n Blue Shift, you're confronted with the totality of the situation - the strange alien world isn't so much a planet as it is an alternate dimension
Oh, what gave you that clue? Could it be when you visited there in the original game, standing on a tiny flat rock in the center of an infinite void, with no planet visible whatsoever?
But I can't understand why people hold it up as an example of great game storytelling when there are so many better examples to choose from.
AOL.
Too many people don't understand the distinction between a story and an experience. HalfLife was a great experience, and the quality of the storyline was largely irrelevant.
Due to constraints of technology and experiential purity, the game designers had really no safe way to enhance the story. Increasing the depth of interaction with NPCs, for example, would've pushed the player back from the immersive game world. (And probably, it would've further underscored limitations in AI code).
More cutscenes or recorded speech would've (again) made it seem less like a game and more movielike. As well, by giving Gordon Freeman speaking lines, it would emphasize the distinction between him and the player. It was better all around to leave the protagonist as tabula rasa.
When I talked to one of the scientists, since I was the one playing the main character, how could I express that I had no time to deal with him and wanted him to go find his own way out
In that case, the binary ("follow me/don't follow me") NPC interaction was sufficient to get the point across. "Don't follow me" implies well enough that he's on his own, and lacking personal initiative, "I'll stay here and wait for my colleagues" is an understandable response.
However, the big failing of that NPC interaction system is with the opposing human soldiers. If that situation were really happening, there would naturally be much shouting of commands and pleas back and forth. Of course, its impossible to implement that kind of gunbattle parley in an action game (without the invention of superior natural-language recognition), so the designers wisely left it out. In a turn-based or otherwise slow-paced game like Planescape, a greater depth of character interaction is allowed without breaking the game paradigm (because picking choices from long menus is the UI paradigm)
The one enhancement to NPC interaction I wish Half-Life had tried would've been to permit you to give/take items from friendly characters. Permitting them each one inventory slot would've been sufficient. It just doesn't make sense that guards would be unwilling to try out a shotgun. (To avoid punishing the player, they shouldn't decrement ammunition when firing)
In general, women just (have the need) to communcate more.
All this supports the prior claim that females have advantages in communication. Willingness to spend time at an activity can be validly considered an advantage in ability to perform the activity.
As the importance of communication increases relative to that of actually getting something done, female advantage grows.
For "studies" on that, see any SAT language score breakdown.
As if they had ever been friendly? Every time you saw them throughout the game they were enemies. They moved, they weren't Barney or Doc, so they had to be killed.
"Government turns on you" barely qualifies as storyline. Although if you decide to grant it that description, it's still not a good storyline. This is evidenced by the fact that from the point-of-view of a GI infantryman, murdering scientists on sight doesn't make any sense. In the follow-on HalfLife: OpFor, they had to retcon that part of the story, because it was silly.
when it was really a series of missions and objectives
A virtue of Half-Life is that it was not a series of missions. It was a continuous environment you moved through, and your only objective was to move (or overcome short-range obstacles to such movement). Unlikely weaker games such as Quake2, there was no silly sequence of "missions" to assign you dumb jobs everyplace.
decided to nuke the facilities?
There was no use or mention of nuculear weapons in Half-Life. Prehaps you're thinking of a follow-up.
Or when the scientists decided you were to go to Xen?
That was exactly when the game started to get really, really bad. So I don't call it "good". And again, I'd still barely call that a story. He's continuing to kill things that threaten him.
You're trying to lie and say Half-Life had a static storyline
No, I'm just pointing out that Half-Life had the same puny storyline as the most popular FPS (Quake and Doom): "scientists unleash monsters". The story was presented better than in Doom- the pacing, acting, scenary, props, and makeup were all superior. But it's the same story.
Is that a static storyline? Yes, absolutely. Simply by scaling the threat level of the monsters up or down, the missions from the game could be rearranged in any order with hardly any confusion. That is a "static" storyline in the same way that StarTrek's is.
And self-order, after a short time, implies authority. Anarchy is only a temporary state. It is a power vacum that will be filled with a power. This has happened every time anarchy occured.
Anarchism has been around for a long time. They invented the deffinition. It's the deffinition you're using that's the wrong one.
No, I said "anarchy", not "anarchism". There's a big difference. "Anarchy" is thousands of years old. "Anarchism" was invented around 100 years ago by an odd kind of utopian terrorist that sprung up in Europe. They named themselves after a political condition that had been previously viewed as only a kind of damage- not something anyone sane would desire or promote. And their pechant for bombing (something you brought up, not me) reinforced their image as dangerous lunatics.
