Not to mention Active Desktop in Windows 98 was about 90% of the way to "widgets." It ran Javascript, it could display live web content, all that good stuff.
You must have been playing on Easy. Or maybe you're just better at the game than I am. But beating the bosses in those Oblivion gates were hard for me, and took me several tries. Plus the time it takes to handle all the baddies leading up to it, and the time it took to figure out the puzzle to open the gate to the main tower...
Uh, wow. I don't know what kind of RPGs you prefer, but I think pretty much the entire world disagrees with you on the Elder Scrolls series. (Especially the last two: Morrowind and Oblivion.)
The gameplay is what you make of it. If you find it boring, that's because you're doing boring things... go do something else. There's no shortage. You can take up alchemy and figure out how to mix herbs to make potions. You can take up enchanting, and construct your own enchanted weapons and armor. You can be a thief and rob anything from anybody. You can go out and find random dungeons to run through, even if you don't have any quests that point there. You can go through all the Oblivion gates in Oblivion; that's like 80 hours of gameplay alone. (There's like 20 of them, and each one takes like 4 hours). You can find all the shrines and finish those quests to get blessed by all the various Gods/Demons in the game.
Sorry, the claim that the game is repetitive just doesn't work with me. You can complain that (in Oblivion) the "you can't go any further!" messages screw with immersion. You can complain that the touted AI-controlled NPCs aren't really as clever as they're claimed to be. You can complain that the physics-using traps are mostly pointless, because it's impossible to be killed by one unless you're a total moron. But saying it's repetitive? No way.
Also, it doesn't say so on the box, but Oblivion really does require the HD to play smoothly. Running Oblivion on a 360 with no HD attached is just asking for trouble.
If the console does have a HD, and you're still experiencing troubles, you can restart the game with A held down (I believe; you can look it up) and it'll reset the cache it keeps. This means the initial load will take much longer, or as long as the HD-less 360s, but from then on it should behave much better. At least until the cache gets full again.
From my experience playing it for extended periods with the HD, you should reset the cache every 15-20 hours of play for best performance.
Why don't you TRY it first? Christ, why is everyone here so damned afraid of change?
If all you want is treeviews of text, why not just go back to Norton Commander in DOS? I'm sure you'd be very happy, and then you wouldn't have to sit here and gripe that (god-forbid!) some companies are doing their damnedest to IMPROVE computing for EVERYONE! You could just stay back in 1993 unmolested by the modern world.
(PS Once again, Slashdot treats a press of the Submit button as the Preview button in Safari.)
The Halo universe is entirely different than Niven's. Almost completely. Utterly. Have you read the novels? (Don't read the novelization of the game; it stinks. Read the other two.) The Covenant are nothing like the Kzin (if that is the comparison you were going to draw).
The only thing they have in common whatsoever is that an ancient race build ringworlds in both works. Other than that, I can't think of any similarities at all. If anything, the Covenant "race" is a rip-off of the later Rendevous with Rama books and their Octi-spiders, and they are a lot more important to the story than the setting of the Ringworld.
Thanks for clarifying. I admit I'm not an expert in the matter, I just know enough to address those liberals who always say, "well why didn't he attack North Korea if he's so against dictators!!!111!one!!"
You *do* know that Microsoft does GUI research when they write programs, right? They actually get typical users in a lab and watch them attempt to accomplish tasks with it and improve their produce accordingly.
I put a lot more faith in Microsoft's research than the knee-jerk "I think this is best" philosophy that gave us terrible GUIs like GIMP's.
Re:The problem with guis is they don't work
on
GUIs Get a Makeover
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· Score: 1
Ok, then the task becomes: "Ensure that my cat recognizing program actually did a good job by previewing all the images."
North Korea only has a chance if China steps in for them, and personally I don't think China would do that and I'm almost 100% sure Russia wouldn't. They're just too batshit insane at this point. South Korea has more people and better-fed, healthier people than the north. South Korea has more modern military equipment and possibly better training. South Korea has active support from the US. (I think the entire reason we keep US troops on the DMZ line is so when/if the North does attack, they can put it on the evening news and get Americans all riled up to go to war. Remember the Maine!) I doubt North Korea could hold for 6 months. Hell, the instant you showed the average brainwashed North Korean a MP3 player or Nintendo DS, they'd probably be rushing to defect.
If China actively supports North Korea, then you have huge problems all around.
