If they just dropped that much on an X-box or PS3 they could have gotten something that keeps up with the gaming pc and is actually more fun to play.
More fun is pretty subjective don't you think? A lot of people prefer the type of games you can get for the PC, see my previous post in this topic.
and would be guaranteed against obsolescence for a couple years.
I'd argue your PC stands the test of time much better. There are loads of emulators out there and you can buy classic games from sites such as Steam or Gametap (lately, I've replayed Fallout, Planescape: Torment, Sam&Max hit the road and Monkey Island 2). In ten years will there still be games released for your console? Will you be able to purchase 10 year old games? (More importantly, are there any console games that are still WORTH playing in 10 years like there is for the PC?)
It seems like console games and computer games have little if any distinction besides input method (controller vs keyboard/mouse).
Some PC games just arent available on consoles. In depth simulation or strategy games, more hardcore RPGs such as Witcher or NWN2:MOTB, adventure games such as Sam and Max...
Hi, I like the same games... Witcher and NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer are two recently released games that might appeal to you. MOTB I have played, and while it didn't reach the greatness of Planescape: Torment it is one of the closest ever in my books.
I can't believe this is actually being defended.[...]How on earth can you continue to defend 'text' editing performance?
Believe what you want. I have used VB/VS, and they were nowhere near what Netbeans offer. Delphi I don't know, but is the IDE capable of all this? Running on multiple OSes? I doubt it.
The load times I give you, they are pretty atrocious, but Netbeans6 is beta, and I believe Sun is working on reducing JVM load times, and Netbeans especially.
If the computer was a 80386, then I would agree with you. None of the things you mention is all that resource intensive.
The parsing is. I can (and do) edit C/C++, Java, Ruby, HTML/Javascript files in parallell. In all of these, Netbeans gives me syntax highlighting, warnings for deprecated code, errors for unmatched tags in HTML, usage suggestions and method/tag documentation in all of these languages whenever I press ctrl+space.
Hey, atheists would have us believe in a bunch of secular stupidity as well. This mystical belief is at the heart of the environmental movement, and its utterly ridiculous.
Being an Atheist means you don't believe in God/gods. That is all, and in itself has nothing to do with environmentalism.
First and foremost is this notion that if we are nice to the earth, the earth will be mean to us.
The believers of the Gaia hypothesis are a fringe movement.... hardly "at the heart" any more than Nazis are "at the heart" of all right-wing movements. And as others have pointed out, the non-mystical version of it is hardly a stretch. Destroying the habitat you depend on will make survival more difficult.
Up in Canada where the Kyoto wealth transfer plan (that's what it is, make no mistake)
Any facts to back up that statement, or is an urging to "make no mistake" evidence enough to get +5 these days?
we had a quite simple statement told to us: if we stopped every train, plane, and automobile in the entire country tomorrow, we STILL wouldn't meet the Kyoto targets (which is something like 30-40% below where we are now).
Who said that, and did THEY have any facts to back that up?
Besides, this article is about the US, not about Canada. As others have already pointed out, you drive more energy efficient cars than the US population do on average, and more energy goes to heating.
In the US, transports are a major contributing factor, and, I believe, the one sector where emissions are growing fastest.
How does a major release like this coming out at the same time for consoles as the PC not confirm the trend for game makers to support consoles at least as well as, and in the future to a greater degree than, PC games?
I love it when people draw far reaching conclusions based on one data point.
Things were looking much worse for the PC a couple of years ago. The PS2 had a lot of games for that platform only. With the PS3 and XBox360 on the other hand, most of the big titles are for all platforms, or for one console AND the PC. Not to mention that there are lots of really good games that are PC only. Strategy, RPGs, Adventure... and MMORPGs for those who like that.
Gaming on PC is on the way up, both quality wise and sales.
I've seen a few of those studies and they never really address causation. It is just as valid to assume that pour living conditions tend to promote a need for social and psychological support networks often found in religious institutions leading to religious belief, as opposed to religious belief causes pour living conditions.
I have one suggested cause that sounds plausible (no data to back it up with though) - the Catholic ban on abortion and demands that people don't use contraceptives helps the spread of veneral disease, and that families (especially poor ones) have more children than they can afford. Instead of putting one or two kids through school so they can get an increased standard of living, they have to spend every dime to keep food on the table every day. Many poor and uneducated children leads to higher rates of crime, higher rates of child mortality and the other things the GP mentioned, and is one contributing factor to keep developing nations down.
