I've always considered Diablo 2.5 to be Titan Quest. Titan Quest is almost free on Steam during holidays and it's a pretty good ARPG game that's more or less Diablo 2 but with a Green Mythos story instead (Greek Gods, Titans, etc). I always thought it was too bad the company went under.
Requires tethering (which will require you to carry a smartphone with you anyhow!)
One way communication? (I don't see or hear anything about writing tweets or email. Just reading)
All for a reasonable price of over $400? Ok, the exclusive obsessed and uber-rich might buy a few, and at those price points, it might make them some money (given I doubt it cost that much to develop). But once people start using them and they have a big cumbersome bracelet on their wrist (because you forgot to charge it) that has no practical purpose to respond to the emails you just got or order movie-tickets online, without pulling out that heavy phone in your pocket or purse, it will lose it's "cool factor".
Side note, Carla Fiorna and Bob Nardelli where also not engineers. Lets not forget, Steve Jobs might have been a CEO but he was also an engineer first. Those others where business majors. That could help explain things. Of course, there was Woz too.
I disagree. Offering Diablo 3 for free for a 1 year WoW subscription is a the "break glass" plan. It's a marketing trick to get people to lock in 1 year subscriptions so they can count those people and be like "See! SW:TOR came out and our numbers are the same! Boooyah!". It's downright deception but that's probably good for business.
With any new release, as soon as the flag is lifted, all the servers will quickly crash because all players will be racing to the login server. It's happened for every major MMO release. WoW was nearly unplayable for 2-4 weeks. Oh, I remember all the free game time they gave us. =)
The holidays will help and hurt Bioware. It will help, as you pointed out, by allowing people to login more sparsely than during "primetime" like hours. It will hurt because it's almost assured that the servers will be down, there will be hundreds of thousands of people foaming at the mouth to play with gleeful excitement, having ALL HOLIDAY to play, but can't because of server stability... oh, the forums will be aflame no doubt!
I'd like to be positive and say "Bioware is spending gobs of money on this game, they have WoW and piles of past MMO launches to draw experience from, they surely WILL get it right!" Yeah, I said that about every MMO that's come out and I don't recall that ever happening.
For starters, they'll probably have lots of server/shard capacity (they're pre-selecting servers for pre-orders based on allowing you to pre-create a guild) but they'll severely under-power their login server so that only a few lucky people will login and have fun while everyone else is crammed in the door, pushing and shoving to get in, until the whole door collapse and no one can get in.
It will take a couple of days before the rush to play spreads out, but not before login servers are added and rebooted, and people get so fed up with trying to login the go and do something else.
At that point, they will have major lag issues because no matter how much stress testing they do, they will miss something in the code that will thousands of players playing, will cause the game to crash. So, they will be spending the first couple of weeks pushing out patches to identifying issues to bring server stability in-line.
Is it fair to compare it with WOW or Star Trek Online?
I didn't play STO but if WoW and Knights of the Old Republic had a baby, this would be it. From what I've seen, you've got combat animations like KOTOR where there's actual interaction between fighters, not just timed swing animations but blocks, parries, etc. (like KotOR). Mixed with Dragon Age / Mass Effect like voice acting with dialogue option paths, and I'm speculating that it will have game play similar to WoW, solo friendly, relatively easy/n00b friendly, upgrade loot heavy, questing centric, as well as more stylized graphics and animation akin to WoW (ie. less photo realistic, more cartoonish)
They make it as cheap as they can while still allowing for a decent profit.
I'd hate to say it, but that's not an accurate statement. A business' goal (excluding non-profits/charity) is to make as much profit as possible, not merely a "decent amount". They do this by testing what how many people are willing to pay how much and picking a point on the curve that suggests the highest possible profit margin.
They're not all just sitting around laughing about how badly they screwed their customers while drinking cognac and lighting Cuban cigars with twenties.
I get your point and I agree with you that too many people just bash on business, assuming they're all heartless billionaires. In reality, there are many passionate people who run business and care about their product / reputation too. That doesn't detract from the fact that there's a lot of other business savoy people trying to maximize profits. It's not an mutually exclusive scenario. They can be both.
