"You're comparing apples to oranges and complaining that apples don't taste anything like oranges."
Games are fun or they are not, you don't say "Is an x type game, so I have to believe it is fun".
You've also missed the gestalt of what I was saying.
These games came well before "MMO's" (really RPG's with n many more players, except with the gameplay dumbed down to make it easy for the lowest common denominator to access the game).
The companies shoe-horned their single player properties and bastardized them into everquest clones because they saw the money being made. Not the other way around they were not "MMO's", MMO's are not "their own genre", all MMO's are single player games shoe-horned and bastardized to fit the "any idiot can play" model where they take a formerly singleplayer game gut it of it's more complex elemeents, make sure it plays like past RPG MMO's, gussy it up and call it an "MMO" and pretend it is its own "genre".
There was ultima before there was ultima online, there was final fantasy before there was FF11, they were both RPG's before and after and not much changed. Hence my points being made about how devs took all the lessons they learned universally about what makes a game fun and then taking the ginsu knife to them when they bastardize their single player games and shoehorn them into for pay "MMO's". I hate the term personally because it's *not a genre* since most online rpg's shard their playerbases so they aren't so "mmo".
RPG Games or games with RPG elements or universal elements of gaming don't suddenly stop being games or having comparable elements because they are labelled "MMO's", the term "MMO" just means sharded multiplayer RPGS that allow many players to connect to the RPG world, but they are still RPG's and still videogames with common universal elements across all genre's (cinematics, story telling, RPG elements, quests, etc). They share all the same conventions with single player RPG's.
EVEN on the nonsense reality TV shows contestants do work hard for the week (and are constantly monitored so cheating is unlikely) and STILL manage to sometimes put on weight. You can cry BS until you go blue but you've clearly never had major weight issues. You don't seem to understand that the body can use the few calories it gets a day first, and that some of the components of that energy burning come from water and air. It's not magic and these people don't violate conservation of energy. It's just that food - fat and carbs - is ONE component in the way the human body works. That's an evolutionary development. It takes a LONG time to starve. Your body doesn't simply give out in a day because you're not fed.
REALITY TV is NOT REAL, in the real world you can't get past the laws of physica and biology, your body requires energy to move if you don't exert youself you will not lose weight, period. It's quite obvious you have serious self-esteem issues and psychological problems
Benching weights increases muscle mass which will actually raise your BMI. You need a cardiovascular workout. To burn energy you need something that increases your breathing and makes you sweat and burn calories quickly. Suggesting benching weights as a way to lose weight is insane.
I've done periods of just FREE weights over the months and benching by itself and *it works*, there are many ways to use free weights and you really REALLY look stupid, you're talking to someone who is the evidence. Everything I suggested to you I have done and tested myself. If you're going to try to convince all of slashdot that somehow magically your body does not work like the rest of ours through some painful intellectual gymnastics and bullshit writing, the people who are regular exercisers and were once overweight know full well you are full of shit.
Your posting just for the sake of posting based on your own heresay or what you read out of misinformed article or are taking me out of context and it is not a very wise thing to be doing. You're are making wild backwards rationalizations based on emotion, and attempting to bullshit your way through to look like you know what you're talking about, I've lived it.
Benching weights increases muscle mass which will actually raise your BMI. You need a cardiovascular workout. To burn energy you need something that increases your breathing and makes you sweat and burn calories quickly. Suggesting benching weights as a way to lose weight is insane.
Which means absolutely squat, doing freeweight exercises and expending energy means you will still lose weight, here's the evidence
For those interested: John was an overweight computer tech/admin and he used to be thin and into sports when he was younger, when he hit his 30's he got fed up with being fat and started to do something about it and he recorded it on his personal blog. Check out the pictures section.
He took pictures of himself daily/weekly/monthly every single year and seeing them all collated is very inspiring and not to mention - it shows the progress that we can barely notice while doing it ourselves but it becomes amazing when you actually document your weightloss.
John was one of the people that originally inspired me to get off my ass and *do something* about my weight.
Now do I take some responsibility for my weight. Sure. Absolutely. Do I think that it's as easy for me to lose weight as a good portion of the population. Hell no.
Sigh, I'm not even going to say anything about this.
Yes, and most of us want to join the freaking army, eat rabbit food and excercise 2-3 hours a day for the rest of our lives. Yeah, that's real sustainable.
You clearly know nothing about weight loss.
It's clear that you are full of shit, anyone that exercises regularly can see through this malarky in
"Exercise can be important but it's far more difficult."
Exercise becomes easy with commitment, and starting off with low key aerobics and working ones way up, you don't bite off more then you can choose all at once. One just needs to find good inspiration/support. I started my whole exercise program when I came across this guy.
He used to do a blog on his personal website and then a company wanted to sponsored him because he was so inspirational to a lot of people, look at the pictures and check out the story very interesting.
Once you start seeing the pounds drop off you it's a self-fulfilling feedback cycle, you get a "hit" for seeing the weight go down, especially when you chart it using a program like fitday, when I looked at the charts I was like "holy shit!!" and you start getting really really motivated to do it because the feedback is so in your face and direct.
Truth is once you lose the weight the ease of wich you get laid and your relationships with everyone improve and your life becomes 1000x better because the subconscious social prejudice and being ignored is severely reduced if not eliminated completely, people start to approach you of their own volition and smile more, you start getting noticed and you notice it right away, for people that have been overweight for a long time its like entering a completely different world they never knew existed.
"I'm not sure how I came to read your shit dribbling because it's only at 1 as I'm responding to this."
