aoanla

I think it's fairer, perhaps, in combination with your previous post, to argue that "The NHS, as it currently prioritises various aspects of health care, is destined to fail"? If some hypothetical British Government came along and said "Right, the NHS will now focus a lot more on preventative medicine - everyone will get a yearly checkup at least, and we'll swing funding in that direction from all of the non-evidence based medicine that we're funding", then I think the NHS would relatively quickly become more sustainable.

Sure, except that I am pretty sure I didn't state that the sets were strict "hard-edge" sets. I'm generally happy with a fuzzy-set model of language, and I don't think anything I said is incompatible with that . Your graph-model as stated is basically mappable to a fuzzy-set membership model, so I think we actually agree even more than you think we do. I mean, I'm also pretty happy with the "language is something that is negotiated between participants" theory of meaning, so I'm not being as prescriptive as I think you think I'm being here. (That said, I'd argue that while very tight formal definitions of games don't exist, it's quite easy to find examples of video games which people would find to be not good examples of "games". Mountain is definitely one of them, as is Proteus.)

I'd argue that "video games" is actually slowly diverging from the meaning of "game" separate to it. As CLWheelJack notes, there's controversy still about various types of "Video game" which lack specifically "game-like" elements - Mountain, for example, springs to mind (partly because the creator wrote an impassioned defence of why they thought that it was a game). Personally, I'd argue that Mountain isn't a "game" in the formal sense - it lacks any kind of clear goal, anything resembling rules etc - but that this doesn't make it any less valuable as a creation (there's a sense in which it feels that the creator thinks that "not a game" always means "less valuable than a game", which I would suggest is clearly false). Similarly, I remember when the Sim "games" from Maxis were all self-categorised as "software toys" - the point being that a toy, unlike a game, does not have a set goal and is instead an open-ended tool for any kind of play (including creating games using it, via the imposition of goals - this is the difference between a pair of dice and Craps, for example). Since we're mostly now using the "video games" to describe things which are formally toys or art-pieces (Proteus, for example), as well as formal games, I'd say that the semantic drift is sufficient that there is a separation between the terms, just not in the direction that tberton is assuming. (That is, rather than "video games" growing to become a larger strict subset of "games", I think "video games" is no longer a strict subset of "games" at all, and rather a separate set which intersects with "toys", "games", "art pieces", "narrative pieces" etc).

This reminds me that I should really pick up my playthrough of Dragonfall again. I wasn't that far into it, it was just unlucky that I had a busy period and never picked it up again when I had more free time again... (That said, Shadowrun Returns is one of those games that itches at the Spade in me - all those options which are sometimes only available if you have Skill X, or Background Y make me simultaneously want to play it enough times to get to see all of them, and despair of not being able to see all of them in a single playthrough.)

Super excitingly, the WFTDA Roller Derby divisional playoffs are starting this weekend. (This is exciting because for the first time, there are plenty of non-USA/Canadian teams in the tournament, including 6 in the Division 1 playoffs - one of which, London Rollergirls, just beat the expected #2 seed a week and a half ago.)

I mean, I should say, it's still mechanically a 1994 shooter in terms of graphics and basic shootiness, I don't want to oversell it here . But I think you'll find it interestingly different to DooM/Wolf3d in focus and intent. To acquire: Go here http://source.bungie.org/ . On a Windows PC, the download is a zip file that you just need to decompress and run Marathon.exe from.

So, the main thing about early FPSes is that the popular view is driven by id's output (Wolf3d, DooM, Quake, QuakeII... arguably by about 1998 we're out of "early FPS territory). id's stuff is very "story-light" - Carmack famously opined that story plays the same role in games as it does in pornography: providing an excuse for the experience you're actually paying for. And, in id-style early FPSen, that experience is killing everything that isn't you in each level, whilst solving button/keycard puzzles to open up areas. The Marathon series (and their more RPGish antecedent, Pathways Into Darkness), while still mostly linear experiences that involve solving puzzles with push-buttons and shooting enemy aliens, are also much more story-focussed and attempt something more complex in your interaction with the world. For a start, there are both (not very smart) allied combatants and allied civilians in many levels - some levels effectively mark you on how well you manage to protect the civilians (although this has no lasting narrative impact) - and the design is smart enough to play with this even in the first game by introducing hard-to-identify enemy clones of the civilians, which explode if they manage to approach you. More significantly, perhaps, the levels are also interested in telling you a story, via computer terminals distributed throughout the levels - whilst serving as a means of providing you with your mission for each level, they also provide your (strictly one-way) interaction with the personalities in the games; the AIs Durandal, Leela and Tycho, for the most part - and in doing so also provide both the ongoing surface narrative, and also hints at deeper aspects of the plot. Those deeper levels are sufficiently interesting that there is a very complex website devoted to discussion about them, something which the id games have never managed. (Notably, time does not stop when interacting with a terminal, so you can be attacked if you've not cleared out an area before using one.) [There's also more ambitious use of different environments - there are airless vacuum levels in each game, which require you to periodically visit oxygen-dispenser panels to top up your air-tanks - shades of Doom 3's outside-on-Mars sequences, a decade later]. So, my argument is that the Marathon series (like System Shock, which kinda approaches from the opposite, RPG-heavy direction) is one of the early harbingers of Deus Ex and Half-Life 2 styles of narrative-centred FPS games. Their isolation on Macs, for the most part, is probably the reason why they're considered so obscure today, but their influence on later titles is still visible.

