Because it's fun? Because it translates remarkably well into a straight-forward video game form?
More likely this: Because being a gangster is, and has been for decades, as common a part of most childhood fantasies as being a cowboy or an astronaut?
Dransik Classic. It was taken offline a few days ago, but the more advanced (looks a lot like pre-suckage UO) version based on it (Ashen Empires) is still in development by TKO and Asylumsoft.
They want to seem smart. Just about everybody I know has shelves and shelves of books.
There's a way to catch them in their lies, though. Just look at the spines and corners of the books. No matter how well you take care of a book, the corners will get dented (especially hardcovers), and the spines will loosen (Paperbacks will have a series of parallel creases down the spine after one reading. After two or three readings, they'll usually be pronounced enough to cause the outer layer of the paper to break, so you can see white behind the printed layer).
If the books are immaculate (except for maybe some dust), then they're just liars who use books to be sophisticated.
If, however, they look like my books - Dog eared, marked all over with bits of napkin or notebook paper, creased, duct tape along the spine, shoved into whatever opening I could find on the shelf, and strewn around at random - then they probably actually took the time to not just read them, but read them more than once, go back and try to find/mark parts, and otherwise enjoyed them.
Take them hunting. Peg Bambi in the throat, have the kid help gutting/cleaning it, take him to the butcher's and let him watch as they run the deer through the bandsaw, then give him a nice big slab of venisen.
It didn't scare me off of video games (I've probably accumulated the digital blood of billions on my hands since), but it sure scared me off of guns.
Either that, or it'll make them a vegitarian.
Fallout 2 went beyond stimpaks. In Fallout 1, all the drugs (while many were addictive) had a purpose in the game (raise strength, charisma, intelligence, purge radiation from the system, heal wounds, etc).
Fallout 2 had Jet, which is probably the most realistic drug ever put into a game. It gives you some brief effect for about two minutes (I forget what it is. I think it was like +1 all stats), but when it wears off, all your stats get lowered and you're addicted. The addiction never wears off, and the only way to stop the slow stat loss is to take MORE jet. Over time, it takes more and more of the stuff just to keep your stats from going down the crapper, and usually once you're addicted, the game is more an excercize in trying to get enough jet to keep from hitting the minimums in all your stats until you can get the antidote (if you can even keep your intelligence high enough to handle that quest).
The liberal stance (although in the US, it gets distored into more emotional terms that can fire up the voters better) is that guns are the MEANS of violence, and not the CAUSE of violence. Removing the guns means that people can't shoot each other wether they want to or not.
If you want to talk about commie liberals, I should remind you that it's mostly Republicans (and Blue Dog Democrats, who might as well be Republicans anyway) that focus on family values and "think of the children" and such.
The liberal path in this (although most Democrats are far from liberal themselves) is that video games constitute art, and are protected by freedom of expression/speech/etc, and that if you want to stop people from buying them, why not tax them and raise the price rather than bogging them down with useless and unconstitutional chains.
They do, and have for a long time. When I was young (early 80's), violent movies were the big target.
Video games are newer. Holywood is established and entrenched, and it's unlikely any amount of litigation will budge them an inch. Video games are getting there, but there's still enough give in the market that they can win little victories here and there.
There are some things about the hentai games for the SNES and GB(A) though:
1. Nintendo didn't license them, and they already say, "Don't play games with out the Nintendo Seal of Approval." I doubt they'll comment on unlicensed games.
2. (As far as I know) none of them have been brought to the US (at least not openly - you can't buy hentai games in the store like you can in Japan, you have to order them), and Japan is a far more open society, both to new ideas and technologies, but in this case more open to forms of entertainment. There isn't a social stigma around pornography in Japan to the extent that there is in the US.
People who don't like it actually participate in capitalism the way it was INTENDED to work: They vote with their money and don't buy it. They don't sue the companies that made it (at least not anywhere near as much as we do). The people who do like it do the same, and they buy it, and it continues to get made.
