I liked the story of Zelda 2, but not the sidescroller feel of the game. Yes, the story in Zelda wasn't incredibly deep, but it was interesting to me. I also spent many many hours playing the gameboy zelda (Did you discover missiles? Equip bomb+Bow and press both buttons at once!) and I'm planning on getting the GameCube Zelda pretty soon. Hopefully it will be better than the n64 zelda.
One nice thing about Zelda is that it was marketed as an Adventure game more than an RPG. When you bought it you knew you were getting a game that would involve more action than some others. Also, the combat is intuitive and for the most part doesn't require incredible reflexes until you get to the N64 version of Zelda, which I hated. I was good at Zelda as a 9 year old with poor vision and poor reflexes. I should be equally good at the newest Zelda now that I'm 22 and have glasses and excellent reflexes, right? But the interface to the game was so broken because Nintendo was enamored with their bad 3D engine that I could barely function in the game world. The original Zelda was close to being the perfect game, Simple interface that was completely intuitive, dynamic and interesting story that progresses clearly through the game, and it was jut plain enjoyable.
I really enjoyed Shenmue actually, but I think it was poorly done compared to how it COULD have been done. I would have dispensed with the voiceacting, it was terrible. Just give me the scrolling text box. Second, I would have used a different graphics engine for the town scenes and the fight scenes to allow you to CHANGE THE VIEW when in the fight scenes so that you can see your opponents. Something like the way the Tekken camera following works. So you can always see yourself and your opponent. The town was great though, weather affects, lots of people, but the plot really wasn't that involved.
That's right, I had forgotten about Sabin. His was especially annoying for some people I know since they are terrible at those rolling movements required to pull his bumrush move off.
Shenmue is an entirely different story. I bought it, played through it, and loved it. But the story was only so-so, the pacing was terrible (HOW many hours driving a forklift?!) and it was designed to span 3 games. It's also not the same style of RPG that is being discussed here. It was more like Tekken, in the city, with some people you could talk to.
Except that the story was so PAINFULLY BAD that I WISHED for random battles to slow the progress! I stopped playing the game entirely when they randomly switched the bad guy for a NEW bad guy on the 4th fucking disc! It wasn't bad enough that they got lazy with the character histories, or that both the motivator (SEED founder) and the original Antagonist where also from the same place as all of the characters, they had to go and randomly swap the bad guy out for something that had NO introduction whatsoever before that point. There was no reason to believe that a larger force was behind the first bad guy at all. Also, you could start fighting, do nothing except store spells, flee, repeat until you had full spells, attach them to your stats and be a level 2 guy with 9999 hp and max stats of all kind. Then all of the monsters would be really weak, and you could tank through the game. It didn't remove the power leveling shortcut, it just changed the dynamics around. I give FFVIII 2 stars, both based on the fact that it had a fun subgame.
One annoying and disturbing trend I noticed recently is the "actionifying" of RPG combat. It started with FF7 in my opinion, where you had to hit the button at the right time for Cloud's sword to fire. IT was worse with Legend of Legaia (Which I liked, and I enjoyed the combat, but my wife HATED It because she plays for the storyline) and then I've seen recent games where you have to hit multiple buttons in a row during combat as dials and boxes move around and occasionally sync up. It means that instead of pressing one button a few dozen times per combat you have to dedicated a lot of though to the combat itself. This is REALLY annoying when you like to just level up and go to the next story. If you want to make a fighting game, make a fighting game. If you want to make an RPG make an RPG. There should never be a human reflex based combat portion. I'm playing the role of my character, not myself. If I have only one hand, and that hand only has one finger, I should still be able to play the game.
Is housebreaking possible? The only way this game would be fun for me would be if I could burgle houses.... >:) I'm not really into that whole mob-farming gig where you camp spawns for 3 weeks to build up your hoard.
That whole concussion thing is the reason I FEAR airbags! I'm a short guy, and I sit really close to the steering wheel so I can see and stuff. If an airbag deployed it would probably kill me!
Because he didn't circumvent any copy protection mechanisms himself. Instead, he created-- as the copyright holder, he is the legal author-- a tool to circumvent copy protection, and then distributed his tool into the United States. That's illegal.
