If there's something physically wrong with a drive you can't do better. As a bonus, the purchase price funds all those free aps over at Gibson Research.
Been years since I used an IRC client [pauses while his geek card is reclaimed] but VIRC had a whiteboard. That client died; did others pick up the functionality? Never used it for RPG play but combined with voice it'd be a quick & dirty & free (& dated & maybe Windows only) option.
I'll second Junta. Like it a lot more than any of the German games. Most of those play well enough but tend to the simple side playwise. Which, of course, is what people want (people love the mind-numbing "gameplay" of Risk). Combine it with the short length (fantastic!) and you get sales hits. They deserve the attention but hopefully there'll someday again be a market for more involved games.
For elegant but simple and fast, Cosmic Encounter simply can not be beat. Unfortunately it's not available at retail anymore but there is online play for a cheap subscription (or free trial) at www.cosmicencounter.com. *Highly* recommended. Each player has a random alien race which can break one of the game's few rules. Work with the or against other players to grab enough land for a win. That's it. Takes minutes to play a round. Ain't gamed until you've backstabbed Virus with Zombie while attacking Sniveller.
More third rate Giger. Yip-friggin-ay
on
Prey Review
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· Score: 1
You've pegged Carmack but Prey (at least the demo) has the same id/Carmack failings. Giger love ought to be banned as an influence. How much more interesting would the game have been using even the equally touchstones as Escher or Bosch to inspire the level and art design? Did we really need _more_ Quake demons + Alien?
An aside: don't brag about how much fake money you made using the bar slot machine. You've done the same thing your grandma does on games.com except you don't have points toward a discounted subscription to Scrapbooking Monthly.
"Is this any different to any other open source sites out there - is it especially for windows users. (if not, I am not sure of the reference to an ex-microsoft employee)"
You'd prefer that info wasn't upfront, to further encourage the Evil Empire and tinfoil cap crowds? And if IS for windows users, ain't it a potentional switch campaign for open source proponents? Jeez.
Parisans are so tiresome. Angband rulz Nethack!!!!!!!!!
System Shock 2, maybe. Silent Hill titles are silly. If we're talking morality as the source of the unease, instead of or in addition to mood, I'm back to Morrowind Fanboi. A grown-up game for grown-up players that also worked as a fun title for those not seeing or choosing to ignore the deeper currents. Much like Gene Wolfe's fantasy novels: many of them can be sucked down as generic Slurpees, and enjoyed at that level, but for those paying attention the implications are appalling.
"I'm considering doing a post-graduate degree (which is what I think your talking about), I have to agree with a previous poster, for me it would just be to get the letters MA to use after my name (whilst not feeling as silly as the people who use BA but not as good as the people who get phd). I have a year free so it's no real loss and I can probably get it for free. I don't think that it would be as valuable as a years experience in an internship, also, if your going to have to pay a lot for it then you'll need to look at how much more money you can make when compared to how much it'll cost...
Also, it's not just for the money you might make, it might be fun if you like that sort of thing."
It's thirty grand to learn where the apostrophes go.
Not a good deal for the person getting the degree but terrific for the rest of us. Semicolons & ellipsis are a different degree program.
It's definitely not lack of talent. Windows must have backward compatibility for programs and drivers. Both home user and corporate installs. That's the horrible downside of the monopoly. It doesn't help Windows is drunken Jenga on iffy code going back to DOS. That Microsoft did as well as it did with XP is nothing short of miraculous. XP is a fine OS. While DRM ain't helping, I doubt it's a major issue. Look to Sony's inability to own the world for what crazed protection can do to tank a company.
It MIGHT help IF the PROGRAMMERS could BLOG without BOLDING every OTHER word WHILE describing THE problems THEY experienced WHILE wrestling WITH Microsoft CODE. I want to drag that guy into an alley and kick his spleen until he pisses red. I bet all his printed documents have full justification.
Spot on. JRPG's generally bore me to tears, so I've my bias, but comparing them as is silly.
On the CRPG side my nominees are Planescape:Torment, Morrowind, Deus Ex, and System Shock 2. Probably Gothic/Gothic 2 too but I never got passed the miserable interface. And the award goes to...Planescape. Linear, which people seem to like, but not on rails, and top notch writing. KotoR was an entertaining cartoon with pretend moral heft. Good fun but only good fun.
