The solution is not to ban mature content in games, the solution is to assist the content provider in giving their recommended restriction levels a little more teeth ; if only by engaging in the same kind of marketing campaigns that are common enough to raise awareness of film certification.
Great point. I would LOVE to see game commercials or posters that said things like, "this game is not appropriate for children". That sends a different message than "This game is appropriate for non-children". Kudos to any company that, making such a game, does a good job making it clear what it's intended audience is.
That said, commercials/ads for Gears of War, Halo, etc -- some look space-ey, others very clearly showcase varying levels of gore. I'd like to be able to see some of the signature things of the series in the commercial, so that I know that if I buy Gears, I'll be seeing some chainsaws applied to faces.
Of course, almost every current / "modern" shooter for any system seems to revel in the amount of gore they can show you -- realistic-looking headshots, etc. It's atestament to game-engine-awesomeness. IT's also something I'd rather my kids not see. Same goes for non-shooters. In WoW, when I attack something, I see numbers jump in the air, and a health bar go down. In Age of Conan, I'd see blood flying and the occasional decapitation. Awesome stuff, but... now I think I'm gonna have to pass on the game.:( (Hopefully I can tone down the gore a bit, as that game sounds darned exciting.)
The solution is not to ban mature content in games, the solution is to assist the content provider in giving their recommended restriction levels a little more teeth ; if only by engaging in the same kind of marketing campaigns that are common enough to raise awareness of film certification. Great point. I would LOVE to see game commercials or posters that said things like, "this game is not appropriate for children". That sends a different message than "This game is appropriate for non-children". Kudos to any company that, making such a game, does a good job making it clear what it's intended audience is.
That said, commercials/ads for Gears of War, Halo, etc -- some look space-ey, others very clearly showcase varying levels of gore. I'd like to be able to see some of the signature things of the series in the commercial, so that I know that if I buy Gears, I'll be seeing some chainsaws applied to faces.
Of course, almost every current / "modern" shooter for any system seems to revel in the amount of gore they can show you -- realistic-looking headshots, etc. It's atestament to game-engine-awesomeness. IT's also something I'd rather my kids not see. Same goes for non-shooters. In WoW, when I attack something, I see numbers jump in the air, and a health bar go down. In Age of Conan, I'd see blood flying and the occasional decapitation. Awesome stuff, but... now I think I'm gonna have to pass on the game.:( (Hopefully I can tone down the gore a bit, as that game sounds darned exciting.)
The point isn't whether she was responsible for it. Rather, the alarming fact is that she seems to believe that resticting ANY availability of the game is the way to keep it from getting to minors.
Because I spend about an hour of every day commuting with these fine people and watching them endanger the lives of everyone they share the road with, I spend quite a bit of time thinking about how they could be caught and punished. So far, my ultimate solution has been that certain exemplary citizens - like, for example, moi - should have their vehicles fitted with government approved land-torpedoes.
Heh. Having commuted in SoCal for years as well, though thankfully not much in the cities, I can understand your desire for appliations of destructive power.
That said, I've also thought about how speed (and general driving safety) could be regulated. I know that I, and many others, frequently drive "with the flow of traffic" -- which is 5-10 mph higher than the posted speed limit. I realize it's illegal, and so does everyone else. Conversely, I try very hard to drive politely, and so do many around me, but I'd love a way for "assholes" and "idiots" to be marked. (Yes, I realize the old joke applies that anyone driving faster than you is an asshole, and anone slower is an idiot.;)) I'd love to read any feedback you guys have.
Idea 1: Let us pay more to be able to speed. It would be interesting if we could pre-declare our highway driving habits, and pay a proportionally higher insurance (or vehicle licensing?) fee if we sped. This would be proportional not to the speed itself, but to the increased likelihood of being involved in an accident (and its subsequent cost), since that's what the speed limits are nominally supposed to be about. If I'm 10% more likely to be in an accident than driver X, I'm sure there's actuarial voodoo that can be done to determine what the expected increased costs are on this.
Tin foil hat time:
1) Insurance companies would love this, as we would all pay more. (doh!) I can't think of a way around this.