Your post is one big long fanboy wank because you can't take any kind of WoW criticism, not only that you can't fucking read.
I said : "WOW is really a crap MMO from a lot of standpoints outside the aesthetics of the cartoony graphics"
Note I said : Outside the aesthetics, most of WoW is crap outside of the art and theme of the game, it's nothing new to the RPG genre and has been done better by other games years before.
Hardly not a major point when we're rehashing the same genre and making it worse and dumbing it down so everyone with a pulse can "play".
It's obvious that anyone that criticizes wow must be retarded isn't that right?
You're exactly what I'm talking about: Bottom feeding gamers who can't see anything but glitter in WoW, having so little gaming experience that anything that's easy as shit and you can get up and leave the fucking room and still have the game play for you, must mean you are a very savvy gamer!
I've watched the RPG genre decline over the years as gaming became more massified to cater to the lowest common denominator. I was hardly trolling or I would have got an instant negative mod. Mods just left it because it was true but didn't want to see me get flamed into oblivion by WoW fanboys like yourself that can't take any kind of criticism of your beloved game.
When you can get up and go to the fucking bathroom in the middle of "the game" while in the middle of battle that is proof positive that you are not 'playing' the game, merely navigating a character from point A to point B while much automation handles the rest. Perhaps blizzard should put in "demo play", similar to the Wii will be doing soon because if certain people can't be bothered to play the game at least they can watch the robot do it all for them, at that point why not just render it out, or watch youtube videos and save the $15 a month?
The problem with WoW is:
"it is just designed to be involving enough to keep you staring at the screen, but never deep enough to actually make you think enough to really become enjoyable."
And that's the whole problem with MMO's in general, for those who have not played the plethora of games over the years and seen the genre's evolve it will seem great and fun, but for those of us who have many years of games under our belt the genre is by and large a step back because they are breaking things intentionally to create needless timesinks so gamers don't whip through the content and hence this is why they are a step back in terms of game design and fun.
"and that even those that have the ability to lose weight can work their arses off and still lose nothing in a week."
I'm going to call bullshit on this, it's fucking impossible to NOT lose weight in a week if you are "working your ass off", you're certainly not working you ass off if you're not losing even half a pound or 1 pound in 7 days. Losing weight DOES require some amount of willpower and definitely requires a commitment hence (by and large) one is responsible for one's weight.
One cannot just excuse oneself unless one has a serious medical condition, but even those that are sick (your arthritis in your leg/angle) can do other exercises. For instance when I was lifting free weights and benching you still burn and awful lot of fat without having to move around that much. What matters is expending energy.
I walked at a leisurely pace 4hrs/day 7/days week and lost 10-12 lbs a month, it's a matter of *commitment* either you want to lose the weight or you dont, if you don't like high intensity you have to make up the lack of intensity with duration of time and distance for low intensity aerobics (like walking).
The biggest thing is monitoring your appetite, no amount of exercise will help if you're over-eating and taking in more energy then you're burning off. The army did a study a long while back that showed just this: Taking in too much energy negates the weight loss benefits of exercise and you don't have to starve youself either, just limit yourself to 1500-1800 cals/day and keep track of it on a site like http://www.fitday.com/
The truth is many people who are overweight have never been thin for most of their life and got fat fairly young and developed a victim psychology because of bullying/social prejudice.
There's only so much you can do to excuse yourself from being overweight.. I agree there are many different body types and some of us store fat easily on the smallest amounts of food, but many of us that store easily barely exercise.
The real issue though is not paying attention to how energy dense the food you're eating is, most people "wing it" when they eat they don't get rigorous ambout keeping track of the amount of food (see fitday.com), once you get rigorous and can see it on a chart, then you will realize that - yes, you are over eating!
I realized this when I started tracking what I ate @ www.fitday.com (a great site btw) and it is handy because it will show you the evidence and you can't just deny it anymore.
Most people live in the fog of their own mind never really looking hard at teh evidence in their own lives contradicting and lending support to the naysayers of "no willpower", the truth is it's more about being aware of your own bad/blind thinking on the matter of how you eat and live that is the root of the problem.
You summed it up succinctly, right on the money. I agree 100%, I did the details, you condensed it into a powerful phrase.
"it is just designed to be involving enough to keep you staring at the screen, but never deep enough to actually make you think enough to really become enjoyable"
"Story does not matter in an MMO. Period. Simple as that."
You're missing the point completely, it's called world of WARCRAFT, if it was a new MMO and IP you'd have a point. And mostly I was just pointing out the fact that developers took their RPG properties and cajoled them into the "MMO" genre (if it can even be called that) while butchering the single player aspects of the IP in the process.
You're missing the point that all MMO's heritage are from single player RPG's, so people who played the previous games in the genres have expectations about gaming conventions and good game design built up the last 20 years that "mmo designers" throughout the window just to extend playtime NOT because it is fun or entertaining, they've added annoyances and unfun things back into the game merely to milk the drooling masses for $ that is what is why MMO's tend to take game design a step back because the focus is not on making the best product but extending monthly payments of your customers.
Your post had no points in it, the idea that MMO's are all about socializing is BS
".. and not a virtual place to inhabit and explore."
This is the most vaguest thing I have ever read on slashdot it says nothing and it really shows how non-savvy you are about games and gaming in general. Games are about interactivity and experiencing "the best parts of the movies" where you are *in control*, the more abstract and robotic and automatic you make a game, it becomes a 3D rendered movie on a computer with only minimal input from the end user.
