"Rogue, Nethack, and all it's ilk are turn-based. Diablo is real time. It makes a huge difference."
It was a tremendous change. Diablo also illustrated what I'd been trying to drill into the brains of the chuckleheads who kept making graphical roguelikes: Angband [I'm a partisan! booo Nethack!:) ] has thousands of unique monsters and items because it takes a few seconds with a text editor to create one. Once you need to draw and animate and record sound for the new content there's little time left to, er, make the new content.
"In Diablo if you spend a long time thinking, you *will* die."
Ever play Nox deathmatch? Wheee but that was fast.
"Not to mention the multiplayer... I have yet to see a Roguelike with decent multiplayer."
Ya. It might be an impossible task. MAngband was good enough I tried it a second time, a left-handed compliment for sure.
Crunch time programmers sickly as ever
on
Coffee A Health Drink?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
From the article,
"A study has found that coffee contributes more antioxidants - which have been linked with fighting heart disease and cancer - to the diet than cranberries, apples or tomatoes."
The key bit here is "to the diet". This doesn't make coffee a health food, it means the collective we don't eat enough of the healthy stuff. Yet another misrepresentation of research and thanks to Slashdot for picking it up. I eagerly await the modded funny posts.
"Music has been turned artificial, movies have followed suit, I guess games are next. When people will wake up and stop accepting this crap is beyond me. People have no "soul" anymore, they want fluff with no real substance, typical disposable society."...and modern dentistry keeps us alive at the price of people with artificially white teeth.
Warlords is still a great game. Most of its era sucked. Same thing now. Whether it is the perceived coarsening of the culture, the quality of the video games or the quality of the toast: I'm sick of the whining. Games now, if not better on average (I'd argue they are), cover a wider range of possibilities from simple control greatness (Warning Forever) to insanely deep simulations (X-Plane) to frantic multi-player (UT2004). Random high quality examples only.
Unconnected to my bitching at the poster, I've got the July 1971 Analog which includes a many page article about Spacewar, written by one of the variant creators, Albert Kuhfeld. It's even got a flowchart of the game logic!
Showing the kids the history of games is a great service; it is a hobby and an industry without ties to its history. Just don't become mired in your own nostalgia. A dangerous narcotic, nostalgia.
Especially given it takes roughly the same amount of raw materials and energy to make one desktop computer as an entire automobile.
That anyone would do this is appalling. They're probably also putting them into the general trash stream where all that tasty lead and such gets improbably processed.
I second this. Cosmic Encounter is both fast AND deep. One of the best game designs *ever* and the online implementation is slick. Can even play a few of the many aliens free. Very low requirements--don't think it does any install.
Red Dwarf ably riffed every SF cliche and was funny doing it. IMO tremendously smart show both in its SF knowledge and its control of sitcom conventions. Compare it to the leaden treatment the various Star Trek series gave the same chestnuts. Dwarf acknowledged why we love the content same time it was jabbing our frozen adolescent adorating with point-ed sticks. Can't ask for more than that.
"Is this story some kind of weird dig at the kind of people who get their 'philosophy' from The Matrix? Or are you actually being serious."
We can only hope the review is a joke. The book sounds equally lousy but more easily dismissed: am I the only Slashdot reading, SF loving person who finds the vast majority sci-fi movies and TV shows useless or worse? (Yes, I'm including Star Wars and Star Trek.)
The reviewer complains about the movies chosen but doesn't suggest the clever and deep SF treatments that have appeared. Red Dwarf. Gattaca. Solaris (Tarkovsky, not Hollywood). There are many more though not as many as there should be. The Matrix is as profound as a stoned college bull session. Fun but boiled off by morning's sober light. Might I suggest Thomas M. Disch's THE DREAMS OUR STUFF IS MADE OF: How Science Fiction Conquered the World? One third pungent SF criticism, two-thirds examination of SF's influence on society and culture. UFO cultism, wet-noodle brained sci-fi TV, Heinlein's going solipsistic bonkers. All there. Couple it with Barry Malzberg's scarifying, funny Engines of the Night.