To that point, the GP has a point, game companies can very much simply give away the client if they plan on having a subscription or micro-transaction model. There are many instances where this is the case, see League of Legends, Lord of the Rings Online, Champions Online, Conan MMO, D&D MMO, etc, etc.
The thing that still gets me is why major companies like Blizzard and Bioware (especially since their game hasn't come out yet) are still doing subscription services when Micro-transactions are far more profitable.
I like using ISO formatting for dates YYYY-MM-DD. Then again, I'm a programmer.
But I was curious about date formats. I knew Wikipedia would have some insight. They have an interesting global map of color coded countries that use one of the 3 formats (Y/M/D, D/M/Y, or M/D/Y).
I agree with you. I'd really like to get a Macbook Pro, but I'm just having a hard time justifying the price when I could spend less and get more on a PC laptop. But I'd really like to get a Mac (finally) but they keep pricing themselves out of my price-range for some of the basic specs I'd expect.
It wasn't ever meant to be a blockbuster which changed the way people think about shooters and gaming in general
I believe Mirror's Edge is a platform game. I would say it had puzzle elements too. While it was first person, I certainly wouldn't call it a shooter even if there was limited gun play in it.
claiming that Fringe's shift to Fridays was an attempt to draw younger viewers back to the 'dead zone' of Friday nights
Simply asked, are time slots and schedule still a major concern in the realm of DVR's, on-demand, and Internet streaming?
Shows like Fringe, where I haven't seen an episode, heard a lot about it and have interest in seeing it, are programs I wait for to be released mostly on DVD/streaming so I can sit and watch back-to-back episodes in order, from the start.
They don't use Steam in their games anymore than they use Wal-Mart in their games.
Actually, that's not true. The "use Steam" probably means having Steam enabled achievements, "cloud" storage for things like game saves, etc. Steam is more than just a content delivery method. You see, one could sell a box game at retail that has Steam support. The retails are complaining that selling such games will drive awareness of Steams sales channel.
Now, I agree with the part that retails complaining about digital downloads and "banning" said games is like biting the hand that feeds you. Go ahead! Ban the games! You'll soon have nothing to sell in your stores and customers will *still* know how to get the game they want.
What's next? Retails QQing about WoW: Cataclysm is being offered as a direct sale from Blizzard with the benefit of no-installation, retail per-order lines, etc? The only thing you miss is: a) CE editions and b) the "party" a store might throw.
In other words, if a game store says "We're not going to sell Warcraft if you offer direct sales!" do you really think WoW players will notice? They'll get their game one way or another. The one thing game companies have done is offer company specific in-game times. To continue to use WoW as an example, they might offer a "Best Buy" or "Target" tabard if you pre-order the game through those stores. I've seen that before on some games. The "Wal-Mart" colored armor set, etc. To avoid the immersion perspective, it oftne times just translates into "an armor set unique to retail store X" which is usually the same as other stores but with a different color shade.
That way, "fans" of said store can feel equally motivated to get it from them.
Anyhow, I should disclaimer that I like Steam, I use Steam and I do enjoy very much their specials and convenience. I also had CATA pre-ordered, but just went and bought the digital update from Blizzard and canceled my pre-order. It will save me a trip to the store and generating packaging waste.
To be fair, I'm also just not a Cheddar eater. =) It's possibly why I call a lot of it bland.
I've had some really good 5-year and 10-year aged Cheddar, but the stuff is just too expensive for me to care to buy given my lack of care for the type of cheese.
Anyways, I'm a fan of French cheese as you can see in my aforementioned "cheese buffet" I had at my wedding.
Unfortunately, I don't think we ever thought of taking photos of the full spread. The worst part of my night, I never got to enjoy the cheese. hehe. I had a full plate but was to busy socializing that it up and walked away on me before I could have some.
If I'm ever in England, I'll try to remember to look you up. I'd like to try some of these fabled cheddars. =)
If you want to talk reality, forget beer comparisons, try cheese.
Disclaimer. I was born and raise in Wisconsin. In fact I still live here. I went to London for a year for school and married a French women. I've spent lot of time in France, a country that prides itself in cheese. In the US, Wisconsin prides itself for it's dairy products, including cheese.
America is home to the worlds most disgusting cheese.
I wouldn't go that far. It's certainly not as good as Europe, but there are reasons for the lack of variety and therefor flavor in cheese.