That said: Morrowind had a weak main story? Uh-uh. Oblivion* is the old game plot: save The Kingdom. Morrowind was so much more. It was fundamentally different: the world WAS THE STORY. The more the player learned about the world the more impact the plot had. The Nerevarine trapped by prophecy, finishing a very old battle. Play that battle to the end and while transforming Vvardenfell, there are other gods of other peoples with other prophecies. The player--hell, me, I was the player--saw how it all hooked into the lands beyond the island of the Dunmer. It was enormously satisfying. Grown-up, even. Video game power fantasy always grounded in larger political and religious (game world) realities.
Morrowind gave me the payoff of other CRPG's without feeling silly or fake-profound (I'm looking at you, Star Wars "universe").
Heck if I know how he could do it, but Teppy needs to find a way to drag people in at various points along the timeline of a Telling. The game experience is *very* different the first days, the first couple months, and a year in.
For example, getting a camel. In the first week or two you'll be up against experienced, obsessive guilds. Whole regions. Chance of doing it solo? Zero. Three months in, your only competition is the unlikely other solo newb trying in your region that night.
ATITD is the bomb throwing radical of the MMORPG market. Second Life + deep gameplay.
Dammit. I've kept my account active for six months without playing. (Couldn't afford to do so but did it anyway.) Lots of complaints. But I think I've finally talked myself into gathering some $!@#!@#% grass to get the first #$!@##!@ camel in the region. The girlfriend, who never left, is going to be thrilled. Dammit!
"Even if WOW was that much better, the MMO market was relatively tiny at the time. Something changed that meant ten times as many people were willing to give WOW a chance"
MMORPG's are strange beasts. Despite all attempts the *play* doesn't hold people over time/levels. Many (definitely not all) WoW subscribers are surely cannibalized from other games. WoW ate all the other games' players. They sloshed into WoW, sloshed out, will slosh back in with the expansion.
WoW is a very good game. It went hoooooj by being good with great timing.
What *I* would do is hit players with an email approximately two months in. Trigger a combination of just-leveled/scored nifty phatloot/etc. Email: 12 month subscription is normally a 5% savings over month-to-month but if you do it RIGHT NOW [Read: You are jazzed RIGHT NOW. Later you will quit. Sign at a savings. Quit. Pay us without using our infrastructure] there is an additional 5% savings! You save money!
Worth remembering that the vast majority of Lovecraft's output was letters. (That'd be snail mail, with stamps, for you youngins.) Most of the "mythos" is the work of obsessive fans. Frank Belknap Long & Clark Ashton Smith are unfairly neglected. Long's work was closer to Lovecraft's but acknowledged the existence of the outside world. Children, sex, jobs, that sort of thing. Clark was a rare word vomitorium. He knew what the words meant, unlike his pulp fellows. Robert E. Howard couldn't help tapping into what made pulp thrilling. It was part of him and it killed him. (The Whole Wide World is the rare chick flick starwarsroxorz can enjoy. Highly recommended.)
The above was an attempt to make this a useful post. BUT I DON'T CARE. Come on, "Cthulhu, Shub-Niggurath, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, the Magnum Innominandum" really are "like anagrams of breakfast cereal names" and I'm posting because I can never resist my all time favorite literary put down. The quote is from Brian Aldiss' Billion Year Spree, required reading for any SF fan.
There's occasional power in Lovecraft. I enjoy and own his work. I humbly suggest reading the collected works of Fritz Leiber instead.
Re:PSP in general was just a huge mistake
on
Everyone Hates UMD
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· Score: 1
"Sony's doing everything right with the Blu-Ray that they did wrong with the UMD"
They're certainly doing better but pushing MPEG-2 on Blu-Ray because they get royalties for 2 but not MPEG-4 isn't thrilling. (I think this is the financial situation. Flame away if I'm wrong.:) ) We'll have to wait for side-by-sides under controlled test conditions to see if their MPEG-2 claims are accurate. Always possible but I'm not hopeful.
