I enjoyed Dragon Age right on its release day. Guess I'm lucky, then, but other than some slight memory leak preventing me from playing over ~7-8 hours straight on the release version I've yet to experience a bug with the game, pre- or post-patch.
And personally, I think comparing Irenicus to the Darkspawn is apples vs oranges. The Darkspawn is, I believe, meant to be seen not a single threat per se but more of a force of nature, a natural disaster you have to be perpetually fighting and while that means it can't be characterized as strongly (how do you give motivations to a tsunami or a hurricane?), it does add IMHO to the feeling of the whole setting.
Besides, Baldur's Gate 2 was heavily villian-oriented. Other than Minsc, Imoen and *maybe* Aerie your party was a forgettable walking trope of cliches and remainded so for the entirety of the game (and Minsc was hilarious, but still fairly shallow), so most of the plot and development *was* Irenicus, his character not being merely an example of BG2's greatness but its only cause.
By comparison DA is far more companion-oriented, and while your party does initially look like a walking trope of cliches as well, once you start using them, witness their interactions, their views on the darkspawn and plot events they become unique characters, far more developed than their BG2 counterparts IMHO. Well, other than Zevran, he's a perverted bisexual elf assassin and that's it for him.
I believe he meant to say "as long as everybody else bans software patents, it won't matter if the US keeps them" which would be the entire opposite of your interpretation. Though I understand why you read it that way, the GP's post could've been phrased better.
That's only due to which one you experienced first, I'm sure there's plenty of guys who feel the same with Ultima compared to your Chrono Trigger.
And, honestly, even though I've been playing videogames just as long as you have I consider Dragon Age to be the finest RPG ever made, with only Baldur's Gate 2 (another Bioware big-budget title) coming close. Now, it doesn't mean that low-budget titles will necessarily suck, but it does mean that having a big budget doesn't make your game automatically inferior to a low-budget one as you seem to imply, *and* that if there's anybody who knows how to make a great RPG it's Bioware themselves.
Yes, they do. YMMV and all that but even my grandma uses Ares from time to time.
In fact, I'd say the geek and the yuppie crowd are the only ones that care about *paying* for your music online, or if not pay per se at least download it legitimately through sites such as Jamendo. Myself included, before all the idiot "stfu u pirate n stop pirateing" trolls.
Name me an artist that has succeeded on par with these artists in today's climate without a label, and I'll be interested to hear about it.
I can't, but give me a couple hours and I'll probably name you over a hundred bands contemporary to Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails who *didn't* succeed in spite of being backed by a large label and in fact ended up owing them money instead for the priviledge of having recorded an album of theirs.
No, going indie isn't a good way to "make it big", but then again neither is the RIAA.
You don't toss out General Relativity because some newbie did a klutzy experiment, in other words.
You don't toss it because some experimented scientist did a proper experiment either.
Yes, there are experiments whose outcomes are different than what's expected from General Relativity, and others for Quantum Mechanics. None of them were merely "klutzy experiments" done by a "newbie". Why do we continue to use GR and QM, then? because they're good enough for our purposes and we haven't found anything better.
And sure, if you make a prediction and a few points are off, we don't get to toss our your theory. But the skeptics weren't claiming any such thing, or thinking that one tiny error necessarily invalidates everything related to climate research.
Actually, that's a perfect way to sum up >99% of all complains by "skeptics" I've ever seen.
What kind of education have you? a first-year math student would be able to tell you why that is, and I suspect more than one high-schooler would be able to do likewise.
This was, basically, a frustrated scientist blowing off steam in a private conversation. Out of a thousand stolen e-mail messages, one of them was frustrated and hot-tempered. Turns out, scientists actually are human.
Yeah. If I were in his position I probably would've said something along the lines of "you know what? fuck him, fuck his paper and the horse he rode in on". And then the "skeptics" would've used that to "prove" I'm a depraved who's into bestiality and tried to rape the other guy.
If correct conclusions are the goal, then studies should withstand the attentions of skeptics.
Look, there's proof that evolution happens *everywhere*. You can make your own experiment proving its existence in your own backyard for God's sake, yet still the morons denying it persist and succeed in pushing their agenda over the truth in many places of the world, the US foremost among them, and you believe simply releasing some raw data will stop the ignorants and "skeptics" from doubting such complex phenomena?
