EA allowed Todd McFarlane to design content for an expansion.
Actually, that's not precisely true. McFarlane's designs, the revived Blackthorn, the Juka and the Meer races were all originally intended to populate the UO sequel, which went through a number of name changes and was eventually shitcanned because EA thought it would compete with the original. Those designs were sat upon for several years, before they finally made their way into an expansion.
More like tinfoil-hat bullshit. Sorry folks, but Morgellons is a particularly sad expression of schizophrenia, not a strange space-age malady that makes you break out in deep-pile shag.
It's particularly telling that the 'big' sites that 'cover' this 'malady' don't actually show pictures of symptomatic sufferers or anything noteworthy like that. No, instead we get useless SEM photos of fibres, bits of dust and ECU shots of cat scratches.
Pretty much. They're in a tizzy now because Sony decided to cut their losses and move out in a different direction, depriving them of what I'm sure they thought was a guaranteed source of revenue.
Your fifteen minutes of ill-gotten fame are up. You owe us for twenty more, now. Oblivion is going to be a blip on the radar-- its install base is a fraction of GTA's, at best, and while there may be code in there for nudity, the hoops that you have to go through to get to it are hardly worthy of spectacle. Polygon nipples vs. a full-blown sexual mini-game, there's a broad difference of degree, there. One makes for great action shots on Fox News, the other just supports arguments about virtual violence against women (since one can only strip corpses, unless using the editor or stripping a player character); one is spectacular news, the other is sadly hashed over.
I think this reads more as an attempt to drive traffic to his site. And if it isn't, it's a pretty loud cry for help. Just think, this could be the next stage in the evolution of cutting.
They do it for the same reason that we get stuck with stuff like Starforce DRM and software that needs to be patched out of the box: because people buy it. If you want to stop it, folks, go to see a different movie or just do something else. Yes, it's the same argument that's made for lashing out against shitty software, but this time there are no mitigating circumstances like patches (unless you're George Lucas), and the hours you might spend enjoying yourself between bugs cropping up is replaced by ninety minutes you could have spent being actually entertained.
Ultimately, I think it's best that the core browser be as simple to work with as possible, and that includes the default bookmarking system: no unnecessary frills, ideally something portable across machines and between browsers. A hypertext bookmark list like Mozilla's works, but as you noted, it gets cumbersome if you've got a lot of sites to keep track of.
I don't use sites like del.icio.us, but I do appreciate that they're available, just like I appreciate the availability of the dozens of Firefox extensions that I don't use either. They're great for the people that can actually put them through their paces, but for the rest of us it's just unnecessary complexity and features we'd never use.
Getting back onto the main topic, I'm glad that places have been rolled back at least for a while; atop the memory leaks and assorted other bugs, the last thing that Firefox needs is a bookmarks/favourites/places/whatever interface that's complex-looking enough to send new users screaming for IE again.
Uh, yes? The last thing that I need are my bookmarks going AWOL because there's a router down, and it affords me at least a thin layer of privacy. If I need to find a site on someone else's machine, I'll Google it. I have no interest in sharing my bookmarks or aiding some outfit's attempts at trend plotting or data mining without being compensated, either. If I wanted my bookmarks on the Web, I'd just sign up for a Geocities site or a Google home page and upload bookmarks.html as index.html.
Yeah, subjectivity is the reason why I bracketed "young" off. I've heard the definition reach down into the tweens and stretch into the mid-twenties. Social habits like drinking, partying, playing games and the like tend to be pretty stable through that long period though, from personal observation at least. The only real differences between the younger and older ends of the set tend to be availability ("let's see some ID") and personal mobility ("Mom, can you give me a lift to Billy's party?").
...how gamers are any different from other [young] adults, in that they as a group tend to enjoy drinking and experimenting with drugs? For that matter, how are 'gamers' defined as separate from young adults as a general population?
And for the question of the year: Who really gives a shit? Come on, young people are demonized as a matter of course, particularly for drinking or doing drugs. Trying to draw a causal link between games and that sort of behavior is unnecessary.
"That time for women in games" and shudder at the implications?
"Lara, you're going to have to swim through this shark infested water to get to the next ruin."
