"Men, we have led these dumb bastards far away to keep them from gettin' their filthy claws on Earth. Instead, we stumbled on something so hot for 'em, they're scrambling over each other to get it. Well, I don't care if its God's own anti-son-of-a-bitch machine or a giant hula hoop, but we won't let them have it! What we will let them have is a belly full of lead and a pool of their own blood to drown in! Am I right, Marines?"
No one cares what the Doom guy looks like in Doom 3 for many reasons. It's a remake, he doesn't have a voice (so he's "you"), it's only in short cinematic sequences with pretty much no plot that you actually see his face...
Compare that to Halo, where there's actually a point made about it. Beginning of Halo 2: CHIEF: I thought you said there weren't going to be any cameras. JOHNSON: And I thought you said you were going to wear something nice!
Somewhat later: Cortana (cocking her head): You look nice! CHIEF and JOHNSON: Thank you!
It's a source of humor, it says something about his character, and he would probably be a somewhat different character without his helmet. In contrast, the Doom guy from Doom 1 wasn't a character -- he was really only a character in Quake 3 and Doom 3, and the Quake 3 Doom Guy is hardly worth mentioning.
I guess it's kind of like Chocolat -- I think it was Chocolat -- some movie where the main characters share a fetish that's never actually explicitly mentioned. Between Ebert and whoever else he was working on, one didn't like it because he thought it was cheap and unfair not to say what it was, and the other liked it because anything would've been disappointing. I think this is the real problem -- any face you put on the Chief will be disappointing. Certainly, no ordinary Marine will ever see it. Half of their morale comes from watching the Chief walk onto the field, a living legend, a giant monster who happens to be on their side -- so of course, it's all the more fuel for rumors and legend if he never takes off his helmet.
If you think faces can't create an emotional attachment, you need to watch Red vs Blue. Ok, so it's a comedy, but... hell, play the game. Or watch the effect the Nightmare Armor suits will have on any fanboys when a Microsoft flunkie shows up in one.
As for the aliens, I guess you could say they do, if you can call it a face. Eyes, yes. Nose, I'm not sure. Mouth, sort of a big hole. Lips, not so much.
And you're right, it is difficult and risky. I guess that's why American Beauty, The Matrix, and V for Vendetta were never created. Oh wait...
Account number isn't always enough. There are other things, like signatures -- still forgeable, but it's better than nothing. Birthdate, number on the back of the credit card, etc etc etc. The phishing sites gather way more than you could probably get from a check or a credit card.
(Hmm, how sure can any of us be that the routers and/or DNS servers between your box and your bank's box are never compromised, especially with ISPs getting into the "let's fuck around with DNS" game like Verizon did a while back, and Earthpink's trying to do now:)
Because SSL has authentication builtin. Just make sure you're not only at the bank's website, but at their SSL-enabled website, before giving them a password. Then you only have to be paranoid about the various Certificate Authorities you trust (VeriSign, etc), instead of every single DNS server/cache between you and theirs, or any machine that shares a network with those DNS servers.
Banks should not be held liable for phishing scams over email, provided they do not actually send similar emails -- which is more and more true these days. There simply isn't a legitimate reason to do this kind of stuff over email.
Banks (and credit card companies) should be held liable for fraudulent transactions conducted over the Internet, because the vast majority of these are inherently insecure, and it's difficult or impossible to tell the difference between a "good" website and a "bad" one.
As far as I know, neither of my banks EVER sends me email telling me I have to "click here to reactivate my account". Any individual who falls for that deserves what they get.
Games with HD support check for the official Sony drive, but the Linux Kit RTE doesn't.
Garh, that's annoying, but at least it's not Linux being bastardized there. Although swapping between a 160 gig Linux homebrew drive and a 20 gig official drive for playing games would be a hell of a lot more annoying than just partitioning it.
The GPL allows for the sale of Linux distros for money, you know that.
Yes, I do. I also know that anywhere else something like this has been tried, there's usually a very good reason for it. For instance, if I were to buy RHEL, I'd also get insane amounts of support to go with it, possibly justifying the price. Certainly, there are cases where you can buy a Linux CD for $2 or so.
But in all of these cases, at least there's a choice. It still pisses me off that not only does it cost $99 (which might be reasonable, if I didn't already own equivalents for half the kit), and if there was some alternative distro I could download for free. BlackRhino doesn't count, it requires the kit to operate.
