What if they were laying their hands on Halo 2 the first time? Seriously, drop the wistful nostalgia, no game can possibly live up to the stuff your brain makes up about the past.
for the first time in around, like, 8-10 years, a major brand (nintendo) came up with the now-forgotten idea of making FUN games instead of ones that has loaded sounds and graphics and repeats old concepts.
Do you seriously think the millions of people who bought Halo 2 don't find it fun at all?
If you had used the word "innovative," you might have a point. But it's ridiculous to claim that Nintendo is the only company that desires to develop fun games.
Apple's been selling OSes as long as Microsoft has. Maybe Be didn't have a chance, but that's because they came out of nowhere and nobody had heard of that. But that's certainly not true of Apple. Or, to a lesser extent, Commodore (with Amiga Workbench.) Everybody knows that Macintosh exists, and for a decade it was just plain better (now it's more arguable), and yet Microsoft still achieved the business they have.
I would just like to point out that he could, in fact, have been more wrong. He could have stated, for instance, that Microsoft is run by dolphins from an secret underwater base in the artic.
Your fourth amendment rights are perfectly preserved because you have the right to walk away from any job that requires drug testing or a polygraph.
But that's totally different than saying that the constitution says anything whatsoever about companies that require drug testing... it doesn't. They have the right to demand the test, and you have the right to say no and walk away. (As you've done.) Everybody's happy, there's no need for the government to stick its nose in.
Yes, but so what? If you don't like it, don't buy products from Tivo. There's no need to add crap to the license for it.
Talk about have your cake and eat it too... open source advocates constantly talk about getting companies to adopt open source. When a company actually does it, suddenly they declare that they did it "wrong" and start changing the license.
Re:The story is my biggest gripe
on
BioShock Review
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· Score: 1
I agree that the grandparent was full of shit, but... Prince of Persia? Sands of Time was one of the best games of the year when it was released, and it definitely does something different as well as tell a somewhat interesting story. (In your own words.) Even the original PoP was pretty damned unique and refreshing when it came out, even though it had a weaker story.
Unless you're talking about the horrible Prince of Persia: 3D, in which case spot-on.;)
Re:I'd only recommend the 360 version
on
BioShock Review
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Just FYI, there are multiple endings. The one I got had nothing to do with what you describe, and it was actually pretty sunny and happy... you've the second comment I've read here saying that the ending was a downer.
Re:I'd only recommend the 360 version
on
BioShock Review
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· Score: 1
You can't turn off Achievements, but you can turn off the Notifications. I believe it's in Console Settings, or maybe the Xbox Live Settings... I don't remember, it's been awhile since I did it.
You might have a point that it might be a good idea to automatically turn it off if you select Casual, but I think the problem with that is that if that happened, then you saw an achievement on a friend's Xbox, you might assume yours was buggy or broken.
Re:The "tube" mini-games sucked ass.
on
BioShock Review
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· Score: 1
It's Pipe Dream. It was a top seller on Gameboy in 1987.
Re:Should have waited for the bargain bin
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BioShock Review
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Which ending did you see? The one I had wasn't at all painful to watch, I thought it was quite touching and beautiful.
I don't know how many endings are possible, but if you save every Little Sister you come across, there's an entire level on the bathysphere you never visit in the course of the game, so I'm guessing the different endings are pretty different.
When you adapt a game for each system you need to keep this in mind and aim at the proper platform, not just the one that will ship the most units.
At this point in time, if you release a game with the production values of Bioshock ONLY on PC, you'll go bankrupt. There are practical considerations to the situation.
Re:I really wanted to like bioshock...
on
BioShock Review
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· Score: 1
To be fair, Bioshock DOES have working toilets. For when they patch in that "full human body" simulation code.
Re:fun yes; groundbreaking no
on
BioShock Review
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· Score: 1
Just recorded conversations you could pick up through the game much like the goofy notes found in No One Lives Forever.
Are you entirely sure you played System Shock 2? And not some other game you might have confused it with, like, say, Chex Quest?
It seems as though you would have compared the recorded messages in Bioshock to the recorded messages in System Shock II, but, hey, what do I know.
