When I swapped out from auto to manual a few years ago, I noticed I immediately started paying attention to more things, esp starting and stopping and light timings. I just go into neutral at lights, but want to make sure I have the clutch in and I'm in 1st before it changes. By now its second nature for me to be more aware of light timings and just in general what is going on around me at intersections, much more so than I was previously.
I think you can gift games to one another, so when the time comes you can probably set him or yourself up with a new account, then divvy up the games as needed, and probably trade back and forth if one or the other gets sick of it. Come to think of it, my dad still buys a lot of steam games and I think he gets sick of them almost as fast as I do, so maybe we could both save each other a little cash in that department.
I actually really wonder what to do with steam now when my sons get older (oldest is only 2) and want to start using games I have on steam. Granted I don't use a lot of the social features on steam, but if my son gets more into it and starts collecting buddies via steam, I don't want there to be a confusion over who is who.
Do they have steam shared accounts? It would be pretty useful if I could create some additional logins over steam that still have access to the same library but tracks friends and achievements separately.
Man, my dad had it easier 25 years ago, no such thing as all these social media drm login blah blah blah features to sort amongst your family. Once you got over the hurdle of installing the game, just play!
I recall reading/watching something saying that organic farming still used pesticides, but none of the new, probably better, synthetic ones. I guess they were 'natural source' pesticides. I guess wikipedia has a list of some.
Eh anyway, also in the same study I remember that on average it said most organic fruits did have much less pesticides on them when they hit the store, but all things end up equal after you rinse it off under water.
Microsoft did this during the xbox breaking fiasco phase. I sent mine back that I had kept in good shape after a read ring o death. I got back a 'refurbished' one that looked like it had been pretty beat up. It worked well for a few months then i started getting random crashes. After a bit it turns out the cd player was fubar in it, wobbling the cd,and scratching all my disks.
I tried to tell tech support this, + they had sent me a shitty one, and they said for 90 they would let me ship it back since it was now out of warranty. I had some gift cards and figured a new one would be better anyway so just went to the store and got a new one for cheaper (ultimately NOT cheaper, but i had the gift cards).
The worst part is that 5 or 6 of my games got scratched pretty badly in places and from that point on would crash or hang at parts of the game. Most of them crap out if I try to install them to the hard drive when they hit the scratched portion of it.
All in all it was a pretty shitty experience. I was planning on seeing about moding the xbox with the broken cd drive with a replacement, but just lost interest in even bothering with it.
My father mentioned once how as a structural engineer, he used to hate autocad back in the 80s, it just wasnt made to work yhe way they are trained. There were many other products out there that were much better but came with dongles and other crazy activation schemes.
Well as time passes, many of their customers have pirated autocad, and start requesting work in that format, or they have done things in that format, can you take a look please. Pretty soon autocad is just what is used, popularity from ease of piracy makes it the dominate program.
For other bad things of the same type see qwerty keyboards, or any closed ms office format
Really enjoyed demoted souls myself, great game...though I think the game beeping p2p broke the unique mp a bit. The only time I raged was Capra demon, but that was because many deaths were due too bad camera (big boss, small room) and sloppy targeting controls (2 small hit stun dogs with boss), which makes you mad. The rest though we're oops, my fault moments, so you don't feel bad.
The skills you learn in the game are great, a mix of knowledge of where things are in the world, memory of enemy attack patterns, stat building and gear optimization, yet still requiring some degree of reflexes and execution to make it all come together. That is something I really enjoy learning and playing.
Though I did t like the multiplayer, was hard to find people to coop with, even at the right level at the right spots. Pvp, I just didn't like how you have to play to win , not to mention if you want frequent fights I would invade, often feeling like a huge jerk since I knew that guy I just great combusted was gearing up to take down a hard boss and make progress, and I just wrecked it for him.
Overall a very cool seirs of games, well executed on many fronts, not to be missed by anybody if you can help it.
I've been plowing through emulator games recently, and to some extent the go is right, I play what I know longest, and the only ones that get more time are the rare gems that I missed out on like secret of mana or some such.
Anyway my point here is that games don't sit in consoles for weeks because we aren't 12 years old anymore. Back then you have time and no cash, so you just play what is available.
Often the skill needed to win the game was rote memorization or extreme repetition. Where is that next guy? Let me throw an endless supply of guys at you, or if you didn't run fast through this spot or kill that guy fast enough you are now in a auto die situation.
I don't know about you but I don't have the will to honestly waste time getting better at nes style games. Now, I used to be a person who locked myself in a small too. With 4 cyber demons in Doom2 and try to get through with no health pickups...but again that was a product of boredom.
