I'd really like to see a better spell system, which allows much more flexibility, within certain rules.[...] What we really need is a system more like "you have 30 mana points"
That is still fuffing around with points which feels a bit limited and static... for me, magic is about rearranging the basic building blocks of reality, and I think White Wolf's Mage is cooler in that aspect (especially the previous version). Characters have 1-5 dots of influence in different spheres - time, matter, spirit, life, entropy, mind, correspondence, prime... How powerful a character in that game gets is very much dependent on the player's ability to think creatively and come up with new effects by combining spheres.
It does get difficult for the GM to keep any plot together on higher levels though when both characters and villains have divine levels of power over reality.
>>Now I'm glad he did since Rails is a pretty nice idea, and it demolished the Java world I hated so much. >The man's a serial framework hater. Look out Python community.
Yeah... Some people take languages waaaay too seriously. If they were really smart they should be able to analyze things rationally not emotionally. It's just computers people, settle down.
A beat em up? Yeah, you've obviously tried the game...
and an expansion pack...
But WHAT an expansion!
I'd try to convince you to try them, but you are obviously satisfied with being a prejudiced, bitter and disappointed gamer, so I doubt anything I'd say would change it.
Troika's dead, an Xbox FPS developer has the Fallout IP, and Bioware was eaten by EA before they could squeeze out an uncorrupted Dragon Age.
On the other hand, we have the Witcher, and NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer, which makes it one of the best CRPG years in a long time. Which brings us to my disappointment, mirrored nicely by this article: This was a great year for PC games, the best in a long time, but online media seems only to care about consoles.
I LOVED Bioshock and it is probably my game of the year... however, I still think I agree with Yahtzee's claim that the final product was slightly shallower than it was originally advertised.
Oh, and automatic +1 and a cookie for you for liking Bloodlines! Check out the Witcher if you haven't already. The sexist-Pokemon minigame aside, it has quite a lot of mature topics as well as difficult choices+consequences in it.
Shame that more work wasn't done in the Planescape universe, it's a pretty interesting system.
Keep an eye open for Purgatorio, the first installment of the free Neverwinter Nights 2 module trilogy. Should be out any day now. You can get NWN2 together with the Mask of the Betrayer expansion cheaply now. If you loved the old Baldur's Gate 2 games, NWN2 and especially MOTB are well worth your money. I also agree with Fallingcow, the Witcher is an excellent game. Best year for great single player RPGs on the PC in a long time.
As for the AC - you can buy Planescape: Torment to download at Gametap. I think Gametap only have licence to sell their games for the US/Canada market though.:( Still, faking an address and IP isn't all that hard if you really want it...
The next-gen consoles really came into their own this year;
Can we please call them "the current console generation" instead? I loathe the "next-gen" buzzword.
Admittedly I am a PC fanboy, but from where I am standing the console offerings, once they arrived, looked surprisingly weak compared to the PC this year. All the massively hyped console games turned out to be either a) Available for the PC too (and usually with extras on the PC)
or b) Not that good after all. Not bad, but not amazing...or anything special really. (Possible exceptions - one or two games on the Wii)
There were a number of PC exclusives also that I really liked - Witcher, Sam & Max Season One, NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer. Notice that they are games in genres that have been declared more or less dead last couple of years - single player, plot driven non-linear RPGs, and adventure games. They not only got great reviews, but they sold quite well too.
(I'm normally not much for FPSs, but from what I've heard the graphics in Crysis spanks anything any of the consoles have to offer.)
Apart from the three games mentioned above, Bioshock and Portal were the games I enjoyed the most this year.
Switch statements are syntactic sugar. They're really not needed. Nested if/then/else do the same thing....only in a less readable way. MOST language features in any language are syntactic sugar. Besides, if the fact that there is more than one way to do something bothers you, isn't Perl the last language you should be using?:)
This is seriously funny, thanks. You certainly did not deserve the offtopic mod.
Ok, I hate looking stupid, but I spent 10 minutes on Wikipedia looking up stuff, but I still don't see the funny. I'd rather admit being ignorant and learn something that remaining ignorant, so - Someone feel like hitting me with a cluestick?
Describes something already existing? Sci-fi literary/movie reference? A biology experiment everyone but me did in high-school, or...?
