The fact people are almost fanatical with their dislike with the N-Gage has never made sense to me.
There are a lot of reasons it gained a fanatical hatred. Even better reasons than fanatically hating Microsoft if you ask me, and I hate them more than I hate Nokia (which is a lot). But rather than go into them, I'll say one thing:
That hatred of the NGage will sink the QD before it gets out of drydock. If I built an airship, and called it the HindenburgGS, how many people you think would ride it?
Maybe I didn't RTFA carefully enough, but I didn't see anywhere that said what the hell QD is supposed to mean (jokes aside).
Did Nokia look at the GBA SP and WinXP and think that two random letters made something better? At least SP and XP imply things, like SPecial, or eXPonential or something, that can be contrived to mean "better.
I'm going to start appending random letters to my name, too, and make myself a better person. From now on, you all call me AyaressFQ.
More ranting about the screen: In the majority of games, the interesting stuff takes place along the horizontal. In FPS, you're both generally standing on a floor/ground of some sort.
In sidescrollers (like Sonic, which is one of the N-Gage's core games), you don't usually worry much about what's above you. It's what's in front of you you need to see. This is even worse in Sonic, where you regularly get up to such speeds that the narrow screen gives you roughly one frame to dodge an oncomming enemy. A TV screen gives you roughly two to three times the reaction time.
Another of their major games is Tomb Raider. We all know how crappy the camera angles are in this game. It's bad enough on a wide screen when you can't see what you're shooting at (and being shot by). The narrow screen conspires with the shitty camera angles to make sure you die more efficiently.
Then there's the sports games. You'd think that, knowing the screen setup, FIFA Soccer would have had the field running virtically, so you could see some distance downfield. But no, they have it running side to side, so you're seeing maybe 5 yards worth of green while you're kicking at a goal five screens away. Frankly, I think a more or less square field of view is best for sports games and (more importantly, since I don't like sports games) strategy games, as well as other top-down games, since it gives a balanced view on all sides.
About the only thing the tall skinny screen is superior for is for the virtically scrolling shooters and games like Tetris (if you strip out the console that takes up half the screen in the Gameboy version) - and I'm not spending $400 to play Tetris when I can already do that on my GBA, which cost me $50.
They could go for another year or two and finally perfect the technology but Nintendo is known for success late in the game, and doing it cheaply.
Yeah, but when you're competing with Nokia, you don't have to worry about price very much. If you keep it under the $500 mark, you're pretty much going to win, even if you're just selling real tacos.
The key part you missed: Women like to feel sexy, but they feel threatened very quickly when guys are looking at another woman. Anybody who's had even ONE girlfriend in their life has eithe noticed this, or been so dense you failed to notice the steam comming out of her ears while you ogled the waitress. That's why they don't like the fact that movies, TV, games, porno, etc make women into sex objects. They may want to feel sexy, but OTHER WOMEN being sexy doesn't make THEM feel sexy.
We like virtual violence. Most of us get pretty queezy at the sight of real blood. I've seen the result of a Terran nuke taking out 400 zerglings in one blast without batting an eye, but I get dizzy eating rare steak.
Lucca in Chrono Trigger was anything but love-starved. Maybe she wanted some more attention from her father, but it doesn't mean she wasn't out in the world, blowing crap up.
I meant Marle. Lucca wasn't bad at all. I don't know why I got the two mixed up.
Marle was even better, actively running away from the palace and successfully taking care of herself.
Actually, Marle was the one who got them in the whole fix in the first place. Also, that whole almost-getting-Chrono-executed thing counts against her. And as for taking care of herself, no way, no how. No attack worth mentioning, no attack magic worth the MP, and her healing magic was a joke. Every time she had dialog, somebody else ended up getting screwed. "I want to try Lucca's machine!" Oops, Lucca and Chrono end up running through time to save her ditzy ass. "What's this button do?" Oops. "Oh, what a nice kitty." Damnit, girl, stop playing with crap until we get past the fish men's nest, ok!? Marle was a complete and utter ditz.
And Ayla was comic relief in a game that didn't have a whole lot. She was so far in prehistory it was beyond gender stereotyping, which was the point.
She may have existed before gender stereotyping, but that was NOT the point. As the story writers even said themselves, she was there to contrast against Marle.
In FF6, Terra was dealing with the realization that she was totally and utterly alone as she was. The only one of her kind.
