Actually, as it stands now, you don't need to buy any books.
The System Reference Document is freely available to download. It's got the basic 3.5 rules, although you don't get the pretty pictures. Still, if you're bad off financially, you can essentially play for free.
On the other hand, it is quite easy to spend a lot of money on D&D stuff. There's no shortage of extra rulebooks, cool dice, and what have you, but those aren't necessary to play. D&D can be really cheap, really expensive, or somewhere in between. It all really depends on how much money you want to spend.
If this is supposed to be 5 years after the first KOTOR, which ending does it follow? Depending on the path you take in the first game, things can turn out vastly different.
Slashdot isn't exactly unbiased, but I think you're barking up the wrong tree here.
A couple of weeks ago, there was a rash of rover stories. Was Slashdot getting payola from NASA? Of course not. There was just a lot of news on that particular subject. There's actually been a lot coming out of Google lately.
Okay, let's do some math here. Let's say it only costs $700 to buy a computer that will play the latest games. Giving you the benefit of the doubt again, we'll say that you can buy a console for $300. That's around the price they go for when they're first released, although they're a lot cheaper right now. Even after buying DVD remotes, memory cards, etc, that's only $400. Hell, let's even say that console games are $50 and computer games are $40. How many games will you have to buy before a console becomes as expensive as a PC?
That was a best case scenario for the PC and a worst case for the console, and the console still comes out way on top in terms of price. There are plenty of reasons to prefer a PC as a gaming machine, but price isn't one of them.
Captain obvious speaking: not everyone uses the internet for the same thing!
Some people need broadband. Most slashdotters are probably that kind of person. Back when I was on dial-up, playing games online was a nightmare. I'd have spurts of lag, disconnects, and a host of other problems that usually pissed me off, got me killed, or both. I also download large files, and on dial-up, that will tie up the phone line for a while. I'm pretty impatient when it comes to waiting for pages to load. All in all, I'm pretty much the perfect candidate for broadband.
On the other hand, there are people that just email each other and occasionally visit a website or two. Those people really don't need broadband. It's worth it to me to pay an extra 20 dollars a month for broadband, but it's probably not worth it to them.
OK, I think you're all misunderstanding this product.
It's not a destination, it's a journey.
This is insightful? When I'm buying something, I'm not going to buy the product that might get there someday in some future incarnation, I'm going to get the one that's worth buying now. The GBA is there now, but the N-Gage isn't even close. Even if your predictions for the future are completely correct, releasing a crappy product that nobody buys won't help Nokia in the present, and it'll also hurt their image in the long run.
Anyway Nokia are trying to make the best product they can for now, but even if the next dozen N-Gages are flops have to keep trying to get it right.
The problem is that Nokia isn't trying to make the best product they can for now. The original N-Gage had several obvious flaws that just about everyone pointed out before it was released. Those flaws were never fixed, despite ample time to do so. This new model seems to fix some of the problems, but many others remain, such as the vertical screen and crappy game library.
1) Windows is full of security holes. (as if everyone didn't already know that)
2) Microsoft is trying to fix their security problems.
I have to wonder, though, how many more unknown or unpatched security vunerabilities Windows has and how hard Microsoft is working on security. I'd suspect that the answer to both questions is "a lot," but that's just pure speculation on my part.
Tribes is a great game. Huge open areas, great maps... most importantly, it's damn fun. Tribes was way ahead of its time in many aspects, such as having vehicles.
There's a ton of good mods for Tribes. I'd try out Shifter and TAC. Shifter expands on the amount of armor/weapons/vehicles/items/etc. To me, Shifter is like the Team Fortress of Tribes. Each armor has its own speciality. TAC (Team Aerial Combat) is just what it sounds like. If you touch the ground anywhere but a base or an objective, you instantly die, so instead of walking, you have to fly around everywhere in vehicles. Of course, flag carriers can't fly themselves, so you have to rely on your team. Aerial firefights are incredibly fun, and they really encourage teamwork too.
I never got into Tribes 2 much. It seemed a bit sluggish, but maybe that's just because I kept trying to play it like the original.
