Those who write, promote or sell proprietary software betray each and every one of those ideals. A more accurate statement would read something like: The OISV is a co-operative of software developers, marketers, distributors, and retailers that combine their thoughts and ideas to make money by denying people the freedom to use, study, modify and share computer programs.
A more accurate statement would read something like: I hate proprietary software, but am far too bigoted to acknowledge that this is nothing more than my personal preference. Instead I see it as an absolute universal truth, and anyone who doesn't see eye to eye with me is evil.
I'm sure theft is very clearly defined in the law - all types of theft.
You are correct. The law is actually very clear in distinguishing between copyright infringement and theft. Somehow you're such a failure that your being right is actually proof of how stupid your point is.
How short sighted of you. What if you'd been crawling through a gigantic desert of shit for days in search of sustenance? I imagine a peanut would make good eatin' at that point.
What the fuck? Why won't this analogy break? We're pushing it as hard as we can and it just won't give! It's too fucking accurate!
Since when were we talking specifically about 3? I think I have version 1.
(Really, you were able to edit the car prices?)
LOL HAX.
a career mode
Not the PGR I played. That's a game that wouldn't have looked odd if 'INSERT COIN' flashed in the corner. Unlockable content works well in a career mode context, because it's a central part of the design. The PGR I know is basically an arcade racer with some minimal saveable data. Your only goals are to win races and to drive stylishly.
with 'uninspired' cars
Misquote
Which Ferrari was that? Or was it the Ford GT?
The first few groups of cars, which were impossible to avoid, contained boring shit like minis and SUVs.
don't like that style of game
I do, but I only like it games where it appears to be there for a gameplay-related reason like a fully-fledged career mode. In PGR it seems more like a lazy way to distinguish the game from a pure arcade title.
seems to make a difference in this conversation
It doesn't. I called the guy a kid because I find the idea of having someone manage my leisure time for me juvenile, and he seems to be in favour of the idea.
It makes sense in Oblivion. Oblivion is an RPG, so it's sequential. It doesn't make any sense for Oblivion to be any other way, and people not wanting to unlock content will have the sense to not buy Oblivion, because it's by its very nature a time sink.
But Project Gotham? An arcadey game like that ought to be its own reward. What logical reason is there for keeping the fun cars from me? The badges and achievements system has nothing to do with unlockable content, and I will agree that it is a good part of the game. In fact, it could be just as good if they didn't force you to race uninspiring shitty cars for several hours. If you don't have much time on your hands, those several hours will take weeks to accumulate.
And I know from experience that Project Gotham is fun without the car unlocking treadmill. After a few sloooooooow laps in some crappy learner car, I thought "Fuck this". So I copied it to my HDD, found the data files, and edited the prices of all the cars to 0. Rebooted, bought up every single car, and have had a great time ever since with the fun goal-oriented reward systems that you yourself describe. You know, the ones based around gameplay. Apart from that first race, I haven't touched the low end stuff. Maybe that will provide good (if a little hardcore) replay value later on. All of the fun, none of the unlocking of content.
Agreed, I think the article's author probably just sucks at modern games. For me most of the fun comes from finding the hidden stuff, seeing if I can beat the game on hard or best my buddies high score.
Look at the name of the site: gamers with jobs. Translation - been playing longer than you.
No mention of the difficulty of the process of unlocking
High scores? Hard mode? You call that "modern"? Just how old are you anyway?
High scores? Hard mode? What the fuck do they have to do with this topic?
For that matter, hidden stuff? Not the same as unlocking, and you know it (I hope)
Locked content is part of that, it keeps the game fresh longer and gives you some goals to shoot for.
No, locked content isn't "part of that". That is an entire debate in itself (one which you would lose because of the number of counterexamples), not some self-evident point you can just state.
If they need to artificially drip feed the content, then their game has much deeper design issues to worry about
Goals to shoot for? We grownups are past that, kid. We're quite capable of managing our own leisure time. We can even maintain an interest in something without being patronised with arbitrary rewards.
