Old people always complain that nowadays X just isn't like it was in the olden days. To them it may very well seem true but there is a logical problem with their belief.
If everything always gets worse then by now something must be truly goddamn awfull. Sure TV hasn't been around long enough but how about theatre? If every generation theatre, wich has been around for hundreds of years in the current form, must by now be truly nasty./me looks at some "art" productions. Hmmm, maybe those oldies are right after all.
When you are young anything you experience is still new and fresh and original. That funny "christmas on 42nd street" episode in your favorite sitcom is hilarious. When you get older and you see the 100th sitcom do the same old routine you are probably not nearly as amused.
As a kid I read some of my mothers harlequin novels. Yeah yeah, I know. But were they really that bad compared to the sci-fi and fantasy trash I was reading? Sure I can also claim to have read the classics at the time but so can my mother, just that both of us topped them off with a nice layer of fluff. I just read them because I was curious and because I was bored and because, well lets be honest here, some of them were rather steamy.
They weren't all bad but after I read my mom's favorites, the pre-selected ones, I found out that the majority of them were just bleh. The same old stuff recycled and rewarmed, names and places changed but the same old story.
Exactly the same as all those paint by numbers sitcoms that share all the same episodes. "Christmas on 42nd street wich a lead character that they are special to the others in a heartwarming episode", "the three ghosts of christmas that get a lead character to behave better for the split second left at the end of the episode", "the estranged parent who left the lead character and now comes back and makes up", etc etc.
The first time you see it, it is original, the 100th time it is not.
The same is true for movies. Was the Doom movie really that bad or was it just bad to us old people because we had seen it all before. I at time felt like I was watching a remake of Southern Comfort and in general every "ten little indians" horror movie.
I think it is one of the reasons so many geeks like anime/manga. Always on the look out for something fresh japense entertainment at least for while does offer that. Granted they got the exact same staple episodes but at least for a while it will all seem fresh and new and exciting.
Entertainment ain't anyworse now then it has ever been. There has always been bad stuff around, just examine your own favorites of your youth, but as you get older you will notice more and more how much of entertainment is the same old crap in a new wrapper. You might then make the mistake of looking at stuff from before your time and think that things were so much better but that is just because the old stuff is still new to you. If you really went to look at all the movies from say the 1940's you would quickly notice that an awfull lot of it is just as steaming a pile of crap as the majority of today's movies.
Movies ain't getting worse, you are getting more critical. It is just the disease of getting old, but don't worry a cure is around. It is called death. Something new and exciting to look forward to eh?
Currently a scandal in The Netherlands, although far smaller, is pretty similar. In Amsterdam a new complex involving a shopping area, apartments and a plaza build over an underground parking garage has been evacuated because of fear of collapse. It was just completed but now it appears that it was not build according to design specifications.
The exact story is still being discovered but it seems that the original builder was replaced by someone cheaper who cut corners.
In itself bad enough but stories are starting to emerge that this kind of stuff has been going on all over. Not a real suprise, we have had a couple of incidents of collapsing balconies because of shoddy building but because this scandale is so public the stories off other scandals also gets more attention.
Then again it is nothing new. Every time there is a disaster like an earth quake anywhere in the world you will learn that some building collapsed because the builder did not follow regulations or even the blueprint.
Cost cutting is almost everytime the reason and who is to blame for that? Well us. We want our buildings build as cheaply and as fast as possible so we hire the guy with the lowest contract and then expect to get quality.
Nobody on the world would expect a ten dollar watch to have the same quality as a ten thousand dollar watch so why do we expect the guy who can do the job for a million to be as good as the one who wants two million?
The fact that a live was lost in this Boston incident is tragic. That it involved such a god awfull amount of money makes it however fortuanlly headline worthy. If we a truly upset about this we will demand more and better inspection of every building project and demand very stiff penalties for those who ignore regulations. Oh and we won't mind paying extra for it.
Did you hear just hear that massive sound of everyone taking a step back? Yup, we want the best but at the least cost. That is how it is supposed to work in a free market. Sadly it doesn't.
Shoddy building by the lowest bidder is nothing new. Just because this one involves a costly project that has already been controversial does not make it new. Shoddy building will go on as long as contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder.
But why doesn't it work to go for the lowest bid? Because it is an ongoing race. There is always another party who wants the contract who is just going to have to find some way to lower costs. At a given point there is no more fat to trim and you have to start cutting in essentials. Think of it as anorexia. When all the fat is gone you can only loose weight by reducing vital organs and tissues until finally you die. In losing weight you need to know the limit, the point were you simply cannot loose weight anymore. In lowering cost you also need to know that limit. Were any further cost savings are coming from critical areas like following the blueprint to the letter, proper inspection and using the right materials. It can be as simple a something as continueing work on days to hot/cold/humid for some materials to properly set. A great cost saving but a gigantic risk.
This woman paid the price for our penny pinching and the great joke? Now the costs are going to be much higher to us all then if the job had been done right by the non-lowest bidder in the first place. Yet how much do you want to bet that in a few years time the next boston city goverment contract will again go to the lowest bidder?
How the fuck did this bug go unfixed for so long? It to me sounds to much like the old MS sale strategy of saying "Just wait please, do not buy X now, our product will be much better in the future."
Yes bugs happen, yes vista is still in beta but rather then just admit "vista is still a buggy piece of crap software that can't even be used properly by its own engineers" they tell us to sit and wait because we can trust them to fix it.
Think of the classic sword fights you see in the movies, now think of the classic gunfight eh fights you see in the movies. Notice a difference? The sword fights, last! They take time. The hero spots the opponent, closes, parries, thrusts, dodges and finally makes the kill.
The gunfight is far faster, spot, shoot, kill.
While in real life a hit with a broadsword is probably as much an instant kill as a bullet in the head, movies have made us believe that sword fights last minutes while gunfights are over in a matter of seconds.
Now take a look at the various MMORPG's games. Because of the general lack of AI or anything approaching tactics let alone strategy most fights are about wearing down the enemies hitpoints slowly in a prolonged duel. No instant kills allowed. It just doesn't fit in the gameplay.
SWG offcourse had guns and believe me that after years of movies and books and other star wars games it came as something of a shock to find that stormtroopers do not die instantly if you hit them with a blaster shot. Neither two, nor three, nor five. In fact during a period before the dreaded CU/NGE debacle you had roving bands of stormies that had some very big brothers that could whoop your ass. But apperently not spot you sniping their platoon down one by one. Well when I say sniping I mean firing away at their heads with concealed shot for about five to ten minutes a piece.
Not that the melee combat was any better but at least that seems acceptable. You can parry my sword blows but how exactly do you stop an energy bolt straight between the eyes? It gets Jagged Alliance kind of silly where you shoot somebody with a machine gun at point blank range, only somehow manage to hit them once, in the head and they still fight with 94% of their health gone in the next round. WTF? Any notion of suspense of disbelief is gone. You are in a spreadsheet with pretty picture mate. Not fighting the evil empire. Or rebel scum.
The same problems occurs ofcourse in KOTOR with the damn lightsabers. You get this cool weapon that can slice through anything except it seems clothes, swords and any piece of armour. That wasn't the deal!
Guns don't work in current MMORPG gameplay. For instant kills to work you need more enemies, they need to be more intelligent (how many MMORPG's are there were the enemy is even capable of seeking cover?) and you need far better code for instance collesion detection to avoid people targetting and shooting through walls. Already a pain with swordfights it could make gunfights with instant kill even more frustating.
Oh and if you add instant kill on the enemies, do you add it on the player? A modern war based MMORPG would suck for the point guy. Spend an hour getting ready to get to the quest area only to be ambushed and get a bullet in face and be forced to respawn.
Your argument of aloneness doesn't ring true to me. Star Trek is very much a group off people, especially the original series, while say the entire TES series of games (Oblivion) is very very lonely.
People accept a resistance to fire. They do not accept a resistance to hot lead. MMORPG structure at the moment just can't do gunfights. Hell, single games can barely do it. FEAR and that old Lucasarts cowboy game are about the only games I remember where there was movie style gunfights going on.
Nintendo did. They apparently didn't think it was important enough. The poster above you also mentions this and yes it is probably true, but by Nintendo's own design. And they knew about the passkey system since the GBA so why not design the DS differently?
The two games are totally different. That is the big upset. The problem for pre-nge fans is that they got no other game to go to. The post-nge fans do. Almost every other MMORPG is like it. Prebaked character classes, loot based economy, twitch to make up for lack of skill.
That I think is where SWG failed, it never succeeded in making clear what market it was for. It would like a bunch of Counterstrike fans wandering into a Jagged Alliance session and sticking around until Jagged Alliance became a bad counterstrike clone.
If you thought the game after the NGE was fun (or indeed post CU) then you must have absolutly hated the game before. So why? Because it was star wars?
SWG failed because they changed everything about the game. The jedi class had nothing to do with it. Only that the kind of people to get a kick out of being a leet class were not the type who should have been in SWG. The game called for more balanced players. If you want a score to show how good you are you need a system like WoW and EQ has.
But yeah, griefers suck. No matter if you are on their side or not. Let others play their game.
