Fiat currencies haven't caused our problems. Rampant speculation on the housing market has. Let's not forget the Tulip Mania a few hundred years ago (when currency was gold-backed!) that resulted in much the same thing.
The problem is a lot of people took on a lot of big risks, and they lost. And now the taxpayer is on the hook.
The problem is also because we *all* started believing the same lie: that there is a free lunch. We all started buying up house after house, stretching ourselves thin with impossibly large mortgages, in the hope that we can score a quick buck by flipping it later. Nobody ever thought about the fact that there's *no value being created* anywhere in the system to justify rising house prices. Nothing.
People used to invest in things that have real value. You invest in a company because they create a compelling product that people will buy. But of course, nowadays (especially if you look at the tech industry), companies with no discernible profitability, or products of questionable usefulness, are still getting funded because of boneheaded investors who are not interested in long term growth, but rather their exit strategy.
Like the housing bubble that's killing us right now, the tech bubble will soon burst. Get your money out of the markets now, or at least into companies that create actual products with actual demand.
I would argue today's games are about fun. I don't sit down after work to prove my awesomeness to the game. I want to have fun, not pass a gauntlet of impossible challenges.
That being said, a game shouldn't be TOO easy, and by and large action games with the regen system *aren't* too easy, simply by the fact that now you are facing a barrage of fire from all sides, and dying is still a distinct possibility. All it does is keep the player IN the game, as opposed to slinking off to look for medkits.
One of the major problems with old games is that the player is never aware of what's coming next. Various small battles can whittle him down to, say, 10 percent health, and suddenly you hit him with a boss battle. He can't go back and heal, now he just has to reload a gajillion times because you made him beat a boss with only 10 health points.
IMHO the state of the gameplay art has advanced substantially since then, and regenerating health is one way of doing it.
I have nothing against reloading the game to try again. I have a problem when the game forces me into a situation where I have to do this 15 times over.
Going and hiding and tooling around with medkits in an inventory system isn't a great game mechanic though.
I agree. I think excessive inventory shuffling was something that was a distinct weakness of DX1. Honestly, I want to hack something, kill something, etc etc, not play virtual Tetris with my inventory items. I'm in favor of a simpler system - e.g. only X weapons, only X lockpicks, etc. Juggling medkits is also not a great way to go.
BioShock handled this well. You can carry around a certain number of medkits that are quick to access without flipping through menus. I think DX would be greatly improved if we kept limited health, and made the healing system more robust.
In fact, at the risk of being an armchair game designer, I would propose something like this:
- GRAW style regeneration... the game will ensure you have enough health to go through an encounter, and you won't ever be stuck in a situation where you have 3 health points and staring down 10 enemies. Regeneration will top out based on your "injury level".
- No medkits. Instead have healing sources in the level. Topping up is resource intensive and can't be done constantly (i.e. run in, shoot guys, get hurt, run back to healing station, repeat).
Deus Ex was never about the immersion. The graphics were lackluster even when it came out, the music was often distractingly bad, and the voice acting was a little sub-par as well.
But keep in mind of the game's origins: Warren Spector started his career as a traditional gamer - which is to say card games, board games, and the such. He knows that to make a fun game you don't necessarily need VR goggles and surround sound.
Think about a game like Risk. Tons of fun, but not immersive in the least, nor realistic. The fun comes from the raw mechanics of gameplay, not feeling like you're there, and IMHO this is what a lot of games are missing. So much effort is being spent to make games a second reality that it's simply not FUN anymore.
BTW, Deus Ex never made you memorize spray patterns nor any stats at all. Your skill in weapons were represented in real-time by the reticule, and your health was monitored through a body parts graph. It's RPG gaming without the numbers, which worked out AWESOME.
Regenerating health is an easy (and crappy) solution to a problem. The problem was that game pace was getting broken up when players ran low on health. Instead of having fun shooting things players were scrounging around for medkits (or worse, quickloading constantly).