SMB didn't have a level select screen because it was a sequential-level platformer. What logical sense would it make to have the levels unlocked? But you can't take this tiny subset of games and use to argue about the entire medium.
What about Mario Kart and Tennis? Not sequential in any way, so you get all the content up front. Yes, games are all about challenges, but to argue that unlocking content is the only possible fun challenge is so incredibly short sighted that it makes me want to throw my computer in the bin and go play basketball. Unfortunately it's 3 in the morning.
In conclusion, your post is bad and you should feel bad.
[*] See that the personal infinitive is irrelevant
[ ] Make the link to your own example
[ ] Explain why you implied that the subjunctive was relevant to sarcasm
You have games like Mario and Zelda, whose unlockable content is logically tied to your progress through the game. People with no time on their hands will naturally avoid those games anyway, so huzzah.
And then there are games like Mario Kart/Tennis/Party, where pretty much all the content is available right off the bat. And those games are also quite well optimised for short bouts of gaming.
What gets to me is the way some games just seem to have unlockable content because it 'just happened' that way, with apparently no thought in it. For example, most racing games. In career sims it makes sense, but an arcade game like Project Gotham has absolutely no reasoning behind it. Nobody wants to drive those crappy cars. They are not part of any natural progression. Either dump them or stop forcing their use.
The worst thing about that is that Project Gotham is just the sort of arcadey racer that I would expect someone short on spare time to buy. Intuitive handling, arcadey gameplay, and the nice clear time boundaries of a race period. And then they spring bullshit like that on you. Bad design.
Tekken 3's unlockable characters was another one. It's nothing more than a software ploy to force a hardware purchase (memory card). Unlocking the characters wasn't a 'rewarding process', as it could be done in an hour or so, but it was just a little too time consuming to put up with regularly. Bastards.
And what of those gamers who want a fulfilling first play through (meaning no cheats) but don't have those 500 hours to spare? They are a growing market.
Yes, that sounds like an adequate description of why they already make games this way. Now let me welcome you to a little thing we call 'the topic at hand', which is the fact that many people don't have time for this kind of game.
Oh yeah, well, I don't even bother taking pictures. I just walk around with a few dozen hi-res wifi webcams attached to my body. If I see anything interesting during my day, I just dig it out when I get home and save it. So ner.
You really should have said some of that in your reply, which . It's good stuff, whereas your other comment was basically a reiteration of the point that your parent post was a reply to. But then hindsight is 20/20, as they say.
The same sort of stuff will be said of Linux in a few years.
Linux is so easy to use securely! You should come to Linux, and you won't have to worry any more!
Will become:
Linux is so easy to use securely that it has attracted lots of stupid people who don't take care of their computers
And on that day someone will write a blog post about how they liked Linux before it was cool but now it's just so lame because just anyone can run it. These will be the same people who go around today promoting Linux as being Ready For The Desktop.
magic quotes escapes user-submitted data with backslashes to make it suitable for use in database queries. It also keeps track of it, and even if you substr the string it keeps track of the backslashing and makes sure everything's still alright.
A reason to take it away is that not all data is for the database. It's a strange assumption to make, and certainly shouldn't be the default. Unfortunately it usually is the default, and now it's entrenched. Lots of people have come to rely on it as if it were a static part of the language instead of a setting.
Incidentally, I'm a total programming noob with LAMP as my platform. I write crappy buggy insecure PHP code with embedded HTML and SQL. Even I have the few short lines of compatibility code required to ensure that things continue to work safely in the abscence of magic quotes. It's not hard, and I actually doubt that the problem is as bad as the uberleet programming gods of the internets are saying.
And allow people to slip even further into ignorance!? And then what happens when the settings change!? It'll be the end of civilisation as we know it!