Why do people still care about SWG, a games that started bugged and to the outsiders at least seems to only get more buggy over the years.
There is a game called Locomotion, a half-assed sequel to the game Transport Tycoon, by Chris Sawyer. It is not perfect. In some ways it is worse then its parent. It is a tycoon game allowing you to build a road, rail, sea and air transport network. The original had a dedicated, still does, following but after a couple of years the game for me was finished. The graphics too old, and the gameplay too restricted by the limited engine.
Some of the gameplay limits (station size, train length, annoying breakdown) wear removed with patches but in the end TT and its fan made offspring are just too old.
Locomotion has at least better graphics but I am again running into the fact that Chris Sawyer has a very different idea about games then I would like. His eternal obsession with things wearing down was easily patched (no dear Chris, in real life you do not have to replace a train every 3 years just to keep it running. Trains 100 years old still run reliably.)
But the extremely limited signalling, morronic path-finding and restricted station layout are once again turning me off from the game. Not because I don't want to play anymore but because I can't play the game I want to play it.
What does this have to do with SWG? Well not much except that TT and indeed Locomotion are by any outsiders as dead a horse as you can find. So why still flog it?
Simple. BECAUSE THERE HAS BEEN NOTHING TO REPLACE IT
SWG for all its faults still stands alone. Pre-CU and certainly Pre-NGE Star Wars Galaxies is a unique game, not just in gameplay terms but also because Sony is one of the few online companies who do not think everyone in the world owns a credit card.
I swear to god that the next person who recommends Eve Online (Credit card only) to me, I will call him a NGE-developer. If you then point out that I could always buy a pre-paid card for Eve Online (only buyable from stores that only accept credit cards) or use paypal (dutch paypal only accepts credit cards) I am going to call them a SWG bug tester.
One thing that made SWG standout was its proffesion system. You didn't have one. Rather most new players would take all the base proffesions available and dabble in each, gaining experience and spending their limited (fixed) amount of skillpoints on getting better in their proffesions. So a new player would have some markmanship (ranged), melee, scout (harvesting from animals), crafting (turning harvested stuff into goodies), medic (turning dead animals into goodies to cure ouchies), maybe even a bit of entertainer to rest your mind and look at your avatars thight ass in a skimpy dress. Oh was that just me?
NGE changed this. It is now exactly like Everquest 1-2, WoW and indeed every goddamn Korean MMORPG. If I wanted to play any of them, I would. SWG was the one I stuck with longest.
But so what? You in the end still had to choose a profession, sacrificing some lesser ones to free skillpoints so you could advance in others. Yes. Correct. BUT if you ever tired of your chosen proffesion you could easily learn a new one. Tired of melee, pick up some pistol skills.
Ah but you can do that in other MMORPG's, just start a new character. But no. In SWG, you didn't have to do that. You would just slowly migrate from your old job, loosing skills and learn new ones. You would still have the same name, still be the same person.
The impact of only being allowed one character per server should not be underestimated. Many a person learned the hardway that this means you can be tracked far more easily, be an asshole and get ignored and you are ignored until you delete your character and restart a new one.
But the most important one for me was that you didn't have to do all the beginners stuff again. Your character respecced from swordsman to pistoleer did not have to get the Point of Interest badges again. In everquest 2 I go
People keep cracking the PSP to run their own games/programs, the so called homebrew scene. Wether sony is upset with them is up for debate. An offspin of this however is that cracked PSP's can also play ripped commercial games and Sony most definitly is against this.
The DS has also been cracked and it too can be used to play ripped commercial games.
The difference is that running cracked games is a software problem on the PSP were on the DS you need some special hardware that you can't buy just anywhere. Al you need to play a ripped PSP game is a big memory card, like say the ones sold by sony itself or even included with the PSP in the gigapack.
It seems pretty clear that Sony is slowly releasing updates each update giving you a goodie but it will also fix the security hole that allows you to play non-sony approved content on the PSP.
In itself it is nothing new, some games with frequent updates could possible be doing the same trick. You want our bug fix? Better have the original exe handy. How many crackers are willing to crack a game again and again? With the PSP it is even better. Each time you crack it you run a risk of bricking it.
So why doesn't Nintendo upgrade its hardware since they been cracked as well? Well they did. I think with the DS Lite they included a new firmware and if you got one of those the old passkeys (the bit of hardware that allows you to play unofficial games) don't work anymore. No problem you pirate. New ones are available.
Still they cost money, it is a physical product and that means somebody wants money for making it, perhaps this reduces the piracy. Most people do not have a huge library of games. If you only want handfull of games you are not going to spend 150 euro in a dodgy online store to run games that run almost perfectly when you can get the games you want for the same amount guarenteed to work from a regular store.
Second is market differences, perhaps the people who want to play nintendogz or brain age are less likely to pirate then say GTA Liberty City players?
What is odd is that because DS games are typically much smaller that piracy actually is easier. If you want you could easily store hundreds of GBA and DS games on a single memory card. Most PSP games are to big to fit in the 1gb memory sticks.
The DS is capable of downloading content from the net so it should be able to update. Maybe it does. Doubt it, someone would have found out by now but just because they haven't doesn't mean they can't.
The naive idea is that Nintendo doesn't do this to be nice to its customers. Yeah right, this could only be considered an option by the insane or those to young to remember the Nintendo before Sony kicked them in the nuts with the PS.
More likely is that Nintendo doesn't consider it a big enough threath.
This is probably combined with not having the possibility to offer goodies to get people to upgrade. Sony is running a risk that people who would buy legal games, like me, might not buy a game if it requires me to upgrade and not use my homebrew anymore. It also runs the risk that it might break one of its own games.
In short it is all about piracy and how companies attempt to deal with this. Sony is more aggressive in its attempts but Nintendo too changes its firmware when it sees an opportunity.
YOU ruined SWG. Not Raplh Koster. You soloed everything as the anti-social being you are. He merely made it possible. He is a person who believes in personal liberty. One of those idiots who believes that if you let people to their own devices they will do the right thing. Yeah right.
In reality, and UO/SWG and the net in general prove this every day, people can barely be forced to not be complete assholes at gunpoint. People just ain't nice unless there is someone standing behind them with a very big stick. Online were often there is no way for the primitive goverment of revenge, anarachy rules and most people do not like anarachy. If we did we would have more of it.
SWG had a job system and an economy, if it had played out in the idealist vision of liberatarion Raplh Koster then their would have been very few if any UBER-specced out players. You would probably have sacrificed some of your skillpoints to be part of the supply chain. Your combat character would still have had scout skills to harvest or prospecting skills to keep the economy floating. This did not work out. If you were able to solo everything in the game it meant you were one of the people who depended entirely on other more balanced players to give you the equipment to do so.
Many of the crafters I knew got utterly fed up with the constant demand by the soloers for supplies yet being unable to get any of the base ingredients of them.
other systems instead emerged, not a huge economy with everyone chipping in but a specialised one with just a handfull of people controlling most production. For a long time I played on servers were there would be only 1 or 2 chefs to keep everyone supplied, them relying on a small core off players to keep things rolling. It didn't take much to upset this. One scout leaving the game lead on one server to a situation were you could only get supplies if you first brought the ingredients.
WoW works because it is far more restricted. It just doesn't give players the freedom to go screw their own game up.
Open ended games wether that is The Sims or Oblivion often require of the player to limit himselfe. To not give yourselve an uber character but rather to limit yourselve in the spirit of gameplay. Yes the best furniture will give you the best stats in the Sims but go ahead and limit yourselve to cheapo stuff to play a game off a students live. Do not just give yourselve some cheat cash so you can finally buy that toilet that actually allows your sim not to spend half of each day on the can.
Same with Oblivion, you know you don't actually have to wear the armour with the best stats, you could actually just choose the one that looks good. The one that best fits your character.
In the old grand prix games you could try regular overtaking and not the slam them up the tailpipe to get them out of the way style of racing.
But people don't do that. In real life people put on godmode and then complain nothing is a challenge.
SWG was ruined by a combination of incomplete design and players not "getting it". Yes that players didn't get it was part of the incomplete design error.
By allowing people to "stack" multiple combat proffesions they allowed players to become too powerfull for the game, helped by errors in armors and buffs, and then made sure to only add content for those uber-specced players like the corvette and the death watch bunker, wich were not doable by non-template stackers.
But nobody forced the playing originally to stack their templates. They just gave you the gun, you used it.
The gamecube was the cheapest of the last generations as well, and at least as far as I can see the PS2 was the most expensive of the last generation too. Yet of the last genetation you own the most expensive console, not the cheapest. mmm, so why is this generation different?
Please remember your history, if price has never mattered before why should it now? I am not saying that the PS3 will be a success. I just don't think price will be the deciding factor. Or maybe my PC gaming has just made me think that 600 euro's for a system is not that expensive.
That is MS being fucked up the ass by the DS. It got to hurt that an older handheld has not only already outsold your optomistic sales predictions but that even their sales preditictions for the same term are higher. No, I am not a nintendo fanboy. I just like handhelds because they allow me to game where I can't play real games because PC's are so difficult to fit in your pocket. For all the excitement about Wii if you read the previews at a site like eurogamer you might find very few games to get that excited about. Same for the PS3 and the 360 btw. Only 360 game I would like to play is oblivion and that is a superior on the PC.
