I don't really like cheesecake. I prefer chocolate cake.

Also, eating the dead would save us a lot of space that we currently use for graveyards.

The only flaw I see in this plan is that you might get hungry and have a bad habit of nibbling off your fingers waiting for supper.

-SirNiko

Or are you saying that insurance companies shouldn't be required to cover people with preexisting conditions? Because if that's your point, then I think you might have something wrong with your moral compass.

Everyone donates a little to the insurance pot on a gamble that if you're the one in ten that has a serious problem and need to cash out, there's enough money in there for everyone.

Would you feel differently if we talking about, say, extended warranties on VCRs? You walk into the department store ten months after buying your VCR, pay 20 bucks for the extended warranty, and then immediately inform them that the VCR broke two days ago and so they should replace it.

That's what it's like when you buy health insurance with a pre-existing condition.

I'm not saying it's not morally right to deny health insurance from a sick person (pre-existing condition or not) but it's dishonest if you only contribute to the pot when you need to cash out, and then act like it's the job of everyone around you to provide that care. You ought to be asking for it, not demanding it.

-SirNiko

I'm upset I missed the Easy ones.

I think #6 is Virtual Boy Wario Land. The skull at least makes me think so, and the "Nearly no-one bought" makes me think of the VB which is supported by the Red image.

-SirNiko

To be completely simple, it's like a farmer getting rid of his mule-driven plow to buy a tractor. The costs are in the short run. Productivity goes up in the long run.

This assumes you do it properly, though. Poorly chosen investments are worse than if you'd just stayed where you are. Not to mention, if you go bankrupt between the investment and the payoff, you didn't accomplish anything even if the investment was perfectly brilliant. That's where the problem lies. We're already running huge deficits from a war and federal funding to try and ease the recession (both the stimulus package and bank bailouts and such). Even assuming those were "Good" investments (And I don't think any of them was) we still have to face the fact we don't have the money to keep investing until we start to see a return on that investment.

-SirNiko

I love the comments in the article about how a local communist group is getting really vocal about how they should get the prize since he doesn't want it.

-SirNiko

"You wanted health care? Move to Hawaii."

Or Mass, which is why the whole "Mass elected a Repub! They hate Obamacare!" Thing was ridiculous.

To be fair, Mass's healthcare system has been cited repeatedly the last few days as an example of government sponsored health care not working as intended.

Not proof that it doesn't work, mind you. Just evidence that it takes more effort than simply passing a bill and waiting for the accolades to roll on in.

I agree with the notion that the states should provide it (Or even the counties or cities, just not the feds), but not so that folks can move from state to state to get 'what they want'. If you manage to create a system that works for your state, it should work for everyone. There should be no need to move unless you have some really aberrant standards.

-SirNiko

I want this to be interactive. Then the hero goes to defeat the bad guy to recover the missing chapters of The Handbook.

-SirNiko

When the game gives you a goal (Kill all the enemies and don't let your leader die!) are you really the leader, or are you just the pawn of the real government? It's not like you're choosing to kill all the enemies. You're being informed that if you do not complete that task, at best you're doomed to stay in the limbo of Level 1 and at worst you'll fail when the timer runs out. Also, most games simply don't offer the opportunity to make peace with your foes. They're going to keep attacking until you give up or die. So it's not like you aren't justified for fighting back.

Tangentially, I had this idea for an RTS that would continuously give you more and more gruesome objectives. For example, Mission 1 might be "Collect wood and build a library!" and mission 5 might be "Protect the city from invaders!". Somewhere around Mission 10 you'd be building entertainment centers to reduce citizen unrest, and 15 would have you forcefully finding and exterminating pockets of traitors. Level 20 would have you hunting down and exterminating pockets of 'unfit' citizens by leading them gently or forcefully to gas chambers. Y'know, basically a Nazi Germany simulator. One part of me says it'd be interesting to see how many players quit in disgust when they realize where the game is going (and how long they have to play before it becomes clear). The other part says that I already know the answer, since people in experiments will continue to shock a person "To death" in real life, let alone in a video game where you know it's fake.

-SirNiko

I never understood why all the resistance to universal healthcare. I live in one of the poorer European countries and we have universal healthcare. I underwent a few surgical procedures in my life, an urgent appendectomy was one of them, without having to pay a single dime. You get a year's worth of health coverage, no questions asked, with an ID, and a token sum payment (think 150$). Employment or not. 'Preexisting conditions' and medical insurance companies are not even WORDS here. It works out pretty well, our doctors are skilled and we are relatively up to date in medical technology. Keep in mind we are like the third or fourth poorest country in Europe.

