Native Jovian

I'd totally prefer to fly a helicopter to work (there's even a municipal airport within easy walking distance where I could land!) but I can't afford a helicopter, so I spend two hours a day commuting in my '97 Honda instead. Just because you "prefer" to do something doesn't mean you're entitled to it. If you want to do something, but you can't afford it, then you don't do it. Simple as that.

Kills = how many people you killed by yourself. Kills assisted = how many people you killed by landing the final blow, but someone else also damaged them (or healed you while you were killing people). Kill assists = how many people where you damaged them, but someone else killed by landing the final blow (or you healed them while they killed people).

But people sell old DVDs they don't want anymore. Or are you saying that that's wrong too?

So how is a car different from a game? How useful it is (most people need cars; no one really "needs" a video game) or how long it lasts (my car is older than most of the video games I own, incidentally; both my car and some of my games were bought used) is irrelevant to the question of whether or not it's okay to resell it. When you buy it, you purchase the rights (the license) and the means (the physical disc) to use it. When you sell it, you transfer the same to someone else. In this, video games are the same as any other kind of property.

That's why we've got another term for it, "intellectual property". It may not technically be theft in a legal sense, but calling it "stealing" is close enough shorthand for most people outside of a legal document or a courtroom.

Argh. Argh argh argh. This hurts me. Seriously, ow. Okay, here's how software (and music, too, but I'm focusing more on software at the moment) works. When I write a program, I own it. It belongs to me. I can do whatever I want with it (as long as it's not illegal etc etc); I can copy it and give it out to my friends, I can modify it, I can sell it, whatever. Now, say I sell you my program. What I've actually done is sell you a license to use a copy of my software. It's basically a contract that says "I, the maker of the software give you, the user of the software, permission to use the software under these conditions". The conditions are generally "you can't modify the program" and "you can't copy the program", among other things. Even free software has licenses, though usually they take out the "you can't copy the program", sometimes they take out the "you can't modify the program", and occasionally they add in "you can't use this program to make a profit". Now, movies/music/etc works the same way. When you buy a DVD or a CD, you own the physical copy of the media, but you don't own the media itself. You can't copy it and start selling them, and you can't use them to make money (by, say, putting a song in a movie, or charging people to view a movie like a theater). That requires seperate contracts with whoever actually owns the media (a musician or a recording label, in the case of music; a studio, in the case of a movie). Let's put it this way. If you made something (whether it be a program, a song, a movie, a story, or whatever), and your livelihood depended on you selling copies of what you made, would you want people to be able to do things besides use/listen/watch/read it without your permission? I don't think anyone can reasonably say "yes". (Note that certain instances, like parody or fair use, are exceptions to this. This is so people like Weird Al can make a living off of making fun of other artists, and so we don't have to do things like pay George Lucas a quarter every time we use the word "jedi" or say "Millenium Falcon".) The point is, if everything became public domain the instant it was created, which seems to be what SoulinEther was advocating, then no one would ever be able to make any money off of stuff they made, and the entire entertainment/publishing/software/etc industries collapse overnight. "But what about open source?", people ask. "They make programs and distribute them for free!" So they do, but many of the people that do are programmers for a living and work on open source projects as a hobby. If it were impossible for a professional programmer to support himself, then it would be impossible for him to develop the skills necessary to make open source projects work. In short, if you couldn't be a [programmer/writer/musician/artist/etc] for a living, then we'd have a hell of a lot less (and lower quality) [software/literature/music/art/etc] because the only time people would have to devote to it would be leisure time. So that's why we have intellectual property rights. How does this fit in with pirating? Well, the short answer is that it's why piracy is illegal. The longer answer is that it's why piracy is wrong, in both a moral and a practical sense. By refusing to pay for something, you're reducing the creater's ability to support themselves, which hurts the industry, which hurts everyone. "But there's no lost sale! I wasn't going to buy it anyway!" Bullshit. The options there are "buy it" or "do without". By choosing option 3, "pirate it", you're throwing the whole system out of whack. If you want it, but not enough to buy it at whatever price it currently costs, then that sends the message to the people who made it that their product