But "Outstanding Innovation in Gaming"? Not so much. (Portal takes it there, without a doubt).
Well, and this might be shocking to you, you might try actually playing BioShock before making a judgement on it... have you thought of that?
Also, Portal's only innovation is that you could shoot the portals out of a gun. Other games have had portals (Prey most recently, Serious Sam is another example I remember), so that's not particularly impressive. Considering that the core concept has been done before, albeit in a less flexible manner, and considering that the "game" was more of a tech demo than an actual fleshed out game, I gotta say I'm not so sure.
That all said, I'm sure the award will go to Portal anyway.
Maybe I didn't select that dialog option, if it was there. If the game warned you about that, good for you, but there was no warning for me, and it negatively influenced my opinion of the game. Although, having played previous Bioware games, I kind of saw it coming and rolled with the punches, since they *all* do that (and it pisses me off in every game.)
I mean, people in this thread talk about the depth of the game-- maybe it has depth, but there were over a dozen quests I couldn't complete because of this issue, and half the galaxy map was still unexplored.
If you think I haven't played the game, then quiz me. But don't ask me any questions any side quests, since I missed most of those.
Ummm... You use your index finger on the RB button and your middle finger on the RT button.
No I don't. Please don't tell me how I hold a game controller, thank you.
If I actually held the controller that way, my hands would be aching in minutes, instead I put in index fingers on the trigger and move them up as needed to the shoulder buttons. Of the 20+ Xbox 360 games I've played, holding the controller this way doesn't impact the game play in any way. Mass Effect is the first game I've played where you need to use the trigger and shoulder, on the same side of the controller, at the same time. IMO, that's just bad design.
Also, left trigger operated the first person mode and allowed you to zoom.
I just drove up and killed them the old fashioned, non-sniping way. (Plus running them over was more fun than shooting.) I didn't zoom at all, and I'm sure people who did would be able to cope it the zoom function was activated by, say, clicking down on a thumbstick (like most other games use.)
Did you actually read the manual?
No. It's the year 2007. The vast majority of games have standard controls. The rest have tutorials. There are minimum quality standards here, and expecting the game to explain its controls is not some crazy request, it's expected.
I should have mentioned in my original review that if they were going to screw with controls for no reason, they could have at least added a tutorial mode to teach you, for example, how to drive the Mako for the first time.
Again, this is the year 2007... if it was 1997, I'd be more tolerant of confusing, non-standard controls. But the Mako is basically a Halo vehicle, similar appearance, similar physics-- would it have killed them to use Halo controls that every Xbox gamer instantly recognizes and understands?
Unfortunately, I couldn't experience most of the depth because when I landed on the Magic Game-Ending Planet, I wasn't able to go back to the dozens of quests I'd collected in the galaxy to do. And when the game ends, it ends-- it's not like Oblivion or other RPGs where you can keep playing the mini-quests after the main quest is over.
I do now, but too late to change my impression of the game.
Why didn't they use A like nearly every other game ever made? Again, that's just poor controls-- I tried A, I tried B (for Back, again like nearly every other game ever made) and I tried Start, Back the triggers... pretty much everything but X.
What possessed you to think that X would skip dialog? Be honest with me: was it because that decision was intuitive for you and you just knew it would work, or was it because you spazzed out over the entire controller, cursing at your TV, until it finally worked? If you're anything like me, I'm guessing the latter.
I wasn't that impressed with Mass Effect, or it's heavily promoted conversation system. Conversations could sound natural if you select options fast enough, but more often than not they ended up still sounding as stilted as ever. In addition, even the longest lines were unskippable, and one of the alien races spoke with an annoying e x t r e m e l y s l o w voice mod that made me want to pull my hair out. (It even used the cliche "reverse the audio, add an echo, reverse it again" effect, ugh.)
As for the game itself, it's pretty much standard Bioware. And like every Bioware game, there's one point in the game where, once you reach it, it's impossible to go back and complete previous quests. That really peeves me off, they could at least warn you that "hey when you land on planet X, the game's on a path to finishing and you won't be able to freely roam anymore!"
