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Comment Re:US Hysterical (Score 1) 330

Maybe now that he's in office he knows something you aren't privy to? I notice Gitmo is still there, a lot of things he said while running seem to fallen by the wayside. He also has a lot more white hair now. Seems to me being the president is a tough job no matter who it is, because there is a lot of things they just can't tell the general public. Go to Walmart sometime, you think that 90% of those people know anything about the world outside of "made in China" on all the labels and stuff they buy. Most people are dumb and no amount of preaching or standing on soap boxes or posts on slashdot will change that. I'm will to bet that most people out there who think they are smart enough to handle the truth are the same ones who bitch and moan but don't vote, or participate in government to make changes. All the changes in our government are brought about manipulation of the retarded masses. Its very rare that someone with good intentions gets out there and manipulates them for the greater good. SO if you think you know better get out there and get some stupid people to vote for you.

Star Wars Prequels

Big Changes Planned For The Force Unleashed 2 100

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed debuted in 2008 to less than stellar reviews, but sales of the game were strong. A sequel for the game is due out in October, and the developers spoke at length with the Guardian's Games blog about the improvements they've been working on. One of their priorities was adding depth to the combat system to make it less of a button-mash. "The team has completely redesigned all the familiar Force powers from the first title including Force Push and Force Grip, and has added a few newcomers including the potentially amusing Force Mind Trick that'll allow you to trick Storm Troopers into leaping from high ledges." Enemy AI is another area that's getting some love, and they're trying to make level design more open and less linear. The team's confidence in the changes they're making stems in part from much greater familiarity with their game-building tools. "Like its predecessor, Force Unleashed 2 will combine three third-party physics engines, Havok, Euphoria and Digital Molecular Matter, to provide cutting edge human animation, materials effects and authentic physical forces. ... 'Whenever you're building the first iteration [of a game series] and a brand new game engine at the same time, everything comes in hot and fast – we were literally figuring out how to get the most out of those three technologies all the way up to shipping. The DLC then helped us to learn more, and that knowledge has given us the biggest leap forward.'" A trailer for the game was released at E3.

Comment Re:I smell a re-hash. (Score 1) 82

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. I had fun with the game playing it as just an out there FPS. I wasn't looking for an in-depth rpg.

What I didn't like about it was the subscribe to play content instead of pay X for the content to play whenever you like (see guild wars model). Also the no LAN play. If they had charged per expansion I am quite sure they would still be running today. The whole free players vs subscribers thing was a huge fiasco.

Most people were not willing to pay the monthly fee because no matter how they strutted it, HG:L was not an MMO. It did not have the depth/story/character growth that people expect in RPGs.

What it did have was more than a little bit of twitch action that people like myself find fun in FPS games. Quake - Unreal...

So now that the servers are shit-canned I've got a shiny box game that is worthless.

The business model was flawed and was IMO the primary reason it failed. Bill Roper's plan. Not every game is an MMO but he told investors that it was going to be a steady revenue stream and forced the game to a model it was unsuited for.

I think he might be doing the same thing here, using buzzwords to hype a game to investors not really thinking about the dynamics of the game and its audience.

Of course I could be wrong, perhaps from the ground up this is designed to be an MMO and the payment model may very well work, but I won't be buying it, due to the earlier "Bill Roper Burn".

Comment I smell a re-hash. (Score 1) 82

Anyone looked up the term "Flagshipped"?

There was nothing wrong with the game Hellgate London but they screwed the pooch with a bad payment model by trying to sell a game as an MMO that was definitely not an MMO.

I smell a another debacle in the making. Bill Roper at the helm is apparently not a good idea.

Handhelds

Submission + - Where in the US can you get JUST a Cell Phone? 6

arakon writes: I am looking around for a cell phone for my technically challenged mother and all she wants is just a phone, and yet there seem to be no carriers in the US that carry a plain cell phone with good reception and battery life. All of them bundle camera's, pda's, mp3 players and a kitchen sink with a battery life of 2 hours, all for the low price of $350 or more...

Having looked around, the Motorola F3 is exactly what she wants but it doesn't seem to be available in the US. If we order it online will it work on US carriers? Are there any comparable products out there with a similar feature set and price range available for US networks? I appreciate the help.
User Journal

Journal Journal: USA: Military Draft System To Be Tested 6

WASHINGTON, Dec. 22, 2006(CBS/AP) The Selective Service System is making plans to test its draft machinery in case Congress and President Bush need it, even though the White House says it doesn't want to bring back the draft.

The agency is planning a comprehensive test -- not run since 1998 -- of its military draft systems, a Selective Service official said. The test itself would not likely occur until 2009.