Agreed. I often see the opinion on Slashdot that online play is the be-all-end-all of games, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because PC games are more popular here. FPSes and RTSes are more suited to online play than, say, Japanese style RPGs or platform games.
Online play often seems more like a marketing gimmick than a neccessary gameplay ingredient. Yes, it has its place, but not every game needs to be online.
I think you're exaggerating the case. I've found FAQs to be more useful than strategy guides.
Strategy guides can't be updated with new information or with error correction. I remember buying a Super Mario RPG strategy guide that had completely wrong information because there were two versions of the game.
In addition to having more accurate information, there's also more specific information in many FAQs. For example, there's a Final Fantasy Tactics guide that goes into extreme detail about the mechanics of the game. It covers the damage and success formulas for everything in the game, which is no small feat. The FFT strategy guides don't do that. There's FAQs that go over glitches in the game, translation issues, and all sorts of other things that will never make it into a strategy guide. Even if only 10% of FAQs are detailed and useful as you claim, those 10% completely blow away traditional guides.
I do agree that there's no better place for good game artwork, screenshots, and such, which is why strategy guides will probably never completely disappear. If I'm looking for information, though, I'll stick to my FAQs.
This reminds me of when Square tried to move their FF9 strategy guide online. When you actually wanted some information, you'd turn to the appropriate page in the strategy guide and be given some really lame explanation with a note telling you to go online for the specifics. It really took the whole point out of strategy guides. When I buy a strategy guide, I want to have all the information sitting right there in one place. Having to hop from computer to paper guide to game is more trouble than its worth. I suspect that having to switch from a DVD to your game is equally annoying, since most people probably have their DVD player and console hooked up to the same TV or use their console as a DVD player.
I can certainly understand why companies are trying new ideas with strategy guides, though. With the advent of GameFAQs, nobody needs to buy a guide anymore. I'd only buy a strategy guide for the nice artwork or as a collector's item.
Looking further ahead, Reeves spoke about Sony's "ultimate goal" for PlayStation 3 - "to get into electronic broadband distribution".
Maybe it's just me, but I actually want a physical copy of whatever I'm buying. If I want a game now, I can go into a store, buy something on a whim, and play as soon as I get home. In 10 years will I have to sit and wait for my game to download? Games are getting bigger and bigger, and even on a broadband connection, they'll take a while.
I'm not sure there's much of a cost savings for broadband distribution either. Sure, there's less money wasted on packaging and inventory, but now there's server problems, bandwidth problems, security problems, and all those other issues that the internet brings. Even if Sony does manage to save some money, I somehow doubt they'll lower their game prices.
Google might be the big dog in the search market, but I'm not especially worried. Unlike certain other monopolies, if you have a problem with Google, there's absolutely no cost to switching. I hear there's plenty of other search engines out there. Privacy is an issue, but if you're not going to trust Google, I'm not sure why you would trust another search engine.
As for finding results you didn't anticipate, are you saying that you'd rather have less accurate results?
This probably has more to do with the terms you're giving Google than Google itself. The more generic of a term you give Google, the less it has to work with. If you give Google a really generic term, you're going to get broad results.
For example, say I'm looking for information on a printer. If I put in something like Printer I get a bunch of generic sites on printers. Putting in a specific printer, such as HP PSC 1350, helps, but I get a bunch of people trying to sell me that printer. Since I'm looking for reviews and not a place to buy it, a search for HP PSC 1350 review -buy gets me even better results. There might be better searches still, but you get the idea: the more specific your search terms, the better your search will be. Google is good, but it can't read your mind.
In this case, you weren't completely in the right either. If a store screws you, the correct course of action isn't to egg their store. The person who got punished for their "mistake" is the poor minimum wage guy who had to clean the mess up, not the guy in charge. The correct course of action is to never shop there and tell everyone you know not to go there. Dealing with shady business practices in a shady manner misses the point.
I'm sure it must have been satisfying, but as the old saying goes, two wrongs don't make a right.
