I had the same situation with FF12.. I bought it and played it for about 3 hours or so and just couldn't get in to it. I don't know if it was because the story took a little while to really take off or what, but I put it aside for half a year or more. One day I got a craving for FF, popped it in and gave it another shot. Something about it gripped me and I played through the entire thing, usually playing for hours in the evening after work. I thoroughly enjoyed it too. I got one of those FAQs from GameFAQs and used it sparingly to find side-mission/quest stuff too. I probably put a good 90+ hours in to the game. The only other console games I've put that much time in to (and enjoyed as much) was Dark Cloud 2 and Final Fantasy 6 (US3). And of all the Final Fantasy games, 12 and 6(US3) are my favorites, far above and beyond the others by a large large margin.
Having "some" people (some being a value that should be as close to zero as possible) on the government dole is fine and unavoidable, unless you live in anarchy I guess. The number on the dole seems to increase as the federal government gets more and more power. There is a trend towards more and more people being on the dole for more and more reasons. It's gone from being a system with the purpose of helping folks out temporarily to get through a tough time period, or helping a segment of the population that is unable to care for itself, to being a blanket safety net for anything that might ever possibly go wrong in a person's life, and without regard to whether or not that person is in the situation they are in because of circumstances out of their control or because they made stupid decisions. Even if it was out of control, why is the default viewpoint "everyone else must be forced to take care of them?"
Fundamentally I just disagree that the role of (federal) government should have anything to do with providing social services in any form whatsoever. It should be left up to the states to decide how they should handle it.
He didn't specify in his original post he was disabled. I also know of at least 3 "disabled" people in my own little world who are just bullshitting and don't want to work, and continue to draw benefits from the government despite being fully capable of finding and keeping gainful employment.
And even having said that, I don't think euthanasia is a solution for this particular person. You, I'd make an exception for though.
No, it's not any more complicated than that at all. For the cases where someone is physically or mentally incapable of providing for themselves, we have programs and such for those people. For everyone else, you get off your ass and you work. You work two jobs if you have to, you learn to live without things. If you have food, water, and shelter, you can live. It is not my responsibility to be forced to subsidize your life, no matter how downtrodden it might be. People lived and prospered without health insurance and they will continue to do so until the end of time.
The real problem is people have come to expect too much to be handed to them, or that they are entitled to have certain things. If they don't have them, then by God it's the government's responsibility to make sure they do. How does the government do that? By forcing someone else to give up some of their property so it can be redistributed to those "in need."
You're happy? Great... you're a leech. You're part of the "entitlement" and "free hand-outs" crowd.. you're useless and borderline worthless. You live off the government tit and contribute nothing of value to anyone. You're part of the reason why tax payers like myself have a public debt of around $140,000 per citizen. Some bleeding-heart liberal douchebag politician promised to bring some of the loot confiscated from working Americans to his district in exchange for your vote. And he promised he would use that loot to subsidize your "lifestyle" if you can even call it that.
After being thoroughly satisfied with Borderlands (and I still play it regularly, can't wait for the expansion this month!) I think Gearbox is the best developer to finish up DNF. BL has lots of similar humor and is probably in my list of top 5 favorite games of at least the last 5 years.
Having said that.. I'm still going to wait until it's been out for a few days or weeks before buying, to see if it's worth it. I don't doubt Gearbox's talent but I do think DNF has enough negative "vibe" around it that there is a chance it won't live up to how fun the original was. And that's really the ultimate metric in my opinion...is the game fun? Nothing else really matters.
I'm in the exact same situation. When I was younger, single, and had a job instead of a career I was able to dedicate hours each day to multi-player gaming. I enjoyed single-player gaming also and would mix them up, but the majority of my game time was spent either playing an FPS online or an MMORPG (EQ, WOW, and DAoC throughout the years).
Contrast that with my life today.. I have a career, a fiance, and I'm older. I have an additional focus on becoming a musician. I get maybe 0 minutes to 2 hours of "free" time on any given night (it's usually 30-45min). The games I play today are almost universally single-player, allow me to jump in immediately and enjoy it for a brief period of time, and then save and jump out at a moment's notice. I'm currently playing through Dragon Age Origins, albeit very slowly, dabbling around with Spore + Galactic Adventures again, some Borderlands here and there, and considering starting a new character in Fallout 3 to try the expansions out. These single player games alone will take me months to complete at 30-45min every other night or so. The only one of those I play online is Borderlands, and that's just with my brother and another friend, and not very often.
There's huge value in being able to hop into a game, have fun for a little block of time, save that progress, and hop out. It becomes much more important as one gets older and priorities are shifted around such that gaming goes from being a "lifestyle" to being a fun hobby or diversion.
You just brought back a lot of (fond) memories of EverQuest for me. I too played it for a long time, from a month after release until right before the Omens of War expansion. My first character was a wood elf bard. I made a bard because I found out before I started that they learned a song that increased your run speed dramatically. Not only was it a convenience advantage by reducing travel time, it had a major survival benefit by being able to easily outrun things. Some of my greatest memories were the first few months of playing the game, traveling around to the new places and just exploring the world.