Sure, I mentioned Marathon because it's from 1994, and therefore roughly in chronological order with where you are (just after DooM, and before Quake in terms of conventional tech developments), and because it is free and open-source now and so is at least not hard to acquire if anyone wanted to. [And, honestly, is more relevant to understanding the history of FPSen than SiN, for example...] If you don't want to grow the backlog any further, that's fine, but I was just making a friendly recommendation

Looking at the list on at the start of this thread, can I argue for including Marathon (the series, or any one of the 3 games if you only want one - I'd argue for Marathon 2 if you're doing just one). Only Marathon 2 was ported to PC from Mac, but they're all available on PC now via the Aleph One project. For the time they were made, they're interesting examples of how development might have gone if people had different priorities (just as System Shock is).

Indeed, this happens to me more often as time goes on, especially with the more puzzle-oriented games (once you get to a point where there's a more significant amount of Thinking needed to solve problems, it's easier to get distracted - hence SpaceChem sitting still with the last 3 levels still unfinished, and TIS-100 heading that way for me). It's much rarer for that to happen for me with a non-puzzle oriented game, but it's hard for me to tell if this is an actual trend, as I also tend to have avoided a lot of modern games with very long play times (the Dragon Ages, The Witchers etc of the modern era), so it might just be that I complete them before I would have forgotten to play them. (I'm more likely to actually quit those kinds of games because I actually dislike them.)

Mostly, I found the good starting synergies in Transistor were combining a function which would mask+jaunt with a function that did backstab damage (and preferably something with Crash() ). That's how you most effectively do big damage, usually. (Although, honestly, I tried a bunch of different approaches, and all of them seemed somewhat usable except Load(), which I never got the hang of using as mines or whatever).

I think that the turn-based control is really a significant difference in the feel of Transistor v Bastion (personally, I'm the precise opposite of SecretAsianMan, in that I hated Bastion's realtime controls, but loved Transistor).

So, sure, intellectually, I know that the designers wouldn't make a map, one level into the game, where I couldn't just get past the guards by waiting until they're both walking away and then going past them. Emotionally, I had such a strong aversion to leaving the safety of the crates that I spent about 15 loops of the guard patrol just sitting in the crates waiting, trying to psyche myself up to moving, and couldn't.

This is interesting to me, because Shipping and Receiving is the level I stopped playing Thief 2 at. Not really a criticism of Thief 2, and I should probably go back and see if I react the same way now as I did then, but I didn't actually get past the opening set of crates, as I felt a really strong aversion to being anywhere in the open with the two immediately close-by patrolling guards. (In a sense, then, it's my least favourite level of Thief 2, but since I only played two of them, and only played a few moments of the second...). I've since completed Deus Ex: HR, and almost completed Dishonoured, so I think it's not so much the "fear of being discovered" as the relative helplessness which I felt I would have on discovery which caused this reaction - I get a similar reaction to trying to stealth in the original Deus Ex, though, so it can't simply be due to that.

Well, indeed, it depends on what kind of "uniform" you want, as I mentioned. (I think for velocity distribution, it makes more sense to have uniformity in r (that is, speed), rather than uniform distribution in the unit circle itself.)

Well, sine and cosine are, at least on x86 cpus, rather efficiently implemented nowadays, so I don't think there's much of an efficiency loss, if any. Plus, the code is actually easier to understand, it's very clear what you mean by rsin(theta), while normalising on values in (x,y) is a little less obvious. It also changes the probability distribution of different vectors, I think, so it depends on how you want your distribution to be uniform. [More specifically, if you want a uniform direction, with unit length, then for almost all good PRNGs, it will be faster to generate a single deviate, theta, and then calculate sin(theta), cos(theta) than it will to generate two deviates, (x,y), and return a normalised vector derived from them.]

Why wouldn't you just generate a random r and theta, and then derive [x,y] = [rsin(theta), rcos(theta)] ? It's much easier to do random directions easily if you work in polar coordinates.

