Are they in black and white or color? Newspaper or graphic novel style? Oh, how I wish someone would tell me because neither the summary nor the quote from the article say!
Also, I'd like to know - what style are they in? And are they in color? Im asking because I couldn't tell from the article, and I don't think it said so in the summary.
Modding me "redundant" will just make this funnier to me.
Because some people are just waaaaaaay too stuck on themselves.
True story:
I was at a Borders with a friend of mine, a GORGEOUS blonde from Lithuania. I wanted to pick up a copy of "Strangers in Paradise" so headed over to the comics section. My friend squeals and says "Oh! These are the comic books! I love the Archie!" A neckbeard who is perusing the manga sniffs and says "We call them 'Graphic Novels'." She just looks at him for a second, and then says "You have not had sex, is that right?"
Bet I get -2 million:D
Re:Cell providers are the problem, not the phone
on
Inside Apple's iPhone
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· Score: 1
I think a flip-phone using a touchscreen would be ideal. (The flip part protecting the touch screen when it isn't in use)
Have the screen not respond to touches unless a button on the side is held down or put into an "active" position, and then the UI can be whatever works best for the feature you're using at the time. Even let the user drag and drop elements of the interface as they like, or make up their own widgets to add.
I actually like this. Harry's "exceptional" traits are ones that anyone can have. He's brave (but not foolhardy), loyal, kind, generous - that's why he manages to pull through. He's got some abilities of his own (flying, pretty good with that whold "defense against the dark arts" thing) but overall the reason he triumphs is because he is a decent human being. In fact, many of the difficulties he runs into in the stories come from when he doesn't act like a mensch.
It's not supposed to be realistic - let's face it, truly "nice" people tend to get eaten alive in the real world - but it does send a good message: you don't have to be special, just try not to be an asshole.
Maybe it should be "Harry Potter and the Cynical Bastards"?
As children's books go, the HP series is far better than most from both a literary and a commercial standpoint. While everyone involved has certainly made a pile of money, they have stayed relatively consistent.
For my money, it beats "JRR Tolkein's Notes Taken While Upon The Crapper That My Son Is Publishing Because He Likes Money A Whole Lot," "Dune: Ass-raping My Father's Legacy" and "Piers Anthony's Yet Another Disturbing Look Into My Psyche (And Also Puns!)"
Sony has been insisting that the thing that makes their product better is the power. But if nobody will ever use all that power, then why is the extra "better"?
A 360 is, from what I understand, only slightly less powerful (if it actually is) but also, again from what I hear, much more easy to develop for, has better on-line capabilities, and a much larger installed base (meaning more liklihood of exclusives or getting cross-platform stuff). So, tell me, Sony, why shouldn't I buy one of those if your power will never be used and your other stuff is equal or worse?
The breaking of the wrist strap may have been one "but for" cause of the remote leaving the user's hand, but something being a "but for" cause is not enough to establish liability.
I've had 3 players - an archos jukebox, a 512mb flash dealy, and an iPod.
The jukebox had a lot of space, but the interface and usability were for shit. I had a 20gb model, and it was full. Because of the way the interface worked, it took me much too long to find a song (1-2 minutes) and I had to actually look at it in order to do things like change volume or skip ahead in a track etc. The 512mb flash dealy was purely for treadmill or biking use - it didn't hold enough to be of any real utility, it could only play as shuffle or right down the list of songs (no way to pick a specific song) but it was free.
When I bought my iPod, I played around with every other player they had at the store first. Within 1 minute of using the iPod, I made my decision to buy it based on how easy it was to use. I have a 60gb model (and it's full - though 20gb are movies) and I can get to any song or video I want in less than 30 seconds. I can change the volume, fast-forward or rewind without needing to look at the screen or take it out of my pocket. I can easily rate songs to have them play at ratios based on favorites etc.
I've played with the Zune. I don't hate the styling, and the bigger screen is nice. The unit itself isn't too big, and I admit to liking the notion of the wireless sharing (though there simply won't be enough people with one to make that feature work well). However, it's not as easy to use as the iPod - the directional pad is just not nearly as straight-forward as the wheel. The software itself isn't any great shakes - I felt like, in order to use some features, I'd actually have to do the unthinkable and read the instructions. In my opinion, something like a music player should not ever need a user to actually read the instructions in order to use it - to me, that's a failure of design for a product of this type.