Most ATITD players do not pursue Leadership (one of the seven Disciplines). For those that do the jury rounds of Demi-Pharaoh voting are very tense. I've never made it out of first round. Too big a mouth and what good works I do under the radar. The jury rounds move forward until the final candidates go to voting from all of Egypt. It's an important vote: the Demi-Pharaoh can kick paying players. Yup, you read that correctly. Covered Cartouche, also in Leadership, is Survivor: Egypt. Not one of my favorite tests.
ATITD is breathtakingly innovative. While not for everyone it is watched by all MMOG insiders. A short list of its most surprising features:
1) It ends. Each Telling has a concrete and player driven finish. Those who have mastered the tests of a given Discipline design a test in that Discipline for the next Telling.
2) The players are in control. If someone is running around building giant swastikas the devs won't step in. Players must organize and pass laws to ban the player or (as happened once Tale 1) change their name and shame them into quitting. Player written and passed laws can change anything short making flying camels. The devs rewrite the code on the fly to implement them.
3) Addictive drugs with both up- and downsides. As disruptive as it sounds. Drugs can cause death (account deletion) so combine that with #7 below.
4) It's full of adults. Most kids or dorks quit out when they realize there are no rats to kill. Game skews both female and older. Nice side effect of the no combat bit. The game is still very, very, very competitive. It's a GAME, not a There or Sims Online chatline.
5) Ridiculously generous trial on PC, Mac, Linux in English, German, and French. All on the same server. There are French cities. Heck, I've tripped over the guildhall for the Belgian Linux Users Group. Game is lousy with penguins.;)
6) With few exceptions there is no leveling or skill building. Every major and most minor tasks are mini-games. The implications are enormous. One new player discovered he had a knack for gem cutting, a knack few shared. Within a week he was selling that ability--to cut others' raw materials--throughout Egypt. No leveling of his Gem Cutting Skill before he could tackle the tough ones. (Selling it mostly for trade but also to player run banks and for player maintained currencies.)
7) The Test of Marriage (in Worship) allows the spouse to log in as you *without knowing your password*. There is no divorce. Tale 1's leading artist was murdered by his spouse.
8) eGenesis has three full time employees. They are running a commercially viable and industry shaping game where the likes of Microsoft's Mythica crap out before launch after years of development and millions invested.
9) Nothing is known at game start (and game restart in a new Telling). How does pollution effect crops? What are the patterns of mushroom spawning? What equations govern Thought puzzles solved v. Perception stat increase? Game's a giant nerdtastic set of nested puzzles. Players spreadsheet data and experiment to answer mysteries both great and small.
http://wiki.atitd.net/tale2 is the player run wiki. Info discovered, info wrong, data craved. It's huge and testament to the game's depth. (Also got the flaws of all wikis--not well organized.)
PC gaming will survive just fine. Most of the damage has already been done--games brain damaged in cross-development.
"First of all, ignore Yahoo! games etc., because that's a different market"
Agreed, though it's worth keeping in mind. I play Tangleword or Wordyacht most every night. Free, word based, definitely requiring PC.
"1. You need A-list titles like Half-Life to sell PC gaming rigs, garner interest, make big money."
PC will continue to slip but won't bottom out. It'll always be the only source for some niche games like flight sims (same as fighters are console only). Yet to play an FPS on a console where I didn't want to through the controller across the room from combined frustration with auto-targeting, squished verticals, and save points.
"2. The last half-life took YEARS to develop, and there's nothing wrong with the development team."
And?
"3. Game graphics will flat-line to the point you can't tell real TV from videogame TV."
Sure. On the NEXT-next generation of consoles.
"4. The new consoles are on High-Def- often higher Def than computers."
