The thing that has changes is that the PC exclusive game has almost died out. There is of course still WoW and a handful of other tiles, but most of the big titles these days are basically console games first and the PC might get a port later on. This is even true for series that originated on the PC.
Another changed is that the hardcore gaming PC game has died out. The last one that really pushed the envelope was Crysis, but that is already over two years old. All other titles take a much more moderate approach, so you don't really have anything to showcase that will blow a console game completly away, instead you get a bit more resolution and a bit of AA, but nothing revolutionary.
There are of course exceptions, the adventure market is still strong in Europe and in large part PC based and some interesting PC titles come out of Russia and other East Bloc countries. But as far as mainstream goes, thats basically all console gaming these days and PC is reduced to MMORPGs and Popcap games.
The day where consoles and PC where clearly separated seem gone, its no longer Mario and Sonic on your consoles and flightsims and CRPGs on your PC, instead the PC genres got watered down and moved to consoles. While the PC still lacks the colorful fun games.
So, the way you should be looking at it from its actual defined figure in decimal: kilobyte = 2^10, megabyte = 2^20, gigabyte = 2^30.
And exactly which operation you do on a regular basis on a computer gets easier by that? With a 1000 based system *all* the math you do on a daily basis gets easier, as you can compare MB with GB and KB without doing complex conversions beforehand, just move the decimal point and you are done.
They are the only ones benefiting from all this,
Wrong, each and every user out there benefits from this, as it becomes much easier to precisely judge file sizes. The only issues a user might have is that stupid software might display stuff based on 1024, adding a bit of confusion, but as the 1024 system is confusion even if used correctly, nothing really is lost and the software should be fixed.
Even as a programmer I see exactly no point in a 1024 based system, it adds complexity, provides no benefit and when I actually have to do low level stuff, I do it in hexadecimal anyway, not in a weird 1024 based decimal system.
Seriously, nobody would be confused at all if drive manufacturers had used the 2^10 convention from the beginning.
Wrong, 1024 is extremely confusing by nature. For example how many Megabyte are in a Terabyte? Can you tell that without looking it up or calculating it? How many 500KB large images fit on a 4.4GB large DVD?
The problem is that in the 1024 system GB and kB are not just different magnitudes of the same unit, but they are basically completly different units and you have to convert them back to bytes if you ever want to actually find out what is going on. In a 1000 system you just append a few zeros to the end and are done.
The 1,000 byte kilobyte is absolutely useless to anybody who actually has to use it.
With a 1000 byte kilobyte I can tell exactly how much free space I have and how large a given file is. With 1024 byte kilobyte I have basically no idea, as one application might round things to GB while another will show me MB and another will show me raw bytes.
Seriously, go convert 1024 into binary (you know, that system that all computer components, even hard drives, are based on?) and compare that to 1,000 converted to binary and tell me which is easier and more useful.
Both are not very useful when you are dealing with low level computer stuff, as 1000 is just as arbitrary as 1024 is. When you actually work with low level stuff having a power two exponent is far more useful (i.e. 2^8 instead 2^10) and of course you don't write stuff down as decimal to begin with, you use hexadecimal.
You might not have a problem telling how many bytes 64K is, because its a very small number with just a single prefix-jump, but times have changes since then. How many bytes are in a Terabyte? How many kilobytes fit on a 4.4GB DVD? With a 1000 based SI prefix it is trivial to tell. With a 1024 base its near impossible to do the math in the head. Even in the days of the C64 I bet you that people would have assumed that 45KB was ~45000 Bytes, not 46080 Bytes, as again, you don't do the math in your head when you read 45KB, you just assume that its 45000Bytes and a bit more. But how much more exactly, that requires a calculator.
The only reason why 1024 is "nice" is that it allows you to buy a 2GB RAM module, instead of a 2.15GB RAM module, but seriously, in basically all other contexts 1024 is completly meaningless, neither a file systems nor network transfer cares about 1024 and those two things are stuff that each user has to deal with on a daily basis. And even in the RAM context 1024 is completly arbitrary, as every other power of two would work just as good if not better.