Actually, I really *wouldn't* be surprised at any of that. I'd be too busy panicking about the fact that THE MOTHERFUCKING HOLLAND TUNNEL just collapsed on me.
My point - which seems to have been completely lost - is NOT that "haha, he said his brother was qualified to rescue people" but that in a situation like THE MOTHERFUCKING HOLLAND TUNNEL collapsing on me, my very last worry would be about how qualified people coming to save my life would be.
I've known several Navy SAR people, and yes, I'm quite aware of just how intense their training is and how hard their job is. That said, it would STILL be the very last thing on my mind. Probably the first through 50th place slots would be taken up by "Oh, FUCK!" "Oh, SHIT!" "I'm gonna die!" and variants.
The trick isn't getting 80% of the people to love you - anyone can do that by simply being a monster and "getting things done." The real trick is getting them to love you without needing to commit atrocities in the process.
Look at any time a "great leader" (well, someone with a vast amount of actual support from their people) arises - I bet more often than not it's because they were able to take credit for pulling a nation or group out of a disaster, and they did so by spilling a LOT of blood.
In the rare cases where one of those leaders is actually a decent human being, expect them to be assassinated.
That's hardly "insightful" - you're assuming that the strategic thinking that works in chess (a game where there are a finite number of pieces, fixed rules for how those pieces can move, and in which play-order is determined) is somehow going to transfer over into "real world" strategic thinking (a "game" where there are an unknown number of pieces, unknown rules for how those pieces can move, and not only is there no play order, but an unknown number of players, and they can switch sides at any time).
In fact, I suspect that Kasparov's incredible skill at chess would actually hamper his abilities in politics - his mental reflexes were trained for much of his life to focus on ways to think in terms of a fixed set of rules, while politicians tend to make up new rules as it suits them and they are VERY good at that. So Kasparov might fail at having to deal with such an incredibly unpredictable environment, while politicians often fail at grasping the concept that maybe some rules ought to apply to them.
I'd say the comparison that was made of technical skill != social skill is a very very good one. Many of the attributes necessary for real mastery technical material seem to be in opposition to attributes necessary for real mastery of social environments.
I dunno about you, but if the MOTHERFUCKING HOLLAND TUNNEL collapses on me, I don't really think I'd be worrying about how "qualified" the person rescuing me is.
"Oh, no, the MOTHERFUCKING HOLLAND TUNNEL has collapsed on me! Here comes someone to rescue me! Excuse me, but are you qualified to rescue me? No? Oh, I will just sit here under the MOTHERFUCKING HOLLAND TUNNEL and wait for someone who's qualified. Thanks!" Yeah... I just don't see that happening.
You forgot to add "for me" in there, as in "what was cool about Fallout (for me) was..."
I liked the environment, the whimsical humor mixed with the emotionally engaging stories, the fun of figuring out how to accomplish various little tricks and puzzles, the "What happens if I do this?" questions.
In an MMO setting, I think all the things I really loved about the Fallouts could survive more or less intact. At the very least, it'll be nice to have more non-fantasy options out there.
I'm glad he's dead, too. I mean, he was funny and all, but I really don't want to see some guy who's been decomposing for years walking about on stage. Rodney Dangerfield already did that bit.
I think the idea is that many people may go to a store looking for a PS3, but because so few shipped and the stores are instantly out of PS3s, they decide, in the purchasing moment, to go with what's available.
What matters here is how sizeable that number is. If it's large, the 360 will pick up a lot of sales that it wouldn't otherwise have gotten since they're the console in most abundance - well, or maybe the PS2 or the DS because those are so much less expensive and thus easier to justify as an alternative purchase.
Good lord, I feel your pain. I used to commute from Waukegan to Chicago, and now I am rather so much more happy to be living in the city. Commute of 1.5 hours each way has dropped to about 20 minutes. Even so, I loves me my portable media!
I love:
Not being tethered to my television if I want to watch a show. For example, I am often too wiped out by the time The Daily Show & Colbert Report come on to stay awake, so I record 'em, throw 'em on my iPod, and watch them the next day during my commute.
Going on road-trips where I now just bring an FM transmitter and my player and I now have every piece of music I own, available without fiddling around with multiple CD's or trying to figure out what I didn't bring.
Downloading podcasts that are on subjects I don't know much about. When I'm out and about doing errands, it's great to be able to learn stuff when I'd normally just be grumbling about slow walkers in front of me.
