Blizzard have mulled over the possibility of a console release from time to time, but there's nothing announced. The game's not that different from its predecessors - as you yourself note.
In fact, the Diablo series is historically a PC/Mac series. There was a Playstation 1 version of the original, but it never got much traction. This series is as computery as a very computery thing that was just made even more computery by the injection of a big pile of computer.
I think you're using "console" as a shorthand for "shallow and repetitive". Well, I can certainly agree that Diablo games are shallow and repetitive. Absolutely. Definitely. With cherries on.
But then, I look at some of the console games I own and I don't necessarily see much in the way of shallowness or repetition in some of those. Valkyria Chronicles (PS3 exclusive) is absolutely brimming with depth and complexity, packaged beneath a highly accessible exterior. Dark Souls (360 and PS3, belated PC version due later this month) is more action oriented, but has one of the deepest and most precise combat systems I've come across. The Forza Motorsport (360 exclusive) games have depth coming out of their ears.
By all means criticise the Diablo series for its core gameplay - god knows it deserves a bit of a grilling as a counter-point to the fawning it got from some review sites. But if you're claiming it's a console game, you look ridiculous and if you're claiming that all console games are shallow, you look ignorant to boot.
This used to be true, but an increasingly popular means of compromising accounts involves using social engineering techniques not on the end user, but on the host company's support staff. Look around a bit and you'll find some shocking examples of how easily certain companies *cough* MS Xbox Live *cough* have been giving their support staff protocols which make it trivial for scumbags to compromise individual accounts via phone-call while knowing nothing more than a username.
But I agree that "hacking" is the wrong word in 99% of cases. If an account's compromised through a Sony style breach, that's "hacking". In other cases, it's best to use a different term.
Well, it might be an "inside job", but not in the way you're thinking.
There was a issue with MS Xbox Live accounts being compromised recently. I was one of the ones affected by this and, until I learned more about it, I was utterly puzzled as to how it had happened.
See, prior to the Sony breach, I had been guilty of a bit of password sharing between accounts. After the Sony breach, I get more sensibly paranoid and, other than random don't-really-care forum accounts, everything gets its own password. As part of this, I change my Xbox Live password. I go for something reasonably strong - 10 characters, mix of lower case, upper case and numerals (spending your teenaged years learning Latin and ancient Greek is great for your memory). This password is only ever entered into my (stock, unmodified) 360. I'm pretty sure my PC is free of keyloggers - but even if it isn't, this particular sequence of characters has never been typed into a PC.
A few months later, I find I'm locked out of my Xbox Live account. The password and e-mail address have been changed (the e-mail address is now some German one) and around 50GBP has been spent on MS points, of which around a quarter have been spent on FIFA DLC. Fortunately, I notice within a few hours of this happening. Half an hour later, I've spoken to MS, who have locked the account and to my bank, who have refunded the credit card transaction.
The account then spends about 3 weeks locked while MS perform an investigation. At the end of this period, I get profuse apologies from them, a free 2 month extension to my gold subscription and my account back. This takes me by surprise - I'd previously thought that, except in cases of Sony-style security breaches, almost all compromised accounts were down to the behaviour of the user. Despite the circumstances of my case, I'd been torturing myself trying to think of all the ways I might have slipped up (god knows how many rootkit scanners I ran on my PC). I'd certainly not expected MS to be bending over backwards to make amends.
Anyway, Eurogamer picks up on stories from people who've had similar cases and investigates. A few months later, we quietly get our explanation. The security breach is at MS's end, but isn't in their software - it's in the protocols that their phone support guys use. Basically, it was possible to use social engineering techniques against MS's own support staff to get them to do password resets and e-mail address changes on an account, without actually knowing anything more than the name of the account. I gather the issue has since been "rectified", but it's still alarming.
Apparently my account had raised many of the flags that makes it desirable to the scumbags who do this. It's an old account (created on the day that the Xbox Live service for the original Xbox was launched in the UK), so it's a bit like having a low UID account on slashdot. It has a reasonably high gamerscore (though not exceptional). Perhaps more importantly, a few days before my account was taken, I'd got my first 1000/1000 gamerscore on a game (and not on one of the titles that are known to be quick and easy to do it for). This apparently meant that my account was desirable not only for the ability to spend on my credit card (FIFA DLC can apparently be traded for real-life cash, and hence is a way to re-monetise XBL currency), but would also have had a high resale value.
Ok, maybe that's slightly disingenuous. There are actually good reasons why he isn't more widely appreciated - such as the fact that his most notable work is written in a hideous cod-medieval style and is about twice as long as it needs to be.
But among a bunch of short-stories of variable quality, he put out two staggeringly imaginative works of longer fiction.
The House on the Borderlands has a central premise that seems, at first glance, quite similar to The Time Machine. However, it has a number of significant differences in its own right. First, it imports some substantial trappings from the gothic horror genre (parts of the book are more horror than sci-fi or speculative fiction). Second, it has some really ambitious cosmological stuff - basically, think back to the "dying earth" section near the end of The Time Machine, and imagine that extrapolated forwards. This book's written in a perfectly approachable style and isn't particularly long - it may date from around a century ago, but it's still pretty accessible to the modern reader.
But the House on the Borderlands is never going to be the work that WHH is best remembered for (where he is remembered at all). That's always going to be The Night Land.
Here we have a book that is, in many ways, so far ahead of its time as to be mind-blowing. Written before the First World War, it's set in the distant future, on an Earth where the sun has gone out and where humanity survives in a gigantic arcology, beset on all sides by both natural and supernatural threats. If you're looking for literary sci-fi firsts, then this book is filled with them: arcologies, geothermal power, NASA-style food concentrates and powered armour, to name some of the more notable examples. It also does a great turn in Lovecraftian horror (indeed, Lovecraft himself was, with some reservations, an admirer of WHH), with hostile yet inscrutable supernatural forces which share quite a few traits with the Cthulhu mythos. The book is a strange combination of speculative sci-fi and fantasy-horror and is one of the most imaginative books I've ever read.
Unfortunately, it's also actively painful to read at times. It's written in the aforementioned cod-medieval style, has a completely unnecessary and rather tedious medieval framing-story, has massive amounts of repetition (particularly in the second half) and features an toe-curlingly misogynistic and implausibly written romance storyline (WHH apparently went through his short life with almost no contact with the opposite sex).
In short, it can be an extremely rewarding book to read, but it demands a lot of effort from the reader (and quite a bit of skim reading in the second half, if I'm honest). There is a modern "remake" of it by James Stoddard that you can get from Amazon's Kindle store, which switches to modern language, tightens up the framing plot, makes the romance subplot more plausible and reduces the length dramatically. That might be a better way into it - but when I tried it, I did find that a little of the original's imaginative power got lost in the translation.
Doesn't need to be kept profitable at this point, any more than chess has to be "kept profitable". Once the game is out there and people own their copies, there's not really much more expense needed to maintain it. If players can host their own matches and it has a server-browser, that's all it needs.
The developer could release graphical updates, certainly, but these would be more along the lines of a company selling a fancy, pretty chess-set (which plenty of companies do).
There are skills involved in competitive Starcraft play that will be transferable to other games. If you were a world-class Starcraft player at the point when Starcraft 2 was released and you decided to move to the new platform, then you'd be at a pretty big advantage compared to somebody like me, who played Starcraft for a few months at release, for the campaign and a bit of LAN multiplayer then moved onto other things.
