Of course it'll be a franchise. As soon as you've evolved your creations to where you want them to be, they'll need to have interesting things to do, which will be provided in the following expansions:
Spore: Vacation - Let your little ones relax is exotic locations, sipping drinks on the beach!
Spore: House Party - Invite your friend's creations to your primate's place and PAARTYYYY!
Spore: Hot Date - Will your cephalopod-esque creature find true love, or just a one-night stand?
And, of course, who can forget Spore: Unleashed, where your spore characters can have their own little sporelings to play God with!
Whenever I think of a game so bad that it's funny, I think of Life's Battle. Since I can't do justice in saying how horribly funny this game is, I'll just provide a link to SomethingAwful's stellar game review.. Enjoy!
because if Chuck Norris were on an aluminum airplane he could go out on the bent wing and bend it back, but if he were on a carbon fiber airplane he would just shout, "I've got nothing to work with here assholes!" shoot everyone on the plane, jump out the window, knit a parachute out of his sweater on the way down and land topless on a throng of adoring Laotian women.
All Chuck Norris needs to do is stare at the carbon fiber wing. It'll straighten out due to sheer and utter fear.
Another thing that she could do in its place is to randomly split the data into training, testing, and validation sets. Use the training set for the actual training of the model, the testing set to verify the results (and also for other statistical alterations that might need to take place to ward off overtraining), and then the validation set as the final test to see how the model works.
Of course, with the extremely small data set that it sounds like she has, I'd bet the results wouldn't look stellar at all. However, it'd be more truthful and scientific than taking the entire data set as a training data set, training the model, and then testing the model on the same set. Anyone with even a small amount of statistical modeling or machine learning knowledge can do the same thing and get 99% accuracy with an overtrained model.
Since we're using "Cleaning up Thunder Bluff" as the subject, I'll assume that most of this is directed at the text seen in World of Warcraft. Here are a couple of things you can do to prevent seeing things that might be offensive:
- Use the profanity filter. This will block out the most offensive words that you may come across in chat.
- Put them on your ignore list. I know that there's a limited number of people you can put on the ignore list, but if one person's irritating you enough, put them there.
- Leave general chat. You can always rejoin it at a later time.
- Finally, you can report someone that's being excessively rude and using slurs. Bans are usually temporary, but they can get the point across. Too many temporary bans will result in a permanent one.
Of course, these are the options that are present in WoW, I can only assume that other MMOs have similar steps. YMMV.
The concept of 'wasted time' is completely dependent on the person who is doing the activity. For some people, it's a fun and rewarding experience to start a character in a different world/time/setting and build that character up through experiences and quests. However, for some people, this is akin to pulling teeth: an agonizing trial that they believe separates them from the action at the endgame. In the latter category, I'd place the author.
I'm one of those people that likes the build a character from scratch and have them grow as I see fit. For this reasons, CRPGs are perfect for me, and don't feel like a waste of time at all. The fact that the author complains about 90 minutes of doing a quest when he could have used that time for something more 'exciting', like watching a movie, tells me one thing: he should definately get his entertainment elsewhere. He wants spontaneous action, he doesn't want to build the character but have it handed to him on a silver platter. There's nothing wrong about that, since there are plenty of games that do this, but CRPGs are not one of them.
It's not a matter of the CRPGs being at fault, it's just the author looking in the wrong place for his entertainment.
At our high school the TI 82/83 calculators were the most commonly used, and it was widely known amonst the students that if you had just that much spare time on your hands, you could type notes into your calculator in the guise of program code. Of course, considering how hard it would be to read due to the limited amount of characters on the screen, plus how long it would take to add all the notes in via the awkward alpha key setup, not many did (at least that I know of). Besides, anyone who spent that much time putting notes into their calcuator could have instead used that time to study and actually know the material for tests. I'm actually surprised that the administration didn't inspect calculators before tests on a regular basis, considering that some people may have actually been bored enough to write notes into their calculators.
Anyone who saw my calculator didn't see anything of the 'notes' sort, but instead saw a bunch of games and some programs that I wrote to make tedious formulas easier (quadratic, etc). It's lasted 10 years (high school, college, 2 years in workforce) and I still use it from time to time in the office.
If you ever need to repopulate your colon's bacteria content, you should reach for Bio-K+ before you reach for most yogurts. It's a live probiotic product w/ at least 50 billion cells of friendly bacteria per container. This stuff works wonders after using antibiotics or while fighting off a Candida infection.
