Where has Jon Katz disappeared to anyway? I miss his articles. Unlike the vocal minority I happened to enjoy his articles a lot. Haven't seen any in a blue moon, though.
A'right, that's better... So you could technically burn it on a CD and then rip it immediately and have it as mp3s... Sounds reasonable, so long as the loss of quality isn't noticeable.
I thought this iTunes thing was full of DRM gotchas, such as having to re-buy the songs if your computer died..? Are there really that many idiotic people around or am I just misinformed?
Forget the death of Kerrigan, that was actually quite a nice unexpected plot twist. What really bugged me is the way they lost steam completely in the Protoss campaign. I mean, what the hell is up with "mission 1: attack the great council and beat their forces down, at the end of which tassadar or whatever his name was surrenders, and then mission 2: free tassadar from the council's stasis prison"...? Such a shame given how good the rest of the plot was...
Don't go confusing those poor people. Both spellings are used in two different contexts. The number of times I've seen gaming articles talk about "special affects" is disturbing. Maybe it's all your fault.
Yeah, but I wasn't firewalled, I didn't block uploads, I just installed bit-torrent, clicked on the link, and got 5k/s when I can easily get 20k/sec from the ftp/http mirrors (I'm on a crappy 256/64 DSL link). If bit-torrent only gives you as much dl bw as you have ul bw, that sucks, cause most connections around here have about 4 times the download rate as upload rate, so that makes bit-torrent useless because 4 times slower than a normal download.
So long as the novel is good, I see nothing wrong with that. The problem I've seen was mostly that those novelisation tended to be quite bad. They brought nothing new to the game world, they had no strong and interesting characters, they had no passion put in their writing. When you add onto that that the writing itself was not particularly good, it's not a surprise that they're not very well regarded.
But should someone with talent decide to write one of those, and was careful to write it so that people with no knowledge of the game can understand and appreciate it, then there's no reason why it should be seen as any different from other novels.
As many have said already, the adventure game genre is not dead at all. Additionally, a lot of features of adventures games have been incorporated inside other genres. For instance, rpg's like Baldur's Gate (or, better, Planescape Torment) have plenty of features which come straight from adventure games. Even some shooters incorporate adventure game features (puzzles, npcs, discussions, etc). I think that far from being dead, the adventure game is ever-present! Nowadays almost every game, no matter its genre, has a bit of adventure gaming sprinkled on top of it, if only to make the bits between the action scenes more interesting.
Dia and Umbrello are the two I found to be some use. ArgoUML, a java program, was really unwieldy, and I don't recommend it. If you're just looking to draw a nice diagram (for presentation purposes), rather than use it in the design process, I found that actually OpenOffice's Drawing program was excellent for the purpose, with lots of arrow/line types (curved, straight, etc).
There's tons of different configurations of fundamental particles, especially quarks. Though the people who set up the accelerators and did this must be pretty chuffed, and have indeed contributed to the advancement of particle physics by helping repertoriate more of the possible combinations, there's nothing even remotely interesting to anyone who's not a particle physicist working on this type of quark configuration.
Now if they had discovered a new fundamental particle, or if that particle exhibited properties in contradiction with the current laws of particle physics (eg symmetry breaking), that would be worth posting...
Don't forget the proof of purchase. Giving CDs as presents is definitely not fair use in Iraq. After all, they might be booby-trapped or something! Don't wanna encourage that.
You're going for the sysadmin job too? You bastard! You live in the states, right? I'm coming for you from across the pond. That job is for me. You can have one of the two toilet cleaner jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
Where has Jon Katz disappeared to anyway? I miss his articles. Unlike the vocal minority I happened to enjoy his articles a lot. Haven't seen any in a blue moon, though.
Daniel
A'right, that's better... So you could technically burn it on a CD and then rip it immediately and have it as mp3s... Sounds reasonable, so long as the loss of quality isn't noticeable.
Daniel
I thought this iTunes thing was full of DRM gotchas, such as having to re-buy the songs if your computer died..? Are there really that many idiotic people around or am I just misinformed?
Daniel
But... We do... don't we? At least for the pills part...
You got that from Doom? I only got that from Settlers.. that damn game had me linking little friggin' roads every time I blinked at school...
