The high end gamers will still spend 500 bucks every 6 months on the newest graphics card, all the while bitching about how expensive Macs are...
But the hobbyist gamers, who combine the hobbies of constantly tinkering with and tweaking their computers with their gaming hobby in order to spend as little as possible and get as much as possible out of it (the sort of folks who bought the hackable Sapphire 9500s in order to mod them into glitchy Radeon 9700 equivalents just because they could) will never be satisfied with the Mac hardware market in anything like its current state. If I know the gamer/tweaker demographic, and I think I do, being very much part of it, these particular hardware hackers want a large selection of widely varied tweaker-friendly motherboards, from cheapo $50 ECS boards to ultra-high-end Asus and Abit boards, and getting the most out of the least and - heck, even the weirdest solution possible - is all part of the fun. Tweakers want a large market both of first and third party system and modding components which don't tie them down to any hardware vendors. It's been the conventional trade-off for running Windows as a gaming OS: to game on a PC, you'll have to run Windows, but you can run pretty much any hardware out there. And it's something a lot of people have grown used to.
And sure, there are Mac modders, tweakers and hardware hackers. Heck, there are still Amiga modders, tweakers and hackers. But folks who are used to picking which of ten motherboard brands and thirty motherboard models from the current generation they want to use for their next upgrade might find themselves a bit frustrated with the Mac market if they try to shift gears straight away. The question is, does Apple allow them the freedom they were used to under Windows or Linux in the long run? We'll have to see.
Indeed, and where were the extra charges to fans when Carmack released GLQuake or when Black Isle released an entire supplementary expansion to Icewind Dale: Heart of Winter for free with Trials of the Luremaster.
I'm convinced it was a strikingly different mentality on the basis of which these games continued to be developed subsequent to release.
Surely by playing free content released on the basis of mere good will towards the fans, we were stealing in some way. Where do I turn myself in?
Or, for that matter, would the plugin author consider providing functionality which would systematically add dupes and typos to other sites using Slash, so as to bring them into closer conformity with Slashdot's standards and make them more familiar in appearance and function to a Slashdot-acclimatised audience?
Interestingly, they seem to have done so within particular regions and cultures fairly completely. It seems that in much of the United States, AIM is the universal standard, and if one wants to speak to one's friends, one will need AIM. Here in Canada, I have never known a Canadian to use AIM. Virtually all use MSN, with some holdouts still sticking with ICQ. IM services seem to tend to gain monopolies in particular regions and cultures. It is merely thanks to the division of the world into a variety of for the most part non-interacting communities that no consolidation is necessary.
I believe what sets it apart from an intelligent design situation, and one of the reasons Will Wright isn't wrong to refer to it as an evolution game, is that the player cannot really know that his designs are intelligent. You might start to see patterns and start to use them, but as the god of this god game, you start out rather naive. Almost completely naive, regarding the potential benefits of various characteristics, beyond the level of "legs make things walk" and "mouths let things eat," etc, and even those assumptions are likely to be inadequate or confused. You're really just trying things and seeing what happens. And you can learn from your mistakes.
So I consider it either the game of a god who is exceptionally stupid and impotent, or an evolution game.
It surprises me how persistent predictions of this kind are, no matter how equally persistent their failures to fulfill themselves.
The "desktop replacement" will supplant the beige box as the home computer, any number of futurists have proclaimed over the years. Counting at least ten years since I heard that one pronounced widely for the first time, it doesn't seem to have done so.
Or the tablet PC and, years earlier, the HPC will supplant the laptop. Still waiting on that one, but no especially strong signs at present.
The fact of that matter is, varying form factors serve their varying purposes, and they will continue to. A 1.8" wide screen is not a 2.4" wide screen is not a 4" wide screen is not a 6" wide screen. And they serve their varying purposes.
This is just HP predicting that their R&D investments and chosen product lines will be the right once. And a great surprise that always is, when a company predicts that the technologies it decides to develop...are the ones it endorses. Who could have foreseen such a thing?
More specifically, in Chuck Norris's grand unified theory of kicking ass and causing pain, Chuck Norris doesn't need any weak-ass nuclear force for his fist to be attracted to your face. In Chuck Norris's grand unified theory of kicking ass and causing pain, massive bodies are attracted to the possibility that he'll end their misery sooner rather than later.
