Don't try to understand the logic. It's illogical. Just understand that this is the prevailing state of mind for many folks.
I believe it's similar thinking behind the paradox of the abortion/death penalty debate - the liberals support abortion but are anti-death penalty, and the conservatives are anti-abortion but pro-death penalty. In either case, it's okay to stop one life, but not the other.
We're talking about consoles...what other console has Doom3 on it?
Re:dreamcast was "failed" only for non-owners
on
XBOX 360=Dreamcast 2.0?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Believe it or not, the gaming business isn't about giving you and your friends fun games to play, it's about making money. That's why it's hard to qualify the XBox as a success. The XBox lost more money than any other console in history.
It's easy to say the Xbox failed due to the fact that it lost money. However, it's hard to find a 10-year old nowadays who doesn't know Halo. They might also know GTA, but Halo has much less controversy surrounding it and is more likely to hit that critical pre-teen bracket where product preference is formed. Plus most of those 10 year olds can't play GTA anyways. Think about it from a marketing standpoint. Perhaps PS2 sold more systems and games, but which system has the movies being made about it's game characters? Even Nintendo's attempts to capitalize on Mario failed. Doom and Halo both are available for the Xbox exclusively and are (going to be) major motion pictures, even though Sony owns it's own motion picture studio. So even though Microsoft may have lost the financial fight, they probably at least are neck and neck, if not ahead, in the product recognition race. And that's what Microsoft does best - market to the masses. That's why Windows is more prevalent than CP/M, why Office is more prevalent that Lotus, and why the Xbox is helping them win over the next generation of geeks to walk the world.
Re:about this potential X-Box failure...
on
XBOX 360=Dreamcast 2.0?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
They are competiting for standards and DRM rights and other BS.
So if Microsoft and Sony are both competing on the DRM and standards front, the only choice you have left is Nintendo. Which is probably where most people find themselves. I for one, however, refuse to limit myself to a system with a bunch of games that make the game designers go nuts but are marketed to 8 year olds. I think Microsoft and Sony both realize that the average age of gamers is not in the teens, but more in the twenties and will likely increase as time goes by. Just like the movies industry where there are movies for adults and for children, I think the games industry will need to fulfill both markets. Nintendo has yet to prove to me they can successfully and consistently hit both markets. For every Splinter Cell there is an Obi-Wan to complement it. Not to mention that there are far few unique adult oriented series for the Gamecube or DS. The company is hit and miss to this age group. Sure, Nintendo can inovate, but all I want are games I enjoy, not the latest and greatest in gameplay mechanics.
Yes, I'd say I definitely made this commitment to myself. It's something I wanted to do to get readership up. But in the end, I guess it doesn't really matter. Maybe I'm getting the guilt more because I wanted to do this and failed miserably?
I totally agree with you, but for some reason I always get twangs of guilt for committing to do something and not being able to do it. I also think that most people get to the point where they don't want to blog anymore and the blog dies out. My brother's and girlfriend's blogs both suffered from this. I think that it doesn't even matter who reads it, nine times out of ten it's more of how much effort you want to put into it. Most blogs are created out of the user's ideas of, hey, that might be nice to do. Once you get into it, however, you can see how much effort it takes to maintain these things and that usually kills the "nice idea" thoughts in your head. Of course, the Slashdot editors are excellent examples of how to keep a blog going by getting paid for your efforts. I think the dedication level only comes from monetary rewards or something like PJ's from Groklaw where you're carrying a cause on your shoulders. The blogs where people just comment on daily life are a dime a dozen and tend to disappear very freqently.
But if you want to learn Linux, not just install it, Slackware is probably one of the best for that. IMO, Despite all the up-and-comers, it's still a good starter kit for the people who want to learn a little about how it works while getting it working.
