If you're talking about the original PC Baldur's Gate games, then yes, they were ground breaking. However, thier graphics pale in comparison with Oblivion.
Yes, I was talking about the original PC games, but actually I would maintain that graphically they are still stunning. The environments are superbly crafted, gorgeous to look at, and, I find, not much less impressive than the 3D vistas in Oblivion. I'm thinking of outdoor environments more than dungeons (although some of them are impressive too, especially the environments in the Underdark). 3D is neat, to be sure, but you can still do an awful lot with 2D -- and the designers of Baldur's Gate certainly did.
Spell effects, I would agree, are a bit meh by today's standards.
Boy, Slashdot really does need a "-1, Wrong" mod option. Here's an introduction, albeit far too brief. Now, if you were to say, "the UK constitution doesn't come in sound bytes", that would indeed be true. But I guess you're only interested in sneering and mocking, not in accuracy.
Absolutely correct. In a course I've been teaching over the summer, the topic of the course was such as encourage using an encyclopaedia as a first stop; so I started out by showing students examples of errors in both. They both had pretty dramatic errors (though they probably wouldn't matter to a non-specialist), and both have different strengths. Inevitably the moral has tobe, "Don't trust tertiary sources like encyclopaedias and dictionaries; always go for the most proximate source possible".
I certainly hope that no editor would be forced to waste his or her time certifying fan-cruft like these. A system that required editors to waste their time like that would be a very bad system; editors should be free to choose. But I see no problem with the existence of such articles, if the fanbase is big enough.
The ban on encyclopaedias is not a universal ban: there are some abstruse topics where an encyclopaedia is simply the only accessible source (one that I've hit against recently is Luwian language). The principle is that for any claim, people should always cite a source as proximate as possible to the topic of the claim. It's rather rare that an encyclopaedia will be the most proximate source available. If you're citing the source for an idea of your own, though, it makes perfect sense to me (as a professor) that an encyclopaedia might sometimes be that source.
I'm guessing you're referring to Sands of Time (rather than the old 80s/90s games)? If you can bear it, it's worth the persistence. If you can get to the point where you face your character's father in combat (about a quarter of the way through), it stops being annoying and starts feeling exhilarating. There're still one or two tricky puzzles later on, but by that point you know what to expect. It's one of the few games where after I finished I felt compelled to restart and play the whole thing through again -- it's a game that really makes you feel like a hero by the end.
Oddly enough, I never had to reload more than a couple of times for that battle -- I think I must power-game a bit too much. (I'll tell you one thing, high-level bardsong makes things an awful lot easier.)
One battle in a DND game that did annoy me for several days, though, was in BG2 Throne of Bhaal -- the fight against the demi-dragon Draconis, outside the front door of one of the Bhaalspawn lairs. It took forever to work out a strategy that even stood a chance of beating him. And then I hear a lot of people find battles in BG2 too easy and use mods to make them even harder than Draconis... it makes me shudder. (Anyway, after Draconis, his dad was a piece of cake.)
Ouch. I did manage to beat The Count, but I remember many hapless hours of infuriation trying to work out what things I could do in Savage Island that wouldn't get me killed very quickly. I never did finish Savage Island I; I never got anywhere in Savage Island II (hyperventilate, breathe out, run through the vacuum... and, inevitably, die)
A tentacle can be just a tentacle if you're a biologist. But this is a horror scenario: what is it about tentacles that makes them fitting in a horror scenario? Not necessarily an easy question to answer.
The gpp is quite right that the article is talking nonsense about this, though: it's got nothing to do with blurring boundaries in Kristeva's sense, or abjection. Probably lots of people will have different views on what it is about tentacles that make them "horror"-fic; what do Cthulhu, Saddler, Demogorgon, and the pool creature in LotR have in common?
Well, for one thing, they're all male. However, the classic psychoanalytic icon of a tentacular mass is the snakes on Medusa's head, which Freud interpreted as iconic of female pubic hair.
OK, starting to get bored. Basically, for an article trying to do a "psychoanalytic" reading, it's way too Lacanian for its own good. In fact it's not a psychoanalytic reading at all -- the references to Kristeva, and to Heideggerian and Derridean terminology make that clear -- it's really just a straightforward deconstructive reading, using an excessively large vocabulary and excessively convoluted sentences to disguise the fact that all the ideas in it are someone else's. It's kinda novel to see it being done on video games, but that's just another self-conscious postmodernist gesture.
