We had the F-4 in Vietnam, which was supposed to never need to dogfight because it would just kill everything at long range with missiles. That turned out to be not so much, and the F-4 turned like a sled and was getting chewed up by MIGs. So we designed and built the F-16, which had very strong dogfighting characteristics while also having reasonable air-to-ground potential.
But we wanted something more robust, with more range and payload, so we built the F/A-18, which has stronger strike capabilities (and twin engines, which gets the Navy stiff), but it's not as good at dogfighting as the F-16.
But we wanted something even more awesome, with stealth and STOVL, so we built the F-35, which is more like a dog than a dogfighter, but it won't matter because with shiny new technology, it'll kill everything at range with missiles. And now it's being shown that the F-35 will be... chewed up by MIGs...........
It's interesting to me to compare Cogswell's post to Matt Briggs' one on the role of senior developers here. http://mattbriggs.net/blog/201...
It seems to me that Briggs has the right of things; the skills that bring real value to development efforts are less connected with specific language functions or quirks and more associated with understanding how to develop software projects.
A proper rush in Starcraft doesn't need to touch the town hall, though that's always nice. Military dominance begets economic dominance via control of map resources. Thus has it always been.
I wish more games would take the 'more is more' approach to enemies that Serious Sam did. I loved the HUGE SCREAMING HORDES of bad guys that would try to zerg you down. It was a nice change of pace from, say, Unreal's 'kill a bad guy, which triggers another bad guy, because the engine chokes and dies if two mobs are on the screen at the same time'. And I liked Unreal. More games should have more swarms.
The basic problem with this movie is going to be, and I'm telling you this now and you can admit I'm right later, is that the creative team feels the need to have humans running around that we can 'identify' with instead of trusting their writing, directing, and SFX to make the Transformers themselves the main characters. And no matter what else they get right (and that 'Exclusive' trailer was very damn cool), that will be the major failing of the movie.
The movie is not 'The Kids That Pal Around With Transformers', the movie is 'Transformers'.
That someone would pick out the era of the PS1 as their 'Golden Age' shows how meaningless the entire attempt to define any sort of objective idea of what gaming's golden age was. For some of us, who remember getting NESes under our Christmas trees as children, the PS1 is a Johnny-come-lately at best. Saying that sequelitis (*coughMaddencough*) and increasing game costs is a 'recent' problem, where 'recent' is equal to 'after the PS1' is absurd. The previous poster is welcome to feel that the PS1 was the apogee of their personal gaming experience, but it's silly to say that somehow all the problems they mention are phenomenon post-dating the PS1.
I like what's happening in gaming right now. There's a lot of quality and a lot of variety. Smaller, indie games are recieving wide distributions, and a PC gamer in particular has a lot of choices. It's not a great time in some ways to be a console gamer, but those lemmings get what they deserve (I kid, I kid!).
I measure the quality of something like gaming not by the median, but by the best. I'm free to ignore Beating A Dead Horse Online IV or Progress Quest XI or Madden 2042 in favor of things that I'm honestly interested in. It's the best games that make an era, and this is a time of some very good games indeed.
I've really noticed this myself. I don't think it's astroturfing, I think it's just that EVE is the sort of game that produces that particular sort of fanaticism in the players it works for. Also, the EVE player culture, because EVE is small, actively encourages people to evangelize; it's not like WoW needs its players to go out and tell players the Good News. Everybody already knows about WoW.
I'll never understand why people will go to such lengths to avoid having to give credit for WoW's success to... it being a better product that its competitors?
'timing' 'hype' 'Blizzard a household name'
Sure, whatever. WoW owns mainstream MMO gaming because it's a better game than any of its competitors (in the eyes of most of the MMO playing public). Full stop.
Pardon me, but what the hell is the point of this law if "it is unlikely that individual online gamblers will be targeted for arrest"? Selective enforcement... for the win!
It's a fairly light tactical RPG. The numbers are mostly hidden, probably to decrease the apparent complexity to it's 'casual' audience. Personally, I'm not convinced that a large latent demand for casual tactical wargames exists. It's fun, kinda, but I found it a touch confusing. Needs better documentation.
Also, 'carebear' is, frankly, a useless and meaningless term that people use to discredit other arguments without having to engage their positions. I find it difficult to take seriously any argument that includes that sort of content-free insults aimed at the other side. That some people feel the need to not just promote and advocate for their own preferred play style, but trash people who's tastes differ along the way is not an argument in favor of the likely social atmosphere of Vanguard.
an MMO among the few that aren't for carebears or the lighthearted n a true MMO world map, loot drops and such don't need instances You should have to fight it out with others The "danger" adds a level of fun, excitment and randomness to it
No 'I' statements here. It's a fact that WoW is for the 'lighthearted'. It's a fact that WoW isn't a 'true MMO world'. It's a fact that you should have to 'fight it out with others'.
