the very odd exception (how many Windows users actually manually edit their hosts file? Less than 1% by a longshot, I'm willing to bet), the stuff in there is for the computer's benefit only. Lastly, you have 'Program Files', where all your programs are installed and conveniently sorted so that all the files for a given application that you will ever need to modify are located inside its folder or in a folder that you can reach easily via a shortcut in its folder.
I understand that for legacy and arguably security reasons, *nix filesystems are quite different from Windows, but surely something could be done to make it at least sort-of sane?
but you don't need to read a book to figure out which way to lean when you are making a left turn.
You might be surprised how many people wreck their bikes because they're afraid if they lean with it on a turn, it will fall over or they'll scrape their elbows off or whatever (sitting up straight or leaning to the outside of the turn is a really great way to lay down your motorcycle.) I see what you were getting at, but you probably could have picked a better analogy.;)
Yeah, as others have said, this is just a list of currently popular games or the most well-known representatives of currently popular franchises. Influence has nothing to do with it. Oblivion could never have hoped to be as big as it was without all the buzz generated by people who played Morrowind.
I don't see how FF XII can even be on the list; it hasn't even been around long enough to be an influence to anything else, and since it is such a derivative of MMO's without adding much (anything?) new to RPG's in general, I don't think it's likely it will be seen as influential in the future.
I don't see any RTS's on there. How the hell could they miss Starcraft, or even Warcraft III, which had such an incredible editor it spawned a few unrelated genres of it's own? I don't see any construction simulators. SimCity 2000? [Insert Industry Here] Tycoon? I don't see any adventure games. Even if you accept that adventure games aren't terribly big sellers, you can't deny that Myst and Riven were incredible in terms of atmosphere and engaging plot, and one can only imagine the sort of effect that the earliest text adventure games had on budding game developers back in the stone ages of the industry.
I tried Vanguard for a few months shortly after it came out. It seemed like it could be really fun, lots of potential there, but it crashed more than any game I've ever played. More than Morrowind, even. And there was no protection so that your character wouldn't get slaughtered if your game crashed, so it was frustrating. Also, I think I picked the worst race possible - it was the ones that look like cat people (so I could be a necro). They were 'kill on sight' to the people in all the major cities of their own home continent, and also that home continent was horribly, horribly unfinished.
But...if they've made it this far, they must be doing something right. I may have to give it another shot.
Any/.'ers play that could say if things have improved?
Enh, fair enough, but since the sort of stuff people normally need help with is, in part, what I actually do at work, I'd rather just tell them no than risk being caught out in a lie down the road.
Acquaintance: Oh, you do computers? Can you fix my Windows? Me: No, I don't work on computers outside of my job.
Nearly everyone who is an acquaintance has gone through that conversation with me at some point in time or another, and it's never been a problem. Most people just shrug and say, "Oh, well can you recommend somebody who does?" I think most computer professionals are afraid of how people will respond to them being blunt about that sort of thing, but the reality is that most people (in my experience, at least*) are perfectly accepting and understanding about it.
*I suppose, though, that it might be worth noting that although I'm typically the shy / quiet / not terribly social type, I am tall, in good shape, and have a deep voice, so when I do make myself stand up straight, look people in the eye, and be assertive and direct, they tend to respond how I'd like them to. YMMV if you're closer to the stereotypical 'geek', especially if you can't learn to make yourself use body language properly.
And by the way, the method I mentioned in the other post (ctrl-alt-del, t) is how I've done it since NT 4.0 as well, hehe, so it's deep ingrained muscle memory.
ctrl-alt-del, t I might be able to get used to ctrl-shift-esc (never knew about that), but since I use ctrl-alt-del all the time anyways (log on / lock / log off / shutdown), it's the fastest-by-muscle-memory way to do it, for me. *shrug*
I've just recently been getting a group of 2008 x64 servers up and running, and for the most part, I actually like them. And no, you don't have to deal with the UAC popups etc. the way it is in Vista for every damned little thing.
My favorite usability change in Vista is probably the way that start menu folders are automatically and by default sorted alphabetically, instead of just appended to the end as they're added.
Yeah, I constantly ran into little things like that when I started using Vista, and even now that I know where everything is, there are lots of things that take longer / more clicks than in XP, for no good reason that I can discern.
The ones that gets me the most are things I used to be able to do very quickly with just the keyboard that now are difficult or impossible without reaching for the mouse, like shutdown / restart, opening network connections, or starting task manager.
Slashdot Mirror
I just bought this during Steam's huge sale a week or two ago. It's a 30GB game, and I beat it in 11 hours, a large portion of which was replaying levels / bosses due to the combination of extremely cheap deaths and really shitty placement of autosave / checkpoints. 22 minutes per GB? Are you fucking kidding me?