Then why don't you use a base-2 notation instead of a base-10 one? Also why don't you use 2^8 as kilo instead of 2^10? Or how about a logarithmic one? Your 2GB RAM upgrade would then become a 31 logarithmic byte upgrade and the upgrade to 4GB RAM would become a 32 logarithmic byte upgrade, makes computer upgrades nice and linear instead of exponential.
The 1024 mess never made sense in the first place, time to get rid of it.
The 1024 thing is perhaps unfortunate, but it exists.
The thing is, 1024 never worked. You don't have people fluently converting between Terabytes and Bytes in their head. Even those that know that 1KB "should be" 1024 bytes have normally absolutely no idea how much bytes are in a Terabyte, even less so how many bytes are in 4.234 terabytes. Sure they can look it up and use a calculator, but whats the point of that? In real life people will generally use the 1KB = 1000B assumption anyway, even if they know it is wrong, because its the only way you can do the math easily in your head.
I think the only reason why 1024 wasn't thrown right out the window from a start is because the error is small enough when you go from Kilo to Mega or from Mega to Giga. But when you go from Terabytes to Bytes you have a 10% error at your hands and is just way to huge.
Using thus using the traditional 1000 step jumps is not only in line with the existing standards, its also the way people think about that stuff anyway.
The only problem I see with this is backward compatibility, if they really go through with this and fix it everywhere, some scripts might break when the output of a command line tool changes. On the other side if they don't do this fix everywhere, they again end up in a mixed world where some tools will say you have 39GB used, while others say its really 37GB.
If so, at this point in the game, there is no point in offering IPv6 because there is nowhere to go.
The main reason why you want IPv6 is so that you could communicate client to client (VoIP, P2P, gaming, etc.). IPv6 provides basically no real advantage if all you want to do is communicate with a big service (youtube, google, etc.), as NAT and proxies mostly work just fine for those cases.
So yeah, ISPs could provide the benifits of IPv6 right now, even when all the big services are still running IPv4 only.
While it is true that humans are often the weak link in the end, there really is absolutely no good reason why clicking on the link should have negative consequences for the user. The whole mess we are in is simply because none of the OSs we use today where build with the security needs of today in mind. Even things like Linux completely fail, as they where build around the concept of protecting users from each other, but not around protecting the user from malicious applications, so once an application runs in the user space it has free access to everything the users has access to, which in a case of a desktop computer means simply everything.
There are a few steps here and there to improve the situation, but we are still far away from having an truly secure OS.
Speaking about coveyor belts and work, that reminds me of Donald Duck's Playground (1984). You have to work and make money in a collection of minigames to buy toys for your nephews. Was pretty nifty game for its time.
Wizard of Wor (1981), a game that basically looks like a Pacman style labyrinth meets space marines. What makes this game brilliant is the pacing, you start out with a large number of small moving targets, then go to a faster moving, but smaller number of targets. The enemies abilities improve too, the last one can teleport, other can get invisible. The game also features COOP gameplay (or VS if you like, as you can shoot your buddy) and music that very effectively underlines the pacing. From all the really old games out there, this one really stands out for me, as its still fun to play for its gameplay, not just for nostalgia.
EF2000 (1995) is what I consider the best flight simulation ever. It might not be quite as realistic as Falcon4.0, but its a lot more accessible. It is also the first game I have seen that simulated a complete dynamic campaign and persistant world. Instead of just having self standing missions, everything was generated dynamically and your action did have actual impact on how the war advanced. To bad that the concept of a dynamic campaign seems to have been lost in time, as it is nowhere to be seen in todays console games.
