Thought it was clear by the fact that I know so much about it. Although I am not a/b/ visitor I know about it from the other 4chan channels such a/s/ sexy beautifull woman and/e/ ecchi pictures.
At least I do not know about not4chan and renchan. Oops. (Lolicon boards)
I call it darwins jailtime. If you haven't evolved by now into using a addblocker then you need to be put in jail to protect the genepool. You can still mate but only same sex.
As for a slightly more serious answer to your question. The bush goverment is also fighting a war on general porn. Just wait a few more years and then just seeing a nudie picture will get you jail time.
Can't wait personally. I wonder how much time an american will get for opening a link I sent them to tubgirl.
Sound familiar. Exactly how do you know about 4chan anyway eh?
For those who don't know. 4chan is a english image board. An image board is a website that allows users to anonymously post images. It is a trend from japan and the fast majority are indeed vile. Filled with images of under age trains and jail bait cars. Oh and mecha. (What trainspotters grow up into if they aren't cured with a cattle prod)
the/b/ board is Hentai/Alternative. Hentai is japanese for perverted. However most of the content is what you get when you let 14yr old boys post anonymously. It ain't pretty.
The idea of a/b/ visitor complaining about anyone else is laughable.
If you know about/b/ then you are at the bottom of the ladder. Lookup and you will in fact see child rapists crap on you.
To be serious the parent reminds me a bit off criminals offended by other criminals. Rapist saying they despise child rapists. WTF?
This guy vists/b/ a channel filled with the worst of the net and then complains about japan. Right. Take a look at yourselve first kiddo.
That he solicted a child OR that a person from a security department is so fucking lacks about security.
Read the article and you get an image not so much of a pervert as an incredible idiot. Either the guy has a several mental handicap or it is a setup because no normal person would give away that much info online.
Hell, first rule of dating. Never give the bitch your phone number. Geez.
Oh well good to see the other rule still is true. The internet where the men are men, the women are men and all the girls are police agents.
In a recent post I mentioned that Bush was elected and got several repsonses that many people voted not for Bush but against Kerry. This is kinda like making sure you when you fall to land face first to avoid hurting your hand.
America is still somewhat of a democracy with furthermore a legal recourse to armed rebellion. IF you truly believe that the current goverment is turning your country into a dictatorship then do something about. Form a new party, dare to vote for a guy who doesn't promise you lower taxes or just buy a gun and shoot the fuckers.
The sad fact is that freedom is only ever won by the sword and is always lost over time. Just look at any country that had a revolution by the citizens to gain their freedom. Like say. America itself for instance.
Hell the russians did it twice and look at them. They went from the slavery off the tsars(?) to the slavery of the so-called communists, to the slavery of extreme capatalism/mafia and now poetin is trying to enslave them again.
The price of freedom is shooting everyone trying to take it away from you.
The child porn argument is nothing new. It is very similar to the "communist" hunt. The drugs hunt. The original witch hunt. All a would be dictator has to do is find what small group of people is currently hated the most and claims his actions are to hunt them down.
It has worked everytime before, it will this time. Unless you right now declare freedom to be more important then childerens safety. Nope. Didn't think so.
Person 1: You! You're against furries and their furry pornography, right?
You: Yeah, lets create a police state to hunt them down.
All you got to know is what buttons to press. For some it is child porn. For others it is furry porn. Whatever works to get you to sign up for a police state.
Please note that I understand the author is making a sorta joke with his furries comment BUT the old fact remains. Either you defend everyones freedom or you give up on freedom. Better people then me said it better. Read books to learn what freedom really means. (Cause you sure as hell aren't going to experience it anytime soon in this world.)
IF you are going to take the view that you are not going to rely on the client having certain capabilities when are you going to stop?
Render the page server side as an image? So you presume the client has image capability?
I think that for to long we have tried to include everyone. Bending over backwards to support crap browsers with broken functions just to make sure nobody was left behind. Well fuck it. At a given point you must just be able to say, "upgrade or our site won't run".
If you don't the price is going to be that other people can move ahead and use new technologies while you are stuck with an ever dwindling but always present group of people who still use the same software from a decade ago.
Ask yourselve if this is normal in the real world.
Old cars can't run on modern petrol. Yet how many gas stations keep an old pump around for cars from before WW2? Try to get some polaroid film from your average camera store. A lp player from a highstreet electronics store.
Get the picture? So why on earth are we still worried about people using browsers 2 generations out of date.
But take it one step further. If pirated DVD's indeed sell at $0.75 then that still would be a whopping 40 bucks in the west.
What is probably the case here that china has a large spread in incomes and that the new middle class does have more money to spend then a factory worker. In a country of a billion plus the middle class even if it is just emerging must be a gigantic market.
Still yeah, your math shows the real problem. In western terms the difference between $0.75 and $1.50 doesn't seem much but translate it to percentage of income and it is huge.
Just wonder what the prices were like before. A dvd costing a weeks salary or more? And they wonder why there is piracy.
He was re-elected. So say of George W. Bush what you like but if he is a moron what the hell does that make the majority of americans who elected him. (Well majority of voting americans anyway).
Remember the old saying, in the land of the blind, one-eye is king. Now in what kind of land could a certified idiot be president.
Read the posts and you will see that even in a nerd enviroment nobody agrees on wich Star Trek was the best.
Even if everybody agrees the series has been milked to death we still can't agree when dead set in.
For fans of TOS it is clear. TNG with its 80's feel-good atmosphere and endless meetings was the beginning of the end. A counseler? We don't need no freaking counselers. Fuck it or Kill it Kirk style!
Others loved DS9, a show with not just 1 kid but 2. An offence punishable by death.
Voyager? Well, I always believed that Star Trek was a sorta reflection of America. TOS we got power but that doesn't always make us right. TNG lets have a meeting and then make one rule for us and one for everyone else. DS9 Lets make allies and then betray them for short term intrests. (Anyone finding the screwing over off the klingons and the koerds oddly similar, both helped defeat a powerfull enemy and then were left to rot when it was convenient?) Voyager, we are right and that makes us right so we can never be wrong.
Oh perhaps I am just reading to much into stuff.
Just remains funny that for all the complaints about to many series there will still be a rabid fanbase for every new series.
Oh and I didn't mention Enterprise because I can't stomach it.
Could a trekkie confirm this? Every other piece of fiction does NOT put them together. Spock is much older then Kirk making it impossible for them to be together at the academy.
Then there is the "fact" that Spock already served aboard the Enterprise before Kirk. A fact from the tv-series. Not any book.