costs too much and if they lower the price they might get more sales. If you pirate it instead of waiting until it's on sale or something to buy it, you're sending the message to the people that made it that no one wants their product. Which is untrue. See the problem? Now, that said, I don't think that piracy is always wrong. If it's impossible (or at least very difficult) to buy what you're pirating, then I don't see any moral problems with pirating it. The two easiest examples I can think of are abandonware and as-yet-untranslated media. Abandonware is software that's been abandoned by its makers -- either they went out of business, or they simply no longer support it because it's too old, or something like that. When I mention untranslated stuff, I'm mostly referring to anime and video games. The original Mother was never sold outside of Japan. Season two of Gundam 00 is currently airing in Japan, but isn't available on this side of the Pacific yet. Certain dedicated fans have made these available to the public; you can download and play/watch them. It's technically illegal (it's still piracy), but I don't see the problem with it. If you can't buy it because it's not being sold, then that's a different situation than "it's too expensive" or "I wouldn't have bought it anyway". As an aside! There's a very good reason why some programs are ridiculously expensive. In short: programming is hard. It takes programmers -- people who have at least a bachelor's degree, and often a master's or PhD, and expect to be paid accordingly -- a very long time to write complicated programs. They expect to be paid while they're doing this, and the company has to recoup all these costs at the end of the programming cycle, by selling the finished product. Creating software of any size is a huge risk for a company, because you basically have to go into debt to keep your employees paid and your office lights on for potentially years until your product is finished, and only then can you even hope to make back the money you spent to create it. To put things in perspective: Microsoft spent five years making Windows Vista. It has over fifty million lines of code. I don't know how many programmers worked on the project, but suffice to say that it's freaking huge. The fact that something so staggeringly gigantic works at all is frankly mind-boggling. And guess what. People bitched and moaned and complained about it, and virtually no one liked it. So they had to turn right around and get cracking on Windows 7 just to keep their customers satisfied. Many people (myself included) skipped over Vista entirely, and plan to leap from Windows XP straight to Win7 when it comes out. That all translates to a financial loss for Microsoft. Now, few programs are as epicly giant as an entire operating system, but by the same token, few programs are in such high demand as operating systems either. So when you complain about price tags in the hundreds of dollars for video editing or music composition software, just remember how much bloody work went into the thing in the first place. In all honesty, it probably wasn't even intended for use by private consumers -- most software is designed to be purchased by other companies. Guess what, guys! If you want to use the same tools as the professionals, then you have to pay the same price. It's not software companies being egotistical dickheads, laughing manaically and counting their money while they swim in pools filled with gold coins Scrooge McDuck style. It's just them trying to actually turn a profit -- and it's a losing proposition for many of them. TL;DR VERSION: Huge post is huge lulz. EDIT re: used game industry I don't see the issue with this. No one complains when you sell a used car, or trade it in at the lot for credit toward a new one. No one cares when people hold a garage sale and sell off a bunch of crap. Why should games be any different? Games generally require that you have the physical copy to play -- either because the disc has to be in the drive for the game to run, or because there's some sort of CD-key that comes unique to each copy of the game. (As an aside, I suppose it would be possible to sell something like Starcraft -- which requires a CD key but no disc to play -- after writing down your CD key. Then you could copy or download the disc and install it using the CD key you bought, copied, and then sold. Anyone buying the disc you sold wouldn't be able to use it, because the CD key would already be in use. How does the used games industry deal with that sort of thing?) By selling your disc, you're selling your license with it, which I see no problems with.

No, that was Mad Max. Not Road Warrior or Beyond Thunderdome, but the first one (the one that no one ever watches).

Changing track names like this is always sort of tricky, because even if they're not official or even entirely accurate, a lot of them have the kind of recognition factor where people will be be looking for the "wrong" track name. The best example I can think of is "The Dream that Time Dreams" from the Chrono Cross soundtrack... which most people I run into know as "Time of the Dreamwatch".

That leads to another set of questions. Did you die of natural causes, and (if "no") would you prefer to roam the Earth as vengeful spirits or have someone avenge your untimely deaths?