There's a ton of stuff that Blizzard implemented in Vanilla WoW without requiring people to buy an expansion pack. You can see them here, but what follows is a small summary of patch content:
- Maraudon (Dungeon)
- Dire Maul (Dungeon)
- Outdoor Raid Encounters
- PvP Honor System/Battlegrounds
- Blackwing Lair (40 man raid)
- Zul'Gurub (20 man raid)
- Ahn'Qiraj (20 and 40 man raids)
- Naxxramas (40 man raid)
Each of these new boosts added new armor sets, trinkets, items, etc.
Note that this isn't an exhaustive list, but only highlights the main points. Plus, the fact that Blizzard was providing this content for over two years without an expansion is pretty nice, imo. Everquest pushed out expansions every 6 months, if I recall correctly.
As for the Burning Crusade, originally I wasn't planning on purchasing it. However, I handed over the $40, and so far I haven't regretted any cent of it. The new world is absolutely stunning, with a wide variety of quests, plenty of eyecandy, wonderful new skills and armor sets, and some really nice dungeons that I enjoy playing through with my friends.:)
I'm reading TFA, and some of this stuff is just silly.
For instance, the "Save" button. He argues that a statement that says "Do you want to save your changes before you exit" is a hard sentence, and that "Do you want to throw away everything you just did" is a clearer sentence.
The word "save" isn't that hard of a word to grasp. People save money. People save possessions. Saving documents is no different. Grade schoolers understand it.
What really cracks me up, though, is that he argues that when deleting documents, there should be *no* confirm. I've had a few times when that windfall was really helpful, when I've accidentally hit the delete button or selected delete, and then said "No, I don't really want to delete this file." He compares it to starting a car, where the car doesn't ask you if you want to start the car or not. This is a horrible analogy: the last time I checked, turning a key didn't do something as devestating as, say, deleting your car.
I deal with end users every day, and I've had many of them admit that they don't read error messages or confirm dialogues. If they don't read it, what difference does it make what's included in the dialogue? I've made messages that were very easy, simple to read and understand, only to have them overlooked.
Next, the author mentions that error messages need to state *why* something failed. Wait a second... I thought he was just arguing for simpler error messages, but now he wants to know specifically what happened? That's not exactly simplifying things for the end user.
Now, I'm not saying that it's all the fault of the end users. There are some rather atrocious error messages out there, but it'd be safe to say that there are more end users out there that don't read things carefully. Computers are a tool, not a replacement for thinking, and users need to know that in order to get the maximum use out of technology.
I've played the game Apples to Apples many times, and what I love the most about it is that you have enough cards for practically everyone at the party to play, especially if you have all the special sets combined into one large set. There have been times where we've had 10+ people in a circle, all playing the most absurd things that they have in their hand. Plus, I love how if you are the judge, you can choose *any* criteria you want for voting the best one.
There's one house rule that we always use, and this always makes for more entertainment: we play two descriptor cards instead of just one. Trying to match one thing is ho-hum, but trying to match two adjectives makes the game much more interesting.
If you have the TIME to FINISH a 25 hour game, you certainly have the time to finish something longer if you would just go and start ANOTHER 25 hour game
Perhaps what he's looking for is 25 hours of a completely different game. You know, with different worlds, characters, and plots that he can enjoy.
As an analogy, let's say that we all went out and watched The Matrix. "Wow, this is a really awesome movie," I say, but then decide that I want to watch a different movie afterwards. It doesn't matter if Matrix was "super hardcore awesome" or whichever, I just now feel like watching a different movie. Watching The Matrix again won't help if I want a different experience, even though I enjoyed the movie.
As funny as the parent comment sounds, I agree with it.
When I play through a game, I like to know that it's more than just A-B-C plot progression. I love sideplots. I love side missions. I love small quirky things that happen in the game that can either distract me from the main plot, or join up with it eventually and make it a broader gaming experience.
I guess the system administrator of the hosted site took Bill's advice, stepped away from his computers, and went out to meet his neighbor and check the weather, since the web server's going up in flames right now...
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it'll be a franchise. As soon as you've evolved your creations to where you want them to be, they'll need to have interesting things to do, which will be provided in the following expansions:
Spore: Vacation - Let your little ones relax is exotic locations, sipping drinks on the beach!
Spore: House Party - Invite your friend's creations to your primate's place and PAARTYYYY!
Spore: Hot Date - Will your cephalopod-esque creature find true love, or just a one-night stand?
And, of course, who can forget Spore: Unleashed, where your spore characters can have their own little sporelings to play God with!
If the terrorists get dependent on constant heals, Power Word: Shield, and their felguards to win in combat, then they're only crippling themselves.