I'll believe it when I see it with decent frame rates. Should happen a couple years into next console generation when developers have mastered the new equipment. For late released titles on current set it largely boils down to art direction: some games look really good Big (resolution aside) and most look better on a PC if given a decent port.
"5. More people are buying laptops."
And?
"6. Game and computer companies are getting serious about IP, and the computer is their weak point. You can't copy anything on a console."
Point taken, though I'd reverse it: I know many who are moving to console version of cross-platform games *because of* the protection on PC games. Also know a couple people who gave up playing PC games entirely because it was so much easier to download and burn all PS2 & XBOX games.
"I think real PC gaming is done. My friends still play Starcraft"
Equivalent to saying, "Console gaming is done because all my friends are still playing with their N64's."
"You're not a fool, but you're on the wrong side."
To your credit, you're not claiming open source triple-A titles will save PC gaming.;) That's an extra special brain twitch many/. folk have.
I don't disagree PC gaming has taken a hit. I do think it ridiculous to imagine it a body blow.
For the PC, consider:
1) PC's are used for other things. All the non-game functions touted by the upcoming consoles are available to any $499 (monitor included) Dell slimline, plus the online play without ongoing fees. Plus same system does online billing, Yahoo! games, etc.
2) PC games are generally cheaper.
3) Mods are important. Yes, consoles are (very slowly) moving in this direction--but they're also picking up the patching and bugginess that is PC games' worst "feature".
4) Indie developers or new kids in their Russian parents' bedrooms can knock out a PC game without the millions required to dev kit and release a console title. Do most suck? Sure! but not all. More and more the PC (perhaps running Linux) will be the birthing ground of the new talent.
5) MMORPGs are the world of PCs. Love 'em or hate 'em. I mostly hate, A Tale in the Desert aside--come say hi there. Wait! that's an indie title! and revolutionary. See #4.
New generation of consoles will steal the thunder, PC will bounce back in a couple years. Maybe not bounce as high as before but it'll happen. Same as last time. And the time before...
A Tale in the Desert has it. Or at least, had it in Tale 1. The only form of death in the game, though took some real effort (or very pissed game spouse) to get hit with it. Deletes the entire account. The only Oracle of Arts & Music (read: big honcho important d00d) was murdered which threw the end game into disarray.
"You'd have to seriously rethink (or more likely abandon) the idea of leveling and posessions, though."
ATITD has almost entirely ditched leveling. Lots of possessions but only one or two (mics, special fishing poles) function as person-specific "power ups" like weapons and armor do in a more typical MMO.
The death was by addictive drug. Gain lots of free travel but log in often enough to take the antidote. The more time you want, the tighter the antidote schedule. Murder came in via marriage: spouses can log in as each other (w/o passwords!) and there is no divorce. So, addict spouse, strand spouse in desert with no travel time or antidote.
More disruptive than drugs & spouses, certain players gain (via election) the ability to ban a small number of people. Anyone they want, no reason required. Effectively murder. Gotta be careful who gets in power in Egypt.:)
Re:At last, Iain M Banks gets a bit of recognition
on
2005 Hugo Nominations
·
· Score: 1
Hasbro does not own worldwide Scrabble rights. Competitor Mattel is the owner in many countries, most notably England.
There are many free online not-quite-Scrabble games. Just far enough off the copyright infringement to mostly avoid the lawyers. There are two problems.
There are quite a few official Scrabble dictionaries. US 2nd, US 3rd (expurgated), US 3rd tournament (no defs, unexpurgated), and goes on from there. There are words valid in UK play (Chambers and otherwise) but not US and vice versa. There are combined dictionaries. A poor dictionary **BREAKS** a word game. Most online word games have truly lousy free or licensed dictionaries. For a competent player it's infuriating playing "cete", "ai", or "qat" and having the word bounce. Some free games like the (Boggle-like) Tangleword(1) at www.playsite.com have solid dictionaries.
