Darkened Skye. That was the "Skittles" game, and although the gameplay was pretty unremarkable (3D plataformer with mild combat, nothing to write home about), it's one of the funniest games I've ever played. No, not fun, funny. It was cheap as dirt too (5 bucks), so all in all I enjoyed the one big ad quite a bit.
> The game is gets very repetative and there's no way to improve a character other than reaching the next level and either getting a few enhancement slots or choosing a new power.
Actually what killed it for me were the massive nerfs that basically meant "you build your character the exact way we want you to or you're FUCKED!". One of the things I liked about CoH was that I could build characters that were somewhat "underpowered" by using interesting power combinations that could be considered original, and had a good time playing them because it wasn't too hard to build enough power to stand up to even-level enemies.
In that respect it wasn't too unlike the original Diablo, where I played and played the same game using different variants (in Diablo these were more item-tied, but still very doable). Then the nerf came... and I left. I knew what the game was like with the "standard builds" well enough, and I had little room to deviate from it. Such a shame.
And because I like being an asshole, I just grabbed one of those cute "time currency conversors" and checked how much $46.7 billion in 1998 would be in 2005's dollars. The number: 55,753,496,932.
>The rest make jests and jokes about the subject of sex in games.
That's because the implementation of sex in games not only leaves much to be desired, but also we've got accustomed to game developers using boobies to sell a poorly implemented, boring and not very imaginative game. The jests made in the responses pointed to this, and surprise surprise, when someone who knew about the game and had played it answered, it confirmed everything we suspected about it *shocked*.
The idea may or may not be worth discussing but it seems like, as we all expected, the implementation sucked, the game was technically a piece of crap, and the design of the "game" part was poorly thought out and weakly executed. This game, like many others before it, attempts to use outrageous claims about the fantastic sex stuff you can find inside to sell you a turd, and they didn't even bother to polish it.
So no, we don't have to "grow up", the game designers have to start thinking about actually making compelling games, sex and all, instead of making a piece of shit and throwing in some jugs hoping the hormonally charged teenagers will flock to it. Because so far that's all they do with "sex in games". Then, and only then, they'll get a less cynical and jaded response.
>Use the buit in looting system or master looter, passing is so stupid and takes too much time.
BoP items are usually "need or pass" because if noone needs it can be disenchanted and the resulting item (usually a valuable shard) given to the winner of a round of/randoms. All passing is better than all greeding and the "disenchanter" rolling need, because if everyone passes you get a nice message saying noone wanted the item so you know it's up for disenchanting.
Now, if you want to do something really cool with that database, you'd blast it against itself using no repeat masking. Or just blast it against the repeats database:-)
What you see depends on where you're sitting. When you're a Nintendo midless fanboi, everything is anti-Nintendo propaganda. Much like Apple and the overly annoying Jobs fanbois in that respect, really. We know in both cases you guys are the minority, but you make a hell of a ruckus; stop with the paranoid bullshit already.
>After all, why should we expect drivers to keep their *!@?% car in their own lane
Are you being purposely dense or were you born an idiot? This system, just like other safety systems in the car, is made to prevent dangerous situations. The beeping, in fact, is to wake the driver up in case he falls asleep. It doesn't happen often, but it does, and the fact that this device can and will prevent accidents from happening is the whole point of the system and a reason good enough for it to exist. After all, why should we expect drivers not to crash and kill themselves? That's why we have belts and airbags, and they're obviously unnecessary because anyone who knows how to drive shouldn't crash.
>Nuclear Power will get us over for a while. but hydrogen is bullshit. It takes
>more energy to make H than what you get from burning it. Therefore it is an
>energy sink, esp. if you get it from cracking H2O. It's better to simply use the
>electricity you make to crack the water As Electricity to Do Work than to blow it
>on H.
Hydrogen has the potential of being a way of tapping resources that are otherwise not easy to exploit. Iceland, for example, has huge geothermal potential but it isn't exactly easy to export that electricity out of the middle of the atlantic. Making H could be a decent way of doing so.
Countless? Say "lots" or "many" if you want, but if there's something Apple does is count their users day in and day out to show in flashy graphics how they're going to take over the world every time their market share goes up a slight bit of a percent point.
>What about all the people working hard to produce those special effects? The artists making 40k, working 80 hours a week, to get the CGI up to spec on deadline?
If all people involved in the making of the latest cinema crapfest really worked 80 hours a week while making 40k, and not just the poor sods burning their eyelashes in front of a monitor to do the CGI, you could make a handy profit by selling DVDs at two bucks a pop. There would be no "piracy problem."