"I certainly hope not. Blood attracts sharks quicker than anything else."
"My god, you're injured? Don't you have any medical kits l-- oh."
<icily>"Quite."
TES: Arena. Dull-witted and buggy. No major patches.
TES: Daggerfall. Buggier than an ant farm. 'Enjoyed' a litany of patches that didn't actually fix major things like the plotline stopping, quest-critical monsters from falling into the void, or unbelievably awful dungeon design.
TES: Morrowind. Trades the majority of bugs for poor mechanical and art design. Who, seriously, thought it was a good idea to make every enchanted item shine like it was covered in an inch of iridescent plastic? Weird bugs, like NPCs on boats falling through into the water and drowning, remain. Poor design decisions, like the ludicrously expensive assassin armor all but given to the PC after Tribunal is installed, are added after the fact. Internal mechanics are horribly broken, ranging from the infinitely abusable alchemy to the arcane min-maxing that the level advancement and attribute gain system all but demands.
TES: Oblivion. Keeps Morrowind's obnoxious level advancement system, plus adds the insult upon injury of monsters leveling with you. Bandits running around in king's ransoms worth of equipment, 'psychic guards' that punish you for taking too long in completing quests, early quests that are virtual deathtraps (including one that can lock a first level character in a small room with two heavily armed adversaries), and atop all of that, an army of CTD bugs.
Okay, I'll harsh on him for being a martinet, an incorrigible asshole, and being absolutely unsuited to the industry that he's been a limpet on for years.
Take a good look at the core rules-- you know, the ones that change with every book, despite the claims that all of them use the same rulebase. Compare it to the D&D rewrites that you did when you were fifteen (everyone did it, so don't deny it). Notice any similarities? How about the sidelong rants about 'neutral alignments are stupid!' or the two page rant about people complaining that the obtuse magic system in the Federation of Magic sourcebook.
Consider multiple reports from people that have had the misfortune of working with or under KS: he can't take criticism and simply cannot abide the idea that someone has done something better than he has. Just look at the insane rants that preface half the Palladium library, and spatter the rest like gobbets of Elder Geek spit.
And last but not least, let's take a long, hard look at his idiotic attempts to go multimedia. Long, long ago, there was a piece of software that purported to be a RIFTS game master's assistant. It was officially sanctioned, praised and all the rest... and was a godawful pile of dung. It was entirely possible to accidentally remove entries for equipment, spells or the like from the program's internal database... but utterly impossible to actually add new data. The interface was abysmal, and support was nonexistent from the coders or from Palladium; inquiries regarding fan-patches were rebuffed very coldly. And now, look at this: a video game, on the Ngage. The platform was dead in the water from the beginning, and they still went ahead with development. Did Siembieda expect the RIFTS name to draw the thousands that still buy his cut and paste crap out of their basements and out to their local cellular stores, to buy a shitty title and an even worse device to run it on?
So now he's resorted to 'buy my prints!' Not that he had anything to do with the prints, unless he's returned to awkwardly aping Kevin Long's art style. Why doesn't he just do what he usually does, and copy and paste whole sections of rulebooks into new source, instead?
Going by that definition, videogames are MORE APTLY called art than a photograph, painting, sculpture, or anything else considered art by the mainstream. If you consider that a videogame combines the elements of sounds, colors, forms, movements, AND other elements for the production of the beautiful in a graphic medium, it seems logically sound to count at least some as art.
So does a cartoon. So does a movie. I can guarantee you that most of the first and a woeful number of the second don't qualify as anything approaching art. Art is not just what Dictionary.com prescribes, nor is it a checklist akin to the sales points on the back of a box of software.
Video games are a medium. To claim that they are art because they combine some of Column A with a couple of bits from Column B, with a side from Column C is ludicrous. On the other hand, declaring that games can't be art is just as laughable. Unfortunately, most games are trite, simple-minded affairs. The ones that go beyond that tend to be pastiche or bog-standard genre pieces at best-- and while that's fun, it doesn't exactly push the envelope of human understanding.
