While there is something to be said for "stock" servers, one major issue is that for hardcore gamers, they get boring fast. When you've played all the maps fifty times, you're often ready for something new.
On our server, we run Mapvote with fairly expansive options. While we have a lot of mods and user-created maps, all the stock options are there as well. If enough people are feeling nostalgic, they are welcome to choose them.
Well, that is, other than the Matrix Moves. That's one mod that's been a standard on all of our UT servers. Why? Because the tranny is a cheep way to travel without getting shot at, and the Matrix Moves requires a great deal of skill. Granted Epic nerfed the tranny in the last two editions, but still, if you aren't on a map ¼ of the time, that's a pretty lame way to play a FPS. We'd rather jump and bound, hover in the air and wallrun, because at bare minimum people can splat us while we do that. And vice versa.
Oh, this was about stock servers...sorry - can't help you there. Stock servers often suck (see tranny rant above) and the only way to get a decent server is to make one.
Incidentally, while our UT2K4 server isn't fully up to speed, (PhD thesis defenses, astrophysics research projects, etc) and it is kind of empty because we don't show on the "vanilla" master server list, you can find it listed as the Apoc Matrix Moves Official Server at 128.151.144.195:8000 (The moves were coded in-house by our own Apoc Death, and a total-conversion Matrix mod using his Matrix Moves placed 4th in the Make Something Unreal contest.)
Werid that I made a similar post on another board minutes before reading/., but anyway...
Most games are still only in the 20 updates/sec range still, when played online. UT/UT2k3 is a good example of this. The game looks great, and plays like a dream on a lan, but even on cable the update rate means rockets can disappear and people can skip over large portions of ground as the game struggles to get enough updates to accurately place things. Of course, it doesn't help that our server is on 110% speed, but who would want to play slower...;)
The other thing that keeps us with UT2k3 is our modding efforts. When I can rip open the code for a weapon and change it, I'm much more likely to keep playing that game. The ability to mod a game is my primary motivation for playing it. Our weapons are pretty well balanced now, which they weren't in the orig game, we have the matrix moves, (coded inhouse) carry the flag, (you have to pick up your flag and bring it back home when it's dropped) as well as a host of other fun mods. Without all those additions, we wouldn't be playing the game still.
Graphics are nice, but when I can make a game *my* game, I'll play it a lot longer than any other.
Exactly. When I was doing astrophysics, a buddy of mine, (well, I helped a bit) made up a swank program to combine ccd images of starfields by locating matching stars and then scaling, rotating, and otherwise shifting the images, in order to combine them even if they were a little off. What turned out to be cool, was that if you took 3 (rgb) images of a starfield at different times, and combined them, objects that moved between the shots (asteroids) would show as a line of rgb pixels.
Aaaah...in true/. style I answered my own question by RTFAing. Their ValuePlus keyboard looks to be exactly what I'm looking for...although they are out of straight ps/2 ones and are selling AT with PS/2 adapter.
Nice, but a bit out of my price range. Anyone know where I can get a vanilla 'classic 101 key' keyboard, straight enter key, home/ins/del and arrow keys in the right places, no meta keys for $10?
Exactly. I had one professor who claimed you could link the increasing effects of global warming with "research" groups fighting for funding in congress. He even had charts.;)
The temperature of the earth has been hotter then this before, and it has been colder. Yes, we may be in a time of man-made temperature increases, but we still don't know for sure. What all the global-warming zealots ignore is the fact that in the hundred thousand year global temperature cycle, we are IN A WARMING TREND. This is to be expected. If you look at the ice age cycles, they follow similar temperature trends. Yes we may be causing some of the temperature increase - but at the same time, a good deal of it is most likely normal, natural, and to be expected.
I wish people would stop looking at the last 50-100 years, and get it through their heads that to understand climate modeling, you need to look at eons. The ice ages do have some meaning - they weren't random events that happened due to man not burning fossil fuels.
