Re:I actually kind of miss the old combat system
on
Review: Mass Effect 2
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
For me, it's like this:
I can point out what are, for me, a lot of flaws in the game... but in spite of them, it will probably end up being one of my favorite games of the year. The parts I like about it outweigh the parts I don't.
Or to look at it another way, there are a lot of games I can't point out any/many flaws in, because they couldn't keep my interest. That doesn't mean being able to point out many of a game's flaws mean it's good, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's bad, either. For everything I could grumble about in ME1, I sure did want to start playing it again immediately after finishing it. As a working adult with not that much time to play games, that's a pretty strong endorsement and would be the kind of thing that would make me score a game highly even if there were a lot of things that pissed me off, too.
The thing about Bioshock's story that will make me remember it is the way it played (trying to keep this relatively spoiler free) with the medium of a video game and used it to spring a plot twist on you that I don't think would work as well in another medium where you aren't used to ignoring certain things. In effect, they did the closest video game equivalent to a something like a novel with an unreliable narrator.
I'd have put Bioshock up there as well, yes. I don't think it's better or worse than ME1's story exactly, just good in different ways.
Re:I actually kind of miss the old combat system
on
Review: Mass Effect 2
·
· Score: 1
I also kind of miss the old combat system.
The improved cover thing is kind of cool, but I miss heat vs. ammo and longer but non-shared cooldowns on powers. The major selling point of playing Adept or Sentinel in ME1 in my opinion is that you have so many powers that later in the game you can just cycle through them to keep casting -- it's not exactly that you have better powers than a half-caster like Vanguard or Infiltrator (although that's slightly true). In ME2 with all powers sharing a cooldown I'm not really sure why you'd want to pick one of those classes.
That being said, although it's not a perfect game and in several ways is a step backwards from ME1 to me, I'm still enjoying it.
It just goes to show that everyone has different taste -- I honestly can't think of a better story told in any video game than ME1. (Although there are a few that are on about the same level for me.)
So you are telling me that Apples target consumer is the "valley girl", omg like, crew cut with striped sideburns, neon in their cars and bedazzled phones? wait a second.... did it start with those "Neony" type MacBooks and iMacs?
I would have said their target consumers are the hipster douchebags, but probably the valley girls, too.:)
(Technically, that's not fair -- although almost every hipster douchebag is an Apple consumer, not every Apple consumer is a hipster douchebag. If you live in a sizeable American city, you know the kind of demographic I mean.)
Id like to comment on your bit about abstinence education. I don't think it is totally without merit...
I don't know, man. Even the proverbial screen door on a submarine might be a good idea as long as the submarine never dives, but abstinence (only) education has never been shown to produce better results than doing nothing at all. It's pretty bad when you make what's supposed to be an incredibly stupid/comical idea seem good by comparison.
If people want insurance for the ailments you mentioned they should choose to buy it from private businesses who understand how to turn a profit, not the government who only knows how to steal, spend and lose money.
The problem with that theory (and I don't disagree that Social Security is a mess) is that your private businesses will turn a profit, and the best way for them to do is to deny your claims if at all possible. This includes, for example, denying a perfectly valid claim that you can't afford to fight in court (or won't live long enough to fight in court.)
Government takeover of health insurance may not be the answer, but I'm positive (having spent several years working in the health insurance industry and having seen things I can't ever forget) that having poorly regulated profit-driven companies handle it is even more surely not the answer.
Not likely. Studios that publish their video on Hulu will want to have copy deterrence no less effective than what its Flash Player already implements. If anything, Hulu would follow Netflix and switch to Silverlight with DRM.
This is a great point, and it cuts to the heart of what everyone talking about how HTML 5 will kill Flash any minute now is missing: technical superiority and especially a greater tendency towards freedom in a technology are no guarantees of its ascendancy, especially where old media companies are in any way involved.
Let me be clear, I hate Flash and I think it would be great if it went away, but as long as A) There are a ton of existing flash apps/sites that no one is in a rush to rewrite, B) It's the technology that most of the people who create the kind of flashy user experience websites are used to using / have experience with and C) People who own the rights to movies, TV shows, etc. think they can protect their revenue stream better by using it, it just isn't going away fast.
I think there's two things that lead to shitty conditions for game developers:
1) There are a lot more people who want that job than can have that job, so people who won't put in unreasonable hours can be and often are replaceable. (Unsurprisingly, experienced game devs/managers with a bunch of shipped successful titles on their resume often are able to demand better working conditions, because they're at least a little less replaceable.)
2) Game development isn't run as "professionally" as other development. This is a superset of the problem of bad management that the parent poster raises.
