Me. For starters, I HATE stealth games or stealth elements in non-stealth games, so MGS is right out. I played Lunar Knights for the DS, which had sneaking sections that pretty much ruined that one as well. The only good thing I think he's ever done is the Zone of the Enders series and the second game, while overall better than the first, had parts that were absolutely infuriating. One particular boss battle sees me turning the game off at roughly the halfway point because of how absurdly hard it is compared to the rest of the game both preceding and following it ("cross swords and grab, cross swords and grab," in case you were wondering). Shame, too, since the best parts of the game were after that sorry excuse for a boss battle.
Atop it all, a lot of his work seems both pretentious and ridiculous at the same time, which is not a good combination to me. You expect me to listen to a man wax lyrical on the nature of war after he's spent an hour running around with a cardboard box over his head, and then take all this seriously? Sorry, no deal, no cookie.
A visionary he may be, but a creator of fun games he is NOT. Hideo Kojima, of all people, saying that consoles are dying translates into "Buy stock in Nintendo. Lots of stock. NOW."
But what does it matter if they use more DRM if people are committed to boycotting their games? Remember the initial scenario posited by EzInKy was to stop buying their games. If they put more DRM into a product that never sells, who is it hurting other than Ubisoft? All it does is burn their resources faster and lead them down a faster road to bankruptcy. We shrug and find games elsewhere, hopefully produced by companies who learn a valuable lesson from the gaming market's execution of Ubisoft.
I wondered the same thing. Alien is by far my favourite sci-fi movie series, and Farscape is by far my favourite sci-fi TV series, and it would make perfect sense for the two of them to be tied together in such a way.
There's an easy cure to that: Become a Mac user. You get so used to being shafted by major improvements mere months (or weeks, days...) after you buy your shiny new system that eventually you're numb to it.
Stupid MDD G4s...*grumble*...
Worse than that, I don't even understand why. I mean, is it an ego thing? Really? Really truly? What would lead car company executives to be so full of themselves as to believe that their cars never, ever see so much as a scratch? Hello, it's a fucking Toyota, or Chevy, or Subaru, or Nissan. It's not a goddamned Abrams tank, it's going to get scuffed up especially when it's going 150-200MPH. The Abrams tank would get scuffed up going 150-200MPH. I mean, I love my Subie - it's very reliable and has been good to me, but I was careless when transporting a computer once and the corner of the case put a nice scratch in the paint by the rear driver's door. At the end of the day, cars aren't invincible.
How did that idiotic licensing condition ever even originate? And why do all the car companies actually buy into it? I can just see corporate pencilnecks in a boardroom somewhere blathering on about "virtual vandalism" or some equally-insipid bullshit. And it makes me glad I haven't eaten anything in the last hour.
I was with you up until the "fourth offense" part. I'm assuming that the unwritten portion of this rule is that once confiscated a fourth time, the device would not be returned to anyone, even a parent.
If I'm misunderstanding, then that's alright.
If I'm not, however, and the parent also agrees that it's a fitting punishment for the student, then that's also alright.
If I'm not and the parent instructs the school to remand the device to their custody and the school refuses, destroying the device anyway then THAT. IS. UNACCEPTABLE.
I don't care how disruptive a device may be, it absolutely, positively must be returned to a parent upon said parent's demand every single time. I'd even go so far as to say that it must be returned whether or not the parent is willing to "sit down with" whatever school official is in charge of the device-confiscation department. At the end of the day, my taxes still pay their salary, and when push comes to shove school officials should be required to concede to parents' demands (at least where property is concerned) each and every time. Kick the student out, fine, that's been done since the dawn of education, but you don't tell parents "no" when they expect their property back.
The "back in my day" crowd can whine and complain all they want. Taking the property of a student and then destroying it, all the while refusing to hand it over to the parent (i.e. taxpayer) should be punishable as either larceny, vandalism, or perhaps both. And the individuals directly responsible for the actions (i.e. whose hands physically took possession of and/or destroyed the property) should be held criminally liable.
If they don't like it, fine, I pull my kid and investigate alternative education options. Whether this means private schools, homeschooling, or whatever other solution may present itself doesn't matter to me. At that point my kid will be beyond the reach of what would constitute an increasingly totalitarian school administration and I'd be happy enough with that for the time being.
