Any lecturer who bans this is hopelessly mired in one given way of doing things, and is one of all too many unfortunate parts of the academic profession.
If I could actually guarantee that all my students would have computers in a lecture, the number of new things I could do with a lecture would be mind-blowing. First of all, I would immediately set up a chat room for the lecture to go on while the lecture is taking place. I'd have a computer in that room as well, both for sending out supplementary material (Weblinks in place of handouts) and for reading over the conversation when I'm done.
Will people have useless discussions on the side, surf the internet randomly, and/or play Quake?
Without a doubt. However, it's not as though someone really hell-bent on not paying attention needs anything more than a notebook. Or the ability to close their eyes.
Trust me, you're in the minority on this. I suspect my situation is much more common.
I spent $3000 on a new computer in March. This will be the computer I use for the next 5-6 years, while I put myself through grad school.
It has an nVidia graphics card.
So, basically, I'm buying games that will support that equipment. Because I'm not going to blow a shitload of money on a new card.
Valve decided to release a PC game. Knowing that many PCs use nVidia graphics cards. It is therefore their job to make their game work with standard equipment. nVidia is pretty damn standard.
Sorry if the card is lower quality than they'd like. But it's not like they haven't had an entire development cycle to test the game on nVidia cards.
It would be wise of Valve, I think, to put all necessary resources into getting a fix for this. Since it's probably a bad idea to release a game that doesn't play well with the most popular graphics card.
I read on Slate a day or two ago that the top selling song on all the various pay-for-download sites totaled about 1500 downloads. Considering that those are far more mainstream releases than the legions of webcomics and small press things that are trying to use micropayments, I can't imagine that small things like penny payments will be very productive.
As with many plans to roll in money on the internet, I don't think that market penetration of the net itself has occurred to the point where that's viable. Online is still narrowly profitable. Micropayments may well be a good idea - but I think they're coming too soon here. Try again in five years.
Personally, I cannot take seriously anyone who suggests that one can only be enthused about platformers and remakes of 16-bit games if one looks at the era through "rosy glasses".
Personally, I think my hobby died with the rise of the PSOne, and I'm left with the Gamecube as the third place console, but the only one that puts out more than a handful of games that are of types I actually enjoy. I could care less about Tony Hawk and Tomb Raider.
And lest someone mod me flamebait, I'm sure both of those are great games. I know people who enjoy them, at least. But I've just never gotten into them. They don't feel like the games I grew up on. They feel like a different hobby to me. Some people made the transition from that hobby to current video games. Some people started with Tomb Raider, and can't figure out what it is I like so much about Zelda.
But for me, if that's the future of video games, I'll be over here with my emulator, thank you.
Online gaming will eternally be marred by the fact that it involves dealing with human beings. To demonstrate the problem with human beings, I invite you to set your moderation threshold to -1, and begin reading Slashdot. When you play online, you are playing with these people.
Online gaming is popular right now among analysts and game makers, because they see that instead of just selling a $50 box, they can sell a $50 box and a $10 subscription every month too. And so quite a bit of fuss is being made about how online gaming is the hot new thing, because companies really want it to be the hot new thing.
Wait for a few more online games to be as massive a debacle as, say, The Sims Online, or Asheron's Call 2, and I'm sure you'll have a much more sensible market that realizes that, yes, online gaming may have some great financial potential, but come to think of it, so does single player gaming.
Meanwhile, Nintendo will have avoided flushing money down the toilet on a bubble market, and will be able to get about the business of making online games once a widescale adoption of broadband, and, more importantly, of home networking exists.
Until then, though, online gaming is a really big loss leader of the sort that Nintendo has never demonstrated much fondness for.
The graduate student point seemed relevent before making claims about the durability of various types of literature. Rather like IANAL, only more like IAAL.
Picking 2 of your 5 examples of "intellectual" as current writers is a bit of a poor choice in dealing with the claim as made... with two of the others being painters, I have a hard time commenting, art history not being my thing.
As for your third point, the number of later discovered writers is staggering... as is the number of seemingly "major" writers of their time who are totally forgotten. Attention to history of a humanistic field would reveal this, making me suspect you have little such attention.
Yes, I am claiming to know design motives of a number of game developers. You could too if you purused the internet and read developer comments and essays, of which there are many by many developers.