The controls were clunky and unintuitive, especially the lunar rover. (It has two weapons, one bound to right trigger, one bound to right shoulder, making it impossible to fire both at once! Meanwhile, the left trigger does virtually nothing.) Equipping mods to weapons and armor was always a pain, and I went through the game confused about when to use X to go back and when to use B to go back. (Getting into the galaxy map, then mistakenly hitting B instead of X wastes a whole lot of loading time! I did that probably a half-dozen times.)
However, it does get kudos for actually allowing my character (with a high personality stat) to talk the villain into killing himself. That's something I've never seen before. 7/10
There's probably the same amount in America as anywhere else. The only difference is that we have multiple 24-hour news networks that have to make-up stories to keep going. Yeah, some wacko made a museum in his garage and now he's out of money-- that wouldn't be "news" before CNN/MSNBC/Fox News came along. At best it'd be a paragraph in the local paper.
In short, I doubt it's actually an issue, it's just way, way over-reported in the news.
I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words.
When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint.
-- Hesiod, Eighth Century B.C.
Your complaint is as old as human civilization.
I can't even understand why science is taught to ALL children, along with higher level maths, when the kids today can barely count, let alone read or speak properly. I had a 20-something in my town use a calculator at a checkout line 2 weeks ago when I gave her $21.01 for a $6.06 charge. Unbelievable.
Do you think there were stupid kids in the 1960s? Or in the 1920s? Or in the 1870s? In which decade could every single American easily do that math problem? And when you answer, try to come at me with some documentation instead of relying on old wives' tales.
Well, it's impossible for any real-life bookstore to compete with the fantasy one you've created in your mind using vast amounts of nostalgia, so I suppose that's probably true.
Being a person who is grounded in reality, when I go into the local Barnes and Noble and see books as far as the eye can see, with a coffeeshop off to my left, a high school kid playing cello music to my right past the checkers, and in the back a kid's section with a local school teacher reading children's books (and then I learn that for every book bought that day, Barnes and Noble is donating books to the local elementary schools)... well, I'll take that over any fantasy nostalgia bookstore you've come up with. Because, you know, it actually exists.
The UK/Ireland wiring standard is arguably the safest in the world, and makes the North American NEMA standard seem primitive and dangerous by comparison, as outlets are not shuttered, circuits do not have an explicit amperage rating, and no ground pin is required.
Considering that I've gone my entire life without ever hearing of a single person, ever, being injured by an electrical socket... either personally or on the news... I'm thinking that just maybe the North American standard is good enough.
That's great for the library in Seattle or Atlanta, but what about the library in Snohomish, WA? They don't have the budget to bring in lecturers/demonstrations, hell they can barely maintain storing the books. While your proposal might make libraries more 'exciting' it's also going to remove a lot of libraries from the world, unless they somehow magically get huge new grants.
Thankfully, Amazon fills the gap. However, browsing a decent, well-stocked book store is a far more pleasant experience than browsing Amazon.
Ok, here in the US we have Amazon. We have books in grocery stores and convenience stores. We also have Borders, Barnes and Noble, and every city with at least a thousand people has a largish used book store or two, not to mention a public library. Amazon isn't threatening actual bookstores, there are more and bigger bookstores than ever.
I don't know what you Brits are doing wrong, but we Americans seem to manage just fine with Amazon and books at grocery stores.
This is a new French philosophy, the consumer anti-protection laws. They just pass laws now to make consumers pay more for stuff and prevent them from getting discounts.
His short story, the Country of the Blind in which he challenges the assertion that "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." Turns out that sight isn't nearly as much of an advantage in a society designed by the blind as one may think.
Secondly, these scientists aren't trying to invent teleportation, they're trying to extract stem cells. Teleportation (and giant flies) are another department.
Aren't scientists (the Environmental Sciences kind) the ones wanting to pass laws to restrict what I can buy/drive?
Face it, everybody has a bit of control freak in them. There's nothing someone likes more than to make someone else jump through hoops-- that's why our society has so many hoops. Doesn't matter if they're a scientist or not.