Ok, I just want to be clear on this, are you seriously asserting that each individual holder of a copyrighted work who wishes to excersise their fairuse rights must be capable of creating a device to circumvent the anti-fairuse measures on the work they have purchased on their own? I believe that places an unreasonable burden on the customer attempting to use the work they purchased in manner which is completely legal.
Oh, and FYI the average prison stay for rapists is just barely more than 5 years. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/psats fv.pdf
Because that would involve no one else being able to print, because the two networks are seperate, jackass. Oh, and as an added bonus, he insisted on buying a Dlink WAP, and the thing is a piece of crap. The connection drops every 10-15 minutes, and it's sitting 4ft from his laptop. He doesn't even NEED wireless except for the time dif between plugging his laptop into our network, and not.
Heh, we're looking into software VPN right now. Heck, I even had it set up at first where I just had to put the key in on the laptop the FIRST TIME, and never again and he said it was still too much trouble. Argh! The guy is seriously annoying.
True Story: Boss insists on getting wireless base station for the office for visitors, people that come in and out with laptops. I'm fine with that, I think, "No problem, I can turn on the encryption, require a password to connect to the wifi network, and we're good". Boss tells me "That's too much trouble, I want to just come in and have it work" I'm like, ok, no problem. You get internet access then. So I hook the WAP up so that it doesn't have access to our internal network, just to the internet. What do I hear next? "Why can't I print? Why can't I see the shared drives?!" A 45 minute explanation on why we shouldn't have our network browsable by every college kid drinking coffee downtown and he stops ranting. Only to come in a week later asking why he can't print. So now, whenever he is here, I have the WAP plugged in to the whole network, so anyone could just wander by and join our network, browse it, check out the shared drives.... Luckily the important stuff is a bit more secure. But not much. Once you get onto our network half of the defense is gone anways... Drives me crazy, because if our network gets compromised I'm the one who gets the blame.
Kintanon
Re:This has *got* to be copy-pasted...
on
Largo Loving Linux
·
· Score: 2
I have to disagree with a single point here. Wine is not an acceptable substitute for windows functionality. Why should Linux not have native DirectX support? I assume it is incredibly difficult, but why has no major vendor done it yet? I don't WANT to run a windows emulator (yeah yeah, wine is not an emulator...), I just want to run linux.
This person most likely has a pre-existing business relationship with everyone who has sent him catalogs and whatnot via the business related e-mails which he sends out. I personally have received several from him and in return I signed him up to receive several excellent catalogs which he may be interested in.
Last time I checked it wasn't mail fraud to sign someone else up for a free catalog. In fact, there are many places which encourage you to sign friends and family up to receive their free catalog. I personally have signed Mr. Ralsky up for 5 or 6 catlogs which I think he might find interesting, one about how to save as much as 66% off of his bills, which may help him since it seems his current business may not sustain its profitibility much longer, one about Jeeps, since I heard he owns a Jeep Wrangler (I may be misinformed), and one about warm weather gear since he lives in Michigan. Hopefully he will find one of these catalogs helpful. And if not, he need only opt out of the service and he shouldn't be bothered any more.
Thank you, I did my part and signed him up for half a dozen catalogs he might be interested in. I believe him sending me business related e-mails constitutes a prior business relationship with me, which I have taken advantage of to send him these excellent catalogs in which he might find some amazing gifts for his family, or products that he may enjoy using. Bondage Whores monthly is surely a high quality publication and I hope he gets many hours of use out of the items he is sure to wish to purchase from them!
If you snagged like... 5 of these big ol' drives you could get damn near every work of classical music ever written, and probably store it in.WAV so you don't have to lose all of your background instruments.... Mmmmmm.....
Gods existence is in fact entirely irellevant to the question of the beginning of life because it is explicitly stated that the existence of God can not be proven. So there WILL be a natural and reproducible method for the primary generation of life which does not involve the intercession of a deity outside the natural rules of the universe as they have been established. So people need to stop talking about "proving" the existence of God. The next person who tries to do that to you, just slap them. It's not worth the effort of telling them they are an idiot.
