Interesting. Would you mind posting your resolution and other details settings here? And btw, I wouldn't call my Radeon 9700 "bleeding edge," either.;-)
But I do find your claim that Valve "didn't catch it" to be hard to swallow. What are the estimates of the cost to develop HL 2? Upwards of $10 million? Valve and financially-troubled Vivendi were under severe pressure to ship this season, and ship they did, almost certainly after testing the game on "bleeding edge" hardware.
Thanks for the insight into reselling. No naughtiness here, I promise.:-)
Now, regarding level loading times. It's true, as you point out, that the loading points are generally tucked away; this helps, as the player isn't out in the great wide open when they hit, which would be nasty indeed.
But that great wide open is an illusion, in any case. The linearity of the level design still funnels the player into an A to Z route. I find this actually more frustrating than the loading times; I see somewhere, and I want to go there. It certainly can be done on today's PC hardware: it's the paradigm in Morrowind and the GTA series, and it's only hinted at in HL 2--teasingly, tauntingly--you might even say the illusion of access is Britneyfied.
So, we are left with anywhere of 5 to 7 minutes (perhaps longer on slower rigs?) per hour of waiting time so that the artificially large levels can be loaded. I don't think that's terrible, but I don't see a great tradeoff for it, either. At best, these "larger" levels in HL 2 are supplying a dioramic effect: we can see more buildings in the background, but great as they look they remain largely as untouchable as the old Quake skyboxes.
Well, it is far from being my favorite comic, but I enjoy Watchmen mainly for its subversion of the superhero genre. Superheroes are, in Moore's vision, fascists--or at least, tools of fascism. The novel undermines superhero worship, suggesting that if such beings walked our earth they'd be put to nefarious work by (literally) the Richard Nixons of the world. (To be sure, Moore ceased believing this, if he ever did; he spins out plenty of superhero worship today in his cloying "Tom Strong" series.) The thematic backdrop is America reeling from the Cold War, Vietnam and self-imposed repression, a land in which heroes are both less and more than what they are made out to be.
Moore's characters here are, in many instances, three-dimensional. So, too, is his language richer than what had come to be expected from comics, and he puts it in service of a deeply skeptical and ironic perspective: he has a sly, critical voice that puts him in league with, say, novelists from Nathaniel West and Kurt Vonnegut to Martin Amis and Will Self. And he has a gift for meta-fiction; there is more to Watchmen than meets the eye, and plenty for those who like to read in the margins, too. So, in short, this blurb: this is a complicated tale built on a richly imagined cast that turns the assumptions of (and about) its genre inside out.
It will make a godawful Hollywood movie, and not least because American popcorn-munchers don't pay to see dystopian visions. It's simply too complex to be told correctly in 90 or 120 minutes. Terry Gilliam--whose imagination is at least the equal of Moore's--gave up on it, saying it would require a mini-series. It's a shame HBO doesn't own the rights.
Those with little or no interest in superheroes can still enjoy Watchmen, which subverts the genre wonderfully while also offering much to say about U.S. politics and society.
But for those who don't like men in tights, they can seek out something from your list or, say, the Shakespeare of comics, Alexandro Jodorowsky.
I wish I had considered your argument previously, as I regret my purchase of HL 2 now. Like other hard core players, I just marched out and bought it, thinking, Here's quality!
But the game itself is woefully overrated. I'd say, "Off to eBay with this," but who knows whether HL 2 will work if it has to be reactivated by a new owner?
HL 2 suffers most from being broken and from a fundamentally bad design choice. The STUT-STUT-STUT-STUT-STUT-STUTtering of dialogue at the start of virtually every new scene is something Valve will have discovered in testing, but obviously (and arrogantly) shipped anyway to get Xmas sales. The Source engine has big memory management problems.
Then there are the long, painfully slow load times, one coming every 10-15 minutes, and lasting around 60 seconds. Levels are split at arbitrarily unidentified points, so you never know when you're going to get hit with another minute-long delay--or make that 2-3 minutes, if you decide you want to go back to explore or find supplies.