The Last Express (1997) is an adventure game, but not just your average adventure game, this one happens in (almost) realtime. Unlike other games this one doesn't sit around till the player takes action, but instead all the other characters in the game world actually act on their own. This makes the game world feel much more alive then basically every other game. I still haven't seen anything quite like it and its ironic how even todays "action" games allow you to basically sit around and twiddle your thumbs, you have to walk to the action, the action doesn't come to you.
Honorable Mention (but not really that obscure): Another World (Ico and SotC got a lot of inspiration from this), The Longest Journey (adventure with the best storytelling ever), Operation Flashpoint (best tactic shooter/warsim around), Syndicate (kind of realtime XCom:UFO), Strike Commander (storyline meets flightsim), Mech Warrior 2 and 3 (mech sim, not watered down mech action game).
This demonstrates an abuse of open source philosophy.
The source code is still out there, that they are doing a closed source fork doesn't take it away. Also lets not forget that its their code, this is not a hostile overtake of somebody else's code base, but simply a relicensing of their own hard work. You can't really fault them for trying to make some money with the stuff that they spend years developing. And while I can't speak about Nexuiz, my experience with the "community" is rather mixed, every now and then you will get contribution that will blow you away, but most of the time you just end up doing all the hard work and do all the end user support in addition and gain absolutely nothing from it. Its not like you can just put a random idea on sourceforce.net and people fill flock over in the dozens to implement it for you.
The whole point of having a patent on something is to use it in the market place and license it to others so that you can make money off of it
Which is exactly what the SawStop guys have done in this case, only problem was that the other manufacturers refused to license the safety technology or develop a competing product serving a similar purpose. The lawsuit is simply the result of that, as somebody ended up cutting of his fingers, while safety technology existed in the marketplace that could have avoided it.
It is very difficult to hurt yourself with a table saw while following all the safety rules, and common sense.
Up to 60'000 table saw injuries a year should be indication enough that the current safety rules are either not good enough or not practical enough to be used by everybody in each and every situation.
... Take the airbag that deploys in a car to help prevent death or serious injury in an automobile accident...
You're sure you're not confusing the airbag with a seatbelt? The seatbelt is a very good safety device and probably saved many, many lives.
The airbag, though, is arguably an expensive gadget that maimed and killed quite a few people. How does it prevent death or serious injury?
Especially in US, this low-yield bomb is quite dangerous if you happen to be a short driver or wear glasses. If I knew how to disable it in my car, I would do it; I don't like the prospect of getting blind just because the frigging airbag deployed from a mild bump...
How does it prevent death or serious injury?
It prevents your head from smashing into the steering wheel.
The airbag, though, is arguably an expensive gadget that maimed and killed quite a few people.
Wikipedia lists 175 killed by airbags and 6377 saved by them, quite a good trade-off. Also security of airbags is constantly improving, so a current generation airbag is much more secure then a generation one airbag. And you won't go blind from an airbag.
People need to take responsibility for their actions.
How about companies taking responsibility for the products they produce? If you have a product that on a regular basis cuts of fingers, you should do something about it, not just sit back and blame the user.
This feeling that "the government" or "the law" must protect the idiots from themselves has got to stop.
Why? When it is cheaper to have safety technology then dealing with the economic cost of injury it makes perfect sense to make the safety mechanism mandatory. I don't quite see the point in having the "freedom" to cut of my fingers by accident. And hey, when you want to do it intentionally, you can still do it with a SawStop, the safety can be disabled.
Speaking the line you've selected doesn't make sense since you already know what the content is and it stops the game from advancing for a few seconds
It makes perfect sense, LucasArts adventures have been doing that since forever, even before they had speech, and it never was an issue, quite the opposite. And even if you don't like that, just do it like The Dig, Dreamfall or Mass Effect, let the user select the intention/topic of the dialog instead of the exact wording, gives you less reading for the user and more talking for the characters and thus better and more natural voice acting.
Having a mute hero always felt for me like having a piece of story telling missing from a game.