Worse than the problem
on
Gates on Spam
·
· Score: 1
This "solution" sounds worse than the original problem! I can deal with getting the occasional penis enlargement spam, but paying for email? Sorry, but I'll stick with my Nigerian friend.
The original Unreal is great. I really love the single player experience, which the Unreal Tournaments don't really have by themselves, and Unreal 2 failed at delivering. Still, single player Unreal is alive and kicking. If you like single player, check out UnrealSP.Org.
A lot of games are easier these days because the control isn't as bad.
For example, Zelda 1 is a lot more difficult than it could have been because of limited movement. You can't move very accurately or diagonally, and your sword has a very tiny poke range. In the later Zeldas, you can move any direction, dash if needed, and Link actually swipes his sword. Similarly, Super Metroid would be a lot harder if your movement was as limited as it was in the original Metroid.
This isn't true for all games, but I'm sure it's a factor for many.
Yeah, and I read in a 'magazine' that Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are gay lovers. Of course, we all know how accurate the National Enquirer is. Just because you saw it in print doesn't mean it's automatically true, assuming this isn't some complete fabrication of yours.
Besides, I doubt id would be stupid enough to anger half of their customers for a comparatively small amount of money.
So basically you're saying that a massive amount of people are buying (and still playing) the above games only because they're sequels? I find that hard to believe. After all, as long as a game is fun, who cares? I'm all for creativity, but I'd rather have a fun game that doesn't do anything new than a creative game that fails to entertain. Of course, there's some games that are fun and also extremely creative; those are the real gems.
Anyway, you may be bored to death by sequels, but that doesn't mean that everybody is.
Perhaps I just misunderstood. When you said "Video gaming history isn't about a bunch of johnny-come-lately Japanese executives who sought to get rich with slickly packaged, mass market products." I mentally emphasized the Japanese instead of the rest of it. After all, there's plenty of American companies mass marketing games, but you specifically mentioned Japanese. Yes, the Sega and Nintendo are Japanese companies, but I don't see how that's relevant.
They are just outdated gaming consoles. For something to have historical significance, it needs to be more than just out-of-production. It needs to have broken new ground. It needs to have been a pioneering or revolutionary effort. The N64, SNES, and Genesis don't fit the definition of historical.
The problem is that gaming is more evolutionary than revolutionary. I actually agree with you that major jumps have more historical significance, but that doesn't mean that the fluid increases are completely insignificant historically.
You need to get a sense of what's important. Of course you teach kids about the Wright brothers, but you don't wax poetic about the development of the Cessna 140a. You have lessons about the invention of the Polio vaccine, but you don't spend class time teaching about the development of Preparation H. You teach kids about the Ford Model A and Model T and how they changed our society, but you don't have lessons about the Dodge Omni and the Chevy Cavalier.
Yes, some things are more important than others. I definitely agree with you on that. My issue is that you assume that the SNES is the Preparation H and not the Polio vaccine. It doesn't have to be an either or issue; it's more likely something in between. Surely, in the 7 or so years of the SNES era, there was some sort of historical event or game. In my mind, something like the Atari Lynx or TG16 is more comparable to the Chevy Cavalier. As far as I know, they had very little impact on how games are played today.
What scares me is that you actually can't recognize the difference between historical technology and technology which is just outdated.
P.S. The very fact that you would mark me as a "Foe" simply because you disagree with something I wrote speaks volumes about you.
What really set me off was that your original post seemed to be saying that only the original gaming machines were history and that everything else is unimportant in the grand scheme of things. The Japanese comment didn't help either. Now that it's apparent your intent was otherwise, I can see that I might have been a bit rash.
Um, what? Just because it's Japanese, suddenly it's not gaming history?
Is it just not old enough to be history? In case you didn't notice, the SNES and Genesis are a good two console generations in the past. The SNES was released (in the US) in 1991, and the Genesis is even older. If those consoles aren't game history, then what are they? They're certainly not the present of games!
I guess we should just ignore the last 200 or so years of US History, too. After all, all the important stuff happened in the 1770's, right? Everyone should just study the founding fathers and then skip right to the present; nothing important happened in between, after all.