Microsoft faces challenges from Google and Linux. That's two fronts. It is also in a battle with itself. The nonsense about trying to protect DRM using the OS is a real handicap.
I'd add at lest one more front to that - Java, especially now that it is open source.
If you're going for PC RPGs from that time period, it's hard to get better than the scores composed by Michael Hoenig for Baldur's Gate I and II. Jeremy Soule's scoring of Icewind Dale was decent, as well.
Yep. The "boss battle" against the giant half-brother Bhaalspawn about halfway through the BG2 expansion was the best one... incredibly epic soundtrack, beats the pants of anything I've heard in movies.
Agree with Sycraft-fu... like so many other top-x game lists online, the people who put them together seem to only know about console games. A shame.
But it was just a bit more shallow than it was first advertised. Maybe PC gamers just have a little higher standards?
Also the marketing occasionally left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth -
on the "Cult of Rapture" site, someone asked early on:"Isn't there a risk that a cross platform UI is going to suck?" and the community representative on the site answered "No no no! This is a game that is designed 100% first for consoles, we will do everything to make the UI perfect for consoles. Consoles." When PC gamers were upset about this, the programmers went out to say "The community representative got this a bit wrong. We are going to make it polished for ALL platforms. We are PC gamers ourselves foremost, we are obviously going to make a good PC UI." And I agree, the UI was nice, not like Oblivion or that abomination Deus Ex 2. However, many other gameplay choices were obviously made with, if not consoles, at least the casual gamer in mind. Vitachambers, all skills/plasmids could be maxed, hacking too easy, blah blah blah.
Then when it was just a few weeks left, there was a blizzard of hype saying "This is a FPS! It has always been a FPS! Totally going to revolutionize FPS genre! A fun shooter first and foremost!" It was obvious they had decided that RPG was now an acronym to avoid like poison.
So yeah, without those things perhaps some people would have been a bit more charitable.
Which is all well and good from a mathematical perspective, but I find it amusing that neither of you got the original theological problem right, the one that Christians have wrestled with for centuries: "Can an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God exist if evil also exists?".
The question isn't if God is infinite in some specific dimension in time or space, it is if God CONTROLS everything in the universe.
Lots of different possible answers to that of course. As an atheist, the only one I think has come close to being satisfactory is: He could be omnipotent, but he chooses not to, enabling free will.
I've always found it odd that games with massive advertising budgets behind them always tend to get VEEERY high scores from the mainstream gaming sites. Case in point - Halo 3. Ok, so I haven't played it myself, but a perfect 100% score on some sites? There is NOTHING that can be better about this game? Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame put this best. He argues that the 10/10 score is especially strange since they go on to say in the review that the single player campaign is flawed, but the totally awesome multiplayer "makes up for it". If the game was really perfect, it wouldn't need something to "make up" for any flaws.
Deus Ex 2 was really awful. I read about the "mixed" reviews, but I thought I should give it a chance. I tried to like it, but it was just....awful. Maybe the plot picked up later in the game, but I couldn't continue playing it past the first couple of levels. The performance on PC was dreadful, levels were tiny to accomodate limited console memory. Everything about the interface screamed "console" - the text font was huge so conversations were always very short. When moving things in the inventory you couldn't drag and drop with the mouse, you had to move a square around slowly with the arrow keys, press space to select and deleselect items. Foes ran up to you and then stood still, firing one shot every ten seconds or so. There were multiple paths through obstacles, but unlike the first game the solutions were always glaringly obvious and no challenge.
I personaly believe that designing for console doesn't HAVE to mean dumb down, but this is one title where they clearly had done just that, in spades. It made for a really crappy PC game, and a game that insulted console players' intelligence.
The title that made thousands of PC players familiar with "consolitis". The Deus Ex 3 makers will have an uphill struggle I'm afraid.
I love the series, and I get the feeling that most of the jokes were done affectionately, but sometimes MST gets a bit personal ("Here is the girl known throughout the dorm as horseface!"). Did you every get contacted by someone who was really hurt by the comments, and did you regret the jokes?
but then you sometimes aren't optimally using memory, and then the designers start wanting things to follow you through the world, or allowing you to carry things back and forth through the world, so you have to manage memory outside of the slot system as well as within it,
Ahh, so something like that might be why characters following you in Oblivion sometimes got stuck on invisible borders - for instance the female ogre paladin outside the southern city who stopped a certain radius away from the bandit camp on the opposite shore that she was supposed to clear?