After you've explored a world once it gets really fucking boring treading back and forth, and you're wasting real world time that could be spent on other games, the idea of "inhabiting a world" is bs, unless you are ultra nerd fringe gamer with no life, there's hardcore, and then there is *fringe* gamers in the casual and hardcore segments who are just F'd right up.
They wouldn't have the RPG elements, if it was not about things to *do* within the game, fighting and equipment, quests, etc. MMO's were attempts to take single player RPG's and put them online, look at the history of RPG's
Ultima online, before it existed - there were countless ultima single player games
Final fantasy 11, before it existed - countless single player games.
World of Warcraft, there are 3 prior games (and all strategy games/w small rpg elements to boot) Yet WoW absorbs the lore and story of the strategy games but it doesn't hardly do any of the great story telling the RTS games did.
I have no issue with the cartoony graphics, I love blizzards aesthetic style and artists, my problem was with the gutting of RPG gameplay that most MMO's have done to make it easy so any idiot and non gamer can "play", by automating most of the interactive things avatars can do outside of navigation and menu clicking. Try really playing the lineage of MMO RPG's before you comment because... you are a shining example of my comment:
"Most WoW'ers I suspect have really awful gaming tastes..... If you're used to single player RPG's of yesteryear it breaks all the conventions and sticks in maddening things like extended travel time (instead of town portal like in say diablo 1+2 another blizzard game)."
"but WOW is one of the only games in which I didn't care at all about the storyline."
I think the problem is that the the storyline gets garbled because anyone who never played warcraft series (from the first on) won't have a damn clue WTF is going on. World of Warcraft is REALLY bad at what the RTS games were good at: Story telling.
I really think the MMO genre is not suited to storytelling unless you go the way of Guildwars. Guildwars with more story polish would have been an outstanding single and multiplayer game, even though it's primarily "multiplayer" because the groups are so small and everything is instanced.
Plus there's no rule saying you can't play the campaign by yourself, and they BOTS/NPC characters you can add to your party, and play in your own instance. Guildwars is pretty much one of the only games that got instancing dead on right out the gate.
WOW is really a crap MMO from a lot of standpoints outside the aesthetics of the cartoony graphics, I couldn't stand wow when I first played it. I forced myself to play it for 2 or 3 months and it still didn't hold a candle to Blizzards previous games like Warcraft and Starcraft in terms of fun and quality.
Most WoW'ers I suspect have really awful gaming tastes. I call it the "bottom feeders" MMO. If you're used to single player RPG's of yesteryear it breaks all the conventions and sticks in maddening things like extended travel time (instead of town portal like in say diablo 1+2 another blizzard game).
It seems in many ways MMO's are sabotaging all the lessons learned about making fun games to extend playtime for $.
Email was designed before the advent of interactive discussion boards, there always needs to be a way to refer to a persons post by their location and absolute character location within lines of text/video/slides/etc.
We're getting there I was certainly glad when youtube added the ability to link to video the exact part of a video segment you wanted to show someone instead of them having to load it all at once and then scroll to the time.
The truth is User interfaces are still in the stone age, I've been looking at things like combining things like mind mapping programs + discussion forums + video/presentation software, if anyone gets it right it's going to sell like hotcakes.
I love applications like the brain and cooliris, because I can see the amazing potential there for the future user interfaces.
"Slashdotters are always bitching about lack of empirical evidence for claims, yet when an article come along with abundant information to back up its conclusions, it dosn't get any credit."
The truth is the way the article displays the information is shit, they could have done a lot better job on information presentation... and anandtech did a big write up on SSD's a while back that should tell anyone all they really need to know until SSD's come down to sane price levels and storage capacities. Everything published here isn't new, and has been known for a long time and has been written about better by anand.
You missed the point completely: We are an algorithm like being that re-arranges *pre existing elements in nature, just like mathematical equations re-arrange pre-existing information (i.e. numbers, symbols, etc, all in the *END* derive from nature itself).
Man did not invent particles or energy, he merely re-arranges it, even games are just re-arranged electrons which are then copied/transferred/stored between to other particles.
You're missing the link between bits of information and mathematics, which is fundamental.
Also... one can be turned on just as much by other things (porn) and it doesn't necessarily have to be an attractive female, just something that really turns you on.
But the idea for evolution is that prettier women/animals are "more fit", and I doubt the definition of attractiveness in the study has much depth beyond very superficial characteristics and behavioural judgements (within a range of normalcy).
... I can see a problem with this study if applying it's conclusions to people. I imagine the amount of sperm has to do more with being extremely turned on and not just attractiveness, you can be with a beautiful girl and not be that turned on because you don't get along that well, and you can be with an average girl who you connect with on a fundamental level that turns you on way more then the prettier girl.
One could argue that nothing should be patentable on the same basis, since all information is just re-arranged in the universe, it is not actually "novel", when we make a "discovery" we're discovering things that are already there inherent in the universe. We have these false ideas that we are "Creating" things rather then merely *re-arranging pre existing stuff*.
Math are just representations of combinatorial elements, that's all particles are in our universe, every invention we "Create" was already inherent in the universe itself, since all things ultimately derive from nature and her processes, we merely re-arrange nature.
... in buildings, bridges, garage's and so forth, I can see criminals using underground tunnels/sewers/access points more often, and wealthy criminals creating such tunnel networks.
"That's because "rights" are an idea from western civilization, and most other cultures had different notions about justice and social harmony. Considering that over 40 million Chinese died during the "Great Leap Forward," and countless more before that in previous wars and revolutions, we don't have the same perspective on stability that they do."
