Brett E

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Posts posted by Brett E

  6. Posted

    Yeah the NHS isn't about being the best for each person, it's about being a good service for everyone no matter who you are or what you can afford. It has its problems sure and it'll no doubt be a tragic state by the time the Tories are done decimating the state but I believe historically it's been consistently ranked as one of the best in the world.

  8. Posted

    I find that GZ is at its best when you're not overthinking things too much and think fast, maintaining stealth but only just.

     

    I was finding it frustrating yesterday as I kept failing while trying to be super meticulous but I've been playing Ground Zeroes this evening and I think I've got there, although being super stealth I'm mostly avoiding alerts and managing to move at a good pace. I just extracted The Eye and The Finger along with all the prisoners in all but the main mission which I'll probably do tomorrow.

  9. Posted

    http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/08/27/benefits-death-claimants-welfare-ids_n_8047424.html

     

    I knew it was bad but didn't think it was quite this bad...

    Obviously the data cannot be interpreted as a direct correlation, people die in all sorts of ways but it seems highly likely that the majority have at least some relation to being declared 'fit for work'.

     

    After this recent story the DWP are really on a roll at the moment:

    http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/18/dwp-admits-making-up-positive-quotes-from-benefits-claimants-for-leaflet

  11. Posted

    I backed the game because I loved Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander but I found this game just too overwhelming. I have no idea what's going on when most of the battlefield is obscured and enemies can attack from any angle then add in into planetary conflict and nope I was out. As you may have guessed I was never a high level player on the previous games.

     

    A tutorial is nice and they added a single player to the original game too so maybe it's time I gave it another shot?

  14. Posted

    http://www.engadget.com/2015/08/26/rovio-angry-birds-layoffs/

    Is it just me or is this becoming an all too familiar story? Particularly with mobile. Company has mega hit and makes a ton of money, expands rapidly, takes on tons of staff, fails to maintain growth that can sustain expansions and starts to tank. It's happened with Zynga and I think others (but can't remember examples right now so could be wrong) and now Rovio. King.com and that War Game company seem likely to be next. 

  15. Posted

    Hmm, well you're not the only person to have cloned it. I've played at least two of these games on mobile but the names aren't coming to me right now. The versions I've played were variations but very subtle ones so I'd probably still class them as clones and I'm pretty sure they were monetised in some way. That doesn't really make things any clearer though, just because others have done it (although I have no idea who the creators are so one could be the original developer) does not change the moral question.

     

    You're not pretending to be the original creator and even credit them so that's in your favour, on the other hand if you do monetise it then it's basically an admission of monetary gain using someone else's intellectual property which in the incredibly remote possibility of legal action would not be ideal.

     

    In your situation I'd feel a lot more comfortable if I changed it enough to not appear to be a direct clone but more of a heavy influence. I do understand your concerns about the deviating from the original design and aesthetic but I don't think I'd be able to resolve the dissonance any other way (apart from getting permission or profit sharing with the original dev but neither seems possible).

  16. Posted

    Any non-Scandinavians I run into are immediately subjected to the wonder that is Djungelvrål.

    If you ever have to chance to sample it, please do.

     

    You Scandinavians and your Licorice! I even saw Licorice crisps (chips) in Denmark, madness! Oh sure you have those but can you find a decent pack of Salt and Vinegar? Not bloody likely.

  17. Posted

    On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee

     

    I've just finished this one and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. It's an odd one for sure.

    The world is interesting, it doesn't go into much detail about what happened just that things sort of deteriorated in seemingly the whole world. Then people from China who seemed to still have their act together moved to the US and occupied near abandoned areas. Exactly how the new social dynamic of class based towns arose seems unclear but I guess it's not that important, it just seems like such a strange system that it's hard to imagine it occurring organically.

     

    The story is told by an unknown narrator who supposedly is passing on this well known tale but has never met the main character. That's fine but it makes the choice of where to add detail to the story a bit strange, there'll be long sections about the tangentially related things or other details that only the main character would have noticed including her inner thoughts. So maybe the story was originally passed on by the main character but it seems unlikely since it's often mentioned how she has no idea that anyone else cares about her story. I dunno, it's just strange.

     

    I struggled with the way it was written, the paragraphs are often very long which means natural breaks infrequent. There's not really any punctuation used to assist in readability, by which I primarily mean quotations for dialogue, I know there's different approaches here but there's almost no attempt to separate it from the general story telling which for me at least created an overall vagueness and made it harder to get immersed in the story.

     

    It's always nice to have a female main character but she has almost no personality which is partially attributed to very restrained social upbringing. She also has very little agency beyond the one big initial decision that starts the story, afterwards she is taken from one place to another (almost entirely by men) and even traded as a commodity, the distasteful nature of the arrangement is commented upon and there's an argument that these events are a part of the world she is in but I still find it all a but disappointing.

    I'm uneasy about imposing overly liberal/progressive values so normally I would shy away from points like that but in this case it seems too overt to ignore.

     

    I also read A Canticle for Liebowitz which was excellent.

