Multiplayer games however, this could work. I find:...
Most of the MP games I've got really into have stagnated from lack of fresh content as the game gets "old". Often these games go on for years longer thanks to some good modding, though fan made maps rarely fare so well.
Strangely, Valve has combated this in Team Fortress 2, but Valve hasn't try to monetize it. The latest (11th major) update came out last week with 4 new maps, 4 new Engineer weapons, and 38 new Engineer achievements. This is the last of TF2's nine class updates. Also, fan made maps are quite popular, and some even make it into the base game distribution during updates (ctf_turbine, cp_fastlane, cp_egypt, cp_junction, arena_watchtower, pl_hoodoo, cp_frieght, and cp_coldfront are the ones I can think of).
- MP games often come out with too much content for people to get properly into, resulting in a long lead time of people being inexperienced with the levels.
TF2 only started with only 7 maps comprising 3 (4 actually) game types, and no unlockable weapons or items.
TF2 today has (if I'm counting right) 34 maps (26 Valve-created maps, 8 community-created maps) comprising 7 (8 actually) game types, 34 unlockable weapons (27 Valve-created replacement weapons, 7 community-created replacement weapons (Medic and Spy don't have any yet)), and 49 hats/misc items (30 Valve-created hats/misc items (3 per class, and 3 generic), 19 community-created hats/misc items (2 per class, but Medic has 3)). Note: I'm ignoring the 10 specialty hats/misc items and 2 reskinned weapons that aren't randomly dropped.
Valve is also planning on adding the winners of the Polycount Contest to the game... they were supposed to announce the winners sometime this week, but that announcement was subject to Valve Time.
- related to above, many people tend to pick a few favourites and just ignore other maps, even if they're still quite good. These maps may offer more value if introduced when they are adding freshness as the old favourites are getting a bit tired.
Certain maps in TF2 are disliked. tc_hydro seems like a good map on the surface, and is one of three maps that has a developer commentary. Valve clearly put a lot of effort into it. However, it is easily the most stalemate-prone map in the game, which in turn makes it unpopular.
As for the new maps, the people on the OCRTF2 servers, which I'm an admin on, have already chosen maps they like and maps they don't. For instance, plr_hightower is disliked by some... it's a relatively small map and has this tendency for one team to steam-roll the other. pl_upward seems to be well liked. cp_coldfront is a map that we already had on our servers in its release candidates (Valve adds community maps in some updates, cp_coldfront was added in this update), and it... can be good or bad, depending on the teams. pl_thundermountain, I'm not sure about as we don't seem to play it as often as the others; I thought it was interesting, though, even if the map does sometimes get stopped before it reaches the final stage.
- the high initial price puts people off because MP games are "high risk" - good balance is hard to achieve.
TF2 has the advantage of being part of the Orange Box. OB had an MSRP of $50 at launch in late 2007, and has an MSRP of $30 today. It also includes all of HL2 (original plus both episodes), Portal, and TF2. On Steam, TF2 alone sells for $20... but a boxed copy from Amazon sells for $9.99. The boxed copy needs to be registered to a
Gamer: This game is crappy. Game maker: Just give us five more bucks, and it won't be so crappy. Gamer: That's a little better, but it's still pretty crappy. Game maker: Oh! We fixed that. Five more dollars, please? Gamer: WTF?!?!? There's DRM on this download. Game maker: Oh yeah. Pirates figured out how to pirate our DLC. Sorry about that. Five more buck and all the female NPCs will be topless. Gamer: Sweet! Keep the change!
Up until the "all the female NPCs will be topless" it sounds like you're describing Borderlands.
I forgot to mention, this is either the 10th or 11th major Team Fortress 2 update, depending on whether you count the Halloween update as major or not... and not counting the community weapon updates.
Do you also bitch at them for releasing an "unfinished" game just because they add content later on?
I'm going to address these two separately.
Valve has released DLC's and patched TF2 for the last 3-4 years, since it's release. They have added content and maps and tweaked the gameplay.
In this case, no. The game was complete as it was. Not only that, but the new updates are free. For those not in the know, the most recent patch was the Engineer Update, a week ago today. It added 3 new Valve-made maps, 1 community-made map, 3 new Valve-made weapons, 1 new community-made weapon, a new game mechanic (Engineer buildings can now be picked up and moved), and 38 new achievements. The Polycount update has already been announced, but without a date and containing an unknown number of community-made weapons.
