We are talking about a man with an ego that demands if a mountain blocks his path, the mountain be removed. What he knows is he doesn't give a fig what he can do on his side, he wants it to be on their heads.
My sarcasm detector is trying to tell me something here... hmmm. No. I don't know what it's beeping about.
Just for the record again, how deep was the multiplayer in any of those listed titles? Especially the main campaigns? As I recall, it was fairly cursory. There were no accomidations made in the game for the idea that more than one player might by playing, in fact, in all the 'official' stuff, the first player was the "Chosen One" and the rest just got to follow the lead player around doing the janitorial work.
Hardly an established genre, the only one that actually acted like it cared to cater to multiplayer was NWN.
That being said, I did overstate that portion of my arguement. Yes, Bioware had been tacking on multiplayer as an afterthought for it's games for a while before they got their first person mojo on. Maybe they just don't want/know how to make a multiplayer FPS.
Many (but not most) new games are $30 if you go to the effort of looking for deals and are willing to then buy the DLC separately.
Most no longer new games will be $30 with DLC included, eventually, if you are willing to wait and don't need to be the first kid on your block to play it.
I used to buy games impulsively due to the fact that in the 80's and 90's it was anyone's guess how long a game would be on the shelf. And once they were gone, they were gone. But in today's day and age, if a game manages to drop off the edge of the Earth it's normally because it was crap and not worth paying for.
Throw as many "you pay as much for a few hours at the movies" arguements at me as you wish, it's been a long, long time that I've come across a game that was so "WOW" that I've felt paying $50-70 bucks for the 'privilege' of being in the first wave of people playing it was actually a worthwhile investment. And as long as year old (and older) games are being bargain binned on things like Steam, it's likely I never will again.
Do you know what they were charging for Mass Effect this weekend? $10.
Do you know what they'll be charging for DAO in a year or two? $10.
I can wait. I picked up Oblivion finally this year, I've still got to find time to play either of the Far Cry games, and even if I push those out of the way, I've got ~80 more A list titles from the 2000's that I paid a pittance for and are just waiting for me to pick up.
That reminds me, I never did get around to finishing Psychonauts...
Uh, Breaker One-Nine, this here's the Rubber Duck You got a copy on me Pig-Pen? C'mon
Uh, yeah 10-4 Pig Pen, fer sure, fer sure By golly it's clean clear to Flag-Town, C'mon
Uh, yeah, that's a big 10-4 Pig-Pen, Yeah, we definitely got us the front door good buddy, Mercy sakes alive, looks like we got us a Road Train
Was the dark of the moon, on the sixth of June In a Kenworth, pullin' logs Cabover Pete with a reefer on And a Jimmy haulin' hogs We 'as headin' fer bear on I-One-Oh 'Bout a mile outta Shaky-Town I sez Pig-Pen, this here's the Rubber Duck An' I'm about to put the hammer on down
Cause we gotta little ol' Road Train, rockin' through the night Yeah we gotta little ol' Road Train, ain't she a beautiful sight? Come on an' join our Road Train, ain't nothin' gonna git in our way We're gonna roll this truckin' Road Train, cross the USA Road Train... Road Train...
Hmmm. That doesn't quite work for me. What if we called them, say... CONVOY!
If it were obvious that you were trolling, I wouldn't have congratulated you on being so subtle that I couldn't tell.
If you post in the middle of a "PCs are better than consoles because..." thread with something along the lines of "plus look what else I can do with my PC!" one sort of expects that "what else" to be exclusive to PCs. Otherwise you are just adding a non sequitur to the mix. Why mention it if it's not exclusive.
"Roy Taylor, Vice President of Content Relations at NVIDIA, has spoken on the subject of the engine's complexity, stating that Crysis has over a million lines of code, 1 GB of texture data, and 85,000 shaders.
Crysis is often used as a benchmark in computer tests, as Crysis with the highest settings and resolutions requires a very powerful PC."
My personal opinion is that it's a little from category A and a little from category B.
You are aware there is a patch out there now that restores a good bit of that content to working order?
And as much as I understand your frustration with them not updating KOTOR 2 themselves, when you are a game developer attempting to make ends meet, if the folk who paid you to make the game aren't willing to pay for you to update it, then it doesn't really matter your intentions, you can't afford to throw development time down the drain on unpaid projects.
