About 3 years after HL was released, I went to E3. I completely expected to hear an HL2 announcement. Didn't happen... for another 3 years. Valve just takes a long time with that series. But, I agree, it's time to get the next "book" out on the story.
Valve has done a good job with this concept. Each of their games (HL+expansions, HL2, HL2-Episodes, Portal) all had a trainer level or helped you build familiarity with the controls and the story reminded you what was going. Granted, the HL story-line is very linear.
I tend to buy a few games, but play them a long time. Even then, I don't get to finish them. I've finished the story-line in Oblivion, but have only once tried to restart the game. (WoW and Grenada Espada keep getting in the way). I completed Neverwinter Nights once. I then bought the expansions (because I had heard they were far, far better), reinstalled and intended to make my way through... never made it past the 3rd area of the game.
I'm like the GP, I now play the games found on armorgames.com. There are some really decent flash games (Sonny, Sonny2 for a type of RPG game, puzzle games, simulators, mindless blow crap up games). But I keep my skill up in Team Fortress and WoW.
Heck, I couldn't even get passed the first mission. The UI was dodgy on my computer. And, apparently, I'm no strategist. I just couldn't get the enemy to advance into my trap without losing a lot of my own men.... Just like in medieval times, I suppose.
True, but the subject is about us heading out there or sending something with the intent of bringing space debris back. Hopefully, those objects get back without Earth atmospheric and substance contamination - unlike a comet.
Did Popeye go into a rage at seeing the spinach or was he already enraged and then went for the spinach. Personally, I like fresh spinach. The canned stuff is just blech!
Do you enjoy being able to nip down to the shop to buy a game?
Actually, no I don't.:) By not going to the store, there is less material waste and less energy used. Sure, I could walk down to my local Wal-mart or Gamestop, but I'd be risking my life on the road. Perhaps in the dense cities, this is not so much of a problem. Get a few miles outside of a city and it can be a mile or more to the nearest conveniences.
All of your points are valid. I would like to remind you, though, that if Steam hadn't become a service available to the consumer, we'd have some pretty horrendous DRM schemes going on with disk releases. We've seen them already, and those games have generally not lasted well or have faced a mountain of outcry... forcing people to Steam. Without Steam, those schemes would continue whether the consumer wanted it or not.
Everything below this line is likely a rambling mess of thoughts that may or may not relate to the subject at hand.
The change in the scenario with no Steam-like service would have to come at the consumer level... The music industry is facing this wrath... but look where it stands. There are a lot of ignorant consumers. This is not a slam on consumers, we are all ignorant in one subject or another. However, the counter argument would be that the consumer should educate themselves on their purchases... in this case, the information is available (unlike shrink-wrap EULAs of the not-so-distant past).
Since my disposable income is small, I don't buy a lot of games. But when I do, I usually by them in the Steam discount packs. I've got over 50 titles on my Steam account alone. I've finished some of them, I've started some of them, and a good number of them have never even been started. (And now I've got to load them all on my recently converted Linux box since the Windows partition crashed and it's time for me to move away from Microsoft. WinXP is no longer being sold and I'm not going shell out $150 for Win 7.)
Heck, I just loaded Ubuntu for the first time on my gaming computer after a hard drive crash. (I've been threatening to do this for a long time.) While my experience has been mostly positive, Canonical has done a very good job of making the install process of software and drivers easy, I'm still mystified why I can't turn on all the nice graphics features of my OpenGL games... yes, they're running through Wine. Perhaps, I haven't hit the correct sites that contain the info I need. At this point, I'm not sure whether to blame the card/driver, the game designer (for making it Windows only), or Wine's inability to pass the full capability of hardware to the application at hand.
You're darn tootin' we notice!!!! They HVAC people stopped getting calls because people got tired of adjusting the thermostat that never worked and calling the HVAC people. While we may sometimes push that "Close Door" button on the elevator, those of us who use an elevator long enough have realized the timing hasn't been effected since "the late '90s". Isn't New York in enough debt without having to install extra push buttons on every corner of the city if the buttons aren't going to do anything?