I can hear the responses right now: "And they'd be happy to be rid of a short-tempered asshole like you." Yes. I'm sure they would, and I'd be equally happy to be rid of them, so everybody's happy. Fine by me. It bears mentioning that along with investigating alternatives to the school that STOLE my child's (or my) property, I'd be investigating what legal recourse I had in terms of pressing criminal charges against either the school, the teacher him/herself, or again, both. Fuck lawsuits, I'd want jail time for the school-official criminals. Really, really humiliating and degrading public service at the least.
Bottom line: you don't take someone else's shit and destroy it. I don't care who you are.
Like what, Frets on Fire, the shitty clone of Guitar Hero?
"Shitty" is your opinion, and obviously someone is enjoying it, as it's still under active development.
Or the Battle for Wesnoth, which is based, and looks like, a Sega Genesis game, that console from 1988.
"Looks like." Because everyone knows that how a game looks has a direct make-or-break impact on whether or not it's enjoyable at all. Which is why no text adventures ever sold, and people were miserable playing games until the advent of 3D-accelerated graphics chips. Oh, wait...
Or OpenArena, a game with a 10 year old engine.
Because everyone knows that the age of a game's engine has a direct make-or-break impact on whether or not it's enjoyable at all. Which is why nobody plays StarCraft anymore. Oh, wait...
There are probably games that have been purchased more than all of the free games you list have ever been downloaded, combined.
So what? What's your point? That corporate money-men making fistfuls of cash have some mysterious power to instantly magically invalidate all the efforts of FOSS developers in making enjoyable free games? Considering your sig, I'm inclined to say you just have a raging hard-on for the idea of corporations profiting, but maybe you've had some bad experience in the past with FOSS games. Give it another go, champ. I'm sure they're willing to forgive and forget if you are.
I guess you could point to all the wonderful F/OSS games that are out there, like... wait.
You mean like Nexuiz, Tremulous, OpenArena, Battle for Wesnoth, PlaneShift, Oolite, Cube, Sauerbraten, Frets on Fire, NetHack, Torus Trooper, TuxRacer, VegaStrike, and Warsow?
For some reason Slashdot doesn't want to accept HTML properly today, so I apologize in advance for the lack of line breaks between my paragraphs.
Zone of the Enders 2 (PS2, 2003) was and is a great action game. It was a marked improvement over its predecessor, felt more like a finished product than a proof of concept (you could tell they were testing the waters with the first installment) and was generally a blast to play.
And I only ever play half of it.
Because about halfway through the game there's a boss battle that is so infuriatingly difficult that it outright removes any desire I have to play the game anymore, at all. This is despite my knowing full well that the best parts of the game take place after this battle. I've finished the game once or twice but don't have the patience to do so anymore because of this idiotic difficulty spike. What's worse is that on subsequent playthroughs, wherein you have the option of keeping your superpowered robot from the first playthrough, the fight actually gets harder as a direct result of your power increase.
With a feature like this, the battle could've been a minor annoyance or just an opportunity to grab a drink while the game takes care of itself. As it is, however, it's resulted in my avoiding like the plague anything with Hideo Kojima's name anywhere near it. Having played Lunar Knights briefly on the DS, I feel most certainly justified in my avoidance of his games as it has similarly impassable and fun-killing parts as well.
As I said in a previous post on a similar topic, does this make me "lame" or "not hardcore?" Fine. Good, even. I'm glad to be called "casual" if that's the case. I don't feel like dealing with hypertension arising from idiotic game design anymore. I had enough of that shit in my teens, I don't need it now.
Same goes for the despicable practice of including "unlockables" in games. I don't care if it enhances a single-player experience. My ideal single-player experience entails doing what the hell I want with the game I bought and paid for. Bought a racing game? Cool, let me race the "bonus" rocket-powered flying car as the very first thing I do. Bought an FPS? Give me the BFG from the get-go if I want it. Bought a quirky JRPG like Ar Tonelico with conspicuously attractive female characters? Bring on the priestess/healer's skimpy lingerie outfit already. These things are all going to be witnessed anyway, and it feels like a ripoff to have the game's +10 radiant pack of tasty doom available only for the last half-hour of gameplay when it hardly does any good anymore. Because I'm realizing something, however slowly, as I age. Games are often a metaphor for life, or they can be. People get kicked around and treated like shit in life a lot of the time. It's certainly a reality of office work if nothing else. It's therapeutic to be able to come home, fire up a game, and absolutely crush the opposition without the opposition having a snowball's chance in hell of stopping you. At some level, subconsciously, you're crushing the people who mistreated you earlier that day and taking out aggressions. It's the very reason that violent videogames reduce the likelihood of actual violent behavior. It's the "save haven" argument in action. So to be told "no" by a game because I haven't proved to it that I love it enough to be deserving of the +10 ball o' awesome is just another perceived injustice that elevates blood pressure and worsens mood. Attention, game. I paid for you, I bought you, you are my property. You don't tell me "no."