Blizzard has done the same with WoW, as have almost every other game company on the planet in the form of patches.
In this case... still no. World of Warcraft was relatively complete, if a little buggy.
Blizzard has two kinds of updates. The first type is incremental updates. Those are funded by the subscription fees people pay (in addition to covering hardware/bandwidth costs). When WoW first launched, there was no Dire Maul. Or Zul Gurub. Or Naxxramas.
Now, you do end up paying for expansions, but each expansion added a new area to the game that is 25% of the size of the existing game world. They also added two new playable races (and their respective starting areas) in the first expansion, and a new playable class (and its starting area) in the second expansion.
The third expansion is going to feature a complete makeover of the old world, even for people who don't buy it, as well as new areas, and two new races (and their respective starting areas).
No, what people bitch about is things like, iirc, Fallout 3 (which I haven't played), where the end of the game itself is sold as DLC.
Can someone point me to a nice lean browser that can run in 32 megabytes (like utorrnt) but is not text-only (like Lynx). It doesn't seem to exist.
Client-side scripting and DOM manipulation puts a damper on that fairly quickly. The number of websites that don't work at all without client-side scripting is growing, and will only continue to grow.
You act like google and mozilla are competitors. They're not. There's nothing mozilla does that competes with google.
Except web browsers.
Google likes having its own web browser, because they use it to steer people towards other Google products. Which in turn not only increases Google's ad revenue, but what they know about you (and will monetize).
Google has Mozilla Corp. between a rock and a hard place.
Google could say "Hey, we're not going to pay you for referrals any more."
What do you think is going to happen? That Mozilla will remove Google from the search engine dropdown? That Mozilla Corp will promote the #2 search engine instead, which just so happens to be owned by their largest competitor, Microsoft?
More importantly, if they do either of those things, how do you think the users will react?
Actually, I bought a GT240 (for $10 more than this, but it was 6 months ago and had a free Capcom game (I chose Resident Evil 5) with it). The difference is that there were two models for the same price: a 1GB DDR3 model and a 512MB GDDR5 model... and one of my friends warned me that the GDDR5 model was probably the better buy, simply because the memory clock speed was more likely to be a bottleneck before the memory amount was.
Speaking of which, that exact card as well as its 1GB DDR3 edition are $64.99 on NewEgg after MIR. The 512MB GDDR5 model has $7.56 shipping, the 1GB DDR3 model has free shipping.
nVidia makes the chips, not the board they are on.
That isn't to say they couldn't still be responsible, but the only problems I've had with nVidia video cards were when I bought the really cheap ones from an unknown vendor... and that was ages ago (during the GeForce 2 line).
Which leaves you two choices: VirtualBox, which supports OpenGL plus DirectX 8/9 if you replace one of the OS's files, or VMWare Player which supports OpenGL and all versions of DirectX out of the box.
I wish MS updated their base system more than once every 10 years.
2000 or 2001 (XP) to 2007 (Vista) is only 6-7 years. If you choose not to update after MS updates their base system, that's your problem, not theirs.
It's quite possible that Apple provides less longevity than MS in terms of OS updates, and I suspect that the future will bear out that supposition, but you can hardly compare the XP->Vista stretch to competitors that released several major updates in the same period.
This is one of those situations where your damned if you, damned if you don't.
People complain you update too often (Apple OSX updates in general, MS Windows updates other than XP -> Vista) or not often enough (MS Windows XP -> Vista). There doesn't appear to be any middle ground.
How do you know that this isn't just the first step?
If we let Blizzard get away with it here, who's to say the next thing won't be the WoW Armory listing the player's full name when you look up characters on it?
I once got charged with cheating in a lit class because I put a bunch of verbatim quotes from the book in as part of my argument...I guess they thought I was the least subtle cheater EVER.
I had to sit and quote shit at them for 10 minutes.
Did you include citations and a bibliography/works cited page?
If not, then they were correct to charge you with cheating until you had proven otherwise. In my experience, writing classes tell you up front about citation requirements for papers when you quote or paraphrase outside sources.
Microsoft seems to make a big marketing splash on a development toolset or language or API every few years only to throw it away with the "next big thing".
One thing about MS is that the old versions of toolsets or languages don't really go away. The Win32 API, introduced in the mid-90s, still works. As does MFC, the first of three abstraction layers MS wrote for the Win32 API in C++ (the other two are ATL and WTL).
