First thing the girl would think of after this is to go make some money? If she wanted to litigate against someone responsible she'd go after the 19 year old. Sueing Myspace is the more profitable option. If she was actually aggrieved here she would prefer to get the 19yr old.
The money-grubbing nature of the suit makes it likely that the parents found out about this later and are exploiting the opportunity to milk money off Myspace success. The girl herself wouldn't even be thinking about Myspace unless she didn't even care about the 19yr-old's participation in the first place.
The girl may even have participated willingly in the act(which doesn't make it legal), but then the parents found out later and wanted money.
It's easy for the kid to never feel forced to sneak behind their back if the kid already never wanted to do anything of the sort. Kids will never ask for permission to have sex or do drugs because they already know the answer. If they want to do these things, they'll just lie and sneak out to do it.
The key here is for the parents to have somehow shaped all the kid's wants before they even try to pursue them. Then you have the nature vs. nurture argument. And really, parents are only part of the influence on a kid, what about their schools and friends where they spend their most engaging hours. You can do PTA meetings to try to affect the school environment, or move to a nice district(bummer for those who can't afford to move around like that). As for friends, you're not there at school so you can't determine who your kid can play with. You can ask later on, but you'll only be told who the kid's "good" friends are, since the kid already knows you won't let them hang out with their bad friends.
Raising a kid is complicated. Sometimes even good parents can have bad kids. Each kid is unique and has a different level of difficulty in raising.
I can understand the 6 months(Looks like that 2007 date is wrong, still on track for december apparently). I thought that the writing, placing, and scripting should be pretty simple too, but after playing through the commentary mode, I can appreciate the amount of time it takes. I was suprised to find out how complicated their design process is. You may or may not have played the game through again on commentary mode.
I found it enlightening. Added a bit of extra value I appreciated.
For those reading who haven't played through it. It showed how the game is broken into a series of play-sections with particular goals in terms of plot and gameplay. Each section is made, sent for player-feedback, then recreated again, and again, until they've got something they're happy with. Not to mention the bug-testing. I didn't know that so much content was made and then cut away to maintain quality.
First time I saw this was SWAT from Quake1, then Actionquake2, the team from which Gooseman left to make Counterstrike. And then a billion other "realistic" games spawned a bevy of bullet-based FPS games.
The popular weaponry was rocket launchers, railguns, freaky energy weaponry and whatnot. Now many games have hit-scan bullet guns instead, and with recoil, stability, and locational damage.
So many FPSes are tossing in headshots and favoring bullet-based guns. I like the crazy fictional guns, too much same-ness in a pistol/shotgun/chaingun(in whatever form they may take).
He's not saying that Google is losing money. He's just saying that it is overvalued in terms of what it's actually earning.
The P/E ratio on google moves around, but it's clearly very, very high(I've seen it at 80+, but it was long enough ago to be irrelevant now, no idea what it is today). The price of the stock divided by the earnings per year is just one way to estimate if the stock is solid, because it's a measure of how long it takes for the earnings to pay back the money put into the company. 20 or less P/E is what you want to see. Google is definitely not making enough money to support all the investment.
The price is just being supported by speculation about what Google will do next. And Google supports this by coming out with a bevy of innovation, some successful, some less so. Minor comments in the news can cause Google's stock to wobble all over since there's so much uncertainty about whether it will ever be able to generate enough earnings to warrant it's price.
It/may/ be sustainable if Google really does come out with some more high-revenue products, and that's why people are still keeping their money in something so risky.
French gave a good account of themselves in WWI. Immense losses in the meatgrinder against Germany. Intense losses on homeground wore them down. Their recovery was too slow to give a real fight in WWII.
His point remains valid nonetheless. Without context, the number is abstract. Using your example of slaves, the context is that they are slaves, and so the abstract number of 30% more food is now put into perspective.