I don't get the idea at all from the movie at least (haven't got the book at the moment) that Spock did the test with him. Their is a book about it, the kobashi maru, that tells the full tale and that of Scotty, Chekov and Sulu taking the trial on their own. Spock is not mentioned.
So for real fans the canon definitly tells us that Spock and Kirk were not at the academy together.
The problem already starts with the TV-series. The pilot made by Roddenberry was with a different cast from wich only Spock remained in the full series. The pilot was however reused in the full series and so came the "fact" that Spock served aboard the Enterprise under Pike before Kirk took command.
Another piece of canon is that Vulcans live much longer then humans. Combine this with the canon fact that Kirk is the youngest captain and it seems pretty unlikely that they were at the academy together.
Certainly no existing piece of official fiction puts them together.
Now to ruin any chances of me ever picking up a girl on slashdot. In the star trek novel "Enterprise: The first adventure" by Vonda N. McIntyre we are in fact told the story of them meeting. A young Kirk takes over command from Pike and meets his new crew members. The already serving Uhura, Scotty, Janice Rand and Spock and the also newly arrived Sulu and McCoy.
We also get a glimpse of Mitch (who gets mentioned in the original series a couple of times as an academy friend of Kirk) and Carol (the divorced wive? from the movies)
It is one of those stories that work for real fans because it ties everyone together. I am a sucker for these pre-quel things when they are done right.
So yes your right, TV-series/movie canon does not put them together at the academy at the time of their study, and novel canon is clear they only meet for real as Kirk takes command of the Enterprise.
IF the movie is really going to put them in the same class it will really upset fans and totally scream "we don't give a fuck" to the hardcore fans. Wich are the people Star Trek movies need. They need those hardcore people to make sure that even if a movie fails it still sells enough tickets to the fans that will see any ST movie just because.
It is offcourse an old problem. If you create an expanded universe then you got a rich world to base your stories in but you are also going to run into restrictions because characters will develop a real history with a timeline you can't just ignore at will.
Well you can but it doesn't sit well with the fans.
But lets not overreact shall we. All it says that we will see a younger Kirk and Spock at the academy. Perhaps it will be a split time episode where they each do their part of the story but at different point in times never meeting. Now that would be Sci-Fi.
Seeing as how in the real world you get statistics that 1 out 4 girls is sexually molested often by a close, family, relation.
Male offcourse.
Yet I have a very simple solution. Only lesbian couples or single females will be allowed to raise childeren. All men will be forced to move to an island, australia perhaps and run around naked. It is the only way to keep childeren safe.
There are online predators BUT they would be the way they are even if there was no internet. Take care of them in the real world. The way to do that is to get more regular cops getting payed a decent amount of money and not getting them to waste time making sure every nudie side has a warning page.
But that doesn't win elections. "Regulate the internet" does. "Pay more taxes to get better police" does not. Welcome to democracy.
Having tried the demo on both a windows XP machine (game rig) and a linux machine (desktop rig) I am not impressed.
Oh the idea of replacing the 2D desktop single user desktop sounds reasonable enough but the problem always remains the same.
Ease of control.
An other way of doing it is to recreate everyday objects so people will feel at home. I personally have had some light experience with an early B2B app wich had as it interface a desk. Yes, a business app where your phone list was a in a grapical binder looking just like the real thing. It had it all, a phone for dialing in. Drawers for storage.
Very nice but now we consider it obsolete. Why? Well partly because we learned to deal with the abstract desktop mostly because it just to cumbersome. Once you have "learned" that the filofax is where you adresses are stored it afterwards becomes just a bother to go through the animation. In a way the learning curve for a more abstract representation is offset by the quicker use. Also a tiny icon or perhaps even a menu entry doesn't wast half your deskspace.
So that is the reason the desk like desktop died.
So we are left with the abstract desktop but now trying to add stuff to it. It doesn't work.
As said control is a bitch. All our input devices are made for a two dimensional world. Even if you can adopt a mouse to control 3 axis (say reuse the scroll wheeel) that comes at the cost of yes, you guessed it loosing the scroll wheel for scrolling.
Even then it is barely possible to control a center point with your mouse. Or the "camera". To then change both your camera AND manipulate objects in view of the camera becomes a nightmare.
The proof? Well try the demo. Control is crap. It is not that hard to figure out. Why do you think CAD programs give you three views of the 3D world you are trying to manipulate? Because it is easier to move something in a 2D plane then in a 3D world.
It all sounds very nice but I seen 3D desktops before and they keep suffering from the same thing. Control.
I wish the next people to undertake such a project would just concentrate first on getting the controls right. Everything else can wait because the moment you release your demo people will be put off by not being able to do anything.
3D desktop adoption == non-qwerty keyboard adoption. IF users don't see a very high payoff of increased usability vs learning costs they just won't do it.
Make sure your demo A does something very usefull B instructs very clearly how to use it (why is there no movement tutorial in this?) and C keep the learning curve shallow.
Take a hint from 3D games. They have had to deal with the same problems for years. TUTORIAL!
It is the simplest way to get a PC to queit down. Put it 2 doors away (old fashioned thick doors not the modern crap) and enjoy the total silence. Oh and the healthy walks to change the cd.
Cooling a PC requires a couple of things. Getting cool air in and getting the hot air out while keeping dust down. The easiest way of doing this is to just turn your PC into a windtunnel. That is never going to happen with a nice looking tiny case. My solution? Rip of the sidewalls and replace them with a frame carrying LARGE and THICK fans (powered by a seperate powersupply) wich suck the air away from the mother board forcing fresh air in from the sides and back.
So the place where some case modders put a transparant window to show off the insides is for me a wall of fans.
Now that keeps everything cool. The noise? Well because of the huge amount of air being moved all over the place the fans themselves don't need to turn all that fast and I can use proper large fans wich are always more silent.
It still makes noise but once I close the door to the closet and then the door to the hallway the noise level is completly down. In the hallway itself you hear a slight hum but still less then from the central heating system.
If you absolutly need your PC in the room with you then you might want to look at some real water cooling. Not the sissy stuff with the radiator on top of your PC. Get that sucker out of the window just like in a proper airco setup.
Just remember that just because the critical components are water cooled doesn't mean you can turn off al the case fans. If you do that you will soon learn all the parts of your computer are prone to overheating.
The best way to reduce noise is distance. With digital connections you can either put distance between you and your noisy computer or use water cooling to at least get distance between you and the cooling setup.
The difference is truly amazing. Silent computing can't be underestimated.
Just that dropping something with zero shock absoprtion(?) onto something else with no shock absorption, such as a piece of metal on a piece of brick, causes an awfull lot of force.
