Just another Serendipity

Grammar Nazi

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Clever Marketing

via: reddit

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A True Internet Bro

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Internet is Back!

via: sephko

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8 Disappointing Video Game Endings

Video
games offer epic experiences with the power to excite,
enthrall, and entertain. At least they do on occasion, when all of
the various elements needed to turn a game from a mildly amusing
distraction into a piece of art are present. Unfortunately, even
the best games can often turn ugly in the end.
Video games often require hours of effort to complete. And while
the experience of actually playing through them is reward enough,
there’s nothing quite like sitting back and enjoying a satisfying
ending. However, there are many disappointing video game endings
out there, leaving the player open-mouthed and ready to pitch
their controller at the TV in frustration and anger.
It should go without saying that the list which follows contains
spoilers, and plenty of them. If you haven’t played the games
mentioned then definitely don’t watch the embedded YouTube videos,
and you should probably avoid reading the text underneath each one
as well. You have been warned.
Fallout 3

Games are meant to be played, not watched. Unless you subscribe
to the Hideo Kojima school of thought (more on that later). Which
makes games that end, not with an epic battle or conclusive action
but a cutscene, ultimately unsatisfying.
Fallout 3 delivers just such a disappointing video game ending,
with a cutscene playing out depending on your actions through the
game. The cutscenes aren’t even cinematic, instead being simple
affairs brought to life by a dramatic voiceover. Which doesn’t
deliver a satisfying conclusion.
Shenmue 2

Some of us here at MakeUseOf, myself included, love the Shenmue
games. So much so we wanted the
series to continue beyond the second game. It never did, and
it looks unlikely that it ever will. Which is why the end of
Shenmue 2 is so disappointing.
This is clearly a game conceived as being the middle part of a
more epic story, and so Shenmue 2 ends with the story still yet to
conclude. This stands as perhaps the biggest anti-climax I have
ever personally experienced in my 30 years as a gamer.
Alan Wake

Alan Wake is a game you’ll either love or hate. There is no
middle ground. And the same is true of the ending, though I
suspect more people hate it than love it. This game was never
going to have a happy, satisfying conclusion, but what was
delivered doesn’t even deliver storytelling 101.
There are questions left unanswered, confusion added to that
which already existed in the main part of the game, and various
possible explanations for what occurs at the end. Playing Alan
Wake is like watching 2001: A Space Odyssey… you’re partly
mesmerized and partly clueless as to what’s happening.
Metal Gear Solid 2

As promised, here’s Hideo Kojima. Every game in the Metal Gear
Solid series has a convoluted storyline, lengthy (some would say
over-long) cutscenes, and plodding endings that will leave all but
pseudo-intellectuals bored and confused. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons
Of Liberty is the worst of them all.
I completed Metal Gear Solid 2 and thoroughly enjoyed the
experience. So much so it made my list of PS2
games still worth playing. But this is despite the
disappointing video game ending, which left me so befuddled I
immediately put the game back in the box and gave it away. It left
me cold and confused. I love the game, I just hate the ending.
Mass Effect 3

Mass Effect 3 has arguably the most famous ending of any video
game in history. Not because it was good, but because gamers were
so disappointed with the original they complained vociferously
online until BioWare was forced to release an extended cut aiming
to counter some of the criticism.
The problems with the ending, or endings to be more precise, are
manifold. The main one being that the consequences of the player’s
actions throughout the game are rendered inconsequential. Add in
plot-holes, inconsistencies, and a general lack of closure for the
trilogy, and you get a wholly disappointing ending.
Borderlands

Borderlands is rightly regarded as one of the best games of
recent years. It’s highly playable, highly entertaining, and
pitched just right to appeal to a wide demographic. There’s just
one problem: the ending is disappointing, as it slowly dawns on
you you’ve been lied to all along.
Your role in Borderlands is to locate the Vault, a fabled
location supposedly full of untold treasures. After many hours of
sometimes-difficult gameplay, you arrive at the Vault to discover
it contains a whopping great monster that you need to defeat. Your
reward for your efforts? Nothing whatsoever.
Rage

Rage is a mixed bag of a game, featuring fantastic visuals and
thoroughly satisfying combat elements. Unfortunately the story is
lacking, and the whole thing is brought to a crashing end with a
finale that does nothing more than set the stage for a sequel
which has so far failed to materialize.
Your role in Rage is to raise the Arks containing humans who
survived the apocalypse. Those you bring out of stasis will help
augment the Resistance and fight against the Authority. You
fulfill your role perfectly, and then the game ends. There is no
fight, there is no conclusion.
Final Fantasy X

Like the Metal Gear Solid series, the Final
Fantasy games all share common themes. But their endings
differ greatly. Some are fantastic, tying up all the loose ends
and leaving you with a happy feeling after many hours of effort.
Others, like Final Fantasy X, leave you shaking your head.
This is one of those games that could have had a fantastic
ending, but the writers decided to go a different way than most
gamers would have done. The whole game builds to a natural
conclusion, but that ending is ripped from under you in place of a
tepid, unsatisfying compromise.
Common Complaints

