Up to 9 dollars for 15 year old games? You can get relatively recent (4 year old) PC games for a fiver, yet somehow, Nintendo are being compared to Mother Theresa of Calcutta for their boundless generosity. Purr-lease, fan boys, get a grip on yourselves.
"... original title laden with sorcery, trolls, dark elves, and the undead".
Er, yes, how original indeed!
The interview with Carmack himself tells us nothing whatsoever about the gameplay, which seems to be par for the course; he's always been more interested in the technology behind games rather the games themselves and seems to have little or no insight into what makes them fun.
It's like something a clueless marketing droid would write. No hard-core gamer willing to spend the kind of bucks required for this machine is going to play the types of games that wouldn't be affected by encoding music in the background. Indeed, I can't think of any game, bar Minesweeper, that wouldn't be affected by such CPU-intensive activity.
Yes I have lusted over many women, but it is a habbit that I have learned (by the grace of God) to overcome (at least to some extent). No, I'm not 9-10. I'm 21. I'm not gay. And even thinking about that makes me want to hurrl, and haven't had a thing to eat yet to day.
Hmm. You do know that most homophobes with violent physical reactions to even thoughts of homosexuality have been shown to react to same-sex images? On top of that, you don't have much interest in lusting after women.
I'm not saying you're necessarily gay; just perhaps extremely screwed up.
Maybe they'll continue to follow in Apple's footsteps and actually produce a decent OS one of these days
The irony of the situation is, that they have, and that's the problem. I'm sure Linux fan boys will diagree, but for most people, XP is a perfectly acceptable OS. Upgrading from 98 to XP was an easy choice, since 98 was a piece of crap. None of the improvements made for Vista so far make me want to eventually spend 100-odd euro on it.
WOW is very forgiving; while my desktop computer was out of action, I played it on a old Sony Vaio - something like 800Mhz with no graphics card. OK, so I was only getting 10 fps, but I was still mildly impressed.
Same here; I've probably spent more on PC gaming in the past year than in the previous 4 years, and little of it in the shops. I've been playing WoW and City of Heroes, and also bought the HL2 Silver package on Steam. The only bricks-and-mortar shop purchase was the WoW retail pack: altogether, I've spent around EUR200, only EUR40 of which was spent in a store.
As far as I'm aware, none of the methods used to calculate current PC game spending would have taken into account that hidden EUR160.
Or why the response to cartoons from Denmark, a Christian country, is to create anti-Semitic cartoons.
Speaking as an atheist, I find lots of religious stuff barmy, but at least when we watched The Life of Brian together the other night, my Catholic girlfriend did not burn our flat down.
Um, where does one begin? Well, I imagine most people would argue that free speech is a basic human right; it's certainly included in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which China itself signed up to:
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
It doesn't appear to mention drug or guns in there. (Or indeed, titties and/or beer).
Yes, Vampire: Bloodlines is a brilliant game, but the fact that it's currently up to unofficial patch 2.1 shows how riddled with flaws it is, while still having a devoted following (on one patch alone, I spent many days spellchecking the dialogues, for example). The real tragedy is towards the end when it loses all subtlety and turns into a beat-'em-up; the developers either ran out of time or inspiration.
I sympathise; I've noticed - and it's just a generalisation - that open-source application forums/mailing lists tend to be minefields compared to industries one. I've posted countless, sometimes dumb questions about Microsoft Word on various groups over the last 13 years, and didn't once get a snippy remark. Having recently moved to DocBook, my experience with the forum for one particular associated application has been chastening; to say I was patronised was an understatement.
So there really isn't much strategy involved. Just show up with your high level players and click the "Attack" button enough times.
You'd be right, if you were talking about an MMOPRG game that had one attack button. Is there such a thing?
But as an example from WoW, when playing my dwarf hunter (normal weapon: gun), when approaching a fight, I first have to make the choice of what trap to put down. Frost, if I think I might alert a mob and need to make a quick exit? Freeze, to trap a single enemy for 10 seconds while I attack its mate? Explosive, to damage several at once? Or, Immolation to do massive fire-based damage against a single enemy?
Then, I send in my pet against a opponent, deciding whether or not to land an Aimed Shot on the enemy just after the pet first lands a blow; hit too soon, and the enemy will come after me. I may actually intend that though; perhaps to lead him through a damage-inflicting trap I laid earlier.
Then I choose which "sting" I want to apply to the enemy. Scorpid, to weaken its strength and agility, if I feel my normal shots and my pet's blows won't land often enough. Or perhaps Serpent, to do damage over time. Or Viper, if it's a magic user and I want to drain its magical enemy. Sometimes it's best to switch these during a fight.