I have a Droid Eris, and as a guy with bigger hands that usually has trouble with these kinds of devices, I have to say I'm very happy with the accuracy - I almost never make a mis-click, even typing quite fast on the touchscreen keyboard.
However, I'm disappointed in responsiveness. The interface reminds me of playing an online game on a shitty internet connection when your roommate is loading a new YouTube video ever few minutes - without warning, for no apparent reason, and rarely in doing the same action twice, a click / tap will take up to 2 or 3 seconds to register. It's accurate, sure, but that's meaningless when I can't tell whether the thing is froze up or it just didn't detect my click, and don't dare click again for fear of accidentally clicking whatever happens to be in that same spot on the next page if the first click did register.
I think it also depends quite a lot on the type of game or what's going on in the game at the time the frame rate dips*. If quick, precise reactions / controls are important, a dip in fps is just horrible. For e.g. adventure games (even with free movement instead of in 'steps' like in Myst), or RTS's where you may need to act quickly, but not terribly precisely due to the map being made up of a grid, or an MMO like WoW or Eve where again speed is necessary, but not really precision because you lock onto and switch targets by clicking anywhere on them, and then all actions thereafter are automatically applied to the target, dipping down to 24 - 30 won't hurt gameplay. It might be annoying to me, but it's not going to really hurt me.
OTOH, with games like First Person Shooters or Platformers with difficult 'jumping / timing puzzles' or enemies that have to be attacked in a special way to be defeated, a sudden dip in frame rate will make the game noticeably more difficult.
*This is another important thing that others have alluded to - suddenly dropping from 60 to 30 fps in the middle of a game is BAD, especially since it's likely that the reason the frame rate dipped is because the game just got a lot more difficult / complicated. However, running consistently at 30 fps on the exact same game might be playable (if still somewhat annoying). Noticeably bad fps is not nearly as frustrating as generally good fps with a few points of noticeably bad fps mixed in.
*cough*Wii*cough*
I got a Wii about two years ago, and haven't bothered to even browse the Wii section of games in stores in probably 1.5 years. It's basically just a convenient emulator as far as I'm concerned - it's simply not worth the bother of browsing through the gobs and gobs of utterly horrible movie-tie-in and mini-game shovelware to find the bare handful of games that are Wii exclusives and worth playing. I can understand trying to hit a broader / more casual market, but I don't think anybody can deny that the vast majority of Wii games are simply shit without crossing their fingers behind their back.
What the hell is so wrong with just putting a menu with difficulty options in, like every FPS since forever has done?
* Can I play, Daddy?
* Don't hurt me
* Bring 'em on
* I am Death Incarnate!
Ditto. Probably for what submitter wants, a 2XXX would be fine, although I've even got a little 1320n I bought for a couple dispatch terminals at the police dept that's seen moderate use pretty much 24/7 for a couple years now and just keeps happily running along.
So given that the 6000 miles figure is obviously going to be optimistic, You're basically paying 1$ per mile to look like an idiot and probably be even more vulnerable to getting in an accident than a bicyclist. No, I don't think I'll be getting one of these.
Net Neutrality is important and I hope it succeeds, but I what I would really like to see - that is, what would have the greatest impact on me personally - is requirements for reasonable QoS and limits on the 'up to X speed' marketing. That would be in keeping with the 'upgrade your hardware' statement. I'm tired of paying for a certain level of service, only to discover that between 3:30pm and midnight or so, my bandwidth / latency are utter shit because the ISP has more customers than it's hardware can handle during prime use times, but they get away with it because, on average (figuring in non-prime time hours), their service looks pretty good.
Although I've heard the tower referred to as 'the hard drive', more often I seem to get people calling it 'the CPU'. I've stopped trying to correct people, but it still makes me cringe or have a confused brain freeze-up when somebody's case fan is going bad and they say that their hard drive or their CPU is making a funny noise ("Are you sure it's the CPU? Because...I don't, um, think that's...er.... Nevermind. I'll just come take a look at it.")
This is to allow lifeless 13 year olds plenty of time to tune up and learn tricks so they can utterly pwn hardworking adults.
I don't understand why they called Eve's launch bad. It would have been a catastrophe if it had been as big as some of the fantasy ones listed, because of the way they run everything on one server. Can you imagine them trying to do 50k simultaneous users back before they had RamSans, with their 2003 budget? No way.
But they have steadily grown and improved, just as intended; running a profitable independent game company for over 5 years is no small feat.
Here's a response from an American in China with some good considerations on where to draw the line: http://odwks.com/2009/03/mandarin-chinese-programmer-communites/
Wow, what a missed opportunity for the direction I thought your post was going to go. Linux geeks, have a look at this guide for the filesystem layout of Debian. I dare you to come up with a sensible explanation for why this is a good, user-friendly, intuitive idea. Let's not even get into the further mucking of the issue that comes from software written for different distros expecting directories to be used for different things, or to be located in different places.
