The point is, while the game is entertaining it's the cinematic qualities that you enjoy the most, the actual game is quite monotonous but they hide this fact by using great art and VA, making each shooter level a contained experience.
I'd say the artists are really what really made mass effect, the amount of detail in the art is just amazing for a video game, the way faces move, animate, and the VA in the conversations and how conversations are skippable as well as having subtitles (in most cases you can read faster then someone can talk).
While the game is enjoyable they took the easy path, they covered up the game's deficits with voice overs and high quality cinematics and cinematic level design to keep your interest, so you don't notice the fact that they basically took the easy road in making ME2.
Like for instance the first part with Shepard on the ship where you are out in space, the artistry was just amazing, they couldn't have pulled the experience together without the artists.
... why haven't console makers displaced phone makers by making their own portable phone hybrid handheld? They have all the background necessary to make a killer phone that could wipe out most other phones.
Re:I actually kind of miss the old combat system
on
Review: Mass Effect 2
·
· Score: 1
"ME2 has a more "Gears of War" feel to it"
It is gears of war in the ME universe, it uses the same engine, it's little wonder the game essentially IS a shooter in the vein of gears of war psuedo-3rd person style (since it really plays more like first person with teh avatar merely being able ot be looked at while aiming).
They turned ME2 into gears of war ish fps
on
Review: Mass Effect 2
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The truth is ME2 is basically now gears of war in the Mass effect 2 universe, the RPG system is laughable, the only thing you end up doing is upgrading your powers but most of the time you can rely solely on guns and powers are kind of redundant.
They took out some of the best parts that just needed fixing from ME1, I loved exploring planets in the mako but even I knew it could get tedious and boring only because the team didn't know how to improve it or where to take it, they could have done a lot with it if they had the right people who knew where to take it.
Also if you are going for paragon/renegade you pretty much have to go soldier for the bonus's or import a mass effect 1 save (which you can now find online).
"That's the funny thing. Many of the dumber grammatical errors you see on Slashdot are made by people who are evidently native English speakers. They're things that should have been corrected in grade school, like problems with "your" and "you're", or "their", "there" and "they're". As they occur in trends like many other mindless activities, the latest one is "loose" vs. "lose". "
Actually these things aren't "correctable" in many people who make these errors. They have unconscious errors in their neurology and they make these mistakes without realizing them, there are gaps in expressing things through motor system of the brain. I'm one who can think clearly internally but when I go to express what I am thinking some words I told my motor system to type will never make it there or there is mis retrieval.
The spoken and writing areas of how words are stored in the brain overlap, the ironic thing about slashdot is that most people here have no background or have read up on modern neurology.
A quick course in the neurology and the activation of these networks will give you a new appreciation for why these people make errors constantly and no amount of schooling is going to correct the problem for many people.
Online many people don't really care if they make small mistakes, it's expected.
A good place to start would be to get a copy of Descartes error, it will give you a new appreciation for how much of what you take for granted in how you function is done by unconscious processes and you're not 'really in control', your control is really minimal and a function of the health of the underlying neurology of different parts of the brain and nervous system.
"The demographic of the underclass is now and has always been manufactured for the purpose of serving the people who have access to knowledge. If that class is growing, then it only means that the elites are more successful at it."
No doubt about it, I agree with pretty much everything you say but lets also not forget that much of the lack of effort comes from being born "rich" (historically speaking), being ignorant, inexperienced, young and not exposed to the harshness to real crushing poverty or war gives one a warped view of what one's ancestors built and escaped from.
The problem is this corruption flows via the mass media and from the top down many times, the richer you are the more you can afford to just flagrantly indulge whatever animal impulses you have because you are free from burden of answering to others for your existence.
That and many schools simply cannot maintain quality control on their teachers, looking back on my own education in public school and highschool it was bloody miracle most of those people had jobs!
I think it is more a problem that with wealth comes the ability to afford to be picky and choosy about whom you associate with or not, this goes a long way to explaining the divorce rate and relaxation of mores as well.