Even after I had seen everything at least once, it was still fun to travel. For me, it became something I would try to plan ahead. If I needed to make a long distance trip to some part of the world, I would find out what other things I could get done in the area I was heading to. That way it wouldn't be like I was going all the way from Qeynos to Kelethin just to turn in some random quest only.
Before the instant travel portals in the Plane of Knowledge, the best way to travel was to become good friends with a wizard or druid (I eventually did, but later I just made my own druid). If you needed long distance travel and they weren't busy, it was a simple matter of "Hey Bob, if you're not busy could you pick me up at the Western Commonlands druid circle and take me to South Ro?"
I miss a lot of things about EverQuest. It's mostly nostalgia I know, but being my first MMORPG, it really did create a lot of fun memories.
There's a simple solution to all these nonsense bills that keep coming up... in 2010 we vote every last incumbent out of office, and start demanding term limits be implemented for all public offices (the Senate and House especially). When the allure of a life long career as a politician is taken away, these positions might actually start attracting people who are interested in protecting the Constitution rather than those who are interested in doing whatever they can to stay in power, including trampling over our rights.
That's why we need term limits for ALL politicians and in a court of law
Totally agree with you here.. term limits would solve a lot of problems (probably a lot more than might be created, if any WOULD be created). This "career politician" bullshit has got to stop. These public offices are meant to serve the people and get important, constitutional (as opposed to unconstitutional) work done. They were not created to be a ladder of power some nutjob can climb to become wealthy and gain celebrity status. Unfortunately it looks like the only way term limits would ever happen is through a Constitutional Convention because the Congress damn sure wouldn't pass that amendment (same deal with the Fair Tax, which I support).
This whole mess is just another reason why if I ever have a kid I'm going to home school him or her. With public schools just becoming less about growing up to be a productive, free-thinking, intelligent person and more about training little lemmings who are afraid of and never question government (and think this country is great because of government rather than in spite of it), it's just too much of a risk to let your kid be indoctrinated in a public school.
One of the consequences, at least what is supposed to be a consequence, relies on the people. When our elected officials do stupid things like create unconstitutional bills it is our responsibility as citizens of the nation to take notice and use our only power: vote them out of office. Unfortunately there are not enough people who take that responsibility seriously these days. The people are part of the checks and balances just as much as the executive, judiciary, and legislative are.
Note, I do realize that it can be damn hard to vote some of these idiots out, especially in areas of the country where they are firmly ensconced and have a constituency that is larger either clueless; or worse, in agreement with some of the ridiculous ideas they come up with.
Just a quick note about the backup feature Steam uses: it seems to be impossible to do a restore from a Steam backup while in Offline mode. I've recently tried doing a restore of a bunch of games I backed up a few weeks ago before I upgraded some major components and I've been unable to do it in Offline mode. For those interested, the failure occurs right after you select the games to restore and the progress window says it's creating local game cache files for each game. The error says "This operation cannot be completed in Offline Mode" and then "The Steam servers are too busy, try your request again later." I don't know if this is just something that was overlooked by Valve or they just don't want people restoring in Offline mode.
The restore works just fine if I do it in Online Mode (though I find it pretty stupid that even before I restore my games I have to download data to do so). Technically I should be able to restore the games in Offline, set them to "Never update automatically" and go back Online without them auto updating (and thus preventing me from playing until they fully update).
The hardware survey is voluntary and it displays the data it sends to Valve at the end (though that doesn't mean they don't collect anything else about your machine). The gameplay data, I *think*, is done behind the scenes while you play although it might be stored on disk and sent with the hardware survey. I understand the importance of the principle of being able to opt-out on something like these surveys; however, from listening to the in-game commentary from Lost Coast, EP1, and EP2, and Valve's reputation (they have been around since 1996 after all), the gameplay data they collect is innocent and I personally believe it really does help them fine-tune their games much better than simple in-house testing. One perfect example of this is the underground carpark elevator zombie fight in Episode 1. Based on the data they were receiving from folks playing that particular section Valve was able to determine the map needed to be tweaked further because of how many people were dying and subsequently not finishing the episode, presumably because they were tired of trying. They released an update quickly which I think added some more health, ammo, and flares/explosive barrels. I remember playing through EP1 the day it was released and getting to that section and barely making it through (on hard mode of course). Later, I played through it again after they patched it and I noticed a definite difference in the difficulty.
It wasn't clear to me until they released the stats for EP1 that Valve was even gathering the data. It might've been in the EULA or some other obscure notice I didn't bother to read, but if the gameplay data is collected automatically there definitely should be an option to turn it off, either in Steam (for all games) or in-game for the particular game.
I think "not much replay value" is pretty close to right in describing the complaints about Portal. I felt it was just about the right length. The end maps were drawn out just a bit too long, but I still enjoyed the hell out of the game. There isn't really a reason to play through the original game again. The advanced maps were interesting (I think I'm on the 5th of 6th, can't remember) and they were definitely a little more difficult. I haven't touched the Challenge maps yet, but I will eventually.