Back to the US: It bugs me how people are so opposed to pornography. If you compare a few polls about how many people like looking at pornographic materials and how many people think they should they should be illegal, you'll see there's a striking overlap - people who buy porn, but say it should be illegal. Porn is considered so socially unacceptable that if you ask people, they'll say it should be illegal even though they have a limited edition of Debbi Does Dallas hidden under their couch. It's like the smoker who says (between weezes and coughs and lighting a new ciggarette) that the tobacco companies should be forced out of business.
I agree entirely. I like violence, swearing, sex, whatever in games, as long as it fits.
An English teacher of mine in high school had a saying about using foul language in writing: "You can swear all you want, but you have to earn every word, or it'll only hurt you."
All games are built on a premise. GTA was built on the premise of street crime: Drugs, prostitutes, carjacking, even low-time acts of terrorism. Wether or not its a good game, how do you capture that premise in a satisfying way WITHOUT sex, language, and violence?
BMX:XXX was something completely else though. I really don't get the premise. If the premise were bike racing, then the riders would be at least wearing appropriate clothing (Ever ride a motor cycle wearing shorts? I burned my leg on an exauhst pipe doing that), because you don't ride a motorcycle naked. If the premise were naked people then what's the point of having them riding bikes?
It didn't build on the game's premise, and frankly, it wasn't all that great to begin with - for half or less of the price, I could buy a copy of Playboy or Hustler and a bargain-rack non-naked BMX racing game.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
So many examples of lame and meaningless changes made from Japanese to US releases. For example, almost no NES/SNES games use the word "kill." "defeat" "destroy" "eliminate" "terminate" "devastate" "remove" "exterminate" so many words used to dance around the one simple one that they actually want to use: "kill"
Beyond it being a rare problem, not all epileptics get seizures from video games, anime, movies, or any of the other things that cause them. I have an aunt who can get very severe seizures, but she has no problems playing on the PS2 with her grand kids.
Sometimes they did, but it wasn't that they weren't prone to seizures, it was that they'd never had one before, and the Nintendo games were the first thing to trigger them. The people who had them could just as easily have gotten them from one of those strobing flashes that some cameras had to reduce red-eye.
"WARNING: KEEP HAIR AND GENITALS AWAY FROM CHAIN BLADE AT ALL TIMES"
The thing that's saddest about the freaky-ass weird warnings on products is that you know the company would never think to warn you not to use a chainsaw to shave your pubic area.
Somebody has to actually TRY these things before they put the warnings there.
I have the same problem. Although I don't have any problem being evil in games like Dungeon Keeper or GTA (where there isn't an option), I have a hard time hardlining myself in more open games.
In Fallout, the only time I managed to stay really evil in a game was when a child got caught in the crossfire while I was killing slavers. Once I got labled a childkiller, there really wasn't much of a choice. Even most of the bad guys would try to kill me because I was TOO evil.
I play an MMORPG that works that way, and it's actually a pretty sad social experiment.
When it started out, pvp was the most profitable thing to do, income and exp-wise, and everybody did it who was at least moderately well equipped. When they took out exp for pvp (due to abuse - people would stand just outside of NPC guard ranges and beat each other to death for hours to powerlevel), it shifted, and finally started working like they wanted: The game split into two major camps: Those that PK'd, and those that didn't. A chunk of those that didn't ended up forming into guilds and alliances that hunted PKers and protected low level players who were being hounded by higher leveled PKs who could kill them in one or two hits.
It took about four months for the groups that hunted PK's to turn into PK's themselves - killing people for no reason other than they have a red or gray name (the more people you killed, the farther down a green/red alignment scale you went. It turned gray for about a minute after you kill somebody. This didn't effect the game itself, though, except that NPC guards would attack you with a gray name).
In the long run, the game went from being a holy guild vs. an evil guild to a constantly shifting power struggle between evil-ish guilds - at one point, two major RP guilds, who by their very premise sould be at eternal war, ended up allied against a rapidly growing PK guild that was rapidly threatening both their power bases.