Now if I am going to get good at a game it's because its most likely multiplayer and has fun mechanics. Once you peak out in a multiplayer game, no way you'll ever find a ai as unique as your opponents online, further, the skills and mechanics you need to know to beat someone are just more interesting than remembering that a random bullet will hit you once you land on platform x across the insta die pit, so you have to jump again when you get there, book.
Anyway, don't really miss the old designs, but like to visit them from time to time to remember. However I still don't like the corridor spoon feed we get now, and generally want interesting mechanics, not insta death and platforming.
I recently received and IPAD 2 for XMAS. It was my first time with any kind of mac/apple device short of a gen1 ipod. I got excited about the possibilities of stuff I could do on it and how portable it was. I liked the swipe interface for some stuff, hated it for others (kid reaching over and touching it makes it zoom instead of scroll etc).
I started thinking about writing an app for it for some random stuff. I also wanted to drop random files on it, and view images and movies over a samba share on my windows machines.
I guess I got spoiled browsing the web with adblock plus for the past few years. I forgot how ugly it was without it. I also hadn't been harassed for $$$$$$$ to do ANYTHING more so than when investigating anything related to the ipad. Free apps all have annoying add bars. Apps that do things the ipad should be able to do cost $. The spirit of open source and giving away of small apps seems to be quite dead in the i- whatever community.
To develop, I need a mac and 100 dollars. Yes, there are alternatives, but all of them seem ugly and honestly just not worth the time if you want to do some quick 'home use' programs.
All in all, the ipad has ended up being a great bathroom reader, so I guess it is good for something. I was just sad to see a bunch of potential great uses for it walled off with money.
I think the gamecube controller is the best of the bunch, but, only on a game designed purely for use with it. Overall I find it less versatile than the others, but on a nice mario xxxx game or a gamecube only game, its fantastic.
But if you take a multiplatform game and put it on the GC, the controls just don't have enough buttons and the positions of the x/y are awkward. Also I found the shoulder pads a little too hard to press in games that required them to be depressed for a long duration.
I was just talking with a coworker about this today, his smart phone lasts about a day, my 'dumb phone' with all that crap in the background I don't use lasts about 3 days. Was saying I bet they could make a more efficient phone with just the basics that would last much longer, but there is nothing like that out there.
For myself I guess I really just want a qwerty keyboard to text and to do voice calls and that fits most of my needs for communicating. I right now pay about 90 a month for 2 phones, and I'm not sure how to get it cheaper. My minutes usage is basically nil as most of the voice calls I would take are on nights/weekends and my texting is reasonably small too. My wife's usage is up a bit more up there though. Wish we could pool our text messages etc but nothing like that.
I was a late cell adopter and I'll probably be a late smart phone adopter too, but I'm glued to a pc most of the time so no real need to have anything mobile.
I still enjoy netflix. It's much easier getting the dvd via mail and having a huge queue than having to take trips to the rental store. The streaming is great though. I just use it via the xbox, and there is always stuff on there to watch. Most movies I do want to watch aren't even there anyway, usually it is older stuff, but honestly what I love are the documentarys and just the odd things floating around out there. It's all the stuff I don't know about, and if I did, would probably not rent, or bother to download.
It is all that one shot content, sort of like how I used to channel surf. You are bored, don't feel like doing anything, so put on the tv, find a random show, watch it. This is what I do with netflix except I have a lot more control over the random show that I watch, and can save shows that I might want to randomly watch another time. I guess so far its been the equivalent of what discovery and the history channel used to be. Now I can watch all those nature and history shows without having to worry about commercials every 5 seconds nor UFO Ice road truckers getting in the way.
Have watched a ton of stuff I found very interesting on there, and its stuff I wouldn't have found on my or heard about, just stuff discovered from stumbling around the huge library that is there. Seems like 7 bucks a month to me for that is a pretty damn good deal.
I think most action games have a meta game at the upper level. Just like you said, a good player playing this predictive one, would be thinking, oh, well he expects me to grab the health since that is my best choice, I'm going to go grab the shotgun over here instead. 95% of the time getting the health is the right move, but when two masters of any game square off, you have to make the 'wrong' move some of the times. Just have to be sure the wrong move isn't suicide.
It's silly but I used to play at mount & blade warband a lot, and I felt like the skill climb culminated in playing like a beginner. A lot of times if you were used to playing good players, if you found yourself squared off against someone just a step above total newbie, you could often get yourself killed because they would act suicidally. In your mind from experience, it is known that attacking at that moment will net them being hit.
Many times you fake out good players, you get in a position where they have no way of attacking you back, they must defend, and you fake them, attacking another way. The beginner just swings, no regard for the perilous situation he is in. Where it succeeds is if the advanced player is already reacting as though there should be no possible way he would think to even attack in that situation, he does, and hits the advanced player.