And in PS2 Linux's case you're paying for the included hardware: the HD, network adapter, keyboard+mouse, and the VGA cable.
I already have plenty of spare HDs, if I needed them -- I wanted to boot off the network. I have a network adapter, for use with PS2 games. I can grab the keyboard/mouse off my desktop, and Linux doesn't require the VGA anyway -- it can use the TV. And I would probably be running it headless anyway.
So it's not the $99 that's a ripoff, it's the $99 with no choices at all. Kind of like if I could only get a new version of Ubuntu by buying a whole new computer from Canonical.
As I said, some of us tried to convince SCEfoo to sell RTE discs on their own just to people like you.
Yeah, nice suggestion, too bad Sony ignored it. Would be even nicer if they offered the individual files -- the ISO, the kernel images, etc -- for download.
There are reasons they can't really do that -- it would be legitimizing things like modchips, exploits, etc -- but I don't find any of these to be particularly valid, and they didn't even try (just releasing the DVD).
For the PS2 I guess most people thought better a Linux with the RTE restrictions than no Linux at all.
By using an exploit and a few small, native PS2 binaries, I was able to backup and restore files from a PS2 memory card to a desktop computer over a network. This is activated by attempting to load a PS1 game with a PS2 memory card in the slot -- it will boot off the memory card instead. The downsides are security (with Linux I could use SSH, this is just some weird, unencrypted TCP) and how annoyingly hard it can be to change network settings -- and some weirdness in attempting to reboot it to play a game afterwards.
So, actually, for me, no Linux was better than the $99 Linux kit. I could probably have done the same thing with the Linux kit, but I doubt I could've gotten it to fit neatly onto a memory card, or boot from the network.
This is why I'm somewhat leery of PS3 Linux. If they do it right, a PS3 could be a viable replacement for a desktop computer. If they do it wrong (again), I may as well buy a Wii.
Fair enough, I was pointing out a specific example that I think both makes things hard, and encourages the kind of tactics and reaction-based play you like, while still likely requiring a bit of memorization.
It may be like PHP, though. PHP isn't that horrible a language, although it is pretty damned bad. The reason most people refuse to work in PHP is that it's too accessible, or for some reason, it's perceived as THE language to do backends. People move from HTML to JavaScript to PHP. This also means you're going to have documentation with that shiny new PHP script that says "If you have any problems with permissions, just chmod 777." I don't want to touch code written by these morons.
As for VB.NET, I don't really get the difference yet between that and C#, but then, I only ever tried to learn C#. Maybe I'll try one of the Ruby/Python/whatever ports to.NET next, those would actually be decent...
These days, kids get this from video games. Since each game has its own commandline interface, usually separate and distinct from its scripting language, it's not very powerful, but you still see kids admining a counterstrike server (or whatever) playing with sv_gravity, friction, and other fun things before they just admin_slay each other.
It was the Slashdotters of yesterday who were playing with BASIC anyway. The same kind of kids who today start with HTML and Javascript. And by the way, almost every kid I know who's at all into MySpace -- and that's a lot -- have at some point made some attempt to "learn some codes", which apparently means learn some HTML and JavaScript.
They may only be using it to turn their page into hideous colors and flashy lights, but it's a start.
External dependencies are such a non-issue it's not even funny. Ubuntu comes with Firefox, does that make Konqueror a less valid Linux browser? Oh, boo hoo, you have to type "apt-get install konqueror".
Now, considering drawing the pixel on the screen, all you need is a decent library.
More importantly, unless you NEED to be able to draw pictures to get them interested in the first place, why do you need graphical capability?
Anyway, my own answer to all of these would probably be Squeak. Given OpenCroquet, and you can do 3D games.
Random things can and do happen, I'm just pointing out that to the extent that it's scripted, and to the extent that you can memorize things, you'll now have to on Legendary.
I still can and do play through on normal or Heroic without memorizing a thing, and it's different every time, even if the plot is the same, and I like it that way.
They didn't even do that for the keyboard and mosue (it's a really nice keyboard with a built in USB port for the mouse.)
How's that relevant? I can buy any old keyboard/mouse I want, and in this case, I didn't want any, I wanted it to boot from the network and, if anything, I could SSH in.
