And by fix, I mean introduce anything new to the formula. Right before I quit, I had a huge urge to get the hell out of the areas I was stuck in the past 10 levels and move on to - what i thought - more exciting content in the upper level areas. However, as soon as I got there, I realized that it was more of the same, except this time the enemy hit for twice as much, I hit for twice as much and I had a few new toys to play with, but still the same boring content.
What was it? The terrible terrible terrible amount of collection quests. You know the ones. Collect X amount of item that is dropped from Y mob, and turn it in. Then, as a follow up, collect X amount of other item that is dropped from Y other mob, sometimes even the same mobs you had just killed to get to the first set. Then usually there is some more collection quests of even bigger mobs and finally you take down some random named mob (who rarely is anything more interesting than a little-bit-tougher enemy) and the quest line ends.
It sounds silly, but think about it. How else are you supposed to level up? You could solo, but you miss out on the quest rewards, and the XP reward arguably isn't as good. You could do 5-man's, and those are actually fun and offer OK rewards, but there are only a couple avalable to you at any given level, only one of which anyone ever decides to do (sup SM), and you have to go through a whole ringamarole in order to get there, having to meet up, dying on the way ass-deep in horde territory and having to trek a good bit of the ditance away, it's just way more of a pain in the ass than it should be. So what do you do? You solo quests. Those god-awful, boring as hell collection quests. Over and over and over again for rat asses and rusted axes and red bandanas and....honestly why the fuck do people contine to play this shit?
Now, I haven't played Burning Crusade to see if it had improved. But if I were in Blizzards shoes, here is what I would have done:
- More unique named mobs that I have to kill, or one singular treasure I have to recover, hell, even fedex quests into dangerous territory were tons more fun than what most of the quests turned out to be. I should never have to grind double-digit numbers of five different types of animals to 'thin the herds' or bring back a double digit number of momentos as 'proof of your deed'. Seriously, that shit needs to stop.
- Have a definitive 'top end' in gear, that doesn't require 5 hour raids. Balance that out by making the stuff in raids look heaps more awesome than 'common' armor. You might think this is nuts, but Guild Wars pulled this off excillently, people LOVE to farm high end content to have armor that had no practical value but looked cool as hell. Think of it as a status symbol.
- Improve PvP. Arenas are a good start, but why is it impossible to be able to schedule Guild vs. Guild on the battlegrounds? Do you have any comprehension how much more fun that would be than random assholes running around meat-grinding aroud one or two points of interest while one or two good players carry the entire team? Think of it...cordination on both sides....calculated strikes instead of mass stupidity...it would probably be the greatest thing ever.
As someone who is listening to rap at this very moment and can appriciate the awesome things that can come out of hip hop (not necissarily things you hear on the radio), go fuck yourself.
Anyone who has ever participated in a fleet battle in EvE would probably laugh hysterically...that is, if they're not pissed off over their weapons taking minutes to kick into gear and hardly knowing what happened until after they've been podded (without them knowing wtf just happened, by the way).
And besides, if nothing you do ingame has any reflection of your skill in playing the game, why play? Especially when empire space (newbie space where you're protected from gankers by NPC police) is so soul-crushingly boring and not profitable at all, and you don't have the means to exist in 0.0 space unless you decide it's fun to be a wage slave and be a cog in some 0.0 corperation which is in turn the bitch of some giant mega-conglomerate who got to where they are today by cheating and developer handouts.
Point being that EvE sounds fun as hell on paper, but really it's got it's own fair share of problems as well. Closest to perfect you can probably get is Ultima Online, but due to the nature of the game it's too prone to 7x botting powergamers, with no reason to run around as anything less, plus its interface is archaic as fuck.
Oh shut the fuck up. I've been a PC gamer since probably before you were born (judging by the content of your posts, you're probably not older than my little sister), and I'm actually anticipating Gears more than UT2007. And I don't even own a 360.
None of us are fooled by your bullshit marketing shots. We all know about cranking up the normal map resolution on objects, huge amounts of AA not possible in games, and all the other crap you did with those pathetic Gears 'in game screenshots' the Net is filled with.
The game still looks beautiful on an HDTV. So what if the official screenshots have too much AA. News flash, most commercials embelish on the truth. Do you complain when you get a burger at Burger King and it doesn't look as nice as the one on TV?
None of us give a shit about a game that can only handle 4 vs 4 online matches. It's 2007 - wake up!
Not all games scale well to all player levels, not just horsepower-wise, but gameplay-wise. Anything more than 4v4 on Gears of War would be complete unorganized chaos. If I want to play 32-64 player nutso fragfests, I'd play Battlefield 2142. But Battlefield 2142 can't really handle 8 player games well...you'd probably want to play Quake 3 TDM for that number of players, or add two more and make it a CS scrim. Likewise, those two games probably aren't very fun if you try to cram 32 or 64 players into them (though the leigions of morons who play 24/7 dust with 32 player servers might disagree, but I don't think they have the cognitive capacity to say much more than random letters and numbers with "nub" somewhere in there). Half of why Gears only supports 4v4 is probably technical, but the other half is probably how the multiplayer gamepalay was built around 4 player teams. Honestly, I dont see how Gears could work with more than 8 players.