>> * Quests are very limited. There 10 basic times, but only about 5 account for 95% of them: "Kill", "Random Drop", "Delivery", "Item", "Boss"
>I challenge you to try to come up with a quest, any quest, that can not be boiled down to those simple constituents. (note that escort quests can be simplified as 'delivery' quests, and any sort of quest that can have you steal/manipulate things with can be simplified to 'item' for example).
Exploration, detective, conversation quests. Problem with them are that they take time to implement well, and once the solution is out people who are more interested in leveling than enjoying the game cruise through them very quickly.
>> * Very limited world interaction. The world is static -- much like a ride through Disney Land. Your actions don't change the world.
>how can you guarantee a consistent gaming experience to all your players if you let them change the world? Can you imagine how crappy the experience would be for a new subscriber if you let old high level subscribers destroy all the lower level areas permanently for example? (which is what would happen a second after you let people do it).
Exactly... see for instance the desert gates in WoW which opened up a new area on the server. The key was given to selected guild leaders as a quest reward, and on some servers, they promptly refused to open the gates. This might have been for role playing reasons or perhaps they just enjoyed the power to cause grief for others, but it did piss off a huge amount of players on those servers.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like Sony wins this one.
:)
A more positive way to view it is that Microsoft lost!
Besides, as others have pointed out, lots of companies were behind Bluray, not just Sony.
I'd really like to see a better spell system, which allows much more flexibility, within certain rules.[...]
What we really need is a system more like "you have 30 mana points"
That is still fuffing around with points which feels a bit limited and static... for me, magic is about rearranging the basic building blocks of reality, and I think White Wolf's Mage is cooler in that aspect (especially the previous version). Characters have 1-5 dots of influence in different spheres - time, matter, spirit, life, entropy, mind, correspondence, prime... How powerful a character in that game gets is very much dependent on the player's ability to think creatively and come up with new effects by combining spheres.
It does get difficult for the GM to keep any plot together on higher levels though when both characters and villains have divine levels of power over reality.
>>Now I'm glad he did since Rails is a pretty nice idea, and it demolished the Java world I hated so much.
>The man's a serial framework hater. Look out Python community.
Yeah... Some people take languages waaaay too seriously. If they were really smart they should be able to analyze things rationally not emotionally. It's just computers people, settle down.
Yeah, an isometric beat-'em-up
A beat em up? Yeah, you've obviously tried the game...
and an expansion pack...
But WHAT an expansion!
I'd try to convince you to try them, but you are obviously satisfied with being a prejudiced, bitter and disappointed gamer, so I doubt anything I'd say would change it.
Troika's dead, an Xbox FPS developer has the Fallout IP, and Bioware was eaten by EA before they could squeeze out an uncorrupted Dragon Age.
On the other hand, we have the Witcher, and NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer, which makes it one of the best CRPG years in a long time. Which brings us to my disappointment, mirrored nicely by this article: This was a great year for PC games, the best in a long time, but online media seems only to care about consoles.
I LOVED Bioshock and it is probably my game of the year... however, I still think I agree with Yahtzee's claim that the final product was slightly shallower than it was originally advertised.
Oh, and automatic +1 and a cookie for you for liking Bloodlines! Check out the Witcher if you haven't already. The sexist-Pokemon minigame aside, it has quite a lot of mature topics as well as difficult choices+consequences in it.
Shame that more work wasn't done in the Planescape universe, it's a pretty interesting system.
:(
Keep an eye open for Purgatorio, the first installment of the free Neverwinter Nights 2 module trilogy. Should be out any day now. You can get NWN2 together with the Mask of the Betrayer expansion cheaply now. If you loved the old Baldur's Gate 2 games, NWN2 and especially MOTB are well worth your money. I also agree with Fallingcow, the Witcher is an excellent game. Best year for great single player RPGs on the PC in a long time.
As for the AC - you can buy Planescape: Torment to download at Gametap. I think Gametap only have licence to sell their games for the US/Canada market though.
Still, faking an address and IP isn't all that hard if you really want it...
The next-gen consoles really came into their own this year;
Can we please call them "the current console generation" instead? I loathe the "next-gen" buzzword.