Well said. Slackware was the first distro I personally installed (around version 9.0 IIRC) and I still use it on my webserver that just sits there and I rarely touch (I think the uptime is about 8 months now). It is not necessarily for the light-hearted, but if you're a CS, CE, or EE student who wants to get down and dirty with operating systems and knows enough to be dangerous, Slackware is definitely an excellent distro to start on because it is simple yet robust. The other distros (outside of maybe gentoo and debian) are getting away from complexity and are moving towards usability. This is just fine for the wider market, but if you want to play with the inner workings, it's harder to find anything easier to start with than Slackware. Once you master Slack, you can head onto Gentoo and make a relatively smooth transition if you really want a customized box. You could also migrate back towards Ubuntu, Red Hat, or SuSE and be able to get that much more from those distros. Don't count Slackware out just yet.
Yeah, go ahead and mark parent Informative. He's just adding to the hype. Until you've actually used the device yourself I doubt you're in a position to comment on its performance.
The reality is that the PSP is not always necesarily to blame. I have about 8 different games and loading times are completely different for each game. Some, such as Virtua Tennis and Ridge Racer actually have pretty decent load times considering the content your getting at once. Virtua Tennis is extremely impressive. It even lets you use the game while it's loading content such as player models in (see your home in World Tour mode)! EA seriously has problems with the UMD. The code they use references the disc so often it's scary. FIFA Soccer and Madden 2006 (not considering that stupid franchise bug which is totally inexcusable) take forever to load. I think 99% of the blame for the long load times with the EA Games are the EA Trax that they play in the background. The games completely drag whenever this music is playing. EA, get rid of your damn music licenses and give me some fast games! Other games also really surprise me, such as Mercury and Ape Escape. These both have really long load times even when doing simple things such as attempting to save or load in Ape Escape or just loading levels in general. I really think this problem is mostly the developers trying to deal with the hardware. Yes, the UMD drive is slow. So don't use it unless necessary! It's not that hard to develop some kind of caching mechanism. I'm really looking forward to Liberty City Stories to see how well Rockstar has worked this issue.
X2 is definitely an awesome space sim, but it has a weak story. Freelancer is a semi-decent space sim that had a great story but horrible replay value. I still have yet to play the X2 campaign and have logged some 200 hours in the game. It's such an awesome environment. The capitol ships and space stations make the game what it is. Scale is everything in a space sim.
However, the economy model of X2 was a little lacking. Once the trader modification was released, the whole purpose of owning a space station was moot. There was no reason to set up your own space stations because the traders could easily earn you a whole lot of money overnight. The other thing was that the enemy skill wasn't balanced well. I purchased a capitol ship and loaded it up with escort fighters. After leaving it alone overnight for like 7 hours, the fighters were all destroyed by the enemy but the capitol ship had nary a scratch.
The moddability and the mod community around the game was excellent. The scripting language is very flexible. The graphics were awesome. The flight model and the ship choice rocked. I think it definitely is the best series available right now for space sim fans. If they fix those issues above it'll become one of the classic series of all time.
As grandparent said, this list was published MONTHS ago. I received this issue as a promotion in the spring. The nano wasn't even a blip on the radar yet. I have a feeling this was more like a best products list of 2004 year in review type thing more than a current year evaluation. They probably just use the current year as a promotional thing to sell magazines.
Yeah, I think this is more a hardware and PEBKAC issue than an OS issue. Operating Systems don't randomly crash unless the hardware or the OS is configured incorrectly (or you're running Windows pre-2000). I read the article. They didn't install it themselves and they were manually patching to meet SAP's support requirements. This is kind of a recipe for disaster. First, you might not remember to get all the requirements for your patch. Some programs have 8 or 9 dependencies. Second, if you didn't install it yourself, you have no idea where anything is. Granted it's a RHEL install by "Certified Engineers", whatever that means, but when you install the OS yourself you get to know the OS that much more.
I won't disagree with those who say that Linux won't solve every problem, but I don't think Linux is fully to blame here.