Sadly this endless repetition of contradicting points is the closest a Slashdot discussion ever comes to realising the need for a balance between two extremes. Are you being really clever and acting this concept out, or are you really just repeating the point made by the great-grandparent post in response to the grandparent?
Lasting News doesn't deserve a link. Their story basically does what Slashdot does, which is to link to other articles, summarise them, and provide a quote. They add nothing. To link to them contributes to this annoying aggregation spam which makes researching a topic through Google a tedious process of weeding out shit like this.
The usual response to this is that they "deserve credit for the find", which is bullshit too. For one, it's most likely not a find at all, but an article noticed in an RSS feed. And anyway, who cares about "the find"? Most of the "this is a cool site" links that we've been seeing lately come from Digg. Do those (lazy) submitters start their submissions with "Digg has a story on..."?
The first paragraph of your reply is totally irrelevant to my comment. Read the whole thread. The guy was asking about a legal way, someone said revolution, I replied to that, and pointed out that revolutions are also known as terrorism (ie. in the news).
And I'm not committing an error. Revolution means terrorism now, at least according to TV and newspapers.
Well, think about it. Who decides to prefix their names with 'honorable'? The people running the country? Congress! If you don't like it, go massacre the inhabitants of some other country and create a democratic government there with self-congratulatory prefixes banned. Think of it as a fork.
Slashdot Mirror
Those who write, promote or sell proprietary software betray each and every one of those ideals. A more accurate statement would read something like: The OISV is a co-operative of software developers, marketers, distributors, and retailers that combine their thoughts and ideas to make money by denying people the freedom to use, study, modify and share computer programs.
A more accurate statement would read something like: I hate proprietary software, but am far too bigoted to acknowledge that this is nothing more than my personal preference. Instead I see it as an absolute universal truth, and anyone who doesn't see eye to eye with me is evil.
How short sighted of you. What if you'd been crawling through a gigantic desert of shit for days in search of sustenance? I imagine a peanut would make good eatin' at that point.
What the fuck? Why won't this analogy break? We're pushing it as hard as we can and it just won't give! It's too fucking accurate!
There's a riot in the bazaar!
Quick! Let's hide in the cathedral!
It makes sense in Oblivion. Oblivion is an RPG, so it's sequential. It doesn't make any sense for Oblivion to be any other way, and people not wanting to unlock content will have the sense to not buy Oblivion, because it's by its very nature a time sink.
But Project Gotham? An arcadey game like that ought to be its own reward. What logical reason is there for keeping the fun cars from me? The badges and achievements system has nothing to do with unlockable content, and I will agree that it is a good part of the game. In fact, it could be just as good if they didn't force you to race uninspiring shitty cars for several hours. If you don't have much time on your hands, those several hours will take weeks to accumulate.
And I know from experience that Project Gotham is fun without the car unlocking treadmill. After a few sloooooooow laps in some crappy learner car, I thought "Fuck this". So I copied it to my HDD, found the data files, and edited the prices of all the cars to 0. Rebooted, bought up every single car, and have had a great time ever since with the fun goal-oriented reward systems that you yourself describe. You know, the ones based around gameplay. Apart from that first race, I haven't touched the low end stuff. Maybe that will provide good (if a little hardcore) replay value later on. All of the fun, none of the unlocking of content.
SMB didn't have a level select screen because it was a sequential-level platformer. What logical sense would it make to have the levels unlocked? But you can't take this tiny subset of games and use to argue about the entire medium.
What about Mario Kart and Tennis? Not sequential in any way, so you get all the content up front. Yes, games are all about challenges, but to argue that unlocking content is the only possible fun challenge is so incredibly short sighted that it makes me want to throw my computer in the bin and go play basketball. Unfortunately it's 3 in the morning.
In conclusion, your post is bad and you should feel bad.
[*] See that the personal infinitive is irrelevant
[ ] Make the link to your own example
[ ] Explain why you implied that the subjunctive was relevant to sarcasm
You have games like Mario and Zelda, whose unlockable content is logically tied to your progress through the game. People with no time on their hands will naturally avoid those games anyway, so huzzah.