And psychologists wonder why Americans are so up tight, their blood pressure skyrocketing, etc... because the darn "conveniences" don't flippin' work! And apparently, they don't work on purpose. And then we get felt up and/or violated when we use the convenience of quickly traveling from one place to another.
It's funny, too. My wife was working a job over the weekend verifying passes for "rich" people who had access to better seats at an event. The couple of guys she was working with were complaining that it wasn't fair that these rich people were rich and that they should be taxed more. They didn't realize that these rich people were currently allowing them to be employed... because the government didn't take so much money from them.
The Post Office: Any commercial outfit that ran their organization the way the Post Office does would have been out of business a LONG time ago.
The public education system. Or do you like the fact that the US is not the top educational system in the world, yet we spend as much or more than anyone else.
Food Stamps: Are they for food or cigarettes, booze, and lottery tickets? Are the recipients actually deserving of them. (pulling numbers out of my butt, 80% of them are deserving, but that leaves a good number who are not deserving.)
Actually, I don't want a government check and I don't want free health care. I don't want to be beholden to someone else (free check) and I want affordable health care (not the same as free). And you're right, I don't want the government, a notoriously ineffecient beaurocracy, to take my money and give it to someone else. Charities are much better suited because they are generally more efficient at providing the poor, needy, etc with the services they need. The charities are also more likely to teach the man to fish rather than giving them the fish. The government is not a charity
Sorry, this article put me in a ranting mood... See below for that response (I've got to find the right thread to put it in.)
Who cares what Europe and the US think! This article is about Australian banks. How does the Australian government classify Paypal?
i.e. you're both right, Paypal is a transaction broker in one place, a bank in another place, but neither of those places is the subject of the current article.;^)
When did you come to that reality? I got to that point at around the late 1990's. Their HP-48GX calculators were great, though (released late 80's - early '90's).
My question is, "Why this push to do remote surgery?" I can see why in specialized cases, but wouldn't the expense to fly the patient or doctor and staff/equipment to an appropriate place be cheaper at this point? Would the cost differences ever merge to the point that holographic remote surgery is feasible?
Again, anecdotal, but I've noticed that I will specifically ignore the top results or ad results and specifically blind myself to those sites when they appear in the results list.
It's not that I have an aversion to the ad style (Google's style helped clean up advertising online), I've just trained myself to ignore all advertisement. Once I've discovered I couldn't find exactly what I need, I'll look to see what was advertised.
I suppose in my mind, if a company has so much money to advertise, they'll be charging more on their product to make up for the advertising. In reality, that sentiment is only true sometimes.
But will I be able to play in a LAN environment without having to connect to the Internet and Battle.net to just play with my friends across the way from me? The answer is NO, (not likely). If I do want to play online with some friends... do we have to go through with the cumbersome fiddling of Battle.net (though they will likely make it as easy as possible), as opposed to allowing me to set up my server local and hand out my IP address (or, better DynDNS name) to my specific friends? NO, (not likely).
That's exactly what I saw. It almost looked like she was moving her mouth, but that I think is caused by her walking through light and shadow that are behind her. If there is a box there, I'll go with the hearing aide option.
That's not his point, though. It seems that a lot of the moves that Blizzard is making with all of their games is the social, multiplayer aspect. They're probably trying to read the signs of the times - a combination of controlling the multiplayer gaming experience, adding a social experience similar to facebook, and attempting to keep a the feel of a LAN party without the LAN aspect.
In my case, I may be in the minority. I have 4 friends I play WoW with, but mostly I just play WoW as a single player, rarely interacting with all the other dolts out there. I want to play Diablo 3 the same way - single player, occasionally in co-op mode with a friend or two. On the occasion I run into a group that is cool, I hang with them for the rest of the game time that night... never to interact with them again after that point, unless we get lucky and are randomly placed in a dungeon together.