As for the last point, I confess to an accidental change in meaning from the earlier usage of "art" as equivalent to "text" to the use of it as a value judgment there. The basic form of the statement is "We do not really study texts that cannot be preserved as literature". Preservation relies on a number of factors - historically, language has been one (Read much Linear A lately?), and interest, both immediate and long-term, is another (Consider that we are missing two plays of Shakespeare... consider also that a number of medieval manuscripts are simply not in any form of print at the moment, which rather restricts their study). Even with the existence of MAME, we're looking at an incredibly young form here, and it has many, many compatability and preservation issues to work out before any claims for its survivability can be made.
Joyce, for all his being the greatest novelist of the 20th century, is hardly touched outside of classes looking at modernists. And generally, if you're reading Joyce, you're reading some short stories at this point.
Seneca is not read outside of classics departments.
Euripedes, while not necessarily popularly acclaimed, was writing for popular festivals all the same - I have trouble calling him intellectual. Also, of little interest outside Classics departments.
Shaw, again, while didactic, was a tremendously popular writer in his time. Don't confuse your tastes with the tastes of the time. Checkov, likewise.
Brecht is important in theatre, but his impact outside of that is minimal, and his impact in theatre is primarily as a theorist.
Beckett will be reduced to Waiting for Godot - by far his most readable and popular play.
As for your last set of examples... have you noticed how poetry as a whole is dying out in the academy? As is popular to dryly point out now, it's the only form with more practitioners than readers. Pound's star fell fast after his fascism. e.e. cummings doesn't show his face past high school much. Blake and Thoreau are probably your two best examples, but I wonder how anti-popular they were.
The "canon" as it were is busting rather largely. "Classics" are hardly read in universities, especially not those considered to have the best English programs. The field is splitting largely between popular culture people and theory people, with those interested in historical periods increasingly focusing on "minor" texts of the period instead of the canon.
I find, as a graduate English student, that I can't really think of any generation or era where the intellectual art has really lasted well. The popular stuff tends to be what survives, largely because it was actually designed for people to enjoy, rather than praise.
If, in 100 years, we look back at any games as great works of art (And we may not - games are so dependent on the technology they run on that they may fail one of the basic tests of art, which is survivability), I do not think it will be deep and contemplative games. I think it will be things like SimCity, Zelda, and other games that were designed, first and foremost, for their players.
"So if you're competing on NFL Fever, do you want to do that on Xbox Live with a controller, or do you want to somehow interact your PC and Xbox together? We believe it's the latter, so things change."
"Someone's yet to explain to me the value of hooking up your handheld device to your console. If somebody can tell me what the value of that is, I'm all for it."
I mean, the first one certainly seem to be saying that connectivity between the PC and the XBox is an innately good idea, regardless of application. And then the second one seems to call for applications... and, I mean, I have to point to Animal Crossing here as an example of connectivity's virtues... to say nothing of everything I've heard about Crystal Chronicles...
Oh, and while we're at amusing quotes, I offer this exchange from the article:
Therefore, can we expect further extensions like a keyboard or MSN messaging functions?
Moore: If it's core to games, we're constantly looking for ways to innovate.
Is karaoke core to games?
Moore: Yes, because it's core to the social aspect of what you do.
God, I think that interview may be more entertaining than the console itself...
Personally, the game I've always wanted to see redone, more than pretty much any other, is M.U.L.E. Of course, with Bunten dead and EA being EA, I don't see that happening in the next, well, ever.
But it would be the greatest game ever if it happened.
Re:One of the characteristics of a conspiracy theo
on
Roswell Declassified
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· Score: 1
One of the big problems discussing God comes when you try to talk about God's existence in the same way that you talk about, for instance, your computer's existence. To borrow Kantian terminology, the computer is phenomenal, in that it is within the conditions of any possible experience, whereas God is necessarily noumenal, and is thus outside said conditions. You cannot, for example, talk about whether not God is underneath your desk. This is because among the things that God lacks as a noumenal object is an existence within space and time.
That is not to say that God does not exist. Ethics, after all, are also outside of space and time. One does not talk about the location of ethics, or of the theory of relativity. All the same, these things exist. And so the fact that, for God to have existed prior to the big bang, He would have had to exist prior to any phenomenal rules is not much of a problem.
Your claim that He existed before logic is somewhat more substantial, but I have to reject it. Part of this is my belief on the nature of ideas, which is that they are not "property" (being as they are outside the conditions of any possible experience). Our language reflects this somewhat - we do not create or invent ideas, we have them. The point being that ideas such as logic do not depend on any phenomenological basis for their existence.
A more substantial objection can be found in the question of whether or not a phenomenal effect such as the big bang can have a noumenal cause. It happens that this question is related to questions of free will (Kant demonstrates persuasively that our will, should it exist, would have to be noumenal). It is not provable, however, and must be taken on faith.
