I think the accent fits just right in the context of the game. (Although you might have been kidding, sorry but I really couldn't tell.) Anyway, the best character in that expansion was obviously Big Head.
Prince of Persia (2008) had a writer-- it didn't help. The story was awful, and the incidental dialog was mind-numbingly worse-than-awful. If I were him, I sure as hell would have been credited as Alan Smithee.
(Either that or purposefully made so awful that it becomes surreal-- and you're actually thinking to yourself, "maybe medieval Persians really did speak like 1990s Californian surfers!)
Voice acting is a very important component for making an immersive game, but you also have to have a good script.
Yup!
Compare Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time with Prince of Persia (2008). The voice acting in the latter is passable, but frankly-- nothing could have saved that awful writing and that awful cliche-ridden story.
Well of course *you're* not. You wouldn't hear anything derogatory said of your beloved Microsoft! The release version didn't have it enabled after it was found in the beta. MS memos at the time specifically refer to not wanting Windows to run on any DOS other than MS-DOS. There's nothing paranoid about it.
Actually, I read up on this (thanks to another poster's helpful link explaining all) and it turns out that the reason Microsoft did this was because Windows was coded like a piece of shit and it dove right into all kinds of DOS internal undocumented data structures. The check wasn't to steal marketshare from DR-DOS, but to prevent Windows from overwriting important files on the off-change that DR-DOS had different data structures than MS-DOS.
In fact, at the trial, they brought up a concrete example where DR-DOS' differing implementation would have caused trouble for Windows.
So Microsoft had the choice of restricting Windows to run on the OS they *knew* worked (because it was the only one they QAed against), or let it run on everything and rely on the OS makers to put in enough compatibility features for it to run. They could have gone either way-- the beta went one way, and they changed their mind and the release went another.
This is just one of the realities of software development, a simple choice to not let it run on a system they never QAed becomes a horrible conspiracy just because so many people have irrational hatred towards one corporation over another. (Frankly, having been subjected to Netware, I'd much prefer to hate Novell... at least Windows works!)
But the real crime here is that you're apparently stuck in a timewarp, re-living 1992 over and over again. Like Groundhog Day, or that episode of Star Trek: TNG. How are you enjoying your Milli Vanilli albums in your personal time warp?
What I'm trying to say here, and I think I've already expressed this, is "get the fuck over it already."
Dude, like I said, the fact that you're a gmail customer means Google gets better ad rates. The more gmail users they have, the better their ad rates are. We've already gone over this. That applies whether or not you put in fake info. Please re-read the post *again* as you obviously still don't get it.
1) Maybe Microsoft just has more products coming out this quarter than they usually do
2) This pales in comparison to the massive amounts of iPad coverage we all were subjected to-- especially since these Microsoft products are actually *useful*, and not crap like the iPad is
I don't get the sense I'm seeing any more pre-release coverage than normal.
Was somebody claiming the opposite? Is the advent of this technology relevant to the discussion at-hand? Should I go ahead and post a whole series of links just in case, for example, someone wasn't sure if ATI made graphics cards?
Sorry, I'm not buying into the paranoid conspiracy theory. The fact is that the release version of the software did not have the bug, so stop getting your panties in a knot over a fucking minor fucking bug that happened 20 fucking years ago.
You either are too young to remember, or you have a short memory.
Or I've heard the same bullshit urban legends about Microsoft repeated three dozen times, but I still don't believe them without proof.
Microsoft went out of their way to maintain compatibility with their own older software. But until recently they always tried to block competition intentionally. Although Windows 3.1 ran perfectly on DR-DOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS, it was returning an non-fatal error message, in effect convincing users there was something wrong with DR-DOS. Eventually Novell gave up on DR-DOS and sold it to Caldera (now called SCO). The ensuing lawsuit was settled out of court sometime in 2000 for $155 million, with Novell and Caldera sharing the profits. This is just one example.