What he's saying is that $50 dollars can buy different amounts depending on where you live. What matters is what kind of life these people can live with the money they make, not the abstract number. $50 dollars just might be enough to satisfy their basic needs.
Beyond the basic needs, wealth affects happiness in terms of who has it and who doesn't. For example, before TVs were invented, people weren't terribly upset that they didn't have TVs. In a country where everyone is poor, if the king slave is getting his basic needs satisfied, he is indeed a king.
How much wealth should everyone have in order that they be happy? It's hard to say because you define the rich by how much more they have than the poor. A king in the middle ages still didn't have basic cable or air conditioning. If you eliminate all the rich people, the poor people would have no comparison against which to declare themselves poor.
The much more immediate and practical concern is whether or not everyone's getting the things they/must/ have, like food, water, and shelter. Then we can take on things like basic health treatment, and elementary education. Then we can worry about relative wealth. But we haven't taken care of these basic needs around the world. The poster was indicating that if the wages for these women was enough in that area of the world to get their needs filled, then there are other places in the world that are in greater need of attention, and this spotlight on Apple in particular may just be exploiting their current popularity. (Not trying to protect Apple, I own none of their products.)
This is what jumped out at me in my play through HL2: Episode One. In many other FPS games, you're basically fighting through the same corridors continually against faceless hordes for no particular reason. In my mind I'm thinking, "I'm grinding up for the next plot event or cutscene."
Battles in this little episode were quite well focused, with little filler combat when venturing about. Then you hit an "action sequence"(This kind of mentality is described in the Lost Coast commentary). In these scenes they tried putting little twists on the action each time to make them more engaging and memorable. Most of these action sequences are primed with a few bits of dialogue to let you know you're getting somewhere and that the "corridor" is getting somewhere.
Alyx, managed to be a useful asset. The increased amount of quips and interaction made her seem a bit less of an annoying bot on follow, and more of a significant plot character. This suprised me really.
This episode really didn't add much technologically that we haven't seen elsewhere. Didn't even change gameplay significantly. What Episode One really did was take HL2's gameplay and just did it better. It's more content in the same vein just a bit higher quality. Enough reason for me to feel like I got my value from the 20 bucks I shelled out(didn't pre-order, wanted to wait to hear some opinions).
Sin episodes? I felt limited. I saw a lot of "corridors". Not nearly as good as HL2:Episode One. Still, I must note that Sin's 1st episode is starting fresh, while Episode One is continuing a finished product. I may or may not get the 2nd Sin episode depending on if they fix what they did wrong in the first iteration.
But Episodic content allows me to choose not to get the 2nd episode instead of buying the whole game at once. As for HL2: Episode One, I liked it enough that I'm certain I'll buy the remaining episodes.
This keyboard doesn't seem any better than the most basic generic keyboard you can find, except perhaps for the extended key life(But you could buy a nice keyboard twice for the cost of that extended life).
There are so many features on other keyboards, why does this one get to be priced so high for doing the bare minimum?
Where's all the programmable shortcut keys? Macros? Zoom wheels? Volume+media keys? How about tilt? These are the nice little keyboard advances we've made, there's no need to take a step backward.
It will hamper the internet for sure, and I am also completely against this two-tiered internet.
However, I don't believe that if implemented it will kill the internet. They'll price it so that it squeezes the maximum amount of money from the public. Higher the price, the fewer suscribers, the lower the price, the more suscribers, they'll test to find the most profitable equilibrium.
There are quite a few people who are intimimately tied to the internet and would pay quite a bit just to access it. Those who use it solely for social purposes may not just drop the internet if it gets more expensive. We are social creatures for the most part and each person has a certain minimum amount of socializing. When people fall below this level they can get pretty desperate. I know folks who almost exclusively socialize over the internet, who will fly out across the country and over the ocean to hang out for a day or two with their internet friends. They've got each other's cellphone numbers to call each other to tell them to get on the computer. MMO games? Some people find their entire life's fulfillment here. I know several people who are middle-aged and still in dead-end jobs. They work their 12 hour shift in the factory and come back home to City of Heroes to chat and play with their friends...then go back to work.