I think a real master will know just when to act like a beginner, doing things that appear completely suicidal, yet somehow coming out unscathed.
Things like this probably have to do with a game moving fast as well. As they article said the SC2 players with more APM's tend to win. Having a fast reaction time, being primed to react immediately to situations sooner than your opponent will usually trump amazing predictive abilities more often than not. I guess it is deadly when the guy with amazing reaction time also has the ability to run the predictions too.
I think it is all factors. I used to buy games I REALLY wanted, then tried all the 'oh that looks cool but I'll probably only play it an hour but I still want to see it' games. At some point in time I dropped playing games from the second category all together.
I have attributed this to getting older and having less time, but honestly just not needing to try out games I know are just rehashes of things I have already played.
But the biggest factor for me to stop downloading things... Steam Sales. Sales on video games, just seems like such a foreign concept to me with the way they have been priced basically forever. I now spend way more $$ on games when I can pick up a 'kinda sorta' games for 7.50 and well made indies for 2.50. That is cheaper than a movie or even a fast food combo meal, well worth it, even if I only play it an hour.
I actually read lvier nda onions as though lvier nda was some weird brand of onion I had never heard of before. I think also I mistook the l as an I, and yes, this font makes the two letters i and L look the same, nice. Iveir nda onions, from idaho;)
Agree here, and I think the tipping point for minecraft was the idea of a game actually being placed in it via survivor mode. That's why I bought it anyway. I had the impression that the 'just build' part of minecraft was around a while but had a smaller following. Once the survivor idea caught on I think is when it exploded.
Unfortunately he hasn't done a good job at making a game out of it yet imho. Some nice forward stepping ideas, and I haven't really looked at mods, but I just haven't picked up the game in a while. Terraria showed me more the kind of game I was looking for, but that got boring for me after time as well, but i definitly spent a lot more time with it since I like smashing through gates.
When I can't survive in an area or get through it to see what is on the other side, it pushes me find out a solution to that problem so I can push forward.
But yeah at the time minecraft just did a perfect mass appeal, it walked right down the middle of the line, being a building/creative tool and having that hint and promise of exploring and finding treasure and monsters, so you were able to scoop up a huge audience and get a pretty big buzz for attention.
I think it failed pretty hard in the 'game' part, but that wasn't really apparent until I had spent 10 bucks and maybe about 3/4 hours in the game and saw everything there was to see. Still hoping that eventually there will be a neat game in there somewhere.
Agree with AC here 100%. If anything it makes more sense to use a wall as cover instead of running around like a mad man. Regenerating health adds a nicer pace to the gameplay. The moment they added that to games is the moment I stopped having to quick save every 3 steps. Seems like a good tradeoff honestly.
Not to say I don't like arena run crazily games like painkiller / serious sam... each method has its place. I mean overall its basically a gaming landscape where you go AAA for a smooth sort of 'look at my cool artwork' gameplay, and go indie for new/different gameplay.
You know this reminded me of something also... I hate the linking in most of the articles. Like you said about say a paper that it is discussing, the link is buried on some weird keyword in the summary that doesn't make it clear which it is... or even worse is when they will link the article like 3 times throughout the article, so you end up loading the page 3 times.
Hell first article on the main page:
"Using new software techniques on Hubble data from 1998, astronomers have teased out direct images of three planets orbiting the Sun-like star HR 8799, 130 light years away. These planets were discovered in 2008 using a different telescope, but had been sitting in the Hubble pictures this whole time, invisible due to their proximity to the bright star. Many other images of other stars are available, so it's entirely possible more planets will be found in this way."
"teased out direct images of three planets" and "but had been sitting in the Hubble pictures this whole time" are the hyper links. Which one is the main article it is talking about? Sometimes it's the first one, sometimes it's the second one. Sometimes the first and second one are the same. Does that first link take me to 3 pictures with no explanation? Are they both taking me to just the photos? Does one of those have an article to read?
I mean I get it, its like some 1995 oldschool style of hyperlinking in a sentence that reminds me of netscape navigator on win 3.1 (blah blah i know it reminds some guy of something older school), but man either way, just some more clearly defined section for links in the summary would be great.
Title/Slashdot link Article link Comment blurb.Comment blurb.Comment blurb. Comment blurb.Comment blurb.Comment blurb Additional Links Tags etc etc
Not the end of the world really, but some organization or clearly defined links would be nice.
Yes.... It has some benefits... like when I wanted to open up a comment below my threshold I had to reload the page, where as now it just opens up... but I don't appreciate my entire browser grinding to a halt when I open up something that has say 400+ comments.