More subtle is the balance of the Scrabble board itself, which must be messed with to pass legal muster. Millions of human and computer hours have been spent analyzing ideal play on that board and with Scrabble's letter scores and distribution. It's akin to changing the movement of the rook or the spacing of bases on the diamond. Might get a good game as a result but it'll sure play differently.
(1) Tangleword's round timer requires Microsoft Java. The game is otherwise playable with proper Java. Maybe if a zillion/. appear and complain it'll be rewritten. (Won't, but a fantatic Tangleworder can dream.)
"Question... do any of these processors come in the socket 478 form factor, or is intel forcing us to upgrade our motherboards yet again? If I have to buy a new mother board, I might as well go AMD this time around!!"
Or, um, simply wait a bit and not buy at the top of the price curve.
I particularly liked how the shadow, chair, and booze accidentally came together in the screenie to suggest a crossbow cocked and ready to shoot a bottle of Canadian Club (at any Cyrix chip designer storming the digital heights?).
I do. Bent a few pins on my first sell-the-first-born-to-pay-for-it 486 50DX. I cried.
The XBOX has horsepower once modded to reveal its inner not-a-toaster. I admire the work of those converting their breadboxes to ovens or SETI receivers but doing it myself ain't high on the list.
Let's not forget the $300 console can really rip through a spreadsheet.
Consoles are toasters. They make toast. If all you want is toast and the style of toast you crave is available for the toaster, buy the toaster. Otherwise, buy a computer.
Apple had the dual advantages of hardware control and low market share. As long as they didn't break, say, ProTools & Pagemaker, Apple could pull off radical processor & OS changes.
People--I'm one of them--are still unreasonably expecting Windows to support dodgily written third party software and strange hardware from five or even fifteen years ago.
Cosmic Encounter is a legendary game. As brilliant a design as Magic: The Gathering without the crack hit payment. I first came across it when I saw people playing with handmade sets. (The game had been many years out of print.) It's currently online in free/pay form at http://www.cosmicencounter.com/screens/home.html. The play is fast, deep, and silly. Four player rounds last at most twenty minutes. The rules are simple and each player is randomly assigned an alien race that can break one rule. A single Macron unit counts as four, another race can force negotiations, a third can win with low cards (and lose with high). Support this game. It is friggin great and the online implementation is too.
Can't say I recommend them given they are out of print, overly complicated or both but my favorites have always been Junta, Stellar Conquest, Starfleet Battles (made into a series of buggy PC games), Down With the King, Chase, and Ipswich.
Junta is a hillariously frantic trading game, Stellar Conquest a strange semi-limited movement numbers game. Starfleet Battles is unbelievably complex and simulates everything from marine combat on exploding planets to strategic war between dozens of galaxy spanning civilizations down to individual ships. [Ie., Derke Smart has been trying to write it for years. Derek Smart Derek Smart Derek Smart] Down With the King is...oh, heck, there is a table to roll on while visiting the funeral of the player you've just assassinated and results range from impressing the nobles to getting drunk and falling into the grave. Chase was a slick pure strategy release by TSR that got no attention and Ipswich is a similarly dead, brutally difficult word game.
Catan is a good game, not a great game. Been years since I last played so appologies in advance but if I remember correctly there is at least one card or goal that sucker punches those new to it, something about a cross map roadway. Given the big draw of the game is easy-to-learn, not knowing about and thus being unable to block this move is a problem. Not a fatal flaw but still a flaw.
The depths to which Adventure games have sunk
on
Programming Puzzles
·
· Score: 1
I knew things were bad when the Sam & Max sequel was cancelled, but this...
Slashdot Mirror
"Rogue, Nethack, and all it's ilk are turn-based. Diablo is real time. It makes a huge difference."
:) ] has thousands of unique monsters and items because it takes a few seconds with a text editor to create one. Once you need to draw and animate and record sound for the new content there's little time left to, er, make the new content.
