What, even the moogle, the mime, and the abomniable snowman? It's a bit like they decided to have a seperate character for every "class", and by the end ran out of ideas. A few of the other characters are a bit disposable as well IMO. I have a bit of a general dislike of the whole thing in RPGs where you end up with a dozen characters but you can only use about three of them at once, so maybe I'm biased about it...
Thus why I said "slice of backstory" instead of "complete backstory." All of the characters, at least, have a reason for being (yes, even the moogle and the yeti.)
My other main issues with FFVI is that I personally can't take a prick in a clown costume seriously as the main villian
And what if that "prick in a clown costume" poisoned entire villages, shattered the world, and sent his wrath upon anyone who dared to disobey him? Would you take him seriously, then?
and the whole "fighting really nice static images drawn in a completley different style to your own characters" bit about the battle system)
...which existed in just about every other 16-bit RPG.
...and migrated to EQ2. Little server lag, only a few instances of unplanned downtime, and stuff actually *works* (i.e. no year-long unfixed bugs). I'd highly recommend it to people who are bored/frustrated with WoW as I was.
I've always thought that FFVI had much more meat to the game.
I agree completely. In a smaller storage space, and with pixels rather than 3-D models, FF6 managed to tell a much better, richer, and more complex story than FF7. Every one of the many characters had his/her own personality and slice of backstory, and each had his/her time in the spotlight at some point in the game. Oh, and Kefka makes Sephiroth look like a pansy.
Actually, now that it doesn't take developers no time at all to make a half-baked game off of a movie franchise (ET for Atari 2600, anyone?), movie-based games are getting better. In the past year, I can name at least four (King Kong, LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth II, Star Wars Battlefront II, The Godfather) that, while they won't be making many peoples' favorites lists a few years from now, are at least playable, fun, and critically-acclaimed.
The parent is absolutely correct. Most game-movies fail because they aren't like the games at all. For example...
Super Mario Bros. should have been a pipe-and-koopa-filled Mario and Luigi adventure to rescue Princess Peach from Bowser. Instead, we got some bizarre sci-fi thing involving parallel universes and evolved dinosaurs(?) Doom should have been like the games - an intense survival-horror flick where the main character blasts his way through demons (and even Hell itself) to save the world. But, nope. Street Fighter... don't even get me started. How they adapted a fighting game into this piece of motion-picture crap, I'll never guess.
Either way, the success of movies like Advent Children proves that people want movies based off of the actual games themselves, rather than some contrived movie plot written by someone who has obviously never played the original games in question.
"The patent, which is described as being for a 'multimedia communications system and method for providing audio on demand to subscribers' (No. 6,985,932), describes the idea of permitting a PC user to play back audio, video and other information on a PC. RealNetworks executives said the technology was distinguished from other similar systems by the fact that it permitted "intelligent" streaming of data in potentially congested networks."
What do you want to bet that RealNetworks is going to use this patent to sue anyone else who develops an "intelligent" method of streaming data?
I mean, the fact is that if you're going to jump and say someone in authority is wrong, you need some sort of proof, even if they're equally empty handed (which isn't exactly fair, but that's how it is).
Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. You just demonstrated the fallacy of appeal to authority.
The fact is that it's not the authority itself, but the evidence, data, and conclusions which that authority brings to the table, that makes what an authority has to say important.
To draw an example: Say that your friend is a meteorologist. One day, he says to you that it's going to rain kumquats tomorrow. When you ask him why, he says that he doesn't have anything to bring to the table, but he's the Authority, so he knows. Does that mean that kumquats are going to start pouring out of the sky tomorrow?
The "think of the children" argument is a form of non-sequitur caused by an extreme appeal to emotion and hysteria. It also often involves the fallacy of the excluded middle. The line of reasoning often operates like this:
Person 1: You! You're against the exploitation of children in child pornography, right?
Person 2: You bet I am!
Person 1: Then you'll sign a petition in support of this bill that turns the United States into a police state?
Person 2: Heck no! I'm against police states, too.
Person 1: Then you support child porn?
Person 2: Didn't I just say that I don't?
Person 1: But you won't sign my petition! Look, you're either with me or you're with the kiddie-porn photographers.
Person 2: But there's probably more sane ways to go about-
Person 1: Bah! It's bleeding-heart liberals like you that make this country full of kiddie porn makers, potheads, and atheists! Go back to Soviet Russia, you commie pinko!