As you may have noticed there are some broad similarities between
the games on the list, which somewhat explains why the endings are
all so disappointing…
There are the attempts at leaving more for the planned sequel,
which are especially annoying when no sequel ever gets made.
Developers have to build
franchises in order to make money these days, hence the
popularity of this approach, but it always ends up sells gamers
short.
There are the multiple endings necessitated by giving the player
choices as to how they approach the game. While this gameplay
mechanic is a welcome one for the most part, forcing developers to
create multiple endings only leads to one thing: a lack of
resources being spent on each one.
There is also the recent desire to leave the ending up to the
gamer’s imagination. The idea is that gamers are more mature now
and can interpret the story however they see fit, but that doesn’t
excuse leaving questions unanswered and plot-holes unfilled.
Conclusions
I decided to limit this list to fairly recent titles, purely
because it maximizes the number of people likely to have played
the games in question. However, there are some older titles whose
endings absolutely sucked.
Those of you whose teenage years are but a dim and distant memory
may remember Doom, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, or Monkey Island 2. Each and
every one had sucky endings. Which goes to show we can’t (wholly)
blame modern developers and publishers.
This list is far from complete because, to be blunt, there have
been countless examples of disappointing video game endings over
the years. The floor is now yours: tell us which of these endings
you hated the most; which you actually liked; which other games
you think should have made the list. The comments section below is
ready and waiting for your input.
Image Credits: Chelsea Gomez, FindYourSearch
The post 8
Disappointing Video Game Endings appeared first on MakeUseOf.

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How GPS Works

As an
avid gamer, I’m surprised by the correlation between GPS-like
features in modern video games and the proliferation of GPS
technology in mundane life. When I was a kid, paper maps and
cartography were still common; if you got lost, you suffered
through it and found your way to your destination. Nowadays, we’ve
got the wonders of GPS to guide us there and back again.
I’m only 24 so I don’t mean to sound like the pre-GPS era was a
“golden age” or anything like that. I appreciate the convenience
of GPS and it has saved my butt on more than a dozen occasions.
But like a lot of technology, we tend to take it for granted. I
know I do.
What is GPS? Do you know how GPS works? What’s the
secret behind the near-pinpoint accuracy that it offers? Keep
reading to learn about the impressive thought that went into
building this magnificent navigational system.

What is the common point between nuclear power, the
Internet, and GPS? They all started as projects meant to
bolster the US’s technological edge over the rest of the world.
Specifically, the technological edge of their military.
The Internet would allow fast communication over long distances;
nuclear power could be both destructive and energy generative; and
GPS meant ease of navigation for military forces through foreign
terrain.
The GPS, which stands for global positioning system,
is actually a network of 27 man-made satellites that orbit around
Earth. Out of those 27 satellites, 24 are currently in use and the
remaining three are there as failsafes in case one of the 24
malfunctions. Based on the arrangement of these satellites, at
least four of these satellites are visible in the sky at any given
time.

In tandem with the orbiting satellites, there are five monitoring
stations on the Earth’s surface: the master station (in Colorado)
and four unmanned stations placed in faraway locations that are as
close to the equator as possible (Hawaii is one of those
locations). These unmanned stations collect data from the
satellites and forward to the master station, which interprets and
makes adjustments before relaying the proper data back to the GPS
satellites.
Though this system was originally intended for military use, the
US opened up the system in 1983 for civilian use which is why we
can use those satellites today to find our nearest Starbucks at
the snap of our fingers.
Okay, so we have this global system of satellites and stations
that are constantly shifting around in the Earth’s atmosphere and
relaying data back and forth. How do our mobile devices and car
trackers tap into the system to figure out where exactly we are?
And if there are so many satellites floating around up there, why
does your GPS
signal sometimes fail?
Think about what you use for GPS navigation. Whether it’s a
dashboard mount from TomTom or the Maps
app from Google, the idea is the same: your device is a GPS
receiver. In other words, your device receives data from
the GPS satellites overhead. What sort of data? Simply put, each
satellite tells your device the distance between you and that
satellite.
At this point, you may be a little confused because you’d think
you need more than distance from an object to pinpoint your exact
location. And you’d be right! Using the distance from each
satellite, your GPS device can use a technique called trileration
to find where you are.

Imagine you’re lost out in the wilderness. If you called your
friend in Philadelphia and he magically knew exactly how far away
from him you were, he’d tell you that you’re 400 miles from
Philadelphia. Knowing that isn’t enough, though, because that
distance from a single point could mean any point along the circle
of a 400-mile radius around that point.

So you call a second friend in New York City and he says you’re
300 miles away. Now you have two circles of distance and every
point along those circles is a potential place where you could be
at this moment. As you can see, the two circles intersect in two
spots: based on the distance data, you know you are at either one
of these spots.