Yeah that book definitely sealed Romero's fate in the minds of most id fans, IMO. If you didn't know Romero before the book, you definitely knew after that his games were to be avoided. There's a reason why this guy is getting his first studio in "several years." When John enters a room, another whole person enters behind him. Between him and Carmack, the lesson to learn is that the best gamers definitely do not make the best developers. When asked by PC Gamer if he were stranded on a deserted island what one game would he want with him, Carmack's response was, "actually I'd just like a compiler."
Everytime I hear of music piracy, I always think of the quote that I believe Justin Frankel said in relationship between Napster and iTunes. The basic philosophy was that the music industry really screwed up by not catching Napster soon enough. By the time they offered the pay for download services, people already knew they could download free music. This meant that every time someone bought a song from iTunes, in the back of their head they were saying "I can definitely get this song for free somewhere." To this day, that's what really is driving the P2P downloaders, however many of them are left.
The music industry is just greedy and they're completely out of control. Someone needs to shut them down and quick. However, without their money many artists probably wouldn't get their albums published, so it's kind of a necessary evil that we have to deal with.
I think they do. I was at a Hollywood Video the other day and they don't rent either PSP or DS. I believe the Blockbuster near me rents both though. I think it depends on the store more than on the company.
Yeah one blockbuster near me has 2 or 3 UMD movies for rent. The blockbuster website doesn't even mention PSP to my knowledge. I have a feeling that we probably won't see anything from them until after GTA:LCS comes out or even after Christmas. There have to be enough units in the area for the stores to rationalize purchasing them. Personally, I won't be happy until there are at least 10-20 movies to rent or so. I might even buy the movies used if they sell them for 5 or 6 dollars after a while because there's no reason to keep them in stock.
I think you missed my point. Buying UMD's is completely useless to me for the reason that my parent stated - you'll end up in a few years with a ton of UMD's that only work on your old and busted PSP. I'm saying that until there are more devices that accept UMDs, I'm not going to purchase movies in that format. DVDs are irrelevant to the conversation but make my point. You can buy many different DVD readers from DVD ROMS to DVD set-top players to portable DVD players. You can't do this with the UMD yet.
I agree with you, but I am definitely waiting for stores like Blockbuster to rent UMD movies. They currently rent games, which is okay but the price is like $8 for a 2-week rental. I view that as kind of high. If they rent UMDs though, it's an excellent way to take your game device and movie player on the go with the newest movies.
I don't plan on buying any UMD movies until I have a device that will play them on my television as well. However, I am a fan of renting them from a movie rental place.
The DS is a solid piece of hardware for sure. I don't think twice about throwing it in my bag and going about my day.
That being said, I'm just going to point out that the PSP is definitely too expensive to buy for your 10 year old, let alone several 10 year olds. However, my 10 year old cousin played my PSP (Ape Escape, if you must know) when I was home a few weeks ago with no problems whatsoever and he loved it. I've heard complaints of dead pixels and shaking it to break and all that. It's an electronic device, not a rubber ball. My PSP has a carrying case with games that is kept in the same bag as my laptop. Both have survived my treks around campus, in the car, and even the NYC subway just fine. I'm pretty sure that durable hardware is a moot point. You want the thing to survive an 18-inch fall onto carpet, not a tumble out of a moving van at 50 mph.
Slackware was my first distro of Linux that I installed. The non-graphical install was definitely a challenge, but I'm sure I didn't run into any more problems that any other new user might run into with linux at first.
I did end up installing it a few times, however when I ended up playing with Gentoo a few months later, I ended up installing that a few times as well.
The only thing I wish Slackware had that Gentoo, Debian, and SuSE (among others) has is a system update feature similar to portage. There are a few third party solutions that aren't too bad but I'd prefer one supported by Slackware itself. All I want to do is dial up a server, check the changelog, and install the new packages. I think it's safe to say that Slackware is one of the few major distros that doesn't have this feature as part of the system. It's the number one reason why I ended up trying Gentoo, along with being able to compile everything from source.
GE is selling CNBC to the News Corporation. Rupert Murdoch was quoted as saying, "CNBC would fit in nicely with our current network, Fox News. As always, we strive to deliver the most biased and unreliable news while also causing a record number of seizures due to our over-elaborate marketing devices."