And they try to give me some Wisconsin cheddar which admittedly is not awful
That's because it's not awful, it's good. The problem is that cheddar simply is a bland cheese. Of course, you do have to find the good stuff. What cheese lover really gets existed over *chedder*?! lol It can go great on burgers (I still prefer swiss) but it's simply a dull cheese and that's not Wisconsin's fault. It's just as bad in Chedder England.
I don't know what it is.
It has to do with milk pasteurization laws. It prevents a lot of cheeses from being made. Lots of them goat cheese. That's why goat cheese in the US is always the same terrible crappy stuff and why you never see the variety of cheese you have in Europe. It has really grown to be a cultural thing.
But likewise, these same laws are the reason you don't see boxes of milk on store shelves, outside of refrigeration units. I was confused the first time I was in France at my wife's house and I had some cereal for breakfast. She had me pull a box of milk from the pantry. I thought all milk had to be kept refrigerated. Then we talked with the shop owner of Nalaa's cheese in Green Bay. He explained the pasteurization laws and why we can't get the good variety of cheese here and how he was limited on what he could import and sell.
American's who haven't spent much time outside of the US simply don't get exposed to what's out there. And those that do, might not be brave enough to ever try it because some of that cheese simply smells like a rotten skunk carcass in the Texas heat, but tastes like the heavens. But many people won't get past that smell. Case in point, we've turned many of my friends onto Rachlette cheese. That's not as pungent as some goat cheeses, but some had some real reservations of ever trying it. It smells up the kitchen when cutting it (who cut the cheese? There's a reason for that phrase).
Of course, one of the biggest complements at my recent wedding (in France) was the fact that we had a cheese buffet. A table with over 30 types of cheeses on it. You've never seen American's so confused and pleased. I shocked one of my friends to go and eat every kind of cheese he could find.
It really is a cheese repression.
Now, beer. Microbrews have really come a long way to pass by the basic Miller and Bud products we have. You can find some pretty good tasting beer in Wisconsin. New Glarus, Leienenkugels, Capital Brew, etc. are good beer. It's also much more expensive and in a place like Wisconsin where quantity can seem more important than quality, you'll find people still turn to Miller or Bud Light. And when you're use to drinking bland for so long, having something with flavor becomes too much of a shock.
I think the UK has a better quality average, but the US also suffers from gimmicks. There's a billion beer makers with a billion private label beers each trying to sound like their beer is something new or different. This one has LIME! This one has LEMON! This one is called "Fat Squirrel", this is "Moose Drool", oh, look, a Monty Python branded beer! Here's a Pumpkin beer!
*sigh*
It's complicated.
Point is, Wisconsin doesn't have crap for cheese. What they do make is good, but what they do make really isn't good cheese to begin with. You can thank US laws and now US culture as it
If you want to know why it failed, ask the subscribers why they left, and then pick out the common points.
I never even finished my 30 day "free" game time upon game launch.
Only one *starting* area had any polish. The rest were hacked together filler space.
Class Abilities were buggy. The White Lion class (I think that was the name) was all about positional attacks. A lot of your abilities were worthless in PvE because you couldn't ever get to the side/back of the enemy. Not encouraging when you're playing the first 10 'intro' levels.
AI was buggy. Mobs couldn't reach you, they'd start running the most bizzare pathing, and this included your pet AI.
Limited class selection and customization. To be fair, this was probably more about the Warhammer license and their restrictions, but if your game is going to be limited like this, the rest of the game has to really shine.
Class balance was off the charts bad. This game was highly PvP focused and if you have class balance that bad, you've really failed. PvE balance was light-years worse, but you could at least write that off because of the PvP focus of the game. But those first 10 levels, again, set the impression and if one class is solo-killing 4-5 monsters several levels higher than you and your class is getting owned by 2 equal level characters... you start to feel put-off.
Missing classes. If I recall correctly, they took out the "tank" classes from the game at the last moment (days before release?) because they simply weren't ready yet. I'm sure there's some press release out there (I recall reading it) that announced that the "tank" classes were coming.
It wasn't all bad. I really liked the "social quests" thing. Where, all of a sudden mobs would spawn and "attack the town" and anyone in that area could help kill the mobs and all get rewarded for helping, instead of fighting against each other to finish each individuals quest requirements.
