The altar you respawn at in Vanguard can summon your corpse for an XP and gear quality penalty. Almost everyone has a 40% run speed horse by level 10 and as you get higher there will be personal flying griffons, speedy player-controlled boats, etc.
There has been something missing from recent MMOs, and that is exploration and a sense of scope. WoW and EQ2 play like themeparks, Vanguard is more spread out. There are advantages and disadvantages to both (I loved EQ2 for the years I played it for what it's worth). It is a narrower audience that is looking for this, but the audience is still out there, and not all of us want to solo grind our way up to level 70 and two billion AA or whatever the place where you can finally get groups in EQ1 is now.
Yeah, most people you'll hear talking about challenge in MMOs conflate challenge with time consumption. There are some legitimately challenging things in MMOs but by and large they're performing easy to moderate tasks over and over again. There is nothing in Vanguard (aside from Diplomacy, which they're alternating between making too easy and borking to impossible hell right now every patch) that requires more skill than in games like WoW and EQ2 -- the time penalties are just stiffer for falling asleep at the keyboard.
Don't get me wrong, I still like Vanguard, but people that say it's extra challenging compared to EQ2 or WoW are extra wrong.
If the choice is between going to work to earn money in the game or playing the game to earn money in the game and work is the most fun option, the game has failed.
Consoles are really the more frugal choice over PC gaming.
It all depends on what you're looking for. The original Half-Life, released in 1998 with modest system requirements, had legs that carried it to the present day with its modability. Starcraft and Warcraft 3 are great RTS that are still worth playing. The hallmark space sim, Freespace 2 from 1999, is essentially a free download, and it has recently been endowed with a fan-created graphics overhaul. The original Neverwinter Nights has a lot of great custom servers and some fun fan-created campaigns for your roleplaying needs. StepMania is like DDR but much better in terms of customizability and options... and it's free. Freeciv is a turn-based strategy game with lots of customization options... and it's free. There's metric shittons of abandonware that's still great. Depending on your ethics, you can have access to the full libraries of the NES, SNES, Sega, etc. If you're feeling guilty you can always send the fifty cents to a random reseller and call it even.
There are always demos and trials (some MMOs have free trials that continue pretty much indefinitely, for example). The MMO for $10-15 a month fulfills some people's entire entertainment needs and constantly evolves.
On top of this, it utilizes a device you probably already have. You basically just need any computer that's not an absolute dinosaur to do everything I've listed in this thread. If you want to play modern games at a decent clip you'll need an okay graphics card (mine retails for sub-100 now) and possibly an extra stick of RAM or something (about $50-100 depending on how much you want to drop in) coupled with any system you're likely to find on store shelves.
Anyway this is all just a big web penarz contest, people buy what they want to buy and no one has a crystal ball to see where the industry is headed.
There's also Zombie Panic for HL1 and I believe another HL2 mod (at least in the works) that did something similar. There's also No More Room In Hell, which doesn't have the type of gameplay you're suggesting but that isn't a huge leap when it finally launches.
The people who care certainly already know, and the people who don't know almost definitely don't care. Do we need even three paragraphs devoted to a retrospective on the menus of Final Fantasy or the whip mechanics in Castlevania? I could've written these article by reading GameFAQs for fifteen minutes.
In the first screen shot it looks like he could view it from his comment history even though it was nuked from the forum but that might not be something that can be directly linked. Also if it's someone in the know they might've posted it with the expectation of it being deleted so that they could expose whatever the scandalous part of this is supposed to be.
The original script for episode four at least was really different from the one they finally ended up shooting. I know this because there was some nerdy book with drafts of the original scripts that came with one of the Star Wars games I bought at some point over the years:P
No, you're misunderstanding the post. It explains what would happen _under this model_ of the universe. As in understanding that with this topological structure it doesn't make sense to discuss a boundary.
My $125 graphics card can handle it with everything but shadows cranked up on a 3200+.
Set camera to top-down, zoom out, turn all spellcasters onto complete manual control. If you pause before encounters and queue up what you need, generally you're set for the battle. If it gets too much for you, crank down the difficulty a bit and play it with only one or two characters.
Personally, it's the best single-player I've played in a long, long time. I can understand where people wouldn't like it though, especially if it runs buggy on their system. I wish they'd spent more time on a serviceable AI.