None of us give a shit about a game that can't get it's networking code to work - we all know about the pathetic lag and disconnect problems that plague Gears.
You do realize that Gears of War servers are essentially listen servers, right? Unless I'm mistaken, there is no "dedicated server" for Gears. You try running a listen server in Counterstrike and get 8 players to hop on your server and then get back to me. Given the range in quality of broadband in the US, it's amazing that it works as well as it does.
Whatever you spent of pulled to get those bogus reviews for the game aren't going to do shit in the pc world.
Hype can only go so far. Halo and Halo 2 continue to thrive to this day because they were actually good games. There are plenty of really hyped games that turn out to be rubbish. So far, it looks like Gears met the hype it recived, but honestly, I think it's too early to tell...we'll see how many people are playing in 6 months.
In other words, don't waste your time with a port. Unlike the Xbox, we pc gamers actually have other games worth buying.
Yeah, like World of Warcraft! And...World of Warcraft!
Halo PC sucked becase Gearbox made a half-assed port. Halo PC had the potential to be great, but Gearbox made a mess of the port, with shitty internet play, unoptimized graphics, and having to use a seperate EXE in order to allow third party maps. The gameplay itself was really fun, but it was obviously gimped by Gearbox's incompitance.
Bungie themselves are working on Halo 2 PC. Frankly, I can't wait, because if anyone has what it takes to deliver Halo 2 to the PC in a worthwhile package, it's Bungie.
* You can earn a lot of Linden dollars in SL, in fact fairly rapidly sometimes, but...
* If you can actually collect your SLLs from your counterparty - which turns out to be an enormous problem - you can't cash them out for USD easily or profitably.
It turns out that inside the game, counterparty risk is tremendous. In fact, entire banks will suddenly disappear. Or banks will simply renege on obligations without recourse. Worse yet, the very people who provide the source of nearly all demand-liquidity within Second Life, those guys at the top of the virtual playpen pyramid, are the same ones who effectively set the SLL/USD exchange rate. Mid-2006, they even owned the only practical exchange market, a fact which I believe is even more true today. (The company run exchange turns out to be impractical for real trades of any volume. It is more of an open currency auction than a spot market.)
What should have been a relatively small SLL/USD exchange trades given media claims about millions of dollars flying around per week in 2006, in reality caused the exchange markets to distort tremendously. We could not effectively move sums of more than a couple thousand dollars out of SL without the exchange market confiscating most of our returns (through rate reflectivity). Example: in July 2006 USD/SLL was 293.0/279.2 bid/ask on the primary open exchange. Our attempts to trade resulted in settlement bids of more than 350. Interestingly, these trades tended to net returns of right around 4%, which was the prevailing dollar deposit rate.
Second Life is making people money...the people at Linden Labs, who happen to be the ones who set the USD/SLL exchange rate. Then there are a handfull of virtual millionares, (in which it's debatable if they can actually cash out). And then there is you, the sucker who pays $10 for a pair of virtual sunglasses.
Oh, and the most famous "virtual millionare" of all, Anshe Chung? She started her Second Life career as a virtual prostitute, and previously made her living goldfarming other MMO's.
Hopefully the opening the source to Second Life's client can result in a standalone Second Life server, so people who would rather just create things can figure out a way to escape from the rapidly escallating stupidity that is the main grid.
Let's assume that I'm Joe Schmoe. Let's presume that I build something in Second Life for profit. Now, let's also say that Joe Schmoe violates the rules of Second Life and is banned. What happens to his intellectual property now?
You're pretty much on the money there. I got Vista a couple of days ago through MSDNAA, and while Vista is certainly not bad, I just can't beleive it took them five friggin' years to deliver what is essentially a pretty version of XP. Remember how XP introduced the "Friendly" Control Panel that was essentially a front end over the same Control Panel we've been using since Windows 95? Well, they've used that mentality and copied it to other things, like display driver properties, and Windows Explorer (which now has twice as many useless sidebars I'l never use). I was actually looking forward to Monad, but they didn't bother to integrate it into Vista, so because it's not a standard part of the package, it's probably never going to be seriously used until the next version of Windows Server.
As far as completely new things go, the User Access Control is a pain in the butt, and I disabled it within 5 minutes. The only thing which took me a shorter time to disable was the desktop widgets engine, which was useless since you had to be looking at the desktop to use them. Why didn't they take a cue from Mac OS X or Yahoo! widget engine and allow me to bind a key to have widgets pop up, I'll never guess. Aero sure is pretty, and the fact that the windows are semi-transparent even with video going on in the background is neat, but stylisticly it looks a little cobbled-tgether, especially with programs designed for earler versions of Windows (which is to say pretty much all of them), and I much prefered my themes for XP overall. (By the way, if anyone can find the last version of the Extensis theme, I would be greatful. The author seems to have nuked it from his deviantart page and I can't seem to find it anywhere else).