If you can get hold of an RTE disc and an FFXI HD you can format it and install.
Key word here: Format. You seem to imply that you can share the drive between them, but I've heard just the opposite.
And anyway, why can't I just grab any old hard drive and put it in there? Why does it have to be a specific one?
I can understand your frustrations but the restrictions were put on the kit to please the "media selling" part of SCEfoo.
I don't care what their fucking excuse is. It's a bastardized Linux that really doesn't deserve to be called "Linux". It's the kind of thing I hope the GPLv3 will prevent.
It is NOT the kind of thing you should be wasting your breath (or keystrokes) apologizing for.
$99 is too much money for a FREE operating system, especially when all I wanted was the kernel and a couple of commandline utilities to safely backup my savegames.
Maybe PS3 Linux will have fewer restrictions. We can hope.
We can hope, but "fewer" isn't going to cut it this time. Try "none".
Seriously, the only modern console I know of that I haven't seen tons of modchips and cracks around for is the Gamecube, and that's only because no one cared. Piracy is going to do far less harm to console games than it's done to PC games, and it doesn't seem to have been much of a problem for PC games. Homebrew is not going to kill certified, licensed games with official dev tools anytime soon.
Give us back our homebrew, or you don't get to call it a "computer".
Agreed on all points, yet I do know people who play Halo 2 on Legendary, which has similar sniper issues. The reason I didn't like that is that even with a hard game like Jak II, I can in theory do it right the first time, because I can react to the situation unfolding around me. With snipers, you have to memorize where they are, and still be wicked fast.
But my friend still does it, and is one of those who beat the game within 48 hours of bringing it home. I never quite understood it, but maybe he's just on a different level than me -- it certainly seems that way whenever we play against each other, which is why we usually play co-op on Heroic.
Agreed, and I do like games where I can just quicksave every 10 seconds. But there's something to be said for the rush of actually beating that impossible sequence.
Bastardized as in, you HAVE to buy it. Even if you have a spare IDE hard drive lying around, and you intend to download Black Rhino Linux. Even if you have multiple ways to run custom code, so it's not an issue of booting an unsigned disk. Even given all of these, you STILL need their kernel with their custom binary kernel stuff, which means you need to buy the dev kit, which last I checked means some $200, including a hard drive that you shouldn't need (I wanted to boot from the network).
Also: The hard drive is not compatible with PS2 games. Thus, you have to have a separate hard drive if you want to use PS2 games which can use a hard drive, such as Final Fantasy XI.
It's not necessarily the open source I'm bitching about -- I use binary nVidia drivers on my desktop -- it's the insane, unnecessary limitations that they put on it, which would immediately go away if it was open source, or if they were at all decent about it.
Wow, I was reading your first list as a list of games and wondering what I was missing out on! (At 6 AM after being up all night, my head makes spawn == spore...)
More seriously, if you want fast action (which may help you develop some close-range tactics for the rest of the game), find one of the various IceWorld maps and play there. A round is really not going to last very long, so unless the teams are insanely unbalanced, you should get at least a couple of kills.
Counter-Strike was always hit or miss for me. A miss would be 20 rounds of not getting a single kill. A hit -- this did happen -- 20 rounds on a huge map (Blackhawk Down), winning, often the last man standing on my team. A bit of schadenfreude there, too -- Blackhawk Down is either the most fun or the least fun you'll ever have in Counter-Strike, all depending on how soon you die, because once you die, you just know you'll have to watch 5-10 mins of 2 guys wandering through this big-ass city trying to find each other, all the more maddening because you KNOW where they both are, you're watching them walk right past each other and not notice, and wishing someone would just commit suicide so you could respawn in a new round.
And, it being Counter-Strike, I have also had such things as 10-20 round winning streaks with TK-ing bastards, with my name as "Penis". Kill half my team, then the other half, then kill off the entire other team single-handedly. I don't think I've ever heard so much whining over voice chat, ever.
Quake 3 and DMC, though -- these were fun even when you're losing. And I was the best at Quake 3 at a couple of small LAN parties. But without many people, we'd often have to invent things like: Who can kill the most bots the fastest? Spam Majors on I Can Win, then try to gauntlet them the fastest...
