My area (Phoenix, AZ) has quite a few stores from both chains.
The EBGames store that's near me is quite a good gamer resource; I patronize it regularly. The GameStops are only so-so.
After reading the article, I suppose that despite the EBGames store having the best sales performance in the region, it will be closed and its staff laid off in order to protect the turf of the mediocre GameStops.
You must be from some alternate universe where comics have continuity.
Peter Parker's been a teen/young adult for what? 30 years? And his character has been re-invented as much as any other in the universe of Marvel comics. I seem to even remember a time (got an issue or two from it too) when there were *two* Peter Parkers, one a clone of the other. They couldn't both be Spiderman, so one was the Scarlet Spider!
What I found most disappointing about the review was the lack of a sense of history.
The game was only compared to the previous comic->movie->game licenses for the latest console generation. But, seeing as how this game is more closely based on the comics, it would have been better to include a comparison to its closer spiritual kin, the comic->game licenses Spiderman and Spiderman 2: Enter Electro for the PS1.
When I first tried Spider-Man for the PS2, I found that the controls and motion, though substantially the same as the PS1 titles, somehow *felt* clunkier. The motion certainly seemed less smooth. And the new game carried with it the teen angst and dark tone of the movie rather than the cheerful fun of the earlier titles. I didn't even bother with Spiderman 2 for the new consoles because I expected more of the same.
What's a Spiderman title, anyway, without Stan Lee's over-the-top narration?
I don't yet know how good Ultimate Spiderman is yet, but if it harks back to the fun of the earlier titles, it may be worth a rental to find out.
The Apaches of the old Westerns (movies, books and TV series) may not have been portrayed as cannibals, but they certainly were portrayed as bloodthirsty savages. After it became recognized that this was not an entirely accurate depiction, in later Westerns they were portrayed as oppressed native peoples.
Reavers were a way for Joss Whedon to introduce the kind of enemy that Westerns used to have, without giving the kind of ethnic offense that the old Westerns gave.
While the article made some good points, its attempt to lend itself credibility by adopting a scholarly - or at least educated - writing style falls flat.
The grammatical and usage errors (affect vs. effect), as well as awkward sentence construction, undercut the article's impact in much the same way that work boots undercut the attempt at a professional appearance of a janitor in a suit.
Heh. My plan is to stay in my current ship and mission profile until I've got all normal and advanced learning skills to L5. It will make learning everything else so much faster, though it'll probably take a few weeks to get there.
Eve isn't going to be for everyone, but I like it well enough that after less than a week I signed up for a year.
I have thought for some time that a game with the mechanics of Frontier Elite II or Privateer and the graphics of Freelancer would be the one thing that would get me into MMO gaming, and Eve pretty much fits the bill.
Levelling is indeed quite slow, though there are things you can do up front to accelerate it - the learning skills speed up the acquisition of other skills. Implants can help too, but the better ones are rare and very expensive.
Travel times are long. This is mostly the result of the game bringing you out of warp (intrasystem FTL jumps) 15km from an intersystem jumpgate, space station or asteroid field, with your max velocity being under 400m/sec (my current ship is 245). Some people have developed a system of bookmarking points in empty space - called instas - in order to bring you out or warp right on top of your destination, but these only work for routes you've already travelled (and therefore will be using frequently). Transit times in my current ship on autopilot average about 30-40 intersystem jumps per hour.
There are some things I would like to see tweaked in the game - for instance using a skill should speed learning its next level, and warp could bring you out 5km from your target instead of 15km, but I'm having fun now, and I'm *not* mining.
I've been in almost two weeks. I started by doing a little trading, then I got my first new ship a week ago, and now I spend all my time going on NPC pirate hunting missions in high-security space. Some risk but not too terrible, some fun battles, and I'm insured and cloned so if I get pod-killed by an experienced player pirate the worst that'll happen is I'll lose some ISK.
I don't expect to be in a capital ship for quite a while, but unlike players used to the quick newbie levelling of games like Everquest, I'm not in a hurry.
As far as I know, EBGames will be... assimilated...into Gamestop.
I'm rooting for this note issuance to fail. I know it varies from area to area, but where I am the EBGames employees are knowledgeable gamers and the Gamestop folks less so. And EBGames trades in used PC games where Gamestop does not.
You're equating your desire to be entertained by a superhero cartoon and a teen angst drama - with you dictating the terms of availability and price - to the desire for political freedom that people in China have been willing to die for?
Wow.