Since nobody seems to be doing this, here are some pretty charts and discussions about why the current hype about global warming is, at minimum overrated, and at max completely bogus:
Ice ages and inter-glacial warming periods:
http://www.ocs.orst.edu/forum/BigPicture.htm
Thermodynamics coupled with solar radiation fluctuations:
While I don't claim that these are all 100% correct and relevant, they should at least get you to question the current global-warming mentality of "we did it and it's here now". Yes, we may be responsible for some global warming. But until we can tell for sure, THROUGH SCIENCE, people need to take a deep breath and calm down. Ask for the facts, ask for the numbers, look at the charts.
Few of you believe manufacturers when they claim speeds for things - you go look at benchmarks. Why would you then automatically accept claims of massive global warming, especially from groups with obvious agendas? Ask to see the data. Ask to see *all* of the data. Get angry that much of the "temperature increase of y degrees in the last x years" "data" came from limited readings in some of the coldest places on earth, because it showed the greatest change, instead of from a representative sample across the entire planet.
Yes, we should pollute less, and yes, we should take responsibility for our environment. However, we shouldn't run around screaming "the ice is melting, the ice is melting". If it is, then it very well might do that every so often, humans, fossil fuels, or not. But using junk or no science to promote a phenomenon which might or might not exist is just not cool...
I completely agree. Not only that, but what is cooler: Having your halfling ranger make his way into the halfling warrior's tomb and finding a human short sword and short bow, or a halfling long sword and long bow with clan markings?
I think this finally legitimizes weapons for the smaller races, and realistically deals with the fact that they would make arms built to their specs. Your great gnome warrior isn't going to go to the great dwarven blacksmith and have a human long sword commissioned for him - he's going to get a greatsword fitted and balanced for him.
While it's more complicated and makes random treasure a little harder, I think it was a worthy change. Power to the little people!
I really like where rangers are now - they really fit in well between rogues and fighters. Before they were too much like poor fighters without enough skill pts for the skills they needed. Now they are skillful hunters - what I view rangers to be.
They aren't tanks - that's left for the fighters. They really have their own place now, and I like that. I think it's a stride forward towards making the class more of a core class, and less of a "we've got a fighter and a rogue, what else can I play?" sort of class.
Yeah, I agree with harm and most of the class tweaks. I think the bard looks pretty good now, and overall, fixing the front-loading of classes was a great idea.
But because I had an issue with the 3.0 ranger I have no issue with the d8 hd in 3.5, in light of all the other stuff they get. In fact, I'm playing my first 3.x ranger in our first 3.5 campaign. I almost fear that they're too powerful in 3.5, but it's hard to judge without playing one. Thus my "sacrifice" for the campaign...;)
I must be angsty this month, but I also have issues with the half elf getting +2 diplomacy and gather info. It forces half elves into a role that isn't right for all half elves. We're fixing this with a house rule that gives them a choice from a number of "quasi-feats" to replace the dip/gather info bonus. These being:
Acrobatic (+2 jump and tumble) Athletic (+2 climb and swim) Deceitful (+2 disguise and forgery) Diligent (+2 appraise and decipher script) Friendly (+2 diplomacy and gather info) (yeah, I made the name up.) Magical Aptitude (+2 spellcraft and use magical device) Negotiator (+2 diplomacy and sense motive) Self Sufficiant (+2 heal and survival) "Elven" Weapon Proficiency (choose long/short bow, rapier, or LS)
This list is designed to point half-elves towards a trait that fits in well with whatever human elements they have grown up with, but also represents their elven heritedge. It also purposely filters out a lot of feats which could be really be munched to overpower the race.
I think they made a stride towards a better half elf, but something like this really rounds it out.
Eh, I'm 50/50 with no-screen DMing. I'd do it more often if it weren't for my bizzare rolling. I often have to tone down rolls in one fight when I crit 3 times in a row on the same PC, and then have to buff them up in another when I constantly roll under 5.
It's supposed to be fun - if you smite the boss with ease and then fall to his puny henchmen, it's not that much fun. If both are good fights, it's more fun.
But I agree - the format is much better than 3.0. Now I just have to re-memorize the page numbers for stuff...
My local gaming group has decided to switch up to 3.5, and we'll be starting a campaign this saturday with the ruleset. At first glance, this edition seems far more streamlined, more flexible, and much more open-ended when it comes to character development. I think it will promote a lot more variety, and overall will speed up the mechanics of game sessions. That and at first glance, the classes are better balanced.