You notice that you have quoted a parenthetical which uses the word "or". It was not a common occurence in my experiment for someone to simply be told RTFM. They were usually provided a link to the relevant documentation and told that their answer could be found within that documentation. It was done politely and with the intention of helping the questioner learn. I only phrased as RTFM because that is still the common term for the method of help described.
14 billions is nothing. I repeat NOTHING compared to what they are required to do with it. The amount of that money which finally makes it into new projects is tremendously smaller. A lot of it is taken with regular expenses, maintenance, etc...
So there are fewer Linux users and fewer people overall familiar with Linux. The cost of finding someone to help you is going to be higher. Plus, I would argue there is *far* more to learn so you're going to pay the high priced people even more.
To test your hypothesis I joined 4 different IRC networks, Undernet, Efnet, Dalnet, and Newnet, on each of those networks I joined #linux, #linuxhelp, #windows, #win2000, #win2k, #win98, #windowsNT, #winNT, and #microsoft. On every single one of them #linux and #linuxhelp had 50+ people, and people were being helped (or told to RTFM), in none of the windows related chans were there more than 15 people, in only 2 of them was there actual conversation going on, and only 1 of those conversations involved someone being helped.
So I posit that it is EASIER to find help for a newbie linux admin than it is to find help as a newbie Windows admin. At least on IRC.
I don't think that follows at ALL from a reading of Genesis. There is nothing which indicates that a 24 hour period is involved. The 24 hour period is because of the rotation of the earth, if the earth does not yet exist, as it doesn't during the first few "days" of creation then there is no reason to assume anything is taking 24 hours. I'm getting my info from someone who went to college as a biblical linguist and was studying to be a missionary until recently. So I'm basing everything off of his translation of the text from as close to the original as he could get access to. He says that the unit of time specified has nothing to do with the traditional term for the day/night cycle of living.
Slashdot Mirror
Same here! My wife is also going pre-med, I help her through school, I retire at 35! >:)
Kintanon
(According to slashdot it only took me 19 seconds to write that comment!)
I liked the story of Zelda 2, but not the sidescroller feel of the game. Yes, the story in Zelda wasn't incredibly deep, but it was interesting to me. I also spent many many hours playing the gameboy zelda (Did you discover missiles? Equip bomb+Bow and press both buttons at once!) and I'm planning on getting the GameCube Zelda pretty soon.
Hopefully it will be better than the n64 zelda.
Kintanon
One nice thing about Zelda is that it was marketed as an Adventure game more than an RPG. When you bought it you knew you were getting a game that would involve more action than some others. Also, the combat is intuitive and for the most part doesn't require incredible reflexes until you get to the N64 version of Zelda, which I hated. I was good at Zelda as a 9 year old with poor vision and poor reflexes. I should be equally good at the newest Zelda now that I'm 22 and have glasses and excellent reflexes, right? But the interface to the game was so broken because Nintendo was enamored with their bad 3D engine that I could barely function in the game world.
The original Zelda was close to being the perfect game, Simple interface that was completely intuitive, dynamic and interesting story that progresses clearly through the game, and it was jut plain enjoyable.
Kintanon
I really enjoyed Shenmue actually, but I think it was poorly done compared to how it COULD have been done. I would have dispensed with the voiceacting, it was terrible. Just give me the scrolling text box. Second, I would have used a different graphics engine for the town scenes and the fight scenes to allow you to CHANGE THE VIEW when in the fight scenes so that you can see your opponents. Something like the way the Tekken camera following works. So you can always see yourself and your opponent. The town was great though, weather affects, lots of people, but the plot really wasn't that involved.
Kintanon
That's right, I had forgotten about Sabin. His was especially annoying for some people I know since they are terrible at those rolling movements required to pull his bumrush move off.
Kintanon
Shenmue is an entirely different story. I bought it, played through it, and loved it. But the story was only so-so, the pacing was terrible (HOW many hours driving a forklift?!) and it was designed to span 3 games. It's also not the same style of RPG that is being discussed here.
It was more like Tekken, in the city, with some people you could talk to.