Ideally, I'd like them to release all their data to the world and all the "skeptics" be ignored by everybody at large, but we all know it ain't gonna happen because controversy, justified or not, simply sells more than consensus particularly when its financed by oil multinationals. So yeah, I do get where they're coming from.
Well, I *can* wait. Know why? because I'm still not finished with the original game. Spent over a hundred hours in my first playthrough (male Human Noble), I'm 10 hours into my second one (female City Elf) and now I've even got Awakening to look forward to after I finish the original campaign. And after that I'd like to try a mage;)
If it had a multiplayer option like NWN it'd be the perfect game, but yeah, even without it its worth every penny and then some.
Really? You don't think they have people just trolling and looking? Or perhaps more likely, some flawed, hacked together piece of software that attempts to do it automatically, with fingerprinting, or even worse, by filename?
I do. I also believe, however, that they've hired lawyers good enough to make sure they own everything from their artists up to and including their own name, and that they've hired lobbyists good enough to make sure they can find a reason to sue an unborn child if they wanted to.
Never underestimate the sheer capacity for evil of multinational conglomerates.
It will all come down to support. Which codec has the widest support. Even Firefox will eventually add H.264 support even if it is with a plug in.
Tell me which one is more likely: Firefox adding a legally-problematic h.264 plugin to the base distribution, or Google creating a VP8 plugin for IE and publicize the hell out of it in their webpage.
There have been toxic chemicals found in food sold that have been "traditionally" engineered, but none that have been "on purpose" engineered in in what has become known as GE.
The way you phrase your statement is... weird. Let me ask, then: *which* toxic chemicals were found? were they put there on purpose? in the GE crops, were they tested for *all* kinds of chemicals or only the ones that were found on the traditional crops? were both crops grown in the same manner? if not, what were the differences? and why was there a difference in the first place?
Answer that, and then you'd begin to have something resembling an objective statement, because as it stands it sounds a bit too much like pro-GM FUD.
You know, if you wish to be taken seriously you should start by trying not to sound like a 15-years-old with a testosterone imbalance. And then follow it by linking to a more reputable source than this "newsmax" of yours, whose author's agenda and ignorance of science is so painfully evident from the way he writes.
I've been reading part of that paper you linked and while I don't think I'll have enough time to look at it completely, the introduction at least is full of pointless fluff and irrelevant factoids that have no relevance whatsoever with the problem he's allegedly addressing. Perhaps you could sum it up more clearly for me?
Define "play well" and "modest PC hardware", because other than Crysis I've yet to find a game that won't run well on my Athlon X2 5600+ and an ATI 4670. And even Crysis ain't *that* bad either.
From a business standpoint there's little reason to abandon consoles when console sales rake in the money.
That's an overly general assertion. The two markets are *very* different from one another (moreso, I'd argue, than between the Wii and the PS360), and a game that'll be popular with one won't necessarily be so for the other so which platform to develop for depends on, among other things, where your expertise lie. You won't get the next Call of Duty from SimBin, for instance, nor will you get the next Starcraft from Epic.
Pretty much the entire American continent calls themselves "Americans", except for Canadians who consider it an insult by reference to their neighbors down south.
In Latin America the proper way to address a US citizen is "estadounidense", which roughly translates to "united-statesian", though as result of its length and the need to sub/dub the word "American" in US movies, the phrase "norteamericano" (meaning "north american") is also in common usage which *also* pisses the Canadians off;)
In fact, correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the only relatively common language that lacks an equivalent word for "estadounidense" is English itself. I know French and Portuguese have one and I believe both Italian and German do as well, at least.
the producer lives or dies from his choices, however they are his choices not yours or anyone elses.
Actually it's society's choice to even allow the producer to pick one, there is no 'right' to copyright in spite of what its name may imply.
So if society one day decides to not give you that choice anymore, well, sucks to be you but it is their right. Sure, that depends on actually getting their representatives to represent *them* rather than their own pockets but still.
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Unless you have solid evidence that absence of gun laws DO stop sexual assaults, I can't see how your post would be in any way relevant.
I enjoyed Dragon Age right on its release day. Guess I'm lucky, then, but other than some slight memory leak preventing me from playing over ~7-8 hours straight on the release version I've yet to experience a bug with the game, pre- or post-patch.