"My wife works in the public schools. I learned one thing from her. Parents claim they want schools with touch academics. However, they also wants their kids to get a 4.0, or very close to it and go apeshit when it doesn't happen. So when a school does crack down and start to grade accurately to touch academic standards, the parents go ballistic. These parents start harassing the teacher, the principal, the administrators, and the school board."
This has more to do with the fact the job market for youth is awful and parents everywhere have drilled into their kids "if you don't go to university you will be poor!", it's just a sign of the times and changing economic circumstances. No one really likes competition when they are on the receiving end of a lower class income.
School today mostly revolves around income hierarchy and not really education anymore, the structure of our society unfortunately has conflicting demands that simply can't be met without conflict.
"But, as usual, most people refuse to see this, or much anything beyond the reach of their computer monitor, which far from being a window to the world at large has, in recent years, turned out to be a tool for reenforcing one's own ideology by being able to filter information down to almost exclusively that with which one is wont to agree. O, tempora... O, mores!"
But this has always been a problem, the truth is human beings have always preferred what appeals to them over truth, after all what is religion other then another triumph of ideology over truth?
We might call them useful lies or noble lies, or try to justify it but even leaders of past ages recognized human nature and the insanity and cosmic malfunctioning of a large percentage of the population. Consider it was at one point ok not so long ago to be openly racist. It's hard to imagine people being so cruel to one another but it was normal for many.
Let's try not to idealize the past, the devolution of language has more to do with demographic and the growing population of those who are not cognitively well endowed and poor environment then anything else I would imagine.
Ironically enough it's academic work that is jargon laden, wasn't it einstein who said if you can't communicate it in simple language you're not really good at communicating or understanding your own ideas?
... and speak it. The so-called "misuse" of grammar is kind of idiotic given that language is invented and grammar changes naturally over time.
Try reading a really old king james version of the bible. It's still "english" and the 'grammar' may be correct but you don't speak like that and it's not necessarily 'english' you'd recognize as how you think or speak in your own voice.
Let's also face facts there are many problems with the english language in general that don't make much sense at all from the way you pronounce a vowel or word and the way it is spelled. Not to mention the strange special cases of silent consonants and the like.
People like efficiency, while some may think this is an expression of illiteracy others just see it as the most efficient way to express an idea.
"There are plenty of very smart people that would agree that stupid people did see the potential of computers and the stupid people were geeks."
Partly true, not all geeks realized the computers potential but most of the smart ones did. If you don't realize somethings potential it's clear you aren't that bright and can't take in information other then your own viewpoint, that is what stupid people do - they can't see the forest from the tree's.
The geeks who realized and took feedback from their failures are the ones who developed empires (apple and microsoft). You still can't get all the whizbang ease of use without knowing what you are doing and getting your hands dirty.
No doubt someone who knows people don't want to deal with the technical side of everything just means more work and research by geeks into making things that are highly complex usable by automating and designing things to carry the load and save time for others.
It's really about time saving most of the time and sometimes also catering to the weakest segments of the human population.
Computers do what people can't, people are not good at computers, therefore make computers that any idiot can use.
But there are limits on how much you can dumb something down before those limits of the design are what is holding you back from progress. The great thing about PC was the removal and constant expansion on the "upper limit" of what was possible.
"The simple fact is that 98% of people out there just want their computer to work. They don't care about getting under the hood. If it plays their youtube videos, netflix streaming content, and lets them send some emails and play the latest game they bought from Steam or Best Buy, they're happy. That's all that's needed. So a company catering to that market instead of the 1 or 2 percent who want to tinker under the hood is just good business."
While in a sense what you say is true, in reality it reflects on the anti-intellectual nature and stupidity of most of the population.
And yet you are absolutely sure you said that sentence, either that sentence exists (1) or it does not (0), when people start claiming they don't really exist or are not sure they exist we lock them up.
The fact that you can differentiate (you know there are differences) means in order to be aware, to know the difference between this bit or that bit, to know anything at all, one must be able to have absolutely know there are differences, no matter how imperfect they are presented to you. You knwo that those imperfect differences exist whether you realize it or not.
No I understand it just fine, either a phenomena 1) really exists or 2) it doesn't, either you can harness knowledge to create computers or you can't. It's a pretty cut and dry question. You have to have absolute understanding of something or else you could not move forward (i.e. you know a door exists in front of you, it is either open or closed, withou tunderstanding that the door is made up of atoms, electrons, etc).