2) The government would LOVE to be able to collect revenue-due-to-speeding from everyone. Conversely, that is ALREADY the way many jurisdictions treat speeding-related fines. (Then again, I haven't seen many people pulled over for speeding on the freeway here, whereas I do see our highway patrol often helping disabled vehicles and such. This idea wouldn't apply to non-highway driving, so maybe it's semi-moot.)
3) To prevent "gaming" of the system, we would likely end up with mandated (or mandated-if-you-want-this-option style "voluntary") black-boxes in our cars. This sucks, as then you would indeed have verifiable proof that you drove 80 MPH for three hours straight. However, the point of this is so that we can DO that on the highway, and (like a toll road) pay explicitly for it. It seems like it would be straightforward to do a cost analysis of one's driving habits ("Hmm, this costs me 20% more to drive from A to B, but I get there faster... I think I'll slow down"), and indirectly lead to SOME people driving more slowly (conserving both gas and speed-fees), and OTHERS with money to burn still driving fast, but not worrying about tickets for said speeds.
Well, that covers speed management somewhat well, I think.:) What about the jerk-factor of unsafe drivers, or people who contribute to poor traffic conditions? (Braking at random, cutting people off, tailgating, weaving through traffic...)
In this case, I think it would be interesting to have a way for OTHER drivers to be able to vote that the person is being a jerk. Ideally, you'd be able to nominate the guy tailgating you as a jerk, or the guy tailgating the people two cars ahead, or the person that just wove through four lanes of traffic at ~10 mph faster than everyone else. People with more Jerk-points would pay higher insurance and/or registration fees, similarly to the speed-metering proposal above, on the notion that if you're a jerk more often, you are more of a danger to the rest of the drivers.
The GPS mentioned in the article is not about monitoring their current actions at any given time, but about knowing where you are so that random drug-testing teams know where to find you to TEST for past activity.
Awesome! I can listen to TWO Nickelback songs at the same time!!:D
All joking aside, it's kindof strange to hear how the tempo, timing of crescendos, and timing of the random-intrumental-section line up almost exactly. Wow.
The ability to lay traps for your opponent, and kill them with no further action on your part, were excellent for multiplayer fun. I had more fun playing Duke Nukem with friends than I did playing nearly any other shooter. Being able to play mind games and mental one-upmanship with friends adds a lot to the shooter experience. It's suddenly not merely a test of reflexes and accuracy, and allows a more cerebral gameplay. ("Hmm, I know he's going to want this super-spiffy weapon or healthpack. I think i'll put a laser trip mine above the door and line the room with pipe bombs!")
The mine + pipe bomb interaction was stellar.:D
Yes, I'd love to be able to rocket jump (rather than just my gibbed bits flying all over). I rather hope they fix that. Even so, being able to play pinball, arcade games, and actually have level designs that seemed semi-believable ("Oh, wow, a bathroom!") are something I don't often see. FEAR kindof did that, I think, and Half Life 2 did as well (now that I think of it), but Duke really pioneered that in the shooter genre. I'd be down for playing DNF, most certainly.
It doesn't help that you posted to slashdot asking about getting rid of offending data. Perhaps, if that post is ever linked to you, you could claim that we all misunderstood what you meant.
As an alternate viewpoint, I interpreted the question as a, "if I regularly wipe data with a provable data-destroying method (such as DOD approved techniques), and later get a subpoena, am I going to be in trouble for my prior data wipes?"
(in-package:i-am-not-a-lawyer)
Now, if you have infrastructure, logs, or other ways to prove that you DO indeed regularly wipe data (clean temp folders, etc) from systems you control, that probably will help establish that the data destruction was not specifically for the purpose of hiding evidence. This, of course, assumes that once one DOES receive notice of being sued, that one STOPPED putting bits through the shredder. That would clearly be bad, and would likely land you in hot water.
BBC's Coupling was damnably funny. I think that if they had marketed that AS IS in America, it would have done better. "Oh, this is a show about british people. OK."
Can someone give a short version of how digital watermarking works?
If I create user account A, and also create user account B (perhaps with incorrect information), and download the song on each of them, wouldn't a binary diff reveal whatever watermarking was in effect? I mean, short of transcoding on the fly (for each song for each per user), it doesn't really seem feasible. What am I missing?
Try looking at the history of ARPANET, as well as the contributions to the Ethernet protocol that came from University of Hawaii. Yes, Ethernet != Internet, but I'm pretty surethat it laid some of the important groundwork.