I'm a officer in one of the larger outfits in Planetside. I've played about 6 or 7 different MMO's in the past, but only got involved in guilds in 2 games. I tried creating one in SWG during the first months of its release but it just failed miserably. I was in one in Earth & Beyond that worked nicely. I think it's safe to say that guilds definitely are an excellent way to get yourself addicted to a game. If you're just soloing through the world, it's definitely more of an uphill battle than if you have people who you are competing against when leveling and trading and such.
The best part of my E&B guild was that there were people who actually helped you level up. In Planetside, we coordinate our attacks and stick together when in combat. PS is unique in that you can definitely level without killing everything in sight. As a result, our players stick with our outfit because it's hard to find other outfits that do what we do consistently with excellent results. We often have people who show up for seven day trials that subscribe just so they can prolong their play with us. I think both of my experiences have shown the two good reasons why guilds should exist.
Okay, obviously you know nothing about Planetside and probably played it for your free week.
First off, the minutiae of planetside is similar on paper. Yes, you have three armor classes. Yes you have kind of the same guns. Yes, there is cloaking and meds and so on.
However, you say "smaller scale." That's the key to Planetside! At a small scale it's going to be very similar to games like Natural Selection and this. But on a larger scale there is a huge strategy in play constantly determining which base to attack when and so on. This is the key to enjoying Planetside.
Not to mention the fact that Planetside has vehicles and airplanes. But that's just a minor detail that was put in more for cosmetic effect. Right.
The are several reasons really why you should pay attention to this mod. First, it is graphically beautiful and well balanced. It is the first 3rd-party mod released that is not a CS clone (read: plan of attack). Finally, it has gameplay that is easy to understand and is easy to build upon. I personally see this one becoming one of the top three mods for HL2 mostly because of the fact it came out early on.
One of the features of a truly good keyboard is the ability to be serviced by its user without destroying the keyboard - I expect to be able to take off the keys and mop up the remains of my ill-advised smacking over the keyboard.
Amazing how changing one letter in that sentence changes the entire meaning all-together.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe it's similar thinking behind the paradox of the abortion/death penalty debate - the liberals support abortion but are anti-death penalty, and the conservatives are anti-abortion but pro-death penalty. In either case, it's okay to stop one life, but not the other.
I hope there isn't a "Didn't get the joke" mod. The server probably was decimated before coral could properly cache the page.
We're talking about consoles...what other console has Doom3 on it?
It's easy to say the Xbox failed due to the fact that it lost money. However, it's hard to find a 10-year old nowadays who doesn't know Halo. They might also know GTA, but Halo has much less controversy surrounding it and is more likely to hit that critical pre-teen bracket where product preference is formed. Plus most of those 10 year olds can't play GTA anyways. Think about it from a marketing standpoint. Perhaps PS2 sold more systems and games, but which system has the movies being made about it's game characters? Even Nintendo's attempts to capitalize on Mario failed. Doom and Halo both are available for the Xbox exclusively and are (going to be) major motion pictures, even though Sony owns it's own motion picture studio. So even though Microsoft may have lost the financial fight, they probably at least are neck and neck, if not ahead, in the product recognition race. And that's what Microsoft does best - market to the masses. That's why Windows is more prevalent than CP/M, why Office is more prevalent that Lotus, and why the Xbox is helping them win over the next generation of geeks to walk the world.
So if Microsoft and Sony are both competing on the DRM and standards front, the only choice you have left is Nintendo. Which is probably where most people find themselves. I for one, however, refuse to limit myself to a system with a bunch of games that make the game designers go nuts but are marketed to 8 year olds. I think Microsoft and Sony both realize that the average age of gamers is not in the teens, but more in the twenties and will likely increase as time goes by. Just like the movies industry where there are movies for adults and for children, I think the games industry will need to fulfill both markets. Nintendo has yet to prove to me they can successfully and consistently hit both markets. For every Splinter Cell there is an Obi-Wan to complement it. Not to mention that there are far few unique adult oriented series for the Gamecube or DS. The company is hit and miss to this age group. Sure, Nintendo can inovate, but all I want are games I enjoy, not the latest and greatest in gameplay mechanics.