Yeah, I have to say I love the new logo too. Plus, the new Fallout Shelter jingle, which definitely sounds oddly Alexander Brandonish to me.

I've been bouncing around a bit in my book reading recently. Fiction-wise, I finally got around to actually reading The Heart of Darkness. While it's definitely a book whose commentary is somewhat of its time, the power of the writing remains very affecting. I also appreciated the more delicate touch in the "horror" elements - it's never really explicitly spelled out precisely what Kurtz has been doing, and is left deliberately unclear as to what his dying exclamation ("The Horror, The Horror!") refers to. As a fan of early horror/sf fiction (Poe/Lovecraft/Machen), I appreciated those elements most of all. (Now, somewhat rebounding, I'm in the middle of the third book in the Glass Books sequence by GW Dahlquist (The Chemickal Marriage), which I only recently discovered had been published. Obviously, if you don't like knowing gothic steampunk written around three archetypes of Victorian fiction, then you won't enjoy it, but if you're not sick of steampunk then the whole trilogy is worth the effort. [Certainly, I enjoyed it a lot more than quite a lot of other steampunk around...] The only disappointment is the fairly obvious allusion in the title, really.)

I replayed Quake a bit recently too (for the second time since originally playing it a lot back in the mid-late 90s). Actually, for me, it holds up better than Quake 2 does - the thematic incoherence you mention really helps me with it, just as it did at the time, because it makes it more timeless. (It also avoids the really strongly b-movie cheesiness of id's settings for Doom and Quake 2, which I think have aged considerably.) I do think there's some cheap moments, and I personally have problems reconciling my feelings for it (it was my first ever PC game, after moving on from our Amiga, and my feelings for it are complex - the visceral feeling of playing something in Real 3D, and the dark setting and brilliant ambient soundtrack (which has also aged much better than Doom and Quake 2's soundtracks, frankly - one reason I shared the much more Quake-like soundtracks from the Playstation release of Doom on the music thread) are part of my nostalgia, but so is my disappointment at the lack of any narrative or functional depth (I really did want to Talk To The Monsters).

So, I think this perception is partly dependant on *which* 16-bit systems you were exposed to. The Atari and Amiga systems, because they were both focussed on audio and graphical performance via hardware accelerators, had a very active and advanced music scene, both in games and otherwise. And quite a lot of their stuff holds up still. The IBM PC Video game music scene of the time... not so much. As the non-IBM compatible platforms were much more popular in Europe than the USA, I would guess you'd be more likely to see a "16 bit music was only good because of nostalgia" perspective in the USA?

Well, every music thread is made better by more Cannon Fodder (and other tracker music from the 90s).

I am saddened that this thread has existed without having this classic gem on it, from the days of the Amiga: Also, since this thread started with the well-known Doom theme, SGDQ recently reminded me that the Playstation and N64 versions of Doom had entirely different (and more Quake-style "ambience soundtrack") music by an entirely different composer, who also did original music for other id games on consoles. Here's what he did for Doom, I think it completely changes the interpretation of the game:

On the original RockPaperShotgun thread, I nominated Ziggurat Vertigo (Quake E1M8) for the nostalgia and low-g deathmatch memories as much as the single-player design, and Cannon Fodder's Mission 10 Phase 4 ("If It Moves, Kill It") because it has a bunch nice Cannon Fodder tactics in it (getting enemies you can't kill to kill themselves with splash damage etc). Every time I think about this, I think of a different map or level from a different game, though.

so, making a start on that shortlist that Ninety-three asked for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffeq4cy08l4 (Meow's Shadow of the Colossus run, with Floating Agro glitch at the end) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzLQX35JGKQ (Witwix' traditional I Wanna Be the Boshy run, for commentary as much as skill (and because he donates $30 per death!)) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmUy49yCHk4 (MunchaKoopas Shovel Knight low% shovel only run!, with devs online!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlOEH2o7oHw (Vulajin's Ori and the Blind Forest run, with dev present) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4XHa3adhVM (The TGM Tetris: The Grand Master extravaganza, including one handed play etc) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgxzVRSUxUM (FearfulFerret and Oginam's Dark Souls II run, with one on the left and the other on the right side of a single shared controller) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVGHGxkdzdE (puncayshun v cheese05 v Simply in Super Mario 64 Any% race) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF3WNmcZuI4 (Sigmasin's impressive and short Lovely Planet speedrun) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsipIn87er4 (abney317's MarioKart64 run) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTo5DtAUqAk (jkoper's Legend of Zelda run... without a sword, except for killing Ganon at the end) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csnrs9i3ALc (danray2352's Kirby: Tilt 'n Tumble run... with an actual GameCube console as the motion controller) [Edited to fix some typos in runner names]