Also the 'show more' style of stuff is kind of annoying. Just show me how many things are left over, or just put it all on one page, don't keep me guessing how far through the comments I am.
Really I think you don't see many great leaders is because the qualities that usually make up a great leader are not the qualities that are going to actually get you into a leadership position in the first place.
Lots of those creative types could probably end up being pretty good leaders with a little bit of development. Leadership skills are like anything else in that they take some development and practice, trial and error. I guess like in any field the 'naturals' stand out, but that doesnt mean that most anyone could not learn to do it well.
Yeah I was surprised how many people hated AC and complained about it. Those are actually some of the few games that I got ALMOST most of the achievements (minus the flag hunting) because quite frankly the cities are amazing, and the feel of climbing around is easy and challenging all at the same time. The difficulty is small, but you have so many choices of HOW you want to take out a target that it is just a sheer pleasure to drive that guy around. Brotherhood did a good thing having levels of challenge... you can play easy mode if you want and only get half sync, or you can try to achieve the specific goal which adds a bit of challenge to get full sync, a great tradeoff.
I still need to get just cause 2. Next steam sale I think I'm going to grab it.
I think people call it social crap because the game bars you from advancing unless you spam the shit out of your friends to play the game also. I think that is the real thing, its like, if you like farmville, why are you not playing like blue harvest or animal crossing or something like that (no clue what farming/sim games are out there). Play a REAL game not one that tells you to spend $$ and or people's time before you can see the next.png image appear on your farm. More often then not, the people just don't know any better, that there are games out there you can just play without those types of barriers.
I know some puzzle gamer's that frighten me. I have a friend who showed me a panel de pon (something like that) video on youtube of him playing and the amount of hardcore gaming skills going on in it made my jaw drop, despite not knowing too much about the game.
But I really wouldn't call someone a gamer if they spend their time playing mafia wars and farmville on facebook. Also for reference I am 31.
Logically I agree with you. Community college for the generals, 4 year for the specials and your BS degree.
From my experience though, and I guess I am still young at 31, I still have yet to ever duplicate my freshmen year of college out of state in a new place. The whole experience of it was something I needed at the time I think, but also I met an amazing assortment of people (plenty I disliked too). I met my wife at school. I met some of my still best friends at school, I even found the right networking to start my career at my school.
But really it is the people. Those friends I have are still in my life bringing me constant joy and happiness, and sure the loan was punishing coming out of the whole thing, but I don't know, for all the logic of it, there is not an easy way to duplicate of the freshmen year experience in college ever again in your life.
The big kali games were war2, c&c, descent, and duke 3d. I played the shit out of war2 on kali and I think that the c&c and war2 playing there was the grandaddy of RTS competition now. In fact some of the 'big names' of the time there went on to work for blizzard (ie shlonglor) and really layed the groundwork to see war2 as a valid competitive platform, pushing for some of the early key patches such as proper position randomization.
But yeah over the modem, was pretty laggy. No room for micro in those games, hit patrol on the other side of the guys town and hope for the best... line em up, knock em down:)
Same experience here for me as a new driver. I was driving down a straight road, to my right was another road meeting the one I was driving down, cars were lined up on my road to make a left onto the second road, and cars were lined up coming off that road to make a left on my road. Basically a T situation with me on the left side of the T.
Anyway I'm going about 40, some woman in a mini van on the road to my right pulls up to the stop sign, stops, presumably looks, doesn't see me at all, and proceeds to pull out, I slam the brakes, but she was so close that I had to steer around her or I'd have slammed into her driver side door.
So I avoid left, and then I can still clearly remember the older guy's face in the car waiting to turn down that street as I start coming right at him, then, I was able to dodge back to the right into my lane, and then feeling like my car was all fine for a second and I'm through it, the car starts fishtailing all over the place while I lost my adrenaline and that was a lot harder to bring under control than the power skid.
In hindsight obviously it was the ABS and possibly the all wheel drive (subaru legacy wagon) that saved my life (well I had an airbag, that woman probably didn't have a side impact bag) because I was able to steer around the obstacles, but I also can't help but feel like all the hours of random driving games I had played where I usually weave and fishtail through traffic came into play somewhere too.
But this makes sense, it is common practice to train pilots and drivers on simulators, and playing a well developed racing sim will help you in your real life driving in the capacity that the simulator mimics real life. Sure GTA won't teach you too much, but it sure will make you a lot better at finding gaps in moving objects like when crossing an intersection you should probably steer into an oncoming car and slip behind it rather than turn away from it and trying to cross in front.