But really, I think the lesson here is that anything can be a sandbox game, even more than GTA, and that I suck at Counter-Strike almost as much as I suck at StarCraft, but I somehow still manage to be Rob the Counterstrike Guy (sorry, can't link to it directly -- scroll down)
Take a game like Quake 3 -- I really couldn't care whether I beat it, or whether I use cheats, or what. It's really intended to be multiplayer anyway. Given x hours, I will have fun, even if it means gauntleting bots on "I Can Win." Or I can play on Nightmare, or online -- either one, I will lose most of the time, but damn, is it fun to win just by the skin of your teeth -- or to get kicked into that higher gear and come back from 5 points behind to 5 points ahead.
Now, consider a game like, say, one of the Final Fantasies. Those are challenging, but you can generally beat one, given enough hours. This is good, because you don't want to pay $50 for a game and not get to see the end of the story. But, being able to see the end does not imply getting all the Legendary Weapons, and damnit, we deserved ours. I say "we", because my roommate and I traded off playing the Chocobo Training (for Tidus' weapon) -- even tossing the controller halfway through, as we were each better at different parts of it.
Or Halo, maybe the best example. Legendary is about as hard as you can make it and still have it be possible. Easy is a bit like "I Can Win" -- if you're trying at all, you'll beat it easily.
I can enjoy a game like, say, Half-Life 2 -- hard was too easy, but it was still fun. But nothing gives a game replayability like a decent set of difficulty levels. And if your game is, say, Enter The Matrix, you NEED as much replayability as you can get -- DAMN that game was short.
I can also enjoy a game that is hard, but not impossible. The Jak games were like this for me, especially Jak II. Often, required missions were ridiculously hard, requiring 10 or 20 tries to get it right. But it was possible, and the plot, animation, and humor makes it all worth it, no matter how short the cinematic.
So, in short, you are permitted to make it hard, provided you either provide a way around it (by making it an optional sidequest, or by allowing an easier difficulty level), or make it worth it. Difficulty levels are really the answer you are looking for -- the casual gamer won't buy Midnight Club 2 or Jak 2, the hardcore gamer won't buy Half-Life 2, but they'll both be happy with Halo 2 for quite a long time.
Oh, and crappy, old, still hard arcade versions of this game are to be unlockable secrets (PoP: Sands of Time had PoP 1), NOT requirements for beating the game! (Donkey Kong 64 required you to beat the original Donkey Kong!)
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Oh, hell yes.
"Men, we have led these dumb bastards far away to keep them from gettin' their filthy claws on Earth. Instead, we stumbled on something so hot for 'em, they're scrambling over each other to get it. Well, I don't care if its God's own anti-son-of-a-bitch machine or a giant hula hoop, but we won't let them have it! What we will let them have is a belly full of lead and a pool of their own blood to drown in! Am I right, Marines?"
No one cares what the Doom guy looks like in Doom 3 for many reasons. It's a remake, he doesn't have a voice (so he's "you"), it's only in short cinematic sequences with pretty much no plot that you actually see his face...
Compare that to Halo, where there's actually a point made about it. Beginning of Halo 2:
CHIEF: I thought you said there weren't going to be any cameras.
JOHNSON: And I thought you said you were going to wear something nice!
Somewhat later:
Cortana (cocking her head): You look nice!
CHIEF and JOHNSON: Thank you!
It's a source of humor, it says something about his character, and he would probably be a somewhat different character without his helmet. In contrast, the Doom guy from Doom 1 wasn't a character -- he was really only a character in Quake 3 and Doom 3, and the Quake 3 Doom Guy is hardly worth mentioning.
I guess it's kind of like Chocolat -- I think it was Chocolat -- some movie where the main characters share a fetish that's never actually explicitly mentioned. Between Ebert and whoever else he was working on, one didn't like it because he thought it was cheap and unfair not to say what it was, and the other liked it because anything would've been disappointing. I think this is the real problem -- any face you put on the Chief will be disappointing. Certainly, no ordinary Marine will ever see it. Half of their morale comes from watching the Chief walk onto the field, a living legend, a giant monster who happens to be on their side -- so of course, it's all the more fuel for rumors and legend if he never takes off his helmet.
If you think faces can't create an emotional attachment, you need to watch Red vs Blue. Ok, so it's a comedy, but... hell, play the game. Or watch the effect the Nightmare Armor suits will have on any fanboys when a Microsoft flunkie shows up in one.