Kintanon
Except that the story was so PAINFULLY BAD that I WISHED for random battles to slow the progress! I stopped playing the game entirely when they randomly switched the bad guy for a NEW bad guy on the 4th fucking disc! It wasn't bad enough that they got lazy with the character histories, or that both the motivator (SEED founder) and the original Antagonist where also from the same place as all of the characters, they had to go and randomly swap the bad guy out for something that had NO introduction whatsoever before that point. There was no reason to believe that a larger force was behind the first bad guy at all.
Also, you could start fighting, do nothing except store spells, flee, repeat until you had full spells, attach them to your stats and be a level 2 guy with 9999 hp and max stats of all kind. Then all of the monsters would be really weak, and you could tank through the game. It didn't remove the power leveling shortcut, it just changed the dynamics around. I give FFVIII 2 stars, both based on the fact that it had a fun subgame.
Kintanon
One annoying and disturbing trend I noticed recently is the "actionifying" of RPG combat. It started with FF7 in my opinion, where you had to hit the button at the right time for Cloud's sword to fire. IT was worse with Legend of Legaia (Which I liked, and I enjoyed the combat, but my wife HATED It because she plays for the storyline) and then I've seen recent games where you have to hit multiple buttons in a row during combat as dials and boxes move around and occasionally sync up. It means that instead of pressing one button a few dozen times per combat you have to dedicated a lot of though to the combat itself. This is REALLY annoying when you like to just level up and go to the next story. If you want to make a fighting game, make a fighting game. If you want to make an RPG make an RPG. There should never be a human reflex based combat portion. I'm playing the role of my character, not myself. If I have only one hand, and that hand only has one finger, I should still be able to play the game.
Kintanon
Is housebreaking possible? The only way this game would be fun for me would be if I could burgle houses.... >:)
I'm not really into that whole mob-farming gig where you camp spawns for 3 weeks to build up your hoard.
Kintanon
That whole concussion thing is the reason I FEAR airbags! I'm a short guy, and I sit really close to the steering wheel so I can see and stuff. If an airbag deployed it would probably kill me!
Kintanon
Because he didn't circumvent any copy protection mechanisms himself. Instead, he created-- as the copyright holder, he is the legal author-- a tool to circumvent copy protection, and then distributed his tool into the United States. That's illegal.
s fv.pdf
Ok, I just want to be clear on this, are you seriously asserting that each individual holder of a copyrighted work who wishes to excersise their fairuse rights must be capable of creating a device to circumvent the anti-fairuse measures on the work they have purchased on their own? I believe that places an unreasonable burden on the customer attempting to use the work they purchased in manner which is completely legal.
Oh, and FYI the average prison stay for rapists is just barely more than 5 years.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/psat
Kintanon
Because that would involve no one else being able to print, because the two networks are seperate, jackass. Oh, and as an added bonus, he insisted on buying a Dlink WAP, and the thing is a piece of crap. The connection drops every 10-15 minutes, and it's sitting 4ft from his laptop. He doesn't even NEED wireless except for the time dif between plugging his laptop into our network, and not.
Kintanon
Heh, we're looking into software VPN right now. Heck, I even had it set up at first where I just had to put the key in on the laptop the FIRST TIME, and never again and he said it was still too much trouble.
Argh! The guy is seriously annoying.
Kintanon
True Story:
Boss insists on getting wireless base station for the office for visitors, people that come in and out with laptops. I'm fine with that, I think, "No problem, I can turn on the encryption, require a password to connect to the wifi network, and we're good".
Boss tells me "That's too much trouble, I want to just come in and have it work"
I'm like, ok, no problem. You get internet access then. So I hook the WAP up so that it doesn't have access to our internal network, just to the internet. What do I hear next? "Why can't I print? Why can't I see the shared drives?!" A 45 minute explanation on why we shouldn't have our network browsable by every college kid drinking coffee downtown and he stops ranting. Only to come in a week later asking why he can't print. So now, whenever he is here, I have the WAP plugged in to the whole network, so anyone could just wander by and join our network, browse it, check out the shared drives.... Luckily the important stuff is a bit more secure. But not much. Once you get onto our network half of the defense is gone anways... Drives me crazy, because if our network gets compromised I'm the one who gets the blame.