I've heard that story before, and I've yet to see any proof that error was put in-place intentionally to shut-out DR-DOS. And notice how even Wikipedia (extremely biased against Microsoft, but at least beholden to provide facts when possible) says the error only occurred in a beta, and the released version did not have it.
Gee! You think it was a... *bug*? That was later *fixed*?
When they couldn't outright deny competitors access, Microsoft's policy was embrace, extend, extinguish. Internet Explorer 4 and 5 were NOT standards compliant.
First of all, the W3C had somehow even less teeth in this era than they do now. Do you think the equivalent Netscape versions were anywhere even remotely close to the standards? No.
Here's a few reasons why IE 4-6 were not standards-compliant, and the reasons why:
1) ActiveX support. Why? Because HTML was originally designed to be extensible (that's why SCRIPT tags have a LANGUAGE property). Microsoft just extended HTML in the way the W3C said people were able to. Five years later, and suddenly that's a huge crime and everybody hates them for it.
2) CSS box model. When Microsoft implemented CSS, they read W3C's incredibly-vague specs on the box model differently than they were intended to be read and ended up with an incompatible box model. W3C didn't fix the vague standards until Microsoft had already shipped a browser.
3) DOM extensions. IE developers knew the DOM sucked-ass as much as all other right-thinking people knew/know. They added a few DOM functions/behaviors that aren't in the standards to make using it easier. (Note: adding additional DOM functions not defined in the standards is not wrong. Remember: all of this was intended to be extensible!) When W3C saw that these DOM functions were useful, they standardized some of them... in a completely different way than the already-implemented Microsoft version! Thus, the sibling function to "innerHTML" is named "textContent" instead of the much-better-named Microsoft version "innerText".
The point is today Microsoft is a better company because the competition forced them to open up and listen to their clients. Remove competitive pressure and I promise you they'll revert to their old policies.
Look, I'm not saying that Microsoft is full of angels, but they're not nearly a hundredth as evil as you seem to think they are.
Look at what you're criminalizing them for: A bug in a beta. Making use of the extensibility built-in to HTML/DOM. Trying to implement W3C's shitty vaguely-worded standards. That's it! That's not mustache-twirling evil villain stuff!
Yeah, but you're contributing to Google's bottom-line by using Gmail. The storage for them is so cheap as to be zero cost, but the more users they have, the better deals they can get when dealing with advertisers.
You can't be ignorant of the fact that it's pretty much impossible to do client-side web development and not test with (3 versions of) IE.
You also have to do testing with several versions of Firefox. Damn that Mozilla! We should all hate them!!! (More seriously: what's your point? If you don't suck at your job, you have to test with all currently-supported somewhat-popular browsers.)
And in many corporate environments, you're still essentially forced to use Windows.
That's because your corporation chose Microsoft products, because Microsoft products generally are much better than the competition in corporate environments. Apple's always ignored corporations, and Linux solutions are disjointed and disorganized.
Did your company have a choice? Of course, they could have gone with some other solution. They chose not to... that's not Microsoft's fault.
But they don't ever really try to bend the whole industry that direction, and the only reason they have as much influence as they do is the same reason anybody who comes up with a good idea or a successful model does.
Sure they have. Look what they did with the record companies... remember when Amazon was fighting to price music at less than $0.99, they were fighting against Apple and the record companies Apple had brainwashed into selling all tracks for at least $0.99.
I suppose you could argue (using the loophole you helpfully included) that Amazon's music store wasn't "a good idea or successful model."
But let's back up a step... Windows (Windows Mobile if you like) ecosystem vs. iPhone ecosystem:
Has your Windows computer ever stopped you from downloading and installing a program because that program contained a feature the OS already had?
Has your Windows box ever prevented you from paying for software that contained pictures of titties?
Has Microsoft done anything, ever, on purpose to break compatibility with older or competitive software? (Apple does this about every week, BTW.)
No, no, and no.