You know Microsoft actually does usability testing, both in a lab and in normal day-to-day usage, right? I'm a lot more likely to trust a UI decision made by Microsoft after testing than I am one made by some random open source project which has never tested at all.
In any case, the Office 2007 ribbon is an improvement in almost every way. The complaint you linked to is extremely petty (basically some people complained it took too much of the screen, so MS added a minimizing function to it) and says nothing about its general usability over the old menus-and-dialogs.
Now, Microsoft is making this problem irrelevant, since their own software doesn't follow Windows guidelines anymore.
True, but Office never particularly followed them that closely anyway.
Heck, not even the different families of Windows apps are not consistent. If you see Office, IE, Messenger, WMP, it looks like each one of them was made by a completely different software vendor.
Also true. And the Live Messenger and WMP people did a shitty job, IMO.
But Microsoft does treat them as entirely different divisions who are free to write software the way they like. You'd think a Slashdotter would see that as a good thing, not a bad thing.
And the stark reality is, while the Windows team does come up with a lot of UI guidelines, the Windows team doesn't really build any applications... Office encounters problems that the Windows team would never see, simply because of the inherent differences between a word processor and a file browser.
The middle mouse button scrolling. Yes, it's something that all browsers have, but here the difference is in quality. Different distances of the pointer to the origin have different scrolling speeds. It seems that the others use a linear scale while Opera uses a logarithmic scale or something like that, but it feels so much better than the others. The same with mouse gestures, their implementation shines above the rest.
I just tried it in Outlook, Firefox and Opera. I can't see any difference between the acceleration used. I did notice that Opera moves my mouse pointer when I activate it, which is a big no-no in UI design.
Slashdot Mirror
But "Outstanding Innovation in Gaming"? Not so much. (Portal takes it there, without a doubt).
Well, and this might be shocking to you, you might try actually playing BioShock before making a judgement on it... have you thought of that?
Also, Portal's only innovation is that you could shoot the portals out of a gun. Other games have had portals (Prey most recently, Serious Sam is another example I remember), so that's not particularly impressive. Considering that the core concept has been done before, albeit in a less flexible manner, and considering that the "game" was more of a tech demo than an actual fleshed out game, I gotta say I'm not so sure.
That all said, I'm sure the award will go to Portal anyway.
Maybe I didn't select that dialog option, if it was there. If the game warned you about that, good for you, but there was no warning for me, and it negatively influenced my opinion of the game. Although, having played previous Bioware games, I kind of saw it coming and rolled with the punches, since they *all* do that (and it pisses me off in every game.)
I mean, people in this thread talk about the depth of the game-- maybe it has depth, but there were over a dozen quests I couldn't complete because of this issue, and half the galaxy map was still unexplored.
If you think I haven't played the game, then quiz me. But don't ask me any questions any side quests, since I missed most of those.
Ummm... You use your index finger on the RB button and your middle finger on the RT button.
No I don't. Please don't tell me how I hold a game controller, thank you.
If I actually held the controller that way, my hands would be aching in minutes, instead I put in index fingers on the trigger and move them up as needed to the shoulder buttons. Of the 20+ Xbox 360 games I've played, holding the controller this way doesn't impact the game play in any way. Mass Effect is the first game I've played where you need to use the trigger and shoulder, on the same side of the controller, at the same time. IMO, that's just bad design.
Also, left trigger operated the first person mode and allowed you to zoom.
I just drove up and killed them the old fashioned, non-sniping way. (Plus running them over was more fun than shooting.) I didn't zoom at all, and I'm sure people who did would be able to cope it the zoom function was activated by, say, clicking down on a thumbstick (like most other games use.)
Did you actually read the manual?
No. It's the year 2007. The vast majority of games have standard controls. The rest have tutorials. There are minimum quality standards here, and expecting the game to explain its controls is not some crazy request, it's expected.
I should have mentioned in my original review that if they were going to screw with controls for no reason, they could have at least added a tutorial mode to teach you, for example, how to drive the Mako for the first time.
Again, this is the year 2007... if it was 1997, I'd be more tolerant of confusing, non-standard controls. But the Mako is basically a Halo vehicle, similar appearance, similar physics-- would it have killed them to use Halo controls that every Xbox gamer instantly recognizes and understands?
