"But my other main point stands. 3rd party presidential votes 'are' a complete waste."
By that same logic, major party Presidential votes in heavily favored states are also a waste. I live in the state of Georgia. In 2004, there was no way Bush was going to lose that state. Voting for Kerry in that situation "might make the voter feel better, but it's still not helping the current situation." Badnarik had just as good a chance of winning as Kerry did in the state of Georgia.
You can even see similar behoavior in the electors themselves. Sometimes when their candidate has certainly lost, you'll see them cast votes form someone else. This happened in 1976. Reagan actually got a few electoral votes when it was obvious Carter was going to win over Ford. This act garnered a decent bit of national spotlight towards Reagan who would go on to win the 1980 Presidential election.
"Actually I will blame you. If you didn't vote for Kerry, you basically elected Bush."
Maybe you missed my point. Maybe I did basically elect Bush but it doesn't matter. Kerry fits in with my ideaology no better than Bush does. It doesn't matter to me at all that Kerry lost. If it did matter, I would've voted for him. Like I said earlier, last resort and all. I'm pretty sure the millions who voted for Bush have more to do with his victory than I do. Don't try to make your political crusade into my political crusade. If your political crusade lost, then it was flawed to begin with.
Re:still supprised at the $250 price tag.
on
The Wii Takes NYC
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"you're stuck with Wii sports, when the game you really want is Zelda. Still, it seems like a smart move for them."
Smart move indeed. It looks like Nintedno is going to indoctrinate you into using their controllers whether you like it or not. Sure you may want Zelda but Nintendo wants to show off the controller. Wii sports gives you the opportunity to use the controller in a variety of different ways on familiar subjects. You may not be an avid player of any of the sports games Wii offers but you've at least seen them enough to know how they should be played. By the time Wii Sports gets played to death by someone, they will be quite proficient at the use of the Wii controller in general.
"Retort: the idealistic voters who ignore the fact that we have a two party political system and, instead of choosing the better of the two candidates available, choose to throw their votes away and allow the conservative side to gain a numeric advantage are the real cause of all our (political) problems."
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
The problem with choosing the "best" fit is that neither may do a single thing to represent you as a voter. There may be no "best" candidate. Personally, I vote third party as a last resort. By the time I get to that point, either a third party candidate gets my vote or nobody does.
"Doom perfected single player FPS and invented multiplayer FPS."
If you're talking "invented" I'm pretty sure MIDI Maze / Faceball 2000 has it beat by a few years. If you're talking overall refinement, Rise of the Triad did a whole lot more towards making the modern FPS than Doom ever did and it was developed around the same time. A 4 player Co-op or Deathmatch is hardly comparable to an 11-player FPS with several different types of play, including the first FPS capture the flag that I'm aware of.
I realize you qualified your assessment with "genreally speaking" but just for fun:
- Do you like the game/genre in the first place? Yes. Immensely.
- If yes, does the game have a good amount of storyline? No
- If yes, do you like the producer who is doing the movie? I do like the production company.
- If yes, do you like the director? They did Max Headroom so that's good enough for me.
- If yes, do you like the actors/actresses (if known)? Most of them, especially Bob Hoskins, Dennis Hopper, and Lance Henrickson.
If mp3.com's customers bet a few EE students a case of beer they couldn't get a MAME-compatible ROM dump from two real arcade boards and then lost that bet, then yes. (They are rather trustworthy fellows so I guess they could've cheated but I doubt it.) You are aware that those ROM images didn't come out of thin air, right? Somebody has the ability to read them out and dump them. I personally think it's pretty cool playing with ROMS directly from my boards.
I had someone else do it for me. I don't have the equipment for reading the neccessary chips. Once you get a proper ROM dump, it is exceptionally easy.
"Some genres just don't work on Consoles and some just don't work on PCs."
You have to be more specific than that. I've got a MAME box running Tekken 2 and Marvel Super Heroes just as good as my arcade boards can. It's a matter of default controls. PC games are typically written to be controlled by keyboard and mouse since that's the lowest common denominator.
I had to hack up a USB gamepad and solder in leads to get some decent arcade controls in MAME. Now the MAME setup is pretty sweet even if my controllers are the size of a shoe box but most folks aren't going to go to such lengths.
