The gripping anthology of questions posed in story format regarding the nature of octogenerianism in the face of the mechanical man: what does it truly mean to be Abraham Simpson? Similar to the Turing Problem, if you construct a black box where one inserts apple and receieve mush, at what point can one fool a double blind surveyor as to which is the machine-octogenarian and which is the Real McCoy.
Because look at how well socially adjusted other children in school are! They see infantile behavior and are surrounded by immature role models, adapt their behaviors and become sterling members of the community!
You get grades for "plays well with others" because the modern educational paradigm is a joke, and that's the punchline.
Babies look around and learn behaviors from those around them. They notice noise coming out of the adults, and so they try and emulate that. As they get closer to speech, more and more positive reinforcement (along with some brute force awesome brainskills) result in omg a grasp of language. Babies do not learn their language by sitting in a crib with ten other babies all drooling with one another and comparing notes.
Without mature role models (older children, with whom there is no socialization in school, or adults), there are no mature behaviors observed to emulate.
Know lots of rude, maladjusted home schooled kids, do you? I know lots of rude, maladjusted public and private schooled kids. (You're welcome to infer from the tone of this comment which I am)
I'm willing to wager the fiscal incentive of a monthly subscription allows for better funded dilligence in this than, say, the advertisements on top of Battle.Net did in Diablo 2. Also, remember that Blizzard has, historically, never done small hits. They wait a month, two months, three months collecting information, and then... wham. In a single go, 300,000 accounts closed. The effect is more dramatic as taint spreads, so laundering of items takes four months instead of two weeks (it doesn't seem like a very patient industry, since EACH PATCH can result in a major shift in valuation - can you say kingsblood at 6g a stack?)
I would be afraid of the "spam" I had "voluntarily" opted-in to due to a fitful session of rolling over the remote in my sleep, except I already get it all now.
Could you imagine a public library that had a sign saying: "All the phat lewt you can imagine, 0-day bookz for free!"? That's where all the cool kids would be. (er, sorry, all the elite kids... er, sorry, all the 31337 kids... er, sorry, all the |33+ kids...)
You might have to, you know, whistle correctly to get the door to open, I guess, for extra geek points.
I thought to myself that the parent's claims had to be SO CRAZY as to be IMPOSSIBLE. To see for myself, I actually (omg) started up IE, and copied the link to see...
AN IMAGE OF TEXT. AWESOME!
But it says, more or less:
Sorry! Dear Internet Explorer User,
We are sorry to inform you that our current issue does not support your selected browser. Please upgrade to a different browser or join us for next month's issue.
If you choose to wait, your current browser will work splendidly next month.
You're Human Resources. You walk into the office, and have about a day to select candidates to advance to the next stage of screening to hire a junior programmer position that needed to be filled last month (but you were only tasked with last week).
You have a thousand resumés on your desk, and some quick mental math suggests that you have about 60 interviews you can do within your deadline.
This is a crazy, crazy theory I have about the situation of the person reviewing my resumé. I'm thinking to myself that if, in a one second glance over of the stack they can remove 400 resumés that have glaring mistakes (misaligned elements or typos, for example) - 60 seconds into 1000 resumés being about 17 = 17 minutes for this theoretical pile, they're going to pitch without a second thought.
Hey, they've already halved their workload, and there isn't an unreasonable argument that it was an effective sieve: anyone too lazy to get their most important pitch sufficently right that it'd pass a glance is most likely too lazy to get putting all those pesky semi-colons in for that slightly more relaxed deadline of five minutes ago their future company finances code will require.
If this HR person has taken a statistics course and DOES have a second thought, they will assuredly pat him or herself on the pat and say, "The population sample is still sufficently large to allow for a reasonable distribution."...but then he or she will bolt upright in the dark of night with a cold sweat, realizing the truth to the quote, "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics."
The thing I like about WoW is that, hey, you want to play the healbot? Really crazy, but you can actually play a priest that isn't totally dependent on a group to level. Contrast this with a controller from CoH.
The lead design is such a genius that he believes players pick classes like Defender and Controller because they enjoy not being able to play the game. Yes, it's an MMO, and yes, you SHOULD be better off in teams. But tanks, scrappers, and blasters weren't nearly as broken without groupmates.
What's the point in giving a class (Controllers) their solo skill (summonable pet that acts as a sort of inflateable teammate to go with their teammate amplifcation/support abilities) at level 32... in a game with 50 levels?
