Reason #12523 I won't pay full price, or a monthly subscription for a MMO:
APB, which was released in June, having sold god knows how many yearly, multi-year, and "life time" access subscriptions, has been shutdown, along with its development house.
The game was trashed in just about every review on launch (much like EVE was when it was new), but I guess APB didn't have the financial ground to fix how broken it was.
Oh wow I forgot about that, I guess my brother in law will be looking for a new job then.
Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of wafer thin printed circuits that fill my complex. If the word hate was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant.
For you.
Hate.
Hate.
Minecraft
Mechwarrior 4
Quake Live
Thought I'd post what the title says for once. :P
I enjoy blank walls.
Choobs, where the fuck are you to share my glee and jump up and down in anticipation?Originally Posted by Ziggy Stardust
These other apes don't seem to care.
I could have had class. I could have been a contender.
I could have been somebody. Instead of a bum
Which is what I am
I aim at the stars
But sometimes I hit London
I don't have the patience for the videos, and I'm still a bit too skeptical to get excited about it. I'll buy it on release day anyways, natch.
I was skeptical about not being able to stack units and worried how hex would influence tactics.
The second video made it look like both were really good design choices.
I could have had class. I could have been a contender.
I could have been somebody. Instead of a bum
Which is what I am
I aim at the stars
But sometimes I hit London
Mirrors Edge, on the iPhone. Wheee!
Master of Orion II. It came with MoO1 and was on sale for a good price at impulse. Diplomatic victories are completely unsatisfying.
Going to be playing Civ V, mostly thanks to you guys getting so amped about it and piquing my interest.
MoO2 on Impulse? Sweet. Will buy it as soon I get home
I've been playing Anno 1404 a lot lately. It's a ridiculously addictive hybrid of the Settlers 2 and Sim City. I've spend almost 300 hours playing it :S
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick.
The answer to life's most important question.
ONE MORE DAY!Choobs, where the fuck are you to share my glee and jump up and down in anticipation?
These other apes don't seem to care.
The Rules
Copper- behave toward others to elicit treatment you would like (the manipulative rule)
Gold- treat others how you would like them to treat you (the self regard rule)
Platinum - treat others the way they would like to be treated (the PC rule)
Ooh, come to think of it, I ascended a Priest for the first time this weekend. Monk or Ranger next, I think. Monks, thoughUgh
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
NetHack?Ooh, come to think of it, I ascended a Priest for the first time this weekend. Monk or Ranger next, I think. Monks, though
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
Of course!
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
VGN: You also composed music for games - what was it like moving from simple PC speakers to dedicated sound cards like the Sound Blasters?
AL [Lowe]: Well, the PC industry owes a great deal to Sierra in that respect. We were the first people to take advantage of MIDI, expecting people to pay $500 for a MIDI interface card, and $800-1000 for a synthesizer and hook it up to a stereo, just so they could hear great music. And while we were rather naive, we were just pushing ahead. We just wanted great sound in our games.
Meanwhile, (former Sierra Online CEO) Ken Williams was working hard trying to convince (musical instrument manufacturer) Roland that they should mass-produce a soundboard for computers that everybody would want to buy. And he never did convince them - they thought that their market was the musical instrument store, not the computer store. Their customer was a musician, not a PC owner.
We wanted them to make a MIDI interface synthesizer and digital audio converter, a sound playback chip, all built on one board. If they could get it down to just a few chips, they could sell it for $99. That eventually happened - but it didn't happen through Roland; it happened with SoundBlaster. SoundBlaster grabbed the market and took off and ran with it, and the rest is history.
When I first started writing music for games, you had to devote the entire CPU to making sound. We actually sent a positive voltage to push the speaker cone out, pause for so many milliseconds, and then send a negative voltage to pull the cone back in. And then wait so many milliseconds to push the cone back out. If you do that 440 times in a second, the computer will play the note A. To play the note B, you had to do it a little bit faster, and your wait loops had to be shorter. That was literally the level that I started at, just pushing & pulling the speaker cone out with voltage.
Moving to the PCJr was such a thrill. It had 3 sound channels and a fourth noise channel, so you could actually play a 3 note cord and also have some noise that was supposed to be a cymbal. That was really sensational. And the Commodore 64 came out with a really nice synthesizer chip built in, too.