Admittedly I am a PC fanboy, but from where I am standing the console offerings, once they arrived, looked surprisingly weak compared to the PC this year. All the massively hyped console games turned out to be either
a) Available for the PC too (and usually with extras on the PC)
or
b) Not that good after all. Not bad, but not amazing...or anything special really. (Possible exceptions - one or two games on the Wii)
There were a number of PC exclusives also that I really liked - Witcher, Sam & Max Season One, NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer.
Notice that they are games in genres that have been declared more or less dead last couple of years - single player, plot driven non-linear RPGs, and adventure games. They not only got great reviews, but they sold quite well too.
(I'm normally not much for FPSs, but from what I've heard the graphics in Crysis spanks anything any of the consoles have to offer.)
Apart from the three games mentioned above, Bioshock and Portal were the games I enjoyed the most this year.
Switch statements are syntactic sugar. They're really not needed. Nested if/then/else do the same thing. ...only in a less readable way. MOST language features in any language are syntactic sugar. Besides, if the fact that there is more than one way to do something bothers you, isn't Perl the last language you should be using? :)
Thanks Aetuneo. (What's wrong with the mods today btw?)
This is seriously funny, thanks. You certainly did not deserve the offtopic mod.
Ok, I hate looking stupid, but I spent 10 minutes on Wikipedia looking up stuff, but I still don't see the funny. I'd rather admit being ignorant and learn something that remaining ignorant, so - Someone feel like hitting me with a cluestick?
Describes something already existing? Sci-fi literary/movie reference? A biology experiment everyone but me did in high-school, or...?
Microsoft faces challenges from Google and Linux. That's two fronts. It is also in a battle with itself. The nonsense about trying to protect DRM using the OS is a real handicap.
I'd add at lest one more front to that - Java, especially now that it is open source.
But it gets better. Basically Global Warming is at fault for all weather bad
Now where does it say that?
Regardless if the earth was warmer before,
Thank you, this is known to everyone and accounted for. It is the rate of change that is scary.
regarldess of the fact we don't know out own planet's ideal temperature
There is no such thing as an ideal temperature, and no one has claimed that there is.
regardless of the fact we can't even forcast a year ahead
Climate is not the same thing as weather.
regardless of the fact that the people who win from all the Global Warming scare mongering are politicians and big business.
No, if global warming and its predicted consequences are real, we all lose.
IPCC as the #1 green idea? That bunch of bad science and fraud?
Any proof of these claims?
If you're going for PC RPGs from that time period, it's hard to get better than the scores composed by Michael Hoenig for Baldur's Gate I and II. Jeremy Soule's scoring of Icewind Dale was decent, as well.
Yep. The "boss battle" against the giant half-brother Bhaalspawn about halfway through the BG2 expansion was the best one... incredibly epic soundtrack, beats the pants of anything I've heard in movies.
Agree with Sycraft-fu... like so many other top-x game lists online, the people who put them together seem to only know about console games. A shame.
But it was just a bit more shallow than it was first advertised. Maybe PC gamers just have a little higher standards?
Also the marketing occasionally left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth -
on the "Cult of Rapture" site, someone asked early on:"Isn't there a risk that a cross platform UI is going to suck?" and the community representative on the site answered "No no no! This is a game that is designed 100% first for consoles, we will do everything to make the UI perfect for consoles. Consoles."
When PC gamers were upset about this, the programmers went out to say "The community representative got this a bit wrong. We are going to make it polished for ALL platforms. We are PC gamers ourselves foremost, we are obviously going to make a good PC UI." And I agree, the UI was nice, not like Oblivion or that abomination Deus Ex 2. However, many other gameplay choices were obviously made with, if not consoles, at least the casual gamer in mind. Vitachambers, all skills/plasmids could be maxed, hacking too easy, blah blah blah.
Then when it was just a few weeks left, there was a blizzard of hype saying "This is a FPS! It has always been a FPS! Totally going to revolutionize FPS genre! A fun shooter first and foremost!" It was obvious they had decided that RPG was now an acronym to avoid like poison.
So yeah, without those things perhaps some people would have been a bit more charitable.
Which is all well and good from a mathematical perspective, but I find it amusing that neither of you got the original theological problem right, the one that Christians have wrestled with for centuries: "Can an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God exist if evil also exists?".