The drivers also have a long way to go. I'm using nvidia drivers from the first week of January, and I'm getting model spiking problems where I previously had none, in pretty much all of my games (and I am pretty much positive that it's not a hardware or heating problem). Supposedly recent beta drivers fix it, but they're not final yet. Also, the drivers for my VIA Envy24 chipset sound card are a little flakey, as the sound tends to stutter under high CPU load where it previously worked just fine, though I suspect it might be the fault of Vista's draconian DRM scheme. Speaking of which, I haven't run into any direct problems with Vista's DRM scheme, and don't plan to, since all of my media is inherantly unprotected (Musepack encoded CD-rips and DVD's watched with VLC).
Overall, it's OK, and worth going for if you're buying a new computer, but if you already have a computer with XP on it, then I'd stick with XP unless you can get it for free through MSDNAA or through other means. Vista is nothing too special, and defeniatly not as groundbreaking as OS9 -> OSX was.
You are a fool if you think that the stupidity stops there: When Wikipedia gives sysop priviliages to batshit insane people like this guy, and he somehow managed to keep said privilages for as long as he did (the only reason he lost said priviliages is because he picked a fight with another abusive admin), you know that there is something fundamentally wrong with Wikipedia.
As mentioned in an earlier post, it's quite fixable using AF Leveling mod, and scaling enemies and lack of 'lucky finds' are fixable with Oscuro's Overhaul. I bought the game at release, played it for a few days, saw the shitty leveling and scaling problems and put it way. I reinstalled it a couple of days ago, downloaded those two (and BTMod), and I'm having an absolute blast.
Only problem is that it's taking me a while to level. I'm using 'one level up for every 10 major skills practiced) and I'm still Level 1, though I'm only 1 or 2 skills away, I've done a few of the begining quests and a few sides and have gotten through a few dungeons, but I haven't really been concentrating on skilling up, so that's probably why.
I hated the game when it came out. However, I just recently reinstalled, and now I can't be happer thanks to two plugins. Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul and AF Leveling Mod. The former balances content by reassigning level ranges for all NPC's, and also changes treasure chests to give out neat static rewards, which brings back "lucky finds" of Morrowind (just tonight I found an awesome two-handed electrified sword two levels down in a dungeon, and I had to stop there because I ran into one thug who was kicking my ass pretty much every time). The latter fixes the completely broken vanilla leveling system by allowing you to select from one of six saner leveling options at the begining of the game, without worring about gimping your charactor because you didn't get solid x5 multipliers. Those two, plus BTMod to make the user interface PC friendly, are all the mods I use, and I love it.
Don't expect this to happen. If I recall correctly, when XP came out, they kept 98 at Home's price point and 2000 at Pro's price point, even years after their release.
Because we don't live in a perfect world where customers aren't treated like criminals. We live in the real world, a world with Walgreens, Starforce and 4X games that appeal to 1% of the game-playing population making a stand for no CD protection.
Half Life 2 took the gamble for online distribution, and as it turns out, people are willing to "put up" with Steam to play their favorite AAA games. Then, the authors of Rag Doll Kung Fu and Darwinia took the gamble as well, and as it turns out, people are more willing to impulse buy indie games that are 20 bucks and that they can download and have on their computer within minutes or hours. These are the same indie developers who used to live in the margins and be at the whims of publishers before Steam, and now they can market their games directly through to you, without necissarily having to worry about the expense behind boxed copies. I support their endeavours, I bought Rag Doll Kung Fu on principle, and then Red Orchestra and Defcon. I also plan on paying for NS2 when it comes out too. And I would have bought Civilization IV on Steam if I hadn't already bought a boxed copy.
And why should you feel guilty about using a crack on a game you legally paid for anyway?
What happens when/if steam is shut down? Valve won't run it forever, at which point you'll no longer be able to download games from it, and may no longer be able to run the ones you already have.
Steam includes an option for backing up a hard copy of your games to convenient CD or DVD-sized files. Then, if Steam ever vanishes, unpack the backed-up.gcf files, use a no-authenticaion crack on it, and you're good to go.
You seem to be missing the point of my statement. The grifers were booted the fuck out of W-Hat a LONG time ago, probably near the start of all this drama. They deserved their ban. That's not what made me quit. Read my post again and this time respond to the things you've oh-so-conveniently skipped over, namely the recent Voted 5 massacre with no explination given.