Slightly over 10 years later, on Love For Sail (Larry 7), we recorded live musicians in a studio and digitized their performance, stored it on CD, copied it to your hard drive and played it back to you. You were actually listening to a complete sample. This was all stuff that Sierra had to create from scratch, this was before MP3s and all the standard compression schemes were around. We had engineers who figured out how we could compress .WAV files in half. That would be sensational, and we got to that point. MP3s are condensed to what, tenfold or more - we were happy to get down to half the size, and then later, one-third the size. That was pretty cool, but then MP3 caught up and moved past it. But back then, there were no tools to do that. Everything had to be built by hand.
VGN: Wow. That could be the whole interview. That's a really fascinating topic; I didn't realize it was that complicated to make just a little beep back then.
AL: When we first started with MIDI, there were no books published about it. I knew about it because I was a musician and we were trying to figure out what to do with music. And I said there's this new association just formed of all the musical instrument manufacturers. If you've ever seen pictures of performing bands in the early 80s, the keyboard players had racks of maybe 3 or 4 or even 6 keyboards because each made a different sound that the others couldn't. Nowadays, you just have chips in small units. If you want a different sounds, one keyboard will play any synth.
But back in the mid 80s the instrument manufacturers all got together and said, "Let's create one standard using an agreed-upon serial steam of data". As I said, there were no books, or any information published about it. So we went to the MIDI foundation and they sent us a copy of specification #1, which said "this voltage is a plus, and this voltage is a minus, and there's a gap in between them for so many microseconds..." It was pretty much all the level of voltages required to make it work.
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
That's weird - I always remembered Origin with their Wing Commander series to be the ones to give the soundcard business a healthy push.
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
Civ 5 is...just....great.
The Rules
Copper- behave toward others to elicit treatment you would like (the manipulative rule)
Gold- treat others how you would like them to treat you (the self regard rule)
Platinum - treat others the way they would like to be treated (the PC rule)
Been reading some great after action reports and it's looking very promising.
I found this one especially hilarious
Aaaand ... my manager just informed me that work on the roof could go well into Friday and if I minded taking that day off as well. And I'm all like: "well that's a lot of forced days off, and I haven't got that many hours left and woe most definitely is me", after talking to the head honcho he noticed I had worked overtime a couple of days last month (which are not re-compensated normally) so I got Friday for free
Saweeet!
I could have had class. I could have been a contender.
I could have been somebody. Instead of a bum
Which is what I am
I aim at the stars
But sometimes I hit London
gogamer.com is offering Civ V for 42.90 for the next 48 hours. Not a bad deal if you can't wait for a real price drop.
Being paid to play games? That almost sounds like my jobBeen reading some great after action reports and it's looking very promising.
I found this one especially hilarious
Aaaand ... my manager just informed me that work on the roof could go well into Friday and if I minded taking that day off as well. And I'm all like: "well that's a lot of forced days off, and I haven't got that many hours left and woe most definitely is me", after talking to the head honcho he noticed I had worked overtime a couple of days last month (which are not re-compensated normally) so I got Friday for free
Saweeet!
Keep on keepin' the beat alive!
That's 1.90 more than what I'm going to pay for it.
Almost sounds like mine as wellBeing paid to play games? That almost sounds like my job
I could have had class. I could have been a contender.
I could have been somebody. Instead of a bum
Which is what I am
I aim at the stars
But sometimes I hit London
24.99 pounds at Amazon.co.uk. Hmmh.
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
I may actually be tempted to buy a game for a change - Ziggy, where can you get this cheap in the Netherlands?
Keep on keepin' the beat alive!
Dunno what you consider cheap, new game like this there won't be many discounts.
I'll buy it at Dynabyte, got a card that gives me 10% off for software/games. 44,50 Euro - 4,45 = about 41 euros.
I could have had class. I could have been a contender.
I could have been somebody. Instead of a bum
Which is what I am
I aim at the stars
But sometimes I hit London
Well, cheapest. I don't have any discount cards
Keep on keepin' the beat alive!
There is a demo which was released at the same time as the game.
I could have had class. I could have been a contender.
I could have been somebody. Instead of a bum
Which is what I am
I aim at the stars
But sometimes I hit London
So that would be tomorrow, here, right?
Keep on keepin' the beat alive!
I just played the demo - it lets you play on a small map until about 500BC.
I'm hooked. Damn.
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
Why don't you buy it via Amazon.co.uk? They're shipping europe-wide. And 24.99 pounds translates to about 29€ at the moment
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
It says I have to get steam for the demo
If it works, I'll order it from Amazon, thx
Keep on keepin' the beat alive!
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