Oh, and here's something else to think about: why do I have to install a gigantic application that sells music and movies so I can update the *firmward* of a cellphone? Why does that gigantic application also install a media library I don't want or need? Why does it try to stealthily install a web browser I didn't fucking ask for? Why do I now have some strange zero-config service running beyond my firewall? Apple's software situation sucks-- it's the worst "software taking over your computer" experience since RealPlayer circa 2004.
You can play Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance with two players without split-screen. It just moves the camera to keep both of them in view.
Nowhere does it say, "there's no split screen, SO THEREFORE YOU NEED TO SHELL-OUT FOR A SECOND CONSOLE YOU SUCKER!! SUCKER!!!!!" which seems to be what you're reading there.
I count myself one of the lucky geeks with a wife who loves video games and one of our favorite types has been the split-screen dungeon crawl like Baldur's Gate.
Uh, assuming you're actually talking about Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, then it's not split-screen.
(Baldur's Gate is a 1-person-per-computer game, and a full-on RPG, not just a dungeon crawl.)
We won't be buying another TV and another PS3 to play games on, though, so I guess this is a game we won't be buying.
Dear Game Developers: Please bring back split-screen play as a standard. While Borderlands is great, we won't be playing it forever.
You're going to confuse the bejeesus out of these mysterious game developers reading Slashdot if you tell them, "make the game split-screen," and "make the game like Dark Alliance" at the same time. Their heads will explode.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering he's:
1) Mostly insane
2) A complete prankster
I think the accent fits just right in the context of the game. (Although you might have been kidding, sorry but I really couldn't tell.) Anyway, the best character in that expansion was obviously Big Head.
Prince of Persia (2008) had a writer-- it didn't help. The story was awful, and the incidental dialog was mind-numbingly worse-than-awful. If I were him, I sure as hell would have been credited as Alan Smithee.
(Either that or purposefully made so awful that it becomes surreal-- and you're actually thinking to yourself, "maybe medieval Persians really did speak like 1990s Californian surfers!)
The Xbox game Sudeki almost made me put a bullet through my brain every time any character opened their mouth-- talk about bad accents! Christ.
Whoever did the voice acting for that game, if there's any justice in the world, they're all living in dumpsters now.
Voice acting is a very important component for making an immersive game, but you also have to have a good script.
Yup!
Compare Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time with Prince of Persia (2008). The voice acting in the latter is passable, but frankly-- nothing could have saved that awful writing and that awful cliche-ridden story.
What the fuck does it matter? It was 20 fucking years ago!
Seriously it's not even close to the same company anymore, get the fuck over it.
You just sound pathetic, when your only example, ONLY example, is not only not a clear-cut case, but 20 fucking years old. Goddamned pathetic.
Well of course *you're* not. You wouldn't hear anything derogatory said of your beloved Microsoft! The release version didn't have it enabled after it was found in the beta. MS memos at the time specifically refer to not wanting Windows to run on any DOS other than MS-DOS. There's nothing paranoid about it.
Actually, I read up on this (thanks to another poster's helpful link explaining all) and it turns out that the reason Microsoft did this was because Windows was coded like a piece of shit and it dove right into all kinds of DOS internal undocumented data structures. The check wasn't to steal marketshare from DR-DOS, but to prevent Windows from overwriting important files on the off-change that DR-DOS had different data structures than MS-DOS.
In fact, at the trial, they brought up a concrete example where DR-DOS' differing implementation would have caused trouble for Windows.
So Microsoft had the choice of restricting Windows to run on the OS they *knew* worked (because it was the only one they QAed against), or let it run on everything and rely on the OS makers to put in enough compatibility features for it to run. They could have gone either way-- the beta went one way, and they changed their mind and the release went another.
This is just one of the realities of software development, a simple choice to not let it run on a system they never QAed becomes a horrible conspiracy just because so many people have irrational hatred towards one corporation over another. (Frankly, having been subjected to Netware, I'd much prefer to hate Novell... at least Windows works!)
But the real crime here is that you're apparently stuck in a timewarp, re-living 1992 over and over again. Like Groundhog Day, or that episode of Star Trek: TNG. How are you enjoying your Milli Vanilli albums in your personal time warp?