The slashdot crowd draws hypercapitalist americans and their sympathizers, of course anything communist/china related anything that infringes on their own sense of cultural/ideological superiority is going to get their pants in a twist. Many slashdotters get tired of these idealogues who border on the fringe of nutterhood, immaturity, lack of life experience or all of the above.
The fact is slashdot draws a highly americanized crowd and americans and western people in general tend to have a puffed up image of themselves since most of them have no sense of their own bloody history, nor can they smell their own stench of taking any principle to the extremes (i.e. freedom vs recent economic meltdown). All people (even nerds sadly) tend to cling to simple ideologies because it takes a lot of hard slog and life experience and the school of hard knocks to see that the world is not an ideology, and due to the complexity and difficulty of accessing more difficult truths, and those truths take a lifetime or more to hammer out. But every ideologue is in a rush saying ".. we have the answer follow me!"
"To me, gameplay often makes or breaks a game, as well."
It does for me also but this does not do away with the fact that a game has almost always had to have a minimum standard of visuals unless the mechanics were so beyond average of every copycat of everything you've played before.
As I said in my above post *all the elements of a game matter* it's that there is usually never enough time or resources to accomplish everything the team would like to get done.
For instance I always go back and play freespace 2 every now and again while I never really had the itch to play freespace 1 more then twice. When games are so good you get an itch years later to relive the experience that is proof positive they are made well.
But you're forgetting most people believe the first games they are exposed to 'are the best ones' I call it the first ecounter effect(tm) because they have never experienced anything like that before one gets an overdose of excitement/fun and tends to embellish the experience because one has *never* experienced it. The more you experience same or similar games the more difficult it can be to remain entertained.
The order in which you experience games has an impact on how you decide later generations of games quality. For anybody that never played nethack, Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 certainly live up to being great fun experiences of deep enough complexity and that's what matters.
We can never assume gamers will have played every obscure game under the sun, this is why medicority tends to be the norm over time - as new kids come into the world without any history of games their level of taste and discernment is low, they are easy to please because they have no prior experiences.
The fact is after playing Super metroid, I found it hard to go back and play metroid 1. You are unusual in the fact that you downgrade your experience. I doubt you would mind an upgrade to nethack that enhanced the visuals and keeps the game exactly the same, since the mechanics are still the same.
By and large many gamers see metroid -> super metroid as the same in terms of game mechanics, so why play one with crappier graphics when you can get the same experience?
The gameplay mechanics difference between NES metroid and Super metroid is marginal at best. You're scraping the bottom of the barrel here IMHO.
If they were radically different you'd have a point as in the difference between say Supre metroid (2D) vs Metroid prime (3D). Even I found the metroid prime's not as good as the 2D games on the cube, but... that's only because doing metroid in 3D doesn't quite work the same way as the way metroid is structured.
I found Echoes boring, and there were parts of the original metroid prime that bored me to tears so that I couldn't play it through a second time without being bored to tears by the lack of action and the lethargic pace, the FPS style did not work well for metroid since I was always itching for more action instead of the slow as mollases cumbersome-to-control metroid experience.
"is important in any game. Graphics can be cool and all, but they shouldn't be the primary reason for any game."
Actually graphics are a *primary reason* for any game, but not the only thing obviously. They are called VIDEO games for a reason.
Art sets the tone of the game, if you check out the extra's on the God of War 1 disc they show you models that never made it into the game, and the different versions of Krato's that never made the cut, looking at some of the models you can see that *art* the vision in someone's imagination *definitely* makes the game better when one can bring it out of one's mind and one has good artistic discernment.
This isn't to say that graphics are the only thing obviously, but when it all come's together it's about putting all the pieces together properly to make the experience.
God of War would not have the same visceral Impact using the other model heroes seen on the God of War 1 disc as Kratos.
Technically God of war is an action button mashing 3D beat em up, yet there are other games like that that never reach the level of fun or success God of War has.
The truth is every part of the game experience matters in the game ideally. The problem is game developers don't have the resources to focus on all the parts equally so they have to pick the "core" and focus on making the the core they've chosen as best they can with the resources they have.
Graphics matter only in so far is that they are done artistically well enough.
I doubt anyone would take Metroid 1 (NES) over Super metroid for instance.
"This is actually what I've wished for long time that MMO's would have. For example in WoW, once you've seen one place it will always be like that."
Actually for some games this is a good thing, we already have algorithmically generated content creation in random maps, and it's hit and miss depending on the genre of game, i.e. you wouldn't want crappy lopsided distribution of resources in an RTS for example.
The problem with evolutionary algorithms that I can see that is that games are the result of a "vision" I doubt a vision would remain cohesive under a competitive process.
For instance in many games that have player created content, one could consider that an evolutionary algorithm (the players) in their own right, and then other players pick the best levels from among the community and assemble them in level packs. The problem becomes though that some levels that are downright shit become popular, as we've seen with summer blockbusters like Transformers: Most people have mediocre tastes, and I'm not sure a player driven world of clueless players would produce anything anyone would want to visit.
Slashdot Mirror
"You're comparing apples to oranges and complaining that apples don't taste anything like oranges."
Games are fun or they are not, you don't say "Is an x type game, so I have to believe it is fun".
You've also missed the gestalt of what I was saying.
These games came well before "MMO's" (really RPG's with n many more players, except with the gameplay dumbed down to make it easy for the lowest common denominator to access the game).