Can'tsleepclownswilleatme can'tsleepclownswilleatme can'tsleepclownswilleatme...

I was totally trying to think of a Firewire pun. Thankfully good sense prevailed. (Wait...)

I actually picked up a Dreamcast a few years ago too, but I still don't have a whole lot of games for it... Here's what I can recommend, though: Jet Set Radio/Jet Grind Radio -- a quirky little game that's lots of fun. The Japanese title was Jet Set Radio, but it was changed to Jet Grind Radio in the US for copyright reasons; try both names if you're looking for it. You play a member of a graffiti gang in a fictional city, and have to go around expanding your territory by spraying your tags across the city, competing against other gangs and avoiding the cops in the process. And for some reason you're all wearing some sort of crazy battery-powered rocket-skates, so you get to do tricks and stuff in addition to spraying your graffiti. It's a 3D platformer at heart, but great music, unique gameplay, and brilliant graphics (it was, IIRC, one of the first games to use cel shading). The Xbox "Jet Set Radio Future" sequel/remake doesn't hold a candle to it. Pick it up if you see it. Bangai-O -- A game I don't have myself, but I would grab it if I found it. A basic shmup with an interesting twist; your ship has a special ability that allows it to counter bullet hell with its own holy-crap-that's-a-ton-of-missiles attack; for every projectile on the screen, it launches TWO; one counters the enemy bullet (destroying both) and the other attacks the enemy that launched it. I remember watching my friend play this way back in the day -- good fun. He never could beat the last boss, though... Shenmue -- I have a copy of this but I've not actually played it. Don't know a damn thing about it. It's supposed to be really good, though. Gundam Side Story 0079: Rise from the Ashes -- Okay, if you're into Gundam at all, and you have a Dreamcast, you pretty much have to pick this up. If you're not into Gundam but you like giant robots, you should pick it up anyway. It's unique among Gundam games because it actually puts you inside the cockpit of the MS rather than giving you a third person view. Gameplay is pretty standard arcade-y shooter stuff, though with the addition of NPC allies you can command (which is neat), and melee combat (which sucks). It's a bit short (only 10 missions) but you should be able to pick it up for cheap, so no reason not to give it a shot.

Hooray! Another 360 L4Der! I'm Native Jovian on XBL. Haven't been playing recently, but I definitely want to get back into it -- I just got tired of playing with random people, honestly. I'll add you and jump on if I see you in a game!

So, wait, they had full frontal nudity? Are they even allowed to do that in a rated R movie?

Please recreate your Em Pee Three link using the Snapdrive Dot Net player generator! Visit Doubleyou Doubleyou Doubleyou Dot Snapedrive Dot Net for details!

That's because elves have been the Mary Sues of fantasy every since Tolkein. "Hey we're super awesome and live forever but we're all agnsty because we used to be even MORE awesome and now we're not". Fucking elves...

So I just read this whole thread because I was bored, and this game seems pretty interesting. From what I gather, it's mostly about customizing your character's skill set and your ship('s equipment) to maximize your effectiveness for your choosen role than it is about picking a class for a certain role and then level-grinding for MORE POWAH. I'm an absolute sucker for high customability, so I'm sort of wanting to look into this... I'm a bit confused about how the leveling works. It seems like there are no real "levels", just skill ranks, which you can actually set to train WHILE YOU'RE OFFLINE? That's an interesting idea, but it makes me wonder if you get any benefit at all out of combat (in terms of character growth, I mean). It would seem odd to tear up a bunch of baddies but have to log off and wait a while to actually make your character more awesome. How do death penalties work? Sounds like you lose your ship, which I could see being a huge pain in the ass at higher levels with expensive toys, but I also saw some reference to "clones" which confused me. In a free PvP environment, I could see getting blown up 12 times in a row by griefers, and if that sort of thing is going to screw me completely over then I'd be very sad. That said, the idea of an almost entirely player-driven world (as far as factional territory and such) sounds awesome, and PvP is more or less required for that sort of thing. How does all that work? Can you actually "claim" territory, or do you just have to work out of a certain area and blow up everyone who comes into "your" zone? I can see problems with both systems... Also, someone mentioned that you can pay for your subscription with in-game money? How hard is that to do? Is it actually possible at low-ish levels, or it is it the sort of thing that only hardcore cash-hording high-level uberplayers can manage consistently? I'd be willing to pay for a few months to get up to steam, but if I could pay my own way after that it'd be awesome. I'm gonna be pretty busy for the next few weeks, but once that all blows over I'll pick up a free trial and see how it goes. I'll look some of you up when I do. How does coorindating with other people work? Are there different servers like in WoW, or what? I don't want to start playing just to strand myself away from the other OCR people who play...