Yeah, in 1966 in rural Texas, the GOP was in charge of two things: jack and squat. That was firmly Democrat territory until the late-70's to early-80's but nice pathetic attempt at trying to make censorship a party-centric issue.
Role Playing is a simulation. You're simulating social interactions. You're typically doing this in some sort of fantastical setting but it's still very much a simulation. I'd even argue that an RPG is more of a simulation than a type of game that doesn't fit well in either catergory: the puzzle game. Tetris for example could tehnically be a simulation but what exactly is it simulating? What do online logic problems simulate for that matter?
Does this sound like a bad to anyone else? These guys are all out of their element. To their credit, Schilling and Salvatore both have some business experience in the pen and paper realm, but that's not neccessarily going to translate into software success. If I had to bet money here, I'd wager that this company is a place for Schilling to dump money that would otherwise be spent paying taxes.
I just glossed over the word "don't." My apologies. I imagine some of those games could crack the top 100 but I imagine it would be more depressing than anything. I'm just imagining some gomes like Falcon 3.0 that were absolutely HUGE at the time and how they couldn't possibly hold up to a world where you can get a wide range of PC games at you local Wal-Mart. And where you can get a computer to play those games on at that same Wal-Mart for $400 to $500 in today's money.
I think you underestimate the Sims popularity and seriously overestimate the PC game buying population in the mid-90's and earlier. As a percentage of potential customer base, the Quest series probably rocked the Sims, but in terms of overall sales figures, anything that ends in the word Quest falls way short of the Sims base package sales.
Only two LANs mention how big they are. And even if you're right, the size of your LAN gaming infrastructure is only one consideration they look at.
"I've also -never- seen another school officially sponsor (e.g. provide free bandwidth, hosting, and administration) for a dedicated gaming server before."
I've never seen a school need to officially sponsor a dedicated gaming server before. I've seen planty of schools provide physical space to set up gaming servers and bandwidth to operate on. Game servers aren't that hard to come by and they don't require anything along the lines of a Athlon 64 to operate efficiently. Most games won't even benefit from such a beast over what someone would find lying around in their closet. The games that do require a blazing fast server are typically new enough to get sponsors to loan out or even occasionally donate a server.
"There are plenty of kids (e.g. people like you)..."
You're the president of a student organization and you're calling me a kid? I haven't been a student in two or three years and that was grad school. I'd wager I outage you by at least a decade. Playing the odds, I'd be willing to bet Reagan was already President when you were born.
I did come down on you hard and that was mostly for humor's sake. I even got the troll mod that was coming to me. It does sound like you have an interesting setup but I don't really think you have a case here. Those other schools on the list may not have the university paying for their gaming server but I'll wager they have a leg up in overall connetivity and gaming culture.
"I admit that I've never been fond of sports games, just play the sport"
You are aware that the two aren't mutually exclusive right? I love playing in a wide variety of sports and I also like playing video game versions of a much smaller subset fo sports. Though is I could manage to find 22 people willing to play tackle football, I'd almost certainly pick that over Madden.
"why do people keep buying the newer game? Slightly better textures? New player rosters?"
Player roster updates are nice. The textures tend to improve slowly enough that 07 may look similar to 06 and 06 may look similar to 05 but 07 looks markedly improved over 05.
There's almost always one "big change" in the yearly Madden games. In 06 to 07 they're added the ability for you to control your lead blocker then your running back on running plays. I haven't tested it myself yet but if it works it's a welcome addition. I can't count the times there's a hole opening and my bonehead blocker runs off in the wrong direction or doesn't block the right player or even just breezes past a blocking assignment forgetting all about the guy with the football.
Last year the "big change" was QB vision. It was ok. It certainly adds a level of complexity in a good way to the game. Some smaller changes included a sane system for running QBs. In 05 you had to toggle between a run mode and a pass mode as the QB. In 06, the run functionality is bult into the passing system (and the AI generally does a good job of knowing if you're on the run).
I think 05 was when they brought out hot routes. Hot routes let you aubible a position on the fly. That is so sweet when you scan the defense and see a hole/mismatch. I probably use a hot route once out of every three passing plays I call, especially when I get a linebacker on a receiver or a soft defense with less than 10 to go for a first down. 06 even gave me a hot route to tell my fullback to stay home and block for when the o-line is getting pounded.