I recall reading that many of the reviews, and even sales, of Bioshock were for hte Xbox360. That's the one that most people seem to be acquainted with. Yes, the game is One Awesome Hurrah for PC Gaming (albeit chock-full of DRM), but I suspect many people that knew (and cared) about the DRM issues bought it for their 360, if they had one.
I still know at a near-instinctive level how to get through almost the entire game... That sounds like nostalgia, and familiarity, much more than good game design to me. Not that FF1 was bad by any means, of course.
It is indeed nostalgia. =) I didn't mean to imply that it was due to good game design. That said, it WAS well done, each dungeon was unique -- more than I can say for portions of some games (Halo...).
Also... for the poster that mentioned how to beat the game with white mages... wow. I couldn't survive the zombie dragons on the way, let alone a boss in the temple of chaos.:(
The original is almost devoid of story/plot, the battle engine sucks, and the graphics aren't that good. It really shows its age.
The graphics sucked, the characters are nameless and have almost zero character development. The plot DOES exist, but it's all based on uncovering what happened (in a very linear manner), and solving the problems of the world.
FF1 is far from perfect, and yet.. I've enjoyed playing it more than almost any other (except 6, mostly). The simplicity of its sandbox meant that it was easier to absorb. (I still know at a near-instinctive level how to get through almost the entire game, despite having not played it in 8 years) Moreover, it allowed you to try very different party setups, and play a "meta-game".
Black Belt Challenge: Start with 4 characters, and let everyone die in the VERY FIRST fight except the single Black Belt. Play the rest of the game with only this character, and do not rez the others. This is very VERY hard. (I've never done it.)
Variants of strange parties: - all white mages (how the hell do you do damage??) - no casters (how the hell do you heal!?) - ALL mages (red, red, white, black was VERY VERY fun, and was pretty much easy-mode for the ENTIRE game, with the sole exception of the end dungeon... which was backbreaking punishment, and which I never decided to finish. Damnably fun before that, though!)
I enjoyed the plot and character development of Final Fantasy 6 much MUCh more. I still get chills even thinking about the Celes opera scene, it was so well done. However, the massive scope of that game made it really hard to get ALL of it. Heck, I never managed to get far in the second phase of the game. So, overall, even though there are MANY weaknesses of FF1, it will always hold a warm place in my heart.
The only games (that I can think of) I've re-played as much as FF1 were: - Fallout (1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2,... 2?), - KOTOR 1 (light, dark, light with dark powers (FUN!)), - Deus Ex, and I think Starfleet Command (3, though they are so similar I consider it effectively the same;)).
The XBox shadowrun game failed to appeal to many Shadowrun fans, because it was not Shadowrun (as we know it). It was a glorified CounterStrike, with some special powers. I realize I am NOT doing it justice, but it would be similar to if they released a game called "Star Wars", but where all you could do was play Sabacc, or play in the Mos Eisley Cantina Band.
"Jizz-Wailer Hero" or "Sabacc", while they might be very good games, would completely fail to come close to doing justice to the full spectrum (or even part of it) of the Star Wars universe. It's this level of failure which applies. (I use Star Wars because not only have there been games which did a great job of capturing major parts of it (Xwing, TIE fighter, and the Jedi Knight series), but it's a franchise which many of us Slashdotters are intimately familiar with -- whereas Shadowrun is relatively much more obscure.
Shadowrun as a roleplaying game has MANY facets, but many of the themes (especially the power of multinational corporations, and the existence of "black-ops" teams of various alliegance) are covered very well (but incompletely) by Deus Ex. Considering how awesome and varied DX was, and that it STILL doesn't cover the social aspects of Shadowrun, you can I hope see why most of us Shadowrun fans hoped for something MUCH much more meaty.
The Shadowrun Game that we might want would possibly be an MMO (to help model the chaos of multiple runner teams of varying alliegance;)), or even a single player CRPG in the scope of Mass Effect, Deus Ex, Neverwinter Nights, and the Elder Scrolls series games. A game where you can make and break political alliegances, where the player is NOT always the hero (but is often be the pawn), and where surviving to the next run can be as big an achievement as saving the princess. Similarly, it has to also allow the player to occasionally feel like a Badass, since it's pretty much a John Woo film with orks and trolls and trideo stars (oh my!). I don't know HOW such a game could ever get made, but I am looking forward to playing Mass Effect in hopes that it will be a good enough placebo.:)
.... and once again I misclick the Submit button instead of Preview. Can I get a -1 mod on the parent, and I'll re-post with better formatting?:D
---- what I meant to say was... -----
Given that World of Warcraft used to run just fine on my old P4 2.0ghz with 512 RAM and a Geforce 4, why on earth would I want to spend such a ludicrous sum of money on a laptop to play it with?
