Group items tagged

Unskippable cut-scenes exist because idiots like me skip the skippable ones. There’s text on screen because idiots like me don’t listen to the characters, and the characters are repeating what the text says because idiots like me won’t read the text. Friendly characters are invincible because idiots like me would shoot them, and we’re not allowed to shoot them because idiots like me will try anyway.

For the most part, Half-Life and its sequel did it right: you could always look wherever you wanted, and after the intro you were usually free to move. You generally couldn’t interact with the scripted sequences, but for logical reasons – they happened out of reach or behind glass.

I don’t have Attention Deficit Disorder, designers – you do. Only one of us in this relationship is forcing the other to look at what they’re doing. We’re locked in a destructive cycle of dickification: I resent when you take control away from me, so I’m as much of a dick as the controls permit. You see dicks like me being dicks in your playtests, and you think of new ways to be bigger dicks back: to force me to watch your scenes, play out your script, follow your high-school reading level plot.

Let’s begin by trying to explain what it was that Putin in particular created. What he recognized was the problem of the Soviet empire, the problem with the czarist empire, was that they totally controlled surrounding territories. As such, they benefited from them, but they were responsible for them as well, and so that wealth was transferred into them to maintain them, to sustain the regimes, and so on and so forth. Putin came up with a new structure in which he had limited desires from countries like Ukraine. These were irreducible, that is to say, they could not be part of NATO, could not have hostile forces there, they had to cooperate on a bunch of issues. But Russia was not responsible for their future, and it was really a brilliant maneuver because it gave them the benefit of the Russian empire, of the Soviet Union, without the responsibilities, without the drain on the Russian treasury.

And what he has created in Ukraine, in Kazakhstan, in Belarus, is sovereignty for these nations and yet alignment with Russia. And this has made Russia a very powerful player because its house is in order at the same time that, for example, as the European house is in massive disorder.

For a kid that wasn't into fantasy books, I didn't approach it as an adventurer. I approached the game as me: I'm standing in front of a house, not unlike my own, a wrapped gift that you have to figure out how to unwrap. It was like a Choose Your Own Adventure in which no other pages were suggested. Here's where you are, kid. Now what?

One element of our education system consistently surprises them: “Sports are a big deal here,” says Jenny, who moved to America from South Korea with her family in 2011. Shawnee High, her public school in southern New Jersey, fields teams in 18 sports over the course of the school year, including golf and bowling.

When I surveyed about 200 former exchange students last year, in cooperation with an international exchange organization called AFS, nine out of 10 foreign students who had lived in the U.S. said that kids here cared more about sports than their peers back home did. A majority of Americans who’d studied abroad agreed.

I've written many times about how I feel like the gaming industry spends most of its time fighting for larger slices of pie instead of focusing on increasing the size of the pie. Having more people playing your game greatly increases the theoretical size of the pie.

The micro-transaction model makes it incredibly painless for anyone to try out a game, and even if lots of those people don't come back, it's a larger group to filter through to produce a dedicated player base, and to survive.

Times change, as do situations, empires die and imperial democracies are born, but Central Asia, this vast portion of the world bordered on the west by the Caspian, on the east by China, on the north by Russia and on the south by Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, continues to be the theatre of significant manoeuvring.

in a new study published in Science, scientists studying groups of people from different societies have suggested that our sense of fairness may depend on the type of society we live in.

Lead researcher Joseph Henrich observed that members of smaller groups were unwilling to punish selfish behavior and were willing to keep much of the money for themselves. This may be because smaller communities lack the social norms or informal institutions like markets and religion, causing them to have narrower concepts of fairness.

This performance of death is a ritual farewell to the world. Even when it happens that the player is not leaving the world completely, just that character, the performance of death in deletion severs their connection to the world through that avatar allowing them to fully re-enter the world in a new character. Giving the character a final end allows the player to move on from the experiences s/he shared with that avatar and experience closure to this kind of self-relationship. For some players though, this performance of death is too strong. Rather than actually delete the character, they just set it aside as ‘retired’. Avatars and the lives we live through them (they live through us) are meaningful. Sometimes, they’re just not ready to die.

That icon-strewn circle in the lower-left corner of the screen is a Rockstar perennial; one could even call it a defining feature of their games.

As an experiment, I tried loading up GTA IV and turning off the HUD and mini-map completely. I found that it made the game significantly more immersive, engaging, difficult, and fun. It didn't quite feel "optimal," and at times the shift was pretty extreme, but all the same I recommend that fans of GTA IV give it a shot.

STRATFOR has also picked up indications that Iran was playing a much more deliberate game — taking care to conserve its resources while counting on the perception of a Wahhabist occupation of Shiite-majority land to exacerbate local grievances and stress the GCC states over time. With the Arab states on edge, Iran’s primary aim is to ensure a full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq — an area where threats to the Islamic republic have historically originated.

This logic is what led STRAFOR today to take a closer look at what was happening behind the scenes

Common mistakes Ducking does not confer any bonus in a combat, it just allows you to cower behind cover like, well, a coward. Furthermore, changing state from standing to ducking will actually make your unit incapable of defending itself for a fraction of a second. This is often long enough for your unit to lose a vital body part, like a head or torso. Partial line of sight does not provide a defensive bonus, I.E., peeking around a corner will not make you harder to hit. Cover bonuses are only granted when standing behind half height (light blue) objects.

The factors that affect this time are listed in rough order below: Unit type - shotguns have the shortest time, snipers the longest. Distance to target - closer target: shorter time. Cover - target in cover: longer time. Stillness - the more quickly a unit was moving before they started firing, the longer it takes for them to get a kill shot.

When engaging another unit, the engaged unit will often attempt to shoot back, even if the engaged unit was not previously looking at the engaging unit. Indeed, a unit will only not do so if it is set to Continue on Sight or it is an indirect fire unit. In this case, there is one additional factor to those discussed earlier: first sight. If unit A engages unit B and B is not aiming at A, then B will suffer a penalty for not having first sight; that is to say, unit B will be at a disadvantage because it joined the combat a bit late.

I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people.