The only kinds of games where I can even remotely see it as being justifiable to limit resources are strategy games, since figuring out how to operate with limited resources is kind of the point of the game itself. But even then it's questionable, and I'd still prefer to have a big, bright "I just had a shitty day at work, unlock the nukes, release the hounds, cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war" button ready for the cli
Mod parent up, please. It sounds a little trollish by the subject line, but he speaks the truth. I own a GP2X-F100 and they do support homebrew. To the extent that the damn thing actually includes an SDK in the box with the console, and a developer's circuitboard is available online for those who really want to go all out.
That 2nd paragraph is everything I've been trying to articulate to people about games for the past 2 years. Thank you thank you THANK YOU for putting it so concisely and perfectly.
I've long been of the opinion that games need to have some kind of, what was it called in Vista, "tilt switch" to detect potential player frustration. Frustration isn't fun. They share a common starting letter but they aren't one and the same. When people get frustrated, they stop having fun. When they stop having fun, they stop playing. And when they stop playing, they tend to remember the bad experience, which comes around to bite the company who made the game when their next big game is released. Games and game developers need to recognize this and start programming games to enable (not necessarily force, but at least enable and make it damn clear to the player that it's enabled) a "compliance mode" of sorts that can, put bluntly, force the game to lose so that the player can continue experiencing the software s/he paid what was most probably a considerable amount of money to experience. Fine, have it be a toggleable feature for those who don't want to completely kill the challenge. I'm all for giving the user more options. There needs to be some kind of frustration-stopping feature available, though, for those of us who don't really care to pull our hair out over some insipid jumping puzzle.
When I was 16, losing repeatedly was motivation to get better at the game, look up an FAQ, hone my skills, whatever. Now, 10 years later, the company CEO is just as likely to get my copy of the game, disc snapped in half, along with a scathing letter from me detailing exactly where he can place the jagged shards of DVD and an explanation of why I will not be purchasing his company's blood-pressure-raising products in the future. I'm willing to retry a level up to 5 times (soft limit, of course, and I'll try more if gameplay's really good) but after that I go straight for the FAQs. If it doesn't solve the problem, I just give up. No more analysis, no more calling friends for the solutions, no more thought devoted to the game at all. It sits on a shelf and rots because frankly, I don't want to look at it since it'll just remind me of how much it aggravated me. Does that make me not "hardcore?" Fine by me. I. Don't. Give. A shit. Anymore.
As far as I'm concerned, they can make games as mind-crushingly hard as they want as long as they include a feature to temporarily (where "temporarily" is a duration defined by the player and not by the developers) drastically diminish the difficulty to bypass trouble spots.
I'd already moderated this discussion so there goes that, but I think your fear is common enough and frustrating enough to warrant a bit of attention.
So then, a couple of points to respond to that:
I know people's hobbies are important to them in that they're how those people derive happiness, without which life would be pretty empty, so I'm going to go light on this first one: I think a lot of people who stick with Windows for gaming need to assess whether games are really worth the increasing encroachments upon our freedom to do what we wish with our data and the hardware that manipulates it. I'm not expecting, hinting at, or demanding any particular conclusion to that assessment. If you find that it's still worth it to you to be able to play games, that's your decision and you're damn well entitled to it. For some others (myself included), the lure of games is already, or will soon be, insufficient to coax us into swallowing the DRM pill.