In my post below, where I said that the sort of players Vanguard attracts seem more dogmatic to me, this is the sort of thing I was referring to. It's not even that this person is particularly agressive or insulting; he's not. But these are very strong statements about the nature of 'good' MMO design that, simply put, don't really seem to reflect the reality of most people's in-game experiences. Certainly, there are a number of people who want more or less what Vanguard is aiming to provide. But there's very little 'should' or 'true' about the difference between WoW and Vanguard. WoW isn't 'Vanguard for carebears' or 'Vanguard with training wheels'. WoW's focus was never on providing the play experience that people who are attracted to Vanguard are looking for.
The first is that Vanguard is not aimed at the same user base as WoW. WoW is clearly a more 'casual' game than EverQuest before it, and Vanguard looks to be designed to be a more sophisticated version of EverQuest's original vision for reward-and-punishment systems, perhaps even harsher. Is the potential playerbase for a game of Vanguard's sort as large as WoW's has proven to be? I've always thought that it wasn't by at least one order of magnitude, perhaps more, and thought that assertions that there was some large community of people that enjoy XP loss and racing to non-instanced raid bosses were flying in the face of all our experiences, player and dev alike, of EQ1. However, if your expectations for population are appropriately calibrated, there's nothing wrong with not having a huge playerbase. If you, as the dev, are satisfied with the artistry and craftsmanship of your game and your game experience, and your players are playing the game they want to be playing (as opposed to killing time waiting for The Next Big Thing), then more power to you. Much as I bash EVE sometimes, there's nothing wrong with it other than offending my (highly personal and idiosyncratic) sense of gaming aesthetics.
The second issue here is the to-me inexplicable assertion, loudly and often repeated, by so many of Vanguard's partisans that their sort of preferred game experience is 'better'. It's true that this sort of 'what I like is better than what you like' is common enough to be banal amongst gamers (even now, wargaming grognards are sneering at us Johnny-come-latelys; nothing we do will ever equal the hate of table-top wargamers for one another). I'm hardly immune myself (see above for my admission of EVE bashing). But certain classes of gamer, and those attracted to the 'difficult' and 'hardcore' aspirations of Vanguard seem very much one of those classes, seem to me to be much worse about it than most. More dogmatic, more aggressive, less tolerant of other perspectives and far, far more strident.
The author has a point about the undead. The Forsaken have suffered horribly, it's true, and they are fighting for their survival against an even worse evil, the Scourge, it's true, but... take a good walk around Undercity sometime. Hang out in the Apothecarium. The Forsaken are evil, and not just a little evil, but a lot evil. From the Big Plan to make a new plauge that will kill everything on the planet to their cultural tendancy towards sadism, the Forsaken are a pretty bad lot.
I disagree that the Horde as a whole are evil; the Tauren, Orcs, and Trolls are 'savage' in many ways, but the dominant themes there are of the classic noble savage, who's brutish ways are part of how they avoid the corruption and decadance of more civilized folk (the human society doesn't come off too well in WoW, with the corruption of Stormwind City leaving the farmers of Westfall to the tender mercies of the Defias, or their abandonment of Darkshire, etc, etc).
Tracking these things around is a pain in the ass, but I like to see them when they pop up. Thanks for a news post that I found Useful and Informative.
Which is true, even if I mostly posted just to spite the other twits in this comment stream.
Damn you Sega, Damn you!!! Thanks for the "wonderful" games like Night Trap, INXS, and Double Switch but can we get Shadowrun CD ? Of course not... bastards!!!
*sobsobsob* It's based on the Genesis Shadowrun game! But a new story and enhancements! *sobsob* The Genesis Shadowrun was amazingly fun. *waaaaah*
Somehow, I really really don't think that more flying limbs and more photorealistic war crimes will bring the joy and passion for games back to jaded developers....
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding, though I haven't looked into it myself, is that CSS is Turing-complete.
As I recall, for most of the Cold War, NATO's strategic plan for an all-out assault from the Warsaw Pact was two-fold.
Step 1: Kiss your ass goodbye, because there's no way NATO had the forces in-theatre to stop the Red Army before it hits the Channel.
Step 2: Use tactical nuclear weapons to vaporize enemy tank concentrations in an attempt to not be pwned.
Step 3: Watch the Red Army use nukes back at them.
Step 4: Watch the nuclear exchanges accelerate and escalate until Paris is a rising fireball.
Step 5: Strategic launch.
Step 6: Threads
Let me get this straight...