The class concepts were interesting. But as TFS states, it definitely was pushed out the door WAAAAY too soon in terms of benefit too the game. But the problem is, it would have taken another year to have polished the game to meet the bar of, say, Warcraft and I imagine that company simply wasn't going to keep dropping money into a hole.
What that has to do with SW:TOR, I'm not sure. Bioware has a lot of funds thanks to their high-grossing titles that they're still releasing (Dragon Age and Mass Effect for example) that can keep funding a project until it's ready. On top of publisher support (EA) as well as Lucas Arts support (how many art concepts and designs are coming from them? How much 'content' is mostly already established thanks to KotOR?) To be fair, again, KotOR 2 wasn't good for Bioware.
And I've been following SW:TOR for a while. I can say they definitely appear to be doing a lot of design decisions right. That is, until I heard they're trying to shoe-horn space combat and regular ground combat into the "Vanilla" game. *shudder* That's never turned out well so far.
And to be further critical... I saw the first game-play footage they showed for, I think, E3? It really, really didn't look very impressive. It was *way* to standard MMORPG when it needs to be -->STAR WARS
Of course, I say this, but I really don't have much of a solution to avoid it expect making it more action/hack&slash RPG than the standard RPG. It's, no doubt, not an easy thing to do or there would be a ton of awesome MMO's people could choose from... instead of WoW and then Niche MMO 1, Niche MMO 2 and "Hey Look! Everyquest is still around and releasing a new XPAC!" LOL, I wouldn't be surprised if EQ1 has more players than EQ2. =P
Warhammer sucked because it was, obviously, released WAY too soon. There was only one zone with any reasonable polish (the one with the burning Windmill), classes weren't complete, **STARTING** zones were so buggy you couldn't complete quests. The bugs go on...
As TFS states, this is why I know so many people tried and left the game within days/weeks and not renewing past their 'free' 30 day included play time.
There was some good parts of the game that you could see the potential... but it wasn't cutting it.
Fact of the matter is, there's just much better choices out there than to release a sub-par game. And MMO's cost WAY to much that some people just don't comprehend what it takes.
I have no idea where/how to dispose of or recycle the oil
This is something I had to learn (I change my own oil on both my and my wife's car as well as air filter... not spark plugs though).
Most cities will have a municipal yard you can drop off oil, big pieces of stuff (often metals that can be recycled), and particularly big lawn trimmings (branches, bushes, etc).
Also, (I don't recall if it's Federal or State) we are recycling computer/electronic parts. All of which have to be dropped off at the city "dump" (see municipal yard).
Call your town hall, ask them where you can do it. I'd say check their website but I never have an easy time finding that kind of information on a government website. Usually they'll have a big bin to dump the oil in or a place to leave the old oil jugs (if you put the dirty oil back into the new oil containers).
Mainly the space combat though, the ground combat was horrific mainly due to the dumb as shit AI.
ST:O was something I was interested in at one point, and for a while I made a point of trying out most 'big' MMO releases, but I skipped this one.
With that said, how is their AI "dumb as shit" different than any other MMO? There hasn't been an MMO that I've played that has smart AI. All NPC's simply do is "aggro PC, take direct path between PC and NPC neglecting most boundary pathing and obstacle, and auto attack, cast spell/ability when not on cooldown".
Boss AI? Nothing but a scripted event. "at x% health, move to this location and spit out this dialog, and follow new pattern." Not something I would really classify as AI, as some sort of 'thinking', or probably better defined as reacting, animate.
And I believe this to be the case, though I'm no expect, simply because having any kind of 'smart AI' would be a pretty big resource drain on the server, that's trying to manage a lot of world events already, without having to add more CPU cycles to learn a NPC to react appropriately.
So, I'm curious, what made ST:O's ground combat AI so much worse? I don't deny it was bad, I'm just curious as how one defines it given the general lack of AI in this genre.
I saw Avatar in 3D and wished I saved $5 and saw it in 2D. Oh, I enjoyed the film but I really didn't like the 3D. If anything, it took something away from the film by having to wear these heavy bulky glasses the whole time and some of the blurry-ness. Crap-tastic. There's one film I'm going to be willing to see in 3D and that will be the new Tron and I'll be finding an IMAX to see it in too.