But still, the fact remains that this handheld that is just a stopgap between the GBA and whatever will come next is outselling everyone else. While only a handfull of games appeal to me it might be true that Nintendo has tapped that mythic casual gamer pool. Yes it is a sad day for us fans of Planescape torment, Scumm and System Shock fans when Nintendogz sells 6 million units but the sign was on the wall ever since The Sims became a record breaker.
It can't be a coincedence that the Gameboy line is the only computer to come in pink. I blame women for the death of the old Sierra and Lucasarts and the demise of Looking Glass.
Do NOT let them WIN! Buy your 360 and it endless horde of mindless FPSes today and make a stand against the pink DS owners. No to social gaming and up with testosterone. It is fragged or be hugged. Buy a copy of DOA beachball today and let the other half of the world know what gaming is all about.
Not that they don't know. Anyone ever notice how all the erotic mods for Morrowind/Oblivion and Never Winter Nights are often made by women? Who would have thought it, the weaker sex is even more obsessed with it then we are. Makes sense, we got to stop to scratch, they can keep thinking of it 24/7
Well my phone does get warm if I use all its features and my iPod sure warms up when it plays video and my PSP and DS both can get a bit warm if played in their case. (Why yes I am a gadget whore)
Presumably the CPU in larger devices like my washing machine is properly placed and can use the entire body of the machine to cool it, but in general electric circuits of any kind will produce heat under load.
Saying it just PC cpu's is idiotic. All cpu's will get warm, just because some you use are small enough and cooled well enough that you don't notice it doesn't mean they won't overheat if you remove the cooling.
First off game type is not rigidly defined anymore then say the term FPS must always describe a Doom clone. Generally visual novel type games are about story, often several story lines intertwined wich you choose between.
Yes a lot of them involve various level of erotica especially the ones that have been translated commercially into english. For those of you with slightly more braincells then the average slashdotter this probably tells you a lot more about the english market then the japanese market.
Yes an awfull lot of visual novel type games have explicit sex. So do an awfull lot of hollywood movies. Just because you don't see them at the oscars does not mean that the majority of movies produced in hollywood are not porn.
Would you judge all live action movies based on this fact? Offcourse not. So why do people judge anime/manga/visual novels that way? It is especially ironic since the japanese RPG is well loved in the west and there are plenty of them with a heavy erotic element.
But the so called dating sim game is very common. Typically the lead character, will start the story waking up to a new situation and then being introduced to the various possible romantic intresests. These can include practically anything and even a lot of hetero games have the possibiluty of a bad ending with a male supporting character. Gay sex, you can just hear the americans cluthing their hearts and cry out, won't someone think of the childeren. Just wait until they find out the characters true age.
Some people compare them to "choose your own adventure" games. The subtle difference is in the type of choices you make. Visual novels typically are more about interaction with other people where cyoa are more about choosing a path through a dungeon. Adventure games (SCUMM) are more about puzzle solving.
An example:
Visual Novel -> Girl-next-door-chan says: "I really don't like walking home alone at night" Do you A. Walk her Home. B. Tell her not to be a coward. C. Stick it in.
Choose your own adventure game -> You stand before the dark park with girl-next-door-chan. Do you A. Take the short path through the park. B. Go around. C. Stick it in.
SCUMM -> You hold a penis and a condom. You see a vagina. Do you A. Stick penis in vagina. B. Put condom on penis. C. Put Condom in vagina.
All three will probably lead to the lead getting laid (wether this is explicit or not depends in the same way as it does in other media were you might just fade to credits when they get each other, see them kiss and fade out or it is time to get the box of kleenex.)
Another difference is visual novels are often less direct in their choices. Especially the lesser porn type wich are the ones translated into english for profit. Wich again tells you a lot more about the west then it tells you about japan. This however does give dating games a worse reputation, even the erotic ones, then they deserve.
For instance you will often be presented with a choice like "Do you stay in the classroom or do you go to the cafeteria." Rather then, "do you eat lunch with Girl A or with Girl B".
Better games still don't give you a named choice but at least attempt to hint at it. For instance to get the sporty girl you take lunch outside, for the rebel girl on the rooftop etc etc.
Another frequent mistake is to confuse dating sims with visual novels. First off is that not all visual novels are about dating but also that datings sims are not just visual novels. They really are sims, often marrying a tycoon style management game with a visual novel. They rarely make the transistion to the west, because they frequently contain less porn probably.
In a dating sim your character has some stats wich you can alter wich will impress certain girls. Typically the game gives you several choices per game day as to what to do and several chances to choose wich girl to interact with. Do sports and go to the track to get the sporty girl, work hard and go shopping to attract the blood suckin
Realistic media prices. Bend over consumer and accept our "cost savings will cost you more money" economy.
VHS is more expensive then DVD (especially in europe where you need a seperate VHS version for every combo of sub/dub for every language) to produce, ship and stock so DVD is more expensive. Downloading saves production, shipping and stocking, so it is more expensive. Give it 2 or 3 more generations and you will have to pay the entire movie production costs if you want to see the trailer.
This time make it really about good vs evil
on
Molyneux Talks Fable 2
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Evil, true evil is not just doing things that benefit you, but doing things that even may hurt you just because they hurt others. But good is even harder. The 3 childhood "quests" to start your character off do NOT have you do good for goodness sake. You do good for your own self advancement.
For those who haven't played it you get the main quest of buying your sister a present. Your father will reward any good deeds with a shiny gold piece and there just happens to be a salesman with a box of candy for sale.
The last quest is too simple, either protect some barrels or destroy them.
But in the end being good gets you no hazzle and 3 gold pieces. Being evil gets you hazzled and the same 3 gold pieces. You still end up spending your hard earned money on your sister, who at this point has done nothing to justify being given a gift. Yes she will be important later in the game but right now she is just sibling A apparently demanding you work your butt off to give her candy.
My problem with the game is that it just doesn't seem to reward evil and doesn't make you pay for being good. If the game would have just allowed you to pass the teddy of as a present allowing you to keep your money then being nasty would have been worthwhile. Who is going to join the mafia if they pay the same as the cops? On the other hand a truly decent cop would probably find life a lot harder to deal with as he lives in world were most people are in the grey area between good and evil.
Fable has none of this.
You also had precious little chance of influecing the story. No choices for instance on how the story of the side characters fate turned out. The PC version had an extended bit where you learned the fate of the original characters but I at least never felt as if I had been the one to set them on their path. Just side stories on a preset path.
For all the romance crap in the game, wich in the end was little more then spamming moves until you score enough points, you never get the chance to romance a named char. Evil? Incest. Good, get the black girl.
Fable just felt shallow. Yes, Planescape Torment and the Fallout series probably have spoiled me for life but even the bards tale was more of an RPG. Both these recent "RPG"'s light just seem to be more about hack&slash then about story and roleplaying.
Give us the lone hero, the troubled pragmatist worried about his soul, the evil maffia boss who own everything but has nothing. Give us STORY!
Oh and this time, make the weapons a bit more like their real world counterparts. Swords, katakana's and axes are not ALL the same weapon and should at minimum at least be swung differently.
When the list is made of the greatest RPG's in history, fable will be one of the also rans. Total mediocrity.
Anyone else want to join on a raid to capture the people behind Fallout and the entire Baldur Gate line of games and the people from troika (and some excellent bug squashers) and just put them in a dungeon and force them to make RPG's?
Everyone knows polar bears live on the poles. Obvious, else they wouldn't be called POLAR bears. Yet there are no polar bears on the south pole. There are penguins on the south pole. Coincedence? I think not. In fact if you check everywhere where penguins live there are no polar bears. The only place were polar bears live is where there are no penguins. Consclusion? Penguins eat polar bears. Even that fluffy tux toy, I got one in my house and no polar bears.
If the meanest biggest land predator can't survive against a penguin change do you stand?
Software in development is loosing money. Software in maintenance is making money. If you have ever worked in other fields especially warehouses or production and have an eye for effeciency you will often spot things that if optomized could easily make cost drops and productivty go up. But only if production is stopped for a week to put in place the optimizations. Wich is too expensive.
It don't matter how much you save. Even if that week shutdown paid itself back in the next week it would still often be considered too expensive. Because one week of non-deliveries, one week of the customer going to the competitor to get what he needs is considered far more costly then day in day out small losses because of ineffeciency.
When it comes to IT this is compounded by the many horror stories of runaway IT projects that just don't finish and always go over budget. Sure sure, they say, an advanced IT tracking system would save us a bundle each and every day but only after we spend 3 years on getting it installed and then it will break down on everyday with a y in it.
For software development itself this means that people have come to accept that software needs costly maintenance. So why prolong the development to save costs you are not going to save anyway?
A F1 engine is going to be stripped down after a race anyway so why bother making it reliable enough to last more then one race?
And don't forget that software deployment is often a race. Software is rarely written in advance. Usually it would preferabbly be ready yesterday. Have you ever had a project were a company said, we predict that we have a need for a new system in 3 years so get to work? No, 99% of the time it is, we needed a new system years ago so can you have it done by yesterday?