Regenerating health gets you back into the action, back to shooting stuff, faster. But it's precisely this reason why it doesn't fit with a game like Deus Ex.
With DX half the fun isn't shooting people, it's avoiding them, hacking systems around them, or using indirect ways to kill them. The player is outgunned and in many cases outclassed by the enemy, which unlike most games doesn't mean constant medkit hunting, it simply means that you have to explore the various ways the game lets you outsmart your enemies... Hack that turret and turn it against the guards. Or, disable the security camera so the guards are never summoned. That was the fun of the game, because getting into a fight was a resource drain, and forced the player to think outside of the standard run and gun combination. I've had problems in many shooters from the Deus Ex era that had you constantly low on health and quickloading, but DX wasn't ever one of them.
Stuff up while getting past a guard, manage to barely take him out but the alarm is raised? Limp off to a hiding spot and wait for the alert to die down.
Or do it like the original game did. Raised the alarm? Get into a hiding spot quick, and use hit and run tactics to take out your enemies. Or, you race back to a room you were in before with thre auto-turret you conveniently hacked, instant death to your enemies. Or you drop a few tear gas grenades and get the hell out of there. Regenerating health removes the incentive to try ANY of the above options. All it does is tell the player "don't worry, don't bother thinking, just retreat, pull out your biggest gun, and keep shooting", which IMHO is really the wrong way for Deus Ex of all games to be going.
Now on the flip side you have GRAW regeneration, which I'm a fan of. GRAW divided your life bar into multiple segments. Your health will regenerate slowly up to your current life bar segment (e.g. you can recharge from 63 to 75, but not higher. To actually "heal" requires medpacks. This is a great way to keep the player from hanging on by a thread of a few health points, but at the same time institutes a real penalty for getting careless and getting shot. I would much prefer this system in DX.
Open-linear is good. It was where the original game excelled and where the second game failed. Think back to the Liberty Island mission in DX1 - you could finish any number of objectives in any order, using any approach. It was true gaming freedom. The whole game was like that, and I loved it.
I don't mind the cover system for stealth. I enjoyed Splinter Cell, even the ones operating in broad daylight, and those games are constantly a lot of fun.
The main beef I have is the health system. There is *no point* to a complex cover and stealth system if there is *no punishment* for failing - and that is exactly what regenerative health encourages. Oops, did I let that security camera see me? Oh well, I'll just duck behind this crate here and snipe at enemies, regenerating health when necessary, until they're all dead. The player has no incentive to do ANYTHING like stealth or NPC interaction if all they have to do is run and gun with no penalties at all.
Of course, the easy (and worst) way the devs will solve this is to make ammo scarce, which is one of the best ways to cripple a shooter. I like games that make me conserve my ammo, not ones where I hit a quickload every time I miss.
What are they thinking with Call of Duty style regenerating health? Seriously... Deus Ex is not a run and gun game, it's a game that rewards resourcefulness and steathiness. The COD-style recharging health mechanic has *no place* here. The sole reason for recharging health is to keep the game pace up and allow the player to keep charging into frenetic combat in action games. Deus Ex is not one of these games.
I was looking forward to this, no longer following this now. Wake me up if this turns out to be good somehow.
I think the bigger issue is that you have a *game* that's so un-fun that people would rather have a computer play it *for them*. I don't know about you, but I'd never use a computer program to "beat" a game like Doom, or Command & Conquer, etc etc. The reward for those games lies in the experience, IMHO the way gaming ought to be.
EA has been doing some good things lately (DRM notwithstanding) and seem to be interested in creating fun, quality games. Too bad they then insist on shackling it up with horrifying DRM....
There are a lot of factors to being financially secure. My father made far less than $100K a year for most of my life, but he had the advantage of a couple of properties he inherited from *his* father. We'd still be knee-deep in mortgage if it weren't for it.