Overall, Madden does a good job of bringing enough to the table to get you to at least heavily consider the new version. Personally, I set my price based on how good it is each year. 06 was worht $28 and when it got to that point I bought it. I'll make a determination on 07 as soon as I get my hands on it.
Fun aside (and it was a really fun game), ROTT was the first FPS that brought a decent LAN play element to the table. That's why computer labs at the time had ROTT loaded on them instead of Doom. Given the importance on LAN play in the modern FPS, I'm surprised this aspect is ignored as a quantum leap in the FPS genre by Gamasutra.
And your school mascot is the Commodores for crying out loud. Oh, the humanity.
Ok, now that I'm done with that, leave it to Vandy to cry about being left out. Sorry if nobody is staring in awe at a 120+ LAN for gaming. 120? That's not even very impressive. An upcoming Counter-strike server sponsored by campus? What is this, the year 2000?
Hey everybody, the university bought us two cans and a string but nobody has contacted me about our campus' telecommunications abilities. I'll cry about it to Slashdot.
I just hope the remasters are as good as the Red Dwarf remasters. It was so good they put the unremastered ones on the DVDs instead of the remasters nowadays.
"are the reasons for why we (my company)" [emphasis mine]
For business support, I fully agree. Dell is up there with the best of them. The university I used to work for was mostly a Dell shop and their support was always top notch. It's too bad they can't extend the same level of support to their home users. Home user support is a nightmare.
The old Alienware PC was an overpriced underperformer. The only difference is that they are owned by Dell now so you can get worse customer service from them if such a thing is possible.
I don't see how it can't be justifiable. X-Box live didn't launch with the X-Box but Microsoft kept plugging it as a major selling point. The 360 is gung ho HD-DVD even though it's not being offered right now and it made a big deal out its backwards compatibility that is still a work in progress. And one day, you'll be able to turn your Colecovision into a computer with a keyboard module. Ok, maybe the last one was a stretch but they were telling us that at launch and it did help sell units. Not every piece of hardware or piece of functionality in general is available at launch.
Slashdot Mirror
"But my other main point stands. 3rd party presidential votes 'are' a complete waste."
By that same logic, major party Presidential votes in heavily favored states are also a waste. I live in the state of Georgia. In 2004, there was no way Bush was going to lose that state. Voting for Kerry in that situation "might make the voter feel better, but it's still not helping the current situation." Badnarik had just as good a chance of winning as Kerry did in the state of Georgia.
You can even see similar behoavior in the electors themselves. Sometimes when their candidate has certainly lost, you'll see them cast votes form someone else. This happened in 1976. Reagan actually got a few electoral votes when it was obvious Carter was going to win over Ford. This act garnered a decent bit of national spotlight towards Reagan who would go on to win the 1980 Presidential election.
"Actually I will blame you. If you didn't vote for Kerry, you basically elected Bush."
Maybe you missed my point. Maybe I did basically elect Bush but it doesn't matter. Kerry fits in with my ideaology no better than Bush does. It doesn't matter to me at all that Kerry lost. If it did matter, I would've voted for him. Like I said earlier, last resort and all. I'm pretty sure the millions who voted for Bush have more to do with his victory than I do. Don't try to make your political crusade into my political crusade. If your political crusade lost, then it was flawed to begin with.
"you're stuck with Wii sports, when the game you really want is Zelda. Still, it seems like a smart move for them."
Smart move indeed. It looks like Nintedno is going to indoctrinate you into using their controllers whether you like it or not. Sure you may want Zelda but Nintendo wants to show off the controller. Wii sports gives you the opportunity to use the controller in a variety of different ways on familiar subjects. You may not be an avid player of any of the sports games Wii offers but you've at least seen them enough to know how they should be played. By the time Wii Sports gets played to death by someone, they will be quite proficient at the use of the Wii controller in general.
"Retort: the idealistic voters who ignore the fact that we have a two party political system and, instead of choosing the better of the two candidates available, choose to throw their votes away and allow the conservative side to gain a numeric advantage are the real cause of all our (political) problems."
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
The problem with choosing the "best" fit is that neither may do a single thing to represent you as a voter. There may be no "best" candidate. Personally, I vote third party as a last resort. By the time I get to that point, either a third party candidate gets my vote or nobody does.
"Doom perfected single player FPS and invented multiplayer FPS."