>Solution? A non-free economic model for email. I happen to have such a design here in my pocket, but...
This is the Internet. You're perfectly free to implement your very own non-free email protocol and get people to use it. If it proves superior, the users will come.
>but in addition, 3 of Hearts doesn't like 4 of Hearts, and so on.
If you bother to look for data, you'll find that almost every position in an aminoacid chain can be mutated without affecting the catalysis. It's an easy to do experiment: grab a popular sequence, load it up in a BLAST server against, say, the NCBI non-redundant data, and start comparing the thousands of different sequences that perform the exact same function in different organism, not even taking into account intra-specific variations. Except for the couple of key catalytic residues, the rest of the protein is typically structure, and structure is cheap. Suddenly the odds aren't so bad, are they?
Actually, they could ask Sega, and they'd tell you that getting there first definitely helped them put up a good show versus the SNES. Genesis/MegaDrive was first, was good, and Sonic was a smashing success. Good times for Sega.
> Wikipedia is an excellent knowledge repository about subjects that a resonable amount of people give a damn about.
I'd add to that, Wikipedia is an excellent knowledge repository for subjects that are not controversial and can be properly referrenced (i.e., peer reviewed scientific articles). When scientists (or anyone, for the matter) don't get their dicks in a knot about being right on something that is not fully understood, they'll be perfectly happy to say "our data suggests this, their data suggests that, we need to study this further to know what's more accurate."
A Wikipedia article about, say, the mitochondrial electron transport chain? Sure! We have a lot of research and plenty of data, and everyone studying the field is quite happy with each other. One about, say, abortion or the last Iraq war? Uh...
>After all, the engine for BGE was used in all of the very successful Prince of Persia sequels.
It wasn't, at least for Sands of Time (and probably the rest, but I can't say since I haven't played any of the subsequent ones). At first they used it, then they switched to some other engine developed in their Chinese studios with more muscle. From Gamespot:
In early January, the programmers realized that the JADE graphics engine was no longer capable of supporting the game's huge levels and detailed visual effects. "The programming team came in and basically said, 'Yannis, we have some bad news. We need to create a totally new rendering system for the game,'" says Mallat.
And in the next page:
As the deadlines began to approach for creating an E3 demo, the JADE rendering engine was removed from the game. It was replaced by a 3D rendering engine created by members of Ubisoft's Shanghai, China, design studio. Almost immediately the team began seeing results. The game was running faster, and, most importantly, the visuals were improving, thanks to effects like in-game fog and streams of light in the environment.
Nevertheless, I agree that it's weird they demoted the lead programmer when the game was actually pretty good. So, it didn't sell but got glowing reviews in several places and not much in the form of negativity from those people who did play it... and the one to blame is the programmer. Riiiiight.
Indeed. In my case, it was a voucher with my Radeon 9800 Pro (which I bought after my ti4400 died a horrible death). Otherwise, the chances of me buying such game would be infinitesimal.
Hey, it worked for the Dreamcast, right? The PS2 was supposed to be like a quantum supercomputer, hi tech industries would buy stacks of them for nuclear reactors and satellite guidance applications, it's going to have all the games in the world and we're going to release soon soon soon NOW! Wait a little bit and it can be yours!
>It's only a term "everyone uses" as long as "everyone" is a small subset of the population.
Here's where we disagree I suppose. I've heard this term used by a wide range of people, in billboard advertisements, TV adverts... Heck, check the MediaMarkt audio and video page and see where the iPod is (hint: click on "Die beliebtesten MP3"). Saturn has the iPods in their "MP3 section." The term "MP3 Player" is very widely extended, where "everyone" stands for a large portion of the general population (sure, all they'll tell you is that it's one of them things that lets you hear the music off your computer, but that's how they're referred to).
>I would not be surprised to see 'iPod' becoming a generic term for digital audio players
I would, simply because there is one already that everyone uses: "MP3 player". Wherever it plays MP3s or not (the Sony ones that played only their craptastic format were still generally called MP3 players). Surprising maybe, since it's two words and MP3 isn't exactly a wizbang-cute sounding word, but there you go.
Slashdot Mirror
> qwe qwewwq (...)
:(
I belive that what you're looking for is:
http://www.babbage.demon.co.uk/morseabc.html
I was originally just going to put some random morse coded text, but the lameness filter got in the way
Darkened Skye. That was the "Skittles" game, and although the gameplay was pretty unremarkable (3D plataformer with mild combat, nothing to write home about), it's one of the funniest games I've ever played. No, not fun, funny. It was cheap as dirt too (5 bucks), so all in all I enjoyed the one big ad quite a bit.