And personally, I think comparing Irenicus to the Darkspawn is apples vs oranges. The Darkspawn is, I believe, meant to be seen not a single threat per se but more of a force of nature, a natural disaster you have to be perpetually fighting and while that means it can't be characterized as strongly (how do you give motivations to a tsunami or a hurricane?), it does add IMHO to the feeling of the whole setting.
Besides, Baldur's Gate 2 was heavily villian-oriented. Other than Minsc, Imoen and *maybe* Aerie your party was a forgettable walking trope of cliches and remainded so for the entirety of the game (and Minsc was hilarious, but still fairly shallow), so most of the plot and development *was* Irenicus, his character not being merely an example of BG2's greatness but its only cause.
By comparison DA is far more companion-oriented, and while your party does initially look like a walking trope of cliches as well, once you start using them, witness their interactions, their views on the darkspawn and plot events they become unique characters, far more developed than their BG2 counterparts IMHO. Well, other than Zevran, he's a perverted bisexual elf assassin and that's it for him.
I believe he meant to say "as long as everybody else bans software patents, it won't matter if the US keeps them" which would be the entire opposite of your interpretation. Though I understand why you read it that way, the GP's post could've been phrased better.
There are some really innovative things happening all the time in software and they take money and time to research.
Same for Mathematics yet they're unpatentable *and* uncopyrightable. Yet innovation goes on.
That's only due to which one you experienced first, I'm sure there's plenty of guys who feel the same with Ultima compared to your Chrono Trigger.
And, honestly, even though I've been playing videogames just as long as you have I consider Dragon Age to be the finest RPG ever made, with only Baldur's Gate 2 (another Bioware big-budget title) coming close. Now, it doesn't mean that low-budget titles will necessarily suck, but it does mean that having a big budget doesn't make your game automatically inferior to a low-budget one as you seem to imply, *and* that if there's anybody who knows how to make a great RPG it's Bioware themselves.
Yes, they do. YMMV and all that but even my grandma uses Ares from time to time.
In fact, I'd say the geek and the yuppie crowd are the only ones that care about *paying* for your music online, or if not pay per se at least download it legitimately through sites such as Jamendo. Myself included, before all the idiot "stfu u pirate n stop pirateing" trolls.
Name me an artist that has succeeded on par with these artists in today's climate without a label, and I'll be interested to hear about it.
I can't, but give me a couple hours and I'll probably name you over a hundred bands contemporary to Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails who *didn't* succeed in spite of being backed by a large label and in fact ended up owing them money instead for the priviledge of having recorded an album of theirs.
No, going indie isn't a good way to "make it big", but then again neither is the RIAA.
You don't toss out General Relativity because some newbie did a klutzy experiment, in other words.
You don't toss it because some experimented scientist did a proper experiment either.
Yes, there are experiments whose outcomes are different than what's expected from General Relativity, and others for Quantum Mechanics. None of them were merely "klutzy experiments" done by a "newbie". Why do we continue to use GR and QM, then? because they're good enough for our purposes and we haven't found anything better.
And sure, if you make a prediction and a few points are off, we don't get to toss our your theory. But the skeptics weren't claiming any such thing, or thinking that one tiny error necessarily invalidates everything related to climate research.
Actually, that's a perfect way to sum up >99% of all complains by "skeptics" I've ever seen.
What kind of education have you? a first-year math student would be able to tell you why that is, and I suspect more than one high-schooler would be able to do likewise.
This was, basically, a frustrated scientist blowing off steam in a private conversation. Out of a thousand stolen e-mail messages, one of them was frustrated and hot-tempered. Turns out, scientists actually are human.
Yeah. If I were in his position I probably would've said something along the lines of "you know what? fuck him, fuck his paper and the horse he rode in on". And then the "skeptics" would've used that to "prove" I'm a depraved who's into bestiality and tried to rape the other guy.
If correct conclusions are the goal, then studies should withstand the attentions of skeptics.
Look, there's proof that evolution happens *everywhere*. You can make your own experiment proving its existence in your own backyard for God's sake, yet still the morons denying it persist and succeed in pushing their agenda over the truth in many places of the world, the US foremost among them, and you believe simply releasing some raw data will stop the ignorants and "skeptics" from doubting such complex phenomena?
Ideally, I'd like them to release all their data to the world and all the "skeptics" be ignored by everybody at large, but we all know it ain't gonna happen because controversy, justified or not, simply sells more than consensus particularly when its financed by oil multinationals. So yeah, I do get where they're coming from.