This is a good example, but not as outrageous as some people seem to think. The rationale behind it is essentially the same as for, say, a prohibition against saying "bomb" on a plane. They're both banned because they're both incredibly dangerous things to do, and they're both significantly detrimental to the welfare, liberty, and happiness of absolutely everyone, and probably some other reasons that don't occur to me right now. The reason the prohibition against holocaust denial doesn't exist in most countries is simply because hardly anyone is dumb enough to take it seriously, so it's nowhere near as dangerous in those countries. (It could, of course, be argued that this is also the case now in Germany and France.)
Totally agree about Gauntlet -- that certainly was a quantum leap -- not so much about Simpsons and X-men: good games, but they were in pre-existing genres.
I'd also pick out Wizard of Wor as an important game, if not terribly long-lived (or, arguably, a very good game either). The fact that you could approach the game either cooperatively or as PVP -- and that the game actually gave significant rewards for suddenly turning against the other player -- made trust a big issue, in a way which I didn't really see again until certain modern 3d team-based FPSes.
Legislate that a person may only legally apply DRM to content if that person personally owns the copyright on the content.
Legislate that a copyright-owner, by applying DRM to his/her content, automatically removes copyright protection from that content and places it in the public domain.
Other kinds of technological prevention measures other than DRM (e.g., hardware protections) will need to be treated in analogous ways.
And, I would predict, the results of the above would not actually be terribly earth-shattering. Piracy would continue pretty much as it always has done; record and movie companies would continue making profit as they always have done. The only difference would be that the status quo would be legal.
Also, while Foxit is faster than Acrobat at loading (though only marginally, if you have the Acrobat SpeedLaunch in your Startup folder like you should), it is much, much slower at rendering complex layouts.
By the way, I agree with Dynedain about PDFCreator too, but I'm not sure why s/he thinks it's hard to find -- pdfcreator.sourceforge.net points you to the right place. I'd agree it's difficult for it to get publicity, though, what with all the zillions of adware equivalents out there.
OK then, this would be my list for the top ten WinXP games, in alphabetical order. Judging from comments here, I think this list is fairly representative, though with a couple of extra contributions of my own --
Civ 4
Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind
Far Cry
FEAR
GTA 3 plus sequels
Half-Life 2 plus mods
KotOR 1
NWN 1 plus mods
ScummVM (OK, this one's kind of cheating)
UT2k4
(I made up a list for 11-20 as well, with things like Psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil, and Escape Velocity Nova, but I figured they were all way too subjective to bother listing here.)
No one said anything about "opinions". As a poster below has said, "corrections are corrections". If all that's happening is that errors are being corrected, that's a good thing. If it should be the case that the corrections all happen to be on one side of an argument, then, well, no one said truth is neutral.
Now, having said that, I wouldn't be one bit surprised if there were some astroturfing, but the article presents nothing to suggest it. Your comment seems to express concern not so much about correction of factual errors as about misrepresentation of the debate itself. The article suggests that this campaign is more about the former than about the latter.
I forget which, but don't Archos or iRiver pretty much support 3rd party apps (well, 3rd party OS).
Really, there's no shortage. I just found the DAP database, where you can enter a set of criteria, bring up detailed comparison tables, and find the audio player that suits you -- e.g. if my ideal criteria are support for FLAC/Vorbis, good battery life, good HDD space, data transfer with any OS, and radio, I can easily find out that the Cowon range is the one for me.
I haven't yet seen any results mentioning the Zune, probably because when I'm entering criteria, I'm entering criteria that I want, and they pretty much rule the Zune out immediately...
Can I ask some advice? I've been itching to get back to using Allofmp3 again, but can't work out how to fill my balance.
The Allofmp3 website doesn't give any hints that you can't actually use Visa or Mastercard. I presume this is to avoid admitting fault; but for an end-customer it's pretty irritating. Nothing's changed there, has it?