Noobs.
Whenever I think of a game so bad that it's funny, I think of Life's Battle. Since I can't do justice in saying how horribly funny this game is, I'll just provide a link to SomethingAwful's stellar game review.. Enjoy!
because if Chuck Norris were on an aluminum airplane he could go out on the bent wing and bend it back, but if he were on a carbon fiber airplane he would just shout, "I've got nothing to work with here assholes!" shoot everyone on the plane, jump out the window, knit a parachute out of his sweater on the way down and land topless on a throng of adoring Laotian women.
All Chuck Norris needs to do is stare at the carbon fiber wing. It'll straighten out due to sheer and utter fear.
Another thing that she could do in its place is to randomly split the data into training, testing, and validation sets. Use the training set for the actual training of the model, the testing set to verify the results (and also for other statistical alterations that might need to take place to ward off overtraining), and then the validation set as the final test to see how the model works.
Of course, with the extremely small data set that it sounds like she has, I'd bet the results wouldn't look stellar at all. However, it'd be more truthful and scientific than taking the entire data set as a training data set, training the model, and then testing the model on the same set. Anyone with even a small amount of statistical modeling or machine learning knowledge can do the same thing and get 99% accuracy with an overtrained model.
Since we're using "Cleaning up Thunder Bluff" as the subject, I'll assume that most of this is directed at the text seen in World of Warcraft. Here are a couple of things you can do to prevent seeing things that might be offensive:
- Use the profanity filter. This will block out the most offensive words that you may come across in chat.
- Put them on your ignore list. I know that there's a limited number of people you can put on the ignore list, but if one person's irritating you enough, put them there.
- Leave general chat. You can always rejoin it at a later time.
- Finally, you can report someone that's being excessively rude and using slurs. Bans are usually temporary, but they can get the point across. Too many temporary bans will result in a permanent one.
Of course, these are the options that are present in WoW, I can only assume that other MMOs have similar steps. YMMV.
and watch with glee as you fling yourselves off the nearest cliff, mewling with self-pity all the way down to the welcoming waves.
I'm glad I picked the perk 'Bloody Mess', this is going to be exciting!
I wouldn't mind except she insists we play together, and waiting for someone to check every single place for studs is crazy-making.
;)
She should stop looking for studs everywhere on those levels, since the most important stud is right next to her on the couch.
Death and Taxes.
Hey, leave the most progressed raiding guild in WoW out of this!
"There's never time to do it right, but always time to do it over."
This post is made of God and win.
If it was really made of Godwin, it would have included Nazis.
The concept of 'wasted time' is completely dependent on the person who is doing the activity. For some people, it's a fun and rewarding experience to start a character in a different world/time/setting and build that character up through experiences and quests. However, for some people, this is akin to pulling teeth: an agonizing trial that they believe separates them from the action at the endgame. In the latter category, I'd place the author.
I'm one of those people that likes the build a character from scratch and have them grow as I see fit. For this reasons, CRPGs are perfect for me, and don't feel like a waste of time at all. The fact that the author complains about 90 minutes of doing a quest when he could have used that time for something more 'exciting', like watching a movie, tells me one thing: he should definately get his entertainment elsewhere. He wants spontaneous action, he doesn't want to build the character but have it handed to him on a silver platter. There's nothing wrong about that, since there are plenty of games that do this, but CRPGs are not one of them.
It's not a matter of the CRPGs being at fault, it's just the author looking in the wrong place for his entertainment.
At our high school the TI 82/83 calculators were the most commonly used, and it was widely known amonst the students that if you had just that much spare time on your hands, you could type notes into your calculator in the guise of program code. Of course, considering how hard it would be to read due to the limited amount of characters on the screen, plus how long it would take to add all the notes in via the awkward alpha key setup, not many did (at least that I know of). Besides, anyone who spent that much time putting notes into their calcuator could have instead used that time to study and actually know the material for tests. I'm actually surprised that the administration didn't inspect calculators before tests on a regular basis, considering that some people may have actually been bored enough to write notes into their calculators.
Anyone who saw my calculator didn't see anything of the 'notes' sort, but instead saw a bunch of games and some programs that I wrote to make tedious formulas easier (quadratic, etc). It's lasted 10 years (high school, college, 2 years in workforce) and I still use it from time to time in the office.
If you ever need to repopulate your colon's bacteria content, you should reach for Bio-K+ before you reach for most yogurts. It's a live probiotic product w/ at least 50 billion cells of friendly bacteria per container. This stuff works wonders after using antibiotics or while fighting off a Candida infection.
