Humodour

I, too, wanna be a girl.

He's just being a troll. He does that sometimes (often). lol. You don't need a license to develop programmes (including games) for the Mac. Spider: Compared to porting it to 2 or 3 different consoles? Far less. I don't know the figures of porting costs, so let me just give you an incomplete list of games that have Mac and Linux versions instead? Mac (mainly big names, RPGs, and games I like): KOTOR 1 IWD 1 NOLF 2 Freedom Force 1 Jade Empire World of Warcraft Spore EVE Online Age of Empires 1, 2, and 3 AvP 1 and 2 Baldur's Gate 1, 2, and ToB Battlefield 1942 Black & White Call of Duty 1, 2, and 4 Civilisation 2, 3, and 4 Command & Conquer 1 and 2 Descent 1 Deus Ex 1 Diablo 1, 2, and 3 (Yes, Diablo 3) Doom 1, 2, and 3 Dungeon Siege 1 Fallout 1 and 2 Giants: Citizen Kabuto Halo 1 HoMM 3, 4, and 5 Hexen 1 and 2 Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Max Payne Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 (but not MotB or SoZ? Smart, Obsidian. A hacker showed that the Windows version of MotB works fine with some slight fiddling, so it was clearly laziness on Obsidian's part ) Prey Quake 1, 2, 3, 4, and Wars Return to Castle Wolfenstein All the Sims Starcraft The Jedi Knight series System Shock 1 Total Annihilation All Unreal Tournaments The Warcraft Series Worms Armageddon Linux games (as for Mac, an incomplete list, though definitely smaller): Doom 3 Quake 1, 2, 3, 4, and Wars Return to Castle Wolfenstein The Unreal Tournament series EVE Online Come on, Obsidian. What's the go?

I have no idea where you got notion that AP would be a NOLF clone.

I don't think US prisons are anything any decent, civilised country should be aspiring to.

Not to derail the thread Morgoth, but generally the person making dubious claims has the burden of proof (i.e. you). I mean your statement is already rather nonsensical because we clearly saw character development in NOLF1, but not only that, character development does not an RPG make. Look at the persistent undercurrents of moral greyness in NOLF1 for another well-done RPG aspect of NOLF - if you actually bothered to stop and listen to people or read what you saw, you really started to get the feeling that the bad guys weren't at all black and white, they were real people with families and dreams. And you were killing them because they got in your way. Now the game didn't really push that theme the way, say, Deus Ex 1 did, but it was certainly there and could easily have been developed further (offering more diplomatic or non-lethal options, and alternate pathways for example). Moreover, I can name a bunch of campy/silly RPGs: Torment, Fallout, Anachronox.

But that's the point - campiness doesn't really allow to develop a character outside of being campy. [citation needed]

I found out how to fix it: reformat and install Windows XP hi.

So, what games released in 2008 were worth buying? They don't need to be 90% epic hits, just fun and entertaining (read: above average). A small description would be nice. PC only. You can list console titles if you want, just make sure you clearly mark them as such in your post. Cheers.

Bull**** detected.

No One Lives Forever 1 showed me that you can still have an awesome spy game (with as many RPG elements as you want) without needing Deus Ex's gothic atmosphere. So while I loved Deus Ex 1, I'm confident they can pull off their own unique (not necessarily dark, gothic, or serious) atmosphere for AP and still make a great game. That doesn't mean they will, but they've got a good chance. They just need to make sure they market AP as a serious game (even if it isn't). Otherwise they'll suffer the same problems NOLF1 and Torment did: appearing too weird to people who've never played them. Honestly, the cover art of PS:T made me almost not buy it, and the cover art for NOLF1 is the reason I only got round to playing it in 2008 (long after it stopped making revenue I suspect).

I fully support the (reasonably) level-headed and democratic Palestinians of the West Bank, and thus (obviously) the Palestinian right to self-determination. What I don't support is an Iranian-backed terrorist organisation deliberately attacking its neighbour to prevent any peace settlement being made. Hamas can burn. The scale of the loss of life is deplorable, but it's also a miracle that the Gaza casualties have been 75% Hamas militia so far. Would that Israeli had the resources and time to assassinate or jail Hamas hard-liners one by one without any loss of civilian life, but alas, that's not an option. I don't pretend to know the answer, but I do know what's not the answer: sticking your head in the sand and hoping the guys with guns and bombs will go away (a.k.a. blind pacifism).

Well said, Walsingham. taks's adamant opposition to fairly obvious and simple facts puzzles me, as does his persistent desire to belittle those who don't take his word as gospel.

Well they have some competition again. Russia just passed a law authorising their military to station warships at various countries (100 or so) around the world "in case a something goes wrong or a situation flares up". Don't get me wrong, I'd like America to have some competition for status as 'world police' - I'd just prefer it be, say, Europe, instead of a corrupt Russia that's slowly reverting back to totalitarianism and agitating for Cold War 2.0.

Want more game sales? Support Linux and Mac. The stats he uses have changed since he last checked (basically non-Windows market share has doubled), but the basic logic is simple and elegant: Linux and Mac users are far more likely to buy computer games, but possibly more importantly, they are extremely strong word of mouth advertisers and faithful fans. 90% of users might use Windows, but if only 5% of them buy computer games, let alone your computer games, what're you left with? But just suppose your Windows market share is 5% - while a quarter of Mac and Linux users also buy your games, that's 50% more sales than if you had of supported Windows alone (just ignoring the word of mouth benefits). It's certainly not obvious why game companies don't support Max and Linux in today's environment, and you need only look at the graph linked to above to see why this argument will simply get stronger in future.