Generally in the game industry it seems like it's standard to be able to fuck around more at work and work late/varied hours than the rest of the team much more than is standard in other dev jobs. So of course you have to spend more time if you can take a two hour lunch and play other games, or if the lead dev doesn't roll in until noon and anyone who needs to ask him a question is shit out of luck until he arrives.
Out of curiousity, why do you prefer makefiles over a VS project file?
It's almost certainly true that I never did enough with makefiles to get particularly good with them, but they mostly seemed like a pain in the ass to me -- a side chore to be completed so I could get to actually solving the problem at hand. I'm interested to know what I'm missing.
I can try; to be fair, it's now been a while since I've used Eclipse.
I remember things like:
- Needing to choose/install/configure plugins for things I generally consider to be standard IDE features, such as user interface (Swing, etc.) design or decent debugging - Views switching for no reason I could discern - Eclipse taking a long time to start up, which is tolerable except that it also crashed a few times a day - Problems building/deploying, such as the infamous "Eclipse Dance" and - Generally, spending more time dicking around with Eclipse and its plugins' config files than I have for any other piece of software, possibly more time than every other piece of software I've used put together.
Most of the Java work I did was web development on fairly large projects; I know many people, even those doing similar kinds of work, have had a better experience with it.
IMHO, Eclipse is a great example of what's wrong with Open Source software from a usability perspective -- to be reasonably productive with Eclipse, you probably need a bunch of plug-ins, a bunch of time tweaking the preferences, someone who's spent years using it, and probably all of the above. Possibly you also need twice the memory (or more) of just about any other option to run at a reasonable speed for no apparent reason.
I'm interested in coding; I'm not interested in spending a bunch of time fighting my IDE to do it, and when I think about the years I spent using Eclipse, that's basically what I remember. Other people have a different experience with it and I won't say they're wrong, but that's what it was like for me.
You know, I've been with Sprint for ten years now and I don't think I've ever had a dropped call. The only place I ever had problems getting coverage was in the middle of the Mojave Desert where the only radio station caters to people driving through because basically no one lives there, and even that was 7-8 years ago.
At my current job, none of the developers with AT&T phones have coverage at all, and mine's great. I'm downtown in a city of over half a million people -- that just shouldn't happen.
Obviously that's all just anecdotal but having seen/heard the problems other people have in contrast with my total lack of them, I'm not sure why I would ever switch.
Yes, those places have girls. Although I did play DnD when I was 19 in a group with a girl. Once.
Believe it or not, I met my wife through what were essentially D&D friends, and she was a gamer before I met her. She also had a bit of a reputation as a killer DM...
Yeah, of all the ways I could've ended up married, I wouldn't have put my money on that one either.
Honestly, if you believe that, then you skipped several versions of Netscape.
I only very grudgingly and unhappily moved to IE during that era because Netscape fell so far behind. I'd go so far as to argue that new releases of Netscape managed to fall behind even previous version of Netscape.
I'm glad that Firefox eventually resulted from that mess and provided real competition again, but let's be honest: IE (temporarily) won the browser wars by default, not because Microsoft strongarmed Netscape out of the market, but because Netscape reached a point where they couldn't even release a browser as good as the last browser they released. It takes a special kind of mismanagement to get that far gone.
What about the main character in the Count of Monte Cristo? Isn't he a bit larger than life?
I'd argue that Edmond Dantes is a more rounded and multi-dimensional character (if, yes, a bit larger than life once he transforms himself into the Count persona) than a John Galt, but your mileage may vary.
Finally, the criticism that you levy about "young, maladjusted geeks" is something should be said for all the people who carry on about how we would have a cake and ice cream paradise, but for those bogey-man corporations, etc.
I'm not completely speaking out of my ass here -- as a former young, maladjusted geek, I did find the kind of worldview seen in Atlas Shrugged as seductive. As an older adjusted geek, I realize that in many ways that worldview simplifies complex issues to the point of uselessness.
And, sure, there are a lot of ideologies that don't hold up in the real world, to large and small degree; I just think this is one that had particular appeal, relatively, to the kind of people who read/post here in their youth.
Ok, does anyone know why these idiot gang members always hold their pistols sideways??
I forget exactly what I'd heard, but it was something about the recoil and the kind of shooting they were doing. Maybe you want the gun to kick a different way during a drive-by, I have no idea.
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For me, it's like this:
I can point out what are, for me, a lot of flaws in the game... but in spite of them, it will probably end up being one of my favorite games of the year. The parts I like about it outweigh the parts I don't.
Or to look at it another way, there are a lot of games I can't point out any/many flaws in, because they couldn't keep my interest. That doesn't mean being able to point out many of a game's flaws mean it's good, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's bad, either. For everything I could grumble about in ME1, I sure did want to start playing it again immediately after finishing it. As a working adult with not that much time to play games, that's a pretty strong endorsement and would be the kind of thing that would make me score a game highly even if there were a lot of things that pissed me off, too.