North Korea doesn't need nuclear missiles. It has regular short-range missiles that can easily reach Seoul, and enough to completely destroy the city if they were attacked. That's just as good as having a nuke, for all practical purposes, and it's a huge deterrant against pissing them off.
(Note: Of course, they'd lose the resulting war, no question about it. But in the first hour of the war, they could litterally kill millions of civilians.)
You need to specify. I've never managed to beat a good PC RPG in less than about 100+ hours, partly because they have a lot more content, and partly because they have puzzles that get you stuck every so often, and partly because (and other PC RPG gamers can nod here) most of them were buggy as hell and you spent as much time working around bugs as playing.
Morrowind was great, but Daggerfall was released so buggy you literally couldn't finish a single dungeon without cheat codes.
They could have cut a full hour from that movie, and it would have been tons better. That's a problem with uber-famous directors, is that their editors/producers/etc become afraid to tell them to cut the length down.
No, the FSF is concerned with being anti-corporate activists who don't give a flying crap about users, but take on that pretense to justify their crusade against choice in the software marketplace.
I'm a user, I should be able to put DRM on whatever the hell I want.
I work in a game testing lab. We turn off Rumble on all our consoles. (Thankfully, 360s have a Dashboard option to turn off rumble altogether so you don't have to do it individually in each title.) Our big problem was that frequently the controllers we weren't using while testing multiplayer games would rumble themselves off the table.
Uh, the vast majority of wireless controllers have rumble, presuming that the console they go with also has rumble. (Obviously, a wireless controller for a Sega Genesis won't, but I don't know of any wireless Xbox controllers that don't.)
You're probably using the Wavebird from Nintendo which doesn't have rumble. Logitech wireless controllers are much better.
Oh, and BTW, Xbox 360s *come* with wireless controllers with rumble, and they last 20+ hours on a single battery charge. They work great.
I understand that you don't consider yourself a hardcore gamer, but you might want to do a bare minimum of research before posting.
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I dunno, that didn't stop the Virtual Boy from being released. Surely they found that it would cause eye-strain during their QA testing?
Not to mention Active Desktop in Windows 98 was about 90% of the way to "widgets." It ran Javascript, it could display live web content, all that good stuff.
You must have been playing on Easy. Or maybe you're just better at the game than I am. But beating the bosses in those Oblivion gates were hard for me, and took me several tries. Plus the time it takes to handle all the baddies leading up to it, and the time it took to figure out the puzzle to open the gate to the main tower...
New Flash: Dinosaurs Still Extinct! (Full story at 11:00!)
Uh, wow. I don't know what kind of RPGs you prefer, but I think pretty much the entire world disagrees with you on the Elder Scrolls series. (Especially the last two: Morrowind and Oblivion.)
The gameplay is what you make of it. If you find it boring, that's because you're doing boring things... go do something else. There's no shortage. You can take up alchemy and figure out how to mix herbs to make potions. You can take up enchanting, and construct your own enchanted weapons and armor. You can be a thief and rob anything from anybody. You can go out and find random dungeons to run through, even if you don't have any quests that point there. You can go through all the Oblivion gates in Oblivion; that's like 80 hours of gameplay alone. (There's like 20 of them, and each one takes like 4 hours). You can find all the shrines and finish those quests to get blessed by all the various Gods/Demons in the game.
Sorry, the claim that the game is repetitive just doesn't work with me. You can complain that (in Oblivion) the "you can't go any further!" messages screw with immersion. You can complain that the touted AI-controlled NPCs aren't really as clever as they're claimed to be. You can complain that the physics-using traps are mostly pointless, because it's impossible to be killed by one unless you're a total moron. But saying it's repetitive? No way.
There already is a video game for the new Battlestar Galactica. It's on Xbox. Hehehe.
Also, it doesn't say so on the box, but Oblivion really does require the HD to play smoothly. Running Oblivion on a 360 with no HD attached is just asking for trouble.
If the console does have a HD, and you're still experiencing troubles, you can restart the game with A held down (I believe; you can look it up) and it'll reset the cache it keeps. This means the initial load will take much longer, or as long as the HD-less 360s, but from then on it should behave much better. At least until the cache gets full again.
From my experience playing it for extended periods with the HD, you should reset the cache every 15-20 hours of play for best performance.
Maybe there's something YOU don't know! Like Torvald's sinister plot, culminating in Decem-- but I've said too much.
Why don't you TRY it first? Christ, why is everyone here so damned afraid of change?