At the same time, there is no pressing reason to switch from 3.0 - the core of the game remains the same, and 3.0 is still a very solid ruleset. There is nothing terribly broken in 3.0 that was fixed in 3.5. That in itself leads to a fair amount of "wizards is grubbing for money" comments.
I can see both sides of the coin here - while 3.5 is indeed an easy way for wizards to make money, it also provides some sweet new art, greater flexibility for classed monsters, and just feels slicker.
Since I made pretty good use of 3.0, I'm not opposed to spending some cash on 3.5 - bare minimum it's cheep entertainment/hour compared to just about everything else.
I wasn't all that impressed with Splinter Cell, to tell the truth. The graphics were great, the feel of the game wonderful, and the lock-picking one of the most creative and realistic representations that I've seen, but the idiocy of the game-play pretty much ruined it for me. That and piss-poor attention to detail, such as repeatedly showing stock tickers with red up arrows. I honestly don't have a lot of hope they will put out a game worth buying, as the current one really isn't, IMHO, of course.
A major part of my problem stems from playing Dues Ex a few times. It is still the most amazing, creative, and flexible FPS I have ever played. In Dues Ex you had the CHOICE of stealth VS tank, and you could pick the mood that suited you. In a game where you were allowed to shoot just about everyone, they were nice enough to give you, pretty much from the start:
a baton/crowbar to knock people out, a crossbow with tranquilizer darts, gas grenades, and a taser/stun gun
Now, in Splinter Cell, where you aren't allowed to kill ANYONE in large portions of the game, they are nice enough to supply you with a sniper rifle and a pistol, leaving you stealth and fists to knock people out for the most part. Um, hello? A little help here? How damn hard would it be to give me a taser, or even a hunk of polished cherry?
Another of my gripes is the object interaction. For instance, if you can shoot out light bulbs, why can you not unscrew them? For a game that focuses on stealth, that seems a little more intelligent than forcing you to waste ammo on all of them.
At the same time, there are people that you have to sneak up on, grab, and force to use optical scanners. I have absolutely NO clue why you can't knock them out first. An unconscious eye scans the same as a conscious one...just another pointless limitation built into the game.
In Dues Ex you coveted and searched out the LAMs, baiting people into hallways where you had placed them, or shooting them as guards walked past. They were one of those things you tried to keep in stock at all times, as a good explosive should be.
In Splinter Cell, you meet Wall Mines in one level. You can only carry 3, and you never see them again once you leave that level. Aparently you aren't allowed to keep any useful equipment you pick up.
While I appreciate the SC-20K and the various attachments and add-ons you get for it, (albeit in pitiful enough quantities that you hardly ever want to use them) I'd take the variety of Dues Ex weapons any day. In no particular order, I can remember: baton, crowbar, knife, stun gun, pepper spray, sword, crossbow, pistol, shotgun, machine gun, sniper, anti-tank rifle, plasma gun, flame thrower, throwaway anti-tank rifle...not to mention other pickups like armors, explosives/grenades, medkits, ammo, weapon mods, lock picks...hell, the GEP gun still gives me a hardon when I think about it. Compare all this to Splinter Cell's 2 weapons and um, 3? 4? other pickups...
Yes, I know that Splinter Cell is all about stealth, but in comparison to Dues Ex it feels like "Stealth in a car, and we're driving". Fuck the "5th freedom" - throughout most of the game you have 2 freedoms: forward and backward, and even then they are limited.
For the next release, they need to understand two things they apparently missed with this one:
1. Someone set a bar 3 years ago.
2. You need to meet or exceed that bar with your game.
At this point, given the choice to play Splinter Cell over, or play Dues Ex for the 3rd or 4th time, I'd have take Dues Ex. It's just that much better.
I dunno. This may be painful for a bit, and increase the amount of mail, but in the long run it might be worthwhile. While I agree that it makes some peoples' jobs harder, those people probably aren't using the major ISPs/mail-services. If the major players do this, it makes it that much less profitable for spammers to do business.