I've played Fallout and Fallout 2. Several times. And I've never seen that before.
:P
Maybe my characters weren't of the right type or something, but don't insinuate that I don't know my RPGs.
Unfortunately, I couldn't experience most of the depth because when I landed on the Magic Game-Ending Planet, I wasn't able to go back to the dozens of quests I'd collected in the galaxy to do. And when the game ends, it ends-- it's not like Oblivion or other RPGs where you can keep playing the mini-quests after the main quest is over.
It does look great.
I do now, but too late to change my impression of the game.
Why didn't they use A like nearly every other game ever made? Again, that's just poor controls-- I tried A, I tried B (for Back, again like nearly every other game ever made) and I tried Start, Back the triggers... pretty much everything but X.
What possessed you to think that X would skip dialog? Be honest with me: was it because that decision was intuitive for you and you just knew it would work, or was it because you spazzed out over the entire controller, cursing at your TV, until it finally worked? If you're anything like me, I'm guessing the latter.
I wasn't that impressed with Mass Effect, or it's heavily promoted conversation system. Conversations could sound natural if you select options fast enough, but more often than not they ended up still sounding as stilted as ever. In addition, even the longest lines were unskippable, and one of the alien races spoke with an annoying e x t r e m e l y s l o w voice mod that made me want to pull my hair out. (It even used the cliche "reverse the audio, add an echo, reverse it again" effect, ugh.)
As for the game itself, it's pretty much standard Bioware. And like every Bioware game, there's one point in the game where, once you reach it, it's impossible to go back and complete previous quests. That really peeves me off, they could at least warn you that "hey when you land on planet X, the game's on a path to finishing and you won't be able to freely roam anymore!"
The controls were clunky and unintuitive, especially the lunar rover. (It has two weapons, one bound to right trigger, one bound to right shoulder, making it impossible to fire both at once! Meanwhile, the left trigger does virtually nothing.) Equipping mods to weapons and armor was always a pain, and I went through the game confused about when to use X to go back and when to use B to go back. (Getting into the galaxy map, then mistakenly hitting B instead of X wastes a whole lot of loading time! I did that probably a half-dozen times.)
However, it does get kudos for actually allowing my character (with a high personality stat) to talk the villain into killing himself. That's something I've never seen before. 7/10
There's probably the same amount in America as anywhere else. The only difference is that we have multiple 24-hour news networks that have to make-up stories to keep going. Yeah, some wacko made a museum in his garage and now he's out of money-- that wouldn't be "news" before CNN/MSNBC/Fox News came along. At best it'd be a paragraph in the local paper.
In short, I doubt it's actually an issue, it's just way, way over-reported in the news.
I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on
the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless
beyond words.
When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of
elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of
restraint.
-- Hesiod, Eighth Century B.C.
Your complaint is as old as human civilization.
I can't even understand why science is taught to ALL children, along with higher level maths, when the kids today can barely count, let alone read or speak properly. I had a 20-something in my town use a calculator at a checkout line 2 weeks ago when I gave her $21.01 for a $6.06 charge. Unbelievable.
Do you think there were stupid kids in the 1960s? Or in the 1920s? Or in the 1870s? In which decade could every single American easily do that math problem? And when you answer, try to come at me with some documentation instead of relying on old wives' tales.
I dunno, my little city of 6000 or so has two of them, good-sized ones too. But maybe that's just us.
Well, it's impossible for any real-life bookstore to compete with the fantasy one you've created in your mind using vast amounts of nostalgia, so I suppose that's probably true.
Being a person who is grounded in reality, when I go into the local Barnes and Noble and see books as far as the eye can see, with a coffeeshop off to my left, a high school kid playing cello music to my right past the checkers, and in the back a kid's section with a local school teacher reading children's books (and then I learn that for every book bought that day, Barnes and Noble is donating books to the local elementary schools)... well, I'll take that over any fantasy nostalgia bookstore you've come up with. Because, you know, it actually exists.