I've known a few people over the years who have gotten deeply into the hardcore competitive gaming scene (though I've never had the talent, time or inclination to go that way myself). They are an incredibly conservative bunch of people when it comes to their games. These are not people who will pick up the latest releases and mess around with them for fun. They have their game, they play it, and they do not want it to change. They might speculate about when the sequel is coming out, but unless it's nothing more than a direct graphical uplift of the original, then it's highly possible that they'll angrily reject a sequel when it does appear.
I remember when Quake 3 appeared. Here was a game that had been designed by id for - and with the co-operation of - players from the hardcore QuakeWorld and Quake 2 scenes. And yet I also remember that, at release, most of the hardcore community from those games refused to make the transition for as long as possible (or in some cases, ever). I've always got the feeling that id were a bit bruised by Quake 3's reception - certainly, it was the last time they put multiplayer at the heart of their game design.
Why the ultra-conservatism? In part, it's driven by ego and a desire to protect their position. These people are among a tiny elite in a game and their self-esteem and (if they've gone professional) their income depends on remaining part of that scene. Change - particularly transition to a new game - represents a risk to that. What if they fall behind the curve?
But there's also a broader point, which gets to the difference between professional video gaming and more traditional games and sports. Now, some sports do evolve over time - but they do so slowly. In some extreme cases such as Chess and Go, while the tactics people use at the top levels have evolved, the rules of the games themselves have been constant for centuries. Video games, on the other hand, are a fast evolving medium. Technological advances don't just mean better graphics - they make it practical to realise entirely new types of game. And at the same time, games are developed to make a profit, so they will evolve to chase whatever the marketing men believe is the new big-selling trend (currently modern military shooters with objective-based competitive multiplayer).
I suspect that what will happen in the end is that a couple of defined "standard" professional-level video games will emerge, with largely fixed game mechanics. Quite plausibly, this will mean one core RTS, one core FPS and one core MOBA. These will receive occasional graphical uplifts to reflect technological advances, but gameplay mechanics, balance etc will become much more locked than they are now. So if, hypothetically, Starcraft should become that RTS "standard", the hitpoints of a Zergling would basically become set more or less in stone, perhaps being reviewed in 20 years time. Meanwhile, "normal" commercial games development will separate further away from these games, continuing more or less as it is at the moment. So Blizzard might put out Starcrafts 3, 4 and 5, with new storyline, units and balance changes, but with no expectation of these becoming the new hardcore professional standard.
Is any of the above an argument that there is any worth in becoming a professional gamer, other than the money you can make from it during the fairly brief window where you can stay at the top? Absolutely not. But then, I'd say that the same goes for professional sports.
UK broadband is... inconsistent. Very good in places, appalling in others, and still not available in a small minority of places (mostly rural, but with a few surprising urban blackspots).
I'm lucky - the place I moved into in April (a South London outer suburb) is in an area covered by Virgin Media's cable service, and seems to be at the better end of what they offer. My service is advertised as "up to" 100mbit downstream and 10mbit upstream. The router is capped at 10% above those levels. In reality, during the evening peak (7PM-10PM), I get around 85-90mbit downstream and 8.5mbit upstream. Outside of the peak, I tend to get around 104mbit downstream and 9.5mbit upstream. It's been reliable so far and, touch wood, I'm happy with it.
In my old place in New Cross Gate (South London inner-suburb), where I was still on the BT copper network, my service was advertised as "up to" 8mbit downstream and 0.5mbit upstream. I got the full upstream and around 5mbit downstream. I lived there for 7 years - when I moved in, that was an excellent connection. However, it had no upgrades at all over that time and by the time I left, it was well behind the curve. It was also unreliable, particularly during periods of wet weather (rarer than you might expect in London, but they do happen), because the local exchange apparently had issues with water seepage.
A couple of miles from there you have Lewisham, which is known as a broadband blackspot, despite still being very close to central London. Unless things have improved over the last month or two, the area was known for dismal broadband speeds - the lucky ones would get 2mbit downstream (with frequent cutouts), while many were below 0.1mbit.
Basically, if you are lucky enough to live in an area with new and/or well-maintained infrastructure, you can get a pretty good broadband service in the UK. But a lot of BT's network is pretty much crumbling and they've not been in much of a hurry to do anything about it.
Until I moved into my current place, the fastest connection I'd ever had was a 10mbit symetric JANET connection in my room at University more than a decade ago (though your chances of being able to download from anywhere outside of the local network at that speed were pretty much zero back then, of course). That was a great connection, but today's students are unlikely to be as lucky as I was. Back then, there were no effective restrictions on what I could do with it, so online gaming and whatnot was very much on the menu. Since then (largely as a result in the rise of P2P traffic, which put a big strain on what was supposed to be an academic resource), the firewalls of doom have descended across most university networks in the UK, making things much less fun.
Sadly true - and it's not just recent. I remember that around 15 years ago, I sent an application pack for a PhD course at a major UK university via Royam Mail recorded delivery. This was a big pack of papers - not just an application form, but substantial portfolio of previous work. Of course, it vanished into a black hole - and I missed the applications deadline as a result. The Royal Mail was very apologetic and there was some derisory compensation offer, but I'd eat my hat if anybody lost their job.
It was all for the best anyway - I stepped back from it, realised I'd rather go into the world of work rather than further academic study and, I suspect, my life is considerably better now than it would have been if I'd spent a further 3 years studying rather than earning.
The philosophy behind the system is sound - Government subsidies to particular companies distort the market, so in a competitive marketplace, such subsidies shouldn't happen unless there's an over-riding social benefit. And it's important that there's somebody impartial to check whether such a social benefit actually exists. Sounds fair enough to me.
In practice, if you ask any UK civil servant (or, I suspect, a civil/public servant in any EU member state) who has had to deal with it what they think of the process, they will likely curl up in a little ball, clutch their head and rock slowly back and forward while letting out little moans of pain. It's slow (if you can get through it in less than a year, then you have been exceptionally clever or lucky), torturous, confusing, sometimes mired in politics and gives the overal impression of having been designed by Franz Kafka. Oh, and it also seems to involve lots of hard-copies of documents (the spread of electronic working having been a little inconsistent within the EU bureaucracy).
Because when you're working full-time, have been doing so for a decade and are generally pretty successful, it really rankles to have people who you only see at Christmas and who only pick up the phone when they have a PC problem expecting you to jump to their aid in the way that you did when you were a teenager or student with plenty of free time.
I've always been forced (by means of parental guilt-trip) to act as tech-support for family, which basically means being the guy who gets roped into decontaminated malware-laden PCs for them, despite the fact I'm in a full time job and earn more than most of them. Yes, the whole "being the guy who knows PCs" thing is really starting to grate as I move further into my 30s, not least because my knowledge is nowhere near as fresh or as deep as it was a decade ago.
Anyway, rant aside, I've been used to dealing with calls about stuff like this maybe 3 or 4 times a year. And now in the last week, I've had two calls from extended family, both relating to infections acquired from the redirected Demonoid. I'm really seething about this - we're talking about people a generation older than I am, with jobs, who are still getting infections from piracy sites. For a decade now, I've been operating on the basis of "Do I need it? If not, do I want it? Can I justify spending money on it? And if not, is there a free-as-in-beer legal alternative available?"