There are quite a few people who would desperately cling to the internet even at high prices.
Try to relax and take a look at your post and that of hoppo. You are/both/ being dismissive of each other's countries as some sort of monoculture with broad overly simplistic assumptions of their population. The targets are just being reversed.
My first thought upon reading the title was a bit of resentment. I thought to myself, "This guy must be pretty cold to try to make money off the outrage effect."
Reading the description and article, I see that he's trying to spark dialogue and is offering the game for free. He wants to create intelligent discussion rather than make a profit.
Does that make it ok? For a moment let's look at this from an abstract view, seperate from this specific case. Should intentions really be a major deciding factor in judgement of the action?
And on a side note... this game involves a specific violent event, rather than a broad and fictional scenario like a war, or a make-believe city. The players of say Brothers in Arms, or Grand Theft Auto, do not feel as though they are killing people. They are simply progressing through a game, looking to achieve goals, and overcome a challenge. Take away the bullets and use paintballs instead, the player doesn't care. But then you'd have to explain why there's paintballs in the guns at Omaha beach. There's only so much suspension of belief the players will sustain before they grow annoyed. You'd have to recreate an entirely new setting around the paintballs and paint artillery guns, and why everybody decided to come out to the beach in a big group for a paintball fight. Say they're bullets and you're in WWII, and you've got a simple setting to understand.
I shoot my best friend in an online game. I didn't have fun because I got to live a fantasy of killing a loved one. I was playing a game with him and I scored a point. That's what is actually happening here.
A game set around Columbine is considerably different since the intention is not scoring "points" or making it towards a goal. It's to try to live out the killing of actual people while being aware of the moral connotation.
Gamers can blow chunks off people all day long. Set them in front of a car accident and they'd be just as prone to being sickened. It's not violence, it's a game.
There will of course be diminishing returns to the profits they might be able to reap by reducing profit margins in favor of a larger volume of sales. You can only milk your market so much. Even if you increase the size of the market from lower prices of entry, there will still be a limit.
There is another cost to video games aside from the pricetag. There's an economic cost involved in playing games. You have a limited amount of time to spend, and for some, this time cost is more valuable than the 30 or so dollars they spend picking which game to go with. I have work, and other hobbies. If I buy 1 game at 50 dollars, I wouldn't necessarily buy 5 games at 10 dollars apiece because I simply don't have the time to play 5 games.
For kids the economic cost of playing more games is low for them since they have relatively fewer things they have to do or need to do. Adults have tons of things they need to take care of. A price drop would have kids grabbing quite a bit more games. A price drop for adults would have a bit less. Different price elasticities. The adults are currently the larger age group.
I don't think game companies will see an increase in profits from dropping below say 30. That said, I could buy that they could afford kicking it down to around 40-50. I base this upon absolutely nothing other than a pure guess about how much prices are hindering the growth of the gamer demographic.
Same here, DBtS was the first thing I thought of after hearing about this game on the Wii. I wonder if those guys are still alive out there. I remember a sequel to the game crashing in flames, with them leaving a statement that they'd like to upgrade the tech for a new game someday if fate allowed it.
People hated carmageddon 2 for some reason, but I loved sending debris ripping through crowds severing limbs. I loved watching the victims try to scuttle away after losing limbs and bleeding to death.
My favorite pasttime was taking the lowrider car with it's long doors and almost driving past pedestrians, only to open the door just in time to slap them silly without dealing fatal damage.
Not only are these posts filtered or have deliberate post plants, even joe schmoe will psychologically want to give glowing postive reviews immediately after buying something because they've just blown money on it and their minds don't want to accept that they've wasted their money. It's a subconscious self-rationalization that is fairly common. It also appears more often because these the ones that the sites want shown.