There is a much better solution: Do Dub, but let the user select the language. See Heavy Rain for example, not only does the game come with quite a handful of languages, it also lets you select the language of the voice acting, the subtitles and the menu independently, something that is still missing in quite a few games. Some PC games (Mass Effect) even require a full reinstall just to change the language, which is pretty stupid. Missing languages due to lack of storage on DVDs is also pretty annoying, the Xbox360 version of Mass Effect for example only includes a single language, something that could be solved with downloadable language packs, but those hardly ever happen.
When developing a game set in a specific foreign country, take a hint from Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ -- do it in that country's language.
Depends, it can often times be fun and authenticity, but lets not forget that most of the time all the actual characters in that story spoke that language and understood it quite well, it wasn't forgein for them, so using a foreign language introduces an alien element that isn't really part of the story.
Same here. The trouble most of the time isn't the voice acting, but the technical side of stuff. Having the same lines repeated over and over again gets annoying and breaks the immersion, no matter how good the acting on that specific line is. Having a mute hero and talking NPCs also leads to very unnatural dialogs. Overuse of the same voice actor with the same voice in different games or using the same voice for different characters in the same game is also a thing that should be avoided.
Another very annoying thing is inconsistent dubbing. For example the voice acting itself in both The Longest Journey and TLJ:Dreamfall was very good, even the translation when taken on its own was good. Where they failed is in making the translation match. Key concepts of the game world are described by difference words in both games (Balance vs Gleichgewicht) and its extremely annoying, as you notice that error a lot and it wreaks the immersion each time.
But again, all this is technical stuff that could be avoided with better planing, not something that is the fault of the acting itself.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing that has changes is that the PC exclusive game has almost died out. There is of course still WoW and a handful of other tiles, but most of the big titles these days are basically console games first and the PC might get a port later on. This is even true for series that originated on the PC.
Another changed is that the hardcore gaming PC game has died out. The last one that really pushed the envelope was Crysis, but that is already over two years old. All other titles take a much more moderate approach, so you don't really have anything to showcase that will blow a console game completly away, instead you get a bit more resolution and a bit of AA, but nothing revolutionary.
There are of course exceptions, the adventure market is still strong in Europe and in large part PC based and some interesting PC titles come out of Russia and other East Bloc countries. But as far as mainstream goes, thats basically all console gaming these days and PC is reduced to MMORPGs and Popcap games.
The day where consoles and PC where clearly separated seem gone, its no longer Mario and Sonic on your consoles and flightsims and CRPGs on your PC, instead the PC genres got watered down and moved to consoles. While the PC still lacks the colorful fun games.
So, the way you should be looking at it from its actual defined figure in decimal: kilobyte = 2^10, megabyte = 2^20, gigabyte = 2^30.
And exactly which operation you do on a regular basis on a computer gets easier by that? With a 1000 based system *all* the math you do on a daily basis gets easier, as you can compare MB with GB and KB without doing complex conversions beforehand, just move the decimal point and you are done.
They are the only ones benefiting from all this,
Wrong, each and every user out there benefits from this, as it becomes much easier to precisely judge file sizes. The only issues a user might have is that stupid software might display stuff based on 1024, adding a bit of confusion, but as the 1024 system is confusion even if used correctly, nothing really is lost and the software should be fixed.
Even as a programmer I see exactly no point in a 1024 based system, it adds complexity, provides no benefit and when I actually have to do low level stuff, I do it in hexadecimal anyway, not in a weird 1024 based decimal system.
Seriously, nobody would be confused at all if drive manufacturers had used the 2^10 convention from the beginning.
Wrong, 1024 is extremely confusing by nature. For example how many Megabyte are in a Terabyte? Can you tell that without looking it up or calculating it? How many 500KB large images fit on a 4.4GB large DVD?
The problem is that in the 1024 system GB and kB are not just different magnitudes of the same unit, but they are basically completly different units and you have to convert them back to bytes if you ever want to actually find out what is going on. In a 1000 system you just append a few zeros to the end and are done.