The second point: there are alternatives available. Gaming under Linux has come a long way in recent years. I'm not talking blockbuster games, nor do I need to be either. The FOSS games available through the apt-get/Synaptic/Adept repositories provide me with just as many hours of enjoyment as the Quakes, Dooms, Far Cries, and Half-Lifes of the commercial software world. I'm not about to give you ultimatums or hold a gun to your head and force you to abandon the commercial games you love (hell, I still adore System Shock 2), but give games like Nexuiz, Tremulous, and OpenArena a shot. Just see what you think. You might be pleasantly surprised.
What? Surely that can't be right. Copyright infringement for personal use is a tort at worst. It's the people who massively copy and distribute, or who copy and sell, who get brought up on federal charges when and if they get caught.
I did the same thing. Randomly grabbed an album by a (then) who-the-hell-is-this band called Therion. They've since become my favourite metal act and I've gone out of my way to seek out and buy their albums, concert DVDs, anything I can get my hands on.
I do the same thing as the GP does, but I check RIAA Radar first. That's "first" as in "before downloading." If it comes up "Warning" I trash the.torrent and forget about the music altogether. Out of sight, out of mind, out of hard drive. If it comes up "Unknown" I check extensively to be sure that it's safe, and finally if it's marked "Safe" I do a very quick double-check on Amazon or the band's site and then I'll do the download (and 9 times out of 10, the purchase). This way I can give the biggest middle-finger possible to the RIAA (as has been discussed at length here before, they're into control and mindshare, and would probably rather have their stuff downloaded than ignored outright) and still be able to sample before I buy.
While I'm thinking about it, does anyone know for sure if the album "Lucidity" by Delain is, in fact, safe? The Radar shows it as being such but I think I see a Roadrunner Records logo on the Amazon product image, and the Wiki article shows them as being a Roadrunner act.
The problem is that not all the material shared on your network is RIAA-owned material, and not all the students on your network are sharing. However, this "plan" treats the situation as if ONLY RIAA-owned content were being shared, and shared by EVERYONE.
This isn't even "Guilty until proven innocent." This is "Guilty, period. Now pay up."
Slashdot Mirror
Me. For starters, I HATE stealth games or stealth elements in non-stealth games, so MGS is right out. I played Lunar Knights for the DS, which had sneaking sections that pretty much ruined that one as well. The only good thing I think he's ever done is the Zone of the Enders series and the second game, while overall better than the first, had parts that were absolutely infuriating. One particular boss battle sees me turning the game off at roughly the halfway point because of how absurdly hard it is compared to the rest of the game both preceding and following it ("cross swords and grab, cross swords and grab," in case you were wondering). Shame, too, since the best parts of the game were after that sorry excuse for a boss battle.
Atop it all, a lot of his work seems both pretentious and ridiculous at the same time, which is not a good combination to me. You expect me to listen to a man wax lyrical on the nature of war after he's spent an hour running around with a cardboard box over his head, and then take all this seriously? Sorry, no deal, no cookie.
A visionary he may be, but a creator of fun games he is NOT. Hideo Kojima, of all people, saying that consoles are dying translates into "Buy stock in Nintendo. Lots of stock. NOW."
But what does it matter if they use more DRM if people are committed to boycotting their games? Remember the initial scenario posited by EzInKy was to stop buying their games. If they put more DRM into a product that never sells, who is it hurting other than Ubisoft? All it does is burn their resources faster and lead them down a faster road to bankruptcy. We shrug and find games elsewhere, hopefully produced by companies who learn a valuable lesson from the gaming market's execution of Ubisoft.
He has to overcome his inertia first.
I wondered the same thing. Alien is by far my favourite sci-fi movie series, and Farscape is by far my favourite sci-fi TV series, and it would make perfect sense for the two of them to be tied together in such a way.
Oh, come now. Everyone knows that Babylon 5 is a big pile of shit.
that was over a app with online play and pay to play a OS is a buy one time per system and you don't pay per mouth to use it as well.
...what?
There's an easy cure to that: Become a Mac user. You get so used to being shafted by major improvements mere months (or weeks, days...) after you buy your shiny new system that eventually you're numb to it. Stupid MDD G4s...*grumble*...
Worse than that, I don't even understand why. I mean, is it an ego thing? Really? Really truly? What would lead car company executives to be so full of themselves as to believe that their cars never, ever see so much as a scratch? Hello, it's a fucking Toyota, or Chevy, or Subaru, or Nissan. It's not a goddamned Abrams tank, it's going to get scuffed up especially when it's going 150-200MPH. The Abrams tank would get scuffed up going 150-200MPH. I mean, I love my Subie - it's very reliable and has been good to me, but I was careless when transporting a computer once and the corner of the case put a nice scratch in the paint by the rear driver's door. At the end of the day, cars aren't invincible.