After applying the Sting shot, I then need to use normal shots and, judging on how much magical ability (mana) I have, use other shots at my disposal, such as Arcane shot (extra damage).
If the enemy notices my shots, I then have a decision to make. If he avoids my trap, I may need to halt him with Concussive Shots until my pet can catch up with him and regain his attention. Otherwise, I may need to pull out my dual axes and engage in direct melee combat; not a hunter's forte.
If so, I have a choice of landing a Disengaging axe blow, slowing him down and allowing me to gain enough distance to use a Concussive Shot, gaining even more distance, all the while sending my pet against him again. If the pet still can't shake him off, I've no choice but to bring him down my my range of melee attacks; some, like Mongoose Attack, I can only use after I've successfully dodged one of his attacks. As a Dwarf, I can choose to increase my natural armor (and avoid poison effects) by switching to Stoneform, but this slows me down.
--
I could go on, but I hope you appreciate it's more than just hitting an Attack button.
I might take Blizzard more seriously if they didn't themselves introduce real-life religious festivals into the games (note: I don't actually mind this, and think it's cute, but they can't do this and then condemn players for introducing similar issues).
Well, after watching over my shoulder for a bit, my fiance tried out WoW the other night with a female character. Within a few minutes, she'd been given 2 free bags by another (flirty) female character. So I can't tell whether it was a guy whose thought my fiance was really female, or another female, or another guy who thought it was another guy.... it's a crazy mixed up world. Hey, free bags though... SCORE.
Hell, you didn't even need a mod chip. There was an add-on called the Game Wizard that plugged into the parallel port at the back of the PS1 that also offered the ability to play copied and import CDs, along with a few other utilities:
I'm just saying it's not that hard to learn the command to install a package with your distribution.
You're right; it's not hard to learn one command. But to use Linux, you have to learn how to use dozens, probably hundreds of commands, many of them with parameters (and many of those parameters are annoyingly irregular). In essence, it's like trying to learn a new irregular language, and it's easy to forgive people if they feel they don't have the time.
If command-line Linux is a new language, Windows could be compared to one of those fridge magnet poetry sets, where at least the available language is laid out in from of you.
Command line tools can be very powerful - I'm just using grep today (using XLiveCD on Windows for a UNIX environment) to process game dialog files. Powerful, but incredibly frustrating (\. is the literal character ".", while \t is a tab character. Go figure.)
I love the irony of someone, complaining about users who think commands are hard to type, putting a typo in their post.
As long as there's zealots like this around who want to keep Linux knowledge to the high priests, Bill G has little to worry about.
P.
Modability? There's nothing I love better than a good game of Day of Defeat - a game that never would have happened if we only played on consoles.
Oh, and mouses; I still cannot for the life of me enjoy a first person shooter using a gamepad. Tried it, tried it again, tried it three times... nope. Ugh.
Then there is the hell that is the memory card.
There's also the fact I don't want to buy yet another console which I know will become obsolete, cluttering up my already small apartment. Not to mention with the PC, it has its own monitor, while with a console I'd have to hog the living room TV.
Not to mention PC graphics are better simply because they are constantly evolving. Sure, PS3 and XBox 360 are coming out soon, and I'm sure they'll look great. But played a PS2 game lately? I tried one here in work and cannot get over how crude the games look compared to the most recent PC games - especially those whose roots are not based in console games.
There's also the thrill of the occasional upgrade. Some people might say this is a negative... me, I loved putting another gig of memory into my machine recently and watching Half-Life 2 getting even prettier. Compare that with a console, when no matter how good it looks, you know that'll be as good as it ever gets.
He is one of those sellers that has tens of thousands of feedbacks and they roll in fast enough that the front page is always positive but the negatives are quite negative (and there are negative ones listed as positive to avoid feedback retaliation which is another shitty part of ebay).
I'm not sure what the problem is. When you view his profile, you can clearly see the total amount of negatives he has (5772 out of 80908 transactions, which is a HUGE proportion in my opinion - I'm wary of anyone with less than a 99% satisfaction rate). He sucks, his customers have said so, and eBay displays the fact. Buyer beware and all that.
Slashdot Mirror
Up to 9 dollars for 15 year old games? You can get relatively recent (4 year old) PC games for a fiver, yet somehow, Nintendo are being compared to Mother Theresa of Calcutta for their boundless generosity. Purr-lease, fan boys, get a grip on yourselves.
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It's like something a clueless marketing droid would write. No hard-core gamer willing to spend the kind of bucks required for this machine is going to play the types of games that wouldn't be affected by encoding music in the background. Indeed, I can't think of any game, bar Minesweeper, that wouldn't be affected by such CPU-intensive activity.