My hope is the one best suited for general storage and computer tasks wins. Unlike the person in the thread who believes there hasn't been a *single movie worth watching in the last two years* (largely, it seems, because video game films aren't done properly), I rent many films...but I almost never buy. Don't feel the need to watch them again until years have passed. Books I buy. No finding reader hardware for old books. No DRM. mmmm books
A member of the gaming press fiddling with the interface to see old Mario games listed but unplayable via a previously announced download option turned "throw out the standard controller and move to something totally unorthodox, and thought that's a stupid move" into "amazing innovation"?
"I may even buy one for my mother and grandmother, cause I always like to push technology down their throat, like any self-respecting geek should."
I'm sure you're the top of the list in grandma's will, what with the back-to-back Christmas gifts of KnoppixToasterOven & Sanyo 9" disk earrings.
Fair enough (re: tight sweaters) but really, won't the same thing happen to some degree for men if the pro gaming "sport" (I'm dubious, can you tell?: I don't live in South Korea:) ) takes off? While it is often more obvious--sometimes sickeningly so--for the female side of things, it's a given that, for example, Michael Jordan made the money because of a combination of skill, not killing anyone, and not being hideous. Triple the size of his ears and cut his earnings twenty-fold.
First learned of it on the Wacom drawing tablet mailing list and now could not survive without it. Endless stream of virtual paper with auto-dating and auto-categorization, all searchable. Plop in pictures, typed notes, swaps from clipboard, live weblinks, quoted text or images from websites which retain the connection. Pony for the quite reasonable paid version and write directly into it with your drawing tablet or tablet PC and get that converted on the fly to searchable text.
Spinrite has been the most amazing hardware maintainance ap bar none for...gosh. Pushing two decades. I'll never forget watching it change my RLL drive's interleave w/o formatting in ~1988. Now that Mac users are on commodity hardware they can use it for their disks without yanking them from the boxes. Not free but worth every last cent. Sales of Spinrite also pay for all the free security aps its creator offers.
Me, I'm waiting for easy OSX on non-Apple hardware. Somehow I don't see Apple helping us with that....
If it's not *every* StarForce protected game that's been fully cracked it's pretty close. Just took awhile for the first one.
Which has nothing to do with why StarForce and its maker are nasty.
I sure didn't enjoy emailing the creators of Space Rangers 2 to tell them they'd lost a sale because of the included StarForce protection. That sucks: I don't get to play a great game, small company loses money.
http://food-force.com/ Currently available for Windows & Mac and localized to more languages every day. Surprisingly, crucially, it's actually a solid game.
Stardock's earlier game The Political Machine had something similar. The publisher (Ubisoft I think; GalCiv 2 is self-published) insisted on copy protection. Stardock argued them down to protection which would sunset not long after release.
There is a huge untapped market for *cooperative* multiplayer games, both on and offline.
There is likely also an untapped market for gamers but it is unclear where they can be safely purchased. I liked Todd a lot, even though he was a console guy, but Sweden announced a crackdown on www.pirategamerbay.org and I didn't dare.
"What helps for me is that I simply don't type longer stretches than 15 minutes."
That's the best advice right there. Fifteen minutes with five off isn't terribly practical but twenty-eight/three should work. Wiggle your wrists around on the off time and focus out the window too (might as well take care of eyes at the same time).
If you're regularly feeling *pain* you're past the warnings and into potentional damage. Tingling or "stretching" sensations are generally the first signs you are doing something wrong.
[puts on his Oscar hat] I deserve some sort of special dufus technical super nerd award for causing my right wrist RSI playing Moria and first release Angband as a teen. Mom paid for my first wrist brace....
Nethack boo, Oangband yay!
Gametap Mac, more Re:Unsubscribing from Gametap
on
StarROMs Closes Doors
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· Score: 1
The unsubscribe is not only phone only but the number is buried in a FAQ. GameTap claims the phone is required for security which makes no sense given you are ending a payment but beginning one, including giving credit card number, is deemed safe enough for online only. There is also no way, short of pulling out your bank statement, to check what date you are billed on. Two online support staff couldn't figure out a way either.