> The game is gets very repetative and there's no way to improve a character other than reaching the next level and either getting a few enhancement slots or choosing a new power.
Actually what killed it for me were the massive nerfs that basically meant "you build your character the exact way we want you to or you're FUCKED!". One of the things I liked about CoH was that I could build characters that were somewhat "underpowered" by using interesting power combinations that could be considered original, and had a good time playing them because it wasn't too hard to build enough power to stand up to even-level enemies.
In that respect it wasn't too unlike the original Diablo, where I played and played the same game using different variants (in Diablo these were more item-tied, but still very doable). Then the nerf came... and I left. I knew what the game was like with the "standard builds" well enough, and I had little room to deviate from it. Such a shame.
And because I like being an asshole, I just grabbed one of those cute "time currency conversors" and checked how much $46.7 billion in 1998 would be in 2005's dollars. The number: 55,753,496,932.
>Usually the screens are scratched to high hell (I can't imagine what people are DOING with the stylus)
E)Elbereth
Makes the DS safe from meddling kids and store managers, and lets me play for longer! Oh crap...
z)d
Which direction?>
*Crash*
>The rest make jests and jokes about the subject of sex in games.
That's because the implementation of sex in games not only leaves much to be desired, but also we've got accustomed to game developers using boobies to sell a poorly implemented, boring and not very imaginative game. The jests made in the responses pointed to this, and surprise surprise, when someone who knew about the game and had played it answered, it confirmed everything we suspected about it *shocked*.
The idea may or may not be worth discussing but it seems like, as we all expected, the implementation sucked, the game was technically a piece of crap, and the design of the "game" part was poorly thought out and weakly executed. This game, like many others before it, attempts to use outrageous claims about the fantastic sex stuff you can find inside to sell you a turd, and they didn't even bother to polish it.
So no, we don't have to "grow up", the game designers have to start thinking about actually making compelling games, sex and all, instead of making a piece of shit and throwing in some jugs hoping the hormonally charged teenagers will flock to it. Because so far that's all they do with "sex in games". Then, and only then, they'll get a less cynical and jaded response.
>Use the buit in looting system or master looter, passing is so stupid and takes too much time.
/randoms. All passing is better than all greeding and the "disenchanter" rolling need, because if everyone passes you get a nice message saying noone wanted the item so you know it's up for disenchanting.
BoP items are usually "need or pass" because if noone needs it can be disenchanted and the resulting item (usually a valuable shard) given to the winner of a round of
Now, if you want to do something really cool with that database, you'd blast it against itself using no repeat masking. Or just blast it against the repeats database :-)
> Hey, I bailed on City of Heroes after a year when the ED super-nerf came out.
Issue 5 did it for me. I saw where they were going, bid farewell to my ingame buddies, and uninstalled.
But remember, if it weren't for these patents and their precious attached IP there would be no progress at all in the software field!
What you see depends on where you're sitting. When you're a Nintendo midless fanboi, everything is anti-Nintendo propaganda. Much like Apple and the overly annoying Jobs fanbois in that respect, really. We know in both cases you guys are the minority, but you make a hell of a ruckus; stop with the paranoid bullshit already.
>After all, why should we expect drivers to keep their *!@?% car in their own lane
Are you being purposely dense or were you born an idiot? This system, just like other safety systems in the car, is made to prevent dangerous situations. The beeping, in fact, is to wake the driver up in case he falls asleep. It doesn't happen often, but it does, and the fact that this device can and will prevent accidents from happening is the whole point of the system and a reason good enough for it to exist. After all, why should we expect drivers not to crash and kill themselves? That's why we have belts and airbags, and they're obviously unnecessary because anyone who knows how to drive shouldn't crash.
>Nuclear Power will get us over for a while. but hydrogen is bullshit. It takes
>more energy to make H than what you get from burning it. Therefore it is an
>energy sink, esp. if you get it from cracking H2O. It's better to simply use the
>electricity you make to crack the water As Electricity to Do Work than to blow it
>on H.
Hydrogen has the potential of being a way of tapping resources that are otherwise not easy to exploit. Iceland, for example, has huge geothermal potential but it isn't exactly easy to export that electricity out of the middle of the atlantic. Making H could be a decent way of doing so.
>countless people
Countless? Say "lots" or "many" if you want, but if there's something Apple does is count their users day in and day out to show in flashy graphics how they're going to take over the world every time their market share goes up a slight bit of a percent point.