What I'm trying to say here, and I think I've already expressed this, is "get the fuck over it already."
I don't want your skeezy old battery in my nice new electric car.
Ouch.
Dude, like I said, the fact that you're a gmail customer means Google gets better ad rates. The more gmail users they have, the better their ad rates are. We've already gone over this. That applies whether or not you put in fake info. Please re-read the post *again* as you obviously still don't get it.
Mozilla could just buy a license to it. It's not like they're short on money.
Two points:
1) Maybe Microsoft just has more products coming out this quarter than they usually do
2) This pales in comparison to the massive amounts of iPad coverage we all were subjected to-- especially since these Microsoft products are actually *useful*, and not crap like the iPad is
I don't get the sense I'm seeing any more pre-release coverage than normal.
But the question remains, how tight will it be to the OS? Would a simple security flaw give a bit of JS access to the kernel?
Are you suggesting that's possible now?
Hint: it's not, hasn't been since Windows 2000 came out.
Annnd?
Was somebody claiming the opposite? Is the advent of this technology relevant to the discussion at-hand? Should I go ahead and post a whole series of links just in case, for example, someone wasn't sure if ATI made graphics cards?
Is there a point you're getting at here?
Sorry, I'm not buying into the paranoid conspiracy theory. The fact is that the release version of the software did not have the bug, so stop getting your panties in a knot over a fucking minor fucking bug that happened 20 fucking years ago.
Get the fuck over it already.
Whether or not you block the ads isn't relevant to the point I made.
Please re-read it.
You either are too young to remember, or you have a short memory.
Or I've heard the same bullshit urban legends about Microsoft repeated three dozen times, but I still don't believe them without proof.
Microsoft went out of their way to maintain compatibility with their own older software. But until recently they always tried to block competition intentionally. Although Windows 3.1 ran perfectly on DR-DOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS, it was returning an non-fatal error message, in effect convincing users there was something wrong with DR-DOS. Eventually Novell gave up on DR-DOS and sold it to Caldera (now called SCO). The ensuing lawsuit was settled out of court sometime in 2000 for $155 million, with Novell and Caldera sharing the profits. This is just one example.
I've heard that story before, and I've yet to see any proof that error was put in-place intentionally to shut-out DR-DOS. And notice how even Wikipedia (extremely biased against Microsoft, but at least beholden to provide facts when possible) says the error only occurred in a beta, and the released version did not have it.
Gee! You think it was a ... *bug*? That was later *fixed*?
When they couldn't outright deny competitors access, Microsoft's policy was embrace, extend, extinguish. Internet Explorer 4 and 5 were NOT standards compliant.
First of all, the W3C had somehow even less teeth in this era than they do now. Do you think the equivalent Netscape versions were anywhere even remotely close to the standards? No.
Here's a few reasons why IE 4-6 were not standards-compliant, and the reasons why:
1) ActiveX support. Why? Because HTML was originally designed to be extensible (that's why SCRIPT tags have a LANGUAGE property). Microsoft just extended HTML in the way the W3C said people were able to. Five years later, and suddenly that's a huge crime and everybody hates them for it.
2) CSS box model. When Microsoft implemented CSS, they read W3C's incredibly-vague specs on the box model differently than they were intended to be read and ended up with an incompatible box model. W3C didn't fix the vague standards until Microsoft had already shipped a browser.
3) DOM extensions. IE developers knew the DOM sucked-ass as much as all other right-thinking people knew/know. They added a few DOM functions/behaviors that aren't in the standards to make using it easier. (Note: adding additional DOM functions not defined in the standards is not wrong. Remember: all of this was intended to be extensible!) When W3C saw that these DOM functions were useful, they standardized some of them... in a completely different way than the already-implemented Microsoft version! Thus, the sibling function to "innerHTML" is named "textContent" instead of the much-better-named Microsoft version "innerText".
