I dunno. Half of Reno 911 is jokes about sex and stuff, but the other half of it is legitimately hilarious. My problem in convincing other people that it's an awesome show is that every time I get them to watch it the show's about something stupid instead of something funny.
The article's dumb, don't bother. The author makes it sound like trying out a PC game in the store is this neat new concept that is indicative of PC Gaming's rise. That's just stupid. The CompUSA around here has had computers running games that people can try out for years now.
Exactly. George Lucas can't "ruin your childhood" by changing a movie that you have already seen. In fact, I have the originals right here on VHS. I could turn them into DVDs anytime I felt like it. George Lucas can do whatever he wants to his movies, but he's never going to take anyone's memories away (and I don't think he wants to).
Gabe Newell, one of the main guys behind Half-Life and Half-Life 2, talked about this a while ago. He was really annoyed at all these consoles and their multithreaded nature, since it meant a game you write for one of them only works on that console, and it's a bitch to write the games at all, since multithreaded things over like 4 or 6 proccessors or something is a real nightmare for coders. I'm grateful I play all my games on a PC.
I'm not sure why your PC costs 200+ dollars each year to stay viable. I spend much less than that and I have never encountered a game I could not play. It costs 200-500 a year AT LEAST if you want to stay on or near the cutting edge, but if all you want to do is play your games at a reasonable frame rate and resolution (especially compared to consoles) then a PC is very cost effective, once you factor in the fact that you need one anyways.
I have a Radeon 9600. It is approximately 5 years old and can run Half-Life 2, Quake IV, Battlefield 2, Age of Empires III, and similar games. Can it run them on high? No. Can it run them on a higher resolution, with better graphics, than a console? Yes. The Playstation 2 came out in 2000, the same year as my 9600. It is not going to run Quake IV at the same level of quality no matter how much you prod it. A console is almost always inferior to a similar PC in terms of power; the only advantages it has, technologically, are price and stability. Price is a silly comparison because a personal computer will do all sorts of things a console won't, and has a longer shelf life because people don't stop making games for it when a new round of videocards come out, wherears a console forces you to upgrade eventually. Stability is a whole category unto itself, but suffice to say the games that crash do so because they're pushing things to the limit.
Or ATi makes shoddy graphics drivers. That causes lots of crashes too.
Yep! No arguments there. It's just going to look worse, is all. And 3 years from now, your PC will not only play Call of Duty 2 at ultra high, but whatever other games you want which look even better. 360 will be stuck with whatever it could play when it came out.
They didn't say "haha you're a fool." They e-mailed him and said the $10,000 dollars that he pledged to give to charity (then later rescinded because it was "satire") was nothing compared to the $500,000 that gamers give to charity each year through Child's Play, the program they set up. Jack Thompson then called them (their phone number was in the e-mail) and screamed at them.
Back in my AP Computer Science class, each kid go to make their own login and password. If you forgot the password, you go tell the teacher and he resets it. Then you log in and it prompts you to change it to something else. Of course, how it generally worked was the kid would forget their password, go get the teacher to reset it, then scramble back to their computer as fast as they can while everyone else in the class tries to log on and change the password to something funny.
1. Smearing ads all over the place. I remember seeing not one, but TWO banner ads toting NBC's "The Office" on the same page. you know, in case we didn't see the first one. It's IGN or *insert video game news site here* bad.
Don't like it? Block it. If you don't know how adblockers work, then maybe it's time to live with banner ads. I realize not everyone knows how to block an ad, but it's not your job to be an Internet vigilante, standing up for people who just want to read The Onion without being accosted by banners. If you can make it work for you, and you can by blocking it, then you should be fine.
2. The oh-so-classic time-honored tradition of putting ALL the links humanly possible on the main page. If i have to hit Ctrl+F to find something obvious, there's something wrong.
There's really not a whole lot of crap. About the same as the previous design, only laid out differently. It might look like more stuff at first, but pull back and look at it objectively and splitting into more pages than it's in already would be needless clicking.
3. Very little new content. A lot of the bottom of the main page is just links to older content, none of which is available to free users.
Nope. It's free now. They're making up for all the new ads I guess.
4. Inconsistent overall look compared to the older site.
Cry me a river. I don't give a crap if The Onion has a consistent design or not. I just want to read the funny articles.