>What about all the people working hard to produce those special effects? The artists making 40k, working 80 hours a week, to get the CGI up to spec on deadline?
If all people involved in the making of the latest cinema crapfest really worked 80 hours a week while making 40k, and not just the poor sods burning their eyelashes in front of a monitor to do the CGI, you could make a handy profit by selling DVDs at two bucks a pop. There would be no "piracy problem."
>Solution? A non-free economic model for email. I happen to have such a design here in my pocket, but...
This is the Internet. You're perfectly free to implement your very own non-free email protocol and get people to use it. If it proves superior, the users will come.
>but in addition, 3 of Hearts doesn't like 4 of Hearts, and so on.
If you bother to look for data, you'll find that almost every position in an aminoacid chain can be mutated without affecting the catalysis. It's an easy to do experiment: grab a popular sequence, load it up in a BLAST server against, say, the NCBI non-redundant data, and start comparing the thousands of different sequences that perform the exact same function in different organism, not even taking into account intra-specific variations. Except for the couple of key catalytic residues, the rest of the protein is typically structure, and structure is cheap. Suddenly the odds aren't so bad, are they?
Actually, they could ask Sega, and they'd tell you that getting there first definitely helped them put up a good show versus the SNES. Genesis/MegaDrive was first, was good, and Sonic was a smashing success. Good times for Sega.
> Wikipedia is an excellent knowledge repository about subjects that a resonable amount of people give a damn about.
I'd add to that, Wikipedia is an excellent knowledge repository for subjects that are not controversial and can be properly referrenced (i.e., peer reviewed scientific articles). When scientists (or anyone, for the matter) don't get their dicks in a knot about being right on something that is not fully understood, they'll be perfectly happy to say "our data suggests this, their data suggests that, we need to study this further to know what's more accurate."
A Wikipedia article about, say, the mitochondrial electron transport chain? Sure! We have a lot of research and plenty of data, and everyone studying the field is quite happy with each other. One about, say, abortion or the last Iraq war? Uh...
>After all, the engine for BGE was used in all of the very successful Prince of Persia sequels.
It wasn't, at least for Sands of Time (and probably the rest, but I can't say since I haven't played any of the subsequent ones). At first they used it, then they switched to some other engine developed in their Chinese studios with more muscle. From Gamespot:
In early January, the programmers realized that the JADE graphics engine was no longer capable of supporting the game's huge levels and detailed visual effects. "The programming team came in and basically said, 'Yannis, we have some bad news. We need to create a totally new rendering system for the game,'" says Mallat.
And in the next page:
As the deadlines began to approach for creating an E3 demo, the JADE rendering engine was removed from the game. It was replaced by a 3D rendering engine created by members of Ubisoft's Shanghai, China, design studio. Almost immediately the team began seeing results. The game was running faster, and, most importantly, the visuals were improving, thanks to effects like in-game fog and streams of light in the environment.
Nevertheless, I agree that it's weird they demoted the lead programmer when the game was actually pretty good. So, it didn't sell but got glowing reviews in several places and not much in the form of negativity from those people who did play it... and the one to blame is the programmer. Riiiiight.
>or it's so cheap I wouldn't bother reselling it.
Indeed. In my case, it was a voucher with my Radeon 9800 Pro (which I bought after my ti4400 died a horrible death). Otherwise, the chances of me buying such game would be infinitesimal.
>"Sony never said"
f ing
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=astrotur
Hey, it worked for the Dreamcast, right? The PS2 was supposed to be like a quantum supercomputer, hi tech industries would buy stacks of them for nuclear reactors and satellite guidance applications, it's going to have all the games in the world and we're going to release soon soon soon NOW! Wait a little bit and it can be yours!
History does have a liking for repeating itself.
>It's only a term "everyone uses" as long as "everyone" is a small subset of the population.
Here's where we disagree I suppose. I've heard this term used by a wide range of people, in billboard advertisements, TV adverts... Heck, check the MediaMarkt audio and video page and see where the iPod is (hint: click on "Die beliebtesten MP3"). Saturn has the iPods in their "MP3 section." The term "MP3 Player" is very widely extended, where "everyone" stands for a large portion of the general population (sure, all they'll tell you is that it's one of them things that lets you hear the music off your computer, but that's how they're referred to).
>I would not be surprised to see 'iPod' becoming a generic term for digital audio players
I would, simply because there is one already that everyone uses: "MP3 player". Wherever it plays MP3s or not (the Sony ones that played only their craptastic format were still generally called MP3 players). Surprising maybe, since it's two words and MP3 isn't exactly a wizbang-cute sounding word, but there you go.