Anyway, I've said I'll "help" with these infections at the weekend. But I'm not going to be spending hours running malware removal kits and trawling through registries. If they have legal Windows reinstall discs, then fine. If not (and I'll bet they don't), they'll be going out to the shops to buy them and then doing format/reinstalls. Backups? Any that they hadn't made pre-infection (and they won't have done any) will, I shall argue, pose too much of a risk of reinfection (which might even be true).
Might encourage them to think twice next time. But probably won't.
I played for about 3 months after launch. It was quite good in some respects, but badly lacking in others. I've been tempted to go back from time to time, but Bioware keep finding new ways to put me off (of which this is one).
The good stuff:
- The storyline stuff was pretty nice. Some were better than others - Jedi Consular was fairly po-faced and boring, but Trooper was quite fun and quite "different" for a Star Wars setting. The game also did a good job of adding further bits of story even after you finished the 1-50 grind.
- The instance design was decent. WoW has settled on a philosophy of "bite sized" 5-man instances, which can be completed in half an hour or less. That has some advantages, but I enjoyed the longer and more involved instances in ToR.
- The level-up process was more challenging, and did a lot more to teach you how to play your class than the WoW equivalent. To beat some of the solo quests, you needed to get at least a basic understanding of core "WoWlike" MMO concepts such as threat, crowd control, interrupts and cooldown use. So unlike in WoW, players would hit the level cap with at least a basic idea of how to play their class. And linked to this...
- The companion system was great. It meant that, unlike in WoW, it was perfectly viable to level as (and hence learn the mechanics of) a tank or healer.
- The talent trees were, for the most part, interesting. Like how they used to be in WoW, before Blizzard adopted the mantra of over-simplification.
- And finally, the crafting system was decent. While there was perhaps slightly too much of a "timesink" component, there were nevertheless some really interesting mechanics at play. And crafting felt much better integrated into the end-game, unlike in WoW, where aside from Jewelcrafting and Enchanting, it feels almost like an after-thought these days.
But there was also quite a lot of bad stuff:
- The servers. Bioware got this badly wrong. They horribly over-estimated both their initial number of players and the percentage of those players who would stick around. There were too many servers and their population caps were set too low. Many servers (including mine) never really got a large player-base and most of that then vanished once the free-trial period expired and the subs kicked in. Many servers became graveyards - and there was no way to transfer between them, short of starting an entirely new character.
- Worse still, there was no group-finder tool for end-game content. I wasn't too badly positioned, as I was part of a small clique within my guild that was able to meet up at regular times to run flashpoints. But I was part of a small minority. For most players, getting a group for flashpoints could mean hours of spamming the chat channels. I gather that after I left, Bioware did add such a tool but - shockingly - it didn't have cross-server functionality. So if your server's a graveyard, you're no better off.
- But at the same time, the 4-man limit on groups for flashpoints was too low. WoW has a 5-man limit and some older MMOs (such as FFXI) had a 6-man limit. 4 just places too many limitations on tactics.
- The UI wasn't bad, but it really, really needed the option for third party extensions (like those which are both allowed and encouraged in WoW). Playing without proper raid-frames and without a threat-meter was just painful.
- Travel was a pain in the backside. Azeroth is cut up into fairly large chunks - you can go an awfully long way without ever seeing a loading screen. In ToR, the world was split up into planets and getting between them was an absolute pain. Space-ports served no purpose other than to act as irritating timesinks.
- And finally, it just didn't push itself to go beyond WoW. Those aspects in which it could have used the Star Wars franchise to be more ambitious were woefully under-developed. The best example here was the space combat - a fun diversion at first, but of very limited appeal in the long run.
Hey, I quite like Microsoft. They're not perfect, but Win7 is good enough that it's the only OS on my PC. I own all three video game consoles and, of the three, the 360 gets the most use. If you're looking for a rabid anti-MSer, then it's not me.
But an amusingly blatant shill is an amusingly blatant shill.
Even the well-known and strongly libertarian political blogger Paul Staines/Guido Fawkes is being a bit cagey about this one. Making death threats via a written, public means of communication is about as far from smart as you can get.
Actually, just noticed that more details of the exchange, including screen-caps of the deleted posts, are available at this blog (along with a bit of commentary, so you can make your own mind up.
Doctor Matt seems to have created his account very recently. He also seems to have found and be very excited by an awful lot of things that Microsoft Research have been saying. One or two of these things are even relevant to this thread.
Not that I wish to suggest anything but... perhaps Doctor Matt might wish to consider whether he has any particular relationships with Microsoft that might usefully be disclosed?:)
We all know the old adage about a civilised society being just three missed meals away from barbarism. In the modern world, I wonder whether something similar could be said for the power supply. And might broadband ever fall into the same camp?
Yeah, that's it. A massive, deep, and uncritical affection. It couldn't be because people get tired of sifting through drek and don't mind that there are consistently solid (if not always truly inspired) games available for Nintendo's systems. I didn't bother reading the rest of your spiel because I've heard it before.
But besides that, why the fuck do you care what people play?
Because the thread's about whether there are any killer titles for the 3DS? And because, as a 3DS owner, it's fair enough for me to offer an opinion on the quality of first-party 3DS games. And also to provide fair warning that - as you have so amply demonstrated - finding impartial opinions on said games can be very difficult, due to a particularly widespread and obnoxious fanboy factor associated with Nintendo (not the only one in the industry, for sure, but certainly the worst - worse even than Apple).
The question for you might be why you even felt it necessary to get in such a pissy fit over a negative comment in an otherwise reasonably balanced post? Worried I might make Nintendo cry?
Oh, in a technical sense, you're absolutely right. What I was talking about, however, was the software line-up and the general market position.
The PS2 dominated its generation in a way that I don't think any other console has achieved before or since. It had a vast installed base, but that's not all of it - the Wii also has an installed base, but is a long way from being a dominant platform. What the PS2 had was the game-sales momentum to go with that installed base that made it a pretty much unstoppable force.
The other platforms had a few big-name exclusives. The Gamecube had the Nintendo first-party games, Eternal Darkness and... erm... Resident Evil 4 (which later went multiplatform). The Xbox had Halo and KOTOR, but even those it had to share with the PC. Everybody else didn't have much choice but to release for the PS2, whatever other platforms they were aiming at. That's despite the fact that the PS2 was, by all accounts, underpowered and difficult to develop for. The PS2's dominance was so great that the platform was basically the main competitor to the PS3 for a year or so after it launched (indeed, the PS2 got many of its finest games after the PS3 launch).
The DS was in a broadly similar position in the handheld world - the installed base was so huge and the attach-rate so high that developers couldn't ignore it. The dual-screen thing was confusing for some and Nintendo have a reputation for being an unpleasant company for third party developers to deal with, but you really didn't have much choice about the matter.
The 3DS, by contrast, looks unlikely to ever achieve equivalent dominance. Ok, perhaps the comparison to the Gamecube was a little unfair, but its market position is certainly more akin to that of the PS3 - it's just one competitor among several, and one which in some ways feels curiously out of touch with the times.
If you have a massive, deep and uncritical affection for Nintendo's traditional franchises (and let's face it, a lot of people on slashdot do), then it's fairly good. You've got Mario, Mario Kart, a Zelda remake, a Starfox remake and so on. That said, none of these are doing anything interestingly different. They are straight technical facelifts for the old franchises.
