Actually, a possible explanation for why the Occam's Razor principle works is because simple ideas are more likely to get accepted by the average human being, thus they spread easier through our social networks and get more easily accepted as truth.
That's not what is meant by the Occam's Razor principle.
What it means, especially in a scientific context, is that if there are two (or more) possible explanations for a phenomenon, the explanation that makes less assumptions (but still manages to explain the phenomenon) is preferable for the simple reason that the extra assumptions made by the more complicated explanation are unneeded and unjustified. There's no reason to make those extra assumptions. It's not a question of the simpler explanation "becoming the truth through general acceptance".
Also, in practice, the simpler explanations have usually proven to be more correct than the complicated ones. In other words, when an unknown phenomenon is studied further, tests are performed and verified, it more often happens that the simpler explanation was right (or at least significantly closer to the truth).
Example: Suppose you arrive at your home, and you see a muddy shoeprint on the floor. You hypothesize two possible explanations:
1) A ghost made it.
2) A member of your family made it.
Which one of those two explanations makes more assumptions (about the workings of the universe in general)? Is there any reason to believe the first explanation, when the second one is completely valid? (Moreover, the second explanation is testable, the first one isn't.)
Zeitgeist takes a look at things from a very unique, but limited point of view. It can really open your eyes and be very educating, as long as you don't blindly believe everything they say, just because it sounds like it could make sense. Opposing views often make just as much sense.
The problem with debunkings of anything is that it's perfectly possible to "debunk" something using credible sources, even if what you debunk is actually completely true. Debunkings are just collections of counter-evidence.
The Occam's Razor principle applies surprisingly often with these types of things. If someone makes an extraordinary claim and someone else says "there's actually a pretty simple explanation for that", the simpler explanation very often tends to be the true explanation (or very close to it). At the very least, there's no reason to believe the extraordinary claim until more convincing evidence is presented, studied, tested and accepted by the worldwide community of researchers of the pertinent field.
There's nothing wrong with presenting hypotheses, even very wild ones. It becomes wrong when you present the hypothesis as the truth and start convincing people of it (especially if to do that you need to imply a worldwide conspiracy among the experts in the field to keep quiet about and deny the subject).
Imagine a world without war, poverty, misery, viruses, spam, scam, annoying ads etc. A world without money.
As long as you understand that any pseudodocumentary created by the zeitgeist movement is pure BS.
If you want a very thorough, well-researched and well-sourced debunking of their first movie, check here: http://www.conspiracyscience.com/articles/zeitgeist
I'm not sure I would completely trust a "top Xbox 360 games" list that includes "Pac-Man Championship Edition DX" in it. (I'm not saying that it's a bad game, but better than a myriad of other great games? Come on.)
VirtualAlex wrote:
Dante's Inferno is absolute trash. If you want a 5 page rant on why... ask I guess. but I would rather not talk about it. it's a bottom of the barral god of war clone.
Too late, because I bought it, played it, and thought it was ok. Perhaps not the greatest game ever, but certainly better than average. (Perhaps more variation in the latter half of the game would have been good. Seemed to get a bit repetitive.)
A game being a "clone" of another popular game doesn't automatically make it inferior or bad. Gameplay originality is not what makes a game good. Else for example HL2 would be a crappy game because it's "just" a Quake clone (or Doom clone if you really want to go back).
Brushy wrote:
Gears of War isn't really a First Person Shooter
Yeah, it's more like a "over-the-shoulder perspective shooter" or "third-person shooter", or whatever the term might be. It's close to an FPS, but not quite the same. There are gameplay differences between the two perspectives.
Does EDF 2017 have an actual storyline, or is it just a melee-type game, where you just kill enemies and more enemies, without actually advancing any kind of plot and progress in the story?
This new run really feels less like "Ahahaha I broke the game wheeee" and more like "Seriously, check out how much control I have over this, and how much artistry I can work into these drawings while still staying within the restriction of having the game accept them as answers."
Are you sure your opinion is not colored by the fact that when the currently published run was submitted, it was the first of its kind, and very surprising, but when you watched this submission, you already knew what to expect, it was nothing new nor innovative?
I suppose that what I'm trying to say is: Suppose that this run had been submitted and accepted first (and got the awards), and then months later the run that is currently published was submitted and you were now considering that one. Would you still think it was better?