Self-described "anarchist" writers have attempted to retroactively re-define "anarchy" to be something more positive. (They are scarcely less correct than mainstream US political pundits, who twist "conservative" and "liberal" into their own molds)
And yes. Span was doing well with anarcho-syndicatism (a social anarchism) before Hitler and his buddies decided to rain on the parade.
Spain? They failed. It is self-evident from their downfall (which was by Franco, not Hitler). Any anarchist society is a ripe target, begging for an authority to pop up (externally, or more likely from within), and seize control. Even the most "successful" examples of anarchism are spoken of in past-tense.
A social form that cannot sustain or propagate itself is weak and untenable, regardless of any other supposed virtues.
Open sourse software is also a good example of anarchist ideas (mutual aid, self-orginisation).
This is completely different. Despite what Eben Mogdlen says, free software is not true anarchy. You can call it prehaps "lateral anarchy"- a society willingly declaring that certain aspects of lifestyle should be free from centralized authority- but it's wrong to claim that free software authors exist in an "absense of authority".
Utopian communism and socialism have demonstrably failed. Prehaps those ideas can survive to be of use as sectional parts of societies that otherwise have authoritative control.
Anyother outside possibility: communism, socialism, or "anarchy" could work as part of a theocracy. But for obvious reasons, they're unlikely to remain pure.
Finally, assuming advances in computers might allow humans to live in anarchism, but only if their syndicates were run by AIs so powerful as to be authoritative. This is a far-out scifi scenario, of course. But it's more likely than voluntary and sustained "anarchy" on a wide-scale.
Computer games and architectural models, however, are trying to provide a useable picture of the space that the user navigates
Nope. (ignoring architectural models, which often allow the user to select useful transforms, especially non-occulting or simultaneous multi-angle views)
Both television and computer games are trying to produce images that look believable- that the viewer's brain can interpret as if he were seeing a the scene for real. Not only does a compressed frustum demolish suspension of disbelief, but it also degrades the user's ability to interact with objects close to the center of his gaze (which are the most important).
The convention camera/virtual camera system produces the best emulation of the CRT screen being a glass window into another real place.
Producers do this- they have to do this- because it's the only way to get any kind of audience acceptance. If a director or designer wants to use a gargantuan FOV, fine. But he's got to provide special display equipment that occupies an equally large part of the viewer's visual field.
that was so stupid in compairison to the rest of the the game.
Hey, the rest was downhill from there. Just pretend the game ends when you hear the word "Lambda Complex". You'll be happier that way.
you know I have always wondered why some geek scientist can just pick up a weapon
Allegedly he had a magic suit.
Apparently, the foes weren't well-trained marines either. They had little discipline and no marksmanship, and were so scared of grenades that they threw them around corners with 5 seconds left. Plus the entire concept of a grenade-launcher mounted on an assault-rifle was just completely beyond them.
But it makes sense that they weren't regular troops- normal military grunts would be quite unwilling to slaughter neatly groomed white males in Nevada. These fellows probably washed out of basic for unstable personalities and were picked up by a dirty-ops division.
"characters"? That's a plural word. Who exactly was a character besides Gordon Freeman? (Who doesn't even qualify, but at least has a name). Suitman? Who else is there? Space-baby?
Anyhow, I still don't quite call the Half-Life experience a "story" (see post on parent), but you're correct that a good fantasy game/movie shouldn't reveal all it's details.
The authors should create a larger, more complete world than the audience ever sees. For each random opponent, think about it's ecology, it's upbringing, and how it came to cross paths with the hero on this faithful day. For each cool treasure, decide who built it and why.
In fact, the designer of Half-Life has been quoted saying (I paraphrase) "Gordon Freeman was written as a 2 dimensional character in the background story, because you always lose a dimension going from story to game".
The original 2 Star Wars movies were good, because Lucas had planned out a vast background story that wasn't directly portrayed, but served to make the outlandish events seem part of larger world. There was something out there, far past the boundaries of the film.
In the decades that followed, he ruined it by hunting down each one of those minor background threads and releasing a comic/paperback/game on the subject, culminating in a bad movie. Episode One tied everything together in a bizarre scramble, unloading lame "revelations" of subjects that had been better left to viewers' imaginations.
I'd hate to buy Microsoft too, but why is your USB keyboard a problem?
Do you mean that you can't dual-boot, because you have no way to input an OS choice at startup?
Linux booatloaders (I've done this with lilo, grub can probably work too) can be made to set a default OS for the next boot only. Issue a special "reboot to Windows" command from Linux, play your games, and "Restart this computer".
Bang, back in bash, no need for interaction with the bootloader.
When you play DOOM, your objective changes throughout game.
"First, you just want to get to earth, then before you know it, you have to go to an evil dimension to save all of earth."