Some are saying it wouldn't be practicable, but it's essentially what Dark Age of Camelot did with player frustration over the introduction of the Trials of Atlantis expansion.
A "classic" server was introduced (quite a while subsequently, mind you), on which the expansion and its changes and additions were not present. It (Gareth) has maintained a sizable userbase throughout its existence so far and the experiment is for all intents and purposes a success. It maintains a separate ruleset and different game dynamic.
The perpetrator was a corp called the Guiding Hand Social Club, the victim was another corp, Ubiqua Seraph and its CEO, Mirial. It got coverage in PC Gamer.
The relevant thread chronicling the heist is here.
Screw the children. Think of the robots! It's one thing to stick one, miniature meatbag on another, bigger meatbag and make him ride around on it. But making a finely tuned robot, a champion among his kind, clatter along on an ugly bag of mostly water merely for our amusement? Disgusting.
I certainly hope they were using a Search Engine Optimization company. The better for it, if one of these dishonourable businesses makes news for being paid to boost a page rank and producing a page rank dropped to rock bottom instead.
Punishing a large corporation whose webdesign group or whose design contractors were being clever might bring some crap down on a few webdesigners who were playing this dirty game for what it is, and justly enough, too, but bring down said crap on a company whose explicit purpose is to skew search results and that's a result I can genuinely be satisfied with.
Yeah, because losing a video game is like seeing your loved one destroyed by a horrible disease...
And why shouldn't it be? A comparison between the character of one experience and the character of another does not necessitate that the scale of those experiences is being equated.
Much wailing and gnashing of teeth is wasted by individuals who feel the need to pretend that any quality characterised by analogy is necessarily a quantity equated by analogy as well. No such necessity exists.
And maybe it's not artful to use analogies which differ in the scale of perceived wrongs which they compare, because the wilfully ignorant will inevitably misinterpret their meaning. But I like to think that writing should serve the genuinely interested reader first, rather than those who actively seek to misinterpret and misunderstand in pursuit of scandal.
The site leverages the powerful Google Maps API to create a revolutionary scaled map with detail and precision never before seen on the Internet.
But does it leverage the power of insufferable marketing lingo to pro-actively develop a synergistic user-oriented information transaction? Yes, yes, I think it does.
People have found ways around this in the past. I have been in a covertly gay MMORPG guild. We were gay, yeah, but ask us outright and you wouldn't get a straight answer. Sometimes closeting and ghettoisation is, pragmatically, the best option from the gay point of view, even today. A military friend of mine can attest to that.
But closeting shouldn't be enforced from above. That's utter crap.
And I don't think the hypocrisy lies in homophobic slang being permitted de facto (and don't tell me it isn't permitted - it is): I think the hypocrisy lies in the fact that straight identity roleplay is permitted in the game while LGBT roleplay is not.
On RP servers or RP-oriented servers and guilds in most MMORPGs, RPed in-game marriages are fairly common. Consequently, a similar issue arose in DAOC a few years ago when a couple players attempted to have a gay marriage in game. Straight marriages in game were, as I say, nothing new at all. I'd attended a couple. There was even a player (very good RPer) on my server who specialised in presiding over marriages there. But much hullabaloo arose over whether an RP gay marriage ceremony should be permitted by the admins. After a great deal of ambiguity and fractiousness, the ceremony was permitted. But of course it had to be. Either you permit relationship RP and you permit gay RP, or you tell people outright, "all creatures in this world are asexual and incapable of romantic association of any kind - RP it that way". And while that's an equal solution, asexual civilisation really is a little hard to take in a conventional fantasy RP contexts. At least unless you give me a little backstory.
Exactly. Complete obliviousness to the premises and principles on which Wikipedia functions is a virtual guarantee of poor contributor content. And that's completely independent of any prior expertise a given individual may possess in the area of knowledge to which said contributor is offering content. If you're a genius in your field and you've haven't the slightest clue how to contribute to Wikipedia, you'll contribute bad content no matter how well-intentioned and well-informed the knowledge behind it is. You can no more write encylopedia articles on, say, wiki programming without the slightest idea what constitutes encyclopedic writing than you can program a wiki without the slightest idea what constitutes good code.