Native laptop resolutions, I suspect.
My home system is an Athlonxp 2200, with a 6600GT. It's somewhat old, but was pretty much Just Fine when I was running at ~1024x768 resolution. I could get most graphical effects, shader stuff, and a good range of "vision". Last December, my family bought me a 24" widescreen LCD. Holy cow. I cannot play at lower than native resolutions. It's physically possible, but it's an assault on my eyes. Thus, I play at full resolution, but absolutely bare minimum graphical settings.
While this laptop is surely overkill (and I'm sure any recent laptop would do Just Fine), there's a reason to have all the bells and whistles.:) If you're buying a warcraft themed laptop you're already in the small group of people with money to burn on crazy stuff like that, so they may as well expect that you as a customer want a machine which is Damnably Good at anything gaming related.
Hence, SLI and PhysX. (I didn't know WoW could even use PhysX?)
Given that World of Warcraft used to run just fine on my old P4 2.0ghz with 512 RAM and a Geforce 4, why on earth would I want to spend such a ludicrous sum of money on a laptop to play it with?
Native laptop resolutions, I suspect.
My home system is an Athlonxp 2200, with a 6600GT. It's somewhat old, but was pretty much Just Fine when I was running at ~1024x768 resolution. I could get most graphical effects, shader stuff, and a good range of "vision". Last December, my family bought me a 24" widescreen LCD. Holy cow. I cannot play at lower than native resolutions. It's physically possible, but it's an assault on my eyes. Thus, I play at full resolution, but absolutely bare minimum graphical settings.
While this laptop is surely overkill (and I'm sure any recent laptop would do Just Fine), there's a reason to have all the bells and whistles.:) If you're buying a warcraft themed laptop you're already in the small group of people with money to burn on crazy stuff like that, so they may as well expect that you as a customer want a machine which is Damnably Good at anything gaming related.
Hence, SLI and PhysX. (I didn't know WoW could even use PhysX?)
I thought you were almost-trolling, and yet -- it's very apropos. Maybe not for a 6 year old, but Crosswords -- ON A DS!? Heck, I could go for that. I know I loved the Sudoku implementation.
Wow. That's really interesting. Scary, in a way, but interesting.
You mentioned that you've scanned pages of books, but never really made the mental pictures. Have you tried going the other direction? Can you imagine things (picture a cat on your bathroom sink, or sliding down a slide at a schoolyard, etc)? (I don't even know if that's the right question to ask, even.) Have you tried composing anecdotes?
It seems that going from a diary-like "this is what happened" to a "this is what almost happened" to "this is what might have happened" to "It'd be interesting if this happened" is a series of transitions that might be easier to handle.
Now to read more on the kuro5hin article you linked.:)
our constitution can't provide rights to non-citizens. It's the tricky part at the beginning "We the People" which doesn't include you.
Wrong. The "We the People of the United States... do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." part refers NOT to the people the constitution applies to, but rather introduces in a formal manner the people who are establishing the Constitution.
The constitution is VERY clear in delineating between Citizens and Persons:
No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.
Note here that we see persons, inhabitants of the US, Citizens of the US, and representatives -- in decreasing order of generality. The Bill of Rights refers also to people and residents, and if they had meant Citizens, they would have said so.
(I'm not a lawyer, or an expert on constitutional law, but having followed early american history more than a little bit, it is pretty clear the way these men thought about matters. They felt these were universal rights, which all people have, not just citizens.)
Slashdot Mirror
Great point. I would LOVE to see game commercials or posters that said things like, "this game is not appropriate for children". That sends a different message than "This game is appropriate for non-children". Kudos to any company that, making such a game, does a good job making it clear what it's intended audience is.