I mean, if you're a spammer, a brute force mailing to joeuser.org is MUCH less profitable than mailing the same million messages to hotmail.com. Go big guys, go! It won't bother me at all.
While the doom series did freak me out on occasion, what really got me were the shifting halls and little green men running around and shooting rockets at my head. After 8 hrs of lan gaming, and *after* I went to bed...
Same thing once happened to me with UT - I ducked a bouncing grenade and promptly fell out of bed. Guess there's a reason you shouldn't play comp games for more than 8 hrs straight...
While more games/quality software is the first step, the second step is to promote linux distros that are stupid-easy to setup, with games and drivers that are stupid-easy to install.
The demise of windows won't come until the average user feels comfortable taking a step up from windowz to something else. The problem I see is that for the average user, anything involving a command line and editing random config files is two steps up.
Honestly, I can walk my mom through a win98 install over the phone. I'd never want to consider trying the same with most linux distros, except maybe RH or Mandrake.
While nvidia has made some huge strides with their latest drivers, until we see that same sort of "stupid easy" on everything else, I don't see linux exploding into mainstream use. But at the same time, with the maturity we've seen in just the last few years, I don't think it really will be that much longer before it does explode - Especially with the work people like Ryan Gordon are doing.;)
Although I too am not sure that the US is doing this for the right reasons, at the end of the day if the people of Iraq don't like what we are doing, (and this is the important part)
They can complain without being executed.
They can take their media out, record what they feel isn't right, and show the world. Again, without being executed. No matter what the US ends up doing there, I think this feature alone will make life a lot more livable for the Iraqi people.
On the off chance that we do indeed help them build a democratic and stable govt that isn't a pawn of the US govt and or of US oil companies, even better. But the whole "If you complain, your family gets killed." theory of the previous govt was a decent enough reason for us to go in there, WMD, terror ties, or not. IMHO, of course.
I do the same with my caps-lock keys, because the only thing I ever seem to use them for is to turn off caps-lock after I accidently turn it on. So far it's been the best idea I've had in quite some time.
In addition to all the fine points mentioned, one major thing we need, with both front end and underlying code, is a simple little, "update" button. Yeah, I know windoz update sucks, and will attempt to stick all kinds of crap onto your system, but for any sort of non-ms product to be #1, mom and grandpa will have to be able to do updates themselves. Holes need to be patched, features added, and even if sonny comes over every now and then and does some updating, MS will reign until we can get some sort of automatic or user initiated update feature.
The main issue here is that MS is so god damn easy to use if you aren't planning on doing anything with it. Forget power users, elite gamers and hax0rs - when mom and pop get a computer out of the box, set it up, and it works, they are happy. Every now and then they click an "update" button and like magic it gets better. If it doesn't, they call someone who helps them out. Until we have this (abet shitty) ability in other OSs, ms wins. Yeah, I know that 90% of slashdotters will want to compile and command-line install everything themselves, but last I checked we weren't a majority in the computer market.
If it's not stupid-easy and compatible with the rest of the world, it's not going to be #1, nor #2. I'd love to see a distro that came as binaries and had auto-updating and app changing features, but also had the source available. That would be the best of both worlds - it would allow for stability and compatibility for mom and pop, yet allow the rest of us to pick and choose what we wanted, and compile when we felt like it.
Humm....I guess what I just described is sort of like the BSD ports tree, with a stupid-easy gui for everyone else....
Eh, I bounce DLT tapes off the floor on a regular basis, and just about all worked fine afterwards. The trick is to say, "It's still good, it's still good." before you pick it up.
Makes me wonder if a profitable startup could somehow get rights to what may be thousands of miles of unused fiber around the US. Anyone interested? I'll exchange brilliant, scheming plans for startups $$$
Slashdot Mirror
While there is something to be said for "stock" servers, one major issue is that for hardcore gamers, they get boring fast. When you've played all the maps fifty times, you're often ready for something new.
On our server, we run Mapvote with fairly expansive options. While we have a lot of mods and user-created maps, all the stock options are there as well. If enough people are feeling nostalgic, they are welcome to choose them.