Slashdot Mirror
When I swapped out from auto to manual a few years ago, I noticed I immediately started paying attention to more things, esp starting and stopping and light timings. I just go into neutral at lights, but want to make sure I have the clutch in and I'm in 1st before it changes. By now its second nature for me to be more aware of light timings and just in general what is going on around me at intersections, much more so than I was previously.
I think you can gift games to one another, so when the time comes you can probably set him or yourself up with a new account, then divvy up the games as needed, and probably trade back and forth if one or the other gets sick of it. Come to think of it, my dad still buys a lot of steam games and I think he gets sick of them almost as fast as I do, so maybe we could both save each other a little cash in that department.
I actually really wonder what to do with steam now when my sons get older (oldest is only 2) and want to start using games I have on steam. Granted I don't use a lot of the social features on steam, but if my son gets more into it and starts collecting buddies via steam, I don't want there to be a confusion over who is who.
Do they have steam shared accounts? It would be pretty useful if I could create some additional logins over steam that still have access to the same library but tracks friends and achievements separately.
Man, my dad had it easier 25 years ago, no such thing as all these social media drm login blah blah blah features to sort amongst your family. Once you got over the hurdle of installing the game, just play!
I recall reading/watching something saying that organic farming still used pesticides, but none of the new, probably better, synthetic ones. I guess they were 'natural source' pesticides. I guess wikipedia has a list of some.
Eh anyway, also in the same study I remember that on average it said most organic fruits did have much less pesticides on them when they hit the store, but all things end up equal after you rinse it off under water.
Microsoft did this during the xbox breaking fiasco phase. I sent mine back that I had kept in good shape after a read ring o death. I got back a 'refurbished' one that looked like it had been pretty beat up. It worked well for a few months then i started getting random crashes. After a bit it turns out the cd player was fubar in it, wobbling the cd ,and scratching all my disks.
I tried to tell tech support this, + they had sent me a shitty one, and they said for 90 they would let me ship it back since it was now out of warranty. I had some gift cards and figured a new one would be better anyway so just went to the store and got a new one for cheaper (ultimately NOT cheaper, but i had the gift cards).
The worst part is that 5 or 6 of my games got scratched pretty badly in places and from that point on would crash or hang at parts of the game. Most of them crap out if I try to install them to the hard drive when they hit the scratched portion of it.
All in all it was a pretty shitty experience. I was planning on seeing about moding the xbox with the broken cd drive with a replacement, but just lost interest in even bothering with it.
My father mentioned once how as a structural engineer, he used to hate autocad back in the 80s, it just wasnt made to work yhe way they are trained. There were many other products out there that were much better but came with dongles and other crazy activation schemes.
Well as time passes, many of their customers have pirated autocad, and start requesting work in that format, or they have done things in that format, can you take a look please. Pretty soon autocad is just what is used, popularity from ease of piracy makes it the dominate program.
For other bad things of the same type see qwerty keyboards, or any closed ms office format
Really enjoyed demoted souls myself, great game...though I think the game beeping p2p broke the unique mp a bit. The only time I raged was Capra demon, but that was because many deaths were due too bad camera (big boss, small room) and sloppy targeting controls (2 small hit stun dogs with boss), which makes you mad. The rest though we're oops, my fault moments, so you don't feel bad.
The skills you learn in the game are great, a mix of knowledge of where things are in the world, memory of enemy attack patterns, stat building and gear optimization, yet still requiring some degree of reflexes and execution to make it all come together. That is something I really enjoy learning and playing.
Though I did t like the multiplayer, was hard to find people to coop with, even at the right level at the right spots. Pvp, I just didn't like how you have to play to win , not to mention if you want frequent fights I would invade, often feeling like a huge jerk since I knew that guy I just great combusted was gearing up to take down a hard boss and make progress, and I just wrecked it for him.
Overall a very cool seirs of games, well executed on many fronts, not to be missed by anybody if you can help it.
I've been plowing through emulator games recently, and to some extent the go is right, I play what I know longest, and the only ones that get more time are the rare gems that I missed out on like secret of mana or some such.
Anyway my point here is that games don't sit in consoles for weeks because we aren't 12 years old anymore. Back then you have time and no cash, so you just play what is available.
Often the skill needed to win the game was rote memorization or extreme repetition. Where is that next guy? Let me throw an endless supply of guys at you, or if you didn't run fast through this spot or kill that guy fast enough you are now in a auto die situation.
I don't know about you but I don't have the will to honestly waste time getting better at nes style games. Now, I used to be a person who locked myself in a small too. With 4 cyber demons in Doom2 and try to get through with no health pickups...but again that was a product of boredom.