Yes, I'd say I definitely made this commitment to myself. It's something I wanted to do to get readership up. But in the end, I guess it doesn't really matter. Maybe I'm getting the guilt more because I wanted to do this and failed miserably?
I totally agree with you, but for some reason I always get twangs of guilt for committing to do something and not being able to do it. I also think that most people get to the point where they don't want to blog anymore and the blog dies out. My brother's and girlfriend's blogs both suffered from this. I think that it doesn't even matter who reads it, nine times out of ten it's more of how much effort you want to put into it. Most blogs are created out of the user's ideas of, hey, that might be nice to do. Once you get into it, however, you can see how much effort it takes to maintain these things and that usually kills the "nice idea" thoughts in your head. Of course, the Slashdot editors are excellent examples of how to keep a blog going by getting paid for your efforts. I think the dedication level only comes from monetary rewards or something like PJ's from Groklaw where you're carrying a cause on your shoulders. The blogs where people just comment on daily life are a dime a dozen and tend to disappear very freqently.
But if you want to learn Linux, not just install it, Slackware is probably one of the best for that. IMO, Despite all the up-and-comers, it's still a good starter kit for the people who want to learn a little about how it works while getting it working.
Well said. Slackware was the first distro I personally installed (around version 9.0 IIRC) and I still use it on my webserver that just sits there and I rarely touch (I think the uptime is about 8 months now). It is not necessarily for the light-hearted, but if you're a CS, CE, or EE student who wants to get down and dirty with operating systems and knows enough to be dangerous, Slackware is definitely an excellent distro to start on because it is simple yet robust. The other distros (outside of maybe gentoo and debian) are getting away from complexity and are moving towards usability. This is just fine for the wider market, but if you want to play with the inner workings, it's harder to find anything easier to start with than Slackware. Once you master Slack, you can head onto Gentoo and make a relatively smooth transition if you really want a customized box. You could also migrate back towards Ubuntu, Red Hat, or SuSE and be able to get that much more from those distros. Don't count Slackware out just yet.
Yeah, go ahead and mark parent Informative. He's just adding to the hype. Until you've actually used the device yourself I doubt you're in a position to comment on its performance.
The reality is that the PSP is not always necesarily to blame. I have about 8 different games and loading times are completely different for each game. Some, such as Virtua Tennis and Ridge Racer actually have pretty decent load times considering the content your getting at once. Virtua Tennis is extremely impressive. It even lets you use the game while it's loading content such as player models in (see your home in World Tour mode)! EA seriously has problems with the UMD. The code they use references the disc so often it's scary. FIFA Soccer and Madden 2006 (not considering that stupid franchise bug which is totally inexcusable) take forever to load. I think 99% of the blame for the long load times with the EA Games are the EA Trax that they play in the background. The games completely drag whenever this music is playing. EA, get rid of your damn music licenses and give me some fast games! Other games also really surprise me, such as Mercury and Ape Escape. These both have really long load times even when doing simple things such as attempting to save or load in Ape Escape or just loading levels in general. I really think this problem is mostly the developers trying to deal with the hardware. Yes, the UMD drive is slow. So don't use it unless necessary! It's not that hard to develop some kind of caching mechanism. I'm really looking forward to Liberty City Stories to see how well Rockstar has worked this issue.
C'mon everyone, read the (second) linked article
I haven't read an article on Slashdot in months.
X2 is definitely an awesome space sim, but it has a weak story. Freelancer is a semi-decent space sim that had a great story but horrible replay value. I still have yet to play the X2 campaign and have logged some 200 hours in the game. It's such an awesome environment. The capitol ships and space stations make the game what it is. Scale is everything in a space sim.
