I bought them from Johnny No Hands, who swore they were just baby sharks whose fins hadn't grown in, but when they started squeaking and doing tricks I should've realized...
Bleh. Why do people always argue the "big picture" concept against the allegedly "small picture" argument? It'll never get traction - it isn't ignorance stopping people from agreeing with you, it's indifference. How tangible is the notion of a "better" society? Bleh.
No, the argument is people starving and money spent on a space program being wasteful so address it as such. A NASA engineer requires a lot of expertise, and is employed, therefore the Indian equivelent very likely requires a lot of expertise and is employed. Said expertise requires higher education - you've just employed a professor or five. Said expert's income can go towards housing and food - you've just employed a carpenter and a farmer... yes. Noone is going to eat a space module, but the persons responsible for mining the materials to construct it are, as are the people who constructed it, support it...
Great Depression in the US was at an impasse because economic thinking before then was the immature cognitive process that produces the fallacy of immediate needs spending. Sometimes you gotta borrow money to make money ("You gotta spend money to make money." well if you've got no money...) - and on the scale of an economy, borrowing money is national jobs no matter how "crazy" - artists on government payroll, eccet.
Keep Scott Bakula, get Al back, scrub the whole star-ship thing, and focus more on the time travel. Have weekly jaunts into random time periods. Surefire formula for success.
We just need a good show name... and since it's about time travel, let's pick something sciency that everyone will be familiar with, and enjoy sounding smart saying... how about Discrete Step?
There's always a first time for someone. A time when you discovered that these things called "mice" are all the rage, and that wonderful new game you bought requires one - I am not kidding. Extraploate... a computer game that REQUIRES online connectivity to play? C'mon, what was the last Blizzard game... Warcraft 3. As much as that game is really in the online playing of it, there's a lot of single player game to be had. A game you can't... play... at all... except online... with an additional subscription fee?
Pfft. They're an established developer, developing an established franchise, with a lot of established buzz... you could call every divergent sale (non-converted) "inertia" and probably be right enough for every day of the week.
Seriously, throw out everything you know as an "expert" in this subject matter... would you know on first glance the difference between Fable and WoW? (Insert obligatory shot at Fable, divergent thread about merits)
The stars were wrong, all wrong! If only they had been in proper alignment so as to have Star Trek: The Next Generation airing new eps at the same time as the N-Gage......so that you could have had Saturday Night Live parody Picard saying to Geordi... "Mister LaForge... Engage!" only to have Geordi turn around with said phone to his ear...
I'm using the name Tribes hypothetically, because I stopped playing befoer there stopped being players, but, there were usually 20-40 people playing (on Base CTF anyway) when I quit... but what's the difference between an MMO and a MO in terms of disappearing or nonexistant playerbase? Is Tribes fun without other people? How long do you want your game to last? E+B lasted more than a month, right? If you have ever gone to a movie in a theatre, your money spent per time enjoyed ratio would be tripled MMOing with a sub fee.
Not entirely the same, as it is more like Runescape now, I guess - a pay premium character state or what have you - but it's a game, it's free, and c'est la vie.
There should be an active movement to get the next revolutionary protocol (or this one, if possible) renamed zerg, so it's "file zerging". Blizzard should be on board with this, because they've taken from the Bittorrent thoughtshare, so returning a word as thanks shouldn't be a big deal... and then, years from now, on the news, we'll actually hear, "Today two teenagers were arrested at Minnesota Heights High school for file zerging..." and then my dream of a real life Kent Brockmanism will come true... nouning a verbed noun, and using the word zerg.
Please refer to RFC 2606 and use example.com, example.org, or example.net instead of things like "mydomainname.com"... and to foresee a funny followup... replace the final bit to "instead of things like "example.com""
Moreover, I recall paying money for an updated game called Diablo 2 (they also advanced the plot). Had I the audacity, I could now store my characters on their servers and - gasp low and behold - avoid many of the problems of Diablo 1. Yes, dupes, hacks, and exploits appeared. But it wasn't anywhere near as bad as the plink! I nuke your inventory and disconnect you from my game of Diablo 1.
It's almost like every time they take your money, it gets better. Weird, right? I wonder how WoW will be with you paying monthly...
After years spent with the Traveller on an adventure of mental space exploration, having seen places and things beyond all possibility of human comprehension, TV's Wil Wheaton this season reprises his role as Wesley Crusher after having become a space-ninja-pirate. After taming an intergalactic astral dinosaur to be his pet, Ninja Crusher and pet dino Stampy mentally warp themselves from adventure to adventure in Star Trek: Exploited Franchise, coming this fall on UPN.
.. and my question, is would you do it, Mister Wheaton?.. just so I'm not totally off topic here...