That said, commercials/ads for Gears of War, Halo, etc -- some look space-ey, others very clearly showcase varying levels of gore. I'd like to be able to see some of the signature things of the series in the commercial, so that I know that if I buy Gears, I'll be seeing some chainsaws applied to faces.
Of course, almost every current / "modern" shooter for any system seems to revel in the amount of gore they can show you -- realistic-looking headshots, etc. It's atestament to game-engine-awesomeness. IT's also something I'd rather my kids not see. Same goes for non-shooters. In WoW, when I attack something, I see numbers jump in the air, and a health bar go down. In Age of Conan, I'd see blood flying and the occasional decapitation. Awesome stuff, but
The point isn't whether she was responsible for it. Rather, the alarming fact is that she seems to believe that resticting ANY availability of the game is the way to keep it from getting to minors.
Exactly. The cost comes not just from the cost of new media, but the cost to have operators making (and verifying) copies of data in perpetuity.
Heh. Having commuted in SoCal for years as well, though thankfully not much in the cities, I can understand your desire for appliations of destructive power.
;)) I'd love to read any feedback you guys have.
... I think I'll slow down"), and indirectly lead to SOME people driving more slowly (conserving both gas and speed-fees), and OTHERS with money to burn still driving fast, but not worrying about tickets for said speeds.
:) What about the jerk-factor of unsafe drivers, or people who contribute to poor traffic conditions? (Braking at random, cutting people off, tailgating, weaving through traffic ...)
That said, I've also thought about how speed (and general driving safety) could be regulated. I know that I, and many others, frequently drive "with the flow of traffic" -- which is 5-10 mph higher than the posted speed limit. I realize it's illegal, and so does everyone else. Conversely, I try very hard to drive politely, and so do many around me, but I'd love a way for "assholes" and "idiots" to be marked. (Yes, I realize the old joke applies that anyone driving faster than you is an asshole, and anone slower is an idiot.
Idea 1: Let us pay more to be able to speed.
It would be interesting if we could pre-declare our highway driving habits, and pay a proportionally higher insurance (or vehicle licensing?) fee if we sped. This would be proportional not to the speed itself, but to the increased likelihood of being involved in an accident (and its subsequent cost), since that's what the speed limits are nominally supposed to be about. If I'm 10% more likely to be in an accident than driver X, I'm sure there's actuarial voodoo that can be done to determine what the expected increased costs are on this.
Tin foil hat time:
1) Insurance companies would love this, as we would all pay more. (doh!) I can't think of a way around this.
2) The government would LOVE to be able to collect revenue-due-to-speeding from everyone. Conversely, that is ALREADY the way many jurisdictions treat speeding-related fines. (Then again, I haven't seen many people pulled over for speeding on the freeway here, whereas I do see our highway patrol often helping disabled vehicles and such. This idea wouldn't apply to non-highway driving, so maybe it's semi-moot.)
3) To prevent "gaming" of the system, we would likely end up with mandated (or mandated-if-you-want-this-option style "voluntary") black-boxes in our cars. This sucks, as then you would indeed have verifiable proof that you drove 80 MPH for three hours straight. However, the point of this is so that we can DO that on the highway, and (like a toll road) pay explicitly for it. It seems like it would be straightforward to do a cost analysis of one's driving habits ("Hmm, this costs me 20% more to drive from A to B, but I get there faster
Well, that covers speed management somewhat well, I think.
In this case, I think it would be interesting to have a way for OTHER drivers to be able to vote that the person is being a jerk. Ideally, you'd be able to nominate the guy tailgating you as a jerk, or the guy tailgating the people two cars ahead, or the person that just wove through four lanes of traffic at ~10 mph faster than everyone else. People with more Jerk-points would pay higher insurance and/or registration fees, similarly to the speed-metering proposal above, on the notion that if you're a jerk more often, you are more of a danger to the rest of the drivers.
Now, clearly, this has many MANY f
The GPS mentioned in the article is not about monitoring their current actions at any given time, but about knowing where you are so that random drug-testing teams know where to find you to TEST for past activity.
Awesome! I can listen to TWO Nickelback songs at the same time!! :D
All joking aside, it's kindof strange to hear how the tempo, timing of crescendos, and timing of the random-intrumental-section line up almost exactly. Wow.