The thing about Bioshock's story that will make me remember it is the way it played (trying to keep this relatively spoiler free) with the medium of a video game and used it to spring a plot twist on you that I don't think would work as well in another medium where you aren't used to ignoring certain things. In effect, they did the closest video game equivalent to a something like a novel with an unreliable narrator.
I'd have put Bioshock up there as well, yes. I don't think it's better or worse than ME1's story exactly, just good in different ways.
I also kind of miss the old combat system.
The improved cover thing is kind of cool, but I miss heat vs. ammo and longer but non-shared cooldowns on powers. The major selling point of playing Adept or Sentinel in ME1 in my opinion is that you have so many powers that later in the game you can just cycle through them to keep casting -- it's not exactly that you have better powers than a half-caster like Vanguard or Infiltrator (although that's slightly true). In ME2 with all powers sharing a cooldown I'm not really sure why you'd want to pick one of those classes.
That being said, although it's not a perfect game and in several ways is a step backwards from ME1 to me, I'm still enjoying it.
It just goes to show that everyone has different taste -- I honestly can't think of a better story told in any video game than ME1. (Although there are a few that are on about the same level for me.)
So you are telling me that Apples target consumer is the "valley girl", omg like, crew cut with striped sideburns, neon in their cars and bedazzled phones?
wait a second.... did it start with those "Neony" type MacBooks and iMacs?
I would have said their target consumers are the hipster douchebags, but probably the valley girls, too. :)
(Technically, that's not fair -- although almost every hipster douchebag is an Apple consumer, not every Apple consumer is a hipster douchebag. If you live in a sizeable American city, you know the kind of demographic I mean.)
Id like to comment on your bit about abstinence education. I don't think it is totally without merit...
I don't know, man. Even the proverbial screen door on a submarine might be a good idea as long as the submarine never dives, but abstinence (only) education has never been shown to produce better results than doing nothing at all. It's pretty bad when you make what's supposed to be an incredibly stupid/comical idea seem good by comparison.
If people want insurance for the ailments you mentioned they should choose to buy it from private businesses who understand how to turn a profit, not the government who only knows how to steal, spend and lose money.
The problem with that theory (and I don't disagree that Social Security is a mess) is that your private businesses will turn a profit, and the best way for them to do is to deny your claims if at all possible. This includes, for example, denying a perfectly valid claim that you can't afford to fight in court (or won't live long enough to fight in court.)
Government takeover of health insurance may not be the answer, but I'm positive (having spent several years working in the health insurance industry and having seen things I can't ever forget) that having poorly regulated profit-driven companies handle it is even more surely not the answer.
Seriously, why do we still want Flash?
It's not about wanting Flash, it's about where a lot of content that people are interested is and will be for a while.
They have been very successful in the hype department without even spending a dime on advertising.
Sure, we haven't seen an iPad ad yet, but do you really believe that
A) Some of the hype around this thing wasn't intentionally engineered by Apple and
B) They did so without spending a dime?
What marketing is in the modern world is changing fast. It's not all about print ads and TV commercials, or even web ads.
Not likely. Studios that publish their video on Hulu will want to have copy deterrence no less effective than what its Flash Player already implements. If anything, Hulu would follow Netflix and switch to Silverlight with DRM.
This is a great point, and it cuts to the heart of what everyone talking about how HTML 5 will kill Flash any minute now is missing: technical superiority and especially a greater tendency towards freedom in a technology are no guarantees of its ascendancy, especially where old media companies are in any way involved.
Let me be clear, I hate Flash and I think it would be great if it went away, but as long as A) There are a ton of existing flash apps/sites that no one is in a rush to rewrite, B) It's the technology that most of the people who create the kind of flashy user experience websites are used to using / have experience with and C) People who own the rights to movies, TV shows, etc. think they can protect their revenue stream better by using it, it just isn't going away fast.
I rather have Apple kill Flash.
If you're going to wish for something unrealistic and beyond their power, at least shoot for world peace.
I think there's two things that lead to shitty conditions for game developers:
1) There are a lot more people who want that job than can have that job, so people who won't put in unreasonable hours can be and often are replaceable. (Unsurprisingly, experienced game devs/managers with a bunch of shipped successful titles on their resume often are able to demand better working conditions, because they're at least a little less replaceable.)
2) Game development isn't run as "professionally" as other development. This is a superset of the problem of bad management that the parent poster raises.