Maybe you're just trolling, but I have the sinking suspicion that you're actually serious, which scares me.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, as it stands now, you don't need to buy any books.
The System Reference Document is freely available to download. It's got the basic 3.5 rules, although you don't get the pretty pictures. Still, if you're bad off financially, you can essentially play for free.
On the other hand, it is quite easy to spend a lot of money on D&D stuff. There's no shortage of extra rulebooks, cool dice, and what have you, but those aren't necessary to play. D&D can be really cheap, really expensive, or somewhere in between. It all really depends on how much money you want to spend.
If this is supposed to be 5 years after the first KOTOR, which ending does it follow? Depending on the path you take in the first game, things can turn out vastly different.
Slashdot isn't exactly unbiased, but I think you're barking up the wrong tree here.
A couple of weeks ago, there was a rash of rover stories. Was Slashdot getting payola from NASA? Of course not. There was just a lot of news on that particular subject. There's actually been a lot coming out of Google lately.
Okay, let's do some math here. Let's say it only costs $700 to buy a computer that will play the latest games. Giving you the benefit of the doubt again, we'll say that you can buy a console for $300. That's around the price they go for when they're first released, although they're a lot cheaper right now. Even after buying DVD remotes, memory cards, etc, that's only $400. Hell, let's even say that console games are $50 and computer games are $40. How many games will you have to buy before a console becomes as expensive as a PC?
That was a best case scenario for the PC and a worst case for the console, and the console still comes out way on top in terms of price. There are plenty of reasons to prefer a PC as a gaming machine, but price isn't one of them.
Captain obvious speaking: not everyone uses the internet for the same thing!
Some people need broadband. Most slashdotters are probably that kind of person. Back when I was on dial-up, playing games online was a nightmare. I'd have spurts of lag, disconnects, and a host of other problems that usually pissed me off, got me killed, or both. I also download large files, and on dial-up, that will tie up the phone line for a while. I'm pretty impatient when it comes to waiting for pages to load. All in all, I'm pretty much the perfect candidate for broadband.
On the other hand, there are people that just email each other and occasionally visit a website or two. Those people really don't need broadband. It's worth it to me to pay an extra 20 dollars a month for broadband, but it's probably not worth it to them.
It's not a destination, it's a journey.
This is insightful? When I'm buying something, I'm not going to buy the product that might get there someday in some future incarnation, I'm going to get the one that's worth buying now. The GBA is there now, but the N-Gage isn't even close. Even if your predictions for the future are completely correct, releasing a crappy product that nobody buys won't help Nokia in the present, and it'll also hurt their image in the long run.
Anyway Nokia are trying to make the best product they can for now, but even if the next dozen N-Gages are flops have to keep trying to get it right.
The problem is that Nokia isn't trying to make the best product they can for now. The original N-Gage had several obvious flaws that just about everyone pointed out before it was released. Those flaws were never fixed, despite ample time to do so. This new model seems to fix some of the problems, but many others remain, such as the vertical screen and crappy game library.
This illustrates two important points:
1) Windows is full of security holes. (as if everyone didn't already know that)
2) Microsoft is trying to fix their security problems.
I have to wonder, though, how many more unknown or unpatched security vunerabilities Windows has and how hard Microsoft is working on security. I'd suspect that the answer to both questions is "a lot," but that's just pure speculation on my part.
Tribes is a great game. Huge open areas, great maps... most importantly, it's damn fun. Tribes was way ahead of its time in many aspects, such as having vehicles.
There's a ton of good mods for Tribes. I'd try out Shifter and TAC. Shifter expands on the amount of armor/weapons/vehicles/items/etc. To me, Shifter is like the Team Fortress of Tribes. Each armor has its own speciality. TAC (Team Aerial Combat) is just what it sounds like. If you touch the ground anywhere but a base or an objective, you instantly die, so instead of walking, you have to fly around everywhere in vehicles. Of course, flag carriers can't fly themselves, so you have to rely on your team. Aerial firefights are incredibly fun, and they really encourage teamwork too.
