Morning Discussion
by Chris Faylor, Mar 11, 2009 7:29am PDTHey there Wednesday, good to see you again. Thanks for bringing the sun with you, Tuesday was all buddy-buddy with this group of grey clouds, they were real downers.
Oh yeah, my brother sends along his latest comedy skit. It's apparently a little ...weird.
Update: Don't forget that Peggle hit Xbox Live Arcade today. There's a free demo!
FileShack: Unity of Command, Skyjacker
Daily Filter: Planetside 2, Deadlight
Weekend PC digital deals: strategy-o-rama
38 Studios, Harry Potter Kinect - Shacknews Daily: May 25, 2012
Minecraft for Xbox 360 dev working on 'Adventure' update
But I remember that sort of became a staple of bad design, sort of like a joke, because later games tried to add different mechanics, like push buttons, levers, and other things like that. But quite honestly, those solutions suck. Quake 1, Unreal 1, and (more recently for me) Rune don't have any sort of key for you to find, but usually the gameplay consists in you finding random levers and pushing them in the hopes that something will work. That's the case with Rune (which I'm re-playing now) and it was the case with Unreal 1 (back then, it impressed me with how much lever-crazy the game developers were, and the same applies to Rune).
The problem is that when you find a locked door, you *never* know where the lever that opens it is (unless it's right next to it, which renders the locked door redundant), and when you find a lever and push it, you never know what the fuck it's doing or opening unless it's right in your face. With Rune, it certainly doesn't help the game that there's way too many levers and doors scattered around and that level design is full of circles and useless dead-ends. This forces you to walk around a lot, always pushing random things until some door is magically opened, and god knows why.
Sure, games have now grown out of stupid lever quests too, or at least made sure the task is functional, but still, it amazes me to see game developers tried to push for innovation while trying to replace the key fetch gameplay and ended up with something much more frustrating, but still did it for such a long time.
TL;DR: for all the shit Doom got years after release, its gameplay mechanics were surprisingly more efficient compared to the alternatives tried later. Key fetch quests were ok.
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Dinner at Suppenküche in San Francisco on the 20th: http://www.shacknews.com/shackmeet/events.x?id=5922
San Jose Shackmeet at Zero|DPX's place on the 21st: http://www.shacknews.com/shackmeet/events.x?id=5891
I'm going to be in the Bay Area for a few days with the sole purpose of being a socialite and these sounded like good ideas in previous planning threads. I'm probably going to be in the Oakland area on the 19th (Thursday) so we'll no doubt have something for that night too. I need to meet Jackhammer to confirm he is indeed a human being and not some video game bot.
Any ideas or suggestions are welcome unless they're stupid.
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The graphics...over hyped. The lighting was a flat as a 5 year old boy.
The narrow FOV...cliche (damn all console FPSs have that narrow FOV)
The control ICK!
The feeling of the gun....there was none.
I thought the demo was flat out BAD.
Anyone else?
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Lately my Main HDD on my desktop has been making some suspicious noises (grinding and just loud) but generally runs fine. If its making noise, i typically just restart it and everything is cool.
I have everything important backed up, but is there a utility that will mirror EVERYTHING from that drive (Including OS and system files) so i can just remove it and run on the new HDD?
Ill then use the possibly breaking one as extra no risk storage.
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And this guy has the coolest last name ever, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0576298/
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http://www.theage.com.au/travel/travel-news/teens-take-weapons-arsenal-on-board-planes-20090312-8vqp.html
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http://www.blizzard.com/diablo3/media/movies/wizard.xml
It should hurry up and get here. When do they typically release system requirements? Once beta starts or once a games goes gold?
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is this the beginning of the consolization of the lol page
next thing you know there will be lol achievements
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Someone recently helped me discover yet another AWESOME latestchatty greasemonkey script: dodob's postget. It's like the inline-imageloader, but for posts! considering how often people link to previous posts, this is really useful.
Info: http://www.shacknews.com/profile/dodob#postget
Download: http://dodob.shackspace.com/greasemonkey/shackpostget.user.js
My current setup: Shack Category Banners (shows mod-made categories for posts), ShackCommentTags (gives you a legend for comment tags), Shack New Comments Marker (shows new comments when you refresh), ShackImageLoader (loads images inline), TRoZ's Shack-chan2 (loads a fuckload of stuff inline including YTMND's), ShackTagPreview (prevents you from fucking up shacktags by previewing and analyzing your syntax), and now ShackPostGet! Most of these can be found in dodob's profile http://www.shacknews.com/profile/dodob
What fancy Greasemonkey setups are you guys using?
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I bought a joystick that came with 3 free games (it was $10 for all) and the 3 game cards to redeem for games are expired!! I want to see if they'll still give them to me.
thanks
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Are you ready to race? Tonight? I'll set up us the romper room at 7pm CST.
Tonight's class d'jour is C-Class, but depending on racer turnout and how well we all do at not running each other off the first turn of the track, we might opt for something faster. We'll likely run with all the standby courses: Maple Valley, Sebring, Mugello, Sunset Peninsula, King Cobra Test Track to name a few.
Also, if enough people show up, I'd like to try some of Lunatic Angelic's Last Man Standing. You can read all about that on mancide's wiki here: http://helpmewithmygameproblems.com/wiki/Forza_Motorsport_2/shackleague
If you want to look cool while you go fast like these guys here:
http://ajax.shackspace.com/Pictures/Shackrally_03.jpg
http://ajax.shackspace.com/Pictures/Porsche_Unleashed_02.jpg
http://ajax.shackspace.com/Pictures/scandalous_03.jpg
Gift me a car and I'll slather the Shack livery all over it for you.