Brilliant design. While you're at it, have you considered the problem of asprin bottles? Let's make a cap to prevent children from getting access to medicine they can't possibly make informed decisions about such that only children can open it.
You are reviewing one of the two battlegrounds presently available.
There is another which is 40v40 combat, which is everything they've said about battlegrounds. There are captureable objectives: graveyards which help respawn player reinforcements farther up, towers which spawn NPC reinforcements farther up, and a number of objectives to achieve against non-player character spawns which help your side (acquire gold mines, summon elementals, air strikes...).
If democracy is 90 sheep and 10 wolves deciding what's for dinner, the ten wolves will look to their right, and to their left, and say, "Let us take our sheep friends amoung us."
The 10 wolves will say to 9 sheep, "You are special, smart, and clever. Let us agree amoung ourselves how to vote, and then however our vote goes, we shall all vote that way, to provide a strong front." The sheep, flattered and eager to have power, nod.
The wolves look to their right, and to their left, and say, "Let us take the sheep fools amoung us."
The 10 wolves and their 9 sheep friends will find 18 other sheep, and say to them, "You are special, smart, and clever. The rest of the flock is quite foolish, and prone to making mistakes. Let our learned council decide how to vote beforehand, and then we all vote together before the flock." The sheep, flattered and eager to have power, nod.
The wolves look to their right, and to their left, and say, "Let us take the sheep idealists amoung us."
The 10 wolves, their 9 sheep friends, and their 18 sheep synchopants find 36 other sheep, and say to them, "We sympathize with your ideals. The other sheep will not see clear to helping your cause, but together we can make it happen. Let our idealistic council decide how to vote beforehand, and then we all vote together before the flock." The sheep, flattered and eager to have power, nod.
The wolves look to their right, and to their left. It is time to sup, and dinner is from the disenfranchised, alone flock of sheep who were truly practicing democracy. Soon their numbers will be gone, and the wolves will see they no longer need the idealists votes, so they start becoming the main course.
Both these games strike me as failing for similar reasons. Yes, they had a premise that they execute awesomely - and in both cases, literally beautifully, too. Evil Genius was, "Hey, let's make you feel like you're in a 60's movie as the villain!" I defy anyone with a reasonable experience (ie, could spot the experience, had a monitor plugged in, got the game to start up... eccet) to state in this objective, Evil Genius was anything other than a total and resounding success.
It was definately the "where do we go from here?" bit that sort of made the actual "Do I pay for this?" experience fail. The problem wasn't the caliber of your idea. I don't think I saw a single advert for it, but every gamer I knew was talking about it. To borrow a snarkism, you had us, but you lost us. If nothing else, that should definately reasonate as a success for a studio other than the Big X (solve for number of major studios like Blizzard, EA...)
You can tell how early in some revision of the program a variable first appeared by which letter in the alphabet it is. That is, my first variable is "a", my second is "b", and when I run out of letters, I just repeat incrementing a prepended letter, that is, "aa", "ab"... "ba".
Huh? You mean I can have a variable named ResultsTable? No, no.. "c" is clearly a better name. After all, you wouldn't know where to find the first reference otherwise! (hint: after "b")
Because it requires effort to come up with conflict to lead a narrative all the time. There are only so many little old ladies that can be kidnapped that the hero cares about and will feel a deep sadness when the villain... offs her! resulting in him breaking through and reaching Super Saijin Eleventeen.
It's also easier to come up with tougher villains. "Wow, that's Johnny Loadeddice, he ALWAYS ROLLS 20s." Just have him crush more kittens as he walks into the arena then the last guy, and you know he's a badder dude than the last.
But I think you're on to something there. Transformers: Final Deck, where the fate of the universe is in the hands of Yoshiro Someguy who must use his Autobot themed deck to defeat the many foes of Standard Highscool with their Decepticon decks or else the fate of teh universe is teh badsss!11. The more I think about it, the more I like it. Season two they could tap into the obvious expansion, Beast Wars. Season three they can get the Transformers who were all trains and stuck to the train system expansion. Then they can get autovices in season four when the fabric of reality begins to unwind, so that the protagonist and his converted from evil previous seasons' villains buddies can all summon their Autobot Force while searching for the legendary seventh autovice!
I blame cooking. There are lots of stab wounds, and cooking has lots of knives, right? In fact, aren't KITCHEN KNIVES a fairly common weapon? Who ever heard of the nerd stabbing that involved a D+D knife?