As for the aliens, I guess you could say they do, if you can call it a face. Eyes, yes. Nose, I'm not sure. Mouth, sort of a big hole. Lips, not so much.
And you're right, it is difficult and risky. I guess that's why American Beauty, The Matrix, and V for Vendetta were never created. Oh wait...
Account number isn't always enough. There are other things, like signatures -- still forgeable, but it's better than nothing. Birthdate, number on the back of the credit card, etc etc etc. The phishing sites gather way more than you could probably get from a check or a credit card.
Because SSL has authentication builtin. Just make sure you're not only at the bank's website, but at their SSL-enabled website, before giving them a password. Then you only have to be paranoid about the various Certificate Authorities you trust (VeriSign, etc), instead of every single DNS server/cache between you and theirs, or any machine that shares a network with those DNS servers.
Banks should not be held liable for phishing scams over email, provided they do not actually send similar emails -- which is more and more true these days. There simply isn't a legitimate reason to do this kind of stuff over email.
Banks (and credit card companies) should be held liable for fraudulent transactions conducted over the Internet, because the vast majority of these are inherently insecure, and it's difficult or impossible to tell the difference between a "good" website and a "bad" one.
Source? I'm curious how you'd go about doing such a thing...
But really, some Private Caller in India? Makes me think the banks aren't even trying.
As far as I know, neither of my banks EVER sends me email telling me I have to "click here to reactivate my account". Any individual who falls for that deserves what they get.
Speaking of buttheads, probably the same person who decided to call it a "backdoor".
Garh, that's annoying, but at least it's not Linux being bastardized there. Although swapping between a 160 gig Linux homebrew drive and a 20 gig official drive for playing games would be a hell of a lot more annoying than just partitioning it.
Yes, I do. I also know that anywhere else something like this has been tried, there's usually a very good reason for it. For instance, if I were to buy RHEL, I'd also get insane amounts of support to go with it, possibly justifying the price. Certainly, there are cases where you can buy a Linux CD for $2 or so.
But in all of these cases, at least there's a choice. It still pisses me off that not only does it cost $99 (which might be reasonable, if I didn't already own equivalents for half the kit), and if there was some alternative distro I could download for free. BlackRhino doesn't count, it requires the kit to operate.
I already have plenty of spare HDs, if I needed them -- I wanted to boot off the network. I have a network adapter, for use with PS2 games. I can grab the keyboard/mouse off my desktop, and Linux doesn't require the VGA anyway -- it can use the TV. And I would probably be running it headless anyway.
So it's not the $99 that's a ripoff, it's the $99 with no choices at all. Kind of like if I could only get a new version of Ubuntu by buying a whole new computer from Canonical.
Yeah, nice suggestion, too bad Sony ignored it. Would be even nicer if they offered the individual files -- the ISO, the kernel images, etc -- for download.
There are reasons they can't really do that -- it would be legitimizing things like modchips, exploits, etc -- but I don't find any of these to be particularly valid, and they didn't even try (just releasing the DVD).
By using an exploit and a few small, native PS2 binaries, I was able to backup and restore files from a PS2 memory card to a desktop computer over a network. This is activated by attempting to load a PS1 game with a PS2 memory card in the slot -- it will boot off the memory card instead. The downsides are security (with Linux I could use SSH, this is just some weird, unencrypted TCP) and how annoyingly hard it can be to change network settings -- and some weirdness in attempting to reboot it to play a game afterwards.
So, actually, for me, no Linux was better than the $99 Linux kit. I could probably have done the same thing with the Linux kit, but I doubt I could've gotten it to fit neatly onto a memory card, or boot from the network.
This is why I'm somewhat leery of PS3 Linux. If they do it right, a PS3 could be a viable replacement for a desktop computer. If they do it wrong (again), I may as well buy a Wii.
Fair enough, I was pointing out a specific example that I think both makes things hard, and encourages the kind of tactics and reaction-based play you like, while still likely requiring a bit of memorization.
And replayability of Halo is always good.
Yes, I am. Question still stands, how does it compare to Steam? Or to just grabbing them out of the bargain bin?
It may be like PHP, though. PHP isn't that horrible a language, although it is pretty damned bad. The reason most people refuse to work in PHP is that it's too accessible, or for some reason, it's perceived as THE language to do backends. People move from HTML to JavaScript to PHP. This also means you're going to have documentation with that shiny new PHP script that says "If you have any problems with permissions, just chmod 777." I don't want to touch code written by these morons.