The "story" for Doom, Quake, and Half-Life were all exactly the same. "Military scientists in a remote base are experimenting with teleportation when they unleash alien monsters that could destroy the earth unless a single man carrying 8000 kgs of ammunition can halt the invasion and take the fight right back to the enemy's home!"
Technically, that can't even be called a story. It's a situation, a setting. To be a story it must change at least once. Football games have as much story.
You want to live, your goals change from living to saving earth
You never take any action except to preserve your own life.
the army coming in to kill you is pretty unexpected
It also doesn't make any sense. In a real story, with you playing the main role, a situation like that would present a choice. Fight the hostile soldiers, or evade them until the alien menace convinces them to work with you (the inevitable flow of any movie treatment of Half-Life). But the railroading game provides no such option.
and therefore the people who love anime because it's anime, and not necessarily because of the content are equally as wrong.
Those people are wrong, yes, because they are misstating their preferences.
Someone who claims to love all anime is most likely only aware of that anime which is good enough to be imported to the US (and marketed as "anime", which Dragonball or dub-only releases often aren't). That skews the content towards things which are scifi, action, or adult.
If you speak a little Japanese, it's easier to be aware of the overwhelming bulk of completely childish anime, that American consumers rarely see.
Gasaraki was promising for the first 4 episodes. The best of Clancy and Evangelion. Then just as the war was about to heat up, they fly back to Japan and it veers back to bland corporate/government/alien conspiracy sameness.
tactical military armor seen as it should be seen( a military tool far better than any tank)
Tactical armor shouldn't be "better than any tank". It should be superior to tanks in some situations.
The military planners in the beginning spoke of Tactical Armor as an advantage in urban combat, a form of super-infantry invulnerable to small-arms fire, able to out-manuver and waylay tanks and aircraft. A weapon that's powerful, and almost believable.
Instead, they quickly turned into magical supermen, capable of easily sprinting 80kph over rough terrain, dodging bullets, and all the rest.
The tearing point was when the hero's squad of 4 TAs is standing around a flattened town in the middle of a dustless desert in broad daylight. Enemy helicopters detect them- and instead of firing some kind of medium-range heat-seeking missles (Hellfires anyone?), they land next door and deploy their own TAs.
4 tactical armors beat the crap out of a full abraham M1 tank battalion
Yeah, and nobody spanks a mecha with a LAW. I believe that.
This is hyperbole. There is nothing "VAST" about the differences.
Swapping around some backstory to replace "dead" with "magic sleep" doesn't really have all that much of an effect on the show itself, which is still "a dumb blonde with a magic school-uniform zaps random monsters with the same magic spell week after week". Although, it is a big shame the homosexuals were transgendered.
I especially recommend watching the first seven episodes,
Although they contain essential character introduction (if you plan to watch the rest), those episodes are poor compared to later ones in the same series. The Sailor Moon seasons inevitably pick up somewhat at the ends (a benefit shared by most anime, in comparison with US television). The beginning of the last season is a good self-contained bit too.
I'm surprised no fans have released a Phantom Edit of Sailor Moon. Taking the best 30% of the episodes, allowing some girl besides Usagi to finish off a small monster periodically... it could be decent. 150 filler episodes is just too much.
The "Eva units" in Evangelion were more robot-like than the mechanized battle suits from a series like Gundam or Golion.
Prehaps you don't know what a "robot" is? It's an artificial machine that moves by itself. An "automaton". The very first use of the word "robot" was in reference to artificial slaves that rebel against humankind.
Anything with a pilot in it is not a robot. "Powered suit" is an appropriate term, so is "battle armor". In fact, the word "mecha" is often used...
There is such a thing a robot anime. Chobits for instance. But Evangelion doesn't count.
You are advocating an approach that is pragmatic in your personal circumstance, but is sub-optimal. We can do better, and we should try.
The steps you've taken to avoid spam have hurt you. Just a little, but the damage is real.
First, it took your time to create alternative "trap" email accounts, and it takes mental effort for you keep these multiple accounts straight and to recreate them when needed, etc. If you're smart enough, that kind of effort doesn't bother you much. But it's more than you should have to do, and it's more complicated than many people can understand. Nerds shouldn't oppose technical solutions to spam because they personally can evade it- they should work to stop spam for the greater good.
Secondly, those steps are "hacks". They are inelegant workarounds. They offend my sense of systemic beauty. Prehaps most people don't care about this, but the existence of poorly-designed patches on a system are a hint that it wasn't build quite correctly in the first place.
Third, (and most importantly) by forcing you to email your email addresses hidden, your abliity to communicate is reduced. You can't allow other people to email you as much as they might like, because they might be marketers. It's impossible to tell how many opportunities we all might have lost due to this effect.
The best email solution depends on economics- micropayments or similar. If a person could decide to impose a charge of a few pennies or dollars for the service of recieving an unsolicited message from a stranger, all spam problems could be solved.