When was the last time a nuclear physicist ever said "The science is settled"?
About a second after the last time a moron stated to a nuclear physicist that perpetual motion machines are possible to build.
Sometimes a question is just stupid rather than audacious.
Smear campaigns don't constitute "scrutiny".
Well, I *can* wait. Know why? because I'm still not finished with the original game. Spent over a hundred hours in my first playthrough (male Human Noble), I'm 10 hours into my second one (female City Elf) and now I've even got Awakening to look forward to after I finish the original campaign. And after that I'd like to try a mage ;)
If it had a multiplayer option like NWN it'd be the perfect game, but yeah, even without it its worth every penny and then some.
Really? You don't think they have people just trolling and looking? Or perhaps more likely, some flawed, hacked together piece of software that attempts to do it automatically, with fingerprinting, or even worse, by filename?
I do. I also believe, however, that they've hired lawyers good enough to make sure they own everything from their artists up to and including their own name, and that they've hired lobbyists good enough to make sure they can find a reason to sue an unborn child if they wanted to.
Never underestimate the sheer capacity for evil of multinational conglomerates.
If your philosophy was "the best performance, and cost be damned" you should be using AIX on an IBM mainframe.
For the rest of the world however, "good enough" is good enough.
It will all come down to support. Which codec has the widest support.
Even Firefox will eventually add H.264 support even if it is with a plug in.
Tell me which one is more likely: Firefox adding a legally-problematic h.264 plugin to the base distribution, or Google creating a VP8 plugin for IE and publicize the hell out of it in their webpage.
Yeah.
There have been toxic chemicals found in food sold that have been "traditionally" engineered, but none that have been "on purpose" engineered in in what has become known as GE.
The way you phrase your statement is... weird. Let me ask, then: *which* toxic chemicals were found? were they put there on purpose? in the GE crops, were they tested for *all* kinds of chemicals or only the ones that were found on the traditional crops? were both crops grown in the same manner? if not, what were the differences? and why was there a difference in the first place?
Answer that, and then you'd begin to have something resembling an objective statement, because as it stands it sounds a bit too much like pro-GM FUD.
But on the plus side, you'd get the same functionality from Apple themselves in a couple months ;)
People only get into "OMIGODSCANDAL" mode when it's Apple for some reason.
And that reason is because people only get into "OMIGODITSSOPERFECT!!!" mode when it's Apple for some reason. Yourself included.
You know, if you wish to be taken seriously you should start by trying not to sound like a 15-years-old with a testosterone imbalance. And then follow it by linking to a more reputable source than this "newsmax" of yours, whose author's agenda and ignorance of science is so painfully evident from the way he writes.
I've been reading part of that paper you linked and while I don't think I'll have enough time to look at it completely, the introduction at least is full of pointless fluff and irrelevant factoids that have no relevance whatsoever with the problem he's allegedly addressing. Perhaps you could sum it up more clearly for me?
Define "play well" and "modest PC hardware", because other than Crysis I've yet to find a game that won't run well on my Athlon X2 5600+ and an ATI 4670. And even Crysis ain't *that* bad either.
From a business standpoint there's little reason to abandon consoles when console sales rake in the money.
That's an overly general assertion. The two markets are *very* different from one another (moreso, I'd argue, than between the Wii and the PS360), and a game that'll be popular with one won't necessarily be so for the other so which platform to develop for depends on, among other things, where your expertise lie. You won't get the next Call of Duty from SimBin, for instance, nor will you get the next Starcraft from Epic.
Pretty much the entire American continent calls themselves "Americans", except for Canadians who consider it an insult by reference to their neighbors down south.
In Latin America the proper way to address a US citizen is "estadounidense", which roughly translates to "united-statesian", though as result of its length and the need to sub/dub the word "American" in US movies, the phrase "norteamericano" (meaning "north american") is also in common usage which *also* pisses the Canadians off ;)
In fact, correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the only relatively common language that lacks an equivalent word for "estadounidense" is English itself. I know French and Portuguese have one and I believe both Italian and German do as well, at least.
the producer lives or dies from his choices, however they are his choices not yours or anyone elses.
Actually it's society's choice to even allow the producer to pick one, there is no 'right' to copyright in spite of what its name may imply.
So if society one day decides to not give you that choice anymore, well, sucks to be you but it is their right. Sure, that depends on actually getting their representatives to represent *them* rather than their own pockets but still.