If all you want is treeviews of text, why not just go back to Norton Commander in DOS? I'm sure you'd be very happy, and then you wouldn't have to sit here and gripe that (god-forbid!) some companies are doing their damnedest to IMPROVE computing for EVERYONE! You could just stay back in 1993 unmolested by the modern world.
(PS Once again, Slashdot treats a press of the Submit button as the Preview button in Safari.)
Just to add a note: If you want to see a rip-off of Niven's work in a video game, try the Wing Commander series.
The Halo universe is entirely different than Niven's. Almost completely. Utterly. Have you read the novels? (Don't read the novelization of the game; it stinks. Read the other two.) The Covenant are nothing like the Kzin (if that is the comparison you were going to draw).
The only thing they have in common whatsoever is that an ancient race build ringworlds in both works. Other than that, I can't think of any similarities at all. If anything, the Covenant "race" is a rip-off of the later Rendevous with Rama books and their Octi-spiders, and they are a lot more important to the story than the setting of the Ringworld.
Thanks for clarifying. I admit I'm not an expert in the matter, I just know enough to address those liberals who always say, "well why didn't he attack North Korea if he's so against dictators!!!111!one!!"
You *do* know that Microsoft does GUI research when they write programs, right? They actually get typical users in a lab and watch them attempt to accomplish tasks with it and improve their produce accordingly.
I put a lot more faith in Microsoft's research than the knee-jerk "I think this is best" philosophy that gave us terrible GUIs like GIMP's.
Ok, then the task becomes: "Ensure that my cat recognizing program actually did a good job by previewing all the images."
Or, as MST3K would put it:
"Thank you for not killing me!"
(Episode Future Wax-- I mean Future War.)
North Korea only has a chance if China steps in for them, and personally I don't think China would do that and I'm almost 100% sure Russia wouldn't. They're just too batshit insane at this point. South Korea has more people and better-fed, healthier people than the north. South Korea has more modern military equipment and possibly better training. South Korea has active support from the US. (I think the entire reason we keep US troops on the DMZ line is so when/if the North does attack, they can put it on the evening news and get Americans all riled up to go to war. Remember the Maine!) I doubt North Korea could hold for 6 months. Hell, the instant you showed the average brainwashed North Korean a MP3 player or Nintendo DS, they'd probably be rushing to defect.
If China actively supports North Korea, then you have huge problems all around.
North Korea doesn't need nuclear missiles. It has regular short-range missiles that can easily reach Seoul, and enough to completely destroy the city if they were attacked. That's just as good as having a nuke, for all practical purposes, and it's a huge deterrant against pissing them off.
(Note: Of course, they'd lose the resulting war, no question about it. But in the first hour of the war, they could litterally kill millions of civilians.)
the 360 has not even the rumor of real Final Fantasy on it.
Uh. The 360 has Final Fantasy XI, actually.
Didn't that attack Godzilla after it was accidentally brought to earth from a wormhole created by the black hole gun?
NT
You need to specify. I've never managed to beat a good PC RPG in less than about 100+ hours, partly because they have a lot more content, and partly because they have puzzles that get you stuck every so often, and partly because (and other PC RPG gamers can nod here) most of them were buggy as hell and you spent as much time working around bugs as playing.
Morrowind was great, but Daggerfall was released so buggy you literally couldn't finish a single dungeon without cheat codes.
More mainstream example: Alexander.
They could have cut a full hour from that movie, and it would have been tons better. That's a problem with uber-famous directors, is that their editors/producers/etc become afraid to tell them to cut the length down.
No, the FSF is concerned with being anti-corporate activists who don't give a flying crap about users, but take on that pretense to justify their crusade against choice in the software marketplace.
I'm a user, I should be able to put DRM on whatever the hell I want.
I work in a game testing lab. We turn off Rumble on all our consoles. (Thankfully, 360s have a Dashboard option to turn off rumble altogether so you don't have to do it individually in each title.) Our big problem was that frequently the controllers we weren't using while testing multiplayer games would rumble themselves off the table.
Uh, the vast majority of wireless controllers have rumble, presuming that the console they go with also has rumble. (Obviously, a wireless controller for a Sega Genesis won't, but I don't know of any wireless Xbox controllers that don't.)
You're probably using the Wavebird from Nintendo which doesn't have rumble. Logitech wireless controllers are much better.
Oh, and BTW, Xbox 360s *come* with wireless controllers with rumble, and they last 20+ hours on a single battery charge. They work great.
I understand that you don't consider yourself a hardcore gamer, but you might want to do a bare minimum of research before posting.