I used to be an excellent, competitive gamer. But that takes a lot of time to hone the skill. I still have the skill, I just lack the practice and don't care to compete or move up the ranks of some random board against thousands of people I don't really care about. Anti-social? Sure, why not;^)
The only reason I didn't graduate a year early was my high school's computer program and art. I also knew that in my literature class, we would be given a "creative works" assignment. Essentially, my friends and I made a movie... others were allowed to do a book of poetry or other creative writing. That was actually the only interesting English / Lit class that I had in 8 years of school... for that one project.
Anyway, I came on here mostly to say that all this talk of truancy keeps me reminded of Frontier Psychiatrist by The Avalanches (look it up on Youtube, I can't provide a link at the moment).
These days, all the other shots - which are actually just as important and form an interesting slideshow of the event - would probably just get deleted out of hand by the guy
I'm not a photog pro, but I have had the (un)fortune of browsing through my family's photos (all 1000s of them over a week's reunion) and selecting the best picture from a group that were taken as a quick 3 or 5 snapshot set. Certainly, there is a chance of missing the special image... the process is tedious.
I agree with both of you. However, with a game as large as WoW, a single person could not experience the entire game within a reasonable amount of time. I've got 5 characters, all Horde, but only two of them I am playing and learning at the moment. I have not had a chance to experience the Allies point of view. I've not had a chance to learn the Rogue's or Paladin's mechanics. I've not even touched my healer druid since it hit 30-something. I've been trying to work my Mage up to 60 so I could finally learn the polymorph-rabbit spell that my Hunter acquired in an Easter event two years ago. He's stalled around 48 because I started a DK so I could have a tank my friends and I can rely on when they want to play a DPS or healer.
I've barely figured out the DK and tank issues when, now, I have to completely re-learn how to play my Hunter (what?! No more Volley!!)
My point is that they could leave well enough alone and people would be able to continue playing the game for several years.
Slashdot Mirror
About 3 years after HL was released, I went to E3. I completely expected to hear an HL2 announcement. Didn't happen... for another 3 years. Valve just takes a long time with that series. But, I agree, it's time to get the next "book" out on the story.
Valve has done a good job with this concept. Each of their games (HL+expansions, HL2, HL2-Episodes, Portal) all had a trainer level or helped you build familiarity with the controls and the story reminded you what was going. Granted, the HL story-line is very linear.
I tend to buy a few games, but play them a long time. Even then, I don't get to finish them. I've finished the story-line in Oblivion, but have only once tried to restart the game. (WoW and Grenada Espada keep getting in the way). I completed Neverwinter Nights once. I then bought the expansions (because I had heard they were far, far better), reinstalled and intended to make my way through... never made it past the 3rd area of the game.
I'm like the GP, I now play the games found on armorgames.com. There are some really decent flash games (Sonny, Sonny2 for a type of RPG game, puzzle games, simulators, mindless blow crap up games). But I keep my skill up in Team Fortress and WoW.
Heck, I couldn't even get passed the first mission. The UI was dodgy on my computer. And, apparently, I'm no strategist. I just couldn't get the enemy to advance into my trap without losing a lot of my own men. ... Just like in medieval times, I suppose.
True, but the subject is about us heading out there or sending something with the intent of bringing space debris back. Hopefully, those objects get back without Earth atmospheric and substance contamination - unlike a comet.
I just don't think it's right for women to take animals as their husbands...
//No, I'm not that stupid.
Did Popeye go into a rage at seeing the spinach or was he already enraged and then went for the spinach. Personally, I like fresh spinach. The canned stuff is just blech!
Do you enjoy being able to nip down to the shop to buy a game?
Actually, no I don't. :) By not going to the store, there is less material waste and less energy used. Sure, I could walk down to my local Wal-mart or Gamestop, but I'd be risking my life on the road. Perhaps in the dense cities, this is not so much of a problem. Get a few miles outside of a city and it can be a mile or more to the nearest conveniences.