The companies shoe-horned their single player properties and bastardized them into everquest clones because they saw the money being made. Not the other way around they were not "MMO's", MMO's are not "their own genre", all MMO's are single player games shoe-horned and bastardized to fit the "any idiot can play" model where they take a formerly singleplayer game gut it of it's more complex elemeents, make sure it plays like past RPG MMO's, gussy it up and call it an "MMO" and pretend it is its own "genre".
There was ultima before there was ultima online, there was final fantasy before there was FF11, they were both RPG's before and after and not much changed. Hence my points being made about how devs took all the lessons they learned universally about what makes a game fun and then taking the ginsu knife to them when they bastardize their single player games and shoehorn them into for pay "MMO's". I hate the term personally because it's *not a genre* since most online rpg's shard their playerbases so they aren't so "mmo".
RPG Games or games with RPG elements or universal elements of gaming don't suddenly stop being games or having comparable elements because they are labelled "MMO's", the term "MMO" just means sharded multiplayer RPGS that allow many players to connect to the RPG world, but they are still RPG's and still videogames with common universal elements across all genre's (cinematics, story telling, RPG elements, quests, etc). They share all the same conventions with single player RPG's.
EVEN on the nonsense reality TV shows contestants do work hard for the week (and are constantly monitored so cheating is unlikely) and STILL manage to sometimes put on weight. You can cry BS until you go blue but you've clearly never had major weight issues. You don't seem to understand that the body can use the few calories it gets a day first, and that some of the components of that energy burning come from water and air. It's not magic and these people don't violate conservation of energy. It's just that food - fat and carbs - is ONE component in the way the human body works. That's an evolutionary development. It takes a LONG time to starve. Your body doesn't simply give out in a day because you're not fed.
REALITY TV is NOT REAL, in the real world you can't get past the laws of physica and biology, your body requires energy to move if you don't exert youself you will not lose weight, period. It's quite obvious you have serious self-esteem issues and psychological problems
Benching weights increases muscle mass which will actually raise your BMI. You need a cardiovascular workout. To burn energy you need something that increases your breathing and makes you sweat and burn calories quickly. Suggesting benching weights as a way to lose weight is insane.
I've done periods of just FREE weights over the months and benching by itself and *it works*, there are many ways to use free weights and you really REALLY look stupid, you're talking to someone who is the evidence. Everything I suggested to you I have done and tested myself. If you're going to try to convince all of slashdot that somehow magically your body does not work like the rest of ours through some painful intellectual gymnastics and bullshit writing, the people who are regular exercisers and were once overweight know full well you are full of shit.
Your posting just for the sake of posting based on your own heresay or what you read out of misinformed article or are taking me out of context and it is not a very wise thing to be doing. You're are making wild backwards rationalizations based on emotion, and attempting to bullshit your way through to look like you know what you're talking about, I've lived it.
Benching weights increases muscle mass which will actually raise your BMI. You need a cardiovascular workout. To burn energy you need something that increases your breathing and makes you sweat and burn calories quickly. Suggesting benching weights as a way to lose weight is insane.
Which means absolutely squat, doing freeweight exercises and expending energy means you will still lose weight, here's the evidence
http://www.johnstonefitness.com/php/enlarge.php?i=123.jpg
For those interested: John was an overweight computer tech/admin and he used to be thin and into sports when he was younger, when he hit his 30's he got fed up with being fat and started to do something about it and he recorded it on his personal blog. Check out the pictures section.
He took pictures of himself daily/weekly/monthly every single year and seeing them all collated is very inspiring and not to mention - it shows the progress that we can barely notice while doing it ourselves but it becomes amazing when you actually document your weightloss.
John was one of the people that originally inspired me to get off my ass and *do something* about my weight.
Now do I take some responsibility for my weight. Sure. Absolutely. Do I think that it's as easy for me to lose weight as a good portion of the population. Hell no.
Sigh, I'm not even going to say anything about this.
Yes, and most of us want to join the freaking army, eat rabbit food and excercise 2-3 hours a day for the rest of our lives. Yeah, that's real sustainable.
You clearly know nothing about weight loss.
It's clear that you are full of shit, anyone that exercises regularly can see through this malarky in
"Exercise can be important but it's far more difficult."
Exercise becomes easy with commitment, and starting off with low key aerobics and working ones way up, you don't bite off more then you can choose all at once. One just needs to find good inspiration/support. I started my whole exercise program when I came across this guy.
http://www.johnstonefitness.com/php/pictures.php
He used to do a blog on his personal website and then a company wanted to sponsored him because he was so inspirational to a lot of people, look at the pictures and check out the story very interesting.
Once you start seeing the pounds drop off you it's a self-fulfilling feedback cycle, you get a "hit" for seeing the weight go down, especially when you chart it using a program like fitday, when I looked at the charts I was like "holy shit!!" and you start getting really really motivated to do it because the feedback is so in your face and direct.
Truth is once you lose the weight the ease of wich you get laid and your relationships with everyone improve and your life becomes 1000x better because the subconscious social prejudice and being ignored is severely reduced if not eliminated completely, people start to approach you of their own volition and smile more, you start getting noticed and you notice it right away, for people that have been overweight for a long time its like entering a completely different world they never knew existed.
"I'm not sure how I came to read your shit dribbling because it's only at 1 as I'm responding to this."
Your post is one big long fanboy wank because you can't take any kind of WoW criticism, not only that you can't fucking read.
