Uhm, you can restart the game and make different choices, so it is actually rather unlike life in that sense.
Sure, and waste ten to twenty hours of work I might have put into the game up to that point. No thanks.
If a game takes fifteen minutes or so to play, I'll happily restart it. However, modern games tend to brag about the multiple tens of hours they take to complete.
In Tetris, all my choices and consequences are laid open before me. The gameplay is unchanging throughout the game, and I know exactly how it will proceed at any given point. Moreover, it is a game that is played again over and over.
A game like Deus Ex, however, doesn't show me how my actions will influence future events up front. And neither is it a game that is played over and over again so that you grow used to what kind of action is advisable in what circumstance. You are left guessing at every step.
In addition to what the others already said, a "50 mile trip" is worth less to the person with the fuel-efficient car, because he usually pays less for a trip of that length.
That would be true if you were talking about gallons-per-mile figures. However, miles-per-gallon is different. A five-mile-per-gallon increase in fuel efficiency is, indeed, less in absolute terms if your fuel efficiency was already high.
To use the numbers given by the grandparent poster, the number of gallons used to drive 100 miles are:
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm, you can restart the game and make different choices, so it is actually rather unlike life in that sense.
Sure, and waste ten to twenty hours of work I might have put into the game up to that point. No thanks.
If a game takes fifteen minutes or so to play, I'll happily restart it. However, modern games tend to brag about the multiple tens of hours they take to complete.
Sure, liking games that are stressful instead of exciting makes you a MUCH BETTER PERSON than me!
This isn't an art-house flick.
That has nothing to do with it. The point is that suspension of disbelief is broken every time you reload.
Too bad that paper turned out to be wrong.
There was something wrong with it, and it was refuted. So back to dark matter.
While that was an ad-hominem
It was not.
No, the main point was that regenerative health removes the possibility of failure.
But it does not. You can still come under fire and get your health run down to 0 before you can escape.
How is running away, auto-healing for a minute, and coming back at 100% natural?
It certainly is more natural than loading a savegame.
And how is it different from simply reloading a save game?
The narrative is not broken.
You win this one.
In Tetris, all my choices and consequences are laid open before me. The gameplay is unchanging throughout the game, and I know exactly how it will proceed at any given point. Moreover, it is a game that is played again over and over.
A game like Deus Ex, however, doesn't show me how my actions will influence future events up front. And neither is it a game that is played over and over again so that you grow used to what kind of action is advisable in what circumstance. You are left guessing at every step.
All games have you do the same thing over and over, so that's not a valid point.
That still doesn't make load-save gameplay "facing the prospect of failure", which was the main point.
Regenerating health makes it so you never get to lose. There's no challenge or threat of your character dying.
Regenerating health doesn't mean your character can not die. It just means that escape is a possibility, instead of having to reload.
Both represent an escape from failure, but escape feels more natural and fun, and doesn't interrupt the natural flow of the gameplay.
If you drive 50 miles a day, that's 10 gallons.
Nope, it's not. That's not how reciprocals work. Re-read my original post. You're confusing gallons-per-mile and miles-per-gallon.
In addition to what the others already said, a "50 mile trip" is worth less to the person with the fuel-efficient car, because he usually pays less for a trip of that length.
That would be true if you were talking about gallons-per-mile figures. However, miles-per-gallon is different. A five-mile-per-gallon increase in fuel efficiency is, indeed, less in absolute terms if your fuel efficiency was already high.
To use the numbers given by the grandparent poster, the number of gallons used to drive 100 miles are:
20 mpg: 100 miles/20 mpg=5 gallons.
25 mpg: 100 miles/25 mpg=4 gallons.
Savings: 1 gallon.
50 mpg: 100 miles/50 mpg=2 gallons.
55 mpg: 100 miles/55 mpg=1.818 gallons.
Savings: 0.182 gallons.
The rest of the world tends to measure fuel efficiency as liters-per-100-kilometers for this reason.
That's not "facing the prospect of failure". It's just doing the same thing over and over again.
"Facing the prospect of failure" would be to not have saves.
the various RPG mechanics were a lot of fun, and you had to live with the choices that you made.
See, that's the thing. If I wanted to "live with the choices that I made", I would be living my real life, not playing a game.
"Living with the choices that I made" is not fun. It just creates stress and worry when I am supposed to be enjoying myself.
Oh, so terribly sorry, let me just change that to "none of those except one".
These aren't backups.
Oh, right, it does. But it certainly doesn't account for all of the entropy increase.
Lempel-Ziv is not runlength encoding.
There are better methods. Some are mentioned in the article I linked!
I linked the article that explains what to actually do, you know.
...and isn't CBC.
Once again, CBC doesn't work on disk images that need fast random access.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_encryption_theory
You don't use any of those modes on disk images, because you need fast random access.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_encryption_theory
Run-length encoding doesn't give you all that high entropy, and neither JPG nor PNG uses it.