HL 2 definitely has moments of brillliance. Fighting giant striders is interesting, and skimming along water reservoirs in your Road Warrior-style craft is fun for a bit. But it is far from being the masterpiece that the sold-out gaming press has blathered on about.
Good points. But don't put too much stock in this decision.
American law is very, very, very fungible. Thorns in industry's side--placed there by courts quaintly imagining that trifles like consumers' rights should take precedence over profits--are easily removed. The history of our law is a measure of the weight of money on the scales of justice.
It's interesting though... we human beings seem to be able to have pretty flexible morals when it's in our own best interest to have them. It's weird , interesting and depressing to see how much your own solid convictions will shift when a buck is at stake.
So you've discovered the truth about yourself. First, the good news: few do. The bad news, however, in your case, is fairly bad; I won't rub it in. Seek after a conscience, which can be obtained via remorse and reformation. The alternative is Cheneyism, and being a self-professed "good liberal," you know, at least, what awaits you. Good luck!
Oh, please, spare me the 'woe is me' crying. Companies owe you NOTHING. Absolutely NOTHING. Presumably you are an adult. You, as an entity, enter into an agreement with another entity to trade labor for money. No more, no less. If you think there should be more than that, then you are simply living a fantasy.
You'll throw the switch on an electric chair holding a convicted baby-butchering doctor in this educational look at both sides of the abortion debate. Learn all about electric current, too.
Take Dat, Bitch!
Use a crowbar on a conniving hooker before the jury rejects her opportunistic criminal complaint against you. The game has been designed to debunk phony assault charges; after all, she's a hooker.
Voterator
Install and, with the help of a bottle of Windex and a micro-fiber cloth, debug the latest U.S. touchscreen polling machines. Can a vote here or there go awry? Find out when your candidate enjoys late surges in the opposition's key districts!
...was when the installer bombed out on Disc 4 with an error message.
A few minutes Googling the newsgroups came up with an answer: Valve had stupidly failed to test the installer with the option to install CS turned off. Back to square one, and another twenty minutes of feeding CDs...
Busy lines to get Steam content? Not pleasant, but understandable. Shipping your installer in this state, after five years of development? Valve should apologize.
The game rocks, but nobody should have to jump through 90 minutes of hoops after paying $50.
It's a fairly good article, with the real goods to be found on page 3 where Microsoft's strategy is outlined: "As the underdog in audio technology, Microsoft has marshaled its formidable resources to get others behind its standard."
Translation: pay off every bastard and his brother until you have made the hardware and distribution ends of the music business your vassals.
The president of Rio explains how the hardware sector is being colonized: "Microsoft made it worth our while to get them into our box...They bring a whole suite of service to us, marketing, help with testing and engineering support."
And at the distribution end, there is more bliss:
"I never would have believed I would say this, but Microsoft has been easy to work with," said Ted Cohen, a senior vice president at EMI Recorded Music.
That stuff will scare Apple, which has had to cajole and bug the music biz to get what it wants. Because this is the key: the battle between Microsoft and Apple won't be fought at the consumer level--that's merely where the proles await the outcome. The real battle is being fought by the Microsoft treasury as it gradually puts everyone on the payroll. As with so much else to which it has applied its monopoly power and wealth, Microsoft will buy this market, too. Once it has blocked and barred and obfuscated and outspent Apple, the good free market ideologues will be along to lecture us again on how consumer "choice" has tamed yet another frontier.
I also wonder if Apple could say "look, these guys are acting very uncompetitively and intentionally breaking our software".
Sure, they could.
Question is: Who would listen?
Try bringing an antitrust action through the right wing Justice Department controlled by a party that has taken lots of money from Bill Gates, swept aside a decade of litigation for Bill Gates, and awards Homeland Security contracts to Bill Gates.
Try doing that when your CEO recently offered to be John Kerry's economic advisor.
