Because that's what those games invariably degenerate into, if they didn't outright start that way. When your main income source are the idiots willing to pay real cash for a +20 Sword Of Ganking or for a Level 3 Mech in a Level 1 Battletech-like game, guess which group does the game catter to?
The thing that you're missing about Puzzle Pirates is that the most of the really big, expensive items don't actually give you an in-game advantage. The custom portrait of your character hanging in your fancy house or the parrot riding on your pirate's shoulder may look cool, but they don't actually affect game play.
Those items that do affect game play are priced so that it is just about as easy for a kid to obtain them by investing a few after school afternoons as it is for an adult to obtain them by investing the fruits of a small portion of their work day. And this is further balanced by the fact that most of the expensive weapons are difficult to use -- it takes a fair chunk of play time before you are going to be skilled enough to be effective with them.
The beauty of Puzzle Pirates over other MMPORGs is that in-game rankings are ultimately related to actual puzzling skill. Your level does not depend on how big your weapons are, or how much time you've invested; it depends directly on how good you are at playing the game, and that makes Puzzle Pirates, to some of us, at least, much more satisfying to play.
Mplayer can dump Windows Media streams (and others!) just fine.
Mplayer won't necessarily be able to play an encrypted stream. And DRMed files are encrypted -- the DRM wouldn't work if they weren't.
Somebody will either have to write a hack, or you'd have to run proprietary windows software on WINE to get a DRM-ed stream to work in Linux (and you might not even be able to get the proprietary software to work on WINE).
The alamringly stupid decision to make GBAs necessary as a (gimpy) controller for multiplayer gaming was hardly a boon for the game, and didn't serve any purpose an eloquent menuing system couldn't have.
Did you actually play the game? Because I think that you may have missed the point.
Fintal Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, is, first and foremost, a social game. The whole game is built to force you to both cooperate and compete with the people sitting in the living room with you. The GBA, by presenting you with information and goals hidden to the other players, is central to this strategy. At times, you're relying on information (a map, say) that only one player has at their disposal. But you can never trust your teammates too much,because everyone is trying to fufill their secret mission best, so that they can get first pick of the treasure at the end.
End result: everyone spends equal time cursing each other and congratulating each other for a hard job well done (the bosses, especially, require cooperation to beat), and that makes for a thoroughly enjoyable gaming experience. YMMV.
I'm sorry, but it did. The main plot point all along was for Frodo to destroy the ring. I never read the books, but I never doubted that he would succeed. And he did destroy the ring.
Frodo didn't destroy the ring. His will gave out at the last, and it was Gollum's lust for his precious that finally lead (accidently) to the destruction of the ring.
In the Matrix, the ultimate goal was to destroy the machines and return control of the planet to the humans. I never doubted they would succeed. But they didn't. That caught me off guard, and I really like it whenever a movie can do that.
The Matrix's ending -- that man and machines would have to work together to defeat Agent Smith -- was made horribly predictable as soon as it became clear that Smith was out to destroy man and machine alike. It's a very standard plot. The villains from the first movie/book/chapters become allies once a worse villain arises. The motivations for each set of villains were even predictable. The first set of villains is always out to control the world, while the second set is out to actually destroy the world. *That* plot has played out a hundred times (see the second X-men movie, for example, or, IIRC the second Amber series).
Honestly, to be satisfying, an ending has to be somewhat predictable, because it has to make sense, given the rest of the story (even a "twist-ending" like the Sixth Sense's has to make perfect sense once you re-watch the movie). The point where Hollywood screws up is when they take an ending that should be sad, because that's how the story goes, and make it artificially happy. See, for example, Pretty Woman, or the part in Return of the Jedi where Lando and the Millenium Falcon don't blow up.
Did you ever notice that things have gotten way more stressful in the past few decades?
Nicely constructed, Troll. I'm going to feed you, anyway...
A story: One spring morning, I was lying on my back in the green grass of the Rose Garden (the one near the Natural History Museum and Science Center in Los Angeles), reading a book. I had a cell phone lying by my side.