We had the F-4 in Vietnam, which was supposed to never need to dogfight because it would just kill everything at long range with missiles. That turned out to be not so much, and the F-4 turned like a sled and was getting chewed up by MIGs. So we designed and built the F-16, which had very strong dogfighting characteristics while also having reasonable air-to-ground potential.
But we wanted something more robust, with more range and payload, so we built the F/A-18, which has stronger strike capabilities (and twin engines, which gets the Navy stiff), but it's not as good at dogfighting as the F-16.
But we wanted something even more awesome, with stealth and STOVL, so we built the F-35, which is more like a dog than a dogfighter, but it won't matter because with shiny new technology, it'll kill everything at range with missiles. And now it's being shown that the F-35 will be... chewed up by MIGs. .... ......
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
It's interesting to me to compare Cogswell's post to Matt Briggs' one on the role of senior developers here. http://mattbriggs.net/blog/201...
It seems to me that Briggs has the right of things; the skills that bring real value to development efforts are less connected with specific language functions or quirks and more associated with understanding how to develop software projects.
A proper rush in Starcraft doesn't need to touch the town hall, though that's always nice. Military dominance begets economic dominance via control of map resources. Thus has it always been.
I did, and L4D gets two big thumbs up from this gamer. Modern firearms, ragdolling, and huge swarms of zombies? Made. Of. Win.
I wish more games would take the 'more is more' approach to enemies that Serious Sam did. I loved the HUGE SCREAMING HORDES of bad guys that would try to zerg you down. It was a nice change of pace from, say, Unreal's 'kill a bad guy, which triggers another bad guy, because the engine chokes and dies if two mobs are on the screen at the same time'. And I liked Unreal. More games should have more swarms.
The beatings will continue until market penetration improves.
Oooooh, look at that topic change. Do you have anything to offer about US telecommunications policy, or are you intent on pissing on the messenger?
I remember that they were the lamest part of the cartoon; my point exactly.
The basic problem with this movie is going to be, and I'm telling you this now and you can admit I'm right later, is that the creative team feels the need to have humans running around that we can 'identify' with instead of trusting their writing, directing, and SFX to make the Transformers themselves the main characters. And no matter what else they get right (and that 'Exclusive' trailer was very damn cool), that will be the major failing of the movie.
The movie is not 'The Kids That Pal Around With Transformers', the movie is 'Transformers'.
Because cynicism is such a courageous and risky stance on Slashdot. Nobody's gonna call you out for hating, big man.
Also, you can have my The Donnas CDs when you pry them from my cold dead hands.
That someone would pick out the era of the PS1 as their 'Golden Age' shows how meaningless the entire attempt to define any sort of objective idea of what gaming's golden age was. For some of us, who remember getting NESes under our Christmas trees as children, the PS1 is a Johnny-come-lately at best. Saying that sequelitis (*coughMaddencough*) and increasing game costs is a 'recent' problem, where 'recent' is equal to 'after the PS1' is absurd. The previous poster is welcome to feel that the PS1 was the apogee of their personal gaming experience, but it's silly to say that somehow all the problems they mention are phenomenon post-dating the PS1.
I like what's happening in gaming right now. There's a lot of quality and a lot of variety. Smaller, indie games are recieving wide distributions, and a PC gamer in particular has a lot of choices. It's not a great time in some ways to be a console gamer, but those lemmings get what they deserve (I kid, I kid!).
I measure the quality of something like gaming not by the median, but by the best. I'm free to ignore Beating A Dead Horse Online IV or Progress Quest XI or Madden 2042 in favor of things that I'm honestly interested in. It's the best games that make an era, and this is a time of some very good games indeed.
I've really noticed this myself. I don't think it's astroturfing, I think it's just that EVE is the sort of game that produces that particular sort of fanaticism in the players it works for. Also, the EVE player culture, because EVE is small, actively encourages people to evangelize; it's not like WoW needs its players to go out and tell players the Good News. Everybody already knows about WoW.
I'll never understand why people will go to such lengths to avoid having to give credit for WoW's success to... it being a better product that its competitors?
'timing' 'hype' 'Blizzard a household name'
Sure, whatever. WoW owns mainstream MMO gaming because it's a better game than any of its competitors (in the eyes of most of the MMO playing public). Full stop.
Pardon me, but what the hell is the point of this law if "it is unlikely that individual online gamblers will be targeted for arrest"? Selective enforcement... for the win!
It's a fairly light tactical RPG. The numbers are mostly hidden, probably to decrease the apparent complexity to it's 'casual' audience. Personally, I'm not convinced that a large latent demand for casual tactical wargames exists. It's fun, kinda, but I found it a touch confusing. Needs better documentation.