Now if I am going to get good at a game it's because its most likely multiplayer and has fun mechanics. Once you peak out in a multiplayer game, no way you'll ever find a ai as unique as your opponents online, further, the skills and mechanics you need to know to beat someone are just more interesting than remembering that a random bullet will hit you once you land on platform x across the insta die pit, so you have to jump again when you get there, book.
Anyway, don't really miss the old designs, but like to visit them from time to time to remember. However I still don't like the corridor spoon feed we get now, and generally want interesting mechanics, not insta death and platforming.
I recently received and IPAD 2 for XMAS. It was my first time with any kind of mac/apple device short of a gen1 ipod. I got excited about the possibilities of stuff I could do on it and how portable it was. I liked the swipe interface for some stuff, hated it for others (kid reaching over and touching it makes it zoom instead of scroll etc).
I started thinking about writing an app for it for some random stuff. I also wanted to drop random files on it, and view images and movies over a samba share on my windows machines.
I guess I got spoiled browsing the web with adblock plus for the past few years. I forgot how ugly it was without it. I also hadn't been harassed for $$$$$$$ to do ANYTHING more so than when investigating anything related to the ipad. Free apps all have annoying add bars. Apps that do things the ipad should be able to do cost $. The spirit of open source and giving away of small apps seems to be quite dead in the i- whatever community.
To develop, I need a mac and 100 dollars. Yes, there are alternatives, but all of them seem ugly and honestly just not worth the time if you want to do some quick 'home use' programs.
All in all, the ipad has ended up being a great bathroom reader, so I guess it is good for something. I was just sad to see a bunch of potential great uses for it walled off with money.
I think the gamecube controller is the best of the bunch, but, only on a game designed purely for use with it. Overall I find it less versatile than the others, but on a nice mario xxxx game or a gamecube only game, its fantastic.
But if you take a multiplatform game and put it on the GC, the controls just don't have enough buttons and the positions of the x/y are awkward. Also I found the shoulder pads a little too hard to press in games that required them to be depressed for a long duration.
Mobile device for a mobile need.
I guess the idea is that people don't have mobile needs yet purchase expensive smart phones to use while they are sitting next to their computer.
I was just talking with a coworker about this today, his smart phone lasts about a day, my 'dumb phone' with all that crap in the background I don't use lasts about 3 days. Was saying I bet they could make a more efficient phone with just the basics that would last much longer, but there is nothing like that out there.
For myself I guess I really just want a qwerty keyboard to text and to do voice calls and that fits most of my needs for communicating. I right now pay about 90 a month for 2 phones, and I'm not sure how to get it cheaper. My minutes usage is basically nil as most of the voice calls I would take are on nights/weekends and my texting is reasonably small too. My wife's usage is up a bit more up there though. Wish we could pool our text messages etc but nothing like that.
I was a late cell adopter and I'll probably be a late smart phone adopter too, but I'm glued to a pc most of the time so no real need to have anything mobile.
I still enjoy netflix. It's much easier getting the dvd via mail and having a huge queue than having to take trips to the rental store. The streaming is great though. I just use it via the xbox, and there is always stuff on there to watch. Most movies I do want to watch aren't even there anyway, usually it is older stuff, but honestly what I love are the documentarys and just the odd things floating around out there. It's all the stuff I don't know about, and if I did, would probably not rent, or bother to download.
It is all that one shot content, sort of like how I used to channel surf. You are bored, don't feel like doing anything, so put on the tv, find a random show, watch it. This is what I do with netflix except I have a lot more control over the random show that I watch, and can save shows that I might want to randomly watch another time. I guess so far its been the equivalent of what discovery and the history channel used to be. Now I can watch all those nature and history shows without having to worry about commercials every 5 seconds nor UFO Ice road truckers getting in the way.
Have watched a ton of stuff I found very interesting on there, and its stuff I wouldn't have found on my or heard about, just stuff discovered from stumbling around the huge library that is there. Seems like 7 bucks a month to me for that is a pretty damn good deal.
I think most action games have a meta game at the upper level. Just like you said, a good player playing this predictive one, would be thinking, oh, well he expects me to grab the health since that is my best choice, I'm going to go grab the shotgun over here instead. 95% of the time getting the health is the right move, but when two masters of any game square off, you have to make the 'wrong' move some of the times. Just have to be sure the wrong move isn't suicide.
It's silly but I used to play at mount & blade warband a lot, and I felt like the skill climb culminated in playing like a beginner. A lot of times if you were used to playing good players, if you found yourself squared off against someone just a step above total newbie, you could often get yourself killed because they would act suicidally. In your mind from experience, it is known that attacking at that moment will net them being hit.