I said : "WOW is really a crap MMO from a lot of standpoints outside the aesthetics of the cartoony graphics"
Note I said : Outside the aesthetics, most of WoW is crap outside of the art and theme of the game, it's nothing new to the RPG genre and has been done better by other games years before.
Hardly not a major point when we're rehashing the same genre and making it worse and dumbing it down so everyone with a pulse can "play".
It's obvious that anyone that criticizes wow must be retarded isn't that right?
You're exactly what I'm talking about: Bottom feeding gamers who can't see anything but glitter in WoW, having so little gaming experience that anything that's easy as shit and you can get up and leave the fucking room and still have the game play for you, must mean you are a very savvy gamer!
I've watched the RPG genre decline over the years as gaming became more massified to cater to the lowest common denominator. I was hardly trolling or I would have got an instant negative mod. Mods just left it because it was true but didn't want to see me get flamed into oblivion by WoW fanboys like yourself that can't take any kind of criticism of your beloved game.
When you can get up and go to the fucking bathroom in the middle of "the game" while in the middle of battle that is proof positive that you are not 'playing' the game, merely navigating a character from point A to point B while much automation handles the rest. Perhaps blizzard should put in "demo play", similar to the Wii will be doing soon because if certain people can't be bothered to play the game at least they can watch the robot do it all for them, at that point why not just render it out, or watch youtube videos and save the $15 a month?
The problem with WoW is:
"it is just designed to be involving enough to keep you staring at the screen, but never deep enough to actually make you think enough to really become enjoyable."
And that's the whole problem with MMO's in general, for those who have not played the plethora of games over the years and seen the genre's evolve it will seem great and fun, but for those of us who have many years of games under our belt the genre is by and large a step back because they are breaking things intentionally to create needless timesinks so gamers don't whip through the content and hence this is why they are a step back in terms of game design and fun.
"and that even those that have the ability to lose weight can work their arses off and still lose nothing in a week."
I'm going to call bullshit on this, it's fucking impossible to NOT lose weight in a week if you are "working your ass off", you're certainly not working you ass off if you're not losing even half a pound or 1 pound in 7 days. Losing weight DOES require some amount of willpower and definitely requires a commitment hence (by and large) one is responsible for one's weight.
One cannot just excuse oneself unless one has a serious medical condition, but even those that are sick (your arthritis in your leg/angle) can do other exercises. For instance when I was lifting free weights and benching you still burn and awful lot of fat without having to move around that much. What matters is expending energy.
I walked at a leisurely pace 4hrs/day 7/days week and lost 10-12 lbs a month, it's a matter of *commitment* either you want to lose the weight or you dont, if you don't like high intensity you have to make up the lack of intensity with duration of time and distance for low intensity aerobics (like walking).
The biggest thing is monitoring your appetite, no amount of exercise will help if you're over-eating and taking in more energy then you're burning off. The army did a study a long while back that showed just this: Taking in too much energy negates the weight loss benefits of exercise and you don't have to starve youself either, just limit yourself to 1500-1800 cals/day and keep track of it on a site like http://www.fitday.com/
The truth is many people who are overweight have never been thin for most of their life and got fat fairly young and developed a victim psychology because of bullying/social prejudice.
There's only so much you can do to excuse yourself from being overweight.. I agree there are many different body types and some of us store fat easily on the smallest amounts of food, but many of us that store easily barely exercise.
The real issue though is not paying attention to how energy dense the food you're eating is, most people "wing it" when they eat they don't get rigorous ambout keeping track of the amount of food (see fitday.com), once you get rigorous and can see it on a chart, then you will realize that - yes, you are over eating!
I realized this when I started tracking what I ate @ www.fitday.com (a great site btw) and it is handy because it will show you the evidence and you can't just deny it anymore.
Most people live in the fog of their own mind never really looking hard at teh evidence in their own lives contradicting and lending support to the naysayers of "no willpower", the truth is it's more about being aware of your own bad/blind thinking on the matter of how you eat and live that is the root of the problem.
I know I went through it.
You summed it up succinctly, right on the money. I agree 100%, I did the details, you condensed it into a powerful phrase.
"it is just designed to be involving enough to keep you staring at the screen, but never deep enough to actually make you think enough to really become enjoyable"
"Story does not matter in an MMO. Period. Simple as that."
You're missing the point completely, it's called world of WARCRAFT, if it was a new MMO and IP you'd have a point. And mostly I was just pointing out the fact that developers took their RPG properties and cajoled them into the "MMO" genre (if it can even be called that) while butchering the single player aspects of the IP in the process.
You're missing the point that all MMO's heritage are from single player RPG's, so people who played the previous games in the genres have expectations about gaming conventions and good game design built up the last 20 years that "mmo designers" throughout the window just to extend playtime NOT because it is fun or entertaining, they've added annoyances and unfun things back into the game merely to milk the drooling masses for $ that is what is why MMO's tend to take game design a step back because the focus is not on making the best product but extending monthly payments of your customers.
Your post had no points in it, the idea that MMO's are all about socializing is BS
".. and not a virtual place to inhabit and explore."
This is the most vaguest thing I have ever read on slashdot it says nothing and it really shows how non-savvy you are about games and gaming in general. Games are about interactivity and experiencing "the best parts of the movies" where you are *in control*, the more abstract and robotic and automatic you make a game, it becomes a 3D rendered movie on a computer with only minimal input from the end user.
After you've explored a world once it gets really fucking boring treading back and forth, and you're wasting real world time that could be spent on other games, the idea of "inhabiting a world" is bs, unless you are ultra nerd fringe gamer with no life, there's hardcore, and then there is *fringe* gamers in the casual and hardcore segments who are just F'd right up.
