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Comment · 14 years ago
Here's a quick summary for anyone who is not familiar with the Mass Effect series. Mass Effect is a 3 part RPG shooter series of blockbuster video games developed by Bioware, which is owned by Electronic Arts. The first 2 games were very popular and loved by fans. The 3rd and final game was recently released. The majority of the story and gameplay were well received by pretty much everyone, but many fans of the series are upset about how the game ended. There's almost universal disappointment on on-line forums (though people who liked it are probably less vocal). A couple of complaints are

1. Despite the series being based on players being able to make different choices that affect the story, almost nothing the player does throughout the series affects the ending.

2. Although players have a choice of 3 different options during the ending affecting the fate of the galaxy, the only thing that changes in the following cutscenes is the color of some explosions (green for one choice, red for another, blue for the last)

3. The ending felt like a deus ex machina and wasn't satisfying

Lots of fans have expressed their criticism on-line, with many hoping that Bioware will "fix" the ending or release a DLC that alters or extends the ending. This is Bioware's first response as far as I know.

Comment · 15 years ago
Great site. But if you're interested in roguelikes I'd suggest starting with Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup instead (http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/). Nethack's really showing its age these days and is missing a lot of key features. Crawl is more accessible to newcomers and is less tedious to play. But it is very much a roguelike in the spirit of Nethack.
Comment · 15 years ago
A lot. Much of it isn't really relevant to beginners, but here's a quick list off the top of my head. Maybe broken wasn't the right word, these are just general problems with the game

1. The endgame is too easy and boring.

2. Elbereth and #pray make it too easy to get out of tough spots

3. Most classes end up playing similarly after the midgame (either wizard or melee typically)

4. Wands of wishing, magic markers, and polypiling are too powerful

5. The game is nearly unbeatable without spoilers

6. Sokoban is boring after you've played through it a few times

7. There's a bunch of cheap tactics like pudding farming

8. It's too generic and boring to put together an ascension kit. There are very few trade-offs you need to make in choosing what armor and weapons to use

9. The religion aspect is too simplistic

10. Combat gets tedious in the endgame. Most of the time you're just plowing through monsters. This results in tons of "battle spam" with you getting several messages like "You hit the minotaur!" every turn, forcing you to not read them and possibly miss important information

11. The game requires several patches to be playable (menucolors, sortloot, hpmon, etc.)

12. The default options are pretty bad

13. Traveling and exploring can be boring

Wow, that was a lot longer than I thought it would be. But I only write so much because I care :) I had a lot of fun beating nethack and and it's one of my favorite games of all time. I'm possibly prouder of beating nethack than of my MS degree :)

Comment · 15 years ago
I would try playing Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup instead. It's another roguelike that is heavily inspired by nethack but is more modern and more beginner friendly. I love nethack (I've ascended twice) but it's definitely showing it's age (not to mention that the game is pretty broken in some regards). Crawl has a better interface and tries to remove all the tedious parts of roguelikes, though there's still a learning curve.
Comment · 15 years ago
I don't think that's true. There's 51 volumes of 400-450 pages, or ~23,000 pages. Let's say you can read half a page a minute, or 7.5 pages per day (at 15 minutes of reading per day).

(23,000 pages)/(7.5 pages / day) = ~3,000 days or a bit over 8 years.

Comment · 15 years ago
Yeah, the same thing happened to me a couple of years ago and at the time I thought I was the coolest guy on the planet when I recovered most of my data. I had accidentally deleted all my chat logs. Luckily, all the chat logs had a timestamp in them, so I just searched for all timestamped lines on the disk and dumped them to a file. I then wrote a script to group and sort all the logs based on the date and who I was talking to and recreate all the files. It worked better than it had any right to especially since I was doing everything on a live disk!
Comment · 15 years ago
The counter is a large image with every possible score (http://ndruger.lolipop.jp//hatena/20110429/css_game/images/c...). Initially only the top of the image is shown, but as the radio buttons are clicked it makes visible some spacing elements which move the image so the next score is shown.
Comment · 15 years ago
Clearly any semi-decent programmer can mentally translate 5 * 60 * 1000 into 5 minutes. So what? This is nonetheless a more intuitive and less error prone way to write times. This is about making readers of your code spend less cognitive effort figuring out what your code does, decreasing the chances of bugs (oops, I missed a 0 or screwed up a conversion factor), and making your code easier to modify. You seem to think this is a plugin for programmers too dumb to use milliseconds; it's not. Stop making excuses for bad code.

That said, sure, this isn't exactly a huge issue that's plaguing the javascript community. I probably won't use this plugin.

Comment · 15 years ago
Here are mine (minus the silly time wasting ones):

art, askscience, books, buddhism, cfb, coding (it's dead these days though), cooking, fitness, frugal, listentothis, lgbt, longtext, netsec, oney, philosophyofscience, scifi, skeptic, space, sports, starcraft, truereddit, twoxchromosomes,

Comment · 15 years ago
Comment · 15 years ago
That would be difficult to implement in javascript, I think. Once you zoom in far enough using a float/double doesn't give you enough precision to calculate each pixel accurately. The typical solution is to switch to some sort of bignum library. That's going to be really slow in javascript.

In general though, infinite zoom mandelbrot programs do exist (don't know of any off the top of my head though), they're just trickier to implement.

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