Also, 'carebear' is, frankly, a useless and meaningless term that people use to discredit other arguments without having to engage their positions. I find it difficult to take seriously any argument that includes that sort of content-free insults aimed at the other side. That some people feel the need to not just promote and advocate for their own preferred play style, but trash people who's tastes differ along the way is not an argument in favor of the likely social atmosphere of Vanguard.
an MMO among the few that aren't for carebears or the lighthearted
n a true MMO world map, loot drops and such don't need instances
You should have to fight it out with others
The "danger" adds a level of fun, excitment and randomness to it
No 'I' statements here. It's a fact that WoW is for the 'lighthearted'. It's a fact that WoW isn't a 'true MMO world'. It's a fact that you should have to 'fight it out with others'.
In my post below, where I said that the sort of players Vanguard attracts seem more dogmatic to me, this is the sort of thing I was referring to. It's not even that this person is particularly agressive or insulting; he's not. But these are very strong statements about the nature of 'good' MMO design that, simply put, don't really seem to reflect the reality of most people's in-game experiences. Certainly, there are a number of people who want more or less what Vanguard is aiming to provide. But there's very little 'should' or 'true' about the difference between WoW and Vanguard. WoW isn't 'Vanguard for carebears' or 'Vanguard with training wheels'. WoW's focus was never on providing the play experience that people who are attracted to Vanguard are looking for.
There's really two issues here.
The first is that Vanguard is not aimed at the same user base as WoW. WoW is clearly a more 'casual' game than EverQuest before it, and Vanguard looks to be designed to be a more sophisticated version of EverQuest's original vision for reward-and-punishment systems, perhaps even harsher. Is the potential playerbase for a game of Vanguard's sort as large as WoW's has proven to be? I've always thought that it wasn't by at least one order of magnitude, perhaps more, and thought that assertions that there was some large community of people that enjoy XP loss and racing to non-instanced raid bosses were flying in the face of all our experiences, player and dev alike, of EQ1. However, if your expectations for population are appropriately calibrated, there's nothing wrong with not having a huge playerbase. If you, as the dev, are satisfied with the artistry and craftsmanship of your game and your game experience, and your players are playing the game they want to be playing (as opposed to killing time waiting for The Next Big Thing), then more power to you. Much as I bash EVE sometimes, there's nothing wrong with it other than offending my (highly personal and idiosyncratic) sense of gaming aesthetics.
The second issue here is the to-me inexplicable assertion, loudly and often repeated, by so many of Vanguard's partisans that their sort of preferred game experience is 'better'. It's true that this sort of 'what I like is better than what you like' is common enough to be banal amongst gamers (even now, wargaming grognards are sneering at us Johnny-come-latelys; nothing we do will ever equal the hate of table-top wargamers for one another). I'm hardly immune myself (see above for my admission of EVE bashing). But certain classes of gamer, and those attracted to the 'difficult' and 'hardcore' aspirations of Vanguard seem very much one of those classes, seem to me to be much worse about it than most. More dogmatic, more aggressive, less tolerant of other perspectives and far, far more strident.
The author has a point about the undead. The Forsaken have suffered horribly, it's true, and they are fighting for their survival against an even worse evil, the Scourge, it's true, but... take a good walk around Undercity sometime. Hang out in the Apothecarium. The Forsaken are evil, and not just a little evil, but a lot evil. From the Big Plan to make a new plauge that will kill everything on the planet to their cultural tendancy towards sadism, the Forsaken are a pretty bad lot.
I disagree that the Horde as a whole are evil; the Tauren, Orcs, and Trolls are 'savage' in many ways, but the dominant themes there are of the classic noble savage, who's brutish ways are part of how they avoid the corruption and decadance of more civilized folk (the human society doesn't come off too well in WoW, with the corruption of Stormwind City leaving the farmers of Westfall to the tender mercies of the Defias, or their abandonment of Darkshire, etc, etc).
Tracking these things around is a pain in the ass, but I like to see them when they pop up. Thanks for a news post that I found Useful and Informative.
Which is true, even if I mostly posted just to spite the other twits in this comment stream.
I also heard that they weren't able to get Freddie Mercury to come in and do vocals for 'Killer Queen'. >_>
Damn you Sega, Damn you!!! Thanks for the "wonderful" games like Night Trap, INXS, and Double Switch but can we get Shadowrun CD ? Of course not... bastards!!!
*sobsobsob* It's based on the Genesis Shadowrun game! But a new story and enhancements! *sobsob* The Genesis Shadowrun was amazingly fun. *waaaaah*
Somehow, I really really don't think that more flying limbs and more photorealistic war crimes will bring the joy and passion for games back to jaded developers....