Multiplayer makes sense for some things but for some things less so.
Multiplayer RPGs in the fashion that Bioware makes their RPGs would be sufficently different from current multiplayer models that it would require alot of thought and effort to make even a cursory system.
At the worse, you'd just be playing seperate characters in a party, one where the entire story is geared towards the idea where your main character is "The One". That isn't plot details concering the most recent game, that's just what BioWare games are about, single character going through the universe righting or doing wrongs along the way to defeat the big bad guy after having a couple of 'bonding moments' with their sidekicks. So who gets to be "The One" and who is the sidekick. And when your teammate starts the romance sideplot with you, are you going to feel uncomfortable about the sex scene?
Or perhaps that isn't the worse, how about two competeing parties. "I'm sorry, you would have been able to save our village from the bandits, if your friend hadn't rolled through town last week and killed all the NPC's himself! Hope you didn't need that XP for leveling!" "Yeah, all the cool NPC's have joined your rival's party. Here are the NPC's no one ever plays with if they can help it.."
Really, a multiplayer version of a Bioware game would need a completely different story structure (not to mention tech) than the one they use. Sometimes just because you can bolt a jet engine to a car, doesn't mean it's a good idea to do so.
Once you get used to a keyboard and mouse you can't go back to a console. I had trouble adapting. Not to mention the number of other things you can do with a high powered computer. I donate my spare cycles to Folding@Home.
Congratulations, I honestly don't know if you are trolling or just ignorant of the fact that the PS3 lets you do the same. That said, I do think PCs are still the high end of the gaming quality spectrum.
This sort of money grab is inevitiablly countered by my own purchasing tactics: Wait till it's on a 50% off sale.
The more expensive the game, the longer they have to wait to get my $30. And lets face it, no matter how orgasmic it is, there isn't a dereth of good cheap games waiting to be played out there these days. The age of "you better buy it now because they'll stop selling it in six months and you'll only be able to find it used on ebay then" is long dead now that digital distribution is around.
And ear wax, the heat from the reaction and the 'bubbling' softens and loosens the wax. A couple of years ago I caught something nasty and ended up deaf in one ear due to wax build up. The doc suggested a couple of drops a night in the ear to help clear it out.
One warning though, don't over do it. Too much too long too often and you can end up giving yourself a chemical burn.
Horses are not omniscient. It really isn't that hard to construct a scenario where your 'inability' to lead a horse would lead to the endangerment of property or lives.
- Suppose you lose control of the horse and it starts galloping down a crowded sidewalk, or worse, starts bucking. - Suppose you try to cross the road and it (because it wasn't bred to look both ways) steps in front of traffic. Deer aren't the only animals that'll freeze when headlights hit them. - Suppose you pass out on the horse while it's walking you home and you slip off and hit your head/into the river/a passing car.
I don't own a cell phone, so my only line is a land line. AT&T here likes to play games with the DSL, even though you can get 'dry' lines with no other service, they charge as much as with, so I go for it.
On the other hand, the last time I had a conversation lasting longer than 3 minutes outside of work and on a phone was long enough ago I can't even remember it. If someone wants to talk to me (and I want to talk to them) it's electronicly via IM or email or other such methods.
Except of course, you ignore the fact that any store that sells books in a non-DRM'ed format sells books that can be read on the Kindle and that we've already established at the start of this whole thread that DRM'ed content (i.e. content you can be prevented from accessing after purchasing) is the whole thing that's giving you a boner over all this. Or are you going to pull more bullshit and pretend that it's better to have a worthless file on your ereader that you can't open/read vs having it deleted off your system.
Just give up dude. It's fairly obvious that you are just grasping at straws to come up with shit to bag the Kindle over because you want to hate the Kindle. Rather than because you've actually thought about the matter. If you had, you'd either come to the conclusion that virtually ALL ebook readers are unsuitable for your purposes or that your expectations are unreasonable.
Like I said, I doubt I'll ever own a Kindle. But at least my reasons are a bit more thought out than "Fuck Amazon!!! Nevar 4get 1984!!!!111"
I don't know about you, but main feature to me isn't "What are the marketing drones attempting to sell the unit with" but "what would render the unit unuseable/pointless if it was removed."