Maybe there is a dream which still survives among some idealists, that everyone, everywhere, should be able to contribute equally, and with equally fruitful productivity, to a knowledge database, absolutely regardless of any ability they possess to summarise and intepret knowledge in a useful and logical fashion. But for those with a realistic outlook, Wiki article writing ends up looking like any other skill set. It isn't intuitive. It takes a bit of experience. And the more experience you have, the better you'll be at it. Closing off, in effect, those with no experience whatsoever, and requiring you be reqistered at least for a few days to edit specific articles, ultimately, is no loss.
The biggest problem for most would-be NES gamers though, I think, isn't scarcity or loss of carts. Most popular NES games, like popular Atari carts, are fairly abundant, so even if you've lost them, you can acquire them very cheaply.
A more insurmountable problem for many games is battery death. We're reaching the outside of the lifespan of most NES cart batteries, at this point. We're well past the time period most were speced for, but some have survived 18 or 19 years inside their plastic shells anyway, backing up save data much longer than they were ever expected to. Only they can't survive much longer.
This isn't a problem for games that don't use cart batteries, but it's a hell of a problem for those that do, unless you can play a whole game in one sitting. And it's all well and good to say that one may simply replace the cart battery, but that takes a proprietary Gamebit screwdriver (or an ersatz equivalent, like a melted pen tip) and a soldering iron, which isn't really something you can expect of a large, semi-mainstream playerbase.
My Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy and Zelda II carts are still going strong, but at some point, those batteries are going to need replacing. All well and good for me, who can be bothered with it, but for most people, when Dragon Warrior carts die, they're going to go in the trash. And scarcity will inevitably increase.
And so you're not quite a collector, in the way that many dedicated classic gamers are. It's simply a matter of fact that many nostalgic gamers want to play it on the original carts, with original gameplay exactly recreated, even when it's for the worse. And using the real, original physical system to do it is part of the magic of recreating that play experience.
Telling a classic gamer with a collector inclination that emulation is the final solution to all his problems is about as sensible as telling a coin collector that books containing pictures of coins have outmoded his hobby. Some people still want to own the cart and play it on the original system for the sake of the reality of the objects themselves and for the sake of the exactitude of the recreation of the play experience, right down to blowing on the cart. Or in the case of older systems, right down to persistently trying and most of the time failing to get game data to load off a damn casette tape, because that's what the system wants.
You see, poster, you, yourself are a robot precisely like the robot described in this article. In fact, you are the selfsame robot described therein. We've presented to you a Slashdot story about yourself and you've failed to realise that the story is in fact about you. And so the experiment fails.
For our next experiment: determining a method for causing Slashdot editors to recognise a mirror image of a story they've already accepted only just hours prior.
Well, it's better than a King Kong Hot Coffee mod story about how to go about unlocking Kong-themed erotic content, or a revelation that beating the game in under an hour lets you see Kong waving at you in a bathing suit.
"The first problem with getting your political and legal theory from traditional media is that the entire process takes too long: three years on average before they pick up a story, often as long as five, and getting longer all the time."
Unfortunately, DAOC faces a serious problem in retaining and gaining new users at present. And I'm not sure that's it's a curable problem. I use the word "unfortunately", because I genuinely believe it's a good game in its own way. It has a niche (realm and siege warfare) which there has been little attempt to fill otherwise (Shadowbane was generally regarded as a failure). And I don't want to see it die. But I'm not sure what can be done with it to keep it at stable subscription levels as it stands.
The problem with DAOC is that its triumph is its endgame. Its problem is precisely the opposite of WoW's. DAOC's RvR really has yet to be beaten by any competitor at what it does: large scale, cooperative, faction-based warfare that people can actually care about (or used to).
But there's a big problem with DAOC's focus from a new player perspective, and that is that playing DAOC today does not mean getting to see the best parts of the game in the short term. The battlegrounds mean access to a miniaturised version of RvR at fairly early levels, but the game's genuine strength is not something available to anyone who hasn't invested hundreds of hours in the game already.