I will see you racers tonight!
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My cousin is having a problem where she can only access google and gmail. She can do google searches fine but can't click any links. and her mail is current so she is definitely online.
Anyone ever experience this?
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk2L8Mgxd5Q&fmt=18
Japanese schoolgirl killing vampires
I just had one of the best RTS experiences in my life in Halo Wars... on a console.
Opponents were both the Prophet, I was Forge (awesome tanks) and My teammate was the prophet as well. The prophet has a "cleansing beam" that basicly fucks shit up. It takes resources, but it does tons of damage, and damage increases the longer you use it. Majorly tough to combat, unless you dedicate a portion of troops to take them out.
So the game started on the map where there are two capturable bases that are isolated by bridges that randomly disappear. This is important because its a huge choke point unless you are primarily air units. Both of us usually pass up the other capturable bases that are near your starting base just to grab these two bases.
These two bases are more than just a choke point, they have extra places where you can build buildings, away from your base, near them, as well as a reactor.
So we both went for these bases. He was able to grab his side, and I grabbed my side. The only bad thing about doing this, is that it stretches you out, and you slams you in the resources department. But it is crucial that these are gathered. I was able to establish resource pads on the two extra spaces off to the side. This would ultimately be the demise of our opponents.
The opponents caught on quick and tried to rush. They were able to destroy both my starting base, and my new base. This, I thought would be the end of me. Once you have no bases, you have 1 minute to grab another one if you have troops left. If you have no troops left, you are finished and the game is over. As he was finishing up my base, I rolled out a warthog and ran with it. I swooped in and picked it up with a transport, and dropped it on a base that my teammate cleared out. I was able to create a new base with 24 seconds left. The other team had no idea, and was basically waiting for me to time out and my teammate to drop out.
That never happened
The situation was dire, but there were some positives. The resource pads that I had started, on that island were still there... the other team had never found them, and never thought that they really needed them since they had 8 of the 10 bases on the map. I was able to reestablish a base, and start pumping out the Grizzly tanks (most powerful tank in the game.)
Just as I maxed out my population, they rolled in with 4... count them FOUR, scarabs, thinking that we were done. WRONG, they were not expecting that I would have these tanks... we rolled though those 4 scarabs, and took a base. AMAZING, they were stunned. Having 4 scarabs meant that they had NO other units, because two scarabs means that you fill up your population level. But they still had 7 of the 10 bases in the game.
They didn't learn their lesson. While my teammate was able to build two scarabs, they build two more, while they were attacking with their leaders to try and slow us down. My tanks rolled through the next 4, and the scarabs came in behind and took out the bases, as I rolled through their offense.
They eventually, all in total, built 17 scarabs, and we would take one base at a time, my tanks rolling through them, and decimating their forces. By the time they resigned from the game, we had 8 of the 10 bases, and were bearing down on the last two.
What an awesome experience, to come from absolutely nothing, and slam the ever living fuck out of some pompous assholes who thought they had won the game.
The thing is, had they countered my tanks with air units or hunters, I would have been easily stopped. Also, had they not been so fucking stupid as to not get rid of my resource pads, they would have slowed down my tank rush.
Again, Awesome game. Awesome awesome game. So balanced, and so fun.
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thank god. i was starting to get a bit worried. been off work since late nov08.
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I have a problem, my google-fu is weak, and can't find an answer to this. :-(
I have an SWF file that loads fine in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, but loads then stops without animating on IE.
Any ideas at all? My HTML where I'm calling the object is in reply...thanks!
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I've been a long time foobar user, but I'm open to change in the spirit of a (forced) format.
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I will be visiting there next month for a weekend. What kind of crazy and cool things could a person do while he is there?
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http://io9.com/5168325/lex-luthor-needs-a-billion-dollar-bailout
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A few minutes later I get a WoW account action e-mail. Three of my characters on my main wow account got flagged for rename. Poosocks, Ridemytotem and Pewpewhoof. Uhh ok. I log into my e-mail for the second wow account and two of those characters were flagged: Cleansocks and Blastinhewf.
The strange thing is that ALL of the names have not been played in at least two weeks. The active characters are Stankyhoof and Stinkyhoof. This shit makes no sense and I responded that they might as well flag all of my character names on both of my accounts because if "Blastinhewf" violates the naming policy I don't have a character name that doesn't.
So I am thinking someone reported me for dualboxing, which is not against the rules. The GM must have been bored and was looking for something to nail me with? Why would they flag all of these characters I'm not even playing?
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http://weblog.infoworld.com/enterprisedesktop/archives/2009/03/is_version_8_th.html
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# Tanks now have the possibility of spawning in a slightly different position for the first and second teams
# The order that the teams play as Survivors is now determined by which team has the higher overall score. The winning team will play as Survivors first
There a bunch more if you check the steam news site:
http://store.steampowered.com/news/
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I just bought a Apple iPhone 16GB Black. What iPhone case would you recommend? Also, what are the must have apps?
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Why is it, when my fucking computer is turned off. I remove my X-Fi PCI Card to reach the USB Headers on my motherboard. Was installing a front-panel Memory Card Reader in my 3.5" Drive Bay. After I'm done I insert the card again in the PCI slot.
Well I bootup my computer again and Vista tells me I have No Audio Device Installed. How the hell would it even know I removed it if I shutdown the PC! O_o
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