And at at least five points in the game, she whined that she didn't have anybody to love her - sorry, love starved twit. Even if just for the boat scene with General Leo. Then, she even tried to leave her (weaker) friends to go to their death in Kefka's tower because she didn't want to fight anymore.
The only people she could relate to were the Magitek knights, and Celes was a cold bitch,
Not a cold bitch, unless you count the fact that she learned ice magic naturally. A moody bitch is more like it. She spent half the game throwing herself at Locke and the other half refusing to talk to him and complaining that men can't love her. Sorry, there's a stereotype right there.
Kefka was crazy, so that Leo was the only one she could relate to. When he died, she went all gushy.
Actually, she could relate - and did - quite well with Celes. If you've played a lot of games out of Japan, you should have caught on that when a girl says she wants a guy to "teach her so many things," they don't mean how to play chess.
Celes had a lot of the same problems, but took them very differently. Even though she got hung up on Locke, she wasn't love-starved.
Yes, she was. Very standard character form - one I've used myself in short stories. All false bravado and harsh words, but every time the shit hits the fan, she's hiding behind Locke. Cases in point: The scene in Zozo before the opera house scene, the dressing room scene at the opera house, the scene in (forgot the town) just before the boat ride to Thamasa, the scene on the deck just before Locke, Terra, and Shadow disembark for Thamasa, both scenes at Rachel's house, and her ending sequence (unless you didn't go through the Pheonix cave to get Locke, in which case she does pretty much the same thing with Edgar or Sabin, IIRC.
Of course, if you really wanted to bring someone up that was bad, you would've pointed out Rosa in FFIV, or Rydia in FFIV, for that matter. There is also any female character in an FF game AFTER FFVI, and a few others.
Rosa yes. Worse than any, really. Rydia gets forgiven for being, what, about 10 years old?
Well, I can think of a few examples, but even then, they're still stereotyped. Gotta remember, there's not just one stereotype for women.
Kerrigan from Starcraft wasn't a sex object by any measure - well, she sort of was before the Zerg captured her, but she was also a minor character then. She only a major driving force in the storyline afterwords.
At any rate, I don't know about you, I certainly wouldn't want to have sex with somebody who claims such titles as "Concubine of the Zerg," "Queen of Blades," and "The Queen Bitch of the Universe," has three foot long razor edged spider legs growing out of her back, and is perfectly willing to eat me to regenerate 150 mp.
She was strong willed and competent, true, but she was also the ultimate manipulative bitch, and spent 5/6 campaigns of the game playing each and every single character in the game against each other and then stabbing them in the back when she got what she wanted. At least it was a departure from the video game norm, and she had some kickass dialog lines.
Then there are the antistereotyped females who only seem to exist to emphasize the stereotyped females they're set next to.
I always saw it as a way of inviting people to generate their own stereotypes, and then slapping them in the face with them. I'll admit when I was playing Metroid, I thought Samus was a guy for the whole game (I never bothered reading the manual, that may have made it clear, but who reads those anyway?). I was a bit humbled when I found out the truth, and I doubt I was the only one.
Anyway, I think the unfair portrayal of women in video games is more often a side-effect of the sort of material covered in games. GTA delves into gangs and violent crime, where women are often utilized as a source of income, not as gunmen (gunpersons?) or drug runners.
Most RPGs are fixed into the high fantasy, which usually brings with it an aristocracy and/or monarcy, and in history, those have been male dominated (title passes from father to eldest son, daughters are primarily used as a tool to secure alliance or union through marriage to the sons of other aristocrats).
RTS generally involve war, and in human history, that's been the realm of male aggression. That's changing now, but even then, that change is bitterly resisted.
FPS are even moreso. They're entire games that pretty much involve nothing but slaughtering one another. If anything better lends itself to testosterone, I don't know what it is.
There are exceptions in each group, but a lot of those aren't any better.
Square (and for that matter, most RPG makers) has(have) a long history of making their major femalecharacters into love starved twits (Lucca from Chrono Trigger, Kid from Chrono Cross, Terra and Celes from FF6, Mint from Tales of Phantasia, need I go on?).
But when one of them gets off to a good start and look like they'll break the mold, they either end up being even worse (Arche from Tales of Phantasia, who after getting off to a good start ended up not just a twit but a slut to boot) or an anti-stereotype (Ayla from Chrono Trigger) which only serve to accentuate the stereotypical characters they're set next to.