Many times you fake out good players, you get in a position where they have no way of attacking you back, they must defend, and you fake them, attacking another way. The beginner just swings, no regard for the perilous situation he is in. Where it succeeds is if the advanced player is already reacting as though there should be no possible way he would think to even attack in that situation, he does, and hits the advanced player.
I think a real master will know just when to act like a beginner, doing things that appear completely suicidal, yet somehow coming out unscathed.
Things like this probably have to do with a game moving fast as well. As they article said the SC2 players with more APM's tend to win. Having a fast reaction time, being primed to react immediately to situations sooner than your opponent will usually trump amazing predictive abilities more often than not. I guess it is deadly when the guy with amazing reaction time also has the ability to run the predictions too.
I think it is all factors. I used to buy games I REALLY wanted, then tried all the 'oh that looks cool but I'll probably only play it an hour but I still want to see it' games. At some point in time I dropped playing games from the second category all together.
I have attributed this to getting older and having less time, but honestly just not needing to try out games I know are just rehashes of things I have already played.
But the biggest factor for me to stop downloading things... Steam Sales. Sales on video games, just seems like such a foreign concept to me with the way they have been priced basically forever. I now spend way more $$ on games when I can pick up a 'kinda sorta' games for 7.50 and well made indies for 2.50. That is cheaper than a movie or even a fast food combo meal, well worth it, even if I only play it an hour.
I actually read lvier nda onions as though lvier nda was some weird brand of onion I had never heard of before. I think also I mistook the l as an I, and yes, this font makes the two letters i and L look the same, nice. Iveir nda onions, from idaho ;)
Agree here, and I think the tipping point for minecraft was the idea of a game actually being placed in it via survivor mode. That's why I bought it anyway. I had the impression that the 'just build' part of minecraft was around a while but had a smaller following. Once the survivor idea caught on I think is when it exploded.
Unfortunately he hasn't done a good job at making a game out of it yet imho. Some nice forward stepping ideas, and I haven't really looked at mods, but I just haven't picked up the game in a while. Terraria showed me more the kind of game I was looking for, but that got boring for me after time as well, but i definitly spent a lot more time with it since I like smashing through gates.
When I can't survive in an area or get through it to see what is on the other side, it pushes me find out a solution to that problem so I can push forward.
But yeah at the time minecraft just did a perfect mass appeal, it walked right down the middle of the line, being a building /creative tool and having that hint and promise of exploring and finding treasure and monsters, so you were able to scoop up a huge audience and get a pretty big buzz for attention.
I think it failed pretty hard in the 'game' part, but that wasn't really apparent until I had spent 10 bucks and maybe about 3/4 hours in the game and saw everything there was to see. Still hoping that eventually there will be a neat game in there somewhere.
Agree with AC here 100%. If anything it makes more sense to use a wall as cover instead of running around like a mad man. Regenerating health adds a nicer pace to the gameplay. The moment they added that to games is the moment I stopped having to quick save every 3 steps. Seems like a good tradeoff honestly.
Not to say I don't like arena run crazily games like painkiller / serious sam... each method has its place. I mean overall its basically a gaming landscape where you go AAA for a smooth sort of 'look at my cool artwork' gameplay, and go indie for new/different gameplay.
You know this reminded me of something also... I hate the linking in most of the articles. Like you said about say a paper that it is discussing, the link is buried on some weird keyword in the summary that doesn't make it clear which it is... or even worse is when they will link the article like 3 times throughout the article, so you end up loading the page 3 times.
Hell first article on the main page:
"Using new software techniques on Hubble data from 1998, astronomers have teased out direct images of three planets orbiting the Sun-like star HR 8799, 130 light years away. These planets were discovered in 2008 using a different telescope, but had been sitting in the Hubble pictures this whole time, invisible due to their proximity to the bright star. Many other images of other stars are available, so it's entirely possible more planets will be found in this way."
"teased out direct images of three planets" and "but had been sitting in the Hubble pictures this whole time" are the hyper links. Which one is the main article it is talking about? Sometimes it's the first one, sometimes it's the second one. Sometimes the first and second one are the same. Does that first link take me to 3 pictures with no explanation? Are they both taking me to just the photos? Does one of those have an article to read?
I mean I get it, its like some 1995 oldschool style of hyperlinking in a sentence that reminds me of netscape navigator on win 3.1 (blah blah i know it reminds some guy of something older school), but man either way, just some more clearly defined section for links in the summary would be great.
Title/Slashdot link
Article link
Comment blurb.Comment blurb.Comment blurb.
Comment blurb.Comment blurb.Comment blurb
Additional Links
Tags etc etc
Not the end of the world really, but some organization or clearly defined links would be nice.