But if you're expecting to find a line-up like the DS had - where the machine was basically the de-facto platform for pretty much any handheld developer and got all kinds of third party games, ranging from spin-offs of big-name "proper console" franchises through to wacky niche Japanese stuff, then you'll be disappointed. The DS was a handheld version of the PS2 - pretty much everything was represented on it. The 3DS, however, is much more akin to the Gamecube or Wii - third party support is poor and narrowly focussed.
It's not like this in Japan, where the system is well on its way to supplanting the PSP (which was huge there) as the platform of choice for some pretty hardcore handheld gamers. It's got Monster Hunter and all that other stuff now and Japanese sales figures for the platform are very healthy (which can't be said for the rest of the world).
Unfortunately, that's of no benefit to us in the West. A huge number of these games are staying Japan-exclusive (to an even greater extent than was the case on the PSP) and - demonstrating yet again that despite the halo-of-virtue effect they seem to be imbued with around here, Nintendo has a deeply-rooted anti-consumer culture - the platform's the first ever handheld console to be fully region locked. So even if you know Japanese or have access to a translation guide (or even are willing to just play despite the language barrier, which I've done on occasion), no importing for you without buying a Japanese console as well.
There are a few bright-spots available in the west. Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy is a pretty good rhythm game which is also a highly potent nostalgia trip if you're a long-time fan of the series. If you can find somewhere that stocks it (which can be easier said than done) then the Tales of the Abyss remake is pretty good. The forthcoming Castlevania also looks interesting. But by and large, these are fairly thin pickings - particularly given the eye-watering prices of 3DS games (Starfox 3d is probably, in terms of cost/gameplay time ratio, the worst entertainment purchase I've ever made).
I bought a 3DS at launch and gave away my old DS when I did so. In hindsight, that was a mistake. Yes, the 3DS is backwards-compatible, but its battery life (and screen-quality in 2d mode) is poor compared to its predecessor. I could do a transatlantic flight with the DS without even thinking about the battery - the 3DS runs dry half way. The 3DS XL apparently improves the battery quite a lot - but given its price, I can't really work up the enthusiasm to buy one.
And then there's the Vita. I've got one of those as well. I do prefer it over the 3DS, but it has a whole host of... shall we say... interesting quirks and issues that I won't go into here.
While we can go to great lengths to guard against some types of security threat, we are reminded once again that the greatest risk is often from somebody who decides to take something lethal to a crowded place and do his worst with it.
People in the thread already engaging in partisan political speculation about motives relating to the film's plot or controversies surrounding it. Give it a rest, guys - too soon. It'll all come out in due course, but there's every chance it was nothing more than somebody with a random grievance picking a target area he knew would be crowded.
I'm tring to work out from TFA whether this is aimed at recruiting new teachers, or developing existing ones. If it's the former, then there have been various similar schemes (or perhaps it's a single often-rebranded scheme) in the UK over the last decade or so. The focus hasn't always been so narrowly on the STEM subjects, but it has tended to be on "difficult" subjects, where recruitment and retention of teachers is usually difficult (and where pupil uptake and performance has been fastest to decline).
In fact, I have a friend who works in teaching who got into it via the scheme in one of its various guises. He's fairly open about both its strengths and drawbacks.
In terms of strengths, he quite openly admits that the salary supplement (which was less than the GBP equivalent of $20,000 when he joined - closer to around $8,000 equivalent) was a very attactive consideration, given that he was graduating with a fair old pile of debt. None of the other career options he was considering would have made it possible for him to move away from the parents and live independently in London quite so quickly. He's also noted that he (and others like him) actually know his subject (maths) to the extent that they can actually field questions from students that go away from the narrow syllabus. He was horrified by how many of his older colleagues were dependant on being allowed to stick to a very narrow syllabus.
On the other side of the coin, a lot of his intake to the graduate scheme dropped out relatively quickly - within the first year in many cases. The scheme was highly focussed on underperforming schools - which largely tend to be those which have the most severe discipline problems. It's no secret that many classes in those schools are more about crowd control than education. As my friend is the oldest of 6 siblings, he came to this with a natural advantage. By contrast, those who had gotten onto the scheme on the basis of academic ability often simply couldn't cope with the levels of misbehaviour, abuse and violence that are endemic in our less impressive schools and dropped out.
The other problem revolved around the reactions of other teachers - and particularly the teaching unions - to the scheme members. This is a profession where pay and career advancement had long been (and is still largely expected to be) determined by length of service, rather than performance or potential. Having a bunch of "bright young things" on additional pay and a fast track to Department-head and other management positions went down in most staff-rooms like a cup of cold sick. At the same time, the unions (membership of which is not mandatory, but is widespread) did everything they legally could to make life unpleasant for them. If you find yourself on a "Fast Track" scheme like this, you need to be prepared to be a bit of a staff room pariah.
So yeah, it's not a bad idea in theory, but expect results in practice to be mixed.
I'd never, ever let a metacritic score determine whether or not I buy a game. That's not to say I don't let reviews (and review scores) influence a purchase, but I find metacritic useless.
When I check reviews of a game to work out whether I want to buy it, I'll look at the score, but it's only one small factor. What I'm actually looking for are certain factors that might be picked up in a review that will be highly likely to influence whether or not I like a game.
For example, I hate - and I do mean absolutely hate - being forced to replay long sections of a game after a death. If an overall positive review criticises a game for poor checkpointing, then I know that the game is highly likely to annoy me and I'm correspondingly less likely to buy it.
Then at other times, there are factors that drive a review score down, but don't bother me at all. A good recent example here is Lolipop Chainsaw. This one had a real spread of review scores, from 9/10 right down to about 4/10. It's clear that some of the reviewers didn't buy into the theme of the game. Others were disappointed that it wasn't (contrary to appearances) a button mashing hack-and-slash. I'd already worked out that the combat was basically a more Arkham Asylum-style methodical brawler and was quite happy with that. And the plot and setting struck me as hilarious. So I bought the game and loved it.
There's also the fact that not all sites mark to the same scale. IGN tends to be fairly "soft" in its marking - review scores tend to cluster around the 7.5+ range. But that's fine, because the review text still tends to pick up the major issues. Eurogamer tend to mark hard on most games and I generally trust their reviews - but their reviewers do feel like fanboys for a couple of companies (Blizzard and Nintendo in particular), so I know to discount them in those cases.
Anyway, tl;dr version - the factors that affect whether an individual will like a game will vary considerably depending on the individual. Trying to capture that in a single meta-score is never going to be workable.
As an intermittent reader of some of the unofficial/unsanctioned police blogs that have sprung up in the UK over the last few years, I was entirely unsurprised by this story.
Complaints to the police regarding rude messages on face-book are absolutely nothing new. Most of those in the UK seem to come from the lower rungs of the social ladder and are normally couched as complaints of "harassment" (though as in Tazmania, most of the complaints fall well short of the level needed for the behaviour to be criminal).
The real story here isn't about technology or Facebook or Twitter or whatever at all. It's about the fact that large numbers of people are so bad at managing their own lives and so used to having other people (usually some agency of the state) sort everything out for them that they think it's appropriate to bring the police into mundane arguments and disputes.
Slashdot Mirror
You know it's not a console game, right?
Right?