When my folks bought their house, they had a $2500 monthly payment. That's $25,000 a year just in mortgage alone. At a tax rate of, say, 25%, you need to make $33K just to keep making your house payments. Not to mention that all this time you should be squirreling away funds for a rainy day - don't want the repo man to show up at your door if you ever lose your job, right?
Then you have car payments, gas, and insurance, all of which are HUGE money suckers in any family. I just don't see how anyone survives on $50K unless they're young and single. Even if you feed your family at subsistence levels (steak? what's that? it's instant noodles every night!) you'd still easily blow through $15K a year for a family, at LEAST. Add all those costs together and I estimate that a family needs some $60K of *raw expenditure* a year. How much do you need to make to have that kind of money left over? $80K? $90K?
I think I'll be taking the 6-figure job and get started on the right foot.
Because my job isn't the only goal I have in life. I would like to raise a family one day, and have the means to give them a comfortable lifestyle. My ambition is to own my own family home in a nice neighborhood. All of this is impossible with some jobs, regardless of how much I love the work. You try supporting 2 kids, a car, and a mortgage on $40K a year.
I will be graduating from college soon, and I face some choices. Employers seem to want me, and I have enough of them beating at my door that I'm not fearful of starving in the near future. That being said, I'm getting offered 6-figures to do enterprise app-y stuff for an unnamed employer, or get $55K working on games. I do a lot of game dev on my own time, and I absolutely love it, but the difference is pretty huge.
Honestly, to be financially secure, own a home, blah blah blah, in this age... $100K salary is just the start.
First, you assume that there are 1 million pirates, and that every "pirate" (Arrrr) would be a paying customer if they weren't "pirating"
The GP's post is actually pretty accurate I would say. First of all, "1 million pirates" is a gross underestimation as it is. Secondly, the $200 loss figure already includes the pirated material that would not have been bought anyways. Think about a guy who pirates all of the movies he watches (I know MANY MANY people like this). Of course they wouldn't buy ALL those movies if he couldn't pirate them, but he would buy *some*, and there's the rub. The $200 loss is quite reasonable in terms of "how much stuff would this person have bought if the pirated copy was unavailable"... think about how much music you consume, video games, movies... spending $200 on all that stuff per year is pretty little.
I'm not sure about the slowness of Steam - I've experienced it myself on other machines before. On my current machine though, things boot in a matter of seconds, and downloading from the Steam servers is up to 2MB/s for me, so I'm still a happy customer.
The only thing that pisses me off is that no effort is made to update old titles to run on new machines. How can you justify selling, for example, Deus Ex 2, when the game clearly will BSOD any dual-core machine? They didn't warn of it either.
No, I just moved apartments and the internet at my new place is still pretty unstable. I've been able to play my singleplayer Steam games regardless, and I'm actually very happy about it.
Now MS just needs a not-so-pathetic content library. This is Microsoft's chance to strike while their competitor is down. But who am I kidding. Even the vaunted IPTV still isn't out, despite being targeted at Christmas LAST YEAR!
What I've heard about the situations regarding Moslems is that the Moslems do not accept the culture they are surrounded by.
I have many Muslim friends, and I simply do not believe that it's true. Sure, Muslims that I know tend to be more traditional than others, and do not ever *fully* assimilate into American culture (as opposed to Asians). But the same can be said of Indians, the *many* I know retaining a great deal of their original traditions and culture.
I personally see a great deal of acceptance of local culture. We've got halal burgers, hot dogs... we watch the same TV shows, play the same video games... The difference isn't really that large.
The Islamophobia I see rampant in the US is simply a result of fearing that which you do not understand. Muslims have beliefs, traditions, and customs that are not familiar to those who come from a strict, homogeneous Judeo-Christian nation, and this creates fear.
The same should go for games, if you return the game in a few days you should get a refund since you probably didn't get to finish it or try all the content.
Not the same. The clothing store has a reasonable guarantee that I didn't throw the shirt into the Clone-o-Tron 3000 and copy myself a shirt before returning it. The nature of the situation means that the return on clothing is probably legitimate (the motivation for abuse is limited and low), but that doesn't hold true for something as easily clonable as a game.