When looking through user reviews, I only look at the negatives for a clue on what you may have to deal with. Positive opinions can be found much more readily on the manufacturer website. If the negative review includes some positives, then I am more inclined to believe those positive traits to be true. But if I don't see any negative commentary, I really don't trust the review at all(And very few products are ever truly perfect)
Indeed, what a great premise for a game. Running over things and crashing into people in the most violent ways possible. I blew hundreds of hours on those games.
This was my first reaction as well. I'd love another superhero game. I loved CoH but ultimately exhausted the game's content.
CoH had a difficult premise to pull off and succeeded beautifully in creating superhero-ish combat(while IMO failing in the other gameplay aspects like missions and loot). They pulled out a huge variety of powers that were each useful and continued to be useful throughout a player's life. The attacks you begin with are still useful in the end-game. Upgrading a power wasn't just leveling to keep the power equivalent to your current level, but each added level makes it more powerful than it ever was. The powers themselves all had unique graphics and in almost every case, a twist to make the power unique. This had the end-result of a player with a multitude of unique and useful abilities to call upon, all of which added to the feeling of being a superhero.
It was a prodigous accomplishment. It was creative and unusual, trying its best to new things in order to fix problems that appear in other MMOS(and it wasn't always successful).
However, I have doubts as to whether or not SOE can do the same. Its track record after EQ has been less than exemplary. These sorts of setbacks make companies want to lower risks and trod the well-beaten path. A lot of risks need to be taken to do a superhero game well. SoE is very familiar with what they need to go through to create an MMO in terms of technical issues. But as for gameplay and immersion in a superhero setting, they're on unfamiliar ground, just like any other developer would be.
Indeed, if anything, such values were already in place before the game was played. If the players did not value the same things the game valued, they'd find themselves unhappy with the gameplay and would stop. I played WoW, I conceded it to be a good game, but I also knew that I hated it. The author frets over "Group > Solo" if the players wanted a solo experience they wouldn't be playing a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. They'd be playing with themselves instead....Stop laughing.
My spelling and punctuation are passable. However, my penmanship is atrocious. I can write cleanly, but it requires around a 60% reduction in my writing speed.
However, I need to write down what the teacher is saying in class so I am forced write at my fastest speed. Often, I need to create my own acronyms and short-speak to get all the information down. I can read my own writing, but often others cannot. The only times I'd use neat handwriting is in writing post-its. In the case of post-its, the short length of the note means I can afford to take the time to write legibly.
Clean handwriting is only rewarded in school when writing is first taught. After that, you're indirectly rewarded more for writing quickly rather than neatly.
Please assume no hostility in this text. You've probably read the/. article about misinterpreted moods on the internet.
I wonder how many children would know what "the subjunctive mood" is. I think that most of the native-born children in the U.S learn their English through conversations or writings. How often does the term "subjunctive mood" come up? By the time it would be taught to a student, they're probably able to understand English to the point where they don't care to listen to a lesson on the precise mechanics of the English language.
I'm just offering an observation here, rather than attacking your helpful correction(this is not sarcasm). As the above paragraph would imply, I don't know jack squat about grammar. I just form sentences as they come to mind without working through grammar.
Re:Meh... Color me unimpressed.
on
Flexible Body Armor
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Please don't think I'm trying to be mean here. Assume a friendly tone:P
But I don't quite follow. The grandparent poster was skeptical about the value of flexible armor over parts that should never bend. If your shin is bending significantly, your shin's probably broken.
Flexible armor is useful over flexing parts of your body so that you can get maximum utility. Like a flexible elbow pad, it'd let you bend your elbow easier and more powerfully. But over your non-bending shin, you'd just want the strongest protection possible here right? Shouldn't be any cases where your shin is bending.
Slashdot Mirror
First thing the girl would think of after this is to go make some money? If she wanted to litigate against someone responsible she'd go after the 19 year old. Sueing Myspace is the more profitable option. If she was actually aggrieved here she would prefer to get the 19yr old.