The 1,000 byte kilobyte is absolutely useless to anybody who actually has to use it.
With a 1000 byte kilobyte I can tell exactly how much free space I have and how large a given file is. With 1024 byte kilobyte I have basically no idea, as one application might round things to GB while another will show me MB and another will show me raw bytes.
Seriously, go convert 1024 into binary (you know, that system that all computer components, even hard drives, are based on?) and compare that to 1,000 converted to binary and tell me which is easier and more useful.
Both are not very useful when you are dealing with low level computer stuff, as 1000 is just as arbitrary as 1024 is. When you actually work with low level stuff having a power two exponent is far more useful (i.e. 2^8 instead 2^10) and of course you don't write stuff down as decimal to begin with, you use hexadecimal.
You might not have a problem telling how many bytes 64K is, because its a very small number with just a single prefix-jump, but times have changes since then. How many bytes are in a Terabyte? How many kilobytes fit on a 4.4GB DVD? With a 1000 based SI prefix it is trivial to tell. With a 1024 base its near impossible to do the math in the head. Even in the days of the C64 I bet you that people would have assumed that 45KB was ~45000 Bytes, not 46080 Bytes, as again, you don't do the math in your head when you read 45KB, you just assume that its 45000Bytes and a bit more. But how much more exactly, that requires a calculator.
The only reason why 1024 is "nice" is that it allows you to buy a 2GB RAM module, instead of a 2.15GB RAM module, but seriously, in basically all other contexts 1024 is completly meaningless, neither a file systems nor network transfer cares about 1024 and those two things are stuff that each user has to deal with on a daily basis. And even in the RAM context 1024 is completly arbitrary, as every other power of two would work just as good if not better.
Then why don't you use a base-2 notation instead of a base-10 one? Also why don't you use 2^8 as kilo instead of 2^10? Or how about a logarithmic one? Your 2GB RAM upgrade would then become a 31 logarithmic byte upgrade and the upgrade to 4GB RAM would become a 32 logarithmic byte upgrade, makes computer upgrades nice and linear instead of exponential.
The 1024 mess never made sense in the first place, time to get rid of it.
The 1024 thing is perhaps unfortunate, but it exists.
The thing is, 1024 never worked. You don't have people fluently converting between Terabytes and Bytes in their head. Even those that know that 1KB "should be" 1024 bytes have normally absolutely no idea how much bytes are in a Terabyte, even less so how many bytes are in 4.234 terabytes. Sure they can look it up and use a calculator, but whats the point of that? In real life people will generally use the 1KB = 1000B assumption anyway, even if they know it is wrong, because its the only way you can do the math easily in your head.
I think the only reason why 1024 wasn't thrown right out the window from a start is because the error is small enough when you go from Kilo to Mega or from Mega to Giga. But when you go from Terabytes to Bytes you have a 10% error at your hands and is just way to huge.
Using thus using the traditional 1000 step jumps is not only in line with the existing standards, its also the way people think about that stuff anyway.
The only problem I see with this is backward compatibility, if they really go through with this and fix it everywhere, some scripts might break when the output of a command line tool changes. On the other side if they don't do this fix everywhere, they again end up in a mixed world where some tools will say you have 39GB used, while others say its really 37GB.
Why does 1024 bytes make sense? Whats special about 1024? Why not 64 or 32 or any other arbitary power of two? Why exactly 1024?
If so, at this point in the game, there is no point in offering IPv6 because there is nowhere to go.
The main reason why you want IPv6 is so that you could communicate client to client (VoIP, P2P, gaming, etc.). IPv6 provides basically no real advantage if all you want to do is communicate with a big service (youtube, google, etc.), as NAT and proxies mostly work just fine for those cases.
So yeah, ISPs could provide the benifits of IPv6 right now, even when all the big services are still running IPv4 only.