It was a tremendous change. Diablo also illustrated what I'd been trying to drill into the brains of the chuckleheads who kept making graphical roguelikes: Angband [I'm a partisan! booo Nethack!
"In Diablo if you spend a long time thinking, you *will* die."
Ever play Nox deathmatch? Wheee but that was fast.
"Not to mention the multiplayer... I have yet to see a Roguelike with decent multiplayer."
Ya. It might be an impossible task. MAngband was good enough I tried it a second time, a left-handed compliment for sure.
From the article,
"A study has found that coffee contributes more antioxidants - which have been linked with fighting heart disease and cancer - to the diet than cranberries, apples or tomatoes."
The key bit here is "to the diet". This doesn't make coffee a health food, it means the collective we don't eat enough of the healthy stuff. Yet another misrepresentation of research and thanks to Slashdot for picking it up. I eagerly await the modded funny posts.
Thexder and Ultima Underworld.
I'd ask for a Nox sequel but of the ten people who bought the game only five saw the amazing competitive multiplayer.
"Music has been turned artificial, movies have followed suit, I guess games are next. When people will wake up and stop accepting this crap is beyond me. People have no "soul" anymore, they want fluff with no real substance, typical disposable society." ...and modern dentistry keeps us alive at the price of people with artificially white teeth.
Warlords is still a great game. Most of its era sucked. Same thing now. Whether it is the perceived coarsening of the culture, the quality of the video games or the quality of the toast: I'm sick of the whining. Games now, if not better on average (I'd argue they are), cover a wider range of possibilities from simple control greatness (Warning Forever) to insanely deep simulations (X-Plane) to frantic multi-player (UT2004). Random high quality examples only.
Unconnected to my bitching at the poster, I've got the July 1971 Analog which includes a many page article about Spacewar, written by one of the variant creators, Albert Kuhfeld. It's even got a flowchart of the game logic!
Showing the kids the history of games is a great service; it is a hobby and an industry without ties to its history. Just don't become mired in your own nostalgia. A dangerous narcotic, nostalgia.
Especially given it takes roughly the same amount of raw materials and energy to make one desktop computer as an entire automobile.
That anyone would do this is appalling. They're probably also putting them into the general trash stream where all that tasty lead and such gets improbably processed.
I second this. Cosmic Encounter is both fast AND deep. One of the best game designs *ever* and the online implementation is slick. Can even play a few of the many aliens free. Very low requirements--don't think it does any install.
http://www.cosmicencounter.com/screens/home.html
Red Dwarf ably riffed every SF cliche and was funny doing it. IMO tremendously smart show both in its SF knowledge and its control of sitcom conventions. Compare it to the leaden treatment the various Star Trek series gave the same chestnuts. Dwarf acknowledged why we love the content same time it was jabbing our frozen adolescent adorating with point-ed sticks. Can't ask for more than that.
(Ya, I should have written clever and/or deep.)
"Is this story some kind of weird dig at the kind of people who get their 'philosophy' from The Matrix? Or are you actually being serious."
We can only hope the review is a joke. The book sounds equally lousy but more easily dismissed: am I the only Slashdot reading, SF loving person who finds the vast majority sci-fi movies and TV shows useless or worse? (Yes, I'm including Star Wars and Star Trek.)
The reviewer complains about the movies chosen but doesn't suggest the clever and deep SF treatments that have appeared. Red Dwarf. Gattaca. Solaris (Tarkovsky, not Hollywood). There are many more though not as many as there should be. The Matrix is as profound as a stoned college bull session. Fun but boiled off by morning's sober light. Might I suggest Thomas M. Disch's THE DREAMS OUR STUFF IS MADE OF: How Science Fiction Conquered the World? One third pungent SF criticism, two-thirds examination of SF's influence on society and culture. UFO cultism, wet-noodle brained sci-fi TV, Heinlein's going solipsistic bonkers. All there. Couple it with Barry Malzberg's scarifying, funny Engines of the Night.