But I'll certainly be picking which films I'll be willing to see in 3D and be going with as many 2D options as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always considered Diablo 2.5 to be Titan Quest. Titan Quest is almost free on Steam during holidays and it's a pretty good ARPG game that's more or less Diablo 2 but with a Green Mythos story instead (Greek Gods, Titans, etc). I always thought it was too bad the company went under.
The whole fiasco is almost certainly a net positive for the product's sales.
Except, of course, the fire bombing of it's ratings on Amazon. I doubt something like 300 1-star reviews will do it much good.
Do these people really have nothing better to do with their time and money than harassing fishing boats?
Obligatory South Park: Whale Whores. tl;dr: Whales and Dolphins bombed Hiroshima. There's proof, but it was forged.
The specs aren't in it's favor.
All for a reasonable price of over $400? Ok, the exclusive obsessed and uber-rich might buy a few, and at those price points, it might make them some money (given I doubt it cost that much to develop). But once people start using them and they have a big cumbersome bracelet on their wrist (because you forgot to charge it) that has no practical purpose to respond to the emails you just got or order movie-tickets online, without pulling out that heavy phone in your pocket or purse, it will lose it's "cool factor".
Side note, Carla Fiorna and Bob Nardelli where also not engineers. Lets not forget, Steve Jobs might have been a CEO but he was also an engineer first. Those others where business majors. That could help explain things. Of course, there was Woz too.
I disagree. Offering Diablo 3 for free for a 1 year WoW subscription is a the "break glass" plan. It's a marketing trick to get people to lock in 1 year subscriptions so they can count those people and be like "See! SW:TOR came out and our numbers are the same! Boooyah!". It's downright deception but that's probably good for business.
With any new release, as soon as the flag is lifted, all the servers will quickly crash because all players will be racing to the login server. It's happened for every major MMO release. WoW was nearly unplayable for 2-4 weeks. Oh, I remember all the free game time they gave us. =)
The holidays will help and hurt Bioware. It will help, as you pointed out, by allowing people to login more sparsely than during "primetime" like hours. It will hurt because it's almost assured that the servers will be down, there will be hundreds of thousands of people foaming at the mouth to play with gleeful excitement, having ALL HOLIDAY to play, but can't because of server stability... oh, the forums will be aflame no doubt!
I'd like to be positive and say "Bioware is spending gobs of money on this game, they have WoW and piles of past MMO launches to draw experience from, they surely WILL get it right!" Yeah, I said that about every MMO that's come out and I don't recall that ever happening.
For starters, they'll probably have lots of server/shard capacity (they're pre-selecting servers for pre-orders based on allowing you to pre-create a guild) but they'll severely under-power their login server so that only a few lucky people will login and have fun while everyone else is crammed in the door, pushing and shoving to get in, until the whole door collapse and no one can get in.
It will take a couple of days before the rush to play spreads out, but not before login servers are added and rebooted, and people get so fed up with trying to login the go and do something else.
At that point, they will have major lag issues because no matter how much stress testing they do, they will miss something in the code that will thousands of players playing, will cause the game to crash. So, they will be spending the first couple of weeks pushing out patches to identifying issues to bring server stability in-line.
It always has happened. Never fails. =)
Is it fair to compare it with WOW or Star Trek Online?
I didn't play STO but if WoW and Knights of the Old Republic had a baby, this would be it. From what I've seen, you've got combat animations like KOTOR where there's actual interaction between fighters, not just timed swing animations but blocks, parries, etc. (like KotOR). Mixed with Dragon Age / Mass Effect like voice acting with dialogue option paths, and I'm speculating that it will have game play similar to WoW, solo friendly, relatively easy/n00b friendly, upgrade loot heavy, questing centric, as well as more stylized graphics and animation akin to WoW (ie. less photo realistic, more cartoonish)
They make it as cheap as they can while still allowing for a decent profit.
I'd hate to say it, but that's not an accurate statement. A business' goal (excluding non-profits/charity) is to make as much profit as possible, not merely a "decent amount". They do this by testing what how many people are willing to pay how much and picking a point on the curve that suggests the highest possible profit margin.