Not having to make choices about what particular data of mine I want to have available. I just shovel all my music on it, tv or movies I haven't watched, and often a bunch of other files since it acts like a hard drive, and go.
It's not like it's changed my life - just made it a hell of a lot more convenient.
And yeah, I'm a freaky over caffinated person who's not happy unless she's overtasked:p Writing this from the bus on the way home from classes, while listening to a comix podcast.
I remember the olden days when we called that "getting an education."
And in these newfangled times we call that "Wasting time on rote memorization."
Learning problem solving and research techniques as well as basic concepts/frameworks and a minimal amount of data is quite a bit more useful than spending an absurd amount of time cramming one's head with facts. Especially in a world in which it is increasingly common that there's so much information available in any given field that it's likely that someone with a highly specialized focus wouldn't even be able to know everything about their particular specialty.
Any situation in which I desperately need to know something beyond the basics and don't have, in this increasingly data-on-demand world, immediate access to that information is probably going to already be beyond catastrophic. If the Internet is cashed or otherwise unavailable, it's highly unlikely that I'll need any of the data on it - more likely I'll need to rely on native intelligence and problem solving skills.
Why did you sign your post? It says in the heading who wrote it, and you have space for a sig. I am just wondering why people do that here. I assume force of habit or something, but am curious if it is something else that I'm not thinking of.
Sorry for the off-topic post, just curiosity got the better of me:D
If I want a nice dinner at Charlie Trotters, I'm going to be spending $300+ per person. If I want a.... dinner at McDonalds, I'm going to be spending about $5 per person. If all restaurants charged roughly the same price - say, between $3 and $7 per meal per person and could accomodate an equal amount of diners at one time, I can pretty much guarantee you that the Alineas and Mortons of the world would have the highest volume of food.
In short, people don't eat at McDonalds because they think it's the best - they eat there because it's cheap and convenient.
But with MMORPGS, we have that "all for the same price/ease" situation. City of Heroes? $15 a month. World of Warcraft? $15 a month. Auto Assault? $15 a month. Random-new-MMO? $15 a month. Really, there's not a lot of flex on the whole price thing. Oh, Guildwars is "free" on a monthly basis, but you're still buying content upgrades (paying the same amount of money, overall, just at a different time).
To me, WoW is not "the best game possible" but it is, more or less, for my needs, the "best game that's available at this time." I can spend a lot or a little time doing stuff in it, there are plenty of other people playing it to do things with, there are plenty of things I can do in it by myself, it's got relatively straight-forward game mechanics so that I can pretty quickly come to figure out what I need to do to accomplish stuff, it's got interesting (to me) graphics rather than the hyper-realistic clones you see in other games, and there's enough depth to it that I don't feel like I've only got one possible way to play it through.
I do wish there were some extra elements added - political systems, more dynamically generated events (like, have "stock" invasion scripts that can be run - "Mulgore is being invaded by RandomMobGroup!" with results depending on how much effort the players put in to stop it. If they immediately rally and kill the invaders, they get a celebration when they win. If they are in a long battle, maybe for a week there could be hostiles sneaking into Thunderbluff trying to assassinate the leader. If they lose the battle, Thunderbluff gets ransacked (torched, or maybe conquered, depending on which group the enemy is) and the players need to either take back the city or go to an "alternate" city that springs up elsewhere with refugees. If it got bad enough - like ALL the major cities were taken, a temporary alliance between the factions could take place, where ALL players on the server could try to take back the major cities, etc. All of this could, I think, be programmed to happen automatically. It would just take some thinking as to how to break the situation/response/result stuff down.
Anyway, blah, that's my $.25 (little more than 2 cents due to inflation)
Uh... I know not one single person who thinks this game is remotely like actually playing a real guitar. It's a game. It's fun. You know - like Contra isn't remotely like being a special forces guy who runs around in South American jungles, or how Civilization isn't at all like actual history or...
Well, the point being, "realism" is not the thing they were aiming for, I think. Making a fun game and selling lots of copies is. Mission accomplished!
When I was in college the first time (tiny liberal arts school, we had a bunch of guys there who were masters and up. One was a dude named Jesse Krai (sp?) and another was Nourdine something or another - I am NOT a chess person, so I don't know if those names are supposed to mean anything or not, but Jesse had won tournaments, and Nourdine was supposedly super-duper hot shit (like all the chess guys were begging him for games etc.)
