A common style of Banks' novels is to have multiple threads running through the books which merge towards the last 1/3rd of the book. In this, Matter is no exception. I found the book to be a very enjoyable and fulfilling read, but only after I had slugged through the mid-section.
I think it would have been nicer and would have maintained a faster pace had it concentrated on and filled-out the culture side more, whilst skipping some of the sub-plots in the "historic" side (the mother of the Prince Regeant, for example, which really I think was just a device to move him to another setting.)
In the engaging parts of this book though - which was most of it in my opinion - this book was gripping and exciting, with a good touch of cynical wit to it. It's nice to see the Culture again, though I would like an entirely Culture based book, which didn't meander off into other worlds.
To compare one Banks against another is a difficult task, as they are all different, and yet all the same. Personal favourites of mine are The Bridge and The Business (From non-m Banks) and Against A Dark Background, The Player of Games and Feersum Endjinn (AADB was my first Banks sci-fi, Player of Games a very inticing read, and Feersum Endjinn was book-long-set-up that leaves you with an amused feeling.)
Copy Protection. What a curse on the paying customer. A serious pirate gives it maybe two seconds of thought, before applying the latest crack or hardware copier that's most likely been released way in advance of the thing being copied.
Meanwhile, the legitimate user, who has *paid* for the privilege of using said software, is greeted by splash screens (which the pirate removes), DVD requirements (where the pirate can just use a no-DVD version) and, in the case of DVD Videos, annoying and patronising messages which cannot be forwarded-through telling us not to copy DVDs.
It's infuriatingly annoying as a paying customer to be treated like tomorrow's pirate. I resent it, and I'm damn sure it has turned some people away from making legitimate purposes and towards piracy because, to be honest, the pirated versions would be easier to use, and less patronising.
If you want your software to phone home, are you going to provide a fully resiliant highly available infrastructure for it to phone home to? If not, what's going to happen to your customer base when they can't use the software they have legitimately bought?
Every piece of protection you add to your software burdens the legitimate end user. It tends not to burden the pirate, because he/she will have downloaded the version that someone else cracked for them ages ago.
Your software will either be good enough for people to pay for, or it wont. If it is, then people will buy it, you don't need protection for that, you just need to write a good piece of software, that people want.
The first, is a symptom of today's "I want it NOW" culture. The author just sounds like he's not willing to put in any work into his gaming, he just wants the Grand Sword of Doom +6000 vs all right from the start, and to leap right in to killing ubervillans. That's where he thinks he should be, so that's what he wants, right now.
The second thing, is that it sounds from a few comments as though the author completely misses a lot of the point of RP. Talking about how quickly he was able to complete a game shows this. Of course, if you power-play your way through a game, you can finish it quickly. But where's the point in that? The idea of RPG is to immerse yourself in the story and the world. The point is to take time, not to zoom as quickly as possible through to the end of the game.
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So I typed all my notes into my laptop. The teacher wants that? She can pry it from my cold, dead hands.
A common style of Banks' novels is to have multiple threads running through the books which merge towards the last 1/3rd of the book. In this, Matter is no exception. I found the book to be a very enjoyable and fulfilling read, but only after I had slugged through the mid-section.
I think it would have been nicer and would have maintained a faster pace had it concentrated on and filled-out the culture side more, whilst skipping some of the sub-plots in the "historic" side (the mother of the Prince Regeant, for example, which really I think was just a device to move him to another setting.)
In the engaging parts of this book though - which was most of it in my opinion - this book was gripping and exciting, with a good touch of cynical wit to it. It's nice to see the Culture again, though I would like an entirely Culture based book, which didn't meander off into other worlds.
To compare one Banks against another is a difficult task, as they are all different, and yet all the same. Personal favourites of mine are The Bridge and The Business (From non-m Banks) and Against A Dark Background, The Player of Games and Feersum Endjinn (AADB was my first Banks sci-fi, Player of Games a very inticing read, and Feersum Endjinn was book-long-set-up that leaves you with an amused feeling.)
Copy Protection. What a curse on the paying customer. A serious pirate gives it maybe two seconds of thought, before applying the latest crack or hardware copier that's most likely been released way in advance of the thing being copied.
Meanwhile, the legitimate user, who has *paid* for the privilege of using said software, is greeted by splash screens (which the pirate removes), DVD requirements (where the pirate can just use a no-DVD version) and, in the case of DVD Videos, annoying and patronising messages which cannot be forwarded-through telling us not to copy DVDs.
It's infuriatingly annoying as a paying customer to be treated like tomorrow's pirate. I resent it, and I'm damn sure it has turned some people away from making legitimate purposes and towards piracy because, to be honest, the pirated versions would be easier to use, and less patronising.
If you want your software to phone home, are you going to provide a fully resiliant highly available infrastructure for it to phone home to? If not, what's going to happen to your customer base when they can't use the software they have legitimately bought?
Every piece of protection you add to your software burdens the legitimate end user. It tends not to burden the pirate, because he/she will have downloaded the version that someone else cracked for them ages ago.
Your software will either be good enough for people to pay for, or it wont. If it is, then people will buy it, you don't need protection for that, you just need to write a good piece of software, that people want.
To me this article smacks of two things -
The first, is a symptom of today's "I want it NOW" culture. The author just sounds like he's not willing to put in any work into his gaming, he just wants the Grand Sword of Doom +6000 vs all right from the start, and to leap right in to killing ubervillans. That's where he thinks he should be, so that's what he wants, right now.
The second thing, is that it sounds from a few comments as though the author completely misses a lot of the point of RP. Talking about how quickly he was able to complete a game shows this. Of course, if you power-play your way through a game, you can finish it quickly. But where's the point in that? The idea of RPG is to immerse yourself in the story and the world. The point is to take time, not to zoom as quickly as possible through to the end of the game.
..just wait until he gets to uninstalling the product ;)
I'm sure you could do that - after all, there's no suitable warning sticker on the hammer saying "WARNING - do not head head with hammer"