Gamers shall have the right to return games that don't work with their computers for a full refund.
I can't agree with that. PC game requirements vary wildly, and it is the responsibility of the consumer to ensure that his machine is within specification. You won't get any sympathy pumping diesel into your gasoline car, so why should you be entitled to a full refund when you try to run Crysis on your GeForce3?
I would agree with giving refunds where the game is crippled by technical issues, but the phrasing as-is is pretty vague.
Gamers shall have the right to expect meaningful updates after a game's release.
What? That's ridiculous. Short of patching critical issues, the company doesn't owe you diddly squat. The game is sold to you with a promised set of features - the developer should be under no expectation to give out free "expansions" to the game post-release. If there are no glaring technical issues I fail to see why gamers have the right to expect updates at all.
The rest I can agree with, or at least sympathize with. But those two "rights" don't sit right with me.
Portal's physics go *way* beyond what the article implies.
Article basically says: it's not a simple teleport, direction of movement and momentum are preserved.
This is far too much of an oversimplification. Portal was probably a technically difficult game to code for - mostly due to collision physics. The problem is that something does not instantly teleport from one end of the portal to another. You can have an object on BOTH sides of the portal. This makes physics calculations very difficult, since you essentially have a single object of a small finite size, colliding with different objects across the room, affected differently by gravity, etc.
If I get the right gist from the developer commentary in the game, their solution was the CLONE the two sides of the portal in a mini physics-only environment and run the simulation there.
Well, the idea is that the GPU is expected to be the first thing in your system to go obsolete. That CPU will last a pretty fricking long time, as will the RAM, without becoming major performance bottlenecks. Your GPU will get out of date quick. The ATI would (ostensibly) offer better longevity in this case.
could be practicing with a REAL guitar, get REAL cheers and likely get laid for REAL too.
The awesome part is that I play with a FAKE guitar, get FAKE cheers in Rock Band, and get laid for REAL too:) Sometimes at the same time:D When the gf's got a competitive streak, and wants you to lose on expert...
Very good point. Monitors are *very very* important, and one of the reasons why I like MacOS more than Windows. When I'm working I have a *lot* of windows open at once, from a lot of different apps. Windows apps, being MDI-centric, tend to want to take over your entire monitor, which greatly limit the number of apps you can run in parallel. On a 30" display at work I can have IM, email, code, debugger, everything visible at once. Good luck doing that on windows... Apps are always designed with full-screen in mind, and functionality and ease of use drops off rapidly if you insist on not giving them screen real-estate.
How would buying a screaming fast computer for work make my job any more profitable?
Depends on what you do. For a 3D artist, for example, a faster machine means shorter rendering times. This creates less downtime, moves the design-render-refine cycle faster, and also opens more possibilities to allow the client to tweak the final product with you.
For a coder who's working on a massive code base, we're looking at shorter compile times. Cutting compiles from 4 hours to 1 is a pretty significant gain that will likewise see a rise in productivity. Having a blazing server-class workstation also allows you to test your code in conditions that are more similar to what your code would be running once deployed.
For an artist, a massively fast computer (or really just one with an assload of RAM) allows more multitasking. Having Photoshop, Illustrator, a compositing app, etc etc, open all at once is great for productivity, and it allows you to bounce between apps without huge downtime.
But a few examples of why speed is still important in computing.
I do, hence the $20 for 3Mbps DSL. I'm quite happy with it - I can't download huge files in an instant, but it suffices for surfing, and for $20 I can't really lose.
In Ontario (Canada), using Rogers, you can get 6 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up for $60-70 a month. Seriously, we suck. I get 3 Mbps service for $20 instead, because I don't like to be gouged by the evil empire known as Rogers.