And then see where you get. The six-gun of economic Darwinism, not priniciple, rules the day in this cowboy-run land.
And it is not hard to predict that Best Buy will soon be faced with litigation over its customer profiling, a practice that can easily become racial and sex discrimination.
I will do no business with a box store that treats people in an invidious manner and honks about it in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Bye bye, Best Buy.
Online shopping has just about eliminated the need for box stores like Best Buy, anyway. It's cheaper and tax free, and what good is a box store if it isn't going to take returns with a smile, anyway? In the past couple of years, I've given Newegg hundreds of dollars of business that formerly would have gone to boxes like Best Buy. Who needs 'em?
It would be interesting to see him make a more modern computer interface, but he seems content to just make vague complaints nowadays.
Check out Raskin's April 2004 keynote for the Desktop Linux Summit Conference. He is especially good on the problem of inherited disadvantages in UIs that have been around for decades now. The GUI, he says, has "outlived its usefulness." Less is more, and Linux is offers an excellent opportunity to break from a troubled tradition.
Among his insights--and this is something the people working on OS X might heed, too--is the following:
"...too many interface designers act like interior decorators rather than structural engineers. We need both, but if an interface (or a building) is to stand up, the use of pretty colors and good visual design alone is not going to hack it."
That said... Sony will crash and burn. Great style.. sometimes... just not as attractive and awe-inspiring as Apple's stores are.
That won't matter. Most shopping in America is done inside Wal-Marts--hardly palaces of style and refinement.
While Apple makes products I like and sells them in stores I visit, it's a very minority taste. And one that isn't at all relevant to the shopping choices or venues of the vast majority of Americans.
...to feed some starving African babies or support some whack hippy group and generally continue to stick their self-righteous noses in everything.
It's really ironic that you're bashing Bono with such hackneyed right wing rhetoric when he has spent the past four years as a habitual guest in the Bush White House, traveling with Bush's Treasury Secretary, praying with Jesse Helms, calling on Bill Frist, and dining with Rupert Murdoch.
Don't you recognize one of your own when you see him?
While no thoughtful person would sneer at the impressive Power Mac G5, it's a fairly common myth among those who prefer to have corporations assemble their machines overseas that "homebuilt" is somehow inferior. For years, non-technophobes have been building the fastest, most well-tuned boxes around. At home. With great mobos. Great power supplies. Great RAM. And the very same hard drives that appear in Apple boxes. Until very recently, in fact, those boxes ran laps around the G4 line; today they are competitive, at least, with G5s.
And not without attention to aesthetics, mind you. It is not merely the Apple customer who is interested in the question of "fantastic industrial design of the case," you're apparently unaware of companies like Liam Li. Apple is far from being the only company that can make a great looking case.
Slashdot Mirror
But I do find your claim that Valve "didn't catch it" to be hard to swallow. What are the estimates of the cost to develop HL 2? Upwards of $10 million? Valve and financially-troubled Vivendi were under severe pressure to ship this season, and ship they did, almost certainly after testing the game on "bleeding edge" hardware.
Now, regarding level loading times. It's true, as you point out, that the loading points are generally tucked away; this helps, as the player isn't out in the great wide open when they hit, which would be nasty indeed.
But that great wide open is an illusion, in any case. The linearity of the level design still funnels the player into an A to Z route. I find this actually more frustrating than the loading times; I see somewhere, and I want to go there. It certainly can be done on today's PC hardware: it's the paradigm in Morrowind and the GTA series, and it's only hinted at in HL 2--teasingly, tauntingly--you might even say the illusion of access is Britneyfied.
So, we are left with anywhere of 5 to 7 minutes (perhaps longer on slower rigs?) per hour of waiting time so that the artificially large levels can be loaded. I don't think that's terrible, but I don't see a great tradeoff for it, either. At best, these "larger" levels in HL 2 are supplying a dioramic effect: we can see more buildings in the background, but great as they look they remain largely as untouchable as the old Quake skyboxes.