Back in my day we only had 8 bits and we liked it just fine.

I can't read the article Zipp linked (stupid work firewall...) but I read through the rest of the thread. Mind that I've not played much survival horror, though I've been meaning to give it a shot (Silent Hill 2 is on my Gamefly queue as we speak), so I might be completely off base here, but here's what I'm looking(/hoping) for in a survival horror game: Normal characters. If you're playing a genetically superior, chemically enhanced, powered armor-wearing cyborg ultra-badass, then the living dead (or whatever) lose a bit of their menace. This is one of the things that I thought Eternal Darkness did wonderfully. The main character is a woman whose only remarkable attribute is the fact that she's stumbled into the story. Even being a normal solider/police officer/bodyguard sort of thing takes away something -- they're people with combat training, expected to face dangerous situations. A random person with a normal background who has no reason to (in a normal situation) be expected to defend themselves makes for a much more entertaining character when they're placed in a survival horror type situation. Juxtaposition. It's important to have a mix of normal and abnormal, mundane and surreal, expected and unexpected. A dark, damp cave filled with mystic chanting and the moans of undead can be creepy, but it lacks a sense of reality. Most people have absolutely no reason to be in a dark damp cave of any sort, much less one filled with chanting and moaning. Faced with such a situation, most people would probably run away, which wouldn't make for much of a video game. On the other hand, a school or office building, a city park or playground -- these are familiar locations that are part of everyday life for most people. Fill them with dark, monstrous creatures, and it's creepy on a much deeper level. Left 4 Dead, while a far cry from what most people would consider survival horror, was very good at this. They set each level in familiar surroundings -- office and apartment buildings, city streets and highways, a hospital and an airport -- transformed into something else by the infection. This juxaposition can be accomplished in a much more meta fashion as well -- imagine entering an area of the game and being treated to a cutscene of a zombie horde breaking down an obstacle of some sort and shambling toward you from some distance away. When control is returned to the player, then they would almost certainly set themselves up to repulse the zombies -- the cutscene draws their attention to it as the primary threat of the area, and their distance gives you plenty of time to prepare for their arrival. Then, as you're doing that, another, much more dangerous creature smashes through a door/window/wall/whatever and enters the scene just behind you. Not only does it provide the shock-scare of an enemy appearing without warning, but because of the setup involving the zombie horde, it plays with your expectations. That's what juxtaposition is all about -- playing with expectations. The game needs to alter your sense of what's normal and what's not, what's possible and what's not, what's real and what's not. Altering perceptions like that is a huge part of horror. Good controls and difficulty. Though this applies to any game, it seems to be much more of an issue with survival horror than almost any other genre. Controls need to be fluid, solid, and intuitive; if you feel like the character you're controlling has had his motor skills degraded by a serious stroke, then not only does that artificially increase the game's difficulty, it also destroys immersion (which has already been mentioned as extremely important). Difficulty is a stickier thing; there's a fine line between hard (and thus satisfying when beaten) and frustrating (and thus no fun to play). A player should never be put into a hopeless situation. Running out of ammo or health kits should never be an automatic death sentence. It should make things harder, obviously, but never impossible. I'll give you an example: in the castle in RE4, there's one room where you're confronted by several groups of cultists equipped with large shields and maces. I must have tried 80 different ways to get through that room, and I never managed it; it was annoying and frustrating enough that I actually stopped playing the game. I was later told that the answer to that room is grenades -- something I never thought of because I didn't have any on me at the time. That's lame -- the game shouldn't punish me for failing to be psychic. How was I supposed to know that grenades would be vital later on? There are a few ways to get around this. One is to always make sure that there are some of whatever is required lying around in the place that it's required. If you need grenades to get through the room, then there will be grenades in or just before the room. The problem with that is that the item placement itself becomes a hint -- if you see grenades, you immeadiately start to wonder what they're supposed to throw them at. Another possibility is a (set of?) infinite-use items. A melee weapon -- something as simple as a baseball bat or a length of pipe -- can be used as a last-resort weapon so that combat remains possible (though unattractive) when your ammo is gone. Some kind of never-runs-out first aid kit that raises your heealth to a certain maximum -- and no more (say, 10% of max health or something). Above and beyond everything else, games are supposed to be fun. If it makes things more horrifying, but less fun, then you shouldn't do it. Having powerful enemies and/or weak weapons, limited ammo and health, monsters with abilities and powers far beyond yours, and dark/cramped/restricted areas that benefit your enemies far more than you are all great, fun ways to inspire horror. Having artificially bad controls or camera, situations that punish you for being unprepared when you had no legitimate reason to bring X peice of equipment, or places that are impossible to get through because of the outcome of an earlier part of the game all add to the horror, but are not fun. They need to be left out. This is getting into rather specific details, but I think that a button combo sequence for certain enemies/situations could be a great part of horror. Not the "QUICKPRESSTHE'A'BUTTONNOWNOWNOW whoops too late you're dead instantly" quicktime events, but something more like The Force Unleashed's "finishing move" animations. Each button corresponds to a particular action (jump, lightsaber, force push, or force lightning, in The Force Unleashed's case), and each part of the sequence has a "correct" action (that continues the sequence), while an incorrect action ends the combo (sometimes causing you damage in the process). This kind of game mechanic is fast-pased (which increases the player's sense of panic), is sometimes (but not always!) dangerous (which makes it more unpredictable -- all to the good in horror), and allows for a cinematic style of play that can really improve the atmosphere and level of immersion. Anyway, now I'm just rambling. Nice long post for you people to tl;dr. If it seems disjointed, my bad; I wrote it over the course of two hours or so amid a number of interruptions (y'know... actual work), so it's more a stream-of-conciousness kind of thing than a well thought out post that I usually try to write. Just my thoughts on things; feel free to shoot them down as much as you like.