Good luck then pointing out that if only you spend a little more time on it you can make it easier to maintain in 3 years time. They want it NOW!
Learning to accept this is the only way of not going insane at work. Offcourse if you have learned to accept this you will also have become part of the problem. One of the suits who can't see reason.
to wikipedia. The hivemind is everywhere. Slashdot is the easiest example offcourse where its moderation system is often used by people to mod things down that don't agree with their opinion and mod things up that do agree with their opinion. This "rewards" only saying what the hivemind of slashdot agrees with. If you care about karma points, here is a simple test, how many posts off you been labelled flamebait/troll? If it is none then either you have been well modded (yeah right) or you only say what the hivemind wants you to say. Not in itself bad, your opinion is as valid as anyone elses but if everyone only says what everyone else says then what is the point of having a forum. Surely it is to get discussion going?
And that really is the problem with hiveminds. They tend to supress discussion. This can be very dangerous.
At least part of the current race problems in western europe can be blamed on the fact that for several decades discussing race issues was stiffled by political correctness. The hivemind of politically correct media comes down like a ton of bricks on anyone who dares to say something that isn't PC. The truth doesn't matter (either way) what matters is what the group thinks.
This is extremely dangerous because it tends to close you off from the real world. Several countries have been suprised by the emergence of new parties wich suddenly get a huge amount of votes because they dare to say the things the public thinks but that the "mainstream" parties have ignored because in their own circles there hivemind thinking have made it seem the issues were non-existant.
A very simple example. There is a dutch radio program with a couple of male presentors kinda of the type of top-gear presentors. Jobbo's I think they are called by the brits. They are strong supporters of the tuftuf club wich a is an illegal group that targets speeding camera's.
They reacted pretty suprised when a newspaper reported that a poll indicated that speeding camera's have the support of the majority of people. How could this be? All the people they know are against them.
Well, yeah. They would. Hivemind. You make friends with the people that agree with you and ignore those that don't. It is very easy to then start to believe that all those people around you that agree with you are "all the people". Since all your friends think speed camera's are the devils tool surely that is the opinion of the entire country?
Slashdot is the same, everyone here thinks DRM is evil so surely the entire world feels the same?
The problem is very real. Mario Antionette who commented on the poor not being able to afford bread said, "let them eat cake". Could this be simply because she existed in her own little world where that was indeed an option? That she existed in the hivemind of the superrich?
That mentality still exists. "Just get a job", is what business leaders say on the subject of social security because the superrich who never ever get fired live in their own little world where they reinforce their own ideas by making sure to only ever associate with people who share their own ideas.
And offcourse the "left" is the same when you look at some nature lovers who propose schemes that just can't work in the real world. Banning all meat products? Just because all your friends are vegans doesn't mean everyone in the world wants to become one.
Hell it is as simple as soccer. Soccer is huge it was watched by millions! Yes and it is NOT watched by even more people. If you are in the pro-soccer on tv 24/7 camp you will find yourselve surrounded by people who agree while watching the latest world cup match. If you don't like soccer you will also find yourself surrounded by people not watching the latest world cup match during the latest world cup match.
Two groups, each convinced they right and getting it confirmed by everyone around them.
So how can Wikipedia possibly hope to only publish the aboslute truth? It even starts with the basic idea of wich articles need to be
Do we really want have a goverment that can keep things secret? A state that can keep things from being investigated by having it totally secure, privileged eyes only, any leak easily traced?
I think not. Just remember the whole fuzz about journalists being bugged so that anyone calling them with secret information can be traced. How can the press then do its job?
If total security is achieved say goodbye to all those leaks and exposes. You will have a system that makes the KGB look like childsplay. Not because they will abuse it but because if they want to they can, without ever being found out. All that would need to happen is for someone to come along who wishes to abuse it. Do you trust any party so much you want to give them complete secrecy?
Democracy and free press are nasty things. They conflict immidiatly with the need to keep things hidden. Even such a simple thing as the skunk works is a direct violation of the principles of free press and accountable goverment. How the hell can we judge our goverment if they can keep what they are doing hidden from us?
The only alternative is to accept a certain level insecurity and just go after the people that go to far. A very strange state of affairs but better then living in a police state.
Mitnick ain't a victim. He is a stupid criminal and deserves everything he is going to get. He was not a journalist seeking the truth, he was just a cracker messing around with computers that were not his.
If I do not lock my door that does not give you the right to enter my house. Neither do I want to live in a world where the goverment is behind closed doors.
First of starcraft. Mmmm, wasn't that a shootoff from another RTS warcraft. So it did get sequels just not directly.
Ultima Online is an MMO and so is Dark Age of Camelot. MMO's that still run don't offcourse get a sequel, they get expansion packs. MMO sequels are a bad idea because you are canabalizing your own audience.
Alpha Centauri is Civilization in space. It got its sequel with Civ 4.
Diablo 2 is offcourse a sequel itself. Also the company behind it has been rather busy. The same excuse also applies to starcraft. Blizzard can only do so much you know.
Tron 2.0 and Chronicles of Riddick are I think movie games wich make them typically hard to sequel since that would involve adding to the original story wich is often hard to do because of licensing. If the movies ever spawn a sequel so will the games.
Most diary's are nothing special. The rantings of, mostly, teenage girls about their dull unintresting lives. Anne Frank's is one of them except they became more because of the extra ordinary circumstances she would find herself in. Who is to say that someday a myspace site written by someone won't have the same impact? Not because they are great writings but exactly the opposite because they give us a view into an ordinary persons live in an non-ordinary world.
Yes it may very well be only 1 page from millions but that is no different from that one diary from the millions written during WW2.
Offcourse it may also not happen, lets hope it does not. WW3 is a bit to high a price to pay for making a myspace account memorable.
But lets say that the myspace accounts of the people at columbine were known. The pictures of those kids drinking and indulging in mass-produced but ineffectual rebellioness. The murderes, their friends, the bullies, the victims. They would give us a glimpse into that small world in wich all of them lived leading up to that day. A far more accurate view then we have now in wich after all only the survivors get to tell their version of events AFTER the fact.
There are several books that contain letters from various war fronts. None of these letters are works of art by themselves but they have significance because they are often the last words these people wrote given us some glimpse into a world we hopefully will never experience ourselves. They are far more accurate then accounts written afterwards because those accounts are by definition only written by survivors and will always be colored by the fact that the person survived. A person saying his was worried he was going to die does not have the same impact as the words from a person unworried about death who has died. Why do you think disaster docu's usually delay introducing the survivors telling their tale? Because it ruins the suspence if you can see they survived. Ghoulish perhaps, that is for smarter people to judge, but effective.
This does not mean I feel like visiting myspace to trawl through it anymore then I would feel like going through the billions of war correspondence letters or the millions of diaries written. Yet somewhere, there may be a myspace account that tells us an extra ordinary story.
Oh and don't feel all that high and mighty,/. is hardly superior to myspace. More technobablle and less nude girls but the same mass-produced but ineffectual rebelliouness.
Simple fact found out after WW1 and WW2 was that the best family consist of a mother, childeren and a dead father. Widows do best of all. The reason is probably very simple. The widow is the absolute authority figure, none of this delayed punishement "wait till your father gets home", no playing the parents of against each other (problem in both together and seperated couples), the mother has one less child to raise, and plenty of other crap.
But still the result remains the same, kids of widows did best. So go kill yourselve for the sake of your kids. You know it makes sense.
In FPS type games one form of cheating is in alterering the way the game presents its data to you. For instance what if the game engine you used did not show you a lush tropical forest and soldiers painted in green camo but a black world with transparant plants and red soldiers? Perhaps you would find it slightly easier to spot enemy players?
MMO's often get around this by doing all the computing on the servers and making the graphical view irrelevant. It don't matter if you can view the enemy, it matters if the server allows you to target the enemy. Since few MMO's are about tactics like hiding (you can usually target anything in a certain radius around you no matter how hidden they are by terrain).
In a FPS this does not work. Unless you move all the computing to the server and on this central server determine what the player can't or can't see in an absolute fashion then you can cheat.
Cheat by making the world simpler to intertrept. Image a FPS were a player has 360 vision, high contrast world, a popup over enemies telling you there stats (health, weapon) vs a normal player. Would that be cheating?
It ain't a bug and there is nothing that many eyes can solve.
The problem is that a FPS game will send more data to a client then the client should b able to see. Opensource by definition can't deal with this and it is the reason you can not ever have truly opensource DRM. (at least not in the ways it exist now)
Your mistake it is simple. You think cheaters rely on bugs. Yes they often do but the most constant threat is people playing with a different client seeing more then they should be able too. Good luck suprising someone with 360 degree x-ray vision.
I imported a DS lite Navy blue and bought a PSP giga pack. Both are okay, limited compared to a PC, sometimes maddingly so but acceptable. I don't own any regular consoles. In fact the Gameboy line is the only consoles I ever owned.
Now to compare the two devices is very very hard. Neither is perfect especially if you own both and can see where the other device is just so much better.