And increasingly, as is probably inevitable, the path to RvR is a very, very long one for new players, as the game ages, as new content is added and as the level of experience presumed of participants grows. And while DAOC PvE isn't bad (it was certainly fine for its time, when it came out, and Darkness Falls was a high point), it can't really claim to compete with WoW in the present in that department, even by the accounts of DAOC's greatest supporters.
DAOC's angle is a serious difficulty for it in the marketplace right now. "Play DAOC, and maybe a year from now you'll get to see the aspects of the game that really make it worth playing, once you've played all the lousy parts" is a hard sell. I wish DAOC the best, but I don't know what can be done for it to remedy its peculiar problem.
The article notes that this in an of itself is only a step in the long march towards all those crazy things people have done with the original Xbox.
And if (as a worst case scenario) attempts to impliment NTFS5 under Linux are any example of just how incredibly nuanced the implimentation of a file system can be (though a very different case, obviously), one is compelled to observe that understanding the basics of a file system can be just one step on an absurdly long path towards fuller support and exposure of all the finer details.
Slashdot Mirror
The high end gamers will still spend 500 bucks every 6 months on the newest graphics card, all the while bitching about how expensive Macs are...
But the hobbyist gamers, who combine the hobbies of constantly tinkering with and tweaking their computers with their gaming hobby in order to spend as little as possible and get as much as possible out of it (the sort of folks who bought the hackable Sapphire 9500s in order to mod them into glitchy Radeon 9700 equivalents just because they could) will never be satisfied with the Mac hardware market in anything like its current state. If I know the gamer/tweaker demographic, and I think I do, being very much part of it, these particular hardware hackers want a large selection of widely varied tweaker-friendly motherboards, from cheapo $50 ECS boards to ultra-high-end Asus and Abit boards, and getting the most out of the least and - heck, even the weirdest solution possible - is all part of the fun. Tweakers want a large market both of first and third party system and modding components which don't tie them down to any hardware vendors. It's been the conventional trade-off for running Windows as a gaming OS: to game on a PC, you'll have to run Windows, but you can run pretty much any hardware out there. And it's something a lot of people have grown used to.
And sure, there are Mac modders, tweakers and hardware hackers. Heck, there are still Amiga modders, tweakers and hackers. But folks who are used to picking which of ten motherboard brands and thirty motherboard models from the current generation they want to use for their next upgrade might find themselves a bit frustrated with the Mac market if they try to shift gears straight away. The question is, does Apple allow them the freedom they were used to under Windows or Linux in the long run? We'll have to see.
Indeed, and where were the extra charges to fans when Carmack released GLQuake or when Black Isle released an entire supplementary expansion to Icewind Dale: Heart of Winter for free with Trials of the Luremaster.
I'm convinced it was a strikingly different mentality on the basis of which these games continued to be developed subsequent to release.
Surely by playing free content released on the basis of mere good will towards the fans, we were stealing in some way. Where do I turn myself in?
[right-click]
[Reply to Selected Text]
Seemingly it funtions, ideally, by turning Slashdot into a sea of superfluous blockquotes.
Not that I'd ever be guilty of such indulgences mind you.
Or, for that matter, would the plugin author consider providing functionality which would systematically add dupes and typos to other sites using Slash, so as to bring them into closer conformity with Slashdot's standards and make them more familiar in appearance and function to a Slashdot-acclimatised audience?
Interestingly, they seem to have done so within particular regions and cultures fairly completely. It seems that in much of the United States, AIM is the universal standard, and if one wants to speak to one's friends, one will need AIM. Here in Canada, I have never known a Canadian to use AIM. Virtually all use MSN, with some holdouts still sticking with ICQ. IM services seem to tend to gain monopolies in particular regions and cultures. It is merely thanks to the division of the world into a variety of for the most part non-interacting communities that no consolidation is necessary.
So I consider it either the game of a god who is exceptionally stupid and impotent, or an evolution game.
It surprises me how persistent predictions of this kind are, no matter how equally persistent their failures to fulfill themselves.
The "desktop replacement" will supplant the beige box as the home computer, any number of futurists have proclaimed over the years. Counting at least ten years since I heard that one pronounced widely for the first time, it doesn't seem to have done so.