And seriously, what is this bullshit about 'abusing free services'? I've been with Something Awful for a few years (late '03), and I've never seen that kind of shit, hell I wouldn't be surprised if people get banned for insinuating doing that sort of thing. You sure you're not confusing us with ebaumsworld or something?
It seems like you, and many many other people, are surviving on little tidbits and little isolated incidents, and really that's a shame. Honestly, what the fuck do you want from us?
Yeah, k\o\w is the infamous Plastic Duck, who was kind of a tool to people with his 'rocket people out of the sim' stuff. However, your perception of W-Hat or Voted 5 organizing grid attacks is flat out wrong. The very first grid attack was perpetuated by a newbie in W-Hat a longass time ago, who thought that the server actually enforced certain limits when it didn't (I'm not familiar with scripting, so I can't break it down into technical terms). However, it was a complete and total accident. Read that again: The first grid "attack" was a complete and total accident by some newbie who didn't think that his script would 'really' crash the grid.
The problem after that was twofold. One, W-Hat didn't handle their public relations well. We tried to explain what had happened, but people automatically assumed the worst because the grid being down was in some cases putting a strain on their income, so of course they were being defensive. After seeing that our pleas for sanity were hitting a brick wall, we just stopped trying to save face altogether. To the best of my knowledge, aside from the very first 'grid attack' nobody in W-Hat or Voted 5 from that point on actually organized a grid attack. Note that in every press release on the subject, Linden Labs has never come out and fingered W-Hat or Voted 5 specificly, people just ASSUMED that.
Two, I don't suppose it helps that our sense of humor doesn't really jive with the general population, having pulled stunts such as remaking Luskwood in the Voted 5 sim (At that point we weren't making fun of Luskwood for being furry, we were making fun of Luskwood for being Luskwood), putting giant prims in the air with dirty pictures on them, and making a huge replica of Porkfry Neva's (aka batshit insane bag-lady) ugly fucking face. Also, long ago, goons used to make fun of the furry population at Luskwood. Nowadays, making fun of furries is really 'played out' and in fact the two goon groups had furries in them. However, idlers who had monitered the second life IRC chat room had noted that there were some Lindens who were going to rain down hell upon us filthy vile goons for making fun of their subculture. And honestly, you would be amazed at what some people call 'greifing'. Does dressing up as a dozen agent smiths and going into a nightclub classify as 'greifing'? What about flying around various (mature) sims in a giant flying penis? Serisouly now.
The banhammer fell shortly after the Prokfry stunt, when pretty much everyone who was above a peon in Voted 5 was banned without explination. No transparency, an appeal process that assumes guilt until innocence....too much to deal with. Also, apparently there was a lot of sour feelings by the linden who reclaimed our property, because the description was something to the effect that it was "liberating the land from those evil goons" or something to that effect. What the fuck?
I don't post anonymously because I have nothing to hide. I personally didn't take part in any of the asshole things my goon friends did, I simply laughed at the war stories about how they were booted out of yet another club for another agent smith invasion. I enjoyed the company of my goon friends, and they were the only reason I continued to play. When half of them got banned (hilariously, some of them hadn't even logged in in weeks or months), that was pretty much the last straw. I know you want to feel like you have the moral upper hand here, but there are two sides to this story, and our side is that a lot of innocent goons got banned because people don't have a sense of humor.
You're a fucking moron if you think that assholes annoying people is "greifing". I had friends who used to do similar things, and they're (along with a bunch of their friends who basically did nothing except exist in the same group with them) all banned now over things that could have been handled on a parcel-by-parcel basis.
Second Life is a huge shithole of malls, 'sex clubs' and batshit crazy, self-important, no-reason morons. The only fun I ever had was hanging out with friends mentioned above, who also happened to make really funny and creative builds too. Now that they're gone, and I feel like there is a banhammer just waiting to hit me just by association, I have no more reason to be there. I suppose it's a great place to be if you feel like conforming to the whims of the hundreds of subcultures and not being able to say a bad thing about any of them, ever, without them being offended and reporting you.
Another case of a game with tons of potential ruined by its userbase.
I love Opera, but the fact that they were going to want to charge money for it was a little meh, though I was more than happy to pay for it. The fact that it's free until 2007 seals the deal for me.
...too bad it was ruined by complete psychopaths like Prokofy Neva and the completely opaque and even arbitrary Linden banhammer.
If you're seriously considering trying out Second Life, keep these forums close, they're the one becon of sanity in this whole sad minagere
http://forums.secondcitizen.com/
(I myself have only made one post there, so I've got nobodies adgenda but my own here)
Really, all but the last one are developer problems, not linux problems. And the last one doesn't make any sense if you understand that linux was not intended to be a Windows-alike, but a Unix-alike. Linux makes sense to most UNIX gurus.
Wow, sounds like you haven't bothered with steam since the, admitedly rocky, HL2 launch. From a fresh format, this is what I have to "go through" in order to install Half Life 2.