It IS a pretty mediocre game though in my opinion (and yes, I have played it). Not bad by any means, just.... nothing special. The Zero punctuation review sums up my opinions pretty well.
And yet, to call the PC games sections of stores like GameStop and EBGames "anemic" is an understatement. What gives?
Internationally, PC sales are better than in the US. Also online sales are beginning to be a large percentage of PC sales. Bookworm Adventures and Puzzle Pirates are two examples I've enjoyed.
Why not just stop by your local college bookstore? Just pick up a math text book, go through it, do the problems, check your answers, etc etc. Millions of students have used them. Probably will work out for you.
I've been using this method, first to repeat the old stuff, and then to do more advanced stuff. It has worked great for the stuff I already did in school. Now that I have come to trigonometric functions, numerical methods, integration, and other stuff which is really new to me, I feel that sometimes I would need someone to ask questions because the explanations in the book are often very terse. Also I get these "Is this connected to that? Why not use this method instead? Can you give me a real world example?" type of questions which aren't necessary to know the answer to, but are fun, and not having someone to toss questions back and forth with takes some of the joy out of learning.
I've managed to struggle through, but I think it would have gone much faster (half the time maybe?) with help. I have a test next tuesday, wish me luck.
Oh, and before the exam you are supposed to hand in the solution to a more advanced problem and will be quizzed on your solution later. There is a list of approved problems in the last 20 pages in the book, and the school homepage said that you should pick one of those to be sure it was of the appropriate length and difficulty level. So I spent several weekends trying to figure out the oil depth of an oiltank (a cylinder laying on its side with the measuring stick missing) as a function of volume - first with tedious step by step/trial and error, then a little better with Newton's iterative method, and then finally (I realized with joy) with integration. I was really pleased with myself that I had figured almost all out without looking it up or asking for help, I had typed all but a few final paragraphs in the document I was going to hand in when a letter from my testing center Åsö arrived. "Dear students, because the solutions to all the questions in the textbooks have been on the internet for a few years now, the questions are no longer valid, here is a new list of questions to choose from." BASTARDS!!
Well, I learned a lot from the first problem, and I learned a lot from doing the second (Pascal's triangel and the binominal function) so it wasn't all for nothing. But I would like to experience a weekend when I can do something else than sit with my nose in mathbooks for once...
No. What is affecting the peace of the entire world at the moment is war. There are wars between nations, wars of nations against their citizens and wars between ideologies.
While not very common today, war over resources have been common in history, and that is what they are warning about. Not to mention the destabilizing effect vast numbers of migrants have on poor nations.
They're mission is to do nothing more than tell people about climate change.
IF you accept that climate change is a problem, then what we must have is public awareness, and public support, throughout the world. If only a few scientists know, and a few politicians believe, and they try to bring in laws to prevent this, the people will only see the drawbacks and throw the politicians out in the next election. So it is a very necessary thing (if you believe climate change is a problem).
Bethesda has been carrying it for quite a while now.
Meh....they are ok I guess, but they are seem to be going more action/console centric with every game released and every interview I read. My vote goes to Obsidian.
There are also some major sites that have online Go on them, such as Yahoo and BoardGameWorld. But yeah, I have the feeling most of the professional players are at Pandanet.co.jp.
Sad to read this. Seems Open Office have two huge barriers to contributing - messy, crufty, monolithic code, and a bureaucratic development process.
Luckily my own experiences with contributing to the OpenJDK have been much better. Hopefully the experiences Sun learned in open sourcing Java can be applied to improving the Open Office project.
>>"If the scientific method is trashed, no amount of resources or loud declarations of intent to develop science can compensate. In those circumstances, scientific research becomes, at best, a kind of cataloging or 'butterfly-collecting' activity. It cannot be a creative process of genuine inquiry in which bold hypotheses are made and checked."
>For a minute there I though he was talking about Global Warming.
For a minute there I though he was talking about Global Warming deniers.
Did you read the article? The author actually mentions global warming in one place: "A bloody clash of civilizations, should it actually transpire, will surely rank along with the two other most dangerous challenges to life on our planet--climate change and nuclear proliferation."
I quite honestly expect that quite soon once TVs, monitors and all home entertainment sets run propertly controlled and firmly DRMed operating systems, they will disable all turning off/switching channels/lowering the sound functionality as soon as a special "now a commercial is on" signal is sent. Circumventing this or selling TVs without this functionality will be illegal of course.