Well, that is, other than the Matrix Moves. That's one mod that's been a standard on all of our UT servers. Why? Because the tranny is a cheep way to travel without getting shot at, and the Matrix Moves requires a great deal of skill. Granted Epic nerfed the tranny in the last two editions, but still, if you aren't on a map ¼ of the time, that's a pretty lame way to play a FPS. We'd rather jump and bound, hover in the air and wallrun, because at bare minimum people can splat us while we do that. And vice versa.
Oh, this was about stock servers...sorry - can't help you there. Stock servers often suck (see tranny rant above) and the only way to get a decent server is to make one.
Incidentally, while our UT2K4 server isn't fully up to speed, (PhD thesis defenses, astrophysics research projects, etc) and it is kind of empty because we don't show on the "vanilla" master server list, you can find it listed as the Apoc Matrix Moves Official Server at 128.151.144.195:8000 (The moves were coded in-house by our own Apoc Death, and a total-conversion Matrix mod using his Matrix Moves placed 4th in the Make Something Unreal contest.)
You can set it up to be turn based, there is an email version floating around out there somewhere, and I'm pretty sure there are now mac/linux ports.
Werid that I made a similar post on another board minutes before reading /., but anyway...
;)
Most games are still only in the 20 updates/sec range still, when played online. UT/UT2k3 is a good example of this. The game looks great, and plays like a dream on a lan, but even on cable the update rate means rockets can disappear and people can skip over large portions of ground as the game struggles to get enough updates to accurately place things. Of course, it doesn't help that our server is on 110% speed, but who would want to play slower...
The other thing that keeps us with UT2k3 is our modding efforts. When I can rip open the code for a weapon and change it, I'm much more likely to keep playing that game. The ability to mod a game is my primary motivation for playing it. Our weapons are pretty well balanced now, which they weren't in the orig game, we have the matrix moves, (coded inhouse) carry the flag, (you have to pick up your flag and bring it back home when it's dropped) as well as a host of other fun mods. Without all those additions, we wouldn't be playing the game still.
Graphics are nice, but when I can make a game *my* game, I'll play it a lot longer than any other.
Exactly. When I was doing astrophysics, a buddy of mine, (well, I helped a bit) made up a swank program to combine ccd images of starfields by locating matching stars and then scaling, rotating, and otherwise shifting the images, in order to combine them even if they were a little off. What turned out to be cool, was that if you took 3 (rgb) images of a starfield at different times, and combined them, objects that moved between the shots (asteroids) would show as a line of rgb pixels.
Aaaah...in true /. style I answered my own question by RTFAing. Their ValuePlus keyboard looks to be exactly what I'm looking for...although they are out of straight ps/2 ones and are selling AT with PS/2 adapter.
http://store.yahoo.com/pckeyboards/valueplus.html
Nice, but a bit out of my price range. Anyone know where I can get a vanilla 'classic 101 key' keyboard, straight enter key, home/ins/del and arrow keys in the right places, no meta keys for $10?
Exactly. I had one professor who claimed you could link the increasing effects of global warming with "research" groups fighting for funding in congress. He even had charts. ;)
1 /fig2_en.html
The temperature of the earth has been hotter then this before, and it has been colder. Yes, we may be in a time of man-made temperature increases, but we still don't know for sure. What all the global-warming zealots ignore is the fact that in the hundred thousand year global temperature cycle, we are IN A WARMING TREND. This is to be expected. If you look at the ice age cycles, they follow similar temperature trends. Yes we may be causing some of the temperature increase - but at the same time, a good deal of it is most likely normal, natural, and to be expected.
I wish people would stop looking at the last 50-100 years, and get it through their heads that to understand climate modeling, you need to look at eons. The ice ages do have some meaning - they weren't random events that happened due to man not burning fossil fuels.