DOH! so much for getting the URLs correct:
http://wiki.atitd.net/tale2/Home
Link I put in original post goes to current census.
Most ATITD players do not pursue Leadership (one of the seven Disciplines). For those that do the jury rounds of Demi-Pharaoh voting are very tense. I've never made it out of first round. Too big a mouth and what good works I do under the radar. The jury rounds move forward until the final candidates go to voting from all of Egypt. It's an important vote: the Demi-Pharaoh can kick paying players. Yup, you read that correctly. Covered Cartouche, also in Leadership, is Survivor: Egypt. Not one of my favorite tests.
;)
ATITD is breathtakingly innovative. While not for everyone it is watched by all MMOG insiders. A short list of its most surprising features:
1) It ends. Each Telling has a concrete and player driven finish. Those who have mastered the tests of a given Discipline design a test in that Discipline for the next Telling.
2) The players are in control. If someone is running around building giant swastikas the devs won't step in. Players must organize and pass laws to ban the player or (as happened once Tale 1) change their name and shame them into quitting. Player written and passed laws can change anything short making flying camels. The devs rewrite the code on the fly to implement them.
3) Addictive drugs with both up- and downsides. As disruptive as it sounds. Drugs can cause death (account deletion) so combine that with #7 below.
4) It's full of adults. Most kids or dorks quit out when they realize there are no rats to kill. Game skews both female and older. Nice side effect of the no combat bit. The game is still very, very, very competitive. It's a GAME, not a There or Sims Online chatline.
5) Ridiculously generous trial on PC, Mac, Linux in English, German, and French. All on the same server. There are French cities. Heck, I've tripped over the guildhall for the Belgian Linux Users Group. Game is lousy with penguins.
6) With few exceptions there is no leveling or skill building. Every major and most minor tasks are mini-games. The implications are enormous. One new player discovered he had a knack for gem cutting, a knack few shared. Within a week he was selling that ability--to cut others' raw materials--throughout Egypt. No leveling of his Gem Cutting Skill before he could tackle the tough ones. (Selling it mostly for trade but also to player run banks and for player maintained currencies.)
7) The Test of Marriage (in Worship) allows the spouse to log in as you *without knowing your password*. There is no divorce. Tale 1's leading artist was murdered by his spouse.
8) eGenesis has three full time employees. They are running a commercially viable and industry shaping game where the likes of Microsoft's Mythica crap out before launch after years of development and millions invested.
9) Nothing is known at game start (and game restart in a new Telling). How does pollution effect crops? What are the patterns of mushroom spawning? What equations govern Thought puzzles solved v. Perception stat increase? Game's a giant nerdtastic set of nested puzzles. Players spreadsheet data and experiment to answer mysteries both great and small.
http://wiki.atitd.net/tale2 is the player run wiki. Info discovered, info wrong, data craved. It's huge and testament to the game's depth. (Also got the flaws of all wikis--not well organized.)
PC gaming will survive just fine. Most of the damage has already been done--games brain damaged in cross-development.
;) That's an extra special brain twitch many /. folk have.
"First of all, ignore Yahoo! games etc., because that's a different market"
Agreed, though it's worth keeping in mind. I play Tangleword or Wordyacht most every night. Free, word based, definitely requiring PC.
"1. You need A-list titles like Half-Life to sell PC gaming rigs, garner interest, make big money."
PC will continue to slip but won't bottom out. It'll always be the only source for some niche games like flight sims (same as fighters are console only). Yet to play an FPS on a console where I didn't want to through the controller across the room from combined frustration with auto-targeting, squished verticals, and save points.
"2. The last half-life took YEARS to develop, and there's nothing wrong with the development team."
And?
"3. Game graphics will flat-line to the point you can't tell real TV from videogame TV."
Sure. On the NEXT-next generation of consoles.
"4. The new consoles are on High-Def- often higher Def than computers."