So absolute knowledge is possible, it's just that human beings can only take the easy layers first (Door exists and is closed, therefore don't walk into door).
Your ability to navigate without dying proves that absolute knowledge is possible, in fact human navigation is repeated experimental collisions and their detection. Either those collisions 1) really happened and are there or 2) are not.
For those who think science is ont about "truth" we can do an experiment - put a gun to your head if you are confident science is not about reality and pull the trigger. Just because science is imperfect (because humans are) does not mean truth does not exist, it means human beings do not yet have a full understanding of the truth.
It also assumes a human centric perspective, what if the universe is 1 bit of information and the many bits of the universe from our perspective are actually fractions of 1 bit of information?
Disney has that already, there is NO evidence that the copyright extensions and abuses will be alleviated only that the law will get worse and the people will still do as they wish.
Look man it's quote obvious that you are stretching things.
In terms of my expectations of what RPG's are that had been built up from many generations of console and PC gaming, MMO's were a huge step backward for me from all RPG's past conventions.
You come across as someone defending a dumbed down genre for the slow/easy interface allows the masses to watch their virtual avatars.
The interactivity in most MMO's has stagnated compared to past games, the lack of proper collision detection and environmental interaction barely exists in MMO's and is all "faked" or illusionary where as in real offline games it works how it's supposed to.
I like to be in control of my avatar, I like to have different move's where there is skill involved in performing the act's, so that when you get better at them you are rewarded. In stat's based/automated MMO's like WoW for instance, that kind of thing has been ripped out completely because of making these games accessible to anyone from 5/6 to 80+ years old.
Accessibility came at the cost of removing older RPG conventions from the game completely and inserting new frustrating ones (i.e. forced travel, cooldowns on warpstones, etc, etc). Where as in Diablo 1/2 you could townportal instantly to wherever you needed or there were conveniently placed waypoints that were spaced appropriately.
"Time spent playing (per dollar) seems like a good measurement"
I disagree, the fun of a game is not correlated with how much you paid for it, this obsession hours per dollar is quite absurd. What is DOTA worth in hours per dollar? Since when I bought War 3 DOTA did not yet exist.
"Then would you prefer a video game where you have to control every step of the player character's walking?"
When you can get up and go to the bathroom while fighting a monster is where I draw the line, the game has been automated to such a point where you could merely develop algorithms to click menu buttons for you if you wanted and merely watch your MMO avatar do everything for you.
Since for most MMO's, the thing you do most often is navigate and business types design the game in such a way to maximize revenue and not fun unfortunately, so they purposely put things in the game that are actually NOT fun but for a certain warped segment of the population hooks their psychology. We've all heard people say they keep playing MMO's without liking it. I look at those people as a little off, but they exist in large enough numbers apparently.
They are not meaningless they help you find reviewers that share your tastes, I always read the lowest scores to find gamers who share my tastes. Gamer's reviews of games are generally correct even if they do not always know why the dislike a game, there is a trend of psychological types and clustering which is very useful.
I dislike most MMO's for instance, and because I like action games with lots to do where things are not automated to high hell and back, where as MMO's tend to automate way too much to make sure any drooling idiot can "play" the game, even dexterously challenged.
"I remember seeing the Final Fantasy: Spirits Within movie in the theater and just minutes into the movie I was convinced I was looking at real humans"
I was really quite aware that the movie had 'video game' characters, the plastic and fake way the skin and arms move and how clothing functions on these characters are a dead give away, esp during scenes with short shirts and their arms/flesh are exposed.
I think people simply forget about it because let's face it, cartoons and animated films have no basis in reality (technically they are "uncanny valley" they are metaphors or tropes based on reality, but we still enjoy these fantasy metaphors nonetheless.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is, while the game is entertaining it's the cinematic qualities that you enjoy the most, the actual game is quite monotonous but they hide this fact by using great art and VA, making each shooter level a contained experience.
I'd say the artists are really what really made mass effect, the amount of detail in the art is just amazing for a video game, the way faces move, animate, and the VA in the conversations and how conversations are skippable as well as having subtitles (in most cases you can read faster then someone can talk).