Well, it is far from being my favorite comic, but I enjoy Watchmen mainly for its subversion of the superhero genre. Superheroes are, in Moore's vision, fascists--or at least, tools of fascism. The novel undermines superhero worship, suggesting that if such beings walked our earth they'd be put to nefarious work by (literally) the Richard Nixons of the world. (To be sure, Moore ceased believing this, if he ever did; he spins out plenty of superhero worship today in his cloying "Tom Strong" series.) The thematic backdrop is America reeling from the Cold War, Vietnam and self-imposed repression, a land in which heroes are both less and more than what they are made out to be.
Moore's characters here are, in many instances, three-dimensional. So, too, is his language richer than what had come to be expected from comics, and he puts it in service of a deeply skeptical and ironic perspective: he has a sly, critical voice that puts him in league with, say, novelists from Nathaniel West and Kurt Vonnegut to Martin Amis and Will Self. And he has a gift for meta-fiction; there is more to Watchmen than meets the eye, and plenty for those who like to read in the margins, too. So, in short, this blurb: this is a complicated tale built on a richly imagined cast that turns the assumptions of (and about) its genre inside out.
It will make a godawful Hollywood movie, and not least because American popcorn-munchers don't pay to see dystopian visions. It's simply too complex to be told correctly in 90 or 120 minutes. Terry Gilliam--whose imagination is at least the equal of Moore's--gave up on it, saying it would require a mini-series. It's a shame HBO doesn't own the rights.
Those with little or no interest in superheroes can still enjoy Watchmen, which subverts the genre wonderfully while also offering much to say about U.S. politics and society.
But for those who don't like men in tights, they can seek out something from your list or, say, the Shakespeare of comics, Alexandro Jodorowsky.
Beautifully put. This licensing scheme is hostile to consumers, and the companies involve need to be taught a lesson--probably through litigation.
But the game itself is woefully overrated. I'd say, "Off to eBay with this," but who knows whether HL 2 will work if it has to be reactivated by a new owner?
HL 2 suffers most from being broken and from a fundamentally bad design choice. The STUT-STUT-STUT-STUT-STUT-STUTtering of dialogue at the start of virtually every new scene is something Valve will have discovered in testing, but obviously (and arrogantly) shipped anyway to get Xmas sales. The Source engine has big memory management problems.
Then there are the long, painfully slow load times, one coming every 10-15 minutes, and lasting around 60 seconds. Levels are split at arbitrarily unidentified points, so you never know when you're going to get hit with another minute-long delay--or make that 2-3 minutes, if you decide you want to go back to explore or find supplies.
HL 2 definitely has moments of brillliance. Fighting giant striders is interesting, and skimming along water reservoirs in your Road Warrior-style craft is fun for a bit. But it is far from being the masterpiece that the sold-out gaming press has blathered on about.
American law is very, very, very fungible. Thorns in industry's side--placed there by courts quaintly imagining that trifles like consumers' rights should take precedence over profits--are easily removed. The history of our law is a measure of the weight of money on the scales of justice.
So you've discovered the truth about yourself. First, the good news: few do. The bad news, however, in your case, is fairly bad; I won't rub it in. Seek after a conscience, which can be obtained via remorse and reformation. The alternative is Cheneyism, and being a self-professed "good liberal," you know, at least, what awaits you. Good luck!
You'll throw the switch on an electric chair holding a convicted baby-butchering doctor in this educational look at both sides of the abortion debate. Learn all about electric current, too.
Take Dat, Bitch!
Use a crowbar on a conniving hooker before the jury rejects her opportunistic criminal complaint against you. The game has been designed to debunk phony assault charges; after all, she's a hooker.
Voterator
Install and, with the help of a bottle of Windex and a micro-fiber cloth, debug the latest U.S. touchscreen polling machines. Can a vote here or there go awry? Find out when your candidate enjoys late surges in the opposition's key districts!
Your posts in this thread are a treat to read. Thanks.