I'll believe it when I see it with decent frame rates. Should happen a couple years into next console generation when developers have mastered the new equipment. For late released titles on current set it largely boils down to art direction: some games look really good Big (resolution aside) and most look better on a PC if given a decent port.
"5. More people are buying laptops."
And?
"6. Game and computer companies are getting serious about IP, and the computer is their weak point. You can't copy anything on a console."
Point taken, though I'd reverse it: I know many who are moving to console version of cross-platform games *because of* the protection on PC games. Also know a couple people who gave up playing PC games entirely because it was so much easier to download and burn all PS2 & XBOX games.
"I think real PC gaming is done. My friends still play Starcraft"
Equivalent to saying, "Console gaming is done because all my friends are still playing with their N64's."
"You're not a fool, but you're on the wrong side."
To your credit, you're not claiming open source triple-A titles will save PC gaming.
I don't disagree PC gaming has taken a hit. I do think it ridiculous to imagine it a body blow.
For the PC, consider:
1) PC's are used for other things. All the non-game functions touted by the upcoming consoles are available to any $499 (monitor included) Dell slimline, plus the online play without ongoing fees. Plus same system does online billing, Yahoo! games, etc.
2) PC games are generally cheaper.
3) Mods are important. Yes, consoles are (very slowly) moving in this direction--but they're also picking up the patching and bugginess that is PC games' worst "feature".
4) Indie developers or new kids in their Russian parents' bedrooms can knock out a PC game without the millions required to dev kit and release a console title. Do most suck? Sure! but not all. More and more the PC (perhaps running Linux) will be the birthing ground of the new talent.
5) MMORPGs are the world of PCs. Love 'em or hate 'em. I mostly hate, A Tale in the Desert aside--come say hi there. Wait! that's an indie title! and revolutionary. See #4.
New generation of consoles will steal the thunder, PC will bounce back in a couple years. Maybe not bounce as high as before but it'll happen. Same as last time. And the time before...
"I think this would work in the correct game."
:)
A Tale in the Desert has it. Or at least, had it in Tale 1. The only form of death in the game, though took some real effort (or very pissed game spouse) to get hit with it. Deletes the entire account. The only Oracle of Arts & Music (read: big honcho important d00d) was murdered which threw the end game into disarray.
"You'd have to seriously rethink (or more likely abandon) the idea of leveling and posessions, though."
ATITD has almost entirely ditched leveling. Lots of possessions but only one or two (mics, special fishing poles) function as person-specific "power ups" like weapons and armor do in a more typical MMO.
The death was by addictive drug. Gain lots of free travel but log in often enough to take the antidote. The more time you want, the tighter the antidote schedule. Murder came in via marriage: spouses can log in as each other (w/o passwords!) and there is no divorce. So, addict spouse, strand spouse in desert with no travel time or antidote.
More disruptive than drugs & spouses, certain players gain (via election) the ability to ban a small number of people. Anyone they want, no reason required. Effectively murder. Gotta be careful who gets in power in Egypt.
SciFi != SF
(I'm a fan of Banks' work.)
Hasbro does not own worldwide Scrabble rights. Competitor Mattel is the owner in many countries, most notably England.
/. appear and complain it'll be rewritten. (Won't, but a fantatic Tangleworder can dream.)
There are many free online not-quite-Scrabble games. Just far enough off the copyright infringement to mostly avoid the lawyers. There are two problems.
There are quite a few official Scrabble dictionaries. US 2nd, US 3rd (expurgated), US 3rd tournament (no defs, unexpurgated), and goes on from there. There are words valid in UK play (Chambers and otherwise) but not US and vice versa. There are combined dictionaries. A poor dictionary **BREAKS** a word game. Most online word games have truly lousy free or licensed dictionaries. For a competent player it's infuriating playing "cete", "ai", or "qat" and having the word bounce. Some free games like the (Boggle-like) Tangleword(1) at www.playsite.com have solid dictionaries.