The money-grubbing nature of the suit makes it likely that the parents found out about this later and are exploiting the opportunity to milk money off Myspace success. The girl herself wouldn't even be thinking about Myspace unless she didn't even care about the 19yr-old's participation in the first place.
The girl may even have participated willingly in the act(which doesn't make it legal), but then the parents found out later and wanted money.
It's easy for the kid to never feel forced to sneak behind their back if the kid already never wanted to do anything of the sort. Kids will never ask for permission to have sex or do drugs because they already know the answer. If they want to do these things, they'll just lie and sneak out to do it.
The key here is for the parents to have somehow shaped all the kid's wants before they even try to pursue them. Then you have the nature vs. nurture argument. And really, parents are only part of the influence on a kid, what about their schools and friends where they spend their most engaging hours. You can do PTA meetings to try to affect the school environment, or move to a nice district(bummer for those who can't afford to move around like that). As for friends, you're not there at school so you can't determine who your kid can play with. You can ask later on, but you'll only be told who the kid's "good" friends are, since the kid already knows you won't let them hang out with their bad friends.
Raising a kid is complicated. Sometimes even good parents can have bad kids. Each kid is unique and has a different level of difficulty in raising.
I can understand the 6 months(Looks like that 2007 date is wrong, still on track for december apparently). I thought that the writing, placing, and scripting should be pretty simple too, but after playing through the commentary mode, I can appreciate the amount of time it takes. I was suprised to find out how complicated their design process is. You may or may not have played the game through again on commentary mode.
I found it enlightening. Added a bit of extra value I appreciated.
For those reading who haven't played through it. It showed how the game is broken into a series of play-sections with particular goals in terms of plot and gameplay. Each section is made, sent for player-feedback, then recreated again, and again, until they've got something they're happy with. Not to mention the bug-testing. I didn't know that so much content was made and then cut away to maintain quality.
First time I saw this was SWAT from Quake1, then Actionquake2, the team from which Gooseman left to make Counterstrike. And then a billion other "realistic" games spawned a bevy of bullet-based FPS games.
The popular weaponry was rocket launchers, railguns, freaky energy weaponry and whatnot. Now many games have hit-scan bullet guns instead, and with recoil, stability, and locational damage.
So many FPSes are tossing in headshots and favoring bullet-based guns. I like the crazy fictional guns, too much same-ness in a pistol/shotgun/chaingun(in whatever form they may take).
He's not saying that Google is losing money. He's just saying that it is overvalued in terms of what it's actually earning.
/may/ be sustainable if Google really does come out with some more high-revenue products, and that's why people are still keeping their money in something so risky.
The P/E ratio on google moves around, but it's clearly very, very high(I've seen it at 80+, but it was long enough ago to be irrelevant now, no idea what it is today). The price of the stock divided by the earnings per year is just one way to estimate if the stock is solid, because it's a measure of how long it takes for the earnings to pay back the money put into the company. 20 or less P/E is what you want to see. Google is definitely not making enough money to support all the investment.
The price is just being supported by speculation about what Google will do next. And Google supports this by coming out with a bevy of innovation, some successful, some less so. Minor comments in the news can cause Google's stock to wobble all over since there's so much uncertainty about whether it will ever be able to generate enough earnings to warrant it's price.
It
Funny, I'm actually quite happy with my life.
/DOOOOOOOM/ pervading my cancerous western upbringing must have somehow skipped me.
The
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Verdun
French gave a good account of themselves in WWI. Immense losses in the meatgrinder against Germany. Intense losses on homeground wore them down. Their recovery was too slow to give a real fight in WWII.
His point remains valid nonetheless. Without context, the number is abstract. Using your example of slaves, the context is that they are slaves, and so the abstract number of 30% more food is now put into perspective.