Daniel
Forget the death of Kerrigan, that was actually quite a nice unexpected plot twist. What really bugged me is the way they lost steam completely in the Protoss campaign. I mean, what the hell is up with "mission 1: attack the great council and beat their forces down, at the end of which tassadar or whatever his name was surrenders, and then mission 2: free tassadar from the council's stasis prison"...? Such a shame given how good the rest of the plot was...
Daniel
"affects", not "effects"
Don't go confusing those poor people. Both spellings are used in two different contexts. The number of times I've seen gaming articles talk about "special affects" is disturbing. Maybe it's all your fault.
Daniel
Why waste the paper? Just provide all budding writers with confidence-boosting classes instead :-P
Daniel
I was going to say that too, but I see you've already done it and been marked redundant, so... erm... I'm not saying it!
Daniel
Downloading. Thanks.
Daniel
Yeah, but I wasn't firewalled, I didn't block uploads, I just installed bit-torrent, clicked on the link, and got 5k/s when I can easily get 20k/sec from the ftp/http mirrors (I'm on a crappy 256/64 DSL link). If bit-torrent only gives you as much dl bw as you have ul bw, that sucks, cause most connections around here have about 4 times the download rate as upload rate, so that makes bit-torrent useless because 4 times slower than a normal download.
Daniel
So long as the novel is good, I see nothing wrong with that. The problem I've seen was mostly that those novelisation tended to be quite bad. They brought nothing new to the game world, they had no strong and interesting characters, they had no passion put in their writing. When you add onto that that the writing itself was not particularly good, it's not a surprise that they're not very well regarded.
But should someone with talent decide to write one of those, and was careful to write it so that people with no knowledge of the game can understand and appreciate it, then there's no reason why it should be seen as any different from other novels.
Daniel
That bit-torrent link sucks ass. I thought bit-torrent was meant to help make downloads faster, not slow them down to 5k/sec!
Daniel
They will also attract people who weren't aware of DoD's existence, but have enjoyed CS and TFC before and are very interested to try it out.
:-)
Like me
Daniel
As many have said already, the adventure game genre is not dead at all. Additionally, a lot of features of adventures games have been incorporated inside other genres. For instance, rpg's like Baldur's Gate (or, better, Planescape Torment) have plenty of features which come straight from adventure games. Even some shooters incorporate adventure game features (puzzles, npcs, discussions, etc). I think that far from being dead, the adventure game is ever-present! Nowadays almost every game, no matter its genre, has a bit of adventure gaming sprinkled on top of it, if only to make the bits between the action scenes more interesting.
Daniel
Let's make slashdot mods eat a fistful of them every time they posts a dupe :-) That would be a geeky punishment - being forced to eat space worms.
Daniel
It's a lot like ArgoUML from the looks of it. The diagrams look really ugly.
Daniel
Dia and Umbrello are the two I found to be some use. ArgoUML, a java program, was really unwieldy, and I don't recommend it. If you're just looking to draw a nice diagram (for presentation purposes), rather than use it in the design process, I found that actually OpenOffice's Drawing program was excellent for the purpose, with lots of arrow/line types (curved, straight, etc).
Daniel
Yeah, that would be interesting too.
Daniel
There's tons of different configurations of fundamental particles, especially quarks. Though the people who set up the accelerators and did this must be pretty chuffed, and have indeed contributed to the advancement of particle physics by helping repertoriate more of the possible combinations, there's nothing even remotely interesting to anyone who's not a particle physicist working on this type of quark configuration.
Now if they had discovered a new fundamental particle, or if that particle exhibited properties in contradiction with the current laws of particle physics (eg symmetry breaking), that would be worth posting...
Daniel
Hypocracy? Wuzzat? Power to the underlings?
Daniel
our motives were not completely alturistic
Are you running for the position of Iraqi Information Minister or something? That's one hell of an understatement.
Daniel
Don't forget the proof of purchase. Giving CDs as presents is definitely not fair use in Iraq. After all, they might be booby-trapped or something! Don't wanna encourage that.
Daniel
I guess it's time to bring religion to EVE...
Daniel
You're going for the sysadmin job too? You bastard! You live in the states, right? I'm coming for you from across the pond. That job is for me. You can have one of the two toilet cleaner jobs.
Daniel