However, the economy model of X2 was a little lacking. Once the trader modification was released, the whole purpose of owning a space station was moot. There was no reason to set up your own space stations because the traders could easily earn you a whole lot of money overnight. The other thing was that the enemy skill wasn't balanced well. I purchased a capitol ship and loaded it up with escort fighters. After leaving it alone overnight for like 7 hours, the fighters were all destroyed by the enemy but the capitol ship had nary a scratch.
The moddability and the mod community around the game was excellent. The scripting language is very flexible. The graphics were awesome. The flight model and the ship choice rocked. I think it definitely is the best series available right now for space sim fans. If they fix those issues above it'll become one of the classic series of all time.
As grandparent said, this list was published MONTHS ago. I received this issue as a promotion in the spring. The nano wasn't even a blip on the radar yet. I have a feeling this was more like a best products list of 2004 year in review type thing more than a current year evaluation. They probably just use the current year as a promotional thing to sell magazines.
Yeah, I think this is more a hardware and PEBKAC issue than an OS issue. Operating Systems don't randomly crash unless the hardware or the OS is configured incorrectly (or you're running Windows pre-2000). I read the article. They didn't install it themselves and they were manually patching to meet SAP's support requirements. This is kind of a recipe for disaster. First, you might not remember to get all the requirements for your patch. Some programs have 8 or 9 dependencies. Second, if you didn't install it yourself, you have no idea where anything is. Granted it's a RHEL install by "Certified Engineers", whatever that means, but when you install the OS yourself you get to know the OS that much more.
I won't disagree with those who say that Linux won't solve every problem, but I don't think Linux is fully to blame here.
Yeah that book definitely sealed Romero's fate in the minds of most id fans, IMO. If you didn't know Romero before the book, you definitely knew after that his games were to be avoided. There's a reason why this guy is getting his first studio in "several years." When John enters a room, another whole person enters behind him. Between him and Carmack, the lesson to learn is that the best gamers definitely do not make the best developers. When asked by PC Gamer if he were stranded on a deserted island what one game would he want with him, Carmack's response was, "actually I'd just like a compiler."
Everytime I hear of music piracy, I always think of the quote that I believe Justin Frankel said in relationship between Napster and iTunes. The basic philosophy was that the music industry really screwed up by not catching Napster soon enough. By the time they offered the pay for download services, people already knew they could download free music. This meant that every time someone bought a song from iTunes, in the back of their head they were saying "I can definitely get this song for free somewhere." To this day, that's what really is driving the P2P downloaders, however many of them are left.
The music industry is just greedy and they're completely out of control. Someone needs to shut them down and quick. However, without their money many artists probably wouldn't get their albums published, so it's kind of a necessary evil that we have to deal with.
I think they do. I was at a Hollywood Video the other day and they don't rent either PSP or DS. I believe the Blockbuster near me rents both though. I think it depends on the store more than on the company.
Yeah one blockbuster near me has 2 or 3 UMD movies for rent. The blockbuster website doesn't even mention PSP to my knowledge. I have a feeling that we probably won't see anything from them until after GTA:LCS comes out or even after Christmas. There have to be enough units in the area for the stores to rationalize purchasing them. Personally, I won't be happy until there are at least 10-20 movies to rent or so. I might even buy the movies used if they sell them for 5 or 6 dollars after a while because there's no reason to keep them in stock.
I think you missed my point. Buying UMD's is completely useless to me for the reason that my parent stated - you'll end up in a few years with a ton of UMD's that only work on your old and busted PSP. I'm saying that until there are more devices that accept UMDs, I'm not going to purchase movies in that format. DVDs are irrelevant to the conversation but make my point. You can buy many different DVD readers from DVD ROMS to DVD set-top players to portable DVD players. You can't do this with the UMD yet.
Just say "no"... ...to proprietary media formats.
I agree with you, but I am definitely waiting for stores like Blockbuster to rent UMD movies. They currently rent games, which is okay but the price is like $8 for a 2-week rental. I view that as kind of high. If they rent UMDs though, it's an excellent way to take your game device and movie player on the go with the newest movies.