This is, of course, ignoring the STL, which is also present.
The current version of Visual Studio (2010), can be used to write applications in C# or VB.NET for.NET 2.0 (2005), 3.0 (2007), 3.5 (2008), and 4.0 (2010). Even in.NET 4.0, I can use WinForms for the GUI, introduced back in.NET 1.0 in 2002; it hasn't been deprecated just because WPF/XAML came along.
Slashdot Mirror
I forgot to mention, TF2 started with 10 achievements and now has 364 achievements.
Strangely, Valve has combated this in Team Fortress 2, but Valve hasn't try to monetize it. The latest (11th major) update came out last week with 4 new maps, 4 new Engineer weapons, and 38 new Engineer achievements. This is the last of TF2's nine class updates. Also, fan made maps are quite popular, and some even make it into the base game distribution during updates (ctf_turbine, cp_fastlane, cp_egypt, cp_junction, arena_watchtower, pl_hoodoo, cp_frieght, and cp_coldfront are the ones I can think of).
TF2 only started with only 7 maps comprising 3 (4 actually) game types, and no unlockable weapons or items.
TF2 today has (if I'm counting right) 34 maps (26 Valve-created maps, 8 community-created maps) comprising 7 (8 actually) game types, 34 unlockable weapons (27 Valve-created replacement weapons, 7 community-created replacement weapons (Medic and Spy don't have any yet)), and 49 hats/misc items (30 Valve-created hats/misc items (3 per class, and 3 generic), 19 community-created hats/misc items (2 per class, but Medic has 3)). Note: I'm ignoring the 10 specialty hats/misc items and 2 reskinned weapons that aren't randomly dropped.
Valve is also planning on adding the winners of the Polycount Contest to the game... they were supposed to announce the winners sometime this week, but that announcement was subject to Valve Time.
Certain maps in TF2 are disliked. tc_hydro seems like a good map on the surface, and is one of three maps that has a developer commentary. Valve clearly put a lot of effort into it. However, it is easily the most stalemate-prone map in the game, which in turn makes it unpopular.
As for the new maps, the people on the OCRTF2 servers, which I'm an admin on, have already chosen maps they like and maps they don't. For instance, plr_hightower is disliked by some... it's a relatively small map and has this tendency for one team to steam-roll the other. pl_upward seems to be well liked. cp_coldfront is a map that we already had on our servers in its release candidates (Valve adds community maps in some updates, cp_coldfront was added in this update), and it... can be good or bad, depending on the teams. pl_thundermountain, I'm not sure about as we don't seem to play it as often as the others; I thought it was interesting, though, even if the map does sometimes get stopped before it reaches the final stage.
TF2 has the advantage of being part of the Orange Box. OB had an MSRP of $50 at launch in late 2007, and has an MSRP of $30 today. It also includes all of HL2 (original plus both episodes), Portal, and TF2. On Steam, TF2 alone sells for $20... but a boxed copy from Amazon sells for $9.99. The boxed copy needs to be registered to a
Up until the "all the female NPCs will be topless" it sounds like you're describing Borderlands.
I forgot to mention, this is either the 10th or 11th major Team Fortress 2 update, depending on whether you count the Halloween update as major or not... and not counting the community weapon updates.
I'm going to address these two separately.
In this case, no. The game was complete as it was. Not only that, but the new updates are free. For those not in the know, the most recent patch was the Engineer Update, a week ago today. It added 3 new Valve-made maps, 1 community-made map, 3 new Valve-made weapons, 1 new community-made weapon, a new game mechanic (Engineer buildings can now be picked up and moved), and 38 new achievements. The Polycount update has already been announced, but without a date and containing an unknown number of community-made weapons.
In this case... still no. World of Warcraft was relatively complete, if a little buggy.
Blizzard has two kinds of updates. The first type is incremental updates. Those are funded by the subscription fees people pay (in addition to covering hardware/bandwidth costs). When WoW first launched, there was no Dire Maul. Or Zul Gurub. Or Naxxramas.
Now, you do end up paying for expansions, but each expansion added a new area to the game that is 25% of the size of the existing game world. They also added two new playable races (and their respective starting areas) in the first expansion, and a new playable class (and its starting area) in the second expansion.
The third expansion is going to feature a complete makeover of the old world, even for people who don't buy it, as well as new areas, and two new races (and their respective starting areas).
No, what people bitch about is things like, iirc, Fallout 3 (which I haven't played), where the end of the game itself is sold as DLC.