After jumping ship from Microsoft to Infinium, like a dot-bomb era flea, Bacchus' opinions are worth next to nothing in my opinion. The man fucked the dog for the sake of a ridiculously obvious scam that's resulted in nothing but ridicule, frivolous lawsuits and vaporware; anything he has to say about the industry he clearly has no understanding of is a desperate attempt to rebuild his annihilated credibility.
$10 is not a lot of money, and it's well worth it considering that without it there wouldn't even be any more updates. Garry hasn't sold out, he just found some more motivation. Besides, if you don't want to spend the money, keep playing 9.0.4, no one is stopping you.
Ten bucks is also the lowest price that Steam is rigged to accept. I'm not saying that Garry would have decided to charge less, given the opportunity, but he certainly could have ended up charging more. Ragdoll Kung-Fu, or Darwinia, anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
Just to see the time-travelling aliens bid furiously on the tox'utat, or however it's spelled.
It's particularly telling that the 'big' sites that 'cover' this 'malady' don't actually show pictures of symptomatic sufferers or anything noteworthy like that. No, instead we get useless SEM photos of fibres, bits of dust and ECU shots of cat scratches.
Yet another fucking literal definition for signal-to-noise.
"Physician, route thyself."
Pretty much. They're in a tizzy now because Sony decided to cut their losses and move out in a different direction, depriving them of what I'm sure they thought was a guaranteed source of revenue.
Your fifteen minutes of ill-gotten fame are up. You owe us for twenty more, now. Oblivion is going to be a blip on the radar-- its install base is a fraction of GTA's, at best, and while there may be code in there for nudity, the hoops that you have to go through to get to it are hardly worthy of spectacle. Polygon nipples vs. a full-blown sexual mini-game, there's a broad difference of degree, there. One makes for great action shots on Fox News, the other just supports arguments about virtual violence against women (since one can only strip corpses, unless using the editor or stripping a player character); one is spectacular news, the other is sadly hashed over.
Of course, there's a reason why Planet Hulk is transpiring at the same time...
No idea what their parent company might be, but I found their site to be next to absolutely useless.
I think this reads more as an attempt to drive traffic to his site. And if it isn't, it's a pretty loud cry for help. Just think, this could be the next stage in the evolution of cutting.
You do realize that unregistered people can post to Slashdot, don't you?
Some are, at least. There's a godawful port of Bejeweled that comes pre-loaded (only as a demo, natch) on my Motorola V220.
They do it for the same reason that we get stuck with stuff like Starforce DRM and software that needs to be patched out of the box: because people buy it. If you want to stop it, folks, go to see a different movie or just do something else. Yes, it's the same argument that's made for lashing out against shitty software, but this time there are no mitigating circumstances like patches (unless you're George Lucas), and the hours you might spend enjoying yourself between bugs cropping up is replaced by ninety minutes you could have spent being actually entertained.
The Hotel Coral Essex was in part two. I know this, because I was blissfully unaware of the existence of parts 3 and 4.
I don't use sites like del.icio.us, but I do appreciate that they're available, just like I appreciate the availability of the dozens of Firefox extensions that I don't use either. They're great for the people that can actually put them through their paces, but for the rest of us it's just unnecessary complexity and features we'd never use.
Getting back onto the main topic, I'm glad that places have been rolled back at least for a while; atop the memory leaks and assorted other bugs, the last thing that Firefox needs is a bookmarks/favourites/places/whatever interface that's complex-looking enough to send new users screaming for IE again.
Uh, yes? The last thing that I need are my bookmarks going AWOL because there's a router down, and it affords me at least a thin layer of privacy. If I need to find a site on someone else's machine, I'll Google it. I have no interest in sharing my bookmarks or aiding some outfit's attempts at trend plotting or data mining without being compensated, either. If I wanted my bookmarks on the Web, I'd just sign up for a Geocities site or a Google home page and upload bookmarks.html as index.html.
Yeah, subjectivity is the reason why I bracketed "young" off. I've heard the definition reach down into the tweens and stretch into the mid-twenties. Social habits like drinking, partying, playing games and the like tend to be pretty stable through that long period though, from personal observation at least. The only real differences between the younger and older ends of the set tend to be availability ("let's see some ID") and personal mobility ("Mom, can you give me a lift to Billy's party?").