They're not all just sitting around laughing about how badly they screwed their customers while drinking cognac and lighting Cuban cigars with twenties.
I get your point and I agree with you that too many people just bash on business, assuming they're all heartless billionaires. In reality, there are many passionate people who run business and care about their product / reputation too. That doesn't detract from the fact that there's a lot of other business savoy people trying to maximize profits. It's not an mutually exclusive scenario. They can be both.
To that point, the GP has a point, game companies can very much simply give away the client if they plan on having a subscription or micro-transaction model. There are many instances where this is the case, see League of Legends, Lord of the Rings Online, Champions Online, Conan MMO, D&D MMO, etc, etc.
The thing that still gets me is why major companies like Blizzard and Bioware (especially since their game hasn't come out yet) are still doing subscription services when Micro-transactions are far more profitable.
But when, before the Apple "App Store" launched, did anyone ever use the term "app" outside of a restaurant?
Yes. Ask any software programmer who programmed Applications for a living.
I like using ISO formatting for dates YYYY-MM-DD. Then again, I'm a programmer.
But I was curious about date formats. I knew Wikipedia would have some insight. They have an interesting global map of color coded countries that use one of the 3 formats (Y/M/D, D/M/Y, or M/D/Y).
I agree with you. I'd really like to get a Macbook Pro, but I'm just having a hard time justifying the price when I could spend less and get more on a PC laptop. But I'd really like to get a Mac (finally) but they keep pricing themselves out of my price-range for some of the basic specs I'd expect.
It wasn't ever meant to be a blockbuster which changed the way people think about shooters and gaming in general
I believe Mirror's Edge is a platform game. I would say it had puzzle elements too. While it was first person, I certainly wouldn't call it a shooter even if there was limited gun play in it.
I do approve of him using his money to help people rather than just hang out and be rich with Warren Buffett all day.
I guess they still "hang out and be rich". In 2006 [Warren Buffet] made American history by making the largest ever charitable donation by an individual – $37bn to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
claiming that Fringe's shift to Fridays was an attempt to draw younger viewers back to the 'dead zone' of Friday nights
Simply asked, are time slots and schedule still a major concern in the realm of DVR's, on-demand, and Internet streaming?
Shows like Fringe, where I haven't seen an episode, heard a lot about it and have interest in seeing it, are programs I wait for to be released mostly on DVD/streaming so I can sit and watch back-to-back episodes in order, from the start.
They don't use Steam in their games anymore than they use Wal-Mart in their games.
Actually, that's not true. The "use Steam" probably means having Steam enabled achievements, "cloud" storage for things like game saves, etc. Steam is more than just a content delivery method. You see, one could sell a box game at retail that has Steam support. The retails are complaining that selling such games will drive awareness of Steams sales channel.
Now, I agree with the part that retails complaining about digital downloads and "banning" said games is like biting the hand that feeds you. Go ahead! Ban the games! You'll soon have nothing to sell in your stores and customers will *still* know how to get the game they want.
What's next? Retails QQing about WoW: Cataclysm is being offered as a direct sale from Blizzard with the benefit of no-installation, retail per-order lines, etc? The only thing you miss is: a) CE editions and b) the "party" a store might throw.
In other words, if a game store says "We're not going to sell Warcraft if you offer direct sales!" do you really think WoW players will notice? They'll get their game one way or another. The one thing game companies have done is offer company specific in-game times. To continue to use WoW as an example, they might offer a "Best Buy" or "Target" tabard if you pre-order the game through those stores. I've seen that before on some games. The "Wal-Mart" colored armor set, etc. To avoid the immersion perspective, it oftne times just translates into "an armor set unique to retail store X" which is usually the same as other stores but with a different color shade.
That way, "fans" of said store can feel equally motivated to get it from them.
Anyhow, I should disclaimer that I like Steam, I use Steam and I do enjoy very much their specials and convenience. I also had CATA pre-ordered, but just went and bought the digital update from Blizzard and canceled my pre-order. It will save me a trip to the store and generating packaging waste.
To be fair, I'm also just not a Cheddar eater. =) It's possibly why I call a lot of it bland.
I've had some really good 5-year and 10-year aged Cheddar, but the stuff is just too expensive for me to care to buy given my lack of care for the type of cheese.