Person 2: But-
Person 1: EVERYONE! This man supports kiddie porn! Let's think of the children and BURN HIM!!
(Hordes of angry people tie Person 2 to a stake and light him on fire. Person 2 burns to death.)
Person 1: (Turns to another passerby) You, sir! You're against the exploitation etc. etc.
And so on.
(Footnote: The above may not be entirely accurate. Please do not lynch, behead, or negative-moderate the Author due to thoughtless ad-hominems. I swear, I never meant to insult anyone. Well, except maybe furries. I hate furries.)
Well, it says it's a 2003 law, I assume this is a new one after the Supreme court struck down the last one in 2002.
Yep, it's a new one, and they haven't tested it in the Supreme Court yet.
I assume this one will do the same, I certainly don't feel I'd have anything to lose that point... 20 years for downloading anime, perhaps resembling real but still... in my country you wouldn't get that if you abducted and violently raped a real girl.Actually, if I remember correctly, Mr. Whorely also possessed *actual* child pornography. However, the non-photographic artwork that he possessed weighed heavily upon his sentence.
Think about it: This artwork harmed no one in the making. Mr. Whorely didn't harm anyone by possessing it. One can't even make the argument that he was harming himself by looking at it, unless you want to really stretch it and say that it was causing him psychological trauma or somesuch drivel.
Actual child porn aside, this was a nonviolent thought crime, pure and simple.
This is definite proof that they're not out to "protect the children." They want to legalize thought crimes.
I mean, if they're censoring artistic depictions of child pornography that, you know, don't actually harm any children, then maybe next they'll ban some of my favorite works of fiction. Stephen King's It, for example, contains a few passages that very vividly depict scenes right out of a pedo's pipe dreams. I wonder if we'll see any banning of that in the future.
The Internet is already made up of private property. People own domain names and can deny access to people (through passwording and other measures), just like someone can invite people into, or lock the door to, their own homes.
Frankly, I can't imagine what else the EU lawyer means by "proprietiz[ing] the Internet."
Now I can spend *another* seventy-five levels fighting crabs! Heck, they could even call it "Crab Fighter 2.0" and it would be a pretty accurate name.
In all seriousness, though, I hope they make it better than FFXI, which was essentially a tear-your-hair-out collection of aggrevating timesinks. Since quitting, WoW and EQ2 have shown me how fun the MMO genre can actually be without resorting to things like having "very easy" mobs kill you more often than not and instituting a crafting system where you still fail 1/10 of the time on a level 1 item at max skill.
Go to college and major in science or engineering. That is the only way to be sure that you will make it to geekdom.
That's honestly a stereotype. There's many more types of geeks than your typical science/engineering geek.
For example: I'm a political science/philosophy major. I may not be able to discuss particle physics on a PhD-worthy level or build a working radio from spare parts, but I've immersed myself in what I'm studying for the past several years. Does that make me a non-geek, or a political-philosophy geek?
...as these comments by Mr. Takahashi *are* definitely flamebait-worthy, but where does this guy get off on saying this sort of thing?
I mean, making a couple of games about rolling around balls of stuff, however fun said games happen to be, doesn't exactly qualify you to make blanket statements about the longest-lived still-active console maker in the gaming industry.
the good, the bad, and the in-between experiences of working at Microsoft; concentrating on focus, unreality, company leadership, managers, source code, benefits and compensation, free soft drinks, work/life balance, Microsoft's not evil, and influence.
Sheyah. They all say that until the chairs start flying.
I'm not trying to flame or anything, but it seems like you can get pretty much anything you want out of simply dual-booting OSX and Windows without throwing Linux or BSD into the batch.
"libertarians" (sociopaths) will attribute any cause to social problems other than ones that might require them to change their behavior.
Do you even know what libertarianism *is,* or are you just talking out of your arse?
Oh, wait; the fact that you label us "sociopaths" (and then later quote Marx, haha) obviously points to the latter. But, then, that's just me pointing to a social cause that won't require me to change my behavior.
If discriminating against ideas were NOT okay, then we'd be teaching Intelligent Design, Scientology, and holistic medicine alongside biology, chemistry, and world history in our public schools. Chew on that.
no, she really is not being discriminated against by any definition of the word, and unless you have your head in the sand, she is trying to make it a cause. She can, right now, go back into WoW and create a GBLT guild. But she refuses. Now I should ahve said "Which many people find as annoying as hell"
Okay, so you find something that someone says annoying. Which, again, is an opinion, however unjustified, that you have every right to state. What's the problem here?