While it is true that humans are often the weak link in the end, there really is absolutely no good reason why clicking on the link should have negative consequences for the user. The whole mess we are in is simply because none of the OSs we use today where build with the security needs of today in mind. Even things like Linux completely fail, as they where build around the concept of protecting users from each other, but not around protecting the user from malicious applications, so once an application runs in the user space it has free access to everything the users has access to, which in a case of a desktop computer means simply everything.
There are a few steps here and there to improve the situation, but we are still far away from having an truly secure OS.
Speaking about coveyor belts and work, that reminds me of Donald Duck's Playground (1984). You have to work and make money in a collection of minigames to buy toys for your nephews. Was pretty nifty game for its time.
Wizard of Wor (1981), a game that basically looks like a Pacman style labyrinth meets space marines. What makes this game brilliant is the pacing, you start out with a large number of small moving targets, then go to a faster moving, but smaller number of targets. The enemies abilities improve too, the last one can teleport, other can get invisible. The game also features COOP gameplay (or VS if you like, as you can shoot your buddy) and music that very effectively underlines the pacing. From all the really old games out there, this one really stands out for me, as its still fun to play for its gameplay, not just for nostalgia.
EF2000 (1995) is what I consider the best flight simulation ever. It might not be quite as realistic as Falcon4.0, but its a lot more accessible. It is also the first game I have seen that simulated a complete dynamic campaign and persistant world. Instead of just having self standing missions, everything was generated dynamically and your action did have actual impact on how the war advanced. To bad that the concept of a dynamic campaign seems to have been lost in time, as it is nowhere to be seen in todays console games.
The Last Express (1997) is an adventure game, but not just your average adventure game, this one happens in (almost) realtime. Unlike other games this one doesn't sit around till the player takes action, but instead all the other characters in the game world actually act on their own. This makes the game world feel much more alive then basically every other game. I still haven't seen anything quite like it and its ironic how even todays "action" games allow you to basically sit around and twiddle your thumbs, you have to walk to the action, the action doesn't come to you.
Honorable Mention (but not really that obscure): Another World (Ico and SotC got a lot of inspiration from this), The Longest Journey (adventure with the best storytelling ever), Operation Flashpoint (best tactic shooter/warsim around), Syndicate (kind of realtime XCom:UFO), Strike Commander (storyline meets flightsim), Mech Warrior 2 and 3 (mech sim, not watered down mech action game).
Try Magic Carpet, that had an auto-stereogram mode, fun to toy around with, but not really practical.
This demonstrates an abuse of open source philosophy.
The source code is still out there, that they are doing a closed source fork doesn't take it away. Also lets not forget that its their code, this is not a hostile overtake of somebody else's code base, but simply a relicensing of their own hard work. You can't really fault them for trying to make some money with the stuff that they spend years developing. And while I can't speak about Nexuiz, my experience with the "community" is rather mixed, every now and then you will get contribution that will blow you away, but most of the time you just end up doing all the hard work and do all the end user support in addition and gain absolutely nothing from it. Its not like you can just put a random idea on sourceforce.net and people fill flock over in the dozens to implement it for you.
The whole point of having a patent on something is to use it in the market place and license it to others so that you can make money off of it
Which is exactly what the SawStop guys have done in this case, only problem was that the other manufacturers refused to license the safety technology or develop a competing product serving a similar purpose. The lawsuit is simply the result of that, as somebody ended up cutting of his fingers, while safety technology existed in the marketplace that could have avoided it.
It is very difficult to hurt yourself with a table saw while following all the safety rules, and common sense.
Up to 60'000 table saw injuries a year should be indication enough that the current safety rules are either not good enough or not practical enough to be used by everybody in each and every situation.
... Take the airbag that deploys in a car to help prevent death or serious injury in an automobile accident...
You're sure you're not confusing the airbag with a seatbelt? The seatbelt is a very good safety device and probably saved many, many lives.
The airbag, though, is arguably an expensive gadget that maimed and killed quite a few people. How does it prevent death or serious injury?