All of your points are valid. I would like to remind you, though, that if Steam hadn't become a service available to the consumer, we'd have some pretty horrendous DRM schemes going on with disk releases. We've seen them already, and those games have generally not lasted well or have faced a mountain of outcry... forcing people to Steam. Without Steam, those schemes would continue whether the consumer wanted it or not.
Everything below this line is likely a rambling mess of thoughts that may or may not relate to the subject at hand.
The change in the scenario with no Steam-like service would have to come at the consumer level... The music industry is facing this wrath... but look where it stands. There are a lot of ignorant consumers. This is not a slam on consumers, we are all ignorant in one subject or another. However, the counter argument would be that the consumer should educate themselves on their purchases... in this case, the information is available (unlike shrink-wrap EULAs of the not-so-distant past).
Since my disposable income is small, I don't buy a lot of games. But when I do, I usually by them in the Steam discount packs. I've got over 50 titles on my Steam account alone. I've finished some of them, I've started some of them, and a good number of them have never even been started. (And now I've got to load them all on my recently converted Linux box since the Windows partition crashed and it's time for me to move away from Microsoft. WinXP is no longer being sold and I'm not going shell out $150 for Win 7.)
Heck, I just loaded Ubuntu for the first time on my gaming computer after a hard drive crash. (I've been threatening to do this for a long time.) While my experience has been mostly positive, Canonical has done a very good job of making the install process of software and drivers easy, I'm still mystified why I can't turn on all the nice graphics features of my OpenGL games... yes, they're running through Wine. Perhaps, I haven't hit the correct sites that contain the info I need. At this point, I'm not sure whether to blame the card/driver, the game designer (for making it Windows only), or Wine's inability to pass the full capability of hardware to the application at hand.
You're darn tootin' we notice!!!! They HVAC people stopped getting calls because people got tired of adjusting the thermostat that never worked and calling the HVAC people. While we may sometimes push that "Close Door" button on the elevator, those of us who use an elevator long enough have realized the timing hasn't been effected since "the late '90s". Isn't New York in enough debt without having to install extra push buttons on every corner of the city if the buttons aren't going to do anything?
And psychologists wonder why Americans are so up tight, their blood pressure skyrocketing, etc... because the darn "conveniences" don't flippin' work! And apparently, they don't work on purpose. And then we get felt up and/or violated when we use the convenience of quickly traveling from one place to another.
It's funny, too. My wife was working a job over the weekend verifying passes for "rich" people who had access to better seats at an event. The couple of guys she was working with were complaining that it wasn't fair that these rich people were rich and that they should be taxed more. They didn't realize that these rich people were currently allowing them to be employed... because the government didn't take so much money from them.
The Post Office: Any commercial outfit that ran their organization the way the Post Office does would have been out of business a LONG time ago.
The public education system. Or do you like the fact that the US is not the top educational system in the world, yet we spend as much or more than anyone else.
Food Stamps: Are they for food or cigarettes, booze, and lottery tickets? Are the recipients actually deserving of them. (pulling numbers out of my butt, 80% of them are deserving, but that leaves a good number who are not deserving.)
Actually, I don't want a government check and I don't want free health care. I don't want to be beholden to someone else (free check) and I want affordable health care (not the same as free). And you're right, I don't want the government, a notoriously ineffecient beaurocracy, to take my money and give it to someone else. Charities are much better suited because they are generally more efficient at providing the poor, needy, etc with the services they need. The charities are also more likely to teach the man to fish rather than giving them the fish. The government is not a charity
Sorry, this article put me in a ranting mood... See below for that response (I've got to find the right thread to put it in.)
Who cares what Europe and the US think! This article is about Australian banks. How does the Australian government classify Paypal?
;^)
i.e. you're both right, Paypal is a transaction broker in one place, a bank in another place, but neither of those places is the subject of the current article.
When did you come to that reality? I got to that point at around the late 1990's. Their HP-48GX calculators were great, though (released late 80's - early '90's).
I never thought I'd see a Resonance Cascade, let alone create one...