No, buy a fucking dictionary.
Care to explain how "buying a fucking dictionary" will stop someone from being insulted when some intrinsic biological aspect of their lives is being spoken of in a derogatory manner?
A) the rules say no talk about sexual orientation.
False. They say that players cannot, and I quote, "insultingly refer to any aspect of sexual orientation pertaining to themselves or other players." 'Insultingly' being the key word.
B) Saying GBLT Friendly is discrimination against people who aren't GBLT friendly.No; it's discrimination against the ideas that those people hold. Discriminating against ideas is okay; discriminating against the people who hold those ideas isn't.
C) It's stoopid and doesn't matter.
D) The person (who was NOT discriminated against) is trying to make her violation of the rules into a cause. Which is annoying as hell.
...which are both opinions. GG.
I think it is interesting that people thinking "That is so gay" is negative. If someone is gay, and there first thought is that saying something is gay is negative, what does that say about how they view their lifestyle?
When the person saying, "This is so gay," is using 'gay' to refer to something annoying/idiotic/morally abhorrent, then what is a homosexual person supposed to do? Agree?
If someone wants to make a private, enclosed community that's non-discriminatory ("GBLT-friendly" != "GBLT-only,") then why not let them? Why all of the backlash from some/. posters? I thought we were better than this.
"Person is mad because Blizzard discrimanted againts them discriminating."
Ah, how I wish there was a mod for '-1, Falsehood.'
The person in question was trying to make a "GBLT-friendly" guild where insults like "this is so gay" would not be tolerated. "GBLT-friendly" is not the same thing as "GBLT-only," or "straight-only," for that matter. The most former admits and accepts straight people. The two latter examples do not.
After a year and four months, I finally let my WoW account lapse last week and moved on to EQ2 for much the same reason as the parent. Until one plays a non-WoW MMO, he/she doesn't know that the constant server lag, all-day-long weekly maintainences that often bork the server for at least another day after, sparse content patches (there hasn't been a new 5-man instance in a year), critical skill/talent/spell bugs that have gone unfixed for over a year, and the other problems that WoW is still experiencing after a year and a half of operation aren't typical of the MMO genre. At least, they haven't been since the early days of EQ1, UO, and Asheron's Call.
That, and the "role-playing" servers are horrid. I'm an RP geek who's done so in a few other MMO's, but it seems like no one even tries to stay in-character on the WoW RP servers. And do you know why? Because Blizzard doesn't enforce their RP rules *at all.*
For example: A few months ago on my old WoW RP server, a friend of mine reported a player who had named his character "Crispybacon." Clearly a non-RP name that Blizz should force, right? Well, the GM who responded said that, no, "Crispybacon" is not in violation of the RP-server rules.
So, in short, Blizzard has no clue how to run an MMO. Otherwise they'd, you know, actually get their servers working instead of coming up with elaborate April Fool's jokes and rooting out goldfarmers whose only crime is violating a questionably-legal EULA.
I absolutely *love* that the parent was modded Insightful. In the same strange, awful way that I love the music of Journey.
I guess it's okay to post troll-worthy tirades containing obviously insightful phrases like, "FALL INTO A FIRE AND DIE," if the target of said tirade is a company that everyone loves to hate.
Slashdot Mirror
Thus why I said "slice of backstory" instead of "complete backstory." All of the characters, at least, have a reason for being (yes, even the moogle and the yeti.)
My other main issues with FFVI is that I personally can't take a prick in a clown costume seriously as the main villian
And what if that "prick in a clown costume" poisoned entire villages, shattered the world, and sent his wrath upon anyone who dared to disobey him? Would you take him seriously, then?
and the whole "fighting really nice static images drawn in a completley different style to your own characters" bit about the battle system)
...which existed in just about every other 16-bit RPG.
...and migrated to EQ2. Little server lag, only a few instances of unplanned downtime, and stuff actually *works* (i.e. no year-long unfixed bugs). I'd highly recommend it to people who are bored/frustrated with WoW as I was.