If you're talking "invented" I'm pretty sure MIDI Maze / Faceball 2000 has it beat by a few years. If you're talking overall refinement, Rise of the Triad did a whole lot more towards making the modern FPS than Doom ever did and it was developed around the same time. A 4 player Co-op or Deathmatch is hardly comparable to an 11-player FPS with several different types of play, including the first FPS capture the flag that I'm aware of.
I realize you qualified your assessment with "genreally speaking" but just for fun:
- Do you like the game/genre in the first place? Yes. Immensely.
- If yes, does the game have a good amount of storyline? No
- If yes, do you like the producer who is doing the movie? I do like the production company.
- If yes, do you like the director? They did Max Headroom so that's good enough for me.
- If yes, do you like the actors/actresses (if known)? Most of them, especially Bob Hoskins, Dennis Hopper, and Lance Henrickson.
Do I like the movie? Heck no.
If mp3.com's customers bet a few EE students a case of beer they couldn't get a MAME-compatible ROM dump from two real arcade boards and then lost that bet, then yes. (They are rather trustworthy fellows so I guess they could've cheated but I doubt it.) You are aware that those ROM images didn't come out of thin air, right? Somebody has the ability to read them out and dump them. I personally think it's pretty cool playing with ROMS directly from my boards.
I had someone else do it for me. I don't have the equipment for reading the neccessary chips. Once you get a proper ROM dump, it is exceptionally easy.
"Yeah, a niche that gets more shelf space than all consoles combined!"
Yeah, in a market that is very small compared to just about any other video game market.
"Some genres just don't work on Consoles and some just don't work on PCs."
You have to be more specific than that. I've got a MAME box running Tekken 2 and Marvel Super Heroes just as good as my arcade boards can. It's a matter of default controls. PC games are typically written to be controlled by keyboard and mouse since that's the lowest common denominator.
I had to hack up a USB gamepad and solder in leads to get some decent arcade controls in MAME. Now the MAME setup is pretty sweet even if my controllers are the size of a shoe box but most folks aren't going to go to such lengths.
Yeah, in 1966 in rural Texas, the GOP was in charge of two things: jack and squat. That was firmly Democrat territory until the late-70's to early-80's but nice pathetic attempt at trying to make censorship a party-centric issue.
Role Playing is a simulation. You're simulating social interactions. You're typically doing this in some sort of fantastical setting but it's still very much a simulation. I'd even argue that an RPG is more of a simulation than a type of game that doesn't fit well in either catergory: the puzzle game. Tetris for example could tehnically be a simulation but what exactly is it simulating? What do online logic problems simulate for that matter?
Does this sound like a bad to anyone else? These guys are all out of their element. To their credit, Schilling and Salvatore both have some business experience in the pen and paper realm, but that's not neccessarily going to translate into software success. If I had to bet money here, I'd wager that this company is a place for Schilling to dump money that would otherwise be spent paying taxes.
I just glossed over the word "don't." My apologies. I imagine some of those games could crack the top 100 but I imagine it would be more depressing than anything. I'm just imagining some gomes like Falcon 3.0 that were absolutely HUGE at the time and how they couldn't possibly hold up to a world where you can get a wide range of PC games at you local Wal-Mart. And where you can get a computer to play those games on at that same Wal-Mart for $400 to $500 in today's money.
I think you underestimate the Sims popularity and seriously overestimate the PC game buying population in the mid-90's and earlier. As a percentage of potential customer base, the Quest series probably rocked the Sims, but in terms of overall sales figures, anything that ends in the word Quest falls way short of the Sims base package sales.
"only two LANs are mentioned that are bigger."
Only two LANs mention how big they are. And even if you're right, the size of your LAN gaming infrastructure is only one consideration they look at.
"I've also -never- seen another school officially sponsor (e.g. provide free bandwidth, hosting, and administration) for a dedicated gaming server before."
I've never seen a school need to officially sponsor a dedicated gaming server before. I've seen planty of schools provide physical space to set up gaming servers and bandwidth to operate on. Game servers aren't that hard to come by and they don't require anything along the lines of a Athlon 64 to operate efficiently. Most games won't even benefit from such a beast over what someone would find lying around in their closet. The games that do require a blazing fast server are typically new enough to get sponsors to loan out or even occasionally donate a server.