A passing stranger noted that I looked quite relaxed, but that I'd be much more relaxed if I didn't have the phone.
Au contraire. If I didn't have the cell phone, I'd be cooped up inside my dreary college apartment, waiting for the landline to ring, because I was expecting an important call regarding a job at the Science Center.
It was much more relaxing to wait for that call outside, in the open air, with a good book in my hands.
And if I ever don't want to be reached, it only takes a couple of seconds to turn the phone off...
The parent likes to talk about the "first rule of web design", but he obviously never has published a web site in his life.
A bit snippy, aren't we?
You're actually quite right that I've never done any serious web design in my life. But I have dealt with my share of customer service messes created by overzealous web developers -- those last-minute Friday evening ideas have a small tendency to create a mass of CS e-mail come Monday morning.
But it's not one line of text on EVERY page. It's one line of text in/robots.txt, a file that is independent of the rest of the site and never even accessed by ordinary browsers.
I stand corrected. Though I can still see why the Times might be hesitant to go to the (minorish) effort of changing it -- there'll still be paperwork to do, and procedures to be followed in order to make a change that's only necessary because of Google's caching feature -- I can see why somebody in Times' Management might want Google to do the work rather than them.
I'm not saying that the Times is right; I can just see where they're coming from.
However, you can achieve a similar end result by merely buying used media. It's rather nice being able to "stick it to the RIAA" in a manner that no airchair moralist can reasonably complain about.
Ha! You underestimate the power of your average armchair moralist!
I consider buying used to be the equivalent of just downloading something. Either way, you're denying the original creators fair compensation.
Of course, you buy used, and you're out $5-$10 on top of the damage to your Karma. I'd rather just download.
they don't have to change the whole site; they just need to add ONE LINE of text to ONE plaintext file.
How hard is that?
First rule of web design (or programming, or anything having to do with a computer or any other complex system): that little change that you make in five minutes that you know won't affect anything -- the one you don't test because it's so minor -- that change is going to bring the whole page/program/computer/national defense system crashing down around your ears.
Adding one little line of code to every one of the myriad of pages on the New York Times website is not a small deal. It's going to involve a lot of paperwork, testing, and coding on the part of a lot of people.
It's probably simpler for Google to create a registry of "do not cache" pages on their end. And it's more their responsibility, anyway, being the ones who created the cache in the first place.
Why, exactly do you think that copyrights are *wrong*? I don't mean the specifics -- "xx years is too many, xx would be better", "xxx company abuses it" -- but why is the actual concept the use of an idea being controlled by the person who thought up the idea (and if anybody has a better def of copyright, feel free to tell me) not good?
I don't think they're wrong per se...
But. Think of it this way:
Say you have some land. I round up a posse and kick you off your land. Now you no longer have a place to live. I've taken something away from you.
Now say you sing a song. Then I round up a band and we sing the song. You still have the song. I have the song, too. I've taken nothing away from you.
See the difference?
There is a catch. Songwriting takes a certain amount of effort, and it is useful to me to encourage you to write more songs by giving you some sort of compensation for that effort. In fact, it's useful to society at large to encourage creative people to create. It enhances our lives and our culture when we are surrounded by songs and stories. And other forms of "intellectual property" -- medical and scientific ideas, specifically -- are more concretely useful.
Thus copyright. So that you can be compensated for your ideas, and thus be encouraged to come up with more of them.
However...
It's important not to forget that all of this is little more than a gentleman's agreement: I give you control of your ideas so that you can make money, and this will supposedly encourage you to create more ideas to entertain and enlighten me. It's a matter of sheer practicality -- copyright is not a moral principle.
The problem of is that some people involved in the agreement have gotten greedy. Instead of requesting reasonable compensation, artists desire to be millionaires. Instead of running a reasonably sized business, the record companies, movie studios, and book publishers want to rake in billions each year.
That's nice for them. But I simply can't afford to contribute much to their fortunes. I have a couple of hundred of dollars of spare budget every month after paying the necessary bills. Part of this needs to go into a rainy day fund. Part of it is earmarked for nights out on the town with friends. I can buy a couple of DVDs and/or CDs and/or books per month with the remaining amount.