I agree completely. In a smaller storage space, and with pixels rather than 3-D models, FF6 managed to tell a much better, richer, and more complex story than FF7. Every one of the many characters had his/her own personality and slice of backstory, and each had his/her time in the spotlight at some point in the game. Oh, and Kefka makes Sephiroth look like a pansy.
Actually, now that it doesn't take developers no time at all to make a half-baked game off of a movie franchise (ET for Atari 2600, anyone?), movie-based games are getting better. In the past year, I can name at least four (King Kong, LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth II, Star Wars Battlefront II, The Godfather) that, while they won't be making many peoples' favorites lists a few years from now, are at least playable, fun, and critically-acclaimed.
The parent is absolutely correct. Most game-movies fail because they aren't like the games at all. For example...
Super Mario Bros. should have been a pipe-and-koopa-filled Mario and Luigi adventure to rescue Princess Peach from Bowser. Instead, we got some bizarre sci-fi thing involving parallel universes and evolved dinosaurs(?)
Doom should have been like the games - an intense survival-horror flick where the main character blasts his way through demons (and even Hell itself) to save the world. But, nope.
Street Fighter... don't even get me started. How they adapted a fighting game into this piece of motion-picture crap, I'll never guess.
Either way, the success of movies like Advent Children proves that people want movies based off of the actual games themselves, rather than some contrived movie plot written by someone who has obviously never played the original games in question.
What do you want to bet that RealNetworks is going to use this patent to sue anyone else who develops an "intelligent" method of streaming data?
Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. You just demonstrated the fallacy of appeal to authority.
The fact is that it's not the authority itself, but the evidence, data, and conclusions which that authority brings to the table, that makes what an authority has to say important.
To draw an example: Say that your friend is a meteorologist. One day, he says to you that it's going to rain kumquats tomorrow. When you ask him why, he says that he doesn't have anything to bring to the table, but he's the Authority, so he knows. Does that mean that kumquats are going to start pouring out of the sky tomorrow?
Person 1: You! You're against the exploitation of children in child pornography, right?
Person 2: You bet I am!
Person 1: Then you'll sign a petition in support of this bill that turns the United States into a police state?
Person 2: Heck no! I'm against police states, too.
Person 1: Then you support child porn?
Person 2: Didn't I just say that I don't?
Person 1: But you won't sign my petition! Look, you're either with me or you're with the kiddie-porn photographers.
Person 2: But there's probably more sane ways to go about-
Person 1: Bah! It's bleeding-heart liberals like you that make this country full of kiddie porn makers, potheads, and atheists! Go back to Soviet Russia, you commie pinko!
Person 2: But-
Person 1: EVERYONE! This man supports kiddie porn! Let's think of the children and BURN HIM!!
(Hordes of angry people tie Person 2 to a stake and light him on fire. Person 2 burns to death.)
Person 1: (Turns to another passerby) You, sir! You're against the exploitation etc. etc.
And so on.
(Footnote: The above may not be entirely accurate. Please do not lynch, behead, or negative-moderate the Author due to thoughtless ad-hominems. I swear, I never meant to insult anyone. Well, except maybe furries. I hate furries.)
Yep, it's a new one, and they haven't tested it in the Supreme Court yet.
I assume this one will do the same, I certainly don't feel I'd have anything to lose that point... 20 years for downloading anime, perhaps resembling real but still... in my country you wouldn't get that if you abducted and violently raped a real girl.Actually, if I remember correctly, Mr. Whorely also possessed *actual* child pornography. However, the non-photographic artwork that he possessed weighed heavily upon his sentence.
Think about it: This artwork harmed no one in the making. Mr. Whorely didn't harm anyone by possessing it. One can't even make the argument that he was harming himself by looking at it, unless you want to really stretch it and say that it was causing him psychological trauma or somesuch drivel.
Actual child porn aside, this was a nonviolent thought crime, pure and simple.
I mean, if they're censoring artistic depictions of child pornography that, you know, don't actually harm any children, then maybe next they'll ban some of my favorite works of fiction. Stephen King's It, for example, contains a few passages that very vividly depict scenes right out of a pedo's pipe dreams. I wonder if we'll see any banning of that in the future.
...and then what?
Frankly, I can't imagine what else the EU lawyer means by "proprietiz[ing] the Internet."