Also a camera will be installed in every home to ensure no one puts a blanket over the TV or shirks their patriotic daily 4 hour of TV watching duty. Yes, this means you, citizen Winston Smith. <-- Only slightly tongue in cheek.
did anyone else feel PS:T had a bunch of similarities to Memento?
Oh good, I'm not the only one! I've read the film was based on a short story written by the director's brother. It would be interesting to hear if he had played the game. I guess it is not impossible to come up with the same concepts independently, but still, there is an AWFUL lot of similarities.
Amnesia -> writing down everything -> safest place to write something permanently: tattoo your own body -> if you don't remember how you got the tattoo, can the written record be trusted even then?
Sadly, they're fscking trashing all the old characters, from what I've read. TELL me they're changing their minds on that?
I too liked the old characters and would have liked to have more adventures with them, but unfortunately, no. The same old reason - there were maybe a hundred slightly different outcomes depending on who you spent time adventuring with and who you chose to gain influence with, and if you played [good|neutral|evil][lawful|neutral|chaotic][smart|stupid][wise|unwise][charismatic|unpleasant] etc etc. Either start anew, make player choices meaningless, or spend hundreds of hours of creating content for the plot branches created by the first game. They chose the first option. Thought you will get references to the characters of the first game in the expansion, if you keep your eye open, so you will get to know what happened to them "canonically".
I must say though that the teasers they have revealed for the new companions though are very nice... A red wizard of Thay who has who knows how many hidden agendas, a hagspawn Spirit Shaman, the enigmatic One of Many... Sounds a lot like we might be back in Sigil territory, eh berk?
Hated NWN2's ending. But... same people who worked on PS:T... I may be convinced to get it.
It is the same team that worked on the original campaign, so if you didn't like that, that may be a vote against it. But I think that now they have a LOT more experience with the authoring tools and could spend more time creating awesome contents and less fixing engine bugs, so I have preordered it, picking it up tomorrow.:)
The characterization was incredible as well. I don't like playing preset characters, but TNO wasn't JUST some mold you had to try to step into. You could make him your own and experience the story on a deeply personal level.
It is a shame that KOTOR:2 was rushed, and treated so poorly by LucasArts. That was ALMOST a truly great game.
Yes, I have great hopes for Team Gizka's restoration project.
Rest of the post contains plenty of **SPOILERS**.
Like the fact that Chris likes to take the RPG/CRPG conventions and turn them into plot elements - for instance in PS:T, the fact that your character in computer games always is immortal (since you can just reload) - there you play the Immortal One.
Same with KOTOR 2. We choose to ignore the fact that our characters in RPGs gain godlike powers in very short time. If this was normal, wouldn't everyone be doing it - be out whacking rats and progressively more difficult wildlife to gain robust health, superstrength and intelligence? Here it is suddenly part of the plot - no, not everyone can do it. It seems that you, and you only, have a rather sinister power to gain supernatural strength by absorbing the life force (XP) of those you kill. The character might have thought a lot about this, but since there is no voice over a la Blade Runner, the player doesn't know it.
Sounds like he MAY be going down a similar path with the soul eating in Mask of the Betrayer. But we will see.
Bioshock might have been taken a leaf out of the same book. Some people have complained that "it is so unrealistic that the player injects himself with a syringe that is just laying there in the beginning of the game, ruined the immersion for me". Well, it turns out later that he was compelled to do it. The character might have fought against it, filled with horror, but again, this the player does not know until later in the game. So they use the literary device known as "the unreliable narrator". The reader/player identifies with the character (even more so in games of course), but it later turns out he/she did not tell everything.
Student pranks for me ha an element of rebellion and underground culture to it. Now that computer games are so mainstream and gaming companies pay ad companies to do ninja marketing that looks like it is word-of-mouth or grassroots (grafitti etc), do the students really have to do their dirty work for them? We are already brainwashed with Halo 3 ads 24/7.
Somewhere a Microsoft marketing executive is chortling evilly.
Slashdot Mirror
If they just dropped that much on an X-box or PS3 they could have gotten something that keeps up with the gaming pc and is actually more fun to play.
More fun is pretty subjective don't you think? A lot of people prefer the type of games you can get for the PC, see my previous post in this topic.
and would be guaranteed against obsolescence for a couple years.