Or I can buy high-speed Internet access and download as much stuff as I want.
Which to choose? I'm afraid it's not that hard: High speed access, all the way. If the studios and artists want my money, they can offer their songs and stories at a more reasonable price. Otherwise, well, BitTorrent is my friend.
(Note: I've also purchased a subscription to emusic, because that is one of the few reasonably priced IP distributors out there, and downloading from them saves me from wasting time hunting stuff up on p2p software -- we need more services like it.)
I've watched a few Buffy's and so far my impression is that Jennifer Garner would kick Buffy's ass all over the place. Maybe the bar for ass-kicking women has just been raised since the series started...
True, there has been much female ass-kicking in the media of late. But Buffy can kick ass in pink high heels...which is a funny twist on the old SoCal girl cliche. It sets her apart from other action heroes; makes her unique.
That isn't an impressive reversal these days. Its almost becoming as cliche as as the cliche it is based upon.
Ah, but Buffy is the show that spawned much of the current crop of cliches. Not to say that it wasn't in turn inspired by earlier stuff, but the reversal felt fresh at the time of the show's inception.
But that's only one example of the way that the show twists. Here's another: In the episode, "The Wish," stuck-up Cordelia wished that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale, thus spawning what seemed like a standard parallel universe episode. Some of the characters are evil in this new universe, and the good characters are a ragtag bunch, just clinging to survival.
The usual way that this works is that we have at least one character (in this case, Cordelia), who knows The Way Things Should Be, and she sets out to make things right.
But, halfway through the Buffy episode, Cordelia gets killed, because she's not ready for this new, violent world, and you're left genuinely wondering how the rest of the episode is going to go.
Plotting like that makes the show fun -- set up the audience's expectations by using a set of cliches, and then suddenly shoot off wildly in another direction, thus surprising and delighting this jaded scifi/fantasy fan.
Those jokes are kinda high school / college jokes. I dunno, maybe I've just moved on to the point where I only find jokes about Project Managers to be funny...
I think that may be the root of your dislike of the show. It's definitely a show about growing up, and if you're finished with the growing up thing, I can see why it might not appeal to you. Nothing wrong with that, just that's probably the reason why it doesn't click with you...
This is the defense of Buffy that I don't get. My impression of Buffy and Willow on the show is that both of them are just highly neurotic whiny high school girls. That isn't very interesting or appealing. And the fact that they're conflicted all the time doesn't give them "depth."
Again, it's probably a matter of taste. My top three TV shows right now are "Buffy," "Farscape" and "Cowboy Bebop." So I go for the angsty stuff. If that isn't your cup of tea, then I suppose Buffy simply isn't the show for you (which hopefully answers your original question -- there are things in it that appeal to some people that don't necessarily appeal to you).
There are a whole lot of reasons why Buffy rocks much...
1) It's fun. Cute woman with mad martial arts skills kicks bad monster ass every week. How can you complain?
2) It's clever. It takes cliches and flips them upside down. Joss Wedon (the show's creator) has stated that the inspiration for the show was the typical cute blond who gets cornered and savaged by the monster in your basic horror movie. What if the cute blond was ready for the monster, and kicked its ass instead? Reversals like that are fun.
3) It's funny -- and the geekier your are, the more sly references you get and the more you appreciate the interesting things that the writers do with the English language. From one character's comment that somebody "makes Godot look punctual" to Xander's perfect sumnation of the effects of an all-night study session: "too much research...need beverage," the writers delight in bouncing their jokes off of culture high and low, and in simply messing around with the language.
4) And, most importantly, the characters ring true. Every character on Buffy is well drawn, three dimensional. Even though they're combating fantastic monsters every week, the characters behave like real people, experiencing all the joy and hurt that real people experience. And the fantastical situations they run into are often just exagerations of events that all of us have experienced.
Basically, the show engages you on visceral, intellectual, and emotional levels; it's exciting, witty, and touching. What more could one ask?