I think the replayability and value of Portal comes from the package as a whole. Valve just delivered into the hands of the mod community an engine and gameplay concept that really doesn't have any limit. I can imagine the modding community (and hopefully Valve as well) is going to come up with some really fun, mind-boggling puzzles that I look forward to playing. I hope I'm right.
Actually, after thinking about it some, I did have one complaint about Portal: I had hoped it was going to reveal more information about the Half-Life 2 universe than it did. Introducing Aperture Science and its basic role in the HL2 universe and its relation to Black Mesa was a good start, but at the end I felt as if they almost forgot that they had wanted to tie the two games together. I did play through all of Episode Two, which was amazing. I know about the ending (not going to spoil it!) and what is likely to come in the future. I just felt that the long wait between EP1 and EP2 and the potentially long wait for EP3 should've been a sign for Valve to release a bit more info for us to chew on in regards to the story and HL2 universe.
An instance in WoW is a self-contained "copy" of a dungeon for your group. You basically get your group mates together, walk through the dungeon's portal entrance, and a "copy" of the dungeon is created for your group to progress through. In the days of EverQuest (before the LDoN expansion), every dungeon was shared across the server, so if one dungeon was full, you basically had to wait until people left or you went to another dungeon. It takes a little bit of the "community" out of the game, but the added convenience is well worth it.
I think what the author meant by "wade through a lot of content" is that there is a lot of pre-requisite content that must be completed before moving on to the later, (arguably) more rewarding content. The statement is partly true (but exaggerated). If you look at the chart supplied showing the requirements, it does look like a whole lot of stuff to do. However, what people fail to mention is that just by playing the game, completing quests, and going through dungeons, you end up completing the vast majority of the requirements without a whole lot of extra effort.
For instance, every Heroic mode dungeon (the harder version of the dungeon) requires every group mate to have the Heroic mode key. You buy the Heroic mode key off a quartermaster for that dungeon's reputation, which requires you to be Revered standing. The first dungeon, Hellfire Citadel, is tied to the reputation "Honor Hold" (for Alliance) and "Thrallmar" (for Horde). By the time you do all the quests available, and run through the dungeon wings a few times on normal mode, you're already nearly up to the required reputation. There is very little extra grinding effort required to get to new content, unless you skip the natural progression of doing quests and dungeons for leveling.
I'm having a lot of fun with the expansion. So far my only complaint has been the issues the Warrior class has been having with fulfilling its job as a tank, but that will be fixed in time.
I have been using Direcway's service for the last 6 years (back when it required a dialup return connection, and now with the DW6000 unit that is basically like a DSL modem). Throughout that time I have played EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, and World of Warcraft and all three were playable. It wasn't the best possible experience at all times, but it was playable and the alternative was just not acceptable (try entering Ironforge in WOW on a dialup connection and watch that latency skyrocket).
For background, I play WOW currently and I have a level 60 Warrior who is a member of a raiding guild that does MC/BWL/AQ40. I am typically an offtank (because it must makes more sense to have one of the faster connection guys be the maintank), and I have no problems fulfilling that role. I also have had no complaints from any of my guildmates. It's just a matter of adjusting how you play. You have to learn to predict things a little faster because you DO have about a 1-2 second delay between when you hit a hotkey and the event happens. I also PVP quite a lot, and while the delay leaves me at a disadvantage, I do just fine against most opponents.
It handles large crowds (raids, crowded cities) very well, also. I have very few, if any, issues with higher than normal latency in cities or on raids. Typically, my ping ranges from 800ms to 2000ms and throughout that range it is still playable.
The biggest pain in the ass is the fact that the satellite is so sensitive to cloudcover and rain. Living in Florida, during the summer months I lose signal almost every day because of the afternoon thunderstorms. It's annoying, but until I move it's my only option.
Having said all that, don't expect to play any FPS's reliably. In fact, I wouldn't even bother trying. Sub 100ms pings are so important to play those games enjoyably that you're better off just playing against bots, or having a LAN party every weekend.
And finally, make sure you check the policies of any satellite provider you look at. Direcway (now Hughesnet) has a policy called the "Fair Access Policy" (someone mentioned this before). This policy is a bullshit rule Hughesnet enforces to "make sure all customers have equal bandwidth access at all times" and basically limits you to a certain amount of bandwidth per day (around 170 megabytes). If you download that much in a short period of time (say, 1 hour), they curtail you down to dialup speed for about 8-10 hours. You can get around this by using a download speed limiter program (Getright has this feature) and setting it to about 15kb/sec. That will allow you to download something nearly indefinitely without risking the FAP (because the FAP is based on how much you d/l over time, and it slowly "refills" by itself).
Aaul
P.S. Be prepared for a very expensive setup/installation and the worst billing/customer service support ever if you go with HughesNet.
I've played MMORPG's for years (from EverQuest, to Dark Age, to WOW these days) and it becomes very easy to tell the difference between a player who paid for power leveling services (or just had a friend power level them, as was the case in EverQuest and DAoC more often than not) and someone who actually played the game from level 1 to MaxLevel. Almost without fail, the person who was power leveled has no clue how to play their character and knows nothing of common game concepts (pulling, tanking, whatever). Worse still, it usually results in players who have no respect for the other people on the server. It's not uncommon for power leveled players to "ninja loot" (steal an item that drops for a party, then immediately leave the group) and cause other forms of grief to others.