First off the oh so important size. The PSP has often been called huge and it is. But the regular DS is in fact even bigger. The DS Lite is almost exactly the same size but 3cm shorter. It tells you a lot about fanboys that during the original launch the Nintendo fanboys called the PSP large. The truth is both devices are HUGE larger then a PDA. Fashionable people might not have the storage space.
Weight is something else. The PSP weighs a ton and that is not good. It will really pull your pants down. This despite the similar size makes it harder to carry around.
The PSP is open with the screen seemingly unprotected. Both DS versions of course are a clamshell design and this makes them very safe from scratching. Except that my PSP so far has not been scratched. This is not an iPod and sony seems to have found a pretty good screen material. Gameplay wise it makes no difference.
Battery time is hard to judge and also depends on the game. Can you really compare a game like say Advance Wars Dual Strike with Grand Theft Auto Liberty City? Maybe the PSP battery will be drained faster but I will have played more intensly in that time. Basically bring extra power if you are really going to need them because both will run out before you know it.
Power saving. Now here the DS Lite takes a nose dive. Compared to the PSP Nintendo's designers just don't seem to have a clue. In the game animal crossing you are told of for switching of the game without saving. Cute but then don't put the goddamn power switch in such a lousy spot. It is on the side, sticks out and is a slide switch with a spring, you slide it up and that causes the device to switch off or on and then it slides back. This easily happens in your pocket and the DS had not "lock" option.
The PSP buton works the same but puts the device in power save mode meaning if you accidently switch off you can almost instantly switch on again and resume where you left off. This helps mitigate a stupid design they made by combining the power and lock switch. Unlocking it will frequently cause the switch to overshoot and put the device in power save mode. But since you can resume easily this is only a nuisance.
The DS however will just loose all your progress. If you judged the DS on its own it would not be so bad but compared to the PSP this really is a very stupid design choice.
Part of the DS charm is being able to play all your old GBA games. Except that in the DS Lite the catridge doesn't fit. This not only looks ugly it also makes even the DS lite bigger then the PSP. Nintendo fanboys eat your heart out.
Ah but sony can screw up too. The screen on the PSP is beautifull oh those damn pixel problems. Everyone I know with a PSP has some problems, nobody I know with a DS (either version) has any. Or for that matter with the GBA not even idiots like me who installed an afterburner. There is also a ghosting problem.
The dual screen? Well it is a nice touch but 99% of the time you only look at one of them, it is rare to find a game where the action happens on both screens at once. The PSP screen contains a lot more action and some games do look damn impressive. There are plenty of times I would with the DS had more screen real estate. In practice however I can't compare them because the games I play on them are just to different.
So wich is better? Well frankly both are flawed devices. Neither company has an excuse for the mistakes made. Nintendo should have done a better job with the powerswitch and Sony should really have handled the screen better. Both have plenty of experience with small devices after all.
Slashdot Mirror
If everything always gets worse then by now something must be truly goddamn awfull. Sure TV hasn't been around long enough but how about theatre? If every generation theatre, wich has been around for hundreds of years in the current form, must by now be truly nasty. /me looks at some "art" productions. Hmmm, maybe those oldies are right after all.
When you are young anything you experience is still new and fresh and original. That funny "christmas on 42nd street" episode in your favorite sitcom is hilarious. When you get older and you see the 100th sitcom do the same old routine you are probably not nearly as amused.
As a kid I read some of my mothers harlequin novels. Yeah yeah, I know. But were they really that bad compared to the sci-fi and fantasy trash I was reading? Sure I can also claim to have read the classics at the time but so can my mother, just that both of us topped them off with a nice layer of fluff. I just read them because I was curious and because I was bored and because, well lets be honest here, some of them were rather steamy.
They weren't all bad but after I read my mom's favorites, the pre-selected ones, I found out that the majority of them were just bleh. The same old stuff recycled and rewarmed, names and places changed but the same old story.
Exactly the same as all those paint by numbers sitcoms that share all the same episodes. "Christmas on 42nd street wich a lead character that they are special to the others in a heartwarming episode", "the three ghosts of christmas that get a lead character to behave better for the split second left at the end of the episode", "the estranged parent who left the lead character and now comes back and makes up", etc etc.
The first time you see it, it is original, the 100th time it is not.
The same is true for movies. Was the Doom movie really that bad or was it just bad to us old people because we had seen it all before. I at time felt like I was watching a remake of Southern Comfort and in general every "ten little indians" horror movie.
I think it is one of the reasons so many geeks like anime/manga. Always on the look out for something fresh japense entertainment at least for while does offer that. Granted they got the exact same staple episodes but at least for a while it will all seem fresh and new and exciting.
Entertainment ain't anyworse now then it has ever been. There has always been bad stuff around, just examine your own favorites of your youth, but as you get older you will notice more and more how much of entertainment is the same old crap in a new wrapper. You might then make the mistake of looking at stuff from before your time and think that things were so much better but that is just because the old stuff is still new to you. If you really went to look at all the movies from say the 1940's you would quickly notice that an awfull lot of it is just as steaming a pile of crap as the majority of today's movies.
Movies ain't getting worse, you are getting more critical. It is just the disease of getting old, but don't worry a cure is around. It is called death. Something new and exciting to look forward to eh?
The exact story is still being discovered but it seems that the original builder was replaced by someone cheaper who cut corners.
In itself bad enough but stories are starting to emerge that this kind of stuff has been going on all over. Not a real suprise, we have had a couple of incidents of collapsing balconies because of shoddy building but because this scandale is so public the stories off other scandals also gets more attention.
Then again it is nothing new. Every time there is a disaster like an earth quake anywhere in the world you will learn that some building collapsed because the builder did not follow regulations or even the blueprint.
Cost cutting is almost everytime the reason and who is to blame for that? Well us. We want our buildings build as cheaply and as fast as possible so we hire the guy with the lowest contract and then expect to get quality.
Nobody on the world would expect a ten dollar watch to have the same quality as a ten thousand dollar watch so why do we expect the guy who can do the job for a million to be as good as the one who wants two million?
The fact that a live was lost in this Boston incident is tragic. That it involved such a god awfull amount of money makes it however fortuanlly headline worthy. If we a truly upset about this we will demand more and better inspection of every building project and demand very stiff penalties for those who ignore regulations. Oh and we won't mind paying extra for it.
Did you hear just hear that massive sound of everyone taking a step back? Yup, we want the best but at the least cost. That is how it is supposed to work in a free market. Sadly it doesn't.
Shoddy building by the lowest bidder is nothing new. Just because this one involves a costly project that has already been controversial does not make it new. Shoddy building will go on as long as contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder.
But why doesn't it work to go for the lowest bid? Because it is an ongoing race. There is always another party who wants the contract who is just going to have to find some way to lower costs. At a given point there is no more fat to trim and you have to start cutting in essentials. Think of it as anorexia. When all the fat is gone you can only loose weight by reducing vital organs and tissues until finally you die. In losing weight you need to know the limit, the point were you simply cannot loose weight anymore. In lowering cost you also need to know that limit. Were any further cost savings are coming from critical areas like following the blueprint to the letter, proper inspection and using the right materials. It can be as simple a something as continueing work on days to hot/cold/humid for some materials to properly set. A great cost saving but a gigantic risk.
This woman paid the price for our penny pinching and the great joke? Now the costs are going to be much higher to us all then if the job had been done right by the non-lowest bidder in the first place. Yet how much do you want to bet that in a few years time the next boston city goverment contract will again go to the lowest bidder?
Yes bugs happen, yes vista is still in beta but rather then just admit "vista is still a buggy piece of crap software that can't even be used properly by its own engineers" they tell us to sit and wait because we can trust them to fix it.
To MS credit, it is a strategy that works.
The gunfight is far faster, spot, shoot, kill.
While in real life a hit with a broadsword is probably as much an instant kill as a bullet in the head, movies have made us believe that sword fights last minutes while gunfights are over in a matter of seconds.
Now take a look at the various MMORPG's games. Because of the general lack of AI or anything approaching tactics let alone strategy most fights are about wearing down the enemies hitpoints slowly in a prolonged duel. No instant kills allowed. It just doesn't fit in the gameplay.
SWG offcourse had guns and believe me that after years of movies and books and other star wars games it came as something of a shock to find that stormtroopers do not die instantly if you hit them with a blaster shot. Neither two, nor three, nor five. In fact during a period before the dreaded CU/NGE debacle you had roving bands of stormies that had some very big brothers that could whoop your ass. But apperently not spot you sniping their platoon down one by one. Well when I say sniping I mean firing away at their heads with concealed shot for about five to ten minutes a piece.
Not that the melee combat was any better but at least that seems acceptable. You can parry my sword blows but how exactly do you stop an energy bolt straight between the eyes? It gets Jagged Alliance kind of silly where you shoot somebody with a machine gun at point blank range, only somehow manage to hit them once, in the head and they still fight with 94% of their health gone in the next round. WTF? Any notion of suspense of disbelief is gone. You are in a spreadsheet with pretty picture mate. Not fighting the evil empire. Or rebel scum.
The same problems occurs ofcourse in KOTOR with the damn lightsabers. You get this cool weapon that can slice through anything except it seems clothes, swords and any piece of armour. That wasn't the deal!