I remember figures like this claimed before.
If you now wonder how humans can survive tripping and falling to the ground. Well A they often don't and the ones that do do because we are both bouncy and don't free fall to the ground.
But it is the reason a fall the the second floor is so fucking dangerous.
An old penny-arcade comic commented on how games are now marketted at the cool kids. Not the geeks anymore.
I recently played the new Tomb Raider and I noticed something. In the first game she was a geekie kinda girl. Sure physically fit and rich but you could tell she would rather read a good book then go clubbing. A dork with tits.
But over the years she been getting further and further away from that to the point where she now seems to have some "cool" dudes hanging out with her and having totally changed her way of talking.
It seems to me very clear that this game is being marketted at a different audience. This is a game for cool kids who look, or at least think they look, like the characters in the game. Geeks need not apply.
The reason is offcourse obvious, marketshare. If you got the geek market then obviously you want to expand that to the non-geek market and so you add some stuff, remove some stuff and then wonder what the fuck happened because nobody is watching anymore.
I like to call the effect, BBC program being raped by the yanks. BBC is geekie. They got ugly losers losing in the game that is life. Wether that is red dwarf or scapheap challenge it is about fat sad people being normal.
Give that to an american producer and he will attempt to cool it up. Search for Red Dwarf american pilot for a real horror show. The american version of scrapheap challenge removes the team factor (instead having the nightmare of all geeks, the being picked by the team leader leading to the horror of being the last one picked, remember that from school?), adds meaningless radiochatter and camera movements and in general looks like a show that feels american. Ugh.
Sadly it sells. Face it, we as geeks are not a big enough group. Even if a product is successfull at targetting us it is only a matter of time until some person looking for promotion suggest altering it to appeal to a larger audience.
Old tv shows don't die, they just get reworked to appeal to more and more people until finally nobody watches anymore.
MTV has become a joke for being the music station that no longer airs music. It was so much a joke that other stations sprang up to replace it. Now they too are starting with more and more non-music. Why? Because we got this insane law that forbids us from shooting people from marketting.
Yet a couple of years ago I did volunteer work at a local tv station as a cameraman. It was very intresting as offcourse a lot of the stuff was about art. Filming local artist during exhibitions and such.
Some stuff I could get. Regular mainstream art like paintings or sculptures even if made out of trash. I am not a complete idiot and did not need to be told wich was the sculpture and wich the trashheap.
But performance art was too confusing. The only difference between performance art and a mental case on the street seemed to be location. Some "artist" would "perform" for an amazing amount of time and apparently it was all very meaningfull. When you are holding a heavy camera usually you don't think much about what you are actually filming since you are busy with your own work. But when the performer freezes or just twists a single limb for minutes on end you can't help but wonder what the fuck it is all about.
The most amazing thing is that these people all think it is extremely important what they are doing. Considering their efforts as worthy as hospitals. After all they want the same tax money to support them that could also be used to research cancer.
Not that I really mind. It keeps them off the street. Sure a less liberal goverment would force them to get a real day job but would you really want one them to be your co-worker? Jails for the criminals, mental hospitals for the insane and art centers for the totally useless.
I say it harsh but nonetheless that is how most people view "art". Useless crap that cost a lot of taxpayers money but does nothing.
Do we really want games to be like that?
It reminds me off a Yes Minister episode in wich the questions arises why opera (wich the masses do not want) receives subsidy but soccer (wich the masses do want) does not.
Games are not art. In the same way movies and indeed books are not. If it is popular and people freely spend their own money on it then it can't be art. Art does NOT sell.
Most REAL artists would agree. If you look at nearly all the great works of arts you would learn that all of them were commercial projects paid in advance. "De nachtwacht" by rembrandt. The "Mona Lisa" by Da Vinci. Great works of art yet made for no other reason then the money.
Perhaps there are two kinds of art. The artsy arts that survive only thanks to goverment subsidies that nobody gives a shit about and the kind that actually sells and can sustain it self. Offcourse that is not "real" art in the eyes of the first group but frankly I don't think that is bad at all.
Think of it like this. Do you know what local delicacy means? It means nobody else in the world wants to eat it. If a game truly became art would anyone really want to play it?
That is the entire point right there. You don't talk about ethics. You have them and live by them. Talk is cheap.
I am also pretty sure that you could go to any evil company and find nice departments with nice people. You don't think everyone at Enron and Worldcom signed a contract with their own blood?
MS is evil from the top down. Not evil as in slave owner evil. I don't for a moment think Bill Gates would whip someone. Ballmer yes.
MS is evil as in not voting to abolish slavery because it would ruin the economy way.
MS would do anything for money and that boys and girls is evil. Not the intresting movie evil that puts the hero in chains above a shark tank but the simple evil of a person who does anything for money no matter what.
Good, because whole opensource needs coders and even graphical artists (ewh) and document writers and usuability engineers what we can really use is tech support monkeys.
So you have hearby volunteerd to sit in an irc channel and answer any and all questions.
oh wait, you can't be arsed? Figures.
We need to be able to include everyone in this community.
Why?
Just that. Why?
As for noob. It is more then being a newbie. Everyone is new to something at least once. There is nothing wrong with that. There is something wrong with expecting others to do your learning for you.
You claim "we" (does that include you) do not entire news users very well. Mmm, odd. You were new once. So was I. So were millions of others. How can that be?
When I was still new to unix (yes I am old) I received plenty of help as well when I later switched to linux. I never been told to RTFM.
Either I was lucky, or polite enough or I showed that I had spent time trying to figure it out on my own before resorting to pestering someone else with it.
I always approach asking for help like asking for directions. I am male. Death first! Well urban male, so being lost for half an hour in freezing weather is about my limit but the idea is, only ask for help as a last resort.
But hey, if your willing to jump in and start asking all the lazy questions I am sure there is a project waiting for your help. Welcome to unpaid tech support hell.
First
RTFM. It is not limited to linux or for that matter computers. When person A says to person B when A says "RTFM" he basically says, "I am tired off constantly helping everyone who can't be bothered to first try it for themselves forcing me to explain the same thing over and over and over again".
Parents are very familiar with this feeling. The reason teachers are payed such a lot of money (HA!) is because they can put up with it.
There are plenty of doctor jokes where the doctor fed up with constantly being asked for free medical advice gives a witty reply instead. Same with computer geeks replying to a request for free technical support with a counter request for free whatever-the-person-does-for-a-living.
The point is that most of us are not your parents or teacher and are only willing to do so much hand-holding. Go past this limit and you will be told to take your questions elsewhere. Imagine someone on the street asked you for directions. You give them then the person asks you to repeat yourselve. How many times would you do it before you tell them to Read The Fucking Map? Congrats, your are an arrgogant RTFM asshole.