I'd argue your PC stands the test of time much better. There are loads of emulators out there and you can buy classic games from sites such as Steam or Gametap (lately, I've replayed Fallout, Planescape: Torment, Sam&Max hit the road and Monkey Island 2). In ten years will there still be games released for your console? Will you be able to purchase 10 year old games? (More importantly, are there any console games that are still WORTH playing in 10 years like there is for the PC?)
Also I can use my PC for more stuff than games.
It seems like console games and computer games have little if any distinction besides input method (controller vs keyboard/mouse).
Some PC games just arent available on consoles. In depth simulation or strategy games, more hardcore RPGs such as Witcher or NWN2:MOTB, adventure games such as Sam and Max...
Now I remember why I quit gaming - DOOM 3.
Fucking elitists. Mod me down, "-1, he's not a rich boy".
Alternatively, you could have tried playing games that concentrate on stuff other rather than the shiniest graphics?
Hi, I like the same games... Witcher and NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer are two recently released games that might appeal to you. MOTB I have played, and while it didn't reach the greatness of Planescape: Torment it is one of the closest ever in my books.
I can't believe this is actually being defended.[...]How on earth can you continue to defend 'text' editing performance?
Believe what you want. I have used VB/VS, and they were nowhere near what Netbeans offer. Delphi I don't know, but is the IDE capable of all this? Running on multiple OSes? I doubt it.
The load times I give you, they are pretty atrocious, but Netbeans6 is beta, and I believe Sun is working on reducing JVM load times, and Netbeans especially.
If the computer was a 80386, then I would agree with you. None of the things you mention is all that resource intensive.
The parsing is. I can (and do) edit C/C++, Java, Ruby, HTML/Javascript files in parallell. In all of these, Netbeans gives me syntax highlighting, warnings for deprecated code, errors for unmatched tags in HTML, usage suggestions and method/tag documentation in all of these languages whenever I press ctrl+space.
Hey, atheists would have us believe in a bunch of secular stupidity as well. This mystical belief is at the heart of the environmental movement, and its utterly ridiculous.
Being an Atheist means you don't believe in God/gods. That is all, and in itself has nothing to do with environmentalism.
First and foremost is this notion that if we are nice to the earth, the earth will be mean to us.
The believers of the Gaia hypothesis are a fringe movement.... hardly "at the heart" any more than Nazis are "at the heart" of all right-wing movements. And as others have pointed out, the non-mystical version of it is hardly a stretch. Destroying the habitat you depend on will make survival more difficult.
Up in Canada where the Kyoto wealth transfer plan (that's what it is, make no mistake)
Any facts to back up that statement, or is an urging to "make no mistake" evidence enough to get +5 these days?
we had a quite simple statement told to us: if we stopped every train, plane, and automobile in the entire country tomorrow, we STILL wouldn't meet the Kyoto targets (which is something like 30-40% below where we are now).
Who said that, and did THEY have any facts to back that up?
Besides, this article is about the US, not about Canada. As others have already pointed out, you drive more energy efficient cars than the US population do on average, and more energy goes to heating.
In the US, transports are a major contributing factor, and, I believe, the one sector where emissions are growing fastest.
How does a major release like this coming out at the same time for consoles as the PC not confirm the trend for game makers to support consoles at least as well as, and in the future to a greater degree than, PC games?
I love it when people draw far reaching conclusions based on one data point.
Things were looking much worse for the PC a couple of years ago. The PS2 had a lot of games for that platform only. With the PS3 and XBox360 on the other hand, most of the big titles are for all platforms, or for one console AND the PC. Not to mention that there are lots of really good games that are PC only. Strategy, RPGs, Adventure... and MMORPGs for those who like that.
Gaming on PC is on the way up, both quality wise and sales.
We have a dress code. But, clearly, we didn't let it get in the way of good debate. (Actually, we have it because we *want* good debate.)
I'm confused, how does a dresscode help getting a good debate? Do the fancier clothes speak up with insightful comments more often, or...?
I've seen a few of those studies and they never really address causation. It is just as valid to assume that pour living conditions tend to promote a need for social and psychological support networks often found in religious institutions leading to religious belief, as opposed to religious belief causes pour living conditions.
I have one suggested cause that sounds plausible (no data to back it up with though) - the Catholic ban on abortion and demands that people don't use contraceptives helps the spread of veneral disease, and that families (especially poor ones) have more children than they can afford. Instead of putting one or two kids through school so they can get an increased standard of living, they have to spend every dime to keep food on the table every day. Many poor and uneducated children leads to higher rates of crime, higher rates of child mortality and the other things the GP mentioned, and is one contributing factor to keep developing nations down.