Guns don't work in current MMORPG gameplay. For instant kills to work you need more enemies, they need to be more intelligent (how many MMORPG's are there were the enemy is even capable of seeking cover?) and you need far better code for instance collesion detection to avoid people targetting and shooting through walls. Already a pain with swordfights it could make gunfights with instant kill even more frustating.
Oh and if you add instant kill on the enemies, do you add it on the player? A modern war based MMORPG would suck for the point guy. Spend an hour getting ready to get to the quest area only to be ambushed and get a bullet in face and be forced to respawn.
Your argument of aloneness doesn't ring true to me. Star Trek is very much a group off people, especially the original series, while say the entire TES series of games (Oblivion) is very very lonely.
People accept a resistance to fire. They do not accept a resistance to hot lead. MMORPG structure at the moment just can't do gunfights. Hell, single games can barely do it. FEAR and that old Lucasarts cowboy game are about the only games I remember where there was movie style gunfights going on.
Nintendo did. They apparently didn't think it was important enough. The poster above you also mentions this and yes it is probably true, but by Nintendo's own design. And they knew about the passkey system since the GBA so why not design the DS differently?
That I think is where SWG failed, it never succeeded in making clear what market it was for. It would like a bunch of Counterstrike fans wandering into a Jagged Alliance session and sticking around until Jagged Alliance became a bad counterstrike clone.
If you thought the game after the NGE was fun (or indeed post CU) then you must have absolutly hated the game before. So why? Because it was star wars?
SWG failed because they changed everything about the game. The jedi class had nothing to do with it. Only that the kind of people to get a kick out of being a leet class were not the type who should have been in SWG. The game called for more balanced players. If you want a score to show how good you are you need a system like WoW and EQ has.
But yeah, griefers suck. No matter if you are on their side or not. Let others play their game.
There is a game called Locomotion, a half-assed sequel to the game Transport Tycoon, by Chris Sawyer. It is not perfect. In some ways it is worse then its parent. It is a tycoon game allowing you to build a road, rail, sea and air transport network. The original had a dedicated, still does, following but after a couple of years the game for me was finished. The graphics too old, and the gameplay too restricted by the limited engine.
Some of the gameplay limits (station size, train length, annoying breakdown) wear removed with patches but in the end TT and its fan made offspring are just too old.
Locomotion has at least better graphics but I am again running into the fact that Chris Sawyer has a very different idea about games then I would like. His eternal obsession with things wearing down was easily patched (no dear Chris, in real life you do not have to replace a train every 3 years just to keep it running. Trains 100 years old still run reliably.)
But the extremely limited signalling, morronic path-finding and restricted station layout are once again turning me off from the game. Not because I don't want to play anymore but because I can't play the game I want to play it.
What does this have to do with SWG? Well not much except that TT and indeed Locomotion are by any outsiders as dead a horse as you can find. So why still flog it?
Simple. BECAUSE THERE HAS BEEN NOTHING TO REPLACE IT
SWG for all its faults still stands alone. Pre-CU and certainly Pre-NGE Star Wars Galaxies is a unique game, not just in gameplay terms but also because Sony is one of the few online companies who do not think everyone in the world owns a credit card.
I swear to god that the next person who recommends Eve Online (Credit card only) to me, I will call him a NGE-developer. If you then point out that I could always buy a pre-paid card for Eve Online (only buyable from stores that only accept credit cards) or use paypal (dutch paypal only accepts credit cards) I am going to call them a SWG bug tester.
One thing that made SWG standout was its proffesion system. You didn't have one. Rather most new players would take all the base proffesions available and dabble in each, gaining experience and spending their limited (fixed) amount of skillpoints on getting better in their proffesions. So a new player would have some markmanship (ranged), melee, scout (harvesting from animals), crafting (turning harvested stuff into goodies), medic (turning dead animals into goodies to cure ouchies), maybe even a bit of entertainer to rest your mind and look at your avatars thight ass in a skimpy dress. Oh was that just me?
NGE changed this. It is now exactly like Everquest 1-2, WoW and indeed every goddamn Korean MMORPG. If I wanted to play any of them, I would. SWG was the one I stuck with longest.
But so what? You in the end still had to choose a profession, sacrificing some lesser ones to free skillpoints so you could advance in others. Yes. Correct. BUT if you ever tired of your chosen proffesion you could easily learn a new one. Tired of melee, pick up some pistol skills.
Ah but you can do that in other MMORPG's, just start a new character. But no. In SWG, you didn't have to do that. You would just slowly migrate from your old job, loosing skills and learn new ones. You would still have the same name, still be the same person.
The impact of only being allowed one character per server should not be underestimated. Many a person learned the hardway that this means you can be tracked far more easily, be an asshole and get ignored and you are ignored until you delete your character and restart a new one.
But the most important one for me was that you didn't have to do all the beginners stuff again. Your character respecced from swordsman to pistoleer did not have to get the Point of Interest badges again. In everquest 2 I go
The DS has also been cracked and it too can be used to play ripped commercial games.
The difference is that running cracked games is a software problem on the PSP were on the DS you need some special hardware that you can't buy just anywhere. Al you need to play a ripped PSP game is a big memory card, like say the ones sold by sony itself or even included with the PSP in the gigapack.
It seems pretty clear that Sony is slowly releasing updates each update giving you a goodie but it will also fix the security hole that allows you to play non-sony approved content on the PSP.
In itself it is nothing new, some games with frequent updates could possible be doing the same trick. You want our bug fix? Better have the original exe handy. How many crackers are willing to crack a game again and again? With the PSP it is even better. Each time you crack it you run a risk of bricking it.
So why doesn't Nintendo upgrade its hardware since they been cracked as well? Well they did. I think with the DS Lite they included a new firmware and if you got one of those the old passkeys (the bit of hardware that allows you to play unofficial games) don't work anymore. No problem you pirate. New ones are available.
Still they cost money, it is a physical product and that means somebody wants money for making it, perhaps this reduces the piracy. Most people do not have a huge library of games. If you only want handfull of games you are not going to spend 150 euro in a dodgy online store to run games that run almost perfectly when you can get the games you want for the same amount guarenteed to work from a regular store.
Second is market differences, perhaps the people who want to play nintendogz or brain age are less likely to pirate then say GTA Liberty City players?
What is odd is that because DS games are typically much smaller that piracy actually is easier. If you want you could easily store hundreds of GBA and DS games on a single memory card. Most PSP games are to big to fit in the 1gb memory sticks.
The DS is capable of downloading content from the net so it should be able to update. Maybe it does. Doubt it, someone would have found out by now but just because they haven't doesn't mean they can't.
The naive idea is that Nintendo doesn't do this to be nice to its customers. Yeah right, this could only be considered an option by the insane or those to young to remember the Nintendo before Sony kicked them in the nuts with the PS.
More likely is that Nintendo doesn't consider it a big enough threath.
This is probably combined with not having the possibility to offer goodies to get people to upgrade. Sony is running a risk that people who would buy legal games, like me, might not buy a game if it requires me to upgrade and not use my homebrew anymore. It also runs the risk that it might break one of its own games.
In short it is all about piracy and how companies attempt to deal with this. Sony is more aggressive in its attempts but Nintendo too changes its firmware when it sees an opportunity.
In reality, and UO/SWG and the net in general prove this every day, people can barely be forced to not be complete assholes at gunpoint. People just ain't nice unless there is someone standing behind them with a very big stick. Online were often there is no way for the primitive goverment of revenge, anarachy rules and most people do not like anarachy. If we did we would have more of it.
SWG had a job system and an economy, if it had played out in the idealist vision of liberatarion Raplh Koster then their would have been very few if any UBER-specced out players. You would probably have sacrificed some of your skillpoints to be part of the supply chain. Your combat character would still have had scout skills to harvest or prospecting skills to keep the economy floating. This did not work out. If you were able to solo everything in the game it meant you were one of the people who depended entirely on other more balanced players to give you the equipment to do so.
Many of the crafters I knew got utterly fed up with the constant demand by the soloers for supplies yet being unable to get any of the base ingredients of them.
other systems instead emerged, not a huge economy with everyone chipping in but a specialised one with just a handfull of people controlling most production. For a long time I played on servers were there would be only 1 or 2 chefs to keep everyone supplied, them relying on a small core off players to keep things rolling. It didn't take much to upset this. One scout leaving the game lead on one server to a situation were you could only get supplies if you first brought the ingredients.
WoW works because it is far more restricted. It just doesn't give players the freedom to go screw their own game up.
Open ended games wether that is The Sims or Oblivion often require of the player to limit himselfe. To not give yourselve an uber character but rather to limit yourselve in the spirit of gameplay. Yes the best furniture will give you the best stats in the Sims but go ahead and limit yourselve to cheapo stuff to play a game off a students live. Do not just give yourselve some cheat cash so you can finally buy that toilet that actually allows your sim not to spend half of each day on the can.
Same with Oblivion, you know you don't actually have to wear the armour with the best stats, you could actually just choose the one that looks good. The one that best fits your character.
In the old grand prix games you could try regular overtaking and not the slam them up the tailpipe to get them out of the way style of racing.
But people don't do that. In real life people put on godmode and then complain nothing is a challenge.