Download Steam. It's less than a meg to download
Wait for it to update. It takes 30 seconds or so on a broadband connection
Look on my games list for the game I want to install and double click on it.
This is really the longest part of the process, where it has to download and install the entire game, and admitedly it does take longer than installing from a CD. However, I just leave Steam open in the background and do other things. Or leave it on overnight and have it install all my games at once. The thing is that nowhere did I have to deal with finding my CD's or fucking with computer-destroying copy protection. I can install and access my games from ANYWHERE, and it's all in one nice self-contained system. It's also led to a few impulse purchases that I would have never considered otherwise, such as Darwinina.
Try it again. You'll be surprised by how much nicer its gotten.
I can't remember where I read or saw this, and it might been a myth, but I remember reading somewhere where Bill Gates and his crew were given a demonstration of a chipped Xbox, complete with the crazy looks, loaders, homebrew and I think even pirated games. After the demonstration, instead of saying "How can we put a stop to this?", Bill was impressed and supposedly said "What can we do to embrace this community?".
Of course, I can't remember where I saw this story, and it might be just that - a story - but seriously, if you think that Microsoft didn't know that the homebrow and modding community existed, and saw it as a potential market, you're crazy. Sure, it's 100 bucks a year, but getting your box chipped or bypassed is inhearantly risky and could brick your $400 investment, ban your $400 investment from Live, not to mention the fact that the nicer chips cost a pretty penny and take quite a bit of work to install.
Slashdot Mirror
What was it? The terrible terrible terrible amount of collection quests. You know the ones. Collect X amount of item that is dropped from Y mob, and turn it in. Then, as a follow up, collect X amount of other item that is dropped from Y other mob, sometimes even the same mobs you had just killed to get to the first set. Then usually there is some more collection quests of even bigger mobs and finally you take down some random named mob (who rarely is anything more interesting than a little-bit-tougher enemy) and the quest line ends.
It sounds silly, but think about it. How else are you supposed to level up? You could solo, but you miss out on the quest rewards, and the XP reward arguably isn't as good. You could do 5-man's, and those are actually fun and offer OK rewards, but there are only a couple avalable to you at any given level, only one of which anyone ever decides to do (sup SM), and you have to go through a whole ringamarole in order to get there, having to meet up, dying on the way ass-deep in horde territory and having to trek a good bit of the ditance away, it's just way more of a pain in the ass than it should be. So what do you do? You solo quests. Those god-awful, boring as hell collection quests. Over and over and over again for rat asses and rusted axes and red bandanas and....honestly why the fuck do people contine to play this shit?
Now, I haven't played Burning Crusade to see if it had improved. But if I were in Blizzards shoes, here is what I would have done:
- More unique named mobs that I have to kill, or one singular treasure I have to recover, hell, even fedex quests into dangerous territory were tons more fun than what most of the quests turned out to be. I should never have to grind double-digit numbers of five different types of animals to 'thin the herds' or bring back a double digit number of momentos as 'proof of your deed'. Seriously, that shit needs to stop.
- Have a definitive 'top end' in gear, that doesn't require 5 hour raids. Balance that out by making the stuff in raids look heaps more awesome than 'common' armor. You might think this is nuts, but Guild Wars pulled this off excillently, people LOVE to farm high end content to have armor that had no practical value but looked cool as hell. Think of it as a status symbol.
- Improve PvP. Arenas are a good start, but why is it impossible to be able to schedule Guild vs. Guild on the battlegrounds? Do you have any comprehension how much more fun that would be than random assholes running around meat-grinding aroud one or two points of interest while one or two good players carry the entire team? Think of it...cordination on both sides....calculated strikes instead of mass stupidity...it would probably be the greatest thing ever.
As someone who is listening to rap at this very moment and can appriciate the awesome things that can come out of hip hop (not necissarily things you hear on the radio), go fuck yourself.
And besides, if nothing you do ingame has any reflection of your skill in playing the game, why play? Especially when empire space (newbie space where you're protected from gankers by NPC police) is so soul-crushingly boring and not profitable at all, and you don't have the means to exist in 0.0 space unless you decide it's fun to be a wage slave and be a cog in some 0.0 corperation which is in turn the bitch of some giant mega-conglomerate who got to where they are today by cheating and developer handouts.
Point being that EvE sounds fun as hell on paper, but really it's got it's own fair share of problems as well. Closest to perfect you can probably get is Ultima Online, but due to the nature of the game it's too prone to 7x botting powergamers, with no reason to run around as anything less, plus its interface is archaic as fuck.
None of us are fooled by your bullshit marketing shots. We all know about cranking up the normal map resolution on objects, huge amounts of AA not possible in games, and all the other crap you did with those pathetic Gears 'in game screenshots' the Net is filled with.
The game still looks beautiful on an HDTV. So what if the official screenshots have too much AA. News flash, most commercials embelish on the truth. Do you complain when you get a burger at Burger King and it doesn't look as nice as the one on TV?
