Bay 12 Games Forum

Nobody ever remembers Oni.  Konoko wasn't overtly sexy, aside from a couple of the mission-ending stillshots.  And a couple of outfits with bare midriffs and tight jeans, and the evil-version of herself.  It was sexy because it worked, and it came off less as an appeal to the viewer and more like the character's own personality.

Oh, man, Oni...  One of my all-time favorite games.  Bungie turned out some really good stuff before Halo, but nobody seems to remember it anymore.  And Oni really got the short end of the stick.

I was playing on the PC, and the keyboard/mouse setup was pretty awful.  Had a hell of a time pulling off combos.  Eventually wound up buying a nice USB gamepad.

Konoko was great.  She was female, and good-looking, but it didn't matter.  She was just a strong character.  There was no real overt attempt play up her sexuality...  Nor was there any attempt to hide her gender.  She was a woman, but that just didn't really matter in the context of the gameplay.

I thoroughly enjoyed the melee/shooter hybrid gameplay.  First game I ever played that really pulled that off well.  Great fun running up to somebody, beating the snot out of them, using them as a human shield, grabbing their weapon away, and killing their buddy with it.  I didn't see gameplay like that again until that awful Matrix game.

The levels were very nicely done.  Solid, believable chunks of geography.  Not the weird crate-filled warehouses that seem to occupy so many games...  And occupied so many more back when Oni came out.  The maps felt like real-world locations, not some geek's idea of a good place to stage a firefight.

The storyline was genuinely interesting.  It unfolded slowly, through the contents of the game, not some arbitrary cutscenes or monologues or anything like that.

And the whole thing reminded me an awful lot of Ghost in the Shell.

Very cool stuff.

First of all, take a deep breath and relax.  You're in highschool.  You've got your entire life ahead of you.  To be completely honest - what you do now is going to have almost no bearing on the rest of your life.

Sure, you want to show up, get decent grades, graduate, all that stuff.  I'm not suggesting that you spend all day getting drunk because it won't matter.

But your choice of classes in highschool?  Nobody cares.  Your GPA in highschool?  Nobody cares.

Hell, once you've had a job or two...  Nobody even cares about what you did in college.

You think you want to get into culinary stuff?  Fine.  Go get a job.  Apply around town.  I wouldn't recommend anything like McDonald's as that's barely food, much less cooking...  But I'm sure there's a family-owned restaurant or a little pizza shop or something like that.  They probably won't let you start out cooking right away.  You'll wash dishes for a while, maybe work your way up to peeling vegetables, eventually you might be doing some prep cooking.  But it'll be experience, and it'll show that you've got an interest.

And the people who are saying High School is fast; maybe I don't want to join the workforce so quickly if this is what you consider fast.

I'm sure there's an opportunity out there somewhere but the only way I know of how to look for it myself is a long, soul-destroying and hope-crushing process which I really, really don't want to do again...

Oh, man, are you in for a rude awakening...

I know you don't want to hear it.  I didn't want to hear it at the time, either.  But seriously - enjoy it while you can.

Highschool is nothing.

It's only four years of your life.  That goes by in a flash.  My wife and I have been married for 8 years and it seems like the wedding was just yesterday.  Time flies.

And it's likely that the only responsibility you really have is school.  I remember that.  Just having to wake up in the morning, go to class, do some homework, pass some tests...  Maybe take out the trash or clean my room...  Sure, at the time I thought I had it rough.  These days I have more responsibility than that when I'm on vacation.

So...  Yeah...  Relax.  You've got your whole life ahead of you.  Do what looks interesting, what seems fun.  Make some mistakes.  Learn from them.  Don't worry so much.

Quote from: Ephemeriis on November 30, 2010, 02:15:20 pm

If I write a story that features people who turn into giant bunnies when the full moon comes out, it isn't a werewolf story, no matter what I call them.

No, they'd be werebunnies. But that's a false analogy. There would literally be no reason to call that a "wolf," because it shares no similarities with wolves. But there is reason to call the vampires of Twilight vampires, even though they go out in the sun. They still drink blood, they're still undead. And the only reason they sparkle, I think, is because they drink animal blood instead of human or something.