Incidentally, when dealing with God, and, by extension, with the notion of absolute power, it is questionable at best whether the law of non-contradiction holds for Him. A reasonable response to "Can God make a rock so heavy that He can't lift it" may well be "Yes. And then He can lift it." Absolute power is neat like that.
One of the characteristics of a conspiracy theory
on
Roswell Declassified
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· Score: 1
Is that it is resistant to evidence. Or, rather, that all possible evidence is evidence in favor of the theory.
It's somewhat analagous to Tertullian's observation that anyone who disagreed with him was speaking Satan's words and thus shouldn't be listened to at all.
I may be remembering Nussbaum poorly here, but I'm fairly sure she makes a claim for a rational component to emotional response, or, at least, that emotional judgments cannot be distinguished from other judgments in terms of their process.
The real problem I see with my claim is that there's an unfortunate circularity to it. If every decision can be modeled as a judgment, then there is no such thing as an irrational decision - merely one with a different valuation than we would use. Thus begins a headlong slide into relativism.
The way out of that is to claim that some systems of value are better than others. In its simplest form, this is an uncontroversial claim - most of us accept that eliminating world hunger is a better value than raping small children. But most of us shy away from extreme absolutism as well - few of us seem terribly comfortable with, say, the fullest rigidity of Kantian (or Utiliatarian) ethics.
The upshot being that what I was really doing was trying to challenge the value system implied by game theory in this problem - that one ought always maximize one's prize. Concepts of social mores and ethics play into a lot of game theory examples, and complicate the matter such that game theory is just that - a theory, and one that can't really be applied to the real world as much as some would try to.
I admit, I'm somewhat curious how "emotion" is defined for the purpose of this study. At least some credible people, most notably Martha Nussbaum, claim that emotions are in fact a form of rational response, depending on a conscious judgment of value. When I am upset that my cat died, this emotion is based on the judgment that my cat was valuable to me, which is a rational decision, not an irrational one.
In other words, the game theory model may be flawed here. If, for some people, seeing someone who has slighted them be unsatisfied is pleasurable, than it has a value. If that value is greater than $1, then it is a rational decision for them to choose not to accept the deal. The game theory model assumes that the pleasure of that has no value, however, and is thus an inaccurate model.
And yes, I do think money is a reasonable measure of value, so long as you accept that there are some things (Being punched in the face) with a value of $0, and some things (Not having to shoot your sister in the head) that are worth an infinite amount of money.
Though the Scourging of the Shire is thematically important, I think it would be very hard to include it without really messing up the pacing of the third film. Movies tend to need to end with climactic resolution, which Aragorn's wedding provides. The scourging of the shire and Frodo's return is much more anticlimactic, and I think it would wind up disappointing far more of the audience than it would satisfy.
She would have been acceptably developled if she was going to marry Aragorn that film. But, in audience time, it was going to be two years before she married Aragorn. She needed to appear as early as she did, since Aragorn is the main male lead, and she needed to appear in all three movies, or else her return to marry Aragorn in RoTK would seem deus ex machina.
I know I'm unpopular in this view, but I think the Arwen sections are totally necessary to the LoTR films.
In the books, Arwen's marriage to Aragorn in the end comes out of nowhere. In some ways it is powerful because of this, but it really would not work in a movie, where people have been watching this story for two years. The payoff of a marriage at the end (And Jackson has confirmed, I believe, that RoTK ends with the marriage, and not with the return to the Shire) needs to actually be a payoff. That can only happen if Aragorn marries someone he's been developed as having some tie to. Arwen cannot come out of nowhere, nor can she be absent from Two Towers, or else it's been two years since we've seen her, and she is no longer adequately developed.
Except that the games are largely in Japanese. And localization does not take place instantly. And Europe is the hardest localization, seeing as it involves a bunch of languages.
That's really odd. I found, in both M64 and Ocarina of Time that the limited camera control, particularly the fact that you couldn't move the camera on the fly, was frequently a problem. The C-Stick camera on Wind Waker and Sunshine was vastly more playable for me, with the exception of that one level in the amusement park where it was impossible to get a close-up view because of the wall. I always felt in total control of the camera, and got quite good at manipulating the camera while I moved and did other things./shrug.
Slashdot Mirror
Any lecturer who bans this is hopelessly mired in one given way of doing things, and is one of all too many unfortunate parts of the academic profession.