I think you've pinpointed a major factor in your post, and that is that the new generation of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians are inducted into the formal education process early on and continue until literally years into grad school. We're taught that when you want to learn something, you take a class and have someone spoon feed it to you. You're a human sponge, passively soaking up knowledge. There are 24-year-old grad students at my university that can't believe they'll be expected to learn thing on their own this year! Gasp.
It's not actually published anywhere except his website and the newspaper fluff piece as far as I can tell. Basically he's come up with a (supposedly) consistent set of algebraic axioms that allow you to define division by zero and infinity. He's done this by creating special cases for the rules of division and introducing a new number to take care of a couple problem cases. I don't know much about NaN unfortunately but from what I've been reading on Slashdot I think it's different because NaN doesn't give you a mathematically consistant structure.
That said, this is the kind of investigation I might assign as a homework problem to an undergraduate algebra class. It's an entirely unsurprising result. Just coming up with a new axiomatic system that sidesteps the problem does nothing for any real world problems and those kind of mathematical avenues have been explored. What would you program an airplane to do if it tried to divide 0 by 0 and got his new number? The same shit you'd program it to do if it tries to do that now.
Do real numbers or infinite sets actually exist? When you get down to the concept of existence it's a little tricky. The models, in a sense, are our reality, because that's how we impose structure on the world.
They pay QA people to go over everything with a fine-toothed comb, because it's a job and no right-minded individual actually wants to do that on their spare time. They invite beta testers for stress testing and publicity (NDA? ya sure). They'll turn up some of the more game-breaking bugs along the way through sheer numbers.
I don't buy into this B.S. about the game making addicts because you can "never beat the last boss" and never truly win the game. These people are addicted, yes, but not to the game.
There are lots of people who pour incredible amounts of time into MMOs doing solitary activities like crafting or harvesting. It's not just the community, it's maxing out your character and draining it of all its content. I had friends who would play SNES RPGs for 100+ hours until they had beaten it in every way possible with every item and all that, then put it down. Then maybe a year later they'd find another game and go on the same binge. Likewise I had a group of friends that lived in an apartment together a couple years ago. We bought GTA: San Andreas, and for a solid month until we'd completed it and tried all sorts of crazy stuff, even the non-gamers would always be caught playing it in the common area. But once we "completed" it, it began collecting dust in the corner.
The denial of this closure is a big part of the "MMO addiction", along with the social aspect.
Ah, yes, the classic "games where you shoot other people" genre. I'd hate to be doing something that was formulaic a decade ago. Give me a modern, fresh game like... golf. A game where everyone aspires to consistancy.
Seriously, if you think all of these games are the same, you don't know enough about the genre. It's like saying all golf courses are pushing the same formula. Sure, but there are variations to the theme that make them each interesting in their own right. And there's people lined up to tell you that your golf hobby marks you as a boy in a man's body, just like with video games and every other activity on earth. Starting a pissing contest about who's a man is one of my qualifications, personally.
I would like a peek into the insanity that actually made enough people at FOX think that was a decent idea to roll on. I almost want to believe it's some sort of conspiracy set up so that O'Reilly and a bunch of their other pundits could shout it down and demonstate their no-spin-fair-and-balanced shtick, just because I can't imagine what the thought process was otherwise.
Re:Where to find real women scientists and enginee
on
Top Ten Geek Girls
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· Score: 1
I wouldn't take this as any sort of measuring stick, it's some random list a scrub at an increasingly irrelevant tech news site cobbled together in want of actual content. I'm sure every name popped up in the first twenty hits on a google search, where the summaries were probably lifted from.
Scientists in general don't have terribly much exposure. I bet a top ten scientist list would read something like Einstein, Newton, Stephen Hawking, Archimedes, Dr. Frankenstein, Jimmy Neutron, etc.
That's because SWG was a series of fuckups, each bigger than the last, and if they reimbursed anyone for that they would've had everyone playing for free. It's actually pretty standard MMO procedure for companies to give shit away after they've screwed something up.
If Bill Maher/Michael Moore/Robert Greenwald come out for/against video games, should that make news on here?
No, but it probably would. Have you noticed the amount of video game stories coming through? We've hated on Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman just as much for their various gaming agendas, along with a whole bunch of minor judges and political figures from either side of the aisle.
Slashdot Mirror
The altar you respawn at in Vanguard can summon your corpse for an XP and gear quality penalty. Almost everyone has a 40% run speed horse by level 10 and as you get higher there will be personal flying griffons, speedy player-controlled boats, etc.