Also, there's not just one way to stereotype a character. Kerrigan from Starcraft, for example. She started out looking like a strong leader, a decent fighter, strong willed, impetuous, etc. Then she goes the way of the love starved twit during the dialog scene at the beginning of the New Gettysburg scenario, and after that, she picks up a completely different female stereotype: The manipulative bitch, playing every single character in the game against each other and then backstabbing her allies the second their job is done.
Of course, all that forces me to ask the question: Are MEN fairly represented in video games?
Even comparing each to its contemporaries, I'd say Tribes 2 was a lot better than Tribes 1. Personally, with the lack of change in the genre, it's still a pretty good game if you're not a graphics whore.
It has its problems, but a lot of them are the same problems you see in the current crop of FPS games. For an example, see the post about sniper weapons a few threads down.
Quick Black Isle rant: They made Planescape, but not NWN or BG. They also no longer exist in any real form. Interplay shut them down. They now exist only as a lable slapped on Interplay games. Everybody who worked on BIS's good games is scattered to the four winds. Obsidian got a good chunk of them, though.
There was a pretty fun cheap sidescrolling shooter once called Iraq Attack. Fly around in a helicopter, bomb tanks, bomb soldiers, bomb soldiers raising white flags, bomb children's hospitals, bombing the peace corps guys who come to save the burning children, bomb the UN peacekeepers, bomb the allied tanks. Heck, if you get a few speed powerups and good reflexes, you could bomb your own helicopter.
Wether it
Although, in this case, I think it would work great. A great deal of people wouldn't know Samus is a woman, and I'll bet you 99% of them would assume she's a man until the "suprise" ending when the truth comes out.
I always enjoyed letting people build up stereotypes in their mind and then smacking them in the face with their own misconceptions.
Dude... that's worse than the SMB movie. I mean, at least when they made Bowser human, they maintained the proper gender. If you closed your eyes and just listened to the audio, you could almost keep from crying bitter tears of lament.
The winner of the X Prize is really just getting a bunch of money. They're not winning the cutting-edge seat into commercial spaceflight.
On the same token as Armadillo's design, I don't think any of the X Prize designs are, themselves, aimed at long-term viability. They're steps along that road, but the first hurdle is the X Prize itself, and you don't have to make it commercially viable to win that. You just have to make it fly.
Real commercial potential will come after the X Prise is claimed, when we're left with a number of companies who have spent a lot of money going after the X Prize who didn't win, but now see another way to get a return on that investment.
In Morrowind, the easy way to get past the wizard's starting weakness is to customize the class and either: A. make blunt weapons a major skill - since if you're strict-RP, you'll be carrying a staff anyway - and rely on that early in the game. B. make small blades a minor skill - it's based on speed, so you don't have to worry about strength; it's good for getting stat boosts for speed, which you need, or you'll be walking like a snail with arthritis for the whole game; and knives are cheap, abundant, and work fairly well even with low skill, so you don't need to take time out from your magic practice.
Re:How common is orbital disruption?
on
Unruly Milky Way
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· Score: 1
Probably not many. You still have to get fairly close to disrupt the orbits of planets more than just throwing a few comets into the inner solar system.
Odds are good that too much disruption would more than just "reset" life, but actually render the system unable to support life.
For example, a large gas giant planet could be disrupted into an elliptical orbit that would bring it dangerously close to inner planets. Close interaction with this planet could eject life-friendly planets from the system completely, send them spiraling into the parent star, or even cause them to collide with the gas giant and/or its moons.
This sort of thing might offer some explanation for the "hot jupiters" that have been found around many stars (large planets orbiting so close to their parent star that they shouldn't have been able to form in their current orbit).
That walking in Morrowind always got to me. My favorite mode of travel were the Scrolls of Icarian Flight. It's always fun to jump from Vivec all the way to Dagon Fel, and save the 40 gp for the boat ride.
Is there any way to get around the fact that the landing from those scrolls always kills you?
I once thought that, too. My dad took me hunting as soon as I looked big enough to carry a rifle. Even by that point, I had the digital blood of trillions on my hands (although a good few billion of those came from unleashing monsters on SimCities).
I wasn't bothered by gunfire (although I got jumpy and tried to get behind cover whenever I heard a shot that one of us didn't fire), but the problems started when it came time to clean the deer we got - and cutting open a dead deer has got to look something like surgury.