Blizzard have mulled over the possibility of a console release from time to time, but there's nothing announced. The game's not that different from its predecessors - as you yourself note.
In fact, the Diablo series is historically a PC/Mac series. There was a Playstation 1 version of the original, but it never got much traction. This series is as computery as a very computery thing that was just made even more computery by the injection of a big pile of computer.
I think you're using "console" as a shorthand for "shallow and repetitive". Well, I can certainly agree that Diablo games are shallow and repetitive. Absolutely. Definitely. With cherries on.
But then, I look at some of the console games I own and I don't necessarily see much in the way of shallowness or repetition in some of those. Valkyria Chronicles (PS3 exclusive) is absolutely brimming with depth and complexity, packaged beneath a highly accessible exterior. Dark Souls (360 and PS3, belated PC version due later this month) is more action oriented, but has one of the deepest and most precise combat systems I've come across. The Forza Motorsport (360 exclusive) games have depth coming out of their ears.
By all means criticise the Diablo series for its core gameplay - god knows it deserves a bit of a grilling as a counter-point to the fawning it got from some review sites. But if you're claiming it's a console game, you look ridiculous and if you're claiming that all console games are shallow, you look ignorant to boot.
This used to be true, but an increasingly popular means of compromising accounts involves using social engineering techniques not on the end user, but on the host company's support staff. Look around a bit and you'll find some shocking examples of how easily certain companies *cough* MS Xbox Live *cough* have been giving their support staff protocols which make it trivial for scumbags to compromise individual accounts via phone-call while knowing nothing more than a username.
But I agree that "hacking" is the wrong word in 99% of cases. If an account's compromised through a Sony style breach, that's "hacking". In other cases, it's best to use a different term.
Well, it might be an "inside job", but not in the way you're thinking.
There was a issue with MS Xbox Live accounts being compromised recently. I was one of the ones affected by this and, until I learned more about it, I was utterly puzzled as to how it had happened.
See, prior to the Sony breach, I had been guilty of a bit of password sharing between accounts. After the Sony breach, I get more sensibly paranoid and, other than random don't-really-care forum accounts, everything gets its own password. As part of this, I change my Xbox Live password. I go for something reasonably strong - 10 characters, mix of lower case, upper case and numerals (spending your teenaged years learning Latin and ancient Greek is great for your memory). This password is only ever entered into my (stock, unmodified) 360. I'm pretty sure my PC is free of keyloggers - but even if it isn't, this particular sequence of characters has never been typed into a PC.
A few months later, I find I'm locked out of my Xbox Live account. The password and e-mail address have been changed (the e-mail address is now some German one) and around 50GBP has been spent on MS points, of which around a quarter have been spent on FIFA DLC. Fortunately, I notice within a few hours of this happening. Half an hour later, I've spoken to MS, who have locked the account and to my bank, who have refunded the credit card transaction.
The account then spends about 3 weeks locked while MS perform an investigation. At the end of this period, I get profuse apologies from them, a free 2 month extension to my gold subscription and my account back. This takes me by surprise - I'd previously thought that, except in cases of Sony-style security breaches, almost all compromised accounts were down to the behaviour of the user. Despite the circumstances of my case, I'd been torturing myself trying to think of all the ways I might have slipped up (god knows how many rootkit scanners I ran on my PC). I'd certainly not expected MS to be bending over backwards to make amends.
Anyway, Eurogamer picks up on stories from people who've had similar cases and investigates. A few months later, we quietly get our explanation. The security breach is at MS's end, but isn't in their software - it's in the protocols that their phone support guys use. Basically, it was possible to use social engineering techniques against MS's own support staff to get them to do password resets and e-mail address changes on an account, without actually knowing anything more than the name of the account. I gather the issue has since been "rectified", but it's still alarming.
Apparently my account had raised many of the flags that makes it desirable to the scumbags who do this. It's an old account (created on the day that the Xbox Live service for the original Xbox was launched in the UK), so it's a bit like having a low UID account on slashdot. It has a reasonably high gamerscore (though not exceptional). Perhaps more importantly, a few days before my account was taken, I'd got my first 1000/1000 gamerscore on a game (and not on one of the titles that are known to be quick and easy to do it for). This apparently meant that my account was desirable not only for the ability to spend on my credit card (FIFA DLC can apparently be traded for real-life cash, and hence is a way to re-monetise XBL currency), but would also have had a high resale value.
I'd nominate William Hope Hodgeson.
Ok, maybe that's slightly disingenuous. There are actually good reasons why he isn't more widely appreciated - such as the fact that his most notable work is written in a hideous cod-medieval style and is about twice as long as it needs to be.
But among a bunch of short-stories of variable quality, he put out two staggeringly imaginative works of longer fiction.
The House on the Borderlands has a central premise that seems, at first glance, quite similar to The Time Machine. However, it has a number of significant differences in its own right. First, it imports some substantial trappings from the gothic horror genre (parts of the book are more horror than sci-fi or speculative fiction). Second, it has some really ambitious cosmological stuff - basically, think back to the "dying earth" section near the end of The Time Machine, and imagine that extrapolated forwards. This book's written in a perfectly approachable style and isn't particularly long - it may date from around a century ago, but it's still pretty accessible to the modern reader.
But the House on the Borderlands is never going to be the work that WHH is best remembered for (where he is remembered at all). That's always going to be The Night Land.
Here we have a book that is, in many ways, so far ahead of its time as to be mind-blowing. Written before the First World War, it's set in the distant future, on an Earth where the sun has gone out and where humanity survives in a gigantic arcology, beset on all sides by both natural and supernatural threats. If you're looking for literary sci-fi firsts, then this book is filled with them: arcologies, geothermal power, NASA-style food concentrates and powered armour, to name some of the more notable examples. It also does a great turn in Lovecraftian horror (indeed, Lovecraft himself was, with some reservations, an admirer of WHH), with hostile yet inscrutable supernatural forces which share quite a few traits with the Cthulhu mythos. The book is a strange combination of speculative sci-fi and fantasy-horror and is one of the most imaginative books I've ever read.
Unfortunately, it's also actively painful to read at times. It's written in the aforementioned cod-medieval style, has a completely unnecessary and rather tedious medieval framing-story, has massive amounts of repetition (particularly in the second half) and features an toe-curlingly misogynistic and implausibly written romance storyline (WHH apparently went through his short life with almost no contact with the opposite sex).
In short, it can be an extremely rewarding book to read, but it demands a lot of effort from the reader (and quite a bit of skim reading in the second half, if I'm honest). There is a modern "remake" of it by James Stoddard that you can get from Amazon's Kindle store, which switches to modern language, tightens up the framing plot, makes the romance subplot more plausible and reduces the length dramatically. That might be a better way into it - but when I tried it, I did find that a little of the original's imaginative power got lost in the translation.
Doesn't need to be kept profitable at this point, any more than chess has to be "kept profitable". Once the game is out there and people own their copies, there's not really much more expense needed to maintain it. If players can host their own matches and it has a server-browser, that's all it needs. The developer could release graphical updates, certainly, but these would be more along the lines of a company selling a fancy, pretty chess-set (which plenty of companies do).
Well... up to a point.
There are skills involved in competitive Starcraft play that will be transferable to other games. If you were a world-class Starcraft player at the point when Starcraft 2 was released and you decided to move to the new platform, then you'd be at a pretty big advantage compared to somebody like me, who played Starcraft for a few months at release, for the campaign and a bit of LAN multiplayer then moved onto other things.