There has been something missing from recent MMOs, and that is exploration and a sense of scope. WoW and EQ2 play like themeparks, Vanguard is more spread out. There are advantages and disadvantages to both (I loved EQ2 for the years I played it for what it's worth). It is a narrower audience that is looking for this, but the audience is still out there, and not all of us want to solo grind our way up to level 70 and two billion AA or whatever the place where you can finally get groups in EQ1 is now.
Yeah, most people you'll hear talking about challenge in MMOs conflate challenge with time consumption. There are some legitimately challenging things in MMOs but by and large they're performing easy to moderate tasks over and over again. There is nothing in Vanguard (aside from Diplomacy, which they're alternating between making too easy and borking to impossible hell right now every patch) that requires more skill than in games like WoW and EQ2 -- the time penalties are just stiffer for falling asleep at the keyboard.
Don't get me wrong, I still like Vanguard, but people that say it's extra challenging compared to EQ2 or WoW are extra wrong.
If the choice is between going to work to earn money in the game or playing the game to earn money in the game and work is the most fun option, the game has failed.
Consoles are really the more frugal choice over PC gaming.
It all depends on what you're looking for. The original Half-Life, released in 1998 with modest system requirements, had legs that carried it to the present day with its modability. Starcraft and Warcraft 3 are great RTS that are still worth playing. The hallmark space sim, Freespace 2 from 1999, is essentially a free download, and it has recently been endowed with a fan-created graphics overhaul. The original Neverwinter Nights has a lot of great custom servers and some fun fan-created campaigns for your roleplaying needs. StepMania is like DDR but much better in terms of customizability and options... and it's free. Freeciv is a turn-based strategy game with lots of customization options... and it's free. There's metric shittons of abandonware that's still great. Depending on your ethics, you can have access to the full libraries of the NES, SNES, Sega, etc. If you're feeling guilty you can always send the fifty cents to a random reseller and call it even.
There are always demos and trials (some MMOs have free trials that continue pretty much indefinitely, for example). The MMO for $10-15 a month fulfills some people's entire entertainment needs and constantly evolves.
On top of this, it utilizes a device you probably already have. You basically just need any computer that's not an absolute dinosaur to do everything I've listed in this thread. If you want to play modern games at a decent clip you'll need an okay graphics card (mine retails for sub-100 now) and possibly an extra stick of RAM or something (about $50-100 depending on how much you want to drop in) coupled with any system you're likely to find on store shelves.
Anyway this is all just a big web penarz contest, people buy what they want to buy and no one has a crystal ball to see where the industry is headed.
There's also Zombie Panic for HL1 and I believe another HL2 mod (at least in the works) that did something similar. There's also No More Room In Hell, which doesn't have the type of gameplay you're suggesting but that isn't a huge leap when it finally launches.
The people who care certainly already know, and the people who don't know almost definitely don't care. Do we need even three paragraphs devoted to a retrospective on the menus of Final Fantasy or the whip mechanics in Castlevania? I could've written these article by reading GameFAQs for fifteen minutes.
In the first screen shot it looks like he could view it from his comment history even though it was nuked from the forum but that might not be something that can be directly linked. Also if it's someone in the know they might've posted it with the expectation of it being deleted so that they could expose whatever the scandalous part of this is supposed to be.
The original script for episode four at least was really different from the one they finally ended up shooting. I know this because there was some nerdy book with drafts of the original scripts that came with one of the Star Wars games I bought at some point over the years :P
No, you're misunderstanding the post. It explains what would happen _under this model_ of the universe. As in understanding that with this topological structure it doesn't make sense to discuss a boundary.
Reduce confusion and broken hearts? What kind of game is that? :P
You gave up on the campaign partially because there's an object you need to equip a sword once to hack down? Okay. :P
My $125 graphics card can handle it with everything but shadows cranked up on a 3200+.
Set camera to top-down, zoom out, turn all spellcasters onto complete manual control. If you pause before encounters and queue up what you need, generally you're set for the battle. If it gets too much for you, crank down the difficulty a bit and play it with only one or two characters.
Personally, it's the best single-player I've played in a long, long time. I can understand where people wouldn't like it though, especially if it runs buggy on their system. I wish they'd spent more time on a serviceable AI.