Shattered Galaxy, a phenomenal game if the game itself is your cup of tea, had pantloads of beta testers. Then it went commercial.
And because the game is entirely PVP, they discovered they needed to bolster the playerbase with free accounts.
Yeah. The playerbase went DOWN from beta. Why? Because it turns out a lot of people like playing for free (read: beta) and not so many like the subscription fee. (You're welcome to posit your own analysis about the actual merits of SG, but, whatever)
How many people purchased Warcraft III? How many MMO players are there currently? How many Warcraft III players are in for spending money monthly (consider one of the major selling points of War3 - free online play...)
But hey, who knows. I just think you're making assumptions in the wrong direction.
"It's also interesting to note that these statements made by Steve Vamos, Microsoft Australia's managing director, come with no knowledge of what Firefox has to offer as he admit not even installing or using Firefox."
There is an "admit" in that sentence look precarious to me.
Considering that they're "reporting" what they're being told... "A source close to the White House"... ie., some guy who was told to come and "leak" the story to us namelessly so it has more cred than if they were saying it themselves (which if they don't honor, they're not invited to the big kids' table anymore).
Oh no I went against the crowd on /.
on
Halo 2 Reviews
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, no. My first FPS chops were on (and yes, I'm going to misspell it) Wolvenstein. I, like everyone else with a pulse, went ape over DooM. Descent is, in my mind, the best FPS ever (although I forgive your inferior brain for being unable to reach the same conclusion). I've played and loved GoldenEye. Took me a little while to come around on Perfect Dark.
I love Halo. I love it solo, I love it multiplayer. I've cleared it on Legendary. I've cleared it on Heroic without using anything other than melee (excepting in cases where it is literally impossible to progress otherwise, ie., the reactor room - but not believedly possible, the tanks can be destroyed with sufficent melee attacks). I love the story.
And I'll tell you the best selling point. It didn't cost $4000 to have a machine and require all kinds of fiddling under the hood to play it passably. I could - and this is the crazy part - go to a friend's house, and bam, right there, they have a box that plays the game passably. Instant LAN fun without the LAN or the carting of PC - I can yell at him and call him a noob camper in the same room with the maximum amount of additional effort over normal single player funness of... buying an additional controller...
instead of buying a hub, buying cat 5, carting them over to everyone's house every time we go somewhere... setting up a local DHCP... which yes, is barely breaking a sweat, but that still takes more than PLUG IN CONTROLLER TWO.
Quoting gamespot.. "For another, the Master Chief, Halo's cybernetic protagonist, made a great hero. A fearless, enigmatic man, the Chief could succeed where pure flesh-and-blood humans could not,"
Squads of marines couldn't do it, but in Doom, hey, you're Teh Ubar Marine!11. All it amounted to in most FPSs is that your character, who has throwaway background information ("You are teh ubar spy!!1"), has the most psychopathic aim skills of the human race. At least here, you're the last in a complicated and failure prone supersoldier project (caveat, caveat, caveat...)
If you pay in advance, your monthly subscription is about $10.
Consider that they have to plan things like server bandwidth, number of customer support agents, and even how much to spend on the "free" updates based on how many customers they have - and at some point, they will be wrong. There will be fewer customers than they allow for. So they have to hedge their finances there.
Also, the game was in development for a long time. Their development staff didnt' subsist on air and good intentions for the years of pure negative spending. There are debts to pay!
Additionally, they have a publisher who again, fronted some risk (in this particular case, I believe they handle CSR, so that's one form of risk-spreading). However, they have... 6? coming out MMOs, and I really can't be bothered to look around, but let's guess they have, or have had, other products on market. Do you think all of them succeeded? Those failures have to be paid for somewhere.
Finally, they're not going to have 180,000 subscribers forever. For example, I cancelled after about six months of being their subscriber (they've gone from communicative with the community to a cutesy we-aren't-telling all the while ignoring feedback on hideously broken changes on the test server that go live and result in tremendous uproar and they take months to unpatch it...). Their next project may not do so well. Statistcally speaking, it won't. They, and their backers, will need some money to keep things going.
On top of that, everyone likes to actually pocket some money.
You know, everyone has stated it that way, rather than "Vote or Die"... but I seriously think he should be wearing a shirt (so he's talking about himself in the third person) with "Vote, or P. Diddy will kill you."
Slashdot Mirror
I bought them from Johnny No Hands, who swore they were just baby sharks whose fins hadn't grown in, but when they started squeaking and doing tricks I should've realized...
Bleh. Why do people always argue the "big picture" concept against the allegedly "small picture" argument? It'll never get traction - it isn't ignorance stopping people from agreeing with you, it's indifference. How tangible is the notion of a "better" society? Bleh.