That carping aside--major issues but not dealbreakers--GameTap is damned impressive. It is windows & single player only but a Mac version is in development with Linux to follow. There will never be any Nintendo titles on it so fanboys are out of luck. The selection from the covered systems is strange. The Dreamcast in particular is underrepresented. The tech is very cool with all the games running their native code. Performance is fine (XP pro, 1 gig RAM, Athlon64 2800, ATI 9700Pro, 5 gigs drive space allocated). Downloading a PC game takes quite a while but the frontend end gracefully handles minimization & alt-tabbing and will sound a tone when the game is ready. The multimedia content is obnoxious and useless. Sound like a certain cable station?
It's worth doing the free trial just to play Beyond Good & Evil or a Splinter Cell and revisit Heroes of Might & Magic III and Stronghold without finding the install disks. Just remember to shut it off before it hits your card.
I'll certainly be checking in over time, probably dipping in and out of subscription for specific games.
Don't know if it was pressing the machine but when I saw that on an Apple GS I nearly peed myself. The flying form of the robot was so responsive, unlike anything I'd experienced before. The (much uglier) PC port was no slouch--and I got to play at my house!--but *wow*.
How about a server only for those with high speed connections? No more PSX draw distances? If you're going to split an already small player base, that'd be my vote.
Complaints (compounds, hack, spit) aside, it's a most clever game. Thank you Teppy.
The reason I'm posting: the game already has an odd sort of metered payment in place, with time out-of-game rewarded. For those new to A Tale in the Desert, your character gains stuff while you are not playing. Warp time (fast travel; not available any other way) or basic but crucial resources. As a semi-quit but paying player in an active guild I pop in as needed, as a mule with my stored time or to switch to accumulating the currently most needed resource. (Time away can be split across several things.) Such a system is certainly abusable but also keeps those of us burnt out or too busy tied to Egypt. It's also clever business, enticing long quit players to return and enjoy zipping around with their massive warp time.
ATITD is an often wrong-headed pain in the ass but it's got a whiff of genius about it. Here's hoping the rest of the industry is skulking around Egypt taking notes.
Slashdot Mirror
If there's something physically wrong with a drive you can't do better. As a bonus, the purchase price funds all those free aps over at Gibson Research.
Been years since I used an IRC client [pauses while his geek card is reclaimed] but VIRC had a whiteboard. That client died; did others pick up the functionality? Never used it for RPG play but combined with voice it'd be a quick & dirty & free (& dated & maybe Windows only) option.
I'll second Junta. Like it a lot more than any of the German games. Most of those play well enough but tend to the simple side playwise. Which, of course, is what people want (people love the mind-numbing "gameplay" of Risk). Combine it with the short length (fantastic!) and you get sales hits. They deserve the attention but hopefully there'll someday again be a market for more involved games.
For elegant but simple and fast, Cosmic Encounter simply can not be beat. Unfortunately it's not available at retail anymore but there is online play for a cheap subscription (or free trial) at www.cosmicencounter.com. *Highly* recommended. Each player has a random alien race which can break one of the game's few rules. Work with the or against other players to grab enough land for a win. That's it. Takes minutes to play a round. Ain't gamed until you've backstabbed Virus with Zombie while attacking Sniveller.
You've pegged Carmack but Prey (at least the demo) has the same id/Carmack failings. Giger love ought to be banned as an influence. How much more interesting would the game have been using even the equally touchstones as Escher or Bosch to inspire the level and art design? Did we really need _more_ Quake demons + Alien?
An aside: don't brag about how much fake money you made using the bar slot machine. You've done the same thing your grandma does on games.com except you don't have points toward a discounted subscription to Scrapbooking Monthly.
"Is this any different to any other open source sites out there - is it especially for windows users. (if not, I am not sure of the reference to an ex-microsoft employee)"
You'd prefer that info wasn't upfront, to further encourage the Evil Empire and tinfoil cap crowds? And if IS for windows users, ain't it a potentional switch campaign for open source proponents? Jeez.
Parisans are so tiresome. Angband rulz Nethack!!!!!!!!!
Scary this is new research. It's their BUSINESS PLAN: DVDs ship out, don't get watched or returned, subscriptions aren't cancelled, Netflix benefits.