I think you've pinpointed a major factor in your post, and that is that the new generation of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians are inducted into the formal education process early on and continue until literally years into grad school. We're taught that when you want to learn something, you take a class and have someone spoon feed it to you. You're a human sponge, passively soaking up knowledge. There are 24-year-old grad students at my university that can't believe they'll be expected to learn thing on their own this year! Gasp.
It's not actually published anywhere except his website and the newspaper fluff piece as far as I can tell. Basically he's come up with a (supposedly) consistent set of algebraic axioms that allow you to define division by zero and infinity. He's done this by creating special cases for the rules of division and introducing a new number to take care of a couple problem cases. I don't know much about NaN unfortunately but from what I've been reading on Slashdot I think it's different because NaN doesn't give you a mathematically consistant structure.
That said, this is the kind of investigation I might assign as a homework problem to an undergraduate algebra class. It's an entirely unsurprising result. Just coming up with a new axiomatic system that sidesteps the problem does nothing for any real world problems and those kind of mathematical avenues have been explored. What would you program an airplane to do if it tried to divide 0 by 0 and got his new number? The same shit you'd program it to do if it tries to do that now.
Do real numbers or infinite sets actually exist? When you get down to the concept of existence it's a little tricky. The models, in a sense, are our reality, because that's how we impose structure on the world.
Uhh, did you disagree with him or did you just get angry because the word "bad" was in his post?
They pay QA people to go over everything with a fine-toothed comb, because it's a job and no right-minded individual actually wants to do that on their spare time. They invite beta testers for stress testing and publicity (NDA? ya sure). They'll turn up some of the more game-breaking bugs along the way through sheer numbers.
I don't buy into this B.S. about the game making addicts because you can "never beat the last boss" and never truly win the game. These people are addicted, yes, but not to the game.
There are lots of people who pour incredible amounts of time into MMOs doing solitary activities like crafting or harvesting. It's not just the community, it's maxing out your character and draining it of all its content. I had friends who would play SNES RPGs for 100+ hours until they had beaten it in every way possible with every item and all that, then put it down. Then maybe a year later they'd find another game and go on the same binge. Likewise I had a group of friends that lived in an apartment together a couple years ago. We bought GTA: San Andreas, and for a solid month until we'd completed it and tried all sorts of crazy stuff, even the non-gamers would always be caught playing it in the common area. But once we "completed" it, it began collecting dust in the corner.
The denial of this closure is a big part of the "MMO addiction", along with the social aspect.
Ah, yes, the classic "games where you shoot other people" genre. I'd hate to be doing something that was formulaic a decade ago. Give me a modern, fresh game like... golf. A game where everyone aspires to consistancy.
Seriously, if you think all of these games are the same, you don't know enough about the genre. It's like saying all golf courses are pushing the same formula. Sure, but there are variations to the theme that make them each interesting in their own right. And there's people lined up to tell you that your golf hobby marks you as a boy in a man's body, just like with video games and every other activity on earth. Starting a pissing contest about who's a man is one of my qualifications, personally.
I would like a peek into the insanity that actually made enough people at FOX think that was a decent idea to roll on. I almost want to believe it's some sort of conspiracy set up so that O'Reilly and a bunch of their other pundits could shout it down and demonstate their no-spin-fair-and-balanced shtick, just because I can't imagine what the thought process was otherwise.
I wouldn't take this as any sort of measuring stick, it's some random list a scrub at an increasingly irrelevant tech news site cobbled together in want of actual content. I'm sure every name popped up in the first twenty hits on a google search, where the summaries were probably lifted from.
Scientists in general don't have terribly much exposure. I bet a top ten scientist list would read something like Einstein, Newton, Stephen Hawking, Archimedes, Dr. Frankenstein, Jimmy Neutron, etc.
That's because SWG was a series of fuckups, each bigger than the last, and if they reimbursed anyone for that they would've had everyone playing for free. It's actually pretty standard MMO procedure for companies to give shit away after they've screwed something up.
If you haven't already, take a look through the Underground History of American Education, free on his website. It's an interesting read.
If Bill Maher/Michael Moore/Robert Greenwald come out for/against video games, should that make news on here?
No, but it probably would. Have you noticed the amount of video game stories coming through? We've hated on Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman just as much for their various gaming agendas, along with a whole bunch of minor judges and political figures from either side of the aisle.
A chamber with no eigenvalues on the unit circle? :P