Anyway, one guy who wasn't a GM but was a "master" ranked player offered to play me and teach me stuff after watching me get my ass kicked by Nourdine about 30 times in 30 minutes. So we played, and, this being college, I was smoking a little weed and I just started talking smack to this guy (who was not smoking anything) - "You gonna move your horse little boy? I bet you're gonna move your horse - you fucking sick bastard, you wanna fuck it don't you?" and just non-stop verbal abuse to him while we were playing. And, lo and behold, he began to *SERIOUSLY* fuck up. Like, I nailed one of his rooks, took a knight, and he only managed to take 2 of my pawns at this point. And people are standing around us, and they're amazed that I'm doing at all well (having just seen me get anhillated by Nourdine). So he won't quit, and he's now, like, DETERMINED to kick my ass. But I'm on a roll, I'm now talking about his mom, his sister, how they go and have these Long Island 3-ways and shit, and he's actually starting to cry. But he's muttering "I will fucking kill you!" and stuff under his breath. Meanwhile, I take his other knight, both his bishops, and he's only nailed those pawns and one of my rooks. When he takes the rook, he's like "I'm gonna fucking mate you in 6 moves, motherfucker!" So I'm like "Oh yeah? Well, I will do the dumbest possible thing I can think of, and that'll throw his shit off!" So I totally sacrifice my queen, and when I do it, I'm like "Dude, your roommate tells me you cry yourself to sleep everynight," and he just fucking SCREAMS and throws the board on the floor, and like jumps across the table and tries to grab me. But I'm way ahead of him, as I have fallen out of my chair, so he just falls flat on his face and is like "MOTHERFUCKING CUNT!!" and I'm all laying on the floor laughing really hard.
One of the faculty members who happened to come in says "Well, she WAS being a real bitch, but I think that's a forfeit, dude."
I won't try that shit playing Go, though, cause those motherfuckers all know kung fu.
Slashdot Mirror
Are they in black and white or color? Newspaper or graphic novel style? Oh, how I wish someone would tell me because neither the summary nor the quote from the article say!
Also, I'd like to know - what style are they in? And are they in color? Im asking because I couldn't tell from the article, and I don't think it said so in the summary.
Modding me "redundant" will just make this funnier to me.
iTalk.
The storage is almost certainly flash - if it was an actual HDD, it'd come in a larger capacity (and larger unit size, with worse battery life).
Because some people are just waaaaaaay too stuck on themselves.
:D
True story:
I was at a Borders with a friend of mine, a GORGEOUS blonde from Lithuania. I wanted to pick up a copy of "Strangers in Paradise" so headed over to the comics section. My friend squeals and says "Oh! These are the comic books! I love the Archie!" A neckbeard who is perusing the manga sniffs and says "We call them 'Graphic Novels'." She just looks at him for a second, and then says "You have not had sex, is that right?"
Bet I get -2 million
I think a flip-phone using a touchscreen would be ideal. (The flip part protecting the touch screen when it isn't in use)
Have the screen not respond to touches unless a button on the side is held down or put into an "active" position, and then the UI can be whatever works best for the feature you're using at the time. Even let the user drag and drop elements of the interface as they like, or make up their own widgets to add.
I actually like this. Harry's "exceptional" traits are ones that anyone can have. He's brave (but not foolhardy), loyal, kind, generous - that's why he manages to pull through. He's got some abilities of his own (flying, pretty good with that whold "defense against the dark arts" thing) but overall the reason he triumphs is because he is a decent human being. In fact, many of the difficulties he runs into in the stories come from when he doesn't act like a mensch.
It's not supposed to be realistic - let's face it, truly "nice" people tend to get eaten alive in the real world - but it does send a good message: you don't have to be special, just try not to be an asshole.
Plus, he's dreamy!
What about "Harry Potter and the Pretentious Fuck"?
Maybe it should be "Harry Potter and the Cynical Bastards"?
As children's books go, the HP series is far better than most from both a literary and a commercial standpoint. While everyone involved has certainly made a pile of money, they have stayed relatively consistent.
For my money, it beats "JRR Tolkein's Notes Taken While Upon The Crapper That My Son Is Publishing Because He Likes Money A Whole Lot," "Dune: Ass-raping My Father's Legacy" and "Piers Anthony's Yet Another Disturbing Look Into My Psyche (And Also Puns!)"
it's also an incredibly dumb thing to say.
