Ross Scott

You always have the lowest common denominator stuff in any medium, I have no problem with that. The difference here is that when it comes to games and writing, that's almost ALL you have. I mean how many movies come out each year that have very good or great writing? A dozen or more? In the gaming world, how many games come out each year that have really great writing? 0-2? If there are more, you REALLY have to search for them. I feel like in movies you'll constantly have ones that are really thought provoking and provide really interesting and new ideas about people, humanity, the world, new concepts, etc. In games, I run across ones like that maybe every few years. If you don't count games in the graphic adventure genre, then the ratio gets really anemic. I realize this is a bit of a nebulous statement however, so here's something more concrete. Many movies you need to be of a certain maturity level to fully appreciate. I don't mean violence or sex, but just being able to understand or relate in terms of life experience (or even brain development). Some movies you simply need to be an adult to fully appreciate, others you're missing nothing if you see them at 13 years old. To pick a few random examples, I'd say the movies Pi, The Informant, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, and Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind are all movies that if I had seen them at 13 years old, I don't think I would enjoy or understand them as much than if I had when I was older. They simply deal with more complex themes and are aimed at adults. Alternately, I think a movie like Jurassic Park, Back to The Future, etc. can be enjoyed equally by a 13 year old as an adult. They're great movies, but they don't require very challenging issues intellectually or deeper themes other than what you're presented with. I feel like with VERY few exceptions, the game industry has almost entirely the latter kind of content. If you ignore sex and violence, I feel the vast majority of games are written to be understood in their entirety by an audience no more mature than 13 year olds. In many cases, I would go so far as to say they're more on the level of Saturday morning cartoons. I personally find this frustrating that the ratio is so poor on what I consider actual adult content in games, which is why I really agreed with the author's point in this case. And yeah, on the piracy issue, I felt like his statement was very one-sided. I felt like it was accurate, but not giving the full picture either. I would comment more on that, but that's kind of a separate rant in itself.

Sorry, I should have clarified, this part of the article I didn't care about either way, though his point about online experiences I think is semi-valid. While I've seen exceptions, in a lot of online games, the degenerate asshole frequency can be very high. I would argue Silent Hill 2, I'd say it's on par to a movie like Jacob's Ladder. Also I don't know if I'd classify them as "great", but I'd say The Black Mirror and Still Life are on par with the maturity level of most mystery movies or books. I haven't finished them, but Culpa Innata and The Longest Journey had promising stories. Also for me personally, I thought Puzzle Agent had a great story and great writing. Easily on par with something like Fargo, just not as violent. I think games with good stories are EASILY compatible, but this seems to be an exceedingly rare event for whatever reason. It's not just blatancy, but frequency. I mean here's a quick question, how many fantasy games have a woman in a combat role portrayed in an armor bikini of some sort? I'd argue the majority of them. I feel like when you have stuff like that that's so blatant, it undercuts the rest of whatever merit the game may have regardless. Well yes, that's a COMIC BOOK movie. I haven't seen The Avengers, but I'll go out on a limb and say it's not going to win any awards for best writing. I think that's the point, games very rarely break out past anything with more intellectual merit than that.

I figure he walks in a Gamestop, barely sees any PC games. IT MUST BE DYING.

I came across this article and agree heavily with about 95% of it, especially #3 and #4: http://www.cracked.com/article_18571_5-reasons-its-still-not-cool-to-admit-youre-gamer.html I am guilty of #2 insofar as anti-aliasing goes. Also while I don't disagree with it (except for the PC gaming dying part), I do think #1 only tells part of the story. Even though I like games, I feel like the majority of them are garbage as far as writing goes. For a lot of them, that doesn't matter. I don't need a storyline for a racing game with exotic locales. However it can make the medium hard to defend on any intellectual grounds. A big part of the reason for my interest in older or obscure games is occasionally you have ones that are much more cerebrally oriented than the majority out there since the market wasn't as enormous as it is now, so developers didn't have as many assumptions about the players. I feel like the graphic adventure genre as a whole has a better track record of bucking these trends more than any other, but even then, it's hardly immune and is pretty much a niche genre these days.

Yeah, if the hardware is dated, XP is still a good choice, I just had issue with saying was "as secure" as 7. Hell, even though I was late getting 7 and skipped Vista entirely, I was an early adopter of XP, moving from 98SE. The whole 9x line-up was simply unstable. You WERE going to blue screen in Win9x, it was just a matter of when. Whereas if you have good drivers for 2K/XP onward, you can keep a system up indefinitely.

Well is changing the maximum tilt angle on the replay camera really so much harder than changing the extra lives value though? Also if you know of forums where people might be more interested in this (I plan to try at vgmaps.com), that might be helpful too.