.NET next, those would actually be decent...
As for VB.NET, I don't really get the difference yet between that and C#, but then, I only ever tried to learn C#. Maybe I'll try one of the Ruby/Python/whatever ports to
These days, kids get this from video games. Since each game has its own commandline interface, usually separate and distinct from its scripting language, it's not very powerful, but you still see kids admining a counterstrike server (or whatever) playing with sv_gravity, friction, and other fun things before they just admin_slay each other.
Yeah, and your comment had absolutely zero point.
It was the Slashdotters of yesterday who were playing with BASIC anyway. The same kind of kids who today start with HTML and Javascript. And by the way, almost every kid I know who's at all into MySpace -- and that's a lot -- have at some point made some attempt to "learn some codes", which apparently means learn some HTML and JavaScript.
They may only be using it to turn their page into hideous colors and flashy lights, but it's a start.
External dependencies are such a non-issue it's not even funny. Ubuntu comes with Firefox, does that make Konqueror a less valid Linux browser? Oh, boo hoo, you have to type "apt-get install konqueror".
Now, considering drawing the pixel on the screen, all you need is a decent library.
More importantly, unless you NEED to be able to draw pictures to get them interested in the first place, why do you need graphical capability?
Anyway, my own answer to all of these would probably be Squeak. Given OpenCroquet, and you can do 3D games.
I keep seeing these ads for GameStop, which appears to be "Steam for older games". Buy Tomb Raider online as a download.
Between the two, I've actually used Steam, but I'd like to hear anyone's impression of other services...
Random things can and do happen, I'm just pointing out that to the extent that it's scripted, and to the extent that you can memorize things, you'll now have to on Legendary.
I still can and do play through on normal or Heroic without memorizing a thing, and it's different every time, even if the plot is the same, and I like it that way.
How's that relevant? I can buy any old keyboard/mouse I want, and in this case, I didn't want any, I wanted it to boot from the network and, if anything, I could SSH in.
Key word here: Format. You seem to imply that you can share the drive between them, but I've heard just the opposite.
And anyway, why can't I just grab any old hard drive and put it in there? Why does it have to be a specific one?
I don't care what their fucking excuse is. It's a bastardized Linux that really doesn't deserve to be called "Linux". It's the kind of thing I hope the GPLv3 will prevent.
It is NOT the kind of thing you should be wasting your breath (or keystrokes) apologizing for.
$99 is too much money for a FREE operating system, especially when all I wanted was the kernel and a couple of commandline utilities to safely backup my savegames.
We can hope, but "fewer" isn't going to cut it this time. Try "none".
Seriously, the only modern console I know of that I haven't seen tons of modchips and cracks around for is the Gamecube, and that's only because no one cared. Piracy is going to do far less harm to console games than it's done to PC games, and it doesn't seem to have been much of a problem for PC games. Homebrew is not going to kill certified, licensed games with official dev tools anytime soon.
Give us back our homebrew, or you don't get to call it a "computer".
Agreed on all points, yet I do know people who play Halo 2 on Legendary, which has similar sniper issues. The reason I didn't like that is that even with a hard game like Jak II, I can in theory do it right the first time, because I can react to the situation unfolding around me. With snipers, you have to memorize where they are, and still be wicked fast.
But my friend still does it, and is one of those who beat the game within 48 hours of bringing it home. I never quite understood it, but maybe he's just on a different level than me -- it certainly seems that way whenever we play against each other, which is why we usually play co-op on Heroic.
Agreed, and I do like games where I can just quicksave every 10 seconds. But there's something to be said for the rush of actually beating that impossible sequence.
Vampire + Bullet time + Stake through the heart.
But seriously, I would much rather have had fun playing it more than once than settle for 5 hours of entertainment, tops.
Bastardized as in, you HAVE to buy it. Even if you have a spare IDE hard drive lying around, and you intend to download Black Rhino Linux. Even if you have multiple ways to run custom code, so it's not an issue of booting an unsigned disk. Even given all of these, you STILL need their kernel with their custom binary kernel stuff, which means you need to buy the dev kit, which last I checked means some $200, including a hard drive that you shouldn't need (I wanted to boot from the network).