None taken, but not everyone understands what a TAS is hence the descriptions on every vid. I chose her point of view cause she would represent the casual viewer thinking TAS = Speed using tools. This is almost to the point of just being a playaround I would imagine and not so much of a 'speed run'. Its like building patterns in Tetris I suppose.
Well, the images are drawn as fast as possible. The main goal is to draw the images, rather than to finish the test as fast as possible (which is only a secondary goal).
(Yeah, guess what is one of the games I bought recently... :P )
Did you get EDF 2017? It's pretty cheap
I have to admit that I got a bit discouraged by the reviews, so it didn't get very high in my priority list, compared to many other games. "Reviewers pointed out the game suffered from relatively poor graphics, a lack of many standard features and characteristically poor voice acting (a typical vice for cost-effective English translations of Japanese games)." "Earth Defense Force 2017 holds a Game Rankings score of 70.67%."
Not that it's impossible for me to disagree with the average review (in fact, that's not even extremely rare), but often they are rightish...
and if you have a friend to play it with, it's so much fun.
Well I decided to come back after talking to my GF about this since we both watch TAS videos time to time together and her opinion on viewing both of these for the first time was that the "short video" would be the preferred video to keep since it holds more valid on what a TAS is so to speak. Its quick and gets the job done in a minimal time.
No disrespect, but the argument seems odd. It would mean that a more simplistic version of the run (one which draws less) would be preferrable to the currently published one. If the run went for speed, if would simply draw the minimal amount of lines enough to fool the program to think it's the correct number. That's not really the point of the run.
- Dante's Inferno: A God of War clone, and not really anything like the original work, but still epic and fun.
Yeah, it's such a close clone that many times I forget I'm actually not playing a God of War game. (Yeah, guess what is one of the games I bought recently... :P )
Warp, maybe you are right. I went back to think about it, and there were good 3-D games, but they really stopped after the game cube generation. With the Wii being targeted to casual gamers, and casual gamers making most of the market of video games, Everything is dumbed down and the same. Really I would say that some of the things that Virtualalex like regenerating health and what not just makes games today to easy. I mean even hard mode is easy. I remember when hard was hard.
I think there are many great 3D games "after the game cube generation". (Well, I don't know if for the Wii because I haven't played it.) And some are quite hard. For example Half-Life 2 is quite great, and quite hard at the hardest level.
There are no consequences for dying anymore. you die and it puts the game on pause for a little bit. THen you come back And its like nothing happened. I liked it when the game reset after your died, sure you had to collect everything again, but at lease it gave you incentive not to die.
Having to start over would be extremely frustrating, and most people wouldn't buy such a game.
Nevertheless, there are some games where dying imposes some penalties, for example in the form of having to start over from the last checkpoint. I think Rainbow Six: Vegas is a good example of a game with a good balance between the game punishing you for dying but not too much, which gives you a good incentive to avoid dying.
It's also worth noting that MMORPGs were around since 1970s, back when they were turn-based ASCII games
It's an interesting question what exactly could be classified as a "massively multiplayer" game.
The first multiplayer RPG which could be played over a network was probably a game named MUD (which became the name of an entire game genre). From a gameplay point of view it was similar to Zork (which in turn was similar to Colossal Cave Adventure, which is arguably the first computer RPG ever made). MUD ran initially on the internal network of Essex University until 1980, when the university connected its network to ARPANet, which was the precursor to the modern Internet, so arguably MUD was the first multiplayer Internet online game. MUD spawned many variants (some of which are still being played today), and they were the precursors to modern MMORPGs.
MUD was definitely a multiplayer online RPG. The interesting question is if it could be considered a massively multiplayer game.
Nowadays "massively multiplayer" means hundreds, if not even thousands of players. (For example a Counter Strike server running something like 20 players is generally not considered "massively multiplayer".) Back in 1980 there were probably not hundreds of people playing MUD simultaneously on the same server, so it becomes questionable if it can be considered "massively multiplayer".
On the other hand, what is "massive" and isn't could be considered in relation to the norm of the period. 50 people playing the same game at the same time could certainly be considered "massively multiplayer" in the 1980's, when 2 was usually the maximum number of players in a game, even though nowadays it probably wouldn't be considered as such (given that nowadays there are game servers with thousands of simultaneous players).