Second
The second part of the problem is the gap between the askers and the givers. It is most obvious in online games, FPS or MMO doesn't matter, where you can make a very safe bet someone will ask how to do something bloody obvious like how to reload your weapon.
The problem here is simple, the asker can't apperently be bothered to check the options for the key configuration instead presuming that others will do the work for him. In itself not a problem. Except that you run into the same problem as with non-seeding torrenters. If 9 out of 10 people decide not to upload their torrent downloads then 1 out of 10 people will have to do all the uploading. It usually is 1 person who gets to answer all those stupid questions. Even if the question is genuine, the person may be new to games and unfamiliar with how to check wich key to press, it is rare for a "wich key do I press" person to then turn into an answer giver for other askers.
Or to put it simply, most students can't be arsed to become teachers. This puts yet more strain on the few people willing to answer questions.
Third
Basic manners are often lacking. This may show my age but I have always been taught that the person who wants somebody is polite to the person they are requesting from. This includes a thank you after getting what you want.
Offcourse the problem is that the irritation over impolite assholes may very well explode over a polite asker who just happens to ask at the wrong time.
But the most important "error" made in the parent article
Arrogance. Well I can certainly see arrogance being a problem BUT it is with the poster, not with the "linux crowd". Why? Well apperently he seems convinced the Linux crowd gives a fuck about his opinion. That is real arrogance. Imagine the following scenario.
Player A: "What key do I press to reload"
Player B: "RTFM"
Player A: "You such an asshole I am not going to play this game".
Player B-Z: "So?"
Player A makes the arrogant mistake that anybody cares. This is very important, if you ask me directions am I arrogant for not giving a fuck wether you can find it or not? No.
To many people presume that the rest of the world owns them something. It doesn't.
A lot of people are willing to spend their own time helping others but that doesn't make it some kind of right you deserve.
Conclusion
When you are told to "RTFM" check wether the following may be true.
Check the "backlog". Has the same question been asked before or in extreme cases is the question being answered right now in the same chat channel while you are asking the question?
Are you asking in the right place? The raid chat channel for the leetest WoW dungeon is probably not the right place to ask how to attack.
Now if there is one recent game you can't complete in 10 minutes that is it. 9 hours? HA!
So if this article got a point this superlong game would not be selling. Except that it is.
So the story is complete and utter crap.
What is "important" for people with other demands on their time is the ability to segment their gaming. Or in other words. Save anywhere.
Call of Cthulhu is another Betsheda game yet while it is much shorter (except for some fake replay forcing) I can play it far less. In Oblivion I could play for say 5 minutes before saving and doing whatever is demanded of me. CoC would mean I had to quit and next time do whatever I did over again because I had not reached a save point.
The online 5 minute FPS section offcourse can't be saved but then again doesn't need to. Same with MMO games wich in way save CONSTANTLY.
I think the most important lesson game companies should learn is that older players with real live demands on their time will have less patience for being forced to play from savepoint to savepoint. Being forced to replay a game if they want maximum difficulty (what the fuck is up with that? Consoles are weird) or all the goodies.
Putting out games in small bits is not going to solve anything. So what if the godfather was segmented into 1 hour episodes. That STILL would not meet your 5 minute game session time.
I just wish gamemakers would wake up and realize that savepoints are a leftover from the days consoles didn't have enough memory to save a full game.
It is a tech limit NOT a design feature. I paid for the product, I decide how to play it.
If you think about it savepoint system is like that recent Philips patent to disable your TV controls during ads. It is the content maker telling you how you should play. Fuck that.
Just encode all porn with these flags and laugh evilly as millions of men are unable to switch off the tv when their significant other walks in on them. Brilliant.
As for watching tv. Channel surfing is already next to impossible (well except to the BBC) as they all sync their ads to run together.
Sadly it doesn't have the effect the tv producers hoped for. My tv watching has dropped to near zero over the last few years.
Not out of any idea that TV is worthless. I am normally a person who laps up mindless entertainment. I just don't have the attention span to last the 5 minute commercial break.
But then your talking to a Grand Prix Legends player here. So perhaps I am not entirely normal.
GPL for those who don't know is a very though historic formule 1 game that focusses on realism. It was so realistic that it took fans a lot of time to realise that all the setups of the cars had been done wrong. Modern F1 games are made to ride as low to the ground because of airodynamics BUT the F1 cars in the era simulated do not even have wings.
So while all the players tried to get the cars as low as possible they were in fact making the cars impossible to handle. The cars instead needed lots of clearance in able to fully use their shocks to get around corners.
GPL is harder then most driving games as you need to special controls of being able to break and accelerate at the same time. So the usual joystick setup of only one axis for both just isn't good enough.
GPL is also a game in wich you shouldn't mind loosing. You probably just won't be good enough to beat the AI drivers. Then again the thrill of coming 10th in that game is infinitly greater then coming first in lesser race sims.
So I would like to play a game with more realistic combat, not to realistic offcourse (just as I can pause GPL for a bathroom break and don't actually have to fit enough to handle a high performance car) but giving me a real challenge in actually having to do some fighting and not just push a button.
I liked Oni. While not realistic you could at least use all your different moves to great effect. Far better then the regular hit or block. Still love that move where you ran to the side of badguy then swung around his neck kicking his companions in the face before snapping his neck.
But why can't we have both? GPL has lots of helper functions wich if all turned on make the game a lot easier. No fun, but a lot easier.
In fact all the really though sims do this.
Morrowind in fact had three different attack moves. Probably considered to complex for console players but there is no reason it couldn't have been an option in Oblivion.
So yes, I would buy such a game and I think I am not alone. True for every Operation FlashPoint fan there are plenty of gamers who could not handle the fact that bullets arc BUT that can be a selling point as well.
To me Oblivion is a nice game, just as soon as I got the instant kill mod because the current fighting get to bloody boring. Especially those damn gates. Endless non roleplaying level with boring enemies dropped around the place. Yawn.
Once, in a galaxy far far away. Eh better stop before I get sued.
Nonetheless at one time they were a top game company producing quality titles that people fondly remember. Indiana and the Fate of Atlantis. X-wing. Monkey Island. Battle of Britain and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe (not the crappy sequel).
Adventurs with a hint of flightsim seemed to be Lucasarts strong point.
Then things went a bit amiss. We got some weird strategy titles, "afterlife". A crappy FMV star wars game.