I didn't eat meat for months, and I haven't been able to eat venisen to this day.
You're not making the right distinction between MMORPGs and MUDs/MUSHs.
MMORPGs make you do all the work with character development - you're actions determine your experience gain and income, your reputation and "background" doesn't extend before you clicked "Continue" on the character creation screen.
That's one cup of tea.
MUDs/MUSHs tend to work more like table-top pen-and-paper RPGs. How would you like it if you were playing D&D, and you're friend insisted on being Lotar - the rich, dashing, heroic Warrior/Wizard/Fighter/Cleric/Archer/Shaman/Priest/Barbarian/Healer/Paladin/Thief, son of three or more assorted Gods and their unholy union with the Queen of someplace-or-other who seems to suddenly know the exact skills he needs suddenly every time he gets into a new situation?
It's annoying in MMORPGs, but they're mostly marketed to that kind of player, and they usually make you spend years making a functional Warrior/Wizard/Fighter/Cleric/Archer/Shaman/Priest/Barbarian/Healer/Paladin/Thief, whereas specialists who accept weaknesses (by not leveling every skill in the book) will have a functional character in a fraction of the play-time, and can then go on to master other skills as well.
In MUDs, where interaction between players and continuing storylines are the top priorities, one or two characters like this can really fsck up the game as a whole. Also, those characters who take weaknesses initially often can't diversify later, or are limited in their ability to do so. There the main reason I quit playing those games.
Some of them even give players the power to *create* characters already on the road to the aforementioned ludicrous state of being, and lets them do whatever bizzare thing the player can type (like, to continue the example used in the article, having quintadecituplets, only to have somebody else have twins without the help of a wife just to outdo you), and leave the "rules" to be enforced by GMs or even the players as a whole.
Most of the pr0n jobs have already gone to Europe and Japan. Just look at any porno site. Russians, Hungarians, Dutch, Italians, Japanese, Chinese, Lesbian. No Americans.
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The fact people are almost fanatical with their dislike with the N-Gage has never made sense to me.
There are a lot of reasons it gained a fanatical hatred. Even better reasons than fanatically hating Microsoft if you ask me, and I hate them more than I hate Nokia (which is a lot). But rather than go into them, I'll say one thing:
That hatred of the NGage will sink the QD before it gets out of drydock. If I built an airship, and called it the HindenburgGS, how many people you think would ride it?
It's got the N-Gage name working against it, though. If you made an airship, and called it the HindenburgGS, how many people you think would ride it?
Maybe I didn't RTFA carefully enough, but I didn't see anywhere that said what the hell QD is supposed to mean (jokes aside).
Did Nokia look at the GBA SP and WinXP and think that two random letters made something better? At least SP and XP imply things, like SPecial, or eXPonential or something, that can be contrived to mean "better.
I'm going to start appending random letters to my name, too, and make myself a better person. From now on, you all call me AyaressFQ.
It's not like the old ugly-ass one won't work anymore.
And you know they'll come up with some way to make the new version suck even more than the old tacophones.
More ranting about the screen: In the majority of games, the interesting stuff takes place along the horizontal. In FPS, you're both generally standing on a floor/ground of some sort. In sidescrollers (like Sonic, which is one of the N-Gage's core games), you don't usually worry much about what's above you. It's what's in front of you you need to see. This is even worse in Sonic, where you regularly get up to such speeds that the narrow screen gives you roughly one frame to dodge an oncomming enemy. A TV screen gives you roughly two to three times the reaction time. Another of their major games is Tomb Raider. We all know how crappy the camera angles are in this game. It's bad enough on a wide screen when you can't see what you're shooting at (and being shot by). The narrow screen conspires with the shitty camera angles to make sure you die more efficiently. Then there's the sports games. You'd think that, knowing the screen setup, FIFA Soccer would have had the field running virtically, so you could see some distance downfield. But no, they have it running side to side, so you're seeing maybe 5 yards worth of green while you're kicking at a goal five screens away. Frankly, I think a more or less square field of view is best for sports games and (more importantly, since I don't like sports games) strategy games, as well as other top-down games, since it gives a balanced view on all sides. About the only thing the tall skinny screen is superior for is for the virtically scrolling shooters and games like Tetris (if you strip out the console that takes up half the screen in the Gameboy version) - and I'm not spending $400 to play Tetris when I can already do that on my GBA, which cost me $50.