A main feature of the Kindle is it's 'large' epaper display, which is miles and above beyond old school ereaders which used backlit lcd screens.
A perk of the Kindle is it is tied to Amazon. A perk of the Kindle is it has free wireless/whispernet access. A perk of the Kindle is it's size/form factor.
One of these is a primary selling point. The others are icing that class right up there with cupholders and automated wipers, nice but you shouldn't be basing your purchasing decisions solely on them.
Here's a tip, if the only place a feature seems to matter is in the manufacturers promotional material, it's not a main feature.
Also, if you want me to buy a Kindle and ignore its main feature, why shouldn't I instead buy another e-book reader that does what I want? That way I can still read my own materials but I could get access to another book store that respects my rights.
A feature of the Kindle is it's integration with Amazon. It is not it's MAIN feature. If there are e-readers out there that fit your needs/wants then I would suggest you buy them based on that, not on whether or not they include features you'll never use. I would also suggest that if you compared the Kindle to the other boys on the block, relevant features for relevant features and price for price, you'd discover it wasn't that bad of a deal.
But, I'm not selling you a Kindle, I'm getting you to back off the hyperbole bullshit you spew about them. I don't care if you ever get one. I just don't like FUD, whether it comes from an IBM salesman or an consumer being ignorant.
I'll probably never own one either, but that's because I find it ridiculous to pay a hair under what my PS3 cost for a black and white hand held device. Regardless of whether it's successful as an e-reader, I'll wait till they have either color models or the price comes down to something a tad less exorbitant.
Except, if you 'bought' the book via Amazon's bookstore, you didn't BUY it, did you? You traded the power of owning the book outright for the convenience of being able to download the book from wherever, whenever. You LICENSED the book.
Hate Amazon if you want, but if you are going to bitch about the Kindle, actually pick something that is true about the KINDLE not something that is true because the Kindle happens to include a feature from Amazon. It's entirely possible to fill a Kindle several times over with legally acquired material and never buy a single bit of it from Amazon.
So, in essense you don't know wtf you are talking about and just don't like the Kindle. The only things Amazon can 'delete' off your system are books that you've licensed access for through the Amazon bookstore. Anything you've uploaded to it on your own, is untouchable.
Ah, the fresh smell of snide asshats in the morning, so much the better when they are willing to spout out shit without even thinking.
There are several possibilities that could account for the facts as they were presented, your two listed possibilities are not the complete set. And yes, one of those possibilities is that at least a few of the groups of people who pass down these legends are descended from people who did witness a megaflood.
No that doesn't mean that the great JC walked on water or Moses parted the sea with a wave of his hand. It doesn't have to. It simply means that there are people who beleive parts of the Bible speak of events that actually occured.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, what a folksy and absolutely bullshit story. Are you telling me that a stop sign would have made the difference there?
An intersection is an intersection, the same problems you detail would have occured with a stop sign as well.
Way to prove that you have a bias against both the rich and the intelligent without actually justifying shit.
I think this calls for a website...
www.areallglenbeckfansdroolingidiots.com
We are talking about a man with an ego that demands if a mountain blocks his path, the mountain be removed. What he knows is he doesn't give a fig what he can do on his side, he wants it to be on their heads.
My sarcasm detector is trying to tell me something here... hmmm. No. I don't know what it's beeping about.
Just for the record again, how deep was the multiplayer in any of those listed titles? Especially the main campaigns? As I recall, it was fairly cursory. There were no accomidations made in the game for the idea that more than one player might by playing, in fact, in all the 'official' stuff, the first player was the "Chosen One" and the rest just got to follow the lead player around doing the janitorial work.
Hardly an established genre, the only one that actually acted like it cared to cater to multiplayer was NWN.
That being said, I did overstate that portion of my arguement. Yes, Bioware had been tacking on multiplayer as an afterthought for it's games for a while before they got their first person mojo on. Maybe they just don't want/know how to make a multiplayer FPS.
Many (but not most) new games are $30 if you go to the effort of looking for deals and are willing to then buy the DLC separately.
Most no longer new games will be $30 with DLC included, eventually, if you are willing to wait and don't need to be the first kid on your block to play it.