Or the tablet PC and, years earlier, the HPC will supplant the laptop. Still waiting on that one, but no especially strong signs at present.
The fact of that matter is, varying form factors serve their varying purposes, and they will continue to. A 1.8" wide screen is not a 2.4" wide screen is not a 4" wide screen is not a 6" wide screen. And they serve their varying purposes.
This is just HP predicting that their R&D investments and chosen product lines will be the right once. And a great surprise that always is, when a company predicts that the technologies it decides to develop...are the ones it endorses. Who could have foreseen such a thing?
More specifically, in Chuck Norris's grand unified theory of kicking ass and causing pain, Chuck Norris doesn't need any weak-ass nuclear force for his fist to be attracted to your face. In Chuck Norris's grand unified theory of kicking ass and causing pain, massive bodies are attracted to the possibility that he'll end their misery sooner rather than later.
A "classic" server was introduced (quite a while subsequently, mind you), on which the expansion and its changes and additions were not present. It (Gareth) has maintained a sizable userbase throughout its existence so far and the experiment is for all intents and purposes a success. It maintains a separate ruleset and different game dynamic.
The perpetrator was a corp called the Guiding Hand Social Club, the victim was another corp, Ubiqua Seraph and its CEO, Mirial. It got coverage in PC Gamer. The relevant thread chronicling the heist is here.
Screw the children. Think of the robots! It's one thing to stick one, miniature meatbag on another, bigger meatbag and make him ride around on it. But making a finely tuned robot, a champion among his kind, clatter along on an ugly bag of mostly water merely for our amusement? Disgusting.
I certainly hope they were using a Search Engine Optimization company. The better for it, if one of these dishonourable businesses makes news for being paid to boost a page rank and producing a page rank dropped to rock bottom instead.
Punishing a large corporation whose webdesign group or whose design contractors were being clever might bring some crap down on a few webdesigners who were playing this dirty game for what it is, and justly enough, too, but bring down said crap on a company whose explicit purpose is to skew search results and that's a result I can genuinely be satisfied with.
Yeah, because losing a video game is like seeing your loved one destroyed by a horrible disease...
And why shouldn't it be? A comparison between the character of one experience and the character of another does not necessitate that the scale of those experiences is being equated.
Much wailing and gnashing of teeth is wasted by individuals who feel the need to pretend that any quality characterised by analogy is necessarily a quantity equated by analogy as well. No such necessity exists.
And maybe it's not artful to use analogies which differ in the scale of perceived wrongs which they compare, because the wilfully ignorant will inevitably misinterpret their meaning. But I like to think that writing should serve the genuinely interested reader first, rather than those who actively seek to misinterpret and misunderstand in pursuit of scandal.
But does it leverage the power of insufferable marketing lingo to pro-actively develop a synergistic user-oriented information transaction? Yes, yes, I think it does.
People have found ways around this in the past. I have been in a covertly gay MMORPG guild. We were gay, yeah, but ask us outright and you wouldn't get a straight answer. Sometimes closeting and ghettoisation is, pragmatically, the best option from the gay point of view, even today. A military friend of mine can attest to that.
But closeting shouldn't be enforced from above. That's utter crap.
And I don't think the hypocrisy lies in homophobic slang being permitted de facto (and don't tell me it isn't permitted - it is): I think the hypocrisy lies in the fact that straight identity roleplay is permitted in the game while LGBT roleplay is not.
On RP servers or RP-oriented servers and guilds in most MMORPGs, RPed in-game marriages are fairly common. Consequently, a similar issue arose in DAOC a few years ago when a couple players attempted to have a gay marriage in game. Straight marriages in game were, as I say, nothing new at all. I'd attended a couple. There was even a player (very good RPer) on my server who specialised in presiding over marriages there. But much hullabaloo arose over whether an RP gay marriage ceremony should be permitted by the admins. After a great deal of ambiguity and fractiousness, the ceremony was permitted. But of course it had to be. Either you permit relationship RP and you permit gay RP, or you tell people outright, "all creatures in this world are asexual and incapable of romantic association of any kind - RP it that way". And while that's an equal solution, asexual civilisation really is a little hard to take in a conventional fantasy RP contexts. At least unless you give me a little backstory.