Because she's lost her soul
on
Ico Sequel Info
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't know about you guys, but I can't see whether or not people have souls, or have lost their souls. Did I miss the post of some righteous hack of some pair of goggles or something?
Since "Final" Fantasy has 20 or so iterations of the franchise, and everyone loves Microsoft here, here's to hoping they release the only iteration ever of "Prodigous" Fantasy soon...
One month of play is included in the fee. Anyone who has ever purchased a game and never played it a month afterwards and complains about the "high cost" of WoW deserves a stab in the face. While I make no implication that you are such a person, it is shocking how many persons I have as friends complained similarly despite having purchased things like DooM3 and Half-Life 2 which, while fine games, they got perhaps two weeks of play out of, and they will never dust those games off again.
Also, a child (peer of this comment) makes the other anemic lament about "oh, give me the game free, I'm paying a subscription fee." Hello. The game was in development for four? five? years. Maybe they'd like to, I don't know, turn a profit (and judging from units moved, that's very likely a possibility). As heart breaking as that notion may be, I think most of us have gone on to realize that Blizzard is a corporation, one of those weird beasts associated with profits and margins and things.
The subscription fee is, presumably, to cover continuing costs of development. When I was a City of Heroes player, I had no use for other video games. Weirdly, the cost for a three month subscription is about on part with a new video game. Hmm... going with a known quantity for three months which will have new! fun! exciting patches! (sorry, I'm a patchaholic) over those three months... or picking some random thing off the shelves.
Now, if you (collective) are the sort of person who has purchased fewer than 4 video games in the course of a year, I tip my hat to you. You're absolutely right. A MMO is a waste of your money. But you (hopefully) can see how it is not a ridiculous fiscal notion on its face for many.
Slashdot Mirror
I, Grandpa
The gripping anthology of questions posed in story format regarding the nature of octogenerianism in the face of the mechanical man: what does it truly mean to be Abraham Simpson? Similar to the Turing Problem, if you construct a black box where one inserts apple and receieve mush, at what point can one fool a double blind surveyor as to which is the machine-octogenarian and which is the Real McCoy.
Because look at how well socially adjusted other children in school are! They see infantile behavior and are surrounded by immature role models, adapt their behaviors and become sterling members of the community!
You get grades for "plays well with others" because the modern educational paradigm is a joke, and that's the punchline.
Babies look around and learn behaviors from those around them. They notice noise coming out of the adults, and so they try and emulate that. As they get closer to speech, more and more positive reinforcement (along with some brute force awesome brainskills) result in omg a grasp of language. Babies do not learn their language by sitting in a crib with ten other babies all drooling with one another and comparing notes.
Without mature role models (older children, with whom there is no socialization in school, or adults), there are no mature behaviors observed to emulate.
Know lots of rude, maladjusted home schooled kids, do you? I know lots of rude, maladjusted public and private schooled kids. (You're welcome to infer from the tone of this comment which I am)
I'm willing to wager the fiscal incentive of a monthly subscription allows for better funded dilligence in this than, say, the advertisements on top of Battle.Net did in Diablo 2. Also, remember that Blizzard has, historically, never done small hits. They wait a month, two months, three months collecting information, and then... wham. In a single go, 300,000 accounts closed. The effect is more dramatic as taint spreads, so laundering of items takes four months instead of two weeks (it doesn't seem like a very patient industry, since EACH PATCH can result in a major shift in valuation - can you say kingsblood at 6g a stack?)
I would be afraid of the "spam" I had "voluntarily" opted-in to due to a fitful session of rolling over the remote in my sleep, except I already get it all now.
But I wager Benjamin Franklin would be thrilled. Ha ha, Founding Fathers were saints, news at 11...
Could you imagine a public library that had a sign saying: "All the phat lewt you can imagine, 0-day bookz for free!"? That's where all the cool kids would be. (er, sorry, all the elite kids... er, sorry, all the 31337 kids... er, sorry, all the |33+ kids...)
You might have to, you know, whistle correctly to get the door to open, I guess, for extra geek points.
I thought to myself that the parent's claims had to be SO CRAZY as to be IMPOSSIBLE. To see for myself, I actually (omg) started up IE, and copied the link to see...
AN IMAGE OF TEXT. AWESOME!