These types of players end up getting a bad reputation eventually, so it becomes easier to avoid them; however, it's still a giant pain in the ass, especially if you're trying to get a group together to do something and you need to fill a spot with someone you haven't played with before. You take a huge risk when you invite a random person along to go do a quest or complete an instance. Will they know how to play their character or will they suck and end up causing the group to die and have to start over multiple times?
There will always be people who just aren't good at playing their character, but usually anyone who plays from 1 to 60 (or 50 or whatever) becomes at least decent at their role. Power leveling services compound the problem by introducing even more crappy players into the world, and that's the main reason why I hate them. I'm not fond of the gold-buying services either, but they aren't as big of a problem. If someone spends a couple hundred bucks to buy 10000 gold so they can go buy whatever it is they want, it's no skin off my back.
The unfortunate thing about IGE is that Blizzard will probably not try to solve the problem with litigation. If Bliz took IGE to court, and IGE won (thus proving in-game items and currency are owned by the player), services like these will blossom overnight and there will be nothing Bliz or anyone else can do about it. So instead, Bliz will just keep trying to track the farmers down and ban them, which is a never-ending battle.
I think it's mostly because of his past with Bullfrog. Syndicate, Syndicate Wars, Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper, Populous. Molyneaux was the designer of Bullfrog's games, and they are arguably some of the better (if not best) games created during the MS-DOS era of gaming. I know Dungeon Keeper was one of my favorites, and Syndicate Wars was pretty damn cool, too. After Bullfrog died and he founded Lionhead, and after the huge disappointment (for me, anyway) of Black & White, I stopped following their games.
He's well-respected for his past games at Bullfrog and is notorious for being a PR nightmare for his teams because he'll go off on a tangent about some feature that may or may not be finished (or even feasible). This usually ends in disappointment for those who were looking forward to said feature because it either gets cut, or is vastly different/inferior to what he described. I think that's one reason he gets so much attention these days.
I think he should explore making a next-gen sequel to Dungeon Keeper and Syndicate. I know I'd buy both.
I'm pretty sure you can't kill anything with a soda can (at least, not in one hit like a saw blade or cinder block does, it might work if you hit a target a couple hundred times), but you can use heavier objects as projectiles with the gravity gun. Most of the Ravenholm chapter was meant to teach the player about the use of the gravity gun as a weapon. In fact, there are people who intentionally try to only use the gravity gun from the point they receive it until the end of the game as a challenge.
When you consider leveldesign, you take the layout and visuals as being aspects, but seem to forget mentioning sound/music: Which importance also has grown -alot- over the years.
I agree completely with this: sound and music have become incredibly important recently. To continue with your Half-Life 2 example, during the Ravenholm chapter the sound cues such as the howling of the fast zombies in the distance, creaking noises and crow calls, and the sounds the headcrabs and other zombies make when they're alerted to your presence really made that particular area one of the best in the game (and one of the most entertaining FPS experiences I've ever had).
If I had mod points, you'd have them. This comment is dead-on and applies to more than just video games. I think a problem that a lot of people have in every conceivable field is unrealistic expectations from the beginning. For instance: becoming a musician (since I am currently training to be a professional musician) is hard work. If you want to make a career out of it (and by career, I mean your sole means of financial support), you have to bust your ass and put in the hours. You have to start from somewhere, and realize you're going to fail (probably many times). The difference between the people who give up and go do something else and the people that make it to the top is that the people that make it learn from the failures and use them to improve.
If you start a career (such as developing games) with the expectation that your first title is going to land you a deal at a big publisher like EA or something, you're bound to failure, unless you happen to be one of the lucky freaks who are just born with massive innate talent (ie: Jimi Hendrix with guitar and music). It's going to take a lot of work, is the premise of my comment I guess.
I think it was mentioned that Warren Spector doesn't say to actually give up, but to instead avoid trying to sign deals with companies like EA. Slightly off-topic, but the same could be said for any budding musician (avoid the record labels like the plague).
The VIN system is useful for checking the history of a used car you might be buying. To verify that you're not buying a car that was used in some criminal act, for example. It's also pretty important for law enforcement in finding and returning stolen vehicles. Without a VIN, you'd have to pretty much describe every last detail of your car so the police can make sure the car they just found is really yours.
Yep, this is very true. It's called the Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance, and if you're an IT student at a school you will most likely be signed up for it automatically upon enrolling. I was, and once my account became active I was able to purchase a multitude of MS products for just the cost of media and shipping.
I picked up a copy of Windows XP Professional for about $7, and Visual Studio.NET 2003 Academic (which is pretty much identical to Professional; I believe the only things missing are enterprise-like tools such as source/project management tools, etc) for $11 which included the most recent MSDN library CD's as well.
You can buy Windows 2000 Professional, Office XP, Windows XP, VS.NET, MSSQL Server (I think), and a couple other high-dollar products. Membership is free as long as you're an IT student. However, if you change majors they are pretty quick about removing your access. I lost mine within two weeks of switching to a non-IT major.