No, the argument is people starving and money spent on a space program being wasteful so address it as such. A NASA engineer requires a lot of expertise, and is employed, therefore the Indian equivelent very likely requires a lot of expertise and is employed. Said expertise requires higher education - you've just employed a professor or five. Said expert's income can go towards housing and food - you've just employed a carpenter and a farmer... yes. Noone is going to eat a space module, but the persons responsible for mining the materials to construct it are, as are the people who constructed it, support it...
Great Depression in the US was at an impasse because economic thinking before then was the immature cognitive process that produces the fallacy of immediate needs spending. Sometimes you gotta borrow money to make money ("You gotta spend money to make money." well if you've got no money...) - and on the scale of an economy, borrowing money is national jobs no matter how "crazy" - artists on government payroll, eccet.
Keep Scott Bakula, get Al back, scrub the whole star-ship thing, and focus more on the time travel. Have weekly jaunts into random time periods. Surefire formula for success.
We just need a good show name... and since it's about time travel, let's pick something sciency that everyone will be familiar with, and enjoy sounding smart saying... how about Discrete Step?
There's always a first time for someone. A time when you discovered that these things called "mice" are all the rage, and that wonderful new game you bought requires one - I am not kidding. Extraploate... a computer game that REQUIRES online connectivity to play? C'mon, what was the last Blizzard game... Warcraft 3. As much as that game is really in the online playing of it, there's a lot of single player game to be had. A game you can't... play... at all... except online... with an additional subscription fee?
Pfft. They're an established developer, developing an established franchise, with a lot of established buzz... you could call every divergent sale (non-converted) "inertia" and probably be right enough for every day of the week.
Seriously, throw out everything you know as an "expert" in this subject matter... would you know on first glance the difference between Fable and WoW? (Insert obligatory shot at Fable, divergent thread about merits)
The stars were wrong, all wrong! If only they had been in proper alignment so as to have Star Trek: The Next Generation airing new eps at the same time as the N-Gage... ...so that you could have had Saturday Night Live parody Picard saying to Geordi... "Mister LaForge... Engage!" only to have Geordi turn around with said phone to his ear...
I'm using the name Tribes hypothetically, because I stopped playing befoer there stopped being players, but, there were usually 20-40 people playing (on Base CTF anyway) when I quit... but what's the difference between an MMO and a MO in terms of disappearing or nonexistant playerbase? Is Tribes fun without other people? How long do you want your game to last? E+B lasted more than a month, right? If you have ever gone to a movie in a theatre, your money spent per time enjoyed ratio would be tripled MMOing with a sub fee.
Shattered Galaxy, http://www.sgalaxy.com
Not entirely the same, as it is more like Runescape now, I guess - a pay premium character state or what have you - but it's a game, it's free, and c'est la vie.
There should be an active movement to get the next revolutionary protocol (or this one, if possible) renamed zerg, so it's "file zerging". Blizzard should be on board with this, because they've taken from the Bittorrent thoughtshare, so returning a word as thanks shouldn't be a big deal... and then, years from now, on the news, we'll actually hear, "Today two teenagers were arrested at Minnesota Heights High school for file zerging..." and then my dream of a real life Kent Brockmanism will come true... nouning a verbed noun, and using the word zerg.
I blame my squad's wipeout on high ping, sarge. I had a lag spurt.
If he's so against privacy, he won't mind telling me his credit card numbers...
Because as we all know, noone cheated in a game like Diablo 1 - CURSE IGE!
Please refer to RFC 2606 and use example.com, example.org, or example.net instead of things like "mydomainname.com"... and to foresee a funny followup... replace the final bit to "instead of things like "example.com""
Moreover, I recall paying money for an updated game called Diablo 2 (they also advanced the plot). Had I the audacity, I could now store my characters on their servers and - gasp low and behold - avoid many of the problems of Diablo 1. Yes, dupes, hacks, and exploits appeared. But it wasn't anywhere near as bad as the plink! I nuke your inventory and disconnect you from my game of Diablo 1.
It's almost like every time they take your money, it gets better. Weird, right? I wonder how WoW will be with you paying monthly...
After years spent with the Traveller on an adventure of mental space exploration, having seen places and things beyond all possibility of human comprehension, TV's Wil Wheaton this season reprises his role as Wesley Crusher after having become a space-ninja-pirate. After taming an intergalactic astral dinosaur to be his pet, Ninja Crusher and pet dino Stampy mentally warp themselves from adventure to adventure in Star Trek: Exploited Franchise, coming this fall on UPN.
.. and my question, is would you do it, Mister Wheaton? .. just so I'm not totally off topic here...
You forgot the added bonus: everyone gets to feel like a winner, because they backed the right horse!