/must/ have, like food, water, and shelter. Then we can take on things like basic health treatment, and elementary education. Then we can worry about relative wealth. But we haven't taken care of these basic needs around the world. The poster was indicating that if the wages for these women was enough in that area of the world to get their needs filled, then there are other places in the world that are in greater need of attention, and this spotlight on Apple in particular may just be exploiting their current popularity. (Not trying to protect Apple, I own none of their products.)
What he's saying is that $50 dollars can buy different amounts depending on where you live. What matters is what kind of life these people can live with the money they make, not the abstract number. $50 dollars just might be enough to satisfy their basic needs.
Beyond the basic needs, wealth affects happiness in terms of who has it and who doesn't. For example, before TVs were invented, people weren't terribly upset that they didn't have TVs. In a country where everyone is poor, if the king slave is getting his basic needs satisfied, he is indeed a king.
How much wealth should everyone have in order that they be happy? It's hard to say because you define the rich by how much more they have than the poor. A king in the middle ages still didn't have basic cable or air conditioning. If you eliminate all the rich people, the poor people would have no comparison against which to declare themselves poor.
The much more immediate and practical concern is whether or not everyone's getting the things they
This is what jumped out at me in my play through HL2: Episode One. In many other FPS games, you're basically fighting through the same corridors continually against faceless hordes for no particular reason. In my mind I'm thinking, "I'm grinding up for the next plot event or cutscene."
Battles in this little episode were quite well focused, with little filler combat when venturing about. Then you hit an "action sequence"(This kind of mentality is described in the Lost Coast commentary). In these scenes they tried putting little twists on the action each time to make them more engaging and memorable. Most of these action sequences are primed with a few bits of dialogue to let you know you're getting somewhere and that the "corridor" is getting somewhere.
Alyx, managed to be a useful asset. The increased amount of quips and interaction made her seem a bit less of an annoying bot on follow, and more of a significant plot character. This suprised me really.
This episode really didn't add much technologically that we haven't seen elsewhere. Didn't even change gameplay significantly. What Episode One really did was take HL2's gameplay and just did it better. It's more content in the same vein just a bit higher quality. Enough reason for me to feel like I got my value from the 20 bucks I shelled out(didn't pre-order, wanted to wait to hear some opinions).
Sin episodes? I felt limited. I saw a lot of "corridors". Not nearly as good as HL2:Episode One. Still, I must note that Sin's 1st episode is starting fresh, while Episode One is continuing a finished product. I may or may not get the 2nd Sin episode depending on if they fix what they did wrong in the first iteration.
But Episodic content allows me to choose not to get the 2nd episode instead of buying the whole game at once. As for HL2: Episode One, I liked it enough that I'm certain I'll buy the remaining episodes.
This keyboard doesn't seem any better than the most basic generic keyboard you can find, except perhaps for the extended key life(But you could buy a nice keyboard twice for the cost of that extended life).
There are so many features on other keyboards, why does this one get to be priced so high for doing the bare minimum?
Where's all the programmable shortcut keys? Macros? Zoom wheels? Volume+media keys? How about tilt? These are the nice little keyboard advances we've made, there's no need to take a step backward.
Could you please describe how you made these modifications or provide a link to a site that can describe how to do it?
I'm a tech "noob" and I don't know how to pose a question like this to google.
It will hamper the internet for sure, and I am also completely against this two-tiered internet.
However, I don't believe that if implemented it will kill the internet. They'll price it so that it squeezes the maximum amount of money from the public. Higher the price, the fewer suscribers, the lower the price, the more suscribers, they'll test to find the most profitable equilibrium.
There are quite a few people who are intimimately tied to the internet and would pay quite a bit just to access it. Those who use it solely for social purposes may not just drop the internet if it gets more expensive. We are social creatures for the most part and each person has a certain minimum amount of socializing. When people fall below this level they can get pretty desperate. I know folks who almost exclusively socialize over the internet, who will fly out across the country and over the ocean to hang out for a day or two with their internet friends. They've got each other's cellphone numbers to call each other to tell them to get on the computer. MMO games? Some people find their entire life's fulfillment here. I know several people who are middle-aged and still in dead-end jobs. They work their 12 hour shift in the factory and come back home to City of Heroes to chat and play with their friends...then go back to work.