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I had the same situation with FF12.. I bought it and played it for about 3 hours or so and just couldn't get in to it. I don't know if it was because the story took a little while to really take off or what, but I put it aside for half a year or more. One day I got a craving for FF, popped it in and gave it another shot. Something about it gripped me and I played through the entire thing, usually playing for hours in the evening after work. I thoroughly enjoyed it too. I got one of those FAQs from GameFAQs and used it sparingly to find side-mission/quest stuff too. I probably put a good 90+ hours in to the game. The only other console games I've put that much time in to (and enjoyed as much) was Dark Cloud 2 and Final Fantasy 6 (US3). And of all the Final Fantasy games, 12 and 6(US3) are my favorites, far above and beyond the others by a large large margin.
Having "some" people (some being a value that should be as close to zero as possible) on the government dole is fine and unavoidable, unless you live in anarchy I guess. The number on the dole seems to increase as the federal government gets more and more power. There is a trend towards more and more people being on the dole for more and more reasons. It's gone from being a system with the purpose of helping folks out temporarily to get through a tough time period, or helping a segment of the population that is unable to care for itself, to being a blanket safety net for anything that might ever possibly go wrong in a person's life, and without regard to whether or not that person is in the situation they are in because of circumstances out of their control or because they made stupid decisions. Even if it was out of control, why is the default viewpoint "everyone else must be forced to take care of them?"
Fundamentally I just disagree that the role of (federal) government should have anything to do with providing social services in any form whatsoever. It should be left up to the states to decide how they should handle it.
I was actually talking about euthanizing the guy who told me I was a "piece of shit", not you (you being the person with the disability).
He didn't specify in his original post he was disabled. I also know of at least 3 "disabled" people in my own little world who are just bullshitting and don't want to work, and continue to draw benefits from the government despite being fully capable of finding and keeping gainful employment.
And even having said that, I don't think euthanasia is a solution for this particular person. You, I'd make an exception for though.
No, it's not any more complicated than that at all. For the cases where someone is physically or mentally incapable of providing for themselves, we have programs and such for those people. For everyone else, you get off your ass and you work. You work two jobs if you have to, you learn to live without things. If you have food, water, and shelter, you can live. It is not my responsibility to be forced to subsidize your life, no matter how downtrodden it might be. People lived and prospered without health insurance and they will continue to do so until the end of time.
The real problem is people have come to expect too much to be handed to them, or that they are entitled to have certain things. If they don't have them, then by God it's the government's responsibility to make sure they do. How does the government do that? By forcing someone else to give up some of their property so it can be redistributed to those "in need."
You're happy? Great... you're a leech. You're part of the "entitlement" and "free hand-outs" crowd.. you're useless and borderline worthless. You live off the government tit and contribute nothing of value to anyone. You're part of the reason why tax payers like myself have a public debt of around $140,000 per citizen. Some bleeding-heart liberal douchebag politician promised to bring some of the loot confiscated from working Americans to his district in exchange for your vote. And he promised he would use that loot to subsidize your "lifestyle" if you can even call it that.
Have some self-respect and get a job.
After being thoroughly satisfied with Borderlands (and I still play it regularly, can't wait for the expansion this month!) I think Gearbox is the best developer to finish up DNF. BL has lots of similar humor and is probably in my list of top 5 favorite games of at least the last 5 years.
Having said that.. I'm still going to wait until it's been out for a few days or weeks before buying, to see if it's worth it. I don't doubt Gearbox's talent but I do think DNF has enough negative "vibe" around it that there is a chance it won't live up to how fun the original was. And that's really the ultimate metric in my opinion...is the game fun? Nothing else really matters.
I'm in the exact same situation. When I was younger, single, and had a job instead of a career I was able to dedicate hours each day to multi-player gaming. I enjoyed single-player gaming also and would mix them up, but the majority of my game time was spent either playing an FPS online or an MMORPG (EQ, WOW, and DAoC throughout the years).
Contrast that with my life today.. I have a career, a fiance, and I'm older. I have an additional focus on becoming a musician. I get maybe 0 minutes to 2 hours of "free" time on any given night (it's usually 30-45min). The games I play today are almost universally single-player, allow me to jump in immediately and enjoy it for a brief period of time, and then save and jump out at a moment's notice. I'm currently playing through Dragon Age Origins, albeit very slowly, dabbling around with Spore + Galactic Adventures again, some Borderlands here and there, and considering starting a new character in Fallout 3 to try the expansions out. These single player games alone will take me months to complete at 30-45min every other night or so. The only one of those I play online is Borderlands, and that's just with my brother and another friend, and not very often.
There's huge value in being able to hop into a game, have fun for a little block of time, save that progress, and hop out. It becomes much more important as one gets older and priorities are shifted around such that gaming goes from being a "lifestyle" to being a fun hobby or diversion.