Now, there are very few good-aligned guilds. Most are either overtly evil, or at best neutral. The main good thing about this is that low leveled players have recieved some indirect "protection" from the competing evil guilds - whenever one would start PKing in an area, another would move in to try to get easy loot while they couldn't run to town for safety, usually affording victims an opportunity to run in and recover at least important items.
Another is the Fallout RPGs. They aren't entirely open, since in both games you have a specific goal to accomplish in the end - but there are lots of ways to accomplish it, and lots of ways to get to that point. For example, there's one problem in Fallout 1 that can be accomplished in several ways: 1. Slaghter the whole city (they're just mutants anyway) 2. Get somebody else to slaughter the city 3. Fix the water pump for the city and get them to freely give you the item you're after. 4. Steal the item you're after and let the city die of thirst 5. Fix the pump, get the item, then slaughter the city for more exp (they're just mutants, after all. If they trust you, that's their own fault, now isn't it?)
Most problems in Fallout 1 and 2 have at least three ways to go about things - noncombatant (diplomacy/stealth), "good guy", and "kill them all and let God sort it out." - and depending on your character, there's usually different approaches you have to take to make each one work. It's not 100% free, but it gives a good feeling of being free.
Fallout didn't get boring in 10 minutes by any means. Even now, five years later, I still play it once in a while.
I'm with the people above - Molyneux just doesn't make them like he used to.
Actually, it would be Massachusetts tax - at least the way it works in Michigan. He's buying it. The transfer over to Long Island is as a gift. It's "purchased in" Massachusetts ("billed to" may be more accurate), and I think that's where the tax comes from. The IRS has no way of knowing he's going to give it to his uncle, wether the uncle's in Long Island or Uzbekistan.
Actually, it's cheapest to go from the MOON to MARS, which is the idea with the Lunar base.
You start out with Earth-Mars missions (which are shorter, and you have the free-return trajectory in case things go wrong). Once you have a small contstruction system set up, you stop bringing people back every time, and just start doing more and more one-way trips to deliver work and supplies that can't be grown/built/mined on-site.
The people for the Moon-Mars missions would be sent to the Moon fairly early in this project. They would train on the Moon, they would work with the hardware for field trials on the moon, and when the time comes, they would lanch the spacecraft and materials, built on the moon, to Mars.
You're also thinking of only ONE mission. Hopefully when we get off our cans and start doing something useful (or at least interesting) in space again, we won't just do it once or twice and go back to piddling around in low-earth-orbit like we did last time.
The moon base would be the building, training, and launching point for NUMEROUS missions to Mars, as well as serving it's built-in scientific and economic potential as a permanant low-gravity (as opposed to our current permanant micro-gravity) installation.
Heck, once it's running well, Earth-Moon missions would become less and less neccessary. The cool thing about human resources is that if you leave them in a confined area long enough, they tend to build more human resources for you.
I saw it about six years ago. I think the most credible bit of evidence was that the Chicago fire wasn't alone. A number of small towns, and even ships on Lake Michigan, had fires simultaneously, and evidence was found that there was a forest fire in southern Wisconsin in the same timeframe. Maybe a small air burst meteor, or a larger meteorite breaking up and falling over a larger area.
The cow's been ruled out for decades, though. It may have lit the barn on fire, but at least one part of the city was on fire before the O'Leary farm.
Actually, it IS the case (Doesn't work the same way, but the high courts have the same power). In fact, they HAVE thrown out the law.
The police can't enforce a law that doesn't exist anymore.
When I've played AA, half the time the opposing force is your own "allies" who don't seem to give a flying fuck about the whole concept of cooperative gameplay, and want to treat it like any FFA deathmatch game.
In the book, this guy built a model of earth and used it to predict earthquakes. It worked fine for a while, but it started failing more and more often. The book never gets around to exactly what happens with the model because it gets destroyed in an earthquake...
Which is about all we need. A terrorist who happens to have a sense of poetic justice and blows up the very machine intended to predict his next target.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it's fun? Because it translates remarkably well into a straight-forward video game form? More likely this: Because being a gangster is, and has been for decades, as common a part of most childhood fantasies as being a cowboy or an astronaut?