Kintanon
I have to disagree with a single point here. Wine is not an acceptable substitute for windows functionality. Why should Linux not have native DirectX support? I assume it is incredibly difficult, but why has no major vendor done it yet? I don't WANT to run a windows emulator (yeah yeah, wine is not an emulator...), I just want to run linux.
Kintanon
This person most likely has a pre-existing business relationship with everyone who has sent him catalogs and whatnot via the business related e-mails which he sends out. I personally have received several from him and in return I signed him up to receive several excellent catalogs which he may be interested in.
Kintanon
Last time I checked it wasn't mail fraud to sign someone else up for a free catalog. In fact, there are many places which encourage you to sign friends and family up to receive their free catalog. I personally have signed Mr. Ralsky up for 5 or 6 catlogs which I think he might find interesting, one about how to save as much as 66% off of his bills, which may help him since it seems his current business may not sustain its profitibility much longer, one about Jeeps, since I heard he owns a Jeep Wrangler (I may be misinformed), and one about warm weather gear since he lives in Michigan. Hopefully he will find one of these catalogs helpful. And if not, he need only opt out of the service and he shouldn't be bothered any more.
Kintanon
Thank you, I did my part and signed him up for half a dozen catalogs he might be interested in. I believe him sending me business related e-mails constitutes a prior business relationship with me, which I have taken advantage of to send him these excellent catalogs in which he might find some amazing gifts for his family, or products that he may enjoy using.
Bondage Whores monthly is surely a high quality publication and I hope he gets many hours of use out of the items he is sure to wish to purchase from them!
Kintanon
If you snagged like... 5 of these big ol' drives you could get damn near every work of classical music ever written, and probably store it in .WAV so you don't have to lose all of your background instruments.... Mmmmmm.....
Kintanon
Gods existence is in fact entirely irellevant to the question of the beginning of life because it is explicitly stated that the existence of God can not be proven. So there WILL be a natural and reproducible method for the primary generation of life which does not involve the intercession of a deity outside the natural rules of the universe as they have been established. So people need to stop talking about "proving" the existence of God. The next person who tries to do that to you, just slap them. It's not worth the effort of telling them they are an idiot.
Kintanon
You notice that you have quoted a parenthetical which uses the word "or". It was not a common occurence in my experiment for someone to simply be told RTFM. They were usually provided a link to the relevant documentation and told that their answer could be found within that documentation. It was done politely and with the intention of helping the questioner learn. I only phrased as RTFM because that is still the common term for the method of help described.
Kintanon
$507.37 per person, for the richest 50% of taxpayers. I doubt most of them would notice.
Kintanon
14 billions is nothing. I repeat NOTHING compared to what they are required to do with it. The amount of that money which finally makes it into new projects is tremendously smaller. A lot of it is taken with regular expenses, maintenance, etc...
Kintanon
So there are fewer Linux users and fewer people overall familiar with Linux. The cost of finding someone to help you is going to be higher. Plus, I would argue there is *far* more to learn so you're going to pay the high priced people even more.
To test your hypothesis I joined 4 different IRC networks, Undernet, Efnet, Dalnet, and Newnet, on each of those networks I joined #linux, #linuxhelp, #windows, #win2000, #win2k, #win98, #windowsNT, #winNT, and #microsoft. On every single one of them #linux and #linuxhelp had 50+ people, and people were being helped (or told to RTFM), in none of the windows related chans were there more than 15 people, in only 2 of them was there actual conversation going on, and only 1 of those conversations involved someone being helped.
So I posit that it is EASIER to find help for a newbie linux admin than it is to find help as a newbie Windows admin.
At least on IRC.
Kintanon
I don't think that follows at ALL from a reading of Genesis. There is nothing which indicates that a 24 hour period is involved. The 24 hour period is because of the rotation of the earth, if the earth does not yet exist, as it doesn't during the first few "days" of creation then there is no reason to assume anything is taking 24 hours. I'm getting my info from someone who went to college as a biblical linguist and was studying to be a missionary until recently. So I'm basing everything off of his translation of the text from as close to the original as he could get access to. He says that the unit of time specified has nothing to do with the traditional term for the day/night cycle of living.
Kintanon