None of us give a shit about a game that can only handle 4 vs 4 online matches. It's 2007 - wake up!
Not all games scale well to all player levels, not just horsepower-wise, but gameplay-wise. Anything more than 4v4 on Gears of War would be complete unorganized chaos. If I want to play 32-64 player nutso fragfests, I'd play Battlefield 2142. But Battlefield 2142 can't really handle 8 player games well...you'd probably want to play Quake 3 TDM for that number of players, or add two more and make it a CS scrim. Likewise, those two games probably aren't very fun if you try to cram 32 or 64 players into them (though the leigions of morons who play 24/7 dust with 32 player servers might disagree, but I don't think they have the cognitive capacity to say much more than random letters and numbers with "nub" somewhere in there). Half of why Gears only supports 4v4 is probably technical, but the other half is probably how the multiplayer gamepalay was built around 4 player teams. Honestly, I dont see how Gears could work with more than 8 players.
None of us give a shit about a game that can't get it's networking code to work - we all know about the pathetic lag and disconnect problems that plague Gears.
You do realize that Gears of War servers are essentially listen servers, right? Unless I'm mistaken, there is no "dedicated server" for Gears. You try running a listen server in Counterstrike and get 8 players to hop on your server and then get back to me. Given the range in quality of broadband in the US, it's amazing that it works as well as it does.
Whatever you spent of pulled to get those bogus reviews for the game aren't going to do shit in the pc world.
Hype can only go so far. Halo and Halo 2 continue to thrive to this day because they were actually good games. There are plenty of really hyped games that turn out to be rubbish. So far, it looks like Gears met the hype it recived, but honestly, I think it's too early to tell...we'll see how many people are playing in 6 months.
In other words, don't waste your time with a port. Unlike the Xbox, we pc gamers actually have other games worth buying.
Yeah, like World of Warcraft! And...World of Warcraft!
Bungie themselves are working on Halo 2 PC. Frankly, I can't wait, because if anyone has what it takes to deliver Halo 2 to the PC in a worthwhile package, it's Bungie.
* You can earn a lot of Linden dollars in SL, in fact fairly rapidly sometimes, but...
* If you can actually collect your SLLs from your counterparty - which turns out to be an enormous problem - you can't cash them out for USD easily or profitably.
It turns out that inside the game, counterparty risk is tremendous. In fact, entire banks will suddenly disappear. Or banks will simply renege on obligations without recourse. Worse yet, the very people who provide the source of nearly all demand-liquidity within Second Life, those guys at the top of the virtual playpen pyramid, are the same ones who effectively set the SLL/USD exchange rate. Mid-2006, they even owned the only practical exchange market, a fact which I believe is even more true today. (The company run exchange turns out to be impractical for real trades of any volume. It is more of an open currency auction than a spot market.)
What should have been a relatively small SLL/USD exchange trades given media claims about millions of dollars flying around per week in 2006, in reality caused the exchange markets to distort tremendously. We could not effectively move sums of more than a couple thousand dollars out of SL without the exchange market confiscating most of our returns (through rate reflectivity). Example: in July 2006 USD/SLL was 293.0/279.2 bid/ask on the primary open exchange. Our attempts to trade resulted in settlement bids of more than 350. Interestingly, these trades tended to net returns of right around 4%, which was the prevailing dollar deposit rate.
Second Life is making people money...the people at Linden Labs, who happen to be the ones who set the USD/SLL exchange rate. Then there are a handfull of virtual millionares, (in which it's debatable if they can actually cash out). And then there is you, the sucker who pays $10 for a pair of virtual sunglasses.
Oh, and the most famous "virtual millionare" of all, Anshe Chung? She started her Second Life career as a virtual prostitute, and previously made her living goldfarming other MMO's.
Hopefully the opening the source to Second Life's client can result in a standalone Second Life server, so people who would rather just create things can figure out a way to escape from the rapidly escallating stupidity that is the main grid.
Let's assume that I'm Joe Schmoe. Let's presume that I build something in Second Life for profit. Now, let's also say that Joe Schmoe violates the rules of Second Life and is banned. What happens to his intellectual property now?
As far as completely new things go, the User Access Control is a pain in the butt, and I disabled it within 5 minutes. The only thing which took me a shorter time to disable was the desktop widgets engine, which was useless since you had to be looking at the desktop to use them. Why didn't they take a cue from Mac OS X or Yahoo! widget engine and allow me to bind a key to have widgets pop up, I'll never guess. Aero sure is pretty, and the fact that the windows are semi-transparent even with video going on in the background is neat, but stylisticly it looks a little cobbled-tgether, especially with programs designed for earler versions of Windows (which is to say pretty much all of them), and I much prefered my themes for XP overall. (By the way, if anyone can find the last version of the Extensis theme, I would be greatful. The author seems to have nuked it from his deviantart page and I can't seem to find it anywhere else).