More subtle is the balance of the Scrabble board itself, which must be messed with to pass legal muster. Millions of human and computer hours have been spent analyzing ideal play on that board and with Scrabble's letter scores and distribution. It's akin to changing the movement of the rook or the spacing of bases on the diamond. Might get a good game as a result but it'll sure play differently.
(1) Tangleword's round timer requires Microsoft Java. The game is otherwise playable with proper Java. Maybe if a zillion
"Question... do any of these processors come in the socket 478 form factor, or is intel forcing us to upgrade our motherboards yet again? If I have to buy a new mother board, I might as well go AMD this time around!!"
Or, um, simply wait a bit and not buy at the top of the price curve.
I particularly liked how the shadow, chair, and booze accidentally came together in the screenie to suggest a crossbow cocked and ready to shoot a bottle of Canadian Club (at any Cyrix chip designer storming the digital heights?).
"could they have made that new keyboard any uglier?"
Anyone else get a sudden craving for Skittles?
I do. Bent a few pins on my first sell-the-first-born-to-pay-for-it 486 50DX. I cried.
The XBOX has horsepower once modded to reveal its inner not-a-toaster. I admire the work of those converting their breadboxes to ovens or SETI receivers but doing it myself ain't high on the list.
Let's not forget the $300 console can really rip through a spreadsheet.
Consoles are toasters. They make toast. If all you want is toast and the style of toast you crave is available for the toaster, buy the toaster. Otherwise, buy a computer.
Apple had the dual advantages of hardware control and low market share. As long as they didn't break, say, ProTools & Pagemaker, Apple could pull off radical processor & OS changes.
People--I'm one of them--are still unreasonably expecting Windows to support dodgily written third party software and strange hardware from five or even fifteen years ago.
"One of the big plusses for AO was it was not well known"
No wonder giant companies keep nixing MMORPG launches. Only EverQuest counts as well known.
Cosmic Encounter is a legendary game. As brilliant a design as Magic: The Gathering without the crack hit payment. I first came across it when I saw people playing with handmade sets. (The game had been many years out of print.) It's currently online in free/pay form at http://www.cosmicencounter.com/screens/home.html. The play is fast, deep, and silly. Four player rounds last at most twenty minutes. The rules are simple and each player is randomly assigned an alien race that can break one rule. A single Macron unit counts as four, another race can force negotiations, a third can win with low cards (and lose with high). Support this game. It is friggin great and the online implementation is too.
Can't say I recommend them given they are out of print, overly complicated or both but my favorites have always been Junta, Stellar Conquest, Starfleet Battles (made into a series of buggy PC games), Down With the King, Chase, and Ipswich.
Junta is a hillariously frantic trading game, Stellar Conquest a strange semi-limited movement numbers game. Starfleet Battles is unbelievably complex and simulates everything from marine combat on exploding planets to strategic war between dozens of galaxy spanning civilizations down to individual ships. [Ie., Derke Smart has been trying to write it for years. Derek Smart Derek Smart Derek Smart] Down With the King is...oh, heck, there is a table to roll on while visiting the funeral of the player you've just assassinated and results range from impressing the nobles to getting drunk and falling into the grave. Chase was a slick pure strategy release by TSR that got no attention and Ipswich is a similarly dead, brutally difficult word game.
For the truly obsessive, find Magic Realm.
"you have to sign secret"
SIGN? oh dear, a novice.
Last I knew Diplomacy had more known variants than any other boardgame. Also, Kissinger's favorite game. Realpolitik, big shock eh?
Catan is a good game, not a great game. Been years since I last played so appologies in advance but if I remember correctly there is at least one card or goal that sucker punches those new to it, something about a cross map roadway. Given the big draw of the game is easy-to-learn, not knowing about and thus being unable to block this move is a problem. Not a fatal flaw but still a flaw.
I knew things were bad when the Sam & Max sequel was cancelled, but this...