I never got into Tribes 2 much. It seemed a bit sluggish, but maybe that's just because I kept trying to play it like the original.
Agreed. I often see the opinion on Slashdot that online play is the be-all-end-all of games, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because PC games are more popular here. FPSes and RTSes are more suited to online play than, say, Japanese style RPGs or platform games.
Online play often seems more like a marketing gimmick than a neccessary gameplay ingredient. Yes, it has its place, but not every game needs to be online.
I think you're exaggerating the case. I've found FAQs to be more useful than strategy guides.
Strategy guides can't be updated with new information or with error correction. I remember buying a Super Mario RPG strategy guide that had completely wrong information because there were two versions of the game.
In addition to having more accurate information, there's also more specific information in many FAQs. For example, there's a Final Fantasy Tactics guide that goes into extreme detail about the mechanics of the game. It covers the damage and success formulas for everything in the game, which is no small feat. The FFT strategy guides don't do that. There's FAQs that go over glitches in the game, translation issues, and all sorts of other things that will never make it into a strategy guide. Even if only 10% of FAQs are detailed and useful as you claim, those 10% completely blow away traditional guides.
I do agree that there's no better place for good game artwork, screenshots, and such, which is why strategy guides will probably never completely disappear. If I'm looking for information, though, I'll stick to my FAQs.
This reminds me of when Square tried to move their FF9 strategy guide online. When you actually wanted some information, you'd turn to the appropriate page in the strategy guide and be given some really lame explanation with a note telling you to go online for the specifics. It really took the whole point out of strategy guides. When I buy a strategy guide, I want to have all the information sitting right there in one place. Having to hop from computer to paper guide to game is more trouble than its worth. I suspect that having to switch from a DVD to your game is equally annoying, since most people probably have their DVD player and console hooked up to the same TV or use their console as a DVD player.
I can certainly understand why companies are trying new ideas with strategy guides, though. With the advent of GameFAQs, nobody needs to buy a guide anymore. I'd only buy a strategy guide for the nice artwork or as a collector's item.
Maybe it's just me, but I actually want a physical copy of whatever I'm buying. If I want a game now, I can go into a store, buy something on a whim, and play as soon as I get home. In 10 years will I have to sit and wait for my game to download? Games are getting bigger and bigger, and even on a broadband connection, they'll take a while.
I'm not sure there's much of a cost savings for broadband distribution either. Sure, there's less money wasted on packaging and inventory, but now there's server problems, bandwidth problems, security problems, and all those other issues that the internet brings. Even if Sony does manage to save some money, I somehow doubt they'll lower their game prices.
You're missing a couple.
21. War is peace.
22. Freedom is slavery.
Okay, okay, so maybe that was a low blow, but that's the first thing that popped into my mind after reading that.
The way I see it, you'd have to be insane, stupid, or both to want to be a politician. Now that I think about it, I guess that explains a lot.
As for finding results you didn't anticipate, are you saying that you'd rather have less accurate results?
For example, say I'm looking for information on a printer. If I put in something like Printer I get a bunch of generic sites on printers. Putting in a specific printer, such as HP PSC 1350, helps, but I get a bunch of people trying to sell me that printer. Since I'm looking for reviews and not a place to buy it, a search for HP PSC 1350 review -buy gets me even better results. There might be better searches still, but you get the idea: the more specific your search terms, the better your search will be. Google is good, but it can't read your mind.
In this case, you weren't completely in the right either. If a store screws you, the correct course of action isn't to egg their store. The person who got punished for their "mistake" is the poor minimum wage guy who had to clean the mess up, not the guy in charge. The correct course of action is to never shop there and tell everyone you know not to go there. Dealing with shady business practices in a shady manner misses the point.
I'm sure it must have been satisfying, but as the old saying goes, two wrongs don't make a right.
This "solution" sounds worse than the original problem! I can deal with getting the occasional penis enlargement spam, but paying for email? Sorry, but I'll stick with my Nigerian friend.