Also: The hard drive is not compatible with PS2 games. Thus, you have to have a separate hard drive if you want to use PS2 games which can use a hard drive, such as Final Fantasy XI.
It's not necessarily the open source I'm bitching about -- I use binary nVidia drivers on my desktop -- it's the insane, unnecessary limitations that they put on it, which would immediately go away if it was open source, or if they were at all decent about it.
Wow, I was reading your first list as a list of games and wondering what I was missing out on! (At 6 AM after being up all night, my head makes spawn == spore...)
More seriously, if you want fast action (which may help you develop some close-range tactics for the rest of the game), find one of the various IceWorld maps and play there. A round is really not going to last very long, so unless the teams are insanely unbalanced, you should get at least a couple of kills.
Counter-Strike was always hit or miss for me. A miss would be 20 rounds of not getting a single kill. A hit -- this did happen -- 20 rounds on a huge map (Blackhawk Down), winning, often the last man standing on my team. A bit of schadenfreude there, too -- Blackhawk Down is either the most fun or the least fun you'll ever have in Counter-Strike, all depending on how soon you die, because once you die, you just know you'll have to watch 5-10 mins of 2 guys wandering through this big-ass city trying to find each other, all the more maddening because you KNOW where they both are, you're watching them walk right past each other and not notice, and wishing someone would just commit suicide so you could respawn in a new round.
And, it being Counter-Strike, I have also had such things as 10-20 round winning streaks with TK-ing bastards, with my name as "Penis". Kill half my team, then the other half, then kill off the entire other team single-handedly. I don't think I've ever heard so much whining over voice chat, ever.
Quake 3 and DMC, though -- these were fun even when you're losing. And I was the best at Quake 3 at a couple of small LAN parties. But without many people, we'd often have to invent things like: Who can kill the most bots the fastest? Spam Majors on I Can Win, then try to gauntlet them the fastest...
But really, I think the lesson here is that anything can be a sandbox game, even more than GTA, and that I suck at Counter-Strike almost as much as I suck at StarCraft, but I somehow still manage to be Rob the Counterstrike Guy (sorry, can't link to it directly -- scroll down)
Take a game like Quake 3 -- I really couldn't care whether I beat it, or whether I use cheats, or what. It's really intended to be multiplayer anyway. Given x hours, I will have fun, even if it means gauntleting bots on "I Can Win." Or I can play on Nightmare, or online -- either one, I will lose most of the time, but damn, is it fun to win just by the skin of your teeth -- or to get kicked into that higher gear and come back from 5 points behind to 5 points ahead.
Now, consider a game like, say, one of the Final Fantasies. Those are challenging, but you can generally beat one, given enough hours. This is good, because you don't want to pay $50 for a game and not get to see the end of the story. But, being able to see the end does not imply getting all the Legendary Weapons, and damnit, we deserved ours. I say "we", because my roommate and I traded off playing the Chocobo Training (for Tidus' weapon) -- even tossing the controller halfway through, as we were each better at different parts of it.
Or Halo, maybe the best example. Legendary is about as hard as you can make it and still have it be possible. Easy is a bit like "I Can Win" -- if you're trying at all, you'll beat it easily.
I can enjoy a game like, say, Half-Life 2 -- hard was too easy, but it was still fun. But nothing gives a game replayability like a decent set of difficulty levels. And if your game is, say, Enter The Matrix, you NEED as much replayability as you can get -- DAMN that game was short.
I can also enjoy a game that is hard, but not impossible. The Jak games were like this for me, especially Jak II. Often, required missions were ridiculously hard, requiring 10 or 20 tries to get it right. But it was possible, and the plot, animation, and humor makes it all worth it, no matter how short the cinematic.
So, in short, you are permitted to make it hard, provided you either provide a way around it (by making it an optional sidequest, or by allowing an easier difficulty level), or make it worth it. Difficulty levels are really the answer you are looking for -- the casual gamer won't buy Midnight Club 2 or Jak 2, the hardcore gamer won't buy Half-Life 2, but they'll both be happy with Halo 2 for quite a long time.
Oh, and crappy, old, still hard arcade versions of this game are to be unlockable secrets (PoP: Sands of Time had PoP 1), NOT requirements for beating the game! (Donkey Kong 64 required you to beat the original Donkey Kong!)