They wouldn't have the RPG elements, if it was not about things to *do* within the game, fighting and equipment, quests, etc. MMO's were attempts to take single player RPG's and put them online, look at the history of RPG's
Ultima online, before it existed - there were countless ultima single player games
Final fantasy 11, before it existed - countless single player games.
World of Warcraft, there are 3 prior games (and all strategy games /w small rpg elements to boot) Yet WoW absorbs the lore and story of the strategy games but it doesn't hardly do any of the great story telling the RTS games did.
I have no issue with the cartoony graphics, I love blizzards aesthetic style and artists, my problem was with the gutting of RPG gameplay that most MMO's have done to make it easy so any idiot and non gamer can "play", by automating most of the interactive things avatars can do outside of navigation and menu clicking. Try really playing the lineage of MMO RPG's before you comment because... you are a shining example of my comment:
"Most WoW'ers I suspect have really awful gaming tastes..... If you're used to single player RPG's of yesteryear it breaks all the conventions and sticks in maddening things like extended travel time (instead of town portal like in say diablo 1+2 another blizzard game)."
All of which is 100% true.
"but WOW is one of the only games in which I didn't care at all about the storyline."
I think the problem is that the the storyline gets garbled because anyone who never played warcraft series (from the first on) won't have a damn clue WTF is going on. World of Warcraft is REALLY bad at what the RTS games were good at: Story telling.
I really think the MMO genre is not suited to storytelling unless you go the way of Guildwars. Guildwars with more story polish would have been an outstanding single and multiplayer game, even though it's primarily "multiplayer" because the groups are so small and everything is instanced.
Plus there's no rule saying you can't play the campaign by yourself, and they BOTS/NPC characters you can add to your party, and play in your own instance. Guildwars is pretty much one of the only games that got instancing dead on right out the gate.
WOW is really a crap MMO from a lot of standpoints outside the aesthetics of the cartoony graphics, I couldn't stand wow when I first played it. I forced myself to play it for 2 or 3 months and it still didn't hold a candle to Blizzards previous games like Warcraft and Starcraft in terms of fun and quality.
Most WoW'ers I suspect have really awful gaming tastes. I call it the "bottom feeders" MMO. If you're used to single player RPG's of yesteryear it breaks all the conventions and sticks in maddening things like extended travel time (instead of town portal like in say diablo 1+2 another blizzard game).
It seems in many ways MMO's are sabotaging all the lessons learned about making fun games to extend playtime for $.
Email was designed before the advent of interactive discussion boards, there always needs to be a way to refer to a persons post by their location and absolute character location within lines of text/video/slides/etc.
We're getting there I was certainly glad when youtube added the ability to link to video the exact part of a video segment you wanted to show someone instead of them having to load it all at once and then scroll to the time.
The truth is User interfaces are still in the stone age, I've been looking at things like combining things like mind mapping programs + discussion forums + video/presentation software, if anyone gets it right it's going to sell like hotcakes.
I love applications like the brain and cooliris, because I can see the amazing potential there for the future user interfaces.
http://www.thebrain.com/
http://www.cooliris.com/
"Slashdotters are always bitching about lack of empirical evidence for claims, yet when an article come along with abundant information to back up its conclusions, it dosn't get any credit."
The truth is the way the article displays the information is shit, they could have done a lot better job on information presentation... and anandtech did a big write up on SSD's a while back that should tell anyone all they really need to know until SSD's come down to sane price levels and storage capacities. Everything published here isn't new, and has been known for a long time and has been written about better by anand.
Anandtech:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=1
You missed the point completely: We are an algorithm like being that re-arranges *pre existing elements in nature, just like mathematical equations re-arrange pre-existing information (i.e. numbers, symbols, etc, all in the *END* derive from nature itself).
Man did not invent particles or energy, he merely re-arranges it, even games are just re-arranged electrons which are then copied/transferred/stored between to other particles.
You're missing the link between bits of information and mathematics, which is fundamental.
Also... one can be turned on just as much by other things (porn) and it doesn't necessarily have to be an attractive female, just something that really turns you on.
"Then why is the world full of so many ugly people?"
Because the heritability of beauty is not 1 to 1, you can have beautiful people have ugly children and vice versa.
"Seems like the same conclusion to me"
But the idea for evolution is that prettier women/animals are "more fit", and I doubt the definition of attractiveness in the study has much depth beyond very superficial characteristics and behavioural judgements (within a range of normalcy).
... I can see a problem with this study if applying it's conclusions to people. I imagine the amount of sperm has to do more with being extremely turned on and not just attractiveness, you can be with a beautiful girl and not be that turned on because you don't get along that well, and you can be with an average girl who you connect with on a fundamental level that turns you on way more then the prettier girl.
One could argue that nothing should be patentable on the same basis, since all information is just re-arranged in the universe, it is not actually "novel", when we make a "discovery" we're discovering things that are already there inherent in the universe. We have these false ideas that we are "Creating" things rather then merely *re-arranging pre existing stuff*.
Math are just representations of combinatorial elements, that's all particles are in our universe, every invention we "Create" was already inherent in the universe itself, since all things ultimately derive from nature and her processes, we merely re-arrange nature.
... in buildings, bridges, garage's and so forth, I can see criminals using underground tunnels/sewers/access points more often, and wealthy criminals creating such tunnel networks.
