This happens extensively on VN (IGN) boards as Turbine requires VN mods to remove messages that criticize Turbine or its people.
I haven't seen evidence of this. Posts on VN regularly criticize Turbine, complain about AC patches, mercilessly mock AC2 at length, and so on. Agree with the rest of your post, though.
AC's fall costume whackiness is happening with next month's prop. But yes, there will almost surely be an event of some sort on Oct. 31. Bit annoying that the costumes, scarecrows, pumpkins, and such are in for November though. I guess they're THANKSGIVING pumpkins!
The Nanaimo outlet beats the Timmins outlet for sheer implausibility. I've been to both places in the last two years, and trust me on this one. No contest.
Ironically, AC2 failed because they eschewed all the stuff that was great about the original (fun PvP, hectic hordes-attacking-you combat, fantastic loot system), and tried to make it too much like... EverQuest:).
AC1 has player housing on the landscape, furnishable, and with a good amount of storage. Four housing types: apartments (which aren't REALLY on the landscape, but are in buildings accessible via portals in some towns), cottages (which are, er, small cottages), villas (which have a large, 3-floor main area with yard and a basement accessable by portal in the bottom floor), and mansions (which are quite big, also have a basement, and are available for purchase only by allegiance (guild) leaders). All furnishable, leading to quite a few quests in AC which are for items that do nothing except look cool in your house:).
So you're willing to pay $10 for a wasteful box that you're going to immediately throw away, and CDs/DVDs that you're going to chuck in a drawer and never pull out again after installation?
Not to mention the joy of driving to the local mall to pick up your purchase:).
Something Awful forums do this, and it's nicknamed a "hellban". There have been folks who have gone weeks without realizing they were even banned, as they merrily, and gradually less merrily, posted away.
I blew through all the "plotline levels", having to repeat two of the levels once each. My second time through the final level (missed it by a mile the first time -- knowing the general layout of the town helps) I got a 801m katamari which was good enough to qualify for eternal.
However, some of the side levels are HARD AS HELL. The bear one is annoying me to death. I keep running over the damn teddy bear. God: "BEEAAAAR!!!" as the level ends and my pathetic Bear star goes up:). If you haven't played it, the object is to get the largest bear possible for the "best" star possible. You "win" the level with any bear, though, but at the start you're only big enough to pick up a baby bear or teddy bear. So, you need to dodge all those bear types until you pick up enough non-bear tat to... well. This game is whacky.:D
Fine and dandy, except part of what makes a great CompSci geek, language wizard, or design god is the ability to quickly recognize and analyze a problem, and whip up a solution. Reusing old code snippets in an effective and WORKING way, to me, is "smarter" than cranking out the same old code by rote again.
Minor nitpick. Lots of the 64k was protected, but it was indeed overwriteable if you did the right POKEs to allow said overwriting. Lots of whacky shenanigans ensue...
Yep, I once hard-soldered a VCR remote control (back when they had wires) into the back port (one of them) on my C64. This was so I could write a Dragon's Lair-style game using Robotech episodes. It worked better than you'd think:).
Mom was impressed, all right.
City of Heroes also uses ogg. The sounds folder contains.piggs, which are expandable into oggs. A thread (which can be found here) on the official City of Heroes boards discusses various methods of messing with these for the non-ogg-aware. Most welcome is the ability to get rid of the Targetting Drone and Forcefield sounds.
He seemed totally agog that players might not do exactly as the Devs intended them to do.
And this is precisely why I will never again play a SOE game. This attitude is too prevalent. The EQ developers are only starting to snap out of it over the last year or so, which is why so much good has happened to EQ lately...
Still, I'll stick with either CoH, which is beer-and-pretzely enough with gamer-and-comic-mark devs, and AC, which has in its past completely lost control of its game for days at a time because it gave its players so much freedom;).
If you want to develop an MMORPG but can't afford it with a subscription fee, you don't ask your customers to pay an arbitrary extra fee for something that's completely useless by itself. You don't develop the MMORPG.
But this doesn't hold water. As I said in my post, the game is NOT completely useless by itself. You have a month's play to enjoy once you've bought the game off the shelf. I can count the number of computer games I've ever bought that I've played past a month on my fingers, and we're talking hundreds of games over the past 18-19 years (my first Commodore 64 game was Ultima III:)). To make that more relevant, the reason I didn't play those games past a month is because I was TIRED of them after a month. In the same way, I've bought into a bunch of MMOs but I got tired of them all with three exceptions, before the included month of online play was over. After that, I drop the game. Sure, if I want to play again, I have to pony up the $12.95 or $14.95 for another month. However, in the case of games like Asheron's Call and City of Heroes, this means that if I'd taken a 6 month break, now I'm getting not only a month of play, but ALSO six months worth of content and storyline patches for my subscription fee. Bargain!
The REAL bottom line is that the customer speaks with his wallet, if you really want to talk about capitalism. Your "compromise" begins the second the consumer feels like he is not getting value out of a product, and does not spend the cash on it. Currently, the market disagrees with those who state that the current pricing model doesn't work. By stubbornly planting your heels and refusing to invest $40 in an MMORPG, you're just missing out on some great games, and you're not changing anything. Remember this next time you buy a game and shelf it after a week -- ask yourself if you feel ripped off by that.
Incidentally, Asheron's Call is currently available for nothing but the subscription fee. It's downloadable probably via turbinegames.com. The download costs, I believe $12.95, and you get an included month, so really it's "free with your first month's paid subscription". The graphics are obviously 4+ years old, but the game is huge and content-rich.
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Any takers on bets for how long it'll take Lucas lawyers to cease-and-desist that Leia framegrab off their front page? :)
I haven't seen evidence of this. Posts on VN regularly criticize Turbine, complain about AC patches, mercilessly mock AC2 at length, and so on. Agree with the rest of your post, though.