Role Playing (Games)

World of Warcraft Tuesday Maintenance A Thing of the Past 151

1up has the news that Tuesday maintenance will no longer be the way of the future for World of Warcraft. This is a big change from the weekly several-hour downtime that the company has used for the past two years. From the official post: "In the upcoming weeks, we will be testing the effect of a live maintenance, where regular maintenance tasks are run during off-peak with realms live. On Tuesday, December 26 there will be no scheduled downtime for weekly maintenance. We will perform all necessary maintenance tasks while the realms are live. We are anticipating the possibility that we may need to perform rolling restarts off-peak if we find that a realm restart is necessary; however the downtime for each realm would be less than 10 minutes if it was required." Is this really that big a deal? I know that the timeframe had to be inconvenient for EU players on the U.S. servers, but was a couple of hours of downtime early in a workday really such a burden?
User Journal

Journal Journal: AP: Congress rebukes FBI's Okla. City probe - Told Ya' So!!

By JOHN SOLOMON, Associated Press Writer 47 minutes ago

The FBI failed to fully investigate information suggesting other suspects may have helped Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, allowing questions to linger more than a decade after the deadly attack, a congressional inquiry concludes.

User Journal

Journal SPAM: George Orwell Was Right: Spy Cameras See Britons' Every Move 2

-> LINKY THING

By Nick Allen

Dec. 22 (Bloomberg) -- It's Saturday night in Middlesbrough, England, and drunken university students are celebrating the start of the school year, known as Freshers' Week.

One picks up a traffic cone and runs down the street. Suddenly, a disembodied voice booms out from above:

The Courts

Guitar Hero Lawsuit Settled 25

1up is reporting that Red Octane and Ant Commandos have settled their lawsuits over 3rd party Guitar Hero controllers. From the article: "Fortunately both sides have now officially reached an agreement - though nobody really knows what form that agreement has taken. Details of the settlement remain private - but we DO know this much: The judge has officially dismissed the case. That's good news for people just wanting to rock the hell out over the holidays."
Games

A Look Back at the Year in Games 17

The excellent Stephen Totilo runs down memorable moments from this year in games, from the perspective of MTV Multiplayer. (Flash site, make sure and stop the ad quickly to avoid brainburn.) From the article: "On a rain-soaked Wednesday afternoon we drove south from Austin to Buda and got a look at the Rooster Teeth digs. One of the guys, the heavily tattooed Geoff Fink, sat Sway down at a bank of Xbox 360s and recording equipment to explain how the 'Halo' machinima gets made. Sway got the details, but we couldn't wrap the interview without asking Fink about a detail we highlighted in our old Rooster Teeth story -- the foot thing. Sway noticed that Fink had nine Xbox 360 controllers at the recording station and enough systems to allow them to be used at the same time -- but Rooster Teeth doesn't have nine gamer/actors to wield them. They solve this problem by wielding multiple controllers at once, some with their hands and some with their feet. We needed a demonstration and got one, captured on film."
Displays

New Research Could Lead to Transparent Displays 85

An anonymous reader tipped us to a ScienceDaily story about advances that may lead to transparent transistors. By combining inorganic and organic materials, we may reach the goal of transparent surfaces that can display information, with no visible wiring marring the effect. The article cites HUDs on car windshields, and targeting goggles for soldiers, but I'm sure we can think of some additional interesting uses for such a technology. From the article: "High-performance, transparent transistors could be combined with existing kinds of light display technologies, such as organic light-emitting diodes, liquid crystal displays (LCDs) and electroluminescent displays, which are already used in televisions, desktop and laptop computers and cell phones ... Prototype displays using the transistors developed at Northwestern could be available in 12 to 18 months, said Marks. He has formed a start-up company, Polyera, to bring this and related technologies to market."

Thinkpad X60 — the Tablet Goes Ultraportable 122

Rovi writes "Lenovo had a gift for Thinkpad fans this season- they finally released the successor to the X41 Tablet. The Thinkpad X60 Tablet weighs in at about three and a half pounds and has great tablet functionality. The updates from the older model include a 2.5" hard drive (the X41 used a 1.8"), automatic screen orientation, and an Intel Core Duo processor. For performance seekers some serious upgrades are available, such as a 120GB 5400RPM hard drive, 100GB 7200RPM drive, SXGA+ monitor, or up to 4GB of RAM."
Linux

ESR's Desktop Linux 2008 Deadline 535

jesboat noted Eric S. Raymond and Rob Landley's essay about what the Linux community must do to achieve dominance entitled "World Domination 201". It says "Idealism about open formats will not solve our multimedia problem in time; in fact, getting stuck on either belief in the technical superiority of open source or free-software purism guarantees we will lose. The remaining problems aren't technical ones, and none of the interesting patents will expire before the end of 2008. We've got to ship something that works now. If we let this be a blocking issue preventing overall Linux adoption during the transition window, we won't have the userbase to demand changes in the laws to untangle the screwed up patent system, or even prevent it from getting worse. It's a chicken and egg problem, demanding a workaround until a permanent solution can be achieved. We can't set the standards until after we take over the world."

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