Xrost seems to be a recommended choice. But paying for an Xrost icard is a problem in itself! There are three payment options for Xrost:
Ukash and Paysafecard are Europe-only;
Clickandbuy (apart from having a very dodgy privacy policy) doesn't seem to want to allow service to my country either -- at least, my country isn't one of the options available for opening an account.
allTunes sounds like it's owned by the same people as Allofmp3, so I presume credit cards aren't an option there either -- ?
So what's the story? If Allofmp3 won't give good advice to its customers, that doesn't exactly endear them to me. Maybe you, or someone, can offer a suggestion.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I was talking about the original PC games, but actually I would maintain that graphically they are still stunning. The environments are superbly crafted, gorgeous to look at, and, I find, not much less impressive than the 3D vistas in Oblivion. I'm thinking of outdoor environments more than dungeons (although some of them are impressive too, especially the environments in the Underdark). 3D is neat, to be sure, but you can still do an awful lot with 2D -- and the designers of Baldur's Gate certainly did.
Spell effects, I would agree, are a bit meh by today's standards.
I disagree. I fear the US government much more than I fear credit agencies, or even spammers.
Boy, Slashdot really does need a "-1, Wrong" mod option. Here's an introduction, albeit far too brief. Now, if you were to say, "the UK constitution doesn't come in sound bytes", that would indeed be true. But I guess you're only interested in sneering and mocking, not in accuracy.
sucker.See?
What part of "soon" don't you understand? Since when does "expected to add" mean "has already added"? Sigh, never mind.
Absolutely correct. In a course I've been teaching over the summer, the topic of the course was such as encourage using an encyclopaedia as a first stop; so I started out by showing students examples of errors in both. They both had pretty dramatic errors (though they probably wouldn't matter to a non-specialist), and both have different strengths. Inevitably the moral has tobe, "Don't trust tertiary sources like encyclopaedias and dictionaries; always go for the most proximate source possible".
I certainly hope that no editor would be forced to waste his or her time certifying fan-cruft like these. A system that required editors to waste their time like that would be a very bad system; editors should be free to choose. But I see no problem with the existence of such articles, if the fanbase is big enough.
The ban on encyclopaedias is not a universal ban: there are some abstruse topics where an encyclopaedia is simply the only accessible source (one that I've hit against recently is Luwian language). The principle is that for any claim, people should always cite a source as proximate as possible to the topic of the claim. It's rather rare that an encyclopaedia will be the most proximate source available. If you're citing the source for an idea of your own, though, it makes perfect sense to me (as a professor) that an encyclopaedia might sometimes be that source.
RTFA. As has been said above, it's not about Office, it's about Exchange.
I'd suggest sticking with that :-) The Baldur's Gate games are much, much better than Oblivion, and just about as good-looking.
I'm guessing you're referring to Sands of Time (rather than the old 80s/90s games)? If you can bear it, it's worth the persistence. If you can get to the point where you face your character's father in combat (about a quarter of the way through), it stops being annoying and starts feeling exhilarating. There're still one or two tricky puzzles later on, but by that point you know what to expect. It's one of the few games where after I finished I felt compelled to restart and play the whole thing through again -- it's a game that really makes you feel like a hero by the end.
Can't recommend the sequels though.
Oddly enough, I never had to reload more than a couple of times for that battle -- I think I must power-game a bit too much. (I'll tell you one thing, high-level bardsong makes things an awful lot easier.)
One battle in a DND game that did annoy me for several days, though, was in BG2 Throne of Bhaal -- the fight against the demi-dragon Draconis, outside the front door of one of the Bhaalspawn lairs. It took forever to work out a strategy that even stood a chance of beating him. And then I hear a lot of people find battles in BG2 too easy and use mods to make them even harder than Draconis ... it makes me shudder. (Anyway, after Draconis, his dad was a piece of cake.)
Ouch. I did manage to beat The Count, but I remember many hapless hours of infuriation trying to work out what things I could do in Savage Island that wouldn't get me killed very quickly. I never did finish Savage Island I; I never got anywhere in Savage Island II (hyperventilate, breathe out, run through the vacuum ... and, inevitably, die)
A tentacle can be just a tentacle if you're a biologist. But this is a horror scenario: what is it about tentacles that makes them fitting in a horror scenario? Not necessarily an easy question to answer.