I know what anarchy means. It is the absense of authority, and it implies either disorder or death.
The broadest stages of human organization are anarchy, tribes (chiefdoms) and states. I used "tribal anarchy" as a synonym for the two non-state stages. (Chapter 14, "From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy" of GG&S, has an entertaining list of the forces that increase state power)
Prehaps you are using a fantasy defintion put forth by self-proclaimed "anarchists". (They are better called "libertarian socialists", which at least makes plain the impossibilities of their goal)
well, there are primative types of anarchism, but it's not the most common
Oh, do you have examples of any other form of anarchism ever occuring? And did it last very long?
Even pro-"anarchist" writers admit that no such system exists today.
I've always wondered why computers tend to render the view that you would see of the model if you were looking through your screen and expect people to have some clue of their surroundings
Do you also wonder why TV shows and films aren't all recorded with fisheye lenses?
Actually, it appears that in modern society, quite a lot of people are valued for social skills even when technically incompetent. At least, if their value is measured by how much financial reward they are given.
These individuals are sometimes called PHBs, and their population is on the upswing.
It's not about what someone "wants" to be called, it's about what is accurate.
You were talking about genetics, and using "African American" to mean "of sub-Saharan African phenotype", which used to be called "black".
Calling a person "black" or "white" is obviously incorrect, unless someone was actually one of those colors (which may be due to 3rd degree burns, or albinoism, respectively). But in the US, speakers have been encouraged to replace the word "black person" with "African-American".
That usage is still incorrect and misleading. It leads to gaffs such as calling Nelson Mandela an "African American". The use of "black" for "African phenotype" has been stripped from the language, but no correct replacement was provided. ("White" has been largely replaced with "Caucasian", which is also incorrect, but less-so)
Similarly, the claim "Genetics dictates that African-American parents will have African-American children" is hilariously incorrect, because "-American" describes place of residence, a factor that technology has rendered independent of genetics.
Quote AC: The second also decreases the value of cooperation, or at least directly cooperating. You can work on a project with another person from long distances with out ever actually seeing this other person. So all in all, I would say the value of physical strength, agility etc will become less important, and the rest will stay as is.
But it appears that females have advantages in indirect, machine-mediated communication as well.
Young girls are reputed to have adapted to telephone, cellphone, and instant-message use more rapidly and more fully than boys, for example.
Is there any science to this article at all? I see references to numbers, but no ways that they obtained them other than asking MS.
Not much science, at least available online. I hope that NewScientist.com is just trying to leave the details as added value for their print subscribers. The experimental process would be very interesting to scrutinize.
I suspect that the claimed result "women become navigational equals of men if given 100 degree screens with smooth animation" is incorrect. Maybe what happened is that "women equalled the men's scores once they had bigger screens". Maybe even "women and men scored equally with the largest screens". But if the latter is the case, I think that men would again pull ahead
I don't think interest in technology is genetic though. I think it's a product of society. Girls are encouraged to imagine the perfect guy and starve themselves until they are married it seems. Boys are taught to protect siblings,
Both those "societal" factors are direct products of genetics.
Or try men from third world countries where technology isn't available.
An experiment conducted with young third-world children saw males as learning computer operation faster. However, the sample size was small, and external factors (mainly assertiveness) were not properly excluded.
I think the trend will change the more technology is required to live and the more games are made for women (The Sims, Sim Park, etc.)
Although the original design of The Sims focused on spatial aspects (residential layout effecting homeowner happiness), the released game was based much more on interpersonal relationships that were pairwise between Sim-people. That is, gameplay in the Sims is largely reliant on non-spatial data models.
The (much-maligned) "Sims Online" goes even further in this direction- buildings don't even have a notional physical positioning relative to each other. It's just one big list of places to visit, with no consideration for the space they occupy. So maybe, future games will be more popular with women, but they might involve less spatial reasoning.
Puzzle-games (tetris, snood, bejewled) seem to be more useful for training spatial reasoning skills, as they're based on the physical interactions of differently shaped pieces. But, those are 2d games, not 3d. And they're are all played with full information- the player can see the whole state of the game world (location of every known puzzle-piece) at all times. There's no exercise of memory or fusing multiple incomplete views into one consistent perceived view of the gameworld.
Slashdot Mirror
n Blue Shift, you're confronted with the totality of the situation - the strange alien world isn't so much a planet as it is an alternate dimension
Oh, what gave you that clue? Could it be when you visited there in the original game, standing on a tiny flat rock in the center of an infinite void, with no planet visible whatsoever?
But I can't understand why people hold it up as an example of great game storytelling when there are so many better examples to choose from.
AOL.