While the game is enjoyable they took the easy path, they covered up the game's deficits with voice overs and high quality cinematics and cinematic level design to keep your interest, so you don't notice the fact that they basically took the easy road in making ME2.
Like for instance the first part with Shepard on the ship where you are out in space, the artistry was just amazing, they couldn't have pulled the experience together without the artists.
"Not really."
Did apple have to make infrastructure for the iPhone? The console makers could have made a phone that works with existing networks.
... why haven't console makers displaced phone makers by making their own portable phone hybrid handheld? They have all the background necessary to make a killer phone that could wipe out most other phones.
"ME2 has a more "Gears of War" feel to it"
It is gears of war in the ME universe, it uses the same engine, it's little wonder the game essentially IS a shooter in the vein of gears of war psuedo-3rd person style (since it really plays more like first person with teh avatar merely being able ot be looked at while aiming).
The truth is ME2 is basically now gears of war in the Mass effect 2 universe, the RPG system is laughable, the only thing you end up doing is upgrading your powers but most of the time you can rely solely on guns and powers are kind of redundant.
They took out some of the best parts that just needed fixing from ME1, I loved exploring planets in the mako but even I knew it could get tedious and boring only because the team didn't know how to improve it or where to take it, they could have done a lot with it if they had the right people who knew where to take it.
Also if you are going for paragon/renegade you pretty much have to go soldier for the bonus's or import a mass effect 1 save (which you can now find online).
http://www.annakie.com/me/
"That's the funny thing. Many of the dumber grammatical errors you see on Slashdot are made by people who are evidently native English speakers. They're things that should have been corrected in grade school, like problems with "your" and "you're", or "their", "there" and "they're". As they occur in trends like many other mindless activities, the latest one is "loose" vs. "lose". "
Actually these things aren't "correctable" in many people who make these errors. They have unconscious errors in their neurology and they make these mistakes without realizing them, there are gaps in expressing things through motor system of the brain. I'm one who can think clearly internally but when I go to express what I am thinking some words I told my motor system to type will never make it there or there is mis retrieval.
The spoken and writing areas of how words are stored in the brain overlap, the ironic thing about slashdot is that most people here have no background or have read up on modern neurology.
A quick course in the neurology and the activation of these networks will give you a new appreciation for why these people make errors constantly and no amount of schooling is going to correct the problem for many people.
Online many people don't really care if they make small mistakes, it's expected.
A good place to start would be to get a copy of Descartes error, it will give you a new appreciation for how much of what you take for granted in how you function is done by unconscious processes and you're not 'really in control', your control is really minimal and a function of the health of the underlying neurology of different parts of the brain and nervous system.
http://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Error-Emotion-Reason-Human/dp/014303622X/
"The demographic of the underclass is now and has always been manufactured for the purpose of serving the people who have access to knowledge. If that class is growing, then it only means that the elites are more successful at it."
No doubt about it, I agree with pretty much everything you say but lets also not forget that much of the lack of effort comes from being born "rich" (historically speaking), being ignorant, inexperienced, young and not exposed to the harshness to real crushing poverty or war gives one a warped view of what one's ancestors built and escaped from.
The problem is this corruption flows via the mass media and from the top down many times, the richer you are the more you can afford to just flagrantly indulge whatever animal impulses you have because you are free from burden of answering to others for your existence.
That and many schools simply cannot maintain quality control on their teachers, looking back on my own education in public school and highschool it was bloody miracle most of those people had jobs!
I think it is more a problem that with wealth comes the ability to afford to be picky and choosy about whom you associate with or not, this goes a long way to explaining the divorce rate and relaxation of mores as well.
"My wife works in the public schools. I learned one thing from her. Parents claim they want schools with touch academics. However, they also wants their kids to get a 4.0, or very close to it and go apeshit when it doesn't happen. So when a school does crack down and start to grade accurately to touch academic standards, the parents go ballistic. These parents start harassing the teacher, the principal, the administrators, and the school board."