Sony has been insisting that the thing that makes their product better is the power. But if nobody will ever use all that power, then why is the extra "better"?
A 360 is, from what I understand, only slightly less powerful (if it actually is) but also, again from what I hear, much more easy to develop for, has better on-line capabilities, and a much larger installed base (meaning more liklihood of exclusives or getting cross-platform stuff). So, tell me, Sony, why shouldn't I buy one of those if your power will never be used and your other stuff is equal or worse?
The breaking of the wrist strap may have been one "but for" cause of the remote leaving the user's hand, but something being a "but for" cause is not enough to establish liability.
What's a "but for"?
Pooping, of course!
Ah, god I'm not remotely funny.
Damn right!
I've had 3 players - an archos jukebox, a 512mb flash dealy, and an iPod.
The jukebox had a lot of space, but the interface and usability were for shit. I had a 20gb model, and it was full. Because of the way the interface worked, it took me much too long to find a song (1-2 minutes) and I had to actually look at it in order to do things like change volume or skip ahead in a track etc. The 512mb flash dealy was purely for treadmill or biking use - it didn't hold enough to be of any real utility, it could only play as shuffle or right down the list of songs (no way to pick a specific song) but it was free.
When I bought my iPod, I played around with every other player they had at the store first. Within 1 minute of using the iPod, I made my decision to buy it based on how easy it was to use. I have a 60gb model (and it's full - though 20gb are movies) and I can get to any song or video I want in less than 30 seconds. I can change the volume, fast-forward or rewind without needing to look at the screen or take it out of my pocket. I can easily rate songs to have them play at ratios based on favorites etc.
I've played with the Zune. I don't hate the styling, and the bigger screen is nice. The unit itself isn't too big, and I admit to liking the notion of the wireless sharing (though there simply won't be enough people with one to make that feature work well). However, it's not as easy to use as the iPod - the directional pad is just not nearly as straight-forward as the wheel. The software itself isn't any great shakes - I felt like, in order to use some features, I'd actually have to do the unthinkable and read the instructions. In my opinion, something like a music player should not ever need a user to actually read the instructions in order to use it - to me, that's a failure of design for a product of this type.
Actually, I really *wouldn't* be surprised at any of that. I'd be too busy panicking about the fact that THE MOTHERFUCKING HOLLAND TUNNEL just collapsed on me.
My point - which seems to have been completely lost - is NOT that "haha, he said his brother was qualified to rescue people" but that in a situation like THE MOTHERFUCKING HOLLAND TUNNEL collapsing on me, my very last worry would be about how qualified people coming to save my life would be.
I've known several Navy SAR people, and yes, I'm quite aware of just how intense their training is and how hard their job is. That said, it would STILL be the very last thing on my mind. Probably the first through 50th place slots would be taken up by "Oh, FUCK!" "Oh, SHIT!" "I'm gonna die!" and variants.
The trick isn't getting 80% of the people to love you - anyone can do that by simply being a monster and "getting things done." The real trick is getting them to love you without needing to commit atrocities in the process.
Look at any time a "great leader" (well, someone with a vast amount of actual support from their people) arises - I bet more often than not it's because they were able to take credit for pulling a nation or group out of a disaster, and they did so by spilling a LOT of blood.
In the rare cases where one of those leaders is actually a decent human being, expect them to be assassinated.
Humanity makes me queasy sometimes.
That's hardly "insightful" - you're assuming that the strategic thinking that works in chess (a game where there are a finite number of pieces, fixed rules for how those pieces can move, and in which play-order is determined) is somehow going to transfer over into "real world" strategic thinking (a "game" where there are an unknown number of pieces, unknown rules for how those pieces can move, and not only is there no play order, but an unknown number of players, and they can switch sides at any time).
In fact, I suspect that Kasparov's incredible skill at chess would actually hamper his abilities in politics - his mental reflexes were trained for much of his life to focus on ways to think in terms of a fixed set of rules, while politicians tend to make up new rules as it suits them and they are VERY good at that. So Kasparov might fail at having to deal with such an incredibly unpredictable environment, while politicians often fail at grasping the concept that maybe some rules ought to apply to them.
I'd say the comparison that was made of technical skill != social skill is a very very good one. Many of the attributes necessary for real mastery technical material seem to be in opposition to attributes necessary for real mastery of social environments.