The drivers also have a long way to go. I'm using nvidia drivers from the first week of January, and I'm getting model spiking problems where I previously had none, in pretty much all of my games (and I am pretty much positive that it's not a hardware or heating problem). Supposedly recent beta drivers fix it, but they're not final yet. Also, the drivers for my VIA Envy24 chipset sound card are a little flakey, as the sound tends to stutter under high CPU load where it previously worked just fine, though I suspect it might be the fault of Vista's draconian DRM scheme. Speaking of which, I haven't run into any direct problems with Vista's DRM scheme, and don't plan to, since all of my media is inherantly unprotected (Musepack encoded CD-rips and DVD's watched with VLC).
Overall, it's OK, and worth going for if you're buying a new computer, but if you already have a computer with XP on it, then I'd stick with XP unless you can get it for free through MSDNAA or through other means. Vista is nothing too special, and defeniatly not as groundbreaking as OS9 -> OSX was.
You are a fool if you think that the stupidity stops there: When Wikipedia gives sysop priviliages to batshit insane people like this guy, and he somehow managed to keep said privilages for as long as he did (the only reason he lost said priviliages is because he picked a fight with another abusive admin), you know that there is something fundamentally wrong with Wikipedia.
Now if only someone can unprotect this article...
As mentioned in an earlier post, it's quite fixable using AF Leveling mod, and scaling enemies and lack of 'lucky finds' are fixable with Oscuro's Overhaul. I bought the game at release, played it for a few days, saw the shitty leveling and scaling problems and put it way. I reinstalled it a couple of days ago, downloaded those two (and BTMod), and I'm having an absolute blast.
Only problem is that it's taking me a while to level. I'm using 'one level up for every 10 major skills practiced) and I'm still Level 1, though I'm only 1 or 2 skills away, I've done a few of the begining quests and a few sides and have gotten through a few dungeons, but I haven't really been concentrating on skilling up, so that's probably why.
I hated the game when it came out. However, I just recently reinstalled, and now I can't be happer thanks to two plugins. Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul and AF Leveling Mod. The former balances content by reassigning level ranges for all NPC's, and also changes treasure chests to give out neat static rewards, which brings back "lucky finds" of Morrowind (just tonight I found an awesome two-handed electrified sword two levels down in a dungeon, and I had to stop there because I ran into one thug who was kicking my ass pretty much every time). The latter fixes the completely broken vanilla leveling system by allowing you to select from one of six saner leveling options at the begining of the game, without worring about gimping your charactor because you didn't get solid x5 multipliers. Those two, plus BTMod to make the user interface PC friendly, are all the mods I use, and I love it.
That's to make up for the fact that digg ran about five stories a day on him, not counting dupes.
Nope, the 31 people who work at ID still suffer from large corpreation syndrome, forgetting what made them popular in the first place.
Don't expect this to happen. If I recall correctly, when XP came out, they kept 98 at Home's price point and 2000 at Pro's price point, even years after their release.
Half Life 2 took the gamble for online distribution, and as it turns out, people are willing to "put up" with Steam to play their favorite AAA games. Then, the authors of Rag Doll Kung Fu and Darwinia took the gamble as well, and as it turns out, people are more willing to impulse buy indie games that are 20 bucks and that they can download and have on their computer within minutes or hours. These are the same indie developers who used to live in the margins and be at the whims of publishers before Steam, and now they can market their games directly through to you, without necissarily having to worry about the expense behind boxed copies. I support their endeavours, I bought Rag Doll Kung Fu on principle, and then Red Orchestra and Defcon. I also plan on paying for NS2 when it comes out too. And I would have bought Civilization IV on Steam if I hadn't already bought a boxed copy.
And why should you feel guilty about using a crack on a game you legally paid for anyway?
Steam includes an option for backing up a hard copy of your games to convenient CD or DVD-sized files. Then, if Steam ever vanishes, unpack the backed-up .gcf files, use a no-authenticaion crack on it, and you're good to go.
And you get to download an actual setup file which you can backup to a dvd.
Steam has had this feature since forever. It will even split it up into neat little CD or DVD sized files for you.
And seriously, what is this bullshit about 'abusing free services'? I've been with Something Awful for a few years (late '03), and I've never seen that kind of shit, hell I wouldn't be surprised if people get banned for insinuating doing that sort of thing. You sure you're not confusing us with ebaumsworld or something?
It seems like you, and many many other people, are surviving on little tidbits and little isolated incidents, and really that's a shame. Honestly, what the fuck do you want from us?