"That's because "rights" are an idea from western civilization, and most other cultures had different notions about justice and social harmony. Considering that over 40 million Chinese died during the "Great Leap Forward," and countless more before that in previous wars and revolutions, we don't have the same perspective on stability that they do."
The slashdot crowd draws hypercapitalist americans and their sympathizers, of course anything communist/china related anything that infringes on their own sense of cultural/ideological superiority is going to get their pants in a twist. Many slashdotters get tired of these idealogues who border on the fringe of nutterhood, immaturity, lack of life experience or all of the above.
The fact is slashdot draws a highly americanized crowd and americans and western people in general tend to have a puffed up image of themselves since most of them have no sense of their own bloody history, nor can they smell their own stench of taking any principle to the extremes (i.e. freedom vs recent economic meltdown). All people (even nerds sadly) tend to cling to simple ideologies because it takes a lot of hard slog and life experience and the school of hard knocks to see that the world is not an ideology, and due to the complexity and difficulty of accessing more difficult truths, and those truths take a lifetime or more to hammer out. But every ideologue is in a rush saying ".. we have the answer follow me!"
"To me, gameplay often makes or breaks a game, as well."
It does for me also but this does not do away with the fact that a game has almost always had to have a minimum standard of visuals unless the mechanics were so beyond average of every copycat of everything you've played before.
As I said in my above post *all the elements of a game matter* it's that there is usually never enough time or resources to accomplish everything the team would like to get done.
For instance I always go back and play freespace 2 every now and again while I never really had the itch to play freespace 1 more then twice. When games are so good you get an itch years later to relive the experience that is proof positive they are made well.
"I also prefer Nethack over Diablo 2"
But you're forgetting most people believe the first games they are exposed to 'are the best ones' I call it the first ecounter effect(tm) because they have never experienced anything like that before one gets an overdose of excitement/fun and tends to embellish the experience because one has *never* experienced it. The more you experience same or similar games the more difficult it can be to remain entertained.
The order in which you experience games has an impact on how you decide later generations of games quality. For anybody that never played nethack, Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 certainly live up to being great fun experiences of deep enough complexity and that's what matters.
We can never assume gamers will have played every obscure game under the sun, this is why medicority tends to be the norm over time - as new kids come into the world without any history of games their level of taste and discernment is low, they are easy to please because they have no prior experiences.
The fact is after playing Super metroid, I found it hard to go back and play metroid 1. You are unusual in the fact that you downgrade your experience. I doubt you would mind an upgrade to nethack that enhanced the visuals and keeps the game exactly the same, since the mechanics are still the same.
By and large many gamers see metroid -> super metroid as the same in terms of game mechanics, so why play one with crappier graphics when you can get the same experience?
The gameplay mechanics difference between NES metroid and Super metroid is marginal at best. You're scraping the bottom of the barrel here IMHO.
If they were radically different you'd have a point as in the difference between say Supre metroid (2D) vs Metroid prime (3D). Even I found the metroid prime's not as good as the 2D games on the cube, but... that's only because doing metroid in 3D doesn't quite work the same way as the way metroid is structured.
I found Echoes boring, and there were parts of the original metroid prime that bored me to tears so that I couldn't play it through a second time without being bored to tears by the lack of action and the lethargic pace, the FPS style did not work well for metroid since I was always itching for more action instead of the slow as mollases cumbersome-to-control metroid experience.
"is important in any game. Graphics can be cool and all, but they shouldn't be the primary reason for any game."
Actually graphics are a *primary reason* for any game, but not the only thing obviously. They are called VIDEO games for a reason.
Art sets the tone of the game, if you check out the extra's on the God of War 1 disc they show you models that never made it into the game, and the different versions of Krato's that never made the cut, looking at some of the models you can see that *art* the vision in someone's imagination *definitely* makes the game better when one can bring it out of one's mind and one has good artistic discernment.
This isn't to say that graphics are the only thing obviously, but when it all come's together it's about putting all the pieces together properly to make the experience.
God of War would not have the same visceral Impact using the other model heroes seen on the God of War 1 disc as Kratos.
Technically God of war is an action button mashing 3D beat em up, yet there are other games like that that never reach the level of fun or success God of War has.
The truth is every part of the game experience matters in the game ideally. The problem is game developers don't have the resources to focus on all the parts equally so they have to pick the "core" and focus on making the the core they've chosen as best they can with the resources they have.
Graphics matter only in so far is that they are done artistically well enough.
I doubt anyone would take Metroid 1 (NES) over Super metroid for instance.
Sorry I didn't know you were a linux only guy!
"If this game is even a fraction as fun as DotA, and has a native Linux client, it's a must buy from me."
You should also check out demigod if you have a more modern system.
http://www.demigodthegame.com/
Demigod is inspired by DoTA
"This is actually what I've wished for long time that MMO's would have. For example in WoW, once you've seen one place it will always be like that."
Actually for some games this is a good thing, we already have algorithmically generated content creation in random maps, and it's hit and miss depending on the genre of game, i.e. you wouldn't want crappy lopsided distribution of resources in an RTS for example.
The problem with evolutionary algorithms that I can see that is that games are the result of a "vision" I doubt a vision would remain cohesive under a competitive process.
For instance in many games that have player created content, one could consider that an evolutionary algorithm (the players) in their own right, and then other players pick the best levels from among the community and assemble them in level packs. The problem becomes though that some levels that are downright shit become popular, as we've seen with summer blockbusters like Transformers: Most people have mediocre tastes, and I'm not sure a player driven world of clueless players would produce anything anyone would want to visit.