I wouldn't be calling them "wolf" - I'd be calling them "werewolf", because they still have similarities to werewolves.  They change at the full moon, they turn into animals, they kill people.  Makes as much sense as calling the things in Twilight vampires.

And it's not like there haven't been vampires who could go out into the sun before. What about Blade? Sure he was only half vampire(how does that even work?) but he could.

Yup.  And the real vampires in Blade could also go out in the sun, they just had to wear some crazy-high SPF sunscreen.

Couldn't Stoker's Dracula as well?

As I've already indicated, Stoker's Dracula is a departure from the folklore vampire.

I mean, you're talking as if the folkloric vampire was a consistent belief over thousands of years. In fact, I can't think of a single folk tale about vampires where the vampire bursts into flames in sunlight.

I never said anything about consistency.  Folklore is, by its very nature, fluid.  There've been all sorts of variations on the vampire theme over the years...  The most common way to kill them was never sunlight or a stake through the heart - rather you had to behead them and burn the head and body separately.

But a fairly common trait of vampires is that they despise the sunlight.  It either kills them outright, or renders them catatonic, or removes their supernatural powers, or whatever.

But the fact is that in the eyes of our culture Edward Cullen is a vampire.

Only because he is labeled as such.  If we didn't have an author telling us that he was a vampire, I doubt if anyone would call him that.  If we were just presented with his assorted attributes, without a label, I doubt if anyone would race to call him a vampire.

Sure, he drinks blood and he's got fangs...  But that's really where the similarities end, isn't it?

That's how things are defined, by their respective cultures.

Is that how it works?  Or do things define the cultures?

You can disagree with it, but it's always been that way. Dracula is a vampire because people say he's a vampire, Dr. Frankenstein isn't because no one believes he is.

In Dracula, the author states that he is a vampire.  The author told us what to believe.  People of the time would not have associated that description with a vampire.  Now, years later, we accept that definition.  The thing defined the culture.

In Frankenstein, nobody claims anyone is a vampire.  So we don't make that association.

If everyone starts calling bicycles cars, well then they're cars. Words and concepts aren't inherently meaningful, they only have the meanings we ascribe to them.

Words are labels for thoughts, concepts, and things.  A particular series of grunts and whistles doesn't have any meaning in and of itself.  But the only reason that "bicycle" actually means "that thing with pedals and two wheels" is because everyone has agreed on that.  If I personally decide to start "car" instead of "bicycle" nobody is going to know what I'm talking about.  The meaning isn't going to suddenly change because I use a different word.

Yes, the meaning of words shifts over time.  "Moron" used to be a medical diagnosis, now it's a simple insult.

But that's due to a slow shift in the connotation, not because somebody wakes up one morning and declares that a purring furry thing with four legs is a cactus.

A traditional vampire was never something pleasant.  It was a genuinely dead body that got up and started walking around.  They slept in dirt, they drank blood, they smelled bad.  Don't think of Dracula, think of Nosferatu.

Ever since Stoker wrote his book, however, they've been far more pleasant critters.  They've gone from being a disgusting, rotting corpse to some kind of romantic, dark, brooding anti-hero.

I'm not sure that's really a bad thing...  I've thoroughly enjoyed some of the newer vampire literature.  Anne Rice turned out some very fun stuff, as did Brian Lumley.

But I think we've gone a little too far with the current vampire craze...  They're getting more and more gothic, less and less macabre.  I mean...  They sparkle now.

In regards to WoW:  I agree that they've really messed with the classes.  These days there's precious little to differentiate my warlock from a mage or a hunter - we're all just ranged DPS.  The unique stuff like managing soul stones or having a permanent pet or emphasis on damage over time is pretty much gone.  If this progresses we'll have basically four classes - ranged DPS, melee DPS, tank, and healer.  Everything else will be cosmetic.