And then there are games like Mario Kart/Tennis/Party, where pretty much all the content is available right off the bat. And those games are also quite well optimised for short bouts of gaming.
What gets to me is the way some games just seem to have unlockable content because it 'just happened' that way, with apparently no thought in it. For example, most racing games. In career sims it makes sense, but an arcade game like Project Gotham has absolutely no reasoning behind it. Nobody wants to drive those crappy cars. They are not part of any natural progression. Either dump them or stop forcing their use.
The worst thing about that is that Project Gotham is just the sort of arcadey racer that I would expect someone short on spare time to buy. Intuitive handling, arcadey gameplay, and the nice clear time boundaries of a race period. And then they spring bullshit like that on you. Bad design.
Tekken 3's unlockable characters was another one. It's nothing more than a software ploy to force a hardware purchase (memory card). Unlocking the characters wasn't a 'rewarding process', as it could be done in an hour or so, but it was just a little too time consuming to put up with regularly. Bastards.
And what of those gamers who want a fulfilling first play through (meaning no cheats) but don't have those 500 hours to spare? They are a growing market.
Yes, that sounds like an adequate description of why they already make games this way. Now let me welcome you to a little thing we call 'the topic at hand', which is the fact that many people don't have time for this kind of game.
And let me introduce you to something called the personal infinitive.
Oh yeah, well, I don't even bother taking pictures. I just walk around with a few dozen hi-res wifi webcams attached to my body. If I see anything interesting during my day, I just dig it out when I get home and save it. So ner.
You really should have said some of that in your reply, which . It's good stuff, whereas your other comment was basically a reiteration of the point that your parent post was a reply to. But then hindsight is 20/20, as they say.
The circle of life continues.
I'm a noob LAMP programmer who first started out in BASIC, you insensitive clod!
magic quotes escapes user-submitted data with backslashes to make it suitable for use in database queries. It also keeps track of it, and even if you substr the string it keeps track of the backslashing and makes sure everything's still alright.
A reason to take it away is that not all data is for the database. It's a strange assumption to make, and certainly shouldn't be the default. Unfortunately it usually is the default, and now it's entrenched. Lots of people have come to rely on it as if it were a static part of the language instead of a setting.
Incidentally, I'm a total programming noob with LAMP as my platform. I write crappy buggy insecure PHP code with embedded HTML and SQL. Even I have the few short lines of compatibility code required to ensure that things continue to work safely in the abscence of magic quotes. It's not hard, and I actually doubt that the problem is as bad as the uberleet programming gods of the internets are saying.
And allow people to slip even further into ignorance!? And then what happens when the settings change!? It'll be the end of civilisation as we know it!
Sadly this endless repetition of contradicting points is the closest a Slashdot discussion ever comes to realising the need for a balance between two extremes. Are you being really clever and acting this concept out, or are you really just repeating the point made by the great-grandparent post in response to the grandparent?
Precisely because there isn't "more on this" at Lasting News.
Lasting News doesn't deserve a link. Their story basically does what Slashdot does, which is to link to other articles, summarise them, and provide a quote. They add nothing. To link to them contributes to this annoying aggregation spam which makes researching a topic through Google a tedious process of weeding out shit like this.
The usual response to this is that they "deserve credit for the find", which is bullshit too. For one, it's most likely not a find at all, but an article noticed in an RSS feed. And anyway, who cares about "the find"? Most of the "this is a cool site" links that we've been seeing lately come from Digg. Do those (lazy) submitters start their submissions with "Digg has a story on..."?
And I'm not committing an error. Revolution means terrorism now, at least according to TV and newspapers.
Well, think about it. Who decides to prefix their names with 'honorable'? The people running the country? Congress!
If you don't like it, go massacre the inhabitants of some other country and create a democratic government there with self-congratulatory prefixes banned.
Think of it as a fork.