Too many people don't understand the distinction between a story and an experience. HalfLife was a great experience, and the quality of the storyline was largely irrelevant.
Due to constraints of technology and experiential purity, the game designers had really no safe way to enhance the story. Increasing the depth of interaction with NPCs, for example, would've pushed the player back from the immersive game world. (And probably, it would've further underscored limitations in AI code).
More cutscenes or recorded speech would've (again) made it seem less like a game and more movielike. As well, by giving Gordon Freeman speaking lines, it would emphasize the distinction between him and the player. It was better all around to leave the protagonist as tabula rasa.
When I talked to one of the scientists, since I was the one playing the main character, how could I express that I had no time to deal with him and wanted him to go find his own way out
In that case, the binary ("follow me/don't follow me") NPC interaction was sufficient to get the point across. "Don't follow me" implies well enough that he's on his own, and lacking personal initiative, "I'll stay here and wait for my colleagues" is an understandable response.
However, the big failing of that NPC interaction system is with the opposing human soldiers. If that situation were really happening, there would naturally be much shouting of commands and pleas back and forth. Of course, its impossible to implement that kind of gunbattle parley in an action game (without the invention of superior natural-language recognition), so the designers wisely left it out. In a turn-based or otherwise slow-paced game like Planescape, a greater depth of character interaction is allowed without breaking the game paradigm (because picking choices from long menus is the UI paradigm)
The one enhancement to NPC interaction I wish Half-Life had tried would've been to permit you to give/take items from friendly characters. Permitting them each one inventory slot would've been sufficient. It just doesn't make sense that guards would be unwilling to try out a shotgun. (To avoid punishing the player, they shouldn't decrement ammunition when firing)
In general, women just (have the need) to communcate more.
All this supports the prior claim that females have advantages in communication. Willingness to spend time at an activity can be validly considered an advantage in ability to perform the activity.
As the importance of communication increases relative to that of actually getting something done, female advantage grows.
For "studies" on that, see any SAT language score breakdown.
How about when the government turned on you
As if they had ever been friendly? Every time you saw them throughout the game they were enemies. They moved, they weren't Barney or Doc, so they had to be killed.
"Government turns on you" barely qualifies as storyline. Although if you decide to grant it that description, it's still not a good storyline. This is evidenced by the fact that from the point-of-view of a GI infantryman, murdering scientists on sight doesn't make any sense. In the follow-on HalfLife: OpFor, they had to retcon that part of the story, because it was silly.
when it was really a series of missions and objectives
A virtue of Half-Life is that it was not a series of missions. It was a continuous environment you moved through, and your only objective was to move (or overcome short-range obstacles to such movement). Unlikely weaker games such as Quake2, there was no silly sequence of "missions" to assign you dumb jobs everyplace.
decided to nuke the facilities?
There was no use or mention of nuculear weapons in Half-Life. Prehaps you're thinking of a follow-up.
Or when the scientists decided you were to go to Xen?
That was exactly when the game started to get really, really bad. So I don't call it "good". And again, I'd still barely call that a story. He's continuing to kill things that threaten him.
You're trying to lie and say Half-Life had a static storyline
No, I'm just pointing out that Half-Life had the same puny storyline as the most popular FPS (Quake and Doom): "scientists unleash monsters". The story was presented better than in Doom- the pacing, acting, scenary, props, and makeup were all superior. But it's the same story.
Is that a static storyline? Yes, absolutely. Simply by scaling the threat level of the monsters up or down, the missions from the game could be rearranged in any order with hardly any confusion. That is a "static" storyline in the same way that StarTrek's is.
It implies self-order.
And self-order, after a short time, implies authority. Anarchy is only a temporary state. It is a power vacum that will be filled with a power. This has happened every time anarchy occured.
Anarchism has been around for a long time. They invented the deffinition. It's the deffinition you're using that's the wrong one.
No, I said "anarchy", not "anarchism". There's a big difference. "Anarchy" is thousands of years old. "Anarchism" was invented around 100 years ago by an odd kind of utopian terrorist that sprung up in Europe. They named themselves after a political condition that had been previously viewed as only a kind of damage- not something anyone sane would desire or promote. And their pechant for bombing (something you brought up, not me) reinforced their image as dangerous lunatics.
Self-described "anarchist" writers have attempted to retroactively re-define "anarchy" to be something more positive. (They are scarcely less correct than mainstream US political pundits, who twist "conservative" and "liberal" into their own molds)
And yes. Span was doing well with anarcho-syndicatism (a social anarchism) before Hitler and his buddies decided to rain on the parade.
Spain? They failed. It is self-evident from their downfall (which was by Franco, not Hitler). Any anarchist society is a ripe target, begging for an authority to pop up (externally, or more likely from within), and seize control. Even the most "successful" examples of anarchism are spoken of in past-tense.