The ability to lay traps for your opponent, and kill them with no further action on your part, were excellent for multiplayer fun. I had more fun playing Duke Nukem with friends than I did playing nearly any other shooter. Being able to play mind games and mental one-upmanship with friends adds a lot to the shooter experience. It's suddenly not merely a test of reflexes and accuracy, and allows a more cerebral gameplay. ("Hmm, I know he's going to want this super-spiffy weapon or healthpack. I think i'll put a laser trip mine above the door and line the room with pipe bombs!")
:D
The mine + pipe bomb interaction was stellar.
Yes, I'd love to be able to rocket jump (rather than just my gibbed bits flying all over). I rather hope they fix that. Even so, being able to play pinball, arcade games, and actually have level designs that seemed semi-believable ("Oh, wow, a bathroom!") are something I don't often see. FEAR kindof did that, I think, and Half Life 2 did as well (now that I think of it), but Duke really pioneered that in the shooter genre. I'd be down for playing DNF, most certainly.
As an alternate viewpoint, I interpreted the question as a, "if I regularly wipe data with a provable data-destroying method (such as DOD approved techniques), and later get a subpoena, am I going to be in trouble for my prior data wipes?"
(in-package
Now, if you have infrastructure, logs, or other ways to prove that you DO indeed regularly wipe data (clean temp folders, etc) from systems you control, that probably will help establish that the data destruction was not specifically for the purpose of hiding evidence. This, of course, assumes that once one DOES receive notice of being sued, that one STOPPED putting bits through the shredder. That would clearly be bad, and would likely land you in hot water.
BBC's Coupling was damnably funny. I think that if they had marketed that AS IS in America, it would have done better. "Oh, this is a show about british people. OK."
Can someone give a short version of how digital watermarking works?
If I create user account A, and also create user account B (perhaps with incorrect information), and download the song on each of them, wouldn't a binary diff reveal whatever watermarking was in effect? I mean, short of transcoding on the fly (for each song for each per user), it doesn't really seem feasible. What am I missing?
Try looking at the history of ARPANET, as well as the contributions to the Ethernet protocol that came from University of Hawaii. Yes, Ethernet != Internet, but I'm pretty surethat it laid some of the important groundwork.
If advertisers blacklisted ISPs, wouldn't that make those ISPs users have a better experience? Sounds like a win-win. ;)
I recall reading that many of the reviews, and even sales, of Bioshock were for hte Xbox360. That's the one that most people seem to be acquainted with. Yes, the game is One Awesome Hurrah for PC Gaming (albeit chock-full of DRM), but I suspect many people that knew (and cared) about the DRM issues bought it for their 360, if they had one.
It is indeed nostalgia. =) I didn't mean to imply that it was due to good game design. That said, it WAS well done, each dungeon was unique -- more than I can say for portions of some games (Halo...).
Also
The graphics sucked, the characters are nameless and have almost zero character development. The plot DOES exist, but it's all based on uncovering what happened (in a very linear manner), and solving the problems of the world.
FF1 is far from perfect, and yet
Black Belt Challenge: Start with 4 characters, and let everyone die in the VERY FIRST fight except the single Black Belt. Play the rest of the game with only this character, and do not rez the others. This is very VERY hard. (I've never done it.)
Variants of strange parties:
- all white mages (how the hell do you do damage??)
- no casters (how the hell do you heal!?)
- ALL mages (red, red, white, black was VERY VERY fun, and was pretty much easy-mode for the ENTIRE game, with the sole exception of the end dungeon
I enjoyed the plot and character development of Final Fantasy 6 much MUCh more. I still get chills even thinking about the Celes opera scene, it was so well done. However, the massive scope of that game made it really hard to get ALL of it. Heck, I never managed to get far in the second phase of the game. So, overall, even though there are MANY weaknesses of FF1, it will always hold a warm place in my heart.
The only games (that I can think of) I've re-played as much as FF1 were:
- Fallout (1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2,... 2?),
- KOTOR 1 (light, dark, light with dark powers (FUN!)),
- Deus Ex,
and I think Starfleet Command (3, though they are so similar I consider it effectively the same
The XBox shadowrun game failed to appeal to many Shadowrun fans, because it was not Shadowrun (as we know it). It was a glorified CounterStrike, with some special powers. I realize I am NOT doing it justice, but it would be similar to if they released a game called "Star Wars", but where all you could do was play Sabacc, or play in the Mos Eisley Cantina Band.