Yes.... It has some benefits... like when I wanted to open up a comment below my threshold I had to reload the page, where as now it just opens up... but I don't appreciate my entire browser grinding to a halt when I open up something that has say 400+ comments.
Also the 'show more' style of stuff is kind of annoying. Just show me how many things are left over, or just put it all on one page, don't keep me guessing how far through the comments I am.
Really I think you don't see many great leaders is because the qualities that usually make up a great leader are not the qualities that are going to actually get you into a leadership position in the first place.
Lots of those creative types could probably end up being pretty good leaders with a little bit of development. Leadership skills are like anything else in that they take some development and practice, trial and error. I guess like in any field the 'naturals' stand out, but that doesnt mean that most anyone could not learn to do it well.
Yeah I was surprised how many people hated AC and complained about it. Those are actually some of the few games that I got ALMOST most of the achievements (minus the flag hunting) because quite frankly the cities are amazing, and the feel of climbing around is easy and challenging all at the same time. The difficulty is small, but you have so many choices of HOW you want to take out a target that it is just a sheer pleasure to drive that guy around. Brotherhood did a good thing having levels of challenge... you can play easy mode if you want and only get half sync, or you can try to achieve the specific goal which adds a bit of challenge to get full sync, a great tradeoff.
I still need to get just cause 2. Next steam sale I think I'm going to grab it.
I think people call it social crap because the game bars you from advancing unless you spam the shit out of your friends to play the game also. I think that is the real thing, its like, if you like farmville, why are you not playing like blue harvest or animal crossing or something like that (no clue what farming/sim games are out there). Play a REAL game not one that tells you to spend $$ and or people's time before you can see the next .png image appear on your farm. More often then not, the people just don't know any better, that there are games out there you can just play without those types of barriers.
I know some puzzle gamer's that frighten me. I have a friend who showed me a panel de pon (something like that) video on youtube of him playing and the amount of hardcore gaming skills going on in it made my jaw drop, despite not knowing too much about the game.
But I really wouldn't call someone a gamer if they spend their time playing mafia wars and farmville on facebook. Also for reference I am 31.
Logically I agree with you. Community college for the generals, 4 year for the specials and your BS degree.
From my experience though, and I guess I am still young at 31, I still have yet to ever duplicate my freshmen year of college out of state in a new place. The whole experience of it was something I needed at the time I think, but also I met an amazing assortment of people (plenty I disliked too). I met my wife at school. I met some of my still best friends at school, I even found the right networking to start my career at my school.
But really it is the people. Those friends I have are still in my life bringing me constant joy and happiness, and sure the loan was punishing coming out of the whole thing, but I don't know, for all the logic of it, there is not an easy way to duplicate of the freshmen year experience in college ever again in your life.
The big kali games were war2, c&c, descent, and duke 3d. I played the shit out of war2 on kali and I think that the c&c and war2 playing there was the grandaddy of RTS competition now. In fact some of the 'big names' of the time there went on to work for blizzard (ie shlonglor) and really layed the groundwork to see war2 as a valid competitive platform, pushing for some of the early key patches such as proper position randomization.
But yeah over the modem, was pretty laggy. No room for micro in those games, hit patrol on the other side of the guys town and hope for the best... line em up, knock em down :)
Same experience here for me as a new driver. I was driving down a straight road, to my right was another road meeting the one I was driving down, cars were lined up on my road to make a left onto the second road, and cars were lined up coming off that road to make a left on my road. Basically a T situation with me on the left side of the T.
Anyway I'm going about 40, some woman in a mini van on the road to my right pulls up to the stop sign, stops, presumably looks, doesn't see me at all, and proceeds to pull out, I slam the brakes, but she was so close that I had to steer around her or I'd have slammed into her driver side door.
So I avoid left, and then I can still clearly remember the older guy's face in the car waiting to turn down that street as I start coming right at him, then, I was able to dodge back to the right into my lane, and then feeling like my car was all fine for a second and I'm through it, the car starts fishtailing all over the place while I lost my adrenaline and that was a lot harder to bring under control than the power skid.
In hindsight obviously it was the ABS and possibly the all wheel drive (subaru legacy wagon) that saved my life (well I had an airbag, that woman probably didn't have a side impact bag) because I was able to steer around the obstacles, but I also can't help but feel like all the hours of random driving games I had played where I usually weave and fishtail through traffic came into play somewhere too.
But this makes sense, it is common practice to train pilots and drivers on simulators, and playing a well developed racing sim will help you in your real life driving in the capacity that the simulator mimics real life. Sure GTA won't teach you too much, but it sure will make you a lot better at finding gaps in moving objects like when crossing an intersection you should probably steer into an oncoming car and slip behind it rather than turn away from it and trying to cross in front.