It IS a pretty mediocre game though in my opinion (and yes, I have played it). Not bad by any means, just.... nothing special. The Zero punctuation review sums up my opinions pretty well.
And yet, to call the PC games sections of stores like GameStop and EBGames "anemic" is an understatement. What gives?
Internationally, PC sales are better than in the US. Also online sales are beginning to be a large percentage of PC sales. Bookworm Adventures and Puzzle Pirates are two examples I've enjoyed.
Why not just stop by your local college bookstore? Just pick up a math text book, go through it, do the problems, check your answers, etc etc. Millions of students have used them. Probably will work out for you.
I've been using this method, first to repeat the old stuff, and then to do more advanced stuff. It has worked great for the stuff I already did in school. Now that I have come to trigonometric functions, numerical methods, integration, and other stuff which is really new to me, I feel that sometimes I would need someone to ask questions because the explanations in the book are often very terse. Also I get these "Is this connected to that? Why not use this method instead? Can you give me a real world example?" type of questions which aren't necessary to know the answer to, but are fun, and not having someone to toss questions back and forth with takes some of the joy out of learning.
I've managed to struggle through, but I think it would have gone much faster (half the time maybe?) with help. I have a test next tuesday, wish me luck.
Oh, and before the exam you are supposed to hand in the solution to a more advanced problem and will be quizzed on your solution later. There is a list of approved problems in the last 20 pages in the book, and the school homepage said that you should pick one of those to be sure it was of the appropriate length and difficulty level. So I spent several weekends trying to figure out the oil depth of an oiltank (a cylinder laying on its side with the measuring stick missing) as a function of volume - first with tedious step by step/trial and error, then a little better with Newton's iterative method, and then finally (I realized with joy) with integration. I was really pleased with myself that I had figured almost all out without looking it up or asking for help, I had typed all but a few final paragraphs in the document I was going to hand in when a letter from my testing center Åsö arrived. "Dear students, because the solutions to all the questions in the textbooks have been on the internet for a few years now, the questions are no longer valid, here is a new list of questions to choose from." BASTARDS!!
Well, I learned a lot from the first problem, and I learned a lot from doing the second (Pascal's triangel and the binominal function) so it wasn't all for nothing. But I would like to experience a weekend when I can do something else than sit with my nose in mathbooks for once...
No. What is affecting the peace of the entire world at the moment is war. There are wars between nations, wars of nations against their citizens and wars between ideologies.
While not very common today, war over resources have been common in history, and that is what they are warning about. Not to mention the destabilizing effect vast numbers of migrants have on poor nations.
They're mission is to do nothing more than tell people about climate change.
IF you accept that climate change is a problem, then what we must have is public awareness, and public support, throughout the world. If only a few scientists know, and a few politicians believe, and they try to bring in laws to prevent this, the people will only see the drawbacks and throw the politicians out in the next election. So it is a very necessary thing (if you believe climate change is a problem).
there's always been change in climate and we have dealt with it, changes which have been far more then small.
No changes this fast, and not with this number of people in the world, and this percentage of planet area changed due to agriculture...
it's just alarmist nonsense your pushing there.
The science supports him, not you.
Bethesda has been carrying it for quite a while now.
Meh....they are ok I guess, but they are seem to be going more action/console centric with every game released and every interview I read. My vote goes to Obsidian.
There are also some major sites that have online Go on them, such as Yahoo and BoardGameWorld. But yeah, I have the feeling most of the professional players are at Pandanet.co.jp.
Sad to read this. Seems Open Office have two huge barriers to contributing - messy, crufty, monolithic code, and a bureaucratic development process.
Luckily my own experiences with contributing to the OpenJDK have been much better. Hopefully the experiences Sun learned in open sourcing Java can be applied to improving the Open Office project.
>>"If the scientific method is trashed, no amount of resources or loud declarations of intent to develop science can compensate. In those circumstances, scientific research becomes, at best, a kind of cataloging or 'butterfly-collecting' activity. It cannot be a creative process of genuine inquiry in which bold hypotheses are made and checked."
>For a minute there I though he was talking about Global Warming.
For a minute there I though he was talking about Global Warming deniers.