I dunno about you, but if the MOTHERFUCKING HOLLAND TUNNEL collapses on me, I don't really think I'd be worrying about how "qualified" the person rescuing me is.
"Oh, no, the MOTHERFUCKING HOLLAND TUNNEL has collapsed on me! Here comes someone to rescue me! Excuse me, but are you qualified to rescue me? No? Oh, I will just sit here under the MOTHERFUCKING HOLLAND TUNNEL and wait for someone who's qualified. Thanks!" Yeah... I just don't see that happening.
Not to say anything bad about your brother.
You forgot to add "for me" in there, as in "what was cool about Fallout (for me) was..."
I liked the environment, the whimsical humor mixed with the emotionally engaging stories, the fun of figuring out how to accomplish various little tricks and puzzles, the "What happens if I do this?" questions.
In an MMO setting, I think all the things I really loved about the Fallouts could survive more or less intact. At the very least, it'll be nice to have more non-fantasy options out there.
I'm glad he's dead, too. I mean, he was funny and all, but I really don't want to see some guy who's been decomposing for years walking about on stage. Rodney Dangerfield already did that bit.
Totally not about your comment but about your sig - Zappos is the bomb. Awesome site that makes me spend far too much money.
I think the idea is that many people may go to a store looking for a PS3, but because so few shipped and the stores are instantly out of PS3s, they decide, in the purchasing moment, to go with what's available.
What matters here is how sizeable that number is. If it's large, the 360 will pick up a lot of sales that it wouldn't otherwise have gotten since they're the console in most abundance - well, or maybe the PS2 or the DS because those are so much less expensive and thus easier to justify as an alternative purchase.
Good lord, I feel your pain. I used to commute from Waukegan to Chicago, and now I am rather so much more happy to be living in the city. Commute of 1.5 hours each way has dropped to about 20 minutes. Even so, I loves me my portable media!
:p Writing this from the bus on the way home from classes, while listening to a comix podcast.
I love:
Not being tethered to my television if I want to watch a show. For example, I am often too wiped out by the time The Daily Show & Colbert Report come on to stay awake, so I record 'em, throw 'em on my iPod, and watch them the next day during my commute.
Going on road-trips where I now just bring an FM transmitter and my player and I now have every piece of music I own, available without fiddling around with multiple CD's or trying to figure out what I didn't bring.
Downloading podcasts that are on subjects I don't know much about. When I'm out and about doing errands, it's great to be able to learn stuff when I'd normally just be grumbling about slow walkers in front of me.
Not having to make choices about what particular data of mine I want to have available. I just shovel all my music on it, tv or movies I haven't watched, and often a bunch of other files since it acts like a hard drive, and go.
It's not like it's changed my life - just made it a hell of a lot more convenient.
And yeah, I'm a freaky over caffinated person who's not happy unless she's overtasked
I remember the olden days when we called that "getting an education."
And in these newfangled times we call that "Wasting time on rote memorization."
Learning problem solving and research techniques as well as basic concepts/frameworks and a minimal amount of data is quite a bit more useful than spending an absurd amount of time cramming one's head with facts. Especially in a world in which it is increasingly common that there's so much information available in any given field that it's likely that someone with a highly specialized focus wouldn't even be able to know everything about their particular specialty.
Any situation in which I desperately need to know something beyond the basics and don't have, in this increasingly data-on-demand world, immediate access to that information is probably going to already be beyond catastrophic. If the Internet is cashed or otherwise unavailable, it's highly unlikely that I'll need any of the data on it - more likely I'll need to rely on native intelligence and problem solving skills.
Completely off-topic, but...
:D
Why did you sign your post? It says in the heading who wrote it, and you have space for a sig. I am just wondering why people do that here. I assume force of habit or something, but am curious if it is something else that I'm not thinking of.
Sorry for the off-topic post, just curiosity got the better of me
The problem here is price differential.
.... dinner at McDonalds, I'm going to be spending about $5 per person.
If I want a nice dinner at Charlie Trotters, I'm going to be spending $300+ per person.
If I want a
If all restaurants charged roughly the same price - say, between $3 and $7 per meal per person and could accomodate an equal amount of diners at one time, I can pretty much guarantee you that the Alineas and Mortons of the world would have the highest volume of food.
In short, people don't eat at McDonalds because they think it's the best - they eat there because it's cheap and convenient.