Slashdot Mirror
Because that's what those games invariably degenerate into, if they didn't outright start that way. When your main income source are the idiots willing to pay real cash for a +20 Sword Of Ganking or for a Level 3 Mech in a Level 1 Battletech-like game, guess which group does the game catter to?
The thing that you're missing about Puzzle Pirates is that the most of the really big, expensive items don't actually give you an in-game advantage. The custom portrait of your character hanging in your fancy house or the parrot riding on your pirate's shoulder may look cool, but they don't actually affect game play.
Those items that do affect game play are priced so that it is just about as easy for a kid to obtain them by investing a few after school afternoons as it is for an adult to obtain them by investing the fruits of a small portion of their work day. And this is further balanced by the fact that most of the expensive weapons are difficult to use -- it takes a fair chunk of play time before you are going to be skilled enough to be effective with them.
The beauty of Puzzle Pirates over other MMPORGs is that in-game rankings are ultimately related to actual puzzling skill. Your level does not depend on how big your weapons are, or how much time you've invested; it depends directly on how good you are at playing the game, and that makes Puzzle Pirates, to some of us, at least, much more satisfying to play.
Mplayer can dump Windows Media streams (and others!) just fine.
Mplayer won't necessarily be able to play an encrypted stream. And DRMed files are encrypted -- the DRM wouldn't work if they weren't.
Somebody will either have to write a hack, or you'd have to run proprietary windows software on WINE to get a DRM-ed stream to work in Linux (and you might not even be able to get the proprietary software to work on WINE).
This bill really sucks.
The alamringly stupid decision to make GBAs necessary as a (gimpy) controller for multiplayer gaming was hardly a boon for the game, and didn't serve any purpose an eloquent menuing system couldn't have.
Did you actually play the game? Because I think that you may have missed the point.
Fintal Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, is, first and foremost, a social game. The whole game is built to force you to both cooperate and compete with the people sitting in the living room with you. The GBA, by presenting you with information and goals hidden to the other players, is central to this strategy. At times, you're relying on information (a map, say) that only one player has at their disposal. But you can never trust your teammates too much,because everyone is trying to fufill their secret mission best, so that they can get first pick of the treasure at the end.
End result: everyone spends equal time cursing each other and congratulating each other for a hard job well done (the bosses, especially, require cooperation to beat), and that makes for a thoroughly enjoyable gaming experience. YMMV.
~ PeteVG
Nitpicky (and spoiler-full), but...
I'm sorry, but it did. The main plot point all along was for Frodo to destroy the ring. I never read the books, but I never doubted that he would succeed. And he did destroy the ring.
Frodo didn't destroy the ring. His will gave out at the last, and it was Gollum's lust for his precious that finally lead (accidently) to the destruction of the ring.
In the Matrix, the ultimate goal was to destroy the machines and return control of the planet to the humans. I never doubted they would succeed. But they didn't. That caught me off guard, and I really like it whenever a movie can do that.
The Matrix's ending -- that man and machines would have to work together to defeat Agent Smith -- was made horribly predictable as soon as it became clear that Smith was out to destroy man and machine alike. It's a very standard plot. The villains from the first movie/book/chapters become allies once a worse villain arises. The motivations for each set of villains were even predictable. The first set of villains is always out to control the world, while the second set is out to actually destroy the world. *That* plot has played out a hundred times (see the second X-men movie, for example, or, IIRC the second Amber series).
Honestly, to be satisfying, an ending has to be somewhat predictable, because it has to make sense, given the rest of the story (even a "twist-ending" like the Sixth Sense's has to make perfect sense once you re-watch the movie). The point where Hollywood screws up is when they take an ending that should be sad, because that's how the story goes, and make it artificially happy. See, for example, Pretty Woman, or the part in Return of the Jedi where Lando and the Millenium Falcon don't blow up.
~ PeteVG
Did you ever notice that things have gotten way more stressful in the past few decades?
Nicely constructed, Troll. I'm going to feed you, anyway...
A story: One spring morning, I was lying on my back in the green grass of the Rose Garden (the one near the Natural History Museum and Science Center in Los Angeles), reading a book. I had a cell phone lying by my side.