"He liked Democracy. One Man, One Vote. He was the Man, and the vote was His."
Native-ian.
You stole my obligatory Penny-Arcade reference!
Shattered Galaxy, a phenomenal game if the game itself is your cup of tea, had pantloads of beta testers. Then it went commercial.
And because the game is entirely PVP, they discovered they needed to bolster the playerbase with free accounts.
Yeah. The playerbase went DOWN from beta. Why? Because it turns out a lot of people like playing for free (read: beta) and not so many like the subscription fee. (You're welcome to posit your own analysis about the actual merits of SG, but, whatever)
How many people purchased Warcraft III? How many MMO players are there currently? How many Warcraft III players are in for spending money monthly (consider one of the major selling points of War3 - free online play...)
But hey, who knows. I just think you're making assumptions in the wrong direction.
Or this is the last we will see of... [Coloniel voice]SNAAAAAKE!!![/voice] as there are, you know, other, non-Solid Snakes.
"It's also interesting to note that these statements made by Steve Vamos, Microsoft Australia's managing director, come with no knowledge of what Firefox has to offer as he admit not even installing or using Firefox."
There is an "admit" in that sentence look precarious to me.
Any blog that also reads AP wire?
Considering that they're "reporting" what they're being told... "A source close to the White House"... ie., some guy who was told to come and "leak" the story to us namelessly so it has more cred than if they were saying it themselves (which if they don't honor, they're not invited to the big kids' table anymore).
Sorry, no. My first FPS chops were on (and yes, I'm going to misspell it) Wolvenstein. I, like everyone else with a pulse, went ape over DooM. Descent is, in my mind, the best FPS ever (although I forgive your inferior brain for being unable to reach the same conclusion). I've played and loved GoldenEye. Took me a little while to come around on Perfect Dark.
I love Halo. I love it solo, I love it multiplayer. I've cleared it on Legendary. I've cleared it on Heroic without using anything other than melee (excepting in cases where it is literally impossible to progress otherwise, ie., the reactor room - but not believedly possible, the tanks can be destroyed with sufficent melee attacks). I love the story.
And I'll tell you the best selling point. It didn't cost $4000 to have a machine and require all kinds of fiddling under the hood to play it passably. I could - and this is the crazy part - go to a friend's house, and bam, right there, they have a box that plays the game passably. Instant LAN fun without the LAN or the carting of PC - I can yell at him and call him a noob camper in the same room with the maximum amount of additional effort over normal single player funness of... buying an additional controller...
instead of buying a hub, buying cat 5, carting them over to everyone's house every time we go somewhere... setting up a local DHCP... which yes, is barely breaking a sweat, but that still takes more than PLUG IN CONTROLLER TWO.
Quoting gamespot.. "For another, the Master Chief, Halo's cybernetic protagonist, made a great hero. A fearless, enigmatic man, the Chief could succeed where pure flesh-and-blood humans could not,"
Squads of marines couldn't do it, but in Doom, hey, you're Teh Ubar Marine!11. All it amounted to in most FPSs is that your character, who has throwaway background information ("You are teh ubar spy!!1"), has the most psychopathic aim skills of the human race. At least here, you're the last in a complicated and failure prone supersoldier project (caveat, caveat, caveat...)
If you pay in advance, your monthly subscription is about $10.
Consider that they have to plan things like server bandwidth, number of customer support agents, and even how much to spend on the "free" updates based on how many customers they have - and at some point, they will be wrong. There will be fewer customers than they allow for. So they have to hedge their finances there.
Also, the game was in development for a long time. Their development staff didnt' subsist on air and good intentions for the years of pure negative spending. There are debts to pay!
Additionally, they have a publisher who again, fronted some risk (in this particular case, I believe they handle CSR, so that's one form of risk-spreading). However, they have... 6? coming out MMOs, and I really can't be bothered to look around, but let's guess they have, or have had, other products on market. Do you think all of them succeeded? Those failures have to be paid for somewhere.
Finally, they're not going to have 180,000 subscribers forever. For example, I cancelled after about six months of being their subscriber (they've gone from communicative with the community to a cutesy we-aren't-telling all the while ignoring feedback on hideously broken changes on the test server that go live and result in tremendous uproar and they take months to unpatch it...). Their next project may not do so well. Statistcally speaking, it won't. They, and their backers, will need some money to keep things going.
On top of that, everyone likes to actually pocket some money.
You know, everyone has stated it that way, rather than "Vote or Die"... but I seriously think he should be wearing a shirt (so he's talking about himself in the third person) with "Vote, or P. Diddy will kill you."
Oblig Star Trek quote.. of course not, as it is only yet another ugly bag of mostly water.