The original Unreal is great. I really love the single player experience, which the Unreal Tournaments don't really have by themselves, and Unreal 2 failed at delivering. Still, single player Unreal is alive and kicking. If you like single player, check out UnrealSP.Org.
A lot of games are easier these days because the control isn't as bad.
For example, Zelda 1 is a lot more difficult than it could have been because of limited movement. You can't move very accurately or diagonally, and your sword has a very tiny poke range. In the later Zeldas, you can move any direction, dash if needed, and Link actually swipes his sword. Similarly, Super Metroid would be a lot harder if your movement was as limited as it was in the original Metroid.
This isn't true for all games, but I'm sure it's a factor for many.
Yeah, and I read in a 'magazine' that Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are gay lovers. Of course, we all know how accurate the National Enquirer is. Just because you saw it in print doesn't mean it's automatically true, assuming this isn't some complete fabrication of yours.
Besides, I doubt id would be stupid enough to anger half of their customers for a comparatively small amount of money.
So basically you're saying that a massive amount of people are buying (and still playing) the above games only because they're sequels? I find that hard to believe. After all, as long as a game is fun, who cares? I'm all for creativity, but I'd rather have a fun game that doesn't do anything new than a creative game that fails to entertain. Of course, there's some games that are fun and also extremely creative; those are the real gems.
Anyway, you may be bored to death by sequels, but that doesn't mean that everybody is.
That's not something that I said or implied.
Perhaps I just misunderstood. When you said "Video gaming history isn't about a bunch of johnny-come-lately Japanese executives who sought to get rich with slickly packaged, mass market products." I mentally emphasized the Japanese instead of the rest of it. After all, there's plenty of American companies mass marketing games, but you specifically mentioned Japanese. Yes, the Sega and Nintendo are Japanese companies, but I don't see how that's relevant.
They are just outdated gaming consoles. For something to have historical significance, it needs to be more than just out-of-production. It needs to have broken new ground. It needs to have been a pioneering or revolutionary effort. The N64, SNES, and Genesis don't fit the definition of historical.
The problem is that gaming is more evolutionary than revolutionary. I actually agree with you that major jumps have more historical significance, but that doesn't mean that the fluid increases are completely insignificant historically.
You need to get a sense of what's important. Of course you teach kids about the Wright brothers, but you don't wax poetic about the development of the Cessna 140a. You have lessons about the invention of the Polio vaccine, but you don't spend class time teaching about the development of Preparation H. You teach kids about the Ford Model A and Model T and how they changed our society, but you don't have lessons about the Dodge Omni and the Chevy Cavalier.
Yes, some things are more important than others. I definitely agree with you on that. My issue is that you assume that the SNES is the Preparation H and not the Polio vaccine. It doesn't have to be an either or issue; it's more likely something in between. Surely, in the 7 or so years of the SNES era, there was some sort of historical event or game. In my mind, something like the Atari Lynx or TG16 is more comparable to the Chevy Cavalier. As far as I know, they had very little impact on how games are played today.
What scares me is that you actually can't recognize the difference between historical technology and technology which is just outdated.
P.S. The very fact that you would mark me as a "Foe" simply because you disagree with something I wrote speaks volumes about you.
What really set me off was that your original post seemed to be saying that only the original gaming machines were history and that everything else is unimportant in the grand scheme of things. The Japanese comment didn't help either. Now that it's apparent your intent was otherwise, I can see that I might have been a bit rash.
The fact that you think GTA III is an FPS indicates to me that you have no idea what you're talking about.
Um, what? Just because it's Japanese, suddenly it's not gaming history?
Is it just not old enough to be history? In case you didn't notice, the SNES and Genesis are a good two console generations in the past. The SNES was released (in the US) in 1991, and the Genesis is even older. If those consoles aren't game history, then what are they? They're certainly not the present of games!
I guess we should just ignore the last 200 or so years of US History, too. After all, all the important stuff happened in the 1770's, right? Everyone should just study the founding fathers and then skip right to the present; nothing important happened in between, after all.
Maybe you're just trolling, but I have the sinking suspicion that you're actually serious, which scares me.