Generally in the game industry it seems like it's standard to be able to fuck around more at work and work late/varied hours than the rest of the team much more than is standard in other dev jobs. So of course you have to spend more time if you can take a two hour lunch and play other games, or if the lead dev doesn't roll in until noon and anyone who needs to ask him a question is shit out of luck until he arrives.
I finally gave in when after ages trying I finally discovered that you *can't* use our version of VS over multiple monitors.
I haven't had any problem using the last few versions of VS on multiple monitors, FWIW.
Out of curiousity, why do you prefer makefiles over a VS project file?
It's almost certainly true that I never did enough with makefiles to get particularly good with them, but they mostly seemed like a pain in the ass to me -- a side chore to be completed so I could get to actually solving the problem at hand. I'm interested to know what I'm missing.
I can try; to be fair, it's now been a while since I've used Eclipse.
I remember things like:
- Needing to choose/install/configure plugins for things I generally consider to be standard IDE features, such as user interface (Swing, etc.) design or decent debugging
- Views switching for no reason I could discern
- Eclipse taking a long time to start up, which is tolerable except that it also crashed a few times a day
- Problems building/deploying, such as the infamous "Eclipse Dance" and
- Generally, spending more time dicking around with Eclipse and its plugins' config files than I have for any other piece of software, possibly more time than every other piece of software I've used put together.
Most of the Java work I did was web development on fairly large projects; I know many people, even those doing similar kinds of work, have had a better experience with it.
IMHO, Eclipse is a great example of what's wrong with Open Source software from a usability perspective -- to be reasonably productive with Eclipse, you probably need a bunch of plug-ins, a bunch of time tweaking the preferences, someone who's spent years using it, and probably all of the above. Possibly you also need twice the memory (or more) of just about any other option to run at a reasonable speed for no apparent reason.
I'm interested in coding; I'm not interested in spending a bunch of time fighting my IDE to do it, and when I think about the years I spent using Eclipse, that's basically what I remember. Other people have a different experience with it and I won't say they're wrong, but that's what it was like for me.
You know, I've been with Sprint for ten years now and I don't think I've ever had a dropped call. The only place I ever had problems getting coverage was in the middle of the Mojave Desert where the only radio station caters to people driving through because basically no one lives there, and even that was 7-8 years ago.
At my current job, none of the developers with AT&T phones have coverage at all, and mine's great. I'm downtown in a city of over half a million people -- that just shouldn't happen.
Obviously that's all just anecdotal but having seen/heard the problems other people have in contrast with my total lack of them, I'm not sure why I would ever switch.
Yes, those places have girls. Although I did play DnD when I was 19 in a group with a girl. Once.
Believe it or not, I met my wife through what were essentially D&D friends, and she was a gamer before I met her. She also had a bit of a reputation as a killer DM...
Yeah, of all the ways I could've ended up married, I wouldn't have put my money on that one either.
Honestly, if you believe that, then you skipped several versions of Netscape.
I only very grudgingly and unhappily moved to IE during that era because Netscape fell so far behind. I'd go so far as to argue that new releases of Netscape managed to fall behind even previous version of Netscape.
I'm glad that Firefox eventually resulted from that mess and provided real competition again, but let's be honest: IE (temporarily) won the browser wars by default, not because Microsoft strongarmed Netscape out of the market, but because Netscape reached a point where they couldn't even release a browser as good as the last browser they released. It takes a special kind of mismanagement to get that far gone.
Eh. Netscape kept making a browser for a while after that. It just wasn't any good.
Which you can blame on their not having so much income anymore if you want, but still.
They can't wait years, or the rights revert to Marvel (Disney). They'd rather crank out anything to keep them.
What about the main character in the Count of Monte Cristo? Isn't he a bit larger than life?
I'd argue that Edmond Dantes is a more rounded and multi-dimensional character (if, yes, a bit larger than life once he transforms himself into the Count persona) than a John Galt, but your mileage may vary.
Finally, the criticism that you levy about "young, maladjusted geeks" is something should be said for all the people who carry on about how we would have a cake and ice cream paradise, but for those bogey-man corporations, etc.
I'm not completely speaking out of my ass here -- as a former young, maladjusted geek, I did find the kind of worldview seen in Atlas Shrugged as seductive. As an older adjusted geek, I realize that in many ways that worldview simplifies complex issues to the point of uselessness.
And, sure, there are a lot of ideologies that don't hold up in the real world, to large and small degree; I just think this is one that had particular appeal, relatively, to the kind of people who read/post here in their youth.
Ok, does anyone know why these idiot gang members always hold their pistols sideways??
I forget exactly what I'd heard, but it was something about the recoil and the kind of shooting they were doing. Maybe you want the gun to kick a different way during a drive-by, I have no idea.
... you do know that Java and JavaScript are completely different and essentially unrelated things, right?