You're trying to hurt my feelings, aren't you? I've resigned myself to the fact that I'm not going to like this game until I play it.

The California SC cannot throw the amendment out because it is part of the Constitution of the State now. In other words, unless it conflicts with another aspect of the same it is the supreme law of the state and the SC is bound to enforce and uphold it. Hold your horses. Two significant lawsuits are in progress already on this matter. 1) Interpreting how rights are applied is up to the Judiciary branch (courts) not the Legislature branch (voters), as determined by the CA Constitution (and also the US Constitution) under separation of powers, 2) removing equal protection under law is a change to the fundamental nature of the Constitution and thus is a Revision, not an Amendment, which in turn requires a 66% majority, not a 50% majority. It sucks that government has any say over marriages in the first place, but until America adopts stronger civil unions things like this will be important.

There's very little wrong with my explanation except that it was oversimplified for lay people, taks. Um. You are aware that Newton's law of universal gravitation was proven false by Einstein about 100 years ago, right? It is correct only in platonic Newtonian/Euclidean mechanics, not real life. It's still used for many Earth-based physical calculations today because it's a decent approximation to the much more complex and time-consuming equations of relativity (an approximation made possible because space-time is a manifold). But for precise calculations, the theory of relativity is used (i.e. space-time curvature due to mass is considered, or at least approximated by geodesics). And we're not done revising the theory of gravity, yet. Relativity, stunning as it is, doesn't play well with quantum mechanics, so as Walsingham said, we'll hopefully learn something about gravity from the LHC.

South Korea is pretty decent. Except if you cheat on your partner, you go to jail. Not a good country for sex, IMHO.

Sort of. Except it's actually targeted for both reasons: it's the biggest and the least secure. Especially for IE6 and 7 (and 5 is a joke). It's like people say Macs and Linux can't get viruses. Well they can, but it's a heck of a lot more difficult even ignoring market share. Why? Because they're designed differently. Chrome's sandbox model is a simple example of how you can design something to be more secure by default. But security isn't the only reason you'd want to leave IE; it's also the slowest browser (the next slowest browser is twice as fast), and has the worst plugin support. In fact, IE's plugin system (if you could call it that) is one of those reasons it's insecure. And it's got the worst rendering and standards support... but hey, I could go on all day. Point is, IE isn't a wise choice. It's fine to try and defend it and all, but there's really nothing to defend, IMHO.

Actually, gravity is a theory. A law is an idealised mathematical construct (also known as an axiom) which is always 100% correct in some platonic mathematical space. We cannot say this about gravity (see below), and in fact there has been at least two different laws of gravity so far (the first Newtonian, the second relativity). To call gravity as observed in physical reality a law is a silly as calling evolution a law because there exists a mathematically idealised version of evolution (see mathematical optimisation techniques). There seems to be this fundamental misunderstanding among laypeople about what the term 'theory' means in science. It means a hypothesis which has been experimentally tested and never been falsified (i.e. always turns out correct). In science, since we cannot with certainty say "this theory is 100% correct" as we do in mathematics, the most powerful assertion we can make is "this theory has been correct in every case tested". Why, then, is science useful? Because our theories are based upon the 'idealised mathematical constructs' (a.k.a. laws) previously mentioned. When we discover these constructs to be an insufficient approximation of the real world (i.e. they are disproved for some specific case), we ditch them and formulate a new theory based on a new mathematical construct which accounts for the anomalous case. This is what has happened to both gravity and evolution in the past. So yes, evolution is, like gravity, 'just a theory'. Edit: if you want another take on the formulation of theories, wikipedia has a nice subsection on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory#Assump...mulate_a_theory

Oh, no. I understand what 'machine' means. But it's proper in a discussion to define what your terms are to avoid confusion. If you're unwilling to do that, I will: Two significant definitions exist: a physical process, and a mathematical one. Either way, you have no basis for your claims, since neural nets are rigorously defined mathematically (they are universal Turing machines), and have been proven to exist physically (in animal brains - both human and not). You tell any half-decent biologist that a 'human is not a machine' and watch them laugh at you. Ahhh. And I bet you believe evolution is just a 'theory' (like gravity?) too?

Always important.

a) I haven't even been on here in a week. b) Yes, I read scientific journals. Does that offend you? But let's get to the meat of your inanity: Define 'machine'. Define 'self-aware'. Define 'true' in this context. From a technical perspective, 'true' AI is metaheuristic, while 'false' AI is symbolic. I fully concede symbolic AI (i.e. generally pre-90's AI) has no capacity for true learning. I have one whooping big counter-example of a machine which is both self-aware and intelligent: humans. Other examples exist, though. Most of them in the mammal or dinosaur family (birds, specifically). Oh, and hey - let's keep religion out of this OK? Or at least tell me if you're approaching this from a religious perspective so I can ignore you.

Wals was being Wals. Kind of odd to assume Mac owners all own consoles, though, and thus can be ignored.