Since nobody seems to be doing this, here are some pretty charts and discussions about why the current hype about global warming is, at minimum overrated, and at max completely bogus:
Ice ages and inter-glacial warming periods:
http://www.ocs.orst.edu/forum/BigPicture.htm
Thermodynamics coupled with solar radiation fluctuations:
http://64.21.37.2/~rhailey/archives/001402.htm
Temperatures since the last ice age:
http://www.gfz-potsdam.de/pb3/pb33/kihzhome/kihz0
While I don't claim that these are all 100% correct and relevant, they should at least get you to question the current global-warming mentality of "we did it and it's here now". Yes, we may be responsible for some global warming. But until we can tell for sure, THROUGH SCIENCE, people need to take a deep breath and calm down. Ask for the facts, ask for the numbers, look at the charts.
Few of you believe manufacturers when they claim speeds for things - you go look at benchmarks. Why would you then automatically accept claims of massive global warming, especially from groups with obvious agendas? Ask to see the data. Ask to see *all* of the data. Get angry that much of the "temperature increase of y degrees in the last x years" "data" came from limited readings in some of the coldest places on earth, because it showed the greatest change, instead of from a representative sample across the entire planet.
Yes, we should pollute less, and yes, we should take responsibility for our environment. However, we shouldn't run around screaming "the ice is melting, the ice is melting". If it is, then it very well might do that every so often, humans, fossil fuels, or not. But using junk or no science to promote a phenomenon which might or might not exist is just not cool...
Well, they *had* an anti-filesharing site. If this gets duped as much as most stories do, maybe /. can keep it down...
I completely agree. Not only that, but what is cooler: Having your halfling ranger make his way into the halfling warrior's tomb and finding a human short sword and short bow, or a halfling long sword and long bow with clan markings?
I think this finally legitimizes weapons for the smaller races, and realistically deals with the fact that they would make arms built to their specs. Your great gnome warrior isn't going to go to the great dwarven blacksmith and have a human long sword commissioned for him - he's going to get a greatsword fitted and balanced for him.
While it's more complicated and makes random treasure a little harder, I think it was a worthy change. Power to the little people!
I really like where rangers are now - they really fit in well between rogues and fighters. Before they were too much like poor fighters without enough skill pts for the skills they needed. Now they are skillful hunters - what I view rangers to be.
They aren't tanks - that's left for the fighters. They really have their own place now, and I like that. I think it's a stride forward towards making the class more of a core class, and less of a "we've got a fighter and a rogue, what else can I play?" sort of class.
Yeah, I agree with harm and most of the class tweaks. I think the bard looks pretty good now, and overall, fixing the front-loading of classes was a great idea.
;)
But because I had an issue with the 3.0 ranger I have no issue with the d8 hd in 3.5, in light of all the other stuff they get. In fact, I'm playing my first 3.x ranger in our first 3.5 campaign. I almost fear that they're too powerful in 3.5, but it's hard to judge without playing one. Thus my "sacrifice" for the campaign...
I must be angsty this month, but I also have issues with the half elf getting +2 diplomacy and gather info. It forces half elves into a role that isn't right for all half elves. We're fixing this with a house rule that gives them a choice from a number of "quasi-feats" to replace the dip/gather info bonus. These being:
Acrobatic (+2 jump and tumble)
Athletic (+2 climb and swim)
Deceitful (+2 disguise and forgery)
Diligent (+2 appraise and decipher script)
Friendly (+2 diplomacy and gather info) (yeah, I made the name up.)
Magical Aptitude (+2 spellcraft and use magical device)
Negotiator (+2 diplomacy and sense motive)
Self Sufficiant (+2 heal and survival)
"Elven" Weapon Proficiency (choose long/short bow, rapier, or LS)
This list is designed to point half-elves towards a trait that fits in well with whatever human elements they have grown up with, but also represents their elven heritedge. It also purposely filters out a lot of feats which could be really be munched to overpower the race.
I think they made a stride towards a better half elf, but something like this really rounds it out.
Eh, I'm 50/50 with no-screen DMing. I'd do it more often if it weren't for my bizzare rolling. I often have to tone down rolls in one fight when I crit 3 times in a row on the same PC, and then have to buff them up in another when I constantly roll under 5.
It's supposed to be fun - if you smite the boss with ease and then fall to his puny henchmen, it's not that much fun. If both are good fights, it's more fun.
But I agree - the format is much better than 3.0. Now I just have to re-memorize the page numbers for stuff...