The gpp is quite right that the article is talking nonsense about this, though: it's got nothing to do with blurring boundaries in Kristeva's sense, or abjection. Probably lots of people will have different views on what it is about tentacles that make them "horror"-fic; what do Cthulhu, Saddler, Demogorgon, and the pool creature in LotR have in common?
Well, for one thing, they're all male. However, the classic psychoanalytic icon of a tentacular mass is the snakes on Medusa's head, which Freud interpreted as iconic of female pubic hair.
OK, starting to get bored. Basically, for an article trying to do a "psychoanalytic" reading, it's way too Lacanian for its own good. In fact it's not a psychoanalytic reading at all -- the references to Kristeva, and to Heideggerian and Derridean terminology make that clear -- it's really just a straightforward deconstructive reading, using an excessively large vocabulary and excessively convoluted sentences to disguise the fact that all the ideas in it are someone else's. It's kinda novel to see it being done on video games, but that's just another self-conscious postmodernist gesture.
Yes, and absolutely everyone without exception who is involved in backing this has anti-Americanism as their sole motivation.
Please, get over yourself.
This is a good example, but not as outrageous as some people seem to think. The rationale behind it is essentially the same as for, say, a prohibition against saying "bomb" on a plane. They're both banned because they're both incredibly dangerous things to do, and they're both significantly detrimental to the welfare, liberty, and happiness of absolutely everyone, and probably some other reasons that don't occur to me right now. The reason the prohibition against holocaust denial doesn't exist in most countries is simply because hardly anyone is dumb enough to take it seriously, so it's nowhere near as dangerous in those countries. (It could, of course, be argued that this is also the case now in Germany and France.)
Totally agree about Gauntlet -- that certainly was a quantum leap -- not so much about Simpsons and X-men: good games, but they were in pre-existing genres.
I'd also pick out Wizard of Wor as an important game, if not terribly long-lived (or, arguably, a very good game either). The fact that you could approach the game either cooperatively or as PVP -- and that the game actually gave significant rewards for suddenly turning against the other player -- made trust a big issue, in a way which I didn't really see again until certain modern 3d team-based FPSes.
Hm, actually now that you mention it, I realise I've had this problem in the past too. :-) I take your point.
Is it difficult?
And, I would predict, the results of the above would not actually be terribly earth-shattering. Piracy would continue pretty much as it always has done; record and movie companies would continue making profit as they always have done. The only difference would be that the status quo would be legal.
Also, while Foxit is faster than Acrobat at loading (though only marginally, if you have the Acrobat SpeedLaunch in your Startup folder like you should), it is much, much slower at rendering complex layouts.
By the way, I agree with Dynedain about PDFCreator too, but I'm not sure why s/he thinks it's hard to find -- pdfcreator.sourceforge.net points you to the right place. I'd agree it's difficult for it to get publicity, though, what with all the zillions of adware equivalents out there.
You forgot flac. (Damn, I love my iAudio ...)
(I made up a list for 11-20 as well, with things like Psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil, and Escape Velocity Nova, but I figured they were all way too subjective to bother listing here.)
No one said anything about "opinions". As a poster below has said, "corrections are corrections". If all that's happening is that errors are being corrected, that's a good thing. If it should be the case that the corrections all happen to be on one side of an argument, then, well, no one said truth is neutral.
Now, having said that, I wouldn't be one bit surprised if there were some astroturfing, but the article presents nothing to suggest it. Your comment seems to express concern not so much about correction of factual errors as about misrepresentation of the debate itself. The article suggests that this campaign is more about the former than about the latter.
Many thanks for the tip, but verbum sapienti: I find I have to replace the %25 and the %3A with a % and a : respectively.
Really, there's no shortage. I just found the DAP database, where you can enter a set of criteria, bring up detailed comparison tables, and find the audio player that suits you -- e.g. if my ideal criteria are support for FLAC/Vorbis, good battery life, good HDD space, data transfer with any OS, and radio, I can easily find out that the Cowon range is the one for me.
I haven't yet seen any results mentioning the Zune, probably because when I'm entering criteria, I'm entering criteria that I want, and they pretty much rule the Zune out immediately ...
So what's the story? If Allofmp3 won't give good advice to its customers, that doesn't exactly endear them to me. Maybe you, or someone, can offer a suggestion.