Compare to Windows: You have 'My Documents', which contains - surprise! - your documents. It also has subfolders for your pictures, downloads, videos, etc., all named in a sane and consistent fashion that makes it immediately obvious what the folder is for. Then you have 'Windows', which contains all the scary OS related stuff that 99% of users, even very advanced users, will never have to muck around with. Bar the very odd exception (how many Windows users actually manually edit their hosts file? Less than 1% by a longshot, I'm willing to bet), the stuff in there is for the computer's benefit only. Lastly, you have 'Program Files', where all your programs are installed and conveniently sorted so that all the files for a given application that you will ever need to modify are located inside its folder or in a folder that you can reach easily via a shortcut in its folder.
I understand that for legacy and arguably security reasons, *nix filesystems are quite different from Windows, but surely something could be done to make it at least sort-of sane?
You might be surprised how many people wreck their bikes because they're afraid if they lean with it on a turn, it will fall over or they'll scrape their elbows off or whatever (sitting up straight or leaning to the outside of the turn is a really great way to lay down your motorcycle.) ;)
I see what you were getting at, but you probably could have picked a better analogy.
Why did they hit on Zip and Jaz, but leave off Rev drives?
Yeah, as others have said, this is just a list of currently popular games or the most well-known representatives of currently popular franchises. Influence has nothing to do with it. Oblivion could never have hoped to be as big as it was without all the buzz generated by people who played Morrowind.
I don't see how FF XII can even be on the list; it hasn't even been around long enough to be an influence to anything else, and since it is such a derivative of MMO's without adding much (anything?) new to RPG's in general, I don't think it's likely it will be seen as influential in the future.
I don't see any RTS's on there. How the hell could they miss Starcraft, or even Warcraft III, which had such an incredible editor it spawned a few unrelated genres of it's own? I don't see any construction simulators. SimCity 2000? [Insert Industry Here] Tycoon? I don't see any adventure games. Even if you accept that adventure games aren't terribly big sellers, you can't deny that Myst and Riven were incredible in terms of atmosphere and engaging plot, and one can only imagine the sort of effect that the earliest text adventure games had on budding game developers back in the stone ages of the industry.
I tried Vanguard for a few months shortly after it came out. It seemed like it could be really fun, lots of potential there, but it crashed more than any game I've ever played. More than Morrowind, even. And there was no protection so that your character wouldn't get slaughtered if your game crashed, so it was frustrating. Also, I think I picked the worst race possible - it was the ones that look like cat people (so I could be a necro). They were 'kill on sight' to the people in all the major cities of their own home continent, and also that home continent was horribly, horribly unfinished.
/.'ers play that could say if things have improved?
But...if they've made it this far, they must be doing something right. I may have to give it another shot.
Any
Hacks
Enh, fair enough, but since the sort of stuff people normally need help with is, in part, what I actually do at work, I'd rather just tell them no than risk being caught out in a lie down the road.
Or you could just do what I do:
Acquaintance: Oh, you do computers? Can you fix my Windows?
Me: No, I don't work on computers outside of my job.
Nearly everyone who is an acquaintance has gone through that conversation with me at some point in time or another, and it's never been a problem. Most people just shrug and say, "Oh, well can you recommend somebody who does?" I think most computer professionals are afraid of how people will respond to them being blunt about that sort of thing, but the reality is that most people (in my experience, at least*) are perfectly accepting and understanding about it.
*I suppose, though, that it might be worth noting that although I'm typically the shy / quiet / not terribly social type, I am tall, in good shape, and have a deep voice, so when I do make myself stand up straight, look people in the eye, and be assertive and direct, they tend to respond how I'd like them to. YMMV if you're closer to the stereotypical 'geek', especially if you can't learn to make yourself use body language properly.
And by the way, the method I mentioned in the other post (ctrl-alt-del, t) is how I've done it since NT 4.0 as well, hehe, so it's deep ingrained muscle memory.
ctrl-alt-del, t
I might be able to get used to ctrl-shift-esc (never knew about that), but since I use ctrl-alt-del all the time anyways (log on / lock / log off / shutdown), it's the fastest-by-muscle-memory way to do it, for me. *shrug*
I've just recently been getting a group of 2008 x64 servers up and running, and for the most part, I actually like them. And no, you don't have to deal with the UAC popups etc. the way it is in Vista for every damned little thing.
My favorite usability change in Vista is probably the way that start menu folders are automatically and by default sorted alphabetically, instead of just appended to the end as they're added.
Yeah, I constantly ran into little things like that when I started using Vista, and even now that I know where everything is, there are lots of things that take longer / more clicks than in XP, for no good reason that I can discern.
The ones that gets me the most are things I used to be able to do very quickly with just the keyboard that now are difficult or impossible without reaching for the mouse, like shutdown / restart, opening network connections, or starting task manager.