How did that idiotic licensing condition ever even originate? And why do all the car companies actually buy into it? I can just see corporate pencilnecks in a boardroom somewhere blathering on about "virtual vandalism" or some equally-insipid bullshit. And it makes me glad I haven't eaten anything in the last hour.
I was with you up until the "fourth offense" part. I'm assuming that the unwritten portion of this rule is that once confiscated a fourth time, the device would not be returned to anyone, even a parent.
If I'm misunderstanding, then that's alright.
If I'm not, however, and the parent also agrees that it's a fitting punishment for the student, then that's also alright.
If I'm not and the parent instructs the school to remand the device to their custody and the school refuses, destroying the device anyway then THAT. IS. UNACCEPTABLE.
I don't care how disruptive a device may be, it absolutely, positively must be returned to a parent upon said parent's demand every single time. I'd even go so far as to say that it must be returned whether or not the parent is willing to "sit down with" whatever school official is in charge of the device-confiscation department. At the end of the day, my taxes still pay their salary, and when push comes to shove school officials should be required to concede to parents' demands (at least where property is concerned) each and every time. Kick the student out, fine, that's been done since the dawn of education, but you don't tell parents "no" when they expect their property back.
The "back in my day" crowd can whine and complain all they want. Taking the property of a student and then destroying it, all the while refusing to hand it over to the parent (i.e. taxpayer) should be punishable as either larceny, vandalism, or perhaps both. And the individuals directly responsible for the actions (i.e. whose hands physically took possession of and/or destroyed the property) should be held criminally liable.
If they don't like it, fine, I pull my kid and investigate alternative education options. Whether this means private schools, homeschooling, or whatever other solution may present itself doesn't matter to me. At that point my kid will be beyond the reach of what would constitute an increasingly totalitarian school administration and I'd be happy enough with that for the time being.
I can hear the responses right now: "And they'd be happy to be rid of a short-tempered asshole like you." Yes. I'm sure they would, and I'd be equally happy to be rid of them, so everybody's happy. Fine by me. It bears mentioning that along with investigating alternatives to the school that STOLE my child's (or my) property, I'd be investigating what legal recourse I had in terms of pressing criminal charges against either the school, the teacher him/herself, or again, both. Fuck lawsuits, I'd want jail time for the school-official criminals. Really, really humiliating and degrading public service at the least.
Bottom line: you don't take someone else's shit and destroy it. I don't care who you are.
In related news it is alleged that Nissan will do a pokemon rice job on the Z370. It will however be $100 cheaper.
I'm only interested if the spoiler looks like a Pidgeotto wing.
Like what, Frets on Fire, the shitty clone of Guitar Hero?
"Shitty" is your opinion, and obviously someone is enjoying it, as it's still under active development.
Or the Battle for Wesnoth, which is based, and looks like, a Sega Genesis game, that console from 1988.
"Looks like." Because everyone knows that how a game looks has a direct make-or-break impact on whether or not it's enjoyable at all. Which is why no text adventures ever sold, and people were miserable playing games until the advent of 3D-accelerated graphics chips. Oh, wait...
Or OpenArena, a game with a 10 year old engine.
Because everyone knows that the age of a game's engine has a direct make-or-break impact on whether or not it's enjoyable at all. Which is why nobody plays StarCraft anymore. Oh, wait...
There are probably games that have been purchased more than all of the free games you list have ever been downloaded, combined.
So what? What's your point? That corporate money-men making fistfuls of cash have some mysterious power to instantly magically invalidate all the efforts of FOSS developers in making enjoyable free games? Considering your sig, I'm inclined to say you just have a raging hard-on for the idea of corporations profiting, but maybe you've had some bad experience in the past with FOSS games. Give it another go, champ. I'm sure they're willing to forgive and forget if you are.
I guess you could point to all the wonderful F/OSS games that are out there, like... wait.
You mean like Nexuiz, Tremulous, OpenArena, Battle for Wesnoth, PlaneShift, Oolite, Cube, Sauerbraten, Frets on Fire, NetHack, Torus Trooper, TuxRacer, VegaStrike, and Warsow?