System Shock 2, maybe. Silent Hill titles are silly. If we're talking morality as the source of the unease, instead of or in addition to mood, I'm back to Morrowind Fanboi. A grown-up game for grown-up players that also worked as a fun title for those not seeing or choosing to ignore the deeper currents. Much like Gene Wolfe's fantasy novels: many of them can be sucked down as generic Slurpees, and enjoyed at that level, but for those paying attention the implications are appalling.
"I'm considering doing a post-graduate degree (which is what I think your talking about), I have to agree with a previous poster, for me it would just be to get the letters MA to use after my name (whilst not feeling as silly as the people who use BA but not as good as the people who get phd). I have a year free so it's no real loss and I can probably get it for free. I don't think that it would be as valuable as a years experience in an internship, also, if your going to have to pay a lot for it then you'll need to look at how much more money you can make when compared to how much it'll cost...
Also, it's not just for the money you might make, it might be fun if you like that sort of thing."
It's thirty grand to learn where the apostrophes go.
Not a good deal for the person getting the degree but terrific for the rest of us. Semicolons & ellipsis are a different degree program.
It's definitely not lack of talent. Windows must have backward compatibility for programs and drivers. Both home user and corporate installs. That's the horrible downside of the monopoly. It doesn't help Windows is drunken Jenga on iffy code going back to DOS. That Microsoft did as well as it did with XP is nothing short of miraculous. XP is a fine OS. While DRM ain't helping, I doubt it's a major issue. Look to Sony's inability to own the world for what crazed protection can do to tank a company.
It MIGHT help IF the PROGRAMMERS could BLOG without BOLDING every OTHER word WHILE describing THE problems THEY experienced WHILE wrestling WITH Microsoft CODE. I want to drag that guy into an alley and kick his spleen until he pisses red. I bet all his printed documents have full justification.
Spot on. JRPG's generally bore me to tears, so I've my bias, but comparing them as is silly.
On the CRPG side my nominees are Planescape:Torment, Morrowind, Deus Ex, and System Shock 2. Probably Gothic/Gothic 2 too but I never got passed the miserable interface. And the award goes to...Planescape. Linear, which people seem to like, but not on rails, and top notch writing. KotoR was an entertaining cartoon with pretend moral heft. Good fun but only good fun.
That said: Morrowind had a weak main story? Uh-uh. Oblivion* is the old game plot: save The Kingdom. Morrowind was so much more. It was fundamentally different: the world WAS THE STORY. The more the player learned about the world the more impact the plot had. The Nerevarine trapped by prophecy, finishing a very old battle. Play that battle to the end and while transforming Vvardenfell, there are other gods of other peoples with other prophecies. The player--hell, me, I was the player--saw how it all hooked into the lands beyond the island of the Dunmer. It was enormously satisfying. Grown-up, even. Video game power fantasy always grounded in larger political and religious (game world) realities.
Morrowind gave me the payoff of other CRPG's without feeling silly or fake-profound (I'm looking at you, Star Wars "universe").
*Great game but much safer. A retrenchment.
Heck if I know how he could do it, but Teppy needs to find a way to drag people in at various points along the timeline of a Telling. The game experience is *very* different the first days, the first couple months, and a year in.
For example, getting a camel. In the first week or two you'll be up against experienced, obsessive guilds. Whole regions. Chance of doing it solo? Zero. Three months in, your only competition is the unlikely other solo newb trying in your region that night.
ATITD is the bomb throwing radical of the MMORPG market. Second Life + deep gameplay.
Dammit. I've kept my account active for six months without playing. (Couldn't afford to do so but did it anyway.) Lots of complaints. But I think I've finally talked myself into gathering some $!@#!@#% grass to get the first #$!@##!@ camel in the region. The girlfriend, who never left, is going to be thrilled. Dammit!
Important point. Another flaw...
"Even if WOW was that much better, the MMO market was relatively tiny at the time. Something changed that meant ten times as many people were willing to give WOW a chance"
MMORPG's are strange beasts. Despite all attempts the *play* doesn't hold people over time/levels. Many (definitely not all) WoW subscribers are surely cannibalized from other games. WoW ate all the other games' players. They sloshed into WoW, sloshed out, will slosh back in with the expansion.