You just brought back a lot of (fond) memories of EverQuest for me. I too played it for a long time, from a month after release until right before the Omens of War expansion. My first character was a wood elf bard. I made a bard because I found out before I started that they learned a song that increased your run speed dramatically. Not only was it a convenience advantage by reducing travel time, it had a major survival benefit by being able to easily outrun things. Some of my greatest memories were the first few months of playing the game, traveling around to the new places and just exploring the world.
Even after I had seen everything at least once, it was still fun to travel. For me, it became something I would try to plan ahead. If I needed to make a long distance trip to some part of the world, I would find out what other things I could get done in the area I was heading to. That way it wouldn't be like I was going all the way from Qeynos to Kelethin just to turn in some random quest only.
Before the instant travel portals in the Plane of Knowledge, the best way to travel was to become good friends with a wizard or druid (I eventually did, but later I just made my own druid). If you needed long distance travel and they weren't busy, it was a simple matter of "Hey Bob, if you're not busy could you pick me up at the Western Commonlands druid circle and take me to South Ro?"
I miss a lot of things about EverQuest. It's mostly nostalgia I know, but being my first MMORPG, it really did create a lot of fun memories.
-Aaul
There's a simple solution to all these nonsense bills that keep coming up... in 2010 we vote every last incumbent out of office, and start demanding term limits be implemented for all public offices (the Senate and House especially). When the allure of a life long career as a politician is taken away, these positions might actually start attracting people who are interested in protecting the Constitution rather than those who are interested in doing whatever they can to stay in power, including trampling over our rights.
Totally agree with you here .. term limits would solve a lot of problems (probably a lot more than might be created, if any WOULD be created). This "career politician" bullshit has got to stop. These public offices are meant to serve the people and get important, constitutional (as opposed to unconstitutional) work done. They were not created to be a ladder of power some nutjob can climb to become wealthy and gain celebrity status. Unfortunately it looks like the only way term limits would ever happen is through a Constitutional Convention because the Congress damn sure wouldn't pass that amendment (same deal with the Fair Tax, which I support).
This whole mess is just another reason why if I ever have a kid I'm going to home school him or her. With public schools just becoming less about growing up to be a productive, free-thinking, intelligent person and more about training little lemmings who are afraid of and never question government (and think this country is great because of government rather than in spite of it), it's just too much of a risk to let your kid be indoctrinated in a public school.
James
One of the consequences, at least what is supposed to be a consequence, relies on the people. When our elected officials do stupid things like create unconstitutional bills it is our responsibility as citizens of the nation to take notice and use our only power: vote them out of office. Unfortunately there are not enough people who take that responsibility seriously these days. The people are part of the checks and balances just as much as the executive, judiciary, and legislative are.
Note, I do realize that it can be damn hard to vote some of these idiots out, especially in areas of the country where they are firmly ensconced and have a constituency that is larger either clueless; or worse, in agreement with some of the ridiculous ideas they come up with.
You might be interested in reading this then - Steam Cloud. It's supposed to provide exactly that functionality.
-JamesJust a quick note about the backup feature Steam uses: it seems to be impossible to do a restore from a Steam backup while in Offline mode. I've recently tried doing a restore of a bunch of games I backed up a few weeks ago before I upgraded some major components and I've been unable to do it in Offline mode. For those interested, the failure occurs right after you select the games to restore and the progress window says it's creating local game cache files for each game. The error says "This operation cannot be completed in Offline Mode" and then "The Steam servers are too busy, try your request again later." I don't know if this is just something that was overlooked by Valve or they just don't want people restoring in Offline mode.
The restore works just fine if I do it in Online Mode (though I find it pretty stupid that even before I restore my games I have to download data to do so). Technically I should be able to restore the games in Offline, set them to "Never update automatically" and go back Online without them auto updating (and thus preventing me from playing until they fully update).
-JamesThe hardware survey is voluntary and it displays the data it sends to Valve at the end (though that doesn't mean they don't collect anything else about your machine). The gameplay data, I *think*, is done behind the scenes while you play although it might be stored on disk and sent with the hardware survey. I understand the importance of the principle of being able to opt-out on something like these surveys; however, from listening to the in-game commentary from Lost Coast, EP1, and EP2, and Valve's reputation (they have been around since 1996 after all), the gameplay data they collect is innocent and I personally believe it really does help them fine-tune their games much better than simple in-house testing. One perfect example of this is the underground carpark elevator zombie fight in Episode 1. Based on the data they were receiving from folks playing that particular section Valve was able to determine the map needed to be tweaked further because of how many people were dying and subsequently not finishing the episode, presumably because they were tired of trying. They released an update quickly which I think added some more health, ammo, and flares/explosive barrels. I remember playing through EP1 the day it was released and getting to that section and barely making it through (on hard mode of course). Later, I played through it again after they patched it and I noticed a definite difference in the difficulty.
It wasn't clear to me until they released the stats for EP1 that Valve was even gathering the data. It might've been in the EULA or some other obscure notice I didn't bother to read, but if the gameplay data is collected automatically there definitely should be an option to turn it off, either in Steam (for all games) or in-game for the particular game.