;)), or even a single player CRPG in the scope of Mass Effect, Deus Ex, Neverwinter Nights, and the Elder Scrolls series games. A game where you can make and break political alliegances, where the player is NOT always the hero (but is often be the pawn), and where surviving to the next run can be as big an achievement as saving the princess. Similarly, it has to also allow the player to occasionally feel like a Badass, since it's pretty much a John Woo film with orks and trolls and trideo stars (oh my!). I don't know HOW such a game could ever get made, but I am looking forward to playing Mass Effect in hopes that it will be a good enough placebo. :)
"Jizz-Wailer Hero" or "Sabacc", while they might be very good games, would completely fail to come close to doing justice to the full spectrum (or even part of it) of the Star Wars universe. It's this level of failure which applies. (I use Star Wars because not only have there been games which did a great job of capturing major parts of it (Xwing, TIE fighter, and the Jedi Knight series), but it's a franchise which many of us Slashdotters are intimately familiar with -- whereas Shadowrun is relatively much more obscure.
Shadowrun as a roleplaying game has MANY facets, but many of the themes (especially the power of multinational corporations, and the existence of "black-ops" teams of various alliegance) are covered very well (but incompletely) by Deus Ex. Considering how awesome and varied DX was, and that it STILL doesn't cover the social aspects of Shadowrun, you can I hope see why most of us Shadowrun fans hoped for something MUCH much more meaty.
The Shadowrun Game that we might want would possibly be an MMO (to help model the chaos of multiple runner teams of varying alliegance
Think of the gnome soccer! :D
(I play alliance, but even I crack up at that idea.)
.. well, it may Slashdot, but that was surprising. :)
---- what I meant to say was
My home system is an Athlonxp 2200, with a 6600GT. It's somewhat old, but was pretty much Just Fine when I was running at ~1024x768 resolution. I could get most graphical effects, shader stuff, and a good range of "vision". Last December, my family bought me a 24" widescreen LCD. Holy cow. I cannot play at lower than native resolutions. It's physically possible, but it's an assault on my eyes. Thus, I play at full resolution, but absolutely bare minimum graphical settings.
While this laptop is surely overkill (and I'm sure any recent laptop would do Just Fine), there's a reason to have all the bells and whistles.
Hence, SLI and PhysX. (I didn't know WoW could even use PhysX?)
Native laptop resolutions, I suspect.
My home system is an Athlonxp 2200, with a 6600GT. It's somewhat old, but was pretty much Just Fine when I was running at ~1024x768 resolution. I could get most graphical effects, shader stuff, and a good range of "vision". Last December, my family bought me a 24" widescreen LCD. Holy cow. I cannot play at lower than native resolutions. It's physically possible, but it's an assault on my eyes. Thus, I play at full resolution, but absolutely bare minimum graphical settings.
While this laptop is surely overkill (and I'm sure any recent laptop would do Just Fine), there's a reason to have all the bells and whistles.
Hence, SLI and PhysX. (I didn't know WoW could even use PhysX?)
I thought you were almost-trolling, and yet -- it's very apropos. Maybe not for a 6 year old, but Crosswords -- ON A DS!? Heck, I could go for that. I know I loved the Sudoku implementation.
Wow. That's really interesting. Scary, in a way, but interesting.
:)
You mentioned that you've scanned pages of books, but never really made the mental pictures. Have you tried going the other direction? Can you imagine things (picture a cat on your bathroom sink, or sliding down a slide at a schoolyard, etc)? (I don't even know if that's the right question to ask, even.) Have you tried composing anecdotes?
It seems that going from a diary-like "this is what happened" to a "this is what almost happened" to "this is what might have happened" to "It'd be interesting if this happened" is a series of transitions that might be easier to handle.
Now to read more on the kuro5hin article you linked.
The constitution is VERY clear in delineating between Citizens and Persons:Note here that we see persons, inhabitants of the US, Citizens of the US, and representatives -- in decreasing order of generality. The Bill of Rights refers also to people and residents, and if they had meant Citizens, they would have said so.
(I'm not a lawyer, or an expert on constitutional law, but having followed early american history more than a little bit, it is pretty clear the way these men thought about matters. They felt these were universal rights, which all people have, not just citizens.)