Yes I have lusted over many women, but it is a habbit that I have learned (by the grace of God) to overcome (at least to some extent). No, I'm not 9-10. I'm 21. I'm not gay. And even thinking about that makes me want to hurrl, and haven't had a thing to eat yet to day.
Hmm. You do know that most homophobes with violent physical reactions to even thoughts of homosexuality have been shown to react to same-sex images? On top of that, you don't have much interest in lusting after women.
I'm not saying you're necessarily gay; just perhaps extremely screwed up.
P.
Maybe they'll continue to follow in Apple's footsteps and actually produce a decent OS one of these days
The irony of the situation is, that they have, and that's the problem. I'm sure Linux fan boys will diagree, but for most people, XP is a perfectly acceptable OS. Upgrading from 98 to XP was an easy choice, since 98 was a piece of crap. None of the improvements made for Vista so far make me want to eventually spend 100-odd euro on it.
P.
WOW is very forgiving; while my desktop computer was out of action, I played it on a old Sony Vaio - something like 800Mhz with no graphics card. OK, so I was only getting 10 fps, but I was still mildly impressed.
P.
Same here; I've probably spent more on PC gaming in the past year than in the previous 4 years, and little of it in the shops. I've been playing WoW and City of Heroes, and also bought the HL2 Silver package on Steam. The only bricks-and-mortar shop purchase was the WoW retail pack: altogether, I've spent around EUR200, only EUR40 of which was spent in a store.
As far as I'm aware, none of the methods used to calculate current PC game spending would have taken into account that hidden EUR160.
P.
Or why the response to cartoons from Denmark, a Christian country, is to create anti-Semitic cartoons.
Speaking as an atheist, I find lots of religious stuff barmy, but at least when we watched The Life of Brian together the other night, my Catholic girlfriend did not burn our flat down.
P.
Um, where does one begin? Well, I imagine most people would argue that free speech is a basic human right; it's certainly included in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which China itself signed up to:
http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
It doesn't appear to mention drug or guns in there. (Or indeed, titties and/or beer).
P.
*cough*
Yes, Vampire: Bloodlines is a brilliant game, but the fact that it's currently up to unofficial patch 2.1 shows how riddled with flaws it is, while still having a devoted following (on one patch alone, I spent many days spellchecking the dialogues, for example). The real tragedy is towards the end when it loses all subtlety and turns into a beat-'em-up; the developers either ran out of time or inspiration.
P.
P.
You don't appear to be the only one who's had, um, problems with her:
http://blogs.gnome.org/view/bolsh/2005/08/30/0
http://www.martianrock.com/?p=130#comment-1676
I sympathise; I've noticed - and it's just a generalisation - that open-source application forums/mailing lists tend to be minefields compared to industries one. I've posted countless, sometimes dumb questions about Microsoft Word on various groups over the last 13 years, and didn't once get a snippy remark. Having recently moved to DocBook, my experience with the forum for one particular associated application has been chastening; to say I was patronised was an understatement.
P.
So there really isn't much strategy involved. Just show up with your high level players and click the "Attack" button enough times.
You'd be right, if you were talking about an MMOPRG game that had one attack button. Is there such a thing?
But as an example from WoW, when playing my dwarf hunter (normal weapon: gun), when approaching a fight, I first have to make the choice of what trap to put down. Frost, if I think I might alert a mob and need to make a quick exit? Freeze, to trap a single enemy for 10 seconds while I attack its mate? Explosive, to damage several at once? Or, Immolation to do massive fire-based damage against a single enemy?
Then, I send in my pet against a opponent, deciding whether or not to land an Aimed Shot on the enemy just after the pet first lands a blow; hit too soon, and the enemy will come after me. I may actually intend that though; perhaps to lead him through a damage-inflicting trap I laid earlier.
Then I choose which "sting" I want to apply to the enemy. Scorpid, to weaken its strength and agility, if I feel my normal shots and my pet's blows won't land often enough. Or perhaps Serpent, to do damage over time. Or Viper, if it's a magic user and I want to drain its magical enemy. Sometimes it's best to switch these during a fight.
After applying the Sting shot, I then need to use normal shots and, judging on how much magical ability (mana) I have, use other shots at my disposal, such as Arcane shot (extra damage).
If the enemy notices my shots, I then have a decision to make. If he avoids my trap, I may need to halt him with Concussive Shots until my pet can catch up with him and regain his attention. Otherwise, I may need to pull out my dual axes and engage in direct melee combat; not a hunter's forte.