The question isn't if God is infinite in some specific dimension in time or space, it is if God CONTROLS everything in the universe.
Lots of different possible answers to that of course. As an atheist, the only one I think has come close to being satisfactory is: He could be omnipotent, but he chooses not to, enabling free will.
I've always found it odd that games with massive advertising budgets behind them always tend to get VEEERY high scores from the mainstream gaming sites. Case in point - Halo 3. Ok, so I haven't played it myself, but a perfect 100% score on some sites? There is NOTHING that can be better about this game? Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame put this best. He argues that the 10/10 score is especially strange since they go on to say in the review that the single player campaign is flawed, but the totally awesome multiplayer "makes up for it". If the game was really perfect, it wouldn't need something to "make up" for any flaws.
They don't mention which platform it is for....
Deus Ex 2 was really awful. I read about the "mixed" reviews, but I thought I should give it a chance. I tried to like it, but it was just....awful. Maybe the plot picked up later in the game, but I couldn't continue playing it past the first couple of levels. The performance on PC was dreadful, levels were tiny to accomodate limited console memory. Everything about the interface screamed "console" - the text font was huge so conversations were always very short. When moving things in the inventory you couldn't drag and drop with the mouse, you had to move a square around slowly with the arrow keys, press space to select and deleselect items. Foes ran up to you and then stood still, firing one shot every ten seconds or so. There were multiple paths through obstacles, but unlike the first game the solutions were always glaringly obvious and no challenge.
I personaly believe that designing for console doesn't HAVE to mean dumb down, but this is one title where they clearly had done just that, in spades. It made for a really crappy PC game, and a game that insulted console players' intelligence.
The title that made thousands of PC players familiar with "consolitis". The Deus Ex 3 makers will have an uphill struggle I'm afraid.
I love the series, and I get the feeling that most of the jokes were done affectionately, but sometimes MST gets a bit personal ("Here is the girl known throughout the dorm as horseface!"). Did you every get contacted by someone who was really hurt by the comments, and did you regret the jokes?
but then you sometimes aren't optimally using memory, and then the designers start wanting things to follow you through the world, or allowing you to carry things back and forth through the world, so you have to manage memory outside of the slot system as well as within it,
Ahh, so something like that might be why characters following you in Oblivion sometimes got stuck on invisible borders - for instance the female ogre paladin outside the southern city who stopped a certain radius away from the bandit camp on the opposite shore that she was supposed to clear?
All paleontology is a matter of guesswork but an air breather who's head is habitually pointing downwards is probably land based
:)
That presumes it breathed through its head, couldn't it have had air intakes conveniently placed on its back?
>> * Quests are very limited. There 10 basic times, but only about 5 account for 95% of them: "Kill", "Random Drop", "Delivery", "Item", "Boss"
>I challenge you to try to come up with a quest, any quest, that can not be boiled down to those simple constituents. (note that escort quests can be simplified as 'delivery' quests, and any sort of quest that can have you steal/manipulate things with can be simplified to 'item' for example).
Exploration, detective, conversation quests. Problem with them are that they take time to implement well, and once the solution is out people who are more interested in leveling than enjoying the game cruise through them very quickly.
>> * Very limited world interaction. The world is static -- much like a ride through Disney Land. Your actions don't change the world.
>how can you guarantee a consistent gaming experience to all your players if you let them change the world? Can you imagine how crappy the experience would be for a new subscriber if you let old high level subscribers destroy all the lower level areas permanently for example? (which is what would happen a second after you let people do it).
Exactly... see for instance the desert gates in WoW which opened up a new area on the server. The key was given to selected guild leaders as a quest reward, and on some servers, they promptly refused to open the gates. This might have been for role playing reasons or perhaps they just enjoyed the power to cause grief for others, but it did piss off a huge amount of players on those servers.
Long time Puzzle Pirates player here.... It seems we have Slashdotted the servers, the installation download is really slow. Try again tomorrow. :)
because i can't find references on the sun & openjdk site.
Mark Reinholt (chief engineer for the java platform) blogs about it. Also the experimental Mercurial repositories are open.
Slightly offtopic, so are the JavaOne 2008 Call for Papers.
True, but none of these games warrant a "gaming" PC.
That is a matter of taste. Personally I definitely think they do. Sam&Max runs on pretty old hardware too.