A passing stranger noted that I looked quite relaxed, but that I'd be much more relaxed if I didn't have the phone.
Au contraire. If I didn't have the cell phone, I'd be cooped up inside my dreary college apartment, waiting for the landline to ring, because I was expecting an important call regarding a job at the Science Center.
It was much more relaxing to wait for that call outside, in the open air, with a good book in my hands.
And if I ever don't want to be reached, it only takes a couple of seconds to turn the phone off...
~ PeteVG
The parent likes to talk about the "first rule of web design", but he obviously never has published a web site in his life.
A bit snippy, aren't we?
You're actually quite right that I've never done any serious web design in my life. But I have dealt with my share of customer service messes created by overzealous web developers -- those last-minute Friday evening ideas have a small tendency to create a mass of CS e-mail come Monday morning.
But it's not one line of text on EVERY page. It's one line of text in /robots.txt, a file that is independent of the rest of the site and never even accessed by ordinary browsers.
I stand corrected. Though I can still see why the Times might be hesitant to go to the (minorish) effort of changing it -- there'll still be paperwork to do, and procedures to be followed in order to make a change that's only necessary because of Google's caching feature -- I can see why somebody in Times' Management might want Google to do the work rather than them.
I'm not saying that the Times is right; I can just see where they're coming from.
However, you can achieve a similar end result by merely buying used media. It's rather nice being able to "stick it to the RIAA" in a manner that no airchair moralist can reasonably complain about.
Ha! You underestimate the power of your average armchair moralist!
I consider buying used to be the equivalent of just downloading something. Either way, you're denying the original creators fair compensation.
Of course, you buy used, and you're out $5-$10 on top of the damage to your Karma. I'd rather just download.
they don't have to change the whole site; they just need to add ONE LINE of text to ONE plaintext file.
How hard is that?
First rule of web design (or programming, or anything having to do with a computer or any other complex system): that little change that you make in five minutes that you know won't affect anything -- the one you don't test because it's so minor -- that change is going to bring the whole page/program/computer/national defense system crashing down around your ears.
Adding one little line of code to every one of the myriad of pages on the New York Times website is not a small deal. It's going to involve a lot of paperwork, testing, and coding on the part of a lot of people.
It's probably simpler for Google to create a registry of "do not cache" pages on their end. And it's more their responsibility, anyway, being the ones who created the cache in the first place.
Why, exactly do you think that copyrights are *wrong*? I don't mean the specifics -- "xx years is too many, xx would be better", "xxx company abuses it" -- but why is the actual concept the use of an idea being controlled by the person who thought up the idea (and if anybody has a better def of copyright, feel free to tell me) not good?
I don't think they're wrong per se...
But. Think of it this way:
Say you have some land. I round up a posse and kick you off your land. Now you no longer have a place to live. I've taken something away from you.
Now say you sing a song. Then I round up a band and we sing the song. You still have the song. I have the song, too. I've taken nothing away from you.
See the difference?
There is a catch. Songwriting takes a certain amount of effort, and it is useful to me to encourage you to write more songs by giving you some sort of compensation for that effort. In fact, it's useful to society at large to encourage creative people to create. It enhances our lives and our culture when we are surrounded by songs and stories. And other forms of "intellectual property" -- medical and scientific ideas, specifically -- are more concretely useful.
Thus copyright. So that you can be compensated for your ideas, and thus be encouraged to come up with more of them. However...
It's important not to forget that all of this is little more than a gentleman's agreement: I give you control of your ideas so that you can make money, and this will supposedly encourage you to create more ideas to entertain and enlighten me. It's a matter of sheer practicality -- copyright is not a moral principle.
The problem of is that some people involved in the agreement have gotten greedy. Instead of requesting reasonable compensation, artists desire to be millionaires. Instead of running a reasonably sized business, the record companies, movie studios, and book publishers want to rake in billions each year.
That's nice for them. But I simply can't afford to contribute much to their fortunes. I have a couple of hundred of dollars of spare budget every month after paying the necessary bills. Part of this needs to go into a rainy day fund. Part of it is earmarked for nights out on the town with friends. I can buy a couple of DVDs and/or CDs and/or books per month with the remaining amount.