If so, I have a choice of landing a Disengaging axe blow, slowing him down and allowing me to gain enough distance to use a Concussive Shot, gaining even more distance, all the while sending my pet against him again. If the pet still can't shake him off, I've no choice but to bring him down my my range of melee attacks; some, like Mongoose Attack, I can only use after I've successfully dodged one of his attacks. As a Dwarf, I can choose to increase my natural armor (and avoid poison effects) by switching to Stoneform, but this slows me down.
--
I could go on, but I hope you appreciate it's more than just hitting an Attack button.
P.
I might take Blizzard more seriously if they didn't themselves introduce real-life religious festivals into the games (note: I don't actually mind this, and think it's cute, but they can't do this and then condemn players for introducing similar issues).
P.
Well, after watching over my shoulder for a bit, my fiance tried out WoW the other night with a female character. Within a few minutes, she'd been given 2 free bags by another (flirty) female character. So I can't tell whether it was a guy whose thought my fiance was really female, or another female, or another guy who thought it was another guy.... it's a crazy mixed up world. Hey, free bags though... SCORE.
P.
I've been playing WoW for 4 months now, and I still have no idea what some of these people are talking about sometimes, so don't worry.
P.
Yes, Stallman hates fascism so much.... he was against a war against an actual, genuinely-based-on-facism government.
As for his own teenage-bedroom-angst definition of fascism, let's just skip that embarrassment for all our sakes.
Will any luck, the neutopia is just around the corner.
P.
Serious question: where does the 500 million go? P.
Hell, you didn't even need a mod chip. There was an add-on called the Game Wizard that plugged into the parallel port at the back of the PS1 that also offered the ability to play copied and import CDs, along with a few other utilities:
http://www.howstuffworks.com/gadget224.htm
P.
Sorry, but that's not logically true. Ruth Lawrence was 13 when she received a first-class degree with maths from Oxford Univerity (more at http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/j uly/4/newsid_2492000/2492853.stm, and you can view her webpage at http://www.ma.huji.ac.il/~ruthel/). Is your reaction to think "gee, well, those Oxford maths exams must be easy"?
P.
http://oceanclub.blogspot.com/
I'm just saying it's not that hard to learn the command to install a package with your distribution.
You're right; it's not hard to learn one command. But to use Linux, you have to learn how to use dozens, probably hundreds of commands, many of them with parameters (and many of those parameters are annoyingly irregular). In essence, it's like trying to learn a new irregular language, and it's easy to forgive people if they feel they don't have the time.
If command-line Linux is a new language, Windows could be compared to one of those fridge magnet poetry sets, where at least the available language is laid out in from of you.
Command line tools can be very powerful - I'm just using grep today (using XLiveCD on Windows for a UNIX environment) to process game dialog files. Powerful, but incredibly frustrating (\. is the literal character ".", while \t is a tab character. Go figure.)
P.
I love the irony of someone, complaining about users who think commands are hard to type, putting a typo in their post. As long as there's zealots like this around who want to keep Linux knowledge to the high priests, Bill G has little to worry about. P.
why would I want to buy a Win game?
Modability? There's nothing I love better than a good game of Day of Defeat - a game that never would have happened if we only played on consoles.
Oh, and mouses; I still cannot for the life of me enjoy a first person shooter using a gamepad. Tried it, tried it again, tried it three times... nope. Ugh.
Then there is the hell that is the memory card.
There's also the fact I don't want to buy yet another console which I know will become obsolete, cluttering up my already small apartment. Not to mention with the PC, it has its own monitor, while with a console I'd have to hog the living room TV.
Not to mention PC graphics are better simply because they are constantly evolving. Sure, PS3 and XBox 360 are coming out soon, and I'm sure they'll look great. But played a PS2 game lately? I tried one here in work and cannot get over how crude the games look compared to the most recent PC games - especially those whose roots are not based in console games.
There's also the thrill of the occasional upgrade. Some people might say this is a negative... me, I loved putting another gig of memory into my machine recently and watching Half-Life 2 getting even prettier. Compare that with a console, when no matter how good it looks, you know that'll be as good as it ever gets.
PCs? I love 'em. Consoles? Meh.
P.
He is one of those sellers that has tens of thousands of feedbacks and they roll in fast enough that the front page is always positive but the negatives are quite negative (and there are negative ones listed as positive to avoid feedback retaliation which is another shitty part of ebay).
I'm not sure what the problem is. When you view his profile, you can clearly see the total amount of negatives he has (5772 out of 80908 transactions, which is a HUGE proportion in my opinion - I'm wary of anyone with less than a 99% satisfaction rate). He sucks, his customers have said so, and eBay displays the fact. Buyer beware and all that.
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