They also handycapped existing games. Was it Monkey Island 3 or 4 that had that weird 3d control system that made it pain just to walk around all because Lucasarts thought point&click was death? Point&Click didn't die. Mr Lucas killed it.
The x-wing series in my eyes went down hill as well after tie-fighter by turning it more and more into a missle sim instead of a dogfighting sim. They even add chaff for crying out loud.
Games like Jedi Knight were okay but again they seemed determined to destroy their own success. The first time it was a star wars skin for doom BUT it was Doom + Star Wars so that was okay. The second time they gave us an engine capable of creating the giantness that is Star Wars. Then the third time (not counting the expansion) they put is in a Quake engine. Yuck. Gone were the GIGANTIC enviroments.
To me lucasarts went from a A list company to another has been. Following Sierra but not entirely disappearing like MicroProse.
If this guy wants to be number 1 he needs to realise that once the company had that position, then find what made them loose it and reverse it.
Pity it would probably involve sacking himself.
For myself I pinpoint Lucasarts true declice the moment you started one of their games and got some third party game company logo during the intro. I believe it was in X-wing vs Tie-Fighter that this happened for the first time.
The current Empires at wars made me nostalgic for a x-wing upgrade. Gigantic space battles please. No missles. I want to duck and weave and blast ties and weave between star destroyers with artoo-detoo bleeping in my ear.
Slashdot Mirror
At least I do not know about not4chan and renchan. Oops. (Lolicon boards)
As for a slightly more serious answer to your question. The bush goverment is also fighting a war on general porn. Just wait a few more years and then just seeing a nudie picture will get you jail time.
Can't wait personally. I wonder how much time an american will get for opening a link I sent them to tubgirl.
For those who don't know. 4chan is a english image board. An image board is a website that allows users to anonymously post images. It is a trend from japan and the fast majority are indeed vile. Filled with images of under age trains and jail bait cars. Oh and mecha. (What trainspotters grow up into if they aren't cured with a cattle prod)
the /b/ board is Hentai/Alternative. Hentai is japanese for perverted. However most of the content is what you get when you let 14yr old boys post anonymously. It ain't pretty.
The idea of a /b/ visitor complaining about anyone else is laughable.
If you know about /b/ then you are at the bottom of the ladder. Lookup and you will in fact see child rapists crap on you.
To be serious the parent reminds me a bit off criminals offended by other criminals. Rapist saying they despise child rapists. WTF?
This guy vists /b/ a channel filled with the worst of the net and then complains about japan. Right. Take a look at yourselve first kiddo.
Read the article and you get an image not so much of a pervert as an incredible idiot. Either the guy has a several mental handicap or it is a setup because no normal person would give away that much info online.
Hell, first rule of dating. Never give the bitch your phone number. Geez.
Oh well good to see the other rule still is true. The internet where the men are men, the women are men and all the girls are police agents.
America is still somewhat of a democracy with furthermore a legal recourse to armed rebellion. IF you truly believe that the current goverment is turning your country into a dictatorship then do something about. Form a new party, dare to vote for a guy who doesn't promise you lower taxes or just buy a gun and shoot the fuckers.
The sad fact is that freedom is only ever won by the sword and is always lost over time. Just look at any country that had a revolution by the citizens to gain their freedom. Like say. America itself for instance.
Hell the russians did it twice and look at them. They went from the slavery off the tsars(?) to the slavery of the so-called communists, to the slavery of extreme capatalism/mafia and now poetin is trying to enslave them again.
The price of freedom is shooting everyone trying to take it away from you.
The child porn argument is nothing new. It is very similar to the "communist" hunt. The drugs hunt. The original witch hunt. All a would be dictator has to do is find what small group of people is currently hated the most and claims his actions are to hunt them down.
It has worked everytime before, it will this time. Unless you right now declare freedom to be more important then childerens safety. Nope. Didn't think so.
Person 1: You! You're against furries and their furry pornography, right?
You: Yeah, lets create a police state to hunt them down.
All you got to know is what buttons to press. For some it is child porn. For others it is furry porn. Whatever works to get you to sign up for a police state.
Please note that I understand the author is making a sorta joke with his furries comment BUT the old fact remains. Either you defend everyones freedom or you give up on freedom. Better people then me said it better. Read books to learn what freedom really means. (Cause you sure as hell aren't going to experience it anytime soon in this world.)
Render the page server side as an image? So you presume the client has image capability?
I think that for to long we have tried to include everyone. Bending over backwards to support crap browsers with broken functions just to make sure nobody was left behind. Well fuck it. At a given point you must just be able to say, "upgrade or our site won't run".
If you don't the price is going to be that other people can move ahead and use new technologies while you are stuck with an ever dwindling but always present group of people who still use the same software from a decade ago.
Ask yourselve if this is normal in the real world.
Old cars can't run on modern petrol. Yet how many gas stations keep an old pump around for cars from before WW2? Try to get some polaroid film from your average camera store. A lp player from a highstreet electronics store.
Get the picture? So why on earth are we still worried about people using browsers 2 generations out of date.
What is probably the case here that china has a large spread in incomes and that the new middle class does have more money to spend then a factory worker. In a country of a billion plus the middle class even if it is just emerging must be a gigantic market.
Still yeah, your math shows the real problem. In western terms the difference between $0.75 and $1.50 doesn't seem much but translate it to percentage of income and it is huge.
Just wonder what the prices were like before. A dvd costing a weeks salary or more? And they wonder why there is piracy.
Remember the old saying, in the land of the blind, one-eye is king. Now in what kind of land could a certified idiot be president.
I think you know the answer.
Not that the rest of the world is any better.
Even if everybody agrees the series has been milked to death we still can't agree when dead set in.
For fans of TOS it is clear. TNG with its 80's feel-good atmosphere and endless meetings was the beginning of the end. A counseler? We don't need no freaking counselers. Fuck it or Kill it Kirk style!
Others loved DS9, a show with not just 1 kid but 2. An offence punishable by death.
Voyager? Well, I always believed that Star Trek was a sorta reflection of America. TOS we got power but that doesn't always make us right. TNG lets have a meeting and then make one rule for us and one for everyone else. DS9 Lets make allies and then betray them for short term intrests. (Anyone finding the screwing over off the klingons and the koerds oddly similar, both helped defeat a powerfull enemy and then were left to rot when it was convenient?) Voyager, we are right and that makes us right so we can never be wrong.
Oh perhaps I am just reading to much into stuff.
Just remains funny that for all the complaints about to many series there will still be a rabid fanbase for every new series.
Oh and I didn't mention Enterprise because I can't stomach it.
