Where's Killer Waldo?

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TV series? Game? Black Mirror is obviously a song by the sometimes famous and often good band, Arcade Fire.

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I had no idea asteroids were so wet.

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Quoting: Doc AngeloNotable difference between the well known Bitcoin and Enjin Coin: The company Enjin already created all of the 1,000,000,000 ENJ and already sold most of them to people who hope that the currency gains value over time. They think of those people as investors.

They may think of those people as investors, but they are not investors, they are speculators. In my opinion cryptocurrencies basically exist purely for speculation (well, as they currently exist--the blockchain technology itself isn't the issue, there's nothing to prevent a country issuing currency in crypto form, or for a cryptocurrency to otherwise have some form of backing, but generally so far they don't). They are currently growing because pure speculation has become such a big part of our financialized economy. And any given cryptocurrency will exist as a going concern with noticeable "worth" for precisely as long as there is buzz about it, prompting people to think that if they get some, somebody else will potentially pay them more than they paid for it. As soon as people stop being interested in a cryptocurrency, it is worthless. And if the general trend for the world economy to be full of bubbles and financial speculation ends or is interrupted, in some sort of crisis a la bigger 2008 or some collective realization that financial elites are looting the economy and hollowing out the tax base, cryptocurrencies will also see a very major crisis, with a lot of people left holding stuff they thought was worth something except it ain't no more.

So it's nice that some of the money this company gained from floating this speculative instrument is going to something that's actually useful like Godot.

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Quoting: RutineI was very happy at the release of Pandora, because I love turn based strategy games, especially 4x games. However it felt... incomplete, not so good.

Well, like the few other games in Pandora's particular sub-sub-sub-genre, it suffered from not being Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri was the greatest Civ-like game ever released, and head, shoulders and upper torso above any other Civ-like SF game. I would pay hard cash on barrelhead in an instant if someone were to take Alpha C, change nothing substantive about it, but give it modern UI controls and make it run on modern computers/OSes (including Linux of course). If I do the right fiddling I can still get my old Loki copy to work, sort of, but it's tricky, and while it's still marvellous it does suffer from being made before mouse wheels were a thing.

But that's not really fair competition. Once I accepted that Pandora wasn't Alpha C (just as Civ: Beyond Earth also failed to be Alpha C), I was able to appreciate it for itself and it's a pretty decent game, with some interesting key differences (global rather than city-based resources, for instance). There are two keys to doing decently at it IMO: The AI smells blood; keep a big armed force because if you're weak everyone will attack you even if you had friendly dealings (plus there are bugs and aliens to crush). And, micromanage your tiles; citizens doing unproductive work kills.

Anyway, I can see them doing a good job at this.

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Quoting: jens

Quoting: cprnI just thought about something I don't think anyone thought before. Valve had all the creative freedom over the look and feel of the Steam Machine cases. Why the hell not a single one of them looks like it was steam powered? Literally. No steampunk theme?? No valves and glowing crystals sticking out?? No deluxe version with a mist producing atomizer, cogs and pistons?? WHY...?

It would certainly be a selling point, though it really depends on the content if people would buy a steam machine or not. Valve needs the big publishers to support steam os/linux, the big publisher would need a bigger market to do so, the bigger market will start to happen once there are more big titles. Chicken and egg issue ;). Only time and slow grow side by side on all sides will help imho.

Well, that or a huge marketing push by a very big corporation with enough muscle to line up the big publishers and content providers behind what they can convince same is a not-to-be-missed opportunity for big profit. Valve doesn't seem to want to do that, but even if they did there are questions whether they are in fact big enough and whether their organizational style is capable of that kind of fast push requiring forceful action on a group of fronts at once.

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It's because they think we're kindred souls who understand what the site is truly about: Good Old Games.
So they wait until a game is old before they sell it to us.

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I played Star Control 2 back when . . . I couldn't believe it when I realized I could play it as Ur-Quan Masters on Linux (for free yet!) Such a great game. SC3 was actually pretty good IMO. Guess I didn't run into many of the bugs. Hmmm, wonder how that would go on Wine these days, I should dig up my copy.

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Seems to me that to make China playable at all you'd have to rather lowball the problems China had at the time. It's not just that the big bosses were venal, corrupt bandits--it was venal, corrupt bandits all the way down, just a bunch of vultures squabbling over a carcass. Even if you'd put a brilliant, incorruptible administrator in the place of say Chiang Kai-Shek, he would have just ended up shouting silently into the storm, orders and reforms reaching no further than his palace while everyone continued graft as usual. If anything started threatening to make a difference, someone would kill him.
I'd argue that at that point, the only thing that could have saved China was just what ended up doing so--a broad-based popular revolution taking power from below and sweeping aside the whole rotten bunch. Not necessarily a Communist revolution in specific, but it would have to be some cause the lower classes would have reason to rally round.

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Quoting: Philadelphus

QuoteI’d say it’s possible to expect to be fighting a better land war in Asia before the end of the year.

You fool! You've committed one of the classic blunders! Never start a land war in Asia! :P

Well, that's WW II for you, it's all about classic blunders. For instance, executing half your generals and staff just before getting into a major war. Or, getting half your army stranded somewhere with no good way to pick them up so you end up having to get saved by fishermen and pleasure boats.
In the war as in Princess Bride, I notice that going up against Sicilians when death was on the line wasn't really one of the big deals.

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