Let me know when you go out to stand in front of the tanks for that ideal, and then I'll consider your ideas worth some respect.
In the meantime, I lack the words to describe the pettiness and self-absorbedness of that attitude. "Spoiled brat" is orders of magnitude too tame.
Retailer margins on new games can't be more than $5 or $10, and some of that is eaten by shipping costs. 50/45 = 11% margin.
Used games are generally purchased for less than half of what they're resold for - $15 for a game that will be resold at $45. 45/15 = 200% margin, and since it's resold in the same store, none of that is eaten by shipping costs. Even if it's resold online, there's no shipping overhead as the buyer pays it.
Wrong. One more time:
Objects on the ground are travelling at approx. 450m/s. Objects stationary above the ground but 22000 miles up are travelling at approx 3000m/s.
So as it came down, Coriolis effects would cause it to begin to whiplash.
As for the terminal velocity of the cable in atmosphere, well that kind of depends on the tensile strength of the unobtanium you're making it from - as in how thick does the cable need to be to support the stress of being a 22000 mile long suspension cable.
Because angular velocity and rotational velocity are not the same thing.
The only place where the rotational velocity of a Stalk matches the Earth's (466 m/s) is at the equator where it's tethered. At GEO it's going 3,070 m/s.
Hurricanes are not so much of a problem. They might tear some of the structures off the sides of the Stalk, but given the cross-section of a Stalk in the face of winds it would encounter and its tensile strength and total mass, the worst a hurricane could do is put a slight oscillation in it, something that stationkeeping thrusters could easily deal with.
Even if you somehow managed to sever it at ground level or even a few miles up, only the part below the break would wiplash.
To get a significant planetary wiplash it would have to be severed several hundred or thousand miles up (i.e. in space). Then you're talking about terrorist nukes or a cometary or asteroidal impact. If something made a Stalk wiplash, my money'd be on the terrorist nuke.
I think you've all got it wrong. I think this man is a cat lover and owns one or more. As someone who is fond of cats myself, I must admit that a cat will on occasion,
Sharpen its claws - this would be okay, but why is a catnip-saturated scratching post so much less attractive than a Louis XVI settee?
Cough up a hairball - a biological necessity, but on the Persian rug?
Go hunting, and leave the best bits where your dinner guests will find them on arriving.
Mark the boundaries of its territory with urine - unfortunately, the boundaries are inside the house.
Do that cute little thing where it chases ghosts across your bed, at 2AM.
Wake you up for its breakfast by nipping your nose, five minutes before the alarm.
Serenade the female cats in the neighborhood, at 4AM.
Use a guest's leg as a scratching post.
Decide it has as much right to eat from your plate as you do.
Always think it's on the wrong side of any closed door. Opening the door for the cat doesn't help, as it will be on the wrong side again when it goes through, or it will simply peer through the door and decide it didn't really want to be in that room anyway - until you close the door again.
Leap from the dresser to the windowsill so it can sun itself, taking care in the process to knock to the floor anything on top of the dresser.
Exercise its arboreal instincts by chasing a squirrel up a tree, only to promptly forget them once it gets there.
Express its displeasure with you and the indignity of existence by using your bed for a litterbox.
Curl up in your lap after ignoring it for weeks...on top of the book you're trying to read.
Eat every chunk of filet mignon in its bowl, except for the one containing its medication.
Leave lots of little holes in anyone trying to feed it a pill.
Walk across your keyb;.l,uygew21oard while you're trying to type.
Chew on anything stringlike, with a special fondess for power cords and CAT-5 cables.
Enough of this sort of thing, and even the most ardent cat afficionado may begin to, well, fantasize...
What's the difference between a cyclone and a tropical storm?
Organization.
Destroy the storm's organization and it falls apart.
Release a large amount of energy all at once at one spot in the eyewall, say a few hundred petajoules, and the storm should lose its cohesive spinning eye.
Slashdot Mirror
My area (Phoenix, AZ) has quite a few stores from both chains.
The EBGames store that's near me is quite a good gamer resource; I patronize it regularly. The GameStops are only so-so.
After reading the article, I suppose that despite the EBGames store having the best sales performance in the region, it will be closed and its staff laid off in order to protect the turf of the mediocre GameStops.
Sigh.
Or M.A.N.T.I.S., starring Carl Lumbly of Alias and Buckaroo Banzai fame.
Probably a bad example since his batteries could never hold a charge for a whole episode...
Moving heavy cargo...