Anyways, I'm a fan of French cheese as you can see in my aforementioned "cheese buffet" I had at my wedding.
Unfortunately, I don't think we ever thought of taking photos of the full spread. The worst part of my night, I never got to enjoy the cheese. hehe. I had a full plate but was to busy socializing that it up and walked away on me before I could have some.
If I'm ever in England, I'll try to remember to look you up. I'd like to try some of these fabled cheddars. =)
Cheers!
If you want to talk reality, forget beer comparisons, try cheese.
Disclaimer. I was born and raise in Wisconsin. In fact I still live here. I went to London for a year for school and married a French women. I've spent lot of time in France, a country that prides itself in cheese. In the US, Wisconsin prides itself for it's dairy products, including cheese.
America is home to the worlds most disgusting cheese.
I wouldn't go that far. It's certainly not as good as Europe, but there are reasons for the lack of variety and therefor flavor in cheese.
And they try to give me some Wisconsin cheddar which admittedly is not awful
That's because it's not awful, it's good. The problem is that cheddar simply is a bland cheese. Of course, you do have to find the good stuff. What cheese lover really gets existed over *chedder*?! lol It can go great on burgers (I still prefer swiss) but it's simply a dull cheese and that's not Wisconsin's fault. It's just as bad in Chedder England.
I don't know what it is.
It has to do with milk pasteurization laws. It prevents a lot of cheeses from being made. Lots of them goat cheese. That's why goat cheese in the US is always the same terrible crappy stuff and why you never see the variety of cheese you have in Europe. It has really grown to be a cultural thing.
But likewise, these same laws are the reason you don't see boxes of milk on store shelves, outside of refrigeration units. I was confused the first time I was in France at my wife's house and I had some cereal for breakfast. She had me pull a box of milk from the pantry. I thought all milk had to be kept refrigerated. Then we talked with the shop owner of Nalaa's cheese in Green Bay. He explained the pasteurization laws and why we can't get the good variety of cheese here and how he was limited on what he could import and sell.
American's who haven't spent much time outside of the US simply don't get exposed to what's out there. And those that do, might not be brave enough to ever try it because some of that cheese simply smells like a rotten skunk carcass in the Texas heat, but tastes like the heavens. But many people won't get past that smell. Case in point, we've turned many of my friends onto Rachlette cheese. That's not as pungent as some goat cheeses, but some had some real reservations of ever trying it. It smells up the kitchen when cutting it (who cut the cheese? There's a reason for that phrase).
Of course, one of the biggest complements at my recent wedding (in France) was the fact that we had a cheese buffet. A table with over 30 types of cheeses on it. You've never seen American's so confused and pleased. I shocked one of my friends to go and eat every kind of cheese he could find.
It really is a cheese repression.
Now, beer. Microbrews have really come a long way to pass by the basic Miller and Bud products we have. You can find some pretty good tasting beer in Wisconsin. New Glarus, Leienenkugels, Capital Brew, etc. are good beer. It's also much more expensive and in a place like Wisconsin where quantity can seem more important than quality, you'll find people still turn to Miller or Bud Light. And when you're use to drinking bland for so long, having something with flavor becomes too much of a shock.
I think the UK has a better quality average, but the US also suffers from gimmicks. There's a billion beer makers with a billion private label beers each trying to sound like their beer is something new or different. This one has LIME! This one has LEMON! This one is called "Fat Squirrel", this is "Moose Drool", oh, look, a Monty Python branded beer! Here's a Pumpkin beer!
*sigh*
It's complicated.
Point is, Wisconsin doesn't have crap for cheese. What they do make is good, but what they do make really isn't good cheese to begin with. You can thank US laws and now US culture as it
I think it was a Moose.
You're over thinking this. All you need is a wedge shaped ship that shoots square bullets.
If you want to know why it failed, ask the subscribers why they left, and then pick out the common points.
I never even finished my 30 day "free" game time upon game launch.
It wasn't all bad. I really liked the "social quests" thing. Where, all of a sudden mobs would spawn and "attack the town" and anyone in that area could help kill the mobs and all get rewarded for helping, instead of fighting against each other to finish each individuals quest requirements.