Then there is the "fact" that Spock already served aboard the Enterprise before Kirk. A fact from the tv-series. Not any book.
I don't get the idea at all from the movie at least (haven't got the book at the moment) that Spock did the test with him. Their is a book about it, the kobashi maru, that tells the full tale and that of Scotty, Chekov and Sulu taking the trial on their own. Spock is not mentioned.
So for real fans the canon definitly tells us that Spock and Kirk were not at the academy together.
Another piece of canon is that Vulcans live much longer then humans. Combine this with the canon fact that Kirk is the youngest captain and it seems pretty unlikely that they were at the academy together.
Certainly no existing piece of official fiction puts them together.
Now to ruin any chances of me ever picking up a girl on slashdot. In the star trek novel "Enterprise: The first adventure" by Vonda N. McIntyre we are in fact told the story of them meeting. A young Kirk takes over command from Pike and meets his new crew members. The already serving Uhura, Scotty, Janice Rand and Spock and the also newly arrived Sulu and McCoy.
We also get a glimpse of Mitch (who gets mentioned in the original series a couple of times as an academy friend of Kirk) and Carol (the divorced wive? from the movies)
It is one of those stories that work for real fans because it ties everyone together. I am a sucker for these pre-quel things when they are done right.
So yes your right, TV-series/movie canon does not put them together at the academy at the time of their study, and novel canon is clear they only meet for real as Kirk takes command of the Enterprise.
IF the movie is really going to put them in the same class it will really upset fans and totally scream "we don't give a fuck" to the hardcore fans. Wich are the people Star Trek movies need. They need those hardcore people to make sure that even if a movie fails it still sells enough tickets to the fans that will see any ST movie just because.
It is offcourse an old problem. If you create an expanded universe then you got a rich world to base your stories in but you are also going to run into restrictions because characters will develop a real history with a timeline you can't just ignore at will.
Well you can but it doesn't sit well with the fans.
But lets not overreact shall we. All it says that we will see a younger Kirk and Spock at the academy. Perhaps it will be a split time episode where they each do their part of the story but at different point in times never meeting. Now that would be Sci-Fi.
Yeah right. Who am I kidding.
Male offcourse.
Yet I have a very simple solution. Only lesbian couples or single females will be allowed to raise childeren. All men will be forced to move to an island, australia perhaps and run around naked. It is the only way to keep childeren safe.
There are online predators BUT they would be the way they are even if there was no internet. Take care of them in the real world. The way to do that is to get more regular cops getting payed a decent amount of money and not getting them to waste time making sure every nudie side has a warning page.
But that doesn't win elections. "Regulate the internet" does. "Pay more taxes to get better police" does not. Welcome to democracy.
Oh the idea of replacing the 2D desktop single user desktop sounds reasonable enough but the problem always remains the same.
Ease of control.
An other way of doing it is to recreate everyday objects so people will feel at home. I personally have had some light experience with an early B2B app wich had as it interface a desk. Yes, a business app where your phone list was a in a grapical binder looking just like the real thing. It had it all, a phone for dialing in. Drawers for storage.
Very nice but now we consider it obsolete. Why? Well partly because we learned to deal with the abstract desktop mostly because it just to cumbersome. Once you have "learned" that the filofax is where you adresses are stored it afterwards becomes just a bother to go through the animation. In a way the learning curve for a more abstract representation is offset by the quicker use. Also a tiny icon or perhaps even a menu entry doesn't wast half your deskspace.
So that is the reason the desk like desktop died.
So we are left with the abstract desktop but now trying to add stuff to it. It doesn't work.
As said control is a bitch. All our input devices are made for a two dimensional world. Even if you can adopt a mouse to control 3 axis (say reuse the scroll wheeel) that comes at the cost of yes, you guessed it loosing the scroll wheel for scrolling.
Even then it is barely possible to control a center point with your mouse. Or the "camera". To then change both your camera AND manipulate objects in view of the camera becomes a nightmare.
The proof? Well try the demo. Control is crap. It is not that hard to figure out. Why do you think CAD programs give you three views of the 3D world you are trying to manipulate? Because it is easier to move something in a 2D plane then in a 3D world.
It all sounds very nice but I seen 3D desktops before and they keep suffering from the same thing. Control.
I wish the next people to undertake such a project would just concentrate first on getting the controls right. Everything else can wait because the moment you release your demo people will be put off by not being able to do anything.
3D desktop adoption == non-qwerty keyboard adoption. IF users don't see a very high payoff of increased usability vs learning costs they just won't do it.
Make sure your demo A does something very usefull B instructs very clearly how to use it (why is there no movement tutorial in this?) and C keep the learning curve shallow.
Take a hint from 3D games. They have had to deal with the same problems for years. TUTORIAL!
It is the simplest way to get a PC to queit down. Put it 2 doors away (old fashioned thick doors not the modern crap) and enjoy the total silence. Oh and the healthy walks to change the cd.
Cooling a PC requires a couple of things. Getting cool air in and getting the hot air out while keeping dust down. The easiest way of doing this is to just turn your PC into a windtunnel. That is never going to happen with a nice looking tiny case. My solution? Rip of the sidewalls and replace them with a frame carrying LARGE and THICK fans (powered by a seperate powersupply) wich suck the air away from the mother board forcing fresh air in from the sides and back.
So the place where some case modders put a transparant window to show off the insides is for me a wall of fans.
Now that keeps everything cool. The noise? Well because of the huge amount of air being moved all over the place the fans themselves don't need to turn all that fast and I can use proper large fans wich are always more silent.
It still makes noise but once I close the door to the closet and then the door to the hallway the noise level is completly down. In the hallway itself you hear a slight hum but still less then from the central heating system.
If you absolutly need your PC in the room with you then you might want to look at some real water cooling. Not the sissy stuff with the radiator on top of your PC. Get that sucker out of the window just like in a proper airco setup.
Just remember that just because the critical components are water cooled doesn't mean you can turn off al the case fans. If you do that you will soon learn all the parts of your computer are prone to overheating.
The best way to reduce noise is distance. With digital connections you can either put distance between you and your noisy computer or use water cooling to at least get distance between you and the cooling setup.
The difference is truly amazing. Silent computing can't be underestimated.
I remember figures like this claimed before.
If you now wonder how humans can survive tripping and falling to the ground. Well A they often don't and the ones that do do because we are both bouncy and don't free fall to the ground.
But it is the reason a fall the the second floor is so fucking dangerous.
G forces are a lot higher then you expect.
An old penny-arcade comic commented on how games are now marketted at the cool kids. Not the geeks anymore.