Especially in US, this low-yield bomb is quite dangerous if you happen to be a short driver or wear glasses. If I knew how to disable it in my car, I would do it; I don't like the prospect of getting blind just because the frigging airbag deployed from a mild bump...
How does it prevent death or serious injury?
It prevents your head from smashing into the steering wheel.
The airbag, though, is arguably an expensive gadget that maimed and killed quite a few people.
Wikipedia lists 175 killed by airbags and 6377 saved by them, quite a good trade-off. Also security of airbags is constantly improving, so a current generation airbag is much more secure then a generation one airbag. And you won't go blind from an airbag.
People need to take responsibility for their actions.
How about companies taking responsibility for the products they produce? If you have a product that on a regular basis cuts of fingers, you should do something about it, not just sit back and blame the user.
This feeling that "the government" or "the law" must protect the idiots from themselves has got to stop.
Why? When it is cheaper to have safety technology then dealing with the economic cost of injury it makes perfect sense to make the safety mechanism mandatory. I don't quite see the point in having the "freedom" to cut of my fingers by accident. And hey, when you want to do it intentionally, you can still do it with a SawStop, the safety can be disabled.
Since I suppose that 133ms + delay from your screen is quite noticeable.
The 133ms include the delay from the display, so its not that bad.
Too bad if you're sword fighting with a friend, 133 ms can make the difference between living or having your head roll on the floor!
When both are using Move, both have to deal with the lag, so there is no difference.
The problem isn't that Youtube doesn't know who uploads stuff, but that they can't tell if the person that is uploading stuff is authorized to do so.
The GM display is for augmented reality, highlighting the road, signs, etc. not just displaying your speed.
As the video shows they are doing active head and eye tracking of the drivers position in space and adjust the image accordingly.
Speaking the line you've selected doesn't make sense since you already know what the content is and it stops the game from advancing for a few seconds
It makes perfect sense, LucasArts adventures have been doing that since forever, even before they had speech, and it never was an issue, quite the opposite. And even if you don't like that, just do it like The Dig, Dreamfall or Mass Effect, let the user select the intention/topic of the dialog instead of the exact wording, gives you less reading for the user and more talking for the characters and thus better and more natural voice acting.
Having a mute hero always felt for me like having a piece of story telling missing from a game.
There is a much better solution: Do Dub, but let the user select the language. See Heavy Rain for example, not only does the game come with quite a handful of languages, it also lets you select the language of the voice acting, the subtitles and the menu independently, something that is still missing in quite a few games. Some PC games (Mass Effect) even require a full reinstall just to change the language, which is pretty stupid. Missing languages due to lack of storage on DVDs is also pretty annoying, the Xbox360 version of Mass Effect for example only includes a single language, something that could be solved with downloadable language packs, but those hardly ever happen.
When developing a game set in a specific foreign country, take a hint from Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ -- do it in that country's language.
Depends, it can often times be fun and authenticity, but lets not forget that most of the time all the actual characters in that story spoke that language and understood it quite well, it wasn't forgein for them, so using a foreign language introduces an alien element that isn't really part of the story.
Same here. The trouble most of the time isn't the voice acting, but the technical side of stuff. Having the same lines repeated over and over again gets annoying and breaks the immersion, no matter how good the acting on that specific line is. Having a mute hero and talking NPCs also leads to very unnatural dialogs. Overuse of the same voice actor with the same voice in different games or using the same voice for different characters in the same game is also a thing that should be avoided.
Another very annoying thing is inconsistent dubbing. For example the voice acting itself in both The Longest Journey and TLJ:Dreamfall was very good, even the translation when taken on its own was good. Where they failed is in making the translation match. Key concepts of the game world are described by difference words in both games (Balance vs Gleichgewicht) and its extremely annoying, as you notice that error a lot and it wreaks the immersion each time.
But again, all this is technical stuff that could be avoided with better planing, not something that is the fault of the acting itself.