The UK/Ireland wiring standard is arguably the safest in the world, and makes the North American NEMA standard seem primitive and dangerous by comparison, as outlets are not shuttered, circuits do not have an explicit amperage rating, and no ground pin is required.
Considering that I've gone my entire life without ever hearing of a single person, ever, being injured by an electrical socket... either personally or on the news... I'm thinking that just maybe the North American standard is good enough.
That's great for the library in Seattle or Atlanta, but what about the library in Snohomish, WA? They don't have the budget to bring in lecturers/demonstrations, hell they can barely maintain storing the books. While your proposal might make libraries more 'exciting' it's also going to remove a lot of libraries from the world, unless they somehow magically get huge new grants.
Thankfully, Amazon fills the gap. However, browsing a decent, well-stocked book store is a far more pleasant experience than browsing Amazon.
Ok, here in the US we have Amazon. We have books in grocery stores and convenience stores. We also have Borders, Barnes and Noble, and every city with at least a thousand people has a largish used book store or two, not to mention a public library. Amazon isn't threatening actual bookstores, there are more and bigger bookstores than ever.
I don't know what you Brits are doing wrong, but we Americans seem to manage just fine with Amazon and books at grocery stores.
This is a new French philosophy, the consumer anti-protection laws. They just pass laws now to make consumers pay more for stuff and prevent them from getting discounts.
Does anyone know of any downside to lopping your legs off below the knee and "installing" a pair of these?
No! I'm going out to the garage to get my hack-saw right now! Thanks, GloomE!
Obligatory H. G. Wells link:
http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/2157/
His short story, the Country of the Blind in which he challenges the assertion that "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." Turns out that sight isn't nearly as much of an advantage in a society designed by the blind as one may think.
First of all, you suck for linking to the sequel and not to the original: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051622/
Secondly, these scientists aren't trying to invent teleportation, they're trying to extract stem cells. Teleportation (and giant flies) are another department.
The animals used are cute fluffy kittens. When people see the kittens, everyone feels better about the whole process.
Also, maybe a lot of scientists are furries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_fandom
She watched a few hours of Bloodrayne and had nightmares
Bloodrayne had the same effect on me.
Aren't scientists (the Environmental Sciences kind) the ones wanting to pass laws to restrict what I can buy/drive?
Face it, everybody has a bit of control freak in them. There's nothing someone likes more than to make someone else jump through hoops-- that's why our society has so many hoops. Doesn't matter if they're a scientist or not.
The problem wiht usability experts is that they would never come up with vi.
And that's a bad thing?
You know Microsoft actually does usability testing, both in a lab and in normal day-to-day usage, right? I'm a lot more likely to trust a UI decision made by Microsoft after testing than I am one made by some random open source project which has never tested at all.
In any case, the Office 2007 ribbon is an improvement in almost every way. The complaint you linked to is extremely petty (basically some people complained it took too much of the screen, so MS added a minimizing function to it) and says nothing about its general usability over the old menus-and-dialogs.
Now, Microsoft is making this problem irrelevant, since their own software doesn't follow Windows guidelines anymore.
True, but Office never particularly followed them that closely anyway.
Heck, not even the different families of Windows apps are not consistent. If you see Office, IE, Messenger, WMP, it looks like each one of them was made by a completely different software vendor.
Also true. And the Live Messenger and WMP people did a shitty job, IMO.
But Microsoft does treat them as entirely different divisions who are free to write software the way they like. You'd think a Slashdotter would see that as a good thing, not a bad thing.
And the stark reality is, while the Windows team does come up with a lot of UI guidelines, the Windows team doesn't really build any applications... Office encounters problems that the Windows team would never see, simply because of the inherent differences between a word processor and a file browser.
The middle mouse button scrolling. Yes, it's something that all browsers have, but here the difference is in quality. Different distances of the pointer to the origin have different scrolling speeds. It seems that the others use a linear scale while Opera uses a logarithmic scale or something like that, but it feels so much better than the others. The same with mouse gestures, their implementation shines above the rest.
I just tried it in Outlook, Firefox and Opera. I can't see any difference between the acceleration used. I did notice that Opera moves my mouse pointer when I activate it, which is a big no-no in UI design.
Did I stop what?