I've known a few people over the years who have gotten deeply into the hardcore competitive gaming scene (though I've never had the talent, time or inclination to go that way myself). They are an incredibly conservative bunch of people when it comes to their games. These are not people who will pick up the latest releases and mess around with them for fun. They have their game, they play it, and they do not want it to change. They might speculate about when the sequel is coming out, but unless it's nothing more than a direct graphical uplift of the original, then it's highly possible that they'll angrily reject a sequel when it does appear.
I remember when Quake 3 appeared. Here was a game that had been designed by id for - and with the co-operation of - players from the hardcore QuakeWorld and Quake 2 scenes. And yet I also remember that, at release, most of the hardcore community from those games refused to make the transition for as long as possible (or in some cases, ever). I've always got the feeling that id were a bit bruised by Quake 3's reception - certainly, it was the last time they put multiplayer at the heart of their game design.
Why the ultra-conservatism? In part, it's driven by ego and a desire to protect their position. These people are among a tiny elite in a game and their self-esteem and (if they've gone professional) their income depends on remaining part of that scene. Change - particularly transition to a new game - represents a risk to that. What if they fall behind the curve?
But there's also a broader point, which gets to the difference between professional video gaming and more traditional games and sports. Now, some sports do evolve over time - but they do so slowly. In some extreme cases such as Chess and Go, while the tactics people use at the top levels have evolved, the rules of the games themselves have been constant for centuries. Video games, on the other hand, are a fast evolving medium. Technological advances don't just mean better graphics - they make it practical to realise entirely new types of game. And at the same time, games are developed to make a profit, so they will evolve to chase whatever the marketing men believe is the new big-selling trend (currently modern military shooters with objective-based competitive multiplayer).
I suspect that what will happen in the end is that a couple of defined "standard" professional-level video games will emerge, with largely fixed game mechanics. Quite plausibly, this will mean one core RTS, one core FPS and one core MOBA. These will receive occasional graphical uplifts to reflect technological advances, but gameplay mechanics, balance etc will become much more locked than they are now. So if, hypothetically, Starcraft should become that RTS "standard", the hitpoints of a Zergling would basically become set more or less in stone, perhaps being reviewed in 20 years time. Meanwhile, "normal" commercial games development will separate further away from these games, continuing more or less as it is at the moment. So Blizzard might put out Starcrafts 3, 4 and 5, with new storyline, units and balance changes, but with no expectation of these becoming the new hardcore professional standard.
Is any of the above an argument that there is any worth in becoming a professional gamer, other than the money you can make from it during the fairly brief window where you can stay at the top? Absolutely not. But then, I'd say that the same goes for professional sports.
About 30GBP. Which under the circumstances felt like a bit of a joke.
UK broadband is... inconsistent. Very good in places, appalling in others, and still not available in a small minority of places (mostly rural, but with a few surprising urban blackspots).
I'm lucky - the place I moved into in April (a South London outer suburb) is in an area covered by Virgin Media's cable service, and seems to be at the better end of what they offer. My service is advertised as "up to" 100mbit downstream and 10mbit upstream. The router is capped at 10% above those levels. In reality, during the evening peak (7PM-10PM), I get around 85-90mbit downstream and 8.5mbit upstream. Outside of the peak, I tend to get around 104mbit downstream and 9.5mbit upstream. It's been reliable so far and, touch wood, I'm happy with it.
In my old place in New Cross Gate (South London inner-suburb), where I was still on the BT copper network, my service was advertised as "up to" 8mbit downstream and 0.5mbit upstream. I got the full upstream and around 5mbit downstream. I lived there for 7 years - when I moved in, that was an excellent connection. However, it had no upgrades at all over that time and by the time I left, it was well behind the curve. It was also unreliable, particularly during periods of wet weather (rarer than you might expect in London, but they do happen), because the local exchange apparently had issues with water seepage.
A couple of miles from there you have Lewisham, which is known as a broadband blackspot, despite still being very close to central London. Unless things have improved over the last month or two, the area was known for dismal broadband speeds - the lucky ones would get 2mbit downstream (with frequent cutouts), while many were below 0.1mbit.
Basically, if you are lucky enough to live in an area with new and/or well-maintained infrastructure, you can get a pretty good broadband service in the UK. But a lot of BT's network is pretty much crumbling and they've not been in much of a hurry to do anything about it.
Until I moved into my current place, the fastest connection I'd ever had was a 10mbit symetric JANET connection in my room at University more than a decade ago (though your chances of being able to download from anywhere outside of the local network at that speed were pretty much zero back then, of course). That was a great connection, but today's students are unlikely to be as lucky as I was. Back then, there were no effective restrictions on what I could do with it, so online gaming and whatnot was very much on the menu. Since then (largely as a result in the rise of P2P traffic, which put a big strain on what was supposed to be an academic resource), the firewalls of doom have descended across most university networks in the UK, making things much less fun.
Sadly true - and it's not just recent. I remember that around 15 years ago, I sent an application pack for a PhD course at a major UK university via Royam Mail recorded delivery. This was a big pack of papers - not just an application form, but substantial portfolio of previous work. Of course, it vanished into a black hole - and I missed the applications deadline as a result. The Royal Mail was very apologetic and there was some derisory compensation offer, but I'd eat my hat if anybody lost their job.
It was all for the best anyway - I stepped back from it, realised I'd rather go into the world of work rather than further academic study and, I suspect, my life is considerably better now than it would have been if I'd spent a further 3 years studying rather than earning.
Ah... state aid clearances...
The philosophy behind the system is sound - Government subsidies to particular companies distort the market, so in a competitive marketplace, such subsidies shouldn't happen unless there's an over-riding social benefit. And it's important that there's somebody impartial to check whether such a social benefit actually exists. Sounds fair enough to me.
In practice, if you ask any UK civil servant (or, I suspect, a civil/public servant in any EU member state) who has had to deal with it what they think of the process, they will likely curl up in a little ball, clutch their head and rock slowly back and forward while letting out little moans of pain. It's slow (if you can get through it in less than a year, then you have been exceptionally clever or lucky), torturous, confusing, sometimes mired in politics and gives the overal impression of having been designed by Franz Kafka. Oh, and it also seems to involve lots of hard-copies of documents (the spread of electronic working having been a little inconsistent within the EU bureaucracy).
Because when you're working full-time, have been doing so for a decade and are generally pretty successful, it really rankles to have people who you only see at Christmas and who only pick up the phone when they have a PC problem expecting you to jump to their aid in the way that you did when you were a teenager or student with plenty of free time.
I've always been forced (by means of parental guilt-trip) to act as tech-support for family, which basically means being the guy who gets roped into decontaminated malware-laden PCs for them, despite the fact I'm in a full time job and earn more than most of them. Yes, the whole "being the guy who knows PCs" thing is really starting to grate as I move further into my 30s, not least because my knowledge is nowhere near as fresh or as deep as it was a decade ago.
Anyway, rant aside, I've been used to dealing with calls about stuff like this maybe 3 or 4 times a year. And now in the last week, I've had two calls from extended family, both relating to infections acquired from the redirected Demonoid. I'm really seething about this - we're talking about people a generation older than I am, with jobs, who are still getting infections from piracy sites. For a decade now, I've been operating on the basis of "Do I need it? If not, do I want it? Can I justify spending money on it? And if not, is there a free-as-in-beer legal alternative available?"