The point is today Microsoft is a better company because the competition forced them to open up and listen to their clients. Remove competitive pressure and I promise you they'll revert to their old policies.
Look, I'm not saying that Microsoft is full of angels, but they're not nearly a hundredth as evil as you seem to think they are.
Look at what you're criminalizing them for: A bug in a beta. Making use of the extensibility built-in to HTML/DOM. Trying to implement W3C's shitty vaguely-worded standards. That's it! That's not mustache-twirling evil villain stuff!
Yeah, but you're contributing to Google's bottom-line by using Gmail. The storage for them is so cheap as to be zero cost, but the more users they have, the better deals they can get when dealing with advertisers.
You can't be ignorant of the fact that it's pretty much impossible to do client-side web development and not test with (3 versions of) IE.
You also have to do testing with several versions of Firefox. Damn that Mozilla! We should all hate them!!! (More seriously: what's your point? If you don't suck at your job, you have to test with all currently-supported somewhat-popular browsers.)
And in many corporate environments, you're still essentially forced to use Windows.
That's because your corporation chose Microsoft products, because Microsoft products generally are much better than the competition in corporate environments. Apple's always ignored corporations, and Linux solutions are disjointed and disorganized.
Did your company have a choice? Of course, they could have gone with some other solution. They chose not to... that's not Microsoft's fault.
But they don't ever really try to bend the whole industry that direction, and the only reason they have as much influence as they do is the same reason anybody who comes up with a good idea or a successful model does.
Sure they have. Look what they did with the record companies... remember when Amazon was fighting to price music at less than $0.99, they were fighting against Apple and the record companies Apple had brainwashed into selling all tracks for at least $0.99.
I suppose you could argue (using the loophole you helpfully included) that Amazon's music store wasn't "a good idea or successful model."
But let's back up a step... Windows (Windows Mobile if you like) ecosystem vs. iPhone ecosystem:
Has your Windows computer ever stopped you from downloading and installing a program because that program contained a feature the OS already had?
Has your Windows box ever prevented you from paying for software that contained pictures of titties?
Has Microsoft done anything, ever, on purpose to break compatibility with older or competitive software? (Apple does this about every week, BTW.)
No, no, and no.
Oh, and here's something else to think about: why do I have to install a gigantic application that sells music and movies so I can update the *firmward* of a cellphone? Why does that gigantic application also install a media library I don't want or need? Why does it try to stealthily install a web browser I didn't fucking ask for? Why do I now have some strange zero-config service running beyond my firewall? Apple's software situation sucks-- it's the worst "software taking over your computer" experience since RealPlayer circa 2004.
You're making assumptions.
You can play Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance with two players without split-screen. It just moves the camera to keep both of them in view.
Nowhere does it say, "there's no split screen, SO THEREFORE YOU NEED TO SHELL-OUT FOR A SECOND CONSOLE YOU SUCKER!! SUCKER!!!!!" which seems to be what you're reading there.
I count myself one of the lucky geeks with a wife who loves video games and one of our favorite types has been the split-screen dungeon crawl like Baldur's Gate.
Uh, assuming you're actually talking about Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, then it's not split-screen.
(Baldur's Gate is a 1-person-per-computer game, and a full-on RPG, not just a dungeon crawl.)
We won't be buying another TV and another PS3 to play games on, though, so I guess this is a game we won't be buying.
Dear Game Developers: Please bring back split-screen play as a standard. While Borderlands is great, we won't be playing it forever.
You're going to confuse the bejeesus out of these mysterious game developers reading Slashdot if you tell them, "make the game split-screen," and "make the game like Dark Alliance" at the same time. Their heads will explode.
I'm guessing it'll be a lot like Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance (and the sequel.) Just based on the blurbs I've read.
Just use pita bread.
There is this: http://stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2010/02/11/forced-unionization/
That's in the US, not Canada, but that's seriously, seriously f-ed up.
I'll be happy when people stop claiming Firefox invented Add-Ons, when IE has the same damned thing for ages, by a slightly different name.