Finally, there were a lot of plot discrepancies and things that pulled me out of the storyline. Like if I were a plane crash survivor, discovering this underwater city, why would I just inject myself with a syringe I found on a table?
Are you entirely sure you played Bioshock? Maybe you accidentally confused it with another game like, say, Bolo Adventures?
You might want to get further into the game before commenting on aspects like this, because like all of the *shock games (but not Chex Quest), there is a plot twist that explains all 2/3rds of the way through. Including this little plot point you're so upset about.
(That said, I agree with you that the U-Invent machines were a bit of a let-down. I also didn't like that the hacking mini-game was Pipe Dream.)
Let's assume for a moment that the designers of this game aren't morons and actually know their audience. Personally, I prefer an easier game-- I work for a living, and it's hard for me to finish a game if I get "held up" at some point and have to play it over and over. I tend to give up and do something else.
I'd wager that 90% of Xbox players are like me, and it's only the small majority (the ones who bought Ninja Gaiden) that want harder games.
What are you talking about? Slashdot spends much more time talking about Second Life, and second life sucks ass. Compared to any other games site ever, that's a very small amount of Halo 3 coverage, considering how popular the game series is.
(Yes, yes, this is Slashdot and so you have to declare that Halo sucks, etc, but you also have to admit that it's popular. Unless you're completely delusional, in that case, status quo.)
Try Starseige Tribes on the PC. It's a multiplayer game circa 1997 which was ahead of its time by a WIDE margin, but it also shares the more slow-paced approach that Marathon and Halo both have.
Secondly: People on Slashdot aren't anti-Halo, they're anti-mainstream. Anything popular, they hate. Don't believe it, it's all just posing to look cool on the Internet.
that is why, even to this day, proprietary software tends to be much more feature-complete, though more buggy.
I don't believe proprietary software is more buggy. I don't like Windows Media Player's and iTunes' user interface, but they certainly worked a whole lot better (in Windows) than the open source Totem media player did (in Ubuntu.) Totem would suddenly quit all the time, it would present error messages written in geek-ese, and had many other annoyances. (It's been awhile; I don't remember the whole list anymore.)
Saying that the driver for my Hauppage video capture card is more buggy than the open source one is laughable; the open source one in Ubuntu *never* worked correctly after weeks of fiddling, while I was using PVR software on Windows on the first day.
You might have a good valid point that Linux *server* software is more stable than Windows server software, or OS X server software. But when you're to the point where a "buggy" Windows server can easily obtain years of uptime with proper administration, you approach the "who cares anymore?" point.
I still don't believe they were violating the "spirit" of anything. I think they just happened to make the mistake of creating a product using open source and selling a whole bunch of them to a group of whiny open source advocates who have to have every detail their own way.
Frankly, I don't see how hardware restrictions can be in the "spirit" of any software licenses. Software licenses are for software, period.
1. Six months ago, the MS - Novell partnership wasn't concluded. This posed a new and hitherto unknown threat to Free Software.
What "threat?" Isn't it a good thing for Microsoft to participate in open source development? Or is the open source community actually just a "we hate Microsoft" club with a fancier name? (My guess is that it's the latter.)
2. GPL3 retains the same freedom for Torvalds as did GPL2. It's only the freedom of some category of users (a.k.a. abusers, corporate thugs etc.) that is affected by GPL3. So technically speaking, Linus as a devloper should have no complaints with it. The fact that Linus spoke harshly about GPL3 indicates that he does not care about Freedom to users of Linux software.
No it doesn't. It adds more restrictions for hardware vendors, for instance. Saying that the GPL3 is all-around "more free" than GPL2, despite the fact that it adds many new restrictions and removes no restrictions is just stupid.
Linus spoke "harshly" about GPL3 because he thinks it's stupid for a *software* license to involve *hardware* makers in any way, shape or form. I agree with him completely. If you want to run stuff on your PVR, then don't buy Tivo brand-- buy another brand. You don't have the "right" to force Tivo to make you happy, especially when Tivo is following the wording of your licensing agreement to the letter.