Or I can buy high-speed Internet access and download as much stuff as I want.
Which to choose? I'm afraid it's not that hard: High speed access, all the way. If the studios and artists want my money, they can offer their songs and stories at a more reasonable price. Otherwise, well, BitTorrent is my friend.
(Note: I've also purchased a subscription to emusic, because that is one of the few reasonably priced IP distributors out there, and downloading from them saves me from wasting time hunting stuff up on p2p software -- we need more services like it.)
~ PeteVG
I've watched a few Buffy's and so far my impression is that Jennifer Garner would kick Buffy's ass all over the place. Maybe the bar for ass-kicking women has just been raised since the series started...
True, there has been much female ass-kicking in the media of late. But Buffy can kick ass in pink high heels...which is a funny twist on the old SoCal girl cliche. It sets her apart from other action heroes; makes her unique.
That isn't an impressive reversal these days. Its almost becoming as cliche as as the cliche it is based upon.
Ah, but Buffy is the show that spawned much of the current crop of cliches. Not to say that it wasn't in turn inspired by earlier stuff, but the reversal felt fresh at the time of the show's inception.
But that's only one example of the way that the show twists. Here's another: In the episode, "The Wish," stuck-up Cordelia wished that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale, thus spawning what seemed like a standard parallel universe episode. Some of the characters are evil in this new universe, and the good characters are a ragtag bunch, just clinging to survival.
The usual way that this works is that we have at least one character (in this case, Cordelia), who knows The Way Things Should Be, and she sets out to make things right.
But, halfway through the Buffy episode, Cordelia gets killed, because she's not ready for this new, violent world, and you're left genuinely wondering how the rest of the episode is going to go.
Plotting like that makes the show fun -- set up the audience's expectations by using a set of cliches, and then suddenly shoot off wildly in another direction, thus surprising and delighting this jaded scifi/fantasy fan.
Those jokes are kinda high school / college jokes. I dunno, maybe I've just moved on to the point where I only find jokes about Project Managers to be funny...
I think that may be the root of your dislike of the show. It's definitely a show about growing up, and if you're finished with the growing up thing, I can see why it might not appeal to you. Nothing wrong with that, just that's probably the reason why it doesn't click with you...
This is the defense of Buffy that I don't get. My impression of Buffy and Willow on the show is that both of them are just highly neurotic whiny high school girls. That isn't very interesting or appealing. And the fact that they're conflicted all the time doesn't give them "depth."
Again, it's probably a matter of taste. My top three TV shows right now are "Buffy," "Farscape" and "Cowboy Bebop." So I go for the angsty stuff. If that isn't your cup of tea, then I suppose Buffy simply isn't the show for you (which hopefully answers your original question -- there are things in it that appeal to some people that don't necessarily appeal to you).
There are a whole lot of reasons why Buffy rocks much...
1) It's fun. Cute woman with mad martial arts skills kicks bad monster ass every week. How can you complain?
2) It's clever. It takes cliches and flips them upside down. Joss Wedon (the show's creator) has stated that the inspiration for the show was the typical cute blond who gets cornered and savaged by the monster in your basic horror movie. What if the cute blond was ready for the monster, and kicked its ass instead? Reversals like that are fun.
3) It's funny -- and the geekier your are, the more sly references you get and the more you appreciate the interesting things that the writers do with the English language. From one character's comment that somebody "makes Godot look punctual" to Xander's perfect sumnation of the effects of an all-night study session: "too much research...need beverage," the writers delight in bouncing their jokes off of culture high and low, and in simply messing around with the language.
4) And, most importantly, the characters ring true. Every character on Buffy is well drawn, three dimensional. Even though they're combating fantastic monsters every week, the characters behave like real people, experiencing all the joy and hurt that real people experience. And the fantastical situations they run into are often just exagerations of events that all of us have experienced.
Basically, the show engages you on visceral, intellectual, and emotional levels; it's exciting, witty, and touching. What more could one ask?