Dransik Classic. It was taken offline a few days ago, but the more advanced (looks a lot like pre-suckage UO) version based on it (Ashen Empires) is still in development by TKO and Asylumsoft.
They want to seem smart. Just about everybody I know has shelves and shelves of books.
There's a way to catch them in their lies, though. Just look at the spines and corners of the books. No matter how well you take care of a book, the corners will get dented (especially hardcovers), and the spines will loosen (Paperbacks will have a series of parallel creases down the spine after one reading. After two or three readings, they'll usually be pronounced enough to cause the outer layer of the paper to break, so you can see white behind the printed layer).
If the books are immaculate (except for maybe some dust), then they're just liars who use books to be sophisticated.
If, however, they look like my books - Dog eared, marked all over with bits of napkin or notebook paper, creased, duct tape along the spine, shoved into whatever opening I could find on the shelf, and strewn around at random - then they probably actually took the time to not just read them, but read them more than once, go back and try to find/mark parts, and otherwise enjoyed them.
Why in that order? With a bit of careful planning, you can have all four at once.
Take them hunting. Peg Bambi in the throat, have the kid help gutting/cleaning it, take him to the butcher's and let him watch as they run the deer through the bandsaw, then give him a nice big slab of venisen. It didn't scare me off of video games (I've probably accumulated the digital blood of billions on my hands since), but it sure scared me off of guns. Either that, or it'll make them a vegitarian.
Fallout 2 went beyond stimpaks. In Fallout 1, all the drugs (while many were addictive) had a purpose in the game (raise strength, charisma, intelligence, purge radiation from the system, heal wounds, etc). Fallout 2 had Jet, which is probably the most realistic drug ever put into a game. It gives you some brief effect for about two minutes (I forget what it is. I think it was like +1 all stats), but when it wears off, all your stats get lowered and you're addicted. The addiction never wears off, and the only way to stop the slow stat loss is to take MORE jet. Over time, it takes more and more of the stuff just to keep your stats from going down the crapper, and usually once you're addicted, the game is more an excercize in trying to get enough jet to keep from hitting the minimums in all your stats until you can get the antidote (if you can even keep your intelligence high enough to handle that quest).
The liberal stance (although in the US, it gets distored into more emotional terms that can fire up the voters better) is that guns are the MEANS of violence, and not the CAUSE of violence. Removing the guns means that people can't shoot each other wether they want to or not.
If you want to talk about commie liberals, I should remind you that it's mostly Republicans (and Blue Dog Democrats, who might as well be Republicans anyway) that focus on family values and "think of the children" and such. The liberal path in this (although most Democrats are far from liberal themselves) is that video games constitute art, and are protected by freedom of expression/speech/etc, and that if you want to stop people from buying them, why not tax them and raise the price rather than bogging them down with useless and unconstitutional chains.
They do, and have for a long time. When I was young (early 80's), violent movies were the big target. Video games are newer. Holywood is established and entrenched, and it's unlikely any amount of litigation will budge them an inch. Video games are getting there, but there's still enough give in the market that they can win little victories here and there.
There are some things about the hentai games for the SNES and GB(A) though:
1. Nintendo didn't license them, and they already say, "Don't play games with out the Nintendo Seal of Approval." I doubt they'll comment on unlicensed games.
2. (As far as I know) none of them have been brought to the US (at least not openly - you can't buy hentai games in the store like you can in Japan, you have to order them), and Japan is a far more open society, both to new ideas and technologies, but in this case more open to forms of entertainment. There isn't a social stigma around pornography in Japan to the extent that there is in the US.
People who don't like it actually participate in capitalism the way it was INTENDED to work: They vote with their money and don't buy it. They don't sue the companies that made it (at least not anywhere near as much as we do). The people who do like it do the same, and they buy it, and it continues to get made.