2. GPL3 retains the same freedom for Torvalds as did GPL2. It's only the freedom of some category of users (a.k.a. abusers, corporate thugs etc.) that is affected by GPL3. So technically speaking, Linus as a devloper should have no complaints with it. The fact that Linus spoke harshly about GPL3 indicates that he does not care about Freedom to users of Linux software.
A lot of those "corporate thugs" are users of the Linux kernel. Why piss them off unnecessarily when they lend you support?
Of course, your entire response ignores the enormous logistical problems around changing the licensing of the Linux kernel. For better or worse, it's going to be GPL2 until the end of time.
Stallman's trying to tell people he's increasing their "freedom" by actually removing their freedom. In our world, once you write a piece of software, you have the right to tell other people how they can use it. In Stallman's ideal world, you lose that ability, and your software is open source whether you like it or not. In a classic example of Orwell's DoubleSpeak, he calls this "freedom."
However, since I believe that going forward, LEGAL issues will be much more important than TECHNICAL issues when it comes to computer code,
Brilliant. The Year of the Linux Desktop gets further and further away as Linux programmers spend more time debating whether the word "software product" is too vague in some legal statement instead of, for example, making sound work better.
In the past they've been able to get by with "Because, we've added $XYZ feature", but they've run up against a wall in that there's not really much left to add.
Yes. The story I've heard from people at Microsoft goes that after each Office release, they do a survey asking people what feature they'd most like to see in Office. The majority of the answers are features Office *already has*, but its interface is so poor that the users couldn't find or use the feature.
Features that people can't use might as well not exist. Microsoft could very well advertise Office 2007 as "all the features it had before, but now you can actually figure out how to use them!" That is a definite selling point, and yes it does make people more productive if they can use, say, a mail merge when they didn't know how to before.
("More productive" must mean "spend even more time fiddling with font choices instead of typing the damn letter".)
Guh. Like I said above, you can conclusively study usability and come up with actual results, and definitely say that one is better than the other. Psychology provides the tools for this. You're making the assumption that Microsoft did NOT do this in the process of developing Office 2007, which frankly strikes me as extremely unlikely.
And this "new interface" is all due to "research" and has nothing to do with trying to find a reason to convince business leaders to pony up to the bar once more?
Why can't it be both? The two aren't mutually exclusive, and selling software is what Microsoft does.
Slashdot Mirror
What if they were laying their hands on Halo 2 the first time? Seriously, drop the wistful nostalgia, no game can possibly live up to the stuff your brain makes up about the past.
for the first time in around, like, 8-10 years, a major brand (nintendo) came up with the now-forgotten idea of making FUN games instead of ones that has loaded sounds and graphics and repeats old concepts.
Do you seriously think the millions of people who bought Halo 2 don't find it fun at all?
If you had used the word "innovative," you might have a point. But it's ridiculous to claim that Nintendo is the only company that desires to develop fun games.
Nerdrage!!!
Apple's been selling OSes as long as Microsoft has. Maybe Be didn't have a chance, but that's because they came out of nowhere and nobody had heard of that. But that's certainly not true of Apple. Or, to a lesser extent, Commodore (with Amiga Workbench.) Everybody knows that Macintosh exists, and for a decade it was just plain better (now it's more arguable), and yet Microsoft still achieved the business they have.
I would just like to point out that he could, in fact, have been more wrong. He could have stated, for instance, that Microsoft is run by dolphins from an secret underwater base in the artic.
Your fourth amendment rights are perfectly preserved because you have the right to walk away from any job that requires drug testing or a polygraph.
But that's totally different than saying that the constitution says anything whatsoever about companies that require drug testing... it doesn't. They have the right to demand the test, and you have the right to say no and walk away. (As you've done.) Everybody's happy, there's no need for the government to stick its nose in.
Yes, but so what? If you don't like it, don't buy products from Tivo. There's no need to add crap to the license for it.
Talk about have your cake and eat it too... open source advocates constantly talk about getting companies to adopt open source. When a company actually does it, suddenly they declare that they did it "wrong" and start changing the license.
I agree that the grandparent was full of shit, but ... Prince of Persia? Sands of Time was one of the best games of the year when it was released, and it definitely does something different as well as tell a somewhat interesting story. (In your own words.) Even the original PoP was pretty damned unique and refreshing when it came out, even though it had a weaker story.