A social form that cannot sustain or propagate itself is weak and untenable, regardless of any other supposed virtues.
Open sourse software is also a good example of anarchist ideas (mutual aid, self-orginisation).
This is completely different. Despite what Eben Mogdlen says, free software is not true anarchy. You can call it prehaps "lateral anarchy"- a society willingly declaring that certain aspects of lifestyle should be free from centralized authority- but it's wrong to claim that free software authors exist in an "absense of authority".
Utopian communism and socialism have demonstrably failed. Prehaps those ideas can survive to be of use as sectional parts of societies that otherwise have authoritative control.
Anyother outside possibility: communism, socialism, or "anarchy" could work as part of a theocracy. But for obvious reasons, they're unlikely to remain pure.
Finally, assuming advances in computers might allow humans to live in anarchism, but only if their syndicates were run by AIs so powerful as to be authoritative. This is a far-out scifi scenario, of course. But it's more likely than voluntary and sustained "anarchy" on a wide-scale.
Computer games and architectural models, however, are trying to provide a useable picture of the space that the user navigates
Nope. (ignoring architectural models, which often allow the user to select useful transforms, especially non-occulting or simultaneous multi-angle views)
Both television and computer games are trying to produce images that look believable- that the viewer's brain can interpret as if he were seeing a the scene for real. Not only does a compressed frustum demolish suspension of disbelief, but it also degrades the user's ability to interact with objects close to the center of his gaze (which are the most important).
The convention camera/virtual camera system produces the best emulation of the CRT screen being a glass window into another real place.
Producers do this- they have to do this- because it's the only way to get any kind of audience acceptance. If a director or designer wants to use a gargantuan FOV, fine. But he's got to provide special display equipment that occupies an equally large part of the viewer's visual field.
Nihongo wo zenzen wakaranai. Demo, kono peeji ga utkushi yo
that was so stupid in compairison to the rest of the the game.
Hey, the rest was downhill from there. Just pretend the game ends when you hear the word "Lambda Complex". You'll be happier that way.
you know I have always wondered why some geek scientist can just pick up a weapon
Allegedly he had a magic suit.
Apparently, the foes weren't well-trained marines either. They had little discipline and no marksmanship, and were so scared of grenades that they threw them around corners with 5 seconds left. Plus the entire concept of a grenade-launcher mounted on an assault-rifle was just completely beyond them.
But it makes sense that they weren't regular troops- normal military grunts would be quite unwilling to slaughter neatly groomed white males in Nevada. These fellows probably washed out of basic for unstable personalities and were picked up by a dirty-ops division.
the complete details of the characters
"characters"? That's a plural word. Who exactly was a character besides Gordon Freeman? (Who doesn't even qualify, but at least has a name). Suitman? Who else is there? Space-baby?
Anyhow, I still don't quite call the Half-Life experience a "story" (see post on parent), but you're correct that a good fantasy game/movie shouldn't reveal all it's details.
The authors should create a larger, more complete world than the audience ever sees. For each random opponent, think about it's ecology, it's upbringing, and how it came to cross paths with the hero on this faithful day. For each cool treasure, decide who built it and why.
In fact, the designer of Half-Life has been quoted saying (I paraphrase) "Gordon Freeman was written as a 2 dimensional character in the background story, because you always lose a dimension going from story to game".
The original 2 Star Wars movies were good, because Lucas had planned out a vast background story that wasn't directly portrayed, but served to make the outlandish events seem part of larger world. There was something out there, far past the boundaries of the film.
In the decades that followed, he ruined it by hunting down each one of those minor background threads and releasing a comic/paperback/game on the subject, culminating in a bad movie. Episode One tied everything together in a bizarre scramble, unloading lame "revelations" of subjects that had been better left to viewers' imaginations.
I'd hate to buy Microsoft too, but why is your USB keyboard a problem?
Do you mean that you can't dual-boot, because you have no way to input an OS choice at startup?
Linux booatloaders (I've done this with lilo, grub can probably work too) can be made to set a default OS for the next boot only. Issue a special "reboot to Windows" command from Linux, play your games, and "Restart this computer".
Bang, back in bash, no need for interaction with the bootloader.
When you play DOOM, your objective changes throughout game.
"First, you just want to get to earth, then before you know it, you have to go to an evil dimension to save all of earth."
The "story" for Doom, Quake, and Half-Life were all exactly the same. "Military scientists in a remote base are experimenting with teleportation when they unleash alien monsters that could destroy the earth unless a single man carrying 8000 kgs of ammunition can halt the invasion and take the fight right back to the enemy's home!"
Technically, that can't even be called a story. It's a situation, a setting. To be a story it must change at least once. Football games have as much story.
