It turns out that the budget doesn't make the game.
Master of Orion III, on a huge budget, ended up being a game I couldn't get into at all. Part of the blame probably goes to the six hours or so it took to get the game to run on my laptop, thanks to its copy protection, but... The game felt weird and unfinished, and I could never figure out why my ships couldn't go from one star system to another. I think it had to do with an abundance of wormholes or something.
Galactic Civilizations 2, on a fraction of that budget, is a beautiful and interesting game. It's a lot more flexible, because the developer isn't terrified of what might happen if people could modify the game a bit. It doesn't have copy protection at all, which is very nice for me as a laptop user. (And so terrifying that employees of a copy-protection vendor posted links to pirated copies to show how dangerous this was.)
I was recently going through old disks, and I stumbled across a rare treasure: A-Sharp's King of Dragon Pass. This is one of the absolute best turn-based games ever. It's a bit of a strategy game, and a bit of a roleplaying game. It's got more depth, and more story, than nearly any other game I've ever played. (Possibly any; I've hardly explored the whole thing.) I don't get the impression they had a multi-million dollar budget; instead, I get the impression that their "graphics team" was a few people who had artistic talent rather than perfect uniformity, and the result is that the game's illustrations are, by and large, actually art rather than merely graphics. I can live with that.
So, the next time you're thinking maybe a video game would hit the spot... Do some research on the tiny companies whose products no one has ever heard of. Stardock, the makers of Galactic Civilizations (and the sequel), are a tiny little developer, still small enough that they can be personally involved in the product. A-Sharp doesn't exactly strike me as a megacorp.
But I could play these games for months and months without losing interest, while huge franchised games with budgets large enough to feed a small country for a year are rarely worth the trouble of getting them installed and running. Food for thought, perhaps.
One of my friends has the tragic misfortune to have a credit card with "USAA", who are a business. Probably; there's some debate about their legal status.
What they do, in my experience, is call at inconvenient times. They are rude. They are annoying. When I point out that they are calling during the time I'm normally supposed to be sleeping, they use this as a lever to say that, if I don't help them contact this person, they'll keep calling. And sure enough! Daily calls.
Today, I finally got them to claim that they would remove my number. I have no real confidence that they will; they have consistently acted in bad faith throughout our little relationship.
The fact is, I know exactly who they're calling for. I don't care. I don't owe them anything; not money, not time, not help harassing someone. If they'd been anywhere near "polite", I might have tried to get them in touch; as is, I am not planning to help them in any way.
Which brings me to my point: If you are thinking about doing business with USAA, don't. If you want insurance, I understand some insurance companies will, say, make you walk across broken glass to get a quote, but that's still a big improvement. If you want credit cards, there are probably a number of better options. (It's not that I can't think of worse, admittedly.)
I have recorded the call. It was funny. I will probably record more. The guy kept calling me "ma'am", and couldn't figure out my name. His big sticking point was a claim that this was the number he was given, only I don't think my friend ever gave him this number; it's possible that, say, they got it from someone else, and decided to just lie about it.
So... Definitely a company to be avoided. I've lost many hours of sleep to these people, and they have strongly implied that, knowing that I work nights, they are specifically targeting times when I'm likely to be asleep. And whaddya know; for once, I'm willing to believe that they're telling the truth.
So, we got a phone call from some lying telemarketer scum. They asked to speak to "the lady of the house". (We don't have one.) I told them not to call. A while later, they called again. We told them not to call.
I got curious and called in to find out who they are. They're an organization claiming to promote "family-friendly" entertainment.
They give an A-OK rating to Left Behind, the blasphemous, ghoulishly masturbatory, apocalyptic revenge fantasy. They pan the Harry Potter movies for "occultism". Harry Potter gets attacked for "violence", but the recent production of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is okay. Because, see, a full-scale battle in which all the death happens off-screen is family friendly. It's like the difference between a movie in which you actually see someone get punched, and the family-friendly entertainment of Gulf War I, where it was just buildings blowing up, with no identified people in them.
My favorite so far is that they attack the Fantastic 4 movie for "occultism", on the grounds of "references by villain to being a god". These people don't understand metaphor, apparently.
These people are delusional, at best. They are dangerous, they are deceitful, and they promote evil.
But, frankly, what really bugs me is that they're also telemarketers who have disregarded our request to not call us anymore.
Actually, one other thing is worth noting: They hang up on you. As soon as they've decided you're not gonna give them money, they hang up. Because, see, your time isn't worth anything; only theirs is.
Edited to add: For hilarity, read the glowing and supportive review of the Dove foundation posted at Family First. Then read the comments. And more comments. These people have been doing annoying telemarketing for a long time, and they don't seem inclined to stop. They are, just as they seem to be, money-grubbing psychos who are out to rip off naive Christians who are afraid of the world.
My friend Dan found this:
#include
unsigned char a[4*1024*1024];
int
main(void) {
while (1)
memset(a, 0, 4*1024*1024);
return 0;
}
We can reliably lock up the AMD64 systems available to us running this code. We've tried on a 3500+, 4000+, and 4400+. We've tried with 64-bit Linux and 32-bit Windows. The only other common thing is that these are nForce4 chipsets, but that shouldn't matter... Lockup isn't instant, but it's fast; a couple of minutes.