Yup. Large metal crates, heat-seeking missiles for gunships, alien queens...
You must be from some alternate universe where comics have continuity. Peter Parker's been a teen/young adult for what? 30 years? And his character has been re-invented as much as any other in the universe of Marvel comics. I seem to even remember a time (got an issue or two from it too) when there were *two* Peter Parkers, one a clone of the other. They couldn't both be Spiderman, so one was the Scarlet Spider!
What I found most disappointing about the review was the lack of a sense of history.
The game was only compared to the previous comic->movie->game licenses for the latest console generation. But, seeing as how this game is more closely based on the comics, it would have been better to include a comparison to its closer spiritual kin, the comic->game licenses Spiderman and Spiderman 2: Enter Electro for the PS1.
When I first tried Spider-Man for the PS2, I found that the controls and motion, though substantially the same as the PS1 titles, somehow *felt* clunkier. The motion certainly seemed less smooth. And the new game carried with it the teen angst and dark tone of the movie rather than the cheerful fun of the earlier titles. I didn't even bother with Spiderman 2 for the new consoles because I expected more of the same.
What's a Spiderman title, anyway, without Stan Lee's over-the-top narration?
I don't yet know how good Ultimate Spiderman is yet, but if it harks back to the fun of the earlier titles, it may be worth a rental to find out.
The Apaches of the old Westerns (movies, books and TV series) may not have been portrayed as cannibals, but they certainly were portrayed as bloodthirsty savages. After it became recognized that this was not an entirely accurate depiction, in later Westerns they were portrayed as oppressed native peoples.
Reavers were a way for Joss Whedon to introduce the kind of enemy that Westerns used to have, without giving the kind of ethnic offense that the old Westerns gave.
Actually, Firefly being a "space western", it would be more accurate to say that the Reavers are the Firefly equivalent of Apaches.
While the article made some good points, its attempt to lend itself credibility by adopting a scholarly - or at least educated - writing style falls flat.
The grammatical and usage errors (affect vs. effect), as well as awkward sentence construction, undercut the article's impact in much the same way that work boots undercut the attempt at a professional appearance of a janitor in a suit.
Slashdot: Dupes for dopes, stuff that matters so much we gotta tell you again!
When an association is made in the media between two groups such as these, the real question is:
Who's more insulted?
Heh. My plan is to stay in my current ship and mission profile until I've got all normal and advanced learning skills to L5. It will make learning everything else so much faster, though it'll probably take a few weeks to get there.
Eve isn't going to be for everyone, but I like it well enough that after less than a week I signed up for a year.
I have thought for some time that a game with the mechanics of Frontier Elite II or Privateer and the graphics of Freelancer would be the one thing that would get me into MMO gaming, and Eve pretty much fits the bill.
Levelling is indeed quite slow, though there are things you can do up front to accelerate it - the learning skills speed up the acquisition of other skills. Implants can help too, but the better ones are rare and very expensive.
Travel times are long. This is mostly the result of the game bringing you out of warp (intrasystem FTL jumps) 15km from an intersystem jumpgate, space station or asteroid field, with your max velocity being under 400m/sec (my current ship is 245). Some people have developed a system of bookmarking points in empty space - called instas - in order to bring you out or warp right on top of your destination, but these only work for routes you've already travelled (and therefore will be using frequently). Transit times in my current ship on autopilot average about 30-40 intersystem jumps per hour.
There are some things I would like to see tweaked in the game - for instance using a skill should speed learning its next level, and warp could bring you out 5km from your target instead of 15km, but I'm having fun now, and I'm *not* mining.
I've been in almost two weeks. I started by doing a little trading, then I got my first new ship a week ago, and now I spend all my time going on NPC pirate hunting missions in high-security space. Some risk but not too terrible, some fun battles, and I'm insured and cloned so if I get pod-killed by an experienced player pirate the worst that'll happen is I'll lose some ISK.
I don't expect to be in a capital ship for quite a while, but unlike players used to the quick newbie levelling of games like Everquest, I'm not in a hurry.
As far as I know, EBGames will be... assimilated ...into Gamestop.
I'm rooting for this note issuance to fail. I know it varies from area to area, but where I am the EBGames employees are knowledgeable gamers and the Gamestop folks less so. And EBGames trades in used PC games where Gamestop does not.
You're equating your desire to be entertained by a superhero cartoon and a teen angst drama - with you dictating the terms of availability and price - to the desire for political freedom that people in China have been willing to die for?
Wow.