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Fiat currencies haven't caused our problems. Rampant speculation on the housing market has. Let's not forget the Tulip Mania a few hundred years ago (when currency was gold-backed!) that resulted in much the same thing.
The problem is a lot of people took on a lot of big risks, and they lost. And now the taxpayer is on the hook.
The problem is also because we *all* started believing the same lie: that there is a free lunch. We all started buying up house after house, stretching ourselves thin with impossibly large mortgages, in the hope that we can score a quick buck by flipping it later. Nobody ever thought about the fact that there's *no value being created* anywhere in the system to justify rising house prices. Nothing.
People used to invest in things that have real value. You invest in a company because they create a compelling product that people will buy. But of course, nowadays (especially if you look at the tech industry), companies with no discernible profitability, or products of questionable usefulness, are still getting funded because of boneheaded investors who are not interested in long term growth, but rather their exit strategy.
Like the housing bubble that's killing us right now, the tech bubble will soon burst. Get your money out of the markets now, or at least into companies that create actual products with actual demand.
I would argue today's games are about fun. I don't sit down after work to prove my awesomeness to the game. I want to have fun, not pass a gauntlet of impossible challenges.
That being said, a game shouldn't be TOO easy, and by and large action games with the regen system *aren't* too easy, simply by the fact that now you are facing a barrage of fire from all sides, and dying is still a distinct possibility. All it does is keep the player IN the game, as opposed to slinking off to look for medkits.
One of the major problems with old games is that the player is never aware of what's coming next. Various small battles can whittle him down to, say, 10 percent health, and suddenly you hit him with a boss battle. He can't go back and heal, now he just has to reload a gajillion times because you made him beat a boss with only 10 health points.
IMHO the state of the gameplay art has advanced substantially since then, and regenerating health is one way of doing it.
I have nothing against reloading the game to try again. I have a problem when the game forces me into a situation where I have to do this 15 times over.
Going and hiding and tooling around with medkits in an inventory system isn't a great game mechanic though.
I agree. I think excessive inventory shuffling was something that was a distinct weakness of DX1. Honestly, I want to hack something, kill something, etc etc, not play virtual Tetris with my inventory items. I'm in favor of a simpler system - e.g. only X weapons, only X lockpicks, etc. Juggling medkits is also not a great way to go.
BioShock handled this well. You can carry around a certain number of medkits that are quick to access without flipping through menus. I think DX would be greatly improved if we kept limited health, and made the healing system more robust.
In fact, at the risk of being an armchair game designer, I would propose something like this:
- GRAW style regeneration... the game will ensure you have enough health to go through an encounter, and you won't ever be stuck in a situation where you have 3 health points and staring down 10 enemies. Regeneration will top out based on your "injury level".
- No medkits. Instead have healing sources in the level. Topping up is resource intensive and can't be done constantly (i.e. run in, shoot guys, get hurt, run back to healing station, repeat).
Deus Ex was never about the immersion. The graphics were lackluster even when it came out, the music was often distractingly bad, and the voice acting was a little sub-par as well.
But keep in mind of the game's origins: Warren Spector started his career as a traditional gamer - which is to say card games, board games, and the such. He knows that to make a fun game you don't necessarily need VR goggles and surround sound.
Think about a game like Risk. Tons of fun, but not immersive in the least, nor realistic. The fun comes from the raw mechanics of gameplay, not feeling like you're there, and IMHO this is what a lot of games are missing. So much effort is being spent to make games a second reality that it's simply not FUN anymore.
BTW, Deus Ex never made you memorize spray patterns nor any stats at all. Your skill in weapons were represented in real-time by the reticule, and your health was monitored through a body parts graph. It's RPG gaming without the numbers, which worked out AWESOME.
Regenerating health is an easy (and crappy) solution to a problem. The problem was that game pace was getting broken up when players ran low on health. Instead of having fun shooting things players were scrounging around for medkits (or worse, quickloading constantly).
Regenerating health gets you back into the action, back to shooting stuff, faster. But it's precisely this reason why it doesn't fit with a game like Deus Ex.