WoW is a very good game. It went hoooooj by being good with great timing.
What *I* would do is hit players with an email approximately two months in. Trigger a combination of just-leveled/scored nifty phatloot/etc. Email: 12 month subscription is normally a 5% savings over month-to-month but if you do it RIGHT NOW [Read: You are jazzed RIGHT NOW. Later you will quit. Sign at a savings. Quit. Pay us without using our infrastructure] there is an additional 5% savings! You save money!
"No no. Cthulu Karts is a race."
Funniest thing I've read in months.
Worth remembering that the vast majority of Lovecraft's output was letters. (That'd be snail mail, with stamps, for you youngins.) Most of the "mythos" is the work of obsessive fans. Frank Belknap Long & Clark Ashton Smith are unfairly neglected. Long's work was closer to Lovecraft's but acknowledged the existence of the outside world. Children, sex, jobs, that sort of thing. Clark was a rare word vomitorium. He knew what the words meant, unlike his pulp fellows. Robert E. Howard couldn't help tapping into what made pulp thrilling. It was part of him and it killed him. (The Whole Wide World is the rare chick flick starwarsroxorz can enjoy. Highly recommended.)
The above was an attempt to make this a useful post. BUT I DON'T CARE. Come on, "Cthulhu, Shub-Niggurath, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, the Magnum Innominandum" really are "like anagrams of breakfast cereal names" and I'm posting because I can never resist my all time favorite literary put down. The quote is from Brian Aldiss' Billion Year Spree, required reading for any SF fan.
There's occasional power in Lovecraft. I enjoy and own his work. I humbly suggest reading the collected works of Fritz Leiber instead.
"Sony's doing everything right with the Blu-Ray that they did wrong with the UMD"
:) ) We'll have to wait for side-by-sides under controlled test conditions to see if their MPEG-2 claims are accurate. Always possible but I'm not hopeful.
They're certainly doing better but pushing MPEG-2 on Blu-Ray because they get royalties for 2 but not MPEG-4 isn't thrilling. (I think this is the financial situation. Flame away if I'm wrong.
My hope is the one best suited for general storage and computer tasks wins. Unlike the person in the thread who believes there hasn't been a *single movie worth watching in the last two years* (largely, it seems, because video game films aren't done properly), I rent many films...but I almost never buy. Don't feel the need to watch them again until years have passed. Books I buy. No finding reader hardware for old books. No DRM. mmmm books
A member of the gaming press fiddling with the interface to see old Mario games listed but unplayable via a previously announced download option turned "throw out the standard controller and move to something totally unorthodox, and thought that's a stupid move" into "amazing innovation"?
"I may even buy one for my mother and grandmother, cause I always like to push technology down their throat, like any self-respecting geek should."
I'm sure you're the top of the list in grandma's will, what with the back-to-back Christmas gifts of KnoppixToasterOven & Sanyo 9" disk earrings.
Fair enough (re: tight sweaters) but really, won't the same thing happen to some degree for men if the pro gaming "sport" (I'm dubious, can you tell?: I don't live in South Korea :) ) takes off? While it is often more obvious--sometimes sickeningly so--for the female side of things, it's a given that, for example, Michael Jordan made the money because of a combination of skill, not killing anyone, and not being hideous. Triple the size of his ears and cut his earnings twenty-fold.
http://www.evernote.com/en/
First learned of it on the Wacom drawing tablet mailing list and now could not survive without it. Endless stream of virtual paper with auto-dating and auto-categorization, all searchable. Plop in pictures, typed notes, swaps from clipboard, live weblinks, quoted text or images from websites which retain the connection. Pony for the quite reasonable paid version and write directly into it with your drawing tablet or tablet PC and get that converted on the fly to searchable text.
http://grc.com/spinrite.htm/
Spinrite has been the most amazing hardware maintainance ap bar none for...gosh. Pushing two decades. I'll never forget watching it change my RLL drive's interleave w/o formatting in ~1988. Now that Mac users are on commodity hardware they can use it for their disks without yanking them from the boxes. Not free but worth every last cent. Sales of Spinrite also pay for all the free security aps its creator offers.