Maybe there is a dream which still survives among some idealists, that everyone, everywhere, should be able to contribute equally, and with equally fruitful productivity, to a knowledge database, absolutely regardless of any ability they possess to summarise and intepret knowledge in a useful and logical fashion. But for those with a realistic outlook, Wiki article writing ends up looking like any other skill set. It isn't intuitive. It takes a bit of experience. And the more experience you have, the better you'll be at it. Closing off, in effect, those with no experience whatsoever, and requiring you be reqistered at least for a few days to edit specific articles, ultimately, is no loss.
Especially given that it has seen copy-cat vandalism
Surely this is no competitor to the blockbuster that was Mediocre Game Has Alternate Ending
A more insurmountable problem for many games is battery death. We're reaching the outside of the lifespan of most NES cart batteries, at this point. We're well past the time period most were speced for, but some have survived 18 or 19 years inside their plastic shells anyway, backing up save data much longer than they were ever expected to. Only they can't survive much longer.
This isn't a problem for games that don't use cart batteries, but it's a hell of a problem for those that do, unless you can play a whole game in one sitting. And it's all well and good to say that one may simply replace the cart battery, but that takes a proprietary Gamebit screwdriver (or an ersatz equivalent, like a melted pen tip) and a soldering iron, which isn't really something you can expect of a large, semi-mainstream playerbase.
My Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy and Zelda II carts are still going strong, but at some point, those batteries are going to need replacing. All well and good for me, who can be bothered with it, but for most people, when Dragon Warrior carts die, they're going to go in the trash. And scarcity will inevitably increase.
Telling a classic gamer with a collector inclination that emulation is the final solution to all his problems is about as sensible as telling a coin collector that books containing pictures of coins have outmoded his hobby. Some people still want to own the cart and play it on the original system for the sake of the reality of the objects themselves and for the sake of the exactitude of the recreation of the play experience, right down to blowing on the cart. Or in the case of older systems, right down to persistently trying and most of the time failing to get game data to load off a damn casette tape, because that's what the system wants.
You see, poster, you, yourself are a robot precisely like the robot described in this article. In fact, you are the selfsame robot described therein. We've presented to you a Slashdot story about yourself and you've failed to realise that the story is in fact about you. And so the experiment fails.
For our next experiment: determining a method for causing Slashdot editors to recognise a mirror image of a story they've already accepted only just hours prior.
Well, it's better than a King Kong Hot Coffee mod story about how to go about unlocking Kong-themed erotic content, or a revelation that beating the game in under an hour lets you see Kong waving at you in a bathing suit.
"The first problem with getting your political and legal theory from traditional media is that the entire process takes too long: three years on average before they pick up a story, often as long as five, and getting longer all the time."
The problem with DAOC is that its triumph is its endgame. Its problem is precisely the opposite of WoW's. DAOC's RvR really has yet to be beaten by any competitor at what it does: large scale, cooperative, faction-based warfare that people can actually care about (or used to).
But there's a big problem with DAOC's focus from a new player perspective, and that is that playing DAOC today does not mean getting to see the best parts of the game in the short term. The battlegrounds mean access to a miniaturised version of RvR at fairly early levels, but the game's genuine strength is not something available to anyone who hasn't invested hundreds of hours in the game already.
And increasingly, as is probably inevitable, the path to RvR is a very, very long one for new players, as the game ages, as new content is added and as the level of experience presumed of participants grows. And while DAOC PvE isn't bad (it was certainly fine for its time, when it came out, and Darkness Falls was a high point), it can't really claim to compete with WoW in the present in that department, even by the accounts of DAOC's greatest supporters. DAOC's angle is a serious difficulty for it in the marketplace right now. "Play DAOC, and maybe a year from now you'll get to see the aspects of the game that really make it worth playing, once you've played all the lousy parts" is a hard sell. I wish DAOC the best, but I don't know what can be done for it to remedy its peculiar problem.
And if (as a worst case scenario) attempts to impliment NTFS5 under Linux are any example of just how incredibly nuanced the implimentation of a file system can be (though a very different case, obviously), one is compelled to observe that understanding the basics of a file system can be just one step on an absurdly long path towards fuller support and exposure of all the finer details.