You want to live, your goals change from living to saving earth
You never take any action except to preserve your own life.
the army coming in to kill you is pretty unexpected
It also doesn't make any sense. In a real story, with you playing the main role, a situation like that would present a choice. Fight the hostile soldiers, or evade them until the alien menace convinces them to work with you (the inevitable flow of any movie treatment of Half-Life). But the railroading game provides no such option.
and therefore the people who love anime because it's anime, and not necessarily because of the content are equally as wrong.
Those people are wrong, yes, because they are misstating their preferences.
Someone who claims to love all anime is most likely only aware of that anime which is good enough to be imported to the US (and marketed as "anime", which Dragonball or dub-only releases often aren't). That skews the content towards things which are scifi, action, or adult.
If you speak a little Japanese, it's easier to be aware of the overwhelming bulk of completely childish anime, that American consumers rarely see.
Gasaraki was promising for the first 4 episodes. The best of Clancy and Evangelion. Then just as the war was about to heat up, they fly back to Japan and it veers back to bland corporate/government/alien conspiracy sameness.
tactical military armor seen as it should be seen( a military tool far better than any tank)
Tactical armor shouldn't be "better than any tank". It should be superior to tanks in some situations.
The military planners in the beginning spoke of Tactical Armor as an advantage in urban combat, a form of super-infantry invulnerable to small-arms fire, able to out-manuver and waylay tanks and aircraft. A weapon that's powerful, and almost believable.
Instead, they quickly turned into magical supermen, capable of easily sprinting 80kph over rough terrain, dodging bullets, and all the rest.
The tearing point was when the hero's squad of 4 TAs is standing around a flattened town in the middle of a dustless desert in broad daylight. Enemy helicopters detect them- and instead of firing some kind of medium-range heat-seeking missles (Hellfires anyone?), they land next door and deploy their own TAs.
4 tactical armors beat the crap out of a full abraham M1 tank battalion
Yeah, and nobody spanks a mecha with a LAW. I believe that.
This is hyperbole. There is nothing "VAST" about the differences.
Swapping around some backstory to replace "dead" with "magic sleep" doesn't really have all that much of an effect on the show itself, which is still "a dumb blonde with a magic school-uniform zaps random monsters with the same magic spell week after week". Although, it is a big shame the homosexuals were transgendered.
I especially recommend watching the first seven episodes,
Although they contain essential character introduction (if you plan to watch the rest), those episodes are poor compared to later ones in the same series. The Sailor Moon seasons inevitably pick up somewhat at the ends (a benefit shared by most anime, in comparison with US television). The beginning of the last season is a good self-contained bit too.
I'm surprised no fans have released a Phantom Edit of Sailor Moon. Taking the best 30% of the episodes, allowing some girl besides Usagi to finish off a small monster periodically... it could be decent. 150 filler episodes is just too much.
You failed to read his post correctly.
He didn't say "not your typical robot anime". He said "not your typical robots".
The "hints" referred to were the evidence that the Evangelion units were biological/supernatural, and not purely mechanical.
I wouldn't exactly call them hints, though. They really bludgeon the idea over your head in the first 2 episodes, but tune it down from there.
The "Eva units" in Evangelion were more robot-like than the mechanized battle suits from a series like Gundam or Golion.
Prehaps you don't know what a "robot" is? It's an artificial machine that moves by itself. An "automaton". The very first use of the word "robot" was in reference to artificial slaves that rebel against humankind.
Anything with a pilot in it is not a robot. "Powered suit" is an appropriate term, so is "battle armor". In fact, the word "mecha" is often used...
There is such a thing a robot anime. Chobits for instance. But Evangelion doesn't count.
I must disagree on a technical basis. Noir shouldn't correctly be called "action".
That word implies that people would move around from time to time, especially when faced with a dangerous situation like a gun battle.
Now that I think about it... maybe it shouldn't even be called "animation". Like Fushigi Yugi, it's more a slide-show with a soundtrack.
The individual patented the 'web' before the web was even heard of outside of universities.
He patented it all the way back in 1944 you say?
You are advocating an approach that is pragmatic in your personal circumstance, but is sub-optimal. We can do better, and we should try.
The steps you've taken to avoid spam have hurt you. Just a little, but the damage is real.
First, it took your time to create alternative "trap" email accounts, and it takes mental effort for you keep these multiple accounts straight and to recreate them when needed, etc. If you're smart enough, that kind of effort doesn't bother you much. But it's more than you should have to do, and it's more complicated than many people can understand. Nerds shouldn't oppose technical solutions to spam because they personally can evade it- they should work to stop spam for the greater good.
Secondly, those steps are "hacks". They are inelegant workarounds. They offend my sense of systemic beauty. Prehaps most people don't care about this, but the existence of poorly-designed patches on a system are a hint that it wasn't build quite correctly in the first place.