SWG was ruined by a combination of incomplete design and players not "getting it". Yes that players didn't get it was part of the incomplete design error.
By allowing people to "stack" multiple combat proffesions they allowed players to become too powerfull for the game, helped by errors in armors and buffs, and then made sure to only add content for those uber-specced players like the corvette and the death watch bunker, wich were not doable by non-template stackers.
But nobody forced the playing originally to stack their templates. They just gave you the gun, you used it.
Please remember your history, if price has never mattered before why should it now? I am not saying that the PS3 will be a success. I just don't think price will be the deciding factor. Or maybe my PC gaming has just made me think that 600 euro's for a system is not that expensive.
But still, the fact remains that this handheld that is just a stopgap between the GBA and whatever will come next is outselling everyone else. While only a handfull of games appeal to me it might be true that Nintendo has tapped that mythic casual gamer pool. Yes it is a sad day for us fans of Planescape torment, Scumm and System Shock fans when Nintendogz sells 6 million units but the sign was on the wall ever since The Sims became a record breaker.
It can't be a coincedence that the Gameboy line is the only computer to come in pink. I blame women for the death of the old Sierra and Lucasarts and the demise of Looking Glass.
Do NOT let them WIN! Buy your 360 and it endless horde of mindless FPSes today and make a stand against the pink DS owners. No to social gaming and up with testosterone. It is fragged or be hugged. Buy a copy of DOA beachball today and let the other half of the world know what gaming is all about.
Not that they don't know. Anyone ever notice how all the erotic mods for Morrowind/Oblivion and Never Winter Nights are often made by women? Who would have thought it, the weaker sex is even more obsessed with it then we are. Makes sense, we got to stop to scratch, they can keep thinking of it 24/7
Presumably the CPU in larger devices like my washing machine is properly placed and can use the entire body of the machine to cool it, but in general electric circuits of any kind will produce heat under load.
Saying it just PC cpu's is idiotic. All cpu's will get warm, just because some you use are small enough and cooled well enough that you don't notice it doesn't mean they won't overheat if you remove the cooling.
Yes a lot of them involve various level of erotica especially the ones that have been translated commercially into english. For those of you with slightly more braincells then the average slashdotter this probably tells you a lot more about the english market then the japanese market.
Yes an awfull lot of visual novel type games have explicit sex. So do an awfull lot of hollywood movies. Just because you don't see them at the oscars does not mean that the majority of movies produced in hollywood are not porn.
Would you judge all live action movies based on this fact? Offcourse not. So why do people judge anime/manga/visual novels that way? It is especially ironic since the japanese RPG is well loved in the west and there are plenty of them with a heavy erotic element.
But the so called dating sim game is very common. Typically the lead character, will start the story waking up to a new situation and then being introduced to the various possible romantic intresests. These can include practically anything and even a lot of hetero games have the possibiluty of a bad ending with a male supporting character. Gay sex, you can just hear the americans cluthing their hearts and cry out, won't someone think of the childeren. Just wait until they find out the characters true age.
Some people compare them to "choose your own adventure" games. The subtle difference is in the type of choices you make. Visual novels typically are more about interaction with other people where cyoa are more about choosing a path through a dungeon. Adventure games (SCUMM) are more about puzzle solving.
An example:
Visual Novel -> Girl-next-door-chan says: "I really don't like walking home alone at night" Do you A. Walk her Home. B. Tell her not to be a coward. C. Stick it in.
Choose your own adventure game -> You stand before the dark park with girl-next-door-chan. Do you A. Take the short path through the park. B. Go around. C. Stick it in.
SCUMM -> You hold a penis and a condom. You see a vagina. Do you A. Stick penis in vagina. B. Put condom on penis. C. Put Condom in vagina.
All three will probably lead to the lead getting laid (wether this is explicit or not depends in the same way as it does in other media were you might just fade to credits when they get each other, see them kiss and fade out or it is time to get the box of kleenex.)
Another difference is visual novels are often less direct in their choices. Especially the lesser porn type wich are the ones translated into english for profit. Wich again tells you a lot more about the west then it tells you about japan. This however does give dating games a worse reputation, even the erotic ones, then they deserve.
For instance you will often be presented with a choice like "Do you stay in the classroom or do you go to the cafeteria." Rather then, "do you eat lunch with Girl A or with Girl B".
Better games still don't give you a named choice but at least attempt to hint at it. For instance to get the sporty girl you take lunch outside, for the rebel girl on the rooftop etc etc.
Another frequent mistake is to confuse dating sims with visual novels. First off is that not all visual novels are about dating but also that datings sims are not just visual novels. They really are sims, often marrying a tycoon style management game with a visual novel. They rarely make the transistion to the west, because they frequently contain less porn probably.
In a dating sim your character has some stats wich you can alter wich will impress certain girls. Typically the game gives you several choices per game day as to what to do and several chances to choose wich girl to interact with. Do sports and go to the track to get the sporty girl, work hard and go shopping to attract the blood suckin
VHS is more expensive then DVD (especially in europe where you need a seperate VHS version for every combo of sub/dub for every language) to produce, ship and stock so DVD is more expensive. Downloading saves production, shipping and stocking, so it is more expensive. Give it 2 or 3 more generations and you will have to pay the entire movie production costs if you want to see the trailer.
For those who haven't played it you get the main quest of buying your sister a present. Your father will reward any good deeds with a shiny gold piece and there just happens to be a salesman with a box of candy for sale.
The last quest is too simple, either protect some barrels or destroy them.
But in the end being good gets you no hazzle and 3 gold pieces. Being evil gets you hazzled and the same 3 gold pieces. You still end up spending your hard earned money on your sister, who at this point has done nothing to justify being given a gift. Yes she will be important later in the game but right now she is just sibling A apparently demanding you work your butt off to give her candy.
My problem with the game is that it just doesn't seem to reward evil and doesn't make you pay for being good. If the game would have just allowed you to pass the teddy of as a present allowing you to keep your money then being nasty would have been worthwhile. Who is going to join the mafia if they pay the same as the cops? On the other hand a truly decent cop would probably find life a lot harder to deal with as he lives in world were most people are in the grey area between good and evil.
Fable has none of this.
You also had precious little chance of influecing the story. No choices for instance on how the story of the side characters fate turned out. The PC version had an extended bit where you learned the fate of the original characters but I at least never felt as if I had been the one to set them on their path. Just side stories on a preset path.
For all the romance crap in the game, wich in the end was little more then spamming moves until you score enough points, you never get the chance to romance a named char. Evil? Incest. Good, get the black girl.
Fable just felt shallow. Yes, Planescape Torment and the Fallout series probably have spoiled me for life but even the bards tale was more of an RPG. Both these recent "RPG"'s light just seem to be more about hack&slash then about story and roleplaying.
Give us the lone hero, the troubled pragmatist worried about his soul, the evil maffia boss who own everything but has nothing. Give us STORY!
Oh and this time, make the weapons a bit more like their real world counterparts. Swords, katakana's and axes are not ALL the same weapon and should at minimum at least be swung differently.
When the list is made of the greatest RPG's in history, fable will be one of the also rans. Total mediocrity.
Anyone else want to join on a raid to capture the people behind Fallout and the entire Baldur Gate line of games and the people from troika (and some excellent bug squashers) and just put them in a dungeon and force them to make RPG's?
If the meanest biggest land predator can't survive against a penguin change do you stand?
It don't matter how much you save. Even if that week shutdown paid itself back in the next week it would still often be considered too expensive. Because one week of non-deliveries, one week of the customer going to the competitor to get what he needs is considered far more costly then day in day out small losses because of ineffeciency.
When it comes to IT this is compounded by the many horror stories of runaway IT projects that just don't finish and always go over budget. Sure sure, they say, an advanced IT tracking system would save us a bundle each and every day but only after we spend 3 years on getting it installed and then it will break down on everyday with a y in it.
For software development itself this means that people have come to accept that software needs costly maintenance. So why prolong the development to save costs you are not going to save anyway?
A F1 engine is going to be stripped down after a race anyway so why bother making it reliable enough to last more then one race?
And don't forget that software deployment is often a race. Software is rarely written in advance. Usually it would preferabbly be ready yesterday. Have you ever had a project were a company said, we predict that we have a need for a new system in 3 years so get to work? No, 99% of the time it is, we needed a new system years ago so can you have it done by yesterday?
Good luck then pointing out that if only you spend a little more time on it you can make it easier to maintain in 3 years time. They want it NOW!
Learning to accept this is the only way of not going insane at work. Offcourse if you have learned to accept this you will also have become part of the problem. One of the suits who can't see reason.
And that really is the problem with hiveminds. They tend to supress discussion. This can be very dangerous.
At least part of the current race problems in western europe can be blamed on the fact that for several decades discussing race issues was stiffled by political correctness. The hivemind of politically correct media comes down like a ton of bricks on anyone who dares to say something that isn't PC. The truth doesn't matter (either way) what matters is what the group thinks.
This is extremely dangerous because it tends to close you off from the real world. Several countries have been suprised by the emergence of new parties wich suddenly get a huge amount of votes because they dare to say the things the public thinks but that the "mainstream" parties have ignored because in their own circles there hivemind thinking have made it seem the issues were non-existant.