But it says, more or less:
Sorry! Dear Internet Explorer User,
We are sorry to inform you
that our current issue does
not support your selected
browser. Please upgrade to
a different browser or join
us for next month's issue.
If you choose to wait, your
current browser will work
splendidly next month.
( http://played.todeath.com/sorry.html )
You're Human Resources. You walk into the office, and have about a day to select candidates to advance to the next stage of screening to hire a junior programmer position that needed to be filled last month (but you were only tasked with last week).
...but then he or she will bolt upright in the dark of night with a cold sweat, realizing the truth to the quote, "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics."
You have a thousand resumés on your desk, and some quick mental math suggests that you have about 60 interviews you can do within your deadline.
This is a crazy, crazy theory I have about the situation of the person reviewing my resumé. I'm thinking to myself that if, in a one second glance over of the stack they can remove 400 resumés that have glaring mistakes (misaligned elements or typos, for example) - 60 seconds into 1000 resumés being about 17 = 17 minutes for this theoretical pile, they're going to pitch without a second thought.
Hey, they've already halved their workload, and there isn't an unreasonable argument that it was an effective sieve: anyone too lazy to get their most important pitch sufficently right that it'd pass a glance is most likely too lazy to get putting all those pesky semi-colons in for that slightly more relaxed deadline of five minutes ago their future company finances code will require.
If this HR person has taken a statistics course and DOES have a second thought, they will assuredly pat him or herself on the pat and say, "The population sample is still sufficently large to allow for a reasonable distribution."
The thing I like about WoW is that, hey, you want to play the healbot? Really crazy, but you can actually play a priest that isn't totally dependent on a group to level. Contrast this with a controller from CoH.
The lead design is such a genius that he believes players pick classes like Defender and Controller because they enjoy not being able to play the game. Yes, it's an MMO, and yes, you SHOULD be better off in teams. But tanks, scrappers, and blasters weren't nearly as broken without groupmates.
What's the point in giving a class (Controllers) their solo skill (summonable pet that acts as a sort of inflateable teammate to go with their teammate amplifcation/support abilities) at level 32... in a game with 50 levels?
Brilliant design. While you're at it, have you considered the problem of asprin bottles? Let's make a cap to prevent children from getting access to medicine they can't possibly make informed decisions about such that only children can open it.
that the linked article's author is a paladin...
I didn't have any more of a joke thought up than "New Netcraft Survey Confirms *Morpheus is dead."
Sorry.
You are reviewing one of the two battlegrounds presently available.
There is another which is 40v40 combat, which is everything they've said about battlegrounds. There are captureable objectives: graveyards which help respawn player reinforcements farther up, towers which spawn NPC reinforcements farther up, and a number of objectives to achieve against non-player character spawns which help your side (acquire gold mines, summon elementals, air strikes...).
If democracy is 90 sheep and 10 wolves deciding what's for dinner, the ten wolves will look to their right, and to their left, and say, "Let us take our sheep friends amoung us."
The 10 wolves will say to 9 sheep, "You are special, smart, and clever. Let us agree amoung ourselves how to vote, and then however our vote goes, we shall all vote that way, to provide a strong front." The sheep, flattered and eager to have power, nod.
The wolves look to their right, and to their left, and say, "Let us take the sheep fools amoung us."
The 10 wolves and their 9 sheep friends will find 18 other sheep, and say to them, "You are special, smart, and clever. The rest of the flock is quite foolish, and prone to making mistakes. Let our learned council decide how to vote beforehand, and then we all vote together before the flock." The sheep, flattered and eager to have power, nod.
The wolves look to their right, and to their left, and say, "Let us take the sheep idealists amoung us."
The 10 wolves, their 9 sheep friends, and their 18 sheep synchopants find 36 other sheep, and say to them, "We sympathize with your ideals. The other sheep will not see clear to helping your cause, but together we can make it happen. Let our idealistic council decide how to vote beforehand, and then we all vote together before the flock." The sheep, flattered and eager to have power, nod.
The wolves look to their right, and to their left. It is time to sup, and dinner is from the disenfranchised, alone flock of sheep who were truly practicing democracy. Soon their numbers will be gone, and the wolves will see they no longer need the idealists votes, so they start becoming the main course.
We don't participate in the English language subculture. WE MAKE OUR OWN WORDS UP, MAN. Don't try and limit us with your "conventional spellings."