I recently played the new Tomb Raider and I noticed something. In the first game she was a geekie kinda girl. Sure physically fit and rich but you could tell she would rather read a good book then go clubbing. A dork with tits.
But over the years she been getting further and further away from that to the point where she now seems to have some "cool" dudes hanging out with her and having totally changed her way of talking.
It seems to me very clear that this game is being marketted at a different audience. This is a game for cool kids who look, or at least think they look, like the characters in the game. Geeks need not apply.
The reason is offcourse obvious, marketshare. If you got the geek market then obviously you want to expand that to the non-geek market and so you add some stuff, remove some stuff and then wonder what the fuck happened because nobody is watching anymore.
I like to call the effect, BBC program being raped by the yanks. BBC is geekie. They got ugly losers losing in the game that is life. Wether that is red dwarf or scapheap challenge it is about fat sad people being normal.
Give that to an american producer and he will attempt to cool it up. Search for Red Dwarf american pilot for a real horror show. The american version of scrapheap challenge removes the team factor (instead having the nightmare of all geeks, the being picked by the team leader leading to the horror of being the last one picked, remember that from school?), adds meaningless radiochatter and camera movements and in general looks like a show that feels american. Ugh.
Sadly it sells. Face it, we as geeks are not a big enough group. Even if a product is successfull at targetting us it is only a matter of time until some person looking for promotion suggest altering it to appeal to a larger audience.
Old tv shows don't die, they just get reworked to appeal to more and more people until finally nobody watches anymore.
MTV has become a joke for being the music station that no longer airs music. It was so much a joke that other stations sprang up to replace it. Now they too are starting with more and more non-music. Why? Because we got this insane law that forbids us from shooting people from marketting.
Some stuff I could get. Regular mainstream art like paintings or sculptures even if made out of trash. I am not a complete idiot and did not need to be told wich was the sculpture and wich the trashheap.
But performance art was too confusing. The only difference between performance art and a mental case on the street seemed to be location. Some "artist" would "perform" for an amazing amount of time and apparently it was all very meaningfull. When you are holding a heavy camera usually you don't think much about what you are actually filming since you are busy with your own work. But when the performer freezes or just twists a single limb for minutes on end you can't help but wonder what the fuck it is all about.
The most amazing thing is that these people all think it is extremely important what they are doing. Considering their efforts as worthy as hospitals. After all they want the same tax money to support them that could also be used to research cancer.
Not that I really mind. It keeps them off the street. Sure a less liberal goverment would force them to get a real day job but would you really want one them to be your co-worker? Jails for the criminals, mental hospitals for the insane and art centers for the totally useless.
I say it harsh but nonetheless that is how most people view "art". Useless crap that cost a lot of taxpayers money but does nothing.
Do we really want games to be like that?
It reminds me off a Yes Minister episode in wich the questions arises why opera (wich the masses do not want) receives subsidy but soccer (wich the masses do want) does not.
Games are not art. In the same way movies and indeed books are not. If it is popular and people freely spend their own money on it then it can't be art. Art does NOT sell.
Most REAL artists would agree. If you look at nearly all the great works of arts you would learn that all of them were commercial projects paid in advance. "De nachtwacht" by rembrandt. The "Mona Lisa" by Da Vinci. Great works of art yet made for no other reason then the money.
Perhaps there are two kinds of art. The artsy arts that survive only thanks to goverment subsidies that nobody gives a shit about and the kind that actually sells and can sustain it self. Offcourse that is not "real" art in the eyes of the first group but frankly I don't think that is bad at all.
Think of it like this. Do you know what local delicacy means? It means nobody else in the world wants to eat it. If a game truly became art would anyone really want to play it?
That is the entire point right there. You don't talk about ethics. You have them and live by them. Talk is cheap.
I am also pretty sure that you could go to any evil company and find nice departments with nice people. You don't think everyone at Enron and Worldcom signed a contract with their own blood?
MS is evil from the top down. Not evil as in slave owner evil. I don't for a moment think Bill Gates would whip someone. Ballmer yes.
MS is evil as in not voting to abolish slavery because it would ruin the economy way.
MS would do anything for money and that boys and girls is evil. Not the intresting movie evil that puts the hero in chains above a shark tank but the simple evil of a person who does anything for money no matter what.
So you have hearby volunteerd to sit in an irc channel and answer any and all questions.
oh wait, you can't be arsed? Figures.
We need to be able to include everyone in this community.
Why?
Just that. Why?
As for noob. It is more then being a newbie. Everyone is new to something at least once. There is nothing wrong with that. There is something wrong with expecting others to do your learning for you.
You claim "we" (does that include you) do not entire news users very well. Mmm, odd. You were new once. So was I. So were millions of others. How can that be?
When I was still new to unix (yes I am old) I received plenty of help as well when I later switched to linux. I never been told to RTFM.
Either I was lucky, or polite enough or I showed that I had spent time trying to figure it out on my own before resorting to pestering someone else with it.
I always approach asking for help like asking for directions. I am male. Death first! Well urban male, so being lost for half an hour in freezing weather is about my limit but the idea is, only ask for help as a last resort.
But hey, if your willing to jump in and start asking all the lazy questions I am sure there is a project waiting for your help. Welcome to unpaid tech support hell.
First RTFM. It is not limited to linux or for that matter computers. When person A says to person B when A says "RTFM" he basically says, "I am tired off constantly helping everyone who can't be bothered to first try it for themselves forcing me to explain the same thing over and over and over again".
Parents are very familiar with this feeling. The reason teachers are payed such a lot of money (HA!) is because they can put up with it.
There are plenty of doctor jokes where the doctor fed up with constantly being asked for free medical advice gives a witty reply instead. Same with computer geeks replying to a request for free technical support with a counter request for free whatever-the-person-does-for-a-living.
The point is that most of us are not your parents or teacher and are only willing to do so much hand-holding. Go past this limit and you will be told to take your questions elsewhere. Imagine someone on the street asked you for directions. You give them then the person asks you to repeat yourselve. How many times would you do it before you tell them to Read The Fucking Map? Congrats, your are an arrgogant RTFM asshole.
Second The second part of the problem is the gap between the askers and the givers. It is most obvious in online games, FPS or MMO doesn't matter, where you can make a very safe bet someone will ask how to do something bloody obvious like how to reload your weapon.
The problem here is simple, the asker can't apperently be bothered to check the options for the key configuration instead presuming that others will do the work for him. In itself not a problem. Except that you run into the same problem as with non-seeding torrenters. If 9 out of 10 people decide not to upload their torrent downloads then 1 out of 10 people will have to do all the uploading. It usually is 1 person who gets to answer all those stupid questions. Even if the question is genuine, the person may be new to games and unfamiliar with how to check wich key to press, it is rare for a "wich key do I press" person to then turn into an answer giver for other askers.
