travathian
Warlord
- Joined
- Jan 15, 2003
- Messages
- 262
first expansion will be free for all people who paid to continue to beta test elementalyay
ftfy.
Elemental Coming Soon!!
- Thread starter Tasunke
- Start date
ftfy.
DirtyFinger
Prince
- Joined
- Apr 20, 2008
- Messages
- 369
I just read a review about the Elemental novel by one Bradley Wardell.
http://www.unamommer.com/?p=109
Seems like Frogboy is not just yet on par with Tolkien.
Enjoy!
http://www.unamommer.com/?p=109
Seems like Frogboy is not just yet on par with Tolkien.
.. and then the sentence ended, and then he indicated that with a punctiation mark, and then he made a new line, and then he even made a new paragraph, and then he started a new sentence, and ....
Enjoy!
Although I doubt the novel is good, this review has been written by someone who hates Wardell and it's far from accurate. If you read some random pages (which you can do on Amazon), you'll see that the book is nothing like the quotes. There's been an explanation of this review on Elemental forums, but I can't be bothered to look for it. I think the story looks generic, but the writing is nowhere as bad as the 'review' would let you think.
ROFL!
Oh my...
Well, punctuation isn't everything. Some writers take a lot of liberty with their punctuation. In truth, it can be just as colorful to make strategic use of punctuation as it can be to make strategic use of a Thesaurus. But, if the writing is particularly bad, ignoring grammar just adds insult to injury. It can also seriously harm unprepared readers who are not deft enough to leap over the hurdles it can create.
I saw the book laying on the "New Books" table in a local bookstore - I left it there. I figured labeling it a "book" was as close as it was ever going to get to being called literature. After all, video game books are notoriously bad. I make it a habit of avoiding them. There are a few exceptions, though I can't recall the notable ones I've read. But, there was at least one that was good.. really... probably. It could happen, right? (A good political intrigue/epic war book based on FFH2 would be particularly interesting.)
Note - An update concerning my "Drank the Kool Aid" post above:
I think this pretty much sums up what a developer starts saying when they've had a full dose of their own Kool Aid and simply can't see reality any more.
[url=http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=2346986&postcount=2431]Brad Wardell[/url] said:
(Link discovered in PCGamer's review of the release - Elemental's Disastrous Launch)
Sounds almost like another Brad I know of... One who has practically od'd on his own Kool Aid in the past along with mainlining liberal doses of The Vision. I can see that Brad saying "Look, if you don't want to login to our game and have blood instantly begin streaming from your eyes and die repeatedly due to being killed by a_rat_09 IN REAL LIFE then don't buy our games! You have no idea what makes a game a truly great game! It's all about how much you can make the player suffer!"
Hubris - It's not just for Greek heroes anymore.
After having read several reviews of his book, all I can say is DirtyFinger's post is right on the mark. Everyone pulls out prose from this book and usually just lets it stand on its own wobbly legs as self-evidenced grammatical murder.
""The princess, and the boy, whose name, Nym now knew, was Xander, though he had no idea whatsoever who the lad actually was." "
Yes, that is intended to be a sentence. In English.
"...Aided by his friend Genica, a mysterious thief named Vreen, and a crafty Sion of unknown loyalty, Xander journeys into the heart of the world, where long-hidden secrets will be revealed that could shatter the delicate balance established by the great Cataclysm a thousand years earlier...."
Hey, I am known as the "Keeper of Commas." I have a bucket full of them, right here, under my desk. I have a warning meter in my browser that informs me when I have not sacrificed enough commas in a post to grant me divine favor. So, I'd be happy to lend anyone a few extra commas, if they needed them.
But, Brad's muscling in on my title and that can not be condoned. The commas, they're all mine, MINE I TELL YOU!
Obviously, Wardell never read Strunk and White's "Elements of Style." I'm pretty surprised this got published. See, Random House has read Strunk and White. They know what an author shouldn't do. The co-author who helped Wardell has probably read it as well as having published several things on his own, according to some sources. He should have known better. What was he actually "helping" Wardell to do?
The plot synopsis is pretty lame, IMO. I don't mean "lame" as bad. I mean lame as in can't move anywhere, crippled, handicapped, dysfunctional, etc..
But, I haven't read the book. I'm not intending to. But, I do need to make full disclosure by admitting to having been lucky enough to avoid reading the book. So, I admit it - I was nimble enough to be able to dodge it at the bookstore the other day.
Deon
Lt. of Mordor
Actually those sentences you showed have totally correct punctuation... in russian. It was easier to read than a common english sentence for me.
In russian it would be: "It was easier to read, than a common english sentence, for me". Because there're two simple sentences: "it was easier to read for me" and "than a common english sentence", which build the entire sentence.
I wonder if Brad is one of slavic people. I am too lazy to look it up.
In russian it would be: "It was easier to read, than a common english sentence, for me". Because there're two simple sentences: "it was easier to read for me" and "than a common english sentence", which build the entire sentence.