They could go for another year or two and finally perfect the technology but Nintendo is known for success late in the game, and doing it cheaply.
Yeah, but when you're competing with Nokia, you don't have to worry about price very much. If you keep it under the $500 mark, you're pretty much going to win, even if you're just selling real tacos.
The key part you missed: Women like to feel sexy, but they feel threatened very quickly when guys are looking at another woman. Anybody who's had even ONE girlfriend in their life has eithe noticed this, or been so dense you failed to notice the steam comming out of her ears while you ogled the waitress. That's why they don't like the fact that movies, TV, games, porno, etc make women into sex objects. They may want to feel sexy, but OTHER WOMEN being sexy doesn't make THEM feel sexy.
We like virtual violence. Most of us get pretty queezy at the sight of real blood. I've seen the result of a Terran nuke taking out 400 zerglings in one blast without batting an eye, but I get dizzy eating rare steak.
Lucca in Chrono Trigger was anything but love-starved. Maybe she wanted some more attention from her father, but it doesn't mean she wasn't out in the world, blowing crap up.
I meant Marle. Lucca wasn't bad at all. I don't know why I got the two mixed up.
Marle was even better, actively running away from the palace and successfully taking care of herself.
Actually, Marle was the one who got them in the whole fix in the first place. Also, that whole almost-getting-Chrono-executed thing counts against her. And as for taking care of herself, no way, no how. No attack worth mentioning, no attack magic worth the MP, and her healing magic was a joke. Every time she had dialog, somebody else ended up getting screwed. "I want to try Lucca's machine!" Oops, Lucca and Chrono end up running through time to save her ditzy ass. "What's this button do?" Oops. "Oh, what a nice kitty." Damnit, girl, stop playing with crap until we get past the fish men's nest, ok!? Marle was a complete and utter ditz.
And Ayla was comic relief in a game that didn't have a whole lot. She was so far in prehistory it was beyond gender stereotyping, which was the point.
She may have existed before gender stereotyping, but that was NOT the point. As the story writers even said themselves, she was there to contrast against Marle.
In FF6, Terra was dealing with the realization that she was totally and utterly alone as she was. The only one of her kind.
And at at least five points in the game, she whined that she didn't have anybody to love her - sorry, love starved twit. Even if just for the boat scene with General Leo. Then, she even tried to leave her (weaker) friends to go to their death in Kefka's tower because she didn't want to fight anymore.
The only people she could relate to were the Magitek knights, and Celes was a cold bitch,
Not a cold bitch, unless you count the fact that she learned ice magic naturally. A moody bitch is more like it. She spent half the game throwing herself at Locke and the other half refusing to talk to him and complaining that men can't love her. Sorry, there's a stereotype right there.
Kefka was crazy, so that Leo was the only one she could relate to. When he died, she went all gushy.
Actually, she could relate - and did - quite well with Celes. If you've played a lot of games out of Japan, you should have caught on that when a girl says she wants a guy to "teach her so many things," they don't mean how to play chess.
Celes had a lot of the same problems, but took them very differently. Even though she got hung up on Locke, she wasn't love-starved.
Yes, she was. Very standard character form - one I've used myself in short stories. All false bravado and harsh words, but every time the shit hits the fan, she's hiding behind Locke. Cases in point: The scene in Zozo before the opera house scene, the dressing room scene at the opera house, the scene in (forgot the town) just before the boat ride to Thamasa, the scene on the deck just before Locke, Terra, and Shadow disembark for Thamasa, both scenes at Rachel's house, and her ending sequence (unless you didn't go through the Pheonix cave to get Locke, in which case she does pretty much the same thing with Edgar or Sabin, IIRC.
Of course, if you really wanted to bring someone up that was bad, you would've pointed out Rosa in FFIV, or Rydia in FFIV, for that matter. There is also any female character in an FF game AFTER FFVI, and a few others.
Rosa yes. Worse than any, really. Rydia gets forgiven for being, what, about 10 years old?
Well, I can think of a few examples, but even then, they're still stereotyped. Gotta remember, there's not just one stereotype for women.
Kerrigan from Starcraft wasn't a sex object by any measure - well, she sort of was before the Zerg captured her, but she was also a minor character then. She only a major driving force in the storyline afterwords.