Back to the US: It bugs me how people are so opposed to pornography. If you compare a few polls about how many people like looking at pornographic materials and how many people think they should they should be illegal, you'll see there's a striking overlap - people who buy porn, but say it should be illegal.
Porn is considered so socially unacceptable that if you ask people, they'll say it should be illegal even though they have a limited edition of Debbi Does Dallas hidden under their couch. It's like the smoker who says (between weezes and coughs and lighting a new ciggarette) that the tobacco companies should be forced out of business.
I agree entirely. I like violence, swearing, sex, whatever in games, as long as it fits.
An English teacher of mine in high school had a saying about using foul language in writing: "You can swear all you want, but you have to earn every word, or it'll only hurt you."
All games are built on a premise. GTA was built on the premise of street crime: Drugs, prostitutes, carjacking, even low-time acts of terrorism. Wether or not its a good game, how do you capture that premise in a satisfying way WITHOUT sex, language, and violence?
BMX:XXX was something completely else though. I really don't get the premise. If the premise were bike racing, then the riders would be at least wearing appropriate clothing (Ever ride a motor cycle wearing shorts? I burned my leg on an exauhst pipe doing that), because you don't ride a motorcycle naked. If the premise were naked people then what's the point of having them riding bikes?
It didn't build on the game's premise, and frankly, it wasn't all that great to begin with - for half or less of the price, I could buy a copy of Playboy or Hustler and a bargain-rack non-naked BMX racing game.
Sorry, couldn't resist. So many examples of lame and meaningless changes made from Japanese to US releases. For example, almost no NES/SNES games use the word "kill." "defeat" "destroy" "eliminate" "terminate" "devastate" "remove" "exterminate" so many words used to dance around the one simple one that they actually want to use: "kill"
Beyond it being a rare problem, not all epileptics get seizures from video games, anime, movies, or any of the other things that cause them. I have an aunt who can get very severe seizures, but she has no problems playing on the PS2 with her grand kids.
Sometimes they did, but it wasn't that they weren't prone to seizures, it was that they'd never had one before, and the Nintendo games were the first thing to trigger them. The people who had them could just as easily have gotten them from one of those strobing flashes that some cameras had to reduce red-eye.
"WARNING: KEEP HAIR AND GENITALS AWAY FROM CHAIN BLADE AT ALL TIMES" The thing that's saddest about the freaky-ass weird warnings on products is that you know the company would never think to warn you not to use a chainsaw to shave your pubic area. Somebody has to actually TRY these things before they put the warnings there.
I have the same problem. Although I don't have any problem being evil in games like Dungeon Keeper or GTA (where there isn't an option), I have a hard time hardlining myself in more open games. In Fallout, the only time I managed to stay really evil in a game was when a child got caught in the crossfire while I was killing slavers. Once I got labled a childkiller, there really wasn't much of a choice. Even most of the bad guys would try to kill me because I was TOO evil.
I play an MMORPG that works that way, and it's actually a pretty sad social experiment.
When it started out, pvp was the most profitable thing to do, income and exp-wise, and everybody did it who was at least moderately well equipped. When they took out exp for pvp (due to abuse - people would stand just outside of NPC guard ranges and beat each other to death for hours to powerlevel), it shifted, and finally started working like they wanted: The game split into two major camps: Those that PK'd, and those that didn't. A chunk of those that didn't ended up forming into guilds and alliances that hunted PKers and protected low level players who were being hounded by higher leveled PKs who could kill them in one or two hits.
It took about four months for the groups that hunted PK's to turn into PK's themselves - killing people for no reason other than they have a red or gray name (the more people you killed, the farther down a green/red alignment scale you went. It turned gray for about a minute after you kill somebody. This didn't effect the game itself, though, except that NPC guards would attack you with a gray name).
In the long run, the game went from being a holy guild vs. an evil guild to a constantly shifting power struggle between evil-ish guilds - at one point, two major RP guilds, who by their very premise sould be at eternal war, ended up allied against a rapidly growing PK guild that was rapidly threatening both their power bases.