In short, if anyone tells you US guys universal healthcare would make your country "poorer", he is full of crap. Take it from a neutral factor.

My concern is scalability. We have 300 million people in the US. Canada, our closest comparable neighbor with universal health care, has closer to 40 million. I'm not convinced that you could scale it up that far without incurring a lot of additional cost due to waste and redundancy, not to mention potential fraud. It's not that it's not worth helping people out, but if it comes at the cost of crippling inflation you're lowering everyone's quality of life to raise the quality of just a few. That's not a good tradeoff.

I'm also unconvinced the US Government is comparable to the government of any European country for the same reason. I'm inclined to think they're closer to the United Nations in terms of size (Although thankfully not as diverse in culture). It's difficult to come to an accord with people who live a few thousand miles from you, let alone come to an accord that's both efficient and effective for all the people involved despite those parties never having any chance of meeting.

-SirNiko

Ha, I wasn't really being totally serious, guys. To me you're Indie until you start saying "It should star a robot because statistics show those are popular in the 12-24 bracket" instead of "Hey, robots are cool. Let's make a game about one.".

-SirNiko

Cave Story is on Nintendo now. Is it really still Indie?

Speaking of which, maybe I should pick that up. I finished Megaman 10, and really I want to encourage more people to make quality platformers on the Wii...

-SirNiko

I'm personally not really interested in what the bill contains. I just don't believe the Federal Government is capable of managing this.

More importantly, we're looking at a bill planned over 10 years, with estimations for 20. You're lucky if you can project out further than one year. There's just no way of evaluating whether or not this bill makes anything better.

I'd have much rather seen the feds apply this plan to just the DC area, a smaller, more easily tracked region. Make the changes quickly, observe what works and what doesn't and if it happens to have improved the situation, then we can apply those lessons to the other parts of the country.

I know a lot of business owners that are likely to drop healthcare and pay the penalties just because it's cheaper. The employees can pick up the government funded care instead. It seems heartless, but the alternative is to buy the healthcare instead and be at a disadvantage in the market. If that happens and you go out of business, then employees lose their health care AND their jobs.

Healthcare for all is great, but it won't do us much good if we go bankrupt the country. 'course, the US hasn't been using real money since the early Bush years, so maybe we're past that point and might as well live it up. I dunno.

Anyway, in summary, I don't think the Feds will be able to manage this. We'll just wind up spending a bunch of money and there won't be any notable positive benefits. The only way to fix problems is to deal with them directly, and a group of people managing from cushy leather chairs in Washington DC is not directly.

-SirNiko

I would suggest moving this topic to the "Technical" section. You'll probably get much better responses there.

-SirNiko

So, here's the idea.

You introduce a new achievement in WoW: "End World Hunger". In order to get this achievement, you have to develop a viable food source that requires less energy to produce than corn currently costs. Provide some in-game utilities for working on this, like a zone where players can sit around chatting on various methods, and maybe ways players can demonstrate their areas of expertise (so if you hit on a chemical problem, you know which players have backgrounds in chemistry). Get those 11 million players working together, and I bet they could come up with something useful. Maybe it doesn't solve the problem, but I can't imagine a scenario where it makes the problem any worse.

-SirNiko

I think ever since Kingdom Hearts did so well, Disney's really pushing the video game angle (Kingdom Hearts has spawned a whole slew of sequels, and now they're trying Epic Mickey). They've always made pretty decent games (Pretty much every disney/capcom game on the NES was well above the average) so it's not like it's a sudden shift.

If they own their own game developer, then they can make their own games to match movie properties right at launch. It could be good or bad. Maybe they'll adjust the movies to include more scenes that can easily convert to video game scenes. Or maybe they'll just take control of the games to include more easily marketable elements.

-SirNiko

My main take-away question here is: Games are more fun than work, even when the tasks being performed are similar. Why does work suck so much?

Games have definite win and lose conditions. Sometimes, there isn't even a lose condition so much as a condition where you haven't won yet. Real work isn't nearly so clean-cut. Lots of times the conditions for winning and losing are arbitrary, or you never even win.

Games are self contained. You can go into the game and get the knowledge needed to proceed. In fact, it's considered bad game design to expect players to do outside research in order to complete the game. In work, on the other hand, I need to go to school and work other positions just to demonstrate I'm allowed to even start.

Games are also finite. Eventually I can explore every inch of the world, identify every item, every monster, every possible button press I can make. In the real world, it's infinite. There's always something you don't know, someplace you haven't looked, and an action you didn't take yet.

And lastly, games don't typically punish failure. You die and you reload from the last save point. In the worst case scenario, you have to start from the beginning. In real life, the worst case scenario can be a company failing, money being wasted, or even a person being killed. Stuff you can't just shrug off and go at a second chance.