;)
Unless you're talking about the horrible Prince of Persia: 3D, in which case spot-on.
Just FYI, there are multiple endings. The one I got had nothing to do with what you describe, and it was actually pretty sunny and happy... you've the second comment I've read here saying that the ending was a downer.
You can't turn off Achievements, but you can turn off the Notifications. I believe it's in Console Settings, or maybe the Xbox Live Settings... I don't remember, it's been awhile since I did it.
You might have a point that it might be a good idea to automatically turn it off if you select Casual, but I think the problem with that is that if that happened, then you saw an achievement on a friend's Xbox, you might assume yours was buggy or broken.
It's Pipe Dream. It was a top seller on Gameboy in 1987.
Which ending did you see? The one I had wasn't at all painful to watch, I thought it was quite touching and beautiful.
I don't know how many endings are possible, but if you save every Little Sister you come across, there's an entire level on the bathysphere you never visit in the course of the game, so I'm guessing the different endings are pretty different.
When you adapt a game for each system you need to keep this in mind and aim at the proper platform, not just the one that will ship the most units.
At this point in time, if you release a game with the production values of Bioshock ONLY on PC, you'll go bankrupt. There are practical considerations to the situation.
To be fair, Bioshock DOES have working toilets. For when they patch in that "full human body" simulation code.
Just recorded conversations you could pick up through the game much like the goofy notes found in No One Lives Forever.
Are you entirely sure you played System Shock 2? And not some other game you might have confused it with, like, say, Chex Quest?
It seems as though you would have compared the recorded messages in Bioshock to the recorded messages in System Shock II, but, hey, what do I know.
Finally, there were a lot of plot discrepancies and things that pulled me out of the storyline. Like if I were a plane crash survivor, discovering this underwater city, why would I just inject myself with a syringe I found on a table?
Are you entirely sure you played Bioshock? Maybe you accidentally confused it with another game like, say, Bolo Adventures?
You might want to get further into the game before commenting on aspects like this, because like all of the *shock games (but not Chex Quest), there is a plot twist that explains all 2/3rds of the way through. Including this little plot point you're so upset about.
(That said, I agree with you that the U-Invent machines were a bit of a let-down. I also didn't like that the hacking mini-game was Pipe Dream.)
Let's assume for a moment that the designers of this game aren't morons and actually know their audience. Personally, I prefer an easier game-- I work for a living, and it's hard for me to finish a game if I get "held up" at some point and have to play it over and over. I tend to give up and do something else.
I'd wager that 90% of Xbox players are like me, and it's only the small majority (the ones who bought Ninja Gaiden) that want harder games.
What are you talking about? Slashdot spends much more time talking about Second Life, and second life sucks ass. Compared to any other games site ever, that's a very small amount of Halo 3 coverage, considering how popular the game series is.
(Yes, yes, this is Slashdot and so you have to declare that Halo sucks, etc, but you also have to admit that it's popular. Unless you're completely delusional, in that case, status quo.)
Two points:
Try Starseige Tribes on the PC. It's a multiplayer game circa 1997 which was ahead of its time by a WIDE margin, but it also shares the more slow-paced approach that Marathon and Halo both have.
Secondly: People on Slashdot aren't anti-Halo, they're anti-mainstream. Anything popular, they hate. Don't believe it, it's all just posing to look cool on the Internet.
Out of curiosity, and apropos of nothing, what does the Bill of Rights say about drug testing or credit checks in relation to keeping a job?
that is why, even to this day, proprietary software tends to be much more feature-complete, though more buggy.
I don't believe proprietary software is more buggy. I don't like Windows Media Player's and iTunes' user interface, but they certainly worked a whole lot better (in Windows) than the open source Totem media player did (in Ubuntu.) Totem would suddenly quit all the time, it would present error messages written in geek-ese, and had many other annoyances. (It's been awhile; I don't remember the whole list anymore.)
Saying that the driver for my Hauppage video capture card is more buggy than the open source one is laughable; the open source one in Ubuntu *never* worked correctly after weeks of fiddling, while I was using PVR software on Windows on the first day.