I used to buy games impulsively due to the fact that in the 80's and 90's it was anyone's guess how long a game would be on the shelf. And once they were gone, they were gone. But in today's day and age, if a game manages to drop off the edge of the Earth it's normally because it was crap and not worth paying for.
Throw as many "you pay as much for a few hours at the movies" arguements at me as you wish, it's been a long, long time that I've come across a game that was so "WOW" that I've felt paying $50-70 bucks for the 'privilege' of being in the first wave of people playing it was actually a worthwhile investment. And as long as year old (and older) games are being bargain binned on things like Steam, it's likely I never will again.
Do you know what they were charging for Mass Effect this weekend? $10.
Do you know what they'll be charging for DAO in a year or two? $10.
I can wait. I picked up Oblivion finally this year, I've still got to find time to play either of the Far Cry games, and even if I push those out of the way, I've got ~80 more A list titles from the 2000's that I paid a pittance for and are just waiting for me to pick up.
That reminds me, I never did get around to finishing Psychonauts ...
Hmmm. That doesn't quite work for me. What if we called them, say... CONVOY!
Wikipedia!
My personal opinion is that it's a little from category A and a little from category B.
You are aware there is a patch out there now that restores a good bit of that content to working order?
And as much as I understand your frustration with them not updating KOTOR 2 themselves, when you are a game developer attempting to make ends meet, if the folk who paid you to make the game aren't willing to pay for you to update it, then it doesn't really matter your intentions, you can't afford to throw development time down the drain on unpaid projects.
Multiplayer makes sense for some things but for some things less so.
Multiplayer RPGs in the fashion that Bioware makes their RPGs would be sufficently different from current multiplayer models that it would require alot of thought and effort to make even a cursory system.
At the worse, you'd just be playing seperate characters in a party, one where the entire story is geared towards the idea where your main character is "The One". That isn't plot details concering the most recent game, that's just what BioWare games are about, single character going through the universe righting or doing wrongs along the way to defeat the big bad guy after having a couple of 'bonding moments' with their sidekicks. So who gets to be "The One" and who is the sidekick. And when your teammate starts the romance sideplot with you, are you going to feel uncomfortable about the sex scene?
Or perhaps that isn't the worse, how about two competeing parties. "I'm sorry, you would have been able to save our village from the bandits, if your friend hadn't rolled through town last week and killed all the NPC's himself! Hope you didn't need that XP for leveling!" "Yeah, all the cool NPC's have joined your rival's party. Here are the NPC's no one ever plays with if they can help it.."
Really, a multiplayer version of a Bioware game would need a completely different story structure (not to mention tech) than the one they use. Sometimes just because you can bolt a jet engine to a car, doesn't mean it's a good idea to do so.
Congratulations, I honestly don't know if you are trolling or just ignorant of the fact that the PS3 lets you do the same. That said, I do think PCs are still the high end of the gaming quality spectrum.
This sort of money grab is inevitiablly countered by my own purchasing tactics: Wait till it's on a 50% off sale.
The more expensive the game, the longer they have to wait to get my $30. And lets face it, no matter how orgasmic it is, there isn't a dereth of good cheap games waiting to be played out there these days. The age of "you better buy it now because they'll stop selling it in six months and you'll only be able to find it used on ebay then" is long dead now that digital distribution is around.
And ear wax, the heat from the reaction and the 'bubbling' softens and loosens the wax. A couple of years ago I caught something nasty and ended up deaf in one ear due to wax build up. The doc suggested a couple of drops a night in the ear to help clear it out.
One warning though, don't over do it. Too much too long too often and you can end up giving yourself a chemical burn.
You ever wonder if the reason those stories are told is because 9 out of ten of the horses just wandered off with their rider, never to be seen again?
Horses are not omniscient. It really isn't that hard to construct a scenario where your 'inability' to lead a horse would lead to the endangerment of property or lives.
- Suppose you lose control of the horse and it starts galloping down a crowded sidewalk, or worse, starts bucking.
- Suppose you try to cross the road and it (because it wasn't bred to look both ways) steps in front of traffic. Deer aren't the only animals that'll freeze when headlights hit them.
- Suppose you pass out on the horse while it's walking you home and you slip off and hit your head/into the river/a passing car.