I don't plan on buying any UMD movies until I have a device that will play them on my television as well. However, I am a fan of renting them from a movie rental place.
The DS is a solid piece of hardware for sure. I don't think twice about throwing it in my bag and going about my day.
That being said, I'm just going to point out that the PSP is definitely too expensive to buy for your 10 year old, let alone several 10 year olds. However, my 10 year old cousin played my PSP (Ape Escape, if you must know) when I was home a few weeks ago with no problems whatsoever and he loved it. I've heard complaints of dead pixels and shaking it to break and all that. It's an electronic device, not a rubber ball. My PSP has a carrying case with games that is kept in the same bag as my laptop. Both have survived my treks around campus, in the car, and even the NYC subway just fine. I'm pretty sure that durable hardware is a moot point. You want the thing to survive an 18-inch fall onto carpet, not a tumble out of a moving van at 50 mph.
Slackware was my first distro of Linux that I installed. The non-graphical install was definitely a challenge, but I'm sure I didn't run into any more problems that any other new user might run into with linux at first.
I did end up installing it a few times, however when I ended up playing with Gentoo a few months later, I ended up installing that a few times as well.
The only thing I wish Slackware had that Gentoo, Debian, and SuSE (among others) has is a system update feature similar to portage. There are a few third party solutions that aren't too bad but I'd prefer one supported by Slackware itself. All I want to do is dial up a server, check the changelog, and install the new packages. I think it's safe to say that Slackware is one of the few major distros that doesn't have this feature as part of the system. It's the number one reason why I ended up trying Gentoo, along with being able to compile everything from source.
GE is selling CNBC to the News Corporation. Rupert Murdoch was quoted as saying, "CNBC would fit in nicely with our current network, Fox News. As always, we strive to deliver the most biased and unreliable news while also causing a record number of seizures due to our over-elaborate marketing devices."
I'm a officer in one of the larger outfits in Planetside. I've played about 6 or 7 different MMO's in the past, but only got involved in guilds in 2 games. I tried creating one in SWG during the first months of its release but it just failed miserably. I was in one in Earth & Beyond that worked nicely. I think it's safe to say that guilds definitely are an excellent way to get yourself addicted to a game. If you're just soloing through the world, it's definitely more of an uphill battle than if you have people who you are competing against when leveling and trading and such.
The best part of my E&B guild was that there were people who actually helped you level up. In Planetside, we coordinate our attacks and stick together when in combat. PS is unique in that you can definitely level without killing everything in sight. As a result, our players stick with our outfit because it's hard to find other outfits that do what we do consistently with excellent results. We often have people who show up for seven day trials that subscribe just so they can prolong their play with us. I think both of my experiences have shown the two good reasons why guilds should exist.
Okay, obviously you know nothing about Planetside and probably played it for your free week.
First off, the minutiae of planetside is similar on paper. Yes, you have three armor classes. Yes you have kind of the same guns. Yes, there is cloaking and meds and so on.
However, you say "smaller scale." That's the key to Planetside! At a small scale it's going to be very similar to games like Natural Selection and this. But on a larger scale there is a huge strategy in play constantly determining which base to attack when and so on. This is the key to enjoying Planetside.
Not to mention the fact that Planetside has vehicles and airplanes. But that's just a minor detail that was put in more for cosmetic effect. Right.
The are several reasons really why you should pay attention to this mod. First, it is graphically beautiful and well balanced. It is the first 3rd-party mod released that is not a CS clone (read: plan of attack). Finally, it has gameplay that is easy to understand and is easy to build upon. I personally see this one becoming one of the top three mods for HL2 mostly because of the fact it came out early on.
One of the features of a truly good keyboard is the ability to be serviced by its user without destroying the keyboard - I expect to be able to take off the keys and mop up the remains of my ill-advised smacking over the keyboard.
Amazing how changing one letter in that sentence changes the entire meaning all-together.