My local gaming group has decided to switch up to 3.5, and we'll be starting a campaign this saturday with the ruleset. At first glance, this edition seems far more streamlined, more flexible, and much more open-ended when it comes to character development. I think it will promote a lot more variety, and overall will speed up the mechanics of game sessions. That and at first glance, the classes are better balanced.
At the same time, there is no pressing reason to switch from 3.0 - the core of the game remains the same, and 3.0 is still a very solid ruleset. There is nothing terribly broken in 3.0 that was fixed in 3.5. That in itself leads to a fair amount of "wizards is grubbing for money" comments.
I can see both sides of the coin here - while 3.5 is indeed an easy way for wizards to make money, it also provides some sweet new art, greater flexibility for classed monsters, and just feels slicker.
Since I made pretty good use of 3.0, I'm not opposed to spending some cash on 3.5 - bare minimum it's cheep entertainment/hour compared to just about everything else.
And since everything else is taken, I'll reply to your sig and get moderated offtopic.
I wasn't all that impressed with Splinter Cell, to tell the truth. The graphics were great, the feel of the game wonderful, and the lock-picking one of the most creative and realistic representations that I've seen, but the idiocy of the game-play pretty much ruined it for me. That and piss-poor attention to detail, such as repeatedly showing stock tickers with red up arrows. I honestly don't have a lot of hope they will put out a game worth buying, as the current one really isn't, IMHO, of course.
A major part of my problem stems from playing Dues Ex a few times. It is still the most amazing, creative, and flexible FPS I have ever played. In Dues Ex you had the CHOICE of stealth VS tank, and you could pick the mood that suited you. In a game where you were allowed to shoot just about everyone, they were nice enough to give you, pretty much from the start:
a baton/crowbar to knock people out, a crossbow with tranquilizer darts, gas grenades, and a taser/stun gun
Now, in Splinter Cell, where you aren't allowed to kill ANYONE in large portions of the game, they are nice enough to supply you with a sniper rifle and a pistol, leaving you stealth and fists to knock people out for the most part. Um, hello? A little help here? How damn hard would it be to give me a taser, or even a hunk of polished cherry?
Another of my gripes is the object interaction. For instance, if you can shoot out light bulbs, why can you not unscrew them? For a game that focuses on stealth, that seems a little more intelligent than forcing you to waste ammo on all of them.
At the same time, there are people that you have to sneak up on, grab, and force to use optical scanners. I have absolutely NO clue why you can't knock them out first. An unconscious eye scans the same as a conscious one...just another pointless limitation built into the game.
In Dues Ex you coveted and searched out the LAMs, baiting people into hallways where you had placed them, or shooting them as guards walked past. They were one of those things you tried to keep in stock at all times, as a good explosive should be.
In Splinter Cell, you meet Wall Mines in one level. You can only carry 3, and you never see them again once you leave that level. Aparently you aren't allowed to keep any useful equipment you pick up.
While I appreciate the SC-20K and the various attachments and add-ons you get for it, (albeit in pitiful enough quantities that you hardly ever want to use them) I'd take the variety of Dues Ex weapons any day. In no particular order, I can remember: baton, crowbar, knife, stun gun, pepper spray, sword, crossbow, pistol, shotgun, machine gun, sniper, anti-tank rifle, plasma gun, flame thrower, throwaway anti-tank rifle...not to mention other pickups like armors, explosives/grenades, medkits, ammo, weapon mods, lock picks...hell, the GEP gun still gives me a hardon when I think about it. Compare all this to Splinter Cell's 2 weapons and um, 3? 4? other pickups...
Yes, I know that Splinter Cell is all about stealth, but in comparison to Dues Ex it feels like "Stealth in a car, and we're driving". Fuck the "5th freedom" - throughout most of the game you have 2 freedoms: forward and backward, and even then they are limited.
For the next release, they need to understand two things they apparently missed with this one:
1. Someone set a bar 3 years ago.
2. You need to meet or exceed that bar with your game.
At this point, given the choice to play Splinter Cell over, or play Dues Ex for the 3rd or 4th time, I'd have take Dues Ex. It's just that much better.