At any rate, I don't know about you, I certainly wouldn't want to have sex with somebody who claims such titles as "Concubine of the Zerg," "Queen of Blades," and "The Queen Bitch of the Universe," has three foot long razor edged spider legs growing out of her back, and is perfectly willing to eat me to regenerate 150 mp.
She was strong willed and competent, true, but she was also the ultimate manipulative bitch, and spent 5/6 campaigns of the game playing each and every single character in the game against each other and then stabbing them in the back when she got what she wanted. At least it was a departure from the video game norm, and she had some kickass dialog lines.
Then there are the antistereotyped females who only seem to exist to emphasize the stereotyped females they're set next to.
I always saw it as a way of inviting people to generate their own stereotypes, and then slapping them in the face with them. I'll admit when I was playing Metroid, I thought Samus was a guy for the whole game (I never bothered reading the manual, that may have made it clear, but who reads those anyway?). I was a bit humbled when I found out the truth, and I doubt I was the only one.
Anyway, I think the unfair portrayal of women in video games is more often a side-effect of the sort of material covered in games. GTA delves into gangs and violent crime, where women are often utilized as a source of income, not as gunmen (gunpersons?) or drug runners.
Most RPGs are fixed into the high fantasy, which usually brings with it an aristocracy and/or monarcy, and in history, those have been male dominated (title passes from father to eldest son, daughters are primarily used as a tool to secure alliance or union through marriage to the sons of other aristocrats).
RTS generally involve war, and in human history, that's been the realm of male aggression. That's changing now, but even then, that change is bitterly resisted.
FPS are even moreso. They're entire games that pretty much involve nothing but slaughtering one another. If anything better lends itself to testosterone, I don't know what it is.
There are exceptions in each group, but a lot of those aren't any better.
Square (and for that matter, most RPG makers) has(have) a long history of making their major femalecharacters into love starved twits (Lucca from Chrono Trigger, Kid from Chrono Cross, Terra and Celes from FF6, Mint from Tales of Phantasia, need I go on?).
But when one of them gets off to a good start and look like they'll break the mold, they either end up being even worse (Arche from Tales of Phantasia, who after getting off to a good start ended up not just a twit but a slut to boot) or an anti-stereotype (Ayla from Chrono Trigger) which only serve to accentuate the stereotypical characters they're set next to.
Also, there's not just one way to stereotype a character. Kerrigan from Starcraft, for example. She started out looking like a strong leader, a decent fighter, strong willed, impetuous, etc. Then she goes the way of the love starved twit during the dialog scene at the beginning of the New Gettysburg scenario, and after that, she picks up a completely different female stereotype: The manipulative bitch, playing every single character in the game against each other and then backstabbing her allies the second their job is done.
Of course, all that forces me to ask the question: Are MEN fairly represented in video games?
Even comparing each to its contemporaries, I'd say Tribes 2 was a lot better than Tribes 1. Personally, with the lack of change in the genre, it's still a pretty good game if you're not a graphics whore.
It has its problems, but a lot of them are the same problems you see in the current crop of FPS games. For an example, see the post about sniper weapons a few threads down.
Quick Black Isle rant: They made Planescape, but not NWN or BG. They also no longer exist in any real form. Interplay shut them down. They now exist only as a lable slapped on Interplay games. Everybody who worked on BIS's good games is scattered to the four winds. Obsidian got a good chunk of them, though.
(hit enter too early) Wether it keeps true to reality is left as an excercise to the reader.
There was a pretty fun cheap sidescrolling shooter once called Iraq Attack. Fly around in a helicopter, bomb tanks, bomb soldiers, bomb soldiers raising white flags, bomb children's hospitals, bombing the peace corps guys who come to save the burning children, bomb the UN peacekeepers, bomb the allied tanks. Heck, if you get a few speed powerups and good reflexes, you could bomb your own helicopter. Wether it
Never:(
Although, in this case, I think it would work great. A great deal of people wouldn't know Samus is a woman, and I'll bet you 99% of them would assume she's a man until the "suprise" ending when the truth comes out.
I always enjoyed letting people build up stereotypes in their mind and then smacking them in the face with their own misconceptions.
Ben Afleck as Samus?
Dude... that's worse than the SMB movie. I mean, at least when they made Bowser human, they maintained the proper gender. If you closed your eyes and just listened to the audio, you could almost keep from crying bitter tears of lament.