And for the question of the year: Who really gives a shit? Come on, young people are demonized as a matter of course, particularly for drinking or doing drugs. Trying to draw a causal link between games and that sort of behavior is unnecessary.
"Lara, you're going to have to swim through this shark infested water to get to the next ruin."
"I certainly hope not. Blood attracts sharks quicker than anything else."
"My god, you're injured? Don't you have any medical kits l-- oh."
<icily>"Quite."
TES: Arena. Dull-witted and buggy. No major patches.
TES: Daggerfall. Buggier than an ant farm. 'Enjoyed' a litany of patches that didn't actually fix major things like the plotline stopping, quest-critical monsters from falling into the void, or unbelievably awful dungeon design.
TES: Morrowind. Trades the majority of bugs for poor mechanical and art design. Who, seriously, thought it was a good idea to make every enchanted item shine like it was covered in an inch of iridescent plastic? Weird bugs, like NPCs on boats falling through into the water and drowning, remain. Poor design decisions, like the ludicrously expensive assassin armor all but given to the PC after Tribunal is installed, are added after the fact. Internal mechanics are horribly broken, ranging from the infinitely abusable alchemy to the arcane min-maxing that the level advancement and attribute gain system all but demands.
TES: Oblivion. Keeps Morrowind's obnoxious level advancement system, plus adds the insult upon injury of monsters leveling with you. Bandits running around in king's ransoms worth of equipment, 'psychic guards' that punish you for taking too long in completing quests, early quests that are virtual deathtraps (including one that can lock a first level character in a small room with two heavily armed adversaries), and atop all of that, an army of CTD bugs.
Book formatting so bad, they published a three hundred page index of Rifts crap to date a few years ago. An index.
Take a good look at the core rules-- you know, the ones that change with every book, despite the claims that all of them use the same rulebase. Compare it to the D&D rewrites that you did when you were fifteen (everyone did it, so don't deny it). Notice any similarities? How about the sidelong rants about 'neutral alignments are stupid!' or the two page rant about people complaining that the obtuse magic system in the Federation of Magic sourcebook.
Consider multiple reports from people that have had the misfortune of working with or under KS: he can't take criticism and simply cannot abide the idea that someone has done something better than he has. Just look at the insane rants that preface half the Palladium library, and spatter the rest like gobbets of Elder Geek spit.
And last but not least, let's take a long, hard look at his idiotic attempts to go multimedia. Long, long ago, there was a piece of software that purported to be a RIFTS game master's assistant. It was officially sanctioned, praised and all the rest... and was a godawful pile of dung. It was entirely possible to accidentally remove entries for equipment, spells or the like from the program's internal database... but utterly impossible to actually add new data. The interface was abysmal, and support was nonexistent from the coders or from Palladium; inquiries regarding fan-patches were rebuffed very coldly. And now, look at this: a video game, on the Ngage. The platform was dead in the water from the beginning, and they still went ahead with development. Did Siembieda expect the RIFTS name to draw the thousands that still buy his cut and paste crap out of their basements and out to their local cellular stores, to buy a shitty title and an even worse device to run it on?
So now he's resorted to 'buy my prints!' Not that he had anything to do with the prints, unless he's returned to awkwardly aping Kevin Long's art style. Why doesn't he just do what he usually does, and copy and paste whole sections of rulebooks into new source, instead?
Video games are a medium. To claim that they are art because they combine some of Column A with a couple of bits from Column B, with a side from Column C is ludicrous. On the other hand, declaring that games can't be art is just as laughable. Unfortunately, most games are trite, simple-minded affairs. The ones that go beyond that tend to be pastiche or bog-standard genre pieces at best-- and while that's fun, it doesn't exactly push the envelope of human understanding.
After jumping ship from Microsoft to Infinium, like a dot-bomb era flea, Bacchus' opinions are worth next to nothing in my opinion. The man fucked the dog for the sake of a ridiculously obvious scam that's resulted in nothing but ridicule, frivolous lawsuits and vaporware; anything he has to say about the industry he clearly has no understanding of is a desperate attempt to rebuild his annihilated credibility.