But with MMORPGS, we have that "all for the same price/ease" situation. City of Heroes? $15 a month. World of Warcraft? $15 a month. Auto Assault? $15 a month. Random-new-MMO? $15 a month. Really, there's not a lot of flex on the whole price thing. Oh, Guildwars is "free" on a monthly basis, but you're still buying content upgrades (paying the same amount of money, overall, just at a different time).
To me, WoW is not "the best game possible" but it is, more or less, for my needs, the "best game that's available at this time." I can spend a lot or a little time doing stuff in it, there are plenty of other people playing it to do things with, there are plenty of things I can do in it by myself, it's got relatively straight-forward game mechanics so that I can pretty quickly come to figure out what I need to do to accomplish stuff, it's got interesting (to me) graphics rather than the hyper-realistic clones you see in other games, and there's enough depth to it that I don't feel like I've only got one possible way to play it through.
I do wish there were some extra elements added - political systems, more dynamically generated events (like, have "stock" invasion scripts that can be run - "Mulgore is being invaded by RandomMobGroup!" with results depending on how much effort the players put in to stop it. If they immediately rally and kill the invaders, they get a celebration when they win. If they are in a long battle, maybe for a week there could be hostiles sneaking into Thunderbluff trying to assassinate the leader. If they lose the battle, Thunderbluff gets ransacked (torched, or maybe conquered, depending on which group the enemy is) and the players need to either take back the city or go to an "alternate" city that springs up elsewhere with refugees. If it got bad enough - like ALL the major cities were taken, a temporary alliance between the factions could take place, where ALL players on the server could try to take back the major cities, etc. All of this could, I think, be programmed to happen automatically. It would just take some thinking as to how to break the situation/response/result stuff down.
Anyway, blah, that's my $.25 (little more than 2 cents due to inflation)
Uh... I know not one single person who thinks this game is remotely like actually playing a real guitar. It's a game. It's fun. You know - like Contra isn't remotely like being a special forces guy who runs around in South American jungles, or how Civilization isn't at all like actual history or...
Well, the point being, "realism" is not the thing they were aiming for, I think. Making a fun game and selling lots of copies is. Mission accomplished!
Actually...
When I was in college the first time (tiny liberal arts school, we had a bunch of guys there who were masters and up. One was a dude named Jesse Krai (sp?) and another was Nourdine something or another - I am NOT a chess person, so I don't know if those names are supposed to mean anything or not, but Jesse had won tournaments, and Nourdine was supposedly super-duper hot shit (like all the chess guys were begging him for games etc.)
Anyway, one guy who wasn't a GM but was a "master" ranked player offered to play me and teach me stuff after watching me get my ass kicked by Nourdine about 30 times in 30 minutes. So we played, and, this being college, I was smoking a little weed and I just started talking smack to this guy (who was not smoking anything) - "You gonna move your horse little boy? I bet you're gonna move your horse - you fucking sick bastard, you wanna fuck it don't you?" and just non-stop verbal abuse to him while we were playing. And, lo and behold, he began to *SERIOUSLY* fuck up. Like, I nailed one of his rooks, took a knight, and he only managed to take 2 of my pawns at this point. And people are standing around us, and they're amazed that I'm doing at all well (having just seen me get anhillated by Nourdine). So he won't quit, and he's now, like, DETERMINED to kick my ass. But I'm on a roll, I'm now talking about his mom, his sister, how they go and have these Long Island 3-ways and shit, and he's actually starting to cry. But he's muttering "I will fucking kill you!" and stuff under his breath. Meanwhile, I take his other knight, both his bishops, and he's only nailed those pawns and one of my rooks. When he takes the rook, he's like "I'm gonna fucking mate you in 6 moves, motherfucker!" So I'm like "Oh yeah? Well, I will do the dumbest possible thing I can think of, and that'll throw his shit off!" So I totally sacrifice my queen, and when I do it, I'm like "Dude, your roommate tells me you cry yourself to sleep everynight," and he just fucking SCREAMS and throws the board on the floor, and like jumps across the table and tries to grab me. But I'm way ahead of him, as I have fallen out of my chair, so he just falls flat on his face and is like "MOTHERFUCKING CUNT!!" and I'm all laying on the floor laughing really hard.
One of the faculty members who happened to come in says "Well, she WAS being a real bitch, but I think that's a forfeit, dude."
I won't try that shit playing Go, though, cause those motherfuckers all know kung fu.