My question is, "Why this push to do remote surgery?" I can see why in specialized cases, but wouldn't the expense to fly the patient or doctor and staff/equipment to an appropriate place be cheaper at this point? Would the cost differences ever merge to the point that holographic remote surgery is feasible?
Again, anecdotal, but I've noticed that I will specifically ignore the top results or ad results and specifically blind myself to those sites when they appear in the results list.
It's not that I have an aversion to the ad style (Google's style helped clean up advertising online), I've just trained myself to ignore all advertisement. Once I've discovered I couldn't find exactly what I need, I'll look to see what was advertised.
I suppose in my mind, if a company has so much money to advertise, they'll be charging more on their product to make up for the advertising. In reality, that sentiment is only true sometimes.
But will I be able to play in a LAN environment without having to connect to the Internet and Battle.net to just play with my friends across the way from me? The answer is NO, (not likely). If I do want to play online with some friends... do we have to go through with the cumbersome fiddling of Battle.net (though they will likely make it as easy as possible), as opposed to allowing me to set up my server local and hand out my IP address (or, better DynDNS name) to my specific friends? NO, (not likely).
That's exactly what I saw. It almost looked like she was moving her mouth, but that I think is caused by her walking through light and shadow that are behind her. If there is a box there, I'll go with the hearing aide option.
Maybe she was calling her alien friends for lunch. I hope they like soup.
/TMBG: Nine Bowls of Soup
//arranged in very special array.
That's not his point, though. It seems that a lot of the moves that Blizzard is making with all of their games is the social, multiplayer aspect. They're probably trying to read the signs of the times - a combination of controlling the multiplayer gaming experience, adding a social experience similar to facebook, and attempting to keep a the feel of a LAN party without the LAN aspect.
;^)
In my case, I may be in the minority. I have 4 friends I play WoW with, but mostly I just play WoW as a single player, rarely interacting with all the other dolts out there. I want to play Diablo 3 the same way - single player, occasionally in co-op mode with a friend or two. On the occasion I run into a group that is cool, I hang with them for the rest of the game time that night... never to interact with them again after that point, unless we get lucky and are randomly placed in a dungeon together.
I used to be an excellent, competitive gamer. But that takes a lot of time to hone the skill. I still have the skill, I just lack the practice and don't care to compete or move up the ranks of some random board against thousands of people I don't really care about. Anti-social? Sure, why not
The only reason I didn't graduate a year early was my high school's computer program and art. I also knew that in my literature class, we would be given a "creative works" assignment. Essentially, my friends and I made a movie... others were allowed to do a book of poetry or other creative writing. That was actually the only interesting English / Lit class that I had in 8 years of school... for that one project.
Anyway, I came on here mostly to say that all this talk of truancy keeps me reminded of Frontier Psychiatrist by The Avalanches (look it up on Youtube, I can't provide a link at the moment).
These days, all the other shots - which are actually just as important and form an interesting slideshow of the event - would probably just get deleted out of hand by the guy
I'm not a photog pro, but I have had the (un)fortune of browsing through my family's photos (all 1000s of them over a week's reunion) and selecting the best picture from a group that were taken as a quick 3 or 5 snapshot set. Certainly, there is a chance of missing the special image... the process is tedious.
I agree with both of you. However, with a game as large as WoW, a single person could not experience the entire game within a reasonable amount of time. I've got 5 characters, all Horde, but only two of them I am playing and learning at the moment. I have not had a chance to experience the Allies point of view. I've not had a chance to learn the Rogue's or Paladin's mechanics. I've not even touched my healer druid since it hit 30-something. I've been trying to work my Mage up to 60 so I could finally learn the polymorph-rabbit spell that my Hunter acquired in an Easter event two years ago. He's stalled around 48 because I started a DK so I could have a tank my friends and I can rely on when they want to play a DPS or healer.
I've barely figured out the DK and tank issues when, now, I have to completely re-learn how to play my Hunter (what?! No more Volley!!)
My point is that they could leave well enough alone and people would be able to continue playing the game for several years.