With DX half the fun isn't shooting people, it's avoiding them, hacking systems around them, or using indirect ways to kill them. The player is outgunned and in many cases outclassed by the enemy, which unlike most games doesn't mean constant medkit hunting, it simply means that you have to explore the various ways the game lets you outsmart your enemies... Hack that turret and turn it against the guards. Or, disable the security camera so the guards are never summoned. That was the fun of the game, because getting into a fight was a resource drain, and forced the player to think outside of the standard run and gun combination. I've had problems in many shooters from the Deus Ex era that had you constantly low on health and quickloading, but DX wasn't ever one of them.
Stuff up while getting past a guard, manage to barely take him out but the alarm is raised? Limp off to a hiding spot and wait for the alert to die down.
Or do it like the original game did. Raised the alarm? Get into a hiding spot quick, and use hit and run tactics to take out your enemies. Or, you race back to a room you were in before with thre auto-turret you conveniently hacked, instant death to your enemies. Or you drop a few tear gas grenades and get the hell out of there. Regenerating health removes the incentive to try ANY of the above options. All it does is tell the player "don't worry, don't bother thinking, just retreat, pull out your biggest gun, and keep shooting", which IMHO is really the wrong way for Deus Ex of all games to be going.
Now on the flip side you have GRAW regeneration, which I'm a fan of. GRAW divided your life bar into multiple segments. Your health will regenerate slowly up to your current life bar segment (e.g. you can recharge from 63 to 75, but not higher. To actually "heal" requires medpacks. This is a great way to keep the player from hanging on by a thread of a few health points, but at the same time institutes a real penalty for getting careless and getting shot. I would much prefer this system in DX.
Open-linear is good. It was where the original game excelled and where the second game failed. Think back to the Liberty Island mission in DX1 - you could finish any number of objectives in any order, using any approach. It was true gaming freedom. The whole game was like that, and I loved it.
I don't mind the cover system for stealth. I enjoyed Splinter Cell, even the ones operating in broad daylight, and those games are constantly a lot of fun.
The main beef I have is the health system. There is *no point* to a complex cover and stealth system if there is *no punishment* for failing - and that is exactly what regenerative health encourages. Oops, did I let that security camera see me? Oh well, I'll just duck behind this crate here and snipe at enemies, regenerating health when necessary, until they're all dead. The player has no incentive to do ANYTHING like stealth or NPC interaction if all they have to do is run and gun with no penalties at all.
Of course, the easy (and worst) way the devs will solve this is to make ammo scarce, which is one of the best ways to cripple a shooter. I like games that make me conserve my ammo, not ones where I hit a quickload every time I miss.
What are they thinking with Call of Duty style regenerating health? Seriously... Deus Ex is not a run and gun game, it's a game that rewards resourcefulness and steathiness. The COD-style recharging health mechanic has *no place* here. The sole reason for recharging health is to keep the game pace up and allow the player to keep charging into frenetic combat in action games. Deus Ex is not one of these games.
I was looking forward to this, no longer following this now. Wake me up if this turns out to be good somehow.
but I disagree with your premise.
I think the bigger issue is that you have a *game* that's so un-fun that people would rather have a computer play it *for them*. I don't know about you, but I'd never use a computer program to "beat" a game like Doom, or Command & Conquer, etc etc. The reward for those games lies in the experience, IMHO the way gaming ought to be.
EA has been doing some good things lately (DRM notwithstanding) and seem to be interested in creating fun, quality games. Too bad they then insist on shackling it up with horrifying DRM....
There are a lot of factors to being financially secure. My father made far less than $100K a year for most of my life, but he had the advantage of a couple of properties he inherited from *his* father. We'd still be knee-deep in mortgage if it weren't for it.