Both these games strike me as failing for similar reasons. Yes, they had a premise that they execute awesomely - and in both cases, literally beautifully, too. Evil Genius was, "Hey, let's make you feel like you're in a 60's movie as the villain!" I defy anyone with a reasonable experience (ie, could spot the experience, had a monitor plugged in, got the game to start up... eccet) to state in this objective, Evil Genius was anything other than a total and resounding success.
It was definately the "where do we go from here?" bit that sort of made the actual "Do I pay for this?" experience fail. The problem wasn't the caliber of your idea. I don't think I saw a single advert for it, but every gamer I knew was talking about it. To borrow a snarkism, you had us, but you lost us. If nothing else, that should definately reasonate as a success for a studio other than the Big X (solve for number of major studios like Blizzard, EA...)
Because noone likes lukewarm cans of shut the @$@@ up. They're supposed to be served warm.
You can tell how early in some revision of the program a variable first appeared by which letter in the alphabet it is. That is, my first variable is "a", my second is "b", and when I run out of letters, I just repeat incrementing a prepended letter, that is, "aa", "ab"... "ba".
Huh? You mean I can have a variable named ResultsTable? No, no.. "c" is clearly a better name. After all, you wouldn't know where to find the first reference otherwise! (hint: after "b")
Because it requires effort to come up with conflict to lead a narrative all the time. There are only so many little old ladies that can be kidnapped that the hero cares about and will feel a deep sadness when the villain... offs her! resulting in him breaking through and reaching Super Saijin Eleventeen.
It's also easier to come up with tougher villains. "Wow, that's Johnny Loadeddice, he ALWAYS ROLLS 20s." Just have him crush more kittens as he walks into the arena then the last guy, and you know he's a badder dude than the last.
But I think you're on to something there. Transformers: Final Deck, where the fate of the universe is in the hands of Yoshiro Someguy who must use his Autobot themed deck to defeat the many foes of Standard Highscool with their Decepticon decks or else the fate of teh universe is teh badsss!11. The more I think about it, the more I like it. Season two they could tap into the obvious expansion, Beast Wars. Season three they can get the Transformers who were all trains and stuck to the train system expansion. Then they can get autovices in season four when the fabric of reality begins to unwind, so that the protagonist and his converted from evil previous seasons' villains buddies can all summon their Autobot Force while searching for the legendary seventh autovice!
I blame cooking. There are lots of stab wounds, and cooking has lots of knives, right? In fact, aren't KITCHEN KNIVES a fairly common weapon? Who ever heard of the nerd stabbing that involved a D+D knife?
City of Heroes.
I don't know about you guys, but I can't see whether or not people have souls, or have lost their souls. Did I miss the post of some righteous hack of some pair of goggles or something?
Since "Final" Fantasy has 20 or so iterations of the franchise, and everyone loves Microsoft here, here's to hoping they release the only iteration ever of "Prodigous" Fantasy soon...
Coming soon, the pizza guy will lower and raise your chin to force chewing..!
"Anything that has the potential to generate significant changes in mood, effect or feeling is potentially addictive to someone, said Faragher[.]"
Let's go ban some art.
One month of play is included in the fee. Anyone who has ever purchased a game and never played it a month afterwards and complains about the "high cost" of WoW deserves a stab in the face. While I make no implication that you are such a person, it is shocking how many persons I have as friends complained similarly despite having purchased things like DooM3 and Half-Life 2 which, while fine games, they got perhaps two weeks of play out of, and they will never dust those games off again.
Also, a child (peer of this comment) makes the other anemic lament about "oh, give me the game free, I'm paying a subscription fee." Hello. The game was in development for four? five? years. Maybe they'd like to, I don't know, turn a profit (and judging from units moved, that's very likely a possibility). As heart breaking as that notion may be, I think most of us have gone on to realize that Blizzard is a corporation, one of those weird beasts associated with profits and margins and things.
The subscription fee is, presumably, to cover continuing costs of development. When I was a City of Heroes player, I had no use for other video games. Weirdly, the cost for a three month subscription is about on part with a new video game. Hmm... going with a known quantity for three months which will have new! fun! exciting patches! (sorry, I'm a patchaholic) over those three months... or picking some random thing off the shelves.
Now, if you (collective) are the sort of person who has purchased fewer than 4 video games in the course of a year, I tip my hat to you. You're absolutely right. A MMO is a waste of your money. But you (hopefully) can see how it is not a ridiculous fiscal notion on its face for many.