In all seriousness, though, I hope they make it better than FFXI, which was essentially a tear-your-hair-out collection of aggrevating timesinks. Since quitting, WoW and EQ2 have shown me how fun the MMO genre can actually be without resorting to things like having "very easy" mobs kill you more often than not and instituting a crafting system where you still fail 1/10 of the time on a level 1 item at max skill.
That's honestly a stereotype. There's many more types of geeks than your typical science/engineering geek.
For example: I'm a political science/philosophy major. I may not be able to discuss particle physics on a PhD-worthy level or build a working radio from spare parts, but I've immersed myself in what I'm studying for the past several years. Does that make me a non-geek, or a political-philosophy geek?
I mean, making a couple of games about rolling around balls of stuff, however fun said games happen to be, doesn't exactly qualify you to make blanket statements about the longest-lived still-active console maker in the gaming industry.
Sheyah. They all say that until the chairs start flying.
Not to troll, as I own a DS and love it, but there hasn't been a single good one out for the system yet.
...oh, wait, that was just the good dream I had last night.
I'm not trying to flame or anything, but it seems like you can get pretty much anything you want out of simply dual-booting OSX and Windows without throwing Linux or BSD into the batch.
Do you even know what libertarianism *is,* or are you just talking out of your arse?
Oh, wait; the fact that you label us "sociopaths" (and then later quote Marx, haha) obviously points to the latter. But, then, that's just me pointing to a social cause that won't require me to change my behavior.
If discriminating against ideas were NOT okay, then we'd be teaching Intelligent Design, Scientology, and holistic medicine alongside biology, chemistry, and world history in our public schools. Chew on that.
no, she really is not being discriminated against by any definition of the word, and unless you have your head in the sand, she is trying to make it a cause. She can, right now, go back into WoW and create a GBLT guild. But she refuses. Now I should ahve said "Which many people find as annoying as hell"
Okay, so you find something that someone says annoying. Which, again, is an opinion, however unjustified, that you have every right to state. What's the problem here?
No, buy a fucking dictionary.
Care to explain how "buying a fucking dictionary" will stop someone from being insulted when some intrinsic biological aspect of their lives is being spoken of in a derogatory manner?
False. They say that players cannot, and I quote, "insultingly refer to any aspect of sexual orientation pertaining to themselves or other players." 'Insultingly' being the key word.
B) Saying GBLT Friendly is discrimination against people who aren't GBLT friendly.No; it's discrimination against the ideas that those people hold. Discriminating against ideas is okay; discriminating against the people who hold those ideas isn't.
C) It's stoopid and doesn't matter. D) The person (who was NOT discriminated against) is trying to make her violation of the rules into a cause. Which is annoying as hell.
...which are both opinions. GG.
I think it is interesting that people thinking "That is so gay" is negative. If someone is gay, and there first thought is that saying something is gay is negative, what does that say about how they view their lifestyle?
When the person saying, "This is so gay," is using 'gay' to refer to something annoying/idiotic/morally abhorrent, then what is a homosexual person supposed to do? Agree?
If someone wants to make a private, enclosed community that's non-discriminatory ("GBLT-friendly" != "GBLT-only,") then why not let them? Why all of the backlash from some /. posters? I thought we were better than this.
Ah, how I wish there was a mod for '-1, Falsehood.'
The person in question was trying to make a "GBLT-friendly" guild where insults like "this is so gay" would not be tolerated. "GBLT-friendly" is not the same thing as "GBLT-only," or "straight-only," for that matter. The most former admits and accepts straight people. The two latter examples do not.
That, and the "role-playing" servers are horrid. I'm an RP geek who's done so in a few other MMO's, but it seems like no one even tries to stay in-character on the WoW RP servers. And do you know why? Because Blizzard doesn't enforce their RP rules *at all.*
For example: A few months ago on my old WoW RP server, a friend of mine reported a player who had named his character "Crispybacon." Clearly a non-RP name that Blizz should force, right? Well, the GM who responded said that, no, "Crispybacon" is not in violation of the RP-server rules.
So, in short, Blizzard has no clue how to run an MMO. Otherwise they'd, you know, actually get their servers working instead of coming up with elaborate April Fool's jokes and rooting out goldfarmers whose only crime is violating a questionably-legal EULA.
I guess it's okay to post troll-worthy tirades containing obviously insightful phrases like, "FALL INTO A FIRE AND DIE," if the target of said tirade is a company that everyone loves to hate.