A very simple example. There is a dutch radio program with a couple of male presentors kinda of the type of top-gear presentors. Jobbo's I think they are called by the brits. They are strong supporters of the tuftuf club wich a is an illegal group that targets speeding camera's.
They reacted pretty suprised when a newspaper reported that a poll indicated that speeding camera's have the support of the majority of people. How could this be? All the people they know are against them.
Well, yeah. They would. Hivemind. You make friends with the people that agree with you and ignore those that don't. It is very easy to then start to believe that all those people around you that agree with you are "all the people". Since all your friends think speed camera's are the devils tool surely that is the opinion of the entire country?
Slashdot is the same, everyone here thinks DRM is evil so surely the entire world feels the same?
The problem is very real. Mario Antionette who commented on the poor not being able to afford bread said, "let them eat cake". Could this be simply because she existed in her own little world where that was indeed an option? That she existed in the hivemind of the superrich?
That mentality still exists. "Just get a job", is what business leaders say on the subject of social security because the superrich who never ever get fired live in their own little world where they reinforce their own ideas by making sure to only ever associate with people who share their own ideas.
And offcourse the "left" is the same when you look at some nature lovers who propose schemes that just can't work in the real world. Banning all meat products? Just because all your friends are vegans doesn't mean everyone in the world wants to become one.
Hell it is as simple as soccer. Soccer is huge it was watched by millions! Yes and it is NOT watched by even more people. If you are in the pro-soccer on tv 24/7 camp you will find yourselve surrounded by people who agree while watching the latest world cup match. If you don't like soccer you will also find yourself surrounded by people not watching the latest world cup match during the latest world cup match.
Two groups, each convinced they right and getting it confirmed by everyone around them.
So how can Wikipedia possibly hope to only publish the aboslute truth? It even starts with the basic idea of wich articles need to be
I think not. Just remember the whole fuzz about journalists being bugged so that anyone calling them with secret information can be traced. How can the press then do its job?
If total security is achieved say goodbye to all those leaks and exposes. You will have a system that makes the KGB look like childsplay. Not because they will abuse it but because if they want to they can, without ever being found out. All that would need to happen is for someone to come along who wishes to abuse it. Do you trust any party so much you want to give them complete secrecy?
Democracy and free press are nasty things. They conflict immidiatly with the need to keep things hidden. Even such a simple thing as the skunk works is a direct violation of the principles of free press and accountable goverment. How the hell can we judge our goverment if they can keep what they are doing hidden from us?
The only alternative is to accept a certain level insecurity and just go after the people that go to far. A very strange state of affairs but better then living in a police state.
Mitnick ain't a victim. He is a stupid criminal and deserves everything he is going to get. He was not a journalist seeking the truth, he was just a cracker messing around with computers that were not his.
If I do not lock my door that does not give you the right to enter my house. Neither do I want to live in a world where the goverment is behind closed doors.
Ultima Online is an MMO and so is Dark Age of Camelot. MMO's that still run don't offcourse get a sequel, they get expansion packs. MMO sequels are a bad idea because you are canabalizing your own audience.
Alpha Centauri is Civilization in space. It got its sequel with Civ 4.
Diablo 2 is offcourse a sequel itself. Also the company behind it has been rather busy. The same excuse also applies to starcraft. Blizzard can only do so much you know.
Tron 2.0 and Chronicles of Riddick are I think movie games wich make them typically hard to sequel since that would involve adding to the original story wich is often hard to do because of licensing. If the movies ever spawn a sequel so will the games.
Yes it may very well be only 1 page from millions but that is no different from that one diary from the millions written during WW2.
Offcourse it may also not happen, lets hope it does not. WW3 is a bit to high a price to pay for making a myspace account memorable.
But lets say that the myspace accounts of the people at columbine were known. The pictures of those kids drinking and indulging in mass-produced but ineffectual rebellioness. The murderes, their friends, the bullies, the victims. They would give us a glimpse into that small world in wich all of them lived leading up to that day. A far more accurate view then we have now in wich after all only the survivors get to tell their version of events AFTER the fact.
There are several books that contain letters from various war fronts. None of these letters are works of art by themselves but they have significance because they are often the last words these people wrote given us some glimpse into a world we hopefully will never experience ourselves. They are far more accurate then accounts written afterwards because those accounts are by definition only written by survivors and will always be colored by the fact that the person survived. A person saying his was worried he was going to die does not have the same impact as the words from a person unworried about death who has died. Why do you think disaster docu's usually delay introducing the survivors telling their tale? Because it ruins the suspence if you can see they survived. Ghoulish perhaps, that is for smarter people to judge, but effective.
This does not mean I feel like visiting myspace to trawl through it anymore then I would feel like going through the billions of war correspondence letters or the millions of diaries written. Yet somewhere, there may be a myspace account that tells us an extra ordinary story.
Oh and don't feel all that high and mighty, /. is hardly superior to myspace. More technobablle and less nude girls but the same mass-produced but ineffectual rebelliouness.
But still the result remains the same, kids of widows did best. So go kill yourselve for the sake of your kids. You know it makes sense.
This worked perfectly. Will make organising my manga a lot easier. Thanks for the help.
MMO's often get around this by doing all the computing on the servers and making the graphical view irrelevant. It don't matter if you can view the enemy, it matters if the server allows you to target the enemy. Since few MMO's are about tactics like hiding (you can usually target anything in a certain radius around you no matter how hidden they are by terrain).
In a FPS this does not work. Unless you move all the computing to the server and on this central server determine what the player can't or can't see in an absolute fashion then you can cheat.
Cheat by making the world simpler to intertrept. Image a FPS were a player has 360 vision, high contrast world, a popup over enemies telling you there stats (health, weapon) vs a normal player. Would that be cheating?
It ain't a bug and there is nothing that many eyes can solve.
The problem is that a FPS game will send more data to a client then the client should b able to see. Opensource by definition can't deal with this and it is the reason you can not ever have truly opensource DRM. (at least not in the ways it exist now)
Your mistake it is simple. You think cheaters rely on bugs. Yes they often do but the most constant threat is people playing with a different client seeing more then they should be able too. Good luck suprising someone with 360 degree x-ray vision.
Now to compare the two devices is very very hard. Neither is perfect especially if you own both and can see where the other device is just so much better.
First off the oh so important size. The PSP has often been called huge and it is. But the regular DS is in fact even bigger. The DS Lite is almost exactly the same size but 3cm shorter. It tells you a lot about fanboys that during the original launch the Nintendo fanboys called the PSP large. The truth is both devices are HUGE larger then a PDA. Fashionable people might not have the storage space.
Weight is something else. The PSP weighs a ton and that is not good. It will really pull your pants down. This despite the similar size makes it harder to carry around.
The PSP is open with the screen seemingly unprotected. Both DS versions of course are a clamshell design and this makes them very safe from scratching. Except that my PSP so far has not been scratched. This is not an iPod and sony seems to have found a pretty good screen material. Gameplay wise it makes no difference.
Battery time is hard to judge and also depends on the game. Can you really compare a game like say Advance Wars Dual Strike with Grand Theft Auto Liberty City? Maybe the PSP battery will be drained faster but I will have played more intensly in that time. Basically bring extra power if you are really going to need them because both will run out before you know it.
Power saving. Now here the DS Lite takes a nose dive. Compared to the PSP Nintendo's designers just don't seem to have a clue. In the game animal crossing you are told of for switching of the game without saving. Cute but then don't put the goddamn power switch in such a lousy spot. It is on the side, sticks out and is a slide switch with a spring, you slide it up and that causes the device to switch off or on and then it slides back. This easily happens in your pocket and the DS had not "lock" option.
The PSP buton works the same but puts the device in power save mode meaning if you accidently switch off you can almost instantly switch on again and resume where you left off. This helps mitigate a stupid design they made by combining the power and lock switch. Unlocking it will frequently cause the switch to overshoot and put the device in power save mode. But since you can resume easily this is only a nuisance.
The DS however will just loose all your progress. If you judged the DS on its own it would not be so bad but compared to the PSP this really is a very stupid design choice.
Part of the DS charm is being able to play all your old GBA games. Except that in the DS Lite the catridge doesn't fit. This not only looks ugly it also makes even the DS lite bigger then the PSP. Nintendo fanboys eat your heart out.
Ah but sony can screw up too. The screen on the PSP is beautifull oh those damn pixel problems. Everyone I know with a PSP has some problems, nobody I know with a DS (either version) has any. Or for that matter with the GBA not even idiots like me who installed an afterburner. There is also a ghosting problem.
The dual screen? Well it is a nice touch but 99% of the time you only look at one of them, it is rare to find a game where the action happens on both screens at once. The PSP screen contains a lot more action and some games do look damn impressive. There are plenty of times I would with the DS had more screen real estate. In practice however I can't compare them because the games I play on them are just to different.
So wich is better? Well frankly both are flawed devices. Neither company has an excuse for the mistakes made. Nintendo should have done a better job with the powerswitch and Sony should really have handled the screen better. Both have plenty of experience with small devices after all.
Gaming wise