I think "not much replay value" is pretty close to right in describing the complaints about Portal. I felt it was just about the right length. The end maps were drawn out just a bit too long, but I still enjoyed the hell out of the game. There isn't really a reason to play through the original game again. The advanced maps were interesting (I think I'm on the 5th of 6th, can't remember) and they were definitely a little more difficult. I haven't touched the Challenge maps yet, but I will eventually.
I think the replayability and value of Portal comes from the package as a whole. Valve just delivered into the hands of the mod community an engine and gameplay concept that really doesn't have any limit. I can imagine the modding community (and hopefully Valve as well) is going to come up with some really fun, mind-boggling puzzles that I look forward to playing. I hope I'm right.
Actually, after thinking about it some, I did have one complaint about Portal: I had hoped it was going to reveal more information about the Half-Life 2 universe than it did. Introducing Aperture Science and its basic role in the HL2 universe and its relation to Black Mesa was a good start, but at the end I felt as if they almost forgot that they had wanted to tie the two games together. I did play through all of Episode Two, which was amazing. I know about the ending (not going to spoil it!) and what is likely to come in the future. I just felt that the long wait between EP1 and EP2 and the potentially long wait for EP3 should've been a sign for Valve to release a bit more info for us to chew on in regards to the story and HL2 universe.
An instance in WoW is a self-contained "copy" of a dungeon for your group. You basically get your group mates together, walk through the dungeon's portal entrance, and a "copy" of the dungeon is created for your group to progress through. In the days of EverQuest (before the LDoN expansion), every dungeon was shared across the server, so if one dungeon was full, you basically had to wait until people left or you went to another dungeon. It takes a little bit of the "community" out of the game, but the added convenience is well worth it.
I think what the author meant by "wade through a lot of content" is that there is a lot of pre-requisite content that must be completed before moving on to the later, (arguably) more rewarding content. The statement is partly true (but exaggerated). If you look at the chart supplied showing the requirements, it does look like a whole lot of stuff to do. However, what people fail to mention is that just by playing the game, completing quests, and going through dungeons, you end up completing the vast majority of the requirements without a whole lot of extra effort.
For instance, every Heroic mode dungeon (the harder version of the dungeon) requires every group mate to have the Heroic mode key. You buy the Heroic mode key off a quartermaster for that dungeon's reputation, which requires you to be Revered standing. The first dungeon, Hellfire Citadel, is tied to the reputation "Honor Hold" (for Alliance) and "Thrallmar" (for Horde). By the time you do all the quests available, and run through the dungeon wings a few times on normal mode, you're already nearly up to the required reputation. There is very little extra grinding effort required to get to new content, unless you skip the natural progression of doing quests and dungeons for leveling.
I'm having a lot of fun with the expansion. So far my only complaint has been the issues the Warrior class has been having with fulfilling its job as a tank, but that will be fixed in time.
I have been using Direcway's service for the last 6 years (back when it required a dialup return connection, and now with the DW6000 unit that is basically like a DSL modem). Throughout that time I have played EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, and World of Warcraft and all three were playable. It wasn't the best possible experience at all times, but it was playable and the alternative was just not acceptable (try entering Ironforge in WOW on a dialup connection and watch that latency skyrocket).
For background, I play WOW currently and I have a level 60 Warrior who is a member of a raiding guild that does MC/BWL/AQ40. I am typically an offtank (because it must makes more sense to have one of the faster connection guys be the maintank), and I have no problems fulfilling that role. I also have had no complaints from any of my guildmates. It's just a matter of adjusting how you play. You have to learn to predict things a little faster because you DO have about a 1-2 second delay between when you hit a hotkey and the event happens. I also PVP quite a lot, and while the delay leaves me at a disadvantage, I do just fine against most opponents.
It handles large crowds (raids, crowded cities) very well, also. I have very few, if any, issues with higher than normal latency in cities or on raids. Typically, my ping ranges from 800ms to 2000ms and throughout that range it is still playable.
The biggest pain in the ass is the fact that the satellite is so sensitive to cloudcover and rain. Living in Florida, during the summer months I lose signal almost every day because of the afternoon thunderstorms. It's annoying, but until I move it's my only option.
Having said all that, don't expect to play any FPS's reliably. In fact, I wouldn't even bother trying. Sub 100ms pings are so important to play those games enjoyably that you're better off just playing against bots, or having a LAN party every weekend.
And finally, make sure you check the policies of any satellite provider you look at. Direcway (now Hughesnet) has a policy called the "Fair Access Policy" (someone mentioned this before). This policy is a bullshit rule Hughesnet enforces to "make sure all customers have equal bandwidth access at all times" and basically limits you to a certain amount of bandwidth per day (around 170 megabytes). If you download that much in a short period of time (say, 1 hour), they curtail you down to dialup speed for about 8-10 hours. You can get around this by using a download speed limiter program (Getright has this feature) and setting it to about 15kb/sec. That will allow you to download something nearly indefinitely without risking the FAP (because the FAP is based on how much you d/l over time, and it slowly "refills" by itself).
Aaul
P.S. Be prepared for a very expensive setup/installation and the worst billing/customer service support ever if you go with HughesNet.