When my folks bought their house, they had a $2500 monthly payment. That's $25,000 a year just in mortgage alone. At a tax rate of, say, 25%, you need to make $33K just to keep making your house payments. Not to mention that all this time you should be squirreling away funds for a rainy day - don't want the repo man to show up at your door if you ever lose your job, right?
Then you have car payments, gas, and insurance, all of which are HUGE money suckers in any family. I just don't see how anyone survives on $50K unless they're young and single. Even if you feed your family at subsistence levels (steak? what's that? it's instant noodles every night!) you'd still easily blow through $15K a year for a family, at LEAST. Add all those costs together and I estimate that a family needs some $60K of *raw expenditure* a year. How much do you need to make to have that kind of money left over? $80K? $90K?
I think I'll be taking the 6-figure job and get started on the right foot.
Because my job isn't the only goal I have in life. I would like to raise a family one day, and have the means to give them a comfortable lifestyle. My ambition is to own my own family home in a nice neighborhood. All of this is impossible with some jobs, regardless of how much I love the work. You try supporting 2 kids, a car, and a mortgage on $40K a year.
I will be graduating from college soon, and I face some choices. Employers seem to want me, and I have enough of them beating at my door that I'm not fearful of starving in the near future. That being said, I'm getting offered 6-figures to do enterprise app-y stuff for an unnamed employer, or get $55K working on games. I do a lot of game dev on my own time, and I absolutely love it, but the difference is pretty huge.
Honestly, to be financially secure, own a home, blah blah blah, in this age... $100K salary is just the start.
First, you assume that there are 1 million pirates, and that every "pirate" (Arrrr) would be a paying customer if they weren't "pirating"
The GP's post is actually pretty accurate I would say. First of all, "1 million pirates" is a gross underestimation as it is. Secondly, the $200 loss figure already includes the pirated material that would not have been bought anyways. Think about a guy who pirates all of the movies he watches (I know MANY MANY people like this). Of course they wouldn't buy ALL those movies if he couldn't pirate them, but he would buy *some*, and there's the rub. The $200 loss is quite reasonable in terms of "how much stuff would this person have bought if the pirated copy was unavailable"... think about how much music you consume, video games, movies... spending $200 on all that stuff per year is pretty little.
I'm not sure about the slowness of Steam - I've experienced it myself on other machines before. On my current machine though, things boot in a matter of seconds, and downloading from the Steam servers is up to 2MB/s for me, so I'm still a happy customer.
The only thing that pisses me off is that no effort is made to update old titles to run on new machines. How can you justify selling, for example, Deus Ex 2, when the game clearly will BSOD any dual-core machine? They didn't warn of it either.
No, I just moved apartments and the internet at my new place is still pretty unstable. I've been able to play my singleplayer Steam games regardless, and I'm actually very happy about it.
Now MS just needs a not-so-pathetic content library. This is Microsoft's chance to strike while their competitor is down. But who am I kidding. Even the vaunted IPTV still isn't out, despite being targeted at Christmas LAST YEAR!
What I've heard about the situations regarding Moslems is that the Moslems do not accept the culture they are surrounded by.
I have many Muslim friends, and I simply do not believe that it's true. Sure, Muslims that I know tend to be more traditional than others, and do not ever *fully* assimilate into American culture (as opposed to Asians). But the same can be said of Indians, the *many* I know retaining a great deal of their original traditions and culture.
I personally see a great deal of acceptance of local culture. We've got halal burgers, hot dogs... we watch the same TV shows, play the same video games... The difference isn't really that large.
The Islamophobia I see rampant in the US is simply a result of fearing that which you do not understand. Muslims have beliefs, traditions, and customs that are not familiar to those who come from a strict, homogeneous Judeo-Christian nation, and this creates fear.
FYI: I am not Muslim. I am an atheist Asian.
The same should go for games, if you return the game in a few days you should get a refund since you probably didn't get to finish it or try all the content.
Not the same. The clothing store has a reasonable guarantee that I didn't throw the shirt into the Clone-o-Tron 3000 and copy myself a shirt before returning it. The nature of the situation means that the return on clothing is probably legitimate (the motivation for abuse is limited and low), but that doesn't hold true for something as easily clonable as a game.