This has more to do with the fact the job market for youth is awful and parents everywhere have drilled into their kids "if you don't go to university you will be poor!", it's just a sign of the times and changing economic circumstances. No one really likes competition when they are on the receiving end of a lower class income.
School today mostly revolves around income hierarchy and not really education anymore, the structure of our society unfortunately has conflicting demands that simply can't be met without conflict.
"But, as usual, most people refuse to see this, or much anything beyond the reach of their computer monitor, which far from being a window to the world at large has, in recent years, turned out to be a tool for reenforcing one's own ideology by being able to filter information down to almost exclusively that with which one is wont to agree. O, tempora... O, mores!"
But this has always been a problem, the truth is human beings have always preferred what appeals to them over truth, after all what is religion other then another triumph of ideology over truth?
We might call them useful lies or noble lies, or try to justify it but even leaders of past ages recognized human nature and the insanity and cosmic malfunctioning of a large percentage of the population. Consider it was at one point ok not so long ago to be openly racist. It's hard to imagine people being so cruel to one another but it was normal for many.
Let's try not to idealize the past, the devolution of language has more to do with demographic and the growing population of those who are not cognitively well endowed and poor environment then anything else I would imagine.
Ironically enough it's academic work that is jargon laden, wasn't it einstein who said if you can't communicate it in simple language you're not really good at communicating or understanding your own ideas?
... and speak it. The so-called "misuse" of grammar is kind of idiotic given that language is invented and grammar changes naturally over time.
Try reading a really old king james version of the bible. It's still "english" and the 'grammar' may be correct but you don't speak like that and it's not necessarily 'english' you'd recognize as how you think or speak in your own voice.
Let's also face facts there are many problems with the english language in general that don't make much sense at all from the way you pronounce a vowel or word and the way it is spelled. Not to mention the strange special cases of silent consonants and the like.
People like efficiency, while some may think this is an expression of illiteracy others just see it as the most efficient way to express an idea.
"There are plenty of very smart people that would agree that stupid people did see the potential of computers and the stupid people were geeks."
Partly true, not all geeks realized the computers potential but most of the smart ones did. If you don't realize somethings potential it's clear you aren't that bright and can't take in information other then your own viewpoint, that is what stupid people do - they can't see the forest from the tree's.
The geeks who realized and took feedback from their failures are the ones who developed empires (apple and microsoft). You still can't get all the whizbang ease of use without knowing what you are doing and getting your hands dirty.
No doubt someone who knows people don't want to deal with the technical side of everything just means more work and research by geeks into making things that are highly complex usable by automating and designing things to carry the load and save time for others.
It's really about time saving most of the time and sometimes also catering to the weakest segments of the human population.
Computers do what people can't, people are not good at computers, therefore make computers that any idiot can use.
But there are limits on how much you can dumb something down before those limits of the design are what is holding you back from progress. The great thing about PC was the removal and constant expansion on the "upper limit" of what was possible.
"The simple fact is that 98% of people out there just want their computer to work. They don't care about getting under the hood. If it plays their youtube videos, netflix streaming content, and lets them send some emails and play the latest game they bought from Steam or Best Buy, they're happy. That's all that's needed. So a company catering to that market instead of the 1 or 2 percent who want to tinker under the hood is just good business."
While in a sense what you say is true, in reality it reflects on the anti-intellectual nature and stupidity of most of the population.
"should they be denied entrance into the digital world because they're not geeky enough?"
Yes. Did stupid people see the potential of computers to change the world, or did geeks?
"No, absolute knowledge is not possible."
And yet you are absolutely sure you said that sentence, either that sentence exists (1) or it does not (0), when people start claiming they don't really exist or are not sure they exist we lock them up.
The fact that you can differentiate (you know there are differences) means in order to be aware, to know the difference between this bit or that bit, to know anything at all, one must be able to have absolutely know there are differences, no matter how imperfect they are presented to you. You knwo that those imperfect differences exist whether you realize it or not.
"You misunderstand the point of science"
No I understand it just fine, either a phenomena 1) really exists or 2) it doesn't, either you can harness knowledge to create computers or you can't. It's a pretty cut and dry question. You have to have absolute understanding of something or else you could not move forward (i.e. you know a door exists in front of you, it is either open or closed, withou tunderstanding that the door is made up of atoms, electrons, etc).