I've played MMORPG's for years (from EverQuest, to Dark Age, to WOW these days) and it becomes very easy to tell the difference between a player who paid for power leveling services (or just had a friend power level them, as was the case in EverQuest and DAoC more often than not) and someone who actually played the game from level 1 to MaxLevel. Almost without fail, the person who was power leveled has no clue how to play their character and knows nothing of common game concepts (pulling, tanking, whatever). Worse still, it usually results in players who have no respect for the other people on the server. It's not uncommon for power leveled players to "ninja loot" (steal an item that drops for a party, then immediately leave the group) and cause other forms of grief to others.
These types of players end up getting a bad reputation eventually, so it becomes easier to avoid them; however, it's still a giant pain in the ass, especially if you're trying to get a group together to do something and you need to fill a spot with someone you haven't played with before. You take a huge risk when you invite a random person along to go do a quest or complete an instance. Will they know how to play their character or will they suck and end up causing the group to die and have to start over multiple times?
There will always be people who just aren't good at playing their character, but usually anyone who plays from 1 to 60 (or 50 or whatever) becomes at least decent at their role. Power leveling services compound the problem by introducing even more crappy players into the world, and that's the main reason why I hate them. I'm not fond of the gold-buying services either, but they aren't as big of a problem. If someone spends a couple hundred bucks to buy 10000 gold so they can go buy whatever it is they want, it's no skin off my back.
The unfortunate thing about IGE is that Blizzard will probably not try to solve the problem with litigation. If Bliz took IGE to court, and IGE won (thus proving in-game items and currency are owned by the player), services like these will blossom overnight and there will be nothing Bliz or anyone else can do about it. So instead, Bliz will just keep trying to track the farmers down and ban them, which is a never-ending battle.
AaulI think it's mostly because of his past with Bullfrog. Syndicate, Syndicate Wars, Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper, Populous. Molyneaux was the designer of Bullfrog's games, and they are arguably some of the better (if not best) games created during the MS-DOS era of gaming. I know Dungeon Keeper was one of my favorites, and Syndicate Wars was pretty damn cool, too. After Bullfrog died and he founded Lionhead, and after the huge disappointment (for me, anyway) of Black & White, I stopped following their games.
He's well-respected for his past games at Bullfrog and is notorious for being a PR nightmare for his teams because he'll go off on a tangent about some feature that may or may not be finished (or even feasible). This usually ends in disappointment for those who were looking forward to said feature because it either gets cut, or is vastly different/inferior to what he described. I think that's one reason he gets so much attention these days.
I think he should explore making a next-gen sequel to Dungeon Keeper and Syndicate. I know I'd buy both.
I'm pretty sure you can't kill anything with a soda can (at least, not in one hit like a saw blade or cinder block does, it might work if you hit a target a couple hundred times), but you can use heavier objects as projectiles with the gravity gun. Most of the Ravenholm chapter was meant to teach the player about the use of the gravity gun as a weapon. In fact, there are people who intentionally try to only use the gravity gun from the point they receive it until the end of the game as a challenge.
If I had mod points, you'd have them. This comment is dead-on and applies to more than just video games. I think a problem that a lot of people have in every conceivable field is unrealistic expectations from the beginning. For instance: becoming a musician (since I am currently training to be a professional musician) is hard work. If you want to make a career out of it (and by career, I mean your sole means of financial support), you have to bust your ass and put in the hours. You have to start from somewhere, and realize you're going to fail (probably many times). The difference between the people who give up and go do something else and the people that make it to the top is that the people that make it learn from the failures and use them to improve.
If you start a career (such as developing games) with the expectation that your first title is going to land you a deal at a big publisher like EA or something, you're bound to failure, unless you happen to be one of the lucky freaks who are just born with massive innate talent (ie: Jimi Hendrix with guitar and music). It's going to take a lot of work, is the premise of my comment I guess.
I think it was mentioned that Warren Spector doesn't say to actually give up, but to instead avoid trying to sign deals with companies like EA. Slightly off-topic, but the same could be said for any budding musician (avoid the record labels like the plague).
The VIN system is useful for checking the history of a used car you might be buying. To verify that you're not buying a car that was used in some criminal act, for example. It's also pretty important for law enforcement in finding and returning stolen vehicles. Without a VIN, you'd have to pretty much describe every last detail of your car so the police can make sure the car they just found is really yours.
Yep, this is very true. It's called the Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance, and if you're an IT student at a school you will most likely be signed up for it automatically upon enrolling. I was, and once my account became active I was able to purchase a multitude of MS products for just the cost of media and shipping.
I picked up a copy of Windows XP Professional for about $7, and Visual Studio .NET 2003 Academic (which is pretty much identical to Professional; I believe the only things missing are enterprise-like tools such as source/project management tools, etc) for $11 which included the most recent MSDN library CD's as well.
You can buy Windows 2000 Professional, Office XP, Windows XP, VS.NET, MSSQL Server (I think), and a couple other high-dollar products. Membership is free as long as you're an IT student. However, if you change majors they are pretty quick about removing your access. I lost mine within two weeks of switching to a non-IT major.
-James