You can get even better than a Radeon 9800 Pro without spending copious amounts of money. The reason the sites foam is because nobody wants to read an article each month about how last month's card is still exactly the same. Just like every day when you open up a newspaper there aren't any stories about how something hasn't changed since yesterday.
I can think of better questions to ask the designers of a game than something easily answered by just about every preview, every review when it comes out, and the box itself.
When it comes to trivial, useless things like video games (I love them, but they're just entertainment, harmless), the only thing that a politician cares about is votes. Except for a few crazy ones, senators couldn't care less what people play on their consoles or their PCs as long as it falls short of interactive child porn. The only reason Hillary Clinton or any of the others even pay attention to someone like Jack Thompson is because he is scaring parents, making them think video games will ruin their children's lives. Jack Thompson might be completely nuts, but he can tell people who to vote for and if they've listened to him thus far, there's a good chance they'd agree with him. Courting Jack Thompson, and to a greater degree playing off of the latest irrational fear that the public has been infected with for some reason or another, is just an easy way to get votes. It's the same reason Republicans bring up 9/11 when they want to get elected: to scare people into voting for them. It's why Democrats blame Katrina on global warming: to scare people into voting for them.
It's all about the votes. If people are afraid of video games, if they're mad at video games, then it's time to regulate video games. The content doesn't come into play for the people making the decisions.
"Black hardware just can't help looking cool (think TIE fighters, NeXT Cubes, and the hard-to-find black SE/30 case you might have lusted for in 1994)"
That's funny. The day HL2 came out, I spent about 5 minutes unlocking it, after having already preloaded it on my computer. It hasn't verified the game once that I can remember, and if it has then it has never locked up. You can use Steam in offline mode; it's more or less well documented if you use the all powerful Google. But you're right about the RAM hogging. Steam is a RAM whore or something.
Seems to me it's the opposite. Growing up in cities, in clsoe proximity to strangers every day, you become more comfortable, to the point where not everyone is out to get you. It's the difference between city kids talking to each other walking down the street, and kids from the suburbs who stop their conversation every time someone gets near enough to hear just because they aren't used to strangers.
Movie theaters, then, filled with a bunch of kids who are pretty much scared of people they don't know, would not be unruly (obviously I'm generalizing because with teenagers you're going to get dumbasses), and the city people would feel more "at home" in a crowd of strangers and would have no problem, say, checking for text messages or explaining the movie to their friend.
I think the idea that you need to add stuff for new players is silly. The new players will have all the stuff the old players got when they started out. Focus on adding new content for existing people, because the arse-load of content you already have will be more than adequate for newbies.
Lieberman got smart. He was complaining back in the days when ESRB was a joke. Now that they've pretty much formed up and started giving games ratings that help parents choose good games for their kids (IF THEY USED THE RATINGS! WAKE UP PARENTS!), Lieberman has backed off. He has praised the gaming industry for its self-regulation.
And how many normal people admit to unethical behavior? Sure, scientists are in a position of power, but it's not like policemen or congressmen or doctors or lawyers or judges or anyone else says they're perfectly ethical. People everywhere make mistakes and misjudgments.
Slashdot Mirror
All the Diablo chaps went off to work on Guild Wars and Hellgate: London.
I dunno. Half of Reno 911 is jokes about sex and stuff, but the other half of it is legitimately hilarious. My problem in convincing other people that it's an awesome show is that every time I get them to watch it the show's about something stupid instead of something funny.
The article's dumb, don't bother. The author makes it sound like trying out a PC game in the store is this neat new concept that is indicative of PC Gaming's rise. That's just stupid. The CompUSA around here has had computers running games that people can try out for years now.
Exactly. George Lucas can't "ruin your childhood" by changing a movie that you have already seen. In fact, I have the originals right here on VHS. I could turn them into DVDs anytime I felt like it. George Lucas can do whatever he wants to his movies, but he's never going to take anyone's memories away (and I don't think he wants to).
Gabe Newell, one of the main guys behind Half-Life and Half-Life 2, talked about this a while ago. He was really annoyed at all these consoles and their multithreaded nature, since it meant a game you write for one of them only works on that console, and it's a bitch to write the games at all, since multithreaded things over like 4 or 6 proccessors or something is a real nightmare for coders. I'm grateful I play all my games on a PC.