You might have a good valid point that Linux *server* software is more stable than Windows server software, or OS X server software. But when you're to the point where a "buggy" Windows server can easily obtain years of uptime with proper administration, you approach the "who cares anymore?" point.
I still don't believe they were violating the "spirit" of anything. I think they just happened to make the mistake of creating a product using open source and selling a whole bunch of them to a group of whiny open source advocates who have to have every detail their own way.
Frankly, I don't see how hardware restrictions can be in the "spirit" of any software licenses. Software licenses are for software, period.
1. Six months ago, the MS - Novell partnership wasn't concluded. This posed a new and hitherto unknown threat to Free Software.
What "threat?" Isn't it a good thing for Microsoft to participate in open source development? Or is the open source community actually just a "we hate Microsoft" club with a fancier name? (My guess is that it's the latter.)
2. GPL3 retains the same freedom for Torvalds as did GPL2. It's only the freedom of some category of users (a.k.a. abusers, corporate thugs etc.) that is affected by GPL3. So technically speaking, Linus as a devloper should have no complaints with it. The fact that Linus spoke harshly about GPL3 indicates that he does not care about Freedom to users of Linux software.
No it doesn't. It adds more restrictions for hardware vendors, for instance. Saying that the GPL3 is all-around "more free" than GPL2, despite the fact that it adds many new restrictions and removes no restrictions is just stupid.
Linus spoke "harshly" about GPL3 because he thinks it's stupid for a *software* license to involve *hardware* makers in any way, shape or form. I agree with him completely. If you want to run stuff on your PVR, then don't buy Tivo brand-- buy another brand. You don't have the "right" to force Tivo to make you happy, especially when Tivo is following the wording of your licensing agreement to the letter.
2. GPL3 retains the same freedom for Torvalds as did GPL2. It's only the freedom of some category of users (a.k.a. abusers, corporate thugs etc.) that is affected by GPL3. So technically speaking, Linus as a devloper should have no complaints with it. The fact that Linus spoke harshly about GPL3 indicates that he does not care about Freedom to users of Linux software.
A lot of those "corporate thugs" are users of the Linux kernel. Why piss them off unnecessarily when they lend you support?
Of course, your entire response ignores the enormous logistical problems around changing the licensing of the Linux kernel. For better or worse, it's going to be GPL2 until the end of time.
Stallman's trying to tell people he's increasing their "freedom" by actually removing their freedom. In our world, once you write a piece of software, you have the right to tell other people how they can use it. In Stallman's ideal world, you lose that ability, and your software is open source whether you like it or not. In a classic example of Orwell's DoubleSpeak, he calls this "freedom."
However, since I believe that going forward, LEGAL issues will be much more important than TECHNICAL issues when it comes to computer code,
Brilliant. The Year of the Linux Desktop gets further and further away as Linux programmers spend more time debating whether the word "software product" is too vague in some legal statement instead of, for example, making sound work better.
In the past they've been able to get by with "Because, we've added $XYZ feature", but they've run up against a wall in that there's not really much left to add.
Yes. The story I've heard from people at Microsoft goes that after each Office release, they do a survey asking people what feature they'd most like to see in Office. The majority of the answers are features Office *already has*, but its interface is so poor that the users couldn't find or use the feature.
Features that people can't use might as well not exist. Microsoft could very well advertise Office 2007 as "all the features it had before, but now you can actually figure out how to use them!" That is a definite selling point, and yes it does make people more productive if they can use, say, a mail merge when they didn't know how to before.
("More productive" must mean "spend even more time fiddling with font choices instead of typing the damn letter".)
Guh. Like I said above, you can conclusively study usability and come up with actual results, and definitely say that one is better than the other. Psychology provides the tools for this. You're making the assumption that Microsoft did NOT do this in the process of developing Office 2007, which frankly strikes me as extremely unlikely.
And this "new interface" is all due to "research" and has nothing to do with trying to find a reason to convince business leaders to pony up to the bar once more?
Why can't it be both? The two aren't mutually exclusive, and selling software is what Microsoft does.