So absolute knowledge is possible, it's just that human beings can only take the easy layers first (Door exists and is closed, therefore don't walk into door).
Your ability to navigate without dying proves that absolute knowledge is possible, in fact human navigation is repeated experimental collisions and their detection. Either those collisions 1) really happened and are there or 2) are not.
For those who think science is ont about "truth" we can do an experiment - put a gun to your head if you are confident science is not about reality and pull the trigger. Just because science is imperfect (because humans are) does not mean truth does not exist, it means human beings do not yet have a full understanding of the truth.
"anyone who thinks science is about "truth" is naive."
You mean like the science ("truth") that produced your computers? Or perhaps that was based on mythological research?
" Not an ounce of prejudice here, eh?"
One should not have to be tolerant against the religious myths of our ancestors taught as "the truth" and "real history".
It also assumes a human centric perspective, what if the universe is 1 bit of information and the many bits of the universe from our perspective are actually fractions of 1 bit of information?
"Disney wants "copyright == infinity"."
Disney has that already, there is NO evidence that the copyright extensions and abuses will be alleviated only that the law will get worse and the people will still do as they wish.
Look man it's quote obvious that you are stretching things.
In terms of my expectations of what RPG's are that had been built up from many generations of console and PC gaming, MMO's were a huge step backward for me from all RPG's past conventions.
You come across as someone defending a dumbed down genre for the slow/easy interface allows the masses to watch their virtual avatars.
The interactivity in most MMO's has stagnated compared to past games, the lack of proper collision detection and environmental interaction barely exists in MMO's and is all "faked" or illusionary where as in real offline games it works how it's supposed to.
I like to be in control of my avatar, I like to have different move's where there is skill involved in performing the act's, so that when you get better at them you are rewarded. In stat's based/automated MMO's like WoW for instance, that kind of thing has been ripped out completely because of making these games accessible to anyone from 5/6 to 80+ years old.
Accessibility came at the cost of removing older RPG conventions from the game completely and inserting new frustrating ones (i.e. forced travel, cooldowns on warpstones, etc, etc). Where as in Diablo 1 /2 you could townportal instantly to wherever you needed or there were conveniently placed waypoints that were spaced appropriately.
"Time spent playing (per dollar) seems like a good measurement"
I disagree, the fun of a game is not correlated with how much you paid for it, this obsession hours per dollar is quite absurd. What is DOTA worth in hours per dollar? Since when I bought War 3 DOTA did not yet exist.
"Then would you prefer a video game where you have to control every step of the player character's walking?"
When you can get up and go to the bathroom while fighting a monster is where I draw the line, the game has been automated to such a point where you could merely develop algorithms to click menu buttons for you if you wanted and merely watch your MMO avatar do everything for you.
Since for most MMO's, the thing you do most often is navigate and business types design the game in such a way to maximize revenue and not fun unfortunately, so they purposely put things in the game that are actually NOT fun but for a certain warped segment of the population hooks their psychology. We've all heard people say they keep playing MMO's without liking it. I look at those people as a little off, but they exist in large enough numbers apparently.
"I think review scores are nearly meaningless;"
They are not meaningless they help you find reviewers that share your tastes, I always read the lowest scores to find gamers who share my tastes. Gamer's reviews of games are generally correct even if they do not always know why the dislike a game, there is a trend of psychological types and clustering which is very useful.
I dislike most MMO's for instance, and because I like action games with lots to do where things are not automated to high hell and back, where as MMO's tend to automate way too much to make sure any drooling idiot can "play" the game, even dexterously challenged.
"I remember seeing the Final Fantasy: Spirits Within movie in the theater and just minutes into the movie I was convinced I was looking at real humans"
I was really quite aware that the movie had 'video game' characters, the plastic and fake way the skin and arms move and how clothing functions on these characters are a dead give away, esp during scenes with short shirts and their arms/flesh are exposed.
I think people simply forget about it because let's face it, cartoons and animated films have no basis in reality (technically they are "uncanny valley" they are metaphors or tropes based on reality, but we still enjoy these fantasy metaphors nonetheless.