Did you read the article? The author actually mentions global warming in one place: "A bloody clash of civilizations, should it actually transpire, will surely rank along with the two other most dangerous challenges to life on our planet--climate change and nuclear proliferation."
I quite honestly expect that quite soon once TVs, monitors and all home entertainment sets run propertly controlled and firmly DRMed operating systems, they will disable all turning off/switching channels/lowering the sound functionality as soon as a special "now a commercial is on" signal is sent. Circumventing this or selling TVs without this functionality will be illegal of course.
Also a camera will be installed in every home to ensure no one puts a blanket over the TV or shirks their patriotic daily 4 hour of TV watching duty. Yes, this means you, citizen Winston Smith. <-- Only slightly tongue in cheek.
did anyone else feel PS:T had a bunch of similarities to Memento?
Oh good, I'm not the only one! I've read the film was based on a short story written by the director's brother. It would be interesting to hear if he had played the game. I guess it is not impossible to come up with the same concepts independently, but still, there is an AWFUL lot of similarities.
Amnesia -> writing down everything -> safest place to write something permanently: tattoo your own body -> if you don't remember how you got the tattoo, can the written record be trusted even then?
Sadly, they're fscking trashing all the old characters, from what I've read. TELL me they're changing their minds on that?
:)
:)
I too liked the old characters and would have liked to have more adventures with them, but unfortunately, no. The same old reason - there were maybe a hundred slightly different outcomes depending on who you spent time adventuring with and who you chose to gain influence with, and if you played [good|neutral|evil][lawful|neutral|chaotic][smart|stupid][wise|unwise][charismatic|unpleasant] etc etc. Either start anew, make player choices meaningless, or spend hundreds of hours of creating content for the plot branches created by the first game. They chose the first option. Thought you will get references to the characters of the first game in the expansion, if you keep your eye open, so you will get to know what happened to them "canonically".
I must say though that the teasers they have revealed for the new companions though are very nice... A red wizard of Thay who has who knows how many hidden agendas, a hagspawn Spirit Shaman, the enigmatic One of Many... Sounds a lot like we might be back in Sigil territory, eh berk?
Hated NWN2's ending. But... same people who worked on PS:T... I may be convinced to get it.
It is the same team that worked on the original campaign, so if you didn't like that, that may be a vote against it. But I think that now they have a LOT more experience with the authoring tools and could spend more time creating awesome contents and less fixing engine bugs, so I have preordered it, picking it up tomorrow.
The characterization was incredible as well. I don't like playing preset characters, but TNO wasn't JUST some mold you had to try to step into. You could make him your own and experience the story on a deeply personal level.
Yep. I loved that also.
It is a shame that KOTOR:2 was rushed, and treated so poorly by LucasArts. That was ALMOST a truly great game.
Yes, I have great hopes for Team Gizka's restoration project.
Rest of the post contains plenty of **SPOILERS**.
Like the fact that Chris likes to take the RPG/CRPG conventions and turn them into plot elements - for instance in PS:T, the fact that your character in computer games always is immortal (since you can just reload) - there you play the Immortal One.
Same with KOTOR 2. We choose to ignore the fact that our characters in RPGs gain godlike powers in very short time. If this was normal, wouldn't everyone be doing it - be out whacking rats and progressively more difficult wildlife to gain robust health, superstrength and intelligence? Here it is suddenly part of the plot - no, not everyone can do it. It seems that you, and you only, have a rather sinister power to gain supernatural strength by absorbing the life force (XP) of those you kill. The character might have thought a lot about this, but since there is no voice over a la Blade Runner, the player doesn't know it.
Sounds like he MAY be going down a similar path with the soul eating in Mask of the Betrayer. But we will see.
Bioshock might have been taken a leaf out of the same book. Some people have complained that "it is so unrealistic that the player injects himself with a syringe that is just laying there in the beginning of the game, ruined the immersion for me". Well, it turns out later that he was compelled to do it. The character might have fought against it, filled with horror, but again, this the player does not know until later in the game. So they use the literary device known as "the unreliable narrator". The reader/player identifies with the character (even more so in games of course), but it later turns out he/she did not tell everything.
Student pranks for me ha an element of rebellion and underground culture to it. Now that computer games are so mainstream and gaming companies pay ad companies to do ninja marketing that looks like it is word-of-mouth or grassroots (grafitti etc), do the students really have to do their dirty work for them? We are already brainwashed with Halo 3 ads 24/7.
Somewhere a Microsoft marketing executive is chortling evilly.