"There are plenty of kids (e.g. people like you)..."
You're the president of a student organization and you're calling me a kid? I haven't been a student in two or three years and that was grad school. I'd wager I outage you by at least a decade. Playing the odds, I'd be willing to bet Reagan was already President when you were born.
I did come down on you hard and that was mostly for humor's sake. I even got the troll mod that was coming to me. It does sound like you have an interesting setup but I don't really think you have a case here. Those other schools on the list may not have the university paying for their gaming server but I'll wager they have a leg up in overall connetivity and gaming culture.
"I admit that I've never been fond of sports games, just play the sport"
You are aware that the two aren't mutually exclusive right? I love playing in a wide variety of sports and I also like playing video game versions of a much smaller subset fo sports. Though is I could manage to find 22 people willing to play tackle football, I'd almost certainly pick that over Madden.
"why do people keep buying the newer game? Slightly better textures? New player rosters?"
Player roster updates are nice. The textures tend to improve slowly enough that 07 may look similar to 06 and 06 may look similar to 05 but 07 looks markedly improved over 05.
There's almost always one "big change" in the yearly Madden games. In 06 to 07 they're added the ability for you to control your lead blocker then your running back on running plays. I haven't tested it myself yet but if it works it's a welcome addition. I can't count the times there's a hole opening and my bonehead blocker runs off in the wrong direction or doesn't block the right player or even just breezes past a blocking assignment forgetting all about the guy with the football.
Last year the "big change" was QB vision. It was ok. It certainly adds a level of complexity in a good way to the game. Some smaller changes included a sane system for running QBs. In 05 you had to toggle between a run mode and a pass mode as the QB. In 06, the run functionality is bult into the passing system (and the AI generally does a good job of knowing if you're on the run).
I think 05 was when they brought out hot routes. Hot routes let you aubible a position on the fly. That is so sweet when you scan the defense and see a hole/mismatch. I probably use a hot route once out of every three passing plays I call, especially when I get a linebacker on a receiver or a soft defense with less than 10 to go for a first down. 06 even gave me a hot route to tell my fullback to stay home and block for when the o-line is getting pounded.
Overall, Madden does a good job of bringing enough to the table to get you to at least heavily consider the new version. Personally, I set my price based on how good it is each year. 06 was worht $28 and when it got to that point I bought it. I'll make a determination on 07 as soon as I get my hands on it.
Fun aside (and it was a really fun game), ROTT was the first FPS that brought a decent LAN play element to the table. That's why computer labs at the time had ROTT loaded on them instead of Doom. Given the importance on LAN play in the modern FPS, I'm surprised this aspect is ignored as a quantum leap in the FPS genre by Gamasutra.
And your school mascot is the Commodores for crying out loud. Oh, the humanity.
Ok, now that I'm done with that, leave it to Vandy to cry about being left out. Sorry if nobody is staring in awe at a 120+ LAN for gaming. 120? That's not even very impressive. An upcoming Counter-strike server sponsored by campus? What is this, the year 2000?
Hey everybody, the university bought us two cans and a string but nobody has contacted me about our campus' telecommunications abilities. I'll cry about it to Slashdot.
"10. I don't think that word means what you think it means"
Inconceivable!
Lockheed Martin flew!
DeKort knew!
I don't know. It just doesn't have the same ring to it.
I just hope the remasters are as good as the Red Dwarf remasters. It was so good they put the unremastered ones on the DVDs instead of the remasters nowadays.
"are the reasons for why we (my company)" [emphasis mine]
For business support, I fully agree. Dell is up there with the best of them. The university I used to work for was mostly a Dell shop and their support was always top notch. It's too bad they can't extend the same level of support to their home users. Home user support is a nightmare.
The old Alienware PC was an overpriced underperformer. The only difference is that they are owned by Dell now so you can get worse customer service from them if such a thing is possible.
I don't see how it can't be justifiable. X-Box live didn't launch with the X-Box but Microsoft kept plugging it as a major selling point. The 360 is gung ho HD-DVD even though it's not being offered right now and it made a big deal out its backwards compatibility that is still a work in progress. And one day, you'll be able to turn your Colecovision into a computer with a keyboard module. Ok, maybe the last one was a stretch but they were telling us that at launch and it did help sell units. Not every piece of hardware or piece of functionality in general is available at launch.