I dunno. This may be painful for a bit, and increase the amount of mail, but in the long run it might be worthwhile. While I agree that it makes some peoples' jobs harder, those people probably aren't using the major ISPs/mail-services. If the major players do this, it makes it that much less profitable for spammers to do business.
I mean, if you're a spammer, a brute force mailing to joeuser.org is MUCH less profitable than mailing the same million messages to hotmail.com. Go big guys, go! It won't bother me at all.
While the doom series did freak me out on occasion, what really got me were the shifting halls and little green men running around and shooting rockets at my head. After 8 hrs of lan gaming, and *after* I went to bed... Same thing once happened to me with UT - I ducked a bouncing grenade and promptly fell out of bed. Guess there's a reason you shouldn't play comp games for more than 8 hrs straight...
While more games/quality software is the first step, the second step is to promote linux distros that are stupid-easy to setup, with games and drivers that are stupid-easy to install.
;)
The demise of windows won't come until the average user feels comfortable taking a step up from windowz to something else. The problem I see is that for the average user, anything involving a command line and editing random config files is two steps up.
Honestly, I can walk my mom through a win98 install over the phone. I'd never want to consider trying the same with most linux distros, except maybe RH or Mandrake.
While nvidia has made some huge strides with their latest drivers, until we see that same sort of "stupid easy" on everything else, I don't see linux exploding into mainstream use. But at the same time, with the maturity we've seen in just the last few years, I don't think it really will be that much longer before it does explode - Especially with the work people like Ryan Gordon are doing.
Amen brother. ;)
Although I too am not sure that the US is doing this for the right reasons, at the end of the day if the people of Iraq don't like what we are doing, (and this is the important part)
They can complain without being executed.
They can take their media out, record what they feel isn't right, and show the world. Again, without being executed. No matter what the US ends up doing there, I think this feature alone will make life a lot more livable for the Iraqi people.
On the off chance that we do indeed help them build a democratic and stable govt that isn't a pawn of the US govt and or of US oil companies, even better. But the whole "If you complain, your family gets killed." theory of the previous govt was a decent enough reason for us to go in there, WMD, terror ties, or not. IMHO, of course.
Well, it all depends on whether you are left or right handed. You do need *one* hand free while browsing p0rn...
I do the same with my caps-lock keys, because the only thing I ever seem to use them for is to turn off caps-lock after I accidently turn it on. So far it's been the best idea I've had in quite some time.
If I had a nickel for every time...
In addition to all the fine points mentioned, one major thing we need, with both front end and underlying code, is a simple little, "update" button. Yeah, I know windoz update sucks, and will attempt to stick all kinds of crap onto your system, but for any sort of non-ms product to be #1, mom and grandpa will have to be able to do updates themselves. Holes need to be patched, features added, and even if sonny comes over every now and then and does some updating, MS will reign until we can get some sort of automatic or user initiated update feature.
The main issue here is that MS is so god damn easy to use if you aren't planning on doing anything with it. Forget power users, elite gamers and hax0rs - when mom and pop get a computer out of the box, set it up, and it works, they are happy. Every now and then they click an "update" button and like magic it gets better. If it doesn't, they call someone who helps them out. Until we have this (abet shitty) ability in other OSs, ms wins. Yeah, I know that 90% of slashdotters will want to compile and command-line install everything themselves, but last I checked we weren't a majority in the computer market.
If it's not stupid-easy and compatible with the rest of the world, it's not going to be #1, nor #2. I'd love to see a distro that came as binaries and had auto-updating and app changing features, but also had the source available. That would be the best of both worlds - it would allow for stability and compatibility for mom and pop, yet allow the rest of us to pick and choose what we wanted, and compile when we felt like it.
Humm....I guess what I just described is sort of like the BSD ports tree, with a stupid-easy gui for everyone else....
Eh, I bounce DLT tapes off the floor on a regular basis, and just about all worked fine afterwards. The trick is to say, "It's still good, it's still good." before you pick it up.
Makes me wonder if a profitable startup could somehow get rights to what may be thousands of miles of unused fiber around the US. Anyone interested? I'll exchange brilliant, scheming plans for startups $$$