Btw, this is my 3000th post. I have to celebrate this somehow.
Btw, isn't the commonly used acronym MMORPG? (Or are there any massively-multiplayer RPGs which are not played online? Seems technically unfeasible... :P )
Would a reloading animation in a FPS count as a cooldown? (Although some FPSs implement literal cooldowns for some weapons, where the weapon heats up with usage.)
Nobody has yet mentioned combos, which became such an integral part of fighting games that a fighting game without them is almost unthinkable.
I'm not sure if someone has already mentioned this in some way, but being rewarded for advancing in the game by enhancements to your character/car/whatever is also something that often gives incentives to keep playing (a staple in role-playing games, but also works in things like racing games, where winning races earns you money which you can use to enhance your car, etc)
I would say that the invention of 3-D games, is where games went downhill. On the Snes, Even the crappy games were at least a bit fun. They always tried to keep everything fresh, and new, and difficult. Today, with all the health regeration, saving like crazy, and scipted vehicle sections, there are few games that are really good. Everything is now the same, and dumbed down for the casual player, since the largest market of games today is for casual players, many who freak if they go for 12 minutes without killing something. The day of the turn-based RPG will soon be a memory because they think the game wont sell if it is turn based.
I have to disagree. I can list only a handful of great 2D games, but countless great 3D games.
The problem with old 2D games is that the vast majority fall into the platformer category, and from those the vast majority are completely bereft of story, logic or any kind of appeal, and most of them are ultimately quite boring, (There are only a few exceptions such as Super Metroid and some Castlevania games.) The best 2D games are JRPGs, but unfortunately they are outnumbered by great modern 3D games (including JRPGs).
Voting no because this run is suboptimal and doesn't complete the game as fast as possible. There clearly is a lot of room for improvement. Many of the numbers could have been drawn with significantly less strokes.
(Just kidding, of course.)
This is strictly a graphics thing, but I'd say normal mapping is pretty goddamn innovative. How do you even come up with that idea?
It's not a gameplay mechanic, and isn't really related to gaming at all (it was invented as a rendering technique, originally for rendering software). You might as well say that "color monitors are very innotavite". Yes they are, but they are not a gameplay mechanic.
I always thought the technique used to end input was part of the category of the run. That is, "fastest to end input" and "fastest to game completion" are two different categories (the first obviously having a shorter time via TASvideos timing, but the second, which isn't allowed to end input until after the game is completed, being more interesting for some games). Obviously, you wouldn't publish both (unless for some reason they had entirely different routes; wasn't there an April Fool's TAS that completed half a game with basically no input at all, just luck manipulation so that the first half of the game would complete itself from there?), but you'd choose whichever category was better.
So all that really needs doing is to add a category explaining the issue, and the run suddenly isn't suboptimal any more.
The games where ending the input way, way earlier and the game still reaching its end, and this producing an interesting run just because of that, are extremely rare (there might be about one game in existence where this is possible). Hence it doesn't deserve a category of its own.
The slightly (but just slightly) more common case is when the input can be ended some seconds before the actual ending, and doing so causes the game to end significantly later than if an optimal input was appended. This usually only results in a run that looks flawed and doesn't really add to the viewer entertainment.
I'd say that doing so is just bending the rules with no real benefit (for the viewers).
I am planning on writing a recurring column on my website which will talk about the greatest innovations in gaming. I would like all of them to be gameplay innovations and not technology innovations.
It can in some cases be pretty hard to draw the line between the two. For example, is "online matchmaking" an innovation in gameplay or an innovation in technology? After all, it became possible only when the technology made it possible.
Also the term "innovation" has a definitely positive connotation to it. However, not all gameplay mechanics are generally perceived as positive. For example escort missions are a pretty well-defined gameplay concept, but often highly reviled in most cases by most people.
How about gameplay mechanics which have become more or less obsolete and are nowadays considered unnecessary? For example lives and continues (with a "continue?" countdown) were gameplay elements invented solely for arcade games, were consequently misaimedly used in some home console games, but have been considered obsolete for a very long time (except for the few arcade games that are still being produced). Can they be considered "innovations"?
One very significant gameplay innovation, one of the first ones, was a top scores list. (There's an anecdote that the first arcade game that used a top scores list got quickly jammed because the coin box got so full that people couldn't insert any more coins and play the game. It proved to be that popular.)