And if you called a third friend and he told you that you were
200 miles from Newark, you’d have three circles that intersect in
one location. That’s where you are.
This same technique is used by the GPS where each satellite can
be viewed as one of your friends from the example above. But since
satellites work in 3D space, you’d have to imagine the
intersection of spheres instead of circles. Combine that distance
data with the fact that you must be standing on the surface of the
Earth (which acts as the 4th sphere) and it’s pretty easy to find
where you are.
For accurate GPS data, most devices try connecting to at least
four satellites. This is also why it sometimes takes a long time
for your device to update GPS locations. It’s also why you
sometimes don’t have a signal: you may be connected to one or two
satellites, but that isn’t enough.
Of course, there’s a lot more math and science behind how GPS
works. For example, compensating for the signal delay between
satellites and receivers (radio waves only move so fast). Ever
wondered why GPS
kills your phone’s battery? It’s because your phone needs to
constantly correct errors in calculation.
Hopefully you learned a bit about the GPS and how it works. I
actually didn’t know how it all worked until I did my research for
this article and the idea behind it is both fascinating and
clever. If you still don’t understand it, perhaps I didn’t explain
it well enough; in that case, I urge you to ask questions in the
comments for clarification.
Image Credits: GPS Network Via Shutterstock, GPS Phone Via Shutterstock, GPS Satellite Via Shutterstock
The post How
GPS Works [MakeUseOf Explains] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

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Financial Side of Being Batman

Batman is one of the richest super heroes out there, this
infographic made by MoneySupermarket
will show you the exact cost of being Batman.

http://awesomenator.com/movies/financial-side-of-being-batman/

Movie Scenes Reenacted In a Global Photo Project

One creative guy combined his love for traveling and film into an
amazing project, paying tribute to some of his favorite movie
scenes by recreating them at the exact spot they were shot at.
Allen Fuqua isn’t the
type of person to take the classical tourist photos in
front of famous sites that have become so painfully boring, so he
tracks down scene locations from popular movies and tries to
reenact them in his photos. He doesn’t insist on having each and
every detail of the scene match the original, but rather pays
tribute to it with the similar choice of composition and actors’
clothes. Allen has traveled all over the world, visiting places in
Taiwan, Japan,
Mexico, France
and many other countries including various locations in the United States.

You can track down all the places Allen visited so far on a Google
Map on his website where each location is pinpointed so other
movie fans could follow his footsteps. This project ads a new
dimension to globetrotting, and many people across the world are
sending out their praise and wishes to participate in it.

Movie: The Talented Mr. Ripley
Location: St. Mark’s Square, Venice, Italy (Piazza San
Marco, Venezia, Italia)

Movie: Source Code
Location: Millennium Park, Chicago, IL

Movie: Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Location: Twin Peaks, San Francisco, CA

Movie: No Strings Attached
Location: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles,
CA

Movie: Lost in Translation
Location: J?gan-ji Temple, Tokyo, Japan (???, ???, ??)

Movie: Inception
Location: Da Stuzzi, Paris, France

Movie: Drive
Location: MacArthur Park, Los Angeles, CA

Movie: 28 Days Later
Location: Westminster Bridge, London, United Kingdom

Movie: 28 Days Later
Location: Westminster Bridge, London, United Kingdom

http://awesomenator.com/movies/movie-scenes-reenacted-in-a-global-photo-project/

Imaginative Pencil Vs Camera Artwork

Sometimes it just takes a piece of paper and a pencil to alter
the reality any way you want and make fantastic art out of it. The
Belgian artist discovered that mixing…
The Ivory Coast born artist Ben Heine introduced
this original concept back in 2010, with his first Pencil Vs
Camera series. He combined pencil drawings with photography,
taking pictures of people, interesting architecture
or passages while holding a piece of paper with an imaginative drawing that
corresponded to the photo in some way.
The contrast between two mediums is even stronger because most of
the drawings are done in black and white, opposed to the colorful
photo background. Each drawing ads a bit of surreal to the
otherwise ordinary photo, depicting wild animals,
mythological creatures and other figments of Heine’s imagination.
Since his first series quickly became popular thanks to the web,
it was followed by two more, and the pictures you’re looking at
are his latest work from Pencil Vs Camera 3 series. Heine points
out that he always ads a deeper meaning to his work, using the
limitless possibilities of changing the scenery with handmade
drawings to make sure there’s a short story behind every photo he
takes.

http://awesomenator.com/photos/imaginative-pencil-vs-camera-artwork/

A Lesson In Amazing Parenting, Narnia Room

If there were such a thing as the parenting of the year award, it
should definitely end up in the hands of the imaginative parents
who surprised their daughter with this room.
During the renovation of the house, the lucky 9-year-old girl’s
parents realized there was some extra space next to her room and
came up with the most amazing idea- to turn it into a Narnia-like
space, the hidden entrance naturally being through the wardrobe.
What seems like a regular girl’s room unveils
its secret once the wardrobe door are opened. Through the passage
lies the room they painted with motives from Narnia including a
big portrait of the lion Aslan. The furry white rug on the floor
is to simulate the snow covered paysage, so the whole room would
look more authentic.
An amazing and creative idea brought to life by these awesome
parents went viral on the internet when their friend uploaded
pictures of it on reddit, under the username kelseypolo. One thing
is for certain – there’ll be kids waiting in line for a sleepover
party at this little girl’s house.

http://awesomenator.com/fun/a-lesson-in-amazing-parenting-narnia-room/