I'm not sure why your PC costs 200+ dollars each year to stay viable. I spend much less than that and I have never encountered a game I could not play. It costs 200-500 a year AT LEAST if you want to stay on or near the cutting edge, but if all you want to do is play your games at a reasonable frame rate and resolution (especially compared to consoles) then a PC is very cost effective, once you factor in the fact that you need one anyways.
Or ATi makes shoddy graphics drivers. That causes lots of crashes too.
Yep! No arguments there. It's just going to look worse, is all. And 3 years from now, your PC will not only play Call of Duty 2 at ultra high, but whatever other games you want which look even better. 360 will be stuck with whatever it could play when it came out.
Something Microsoft makes is screwing stuff up? STOP THE PRESSES!
Heh. Try it on a computer; high resolution with better anti aliasing, anisotropic filtering, normal mapping, and polygon counts.
They didn't say "haha you're a fool." They e-mailed him and said the $10,000 dollars that he pledged to give to charity (then later rescinded because it was "satire") was nothing compared to the $500,000 that gamers give to charity each year through Child's Play, the program they set up. Jack Thompson then called them (their phone number was in the e-mail) and screamed at them.
Good times.
Don't like it? Block it. If you don't know how adblockers work, then maybe it's time to live with banner ads. I realize not everyone knows how to block an ad, but it's not your job to be an Internet vigilante, standing up for people who just want to read The Onion without being accosted by banners. If you can make it work for you, and you can by blocking it, then you should be fine.
2. The oh-so-classic time-honored tradition of putting ALL the links humanly possible on the main page. If i have to hit Ctrl+F to find something obvious, there's something wrong.
There's really not a whole lot of crap. About the same as the previous design, only laid out differently. It might look like more stuff at first, but pull back and look at it objectively and splitting into more pages than it's in already would be needless clicking.
3. Very little new content. A lot of the bottom of the main page is just links to older content, none of which is available to free users.
Nope. It's free now. They're making up for all the new ads I guess.
4. Inconsistent overall look compared to the older site.
Cry me a river. I don't give a crap if The Onion has a consistent design or not. I just want to read the funny articles.
You can get even better than a Radeon 9800 Pro without spending copious amounts of money. The reason the sites foam is because nobody wants to read an article each month about how last month's card is still exactly the same. Just like every day when you open up a newspaper there aren't any stories about how something hasn't changed since yesterday.
I hate to be a grammar Nazi (who am I kidding; I love it), but you guys used the wrong "its." The apostrophe is woefully out of place.
I can think of better questions to ask the designers of a game than something easily answered by just about every preview, every review when it comes out, and the box itself.
Hey, San Andreas has realistic women. For California I mean.
It's all about the votes. If people are afraid of video games, if they're mad at video games, then it's time to regulate video games. The content doesn't come into play for the people making the decisions.
TIE Fighters aren't black.
Sorry. It's Slashdot. I had to say it.
That's funny. The day HL2 came out, I spent about 5 minutes unlocking it, after having already preloaded it on my computer. It hasn't verified the game once that I can remember, and if it has then it has never locked up. You can use Steam in offline mode; it's more or less well documented if you use the all powerful Google. But you're right about the RAM hogging. Steam is a RAM whore or something.
Movie theaters, then, filled with a bunch of kids who are pretty much scared of people they don't know, would not be unruly (obviously I'm generalizing because with teenagers you're going to get dumbasses), and the city people would feel more "at home" in a crowd of strangers and would have no problem, say, checking for text messages or explaining the movie to their friend.
I think the idea that you need to add stuff for new players is silly. The new players will have all the stuff the old players got when they started out. Focus on adding new content for existing people, because the arse-load of content you already have will be more than adequate for newbies.
Lieberman got smart. He was complaining back in the days when ESRB was a joke. Now that they've pretty much formed up and started giving games ratings that help parents choose good games for their kids (IF THEY USED THE RATINGS! WAKE UP PARENTS!), Lieberman has backed off. He has praised the gaming industry for its self-regulation.
It has to be pretty urgent if they post the news without bothering to capitalize first :D
And how many normal people admit to unethical behavior? Sure, scientists are in a position of power, but it's not like policemen or congressmen or doctors or lawyers or judges or anyone else says they're perfectly ethical. People everywhere make mistakes and misjudgments.