Wow, I was expecting "THE GMAN IS GORDON AFTER BECOMING GOD AND SENDING HIMSELF BACK IN TIME TO BECOME HIS OWN FATHER" sort of nonsense, but that's actually a fairly sucinct and accurate-as-far-as-we-know summation of the Half Life universe. The only things on there that are somewhat questionable as far as I know is the portrayal of the Vortigaunts and Nihilianth pre-Half Life 1. WARNING: HUGE NERDY HALF-LIFE BACKSTORY THEORY INCOMING He portrays Nihilianth as the leader of the Vortigaunts, overall head of their resistance against the Combine. Essentially, he paints Nihilianth as the Vortigaunt version of Gordon. I think it's more likely that Nihilianth is the Vortigaunt's version of Breen. Remember in Half Life 1 that one of the enemies was the "alien controller" (the midget guys with huge heads that fly around chucking fireballs). We know that Vortigaunts have some sort of mental connection to each other (exactly how much is up for debate; it could be anything from "talk with their brains" to "complete hive-mind"); the implication is that the alien controllers have been modified by the Combine in order to enslave the Vortigaunts (who are, after all, known as "alien slaves" in HL1). Nihilianth looks more like a giant version of the alien controllers than anything else; it seems a fair assumption to believe that he's the psychic overlord of all Vortigaunt-dom, especially given some of the comments made by Vortigaunts in HL2 about how Gordon freed them. So rather than the Vortigaunts being another race still fighting (albeit a losing battle) against the Combine, my thought is that they were already fulled assimilated into the Combine by the time HL1 rolls around. The events of HL1 weren't the desperate Vortigaunts trying to escape the Combine; they were the first step of a Combine invasion (the Vorts being the only Combine around when the Gman prodded the Black Mesa research into starting a resonance cascade). Gordon, in killing Nihilianth, broke the psychic control over the Vortigaunts and released them from the Combine. Presumably they decided to go while the goings were good and hitched a ride to Earth on the portal storms in order to prevent being re-conquered by the Combine. WARNING: REQUESITE GMAN THEORY INCOMING So where does that leave the Gman? He seems to be an opposing force (lulz pun) to the Combine. In HL1 he causes the resonance cascade and then leads Gordon around, which ends with the death of Nihilianth and the emancipation of the Vortigaunts, which is presumably a fairly serious blow against the Combine. In HL2 he sets Gordon loose again, eventually resulting in the destruction of the Citadel, effectively cutting off the Combine forces on Earth. Why the Gman fights (by proxy, at least) against the Combine is anyone's guess, but from comments he's made it seems as if he's some kind of mercenary. He refers to "hiring" Gordon at the end of HL1, and in HL2 he talks about people bidding for Gordon's services. If that impression -- that the Gman is only opposing the Combine because he's being paid to, and he's coersed Gordon into being one of his "employees" -- is correct, then it means that there's at least six factions in the Half Life universe: humanity, the Vortigaunts, the Xen "wildlife" (which are basically animals, but they're a force to consider none the less), the Combine, the Gman (and compatriots?), and whoever hired the Gman to oppose the Combine. The Gman's mission (accoplished through Gordon) in HL1 is "free the Vortigaunts" and in HL2 it's either "free humanity" or "keep the Vortigaunts free" (which amounts to the same thing: destroying the Combine's hold on Earth). The motives for this could be altruistic (the freedom of the species is its own goal), practical (freeing the Vortigaunts and the humans causes the Combine a lot of trouble), or experimental (let the humans loose and see what they do/how the Combine react/etc), but we don't really have enough information to do more than outline vague possibilities.