There are quite a few people who would desperately cling to the internet even at high prices.
Try to relax and take a look at your post and that of hoppo. You are /both/ being dismissive of each other's countries as some sort of monoculture with broad overly simplistic assumptions of their population. The targets are just being reversed.
My first thought upon reading the title was a bit of resentment. I thought to myself, "This guy must be pretty cold to try to make money off the outrage effect."
Reading the description and article, I see that he's trying to spark dialogue and is offering the game for free. He wants to create intelligent discussion rather than make a profit.
Does that make it ok? For a moment let's look at this from an abstract view, seperate from this specific case. Should intentions really be a major deciding factor in judgement of the action?
And on a side note... this game involves a specific violent event, rather than a broad and fictional scenario like a war, or a make-believe city. The players of say Brothers in Arms, or Grand Theft Auto, do not feel as though they are killing people. They are simply progressing through a game, looking to achieve goals, and overcome a challenge. Take away the bullets and use paintballs instead, the player doesn't care. But then you'd have to explain why there's paintballs in the guns at Omaha beach. There's only so much suspension of belief the players will sustain before they grow annoyed. You'd have to recreate an entirely new setting around the paintballs and paint artillery guns, and why everybody decided to come out to the beach in a big group for a paintball fight. Say they're bullets and you're in WWII, and you've got a simple setting to understand.
I shoot my best friend in an online game. I didn't have fun because I got to live a fantasy of killing a loved one. I was playing a game with him and I scored a point. That's what is actually happening here.
A game set around Columbine is considerably different since the intention is not scoring "points" or making it towards a goal. It's to try to live out the killing of actual people while being aware of the moral connotation.
Gamers can blow chunks off people all day long. Set them in front of a car accident and they'd be just as prone to being sickened. It's not violence, it's a game.
There will of course be diminishing returns to the profits they might be able to reap by reducing profit margins in favor of a larger volume of sales. You can only milk your market so much. Even if you increase the size of the market from lower prices of entry, there will still be a limit.
There is another cost to video games aside from the pricetag. There's an economic cost involved in playing games. You have a limited amount of time to spend, and for some, this time cost is more valuable than the 30 or so dollars they spend picking which game to go with. I have work, and other hobbies. If I buy 1 game at 50 dollars, I wouldn't necessarily buy 5 games at 10 dollars apiece because I simply don't have the time to play 5 games.
For kids the economic cost of playing more games is low for them since they have relatively fewer things they have to do or need to do. Adults have tons of things they need to take care of. A price drop would have kids grabbing quite a bit more games. A price drop for adults would have a bit less. Different price elasticities. The adults are currently the larger age group.
I don't think game companies will see an increase in profits from dropping below say 30. That said, I could buy that they could afford kicking it down to around 40-50. I base this upon absolutely nothing other than a pure guess about how much prices are hindering the growth of the gamer demographic.
Same here, DBtS was the first thing I thought of after hearing about this game on the Wii. I wonder if those guys are still alive out there. I remember a sequel to the game crashing in flames, with them leaving a statement that they'd like to upgrade the tech for a new game someday if fate allowed it.
People hated carmageddon 2 for some reason, but I loved sending debris ripping through crowds severing limbs. I loved watching the victims try to scuttle away after losing limbs and bleeding to death.
My favorite pasttime was taking the lowrider car with it's long doors and almost driving past pedestrians, only to open the door just in time to slap them silly without dealing fatal damage.
Not only are these posts filtered or have deliberate post plants, even joe schmoe will psychologically want to give glowing postive reviews immediately after buying something because they've just blown money on it and their minds don't want to accept that they've wasted their money. It's a subconscious self-rationalization that is fairly common. It also appears more often because these the ones that the sites want shown.