This is my favorite duct tape project: qZDCBVy22W8

I played it some in high school, then sold my collection. 10 years later a friend of mine is into it, whom I'm calling Patient Zero, and is eager to get a game going. Another one of my friends had his collection around from high school, so he brings it out, I borrow a simple deck and we end up playing some games. It reignites interest in the other friend and the next week he's buying a couple cards, I figure to round things out from his old deck. Around that time he moved, then later I moved and I lost contact for over a year. When I come back, he's moved back and now he has a LOT of cards and is having sessions regularly and has guest decks people can use. He's also indoctrinated his girlfriend into it (who never played it prior to being with him), and they're both borderline obsessive with it, talking about how much time they put into selecting the perfect cards for the decks they're using. He always gets quiet and tries to change the subject when I ask how much money he's sunk into it. Meanwhile, Patient Zero has a lot of really potent cards and did small tournaments for a while, and is trying to ween himself off of it, but I think he's like Frodo being the ringbearer, fighting the temptation to buy more. I think his influence alone has collectively caused the local game shop to have about $5000 or more than it would have if he never started. As for me, I think it can be kind of fun, but no way in hell I'm going to sink the kind of money into it I've seen others do. I'll play with people I can bum decks from. I really do appreciate the artwork on a lot of the cards however. I'm definitely leaning towards buying a digital picture frame, going through a collection of high quality scans of the cards, crop the rest of the image, then put all the pictures I like on the picture frame that could randomly change.

I'm sure maybe a grand total of 5 people in the world are interested in this, but I was wondering if it would be possible at all to create a map somehow of the levels from Test Drive 3. Here are some screenshots: It may not look like much, but for 1990, this game was kind of mind blowing with open sandbox racing, 3d vector graphics, semi-believable road and landscape design, etc. I'm a geek and like videogame maps, but I don't think it's possible to map this one out without modifying the code. I think it's possible though as someone already hacked the .exe to get extra lives. The game itself has a buillt-in replay and chase cam controls that you can fly around with and look at different angles. Really if the tilt value could just be modified to be able to turn 90 degrees straight down (the farthest it will go is about 45), then that and a stitching program might be all that's needed to map the game out. Unfortunately I don't have knowledge of programming or something like Cheat Engine to know how to do this. The ideal method would be to have an isometric angle render view like I've seen some people do for Minecraft and Doom, but that would probably take a lot more work. Here's a link to the game, it's abandonware now: http://www.abandonia.com/en/downloadgame/385

I'm moving this back to the Gaming section since even though it's the engine, this isn't a Valve game. Also in the future, leave a shadow topic, I though the thread got deleted.

Well I'm just wondering what the chain here was. I was using XP until 2011 and I still remember occasional viruses slipping by, though by far the biggest reduction was from Ad Blocker. I use Avira Antivir, which has a very high detection rate (may have more false positives though): http://www.av-comparatives.org/images/stories/test/ondret/avc_od_aug2011.pdf Once I switched to 7, this pretty much ended. So whether my contraction method was from an actual OS hole or not is debatable. Some of it was DEFINITELY from Flash, but even if all of it was, my point is that there seems to be more protections within 7 to block the virus contraction in the first place. So even if XP may not have holes in it, 7 seems to have additional protections so that even programs with holes in them, like Flash, can't get as far as they would otherwise. Again, this is objective, but I do feel like 7 is the more secure OS given my experience with it. And also, I never had security problems with XP for probably the first 6 years or so of its use.

My bad, I didn't think to check for another thread, I just looked at the main page. Well there's Out of Hell, one UT mod I've been meaning to play.

I just want to encourage more people to play this mod, I think it's great. It's a multiplayer zombie survival mod and is basically the game I was hoping for instead of Left 4 Dead. I thought the pacing on Left 4 Dead was too rapid to build suspense and felt more like an arcade shooter to me than anything else; with zombies running at me OVER and OVER and OVER again while I have hundreds of rounds of ammo. Here you have fast zombies, but the ratio of them to slow ones I'd guess is around 1 out of 20-30. Ammo is quite limited, your teammates clip into you and can botch things up, you (or them) can become infected from bites, you can use boards to build barricades in doorways, it really adds a survival feel to the game. Here is a machinima someone made of it: XYS_raQUrqQ The beginning is something from Garry's Mod (the snow level isn't from the game), but starting at around 2 minutes, it's all actual gameplay (though you don't see the rural levels in it). Anyway, you can download the mod here and it's free to play: http://www.nomoreroominhell.com/

My point was that when you can in essence bribe chunks of congress to pass laws, especially when it's in opposition to the majority of your constituents, that's not democracy. That's what I mean by overstepping authority, regardless of their intent and implementation. Except that in the case of the grandmother, the computerless family, the dead person, and many others, that's a false statement. My point here was that the RIAA has a long history of abusing what authority they do have. Actually I don't, but the police do. And the key words there are PROBABLE CAUSE, not "suspicion based on automated algorithm search" No, that's the completely wrong analogy. Do you recognize the difference between making something illegal versus how that law is enforced? This bill was not about making piracy illegal or not. A better analogy would be "We already know X is illegal, and it's likely some X activity is going on in this neighborhood, so we should arrest everyone on the block. Some of the innocents will be found guilty and imprisoned unless they have money or good legal assistance, and some of the guilty may get caught, it's hard to say" It doesn't directly, but it establishes a precedent which is then used to wield influence. Here's an explanation of one of the more recent examples, where the USA put pressure on Spain to pass a SOPA-like law. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikileaks_proves_us_forced_spain_to_adopt_sopa-sty.php It's basically a form of blackmail, just at a macro level.