I hope you don't get texts around other people very often or else someone is going to murder you in your sleep for that. Though, now that I think about it, Tatl's little ringing sound effect from Majora's Mask would make a decent ringtone... Zelda's actually got a lot of random sound effects (they've got different ones for opening a chest, opening an IMPORTANT chest, getting a rupee, getting a piece of heart, getting a heart container, etc etc etc, and most of them end up on the soundtrack for the game, too!) that would make good ringtones for things like text messages or voice mail. Not so much for phone calls, though... NEW TOPIC! What's the worst gaming-related ringtone you've ever heard? A friend of mine has Kefka's laugh as his ringtone. At first it's startling, but that quickly fades to irritating. He's had it for years. I don't know how he stands it...

too long; didn't read ridiculously

This is precisely why I don't generally have songs as my ringtone. (That, and because I don't want to have inappropriate music start randomly playing while I'm in the middle of something; generic rings are by far the least offensive as far as that goes.) HOWEVER! I'm totally stealing the MGS Codec sound and the "!" noise as ringtone idea. Now I just need a third one along that vein and I can cover phone calls, voicemail, and text messages... Did the "?" have a unique sound effect to go with it....? After I figure out how to put custom tones on my phone for at least the third or fourth time, anyway. Edit -- Since I noticed it wasn't linked anywhere in this thread, I present to you: "!" It's not my host, so try not to break it or anything, because then I'd feel bad.

I've never had a problem with my 360 eating discs -- is it just when the system is vertical? Or is it just that it's easier to bump it when it's vertical? My 360 is horizonal, and the way I've got it set up it's in an out-of-the-way place so I'm never even near it unless I'm switching out a game disc (yay for wireless controllers!).

My problem with Halo Wars, from what I played of the demo, is that it consists entirely of "build lots of units, tell all units to attack". That's... really dull. There was no way to assign groups, so you couldn't do any sort of strategy easily. There was no way to select more-than-one but less-than-all of your units easily, which meant that it was near-impossible to do even simple tactics like leaving some of your units behind for base defense or attack different targets simultaneously. I'm not one of the "lulz mouse + keyboard better at everything!" types, but RTS games are really the exception. Halo Wars demostrates exactly what the problems with a console-based RTS game are. Hell, even turn based strategy games are fine, but RTS, where the time it takes to input commands actually matters? That's a different story...