If work was more like games (ie, simply defined, finite, and lacked failure) work and games would be interchangable. In the real world, this simply isn't the case for most jobs you might do.

-SirNiko

I consider myself an "Explorer" type. I love games with big worlds with lots of things to see, especially if I can play multiple times and discover new things.

I'm playing FF13 right now. It's pretty common knowledge that most of the game is linear, even stiflingly so. Despite that, I find it's really fun to explore around. Most of the zones are relatively spacious, so in addition to the area where I can walk, I can reach the top of a cliff where I can see a panorama of a beach, or see a distant mountain with circling wyverns, or just walk around a ruined city and look at all the strange and interesting machinery. Most of the time I can't interact with that stuff (only a few areas have objects you can inspect with X for details, and usually these have no useful impact on the game). The objective side of me is pleased with finding the correct way to navigate a bunch of broken girders to climb a ruined building to find a treasure box. I feel the game is successful from an exploration standpoint.

Metal Max Returns (SNES) and Metal Saga are two games from a series that hit and miss on exploration. Both games are in a post apocalyptic setting, and a lot of the "Dungeons" are actually ruined apartments or subways or military bases, which appeal to me. In MMR, one dungeon is a long subway tunnel that you enter with your tank. There are vending machines to use, and you can see what appears to be a crumbling ticket counter. In one of the tunnels, you discover a wrecked train that you can explore on foot, which leads to another tunnel that leads to an old skyscraper. In the skyscraper, there are little dioramas that lend hints about the world before it was wrecked, and computers that have useful information (such as telling about other buildings you can find and explore, or giving hints about how to get past a gate elsewhere in the world). I really enjoyed this.

Metal Saga, on the other hand, had relatively simple ruins filled with lots of items, although many of them were useless and for novelty (like expired juice cartons or camera bag straps). A number of these were one-of-a-kind, so you were frequently finding new items. The downside, though, was that you couldn't look around very much, and very few objects could be interacted, especially later in the game.

In all these examples, what got me was the things that were one-of-a-kind. You'd see a view that wouldn't be repeated, and didn't look like the other areas you'd explored. You'd find an item that you won't find anywhere else. You'd see some dialogue that was unique and interesting, whether from a fluffy or a crunchy standpoint.

I think "Exploration" in games is alive and well, it's just about the detail. If you put in lots of little unique things to see, or make it so that the environments have lots of nooks and crannies to hide things that the players can find, then you've got a worthwhile exploration game.

-SirNiko

One issue is that the game really isn't any different than the earlier ones. Not just in the broad sense that Super Mario Wii is the same concept as the original Super Mario, but in the sense that you're collecting the same pokemon with the same combat system and the same moves.

Then the biggest problem is after you've captured the pokemon, the versus metagame. You'll spend hours and hours and hours carefully preening a pokemon to have the right EVs and IVs (Which were a clever secret in Red and Blue, but by now are hidden just to be hidden even though everyone knows about them).

I got Pearl for my birthday, but I don't see any reason to buy this game. It's almost exactly the same as what I have, as far as I can tell.

I really feel like the next logical iteration for the pokemon franchise is to allow players to custom build pokemon with a point system to select moves, powers, types, abilities, etc. Put the focus on combat strategy when you can't simply outlevel a foe. Make the collection aspect focus on acquiring bits of pokemon DNA that give you more moves and abilities to assign to your little pokemon.

But... the problem with that is that it's less marketable (having 500 distinct pokemon is more marketable) and it's likely to be less popular with the child market (after all, for them a game where you can win by outleveling the foe helps ease the learning curve).

I'm left feeling that pokemon simply isn't for me anymore, having bought and played Blue back on my toaster boy.

I'd love to see a fan game that goes beyond just making up some new pokemon and having the characters cuss.

-SirNiko

Personally I think the fact that grinding is boring as shit in eve is great. It means it can't waste as much of my time as WoW etc. can. If it was interesting enough, I would quit. Seriously, I would have to, simply because I wouldn't get anything else done.

So you're basically saying that games should carefully straddle a thin line between fun and boring, and be JUST fun enough to be worth your time, but not too fun so as to make you play in exclusion to other activities.

This is an interesting theory. I've never heard anyone suggest before that games can be TOO fun.

-SirNiko

Man, I MISSED this thread. Welcome back!

I knew I kept this bookmarked for a reason.

-SirNiko

Edit: Having read through the most recent document, it amazes me how much time and effort the courts will go through to read up on old cases when it'd probably be way faster and just as accurate to simply decide for themselves whether or not the case deserves to be tried or dismissed. No wonder it takes a year or more to try a case.