If I could actually guarantee that all my students would have computers in a lecture, the number of new things I could do with a lecture would be mind-blowing. First of all, I would immediately set up a chat room for the lecture to go on while the lecture is taking place. I'd have a computer in that room as well, both for sending out supplementary material (Weblinks in place of handouts) and for reading over the conversation when I'm done.
Will people have useless discussions on the side, surf the internet randomly, and/or play Quake?
Without a doubt. However, it's not as though someone really hell-bent on not paying attention needs anything more than a notebook. Or the ability to close their eyes.
Trust me, you're in the minority on this. I suspect my situation is much more common.
I spent $3000 on a new computer in March. This will be the computer I use for the next 5-6 years, while I put myself through grad school.
It has an nVidia graphics card.
So, basically, I'm buying games that will support that equipment. Because I'm not going to blow a shitload of money on a new card.
Valve decided to release a PC game. Knowing that many PCs use nVidia graphics cards. It is therefore their job to make their game work with standard equipment. nVidia is pretty damn standard.
Sorry if the card is lower quality than they'd like. But it's not like they haven't had an entire development cycle to test the game on nVidia cards.
It would be wise of Valve, I think, to put all necessary resources into getting a fix for this. Since it's probably a bad idea to release a game that doesn't play well with the most popular graphics card.
Actually, it did fall through... hence the article. =P
I read on Slate a day or two ago that the top selling song on all the various pay-for-download sites totaled about 1500 downloads. Considering that those are far more mainstream releases than the legions of webcomics and small press things that are trying to use micropayments, I can't imagine that small things like penny payments will be very productive.
As with many plans to roll in money on the internet, I don't think that market penetration of the net itself has occurred to the point where that's viable. Online is still narrowly profitable. Micropayments may well be a good idea - but I think they're coming too soon here. Try again in five years.
Personally, I cannot take seriously anyone who suggests that one can only be enthused about platformers and remakes of 16-bit games if one looks at the era through "rosy glasses".
Personally, I think my hobby died with the rise of the PSOne, and I'm left with the Gamecube as the third place console, but the only one that puts out more than a handful of games that are of types I actually enjoy. I could care less about Tony Hawk and Tomb Raider.
And lest someone mod me flamebait, I'm sure both of those are great games. I know people who enjoy them, at least. But I've just never gotten into them. They don't feel like the games I grew up on. They feel like a different hobby to me. Some people made the transition from that hobby to current video games. Some people started with Tomb Raider, and can't figure out what it is I like so much about Zelda.
But for me, if that's the future of video games, I'll be over here with my emulator, thank you.
Online gaming will eternally be marred by the fact that it involves dealing with human beings. To demonstrate the problem with human beings, I invite you to set your moderation threshold to -1, and begin reading Slashdot. When you play online, you are playing with these people.
Online gaming is popular right now among analysts and game makers, because they see that instead of just selling a $50 box, they can sell a $50 box and a $10 subscription every month too. And so quite a bit of fuss is being made about how online gaming is the hot new thing, because companies really want it to be the hot new thing.
Wait for a few more online games to be as massive a debacle as, say, The Sims Online, or Asheron's Call 2, and I'm sure you'll have a much more sensible market that realizes that, yes, online gaming may have some great financial potential, but come to think of it, so does single player gaming.
Meanwhile, Nintendo will have avoided flushing money down the toilet on a bubble market, and will be able to get about the business of making online games once a widescale adoption of broadband, and, more importantly, of home networking exists.
Until then, though, online gaming is a really big loss leader of the sort that Nintendo has never demonstrated much fondness for.
So.
Ummm...
What was the change to the FAQ, anyway?
Well trolled!
Going in order, then...
The graduate student point seemed relevent before making claims about the durability of various types of literature. Rather like IANAL, only more like IAAL.
Picking 2 of your 5 examples of "intellectual" as current writers is a bit of a poor choice in dealing with the claim as made... with two of the others being painters, I have a hard time commenting, art history not being my thing.
As for your third point, the number of later discovered writers is staggering... as is the number of seemingly "major" writers of their time who are totally forgotten. Attention to history of a humanistic field would reveal this, making me suspect you have little such attention.
Yes, I am claiming to know design motives of a number of game developers. You could too if you purused the internet and read developer comments and essays, of which there are many by many developers.