Anyway, I've said I'll "help" with these infections at the weekend. But I'm not going to be spending hours running malware removal kits and trawling through registries. If they have legal Windows reinstall discs, then fine. If not (and I'll bet they don't), they'll be going out to the shops to buy them and then doing format/reinstalls. Backups? Any that they hadn't made pre-infection (and they won't have done any) will, I shall argue, pose too much of a risk of reinfection (which might even be true).
Might encourage them to think twice next time. But probably won't.
I played for about 3 months after launch. It was quite good in some respects, but badly lacking in others. I've been tempted to go back from time to time, but Bioware keep finding new ways to put me off (of which this is one).
The good stuff:
- The storyline stuff was pretty nice. Some were better than others - Jedi Consular was fairly po-faced and boring, but Trooper was quite fun and quite "different" for a Star Wars setting. The game also did a good job of adding further bits of story even after you finished the 1-50 grind.
- The instance design was decent. WoW has settled on a philosophy of "bite sized" 5-man instances, which can be completed in half an hour or less. That has some advantages, but I enjoyed the longer and more involved instances in ToR.
- The level-up process was more challenging, and did a lot more to teach you how to play your class than the WoW equivalent. To beat some of the solo quests, you needed to get at least a basic understanding of core "WoWlike" MMO concepts such as threat, crowd control, interrupts and cooldown use. So unlike in WoW, players would hit the level cap with at least a basic idea of how to play their class. And linked to this...
- The companion system was great. It meant that, unlike in WoW, it was perfectly viable to level as (and hence learn the mechanics of) a tank or healer.
- The talent trees were, for the most part, interesting. Like how they used to be in WoW, before Blizzard adopted the mantra of over-simplification.
- And finally, the crafting system was decent. While there was perhaps slightly too much of a "timesink" component, there were nevertheless some really interesting mechanics at play. And crafting felt much better integrated into the end-game, unlike in WoW, where aside from Jewelcrafting and Enchanting, it feels almost like an after-thought these days.
But there was also quite a lot of bad stuff:
- The servers. Bioware got this badly wrong. They horribly over-estimated both their initial number of players and the percentage of those players who would stick around. There were too many servers and their population caps were set too low. Many servers (including mine) never really got a large player-base and most of that then vanished once the free-trial period expired and the subs kicked in. Many servers became graveyards - and there was no way to transfer between them, short of starting an entirely new character.
- Worse still, there was no group-finder tool for end-game content. I wasn't too badly positioned, as I was part of a small clique within my guild that was able to meet up at regular times to run flashpoints. But I was part of a small minority. For most players, getting a group for flashpoints could mean hours of spamming the chat channels. I gather that after I left, Bioware did add such a tool but - shockingly - it didn't have cross-server functionality. So if your server's a graveyard, you're no better off.
- But at the same time, the 4-man limit on groups for flashpoints was too low. WoW has a 5-man limit and some older MMOs (such as FFXI) had a 6-man limit. 4 just places too many limitations on tactics.
- The UI wasn't bad, but it really, really needed the option for third party extensions (like those which are both allowed and encouraged in WoW). Playing without proper raid-frames and without a threat-meter was just painful.
- Travel was a pain in the backside. Azeroth is cut up into fairly large chunks - you can go an awfully long way without ever seeing a loading screen. In ToR, the world was split up into planets and getting between them was an absolute pain. Space-ports served no purpose other than to act as irritating timesinks.
- And finally, it just didn't push itself to go beyond WoW. Those aspects in which it could have used the Star Wars franchise to be more ambitious were woefully under-developed. The best example here was the space combat - a fun diversion at first, but of very limited appeal in the long run.
Hey, I quite like Microsoft. They're not perfect, but Win7 is good enough that it's the only OS on my PC. I own all three video game consoles and, of the three, the 360 gets the most use. If you're looking for a rabid anti-MSer, then it's not me.
But an amusingly blatant shill is an amusingly blatant shill.
Even the well-known and strongly libertarian political blogger Paul Staines/Guido Fawkes is being a bit cagey about this one. Making death threats via a written, public means of communication is about as far from smart as you can get.
Actually, just noticed that more details of the exchange, including screen-caps of the deleted posts, are available at this blog (along with a bit of commentary, so you can make your own mind up.
Doctor Matt seems to have created his account very recently. He also seems to have found and be very excited by an awful lot of things that Microsoft Research have been saying. One or two of these things are even relevant to this thread.
Not that I wish to suggest anything but... perhaps Doctor Matt might wish to consider whether he has any particular relationships with Microsoft that might usefully be disclosed? :)
Saw an interesting and partially-related piece yesterday about scheduled and unscheduled power-outages in neighbouring Pakistan and the social unrest that can result from them.
We all know the old adage about a civilised society being just three missed meals away from barbarism. In the modern world, I wonder whether something similar could be said for the power supply. And might broadband ever fall into the same camp?
Because the thread's about whether there are any killer titles for the 3DS? And because, as a 3DS owner, it's fair enough for me to offer an opinion on the quality of first-party 3DS games. And also to provide fair warning that - as you have so amply demonstrated - finding impartial opinions on said games can be very difficult, due to a particularly widespread and obnoxious fanboy factor associated with Nintendo (not the only one in the industry, for sure, but certainly the worst - worse even than Apple).
The question for you might be why you even felt it necessary to get in such a pissy fit over a negative comment in an otherwise reasonably balanced post? Worried I might make Nintendo cry?
Oh, in a technical sense, you're absolutely right. What I was talking about, however, was the software line-up and the general market position.
The PS2 dominated its generation in a way that I don't think any other console has achieved before or since. It had a vast installed base, but that's not all of it - the Wii also has an installed base, but is a long way from being a dominant platform. What the PS2 had was the game-sales momentum to go with that installed base that made it a pretty much unstoppable force.
The other platforms had a few big-name exclusives. The Gamecube had the Nintendo first-party games, Eternal Darkness and... erm... Resident Evil 4 (which later went multiplatform). The Xbox had Halo and KOTOR, but even those it had to share with the PC. Everybody else didn't have much choice but to release for the PS2, whatever other platforms they were aiming at. That's despite the fact that the PS2 was, by all accounts, underpowered and difficult to develop for. The PS2's dominance was so great that the platform was basically the main competitor to the PS3 for a year or so after it launched (indeed, the PS2 got many of its finest games after the PS3 launch).
The DS was in a broadly similar position in the handheld world - the installed base was so huge and the attach-rate so high that developers couldn't ignore it. The dual-screen thing was confusing for some and Nintendo have a reputation for being an unpleasant company for third party developers to deal with, but you really didn't have much choice about the matter.
The 3DS, by contrast, looks unlikely to ever achieve equivalent dominance. Ok, perhaps the comparison to the Gamecube was a little unfair, but its market position is certainly more akin to that of the PS3 - it's just one competitor among several, and one which in some ways feels curiously out of touch with the times.
Yes and no. It depends what you want.
If you have a massive, deep and uncritical affection for Nintendo's traditional franchises (and let's face it, a lot of people on slashdot do), then it's fairly good. You've got Mario, Mario Kart, a Zelda remake, a Starfox remake and so on. That said, none of these are doing anything interestingly different. They are straight technical facelifts for the old franchises.