Third, (and most importantly) by forcing you to email your email addresses hidden, your abliity to communicate is reduced. You can't allow other people to email you as much as they might like, because they might be marketers. It's impossible to tell how many opportunities we all might have lost due to this effect.
The best email solution depends on economics- micropayments or similar. If a person could decide to impose a charge of a few pennies or dollars for the service of recieving an unsolicited message from a stranger, all spam problems could be solved.
I know what anarchy means. It is the absense of authority, and it implies either disorder or death.
The broadest stages of human organization are anarchy, tribes (chiefdoms) and states. I used "tribal anarchy" as a synonym for the two non-state stages. (Chapter 14, "From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy" of GG&S, has an entertaining list of the forces that increase state power)
Prehaps you are using a fantasy defintion put forth by self-proclaimed "anarchists". (They are better called "libertarian socialists", which at least makes plain the impossibilities of their goal)
well, there are primative types of anarchism, but it's not the most common
Oh, do you have examples of any other form of anarchism ever occuring? And did it last very long?
Even pro-"anarchist" writers admit that no such system exists today.
I've always wondered why computers tend to render the view that you would see of the model if you were looking through your screen and expect people to have some clue of their surroundings
Do you also wonder why TV shows and films aren't all recorded with fisheye lenses?
Actually, it appears that in modern society, quite a lot of people are valued for social skills even when technically incompetent. At least, if their value is measured by how much financial reward they are given.
These individuals are sometimes called PHBs, and their population is on the upswing.
It's not about what someone "wants" to be called, it's about what is accurate.
You were talking about genetics, and using "African American" to mean "of sub-Saharan African phenotype", which used to be called "black".
Calling a person "black" or "white" is obviously incorrect, unless someone was actually one of those colors (which may be due to 3rd degree burns, or albinoism, respectively). But in the US, speakers have been encouraged to replace the word "black person" with "African-American".
That usage is still incorrect and misleading. It leads to gaffs such as calling Nelson Mandela an "African American". The use of "black" for "African phenotype" has been stripped from the language, but no correct replacement was provided. ("White" has been largely replaced with "Caucasian", which is also incorrect, but less-so)
Similarly, the claim "Genetics dictates that African-American parents will have African-American children" is hilariously incorrect, because "-American" describes place of residence, a factor that technology has rendered independent of genetics.
Quote AC:
The second also decreases the value of cooperation, or at least directly cooperating. You can work on a project with another person from long distances with out ever actually seeing this other person. So all in all, I would say the value of physical strength, agility etc will become less important, and the rest will stay as is.
But it appears that females have advantages in indirect, machine-mediated communication as well.
Young girls are reputed to have adapted to telephone, cellphone, and instant-message use more rapidly and more fully than boys, for example.
Is there any science to this article at all? I see references to numbers, but no ways that they obtained them other than asking MS.
Not much science, at least available online. I hope that NewScientist.com is just trying to leave the details as added value for their print subscribers. The experimental process would be very interesting to scrutinize.
I suspect that the claimed result "women become navigational equals of men if given 100 degree screens with smooth animation" is incorrect. Maybe what happened is that "women equalled the men's scores once they had bigger screens". Maybe even "women and men scored equally with the largest screens". But if the latter is the case, I think that men would again pull ahead
I don't think interest in technology is genetic though. I think it's a product of society. Girls are encouraged to imagine the perfect guy and starve themselves until they are married it seems. Boys are taught to protect siblings,
Both those "societal" factors are direct products of genetics.
Or try men from third world countries where technology isn't available.
An experiment conducted with young third-world children saw males as learning computer operation faster. However, the sample size was small, and external factors (mainly assertiveness) were not properly excluded.
I think the trend will change the more technology is required to live and the more games are made for women (The Sims, Sim Park, etc.)
Although the original design of The Sims focused on spatial aspects (residential layout effecting homeowner happiness), the released game was based much more on interpersonal relationships that were pairwise between Sim-people. That is, gameplay in the Sims is largely reliant on non-spatial data models.
The (much-maligned) "Sims Online" goes even further in this direction- buildings don't even have a notional physical positioning relative to each other. It's just one big list of places to visit, with no consideration for the space they occupy. So maybe, future games will be more popular with women, but they might involve less spatial reasoning.
Puzzle-games (tetris, snood, bejewled) seem to be more useful for training spatial reasoning skills, as they're based on the physical interactions of differently shaped pieces. But, those are 2d games, not 3d. And they're are all played with full information- the player can see the whole state of the game world (location of every known puzzle-piece) at all times. There's no exercise of memory or fusing multiple incomplete views into one consistent perceived view of the gameworld.