Huzzah, sir. Where are my mod points when I need them?
If you're not going to knock those comics, I will. They're pretty horrid. I do like the funny one-pagers at the back, though.
AC's fall costume whackiness is happening with next month's prop. But yes, there will almost surely be an event of some sort on Oct. 31. Bit annoying that the costumes, scarecrows, pumpkins, and such are in for November though. I guess they're THANKSGIVING pumpkins!
Don't forget the "Play It Loud" campaign from the early 1990s, with the adverts featuring Butthole Surfers music.
The Nanaimo outlet beats the Timmins outlet for sheer implausibility. I've been to both places in the last two years, and trust me on this one. No contest.
ePeen size challenged! Write an algorithm to correctly determine the size of the challenger's ePeen while not revealing yours!
Ironically, AC2 failed because they eschewed all the stuff that was great about the original (fun PvP, hectic hordes-attacking-you combat, fantastic loot system), and tried to make it too much like... EverQuest :).
AC1 has player housing on the landscape, furnishable, and with a good amount of storage. Four housing types: apartments (which aren't REALLY on the landscape, but are in buildings accessible via portals in some towns), cottages (which are, er, small cottages), villas (which have a large, 3-floor main area with yard and a basement accessable by portal in the bottom floor), and mansions (which are quite big, also have a basement, and are available for purchase only by allegiance (guild) leaders). All furnishable, leading to quite a few quests in AC which are for items that do nothing except look cool in your house :).
Not to mention the joy of driving to the local mall to pick up your purchase :).
Something Awful forums do this, and it's nicknamed a "hellban". There have been folks who have gone weeks without realizing they were even banned, as they merrily, and gradually less merrily, posted away.
I blew through all the "plotline levels", having to repeat two of the levels once each. My second time through the final level (missed it by a mile the first time -- knowing the general layout of the town helps) I got a 801m katamari which was good enough to qualify for eternal. However, some of the side levels are HARD AS HELL. The bear one is annoying me to death. I keep running over the damn teddy bear. God: "BEEAAAAR!!!" as the level ends and my pathetic Bear star goes up :). If you haven't played it, the object is to get the largest bear possible for the "best" star possible. You "win" the level with any bear, though, but at the start you're only big enough to pick up a baby bear or teddy bear. So, you need to dodge all those bear types until you pick up enough non-bear tat to... well. This game is whacky. :D
Chuckle, so I can ride the nostalgia wave by playing ports of games I used to play on my old 486/66 and SNES, eh? Huzzah! Trousers fall down!
I can't leave without my Martian Buddy Superfly!
I demand festive Chewbacca, and animated Boba Fett!
Fine and dandy, except part of what makes a great CompSci geek, language wizard, or design god is the ability to quickly recognize and analyze a problem, and whip up a solution. Reusing old code snippets in an effective and WORKING way, to me, is "smarter" than cranking out the same old code by rote again.
Zbir nyy mvt! Sbe terng whfgvpr!
What about Wizards and Warriors on the old NES? That was a great game.
Rare also made the two Banjo-Kazooie games for N64, both of which were EXCELLENT.
Minor nitpick. Lots of the 64k was protected, but it was indeed overwriteable if you did the right POKEs to allow said overwriting. Lots of whacky shenanigans ensue...
Yep, I once hard-soldered a VCR remote control (back when they had wires) into the back port (one of them) on my C64. This was so I could write a Dragon's Lair-style game using Robotech episodes. It worked better than you'd think :).
Mom was impressed, all right.
City of Heroes also uses ogg. The sounds folder contains .piggs, which are expandable into oggs. A thread (which can be found here) on the official City of Heroes boards discusses various methods of messing with these for the non-ogg-aware. Most welcome is the ability to get rid of the Targetting Drone and Forcefield sounds.
And this is precisely why I will never again play a SOE game. This attitude is too prevalent. The EQ developers are only starting to snap out of it over the last year or so, which is why so much good has happened to EQ lately...
Still, I'll stick with either CoH, which is beer-and-pretzely enough with gamer-and-comic-mark devs, and AC, which has in its past completely lost control of its game for days at a time because it gave its players so much freedom ;).
But this doesn't hold water. As I said in my post, the game is NOT completely useless by itself. You have a month's play to enjoy once you've bought the game off the shelf. I can count the number of computer games I've ever bought that I've played past a month on my fingers, and we're talking hundreds of games over the past 18-19 years (my first Commodore 64 game was Ultima III :)). To make that more relevant, the reason I didn't play those games past a month is because I was TIRED of them after a month. In the same way, I've bought into a bunch of MMOs but I got tired of them all with three exceptions, before the included month of online play was over. After that, I drop the game. Sure, if I want to play again, I have to pony up the $12.95 or $14.95 for another month. However, in the case of games like Asheron's Call and City of Heroes, this means that if I'd taken a 6 month break, now I'm getting not only a month of play, but ALSO six months worth of content and storyline patches for my subscription fee. Bargain!
The REAL bottom line is that the customer speaks with his wallet, if you really want to talk about capitalism. Your "compromise" begins the second the consumer feels like he is not getting value out of a product, and does not spend the cash on it. Currently, the market disagrees with those who state that the current pricing model doesn't work. By stubbornly planting your heels and refusing to invest $40 in an MMORPG, you're just missing out on some great games, and you're not changing anything. Remember this next time you buy a game and shelf it after a week -- ask yourself if you feel ripped off by that.
Incidentally, Asheron's Call is currently available for nothing but the subscription fee. It's downloadable probably via turbinegames.com. The download costs, I believe $12.95, and you get an included month, so really it's "free with your first month's paid subscription". The graphics are obviously 4+ years old, but the game is huge and content-rich.