The winner of the X Prize is really just getting a bunch of money. They're not winning the cutting-edge seat into commercial spaceflight.
On the same token as Armadillo's design, I don't think any of the X Prize designs are, themselves, aimed at long-term viability. They're steps along that road, but the first hurdle is the X Prize itself, and you don't have to make it commercially viable to win that. You just have to make it fly.
Real commercial potential will come after the X Prise is claimed, when we're left with a number of companies who have spent a lot of money going after the X Prize who didn't win, but now see another way to get a return on that investment.
In Morrowind, the easy way to get past the wizard's starting weakness is to customize the class and either:
A. make blunt weapons a major skill - since if you're strict-RP, you'll be carrying a staff anyway - and rely on that early in the game.
B. make small blades a minor skill - it's based on speed, so you don't have to worry about strength; it's good for getting stat boosts for speed, which you need, or you'll be walking like a snail with arthritis for the whole game; and knives are cheap, abundant, and work fairly well even with low skill, so you don't need to take time out from your magic practice.
Probably not many. You still have to get fairly close to disrupt the orbits of planets more than just throwing a few comets into the inner solar system. Odds are good that too much disruption would more than just "reset" life, but actually render the system unable to support life. For example, a large gas giant planet could be disrupted into an elliptical orbit that would bring it dangerously close to inner planets. Close interaction with this planet could eject life-friendly planets from the system completely, send them spiraling into the parent star, or even cause them to collide with the gas giant and/or its moons. This sort of thing might offer some explanation for the "hot jupiters" that have been found around many stars (large planets orbiting so close to their parent star that they shouldn't have been able to form in their current orbit).
That walking in Morrowind always got to me. My favorite mode of travel were the Scrolls of Icarian Flight. It's always fun to jump from Vivec all the way to Dagon Fel, and save the 40 gp for the boat ride.
Is there any way to get around the fact that the landing from those scrolls always kills you?
Just so they don't start emulating the surgery. Savestate abuse really weakens your game.
I once thought that, too. My dad took me hunting as soon as I looked big enough to carry a rifle. Even by that point, I had the digital blood of trillions on my hands (although a good few billion of those came from unleashing monsters on SimCities).
I wasn't bothered by gunfire (although I got jumpy and tried to get behind cover whenever I heard a shot that one of us didn't fire), but the problems started when it came time to clean the deer we got - and cutting open a dead deer has got to look something like surgury.
I didn't eat meat for months, and I haven't been able to eat venisen to this day.
You're not making the right distinction between MMORPGs and MUDs/MUSHs.
t /Barbarian/Healer/Paladin/Thief, son of three or more assorted Gods and their unholy union with the Queen of someplace-or-other who seems to suddenly know the exact skills he needs suddenly every time he gets into a new situation?
t /Barbarian/Healer/Paladin/Thief, whereas specialists who accept weaknesses (by not leveling every skill in the book) will have a functional character in a fraction of the play-time, and can then go on to master other skills as well.
MMORPGs make you do all the work with character development - you're actions determine your experience gain and income, your reputation and "background" doesn't extend before you clicked "Continue" on the character creation screen.
That's one cup of tea.
MUDs/MUSHs tend to work more like table-top pen-and-paper RPGs. How would you like it if you were playing D&D, and you're friend insisted on being Lotar - the rich, dashing, heroic Warrior/Wizard/Fighter/Cleric/Archer/Shaman/Pries
It's annoying in MMORPGs, but they're mostly marketed to that kind of player, and they usually make you spend years making a functional Warrior/Wizard/Fighter/Cleric/Archer/Shaman/Pries
In MUDs, where interaction between players and continuing storylines are the top priorities, one or two characters like this can really fsck up the game as a whole. Also, those characters who take weaknesses initially often can't diversify later, or are limited in their ability to do so. There the main reason I quit playing those games.
Some of them even give players the power to *create* characters already on the road to the aforementioned ludicrous state of being, and lets them do whatever bizzare thing the player can type (like, to continue the example used in the article, having quintadecituplets, only to have somebody else have twins without the help of a wife just to outdo you), and leave the "rules" to be enforced by GMs or even the players as a whole.
Most of the pr0n jobs have already gone to Europe and Japan. Just look at any porno site. Russians, Hungarians, Dutch, Italians, Japanese, Chinese, Lesbian. No Americans.