Or to put it simply, most students can't be arsed to become teachers. This puts yet more strain on the few people willing to answer questions.
Third
Basic manners are often lacking. This may show my age but I have always been taught that the person who wants somebody is polite to the person they are requesting from. This includes a thank you after getting what you want.
Offcourse the problem is that the irritation over impolite assholes may very well explode over a polite asker who just happens to ask at the wrong time.
But the most important "error" made in the parent article
Arrogance. Well I can certainly see arrogance being a problem BUT it is with the poster, not with the "linux crowd". Why? Well apperently he seems convinced the Linux crowd gives a fuck about his opinion. That is real arrogance. Imagine the following scenario.
Player A: "What key do I press to reload"
Player B: "RTFM"
Player A: "You such an asshole I am not going to play this game".
Player B-Z: "So?"
Player A makes the arrogant mistake that anybody cares. This is very important, if you ask me directions am I arrogant for not giving a fuck wether you can find it or not? No.
To many people presume that the rest of the world owns them something. It doesn't.
A lot of people are willing to spend their own time helping others but that doesn't make it some kind of right you deserve.
Conclusion
When you are told to "RTFM" check wether the following may be true.
So if this article got a point this superlong game would not be selling. Except that it is.
So the story is complete and utter crap.
What is "important" for people with other demands on their time is the ability to segment their gaming. Or in other words. Save anywhere.
Call of Cthulhu is another Betsheda game yet while it is much shorter (except for some fake replay forcing) I can play it far less. In Oblivion I could play for say 5 minutes before saving and doing whatever is demanded of me. CoC would mean I had to quit and next time do whatever I did over again because I had not reached a save point.
The online 5 minute FPS section offcourse can't be saved but then again doesn't need to. Same with MMO games wich in way save CONSTANTLY.
I think the most important lesson game companies should learn is that older players with real live demands on their time will have less patience for being forced to play from savepoint to savepoint. Being forced to replay a game if they want maximum difficulty (what the fuck is up with that? Consoles are weird) or all the goodies.
Putting out games in small bits is not going to solve anything. So what if the godfather was segmented into 1 hour episodes. That STILL would not meet your 5 minute game session time.
I just wish gamemakers would wake up and realize that savepoints are a leftover from the days consoles didn't have enough memory to save a full game.
It is a tech limit NOT a design feature. I paid for the product, I decide how to play it.
If you think about it savepoint system is like that recent Philips patent to disable your TV controls during ads. It is the content maker telling you how you should play. Fuck that.
As for watching tv. Channel surfing is already next to impossible (well except to the BBC) as they all sync their ads to run together.
Sadly it doesn't have the effect the tv producers hoped for. My tv watching has dropped to near zero over the last few years.
Not out of any idea that TV is worthless. I am normally a person who laps up mindless entertainment. I just don't have the attention span to last the 5 minute commercial break.
GPL for those who don't know is a very though historic formule 1 game that focusses on realism. It was so realistic that it took fans a lot of time to realise that all the setups of the cars had been done wrong. Modern F1 games are made to ride as low to the ground because of airodynamics BUT the F1 cars in the era simulated do not even have wings.
So while all the players tried to get the cars as low as possible they were in fact making the cars impossible to handle. The cars instead needed lots of clearance in able to fully use their shocks to get around corners.
GPL is harder then most driving games as you need to special controls of being able to break and accelerate at the same time. So the usual joystick setup of only one axis for both just isn't good enough.
GPL is also a game in wich you shouldn't mind loosing. You probably just won't be good enough to beat the AI drivers. Then again the thrill of coming 10th in that game is infinitly greater then coming first in lesser race sims.
So I would like to play a game with more realistic combat, not to realistic offcourse (just as I can pause GPL for a bathroom break and don't actually have to fit enough to handle a high performance car) but giving me a real challenge in actually having to do some fighting and not just push a button.
I liked Oni. While not realistic you could at least use all your different moves to great effect. Far better then the regular hit or block. Still love that move where you ran to the side of badguy then swung around his neck kicking his companions in the face before snapping his neck.
But why can't we have both? GPL has lots of helper functions wich if all turned on make the game a lot easier. No fun, but a lot easier.
In fact all the really though sims do this.
Morrowind in fact had three different attack moves. Probably considered to complex for console players but there is no reason it couldn't have been an option in Oblivion.
So yes, I would buy such a game and I think I am not alone. True for every Operation FlashPoint fan there are plenty of gamers who could not handle the fact that bullets arc BUT that can be a selling point as well.
To me Oblivion is a nice game, just as soon as I got the instant kill mod because the current fighting get to bloody boring. Especially those damn gates. Endless non roleplaying level with boring enemies dropped around the place. Yawn.
Nonetheless at one time they were a top game company producing quality titles that people fondly remember. Indiana and the Fate of Atlantis. X-wing. Monkey Island. Battle of Britain and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe (not the crappy sequel).
Adventurs with a hint of flightsim seemed to be Lucasarts strong point.
Then things went a bit amiss. We got some weird strategy titles, "afterlife". A crappy FMV star wars game.
They also handycapped existing games. Was it Monkey Island 3 or 4 that had that weird 3d control system that made it pain just to walk around all because Lucasarts thought point&click was death? Point&Click didn't die. Mr Lucas killed it.
The x-wing series in my eyes went down hill as well after tie-fighter by turning it more and more into a missle sim instead of a dogfighting sim. They even add chaff for crying out loud.
Games like Jedi Knight were okay but again they seemed determined to destroy their own success. The first time it was a star wars skin for doom BUT it was Doom + Star Wars so that was okay. The second time they gave us an engine capable of creating the giantness that is Star Wars. Then the third time (not counting the expansion) they put is in a Quake engine. Yuck. Gone were the GIGANTIC enviroments.
To me lucasarts went from a A list company to another has been. Following Sierra but not entirely disappearing like MicroProse.
If this guy wants to be number 1 he needs to realise that once the company had that position, then find what made them loose it and reverse it.
Pity it would probably involve sacking himself.
For myself I pinpoint Lucasarts true declice the moment you started one of their games and got some third party game company logo during the intro. I believe it was in X-wing vs Tie-Fighter that this happened for the first time.
The current Empires at wars made me nostalgic for a x-wing upgrade. Gigantic space battles please. No missles. I want to duck and weave and blast ties and weave between star destroyers with artoo-detoo bleeping in my ear.
Will this happen? Offcourse not.