As for the last point, I confess to an accidental change in meaning from the earlier usage of "art" as equivalent to "text" to the use of it as a value judgment there. The basic form of the statement is "We do not really study texts that cannot be preserved as literature". Preservation relies on a number of factors - historically, language has been one (Read much Linear A lately?), and interest, both immediate and long-term, is another (Consider that we are missing two plays of Shakespeare... consider also that a number of medieval manuscripts are simply not in any form of print at the moment, which rather restricts their study). Even with the existence of MAME, we're looking at an incredibly young form here, and it has many, many compatability and preservation issues to work out before any claims for its survivability can be made.
Well, let's see...
Joyce, for all his being the greatest novelist of the 20th century, is hardly touched outside of classes looking at modernists. And generally, if you're reading Joyce, you're reading some short stories at this point.
Seneca is not read outside of classics departments.
Euripedes, while not necessarily popularly acclaimed, was writing for popular festivals all the same - I have trouble calling him intellectual. Also, of little interest outside Classics departments.
Shaw, again, while didactic, was a tremendously popular writer in his time. Don't confuse your tastes with the tastes of the time. Checkov, likewise.
Brecht is important in theatre, but his impact outside of that is minimal, and his impact in theatre is primarily as a theorist.
Beckett will be reduced to Waiting for Godot - by far his most readable and popular play.
As for your last set of examples... have you noticed how poetry as a whole is dying out in the academy? As is popular to dryly point out now, it's the only form with more practitioners than readers. Pound's star fell fast after his fascism. e.e. cummings doesn't show his face past high school much. Blake and Thoreau are probably your two best examples, but I wonder how anti-popular they were.
The "canon" as it were is busting rather largely. "Classics" are hardly read in universities, especially not those considered to have the best English programs. The field is splitting largely between popular culture people and theory people, with those interested in historical periods increasingly focusing on "minor" texts of the period instead of the canon.
I find, as a graduate English student, that I can't really think of any generation or era where the intellectual art has really lasted well. The popular stuff tends to be what survives, largely because it was actually designed for people to enjoy, rather than praise.
If, in 100 years, we look back at any games as great works of art (And we may not - games are so dependent on the technology they run on that they may fail one of the basic tests of art, which is survivability), I do not think it will be deep and contemplative games. I think it will be things like SimCity, Zelda, and other games that were designed, first and foremost, for their players.
"So if you're competing on NFL Fever, do you want to do that on Xbox Live with a controller, or do you want to somehow interact your PC and Xbox together? We believe it's the latter, so things change."
"Someone's yet to explain to me the value of hooking up your handheld device to your console. If somebody can tell me what the value of that is, I'm all for it."
I mean, the first one certainly seem to be saying that connectivity between the PC and the XBox is an innately good idea, regardless of application. And then the second one seems to call for applications... and, I mean, I have to point to Animal Crossing here as an example of connectivity's virtues... to say nothing of everything I've heard about Crystal Chronicles...
Oh, and while we're at amusing quotes, I offer this exchange from the article:
Therefore, can we expect further extensions like a keyboard or MSN messaging functions?
Moore: If it's core to games, we're constantly looking for ways to innovate.
Is karaoke core to games?
Moore: Yes, because it's core to the social aspect of what you do.
God, I think that interview may be more entertaining than the console itself...
It should properly read "Star Wars: Galaxies to begin charging for beta June 26th."
But, then, I'm cynical, jaded, and broken.
Personally, the game I've always wanted to see redone, more than pretty much any other, is M.U.L.E. Of course, with Bunten dead and EA being EA, I don't see that happening in the next, well, ever.
But it would be the greatest game ever if it happened.
One of the big problems discussing God comes when you try to talk about God's existence in the same way that you talk about, for instance, your computer's existence. To borrow Kantian terminology, the computer is phenomenal, in that it is within the conditions of any possible experience, whereas God is necessarily noumenal, and is thus outside said conditions. You cannot, for example, talk about whether not God is underneath your desk. This is because among the things that God lacks as a noumenal object is an existence within space and time.
That is not to say that God does not exist. Ethics, after all, are also outside of space and time. One does not talk about the location of ethics, or of the theory of relativity. All the same, these things exist. And so the fact that, for God to have existed prior to the big bang, He would have had to exist prior to any phenomenal rules is not much of a problem.
Your claim that He existed before logic is somewhat more substantial, but I have to reject it. Part of this is my belief on the nature of ideas, which is that they are not "property" (being as they are outside the conditions of any possible experience). Our language reflects this somewhat - we do not create or invent ideas, we have them. The point being that ideas such as logic do not depend on any phenomenological basis for their existence.
A more substantial objection can be found in the question of whether or not a phenomenal effect such as the big bang can have a noumenal cause. It happens that this question is related to questions of free will (Kant demonstrates persuasively that our will, should it exist, would have to be noumenal). It is not provable, however, and must be taken on faith.