The class concepts were interesting. But as TFS states, it definitely was pushed out the door WAAAAY too soon in terms of benefit too the game. But the problem is, it would have taken another year to have polished the game to meet the bar of, say, Warcraft and I imagine that company simply wasn't going to keep dropping money into a hole.
What that has to do with SW:TOR, I'm not sure. Bioware has a lot of funds thanks to their high-grossing titles that they're still releasing (Dragon Age and Mass Effect for example) that can keep funding a project until it's ready. On top of publisher support (EA) as well as Lucas Arts support (how many art concepts and designs are coming from them? How much 'content' is mostly already established thanks to KotOR?) To be fair, again, KotOR 2 wasn't good for Bioware.
And I've been following SW:TOR for a while. I can say they definitely appear to be doing a lot of design decisions right. That is, until I heard they're trying to shoe-horn space combat and regular ground combat into the "Vanilla" game. *shudder* That's never turned out well so far.
And to be further critical... I saw the first game-play footage they showed for, I think, E3? It really, really didn't look very impressive. It was *way* to standard MMORPG when it needs to be -->STAR WARS
Of course, I say this, but I really don't have much of a solution to avoid it expect making it more action/hack&slash RPG than the standard RPG. It's, no doubt, not an easy thing to do or there would be a ton of awesome MMO's people could choose from... instead of WoW and then Niche MMO 1, Niche MMO 2 and "Hey Look! Everyquest is still around and releasing a new XPAC!" LOL, I wouldn't be surprised if EQ1 has more players than EQ2. =P
Warhammer sucked because it was, obviously, released WAY too soon. There was only one zone with any reasonable polish (the one with the burning Windmill), classes weren't complete, **STARTING** zones were so buggy you couldn't complete quests. The bugs go on...
As TFS states, this is why I know so many people tried and left the game within days/weeks and not renewing past their 'free' 30 day included play time.
There was some good parts of the game that you could see the potential... but it wasn't cutting it.
Fact of the matter is, there's just much better choices out there than to release a sub-par game. And MMO's cost WAY to much that some people just don't comprehend what it takes.
I have no idea where/how to dispose of or recycle the oil
This is something I had to learn (I change my own oil on both my and my wife's car as well as air filter... not spark plugs though).
Most cities will have a municipal yard you can drop off oil, big pieces of stuff (often metals that can be recycled), and particularly big lawn trimmings (branches, bushes, etc).
Also, (I don't recall if it's Federal or State) we are recycling computer/electronic parts. All of which have to be dropped off at the city "dump" (see municipal yard).
Call your town hall, ask them where you can do it. I'd say check their website but I never have an easy time finding that kind of information on a government website. Usually they'll have a big bin to dump the oil in or a place to leave the old oil jugs (if you put the dirty oil back into the new oil containers).
Hope that helps
Mainly the space combat though, the ground combat was horrific mainly due to the dumb as shit AI.
ST:O was something I was interested in at one point, and for a while I made a point of trying out most 'big' MMO releases, but I skipped this one.
With that said, how is their AI "dumb as shit" different than any other MMO? There hasn't been an MMO that I've played that has smart AI. All NPC's simply do is "aggro PC, take direct path between PC and NPC neglecting most boundary pathing and obstacle, and auto attack, cast spell/ability when not on cooldown".
Boss AI? Nothing but a scripted event. "at x% health, move to this location and spit out this dialog, and follow new pattern." Not something I would really classify as AI, as some sort of 'thinking', or probably better defined as reacting, animate.
And I believe this to be the case, though I'm no expect, simply because having any kind of 'smart AI' would be a pretty big resource drain on the server, that's trying to manage a lot of world events already, without having to add more CPU cycles to learn a NPC to react appropriately.
So, I'm curious, what made ST:O's ground combat AI so much worse? I don't deny it was bad, I'm just curious as how one defines it given the general lack of AI in this genre.
I saw Avatar in 3D and wished I saved $5 and saw it in 2D. Oh, I enjoyed the film but I really didn't like the 3D. If anything, it took something away from the film by having to wear these heavy bulky glasses the whole time and some of the blurry-ness. Crap-tastic. There's one film I'm going to be willing to see in 3D and that will be the new Tron and I'll be finding an IMAX to see it in too.
But I'll certainly be picking which films I'll be willing to see in 3D and be going with as many 2D options as possible.