Let me know when you go out to stand in front of the tanks for that ideal, and then I'll consider your ideas worth some respect.
In the meantime, I lack the words to describe the pettiness and self-absorbedness of that attitude. "Spoiled brat" is orders of magnitude too tame.
So the media companies are violating your right to be entertained?
You forgot the laser pointers.
How much more? Lots more.
Retailer margins on new games can't be more than $5 or $10, and some of that is eaten by shipping costs. 50/45 = 11% margin.
Used games are generally purchased for less than half of what they're resold for - $15 for a game that will be resold at $45. 45/15 = 200% margin, and since it's resold in the same store, none of that is eaten by shipping costs. Even if it's resold online, there's no shipping overhead as the buyer pays it.
I see I must resort to diagrams:
Diagram of Earth with a Stalk at a Pole
What's holding up the stalk? It certainly isn't "centrifugal" force.
Wrong. One more time: Objects on the ground are travelling at approx. 450m/s. Objects stationary above the ground but 22000 miles up are travelling at approx 3000m/s. So as it came down, Coriolis effects would cause it to begin to whiplash. As for the terminal velocity of the cable in atmosphere, well that kind of depends on the tensile strength of the unobtanium you're making it from - as in how thick does the cable need to be to support the stress of being a 22000 mile long suspension cable.
Because angular velocity and rotational velocity are not the same thing.
The only place where the rotational velocity of a Stalk matches the Earth's (466 m/s) is at the equator where it's tethered. At GEO it's going 3,070 m/s.
Hurricanes are not so much of a problem. They might tear some of the structures off the sides of the Stalk, but given the cross-section of a Stalk in the face of winds it would encounter and its tensile strength and total mass, the worst a hurricane could do is put a slight oscillation in it, something that stationkeeping thrusters could easily deal with.
Even if you somehow managed to sever it at ground level or even a few miles up, only the part below the break would wiplash.
To get a significant planetary wiplash it would have to be severed several hundred or thousand miles up (i.e. in space). Then you're talking about terrorist nukes or a cometary or asteroidal impact. If something made a Stalk wiplash, my money'd be on the terrorist nuke.
This is one of the (unintentionally) funniest things I've read in many moons. Somebody should mod it up.
Seriously, the centripetal force along the axis of rotation (i.e. "above a Pole") is exactly zero, regardless of distance along that axis.
- Sharpen its claws - this would be okay, but why is a catnip-saturated scratching post so much less attractive than a Louis XVI settee?
- Cough up a hairball - a biological necessity, but on the Persian rug?
- Go hunting, and leave the best bits where your dinner guests will find them on arriving.
- Mark the boundaries of its territory with urine - unfortunately, the boundaries are inside the house.
- Do that cute little thing where it chases ghosts across your bed, at 2AM.
- Wake you up for its breakfast by nipping your nose, five minutes before the alarm.
- Serenade the female cats in the neighborhood, at 4AM.
- Use a guest's leg as a scratching post.
- Decide it has as much right to eat from your plate as you do.
- Always think it's on the wrong side of any closed door. Opening the door for the cat doesn't help, as it will be on the wrong side again when it goes through, or it will simply peer through the door and decide it didn't really want to be in that room anyway - until you close the door again.
- Leap from the dresser to the windowsill so it can sun itself, taking care in the process to knock to the floor anything on top of the dresser.
- Exercise its arboreal instincts by chasing a squirrel up a tree, only to promptly forget them once it gets there.
- Express its displeasure with you and the indignity of existence by using your bed for a litterbox.
- Curl up in your lap after ignoring it for weeks...on top of the book you're trying to read.
- Eat every chunk of filet mignon in its bowl, except for the one containing its medication.
- Leave lots of little holes in anyone trying to feed it a pill.
- Walk across your keyb;.l,uygew21oard while you're trying to type.
- Chew on anything stringlike, with a special fondess for power cords and CAT-5 cables.
Enough of this sort of thing, and even the most ardent cat afficionado may begin to, well, fantasize...What's the difference between a cyclone and a tropical storm? Organization. Destroy the storm's organization and it falls apart. Release a large amount of energy all at once at one spot in the eyewall, say a few hundred petajoules, and the storm should lose its cohesive spinning eye.
She was CAPCOM? Really? What button combo did you need for her finishing move?
So that those who prefer SP games don't get their hopes up,
IT'S MULTIPLAYER ONLY
Not that that little nugget's on the front page or the Slashdot article summary... at least it's on the About page near the top.