Client-side scripting and DOM manipulation puts a damper on that fairly quickly. The number of websites that don't work at all without client-side scripting is growing, and will only continue to grow.
Arg, I had a response typed up but I rebooted my computer while diagnosing an issue with an application.
It went a little something like this:
Given those exact words, people under the influence of the RDF will interpret it like so:
Ladies and gentlemen,
We have determined that the problem only occurs if you hold it in an unusual way.
We now stock iPhone 4 cases in the Apple Store. This will protect your phone from the effects of being held wrong!
The iPhone 5 will solve all your problems! It's insanely great! Stay tuned in the next few months for pre-order information.
The end.
Except web browsers.
Google likes having its own web browser, because they use it to steer people towards other Google products. Which in turn not only increases Google's ad revenue, but what they know about you (and will monetize).
Google has Mozilla Corp. between a rock and a hard place.
Google could say "Hey, we're not going to pay you for referrals any more."
What do you think is going to happen? That Mozilla will remove Google from the search engine dropdown? That Mozilla Corp will promote the #2 search engine instead, which just so happens to be owned by their largest competitor, Microsoft?
More importantly, if they do either of those things, how do you think the users will react?
They have their right to remove it, just as we have a right to post somewhere else that they're removing it and pretending that it isn't happening.
FTFY
I'm assuming you meant 5770 here and that the 4 was a typo, since the other time the card number is mentioned, it's the 5770.
Actually, I bought a GT240 (for $10 more than this, but it was 6 months ago and had a free Capcom game (I chose Resident Evil 5) with it). The difference is that there were two models for the same price: a 1GB DDR3 model and a 512MB GDDR5 model... and one of my friends warned me that the GDDR5 model was probably the better buy, simply because the memory clock speed was more likely to be a bottleneck before the memory amount was.
Speaking of which, that exact card as well as its 1GB DDR3 edition are $64.99 on NewEgg after MIR. The 512MB GDDR5 model has $7.56 shipping, the 1GB DDR3 model has free shipping.
nVidia makes the chips, not the board they are on.
That isn't to say they couldn't still be responsible, but the only problems I've had with nVidia video cards were when I bought the really cheap ones from an unknown vendor... and that was ages ago (during the GeForce 2 line).
XP Mode doesn't support 3D graphics. At all.
Which leaves you two choices: VirtualBox, which supports OpenGL plus DirectX 8/9 if you replace one of the OS's files, or VMWare Player which supports OpenGL and all versions of DirectX out of the box.
2000 or 2001 (XP) to 2007 (Vista) is only 6-7 years. If you choose not to update after MS updates their base system, that's your problem, not theirs.
This is one of those situations where your damned if you, damned if you don't.
People complain you update too often (Apple OSX updates in general, MS Windows updates other than XP -> Vista) or not often enough (MS Windows XP -> Vista). There doesn't appear to be any middle ground.
Even sin. According to the Bible, anyway.
Blue, Silver, AND Green!
You get the best from Fisher-Price! Er... Microsoft.
How do you know that this isn't just the first step?
If we let Blizzard get away with it here, who's to say the next thing won't be the WoW Armory listing the player's full name when you look up characters on it?
Did you include citations and a bibliography/works cited page?
If not, then they were correct to charge you with cheating until you had proven otherwise. In my experience, writing classes tell you up front about citation requirements for papers when you quote or paraphrase outside sources.
Does this diego.viola support reading English text?
Is it possible to read the article summary without me having to paste it in this message?
Even Internet Explorer 6 got one in Windows XP SP2.
One thing about MS is that the old versions of toolsets or languages don't really go away. The Win32 API, introduced in the mid-90s, still works. As does MFC, the first of three abstraction layers MS wrote for the Win32 API in C++ (the other two are ATL and WTL).
This is, of course, ignoring the STL, which is also present.
The current version of Visual Studio (2010), can be used to write applications in C# or VB.NET for .NET 2.0 (2005), 3.0 (2007), 3.5 (2008), and 4.0 (2010). Even in .NET 4.0, I can use WinForms for the GUI, introduced back in .NET 1.0 in 2002; it hasn't been deprecated just because WPF/XAML came along.
No they couldn't; Borland would have started an anti-trust suit against them the moment they tried.
As it is, even today the Microsoft compilers are free (as part of the Windows SDK, formerly Platform SDK), but the IDE itself still isn't.