Now, there are very few good-aligned guilds. Most are either overtly evil, or at best neutral. The main good thing about this is that low leveled players have recieved some indirect "protection" from the competing evil guilds - whenever one would start PKing in an area, another would move in to try to get easy loot while they couldn't run to town for safety, usually affording victims an opportunity to run in and recover at least important items.
Another is the Fallout RPGs. They aren't entirely open, since in both games you have a specific goal to accomplish in the end - but there are lots of ways to accomplish it, and lots of ways to get to that point. For example, there's one problem in Fallout 1 that can be accomplished in several ways:
1. Slaghter the whole city (they're just mutants anyway)
2. Get somebody else to slaughter the city
3. Fix the water pump for the city and get them to freely give you the item you're after.
4. Steal the item you're after and let the city die of thirst
5. Fix the pump, get the item, then slaughter the city for more exp (they're just mutants, after all. If they trust you, that's their own fault, now isn't it?)
Most problems in Fallout 1 and 2 have at least three ways to go about things - noncombatant (diplomacy/stealth), "good guy", and "kill them all and let God sort it out." - and depending on your character, there's usually different approaches you have to take to make each one work. It's not 100% free, but it gives a good feeling of being free.
Fallout didn't get boring in 10 minutes by any means. Even now, five years later, I still play it once in a while.
I'm with the people above - Molyneux just doesn't make them like he used to.
Actually, it would be Massachusetts tax - at least the way it works in Michigan. He's buying it. The transfer over to Long Island is as a gift. It's "purchased in" Massachusetts ("billed to" may be more accurate), and I think that's where the tax comes from. The IRS has no way of knowing he's going to give it to his uncle, wether the uncle's in Long Island or Uzbekistan.
Actually, it's cheapest to go from the MOON to MARS, which is the idea with the Lunar base.
You start out with Earth-Mars missions (which are shorter, and you have the free-return trajectory in case things go wrong). Once you have a small contstruction system set up, you stop bringing people back every time, and just start doing more and more one-way trips to deliver work and supplies that can't be grown/built/mined on-site.
The people for the Moon-Mars missions would be sent to the Moon fairly early in this project. They would train on the Moon, they would work with the hardware for field trials on the moon, and when the time comes, they would lanch the spacecraft and materials, built on the moon, to Mars.
You're also thinking of only ONE mission. Hopefully when we get off our cans and start doing something useful (or at least interesting) in space again, we won't just do it once or twice and go back to piddling around in low-earth-orbit like we did last time.
The moon base would be the building, training, and launching point for NUMEROUS missions to Mars, as well as serving it's built-in scientific and economic potential as a permanant low-gravity (as opposed to our current permanant micro-gravity) installation.
Heck, once it's running well, Earth-Moon missions would become less and less neccessary. The cool thing about human resources is that if you leave them in a confined area long enough, they tend to build more human resources for you.
I saw it about six years ago. I think the most credible bit of evidence was that the Chicago fire wasn't alone. A number of small towns, and even ships on Lake Michigan, had fires simultaneously, and evidence was found that there was a forest fire in southern Wisconsin in the same timeframe. Maybe a small air burst meteor, or a larger meteorite breaking up and falling over a larger area.
The cow's been ruled out for decades, though. It may have lit the barn on fire, but at least one part of the city was on fire before the O'Leary farm.
Actually, it IS the case (Doesn't work the same way, but the high courts have the same power). In fact, they HAVE thrown out the law. The police can't enforce a law that doesn't exist anymore.
When I've played AA, half the time the opposing force is your own "allies" who don't seem to give a flying fuck about the whole concept of cooperative gameplay, and want to treat it like any FFA deathmatch game.
In the book, this guy built a model of earth and used it to predict earthquakes. It worked fine for a while, but it started failing more and more often. The book never gets around to exactly what happens with the model because it gets destroyed in an earthquake...
Which is about all we need. A terrorist who happens to have a sense of poetic justice and blows up the very machine intended to predict his next target.
(insert favorite FPS game here) map?