Well I plan to make a bunch of headway on MKV copies and updating site links after #42 is done.

I don't use AVC. The videos will all be converted using handbrake (I found it had better playback compatibility than x264 commandline) from uncompressed AVI which I'll decompress. None of the sources are encoded in WMV, that's only what I've released. The original sources are all either HuffyUV or Xvid AVI. The early CP episodes were stored in HuffyUV, the 1280x720 ones (prior to The Tunnel) were encoded in max quality xvid, and the Freeman's Mind episodes were a mix between using a quantizer of 1 or 2 for the Xvid content. You guys may hate me, but I wasn't as concerned about ultra high quality for Freeman's Mind, though it still looks clearly better than any of the WMV copies.

This is just a subjective account and is maybe just bad timing, but I'd disagree. My computer got compromised multiple times on XP (even though I had multiple spyware scanners and cycled through different antivirus solutions at the time). I'm pretty sure I can trace it back to viruses being delivered using flash ads as a vector. The last straw for me was I remember visiting mobygames.com and have the virus scanner immediately go off once it loaded. The infection rate dropped DRAMATICALLY after using ad blocker, but it still would happen every once in a while. Since I've been on 7 I haven't had any infection issues, so it's been a smoother experience overall. I mean you could just blame it all on flash exploits that Adobe fixed around the same time, but since the issue hasn't happened to me on 7, I personally lean towards Vista / 7 having SOME security bonuses over XP just from the results. It is worth noting that BEFORE 2008-2009 or so I can't remember ever having security issues from the internet on XP. I really think Flash has done more to undermine system security than anything else in the past decade.

I'd be surprised if somebody doesn't come up with an unauthorized patch to add back in the original music. I read a while back that Crazy Taxi was being re-released also where the axed the original soundtrack along with Pizza Hut and KFC ads. That one's less of an issue though since the original was ported to PC and I believe still runs.

Even though my earliest experience of the internet comes from BBS, I guess I'm immigrant. I can't fathom wanting to switch between media 27 times in an hour. Even for games I always like them to be full screen, I find it less enjoyable if they're windowed so I'm receiving other information. I generally have a good attention span as long as exercise, but I can handle rapid multitasking (like a RTS) as long as the decisions and operations can be done in a few seconds. If they require more in-depth thought, then no.

Well the way to look at that analytically would be to see what percentage of the rich donate to charity and what percent of their income compared against the middle class (the working class likely wouldn't be able to afford to donate much). Again, we're talking about averages, not individual cases.

I read this article, it's interesting seeing multiple studies confirm the findings: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/10/rich-people-compassion-mean-money_n_1416091.html I also saw this study a while ago, but you could argue it's less conclusive by itself rather than having a multitude of them in different scenarios like the previous article: http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/02/shame-on-the-rich.html?ref=hp Again, these are just averages. It doesn't mean every rich person is less compassionate, just likely the majority of them.

This could be the sort of thing I could see adding for donators (depending on how many lines a GPS system needs, I imagine it's a lot)

-16x anisotropic filtering -4x4 supersampling antialiasing (with Nvidia Inspector, AMD has standard-grid supersampling on their videocards, but I think it tends to blur Source games for some reason) -recorded at 180fps (not in real time), then downsampled to 30 to add motion blur -Colton Rappe adds lens flares and stuff to the intro footage

Well fair enough, but I think it's possible you'll be surprised. Look at this way, which would you rather show to someone, a dozen Saturday Night Live skits with Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd, or the movie Ghostbusters? That's the best comparison I can make to the difference between the movie and Freeman's Mind. I am only too happy to delegate huge chunks of the movie to other people, but from my experience in other videos I've made, anything volunteer-based can easily evaporate without much warning. I mean what do you do in scenarios where all your "trusted" people have become too busy or disappear and trying to work with new people is a dice toss as to whether they are competent or reliable or not? Go to moddb.com sometime and see how many mods get started that never get finished. The only reason my videos get finished is because when people bail, I'll finish the work myself (except for coding or modelling, I'm at people's mercy there). Once I get more done on Freeman's Mind, I plan on adding a "help wanted" section to the site for specific positions I need help with on the movie (not at all once, otherwise I wouldn't be able to manage it all). Well on one side, this isn't a democracy, I am going to work on different video projects, regardless. On the flipside, I'm not trying to piss people off when their preferred videos or requests get neglected, I just simply have lots of different things I want to do and limited resources to work with. If ALL I had to do was writing, directing, and voice acting, things would be 10x faster, but that doesn't really happen outside of a studio environment.

I record in-game audio directly from the source engine, which does it in stereo when you output to video (even if it supports 5.1 in-game). Sound editors add to that, which is also in stereo. I guess 5.1 mixing would be possible, but I don't really see it as being worth all the extra time. Besides, I keep the sound effect tracks, in-game audio, music, and dialogue separate for almost the videos. If I ever make something good enough to warrant 5.1 sound, someone could always come back to "remaster" it later.