When looking through user reviews, I only look at the negatives for a clue on what you may have to deal with. Positive opinions can be found much more readily on the manufacturer website. If the negative review includes some positives, then I am more inclined to believe those positive traits to be true. But if I don't see any negative commentary, I really don't trust the review at all(And very few products are ever truly perfect)
Indeed, what a great premise for a game. Running over things and crashing into people in the most violent ways possible. I blew hundreds of hours on those games.
This was my first reaction as well. I'd love another superhero game. I loved CoH but ultimately exhausted the game's content.
CoH had a difficult premise to pull off and succeeded beautifully in creating superhero-ish combat(while IMO failing in the other gameplay aspects like missions and loot). They pulled out a huge variety of powers that were each useful and continued to be useful throughout a player's life. The attacks you begin with are still useful in the end-game. Upgrading a power wasn't just leveling to keep the power equivalent to your current level, but each added level makes it more powerful than it ever was. The powers themselves all had unique graphics and in almost every case, a twist to make the power unique. This had the end-result of a player with a multitude of unique and useful abilities to call upon, all of which added to the feeling of being a superhero.
It was a prodigous accomplishment. It was creative and unusual, trying its best to new things in order to fix problems that appear in other MMOS(and it wasn't always successful).
However, I have doubts as to whether or not SOE can do the same. Its track record after EQ has been less than exemplary. These sorts of setbacks make companies want to lower risks and trod the well-beaten path. A lot of risks need to be taken to do a superhero game well. SoE is very familiar with what they need to go through to create an MMO in terms of technical issues. But as for gameplay and immersion in a superhero setting, they're on unfamiliar ground, just like any other developer would be.
Indeed, if anything, such values were already in place before the game was played. If the players did not value the same things the game valued, they'd find themselves unhappy with the gameplay and would stop. I played WoW, I conceded it to be a good game, but I also knew that I hated it. The author frets over "Group > Solo" if the players wanted a solo experience they wouldn't be playing a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. They'd be playing with themselves instead. ...Stop laughing.
My spelling and punctuation are passable. However, my penmanship is atrocious. I can write cleanly, but it requires around a 60% reduction in my writing speed.
However, I need to write down what the teacher is saying in class so I am forced write at my fastest speed. Often, I need to create my own acronyms and short-speak to get all the information down. I can read my own writing, but often others cannot. The only times I'd use neat handwriting is in writing post-its. In the case of post-its, the short length of the note means I can afford to take the time to write legibly.
Clean handwriting is only rewarded in school when writing is first taught. After that, you're indirectly rewarded more for writing quickly rather than neatly.
I hate myself because the first thought that came to mind when I read that was: "How would one go about raping a book?"
Please assume no hostility in this text. You've probably read the /. article about misinterpreted moods on the internet.
I wonder how many children would know what "the subjunctive mood" is. I think that most of the native-born children in the U.S learn their English through conversations or writings. How often does the term "subjunctive mood" come up? By the time it would be taught to a student, they're probably able to understand English to the point where they don't care to listen to a lesson on the precise mechanics of the English language.
I'm just offering an observation here, rather than attacking your helpful correction(this is not sarcasm). As the above paragraph would imply, I don't know jack squat about grammar. I just form sentences as they come to mind without working through grammar.
Please don't think I'm trying to be mean here. Assume a friendly tone:P
But I don't quite follow. The grandparent poster was skeptical about the value of flexible armor over parts that should never bend. If your shin is bending significantly, your shin's probably broken.
Flexible armor is useful over flexing parts of your body so that you can get maximum utility. Like a flexible elbow pad, it'd let you bend your elbow easier and more powerfully. But over your non-bending shin, you'd just want the strongest protection possible here right? Shouldn't be any cases where your shin is bending.