But if you're expecting to find a line-up like the DS had - where the machine was basically the de-facto platform for pretty much any handheld developer and got all kinds of third party games, ranging from spin-offs of big-name "proper console" franchises through to wacky niche Japanese stuff, then you'll be disappointed. The DS was a handheld version of the PS2 - pretty much everything was represented on it. The 3DS, however, is much more akin to the Gamecube or Wii - third party support is poor and narrowly focussed.
It's not like this in Japan, where the system is well on its way to supplanting the PSP (which was huge there) as the platform of choice for some pretty hardcore handheld gamers. It's got Monster Hunter and all that other stuff now and Japanese sales figures for the platform are very healthy (which can't be said for the rest of the world).
Unfortunately, that's of no benefit to us in the West. A huge number of these games are staying Japan-exclusive (to an even greater extent than was the case on the PSP) and - demonstrating yet again that despite the halo-of-virtue effect they seem to be imbued with around here, Nintendo has a deeply-rooted anti-consumer culture - the platform's the first ever handheld console to be fully region locked. So even if you know Japanese or have access to a translation guide (or even are willing to just play despite the language barrier, which I've done on occasion), no importing for you without buying a Japanese console as well.
There are a few bright-spots available in the west. Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy is a pretty good rhythm game which is also a highly potent nostalgia trip if you're a long-time fan of the series. If you can find somewhere that stocks it (which can be easier said than done) then the Tales of the Abyss remake is pretty good. The forthcoming Castlevania also looks interesting. But by and large, these are fairly thin pickings - particularly given the eye-watering prices of 3DS games (Starfox 3d is probably, in terms of cost/gameplay time ratio, the worst entertainment purchase I've ever made).
I bought a 3DS at launch and gave away my old DS when I did so. In hindsight, that was a mistake. Yes, the 3DS is backwards-compatible, but its battery life (and screen-quality in 2d mode) is poor compared to its predecessor. I could do a transatlantic flight with the DS without even thinking about the battery - the 3DS runs dry half way. The 3DS XL apparently improves the battery quite a lot - but given its price, I can't really work up the enthusiasm to buy one.
And then there's the Vita. I've got one of those as well. I do prefer it over the 3DS, but it has a whole host of... shall we say... interesting quirks and issues that I won't go into here.
Grandparent here.
I'm a Londoner.
Try 7/7.
No guns involved.
While we can go to great lengths to guard against some types of security threat, we are reminded once again that the greatest risk is often from somebody who decides to take something lethal to a crowded place and do his worst with it.
People in the thread already engaging in partisan political speculation about motives relating to the film's plot or controversies surrounding it. Give it a rest, guys - too soon. It'll all come out in due course, but there's every chance it was nothing more than somebody with a random grievance picking a target area he knew would be crowded.
I'm tring to work out from TFA whether this is aimed at recruiting new teachers, or developing existing ones. If it's the former, then there have been various similar schemes (or perhaps it's a single often-rebranded scheme) in the UK over the last decade or so. The focus hasn't always been so narrowly on the STEM subjects, but it has tended to be on "difficult" subjects, where recruitment and retention of teachers is usually difficult (and where pupil uptake and performance has been fastest to decline).
In fact, I have a friend who works in teaching who got into it via the scheme in one of its various guises. He's fairly open about both its strengths and drawbacks.
In terms of strengths, he quite openly admits that the salary supplement (which was less than the GBP equivalent of $20,000 when he joined - closer to around $8,000 equivalent) was a very attactive consideration, given that he was graduating with a fair old pile of debt. None of the other career options he was considering would have made it possible for him to move away from the parents and live independently in London quite so quickly. He's also noted that he (and others like him) actually know his subject (maths) to the extent that they can actually field questions from students that go away from the narrow syllabus. He was horrified by how many of his older colleagues were dependant on being allowed to stick to a very narrow syllabus.
On the other side of the coin, a lot of his intake to the graduate scheme dropped out relatively quickly - within the first year in many cases. The scheme was highly focussed on underperforming schools - which largely tend to be those which have the most severe discipline problems. It's no secret that many classes in those schools are more about crowd control than education. As my friend is the oldest of 6 siblings, he came to this with a natural advantage. By contrast, those who had gotten onto the scheme on the basis of academic ability often simply couldn't cope with the levels of misbehaviour, abuse and violence that are endemic in our less impressive schools and dropped out.
The other problem revolved around the reactions of other teachers - and particularly the teaching unions - to the scheme members. This is a profession where pay and career advancement had long been (and is still largely expected to be) determined by length of service, rather than performance or potential. Having a bunch of "bright young things" on additional pay and a fast track to Department-head and other management positions went down in most staff-rooms like a cup of cold sick. At the same time, the unions (membership of which is not mandatory, but is widespread) did everything they legally could to make life unpleasant for them. If you find yourself on a "Fast Track" scheme like this, you need to be prepared to be a bit of a staff room pariah.
So yeah, it's not a bad idea in theory, but expect results in practice to be mixed.
I'd never, ever let a metacritic score determine whether or not I buy a game. That's not to say I don't let reviews (and review scores) influence a purchase, but I find metacritic useless.
When I check reviews of a game to work out whether I want to buy it, I'll look at the score, but it's only one small factor. What I'm actually looking for are certain factors that might be picked up in a review that will be highly likely to influence whether or not I like a game.
For example, I hate - and I do mean absolutely hate - being forced to replay long sections of a game after a death. If an overall positive review criticises a game for poor checkpointing, then I know that the game is highly likely to annoy me and I'm correspondingly less likely to buy it.
Then at other times, there are factors that drive a review score down, but don't bother me at all. A good recent example here is Lolipop Chainsaw. This one had a real spread of review scores, from 9/10 right down to about 4/10. It's clear that some of the reviewers didn't buy into the theme of the game. Others were disappointed that it wasn't (contrary to appearances) a button mashing hack-and-slash. I'd already worked out that the combat was basically a more Arkham Asylum-style methodical brawler and was quite happy with that. And the plot and setting struck me as hilarious. So I bought the game and loved it.
There's also the fact that not all sites mark to the same scale. IGN tends to be fairly "soft" in its marking - review scores tend to cluster around the 7.5+ range. But that's fine, because the review text still tends to pick up the major issues. Eurogamer tend to mark hard on most games and I generally trust their reviews - but their reviewers do feel like fanboys for a couple of companies (Blizzard and Nintendo in particular), so I know to discount them in those cases.
Anyway, tl;dr version - the factors that affect whether an individual will like a game will vary considerably depending on the individual. Trying to capture that in a single meta-score is never going to be workable.
As an intermittent reader of some of the unofficial/unsanctioned police blogs that have sprung up in the UK over the last few years, I was entirely unsurprised by this story.
Complaints to the police regarding rude messages on face-book are absolutely nothing new. Most of those in the UK seem to come from the lower rungs of the social ladder and are normally couched as complaints of "harassment" (though as in Tazmania, most of the complaints fall well short of the level needed for the behaviour to be criminal).
The real story here isn't about technology or Facebook or Twitter or whatever at all. It's about the fact that large numbers of people are so bad at managing their own lives and so used to having other people (usually some agency of the state) sort everything out for them that they think it's appropriate to bring the police into mundane arguments and disputes.