I don't own a cell phone, so my only line is a land line. AT&T here likes to play games with the DSL, even though you can get 'dry' lines with no other service, they charge as much as with, so I go for it.
On the other hand, the last time I had a conversation lasting longer than 3 minutes outside of work and on a phone was long enough ago I can't even remember it. If someone wants to talk to me (and I want to talk to them) it's electronicly via IM or email or other such methods.
Except of course, you ignore the fact that any store that sells books in a non-DRM'ed format sells books that can be read on the Kindle and that we've already established at the start of this whole thread that DRM'ed content (i.e. content you can be prevented from accessing after purchasing) is the whole thing that's giving you a boner over all this. Or are you going to pull more bullshit and pretend that it's better to have a worthless file on your ereader that you can't open/read vs having it deleted off your system.
Just give up dude. It's fairly obvious that you are just grasping at straws to come up with shit to bag the Kindle over because you want to hate the Kindle. Rather than because you've actually thought about the matter. If you had, you'd either come to the conclusion that virtually ALL ebook readers are unsuitable for your purposes or that your expectations are unreasonable.
Like I said, I doubt I'll ever own a Kindle. But at least my reasons are a bit more thought out than "Fuck Amazon!!! Nevar 4get 1984!!!!111"
Compared to every other ereader out there? Not a bad deal. Compared to what else I might be spending the money on? To me it's not a good deal.
You really are bad at this finding faults thing.
I don't know about you, but main feature to me isn't "What are the marketing drones attempting to sell the unit with" but "what would render the unit unuseable/pointless if it was removed."
A main feature of the Kindle is it's 'large' epaper display, which is miles and above beyond old school ereaders which used backlit lcd screens.
A perk of the Kindle is it is tied to Amazon.
A perk of the Kindle is it has free wireless/whispernet access.
A perk of the Kindle is it's size/form factor.
One of these is a primary selling point. The others are icing that class right up there with cupholders and automated wipers, nice but you shouldn't be basing your purchasing decisions solely on them.
Here's a tip, if the only place a feature seems to matter is in the manufacturers promotional material, it's not a main feature.
A feature of the Kindle is it's integration with Amazon. It is not it's MAIN feature. If there are e-readers out there that fit your needs/wants then I would suggest you buy them based on that, not on whether or not they include features you'll never use. I would also suggest that if you compared the Kindle to the other boys on the block, relevant features for relevant features and price for price, you'd discover it wasn't that bad of a deal.
But, I'm not selling you a Kindle, I'm getting you to back off the hyperbole bullshit you spew about them. I don't care if you ever get one. I just don't like FUD, whether it comes from an IBM salesman or an consumer being ignorant.
I'll probably never own one either, but that's because I find it ridiculous to pay a hair under what my PS3 cost for a black and white hand held device. Regardless of whether it's successful as an e-reader, I'll wait till they have either color models or the price comes down to something a tad less exorbitant.
Except, if you 'bought' the book via Amazon's bookstore, you didn't BUY it, did you? You traded the power of owning the book outright for the convenience of being able to download the book from wherever, whenever. You LICENSED the book.
Hate Amazon if you want, but if you are going to bitch about the Kindle, actually pick something that is true about the KINDLE not something that is true because the Kindle happens to include a feature from Amazon. It's entirely possible to fill a Kindle several times over with legally acquired material and never buy a single bit of it from Amazon.
So, in essense you don't know wtf you are talking about and just don't like the Kindle. The only things Amazon can 'delete' off your system are books that you've licensed access for through the Amazon bookstore. Anything you've uploaded to it on your own, is untouchable.
If all you have in the area are drones, everyone with a heat signature is a target. Notice I didn't say a valid target.
Bigger news is that his anchor text for his link is 35 words long and happened in less than a day!
Ah, the fresh smell of snide asshats in the morning, so much the better when they are willing to spout out shit without even thinking.
There are several possibilities that could account for the facts as they were presented, your two listed possibilities are not the complete set. And yes, one of those possibilities is that at least a few of the groups of people who pass down these legends are descended from people who did witness a megaflood.
No that doesn't mean that the great JC walked on water or Moses parted the sea with a wave of his hand. It doesn't have to. It simply means that there are people who beleive parts of the Bible speak of events that actually occured.