I wonder if Brad is one of slavic people. I am too lazy to look it up
.he might be a secret russian agent, who disguises himself as a game and application developer. now we know who those mystic foreign investors are:
http://forums.elementalgame.com/395168/page/5/#2756859
hahaha
http://forums.elementalgame.com/395168/page/5/#2756859
hahaha
Deon
Lt. of Mordor
:3
And patch 1.07 is better in terms of balance and smooth play. However the game still lacks something. It looks like all those fancy mechanics do not create a whole picture of a "game".
For example, I still don't dig the manual creation and leveling up of units which cannot change their equipment.
Why are there different types of swords and armor if you can't CHANGE them? Why not to make "+1 attack costs X gold" instead, it would be easier and would do the SAME.
If they ever become changeable, I will totally consider Elemental a much better game. I would prefer units which I could name, consider heroes and warriors and pet and level, not static guys with 0 defence through all the game because I didn't have armor when I've made them (and now every peasant wears it).
Also the map itself seems a bit... bland. I am probably spoiled by Civilization's different terrain and terrain features. A bland "wasteland" with rare repeating stuff on it which you cannot change is quite sad.
And patch 1.07 is better in terms of balance and smooth play. However the game still lacks something. It looks like all those fancy mechanics do not create a whole picture of a "game".
For example, I still don't dig the manual creation and leveling up of units which cannot change their equipment.
Why are there different types of swords and armor if you can't CHANGE them? Why not to make "+1 attack costs X gold" instead, it would be easier and would do the SAME.
If they ever become changeable, I will totally consider Elemental a much better game. I would prefer units which I could name, consider heroes and warriors and pet and level, not static guys with 0 defence through all the game because I didn't have armor when I've made them (and now every peasant wears it).
Also the map itself seems a bit... bland. I am probably spoiled by Civilization's different terrain and terrain features. A bland "wasteland" with rare repeating stuff on it which you cannot change is quite sad.
travathian
Warlord
- Joined
- Jan 15, 2003
- Messages
- 262
It is called focus and polish.
Nikis-Knight
Deity
In English, the second is not a sentence; no verb.
But you can have perfectly punctuated sentences that still make reading it very difficult if they drag on or have ambiguous pronouns, etc. Joining too many sentences into a grammatically correct longer sentence can leave readers lost. Too many short sentences are a problem as well, of course; variety and pacing are important.
Haven't read Wardell's book, just commenting on what was posted above.
Erm, welcome to last week? Brad already retracted that comment, apologised for it several times over, and then went on to launch a flood of mea culpas covering just about every possible aspect of the game's development and launch.
Elements of Style, that would be the book that was utterly debunked decades ago, and should not ever be seriously read by anybody? I should think it a good thing that he's never read it then. Seriously, not only do Strunk and White get a great many things factually wrong, but they also thoroughly and egregiously violate their own recommendations at every opportunity. If Random House has read that book, then it is only as an example of how to do things utterly wrong. There's a reason why it's known as "the book that ate America's brain".
Deon
Lt. of Mordor
In russian it is implied that there's a "hidden" verb (you don't have to have a verb and a noun to make a sentence). I just said that Brad probably uses his native language's grammar to make English sentences
. I don't know why hehe.
Vladesch
Warlord
I find Brad's story about honestly believing the game was ready difficult to believe at best. You only had to sit down and play through a game and experiencing the crashes and slowdowns to make it plainly obvious that it had severe problems and wasn't ready, clouded judgement or not.
Unless of course those crashes dont happen on a certain hardware setup and he only played it with that setup. But since i havn't played elemental, i dont know anything about the crashes, so it could be that those happen on any system.
Valkrionn
The Hamster King
I'll admit, I've had that type of crash in RifE before. Absolute PITA when you get reports about crashes that you flatout cannot duplicate on your machine.
I remember them.
The Elemental crashes come with an out of memory box. So its probably a memory leak somewhere. The also come fairly regularly, so something is loosing memory at a fairly constant pace.
Personally I quite like Elemental. I liked FFH, Civ1-4, MOO2&3, AOW, Spore, HOMM etc. also so I am probably biased.
A change of pace sometimes is nice, and computer game prices are really not that much compared with whatever. (It is the time spent playing that is expensive.)
Bugs and badly designed UI aside, the strategic game could develop into something as good as FFH. Unfortunately I think the tactical game pales in comparison with AOW and could do with a complete rewrite.
Maniac
Apolyton Sage
That's misinformation spread by Wardell. The reviewer's hobby is reading bad books and making blogposts about it.
Seriously? Man, I thought it was bad enough that Wardell's wife was astroturfing the amazon reviews, but if he can't even take legitimate factual criticism...
My numerous crashed of Elemental came without such an "out of memory" box. They were just plain crashes. Some of them seemed linked to audio resources problems, so I jsut shut the sound off in the game preferences (would be great if games started by checking if, perchance, the OS had already muted everything and didn't waste time, cpu or whatever on sound when nobody can hear it, but nevermind that).
Maybe. Still the quotes are not representative of what can be read at Amazon, so it's certainly not unbiased. If the quotes purported to be from a random open page were really random, the writer was unlucky, because none of the pages I browsed on Amazon were that horrible. I wouldn't trust that review. I still wouldn't buy the book either, though.
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