A few minutes Googling the newsgroups came up with an answer: Valve had stupidly failed to test the installer with the option to install CS turned off. Back to square one, and another twenty minutes of feeding CDs...
Busy lines to get Steam content? Not pleasant, but understandable. Shipping your installer in this state, after five years of development? Valve should apologize.
The game rocks, but nobody should have to jump through 90 minutes of hoops after paying $50.
Translation: pay off every bastard and his brother until you have made the hardware and distribution ends of the music business your vassals.
The president of Rio explains how the hardware sector is being colonized: "Microsoft made it worth our while to get them into our box...They bring a whole suite of service to us, marketing, help with testing and engineering support."
And at the distribution end, there is more bliss: "I never would have believed I would say this, but Microsoft has been easy to work with," said Ted Cohen, a senior vice president at EMI Recorded Music.
That stuff will scare Apple, which has had to cajole and bug the music biz to get what it wants. Because this is the key: the battle between Microsoft and Apple won't be fought at the consumer level--that's merely where the proles await the outcome. The real battle is being fought by the Microsoft treasury as it gradually puts everyone on the payroll. As with so much else to which it has applied its monopoly power and wealth, Microsoft will buy this market, too. Once it has blocked and barred and obfuscated and outspent Apple, the good free market ideologues will be along to lecture us again on how consumer "choice" has tamed yet another frontier.
Sure, they could.
Question is: Who would listen?
Try bringing an antitrust action through the right wing Justice Department controlled by a party that has taken lots of money from Bill Gates, swept aside a decade of litigation for Bill Gates, and awards Homeland Security contracts to Bill Gates.
Try doing that when your CEO recently offered to be John Kerry's economic advisor.
And then see where you get. The six-gun of economic Darwinism, not priniciple, rules the day in this cowboy-run land.
I will do no business with a box store that treats people in an invidious manner and honks about it in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Bye bye, Best Buy.
Online shopping has just about eliminated the need for box stores like Best Buy, anyway. It's cheaper and tax free, and what good is a box store if it isn't going to take returns with a smile, anyway? In the past couple of years, I've given Newegg hundreds of dollars of business that formerly would have gone to boxes like Best Buy. Who needs 'em?
Yeah, but remember: blue for boys, pink for girls. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Check out Raskin's April 2004 keynote for the Desktop Linux Summit Conference. He is especially good on the problem of inherited disadvantages in UIs that have been around for decades now. The GUI, he says, has "outlived its usefulness." Less is more, and Linux is offers an excellent opportunity to break from a troubled tradition.
Among his insights--and this is something the people working on OS X might heed, too--is the following:
" ...too many interface designers act like interior decorators rather than structural engineers. We need both, but if an interface (or a building) is to stand up, the use of pretty colors and good visual design alone is not going to hack it."
That won't matter. Most shopping in America is done inside Wal-Marts--hardly palaces of style and refinement.
While Apple makes products I like and sells them in stores I visit, it's a very minority taste. And one that isn't at all relevant to the shopping choices or venues of the vast majority of Americans.
But we haven't even got to the DRM in the car radio yet!
Well, true enough, but so what? Are you saying that the jokes aren't insightful or funny enough, or are you admitting that you don't get them? ;-)
...the mp3s first sign agreements with Russian Organization for Multimedia & Digital Systems (ROMS), and then they delete you!
Mod parent up. What are you waiting for? A better expression of this classic humanist argument you won't find.
It's really ironic that you're bashing Bono with such hackneyed right wing rhetoric when he has spent the past four years as a habitual guest in the Bush White House, traveling with Bush's Treasury Secretary, praying with Jesse Helms, calling on Bill Frist, and dining with Rupert Murdoch.
Don't you recognize one of your own when you see him?
And not without attention to aesthetics, mind you. It is not merely the Apple customer who is interested in the question of "fantastic industrial design of the case," you're apparently unaware of companies like Liam Li. Apple is far from being the only company that can make a great looking case.