Having said that...  It's an MMO - they've never really been about the gameplay.  They've been about the social aspect.  The whole point was to get together with dozens/hundreds/thousands of people and live in a virtual world.  So I'm not so much bent out of shape about the changes to class mechanics.

But, even in that regard, I think WoW is failing.  There's more emphasis on phasing stuff to present a storyline, which is cool, but ruins the whole "shared world" thing.  As does making everything into an instance, and letting you find a group and teleport to/from the dungeon from a couple clicks of the mouse.  There's almost no need to talk to anyone anymore.  You can almost pretend it's a single-player game these days.

Having said all that...  I still play WoW.  I've got some friends on there that I've been playing with since the days of EQ.  And my wife and I have been playing MMO's for years.  It's as good a way as any to waste a few hours of downtime.

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In regards to Other Games:  It seems to me that single-player games are a dying breed.  Yes, there's been some good stuff out there like Mass Effect and Dragon Age...  But it really seems like there's just one or two companies keeping the flame alive.  The emphasis now seems to be on competitive multi-player.

I don't blame the publishers - it's cheaper that way.  Build just one or two maps and your players can keep themselves entertained for hours.

But I miss the single-player game as an art form.  Yeah, sure, there's been some really shitty single-player games...  But there's been some really good ones too.  Games that really told a story.  Games that created real characters and real worlds and really grabbed my attention.  Games like Half-Life and Deus Ex and System Shock 2 and Undying.  Games like that seem to be harder and harder to find.

I think a large part of the problem these days is our lack of attention span.

Folks want immediate gratification.  They want to fire something up, kill a few people, and shut it down.  I understand that.  There are times when I just need to blow off some steam...  Or I don't have a whole lot of time to play...  And it's nice to have a quick thrill available.

But I also like to sit down and lose myself in a game for hours at a time.  And that just doesn't seem to be terribly popular these days.

So games are getting shorter, simpler, more immediately gratifying.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing...  But the fact that they're cheaper to make that way, and the fact that the big publishers are all about profit margins, means that there's precious little innovation or experimentation these days.  Just one short/simple multi-player focused game after another.

To make booze you first need plants to brew.  You can grow these yourself, or you can gather them from the countryside, or you can buy them from a caravan.

Then you need a still, which is built under the workshops menu.

Then you need some empty barrels to put the booze in.

Then you need to order the still to brew drinks, and you need a dwarf with the right labor enabled to actually go do the brewing at the still.

Assuming that you have a plant which can be brewed, an empty barrel, and a dwarf who can do the brewing - you'll see a barrel of booze produced and hauled away.

This happened just moments ago...

I'm in the process of loading up a replacement computer for one of the guys in maintenance.  Just fired up IE to grab some windows updates.  It's still set to MSN as the default web page.

Headline news today is the whole Wikileaks thing...  More stuff coming out that the US Government doesn't want people to hear about.

Right below that headline is a poll:  Vote: Should WikiLeaks be designated a terrorist group?

Seriously?  Wikileaks?  A terrorist group?

What ever happened to freedom of the press?  What ever happened to real investigative journalism like the kind of stuff that took down McCarthy and exposed Nixon?  Since when is telling the truth a terrorist act?  What the hell happened to the land of the free?

This is just getting ridiculous...

I wonder how long before they're busting down doors and hauling people away for reading seditious material?

I usually set my HDD to boot first, just so I don't have to wait the few seconds it takes my machine to figure out there's nothing in the floppy/optical/USB to boot off of.

But, honestly, that shouldn't matter.  With the exception of floppy disks, which will be treated as boot media even if there's nothing usable on them - leading to errors.  And some old machines that did the same thing to USB disks - leading to errors.  Most computers are able to deal with non-bootable media on USB ports.  I routinely boot machines with a USB key attached, and them set to boot from USB if available, with no trouble at all.

The problem isn't that there's no boot files on the USB - you can't have boot files on a keyboard anyway.  The problem is that there's something wrong with that USB device and it's sending garbage back to the computer.  Turning off USB boot won't fix that.