  19. Posted

    The only space flight game I ever really got into before ED was Freelancer so perhaps I just lean more to the universe designed for play rather than based on realism.

    I (like a lot of people) am unsure about Star Citizen, I didn't back it because I generally don't back things that reach their goal quickly. No Man's Sky is my current hope.

     

    So it's £85 for everything for ever, wow. I can see why they'd do that at the time, you want to entice people with maximum reward at minimum price to get to the goal but yeah that does seem cheap.

    I'm not sure I follow you regarding the year after, do expansions get rolled into the main game after a year? or just that it's on steam so the price will come down and be in sales, etc?

  20. Posted

    There are exceptions I admit but the majority of the galaxy is the same few stars and planets over and over with different names. Since the game is broadly realistic this does make sense but it also makes exploration rather uneventful. 

     

    I considered changing the wording there, "fuck you for not backing" is a bit much, I guess 'leaves a bitter taste' might be more suitable. So £85 for the game and two expansions? 

  21. Posted

     

    @Brett E

     

    I find it useful to think about public policy and social interactions on a liberty/security spectrum, so that's why I use that word. I tend to think that liberty is more important than security when it comes to Second Life let's plays. My lean towards liberty has it's limits of course. 

    I personally enjoy when people get side-tracked on the forums, I'm just grateful that everyone who posts posts so that I'm not just talking to myself and I can see how similar or different my views are on these matters and I can get a larger breadth of perspectives. The side-tracks are often expressive about what is informing the views the poster has on the subject at hand. 

     

    A big difference I see between walking into someone's Second Life home and walking into someone's actual, physical-world home is that there is a great difference in physical security. Walking into a real home as a complete stranger is threatening physical violence. Walking into someone's Second Life home is threatening public awareness(?), but there is no threat of physical violence. I see virtual worlds as being places where we can experiment with liberty with far less consequence to both the dancer and the person who is having their toes stepped on. I value that expectation of permission and I don't feel comfortable giving it up as freely as others seem to. For example, Second Life seems like a public space where resources and space aren't scarce, so people can express themselves with buildings and such without having to worry about taking something (or only taking very little) from others. Remember that every time someone claims ownership of something, that means that they are removing it from the commons. 

     

    I think it should be more about respect and what's morally acceptable than the fear of physical violence that prevents someone from intruding upon another's space and it's this which I feel should translate to the digital world. 

    Which isn't to say that I want the digital world to be an identical copy of the physical but I think more respect wouldn't significantly damage creativity. Of course the 'comedians' that decry having an opinion as the end of comedy would disagree :)

     

    Candy Crush. The app. Stolen by a big company from a "little guy".

     

    Ok not everyone. But a lot of people steal/clone from each other.

     

    Well it's a grey area, of course we all do it to some extent but I feel that's why this thread exists, to explore the boundaries of what's acceptable.

  23. Posted

    I disagree with there being billions of things to see. While technically accurate they draw from a relatively shallow seed pool so after playing the game for a little while you'll see pretty much every type of planetary body and after that point you'll just see them in different configurations which doesn't make a big amount of different in this game given the nature of the environments. Of course you weren't talking just about the environments so sure there's various ship interactions which also count although the variation here also seems somewhat limited. They built a massive universe and created numerous systems but seem to have been very restrained in allowing emergent events to occur, which is consistent with the game in general in my opinion, the market for example which seems to have so little variation in pricing that there's little reason to search out great prices because they basically don't exist which reduces standard trading to somewhat tedious repetition for marginal gains.

     

    I don't want to be too down on the game because there's also a lot I like about it, I must have played it for 100 hours so clearly there's things that click with me. Also not everything I've mentioned is necessarily a negative and I'm sure there's good reasons behind the decisions. I think they created a great foundation and I stopped playing before powerplay (because of reasons documented in this thread) so I guess I haven't seen some of the building upon that foundation. I'm glad there's more significant stuff coming but I'll probably wait a year or two before coming back.

     

     

     

    Hmm, I guess I got the original game for a steal at 20 pounds, so it's probably worth it to throw in another 40. The real question is, am I going to be still playing this in 4 years to make the lifetime expansion pass worth it.

    Edit: Oh, wait, that's before the 10 pound loyalty discount. OK, 30 pounds is definitely worth it.

     

     

    One final moan, I paid £40 for the game and would have to pay £40 for the expansion but for backing you pay a total of £50. Really? I understand the reasoning behind giving backers a better initial deal and bonus' etc but this is such a big difference and lifelong thing at that, it feels like a bit of 'fuck you for not backing'.

  24. Posted

    Loop is very simple and relaxing game with a nice minimalist aesthetic, you rotate lines to join them all together and create a loop. It reminds me of Desert Golf in how there's not a lot of depth but it's strangely satisfying (although I don't think there's any weird meta stuff going on). It's pretty much the perfect mobile game for me, a nice time killer that you can play while listening to podcasts and such.

     

    Also it's free, actually free, not free to play, no ads, nothing. It doesn't require permissions for your entire life either, just photos because you can save screens of the lovely finished loops.