There's a ton of stuff that Blizzard implemented in Vanilla WoW without requiring people to buy an expansion pack. You can see them here, but what follows is a small summary of patch content:
:)
- Maraudon (Dungeon)
- Dire Maul (Dungeon)
- Outdoor Raid Encounters
- PvP Honor System/Battlegrounds
- Blackwing Lair (40 man raid)
- Zul'Gurub (20 man raid)
- Ahn'Qiraj (20 and 40 man raids)
- Naxxramas (40 man raid)
Each of these new boosts added new armor sets, trinkets, items, etc.
Note that this isn't an exhaustive list, but only highlights the main points. Plus, the fact that Blizzard was providing this content for over two years without an expansion is pretty nice, imo. Everquest pushed out expansions every 6 months, if I recall correctly.
As for the Burning Crusade, originally I wasn't planning on purchasing it. However, I handed over the $40, and so far I haven't regretted any cent of it. The new world is absolutely stunning, with a wide variety of quests, plenty of eyecandy, wonderful new skills and armor sets, and some really nice dungeons that I enjoy playing through with my friends.
I'm reading TFA, and some of this stuff is just silly.
For instance, the "Save" button. He argues that a statement that says "Do you want to save your changes before you exit" is a hard sentence, and that "Do you want to throw away everything you just did" is a clearer sentence.
The word "save" isn't that hard of a word to grasp. People save money. People save possessions. Saving documents is no different. Grade schoolers understand it.
What really cracks me up, though, is that he argues that when deleting documents, there should be *no* confirm. I've had a few times when that windfall was really helpful, when I've accidentally hit the delete button or selected delete, and then said "No, I don't really want to delete this file." He compares it to starting a car, where the car doesn't ask you if you want to start the car or not. This is a horrible analogy: the last time I checked, turning a key didn't do something as devestating as, say, deleting your car.
I deal with end users every day, and I've had many of them admit that they don't read error messages or confirm dialogues. If they don't read it, what difference does it make what's included in the dialogue? I've made messages that were very easy, simple to read and understand, only to have them overlooked.
Next, the author mentions that error messages need to state *why* something failed. Wait a second... I thought he was just arguing for simpler error messages, but now he wants to know specifically what happened? That's not exactly simplifying things for the end user.
Now, I'm not saying that it's all the fault of the end users. There are some rather atrocious error messages out there, but it'd be safe to say that there are more end users out there that don't read things carefully. Computers are a tool, not a replacement for thinking, and users need to know that in order to get the maximum use out of technology.
The one I found most useful was:
79. The best-value consumer purchase in terms of the price and usage is an electric kettle.
I wonder what the worst is?
Duke Nukem Forever Pre-Orders.
I've played the game Apples to Apples many times, and what I love the most about it is that you have enough cards for practically everyone at the party to play, especially if you have all the special sets combined into one large set. There have been times where we've had 10+ people in a circle, all playing the most absurd things that they have in their hand. Plus, I love how if you are the judge, you can choose *any* criteria you want for voting the best one.
There's one house rule that we always use, and this always makes for more entertainment: we play two descriptor cards instead of just one. Trying to match one thing is ho-hum, but trying to match two adjectives makes the game much more interesting.
Now, not only can the blind lead the deaf and dumb, but they can shoot for them too!
And if you're lucky enough, you may get a tutoring session from Paula Bean!
I heard that she's brillant...
So what do the girl squirrels do?
Get a boyfriend?
If you have the TIME to FINISH a 25 hour game, you certainly have the time to finish something longer if you would just go and start ANOTHER 25 hour game
Perhaps what he's looking for is 25 hours of a completely different game. You know, with different worlds, characters, and plots that he can enjoy.
As an analogy, let's say that we all went out and watched The Matrix. "Wow, this is a really awesome movie," I say, but then decide that I want to watch a different movie afterwards. It doesn't matter if Matrix was "super hardcore awesome" or whichever, I just now feel like watching a different movie. Watching The Matrix again won't help if I want a different experience, even though I enjoyed the movie.
As funny as the parent comment sounds, I agree with it.
When I play through a game, I like to know that it's more than just A-B-C plot progression. I love sideplots. I love side missions. I love small quirky things that happen in the game that can either distract me from the main plot, or join up with it eventually and make it a broader gaming experience.
I guess the system administrator of the hosted site took Bill's advice, stepped away from his computers, and went out to meet his neighbor and check the weather, since the web server's going up in flames right now...
Mod parent up, for Spinal Tap justice. :)