Or did I dream all those?
Zone of the Enders 2 (PS2, 2003) was and is a great action game. It was a marked improvement over its predecessor, felt more like a finished product than a proof of concept (you could tell they were testing the waters with the first installment) and was generally a blast to play.
And I only ever play half of it.
Because about halfway through the game there's a boss battle that is so infuriatingly difficult that it outright removes any desire I have to play the game anymore, at all. This is despite my knowing full well that the best parts of the game take place after this battle. I've finished the game once or twice but don't have the patience to do so anymore because of this idiotic difficulty spike. What's worse is that on subsequent playthroughs, wherein you have the option of keeping your superpowered robot from the first playthrough, the fight actually gets harder as a direct result of your power increase.
With a feature like this, the battle could've been a minor annoyance or just an opportunity to grab a drink while the game takes care of itself. As it is, however, it's resulted in my avoiding like the plague anything with Hideo Kojima's name anywhere near it. Having played Lunar Knights briefly on the DS, I feel most certainly justified in my avoidance of his games as it has similarly impassable and fun-killing parts as well.
As I said in a previous post on a similar topic, does this make me "lame" or "not hardcore?" Fine. Good, even. I'm glad to be called "casual" if that's the case. I don't feel like dealing with hypertension arising from idiotic game design anymore. I had enough of that shit in my teens, I don't need it now.
Same goes for the despicable practice of including "unlockables" in games. I don't care if it enhances a single-player experience. My ideal single-player experience entails doing what the hell I want with the game I bought and paid for. Bought a racing game? Cool, let me race the "bonus" rocket-powered flying car as the very first thing I do. Bought an FPS? Give me the BFG from the get-go if I want it. Bought a quirky JRPG like Ar Tonelico with conspicuously attractive female characters? Bring on the priestess/healer's skimpy lingerie outfit already. These things are all going to be witnessed anyway, and it feels like a ripoff to have the game's +10 radiant pack of tasty doom available only for the last half-hour of gameplay when it hardly does any good anymore. Because I'm realizing something, however slowly, as I age. Games are often a metaphor for life, or they can be. People get kicked around and treated like shit in life a lot of the time. It's certainly a reality of office work if nothing else. It's therapeutic to be able to come home, fire up a game, and absolutely crush the opposition without the opposition having a snowball's chance in hell of stopping you. At some level, subconsciously, you're crushing the people who mistreated you earlier that day and taking out aggressions. It's the very reason that violent videogames reduce the likelihood of actual violent behavior. It's the "save haven" argument in action. So to be told "no" by a game because I haven't proved to it that I love it enough to be deserving of the +10 ball o' awesome is just another perceived injustice that elevates blood pressure and worsens mood. Attention, game. I paid for you, I bought you, you are my property. You don't tell me "no."
The only kinds of games where I can even remotely see it as being justifiable to limit resources are strategy games, since figuring out how to operate with limited resources is kind of the point of the game itself. But even then it's questionable, and I'd still prefer to have a big, bright "I just had a shitty day at work, unlock the nukes, release the hounds, cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war" button ready for the cli
No, he just accidentally the word, that's all.
Mod parent up, please. It sounds a little trollish by the subject line, but he speaks the truth. I own a GP2X-F100 and they do support homebrew. To the extent that the damn thing actually includes an SDK in the box with the console, and a developer's circuitboard is available online for those who really want to go all out.
That 2nd paragraph is everything I've been trying to articulate to people about games for the past 2 years. Thank you thank you THANK YOU for putting it so concisely and perfectly.
I've long been of the opinion that games need to have some kind of, what was it called in Vista, "tilt switch" to detect potential player frustration. Frustration isn't fun. They share a common starting letter but they aren't one and the same. When people get frustrated, they stop having fun. When they stop having fun, they stop playing. And when they stop playing, they tend to remember the bad experience, which comes around to bite the company who made the game when their next big game is released. Games and game developers need to recognize this and start programming games to enable (not necessarily force, but at least enable and make it damn clear to the player that it's enabled) a "compliance mode" of sorts that can, put bluntly, force the game to lose so that the player can continue experiencing the software s/he paid what was most probably a considerable amount of money to experience. Fine, have it be a toggleable feature for those who don't want to completely kill the challenge. I'm all for giving the user more options. There needs to be some kind of frustration-stopping feature available, though, for those of us who don't really care to pull our hair out over some insipid jumping puzzle.