Me, I'm waiting for easy OSX on non-Apple hardware. Somehow I don't see Apple helping us with that....
If it's not *every* StarForce protected game that's been fully cracked it's pretty close. Just took awhile for the first one.
Which has nothing to do with why StarForce and its maker are nasty.
I sure didn't enjoy emailing the creators of Space Rangers 2 to tell them they'd lost a sale because of the included StarForce protection. That sucks: I don't get to play a great game, small company loses money.
http://food-force.com/ Currently available for Windows & Mac and localized to more languages every day. Surprisingly, crucially, it's actually a solid game.
Stardock's earlier game The Political Machine had something similar. The publisher (Ubisoft I think; GalCiv 2 is self-published) insisted on copy protection. Stardock argued them down to protection which would sunset not long after release.
There is a huge untapped market for *cooperative* multiplayer games, both on and offline.
There is likely also an untapped market for gamers but it is unclear where they can be safely purchased. I liked Todd a lot, even though he was a console guy, but Sweden announced a crackdown on www.pirategamerbay.org and I didn't dare.
"What helps for me is that I simply don't type longer stretches than 15 minutes."
That's the best advice right there. Fifteen minutes with five off isn't terribly practical but twenty-eight/three should work. Wiggle your wrists around on the off time and focus out the window too (might as well take care of eyes at the same time).
If you're regularly feeling *pain* you're past the warnings and into potentional damage. Tingling or "stretching" sensations are generally the first signs you are doing something wrong.
[puts on his Oscar hat] I deserve some sort of special dufus technical super nerd award for causing my right wrist RSI playing Moria and first release Angband as a teen. Mom paid for my first wrist brace....
Nethack boo, Oangband yay!
The unsubscribe is not only phone only but the number is buried in a FAQ. GameTap claims the phone is required for security which makes no sense given you are ending a payment but beginning one, including giving credit card number, is deemed safe enough for online only. There is also no way, short of pulling out your bank statement, to check what date you are billed on. Two online support staff couldn't figure out a way either.
That carping aside--major issues but not dealbreakers--GameTap is damned impressive. It is windows & single player only but a Mac version is in development with Linux to follow. There will never be any Nintendo titles on it so fanboys are out of luck. The selection from the covered systems is strange. The Dreamcast in particular is underrepresented. The tech is very cool with all the games running their native code. Performance is fine (XP pro, 1 gig RAM, Athlon64 2800, ATI 9700Pro, 5 gigs drive space allocated). Downloading a PC game takes quite a while but the frontend end gracefully handles minimization & alt-tabbing and will sound a tone when the game is ready. The multimedia content is obnoxious and useless. Sound like a certain cable station?
It's worth doing the free trial just to play Beyond Good & Evil or a Splinter Cell and revisit Heroes of Might & Magic III and Stronghold without finding the install disks. Just remember to shut it off before it hits your card.
I'll certainly be checking in over time, probably dipping in and out of subscription for specific games.
Don't know if it was pressing the machine but when I saw that on an Apple GS I nearly peed myself. The flying form of the robot was so responsive, unlike anything I'd experienced before. The (much uglier) PC port was no slouch--and I got to play at my house!--but *wow*.
How about a server only for those with high speed connections? No more PSX draw distances? If you're going to split an already small player base, that'd be my vote.
Complaints (compounds, hack, spit) aside, it's a most clever game. Thank you Teppy.
The reason I'm posting: the game already has an odd sort of metered payment in place, with time out-of-game rewarded. For those new to A Tale in the Desert, your character gains stuff while you are not playing. Warp time (fast travel; not available any other way) or basic but crucial resources. As a semi-quit but paying player in an active guild I pop in as needed, as a mule with my stored time or to switch to accumulating the currently most needed resource. (Time away can be split across several things.) Such a system is certainly abusable but also keeps those of us burnt out or too busy tied to Egypt. It's also clever business, enticing long quit players to return and enjoy zipping around with their massive warp time.
ATITD is an often wrong-headed pain in the ass but it's got a whiff of genius about it. Here's hoping the rest of the industry is skulking around Egypt taking notes.