Gamers shall have the right to return games that don't work with their computers for a full refund.
I can't agree with that. PC game requirements vary wildly, and it is the responsibility of the consumer to ensure that his machine is within specification. You won't get any sympathy pumping diesel into your gasoline car, so why should you be entitled to a full refund when you try to run Crysis on your GeForce3?
I would agree with giving refunds where the game is crippled by technical issues, but the phrasing as-is is pretty vague.
Gamers shall have the right to expect meaningful updates after a game's release.
What? That's ridiculous. Short of patching critical issues, the company doesn't owe you diddly squat. The game is sold to you with a promised set of features - the developer should be under no expectation to give out free "expansions" to the game post-release. If there are no glaring technical issues I fail to see why gamers have the right to expect updates at all.
The rest I can agree with, or at least sympathize with. But those two "rights" don't sit right with me.
Portal's physics go *way* beyond what the article implies.
Article basically says: it's not a simple teleport, direction of movement and momentum are preserved.
This is far too much of an oversimplification. Portal was probably a technically difficult game to code for - mostly due to collision physics. The problem is that something does not instantly teleport from one end of the portal to another. You can have an object on BOTH sides of the portal. This makes physics calculations very difficult, since you essentially have a single object of a small finite size, colliding with different objects across the room, affected differently by gravity, etc.
If I get the right gist from the developer commentary in the game, their solution was the CLONE the two sides of the portal in a mini physics-only environment and run the simulation there.
Definitely much more complex than the article.
Well, the idea is that the GPU is expected to be the first thing in your system to go obsolete. That CPU will last a pretty fricking long time, as will the RAM, without becoming major performance bottlenecks. Your GPU will get out of date quick. The ATI would (ostensibly) offer better longevity in this case.
could be practicing with a REAL guitar, get REAL cheers and likely get laid for REAL too.
The awesome part is that I play with a FAKE guitar, get FAKE cheers in Rock Band, and get laid for REAL too :) Sometimes at the same time :D When the gf's got a competitive streak, and wants you to lose on expert...
Very good point. Monitors are *very very* important, and one of the reasons why I like MacOS more than Windows. When I'm working I have a *lot* of windows open at once, from a lot of different apps. Windows apps, being MDI-centric, tend to want to take over your entire monitor, which greatly limit the number of apps you can run in parallel. On a 30" display at work I can have IM, email, code, debugger, everything visible at once. Good luck doing that on windows... Apps are always designed with full-screen in mind, and functionality and ease of use drops off rapidly if you insist on not giving them screen real-estate.
How would buying a screaming fast computer for work make my job any more profitable?
Depends on what you do. For a 3D artist, for example, a faster machine means shorter rendering times. This creates less downtime, moves the design-render-refine cycle faster, and also opens more possibilities to allow the client to tweak the final product with you.
For a coder who's working on a massive code base, we're looking at shorter compile times. Cutting compiles from 4 hours to 1 is a pretty significant gain that will likewise see a rise in productivity. Having a blazing server-class workstation also allows you to test your code in conditions that are more similar to what your code would be running once deployed.
For an artist, a massively fast computer (or really just one with an assload of RAM) allows more multitasking. Having Photoshop, Illustrator, a compositing app, etc etc, open all at once is great for productivity, and it allows you to bounce between apps without huge downtime.
But a few examples of why speed is still important in computing.
I do, hence the $20 for 3Mbps DSL. I'm quite happy with it - I can't download huge files in an instant, but it suffices for surfing, and for $20 I can't really lose.
Proudly Rogers-free for 1.5 years and counting :)
In Ontario (Canada), using Rogers, you can get 6 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up for $60-70 a month. Seriously, we suck. I get 3 Mbps service for $20 instead, because I don't like to be gouged by the evil empire known as Rogers.