When I was 16, losing repeatedly was motivation to get better at the game, look up an FAQ, hone my skills, whatever. Now, 10 years later, the company CEO is just as likely to get my copy of the game, disc snapped in half, along with a scathing letter from me detailing exactly where he can place the jagged shards of DVD and an explanation of why I will not be purchasing his company's blood-pressure-raising products in the future. I'm willing to retry a level up to 5 times (soft limit, of course, and I'll try more if gameplay's really good) but after that I go straight for the FAQs. If it doesn't solve the problem, I just give up. No more analysis, no more calling friends for the solutions, no more thought devoted to the game at all. It sits on a shelf and rots because frankly, I don't want to look at it since it'll just remind me of how much it aggravated me. Does that make me not "hardcore?" Fine by me. I. Don't. Give. A shit. Anymore.
As far as I'm concerned, they can make games as mind-crushingly hard as they want as long as they include a feature to temporarily (where "temporarily" is a duration defined by the player and not by the developers) drastically diminish the difficulty to bypass trouble spots.
The Crab People are not going to be happy about their weakness being discovered.
Well, would you be smug if you were staring a horde of these in the face?
I'd already moderated this discussion so there goes that, but I think your fear is common enough and frustrating enough to warrant a bit of attention.
So then, a couple of points to respond to that:
I know people's hobbies are important to them in that they're how those people derive happiness, without which life would be pretty empty, so I'm going to go light on this first one: I think a lot of people who stick with Windows for gaming need to assess whether games are really worth the increasing encroachments upon our freedom to do what we wish with our data and the hardware that manipulates it. I'm not expecting, hinting at, or demanding any particular conclusion to that assessment. If you find that it's still worth it to you to be able to play games, that's your decision and you're damn well entitled to it. For some others (myself included), the lure of games is already, or will soon be, insufficient to coax us into swallowing the DRM pill.
The second point: there are alternatives available. Gaming under Linux has come a long way in recent years. I'm not talking blockbuster games, nor do I need to be either. The FOSS games available through the apt-get/Synaptic/Adept repositories provide me with just as many hours of enjoyment as the Quakes, Dooms, Far Cries, and Half-Lifes of the commercial software world. I'm not about to give you ultimatums or hold a gun to your head and force you to abandon the commercial games you love (hell, I still adore System Shock 2), but give games like Nexuiz, Tremulous, and OpenArena a shot. Just see what you think. You might be pleasantly surprised.
Come on now. Everyone knows the cake is a lie.
What? Surely that can't be right. Copyright infringement for personal use is a tort at worst. It's the people who massively copy and distribute, or who copy and sell, who get brought up on federal charges when and if they get caught.
I did the same thing. Randomly grabbed an album by a (then) who-the-hell-is-this band called Therion. They've since become my favourite metal act and I've gone out of my way to seek out and buy their albums, concert DVDs, anything I can get my hands on.
Direct Connect made Therion about $125 so far.
I do the same thing as the GP does, but I check RIAA Radar first. That's "first" as in "before downloading." If it comes up "Warning" I trash the .torrent and forget about the music altogether. Out of sight, out of mind, out of hard drive. If it comes up "Unknown" I check extensively to be sure that it's safe, and finally if it's marked "Safe" I do a very quick double-check on Amazon or the band's site and then I'll do the download (and 9 times out of 10, the purchase). This way I can give the biggest middle-finger possible to the RIAA (as has been discussed at length here before, they're into control and mindshare, and would probably rather have their stuff downloaded than ignored outright) and still be able to sample before I buy.
While I'm thinking about it, does anyone know for sure if the album "Lucidity" by Delain is, in fact, safe? The Radar shows it as being such but I think I see a Roadrunner Records logo on the Amazon product image, and the Wiki article shows them as being a Roadrunner act.
The problem is that not all the material shared on your network is RIAA-owned material, and not all the students on your network are sharing. However, this "plan" treats the situation as if ONLY RIAA-owned content were being shared, and shared by EVERYONE.
This isn't even "Guilty until proven innocent." This is "Guilty, period. Now pay up."
This is madness.