The problem after that was twofold. One, W-Hat didn't handle their public relations well. We tried to explain what had happened, but people automatically assumed the worst because the grid being down was in some cases putting a strain on their income, so of course they were being defensive. After seeing that our pleas for sanity were hitting a brick wall, we just stopped trying to save face altogether. To the best of my knowledge, aside from the very first 'grid attack' nobody in W-Hat or Voted 5 from that point on actually organized a grid attack. Note that in every press release on the subject, Linden Labs has never come out and fingered W-Hat or Voted 5 specificly, people just ASSUMED that.
Two, I don't suppose it helps that our sense of humor doesn't really jive with the general population, having pulled stunts such as remaking Luskwood in the Voted 5 sim (At that point we weren't making fun of Luskwood for being furry, we were making fun of Luskwood for being Luskwood), putting giant prims in the air with dirty pictures on them, and making a huge replica of Porkfry Neva's (aka batshit insane bag-lady) ugly fucking face. Also, long ago, goons used to make fun of the furry population at Luskwood. Nowadays, making fun of furries is really 'played out' and in fact the two goon groups had furries in them. However, idlers who had monitered the second life IRC chat room had noted that there were some Lindens who were going to rain down hell upon us filthy vile goons for making fun of their subculture. And honestly, you would be amazed at what some people call 'greifing'. Does dressing up as a dozen agent smiths and going into a nightclub classify as 'greifing'? What about flying around various (mature) sims in a giant flying penis? Serisouly now.
The banhammer fell shortly after the Prokfry stunt, when pretty much everyone who was above a peon in Voted 5 was banned without explination. No transparency, an appeal process that assumes guilt until innocence....too much to deal with. Also, apparently there was a lot of sour feelings by the linden who reclaimed our property, because the description was something to the effect that it was "liberating the land from those evil goons" or something to that effect. What the fuck?
I don't post anonymously because I have nothing to hide. I personally didn't take part in any of the asshole things my goon friends did, I simply laughed at the war stories about how they were booted out of yet another club for another agent smith invasion. I enjoyed the company of my goon friends, and they were the only reason I continued to play. When half of them got banned (hilariously, some of them hadn't even logged in in weeks or months), that was pretty much the last straw. I know you want to feel like you have the moral upper hand here, but there are two sides to this story, and our side is that a lot of innocent goons got banned because people don't have a sense of humor.
You're a fucking moron if you think that assholes annoying people is "greifing". I had friends who used to do similar things, and they're (along with a bunch of their friends who basically did nothing except exist in the same group with them) all banned now over things that could have been handled on a parcel-by-parcel basis.
Second Life is a huge shithole of malls, 'sex clubs' and batshit crazy, self-important, no-reason morons. The only fun I ever had was hanging out with friends mentioned above, who also happened to make really funny and creative builds too. Now that they're gone, and I feel like there is a banhammer just waiting to hit me just by association, I have no more reason to be there. I suppose it's a great place to be if you feel like conforming to the whims of the hundreds of subcultures and not being able to say a bad thing about any of them, ever, without them being offended and reporting you.
Another case of a game with tons of potential ruined by its userbase.
I love Opera, but the fact that they were going to want to charge money for it was a little meh, though I was more than happy to pay for it. The fact that it's free until 2007 seals the deal for me.
...too bad it was ruined by complete psychopaths like Prokofy Neva and the completely opaque and even arbitrary Linden banhammer. If you're seriously considering trying out Second Life, keep these forums close, they're the one becon of sanity in this whole sad minagere http://forums.secondcitizen.com/ (I myself have only made one post there, so I've got nobodies adgenda but my own here)
Still, what you really want is a free verison of Windows. This is probably what you're looking for.
- Download Steam. It's less than a meg to download
- Wait for it to update. It takes 30 seconds or so on a broadband connection
- Look on my games list for the game I want to install and double click on it.
This is really the longest part of the process, where it has to download and install the entire game, and admitedly it does take longer than installing from a CD. However, I just leave Steam open in the background and do other things. Or leave it on overnight and have it install all my games at once. The thing is that nowhere did I have to deal with finding my CD's or fucking with computer-destroying copy protection. I can install and access my games from ANYWHERE, and it's all in one nice self-contained system. It's also led to a few impulse purchases that I would have never considered otherwise, such as Darwinina.Try it again. You'll be surprised by how much nicer its gotten.
I can't remember where I read or saw this, and it might been a myth, but I remember reading somewhere where Bill Gates and his crew were given a demonstration of a chipped Xbox, complete with the crazy looks, loaders, homebrew and I think even pirated games. After the demonstration, instead of saying "How can we put a stop to this?", Bill was impressed and supposedly said "What can we do to embrace this community?".
Of course, I can't remember where I saw this story, and it might be just that - a story - but seriously, if you think that Microsoft didn't know that the homebrow and modding community existed, and saw it as a potential market, you're crazy. Sure, it's 100 bucks a year, but getting your box chipped or bypassed is inhearantly risky and could brick your $400 investment, ban your $400 investment from Live, not to mention the fact that the nicer chips cost a pretty penny and take quite a bit of work to install.