Incidentally, when dealing with God, and, by extension, with the notion of absolute power, it is questionable at best whether the law of non-contradiction holds for Him. A reasonable response to "Can God make a rock so heavy that He can't lift it" may well be "Yes. And then He can lift it." Absolute power is neat like that.
Is that it is resistant to evidence. Or, rather, that all possible evidence is evidence in favor of the theory.
It's somewhat analagous to Tertullian's observation that anyone who disagreed with him was speaking Satan's words and thus shouldn't be listened to at all.
Sweet sweet circularity.
I may be remembering Nussbaum poorly here, but I'm fairly sure she makes a claim for a rational component to emotional response, or, at least, that emotional judgments cannot be distinguished from other judgments in terms of their process.
The real problem I see with my claim is that there's an unfortunate circularity to it. If every decision can be modeled as a judgment, then there is no such thing as an irrational decision - merely one with a different valuation than we would use. Thus begins a headlong slide into relativism.
The way out of that is to claim that some systems of value are better than others. In its simplest form, this is an uncontroversial claim - most of us accept that eliminating world hunger is a better value than raping small children. But most of us shy away from extreme absolutism as well - few of us seem terribly comfortable with, say, the fullest rigidity of Kantian (or Utiliatarian) ethics.
The upshot being that what I was really doing was trying to challenge the value system implied by game theory in this problem - that one ought always maximize one's prize. Concepts of social mores and ethics play into a lot of game theory examples, and complicate the matter such that game theory is just that - a theory, and one that can't really be applied to the real world as much as some would try to.
I admit, I'm somewhat curious how "emotion" is defined for the purpose of this study. At least some credible people, most notably Martha Nussbaum, claim that emotions are in fact a form of rational response, depending on a conscious judgment of value. When I am upset that my cat died, this emotion is based on the judgment that my cat was valuable to me, which is a rational decision, not an irrational one.
In other words, the game theory model may be flawed here. If, for some people, seeing someone who has slighted them be unsatisfied is pleasurable, than it has a value. If that value is greater than $1, then it is a rational decision for them to choose not to accept the deal. The game theory model assumes that the pleasure of that has no value, however, and is thus an inaccurate model.
And yes, I do think money is a reasonable measure of value, so long as you accept that there are some things (Being punched in the face) with a value of $0, and some things (Not having to shoot your sister in the head) that are worth an infinite amount of money.
There is also, I believe, a second person boss in TMNT 4 (Turtles in Time).
Strangely, this conversation comes up a lot with one of my friends. =)
Though the Scourging of the Shire is thematically important, I think it would be very hard to include it without really messing up the pacing of the third film. Movies tend to need to end with climactic resolution, which Aragorn's wedding provides. The scourging of the shire and Frodo's return is much more anticlimactic, and I think it would wind up disappointing far more of the audience than it would satisfy.
She would have been acceptably developled if she was going to marry Aragorn that film. But, in audience time, it was going to be two years before she married Aragorn. She needed to appear as early as she did, since Aragorn is the main male lead, and she needed to appear in all three movies, or else her return to marry Aragorn in RoTK would seem deus ex machina.
I know I'm unpopular in this view, but I think the Arwen sections are totally necessary to the LoTR films.
In the books, Arwen's marriage to Aragorn in the end comes out of nowhere. In some ways it is powerful because of this, but it really would not work in a movie, where people have been watching this story for two years. The payoff of a marriage at the end (And Jackson has confirmed, I believe, that RoTK ends with the marriage, and not with the return to the Shire) needs to actually be a payoff. That can only happen if Aragorn marries someone he's been developed as having some tie to. Arwen cannot come out of nowhere, nor can she be absent from Two Towers, or else it's been two years since we've seen her, and she is no longer adequately developed.
I'm guessing Gamespy has already decided on the last 15 entries for their dumbest video game moments.
Except that the games are largely in Japanese. And localization does not take place instantly. And Europe is the hardest localization, seeing as it involves a bunch of languages.
That's really odd. I found, in both M64 and Ocarina of Time that the limited camera control, particularly the fact that you couldn't move the camera on the fly, was frequently a problem. The C-Stick camera on Wind Waker and Sunshine was vastly more playable for me, with the exception of that one level in the amusement park where it was impossible to get a close-up view because of the wall. I always felt in total control of the camera, and got quite good at manipulating the camera while I moved and did other things. /shrug.
No accounting for taste.